The Spirit of an Illinois Town: In Three Parts. Part Three

ON THE SOUTH SIDE.

WE stood without speaking. The most vital consciousness I had was of the change that had come over me, rendering me so indifferent to her presence. Her dark beauty was intensified rather than marred by what she had done. Vivid health and the very insolence of prosperity sat visible upon her. Her eye, encountering mine with resistant hardihood, swept critically down my length. She could not help that; she was a physical epicure. It was I, care-and-sorrowworn, lean in my clothes, who winced before her.

“ You sent for me ? ”

“ Yes. I saw you at the station this morning. I was on the south-bound train. I got off at the next junction and came back.”

“ What do you want ? ”

She sank into the chair on which her hand rested, and said, “ Sit down.”

I stood. On the opposite side of the small parlor was a full-length glass, reflecting a cadaverously pale man in evening dress, hat in hand, holding an overcoat on his left arm. His features were large, but the mouth was like a woman’s. He had a thin layer of blond hair on his head. His eyes, which I had always thought blue, were points of steel. I had no interest in him as a presentation of myself, except to despise his lankness and his pitiable attitude before the world and the woman who had wronged him.

She, who had been for me the romance of youth, my first voyage, my first taste of life, the woman who had done with me as she pleased without having her caprices questioned, began the arraignment: ——

“ I want to know what you are doing here on this miserable raw prairie.”

“ May I ask what concern it is of yours ? ”

“ I choose to know what brought you here.”

“ Poverty.”

“ What are you doing ? ”

“ Editing a country paper. There was a time when I could have selected my occupation, but that time is past.”

The swimming nights of our young dissipation floated between us. Any human presence is compelling, but the power held by one who has been wedded to you is a spiritual tyranny which I do not believe death destroys. I was calm, and without any desire to throw my ruin in her face. She, on her part, I could see, was yielding to the strain of the old tie.

“ There is some other reason for your being here. Your talents would command something better.”

“ My talents are perhaps undeveloped. And the place need not trouble you to the extent of sending for me to remonstrate about it. There was really no occasion for this meeting.”

Her crimson mouth flattened across her teeth. “ You are here on account of a — person,” she accused, and for the first time I felt jarred.

“ As you are evidently neither in ill health nor in need, I will say good-night. Our relation ended when you left me in Paris with our sick boy.”

“ You shall not blame me with the child’s death. It was the nurse’s fault. I have shed enough tears without being unjustly blamed. You know I was not fit for the care of children.”

I wondered that I had ever thought her fit for anything except bending the world to her amusement. I could look at her without any cursing, and see the tangle of erratic motives which governed her life. It was not manly to be even bitter toward a creature so slight. Her pretty selfishness I had myself fostered. We met on shipboard, during my first voyage, and I followed her and her parents, and courted her from Edinburgh to Egypt, so that the guidebook routes were full of her. Her indulgent father and mother finally witnessed our marriage and went home, and then like two prodigals we wasted my living. And all the time that rich American friend who had been her suitor hovered around us, pitying her for the shortness of my purse, until we quarreled, and she suddenly chose her lot with him. It actually seemed now the affair of another man, and I an idiot for having taken it to heart. Her trespasses were far away in a dream, as all trespasses may appear when we look back at them from another life.

“ I have not accused you of being fit for anything ; and as I said before, there is no need of this interview, so good-night again, and good-by.”

She threw herself against the door and faced me.

“ No, Seth Adams, you are not going to leave this room yet. I have disgraced you. I have disgraced myself. But my father and mother have forgiven me, and they have hushed things up. It is n’t known, among us, exactly what happened ; and that other — you know he lives abroad. I shall never see him again. I don’t want to.” She was crimson. “ I never should have behaved as I did if you had not blamed me about money. At home they never blamed me for anything. I was n’t used to it. You made me wretched, and I was determined to make you wretched, and I did. But I never thought how terrible it was until I had actually gone with him. I made him send me home when I heard the baby was dead.”

I put out my hand to stop her. I was ashamed. But she caught my hand and hung to it, and I loathed her touch, shaking it off.

“ Clara, I don’t know what you have done to me, but you have killed something in me that can’t be brought to life again. Doubtless I was to blame, but I cannot be what I was before. I don’t feel now as I did for months after the baby died. That’s past. I believe I can honestly say I forgive you, but as for anything else — you are dead to me.”

She stood away from the door, turning so pallid that I remembered keenly the pinched nostrils of my dead child.

“ You have never cared for me, — you let me go easily, — and I — I have been searching for you.”

I broke away and ran downstairs, and paused, moved to go back and comfort her, and rushed on, anywhere, to get her out of my sight. The personal charm that I had once thought so irresistible filled me with loathing. I said, “ She would try it on any man.” I did not believe she had been seeking me. It was her caprice to get off the train, and to-morrow it would be her caprice to do something else.

Sam found me about one o’clock in my room, burning a student’s lamp, and smoking densely from a case containing my blackest cigars. Having caused a front-door key to be made for himself, and coaxed Mrs. Jutberg not to bolt the locks, he entered at will; but no other footsteps than his came into the house. Kate stayed all night with the Yorks, when she had been given to what her aunt called play-acting.

Sam tiptoed, the floor creaking under him, and sat noisily down, giving me so determined a look of misery that I thought my secret was out. It would have to come out to Sam, anyhow, without further evasion. The next day might bring me trouble. I was in a frame of mind to expect anything. Discovery could no longer pain me. I had a steady front fixed for Sam, but the poor fellow stretched himself out in great weariness, declaring, “ You have the only level head in the firm, after all, old man. Here you sit smoking in comfort, and I’ve been bawling and dancing and eating and proposing ever since eight o’clock, until I ’m a complete wreck. ”

“ Lucia York or Teresa Babcock ? ”

“ Both, man, both. I’ve been asking ’em right and left. If Alice had n’t been engaged, and the young man in attendance, I ’d have given her a whirl, too. In fact, there’s hardly a girl in Trail City that I have n’t proposed to to-night.”

“ You must have been drinking.”

“ Not in this town. I ’d like to get drunk.”

“ And which of these young ladies may I congratulate ? ”

“ All of them, man, all of them. I ’m not quite unanimously accepted, but I ’m taken on probation and the approval of our elders by one or two. And the only one I’m head over ears in love with I did n’t dare tackle at all.” Sam heaved a sigh which might have alarmed the house. “ That’s Kate Keene.”

I transfixed Sam with an eye which arrested him in the midst of his emotions, and pushing the cigars toward him, I began and told him my own story.

We smoked until three o’clock, and he gave me copious advice. He had been sure I was hiding something from him. I had to defend my child’s mother, so scathing and contemptuous was his wrath.

“ If we had both of us come to these prairies from college, instead of trying experiments or loping off to Europe, we might be rich men now. As it is, your prospects are ruined, and mine have been damaged at least ten years.”

“ I like your material views of things,” I said. “ I had n’t quite reduced the matter to dollars and cents before, but your calculation is a great help to a man.”

Sam spouted forth a strong oath and struck the table with his fist. “ Everything in this world has to stand on a basis of dollars and cents. You are like a dog chained to a post, if you have n’t dollars and cents. Money is liberty, freedom of choice, power, generosity, virtue, religion.”

This estimate of his struck me a convincing blow in the face next morning when a telegram was handed to me, signed with my wife’s initials : —

“ I am going back to him. Shall sail Saturday from New York.”

“ Sam,” I exclaimed, starting up from my office chair, “ I must have a hundred dollars before the train goes north.”

As I crushed the telegram into my pocket my partner answered, “ Bank won’t be open ; and we have n’t a hundred dollars on the right side of the balance, anyhow, collections have been so slow.”

“ You must get it.”

The keen north wind made me bow to encounter it as I rushed to my boardinghouse. By the time I had put some things in a valise I paused. The old habit of guarding the woman I had married, from her impulses, had sent me like a bolt from a bow. But why should I attempt to restrain her now ? What would it mean if I did restrain her, except an assertion of rights which could never be resumed ? I smoothed the telegram on my knee and gave it a second reading. It had been written on an east-bound train, and sent from a station in Indiana. It dared me to let her plunge again into that life from which she had recoiled. It was desperation, defiance, challenge. Her father and mother, ignorant of her change of destination, would not be able to check her. I clenched the telegram and threw it across the room. Very well. Let her go. What affair was it of mine ? It had now become her father’s affair. Let him see to her. I would telegraph and warn him. But how could I open communication with him ? The whole business turned me sick. How bitter it is to feel responsibility and loathing ! To what good did it tend, this appalling tangle of human lives ?

I had never been in the house at that time of day before. It seemed very still, like a sanctuary, from which Mrs. Jutberg must be eliminated on some errand. Presently a singing voice sought through the lower rooms, for what I know not; but it found me and turned me as soft as a child, so that I wept face downward on the table. A man in my position could never meddle with that crystal simple spirit called Kate Keene. She who had stood in a large transfiguration like the spread of wings, with a community at her feet, was now moving about the house again in her short black dress, forgetting her power in domestic service for us. Meaner women would have been posing for homage, but she served, served always.

Oh, I had made a mess in my boyish folly, cutting myself off from the real things, and mixing with lives I had no warrant to touch. My wife’s case against me was as bad as my case against her. If that telegram had come from Kate Keene, I would have followed her on my hands and knees.

Sitting down calmly at my office desk again, I told Sam I should not want that hundred dollars.

“ But I ’ve got it!” he exclaimed, elated.

“ Take it back, then. And thanks, old fellow, for your promptness. But I ’m not going.”

“ What was the row, anyway ? ”

I opened the telegram, which I had picked up to destroy, and, smoothing creases, passed it over to him.

He whistled, and tore it into the wastebasket. “ I should think not. Were you such a fool as to want to run after her ? Where do you expect to land ? ”

“ She was my wife — and is yet.”

“ She ’ll get unhooked from you easy enough. That kind always do. They ’il have their way if it bursts up the universe. Let her go and be hanged. Blast such business ! ”

I looked up at Sam, and he dropped the subject, fingering some bank-notes which he took out of his vest - pocket. His quizzical smile dwelt on me.

“ Like to know who I held up ? Old Billy, the coroner. He was flush, and going to deposit when the bank opened. I touched him about the boost we gave him in election. Say, Seth, my mouth has been watering for one of these new sewing-machine-looking things they call typewriters. Think what an attraction and boom it would be in this office. The fellows over at Caxton would lie down and die if they heard we had one.”

“ But we have n’t the money for it.”

“ Yes, we have; here it is. I fixed old Billy up with a note for sixty days, at legal rates; and money loans outside at ten now. We ’re solid with old Billy. It was an accommodation, but he said he would n’t want it until the note comes due.”

“ We have another payment to make on our press in sixty days.”

“ But our circulation ’s growing. If we get hard up, I ’ll renew old Billy.”

It therefore resulted that we soon had a typewriting machine in the office, a thing of wonder, which Sam manipulated and streams of farmers came to see. He showed its paces, rattling the types and jingling the little bell in endless lines of senseless printing, while I worked double, making up the paper. Our friend Billy came, also; but when the novelty of the typewriter had worn off, his attitude used to disturb us. He would sit leaning forward, with his arms on his knees, gazing pensively at Sam.

“ Confound it, what does ail you? ” Sam once burst out.

Billy shook his head. “ I have n’t said anything.”

“ No, but you wear a man out looking at him. What did you lend your money for, if you wanted it yourself ? ”

“ I have n’t asked you to take up the note.”

“ No, but you come and sit on it right here in the office. Now will you go before I mash you with this letterpress ?”

Billy sat still, leaning on his arms and looking at Sam, waiting for his note to mature.

“ Blast an accommodating man that repents ! Go out and wreck a train, Seth, and give the old fool something to do.”

Then Sam would put on a stoic front, and fix Billy with fishlike glassiness between intervals of work.

So it came to pass that at the end of sixty days we renewed other notes, but paid old Billy’s, though with the unflinching fraternity of Western men he and Sam remained in that state of mutual affection which they called “ solid ” with each other.

It was not so easy to keep solid with the social element of Trail City, for we had started our daily, and were obliged to watch with incessant vigilance all municipal ebb and flow. While no hostess wanted to blazon her social functions, and affected much reticence toward the press, each was indignant and sometimes revengeful if not blazoned according to her full merit. I learned also that there is no stickler for etiquette like your small-town woman who has read and not traveled. It came to me like another revelation that rich men are really the scapegoats of the poor. I saw the financial sins of a whole community piled again and again on the few who were able to bear them.

“ Confound the unsuspecting beef !” growled our banker, Mr. Babcock, who took me for a confidant in his municipal troubles. “ They ’ll vote for a measure that will take the very hide off of them. Then as soon as it begins to hurt they bellow and lie down ; and we other fellows, we have to step up and do the pulling.”

The beef, on their part, were wise in the use of money not their own, and full of suggestions to those who had it. “ Babcock and York,” remarked one of these small taxpayers, “ is belly-achin and chawin’ the rag about somethin’ the whole time. If I had as much as they have, I’d make a handsome gift to the town, f’rinstance a lib’ary.”

Sam showed his athletics in our local column, and polished off items in the prevailing manner. We chronicled the visits of Miss Callie Van Voris, one of Trail City’s fairest daughters, to Veedersburg, or the arrival of a lovely bricktop blonde from Caxton. And we announced that Mr. Blue Thompson had accepted a position in Davis’s drugstore, when everybody knew he had been hanging around all winter for a job. In the same spirit, a few weeks later, Mr. Blue Thompson being kicked out of the drug-store for incompetency, and obliged to fall back on his relations, we said he had severed his connection, and would visit a few weeks at his grandfather’s, to recuperate his health. Nobody but a political aspirant of the wrong party had the truth printed about him. We chronicled Christmas trees in the various churches, and Reverend Spindle’s apt remarks to a giggling school on the difficulty of Santa Claus’s making a way through drifts that year.

As spring opened, every stick or stone of improvement which took shape in Trail City we duly recorded, with glorification of the public-spirited improver. At the same time, having our yearly railroad passes in the bottoms of our pockets, we performed that gymnastic feat which Sam called jumping on the companies with both hoofs, demanding suitable station buildings for our growing town. The penurious policy of sticking old sheds together with new paint was held up to Trail City’s delighted ridicule.

This applause, however, was the last unanimous voice heard in trail City that spring; for we of the North Side were growing bitterly jealous of the South Side. It blossomed, and throve, and flaunted. We sneered, and called it the Capitol and Nob Park ; while it retorted jauntily by giving us the name of Chewthe-Rag or Grumblersville. But none of these little localisms crept into the paper. On the contrary, Trail City’s daily organ trumpeted the vigorous solidarity which was making us the envy of all less prosperous towns.

Then the first warm day of spring, like a stroke of summer, prostrated us. One hour it was March, bleak and howling, mud from bottomless slews smearing revolving spokes to a semblance of chariot wheels ; and almost at once the earth was fleeced with grass, it was April, the air ringing with bird-songs.

The blood started anew with longing which was harder to starve down than it had been during hibernating winter. I was in a passion of aching, and used to sit with hands clasped behind my head in the spring twilights, secretly demanding my own and the life I had a right to live with her. Perhaps because the riot of youth had turned to loathing, I put my idol on a pedestal and adored her, with nunlike hiding and cherishing of celestial passion. How many times I watched Kate in the April and May evenings of that spring, standing, the centre of assemblies, raying her power in almost visible streams in every direction to the remotest soul. It seemed impossible for her to imagine malice even in her aunt. Through Sam I learned that Teresa Babcock and Lucia York were always quarreling. When Teresa’s betrothed from a distant State appeared to claim his rights, and Sam’s engagement to Lucia duly followed, these girls agreed worse than ever. Kate used to stand between them, a golden medium through which their spiteful speeches passed gilded and refined. While they fought for social leadership, she easily led both them and their partisans, because she did not care to rule and had every one’s love.

Her lonesomeness was known only to me. who drew near her in the same need. “ When People see you lucky and glad,” said Kate, in one of our brief talks, “ they think the world must be a glad and lucky place, and are ashamed they have n’t found it out for themselves. I never tell the girls my troubles. What good would it do ? They could not help me. I ’m not going to make any fuss. My father said that’s what strengthens us,—bearing strains by ourselves. I love to kneel and keep still. There must be such a racket of prayers in God Almighty’s ears, especially in the winter when some churches have revivals, that heaven resounds like a factory.”

During this resurrecting spring she kindled ambition in me once more, and I began to work in that line which has since become my absorbing occupation. Kate was my critic. We were not often together, but I passed her my manuscript, and she set down her opinion on a separate slip of paper. It had salt sense, and was gently merciless with my faults. And no praise that ever comes again to me in this world will bring such rapture as her large-lettered “ Right ” penciled beside a paragraph. We sometimes disagreed and argued from our points of view, her eyes looking straight into mine with human love and experience and patience, old as the Pyramids, wise as the Sphinx. She was like primeval air blowing across the prairies, her very flesh seeming to exhale fragrance.

Clara had sent me notice of divorce proceedings from Paris. She would some time be able to rehabilitate herself and take the place she was fitted for. Clara was one of those people who get anything they want by simply taking it at any cost. I may set down here that she finally married her friend, whose wealth was boundless, and now queens it in a certain American circle in Paris, and no doubt looks back with contempt on her advances toward me. These established facts have become a moral stay to me.

The animal instinct to better herself without retrospective pangs, which Clara had, was not understood by Kate. I left the French paper containing notice of matrimonial dissolution on my table, marked and conspicuous, secure in the knowledge that Mrs. Jutberg read nothing but her mother tongue. My child was very tender with me afterwards, not failing to call me father when we spoke together alone. She thought I cared because divorce was to be added to my other griefs. Though this sweet impersonal kindness might have been shown as well to Sam, I lived on it.

Oh, what sunsets there were, flashing across emerald plains ; and twilights, beginning before the sun went down, and lingering with the smell of grass quite into the night ! The thunder-pumper began his suction-note again in the distance, and as days warmed and the birds thickened, like a dream-note far out on the prairie you heard the prairiechicken’s “ bum - bum - boo.” How cunning was that lowly home-maker! I have seen the mother hen fall, dragging her wing and limping, to draw the sportsman away from her nest ; and, this accomplished, rise in the air like a dart. Listening, I can hear again, across years, the six dove cadences which came incessantly from the cemetery up the slope :

Not the least wistfulness stirred in Kate as she saw other girls pairing off, and heard their talk about weddingclothes. She had to keep clear of such entanglements. Sam, elated by alliance with a leading house, really congratulated himself on putting Kate like a temptation out of his mind. He told me broadly her father had furnished her all the shade she could stand. What Kate Keene now required was a rich, indulgent, and powerful husband, a man politically established, who would give full play to her talents in a diplomatic way.

“ I would like to see her in Washington,” declared Sam. “ Confine her powers to a drawing-room, and let her work for a purpose ; she could move the government.”

I told Sam broadly that an engaged man would be better employed turning his face toward the charms he meant to admire in the future instead of back to the charms he had admired in the past; upon which he began a resentful and baffled eulogy of Lucia.

“ You know Lucia is exactly the girl for me. I ’ve got my way to make. I don’t expect the old colonel to take me in out of the wet, though a quarter section as a starter won’t go bad. Lucia York is n’t one of your fair-weather girls, either ; she ’ll come out best under hardship.”

“ And you ’re just the man for her. You’ll keep her in hardship enough to develop all her virtues.”

“ There are times,” my partner said contemptuously, “ when I would like to turn in and be a hog myself. But there’s never any chance ; the other member of the firm has a permanent job of it.”

I pointed out to Sam how often we violate conscience and self-respect by smiling at our friends’ horse-play, and suffering in accepting it as humor. But a man like Mr. Jutberg never distorted one by this passion of sympathy. He put himself sincerely into what he said, and the restricted alphabet of his native tongue drove the few words he used home in the memory.

He was smoking his pipe when an altercation took place between his wife and Mrs. York at the gate. Mrs. York, gentle to tremulousness, always fluttering about her children, apprehensive of some change in their health, must have thought of the domiciliary interest this formidable neighbor ought to have in Lucia’s affianced husband. With nagging love she would coo, How do you feel, Alice ? Does your head ache ? ”

“ No, mamma,” the impatient girl would answer.

“ But, Lucia dear, your poor stomach, — how is your poor stomach to-day ? ”

“ Oh, mamma,” the girls would groan, “ do let our heads and hacks and stomachs alone.”

So, feeling her family ties extended, Mrs. York braved the tricks which fierce sky-light plays with the human countenance, and dared the encounter : —

“ How are you to-day, Mrs. Jutberg ? How is your — face ? ”

“ I’m well,” answered Mrs. Jutberg, unmasking that face like a battery, “ and likelier to stay well than folks that spend their nights dancing.”

“ Yes, I know you don’t approve of it. But boys and girls,” pleaded Mrs. York weakly, “ always love the harmless amusement.”

“ Do you call yourself a boy or a girl ? ”

“ Well, not exactly,” hedged the gentle sympathizer. “ But they like to have their fathers and mothers occasionally take a turn with them. Indeed, I feel it is only due to the girls.”

“ I ’ve been wanting to ask you a question this long time,” said the burdenbearer, coming nearer the fence and looking her apprehensive listener down.

“ Have you ? ” faltered Mrs. York. “ What is it? I shall be glad to answer anything I can answer.”

“ The question is this: What is a man thinking about,” demanded Mrs. Jutberg, chopping her words fiercely,“ when he is dancing with you? ”

The expression of the matron outside changed at once from puzzled pondering of a conundrum to alarm and swift aversion, as she saw the other begin to gasp and chew air with inarticulate sounds.

“ The man that danced with you would have enough to think about,” she returned, with tardy but effectual asperity, escaping as Mr. Jutberg sauntered to the fence and performed his usual surgery.

In a culmination of soft Swedish wrath he swore : “ By Vashin’tons ! I never put this yaw up again no more if it vag at every neighbor that go past. By Yacksons ! I could get me plenty voman that not come unyointed at all.”

Then the woman pulled her sunbonnet over her face, slammed the gate, and set forth on one of her hag-ridden walks, and her husband looked after her, relenting. “ She vas the finest cook in Trail City.”

I cannot recall a word of love that was spoken by me to Kate. Yet if she came unexpectedly near, the blood jumped in my heart. Sometimes our eyes met in silence, and she was puzzling with a beneficence that for the first time held pain.

Heats like burning blasts of the desert swept those prairies in the very greenness of May. Before we could well bear the renewed tingle of life which the spring brought, that unspeakable longing for things unfulfilled, the passion of lava fires was in the air.

On a hot May night, as I came downstairs, I saw Kate in the unlighted hall. Her hand was on the newel where I had rested the lamp the first night I looked upon her face. She stood thinking, and turned mutely to give me through the dusk the smile of general good will, her potent benediction on all men. I dared to slide my hand down the rail, so near that my finger - tips kissed her dear wrist, lingering, taking joy of the touch. The strong current of her life shocked through me. The cool firm surface of flesh drove my blood like mad waters. Her hand turned and clung around mine, understanding ; and then remembering, wrung itself away. Her breath was caught with a gasp. She left me, and I went out to the limits of the town, and walked and walked, feeling as if I could take the stars out of the sky and handle them one by one. How high life rose in that touch !

The afternoon of the next day, about three o’clock, night swept suddenly through the office. Our windows looked north. I was hard at work, oblivious to time, and rose for matches to light the chandelier. Then I heard a stampede of feet on the pavements below. Little pillars of dust walked like phantoms. The air which had been sultry turned deadly cold, and yet you could not breathe it in that strange vacuum. It was as if air had been withdrawn, and a stifling odorless gas substituted. It rasped all objects with a whistling scream. I saw the sky dragging on the opposite roofs, rising and rebounding; and running down into the eclipsed streets, I joined men standing on a crossing holding their hats on. My head was bare, and I had a sensation of having my hair pressed into my skull. Northward, vapor bounded along the surface of the earth at right angles to a moving wall of blackness coming out of the southwest. Ragged lights of bird’segg green zigzagged in this wall, and the faces of all around me were dim and ghastly. We smothered in an icy river of exhausted air, and the wall came on with a million locomotive roars, crashes and screams rising in its course. I remember Sam shouting at my ear, but his voice was blown away, and so seemed the people, running to cellars in that earthquake darkness. The most distinct object in the world to me was Kate, two or three blocks to the south, driven like a leaf.

Sometimes I dream now of swimming against eternity, clutching for the dear lithe shape I could not, could not find. The wind which drowned my voice brought hers to me. She called me. My child, my mate, mine by the kinship nothing can break — if I ever strained body and soul until blood broke through the pores, that was my instant of sinewcracking agony. If I had found her, heaven would have made a white spot in that whirling hell.

The next thing I knew there was rain pouring down windows. I heard it hiss. Then the smell of drugs surrounded me ; and I looked up into a physician’s face, and at Sam supporting me, and at the ceiling of Mrs. Jutberg’s back parlor. So tyrannical are the trivial things of life, I thought first of her anxious care about the carpets, and wondered what had happened to sink them below humanity.

Then I noticed that I was dressed for bed, and had perhaps lain some time in the folding couch which held me. Mrs. Jutberg was behind my head, for she moved into sight as she came into my mind, looking chastened. But I had no further interest in her. It flashed across me that the cyclone was over, and I did not see Kate.

“ Where is she ? ” I demanded.

“ You ’re all right now,” said Sam.

“ Did any one bring Kate in ? ”

“ Oh yes,” soothed the doctor, “ Kate was brought in.”

“ Was she hurt ? ”

“ She’s well.”

“ I want to see her,” I explained to the bland stupidity of the man. “ I want to see Kate Keene. She was out in the storm. Did you bring her in yourself, Sam ? ”

“ I helped,” answered Sam. “ Shut up, sonny, and take your medicine. You were a pretty spectacle when we brought you in ; must have been blown through a tree-box. What little sense you ever had has been knocked out of you for a week.”

After swallowing what they gave me, I did not fully awake until it was night, and I saw the water still rushing down black panes. Sam was with me, reading beside a shaded lamp.

“ Is it ever going to quit raining ? ” I inquired.

He put his book down, and sat on the edge of my bed. “ We have had a pretty wet spell since the cyclone. How do you feel? ”

I tried to move a body stiff and weighted.

“ A few broken ribs,” exaggerated Sam, “ and a few pieces of skull jammed in.”

I looked at him closely: he showed ravages himself. “ Was Kate hurt? ”

He twisted uneasily, and I saw he was preparing a tale for me, and gripped him by the lapels of his coat. My arms had not been broken. “ Sam, you are a great fraud in some ways, but you are not a good liar. Tell me the truth.”

“ You idiot! ” he blustered. “ When half the South Side was wrecked, would anybody outside a cellar escape a whirl ? The storm cut a track of a hundred yards as clean as if a mowing-machine had done it.”

“ Who suffered on the South Side ? ” I asked craftily.

“ Babcocks ; everybody. But you ought to have seen how the North Side turned out to clear the wreck and house the homeless, and the food and clothes and household stuff and money they poured over the Capitol to get the nobs on their feet again. Trail City is the best neighbor in this State. There’s no north, no south, no west, now; nothing but one united town.”

“ Was any one killed, Sam ? ”

“ Yes : Esther’s little chap, that she carried around with the crane, was blown across the prairie and picked up dead. But the crane survived.”

“ Poor old Esther! What did Kate say to her ? ”

Sam looked at me, startled.

“ Kate would say something to comfort Esther.”

“ Well, these things have been so sudden, none of us know how to take hold of them yet.”

“ She would come in here and see me, too. I want you to call her.”

“ I can’t call her in the night, Seth. Have a little consideration.”

With mad abandonment of all selfcontrol I caught him around the neck, and pleaded by every kind memory there was between us, by every prospect he had of joy for himself, that he would have mercy on me and tell me where Kate was.

“ I know she would at least come and look at me,” I said. “ She had love and a kind word for every human creature. If you tell me she is dead, I must bear it. But if she has forgotten me — my God ! then I am forsaken.”

With a blubbering cry Sam broke down and hugged me like a mother. I knew that she was dead. The pungent odor of camphor offended my nostrils, and my eyes stared at him.

“ But what have they done with her ? ”

“ Bear it, my boy, bear it. She was taken out of this house four days ago.”

I tried to climb from the couch. Had I lain there a dead log and never looked my last on her sweet face ? My partner had no need to force me back. I fell.

“ You know how it is with me, Sam.”

“ Yes, I know. I’ve seen it all along.”

“ God Almighty ! Sam, can you pray ? ”

“ No, Seth, I can’t.”

“ But you must.”

“ Wait till I call Jutberg; he ’ll fetch a preacher.”

“ No—pray quick. I learned one that will do. Thank God Almighty.”

“ What for ? ”

“ For everything.”

“ Well, that’s a fine prayer ! ”

“ It’s a prayer to love. Say it.”

“ Thank God Almighty for everything.” As he spoke it, I said, “ For everything,” like one who lies in the trough of the sea and watches unattainable cloud mountains rush overhead.

“ For everything.” Kate’s body was underground. “ For everything.” Yes, for that touch of her hand. Yes, for that cry in the storm. Yes, for the stainless love of my stainless girl. A peace came on me that passed understanding. Sam was wiping the cold sweat from my face.

“ Seth! are you dying ? ” he whispered. “ Seth ! are you in a trance ? Why, man, what ails you ? Your face is like a spirit’s.”

He could do nothing but bathe my face and fan me. And as he fanned and his apprehension settled, he poured out, unasked, that chivalrous worship which men cannot withhold from their ideals. I heard his voice away in the distance, or it buzzed close in my ears. The facts struck, and I put them one by one in a vivid row.

“ She was the grandest sight under white flowers that you ever saw lying with the frozen smile. The women say there was n’t a bruise on her, and I don’t believe she knew she was hurt. She was just caught up in the fiery chariot like old Elijah — or was it Abraham, or Moses ?

“ I said to myself again and again, as I looked at her, ‘ The Spirit of this Illinois town ! ’ Sprung out of hardship, buoyant and full of resources, big-hearted, patient, great, — how mightily she did express the soul of the West !

“ Oh, this house has seen mourning. That room was crowded with girls on their knees, as if they surrounded a shrine. And then came the young men, fathers and mothers and children. She lay in state like a queen. Near you, not ten feet from those closed doors the pageant went on. The room was sweet with wild flowers.

“ Poor old Billy and his coroner’s jury, when she was first brought in, made a ring of crying men around her. I never saw such a sight before. Every fellow put his face in his handkerchief, — or, if he did n’t have a handkerchief, in his hat, — and shook. To see her lying there with the dust in her hair, — who had been our pride, —her face, that had always lighted up at meeting us, white and holy-looking —

“ Billy blew his nose, and said to them, ‘ This is the hardest way to earn a living that I ever tried, boys. I ’m doing some kicking now myself.’

“ The Spirit of this town, — that’s what she was; just as a beautiful ideal woman expresses the Goddess of Liberty. Pluck and genius and humility, boundless energy and vision, and a personal power that carried everything before it, — all these covered with the soft flesh of a child just turning woman, — that was Kate.

“ Esther’s been in to see you, Seth. She stood here, her big coarse Madonna breast heaving. She ’s cried her face shapeless. To top all, her brother’s widow has taken the remaining children and moved back home to Indiana. ‘She took everything,’ says Esther. ‘ She did n’t even leave me the crane.’

“ ‘ We’ve had hard luck, too, Esther,’ says I. ‘ But I hope we ’ll save our crane.’ ”

Before the rising sun leaped above the prairie edge far northeastward, I was wakened. Sam slept. He was not near me and could not have touched me. I was wakened by the invisible dear hand of her I love. It touched and turned and clung around mine, and the thrill of our marriage went through me, — a rising tide of life.

Two or three years ago I encountered in New York a man whom I had known as a hard drinker abroad. We renewed our acquaintance, he appearing the chastened angel of his former self. There was some attraction between us during the brief time we spent together, and I made bold to bridge years and inquire what bad changed him. His name has nothing to do with this story, which, if he reads it, will forestall his pardon for setting down his secret here. I have never repeated it with my lips.

He turned himself squarely and looked me in the eye. “ Do you believe in what is called Spiritualism ? ”

“ No.”

“ Neither do I. But do you believe it is impossible for departed souls to come back ? ”

“ I did n’t say that. I only meant to assert that I have no interest in spiritists, in people who live by a presumed traffic with the other world.”

“ Neither have I. But this queer thing happened to me. When I was at my worst, I went one night with some fellows to what they called a séance, and the woman fakir told me there was a young girl at my shoulder, and that girl made signs that she had come to be my guardian angel. The woman described her, and, my friend, I remembered the girl. She was a lovely child who died when she was about sixteen, in my native town. I don’t know what interest she had in me ; I was older than she was. I could n’t get rid of it. I know she is with me, watching everything I do. Well — I would n’t give up that conviction for money.” He turned his cigar in his fingers and laughed.

“ She takes good care of me. She does n’t let me make a dog of myself any more. I would n’t go where she ought n’t to, I would n’t let her eyes rest on what was n’t fit for them to see, for anything that could be offered me. Now that is what has changed me : I’m trying to live up to her. But I never have talked about it. She’s more to me than any living woman. Did you ever hear of such a case ? Do you understand ? ”

I told him I understood.

Mary Hartwell Catherwood.