The Illumined Moment

I

A BLUE ray from an arc lamp shot through the window. There was a sudden flood of livid light in the compartment, and the girl’s face was touched for an instant with a gray, unearthly pallor. The train groaned and clattered and lurched over a multitude of switches, and through a maze of shifting lamps that played in smothered gleams of light upon the black outlines of the tracks about us. We were passing through the yards that lie south of Lyons.

The girl pressed her slim figure a little closer to the window. A wavering circle of yellow light from the ceiling lamp moved with monotonous irregularity above her head, blurring her face for an instant in shadow, and as suddenly revealing it in all its delicate firmness of outline. The dark eyes fixed on the cushion beside me were intent, with the palpitating, hovering intentness of the wings of a moth that has just alighted. There was nothing self-conscious or expectant in the steady gaze; only a deep, restrained, and self-sufficient brooding.

She had got on at Lyons, and I had ret urned, after the train started, to what I thought was my reserved compartment, to find her seated at the window. I confess that I was not sorry. It was four hours to Arles, and the light was bad for reading. Besides, she had, I felt, the delightful compelling flavor of the unusual. It had been a long time since I had felt any flavor of the unusual — not since the turbulent, exciting days of the Armistice. Now, more than a year later, it was a France thoroughly bereft of the unusual that I was finding in my capacity of sober business man.

The girl closed her eyes and folded her hands in her lap. There was aweary droop to her mouth; the look of brooding intentness had gone from her face. In its impassive, almost reluctant youth, it seemed strangely old, as if in some subtle way age had breathed upon it without touching the outline.

‘Born in the end of life, — the words echoed through my mind in the cheerful, vibrant tones of Jimmie Foster. In the old careless days he had made that generalization of the girls one met in France — made it after a fourteenday leave which had evidently been starred with more than one untalked-of adventure.

I felt as if the wayward and debonair Jimmie had suddenly entered the compartment. I suppose it was the night journey — we had taken so many together in the days of the war, and talked to so many strange and untoward people. And then, I was going to see him at Arles; him and his wife, above all things! He had written me rather plaintively from Marseilles that Jane had insisted on going to Arles — said she was entitled to a wedding-trip through the Pyrenees before they went back. Jane at Arles explained the plaintive note that Jimmie had evidently overlooked. I could hear her nervous, shallow laugh, and the quick splutter of her precipitate response to what someone else thought was beautiful, sounding in all its futility against the great arches of the Arena.

No one had quite understood why Jimmie had married Jane. Malicious persons said that architecture after the war could n’t afford any man the living Jane did. Jimmie’s friends said he should have settled down long ago. At any rate, he had married her, and there they were, at Arles.

I turned toward the window; the darkness outside seemed desolate, empty— a black void streaked with the ghostlike glimmer of falling snow. We were at full speed, and the wheels beat with devouring remorselessness against the rails, casting them behind with a monotonous implacability, as if they were but passing moments in the flight of time. My thoughts wandered to the year that had gone by, the year of excitement, of hardships, of dreams and high endeavor. It gleamed against the shrouded bosom of the past, a tissue shot with strange lights, deep glowing with alluring color. France — struggling, battling France — had seemed a place of mystery then, a place of mystery and of strange disordered beauty. Now it seemed dark and empty as the night about us.

I put my foot on the floor and straightened up. Such ideas were all rot. Anyhow, Jimmie and I would soon be together, talk things over, cheer each other up. The thought of Mrs. Jimmie dashed me for a moment. And then, without warning, like the breath of some forgotten perfume, a sense of the old joy of living stole over me. I looked up; the eyes of the girl were fixed upon me, and there was a faint, almost interested smile on her face.

‘ You go to Arles? ’ she said in French. Her voice had the remote hidden quality of the wood thrush, something of its sudden lift and sustained resignation. I answered that I was going there, and asked if she were, too.

She nodded, her gaze fixed upon me with an air of detached interest that was by no means flattering.

’You are American, are you not?’

The corners of her mouth drooped slightly, as if brushed by the shadow of some mocking spirit; she leaned her head back and looked at me through slightly narrowed lids.

I assured her, emphatically, that I was.

She laughed — an odd laugh, with a note in it as of the breaking of something fragile. She swept her hands with a sudden impish gesture across her forehead and through the dark hair that lay against the cushion.

‘You enjoyed the late war, I suppose?’ There was not a trace of irony in her tone; she looked at me with an air of candid inquiry.

I puzzled for a moment and then said I had been in France for a year.

‘First Division?’ she asked quickly; and when I said ‘no,’ she turned toward the window as if the conversation had ceased to interest her.

The foot that just touched the floor swayed back and forth restlessly; once or twice I thought I noticed a swift movement of her shoulders against the cushions; but her face seemed as passive and remote as its own reflection in the glass. I felt as if there were somesomething unreal about her: she was like the echo, the story of an adventure, with all its haunting, far-away sense of emotion, and all its ghostlike conviction of unreality—a part of the dim, snow-starred night, the rush of wheels through the darkness, and the rich, vivid imaginings of the past. And then what a curious question to put to a man — ‘I suppose you enjoyed the late war? ’

‘You know Lyons?’ Her voice sounded from the corner with a certain level detachment.

I answered quickly in the negative, and sat waiting.

‘I was there last year, the month of December,’she said. For a moment the noises of the train rushed through our expectant silence, and then, with a little tilt of her head against the gray cushions, she went on: ‘It is very dull now in France, is it not? But Americans — do they ever find things dull?'

I admitted that at times they did.

‘None that I have ever seen,’ she replied. ‘But then I have only known one.’

‘What was his name?’ I asked, a little abruptly in my curiosity, and feeling that perhaps it was not a wise question.

‘You would n’t know him,’ she answered.

For a moment we looked at each other, measuring, appraising, divining, and then her face softened.

‘You remember Paris in Armistice days?’ she said. There was a supple stretch to her body and the suggestion of an upward lift to her arms as she leaned forward. ‘Paris in Armistice days — the lights in the street, the beautiful white buildings again, the crowds sweeping by in sudden waves of laughter, and the thick warm scent of the cafés, that stifles you and makes your heart jump! ’ She trembled slightly, as if from the poignancy of the recollection, and leaned back against the cushions. ‘Americans live so hard, don’t they?’ Her gaze was remote, impersonal, and yet strangely appealing.

I nodded, without speaking.

‘You see,’ she said, leaning forward and looking at me intently, ‘he was so much a part of it all; he seemed to catch all the joy, and vividness, and color, and then give it out unconsciously. He was so much, so intensely alive. That was it — he was so alive!' She fixed her glance on the wall above me, and one of her slim hands moved slowly over the other. ‘Yes,’ she said, after a moment, ‘you don’t absorb what you like, you Americans. You tear it to pieces like eager children, and then look for more. It’s stimulating, at any rate.’

She laughed, and again I caught the faint trembling note in her laughter.

‘You see,’ she continued, ‘it was so terrible at Lyons. I was working in the station; I was there three years, day and night, and I got so tired. It was trains and soldiers going and coming all the time. It was desolate and gray and without end. I thought it would go on forever.’

She turned her face toward the window, and I listened for a moment to the remorseless beat of the wheels in the black void about us.

‘Then the Americans came, and one of them talked to me, and after the Armistice he came back. He was just starting on leave. You Americans, you make so much noise when you ’re happy, don’t you?’

A bubbling, childlike note broke for an instant into the calm level of her voice.

I shook my head and waited, afraid by a word to destroy the slender cobweb that had stretched between us.

‘I think it was really the way he laughed that made me go with him,’ she said with a flash of self-amusement. ’I felt more alive when I heard him laugh. There was something warm and sparkling about it. Some people are like that, are n’t they?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they are’; and a vision of the snug, low-lit room at Escargots, and our nightly table, with its vivid youthful faces shining above the amber twinkle of the glasses, blotted out for a moment the little figure against the gray cushions. ‘Yes, some people are like that,’ I thought; but just why, I did not venture to tell her; indeed, I am not sure that I wholly knew.

‘We went to Bordeaux after Paris.’ Her eyes were vague and elusive now, and her relaxed body swayed slightly to the motion of the train. ‘ We were tired, and he wanted to go away. He said we needed the mountains after Paris. He always knew just what he needed. He often told me how important it was to be very sure of what you needed, and then get it. He needed beautiful things most of all, I think.’ She looked at me without a hint of self-consciousness. ‘He was always talking about beauty and always looking for it, and yet he seemed to have found more than anyone I ever knew. That night going to Bordeaux he told me about all the wonderful things he had ever seen. I can remember as if it was — now.’ She sought the darkness for a moment and the beat of the wheels, inevitable and persistent, leaped suddenly into the silence. ‘Do you have a feeling in trains,’ she said, ‘a feeling of going on and on forever? I had that with him; I felt as if all the wonderful things he was telling me, and all the wonderful things we were going to do, would go on forever.’

She looked gravely at me as if to test my response. I had nothing adequate to say — the sheer, revealing honesty of the girl was quite beyond words. I only waited, every instinct of sympathy alive, to draw some now revelation from those extraordinary lips.

‘Do you know the Pyrenees and the Provence country? We went to Luz and Gavarnie and the Pass of Roland.’ Her voice lingered on the words for a moment. ‘ It was like a picture, all day long. The little steep-roofed houses, and the men and women working in the fields, and the far white peaks that shone so warmly in the sun. I could have stayed there with him forever.’ She looked directly at me, her gaze as clear and unfathomable as the waters of some mountain pool. ‘Oh, well,’ she said, with a return of her self-amusement, ‘nothing really lasts, does it?’

‘Nothing?’ I questioned.

She turned her face to the window without answering.

After a moment I broke the silence; I simply could not help it. ‘Did you go to Arles?’ I said.

‘Yes,’she answered, without turning from the window, ‘we went to Arles, and then ’ — she paused — ‘ I went back to Lyons alone.’

A swift attack of the brakes shook the carriage into a series of little jumps. A row of lights stretched out across the darkness, fixed and unwavering above their reflection in the water below. Beyond, other lights shone, high up against the massed obscurity of the horizon.

The refrain of the ancient song came softly under her breath, a ghostly whisper from the past. She leaned back and looked at me like a weary child. ‘I’m going to sleep,’ she said, turning her face against the cushions. ‘ Please wake me at Arles.’

II

The sunlight was just touching the broad hat of Mistral when I emerged from the Hôtel du Nord into the square. There was a pleasant hint of early morning scrubbing in the air, and the chairs of the restaurant lay in supine preparation for the bath. The cochers cocked a friendly eye at the white expanse of their victorias; the market women, passing with leisured preoccupation, smiled quite frankly; altogether I felt enveloped and sustained by a comfortable air of unhurried routine. The haunting personality of the night before seemed shadowy and unreal before the simple solid facts of daily life. I wondered vaguely, as I looked at the cheerful houses across the square, what had become of my lady of the train. She had refused to give me her name, and had disappeared with a great bearded man, who enveloped her with an enthusiasm the exact quality of which I was unable to detect.

Disregarding Jimmie’s wife, I had beaten upon his door a few moments before, and had been told not to eat my breakfast for five minutes. The door had not been opened, possibly for domestic reasons, and the usual high note of enthusiasm in Jimmie’s voice had seemed a little subdued. The impression lay like a tiny speck upon my sense of the clear brightness of the morning. Jimmie married might be very different from Jimmie single—probably would be, I thought, rather absently noting the lovely profile of an Arlésienne who was passing just in front of me.

I heard a quick, light step behind me, and Jimmie and I were face to face.

‘ You old scout! ’ he said; ’I’m mighty glad to see you! What are you doing, knocking about France this way, anyhow? Come over here and tell me all about it.’

He led the way to some chairs that had not yet suffered their morning bath.

We sat for an instant in the silence that succeeds a hearty greeting. Then I remembered Jane. I pulled myself together, rose, and hurdled her nicely. My congratulatory phrases had a warmth in them drawn from sources of deception that I did not know I possessed. Jimmie was all that could be desired: his voice had just the right accent of sober pride, and his words were brief and hesitating, as if revealing depths that could be reached only with difficulty. And as he talked, his gray eyes were fixed, in the eager gaze I knew so well, on the cluster of roofs that splashed a warm red against the fair morning sky, and his nostrils twitched as if he were smelling the sunshine.

‘God, what color!’ he exclaimed, breaking impetuously from the middle of a sentence and plunging his face forward as if to drink it in.

There was a commotion amongst the somnolent cochers, a general shifting of posture and sprucing up. Evidently something was happening at the hotel. The broad, expansive figure of Jane appeared in the doorway, and bore slowly down upon us. Jimmie leaped from his immersion; his startled look turned immediately to one of bland quiescence. I saw Jane’s pink face shining above the wattles of her chin with a diffused, rather aimless delight. We shook hands, and I experienced my accustomed shock in striking so suddenly the bottom of her pale, shallow, close-set eyes.

‘Is n’t it just lovely that we should all meet in this idyllic spot?’ she said, beaming vaguely at me. ‘Jimmie has been so anxious to see you — a kindred spirit in the appreciation of the arts, you know’; and she sighed herself softly to the end of the sentence.

I murmured something that I hoped was appropriate, and Jimmie suggested that we go in to breakfast.

It was a long breakfast, rather tiresome, and pervaded by a certain sense of stoppage in the conversation. We were always coming up short and beginning over again with enthusiasm. I felt a certain weariness; the keen pleasure I expected had somehow evaporated. I knew I was doomed to watch Jimmie and Jane, to observe, to probe into, and above all to feel, the ceaseless action and reaction of their two personalities. And hot little egos seemed so futile in the presence of the clear beauty that lay around us. In the last twenty-four hours I had had enough of the dark mists of analysis and vicarious introspection. Too much of the human soul was not pleasant. I wanted to eat my food and enjoy it, and to talk to Jimmie about pleasant, wholesome physical things. There was so much of beauty in Arles; things that had been built and dreamed over in the past by — hot little egos like our own, I suppose.

Once out in the sunlit square I felt better, and so apparently did Jimmie. He beat Jane on the shoulder, shook himself, and remarked that, after all, it was good to be alive.

‘Look at the old poet Mistral, with a slouch hat on like a Confederate officer!' he said, pointing at the statue; ‘he knew it — he knew it! He lived a dozen lives, Jane, did you know that?'

‘Ah,’ breathed Jane, ‘how wonderful!’ Her fat face fairly exuded appreciation. ‘I remember a Swami once, at Mrs. Hildreth’s; he said we could grasp all consciousness and pass into the illimitable beyond, if we only chose. Is n’t theosophy wonderful!’

Her eyes swam, and she sighed heavily at the statue. There was a moment ’s silence, and then Jimmie suggested that we might as well walk a bit.

The pleasant preoccupation of watching faces, and especially the faces of the Midi, lifted the slight shadow that had fallen upon us. Everyone who passed seemed so delightfully and so leisurely engaged in the cheerful process of living. Jimmie’s eyes were a study, now alive with a stealthy ardency, now far away, reflective, as if lost in speculation. His comments were vivid, illuminating, shooting like rockers from the absorbed contemplation into which he had plunged; and his lean, nervous hands moved restlessly, as if to seize some fleeting impression, some hint of strangeness or beauty.

We passed an open doorway; within, the outlines of a Greek column stood with poised serenity against the sky, and from the adjoining wall a gargoyle looked down, distorted in all the turbid agony of mediævalism.

’Marvelous city! ’ cried Jimmie. ‘ Can you beat that for contrast? Look at it, Jane; see how it stands out in that extraordinary sunlight!’

’Ah, yes,’ echoed Jane; ‘extraordinary sunlight, extraordinary sunlight! Is n’t it just perfect — so adorable, sitting there all by itself! And think how lucky we are to be here!’ — She spoke in a tone of benediction. — ‘I suppose it is probably snowing or raining in Philadelphia.’

It was Jane who did most of the talking for the next five minutes, Jimmie surrendering to the conversation only when necessary. It was a way he had of his own, that of stepping quite out of the picture, leaving a vacantly amiable countenance to deceive the unwary.

Just how far his present companion was unwary, I did not know. As her conversation grew in volume, there was a suspicion of insistence in her voice, a hint that she too felt that her thoughts had some claim to attention. She even fluttered now and then, like a large soft bird about to become petulant. The idea crossed my mind that upon occasion she might act with considerable clumsiness.

Jimmie, however, seemed quite unconscious of any such possibilities. It was only when we reached the Musée that he came to; and then, quite abruptly, ‘Now,’ he said, seizing Jane by the arm, ‘we’ll go in and visit the Venus of Arles.’

Jane ascended the steps with a lumpy sedateness, her broad, yellow-plaided back seeming a little formidable as it passed into the suave interior of the Musée. She blinked for a moment at the young woman at the door, and then walked immediately to the centre of the room. Her eyes went from object to object, as if bewildered by the variety of shapes.

‘ How many things there are here, and all so different!’ she said. ‘How versatile the ancients were! Jimmie! ’ — her fat hand waved commandingly— ‘show me these things. I want to understand them in all their inwardness.’

For her own sake I could have taken her neck below the fluff of yellow hair and wrung it sharply.

Jimmie walked straight to the statue of the Arlésienne Venus. ‘Look at that for a moment, Jane,’ he said gently. ‘You don’t really need to look at anything else. —Do you?’ And he turned with a quick smile to me.

I nodded, and for a moment we stood in silence before the statue.

The young woman attendant moved within the range of our vision. A decidedly human appreciation replaced the look of awe and reverence on Jimmie’s face. The statue, somewhat less perfect, yet somewhat more seductive, had come to life. I realized that I had not noticed sufficiently that young woman at the door. Jane evidently had not noticed her at all. In fact, Jane was busy just then thumbing the pages of her Baedeker.

‘Now,’ she announced, ‘I think we ought to read about the Venus of Arles. It releases the spirit so to read about these things.’

She turned her plump face toward me. It was slightly disheveled; evidently she was in hot pursuit of an emotion. Jimmie was far off, lost in contemplation of the resemblance between the past and the present. I doubt if he even heard Jane. She waited an instant for his response, waited until she caught sight of the human recipient of his divided attention. Then she shut the book with a little snap.

‘You should at least listen to me, Jimmie,’ she said, and marched toward the door.

I broke the embarasssing pause on the steps by suggesting that we go to the Arena.

‘No,’ said Jimmie shortly, ‘let’s not go to the Arena; let’s go to the river.’

I knew what Jimmie really thought of the Arena, but it was no time to ask questions. I started them down the steps without delay. There was something ominous about Jane’s silence. A brisk walk on the streets would do her good. As for Jimmie, he always had been able to take care of himself. How far his ability would continue in the future, was a thought I gave myself to with considerable interest as we walked to the bridge.

We leaned over the balustrade, absorbed for a moment, by the unceasing flow of green, sunlit water that hurried on its way to the Mediterranean. The mistral blew down the valley, fresh and insistent, like a draught from some gigantic door that had been left open. It fretted the pale green of the water with tiny ridges that shone with the color of steel in the sunlight. Above us the sky was a radiant, translucent blue, shot with faint vaporous mists floating high up in the eye of the sun. There was a tenseness, an eagerness, in sky and wind and water; it whipped the nerves and drove the imagination into extraordinary antics. I could feel Jimmie respond to it, feel the lift of his spirit as he leaned out over the balustrade, hat off, his face set keen against the wind.

‘Jolly old world,’ he said. ‘Goes on and on — always new — carries you along somehow, does n’t it?’ He turned to me. Jane edged a little closer. ‘If you could only get hold of it, just for a minute — the strange passing beauty that mocks you — laughs right at you. You think you have it, and it’s gone.’ He leaned out again, and the wind caught his words and blew them back to us in sudden eddies of sound. ‘We ’ve all tried; men have tried for a thousand years, and it escapes, elusive, imperishable — unspeakably precious. Romanticism!’ He laughed. ‘Yet the Greeks understood, and they were n’t Romantic. And the French — they get it somehow. Fine sense of form and clear thinking, I suppose — eh?’ Jane was looking eagerly at him, but he seemed oblivious of her. ‘I tell you, old man,’ and he slapped the balustrade, ‘we’ve got a lot to learn. We’re like those old Roman Johnnies that came floating down from Avignon to the cemetery over there.’ He pointed to the Alyscamp, which lay shrouded in cypresses, its tombs a dazzling white through ihe green foliage. ‘They brought their burial money in their dead hands, paid their way through with good honest money, even unto death; and then some esurient Greek stole it, and sat in the shadow of the Arena, looking lazily upon life and feeling that it was good. Oh, my boy, we miss it all, — we miss it all, — and we have n’t long to live, either!’ His gaze sought the green, sparkling water that was slipping away beneath us, and then came back to me. ‘I suppose I ’m simply a rank hedonist,’ he said in a matter-of-fact voice.

‘What is a hedonist, Jimmie?’ said Jane.

There was something disturbing in her voice; I wondered what was coming next.

‘My dear,’said Jimmie, patting her hand absently, ‘you wouldn’t understand, and I won’t try to explain it to you.’

‘Why would n’t I understand?’ she insisted.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Jimmie carelessly, his eyes fixed on the dazzling line that marked the bend in the river. ‘Because you’re you, I suppose.’

Her pink face darkened and her hands fluttered a little.

‘I understand a lot more than you think I do,’ she said. ‘You talk too much anyway, and you never listen to me. Come on back to the hotel; I’m tired.’

Jimmie and I spent the afternoon together, Jane having retired to her room immediately after lunch. Jimmie was morose; we had very little exercise and many moody sessions on the sidewalk cafés. To his credit, he kept what he thought to himself, only allowing it to escape in a fine drizzle of pessimisticphilosophy. He dwelt long and lovingly on our year in France, the wild irresponsibility of it, and the glamour of its incessant variety. It was as if its ghost had come back to haunt him, so ceaselessly did he turn the details over and over. Bit by bit he traveled through its history, down to the days of the Armistice.

And then I dropped a question, let it roll unobtrusively into the conversation: ‘You were here on leave, were n’t you, Jim?’

He looked straight at me. ‘Yes, I was,’ he said. ‘That leave, my boy, was — an illumined moment.’

It was an unappeased Jane and a sullen Jimmie who sat down to dinner. The drawn curtains, the soft light of the rose-colored candles shining on the white linen and polished silver, the deft, friendly touch of the waiter, all the pleasant intimate surroundings of a French dinner, seemed garish and unreal in the atmosphere of bitterness that enveloped our table. Whence the lightning would strike, I did not know. My curiosity was gone; I had only a desire to get out of Arles as quickly as possible.

The waiter, with soft apology, presented the bill to Jimmie. Jane took it quickly out of his hands.

‘Charge it to my account, room 19,’ she said in barbarous French.

Jimmie’s face was scarlet, but he laughed cheerfully. ‘Do you insist on paying it, Jane dear?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do. And will you order tickets for Paris? We’re going up to-morrow. You can have them charged, too.’

III

The moonlight lay in cool splashes on the roofs of the houses, and the town was settling into the reposeful calm of night. Our steps echoed emptily upon the pavement; there was only a passing figure in the square, and the café had put up its shutters.

Jimmie was silent. He had not said a word since we had left Jane seated at the table. He turned at the corner in an opposite direction from the railway station.

‘I have a great desire,’ he said slowly, ‘to see the Arena. Do you mind? We can’ — he gulped painfully — ‘let the tickets go for the time being.’

The street lay before us, a black trench between two rows of moonlit roofs. The freshness of the air was vaguely disquieting; the night seemed to stir about us like the unfolding of some deep-petaled flower. Two women passed. I caught for an instant the glimmer of their faces turned toward us, a sleeve brushed my arm, and an odor of perfume drifted out into the night. I looked at Jimmie. His gaze was fixed on the courtyard just beyond, a courtyard where the moonlight fell in clear, unbroken radiance on the fragments of two columns, ancient, immutable, absorbing and reflecting an unchanging and eternal beauty.

The Church of Saint Trophine loomed ahead, massive, forbidding, crowned with silver light. The shadows of the arched doorway lay like grim lines of pain on the graven surface; they frowned upon us in all the agony of souls in self-inflicted torture.

Jimmie shivered a little. ‘I wonder what it all means,’ he said. ‘ It’s a part, though, is n’t it, of something? Something I can never quite understand. Form, of course, I understand that — but the spirit of it; no, I don’t get it. Do you?’

He peered wistfully at me out of the darkness.

A shaft of ruddy light stained the pavement at our feet. The shutters of a little café were open; its intimate interior turned an unconscious, friendly eye upon us. A swarthy, black-bearded man threw back his head and laughed; the woman by him seized the cards out of his hand, and the echo of their laughter floated out, muffled, rich with a note of deep contentment. From above came the sound of a voice singing a Spanish song, the melancholy, long withdrawing notes passing with poignant futility into the peace of the impalpable night.

We walked in silence to the end of the street. The walls of the Arena stood before us, black as the shadow of poised wings in the moonlight. Above, on the stones that seemed to meet the sky, the light lay in still pools caught from a flood that gleamed with radiant tranquillity beyond the enclosing darkness.

Jimmie drew a deep breath. ‘If people were only like that!' he said. ‘ What restless, searching creatures we are, are n’t we? We flow in an eternal flux about the white hidden face of truth, and now and then it’s revealed to us in rare glimpses like this, caught and put down in some great work of art or some great act. And then the current washes us away, to grope about like weary swimmers lost in a sea of illusions. Lord!’— he shook his head like a dog emerging from water — ‘I’m getting decadent; come on.’

There was a knowing smile on the face of the old concierge as he swung the gate out for us and pocketed our franc. He grunted quite familiarly at Jimmie, who scarcely noticed him. Standing against the gate with his grizzled head on one side, he peered after us, a bit of cheerful, curious humanity, at the entrance to antiquity.

The great circles of stone rose about us, empty, expectant, as if awaiting some ghostly pageant. Above, in the dim arches, the night wind murmured in hushed whispers; there was no sound save that of our footsteps echoing through the moonlit well of the Arena. We walked toward the Saracenic tower, a black square on the topmost circle. Jimmie climbed the first stone of the ascent, and then faced me.

‘My boy,’ he said, ‘don’t ever’ — He stopped for a moment and looked across the moonlit space.—‘There’s something you can lose, and don’t you forget it makes a difference. I thought it did n’t, but it does. I was here before, and — I don’t like it.’ His face had the look of one who sees for the first time the vision of something irretrievably lost. ‘Hell of an old world, of our own making, is n’t it? Why have the gods afflicted me?’

He smiled, and a little twist caught the corners of his mouth.

Slowly we climbed toward the topmost circle of stone. The moonlight fell in slanting beams down the rows of staring seats, our shadows lengthened and shortened in strange gyrations behind us. We seemed the actors in some ancient tragedy, mouthing bits of humanity before the sardonic face of the Arena. The great stones above the arches lay like folded hands, impassive, pitiless, in the white light that fell upon them.

We stood at the top, breathing heavily. For a moment we looked down. Then Jimmie walked to a stone that lay breast-high above us, its surface emerging from t ho shadow of the tower. He climbed upon it, and as he did so a figure slipped from the darkness and moved toward him.

Jimmie stood as if frozen. He passed his hand slowly over his forehead.

‘Madeleine, is that you?’ he said, in a voice that trembled slightly.

She looked at him without a tremor, her body tense and her eyes filled with wonderment.

‘You have come back?’ she said.

He walked toward her, and then stopped, as if checked by an invisible barrier.

‘I cannot believe it.’ His voice vras almost a whisper. ‘It is too strange that it should be you. O Madeleine, tell me, why did you come here?’

She looked gravely at him, seeming to draw slowly from some deep source of composure.

‘I did not think we should meet,’ she answered. ‘I did not know you were in France. You have never written to me — not a word.’

He hesitated, as if struggling against some dim bewilderment. His arms moved forward, and then dropped.

‘You can’t understand — I don’t, myself. I wanted to write, but it was so far away, so different. I was in another world; and now, with you here, it all comes back to me overwhelmingly.’

His outstretched hands tried to convey his meaning, but she did not move.

‘Had you forgotten that you were ever in Arles?’ she said quietly.

‘No,’ he cried, ‘I had not!’

‘Ah, yes, you had forgotten,’ she answered. ‘You remember now, and you think you remembered always, but I know it is not true; you had forgotten. You had finished with Arles, and it had gone from your mind. Is it so beautiful then, in America, and so interesting? ’

Her words fell with delicate precision, like arrows finely barbed.

Jimmie quivered; once again his arms moved forward, reached out, and dropped.

‘Oh,’ — he spoke as if in agony, — ‘you don’t understand, Madeleine, you don’t understand! I feel shaken — clear out of myself. Things change, and then, suddenly, they change back. I had forgotten what you were like, and now—’

He shut his lips tight and clinched his hands.

She came closer to him; there was an appeal in her gesture, and yet she seemed as remote and inaccessible as some returned spirit.

‘There is magic in the Arena,’ she said; ‘it calls up the beauty of the past, and then, on nights like this, it gives it forth to trouble us with visions. It was just a year ago that we were standing here together, and you said that. You see, I remember everything.’ Her slim body and dark head swayed slightly forward, as if bending to the force of some poignant memory. ‘We had so much together, did n’t we? — Paris, and the Pyrenees, and this! And after, I had Lyons again.’ Her head drooped for a moment; she threw it back, and her eyes sought his face with a swift, controlled eagerness. ‘And you — what did you have? Adventure, excitement, and the never-ending quest for beauty? Without that you could n’t live, is it not true? And yet, with all the world before you, you come back to Arles! Tell me,’ she demanded fiercely, ‘why did you come?'

Without answering, he threw his arms about her.

She drew her head away and looked steadily at him.

‘Why did you come back?’ she said.

He made no answer; his arms only closed tighter. She laid an elbow against his breast and kept herself clear of his grasp.

‘You never wrote, not one word. I did n’t even know where you were; I wrote you, oh, so many letters!’ Her voice faltered a little. ‘Have you never thought about me at all until to-night?’

Jimmie buried his head on her shoulder. She smoothed the thick hair that lay against her dress. Her touch had in it something inexpressibly old and full of wisdom .

‘You are not happy, are you?’ she said, bending her face over until her lips touched his hair.

He was silent, and she looked out over the still beauty of the Arena, as if seeking the answer to her question.

‘You are married?’ she said, in an even voice.

Jimmie raised his head. ‘Yes.’

She stood motionless as marble, the firm lines of her face drawn with delicate distinctness in the moonlight. ‘And is she in Arles?’ she asked gently.

Jimmie nodded.

‘Oh, poor boy! ’ Her voice broke into a ripple of laughter. ‘Why did you bring her to Arles?’

Jimmie seized her with an overpowering grip; her face fell back like a flower caught in a sweeping torrent ; he moved toward the edge of the Arena as if driven by an insane desire, and for an instant they swayed perilously on the brink. Then he dropped his arms, and she leaned against him a little unsteadily.

‘ Will you go with me?' he said.

She stepped back. ‘ And to-morrow ? ’ Her voice was the level voice I had heard on the train. ‘What about tomorrow?’

Jimmie stretched out his hands impetuously, as if to sweep away all obstacles.

‘Let to-morrow go; why think about it now! For God’s sake! Madeleine!'

She looked at him for a moment, her calm scrutiny seeming to come from that deep hidden source of wisdom and composure. Her face, so sensitive, so full of sadness and undaunted resolution, brought back old memories of her countrymen in bitter days of trial.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it is impossible. It is always dream with you; but we are very old, we French, we do not hesitate to look upon the truth. You and I have had our moment, and we can never recapture it. I know, oh, I know so much more than you. You are young and you dream, and you cannot see the truth. You are always changing, and absorbing, and passing on to new things. It is the youth of a young race, and mine is old, and wise, and deep in loyalties. No, it is impossible.'

She slipped back into the shadow of the tower, and her whispered good-bye sounded with piteous finality across the still, moonlit stones. Jimmie turned away, and climbed slowly down to where I was standing.