Part 12

What? Ali Beg found us together on a giant teak log at the river’s bend at Maung Haut, where he had stopped to trade? And, tightly clasped in Nagy’s hand was something strange? Show it me!

It is the belly scale of a great river python.

_Burn it! Hold the night taper flame to it! Ah, that ends the fat priest’s evil spell!_

Where is Ali Beg? Here! And Nagy? Here, too!!

Wheel our cots together, ma’am!

Only let me clasp her hand again. Thanks; _it is warm; she is alive_!

No; we won’t go up-country again. Why? Because when our first child comes, I want it born outside—out from under the shadow of the dread Curse of Siva!

THE FATHER’S HAND

_By_ G. HUMPHREY From _The Bookman_ _Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead, and Company._ _Copyright, 1919, by George Humphrey._

The Dean and I were sitting after dinner discussing the shortage of students at Oxford since the war began.

“You have no idea,” he was saying, “how strange it is to lecture to a class of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty. This morning, for instance....”

“Well, Dean,” I put in, “after the war there will be no lectures on Latin poetry. The times are changing.”

The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the candle-light.

“Listen,” he began, “you remember the passage where a father was trying to carve a picture of his son’s death?”

“_Bis patriae manus cecidere_,” I quoted. “Twice the hands of the father fell. Icarus, was it not, for whom his father had made wings, and who flew too near the sun and fell down to earth?”

He nodded. “_Bis patriae manus cecidere_—twice the father’s hands fell to his sides. In our village in the first few months of the war, there came an old man, a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine. By profession, he was a monument carver, and out of the exercise of his craft he had acquired a considerable familiarity with what one might call Phœnix-Latin, the kind that is only called into being when ‘Our Esteemed Fellow-Townsman’ dies. He had all the pedant’s love for the language. Often he would exchange tags with me when I met him in the street.

“‘_Quomodo es?_ How are you,’ he would laugh in the tiny general store, to the mystification of the little spectacled proprietress.

“‘_Bene, domine_,’ was my grave answer,—‘Very well, sir.’

“Soon he became very popular in the village, though he was regarded as something of a crank. It appeared that he was of the old days when Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the French. Of his private affairs we could learn nothing, except that he had married young and that his wife had died at the birth of a son. When he was questioned about his early life, he would affect not to understand—‘_Je ne comprend pas, m’sieu_’—this and a shrug of the shoulders was all that we could get out of him.

“Well, the old fellow prided himself on his excellent eyesight, and in the fairly frequent air raids, he refused to go into shelter, preferring instead to remain lying down on the hill outside the village, where he would watch the hostile aeroplane pursued by our guns until it became a speck in the distance toward London. Then he would trudge back again.

“‘The pigs are gone,’ he would reassure us in our cellars, shaking his fist at the sky. ‘Ah the _cochons_! _Sus Germanicus!_’ and we would crawl out again into God’s air, pleased to see him and knowing that there was no longer any danger even if the ‘all clear’ signal had not yet sounded. For he was always right. He knew from bitter experience.

“One day I saw him in conference with the little knot of sailors that presided over our anti-aircraft defences. He was pointing to the sky rather excitedly and telling them in his broken English something about aeroplanes and ‘it is necessaire that they pass so,’ at the same time indicating a track of sky.

“‘What is it?’ I asked the petty officer.

“‘He’s got an idea for bringing down the Germans,’ explained the man, twitching his thumb rather contemptuously toward my old friend. ‘He says they always pass over that point above the headland before they turn to London. I never noticed it myself, but there may be something in it. I’ll tell the captain.’

“‘_En hostes_,’ cried the old man in Latin to me, pointing to the place. ‘Behold the enemy. It is quite necessaire that he pass by here what you call the landmark, is it not? The German precision, _toujours_ the same.’

“I laughed and took him by the arm, down to the village, marvelling at the intense hatred with which he spat out the words. ‘The German pigs,’ he muttered as we went along. ‘They have my country.’

“Soon after there came another raid. We heard the gunfire, without paying much attention to it, so customary had it become. When the safety siren was heard, we all went back to our occupations as usual. I wondered why the old fellow had not appeared, and began to grow anxious, thinking he might have been killed. I was just setting out to look for him when I caught sight of him running toward me over a ploughed field, stopping every other moment to pick up his battered black hat, and looking, even at a quarter of a mile, as if he was full of news of some kind. When he came within a hundred yards or so, still running, he shouted something at me, raising his hands to the sky and then pointing to the earth.

“‘_Fuit Ilium_,’ I heard. ‘Troy is fallen. The German is destroyed. They have him shot, so,’ and he brought his arm from above his head to the ground in a magnificently dramatic sweep.

“‘What is it?’ I asked as I reached him.

“Perspiring and mopping his face with the tricolor handkerchief that some would-be wag had given him, he told his tale. The gunners had taken his advice, and fired at the spot he told them, and a German aeroplane had actually been brought down.

“That week the village was jubilant, and my old friend found himself suddenly a hero. The local papers brought out a long account of the affair, with a leader about the ‘victim of German autocracy, whom we are proud to shelter in our midst. With the courage that we know so well in our brave allies, he stayed out unprotected and discerned the weak spot in the foe’s armor. We are proud of our guest.’ It was, indeed, a proud time for our refugee.

“The naval authorities took over charge of the wrecked aeroplane, and the remains of the fallen aviator were gathered together to be buried the following week in the village cemetery. We were a simple, kind-hearted community, far away in the country, and many of the villagers had themselves sons fighting at the front. So we decided that the village should erect a simple tombstone over the fallen enemy—the resolution being made, I suspect, chiefly as the result of a sermon of the worthy pastor, who pointed out that the dead man was more sinned against than sinning, that he was the victim of the German system, and that we ought not to think bitterly of a fallen foe who died at what he conceived to be his duty.

“The next question was as to the inscription. The old Frenchman brought out a book, which he explained was the ‘_Vade mecum_ for cutters of tombs.’ From it he produced a marvellous quotation, which he said came from Seneca. He was listened to now with respect, but I could see that the idea was not popular. No one liked to oppose him, until I finally remarked that something simpler would perhaps be better, and suggested, ‘Here lies a fallen German,’ with the date. The old refugee was obviously very reluctant to give up his wonderful epitaph, but my reading was clearly the favorite, and it was adopted in the end. The obvious man to do the carving was the old stonecutter who had brought down the aeroplane. He was given the commission.

“The burial took place, and the village went back to its normal routine, the old man being supposed to be working on the inscription.

“It was about the time of the discussion of the epitaph that the relics from the recent raid were exposed for view in the little museum at the school. There was no address found on the body, and almost the only personal effect that had survived the terrible fall was a photograph of a woman, young and fair-haired, with the inscription, ‘Meine Mutter,’ which I translated to the admiring villagers as meaning, ‘My Mother.’ Nothing else. I went to tell the old Frenchman and ask him if he had seen the curiosities. I found him sitting in the garden of the cottage where he lived, in the little shed he called his workshop, where the tombstone had been brought. To my surprise, he was lying on the ground, and beside his open hand lay a chisel.

“‘What is it?’ I asked him.

“He started up when he saw me. ‘I was tired,’ he answered confusedly. ‘_Fatigatus opere_, weary with labor. _N’est-ce-pas?_’ and his poor old face relapsed into a sad attempt at a smile.

“‘But you have not begun to labor,’ I answered, trying to joke away an impending feeling of tragedy that I but dimly understood. ‘Why do you not do the work?’

“‘Ah, I cannot. My hands are old, and I can no more.’

“Then I saw that his hands were shaking, and I grew alarmed. I could see that the strain of the last few days was telling on him. He seemed years older. So I gently helped him up and took him indoors, where the good woman of the house put him to bed. I asked her how long he had been sick, and she told me that he had gone out that afternoon, looking well, and intending to buy a chisel and visit the little museum. She had not seen him again till I brought him in from the garden.

“From that time the poor old man seemed to grow feebler and feebler, and we began to think that his last joke had been cracked and all his troubles ended. He seemed to lose all wish to live, lying on his bed without a word, and only taking food when it was almost forced down his throat. I frequently visited him and tried to console him. For the one thing that now troubled him was that he would not be able to execute his commission before he died. ‘Never have I promised and not perform,’ he would say. ‘Oh, for one day of my _pristini roboris_—my youthful strength.’

“I comforted him and told him, against my belief, that he would be out cutting the inscription next spring. But he shook his head sorrowfully, and at each visit he seemed to grow weaker and weaker. The climax came quite suddenly. Summer had turned to fall, and I was taking my usual walk by the light of the harvest moon, passing through the old churchyard, where the German had been buried and the cross had now been put, uncarved. For we boasted no other stonecutter in the village. I went up to look at it, and by the moonlight I caught sight of the figure of a man. Bending down, I saw my old friend, dead, by the work he had promised. It was not till the next day that they found his chisel by the tombstone, and about a dozen letters which he had chiselled. The villagers thought that the old man had gone out of his mind, for the letters on the stone were not the beginning of the epitaph we had agreed on. They think so yet. For I never told them, and I am the only man who can read what is written on the stone.”

Here the Dean was silent a moment or so.

“Well, what had he carved?” I asked.

“_Bis patriae m_ ... Twice the hand of the father failed. The dead man was his son.”

THE VISIT OF THE MASTER

_By_ ARTHUR JOHNSON From _Harper’s Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._ _Copyright, 1919, by Arthur Johnson._

“Have you ever read any of Marian Haviland Norton?”

I didn’t expect, when I put the question, to fall right into a mine of information. It was out of my line, moreover, to talk about authors and books at dinner. But the topic had popped inconsequently into my head, and there was certainly something about the quiet, sly-looking Jane-Austenish woman at my left that inspired confidence.

“I’m distinctly curious about her,” I added. “She’s sprung up so soon, so authoritatively. And she’s so new.”

Up to this point my companion had only listened more quietly, more slyly, than ever; but her eyes now opened wide, her eyebrows went whimsically high, and she turned to me with a twinkling smile.

“_New?_ You really think so?”

She gave me no time, either, to correct my statement.

“I didn’t suppose any one still thought that—except, possibly— Have _you_ ever read Hurrell Oaks?”

I nodded gropingly.

“Miss Haviland was a teacher of mine at Newfair when it happened. That was eight, ten years ago. D’you see?”

“I don’t ‘see’ anything.”

“But you do Hurrell Oaks—you’re, you’re really all ‘for’ him, I mean? So you’d adore it. It’s pathetic, too. Though it is funny!” she cried, avid to tell me more about whatever “it” was.

But the inevitable shift in table talk veered us apart at that moment; and it wasn’t until after the long meal was over that we came together again, and could choose a quiet corner away from interruptions.

“Here goes, now,” she began, “if you’re ready?”

――――

Miss Haviland must have been about thirty when I first saw her. She was tall, handsome in an angular way. Her face was large, her features regular, though somewhat heavy, her coloring brilliant, and her dark hair grayish even then. She was of a stocky leanness, a ruggedness indigenous to northern New England—and perhaps she did “come” from New England; wanderers from those climes can flourish so prodigiously, you know—which only made her pretentious garb and manner the more conspicuous.

To see her at those college parties! She wore black evening-gowns, and a string—a “rope,” I think you could call it—of imitation pearls, and carried a fan always, and a loose wrap with some bright lining, and fur on the neck and sleeves, which she’d just throw, as if carelessly, over her shoulders. We used irreverently to say that she had “corrupted” (one of her favorite words) the premise of the old motto, “When you’re in Rome” to “Whether or not you’re in Rome,” so did she insist on being—or trying to be—incongruously _grande dame_ and not “of” the _milieu_ she was privileged to adorn. Without ever letting herself mix with those gatherings really, she’d show her condescension by choosing a place in the most mixing group, and there carry out her aloofness by just smiling and peering reservedly at—at the way a man set a glass of water upon the table, for instance, as if that constituted enough to judge him by; as if he’d laid his soul, also, sufficiently bare to her in the process. And she must have been, as you’ve seen, a resourceful observer; she had a gift for reacting from people; though how much depended upon the people and what they did and said, and how much upon what she unconsciously—or consciously—adapted from Hurrell Oaks while she gauged them, is a question. The result at least fits the needs of a gaping public. But I’m drifting.

All this—in fact, everything about her—took George Norton by storm when he turned up, fresh from a freshwater university farther west, to fill the Slocum professorship. He found in her the splendor that he’d been stranded away from in “real life,” and had never had time or imagination to find in books. She represented great, glorious things beyond his ken—civilization, culture, society, foreign lands across the sea for which his appetite had been whetted by the holiday tour he took to Bermuda after getting his A.B. with highest honors in history and government. He was about forty or so, and lived alone with his mother.

Rumor had it (and it may have been well founded, it’s so difficult to tell what goes on in the minds of those small, meek men), that he had always wanted to discover an “Egeria-like woman,” and that, once he stepped into Mrs. Braxton’s drawing-room and saw—and heard—Miss Haviland discoursing on “The Overtones in Swinburne’s Prose,” his wildest hope was realized. Be that as it may, his recognition must have been overpowering to have won her attention so easily; for her standards wouldn’t have permitted her, by any stretch of imagination, to think of him as an Egeria’s man—however she may have felt she merited one.

But she wasn’t, with her looks and distinction and learning, the sort to attract men readily. She was too self-sufficient and flagrant, to begin with. She left no medium of approach suggested. She offered no tender, winning moments. Her aspect for men, as well as for women, implied that she thought she knew their ways and methods better than they did.... It shows as a weakness in her stories, I think—the temerity with which she assumes the masculine role, the possible hollowness of her assumptions not once daunting her. Remember the one that begins, “I had just peeked into the bar of the Savoy Hotel”? I could never, when I read it, think of anything except just how Marian Haviland herself would look, in a black evening gown and her other regalia, “peeking”—as she no doubt longed to do. But I’m drifting again.... Her favor might have fired the heart of a _grand seigneur_, I don’t know; to the men of Newfair it was too much like a corrective. George Norton, I guess, was the only one who ever craved it. He courted the slavedom of learning to be her foremost satellite.

His courting went on at all the assemblages. The moment he entered a room, you could see her drawing him like a magnet; and him drawn, atom-like, with his little round beard and swallow-tail coat and parsonish white cravat, to wherever she ensconced herself. No sooner would he get near than she’d address a remark almost lavishly to somebody on the other side, and not deign to notice until the topic had been well developed, and then she would only frown distantly and say:

“Mr. Norton, how are _you_ this evening?”

But he would bob, and smirk consciously, up and down on his toes, and slap one hand against the other in an appreciative manner; undismayed if she looked away to talk quite exclusively to somebody else for another five minutes, just perhaps glancing fugitively over at him again to suggest:

“It’s too bad you must stand, Mr. Norton.” Or, when another pause came, “Can’t you find a chair?”

But you could see her still holding him fast behind her while she finished her own chat, and before she had leisure to release him at last with some cue like:

“That chair, perhaps, over there—no, _there_, Mr. Norton.”

Nice little man. He would fetch the very one. He would even keep it suspended in the air until she pointed out the exact spot and, with eyes and eyebrows tense, nodded approval of her scheme—asking him, however, after he was seated, to stand a moment, so she could move her own chair a bit farther to the right, away from the person whose foot had been planted, as she all the time knew, upon a rung of it.

He would yearn up to her presently and murmur, “A beautiful room, don’t you think, Miss Haviland?”

At which she would wince, and whisper down in his ear; and he wag his head and roll his eyes surreptitiously, sure of not appearing to observe any details she was kind enough to instruct him on. He would smile gratefully, proudly, after it was over, as if her words had put them into a state of blissful communion.

I remember well the day I met them together when she told me Hurrell Oaks was coming to Newfair. I can see her now as she sauntered across the campus, in slow, longish strides, and the would-be graceful little spring she gave when her feet touched the ground, and her head set conveniently forward on her shoulders. She looked at me, and then smiled as if to let me know that it wasn’t her fault if she had to take me all in so at a glance. Why, in a glance like that she’d stare you up and down. If your hat was right, she’d go on toward your feet, and if your shoe-lacings were tied criss-cross instead of straight, it meant something quite deplorable. And if she wasn’t fortunate enough to meet you or anybody else on the way, she doubtless scrutinized the sky and trees and grass with the same connoisseurship. I actually believe she had ideas on how birds ought to fly, and compared the way they flew at Ravenna with the way they flew at Newfair.

That was autumn of my senior year. Miss Haviland’s first book had been published by then, and acclaimed by the critics. The stories, as they appeared one by one in the magazines, had each in turn thrown Newfair into a panic of surprise and admiration.

Nobody ever knew, you see, until they began, what Miss Haviland did during the long periods she shut herself up in that little apartment of hers in the New Gainsborough. If, as you say, she seemed to burst so suddenly, so authoritatively, into print for you, think what it must have meant for us when we saw such dexterity and finish unfurled all at once in the pages of the _Standard_. Unbeknownst she had been working and writing and waiting for years, with an indefatigable and indomitable and clear-sighted vision of becoming an author. It was her aim, people have told me since, from the time she was a girl.

She had been to Harvard, summers, and taken all the courses which the vacation curriculum afforded—unnoticed, unapplauded, it is said, by her instructors. She had traveled—not so widely, either, but cleverly, eclectically, domineeringly, with her sole end in view. After five minutes with only—say—a timetable, acquired, let us suppose, at Cook’s, Topica, she could as showily allude to any express _de luxe_ there mentioned—be it for Tonkin or Salamanca—as the most confirmed passenger ever upon it. She had mastered French and Italian. And she had—first and last and betweenwhiles—read Hurrell Oaks. I venture to say there wasn’t a vowel—or consonant, for that matter—of the seventy-odd volumes she hadn’t persistently, enamouredly, and enviously devoured.

At Newfair, people had by this time, of course, compared her “work” with the “works” of Hurrell Oaks; but you know how few people have the patience or the taste to “take him in”? And the result of comparisons almost invariably was that Marian Haviland was better. She had assimilated some of the psychology, much of the method, and a little of the charm; and had crossed all her T’s and dotted her I’s, and revised and simplified the style, as one person put it, for “the use of schools”; and brought what Hurrell Oaks called “the base rattle of the foreground” fully into play.