Dream’s End E-Book

Thorne Smith

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

A New York advertising executive leaves his job in the city to write poetry in a hut by the sea. Once there he finds himself caught in the coils of his attraction to two women – a situation that so unsettles his wits that he falls prey to a heavily symbolic dream obsession. The story centers on a love triangle that develops between Landor, the niece of the man he’s staying with, Scarlet and the wife of the local land baron, Hilda. „Dream’s End” is a radical departure from Thorne Smith’s humorous novels, and was, in fact, Smith’s first book rejected by publishers until his Topper novels became successful. Fans of Thorne Smith are likely to be intrigued by this book for its gothic nature and for an unexpected glimpse at a more serious side of the author.

Leseprobe

Contents

PART I

THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF A DREAM

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

PART II

RETURN TO THE SALT MARSHES

PART II.

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

EPILOGUE

PART I

THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF A DREAM

CHAPTER I

MANY years have passed since last I was here in this silent place on the border of the salt marshes... many years. And though time and absence have blunted somewhat the edge of my regret for the things that came to pass here and hereabouts, neither time nor absence has been able to alleviate the pain which to-day I feel as keenly as I did this day twenty years ago.

Like a living symbol of discontent, casting shadows in its wake, I have skulked drearily across a sun-lit world since last I turned my face from these marshes with a double purpose in view–to escape a tormenting memory and to recapture a lost dream. And now after the passage of all the restless years I have returned to the point of departure no better off than when I set out.

There is a difference though, and I can feel it. For as I sit here in the quiet of falling dusk, it seems to me that an odd, quivering tension is troubling the air, as though actors were silently waiting behind a curtain for the last act of a play in which I am cast for a part. Whether the actors are hostile or friendly, and what is to be the nature of my role, is still withheld from me, for that is the dénouement of the drama and the end of a long, long quest.

*     *

*

TO me this is the fairest spot in the world, and the saddest. In the days of my youth when I first came upon it, I recall how I crept through the rushes and sat watching, as now I watch, the water trails in the marshes fill up with purple and crimson shades as the sun made down the sky.

I have always heard that disappointment follows the footsteps of those who retrace their paths back to the scenes of their youth. Mountains diminish to hills, I am told, and rivers change to muddy streams, nor does the sun ever shine so brightly or the sky seem quite so blue, I have not found it true in this case. If anything, time has intensified the beauty of these marshes. The influence they exert over me is as strong to-day as it was many years ago. I look upon them now, not with diminished vision, but with added appreciation. They have become a vital part of my life.

Through all the years that I have fled this place memory has held it ever fresh in my eyes; and now, as I behold it once more in reality, nothing seems to have changed... even the peculiar stillness hovering over the spot, the sensation of finding oneself quite alone in a lost corner of the world still lingers in the air, holding the soul within me in a calm but watchful hush.

*     *

*

THAT ragged apple tree over there, extending its maimed and cramped limbs from the green curve of the bank, is as gaunt and weird an object as when I first looked on it, yet just as friendly. Perhaps a little more so, now that the years have brought me similar physical defects... but here perhaps I should apologize to this weather-blown old watcher of the marshes, for it at least has remained picturesque.

One of the fascinations of this place for me lies in the fact that it is shut off on three sides from the rest of the world by a tall and thickly laced screen of reeds, the open side giving view to the green level reaches of the salt marshes where flat creeks of water wind slowly, endlessly, and mysteriously into a fantastic and insolvable design of flowing color.

The semicircular inclosure itself is carpeted with a broad mat of springy reeds which time and the elements have beaten low. Though dead, dry and gray, these reeds, from having become so closely interwoven, still retain a feeling of buoyancy, and yield softly without breaking under the weight of the reclining body.

I have said that this natural pavilion by the marshes appeals to me because on three sides it is shut off from the world, and this statement, on second thought, seems to be no less than the truth. Perhaps I am still possessed by some compelling instinct of a distant primitive life thus to find comfort and satisfaction in having safety around me and a clear outlook in front. Whatever the reason may be, I never fail to experience a thrill of expectancy and relief whenever I turn away from the great voice of the sea that chants against the rocks on the other side of this ledge of land–to seek out this hidden pocket in the reeds.

Through fields high in wild grass and, in May time, freckled with daisies, I pick my way until at last, after a careful survey round me, I drop suddenly from view down a declivity concealed by the overgrowth. Immediately I am plunged into a land of wavering twilight and of intimate earthy smells. I pause for a moment to drink in my sensations, then parting a known opening in the rushes, I fling myself down on the mat of reeds to gaze on the green, salt marshes where the waterways slowly glide.

Before me, stretched out like a huge map, and reminiscent of an old geography, lies a silent and unpeopled country; while round me circle the whispering reeds terminating in a high, green bank from which like a garrulous old pensioner, the friendly apple tree hobbles out to greet me.

*     *

*

IN the bygone days, to my knowledge, no other person visited this spot save one who came and passed in the swift flight of a summer, and in passing left no path that mortal foot could follow.

See, over yonder, on the flat surface of the marshes, there lies a small green island decked with a plume of trees?

It was there that I lost a dream.

CHAPTER II

MEN have fought to realize a dream and men have gone down in defense of one; but my lot has been less fortunate and certainly less spectacular than these, for I have been possessed of a longing that has forced me to wander, restless and unrewarded, across the face of the world in fruitless search of a dream that I lost in the days of my youth, and I have grown old and unbecoming in the quest.

Those who have tasted and died have at least experienced the joy of the dram before the goblet was shattered at their feet, whereas I, who have quaffed from many goblets, have never yet found in any of them a liquor that would appease the flame which even now is parching my throat.

When I first set out in pursuit of this dream, I proceeded with the logical folly characteristic of many madmen. I wandered irresponsibly in strange places, but always with a definite object in view. During the first year of the search I passed through cities and foreign lands as the shadow of a cloud drifts across a field. I was not a part of anything. Places made no impression on me, and I left no impression behind. Like a sightless phantom I moved with outstretched hands, futilely plucking at the air. And in those days I dwelt in pools of spiritual silence.

Once when I was in Egypt my search carried me out into the desert, where through many days of disappointment I endeavored to concentrate on the dream that I had lost. With all my will I strove to recall it from the appalling immensity confronting my burning eyes. But the brooding consistency of the desert silence, and at night the impersonal splendor of the stars, instead of quieting my spirit, awoke within me a strong desire for human companionship. Night after night I continued to struggle alone in this vast, unresponsive stillness, hoping to force myself into that condition of spiritual calm which I knew to be vital to the success of my search. At length, unable to endure it longer, I arose one night from my rug and drew near to the camp of my guides. Their fire lay like a pool of light on the dark floor of the desert, and as I approached I caught the monotonous whining of native instruments and heard the tinkling of flying anklets. Imperceptibly, as though hypnotized, and yet clearly aware of my weakness, I drew nearer, with quickening pulse, to the half-circle of swarthy nomads. Three girls were dancing in the firelight, their supple bodies voluptuously abandoned to the rhythm of the music. And as I watched my eyes grew bright with hunger... and I no longer sought a dream.

The next day I struck camp, and retreated from the scene of my defeat. I returned to Paris and sought to capture my dream in the fleeting glance of a woman, or to hear it floating to me from the cascading notes of a symphony. All day long I walked the streets, peering into the eyes of the women I passed, and at night I drowned myself in a flood of music. But in the feverish turmoil of Paris I fared no better than I had in the austere silence of the desert.

Then, stung by remorse and self-loathing, I denied myself the companionship of my kind, and withdrew to a little hamlet far up on the snow-cloaked shoulder of a mountain. Through the long, cold winter nights, I waited for the dream to come. In the intensity of my longing I fasted for many days and punished my body with exhausting exercise and long exposure to the elements. And in the deep, still valleys of the mountains I groveled in the snow and whimpered for the return of the dream. But I who had forsaken the object of my quest was in turn forsaken. The mountains looked down on my misery and denied me peace. Then, once more, the spirit of rebellion took possession of me and I went down from the mountain to find laughter and forgetfulness in the sun- warmed dissipation of a Mediterranean watering-place... I met there many who gave me memories, but none who brought me a dream.

*     *

*

ONCE I thought I had found it. In a sultry back yard in London a girl lay dying. Childhood had hardly left her before the city had found her out, used her, enjoyed her, and passed on to its trams and pubs and laughing stalls. As she lay stretched out on a miserable cot, her hot breath falling on the tepid air around us, her wandering eyes sought comfort in the sickly green of a stunted tree.

She was known to me as Molly, and during the early days of her decline we had spent many hours together conversing on subjects which would have brought pious consternation to the matrons of the last “home” that had turned her out redeemed. Instinctively she seemed to divine that, like herself, I too belonged to the unstable and was drifting without a rudder.

Now she lay dying. From time to time a red-faced, perspiring woman came panting out of the kitchen to gaze solicitously at Molly, then returned silently to her labors. Once she wiped her large, raw hands on her apron and timidly stroked the bleached hair of the dying girl. A little later appeared a doctor, aggressively supported by a visiting nurse. After making his patient keenly aware of the fact that she was stubbornly dying the face of a pure, powerful and indignant charitable organization, he took himself off with many ominous shakings of his head. But before he left, the doctor was good enough to explain to me that it was quite a common case.

“Oh, quite common, sir, I assure you,” he said. “The wards are full of ‘em. They’re eaten up, simply eaten up. No fiber moral or physical... weak sisters This girl will die soon. You might give her a few drops from this bottle. It will steady her nerves a bit.”

As evening came on Molly grew steadily weaker, and her eyes filled up with dreams. Her thin hand groped for mine, and she made an effort to rise.

“Yes, Molly,” I said, bending over her. “What is it? What do you see?”

“Something I can’t understand,” she answered. “Something new.”

“Try, Molly, try,” I pleaded.

“It’s bright,” she gasped, “an’ green an’ there are trees waving on it in the wind. Oh, Mr. Landor, it’s ever so peaceful there.”

Her voice faded away as her life streamed out through her eyes. I was trembling violently now and clinging to her hand.

“Is that all, Molly?” I asked. “Is there anything else you see?”

“Yes; I seem to make out something... some one... Lor’! Mr. Landor,” she murmured as peace touched the lines of her face.

Quickly, before she died, I bent and kissed her lips.

*     *

*

NOW the sun is rapidly nearing the end of its course, and still I sit here muttering to myself like some old book left to grumble alone on a shelf.

See! There it hangs now behind the island, blazing for a moment through the trees like a burning scarf... it’s quenched, and the night is at that stage of darkness which precedes the coming of the stars. The marshes are blotted from view, but soon their wandering waterways will be shot with dancing jets of green and the golden shrubbery of the stars will twist across the sky.

From the high bank above me drifts down the mingled voices of a boy and girl engaged in earnest discussion–fisher folk, perhaps, straying inland from the beach. Although it is impossible for me to miss a word of their conversation, sitting as I am directly at their feet, yet to them I am as far away as though I were squatting in a reed- built tepee on a distant South Sea island.

“But, Joe, you promised. When we started out you said you wouldn’t go home so soon.”

“Aw, I know, but this walking ain’t no fun.”

“So you want to go back to Becky, is it? What do you do if you don’t walk when you go out at night with her?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I’m a finer shape of a girl than her, the flat-breasted, thin-flanked gabby.”

“Come, let’s see if you’re. You’d better let me try.”

“What do you think of her now? Oh... Joe!”

“You are fine, Madge, darned if you ain’t! Say, let me try again.”

“You won’t go back if I do?”

“No, let me hold you now.”

“Promise?”

“I swear!”

“Then you can try if you want.”

“Madge! Where have you gone to now?”

“The daisies are thick where I am.”

The voices die away.

*     *

*

HERE in the darkness I sit apart from life, and like an unregenerate worldling moralize on its ways. The ways of a man with a woman and the ways of a woman with a man; different in method of approach, different perhaps in fundamental purpose, but eventually arriving at the same conclusion. The battle continues as briskly to-day as when the issue was first joined eons ago in the twilight of the jungle. The ambush warfare between women still goes on, and man still fights his brother as merrily as ever for a booty of yielding flesh. And the old, sweet, hateful flame burning between man and woman forever blinds their eyes to the world that lies round them. The curve of a woman’s breast, or the swift pressure of her thighs, largely controls the impulses and aspirations of man. In his inability to adjust himself to the most powerful and joyous force in life man still walks on all fours; and in the presence of this force the cumulative experience of the ages drops away, leaving him as helpless to order his conduct as any of his capricious cousins chattering in a. treetop to an audience of trembling leaves.

Here, after years of searching for the one thing in life or death that I truly desire, here on the very spot where my dream fleetingly merged with life, I find my mind distracted by a crude courtship. Forgotten now the dream I have searched in vain to find and reluctantly, but with a furtive thrill, my thoughts return to Scarlet.

CHAPTER III

FROM out the deep, disturbing past swarm thoughts of Scarlet. Memories long suppressed attack me now. Like swift pursuing insects bearing poison in their stings, they dart around me, but their wings are gorgeous as they poise before the thrust. In bygone days, that poison, sweet and wild, ran riot in my veins.

At a time of conflict and disenchantment this girl, like a scented flame, kindled in me a spark of madness which, dying, left me desperately sane. Though the perfume is gone now–gone utterly and forever–the memory of its fragrance still taints the air I breathe. Even while I pray for the return of my lost dream, I am moved to hopeless laughter. I see myself. The masks have all been used. Poor, painted masks... fatuously grinning!

*     *

*

THE city was pressing down. I could feel it at my back. With lazy, good-natured indifference it seemed to be waiting for me to encompass my own trifling destruction. In my guardedly neurotic mind, New York was assuming the personality of a huge, sponge-like creature implacably bent on absorbing my identity. As a matter of accurate record, I trod its streets unnoticed and betrayed the sincerity of my desire to escape by surrendering of my own free will to the drab routine of its days and nights.

What fascinated me most in the city, I feared most in myself. Under the influence of solitude and ceaseless speculation, I had grown abnormally sensitive and, I suspect a trifle arrogant. Even then there was something for which I was always searching, and although I was unable to define the exact object of my quest, I was dimly aware of its nature. Immersed in a world of fantastic ideals and bitterly checked desires, I had already discarded as inconsequential the aims and ambitions of men as expressed by the people with whom I came into daily contact.

In spite of this vainglorious superiority of youth I had a sincere desire to live, but no equipment with which to set about doing it. From time to time vague rhythms of life ran through me–a passage in a book, glance in a crowded car, the atmosphere of a room or the signal of a ship at night aroused in me a feeling that I was standing on the edge of things, plucking at reality with uncertain fingers.

I had a friend during this period who was much like me. For several years we had been readjusting the world together, changing it bit by bit until we had created something quite new and beautiful, a decent place to live in to our way of thinking.

“But it’s impossible,” he said one day, getting up from the table with a defeated expression in his eyes. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

But my friend never came back to the table. Within sixty seconds he had shot himself cleanly through the heart rather than face the weary problems which centuries of civilization had failed to solve.

They found him in the lavatory, crumpled and unimportant looking, a weak young man, conventionally known as a coward. The bubbles were still on his beer and his castles were floating round me when I was asked to claim the body of this fleeting friend of mine.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he had said, and I wondered where he really was now as I clung to a circular towel and watched the curtain rise higher and higher on the jumbled stage of life. I realized then that I could never go his way. His worn boots bereft of personality remained forever in my mind as a symbol of surrender. There was something within me, something either cowardly or curious which prevented me from voluntarily giving up my seat at the play, as ineptly directed as it seemed to be.

*     *

*

MEANWHILE life was made more unreal for me by the nature of my occupation. From nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, I was grimly engaged in creating beautiful illusions about various commodities bought, but not needed, by a duped public.

“Mr. Landor,” my chief once said to me, “do you realize that if you lived in the heart of a dense forest and invented there a more efficient rat trap than had ever been launched on the market by judicious advertising, the world would make a beaten path to your door?”

I was forced to admit that I had never devoted much thought to this particular problem.

“Well, it’s true,” continued the chief. “Emerson says so. Read Emerson? You must! Great man. Study him. He had the heart of a copy writer. And man, I want you to put some life in this copy. Let the public understand the romance behind these lawn mowers, the part they play in the heart of the home, their power for good in the life of the nation. Pack a punch into every sentence. Make a beaten path.”

Thus inspired, I devoted myself to the glorification of lawn mowers until I learned to detest them.

The remarkable seriousness with which my zealous colleagues at the office gathered in their conferences over the most insignificant trifles gave color to my belief that I was passing through a value of unreality from which I would presently emerge into the open space of reason. Surrounded by degrading wall mottoes, and further humiliated by the inspirational speeches of a desk pounding executive, I sometimes wondered if it would not be more admirable of me to take an uncompromising stand at once and apply to be admitted to a home for the mentally defective, where life could be led frankly and agreeably off key.

This attitude of mine, insufferable certainly in one who had hardly been brushed by the wing of life, could not help but be reflected in the spirit of blind detachment with which I approached my work. As a result I was regarded with quite justifiable suspicion by those who paid me for my time. They seemed to realize instinctively that my thoughts were unfumigated aliens invading their beautiful business world, and I was classified as an enemy to the established order of things, both sacred and sublime, all of which had to do with the accumulation of wealth.

The mistrust of those for whom I worked fortified my self-respect, but offered little prospect of advancement. This last consideration hardly disturbed me at all, for I had the satisfaction of knowing that in two years’ time, when I had attained the age of twenty-five, I would through the agency of a trust fund left to me by my father, become economically independent of a system I despised.

After the death of my friend I was very much alone. The world was full of a number of things, most of them disturbing. And in my solitude I would dwell on these things. It seemed to me that there was no scheme nor pattern in life, no mounting rhythm nor sense of value. People talked of unreal aims and worked for unreal ends, and died at last in great confusion clinging to unreal gods. To keep alive the majority of men and women were forced to withdraw from life. From blind alleys they looked out through all their weary days on a world which, in the course of a work- day week, had been created for the edification of man; but they did not find it good. In fact, they never found it at all. The world to them was merely a problem on which they were being hurled arbitrarily through space, filled with work and nervous quarrels and a profusion of unsavory smells. To their more fortunate fellow-men, particularly to those for whom I worked, the world was a nice, bright ball to be plastered over as speedily as possible with nice, bright advertisements, and girdled stoutly with slogans. While scientists were quietly revolutionizing life and artists contributing new forms to it, these business- builders came staggering down from the mountain with a billboard brandished aloft.

*     *

*

FINALLY there were women and the tremendous possibilities they presented. There were so many different kinds of women and they had so many ingenious ways of showing that they were different, though still women. To walk along a shopping street on a Saturday afternoon gave me the sensation of swimming against a current of swiftly darting glances, ever changing, ever seeking. In the short course of a block I was able to read a thousand feminine moods and a thousand feminine meanings. The interrupting eyes of women, cut across my thoughts and left me fearfully alert. Arrogant, tender, cruel and alluring, they plunged into my mind and created there a question, a sort of troubled wonderment. Yet whenever I was brought into contact with women by my more astute friends, I was invariably disappointed by a certain underlying sameness characterizing them all. This was due, I realize now, to the obvious fact that they were women, but in those days of unexamined expectations, I looked upon it as being a rather saddening indication.

On the rare occasions when I sat at a table with my friends in the cheerful intimacy of a glass or so of something and the equally stimulating presence of women, I became quite pleased and excited with the prospect. But I was never able to shake off the feeling that beneath their masks of laughter these delightfully animated creatures were dispassionately testing me by their own unfathomable standards. I always divined that when they had satisfied themselves I was of no practicable value to them they would tolerantly include me in the party and apply their talents to more profitable fields of endeavor.

For this there was ample justification. I was rather a sallow and unimposing person, disconcertingly watchful and utterly devoid of technique. It was only natural I should be the loser in these furtive counter-appraisals. Although the women fell far short of my expectations, they still remained women to me and were desirable as such, whereas to them I was merely a vague sort of person of no particular value other than serving as a useful bit of masculine furniture to be propped up in a public place.

Once I found myself sitting alarmingly alone opposite an elderly sort of a girl with discontented eyes made hard and bold by contact with many men.

She was my first woman, and I was none too happy.

Presently she said, “Come on, dear, it’s time we were getting home.”

As I placed my empty glass on the table I wished that she had given me at least an opportunity to do the urging. There was something rather disconcerting in the way she had said “we.” It sounded so intimately inclusive.

A dark side street and a dingy entrance presided over by a collarless West Indian bell boy. Beneath our feet the narrow elevator wheezed and shuddered; and a damp, unpleasant smell followed us up the shaft. The woman was standing close to me, her arm pressed to mine. I was wondering about her arm. The elevator came to a stealthy, insecure stop, and with a grating noise the door slid back. We were at the fifth floor.

“Here we are,” said the woman, giving my hand a squeeze. “This is where we get off.”

I was being led down a long, dimly lighted hall in which there were many doors, and I walked on guilty tiptoe. No moral consideration troubled me. I was disturbed merely by the sordid method of a procedure which this woman took for granted. I was accepted as a matter of course.

Gas light on a pink bed and the closing of a door. I felt a desperate need to escape. Then it occurred to me that to stave off the inevitable I might try to reform her; but when her lips sought mine, I decided to postpone the reformation indefinitely. She asked me for money and mechanically I gave her what I had. When she had carefully counted off the amount to which she was entitled, she handed back the remaining bills and placed her share on a small table on which there was a bust of Garfield. I remember that–Garfield! Why not Grant or Arthur, I kept wondering. Why Garfield? Then I decided that whoever the bust represented, its presence on that table would still be just as puzzling.

A few moments later she emerged fleshily from an alcove and after looking at her with frank interest I dropped my eyes to the carpet. It was a red carpet with sprawly blobs in it of a deeper hue. The only sensation I experienced was one of disappointment. Although I had never before seen a woman so scantily draped, I had often enough thought about them. This woman now confronting me was unlike anything my mind had ever culled. Her weary looking breasts were heavy and pendulous and the flesh round her hips had been despoiled by the markings of her corsets. I had never considered this contingency before, but now that I saw it, I realized that it was both a natural and pardonable result of girth and civilization. Nevertheless it was an unsightly one. Her thighs seemed dumpy to me and terribly aggressive, and there was something altogether spiritless in the poise of her body. It was naked, but unalive. Yet when she came up to me and twisted her arms round my neck, I trembled in spite of myself and pressed my palms tentatively against her soft flesh.

“Why are you so slow, dearie?” she whispered. “Don’t you like me?”

As I raised my head to answer, my eyes were attracted to the doorknob. It was turning noiselessly.

“Don’t you like me?” she repeated.

Before I had time to push her from me, the door slowly opened and an oily-haired, bepimpled youth, clad in striped silk pajamas, stood looking at us with an expression of apologetic surprise.

“Hello,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t know you had visitors.”

In spite of his apologetic attitude he still waited, until with a gesture of impatience, the woman turned from me and hurried over to the door. There was a whispered conversation which made the oaths punctuating it sound terribly in earnest. Several times he thrust out his hand and finally the woman, with a whipped expression on her face, seized the money from the table and brought it back to him.

“More before morning,” I heard.

Suddenly I felt tired and shamed. I tried not to look. A wave of sympathy and understanding passed over me, and I realized my own uselessness. People wanted to be real, but conditions had changed. The world was old and rouged. It could never be young again.

The door closed and behind me on the carpet I heard the patter of the woman’s bare feet. She placed her hands on my shoulders and leaned against me. I turned and looked at her through different eyes. For some reason I was unable to speak. I was crying. Then moved by a strange impulse I took her face between my hands and kissed her. At the door I looked back and tried to smile, but failed. She was standing in the middle of the red carpet, a white, ridiculous figure, dismayed and incredulous, perhaps a little indignant.

That night I walked the streets and occasionally stopped in at the side doors of dark cafés. Through the gray mist of dawn I returned to my lodgings to change my collar before going to the office. As I walked down Fifth Avenue, a wagon- load of cut flowers clattered past. The air was filled with fragrance. Weary, disillusioned, and a trifle drunk, I followed the wagon, my eyes already filled with new visions.

*     *

*

WHEN people are left much to themselves they think such queer little shame-faced thoughts, and carry on such unbelievable games of the imagination, that I have often felt the courageous foolishness of man is perhaps his only attribute of divinity. Nine-tenths of the time the mind of the average man and woman is forced by the sorry facts of life to be occupied with unpleasant and trifling considerations. It is an ironical thing indeed that the brain should thus become the dwelling place of pygmies.

The expedients of a solitary man were all mine. My few possessions became my friends. I endowed them with all the qualities I admired most in others and which I lacked myself. When occasionally some jest was made at my expense because of my habit of carrying a cane to the office, I never explained to the red-blooded wits that my cane was not an inanimate rod of wood, but a confidential friend, an admirer, in fact, who hugely enjoyed taking walks with me.

This sort of ingrowing thought life was in many ways I realized, both timid and sentimental, but as I look back now on those days of solitude and futile protest, I find in them something of happiness, something which might have led to a truer contact with life than any I have since been able to establish.

There were the Saturday afternoons when, among the first to abandon the oppressive diligence of the office, I would hurry home to prepare for an elaborate walk which I had planned and eagerly looked forward to during the colorless week just passed. From beneath the arch in Washington Square I would usually proceed up Fifth Avenue past the two brown churches set neatly back in their little lawns of green, and on through the valley of silk lofts and sweat shops draped at all hours of the day with heavy shadows. Further up the Avenue, I would run into the feminine maelstrom of the shopping district and here it was that I encountered the glances and experienced the swift little contacts that so often upset my tranquillity. Occasionally, when I caught the happy, carefree eyes of a girl, I would turn mine quickly away, fearing that perhaps she might misunderstand my meaning or that I might be disappointed in the thoughts I was weaving around her.

These walks took me far afield. Without mercy I drove myself on them, hoping thus to gain that mental and bodily repose which comes to one after strenuous exercise. After leaving the glittering shopping district behind, I would continue northward, skirting the east side of Central Park, but never entering it, for I preferred to picture in my mind a fantastic park of my own rather than to see this one in all its artificial reality. Sometimes I found myself on the banks of the Hudson far up above Riverside Drive. Here as I watched the broad stream move onward to the sea, I would rest and speculate idly on the probable destinations of the ships riding quietly there at anchor. It always liberated my mind a little to see at dusk the lights appear on the ships and to picture to myself the scenes taking place along their decks and within their twinkling cabins.

To return to the lights and excitement of the city after one of these quiet, open-air expeditions was like plunging back into a horribly fascinating nightmare from which I had striven to free myself. All the old things were there–the women, the restaurants, the swarming multitudes, and the heady temptation to spend oneself down to the last drop of one’s innermost personality in a night of headlong debauchery.

“Why not?” I asked myself.

“Why not, indeed?” replied New York, with bland indifference.

*     *

*

THEN one day I received a letter from an old artist, Hugh MacKellar, a friend of my father’s youth who in the course of an untidy life had succeeded in painting a number of good pictures which had at first aroused the ridicule, then the animosity, and at last the recognition of the artistic world. He had been spending the last three years on the Continent, but he was now home and was writing to tell me that his little hut by the sea, such as it was, had room enough for my small frame. He went on to say that while abroad he had assumed another responsibility, this time a girl–his niece, in fact–unceremoniously left to him by his good but nevertheless good-for-nothing brother, who had acquired final promotion by politely drinking himself to death among his mess-room companions in India. This girl was now a sort of ward and was known as Scarlet, a regimental nickname given to her years ago because of her fondness for that color. Scarlet’s mother had died when the child was still very young, and as a consequence she had grown to womanhood in the atmosphere of a military post in India, which is not always the best. Scarlet was an unusual product. I would have to be prepared for her, he said. She admitted twenty-three years and treated MacKellar brutally. He had gotten accustomed to her, however, and could stand for her moods. At present she was posing for him when she was not sleeping, eating, or fuming round the house like a caged tiger from the jungle she knew so well. Mrs. Tylor, their estimable cook, was shocked by Scarlet and a little afraid of her. MacKellar rather enjoyed the situation. So much for Scarlet. Did I care to leave the city?

After my encounter with the woman I had a feeling that I was becoming morally and intellectually bankrupt. I was beginning to accept things, things that I knew were false. I was even finding satisfaction in revenging myself against society by hastening the day of my country’s economic ruin through the medium of catch-penny advertisements exploiting inferior goods. Unless I abandoned my solitary mode of existence and shook myself free from the influence of the hotly circulating night life round me, I knew that soon I would not be listening to the experiences of my acquaintances, but cheaply participating in them. When not engaged at night in peering, like a shamed but desirous phantom into the eyes of the women I passed on the street, I had been forcing myself to the creation of what I fondly believed to be the better sort of literature–literature so remote from life that fortunately it never lived. Even in this I found no comfort. And now MacKellar’s letter. Did I care to leave the city?

I smiled cheerfully and gave a quick, appraising glance round the room containing my few possessions. No, it would not take me long to pack. Then I fell to studying the elaborately drawn and marked map MacKellar had enclosed in his letter, and as my eyes followed the outlines of a ragged coast New York gradually withdrew, until at last the room was filled with the sound of churning water.

CHAPTER IV

AS the heavy train clanked and buckled from the little station, I felt, with unlimited relief, that the last tie binding me to the city and my old ways of life was definitely severed.

Somewhere, hidden, yet close at hand, I sensed the sea, and a great longing to look upon open water took possession of me. I produced MacKellar’s map and studied it with a view to finding my way to his cottage, which as well as I could figure lay some five miles off in a grove of trees running down to a beach.

According to the map, I was to take the Station Road. This dusty bit of tape twisted out of sight beneath a small railway bridge close at hand, only to reappear on the other side, sliding lazily over the crest of a brief hill, until finally it settled down to a quiet and comfortable course which carried it across a green stretch of meadowland into the shadowy recesses of a forest rising far off in the distance.

With renewed interest I returned to the map. Apparently the neck of land I was on the point of exploring thrust itself out into the ocean like a battleship plunging headlong through the waves. However, it was not altogether cut off from the mainland, for near its prow a narrow strip of land sprang out at right angles, and running gracefully across the sea, almost touched the opposite shore, thus forming a natural breakwater for small craft in time of stress. This smooth and practically land-locked body of water lay against the lower two-thirds of the battleship’s side and was finally absorbed in a series of salt marshes laced by innumerable serpentine currents, which flooded and faded away with the rise and fall of the tide. Thus on one side of this rugged vessel and against its prow the sea dashed endlessly, while the other side lay untroubled in the still waters of a lake. Altogether the promontory suggested an interesting subject for exploration, and as I studied the map I grew impatient to tread the reality.