GALAHAD

 

I

IT HAD JUST BEEN BROUGHT HOME to Hart Foster that he was probably certain of being elected to next year’s presidency of the Y.M.C.A. of St. Matthew’s School. The officers were always members of the Sixth Form, but when the Sixth Form secretary had been obliged to leave school, as the result of a mysterious nervous breakdown, Hart, who was still only a Fifth Former, had been asked to take his place. Tonight, before dinner, when he had mentioned to his room-mate that Boards Borden, the Sixth Form President, had invited him to visit him during the holidays, Eddie O’Brien had observed, as if with a chill of alienation: “Well, we’ll all have to reform next year when you’re President of the Y!” Hart had noted the change of tone, which already implied both the gulf between the layman and the consecrated priest and the inequality between the commoner and the heir to some position of prestige, and it had somewhat worried and distressed him. As he had dressed for the evening meeting, plastering his hair down glossily on each side, stretching his watch-chain with Y.M.C.A. tautness between the two lower pockets of the vest of his immaculate blue suit, he confronted the situation for the first time. The Fifth Form was notoriously below standard in moral character: three Fifth Formers had recently been suspended for a nocturnal escapade to Boston, and almost a whole floor of the Fifth Form Flat had been deprived of their privileges—from going into town on Saturday to visiting after evening study hour—for having been caught smoking in their rooms. The only other member of the Fifth Form who had been as active in the Y as Hart had a stutter which would make it impossible for him to preside at the weekly meetings. But Hart wondered now whether he were really prepared to assume the responsibility of of the Y. He would enjoy this position of importance, but he doubted whether he possessed the qualifications for it. He would, he felt, make a good executive; and, from some points of view, a good speaker. But he was far better as a debater than as an inspirational orator: he felt more confident of his ability to achieve distinction in the big inter-school debate. When his room-mate had spoken with that edge of grimness, Hart had felt a little like a hypocrite. Did being President of the Y.M.C.A. mean denying the jovial roughhouse, the nonsense and bawdy jokes, of the Fifth Form Flat? Did it mean becoming like Boards Borden? His own temperament was severer and more restrained than that of most of his companions, but he thoroughly enjoyed their society and shrank from the prospect of being isolated from them. One of the great sports of the hour before lights-out when life so rapidly became heightened and riotous—as soldiers soon to return to the front make the most of their last hours of leave—was putting people under the bed. Could he continue to participate in such diversions if he were President of the Y.M.C.A.? Yes, he told himself, he certainly should: he would show them that he was still a good fellow. But would his presence discourage their fun? Would his former companions feel at liberty to put him under the bed? And would it be right for them to do so? Yet, without equality of privilege, the roughhouse game would be spoiled; the situation would become impossible. Hart wondered whether he really lacked faith: he knew himself to be capable of an earnest kind of moral enthusiasm, but he had noticed that, though he had prayed with the best masters, he had never seemed to catch their exaltation, and that Holman Hunt’s Light of the World, which was hung behind the platform in the Study Hall, had obstinately remained for him a beaconless symbol which never flashed its revelation.

Tonight, therefore, at this most important of all Y.M.C.A. meetings, the last before the Christmas holidays, as he sat behind his desk on the platform, watching the room gradually filling and making accurate businesslike gestures in connection with the minute-book before him—his glowing cleanness, but lately issued from the shower, gilded richer by the powerful droplight which illuminated his desk—he felt an unaccustomed self-consciousness and, as it were, an imperfect harmony with the ritual at which he was officiating, such as, before his final realization that the mark of his call was upon him, had rarely caused him embarrassment. Where he had hitherto been able to enjoy the sensations that were the accompaniment of presiding at a Y meeting, the deeply gratifying sensations of a pure and well-washed consecration, of a competent noble maturity, which, though still on terms of admirable good-fellowship with the juvenile student body, bears the seal of having passed from among them to receive the Tables from Sinai, and smiles down upon them now for the moment with the cordiality, a little too ready, of the heroic Christian leader who is but the servant of all—though he had hitherto enjoyed these sensations, he seemed this evening to have partially lost contact with them. He tended to scrutinize and reflect on himself—even, before his own conscience, to judge.

The meeting had been well advertized and the attendance was particularly good. In his belief that the Christmas holidays were a period of peculiar temptations, Mr. Hotchkiss, the patron saint of school and college Y.M.C.A.’s, who kept them all under supervision and was usually present on occasions of importance, had especially provided, to warn them against Vice, a professional reformed debauchee; and perhaps a third of the school had turned out in the eager, if apprehensive, hope of being treated to gamy details of this sinner’s abominable life. They swarmed along the rows of seats, with flurries of restrained rioting, in the hard electric light and the plain woodwork setting of the Study Hall; and, above them, in a plaster garland, were ranged the busts of the great men of antiquity—of Homer and Socrates and Plato, of Thucydides and Euripides, of Seneca and Virgil and Augustus.

Boards Borden at last rang the bell and called the meeting to order.

He was a tall square-shouldered youth, blond, handsome and without distinction, whose white collar stood so high that his neck seemed encased in a pipe and whose watch-chain and plastered hair followed the same convention as those of Hart. When he stood up to open the meeting, a vast solemnity paralyzed the audience—as if the barren robustness of his spirit had had the effect of making even emptier that great bare box of a room, as if the crude steady light of his zeal had been able to render even harsher that unshaded electric glare. It was apparently not merely his family name, but something in his appearance and character, which had earned him the nickname of Boards.

First, Onward Christian Soldiers was sung with a certain amount of gusto, and then the President offered up a short prayer requesting divine support during the holidays. Then Hart read the minutes of the last meeting with creditable distinctness and gravity.

Now Boards Borden stood up again and haltingly addressed the assembly. Hart reflected that, though he himself might perhaps somewhat lack inspiration, he would at least be able to speak more coherently.

“Fellows, we have to talk to us tonight both Mr. Hotchkiss and Mr. Bergen. Mr. Hotchkiss hardly needs an introduction among St. Matthew’s fellows. His work among the schools and colleges is—well known throughout the country—and especially at St. Matthew’s—as is also his work in connection with China—with the missionary work in China. —And I want to say, by the way, in regard to this work, that the response we’ve been getting has been pretty disappointing. Now, fellows, we’re pretty lucky! We have about everything we want. And it seems to me that we ought to be able to spare a little more to help this work along. It seems to me that each of us ought to be able to spare something—for this work in China. The first meeting after the holidays is going to be especially devoted to the work in China, and I hope that we’ll make a better showing then than we have so far.—Mr. Hotchkiss will now speak to us, fellows.”

Mr. Hotchkiss arose and came behind the lectern. He was a big broad-shouldered man with a florid solemn face and the sonorous fluent voice of a natural orator.

“Fellows,” began Mr. Hotchkiss, “there are certain things that I want especially to speak to you about tonight. Next week, you will all be going home for your Christmas holidays. You are all very eager to get away from the restraints of school and to see your dear ones at home and to have a chance to play. Now that instinct to get away and play is a perfectly healthy and normal one. You have all heard the old saying: ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ Well, that is perfectly true. Without the right amount of play—and the right sort of play—we should not be able to do our work or to be of service to God. Play then, for all you are worth! Play to your heart’s content. Go to the theater; go to dances; go sleigh-riding; go skating. Enjoy yourselves in every clean manly sport that the town or the country provides. But be sure that the amusements which you choose are clean and manly and wholesome. There will be other kinds of amusements that will not be so clean and not be so wholesome; and you will perhaps be tempted to indulge in them because you are no longer at school and because there is no one there to watch over you. In the carelessness and gaiety of the holidays, you will perhaps be tempted to forget yourselves; you will be tempted to drink a cocktail or to go with a loose woman; you will be tempted to abuse your body and your soul—perhaps to ruin them for ever—all for a moment of so-called pleasure. I believe that the Christmas vacation—which will begin for you next Wednesday—is the most dangerous period of the whole year!”

The boys, who, for the most part, had found their vacation a harmless, though agreeable, experience, asked themselves how they had ever overlooked the peculiar snares with which it appeared to abound. It was no doubt by reason of their youth that they had so far managed to escape them; but they told themselves now that in the future they would be on the look-out for them. The younger and more timid boys were a little frightened by the news; it seemed to put such an ugly mask on the dear and looked-forward-to holidays, which had hitherto smiled from afar to them, with the joyousness of freedom and the kindness of their homes.

“Now,” continued Mr. Hotchkiss, “I want to take these temptations up one by one. I want to show you that, far from bringing happiness, they can also bring degradation. First, let me say a word about gambling. Now, gambling has always seemed to me the most foolish of all the vices: if you win the other man’s money, you are taking money that doesn’t belong to you, that you have no right to keep; if you lose, why then you lose, and you’re poorer than you were before.” (The audience, enslaved by his spell, were heard to give an abject giggle.) “I cannot conceive how a rational man can be willing to waste his time and his money in gambling!”

He proceeded to the other vices—smoking, drinking and swearing were all discredited—and at last he arrived at the culminating vice of which they had all been waiting to hear.

“And finally,” he began, “there is the most dangerous of all temptations—the temptation from which perhaps none of us is free. I mean the temptation which has its basis in the sexual instinct.”

At these words, the whole room became perfectly still: not a coat sleeve was heard to rustle; scarcely even a breath was drawn.

“Fellows,” proceeded Mr. Hotchkiss in his ponderous droning voice, like some flat and monotonous organ that swelled now to a fuller strain with the speaker’s mounting emotion, “I’m not going to handle this subject with gloves on! I’m not going to handle this subject evasively! I believe in calling things by their right names; and I believe in telling the facts! But before I do anything else, I’m going to show you two photographs.” He came to the front of the rostrum and handed them down to the audience. “They are two pictures of the same girl—the first one taken when she was living decently, earning an honest living in a soap factory, and the other after she had fallen and had been practising for a number of years the trade of a woman of the streets. You wouldn’t know it was the same person, would you? Slovenly, debased, diseased!

“Fellows! Suppose someone came to you and said: ‘It was you who did this thing! It was you who changed this decent and happy girl, with the whole of life before her, with the hope of a respectable marriage and the sacred joys of motherhood—it was you who changed this decent girl into this miserable degraded creature dying of poverty and filthy disease!’ You might laugh at the person who told you this. You might think it was impossible. You might think it was impossible for you, for you a St. Matthew’s fellow, to have had anything whatever to do with such a hideous tragedy. But somewhere, fellows, somewhere that girl took the first false step.” (Here his voice began to grow lachrymose, as it always did at the climax of his sermons: he had acquired, among the irreverent, the nickname of Weeping Fred.) “Perhaps some evil-minded fellow—or perhaps only some careless fellow—because carelessness is the cause of almost as much evil in the world as wickedness—perhaps some careless young man offered her marriage and then took advantage of her trust in him; or she may have been tempted into drinking too much and may have made her first fatal error when she didn’t know what she was doing; or she may have craved luxury and fine clothes and become the mistress of some wealthy man, who cast her aside as soon as he was tired of her. But it wasn’t you, you say. How do you know it wasn’t you? You go into a bar or café, let us say, where there is a young girl serving drinks. She allows the men to talk with her familiarly as she waits upon them. All day she is obliged to listen to the profanity and the filthy talk of the men in the bar or the café. One day some drunken fool puts his arm around her waist—perhaps he tries to kiss her. It may even be you who do this; you may forget that she is a woman; you may forget St. Matthew’s School and all that it has meant when you were here; you may think that because she talks slangily, because she has never been educated like you, that she is any the less worthy of respect than your own sister or your own mother. She smiles at you when you joke with her. You may ask her to go out with you, to go to the movies. For a girl in her position, that will be a temptation hard to resist. She may allow you to flirt with her and you may take advantage of her folly. Now think, fellows!—think a moment!—what you could do to that girl!”

His appeal thundered out over the room with lugubrious vibrations and the audience sat stunned and gaping, petrified before the abyss. It had never before occurred to most of them to think what they could do to that girl. Even Hart, who, in his present mood, had tended at first to sit through this classical set-piece with the composure of a conjuror’s assistant looking on at a levitation act, found himself both stimulated and scared by the vision of this imaginary seduction. He feared that he might be capable of taking advantage of this girl—after somebody else had seduced her and made her more easily accessible. But the description of venereal disease which followed disinfected his erotic imaginings.

When Mr. Hotchkiss finally sat down, with a tear in either tragic eye, and Boards Borden stood up again to announce Mr. Bergen as the next speaker, there was a shuffling of frozen feet and a clearing of phlegmy throats, a rustle of moistened lips and relieved respiration. They looked up at the figure before them with expectation and awe.

He was a bloated red-faced man with a wild alcoholic eye, who had assumed the youthful blue suit and the white zinc-cylinder collar appropriate to the Y.M.C.A. But not even that rigid uniform, nor the gold chain across his bulging paunch, not even his fierce glaring dignity could impart integrity to that countenance, which had spoiled like an old pumpkin-lantern that a child has left to rot. He carried with him a pile of papers.

“Before I start to talk,” he began, in a loud raucous voice, “I just want to show you boys a few pictures and tell you a few facts. You can draw your own conclusions from them! —Now here’s a picture of a man that you’ve all heard about!” He held up a photograph which nobody could see. “Quarter-back on the Yale eleven! The best all-around athlete of his time! As fine a fellow as you could wish to see! And where is he now? Where is that fine young fellow now? Boys, that young fellow is in jail!—in jail for forging his father’s name to a check for five thousand dollars! —Here’s Jack Sheldon—I don’t want to tell you their real names—here’s Jack Sheldon—the most brilliant man at Harvard—Captain of the Debating Team and President of the Dickie. —Duh yuh know where he is now? Duh yuh know where Jack Sheldon is now? Jack Sheldon is in the insane asylum with a loathsome social disease! —Here’s Bill Davis, the half-mile runner! You’ve all heard of Bill Davis—a man who was famous for years in intercollegiate sports—voted the most popular man in his class! Boys, here’s a telegram I received from Bill Davis’s father, begging me to come quick, for God’s sake, because Bill is in Roosevelt Hospital with a fractured skull where he was hit on the head in a drunken brawl and found unconscious in the street.

“Now that’s just to show you what vice can do to a man, when he hasn’t got Christ in his heart! A man may be the greatest athlete in the world or the brainiest student in the world, but if he hasn’t got faith in Christ, temptation will drag-um in the mire. —I see them all at Fantoni’s and Charlie’s! I know which of yuh go there! —And duh yuh know where I was once? Duh yuh know where Bergen was once? Boys: Bergen was down! Bergen was down in the depths! You could see him coming out of a low saloon over on 4th Avenue, with a hiccough on his lips, with bleary eyes and a sodden face, begging the passers-by for a nickel to buy him another drink! Boys: Is Salvation real? —When my father heard the life I was living, it almost broke his heart. He sat down in his office one day—the fine old Southern gentleman!—and he took out his will from his desk and he crossed out his son’s name from it and he broke down and wept because Bergen was a prodigal and a bum! I’d wasted my father’s money in the saloons and the low dives of New York. Some nights I hardly knew my own name! You couldna told me from the tramps and the bums that you see laying around in the street. Oh, Bergen’s been in the depths, boys! —Is Salvation real?”

He proceeded to disquieting details of his life in the underworld. The boys’ hands sweated in their pockets or clasped the arms of their seats. At last, Bergen staggered into a mission and was suddenly and miraculously redeemed.

“Well, one day my picture appeared on the front page of a New York paper, and when my father saw that picture he took the train straight up to New York and he came to see me at my hotel. I put on a silk-hat and a frock-coat—yes, Bergen put on a frock-coat!—and I walked right down into the lobby of one of the swellest New York hotels. And when my father saw me there, when my father saw me dressed like that, he threw his arms around my neck, and he said, ‘My boy! my boy! My God! forgive me!’ —Is Salvation real?

“Now, I’ll be in Mr. Clarkson’s office,” he concluded, “tonight and tomorrow morning. If any boy wants to ask me any questions or talk over any of his problems with me, I’ll be glad to have him come and see me. I’ve been able to help hundreds of young men who were struggling with secret sins and temptations.”

He sat down amidst deathly silence, and the President arose.

“Do you want to say anything more, Mr. Hotchkiss?” he inquired.

“Only this,” said Mr. Hotchkiss smiling. “A merry Christmas to you all!”

“We will close the meeting,” continued Boards, “with as many short prayers as possible and afterwards the singing of Hymn Number 508.”

The audience collapsed into attitudes of prayer, and the President started them off with a dull and correct invocation which bore witness to long practice. This was followed by a strange vacant moment of shyness, broken at last by several voices which all tried to begin at once and then pulled themselves up in a panic; then two voices were heard to begin and again strike a deadlock of silence—till, at last, one, bolder than the other, persisted and prayed his competitor down. But when he had finished, little jets of prayer, lifted sometimes in plaintive trebles, were heard rising one by one. They had been taught to feel the stirring of the Spirit. When the President, peering at his watch, decided that they had prayed enough, he cut them short with a prayer of his own, like a wooden plug in a leak; and the audience, blinking, disturbed and moved, found their places in the hymnbook self-consciously, so solemn that they did not know what to say nor how to look at one another.

And Hart, as he watched them disperse, felt stiffened and sterilized. There was something, to be sure, about Bergen which he had not entirely liked, which had affected him unpleasantly at first, which had embarrassed him as he had been embarrassed by the billowing breath of a saloon belched obscenely across his path when he had been walking in New York with a lady. But Bergen did make vice seem poisonous—though perhaps at the same time alluring, a crapulous and fascinating power. As he had listened, he had lost his detachment: gambling and drinking meant nothing to him, but day-dreaming about women he had to admit and, as Bergen talked, Hart had felt a kind of dizziness, a vertigo at the edge of the abyss, a perverse desire to plunge, to succumb to its iridescent waters. Yet that lasted only a moment. Yes: the Y.M.C.A. was right! It stood for clean thoughts and clean living; and clean living was the only way! He told himself that now forever he must be master of those sinister lapses: no longer would he look through the cheap magazines for the buxom breasts and legs of actresses; no longer should a line from Virgil set him chasing white nymphs in a wood. He remembered the bawdy little boy who had once told dirty stories, who had sneaked into his uncle’s library to read The Decameron, and he felt nothing but hatred and contempt for the creature he had once been.

He knew now that there were only two courses in dealing with one’s sexual desires: one way was to sink and to drown in the morass—prostitution, syphilis, shame; and the other was to accept the revelation handed down by the Y.M.C.A.: to preserve one’s self-discipline, stay clinically pure. It was a sort of scientific idealism, a mixture of pathology and holiness. He felt as if his soul had now been dedicated to some chivalrous religious order, a combination of the Round Table and a Trappist monastery, in which the brothers wore the white robes of doctors when they worked in contagious wards, and washed their hands, as regularly as they prayed, in a solution of carbolic acid. And now he had been chosen as their Leader. He felt a thrill of consecration—and yet also a cramp of fear.

 

II

HART FOSTER HAD NEVER VISITED Board Borden’s family and was astonished to see the scale on which they lived. For almost half an hour, the glossy limousine glided along among landscape-gardened lakes and groves and finally drew up at the door of a prodigious, an apparently limitless house, which lifted its vast white façade in the naked winter dusk. It was as if some simple colonial cottage had been blown to enormous dimensions and its grace become stupid and gross, being swollen beyond man’s measure. Hart had known that Boards’s father had been rich but he had not realized how rich. Rather like a hotel, he reflected, as he gazed up at the tiers on tiers of windows.

Boards opened a shadowy door on an interior of warm rich light, and they were saluted by a crash of barking, as if they had invaded a kennel. Hart found himself surrounded by dogs, most of them very large; a Great Dane, as big as a calf, nearly knocked him down. Boards ordered them to be still, but they only barked louder than ever, and when he tried to placate each in turn, the dogs that were being neglected were aroused to frenzies of jealousy. At last, a tall young girl rushed up and, with the ruthless authority of a lion-tamer, succeeded in beating them down. Hart saw that, besides the Great Dane, there were two collies, a Russian wolf-hound, an Airedale and a spotted coach-dog.

“This is my sister,” explained Boards. “Barbara, this is Hart Foster.”

“Hello!” said Barbara.

She was a handsome girl, with fine brown eyes, wilful and superb, and a heavy clot of brown hair arranged at the back of her head: she bulked strangely on Hart’s gaze, almost with a physical impact. The smooth robust mask of her face, which smiled with conventional cordiality, seemed to shield some formidable power, which challenged him and asked him a question; she was charged with some magnetic current which might almost have galvanized him as he took her frankly-given hand. In her presence, he suddenly became aware, not merely of his Christian manhood, but also of his smartly parted hair and his brown eyes that were returning her cordiality.

As he was trying to shake hands with Barbara, one of the collies got between them and jumped up on her.

“Get down, you big clumsy boob!” she cried. “You’ll ruin my dress!”

“What a lot of dogs you have!” said Hart.

“Yes,” she answered. “They’re all mine.”

“The new Dupont has come,” she said to Boards. “Let’s go out in it after dinner. It’s got a new kind of gearshift.” Hart watched her with an admiration not untempered by fear and disapproval. She seemed to Hart as different from her brother as possible: Boards was conventional and stiff, moving slowly and speaking weightily, but his sister followed vigorous instincts with natural and rowdy movements, as imperious, yet as little formal, as a young barbarian queen.…

They had got into a curious room, a paradise of pink and gold, which suggested the gilt cord and ribbons of an expensive box of candy. It made Hart uneasy to see the dogs ranging unrestrainedly about this room among the fragile furniture and jumping up with ruthless paws on the satin sofa cushions. The Airedale and the wolfhound, which had jumped onto the couch, were barking out the window behind it.

“The old Baxter stalled on me again yesterday,” Barbara was saying. “It just fell dead in the ditch. I was so sick of getting the darned old thing fixed that I just went away and left it in the road. The man in the barber-shop at Greenwich came out and tried to fix the clutch, and I told him he could have it, if it was any good to him.”

“You ought to have sent somebody to get it,” her brother objected, shocked. “You oughtn’t to throw away a perfectly good car like that. We could have given it to the McFadden Street Settlement House.”

But here the Great Dane knocked over with his tail an enormous Japanese vase, which crashed like an eggshell on the floor.

“Oh, my God!” exclaimed Barbara, “there goes something or other! —Now, look what you’ve done, Goofo!”

She gave him a terrific smack.

“Still,” she reflected, “he never knows where his tail is going—do you, Goofo?” She patted him and put her arm around his neck. “Poor old Goofo,” she said.

“Oh, Barbara!” cried a voice. “I’ve told you not to bring the dogs in here!”

Hart, who had been picking up the pieces, beheld a broad, rather handsome lady, who combined a majestic presence with an air of bewilderment and uncertainty. Her dark hair, parted in the middle, made two smooth low bands along her temples in a manner both becoming and plain.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” said Barbara, “but we were just going through this way. And besides, I never could see what this room was good for, anyhow!”

Hart, looking about him in the lull that had followed the appearance of Mrs. Borden, saw a salon which somehow reminded him of the “parlors” of old-fashioned houses. The scale was infinitely greater but the style was unmistakably the same. On the walls were portraits of the children, painted badly but invested with the air of young princes; a portrait of the late Mr. Borden, with the masterful brow of Barbara; a water-color of a group of blue-birds perched appealingly on a bough; and a great gilt-framed placard which said “God is Love.” On a little stand stood a silver model of the first Borden Motor Truck—Mr. Borden had made motor trucks—and on a pedestal an enormous bust of Barbara modelled at the age of twelve, with the blank white pupils of the eyes, the hair-ribbon and lace collar, all precisely reproduced in the marble; on the table were books by Raymond Fosdick and Dr. Henry Van Dyke, and two richly bound volumes, with clasps, of a work called Picturesque Florence. Hart felt that the shades should perhaps be pulled down and the room preserved in darkness.

“That was the vase your father brought from Japan,” Mrs. Borden explained to Barbara. “Oh, don’t bother about picking them up,” she stayed the helpful Hart.

“It must have been a beautiful vase,” he said politely, holding up a flowery fragment.

“Well, we were very fond of it. My husband brought it home from Japan. They make such beautiful things in Japan. It’s all imitated from the Chinese, of course, but they make beautiful things. Have you ever been to Japan? … It’s such a beautiful country. Of course, you don’t think the women are beautiful, at first, but after a while you get used to them—the Japanese type of beauty. My husband never would admit that a Japanese woman could be beautiful, but I really learned to like them. And then their little feet seem so queer at first—as if they were deformed. We had the cunningest little Jap girl to wait on us at the hotel.…”

After dinner, which was eaten with simple manners amidst impressive surroundings, the new Dupont was tried out. Accompanied by unheeded admonishments on the part of Mrs. Borden, Hart, Boards and Barbara all three wedged themselves into the front seat, and Barbara drove, at a terrific rate. Without slackening speed, she would wrench the car in a masterful way around wooded curves. There was an arrogance about her which disquieted Hart and at the same time compelled his admiration. She seemed to be riding above ordinary life; she lifted them into a new world.

In the town, they stopped for a soda.

“I believe,” Boards advised Hart, as they imbibed strawberry syrup through straws, “that you ought to do everything you can to reach Butts Bigelow and that bunch when they get back to school next fall.” (Butts Bigelow had been the ringleader of the dissipating group of Fifth Formers, and one of those suspended for taking a night out in Boston.) “They’ll be Sixth Formers next year, and I think it’s a darn shame that the younger fellows should see Sixth Formers behaving the way they do.”

“I think Butts Bigelow is cute,” said Barbara. “I danced with him and he was awfully funny.”

“I heard that Butts Bigelow was seen drunk in New York,” contributed Hart.

“You don’t mind my drinking your water, do you?” asked Barbara, smiling at him delightfully.

“No—not at all,” replied Hart, with a responsive smile which he somehow felt did violence to the spirit of the conversation.

“You heard that he was drunk,” said Boards. “Well, there’s more to that!”

“What?” asked Hart.

“I’ll tell you sometime.”

“Oh, tell now,” demanded Barbara. “I won’t tell anybody!”

Boards shook his head. “It wouldn’t be fair to the man,” he explained. “It might hurt him some day when he’s trying to be decent. If a man has a bad reputation, very often he’s unfairly handicapped later on when he wants to lead a clean life. Nobody will believe any good of him. I always make it a point not to tell anything I may know about the the fellows.”

“Oh, bull!” said Barbara.…

But when Barbara had gone to the back of the store, in order to buy some flea soap, Boards laid bare the shame of Butts Bigelow in a low grim voice, which nearly made his companion’s heart stop beating. “Well, there’s a place in New York called the Prince Edward Club, which is really nothing more than a brothel. And it seems the people who go there have to sign names in a register. Well, Butts Bigelow has been seen in this place, and, you mustn’t let it be known at school, but instead of signing his own name, he signed Dr. Durham’s name!”

Hart gaped before it aghast: to make light of the Headmaster was like blasphemy. Yet a sinister fascination summoned up for him a muffled ambiguous front, then a narrow electric-lighted room with a glittering bar at one side, where Butts Bigelow, entering with rakish aplomb and hideous sophistication, wrote sneeringly in a register and then went upstairs—to what?

“How do you know?” he faltered.

“Bergen saw him and told us.”

“How can you reach a fellow like that?” Hart wondered in dismay.

“You must try to pray with him,” said Boards.

Then Barbara returned and swept them off to the car.

“You drive going back, Boards,” she commanded, “and Hart and I’ll sit in back. It’s too crowded three in front.”

“Let’s put this big robe over us,” she said to Hart. “It’s cold as blazes tonight.” And she wrapped them up close together.

As they cut through the winter night, mowing down the shadows with their headlights—beneath a cold high-riding moon that left the thickets of the roadside black—Hart, setting his face against the wind, with his head thrown impressively back, felt the combined exhilaration of rapid movement, spiritual nobility and power, and the presence at his side of an exciting girl who was evidently disposed to like him. He saw himself reasoning with Butts Bigelow, saying, “It’s not fair to the girl, Butts. It’s not fair to the girl.” How clean, how handsome, how firm, and withal how human he was! Butts thanked him and shook his hand—frank and wholesome, a fine fellow now. It nearly brought tears to Hart’s eyes: he was a Helper, a Leader of Men!—And he turned an earnest and exalted face to the handsome girl at his side.

When they were back in the inflated house, eating apples in front of a fire, Boards’s sober decision that it was time to go to bed brought a vehement protest from Barbara. She insisted that Hart should stay up and play a bout with her in the bowling-alley. But Hart, much in awe of his friend and invariably following Boards’s lead, excused himself and went up to his room.

But they bowled the next afternoon, and Barbara scored against Hart so heavily that, embarrassed, perspiring and flushed, he was moved to muster all his skill and energy for a smashing succession of strikes. “You’d make a good bowler,” said Barbara, “if you had a little practice.” The close, sweaty, woody smell of the bowling-alley, which, as he knew it in the school gym, had always seemed stale and unpleasant, now took on a rank and heady savor from Barbara’s moist face and bright eyes. The crash of the falling pins fed a nervous accelerating excitement.

When that night they went again for a ride, he and she sat behind all the way, and Hart tried to sing tenor to her popular songs, a refinement which did not seem to impress her. Once his hand, beneath the robe, was shifted against hers as they rounded a curve, and he noticed that she did not draw her hand away, as he should have supposed a well-bred girl would do. Then he wondered why he did not draw his own away, and immediately did so. She began a kind of ballad about Frankie and Johnnie which he had never heard before, and he sat in stupid silence. Its rowdy sound—like her reckless driving—seemed again to raise a barrier between them.… Now her head was flung back in drunkenness; she was riding down the night with ribaldry. She glanced at him from under lowered eye-lids with gaiety and a challenge. It would be nice to kiss her, he thought. Then he felt her snuggle against him, and he pressed against her. So they sat, singing Harvest Moon, My Yellow-Jacket Girl and The Girl I Love Is on a Magazine-Cover. Before long, they were holding hands, and he found himself embarrassed by the evident eagerness with which she squeezed his.

Alone in his bedroom later, his gratification overflowed the bounds by which it had been restrained during a visit from boring neighbors and a very confused billiard match: it flooded the enormous room and became the element in which he swam. The high ceiling, the magenta curtains, the abundant purple-shaded lamps, the serviceable tables and bureaus set about at enormous distances, with nothing on them except a few of Hart’s neckties and his military hair-brushes, seemed to make an appropriate setting for the present state of his soul—they reinforced a conviction of power, of moving through the great scenes of life. He struck a kind of noble pose in a great gilt-framed oval mirror; then slicked down his hair a little and looked at himself again. In the bathroom, of a candor like smooth glazed snow, he was humming My Yellow-Jacket Girl along with Who Follows in His Train?

He was thinking of himself again now as a Master and Leader of Men, but with Barbara for a wife. He was imagining the scene between them when he should tell her first of his love. He would say, “Barbara, I have loved you for a long time now.… Will you share with me my life and my work?” … She was evidently a great woman, whose extraordinary energy and strength needed only to be shown the path, to be turned to the service of Christ. What a spiritual companion she would make! At the end of the busy day, when he would come home utterly exhausted—exhausted, strong as he was—from his administrative duties and his speaking; and she from her settlement work, deeply moved by the condition of the poor, they would console and sustain one another, they would kneel down together and pray.…

He knelt now by his bedside alone and prayed to be made worthy of her—to be clean, to be wise, to be upright, to be a tower of strength to the weak.… Then he turned out the silk-shaded lights and opened a window by the bed. Below it lay the phantom grounds, like the floor of a tranquil lake—all brimmed full to-night by the moon with a limpid bluish-gray water, where the trees stood up like water-weeds and the grass seemed just to show green with a faint silver luminosity. He thought for a moment of Romance, of magic in German forests, of monstrous castles cracked asunder and black-armoured foemen beaten down, of a lady riding behind him on the back of a great white horse.… Then he snuffed out these childish fancies and got in between the fresh crisp sheets. From the window fell a shaft of moonlight which threw long silver panes on the floor.

He thought of the first time he should kiss her—on the cheek it would be, of course—when they had told one another of their love—and then, later, they would kiss on the lips, like the people on the covers of Life. It must be wonderful to kiss on the lips!—wonderful and very sacred. It seemed almost the last satisfaction, the ultimate moment of intimacy—an incredible realization of the fact that two people understood one another.… And then the first kiss at the altar, when the ceremony was over, and the bride, in her long robe of white, took her husband’s lips with closed eyes, with face tenderly yielded … Then these visions began to dissolve and to float away on dark waters; dim irrelevant shapes reëmerged and were whelmed by the dark again, till he drowned in the swell of that warm and pleasantly benumbing sea.…

He became aware that somebody was in the room—somebody in a vague dark gown, who was closing the bathroom door with a gentle and stealthy click. Someone had got into the wrong room. Hart called out: “Hello!”

“Hello,” replied a woman’s voice in a deep cordial whisper. Hart recognized the voice of Barbara.

“I—I’m sleeping in this room!” he tried to explain.

She came forward without answering into the moonlight.

He saw her now in her kimono, with her thick hair about her shoulders, shrouded palely in shadowy silver and with shadows under her brows.

“Did I wake you up?” she inquired.

“Oh, no,” he answered, uneasy and puzzled. “I wasn’t quite asleep. It’s perfectly all right.”

She sat down on the bed beside him, so that the panes of silver light from the window were broken across her lap. It occurred to him that she might be in need of some immediate spiritual guidance, that she might have come to confide to him some struggle or some agony of the soul.… He noticed that her thin silk kimono was molded to the roundness of her thighs and that her feet were clad in little slippers with round puffs of silk at the toes.

There was a momentary silence. Then, “I thought I’d come and visit you. I didn’t want to go to bed so early.”

He was embarrassed and could only say, “What time is it?”

“Oh, it’s early,” she replied and bent toward him, as he sat up in bed, her dark hair falling about her face. She whispered, “You can kiss me if you want to.”

But a proud and virginal shrinking made him hesitate a moment. Then he leaned over toward her quickly, and his lips, which would have found her cheek, were drawn to her swiftly proffered mouth; he touched it in a brief clumsy kiss. As her own lips were still parted and she seemed to expect something more, he kissed her again and again, embracing her with awkward arms.

And in that timid self-conscious embrace, those dry half-terrified kisses—at the touch of her warm wet mouth, the smell of her clothes and skin, he suddenly became a lover, a new personality had been brought into being—a much more exciting one. His old self had shrivelled in the blast to a brittle and hollow shell. His shyness was melting away.

“I love you, Barbara!” he breathed, and pressed his mouth against hers in mounting intoxication. Her mouth was something unexpected, an enormous physical fact, something brutal and overwhelming, of an almost indecent intimacy. He had never known that kissing was like that!

Then she disengaged herself from his arms and swiftly slipped off her kimono. As she bent over for a moment, Hart had a glimpse of her firm round breasts; he was surprised to find them so big: he had always supposed that girls’ breasts were little low dotted things. He was shocked and recoiled from the sight, as if from something indecent; it drove him back into himself.

She slipped into bed and whispered, “It’s better in bed like this.”

“Oh, you mustn’t do that!” he objected.

“Why not?” she asked. “Don’t you like it?”

“I don’t think you ought to,” he said.

“I thought you said you liked me.”

“That’s just why I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to—to compromise yourself.”

“Nobody’ll know.”

“Somebody might.—And besides, it’s not the right thing to do. We—oughtn’t to do like this.” His protestations sounded childish.

“I don’t see why you say you like me then!”

He could feel how warm she was as she lay beside him there, her face half hidden in the pillow. But he now sat upright and prosaic.

“I do like you,” he replied and tried to assume a correcter tone, tried to bring the conversation closer to his ideal standard for such scenes. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.” In his attempt to achieve his end, he bent to kiss her forehead gently, but again she offered him her lips and again they overwhelmed him. In a moment, he was down beside her, with one arm about her back. She came up close against him, and he slipped his other arm beneath her; then she came to place with her arms about him and he found himself embracing her body, which, solid, soft and very warm, lay against his thighs and breast. So this was the real Barbara, this solid living body!—not merely the face at the top of a dress that one knew in ordinary life. How wonderful—he could not have imagined it—it was to lie against another person’s body! All the pains and constraints of his life seemed to melt in a sudden blaze; he was flooded with a gratitude that was close to tears. That warm breathing body was everything—all happiness, all satisfaction! It was not an embrace, but a different world, a different kind of life!

“I love you! I love you!” he repeated, and she turned her mouth for more kisses.…

But, as they lay, he felt the waking of desire in a now unmistakable form.… In horror, he drew away. How base that that should have happened! How dreadful if she should have noticed!—She was lying with eyes closed and lips parted, her cheeks all flushed and hot.

He wanted to rouse her and warn her: “We mustn’t stay here like this!”

“Why not?” she demanded softly, half opening her eyes and half smiling.

“Because—because it isn’t right. We mustn’t, honestly. You really ought to go now. We—we can see each other tomorrow.”

“You don’t need to be afraid,” she said. “I know what to do.”

“Please go, Barbara!” he insisted, half pleading, half assuming the tone of an older person reasoning with a child about matters it does not understand. “You and I mustn’t … till after we’re married.”

“Married?” she replied. “I’m never going to get married!”

This brought him up against a blank wall, and he did not know what to answer.

“Won’t you marry me?” he asked at last and was aware that it sounded foolish.

“I’m not going to marry anybody. I don’t want to be married! You’ll have to wait a long time if you wait to have me marry you!”

He was silent again for a moment, then he doggedly returned to his point: “You and I oughtn’t to be together like this without being married.”

“Oh, why shouldn’t we?” she retorted. “Everybody does!”

“No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do. Look at the débutantes!” she continued with indignation, turning over now on her back. “You don’t think they’re all so pure, do you?”

“I certainly think they all ought to be,” he replied, driven back into priggishness. And he noticed how beautiful her throat was, as her head, thrown back on the pillow, uncovered its smooth firm bow. He would like to kiss her there, he thought.

“Why?” she demanded. “Why should they be?” And she delivered this terrible judgment: “Do you know why girls stay pure? It’s just to get themselves married! They just hang on to their old purity so that the man’ll still want something from them. They won’t let him have it unless he marries them. That’s how they get married! If they didn’t, a whole lot of girls would never get married at all. But I don’t care! I do whatever I want and there’s lots of men who are crazy to marry me just the same!”

“I don’t think that’s true at all!” he protested. “Everybody ought to—try to keep clean—because—”

“Oh, you talk just like Boards!” she cried—she seemed nervous and irritable now. “I thought you were a good sport.”

“If it’s being a good sport to let you—”

She suddenly sprang up, cutting short his righteous declaration, in which he had been converting his note of complaint into the authentic high tone of the Y.M.C.A. She determinedly threw on her kimono and shod her bare feet with slippers. He noted how cunning the puffs were.

“Don’t go,” he said. “Look a minute—”

“I thought you wanted me to go. You just said I had to go!”

“Oh, please don’t be sore!” he pleaded. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I only—”

“Hurt my feelings!” she flung at him, wrapping the kimono across her breast. “You haven’t hurt my feelings!”

She turned to the bathroom door.

“Oh, please listen a minute!” he begged, jumping out of bed. “Please don’t go away like that!”

She stopped without turning around.

“It’s simply that I don’t want you to think that I—that I don’t like you—or that I think there’s anything necessarily improper—”

She went out and shut the door with a bang that shocked his nerves. He remembered that the bathroom had another door—it must lead into another bedroom.

He stood for a moment in the darkness, staring at the closed door. Then he found that he was trembling all over and weakly sat down on the bed. He was much relieved that she was gone; his soul had been disordered to its depths.… After contemplating the moonlight a little, he got back into bed again. All night his thoughts continued to churn with the violent throbbing of his head. He was sometimes the Christian Leader saving a foolish child from herself; sometimes the conqueror of life to whom the splendors of love came easily; but the picture too often collapsed in a treacherous doubt and confusion, a terror before unknown facts, an uncertainty of himself.… Yet, for all his bewildered distress, her kisses and her embrace had drenched all of life with a wonder which he had never known before. It was a feverish breathless romance in which mighty emotions ran high! It was a drama which dwarfed the setting and where everything but emotion was the setting.… When he looked out, at early morning, on the slow gray winter dawn, where the lawn lay unreal and silvered with the whitish bloom of the frost, it was now upon a grimmer, less familiar world, a world full of mystery and danger, but a world where great men and women lived and died by the grace of great passions.

 

III

“AND THERE IS ANOTHER THING I should like you to say a word about,” Mr. Hotchkiss continued to Boards Borden. They were having a conference in the Bible class room just before the first meeting after the holidays, and the boys sat about on the benches in all their official solemnity. Only Hart seemed haggard and distrait: he sat drawing little circles with a pencil on the arm of his seat. The bookcases were black with hymnals and on the walls were a portrait of Christ and a photograph of Mr. John Mott. “Something which has been particularly called to my attention during the holidays. I mean the behavior of young girls at dances and, in short, in all their relations with young men. I believe very warmly in dances and in sports of all kinds—I believe in every sort of ‘clean mirth,’ as Kipling says; I believe that young people should be jolly and free together, and I think that for the ordinary wholesome boy and girl a chaperon is ridiculous; but it seems to me that the modern young girl is coming dangerously close to the line which separates freedom from license. I don’t speak only of the clothes which are worn and which are hardly proper even for older women, nor of the open sensuality of the new dances—‘cheek to cheek,’ as I believe they are called—but it seems to me that when it becomes tolerated, when it even becomes fashionable, for a well-bred young girl, or a young girl who is supposed to be well-bred, to smoke cigarettes, to drink cocktails and to tell risqué stories without provoking any surprise or losing caste among her companions, then it is time to begin to consider where this thing is taking us!”

“Well, but Mr. Hotchkiss,” retorted Hart, much to everyone’s consternation, “do you really think it’s up to us here to say what the girls ought to do? I should think they ought to deal with that at the girls’ schools.”

“Tell me,” propounded Mr. Hotchkiss, with weighty assurance, “who do you think is responsible for the moral standards of the fast young girl? Where did she first learn to drink the cocktail, to smoke the cigarette, to tell the questionable story? Is it not the young men with whom she has associated who must have encouraged her in these things! Who taught the girl the unclean story? She can hardly have imagined it herself: she is not yet so corrupt as that. She can hardly, in the first instance, have learned it from another woman. No: some young man must have told it to her—some young man with whom she is on terms of friendship and whom she perhaps innocently thought to please by exhibiting an interest in such stories. But no friendship can long remain pure which indulges in such impurities as these. The girl may think it only a joke—something which exists only in words—but the thought is father to the deed. The thing which you imagine today is the thing you perform tomorrow. The next time they dance together, she may perhaps permit him to hold her more closely; the next time, she may consent to drink with him and may allow him to flirt with her a little—though he may not really be in love with her nor have any sincere intention of marrying her. The next time.…”

“Do you think,” interrupted Hart, a little acidly and terribly constrained, “that she ought to make him promise to marry her before she lets him begin to make love to her?”

“I think,” replied Mr. Hotchkiss, adopting a more direct severity, and bending upon Hart his great creased and heavy face, saddened by the sinfulness of the world, “that if we lose our reverence for womanhood, we shall lose the keystone of our civilization, and I believe that it is the duty of the Y.M.C.A. to warn the fellows against allowing their ideal to become debased. They should certainly not be willing to see a young girl do anything which they would not be willing to see their sisters do. If you put that argument to them, they will see the point every time! Without reverence for womanhood, without chivalry and chastity, there can be no clean and enduring love, there can be none of that adoration which you find expressed so beautifully in Browning’s lines—

‘Oh, lyric love, half angel and half bird!’—”

Hart found himself regarding Mr. Hotchkiss with hostile and angry eyes, which were also guilty and shy; he had flushed with his last retort and kept his hands pressed against the bench arms to conceal his trembling tenseness. But his defiance broke out abruptly in all its naked insolence. “I don’t see why a girl should have to make a man promise to marry her before she lets him begin to make love to her! I think that a good deal of this modesty—” (Barbara’s verdict hung in his mind, but in that company it seemed impossible to repeat it, and the inhibition, robbing him of his point, brought his climax down with heartbreaking lameness) “—is—false modesty!” he concluded; and with the collapse of this speech, his voice broke.

“You ask me,” replied Mr. Hotchkiss, with magisterial composure, while the others sat in the stricken silence which always follows a breaking voice, “you ask me if a young girl should let a man make love to her without promising her marriage. I answer that there’s all the difference in the world between clean and unclean love and that any decent wholesome girl knows which kind is being offered her.”

“Listen old man!” said Boards, coming over to Hart. “You’re not feeling very well, are you? You don’t have to come tonight. Somebody else can read the minutes.”

“That’s all right,” snapped Hart irritably. “I’m all right!”

“Have you any fever?” asked Mr. Hotchkiss, feeling his forehead and pulse. “I learned how to be a doctor among the lumberjacks,” he explained, as he took out his watch, smiling in proud gratification at feeling himself rough and ready, a man among men. “The only regular doctor in the woods lived about a hundred and twenty miles away, so I had to be doctor and druggist and trained nurse all in one!”

“No, I don’t think so,” answered Hart between anger and the temptation to flee. “I’ve just got a little headache.”

“Too many dances during the holidays?” inquired Mr. Hotchkiss, smiling, in an undeceptive attempt to speak of these things as other men.

“No,” said Hart, “I’m just out of sorts.”

“Look here, my boy,” said Mr. Hotchkiss, “you’d better go to bed right away. It’s a losing game in the long run to use up all your nervous force by trying to keep on working when you’re sick. When I was up in the lumber-camps, I rode a hundred and sixty miles and conducted five services and a ‘sing’ one Sunday, when I could hardly stand up with chills and fever, and I’ve never got over the effects of it. I’ve never been able to do the same work. Now you’d better go to bed right away and see the doctor the first thing in the morning.”

Hart left the room on the verge of tears; but, as he walked out across the frozen campus, Mr. Hotchkiss and the Y.M.C.A. passed swiftly beyond the limits of his consciousness, outshone by the splendor in his heart.

Nothing else in the world was real except his overwhelming longing! The school itself, but a few weeks ago the scene of his whole drama, a drama which he followed with excitement, had shrunk to a stage for amateurs, whose triviality enraged him. His school-fellows were children; the masters were fogeys and pedants. He was humiliated by these pygmies.

He knew what passion was! They knew nothing of passion! The word thrilled and terrified him and filled him with a kind of drunkenness. Now he understood the conduct of the people in the stories of Maupassant; now he understood why Marc Antony had behaved so badly about Cleopatra. Now he found himself living the lurid dream which had seemed so fantastic and remote! He shuddered at its rank carnality, yet it conquered him and made him proud. He knew himself a man now at last.

In his room, he found Eddie O’Brien doing Greek with another boy. He had hoped there would be no one there so that he could write another urgent letter to Barbara, and he regarded them with undisguised disgust.

“Thought you were at the meeting,” said Eddie.

“I’m not feeling very well,” he explained shortly. “I’ve got a headache.”

“That’s a darn shame,” said Eddie. And they went on doing Greek. “οὐ γάρ πώ ποτέ μ᾽ δέ γ᾽ ἔρως ɸρένας ἀμɸɛκάλυψɛν”—‘For never this desire concealed my mind’—now wait a minute: this ὥς must be the end of it, that must mean ‘as’—ὥς σɛο νν ἔραμαι καί μɛ γλυκùς ἵμɛρος αἱρɛ.”

“Say, look: we don’t have to do these lines: I’ve got that passage marked to omit.”

“There must be something dirty in it then. λέχοσδε, that means something about a ‘bed.’—Say, I’ve got to read this passage: it’s got something about a bed in it!”

“Oh, pshaw!” (shutting the book) “you couldn’t hire me to read any more of that stuff than I have to—bed or no bed!”

He hated their slipshod work; he hated their imbecile jests. What did they know about Paris and Helen? He had worked the passage out himself—and now he saw the beautiful couple, not merely smooth and white like Greek statues, but flushed and made drunk by desire. “It’s better in bed like this,” she had said.… What right had such creatures as these schoolboys to chatter and brawl in his room? … He opened the window and looked down from their hill on the snow-laden roofs of the town. A spell had been laid upon it: its sordidness was effaced; the dreary life that one knew had been utterly purged away. The very streets were blank pages on which no one’s name had been traced. But from the yellow lights in the windows he knew that life there was still warm. He pictured pleasant family scenes—young couples, just come back from their honeymoons, settling down to the intimacy of winter. He saw in his imagination a fresh young woman in a silk kimono, with brown hair unloosed about her shoulders, who sat happy, before a fire, with a clean-cut young man at her side. He envied that clean-cut young man.… Through the frozen air, from a distance, came the brisk jingle of sleigh-bells. And he thought of how lovers rode out on moonlight nights like this; he had heard that they revelled in a moon. They would make a safe little world of warmth in the icy night through which they moved. He would put his arm about her and with the other arm drive the sleigh through the empty country roads, terrible and lovely beneath the moon, through the stiff-standing pines of the mountains that walled their path about with black. And he would feel how warm she was and how he guarded her against the night, against the snow and the lonely moon and the shadows that lurked in the pines. They would be reckless and gay together and conquer the cold road with songs. But stay! there are wolves behind us!—you can hear their faint yelping in the distance—they drew nearer—Don’t be afraid!—They are all about us now, barking hungrily—Bang! Bang! Bang! they are dead!—their blood lies black on the snow. He would put his arm about her again and feel her warm bulk against his side. What a brave staunch partner she was! And when they were back at last, he would take her in his arms altogether; he would kiss her once warmly on the lips, and then she would go up before him.…

“Say, do you want to freeze us out?” came the voice of the visiting friend.

“Yes, for Pete’s sake,” yelled his room-mate, with the superior harshness of intimacy, “put that damn window down!”

He remained at the window a little longer to indicate his contempt for them; then he withdrew and threw himself on the bed.

“Hope we don’t disturb you,” said the visitor. “We’ll be through before long.”

“How long will it be?” asked Hart with authoritative distinctness.

“Oh, we’ll be done pretty soon!” said Eddie.

They turned the lamp-shade around so that the bulb would not shine in his eyes, and he detested them for their attentions, which seemed to him insincere—since it was evident he couldn’t rest with them talking in the same room.…

Oh, he was in agony to possess her! He could think of nothing else night and day. To hold her in his arms again! He had once held her in his arms! It was incredible—it must be a dream. How could he ever have lived through that rapture—so prosaically, so calmly? In retrospect, it had become for him the central experience of his life. It was a burst of illumination which blazed like a pillar of fire on the horizon of the past, and the further he receded from it, the more magical and amazing it seemed and the more pressing became the necessity of getting back to it and finding it real.… And it had been so different from what he thought!—not a bit like the covers of Life. His mind was no longer divided into two not very well policed compartments—a compartment for lecherous longings and a compartment for ideal love: the dyke had been broken down and the turbid waters of desire had been loosed on the chaste embraces, the aquiline kisses, of Life. The plump wanton ladies of Boccaccio came romping into the love scenes of Booth Tarkington, and the two were being founded together into something which was terrible, which was real.… “It’s better in bed like this,”—the words seemed to reach him electric with the life of another world. Oh, to find it, to enter it again! To find the world where that language was spoken!

He must write her a letter at once to show her he knew now how to speak to her. And yet wouldn’t that perhaps be an error so soon after his other letter? He had had no reply to that, and it would make him ridiculous to write again; it would put him at a disadvantage. But if he made it an ultimatum on a high and decisive tone?—in that case, she must let him know definitely that she was really in love with him or wasn’t. But what if she should become indignant and perversely declare that she wasn’t when actually she was? Suppose he should spoil the whole thing by approaching her, as he might, too clumsily?—If he could only go down to Greenwich and talk it all over with her!—he would put his case so eloquently, so nobly, with such fire and compelling force, that she could not but be moved by his love and respond with the gift of hers.… How intolerable that it would still be at least three weeks before he could get away from school!—And as a makeshift in his bitter privation, he pictured himself running off to see her—getting out by the fire-escape, making a dash for the back fence, catching an early train to New Haven.…

The students shut up their books and slammed down the roll-top desk. The sound of slippers was heard in the corridor. The roughhouse was about to begin. Hart was sickened as he thought of tearing off people’s pyjamas, of pushing them under the bed. He withdrew to the shower-room and took a very long hot shower which lasted until lights-out. As he ruminated in the steam, the fancy of escaping from school presented itself as a possibility; and, in a moment, his will had seized on it and made of it an overmastering purpose which beat down all opposition and filled him with excitement and panic. After all, why shouldn’t he go? It would perhaps be betraying the Y, the confidence and respect of the masters; it would mean, if he ever returned, a trying scene with Dr. Durham; but, in the end, they would take him back on the strength of his excellent record. He could say that he had been worried about something, some personal matter he couldn’t explain, and they would have to treat him sympathetically. He thought of Butts Bigelow’s escapade to Boston, and it terrified him for a moment to reflect that his own conduct might have something in common with his.…

But what were such qualms to the anguish of three more weeks endured at school? With this racking uncertainty and anguished desire, he was unable to interest himself in anything; he could not even do his assignments. If he only knew that Barbara loved him, he could be more brilliant than he had ever been. With the support and stimulation of Barbara, he could be happy and clear-headed and strong! He would win the interschool debate!

Perhaps, when he came back to school, he would be able to announce his engagement—in which case he would be certainly forgiven. In any case, he must go! He knew about a 4:30 train on which boys who were expelled were bundled off so as not to be seen by their fellows; and he now chafed more fiercely at five hours’ delay than he formerly had at three weeks.…

At last, it was three o’clock. He got up and took his clothes from the chair and cautiously made his way to the bathroom, looking furtively down the hall to make sure that the hall master’s room was dark. This movement set going again the painful rhythm in his head. When he had dressed, he returned to his own room, where his room-mate, breathing heavily, was entombed in a heavy comforter. Hart had tied the laces of his shoes together and slung them around his neck, and he made his escape through the window in a pair of noiseless wool-lined slippers.

The fire-escape steps were narrow and coated with frozen snow, and the hand-railing was also slippery; he had to descend very slowly. At the bottom, he crunched through a snow-crust and had a terrible moment of fear when he half-expected a blast from the Headmaster’s house to stop him in his tracks. But once he had left the school grounds—among the sleeping streets of the town—he breathed deep of the strong cold air and lifted his head in release. How clear-minded he felt! How dynamic!—If he could only talk to her now—walk into a house and find her! He felt himself a dashing fellow who had just claimed a daring freedom—but at the same time a levelheaded hero with the situation well in hand, who in breaking the rules of the school had not sacrificed his responsibility nor his fundamental seriousness. His Barbara was no longer a rowdy wanton, but a noble and passionate woman—a Guinevere. And he, in his illicit love, was still knightly and dignified. Where he had formerly pictured himself as Galahad, he now figured as Lancelot.… The houses were dark and faceless. People lying in each other’s arms, he thought.…

At the deserted desolate station, he half-expected the ticketman to challenge him: “Say, you’re leavin’ pretty early, aintcha?” or to ask for his card of permission, but the old man seemed quite indifferent and went back to doze against the stove.… Hart paced the cracks in the station platform back and forth past a squad of milk-cans, and at last, at 5:15, the 4:30 train appeared, lounging along in a tranquil somnolence as if the nervousness and haste of men had not yet waked up to excite it.

In the train, he tried to think exactly what he should say when he found himself with Barbara, but he went to sleep against the window.… The train stopped joltingly every fifteen minutes at unfamiliar stations with irritating names—East Walsheim, Bloodgood, Medill. He could hardly believe they existed; he had never heard of them before. They intensified in Hart an uncomfortable feeling of having rashly broken through into an unfamiliar world. He had somehow lost his grip on his project, and now, when he thought of it again, it had come to seem quite ridiculous in the raw and livid winter light which harmonized so much better with the thawing snow and the unloading of morning milk-cans than it did with declarations of passion and vows of compelling devotion. Had that all been a feverish fancy of the evening, a vision of late hours and electric light? On one occasion, when Hart had dozed off and abruptly waked up again, he was utterly unable to believe that he had ever undertaken this errand. In the air of that dreary dawn, romance was thawing out like the snow. The ache he had felt for days reappeared as a hopeless blueness, which kept brimming up toward tears.…

At New Haven, he partially revived by the aid of a cup of coffee and a very old thick chicken sandwich, lined with something like a pale slice of rubber, which seemed to have been preserved for years under a flyblown glass cover, as if it had been the sandwich of some distinguished person.… He told himself that he now felt fit to go on and play his great scene. He would be serious, earnest, yet charming. He shuddered in violent revulsion when he imagined the figure he had made. How insufferably priggish he had been! With what stupid obstinacy he had sent her away! But this time he would make no mistakes. She should quickly understand and forgive. Had she not once held him in her arms? Were they not pledged, deeply, supremely?

And yet there was something about the whole affair which made him apprehensive and uneasy. The day after she had come to his room, she had refused either to bowl or play billiards, and he had left the following day. It was as if his conception of their personal relations were founded on some insecure base. Was there really something wrong about it? Did he fear to find out what it was? … His impatience was diluted now with a complacency in delay: he clung tight to, he cherished, the security of the hours that stretched ahead before he should arrive at his goal, and he gazed out at the skeleton landscape between New Haven and Greenwich with a kind of morbid relish for every dry winter meadow mottled with melting snow, for every long flat factory building, for every black ice-glazed stream, for every hard square-angled town with its hollow-looking boxlike houses, because they were still recognizable things untransfigured by that terrible spell.

At last, with a dreadful sinking, he beheld the outskirts of Greenwich, littered with dead-looking cottages that seemed all to be closed for the winter. But with a rapidly awakening excitement, he descended the steps from the train. He felt that all the people in the station must notice that he was getting out.

He went first to a small hotel and called up the Bordens’ house. Barbara was not at home but was coming back later to tea. It was now not yet noon; he had five hours to wait. This at once annoyed and relieved him. He looked at himself in a glass and was sickened by what he saw: instead of a handsome and determined young man full of passion and determination, he beheld a pasty puffy-faced child with a pitiful hangdog look, whose shirt collar was smudged with soot and whose derby seemed much too big for him. Perhaps it was just as well, after all, that he should have enough time to refresh himself. He took a room at the dreary hotel and lay down and slept for three hours.…

At a quarter past four, when he woke, the overcast January day was collapsing as a total failure: the world seemed dirtily melting away in drizzle and slush and mist; the very daylight seemed dissolving in a fluid gray like the snow. Hart took a bath, dressed and brushed his hair; then summoned a rickety taxi and curtly bade the driver to take him to the Bordens’.

At the door-step, the Great Dane and the collies assailed him with a deafening clamor, and as soon as the door was opened, the others came eagerly to join them. Damn the dogs! He had forgotten about them. It was impossible to keep one’s dignity among them!

Then Mrs. Borden appeared and explained that Barbara was not back yet, but wouldn’t he come in and have some tea?

By a lamp in the monumental gloom of the heavily oak-panelled sitting-room, she presided with her slight unintimidating air of not quite knowing what to do. She was glad it was thawing at last: she hated cold weather, she said. Her husband always used to say that she might have been born in the South, though she had really been born in Illinois. They had very severe winters sometimes out there. Perhaps that was why she hated them so. She remembered how when she was a child they used to tap the maple trees in winter. She had thought there was nothing so good in the world as eating maple-syrup and snow.

Hart sat at a strain of attention, saying “Yes” and “Really” and “No.”

Then Barbara burst into the room, and his fate was upon him at last. As he got up to shake her hand, he felt his knees quaking beneath him. She took it with a casual “Hello,” in which he thought he saw a studied indifference.

In her wake came a tall young man with enormous hands and feet, who, when he talked, displayed horse’s teeth. He was introduced as Mr. McGuffy, and Hart, in consternation, recognized him as “Runt” McGuffy, the celebrated Yale tackle. The effect of this recognition was instantaneously crushing. Hart, in spirit, crawled under his chair and asked only to be left there in abjection. In the first place, McGuffy was at college, which made him a man instead of a boy. College was the great world beyond, to which a school-boy ascended trembling; in it men triumphantly “made good” or catastrophically went to pieces. McGuffy had perhaps encountered those temptations of which Hart had heard so much, had perhaps even yielded to them. No doubt Barbara liked him better for that! And then, further, McGuffy was a football star, just the sort of man—he saw it all—that the spirited Barbara would admire. Hart kept up a brave pretence of enjoying the conversation, but he sat there watching the others as if it were all something in which he had no real part, something distant and inconsequential, but, paralyzed thus by emotion, he thought it must be plain to everyone how he felt and what he had come for.

McGuffy, from behind his legs, which as he sat were mountainously crossed, talked clumsily, amiably, of the team, with the knowingness of sophomore year—while Barbara turned his more moderate strictures upon certain of the Princeton players into a venomous attack on the whole Princeton team, which she seemed like a carnivore to worry in her teeth as she pointed out their lack of guts, their laughable fumbling with the ball, their abysmal bad sportsmanship. It made Hart shudder to hear her; he felt out of it in the presence of such savagery, and uneasy, as if for his own skin.

At last McGuffy moved to go. “Well, I guess I better ease,” he said.

“I must go in a minute, too,” Hart murmured.

“Can I take you anywhere?” asked McGuffy genially. “Drop you in town just as well as not. The roads are pretty rotten now. I wouldn’t advise you to walk.”

Hart stammered out something lame about not going for a minute or two. Barbara accompanied her friend to the door and left Hart with Mrs. Borden again.

“Won’t you stay and have dinner with us?” Mrs. Borden suggested.

He hastily declined, embarrassed by the fear that she might have thought he was staying in order to be asked.

Barbara came back, and the conversation dragged. She talked with her mother about the washed-out roads which ought to be repaired in the spring, and he felt himself helplessly shut out. At last, it was half past six: he was keeping them from getting dressed.

He got up and took his leave of Mrs. Borden, then turned in desperation to Barbara. “May I speak to you a minute?” he pleaded.

She led the way out in silence.

“Well, what can I do for you?” she asked, as he felt her father might have done.

They were among the Japanese umbrella-stands and the comic hunting pictures of the hall. She stood before him in a bright red jersey which displayed the roundness of her breasts. Her color was very high. She had assumed a rather snippy manner.

But it was not her snippy manner which turned Hart to a helpless child before her. It was the terrible prestige of her sexual experience. In its presence, all Hart’s school authority, his intelligence, his superior age, had shrivelled and dropped away and left him naked in inane virginity.

When he commenced to talk at last, he thought he sounded gasping and tearful like a little boy. “I wanted to tell you, Barbara,” he blurted out, “that I’m sorry about the other night. I’m sorry I was such an awful prig. I don’t wonder that you were mad about it—but—my ideas about a lot of things have changed since then.”

“They have?” she checked him up with irony.

He went on, gaining courage with his passion. “And I want to tell you, Barbara, that I’m in love with you. I think about you all the time. I can’t work or sleep or do anything now, because I’m thinking about you all the time.” He tried to give her his whole rebirth in one stupendous revelation. “Life has been entirely different since I’ve been in love with you!”

“Lots of people are in love with me,” she answered.

“But you don’t know how I love you! I love you the way Lancelot loved Guinevere! I could stand with you against the whole world! I don’t care about—about public opinion. I want to be with you—to face life with you! I want to be with you—forever!”

She smiled at him mockingly. “I think you better go and get some nice little girl that won’t scare you.”

“But I don’t want a nice little girl! You’ve spoiled all the nice little girls for me. I hate everybody else. The other girls make me sick. All I told you in my letters was absolutely true!” He was sick and giddy from the shock. He felt like crying out, “Oh, Barbara; don’t you remember where we’ve been together?” But he only began to reproach her: “Why didn’t you answer my letter?”

“I never write letters,” said Barbara.

“I don’t think that’s fair!” he replied. —“I wish you still liked me.”

“You reminded me of a boy I like who’s away in Canada.”

He was dazed as by a cannon’s loudness.

She stood before him like a princess, her hands in her jersey pockets. The dogs, who had just been fed, came trooping back into the hall, tails waving and jowls agrin, delighted to rejoin their mistress. He looked at them for distraction. He knew that he had no place there.

In his desperate agitation, he had begun to wrench on his overcoat and, as he did so, there fell from his pocket the shapeless wool-lined slippers which he had used for the fire-escape.

Barbara laughed. “Did you bring those along,” she said, “for fear you’d be getting cold feet?”

“I left school last night,” he tried to explain. “I’m never going back again.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m going out into the world. I’m going to work on a paper or something!”

“You’d better go back to school,” she said, smiling suddenly with genuine friendliness. “Of course I do like you. Come down again with Boards sometime.”

He brightened. “Maybe I could see you sometime during the Easter holidays. Couldn’t you come to New York—and see a show?”

“I won’t be here then.”

“Where will you be?”

“I’m going to Montreal for the winter sports.”

“Well, good-bye,” he said, shaking her hand. “I’ll see you sometime later maybe.”

He pulled open the big door and strode off down the night of the drive, burning face set against the cold, as if with the energy of some sturdy errand. But the further he plunged among the bare black trees and the shapeless bush-masses of the grounds, the more he felt like some captured seaman marching bravely toward the end of a plank. Even if he should come for a visit, he felt that his love was futile. And now he was advancing into emptiness, into a universe divested of meaning; and all about him, in the winter desert, the darkness seemed to ache.