OBLIQUE DESTINATIONS I

This was the evening of the day after election. Jael was at Lothian Farm. Supper, which had been made there the high communion rite of the day, was taking place when Capuchin came. There were no servants. His knock at the door was answered by the nearest Lothian, who, on seeing Capuchin, left the door open and silently returned to the table. He entered, closed the door, and advanced to greet Jael. His face wore an ingratiating expression, which was disagreeable, and there was a way of stealth about him. He held his hand out to Jael, who was regarding him steadily; she declined the gesture, that is, she sat perfectly still, continuing only to regard him.

“I can’t blame you,” he said, dropping his hand. “The pity is in a thing like this everybody gets scarred up... all of us... even the best of friends. Friends most of all.”

Jael said nothing to this.

“There’s a matter I must talk to you about,” he said. “Something to be straightened up between us. A personal interview seemed necessary.”

“Have you had your supper?” Jael asked.

“No, I haven’t. I left Liberty right after lunch.

Stopped two or three times on the way to talk. But don’t bother.”

Jael prepared a place for him. As she rose several others did also, but she made them a sign they understood. She wished to do it herself. Having brought him food on a platter and a cup of tea she took her seat and looked at the Lothian who had been talking when Capuchin knocked.

“Yes,” she said, “the effect of sunset upon primitive religion was what?”

The Lothian, so reminded, took up his thought and went on with it.

Capuchin was non-existent. When he had finished eating he seized a moment of silence to say to Jael: “There was no way I could see to avoid a private interview. You will understand when you hear me.”

“This is quite private enough,” said Jael, without turning her head.

He was determined not to take offense. The necessity under which she placed him to state his business in the hearing of all the Lothians did not embarrass him. On the contrary, it suited him very well to do it that way.

“It’s this matter of the ‘Northwestern Herald,’” he said, holding his voice up. “I’ve made out a bill of sale...” (pulling it from his pocket), “here... in which, for the consideration of one dollar, as the formality is, the property is conveyed outright to you. It has been yours all the time, of course, but the fact was not on record. This is to acknowledge it legally. You remember how it was. The objection to your taking a mortgage in the first place to secure the purchase money was in that case we should have to disclose your interest, which was thought at the time inadvisable to do. So there has never been any record of your ownership. I wanted to set it all straight before leaving. I’m going away for a rest.”

He said it smoothly, a little too plausibly, never hesitating for a word. Jael was thoughtful and did not speak. He moved the paper toward her, quitting himself of it, and said: “If I may offer a word of advice... Semicorn... I... I’d be very dubious about him—about going any further with him, I mean. I’ve noticed recently that he’s... what shall I say?... not always the same. I hate to say it, but I begin to think he has periods of...”

What it was Semicorn had periods of he did not finish saying; by contracting his eyebrows, shaking his head and tapping it with his fingers he left no doubt of his meaning.

Jael lighted a cigarette with an absent, meditative air and sat staring directly at him for some time. She said nothing. She did not touch the paper there in front of her. Conversation was resumed with an effort at the far end of the table and presently became general again, though halting and with need to be artificially sustained. Jael turned her interest toward it, but took no part. Capuchin held his hand before his face, rubbing his temples or gazing abstractedly at a picture on the wall.

The tension was broken by a loud knock at the door; and when the door was opened, there stood Fitzjerald.

Jael rose to greet him; so did those of the Lothians who knew him.

“A passing sight!” said Jael. “First you are cold. And we should take it nice if you were hungry.”

“Cold but not hungry,” said Fitzjerald. “I’d like any hot thing to drink.”

When he had been served and was comfortable, Jael regarded him with frank pleasure.

“You might look at us,” she said. “This is Lothian Farm. These are all Lothians. When and whence? Do account for yourself.”

“Today,” said Fitzjerald. “At your house in Liberty they told me you were here and how to find you.”

“But you must have arrived at noon. Here it is nine o’clock, and the drive takes only two hours.”

“Just two hours,” he said. “I started at seven.”

“You are most unsatisfactory,” said Jael. “Nothing to be got out of you. Why these heavy looks?”

“I’m looking at Capuchin... Good evening, sir,” he roared. “How do you do?”

“Good evening, Mr. Fitzjerald,” said Capuchin.

“You are safe I see,” said Fitzjerald, so offensively that everyone, even Jael, began to wonder at him. “Safety is your private platitude,” he continued. “You mould the bullet, set it in powder, cock the hammer. You do not pull the trigger. That’s the dangerous part.”

Visibly agitated, Capuchin pushed his chair back from the table and began dusting himself, not aware of what he did.

“You don’t brush yourself at the table, Mr. Capuchin,” said Fitzjerald. “It’s abominable. Moreover, it betrays you. What guilty knowledge of yourself are you forever brushing away?”

“Mr. Fitzjerald,” said Capuchin, “we shall have an accounting in full one day.”

“It isn’t possible,” said Fitzjerald. Then he asked suddenly: “At what time today did you leave Liberty, Mr. Capuchin?”

Capuchin’s manner altered. He answered quickly, anxiously, “At one o’clock.”

“Witnesses for it, I trust? You would have thought of witnesses, Mr. Capuchin.”

“Yes,” said Capuchin, strangely. He was instantly conscious he had blundered. His wits returned. “I could not possibly leave Liberty unobserved,” he said, “whatever it is you mean.”

“Of course,” said Fitzjerald, sneering. “That you have witnesses is a harmless fact, and still very important. Well, in that case it is news I bring. The banker Plaino was murdered this afternoon.”

All eyes turned to Capuchin. He came slowly to his feet, with a dazed expression, and began pacing the floor in a line parallel to the table, beating the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, groaning at intervals.

“Why so distressed, Mr. Capuchin,” said Fitzjerald, with wicked taunting. “You are safe. No one will suspect you, least of all the law. The law is stupid. It will pass you by. Its business is only with him who pulled the trigger.”

Capuchin stopped, turned to face Fitzjerald and met his gaze unwincingly. To the astonishment of those present who had not seen it happen before, his appearance changed, even the outline of him, which seemed all at once larger and more definite, not blurred at the edges as usual. This was one of those moments in which he saw himself in an aura of innocence, maligned, misunderstood, majestically wearing his sorrows. It clothed him with a fictitious dignity.

“Mr. Fitzjerald,” he said, “you are a fiend. I am a guest in this house, an unwelcome one, yet a guest. As touching your insults, therefore, I am at the mercy of Miss Saint-Leon. What she permits I cannot help. But you goad me to say, to her, to you, to all present, that I am no more responsible for what has occurred today than... than others. Certainly no more than the Lothian College, no more than the founder of that college herself. I did not invent Semicorn. I did not find him. He was presented to me in Jones street. I met him there as I met you, as I met her, as I met Lothians at all. I accepted him as I accepted the others. And if... no, that’s all. That’s all I mean to say.”

He began pacing the floor again.

“Semicorn!” said Fitzjerald, repeating the name. He was tense, dramatic, leaning half-way across the table, following Capuchin with his eyes. “Nobody had mentioned Semicorn, Mr. Capuchin. Why do you mention him?”

Capuchin faced the company. A stricken look spread slowly over his features.

“No,” he said, speaking just above a whisper. “I should not have mentioned him, either. I beg everyone here to forget that I did.”

Then, to complete the scene, he fell with a crash upon the table, sobbing:

“I loved that man... like a brother... I loved him.”

Fitzjerald supplied the theatrical fact.

“Semicorn,” he said, “is charged with the murder of Plaino.”

II

Capuchin’s behaviour was never clearly understood by those who witnessed it. No one knew what had taken place between him and Semicorn that morning. He had stopped just short of disclosing it. As information it was very important; and although it was by no means final as evidence of Semicorn’s guilt, yet if it had been known it would have reduced the tormenting doubt that surrounded his case. Capuchin never did reveal it.

It was this: Capuchin was still in bed the morning after election when Semicorn came to see him. What he came for was to expound the Lenine doctrine of revolution, especially the defense of it as an accomplished fact.

The fatal error was to suppose that once the people had got control of the state they were safe. Not so. A revolution had to be defended jealously, by ruthless means. Counter-revolution had to be put down by the same methods as those by which the capitalistic state puts down revolution when it can. What happened to the leaders of a revolution if they failed? They were exiled, hanged, destroyed. So the people, having got the power, should stand their enemies against the wall, instead of leaving them entrenched, free to plot against the new order, to corrupt the inexperienced leaders, to seize the first moment of discouragement to turn the people against themselves, and so destroy the works of revolution.

His mind was aflame. The point of his argument was that a political defeat meant nothing if they refused to accept it. Capuchin was a fool to accept it.

There was yet time to act logically. They had all the means still in their hands. What they lacked was courage. He, Semicorn, would undertake in one hour to raise a force sufficient for all purposes.

He had worked out a military plan. Spreading a large map on the bed, he traced upon it with an icy finger the lines of communication to be seized. All points of strategic importance were marked in red; there was indicated also the location of food reserves, ammunition, rifles, oil, with precise data as to quantities. According to the plan, the first act after a secret mobilization of forces would be to destroy Plaino and take his bank, as a stroke of terrorism against the morale of the enemy.

As to all the facts he was cool and reasoning. When he returned to the argument his intensity was alarming. The more Capuchin tried to calm him the worse it was. Toward the end—and it went on four hours—he began to reproach Capuchin for cowardice.

“I ought to’ve known it,” he said. “What you haven’t got is guts. I’m trying to put some into you—guts to think red, feel red, act red, so’s not to let the people down. They’re red ‘n’ you don’t know it. They don’t know it themselves until they see red done. Then they know it. They’re not afraid of red. The capitalis is. Red scares them—their own red does. They won’t ride me out of here on a rail. I’ve told you what I’d do in your place and I’m saying this for myself. I got a better way to go. I’m red to my middle. I’ve got the guts to do red.”

He was talking to himself and to Capuchin at the same time; he appeared to be in physical agony, like some primeval worker of black magic consuming himself to invoke a dreadful power. Red was the word of incantation. He phonated it diabolically.

The paroxysm passed; he was calm again, saying: “It’s no good. I hear you saying it’s no good. Then let me alone. Leave that to me. You see your way, I see mine; what comes of mine is mine. T’hell with the Freemen’s League of politics. Semicorn rides on his own guts... I’m telling you in time as I promised to.”

In one moment he was gone.

Capuchin, who all this time had been in his pajamas, clothed himself frantically, with no other thought in his head than to pursue Semicorn. As he was leaving the room he looked back and saw the map and the neatly typed military plan still lying on the bed. He put them in his pocket and went on. It was not until he was within sight of the “Herald” office that he was struck with a sense of the incriminating character of these papers.

He stopped aghast. What if something horrible should issue from Semicorn’s madness and he, Capuchin, should be arrested with these documents on his person! Time was passing. He shook with dread. The back-firing of a motor car gave him a nasty start.

The self-saving motive came uppermost. Turning, he went around the block to the public garage where he kept his car, spoke to as many persons as possible, asked the time of day, took on oil and gas, and drove away, hearing himself say he was going for a rest.

That he took the road to Lothian Farm was accidental. His one conscious purpose was to find a place where he could burn the papers without trace. As he was burning them in a deep ravine out of sight of the road his thoughts went back to Semicorn. What should he do? He could not imagine informing against him or having him locked up. Suppose he did. Semicorn would deny everything and he himself had just destroyed the only evidence there was.

Fear began to clutch him, mysterious and horrible. He was afraid to go back. He had told people he was going away to rest. What had prompted him to say that? It was not true when he said it. He had no such intention consciously. They had seen him depart. He need not go back at all. It would seem strange to go back.

Presently he went on. Instinctively he did it, refusing to analyze the impulse, only taking care to stop at least once an hour to talk to someone. Invariably he asked the time of day.

His thoughts dwelt morbidly on the character of Semicorn; he reviewed the incidents of their association together. Together! Together! What did that mean. It was significant, ominous.

Ah! How obvious it was when his wits came through! They were closely related in people’s minds—himself and Semicorn. Everybody knew that Semicorn conducted the “Herald” under his direction. He must rid himself of Semicorn. The “Herald” connected them. He began threshing his mind for some plausible act of disavowal.

It was then it occurred to him to convey the “Herald” back to Jael in a way to make it appear he had never owned it. Between Liberty and Lothian Farm was a small town where he got a blank bill of sale, such as farmers use; then he stopped in a deserted barn to fill it out.

Thus he appeared before Jael, cunningly intent upon a transaction that had no importance whatever outside of his terrified imagination.

On hearing from Fitzjerald that Plaino had been murdered he was as sure as if he had seen the deed that Semicorn had committed it. Two emotions assailed him. One was that of simple horror; the other was one of remorse. For it was true, he had conceived a great affection for Semicorn, and the memory of having abandoned him to his madness clutched his heart. Distributing the responsibility for Semicorn, in that rise against Fitzjerald, was a general defense quite characteristic; it was also a secret, specific defense against the torment of remorse. Then all at once his direct feeling for Semicorn swamped all other emotions and so he collapsed.

III

Jael turned from that ambiguous sight to Fitzjerald and asked for more news. What was the evidence against Semicorn? And what were the circumstances of the murder?

As Fitzjerald recited the details Capuchin lifted his face and listened, forgetting himself, unaware of the incongruity of his position in this company.

The murder was that kind of incredible thing which does often take place. One simply could not imagine it to have happened unobserved, in the midst of activity, in the light, with no effort or possibility of concealment. Yet there was the fact. It did so happen.

At two o’clock Plaino was seen at his desk alive. He sat in a private room at the back of the bank.

Entering the bank one had on the right a row of windows with little desks between for the use of patrons, on the left the long continuous counter with the opaque glass screen and the little barred openings such as one has seen in many banks. Walking straight down this corridor between the street windows and the counter one came to a partition wall with two doors. One was the door to the directors’ room, always locked; the other was the door to Plaino’s private office. The partition wall was thick and the door was heavy; still it was very extraordinary that such a sound had not been heard through the wall and through the closed door by the clerks back of the counter outside. From where the cashier sat to Plaino’s desk the actual distance was less than thirty feet, and the cashier was all the time in his place, or was supposed to have been.

At two-thirty o’clock a clerk entered Plaino’s room. He was there, at his desk, a shapeless lump, with a bullet through his heart. The killer had walked in, right up to the old man’s desk, facing him, had shot him and walked out again, and nobody had seen him.

The sequel was swift. The chief of police, a man hitherto unnoted for any power of insight, went immediately to “The Northwestern Herald” office, arrested Semicorn and his Wobbly crew, and searched the editorial premises. In the top right-hand drawer of Semicorn’s desk was found a Colt revolver with one chamber fired. The empty cartridge shell was still in it and the smell of burnt powder was fresh. The bullet that killed Plaino had been already recovered; it was found in the wall behind him, and it fitted the empty shell.

Semicorn was questioned. They asked him if the weapon was his. He refused to answer. They asked him if he had killed Plaino. He refused to answer. They asked him if he knew who killed Plaino.

“Yes,” he said.

“Who?”

“The people killed him,” he answered; and that was all they could get out of him.

There was nothing more, except that the town was in a state of dangerous excitement. When Fitzjerald left at seven o’clock people were gathering around the jail in which Semicorn and his Wobblies were held.

Jael rose from the table. To Fitzjerald she said, “Were you intending to go back tonight? You would be quite comfortable here. But if you were going back we might go together.”

“I meant to go back tonight,” he said, moving to get on his coat.

Capuchin stared at her unbelievingly. He had no understanding of her compulsion to go and could not restrain a sound of protest.

“But Ja-ah, Miss Saint-Leon, do you... if you... well, why should you go?”

She did not hear him.

It was remembered afterward by those who noticed him that he was so torn by equivocal impulses as to seem to be moving in two directions at once. As a fact, he followed Jael’s car for several miles, then turned back, went deeper into the country, took refuge with some farm friends, and was not heard of again for several weeks.

IV

A sleet storm had come on. The going was slow. When Jael and Fitzjerald arrived at Liberty it was two o’clock and the town was quiet. They went to Little Jones Street, which had the character of a club, and met again at breakfast. They were alone.

Fitzjerald had been out through the town. There was no newspaper, because, first, the editors were all in jail, and because, secondly, a mob had wrecked the plant.

Feeling ran very high against Wobblies, Lothians, even Leaguers. The mob that wrecked the “Herald” plant had earlier assaulted the jail, meaning to lynch Semicorn. It had entered, in fact, and got its hands on him. The sheriff was a man of strength. He saved his prisoner. In the struggle Semicorn was wounded, no one knew how badly.

“Angus,” said Jael, “I’ve been thinking of what you said to Capuchin on his responsibility—that he did everything but pull the trigger—not meaning to do so of course and yet in fact, by words, by suggestion, by flinging about combustible materials of thought, inciting another type of mentality to commit an insane act. Does that apply to me also?”

He answered, “Jael, you are too rational.”

“Don’t evade me,... please.”

“A terrible responsibility does rest upon the intellectual radicals,” he said. “If you press me, I am obliged to say I think so. They talk revolution philosophically, meaning change, if they know what they do mean. On a plane beneath philosophical distinctions other people talk revolution, using the same words, and they are literal. The intellectuals’ processes are abstract. They say revolution and see nothing. These others say revolution and see it taking place in the historical manner, as a brutal physical drama. And it seems to me these others are right. That is what revolution does mean. If the intellectuals don’t mean revolution in the historical figure they ought to find some other word for what they are talking about. I recall a conversation with the editors of a radical German newspaper in Frankfurt, years ago. We were at lunch, talking politics. They kept speaking of the revolution. I said, ‘What do you mean when you say revolution?’ First they stared at me and then they said, ‘You don’t suppose we mean killings in the street and blood in the gutters? That cannot happen in Germany.’ I said I only wished to be sure. Thousands of people who read that paper and repeated its very phrases did mean killings in the street and blood in the gutters. And when this actually happened in Germany those editors were of course horrified. That was not what they meant at all. The same words, the same language, the same images, philosophical on one plane, literally understood on the other. It is as if... Well I”

There were sounds of crashing glass, then a thud on the floor below—once, twice, a third time. In the intervals could be heard an ominous huzzing outside. Someone came running up to say there was a mob in front of the house. Jael immediately went down. Fitzjerald followed, not to restrain her but to stand by. She opened the door just as a rock fell on the threshhold, short of its mark. Fitzjerald stood behind her, not clearly in view.

The house was twenty feet back from the street and there was a fence. The crowd, not quite a mob, was on both sides of the fence, egging itself on. Jael’s appearance produced a hush. She went to the edge of the porch and said: “I am at home. If you want to see me you may come in. But please do not break my windows.”

That was all. She stood there half a minute, waiting. Some unintelligible remarks were shouted at her from the sidewalk; those who were inside the fence began to ooze out again, and nothing more occurred. She went inside and closed the door, not at all gently.

V

At the coroner’s inquest Semicorn, his head in bandages, doggedly repeated his first statement. As to the revolver, he refused to answer. Did he kill Plaino? He refused to answer. Did he know at whose hands the deceased had met his death?

Yes.

Whose?

“The people killed him,” he answered.

Not another word, no variation of these words, could be got from him, then or ever.

There was no doubt about the revolver. It was his. Seven or eight persons testified positively on this point. In fact, everybody in the “Herald’s” editorial department knew it was his weapon. Not this time but at other times and often he was seen to take it from the drawer and slip it into his pocket on going out, always putting it back in its place on returning. Moreover, he had bought it in the town, a year before, and this was proved.

The next day he was indicted for murder.

Jael went to the prison to see him. Many difficulties were raised about it, and when these were overcome he declined to receive her. He declined also to have the aid of legal counsel. Nevertheless, she brought two eminent lawyers from New York to prepare his defense. This everyone knew. Secretly, she brought detectives to work on the case, thinking it was possible to prove his innocence.

Her motives were not rational, nor did she seek to rationalize them to herself or to anyone else. From this time forward her conduct was purely emotional.

Her conscious feeling was one of responsibility for Semicorn. It did not interest her to argue it and she would not discuss it, more than to say, “My conscience tells me so.”

She had included him with her Lothians. Her loyalty to them was devotional. Lately, with the unfolding of her emotional nature, there had been added to her sense of loyalty a richer feeling. She began to see them as children. The mother hunger again, disguised and projected. Never until now had this hunger possessed a tragic and helpless object upon which to fix itself. Semicorn became that object.

Her conviction of his innocence was a maternal extravagance, not a reasoned conviction. Never for a moment did she doubt it. She had no theory of the crime nor did she try to explain Semicorn’s behaviour under the charge of having committed it. Purposely she avoided formulating theories. Simply, he was not guilty. To that she held. In the development of this attitude she was undoubtedly preparing beforehand the moral justification for extreme, extra-legal measures, with the premonition they would be necessary to save him.

Her detectives found nothing whatever to her use. They were soon convinced of Semicorn’s guilt. Her lawyers told her the defense would be hopeless if he persisted in his categorical, incriminating answers, saying he knew who killed Plaino and then refusing to tell, or saying absurdly it was the people killed him, which was the same as refusing to tell. He admitted knowledge of the deed and to withhold it made him accessory to the crime. They supposed he would continue to make these answers. They could not be sure, because he obstinately refused to converse with them. They strongly urged her to adopt the plea of insanity as a defense. There were two difficulties. He probably would repudiate that plea. It might be managed in spite of him but for the other difficulty, which was final. Jael herself would not consent. She positively forbade the lawyers to take that line. It was not consistent with her conviction of his innocence.

VI

The Semicorn case meanwhile had become the most celebrated of its kind. It was one of a notorious kind.

In the mentality of those who define themselves as class-conscious proletarians, coming as such to inherit the world, there is a morbid passion to exploit, experience and contemplate martyrdom. This passion, forever strange, is very old. The wonder and mystery of it haunt the ruins of Rome to this day. Any I. W. W., any communist, anarchist, rebel or radical, whom or what, brought to trial on a criminal charge, be the crime homicide, arson, burglary, sedition or treason, is thereby recommended for sainthood. A weird litany begins in the radical press, and the formula is:

First, the crime was an act of class warfare, therefore not a crime.

Second, the man is innocent; the crime was not committed.

Third, the charge was invented by the Neros of capitalism and their satraps.

Fourth, the object is to terrorize the proletariat; a victim is wanted; justice has been corrupted beforehand.

Lastly, if he is convicted and hanged, the obit and post-obit songs and the enrollment of another martyr.

But if he is found not guilty, justice acquires no merit. Only, Nero was that time afraid. The proletariat has won a victory.

The organization that had learned how to exploit this emotional asset most effectively was the one to which Semicorn belonged, namely, the I. W. W. It had found the cry of persecution to be much better for all purposes of propaganda than its old free speech fighting. It had always one candidate for martyrdom, sometimes two or three, on the way to the scaffold, besides twenty or thirty minor martyrs in jail, not for anything they had done, whether they had done it or not, but for what they believed—for their faith.

Now the Semicorn case went to the top. It was inevitable they said, that the bosses on returning to power in New Freedom would demand a victim. Semicorn was marked as a sacrifice to their lust for revenge. The evidence, all circumstantial, had been framed against him. The revolver had been planted in his drawer and wretches had been bought to swear it was his; or, if it was really his, then it had been fired by someone else, perhaps into the body of Plaino, and then returned to his drawer.

All revolutionary organs chanted these sayings; the liberal weeklies, like “The People’s Witness” edited by Grinling, repeated them, not as their own, not with direct sanction, but to show what the masses were thinking and feeling and how low and discouraged was their opinion of justice. It behooved the state, they said, to be aware of this, and, besides, with reactionary feeling such as it was in New Freedom, it was impossible that a man in Semicorn’s case could get a fair trial.

Capuchin never came forward with his evidence. If he had, the retort would have been that the capitalists had paid him to imagine a damning tale to justify the atrocity upon which they were bent.

The trial came on in March. Jael attended. On Semicorn’s side were five lawyers—Jael’s two, then two hired by the I. W. W. with funds raised from popular subscription, and a fifth appointed by the court as a formality after Semicorn had refused to have anything to do with the other four. On the side of the state was the prosecuting attorney alone. Having put in all the circumstantial evidence, he asked Semicorn to take the stand. Over the protest of his five lawyers he did so. The prosecuting attorney asked him again the well known questions and in a clear voice he made the well known answers.

The case was hopeless, as Jael’s lawyers had said. The jury was out ten minutes and brought in a verdict of guilty in the first degree.

He was sentenced to be hanged.

Without his sanction the case was appealed; the higher court confirmed the verdict unanimously. It was appealed again, and with the same result. The day for his execution was set.

VII

Jael had not waited. She was already acting upon a secret design. Her weapon was money; in her use of it she was perfectly unmoral, reckless and extravagant. The justification, if she needed any, was her conviction of Semicorn’s guiltlessness.

What now she proposed to do could not be worked through lawyers, nor through detectives, nor through anyone whose like she had ever known. Certainly not through friends, for it was dangerous. She required someone who was already persuaded, a zealot caring nothing for the consequences and yet one who should be subtle, cautious and coolminded in all that was of means to a desperate end.

And she found this ideal agent in the person of an I. W. W. who was the only one of Semicorn’s friends at large, going about freely, accepted by everyone. This was owing to his personality. It was very droll. Nobody could be serious about him. His figure was ludicrous. His pockets were always so bulging with papers and documents that his arms were spread, and he carried a thick, twisted cane like a fifth member. One eye was slightly cocked. He had a twitching smile. This was a nervous affliction, increasing with mental excitement, so that if he became very earnest or vehement, all the more he seemed to be laughing at himself, or kidding the part. He made others laugh. He had the wit to shape these personal oddities into a perfect disguise beneath which he concealed a nature almost as violent as Semicorn’s, and it was never suspected. His name was Leaveout. Besides that he possessed extraordinary intelligence, he was daring, fertile, and cunning.

Semicorn had been removed to the state penitentiary to await death. The penitentiary was a small institution on a lonely hill twenty miles beyond Lothian Farm. The warden had some secret radical sympathies, rooted in malicious envy; much more important was the fact that he was greedy.

The plot evolved between Jael and Leaveout was to deliver Semicorn into the hands of the International Workers of the World, who would undertake to hide him forever.

With the corruptible warden a party to the conspiracy, two men, as Leaveout discovered, could easily effect the delivery in a noiseless manner, by stealth. It was really quite simple. Nevertheless, it took time to perfect the plan. There was the escape after the delivery to be organized. At almost the last moment the warden doubled his price to a fabulous sum. Two weeks before the day set for the execution everything was ready. But then they had to wait ten days more for a dark night.

On the day preceding the appointed night the conspirators were gathered at Lothian Farm. They were, besides Jael herself, Leaveout and four other men who might have passed for lumberjacks, riggers, sailors, or farm laborers, as in fact they were and might be, interchangeably. True types of the bedouin worker. Two were sauntering about separately, outdoors. Two were indoors reading. All four had that solitary, musing air which in strong men on the way to a rash action overlays the coiled intention. They are never thinking about what they are going to do.

It was a warm afternoon. Jael was at her desk in the living hall, working with some papers, and Leaveout was with her, when Fitzjerald’s voice came booming through the open door. To Jael’s surprise, Leaveout knew him and greeted him freely.

She had not seen him for some time, though he had kept rooms at the hotel in Liberty ever since his first arrival on the day of the murder and was always somewhere around. She understood vaguely that he liked the country and was seeing a good deal of it. That accounted for frequent periods of absence, sometimes for a day or two, again for a week or more.

His appearing unexpectedly at this time evoked in her a variety of feelings. She was glad to see him; but the moment was awkward. Somehow it weakened her. Not as to her purpose, for that was fixed, and besides, her cast was made. The last detail had been settled; all the money had passed. The reaction had begun. She was low in spirit, lonely, wretched and dangerously tense. Conspiracy was foreign to her nature. Partly it was that Fitzjerald’s figure was like the ghost of a time so tranquil and remote that she could hardly suppose her life to have been one continuous piece of reality. For an instant it stood otherwise. Everything this side of Jones street was unreal; it would dissolve as a nightmare. She could have thrown herself headlong upon him as he stood there in the doorway, filling it and looking in, to ask him if this were not so, turning child herself.

“I want to take you for a ride,” said Fitzjerald.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m not at all sociable, but I’ll go.”

As they were leaving he asked, “Would it matter if we got back late? I mean, are you leaving anything in suspense?”

“No,” she answered. “I’m all clear. The later the better.”

They drove for an hour on a road Jael did not know—hardly more than a track on the buffalo grass. Suddenly he turned around the shoulder of a small butte and stopped out of view of the road. They walked a short distance to a spring and sat there in the shade of a glacial boulder.

“I know what you have been doing,” he said. “I know what is to take place tonight.”

Her first reaction was one of anxiety for the plot.

“How did you find it out?”

“By using my faculties,” he said. “That’s all irrelevant.”

“But is it likely anyone else knows?”

“I think not,” he said. “In that sense your enterprise is probably safe. That is not to say it could not have been discovered—only that no one else has had any suspicion. I knew you too well not to suspect you. That’s where I started.”

“But I couldn’t tell you,” she said.

“I understand that,” he answered, “and though I have known it for some time I couldn’t speak of it, either, for I realized how necessary it was for you to go through with it. You have gone through with it. Your part is accomplished. A very practical piece of work, if I permit myself to admire it. Now my part begins.”

“Your part!”

“Mine. The part I take. First I speak of consequences. You will be found out. It is certain. All your care has been to safeguard the end in view. As concerns yourself you have been reckless. Have you thought of the personal consequences?”

“Don’t, Angus. Don’t... please.”

“One of the consequences is that you are likely to be hanged in Semicorn’s stead. For having effected his escape you may be deemed guilty of the crime of murder.”

“I am one of those who did everything but pull the trigger,” she said.

“Oh! nonsense. Now hear me, Jael. I possess this information. It is mine. I may do with it what I please. I am resolved to use it in one of two ways. As we stand here you shall choose. Either you shall bind yourself upon your word to put yourself entirely in my hands, go with me now from this spot, remain in my keeping until I release you—or, I will go immediately to Liberty and prevent the delivery of Semicorn.”

“Angus! What is this? You do not... it is... yes, but you do mean it, don’t you?... I know you. We do not begin now and here to play with words. Say it again, please. Carefully.”

“If you say yes we go on from here, on and on, wherever I see the way——”

“You as my jailer.”

“I as your keeper.”

“And if I say no?”

“If you say no, I shall go at once to Liberty and give information of your plot.”

“And as to going away... with you... where is away?”

“Nowhere. To invisibility. We vanish.”

“For how long?”

“Until I release you.”

“I see,” she said. “Until Semicorn is discovered. Until then, you think. I tell you I have put all my intelligence to this. The plan is perfect. He will never be found.”

“Well,” said Fitzjerald, “I tell you I have used such wits as I possess to a similar end. We shall never be found, either.”

She was quite still for several minutes.

“Angus, while we are still friends, as of old, lot us speak our thoughts freely. We are not playing a game, are we? You apparently do not understand. This is an indignity to my person, to my personality, to the soul of me. You wish to save me. You are willing to sacrifice yourself to save me. The sentiment is noble. To be saved at all is repugnant to me. To be saved in this manner is ignominious. I should prefer to be hanged.”

“I know all that,” he said. “I admit it.”

“And you will admit also that you have no right to put me to this choice.”

“Admitted,” he said carelessly.

“I am trying to keep it clear,” she said. “You have the power to oblige me to say yes. That I admit. I cannot prevent you from defeating my project if I say no. This you must see is at bottom oimply a question of physical strength. You are the stronger. I mean, if it were reversed you could prevent me from defeating you? You could detain me here by brute force.”

“You shall choose,” he said, looking at his watch.

“One more word, Angus. You can oblige me to say yes. You can. But if you do I shall never forgive you. It will be as a solid wall between us forever.”

“Even so.”

“I should be unable to help hating you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She stood for a while looking into the spring with her back to him.

“Are you ready to take my word?”

“I am listening for it,” he said, “and I’m hoping it will be no.”

“Yes,” she said, facing him, with an expression he had never seen.

He held out his hand; she turned away.

“Then let’s be starting,” he said. “Take the back seat, please, and find the rug. We shall be driving all night.”

It was Fitzjerald’s one extravagant enterprise in the field of emotional action and need not be otherwise explained. It became fantastic. That would be supposed. From an overdeveloped life of the mind the descent to emotionalism, when it occurs, is steep. Being new, the taste in romantic behaviour is rank, juvenile and uncritical. Its gratification is a wonderful debauch.

VIII

On the Mississippi river a little twenty foot scow with a cabin on her and a long oar over the stern for either steering or lazy propulsion, nosing about In the flats, stuck on a sand-bar, drifting with the current or tied up in the shade at sundown, a wisp of violet smoke curling out of her stove-pipe funnel, a smell of bacon coming off on the breeze, will not be observed, remembered or missed, especially if she is unpainted and dingy. If her whole company consists of one man and one woman, it is quite enough and all that life’s maritime regulations require. If the members of this company are not on speaking terms, that is unfortunately human. Proximity does it. Or if the woman were mostly invisible and the man, lazing aft, conducted an interminable monologue, you would understand.

There was one such scow, more aimless seeming than the rule is, on which the man talked a high language, as if he were reading a book, though he was not; and if the other river people had listened they would have been suspicious, thinking it alien and wrong. There was much that was wrong here.

The woman inside never spoke; but she thought what a blessed relief it would be to break character, to scream, to quarrel, to fight, to utter profanity, even as other river women, their protests beginning abruptly, ending suddenly, ending sometimes with a splash, the sound of it all coming swiftly across half a mile of still water, staccato vibrations intensified.

This woman appeared when the meal was ready. The meal was eaten in silence. She washed up the things and set them away, as if that were a self-assigned task. Then sometimes she went forward and sat in a little sawbuck chair, slapping mosquitoes.

The man reclined aft, smoking and rumbling. He was undiscouraged though the woman seemed never to be listening. The reader may not care to listen, either. Nothing happens right away, and one who likes may skip.

Evenings, mornings, afternoons, the man rumbled, and his sayings were such as these:

“The people are not radical here. They are conservative. The soil is young, the hour is young, opportunity is young. Radicalism in this country is a pale ferocity. A personal attitude disguised as a social intention. If you are really a radical you have something the matter with you. There was nothing the matter with the people of New Freedom. They were too young to have anything the matter with them. They had no impulse to destroy anything in principle. What they did want and all they wanted was increased participation in the material benefits of the order that is. Which is not radicalism. Now comes a man like Capuchin, bidding them rise as peasants against the castle. They are not peasants. They are proprietors of the land they work. And there is no castle. What stands for it is an invisible fact called capitalism. They discover that they themselves are capitalists, interested not in the destruction of capitalism but in the proper working of it. Which again is not radicalism. It is the despair of the radical cult. If those people had been radical, wishing to destroy the order, they could have understood a deed like Semicorn’s. Instead, they reacted violently the other way. Hence that sudden revulsion of feeling in New Freedom...”

Again: “The proletariat. This is an old-world word, imported here. So far as it is a fact it is an old-world fact, also imported here. When the proletariat becomes articulate, what does it say? It says, ‘Life shall be level. The values of existence shall be horizontal. No one shall have more to eat or wear or enjoy than another.’ That is to say, everyone shall be free but to possess more than another; everyone shall be free but to be greater or better than another. And the desire to be greater than another is universal. It is this desire that moves the proletariat itself, as a class. For what is it really saying? The meaning of what it says is this: ‘We, the people, the slaves, the hewers and bringers whom you have so long despised—we are greater than any other class, greater than all other classes. None shall possess more than we possess and pretend by that sign to a superiority of any kind. We shall inherit the earth.’ What unites the proletarians is this thought of their collective greatness and a bitter hatred toward those who deny it in words, in acts, in manners, or by the implication of their possessions.... Here is no permanent proletariat. It is always passing, dissolving. Why? Because here it is so easy to possess....”

Again: “I close my eyes and see adopted children to the number of three or four thousand gathered in Washington Square. They have banners, reading;

‘Bloody Hands Off Russia.’ ‘Empty the Jails.’ ‘Release Our Class Prisoners.’ ‘Deport Us to Russia if You Dare.’ They are Slavs and Jews and Letts and Poles, all a little timorous and anxious to touch one another. Gradually order is established, four abreast, and out of the mass the head of a column appears, twenty or thirty leaders singing in very good voice, the others following. The song is the Internationale, and as the strain lifts and floats all hats come off. This is significant. The procession gives one the curious impression of being weighted. It moves forward steadily and at the same time there is a hanging back. What moves these people? Why do they do this? They are all well dressed and well fed. They have come lately from Russia. They would not go back. Their banners are irrelevant altogether. What is taking place here? Why are they so wistful and earnest? This is what it means. These people are not wretched. They are happy. They are not falling. They are rising. They are stumbling up. Yesterday they were nobody in Russia. Here they are emerging. They are free to gratify publicly their desire for self-assertion. They are saying to themselves, addressing the imaginary people who live in the big houses all about: ‘We are the proletariat. The earth belongs to us, not to you. We have only to reach forth our hands and take it. Therefore, we are superior to you, even though you do not believe it, even though we do not really believe it ourselves.’ It is a kind of class daydream. It satisfies the bitter yearning to be as good as anybody. This takes the place of religion. That is why the hats come off. They are all so naïve and shy and crowd-conscious that they cannot be looked in the eye. There is no destructive intent in their minds. Everything they feel is large and vague. But they will be as petulant as children if they are crossed. They will kick and scream and bite. But they are rising. That is the fact. They will disappear upward....”

Again: “Some radicals say, ‘We do not propose to abolish wealth. We say, abolish poverty.’ The fact is you cannot abolish poverty without abolishing wealth. For wealth is relative. One can be sensible of it only in contrast with poverty. What is poverty? What is wealth? There is no absolute measure. Only contrast. In that hut over there the people seem wretchedly poor. That is because habitations have improved. Not long ago, historically speaking, the royal family would have lived in a hut like that. The king himself. The poor now have more than the rich had a few generations ago, more of everything to eat and wear and enjoy. They are none the less torn by envy because others have more....”

Or: “I come again to Kropotkin, idealist, grieving for the botch of mankind, desperately sad at seeing how badly human nature works. He conceives a better way for it to behave. It should behave altruistically. Life should be on a plan of mutual aid. Help thy neighbor as much as thyself. It is not working that way. The facts are all otherwise. The visible facts. What does he do? Does he accept the facts we know about human nature? No. He rejects them. He recreates the facts of history to prove how well it might work in this other way. There is the silly difficulty that when he has so recreated the facts of history to show human nature working as it should, the people fail him. Having found the perfect way, they depart from it. Thus, the league of free cities, founded on mutual aid, ate up the serfs and peasants. The craft guilds, formed on the same right principle, oppressed the minor crafts and the unskilled and the consumers, until they had to be overthrown. What is proved? That people unite to gain an advantage and, having gained it, abuse it? No. It is only proved to Kropotkin that there is some principle of wickedness in the leadership, for see how beautiful the world would be if from the beginning those who united to make themselves free and equal and powerful had included everyone else in their freedom and power and equality. Absurd! The imagination may so easily recreate historical facts to prove that to be true which ought to be true! Man may do almost anything he likes with the facts. He is continually creating new facts. He cannot recreate the fact of himself. That is not to say he has ever tried....”

And again: “You cannot tell people the truth. In the first place, they will not receive it. In the second place you do not know what it is....”

IX

Headway by leeway, floating and drifting, sleeping and waking, the endless rumbling of Fitzjerald’s serial soliloquy—this had been going on for nearly two months, down three hundred miles of river, and Jael was nearly mad. She had thought of saying to him: “I may not take back my word, but I am free to end my life.” What restrained her was a sense of absurdity.

His physical nearness day and night became a horror. A thin partition divided the cabin. At night she could hear the slightest movement on his side. Sometimes he snored.

It was much more comfortable than she could have imagined, in the creature sense. Her little bunk was soft. He had been extremely thoughtful to provide personal necessaries, certain indispensable things a man could not be expected to remember or think of, even intimate garments of fine texturre to be worn under the coarse gingham dress he specified for appearances. Yet each of these things was a separate outrage. They were details, offensively touching her person, whereas she had conceded to him only the right to control her movements.

Right! What right had he to take charge of her life at all? The only right he could conceivably claim was one he did not assert.

Her anger and disgust were so strong that the consequences she had been saved from, in contrast with what she had been saved for, grew dim. Suppose she had stood her ground at Lothian Farm, as she meant to do, until he had interfered. Suppose she had been hanged in Semicorn’s place. Even in that extremity she would still have been herself, a definite, responsible person. In this incredible situation she was not herself. She did not belong to herself; she did not belong to him.

She, Jael Saint-Leon, reduced to melodrama!

A nameless woman floating on the river with a man who believed he had saved her from being hanged, for God knew what fantastic reason of his own, if any.

His impersonal serenity in all circumstances, ignoring even the fact that she never spoke, compounded the torture.

He had put off his beard. His face had turned a cherry-wood color from the sun. His forearms had become freckled, and the hair upon them, now lighter than his skin, was a revelation of shagginess. He had an odor she had never noticed before. Not an odor of uncleanliness. A masculine smell that affected her sometimes very disagreeably, sometimes quite otherwise.

She hated him, and her feeling of repugnance was often so strong that she could not eat. This worried him, whereupon she had moments, for which she despised herself, of feeling sorry. Then there was the ghastly uncertainty, the fact of its being an indeterminate affair. When should it end? Perhaps never, unless she broke out of his trap. When they should come sometime to the end of the river—then what?

But she was fair, analytical and self-seeing. It was with her mind and spirit she hated him. That was not the whole of her. She knew—having discovered it by a process of painful self-exploration—that his total unawareness of her as a woman was the unpardonable affront, a subtle, unmentionable injury.

Wondering if his attitude were real or only studied she began to regard him from that point of curiosity. Apparently it was real. She could not be sure; and she never knew. But to the end of this preposterous interlude his indifference to her, as man to woman, was flawless. It taunted her. More than once she had the impulse to test it by some overt act. She knew also that if for one instant it were different on his part, if he betrayed by so much as one little gesture the slightest sex interest in her, she would cast herself overboard or try to kill him.

With this humiliating and unexpected knowledge of herself she went back to the evening when he put her to the choice. What else could she have done? She could think of many things another kind of woman might have done. She was not that kind of woman. Probably he was not the kind of man the kind of woman she was not could have detained there by the spring.

Nevertheless, when she came to this point something seemed to be left out, or to drop out—some further subtle explanation of her yes. So far as she knew at the time she said yes to protect and save her plot, unable to see any feasible alternative. Was it possible that an unacknowledged feeling for Fitzjerald, as a refuge of strength, as a lover, perhaps, had defeated her wits and influenced her decision? She had the courage to face this at last, and to prove it affirmatively, by putting to herself squarely the question: Suppose it had been another man? Suppose it had been Capuchin, for example? Then would she have said yes? Certainly not. What else she might have done she could not say. Yet there was the fact. In no other case, with no other man, would she or could she have said yes.

These progressive discoveries of her inner self did not in the least soften her sense of indignation. On the contrary, they increased it most perversely. She hated him all the more.

Such was the case and the breaking point of strain was near when one day the drifting scow came upon three men swimming the river. Two were in trouble, having spent themselves; the third, a powerful swimmer, was helping them, first one and then the other, telling them how to unhinge their joints and take it easy. Fitzjerald hauled them all aboard.

The two who were spent fell down in a wet heap. The third, who was tall, red haired and purposeful, said to Fitzjerald, “Take us over t’ the other side.”

The river at that point was more than a mile wide. The other side was flat, alive with mosquitoes, and the scow had been avoiding it; besides, it was twice as far.

“Why that side?” Fitzjerald asked. “I don’t want to go over there. This side is nearer.”

“We got t’get over there,” the man said. His tone was peremptory. He looked uneasily at the near side, then marked the course of the scow and glanced at the sculling oar, clearly with the thought of taking possession of the craft and putting her across himself.

“Then you had better go on swimming,” said Fitzjerald. “This is not a ferryboat.”

Just then on the near bank, which was high, appeared a group of horsemen, all armed with rifles and shotguns. One of them, thinking himself a battleship commander, dropped a bullet in the water ahead of the scow; and all of them yelled.

“Put her off!” said the red haired man, moving to take the oar.

“Stand still,” said Fitzjerald, quietly. “I’ll not put you ashore until I find out what it’s all about.”

The man hesitated. Meanwhile the scow was working shoreward. One of the horsemen shouted: “Take them men to the other side. You bring them back here an’ we’ll hang them.”

At that Fitzjerald put the scow off toward the other side, remembering how the river divided the states. The other side was another state. Evidently this was an affair of summary expulsion.

“It seems unanimous,” he said to the red haired man. “What’s your name? and what’s wrong with the three of you?”

“My name’s Lovelace,” the man answered. “That ain’t my name but I like it. An’ they ain’t nothing wrong with us. We belong to th’ red card union, that’s all.”

He leaned against the cabin, wet, contemptuous and disgusted, as one who knows trouble and may be easily bored with it.

“Wobblies, eh?” said Fitzjerald. “What have you been doing to make yourselves so unpopular?”

“You don’t haf to do anything t’ get unpopular ‘f’you’re a Wobbly,” said Lovelace. “Y’just naturally are that way. Ain’t no place good for you. ‘F’a wheat stack burns up ‘r’a pulley runs off th’ shaft ‘n’ they know you tote a red card, that’s you, ‘n’ they fan you out o’th goddam state. One o’ my partners there now’s got some lead in his leg. That’s why he wasen swimming so good.”

“May we do something for him?” Jael asked. She had been listening, and now appeared in the cabin door with this question.

Lovelace regarded her for a moment casually and answered: “No, madam. We got him fixed up. Ain’t so bad. They diden go t’ kill him. Just t’ scare him. When they want one of us killed they get th’ law to do it, like they done t’ Semicorn.”

“Semicorn?” she repeated. “Did you say Semi-corn?”

“Yes, madam. He was one of us they wanted to kill, ‘n’ they murdered him by law.”

“You are wrong,” she said. “He was not executed. Are you sure?”

“Am I sure?” he said. “You c’n read, can’t you?... Here!”

He pulled from his pocket an oil skin wallet, opened it carefully and drew out the folded front page of an I. W. W. newspaper. The only news on it was the account of Semicorn’s execution, treated as a class murder in great block type. Jael only glanced at it.

“But I had heard he was to be... to be saved,” she said.

“Where d’yu get that?” he asked. His manner was rough and menacing and he regarded her with wonder-struck suspicion. Before she could answer his expression changed. The wonder remained, apparently increasing; the suspicion went away.

“I mean,” she said, hesitating, “there was a rumor that he was to escape... that it had been arranged... and I had heard nothing since.”

“Now I get you,” he said, in a very different voice. “That was so, too. What you diden know—”

“Lay off! Lay off that!” shouted one of the two men lying forward of the cabin.

“Shut up!” said Lovelace. Then to Jael: “What you diden know was he refused t’ be saved. It was all ready for him. Like that!” (Snapping hit fingers.) “He woulden go. He said no.”

At that moment the scow crawled up on the mud.

Jael looked at Fitzjerald.

“You hear?” she said. “I am released.”

“Yes,” he answered.

“Put the plank over, please.”

“I’ll go ashore and get directions,” he said. “It may be miles to the nearest town.”

Lovelace was already putting the plank over, with one ear cocked to what was passing between Jael and Fitzjerald.

“If you were not a profound idiot,” she said to Fitzjerald, “you might see that I am at the limit of my self-control. I loathe myself. I loathe you. I will go alone. Do you understand? From this instant I will be alone. I wish to walk in the mud—alone!”

“It’s coming dark,” he said, placidly. “It isn’t safe.”

At that she laughed, with wicked scorn, and there was the note of an hysterical scream in it.

“Safe!” she repeated. “From safety I am delivered.”

With that she walked down the plank and cut straight across the dried mud flat. There was nothing ahead of her but this black bottom land so far as one could see. No habitation in sight.

Lovelace spoke a few words in a low tone to his companions and then set out after her. Fitzjerald followed.

For a mile or more Lovelace made no effort to overtake her. Then he mended his pace.

“He’s foll’in’ you, madam,” he said. “Him you heaved off back there.”

“So are you,” said Jael.

“That’s different,” he said. “You got nothin’ agen me ‘n’ I wanta talk to you.”

“What about?” she asked, holding her way.

“You woulden know me, that’s right,” he said. “I’ve done myself over a bit since I was t’your place. I diden know you first.”

She stopped to look at him. There was first some vague, startling association; then suddenly full recognition.

“I do,” she said. “You were one of the four who waited that day at Lothian Farm. You were—”

“One o’ them that went for Semicorn,” he said.

“Why didn’t you take him by force?” she demanded.

“No good,” he replied. “He diden want t’go. Where’d you keep a man like that agen his own will? I knowed him too well for that.”

“You knew him? How long had you known him?”

“Long afore that was. From when he was a kid, you might say.”

Here at last was one who knew something of Semicorn’s history. For the rest of the way—and it was six miles to the nearest town—they walked together, Lovelace talking about Semicorn. Fitzjerald doggedly kept them in sight.

How a certain tragedy in Semicorn’s childhood controlled the rest of his life was easily understood. His father was a miner in Colorado, not a radical, not an agitator, a docile man, whose way in a labor dispute was merely to stand with his own. There came a very desperate strike when the boy was ten. The strikers and their families, evicted from the company houses, pitched camp in tents and armed themselves; and it became very hot for scabs and strike breakers. To protect the lives of these the militia was called out. Between the strikers and the militia occurred several bloody collisions. In one of them a stray bullet killed Semicorn’s mother. To take revenge was thereafter his ruling passion. He cut out for himself at fourteen, worked at anything he could find, went to night school, joined the I. W. W. because it was the most militant order in sight, and soon found his way to its department of propaganda. It was to increase his equipment for that work, with an ambition to become head of the organization, that he went to New York and entered Lothian College after having been discharged from Leavenworth prison, where he served a term for inciting men to resist the draft. Not that he was a pacifist. He said it was a capitalistic war, and he believed it was a capitalistic bullet that killed his mother.

Lovelace evidently had known him intimately. He told many details of his life, humanly interesting though irrelevant, and would have gone on interminably but that they came at last to the town and to the door of the hotel. Jael gave him some money and bade him come to her in the morning. She had an idea for his future.

As Lovelace left her Fitzjerald came up. He stood in a ludicrous light and did not mind. His manner was not in the least altered.

“It is both custom and law,” he said, “for the jailer to see that his charge shall fare forth with the requisite means. Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

“Thank you,” she said, coldly, and turned to go in. But the sight of his tall figure receding gave her a pang.

“Angus!” she called.

He came walking back.

She was embarrassed. This made her very angry again. She the one to be embarrassed! It was one thing more he had done to her.

“I have forgotten why I called you back,” she said. Then on impulse, “Angus, I do you the compliment to suppose you are a damn fool.”

“I know that,” he said.

“You know everything,” she retorted. “Do you know one thing more? I should sometime regret not having asked you and I may as well ask you now. What are your true feelings about me?”

“I have given it some thought,” he answered.

“I’m sure you have. What have you found out?”

“This,” he said. “Between man and woman there is no wormless friendship.”

She might have retorted. The words were ready. Friendship! Did he lay it entirely there at last and put her in the wrong for having failed to understand it? Did not men with one another respect the individual’s right to meet the consequences of his own acts in his own way? Would one man have taken possession of another as he had taken possession of her?

But she said none of this. A contrary emotion moved her to offer him her hand.

“Good-bye,” she said, smiling a little. “What arc you going to do?”

“My legs are stiff,” he said. “So is my mind. I shall go for a walk to the west, over the mountains, putting the rest of the year to it. What are you going to do?”

“You will find me in New York,” she said, “and that’s as far as I know.”

With that she went in.

X

She returned to New York unannounced and went direct to Jones street. It was early morning. Lillibridge and DeGrouse were at breakfast alone, with certain unmistakable signs of a very intimate relationship.

“It’s quite all right,” she said to Jael’s look of inquiry. “We are married. I couldn’t leave while you were lost. So we did the other thing. De Grouse came here.”

Jael ceded them the place for so long as they might wish to keep it. On entering the door she had been seized with a feeling of aversion. To reinstate herself here was unimaginable. Instead, she opened the old Saint-Leon house uptown and went to live there, temporarily, she supposed.

The old circle reformed in this environment, and she was interested to see how readily her guests accommodated themselves to its luxurious texture, as if they were quite used to it. Indeed, in the years that had passed since she left this house to make a place in Jones street where her friends could be at ease everyone had become much more familiar with the surfaces of fine living.

She abandoned the Lothian Farm in New Freedom, though not the idea. That she went on with, to a much larger scale, with one farm in Pennsylvania and another in Connecticut, and induced the Lothian College to take it up.

From time to time she heard of Capuchin. Once she heard from him direct. He took up co-operative marketing and worked out an elaborate scheme of control, costing, grading, branding and selling, which he had sold once to the fig growers in California, once to the apple growers in Washington and once to the irrigationists in Idaho; and now in a long letter to Jael he wished her to finance its application to nation-wide agriculture.

Fitzjerald returned to New York the next winter. One evening he appeared for dinner. Jael greeted him as of old, and also as of old she was genuinely glad to see him. He was just the same. He knew most of the company. It had not changed so much. One notable addition was a red haired man as tall as himself and much in the same figure. This was Mr. Lovelace, who had not renamed himself and appeared to have a good deal to do in an executive way with the new Lothian farms. No one could tell, not even Jael, whether Fitzjerald remembered him or not.

Secretly both Jael and Fitzjerald were very sentimental about that absurd Mississippi river voyage. They knew too much and thought too much. That was the whole trouble and why it turned out so badly. He with a fantastic notion of romantic behavior from the literature of sublime knighthood and she with no Eveish way to a man.

On taking her away so high-handedly he had no thought but one of rescue; yet he had been willing to give all the rest of his life to it, with whatever that might entail. Afterward it seemed to him quite impossible to make love to her or in any way disclose his feeling to a damsel held in durance. Then at the end when she said she loathed him he believed it, and so answered her question as to say the motive had been one of friendship.

For a long time, under conditions of restored amity, neither one referred to this experience obliquely or otherwise. He perhaps would never himself have touched it.

One night at dinner a vivacious California woman sat opposite Fitzjerald and they had been tilting together. At one thrust from him, somewhat rough, she turned to Jael and asked:

“What kind of man is this Mr. Fitzjerald?”

Jael was lighting a cigarette, and she answered, saying it slowly: “He is the kind of man who doesn’t know what a woman means when she says yes.”

THE END