THE LEGEND OF 
 JERRY LADD 
 
 ROY ROLFE GIL SON
 
 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD
 
 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 BY ROY ROLFE GILSON 
 
 Author of "Ember Light," "The Wistful Years" "Katrina,' 
 "In the Morning Glow," etc. 
 
 GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 1913
 
 Copyright, 1913, by 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of 
 
 translation into foreign languages, 
 
 including the Scandinavian
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF JERRY 
 
 2229450
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. "THIS DREAMER COMETH" . 3 
 
 II. A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST . 28 
 
 m. A PRACTICAL MAN .... 48 
 
 IV. BARBARA 73 
 
 V. THE NOW ....... 98 
 
 VI. LARK FLIGHTS 119 
 
 VII. CLOUD SHADOWS 137 
 
 VHI. IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING. 155 
 
 IX. WAYFARERS . . . ... . 175 
 
 X. ANGELS . . . . . . . .195 
 
 XI. WHERE GARDENS MEET . . 218 
 
 XII. THE VALE OF SILENCE . 230
 
 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 
 
 1WAS always fond of him," said one, "as you all 
 know. But he was a fool." 
 "Or a genius," said another. "You never can 
 tell." 
 
 "A child rather, I should say," observed a third. 
 " He never grew up." 
 
 "But something of a poet too, don't you think?" 
 ventured a woman's voice. "Though not in verse, or 
 prose either, for that matter. In life, I mean." 
 
 "Well, yes," one of them conceded, in a juster tone 
 than he had used before. "Jerry was what you might 
 call a rhapsodist. Certainly an unpractical man. An 
 idealist, a dreamer, always." 
 
 "Illusionist is the better word," another voice sug- 
 gested. 
 
 "That is to say," interposed the one who had used 
 a harsher name, "he was a visionary." 
 
 "Oh, yes. He was always seeing visions, Jerry was," 
 3
 
 4 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 murmured another who had not yet spoken. "He 
 was not of this world. He was always a stranger here. 
 Let us hope that he is more at home where he is now." 
 
 And all were silent. It was that silence of remem- 
 brance, more eloquent, more final than any speech 
 each one waiting in the consciousness that, after all, 
 a visionary's life could only be summed up in reverie. 
 And yet, somehow, the woman did find words for it, 
 saying them softly like a sigh 
 
 "Poor St. Jerry!" 
 
 And all the rest, surprised in their own compassion, 
 and astonished that it should be so simply and yet so 
 perfectly revealed in words, and in the very spirit 
 of the one thus canonized forever in the calendar of 
 their remembrance, looked up and smiled. 
 
 Such were the doubtful verdicts of the world when 
 he was gone. Often, since, I have been haunted by 
 his story. It is a tale more common than I used to 
 think. I have known few like him, but I have met 
 often, in the thoroughfares of life, strange faces in 
 whose lights and shadows I have seen his own again. 
 And, for his sake, I have always felt for them a certain 
 friendliness of pity a wistful, helpless, hopeless kind 
 of pity, for however I may think, or write, about him 
 just as however I tried to hold him, as it were,
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 5 
 
 when he was here he always eludes my imagination 
 as he did my hand. His coat-tails always seemed 
 slipping from my grasp. And even now I scarce know 
 how to keep his memory fast long enough to be quite 
 sure that it is fairly and truly here. 
 
 Of those doubtful verdicts, each one, perhaps, was 
 partly right. But, on the other hand, it is very likely 
 that none of us did Jerry justice. I do not pretend to 
 say. All I can be sure of is that he seldom saw with 
 our eyes at all, nor we with his. Sometimes, touched 
 to a kind of tenderness that one does not easily confess, 
 I am inclined to think that it was he who had the truer 
 vision; that he saw more deeply than the rest of us. 
 But he was so unpractical, and he was such an ungov- 
 ernable enthusiast for those lovely desirable things that 
 we all dream of when we are young, but fail, somehow, 
 to realize in our maturity. And he would not com- 
 promise with life. Could not, it may be. That was 
 the exasperating thing about him. That was what 
 made one's fingers ache, sometimes, to shake him into 
 what the world calls common sense. 
 
 And yet . . . one is ashamed to quarrel with 
 those angelic visions. I remember his saying once, 
 when some one spoke of the lack of common sense in 
 another imaginative friend of ours:
 
 6 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Perhaps he has wwcommon sense." 
 
 Perhaps Jerry had. 
 
 Poor St. Jerry! For one always comes back to 
 that extravagant, half-sad, half-humorous, but alto- 
 gether final phrase. And he was faithful, unto death, 
 to those beauties that were so dim to us, but so bright 
 and real to him that he saw them, his wife once told 
 us, "even on weekdays." And she said it with a proud, 
 defiant, little smile that reminded one of us at least 
 that he always had bis visions of a Sunday. 
 
 She herself was a heroine Barbara Ladd. For it 
 is all very well to go flying about on wings that nobody 
 else can see, if only you can feel them for yourself, buoy- 
 ing you up over threatening seas. But to be bound 
 helpless, as a wife, to such an air-man to go sailing 
 on into the clouds, while he assures you that you are 
 really safe with him, upborne by angels whose light, 
 perhaps, is in his eyes, but whose hands would be a 
 deal more sure and comforting if only you could feel 
 them clutching your skirts and holding you fast from 
 those terrible realities beneath that, it seems to me, 
 is the daftest, most breathless heroism in the world. 
 And Barbara had it. 
 
 But, I am told, I forget that Barbara herself had 
 wings to fly with wings all her own, of love. True.
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 7 
 
 And that love could flame as well as fly, as one of us 
 has reason to recall. I mean, of course, the devil's 
 advocate. He shall be nameless, though I have quoted 
 him. He was not myself. He was that other friend, 
 who said that Jerry was a fool; and who had the 
 temerity to write to Barbara, even in her grief, words 
 that she never could forgive, much less forget. 
 
 "After all," he told her, "deeply sympathizing as I 
 do with you in your great sorrow, one cannot I 
 assume that even you cannot in your heart of hearts 
 be really sorry that he has been saved the inevitable 
 pain of a world for which he was always so unfitted. 
 Had he lived, no one can say what bitter sorrow and 
 disillusionment he might have come to." 
 
 "What right," cried Barbara, with trembling lips 
 and swimming eyes, "what right has he, or any other 
 man, to write like that? Smug little worldling! As if 
 Jerry was all wrong! And he, of course, all right! To 
 be so sure, in his conceit, that failure was inevitable 
 for for a man a million times more . . . and to 
 talk about my 'heart of hearts'! What does he know 
 about a woman's heart of hearts, who hasn't any of his 
 own?" 
 
 Grief, of course, can hardly be expected to be philo- 
 sophical; and, on the other hand, a devil's advocate
 
 8 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 must say hard things which may be true. But, after 
 all, in spite of them, Jeremy, with all his frailties, was 
 beatified and canonized for those outnumbering virtues 
 that shone so wonderfully through Barbara's tears. 
 
 "A man like Jeremy," I am told on the very best 
 authority, "arouses the mother in the wife." 
 
 Certainly Barbara mothered him. What would have 
 happened if she had had no brooding pity to arouse, 
 no steadfast sense of homely duty, no meek and simple 
 faith in a Providence that watches over little children, 
 even grown ones, in their dreams, it might have puzzled 
 the devil's advocate himself to say. And he was quite 
 familiar with such contingencies. 
 
 She had two children, Barbara had. The elder was 
 
 St. Jerry. 
 
 ii 
 
 I knew him first, quite fittingly, as a man of words. 
 He was Our Correspondent in a place called Toodlums. 
 The postoffice was Veteran; old residents of the little 
 town still spoke of it sometimes as Unionville, after a 
 former fashion; but "folks generally" called it Tood- 
 lums a term of endearment whose derivation I have 
 forgotten, if I ever knew. It was the merest trifle of 
 a village, but of a remarkable productiveness, out of 
 all proportion to its geographical significance, in the
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 9 
 
 way of literary fires, elopements, weddings, accidents, 
 and lawsuits, with an occasional crime. That is to 
 say, the news that came to us from Toodlums always 
 had a certain Cranford flavour, as if that charming 
 old English village might have somehow emigrated to 
 America dames, spinsters, bachelors, Jerry Ladd, and 
 all. 
 
 As the junior editor of the Gazette published at 
 the county seat some miles from Toodlums it fell 
 to my apprentice hand to arrange, weekly, a dreary 
 mass of county items that came in by mail. They 
 were written on odd sheets of paper, in outlandish 
 hands, ludicrously misspelled, and terribly befuddled 
 as to tenses; and one had to keep a vigilant and clair- 
 voyant eye, which all editors are expected to possess, 
 upon the dull monotony of personal allusions, lest 
 rustic wit and malice should creep in unawares, and the 
 Gazette should suffer in a suit for libel. It was a thank- 
 less task, and a mournful; for, in the main, country 
 life appeared to be a sad succession of influenzas, 
 sociables, new barns, and babies, and regularly, once 
 a week Another Old Resident Gone. 
 
 Toodlums, however, was an exception to the rule. 
 It was a poor week when I did not smile gratefully at 
 the appearance of Jeremy Ladd. He came in a yellow
 
 io THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 envelope bearing in one comer the name of some brick 
 concern by which, I fancied, he was employed. And 
 he brought with him not merely the homely gossip of 
 the country store, but something of the woods and 
 fields as well little sunlit touches that made his Tood- 
 lums an idyllic background for his humble chronicles, 
 so that I imagined it must be different from our other 
 country scenes, and even thought of seeing it some 
 day myself. Sentimental beyond a doubt, and a little 
 immature high-schoolish is perhaps the word, if it 
 is a word Jeremy's writings, from my own young 
 point of view, were beyond reproach, and they were 
 highly literary for the Gazette. If it had Inot been for 
 the brick concern, one might have guessed him the 
 village schoolmaster, earning funds for a university 
 career. But he was hardly text-bookish enough for 
 that. He was too imaginative. If there was a Cran- 
 ford in his Toodlums, there was a something more 
 subtly, more elusively English in himself. Yet not 
 English in any modern sense. Not at all British. 
 English in a sense more ancient even than Cranford 
 days. It was Elizabethan, though I did not under- 
 stand it to be so then. And how it was Elizabethan is 
 better left for a more timely page. Then, when I was 
 editing his classic items, I only knew that they had in
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH n 
 
 them an alien atmosphere of hawthorn-scented lanes. 
 And I am afraid I expected to find hawthorn-hedges 
 when I went to Toodlums. 
 
 One thing I did expect, and found. There was a 
 little river there, very Englishy, which had a way of 
 meandering through his correspondence, placidly in and 
 out of its hay-fields and its mild adventures, but with 
 treacherously rushy places, and lilied havens, where 
 Toodlums youngsters had a way sometimes of getting 
 drowned. On such occasions I am sure that it was a 
 cross to Jeremy that he had to mention the village 
 "cemetery" when his pen so naturally would have 
 written "churchyard." And it is sad to think how 
 always he must have nibbled at his pen trying to con- 
 trive some way of using all the lovely old English words 
 that, with their tender meanings, we left behind 
 us when we came away. Once, I know, the Gazette 
 received a protest from the Methodist minister at 
 Toodlums complaining that Our Correspondent showed 
 a strange partiality for the services at the little Prot- 
 estant Episcopal mission chapel which had lately 
 been erected there. Strange! It was not strange at 
 all. Not that Jerry was a churchman. On the con- 
 trary, he preferred to listen to the Sabbath bells from 
 the safe seclusion of the river meadows. But the
 
 12 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 mission had extended his vocabulary, or, rather, it 
 had set free from that secret and imprisoned music 
 of his thoughts certain exquisite old words that he 
 could write at last matins and evensong, Advent, 
 Whitsuntide, and a dozen others that blossomed there- 
 after in the Gazette, like English primroses among the 
 more familiar flowers of our native speech. 
 
 I have forgotten much, but when the brickyard 
 burned it did so twice during my incumbency 
 Our Correspondent was on the spot, and I remember 
 how the "river's musing face was flushed with firelight." 
 Brickyards, it should be remembered, burn best in the 
 middle of the night. And "all the countryside" rose 
 from bed to "watch the glamour in the sky." Now 
 editors are far more grateful than other people think; 
 and it was pleasant seated in a stuffy office two days 
 afterward to open that yellow envelope and see in 
 a flash "the illumined landscape," and feel "the cool 
 air of the country night" (I think it was) upon one's 
 cheek, while one listened to "the crashing of the sheds." 
 Nothing to delete. No mention whatever of "the de- 
 vouring element" that wrought such havoc in our other 
 country towns. Nor do I remember even "ruddy flames." 
 Simply the firelight and the glamour in the sky! 
 
 Probably he forgot to mention the insurance if
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 13 
 
 indeed such inflammable risks as brickyards ever have 
 any. And, at any rate, insurance would have been a 
 modern touch a veritable anachronism in Jerry Ladd. 
 And when did he ever remember money in connection 
 with a vision ? 
 
 Then there was the human side. Life in Toodlums, 
 according to Jeremy, had the homely glow that country 
 faces have or used to have, in old English ballads 
 when they stop to grin with you in the middle of the 
 road. There was Uncle Nat Jones. Uncle Nat was 
 not "confined to the house." He was not "suffering 
 with a cold." Nor with "an attack of grip." There 
 was, in fact, no mention of his head whatever. But 
 Jerry interviewed him, I remember it was some 
 question of Toodlums politics, perhaps and reported 
 faithfully what Uncle Nat had said. Just that and 
 nothing more word for word, snuffle for snuffle! 
 One scarce could read it without a handkerchief. 
 
 Now that, to my young journalistic mind, was Art. 
 Pure Art. And I wrote Ladd so. It was the begin- 
 ning of our correspondence. 
 
 in 
 
 Through it through those private confidences 
 the little English river flowed more beautifully, more
 
 i 4 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 intimately, and with a gentler, more retrospective, 
 Elizabethan air than ever had been possible in print. 
 
 "You ought to be a ferryman," I wrote. 
 
 "I am," he answered. "I ferry dreams across to 
 the other side, where they vanish behind the willows, 
 leaving me to row myself back alone to the brickyard. 
 You see my office window overlooks the stream and I 
 have long idle moments to myself between the weigh- 
 bills." 
 
 "I begin to have suspicions," I replied next week, 
 "that you are only a poet, after all." 
 
 A fortnight passed. 
 
 "A poet!" I said again. "You have all the ear- 
 marks." 
 
 "P.S." was his reply for I have the old letters 
 before me, both his and mine, upon my desk. "Now 
 about that poet-business: Your communication has 
 been duly filed, and will be taken up at the earliest 
 possible opportunity. The fact is, I'm waiting to hear 
 from Life." 
 
 "P.S.S. I've heard. The mail's just in and the 
 rumour that you mentioned is without foundation." 
 
 "Send them the Snuffles," I suggested. "Uncle Nat 
 Jones." 
 
 "I did."
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 15 
 
 "Don't be disheartened," I entreated. 
 
 "I'm not. You see," he explained and the ex- 
 planation throws light upon his life "I'm never 
 permanently disheartened. I get blue. You mightn't 
 think so, but Toodlums at times is indigo. Then I 
 smoke my brier, and look at the river, and think what 
 my Uncle Charles Lamb would have said, if he'd cared 
 for rivers (it was the town be loved), and, little by little, 
 the blue turns to softest purple, and the purple to a 
 fine kind of blooming rose." 
 
 "What would your Uncle Charles Lamb have said," 
 I inquired the next Sunday, "if he'd cared for rivers ? " 
 
 And on Tuesday 
 
 " I really don't know," was his reply. " But some- 
 thing elderly. Something calculated to make a little 
 old young man in a brickyard content to be there, 
 with his unpublished whimseys locked up tight in the 
 office drawer." 
 
 And then he added what reads now like the best 
 text that I can think of, for a sermon on Jerry's life; 
 and it would, of course, be variously expounded : 
 
 "Lamb, you know, always makes mere reverie seem a 
 legitimate vocation." 
 
 \ shall not preach from this any more than may be 
 inevitable in recalling a life that was mostly reverie
 
 16 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 from first to last. Whether or not it is ever a " legiti- 
 mate vocation" whether there is any room left for 
 the contemplative man who is merely contemplative 
 and nothing more, in a world where most men are 
 merely active and nothing more I am not, in these 
 robust times, prepared to say. It is as much as one's 
 life is worth to waste a moment in meditation. Cer- 
 tainly the roads are no longer safe, and even the little 
 absent-minded lanes, where the cow-bells used to tinkle 
 and the wild bees hummed, are perilous with hoarse- 
 voiced dragons breathing smoke and fire. Nature her- 
 self has been roused from reverie. How or where shall 
 man dream quietly any more, when, at any turn, even 
 among the brier-roses, he must look sharp, hurry up, 
 move lively ? 
 
 And it is considered heresy to preach anything but 
 dynamics now. To do so fittingly one must raise the 
 roof, or make the everlasting hills resound; so that to 
 lift a quiet voice in which alone one may plead 
 becomingly for the static life is to waste one's 
 breath. 
 
 Moreover, as the contemplative man will learn in 
 sorrow, it is a question also of finance. Reverie, per- 
 haps, is only moral when it has a bank account. 
 
 At any rate, so far as Jerry was concerned, his mani-
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 17 
 
 fest vocation the only one that he ever had seemed 
 fitted for, or that he ever pursued to any purpose is 
 a thing that one would wish to think about, and write 
 about, before one came to a conclusion, My own 
 comment at this time, I find, related solely to his com- 
 ment on his uncle's writings. 
 
 "Good heavens!" I retorted. "What right has a 
 literary critic to live in Toodlums?" 
 
 "It's the only way to live in Toodlums," was his 
 reply. "Books are the only things that make life 
 bearable. You have no idea what a hole this 
 is." 
 
 "Hole?" I cried. "Toodlums a hole? Why, I 
 thought it was an Eden where they made bricks. Or 
 at least a bit of dear old England. What about the 
 river?" 
 
 "Oh, damn the river!" he fairly shouted through the 
 mail. " I've tired of the river. I'm looking at it now. 
 I'm always looking at it. It's a mere ditch of a river 
 slow as time, and quiet as the dead. I'm tired, I 
 tell you, of this living in the past. I want the seal 
 The stir and roar of things that have a future in them. 
 You know what I mean: the sea of life dreadful, but 
 deep, and endless. I should drown, probably; but at 
 least I should have had to fight a little first, striving
 
 i8 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 to save myself. And that would be better than all 
 this shallow meandering in a meadow dream." 
 
 But even that all that fine bravado was but 
 a dream. Jerry himself suspected it, it seems, for in 
 his next letter he confesses: 
 
 "Something tells me that I am unfitted for this 
 world. It is a matter of eyesight, apparently. I don't 
 seem to see what other folks are seeing; nor do they 
 see what 1 see. And so, after all, perhaps the little 
 quiet places are the safest . . . only in being quiet, I 
 should like not to be mute. I should like to say some- 
 thing. I should like to sing, not merely be mured up 
 in this little cage of a country town, whose bars just 
 now are gilded by the setting sun. It is odd, but 
 living so much in the past, I suppose I have always 
 imagined myself old. Really seen myself, always, as 
 an old man. But old in a young fashion like a 
 russet apple. Rusty, ripe, and mellow. That's why 
 I took to Lamb, I suppose . . . and while you, with 
 your ambitions, are rising into fame, one of these days 
 I and the little old river will be meandering down the 
 valley together, quarrelling now and then, and falling 
 out, but, at the next bridge, making up again." 
 
 "You have the true russet flavour," I acknowledged. 
 "But look out! You are growing old in the wrong
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 19 
 
 direction. You have turned time around. Now you 
 are in the Elizabethan age, but if you keep on living 
 backward, you'll die a contemporary of the Canter- 
 bury pilgrims. Better come away from Toodlums 
 your Toodlums, the old English poetry town before 
 it is too late. Come down into modern times. There 
 is a very pretty route (for quiet, old-fashioned people 
 like yourself), by way of Milton, Pope, Burns, Words- 
 worth, and Alfred Tennyson with side excursions. 
 But the shorter way (and you might as well do this 
 business up at once, and get it over) is to change your 
 knee-breeches for peg-tops, kiss all your milkmaids 
 good-bye under the hawthorn tree, and take the choo- 
 choo cars for this glorious present, which you seem to 
 have utterly forgot. In other words, Come and see 
 me." 
 
 "No, you come here," was his reply. "Mother will 
 make you any kind of pie you like, and I'll take a 
 holiday and show you Toodlums. My Toodlums! 
 It's really very pretty. At least I think it's pretty. 
 Perhaps you'll have to squint at it a little the way the 
 artists do. Or do a little reading first, the way I 
 did, in good old English verse, before I really saw its 
 loveliness. But come. Come Saturday and spend a 
 Sunday with us, and we'll go a-rivering."
 
 20 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 And then he added these singular but prophetic 
 words. Odd-sounding at the time quaintly, but 
 rather foolishly self-conscious, I thought them then 
 they come back now like an echo of his life: 
 
 " You speak of friendship, but I warn you in advance 
 that nobody ever knows me who is not kind to me, 
 but always, after a while, with a little mixture of in- 
 dulgence as if they liked me, somehow, but could 
 never find a good, sure reason for it, and so were doubt- 
 ful that my claim upon them was quite so valid as it 
 seemed." 
 
 IV 
 
 I went to Toodlums. 
 
 It was, as Jerry had foreseen, a matter of eyesight; 
 and I failed perhaps to squint the way the artists do, 
 or I had read too little, or too much, to find the Tood- 
 lums of his dream, or mine. Candour compels me to 
 confess the disappointment. It was not, so far as I 
 could see, different from our other little country villages. 
 It was not picturesque to me. It was not long- 
 built enough for that; nor were its sharp angles as 
 yet sufficiently relieved by that shadowy grace of foliage 
 which is the secret of most lovely little towns. Even 
 the river when I first saw it seemed commonplace 
 enough, though amiably complacent under my eager
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 21 
 
 gaze, as I was driven over it into the village street 
 where Jerry awaited me before the postoffice. 
 
 We met, as young men meet, with a hearty shyness, 
 and with a strained and rather incoherent effort to 
 disclose ourselves all our fine points completely; 
 and so, at first, talked fast, and both at once, in little 
 futile outbursts of irrelevancy, laughing a great deal 
 to cover our embarrassment, until the strangeness wore 
 away. Elia, for example, was mentioned, as it were, 
 in the first paragraph, in the same breath with which 
 Jeremy told me he was glad I'd come; and while 
 he deplored the fact that the weather was too dull to 
 exhibit Toodlums at its best, I was apologizing for 
 the razor-cut that impaired my own pretensions, which 
 could ill afford so serious a defacement. Soon, however, 
 all awkwardness was gone. It had vanished like a 
 mist under those blessed rays of our youthful joy in 
 one another, and then, but not till then, did my scat- 
 tered senses begin to assemble their impressions of 
 this long-anticipated friend. 
 
 He was always difficult to describe, because, as I 
 can only say it, the spirit and the letter of him so oddly 
 disagreed. One hesitates to call him homely, because 
 his homely features always became so vague, and so 
 inconsequential, even so handsome sometimes, illu-
 
 22 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 mined by that inner light. And after the first single 
 glance of inquiry and its inevitable disappointment, it 
 was the light one saw rather than the lamp in which 
 it shone. I cannot even be positive as to his nose, or 
 the colour of his eyes, though I think the latter were 
 a kind of gray; and his nose, as one might say, was 
 neither here nor there: really didn't matter. His 
 mouth was large enough; more I cannot pretend to 
 say. His hair was dark, and his skin was what his poet 
 would have called nut-brown. It had been caught, 
 I suppose, in his Elizabethan hay-fields. 
 
 In short, of any sign, outward and visible, of that 
 inward grace which had drawn me to him all those 
 miles, I did not instantly make out one that was com- 
 pletely satisfying, or undeniable, though gradually, as 
 our hearts found voices, my eyes caught gleams as of 
 a light that I had always known, and my ear heard 
 faint, far harmonies that seemed the echoes of familiar 
 song. Attuned we were indeed, by youth. But there 
 was something more. Perhaps it was the kind of youth 
 we shared, and yet there was something subtler 
 still that drew me to him. Just what I never could 
 define, and it eludes me now; but it held me always, 
 even in those later years when I grew impatient with 
 the vagaries that I could not follow. And it haunts
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 23 
 
 me still, just now as a strange restraint upon my 
 pen. 
 
 Hovering about the memory of that Sunday which 
 I spent with him are certain smiles, gently, almost 
 timidly, benign, that were his mother's; and a conscious- 
 ness of her ministrations, hardly more definite than 
 firelight, but equally warming and comforting to our 
 needs. Even with her bread before me, I scarcely 
 gave a lingering thought to all that self-effacing kind- 
 ness. Or was it so self-effacing as I thought? Rather, 
 I blush to think, it was something else we were so 
 lost, Jeremy and I, in the preposterous selfishness of 
 youth which, like a prince, takes all his regal world 
 for granted, undreaming at what price of labour or of 
 pain his ease and happiness are served. Not till that 
 kingdom vanishes, and he becomes in time a page and 
 serving-man himself, perhaps, to the usurpers of his 
 former majesty, does he realize what I do now; what 
 anxious care a hopeless invalid bestowed that day upon 
 a royal visitor to her royal son. 
 
 All day we wandered by the river. Certain moments 
 their scene and setting, and their background of 
 those farther, fairer vistas of the mind opened, it 
 might be, suddenly, by the magic of a word, and lighted 
 for an instant by the flashing answer of a smile still
 
 24 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 glow for me out of those hours that are now as shadowy 
 as a dream. Certain tall cardinal flowers still flame 
 for me, just as we came upon them in one of the lonelier 
 reaches of the quiet waters. What we were talking 
 of, I do not know; nor why they have remained so 
 vivid through the intervening mist of years. I am 
 almost certain that we did not speak of them; but we 
 both stopped suddenly in our walk, with our eyes upon 
 them. And somewhere by a bridge a bird flew up from 
 our very feet, and vanished like the reason for its 
 long remembrance. 
 
 Foolish memories! to linger thus when weightier 
 matters are so utterly forgot. For we spoke, I know, 
 of those crises that come to youth, those mighty ad- 
 ventures of the spirit in its eager quests and wanderings 
 in a world still fresh with dawn and glistening with 
 dew. We poured out our pent-up thoughts and dreams, 
 talking at once, finishing each other's sentences, and 
 laughing outright in those delicious ecstasies of dis- 
 covery and of revelation that are only to be shared so 
 equally when life is young, before our paths diverge 
 and lead us, through dissimilitudes of fortune and 
 experience, to the imperfect sympathies of our matur- 
 ity. Young love has come to mean nothing but the 
 eternal legend of lad and lass. Yet the bonds in
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 25 
 
 which two youths will stray blissfully, all day long, 
 by little rivers, are very lovelike and lovely to recall. 
 As one turns again those first idyllic pages of his life's 
 romance, it is hard to say where his hand will pause 
 and his eye rest longest. There are pages that are 
 now too sweet. And there are others still full of 
 poetry that, strange as it would once have seemed, 
 have never a girl in them at all! 
 
 Yet there was a girl, of course, and if only she had 
 been a Sally or a Phyllis I think Jerry's bliss would 
 have been complete. Her name was Huldah. It was 
 unfortunate, but he made the best of it; and I am 
 sure there must have been something English about 
 her to overcome so serious a defect. For while, no 
 doubt, Huldah herself was blameless in the matter, 
 it cast a shadow upon her parentage. It argued an 
 unpoetic strain; to say the least, a singular forgetful- 
 ness of all those sweet old names for girls, kept fragrant 
 in the lavender of English verse. I never saw more 
 of her than a poor little village photograph on Jerry's 
 bureau. She was a comely schoolgirl, and the English 
 of her was perhaps revealed in one of his letters of that 
 time, where I find him praising "the quiet candour 
 of her eyes." 
 
 His own parentage was not beyond reproach. He
 
 26 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 ought to have been born in Warwickshire. It was 
 late to think of it, of course, but it was very often 
 upon Jerry's mind, as one could see in the wistfulness 
 with which he showed me, one by one, on the walls 
 of his room, copies of those charming drawings which 
 Abbey and Parsons made to illustrate old English 
 songs. When he died, he told me, he would go to 
 England. He had, I remember, a quaint idea of heaven. 
 It was to drink a mug of Shakespeare's ale in an Abbey 
 inn, and pick Wordsworth's primroses by a Parsons 
 brook. 
 
 "There's Rugby!" he said, as we passed the school- 
 house hopelessly wooden, and plain, and bare, and 
 painted yellow. 
 
 "All but the vines," I answered. 
 
 "Oh, no!" he assured me. "Not if you have eyes." 
 
 It will be plain, I think, that Jerry Ladd never saw 
 Toodlums or Huldah at all. I do not mean to say that 
 in his visions he always was so whimsical; but it was 
 in this investiture of the homely and sharp-edged things 
 about him with something of the shadowy leafage of 
 the past that others saw in him both child and fool. 
 Childlike indeed, but not as a simpleton, he dreamed 
 his little recompensive dreams. They touched me, 
 rather, to a kind of pity that one who was so fond
 
 THIS DREAMER COMETH 27 
 
 of what was gone, and what was far from him, should 
 be so caged in a present whose sign and symbol was 
 little Toodlums. But as I drove away from it forever, 
 waving my hand to him in token of the larger future 
 beyond its bounds, I found some pleasure in a flight of 
 crows across the pastures. For I had no doubt that 
 they were rooks to him.
 
 II 
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 
 
 SOME years went by and I had long been freed 
 from my apprenticeship to the Gazette when I 
 saw him again. In the meantime so many 
 things had happened of which I was mine own hero, 
 after the fashion of young men, I paid small heed to 
 the stories of my former friends. It was those years 
 when, the prologue over, the drama of one's life begins; 
 and in its crises, the past, still lovely in its simpler 
 fashion, like an idyl, lived only as a kind of background 
 for the present's storm and stress. It was like those 
 landscape vistas in the old masterpieces, of which one 
 is but dimly conscious until the foreground with its 
 human legend has become familiar to the eye. I was 
 busy with vicissitude. And in the turmoil of New 
 York, and its bewilderment of strange adventure and 
 romance, Toodlums and all the other little quiet places 
 and friendly faces that I had known seemed years 
 away. 
 
 28
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 29 
 
 Meanwhile, I heard sometimes from Jerry Ladd. 
 Often at first, in letters that I answered faithfully with 
 chronicles of those hopes and wonders that I was 
 always tempting him to share. But, little by little, 
 the intimacy faded, like the days of which it seemed a 
 part. And then, quite suddenly, it was resumed again. 
 
 One morning Jeremy came to town. 
 
 "For good," he told me, his face shining with the 
 joy and mystery of his high adventure. 
 
 "But your mother!" 
 
 "Oh, she's come too." 
 
 "To stay?" 
 
 "To stay." 
 
 I laughed, and gasped. 
 
 "But the brickyard, man!" 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "Ashes." 
 
 "Burned again?" 
 
 " No just ashes." 
 
 He was all a-smile. 
 
 "And the river?" 
 
 He had expected that. 
 
 "What river?" 
 
 "The Avon, of course. The Toodlumshire Avon. 
 Surely you haven't gone back on the river ?"
 
 30 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 But he did not even sigh as he replied blissfully: 
 
 "It flows no more!" 
 
 They had come, of course, solely for Jerry's sake. 
 It was a venture of love a mother's sacrifice for her 
 only son, that he might in this larger world dream 
 larger dreams. It was sufficient for her that he should 
 see ahead of him a rosy mist. For herself her only 
 future was of the past, and this strange new present 
 never became real to her at all. Even in New York 
 she was in Toodlums. The city, which it seemed he 
 had been always seeing since I first wrote of it a 
 thousand towers in the glory of his rising sun was 
 only a mirage upon her evening sky. And even now 
 that she was really there, streets to her never were 
 those crowded thoroughfares in which she found her- 
 self bewildered and a little terrified. They were always 
 those village lanes that she had known, under boughs 
 whose rustlings no traffic ever drowned, and open to 
 the wind, fragrant with the pastures where it had 
 lingered, or cold and pure as its glistening trail 
 of the untrodden snow. One could see this in her 
 eyes. 
 
 They lodged Jerry said charmingly, I thought 
 drearily, and what his mother thought one could only 
 guess, for she made no comment on the musty old board-
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 31 
 
 ing-house that he had found for them in an anti- 
 quated quarter of the town. 
 
 And he had found something more. He had dis- 
 covered, somehow, somewhere, a "legitimate vocation." 
 It was meagre enough, and it had the doubtful character 
 of most beginnings. That is to say, it was little more 
 than a chance of becoming something definite. I 
 never quite made out just what it was, but it appeared 
 to be a hybrid thing. He was something like a clerk, 
 and something like a messenger, in one of those odd 
 unheard-of commercial enterprises that supply details 
 of more familiar things. His, I believe, furnished 
 some kind of artificial whalebone for other houses' 
 corsets. It was something very trifling at any rate 
 so far as Jerry was concerned, though lucrative enough 
 to give a poet or whatever he was a foothold in 
 the world. I say a poet, because while Jerry's legs 
 were running errands, his thoughts took wings and 
 sailed and soared above the city's traffic in a way that 
 I could only guess at, from the hints of cloud-rack in 
 his eyes. 
 
 Now this is not a story of Jerry's legs. It must 
 be remembered that he was never in the artificial 
 whalebone business any more than he was ever really 
 in that brickyard back in Toodlums. Just what he
 
 32 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 was, and where he was, all that time when his fleshly 
 shadow was so humbly occupied in the eyes of men, 
 should be worth inquiring. Certainly it was not the 
 whalebone man I cared for. It was quite another 
 fellow, whom the whalebone people never dreamed 
 of never hired, never paid. And if Jeremy had seen 
 himself as they saw him, he would have walked straight 
 down to that larger river which flowed conveniently 
 at the end of his lodging street, and my story would 
 have ended there. 
 
 That he could rise each morning, and eat, and smile, 
 and even hum softly and happily to himself, as he 
 went his way through the morning sunlight to the 
 patent-whalebone place, was due entirely to the great 
 secret throbbing within him, that he was not a patent- 
 whalebone man. That, not the sun, was what made 
 the morning shine. It was that which made him laugh, 
 seemingly at nothing, to the wonder of the apple-lady. 
 And it was that which nourished him the very body 
 of him; for certainly no mere boarding-house prunes 
 and tapioca ever accounted for such animation. 
 
 Ah, yes! It was something to be alive thus, in- 
 cognito. To realize what all those passing thousands 
 never noticed and what his very friends but dimly 
 guessed, though they themselves went by, each day,
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 33 
 
 disguised. When they would discover him the real 
 Jeremy; when, if ever, the legend of his life would be 
 read through that prosaic chronicle of his every-days, 
 by which it was obscured, it was impossible to even 
 dream. But he could afford to wait. The joy of 
 youth is its consciousness of illimitable spaces; that 
 blissful sense of far horizons and ample leisure, years 
 upon years, in which to be discovered sometime, 
 somehow, somewhere. 
 Jerry did not ask, as yet, if he had found himself. 
 
 The city where he lived 
 
 And by the city I do not mean my own New York, 
 nor yours, nor any one's. I mean Jerry's. I mean 
 the city where the real Jerry lived and moved and had 
 his being; in which, each morning, he arose from dreams 
 to dreams, in that house which he had chosen for 
 reasons, and which he saw with eyes, that were his own. 
 They were, of course, literary reasons. Dickens, who, 
 according to the weather, makes old houses smile or 
 frown at will, and even weep upon occasion, after the 
 fashion of these human habitations in which we dwell, 
 helped Jerry to select his boarding-house. It must 
 not be imagined that he had taken my advice, and come
 
 34 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 down into the present yet. But he was coming, slowly. 
 He had crossed the ocean, though he could not be 
 induced to stay, and, in fact, at this period of his life, 
 was dividing his time pretty equally between the old 
 world and the new. Dickens, as I say, was with him 
 when he chose his lodgings, but a hopeful sign 
 Washington Irving was also of the party, and the three 
 of them, arm in arm, wandered up and down until 
 they found that dear old-fashioned rattletrap. In 
 short, Jeremy was in United States history at last. 
 It is true that he was not very far advanced in it as 
 yet, but when one considers the long road that he had 
 come all the way from that golden Elizabethan 
 age in the hay-fields of Toodlumshire he may be 
 said, I think, to have made a most amazing progress. 
 And now that he had gone so far as to take lodgings 
 in the new world in so much of it at least as was 
 still antique enough to seem a part of that old world 
 in which he was a loyal subject of his Queen I began 
 to hope that he would yet be naturalized. 
 
 I believe I used a word just now that was hardly 
 warranted. This is not my story. And if I so far 
 forgot myself, or rather, if I so far forgot my hero as 
 to use my own eyesight instead of his, it is my duty 
 to retract. I retract "rattletrap." It was a lovely
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 35 
 
 old-fashioned mansion in which Jerry dwelt, with a 
 wistaria vine upon its curious portico. A modern 
 critic might have objected that the paint had peeled. 
 But who would take a critic's word against a poet's? 
 To do so would be the death of literature. It was 
 all in your eye whether the paint had peeled or not. 
 The portico was there, and it was still genteel enough 
 for a poet to emerge from it, pulling on his worn kid 
 gloves as carefully as if he had not been going to the 
 patent-whalebone place at all (and he was not); as if, 
 indeed, his appointment was with Nat Willis, or to 
 purchase tickets for the Battery concert, to hear the 
 new singer, Jennie Lind. 
 
 The beauty of living thus in whatever year one 
 chooses from the past or in several years at once, in 
 the most delectable confusion of fragrant names and 
 romantic dates is indescribable. When spring came, 
 all the springtimes of half a century were sweetly 
 blended for Jerry Ladd. Imagine the intoxication! At 
 such times, lingering in the sweet old squares Chelsea, 
 or Washington, or Gramercy Park he was beside 
 himself with the romance of life, and even shed tears 
 on one occasion. To peer through the tall iron fence 
 in Chelsea, listening to the chapel chimes, and watching 
 the discreet young seminarians pass by in caps and
 
 36 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 gowns, under the ivied walls, was all too much for the 
 composure of a man who had the tenses are a little 
 difficult to manage who had studied to have gone 
 to Oxford. 
 
 Once, too, the children playing in Gramercy Park 
 stuck for a moment in his throat, he had stepped so 
 suddenly from the unreality of modern times, where 
 his presence at all was due to some question about 
 patent whalebone, into the very middle of a Victorian 
 novel by a man named Thackeray. And to come home 
 so unexpectedly, and find one's self again among those 
 innocent and lovely faces! . . . 
 
 It was all very tender, and a little sad. Time was 
 flying, and the world, each day, somehow, was growing 
 stranger to him. Often now he was not himself. He 
 never could be sure that around the corner somebody 
 else's New York might not run plump into him. And 
 then it would be blocks, perhaps, before he could arouse 
 himself sufficiently to realize that what had just now 
 startled him was but a nightmare after all, and that 
 in reality he was safe and sound, a hundred years ago! 
 
 in 
 
 We were sitting in an old tavern with sand upon 
 the floor, and with our chops a-broiling on fiery racks
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 37 
 
 under our very eyes, for it was pay-day, and this, as 
 Jerry informed me, was the only eating-place in all 
 New York. It was the very last! And what folks 
 would do when it was gone, certainly be was not the 
 man to say. It was beyond his imagination. 
 
 Across our mugs of ale his face was beautiful to 
 behold. I had never seen him more at ease, not even in 
 Toodlumshire; nor had ever heard him talk more 
 eloquently. The coach, I fancy, had just come in 
 with old Weller on the box, and what with the stir 
 and talk, and the smoke of meats, and the sizzling at 
 the fire, Jeremy was in his element. It was a raw 
 day, and the tavern snugness was very comforting. 
 
 There was, at first, a stranger at our table who ap- 
 peared to be interested in Jerry's talk. 
 
 "You look happier than most New Yorkers," he 
 remarked as he finished his dessert. "Give me Chi- 
 cago." 
 
 I was much amused at Jerry's face. In fact I was 
 a little doubtful that he had ever so much as heard 
 of Chicago. Certainly he spoke it with an absent air. 
 
 "Chicago . . . But Chicago, somehow, doesn't 
 mean anything to me. It hasn't any it hasn't any 
 background, has it?" 
 
 The other laughed good-humouredly.
 
 38 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Plenty of foreground, though," he remarked as he 
 pushed back his plate and lighted a cigar. And Jerry 
 shook his head. 
 
 " I never cared much for foregrounds." 
 
 "What's your line? " the stranger asked. 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "I say, what's your line?" 
 
 "Oh!" and Jerry's face was something of a study. 
 "Well, I'm I'm in the clothes line, in a way, 1 sup- 
 pose. Or pretty near it. Patent whalebone for 
 corsets." 
 
 It took courage for a poet to say that! His face 
 flushed a little, which gave the stranger a chance to 
 remark that he should hardly have expected that a 
 corset-man would be so modest. And he added as 
 he rose: 
 
 "That's why you're so fond of keeping in the back- 
 ground, eh? Well, that's right." He slapped Jerry 
 on the shoulder, and winked at me. "That's right, 
 my boy where corsets are concerned. You shouldn't 
 have even eyelets for the foreground ! " 
 
 Jeremy had stiffened under the familiarity. He 
 smiled faintly, but he said nothing until we were alone, 
 and then there was a touch of weariness in his voice. 
 
 "It used to be brick, and they all had their little
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 39 
 
 jokes about that. And now it's corsets. That's life, 
 I suppose. Hello a little banter about something 
 that we don't give a tinker's damn for and then, 
 Good-bye! What do we know about each other?" 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "It's life, and it isn't life. It's not my life. I'm 
 not a corset-man." 
 
 He uttered it with profound contempt. But pres- 
 ently his voice softened. 
 
 "I'd like to know what I am. I'd give a good deal 
 to find myself." 
 
 His eyes began to have that wistful look, which was 
 the invariable sign in them of coming visions. Oh, 
 he would find himself, I knew! In about three minutes 
 he would be slipping back through the last century 
 until he could hobnob with his own great-grandfather. 
 And that was precisely what I had determined to 
 prevent. I had come that day with the intention of 
 talking plainly; for it was high time, I told myself, 
 that he should stop this idle dreaming, and begin to 
 live. 
 
 "Look here, old man," I said resolutely. "Now 
 that you have condescended to spend five minutes 
 in your own era, for heaven's sake stay here!" 
 
 I had caught him just in time. A moment later and
 
 40 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 that wistful look would have become the familiar happy 
 trance from which I felt it my hard but solemn duty 
 to rescue him. Instead, I had the satisfaction of seeing 
 that waxing glamour in his eyes begin to wane again. 
 He came back slowly, and painfully I must confess, 
 into those harsh realities that I had sworn as a friend 
 to make him face. It was hard, of course, to see the 
 light grow dim, and the shadows lengthen in his eyes. 
 But he must play the man. 
 
 "Now that you're here," I repeated, fixing him 
 sternly with my own eyes lest he should again elude 
 me, "now that you've actually come down into the 
 present " 
 
 "Where they make their little jokes," he said. 
 "Where I am a corset-man." 
 
 He smiled, but it was such a faint, sad, almost 
 reproachful smile that I felt my heart begin to soften 
 toward him, in the way it always did; and if I had 
 not vowed that day to save him from his fatal lotus- 
 eating I should have said no more. 
 
 "Why don't you do something?" I demanded. 
 "Why don't you rise up and kick the dashboard into 
 kindling wood? What right has a man like you, a 
 man of your brains and heart, to peddle whalebone?" 
 
 His face fell. He uttered not a word as I went on,
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 41 
 
 relentlessly, to point out the error of his ways. I 
 poured out, literally, upon my best of friends, the 
 vials of my wrath. And when I had proved to him, 
 with all the rhetoric of youth, and with all the logic 
 of my own experience among men, that he was doomed 
 unless he roused himself from the folly of those lovely, 
 lovely, but utterly unmarketable dreams I felt better. 
 
 I cannot say so much for Jerry. 
 
 Poor lad! His whole frame drooped under my 
 heated eloquence; and his ale that good old English 
 ale that was so nourishing to those false illusions that 
 I had banished as I hoped forever grew warm and 
 flat in his pewter mug. 
 
 "Drink up!" I said, more heartily. "Let's have a 
 little Milwaukee beer, to to change your luck. To 
 celebrate your naturalization papers. Why, man, you 
 are an American citizen! Think of that! A citizen 
 of the most glorious republic the world has ever seen. 
 Drink down old England, and we'll drink up the U.S.A. 
 You're one of us." 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "I'm not thirsty." 
 
 "You're not angry, I hope?" 
 
 "Oh, I can't be angry," he confessed. "It's all 
 true."
 
 42 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Well, then, cheer up. What you want to do is 
 go to writing. That's your bent." 
 
 "I am writing," he answered sadly. "I am always 
 writing. But what difference does it make?" 
 
 1 had never seen ibis Jeremy. And when I had 
 tried for an hour, but all in vain, to soften the shocking 
 effect that my words had wrought in him that utter 
 listlessness in which he listened; when all that I could 
 say to rouse him to life again only plunged him deeper 
 into that deathlike silence, I had to confess though 
 I did so prudently, to myself that if the present 
 was so fatal to him, to that virile radiance in which he 
 had shone and sparkled until it intervened, it were 
 better, perhaps, to get him back again as soon as 
 possible into the glorious safety of the past. 
 
 "Waiter," I said, "bring us two Tobies of good old 
 stout." 
 
 Jerry roused himself. 
 
 "No," he protested feebly, "let's have the beer." 
 
 And while it was coming I seized the opportunity 
 to say as soothingly as possible: 
 
 "You have been unfortunate, old man, in your ex- 
 periences with the present. That's all." 
 
 "Yes," he murmured. "They all come back." 
 
 "What do?"
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 43 
 
 "The manuscripts." 
 
 "Oh, well, they're likely to at first," I told him. 
 "But wait. Have patience. Why, man alive," I 
 cried, striking the table with my fist, " the whole future 
 is before you." 
 
 And as if by magic at the mere word future his 
 face brightened! 
 
 "Ah," he said, a new light dawning in his eyes, 
 "I know! I know!" 
 
 Before I was aware his coat-tails slipped, and van- 
 ished, from my grasp. There was no holding him. 
 And I sat and stared! He had cleared the Present 
 at a bound! 
 
 IV 
 
 Past or Future one or the other it had to be with 
 him. He was at home in both. Only the Present was 
 dark and strange to Jerry Ladd; and there, only, was 
 he troubled or terrified by ghosts. For it was only flesh 
 and blood that ever haunted him the men of his 
 own generation that made him quake with fear. 
 
 Never again did I attempt to rescue him, to bring 
 him either up, or back, to date. And if I was forever 
 losing him in that maze of crooked old-world lanes 
 with which he was familiar for he was always darting
 
 44 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 down strange alleyways of time, and turning queer 
 old corners where I paused bewildered we shared 
 in common those forward vistas of life's young dream. 
 
 He showed me his rejected manuscripts. Secretly 
 I shook my head at them, but openly and recklessly 
 I urged him on to the expenditure of unknown sums in 
 stamps, by which they travelled up and down, until, 
 in time, encountering nothing but misadventures and 
 rebuffs, they became such sorry-looking, ragged vaga- 
 bonds that they did not dare to venture any more into 
 the great high roads of literature, but slunk along 
 unfrequented and miry byways, sleeping sometimes 
 under the very hedges, exposed to the editorial ele- 
 ments. Thus, smudgy with tobacco ash and the drip- 
 pings of nicotine, I have seen them since tied up in 
 a melancholy bundle; and on a bit of paper slipped 
 under the enclosing string I read in the familiar hand 
 of the most hopeful man it ever was my lot to 
 know: 
 
 Possible Manuscripts. Preserved Against Future 
 Reference or Publication. 
 
 Their titles made a fragrant catalogue. There was: 
 
 A Country Lad some reverie, I suppose, of Tood- 
 lumshire. 
 
 The Eternal Legend young love, of course, and
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 45 
 
 written when Huldah had become a mere legendary 
 heroine herself. 
 
 Drowsy Waters the river the only river the 
 Toodlumshire Avon. 
 
 Jewel Weed that is to say, the precious common 
 things that bloom about us. The meditations of an 
 old young man on the pursuit of happiness. The 
 philosophy that youth holds instinctively, in its 
 idealism; that maturity forgets, scoffs at; and that age 
 comes back to, as the fairest harvest of its experience. 
 
 A Whitsuntide Pastoral no need to say that this 
 was in the days of Good Queen Bess, and that Jeremy 
 and Huldah had gone a-maying. I assume that it was 
 Huldah, though her name was Celia. It was a meadow 
 love scene, so innocently simple that I doubt if there 
 is a girl living could speak the maid's part in it out 
 of her modern little head. Huldah might have done 
 so, for in those days ragtime was not yet. Speech and 
 song are as inseparable as ever. Our utterance is 
 attuned to what is running in our heads, and we talk 
 love in the measure and melody in which we sing it. 
 
 The High Street at Lamplight Fifth Avenue in its 
 fairest mood. Old York, to which he had come up by 
 coach, out of the country, on a wet evening when the 
 pavements shone.
 
 46 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Under the Eaves visions from that antique house 
 in Chelsea; a prose fantasy in the manner of Jerry's 
 Uncle Charles. 
 
 May in Gramercy Park. 
 
 June in Maiden Lane. 
 
 July in Greenwich. 
 
 August 
 
 I forget where August was; but, wherever it was, it 
 was hot and enervating, and by that time the other 
 manuscripts had begun to look seedy with their in- 
 cessant journey ings; and that fair springtime in which 
 Jerry had come up to town seemed long ago. The 
 August manuscript was never even finished, and what 
 there was of it had nothing of that earlier bloom. 
 
 The titles, as one reads them now, are chapter- 
 headings in their author's unwritten story that 
 golden legend of which mine is but the feeblest shadow. 
 I call it a legend because, in my desire to catch the 
 spirit of his life, I must so often forget its letter. 
 Because, to be fair to him, and true as to any of us, 
 for that matter one must write not merely under 
 oath, but under the inspiration of a half-forgetfulness. 
 Under revelations too those revelations of glance 
 and smile, and of a word here and a word there, 
 caught in passing, and, after years perhaps, pieced
 
 A STRANGER IN OUR MIDST 47 
 
 together into a completed sentence that shall tell at 
 last what once one could but partly guess. There 
 are scenes here that I never witnessed, that I could 
 not know, save in the mystery of those divinations 
 that I would trust rather than my very eyes. And, 
 intimate though they are, I dare to tell them because 
 I know yet cannot tell, always, bow I know that 
 they are true.
 
 Ill 
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 
 
 ONE morning Jeremy was waiting patiently 
 in the outer office of a certain newspaper, 
 seated solemnly, bolt upright, in a wooden 
 chair, between the door and the desk of a little office- 
 boy. The lad watched him out of a corner of one 
 mischievous young eye, and in the intervals of duty 
 appeared to Jeremy to be making game of him, by 
 means of furtive nods and winks at another imp, 
 whose sole business it was to loll upon his comrade's 
 desk and grin perpetually. It was uncomfortable, like 
 the chair; but not altogether unendurable for a man 
 who sat in one world, but held his head high up in 
 another, where office-boys were never even dreamed of. 
 "He'll never do," whispered the arch-imp, hoarsely; 
 and the other nodded. 
 "Nope. You can see he ain't all there." 
 But Jerry looked at them and smiled. It was not 
 the mere curving of the lips that caught them unawares. 
 48
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 49 
 
 It was that smile within a smile the smile of the 
 real Jeremy, who was, perhaps, so much a boy himself, 
 though an old one, that he was irresistible. At any 
 rate they both smiled back. 
 
 "Say," said the arch-imp confidentially, "we'll put 
 you wise. Don't you be bluffed by anything He says" 
 indicating the inner door. "Just look Him in the 
 eye." 
 
 Jerry nodded. It was good advice, however perti- 
 nent; and, as it happened, he was in need of counsel, 
 for just when the Future had seemed most promising, 
 and he had begun to live in it with heart and soul, 
 the Present, with its customary dampness, had inter- 
 vened. He was under a cloud. For the past four 
 months he had been writing, writing, writing, at a 
 story that was to take the world by storm a novel, 
 this was; and just when it was about to be completed, 
 and he was composing not only its final chapters but 
 the very language of the reviews that were to hail 
 it as the "finest English prose that we have read in 
 years," and just, too, when he was beginning to hold 
 his head up, and look the very Present in its grimy 
 face, the patent-whalebone people (not being in the 
 secret of this unprecedented dignity) gave him a two 
 weeks' notice releasing him from all further humilia-
 
 5 o THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 tion at their hands. It was a petty incident, too small 
 and sordid for Time to note. But Time did note it, 
 however Eternity may view these foolish little questions 
 of finance. The rosy Future turned quite pale, and 
 fled to the horizon; and Jeremy, bewildered by the 
 sudden darkness, was left alone where it was Now or 
 Never, and where even the counsel of a friendly office- 
 boy was comforting. 
 
 "Remember now; look Him in the eye!" 
 
 Jerry nodded, gulping hard as he stood at last before 
 that Dreadful Presence an Editor Enthroned ! 
 
 He was a mortal-looking man; but like the monarch 
 that He was, He sat in a mighty halo, partly of pipe- 
 smoke and partly of His exalted state, so that Jeremy 
 forgot himself, forgot all that he had been, forgot what 
 some day he would be, when bis time came, the glorious 
 but recreant Future that had deserted him in the 
 hour of his need and in answer to that Awful Voice 
 replied meekly: 
 
 "I'm looking for a job." 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "I say I'm 1-Iooking for a job." 
 
 The royal head swayed dubiously. The royal eye 
 was lighted by a baleful fire, and the royal voice was 
 very sorry.
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 51 
 
 There was no job. 
 
 Then Jeremy remembered the kindly office-boy and 
 looked Him in the eye. 
 
 "Perhaps you have a g-ghost of a job?" 
 
 It was the ghost of a voice that said it, but it made 
 Him look twice before he thundered, with the faintest 
 glimmer of a smile: 
 
 "And what may that be?" 
 
 Jerry laughed. That is, he meant it for a laugh. 
 It was really little more than a kind of hoarse grin. 
 
 "What is the ghost of a job?" demanded the Mighty 
 One. The glimmer now had been extinguished, but 
 Jerry did not even wink. 
 
 "The ghost of a job? Why the privilege of 
 h-haunting you," he explained. "You know what I 
 mean b-bringing you things to print." 
 
 The Monarch roared. 
 
 "Oh! That's all right," he said heartily. "Bring 
 'em along. Haunt away! " 
 
 "You p-pay, of course?" Jerry ventured, trying to 
 restrain his joy. 
 
 "Sure! By the yard. What are you going to write 
 about?" 
 
 "Well, for one thing, I thought I'd write about the 
 Streets of New York."
 
 52 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Jerry's ears may have deceived him, but they re- 
 corded just the ghost of a royal groan. 
 
 " Do you want to know how many times the Streets 
 of New York have been written up! Well, I'll tell 
 you, young man. Just nine thousand nine hundred 
 and ninety-nine times, to be exact." 
 
 "Not m-my Streets of New York," Jerry assured 
 him. 
 
 "Humph! Perhaps not," the editor conceded, be- 
 ginning to shuffle the papers on his desk. "Well, bring 
 'em along your streets. But it's a wornout theme, 
 and I can't give you any hope." 
 
 "Oh, I'll furnish the hope," Jerry told him, raptur- 
 ously. "That's right in my line. And I have here," 
 he confessed, beginning to take them from his pockets, 
 "s-several manuscripts that I " 
 
 The editor glanced at them, and laid them away 
 from him as far as possible on his desk. 
 
 "Hope's in your line, is it?" he demanded sharply, 
 lighting his pipe again. 
 
 "Y-yes, sir. You know what the old English ballad 
 says, '"My face is my fortune, sir," she said.' Well, 
 Hope's mine." 
 
 The editor was silent. He gazed off thoughtfully, 
 out of a very dirty window, at the elevated tracks,
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 53 
 
 where, now and then, a train rushed by. Seated thus, 
 quietly, he did not appear so very terrible. In fact, 
 Jeremy, with his instinctive sympathy for anything 
 man or beast, king or peasant that gazed off wist- 
 fully into the distance, whether of the Future or the 
 Past (and here it was the Past, he knew) felt his heart 
 drawn to the royal meditant. 
 
 " Doubtless you began with a pretty fair inheritance 
 of hope yourself," he ventured, feeling more at home 
 now. 
 
 "Doubtless I did," was the gruff reply. "The fact 
 is I" and here his bulk began to heave with some 
 secret and irresistible emotion " I wrote up the 
 Streets myself! Yes, sir. It was the very first thing 
 I did when I came to town." 
 
 "And did they did they p-print them?" Jerry 
 inquired, cautiously. 
 
 "Oh," was the equally cautious answer, "they used 
 a block or two, I guess." 
 
 "Well, history repeats itself," was Jerry's optimistic 
 comment. "And I don't expect, of course, to confine 
 myself to the Streets. There must be some wonder- 
 ful stories in all this mob and uproar if one can find 
 them." 
 
 " Yep if you can find 'em."
 
 54 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Things happen to you down here," Jerry remarked, 
 remembering the patent-whalebone episode. "If one 
 never finds a story here, one is apt to live one and 
 never know it, I suppose." 
 
 The editor shuffled his papers again, and Jerry 
 rose. 
 
 "I mustn't keep you," he began 
 
 "Oh, that's all right," the editor growled. "You've 
 got to haunt me, of course. That's understood. 
 That's the arrangement. But I don't know what it 
 is something or other that ghost in you, I guess 
 
 reminded me of a fellow I used to know." 
 
 Jerry smiled. It was the same smile within a smile 
 
 the ghost in his smile that had caught the office- 
 boy. 
 
 "Yourself, perhaps?" he said, respectfully. 
 
 "Well I used to think it was myself," the editor 
 confessed. "But I don't know now. One either finds 
 himself, or loses himself, down here. You may not 
 know that I used to be a novelist." 
 
 "Oh!" cried Jeremy, for they were brothers now. 
 " I should like to read some of your books." 
 
 The editor nodded. 
 
 "So should I!" 
 
 He smiled grimly, and with his blue pencil began.
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 55 
 
 to edit what was lying nearest in the clutter on his 
 desk. It is the customary sign of royalty that the 
 audience is at an end. Jerry withdrew. 
 
 "Did you look Him in the eye?" demanded the 
 office-boy. 
 
 And Jerry nodded. It was a beautiful little office- 
 boy, with wings. And it was a beautiful world that 
 he descended to, floating down the staircase that he 
 had climbed. For the Future had come back, blush- 
 ing for its base desertion, and he was at last a Jour- 
 nalist. Or, if not quite a Journalist, he was, at least, 
 the ghost of one. 
 
 ii 
 
 The Streets were declined. No reason was given 
 either for the declination or for the thanks with which 
 they were accompanied. Nor did Jerry ever seek one. 
 But Oxford Through the Fence was accepted, cut down 
 one half, and Published the word demands a chapter 
 by itself published in the Saturday supplement 
 item $4.66 in a brown paper envelope marked Ladd. 
 
 And that was the Beginning. 
 
 What Jerry saw the day that his Oxford appeared 
 in print was one long beautiful vision extending from 
 the news-stand where he bought it for himself to Wash-
 
 56 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 ington Square, whither he retired with it, almost in 
 tears. 
 
 It was yet winter, and ice and snow lay on the 
 ground; but a sudden mildness and radiant sunshine 
 had suffused the Square as with a tender April haze. 
 In its bloom outlines became indistinct boughs 
 seemed clothed in an impalpable fairy foliage, as if 
 the spirit of the springtime already hovered there 
 unseen. Hues and colouring were glorified the white 
 and gray of the majestic arch looming above the noisy 
 traffic, the yellow of the memorial tower holding its 
 cross aloft to the serene and cloudless blue, and the 
 rose and white of the stately old-fashioned mansions, 
 their red-brick faces flushed cheerfully with the morn- 
 ing sun. All objects shared in this transient halo; 
 even the heaps of dirty snow, the ugly little park 
 pagodas, and the dilapidated houses on the meaner 
 side of the pleasaunce, outliving their residential use- 
 fulness, but lingering on, and beginning now to be 
 frowzy with the signs of that encroaching Present 
 which, all day long, roared about the Square, showing 
 its teeth, and waiting hungrily for the time when all 
 four sides that fair and rosy one as well should 
 become its prey. 
 
 On the crossings, baby-carriages contended for the
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 57 
 
 right of way with carts and trucks, cabs and automo- 
 biles, and foreign-looking busses. The paths were full 
 of playing children children of the rich, with their 
 gossiping nurses, and children of the poor with no one 
 to chide or check their noisy gambols; while on the 
 benches old men, waiting for their end, basked in the 
 sunlight, blinking and smoking and muttering to them- 
 selves, as oblivious of the nursing bottles and the 
 flying snowballs as of the sparrows feeding at their feet. 
 There were swarthy faces from an Italian colony 
 close at hand, and others, pale and pinched with hunger 
 and despair they of that scattered nation of the 
 homeless staring blankly at the beauty of another 
 futile day. And, now and then, fairer faces passed 
 from the rosy houses to cushioned vehicles waiting at 
 the curb. On every side the same commingling of 
 opposing elements old and new, native and alien, 
 commerce and home, wealth and poverty, youth and 
 age, memories and hopes while over all presided 
 the great white arched memorial of the silent and 
 immutable Past, over-shadowing the clamorous and 
 ever-changing Present. The Future only like those 
 premonitions of the spring transfiguring the winter's 
 morning was a doubtful and elusive presence in 
 the Square. But it was there not merely nursed
 
 58 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 and watched and guarded, but all unseen and unsus- 
 pected and alone. And nowhere was it half so real, 
 or so supremely beautiful, as where a young man sat, 
 solitary, upon a bench, smiling blissfully to himself, 
 with a morning paper in his hands. 
 
 in 
 
 Thus Jeremy came out of the old romance into the 
 new. From living backward to living forward. And, 
 as always, the interim was but a strip of foreground 
 from which the eye pressed on eagerly to the enchanted 
 distance, which was now of the future, where it had 
 been, formerly, of the past. 
 
 The present provided, to be sure, a ten-cent bottle 
 of ink, a tablet of white paper, and a window in a hall 
 bedroom which had, for mere common eyes, a vista 
 of a very lean and frugal heaven, where the clouds 
 hung low sometimes, and were caught and tethered 
 with wooden clothes-pins. And it yielded him, besides, 
 shelter and a pallid sustenance consisting of what there 
 is only one word to fittingly describe victuals. But 
 what were victuals to Jerry Ladd? Truth to tell, he 
 would always rather talk then eat; and considering his 
 boarding-place it was well, perhaps, that this was so. 
 
 When not talking he was sitting at his window
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 59 
 
 scratching away at what mostly came to naught; and 
 the remainder came to little enough, so far as this world 
 was concerned. On the other it fed a growing Fame. 
 Right through the clothes line Jerry saw it glow by 
 day, until it filled, all golden, that strip of sky; by 
 night it sparkled there, a thousand tapers lighting up 
 the dark for him, as he leaned his head against the 
 pane. 
 
 It was then, sometimes, that he remembered his 
 forgotten prayers, addressing them to the gracious 
 Mystery of that illumined distance. Sometimes, as if 
 in answer, the lights so dazzled him, or swam so 
 strangely in his eyes, that he was forced to close them. 
 Oftener there seemed to be no sign whatever that he 
 was heard, or that it was even known There that the 
 manuscript sent off that day must not come back 
 that Here it was the eleventh hour of necessity, and 
 poor, weak human frailty could do no more! 
 
 A little lower than the angels, there was, across the 
 yards, a high room like his own, where on the eaves- 
 ledge a pot of geraniums bloomed by day, the glimmer 
 of a lamp by night. The room was occupied by a girl. 
 She was seldom to be seen and then only when she 
 leaned for a moment over her scarlet treasure. That 
 her features were vaguely youthlike was all that he
 
 60 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 ever could distinguish, but he used to muse and imagine 
 things about her; and it pleased him to think that she 
 was fair, and that even in New York, and doubtless in 
 poverty as well, she cherished in her heart old-fashioned 
 cottage-thoughts, like the flowers on her sill. In time 
 she became the heroine of his more idyllic themes, 
 which made him wonder, sometimes, what she would 
 have said, could she have known. Ladlike, he even 
 plotted romantic little episodes, in which her uncon- 
 scious influence and inspiration in a young man's life 
 were suddenly revealed to her, to her amazement and 
 confusion, in which her cheeks became the colour of 
 her geranium. It seemed a pity that in her loneliness 
 she never would even dream that she had cheered and 
 brightened another solitude. It never occurred to 
 Jeremy, I am sure, that any one might be watching 
 him that his own life, seemingly so obscure and futile, 
 illumined others from afar; or even those that it touched 
 in passing. Certainly, he never dreamed that any one 
 would write these lines of him. But, youthlike, he 
 did resent the barriers of custom and of circumstance 
 that kept him from sharing those shadowy lives that 
 lingered near or flitted past his own; and some notion 
 of what the spirit-land would be, of its beautiful free- 
 dom and its untrammelled sympathy the real Jeremy
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 61 
 
 and those other real ones, released at last, so that there 
 would be no longer any need for loneliness brought 
 to his musings a compassion for his fellow-prisoners 
 that he had never felt before; so that even the depised 
 and rejected Present, in its lights and shadows, and 
 its subtle colourings, began to have a beauty of its own. 
 
 But alas for any living in it! it was always dis- 
 appointing him. It was always intervening in the old, 
 hard, wall-like fashion, between him and those fairer 
 vistas of his hopes. It was only meant apparently for 
 the so-called Practical Man, who dwelt there comfort- 
 ably on the very ground that had been won for him 
 by the foolish dreamers of the past! 
 
 "Ladd," said the editor one day, "there's one nice 
 thing about your contributions." 
 
 Jerry flushed. It was not often that a crumb of 
 praise fell to him from that full table where the prac- 
 tical men were dining sumptuously every day. 
 
 "Yes, sir, there's one nice thing about the things 
 you write. They can go into the paper, or into the 
 waste-basket. If we leave them out we shan't be 
 scooped by any other sheet. And if we put them in 
 well, that doesn't matter either." 
 
 A practical man would have known what to reply 
 at once, but it was some moments before Jeremy could
 
 62 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 find his tongue. And then it was only to say, as he 
 sat there softly tearing into bits the manuscript that 
 he had brought with him that morning: 
 "It matters to me." 
 
 IV 
 
 Jerry's mother had gone back, long ago, to Tood- 
 lums, which she had never really left, and so there was 
 no one to notice his bewildered face when he returned 
 that day from his visit to the editor. It was a crisis 
 in his life. And it was many a darkened hour before 
 his thoughts began to flow again to any purpose, 
 out of the confusion into which they had been 
 plunged. 
 
 One thing was clear he was done with dreaming. 
 There was to be no more reverie in his life. No more 
 star-gazing. No more appointed trysts in moon- 
 shine, where he was always waiting for what never 
 came. 
 
 He would face the Present. 
 
 And he would face it, not as a dreamer any longer, 
 but as a practical man. As a practical man! He 
 would put aside childish things. Youth also, and its 
 bravado, and its illusions. And the Past, and the 
 Future they were non-existent. He would renounce
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 63 
 
 them all! And henceforth and forever he would dwell 
 in the world that he could feel, and see, and hear, and 
 smell, and taste, in each moment as it passed. 
 
 And, as a practical man, that world would claim him 
 as its own for better, or for worse. And if for worse, 
 why then, at least, he would have lived, not merely 
 dreamed. , 
 
 Perhaps this also was a dream disguised. 
 
 But if it was a dream, there was as yet no sign of 
 it. He was in earnest, terribly in earnest, now. Now, 
 and Here. 
 
 "If one is ever to be practical," he told himself, 
 "one must begin at once." 
 
 And he began at once! 
 
 Then and there, seated in his hall bedroom, he began 
 life over again. 
 
 It is safe to say that no one ever went about a ref- 
 ormation in a manner more ideally businesslike. He 
 rose suddenly something within him lifting him to 
 his very feet and literally kicked his past out of the 
 window, where it vanished somewhere among those 
 stars where it belonged. 
 
 Then he lighted the lamp, for he had been brooding 
 in the dark, and with one sweep of his hand cleared his 
 table of every vestige of his dream every finished
 
 64 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 page and scribbled note and seated himself before 
 a clean white sheet of paper. 
 
 "In the first place," he told himself, rapping himself 
 to order, as it were resolving his assembled wits 
 into a committee of the whole, with his will as chairman ; 
 and, without any further preliminaries, plunging at once 
 into the heart of the business "in the first place, we 
 have got to have a steady income." 
 
 There was no dissent. 
 
 "And to have a steady income," he continued, in 
 the same cool, calculating, inevitable tone of thought 
 without a tremor of the old emotion, without a 
 shadow of doubt or hesitation or any fear whatever, 
 for all such follies he had put behind him with his 
 past, and he was Master now "to have a sure, safe 
 income, always, as long as one shall live, the best way 
 is to go into business." 
 
 The silence was unanimous. 
 
 "But not into any fly-by-night business," he warned 
 himself. "Not into any doubtful venture, or high- 
 tension enterprise, at the mercy of the wind and weather. 
 Not into the stock market. (The stock market was then 
 and there eliminated.) Nor into any passing whim 
 or novelty. (This was a rap at patent whalebone, 
 which had already been eliminated.)
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 65 
 
 "No," Jeremy continued calmly, "what we want 
 is some good old staple line founded on Necessity. 
 And, in particular, a concern old enough to have raised 
 itself into the sight of men flourishing enough to 
 afford a refuge in its spreading foliage, and with its 
 roots down deep in the cool, moist regions of the solid 
 earth. (That was to say, of course, safe deposit 
 vaults. And in his reference to "a refuge in its spread- 
 ing foliage," Jerry had in mind something like the 
 India House, where his Uncle Charles Lamb worked 
 so long, and came at last into a pension.) 
 
 "And why not?" he asked, still speaking as a prac- 
 tical man. "When one is choosing one's house (and of 
 course one does) why not choose one with a past? 
 History repeats itself. (Now that was true that 
 very moment history was repeating itself.) A house 
 with a victorious past is the best assurance of a victor- 
 ious future. And besides " here, it must be con- 
 fessed, Jeremy forgot himself; it was the shadow of 
 his own past sneaking back from its banishment 
 among the laughing stars "besides, there is a 
 certain charm, even romance, in an ancient and 
 honourable institution. Commerce, also, has its 
 Oxfords!" 
 
 There was a sudden stir in the committee. A kind
 
 66 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 of thrill ran through its members, and an instant 
 later would have broken into a tumult of applause. 
 But Jerry checked it with a frown. 
 
 "It may take longer for a man to rise in such a 
 house," he sharply reminded them, "but once there, 
 one has the assurance that there will always be 
 always at least in his own lifetime something to rise 
 to. And slowly, but surely, in such a place faithful 
 service will find reward." 
 
 Oh, there could be no doubt of that. On that point 
 the whole committee was a unit, and Jeremy went on 
 triumphantly to point the way to this accomplishment 
 of so prudent and practical a design. It was to be 
 furthered not in the usual haphazard fashion (to wit, 
 advertisement), but by one long, grim, protracted siege 
 of those ivied walls that he had in mind. For even 
 mills are muffled, sometimes, in a leafy mantle beauti- 
 ful with time. 
 
 One must choose his citadel of trade that was the 
 first point and then lay siege to it; and then which 
 was more important even than the vines one never 
 must give up! Never until one found some foothold, 
 though it be the humblest, on that lowest floor. Some 
 errandry, perhaps, or wrappery, or even sweepery, from 
 which one would rise in time to higher things.
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 67 
 
 That was the programme, and the entire committee 
 voted it a go. 
 
 Well, then, which house? That was the next con- 
 sideration. And it was one that would require some 
 time. Haste, obviously, was to be avoided in a venture 
 that involved a man's whole future life. The thought 
 of that and it was a solemn thought, and suffused 
 the committee with a kind of suppressed but tremulous 
 excitement caused even Jeremy to pause. He had 
 never realized before that the business world could 
 be so spiritually exalting! And more than once, as 
 he paced the floor his chair had proved a bit con- 
 fining he had to calm himself with the reminder 
 that, above all things, a practical man must never, 
 even in a crisis, lose his head. 
 
 Which house, then ? That was the question. 
 There were so many in the world, it seemed at first 
 impossible to choose. But, as every practical man is 
 well aware, every question, however vast, is vertebrate; 
 that is to say, is to be solved upon some simple prin- 
 ciple its bony skeleton, on which its bulk depends. 
 
 The principle here was that of Choice. When one 
 can choose at all, one chooses, naturally, what is most 
 congenial. There was no earthly reason, then, no 
 practical reason, why one, for example, should choose
 
 68 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 a business that smelled to heaven or that had any 
 other disagreeable however venerable concomi- 
 tant. Certainly not when there were others in the 
 world, equally old, or famous, or well-rooted in the 
 "solid earth, " that were inoffensive and even some 
 that must be highly pleasing to the senses. There 
 would be no occasion for accusing a man of being un- 
 practical, because he elected to sweep out an ancient 
 and honourable manufactory of let us say frank- 
 incense and myrrh, the aromatic perfumes and spices 
 of Araby, or the nutritious chocolate or fragrant coffees 
 of our fairer walks of commerce; or (if such things 
 pall in time), silver, or silks, or books, or linens, rather 
 than a hoary old tannery, for example, or an old- 
 established, even vine-clad, pharmaceutical establish- 
 ment, bottling up smells from every corner of the 
 odoriferous globe. Not at all. Nor was there any 
 really practical reason for selecting fish, or glue, or 
 grease, or coffins, in preference say to wine, with its 
 ancient and idyllic lineage; or even to so homely a 
 commodity as flour which, though dusty it is true, 
 has still a pure white, altogether chaste and wholesome 
 association with the sunny fields and graneries of the 
 world, from Joseph's time, or Ruth's, till now. 
 ; No; one could still be practical and not forswear
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 69 
 
 the poetry of life. Indeed, the more he thought of 
 it, the clearer Jerry's vision grew of that epic com- 
 merce in which it was still man's privilege to embark 
 upon romantic seas, as adventurously, as heroically, 
 as ever, dipping his very hands into the things that 
 poets only catalogue. 
 
 Which line, then, should it be? 
 
 Not books. It would be well, perhaps, to avoid 
 even the appearance of literature! And, on general 
 principles, to select a merchandise not too elusive; 
 whose address was already known. Spices of Araby 
 are boxed up where? Heaven only knows; the bill- 
 boards do not; nor the newspaper advertisements. But 
 of the others ... of them all, perhaps . . . 
 yes, on the whole he preferred, he thought, as a prac- 
 tical man . . . and there were many consider- 
 ations in its favour, both practical and poetic . . . 
 and, moreover, a certain leaning as it were, that was 
 purely psychical, and not to be divined; but no less 
 creditable on that account Chocolate. 
 
 It was not merely that he was fond of chocolate. 
 Nor that his mother might have had some qualms 
 about the wine trade. Nor simply that chocolate 
 was a neat commodity, or one that was moral and 
 nutritious notoriously nutritious; nor that its savour
 
 70 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 and flavour were, esthetically speaking, so unobjec- 
 tionable. These were good reasons, but superficial, 
 all of them. There were other and profounder ones 
 that touched the question at its very core. Business 
 reasons. Reasons that would appeal at once to a 
 practical man like Jerry Ladd. (J. Ladd he was to 
 sign himself thereafter.) 
 
 Chocolate had "come to stay." It was, therefore, 
 a safe investment for a man who expected to put all 
 his eggs in one basket risk his whole life, body and 
 mind and soul, in exchange for a steady income. Choco- 
 late, so to speak, was in the flower of its commercial 
 youth; while tea and coffee, on the other hand, were 
 growing seedy. In a nervous age they had lost both 
 their glamour and alas! their reputation. Things 
 were being said of them. The respectable eyed them 
 askance; the learned glared at them recommending 
 chocolate! Chocolate it took but one glance of a 
 business eye to see had a future without a single 
 cloud, moral or scientific, upon its fair horizon. And 
 as for its present, where, in the universe of trade, was 
 the shelf or counter so remote, or so unfrequented, 
 that the dust ever settled, or the spider ever wove 
 its web, on a box of chocolate? 
 
 Which house, then? for it was only the line that
 
 A PRACTICAL MAN 71 
 
 the committee had agreed upon, without a murmur: 
 it was all so logical and conclusive as presented by a 
 practical man ! Which firm? Their names were legion. 
 Which citadel of chocolate was to be stormed and 
 carried by assault? Which cocoa-tree was to be 
 climbed? well-rooted, and affording in its spreading 
 foliage a roost and refuge for this Lieutenant Buona- 
 parte of finance. 
 
 The committee hesitated this was not a matter 
 for the public ear and the doors were shut, excluding 
 the biographers. Among them, however, was a budding 
 novelist, who carried in his mind a keyhole through 
 which the very deaf might hear. He knows, but may 
 not say, which house it was. But it was a good house, 
 flourishing in the sight of men; and its roots were all 
 that could be desired, even by the most conservative 
 investor. It was the house whose cocoa Mother used 
 to make the Very Best, of course Pure and Un- 
 adulterated. Oh, you may be sure of that. And when 
 the doors were opened, and the biographers rushed 
 in again, there was J. Ladd, seated at his table in the 
 most businesslike manner in the world not biting at 
 his pen, dreamerlike, but dictating! his Application. 
 
 It was an idyl! Neat of phrase, compact, a very 
 compendium of information, so lucid in what it said
 
 72 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 and so suggestive of all that it in modesty withheld, 
 that a busy business man, with one sweep of his dis- 
 tracted eye, might visualize the applicant. Completely 
 visualize him: his lusty youth; its derivation from 
 morally reliable and socially patriotic sources; its ami- 
 able readiness for any service however humble; its 
 smiling patience founded on unblemished faith in a 
 future where not a broom-stroke or a hammer-blow 
 would be forgotten, but all, in due course of time, 
 would be rewarded; and not a word about the stipend! 
 All that, and more! so that he must have been a very 
 duffer of a chocolate manufacturer who would not have 
 cried at once: 
 
 "By Jove! The very man! This is the chap we 
 have been looking for!" 
 
 It was indeed an idyl; and when at last Jeremy had 
 drafted it afresh, and addressed the envelope, weary 
 with so much business all at once for one has to 
 grow accustomed to being practical but happy now, 
 and once more hopeful, feeling his feet upon the solid 
 earth and his head aloft in the very heaven of the Pres- 
 ent, he dropped his letter into the nearest post-box. 
 And then, feeling hungry, as in the Present one is apt 
 to do, for it was midnight, he slipped into an all-night 
 lunch-room across the way, for a cup of
 
 IV 
 
 BARBARA 
 
 OPPOSITE Jeremy, across the tapioca pudding, 
 sat one of the young ladies of the boarding- 
 house, whose cheerful countenance had been 
 a light to him in downcast moods. It was a plain face, 
 but appeared always to be concealing something beau- 
 tiful. Something, however, that eluded vigilance; a 
 presence that was forever escaping through the open 
 doorways of her eyes, and lingering playfully about 
 her lips, and that hushed her voice, so that, however 
 commonplace her words might be, there was always 
 an undermessage in them that could be very tender 
 and consoling. 
 
 Before he was aware, he found himself expecting her 
 each evening, for it was seldom otherwise that they 
 chanced to meet, and turning to her with a sense of 
 refuge from shadowy and uncertain things. There 
 was nothing doubtful about Barbara; nothing tense 
 nothing belated or bewildered, or incomplete. It was 
 73
 
 74 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 always quiet there where she was; as if, the day's work 
 over, to-morrow could be entirely trusted to arrive on 
 time, and with its usual luggage, which she never lifted 
 in advance. Like Jerry's mother, she had for him a 
 homely philosophy that, manlike, he was bound to 
 smile at, but that, manlike also, he liked to lean upon 
 sometimes. 
 
 "You are tired, that's all. Never mind; it will all 
 come right. I know it will." 
 
 Easy to say; but not so easy to believe. And Bar- 
 bara believed there was never any doubt of that. 
 If she had not, he never could have found such comfort 
 in those simple phrases, which are the hardest in the 
 world for hypocrisy or artifice to utter feelingly, they 
 are so inane, until one, hears them ring and echo with 
 the voice of faith. That he did find comfort in them, 
 and inspiration, was proved sufficiently by the radiance 
 that, little by little as they talked, always came back 
 into his face. 
 
 Barbara was a typewritist in a lawyer's office, some- 
 where downtown, where she must have been a prize, 
 for her calm speech was in itself an affidavit of efficiency. 
 She was one of those women who never swerve, never 
 lapse, and who pass, unwearied and unsmirched, 
 through rough or miry ways, as if predestined to such
 
 BARBARA 75 
 
 goodness. Or, as if beloved of angels, they move always 
 in the safe bright shadow of unseen wings. There was 
 nothing lurking in Barbara's eyes, which, like the eyes 
 of children, looked straight at Jeremy in a steadfast 
 innocence, whose visions, doubtless, were like his 
 own. 
 
 "Suppose there are two hundred on the waiting-list," 
 she told him. "Chocolate, you know, is not the only 
 business in the world. Have you tried an advertise- 
 ment?" 
 
 He had not. It was such a haphazard method of 
 beginning one's career. It was going into business 
 blindfolded. In the end, however, Jeremy listened to 
 her advice, and spent another practical evening, the 
 fruit of which was this very plain, businesslike appeal. 
 
 A young man, country-bred, with a certain variety 
 of experience, and literary qualifications, and with 
 ideals of loyalty and diligence, desires a connection, 
 however humble, with an established house, where he 
 may have an opportunity to obtain a sound commercial 
 training with hopes of an advancement. Address 
 "Perseverance," Bulletin. 
 
 "It is beautiful," she told him, when he sub- 
 mitted it next day for her approval. "Beautifully 
 worded." 
 
 And then she held it musingly in her hands.
 
 76 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Well," Jerry explained, modestly, "it is the simple 
 truth. It has that to commend it. And it brings up, 
 I think don't you? a certain picture before the 
 mind ? So that so that the wrong person would 
 hardly be likely to answer it." 
 
 "Yes," she acknowledged gravely, "I think that's 
 true. It has too too refined a sound for the wrong 
 person to reply to it." 
 
 "I did take pains with it," he acknowledged, flushing 
 with pleasure. "I wanted it to be myself, so far as 
 possible, so that if I were not the kind of a man that 
 was wanted they would know it at a glance, without 
 my troubling them to send for me. I wanted, don't 
 you see, from the very first even in the advertise- 
 ment to start fair." 
 
 "Oh, you will!" she murmured, lifting her eyes, and 
 regarding him almost with reverence. " You'll start 
 fair." 
 
 She was silent a moment, and then some sense of 
 duty coming to the surface of her mood she roused 
 herself. 
 
 " I wonder," she began gently, "if it wouldn't be wise, 
 perhaps, to omit the 'variety of experience,' and the 
 'literary qualifications'? They are true, of course; 
 but business men, you know, are apt to be suspicious
 
 BARBARA 77 
 
 of the word 'literary.' And, to them, 'a variety of expe- 
 rience' might suggest, don't you think, that you . . . 
 never stuck long at anything?" 
 
 "But I signed it Perseverance, you notice?" Jeremy 
 replied. 
 
 "Y-yes. That's so. But don't the two suggestions 
 conflict somewhat? And wouldn't it be better," she 
 ventured boldly, "to omit them both with the 
 'literary qualifications'?" 
 
 "Omit them all!" 
 
 "Yes! / would. And sign your initials, as if, don't 
 you see, you had nothing to conceal, even from your 
 friends, who might guess from them what you were 
 about. And as for the 'ideals of loyalty and diligence,' " 
 she added, thoughtfully, "well they, of course, are pre- 
 supposed. At least no hard-headed business man is 
 going to take any stock in them until they had been 
 demonstrated." 
 
 "How much does that leave?" Jerry inquired. 
 
 "And I'd take out the 'humble,' too," she advised 
 him. "Really! Humility, you know, is not an asset 
 in New York. Oh, not at all! It's all the other way. 
 And the 'country-bred.' It doesn't matter where one 
 is bred, so long as one " 
 
 She hesitated, but she said it so demurely that even
 
 7 8 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 a young man with "literary qualifications" could hardly 
 have objected to the phrase: 
 
 "So long as one delivers the goods." 
 
 "And does that," Jeremy inquired again meekly, 
 "1-Ieave anything?" 
 
 "Oh, yes! Have you a pencil?" 
 
 It took her but a minute two at most. 
 
 "A young man," she read aloud, while the pencil 
 was still busy, "desiring a commercial training, seeks 
 employment in a well-established house; and, in the 
 hope of subsequent advancement, is willing to begin 
 his service without pay. J. L., Bulletin." 
 
 "Does it leave that!" Jeremy exclaimed. 
 
 "All that!" she answered quaintly, with just the 
 glimmer of a smile. "You can read it for yourself." 
 
 And then, at his complete bewilderment, she began 
 to laugh softly. Still he gazed at her, and not at 
 all at the revision which she had handed him. 
 
 "My!" he said. "And one wouldn't dream of it, 
 to look at you!" 
 
 She was grave at once. 
 
 "Wouldn't dream what?" she asked. 
 
 "Why that you could be so practical!" 
 
 Barbara smiled. But her face flushed, and all her 
 quickness and precision vanished instantly.
 
 BARBARA 79 
 
 " It is something one has to be, sometimes," she con- 
 fessed, slowly lowering her eyes. " Not what one wants 
 to be . . . I don't like practical women!" 
 
 It was the first time that he had ever seen her on 
 the verge of tears. And it had all come about so 
 suddenly, so strangely he could not quite remember 
 how, nor make out why, nor what was signified nor 
 how to comfort her. Praise and gratitude were of 
 no avail. 
 
 But he sent her advertisement. 
 
 The only question had been that of pay, but it all 
 came out as she predicted that the established 
 houses, like that of chocolate, were hardly in need 
 of men; and that the main thing, in so general an ad- 
 vertisement, was to win the attention and capture the 
 imagination at a single glance. 
 
 "Nothing in the world," she contended, "is so con- 
 vincing of a man's sincerity, as his willingness to work 
 without pay." 
 
 The answers were few and disappointing. Not one 
 from the vine-clad Oxfords of commerce! But each 
 of them, in lieu of an historic past, offered him a modest 
 salaried present, arched by a gorgeous rainbow, with
 
 8o THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 a pot of gold at the other end. Jerry shook his head 
 at them, and Barbara herself confessed that they were 
 not, in root or foliage, all that could be desired but 
 they were a beginning. And having, as it were, con- 
 secrated himself to the practical life, they agreed that 
 it was not for him "to reason why," but to charge 
 valorously, and leave the outcome to the higher 
 powers. 
 
 He chose, therefore, after the most careful consider- 
 ation, what seemed to be the least objectionable 
 the offer of a mysterious agency, which had at least 
 the merit of promising fresh air, its office being on the 
 eighteenth floor. His duties were those of a solicitor 
 of advertising for some kind of novel pocket-calendar, 
 pencil attached. It was a branch office, one of several, 
 it appeared, in divers cities, the parent stem flourishing 
 in Chicago, with a root-system that had not as yet 
 suffered any drought. The agent, moreover, was a 
 brotherly man. A hearty, generous fellow, who would 
 not hear of employing without pay a youth of such 
 self-sacrificing worth, and who offered Jerry, to 
 begin with, ten dollars a week a purely nominal 
 salary, he explained, to be increased, from time to 
 time, in proportion to the sales of space in the little 
 book.
 
 BARBARA 81 
 
 At the end of a week Jeremy appeared, to Barbara's 
 inquiring eye, to have something on his mind. Just 
 what, she was unable to conjecture; and she refrained 
 from questioning him. But at the end of the second 
 week, the burden, whatever it had been, and been 
 removed, and Jerry, to her great relief, appeared him- 
 self again. 
 
 "Well?" she said, her heart warming at the sight of 
 his radiant face across the table. "How does the work 
 go?" 
 
 "Go?" he repeated. "It's gone!" 
 
 "Gone!" 
 
 "Oh, yes. Why " 
 
 He shook his head, and smiled derisively. 
 
 "I've never pretended to be a business man, but it 
 took me a week, just one week," he declared proudly, 
 "to sound that enterprise, so far, at least, as I'm con- 
 cerned." 
 
 "Was it a a fake?" Barbara inquired. 
 
 "No-o-o; I wouldn't say that. Not a fake. The 
 concern's all right, so far as I know. And the scheme's 
 all right. Nothing important, of course; but nothing 
 wrong about it. And the agent is a right nice chap. 
 But he doesn't know anything about business." 
 
 "What do you mean?"
 
 82 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Why, simply this: there isn't enough work for two 
 men that's all." 
 
 "Isn't enough work!" 
 
 "Why, no. One man can manage the whole agency 
 manage the office and do the soliciting as well. As 
 a matter of fact there isn't any office-work worth men- 
 tioning. The soliciting's the thing. It all depends 
 upon that. And all he did was to sit there and read 
 the newspaper, and draw his salary, while I went 
 out and got the advertisements. Why, as I showed 
 him, there wasn't any earthly reason why he should 
 be employing me or any other man. Not the 
 faintest shadow of an excuse! He could do the work 
 all the work and save the company the expense. 
 My job, I told him frankly, was simply a piece of 
 useless extravagance; and I thought the company 
 ought to know about it." 
 
 Barbara gasped. 
 
 "And what did le say to that?" she asked. She 
 had forgotten her dinner. 
 
 "Say! What could he say? It was perfectly clear. 
 So plain that I don't understand how it never had 
 occurred to him." 
 
 "And what did you decide to do about it?" Barbara 
 inquired nervously.
 
 BARBARA 83 
 
 "What could I do? There was only one honourable 
 thing to do considering the interests of the house. 
 I resigned." 
 
 "Resigned?" 
 
 "Why, yes. I couldn't expect him to resign, you 
 know." 
 
 "And was he willing?" 
 
 "Oh, yes. He seemed willing. He didn't say much; 
 but then the matter had been presented so very plainly 
 he couldn't say much, considering the interests of the 
 house. 
 
 " But considering your interests," Barbara reminded 
 Jeremy, "what are you going to do? now?" 
 
 "Well," he replied frankly, "I haven't had time to 
 think of that yet. I don't know. What would you do?" 
 
 Barbara considered. Her face was a study. There 
 was a shadow there that he never had seen before. It 
 was as if, somehow, she had met at last a problem that 
 even her calm and sanguine temperament was not 
 quite sure of solving; a problem that carried with it 
 a responsibility such as she had never been called 
 upon to assume before. And as nothing could be 
 decided then, the shadow lingered, and in the days 
 that followed deepened from that first perplexity to 
 care. She had known his mother at the boarding-
 
 84 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 house, and the thought of her concern for her only 
 son, and of that son's strange, solitary figure in the 
 world about him, aroused the mother in herself. 
 Somehow, without her knowing it, it had become a 
 duty to befriend him; and thus, without his knowing 
 it, Jeremy became the burden not only of a woman's 
 thoughts, but of her very prayers. 
 
 HI 
 
 Meanwhile Jeremy, as the next best thing to being 
 practical, was polishing his neglected novel, through 
 which his former love, the river, flowed; and of which 
 the hero was a poor young bookkeeper in a lumber 
 yard. Chapter by chapter he was showing it to Bar- 
 bara, who said to him one Sunday afternoon, as they 
 sat together in a corner of the parlour, where they 
 chanced to be alone, "You know, / think that, for 
 some people, being unpractical is the most practical 
 thing in the world!" 
 
 "Just what do you mean by that?" he asked, looking 
 up from his manuscript. 
 
 "Why, I mean just this: that, for some people, being 
 unpractical is just well, minding their own business! 
 And that," she added, "is the most practical thing I 
 know."
 
 BARBARA 85 
 
 'And so," he answered, "you think 
 
 "Yes, I do!" she interposed. "I think that for you 
 to try to be a hard-headed business man is as foolish 
 and far-fetched as for a hard-headed business man to 
 set himself up as a poet, for example: as an author." 
 
 "But do you really think," Jerry began 
 
 "Yes," she assured him. "I do! You are an artist, 
 a dreamer. And you have no business trying to be 
 anything else." 
 
 He flushed gratefully. If he remembered, afterward, 
 that a kind young woman is not necessarily a literary 
 critic, he remembered, also, that woman is famed for 
 her intuition, which amounts sometimes to prophetic 
 vision; and that the public is not made up of critics, 
 after all, but of "gentle readers," like Barbara. More- 
 over, though he could not know it at the time, his own 
 case was exceptional in this that it isn't every 
 young literary man whose first work is considered 
 prayerfully. 
 
 Barbara insisted that she was right. That she 
 knew he was an author! And at the waving of that 
 wand of faith, which is the truest magic in the world, 
 Jerry's old visions began to come back again, and 
 faster and faster, until his fair young dream of life 
 was there before his very eyes incarnate! Again it
 
 86 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 smiled at him, bravely, and a little roseate of cheek, 
 and spoke to his very heart, in a voice all tremulous 
 with earnestness, so that which was his dream, and 
 which was Barbara, he could not say! 
 
 " It won't be easy," the voice reminded him. " But, 
 then, what road is easy? Not even a business man's, 
 you know. Why, I heard Mr. Penningwell " Mr. 
 Penningwell was a former employer of Barbara "say 
 once, to a junior member of the firm, a nice young 
 man, but a little self-satisfied with their prosperity, 
 'Oh, it's all very well,' he said, 'for you to sing, my 
 boy. Your nest was feathered for you. You don't 
 know of the days when I have gone down on my knees 
 to bankers, pleading with them for just twenty-four 
 hours more! Nor of the nights when I've gone home 
 feeling that the end had come, and that our doors 
 would close upon the morrow!' You have your 
 panics too," the voice continued, addressing Jeremy. 
 " But, then, that's life, isn't it? weathering the 
 storm, with the ship leaking ?" 
 
 Jeremy was stirred. What a junior partner Bar- 
 bara would have made! Imagine her Jeremy could 
 imagine her down on her knees to Fate! And he 
 could imagine Fate, under the circumstances! 
 
 "I shouldn't want everything ready-made, for me,
 
 BARBARA 87 
 
 if I were a man," the voice confided. " Because, then, 
 I wouldn't be apt to be a man, would I?" 
 
 Jerry thought not. 
 
 "And don't you adore storms! Watching, hoping, 
 believing, fighting!" 
 
 Oh, yes! Jerry did seeing once more the poetry 
 of it all. Looking into those two brave, shining eyes 
 he felt that there was nothing in life so noble, so exalt- 
 ing, so divinely beautiful, as Battle. 
 
 "Victory or not!" the voice exclaimed, softly. 
 
 True! It was not a question of victory. It was a 
 question of 
 
 "Playing the man!" the voice reminded him. 
 
 Yes, that was it! It was wonderful how his old 
 thoughts that old idealism which, he shuddered to 
 think, he had so recently renounced forever were 
 being said for him. And by the very Spirit, a very 
 angel, of the Present, whose voice was like an echo 
 out of that deserted Past. 
 
 "I shall remember, I shall never forget," he told 
 her gratefully, "that it was you who rescued my old 
 dream for me!" 
 
 "You will remember," she answered, "that there was 
 a girl, once, living in a boarding-house." 
 
 "No, no!" he protested. "I shall remember more,
 
 88 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 far more, than that." It would be a pity if kindness 
 such as hers should be unrequited, fame's junior partner 
 dwelling in obscurity! "You will see. I shall dedi- 
 cate a book to you." 
 
 "More likely," she replied, "you will put me into 
 one, as a minor character." 
 
 "I'll make you a heroine." 
 
 "You'll be foolish if you do," she warned him. 
 "People will say, 'Why, she's no heroine! She might 
 be anybody!' You have to be Somebody to be a 
 heroine." 
 
 "Ah," Jeremy exclaimed," but anybody is Somebody 
 to Somebody Else!" 
 
 And just then the bell rang for tea. It is the way 
 with bells, just when the Present is becoming interest- 
 ing. Just when the Past, too, had been restored to 
 him, as beautiful as ever. Oh, yes, it was as beautiful 
 as ever . . . but he saw it now as a lovely back- 
 ground, for a fairness that was very near. 
 
 IV 
 
 And she was right, he told himself. He had tried 
 to be something that he was not. Hereafter, he would 
 be unpractical to his heart's content. He would mind 
 his own business.
 
 BARBARA 89 
 
 Under the spell of this decision he worked manfully 
 at his novel, which, chapter by chapter, as he revised 
 it, Barbara copied for him upon her typewriter. It 
 would be good practice, she explained. And then, 
 feeling somehow that it was an explanation that should 
 be explained, she added hastily, 
 
 "I might have to do that kind of work some day." 
 
 And as this also might seem to require elucidation, 
 she said frankly that she had thought something of 
 setting up in business for herself. 
 
 This made things clear, though it did not account 
 for her indignation when Jeremy proposed to pay. 
 She was curiously sensitive about these business 
 matters. When Jeremy promised her all his manu- 
 scripts, which, he hinted, might be considerable if he 
 continued to compose as flowingly as he was writing 
 then about 365,000 words a year she only smiled. 
 But when he continued to find diversion in figuring 
 her profits from his pen, at the usual rate for literary 
 copying; and in picturing her frantic efforts to realize 
 her share her bills and duns, and his subtle makeshifts 
 for eluding them by means of "literary" answers, 
 poems to her typewriter, first editions of his work, fire- 
 escapes, trap-doors, etc. her silence became eloquent 
 enough, and put an end to such commercial themes.
 
 90 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 She began indeed to be more reticent upon every 
 subject. He became aware of a shadow upon their 
 comradeship. Just what it was he could not say, but 
 it was there as if, suddenly, their little golden day 
 had grown self-conscious, and knew, in twilight, that 
 it was doomed to pass. 
 
 Then came the time when the work was done at 
 last, and submitted to the publishers. The suspense 
 was ominous. Jeremy was eager, yet afraid, to get 
 his mail. He complained of a sinking feeling, some- 
 where, he thought, "about his gizzard." Trolley cars 
 made him strangely seasick; long sea-voyages, on the 
 contrary, to Staten Island, acted as restoratives; but 
 all cures failed when he approached the boarding- 
 house and remembered what might be waiting for him 
 behind its* door. 
 
 "There is a letter for you, Mr. Ladd." 
 
 That was bad enough, in spite of the chance that 
 this letter might be that very one of which he feared, 
 now, even to so much as dream. His hands trembled 
 over innocent insurance circulars; post cards even 
 disagreed with him; and when, one day, his landlady 
 met him with these fatal words 
 
 "There is a package for you, Mr. Ladd." 
 
 his face paled, he breathed heavily, and, murmuring
 
 BARBARA 91 
 
 of something that he had forgotten, he turned directly 
 upon his heel, and slunk away as he had come. It was 
 late when he returned, long past midnight, when he 
 crept back desperately 
 
 To find his laundry by the stairs! 
 
 Evenings when Barbara came in to dinner her first 
 swift glance was at Jerry's face; and there never was 
 any need for him to say that he had heard nothing. 
 She laughed and chatted, and more freely now, as she 
 had been wont to do at first; but it seemed to him 
 though it may have been the dullness in his ears 
 that her gaiety was more subdued, and less original 
 and charming. Sometimes she burst out frankly with 
 words of homely cheer. 
 
 " Don't be disheartened. I had a dream last night. 
 I thought I saw a ship " 
 
 Or, "There's something coming to you. I can see 
 it, and it's just around the corner!" 
 
 Though that, of course, was not so encouraging as 
 the ship. He loved that ship! It was a beautiful 
 ship, full-rigged, and fairly bursting, as Barbara de- 
 scribed it, with golden grain. 
 
 "Just wait and see!" she urged. 
 
 And Jeremy would groan: 
 
 "I am waiting!"
 
 92 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Eat something do! You scarcely touch any- 
 thing any more." 
 
 "But I'm not hungry any more!" 
 
 " Eat, anyway. Please have my piece of pie." 
 
 It was the least, she explained, that she could do for 
 him, and to his helplessness it may have seemed the 
 most that she could do, in his ignorance that she was 
 doing more; though there were moments when, standing 
 sleepless by his window, gazing up at that strip of 
 glistening stars, he wondered vaguely if they had one 
 half the influence with editors that they have over 
 the poor young authors who put them into love-stories, 
 to make them true. What was there beyond those 
 stars, he asked himself, that possibly could care about 
 a tale of Toodlums? There was no answer. But 
 when the manuscript came back, that seemed the 
 answer. 
 
 "Oh," he said, gazing at it without a tremor, now 
 that it was really there. "I wonder what this is?" 
 
 And he took it up with him, and shut the door. 
 
 Barbara, entering the dining-room, and, noting from 
 the threshold that Jeremy was not there, paused an 
 instant, and then turned back. At the stairs she
 
 BARBARA 93 
 
 hesitated; but again it was only for a moment, and she 
 went up quickly and knocked upon his door. 
 
 There was at first no answer. But she knocked 
 again; and this time so much more softly that he knew. 
 She heard his step. Then the door opened, and they 
 were looking into each other's eyes. 
 
 "Have you been to dinner?" 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "I'm not hungry," he began 
 
 "Nor I!" she told him. She spoke breathlessly. 
 "I thought I thought that maybe you would take 
 me for a walk? But not, of course, if you " 
 
 Her cheeks flushed. 
 
 "Oh," he said, "I should like to go." 
 
 "Really?" she demanded. "Really?" 
 
 "Really," he assured her. "It was kind of you to 
 think of it." 
 
 "I wanted to talk with you," she explained, as they 
 passed together out into the evening glow. "I have 
 been thinking things that I wanted to say to you 
 before you had any chance to be disheartened. Be- 
 fore" and she slipped her hand into his arm 
 "before any great disappointment intervened." 
 
 And before he could reply, she went on eagerly: 
 
 "I wanted to remind you that it isn't of any real
 
 94 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 importance, whether whether it comes back or 
 not!" 
 
 "Not of any real importance ?" he repeated. 
 
 "No!" And he knew without looking that her 
 face was all a-Iight with earnestness. "Because, 
 after all, either event would be only an incident. 
 In itself, nothing nothing unless you make it 
 so." 
 
 "Unless I make it so!" 
 
 "Why, yes! Oh, don't you see that its importance is 
 just whatever you invest it with? That it is vital, for 
 joy or sorrow, only as you make it vital? That it 
 rests with you, not with the editors!" 
 
 "And there are so many things," she added hastily, 
 as if she were still afraid to let him speak, "that are 
 so much more vital to one's life than the fulfillment 
 of any single dream. Certainly than the merest in- 
 cident, the merest shadow of that dream ! You are a 
 man, first; a writer afterward. And disappointment, 
 even if it were not the first, if it were the very last 
 of a lifetime of disappointments, and even though it 
 defeated the writer in you forever, might be the 
 making oh, it might be the very crowning of the 
 man. Victory in defeat, you know: the old, old story 
 of idealism."
 
 BARBARA 95 
 
 He would have spoken, but she had, to-night, a posi- 
 tive genius for intervention. 
 
 " I mean to say that you are not bound to succeed 
 as a writer. Only as a man." 
 
 " But the two," he managed to interpose 
 
 "The two," she insisted, "are not inseparable, unless 
 you make them so." 
 
 "You said " 
 
 "I know. I said you were a writer. But you said, 
 too, that I was 'practical,' you remember. Well, I 
 aw practical; and you are a writer. But we are some- 
 thing more I hope!" 
 
 " You are something more!" he told her. 
 
 He turned and looked at her. It was the same look 
 of surprise and wonder that he had given her when he 
 called her practical, striving to see more clearly, in 
 the face, half turned to him, what no one ever sees at 
 once. 
 
 "Oh, yes! You are something more," he said. "Very 
 much more; though being practical is not a little thing 
 to me it is so impossible, apparently! But you are 
 more than that." 
 
 How much more he did not, could not, say. What 
 she really was, was beyond his sight as yet, however 
 he might gaze at her and wonder. He only knew that
 
 96 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 she was fairer than he had thought. It astonished him 
 that he had never noted, until to-night, the exquisite 
 delicacy of her face in its repose. It never occurred 
 to him that until to-night indeed, until that very 
 moment of his wondering acknowledgement her face 
 had never, in his presence, known repose, content: 
 that peace, and its mysterious beauty which are never 
 in the face until they are in the heart, and never in the 
 heart until one knows for sure that something of one's 
 secret self has been revealed at last, in spite of the 
 barriers that flesh, or circumstance, have offered to 
 the imprisoned soul. 
 
 It was a long walk no matter where. They took 
 no account of any journeying but that other one in 
 which they wandered, secretly, through unseen ways, 
 whose shadows her presence, rather than her fair 
 philosophy, softened for him. Her silence was more 
 kind, more eloquent, than any words that she could 
 find to say. And when he would have told her 
 
 "You needn't!" she interposed, softly. "I have 
 known it all the time. And it doesn't matter does 
 it?" 
 
 No. Nothing no disappointment, or chagrin 
 had ever mattered less to him! It was very strange, 
 and very sweet, to care so little. To see it all as the
 
 BARBARA 97 
 
 merest incident, as she had said; as the merest shadow 
 of a dream, that was not yet over, not yet unfulfilled, 
 or hopeless, while she was near. 
 
 This was a miracle that he had never known before. 
 A magic that could so transfigure the very Present, 
 that, with all its grimness, it began to have something 
 of that beauty which he had never seen, save in the 
 Past or Future. 
 
 And he was only beginning to see her! 
 
 For Barbara also, the Present had its sudden love- 
 liness. 
 
 She was beginning to be seen.
 
 THE NOW 
 
 C~~IE the watched pot that never boils, no self- 
 respecting dream ever comes true in the hour, 
 or quite in the fashion, of our hopes for it. It 
 lurks, or sulks, until the back is turned, and then 
 for beauty always will have its own sweet way steals 
 in upon us unawares; or throws off its disguise of home- 
 liness, and lo! we see that it was there already. We 
 knew the dream, but did not recognize its strange 
 reality. 
 
 Thus now to Jeremy, when letters w re neither to 
 be feared nor hoped for any longer, came one from 
 of all the last persons in the world to write to him 
 the editor. And, of all the last things that he ever 
 would have dreamed of dreaming of, it offered him a 
 Job. Not the ghost of one a real one this time, with 
 a jingle in its pocket. 
 
 "You might have had it six weeks ago," the editor 
 informed him, when Jeremy appeared once more at 
 98
 
 THE NOW 99 
 
 the deserted office, this time to stay. "Where in 
 thunder have you been keeping yourself?" 
 
 "Why, you said, you know " 
 
 "What did I say?" 
 
 "That my stuff was fit only for the waste-paper 
 basket." 
 
 " Did I say that? " 
 
 " Practically." 
 
 "Humpf!" 
 
 "So I took you at your word." 
 
 "You ought never to do that!" 
 
 "In fact," Jeremy confessed, "I gave up writing 
 altogether for a time." 
 
 "What did you do then?" 
 
 "Why, I I went into business as it were." 
 
 "As it were!" 
 
 "As it weren't!" Jeremy acknowledged. 
 
 " But you're not a business man." 
 
 "What makes you think that?" 
 
 "Well, for one thing you took me at my word. No 
 business man ever would have done that." 
 
 " But I thought you meant it." 
 
 "Probably I did. What difference did that make?" 
 
 "Well, it made a considerable difference to me!" 
 Jeremy assured him, rueful'y- " But it's all right now.
 
 ioo THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Why, I'm just beginning to live! I've been a little 
 slow growing up," he confessed, "but I've had my 
 eyes opened. You have no idea what a change these 
 last few weeks have made! I'm beginning to see 
 things differently. Everything!" 
 
 "Humpf! How are you beginning to see things?" 
 
 Jeremy pondered. 
 
 " It's pretty hard to put it in a word," he said. " But 
 I'm beginning to see the romance of life. The drama 
 of it. The poetry of it of the every-day, common 
 life, I mean. This life," he explained, looking far off, 
 and straight through the editor's grizzled head, which 
 he apparently did not see at all. "I'm beginning to 
 see the life right here about us now. That's it : 
 the Now!" he exclaimed, finding the word for it at last. 
 " I'm beginning to see the Now ! The Romance of the 
 Now!" 
 
 "Always before," he went on thoughtfully, "I'm 
 afraid I've been a a good deal of a what you 
 would call a dreamer!" His face flushed a little at 
 all the folly that the word recalled. "But now," he 
 added, "I'm beginning to see things as they are." 
 
 "How do you know that you are beginning to see 
 things as they are?" the editor demanded, though in 
 a mild tone that invited confidence.
 
 THE NOW 101 
 
 "Because," Jeremy replied, "they are so much more 
 interesting, so much more thrilling, so much more 
 beautiful than they ever seemed before!" 
 
 The editor reflected. He too, before he was aware 
 of it, was beginning to look off, and see things. It was 
 a strange influence that Jerry always had. It may 
 have been his eyes the light in them, so mysteriously 
 rapt; or his voice, with its subtle and contagious note 
 of awe. But, wherever Jerry was, there was reverie 
 weaving its silvery web, so silently, so swiftly that 
 before they knew it men found themselves enmeshed. 
 The weaving, from one heartstring to another, stirred 
 sometimes faint echoes of forgotten song. Old love- 
 songs, chiefly love, I mean, of life. Men who had 
 neglected, or who hated, or dreaded, to look back, 
 found themselves seeing things again that softened 
 every hardened fibre of their thoughts. Old roseate 
 vistas, renounced as folly and illusion, would open up 
 again, making them wonder where their eyes had been 
 all those intervening years; and whether, after all, they 
 had not been blinder in their knowledge than in their 
 innocence. And then, sometimes, like the editor, they 
 would break the web, half angry, or ashamed, to have 
 been caught in such a childish lure as if they had 
 been discovered reading fairy tales.
 
 102 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Humpf! I put all that in the waste-basket long 
 ago! And now you come in here confound you 
 you're a nice fellow, Ladd, but I've got to work! 
 I haven't time to gawp at life! You haven't either. 
 What the devil do you mean by always " 
 
 Jerry would have retired precipitately to the door, 
 but his flight was checked, sternly. 
 
 "Here, you dreamer! Come back. Now don't 
 you run away again and go into business ! Understand? 
 You remember what I told you?" 
 
 "W-which?" Jeremy inquired, cautiously. 
 
 "Which!" The lightning in the editorial eyes was 
 followed instantly by thunder. "Why, that you're 
 not to be always taking people at their word, that's all. 
 What I said just now was true enough, heaven knows; 
 but that's no reason why you should up and run, and 
 commit suicide in Wall street!" 
 
 "I've r-renounced Wall Street," Jeremy assured him, 
 "f-forever." 
 
 "Very well, then. But look here " 
 
 It was a fierce glare, and blinding to eyes accustomed 
 to the softer light of far perspectives. 
 
 "What are you going to do this evening?" 
 
 "N-nothing." 
 
 "All right, then. You can come home with me to
 
 THE NOW 103 
 
 dinner. Now, you understand! I mean this, every 
 word of it. And I don't ask every bally idiot to go 
 home with me. No, sir! It's the only place that I've 
 got left to " 
 
 The glare faded, just sufficiently to warrant the con- 
 clusion 
 
 " see things as they are!" 
 
 And, oddly enough, as Jerry stood there facing the 
 editor looking him, as the little office-boy had said, in 
 the eye the glare vanished, and, before he was aware 
 of it, the editor himself was looking off again, straight 
 through Jerry's head, so that Jerry withdrew without 
 his knowing it, and he was left alone with his thoughts 
 in a foolish haze. 
 
 "Hang these dreamers!" he muttered to himself, 
 ruffling the papers on his desk. "And hang their 
 
 Now!" 
 
 ii 
 
 But it was a pleasant Now. A regular income is 
 always an agreeable thing, and lends colour even to 
 one's dreams. A fast colour that does not ebb and 
 flow like those elusive dyes which one procures from 
 rainbows. 
 
 The editor had offered Jeremy a job; but it was not 
 a job that Jeremy accepted. It was a solemn mission.
 
 104 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 And it was as a knight of the ancient and eternal 
 chivalry that Jerry sallied forth each morning upon 
 those quests that led him up and down the highways 
 and byways of that world whose drama and romance 
 he had begun to see. Upstairs and downstairs, into 
 the houses and offices and meeting places of his fellow- 
 men, he wandered in an errantry of subtler and more 
 romantic purposes than those on which he was de- 
 spatched. For he sought not merely facts, he told 
 himself, but rights to be championed and wrongs to 
 be redeemed. This consecration transfigured even the 
 humblest mission with the high hope that imprisoned 
 in the homely and routine such assignments as are 
 usually entrusted to young knights of journalism 
 he would find fair truths to be released: truths only to 
 be descried by an eagle eye, and only to be rescued 
 by the valour of a lion heart, and the might of an un- 
 sheathed pen. Even a statistical report, such as he 
 found in public offices, he warned himself, might be a 
 donjon-keep, concealing dark deeds from the outer 
 sun. He watched vigilantly, questioned cunningly, 
 listened thoughtfully, lest any Lady should sigh or 
 perish in a tower, while he rode by. 
 
 "Every assignment has its story," was the motto 
 on his crest. "I'll find it!" was his vow.
 
 THE NOW 105 
 
 "But you don't have to find it!" he was told. It 
 was an old, gray-headed man-at-arms who said it. 
 "You don't have to find it, boy. It has been found 
 for you already. You don't expect, do you, to find any- 
 thing that we have missed? What have we been living 
 for, all these years? There is nothing new under the 
 sun. The moulds are ready for you." 
 
 "I don't understand." 
 
 "Why, it's plain as day. Everything that happens 
 has happened before, time and again, and been written 
 for you. We've made the moulds for you, hard and 
 fast. The moulds are the traditions. Use 'em. They're 
 yours. You have only to reach up your hand and take 
 'em down. You don't understand?" 
 
 "Not quite." 
 
 "Why, look here: take the suicide story. There are 
 moulds for that. Girl jumps into the river. Well, 
 you haven't time none of us has to hunt out that 
 old, old tale old as the everlasting hills! You take 
 down the matrix, and be thankful that it's all so easy. 
 It's labelled for you: Pretty Girl Suicides for Love. 
 You can't go wrong. What's more, it's true! What 
 does life amount to? It's only a shuffling of names 
 and dates." 
 
 "But suppose she isn't pretty?"
 
 106 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Every girl's pretty! Go ask the moulds." 
 
 " But suppose it wasn't love?" 
 
 " It's always love! The moulds will tell you so. All 
 girls that suicide, suicide for love. It's the history of 
 the phenomenon. Arsenic or water it's all the same. 
 There's a man in the case, you can bet your salary 
 though he may have been a ghost!" 
 
 Jerry shook his head. 
 
 "That's putting stories, into life," he said, "not 
 drawing stories out. It's the truth we're after; not 
 what we guess, or imagine, or have heard as truth.'' 
 
 "Oh, is it, though!" 
 
 "And the truth," cried Jeremy, "isn't just what it 
 seems to be, at the first glance. Or what we imagined 
 it would be at all. Take the weather-story yesterday." 
 
 "Go on. I wrote it," said the man-at-arms. "Go 
 on," he insisted calmly. "/ shan't mind." 
 
 "Well," Jeremy confessed, "you jumped to unwar- 
 rantable conclusions." 
 
 "Go on. Proceed." 
 
 "It was hot for autumn; but it wasn't true, that 
 mankind got out it's old straw hat! All down Broad- 
 way men were mopping their faces and suffering from 
 the heat ; but not a single straw was to be seen. I 
 noticed it particularly."
 
 : THE NOW 107 
 
 The other laughed. 
 
 "Oh, well, that was only a way, an easy way, of 
 telling the truth: of saying that it was hot. Only a 
 journalistic figure, as it were, of speech, to say bow 
 hot so hot that Man went and got out his old straw 
 hat again. The Return of Summer dear old mould!" 
 said the man-at-arms. " Many's the blistering autumn 
 day I've used it, and" he winked solemnly "kept 
 cool!" 
 
 "Ah, yes," the young knight protested, "but there 
 was a story there a true story the one you missed 
 by keeping cool. The truth that, for habit and custom, 
 Man would roast rather than be comfortable. That 
 was the weather-story yesterday." 
 
 The other yawned. 
 
 "Possibly. Possibly. If you want to weigh thistle- 
 down. / don't. There isn't time. And while you 
 are balancing your fluffy little truths and phrases, the 
 paper goes to press! I cool, you hot; my story in, 
 your story out. And what fills the paper, fills the little 
 brown Saturday envelope, my lad! Remember that!" 
 
 Jerry shook his head. He said no more, but, in the 
 secret chambers of his heart, he polished up his shield 
 and lance, and sallied forth more sure than ever that 
 his creed was best; and that, in the end, Truth would
 
 io8 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 assert itself as the thing most practical as well as beau- 
 tiful, even in a world of moulds and expediency. But, 
 right or wrong, under that banner he would fight and 
 live, or fight and die, faithful to his vows. 
 
 in 
 
 Alas ! Even in the beginning-to-be-romantic Now, the 
 days would pass without adventure, until, sometimes, 
 it seemed to Jeremy that not men only, but life itself, 
 mocked his high thoughts of it, with low realities. But 
 then, again, he would remind himself that for knights 
 always there must have been long days of spiritual 
 famine, through which they roved, thirsting and hun- 
 gering for opportunity. Always, for heroes as for com- 
 mon men, there must have been the dust and heat: 
 the unheroic dust and heat, not of high battle, but 
 of the long, low, drowsy, noonday road across the plain, 
 without an inn, without a brook or bough, to cheer 
 or shelter them; and the small pestiferous annoyances, 
 frustrations, and miscalculations, and all the little 
 nipping fleas of circumstance, mocking their lofty calm 
 and the midnight vows of their idealism. 
 
 All this was helpful to a maiden knight. It was 
 cheering to recall when the Now eluded him lurking, 
 or sulking, like any other lovely dream, refusing to
 
 THE NOW 109 
 
 be realized. When, here before his very eyes, the 
 Present, veiling its romantic heart from him, seemed 
 often as far and unapproachable as ever the Past had 
 been, or the Future, in his earlier visions. He knew 
 that there was romance, somewhere beneath that 
 humdrum surface somewhere behind that jesting 
 face of things. That, in disguise, fair truths slipped by, 
 lonely and friendless, in the throngs; and that, all 
 about him, life's loveliest graces were sighing out 
 imprisoned lives, in towers, even as he watched and 
 waited, listening for their faintest call, and armed and 
 ready to succour and restore. 
 
 And it was always then then when he was bravest, 
 truest, eagerest that the Now would laugh at him! 
 At that futile chivalry, at that chaste, dumb wistfulness 
 of Youth. That was the one inexplicable, dishearten- 
 ing, humiliating thing about the Now. Its untimely 
 and utterly irreverent facetiousness ! It would never 
 take him seriously; and, what was worse, to make a 
 fool of him, was always willing to sacrifice itself! its 
 native dignity, its secret beauty, of which he caught 
 but fleeting gleams and shadows, while it cut strange 
 capers and played odd pranks with him, nudging his 
 sword-arm, or mimicking his braced and sober gallan- 
 try, and twiddling its fingers at his wrath! It was
 
 no THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 enough, sometimes, to make one doubt; to make one 
 fling his lance into the dust, and join the laugh, swear- 
 ing that life was but a jest. 
 
 And yet no while in all that low buffoonery 
 there remained one single gleam of a divine romance, 
 he would be true to it! Always, for knights of the 
 eternal order of idealism, there must have been these 
 clownish mockeries along the road these empty grins 
 to pass, and never see; this gutter persiflage bringing 
 the blush into the cheek, yet never to be heard, or 
 answered. Always, before, the scorching plain ; always, 
 in the dust behind, the alien village and its hoarse 
 derision even for heroes. 
 
 "Hi, there! what are you dreaming of ?" 
 
 It was the voice of the Now, roaring through the 
 editor. 
 
 "Oh! I was thinking, that was all." 
 
 "What were you thinking?" 
 
 "I was thinking," Jeremy replied, "that I'd for- 
 gotten my handkerchief." 
 
 "Humpf! It must have been a glorious handker- 
 chief! Why, say, you looked like Joan of Arc, or 
 Francis of Assisi: they were always seeing hand- 
 kerchiefs. Same kind of wild eyes as yours, exactly. 
 But, to come back to earth, here is a handkerchief
 
 THE NOW in 
 
 a regular bandanna for you. Fact! A regular buc- 
 caneer's bandanna! A riproaring sea-yarn, my hearty 
 A Tale of the Spanish Main! Run down and find 
 Cap'n Jack Smith of the Schooner Ida 864 Back- 
 water Street. Just in from Barbadoes with a cargo 
 of mutineers. And say hustle I " 
 
 Jerry felt a tap upon his shoulder as he turned away. 
 It was the man-at-arms. 
 
 "Fine old mould for that tale!" he muttered en- 
 viously. " You can't go wrong. It's all there blood, 
 bones, dialect and all! Mutiny On the High Seas. 
 Old favourite o' mine." He winked warningly. " Bet- 
 ter use it!" 
 
 Jerry laughed gayly as he folded up his copy paper 
 and hustled was the word down to Barbadoes, 
 his mind awash with buccaneers, beards, bandannas, 
 earrings, pistols, cutlasses, doubloons, and blood- 
 flecked foam. Years and years he had yearned for 
 those magic seas. Now, in a way, he was to sail them! 
 And he was to see their coloured isles! Not through 
 the dreaming eyes of an idyllist ashore not even 
 through the eyes and glasses of that prince of idyllists, 
 who saw the light which never was on sea or land, save 
 only upon Martinque. He was to see them now 
 through the bloodshot vision of a master, not of words,
 
 ii2 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 but men: one of those hairy heroes of the deep, of the 
 Spanish main, come suddenly to life again Cap'n Jack 
 Smith of the Schooner Ida. 
 
 Something of the dialect began already to be audible 
 above the roar of waves and trolley-cars a sturdy 
 speech, flavoured with tobacco juice, and hot with the 
 breath of scorn of God and man as he put, full sail, 
 into Backwater Street. A woman met him at the 
 door. Two or three children peered out around her 
 bespattered skirts, as she let them down, and wiped 
 the sea foam from her hands. 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 Jerry bowed politely. 
 
 "May I see Cap'n Smith?" 
 
 "Sure. He's out in the back. Go straight through 
 the hall that's right right through the door ahead 
 o' you." 
 
 It was a dirty hall, and it ended in a dirty yard, full 
 of noise and rubbish. And the captain was there. 
 There was never any doubt of that! Stumbling 
 through the passage, Jerry was aware of a high wind, 
 somewhere beyond. 
 
 "You bowlegged land-lubber! " 
 
 And a plaintive zephyr of a voice protesting. 
 
 "You say what ain't true!"
 
 THE NOW 113 
 
 " I say what I can see with both me eyes shut, you 
 little ditch-digger, you!" 
 
 And then again, the mild rebuke of a little man with 
 his back to Jerry: 
 
 "You say what ain't true!" 
 
 Across his shirt-sleeved shoulders, with their galluses, 
 Jerry made out at once, the buccaneer, whose scowling 
 visage and hairy breast were all that the wildest 
 dreamer could have desired. It was a noble sailor-man, 
 tattooed and fearful to behold, for he was heaving with 
 his wrath. 
 
 "Well, what do you want?" roared the hurricane. 
 
 " I beg your pardon, but I'd like to see Cap'n Smith." 
 
 "Huh! You would, would yuh? Well, all I got 
 to say is, it's lucky for him!" and the hurricane jerked 
 out one tattooed fist in the direction of the milder gale. 
 " I was just thinkin' o' takin' a good close look at him, 
 meself! And maybe I will yet, when you've got 
 through with him, the old hawser! Huh hawser! 
 1 guess not. He ain't no hawser. He's nothin' but 
 a bit o' pack thread!" 
 
 "Lanigan," said the little captain, quivering with 
 reproachfulness, "you say what ain't so! And you 
 know you say what ain't so! You ought to be ashamed 
 of yourself!"
 
 ii 4 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Ashamed, is it? Yes, I ought to be ashamed! I 
 ought to be ashamed o' standin' here arguin' with the 
 likes o' you you little spindle-shanked nanny- 
 goat ! " 
 
 "You heard what he said!" the captain cried, turn- 
 ing to Jeremy with an appealing gesture, and a coun- 
 tenance, soft-bearded as a lamb, and pale with horror. 
 "You heard what he said!" And then, facing the 
 hurricane again, the little gale rose shrilly to the occa- 
 sion. "For two cents I'd have you arrested! I 
 would! You haven't got no more sense you haven't 
 got no more sense " 
 
 It was a soprano crescendo, while the captain, stand- 
 ing a-tiptoe, shook his forefinger at the mutineer, and 
 gasped for words to express the heights and depths of 
 his emotion. 
 
 " You haven't got no more sense than an old empty 
 tomato can ! No sir! " 
 
 And turning to Jeremy again, his blue eyes filled 
 with tears. 
 
 Meanwhile, Lanigan, breathing smoke and flames, 
 had retired to his own back door, where he continued, 
 from time to time, to deliver himself of a soliloquy for 
 the benefit of all concerned. 
 
 "The old penny-whistle! Did ye hear him pipe at
 
 THE NOW 115 
 
 me? ' No more sense than an old tomato can ! ' Him a 
 captain! Why, he ain't fit to sail a wash-toob!" 
 
 " You heard him!" Captain Smith was saying to 
 Jeremy, as they went inside. "Why, I never was 
 talked to like that in all my life! Never! And I've 
 been in rough places too. And seen rough men. 
 Drunken men! But none like him! Why, he ain't 
 fit to have around!" 
 
 "What was the trouble?" Jeremy inquired, striving 
 to imagine how that other mutiny had been quelled, 
 on the high seas. 
 
 "Why, I was standing right there, and I says to him, 
 I says, ' I think we're a-goin' to have rain.' Just like 
 that! And says he, 'No,' says he, 'we ain't!' Well, 
 / shut up. I wasn't a-goin' to get into no argument. 
 For, if there's anything I hate, it's to have any un- 
 pleasantness around. I never did like it, and I never 
 will. I pay my bills, and never interfere with nobody, 
 nohow never. And why he should up and abuse a 
 peaceable " 
 
 "/ thought he was one of the mutineers," Jerry in- 
 terposed. 
 
 "The what?" 
 
 " Mutineers." 
 
 "Him! Why, he's nothin' but a bill-poster."
 
 n6 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Well, captain, would you mind telling me I'm 
 from the Bulletin about the mutiny?" 
 
 "The w-what?" 
 
 "The mutiny on the Ida. You're just in from Bar- 
 badoes, I hear." 
 
 "Yes, but there wasn't no mutiny! We never have 
 no mutiny on the Ida do we, Ida?" 
 
 "Well, I should say not ! " came a healthy bass voice 
 from the wash-tub just within. It startled Jeremy. 
 He had heard it before; but after the events which had 
 intervened, and owing to its suddenness, and a new and 
 surprising depth and volume awakened, doubtless, 
 by the very notion of a mutiny it gave him a strange 
 sensation, as if, in some mysterious way, it was really the 
 captain who was rubbing clothes, while he talked to I da. 
 
 "It must have been a rumour!" said the tub. 
 
 "Well, yes, I suppose it was," the captain if he 
 was the captain agreed. " I suppose it was. But 
 the strange part is that the Bulletin is always a-hearin' 
 about our havin' a mutiny on the Ida ! I don't under- 
 stand it, at all. Why, you're the third young man from 
 the Bulletin as has asked me that question. Yes, sir. 
 Why only last spring there was a feller here, and be 
 was from the Bulletin; nice young feller; too, and we 
 told him we never had no mutiny on the Ida ever. And
 
 THE NOW 117 
 
 sir, that feller went back an' wrote us up both of 
 us somethin' terrible! You'd a-thought that we 
 was pirates!" 
 
 There was a suspicious sound within, and Ida 
 unless it really was the captain darkened the door- 
 way, and wiped her hands of foam. 
 
 "I hope you're not that kind o' young feller!" was 
 her greeting. And there was something in the tone 
 of it, or rather in the undertone, of it, that sounded so 
 familiar Jerry wondered if she might not be the bill- 
 poster's sister. At any rate there were wind-clouds and 
 other evidences that a storm was brewing; and the 
 little captain, having a weather eye for all unpleasant- 
 ness, as he had said, hastened to intervene. 
 
 "Oh, my, no!" he said anxiously, and for the first 
 time Jeremy began to have a fellow feeling for the 
 mariner of such uncertain seas ; "oh, dear, no ! He's not 
 that kind of a young feller. He doesn't look it." 
 
 "Neither did the other feller look it!" was the grim 
 response, so that Jerry thought it prudent to reassure 
 them, 
 
 " Don't worry," he entreated, pledging his knightly 
 word. "You're safe with me. Perfectly safe! Both 
 of you!" 
 
 "Huh!"
 
 n8 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Jerry could have sworn, now, that she was a sister, 
 or at least a relative of the bill-poster. That she was 
 the captain there could be no longer any slightest 
 doubt! 
 
 "You see," it was explained to him, "there's no one 
 on the Ida, ever, except jest us. Jest ourselves. Yes, 
 sir, it's jest as nice a little quiet family affair as you 
 could wish to see, the whole kit and caboodle of us, 
 big and little, including two pretty fair-sized boys as 
 can sail with the best of 'em, if I do say it. Yes, sir. 
 Oh, we have a gale now and then but nothin' 
 human. Nothin' human ever happens. No, sir. 
 But with her there well " 
 
 "You can see, young feller," the captain of the Ida 
 interposed, "that there couldn't never be no mutiny, 
 nohow! Y 'understand?" 
 
 "Perfectly!" 
 
 Jeremy bowed, and at the same time backed dis- 
 creetly through those outer portals into the safer, 
 sunnier, more heroic Now. 
 
 "/understand!"
 
 V! 
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 
 
 IT WAS a relief, each evening, to look into Barbara's 
 homelike face, to hear her voice as she recounted 
 her mild adventures, or to watch the lights and 
 shadows in her eyes as she listened to his own more 
 vivid chronicles of that living maelstrom in which 
 they had been whirled. Often, after dinner, they 
 walked together, or went to plays, viewing them from 
 lofty, inexpensive vantages, so that they knew in time, 
 as Barbara declared, the tops of most of the celebrated 
 actors and actresses of their day. Or, as Jerry put it, 
 they had of dramatic art a barber's point of view. 
 However that may have been, they had the eyes to 
 see through the head to the very heart of things; and 
 these emotional diversions, with their varied pageantry 
 of joy and sorrow, gave them opportunities to weep 
 and laugh together privileges of intimacy that the 
 ordinary humdrum course of things could not have 
 granted them so lavishly, with such swift and subtle 
 disclosures and conclusions. 
 119
 
 120 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 One midnight as they returned, sad and silent, from 
 the theatre, with their eyes upon the slimy pavement 
 underfoot, rather than on the long perspective of 
 shining street lamps that were quite as true to life, 
 Barbara sighed: 
 
 "Oh, dear! I wish we hadn't gone. Such things 
 are, of course. But a play like that leaves you with 
 a false suggestion that its story is inevitable. For 
 all of us. And that isn't true." 
 
 "Still, I'm not sorry that we went," Jeremy made 
 answer, out of his own dark musings. "It makes 
 some things you, for example so much more 
 so much more . . . exquisite." 
 
 There was really nothing for Barbara to say, so she 
 said nothing wondering if she ought to be certain 
 that she had heard aright. But, from that instant, 
 the play was no longer of the slightest consequence. 
 Life, after all, was so much more memorable, so much 
 more thrilling even, than art could be. She forgot 
 the pavement; even the street-lamps were a little in- 
 adequate to express the hopefulness of life; and, before 
 she was aware of it, she found herself calling his at- 
 tention to the splendour of a certain particularly extra- 
 ordinary star. 
 
 And it was thus, star by star, that their sky bright-
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 121 
 
 ened. It was not a sudden illumination. It was not 
 fireworks. It was a gradual and steadfast revelation 
 of the shadowy wo Id, in which they found themselves 
 oftener and oftener together, as a place of the most 
 astounding and mysterious beauty, when one came to 
 look at it. When one trusted one's own eyes, rather 
 than another's. But it did not burst suddenly upon 
 the enraptured vision. It was the vision that grew 
 clearer, first; and then, star by star, the ancient love- 
 liness was disclosed to them. 
 
 Love, therefore, had no single splendid scene of 
 declaration and surrender, as the books and plays 
 would lead one to suppose. It is the easy way to tell 
 what never yet has been caught in words. Love was 
 at first, for them, no more than a pleasant conscious- 
 ness of one another. The right to speak to say 
 those things at which a glamour stole upon the world, 
 all unforeseen was never asked for, never granted 
 or denied. The right to count upon each other's 
 vision, each other's sympathy, the right to trust each 
 other's glance, even when its glow deepened, each 
 other's handclasp, even when it lingered these, also, 
 never were defined. But they found no strangeness 
 in each other's arms, at last! so silently the world 
 had faded into the merest background for the eternal
 
 122 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 legend, and, star by star, love's twilight had become 
 love's radiant night. 
 
 It was not The End for them: for the idyl of their 
 love. It was only the beginning of a new chapter in 
 the middle of the book; of new and more rapturous 
 verse in a poetry of life that neither began nor ended 
 for them there, in that lyric hour: one yet more tender 
 word in a confession that, day by day, syllable by 
 syllable, had grown eloquent, and was still unfinished. 
 Words, these were, that are better imagined, better 
 remembered, than described. Young love has a native 
 speech that has never been translated. A dialogue 
 whose fleeting and elusive shadow the most subtle 
 art has never caught, save only for an instant the 
 merest gleam of vision and remembrance here and 
 there in that comedy of our inexperience which it is 
 so easy to recall, and so amusing to record. Theocritus, 
 perhaps, or Landor but, then, Theocritus must wait 
 a thousand years or so for an audience that will not 
 laugh; and for the same immunity Landor must go 
 back his thousand, and set his lovers in the leafy refuge 
 of antiquity. From first to last, art but burlesques or 
 over-draws, or over-colours, or at best must symbolize"; 
 what comes and vanishes so secretly as to make one 
 wonder if one saw, or only dreamed of seeing. It is
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 123 
 
 easy to doubt what one watches for in vain; and what 
 never comes again, one soon forgets. 
 
 Where all this happened, it is hard to say. The 
 great world smoked and simmered, and, dragon-fashion, 
 lay in wait for them. They were nowhere to be seen ! 
 
 Doubtless if one had known where to look but 
 that also is so soon forgotten. Where is it that lovers 
 pledge their vows? From whence do they return with 
 so strange a light upon their faces? One sees them 
 going, and anon one sees them coming back but 
 meanwhile? 
 
 The Park? Oh, no. Nor in the country; nor on the 
 river; nor in the shadows of deserted streets. One 
 meets them in all these places, but they are always 
 on their way always going, or returning; never there. 
 Jeremy and Barbara one used to meet sometimes under 
 the pleasantest of circumstances; but their faces told 
 you of still pleasanter, from which they had but just 
 descended, condescended, to your lower plane; and to 
 which, right willingly, they would return if you 
 would be so kind! How or whither did they go back, 
 when one was so kind? Where is There? 
 
 Well, putting two and two together for Jeremy
 
 124 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 and Barbara were one pair, and there was another 
 it is not so difficult to say. Jeremy, first and last, 
 confided a good deal while he was here; and still his 
 manuscripts, those tell-tale travellers that were always 
 coming home, like prodigals, to be refreshed, are wit- 
 nesses to forgotten mysteries. They tell of a place 
 where dreamers, strangers, or call them what you will, 
 armed with high thoughts of life, but encountering on 
 every hand earth's low realities, may turn for refuge, 
 and find sanctuary for their wounded souls. "The 
 Sky of Love" is the title of one of them. "Lark 
 Flights" is another. Certainly it is only from some sky, 
 and only in a rapturous soaring, that the earth can 
 ever seem so low and far and insignificant as it appears 
 to lovers' eyes. And in love, life's order is inverted : 
 heaven first, earth afterward. 
 
 Earth afterward! That is the sadness in the song. 
 It is the refrain of love. Over and over, it appears, 
 Jeremy and Barbara came back to it, and always with 
 a sigh. Ways and Means that was the hard, low 
 ground to which they always fluttered down from 
 happier things. Yet even on the earth again, some- 
 thing of that upper light descended with them. Some- 
 thing of that higher freedom nerved their hopes. Earth 
 always is a little heavenly while love endures, as they
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 125 
 
 always found when they dropped to it again, out of 
 their clouds and starlight ; and this was that romantic, 
 that heroic Now, some gleams of which Jerry had 
 discerned, before he wakened to their heavenly origin. 
 
 Earth afterward but together they would manage 
 it. With Barbara, Jeremy predicted, his backward 
 and obstructed life would flower in a very springtime 
 of efficiency! It had but waited for this month of love. 
 To be precise, and practical, twenty dollars say a week, 
 not an improbable income for a man inspired 
 would be sufficient for two idealists. 
 
 Barbara agreed. 
 
 What had been earned before, would be earned 
 again ! 
 
 That also was unanswerable. 
 
 And if a man with a sweetheart could earn twenty 
 dollars, a man with a wife! 
 
 It is an old argument, and, like the everlasting hills, 
 has never been refuted in love. 
 
 And if the wife were Barbara ! 
 
 Well, as to that, modesty on the one hand, and awe 
 upon the other, prevented any calculations. And the 
 logic of the thing was so irresistible, and so practical 
 withal. And proved so conclusively that the divine 
 was the expedient as well!
 
 126 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Thus, with Cupid in the chair, the Ways and Means 
 Committee made short, sweet work of its budgets and 
 appropriations, and was adjourned. But when they 
 attempted to go back so the story goes when they 
 attempted to return, that evening, whence they had 
 come a clock struck eleven. Straightway, around 
 the corner, out of the forgotten world, came the 
 Proprieties ghostly policeman, utterly heartless, and 
 armed with clubs. 
 
 "Move on!" 
 
 And when they lingered, only a moment or two at 
 most, the clock struck twelve! 
 
 "Move, I say!" 
 
 "Jerry dear, I think we ought." 
 
 And yet again 
 
 "Jerry, darling, we really must! . . . What are 
 those lovely lights across the river?" 
 
 "Hoboken." 
 
 They had fallen indeed! Earth afterward Hobo- 
 ken! There is no such word above! 
 
 in 
 
 Below, they opened bank accounts. It is easier 
 said than done; but they did it, to be really practical. 
 And Jeremy kept sending off that Toodlums novel
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 127 
 
 which was always coming back; and scribbling others 
 "Lark Flights," doubtless, and "The Sky of Love" 
 -^ which bear no sign that they were ever published. 
 
 Their return was Barbara's cue. Enter Love. 
 
 " Dearheart, you must take it in the spirit of adven- 
 ture." 
 
 "I do take it in the spirit of adventure, but" here 
 Jeremy would toss the manuscript into an imaginary 
 fire, from which Love would rescue it "the same old 
 dragon grows monotonous. " 
 
 " I know but if you could see what / see!" 
 
 He would smile at that. It was so charming, that 
 second-sight of hers! which never failed her, never 
 grew dim, even when the mists closed in about them, 
 shutting out every other view. 
 
 "Ah, yes; I know what you see." 
 
 "What do I see?" 
 
 "You see a ship!" 
 
 "Yes," Barbara, as calmly as the last time, would 
 reply. "I do. I see a ship." 
 
 "And is it," he would ask, "the the same old 
 ship?" 
 
 But Barbara, in seeing things, was often deaf. 
 
 "I do see it! "she would insist, indignantly. "It's 
 in the offing, I think you call it, don't you?"
 
 128 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "/ call it a mirage," he said. "They don't arrive, 
 somehow, those ships of ours!" 
 
 "One did!" 
 
 There was never any answering that. One dream, 
 indeed, had floated in to them, a fair reality with great 
 white wings of hope; and she had only to remind him 
 of it and its merchandise, only to reproach him gently 
 with the shame of his forgetfulness, to make him see 
 how immaterial all riches were, besides. Let no one 
 laugh; it would be a sad confession. Young love alone 
 knows such fine scorn of things deemed indispen- 
 sable heaven first. Old love earth afterward 
 grows prudent; prefers snug havens. But snug havens 
 mean deserted wharves; and to laugh at young love 
 is to laugh at the spirit of adventure, and the romance 
 and rapture of the sea. 
 
 On land, that same old dragon of Jeremy's complaint 
 now found two adversaries where before it had en- 
 countered one. In spite of its proximity, they went 
 on planning. They planned a home under its very 
 nose; for they would place it safely in the magic circle 
 of their dreams which must come true, they were 
 so beautiful. It is a fair philosophy, and it has the 
 merit of being true; for so long as one believes it, it 
 never fails. Those who lose faith in it, lose sight also.
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 129 
 
 Lose sight of that other, that Epic life, which is now 
 and here, to-day as surely as ever it was yesterday 
 and will be to-morrow, with its ships in the offing, 
 and its haunted wood, where Jeremy had wandered up 
 and down alone. For it was there it was not in 
 New York at all that Jeremy had fought those soli- 
 tary battles with that ancient dragon of despair. 
 There, in that same old shadowy forest where Arthur's 
 men performed their prodigies centuries before, he had 
 battled from dawn till nightfall, and been wounded unto 
 death; and now, at last, as in those elder legends, he 
 had awakened to the consciousness of soft hands bind- 
 ing up his bruised and aching body, and of pitying eyes 
 restoring his dejected soul to life again. 
 
 Ask love if poetry is dead! Young love, not old. It 
 is the old which is mad. Its shield and lance are on the 
 dusty wall, but it denies as myth what it has lived as 
 history, and warms its hands over the embers of a fire 
 whose kindling it has utterly forgot. Ask youth what 
 youth is. It, only, knows; but alas! is dumb. 
 
 Jeremy and Barbara, living romance, could never 
 find the words for it. Feeling about them that haunted 
 forest, braving its perils, and resting in its shadowy 
 glades, they could only gaze wistfully into each other's 
 eyes, and wonder. How it had come to pass that they
 
 130 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 were there! How he had happened to be riding by that 
 day! Wloicb day! Alas! already they were beginning 
 
 to forget what they had never known till it was 
 
 over! 
 
 It is the way with dreams. Knight that he was, and 
 long as he had watched and waited for Opportunity, 
 he did not know, nor could she tell, the place or hour in 
 which that dream of chivalry had come true. 
 
 But he had her word for it, that, somehow, some- 
 where in the enchanted forest, he had rescued a lady 
 from a lonely tower! 
 
 And she had his word, that, for her, if need be, he 
 would slay all the dragons in the world! 
 
 IV 
 
 All that was true. But it was only the wonder, it 
 was not the rapture of the dream. The Sea of Ships and 
 the Forest of Dragons were still of earth, though an 
 earth transfigured, it is true. But love, it seems, had a 
 higher, more ethereal mystery, of the sky, which 
 Jeremy, in those lamented manuscripts, was always 
 seeking words for. After all, it is the sky that is love's 
 native element. They were lovers or so their silences 
 rather than their words confessed not only in what 
 was near and obvious, but in what was far and mystica\.
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 131 
 
 and could never be explained. And only love, and only 
 love when it is young, knows ecstasies that spurn the 
 earth; that will not be content to climb, painfully, to 
 the mountain tops, whose exaltations are among the 
 snows, but must mount straight upward from the 
 meadows, higher, and ever, ever, ever higher, in those 
 lark flights of the unfettered spirit, that knows not 
 how, nor whither, nor even why, it soars and sings. 
 
 One moment she would be sitting there, upon the 
 greensward of the forest, her hands about her knees, 
 silent, in a reverie of sunbeams. The next she would 
 appear to him to fade into a dream of tender light, in 
 which, transfigured first and then transformed, she 
 seemed to float and hover like a bird. Yet was not a 
 bird ; even in love's young dream she was not as mortals 
 know the birds. It was the flight and soaring that 
 seemed birdlike, in these transcendent moments of 
 their comradeship. It was that sudden vision which 
 lovers know only lovers, and only when love is 
 young of the world, so far, so small, so insignificant, 
 down there below them! For where she floated, so did 
 he free, and high, and scornful, and forgetful of 
 everything in life except themselves leaving behind 
 them, farther and farther, that low green earth of toil 
 and care, which is only to be spurned on wings. This
 
 132 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 was their sky. And it was theirs, all of it : all of this 
 pale, blue boundlessness of love, through which he 
 followed, turned and followed, sinking to her eagerly, 
 rising to her wistfully, who was ever just, just, just 
 beyond him! too swift and subtle for his clumsy 
 flight. And then all in an instant it was over. She 
 was there again, seated as before upon the greensward, 
 her hands about her knees. 
 
 That was the pain of it that low return. For to 
 rapture, wonder even is an earth-bound thing. And 
 to walk, when one has known, on wings, the feeling of 
 the sky! Homeward the flowers even, and the wind- 
 voiced trees, were now too near, too crude, for loveli- 
 ness. The touch of earth was clogging to the feet. The 
 sound of words, such words as they could think to 
 utter, wrought foolish discords in the heavy air, and 
 only silence had any melody. 
 
 Love, young love, is the name for it that rapturous 
 flight above the common earth, which young hearts 
 spurn together, wing to wing, yet must come back to it 
 again and find it sad. 
 
 It was not to be expected that they should tell others 
 what they never could tell themselves, what defied
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 133 
 
 analysis, and was so utterly bewildering that even the 
 memory of it was like a rosy mist. 
 
 "Do you think I shall care for love?" asked one of 
 Barbara's friends who as yet was ignorant, gravely 
 ignorant, of those famous mysteries. 
 
 "Oh, my dear! Yes!" 
 
 "But what makes you so very sure?" 
 
 "Why you can't help it!" 
 
 "But suppose I prefer to help it?" 
 
 Barbara was dumb. 
 
 "I don't know, " she said at last. "I never thought of 
 that." 
 
 "And suppose I do help it?" the other one insisted. 
 
 "Oh, you can't do that!" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "You won't have a chance!" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "You won't have time!" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 " Because you won't know anything about it, until 
 until it is too late!" 
 
 "Why won't I?" 
 
 "I don't know!" 
 
 "Why don't you know ?" 
 
 "I don't know why I don't know!"
 
 I 3 4 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Well, what do you know?" 
 
 Barbara laughed. 
 
 "Why, I I don't know what I know!" she cried, 
 helplessly. 
 
 "And is that love?" 
 
 "Yes! That's love!" said the one who knew. And 
 the one that didn't know shook her head doubtfully 
 and smiled. 
 
 "Well, Barbara dear," she said, "I never met a 
 person who knew so little, and looked so much. But 
 I'll trust your face for it." 
 
 That was precisely what they did themselves. It 
 was all a venture a venture of faith, like all adventur- 
 ings, whether of the earth or air. Doubt takes no 
 chances; risks no heart-throb; never knows, nor dares 
 to know, the thrill of any splendid hazard or embarka- 
 tion. They had found Romance. That much, at 
 least, must be conceded to love's younger, braver 
 dreams. But they had found it in nothing that was safe 
 or sure. 
 
 That was what made the heart leap! That was what 
 made them gasp, and laugh, in the face of dragons, on 
 the edge of the abyss. It was not the wonder, it was 
 not the rapture of the dream it was the risk and 
 recklessness. Faith's old adventure into mystery
 
 LARK FLIGHTS 135 
 
 Romance, whose starlight was in their faces, so that 
 they shone strangely to the world of doubt and fear. 
 
 "I feel," she told him 
 
 "How do you feel?" 
 
 "Why" she caught her breath "I feel as if 
 anything, anything, might happen now!" 
 
 "And now," he answered, "we are ready for it!" 
 
 They were ready, indeed; but when it came it found 
 them dumb. It seemed a miracle; perhaps it was. 
 Perhaps in faith they had discovered an eternal law, 
 with power even in that substantial world around 
 them. 
 
 "Things don't just happen!" Barbara said, 
 when they could speak. 
 
 But Jeremy could only stare. He only knew that it 
 was not a dream which trembled in his hands. 
 
 It was Forty Dollars! 
 
 And in the offing there was a fleet of sails! 
 
 "I wrote it in two hours!" he said, breathlessly. 
 "How much would that be a month? You figure it; I 
 can't seem to count." 
 
 "But, Jerry dear, you couldn't do it every two 
 hours!" 
 
 "I could do it once a week!" 
 
 "Oh are you sure?"
 
 136 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Yes! now. Now, I'm sure. Now I'm sure of 
 anything everything! . . . You!" 
 
 "Oh, Jerry, I I think we ought to wait!" 
 
 " Waitl We will wait always if we wait now now 
 when everything, everything, is coming true! Why do 
 you suppose that it was sent ! " 
 
 "Was it sent?" 
 
 "Things don't just happen," he reminded her. "Not 
 things like this! Things that we've been dreaming 
 of!" 
 
 They were both in tears. She had shut her eyes 
 his own were so convincing; and it was so dizzy high, 
 that precipice on whose very brink he was asking her to 
 trust to wings. They were beautiful wings beautiful 
 . . . but dreams every pinion of them! 
 
 Her heart misgave her. But it was the same heart 
 that, a fortnight later, in the little Chapel of the 
 Divine Compassion, beat tremulously, stopped, and 
 beat again; and then without a tremor of anything 
 but faith and joy felt itself lifted into space and 
 borne away upon the starlit air.
 
 VII 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 
 
 THERE is no lovelier quarter of New York than 
 that in which they came to dwell; for while it 
 is pleasant to float upon the ecstasies that are 
 the heart and soul of all fair beginnings, love builds its 
 nest upon the solid earth. Not on the ground, however. 
 They built theirs high, under the eaves, in a mansion 
 that even common eyesight could discern, though in a 
 neighbourhood one might as well confess it, first as 
 last whose very existence has been denied. 
 
 It is a quarter so old-fashioned and exclusive that 
 not a real-estate firm in all the city ever has been able 
 to get its hands upon it. Not a foot of it is for sale. 
 It is never in the advertisements. There are folk on 
 Fifth Avenue, and on Riverside Drive, who would give 
 half their fortunes to be able to live there. Poor souls, 
 they do not even know its name! 
 
 Jerry used to slip off into it after the day's work was 
 done, and, with Barbara on his arm, they would 
 37
 
 138 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 wander blissfully through its pleasant thoroughfares, 
 where even the noises of city life are softened to the 
 ear. The drivers of trucks go softly there; and, oddly 
 enough, not by virtue of any ordinance of the board of 
 aldermen, but through the sheer love of not disturbing 
 folk, who might have other things to think of. Even 
 the wagons full of milk cans are quite melodious in 
 that part of town, as they skim the cobbles, providing 
 no more than a soft accompaniment to conversation 
 about the joy of life and the beauty of the world. 
 
 And the residents are charming! The apple-women, 
 to cite the humblest of examples, are the dearest old 
 motherly souls that ever lived. They would give you 
 their fruit, if you would let them! And when the 
 policemen are there at all, it is only to add a touch of 
 colour now and then, a speck of blue, here and there, to 
 convivial corners where the gilt signs glitter in the sun. 
 Or they are there to pick up any of the lovely, happy 
 little romping children that may stumble on the cross 
 ings sweet little things, to whom Barbara was 
 always calling Jeremy's attention, and pausing to 
 watch, as they danced and sang about the organ- 
 grinders. 
 
 There was one place especially that Jeremy and 
 Barbara were continually seeking. It was about as
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 139 
 
 large as a very large pocket-handkerchief, greenish, with 
 a pearl-gray border, and shaded by two or three gentle 
 trees. They had started to be maples; and then, under 
 the extraordinary influence of their surroundings, had 
 changed their minds, and, forgetting all about their 
 botany, had become just trees; which was exceedingly 
 good-humoured of them, for one could imagine them 
 anything, anything sheltering and whispering, that 
 one particularly liked. To Barbara they were whatever 
 they might be to Jeremy. To Jeremy they were 
 hawthorn trees. Hawthorn trees reminded him of 
 "took him back so" to Toodlumshire, where the 
 hedgerows were enough to make one sigh, merely to 
 remember them! Ah, well, some day they would go 
 there. Meanwhile, the hawthorns here were fragrant in 
 their way. What the boughs lacked themselves, a 
 bakery opposite made up to them in the most appetiz- 
 ing kind of scented springtime. Indeed, it is the way in 
 that quarter of the city. Everything helps everything 
 else to be whatever one has eyes, or ears, or nose for. 
 And to Jeremy and Barbara their little corner of the 
 world was that same fair place which is always to be 
 found, in town or country, if only one does not go 
 alone to look for it, and is fortunate in his company. 
 "Which do you say it will be?" Jeremy would ask,
 
 140 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 as they would rise from the bench under the hawthorns 
 and stroll off home to dinner. 
 
 "/ say it will be tapioca pudding. Which do you 
 say?" 
 
 " I say prunes." 
 
 And then, if it were apple-sauce, that would be one 
 more subject of discourse, as they finished their repast 
 and floated out again into the twilight, when the 
 neighbourhood is always loveliest, and lends its softly 
 illumined forms and colourings to any imaginable kind 
 of dream. 
 
 Or, if they preferred, they could sit upstairs by the 
 open window, through which the wind and moonlight 
 came from the distant sea and sky, as sweetly as ever 
 it blew, or shone, in country love-stories; while, from 
 the street below, floated up music of the Italian operas, 
 or ballads of the seasons before last, grown a little 
 tenderer with time and distance, now that the words 
 could be forgotten, and the lilt of the melody could be 
 fitted to the mood or reverie of the passing hour. Or 
 they could lean out across the sill, their heads touching, 
 while they watched below the will o'the wisps, the 
 cabs and popcorn men, go by; or above in the strip 
 of heaven those other lights that seemed to say to 
 them
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 141 
 
 "It is the same up here, my dears nothing but 
 Love! You have found the secret of the universe." 
 
 Well, so they had. And, now, if only they could 
 keep it, if only they could keep their eyesight, if only 
 they could keep that tender quarter of the town from 
 growing noisy and unkempt and altogether low and 
 vulgar, after the fashion of the city, which is always 
 changing, always losing something that one loved about 
 it once, and that, missing, one never has the heart to 
 seek, or the fortune to find again, elsewhere. 
 
 Not that they questioned it the living Present had 
 grown so amiable! As yet there was only one shadow 
 upon its bliss. Always it was the same shadow. Its 
 form was the same. Its meaning was the same. It 
 was like a letter "S,"only it was not half so graceful; 
 for, through its curves, two lines, vertical and parallel, 
 made of it that warning and familiar symbol of man's 
 slavery, which, being interpreted, bids him look down, 
 not up for star-dust ; for that toll which his life yes, 
 even his love must pay, earth-gold for gold-of- 
 heaven, gleam for gleam. 
 
 It was unfortunate that the other people in the 
 boarding-house should have elected to live in a neigh-
 
 142 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 bourhood with which they had so little sympathy, and 
 for which they were so utterly unfitted by spiritual 
 and esthetic gifts. None of them realized its charm. 
 None saw its picturesque forms, or mellow colourings. 
 They found it, one regrets to say, intolerably deafening, 
 and dirty, and dilapidated; and the lovely old house 
 itself a gloomy hole full of rats and things, and frowzy, 
 and musty, and altogether uninhabitable for persons 
 of refinement like themselves. Yet they stayed on. 
 The Major stayed that is to say, the portly little 
 man who looked as if he might have been a major, if 
 he had ever wanted to be one; but, who, like most of 
 the others of the company, was now employed some- 
 where, doing something, somehow, for somebody. 
 And the two or three assorted couples, for all the world 
 like so many pairs of old shoes, limp and lumpy, run 
 down at the heels, and with their tops askew they 
 stayed. And Miss Leeds, she stayed, taking her 
 tablets, and, as was only becoming to one in her condi- 
 tion of life, sitting up stiffly and speaking with reserve 
 to persons who had so recently been married. But, on 
 the other hand, there were others who remained, with 
 an eye for the comedy, if not for the poetry of the 
 place. The two dear, jaunty, bright-faced Western 
 girls of the dramatic school, for example, who were so
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 143 
 
 tremendously in earnest, and in love with life, with 
 everything and everybody, but with Jeremy and 
 Barbara in particular; and who made them forget the 
 rest, whom they only bumped against, now and again, 
 in the dim hallways, or saw or rather felt than saw 
 as a more or less vague and variegated hodge-podge of 
 humanity, at the farther tables in the basement dining- 
 room. 
 
 It may have been that envy had somewhat to do 
 with the general aloofness and tone of bitterness and 
 discontent. Jeremy and Barbara, it must be remem- 
 bered, had the best room in the house; though, oddly 
 enough, at the very top of it, the top floor front. It 
 was not the most expensive lodging, it is true; but it 
 had the best air, and the only view of life worth men- 
 tioning, the sunniest and starriest outlook upon the 
 world; and what was more, the fairest in-look, a 
 springlike atmosphere pervading it, so that a bloom lay 
 over Barbara's trinkets and Jerry's books. They often 
 remarked upon the picture that it made, of homely 
 cheerfulness and sweet seclusion. It gave them, more- 
 over, a sense of living in a tower, or a dove-cote, so to 
 speak, right at the top of things; and so serenely and 
 sky-fully above them that they did not mind the 
 flights of stairs, which Jerry mounted, three steps at
 
 144 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 once, but Barbara as time went by more and 
 more slowly. 
 
 HI 
 
 Love, it seemed, however, it might vaunt its present, 
 and forget its past, must reckon always with the 
 future. Suddenly, above the far horizon, a cloud had 
 risen. Dimming the brightness, but deepening the awe 
 and strangeness of that forward view, it come in- 
 evitable, nearer with each passing day, and with other 
 clouds attendant in its train; and gathering in its swift 
 approach, all the doubtfulness, all the dread and 
 menace of the unknown, into its hovering and solemn 
 beauty. 
 
 Watching and waiting, love's voice was hushed. 
 They had come to those silent days in which love 
 pauses to consider; in which it sees what, according 
 to its eyes, and light, is for better or for worse. In 
 valleys of the shadow romance pales swiftly to a 
 ghostly memory of the starlit air; or else, in that 
 insight concerning which mankind has never been 
 agreed, whether it be of vision or of blindness, the 
 spirit of adventure is seen to be an angel not of rapture 
 merely, nor of flight, but of tears also, and vigils, and 
 folded wings.
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 145 
 
 Which it was to be for them a memory, or an 
 eternal presence no one could foretell. Not even 
 Jeremy of the knightly vows! with his manuscripts 
 coming back, just as of old, and as if there were no 
 dream at stake, nor need at hand. Nor even Barbara 
 of the childlike faith in knights and angels, with that 
 mortal heaviness dulling the sense of spiritual realities. 
 But they could trust dumbly; and there was reassur- 
 ance in the light of secret-sharing smiles and glances, or 
 in the pressure of a hand, as they sat together, silently, 
 under the hawthorn trees, watching that little coloured 
 world of theirs, still lovely, even with the shadows of 
 those clouds upon it. 
 
 Indeed, sometimes, it had a strange new charm that 
 they had never known; and which took them unawares, 
 clutching at their throats, and stifling their laughter at 
 its passing comedy. As if, somehow, that rippling sur- 
 face had been stilled, ^and they had seen, beneath, the 
 hidden springs that under-drama, of motive and of 
 aspiration; the poetry of life which finds no utterance 
 but prose; those dreams that do not die, as we imagine, 
 but live, on and on, unguessed, in a helpless poverty, 
 whose rags and hunger are not of the body, but the soul. 
 
 "What I used to laugh at," Barbara confessed, 
 "makes me want to cry. All the foolish things, and
 
 146 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 the faded things, and the broken and the crooked 
 things, and the things with humps! But most of all," 
 she said, more thoughtfully, "most of all, the things 
 that try so hard to smile, and only crack them- 
 selves!" 
 
 "1 suppose," she added, "it's because we never 
 guess other people's secrets, till we have secrets of our 
 own." 
 
 She was very tender with Miss Leeds, and the Major 
 and those old pairs of boarding-house shoes that, once 
 upon a time, she reminded Jeremy, were bright and new. 
 
 "Think," she said to him, "of all the romance that 
 has been forgotten lost, somehow. . . . Oh, my 
 dear!" 
 
 It so appalled her that she turned quite pale. 
 
 " But why are you afraid?" he asked. 
 
 "I don't know," was her reply, "unless . . . 
 unless it's because we might turn out to be so " 
 
 "So what?" 
 
 And she answered, sorrowfully: 
 
 "So very human, after all!" 
 
 IV 
 
 It was possible, of course; but hardly likely, Jerry 
 thought, so long as she could keep those secret-guessing
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 147 
 
 eyes of hers, and a heart so tender and compassionate. 
 There was one word that the lovers in the old books 
 used to use, that he had come to think half-true of her, 
 at least. And never, he told her, could she be quite 
 human, so long as she was half an angel. 
 
 As for his own eyesight, his own vision of that 
 environment in which their love had built its nest, 
 high up, under the eaves, it was yet too soon to say 
 that any of its romance had faded. Shadows there 
 were, of gathering clouds. But, after all, they only 
 meant a little more determined and undaunted striving 
 for life's prizes; a little graver contemplation of life's 
 mysteries; and faith that was the essential thing. 
 Not once and for all, had they risked and ventured. 
 Always, now, over and over, again and yet again, they 
 must do the same. They must stop their ears, and 
 shut their eyes, and, hand in hand, every day, entrust 
 themselves to the unseen mercies of the air. To the 
 unknown: seemingly so empty, but in reality, while 
 faith endured, so safe and radiant with angels' wings. 
 
 And yet 
 
 That Toodlums story was always coming back 
 and was laid away. And those other new ones, for 
 whose sure success that one only little published tale 
 had been the pledge Barbara's wedding ring, they
 
 148 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 called it; those new visions, which he wrote evenings, 
 seated at the only table in the room, and looking up at 
 her between the lines, and when he laid each finished 
 page among her sewing these, too, showed that 
 same inevitable and mocking tendency to return. 
 
 Truth to tell, they dealt with that quarter of the city 
 which the editors, like the real-estate men, had for- 
 gotten, if they ever knew it. No such kindly apple- 
 women ever had existed, they told each other; nor such 
 fragrant hawthorns in the middle of the smoky town; 
 nor any such melodious milk carts, skimming the 
 cobbles. And when at last, driven to desperation, 
 Jeremy sent them the story of two young married folk, 
 nesting high up, under the eaves; and of what they 
 saw out of their lofty, geranium-scented window; 
 and of what they thought, and of how it all happened 
 on fifteen dollars, more or less, a week one wise 
 young editor, breaking the mysterious silence in 
 which these things are settled for better or for worse, 
 wrote to Jeremy, suggesting in a kindly, paternal way, 
 that if he would go, limself, and get married, and try 
 living up under the eaves, with a wife and a geranium, 
 and fifteen dollars, more or less, a week, he would 
 doubtless understand why his rosy little idyl had been 
 unavailable!
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 149 
 
 It was the only time that Barbara ever heard Jerry 
 swear a mild oath, with which the recording angel 
 promptly debited the account of the wise young 
 editor. 
 
 "Jerry, dear!" was Barbara's comment. 
 
 "Well," he answered, and his face was wonderful 
 to behold, "I know what they want, and I'm going to 
 give it to them!" 
 
 Prudently, Barbara removed the pins from her 
 mouth before she asked him, 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "I'm going to write a story," Jeremy declared, 
 calmly, and it was a splendid calm! as if, at last, the 
 long-sought secret was in the hollow of his fist, with 
 which he emphasized his smashing plot. "I'm going 
 to write a story in which a man, living up under the 
 eaves of an old boarding-house, comes home one night, 
 and discovers that his wife has been unfaithful " 
 
 "Why, Jerry!" 
 
 " Yes! He comes home, and he rears and he tears, 
 and he throws the geranium out of the window, and 
 goes away, before she has a chance to explain that the 
 man he had seen her with was her poor, dear, long-lost, 
 only brother, who had just been released from the 
 penitentiary, where he had been confined ten monstrous
 
 150 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 mortal years for a crime of which he was as innocent as 
 a babe unborn!" 
 
 "Jerry!" 
 
 "Listen! Time goes by. Years. And one day, 
 when he's old, and rich, and sour as a crab, he chances 
 to be passing across the street it was the very street 
 where he had lived so happily in those dear, dead days, 
 before his geranium and his heart were broken and 
 as he toddles out into the very middle of the traffic, 
 clang ! clang! round the corner comes Fire Engine 23. 
 There is a hoarse cry! Man leaps from the curb, and, 
 at a single bound, jerks the old party from the horse's 
 hoofs, just in time to be struck himself! And as he 
 falls, and lies there, dying, in the muck and gore, 
 whom should his upturned face disclose but " 
 
 "Jerry! Who?" 
 
 He looked at her suspiciously almost reproach- 
 fully, she thought as he continued: 
 
 "Why, the brother, of course. Who else could it 
 have been? The one conceivable human being who 
 could possibly have been there, of all the spots on 
 earth then, of all the moments in eternity to 
 perform the deed, and save the old boy's life; and who, 
 all these weary years, had been, you see, the sole 
 support of his injured and deserted sister. The old
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 151 
 
 boy finds that out, of course, at the undertaker's 
 shop." 
 
 Barbara shuddered. 
 
 " Horrors ! " she said. " I loathe such stories." 
 
 And Jerry smiled. He seemed more cheerful. 
 
 "It's rather touching at the end," he assured her. 
 "The long, level rays of the afternoon sun falling 
 through the morgue windows, upon the " 
 
 "Jerry, stop!" 
 
 "Oh, not on it!" 
 
 "On what, then?" 
 
 "On her! On the old gray head of his dear old ducky, 
 who had come in, don't you see, to identify two men 
 instead of one. One more than she expected! And to 
 weep on both both heroes: the living and the dead!" 
 
 He paused. There was infinite satisfaction in his 
 voice as he added : 
 
 "I could sell that story!" 
 
 "But, Jerry dear, do you think you could write it ?" 
 
 "Write it!" he exclaimed. But then, again, more 
 thoughtfully, more softly, as he considered it: 
 
 "Write it ..." 
 
 And, finally, in a tone half-resignation, half-con- 
 tempt 
 
 "No!"
 
 152 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 v 
 
 Two days afterward he was at work again, as hope- 
 fully as ever, on one of those visions that were real to 
 him, but, alas, as the outcome proved, as unreal to 
 other folk as all his other unmarketable dreams. 
 
 "Suppose," he said to her one day, as they sat under 
 the hawthorns, "that one little published story of 
 mine should be the only one?" 
 
 The possibility had just descended on him like a 
 cloud. And it was noticeable how, as its shadow over- 
 spread the world about them, the bloom faded the 
 rose and gray of walls, the tender mist of dust and 
 distance, and the thrill of humour and of pathos in 
 that passing comedy. All vanished in a doubt! 
 
 He felt the pressure of her hand. 
 
 "It won't be!" 
 
 "But suppose it should be!" 
 
 And then, under the stress of that intolerable 
 tumult in the street, the roar and rumble of trucks 
 and cars, which made it so difficult to speak, or hear, 
 or even think, there, on the crowded benches, he added 
 peevishly : 
 
 "What is the use of all this interminable hoping, 
 striving, failing " 
 
 His voice broke. But, instantly, he crushed her
 
 CLOUD SHADOWS 153 
 
 hand in his, and smiled only he had the feeling, 
 somehow, that it was the merest crack in that grotesque 
 bravado of his face! 
 
 "Suppose," she told him, "it were the last that you 
 should ever write you would still be You!" 
 
 "But what am I? That's what I've been trying to 
 find out!" 
 
 "Something," she answered, "that you never dream 
 of!" 
 
 She smiled fondly. Even in another's faith, some- 
 thing of that former bloom, it seemed to him, came 
 back something of that ancient hope around which 
 all our planetary lives revolve eternally. Faith holds 
 us fast to it, even in the night; but, were it not for love, 
 no morning ever would o'erspread the sky. 
 
 Often they sat together, waiting, under those trees 
 that were sometimes hawthorns, sometimes not; in 
 what was now an intolerable din, and yet again the 
 merest murmur; while they watched, in faith, a world 
 all coloured like a dream in doubt, a world all 
 blighted, with the shadows of those gathering clouds. 
 
 But it was then, when the past was so irrevocable, 
 the present so precarious, the future so inevitably 
 pledged to pain, no less than pleasure, that he felt that 
 first, deep thrill of a romance that was neither of the
 
 154 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 past, nor present, nor future, merely but of them all! 
 An eternal, a divine romance, in which, not merely 
 as Jeremy and Barbara, but as Man and Woman 
 strangely journeying, they knew not why, nor whence, 
 nor whither they had found each other's hand! 
 
 He remembered always the hour, the very instant, 
 when the vision dawned upon him. They were walking 
 homeward, and she had begged him not to go so fast. 
 And as they went more slowly, and he felt how heavily, 
 how helplessly, she leaned upon him it was then. 
 
 And when he turned and looked lo! . . . that 
 self-same vision was in the joy and sorrow of her eyes!
 
 VIII 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 
 
 IN THE fulness of time Barbara went away to 
 Toodlums, and Jeremy was left alone. It was that 
 first, that age-long separation, only to be soothed 
 by daily letters, and haunted perpetually by ghosts of 
 every foolish or untender word that had been uttered, 
 and by the shadows even of those hasty thoughts 
 withheld from speech. A sad but chastening chapter 
 in the idyl of young love, with its daily confessions and 
 absolutions, and its renewals of old vows and dreams. 
 Ghosts, too, of unknown but imaginable ills kept 
 rising up over the horizon of his mind, and, drawing 
 nearer with the appointed day, plucked at his heart- 
 strings and played grim melodies upon them in the 
 sleepless silences of the night. This trembling emphasis 
 upon his love made the rest of life a confusion of mere 
 trivial realities. Even his rejected hopes, and all those 
 other futile efforts to rescue from the ebb and flow of 
 things about him some little treasure of opportunity, 
 155
 
 156 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 or reward these, now, were the merest background 
 of his life. Its heart and soul were in a world whose 
 drama, to all but him, was silent and invisible. 
 
 How to reconcile this secret and lasting life within 
 with its transient and rude environment of things felt 
 and touched, this inner music with that outer tumult 
 the old, old problem of humanity this was the 
 real day's work to him. Walking among those visions 
 in which he lived and moved and had his being, how- 
 ever he may have seemed to dwell among material 
 things, it was the latter that were dreamlike to him: 
 the city-street that was really strange, and its men and 
 walls that were the phantoms of his mind: mere 
 shadows flecking that starlit way by which he passed, 
 communing with those dearer forms, those more 
 familiar presences, that thronged his hidden day, 
 and made it happy, or made it sad, regardless of the 
 outer world and weather. 
 
 Sometimes, mornings, in the moments of his setting 
 forth, that outer life so charmingly reflected this other 
 one within, that, in their harmony, the mingling of 
 outer sunlight and inner hope, and of the movement 
 and sound about him with the unseen stir and the 
 unheard voices of his thoughts, he knew a momentary 
 thrill and bliss, which seemed the promise of some
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 157 
 
 sweeter and more lasting unity. But as he plunged 
 deeper into the city's storm and stress, discord and 
 disproportion would intervene, with all their intru- 
 sions and irrelevancies. Instinctively he would shrink 
 back into that fairer refuge. In its safe seclusion all 
 else would fade into a blur and murmur: that vague, 
 objective world through which he passed, strangely, 
 in an enchanted circle of the soul. 
 
 What he was, there; what, there, he saw, and heard, 
 and tasted what he was, and what he felt, and did, 
 in that divine romance of spiritual adventure, seen 
 only by the unseen only the eyes of love can guess. 
 No man knows another's solitude, save in a legendary 
 lore of dim surmises and momentary gleams. Yet it 
 was there, where he dwelt apart, that one must seek 
 the Jeremy whom Barbara knew, and the vantages 
 from which he saw what other men denied so strenu- 
 ously. That bloom upon the world was not inexplic- 
 able. Like the soft enchantment which lies for all of 
 us upon the far-off hills, it was born of the ethereal 
 distance. Looking thus, outward, from afar within, 
 he saw, indeed, what others doubted; and, over all, a 
 glory and a glamour that near at hand were but the 
 common light of day. 
 
 In space and time, to gain long vistas we must
 
 158 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 climb, or wait; or we must seek within, those far 
 retreats from which the outer world is but the fair 
 horizon of the scene and setting of our nobler story 
 that starlit circle from which, as strangers, we gaze 
 upon one lighted by the sun. 
 
 One must forget the eaves, under which he was 
 supposed to dwell. Even the city must be left behind, 
 until its roar becomes the merest monotone, and its 
 towers fade into the magic distance. Here, in these 
 quiet places, was where he lived. And here though 
 he had been long a-guessing it he was the son and 
 subject of a King. 
 
 To know him in his palace, as Barbara knew him; 
 to be with him among its treasures; to walk with him 
 in those gardens of his thoughts, or to lean with him 
 upon their terrace walls, gazing out upon that alien 
 city, where no man recognized his royal lineage, and 
 where, by immemorial law, he toiled daily for his 
 bread this was to better understand why he could 
 smile and wait. His hour would come. 
 
 But, meanwhile, perils encompassed him on every 
 hand. Armed fears and doubts lay waiting for him, to 
 dog his steps. Strange voices mocked him, warning
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 159 
 
 him to wake. His hopes were an illusion; his kingdom 
 but a dream. That outer world alone was real, they 
 told him; and there, among those things that he 
 could touch and handle, he must plot and strive and 
 trample in the dust, if he would save himself. He 
 was not a prince, but the pauper that he seemed. 
 
 Not hireling fears alone, but lordlier foes by whom 
 they were employed, contended with him for his birth- 
 right, striving to cheat him of it, hope by hope, and 
 grace by grace. Anger, and its cooler brother, Malice; 
 dark Envy, and smooth-tongued Deceit; and Sloth, 
 and Lust, and Pride man's ancient enemies met 
 him in the market-place, haunted his palace, and 
 supped and slept with him. These, not men, were the 
 real companions of his daily way. And his adventures 
 with them, battles with them, defeats and victories 
 that left him wounded sometimes unto tears, while 
 still he smiled at life: these were the divine romance, 
 to which at last he had awakened. This was that fair 
 new vision of the dignity of life, of its high cause, 
 and its shining destiny ennobling love, and labour; 
 transfiguring the city of his toil, and the room under 
 the eaves. And this was his brave new vow, and 
 challenge: that nothing, now poverty, futility, nor 
 even failure should rob him of his royal heritage;
 
 160 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 that in spite of that inscrutable malevolence by which 
 he was forever haunted and assailed, he would keep 
 his faith in life as a splendid and heroic mystery. 
 
 Walking thus daily, in those gardens of the King, 
 from which alone men see such visions, among its 
 secret aisles, leafy with memories, and abloom with 
 hopes; and lingering by those still waters that mirror 
 every fleeting cloud and wing, every smile and frown, 
 every gleam of goodness and shadow of sin, he was 
 oppressed sometimes with the loneliness of it all : that 
 thrilling beauty of remembrance and of aspiration in 
 which he dwelt, so strangely, and, save for love, 
 seemingly so solitary. Had he been a musician, he 
 could have put it into song; a painter, into colour; 
 a poet, into words. But he was none of these. And, 
 yet, like these, he was a steward of life's mysteries; 
 and the day would come when he must render his 
 account. How, then, could he express this beauty in 
 other -loveliness, for men to share? How exercise his 
 stewardship? It is the old question that men ask, 
 until they find themselves; until they find, at least, 
 symbols signs, outward and visible, for their secret 
 visions. 
 
 For Jeremy, as yet, there was no answer. 
 
 He did not dream that in his eyes and smile men
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 161 
 
 caught sometimes that light which never was on sea or 
 land, but only in the King's gardens; that in his voice 
 they heard, faintly, the music of the winds and foun- 
 tains there; and that, even as their fellow in the 
 common, sunlit world of toil, they found in him hints 
 of some romantic mystery. 
 
 Even as he himself, seeing that they too came forth 
 each morning from palaces and hovels of the spirit, 
 caught glimpses through their own disguise! 
 
 in 
 
 One morning it was spring in the gardens of the 
 king, and a bloom of dew and light lay, silvery, upon 
 every leaf and flower he went down joyfully into 
 the city. There it was summer; and so hot and stifling 
 that those who knew him marvelled at his strange 
 exuberance. Some called it Youth. Others and 
 each according to his own peculiar vision found 
 various interpretations. 
 
 "You must have had a fortune left you!" 
 
 "You have had a letter from Spain!" 
 
 "Which horse did you back?" 
 
 "Oh, no. He has sold his Cumberland Preferred!" 
 
 "There is a woman at the bottom of it!" 
 
 He shook his head, and smiled, like one interrogated
 
 1 62 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 in a foreign tongue. It was always so. Long as he had 
 been with them, he was a stranger still. He could not 
 learn their speech; nor had they anything but a smiling 
 indulgence for his own, which had a sound to them of 
 places hidden from the world. 
 
 And yet such is the mysterious assent we give, 
 despite our creeds, to the very realities that we deny 
 if any one of them, by chance, had found some vista 
 in his life a little more colourful than he was wont to 
 see, or to confess to seeing; or had heard some strain 
 of melody, more thrilling, or more tender, than he was 
 supposed to have the ear for in short, if they had 
 anything to say of which they were ashamed as men, 
 but proud as Man it was to Jerry that they told it. 
 He knew more of their homes, of their wives and 
 children, of their forward fears, and their wistful 
 retrospects, than any other man amongst them, and 
 than any of them guessed. Under the profane bravado 
 in which they railed or laughed at life, he saw them as 
 they were: toiling, most of them, for others grum- 
 bling at Sacrifice, perhaps, but making sacrifices, day by 
 day, faithfully, and never dreaming of deserting posts 
 or cares, however onerous; deriding Courage, and 
 Fortitude, and Loyalty, and Hope, yet bearing, some 
 of them, unlovely burdens giving, each day they
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 163 
 
 lived and toiled, the lie to that easy, sentimental 
 pessimism which they glibly preached. 
 
 The office, therefore, was not to Jeremy what it 
 seemed to other eyes: a mere environment of desks and 
 employees, each with a price upon his head. Its noise 
 and clatter, its change, its smoke and speech, were but 
 a fleeting dream, whose reality was something nobler 
 and more permanent: not the low comedy that it 
 seemed, but that drama of the divine romance, in 
 which, each day, men battle for their immortal lives 
 with dragons and enchantments all the vile sorcery 
 and demonry of evil and faint and fall, or conquer 
 and go on their way, as heroically as ever in the legends 
 of the past. 
 
 "You idealize men," they were always telling him. 
 
 "No; I visualize them," he would reply. "One 
 must to know a man. There is so little of him to 
 be seen." 
 
 This morning was like other mornings, but, unlike 
 most of them, was destined for remembrance. Not in 
 the history of men and nations, nor yet in that mere 
 world-gossip with which the office hummed, and for 
 which great headlines were being written, while 
 editions followed upon each other's heels; but in those 
 records which the angels keep. It was the day when
 
 1 64 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Jeremy, fresh from the places where he dwelt apart, 
 and with their light in that joyful mystery of his eyes, 
 came face to face with those grim realities illumined 
 by the outer sun. 
 
 "Ladd," said the editor and on the margin of the 
 copy that lay before him, he began to trace designs 
 out of some erratic and unsymmetrical geometry of 
 the emotions "I have received orders that the 
 staff must be reduced to a working minimum. You 
 know, of course, that in this I am as helpless as you. 
 I'm sorry, and it goes against the grain and, if I 
 could, I'd keep you for yourself, you understand. 
 But that would be that would be religion," he 
 explained, with a melancholy smile, and a quick 
 glance upward into Jerry's face. "This is business." 
 
 And then, as Jeremy was silent, he said more cheer- 
 fully: 
 
 " You will have two weeks, of course, in which to 
 find yourself." 
 
 Jerry cleared his throat; but he said nothing. 
 
 "Fortunes of war!" the editor reminded him. 
 "And you are young. There's everything in that. I 
 shall be going, too, one of these fine mornings," he 
 added, grimly, putting the finishing touches to a very 
 lopsided hexagon. "That, also, will be business!"
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 165 
 
 He looked up quietly. 
 
 "But /shall be old." 
 
 "Oh," Jeremy assured him, finding his voice at 
 once, and laying a consoling hand upon the other's 
 shoulder, "don't you fear! They know your worth. 
 In your case there isn't any question of vocation. And 
 besides," he added earnestly, seeking some still more 
 convincing word of cheer, "even though worst comes 
 to worst, such things such things are all in a life- 
 time, you know. Don't worry!" 
 
 Involuntarily, they both began to smile. 
 
 " I say, Ladd," the editor began 
 
 "I know!" Jeremy interposed, his face flushing. 
 "It is 7 who am being fired!" 
 
 And now it was the editor who cleared his throat. 
 
 IV 
 
 How do men find themselves? 
 
 That was the question which Jerry asked himself, as 
 he went out into the crowded streets, where a shadow 
 had fallen upon the mysterious brightness of the day; 
 and, over and over, he asked it, as the day went by 
 one of those brief fourteen allotted him. Never had 
 he felt so much a stranger. And there is no loneliness 
 like the oblivion of the crowd; no silence like the
 
 166 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 ceaseless roar of city life, when it has no voice for him 
 who listens. 
 
 As he passed through that familiar square where he 
 had walked so proudly upon one memorable occasion 
 of his life, noting now the dejected figures on the 
 benches, it came to him that some men never find 
 themselves 
 
 Unfit for life that was the phrase which kept 
 running in his head. The suspicion that it might be 
 applicable to himself had never dawned on him before. 
 That there were men, of whom he might be one, who 
 were always strangers among their fellows, always 
 alien of thought and speech, in a world which they 
 could only stare at, wonderingly, helplessly, like little 
 children. Dependent ones, with doubtful gifts. 
 Journeymen of irrelevant, almost impertinent crafts- 
 manship, in a land that acknowledged but few and 
 stern necessities, and where man ate bread in the sweat 
 of a traditional toil. Wanderers afield; gleaners of 
 wild-honey; vendors of exotic wares as fair, perhaps, 
 but as unmarketable as love. 
 
 The possibility that, for all his dreaming, for all his 
 striving even, this might be true of him, haunted his 
 thoughts; and as often as he thrust it desperately back 
 into the world from whose indifference it came to him
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 167 
 
 as often as he faced it with the utterly unreasonable 
 and defenseless hope, which dwelt in that other, 
 kinder, fairer world within it would return, to dog 
 his loneliness. To have known that it was true would 
 have been easier. The inevitable is always to be borne; 
 it is doubt and suspense that are intolerable. 
 
 He hurried from the square, from its dozing drunk- 
 ards, and creatures with the bloodshot eyes who 
 stared straight forward into space, seeing what he 
 shuddered even to surmise. With a tightening of the 
 heart-strings, and a clutching at his throat, he passed 
 on into the more active turmoil of the streets, with a 
 sense of relief in that ceaseless movement, and in his 
 own small part in it. It was something to walk to 
 achieve even that barren progress; to put not only the 
 stones under his feet, but those hard thoughts in his 
 mind, behind him; to feel that he was getting on, at 
 least in space and time, if not in more substantial 
 ways; and with the hope always that inextinguish- 
 able hope that, around the corner, he would en- 
 counter Something that always possible, always to- 
 be-looked-for Something, which would change his life. 
 
 Perhaps he was right. Hopes, the least reasonable 
 in the world, have been known to be the truest coun- 
 sellors. Few but can recall some darkened hour of
 
 168 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 life when the outer voices were a perfect harmony of 
 foreboding, and only one still, small tone within 
 denied their prophecy, and did not cease until, in 
 time, their din was silenced by the unforeseen. 
 
 So, now, to Jeremy, against those outer facts of his 
 impending failure in the very hour of his greatest need, 
 there was but one one single stubborn fact in either 
 world of his, that strove against accumulating doubts 
 and fears. It was that solitary Voice within, which 
 no one but himself could hear; which spoke to him 
 alone, and in that language which all men understand, 
 but no man has the power to utter. Some say it is 
 the voice of God; others that it is the speech of angels. 
 However that may be, and however it be heard 
 whether in faith, or only in wonder, or even in 
 doubt so long as he is listening, man knows it for 
 his native tongue. Speech of some far, fair country, 
 falling as music upon his exiled ear. 
 
 But meanwhile meanwhile, he asked the Voice, 
 could one live on hope? Eat hope, pay hope? . . . 
 
 It is the old question, and the old voice answers it, 
 in the old, old fashion, as mysteriously, as ceaselessly, 
 as the flight of time: denying nothing, but affirming, 
 affirming, and still affirming, ever and forever, in the 
 face of reason, in the face of facts, and in the face of
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 169 
 
 man, and the whole inexorable outer world of outer 
 Law Hope, Hope, Hope Hope, with every throb 
 of the human 'heart! Hope, with every beat of the 
 winging moments! as it was in the beginning, is 
 now, and ever shall be, world without end. 
 
 Jeremy was silent. 
 
 But the Voice was not. It was still speaking when 
 he turned into a wretched street to which he had been 
 sent. And when he entered a crowded tenement, 
 pushing his way through an awestruck throng upon 
 the walk, and climbed the stairs, and knocked at a 
 door with crepe upon its knob, still was that murmur 
 in his ear. Still was a whisper there when he emerged, 
 and hurried back, out of that squalid mourning, to 
 write the old, old story of man's hopelessness. 
 
 Yet he shuddered as he wrote; and turned, heart- 
 sick, from the familiar words that stared so blackly 
 at him out of the printed page that evening: 
 
 Suicide Out oj Work 
 
 Foolish words! Even to-day he knew that they were 
 so. And yet to-day, of all days in his life, there was 
 a grim reality in foolishness. Even in another's. And, 
 with a kind of horror, Jeremy turned from it, as from 
 his own.
 
 170 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 v 
 
 The day was drawing to a close, when, grimy with 
 the dust with which the wind smote him, almost blind- 
 ing him as he came into his familiar quarter of the 
 town, and deafened by the din of traffic there, Jeremy 
 reached at last that time-stained row of dilapidated 
 dwellings where he lodged. The room under the eaves 
 was stifling, but it was a refuge from the ceaseless glare 
 and turmoil down below, in which it was so difficult to 
 think, and so impossible to plan. 
 
 He threw himself, face downward, on the bed. In 
 the demoralization of defeat that first fatigue of 
 body, and utter bewilderment of thought and will 
 it was easiest, thus, to shut out the dingy cheerlessness 
 of the place. Those faded wall-flowers, and tattered 
 curtains, and all the coffin-coloured furniture in which 
 old boarding-houses are the graves of departed pomp 
 and pride, perpetual warnings to their inhabitants 
 that all things shine awhile, only to end in gloom and 
 dust. 
 
 Lying there, the city became a murmur and a 
 memory. But there also, in that refuge, neither of 
 space, nor time that freedom which man seeks 
 vainly in a world whose law is limitation that 
 inwardness to which, in the instincts of divinity, he
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 171 
 
 turns from an environment that seems, sometimes, a 
 soulless mechanism and inquisition of malevolence 
 there also, even there, the light had vanished! What, 
 that morning, had been all abloom and sparkling with 
 the dew of hope, had faded, in those few brief inter- 
 vening hours, to an inexplicable desolation. Every 
 fountain had ceased to play every singing sound of 
 winds and waters slept, now, in silence. 
 
 It was that Silence in which he who hath ears, hears 
 voices of mystery. 
 
 "Thou fool!" they said to him. And, over and 
 over, he heard 
 
 "Fool, Fool, Fool that thou art! See, now, what 
 comes of dreaming ! " 
 
 In all that mocking chorus there was not one single 
 friendly accent to be heard. Where, he wondered, was 
 the God of dreamers? And the angels that are said to 
 watch over the foolish children of this underworld? 
 Wlno cared? . . . Two women! that was all. 
 
 Two mortals, now. Some day, perhaps, one more, 
 created in his very image another dreamer, drunken 
 with a wine not made with hands, but lying in some 
 gutter of the solid earth would care! and curse him 
 for that heritage of moonshine. 
 
 Even his body trembled! The remembrance of that
 
 172 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 other dreamer, blissfully asleep as yet, was in itself 
 almost a prayer that he might never waken, who was 
 now so safe from pain, so innocent of folly! It was the 
 first of that sudden throng of bat-winged creatures who 
 sleep in light, but flit in the darkness of blighted 
 gardens. Black thoughts and wishes, from whose 
 apparition he recoiled; unbidden guests to whom he 
 shut his eyes, and whom he drove back, blindly, into 
 those haunted shades from which they came to him. 
 
 And then it was that his very soul cried out to the 
 mystery about him: a cry that echoed and reechoed, 
 in the silence, with a sound like laughter. . , . 
 Then all was still again. 
 
 But it was a strange stillness! Not like the other, 
 when, still on the confines of that world which he had 
 left behind, he could hear its murmuring silent now, 
 and utterly forgot. Even those mocking voices were 
 no longer heard, in this oblivion, this sudden hush, and 
 calm, which had befallen him. He was alone alone, 
 and safe! Not only men, but those haunting shapes of 
 evil Envy, and Pride, and Fear, and all the rest of 
 that dark band by which he was assailed had 
 vanished, now. He was alone, at last. Yet not alone! 
 . . . For, all about him, in their stead, hovered a 
 white-winged host of peace!
 
 IN THE GARDENS OF THE KING 173 
 
 Silently, invisibly, they had come to him in answer 
 to his cry. Healing presences, and still, small voices 
 of good cheer, out of the past, with its hard-won wis- 
 dom; out of the present, with its priceless treasures of 
 love and hope; out of the future, also that unknown 
 future, which surely must be safe and fair, when its 
 very threshold was so thronged with angels! 
 
 Never before in this enchanted circle of the soul, 
 this dream within a dream, had he known seclusion, or 
 immunity, or love, like this this secret of the garden's 
 heart. 
 
 And this was a beginning! Who could say what 
 depths of stillness and security there might be here, 
 waiting for his need! What splendid answers waiting 
 for his cry ! 
 
 It came to him how often he had heard of this; how 
 little he had heeded what man had said, and sung of it, 
 from the beginning. And it was true! true as ever, 
 that for every dreamer there is a refuge long hidden 
 from himself; and seldom found until all other ways 
 are desolate. True that there are voices there 
 speech that no language can interpret, but every 
 listening ear may understand; and wings on which 
 all sinking, failing, dying things are lifted into life 
 again !
 
 i 7 4 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 For Jeremy so new to this, so wondering, and 
 amazed it was a mystery too strange and fair for 
 words, or even for his thought. He only knew that now, 
 in those familiar places, so lately desolate, he found 
 old hopes abloom, old fountains playing! 
 
 And as he rose up from his knees, there in the 
 twilight of his room, he listened fearlessly to the city's 
 murmuring.
 
 IX 
 
 WAYFARERS 
 
 FROM those mysterious refuges, lovely and 
 unlovely, where men dwell apart, meeting in a 
 common world in which they are but phan- 
 toms of themselves, and their temporal drama is but 
 a play of shadows the reflection of unseen realities, 
 more fair, more terrible they come each morning 
 into the market-place seemingly so like each other that 
 Only a sinner who is something of a saint as well can 
 guess the divinity in the throng. For only kindness 
 has eyes for kindness, faith for faith, hope for hope. 
 To-day mankind was tenderer than ever it had been 
 before. Its very ugliness was fair: not with mere 
 radiance of the sun, but with a light that no one in all 
 those hurrying thousands could possibly have had 
 eyes for, unless like Jeremy that morning, and for 
 the first time, he had become a father! The father of 
 a son! 
 
 A certain blindness, now, was gone forever. He 
 175
 
 176 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 could see in the men about him, in the women whom 
 he passed, in the children whom he paused to smile at, 
 things that belied the hardness and indifference in 
 those elder faces; and in those younger ones, in their 
 play and wonder, something shining, that grime, or 
 hunger, or disease itself, no longer hid from him 
 something helpless that stirred his heart. For in the 
 news from Toodlums, not he alone, but every man had 
 suddenly become a father! Every woman was a 
 mother now; and every child was, in some trembling 
 sense, his own. 
 
 It had brought him nearer to his fellows, strangely 
 nearer. In this new kinship, their hidden lives would 
 never be again the mystery they had been before. He 
 could guess more easily their secret joys and sorrows: 
 those light hopes, and those heavy burdens, with which 
 they passed him in the street. Their strife for bread; 
 the eagerness with which they fought for more than 
 they would ever need themselves; their thwarted 
 hopes, and their hard dilemmas, and, in utter weari- 
 ness, or chagrin, or fear, their desperate sacrifice of 
 unseen birthrights for a pottage that is made with 
 hands all these cried out unto his pity. Always 
 they had touched, but never had they thrilled him 
 until now he, also, felt white arms clinging to his
 
 WAYFARERS 177 
 
 frailty; and his heart all trembling, even in its joy, 
 with the knowledge of those precious futures entangled 
 with his own. 
 
 He laid the message upon the desk of his friend, the 
 Editor, without a word. The other read it once, twice, 
 thrice, before he raised his eyes to those youthfully 
 parental ones. Even then it was with the slightly 
 embarrassed air of elder fathers that he offered his 
 congratulations; and he added what, perhaps, might 
 better have been left unsaid 
 
 "Now, of course, you have got to find yourself!" 
 
 which was undeniable. 
 
 As yet, in his letters to Barbara, he had written 
 nothing of his impending fate. It would be time 
 enough when he could both propound the question of 
 their future, and answer it, at once; and with some- 
 thing more than this indefinite but persistent hope in 
 which he gazed about him for some new way forward. 
 
 But it was the old way that still seemed likeliest. 
 If he could find, somehow, somewhere, in all this tumult 
 and confusion, some true story, some tale to write 
 some little chapter out of that divine romance to 
 which he was awakening that seemed the surest, 
 indeed the only way, in which to find himself. 
 
 For he was still, despite his failure to impress the
 
 178 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 world, a novelist. One trifling published story, it 
 was true, was the merest promise of fulfilment, in that 
 oldest, fondest, loveliest of all his dreams. The friend 
 who had edited his news from Toodlumshire had 
 already written books. Even so, Jeremy also was to 
 live and die a novelist. Because it was so that he had 
 seen, always, that spiritual hero inhabiting his dream 
 of self: that ideal Jeremy, whose form and stature, 
 whose mien and movement, whose very mind and soul, 
 he was forever striving, consciously, and unconsciously 
 as well, to realize, though with such fortune as has 
 been seen. Illusion or not, and however to be ac- 
 counted for, it was the pitch to which he tuned his 
 life heart-strings to harp-strings. And whether it was 
 because the harmony was untrue, or because his play- 
 ing was unskilful, or that for those who listened the 
 melody was too familiar, or too new and strange, it 
 would be hard to say; but, somehow, the music of his 
 life seemed never to awaken those answering echoes 
 that he longed to hear. 
 
 There were echoes that he failed to hear, because 
 they were not the ones for which he listened. Echoes 
 that, from first to last and for all that Barbara could 
 protest in that clear audition of her love he never 
 dreamed of. Echoes that still are to be heard, and
 
 WAYFARERS 179 
 
 that still are musical, in a world where, failing as a 
 novelist, he accounted himself, and was by others also 
 accounted, in that world's wisdom, a failure as a man, 
 
 as well. 
 
 ii 
 
 Seated one evening by that upper window where he 
 and Barbara had gazed so often at the stars, he had 
 been thinking of Toodlums : a thousand wistful thoughts 
 that wandered even to the little river there, and to 
 the woods where, in that very hour, he knew the 
 thrushes would be singing. And as he dwelt upon 
 old half-forgotten things, the new, by contrast, seemed 
 doubly sad. 
 
 Doubts had come creeping in again those shadows 
 fatal even to the divine romance. The vision of it 
 was so hard to keep that vision of life's higher 
 dignity, in its lower shame and mockery of defeat; of 
 its light, in darkness; of its wealth, in poverty; of its 
 eternal safety, in mortal perils of pain and fear. Faith 
 he knew faith, and its adventurous daring was 
 the secret of Romance. Of all Romance, human and 
 divine. But how was he to keep that faith? that 
 perfect freedom in these fetters of inglorious Space, 
 and inexorable Time? That largeness, in this littleness ! 
 
 It would be easier, he told himself, if he but had
 
 i8o THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 some surer foothold on the solid earth easier in 
 honour, or in ownership, to keep that splendid feeling 
 of the universe. And that heroic sense of all eternity 
 if fourteen days of it were not so paramount ! 
 
 They passed so swiftly that they left him numb. It 
 was a paralysis of doubt and fear. Before his very 
 eyes Romance was dying. Soon there would be no 
 more poetry, no story worth the telling, left. Daily, 
 he had sought, and waited; watched, and listened: but 
 all in vain. To his dazed senses the world about him, 
 brushing him, jostling him, deafening, blinding him, 
 was but a foolish uproar: all mad and meaningless 
 confusion ; and man, to his bewildered reason, seemed 
 but a leaf whirled, helpless, in some ceaseless gale. 
 
 Nightly, there by that upper window, he had striven 
 to revive old visions to conjure up that former bloom 
 and glamour, which he had seen upon this very world. 
 It would not return not even to his imagination. 
 His very pen, it seemed to him, balked at those words 
 that were no longer true. 
 
 But when he tried to say what now appeared to him 
 as truth tried to find words for that benighted scene 
 and setting, and for the warp and woof of that inter- 
 minable plot, in which it seemed to him that his and 
 all men's helpless lives were being woven: when he
 
 WAYFARERS 181 
 
 tried to find a story even in his failure and despair 
 his pen dropped from his fingers. . . . Perhaps 
 that, also, was not true. 
 
 Then what? What could he count upon as true? 
 
 It was then that his thoughts turned home to 
 Toodlums. He could count, always, upon two women 
 and that other dreamer there, scarcely as yet 
 awake. Those three, at least mother, and wife, 
 and child. Little enough of truth and beauty to be 
 sure of! but all that man has ever needed to keep 
 him safe. In gathering shadows, it is to love always 
 to love that he goes back, to find the light again. 
 The light of faith and its romance. 
 
 But now, to-night, just when that light began to 
 dawn again upon the darkened world, and life, with 
 all its failures and its disappointments, and its impend- 
 ing peril, seemed, once more to him, a divine adventure 
 in which, to-morrow, he was to rise again, and gird 
 himself with unseen might, to play the hero in the 
 man just then the Devil was at Jerry's ear. 
 
 The Devil, it is said, is dead; or was never aught but 
 a nightmare of man's childhood dreams. However 
 that may be, that dark, eternal truth which never 
 dies, and which waits and watches, sleepless, lest man 
 in his weakness and despair should pluck up heart
 
 182 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 again, was there. And I like the old names, for the 
 old truths, best. 
 
 "Ah, yes," it whispered, "for some men, life is a 
 romance. Some men are heroes . . . - 
 
 The pause was eloquent. 
 
 " Even you might have been perhaps. To be 
 born again, it is now a little late, my friend . . 
 but you might try!" 
 
 The silence was profound. 
 
 "You have three days left. Three whole days in 
 which to give the lie to ages think of that ! To 
 generations upon generations of sin and folly, of which 
 you are the flower! The lovely flower!" 
 
 Jerry almost laughed himself. The Devil did! 
 
 Dreamer that he was, he had never thought of it 
 before: that, for some men, hope is such sublime 
 presumption! 
 
 " I see, my friend, that you are not so childish as is 
 generally supposed. You are growing up. You are 
 beginning to observe and reason. Mark you, now, 
 what I should hardly have said to you before. You 
 would not have understood me. You are seeking 
 Freedom. You want to be unshackled from these 
 petty miseries of time and space. Why, so did that 
 other wise man that other dreamer, the other day!
 
 WAYFARERS 183 
 
 You remember him or what was left of him. The 
 man out of work. With him, also, it was a little 
 matter of, say, three out of fourteen days. He found 
 release. . . . 
 
 "Ah, well, of course, don't think of it again. It is 
 not to be expected that one of your peculiar sensi- 
 bilities the flower of so delicate a race of heroes! 
 would have the heart, or hand, for so violent an 
 adventure." 
 
 "But the next best freedom is in your very line! 
 All the poets, all the dreamers in the world, have 
 sung of it the Freedom of the Road! Had you 
 never thought of that ? Why, there's the door! Beyond 
 it the whole earth lies yours, every road of it! 
 Yours, every day of it! to dream in. Every night! 
 without a ghost of care. And poverty that blessed 
 poverty of the saints and poets! without a need beyond 
 the bread they'll give you, never fear for Christ's 
 sake! 
 
 "Eh? . . . That would be Romance! Wander- 
 ing up and down the earth, with, every new day, new 
 adventures! new dreams, every hour! Old dreams, 
 too dreams, remember, that you never asked to 
 dream: gifts, surely, from a God of Freedom! 
 
 "And as for love why, if you love them so, why
 
 184 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 burden them so heavily, with all this weight of your 
 bewilderment, your incompetence? Those dear to 
 you will live more safely when you are gone. Pity 
 will be kind to them: kinder than Folly! For them 
 also listen but a moment longer: the truth's 
 soon told for them, also, Freedom! And out of 
 their lives your own will fade as a dream; and as a 
 dream their lives will fade from yours; and in the 
 end . . . well, as to that, my friend, where the 
 beginning was so easy that no one remembers it, surely 
 one may be quite comfortable about the end!" 
 
 The voice was silent. 
 
 All the while, even when it spoke most movingly, 
 Jeremy had heard, beneath its clear discourse, that 
 other still, small voice of hope. Now, in the quiet, 
 it had a warning sound. Or, rather, it was not the 
 sound itself it was its ceaselessness that made him 
 listen. . . . 
 
 "Why do you hesitate?" whispered that bolder 
 voice again. "What you hear is but the beating of 
 your own heart! And when your heart stops fft I 
 the little voice stops too!" 
 
 "It might not." . . . Jeremy was listening. 
 
 "Bah!" said the Devil. "What are you afraid of? 
 An old wife's tale, to frighten children with! I've
 
 WAYFARERS 185 
 
 told you where the stories are. You'll never find one 
 here." 
 
 "\rnay." . . . Jeremy was listening still. 
 
 The Devil laughed. 
 
 "You!" he cried. "You are a pretty hero! A 
 very flower of romance, eh? Take my advice, and 
 be off with you, before it is too late." 
 
 There was a moment's silence. 
 
 "Well, then," said the Devil, "stay and be 
 damned!" 
 
 And as he stayed seemingly so solitary, so dumb, 
 so motionless, so utterly remote from crisis and decision, 
 from stir and action, from the thrill and drama of 
 what men call Life lost, seemingly, in the shadows 
 of its prose, without a gleam of its poetry and romance 
 every muscle that men strive with was stretched 
 and strong! And every nerve with which they fire 
 their clay, for use and service even for the merest 
 hope of some diviner purpose than they know was 
 like a flame! 
 
 HI 
 
 Seated there among the presences and voices of 
 the larger life, he was conscious of a new one entering 
 through that very door whose way to freedom he
 
 1 86 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 had declined. It was open for the solace of the breeze 
 that floated through the window and passed on into 
 the hall from which the phantom came rustling in, 
 without a word of greeting, and seating itself among 
 the evening shadows, in Barbara's chair. 
 
 He said nothing, and but turned his head. As for 
 the ghost, the moonlight told him who it was one 
 of those mysterious beings who haunt old boarding- 
 houses, coming and going as silently as now, at all 
 hours of the day and night; and variously explicable, 
 according to one's gift of vision. This one dwelt 
 across the hall. He had seen her on the stairs, where 
 she might indeed have been a ghost, for aught he 
 knew of her; and he had been, at times, conscious 
 of her apparition in the dining-room below, where 
 spectres are unlikely visitors. And he had heard her 
 name. 
 
 Taking her for granted, as she had taken him, he 
 said nothing. He was becoming used to uninvited 
 guests. This one spoke at last, softly, in the merest 
 reverie of voice. 
 
 "I knew that you would understand." 
 
 "Oh!" he answered. 
 
 "It isn't everyone that does, is it?" inquired the 
 same calm tone of confidence; and now there was a
 
 WAYFARERS 187 
 
 stir beside him, and some faint, exotic perfume in 
 the air. " I knew you would. I knew it the first day 
 that I saw you." 
 
 "How how did you know?" 
 
 "It was in your face. You didn't look at me as 
 other men." 
 
 He had hardly looked at her at all. Nor could he 
 remember when they met ; or where. 
 
 "It was on the steps. I knew at once that I had 
 nothing " 
 
 She paused, and, for the first time, turned upon 
 him the mystery of her eyes. 
 
 " nothing," she repeated gratefully, "to fear. 
 You pitfed me. I saw it in your face." 
 
 It was very possible, of course. 
 
 "You understood how I had suffered." 
 
 This was news, indeed! 
 
 "You read me at a glance. I knew, then, that 
 concealment was impossible. That we were to be 
 friends always!" 
 
 She confessed all this in a breathless undertone 
 that Jeremy had heard before, though only at the 
 theatre. 
 
 "Why are you silent?" she demanded. "You are 
 lonely."
 
 188 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 He hesitated. 
 
 "Yes," he said. 
 
 "And sad." 
 
 Again he hesitated. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Why?" she asked. And, as he was silent, she 
 answered for him, in a kindly way. "You have 
 many cares." 
 
 "Nothing but will pass." 
 
 "How do you know that they will pass?" 
 
 "Things change," he answered, "when it is darkest." 
 
 "Ah, but the time comes when they never change!" 
 she told him sadly. "You see, 1 know!" 
 
 His heart reproached him. 
 
 "I'm sorry," he replied, touched by the sudden 
 thought of how much more hopeless and forbidding 
 even than to himself, the world must seem to lonely 
 women. Women, he thought he thought so to 
 the end were infinitely more sensitive to life than 
 men; infinitely more tender-hearted, and more fair 
 and delicate of mind as they were of flesh; and more 
 pure of vision. He had never doubted it; and always 
 as he looked into their eyes, or watched them in their 
 silences, he had felt a shame before those thoughts 
 that he could only guess, but that he fancied were a
 
 WAYFARERS 189 
 
 kind of garden, more springlike than his own. He 
 had always thought of it as morning there, with 
 something of childhood lingering like dew; or evening, 
 with its maternal hush; or, if the flowers ever drooped 
 or withered in the heat of noon, or fell beneath the 
 wrath and torment of the storm they did, some- 
 times, he knew heat and storm were of that outer 
 world, where women, he believed, were always strangers 
 like himself. Barbara, surely, had never roused him 
 from that dream. And now beside him was another 
 woman, vaguely young, and dimly fair, who had 
 faced that world, before which even his coarser strength 
 had quailed. Remembering his weakness now with 
 shame, his heart went out to her. 
 
 "You have friends," he said. 
 
 She seemed to shrink from the very word. 
 
 "Friends!" 
 
 "Ah, then," he said, at once, "you must know 
 Barbara!" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Women do not care for women." 
 
 "Barbara will care!" 
 
 "Perhaps. I'd rather trust the sympathy of a man. 
 Not all men," she added, quickly and then with a 
 touch of irony, "one in ten thpusand, perhaps! Some,
 
 190 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 one like you a dreamer. I knew you were a 
 dreamer, that day upon the steps." 
 
 "But Barbara," he began and stopped instinc- 
 tively; but wondering that any one who had seen, 
 could question Barbara. 
 
 "I don't doubt that she is all you say. But she 
 wouldn't care for me." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "You wouldn't understand.' 
 
 "Perhaps I would." 
 
 "No. You are an idealist." 
 
 "If that is true, wouldn't that be a reason," he 
 suggested, "for understanding?" 
 
 She seemed to hesitate. 
 
 "Well let me see whether you are a true idealist 
 . . . / don't believe in anything, you know. I don't 
 believe in God, and I don't believe in man not even 
 in idealists. Men are all alike sensualists. Ideal- 
 ists are esthetic sensualists, that is all. You see, I 
 know. My husband was a rake. And as for women 
 we are all alike, too. The only difference is that 
 some of us are legally good, and the rest of us 
 are illegally bad. . . . What do you say to 
 that?" 
 
 "T say," Jeremy made answer, without an instant's
 
 WAYFARERS 191 
 
 hesitation, and in a tone of passionate protest, "that 
 you don't believe anything of the kind!" 
 
 She clapped her hands. 
 
 "Ab! What did I tell you? You are you are 
 a true idealist ! But I do believe it what I said 
 just now." 
 
 "You may try to believe that you believe it," he 
 acknowledged, "but your heart tells you that it isn't 
 so." 
 
 "My heart! What do you know about my heart? 
 When I meet one single man in all the universe that 
 I can trust not merely say \ trust " 
 
 "I don't doubt," Jeremy interposed, "that you 
 have been unfortunate in others. But how can you 
 despair of goodness, so long as there is any in yourself?" 
 
 "There isn't any in myself." 
 
 "Ah, but you are wrong!" 
 
 "What right have you to say that? What do you 
 know about myself? How do you know?" 
 
 "I know," he answered, "because in my own heart 
 there are places places," he confessed, "that I 
 would not be ashamed to have you see. Have I any 
 right to suppose that there are not those places in 
 others also?" 
 
 And as she was silent, he added musingly:
 
 i 9 2 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "The unexplored country seems to be within us. 
 It is a strange country, and we know very little about 
 it yet; only, the more one travels there, the more it 
 seems to be one's native land it is so full of hope." 
 
 "You have been very fortunate," she murmured. 
 "How happy you must be!" 
 
 Jeremy was silent. 
 
 " You are one of those lucky persons," she continued, 
 "whom the fairies and the angels watch, and the stars 
 guide. Who never know pain or failure or wrong 
 or tears. I have heard of such persons. But 1 
 never met one before." 
 
 And she added, bitterly: 
 
 "It is easy for you to have faith in things!" 
 
 "Perhaps," he answered, "it is not so easy as you 
 think." 
 
 "Ah, yes, I know. You said that you were sad, and 
 lonely. You feel sadness; but you don't know sadness. 
 Or loneliness. You don't know struggle, and pain, 
 and wrong, and fear. Some day, perhaps, you will 
 be deserted by all those lovely hopes of yours; and the 
 world that you talk of will seem very far away from 
 you, then, and like a dream . . . Then you will 
 know!" 
 
 They were both silent. And then, suddenly, to
 
 WAYFARERS 193 
 
 his astonishment, she arose and gave her hand to him, 
 in token of surrender. 
 
 "Well," she said to him, with charming candour, 
 and in that former, kindlier voice, "I'll begin all over 
 again by believing in you!" 
 
 She felt his hands tremble at her touch. 
 
 "You must do nothing so foolish!" he protested. 
 
 "All!" she laughed softly. "So it seems that I am 
 not to trust you, after all!" 
 
 Jeremy was silent. And she divined, easily enough, 
 what manner of silence it was that held him one 
 of those crucial silences in which a voice, or the merest 
 shadow of a voice, may end the balance, once, and 
 sometimes forever. 
 
 "But how, then, shall I begin all over again," she 
 asked plaintively, "if I cannot believe in you? You, 
 of all men an idealist!" 
 
 The silence was profound. 
 
 "By believing in yourself!" he at last made answer 
 in a desperate voice. 
 
 "Bab!" she cried, petulantly, jerking her hand away. 
 "I tell you, you don't know anything about myself! 
 I didn't come here " 
 
 She whipped out a cigarette, and lighted it, so that 
 for an instant, while the match was flaming, her face.
 
 194 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 with all its scorn, but all its lingering and still hopeful 
 youth as well, was suddenly revealed to him. And 
 then, in the shadows again, as she leaned back against 
 the open window, her defiant head was outlined against 
 the sky. 
 
 "I didn't come here to be believed in. And, for 
 that matter, you seemed just now a little doubtful of 
 yourself!" 
 
 "1 know!" he answered; and his shame touched in 
 her heart those very chords that she denied. "I 
 didn't say," he reminded her, "that faith in one's 
 self was easy. And it was you, remember, who said 
 that I didn't know . . . what struggle was!" 
 
 "Yes," she acknowledged . . . "and I was 
 wrong." 
 
 With exquisite care as if it were the very silence 
 that she feared to break she laid down her ciga- 
 rette. 
 
 "Nevertheless," she told him, giving him her hand 
 again in new surrender, and in farewell, "I shall 
 begin just as I said I would! Yes!" she insisted and 
 he never knew that she was crying softly to herself 
 "by believing . . . in the first idealist ... I 
 ever met!"
 
 ANGELS 
 
 THOSE fourteen days in which he was to find 
 himself, who never would be aught but what 
 he was and had been always from the begin- 
 ning, were quickly past. But Time was kind to him: 
 kinder than man. Jeremy awoke to find a fifteenth 
 day and then a sixteenth. While there was light to 
 dawn, even though it always faded, it was yet too 
 early to despair. 
 
 He had been sending out those old neglected manu- 
 scripts again, and while, in their former fashion, they 
 were coming home to him, still, faithful to his dream of 
 authorship, he was sitting there under the eaves, 
 waiting, waiting waiting in light, and waiting in 
 darkness before that blank white paper of his story- 
 less and unromantic, unheroic hope. 
 
 And it was curious, then one of those spiritual 
 ironies of life akin to its outward and visible derisions 
 that, pen in hand, in this eleventh hour of his need, 
 '95
 
 196 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 his desperate and tortured mind could conjure up for 
 him nothing but the airiest phantasies mere butter- 
 flies of thought, that, in pretty little sunlit scenes of 
 peace and joy, flitted, here and there, among the 
 fragrant flowers of his fancy. Even while the active 
 world roared warnings from below, or when he started 
 up involuntarily from his chair at some apparition of 
 remembrance some grim reminder that time would 
 not be always kind, and that a day of reckoning was 
 at hand Jeremy would dip his pen and nerve himself 
 again with set teeth and frowning determination, only 
 to visualize some tranquil garden some bliss of life, 
 sequestered from its storm! Pictures of country 
 quiet, of little rivers meandering in meadows, of roofs 
 and towers among distant trees, and youthful lovers 
 under hawthorn boughs: all these returned to him 
 out of forgotten dreams. They were those English 
 vistas that he had seen while yet a lad, in Toodlum- 
 shire, looking up from the pages of old English verse, 
 to wish and wonder. And now when, a lad no longer 
 among the bees and roses, he faced what men face, 
 there, in his city cell, back they came again, unsum- 
 moned; and still so beautiful, and so useless for any 
 purpose of the hour, for any story but his own ! Haunt- 
 ing visions of the peace men dream of from the first,
 
 ANGELS 197 
 
 and seek unto the end, and find sometimes but not 
 in the gardens which they saw as boys. 
 
 Perhaps, however, they were not so purposeless as 
 they had seemed: those pretty, little, wistful dreams 
 of earthly refuge from care and sorrow. It was, from 
 the first, their very uselessness, and hopelessness, and 
 that very irony of their comparison with all the un- 
 lovely and unkempt realities of life, so utterly un- 
 gardenlike, that had made him turn from them at 
 last, in pain, only to discern in joy his first dim visions 
 of a surer sanctuary. And now, once more, it was 
 their very mockery that was kind to him the un- 
 timeliness of their sad reminders that made him turn, 
 and turn again, to visions of greener pastures and 
 stiller waters. For, in this valley of the shadow, as 
 he sought for light in the wisdom that other men had 
 found in darkness, nothing they had ever said, or sung, 
 brought half the cheer that shone for him in words 
 that, as a little child, he had been permitted to recite 
 each morning in the school at Toodlums. They 
 were not the wisdom that was taught there, day by 
 day, class by class, room by room, carefully, insistently, 
 as essential armour for these battles with the world. 
 They were but slight concessions to an ancient but 
 now doubtful faith, not indeed to be taught at all
 
 198 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 on pain of popular displeasure, but of which some 
 frugal morsels now and then might do no harm, 
 perhaps, before the real work of the day began. 
 
 But, now, in another of life's kindly ironies, face 
 to face with the ancient problem of existence, every 
 book that he had ever laboured over all those 
 studies in which, one proud spring day, he had been 
 pronounced proficient, and ready for the world, and all 
 those others that he had loved were dumb! To his 
 troubled mind, the brightest jewels among all its treas- 
 ures now were words that he had learned by rote 
 
 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want . . . 
 
 For as he told them over, word by word, bead by 
 bead in the rosary of remembrance, their ancient 
 loveliness seemed now a music not of speech, but life! 
 It was not his own voice merely that he heard. It 
 was the voice of Man, from the beginning, singing 
 out of age-long joy and sorrow, that childlike chant. 
 Singing in innocence not any longer in ignorance of 
 life, but in that wisdom of it which men call Faith : a 
 diviner innocence to which they, spiritually, are born 
 again; and in which, as children of a childhood that 
 need never vanish, an eternal kingdom has been prom- 
 ised them.
 
 ANGELS 199 
 
 Even the darkness had not been purposeless if this 
 light, which was born of it, was true. Words never 
 meant so much to him before. If untrue well, then 
 . . . but they were not untrue! As men say, 
 Something told him that. Something strangely swift 
 and tender, winging its unseen way out of the inmost 
 silence; lighting as it came his troubled thoughts, until 
 they shone; and as it stayed, calming their strife, and 
 the very beating of his heart, until, in stillness, he 
 could hear again those voices which are lost in storm. 
 It was that shining Something that always came to 
 him in eleventh hours, when the last mere reasonable 
 hope had fled. Something final, that had never 
 failed him yet; that would not leave him in extremity, 
 nor let him go. And in answer to whose watch and 
 ward his wistful life had found a voice at last in words 
 that he repeated as a child, telling them over as aves 
 and paternosters of his helplessness. 
 
 And if the psalm was true, then he was safe! Now, 
 and always in green pastures, and beside still 
 waters; yea, but in valleys, also, of the shadows of all 
 those deaths men die to find themselves, he need have 
 no fear. Not even in ibis darkness, ibis silence, in 
 which he waited this risk and recklessness in which 
 he hazarded his life and love, all that was dear to him,
 
 200 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 in the adventure of a last fond faith and felt again 
 the first faint thrill, and saw once more the dawning 
 glamour, of Romance! 
 
 These, verily, are they to whom the angels minister: 
 who are led through days of weariness by clouds, and 
 through nights of anguish by pillars of strange fire; 
 and who are fed with manna in the wilderness. For, 
 there where no human footfall was ever heard, and 
 where the very beating of his heart was of the outer 
 world there where the real Jeremy, as Barbara had 
 seen, was some one nobler even than that ideal Jeremy 
 of his earthly quest who but angels could have found 
 their way to him? And if not angels, who were They 
 that took each night from him, upon his knees, those 
 dying hopes of his, and gave them back again, restored 
 to life, against the morrow? 
 
 To those who knew Barbara as yet knew nothing 
 it seemed sheer madness, his waiting there, day 
 after day, striving with those foolish pages filling 
 them desperately, if only to see some mark, some 
 sign upon them of what he waited for; but only to 
 crush them in his hands at last, and wait again, and 
 strive, and wait, day after day, before that blank white
 
 ANGELS 201 
 
 surface of mere hope. And it was now that they 
 began to find those verdicts, which, according to their 
 lights, still lie like shadows upon his memory. He 
 was a dreamer, an illusionist, a child, a fool. To all 
 their counsels he listened helplessly. From all their 
 silences, so much more eloquent with scorn or pity 
 than any words they uttered, he turned away into 
 that silence of his own. What he saw there, or what 
 he heard, they could not guess. 
 
 But they were strangely moved. 
 
 "If he wants to make a fool of himself," one of 
 them protested wrathfully, "I can't help it. I've 
 done what I could. I've warned, I've lectured him. 
 I've told him what to do to save himself. Yet he goes 
 on living in his fool's paradise. What right has he to 
 make me care?" 
 
 The speaker paused. Slowly a puzzled look came 
 into his defiant eyes, which lost their anger; his voice 
 was softened. 
 
 " But I do care. That's what I cannot understand." 
 
 That was what none could understand, just yet 
 the mystery of those silent, those insistent, never to be 
 quite stifled promptings from within, to rescue one who 
 had no further claim upon them before the law of men! 
 For it was not mere pity. They pitied many whom
 
 202 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 they felt no charge to keep from sorrow or disaster. 
 Why, indeed, should they care so much? Here was 
 but one more failure in a busy world; and the folly was 
 his own. 
 
 Yet they did care! 
 
 It was as if one likes to think thus of it Some 
 one cared, Who had given His angels charge concerning 
 him : so that the hearts of men were stirred and troubled 
 by presences that were all unseen, and by unheard 
 voices that would not cease, lest, in his helplessness, 
 he dash his foot against a stone! 
 
 One Sunday there came a knock upon his door. 
 Jeremy opened it to find, to his surprise, his friend the 
 Editor. Yet not the Editor. In the kindly but hesi- 
 tating figure that crossed his threshold, and that sat, 
 awkwardly, and rather silently at first, in Barbara's 
 chair, it was hard to realize the monarch of affairs 
 before whom Jeremy had always trembled. Now, 
 indeed, it was the Editor who was ill at ease, and who 
 stammered in his speech. 
 
 "I was passing," he explained, "and just dropped 
 in " which was not quite true. "I thought I'd inquire 
 how you were getting on." 
 
 "Oh," Jeremy made answer, "things look more 
 hopeful now."
 
 ANGELS 203 
 
 "You have found a place?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "You have one in view, perhaps?" 
 
 "No. I meant " 
 
 He brushed an imaginary speck upon his coat, and 
 added slowly, 
 
 "that I had found myself!" 
 
 Both were silent. Then the Editor remarked sug- 
 gestively, 
 
 "You are writing, I see." 
 
 "Yes. . . . Always writing." 
 
 Jeremy smiled, with a furtive glance at the crumpled 
 papers on the table and on the floor. It was a half- 
 embarrassed, half-defiant smile. And there was another 
 pause in which the elder man gazed helplessly at the 
 younger, who looked very white and worn, he thought, 
 like one who had rather lost than found himself. He 
 was not unkempt; he was clean and shaven. But 
 there were deep lines about the mouth and between 
 the faded eyes, which were strained and swollen. 
 
 "I have caught cold," Jeremy explained in answer 
 to the other's inquiry. 
 
 "So I see," the Editor replied, quietly. "Writing 
 is a catarrahal sort of thing, sometimes." 
 
 Jeremy surrendered.
 
 204 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Oh, something will come of it!" he said wearily. 
 "At times one is baffled, of course. That's life, I 
 take it. But there is nothing " 
 
 He looked up smilingly. 
 
 "There is nothing final in defeat. That's what I 
 tell myself, over and over. It is curious, isn't it, 
 that we should always have to keep reminding our- 
 selves of the things that are helpful? It is the 
 hopeless, the disheartening things, that are so easy 
 to recall." 
 
 And he went on talking. It was not so much that 
 the Editor was inclined to silence now, as that Jeremy 
 felt bound, somehow, to speak partly for self- 
 expression, long pent up in lonely labour, and partly 
 doubtless in self-defence; but partly also in instinctive 
 dread of what this other man might say, out of the 
 hard philosophy of success. 
 
 "Life's an adventure," Jeremy soliloquized, with a 
 strange half-light in his eyes and smile. It was 
 prematurely in one so young that twilight which 
 is sometimes to be seen in faces, when invading 
 shadows have conquered life's blaze and heat, but 
 pause, baffled by a remnant glow that will not yield 
 itself, nor die, but that lingers on, illumining the night. 
 It is a kind of starlight.
 
 ANGELS 205 
 
 "I am just beginning," Jeremy confessed, slowly, 
 idling with his pen, "to see the the drama and 
 romance of life: this struggling on, sword in hand, 
 and wounded sometimes, and mighty weak, against 
 . . . Once seeing it, of course once catching it, 
 I mean, the " 
 
 He groped vaguely for the word. ' 
 
 " the nobility," he said at last, "even in the things 
 we call ignoble; in the commonplace and prose of 
 life you know what I mean. Once catching gleams 
 where everything, we thought, was shadow; once 
 seeing life as a splendid and mysterious quest, and 
 man as " 
 
 He paused again, and the glow deepened in his 
 careworn face, so that it lost its homeliness. 
 
 "God's own knight!" he said, breathlessly. "Once 
 seeing that, one knows what one must do! Fight on, 
 and " 
 
 He dropped his eyes. 
 
 " fail, perhaps it is the lot of some. But never 
 yield, never surrender! " 
 
 His pale face flushed a little under the Editor's 
 silent scrutiny. 
 
 "It isn't egotism; it isn't bravado," he declared. 
 " I know that 1 am one of the least knightly of men,
 
 206 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 one of the weakest vessels of so high a chivalry. One 
 that some dragon will be gulping down, perhaps, one 
 of these days flesh and blood but not quite all 
 of me. I'll warrant there'll be something left, to 
 fight on somewhere. But at any rate ibis is the 
 point," he said, looking the other straight and steadily 
 in the eyes, and speaking now in that exalted and 
 unanswerable tone which men never use save in their 
 high decisions, " I have made up my mind. Right or 
 wrong, I have made up my mind about life forever! 
 It's my last dream. And if I'm wrong . . . well, 
 if I'm wrong," he added passionately, "all I can say is, 
 I'd rather be Man, and go down to mockery and defeat 
 in an error so supremely beautiful, than be the God of 
 any scheme of things less kind and fair!" 
 
 "Ladd," said the Editor, for Jeremy was silent now 
 now that he had set up his standard, so to speak, and 
 given warning that he would not compromise with life, 
 whatever it might do with him "Ladd," said the 
 Editor, very gently, like a father speaking to a son 
 whom he at once admonishes and admires, "I think 
 you're right. You've found the epic where you used 
 to find the lyric life. And now the practical question 
 is, What is your sword! Your sword?" 
 
 He hesitated.
 
 ANGELS 207 
 
 "Is it," he asked at last, striving to temper doubt 
 with his compassion speaking with downcast eyes, 
 and in a lowered voice, as if, in this sanctuary of a 
 young man's faith, he was fearful lest a word or a 
 mis-tone might mar some irrevocable loveliness "is 
 it, are you sure, your pen?" 
 
 Jeremy was silent. He rose and walked across 
 the room, standing for a moment, with his back to 
 the questioner. Then he turned and came back 
 slowly to the table littered with his futile toil; and 
 seeing it, he could not trust his voice at first. But 
 presently he said huskily, 
 
 "It's the only sword I know!" 
 
 The Editor was silent. Finally he arose, an3 
 placing his hands on Jerry's shoulders, 
 
 "My boy," he said, "I don't know what to say, or 
 do, for you. You are one of those men that the world 
 never does know what to make of, but is bound, 
 somehow, in spite of everything, to respect and love; 
 and leave, more or less, to the mercy of the angels 
 if there are angels! I'm blest if I know. I've never 
 believed in them, myself. But if there are " 
 
 He smiled, and there was a suspicion of moisture 
 in his eyes as with a kind of rude tenderness he shook 
 Jeremy, in token of affection and farewell.
 
 208 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "Well, if there are, why you are the kind of fellow 
 they'll take care of! I'm sure of that." 
 
 He went away, suddenly, as he had come. After 
 he was gone, Jeremy, turning sadly to his work again, 
 saw among his papers a sum of money! In his amaze- 
 ment, his first thought was to call. . . . But it 
 had not been lost. 
 
 In one sense it was little. But in another, measured 
 by the secret need of that eleventh hour not by its 
 darkness, merely, which had been seen, but by its 
 unguessed hunger of starved flesh and blood it 
 was so much, he wept ! 
 
 Angels indeed ! knocking unasked, unwelcome, 
 from door to door, from heart to heart; and at their 
 opening, and before they can be shut again, flooding 
 them with light of a divine compassion, so that men 
 find themselves, even against will and reason, loving 
 their neighbour as themselves! 
 
 in 
 
 In his own way that timid, childlike, unwordly, 
 unpractical way which is so inexplicable and con- 
 temptible to men who fall upon their feet, who never 
 are at a loss to make themselves useful to their fellows, 
 or their fellows useful to themselves Jeremy was
 
 ANGELS 209 
 
 groping for employment. The truth was, he had no 
 imagination in these material things. His visions 
 were of nothing that is made with hands. Men 
 looked askance at him. Just what was alien in him 
 he could not tell, any more than they; but he noticed 
 that they eyed him curiously, and listened to him 
 silently, as if he were a stranger. He would have been 
 amazed, had he been told that he did not even speak 
 their language! Yet it was true. They would have 
 better understood him, had he come to them in their 
 homes, instead of in their shops and offices; if he 
 could have appealed to them in those quiet places 
 where they kept their secret treasures, which neither 
 moth, nor rust, nor thieves might touch, and where 
 even the sternest of them were sometimes children. 
 There he would have been at home: more at home 
 even than themselves. His genius was for intimacy. 
 His errors were of the market-places, never of the 
 shrines of life. For sanctuaries, seen and unseen, 
 he had the gifts both of speech and silence. 
 
 Perhaps already he was employed. Perhaps he 
 had been employed always, from the first, and would 
 be employed until the end or, at least, so long as 
 he could keep that light of faith which transfigured 
 his futility giving, for that was what he did, what
 
 210 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 other shrewder men contrive to sell. If this was so, 
 he was not aware of it. He was looking still for a 
 kingdom more visible than that. He only knew that, 
 coming each morning into the market-place, at whose 
 more fragrant stalls men buy a little, now and then, 
 of the produce of kings' gardens, though warily and 
 according to the fancy of the hour, he had found no 
 purchasers. Jeremy, no more than the rest of us, in 
 those days took account of what he gave away, freely, 
 in the sheer joy of giving, along the road. Treasures 
 of the spirit, which come from mystery and go in 
 mystery; which come from the illumined silences, and 
 go in the light of them men shed in passing. So it 
 was with him, though he never dreamed of it. What- 
 ever his life had touched, it had illumined, though 
 with unmarketable light. And in this last stand, 
 waiting for his hidden fate, daring he knew not what, 
 in that spirit of divine adventure which some call mad- 
 ness and some call faith, he had found himself again, 
 who never would be aught but what he was and had 
 been always, from the beginning. For always he had 
 met each challenge of vicissitude with some new and 
 chastened, but fragile and, as it always seemed, 
 perishable dream of life a new dream for each new 
 chapter of experience. And always his latest hope
 
 ANGELS an 
 
 and view, when once it had dawned upon his darkness, 
 putting it to flight, was a fairer, more extended pros- 
 pect, than ever he had seen before. 
 
 It was an old, old road that he was journeying the 
 ancient way of the idealist : defying fate, and, though 
 defeated, defeated always on his own high ground; 
 and ever higher, so that each new reverse but marks 
 a progress and ascent to some nobler level of adversity, 
 until the final failure and its Easter song! 
 
 As the Editor had said, Jeremy was one of those men 
 whom the world never does know what to make of. 
 For, not being cast in an heroic mould, there was no 
 melodrama to arouse their latent sympathies, in his 
 silent battlefields, his quiet life, and its veiled adven- 
 tures. Those who were nearest only dimly guessed. 
 And Jeremy himself, in spite of his dawning vision 
 of the divine romance which is in every life, however 
 humble, because his own life was not what he had 
 dreamed it would be, never really dreamed of what it 
 was. All men live stories; some men see them; fewer 
 write them. But for all of these, life is but an hour, 
 vision but a glimpse, and words but echoes of reality. 
 
 The world which lay below his fairer life, like a 
 modern city seen from the terraces of the ancient 
 hills man's world, transient, but to be sternly
 
 212 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 reckoned with until he came into his royal heritage 
 was now as strange and disconcerting as an evil 
 dream. Time had but deepened the sense of his alien 
 presence there; so that, more and more, he had with- 
 drawn into those garden silences that were always 
 home to him. Life had dawned upon him in a reverie; 
 in a reverie it was vanishing. 
 
 "He ought to have been endowed," some one re- 
 marked, sadly. "No poor man can afford to muse. 
 He must be up and doing." 
 
 The hour was late, but Jeremy himself had wakened 
 to this truth. Up and doing were what he wished to 
 be, with all his soul but how? He had tried to do; 
 was striving still in the only way whose mysteries 
 he knew, a little. And all that he accomplished 
 were clearer visions, farther vistas, nobler dreams 
 of a life in which he found no foothold that he could 
 call his own ! 
 
 It was not strange that, in his bewilderment, 
 he turned gratefully to the night, in which man's 
 world was hushed, and all that din of merciless re- 
 minders faded away into a starlit reverie like his 
 own. He longed for it to come, welcomed its refuge 
 of concealing shadows and opiate sleep; and when he 
 woke, turned sadly from the light of another futile
 
 ANGELS 213 
 
 morning, not in indolence but in sheer despair, closing 
 his eyes again, and striving to drift back into that 
 kind oblivion. Forgetfulness man always turns to 
 it when knowledge fails. Since Jeremy could find 
 no answer to the riddle of his inefficiency, only to be 
 deaf to it would be enough! Blind, seemingly, he 
 had always been. Now, also, he was growing dumb. 
 He spoke no more of that final faith of his, which, 
 like all others that he had known, seemed only to 
 have beguiled him deeper still into a folly that ap- 
 peared predestined, it was so inextricably woven into 
 the very fabric of his soul. Always he had failed. 
 In that, at least, his life had been consistent. AH 
 those pretty little coloured lights of youth will o' 
 the wisps of sentiment and yearning; and all these 
 later, nobler stars, that lead the strong unto the 
 heights, had only mired him as if high truth for 
 some might be for others valleys of destruction. 
 
 And there had been no escape. However he had 
 turned, however he had groped always for ascent, 
 step by step, all the long way that he had come, he 
 had descended! For here, upon the brink of unknown 
 depths whose quicksands sank beneath his feet, he 
 saw those solid heights that he had climbed; and lo! 
 they were but pale hill-shadows in fatal waters.
 
 2i 4 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Even when he roused himself, and told himself 
 defiantly that he was wrong; that truth for the strong 
 was truth for the weak as well, and that the psalm 
 was true; that the Shepherd of lost sheep would rescue 
 him at last, all in good time, if he would trust and 
 wait it was as if the voice were not his own. It 
 was so faint and far. Or now, perhaps, he was too 
 tired to listen any longer. 
 
 If he could sleep that would be divine com- 
 passion now. All that he would ask of any shepherd: 
 to be permitted to lie down beside still waters, and 
 never rise, never know again this weary wakefulness. 
 
 But when he did sleep from exhaustion his head 
 nodding as he wrote, until at last it sank down, down, 
 among those white certificates of failure, resting at 
 last upon his folded arms, it was not forgetfulness. 
 Haunted, in anxious dreams, by phantoms of futility 
 preposterous crises of a troubled fancy in which he 
 was forever struggling, but in vain, to break some bond 
 that held him like a vise, while all the world looked on, 
 aloof and smiling, watching curiously to see how it would 
 end, and if his heart would break! he would awake, 
 starting up, trembling and weak with strife, and cold 
 with fear, only to strive and fear again, in this other 
 bondage. Perhaps it, also, was an evil dream!
 
 ANGELS 215 
 
 Sometimes he said the psalm mechanically. Merely 
 to speak faith seemed to revive it, faintly, even in 
 despair. Once, in some sheer reaction of spent nerves, 
 he rose suddenly from his chair, and seizing the half- 
 written sheets before him, tore them into shreds. 
 He was a failure. Well, then, he would be a failure. 
 He would accept his fate, and drink it to the dregs. 
 He would defy not only man, but God himself! He 
 could understand why, in defeat, men turned to 
 wantonness. And if it but hastened an inevitable 
 destruction, was it not better than to die this lingering 
 death? It had, at least, the virtue of activity. Unlike 
 this passive grovelling in the dust, it did not await 
 the end, but went forth to meet it with a certain grace 
 and heroism in its defiance. There was drama in it 
 that men could see, and pity; and romance, which, 
 in good or evil, is only to be found in risk and reck- 
 lessness. 
 
 But even as he thought of this, Jeremy was piecing 
 together the papers in his hand. He knew Some- 
 thing told him that that alternative was not for him. 
 For him, always, courage and gallantry, whether in 
 victory or defeat, would be obscure, hidden from 
 the world in noiseless battlefields like this; challenge 
 and defiance, for good or evil, would be untrumpeted;
 
 216 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 he must rise, or fall, in the patience and the lonely 
 silence of his dreams. 
 
 Truth to tell, Jeremy was already dying to that 
 outer world, in which he always had been a stranger. 
 This numbness in which he sat, dazed and motionless, 
 in his room, vaguely aware of time and place, and 
 mechanically responsive to its few demands, was that 
 same detachment which come to most men in old age. 
 Life seemed to be closing in around him. What little 
 of the world was left was but a darkened garden of 
 dim thoughts, memories mostly, in which he waited 
 for he knew not what it did not matter but it 
 was coming soon. Still he could reason but no 
 longer care. The room, the table, the very chair in 
 which he sat, seemed foolish things. He wondered 
 why they had ever mattered; how, ever, he could 
 have been concerned with them; why he should have 
 noticed even the little flaws and colours in them. He 
 even touched them to be quite sure, and with a mild , 
 a mental and unemotional surprise, that they were 
 there. He wondered what time it was; but that, of 
 all things, was the least. Sleeping or waking, it was 
 all a dream. Days came and went days and days, 
 and days indefinitely. And it seemed so natural to 
 be there, alone. Quite peaceful to be by himself.
 
 ANGELS 217 
 
 It was all so simple not to be striving, or planning, 
 or hoping, any more. 
 
 He had been all wrong. Even the flowers on the 
 wall, that he had thought so ugly, were really lovely 
 when he came to look at them: friendly things, nodding 
 and smiling in the wind, and beautifully reflected 
 in the waters. It came to him that these were those 
 "still waters" that he had heard of, long ago. One 
 could lie down beside them, and be quite content. 
 So perfectly at rest that it was not worth while to go 
 and see if the brickyard was still there, below the 
 bridge. It had been burned anyway. He ought 
 to let them know at the Gazette. Perhaps he would 
 some day. Not now. This was a holiday. All day 
 long, and to-morrow if he liked, forever he had 
 only to lie still and listen to his thoughts, and watch 
 the cloud-drift and the lilies. They were strange 
 lilies lilies, and not-lilies. There were thousands 
 of them thousands; and they grew upon a wall. 
 And in their midst while he was watching them, and 
 wondering suddenly a door opened. 
 
 Through it, with a cry of joy, all that lost world 
 of sense surged in upon him, encircling him with the 
 warm, kind arms of love! . . . 
 
 Barbara had come back from Toodlums.
 
 XI 
 
 WHERE GARDENS MEET 
 
 SHE had come hastily, and alone, because she 
 had been told to come. Something, who or 
 what she could not say, but it was not a 
 person, nor anything that he had written or had failed 
 to write those days and days that he had waited 
 there in silence had been but hours after all Some- 
 thing in her heart, she said, had told her that she 
 must come. And, in one glance, she knew that Some- 
 thing had been divinely kind, divinely merciful. 
 
 It was not a long illness, nor a fatal, nor even an 
 unhappy one. For pain was softened by delirium; 
 and when it vanished, under the ministrations of 
 angelic care, the peace of lying there so still and cool 
 after the fire of conflict, and so free that heavy 
 hand lifted from his life at last, so that he could breathe 
 again was like nothing that he had known since 
 childhood. It was as if childhood had come back to 
 visit him. Once more he could dream again, blameless; 
 ai8'
 
 WHERE GARDENS MEET 219 
 
 unmenaced from without, and from within all un- 
 reproached by that ceaseless warning to be up and 
 doing. Within, silence the silence of that hidden 
 garden with its fountain of eternal hope, and its long, 
 long tender vistas, from which the mist had cleared. 
 Without that silence of a woman's love. 
 
 Now too he tasted those sweets of pity hitherto 
 denied. Friends he had never dreamed there were 
 so many left fruit and books, flowers to adorn his 
 room, and, better still, words that were like frankin- 
 cense and myrrh to him, and some like gold that he 
 would always treasure. He caught strange glimpses 
 into walled gardens that he had never guessed. Men 
 whom he had thought he knew, who had been impatient 
 or derisive of his claims upon them, and who had 
 laughed to scorn all secret beauty and outward tender- 
 ness of life, held doors ajar awkwardly, it is true, but 
 with pathetic kindness; doors that, creaking on their 
 rusty hinges, disclosed to him paths and arbours, 
 neglected and falling to decay, but still abloom with 
 those hopes and faiths that are perennial; that will 
 not die, but struggle on, even in desertion and forget- 
 fulness, striving with little humble flowers to keep a 
 refuge for man's sure return, in hours of his need. 
 
 Stranger still to Barbara a tender mystery
 
 220 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 was the kindness of that one across the hall! She 
 had been amazed and touched shamed, she con- 
 fessed, humbled to her very knees, that a stranger 
 of whom her thoughts had been so pitiless, and from 
 whose merest touch or glance she had held herself 
 aloof, could, when her hour came, of need and loneli- 
 ness, be so forgiving and so merciful. It was this 
 girl of whom Jeremy had been vaguely conscious as a 
 ministering angel, with Barbara; who, at the first, 
 until he wakened to himself again when she with- 
 drew, and never afterward would venture nearer 
 than the door had shared with Barbara the long 
 night-watches, and softened with a mysterious sym- 
 pathy the pain of waiting and suspense. They had 
 mingled their very tears. 
 
 "It was when I asked her why," Barbara related. 
 "Why she should care so much. She shook her head; 
 and, all at once, she burst out crying. She did care," 
 Barbara added, thoughtfully. "All I know is, that 
 some one, once, had been very kind to her. Some 
 man, it was. He was not a lover. He was just a 
 just a passerby, she said. But, since then, life had 
 been very different. Somehow she didn't say." 
 
 There were other mysteries. Just what it was that 
 people owed to Jeremy, none of them could tell. It
 
 WHERE GARDENS MEET 221 
 
 was not money. It was not counsel. Yet it was a 
 debt. And they spoke of it to Barbara as one that 
 they could not repay yet did repay, in a currency 
 of light, which they did not seem at all aware of, but 
 which brightened up his room for him, and warmed 
 his heart to a consciousness of priceless riches, while 
 it touched Barbara to happy tears. It illumined even 
 that future of which they did not speak, but only 
 waited for, in thankfulness that it was to be at 
 all. There were premonitions in the air; in the lull 
 and silence, a sweet expectancy: the thrill of some 
 impending change. As if that kindness which had 
 stolen in upon their life under the cover of bleak, 
 wintry days, were some new springtime, in which the 
 past, sorrows and joys alike, would soon be bursting 
 into flower, against the fruitage of their dreams. In 
 its promise, nothing that was beautiful, nothing that 
 was kind, seemed strange. It seemed but natural 
 that the Editor, coming himself in haste when the 
 news reached him, should promise Barbara that 
 Jerry should have work again. And, there in the 
 shadows of the hall where he breathlessly delivered 
 his eager message, and in that dim confusion of Bar- 
 bara's relief and joy, it seemed but natural that he 
 should press her hands in his, in token of good cheer.
 
 222 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 And that, in token of that nameless bond between 
 them, ere he hurried back into the heartless world 
 again, both standing speechless, he should touch her 
 forehead with his lips. 
 
 Ah, yes! It was too early yet to talk of failure! 
 Jeremy himself could see it now now that Love had, 
 lighted up his life again. 
 
 "You forgot us!" she said reproachfully. "Or, 
 rather, you reckoned us me and the other Jeremy 
 not as assets at all; but only as liabilities!" 
 
 It was quite true. 
 
 "But you wouldn't have done so," she conceded, 
 "if you only could have seen him!" 
 
 That also was quite true. Barbara's eyes convinced 
 him of that; for they were always seeing "him," 
 always shining at something in the air that to Jeremy, 
 as yet, was little more than a cherub's head with 
 wings, hovering above Barbara's transfiguration. 
 
 "You ought to see his eyes!" 
 
 "You ought to see your own!" he answered. He 
 began to understand somewhat those ancient pictures 
 of the Madonna and her Child. Never again would 
 they seem so strange, or antiquated.
 
 223 
 
 "And, after all," Barbara reminded him, "bad as 
 it is to lose one's foothold, dear, couldn't you imagine 
 something worse?" 
 
 It was not so difficult. On the contrary it was 
 very easy to imagine something worse just then, 
 with that fond new sense of her illumined presence. 
 What it had meant to him, what he had missed in 
 its absence, what it had restored to life in its return 
 all that, and the knowledge that such things vanish 
 sometimes like a dream, and become as those other 
 angels that he could only trust, but never see, or hear, 
 or hold thus humbly in his arms moved him to a 
 sense of shame and wonder, at his forgetfulness. 
 
 "Why, suppose," she told him, "that that one 
 little story should be the only one; you would still 
 be You!" 
 
 Love's old sweet argument. 
 
 "And you would still have Us!" 
 
 Love's old appeal; but twice as brave, twice as sure, 
 as it had used to be! 
 
 "You would still have things that to other men 
 are only rainbows!" 
 
 It was all unanswerable. But, for all her cheer, 
 the old wistfulness would come back into his face. 
 
 " But / see rainbows."
 
 224 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 "And I!" she answered. "But the place we see 
 them from, you and I, is so lovely in itself!" 
 
 This was the truth that she was always telling him. 
 
 "I never think of it as just this room under the 
 eaves. We are here, yes but we are not here. It is 
 so much larger, so much more peaceful and beautiful, 
 where we really are! Where we are not mere folks, 
 struggling " 
 
 She smiled whimsically. 
 
 " struggling with the financials and the physicals ! " 
 
 She pressed his hand. 
 
 "You know what I mean. I mean where we are 
 not mere skimpy, little, achey, worried people, skurry- 
 ing about in faded clothes, and trying to hide behind 
 our smiles but something better, something nobler 
 than all that! That is one side the shabby side 
 of us. And it's the one that other people make the 
 most of unless they love us. And it is funny some- 
 times; but mostly sad. It isn't even half the story 
 is it?" 
 
 She leaned her head against his own. 
 
 "They don't know where we live, dear, do they? 
 . . . Nor what we see! . . . Nor even what we are!" 
 
 In the silence, which he would not break it was 
 so much more true than any words that he could find
 
 WHERE GARDENS MEET 225 
 
 to utter the encircling sense of that fair, inviolate 
 seclusion which they had come to share, and knew 
 they shared; its shadowy mysteries, of peace in the 
 very midst of strife, of light in darkness, of forms and 
 fragrances that would never fade, save in some passing 
 blindness, and of melodies that would never cease, 
 though drowned sometimes in that outer din; and far 
 beyond, into the unknown future, those long per- 
 spectives that did not end with death all these were 
 speech to them. Nor is life ever half so eloquent, 
 half so sacred, as it is in these illumined silences. 
 
 in 
 
 Little by little, thus, they had come to know each 
 other. Word by word, glance by glance, mood by 
 mood, silence by silence, they had discovered those 
 secrets of each other's spiritual history and romance, 
 in the light of which they saw each other now as 
 beings not merely to be cherished, but to be far more 
 deeply reverenced and pitied than they had dreamed. 
 It was a solemn thought to her, that she alone knew 
 him for what he was. That, whatever he might seem 
 to others upon that plane of life where he would 
 always be a stranger, it was given to her alone to 
 see him in this nobler realm of the divine romance:
 
 226 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 here among his memories and his aspirations, his 
 strivings and defeats and victories all those daily 
 tragedies and heroisms, whose scene and setting are a 
 garden hidden from the world. Here he was a figure 
 whose chivalry, seemingly so futile, and so obscure, 
 touched her to tears. His very loneliness was enough 
 for that. And the unblemished honour of which 
 sometimes it was so hard for him to keep the letter, 
 in the makeshifts of a losing battle with that other 
 world; and the patient courage, which had fainted in 
 the stifling atmosphere of hopes deferred love must 
 save them! It must drive back those gathering 
 shadows in his eyes, which told her where doubt and 
 fear had begun already to shroud the light of his 
 idealism. Love must do this. For only love has 
 eyes to see, or heart to pity and adore, or hands to 
 save. It is the work of women and of angels. 
 
 "It isn't poverty, or obscurity, that I fear," she 
 told him. 
 
 "What is it that you fear?" 
 
 " Ever to see you change to see your face harden, 
 and its light go out. I could bear anything but 
 that." 
 
 There was no answer but the sudden pressure of his 
 hand.
 
 WHERE GARDENS MEET 227 
 
 "And it isn't only of ourselves that I am thinking," 
 she reminded him. 
 
 No need to tell him that! There, always now, 
 was that other Jeremy hovering above their tenderest 
 confidences. He was always relevant; and from one 
 to another of the three of them, their thoughts slipped 
 easily, swiftly, without a break to and fro, like 
 coloured threads in a design. Love was weaver. 
 
 And it was strange, but at the mere remembrance 
 of that little Helplessness, Jeremy was strong again 
 all his old courage surging back into his stricken life. 
 Or, rather, it was a new courage that he had never 
 known before. A courage that had nothing to do with 
 dreams, their failure or their fulfillment. Or, rather, 
 he was thinking now, not of his own dreams any 
 longer, but of another's that were yet to be; and that 
 would be dimmed or brightened, according as he lost, 
 or kept, the light youth borrows from a father's eyes. 
 
 Courage for another's sake: it was something very 
 different from courage for one's self! It put new 
 ground under his feet. And when he turned and 
 looked behold ! he stood above where he had been 
 before! Higher, safer, freer out of reach of hands 
 that before had dragged him down: the clutch of those 
 deadly fears that vanish in unselfishness!
 
 228 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 Here was a higher air in which he breathed again, 
 and far more deeply, far more calmly, than he had 
 ever breathed before. In which he saw the littleness 
 of things that had been big to him and the ghostli- 
 ness of things that had been solid and impenetrable 
 barriers. This, it came to him, was that "service 
 which is perfect freedom." Love Love was the 
 secret. Love first; then, lo! Hope and Faith were 
 by his side. 
 
 He said nothing, but the vision was in the kindling 
 of his face, and in that pressure of his hand. 
 
 And Barbara knew. For her also Love was the 
 secret. It was the secret of her tender insight, and its 
 discovery of those fair ideals that he had pondered 
 in his heart, that he had kept before him even in the 
 dark that she had seen even through the veil of 
 his poor accomplishment. 
 
 "They don't know where we live! Nor what we 
 see! Nor even what we are!" 
 
 It was thus that she had spoken. And it was true. 
 For there where gardens meet, so openly that they 
 seem to mingle, where intervening barriers have been 
 obliterated by Love's concessional or overgrown by 
 its concealing grace, so that they who dwell in kindred 
 and adjoining mysteries may walk together the same
 
 WHERE GARDENS MEET 229 
 
 embowered paths, gazing upon the self-same vistas, 
 listening to the same far melodies, breathing the same 
 sweet freedom of an eternal air they, they only, 
 know what Love may be, even upon earth. It is the 
 love to which the angels minister that higher joy 
 which man seeks in vain upon the lower levels of the 
 sense, however passing sweet. And those who know 
 it need not mind how small Space is for them: they 
 know no bounds. Nor how Time flees: for there its 
 touch has lost all power to destroy. The terrible 
 phantom with the glass and scythe is seen to be noth- 
 ing but a mild old under-gardener of immortal 
 loveliness.
 
 XII 
 THE VALE OF SILENCE 
 
 IT WAS thus that Jeremy found himself, one day, 
 an Assistant Real-estate Editor he to whom 
 the solid earth was so unsubstantial, and whose 
 pen, tracing henceforth the record of Sites and Sales, 
 Values and Permits and Sub-divisions, moved vaguely 
 in a trance, writing in a foreign language of things 
 that were not in the beginning, were not now, nor 
 ever would be, real to him. 
 
 Whose dream it was that was being realized, he 
 never could make out. Doubtless there were men 
 who had seen such visions; doubtless, they, too, were 
 realizing unrealities. It was a strange sensation to 
 know that he was sitting at another man's desk; and 
 that, somewhere, some one else was sitting at his own! 
 by right of dreams. For here, beyond a doubt, 
 he was or seemed to be: he sometimes questioned 
 it at first in a new corner of the old office where he 
 had failed so miserably as himself, succeeding as 
 230
 
 THE VALE OF SILENCE 231 
 
 another! At least not failing any more how, or 
 why, he could not say. For all day long he wrote the 
 merest fairy tales! Or moved, spellbound, in unheard- 
 of places, asking strange, idle questions, and listening 
 to answers that did not matter jotting them down 
 upon innocent white sheets of paper that were not 
 more helpless than himself! 
 
 That day when he brought the news home to Bar- 
 bara, they sat and gazed at each other, until her mind 
 could be born anew. 
 
 "A Real-estate Editor!" 
 
 Echo: "Real-estate Editor!" 
 
 "A Real " 
 
 She burst out laughing. 
 
 "But . . . but why?" 
 
 Echo: "Why?" 
 
 Why, indeed? All he could tell was, that he had 
 been ill in the very nick of time to get well again in 
 the one week, of all the weeks in history, when another 
 young man rose from his desk in wrath and renounced 
 Real Estate forever. And Jeremy, it seems, arriving 
 at the office of his friend the editor half an hour late, 
 by reason of a broken shoestring 
 
 That was why. 
 
 It was the shoestring. Barbara always declared
 
 232 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 it was the shoestring. For Jeremy, entering when he 
 did, in the very midst of the dilemma, found himself 
 acclaimed, and was consecrated on the spot, the Very 
 Man! the one young, promising, assistant-looking 
 person available in all the universe that hour, to step 
 into the breach. 
 
 " But you don't know anything about Real Estate," 
 Barbara reminded him. 
 
 "That's what I told them. They said it didn't 
 matter. What they needed was a man." 
 
 "But, Jerry dear . . . well, after all, we 
 should be thankful." 
 
 Jeremy sighed. 
 
 "Oh, doubtless I shall make a hit," he mused. 
 
 "Why?" she asked. It was not Jeremy who had 
 spoken so. It was the Assistant Real-estate Editor. 
 "Why," she insisted, "do you say that?" 
 
 "Because," he answered, "I never dreamed of it. 
 And will never " 
 
 He gazed thoughtfully out of the window. 
 
 " never care!" 
 
 ii 
 
 It was something to be thankful for, indeed 
 every Saturday, just at noon, when, in a brown paper
 
 THE VALE OF SILENCE 233 
 
 envelope thrust out at him through a grated window, 
 he drew the wages of amazement. 
 
 For Jeremy it was the beginning of that vale of 
 silence in which men gaze at one another, pondering 
 in their hearts whither they are going in such strange 
 fashion of a dream ; whether it be chance, or providence, 
 that has brought them where they find themselves, 
 in unsought ways; or some missing of the road, per- 
 haps, for which they are themselves to blame. Jeremy 
 Ladd and J . Lad, the Assistant Real-estate Editor 
 it was J. Lad on the brown paper envelopes argued 
 between themselves what the philosophy of round 
 pegs in square holes might be, and the inscrutable 
 purpose of discrepancies. To be paid by that cunning 
 old Shylock of a world for the little that one knew, 
 while the much was so utterly unmarketable " I 
 don't see why!" as Barbara used to say. Neither did 
 Jeremy. But doubtless they would see, some day. 
 And meanwhile 
 
 Always meanwhile! Life's password! Life itself 
 had whispered it to them at last. The open sesame 
 to all those joys and wonders that are not a dream, to 
 be missed, or waited for; or, if a dream, one that is so 
 safe, and sure. He had but to look at Barbara and 
 the Other Jeremy, or even but to think of them, to
 
 234 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 know that they were far more relevant than any of 
 those riddles with which men scatter the few wits 
 they have. And it was strange, but the sweetness of 
 life lay largely in those kindly ironies by which its 
 burdens and rebuffs turned out to be its blessings and 
 caresses. Love, always, was the transforming magic. 
 He had noticed that. Love, doubtless somehow 
 was behind it all. 
 
 Even now, behind that grim, sardonic mask of fate, 
 it might be smiling at him! 
 
 So he smiled back. 
 
 And, instantly, the air cleared! 
 
 The mask vanished! 
 
 In the twinkling of an eye, in faith again always 
 in faith, but now not merely in its high-strung gallantry, 
 but as well in that divine good humour which is 
 reckoned commonly a mere human thing the old, 
 old spirit of romance came back into his heart 
 singing! 
 
 in 
 
 He did, I believe, some very pretty writing now. 
 It may be doubted if Real Estate ever had its due 
 before, in the columns of the daily press. For the 
 more he looked at it, the more he discovered that 
 behind it all always behind it all, in this illusive
 
 THE VALE OF SILENCE 235 
 
 life of ours behind the Facts, there was now and 
 then a beautiful Idea discernible. At the very least, 
 a background that lent itself to something that was 
 almost poetry: of phrase, or chronicle. Mists of fog 
 er smoke softened the outlines of the newest buildings 
 as they rose like towers of Babel into the upper air. 
 So also there was the eternal glamour of adventure in 
 their enterprise. And sometimes antique memories 
 among their modern hopes. Many a loving moment 
 Jeremy spent over the precious record of a mullioned 
 window, or a cloistered passageway. It was the old 
 brickyard life all over again! That old, old making- 
 the-most of meagreness the frugal treasuring of the 
 occasional, of fleeting echo and transient gleam; with 
 now and then a wistful glance, over the weigh-bills and 
 across those waters of separation, into a magic and il- 
 limitable distance of the withheld and the unattained. 
 
 They were happy days. For in this quiet smiling 
 in life's face, the spirits of evil that are abroad no less 
 than angels seeing him so sweetly-humoured, I 
 suppose, so reasonable withal, their best-aimed arrows 
 glancing from that magic shield of faith left him to 
 his humble peace. 
 
 And who could say it was still so early, fortune 
 so mysterious, realizations sometimes so hard to
 
 236 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 recognize at first what might not yet come true, 
 even of those baffled dreams? Not that it mattered 
 now, so much; but there were shoestrings yet that 
 might be broken in the nick of time! Life stretched 
 away, years and years. Later, sometime, when it was 
 a little less insistent, they would go out into the 
 country Toodlumshire, perhaps and settle down 
 with a garden and a flock of chickens; and in the peace 
 of all those quiet vistas that come to man by old red- 
 apple trees and cottage fires, he would write. . . . 
 Not what he must write, then. Only what he would! 
 
 Surely, in years and years, one might realize a dream 
 like that. 
 
 So small a dream the merest remnant. A last 
 fond cottage, as it were, in Spain, with this ancient 
 motto above its hearth: 
 
 While I was musing, the fire burned 
 
 He had chosen it himself. It seemed to him so 
 much like Life, he said. To the rest of us, it seemed 
 so much so very much ! like Jeremy. 
 
 IV 
 
 It was the very littleness of the asking that made 
 it so hard for him to understand. To be denied so
 
 THE VALE OF SILENCE 237 
 
 slight a boon! To find it twilight ere the day, seem- 
 ingly, had but well begun! Shadow by shadow, year 
 by year, in the appointed fashion of man's lot, he 
 would have grown accustomed to the darkness; even 
 have welcomed it, as time for sleep. 
 
 But to have it descend so swiftly, out of the noon- 
 day sky! And with that old, old foolishness of life 
 
 that old confusion and bewilderment. Nothing 
 where one looked for it, nothing when one wished for it, 
 nothing when one needed it not even time, when 
 one had learned to wait ! No unity, no plot, no rhyme, 
 nor reason, nor even decency and order. Ebb and 
 flow without a calendar. Entrance and exit without 
 a cue. And now, in the very midst of folly, a crisis so 
 preposterous! A summons from the King Himself 
 
 all unannounced by any herald voice or trumpeting, 
 all unattended by any fitting pomp or pageantry! 
 And ibis this breaking of some merest shoestring 
 
 was the end of knighthood and the divine romance! 
 Jeremy said nothing, but his smile vanished and 
 
 his face blanched. 
 
 And nothing mattered any more. 
 
 To those who saw him it was plain that the end 
 had come indeed. The last chapter of a strange
 
 238 THE LEGEND OF JERRY LADD 
 
 story and no one could say just what he thought of 
 it, nor whether it had been worth the reading, nor 
 even what it meant. Only that it was true, and 
 left one dumb and wondering, like one's own strange 
 story. 
 
 Barbara herself was silent now. To her alone he 
 ever spoke again, turning his head one day, a little, to 
 say faintly: 
 
 "I was just . . . beginning ... to learn 
 how to live." 
 
 And even Love could find no answer but its tears to 
 that. 
 
 But just at the last, while she was watching 
 suddenly, in the flash of an instant, his pale face 
 shone again, and all his visions came back into his 
 wondering eyes! 
 
 THE END
 
 THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS 
 GAXDEN CITY, N. Y.
 
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