THE HEROINE IN BRONZE MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO THE HEROINE IN BRONZE OR A PORTRAIT OF A GIRL A Pastoral of the City BY JAMES LANE ALLEN AUTHOR OF ' THE KENTUCKY CARDINAL,' ' THE CHOIR INVISIBLE,' ETC. MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET. LONDON i 9 1 2 COPYRIGHT 9?? • A+37 X TO I. F. M. There is no other healing for love, O Nicias, either as an ointment or as a plaster, except the Muses. But agreeable and desirable though this remedy be in the lives of men, it is not easy to procure. — Theocritus. I loved you, damsel, the first time you came ... to pluck hyacinths on the mountain with me as your guide. I could not leave off loving you the first time I beheld you. I could not leave off loving you afterwards. And I cannot leave off loving you now. — Theocritus. Dedication TO YOUTH— ITS KINGDOM AND IDEALS CONTENTS FIRST PART The Parting . SECOND PART The Waiting . PAGE I 99 THIRD PART The Getting Home FIRST PART THE PARTING 35 i b CHAPTER I A few years ago, in the budding month of June, one morning as the east began to flush rose-coloured with the dawn, I awoke ; and upon awaking, discovered that I had an original story to give to the world — a perfect love-story of a youthful pair. Now a gift is often a galling load : alike to him who carries it and to him on whose shoulders it is laid and left. But the gift of a good story burdens neither and lightens both. It is perhaps the only kindness that may always be safely offered to an enemy and to a stranger and to a friend ; it is surely the only traveller that, starting anywhere, can journey everywhere without cost or risk ; invigorating all minds without losing its vigour ; emptying laughter and tears round the whole earth, yet keeping 3 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE them unwasted like a cloud. The world never has too many good stories ; it is perpetually impatient for one more ; it would be ready — and grateful — to listen to mine. This reflection encouraged me. The several pulplike romances on which I had first persuaded myself that I should help to nourish mankind had not sustained that favourable estimate of their importance ; mankind had not shared my view that those works held any of the nutriment of its delight. It had nibbled, but had decided not to partake,. and had even left it to me to express the necessary regrets : I duly expressed them. I was pleased, moreover, that my story had come to me in the early hours of the morning while as yet the day had not a footstep on it, not a finger-print, not a breath that might be a stain. For the work itself, as I have intimated, was about youth — life's dawn ; the white dews of nature still lay over it, over that land of youth. And then, finally, the story was so wholly mine and of myself. I had not had the ill-luck to find my treasure in the neighbourhood of some other man's treasure, just outside the THE PARTING 5 covers of his book, just beyond the range of his conversation. I had not been racked with the need of a story, had not been hunting for one through the forest of my brain as the beast must find within his jungle some quarry to keep him from starving. I had not done anything. It came as our best things, greatest things, always come, not by outside compulsion, but by growth within and as the silent rewards of what we ourselves are, the inevitable rewards of what we are. The sculptor sometimes quietly awakens with his most human statue ; the musician with greater music ; the poet with a finer song ; the painter with a fairer country ; the scientist with some vaster law of the earth or of the air or of the stars — all as the rewards of what they themselves are. I, an unknown writer of a few unsuccessful tales, a vouth two seasons out of college and dowered as to fortune with one dry rectangle of university parchment and twenty- two green years, I, by name Donald Clough, and by nature an optimist and by hope a philosopher of the heart, — fired with the wish to create a work which might by its shape and substance touch the unchangingly sound heart of 6 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE mankind and thus become a classic, — I, after failures and disappointments, awoke triumphantly with a little masterpiece. If any masterpiece may be called little, if so great a matter as perfection can have aught to do with so small a thing as size. The immediate resolve was to carry the tidings of this good fortune to her whose approval of my work, whose approval of me, meant my happiness. The masterpiece as soon as finished would itself go to her as yet another offering. I myself had been but an offering from the first day I beheld her, that perfect day of the June previous, with its balmy airs and blue sky, on her crowded, sunny college campus, on the day of her distinguished graduation, when she, mounting with her elect sisterhood, all in white, a rose-twined platform, had read to a delirious audience her finishing essay (the essay that finished me) ; when afterwards, de- scending from the platform and standing with bowed head — that exquisite head with the gold of dawn on it — she, Muriel Dunstan, had re- ceived from an impersonal president the diploma of her dismissal in honour and peace ; and then THE PARTING 7 had been turned sorrowfully out of doors by all her old professors in a body, to enter alone the rougher pathways of young men. Most sorrowfully by the professor of English whose favourite brilliant pupil she had been : though this was not the reason why he was in love with her, after the masklike antique manner of professors sometimes. I charge him here that salaries are paid to professors for staid ideas, not wayward emotions ; for their felicitous learning, not their unhappy leaning. Yet I salute him, too, with grovelling respect that it he leaned perilously toward her, he leaned like the Tower of Pisa — without falling : a human classic, rigid with his years. Turned out of doors to enter alone the rougher pathways of young men ! The young men were already there with their rougher pathways ; for a throng of them had quickly gathered about her, that sure and favourable sign. As one of that contesting group I was from that day forth none too gentle in trying to push the others out of the way ; you may rest satisfied that they greatly rejoiced to push me. In vain for all of us ! As to myself, with 8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE my rustic gifts of nature, she had, as time went on, not been disdainful exactly ; to the con- trary, she had distantly scrutinized these as though she might so far be rather well pleased. But beyond that point she had demeaned her- self as one who, looking you solemnly, search- ingly, in the eyes, shakes her head with a baffling smile and demands more, far more, immeasurably more. Thus between her and me life had for some time been at a standstill, — at least love had, — all because I had not the needful gifts to scatter at her feet ; and when love stands still and life goes on, the two perforce soon get too far apart. Please do not admonish me that love is not to be won by gifts. Love is not to be won with anything else. There is never any ques- tion between any two but the same question : whether one must needs surrender one's self to another in exchange for what one's desire cannot do without. The barter may be very low, the barter may be very high; but it is always barter, barter, barter. All our sublimities even have to go to the highest bidder in the market-place of ideals ; we trade THE PARTING 9 in our souls as we sell apples for laces and wines for shoes. This was the exact ground for my present hope that the story might bring me nearer the end of my toilsome, wearisome journey toward her heart. It was the best gift I had yet been able to carry to her, for it was the best proof of what I myself was that very morning ; and of course what I was that morning was proof in its turn of what I had been all the mornings of my life. I hoped, therefore, that she would accept it as the first real token of what, with added years, I might become in my profession — I, aged enough for a full-grown lover, but not mature enough for a full-grown author. In truth, of late, after some tenderer partings I had left her, persuaded that at heart she had already accepted me as a lover and was holding back only because the lover of some twenty-two years could furnish her no assurance of what he might be accomplishing as a man at thirty- five. She, planning prudently and proudly far ahead, was considering whether by that time or at some earlier or later time she might not find herself bound for life to a man who was io THE HEROINE IN BRONZE neither a lover nor anything else. Alas, those women : can there be many of them ! I exulted in this challenge of hers : I desired that I be challenged to nothing less. But my difficulty was that I could not outstrip time, I could not advance more rapidly than nature herself. The proof of what I could do in my profession must be unfolded little by little — piece by piece — with sweat and toil — through defeat often — through patience and consecration always. I could no more drive my mind through the wall of future years, and drag from beyond them the deeds that belonged there, than a man, standing at the eastern base of a mountain, could thrust his arm through the mountain and gather gold on its western slope. She knew this ; and there was some beauti- ful justice in her ; and I think as she pondered her perfectly natural caution and my perfectly natural helplessness to satisfy it, I think that under the leading of her heart — though she had spoken no word about this — she had given way far enough to narrow her demand to a single requirement : I must at least show one sign, one valid, solid, sweeping sign, that I would carry THE PARTING n off in my profession some due share of its honours and not soon after marriage begin to drain toward a wife the long dark sewer of a husband's failures. Let me put this matter in yet another way. It is very important and I wish it to be made perfectly clear. Therefore I shall employ a kind of parable of the fields because I like their language best, the simple honest forthright speech of the fields. She did not require, then, that at this outset of my career I should lead her as to some mountain-top from which she could descry the distant gold of my autumn harvest ; she did not even ask for the sight of the full -stalked summer green. But she did demand that I reach down where I stood on my mountain of hope and pluck for her a handful of vigorous young wheat-blades as they show in early spring the promise of the ended season. Then perhaps she would be ready to let me know whether upon this evidence she would wed April — and risk September. This morning I believed that I had in my hand April's promise — my new story, my first masterwork. The thought robed the world 12 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE with joy. This day might bring about my betrothal. At once it became solemn and beautiful beyond all my days. As I sprang out of bed with the belief that happy things were just ahead and that I might prepare myself for them, I was not even content to take my bath in one of those scant allowances of porcelain which are sometimes assigned to the less important tenants in a sumptuous New York apartment building. Too poor myself to keep a valet, I was rich enough to retain some- thing better — my faithful servitor Imagination : ever at my elbow to do for me what I could not do for myself; its duty being to better my lot in the world as often as I wished and as much as I might crave. I now invoked Imagin- ation ; and then I took my bath as one who, with an eager start, leaps at the surf's edge from some high rock, soft to his bare feet with living moss and fragrant to him with wild rose and pine — as one who with strong young limbs leaps from such a rock, clear-bodied in the morning light, and dives deep into blue ocean. From this imaginary bath rather than the actual one, this boundless primeval bath, I THE PARTING 13 emerged dripping and aglow with its cold purity. When I descended to the street, ten floors down, I found that my earlier fancied union with the sea was succeeded by a kind of reality. With the deep breathing which is instinctive as we step into the open air, the smell of fresh brine swept into my nostrils ; its moisture began to settle on my moustache and face ; the ripple of it seemed to pass into the full- running channels of my blood. For during the night a vast vapour from the bay had overspread the city ; and now this vapour hung suspended like some finest dew- cloth spun far out on silver and azure sea : a vast dew- cloth, floating, drift- ing, invisible in a crystal ether. And falling through this cool, clear, dew-wet air came the splendours of the morning sun. I could but stand still in the street for a moment to drink it all in, to acknowledge the glory of it with my adoring soul, my thrilled body. What a masterpiece of a day ! And it was the birthday of what I hoped would be a masterwork in my hand. I made good omen for myself out of the benign aspects of the i 4 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE universe ; I let my mind dwell waveringly upon man's old fond belief that his fairer deed finds a fairer day. Then, thus assured that all within and with- out was auspicious, I started eagerly across the city in a south-easterly direction toward her home. CHAPTER II She lived within less than half a block of Fifth Avenue, that long, hard, stately, palace-crowded, diamond-bedusted, world-weary road — the Via Dolorosa of great cities. And her residence was not far southward from Central Park — that Arcady of Nature in town : slopes of green- sward for dances of the children of the earth ; thickets for the nests and songs of the children of the air ; turf scattered plenteously over with dews and rains — jewels that do not fret the fingers or the mind ; trees with wild thorns which pierce no brow, such thorns as may strike through the down of pillows ; quiet waters into which the stars flash— surer lights to go by than any that mirrors can reflect from chandeliers ; paths that lead to shade for young lovers who grow faint in the sun ; and many a resting-place for the 15 16 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE worker and for the old who are past their work. Thus Fifth Avenue and Central Park were the figurative boundaries of her existence, the frontiers of the two worlds of her spirit — society and nature. She dwelt near both worlds ; and she entered both ; she entered both freely and returned from both — free ; too free for my peace ! From this description you will understand that her home — that is, her father's residence, over which she presided, her famous mother being dead many years, — you will understand that her home stood in perhaps the most beautiful, the most celebrated, and the most fashionable quarter of the city. A house that can stand where it stood has to be a strong house. It showed its strength still further by the prominence it took in a street of more modern houses whose partition walls conjoined. In the long block of these to the east and to the west, it, much the oldest of them, stood apart in its own yard. And it stood there with authority. The others wore the air of having won a shallow THE PARTING 17 foothold by rude and hasty force ; they sug- gested that they were achievements in worldly competition. Here and there a doorstep seemed ready to fawn at the right footstep or to insult the wrong one ; here and there windows looked out at the world, prepared to smirk or to frown ; and plainly certain chimney-tops were too rigid to bow or too obsequious to do so — like hats quickly jerked off when the mightier pass. But her home reigned amid these with the quietness of unconcern, as if knowing that its foundations were built below the crumbling reefs of old and new, below the passing and repassing tides of New York names and fashions and fortunes. It did not so much appear to stand in the city as to grow in the soil, on one of the last visible vestiges of lower Manhattan Island ; and you responded to it as you might to an unrulable oak which knows itself to be legal heir to its share of the forest and demands space for the freedom of its boughs. It affected me powerfully because it did stand aloof. The rows of buildings soldered together, wall by wall, annoyed me, a green country boy, much as if I had seen a neighbourhood of 1 8 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE farmers pinioned together by their shoulders. I could no more have wished my home, when I should have one, to be welded to any other man's home than I could have planned that mv ribs should be nailed to his ribs. Often, as I looked at solid blocks of houses, I twisted and writhed to get loose with sun and air and space for life, growth, independence. This house satisfied my craving : it flourished unsupported ; nothing else held it up ; it seemed to say to the others : I stand on my foundation, stand on yours. If you cannot stand alone, fall alone. And its humanized countenance ! Have you in remembrance at the moment some strong, middle-aged, vanished face, in the wrinkles of which lurked gentle humours and moods of fun, but over which had settled one expression of mellowed dignity before the world ? This, for me, was quite the hallowed eloquence of its look. By some train of suggestion, possibly by some resemblance it bore to another house now dim and distant, and lost to me with those v/ho once dwelt there, the first sight of it brought back the memory of a middle-aged face — the most loved face in the world — strong, but with THE PARTING 19 innocent humours peeping from behind the ravages of the years, and resting over it one expression of brooding tenderness, a kind of indestructible peace. Into this mystery of remembrance and re- semblance I cannot go deeper here. I only know that from the first I liked the house because of earlier things in my own heart ; because she had been born there and had passed her life there, with absences for sessions at col- lege and for summers of travel ; because it still moulded her as its pliant mistress ; and because, in fine, I was making love to her in it and trying to entice her out of it. Beyond question this was why I loved it most : that I was trying to induce her to leave it. Please give some attention to details. A broad strip of yard extended along the eastern and the western side, and there was a broader strip at the rear. The stone steps in front descended to the street, but even on each side of the steps there was a narrow strip of yard. At one boundary of the enclosure there was a driveway entrance to the stables, and a servants' gate ; and here also around the feet of the 20 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE horses and the dogs, of the coachman and the footman, cf the butler and the valet, of the maids and the cook, even around the issuing feet of these, there were little plots of priceless green. Each of those tiny expanses of grass, if valued in terms of the Wall Street Mint, would have been as a small field of the cloth of gold. Here was a family that held on to the common grass and let the commoner gold go. This grass, too, ensnared my affections. For it here becomes intrusive to inform you that New York City is not my birthplace. I came from a rich, wide-rolling, pastoral region several hundred miles away ; and I had dwelt on a farm until I was grown, getting my education from a small college town a few miles distant. It was only two years before this that I had made mv solitary wav to the vast city, — America's London — a vouth, a stranger, almost without money, without acquaintances, without in- fluence, but with the determination to succeed in one of the most difficult of professions with- out any man's aid. I had not succeeded amazingly, and I was yet homesick. As I walked about the city — there being little else THE PARTING 21 to do — I carried with me a pair of eyes which alighted gladly upon any verdure. Any mere florist's window in spring decorated with boughs brought up torturing memories of native woods far away, beginning to bud and blossom. Any solitary tree on a sidewalk invited me, a summer day, to throw myself down under its round shade, look up at the infinite blue, and try to dream again the things that once were so easy when they were distant, but were now so diffi- cult, being near. A more noteworthy feature still of this much-studied home of hers. With my habit of keeping eyes wide open on human life, I had made a small discovery in my limited travels ; and I always go in for my own discoveries. In some cities, as Washington and Boston and Baltimore, where the early influence of English architecture was decisive, a high stone wall, after the old English custom of aristocratic town houses, separates the family from the world. I had been much used to such walls, even in my little pastoral Southern town with its pure English tradition. But in New York City, where the Dutch did most of the 22 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE building and the British chiefly camped — and decamped, — this Anglo-Saxon stone wall does not stand. Aristocratic usage has adopted the iron fence barbed at the top — an array of black spears in front of the enclosure. If further seclusion is desired for the grounds, a hedge is planted inside this fence : of privet or of arbor-vitas or of hemlock or of rhododendron. There was such a fence, such a hedge, in front of her residence. The passer could not see the ground premises. But over the top of this hedge he might have noticed that one entire wall of the house was covered with a mighty vine which made its way upward, in masses of foliage thickly looped, about the windows. On an October day I have seen that wall of the house glow dark red like an oak in the autumn woods. And late one afternoon, when there was a blue haze in the city air and a grey sky and a chilliness, as I walked past with my eyes dubiously turned in that direction, I caught sight of her at one of her windows, standing quite still there, framed in the dark red autumn picture and looking down into the yard. That vision of her head and face with its gold and its THE PARTING 23 fairness was as an April glimpse of daffodils and lilies — brought forward to the winter's edge. " At this moment," I mused, ill at ease about my own case, " she may be settling the fate of some one of us ! Let her be thanked, at least, for being thoughtful about it ! " A more curious person, glancing over the hedge and fence, could further have seen the tops of evergreens and the roof of a vine- covered arbour. He might have thought such a grotto a concession to the artificial, with no more natural right to be there than a Swiss chalet for Marie Antoinette had artistic warrant to be transplanted to the forest of Versailles. It to him may have stood for the same species of mock rusticity that one finds in a landscape of Aubusson tapestry or in the lawn of a Watteau fan. But I am sure that it was a very simple and sincere place to her, because the yard had been her mother's plan, she told me ; and her mother had- been reared in the country and had never been weaned from it. I am sure there was naught artificial in it to her, but a double tenderness for this reason ; and I cer- tainly know that I myself found out something 24 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE very sincere in her nature from that very arbour. For after I had established my acquaintanceship well enough to be taken out of doors, one day she and I were walking there. It was sober twilight, and low overhead I suddenly heard the notes of a grackle alighting in the foliage. A few minutes before I had recognized the call of a starling as it descended out of the darkening air. I turned toward her : — " Birds must drop in here for the night," I said. " As they migrate in spring and migrate in autumn and make a great encampment of Central Park, sometimes the thin edge of a flying squadron must drop down here to tent for a night and a day." " They do stop here," she replied, evidently glad. " Sometimes from my window I hear them as they flutter in after dark ; and some- times I hear them utter their farewells as they leave at dawn. Sometimes one may linger for a few days." Then with a change of tone quite natural to her she added, with her eyes on the ground : — " We are all birds of passage — we human beings. From somewhere — to somewhere. THE PARTING 25 Either flying from dawn and spring toward winter and night ; or from night and winter toward spring and dawn. I think, toward Perpetual Spring." There sounded the grave note in her. I had heard it first in her Commencement essay, and I shall never forget how it startled me. She there that June morning, in the great audi- ence hall of her college, before that audience of old age so reverential to youth on such days, with that bold note of the immortal in her girlhood most musically, fearlessly, uttered it as from the hilltops of life's morning. Shall I ever forget, either, how that night, when I was at my own prayers, this spiritual flight of hers already toward eternity drew her mystically beside me, as though some day we should be together — we two — Donald Clough, Muriel Dunstan ? But do not misunderstand about her serious- ness ; It was not gloominess. Across the bright field of her consciousness lay that one slender dark bar — just that one. Perhaps a refrain of pathos caught from her mother whom she vividly remembered and whose life had ended 26 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE almost before girlhood itself. All the rest of her was luminous with joy and humour. And woe to you if you ever ran your head rashly into the general blaze of that humour ! The uncertainty of when it might make its appear- ance, and the certainty that it was always there ready to appear ! It got to be a kind of terror to every man of us ! Not one of us in love with her but felt tremors for this reason. No man need be afraid of anything he can fight ; but how can a man attack a girl's laughter at him ! It bowls him over, once and for all. He may rise again, smiling, to face death ; not to face her. As further bearing on this subject of her humour — and also as still harping on the house ! After the yard-turf had stretched rearward a space it suddenly turned uncontrollably gay and burst into a garden. Not quite an Italian garden, not quite an American garden, not quite anything but itself. There were flower- beds, evergreens, and honeysuckles ; and through these went a little ramble lined with dwarf-box. It was a dwarf ramble. But then there are THE PARTING 27 short rambles that can be long and long rambles that can be short : there is no criterion for rambles — it depends upon the ramblers. This ramble led to the remotest corner of the en- closure, where there was an iron filigree seat painted grey — an iron seat, cold and grey, very iron, very cold, very grey. The world calls such a contrivance a settee ; I called this one a seat-two. To my limited knowledge it always did seat two ; and there could have been no calculable motive for any one to sit there alone : unless to enjoy self-misery, as people sometimes do. But why bother about self-misery when you are free to enjoy other people's? I repeat that no one would have chosen to sit there alone. For in addition to the attractive qualities already enumerated, there arose from the four legs of this settee four iron grape-vines that trailed themselves across the bottom and up the back, profusely laden with bunches of very uncrushable, unbacchanalian grapes. They prodded a man in the back and ribs like mailed iists ; and they administered the peace of cobblestones to him in other directions. This wanton piece of outdoor machinery was 28 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE arranged behind shrubs and vines — not art- fully. I When one of her suitors sat there with her, he may not have been arranged artfully, but he made that impression ; he conveyed that idea to the hostile beholder. I suspect that he made that impression upon her. For though still a youth, I have long been a student of human nature, particularly of the human nature of the sex that possesses nearly all of it. Very old ladies and middle-aged ladies are beyond me — in time and in depth : what they are up to I shall never know. But the result of my study of the unaccountable beings of my own age is the belief that each of them puts her suitors to some same test. The suitors may never perceive what the test is : the investigatress knows admirably. And so far, I am sure, every girl is for weavings by day and unweavings by night, as the original Penelope. Of course you do not fall into the error of thinking there was never but one Penelope, and she a Greek and a married woman. The United States to-day is well peopled with young Penelopes who have never been to Greece and have never heard of the Ulysses : but they THE PARTING 29 expect to hear of husbands ! The middle-aged classic Penelope unwove for a return ; the youthful classic American weaves for an arrival. I am sure that this settee was her test : one of her weavings — or castings. The caldron of the open sky there stewed the suitor to sim- plicity ; that misshapen crucible of torture grilled him to the bones of candour. I know that one afternoon when I called on her and was invited to go out into the garden, as I drew near that farthest corner, I met one of the suitors hurrying away ; he looked shrivelled, juiceless, drawn. There was iron to the rear of him — but he had the iron in him — the spear of her last word. I could almost see where it had gone through. I stepped quite to one side of the ramble that he might have the whole road of suffering to himself and wished him joy in his ruin. Thenceforth I called the bench the purgatory of the Last Judgment. For me it possessed fewer terrors than any other spot of her domain, because I belong out of doors and speak best in the open. The worst impressions I had ever made upon her had been attributable to the house. Never have I feared 30 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE my species ; but I, a country boy, long could be awed by New York furniture. And there was furniture in her parlours that for a time nearly deprived me of the natural use of my limbs and my intelligence. The first wretched, clogged, futile, lying words of love I ever spoke to her were mumbled at her as I sat in a gilt chair with an embroidered fox at my back in full chase of an embroidered goose. She faced me on a gilt sofa with what at her back I know not — certainly not Sour Grapes ; and she sat under a large picture known as Botticelli's Spring — so she had informed me upon my anxious inquiry. But if that was the best that Botticelli ever knew of spring, he must have had a queer four seasons in his native country ; and he must have been used to see queer people : it is not remarkable that he should have painted them wandering about unemployed, puzzled, and low-spirited ; and tempered in their un- mannerly garments neither to the wind, the Lord, nor the tailor. Ah, no ! Had she and I only been out in the real spring — on some warm, grassy slope of sun and shade ; near some wild grape whose blossoms scented the golden THE PARTING 31 air ; with a brook faintly heard running through banks of mint and violets ; and with the silken rustling of doves' wings audible amid the white blossoms of wild plum trees. One last most important thing to tell you about this interminable yard ! But feel yourself honoured by being taken even into her yard if it brings you closer to her. Perhaps you would prefer that I should begin to say less and she begin to say more. But I speak while I may. When she appears upon the scene and begins to speak for herself, I shall vanish and speak for nobody. A wall shut the yard in from the neighbour yard on one side, and v/here this wall met the front fence of iron spears there was formed a shaded nook. Perhaps in the whole city there was not an outdoor cranny where one who wished to read alone could be so undisturbed. Within a few yards of the passing world of realities, New York realities, you could ensconce yourself there, forget your surroundings, and make your journey to the ideal. If you had read in a story up to some point where you must stop to think, there was not a more 32 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE favourable spot in which to indulge that mood of dreaming and longing which it is the duty of every right kind of book to bring on. The wall forming that nook of the yard is heavily covered with old ivy — not the Gray's Elegy kind of ivy, none of that ; that does well enough for bards. In this nook there was a marble seat 'after the manner of the ancient Greeks and Alma Tadema. Within arm's reach of the seat, at one end, flourished one of her mother's rose-bushes, which puts forth in the month of June. Never shall I forget that rose- bush or a quiet twilight when it flowered there and when Destiny stood behind it and touched a blossom. Here, then, in this strong, proud, gentle, old mansion, in this yard with its seclusion and ramble and vines and seats, she lived with a household of four members. Her father, whom she playfully called the Commodore, was a banker, a clubman, and a patriot prominent in yachting circles. He had had something to do with the international challenges — not by way of wind and wave, but of mast and sail ; and he was THE PARTING 33 more concerned over the hardy adventurous Britisher who might some day lift The America s cup than over the hardy adventurous American who might sooner lift his daughter. There were two younger brothers off at their New England college, but at home for riotous intervals. There was an aunt, the Commodore's sister, a divorced dowager, who declared dividends on her alimony. She declared a great many more things than dividends. At my first dinner there, being her alimentary attache, for the occasion, I received some kind of notion that she consisted chiefly of diamonds, opinions, and a succession of silver forks. Her opinions were to be classed rather with forks than with diamonds. They did not flash ; but they were solid and heavy ; and she took them up and laid them down, one by one, during the routine of courses, and made them generally useful to herself while feeding. I am sure that her ideas were forks. She, like the Commodore, was of aquatic habits ; but she went all the way across and inhabited the marshy watering-places of the Old World. I called her the Paludal Aunt ; and I still suspect that she was web-footed, and that if she had flapped her D 34 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE arms briskly enough, she could have walked across a good-sized pond without wetting her ankles. O Tempora ! O Mores / Nuptice Americana ! O Paludes ! And thus with all that perfection of wordly estate, family ties scarcely existed in the house- hold — a breakdown of the home-life in the too common New York way. The Commodore was absorbed in his banking, his clubs, his yachts, the traditions of The America. I was not unaware, however, that he kept a landward eye on me : as I kept a weather eye on him. The brothers were given over to their athletics, their studies, their fraternities ; to their getting tapped and to doing some tapping for them- selves. The aunt diverted herself with waters and foods and dividends and declarations. And thus she, daughter, sister, niece, and youthful mistress of them all, was left much to herself. Not like any of them, somewhat of a stranger among them. Society, with its quick perception of what is fresh and charming, had advanced hungrily upon her from all directions during that first year of THE PARTING 3S her appearance in it. It encircled her to absorb her. In her social set were mothers who had known her mother ; in her father's set were men with sons dangerous to me as rivals. Life spread out around her in every direction for her to walk a rose path across it whither she would ; and always at the boundary waited the world's best. Sometimes at night the whole street would be blocked with the splendid motor cars and older - fashioned carriages of those who within the house rendered tribute to her. She bore her honours gladly. Yet I am sure that the deepest' call of life did not reach her either from her family or from her social world. And she managed her responsibilities so well that she contrived to reserve days when the house and the yard were left to quietness. These were the days for which I watched and waited. Then I found her alone, and more nearly reached her deepest hidden self. Now as to the manner in which these reserve days became known to me, you will be left to puzzle that out for yourself. But cherish the observa- tion that whenever a pleasant thing is a secret to one young person, it becomes a secret to 36 THE HEROINE IN BRONZE another young person : only the old must have learned to keep their secrets. An occurrence took place the spring of that same year a few weeks before the time of which I write. It was about eleven o'clock, a brilliant morning in May : a day when youth is ready to drop work and laugh and dally. The red blood in it belongs to the blue sky and the golden sun ; it would willingly throw itself down beside the first wayside temptation and give a hard life-time for an hour of vagrant joy. Being in that quarter of the city, I could not resist the temptation to turn my steps into her street ; I had gone thither determined not to resist. As I reached the fence with its hedge inside I stopped. The fragrance of the garden was wafted out to me on the sidewalk : the smell of privet blossoms, the aroma of box- boughs and pine-buds ; and rising from under the hedge, the odour of the strong moist earth. Recollection overcame me of spring days in my country. As though I were one cup of memory I filled this cup to the brim with draughts from her hedge and garden. Then the cup of THE PARTING 37 memory plotted a little for its future. The street was quiet, no one near ; my audacious behaviour could not scandalize social conven- tions. Placing my face against the hedge, in a voice pitched not to be heard through the public atmosphere, but in a sheltered corner, I took the chance and murmured : — " How do you do ? " I heard a book close quickly, and I heard laughter, surprised, amused laughter (though she did not know I heard). Then she replied as though she had not laughed and in a voice unconsciously lowered to go through hedges only : — " Do you imagine I am going to talk to you there in the street ? " " At least, that is one remark ! A non-com- mittal remark, but still a remark." " Why don't you come in ? " "Another remark ! I await still others." "There will not be any others. Only the one remark — why don't you come ? ' " Well, then, I do not wish to come in." " At least that is frank and civil."