Harangue

I

It was a filthy night. The February harpy had lost her wind brats and was running wide in the avenues, railing, calling, tearing her hair; and her demented brood was brawling in the by-ways.

Empty ash-cans were overturning, rolling, bumbling, saying scandal. Gray streaks of feline terror. Sounds of grating, snapping, creaking, whamming, unholding, unfastening, all for an instant swallowed up suddenly in deep holes of stillness. An electric gong unable to stop. A female shriek, the same for murder or the loss of a hat. Then the din again.

Not a night for holding an intellectual tryst out of doors with nature. As well importune a wild jade in tantrums. Yet there at the top of Washington Square stood a tall red-bearded figure fixed in meditation. He seemed vertical without effort, a neutral fact in vorticular confusion, like the hypothetical perpendicular in chaos.

This grand absurdity was the mind’s triumph. The cold wind whipped his thin serge garments, exposed the unvoluptuous sculpture of his long, solitary legs; his thoughts were of the infinite, touching the cosmic hubbub.

He was looking back through Fifth Avenue. The commotion was no part of that view, or the least part; he was hardly aware of it. As before so many times, now again, having descended upon this spot in a certain way and turning to look back he had almost seized that simple, astonishing word-image which was to reveal a metaphysical truth to the senses. He was repeating, like an invocation, this formula: Idea the only reality. Idea is without substance. Therefore substance is unreal.

For the high jargon of metaphysics he had thoughts of deep scorn. Incanting it he hated it. He hated word-images, too. So much silly use had been made of them. Alas! access to truth had immemorially been by fatuous means, bubbles and toys, superstitions and tricks. That was not his fault. None the less it was stultifying, like having to woo one’s goddess in the guise of a clown.

Others before him had resolved the nature of reality. The difficulty was that nobody could prove it. Appearances were apparitional. Things were illusions. It-ness, this-ness and that-ness among things, all signs of identity, were illusory, proceeding from contrast, and contrast was the basic illusion, since no form or aspect of phenomenal existence could be other than a movement of one infinite idea. Existence was a limitation. Infinity was limitless. Ergo, infinity, although it was, did not exists; and the finite symbol for reality was 0.

This was apprehensible to the intellect. Quite. But the opposite of it also was apprehensible, or any pontifical nonsense. The intellect, as he had written, was more gullible than the senses, mainly intent upon deducing by logic what the emotional self had wished beforehand to believe in a mystical manner.

What he had undertaken to do with this truth was to bring it down to the senses, prove it like a physical fact, like relativity. To his own senses first. He himself must be able to apprehend it in that original way. Did not Einstein see relativity as Newton saw gravity, first with the eyes?

Almost he could see it. He had only to establish one vital contact of the illusion that was substance with the reality that was idea, by means of an image—a word-image known to the senses—and the doors of understanding would burst, just as bringing negative and positive together from the two poles of matter had flooded the world with electric power.

Becoming of a sudden conscious that he was consciously thinking he adopted the method of the despised word-imagists, who consciously think of nothing in order that something may unconsciously think of itself. But nothing did think of itself. Then he began to trample and bully his mind; the more he did that the worse it behaved, until he, Angus Phlyn Fitzjerald, searching the universe for its simplest image and the February harpy seeking her brats were both in one frenzy, the same and equal, two movements of one infinitely extravagant idea, non-existent.

Now idea in the aspect of some hard, foreign substance entered his right eye. Another in the aspect of an alley cat walked through his legs in the figure eight.

With a Greek oath for its satisfying sound he took up his way, which lay diagonally across the Square; he walked as one who well knew the neighborhood, looking at nothing. Turning into Jones street he did not see the idea that passed, hesitated, then turned and made after him to ask a question. Physical irritation, above the displeasure he had taken against his mind, made him blind and politely ferocious. The wind had become offensive in a personal manner.

A little girl with a long loaf of bread held babywise in her arms was running before it with her head down. He did not see her either. Suddenly she veered to miss a barrel of kindling wood that stood on the sidewalk above a fuel vendor’s cellar. It went over, spilling, just in front of her. She was agile and should have got round it safely. What wrecked her was a loop of twine that slipped itself from one of the kindling bundles and lassoed her feet.

Fitzjerald and the man wishing to accost him were coming against the wind, walking rapidly in the middle of the street. They were almost abreast as the girl fell headlong, casting the loaf of bread. Her body tripped Fitzjerald, his legs tripped the other man, and they all went down in a heap.

Fitzjerald was the first to rise. He lifted the child and tried her on her feet. Seeing she was unhurt he left her standing and picked up the bread. As she took it from him she looked at the other man. He was bent over, brushing himself angrily with a pocket broom. Then she looked up at the taller man with a scowl that changed slowly to a friendly grin. He neither spoke nor smiled, but gave her knitted cap a tug, as he might have thought either to straighten it or to settle it tighter, then turned her by the shoulders until she was true on the wind again and let her go. As he came about on his own course the other man stood facing him.

“Is this the only Jones street in New York?” he asked.

“Isn’t one enough?” Fitzjerald answered and went straight on. He uttered the words with a rumbling growl. That was his natural voice. But his manner was offensive, and all the more for being oblique and impersonal. The smaller man, at first astonished, reacted with resentment. He quickened his steps to catch up, twisted his body around and tilted his face at Fitzjerald. His chin was thrust out, both hands were clenched, one still holding the pocket broom, which he had forgotten; and he spoke through his teeth.

“As one species to another,” he said, “it was a civil question.”

Fitzjerald suddenly regarded him with interest.

“Civility,” he said, “is an attribute of the species ass.”

His manner, although more offensive than before, had changed. For as they looked at each other a Celtic sign appeared between them. Extremely unlike as types, and by reason of that unlikeness mortally antagonistic, still both were Irish and therefore related in a manner too subtle for non-Celtic understanding. Further offence, if any, would be personal and so intended. That was the difference. And this was a kind of recognition that gave the smaller man a sense of satisfaction.

“It was a civil question,” he repeated.

“Your mother was a dogged woman,” said Fitzjerald.

“A civil question,” said the other.

“It had that grand merit,” said Fitzjerald. “What then?”

“Is it?”

“It’s the only Jones street I ever heard of.”

They were still walking, never having paused at all. The smaller man put his little broom away, saying: “There’s some mistake. I must have both the street and the number wrong.”

“I suggest you have the city wrong,” said Fitzjerald.

This mocking the other ignored, saying aloud to himself: “Jones street, thirteen-and-a-half. Quite plain.”

“We’re just at it,” said Fitzjerald, with a slight increase of interest. “The name there,” he added, “is Saint-Leon.”

“Miss, is it? Miss Jael Saint-Leon?”

“Perfect.”

“Isn’t she supposed to be very rich?”

“I’ve known it to be alleged,” said red beard.

“Why does she live in a street like this?”

“Maybe because it’s the only Jones street there is. I’ll ask her.”

On that, Fitzjerald turned abruptly, crossed the sidewalk and mounted seven stone steps to the doof of a very old Dutch-built house of which three together, all originally alike, had survived in the block. The one to the right of it was let to a junk dealer who used it as it was. The one to the left, on the corner, had been made over on the ground level with plate glass windows and a chamfered front entrance painted red and blue, to an apothecary’s taste. Opposite was a five-story walk-up tenement with the fire-escapes in front, now presenting a much less untidy appearance than usual because such of the lares and penates as the wind had not run off with had been snatched inside. On one side of the tenement was an abandoned livery stable and on the other a Board of Health dispensary.

You could not have passed No. 131/2 without noticing that the door and window frames were painted, that the steps were clean and that the brass knobs on the hand railing were not missing. It was not otherwise distinguished, unless by having curtains at the three second-story windows. The lower windows were bare.

Fitzjerald entered this house without knocking. The pugnacious reality followed him in and closed the door behind them.

The hallway was scarcely more than a vestibule, twice the width of the staircase that took off abruptly. The floor was bare and much walked over, but the stairway, clean and white, had a rich carpet tread and the railing was of polished dark wood. At the right was a door bearing a cardboard sign:

Joining
Turning
Carving
Odd Handicrafts
WALK IN

That would account for the fact that the lower windows were uncurtained. The first floor was a workshop. Beyond this door, against the wall, were two wooden effigies, Dutch sailors, three-quarters life size, such as once were a variation upon the tobacconist’s wooden Indian sign. From their weathered appearance it was evident they were true trophies of that time and manner. Here they served as coat holders. Men’s coats were hanging on their arms, and men’s hats sat carelessly upon their heads. Against the other wall, hanging free by a chain from the ceiling, was a fire gong such as one may see in small villages—a steel band five feet in diameter, weighing at least an eighth of a ton; and hanging by a chain to the wall was a small machine hammer to beat it with.

The only light was from a brass ship’s lantern swinging high over the first step of the stairway. From above came the sound of men and women’s voices mingling—cultivated voices.

Fitzjerald stood for a moment before the wooden sailors; as there was no place left for his coat he threw it over the banister and started up, thereby pointedly casting off what he had let in after him.

“My name is Capuchin,” the man announced. He said it reliantly and with an air of not being magnanimous. It was evident he expected his name to be recognized; also that he expected the tall, superior person to be surprised at the sound of it and a little embarrassed, as one who has behaved badly in a chance encounter with a body who turns out to be of some importance. Fitzjerald did recognize the name; it had been running in newspaper headlines for several months. But he neither paused nor spoke. From the top of the staircase he glanced down, Mr. Capuchin was brushing himself again.

II

In the room Fitzjerald entered on the second floor were three women and five men, all but one seated in various postures at a long refectory table of beautiful medieval design, reproduced by craftsmen in the shop below. The linen upon it was craft woven. The candles that lighted it were in iron holders, hand wrought. Around it instead of chairs were benches of the same design, each one long enough for two to be seated.

At the head of the board, sideways to it, was Jael Saint-Leon. She had finished eating and was smoking a cigarette through a long blue tube held in a clenched hand. Her elbow rested on the table and her forearm was rigidly vertical; when she thought of the cigarette she moved her head to reach it. Otherwise than in this arm her body seemed quite relaxed. She was gazing idly through her smoke at the second figure on her right.

That was a spherical little man with small features in a large face and an immense head perfectly bald. He was eating and had no perception of lesser things. His face hung low over his plate and he made murmuring, cajoling sounds to his food, as if it were alive. Dr. Rabba, writer of histories. He had written scores of them—histories of the world, of religion, of races, of science, and lately in ten volumes a history of history—all perfectly sound and empty. He was a prodigious hack containing millions of facts. He had no fame at all on the literary plane. One of his several pseudonyms was better known than his own name. His recreation was a passionate interest in talk of revolution. He was useful in this company as a selfreciting encyclopedia, and was neglected as all encyclopedias are. To the conversation he had nothing but historical facts to contribute; and as everyone had learned not to start that torrent and as he was too shy to break it unasked, his rôle was that of listener, which was very agreeable, for very often the talk was about revolution.

He had, however, one amusing office. When the mysterious power had been present that did sometimes lift them high above their cynicism, their boredom, their sophisticated despair, their weariness of facts, and when the human instrument of this power, usually a visitor, had revealed a vision of perfectible man living in a perfect state, a state of nature perhaps, delivered from his wicked institutions, there came after the climax always an embarrassing moment. There was no curtain; no way of theatrical exit. There they sat staring helplessly at one another. Then it was Dr. Rabba who let them down. They would hear him saying in gentle voice, the same in which he addressed his food: “Massacre! Massacre! A little blood. It is ugly. It is soon over. They are not so many after all. You laugh. It is history. I know.”

A moment later he, too, would laugh and look around with merry eyes.

Beyond Dr. Rabba sat Dwind, a socialist teacher of economics in the Lothian College of Social Science, which Jael Saint-Leon supported. His eyelids were thin but very tired and he lifted his head to see. The wonder was that a person so anaemic could think so fiercely. He had written many books and was the leading exponent of the doctrine in the country. He talked little, and made always an irritated sound. He appeared to be the only one listening to Grinling, opposite, who was saying there was no such thing as true American liberalism.

Grinling was a Harvard man, under thirty-five, who toyed with the heroic notion of disrecommending his country by cutting himself off from it. Meanwhile, holding that chastisement in reserve, he acted as associate editor of a weekly journal of radical opinion. He was a brilliant writer.

At the end of the table, aloof, was a young man with much upright hair named Semicorn. He had been lumberjack, hobo, editor of an I. W. W. newspaper in Seattle. Having served a term in the Federal prison at Leavenworth for seditious utterances in war time, he came to New York and appeared at the Lothian College. To his surprise he was seized to the heart of a distinguished group of people who thought it monstrous in principle that one should be punished for any political utterance whatever, and had organized a society, with funds, offices, counsel, agents and publicity experts, for the jealous protection of free speech. Among them was a banker who undertook to see that the young man Semicorn, their instance and hero, should want for nothing. He was serious, a little timid among high foreheads, and awed by the company in which he flourished, perhaps because he could not talk without getting red and losing his grammar. But he made his patrons almost as uneasy as they made him.

The fifth man, the only one not at the board, was De Grouse, second son of a banker by an ancient line. It was supposed that in him the family talent had failed. At least it was that he turned contemptuously from the money trade and preferred the life of a literary artist. He evolved an obscure, precious manner of writing and found some vogue for it in magazines of that taste. He was musical, and wrote at first about music, then about literature and at length about life. His judgments, embossed, cold, intricately strange, were all alike because his interest was not in the thing but in his own sensations about it. He was content to have turned out to be a rosy, waxy, abdominal man, still young. He was at this moment reclining backward on a couch, his short legs crossed, one hand in his trousers pocket, the other, because of the ring, lying palm down and a little spread at his side. Dividing him at the equator was a fine gold chain.

The two women, besides Jael, were near her at the head of the table. The one on her right, her secretary and constant companion, was Miss Lillibridge.

Fitzjerald once asked Jael in the hearing of a large company, including the object of his remark, why out of all the world she had taken to be her henchwoman a person so alarmingly distractive.

Jael answered, “Yes, isn’t she pretty. She is my hair shirt.”

Miss Lillibridge was perfectly oblivious. Everyone else was embarrassed and Fitzjerald was deeply sorry, for they all knew what Jael meant. Her satellite had everything that she had not.

The other woman was a Russian, a refugee, princess somebody, whose name no one could pronounce or spell twice the same way. The remedy was to call her Madame, with a strong French accent, and that did very well. She was tall, very thin and spoke only in a fever of excitement, no matter what the subject was. She had come to her English roundabout, through German and French, and made the sound “zee” for “th” incurably. Voluble, yet she might be silent through an entire evening, merely turning her hot black eyes quickly from one speaker to another, maybe not listening at all, just gazing. Her experiences had been melodramatic, some in her imagination and some really. She got them mixed up. She had faced a firing squad. If she forgot to say she had been shot and left there for dead and was reminded of the omission by one who had heard it before she would say, “Oh, yes; zat ozer time,” and go right on. She had killed a man. She got part way out of Russia on a troop train, riding with the soldiers, and walked the rest of it. Many times she had slept in the trenches. Having somehow some money, she kept a very nice apartment up-town. It was never locked for fear some wandering Russian, especially one drunk, might be unable to get in. Sometimes in the morning there would be ten or twelve on the floor, very comfortable. The janitor was scandalized and told the landlord; even the police were interested. But they had all been made to understand zat zese were her children. Besides, what else could zey do?

III

“Welcome, Angus,” Jael called, seeing Fitzjerald’s form filling the door way. “We are a small lot tonight. Low in our minds. Disagreeably inclined. Come, tell us a new thing.”

Fitzjerald saluted by lifting her hand as if to kiss it, which he did not do. It was a gesture only, but invariably he greeted her in that way. In speech he was rude to her, more so than anyone else, but in manner he was old-fashioned and courtly, and although she pretended to be mildly amused, really she liked it.

Everyone treated her with certain marks of respect, especially Dwind, who got a nice salary at the Lothian College, and Dr. Rabba, who lectured there; but the convention of conduct here was bad manners.

From the couch De Grouse shouted cheerily and Grinling said hello. Fitzjerald did not respond. It was not expected. Nothing was expected.

Having made his little ceremony with Jael he said, “Hello, Lillibridge,” “Good-evening, Madame,” and passed around to a row of copper pots on a warming table against the far wall. At the end of the warming table was another with plates, silver and so forth. Each guest helped himself to food, of which there was a great abundance, excellent, always ready. A man that might be called a butler, wearing a sack suit, appeared from time to time bringing water and pieces of linen or to remove what was no longer wanted.

Fitzjerald helped himself generously, brought his plate to the table, and sat between Grinling and Madame.

“No new thing, Jael,” he said, speaking for the first time. “I’ll ask you a question. Someone asked it of me. Why do you live in Jones street?—here?—like this?”

Jael regarded him thoughtfully.

“Well, Mr. Father Confessor,” she said, “why do I?”

“I’m serious,” he said.

“So am I,” she said. “That’s it. I might have answered you lightly. Why do you live as you do?”

She knew how Fitzjerald lived. So did the others know. He lived, as anyone would say, wretchedly, in a square hole at the end of a furrier’s loft, with a portable oil stove, three sticks of furniture, a bowl of ink and some books on the floor.

“Fair,” he said. “I happen to know. The main thing is to express my contempt as I please.”

“Contempt of what?” Jael asked.

“Of many absurdities. Of everything I am not and have not got. People. Wealth. The strut of success. Vulgar taste. The triumph of mediocrity. The whole human scene as God left it. And that is what—”

He was stopped by a clangor that jarred the dishes, hurt the teeth, smote the eyes, and died slowly away in waves of appalling reverberation. Madame screamed and covered her face.

“Praise be!” said Jael. “Somebody at last has hit my gong in a regular way. I never could.”

Miss Lillibridge got up to see.

Fitzjerald called after her: “Oh, Lillibridge, I forgot. He wants a whisk broom. I see one right there. Throw it at him, please. He fell down in the dust.”

“A friend of yours?” Jael asked.

“No. We only arrived at the same moment.”

Miss Lillibridge, standing in the upper hall at the top of the staircase, threw the broom down and said, “Come up.” With that she returned to her seat.

“Who is it?” Jael asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “A stranger.”

There was a clumsy silence. The only audible sound was a bubbling in one of the copper pots. Fitzjerald did not go on with his speech because it would be interrupted by the stir of an arrival, and for the same reason no one else spoke. One, two, three minutes passed. Everyone began to listen for the footfall that came not on the stairway. Fitzjerald of course knew why. That is, he had guessed correctly that it would take Mr. Capuchin some time to decide how to behave in the circumstances. First a long wait in the hallway, very injurious to his self-esteem, and then, after his unbalanced attack upon the gong, a whisk broom at his head.

Fitzjerald was thinking to himself: “Man with a tic in his brain—Always brushing himself—Symbolic unconscious gesture—Something he wishes he didn’t know about himself—Something he wants to be rid of—The broom—Won’t know what to make of it.”

Then Jael herself rose and moved toward the door. As she did so Capuchin was heard ascending. They met, and he handed her a letter, not in an envelope, at the same time pronouncing his name.

“Oh,” she said, first shaking hands with him and then glancing at the letter. “You move quickly. I heard only this afternoon that you were starting for New York, and here you are.”

She had brought him in.

“These are all nice people,” she said, waving her smoking blue tube at them. “They have nice names, but you would forget them at once. Only Miss Lillibridge. You won’t forget hers. This is she. You may sit between us. Here. We shall want to talk. Help yourself from the pots. Everything’s there. We are all self-serving.”

Pointing him to the copper pots, she sat down, vaguely smiling. “It’s Mr. Capuchin,” she said, and then turned to Fitzjerald.

“Yes, Angus. Contempt of the whole human scene as God left it. And that was what—there you stopped. What was what?”

“What all of us are doing,” he said.

“You mean I live in Jones street to be contemptuous?”

“Are you serious or being feminine?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but go on.”

“Envy and contempt,” he said, going on. “They translate in human conduct thus: Envy, ‘I am as good as.’ Contempt, ‘I am better than.’ These are the two fundamental forms of the social animal’s self-assertion; and which it shall be in the specific case, one or the other, is a matter of how one was born or what one was born with. Every imaginable way with this conflict has been tried. In the east it appeared to have been settled by a caste system, as among the Hindus, inferiors, betters and superiors stratefied by superstition and taboo on rigid lines supposed to be ordained in nature. But there you see it is breaking out again. In what we call democratic—”

He was interrupted by sounds from De Grouse and Grinling. “Civilization again,” one of them groaned. “Spare its old bones!”

Capuchin, who had taken his place at the board between Jael and Miss Lillibridge, moved his head sideways, glancing right and left, as one who, wishing to get into a shindy, casts around for a handy weapon. He thought they were going to put Fitzjerald down, ridicule him, trample on him, and he should have a chance to get in on it. But nothing came of it. The interruption was ironic and despairing. There was no one could talk against Fitzjerald. He would go on until he wished to stop. His voice came from deep roaring pouches, with an effortless booming.

So Capuchin returned to the contemplation of himself. He had got a dinner coat and wore it badly. He kept looking at the front of himself, shooting his cuffs, shooting them too far and getting them back with a wriggling movement. His dress was a mistake. Fitzjerald wore a blue cotton shirt; Grinling a soft flannel one. They made some point of carelessness in dress. The only one who had any style about him was De Grouse. His attire was fancy, not formal.

“—In what we call democratic civilization,” Fitzjerald continued, “nothing is fixed. No status can be fixed. The as-gooders of course have the great majority. To their number is added political power. The I-am-betters are hard put to it. In the last resort they become ludicrous. I think I am better than money changers, shop keepers, meat packers, superior to the great cult Rotarian. I know I am better than a coal digger. But if these others, I mean the money changers, shop keepers, meat packers, Rotarians, press me hard—and they are always coming up—if they begin to know too many things as I know them and to prate my language, then I am obliged to go and live near or among coal diggers in order to keep my contrast clear. To conceal from myself what I am doing I am very likely to ally myself with them against the cult Rotarian, whom they envy and of whom I am contemptuous. I become their champion. I talk of up-lifting them. Deity stuff. I am much more likely to fool myself than to fool them. I am not a coal digger. But I may start a revolution.”

He paused.

“Bring it back to Jones street,” Jael suggested.

“In a very prosperous state of democratic civilization,” Fitzjerald continued, “the competition becomes abominable. Anybody can get rich. The most impossible persons do. Therefore wealth, which has hitherto conferred the high-caste mark, ceases to have any aristocratic value. The I-am-betters who relied upon it are pressed from two sides. On one side the as-gooders competing with them successfully in display. On the other side those, like myself, who, having declined the competition, hold all wealth in disdain. I, sitting in my cave, exchanging now and then a precious bauble, intrinsically worthless, for the means with which to fill my belly and hide my back—I hold myself high among the I-am-betters.

“But they crowd us hard—the as-gooders. They run after culture and seize it even faster than we can discard it. Why is it the thing, if you are rich, to behave as if you were not? the thing, if you have manners, to get rid of them? the thing, if you have style of dress, to put it off? the thing if you have classical taste in art, to pretend to despise it and prefer instead the grotesques of ancient Africa, jazz, ugliness, anything different? Why? Because so many are rich. A fine house is nothing. Display is cheap. The new rich learn very soon how to buy polish, mental furniture and snobbery, as they buy motor cars or other merchandise. Standard culture is made compulsory. Children get soused in it at the public schools, where they learn polite manners, good English, the outlines of science, the latest dialect of art. From there they go in shoals to the universities, which become culture factories, producing it by mass methods, efficiently. There is irony in it. What shall these children do with what has been bought for them? Are they content to go on with the useful work of their fathers? They are much more likely to cultivate the contemptuous pose, pressing me again. De Grouse—I’m never sure about De Grouse, whether he is an artist, born such, or merely unreconciled to a second sonship in a dynasty of great wealth. Give him the benefit. But take Grinling. What was bought for him at Harvard makes him ashamed of the fact that his father got rich in the garment trade. You see what he does. He turns radical and writes disparagingly of wealth.”

Neither De Grouse nor Grinling seemed to mind. It was all within the code. Unlimited speech was their idolatry; they had the fervor of flagellents for it. Personalities no matter how extreme were inoffensive provided only they had a political bearing. If one wished to call another a liar or a scoundrel, he did it obliquely, by presenting the other to himself as a social product of that type.

“Is it proved,” Jael asked, “that I am living with coal diggers for contrast?”

“You are,” said Fitzjerald. “Rich women in fine houses with soft hands and nothing to do are very common. You would be horribly bored. Besides, there could be no distinction in it. So what? You establish yourself in this old house, in this dirty street, to cultivate the handicrafts and work with your own hands. They are callous from contact with refractory materials.”

Capuchin looked at Jael’s hands. They were as Fitzjerald represented. Thick, applicable hands, with primitive knowledge in them.

IV

No one had noticed that the young man Semicorn in the dimness at the far end of the table had come to his feet, nor was anyone prepared for his flaming forth as he was about to do.

“Th’ only word you said that ain’t smoose,” he began, pointing at Fitzjerald, “is you could’n’ fool anybody. You’re different than other finks like toads is different than snakes. They ain’t no excuse for you. You don’t even want what that is we’re fighting for ‘n’ you don’t know. My father, he was a coal digger ‘n’ I ain’t ashamed. Maybe I’m ashamed he was a scissorbill, only he didn’ know any better. No, sir, you couldn’ fool anybody.”

His words were very distinct, his voice was clear and hot, but in his excitement he fell back upon the rooty lingual formations in which he was fluent, the vernacular of his nativity, enriched from the dictionaries of the hobo, the lumberjack, the I. W. W. zealot. A curious kind of tongue, not pure in its crudity, but unstable and changing from an overlay of acquired grammar.

“I knew a gyppo like you,” he continued. “He was a Cockney clocker with a high lead outfit in Montana. We was riggers up ‘n’ gandy dancers. He’d be reading books ‘n’ throwing the bull he was for us, but when as we asked him to stamp in he in and turned us up to th’ bull-whacker, who was a fink, too, ‘n’ then th’ boss slapped us on th’ behind with our pay checks. You’d have society be like it is, wage slaves, scissorbills, bosses, pie in th’ sky ‘n’ capitaliss just an so you could feel better than somebody. You ain’t no better than a coal digger but for th’ way you can talk. It ain’t what you know. Why shouldn’ their chilern be educated? What’s anybody got they ain’t entitled to? Their ain’t no betters, people being born all equal and same. What makes them different is th’ wage system. Nobody’s pulling that stuff on me. I ain’t fooled with th’ dehorn talk I hear around here. I might have met some nice people who can’t help being what they are, any more’n my father could. What do they know about free speech, hiring somebody to set in th’ office ‘n’ write letters to th’ papers? Nothing. We fight for it. I been in jail for it. Two hundred of us who could get there was at a convention last week in Chicago ‘n’ we counted a hundred ‘n’ eighty’d been in jail for free speech. We don’t care what th’ brass check papers say. Th’ labor papers, they called us a bummery convention. We’ll make them eat that off th’ ground yet. You’re wrong about why the rich act like they wasn’t rich ‘n’ take some of us on their lap. They’re scared. They know we’ve got th’ idea to break empires ‘n’ scatter kingdoms like they was dust, abolish the wage system, make th’ bosses go to work. Put us in jail! We’ll fill all th’ jails they got. Show me anybody here’s been in jail for what they believed.”

Through all this wild speech Jael gazed attentively at the young man. Her face was impassive. When he had stopped Fitzjerald boomed:

“My God! What a lot I don’t know about this language, and it’s my trade. What is a fink, Semicorn, and a scissorbill?”

His manner was easy, familiar, conversational. Semicorn was instantly dehorned; and sank in a state of sullen embarrassment. He could not think how to answer the question. To define his words would deflate their importance, make them silly. Unable to think of anything right to say, he sat there shifting his eyes, trying not to look at anyone or be looked at. In spite of himself he was obliged to look at Capuchin. Everyone else was looking at him. He had been leaning further and further toward the young man until he lay lengthwise along the edge of the table in front of Miss Lillibridge, apparently very anxious to fix Semicorn’s eye.

“I didn’t get your name,” he said.

“Semicorn.”

The young man’s voice was defiant and suspicious. He was not sure of Capuchin, whose expression when he became excited was extraordinary. His jaws locked, his chin came forward, and his lips Contorting to finish his syllables in front of his teeth made him appear to be either grinning or grimacing. His teeth were gleaming white. He never used tobacco. His eyes, with a glint of light running in them, were as inscrutable as a black fluid. Now he extended his hand. In doing so he edged further along the table. A glass was overturned; mechanically he set it right again. The young man slowly extended his hand.

“Mr. Semicorn. Yes, of course. One of the men they sent to Leavenworth. I’m glad to meet you. I merely wanted to say, Mr. Semicorn, if you will come with me to New Freedom—I’m going back tomorrow—I’ll put you somewhere. We need young men like yourself. Would you care to be editor of our state paper? A chain of papers perhaps. I’ll put you anywhere you say. Think it over. That’s all, Mr. Semicorn.”

He got back to his place on the bench beside Miss Lillibridge without seeing her at all, though he had been lying almost across her lap.

“And I’ll tell you what a fink is, Mr. Fitzjerald,” he said, setting his face that way. “We named the animal. The fink’s conscience is like one of those cute cardboard things you use to send coins by mail, with holes cut in it to fit quarters, dimes and nickels. His principles are the holes. He would take a raise in his pay to blow the whistle two minutes early in a factory full of ten-year-old children working twelve hours a day. He isn’t cross-eyed but he never goes where he’s looking, and he keeps his civility for his superiors. Civility, Mr. Fitzjerald, is an attribute of the species ass.”

“And a scissorbill. What’s that?” Fitzjerald asked, with deep interest.

“A scissorbill, Mr. Fitzjerald, is a man who thanks the boss for his pay check.”

Jael suspected there had been a beginning to these amenities downstairs. She was secretly diverted. Nevertheless she intervened.

“Where is this New Freedom you speak of?” she asked. “May anybody go?”

“You haven’t seen the evening papers, then,” said Capuchin.

“I’m afraid we don’t read the newspapers very regularly,” said Jael.

“Above it,” he commented, speaking audibly to himself as on this new idea. Such a thing as intelligent people not reading the newspapers had never occurred to him.

“Maybe you haven’t heard much about the Freemen’s League,” he said.

“Indeed, we have, though,” said Jael. “We’ve followed it with joy. How you turned everything upside down, elected your own governor, your own legislature, your own judges, when nobody thought it was possible, and then rewrote the constitution as the people wished. We haven’t seen that yet—the constitution, I mean. We’re looking for it.”

“To look is to see,” said Capuchin. “Here it is—copies of it. I brought them with me.”

He pulled a large quantity of printed matter from his pocket and passed it around, getting up to serve the inert De Grouse, but overlooking Lillibridge as if she were non-existent. “There’s a paragraph in it,” he was saying, “purposely a little obscure, which was to give the governor power to change the name of the state by proclamation. That was one of the ideas I couldn’t talk much about. I go by psychology in these matters. Sounds are important. People can’t see their ideas. Seeing, as somebody says, is the most imperfect of the senses. Hearing came first. That may be. They have to hear their ideas. A sound—you must give your people a sound. Fancy the French revolution without its three sounds—liberty, equality, fraternity! But you can’t discuss these matters publicly, can you? New Freedom. The state of New Freedom. Don’t you like it? I arranged it with the governor before I left and he did it this afternoon. The people of course think they did it. They have named their own state. And the capital, too. Its name has been changed in the same way to Liberty.”

Grinling spoke.

“I’ve been commenting on your revolution,” he said. “I don’t know if you have seen any of it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Capuchin. “In the ‘New World.’ Very fair, I thought, only you—”

“I have nothing to do with ‘The New World,’” said Grinling.

“Oh, no,” said Capuchin, quickly. “I meant the—uh... it was the—uh—”

Grinling left him swinging.

“In ‘The People’s Witness,’” said Jael.

“Yes—yes,” said Capuchin.

“The news we have to go on isn’t always clear,” said Grinling. “It occurs to me—”

Capuchin interrupted. “That’s the next thing we’ve got to do. I’m boiling a kettle of water now for the reptile press. If I had the time I might sue half the newspapers in the country for libel. They keep leery little men out there all the time trying to get something on me. Their editors call me crook, traitor, irreligionist, dictator setting up a Russian form of government in their privately owned United States. They walk in my tracks. I’m registered now at a little hotel here under an assumed name because I don’t want to be bothered. I shouldn’t be surprised at all if they were sitting on the doorstep below, waiting to serenade me.” He added: “It might ruin me. Think what they would make of me in a dress suit.” He was evidently pleased with this remark, thinking that by referring thus lightly to his mistake in dress he got rid of it.

“I was thinking,” said Grinling, “you might give us an intimate outline of events from the beginning—how you got started, I mean, what your means were, and what has really happened.”

V

Capuchin needed space in front of him. He put his hands against the table to move himself back, thinking he was in a chair. But it was not a chair. Then he lifted his end of the bench and moved it back, Miss Lillibridge teetering on the other end. Reseating himself, he put his hands in his pockets, assumed a crouching attitude, and talked.

He had a gift for dramatizing the incident, a kind of unexpectedness, and a comic sense from which nothing was withheld, not even himself. Almost at once his auditors were fascinated. Owing to his habit of making his final word sounds outside of his teeth he could not talk and smile at the same time. At the humorous episodes he stopped to smile, and it was irresistible. His emotions were uncontrolled. When he spoke of little children in their taties or of a woman in childbirth, the nearest doctor forty miles across the frozen prairie and nothing for the new Freemen’s Leaguer to wear but a flour sack nightie, he wept.

Afterward—perhaps long afterward—the reflection that these figures in any political sense were irrelevant. They were bits of color splashed in. When he was moved to weep he wept naturally, as a child would, with not the slightest embarrassment and without getting his eyes red. His narrative had the form of fiction. He might have been reciting a story.

First was where.

A state twice the size of Ireland and fewer people than in one first rate city. Climate, 40 below in winter to 110 in summer. There was one very rich valley, a river flowing north. The rest of it had been bison pasture. Then came the bonanza cattle men. They turned the bison out and drifted their cows up there from Texas to graze on the public domain. The first railroad was built, with enormous grants of land as a free kiss from the Federal government. The eastern owners of the railroad, led by Jay Cooke & Company, bankers, thought of a way to turn their land into money. They advertised it to land-hungry European peasants in the best Yankee manner. Virgin soil, almost for nothing, in a land where everything else was free. Immigrants, mostly Swedes and Norwegians, came in boat loads to buy and settle upon it.

Many Americans, even the newspapers, that were not so bad then, indignantly protested. They said it was immoral to sting confiding foreigners in that manner. The land was worthless. Thereupon the railroad people did what they had not thought of doing before. They tried it. They plowed and sowed some of it experimentally. And it turned out that the land was all right.

But wickedness went only the deeper with the fact of the land being good. All the more the settlers were exploited. That was what they were for. Generally they began with too little capital. They should have known better; yet think how they were beguiled by the legends that brought them. Everyone who touched them made money. Those in the first place who sold them seed, implements, lumber, bacon and flour at wilderness prices. Then the elevator men who bought their grain, the Minneapolis and Chicago speculators who played in it afterward, the railroads that hauled it out. The man whose labor produced this wealth delivered it to his creditors in the harvest moon and faced the long, hard winter with barely enough to sustain life in a state of hibernation. His winters were terrible. You would find him, if at all, by a length of six-inch stove-pipe sticking out of a snow drift. He lived there in gloom and brooding with his wife and children, eating fried potatoes, and when Spring came he had the shape of a shad. Then he borrowed some seed, some ten per cent. money, some hope from the Lord, and did it once more. If he got a crop, which was not always, the storekeeper who kept him in pawn, the* banker, the miller, the trader and the railroad again divided it among themselves. And these people were helpless. He had been looking at it a long time without seeing it. That was because he had been occupied in another way.

“What were you doing there?” Jael asked.

He was coming to that. Running a newspaper, an anti-railroad newspaper, first of that species. It was from that angle he had been assaulting the castle of privilege. The power of the railroads was tyrannical and absolute. There was no other authority in the state to mention. They controlled the elections and what was elected; they controlled economic conditions; they suppressed public opinion by suborning the press. He did not buy the newspaper; he found it. The man who owned it was about to bequeath it to his creditors, had in fact announced that he meant to stop printing it. There was a funny episode in the taking of it. They were looking at the books, he and the owner; apparently there was only one customer who ever paid, and it wasn’t clear what that one paid for. He hadn’t even a name. He was entered as Account A, and paid $250 a month regularly.

Capuchin asked what that was.

That, the bankrupt told him, was the only thing he need not worry about. The check came every fifteenth and the people who sent it didn’t want much. An editorial maybe twice or three times a year, and they wrote it themselves. It was a gratuity from the railroad, and but for that one little stream of juice the creditors might have had the paper long before..

Drawing a pencil through Account A, Capuchin said, “I’ll take it without that,” and signed the memorandum of sale that lay on the table.

The retiring owner sat for a minute regarding him in a strange way. Then taking thought for himself he said he should like to make one slight addition to the contract. Taking it under his hand, he made a caret after George Capuchin, party of the second part, and wrote, “being of sound mind,” comma, etc. The rest he left as it was, which was merely to say that the party of the first part, in consideration of one dollar paid, having transferred title and interest, the party of the second part assumed all the liabilities. “Just in case,” he said, referring to the change he had made in the paper requiring the buyer to acknowledge his sanity; and so he signed it and pushed it back. That was the complete transaction, except that the relieved owner looked back from the doorway and said: “If you write anything against those people the check will stop and you won’t last a month.”

He made some wonder in the community, daring the lightning to strike him; but that was nothing to live on. Those who owed the paper money now laughed at the idea of paying. Somehow he lasted nearly two years. He did get an anti-railroad bill introduced in the legislature by the only free member there was in it, and that was all.

One night the paper was set up and might have issued once more if there had been anybody to print it or anything to print it on. The sheriff was strolling about the premises. Word had come from the capitol that his anti-railroad bill, splashed with a quid of tobacco, was hanging upside down on the bulletin board in the public corridor. Of a sudden it occurred to him as an original, astonishing thought that he could quit. He walked out the front door, locked the sheriff inside, threw the key in the gutter and remembered a saying that ran in his family: the tick crawls out of a dead dog’s ear.

With nothing else to do he sauntered toward the state capitol. It was the last night of the session, and there was no other diversion. The rotunda was full of people.

A delegation of farmers had come to beg for a bill that was introduced regularly at the beginning of each session and then purposely forgotten. It was a bill providing for grain elevators to be built by the state so that the farmers might store their grain in their own keeping and sell it when, as and to whom they pleased, instead of having to sell it wet on the harvest glut to the private elevator combine that docked away one-fifth of it, graded away another fifth, and paid for the remainder a take-or-be-damned price. It was never intended that the bill should pass. Its use was to be dangled before the farmers at election time.

The delegation had not been honored with a formal reception. The legislature who had thought it worth while to receive it at all met it standing in this public space. The farmer’s spokesman was arguing the matter in a weak, egotistical voice. Nobody was listening. He was very dull; besides, all that he was saying had been said many times before.

A Swede with a long white mustache kept saying, “Aay pro meest! Aay pro meest!”

A man at the edge of the crowd, getting suddenly what the Swede meant, set up the tune, “Oh, Promise Me.” There was rude and cynical laughter at that.

Then from among the members of the legislature, who were all on one side, came a loud voice, saying, “A-a-h-h, go home and slop your hogs.”

That insult was the climax. There was a moment of ominous silence. Then the legislators disappeared up the marble stairway, one leading, the others straggling. They had business above.

For a while the farmers lurched and shuffled, about, some dumbly gazing, others muttering, and then melted away.

Capuchin was next conscious of himself in the experience of having a vision.

Did they remember the story of Rousseau, father of the French revolution, walking to Vincennes? How under a tree he was struck with a vision that changed the mind of the world? The vision that man was naturally perfect and altogether good and was made wicked by his institutions? It was as sudden as that. Only, it was a very cold night, his tree was a trolley post, and there was no Vincennes.

His vision was of the utmost simplicity. Why shouldn’t these people have what they wanted? It was their state, not the railroads’ state. What they Were talking about was a way to sell the wealth produced by their own labor. Their own, not the railroads’ wealth. These legislators telling them to go borne and slop their hogs were men whom they, the people themselves, elected, always of course after they had been nominated by the railroads, the bankers, et al. All they needed was someone who could show them how to unite, declare their freedom and take possession of their own. He could do that.

Two of the farmers in that delegation named Swanson, brothers, he knew; and he returned to the capital to look for them. They were gone. He found them in the town, just as they were starting home, and he went with them.

They sat in the kitchen and talked. A kerosene lamp was both heat and light. The stove was cold and useless because the women and children had taken the lids to bed with them. It got colder and colder, and still they talked. They talked all night and the Freemen’s League was born at dawn. The enacting words were written in pencil on the pages of a child’s copy book; and they were few. The fewer the better. That was why it took so long.

It was not a political organization though it proposed to employ political means.

The subscriber pledged himself to vote only for men of any political party who were pledged to the League.

Ten or more subscribers constituted a local folkmote, autonomous, self-organizing, electing its own leader.

All the local folkmotes in a county constituted a county folkmote, also autonomous, self-organizing, choosing its own leader.

The Freeman’s League was the total organism thus built up, with its head at the capital, its body everywhere. It was authorized beforehand to use such funds as were necessary to conduct a newspaper, which, received by every member, should possess them all of the truth alike and inform them of the program.

And the whole purpose of the League was to disestablish the predatory profit makers, all private privilege, and establish instead the rights of the people.

Amen.

(Sign here.)

$2.50 payable.

Principles only. That left the program to be talked about. It should be flexible, accommodating itself to the opportunity. All the more it could contain everything the Leaguers wished—state elevators, a state flour mill, a chain of co-operative stores, a government for the people first, one that should fix reasonable prices for the things the people were obliged to buy and profitable prices for what they sold.

After breakfast they set forth. Evangels three. They had agreed to test it first on Knutson, a hard, grunting Norwegian to whom substance had been added. The more grouch the more substance. He had pigs—more pigs than words—a painted barn and money in the bank. If they could sell it to him they could sell it to anybody. They did sell it to him. It was easy. He had been one of the delegation, and had not been able to sleep for burning with anger at the insult received from the legislators. To him it was personal, for he had hogs; few of the others had. Knutson went with them to see that Steenerson signed. Evangels four. Steenerson made one difficulty. He had not the two-fifty; but he offered to give his check, dated the next fall, after harvest. They took it, and it was an idea.

They spent the day at it, and when they turned back they had twenty subscribers and nineteen postdated checks, payable after harvest. The League was launched. On its note, payable after harvest, it borrowed from Knutson enough money to buy a used Ford for traveling about.

Returning that night to the capital Capuchin’s first official deed, after finding the key he had flung in the gutter, was to write a notice and paste it in the newspaper window: “SOLD! To the Freeman’s League. George Capuchin, president.”

There had been no election of officers but someone had to be president; there had been no sale or purchase of the paper, but all the same it belonged to the League.

It was nothing to sell the idea of the League; it was easy to get post-dated checks. To get any real money, enough to keep the paper going—that was a nightmare. Nevertheless, it was managed. He advertised for torch bearers, practiced them in what they should say so that they should all say it alike, as the paper was saying it, and sent them forth to sell the League—for one-tenth of the subscription money. In ninety days there was at least one folkmote in every county, and he—rather the League—had a drawer full of post-dated checks. A few of these now and then he was able to pawn for some real money.

So much of genesis. The rest was generally though imperfectly known.

At the first political election in the spring the League had been unable to get any of its own men up on either party ticket. What it should do in that case had been planned beforehand. No Leaguer voted at all.

The boss politicians were amazed at the extent of the missing vote. They began to inquire about the League and then of course to denounce it as inimical to the peace and morals of the state. It grew all the faster.

As the post-dated checks began to turn up after harvest the banks were able to identify many of the League’s members and wickedly black-listed them as borrowers. That was persecution, and the League had made strong wine of it.

Before the autumn election came there was a folkmote in nearly every township. The weaker of the two political parties put four Leaguers on its ticket for the Legislature. They were elected in a manner to show that the Freemen’s League, if it held together, would swing the balance of power.

Then of course all the reactionary forces of the state came together in one mind to fight it. Those who belonged to the party that had admitted Leaguers to its ticket went over to stand with the other against the League; that left the League in possession of the first one’s skin, which it immediately filled.

In the next election, which was the big one, the League had its own people up for all offices. The fight was desperate.

On the side of the conservatives the most effective man was not a politician. He was a banker, Anx. Plaino, who, never having made a speech before in his life, developed suddenly a remarkable gift of simple exposition. He was dangerous for two reasons. It was not only that he could argue for Satan too plausibly; his bank had tremendous influence with rich farmers, many of whom it had built up and then corrupted into the machine of privilege. So, this person, Old Anxiety, they called him, had begun to make some very offensive speeches.

Coming to a sudden stop Capuchin smiled and looked into the faces around the table, one after the other, with an air of letting them all in.

“My grandfather had asthma,” he said. “He never went near the horses, for if he did he was sure to be violently seized with it. That’s how I happened to think of the trick we played on Anx. Plaino. We waited until he was to bring off a speech a lot of us could get to. He was surprised at the size of his crowd; more perhaps at the applause he got. The Leaguers came early and sat well up front. Every man had a pocket full of horse dander. We dropped it on the floor. When we applauded the speaker we stomped our feet and raised the dust. That was the last of Mr. Plaino. He didn’t recover until long after the election. He nearly died.”

He was silent again, then passed under signs of strong emotion.

“Did you hear that on the Sunday before election they prayed for foul weather? Perhaps not. That wouldn’t be news. But they did, thinking it would keep our people away from the polls. And the prayer was answered. Two feet of snow. I doubted them myself. The first returns came from the towns and we were beaten. I thought so. Then slowly the returns from the country began to come in. They came in for three days, piling higher and higher, and the folkmotes had won. Everything! Apples and basket.”

This he seemed to be saying to himself, forgetting where he was. He was thinking of the steadfastness of his Leaguers, re-creating his own excitement, feeling again the ecstasy akin to grief of victory against great odds. Tears stood in his eyes.

“So there we are,” he said, coming to with a start. “The state of New Freedom, capital, Liberty. That’s what you asked for, wasn’t it?”

He looked at Grinling.

VI

“You must write it,” said Grinling. “Just that way. Really! You must. I undertake to find you a publisher.” He permitted himself to speak with some enthusiasm.

Fitzjerald spoke, addressing no one directly.

“There is something I miss in these wonderful matters,” he said. “I speak of it with proper humility. Something I never see. The point, in fact. What is it the people of New Fredom now are free to do that they could not have done before? Were they not always free to exercise the rights of a majority? Take the seat of authority by voting themselves there? They wanted only the will and the intelligence to do it and a man to lead them.”

“The people,” said Capuchin, “are always free to cut off the king’s head if they can.”

“‘One, two, three. The king shall headless be.’ So the mummers do it still in Bohemia on Whit-Monday,” said Fitzjerald. “Beheading the image of his thralldom is man’s most exciting activity. He begins historically with the dragon. He hunts the dragon, heroically. It is cornered in a mud hole; its head is chopped off. Still man is not free. The gods rule. One by one he cuts off the heads of the gods. No good. The king rules. Behead the king! The slayer of the king then rules. Off with his head! The proletariat is enthroned. But the proletariat has no head either to rule itself with or to be chopped off. What then? The intelligent fragment rules. Away with the head of intelligent fragment! Success rules. Cut off the head of success! Facts rule. Behead the tyrannical facts! Every kind of head has been cut off. Yet man is not free. Still he has to be ruled. Shall he free himself by cutting off his own head?”

“The world as it was and is and will be, forever, amen,” said Grinling, jeering. Loud speeches annoyed him, especially these.

“The world is fool-proof,” Fitzjerald retorted. “No one can jump off.”

Those who knew Madame had been aware for some moments that a diversion was imminent. Only Capuchin was surprised.

“Ze revolution! Where is ze revolution?” she demanded. “Mr. Grinling has been writing about your revolution and will you tell us about it, please. I listen and listen for ze revolution and I hear nozing but ze elections and ze politics and ze voting. Where is ze revolution?”

Pulling his bench back to the table, Capuchin rested his arms on it and held his hands out with a movement of squeezing a soft, round object.

“Privilege has been overturned, Mrs.—uh—” He thought he had forgotten her name, whereas he had never heard it. He gave it up and went on. “A wicked class government has been destroyed. A state exploited by the railroads, by petty lords, by absent capitalists, has been delivered to the people. The people! Do you understand? Those whose labor creates the wealth and who now for the first time have the light of the body in their eyes.”

“Ach! Zeir wealz and zeir bodies,” said Madame, scornfully. “In zeir bodies zey are swine, oh, such swine!” Her voice and gestures expressed disgust, amusement and despair, as if she had been thinking of impossible children. “But zeir souls, zey are lovely. Have you done nozing for zeir souls, Mr. Capuchin?”

“I think you are talking nonesense,” said Capuchin.

Madame frowned slightly at his rudeness and subsided, murmuring to herself, “Ze anamals! And wiz such lovely souls.”

Capuchin was on the point of addressing her again, to mollify her, thinking he had produced an ill effect, when Jael deflected him.

“Folkmote,” she said. “Have you been using the word picturesquely, or do you really call them so.”

“That’s what they are,” said Capuchin.

“I like it,” said Jael. “Where did you get it?”

“From Kropotkin,” said Fitzjerald.

The effect of his cutting in with those two words was unexpected. Capuchin rose slowly to his feet and pointed at him. He was very angry, and when he was angry pools of saliva gathered in the corners of his mouth.

“That person,” he said, “that—that—hollyhock, with no provocation but his own bad nature, has been insulting me ever since we met in the street. I can no longer endure his society.” He stood there holding his attitude, still pointing at Fitzjerald, waiting for what should happen.

“Lillibridge, embrace him,” said Jael in a shriek of delight. “Kiss him! What joy when they let their angry passions go!”

Miss Lillibridge patted him gently on the back, as she might have passed the butter, without looking.

He looked at Jael to see if she were making ridicule of him. But she was smiling at him earnestly, and said: “We quarrel like this all the time. It is our pastime. Angus says he is sorry whether he is or not and that let’s you down. More of the folkmotes. Come. What are your problems now?”

He remembered his errand. Here was a direct invitation to state it. So, although the feathers of his dignity were standing, he sat down again and addressed himself exclusively to Jael.

“Funds,” he said, bluntly. “That’s our great problem.”

And he began to explain why.

The League itself was all right. It was supported by the annual dues. Only, the post-dated check was in one way a great nuisance. They couldn’t get rid of it, for it had become a habit, an institution, peculiar to the temperament of the people. They would buy anything with a post-dated check. As the membership grew, and it was growing very fast, the League always had more postdated checks than money.

Take a matter for example. There was but one important newspaper in the state. The League’s paper was of course a League organ. They could understand how that was and that only the members read it. Well, they needed access to public opinion in general. This paper he was speaking of was a regular newspaper, with an Associated Press franchise and all, and was of course a foe of the League. But the owner was secretly in a terrible panic. He saw what was coming, and he wished to sell out. If the League owned that newspaper it would have all the press there was in the state. Think what that would mean! And the League had in its box enough post-dated checks, if only it could turn them into money, to buy the paper.

However, that was not the main thing. The crucial matter was perhaps easier to handle on the plane of finance. He did not know. He had come for advice.

The legislature was in recess during his absence. That was a precaution. When it came to sit again it would pass at once a bill authorizing the state to build six great grain elevators and a flour mill. Very good. But to build such things you had to have more than a statute. You had to have money. And the state had no money to build them with. So, the question: would it be possible to sell a bond issue in the east—bonds guaranteed principal and interest by the state of New Freedom, that was to say, by the people themselves? What could be better security for an investor?

All this about the bonds he uttered rapidly, without a pause, having rehearsed it carefully in his mind; and now he looked expectantly at Jael. How easy it would be for her to say: “How much? One, two, three millions? I’ll buy them myself.” Instead she seemed very thoughtful for a time and said: “Mr. Dwind is our economist. He knows. Dwind, do you think the state of New Freedom could sell a bond issue in the east?”

“I do not,” he said.

“Why?” asked Capuchin.

“I speak coldly,” said Dwind. “Not as I feel but as I think. In the first place, your New Freedom is experimental. In the second place, you are socialistic, putting the state into business and turning the capitalists out. Therefore, you would not find a banking house willing so much as to touch your bonds.”

Grinling said Dwind was wrong. If a banking house could not be found to act, then let the bonds be offered by the state of New Freedom, on direct advertising. He would put the influence of “The People’s Witness” behind them. All the liberal opinion in the country would rally to their support.

“Unfortunately,” said Dwind, “liberal opinion does not flourish in the pocket, least of all in the pockets of liberals.”

While they argued De Grouse came to the table and stood by Capuchin, whose face was sour.

“As I understand it, you’ve got the legislature, the governor, the bench, the whole state government, including the power to write anything you like into the constitution?”

“Right,” said Capuchin.

“And you are proposing to put the state into the elevator and milling business for the people’s benefit?”

“Right,” said Capuchin again.

“Then why not put it into the banking business for the same reason? Set up a state bank. Require all the funds of the state, the towns, the counties, the townships, the school boards, to be kept there. Then you will have a bank of your own that can cash your post-dated checks, lend money to the League, finance your elevators and mills, anything, provided of course you take care to make it legal.”

“We can make anything legal,” said Capuchin.

“In that case there is no problem about funds,” said De Grouse. “It’s perfectly simple.... I’m going, Jael.”

He waved good-night and disappeared. For several minutes no one spoke, and then—

“De Grouse is right,” said Dwind. “He would be, you know. That is, I mean finance runs in his family as an instinct. That same idea was coming to me. Credit must be an essential part of your structure, Capuchin. Let the people control their own credit. Why should they buy it from private bankers, seeing that they themselves produce the wealth on which it rests?”

“I wonder,” said Capuchin, “if we have anybody who could write such a law.”

He was still thinking how much easier it would be for Jael to buy the bonds. He had no financial understanding; therefore he was slow to get the meaning of this new idea.

“I will write it for you,” said Dwind. “I’ll be glad to do it. Great God! Here is the beginning of the end of capitalism forever. And this country, this last refuge of capitalism, was the one in which the perfect opportunity was meant to appear.”

No one had ever seen him so excited before.

Miss Lillibridge went to bed. Madame disappeared. Dr. Rabba had slipped away unnoticed. Jael, Fitzjerald and Semicorn listened while Dwind, assisted by Grinling, conducted Capuchin through a foreshortened course in finance. Dwind wrote three outline draughts of the law, the second twice as long as the first, and the third twice as long as that; then he decided he should have to go back with Capuchin to make a survey of conditions. It was important to make no mistakes.

Capuchin had one anxiety. This evidently was going to take some time. That matter of the newspaper was urgent. The owner might get over his panic or find another buyer. He stated this dilemma several times and once directly to Jael, but she let it drop.

So the destiny of New Freedom was plotted.

As they were breaking up, Semicorn put out his hand to Capuchin, saying, “I’ve accepted your offer.”

Capuchin said, “Fine!” He said it three times. He had forgotten what the offer was. Seeing this the young man said, “I mean I’m going back with you.”

“Yes, of course you are,” said Capuchin, then remembering. “If we don’t get the big newspaper we’ll find something else. We’ll need you somewhere.”

They were passing through the doorway—the men. Jael was still seated at the table.

“Oh, Angus,” she called, and Fitzjerald went back. They were alone.

“Tell me something about Kropotkin,” she said.

He was surprised.

“You know Kropotkin by heart.”

“Never mind. I’m asking you. Not what he wrote. What about him? What was his own meaning?”

“Oh, why he lived in Jones street. A glooming Russian soul. I don’t know why for sure. I never thought of taking him up in that light. I’ll do it if you say.”

“Then it isn’t the same reason in every case, is it? And you may be wrong about me?”

“Quite,” he said, wondering why she was so serious. There was a silence. He broke it. “Kropotkin was that fearful enigma of civilization—a sensitive sympathetic, who, unable to endure the sight of struggle for advantage in this silly business of existence, turns nihilist, as Kropotkin did, and meditates violence. He may be religious and afraid to blame God. Or he may in one breath deny God and propose to destroy him. In any case he must fix the blame, so he blames laws, institutions and men for the order of facts. But you never know which is innate: the sense of pity or the impulse to violence. They are related as yes and no, compulsion and inhibition, one to justify the other or one to compensate the other. God and monster both. The killer may feel also a great tenderness for life. All of which comes of thinking. Kropotkin was one of those who made plausible use of the historical method. Unable to prove what he wished to be true from the visible facts of human behaviour he selected historical facts to prove his thesis that mutual aid had been of greater importance than struggle as a principle; and when his mutual aid leagues, having delivered themselves from oppression, turned out invariably to be oppressors of others, that was merely because they forgot the principle in which he himself preferred to believe.... You are not listening.”

“No,” said Jael, “I am not. You are too long. That’s peevish, isn’t it? I’m sorry. I wanted to know only why Mr. Capuchin was so angry when you mentioned Kropotkin.”

“Vanity in its naive form,” said Fitzjerald. “He has few sources, and one of them was rudely discovered. Those of us who are sophisticated in knowledge reveal our sources because if we try to conceal them we are sure to be found out. Put one of us in a company where he knows it to be safe and he will find himself forgetting to mention his sources. I should. One who has read little will say of a book he has never seen or heard of before that he has read it, or thinks he has read it, or doesn’t remember, whereas one who has read much, and knows that everyone knows it, may easily say he has never read Shakespeare or the Bible, may even feign not to have read them, to be eccentric. It is all the same thing.”

“Angus, you can’t help being nice. Why do you hold yourself out to be disagreeable?”

“I merely hold myself out to be the ultimate radical, believing that people are as they seem. Whether they dream their dreams or make them up, invent their masks or get born with them on, it is all the same.”

They said good-night.

VII

Jael looked at the time. It was 3:30 A.M. Not late for her. She wished to think; and the proceedure was as follows:

First she built up the open fire, near it she placed a reading lamp, by the lamp a small table with smoking materials, and pulled up a deep chair. Next she tapped a cup of coffee from the urn that was still hot and brought it to the table. These movements were performed in a pattern, that is to say, absently, as from habit. Then she opened a chest that was full of current French fiction in paper jackets and lifted out an armful. The first one she looked at was “Three Who Loved.” She threw it back. The second was “The Sadist.” That went back. Then “The Remorse of Virtue.” She let it fall. The next one bore a jacket illustration of a young woman smoothing the brow of her sleeping Apache with one hand while holding a dagger in the other. She hesitated and looked at the next, whose author in the new fashion disdained titles. In place of a title was a very striking design—a woman smiling ironically into the face of an angry serpent. Deciding for that one, she threw all the rest back, slammed the lid of the chest, kicked off her shoes, and settled herself to read. When she came to again she would have the answer to what it was she had been thinking about.

It often was that as she capsized herself in this manner she remembered her father, who did the same thing in almost the same way. That was before the Freudian literature of psychology had put within reach of every owner of a mind the appropriate hinges, single or double acting, full instructions with each set, no skill required, merely the commonest household tools, so that anyone could do it.

Her father got his money in Wall street. He was not a banker, not a broker, not a speculator in the ordinary meaning of that word. A mysterious person, who worked alone and never spoke but to say buy or sell and name the quantities. David Saint-Leon. The Silent Saint. He kept an office without books; his records were in his head. He had no habits, no methods. For six months or a year he might not appear once on the tilting ground, or, if at all, only for a moment as a knight on the hill in black silhouette against the sky. If he tarried it was to act. His movements were swift, daring, always at first incomprehensible. Invariably they turned out to be disastrous for some powerful inner group of financiers with a golden cargo in transit. Always at some point they were obliged to cross the open road. There stood Saint-Leon. Before defence or reprisals could be organized he was gone with the booty.

What he did in the meantime was to read or travel. He would sit for months in his library reading Dumas, Hugo, Reade, Scott, Dickens. He had read all the fiction bound up in sets that existed in the English language. When he traveled it was in Egypt, up and down the Nile, the same path over and over, gazing at the scenery which he never saw. He knew less about Egypt than a child in its first geography.

He was a small man with an eagle head and a lifting, sardonic voice. Most people feared him at sight, probably for his eyes, which pierced what they looked at, penetrating the surface as if it did not exist, or as if he did not see it. One of his unpredictable acts was to marry a famous opera singer. She was a large, thrilling woman, not beautiful. Jael was their only child. Her father named her; it was not until long afterward that her mother by accident learned of the first Jael. By that time she was numb; and besides, the child—well, once more perhaps the man had been right in his diabolic way. The name was the only touch of Eveness the child had.

With a father like that and a mother pursuing an international career, Jael’s childhood was a superintended affair. Acquaintance with her parents progressed by intervals, with sometimes as much as a year between; and after she was three the experience of being re-introduced to them became an ordeal.

She was conscious of disappointing them, each time a little more. Her manners were all right; the reports were excellent. Her governess and tutors were enthusiastic about her merits. Nevertheless, her father wrinkled his eyes and her mother frowned and kept regarding her with an air of tragic perplexity. Then it would wear off; but then they were gone again.

She did not know what was wrong. She got the notion it was her way of greeting them. She was not exuberant; they expected more warmth. So she tried hurling herself at them. Then it was worse. Gradually she began to realize it was in her looks she disappointed them. But she was not responsible for the way she looked; she did not pick out her own things to wear.

She was twelve before she knew it was deeper than clothes. That year her mother gave her a grand party. There were thirty children. Her mother looked in on them from time to time, each time with the same expression because each time the facts were the same. It was Jael’s party; but Jael was not the center of it. She was nowhere in it. Fifteen little aspects of the male principle behaved as if she were non-existent.

This was one of the occasions, not very frequent, when both her father and mother were home at the same time. At dinner her mother was in hectic color, and from the conversation Jael understood they had been talking about her, had talked themselves into a temper, and were continuing the subject obliquely, thinking they were over her head.

“I wanted to see,” said her mother, aloud, but to herself, as one talks to an echoing thought. She must have said it already many times.

“Let her buy it, then,” said her father in his cynical voice. “Buy it. She’ll have the money. As many nice men as nice women now go around holding up their skirts.”

“Oh, you beast!” said her mother.

“Your own taste, madame,” said her father.

Presently her mother said, “Well, it can’t be laid at my door.”

“No?” said her father, feigning polite astonishment. “It came by the window, or down the chimney.”

When Jael was fourteen her mother died of a heart attack in Berlin.

Before that her father had begun to be interested in her talk, it was so droll, so serious and unexpected. After her mother’s death her father passed more time at home and saw more of her. They often talked half the evening, lingering at the dinner table. Their contacts however were mental only. He treated her as friend and equal, sometimes as one woman to another, then again as one man to another.

She was sixteen when one day he sent for her to come to his private abode. This was one wing of the house—first a very large museum room, then a library, off the library sleeping rooms for himself and man-servant.

He was in bed, propped up in pillows, smoking a strong cigar. She had not seen him for several days and did not know he was ill. She was pulling up a chair; he made her a gesture to sit on the edge of the bed.

“Jael,” he said, “you have not my nature but you have my mind. It will be your curse. But you will have also a lot of money, more than you can spend. All I suggest is that when you are through with it you will leave it free, as I leave it to you.”

He smoked a little, thoughtfully.

“There’s a silly saying,” he said, “that money will not buy happiness, as if happiness were a thing you might hope to acquire. It cannot be acquired. Nobody can give it to you. It’s a silly bauble. Ruminants are born with it. All others, if they want it, have to create it in their minds. Money is no hindrance. Only the people who haven’t any say it is and they don’t believe it.”

Then the premonition seized her.

With it came two intense emotions, one of tenderness and one of regret, both rising from a sudden appalling sense of the selfish loneliness of his life.

She fell upon him weeping, took him in her arms. Never before had she wept for anything from her heart.

He was passive for awhile. Stroking her hair he said, in a dry voice, “That’s all, Jael. Now I want to think.”

But he called to her when she was at the door.

“Don’t marry if you can help it,” he said. “If you can’t help it, marry a man with red hair and plenty of it. It is my best opinion.”

With that he took up the book from his knee and began to read. She had noticed what the book was. Fiction: “Eugene Aram.”

The next morning she was amazed that the paper made first page news of his death. Never having once thought of him in relation to the world, she had no notion how important he was.

It seemed strange that anybody else should have known him at all. But how little she knew him herself! She read eagerly all that was said about him; and although the newspapers added much to her picture of him she realized that their knowledge of him, too, was limited. His importance as news lay in the legends that had grown up about him in Wall street, legends of his daring, his success, his wizardry and the extent of his wealth. Their estimates of this seemed to her incredible, little as she could weigh such matters.

The facts were more incredible. His fortune was greater than anyone had guessed.

When the will was filed, leaving the whole of it to her to do with as she pleased, she suffered a violent collision with public opinion. Reporters beseiged the place, got into the house by subterfuge, accosted her as she went in and out, even in her own hallway, demanding her picture, and shouting always one question: what would she do with the money? There was no picture; she had never had one. This she did not say. In a moment of great exasperation when she had been unable to enter her own doorway for the mob that held it against her, she did say, to the question they shouted at her, that it was nobody’s business.

A thoughtless, natural remark. Yet it was instantly telegraphed all over the world and appeared within ten minutes under great black headlines in the afternoon papers. Then it was treated editorially.

It became the text for a brutal attack upon the character of her father. What had he done to be possessed of millions? He had never built anything; he had never thought anything. Out of his vast fortune he had contributed nothing to the aid of art, science or charity. By speculation, which was not labor, he had amassed immense wealth, only in the end to leave it to a sixteen-year-old child who, when asked what she would do with it, replied in that manner—it was nobody’s business.

Her mail was astonishing. Black Hand letters, begging letters, religious letters, form letters, one from a clipping bureau containing examples of these insulting opinions and offering to clip and send all of them for so much per hundred.

One of the cuttings enclosed was from a periodical she had never heard of before. It described her personal appearance with cruel unfeeling; and the paragraph ended: “But she has one very fetching feature—fifty millions of dollars.”

This was a blow her mind could not parry. She felt it deep in her body. All her life she had been starved. The bread of affection and the sweet of love she could do without. Her desperate hunger was for that glance of appraisal that returns and lingers. And as this hunger was never fed, the more her pride of person grew to be a fierce and jealous passion. The unanswered craving to be touched may make one untouchable.

To be suddenly confronted with an unexpected world all eyes, teeth and claws was a nightmare. But to see her person published to ridicule was agony.

Public curiousity is a busy gadfly. The clamor very soon subsided. She picked her own college, entered quietly and lived in a very modest way, attracting friends of both sexes by the qualities of her mind. Her thinking was free and hearty, and she tended naturally toward the radical process for two reasons. First, she found among rebels a kind of reckless comradeship that stopped the ache of her hunger. Secondly, radical taste in art and literature offered revenge upon the conventional standards of beauty and good-lookingness. She embraced socialism without reflecting upon its implications or the incongruity of her own relation to that doctrine. She saw only its idealism. Communism was even better.

It was not until she left college that she came to have any sense of her wealth. The income was piling up. When her bankers wished to know what to do with it, she asked them what was the safest of all investments. They said government bonds. She said, “Then put it in government bonds,” and went to live three years abroad.

She hated it. Returning, she began to look about for her college friends. They were pursuing their ideas earnestly and fanatically, some as teachers, some as writers, some as artists, some as settlement workers, some as researchers. They came to sec her. It was much pleasanter going to see them where they lived in tenements, shabby studios, lofts, community houses, for then the fact that she was rich made no difference, since they liked her as a human being.

In her Fifth avenue house it was either that they were strange or she was ashamed. She imagined they were musing adversely on her father. What had he done to possess these millions? He had never built anything; he had never thought anything. Out of his vast fortune he had contributed nothing to the support of art, science or charity.

Her secret defence of him was plausible. The world’s case was gratuitous for the simple reason that he had not spent the money. Instead he had left it to her. She was to do with it what she pleased. From this she evolved the notion that he had expected her to spend it in some honorable manner. This of course she never said to anyone but herself.

It was she who proposed to her radical friends the idea of the Lothian College of Social Science. They were to conduct it in their own way, freely; she was merely to house and support it. Her theory was that earnest thinking, however it begins, will ultimately find some truth. She didn’t care what else they taught if only they taught thinking.

When they came to make away with certain dilapidated tenements to clear a site for the building, she was appealed to on behalf of some old craftsmen who bitterly complained at being dispossessed. They could not find cheaper places: they were unable to afford more expensive ones. All old world people they were, who had brought with them nothing but the cunning of their hands and found it not very saleable. That is, they did not know how to sell it.

Among them was a solitary Bohemian coppersmith of rare skill. She sat for hours watching him draw a sheet of soft copper into any shape his imagination desired, a teapot, for instance, all in one piece without a seam, by beating the metal gently with a hammer on a curious horn, one kind of blow when he wished to thicken it and another kind when he wished to thin it. Not alone the art; the material by its color, malleability, and texture excited her fancy. She induced him to teach her.

Out of this experience grew her guild of handicrafts, which became a mild passion. She gathered up those old workmen, placed them comfortably, then opened a shop in lower Fifth avenue for the display of their things. She put a sign in the window: “Money may be exchanged for these beautiful objects.” That made them easy to sell.

The Lothian College gave her a kind of prestige she did not really like. She found herself certified among rich patrons of the masses; the best doors of that cult stood open to her.

In the full phase of a luxurious, highly competitive civilization society breaks at the top. The old rich, becoming weary of their own world, which had no divinity of caste to begin with, abandon its values to the new rich. Then two main roads lie open. One is the jazz road, with manners adapted from the underworld, short, dangerous and jolly. The other is for grave, respectable natures and leads back to a footing with the herd. It is the longer road by about twenty years, and has this further advantage that it offers many beautiful sites for noble monuments on which may be inscribed the particulars of one’s interest in his fellow man. Fame, in short. This is really the smart, exclusive road, not only because it is the more difficult but because also it is the more expensive. It is a road to the people, but not a people’s road.

Jael went about in this society for a while, exchanging amenities with it, and was amused to see anarchists, revolutionaries, violent dispraisers of wealth, partaking of its hospitality in fine houses, scornfully at ease there. Then she began to see it cynically. What: a blurred design! How involved the meaning, if any meaning it had. How much more honestly vivid the human tapestry must have been with the Scribe, the Pharisee, the Samaritan, a certain rich man, a certain poor man, Herod, Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, the Great Disturber out of Galilee, each as such!

Besides, it was tiresome. The same talk over and over, endless in monotony, endless in reason, always inconclusive. She was at that age of the mind when the thirst for certitude begins. Surely all things could be settled, one at a time. Yet nothing was ever settled, all thinking seemed a process of absurd upheaval, as if digging up the mental universe were a pastime for its own sake, with no treasure in prospect.

Jones street was in that aspect an adventure of the mind. She resolved to create there a truly radical atmosphere, free of posture, cant or conventional restraint. She did not wish to talk, only to listen. Women were not discouraged; men were preferred. Few women liked it as a matter of fact. Men did. It was comfortable, they were well fed, nothing was expected of them, any humor had its rights, and above all she stimulated them to display their powers of mind.

The more she listened the more perplexed she was. It amazed her to see two men of equal powers proceed by divine logic from the same premises to opposite conclusions. If three reasoned together there were three conclusions. If the number was four, there were four conclusions. It was so as to everything—an economic matter, a social principle, a work of art, an interpretation of historical facts. Worse, the more intellectual their reasoning was the more uncertain they were of their own conclusions. In the highest case they were not dogmatic; they would admit they might be wrong and probably were; yet starting all over again each would come inevitably to the same place as before, and hopelessly, as she saw, for each mind had a fixed direction. Reasoning did not determine the result; it was the certainty beforehand of the one result that determined the character of the reasoning. Anything could be proved; therefore nothing was proved.

For a long time she suffered the humiliation of supposing their powers were superior to hers. This was from the repetition of a disconcerting experience. There was a point at which she lost them entirely. As they ascended higher and higher on the slopes of the upper mind, she trudging breathlessly behind, suddenly they disappeared as in a mist. Then she had no idea what they were talking about. Their words made no pattern of sense. When they descended again into view, that is, to her plane of comprehension, they were a little awkward and self-conscious, like mystics fresh from a vision. She wondered if perhaps they agreed, off in the mist without her.

She was tormented by the fear that there was a rift in her mind, corresponding to what musical people mean by a hole in the ear. Total deafness to a certain tone interval.

At this time she conceived a worshipful respect for man’s gift of abstraction. Man’s power, alas! was in the movements of his mind; woman’s in the movements of her heart. Therefore she was on the wrong road. Still she was not sure.

One day, between a Cézanne and a Matisse, both notable examples of a kind of perception for which the critics had been obliged to invent a new language, she hung a hideous chromo, processed upon glass, from a Sixth avenue furniture shop, price $2.98. Two of the great art critics were in to dinner that evening. They were startled, then tentatively facetious, and very curious. They kept looking at it and she held her tongue. At length one of them asked her guardedly what she saw in it.

“I don’t see the picture,” she answered, “if that’s what you mean. I haven’t any notion what the picture is like.”

“What do you see?”

“That bit of red,” she said.

They got up and looked at it closely. “That?” one said, pointing.

“Yes,” she said.

“But it doesn’t belong there.”

“Silly,” she answered. “Now you are looking at the picture.”

She would say no more; and they were shaken. For all their patter of critical wisdom they were not sure. There was the possibility she had seen something they could not see. She had taken them in; and it occurred to her that she might have produced a similar result by standing suddenly still in Broadway and gazing hard at an imaginary elephant floating in upper space.

Again she did it with the literary critics. They were surprised to find on her tables all at once a great quantity of old dime novels, of a series written entirely by one man who had recently died. His achievement, disclosed for the first time in the obituary news, was that he had written one novel a week regularly during nearly thirty years, in all about fifteen hundred. They asked her what she found in them.

“The pure line of the tale,” she said, gravely. “The story itself and nothing else. No surface, no writing, no obstructions whatever. An amazing example of the unconscious method. You know of course how the man worked. Listen!”

She read to them bits here and there, daring as she went on to choose the most banal passages, and they were deeply impressed. One borrowed some of the novels to read carefully, and then wrote a profound literary essay on her text—the pure line of the tale.

After that she was sure they never agreed in the mist and suspected, too, that they never themselves understood what they were saying as they departed from her into their heaven of intellectual obscurities. Yet always some doubt. She cherished the story of the man in the Cape Cod fishing village who, thinking to make a place for himself at the stove in the grocery store, said he heard there was a whale on the beach. It worked as he thought. One man got up and went to see. That gave him the chair he wanted. But then another got up and went to see. Neither came back. Then a third went. Presently the man who invented the whale was alone by the fire; and when he heard the crunching footsteps of people passing the door in the direction of the beach, he, too, went out in the cold to see. Maybe after all there was a whale.

Her case was somewhat different. She stood fixed in doubt about her own whale. Nevertheless, if she had been certain of its non-existence and of their absurdity, still she would have gone on with them in the same way, never letting them know. It was men she liked, not their minds. She liked their sounds, their smell, their funny ways, their quarrels, their ungrown-up demeanor when she caught sudden glimpses of them as little boys. Seeing them so she discovered how much older women are than men from the moment they are born.

There were no romantic attachments; never had been any. For this two reasons, one on each side.

The only free and natural way she had with men Was to challenge their minds. Not otherwise could she challenge them at all. What other women did she saw. She could analyze it. She understood it. As for herself, she could not manage its first most trifling gesture.

Only once had she ever tried. That was in childhood. She was seven. One rainy day as she sat in her window reading, a boy of the same age appeared in the window of the adjoining house. He was fat and wore glasses. A visitor, perhaps. She had never seen him before. He came the next day at the same hour to ogle her. The third day she expected him, and she threw him a kiss. He returned it. On this small motive she built a romance that filled the world. Every day for two weeks they gazed at each other.

Then they met in the street. She waited for him to speak. He only glanced at her and went by. She ran after him and plucked him by the sleeve. He was eating peanut brittle. For a minute he stood staring at her, with a short-sighted squint, his mouth too full of the sweet to speak, then turned and went on without a word. Ever afterward the sight of peanut brittle produced in her a tremor of dread and a sensation of reeling.

When she was eighteen she began to imagine men looked at her in a certain way and was hysterically furious. Later she learned what that was. When she was twenty objects of feminine loveliness excited extravagant emotions in her. Later she knew also what that meant, and one use of Miss Lillibridge was to remind her that no trace of it was left.

In every situation it was her mind that saved her. The mind of her one self could gaze down on her elemental other self, seeing it as a lake that was meant to be a torrent. She could see the bottom of the lake. Disagreeable things lived there, slowly groping about, eldritch, terrifying things until she conceived them to be natural creatures distorted by the view as everything under the water is; distorted also and perhaps much more by the accident of having got themselves trapped there.

And the other reason why there were no romantic attachments, the one on the other side, was that these men with whom she did surround herself were intellectual. High thinking cools the blood. Or is it that only the cool blooded think—that way? The frustrated female of her craved not the mentality of man so much as the hot-bloodedness of him, more that as a desperate fact than even the character, the shape or the color of him.

For her coming to live in Jones street there was one explanation Fitzjerald had either missed or found it impossible to mention. In a fastidious mood she detested it. Yet with no disguise of social or aesthetic interests she would have passed at least a part of her time there or in a street of that character. Those groping creatures in the lake of her elemental self required it. They became active, even demonish, when she denied them entirely. They craved contact with vulgar, odorous, commonplace life. Here it was thinly sheathed, sometimes for a moment stark naked, and so oblivious that one could get close up. Its emotions were not in deep wells; they were artesian, suddenly overflowing to the surface. Then the quarrel, the oath, the blow, the caress, the swift, blinding uncoil of the watchful reptile.

There was a time when she did her own shopping for fruits, vegetables, condiments and oil, solely for the secret pleasure of observing a Corsican whose shop was around the corner. He had the look, the easy walk, the animal dignity of a bandit. There was insolence in the way he carried his clothes, especially his trousers. His wife was exquisitely pigmented, and although she was fat she was not stuffed and her movements were all the more voluptuous. They were always together in the shop and yet they almost never spoke. Jael understood the basic meaning of their relationship. The sight of it thrilled her.

One evening as she was passing the shop, over which the pair lived, she heard the woman screaming. Her bandit was beating her. Jael was neither scandalized nor horrified. Her blood leaped and her throat was dry. One might have thought she was angry. She would have thought so herself if she had thought about it at all. But her emotions begged not to be analyzed.

The next day she saw them together again in the shop, as if nothing had happened. The woman bore no visible marks; he had evidently been careful. Jael regarded him with intense interest. She was particularly fascinated by his hands, one holding out to her a paper bag and the other, palm upward, waiting for her money. They were thick, soft hands, not ugly. As she came to her own door a few minutes later she was conscious of having walked very fast; and then of a phantasy she had been making.

It began with the thought: “What I should do with him if he were mine!” Then either he was hers or she was his and it had to be decided. They were alone on an island. The struggle was terriffic, brutal, dangerous. If he conquered her she would be his slave; yet she was afraid he might not.

“How interesting!” she said to herself. “My own phantasy. Therefore I could do anything I pleased with it. I might have hit him on the head with a stone. But I didn’t.”

She went no more to the Corsican’s shop, perceiving clearly why she had been doing it.

*   *   *

It was six-thirty when she turned the last page of her French novel. Yawning, she tossed the book in the fire, then sat down at her desk and wrote a note for Miss Lillibridge to find. This was the note: “Get Mr. Capuchin at his hotel and have him in to tea. Tell him I am interested in his newspaper.”

Then she went to bed, saying to herself aloud: “What a blessing it must be to have a one-storey mind.”

VIII

Walking home from Jael’s house Fitzjerald passed again through Washington Square. The sky was hard and clear, the moon was full, and still the harpy raged. The waste of a city’s castoff day was running to the second and third cornice lines. Chewing gum wrappers, metallic dust, scurrilous particles, absurdities of waggish matter, news and ideas. Soiled newspapers astride the wind in guilty, obscene shapes, moving in a plane of dimness above the lights. They might even seem to be making evil gestures, like—

“Like witches,” said Fitzjerald. “What a witches’ night!”

That set him on a train of thought.

Witchcraft had been real, as the church well knew, because it was an idea—an idea the witches had of themselves, an idea people had of witches. Notions of good and evil. Notions of magic. Notions of flying. Videlicet, ideas.

Here were ideas literally flying. Vehicle, once printed matter, or, that was to say, trees converted into woodpulp, instead of the New England broomstick or the imaginary animal of the Scottish witch. It was the Scandinavian witches flew on trees, trees as they grew.

One might see, too, that these objects had a sense of direction, some trick of dirigibility, hither-bound from Bank street, Grove street, Waverly place, Third street, Jones street, all those bias environs west and south where every cult of disaffection had its coven, priest or priestess.

As to who than he should know them better?

Youth in its radical, self-conscious phase, and not very vital, else it would not have time to invent for itself a symbol of flame to worship. Much of that. Ego stuff. Innocuous....

Then those making it a point of difference with society to live romantically in obsolete tenements under some fanciful sign of protest. A good deal of that. Boredom, mostly, increasing with wealth....

Artists pretending to be scornful of Puritanical opinion, to which they were not indifferent, since they spent all their strength to shock it....

Writers, too, bulging their eyes at the key hole, reporting life as a peep-show. Not that they were dirty. The great ancients were dirty, only they did not know it....

Free unions wearing the soiled garment of revolt because otherwise they should be naked; they must pay respectability the homage to keep feud with it. Silly stuff....

Others, however, such as ego-mad communists; self-chosen saviours of the proletariat, avoiding work; anarchists, jealous of the law’s protection; pacifists, dreaming of a war to exterminate militarists; idealists, living grossly; Jack Cades, thinking themselves Cromwells; political refugees from Europe, thinking themselves Lenines and liberators. Economic perverts, living by what they denounced, trading on the evil eye, setting their incantations adrift on woodpulp paper, pretending in their ideas to possess the sorcery to plow a rich man’s field with toads and reap barley from his thistles.

Imagine them overcome by faith in their ideas, as the witches were by their belief in the power of the blood-suckled creatures they kept in their imp pots. Then the parallel. On a night like this their ideas take possesion and carry them off to a Devil’s Sabbath where anything you will is true. No harm to the witches, old or new. They were sure to come awake again where and as they were. No harm to the furtive old man, walking carefully and looking always behind him, who came every morning an hour before dawn to gather up all the old newspapers in Washington square, folding and sorting them particularly. No harm either to capitalistic society, never to be destroyed by spells and curses, never from without, but only, if ever, from within.

How infantile, how circular, this human intelligence!

What was it the old witches bargained with Satan for? Power—the power to redistribute good and evil in the world. This had turned out to be a power of evil only, because, first, it was an impotent power, except as it might act upon human fear, and because, secondly, its possessors, unable to do good, became wholly intent upon doing evil to others, in envy, malice and disappointment. And so still in this day of artificial light.

What was the faith of old witches? Faith in the power of a phrase to change realities. “Thout, tout, throughout and about.” Merely that, and anything might happen as you wished it. True still in the age of applied science.

What was then as now the greatest common delusion? That you could overcome the disagreeable facts by the simple rite of denying their existence.

And the greatest of all human passions? The passion for martyrdom....

For a moment he was pleased, even a little admiring of his mind. What he had just been thinking was not altogether bad. Not bad at all. Good, in fact. Very good. He would turn it to some account in an essay. Then his critical faculty reviewed it and it went to pieces. It was bad. Intrinsically bad. Not that any part of it was false but that as a whole it represented a fatal confusion of illusion and idea as he conceived them. This always happened. It was his curse. Nothing he did with his creative power ever escaped the destructive acid of his critical judgment. He knew too much; he was knowledge-foundered and he knew eren that.