William Dudley Pelley

“ And that hand was cold.
“And if I don’t come back, dear?” he said hoarsely at last.
“Maybe, Gordon, I’ll wear no other ring—the rest of my life. Who knows?”
“Perhaps, after all, dear girl, it’s better so.”
“But even until I know, I shall have a little song in my heart, dear. I shall have a man at the wars. And he is a man! Of that there’s never a doubt. Not even now, to-night.”
Verily in the life of every man, sooner or later, comes one white-hot moment when small things drop away. Prophets and seers are silenced and dismissed. The earth is without form and void. ”

“ As the land dropped lower behind the ship and the flocks of gulls thinned out and the arms of the Pacific opened wider and wider, a sense of vast freedom came to Nathan. Those broad ocean reaches stirred deep reactions within him. They beckoned him away from petty things. Hour after hour he walked the Tenyo’s decks or sank down in his steamer chair and dozed there, sending dream-cargoes off across the miles. Every day carried him farther from the handicap, sordidness, mediocrity, trial, pose, struggle, which had been the sum and substance of his life and environment to date. ”

“ What mattered it that they stood in a land of blood and junk and chaos, with war roaring across the horizons and all the world on fire? There was a cobalt sky above them and the world stretched true into the western Infinite. It was a long way to the horizon, a very long way.
“Miss Theddon,” said Nathan, “life is very queer at times, isn’t it—in some of its coincidences and dénouements, I mean?”
“Yes,” replied Madelaine, scarcely recognizing her own voice. She was trying to credit that this romantically garbed, erect-figured, firm-footed, steady-voiced man by her side was Nathaniel Forge. ”

“ Mr. John H. Forge, my father, will wreck his displeasure on me, his son. Oh, God, we didn’t mean to do it, God,—that is, we meant to do it but didn’t mean to get caught. Therefore shield and protect us in Thy infinite mercy, oh, God, and turn not Thine ear from us—Thine ear from us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Amen!”
Nathan turned quickly, anxiously.
“Did I say enough?” he demanded. “I suppose I might have laid it on stronger.” ”

“ Declaration of war on April 6 was only a matter of dénouement.
When Madelaine came home for the spring vacation, she was hardly in a mood, with the swift and ominous trend of world events moving about her, to consider any advances of a marital tenor from Gordon or any other man. Then one night in late February it came to her how short the space can really be between a blind exasperation and intolerance of anything threatening a fierce desire for complete independence, and a frantic heart-cry after reliance on a man’s strength, the most tender and intimate dependence life had to offer her. ”

“ Nathan laid his pipe aside and sat with his big talon claws at his right temple to hide the emotions playing over his face. As he seemed disposed to silence, Madelaine continued:
“It’s almost too much to understand, dear boy—how you’ve stood out true to yourself and your ideals against such a background. Most boys would have succumbed. But you kept the faith with yourself. That was glorious. Such a constancy makes me want to sing. There are so few who keep the faith and go on, plow on—fight on!—through everything!” ”

“ HILL TOPS I Their baby was born the following August.
The day of its arrival, Nathan paced the cool, impersonal corridors of the maternity hospital like an animal crazed, obsessed with the necessity of getting relief by tearing something.
He had often smiled over the acclaimed nervousness and general distress of certain young fathers, awaiting the arrival of their first-born. He was not smiling now. Suppose the child should cost Madelaine her life? What youngster could ever compensate for the Woman Beautiful who from the first had made matrimony almost an idealist’s dream? ”

“ The provincials are only those who hide in the backwaters, content to stay in the backwaters, to remain in their tracks, to be satisfied with little, inconsequential things, to see no reason for changing their standards. And I’m not!”
Torn and mangled of spirit as he was that night, emaciated with the great hunger of brain and heart for a birthright of sane, constructive, inspiring, encouraging, understanding parenthood which had been denied him, Nathan fought out his problem, step by step, for himself, and in the recesses of his own soul looked for the way, the truth and the light. ”

“ Save them for the dark hours, the melancholy twilights, the haunting midnights. Sleep with them beneath your pillow and take them out in dreams and say: I am cursed by my father! I am a son outside the pale! I have desecrated God. I have damned my soul!
Your cable and its unnatural message cuts the last ties binding me to the past. Henceforth I go alone, a wanderer on the face of the earth, the cup of happiness dashed from my lips, life an inferno of What-Might-Have-Been—made so by the boy whom I gave the breath of life and who now brings down my gray hairs in sorrow to the grave. ”

“ Somewhere down the street piano keys were tinkling and the rich tenor of a man’s voice was softened by the distance.
Madelaine was thinking of Bernie’s problem. Yet not altogether. She was also thinking of her own. Life was coming to her now as a responsibility. She owed much to her mother, far more to the world that had been so good to her, and the poor, perplexed, fog-groping men and women—especially young men and women—in it. What should be her life work? How should she try to repay that debt mounting with each passing month and year to overwhelming proportion? ”

“ Hushed Japanese night, the moon riding hazily above the rakish branches of eucalyptus now, cicadas singing on into eternity, paper lanterns bobbing far across elfin dark! They stood amid the trillion blossoms of cherry trees whose petals sifted all around them, and Nathan knew for the first time in twenty-nine barren, heart-breaking years, the sensation of a real woman’s soft arms about his neck and the sweet, scented, delicate impress of a real woman’s kiss upon his lips, returning his caress with a warmth and a tenderness that fused his heart and his soul and made them as one forever. ”

“ I am not ashamed to write why I want a divorce. The fact is, an enforced exile in a foreign land, charged with a crime which was not a crime if my position could only be understood, I have met a lady who is all which your mother never has been, is not now and never can be. Beautiful of face and form, talented, poised, brainy and cultured, I would turn over a new page in life, redeem the past and live as God intended every man should live—normally, happily, at peace with his wife and the world. ”

“ Again Nathan considered, ashen-faced, biting his nails until the blood came. Then two distraught boys, hatless, their clothing bedaubed and briar-torn, facing the most hideous dilemma thus far in their lives, knelt in the shower-washed alders. Earnestly they besought aid from the giver of every good and perfect gift.
“Oh, God,” prayed Nathan, “we have sinned—we have sinned—against heaven and against Thee. Lord, we have kissed—we have kissed—no, I have kissed—a g-g-girl—and her father, Mr. Caleb M. Gridley, who runs the tannery here in Paris—he caught us!” ”

“ Who was the one with whom he had built castles—Bernie? Carol? Mildred? Who?
“Your face glows plain in an evening star,
Ere the moon rides high and cold,
And memories tune with the summer night
On a chord that’s rare and old——” A face in a star! Whose face? He thought for a time he could almost discern. Fancy led him to invent a face which should approximate his ideal. What was his ideal woman’s face? If he were a great painter and would put on canvas the features of his Dream Girl, what manner and type of face would he paint?
The boat swayed on in the starlit dark. ”

“ I have beheld many boys. Yet never since a freshly molded clay Adam was pronounced a reasonably passable job and stood against the nearest rock to dry has one human being looked into the features of another, regardless of age, and beheld such freckles.
I once knew a boy who had thirty-one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four freckles, not counting those behind his ears or a few odd thousand remaining, sprinkled across the back of his neck. The average boy manages to worry along with eighteen or twenty thousand. But the infinity of freckles upon that new boy’s face was beyond all computation. ”

“ Sordidness! Narrowness! Bigotry! Stagnation! Dross! Chaff! Nature segregating her human waste! Nathan was not yet sufficiently enlightened to sweep them all into the same great basket and discard them from his scheme of things forever.
And this was the thing that bothered most: He knew instinctively that in certain portions of her indictment, perhaps in its very fundamentals, Bernie had been right. But where to go to overcome those deficiencies she had excoriated, how to lift himself above them, perfect himself—who was there to show him, give him his cue, point a way? ”

“ The exotic shrubbery, the great yellow moon peeping over the top of a gigantic pepper-tree, the sharp, intermittent cleek of the cicadas and other night insects singing out of tune around them, now and then the light of a pink-paper lantern bobbing along on the shafts of a distant rickshaw turned that park into a Garden of Dreams.
Madelaine was clothed in a white frock, white pumps; she carried a white parasol splashed over with quaint figures in pink. Nathan wore pongee and a Panama. They had fallen into talk about the future; what each expected to do when they reached home. ”

“ Often Nathan and I borrowed Pete Collins’ old red scow, let the current carry us dreamily down-stream in the afterglow, to work our way slowly homeward under the stars. The hills, mist-haunted, were exotic in those late evening hours. Trees in the silhouetted woods rose weird against the sky. It was not difficult to imagine ourselves back in Neolithic ages,—those trees rising out of decaying fens, with outlandish shapes wallowing in the bogs along the shore. ”

“ They passed through the big waiting room to the portico steps on the south, where a limousine throbbed softly.... And as Nathan followed into that car and the driver closed the door, the man who had always known crude and sordid things, even though he rebelled against them, had an overwhelming sense of peace. He was finding his own. A world of beautiful things awaited him, beauty and richness,—not for cheap, provincial show, not because they had to do with The Best People, but beauty for beauty’s sake because at heart he had ever been the artist. ”

“ At once into poor Nathan’s distraught brain came the experience of the New York knitting-mills management. His acknowledgment showed plainly on his bewildered face.
“Ah! I thought so!” cried Bernie exultantly. “And why did you lose that opportunity? Because you were a hick! Because you didn’t know how to act! Because you probably deported yourself before fine-grained, well-bred people the way you’ve been deporting yourself in my house to-night—like a savage who pads around naked before his family and tears his food apart with his fingers! ”

“ Carol went on:
“And we can’t see a problem in proper perspective when it’s up too close to our noses, now, can we?”
“Usually not,” agreed the boy.
“Do you know, Mr. Forge, I think we’re going to be awfully good friends. We understand each other so completely. And it’s such a relief for a girl to have a firm, true gentleman-friend to turn to—in such a vital matter as love and marriage.”
“I wish you could have read some of the stuff I’ve written,” observed Nathan. “You’d get my viewpoint exactly.”
“It must be very wonderful, Mr. Forge. You understand human nature so perfectly.” ”

“ Madelaine sprang from the divan and walked down the room. She threw up her soft, bare, beautiful arms. From her throat came a cry.
“Yes, I’m different—different!—different because romance has never come to me as it has come to other girls—sweet, wild romance that would make me love a man so deeply and fiercely I’d follow him over the world and live with him in a hovel, to be close beside him!—love him so that he would beat me, if you please, and I could suffer it—because I loved him! Oh, Gordon! Gordon! You may win, after all, for you’ve overcome the most of any man I’ve ever known. ”

“ Sometimes that search ends beautifully. Nathan was not so far wrong in his youthful poetry after all.
“Forge!” cried the woman. “Nathaniel Forge!”
“Yes,” the man answered. He never knew why she spoke his name as she did. He only knew that, gazing deep into her face, he saw the blood die out and an expression come as though she would cry aloud. He knew that she dropped the book and half-raised her arms toward him.
A man’s brain may play queer pranks in life’s Great Moments. ”