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Alexander's Bridge
Cather, Willa
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lexander's Bridge by Willa Cather
Alexander's Bridge
2
CHAPTER I
L
ate one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of
Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very
often get to Boston. He had lived there as a student, but for twenty years and more, since he
had been Professor of Philosophy in a Western university, he had seldom come East except
to take a steamer for some foreign port. Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating with
a whimsical smile the slanting street, with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely colored
houses, and the row of naked trees on which the thin sunlight was still shining. The gleam of
the river at the foot of the hill made him blink a little, not so much because it was too bright
as because he found it so pleasant. The few passers−by glanced at him unconcernedly, and
even the children who hurried along with their school−bags under their arms seemed to find
it perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman should be standing there, looking up through
his glasses at the gray housetops.
The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light had faded from the bare boughs and the watery
twilight was setting in when Wilson at last walked down the hill, descending into cooler and
cooler depths of grayish shadow. His nostril, long unused to it, was quick to detect the smell
of wood smoke in the air, blended with the odor of moist spring earth and the saltiness that
came up the river with the tide. He crossed Charles Street between jangling street cars and
shelving lumber drays, and after a moment of uncertainty wound into Brimmer Street. The
street was quiet, deserted, and hung with a thin bluish haze. He had already fixed his sharp
eye upon the house which he reasoned should be his objective point, when he noticed a
woman approaching rapidly from the opposite direction. Always an interested observer of
women, Wilson would have slackened his pace anywhere to follow this one with his
impersonal, appreciative glance. She was a person of distinction he saw at once, and,
moreover, very handsome. She was tall, carried her beautiful head proudly, and moved with
ease and certainty. One immediately took for granted the costly privileges and fine spaces
that must lie in the background from which such a figure could emerge with this rapid and
elegant gait. Wilson noted her dress, too, – for, in his way, he had an eye for such things, –
particularly her brown furs and her hat. He got a blurred impression of her fine color, the
violets she wore, her white gloves, and, curiously enough, of her veil, as she turned up a
flight of steps in front of him and disappeared.
Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things that passed him on the wing as completely and
deliberately as if they had been dug−up marvels, long anticipated, and definitely fixed at the
end of a railway journey. For a few pleasurable seconds he quite forgot where he was going,
and only after the door had closed behind her did he realize that the young woman had
entered the house to which he had directed his trunk from the South Station that morning.
He hesitated a moment before mounting the steps. «Can that,» he murmured in amazement,
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CHAPTER I 3
– «can that possibly have been Mrs. Alexander?»
When the servant admitted him, Mrs. Alexander was still standing in the hallway. She
heard him give his name, and came forward holding out her hand.
«Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson? I was afraid that you might get here before I did. I
was detained at a concert, and Bartley telephoned that he would be late. Thomas will show
you your room. Had you rather have your tea brought to you there, or will you have it down
here with me, while we wait for Bartley?»
Wilson was pleased to find that he had been the cause of her rapid walk, and with her he
was even more vastly pleased than before. He followed her through the drawing−room into
the library, where the wide back windows looked out upon the garden and the sunset and a
fine stretch of silver−colored river. A harp−shaped elm stood stripped against the
pale−colored evening sky, with ragged last year's birds' nests in its forks, and through the
bare branches the evening star quivered in the misty air. The long brown room breathed the
peace of a rich and amply guarded quiet. Tea was brought in immediately and placed in
front of the wood fire. Mrs. Alexander sat down in a high−backed chair and began to pour it,
while Wilson sank into a low seat opposite her and took his cup with a great sense of ease
and harmony and comfort.
«You have had a long journey, haven't you?» Mrs. Alexander asked, after showing
gracious concern about his tea. «And I am so sorry Bartley is late. He's often tired when he's
late. He flatters himself that it is a little on his account that you have come to this Congress
of Psychologists.»
«It is,» Wilson assented, selecting his muffin carefully; «and I hope he won't be tired
tonight. But, on my own account, I'm glad to have a few moments alone with you, before
Bartley comes. I was somehow afraid that my knowing him so well would not put me in the
way of getting to know you.»
«That's very nice of you.» She nodded at him above her cup and smiled, but there was a
little formal tightness in her tone which had not been there when she greeted him in the hall.
Wilson leaned forward. «Have I said something awkward? I live very far out of the
world, you know. But I didn't mean that you would exactly fade dim, even if Bartley were
here.»
Mrs. Alexander laughed relentingly. «Oh, I'm not so vain! How terribly discerning you
are.»
She looked straight at Wilson, and he felt that this quick, frank glance brought about an
understanding between them.
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CHAPTER I 4
He liked everything about her, he told himself, but he particularly liked her eyes; when
she looked at one directly for a moment they were like a glimpse of fine windy sky that may
bring all sorts of weather.
«Since you noticed something,» Mrs. Alexander went on, «it must have been a flash of
the distrust I have come to feel whenever I meet any of the people who knew Bartley when
he was a boy. It is always as if they were talking of someone I had never met. Really,
Professor Wilson, it would seem that he grew up among the strangest people. They usually
say that he has turned out very well, or remark that he always was a fine fellow. I never
know what reply to make.»
Wilson chuckled and leaned back in his chair, shaking his left foot gently. «I expect the
fact is that we none of us knew him very well, Mrs. Alexander. Though I will say for myself
that I was always confident he'd do something extraordinary.»
Mrs. Alexander's shoulders gave a slight movement, suggestive of impatience. «Oh, I
should think that might have been a safe prediction. Another cup, please?»
«Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the case of boys, is not so easy as you might
imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad hurt early and lose their courage; and some never
get a fair wind. Bartley» – he dropped his chin on the back of his long hand and looked at
her admiringly – «Bartley caught the wind early, and it has sung in his sails ever since.»
Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire with intent preoccupation, and Wilson studied
her half−averted face. He liked the suggestion of stormy possibilities in the proud curve of
her lip and nostril. Without that, he reflected, she would be too cold.
«I should like to know what he was really like when he was a boy. I don't believe he
remembers,» she said suddenly. «Won't you smoke, Mr. Wilson?»
Wilson lit a cigarette. «No, I don't suppose he does. He was never introspective. He was
simply the most tremendous response to stimuli I have ever known. We didn't know exactly
what to do with him.»
A servant came in and noiselessly removed the tea−tray. Mrs. Alexander screened her
face from the firelight, which was beginning to throw wavering bright spots on her dress and
hair as the dusk deepened.
«Of course,» she said, «I now and again hear stories about things that happened when
he was in college.»
«But that isn't what you want.» Wilson wrinkled his brows and looked at her with the
smiling familiarity that had come about so quickly. «What you want is a picture of him,
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CHAPTER I 5
standing back there at the other end of twenty years. You want to look down through my
memory.»
She dropped her hands in her lap. «Yes, yes; that's exactly what I want.»
At this moment they heard the front door shut with a jar, and Wilson laughed as Mrs.
Alexander rose quickly. «There he is. Away with perspective! No past, no future for Bartley;
just the fiery moment. The only moment that ever was or will be in the world!»
The door from the hall opened, a voice called «Winifred?» hurriedly, and a big man
came through the drawing−room with a quick, heavy tread, bringing with him a smell of
cigar smoke and chill out−of−doors air. When Alexander reached the library door, he
switched on the lights and stood six feet and more in the archway, glowing with strength and
cordiality and rugged, blond good looks. There were other bridge−builders in the world,
certainly, but it was always Alexander's picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted,
because he looked as a tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head
seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked strong enough in
themselves to support a span of any one of his ten great bridges that cut the air above as
many rivers.
After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room over the
library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of white lights along the Cambridge
Embankment. The room was not at all what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson
felt at once the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without obtrusions
of ugliness or change. It was none of Alexander's doing, of course; those warm consonances
of color had been blending and mellowing before he was born. But the wonder was that he
was not out of place there, – that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable background for his
vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in the cushions of his chair,
his powerful head upright, his hair rumpled above his broad forehead. He sat heavily, a cigar
in his large, smooth hand, a flush of after−dinner color in his face, which wind and sun and
exposure to all sorts of weather had left fair and clearskinned.
«You are off for England on Saturday, Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me.»
«Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a meeting of British engineers, and I'm doing
another bridge in Canada, you know.»
«Oh, every one knows about that. And it was in Canada that you met your wife, wasn't
it?»
Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her great−aunt there. A most remarkable old lady. I
was working with MacKeller then, an old Scotch engineer who had picked me up in London
and taken me back to Quebec with him. He had the contract for the Allway Bridge, but
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CHAPTER I 6
before he began work on it he found out that he was going to die, and he advised the
committee to turn the job over to me. Otherwise I'd never have got anything good so early.
MacKeller was an old friend of Mrs. Pemberton, Winifred's aunt. He had mentioned me to
her, so when I went to Allway she asked me to come to see her. She was a wonderful old
lady."
«Like her niece?» Wilson queried.
Bartley laughed. «She had been very handsome, but not in Winifred's way. When I
knew her she was little and fragile, very pink and white, with a splendid head and a face like
fine old lace, somehow, – but perhaps I always think of that because she wore a lace scarf on
her hair. She had such a flavor of life about her. She had known Gordon and Livingstone
and Beaconsfield when she was young, – every one. She was the first woman of that sort I'd
ever known. You know how it is in the West, – old people are poked out of the way. Aunt
Eleanor fascinated me as few young women have ever done. I used to go up from the works
to have tea with her, and sit talking to her for hours. It was very stimulating, for she couldn't
tolerate stupidity.»
«It must have been then that your luck began, Bartley,» said Wilson, flicking his cigar
ash with his long finger. «It's curious, watching boys,» he went on reflectively. «I'm sure I
did you justice in the matter of ability. Yet I always used to feel that there was a weak spot
where some day strain would tell. Even after you began to climb, I stood down in the crowd
and watched you with – well, not with confidence. The more dazzling the front you
presented, the higher your facade rose, the more I expected to see a big crack zigzagging
from top to bottom,» – he indicated its course in the air with his forefinger, – «then a crash
and clouds of dust. It was curious. I had such a clear picture of it. And another curious thing,
Bartley,» Wilson spoke with deliberateness and settled deeper into his chair, «is that I don't
feel it any longer. I am sure of you.»
Alexander laughed. «Nonsense! It's not I you feel sure of; it's Winifred. People often
make that mistake.»
«No, I'm serious, Alexander. You've changed. You have decided to leave some birds in
the bushes. You used to want them all.»
Alexander's chair creaked. «I still want a good many,» he said rather gloomily. «After
all, life doesn't offer a man much. You work like the devil and think you're getting on, and
suddenly you discover that you've only been getting yourself tied up. A million details drink
you dry. Your life keeps going for things you don't want, and all the while you are being
built alive into a social structure you don't care a rap about. I sometimes wonder what sort of
chap I'd have been if I hadn't been this sort; I want to go and live out his potentialities, too. I
haven't forgotten that there are birds in the bushes.»
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CHAPTER I 7
Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the fire, his shoulders thrust forward as if he were
about to spring at something. Wilson watched him, wondering. His old pupil always
stimulated him at first, and then vastly wearied him. The machinery was always pounding
away in this man, and Wilson preferred companions of a more reflective habit of mind. He
could not help feeling that there were unreasoning and unreasonable activities going on in
Alexander all the while; that even after dinner, when most men achieve a decent
impersonality, Bartley had merely closed the door of the engine−room and come up for an
airing. The machinery itself was still pounding on. Bartley's abstraction and Wilson's
reflections were cut short by a rustle at the door, and almost before they could rise Mrs.
Alexander was standing by the hearth. Alexander brought a chair for her, but she shook her
head.
«No, dear, thank you. I only came in to see whether you and Professor Wilson were
quite comfortable. I am going down to the music−room.»
«Why not practice here? Wilson and I are growing very dull. We are tired of talk.»
«Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander,» Wilson began, but he got no further.
«Why, certainly, if you won't find me too noisy. I am working on the Schumann
`Carnival,' and, though I don't practice a great many hours, I am very methodical,» Mrs.
Alexander explained, as she crossed to an upright piano that stood at the back of the room,
near the windows.
Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated, dropped into a chair behind her. She
played brilliantly and with great musical feeling. Wilson could not imagine her permitting
herself to do anything badly, but he was surprised at the cleanness of her execution. He
wondered how a woman with so many duties had managed to keep herself up to a standard
really professional. It must take a great deal of time, certainly, and Bartley must take a great
deal of time. Wilson reflected that he had never before known a woman who had been able,
for any considerable while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting
behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes with his hand. In her
dinner dress she looked even younger than in street clothes, and, for all her composure and
self−sufficiency, she seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there were
something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty much what she demanded in
people and what she demanded from life, and he wondered how she squared Bartley. After
ten years she must know him; and however one took him, however much one admired him,
one had to admit that he simply wouldn't square. He was a natural force, certainly, but
beyond that, Wilson felt, he was not anything very really or for very long at a time.
Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bartley's profile was still wreathed in cigar
smoke that curled up more and more slowly. His shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions
and one hand hung large and passive over the arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple
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CHAPTER I 8
velvet smoking−coat. His wife, Wilson surmised, had chosen it. She was clearly very proud
of his good looks and his fine color. But, with the glow of an immediate interest gone out of
it, the engineer's face looked tired, even a little haggard. The three lines in his forehead,
directly above the nose, deepened as he sat thinking, and his powerful head drooped forward
heavily. Although Alexander was only forty−three, Wilson thought that beneath his vigorous
color he detected the dulling weariness of on−coming middle age.
The next afternoon, at the hour when the river was beginning to redden under the
declining sun, Wilson again found himself facing Mrs. Alexander at the tea−table in the
library.
«Well,» he remarked, when he was bidden to give an account of himself, «there was a
long morning with the psychologists, luncheon with Bartley at his club, more psychologists,
and here I am. I've looked forward to this hour all day.»
Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the vapor from the kettle. «And do you remember
where we stopped yesterday?»
«Perfectly. I was going to show you a picture. But I doubt whether I have color enough
in me. Bartley makes me feel a faded monochrome. You can't get at the young Bartley
except by means of color.» Wilson paused and deliberated. Suddenly he broke out: «He
wasn't a remarkable student, you know, though he was always strong in higher mathematics.
His work in my own department was quite ordinary. It was as a powerfully equipped nature
that I found him interesting. That is the most interesting thing a teacher can find. It has the
fascination of a scientific discovery. We come across other pleasing and endearing qualities
so much oftener than we find force.»
«And, after all,» said Mrs. Alexander, «that is the thing we all live upon. It is the thing
that takes us forward.»
Wilson thought she spoke a little wistfully. «Exactly,» he assented warmly. «It builds
the bridges into the future, over which the feet of every one of us will go.»
«How interested I am to hear you put it in that way. The bridges into the future – I often
say that to myself. Bartley's bridges always seem to me like that. Have you ever seen his
first suspension bridge in Canada, the one he was doing when I first knew him? I hope you
will see it sometime. We were married as soon as it was finished, and you will laugh when I
tell you that it always has a rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest river, with mists
and clouds always battling about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb hanging in the sky. It
really was a bridge into the future. You have only to look at it to feel that it meant the
beginning of a great career. But I have a photograph of it here.» She drew a portfolio from
behind a bookcase. «And there, you see, on the hill, is my aunt's house.»
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER I 9
Wilson took up the photograph. «Bartley was telling me something about your aunt last
night. She must have been a delightful person.»
Winifred laughed. «The bridge, you see, was just at the foot of the hill, and the noise of
the engines annoyed her very much at first. But after she met Bartley she pretended to like it,
and said it was a good thing to be reminded that there were things going on in the world. She
loved life, and Bartley brought a great deal of it in to her when he came to the house. Aunt
Eleanor was very worldly in a frank, Early−Victorian manner. She liked men of action, and
disliked young men who were careful of themselves and who, as she put it, were always
trimming their wick as if they were afraid of their oil's giving out. MacKeller, Bartley's first
chief, was an old friend of my aunt, and he told her that Bartley was a wild, ill−governed
youth, which really pleased her very much. I remember we were sitting alone in the dusk
after Bartley had been there for the first time. I knew that Aunt Eleanor had found him much
to her taste, but she hadn't said anything. Presently she came out, with a chuckle: `MacKeller
found him sowing wild oats in London, I believe. I hope he didn't stop him too soon. Life
coquets with dashing fellows. The coming men are always like that. We must have him to
dinner, my dear.' And we did. She grew much fonder of Bartley than she was of me. I had
been studying in Vienna, and she thought that absurd. She was interested in the army and in
politics, and she had a great contempt for music and art and philosophy. She used to declare
that the Prince Consort had brought all that stuff over out of Germany. She always sniffed
when Bartley asked me to play for him. She considered that a newfangled way of making a
match of it.»
When Alexander came in a few moments later, he found Wilson and his wife still
confronting the photograph. «Oh, let us get that out of the way,» he said, laughing.
«Winifred, Thomas can bring my trunk down. I've decided to go over to New York
to−morrow night and take a fast boat. I shall save two days.»
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CHAPTER I 10
CHAPTER II
O
n the night of his arrival in London, Alexander went immediately to the hotel on the
Embankment at which he always stopped, and in the lobby he was accosted by an old
acquaintance, Maurice Mainhall, who fell upon him with effusive cordiality and indicated a
willingness to dine with him. Bartley never dined alone if he could help it, and Mainhall was
a good gossip who always knew what had been going on in town; especially, he knew
everything that was not printed in the newspapers. The nephew of one of the standard
Victorian novelists, Mainhall bobbed about among the various literary cliques of London
and its outlying suburbs, careful to lose touch with none of them. He had written a number
of books himself; among them a «History of Dancing,» a «History of Costume,» a «Key to
Shakespeare's Sonnets,» a study of «The Poetry of Ernest Dowson,» etc. Although
Mainhall's enthusiasm was often tiresome, and although he was often unable to distinguish
between facts and vivid figments of his imagination, his imperturbable good nature
overcame even the people whom he bored most, so that they ended by becoming, in a
reluctant manner, his friends. In appearance, Mainhall was astonishingly like the
conventional stage−Englishman of American drama: tall and thin, with high, hitching
shoulders and a small head glistening with closely brushed yellow hair. He spoke with an
extreme Oxford accent, and when he was talking well, his face sometimes wore the rapt
expression of a very emotional man listening to music. Mainhall liked Alexander because he
was an engineer. He had preconceived ideas about everything, and his idea about Americans
was that they should be engineers or mechanics. He hated them when they presumed to be
anything else.
While they sat at dinner Mainhall acquainted Bartley with the fortunes of his old friends
in London, and as they left the table he proposed that they should go to see Hugh
MacConnell's new comedy, «Bog Lights.»
«It's really quite the best thing MacConnell's done,» he explained as they got into a
hansom. «It's tremendously well put on, too. Florence Merrill and Cyril Henderson. But
Hilda Burgoyne's the hit of the piece. Hugh's written a delightful part for her, and she's quite
inexpressible. It's been on only two weeks, and I've been half a dozen times already. I
happen to have MacConnell's box for tonight or there'd be no chance of our getting places.
There's everything in seeing Hilda while she's fresh in a part. She's apt to grow a bit stale
after a time. The ones who have any imagination do.»
«Hilda Burgoyne!» Alexander exclaimed mildly. «Why, I haven't heard of her for –
years.»
Mainhall laughed. «Then you can't have heard much at all, my dear Alexander. It's only
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lately, since MacConnell and his set have got hold of her, that she's come up. Myself, I
always knew she had it in her. If we had one real critic in London – but what can one
expect? Do you know, Alexander,» – Mainhall looked with perplexity up into the top of the
hansom and rubbed his pink cheek with his gloved finger, – «do you know, I sometimes
think of taking to criticism seriously myself. In a way, it would be a sacrifice; but, dear me,
we do need some one.»
Just then they drove up to the Duke of York's, so Alexander did not commit himself, but
followed Mainhall into the theatre. When they entered the stage−box on the left the first act
was well under way, the scene being the interior of a cabin in the south of Ireland. As they
sat down, a burst of applause drew Alexander's attention to the stage. Miss Burgoyne and
her donkey were thrusting their heads in at the half door. «After all,» he reflected, «there's
small probability of her recognizing me. She doubtless hasn't thought of me for years.» He
felt the enthusiasm of the house at once, and in a few moments he was caught up by the
current of MacConnell's irresistible comedy. The audience had come forewarned, evidently,
and whenever the ragged slip of a donkey−girl ran upon the stage there was a deep murmur
of approbation, every one smiled and glowed, and Mainhall hitched his heavy chair a little
nearer the brass railing.
«You see,» he murmured in Alexander's ear, as the curtain fell on the first act, «one
almost never sees a part like that done without smartness or mawkishness. Of course, Hilda
is Irish, – the Burgoynes have been stage people for generations, – and she has the Irish
voice. It's delightful to hear it in a London theatre. That laugh, now, when she doubles over
at the hips – who ever heard it out of Galway? She saves her hand, too. She's at her best in
the second act. She's really MacConnell's poetic motif, you see; makes the whole thing a
fairy tale.»
The second act opened before Philly Doyle's underground still, with Peggy and her
battered donkey come in to smuggle a load of potheen across the bog, and to bring Philly
word of what was doing in the world without, and of what was happening along the
roadsides and ditches with the first gleam of fine weather. Alexander, annoyed by Mainhall's
sighs and exclamations, watched her with keen, half−skeptical interest. As Mainhall had
said, she was the second act; the plot and feeling alike depended upon her lightness of foot,
her lightness of touch, upon the shrewdness and deft fancifulness that played alternately, and
sometimes together, in her mirthful brown eyes. When she began to dance, by way of
showing the gossoons what she had seen in the fairy rings at night, the house broke into a
prolonged uproar. After her dance she withdrew from the dialogue and retreated to the ditch
wall back of Philly's burrow, where she sat singing «The Rising of the Moon» and making a
wreath of primroses for her donkey.
When the act was over Alexander and Mainhall strolled out into the corridor. They met
a good many acquaintances; Mainhall, indeed, knew almost every one, and he babbled on
incontinently, screwing his small head about over his high collar. Presently he hailed a tall,
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CHAPTER II 12
bearded man, grim−browed and rather battered−looking, who had his opera cloak on his arm
and his hat in his hand, and who seemed to be on the point of leaving the theatre.
«MacConnell, let me introduce Mr. Bartley Alexander. I say! It's going famously
to−night, Mac. And what an audience! You'll never do anything like this again, mark me. A
man writes to the top of his bent only once.»
The playwright gave Mainhall a curious look out of his deep−set faded eyes and made a
wry face. «And have I done anything so fool as that, now?» he asked.
«That's what I was saying,» Mainhall lounged a little nearer and dropped into a tone
even more conspicuously confidential. «And you'll never bring Hilda out like this again.
Dear me, Mac, the girl couldn't possibly be better, you know.»
MacConnell grunted. «She'll do well enough if she keeps her pace and doesn't go off on
us in the middle of the season, as she's more than like to do.»
He nodded curtly and made for the door, dodging acquaintances as he went.
«Poor old Hugh,» Mainhall murmured. «He's hit terribly hard. He's been wanting to
marry Hilda these three years and more. She doesn't take up with anybody, you know. Irene
Burgoyne, one of her family, told me in confidence that there was a romance somewhere
back in the beginning. One of your countrymen, Alexander, by the way; an American
student whom she met in Paris, I believe. I dare say it's quite true that there's never been any
one else.» Mainhall vouched for her constancy with a loftiness that made Alexander smile,
even while a kind of rapid excitement was tingling through him. Blinking up at the lights,
Mainhall added in his luxurious, worldly way: «She's an elegant little person, and quite
capable of an extravagant bit of sentiment like that. Here comes Sir Harry Towne. He's
another who's awfully keen about her. Let me introduce you. Sir Harry Towne, Mr. Bartley
Alexander, the American engineer.»
Sir Harry Towne bowed and said that he had met Mr. Alexander and his wife in Tokyo.
Mainhall cut in impatiently.
«I say, Sir Harry, the little girl's going famously to−night, isn't she?»
Sir Harry wrinkled his brows judiciously. «Do you know, I thought the dance a bit
conscious to−night, for the first time. The fact is, she's feeling rather seedy, poor child.
Westmere and I were back after the first act, and we thought she seemed quite uncertain of
herself. A little attack of nerves, possibly.»
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CHAPTER II 13
He bowed as the warning bell rang, and Mainhall whispered: «You know Lord
Westmere, of course, – the stooped man with the long gray mustache, talking to Lady
Dowle. Lady Westmere is very fond of Hilda.»
When they reached their box the house was darkened and the orchestra was playing
«The Cloak of Old Gaul.» In a moment Peggy was on the stage again, and Alexander
applauded vigorously with the rest. He even leaned forward over the rail a little. For some
reason he felt pleased and flattered by the enthusiasm of the audience. In the half−light he
looked about at the stalls and boxes and smiled a little consciously, recalling with
amusement Sir Harry's judicial frown. He was beginning to feel a keen interest in the
slender, barefoot donkey−girl who slipped in and out of the play, singing, like some one
winding through a hilly field. He leaned forward and beamed felicitations as warmly as
Mainhall himself when, at the end of the play, she came again and again before the curtain,
panting a little and flushed, her eyes dancing and her eager, nervous little mouth tremulous
with excitement.
When Alexander returned to his hotel – he shook Mainhall at the door of the theatre –
he had some supper brought up to his room, and it was late before he went to bed. He had
not thought of Hilda Burgoyne for years; indeed, he had almost forgotten her. He had last
written to her from Canada, after he first met Winifred, telling her that everything was
changed with him – that he had met a woman whom he would marry if he could; if he could
not, then all the more was everything changed for him. Hilda had never replied to his letter.
He felt guilty and unhappy about her for a time, but after Winifred promised to marry him
he really forgot Hilda altogether. When he wrote her that everything was changed for him,
he was telling the truth. After he met Winifred Pemberton he seemed to himself like a
different man. One night when he and Winifred were sitting together on the bridge, he told
her that things had happened while he was studying abroad that he was sorry for, – one thing
in particular, – and he asked her whether she thought she ought to know about them. She
considered a moment and then said «No, I think not, though I am glad you ask me. You see,
one can't be jealous about things in general; but about particular, definite, personal things,» –
here she had thrown her hands up to his shoulders with a quick, impulsive gesture – «oh,
about those I should be very jealous. I should torture myself – I couldn't help it.» After that
it was easy to forget, actually to forget. He wondered to−night, as he poured his wine, how
many times he had thought of Hilda in the last ten years. He had been in London more or
less, but he had never happened to hear of her. «All the same,» he lifted his glass, "here's to
you, little Hilda. You've made things come your way, and I never thought you'd do it.
«Of course,» he reflected, «she always had that combination of something homely and
sensible, and something utterly wild and daft. But I never thought she'd do anything. She
hadn't much ambition then, and she was too fond of trifles. She must care about the theatre a
great deal more than she used to. Perhaps she has me to thank for something, after all.
Sometimes a little jolt like that does one good. She was a daft, generous little thing. I'm glad
she's held her own since. After all, we were awfully young. It was youth and poverty and
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proximity, and everything was young and kindly. I shouldn't wonder if she could laugh
about it with me now. I shouldn't wonder – But they've probably spoiled her, so that she'd be
tiresome if one met her again.»
Bartley smiled and yawned and went to bed.
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CHAPTER II 15
CHAPTER III
T
he next evening Alexander dined alone at a club, and at about nine o'clock he dropped
in at the Duke of York's. The house was sold out and he stood through the second act. When
he returned to his hotel he examined the new directory, and found Miss Burgoyne's address
still given as off Bedford Square, though at a new number. He remembered that, in so far as
she had been brought up at all, she had been brought up in Bloomsbury. Her father and
mother played in the provinces most of the year, and she was left a great deal in the care of
an old aunt who was crippled by rheumatism and who had had to leave the stage altogether.
In the days when Alexander knew her, Hilda always managed to have a lodging of some sort
about Bedford Square, because she clung tenaciously to such scraps and shreds of memories
as were connected with it. The mummy room of the British Museum had been one of the
chief delights of her childhood. That forbidding pile was the goal of her truant fancy, and
she was sometimes taken there for a treat, as other children are taken to the theatre. It was
long since Alexander had thought of any of these things, but now they came back to him
quite fresh, and had a significance they did not have when they were first told him in his
restless twenties. So she was still in the old neighborhood, near Bedford Square. The new
number probably meant increased prosperity. He hoped so. He would like to know that she
was snugly settled. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past ten; she would not be home
for a good two hours yet, and he might as well walk over and have a look at the place. He
remembered the shortest way.
It was a warm, smoky evening, and there was a grimy moon. He went through Covent
Garden to Oxford Street, and as he turned into Museum Street he walked more slowly,
smiling at his own nervousness as he approached the sullen gray mass at the end. He had not
been inside the Museum, actually, since he and Hilda used to meet there; sometimes to set
out for gay adventures at Twickenham or Richmond, sometimes to linger about the place for
a while and to ponder by Lord Elgin's marbles upon the lastingness of some things, or, in the
mummy room, upon the awful brevity of others. Since then Bartley had always thought of
the British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where all the dead things in the
world were assembled to make one's hour of youth the more precious. One trembled lest
before he got out it might somehow escape him, lest he might drop the glass from
over−eagerness and see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his youth
under his coat and hugged it! And how good it was to turn one's back upon all that vaulted
cold, to take Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door and down the steps into the sunlight
among the pigeons – to know that the warm and vital thing within him was still there and
had not been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the veins of some
bearded Assyrian king. They in their day had carried the flaming liquor, but to−day was his!
So the song used to run in his head those summer mornings a dozen years ago. Alexander
walked by the place very quietly, as if he were afraid of waking some one.
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CHAPTER III 16
He crossed Bedford Square and found the number he was looking for. The house, a
comfortable, well−kept place enough, was dark except for the four front windows on the
second floor, where a low, even light was burning behind the white muslin sash curtains.
Outside there were window boxes, painted white and full of flowers. Bartley was making a
third round of the Square when he heard the far−flung hoof−beats of a hansom−cab horse,
driven rapidly. He looked at his watch, and was astonished to find that it was a few minutes
after twelve. He turned and walked back along the iron railing as the cab came up to Hilda's
number and stopped. The hansom must have been one that she employed regularly, for she
did not stop to pay the driver. She stepped out quickly and lightly. He heard her cheerful
«Good−night, cabby,» as she ran up the steps and opened the door with a latchkey. In a few
moments the lights flared up brightly behind the white curtains, and as he walked away he
heard a window raised. But he had gone too far to look up without turning round. He went
back to his hotel, feeling that he had had a good evening, and he slept well.
For the next few days Alexander was very busy. He took a desk in the office of a Scotch
engineering firm on Henrietta Street, and was at work almost constantly. He avoided the
clubs and usually dined alone at his hotel. One afternoon, after he had tea, he started for a
walk down the Embankment toward Westminster, intending to end his stroll at Bedford
Square and to ask whether Miss Burgoyne would let him take her to the theatre. But he did
not go so far. When he reached the Abbey, he turned back and crossed Westminster Bridge
and sat down to watch the trails of smoke behind the Houses of Parliament catch fire with
the sunset. The slender towers were washed by a rain of golden light and licked by little
flickering flames; Somerset House and the bleached gray pinnacles about Whitehall were
floated in a luminous haze. The yellow light poured through the trees and the leaves seemed
to burn with soft fires. There was a smell of acacias in the air everywhere, and the
laburnums were dripping gold over the walls of the gardens. It was a sweet, lonely kind of
summer evening. Remembering Hilda as she used to be, was doubtless more satisfactory
than seeing her as she must be now – and, after all, Alexander asked himself, what was it but
his own young years that he was remembering?
He crossed back to Westminster, went up to the Temple, and sat down to smoke in the
Middle Temple gardens, listening to the thin voice of the fountain and smelling the spice of
the sycamores that came out heavily in the damp evening air. He thought, as he sat there,
about a great many things: about his own youth and Hilda's; above all, he thought of how
glorious it had been, and how quickly it had passed; and, when it had passed, how little
worth while anything was. None of the things he had gained in the least compensated. In the
last six years his reputation had become, as the saying is, popular. Four years ago he had
been called to Japan to deliver, at the Emperor's request, a course of lectures at the Imperial
University, and had instituted reforms throughout the islands, not only in the practice of
bridge−building but in drainage and road−making. On his return he had undertaken the
bridge at Moorlock, in Canada, the most important piece of bridge− building going on in the
world, – a test, indeed, of how far the latest practice in bridge structure could be carried. It
was a spectacular undertaking by reason of its very size, and Bartley realized that, whatever
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CHAPTER III 17
else he might do, he would probably always be known as the engineer who designed the
great Moorlock Bridge, the longest cantilever in existence. Yet it was to him the least
satisfactory thing he had ever done. He was cramped in every way by a niggardly
commission, and was using lighter structural material than he thought proper. He had
vexations enough, too, with his work at home. He had several bridges under way in the
United States, and they were always being held up by strikes and delays resulting from a
general industrial unrest.
Though Alexander often told himself he had never put more into his work than he had
done in the last few years, he had to admit that he had never got so little out of it. He was
paying for success, too, in the demands made on his time by boards of civic enterprise and
committees of public welfare. The obligations imposed by his wife's fortune and position
were sometimes distracting to a man who followed his profession, and he was expected to
be interested in a great many worthy endeavors on her account as well as on his own. His
existence was becoming a network of great and little details. He had expected that success
would bring him freedom and power; but it had brought only power that was in itself
another kind of restraint. He had always meant to keep his personal liberty at all costs, as old
MacKeller, his first chief, had done, and not, like so many American engineers, to become a
part of a professional movement, a cautious board member, a Nestor de pontibus. He
happened to be engaged in work of public utility, but he was not willing to become what is
called a public man. He found himself living exactly the kind of life he had determined to
escape. What, he asked himself, did he want with these genial honors and substantial
comforts? Hardships and difficulties he had carried lightly; overwork had not exhausted
him; but this dead calm of middle life which confronted him, – of that he was afraid. He was
not ready for it. It was like being buried alive. In his youth he would not have believed such
a thing possible. The one thing he had really wanted all his life was to be free; and there was
still something unconquered in him, something besides the strong work−horse that his
profession had made of him. He felt rich to−night in the possession of that unstultified
survival; in the light of his experience, it was more precious than honors or achievement. In
all those busy, successful years there had been nothing so good as this hour of wild
light−heartedness. This feeling was the only happiness that was real to him, and such hours
were the only ones in which he could feel his own continuous identity – feel the boy he had
been in the rough days of the old West, feel the youth who had worked his way across the
ocean on a cattle−ship and gone to study in Paris without a dollar in his pocket. The man
who sat in his offices in Boston was only a powerful machine. Under the activities of that
machine the person who, in such moments as this, he felt to be himself, was fading and
dying. He remembered how, when he was a little boy and his father called him in the
morning, he used to leap from his bed into the full consciousness of himself. That
consciousness was Life itself. Whatever took its place, action, reflection, the power of
concentrated thought, were only functions of a mechanism useful to society; things that
could be bought in the market. There was only one thing that had an absolute value for each
individual, and it was just that original impulse, that internal heat, that feeling of one's self in
one's own breast.
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CHAPTER III 18
When Alexander walked back to his hotel, the red and green lights were blinking along
the docks on the farther shore, and the soft white stars were shining in the wide sky above
the river.
The next night, and the next, Alexander repeated this same foolish performance. It was
always Miss Burgoyne whom he started out to find, and he got no farther than the Temple
gardens and the Embankment. It was a pleasant kind of loneliness. To a man who was so
little given to reflection, whose dreams always took the form of definite ideas, reaching into
the future, there was a seductive excitement in renewing old experiences in imagination. He
started out upon these walks half guiltily, with a curious longing and expectancy which were
wholly gratified by solitude. Solitude, but not solitariness; for he walked shoulder to
shoulder with a shadowy companion – not little Hilda Burgoyne, by any means, but some
one vastly dearer to him than she had ever been – his own young self, the youth who had
waited for him upon the steps of the British Museum that night, and who, though he had
tried to pass so quietly, had known him and come down and linked an arm in his.
It was not until long afterward that Alexander learned that for him this youth was the
most dangerous of companions.
One Sunday evening, at Lady Walford's, Alexander did at last meet Hilda Burgoyne.
Mainhall had told him that she would probably be there. He looked about for her rather
nervously, and finally found her at the farther end of the large drawing−room, the centre of a
circle of men, young and old. She was apparently telling them a story. They were all
laughing and bending toward her. When she saw Alexander, she rose quickly and put out her
hand. The other men drew back a little to let him approach.
«Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you been in London long?»
Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously, over her hand. «Long enough to have seen you
more than once. How fine it all is!»
She laughed as if she were pleased. «I'm glad you think so. I like it. Won't you join us
here?»
«Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about a donkey−boy she had in Galway last
summer,» Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed up again. Lord Westmere stroked
his long white mustache with his bloodless hand and looked at Alexander blankly. Hilda was
a good story−teller. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, as if she had alighted there for a
moment only. Her primrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheath for her slender, supple
figure, and its delicate color suited her white Irish skin and brown hair. Whatever she wore,
people felt the charm of her active, girlish body with its slender hips and quick, eager
shoulders. Alexander heard little of the story, but he watched Hilda intently. She must
certainly, he reflected, be thirty, and he was honestly delighted to see that the years had
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CHAPTER III 19
treated her so indulgently. If her face had changed at all, it was in a slight hardening of the
mouth – still eager enough to be very disconcerting at times, he felt – and in an added air of
self− possession and self−reliance. She carried her head, too, a little more resolutely.
When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne turned pointedly to Alexander, and the
other men drifted away.
«I thought I saw you in MacConnell's box with Mainhall one evening, but I supposed
you had left town before this.»
She looked at him frankly and cordially, as if he were indeed merely an old friend
whom she was glad to meet again.
«No, I've been mooning about here.»
Hilda laughed gayly. «Mooning! I see you mooning! You must be the busiest man in
the world. Time and success have done well by you, you know. You're handsomer than ever
and you've gained a grand manner.»
Alexander blushed and bowed. «Time and success have been good friends to both of us.
Aren't you tremendously pleased with yourself?»
She laughed again and shrugged her shoulders. «Oh, so−so. But I want to hear about
you. Several years ago I read such a lot in the papers about the wonderful things you did in
Japan, and how the Emperor decorated you. What was it, Commander of the Order of the
Rising Sun? That sounds like `The Mikado.' And what about your new bridge – in Canada,
isn't it, and it's to be the longest one in the world and has some queer name I can't
remember.»
Bartley shook his head and smiled drolly. «Since when have you been interested in
bridges? Or have you learned to be interested in everything? And is that a part of success?»
«Why, how absurd! As if I were not always interested!» Hilda exclaimed.
«Well, I think we won't talk about bridges here, at any rate.» Bartley looked down at the
toe of her yellow slipper which was tapping the rug impatiently under the hem of her gown.
«But I wonder whether you'd think me impertinent if I asked you to let me come to see you
sometime and tell you about them?»
«Why should I? Ever so many people come on Sunday afternoons.»
«I know. Mainhall offered to take me. But you must know that I've been in London
several times within the last few years, and you might very well think that just now is a
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CHAPTER III 20
rather inopportune time – »
She cut him short. «Nonsense. One of the pleasantest things about success is that it
makes people want to look one up, if that's what you mean. I'm like every one else – more
agreeable to meet when things are going well with me. Don't you suppose it gives me any
pleasure to do something that people like?»
«Does it? Oh, how fine it all is, your coming on like this! But I didn't want you to think
it was because of that I wanted to see you.» He spoke very seriously and looked down at the
floor.
Hilda studied him in wide−eyed astonishment for a moment, and then broke into a low,
amused laugh. «My dear Mr. Alexander, you have strange delicacies. If you please, that is
exactly why you wish to see me. We understand that, do we not?»
Bartley looked ruffled and turned the seal ring on his little finger about awkwardly.
Hilda leaned back in her chair, watching him indulgently out of her shrewd eyes.
«Come, don't be angry, but don't try to pose for me, or to be anything but what you are. If
you care to come, it's yourself I'll be glad to see, and you thinking well of yourself. Don't try
to wear a cloak of humility; it doesn't become you. Stalk in as you are and don't make
excuses. I'm not accustomed to inquiring into the motives of my guests. That would hardly
be safe, even for Lady Walford, in a great house like this.»
«Sunday afternoon, then,» said Alexander, as she rose to join her hostess. «How early
may I come?»
She gave him her hand and flushed and laughed. He bent over it a little stiffly. She went
away on Lady Walford's arm, and as he stood watching her yellow train glide down the long
floor he looked rather sullen. He felt that he had not come out of it very brilliantly.
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CHAPTER III 21
CHAPTER IV
O
n Sunday afternoon Alexander remembered Miss Burgoyne's invitation and called at
her apartment. He found it a delightful little place and he met charming people there. Hilda
lived alone, attended by a very pretty and competent French servant who answered the door
and brought in the tea. Alexander arrived early, and some twenty−odd people dropped in
during the course of the afternoon. Hugh MacConnell came with his sister, and stood about,
managing his tea−cup awkwardly and watching every one out of his deep−set, faded eyes.
He seemed to have made a resolute effort at tidiness of attire, and his sister, a robust, florid
woman with a splendid joviality about her, kept eyeing his freshly creased clothes
apprehensively. It was not very long, indeed, before his coat hung with a discouraged sag
from his gaunt shoulders and his hair and beard were rumpled as if he had been out in a gale.
His dry humor went under a cloud of absent−minded kindliness which, Mainhall explained,
always overtook him here. He was never so witty or so sharp here as elsewhere, and
Alexander thought he behaved as if he were an elderly relative come in to a young girl's
party.
The editor of a monthly review came with his wife, and Lady Kildare, the Irish
philanthropist, brought her young nephew, Robert Owen, who had come up from Oxford,
and who was visibly excited and gratified by his first introduction to Miss Burgoyne. Hilda
was very nice to him, and he sat on the edge of his chair, flushed with his conversational
efforts and moving his chin about nervously over his high collar. Sarah Frost, the novelist,
came with her husband, a very genial and placid old scholar who had become slightly
deranged upon the subject of the fourth dimension. On other matters he was perfectly
rational and he was easy and pleasing in conversation. He looked very much like Agassiz,
and his wife, in her old−fashioned black silk dress, overskirted and tight−sleeved, reminded
Alexander of the early pictures of Mrs. Browning. Hilda seemed particularly fond of this
quaint couple, and Bartley himself was so pleased with their mild and thoughtful converse
that he took his leave when they did, and walked with them over to Oxford Street, where
they waited for their 'bus. They asked him to come to see them in Chelsea, and they spoke
very tenderly of Hilda. «She's a dear, unworldly little thing,» said the philosopher absently;
«more like the stage people of my young days – folk ofsimple manners. There aren't many
such left. American tours have spoiled them, I'm afraid. They have all grown very smart.
Lamb wouldn't care a great deal about many of them, I fancy.»
Alexander went back to Bedford Square a second Sunday afternoon. He had a long talk
with MacConnell, but he got no word with Hilda alone, and he left in a discontented state of
mind. For the rest of the week he was nervous and unsettled, and kept rushing his work as if
he were preparing for immediate departure. On Thursday afternoon he cut short a committee
meeting, jumped into a hansom, and drove to Bedford Square. He sent up his card, but it
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CHAPTER IV 22
came back to him with a message scribbled across the front.
So sorry I can't see you. Will you come and dine with me Sunday evening at half−past
seven?
H.B.
When Bartley arrived at Bedford Square on Sunday evening, Marie, the pretty little
French girl, met him at the door and conducted him upstairs. Hilda was writing in her
living−room, under the light of a tall desk lamp. Bartley recognized the primrose satin gown
she had worn that first evening at Lady Walford's.
«I'm so pleased that you think me worth that yellow dress, you know,» he said, taking
her hand and looking her over admiringly from the toes of her canary slippers to her
smoothly parted brown hair. «Yes, it's very, very pretty. Every one at Lady Walford's was
looking at it.»
Hilda curtsied. «Is that why you think it pretty? I've no need for fine clothes in Mac's
play this time, so I can afford a few duddies for myself. It's owing to that same chance, by
the way, that I am able to ask you to dinner. I don't need Marie to dress me this season, so
she keeps house for me, and my little Galway girl has gone home for a visit. I should never
have asked you if Molly had been here, for I remember you don't like English cookery.»
Alexander walked about the room, looking at everything.
«I haven't had a chance yet to tell you what a jolly little place I think this is. Where did
you get those etchings? They're quite unusual, aren't they?»
«Lady Westmere sent them to me from Rome last Christmas. She is very much
interested in the American artist who did them. They are all sketches made about the Villa
d'Este, you see. He painted that group of cypresses for the Salon, and it was bought for the
Luxembourg.»
Alexander walked over to the bookcases. «It's the air of the whole place here that I like.
You haven't got anything that doesn't belong. Seems to me it looks particularly well
to−night. And you have so many flowers. I like these little yellow irises.»
«Rooms always look better by lamplight – in London, at least. Though Marie is clean –
really clean, as the French are. Why do you look at the flowers so critically? Marie got them
all fresh in Covent Garden market yesterday morning.»
«I'm glad,» said Alexander simply. «I can't tell you how glad I am to have you so pretty
and comfortable here, and to hear every one saying such nice things about you. You've got
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CHAPTER IV 23
awfully nice friends,» he added humbly, picking up a little jade elephant from her desk.
«Those fellows are all very loyal, even Mainhall. They don't talk of any one else as they do
of you.»
Hilda sat down on the couch and said seriously: «I've a neat little sum in the bank, too,
now, and I own a mite of a hut in Galway. It's not worth much, but I love it. I've managed to
save something every year, and that with helping my three sisters now and then, and tiding
poor Cousin Mike over bad seasons. He's that gifted, you know, but he will drink and loses
more good engagements than other fellows ever get. And I've traveled a bit, too.»
Marie opened the door and smilingly announced that dinner was served.
«My dining−room,» Hilda explained, as she led the way, «is the tiniest place you have
ever seen.»
It was a tiny room, hung all round with French prints, above which ran a shelf full of
china. Hilda saw Alexander look up at it.
«It's not particularly rare,» she said, «but some of it was my mother's. Heaven knows
how she managed to keep it whole, through all our wanderings, or in what baskets and
bundles and theatre trunks it hasn't been stowed away. We always had our tea out of those
blue cups when I was a little girl, sometimes in the queerest lodgings, and sometimes on a
trunk at the theatre – queer theatres, for that matter.»
It was a wonderful little dinner. There was watercress soup, and sole, and a delightful
omelette stuffed with mushrooms and truffles, and two small rare ducklings, and artichokes,
and a dry yellow Rhone wine of which Bartley had always been very fond. He drank it
appreciatively and remarked that there was still no other he liked so well.
«I have some champagne for you, too. I don't drink it myself, but I like to see it behave
when it's poured. There is nothing else that looks so jolly.»
«Thank you. But I don't like it so well as this.» Bartley held the yellow wine against the
light and squinted into it as he turned the glass slowly about. «You have traveled, you say.
Have you been in Paris much these late years?»
Hilda lowered one of the candle−shades carefully. «Oh, yes, I go over to Paris often.
There are few changes in the old Quarter. Dear old Madame Anger is dead – but perhaps
you don't remember her?»
«Don't I, though! I'm so sorry to hear it. How did her son turn out? I remember how she
saved and scraped for him, and how he always lay abed till ten o'clock. He was the laziest
fellow at the Beaux Arts; and that's saying a good deal.»
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CHAPTER IV 24
«Well, he is still clever and lazy. They say he is a good architect when he will work.
He's a big, handsome creature, and he hates Americans as much as ever. But Angel – do you
remember Angel?»
«Perfectly. Did she ever get back to Brittany and her bains de mer?»
«Ah, no. Poor Angel! She got tired of cooking and scouring the coppers in Madame
Anger's little kitchen, so she ran away with a soldier, and then with another soldier. Too bad!
She still lives about the Quarter, and, though there is always a soldat, she has become a
blanchisseuse de fin. She did my blouses beautifully the last time I was there, and was so
delighted to see me again. I gave her all my old clothes, even my old hats, though she
always wears her Breton headdress. Her hair is still like flax, and her blue eyes are just like a
baby's, and she has the same three freckles on her little nose, and talks about going back to
her bains de mer.»
Bartley looked at Hilda across the yellow light of the candles and broke into a low,
happy laugh. «How jolly it was being young, Hilda! Do you remember that first walk we
took together in Paris? We walked down to the Place Saint−Michel to buy some lilacs. Do
you remember how sweet they smelled?»
«Indeed I do. Come, we'll have our coffee in the other room, and you can smoke.»
Hilda rose quickly, as if she wished to change the drift of their talk, but Bartley found it
pleasant to continue it.
«What a warm, soft spring evening that was,» he went on, as they sat down in the study
with the coffee on a little table between them; «and the sky, over the bridges, was just the
color of the lilacs. We walked on down by the river, didn't we?»
Hilda laughed and looked at him questioningly. He saw a gleam in her eyes that he
remembered even better than the episode he was recalling.
«I think we did,» she answered demurely. «It was on the Quai we met that woman who
was crying so bitterly. I gave her a spray of lilac, I remember, and you gave her a franc. I
was frightened at your prodigality.»
«I expect it was the last franc I had. What a strong brown face she had, and very tragic.
She looked at us with such despair and longing, out from under her black shawl. What she
wanted from us was neither our flowers nor our francs, but just our youth. I remember it
touched me so. I would have given her some of mine off my back, if I could. I had enough
and to spare then,» Bartley mused, and looked thoughtfully at his cigar.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER IV 25
They were both remembering what the woman had said when she took the money:
«God give you a happy love!» It was not in the ingratiating tone of the habitual beggar: it
had come out of the depths of the poor creature's sorrow, vibrating with pity for their youth
and despair at the terribleness of human life; it had the anguish of a voice of prophecy. Until
she spoke, Bartley had not realized that he was in love. The strange woman, and her
passionate sentence that rang out so sharply, had frightened them both. They went home
sadly with the lilacs, back to the Rue Saint−Jacques, walking very slowly, arm in arm. When
they reached the house where Hilda lodged, Bartley went across the court with her, and up
the dark old stairs to the third landing; and there he had kissed her for the first time. He had
shut his eyes to give him the courage, he remembered, and she had trembled so –
Bartley started when Hilda rang the little bell beside her. «Dear me, why did you do
that? I had quite forgotten – I was back there. It was very jolly,» he murmured lazily, as
Marie came in to take away the coffee.
Hilda laughed and went over to the piano. «Well, we are neither of us twenty now, you
know. Have I told you about my new play? Mac is writing one; really for me this time. You
see, I'm coming on.»
«I've seen nothing else. What kind of a part is it? Shall you wear yellow gowns? I hope
so.»
He was looking at her round slender figure, as she stood by the piano, turning over a
pile of music, and he felt the energy in every line of it.
«No, it isn't a dress−up part. He doesn't seem to fancy me in fine feathers. He says I
ought to be minding the pigs at home, and I suppose I ought. But he's given me some good
Irish songs. Listen.»
She sat down at the piano and sang. When she finished, Alexander shook himself out of
a reverie.
«Sing `The Harp That Once,' Hilda. You used to sing it so well.»
«Nonsense. Of course I can't really sing, except the way my mother and grandmother
did before me. Most actresses nowadays learn to sing properly, so I tried a master; but he
confused me, just!»
Alexander laughed. «All the same, sing it, Hilda.»
Hilda started up from the stool and moved restlessly toward the window. «It's really too
warm in this room to sing. Don't you feel it?»
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CHAPTER IV 26
Alexander went over and opened the window for her. «Aren't you afraid to let the wind
low like that on your neck? Can't I get a scarf or something?»
«Ask a theatre lady if she's afraid of drafts!» Hilda laughed. «But perhaps, as I'm so
warm – give me your handkerchief. There, just in front.» He slipped the corners carefully
under her shoulder−straps. «There, that will do. It looks like a bib.» She pushed his hand
away quickly and stood looking out into the deserted square. «Isn't London a tomb on
Sunday night?»
Alexander caught the agitation in her voice. He stood a little behind her, and tried to
steady himself as he said: «It's soft and misty. See how white the stars are.»
For a long time neither Hilda nor Bartley spoke. They stood close together, looking out
into the wan, watery sky, breathing always more quickly and lightly, and it seemed as if all
the clocks in the world had stopped. Suddenly he moved the clenched hand he held behind
him and dropped it violently at his side. He felt a tremor run through the slender yellow
figure in front of him.
She caught his handkerchief from her throat and thrust it at him without turning round.
«Here, take it. You must go now, Bartley. Good−night.»
Bartley leaned over her shoulder, without touching her, and whispered in her ear: «You
are giving me a chance?»
«Yes. Take it and go. This isn't fair, you know. Good−night.»
Alexander unclenched the two hands at his sides. With one he threw down the window
and with the other – still standing behind her – he drew her back against him.
She uttered a little cry, threw her arms over her head, and drew his face down to hers.
«Are you going to let me love you a little, Bartley?» she whispered.
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CHAPTER IV 27
CHAPTER V
I
t was the afternoon of the day before Christmas. Mrs. Alexander had been driving
about all the morning, leaving presents at the houses of her friends. She lunched alone, and
as she rose from the table she spoke to the butler: «Thomas, I am going down to the kitchen
now to see Norah. In half an hour you are to bring the greens up from the cellar and put
them in the library. Mr. Alexander will be home at three to hang them himself. Don't forget
the stepladder, and plenty of tacks and string. You may bring the azaleas upstairs. Take the
white one to Mr. Alexander's study. Put the two pink ones in this room, and the red one in
the drawing−room.»
A little before three o'clock Mrs. Alexander went into the library to see that everything
was ready. She pulled the window shades high, for the weather was dark and stormy, and
there was little light, even in the streets. A foot of snow had fallen during the morning, and
the wide space over the river was thick with flying flakes that fell and wreathed the masses
of floating ice. Winifred was standing by the window when she heard the front door open.
She hurried to the hall as Alexander came stamping in, covered with snow. He kissed her
joyfully and brushed away the snow that fell on her hair.
«I wish I had asked you to meet me at the office and walk home with me, Winifred. The
Common is beautiful. The boys have swept the snow off the pond and are skating furiously.
Did the cyclamens come?»
«An hour ago. What splendid ones! But aren't you frightfully extravagant?»
«Not for Christmas−time. I'll go upstairs and change my coat. I shall be down in a
moment. Tell Thomas to get everything ready.»
When Alexander reappeared, he took his wife's arm and went with her into the library.
«When did the azaleas get here? Thomas has got the white one in my room.»
«I told him to put it there.»
«But, I say, it's much the finest of the lot!»
«That's why I had it put there. There is too much color in that room for a red one, you
know.»
Bartley began to sort the greens. «It looks very splendid there, but I feel piggish to have
it. However, we really spend more time there than anywhere else in the house. Will you
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER V 28
hand me the holly?»
He climbed up the stepladder, which creaked under his weight, and began to twist the
tough stems of the holly into the frame− work of the chandelier.
«I forgot to tell you that I had a letter from Wilson, this morning, explaining his
telegram. He is coming on because an old uncle up in Vermont has conveniently died and
left Wilson a little money – something like ten thousand. He's coming on to settle up the
estate. Won't it be jolly to have him?»
«And how fine that he's come into a little money. I can see him posting down State
Street to the steamship offices. He will get a good many trips out of that ten thousand. What
can have detained him? I expected him here for luncheon.»
«Those trains from Albany are always late. He'll be along sometime this afternoon. And
now, don't you want to go upstairs and lie down for an hour? You've had a busy morning
and I don't want you to be tired to−night.»
After his wife went upstairs Alexander worked energetically at the greens for a few
moments. Then, as he was cutting off a length of string, he sighed suddenly and sat down,
staring out of the window at the snow. The animation died out of his face, but in his eyes
there was a restless light, a look of apprehension and suspense. He kept clasping and
unclasping his big hands as if he were trying to realize something. The clock ticked through
the minutes of a half−hour and the afternoon outside began to thicken and darken turbidly.
Alexander, since he first sat down, had not changed his position. He leaned forward, his
hands between his knees, scarcely breathing, as if he were holding himself away from his
surroundings, from the room, and from the very chair in which he sat, from everything
except the wild eddies of snow above the river on which his eyes were fixed with feverish
intentness, as if he were trying to project himself thither. When at last Lucius Wilson was
announced, Alexander sprang eagerly to his feet and hurried to meet his old instructor.
«Hello, Wilson. What luck! Come into the library. We are to have a lot of people to
dinner to−night, and Winifred's lying down. You will excuse her, won't you? And now what
about yourself? Sit down and tell me everything.»
«I think I'd rather move about, if you don't mind. I've been sitting in the train for a
week, it seems to me.» Wilson stood before the fire with his hands behind him and looked
about the room. «You Have been busy. Bartley, if I'd had my choice of all possible places in
which to spend Christmas, your house would certainly be the place I'd have chosen. Happy
people do a great deal for their friends. A house like this throws its warmth out. I felt it
distinctly as I was coming through the Berkshires. I could scarcely believe that I was to see
Mrs. Bartley again so soon.»
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER V 29
«Thank you, Wilson. She'll be as glad to see you. Shall we have tea now? I'll ring for
Thomas to clear away this litter. Winifred says I always wreck the house when I try to do
anything. Do you know, I am quite tired. Looks as if I were not used to work, doesn't it?»
Alexander laughed and dropped into a chair. «You know, I'm sailing the day after New
Year's.»
«Again? Why, you've been over twice since I was here in the spring, haven't you?»
«Oh, I was in London about ten days in the summer. Went to escape the hot weather
more than anything else. I shan't be gone more than a month this time. Winifred and I have
been up in Canada for most of the autumn. That Moorlock Bridge is on my back all the time.
I never had so much trouble with a job before.» Alexander moved about restlessly and fell to
poking the fire.
«Haven't I seen in the papers that there is some trouble about a tidewater bridge of yours
in New Jersey?»
«Oh, that doesn't amount to anything. It's held up by a steel strike. A bother, of course,
but the sort of thing one is always having to put up with. But the Moorlock Bridge is a
continual anxiety. You see, the truth is, we are having to build pretty well to the strain limit
up there. They've crowded me too much on the cost. It's all very well if everything goes
well, but these estimates have never been used for anything of such length before. However,
there's nothing to be done. They hold me to the scale I've used in shorter bridges. The last
thing a bridge commission cares about is the kind of bridge you build.»
When Bartley had finished dressing for dinner he went into his study, where he found
his wife arranging flowers on his writing−table.
«These pink roses just came from Mrs. Hastings,» she said, smiling, «and I am sure she
meant them for you.»
Bartley looked about with an air of satisfaction at the greens and the wreaths in the
windows. «Have you a moment, Winifred? I have just now been thinking that this is our
twelfth Christmas. Can you realize it?» He went up to the table and took her hands away
from the flowers, drying them with his pocket handkerchief. «They've been awfully happy
ones, all of them, haven't they?» He took her in his arms and bent back, lifting her a little
and giving her a long kiss. «You are happy, aren't you Winifred? More than anything else in
the world, I want you to be happy. Sometimes, of late, I've thought you looked as if you
were troubled.»
«No; it's only when you are troubled and harassed that I feel worried, Bartley. I wish
you always seemed as you do to−night. But you don't, always.» She looked earnestly and
inquiringly into his eyes.
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CHAPTER V 30
Alexander took her two hands from his shoulders and swung them back and forth in his
own, laughing his big blond laugh.
«I'm growing older, my dear; that's what you feel. Now, may I show you something? I
meant to save them until to−morrow, but I want you to wear them to−night.» He took a little
leather box out of his pocket and opened it. On the white velvet lay two long pendants of
curiously worked gold, set with pearls. Winifred looked from the box to Bartley and
exclaimed: –
«Where did you ever find such gold work, Bartley?»
«It's old Flemish. Isn't it fine?»
«They are the most beautiful things, dear. But, you know, I never wear earrings.»
«Yes, yes, I know. But I want you to wear them. I have always wanted you to. So few
women can. There must be a good ear, to begin with, and a nose» – he waved his hand –
«above reproach. Most women look silly in them. They go only with faces like yours – very,
very proud, and just a little hard.»
Winifred laughed as she went over to the mirror and fitted the delicate springs to the
lobes of her ears. «Oh, Bartley, that old foolishness about my being hard. It really hurts my
feelings. But I must go down now. People are beginning to come.»
Bartley drew her arm about his neck and went to the door with her. «Not hard to me,
Winifred,» he whispered. «Never, never hard to me.»
Left alone, he paced up and down his study. He was at home again, among all the dear
familiar things that spoke to him of so many happy years. His house to−night would be full
of charming people, who liked and admired him. Yet all the time, underneath his pleasure
and hopefulness and satisfaction, he was conscious of the vibration of an unnatural
excitement. Amid this light and warmth and friendliness, he sometimes started and
shuddered, as if some one had stepped on his grave. Something had broken loose in him of
which he knew nothing except that it was sullen and powerful, and that it wrung and tortured
him. Sometimes it came upon him softly, in enervating reveries. Sometimes it battered him
like the cannon rolling in the hold of the vessel. Always, now, it brought with it a sense of
quickened life, of stimulating danger. To−night it came upon him suddenly, as he was
walking the floor, after his wife left him. It seemed impossible; he could not believe it. He
glanced entreatingly at the door, as if to call her back. He heard voices in the hall below, and
knew that he must go down. Going over to the window, he looked out at the lights across the
river. How could this happen here, in his own house, among the things he loved? What was
it that reached in out of the darkness and thrilled him? As he stood there he had a feeling that
he would never escape. He shut his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cold window
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER V 31
glass, breathing in the chill that came through it. «That this,» he groaned, «that this should
have happened to ME!»
On New Year's day a thaw set in, and during the night torrents of rain fell. In the
morning, the morning of Alexander's departure for England, the river was streaked with fog
and the rain drove hard against the windows of the breakfast−room. Alexander had finished
his coffee and was pacing up and down. His wife sat at the table, watching him. She was
pale and unnaturally calm. When Thomas brought the letters, Bartley sank into his chair and
ran them over rapidly.
«Here's a note from old Wilson. He's safe back at his grind, and says he had a bully
time. `The memory of Mrs. Bartley will make my whole winter fragrant.' Just like him. He
will go on getting measureless satisfaction out of you by his study fire. What a man he is for
looking on at life!» Bartley sighed, pushed the letters back impatiently, and went over to the
window. «This is a nasty sort of day to sail. I've a notion to call it off. Next week would be
time enough.»
«That would only mean starting twice. It wouldn't really help you out at all,» Mrs.
Alexander spoke soothingly. «And you'd come back late for all your engagements.»
Bartley began jingling some loose coins in his pocket. «I wish things would let me rest.
I'm tired of work, tired of people, tired of trailing about.» He looked out at the storm−beaten
river.
Winifred came up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. «That's what you always
say, poor Bartley! At bottom you really like all these things. Can't you remember that?»
He put his arm about her. «All the same, life runs smoothly enough with some people,
and with me it's always a messy sort of patchwork. It's like the song; peace is where I am
not. How can you face it all with so much fortitude?»
She looked at him with that clear gaze which Wilson had so much admired, which he
had felt implied such high confidence and fearless pride. «Oh, I faced that long ago, when
you were on your first bridge, up at old Allway. I knew then that your paths were not to be
paths of peace, but I decided that I wanted to follow them.»
Bartley and his wife stood silent for a long time; the fire crackled in the grate, the rain
beat insistently upon the windows, and the sleepy Angora looked up at them curiously.
Presently Thomas made a discreet sound at the door. «Shall Edward bring down your
trunks, sir?»
«Yes; they are ready. Tell him not to forget the big portfolio on the study table.»
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER V 32
Thomas withdrew, closing the door softly. Bartley turned away from his wife, still
holding her hand. «It never gets any easier, Winifred.»
They both started at the sound of the carriage on the pavement outside. Alexander sat
down and leaned his head on his hand. His wife bent over him. «Courage,» she said gayly.
Bartley rose and rang the bell. Thomas brought him his hat and stick and ulster. At the sight
of these, the supercilious Angora moved restlessly, quitted her red cushion by the fire, and
came up, waving her tail in vexation at these ominous indications of change. Alexander
stooped to stroke her, and then plunged into his coat and drew on his gloves. His wife held
his stick, smiling. Bartley smiled too, and his eyes cleared. «I'll work like the devil,
Winifred, and be home again before you realize I've gone.» He kissed her quickly several
times, hurried out of the front door into the rain, and waved to her from the carriage window
as the driver was starting his melancholy, dripping black horses. Alexander sat with his
hands clenched on his knees. As the carriage turned up the hill, he lifted one hand and
brought it down violently. «This time» – he spoke aloud and through his set teeth – «this
time I'm going to end it!»
On the afternoon of the third day out, Alexander was sitting well to the stern, on the
windward side where the chairs were few, his rugs over him and the collar of his fur−lined
coat turned up about his ears. The weather had so far been dark and raw. For two hours he
had been watching the low, dirty sky and the beating of the heavy rain upon the
iron−colored sea. There was a long, oily swell that made exercise laborious. The decks
smelled of damp woolens, and the air was so humid that drops of moisture kept gathering
upon his hair and mustache. He seldom moved except to brush them away. The great open
spaces made him passive and the restlessness of the water quieted him. He intended during
the voyage to decide upon a course of action, but he held all this away from him for the
present and lay in a blessed gray oblivion. Deep down in him somewhere his resolution was
weakening and strengthening, ebbing and flowing. The thing that perturbed him went on as
steadily as his pulse, but he was almost unconscious of it. He was submerged in the vast
impersonal grayness about him, and at intervals the sidelong roll of the boat measured off
time like the ticking of a clock. He felt released from everything that troubled and perplexed
him. It was as if he had tricked and outwitted torturing memories, had actually managed to
get on board without them. He thought of nothing at all. If his mind now and again picked a
face out of the grayness, it was Lucius Wilson's, or the face of an old schoolmate, forgotten
for years; or it was the slim outline of a favorite greyhound he used to hunt jack−rabbits with
when he was a boy.
Toward six o'clock the wind rose and tugged at the tarpaulin and brought the swell
higher. After dinner Alexander came back to the wet deck, piled his damp rugs over him
again, and sat smoking, losing himself in the obliterating blackness and drowsing in the rush
of the gale. Before he went below a few bright stars were pricked off between heavily
moving masses of cloud.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER V 33
The next morning was bright and mild, with a fresh breeze. Alexander felt the need of
exercise even before he came out of his cabin. When he went on deck the sky was blue and
blinding, with heavy whiffs of white cloud, smoke−colored at the edges, moving rapidly
across it. The water was roughish, a cold, clear indigo breaking into whitecaps. Bartley
walked for two hours, and then stretched himself in the sun until lunch−time.
In the afternoon he wrote a long letter to Winifred. Later, as he walked the deck through
a splendid golden sunset, his spirits rose continually. It was agreeable to come to himself
again after several days of numbness and torpor. He stayed out until the last tinge of violet
had faded from the water. There was literally a taste of life on his lips as he sat down to
dinner and ordered a bottle of champagne. He was late in finishing his dinner, and drank
rather more wine than he had meant to. When he went above, the wind had risen and the
deck was almost deserted. As he stepped out of the door a gale lifted his heavy fur coat
about his shoulders. He fought his way up the deck with keen exhilaration. The moment he
stepped, almost out of breath, behind the shelter of the stern, the wind was cut off, and he
felt, like a rush of warm air, a sense of close and intimate companionship. He started back
and tore his coat open as if something warm were actually clinging to him beneath it. He
hurried up the deck and went into the saloon parlor, full of women who had retreated thither
from the sharp wind. He threw himself upon them. He talked delightfully to the older ones
and played accompaniments for the younger ones until the last sleepy girl had followed her
mother below. Then he went into the smoking−room. He played bridge until two o'clock in
the morning, and managed to lose a considerable sum of money without really noticing that
he was doing so.
After the break of one fine day the weather was pretty consistently dull. When the low
sky thinned a trifle, the pale white spot of a sun did no more than throw a bluish lustre on the
water, giving it the dark brightness of newly cut lead. Through one after another of those
gray days Alexander drowsed and mused, drinking in the grateful moisture. But the
complete peace of the first part of the voyage was over. Sometimes he rose suddenly from
his chair as if driven out, and paced the deck for hours. People noticed his propensity for
walking in rough weather, and watched him curiously as he did his rounds. From his
abstraction and the determined set of his jaw, they fancied he must be thinking about his
bridge. Every one had heard of the new cantilever bridge in Canada.
But Alexander was not thinking about his work. After the fourth night out, when his
will suddenly softened under his hands, he had been continually hammering away at
himself. More and more often, when he first wakened in the morning or when he stepped
into a warm place after being chilled on the deck, he felt a sudden painful delight at being
nearer another shore. Sometimes when he was most despondent, when he thought himself
worn out with this struggle, in a flash he was free of it and leaped into an overwhelming
consciousness of himself. On the instant he felt that marvelous return of the impetuousness,
the intense excitement, the increasing expectancy of youth.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER V 34
CHAPTER VI
T
he last two days of the voyage Bartley found almost intolerable. The stop at
Queenstown, the tedious passage up the Mersey, were things that he noted dimly through his
growing impatience. He had planned to stop in Liverpool; but, instead, he took the boat train
for London.
Emerging at Euston at half−past three o'clock in the afternoon, Alexander had his
luggage sent to the Savoy and drove at once to Bedford Square. When Marie met him at the
door, even her strong sense of the proprieties could not restrain her surprise and delight. She
blushed and smiled and fumbled his card in her confusion before she ran upstairs. Alexander
paced up and down the hallway, buttoning and unbuttoning his overcoat, until she returned
and took him up to Hilda's living−room. The room was empty when he entered. A coal fire
was crackling in the grate and the lamps were lit, for it was already beginning to grow dark
outside. Alexander did not sit down. He stood his ground over by the windows until Hilda
came in. She called his name on the threshold, but in her swift flight across the room she felt
a change in him and caught herself up so deftly that he could not tell just when she did it.
She merely brushed his cheek with her lips and put a hand lightly and joyously on either
shoulder. «Oh, what a grand thing to happen on a raw day! I felt it in my bones when I woke
this morning that something splendid was going to turn up. I thought it might be Sister Kate
or Cousin Mike would be happening along. I never dreamed it would be you, Bartley. But
why do you let me chatter on like this? Come over to the fire; you're chilled through.»
She pushed him toward the big chair by the fire, and sat down on a stool at the opposite
side of the hearth, her knees drawn up to her chin, laughing like a happy little girl.
«When did you come, Bartley, and how did it happen? You haven't spoken a word.»
«I got in about ten minutes ago. I landed at Liverpool this morning and came down on
the boat train.»
Alexander leaned forward and warmed his hands before the blaze. Hilda watched him
with perplexity.
«There's something troubling you, Bartley. What is it?»
Bartley bent lower over the fire. «It's the whole thing that troubles me, Hilda. You and
I.»
Hilda took a quick, soft breath. She looked at his heavy shoulders and big, determined
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER VI 35
head, thrust forward like a catapult in leash.
«What about us, Bartley?» she asked in a thin voice.
He locked and unlocked his hands over the grate and spread his fingers close to the
bluish flame, while the coals crackled and the clock ticked and a street vendor began to call
under the window. At last Alexander brought out one word: –
«Everything!»
Hilda was pale by this time, and her eyes were wide with fright. She looked about
desperately from Bartley to the door, then to the windows, and back again to Bartley. She
rose uncertainly, touched his hair with her hand, then sank back upon her stool.
«I'll do anything you wish me to, Bartley,» she said tremulously. «I can't stand seeing
you miserable.»
«I can't live with myself any longer,» he answered roughly.
He rose and pushed the chair behind him and began to walk miserably about the room,
seeming to find it too small for him. He pulled up a window as if the air were heavy.
Hilda watched him from her corner, trembling and scarcely breathing, dark shadows
growing about her eyes.
«It . . . it hasn't always made you miserable, has it?» Her eyelids fell and her lips
quivered.
«Always. But it's worse now. It's unbearable. It tortures me every minute.»
«But why NOW?» she asked piteously, wringing her hands.
He ignored her question. «I am not a man who can live two lives,» he went on
feverishly. «Each life spoils the other. I get nothing but misery out of either. The world is all
there, just as it used to be, but I can't get at it any more. There is this deception between me
and everything.»
At that word «deception,» spoken with such self−contempt, the color flashed back into
Hilda's face as suddenly as if she had been struck by a whiplash. She bit her lip and looked
down at her hands, which were clasped tightly in front of her.
«Could you – could you sit down and talk about it quietly, Bartley, as if I were a friend,
and not some one who had to be defied?»
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER VI 36
He dropped back heavily into his chair by the fire. «It was myself I was defying, Hilda.
I have thought about it until I am worn out.»
He looked at her and his haggard face softened. He put out his hand toward her as he
looked away again into the fire.
She crept across to him, drawing her stool after her. «When did you first begin to feel
like this, Bartley?»
«After the very first. The first was – sort of in play, wasn't it?»
Hilda's face quivered, but she whispered: «Yes, I think it must have been. But why
didn't you tell me when you were here in the summer?»
Alexander groaned. «I meant to, but somehow I couldn't. We had only a few days, and
your new play was just on, and you were so happy.»
«Yes, I was happy, wasn't I?» She pressed his hand gently in gratitude. «Weren't you
happy then, at all?»
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as if to draw in again the fragrance of those
days. Something of their troubling sweetness came back to Alexander, too. He moved
uneasily and his chair creaked.
«Yes, I was then. You know. But afterward. . .»
«Yes, yes,» she hurried, pulling her hand gently away from him. Presently it stole back
to his coat sleeve. «Please tell me one thing, Bartley. At least, tell me that you believe I
thought I was making you happy.»
His hand shut down quickly over the questioning fingers on his sleeves. «Yes, Hilda; I
know that,» he said simply.
She leaned her head against his arm and spoke softly: –
«You see, my mistake was in wanting you to have everything. I wanted you to eat all
the cakes and have them, too. I somehow believed that I could take all the bad consequences
for you. I wanted you always to be happy and handsome and successful – to have all the
things that a great man ought to have, and, once in a way, the careless holidays that great
men are not permitted.»
Bartley gave a bitter little laugh, and Hilda looked up and read in the deepening lines of
his face that youth and Bartley would not much longer struggle together.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER VI 37
«I understand, Bartley. I was wrong. But I didn't know. You've only to tell me now.
What must I do that I've not done, or what must I not do?» She listened intently, but she
heard nothing but the creaking of his chair. «You want me to say it?» she whispered. «You
want to tell me that you can only see me like this, as old friends do, or out in the world
among people? I can do that.»
«I can't,» he said heavily.
Hilda shivered and sat still. Bartley leaned his head in his hands and spoke through his
teeth. «It's got to be a clean break, Hilda. I can't see you at all, anywhere. What I mean is
that I want you to promise never to see me again, no matter how often I come, no matter
how hard I beg.»
Hilda sprang up like a flame. She stood over him with her hands clenched at her side,
her body rigid.
«No!» she gasped. «It's too late to ask that. Do you hear me, Bartley? It's too late. I
won't promise. It's abominable of you to ask me. Keep away if you wish; when have I ever
followed you? But, if you come to me, I'll do as I see fit. The shamefulness of your asking
me to do that! If you come to me, I'll do as I see fit. Do you understand? Bartley, you're
cowardly!»
Alexander rose and shook himself angrily. «Yes, I know I'm cowardly. I'm afraid of
myself. I don't trust myself any more. I carried it all lightly enough at first, but now I don't
dare trifle with it. It's getting the better of me. It's different now. I'm growing older, and
you've got my young self here with you. It's through him that I've come to wish for you all
and all the time.» He took her roughly in his arms. «Do you know what I mean?»
Hilda held her face back from him and began to cry bitterly. «Oh, Bartley, what am I to
do? Why didn't you let me be angry with you? You ask me to stay away from you because
you want me! And I've got nobody but you. I will do anything you say – but that! I will ask
the least imaginable, but I must have SOMETHING!»
Bartley turned away and sank down in his chair again. Hilda sat on the arm of it and put
her hands lightly on his shoulders.
«Just something Bartley. I must have you to think of through the months and months of
loneliness. I must see you. I must know about you. The sight of you, Bartley, to see you
living and happy and successful – can I never make you understand what that means to
me?» She pressed his shoulders gently. «You see, loving some one as I love you makes the
whole world different. If I'd met you later, if I hadn't loved you so well – but that's all over,
long ago. Then came all those years without you, lonely and hurt and discouraged; those
decent young fellows and poor Mac, and me never heeding – hard as a steel spring. And
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then you came back, not caring very much, but it made no difference.»
She slid to the floor beside him, as if she were too tired to sit up any longer. Bartley
bent over and took her in his arms, kissing her mouth and her wet, tired eyes.
«Don't cry, don't cry,» he whispered. «We've tortured each other enough for tonight.
Forget everything except that I am here.»
«I think I have forgotten everything but that already,» she murmured. «Ah, your dear
arms!»
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CHAPTER VI 39
CHAPTER VII
D
uring the fortnight that Alexander was in London he drove himself hard. He got
through a great deal of personal business and saw a great many men who were doing
interesting things in his own profession. He disliked to think of his visits to London as
holidays, and when he was there he worked even harder than he did at home.
The day before his departure for Liverpool was a singularly fine one. The thick air had
cleared overnight in a strong wind which brought in a golden dawn and then fell off to a
fresh breeze. When Bartley looked out of his windows from the Savoy, the river was
flashing silver and the gray stone along the Embankment was bathed in bright, clear
sunshine. London had wakened to life after three weeks of cold and sodden rain. Bartley
breakfasted hurriedly and went over his mail while the hotel valet packed his trunks. Then
he paid his account and walked rapidly down the Strand past Charing Cross Station. His
spirits rose with every step, and when he reached Trafalgar Square, blazing in the sun, with
its fountains playing and its column reaching up into the bright air, he signaled to a hansom,
and, before he knew what he was about, told the driver to go to Bedford Square by way of
the British Museum.
When he reached Hilda's apartment she met him, fresh as the morning itself. Her rooms
were flooded with sunshine and full of the flowers he had been sending her. She would
never let him give her anything else.
«Are you busy this morning, Hilda?» he asked as he sat down, his hat and gloves in his
hand.
«Very. I've been up and about three hours, working at my part. We open in February,
you know.»
«Well, then you've worked enough. And so have I. I've seen all my men, my packing is
done, and I go up to Liverpool this evening. But this morning we are going to have a
holiday. What do you say to a drive out to Kew and Richmond? You may not get another
day like this all winter. It's like a fine April day at home. May I use your telephone? I want
to order the carriage.»
«Oh, how jolly! There, sit down at the desk. And while you are telephoning I'll change
my dress. I shan't be long. All the morning papers are on the table.»
Hilda was back in a few moments wearing a long gray squirrel coat and a broad fur hat.
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CHAPTER VII 40
Bartley rose and inspected her. «Why don't you wear some of those pink roses?» he
asked.
«But they came only this morning, and they have not even begun to open. I was saving
them. I am so unconsciously thrifty!» She laughed as she looked about the room. «You've
been sending me far too many flowers, Bartley. New ones every day. That's too often;
though I do love to open the boxes, and I take good care of them.»
«Why won't you let me send you any of those jade or ivory things you are so fond of?
Or pictures? I know a good deal about pictures.»
Hilda shook her large hat as she drew the roses out of the tall glass. «No, there are some
things you can't do. There's the carriage. Will you button my gloves for me?»
Bartley took her wrist and began to button the long gray suede glove. «How gay your
eyes are this morning, Hilda.»
«That's because I've been studying. It always stirs me up a little.»
He pushed the top of the glove up slowly. «When did you learn to take hold of your
parts like that?»
«When I had nothing else to think of. Come, the carriage is waiting. What a shocking
while you take.»
«I'm in no hurry. We've plenty of time.»
They found all London abroad. Piccadilly was a stream of rapidly moving carriages,
from which flashed furs and flowers and bright winter costumes. The metal trappings of the
harnesses shone dazzlingly, and the wheels were revolving disks that threw off rays of light.
The parks were full of children and nursemaids and joyful dogs that leaped and yelped and
scratched up the brown earth with their paws.
«I'm not going until to−morrow, you know,» Bartley announced suddenly. «I'll cut off a
day in Liverpool. I haven't felt so jolly this long while.»
Hilda looked up with a smile which she tried not to make too glad. «I think people were
meant to be happy, a little,» she said.
They had lunch at Richmond and then walked to Twickenham, where they had sent the
carriage. They drove back, with a glorious sunset behind them, toward the distant
gold−washed city. It was one of those rare afternoons when all the thickness and shadow of
London are changed to a kind of shining, pulsing, special atmosphere; when the smoky
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CHAPTER VII 41
vapors become fluttering golden clouds, nacreous veils of pink and amber; when all that
bleakness of gray stone and dullness of dirty brick trembles in aureate light, and all the roofs
and spires, and one great dome, are floated in golden haze. On such rare afternoons the
ugliest of cities becomes the most poetic, and months of sodden days are offset by a moment
of miracle.
«It's like that with us Londoners, too,» Hilda was saying. «Everything is awfully grim
and cheerless, our weather and our houses and our ways of amusing ourselves. But we can
be happier than anybody. We can go mad with joy, as the people do out in the fields on a
fine Whitsunday. We make the most of our moment.»
She thrust her little chin out defiantly over her gray fur collar, and Bartley looked down
at her and laughed.
«You are a plucky one, you.» He patted her glove with his hand. «Yes, you are a plucky
one.»
Hilda sighed. «No, I'm not. Not about some things, at any rate. It doesn't take pluck to
fight for one's moment, but it takes pluck to go without – a lot. More than I have. I can't help
it,» she added fiercely.
After miles of outlying streets and little gloomy houses, they reached London itself, red
and roaring and murky, with a thick dampness coming up from the river, that betokened fog
again to−morrow. The streets were full of people who had worked indoors all through the
priceless day and had now come hungrily out to drink the muddy lees of it. They stood in
long black lines, waiting before the pit entrances of the theatres – short−coated boys, and
girls in sailor hats, all shivering and chatting gayly. There was a blurred rhythm in all the
dull city noises – in the clatter of the cab horses and the rumbling of the busses, in the street
calls, and in the undulating tramp, tramp of the crowd. It was like the deep vibration of some
vast underground machinery, and like the muffled pulsations of millions of human hearts.
[See "The Barrel Organ by Alfred Noyes. Ed.] [I have placed it at the end for your convenience]
«Seems good to get back, doesn't it?» Bartley whispered, as they drove from Bayswater
Road into Oxford Street. «London always makes me want to live more than any other city in
the world. You remember our priestess mummy over in the mummy−room, and how we
used to long to go and bring her out on nights like this? Three thousand years! Ugh!»
«All the same, I believe she used to feel it when we stood there and watched her and
wished her well. I believe she used to remember,» Hilda said thoughtfully.
«I hope so. Now let's go to some awfully jolly place for dinner before we go home. I
could eat all the dinners there are in London to−night. Where shall I tell the driver? The
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Piccadilly Restaurant? The music's good there.»
«There are too many people there whom one knows. Why not that little French place in
Soho, where we went so often when you were here in the summer? I love it, and I've never
been there with any one but you. Sometimes I go by myself, when I am particularly lonely.»
«Very well, the sole's good there. How many street pianos there are about to−night! The
fine weather must have thawed them out. We've had five miles of `Il Trovatore' now. They
always make me feel jaunty. Are you comfy, and not too tired?»
I'm not tired at all. I was just wondering how people can ever die. Why did you remind
me of the mummy? Life seems the strongest and most indestructible thing in the world. Do
you really believe that all those people rushing about down there, going to good dinners and
clubs and theatres, will be dead some day, and not care about anything? I don't believe it,
and I know I shan't die, ever! You see, I feel too – too powerful!"
The carriage stopped. Bartley sprang out and swung her quickly to the pavement. As he
lifted her in his two hands he whispered: «You are – powerful!»
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CHAPTER VII 43
CHAPTER VIII
T
he last rehearsal was over, a tedious dress rehearsal which had lasted all day and
exhausted the patience of every one who had to do with it. When Hilda had dressed for the
street and came out of her dressing−room, she found Hugh MacConnell waiting for her in
the corridor.
«The fog's thicker than ever, Hilda. There have been a great many accidents to−day. It's
positively unsafe for you to be out alone. Will you let me take you home?»
«How good of you, Mac. If you are going with me, I think I'd rather walk. I've had no
exercise to−day, and all this has made me nervous.»
«I shouldn't wonder,» said MacConnell dryly. Hilda pulled down her veil and they
stepped out into the thick brown wash that submerged St. Martin's Lane. MacConnell took
her hand and tucked it snugly under his arm. «I'm sorry I was such a savage. I hope you
didn't think I made an ass of myself.»
«Not a bit of it. I don't wonder you were peppery. Those things are awfully trying. How
do you think it's going?»
«Magnificently. That's why I got so stirred up. We are going to hear from this, both of
us. And that reminds me; I've got news for you. They are going to begin repairs on the
theatre about the middle of March, and we are to run over to New York for six weeks.
Bennett told me yesterday that it was decided.»
Hilda looked up delightedly at the tall gray figure beside her. He was the only thing she
could see, for they were moving through a dense opaqueness, as if they were walking at the
bottom of the ocean.
«Oh, Mac, how glad I am! And they love your things over there, don't they?»
«Shall you be glad for – any other reason, Hilda?»
MacConnell put his hand in front of her to ward off some dark object. It proved to be
only a lamp−post, and they beat in farther from the edge of the pavement.
«What do you mean, Mac?» Hilda asked nervously.
«I was just thinking there might be people over there you'd be glad to see,» he brought
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CHAPTER VIII 44
out awkwardly. Hilda said nothing, and as they walked on MacConnell spoke again,
apologetically: «I hope you don't mind my knowing about it, Hilda. Don't stiffen up like
that. No one else knows, and I didn't try to find out anything. I felt it, even before I knew
who he was. I knew there was somebody, and that it wasn't I.»
They crossed Oxford Street in silence, feeling their way. The busses had stopped
running and the cab−drivers were leading their horses. When they reached the other side,
MacConnell said suddenly, «I hope you are happy.»
«Terribly, dangerously happy, Mac,» – Hilda spoke quietly, pressing the rough sleeve
of his greatcoat with her gloved hand.
«You've always thought me too old for you, Hilda, – oh, of course you've never said
just that, – and here this fellow is not more than eight years younger than I. I've always felt
that if I could get out of my old case I might win you yet. It's a fine, brave youth I carry
inside me, only he'll never be seen.»
«Nonsense, Mac. That has nothing to do with it. It's because you seem too close to me,
too much my own kind. It would be like marrying Cousin Mike, almost. I really tried to care
as you wanted me to, away back in the beginning.»
«Well, here we are, turning out of the Square. You are not angry with me, Hilda? Thank
you for this walk, my dear. Go in and get dry things on at once. You'll be having a great
night to−morrow.»
She put out her hand. «Thank you, Mac, for everything. Good−night.»
MacConnell trudged off through the fog, and she went slowly upstairs. Her slippers and
dressing gown were waiting for her before the fire. «I shall certainly see him in New York.
He will see by the papers that we are coming. Perhaps he knows it already,» Hilda kept
thinking as she undressed. «Perhaps he will be at the dock. No, scarcely that; but I may meet
him in the street even before he comes to see me.» Marie placed the tea−table by the fire and
brought Hilda her letters. She looked them over, and started as she came to one in a
handwriting that she did not often see; Alexander had written to her only twice before, and
he did not allow her to write to him at all. «Thank you, Marie. You may go now.»
Hilda sat down by the table with the letter in her hand, still unopened. She looked at it
intently, turned it over, and felt its thickness with her fingers. She believed that she
sometimes had a kind of second−sight about letters, and could tell before she read them
whether they brought good or evil tidings. She put this one down on the table in front of her
while she poured her tea. At last, with a little shiver of expectancy, she tore open the
envelope and read: –
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CHAPTER VIII 45
Boston, February –
MY Dear hilda: –
It is after twelve o'clock. Every one else is in bed and I am sitting alone in my study. I
have been happier in this room than anywhere else in the world. Happiness like that makes
one insolent. I used to think these four walls could stand against anything. And now I
scarcely know myself here. Now I know that no one can build his security upon the
nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their
tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting
expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to
the end.
The last week has been a bad one; I have been realizing how things used to be with me.
Sometimes I get used to being dead inside, but lately it has been as if a window beside me
had suddenly opened, and as if all the smells of spring blew in to me. There is a garden out
there, with stars overhead, where I used to walk at night when I had a single purpose and a
single heart. I can remember how I used to feel there, how beautiful everything about me
was, and what life and power and freedom I felt in myself. When the window opens I know
exactly how it would feel to be out there. But that garden is closed to me. How is it, I ask
myself, that everything can be so different with me when nothing here has changed? I am in
my own house, in my own study, in the midst of all these quiet streets where my friends live.
They are all safe and at peace with themselves. But I am never at peace. I feel always on the
edge of danger and change.
I keep remembering locoed horses I used to see on the range when I was a boy. They
changed like that. We used to catch them and put them up in the corral, and they developed
great cunning. They would pretend to eat their oats like the other horses, but we knew they
were always scheming to get back at the loco.
It seems that a man is meant to live only one life in this world. When he tries to live a
second, he develops another nature. I feel as if a second man had been grafted into me. At
first he seemed only a pleasure−loving simpleton, of whose company I was rather ashamed,
and whom I used to hide under my coat when I walked the Embankment, in London. But
now he is strong and sullen, and he is fighting for his life at the cost of mine. That is his one
activity: to grow strong. No creature ever wanted so much to live. Eventually, I suppose, he
will absorb me altogether. Believe me, you will hate me then.
And what have you to do, Hilda, with this ugly story? Nothing at all. The little boy
drank of the prettiest brook in the forest and he became a stag. I write all this because I can
never tell it to you, and because it seems as if I could not keep silent any longer. And
because I suffer, Hilda. If any one I loved suffered like this, I'd want to know it. Help me,
Hilda!
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CHAPTER VIII 46
B.A.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER VIII 47
CHAPTER IX
O
n the last Saturday in April, the New York «Times» published an account of the
strike complications which were delaying Alexander's New Jersey bridge, and stated that the
engineer himself was in town and at his office on West Tenth Street.
On Sunday, the day after this notice appeared, Alexander worked all day at his Tenth
Street rooms. His business often called him to New York, and he had kept an apartment
there for years, subletting it when he went abroad for any length of time. Besides his
sleeping−room and bath, there was a large room, formerly a painter's studio, which he used
as a study and office. It was furnished with the cast−off possessions of his bachelor days and
with odd things which he sheltered for friends of his who followed itinerant and more or less
artistic callings. Over the fireplace there was a large old−fashioned gilt mirror. Alexander's
big work−table stood in front of one of the three windows, and above the couch hung the
one picture in the room, a big canvas of charming color and spirit, a study of the
Luxembourg Gardens in early spring, painted in his youth by a man who had since become a
portrait−painter of international renown. He had done it for Alexander when they were
students together in Paris.
Sunday was a cold, raw day and a fine rain fell continuously. When Alexander came
back from dinner he put more wood on his fire, made himself comfortable, and settled down
at his desk, where he began checking over estimate sheets. It was after nine o'clock and he
was lighting a second pipe, when he thought he heard a sound at his door. He started and
listened, holding the burning match in his hand; again he heard the same sound, like a firm,
light tap. He rose and crossed the room quickly. When he threw open the door he recognized
the figure that shrank back into the bare, dimly lit hallway. He stood for a moment in
awkward constraint, his pipe in his hand.
«Come in,» he said to Hilda at last, and closed the door behind her. He pointed to a
chair by the fire and went back to his worktable. «Won't you sit down?»
He was standing behind the table, turning over a pile of blueprints nervously. The
yellow light from the student's lamp fell on his hands and the purple sleeves of his velvet
smoking−jacket, but his flushed face and big, hard head were in the shadow. There was
something about him that made Hilda wish herself at her hotel again, in the street below,
anywhere but where she was.
«Of course I know, Bartley,» she said at last, «that after this you won't owe me the least
consideration. But we sail on Tuesday. I saw that interview in the paper yesterday, telling
where you were, and I thought I had to see you. That's all. Good−night; I'm going now.» She
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CHAPTER IX 48
turned and her hand closed on the door−knob.
Alexander hurried toward her and took her gently by the arm. «Sit down, Hilda; you're
wet through. Let me take off your coat – and your boots; they're oozing water.» He knelt
down and began to unlace her shoes, while Hilda shrank into the chair. «Here, put your feet
on this stool. You don't mean to say you walked down – and without overshoes!»
Hilda hid her face in her hands. «I was afraid to take a cab. Can't you see, Bartley, that
I'm terribly frightened? I've been through this a hundred times to−day. Don't be any more
angry than you can help. I was all right until I knew you were in town. If you'd sent me a
note, or telephoned me, or anything! But you won't let me write to you, and I had to see you
after that letter, that terrible letter you wrote me when you got home.»
Alexander faced her, resting his arm on the mantel behind him, and began to brush the
sleeve of his jacket. «Is this the way you mean to answer it, Hilda?» he asked unsteadily.
She was afraid to look up at him. «Didn't – didn't you mean even to say goodby to me,
Bartley? Did you mean just to – quit me?» she asked. «I came to tell you that I'm willing to
do as you asked me. But it's no use talking about that now. Give me my things, please.» She
put her hand out toward the fender.
Alexander sat down on the arm of her chair. «Did you think I had forgotten you were in
town, Hilda? Do you think I kept away by accident? Did you suppose I didn't know you
were sailing on Tuesday? There is a letter for you there, in my desk drawer. It was to have
reached you on the steamer. I was all the morning writing it. I told myself that if I were
really thinking of you, and not of myself, a letter would be better than nothing. Marks on
paper mean something to you.» He paused. «They never did to me.»
Hilda smiled up at him beautifully and put her hand on his sleeve. «Oh, Bartley! Did
you write to me? Why didn't you telephone me to let me know that you had? Then I
wouldn't have come.»
Alexander slipped his arm about her. «I didn't know it before, Hilda, on my honor I
didn't, but I believe it was because, deep down in me somewhere, I was hoping I might drive
you to do just this. I've watched that door all day. I've jumped up if the fire crackled. I think
I have felt that you were coming.» He bent his face over her hair.
«And I,» she whispered, – «I felt that you were feeling that. But when I came, I thought
I had been mistaken.»
Alexander started up and began to walk up and down the room.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER IX 49
«No, you weren't mistaken. I've been up in Canada with my bridge, and I arranged not
to come to New York until after you had gone. Then, when your manager added two more
weeks, I was already committed.» He dropped upon the stool in front of her and sat with his
hands hanging between his knees. «What am I to do, Hilda?»
«That's what I wanted to see you about, Bartley. I'm going to do what you asked me to
do when you were in London. Only I'll do it more completely. I'm going to marry.»
«Who?»
«Oh, it doesn't matter much! One of them. Only not Mac. I'm too fond of him.»
Alexander moved restlessly. «Are you joking, Hilda?»
«Indeed I'm not.»
«Then you don't know what you're talking about.»
«Yes, I know very well. I've thought about it a great deal, and I've quite decided. I never
used to understand how women did things like that, but I know now. It's because they can't
be at the mercy of the man they love any longer.»
Alexander flushed angrily. «So it's better to be at the mercy of a man you don't love?»
«Under such circumstances, infinitely!»
There was a flash in her eyes that made Alexander's fall. He got up and went over to the
window, threw it open, and leaned out. He heard Hilda moving about behind him. When he
looked over his shoulder she was lacing her boots. He went back and stood over her.
«Hilda you'd better think a while longer before you do that. I don't know what I ought to
say, but I don't believe you'd be happy; truly I don't. Aren't you trying to frighten me?»
She tied the knot of the last lacing and put her boot−heel down firmly. «No; I'm telling
you what I've made up my mind to do. I suppose I would better do it without telling you. But
afterward I shan't have an opportunity to explain, for I shan't be seeing you again.»
Alexander started to speak, but caught himself. When Hilda rose he sat down on the arm
of her chair and drew her back into it.
«I wouldn't be so much alarmed if I didn't know how utterly reckless you CAN be.
Don't do anything like that rashly.» His face grew troubled. «You wouldn't be happy. You
are not that kind of woman. I'd never have another hour's peace if I helped to make you do a
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CHAPTER IX 50
thing like that.» He took her face between his hands and looked down into it. «You see, you
are different, Hilda. Don't you know you are?» His voice grew softer, his touch more and
more tender. «Some women can do that sort of thing, but you – you can love as queens did,
in the old time.»
Hilda had heard that soft, deep tone in his voice only once before. She closed her eyes;
her lips and eyelids trembled. «Only one, Bartley. Only one. And he threw it back at me a
second time.»
She felt the strength leap in the arms that held her so lightly.
«Try him again, Hilda. Try him once again.»
She looked up into his eyes, and hid her face in her hands.
Alexander's Bridge
CHAPTER IX 51
CHAPTER X
O
n Tuesday afternoon a Boston lawyer, who had been trying a case in Vermont, was
standing on the siding at White River Junction when the Canadian Express pulled by on its
northward journey. As the day−coaches at the rear end of the long train swept by him, the
lawyer noticed at one of the windows a man's head, with thick rumpled hair. «Curious,» he
thought; «that looked like Alexander, but what would he be doing back there in the
daycoaches?»
It was, indeed, Alexander.
That morning a telegram from Moorlock had reached him, telling him that there was
serious trouble with the bridge and that he was needed there at once, so he had caught the
first train out of New York. He had taken a seat in a day−coach to avoid the risk of meeting
any one he knew, and because he did not wish to be comfortable. When the telegram
arrived, Alexander was at his rooms on Tenth Street, packing his bag to go to Boston. On
Monday night he had written a long letter to his wife, but when morning came he was afraid
to send it, and the letter was still in his pocket. Winifred was not a woman who could bear
disappointment. She demanded a great deal of herself and of the people she loved; and she
never failed herself. If he told her now, he knew, it would be irretrievable. There would be
no going back. He would lose the thing he valued most in the world; he would be destroying
himself and his own happiness. There would be nothing for him afterward. He seemed to see
himself dragging out a restless existence on the Continent – Cannes, Hyeres, Algiers, Cairo
– among smartly dressed, disabled men of every nationality; forever going on journeys that
led nowhere; hurrying to catch trains that he might just as well miss; getting up in the
morning with a great bustle and splashing of water, to begin a day that had no purpose and
no meaning; dining late to shorten the night, sleeping late to shorten the day.
And for what? For a mere folly, a masquerade, a little thing that he could not let go.
And he could even let it go, he told himself. But he had promised to be in London at mid−
summer, and he knew that he would go. . . . It was impossible to live like this any longer.
And this, then, was to be the disaster that his old professor had foreseen for him: the
crack in the wall, the crash, the cloud of dust. And he could not understand how it had come
about. He felt that he himself was unchanged, that he was still there, the same man he had
been five years ago, and that he was sitting stupidly by and letting some resolute offshoot of
himself spoil his life for him. This new force was not he, it was but a part of him. He would
not even admit that it was stronger than he; but it was more active. It was by its energy that
this new feeling got the better of him. His wife was the woman who had made his life,
gratified his pride, given direction to his tastes and habits. The life they led together seemed
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to him beautiful. Winifred still was, as she had always been, Romance for him, and
whenever he was deeply stirred he turned to her. When the grandeur and beauty of the world
challenged him – as it challenges even the most self−absorbed people – he always answered
with her name. That was his reply to the question put by the mountains and the stars; to all
the spiritual aspects of life. In his feeling for his wife there was all the tenderness, all the
pride, all the devotion of which he was capable. There was everything but energy; the
energy of youth which must register itself and cut its name before it passes. This new feeling
was so fresh, so unsatisfied and light of foot. It ran and was not wearied, anticipated him
everywhere. It put a girdle round the earth while he was going from New York to Moorlock.
At this moment, it was tingling through him, exultant, and live as quicksilver, whispering,
«In July you will be in England.»
Already he dreaded the long, empty days at sea, the monotonous Irish coast, the
sluggish passage up the Mersey, the flash of the boat train through the summer country. He
closed his eyes and gave himself up to the feeling of rapid motion and to swift, terrifying
thoughts. He was sitting so, his face shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer saw him
from the siding at White River Junction.
When at last Alexander roused himself, the afternoon had waned to sunset. The train
was passing through a gray country and the sky overhead was flushed with a wide flood of
clear color. There was a rose−colored light over the gray rocks and hills and meadows. Off
to the left, under the approach of a weather−stained wooden bridge, a group of boys were
sitting around a little fire. The smell of the wood smoke blew in at the window. Except for
an old farmer, jogging along the highroad in his box−wagon, there was not another living
creature to be seen. Alexander looked back wistfully at the boys, camped on the edge of a
little marsh, crouching under their shelter and looking gravely at their fire. They took his
mind back a long way, to a campfire on a sandbar in a Western river, and he wished he
could go back and sit down with them. He could remember exactly how the world had
looked then.
It was quite dark and Alexander was still thinking of the boys, when it occurred to him
that the train must be nearing Allway. In going to his new bridge at Moorlock he had always
to pass through Allway. The train stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two miles up the
river, and then the hollow sound under his feet told Bartley that he was on his first bridge
again. The bridge seemed longer than it had ever seemed before, and he was glad when he
felt the beat of the wheels on the solid roadbed again. He did not like coming and going
across that bridge, or remembering the man who built it. And was he, indeed, the same man
who used to walk that bridge at night, promising such things to himself and to the stars? And
yet, he could remember it all so well: the quiet hills sleeping in the moonlight, the slender
skeleton of the bridge reaching out into the river, and up yonder, alone on the hill, the big
white house; upstairs, in Winifred's window, the light that told him she was still awake and
still thinking of him. And after the light went out he walked alone, taking the heavens into
his confidence, unable to tear himself away from the white magic of the night, unwilling to
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sleep because longing was so sweet to him, and because, for the first time since first the hills
were hung with moonlight, there was a lover in the world. And always there was the sound
of the rushing water underneath, the sound which, more than anything else, meant death; the
wearing away of things under the impact of physical forces which men could direct but
never circumvent or diminish. Then, in the exaltation of love, more than ever it seemed to
him to mean death, the only other thing as strong as love. Under the moon, under the cold,
splendid stars, there were only those two things awake and sleepless; death and love, the
rushing river and his burning heart.
Alexander sat up and looked about him. The train was tearing on through the darkness.
All his companions in the day−coach were either dozing or sleeping heavily, and the murky
lamps were turned low. How came he here among all these dirty people? Why was he going
to London? What did it mean – what was the answer? How could this happen to a man who
had lived through that magical spring and summer, and who had felt that the stars
themselves were but flaming particles in the far−away infinitudes of his love?
What had he done to lose it? How could he endure the baseness of life without it? And
with every revolution of the wheels beneath him, the unquiet quicksilver in his breast told
him that at midsummer he would be in London. He remembered his last night there: the red
foggy darkness, the hungry crowds before the theatres, the hand−organs, the feverish rhythm
of the blurred, crowded streets, and the feeling of letting himself go with the crowd. He
shuddered and looked about him at the poor unconscious companions of his journey,
unkempt and travel−stained, now doubled in unlovely attitudes, who had come to stand to
him for the ugliness he had brought into the world.
And those boys back there, beginning it all just as he had begun it; he wished he could
promise them better luck. Ah, if one could promise any one better luck, if one could assure a
single human being of happiness! He had thought he could do so, once; and it was thinking
of that that he at last fell asleep. In his sleep, as if it had nothing fresher to work upon, his
mind went back and tortured itself with something years and years away, an old,
long−forgotten sorrow of his childhood.
When Alexander awoke in the morning, the sun was just rising through pale golden
ripples of cloud, and the fresh yellow light was vibrating through the pine woods. The white
birches, with their little unfolding leaves, gleamed in the lowlands, and the marsh meadows
were already coming to life with their first green, a thin, bright color which had run over
them like fire. As the train rushed along the trestles, thousands of wild birds rose screaming
into the light. The sky was already a pale blue and of the clearness of crystal. Bartley caught
up his bag and hurried through the Pullman coaches until he found the conductor. There was
a stateroom unoccupied, and he took it and set about changing his clothes. Last night he
would not have believed that anything could be so pleasant as the cold water he dashed over
his head and shoulders and the freshness of clean linen on his body.
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CHAPTER X 54
After he had dressed, Alexander sat down at the window and drew into his lungs deep
breaths of the pine−scented air. He had awakened with all his old sense of power. He could
not believe that things were as bad with him as they had seemed last night, that there was no
way to set them entirely right. Even if he went to London at midsummer, what would that
mean except that he was a fool? And he had been a fool before. That was not the reality of
his life. Yet he knew that he would go to London.
Half an hour later the train stopped at Moorlock. Alexander sprang to the platform and
hurried up the siding, waving to Philip Horton, one of his assistants, who was anxiously
looking up at the windows of the coaches. Bartley took his arm and they went together into
the station buffet.
«I'll have my coffee first, Philip. Have you had yours? And now, what seems to be the
matter up here?»
The young man, in a hurried, nervous way, began his explanation.
But Alexander cut him short. «When did you stop work?» he asked sharply.
The young engineer looked confused. «I haven't stopped work yet, Mr. Alexander. I
didn't feel that I could go so far without definite authorization from you.»
«Then why didn't you say in your telegram exactly what you thought, and ask for your
authorization? You'd have got it quick enough.»
«Well, really, Mr. Alexander, I couldn't be absolutely sure, you know, and I didn't like
to take the responsibility of making it public.»
Alexander pushed back his chair and rose. «Anything I do can be made public, Phil.
You say that you believe the lower chords are showing strain, and that even the workmen
have been talking about it, and yet you've gone on adding weight.»
«I'm sorry, Mr. Alexander, but I had counted on your getting here yesterday. My first
telegram missed you somehow. I sent one Sunday evening, to the same address, but it was
returned to me.»
«Have you a carriage out there? I must stop to send a wire.»
Alexander went up to the telegraph−desk and penciled the following message to his
wife: –
I may have to be here for some time. Can you come up at once? Urgent.
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CHAPTER X 55
BARTLEY.
The Moorlock Bridge lay three miles above the town. When they were seated in the
carriage, Alexander began to question his assistant further. If it were true that the
compression members showed strain, with the bridge only two thirds done, then there was
nothing to do but pull the whole structure down and begin over again. Horton kept repeating
that he was sure there could be nothing wrong with the estimates.
Alexander grew impatient. «That's all true, Phil, but we never were justified in
assuming that a scale that was perfectly safe for an ordinary bridge would work with
anything of such length. It's all very well on paper, but it remains to be seen whether it can
be done in practice. I should have thrown up the job when they crowded me. It's all nonsense
to try to do what other engineers are doing when you know they're not sound.»
«But just now, when there is such competition,» the younger man demurred. «And
certainly that's the new line of development.»
Alexander shrugged his shoulders and made no reply.
When they reached the bridge works, Alexander began his examination immediately.
An hour later he sent for the superintendent. «I think you had better stop work out there at
once, Dan. I should say that the lower chord here might buckle at any moment. I told the
Commission that we were using higher unit stresses than any practice has established, and
we've put the dead load at a low estimate. Theoretically it worked out well enough, but it
had never actually been tried.» Alexander put on his overcoat and took the superintendent by
the arm. «Don't look so chopfallen, Dan. It's a jolt, but we've got to face it. It isn't the end of
the world, you know. Now we'll go out and call the men off quietly. They're already
nervous, Horton tells me, and there's no use alarming them. I'll go with you, and we'll send
the end riveters in first.»
Alexander and the superintendent picked their way out slowly over the long span. They
went deliberately, stopping to see what each gang was doing, as if they were on an ordinary
round of inspection. When they reached the end of the river span, Alexander nodded to the
superintendent, who quietly gave an order to the foreman. The men in the end gang picked
up their tools and, glancing curiously at each other, started back across the bridge toward the
river−bank. Alexander himself remained standing where they had been working, looking
about him. It was hard to believe, as he looked back over it, that the whole great span was
incurably disabled, was already as good as condemned, because something was out of line in
the lower chord of the cantilever arm.
The end riveters had reached the bank and were dispersing among the tool−houses, and
the second gang had picked up their tools and were starting toward the shore. Alexander,
still standing at the end of the river span, saw the lower chord of the cantilever arm give a
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CHAPTER X 56
little, like an elbow bending. He shouted and ran after the second gang, but by this time
every one knew that the big river span was slowly settling. There was a burst of shouting
that was immediately drowned by the scream and cracking of tearing iron, as all the tension
work began to pull asunder. Once the chords began to buckle, there were thousands of tons
of ironwork, all riveted together and lying in midair without support. It tore itself to pieces
with roaring and grinding and noises that were like the shrieks of a steam whistle. There was
no shock of any kind; the bridge had no impetus except from its own weight. It lurched
neither to right nor left, but sank almost in a vertical line, snapping and breaking and tearing
as it went, because no integral part could bear for an instant the enormous strain loosed upon
it. Some of the men jumped and some ran, trying to make the shore.
At the first shriek of the tearing iron, Alexander jumped from the downstream side of
the bridge. He struck the water without injury and disappeared. He was under the river a
long time and had great difficulty in holding his breath. When it seemed impossible, and his
chest was about to heave, he thought he heard his wife telling him that he could hold out a
little longer. An instant later his face cleared the water. For a moment, in the depths of the
river, he had realized what it would mean to die a hypocrite, and to lie dead under the last
abandonment of her tenderness. But once in the light and air, he knew he should live to tell
her and to recover all he had lost. Now, at last, he felt sure of himself. He was not startled. It
seemed to him that he had been through something of this sort before. There was nothing
horrible about it. This, too, was life, and life was activity, just as it was in Boston or in
London. He was himself, and there was something to be done; everything seemed perfectly
natural. Alexander was a strong swimmer, but he had gone scarcely a dozen strokes when
the bridge itself, which had been settling faster and faster, crashed into the water behind
him. Immediately the river was full of drowning men. A gang of French Canadians fell
almost on top of him. He thought he had cleared them, when they began coming up all
around him, clutching at him and at each other. Some of them could swim, but they were
either hurt or crazed with fright. Alexander tried to beat them off, but there were too many
of them. One caught him about the neck, another gripped him about the middle, and they
went down together. When he sank, his wife seemed to be there in the water beside him,
telling him to keep his head, that if he could hold out the men would drown and release him.
There was something he wanted to tell his wife, but he could not think clearly for the roaring
in his ears. Suddenly he remembered what it was. He caught his breath, and then she let him
go.
The work of recovering the dead went on all day and all the following night. By the
next morning forty−eight bodies had been taken out of the river, but there were still twenty
missing. Many of the men had fallen with the bridge and were held down under the debris.
Early on the morning of the second day a closed carriage was driven slowly along the
river−bank and stopped a little below the works, where the river boiled and churned about
the great iron carcass which lay in a straight line two thirds across it. The carriage stood
there hour after hour, and word soon spread among the crowds on the shore that its occupant
was the wife of the Chief Engineer; his body had not yet been found. The widows of the lost
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CHAPTER X 57
workmen, moving up and down the bank with shawls over their heads, some of them
carrying babies, looked at the rusty hired hack many times that morning. They drew near it
and walked about it, but none of them ventured to peer within. Even half−indifferent sight−
seers dropped their voices as they told a newcomer: "You see that carriage over there? That's
Mrs. Alexander. They haven't found him yet. She got off the train this morning. Horton met
her. She heard it in Boston yesterday – heard the newsboys crying it in the street.
At noon Philip Horton made his way through the crowd with a tray and a tin coffee−pot
from the camp kitchen. When he reached the carriage he found Mrs. Alexander just as he
had left her in the early morning, leaning forward a little, with her hand on the lowered
window, looking at the river. Hour after hour she had been watching the water, the lonely,
useless stone towers, and the convulsed mass of iron wreckage over which the angry river
continually spat up its yellow foam.
«Those poor women out there, do they blame him very much?» she asked, as she
handed the coffee−cup back to Horton.
«Nobody blames him, Mrs. Alexander. If any one is to blame, I'm afraid it's I. I should
have stopped work before he came. He said so as soon as I met him. I tried to get him here a
day earlier, but my telegram missed him, somehow. He didn't have time really to explain to
me. If he'd got here Monday, he'd have had all the men off at once. But, you see, Mrs.
Alexander, such a thing never happened before. According to all human calculations, it
simply couldn't happen.»
Horton leaned wearily against the front wheel of the cab. He had not had his clothes off
for thirty hours, and the stimulus of violent excitement was beginning to wear off.
«Don't be afraid to tell me the worst, Mr. Horton. Don't leave me to the dread of finding
out things that people may be saying. If he is blamed, if he needs any one to speak for him,»
– for the first time her voice broke and a flush of life, tearful, painful, and confused, swept
over her rigid pallor, – «if he needs any one, tell me, show me what to do.» She began to
sob, and Horton hurried away.
When he came back at four o'clock in the afternoon he was carrying his hat in his hand,
and Winifred knew as soon as she saw him that they had found Bartley. She opened the
carriage door before he reached her and stepped to the ground.
Horton put out his hand as if to hold her back and spoke pleadingly: «Won't you drive
up to my house, Mrs. Alexander? They will take him up there.»
«Take me to him now, please. I shall not make any trouble.»
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CHAPTER X 58
The group of men down under the riverbank fell back when they saw a woman coming,
and one of them threw a tarpaulin over the stretcher. They took off their hats and caps as
Winifred approached, and although she had pulled her veil down over her face they did not
look up at her. She was taller than Horton, and some of the men thought she was the tallest
woman they had ever seen. «As tall as himself,» some one whispered. Horton motioned to
the men, and six of them lifted the stretcher and began to carry it up the embankment.
Winifred followed them the half−mile to Horton's house. She walked quietly, without once
breaking or stumbling. When the bearers put the stretcher down in Horton's spare bedroom,
she thanked them and gave her hand to each in turn. The men went out of the house and
through the yard with their caps in their hands. They were too much confused to say
anything as they went down the hill.
Horton himself was almost as deeply perplexed. «Mamie,» he said to his wife, when he
came out of the spare room half an hour later, «will you take Mrs. Alexander the things she
needs? She is going to do everything herself. Just stay about where you can hear her and go
in if she wants you.»
Everything happened as Alexander had foreseen in that moment of prescience under the
river. With her own hands she washed him clean of every mark of disaster. All night he was
alone with her in the still house, his great head lying deep in the pillow. In the pocket of his
coat Winifred found the letter that he had written her the night before he left New York,
water−soaked and illegible, but because of its length, she knew it had been meant for her.
For Alexander death was an easy creditor. Fortune, which had smiled upon him
consistently all his life, did not desert him in the end. His harshest critics did not doubt that,
had he lived, he would have retrieved himself. Even Lucius Wilson did not see in this
accident the disaster he had once foretold.
When a great man dies in his prime there is no surgeon who can say whether he did
well; whether or not the future was his, as it seemed to be. The mind that society had come
to regard as a powerful and reliable machine, dedicated to its service, may for a long time
have been sick within itself and bent upon its own destruction.
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CHAPTER X 59
EPILOGUE
P
rofessor Wilson had been living in London for six years and he was just back from a
visit to America. One afternoon, soon after his return, he put on his frock−coat and drove in
a hansom to pay a call upon Hilda Burgoyne, who still lived at her old number, off Bedford
Square. He and Miss Burgoyne had been fast friends for a long time. He had first noticed her
about the corridors of the British Museum, where he read constantly. Her being there so
often had made him feel that he would like to know her, and as she was not an inaccessible
person, an introduction was not difficult. The preliminaries once over, they came to depend
a great deal upon each other, and Wilson, after his day's reading, often went round to
Bedford Square for his tea. They had much more in common than their memories of a
common friend. Indeed, they seldom spoke of him. They saved that for the deep moments
which do not come often, and then their talk of him was mostly silence. Wilson knew that
Hilda had loved him; more than this he had not tried to know.
It was late when Wilson reached Hilda's apartment on this particular December
afternoon, and he found her alone. She sent for fresh tea and made him comfortable, as she
had such a knack of making people comfortable.
«How good you were to come back before Christmas! I quite dreaded the Holidays
without you. You've helped me over a good many Christmases.» She smiled at him gayly.
«As if you needed me for that! But, at any rate, I needed YOU. How well you are
looking, my dear, and how rested.»
He peered up at her from his low chair, balancing the tips of his long fingers together in
a judicial manner which had grown on him with years.
Hilda laughed as she carefully poured his cream. «That means that I was looking very
seedy at the end of the season, doesn't it? Well, we must show wear at last, you know.»
Wilson took the cup gratefully. «Ah, no need to remind a man of seventy, who has just
been home to find that he has survived all his contemporaries. I was most gently treated – as
a sort of precious relic. But, do you know, it made me feel awkward to be hanging about
still.»
«Seventy? Never mention it to me.» Hilda looked appreciatively at the Professor's alert
face, with so many kindly lines about the mouth and so many quizzical ones about the eyes.
«You've got to hang about for me, you know. I can't even let you go home again. You must
stay put, now that I have you back. You're the realest thing I have.»
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EPILOGUE 60
Wilson chuckled. «Dear me, am I? Out of so many conquests and the spoils of
conquered cities! You've really missed me? Well, then, I shall hang. Even if you have at last
to put ME in the mummy−room with the others. You'll visit me often, won't you?»
«Every day in the calendar. Here, your cigarettes are in this drawer, where you left
them.» She struck a match and lit one for him. «But you did, after all, enjoy being at home
again?»
«Oh, yes. I found the long railway journeys trying. People live a thousand miles apart.
But I did it thoroughly; I was all over the place. It was in Boston I lingered longest.»
«Ah, you saw Mrs. Alexander?»
«Often. I dined with her, and had tea there a dozen different times, I should think.
Indeed, it was to see her that I lingered on and on. I found that I still loved to go to the
house. It always seemed as if Bartley were there, somehow, and that at any moment one
might hear his heavy tramp on the stairs. Do you know, I kept feeling that he must be up in
his study.» The Professor looked reflectively into the grate. «I should really have liked to go
up there. That was where I had my last long talk with him. But Mrs. Alexander never
suggested it.»
«Why?»
Wilson was a little startled by her tone, and he turned his head so quickly that his
cuff−link caught the string of his nose−glasses and pulled them awry. «Why? Why, dear me,
I don't know. She probably never thought of it.»
Hilda bit her lip. «I don't know what made me say that. I didn't mean to interrupt. Go on
please, and tell me how it was.»
«Well, it was like that. Almost as if he were there. In a way, he really is there. She never
lets him go. It's the most beautiful and dignified sorrow I've ever known. It's so beautiful that
it has its compensations, I should think. Its very completeness is a compensation. It gives her
a fixed star to steer by. She doesn't drift. We sat there evening after evening in the quiet of
that magically haunted room, and watched the sunset burn on the river, and felt him. Felt
him with a difference, of course.»
Hilda leaned forward, her elbow on her knee, her chin on her hand. «With a difference?
Because of her, you mean?»
Wilson's brow wrinkled. «Something like that, yes. Of course, as time goes on, to her he
becomes more and more their simple personal relation.»
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EPILOGUE 61
Hilda studied the droop of the Professor's head intently. «You didn't altogether like
that? You felt it wasn't wholly fair to him?»
Wilson shook himself and readjusted his glasses. «Oh, fair enough. More than fair. Of
course, I always felt that my image of him was just a little different from hers. No relation is
so complete that it can hold absolutely all of a person. And I liked him just as he was; his
deviations, too; the places where he didn't square.»
Hilda considered vaguely. «Has she grown much older?» she asked at last.
«Yes, and no. In a tragic way she is even handsomer. But colder. Cold for everything
but him. `Forget thyself to marble'; I kept thinking of that. Her happiness was a happiness a
deux, not apart from the world, but actually against it. And now her grief is like that. She
saves herself for it and doesn't even go through the form of seeing people much. I'm sorry. It
would be better for her, and might be so good for them, if she could let other people in.»
«Perhaps she's afraid of letting him out a little, of sharing him with somebody.»
Wilson put down his cup and looked up with vague alarm. «Dear me, it takes a woman
to think of that, now! I don't, you know, think we ought to be hard on her. More, even, than
the rest of us she didn't choose her destiny. She underwent it. And it has left her chilled. As
to her not wishing to take the world into her confidence – well, it is a pretty brutal and stupid
world, after all, you know.»
Hilda leaned forward. «Yes, I know, I know. Only I can't help being glad that there was
something for him even in stupid and vulgar people. My little Marie worshiped him. When
she is dusting I always know when she has come to his picture.»
Wilson nodded. «Oh, yes! He left an echo. The ripples go on in all of us. He belonged
to the people who make the play, and most of us are only onlookers at the best. We shouldn't
wonder too much at Mrs. Alexander. She must feel how useless it would be to stir about,
that she may as well sit still; that nothing can happen to her after Bartley.»
«Yes,» said Hilda softly, «nothing can happen to one after Bartley.»
They both sat looking into the fire.
**Alexander's Bridge, by Willa Cather**
Here is a copy of «The Barrel Organ» by Alfred Noyes, who was also the author of
«The Highwayman.»
THE Barrel ORGAN
Alexander's Bridge
EPILOGUE 62
by Alfred Noyes
THE Millennium fulcrum electronic edition, 1988 There's a barrel−organ caroling
across a golden street, In the City as the sun sinks low; And the music's not immortal; but
the world has made it sweet And fulfilled it with the sunset glow; And it pulses through the
pleasures of the City and the pain That surround the singing organ like a large eternal light;
And they've given it a glory and a part to play again In the Symphony that rules the day and
the night. And now it's marching onward through the realms of old romance, And trolling
out a fond familiar tune, And now it's roaring cannon down to fight the King of France, And
now it's prattling softly to the moon, And all around the organ there's a sea without a shore
Of human joys and wonders and regrets; To remember and to recompense the music
evermore For what the cold machinery forgets. . . . Yes; as the music changes, Like a
prismatic glass, It takes the light and ranges Through all the moods that pass; Dissects the
common carnival Of passions and regrets, And gives the world a glimpse of all The colors it
forgets. And there La traviata sights Another sadder song; And there Il trovatore cries A
tale of deeper wrong; And bolder knights to battle go With sword and shield and lance, Than
ever here on earth below Have whirled into – A dance! – Go down to Kew in lilac time; in
lilac time; in lilac time; Go down to Kew in lilac time; (it isn't far from London!) And you
shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland; Go down to Kew in lilac
time; (it isn't far from London!) The cherry−trees are seas of bloom and soft perfume and
sweet perfume, The cherry−trees are seas of bloom (and oh, so near to London!) And there
they say, when dawn is high and all the world's a blaze of sky The cuckoo, though he's very
shy, will sing a song for London. The nightingale is rather rare and yet they say you'll hear
him there At Kew, at Kew in lilac time (and oh, so near to London!) The linnet and the
throstle, too, and after dark the long halloo And golden−eyed TU−WHIT, Tu whoo of owls
that ogle London. For Noah hardly knew a bird of any kind that isn't heard At Kew, at Kew
in lilac time (and oh, so near to London!) And when the rose begins to pout and all the
chestnut spires are out You'll hear the rest without a doubt, all chorusing for London: –
Come down to kew in lilac time; IN Lilac time; IN Lilac time; Come Down to kew in
lilac time; (IT ISN'T Far from LONDON!) And you shall wander hand in hand with
love in SUMMER'S Wonderland; Come Down to kew in lilac time; (IT ISN'T Far
from LONDON!) And then the troubadour begins to thrill the golden street, In the City as
the sun sinks low; And in all the gaudy busses there are scores of weary feet Marking time,
sweet time, with a dull mechanic beat, And a thousand hearts are plunging to a love they'll
never meet, Through the meadows of the sunset, through the poppies and the wheat, In the
land where the dead dreams go. Verdi, Verdi, when you wrote Il trovatore did you dream
Of the City when the sun sinks low Of the organ and the monkey and the many−colored
stream On the Piccadilly pavement, of the myriad eyes that seem To be litten for a moment
with a wild Italian gleam As A Che la morte parodies the world's eternal theme And pulses
Alexander's Bridge
EPILOGUE 63
with the sunset glow? There's a thief, perhaps, that listens with a face of frozen stone In the
City as the sun sinks low; There's a portly man of business with a balance of his own,
There's a clerk and there's a butcher of a soft reposeful tone, And they're all them returning
to the heavens they have known: They are crammed and jammed in busses and – they're
each of them alone In the land where the dead dreams go. There's a very modish woman and
her smile is very bland In the City as the sun sinks low; And her hansom jingles onward, but
her little jeweled hand Is clenched a little tighter and she cannot understand What she wants
or why she wanders to that undiscovered land, For the parties there are not at all the sort of
thing she planned, In the land where the dead dreams go. There's an Oxford man that listens
and his heart is crying out In the City as the sun sinks low; For the barge the eight, the Isis,
and the coach's whoop and shout, For the minute gun, the counting and the long disheveled
rout, For the howl along the tow−path and a fate that's still in doubt, For a roughened oar to
handle and a race to think about In the land where the dead dreams go. There's a laborer that
listen to the voices of the dead In the City as the sun sinks low; And his hand begins to
tremble and his face is rather red As he sees a loafer watching him and – there he turns his
head And stares into the sunset where his April love is fled, For he hears her softly singing
and his lonely soul is led Through the land where the dead dreams go. There's and old and
hardened demi−rep, it's ringing in her ears, In the City as the sun sinks low; With the wild
and empty sorrow of the love that blights and sears, Oh, and if she hurries onward, then be
sure, be sure she hears, Hears and bears the bitter burden of the unforgotten years, And her
laugh's a little harsher and her eyes are brimmed with tears For the land where the dead
dreams go. There's a barrel−organ caroling across a golden street, In the City as the sun
sinks low; Though the music's only Verdi there's a world to make it sweet Just as yonder
yellow sunset where the earth and heaven meet Mellows all the sooty City! Hark, a hundred
thousand feet Are marching on to glory through the poppies and the wheat In the land where
the dead dreams go. So it's Jeremiah, Jeremiah, What have you to say When you meet the
garland girls Tripping on their way? All around my gala hat I wear a wreath of roses (A long
and lonely year it is I've waited for the May!) If any one should ask you, The reason why I
wear it is, My own love, my true love, is coming home to−day. It's buy a bunch of violets
for the lady (IT'S Lilac time in london; IT'S Lilac time in LONDON!) Buy a bunch of
violets for the lady; While the sky burns blue above: On the other side of the street you'll
find it shady (IT'S Lilac time in london; IT'S Lilac time in LONDON!) But buy a bunch of
violets for the lady; And tell her she's your own true love. There's a barrel−organ caroling
across a golden street, In the City as the sun sinks glittering and slow; And the music's not
immortal, but the world has made it sweet And enriched it with the harmonies that make a
song complete In the deeper heavens of music where the night and morning meet, As it dies
into the sunset glow; And it pulses through the pleasures of the City and the pain That
surround the singing organ like a large eternal light, And they've given it a glory and a part
of play again In the Symphony that rules the day and night. And there, as the music changes,
The song runs round again; Once more it turns and ranges Through all its joy and pain:
Dissects the common carnival Of passions and regrets; And the wheeling world remembers
all The wheeling song forgets. Once more La TRAVIATA sighs Another sadder song: Once
more Il trovatore cries A tale of deeper wrong; Once more the knights to battle go With
Alexander's Bridge
EPILOGUE 64
sword and shield and lance, Till once, once more, the shattered foe Has whirled into – A
dance – Come down to Kew in lilac time; in lilac time; in lilac time; Come down to Kew in
lilac time; (it isn't far from London!) And you shall wander hand in hand with Love in
summer's wonderland; Come down to Kew in lilac time; (it isn't far from London!) Come
down to kew in lilac time; IN Lilac time; IN Lilac time; Come Down to kew in lilac
time; (IT ISN'T Far from LONDON!) And you shall wander hand in hand with love
in SUMMER'S Wonderland; Come Down to kew in lilac time; (IT ISN'T Far
from LONDON!)
Alexander's Bridge
EPILOGUE 65
About Phoenix Editions
Why Phoenix Editions?
With the already available tools, converting files to eBook formats is not a big task. You can
use a plugin in MS Word and with just one click have a lit file. You can drag and drop html
into Adobe Acrobat and create a pdf file.
If we can be happy over the possibilities given to anyone to publish and to be published, we
must nevertheless look at previous experiences from the history of the computer and the
internet in order to get some needed advice:
The lack of standards threatens the persistance of data.•
We are able to access data from tablets from 3.000 year B.C. but not from files
created 10 years ago in a proprietary format, stored in some specific non standard
media, or even in previous versions of existing products.
If not enough care is taken, some operations like drag and drop or cut and paste can
result in the production of corrupted data.
•
Many ebooks come from html files. But outdated tags are still being used, and one
only needs to view the source to find beginning tags without their corresponding end
tags, improper nesting, and proprietary or non standard encoding. If the source code
is not cleaned up, all this will make its way to the derivated ebook.
•
Not every user knows how, is able to or wants to use the more advanced standard
features of available ebooks formats, resulting in a work that very often doesn't make
for the most pleasing reading experience.
•
Centuries of history and experience in graphical and printing arts should not be lost
for the sake of speed in converting to an ebook format. Much can be done in our
search for excellence to adapt and improve, the end result of which is a ebook of
higher quality.
•
But, we must be very careful in our search for quality and in our establishing criteria to meet
this lofty goal. Otherwise, as we know and are aware of, a new kind of elitism, censorship or
snobism can arise out of this endeavour.
Finding the proper and fair way to achieve this quality of ebook without such detrimental
effects led us to implement what we at Phoenix−Library call Phoenix Editions.
Alexander's Bridge
About Phoenix Editions 67
What is a Phoenix Edition
At Phoenix−Library we call a Phoenix Edition, an ebook with the following characteristics:
It is converted from clean and standard xhtml/xml files•
It uses meta tags to identify content, and other data•
The available resources specific to each ebook format are used to give the reader a
pleasant reading experience.
•
This means: objectives and normative criteria, regardless of taste, aesthetic or otherwise
subjective evaluations of contents and/or presentation.
Phoenix Edition of a RocketEdition file:
An ebook with a cover, a table of contents with active links, chapter breaks, a "go to" touch
access at least to a TOC, oeb compliant metadata, indentation if required from a pEdition
reproduction, internal links to notes.
Phoenix Edition of a Softbook file:
An ebook with a cover, a table of contents with active links, chapter breaks, oeb compliant
metadata, indentation if required from a pEdition reproduction, internal links to notes.
Phoenix Edition of a MS−Reader file:
An ebook with a cover, an external table of contents with active links at least to an internal
TOC, chapter breaks, images, oeb compliant metadata, indentation if required from a
pEditon reproduction, internal links to notes.
Phoenix Edition of a Mobipocket file:
An ebook with a cover, an external table of contents with active links at least to an internal
TOC, chapter breaks, oeb compliant metadata, indentation if required from a pEdition
reproduction, internal links to notes.
Phoenix Edition of a Acrobat file:
Alexander's Bridge
What is a Phoenix Edition 68
An ebook with a cover, images, chapter breaks, matching page numbers, oeb compliant
metadata, indentation if required from a pEdition reproduction, internal links to notes.
Note 1: These criteria will be discussed in the Phoenix eBook newsgroups in order to be
refined and then implemented in a Phoenix Edition guideline, that will be available in the
near future to all Phoenix−Library associates.
Note 2: In order to stimulate and reward all associate eBookProducers in their search for
excellence, a percentage of all associate subscriptions will be allocated to this cause.
Alexander's Bridge
What is a Phoenix Edition 69
©2001 Phoenix−Library.org
eBook Version
Phoenix−Library.org
Layout done by NoPapers.org
___________________
September−2001
Alexander's Bridge
What is a Phoenix Edition 70
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