THE BEGINNING
OF WISDOM
STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT


ALA 800. 319.47
HARVARD COLLEGE
LIBRARY
ARDIAN
ET
HARVAR
VEHIRI
EMIA
RISTO
TAS
PHONE
LESIA
CHR
KOVOV
THE GIFT OF
WILLIS ARNOLD BOUGHTON
CLASS OF 1907



- 13 -
The very frank story of a very young
man. A novel, it is perfectly safe to say,
quite unlike any other. The story of
Philip, his idyllic birth in California, the
humorous surroundings of his rearing, the
vitality of his years at Yale, his picturesque
adventures in Arizona, his days in the
army, and above all, the tender scenes of
his young love, are the quintessence of
poetry presented in the form of penetrating
realism.
This first novel by one of the most dis-
tinguished of our younger poets has had the
odd good fortune of being much discussed
in New York literary circles before it ap-
peared anywhere in print. It had also the
further distinction of appearing serially in
part in The Bookman. Only in book pub-
lication, however, is the full story given.
There is every reason to believe that this
will be one of the most widely discussed
novels of the year.














THE BEGINNING OF
WISDOM
BY
STEPHEN VINCENT BENET
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1921


AL 94.3.2.41
ALA 800 319.4
RARYARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
GIFT OF
WILLIS A. BOUGHTON
Mar 14.1933.
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published September, 1921
Second Printing, October, 1921
Third Printing, December, 1921
Fourth Printing, March, 1922
Fifth Printing, August, 1922
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
Che Quinn Baden Company
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
RAHWAY
NEW JERSEY


To
SHREVE COWLES BADGER
JOHN FRANKLIN CARTER, JB.
EFFINGHAM COCK EVARTS
Fellow Epicureans and very kind companions





NOTE
THANKS are due to Danford Barney of “Parabalou,"
Norman Fitts of the “S4N” and Christopher Morley of
“The Bowling Green" for permission to reprint poems
previously published by them.


---
----
-


“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wis-
dom. . .."-The Bible.
"Lord—'to put the fear of the - into,' to aston-
ish, to cow, to terrify.”—Harkett's Slang Dictionary.
“.... ... And coolly from the waste
Now slender beauty rises, strong and harsh,
And with it comes a salt, ironic taste,
A tang of evening floating on the marsh.
That beauty is not delicate nor weak
It can withstand all mockery and doubt,
It is the very words the mockers speak,
And only hardy fools can find it out."
-Phelps Putnam.





CONTENTS
BOOK I
PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
PAGE
CONVERSATION . .
GARDEN PARTY . .
SUCCESSION OF DAYS
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
10
22
BOOK II
PARABALOU!
SUMMER WITH PHILIP. .
SNOW AND ELMS—"LIGHTS OUT, FRESHMAN !”.
SUN AND PEPPERS . .
"THE JUNIOR FRATERNITIES . . . ANNOUNCE
THE ELECTION OF"
GROWING PAINS—I.
. . . . .
GROWING PAINS-II .
! "JUNIOR YEAR WE TAKE OUR EASE" —
END OF A CYCLE . . . . . . .
·
91
· ·
96
·
105
BOOK III
"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
WERE LOVERS” . .
.
.
.
113


CONTENTS
PAGE
BOOK IV
COLD MOUNTAINS . .
:
:
:
153
BOOK V
AMATEUR THEATRICALS
.
.
. 211
BOOK VI
THE TINSEL HEAVEN-A DREAM
OUTSIDE HEAVEN
INSIDE HEAVEN
Past HEAVEN .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
. 259
. 263
. 273
BOOK VII
. . . .
TERRA FIRMA
.
.
. 281
BOOK VIII
THE FEAR OF THE LORD
OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. . . .
THE FEAR OF THE LORD . . . . .
. 329
. 345


BOOK I
PROLOGUE TO PHILIP


CONVERSATION–1892
The only sound in the big front room is the faint
growling of the bright coal fire as it chars to the
ruddiness of a winter apple behind the three black bars
of its grate. Outside the wind slashes at the windows,
flinging handfuls of spatting rain to run down the
panes like long tears. Clove-black and brittle-brown
as tatters from old sails, the dead leaves of the eucalyp-
tus hurry past in the wet of the gust, to be heaped into
overflowing gutters along with shriveled gray pepper-
berries and torn flowers and much red sand. It is
pleasant to look once through the window at that scurry
of storm and broken cloud and then turn back to the
quiet crickling of the coals. A month more now, and
in the East it will be old cold Christmas, with the
ground frosted over like a cake but this is California
and the rainy season, and the earth will sluice and steam
for three months longer in a continual pouring of
clear rain.
There is another sound in the room nowa sound
no one could have noticed before, it is so small and
monotonous—the sound of even breathing. It comes
from the great oak bed by the wall and the chair rocked
close to the grate. Hearing it makes the room seem
stiller and warmer. The fire shifts suddenly, throwing
a gay flare on the face of the drowser before it, and
the procession of dull-blue peacocks that parade the


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
without are the mollis!
ivory chintz of the deep chairs and tall curtains. From
the bed comes an indistinguishable sleepy sound that,
finding itself nonsense, stops, and a little later begins
again, this time enough waked-up to be in words.
“ Nurse ! ” it says. “Oh, Nurse!”
The rumple of starched linen in the rocker moves in-
finitesimally and relapses without answering.
“Nurse!” repeats the voice from the bed, this time
with a tickle of laughter in it. “Miss Hollis! Sorry
to wake you!”
And now the linen hears and crackles. The figure
in the chair rises, a tall strapping girl with a tumble
of blond hair coming out from under her nurse's cap.
She looks as vigorous and healthy as a young tree, but
the pulled-down droop of the corners of her mouth
shows that she recently has been very thoroughly tired.
She stands now with her arms over her head, yawning
magnificently, and then, suddenly realizing what she
is doing, straightens and starts to look very profes-
sional. But the next minute her hands are at her eyes
again, trying desperately to rub away the sleep.
The voice from the bed is contrite.
“I'm awfully sorry. I know I shouldn't have waked
you. I've been counting peacocks and peacocks getting
the cruelty to. Because if you were as sleepy as I
was->
“ You should have waked me long ago, Mrs. Sellaby.”
The full dignity of an expert has been recovered. “I
had no business to sleep like that. I don't know how
1_” A yawn splits this in the middle, but she goes
on determinedly, “I don't know what 14" Again the


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
bith that delica curgeon-the visitely
annihilating yawn. This time she gives up. “Oh, dear,"
she says frankly, “I was so tired.”
“I was a pig. A perfect pig.”
This from the bed, then, inconsequentially, “By the
way, that clock's still stuck at nine-thirty—”
Miss Hollis consults a small bangle of a watch.
“Good heavens, it's half-past four! and Mr. Sellaby
will be coming in, and the doctor"
She busies herself with bottles and trays and pillows,
hiding what yawns will come behind four fingers. The
girl in the bed lies flat back, looking at the ceiling.
Her hair, which is the color of pine-smoke, is in thick,
soft waves about her face.
It is a face with that delicate tense strength you
may see in the hands of a great surgeon—the soul be-
neath it has been tempered steely, is as exquisitely
balanced and direct as the long springing blade of an
old rapier. And at present, in spite of the weight and
heaviness of exhaustion upon it, so deep as to be al-
most visible and clinging like a netted veil, it is over-
whelmed with peace, absorbed in peace. She has that
look of calm strangeness with her that will make even
her husband, when he sees her this time, forget her as
anything but a visitor from brightness. Her face and
her throat might have been bathed in starry water. She
turns her head to the pillow again and her eyes grow
merry.
“Philip? ”
But Miss Hollis is slow.
“Mr. Sellaby? The carriage hasn't come back yet."
The girl in bed smiles swiftly.


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“No. Not Phil. Philip."
This time she is comprehended with an answering
smile of vast though somewhat technical understanding.
“Miss Woods has him, I think. Shall I bring him
in?”
“ Please.”
Miss Hollis vanishes with a laundered rustle, tread-
ing hard on her sensible shoes. An antiseptic smell
the essence of the endless tiled corridors of a thousand
expectant hospitals, permanently anesthetized into rub-
bery quiet—drifts thinly into the air. Lucia Sellaby's
hand, absurdly weak and uncoördinated like the hand
of a puppet with the wires gone wrong, fumbles slowly
with a stopper and closes the exclamatory bottle. Then
she smiles again, this time with the fervent pleasure of
a child that has just successfully carried through a mild
naughtiness undiscovered. Miss Hollis reappears, carry-
ing some crude sort of a bundle with great care. The
whipping sound of rain on glass is broken in upon by
flacking hoofs and the ripple of tired wheels that tattle
and slur into a stop.
“Here he is,” says the nurse judiciously. She is
much too well instructed to crow meaningless languages
at the baby or dig pointed fingers into his fat. That
will be left to uncles and aunts.
Philip is put beside his mother. He is the color of
the shell of a boiled crab—a creature of compound
wrinkles and ugliness with the face of a cathedral gar-
goyle. This ugliness will be geographically examined by
all visiting relatives for perfect resemblances to other
members of the family. Cousin George Vane will re-


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
mark with a happy appreciation of his own wit that
the kid's nose is just as lopsided as his dad's and Aunt
Ethel Sellaby will eat liver-tablets as she looks at him
and say, as she crunches with a noise like breaking teeth,
that it is perfectly evident to any one the Vane temper
has come out in him already. But so far he has been a
good deal too young to be seen and a good deal too busy
with existing to be quite sure that he is existing at all.
He makes crablike movements of discontent, though,
even in the crook of his mother's arm. She looks at
him, humming wordlessly. His eyes are shut-squeezed
in like a puppy's—but one formless paw crawls, feeler-
wise, to the swelling curve of her breast. Miss Hollis
busies herself complacently with her slops and linen
and scissors—she has all the composed self-consciousness
of a popular actor acknowledging applause after an un-
usually successful first night. Under the calm sky of
her satisfaction Philip and Lucia hold close, belong
to each other, are contented. Footsteps and a soft rap-
ping at the door break in upon the dream.
Miss Hollis answers the rapping discreetly, parleys
a little, then admits Phil Sellaby-Philip Sellaby, Sr.,
now, of course. Handsome as a show red setter, young
as a colt, he has more or less the limitations of mind of
both animals while lacking their uncanny earthy quali-
ties of scent and instant intuition. The crooked nose
is there and serves only to add tricky good-humor to
looks otherwise too regular to be interesting—and the
eyes are gleaming and empty as blue glass. At present
the man is nervousness, exalted relief, profound grati-
tude and ferocious pride by turns. He treats his son


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
alternately as if he were porcelain and rubber, and his
wife as though she were a combination of descended
angel and new and very startling machine whose actions
and curious potentialities he had never before suspected.
She loves him but is beginning to comprehend him—he
worships her and never will, any more than he will why
the pastel shades become her or why a sonnet should have
only fourteen lines. A very nice fellow on the whole
though a little too much the sort of a man at his best
in the lounge of a men's club. His youth suits him ex-
tremely—he wears it like a flower in his buttonhole
if he could stay in the twenties forever, he would be
completely successful, for age will harden and veneer
without greatly ripening him. But he has been standing
at the door long enough.
He starts to run to his wife, decides that isn't
dignified, and walks. Miss Hollis departs elaborately
and is heard playing with faucets in the bathroom. As
soon as her skirt has vanished behind the door, he
runs over and kneels beside the bed.
“Darling, darling, darling!” he says in a cracking
voice. Lucia turns her head and shoulder so that their
lips can meet. The kiss is long and speechless and
without any pulse or banner of passion. The man has
put off for once the gilded metal of his attitudes. He
is suddenly able to remain silent-he kneels uncon-
sciously, in the posture of a devotional figure beside a
tomb. And her hand is gentle with him in a calm ges-
ture-she will need that gesture later, too, for the other
Philip, when he has got acclimated. Miss Hollis coughs
before reëntering, and the embrace breaks up on the


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
9
instant like a half-played theme in a concerto when the
musician takes his hands from the keys. Phil Sellaby
gets up, half-tripping, and finds that his trousers are
dusty. And Philip mews, wishing food.
The kiss has been good for Lucia, who needs actual
present love as much to live as a pine needs soil and
water and cannot exist by fractions. And the fact that
this son of his can actually utter passable sounds sways
the father back into gay arrogance again. He rips
open a lengthy striped box that he has brought with
him and tossed anyhow on the floor. It is full of pale
and scarlet roses, long-stemmed and silvery with rain.
Philip mews again, this time more decidedly, and Lucia,
after cocking a doubtful eye at Miss Hollis' back, winks
at him rapidly and furtively to show that he is com-
pletely understood, and begins to tug at the little bows
on her nightgown. But Phil has got out the roses-
he holds them high up-petals of stained silk and ivory
rock and flutter and drift to Lucia's pillow—she shivers
with the serene mirth of a bell. Philip opens his button-
eyes—he sees the ripple of color, the few small sparkling
drops that shower like globes of mercury from the shaken
flowers, and, seeing, laughs, laughs for the first whole
time in his life with a loud wide toothless chuckle and a
striking of fists and feet at the great wonder.


GARDEN PARTY-1901
Clink-tink-clitter of silver, tankle of forks on
peach-bloom plates,
Delicate ivory crunchings titter through foam-
white biscuits and oozing dates ;
Trill, spill, ripples of laughter, even the dangling
bags play tunes.
Mandarin-buttoned and dragon-slippered, the tea-
steam walks by the macaroons !
PHILIP has been put into a white suit and a bad
temper and sent marauding through the rustle of guests
as a sort of wandering ornament. He goes through his
motions sullenly and without style, feeling as if he had
been starched all over. For him the whole high-voiced
confusion splits itself up into hats and hands. Hats ·
like fruit-salad and hats like painted bird-cages, long
chilly hats that rest the eyes like shade after hard read-
ing, little round swearing parrots of hats, as reekingly
alive as tropic sunlight. Hats of every shade from pis-
tachio to flamingo-mauve, apricot, sherry, bisque—they
spot and color the green cool of the garden like a sudden
new creation of great, gay artificial plants. And below
the hats are the hands—hands of all shapes and tints and
firmnesses—from the limp, perspiring palm of fifteen-
year-old Marjorie Kellaber that crumples like a wet
rubber glove as you take hold of it to the dry sweet tiny
fingers of old Mrs. Janet Whistley who offers you three
10


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
11
of them like an investiture of the Garter in an atmos-
phere of lace and mignonette. Hats and hands, nothing
but hats and hands, and not a chance for Philip to do
anything but hand around baskets of pink-iced cakes and
have people pat him with squat hands and lumpy hands
and tell him what a polite little gentleman. What a
polite little gentleman-what a polite little gentleman
—and Philip, with a company grin outside, inside runs
through Mac the stable-man's best barnyard vocabulary
with the ease, care and devotion that a Buddhist monk
expends on his prayer-wheel. Then he looks to catch
a wink from his mother, but she is fenced behind hats
and hands and a vaporous silver urn, she is pouring tea
for countless hats and hands; and Philip puts down his
basket where a fat hat will be sure to come and step into
it, and speaks off through the side-garden to the peace
and food of the kitchen.
Swerve, wheel, succulent incense, wave like the
tails of Persian cats,
(Low light strokes flower-soft dresses, sweet-pea
veilings and fur-sleek spats),
Bright, bitter intrusions of lemon, prosperous
gurgles of clotting milk,
Even the wind is combed and curdled in cloudy
powder and crinkling silk !
The Striped Aunt is talking to the Lozenged Aunt
while they trot up and down the brick walk of the rose-
garden. Their promenade is proud but with something
lacking in it, like the evening review of two large and
prominent peacocks who have mislaid essential fractions
of their tails.


12 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ And just how old is that splendid boy of Lucia’s?”
says Stripes.
“ Little Philip?” Lozenges' voice has that quality of
medical oversweet to be found in popular cough-tablets.
“ Nine in November.”
“ And, my dear, you didn't think he looked delicate ?"
“No." Then Lozenges reconsiders. “Not precisely.
But he has that excitable Vane look. It always makes
one fear for the mind.”
“Why, there's been no actual insanity, surely—"
“So far? No." Oh, sepulchral Lozenges! “But
with precocious children, when they have that queer
look, you never ought to be too sure. No child has any
business to draw or read or write so much at that sweet
little fellow's age. If I were Lucia—".
“Give him a good sound spanking every time he
touches a book!” Spinster Stripes rubs out all litera-
ture with one obliterating thumb. “It isn't normal.
It isn't right.”
“It isn't the way a sensible mother would act. It
isn't what Grandfather Sellaby ever believed in."
They trot faster, chanting their litany at each other.
“It isn't proper or wise."
“He ought to be packed off to boarding-school.”
“It isn't fair to the boy.”
“ Too much affection is so dangerous."
“His father should take a firm hand.”
“He isn't like other boys his age.”
The antiphony drops, commences again, sweetly
choral.
“If Phil Sellaby wasn't so flighty."


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
“If Lucia didn't have such curious ideas."
“If they gave him a box of tools.”
“If he played more with other little boys."
“If his eyes hadn't turned brown, when they were blue
at first."
“If he took more after his Uncle Ashbel.”
But even the tongues of Lozenges and Stripes wag
weary after much good breath is wasted. They are
warm—they sit down on a garden-bench, and huddle
their musty, feathery gowns about them. Stripes waves
a soporific fan, driving little sharp dusty gusts at the
face of Lozenges. She cools and they discuss the sinful
habits of some servants and most dogs and all small
children.
Plop, pop, bubbles of chatter silverly burst into
brightening spray,
Blood runs from the reputations-every one knows
what They will say-
Toast blooms like a field of buttercups, spoons
batter empastried shams,
Cloyed, sirupy, over the china troops the parade of
the dark, proud jams.
For a few breathless seconds Lucia Sellaby has escaped
away from her party. She has made the escaping an ad-
venture, as she is able to do with most things, and now
sits hidden in the little wistaria-arbor with her brother,
wrapped in all the hush and attitudes of conspiracy
she can summon up and yet help laughing, which is
hard. Shreve Vane resembles her greatly—his face,
for instance, is a first-class copy from her original, first
class, but hastily done. Their minds have the likenesses


14 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
and differences of the right and left profiles of a single
countenance. His is sturdier and must digest most
thoroughly before it can assimilate-hers subtler, twice
as unexpected, with an intuitive gift for sudden flash-
ing comprehension of a whole from one seen particle.
There are no unexplored regions for him he has atlased
himself out with the thorough patience of a scientific
geographer, down to railways and deltas and exports and
towns of less than five thousand inhabitants—while she
thinks of her mind, if at all, in the terms of a medieval
map, full of castles and sirens and unicorns with the
four winds bursting their puffy cheeks at appropriate
corners of the compass. She won't let him probe the
honeycomb of an empty hornet's nest to tease her
there is too little time for that.
“Phil thinks Philip ought to go to boarding-school,"
she begins without any preliminaries.
“Now?” Shreve whistles more piercingly than he
meant to. “Good Lord, the boy isn't even nine!”
“Phil went when he was ten.” A quirk of mirth
comes over her mouth. “He was quarterback on the
team when he was twelve."
“You never went at all though.” Shreve is accusing.
“ You howled like sin when Mother talked about send-
ing you. And after all, Luke, it's you the boy's like-
not Phil at all, except for his pretty looks.”
The nickname goes back to a fervently religious ten-
year-old who insisted on her direct connection with and
spiritual descent from the Third Gospel. Lucia hesi-
tates in front of the matter of pretty looks, like a kitten
before a new ball of string. But that isn't really the


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
15
question after all, and she withdraws from it with a
minor sigh of relinquishment.
“I don't want him to go any time ever!” she says
flatly.
“He's got to be sent sometime, Luke. It's only
common sense. I know how you hate the idea of it.”
With unusual fervor, “He'll hate it too, the first year,
anyway. Lord, I remember how I did !”
“That's just it, and I don't want him to hate it. It
isn't-I wouldn't-I'm really not like most of these
nice women, Shreve. I don't want him done up in cot-
ton wool and pinned to a card like a specimen boy-I
don't even worry about whether he's got rubbers and a
raincoat on-sometimes. I'm proud of him, of course,
extensively so. I'm fearful for him, too, horribly so
till I've stayed awake nights wondering if there were
another earthquake and he were out there on the sleep-
ing-porch—" She breaks off with a little gesture of
cold. Shreve covers her hand with his.
“ Back in the eighties was the last shake for a hun-
dred years,” he says with the wilful faith of all good
Californians.
“I keep telling myself that, all the time. But it
isn't him that I worry over, generally. It's the rest
of him, his mind, what he thinks about. He'll be lonely
a good deal and without much helpthat's because he's
my son, Shreve. He'll take things he can't do to heart,
because he's Phil's. Lonely and off from most people
and getting a hard sort of joy out of loneliness. And
when he has to adjust himself to people and living, it
will have to be done with preparations. It'll hurt him


16 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
as much as his being born did. If the preparations are
wrong-if they aren't at least approximately kindly-
he'll just be driven in on himself again and eat at him-
self for years. You see?” She spreads her hands
palm-up, to be helped.
Shreve sees. Indeed in spite of the respectable age
and the correct clothes and the sober bank account he has
industriously acquired, he still sometimes, in painful
moments, has that nightmare feeling that these posses-
sions may on the instant vanish away and he be left a
small and confused child in a world of uninterested
strangers that is the hereditary prerogative of the shy.
But the feeling is too deep to be made into talk, just
now. All he says is :
“ Don't worry about it, Luke. I'll bicker with Phil.”
She is grateful; it is exactly what she has conspired
for.
“I wish you would. He thinks a good deal of your
advice."
“ I'm afraid it will be no go later. Phil will want
to send him some time, of course, which ought to be
all right, Luke, after all-when he's thirteen or four-
teen—"
She nods dubiously.
“Perhaps. That's another thing. It has to be a
school out here. If we were East; if we could send him
East, very well—that's something else that Phil is
against, and I must say, I am too. I'd rather keep
him."
“ Till he's twenty?” This is chaff, not meant to
sting as it does.


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
17
“No. I'm not sheltering him, Shreve. But I do
know about it. I know how alike we are. You'd feel
it-you do feel it—if you won't admit it—and—”
Shreve has no course open but retraction and he takes
it whole-heartedly, more especially as certain glimpses
of poignant memory have deserted and gone over to
Lncia’s flag
“Yes, Luke, I do feel it, honestly. As for shelter-
ing' him-people always talk rot. Phil's right, too,
that's the dickens of it—the way he sees it. He'd be
right nearly always-entirely 80—but he isn't quite
right now, about Philip. I'll talk to him.”
This satisfies her and she remembers her party. They
slide out of the arbor, crouching like plotters in a film
and both now enjoying themselves tremendously. As
they leave Shreve decides to try a simile.
“When we're young, Philip and you and I and the
rest of us, we're people who need some kind of mental
armor,” he starts timidly. “If we haven't it-we climb
up into our minds and stay there. Now Phil—"
She-he-mumble of dowagers—chatter from lit-
tle old men in stays,
Thick, soft, glutinous spooning of guava jelly and
gorged patés,
Slip, slop, mayonnaise sandwiches burble delight to
a careless thumb,
White spite winks a decanter, chuckling a tot of
obsequious rum!
Philip, smudging his nose against the pantry-window,
sees a crammed belated carriage creak away down the
drive. The garden-party has withered into a few,


18 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
middle-aged, exhaustless talkers and two stranded wives
nervously looking around bushes for their husbands.
Philip settles back to his cache of salvaged edibles;
three sardine sandwiches, the wreck of a guava-jelly
messed into the remains of some chicken-in-aspic, and
the sticky internals of the ice-cream freezer. He at-
tacks with technique, voracity and dispatch; inserts a
crushed macaroon in one of the sandwiches, and tries
the combination dubiously. Strange blends of abnormal
foods appeal to him, and the maids, Lizzie and the
borrowed ones, are too busy stacking dishes and com-
paring scandals about prominent guests to pay much
notice. Philip looks and is more like his father just
now than he ever will be again the resemblance is
of the kind that drives aging ladies to gentle sentimen-
tal tears. Any thoughts he has are chiefly about food
and Mrs. Whistley's lent black butler, who is quite the
finest and most overpoweringly-mannered gentleman
that has yet come into his ken. Philip has been trying
to draw him all day on the sly, and has only succeeded
once, a wild, amusing caricature of him at the door of
Noah's Ark, ushering in with effusive cordiality a pro-
cession of silk-hatted rhinoceroses. Philip thinks of the
latter beasts and grins profoundly, before spreading
guava paste on a loose sardine.
Lucia may have worried about him unnecessarily.
He seems in most respects as normal and inquisitive
as a terrier. Every emotion he has goes instantly all
through and over him as a current of electricity pours
through a wire-and he is still at an age when the
space between shutting eyes at night and opening them
s


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
19
again in the morning flicks past like the second-hand of
a watch about its dial, and most dreams, good or bad,
come from indigestion. He doesn't know what it is to
be bored, has a quantity of humorous vanity, consider-
able physical recklessness and is beginning to develop
from much scattered and unchecked reading an ashamed
fierce curiosity in regard to matters of sex. His flair for
mockery, with pencil or words, is his chief unusual
quality and he knows quite well, to his own last adjec-
tive, exactly how unusual it is.
Lizzie, their own maid, skims by with a couple of
empty cake-baskets, eyeing him askance.
“It's a pig you are, Master Philip,” she calls in her
soft slippery Irish. “What with Lee wishful to save
them little fishes for your mother's lunch, this Satur-
day!”
“Aw, Lizzie, he won't give a darn!” and “Have
one?” Philip adds with mischievous good-temper.
“Have one, is it? It's none of you and your fishes
I'll have, with me work to be done and supper to get
and the hair that will fly when your Aunt Agatha sees
the place the wall-eyed horse of Colonel Marley's ate
off the cockle-vine! Now by the Holy Fly!”
The invocation interests Philip.
“What's the Holy Fly?”
“It's the fly that lit on the face of Our Lord and
him hangin' on the Cross and the one he blessed and
took into Heaven with him along of the two thieves.
Now go along with your questions!”
“But why did Our Lord take it to Heaven?”
“Because it was the holy wish of Him." Lizzie


20 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
crosses herself, with some difficulty, owing to the cake-
baskets.
“But why did he want it in Heaven?”
“ Because he did, and that's all, and bad luck to you
and who are you to know what he wished or did not
wish? Putting jelly on good sound fish as if it was
bread they were, and not letting a decent girl go on
with her work!”
Philip wonders idly what the difference would be
in not letting an indecent girl go on with her work.
Indecent. That was the word he looked up in the dic-
tionary, yesterday, only to find it: “Indecent a., obscene,
lascivious.” Obscene is a good word to try out,
then, though he is quite in the dark as to its mean-
ing.
You're on with a bankrute, por
“ Lizzie," he says with decision, “why do you call
yourself a decent girl? You're obscene.”
The cake baskets are put down with a bang.
“Out of the pantry it is you go this minute, you
black-hearted, small plague of a bad child! Calling a
good girl out of her name with dirty words from your
father's books that you should not have read !” She
advances upon him with a dish-towel. He holds his
ground.
“You're obscene!” he patters off hurriedly. “You're
obscene-you're obscene--a-ah, Lizzie, you're obscene!”
The dish-towel flaps into his face. “Out ye go!”
whacks Lizzie. “Out ye go—you and your fishes and
your abseens”
But the tempest settles back instantly into its teapot
as Phil Sellaby, who has come running over the lawn


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
21
unobserved, raps suddenly on the window-pane with
his knuckles.
“ Play tennis, Philip ?” he calls, in a voice that sounds
funnily small through the glass, and Philip, forgetting
everything else, rushes out and upstairs to get his
racket and play vehement handicap-singles that his
father always wins through a slow, long sleepy twilight
of dulling gold.


SUCCESSION OF DAYS–1905
THE skinny minute-hand of the white-faced clock
over Major Stelly's desk in the big assembly-room
hitches slowly from numeral to numeral. Philip looks
up at it again from the glare of naked electric-light
that floods over his cramped little desk. Fifteen minutes
till Recall from study-period and he is so sleepy already
that his eyes feel as if they had been washed with sand.
He turns to the back of the geography for relaxation-
what other lessons he has had to prepare are done.
Tangier-imports, machinery_exports, silks, gold-dust
and cinnabar. Cinnabar. Golly, what a name! He
whispers it roundly, tasting it over his tongue. Morocco
-imports, machinery-exports, leather and sackcloth.
Sackcloth and ashes are in the Bible, but I suppose
it doesn't matter what kind of ashes. Siam-imports,
machinery-exports—must be white elephants--white
elephants-big-white-e-le-phants-
Philip pulls up his head just as it is about to drop
to the desk-lid and tries to shake the heavy drowse out
of it by one quick toss as a swimmer shakes off water.
It's no good. He is smothering under sleep, and he
mustn't, he mustn't go to sleep. Major Stelly caught
Fat Clark sleeping ten minutes ago and gave him an
hour and a half on the beat. An hour and a half sen-
try-go with a Civil War musket six feet high.
Now he's sitting up there at his deska little gray
22


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
23
wrath of a retired army-officer-with the sour eyes of a
biting horse. Ten years of teaching at Kitchell Military
Academy have left him with the restraint of a hanging
judge and the ingenuity in small cruelties of a Jesuit
Inquisitor. The great, hushed legend of the school is
of “ the time when Woozy Fisher knocked him out.”
Philip catches his glance for a moment and looks
away quickly. The clock-hand jumps. Four minutes
gone.
Madagascar—imports, machinery. Don't they ever
buy anything but machinery? A picture of thousands
of brown, sleek natives cavorting with howls of joy
about the vast bulk of a McCormick reaper, forms fan-
tastically in Philip's mind. Too hot there to want
other things, probably. Too hot even to handle the
machinery. As hot as this room.
The air is breathless and weighty over Philip—the air
is smoky with heat and the smell of pine and spilt ink
and boys. Philip takes a long sucking breath and his
will surrenders suddenly, without any warning. He
looks stupidly at the flagellating, harsh light on Fat
Clark's open history on the next desk. He feels as if
he were being pleasantly suffocated under great pillows
and bolsters of sleepy warmth. And then he doesn't
feel or think at all.
Vague discomfort-swift pain-he can't breathe
he can't breathe at all—he is choking. He opens his
mouth and eyes with a gasp—a sharp finger and thumb
are gripping down on his nose. Major Stelly swims
cloudily into vision as he forces up his thick, drugged
eyelids. Major Stelly's hand is pinching his nose. The


24
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
whole room chirrups and swirls with muffled laughter.
Major Stelly's voice coughs dryly above him.
“Three hours on the beat to-morrow, Sellaby. Re-
port from me to the Sergeant of the Guard.”
He lets go of Philip's nose and turns to look for the
laughter. It stops as if it were blown out like the
flame of a candle. Then the little tin-godly man is
satisfied and his footsteps crackle back to his desk again,
leaving Philip to tender examination of his nose.
Out of the cool night that drifts and whispers like
snow against the stuffy squares of hot windows, expected
and clear and sudden, comes the brief falling call of
a bugle. For an instant it fills the sterile air, drooping
wistfully, a blown flower of silver spray.
“ "Tenshun!” coughs Major Stelly. “Sergeants,
take command of your squads ! ”
“Pinky” Kitchell—Dr. Ward Erastus Kitchell,
B.A., M.A., Harvard, B.Litt. Oxon.-has visitors at
the Masters' Table in Dining Hall. The cooks out in
the greasy kitchen know about it, and send nice food,
thoughtfully cooked, to him and the gobbling loud par-
ents from Oakland who are “ taking a look around the
school.”
“Oh, yes, indeed, I always make it a practice of
dropping in for pot-luck with the boys every few days
or so!” says Pinky, the faint reddish fur of his whiskers
showing up like the brush of a squirrel as he slices him-
self a delicate wafer of ham. “It keeps our Chinamen
up to the mark, I find."
There is a sudden chatter of laughter from one of the


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
boys' long mess-tables. It comes from the pair sitting
on either side of Philip, who has just discovered a third
of a pearly worm inside a half-eaten leaf of boiled
cabbage.
“ They look like smart little chaps in their uniforms,”
remarks the male visiting parent with the air of an
expert newspaper strategist.
“ Such a comfort to think of the good home influence
Dr. and Mrs. Kitchell must give them," tucks in his
female, her voice like tallow.
“ Good wholesome discipline."
“A Christian Church in the village."
Pinky inserts a word.
“Our little shop for manual training-sloyd, they call
it-the boys were in class when we passed there, Mrs.
Vorgas. It is an interesting experiment, nothing like
it to teach practicality, as I often say to my wife.
They make-oh, boxes—and ironing-boards—chairs,
sideboards, no, no, possibly not sideboards,” but his tone
if not his sentence includes gigantic specimens of every
type of period furniture. “That comes, of course, as
an extra, but,”
“And our William is so clever with tools already.
We should want him taught, of course if we could ar-
range" The word “ terms ” hangs disembodied, as
it were, in the air, a mere specter of a noun, a phantom.
“Now, Amanda.” This voice is as male as a cheap
cigar. “You must remember our little agreement. We
were to make no decisions until we had seen Mercator
and St. Vitus”.”
“Quite right, dear. Still," and this with a candied


: 26 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM .
smile, “ Dr. Kitchell has convinced me so far that this
is the place for William. Thoroughly. If the terms—
that is the terms-eh-"
“Suppose we leave them till later.” Pinky's haste is
a bit anxious as well. “They are business, my dear lady,
horrid business. Now I always say that taking visitors
about our little academy is one of the chief pleasures—"
The brassy clamor of a bugle cuts him short. The
boys rise—the whole wide Dining Hall is broken into
stiff ranks of slate-and-black soldiers. They are
marched out_expressionless, for they march well.
Philip tramps past Pinky's table, rigid and healthy.
Inside his mind: “You beast, you pink beast! Sit-
ting and wetting your lips with your tongue and smiling
and lying and getting fathers and mothers who want
to be nice and decent to send their kids to your dirty,
rotten, beastly school ! ”
The long Alameda pitcher winds up like a tortured
spring. Philip watches him with frantic supplications,
his hands hot, his eyes burning. A man out-man on
second-Kitchell's half of the tenth. His gaze flicks
for a moment to the scoreboard— Visitors 1, Kitchell 1.
Thud! The ball shoots deep into the catcher's glove.
Two strikes on Billy Harbison already.
The pitcher rubs the ball on his trouser-leg, then
turns and insolently motions the outfielders nearer. The
slow, gold flow of settling evening is beginning to haze
the tawny patch of ground between the bases. As the
Alameda centerfielder moves in scoutily over the clipped
green sheen of the outfield, he walks with a dragging


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP . 27
shadow. Billy Harbison strikes out with a back-break-
ing swing that nearly takes him off his feet. The
stands sigh back into dulled composure. Dicky Tresola
up!
Philip gapes at the batter, full of worship. He is
seventeen-pure Spaniard—the face and hands by
Murillo. He steps to the plate swinging two glossy
bats, agile as a pouncing cat, calm as stone. The Ala-
meda pitcher spits in his glove-looks doubtfully back
at his fielders and decides to let them stay where they
are. Ball one!
Dicky hasn't taken the bat from his shoulder. A
pucker comes into the pitcher's forehead, he eyes his
enemy a long moment, winds up craftily–Ball two!
The next is a strike, and the next. Tresola doesn't move
his bat at either. A sudden irruption of fierce single
yells bursts from the stands and is silenced as quickly
as it spoke. The pitcher is smiling, saved—and care-
less. Ball three !
The catcher snaps it down to second, trying to catch
Bunny Ilsley off. There is a scramble of arms and legs
in the sallow dirt. Bunny is safe by yards and sits
on the bag to prove it. The ball floats slowly back to
the pitcher's box.
“He's up in the air!” howls Philip. “His arm's
full of glass! Yow! Dicky, hit it a mile!”
The pitcher delivers the ball with the solemn fatal-
istic motions of a man playing lugubriously good poker
against a loaded deck. There is a chiming crack from
Dicky's bat-a wild hopeless dive backwards by the cen-
terfielder-and in a tumult of screaming cheers and


28
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
running and dust, the two runs scuttle across the plate
while Philip pounds the breath and sense and hearing
out of the round boy next to him.
Philip, galloping through the little roofed passage
between Ashmead Hall and Pinky's house, bumps square
into Butch Draper and Star Hawes. Butch catches
him by the wrists.
“And what the hell do you mean by running into
us, young Sellaby?” he queries satinly. He has a big
loose body and a face the color of a side of beef, but
his voice is astonishingly puerile.
“I didn't mean it. I never meant to run into you,
Butch. Ah, Butch, let me go."
“Let me go. Shall we let him go, Star?"
Star, a little mean rat of a boy with a skin like dirty
tobacco, spits through his teeth on Philip's shoes.
“Let's keep him, Butch. He was fresh to me yes-
terday, damn fresh.”
He locks Philip's arm into his. Butch puts torsion
upon one of the imprisoned wrists. Philip's eyes go
desperately all about him. It is a quiet place. Nobody
at all will hear.
“Ah, Butch,” he whines, wrenched down on a knee,
“let me go, Butch. For Christ's sake let me go !”
“ Listen to the kid curse! "Ah, Butch. For Christ's
sake, Butch!""
Star takes the other wrist and experiments with it.
In that thick, choking moment Philip knows, as only
a boy who lives always by present seconds can know
it, despair, utterly bleak and sardonic and final. They


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP 29
have got him and they are going to hurt him all they
want. That is all. There is to be no escape, any more
than for a worm stuck on a fish-hook. If he could,
he would see them struck by lightning now, with no
slightest feeling but thanks and relief.
“Let's take him behind the backstop,” says Butch,
mouthily. “We can do some things to him there."
“ All right. Get a move on, Sellaby!”
They shoulder him down the passage.
“If you yell,” whispers Star. “If you just yell—"
Philip nods. He has a dumb, cold devil of rage and
fear. They are almost out into the sun when Froggy
Stillman, Philip's age and another of the fleeing per-
secuted, steps blithely and unseeingly in front of them.
Butch hesitates—his grip relaxes—he wonders if this
new quarry is worth pursuit. Philip sees his chance in
a second and kicks Star square in the shin, so hard he
feels the bone through his shoes, twists out under
Butch's arm, and is running like wind over grass to
Ashmead and safety. Behind him are squeals and
curses but no chase. The weasels have got hold of a
different rabbit. Stumbling up on the porch of Ash-
mead, sobbing for breath and fright, Philip looks back
just once to find what has become of Star and
Butch. They have twisted Froggy Stillman between
them. They are taking him over behind the back-
stop.
Young rain comes trailing silver sleeves,
And wind, her dog, barks after.
She desolates the striving leaves
With chill and tinkling laughter.


30
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Sleet and the pouring gust like ink !
-New buds and tempers harden
But that's what colors the purple and pink
All over your Summer's garden!


1908
PHILIP, suddenly roused a second ago, after a bone-
breaking night, by the running of the wet paws of a
chipmunk over his face, takes another look at his watch
and decides with resignation that he is much too
waked-up to try and go to sleep again. It is very
early—the pines around the lake have not yet stopped
talking-over dawn, and all things are to be seen or
shrouded in a daze of umber half-lights. Day has not
yet fully ascended into her bright sky; she tiptoes
languidly from her warm bed of mountains, leaving
shreds and tangles of saffron and Chinese-yellow behind
her, like lost feathers scattered about a nest of the clouds.
The lake is a pale jewel veiled in silk, the outlines of the
hills are furry with distance. Philip looks at it all
through half-shut eyes, wondering how he can ever draw
or paint or phrase any second of it.
The formless, sack-of-potatoes heaps in the sleeping-
bags at each side of him snore on without stirring. He
gets up somehow without disturbing them, and walks
over to the white ashes of the fire. There's enough wood
left to start breakfast with, anyway. He wonders if it
wouldn't be advisable to wake Phil and go out in the
boat after trout. In his ears the faint persistence of
the water rustles gently. No not yet for a while
that lake needs some one to swim in it too badly.
He goes softly to the diminutive tent-parts the cur-
31


32 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
tains with all sorts of apologies ready. Everything sale
-not a sound from Lucia, who is curled into the heart
of her scarlet blankets like a mouse under a pile of
ruddy leaves. Sylvia is quiet, tooone long braid the
color of harvest-wheat trailing her shoulder, her mouth
childish, her face calm pallor. For a second that
frightens his mind, he wonders if they would both be
like that, dead. Then he turns away.
Stripped and a little shivery at the edge of a ripple-
less cove that four black cockades of pines screen from
the camping-place, he tests the edge of the bath before
him, blue as ground cobalt, with the sandy toes of one
inquisitive foot. It is as breathlessly cold as liquid air.
He scrambles up the side of a square brown headstone-
rock that leans with drowsy thirst at the long shimmer-
ing pool, deep-clear as the patch of sky between two
spring clouds. His muscles set for the shock-he dives
into freezing light, to come up into the sun naked and
gasping, every inch of him frosted over with silver air-
bubbles and all the blood in his body swinging clean and
vivid through his veins. He ducks back again into
turquoise underworlds—he floats through gloom's of
translucence—he twists like a sparkling fish—then gets
dry by racing up and down the sleek, hard sand, a run-
ning, chanting water-monster that sun and wave between
them have just created and called immortal and made
shout.
Room 642 in the St. Francis is gray with evening.
Philip, who has been taken out of school for a dentist's
week-end and the theater with his mother and Sylvia,


34
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
simpering, overwhelm him with a sense of their com-
pleteness.
“H’lo, Syl,” he says bluffly, shooting his hand
at her. “ Glad t see you. What do you want for
tea?”
“How do you do, Cousin Philip.” She takes his
hand high up in shaking it, making it feel much too
large and too carelessly cleaned. “It is very nice in-
deed of you to think of tea. But where is your mother?”
“Ah, she went out to do some shopping. She'll be
back soon.” With an effort, “ Shall we shall we have
tea downstairs ?”
“I'm not sure that Mother would like me to.” This
is merely a prim pawn of conversational chess, played
to be taken, but Philip knows nothing of gambits and
hastily takes her at her word.
“ All right," he says with extreme relief. “We'll
have it up here.” He turns to the phone. « This is
room 642, Mr. Sellaby,” he begins. “Will you"
A precise little titter from Sylvia reddens him up to
his ears. “Haven't you forgotten to take the receiver
off, Cousin Philip?" she says in an edgy giggle.
Half-an-hour later, things are better. Sylvia has
spilled marmalade on her sleeve, said “ darn!” and shat-
tered her pose of young propriety. Philip is emerging
out of his mist of hot embarrassment. His voice is full
of excitement and English muffin.
“Just wait till we get up there next year, Syl,” he
rattles, jabbing the points home with a sticky fork.
“ Father says we're going to Freel's Peak, sure. Gosh,
and it's a two-week pack-trip there and back and we'll


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
35
take three burros for the lot of us. Won't that be
swell ?” Sylvia nods frantically.
“Great!” she murmurs, examining the empty cream-
jug. “I hope they let me come, Phil. But they think
they want to ship me to a girls' camp. Girls' camp!”
She forgets herself utterly and makes sounds as unre-
fined as they are expressive.“ Can't you see it, Phil?
A bunch of talky girls?”
Philip rises, nearly upsetting the tea-table. He is
hearing of a deliberate atrocity.
“Oh, gee, you mustn't let them do that, Syl! Why,
if they want to do that, Why, it's a crime, that's what
it is, it's a dirty crime!”
He waves his arms with the clumsiness of great feeling.
“Say, Syl, if I can do anything about it,” he starts
harshly. Her hand lies in front of him on the chair-
arm, helpless, soft, a bit jammy. He takes hold of it
without in the least knowing why. “If I can, you-
you tell me,” he ends weakly. The whole pulse of his
heart seems to beat for a second in the hand over Sylvia's
hand. She is trembling faintly, but in control of her-
self; this has almost happened before, several times, but
not with people known like Phil. She looks up at him
swiftly, being conscious of the fact that her eyes are
beautifully full of tears. Their lips meet once, almost
casually, gulls calling to each other across white spray,
then settle to a very definite kiss with the swift deter-
mination of thirst. It only takes about thirty seconds
till Sylvia cries.
Philip feels as if the room were falling to pieces
about him like broken eggshells.


36 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“Syl, Syl, I didn't I never meant-I never will
again-Oh, Syl, for God's sake stop crying!” he stut-
ters, unconscious he is repeating one of the favorite
lines of all emotional actors, he is so desperately scared
and in earnest.
“What did you do it for then, you, you boy? What
did you do it for? I didn't mean you to kiss me! I
just wanted you to be nice ! ” through Sylvia's tears.
She, too, doesn't know that she has picked up the cue
in Philip's speech as neatly as a star in a demonstrative
second act.
“I don't know! It's all your fault, you made me!”
An outburst of furious sobs, “Oh, no, no, darn it, damn
it, you didn't make me! Quit crying! I wanted to—1—"
Again the noise of the telephone. Philip shakes
Sylvia violently, kisses her again, attempts to express
rage, shame, sin, unutterable feeling and despair in one
great flopping gesture that merely gives the impression
that he is trying to dislocate his arms and rushes to
answer it. It is Lucia this time, and a voice as pleasant
and sane as brook-water.
“ Is Sylvia there?”
“No, yes. Yes, mother, she's here."
“ What's the matter, Philip?.” A little laughter.
“Have you two been fighting again? She's your
guest, you know.”
“Oh, yes-oh, yes, yes, yes," with extreme emotion.
“It must have been a fight. Never mind. I'll be
right up. Have you children left me any tea ?”
She rings off before he can answer. He turns back
ferociously to Sylvia.


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
37
- “Now for Pete's sake, Syl—” he begins.
But her weeping has been turned off like a tap. She
is sitting up. She is rubbing her cheeks with her hand-
kerchief.
“I am quite all right, thank you,” she answers with
icy repose. “Quite all right. Please speak to me as
little as possible.”
When Lucia finds them, Philip is as blasphemously
and completely puzzled by the whole affair as Adam was
after his first sharp taste of Eden greening. Sylvia
gives her aunt-by-courtesy a little-girl kiss with entire
composure, a small, correct and figgily supercilious Eve.
“Sellaby,” says Major Stelly, bronchially, “I have
decided to make you a sergeant.”
“ Yes, sir.” Philip stands at the ideal Manual-of-
Arms position of attention, stomach cramped into his
back, hands flat at sides, chest out. .
“Ah-I'll be frank with you, Sellaby. For quite a
time-in fact, for the first year you were at Kitchell
Dr. Kitchell and myself were a bit anxious about you.
You didn't seem to get on with the other boys."
“No, sir?” The query is surreptitiously acid.
“No, but lately-you've developed. You've been
(tck !) forgetting all that nonsense doing your drill
smartly-like a soldier, like a soldier, sir. So now
we have decided to give you this chance"
Philip's posture holds stiff and correct, but his mind
drifts off from the little coughy man in front of him.
He sees himself as he was when he first came to Kitchell,
a scared atom of an “only child,” to be kicked around


38 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
and chucked into corners like Froggy Stillman's books.
Now he has improved—he has the age and the muscles
and the bag of dirty stories that will keep him from be-
ing bullied at all, that may even permit him to bully
some one else. A fierce cramped hatred runs through him
at the bullies and his new chevrons and Major Stelly and
the whole air of uniformed stupidity and disciplined
nastiness that hangs over the school like gas above a
marsh. Lord! If he could only get out of the place!
“ And so, Sellaby, man to man, we believe in you,”
ends the Major. His hand goes out tentatively. Philip
shakes it in silence, loathing the moist, froggy palm.
Then he salutes and makes his about-face perfectly.
Major Stelly believes him righteously overcome with
emotion.
In his room alone that night, Philip writes letters.
DEAR FATHER:
Major Stelly told me to-day that I am to be
made a sergeant at next promotions. This brings
up a thing (crossed-out) a matter I have wished
to write you about for a long time. Father, I
have been at Kitchell two years and I hate it
more than any other place in the world. (Some
erasures of false starts with initial I's.) This may
come as a surprise to you, but I mean it. As a
favor, do not send me back after this year, which
I can stick out all right. I think I have a right
to ask this now, as my being promoted shows
that I am not effeminate (inked over), that I have
been able to get some good out of the training,
but not enough to warrant my staying longer.
Father, the place is a dirty hell, that's all, and
I-


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
39
But here the page is torn right across its face. The
writer rips his pen through the last sentence, crumples
the sheet into a rag, tries a fresh one.
DEAR FATHER:
The weather so far has been fine. I am trying
out for track—the sprints—but am pretty rotten,
I'm afraid. The coach says I should have come
out earlier. We play Lick to-morrow in baseball
and, believe me, I certainly hope we “Lick"
(careful quotation-marks) them as we ought to.
Tell Mother the cake was fine. I need some socks.
I have lost my allowance two weeks running now
for minor sins, nothing to worry about. (Sketch
of a small and very impudent devil, labeled “ Sin,
Minor, One.") I am having a good time. Oh, yes,
I meant to tell you, Major Stelly said to-day that
they were to make me a sergeant next promotions.
Love to dearest Mother and Aunt Agatha and
every one. And now I must close. As ever, dear
Father,
Your affectionate Son,
PHILIP.
Scraggling pasture and stony shelf,
Little to munch but thorns;
But the young ram swears with pride in himself
And tittups stones with his horns.
He waggles his scut at the wintry crowd
Of ravens, sneering and old.
And the young-god sun steps out of a cloud
And covers his horns with gold.


1909
GRADUATION — continual dress-uniforms — polished
swords—white gloves, soft as well-soaped skin, your
thumb kept over the spot in one of them—the long
echoing floor of Assembly Room waxed to velvety slip-
periness for the Senior Dance-girls-Sylvia in faint
blue and shrouded silver, the delicate eager throb of
her feet retreating before yours-music, now nervously
barbaric, now young and full of exquisite, useless tears,
slow long spoonfuls of honey-on-ivory. “Pinky”
Kitchell—“ Handing on the Torch "_" now quit
yourselves like men !”—all the throaty emotion of
Graduation Sermon, as sham and evident as false hair
on a dressing-table. Everything with a certain hurried
unreality about it, like a movie run too fast over its
screen.
A sense that something is ended, something definite,
though nobody seems to know exactly what. A des-
perate sense that hereafter things will be different, or-
dered and consecutive, clear and purposeful and efficient,
like the autobiographies of bank-presidents in twenty-
cent magazines. Old hatreds, old violences, old ardors
washed away in twenty-four hours by a tide of kindly,
sentimental “good feeling ”-hard, emotional hand-
shakes with old enemies instantaneously reconciled be-
cause both of you are leaving “ the old school.” Major
Stelly, “ Sellaby, you are one of the boys we are proud
40


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
41
of—” Parents, little and big, obtrusive and meek, full
of secret comparisons of their own sons with other
people's sons, and that not to the disadvantage of the
former. It all ends—it is as suddenly gone as foam
down a freshet—and Philip's neat, strapped trunks come
home with the shards and rag-bag remnants of six years
of life inside them, done up in labeled, brown-paper
parcels, heaped away in a disorderly muddle of letters
and reports and scrawled-over dance-cards and old copies
of the Kitchell Weekly Bayonet. Life is closing in
on Philip, overtaking him with the sprint of a crafty
miler in the stretch. Well, that's over!
A month later—and Tahoe and a sense of expanding,
delicious freedom, tangible as honey on pancakes, con-
nected somehow with a new equality in his father's
talk and not having to account either to him or a first
sergeant for any long idle minute of the enchanted day.
The happiest summer he has had, a summer as clear
and glowing as light through a piece of unflawed amber.
Money in the pockets of loose comfortable clothes and a
whole great fifteen months to chuck away as he likes,
like pennies to a crowd of small boys—for Lucia is a
little anxious about his eyes, and he is not to enter
Yale till the Fall after this.
THE PROUD HUNTSMEN
(Being a poem Philip wrote about this time)
Cruel and careless, clean and chill,
March slaps awake the sleepy mind,
And past this hill and t'other hill
There is our phenix still to find !


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
The raw wind echoes with his shout,
His track is on the ragged sky;
And we've the hearts to hunt him out
And live like gods before we die!
His eyes are fiercer than a star,
His wings are brighter than the young,
And every word he cries afar
Is with a lark's ecstatic tongue.
Past crumbling cloud and crackling ray
And wrecks of worlds not yet begun,
We'll hound him down the golden day
And kill him in his nest of sun!
For what is Fear? A limping fool.
And what is Death? A windy sage,
Not all whose vacant breath can cool
The sunrise of our pilgrimage!
Within the hand of Youth, our chief,
Lies Life, the bright and steely toy,
He whirls it like a spinning leaf
And shouts with mockery and joy.
There will be banners on the hills !
There will be scarlet in the skies !
When we ride back from Heaven's rills,
Bowed with our kingly merchandise.
There will be thunder in the street
When we ride back to our own town!
-The men with crowns beneath their feet
-The men who brought the phoenix down.


1911
WINTER on the white, South California beaches. The
shells of abalones, murky-purple, the white shells of sea-
snails, so pure, so sculptured, they might have been cut
for an altar-screen. Philip, riding surf with Phil, both
so shakingly weak in laughter at their own half-drown-
ings that they can hardly stay on their shooting, slip-
pery planks in smooth water. Lucia untroubled as the
sea or the sun, a second youth of the sea come upon her,
combing her heavy hair as she sits on a sunny, beast-like
rock, a strayed maternal immortal seeming to share in
the vagrant peace and calm incertitude of the whole
fluctuating world of green swells and dripping foam.
Sylvia in a sun-bitten, short bathing-suit, the brown
swimming child of sea-sound and a mermaid, as beauti-
ful and sexless a thing as the flight of a gull over waves.
And in the crystalline hours before night's large stars,
when evening departs with the languid magnificence of
an argosy and the sky seems made of clear colors and
dreams and the single cries of birds, Philip, lying be-
side the brimstone sparks of a driftwood fire, drinks in
with every breath of his body this saturating and ex-
haustless life. Yes, and curled so beneath a wrecked
and flying twilight once, he half-sleeps and imagines an
insolent vision.


44 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Lac
... The neat door of a very modern office. Three
names on the frosted glass in gold, “ Clotho
Lachesis
Atropos”
and below in large capitals, “PRIVATE.” Philip
nevertheless turns the knob and goes in. The chamber
within is tremendous, labyrinthine, cut up like some
vast bagatelle-board into a criss-crossing series of small
stone covered and open mazes with green plants growing
oddly in some of them. From the mothy vagueness at
the far end of the room-if indeed it has an end, for
Philip can see no wall there—comes the slumbering
dark sound of continuously falling water, water that
chuckles and chokes over worn-out stones. Three women
are seated at desk-chairs—their backs are to Philip
and they do not turn as he enters-each one has the
mouth of a maze before her and they are intent on some
sort of game with little colored balls. At the side, a
small, inhuman creature keeps score with figures that
Philip cannot read.
One of the Fates will take a ball up in her palm-
all the balls have some faint individuality of tint or
pattern and are heaped in huge baskets beside the chairs
-examine it and pass it to her sisters. They may mark
it with tools that they have by them, blow upon it, rub
it on their sleeves, in the end return it. Sometimes
the Fate inserts it in her maze alone, sometimes with
others; after each has been swallowed up, all the Fates
listen and watch together unmovingly. Philip can hear
the click and slither of the balls as they rush down the
roofed passages, can see them spot the maze with color


PROLOGUE TO PHILIP
45
for an instant, collide with other rushing balls perhaps,
then vanish again into the gaping rambles of the board.
Some fall through sudden holes without a sound, there
are others that circle and circle and do not get free.
But the Fates watch steadily with eyes that never blink
till a faint plopping sound, the sound of a light thing
dropping into water, ends their fixity. Then they all
start slightly, and the creature makes his tally, and
the game begins all over again as before.
Philip does not like the quietude of the Fates. At
first they seemed merely aunt-like, they and their faces
gray as ice, but their unwearying absorption in the clue-
less game and the recurrent tiny splashes of the colored
balls as they fall and are swept away by darkling water
wears at his mind like the scraping of chalk on a black-
board. There is a continual icy fingering on his spine.
He grows stiff with the terror of nightmare. The Fates
continue their sport, the balls roll softly ...
The Fate in the middle has passed a ball to the others.
They have sent it back, one has scratched at it with a
needle. Now the middle Fate holds it up, dubiously,
poised between finger and thumb. It is veined with
purple like a chintz, it is a pretty ball. Philip looks
at the Fate and finds he cannot move. It is his ball
she is holding.
Philip fights the air with his hands, he rushes for-
ward.
“Stop!” he says through the fog of dream that
weights him like mail. “ Stop! Stop! Give me it! Give
me back my ball!”
The calm Fate stirs and opens her thumb and finger.


46 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
The ball clicks into the maze, Philip can hear it slur-
ring over little bridges, down polished shafts of marble,
racing and gathering speed ...
He is wakened by Sylvia kneeling beside, tickling his
car with a long feather of dry seaweed.
“ Supper ! ” bawls Phil from the porch. “Come and
get it, Philip! Come and get it!”


BOOK II
PARABALOU!





SUMMER WITH PHILIP
(1912)
NIGHT
THE wrenched boughs of the eucalyptus trees shiver
and creak, the wind floods over them like a storm of
dark ruffled water. “Fff,” says the wind, “Fff,"
“Fff.”
Oaks are realities, thick, solid. Elms keep a tame sort
of mystery, though their dryad has long gone out of
them. These trees are fever trees saplings of the soil
of illusion and the waters of nightmare. It is they who
stand out of the ground like black, crooked fingers,
trembling with an unconquerable palsy under the hush
and lapping of the gust.
Sigh and turn your mouth to the wind, deep dreamer,
it is cool on your face that sleep has smoothed and
left empty. You lie upon the knees of wise Night and
she touches you with her hands of air. She is sightless
but her eyes are meditations.
Sleep, for if you awoke you could not sleep again,
you could not take your eyes from the sight of the
countless myriads of stars that shine, overlaying all
heaven stainlessly with their radiant and glowing dust.
49


50
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
MORNING
Not a cloud, not a sheep of a cloud in all the limitless
pastures of the sky, not the white of the edge of a feather,
not the white of a curl of wool.
It is the middle of the dry, hot season-the earth
turns brown—the sky is a blue crystal. For three
months now there will not be a cloud.
Saddle your horse, Philip, and come looking for your
friends, the clouds. Ride your horse down the shelving
road to the bay, through dust that is like thick, fine
pollen. Drop the reins over his head and let him graze
in the patchy shadow of a pepper-tree.
Strip and walk into the green forest of the water-
swing and shout upon the broad backs of calm and
monstrous waves that roll like sailors to the shore.
There are your clouds, Philip, but they have been
broken into foam and bubbles. It is a froth of forgotten
clouds that covers the tops of the waves like snow.


PARABALOU!
AFTERNOON
The leaves of the tulip-tree are so thick and so many
that the sun sinks through them slowly, like gold tissue
crumbling in a gloom of emerald.
The buds of the tulip-tree are the color of pure
cream, they are little pale slender urns that hang upon
the dimness of the branches like flecks of wax inside a
jadestone.
When your shadow stretches out, a thin long man,
and the light comes creeping and has lost its blaze;
when a puff from the bay is tiptoeing in the grass-blades
and your lips taste at it and are salt.
Then it is time to sit chaired in the boughs of the
tulip-tree and watch, through its haze and glimmer of
green lights, the whole and perfect orb of afternoon
drop into the gray, cupped palms of evening as sound-
lessly as a gold leaf drowning in a pool.


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
EVENING
Coffee on the big white quiet porch. Long roomy
cane chairs and a chance to stretch. The first stars,
few and intense, have come out with the moths that fly
at twilight.
“ Philip, what do you think?" but Philip is in the
snail's peace of laziness and will not come out. The
talk, brittle as porcelain, crackles about him like broken
candy. It stops, it is tinkled into motion again by
the empty, gay bell of laughter.
“ Philip, what do you think?” That the sky is like
sooty velvet. That the stars have begun to march in
order. That it is time for another cigarette. It is good
to be alive. It is good to be tired in the dusk, and
drowsy, and feel the burn of the sun still on your face.
It is good-
“Philip, what do you think?”
“Oh-nothing."
.


SNOW AND ELMS“ LIGHTS OUT,
FRESHMEN!"
(1912-1913)
THE big blue scrapbook with the staring white “ Y,"
large as a football-letter, glued on to the cover that
Philip bought with such innocence and pride his third
day at Yale and carefully left behind under a dead
straw hat as a pitiful sop for his untipped janitor at
the end of his freshman year, contained only two clip-
pings at its fattest. One was the News account of the
Freshman Rush and the other a thickly underlined
Schedule of Courses. And Philip was not of the species
that snapshots hangdog and consciously affectionate
groups on the Senior Fence or treasures light-struck
films of forgotten baseball games and the stone-ax jests
of fraternity “running ” to delight the hearts of Class
Book editors and mortify the friends thus permanently
satirized past all swearing. So to him the recollection
of the rapid, rich four years was like rummaging a sea-
chest stowed away in an old attic-everything higgledy-
piggledy, anyhow and comfortable—ivory monkeys
jostling worn brass sword-hilts, yellow love letters
stuck away in a sprigged silk waistcoat, a white beaver
hat full of rose-shells and elephant-chessmen and Chi-
nese cash. And the attic smells of tar and old leather
and honeysuckle-May morning drifts through the win-
53


54 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
dows—the air is as light and heady as white French
wine-
So dancingly, so careless of order, the memories crowd
on him-little square living colored pictures, diminished
but burning-clear, take form and glow on the white
blank screen of the mind.
A long, sickeningly lonely walk down the two imita-
tion-Broadway blocks of Chapel Street above Church,
out the decorous length of Whitney Avenue with its
placid middle-aged parade of well-mannered houses and
well-pruned elms till it strips into naked country be-
yond East Rock Road. Then back through the hum-
ming swarm of all Sheff and Academic and fifteen hun-
dred strangers, his own age or near it, from every state
in the Union and all as little concerned with him and his
individual vagaries as June bees would be with a peri-
patetic ant ... First classes in Lampson and Phelps,
Al Osborn, a steep hill of uncomfortable chairs, the bone
in his throat when he is called on to rise and recite.
The Rush—the sweaty pink wrestlers fighting in torch-
light—the weave and swing of the snake-dance-rowdy
Sophomores, amused Juniors, cool Seniors, hatless and
statuesque like wandering marble gods—all a mêlée of
breaking song, processional lights and cheers. Early
mornings of Battell Chapel and its dim irreligious
light with the whole sleepy College congregated together
-his own class in the gallery observing that strange
new entity, itself, with drowsy surprise and wonderment
-two familiar faces in five hundred—the hiss of the
esses in the “Lord's Prayer" as it runs through the
kneeling crowd like wind through com—the indecorous


PARABALOU!
55
stampede toward the doors after the fleeing President
when the Seniors have bowed him out, that the Rec-
ord irreverently caricatured as “ The Passing of Arthur.”
Then there were preliminary football games watched
from the cramped hard benches of Yale Field under
the cider-apple air and swept gold sunsets of October
and early November—the smash of the two caterpillar-
legged lines together like the impact of shocking pool-
balls on green, white-gridironed baize, with the little
live blue dolls always breaking through, always gain-
ing. Lonely backs crouching taut before a trick-play
with the single will and hard eyes looking ahead of
weathered knights in a tournament or seamen holding
on to a bucking wheel. Bob Sailer, Captain and All-
American half, the yellow egg of the ball cuddled up in
his arms like a baby, in a fox-footed thirty yard run
through the whole Amherst team-the wrenched fierce
face of a full-back, running back to his position after a
javelin-thrust through tackle-yelped signals, strangely
distinct in the clear breeze that came with the burnt-
sienna decline of evening, and the stilt-like black H's of
the goalposts flinging taller, dark shadow-capitals, on
the ending battle that tore the careful sod to dirt and
torn grass.
Of the Dean's Office Philip's knowledge as yet was
fortunately small. He had stood in a line for anywhere
from five minutes to an hour and a half there at various
times, to be finally pushed up in front of a desk where
a large man with the sleepy kindness of a tired brown
seal had once advised him into a cubbyhole of a room
in Pierson, with roommate attached, and on other occa-


56 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
sions informed him as to his scant remaining chapel-
cuts or the fact that so far he did not even seem to be
trying to pass Physics. From the deadly little chamber
on the opposite side of the hall he had sometimes heard,
as men hear thunder in sleep, the shouts and sudden
trumpetings of the Dean—and had once been sent him-
self into that dreadful presence, to find merely a healthy
old gentleman with the frosty hair, red face and gusty
manners of a hunting squire, who, the moment Philip
appeared shrinkingly within the door, began to rate him
for throwing water-bottles out of his window (an in-
genuous Freshman pastime in which he had not hap-
pened to take part) and left him with the general feeling
of having been out in a cloudburst without an umbrella
and the vague impression that he would have to stand
up straighter when he talked and specialize in Advanced
Chemistry and Business Economics if he ever expected
to leave with an A.B. Let it here be said, however, to
the credit of Tyrranosaurus Superbus (as Dick Sheldon
bitterly rechristened him after being made to sweat his
way through Elementary Geology when he had wished
to specialize in the Metaphysical Poets) that his yearn-
ing for forcing square pegs into the roundest possible
holes did not apply to offenders of Philip’s stripe alone,
as the five wretched shot-putters and wrestlers forced to
flunk three hours a week of the History of Music be-
cause he thought they needed broadening, attested in
their own inarticulate but sad-eyed way.
Of Professors Philip made no friends as yet, they were
desked abstractions, to be handled like high explosives
and given “ Good Morning" respectfully when met on


PARABALOU!
57
the street. Two stood out, an affable and interesting
1911 man, enabled by means of a private fortune to
accept the poverty's pence of a freshman-instructorship
-he gave Philip much kindness and advice, tea and
scones from the hands of a delightful wife, and the
highest mark Philip ever received in College. The
other, a great, burly, bearish man with the face of a
Visigoth king and a sandy beard that never seemed
quite intentional and yet could not deliberately be
called a lapse on the part of his razor, Philip always
remembered as one of the few, rare, lucently-forceful
intellects that can vivisect the smallest nerve or joint
of a subject without ever losing its place and importance
in the general anatomical scheme.
In his classes men neither yawned, wrote surreptitious
letters nor tried to bluff. He taught History—a pell-
mell course from the Fall of the Roman Empire to
1815and before this year was over he had left his
own signature and the skeleton facts of the case on the
logiest minds in his divisions, as a stamping-machine
leaves motto and pawing buffalo on the blank of a
nickel in the mint. He taught roaringly to bump
sleepy intellects awake, he would break long pieces
from the end of his pointer (the length of a tall man's
cratch the first of the week, of a worn-down pencil at
the last of it), he would smash his watch down on the
desk and jar its wheels apart in the stress of the mo-
ment's question as to the "sig-nif-i-cance” of Charle-
magne's imperial title or the effect of the Reformation
on German trade. This was necessary vaudeville
under its cover he dug to the essential roots of things-


58 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
and he insisted so forcibly on the same straining vehe-
mence of intelligence from his men that by February
they were running to keep up with him in as healthy
an ardor of pursuit as if historical causes were cats and
they were terriers. Only once did Philip see him
genuinely out of temper. He cared little for dates as
a rule, but when he happened to want a particular one
he worried the class for it like a ferret. It was four
days before Christmas vacation-an eight o'clock after
one of the Freshmen Dances. He viewed the somnolent
ranks before him with the amiable grin of a fed cobra.
“And now," he repeated for the ninth time," and
now, just what was the sig-nif-i-cance of 512 A. D.?”
He paused, the name quivered and struck like an arrow
“Mis-ter Post!”
“ Chubby” Post, an impudent cherub, cox of the sec-
ond Freshman crew, was jarred into round-eyed im-
becility.
“ Washington at Valley Forge, sir,” he said in a
stupefied whisper.
The professor rose to his full tower of height, took
his watch in his hand and threw it out of the window.
“ This class is dismissed !” he roared. They de-
parted on tiptoe, shivering. And after that even Chubby
came to him with at least a flunking knowledge of his
subject.
The Fall waned through a Princeton Game at Prince-
ton where Philip saw the two teams gore at each other
like fighting elk for the brief four quarters and emerge
at a 6-6 tie; through a Harvard Game at New Haven
that was to be the first of three successive Sedans for
nor


PARABALOU!
59
Yale and the numb, sick disappointment of the sardoni.
cally-drunken evening that followed it; through Thanks-
giving to the first pale flurry of snow that soon turned
to a sodden blanket of freezing slush and made walking
galoshed and aquatic for the next four months. Philip
viewed the first flowerlike settling of rustling crowds
of swift flakes on Campus and Green with poetical rap-
tures—the pallid glowing light that accompanied them
enchanted him-he was found in a chilblained daze on
the steps of Dwight Hall, trying to sketch the brick
Noah's Ark of Connecticut under its deluge of white
fluff and whispering scraps of frost. Then the cold
that he had never known got in between his bones and
he went around barking and sneezing with an open box
of cough-tablets in one coat-pocket and all his roommate's
clean handkerchiefs in the other. He shivered like
a Malay on a Polar Expedition on his way from one
classroom to the next, pared his board-bill down to a
shaving and spent the money on immense wood-fires.
That his roommate insisted on opening all the windows
at night, while he recognized the health of the measure,
was a deliberate insult to every muscle in his body. He
dreamed of California continually, of picking oranges
from the tree under a sun as dry as champagne sec.
And besides his adventures with every kind of “Kill-
Kold” and “Grippe-Buster” nostrum and gargle, two
things of considerable importance happened to him. He
heeled the Lit. and the Record and began to make friends.
The first two occupations came easily enough—he
had passed the Summer scribbling industriously and
so had a reserve of some thirty various pieces of verse


60 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
which he fed cautiously, three or four a month, through
the letter-slit in the door of the Lit. office a secluded
damp little cave in the basement of Osborn. His first
attempt, a long bloody ballad he had stewed out of the
bones of William Morris, appeared in the October Lit.
and was much more enthusiastically reviewed than it
deserved. After that he began to be known as “the
Freshman pote” or “that queer bird who writes those
crazy things for the Lit.” A legend sprang up that
he cut Chapel every Sunday and composed great works
in a vinous stupor on top of a keg full of California
claret-and the fable helped to raise his social position.
There was always the fragile excitement of padding over
to the Lit. window on make-up nights and reading by
sputtering match-light the white face of the swinging
card that held the list of accepted young sprouts of
fancy. And the joy of talking to and being talked to
by Senior Lit. editors, great prehistoric creatures who
quoted Dante in the original and unpublished and un-
printable Eugene Field in the vernacular and wore the
glittering gold triangle of Chi Delta Theta with the
casual unobservance cradled royalty pays to its heredi-
tary shining toys of Garter or Golden Fleece.
As for the Record, it was then in the hands of
three happy-go-lucky Dekes, with a wit as merrily and
innocently indecent as a Papuan's, who, having neither
expected nor received the gifts of the elder gods on Tap
Day, had neither bitterness toward nor the restraints
of Senior Societies, spent most of the advertising profits
on beer parties with the heelers (to the gesticulating
dismay of a strongly Semitic business board) and gave


PARABALOU!
the Record a flavor of Canton ginger and crème de
cocoa that tickled every section in College, except that
of the prematurely devout. Philip slaved over care-
ful oils and pen-and-inks at first—they were uniformly
praised and left unused—then he discovered a knack for
absurd cartoons and broad splashes of decoration that
made his name creep steadily up the list of competitors.
He devoted unregenerate hours his fellow Lit. com-
petitors were spending on clottingly-purple essays on
Lionel Johnson's Prose to the construction of light verse
and flashy sketches calculated to annoy the discreet-
and was given much free beer by his superiors and on
the whole, had an outrageously good time.
The friendships formed were like most Freshmen
friendships when the men concerned have not come down
together from the same school, somewhat tentative and
on the basis of chance meetings, happening to room close
by or sit next to a man in class, rather than by deliberate
affirmation and choice. Some were lucky and grew to
close relationships, others straggled out like chance
pencil-lines on a piece of paper, or recoiled and hurt
like snapped rubber bands. There was first his room-
mate, Tom Whitter, steady, humorous, whimsical and
poor, working his way through unaided, from a small
Connecticut town. A small chap carelessly built, with
the face and long nose of an alert, good-humored mouse;
fate and the registrar had thrown them together, and
the accident developed into firm liking on both sides.
Tom was as kind as bread and as trustworthy as salt-
in their two years of rooming together they exchanged
ties and confidences and families, tried on each other's


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
best clothes and new opinions, shared an equal wonder-
ment as to the internals of Life's machine and what on
earth they and their class would be doing in the next ten
years. When they parted, Philip to room with Dick
Sheldon, it was, on Philip's part at least, with a sense of
somewhat shabby desertion. But the twenty-four months
current had forced their friends and interests diametri-
cally apartmindeed, they had come to the condition of
so many roommates who hardly see each other at all,
except before chapel in the morning and in bed at night.
They kept up the friendship, however, because they
were gentlemen, and with strain because they were
young, and before the class graduated were honest if
temperate comrades again. But Philip never thought
of Tom later without a sense of undeserving gratitude
and much taken for little given—he had not even been
able to get him into his own Junior fraternity on ac-
count of the ferocious party wars in his particular dele-
gation. “Good Lord, we couldn't get Jesus Christ by
this crowd without four blackballs ! ” said Dick Sheldon
acidly after an unusually bellicose session. And they
cheered the remark but went on excluding Tom.
Billy Stack lived across the hall from Tom and Philip,
blond and huge, his tongue had the German burr. To
the strength and placid disposition of a Great Dane, he
added a consuming love for hot chocolate, the movies
and bowling. Philip partook of all three with him,
even wrestled with him on occasion, much to the excru-
ciation of his muscles, for Billy would get so interested
explaining the theory of the “scissors ” that Philips
stomach, the object used for forcible demonstration,


PARABALOU!
63
would be squashed into his spine like a muffin before
frantic kicks finally made Billy realize that anything
was the matter. Stacy Cooper, a dark-pompadoured
musician with sweet wit and the ironic mind; Paul
Stannifer, a grotesque like a resurrected dodo, who did
nothing but grind, play chess and read The Christian
Science Monitor; Hank Cummings, that useless
clothes-hanger; Tuck Carson, a stupid ex-Exeter beauty
gone to seed; Nick Wayne, another of the many putting
themselves through—he had been everything from bell-
boy to stoker on a Lake Steamer-faint hair, pink al-
bino eyes behind tortoise-shell rims, a ribald mouth-
they trundle like Jack-o'-lantern ghosts out of the
wraiths of that dim first year, mow, posture and are
past.
So the days crowded to weeks and the weeks trickled
off and ran away from Philip like bran out of a broken
sack, while he drifted the eddies of Pierson with the
great unorganized of his class. The young entry-poli-
ticians, the men from the bigger prep. schools, the fel-
lows sure of athletic numerals—the grotty ones and the
snotty ones-were most of them collected in Wright.
Loose " crowds” were beginning to form already, the
wise ones were making out fraternity-lists, the uncanny
ones held hushed converse with the blinds pulled down
as to their own and others' chances for Senior Societies
two years away. Distinct cleavage between prep-school
and non prep-school exists only in Freshman year to
any extent—and then generally in the mind of the non
prep-school man. For a Yale class, like most real and
historic democracies, begins with a hereditary aristoc-


64 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
racy, grows tired of it and knocks out its underpinnings
so that its members slide gently back into the general
mass. So Philip by the nature of his case was delivered
from premature politics and the Greek gift of early
prominence that inflates certain unfortunates to the
transitory blossom and limp rubbery ending of a night
blooming cereus and leaves them in that tiny hurt mi-
nority that votes its first year its pleasantest.
Philip took long walks in the weeping month before
Easter when he dared consider leaving off fur gloves.
He splashed about in unbuttoned galoshes through streets
and under skies that were glutted with gray heavy glis-
tening rain. The sopping walk crosswise across the
campus from
“ Osborn, that weird fantastic dream in stone,
Crouched like a squatting toad with open lip,
Or like a ferry-boat, banged, battered, blown,
Bumping a beaten nose into its slip,”
past Connecticut, under the draggled, brown-sugar tower
of Phelps with its four green-rusty turrets that clear
night and a moon make shine like silver helms, was on
uneven flags, glinting dead-leaf-color with the wet. On
Philip's left was the brown New Library, a square tall
block, flanked on the Art School side by the squat Chi-
nese-parasol top of Chittenden Reading Room, on the
right by the four fretted spires of the Old Library that
rose so blackly satisfying against the colored dome of
spring sunset. In May and early June the Library ivies
talked ; musical over and over with the soft continual
curring and whistle of birds. Mushroom-shaped, mush-


PARABALOU!
65
room-colored Dwight Hall on the left again, on the right
the red high honeycomb line of Lawrence and Farnam,
slantingly ahead the gray hulk of Battell Chapel with
its chiming, gold-handed clock-Miller Gateway and
the great rocky mass of Durfee. All around the little
patch of soaking earth and its trees and its statues ran
the Fence, sacrosanct, covered with generations of ini-
tials. At the end of the path, Wright Hall, with its
paved and hollow court and its two prim lions. Young
melancholy in all its poignant satisfaction, Philip had
always from that three minute walk, when the ground
was covered with rotten snow or bare, and the elms sigh-
ing and leafless. But when Spring cameConnecticut
Spring as frail and intoxicatingly green-and-gold as the
limbs of a Puritan girl turned oread-or rich Autumn
wandered the round calm hills and brown fields, shak-
ing multitudes of scarlet and tawny leaves from the
profusion of his wine-stained reeling cup—Philip found
such happiness as is not given twice. He tried to put
it down in rhymes often enough but knew each word
that came to him fainter than the thing. But the map
of the campus stayed in his mind—bitten there as an
etching is bitten into a plate. He could remember it
always, later, under every trick and pulsation of shade
or weather, and it always brought with it peace and
that sense of fed accomplishment that comes like sleep
after hours of annihilating toil.
Other snapshots were his to remember too-Book
and Snake tomb under April moonlight, serene as the
face of Pallas, the Greek temple of a dream--the statue
of Nathan Hale on the grass in front of Connecticut with


PARABALOU!
67
Egypts; she is hooded in silver silk. Bells tinkle and
jar as she walks, a multitude of throaty small golden
bells. She stands before him motionless, the burning
gems of her eyes lift to his gaze, she begins to sing.
Behind her the Sphinx lies down like a lion asleep and
there rise against the sky the three stiff horns of the
Pyramids.
Philip drops his head on his left arm, his hand begins
to make shuddering progress across the paper. “ Isis"
it writes and erases, then “ Isis of the Sands," draws a
line under it, hesitates doubtfully, but lets it stand.
“ Measureless sand ... interminable sand ..."
The pencil shakes and crawls, the hand moves spider-
wise, the letters form more carelessly ... if he can only
grip and paint clear what he sees with his eyes ...!
“... the Sphinx alone
Couched on her forepaws, like a sleepy hound
Under the weight of a caress of rock
And smiled her woman's and chimera's smile
Inexorably, drowned with the savage dark.
The black tide filled the heavens up and ceased.
A little tongueing flame ran on the sand ..."
Isis is speaking now—she has loosed the first of her
veils and her voice sways and floats like a pennon of
clouded red. The words swing into lines, the lines
inch down the page, slow and cautious at first, with
many scratched out or written over, then swifter and
more swift, untroubled, an effortless dancing, a stream-
ing current. The daze of creation makes all Philip's
body hot while its passion lasts. After an amount of


68
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
indefinite time that has no division into minutes, the
tide crests and turns to its ebb, the writing runs down,
the shapes disintegrate, thin into wraiths, are nothing.
Philip wrestles them back before him with a rasping
effort of will, writes four quick lines in a strain like
the last spurt of a sprinter, relaxes utterly and throws
the pencil up to the ceiling. He then looks at his
watch, it is six o'clock and he has been writing five
hours without a break. He chuckles and shakes himself
all over like a dog coming out of water. After a while
he starts to re-read his poem.
Tom Whitter, coming in about seven, finds him typing
and cursing softly as he types.
“ Hi, Tom!”
“ Hi, Phil! Had dinner?”
“No."
“ Why not, you silly idiot? Do you know what time
it is ? »
“Sure,” with conscious pride. “I've been writing.”
“Well, you look pepped-out enough. Come over and
get a shredded or something."
“Wait a minute. I've got one more page to go. Oh,
just wait till I show you this, Tom! It's good—I know
it's good— I know it's damn good-damn good for me,
anyway-oh, Tommy, it's the best thing I've ever done
in my life! ..."
Exit Freshman year in a worry of last exams. and
packing trunks. Philip went home for the summer,
found his family amusing, Sylvia inclined to be oppres-
sively cocky after a strenuously-popular first season and
five proposals, and his father's chop-strokes at tennis


PARABALOU!
69
still unfathomable. He loafed and experimented with
water-colors and came back in the fall prepared to an-
swer the inevitable “ Good vacation, Phil?” from every
renewed acquaintance with “Sure-wonderful !”, and
take up his position as acknowledged minor demigod
with the three hundred and fifty others of his class,
minor demigods, too, now that Freshman year was
passed.
SUN AND PEPPERS
(SUMMER OF 1913)
FAMILY-I
FATHER and I are alike when we leave a room. We
take hold of the door-jamb and swing ourselves out by
one hand. Our fingers are the samewe can both crack
nuts with them—and we are alike in the way we laugh.
Father, when he is awake, looks young, but asleep
the lines creep into his face like writing and he lies
with his head bent over one arm like a tired cat resting
on its paws. Father isn't so old, though. He wasn't
much more than my age when I was born.
When the Druggist made up the prescriptions, he put
more bad-temper and courage in Father's and more fool
dreams and talk in mine. If he'd mixed us different
entirely what a fine time we'd have had, but we're too
much alike to get along. So we just sit still here and


70 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
look at each other as you look at your reflection in the
mirror when the mercury at the back has begun to run.
FAMILY-II
“Mrs. Sellaby is such a beautiful woman.” Funny
to hear that hen's voice coming through the window and
know it is Mother the hen is talking about.
Yes, but you don't know how beautiful she is. Yes,
and how her hair when she coils it in the morning still
winds into thick, soft ropes, blue-black and fragrant like
a living thing. I yelled for her once when I was ten
and she came up and let my crying spoil her dress!
Slow patience and the infinite peace of a rich heart.
The laughter of a young, proud, stately girl and the
hands that are so strong and calm yet whiter than the
untouched blooms of the magnolia. How on earth
could you know how beautiful she is, my beautiful and
adored and darling Mother?
FAMILY-III
Aunt Agatha is a very old little silver lady. She
is so old that to pick a handful of sweet peas is a trouble
and an adventure. In summer she sits all day on the
upper porch where she can look down into the nests of
the young housekeeping birds and knit blue slippers.
Lee is a Chinaman, as full of good buttery things as
a yellow drop of oil. He never has a cross word or


PARABALOU!
71
makes bad pie-crust and the smile on his mouth is as
soft and immutable as the glow of his copper saucepans.
Lizzie, the maid, is Irish. She says she sees ghosts.
Prince is a curly dog with a sad priest-face and the
manners of a copybook gentleman. Fred Fish is a
mossed old carp that lives in a fountain and comes to
have his head scratched if he likes you. If he doesn't
-he splashes water.
Let's see that must be all my family.
BOOKS
“Your majesty shall shortly have your wish and
ride in triumph through Persepolis.” Then Tambur-
laine speaks, slow at first, because he's handling the
words as if they were kings' crowns. Your breath
catches and everything in you tingles as you look at
the little black spiderings on the page.
“ And ride in triumph through Persepolis.” He draws
his three bloody companions and the armed and silent
armies of the world around him with one sweep of his
hairy arms. “Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles,
Usumcasane and Theridamas, is it not passing brave to
be a king, and ride” It comes like a falling sword,
it colors your mind like scarlet.
“And ride in triumph through Persepolis!”
It would be worth while getting eaten up like a snail


72
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
by salt and the sun for that even to be only Usum-
casane.
NAME
What does it mean—this thing that people call you
by? Philip Sellaby, philipsellaby—say it over a dozen
times and it starts to sound like nonsense, maybe it
is.
Walking along a road, hot days, if you aren't think-
ing of much, you can often step clear out of your name.
You can climb into somewhere different where your
name and your eyes and your body aren't any more you,
really, than the clothes you take off at night. And the
you that is detached, that sits apart, can look down upon
the other you and smile.
I think that's why you feel sorry, sometimes, for
the other you—for that poor, stupid walking automaton
of white bone and senseless gristle that other people have
to label all the time with a couple of guttural noises so
they can tell it apart from the other animals.
" THE JUNIOR FRATERNITIES ANNOUNCE
THE ELECTION OF ..."
(1913-1914)
WHEN Philip and Tom had exchanged the reforma-
tory-walls of Pierson for the stuffy comfort of Durfee


PARABALOU!
73
and discovered that all prints and pictures, however
framed or hung, harmonized just as badly with the weak
arsenic green of their present quarters as they had
with the tomato-bisque plaster of their former ones,
the five Junior Fraternities started calling on Sopho-
mores.
At least it seemed that soon, though in reality a month
had fled by and lost itself in October's scurry of sun-
set-colored leaves and Philip had had time to be elected
to the Elizabethan Club. He drank his first self-con-
scious cup of tea there on the big leather lounge in
front of the fire and felt hugely out of place as the
gay toy-balloon of amusing talk was batted about from
hand to hand under the wreathing smoke of church-
warden pipes by men he scarcely knew. But there was
a comfortable informality about the Club a balancing
of ultra-violet æsthete against Newsily solemn in-
dustrious apprentice amid general mild chaff at the
expense of both-that made Philip enjoy his increasing
excursions there in the same pleasant ratio that one
enjoys the subsidence of a Virginia mint-julep into its
ice. That a Club founded for avowedly artistic rather
than Arty and Crafty purposes could exist in and have
the healthy nicknaming respect of the most American
of American colleges was enough to shock Philistine and
poseur out of every one of their two senses. Philip car-
tooned it as he thought it would have been at Harvard
—a classically anemic Boston salon, cold teaed to
death under wax busts of Emerson and Bryant-at
Princeton; the Mermaid Tavern under the Restoration
with Rochester, crowned with a pint-pot, leading the


74 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
revels. “But, Philip, my dear man, don't you see we're
having a literary Renaissance right here and now ? "
asked Johnny Chipman, of the class ahead, with a shake
of his tawny squirrel's brush of hair. “I guess we are.”
Philip said, “I guess we are. This place and the people
at the Press—and people actually come out of Yale Sta-
tion reading the Lit.--counted five of 'em to-day
myself in half an hour.” Then gravely, “ Awful respon-
sibility to be a whole Renaissance, isn't it, John? Let's
have some more mild fluid on it. Lemon or cream?”
Johnny Chipman was the principal reason why Philip
got one of the last five hold-offs to A. D. when the fra-
ternity elections finally came. The “calling” was a
singular businessmuch heavy tramping up and down
the entry stairs—appearance of a group of four or five
tongue-tied or professionally affable strangers, each
giving a mumbled name and a set firm handshake as he
entered-ghastly spurts of forced talk of the “ You
fellows certainly live a long way up!” or“ Pretty nice lot
of pictures you've got here” order—an obviously relieved
departure after two minutes of such uneasy badinage
and long stares, with consultations sometimes cruelly
audible, on the part of the calling committee as soon as
their last man shut the door and a general sinking feel-
ing on Philip's part that he had ruined his chances with
that bunch forever and ever as he and Tom dashed for
a hidden Pot-Pourri to find out, by looking up as much
as they could recall of their visitors' grumbled appella-
tions just what fraternity it was that had called.
“Hey, Phil, that guy's name was Keating, wasn't it?"
“ Keator, I think.”


PARABALOU!
“Well, there's a Keating in Zete and a Keator in
Psi U. Remember any more of them ? "
“Smith," doubtfully.
“Oh, Lord, there are four Smiths and they're all
different places. Call 'em Zete-if they are that
makes three calls from them. Could you see their
pins ? ”
“Not a chance. Now who were the crowd that
skinny fellow named Wilkes ran with ?”
Tom flutters the leaves obediently, another committee
knocks and instantly enters—a Campaign Committee
this time by their funeral derbies and the grim fixed
grin on their mouths. Tom and Philip are caught red-
handed but the former's kangaroo leap to sit on the in-
criminating book brings a roar of laughter that saves
the situation. And so it goes.
After three such evenings Psi U, which Chubby Post
has nicknamed “ The Holy Ice House," since it runs
to the pious athlete, prominent Christian and impeccable
parlor-snake and has more fanatic internecine feuds
and a larger proportion of men in Senior Societies than
any of the others, decides that Philip is a good deal
too queer for even their carefully-preserved reputation
for impersonal selection and they don't want the trouble
of educating him up to Brooks, Frank's, and the Lawn
Club Dances. Philip's Senior friends in Deke have done
their best but the class has such a large number of
pleasant liquorers and friendly muscular mammoths
that it is like trying to gain for a singing-mouse the
friendship and trust of a herd of respectable bull-ele-
phants. Bete and Zete, Religion's Serious Call and


76 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the Sporting Life, the sacred and profane twins of
College politics, trail on to the end but only to shake
their heads.
Meanwhile Johnny Chipman, over whom the shadow
of approaching Bones hangs even this early in the year,
an amiable and portentous cloud, jams Philip into A. D.
almost single-handed, because he is his friend and he
believes in him. Philip recognizes effort and result, is
secretly and immeasurably grateful. He had not ex-
pected to make a Junior Fraternity for another year at
least. And his friendship for Johnny, that tricksy,
sensitive, lovable New England Puck-Ariel, begun last
winter in the Lit. office, has been one of those instan-
taneous affairs when two natures meet and combine
with the sudden explosive certainty of oxygen and hydro-
gen in a chemical experiment. They are alike in many
ways and are to have much the same paths in college
both “poets,” both Chairmen of the Lit.--and the fel-
lowship between them, between dreamy, snowy Vermont
and dreamy, sunny California is only to age like Bur-
gundy as the years go past.
Hold-off night, and the Sophomore dormitories tense
and sweltering as air before a thunderstorm. The silent
or nervously chattering fraternity men with their car-
nations, blossoms colored with fate, making bright spots
up and down the entries and under the yellow lamp-
light by the Fence. The strain of the last ten minutes
before seven, like the strain before the start of a crew-
race that makes graduates drum on their knees with
white-knuckled fingers. The breathless jokes between
men who are “sure," the executioner's quiet of the


PARABALOU!
77
doubtful. Clustered chairs and a dumb, small, anxious
crowd in front of the room across the hall where Deke,
Psi U and Zete are to fight it out over the modest and
undecided body of the first-string quarterback. Then
Battell Clock starts its clanging, casual chime—and Far-
nam and Durfee and Lawrence burst on the instant into
a madhouse of shouts and cheers and running shapes.
Philip waits in his room, no one has come for him, three
minutes past, he is sweaty at the hands. Steps trample
up-and past a dark, straining figure bolts up the
stairs outside his open door—there is a shriek, “Yeah!
we got Bunny Vick! "--and two men with Zete carna-
tions come rocketing down like a charge of horse, the
dazed Vick between them, his hat crammed over his
eyes.
Tom clears a dry throat, “You'll get it, fellah!” he
says. “You'll get it!”
“Hope so. Listen-Deke's starting to go off, I
think_"
He pokes his head out of the window. A broken,
gasping snatch of song begins, breaks, rises to a roar-
ing chant with the crash of rollicking feet beating out
the tune.
“ The jolly brothers of D. K. E. we march along,”
“Phil!” screams Tom in his ear.
He turns. A panting classmate rushes in followed
by two pink-carnationed A. D. Juniors and jams a
square of paper under his eyes.
“Will you accept a hold-off to Alpha Delta Phi if
it is offered you?” is written on the paper.
Philip nods. “ Yes," he says thickly.


78 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
His hand is shaken violently three times, nearly
wrung off.
“You come with us Friday night,” yells the class-
mate and he and the Juniors ramp away like the close
of a waking dream.
The fraternities, singing loud, rock off the campus
Noise dies, against Philip's eyes night is cool and dark.
Through the tatter of elm-leaves he can see three silver
pricking points that must be stars ...
Tom congratulates him gravely. Philip feels happy,
enormously relieved and let down, like a man after a
strenuous ten minutes in the hot-room of a Turkish
Bath.
“Come on and go to the movies, you old tin-pirate,"
he suggests, and they wander over the peace of the cam-
pus down Chapel Street to the Globe, to sit dopily
through two hours of Bessie Barriscale and other peo-
ple's breath.
The rest of the year according to Philip divided itself
up into a quintuple friendship and three parties. Be-
sides these and because of Skinny Singleton, in his own
A. D. delegation, he discovered the extraordinary
achievements of the Dramat.
Skinny Singleton, with his face like a white three-
quarters moon and long humorous jaw—with the tall
gesticulations and proud walk of a Gascon poet—with
the fantastic visions and bitter-almonds wit, quaint
speech and complete generosity of a troubadour-grandee.
The light never went off all night in his room on the
ground-floor of Durfee, and at any time from one to


PARABALOU!
79
four in the morning Philip could go over and be sure
of finding him there, drawing pictures for the Record,
designing scenery for the Dramost, writing wild short
stories for the Lit., putting his own or other people's
roommates safely and drunkenly to bed. Together they
made the Record, ate ripe olives and drank May wine
at Mory's reciting impromptu odes the while; and forced
an unfortunate candidate for A. D. to appear cowering
and green-ribboned before the Dean, a copy of the
“Rules and Regulations of Yale College” in his hand,
and explain to that white-haired Majesty that he, the
candidate, had read the proffered little pamphlet with
such keen critical enjoyment that he must really ask its
official author to autograph a copy. That the jest nearly
brought about the excision of themselves from A. D.
and A. D. from Yale did not greatly perturb, in the
end, either Skinny or Philip.
They also devised a new and malicious pastime
whenever bound for a silly adventure they would first
meet by careful appointment in some other man's room,
preferably that of a mutual foe or a total stranger,
which would lead to scenes like the following.
(Bill Arbroath's room. Solid Bill, a prominent and
respected "soul saver” and four serious-minded
friends are doping out a Bones list in peace and quiet.)
Bill (oracular): Stan Ballard, sure. That makes
eleven.
Bob Meredith (a chorus): Why not Keys ?
Bill: Wouldn't take it on a glass dish-he's sore at
the crowd that are going. Who'll be twelfth ?


80 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Ted Van Sicklen: (Once voted, "the boy who had
done most for his prep. school”-and he has never
gotten over it.) “What about yourself, Bill ?"
Bill (without a smile): “First substitute Ted. I'll
never get it.” (He is probably the surest election
in the class and knows it. Murmurs of " Sure you
whill," " Wish I had your chance," and "Safe as a
church.”)
Ted: “How about Sellaby?”
Bill (ponderous): Drinks. Too flighty. (Knock at
the door.)
Bill: Come in! (Enter Philip, jauntily.)
Philip: Hello, Bill! Hello, Ted, Bob, Bunny, Stu!
All (rather sulkily): 'Lo, Phil!
Philip (stretching out on the most comfortable part
of the windowseat): Skinny Singleton been around
here?
Bill: He lives over in Durfee, doesn't he, Phil ?
Ground floor, entry next Chapel.
Philip (impassive): Sure. Said he'd meet me over
here, though. (This seems a little startling, bat Philip
is blandly casual.)
Philip: Mind if I wait for him, Bill ?
Bill (Christian to lion): Oh, no! (A stiff silence.)
Philip: Sorry to bust up the party. What were you
people doing, anyway-packing Bones? (Everybody in
the room gives a slight, nervous jump. Bill looks as if
he had just seen the family banshee.)
Philip (his chance shot having hit between wind and
water): Why, Bill! And a whole long year ahead of
time, too!


PARABALOU!
81
Bill (bluff, but viciously embarrassed): Kid's trick,
I know. We were just making out a list-
Philip (plaintive): A list? Bill! Was I on it,
Bill?
Bill (worse): We were just, just-just coming to
you
Philip: Must have gone pretty far down on the list,
Bill.
Bill (absolutely up in the air): Oh, I think, we ali
think, you've got a good chance, Phil, a peach of a
Philip (nipping him off expertly): Thanks so much.
(Tableau. Bill speechless. The door slams open.
Skinny, late by prearrangement, enters scoffing and
careless.)
Skinny: Hello, boys. Phil Sellaby here? (seeing
him.) Am I late, Phil ?
Philip: Only about twenty minutes. What were
you doing-praying?
Skinny: Had an official appointment, Moon-face my
pet, the Bursar wanted me to call on him. Coming
along?
Philip (rising slowly): Sure. But what do you
think I found these innocent people up to, Skinny?
Skinny: You don't mean they've had Louise here
again? Or Peggy? or Olive? (A flush settles pinkly
on Bill and two of his child crusaders.)
Philip: Oh, no-no-none of that mere viciousness.
Singleton: They were doping a Bones list for the
class. Our children!
Skinny: We ought to take it away from them. (The
others gape angrily but are dumb.)


82 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Philip: We will. We'll come back for it. Where we
going—the Bije?
Skinny: Poli's. There's a Diving Beauties Act.
“Rabbit” Winston's seen it four times.
Philip: All right-on your way! (Exeunt arm in
arm. The martyrs relax and look at each other. A
second later the door flies back again with a crash.)
Philip: Anybody want to go to the movies ? Bill?
Teddy? Bob? Bill? Oh, Bill? (The door slams
shut before any answer can be given. Steps trip down
the hall.)
Bill (with a long breath, heartfelt): Je-sus Christ !
It was Reggy Evans' and John Castine's room in
the first blind blackness of winter evening, when the
college is trooping back through Yale Station after
hasty dinner at Commons or the College Street“ joints."
Philip and John were talking in front of a three-stick
fire. Having all Freshman year regarded each other
from afar with no words but with perfect recognition
and hate as probable rivals and certain enemies, they
had now worked round to the surprising status of com-
plete and intimate friends. Philip had heard of John
as “one of those snotty St. Markers—acts like a per-
sonal pal of John the Baptist”; sat above his window
in Wright on Tap Day and taken an instant dislike to
everything about him from his pink face and tortoise
shell glasses to the sad droop of his roommate's mouth.
A little later in the year Seth Stevens, who roomed
across the hall from John, had come up and solemnly
congratulated the latter on his future Chairmanship


PARABALOU!
of the Lit. “ Thanks awfully, Seth—but why?” John
answered, somewhat puzzled, “ I'm six contributions be-
hind Phil Sellaby in the comp., you know.” “Why?"
Seth retorted. “That's why! My Lord, John, I've
just seen Sellaby!”
But Philip and John had made up the unspoken
quarrel over a bonus quart of Great Western champagne
in the Record office, and begun a diffident acquaintance-
ship that had strengthened rapidly. They supplemented
each other like cheese and crackers (“Yes,” said John,
when the simile was propounded, “ fire-crackers and rat-
trap cheese!")-viewed the painfully indefinite whirl of
existence from much the same rather humorous, rather
arrogant intellectual critical angle--and knew each
other's virtues and faults like Renaissance swordsmen.
A word-and-a-half from either could make the other
complete the thought that never had to be wholly ut-
tered, and fling back comprehensive understanding. “I
think, on the whole, Phil, we do each other good,” was
John's verdict after five years of it; and the character-
istically mild and difficultly spoken sentence went to roots
and memories in both that made back-slapping and
loose confidences seem meager.
Philip runs down the last typewritten page of a manu-
script, tosses it back.
“Well—what do you think?" from John.
“I like it. I think it's clever as hell. As I get it,
it's all about a shy, hypocritical young man in a very
embarrassing situation-a part both of us ought to know
pretty well by heart.”
“ Think the Dramat would do it? »


THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ Don't know. Show it to Skinny-he'll be amused.”
“I will. Fire's nice, isn't it?”
“Um. See any pictures in it, Editha, my child?”
“ George Warren frying in hell.” He pokes his foot
at a bulky, frizzling chip.
“Here, here, mustn't be so violent. He's a brother
of mine."
“Well, he isn't of mine anyway, thank the Lord! If
he ever does fry, I bet he hogs the biggest and most
prominent flame.” He starts to hum, “Oh, I haven't
the News to go Deke, I haven't the car to go Zete"
“Psi U and A. D. mean nothing to me" Philip lends
a vacillating tenor to the air.
A voice from without. “Oh, John Castine!”
Neither moves. “That you, Dick?” John shouts in
return. “Come on in and bicker."
Dick Sheldon, temperamental as a débutante, easily
hurt and pleased as a child and demanding and getting
a child's unreasoning devotion from his intimates,
slumps in and flings himself heavily in the Morris-chair.
“ Christ-I feel low!” is his greeting.
“ What's matter, Dicky?”
“Oh, nothing everything. Nothing you people
would understand." He sinks into a pose that suggests
Niobe. “Give me a cigarette.” Rejecting John's prof-
fered paper-package indignantly. “A good cigarette,
you Shylock. You've got some, Phil, I saw you take
them out of your pocket a minute ago." He selects
three with care, pockets two, lights the other and seems
revived. “Where's the sullen Evans, O angular Cas-
tine and frog-eyed Sellaby?”


PARABALOU!
85
“Going to wait for us up at Mory's." This is from
Phil.
Dick is as pleased as an infant with something new
and shiny.
“Oh, we're going to Mory's? We're going to have
a party? A nice party and sing Christmas carols just
as I said we would ?”
“Are we?” John's accent is intentionally snarkish.
“Oh, God, I wasn't talking to you, Castine. Every-
body knows what a grinning, stupid, rosy-faced Cheshire
Cat you've made of yourself ever since you went Psi U
and got a chance to suck around Stan Clark and Bill
Arbroath all day long! Are we, Phil ? "
“I guess so, Dick-as soon as the crowd's cleared out
and Steve comes.”
“Oh, if you don't want me. You weren't like this
last year though, Sellaby, my footless friend. This
god-damn Junior Fraternity system makes you all think
you're little Sèvres gods on ebony tables. I'm not com-
ing." And, purring over his soul-satisfying climax,
Dick relapses into a grandiose fit of sulks.
Steve Brackett, plump and smiling, round as a beaver,
with the cherub's bow mouth of a Love or a pleased
small boy, appears, dressed as ever in the most impec-
cable clothes in college.
“Hello, Steve!” from Philip and John, and “Hello,
you potty little fool, when are you going to get me into
Deke?” from Dick, over his shoulder.
“Well, well, well,” chuckles Steve in the deep
cracked voice of a genial bittern. “When's the party
going to start—and what have you people been doing?”


86 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“Making nasty remarks to me.” But that is Dick,
and nobody pays attention.
“ Half an hour or so, round man. Come in and
play hearts-Reggy's tutoring, he'll meet us up at
Mory's."
“ All right. Just one minute while I light a cigar.”
He examines John's apparel with searching eyes. “My
Lord, Castine, when are you going to get another tie?
That's the same string tie your grandmother gave you
when you first went to St. Mark's—and the Castine
finances must have been scraping the bottom right then,
because it looks as if it had been part of the family
quilt or your great-grandfather's flowered shirt. If I
buy you a decent tie, Castine, will you wear it? I can't
lose my social position with Rosy the cleaner by going
around much longer with people dressed like you."
“Let me pick it out and you pay for it.” John is
unruffled and, “ If you buy him a tie you've got to buy
me one too,” from Dick, who is trying hard to combine
injured dignity with avid interest in the conversa-
tion.
“You'll pick the most expensive one you can find,
and it'll probably have magenta bolts-of-lightning all
over it. Oh, all right, all right-I've been ruined all
my life by my friends' riding gravy, but I'm going to
get you dressed up so you look like a candidate for
Keys, Castine, if I have to sell the eating-joint to do
it. You'll be able to walk through the Biltmore lobby
without having girls turn round and ask who that
poor boy is who's collecting for the Salvation Army,
when I get through with you. Hearts ? Very well. I
never won a game of hearts in my life.”


PARABALOU!
87
The three of them play for ten minutes before Dick
consents to be included. John then succeeds in stick-
ing him with most of the high hearts in the pack for
three hands running and he overturns the table and
throws the cards at the fire. There is a general scuffle
that only succeeds in breaking the one whole electric
light bulb in the room. They go out, Dick linking arms
between Steve and John.
“You people are so nice to me it makes me feel like
a bum,” he announces inconsequentially as they march
up Elm Street. “What makes you all so darn nice,
anyway?”
“ Just our natural sweet natures,” John suggests,
to which Dick replies characteristically, trying to trip
him, “Great Bill Arbroath, Castine, you know blessed
well I wouldn't stand your God-damned snottiness from
anybody else but you !”
At Mory's they find Reggy Evans, vacantly studying
back numbers of the Lit. Everybody orders milk-
punches. They start to sing. Snow taps and feathers
on the frosty windows of that shut-in room full of warm
yellow lights and voices. “Frankie and Johnny” gives
place to “ Jolly Boating Weather” and that to “ Venite
Adoremus,” in shaky Latin for the benefit of Bill, the
steward. More drinks wander in and are consumed. A
bland glow like the touch of summer sunlight flows in
upon and gentles the mind. The tunes rise and float
in the air like great radiant bubbles_voices carry them
easily now, a proud, bright load.
“ Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the feast of Stephen "


88 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
And even the cold hush of graying dark into which
they are ushered when the doors of Mory's close and
the whole sky seems to be collapsing from heaven in
an infinite falling of minute and hurried flakes does
not touch the released calm flame of their chanting
comradeship. It is something whole as a golden orb,
as a golden planet; something youthful and vividly
careless, frail, poignant and without name. ... They
recite Ariel's lullaby to the Campus policeman; and so
vocally home to the deep sleep of happy blasphemers.
There was also the Eton-Harrow banquet on prep-
school Alumni Day with the College largely deserted by
most conscientious or moneyed prep-school men. It be-
gan by John and Reggy discovering that they had both
been to Eton with Lord Kitchener and Queen Victoria,
and Skinny Singleton and Philip forming a Rugby
contingent strong on “ bloodys ” and reading aloud to
each other in the pause between drinks and drinks the
more righteously British passages of “ Tom Brown,"
while Dick, a bitter minority, defended the fame of
“grand old Harrow” with amazing wit, vigor and pro-
fane invention. It ended in a solo Bacchante dance by
Steve, which he insisted was called “Bouncing the
Butterfly"... a Virginia reel joined by three over-
loaded Sheff men and a local judge ... the crowning
of a scandalized waiter as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Queen
of the May ...
And then there was spring hold-off night, when Philip,
for the first time in his life, got thoroughly drunk. He
had been out with Skinny Singleton in the hour between


PARABALOU!
89
six and seven, discussing the Grand Style in Writing
over double Bronxes in the cool leather-lined cavern of
the Taft Bar and the discussion had reached the “ What
I mean is gra-grand-grand, y understand ? " stage
when it was time for both to return to the rooms they
were guarding. Both watched the proceedings through
a jocund fog and adjourned to Mory's and as much as
they were able to poach of the various fraternity green-
cups. Steve has gone Deke, and they congratulate
him with reservations. Mory's is packed and turbulent
with the warring crowds and songs of three fraternities.
Philip drinks steadily and of anything that comes handy,
and begins to feel his mind expand like a blown-out pa-
per snake-expand and at the same time grow uncannily,
unearthly clear.
Physically, he is seventeen yards tall, he could break
a varsity tackle between finger and thumb. A vast pity
-the pity of the broken-hearted ancient gods—falls on
him like a silver mist, for all this shuffling riot of
humanity that swarms about him. He treads like a
god on shoes covered with wings over the crystal wreck-
age and crumbling jeweled shards of disintegrated
worlds. Stafford Vane, king of Deke and his pet ab-
horrence, puts affectionate arms and a weeping face
on his shoulder. He is filled on the instant with im-
mense and nameless pride. “Staff’d's not all right,
but I'm all right-Staff'd's not all right, but I'm all
right!” juggles through his head like the ring of the
Marseillaise. “I'll give you speech!” he shouts,
clambering a table. “Good speech. Fine speech. All
'bout how A. D. cleaned up on Deke! ..."


90 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Suddenly, he is out on the street, reclined on the
steps of the Zete tomb ....
That passes in a phantasmagoric flicker. He is as-
cending stairs, intolerable, unending stairs.
They are the stairs inside the U-Club. A boiling
crowd of Zetes, Psi U’s and Dekes greet him with af-
fectionate whoops. Somebody gives him an open quart
bottle of champagne. Somebody else pulls his chair out
from under him. He gets up with a vague lust for
indefinite blood but everyone has started to march
around the billiard table singing, “We'll drink, drink,
drink, drink, drink, drink, drink to the Eta," and he
joins the distorted procession with eyes that make every
color screamingly bright and hands and feet that seem
six miles off from his body. “'S this is a merry-go-
round ?” he asks uncertainly. “Where's the horses ?
Where's brass rings?”
Somebody starts throwing pool-balls ...
There is a great ocean of voices talking somewhere
far outside of him. He listens, bends his will like a
spring and reduces the voices into words.
One, faint as a gnats, is shouting, “Hey, Steve!
Hey, Billy! Come out here. There's a man outside your
door that can't speak and doesn't know his own name ! »
“'S absurd! Name's Alg'non Swin Swinburne.
Grea' poet!” murmurs Philip.
The last memory is that of being inserted, pajamaless
into a bed.
“Put p’jamas over me,” he explains. “On top. Use-
ful. Warm. Antiseptic. D'corative.”
Steve's face rises over him like a moon.


PARABALOU!
91
“So drunk,” it says. “So drunk. And such a good
time!”
GROWING PAINS-I
(SUMMER OF 1914)
SEA-VERSE
LIFE is a dream, yo ho, yo ho! Life is a dream, yo
ho!
The boat slides through the blue, chucking water like
a sled over slippery grass. The bright water sparks
and dances under the kicking heels of the bright breeze.
The tan sail slats—we are nearly across Muchacha
Straits. Sitting at the tiller with the whole live boat
under my hand, I am as much a part of the sea as if I
were a Triton.
When the rainy season starts there will be dish-water
days enough to be gloomy in. But who cares now if we
bump a rock or a mermaid? Who'd be sorry to drown
in such jewels of reckless water? Who gives a damn,
while Life is a dream, yo ho ?
LAND- VERSE
Riding a loping horse, I chase the white snake into
the West. The red, huge sun sees me coming and flings
arrow after burning arrow.


92
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
The hoofs of my horse go trample on the white snake's
hide, but still his coil laps miles and miles ahead of me
and when I turn in the saddle and look back, he is
suddenly crawling the other way, miles on lapping miles
behind.
He is not to be caught, that serpent of a road, though
I drum on his scales forever he keeps just as far aloof
and away. If I caught him there'd be no more pride in
riding. And my horse lopes and I ride and ride and
ride.
ANTS
Near the tennis-court there is a city of ants. Four
holes in the red earth and four little red dusty mounds.
Underneath it must be as full of tunnels as Chinatown.
Three ants are grappling a eucalyptus-nut, dragging
the mountainous thing along by their pen-scratch legs.
It fell that time and one of them was hurt. He's got
up again. What strong ants !
Ants scurry like business-men around the little
mounds. They dive into the ground all of a sudden-
hurrying to catch a train!
They seem to be having a wonderful time. I think
I'll play God and knock down the city.
Town
Four cheap saloons to a corner and a church with a
spire like a skewed top-hat. A scattering of baked
brown little houses, as carelessly scrambled together as


PARABALOU!
93
thrown dice, choke slowly in the dust of the white road.
The New Palace Hotel has two stories but already the
paint is scabbing from its walls.
Smell of acid, rosin and leather from the tannery.
Smell of sour wine and dregs from the saloons. Smell
of stuffy rep pew-cushions and cracked hymnals
from the church, but nobody ever goes there, of
course.
Old men warm chairs on the hotel porch, buzzing
together like drowsy flies. They tell about the time San
Esteban was the capital. And San Esteban sleeps in
front of them like a mummy. It hasn't been alive for
forty years.
Down on the broken wharves—there's where any soul
it has is, maybe. A gray rat scuttling by weedy timbers
scared of the quiet, little, and sick and old. A rat
gray as ashes, hunched in the blinding sunlight, thinking
about the time it used to sail round on ships.
HILLS
This is a country of hills—where earth has been left
alone here, there is nothing anywhere at all but great
brown rolling hills. Smooth wave after mountainous
wave of ocean between one billow and the next billow of
this tossing and eternal sea of land.
One hill is exactly like the next hill. There is no
more difference between them than between two big
turtles sleeping on a beach. And their backs are rounded


PARABALOU!
95
that was all—and you got the second set on me as it
was."
“I know, but I wanted to beat you!” She scuffles
her sneakers half-angrily in the dirt. Philip looks down
on her from an advantage of four inches and notes dis-
passionately that no matter how hot Syl gets, she never
becomes either scarlet-faced or trickly, those two fatal
stigmata of the average “ athletic girl.” They drop on
a bench to cool off, each chewing the stalk of a eucalyp-
tus leaf with ruminant calm and kicking idle heels in the
dust. Philip looks at Sylvia and wonders if he is in
love with her. He doesn't think so, quite, but is not
too sure. He wants to kiss her very much, kiss her
all over. The heady heat of noon envelops them lan-
guidly. Unconsciously they sway toward each other
like tired animals, closer, almost touching now, p-e-r-
h-a-p-8-
Then the queer pulsing moment, sudden and sleepy-
sweet, as suddenly passes. Sylvia jumps up with a little
shiver of her body and gets ten yards start on Philip as
they race to the house.
Or again, Philip is reading his poetry to her under the
tulip-tree. Her hair has discreetly come down—it is
hot, and the coiled mass uncomfortable and Philip,
trying to find similes for her, thinks she looks half Alice-
in-Wonderland little girl and half restless Atalanta
with the hunt in her eyes. He pauses at the end of a
sonnet, expecting appreciation.
“You know, Phil,” she says suddenly instead, “I
think a girl in society has a pretty rotten time these
days, by and large.”


96 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ You don't seem to from what I've seen of you."
He grunts peevishly. She is generally sympathetic.
“Oh, going around to parties and things—that's nice,
but I don't know. And all these boys—where does it
get you ? "
“ Gets you married, Syl.” Philip is practical.
“I know, but I don't want to get married."
“How about your friend George Carpenter?”
“He's sweet, but I couldn't marry him-we'd start
breaking crockery in two weeks. I don't know anybody
I could marry that I'd want to."
“Hen Bristol ?”
“And end up with three cocktails before tea every
day at the Palace ? Not for this child. He'd like me
painted like a new Rolls-Royce.”
“Oh, well, you'll find somebody. Prince of Wales,
Guynemer.” Philip wants to get back to his sonnets.
“Phil, what makes you so suddenly sympathetic?
I'm going to sleep-you're a snob—you don't care for
anything in the world but your own rotten poetry.”
She turns her shoulder, more little girl than ever.
He goes on reading.
“ JUNIOR YEAR WE TAKE OUR FASE_".
(1914-1915)
JUNIOR YEAR. Philip's pictures grow foggier and
fewer. Life rolled on, sleek, smooth and thoughtless,
like the life of a contented goldfish inside its bowl. A


PARABALOU!
97
sparkling life, a fertile life, a swift life, but a life more
leveled plain without crests or dips than Philip had yet
experienced. The war came, watched by Philip and
most of his class with the fascinated interest of specta
tors before a burning house, but its cloud was as yet no
bigger than one's personal convictions. Men took sides,
ally or German, some from reason but more from the
fun of taking sides, a fun comparable to that of backing
the Cubs against the Giants. A handful left for am-
bulance service, two or three to join various armies
to the others no warning came at all that each casual
step taken was on earthquake-ground.
Philip got together a book of poems, sent it to pub-
lishers and collected their printed rejection-slips to
frame when he was famous. He worried through an
abominable winter, smothered in snow, with a steady
cold from Christmas to Easter that left him a legacy of
persistent small coughs.
“Oh, I'll be a lunger yet,
I'll be a lunger yet!”
he would chant to Dick's amusement and his own
bronchial disgust on January mornings as he came in
from the icy mile-walk to and from the Physics Labora-
tory. He was repeating Freshman physics for the sec-
ond time to the acute dismay of that worthy Depart-
ment, for he could not pass the course and would not
drop it, and so was hardly an encouraging influence on
Freshmen getting their first taste of science.
Dick and he had spacious apartments in Fayerweather
now, on the sunny side of the brick horseshoe of Berke-


98 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
ley Oval, and John and Reggy roomed across the hall.
Hence the four combined choice furniture, books and
best pictures and rehabilitated John's and Reggy's bare
chamber into an Official Reception Room or New Crystal
Palace (“ to be frequented when the lighter diversions
of life are sought,” explained Dick lucidly) while Dick's
and Philip's quarters are turned into a Library, Study,
Open Air Sleeping Porch (“complete ventilation
through all four walls”) and general den of iniquity.
But the people on the floor below usually spoke of it as
“Murderers' Row” and swore when the plaster-dust
started shaking down from their ceilings in the daily
scrimmages between Reggy and Dick. The two had
learned piquet together out of a tattered Hoyle and
played daily for vast sums which neither ever thought
of paying. “I don't mind your cheating at cards,
Reggy," Dick would say, after being piqued twice in
three deals, “but for God's sake don't cheat so like a
plumber!” and the fight would begin to the pianissimo
accompaniment of John's bitter wail that, after all, it
was his furniture they were breaking.
Winter and spring brought the five very close to
gether. Friendship is as hard to define as the definite
article-it should be enough to say that these five were
unhesitating friends. Each gave as he could and as
much as he could to the mutual fellowship and the
clash of mind on mind. It was not an association that
found little watch charms and an elaborate club-ritual
necessary to ensure its permanence.
John's mocking mind, Reggy's perfect independence,
Steve's open-handed laughter (though he could be as


PARABALOU!
99
amusingly sour as a good crab-apple), the essential
mirth and affection that was Dick-Philip took from all
of these and felt nourished completely, as a piece of
grass is nourished by sun and rain. They had that feel-
ing that together they could probably become lion-
tamers, great dramatists, or Mongol Emperors—that is
the enchanted inheritance of such a combination. As
for Philip and Dick, they only squabbled twice in two
years of rooming together and Philip learned to love
him as a brother, enjoy his flashing varying moods like
Shaw high comedy, and try and keep him from casually
insulting people too stupid to understand him, with the
patience and persistence of a favorite aunt. And of
these tasks the first two were much the simplest, for
Dick who had from his christening the rare qualities of
affection and heart of a jolly boy, could on occasion
make use of these qualities to the wild annoyance of
the young-old "unco guid.” So the year paced past its
monthly mile-posts with the smooth devouring rush of a
speeding car.
Yet in many ways, besides the friendly, the nine
months were devoutly educational for Philip. His
courses were mainly voluntary-four of them under
first-class teachers—Billy Phelps, the most gracious
and attractive of all the literary traditions of Yale-
Stanley Cathcart, that acrid, eccentric genius with a
mind that had the illuminated solidity and continuous
fluctuating brilliance of a fire-opal—a professor of
paleontology who made the dinosaur as familiar a beast
as the camel and showed the solid crust of the earth
with its eternal hills flowing and melting like a wave


100 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
in the vast empty spaces of geologic time an assistant
professor of history with an eye for the purple and
scarlet of kings and queens. Besides these Philip read
continuously and haunted the library stacks, discovering
a burrow in the section devoted to the Great Rolls of
the Pipe where nothing else ever came but dust, and
Record verse could be composed and such things as the
Bible, Taylor's “Mediæval Mind” and the more risqué
productions of Gyp consumed without ribald question or
interference. His reading ranged through some desic-
cated Hegel to Gilbert Murray's translations of Eurip
ides and back again through Wilfred Scawen Blunt and
Paul Fort to the Catholic novels of Robert Hugh Benson
and that astonishing sexual raree-show, “ The Rainbow,"
by D. H. Lawrence. Much of what he read seemed un-
assimilated and indigestible at the time but it worked
inside his mind, eroded, built up, made deltas and
straits and islands, pushed back the cloud from undis-
covered continents. He felt growth, though exactly
where or how he could not say—the sensation he recog-
nized but neither its direction nor its cause. But there
slowly evolved out of fog and the wreck of broken ideas
and old prejudices a sort of informal synthesis of what
he felt about Art (big A or small) and his own or
any writer's or painter's place in the service of it. And
this synthesis was infinitely aided by the casual long
talks about everything for the moral surrender involved
in “necking” to the benefits of an absolute despotism
as a system of government that came between the five
companions-an interchange in which each benefited
tremendously by having his own most cherished delu-


PARABALOU!
101
sions and towers of ivory logically and swiftly abolished
by combined attack. In other words, Philip was burst-
ing out of his mental clothes all year, like an eight-year-
old boy who has been compressed into six-year-old
trousers. To parallel him with the molting snake,
June saw two cast skins crumpled and left behind. One
was labeled “ L'Art pour l'Art” and the other “Inspira-
tion is Perspiration” and the both of them he now
regarded with immense distaste.
He wrote little—that spring had run suddenly dry.
As for painting, he had not tried to paint in oils for a
year. In spite of which occurrences he existed and was
very happy, though he had to fight torturing doubts now
and then as to whether either craft would ever return
to him. He felt that both would in their own impera-
tive time that this year was preparation-lying fal-
low. But the feeling was so strong and reasonless it
almost amounted to a personal superstition, and he
laughed at both fear and confidence in ordinary moods.
In the social and hospitable life of New Haven he
took mild part. He went to the various dances, and
discovered the insolent pleasure of walking back across
the Campus from the Taft or the Lawn Club in full
dress and broad daylight, just as startled Freshmen
were trooping across to Chapel and honest working men
arriving late to their jobs. And for calls and so forth,
he. and John worked out a nefarious system, which
entailed rather cautious planning but brought perfect
results. Over as large a tea as possible at the Eliza-
bethan Club, they would lay their plots of a Sunday
afternoon.


102 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“We really ought to call on the Stoddards,” John
would declare the two had a rule of hunting in couples.
“ They gave us a very nice dinner three weeks ago,
you know, and we haven't been there since.”
“All right, Stoddards first," from Philip, his mouth
full of toast. “Do they tea you well ? "
“Fair-ly.” John was dubious. “Wafers and saltines
—they used to run as far as lettuce sandwiches, but
I've seen them when they went down to the crackers
you get out of a barrel." His face brightens. “But they
have those marvelous Persian cigarettes. Must be
fruity with opium at the least, smoke two and you're
off in a sort of Oriental haze for the rest of the
day.”
“Better take them as soon as possible then—we
needn't stay long. I've got to call at the Verraynes'."
“Don't know the Verraynes.”
“Come along anyway—they'll like you and they have
crumpets and English jam.”
“All right, but God knows it'll be a surprise for
them. I got introduced to Mr. Verrayne once by mis-
take for my brother and he's cut me dead on the street
ever since. Don't know what he has against Henry,
but I wish he wouldn't take it out on me! Still-
crumpets you said ? It's worth trying.”
“ Good scout. We can't get away from there before
half-past five, though. Question is can we rush a call
on the Fleetings in after the other two?”
“Doubt it. They'll think we're making a bid to stay
to supper.”
“ So we will be what of it?”


PARABALOU!
103
“Well, it isn't too damn Machiavellian, that's all.”
“Well, we're only innocent Juniors—don't know
what time they feed. Besides, they're tight with their
suppers. I stayed there till half-past six once, looking
starveder and starveder all the time, and all I got was
an invitation to subscribe to the Suffering Armenians.
We might look in."
“Well, if we have time.”
“I'll fix it. The old signals—when I cough threo
times in succession you start working up to that nice
little good-by speech we doped out together.”
“ C'est bien. I'll reniember. Come on. “For Duty,
Duty, must be done?”
“ The rule applies”
“ To every one. And painful though the duty be"
And the two tea-pirates depart, knowing there will
be no need to pay for supper that Sunday evening.
Yet in spite of such harmless buccaneering, there
were houses where they went by choice and where the
food, if there happened to be food, was merely a pleasant
accessory-houses like the Argiers' and the Vawtreys',
the de Sessas' and the Harry Winchelseas'. Nights at
the Winchelseas' with Dick stay in the recollection like
the bouquet of century port, nights where the random,
skeptic talk ran nosing like a foxhound through the
arts and the ages, white nights, nights hoarded like a
sheaf of silver arrows . . . Other nights, too, a night
at the brass-band glitter of Savin Rock, where they
rode and rode on the roller-coaster and introduced them-
selves to its proprietor as Russian ambassadors when he
came to see if they had gone suddenly insane ... A


104
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
night on the desolate beaches beyond Momaguin, after
three rum-sours apiece, when they watched the pearl,
pale evening lie like milk upon the water, lit a fire and
cooked burnt chops under a warm vast cave of darkness
pollened with stars . . . Clear nights, nights ardent and
unforgettable, nights, soft with lilac, dyed white and
ruddy with wine ...
Externally and internally as well, Junior Year was,
for Philip, extremely successful. He was elected Chair-
man of the Lit. and Art Editor of the Record. John
Castine held the Chairmanship of the latter and both
he and Skinny Singleton were on Philips Lit. Board—
an interlocking directorate all three viewed with some
amusement. On Tap Day Philip promptly went to
Wolf's Head with Reggy, Steve and John-thus break-
ing a tradition as old as the Lit. itself, that its chairman
went to Skull and Bones or nowhere—and for once in
his life felt completely content with one of his own
decisions. Keys he had never considered, and Keys had
repaid the compliment. The Tap Day was uneventful,
and as Philip was lucky enough to be tapped in the first
five minutes he had no chance at all to feel the shiver-
ing white tenseness that comes toward a quarter of six
and the end of the lists. Two things in the day's pro-
ceedings he never forgot-the smack of Sam Austin's
hand between his shoulders and the cheers of the class
as each man left the Campus. Skinny Singleton went
Keys, twelfth man, Bill Arbroath and Bob Meredith
Bones. Then came the initiations. And over what
Philip said or did or had done to him when he finally
passed through the spike-topped chevaux-de-frise that


106 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Also, I suppose the Marriage Question arises some-
time and Bringing Tender Little Lives to Roost
on the Cold, Cold World. Any lives I thus en-
couraged any time in the near future would have to
Scratch Dirt or Pass Out, as I see it. Ah, what the
hell, kid; is Fate going to put us away in the first
round as easily as all that? Not a chance! But how
not?
Added to this, I can't do a lick of work—my tennis
is as soft as a spoiled peach-and I am holding my
breath to keep from falling in love with that Sylvia
Persent I've told you so often about. Good Lord, she's
a lovely, companionable person! (Three lines of words
x-ed over by the typewriter.)
Don't you wish you knew what that was ?
My vacant ideas on Art. You have to give your life,
lungs, liver, lights and everything else to it. You can't
“write down” or “paint down” without taking the
fine edge off your mind—that is, if you keep on doing it.
The grand manner forever, and the flat of your palm
and the sole of your foot to the too-clever, the George
Moores and the just pretty writers. A small income,
a violent mind, marriage or its substitute (the latter
helpful but can be dispensed with) are what is needed.
Selah.
My best to Steve-how is the fat little boy? Why
can't you both come out here for the start of September
and drive back in my uncle's car if I can borrow
it? This is serious—let me know right away if you
can.
Must quit. My best to you and Steve, something


PARABALOU!
107
else to P , T, and A- and kick T- under the ear
if you see him. Write me.
As ever,
PHILIP.
P. S. Summer here--miraculous. No cough-every-
thing lovely. I send some vagrant bits of spotty prose
all I've done in two months except lie flat on the grass
under a pomegranate tree and thumb my nose at the
Presbyterian gods. On the crest, really, John, on the
crest!
(Enclosed in the Letter)
CITY DANCE
The eight nigger musicians make a curdled sound
with horns and drums and glass. The tortuous music
is impatient-it frets like a spoiled child that knows
too much, for every one to go out and dance to it.“ Got
to dance-got to dance~got to dance”-that's the hurry
it puts into your feet.
Margaret's in black with jade earrings. May I cut
in ? Don't have to talk to her, thank God. You can
get drunk dancing with her though.
What does she think about, anyway? Has she any
mind or insides or thoughts, that mask-on-a-husk of a
person opposite that I don't know and never will know,
except that she's warm and our bodies like each other.
Would anything last of her if she died now, or would


108 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
she just stay dry and rattling like the shelled pod of a
pea ? If I asked her, she'd think I was drunk or crazy.
“Waaah!” goes the peevish saxophone. “ Got to
dance with somebody else—Got to dance"
COUNTRY DANCE
Girls in bunchy white with hair-ribbons and powder
over their sunburn. Boys in blue serge suits with the
pockets cut like cheese-rindsfaces shiny with soap and
rubbing, and their hair slicked back with tonic. Purple
and yellow paper festooned all over Odd Fellows Hall.
They waltz around sweatily awhile to the tunes people
whistled five years ago. They spill pink lemonade on
the floor, and the smart boys cut up rancidly, and the
girls giggle and slap them.
Then they start the " Portuguese Jig ” and the bare,
scrubbed boards rock and shiver. The fiddle sings honey
out of its strings, and the boards are the deck of a ship
somehow-of a galleon tossing wild in blue water-
and it reels like a house in an earthquake to the shak-
ing dance of glimmery sea-girls with coral and clear
pearl-shells for their side-combs and burnt sailors with
bright guineas at their ears.
THE THOUGHT
Dawn, wan Dawn, naked silver girl with a young
child's breasts, blow the yellow scent of the trumpet-


PARABALOU!
109
honeysuckle over Philip's mouth as he turns in his
sleep; dust upon his lips the stinging fertile pollen,
borne by the bee gone drunken to his hive!
Day, radiant Day, flame-footed runner, beat upon the
heart that sobs beneath your treading, heat and troubling
dreams of a dumb, stark rapture, mist and aching
hunger that moans and cries aloud !
Night, black Archer, take an arrow from your quiver,
poison it with sweetness that his parched mouth thirsts
for; ring the starry clang of the loosed, belling bow-
string; run him through and through with a barbed
and golden thought.
THE WISH
When the fog of sleep rolled thick with spume, and a
vacant mist hung low between sleeping and waking, I
looked in the face of a dream and shuddered and was
afraid.
Dreams melt in a single instant, they grow tiny like
a dead man's voice and pass—but this dream had white
hands and would not vanish. I held her. There was
the perfume of her in her hair.
It is not meant to dream so. It is not right to think
and bleed for a visioned mouth whose kissing is like
grapes. It is not just that air and earth and water
should be hurt flame and sand and a starved wind ghost-


110 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
ing, because of what I have seen in the deep eyes of a
dream.
THE FEVER
Sometimes the thing is only fantastic—the street pa-
rade of a circus, reeling through the mind in color and
noise and dust. Clowns and healthy animals laughing
and happy and bawdy. Best to take it that way and
not worry any more than dogs.
And then, wanderingly, quick breathless perfection
-careless humming pride as if there were wings on
your arms—Beauty stooping suddenly and yours, yours,
like the face of a star seen close.
But, in brief and mourning eve-lights I have seen it,
too, and then been sick with horror. I have seen it like
the smoke of burnt flesh cloud and cover every planet
in the heavens. I have seen it brood and furl all the
universe in the black dead pinions of a bat.


BOOK III
"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
WERE LOVERS”





(1915-1916)
SUNG IN A SUMMER GARDEN
Bitter December broke the ground !
The plow, ho! the plow, ho!
He clove it in two with a clanging sound.
Oxen tug at the plow!
It crackled like steel at his horses' stir,
He beat the snowstorm out of his fur,
The least of his wear was miniver.
Plow you stubbornly now!
February the monk sowed fair!
The seed, ho! the seed, ho!
He pattered his beads at the agued air.
Wrinkled imps in the seed.
The frosty sky was a caldron cold,
He flung the crooked seeds in the mold,
And the earth was fat and the earth took hold.
Sow, you drinkers of mead!
Gallantly April stooped to the bud!
The bloom, ho! the bloom, ho!
Crocus and thorn were mixed in his blood.
Wind and rain on the bloom.
He gave it a couple of careless bees
To dust its pollen like gold on their knees,
While its petals swung in a silken breeze.
Swarm, black bees of the coombe!
August hot comes harvesting home!
The pipe, ho! the pipe, ho!
113


114 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Crunching his teeth through a honeycomb.
Satyr, sound on your pipe!
What shall he have for a throat like chips ?
Berry-black sweet that the wine-cask drips
-And your wise, cool lips on my thirsty lips.
Pluck, for the fruit is ripe !
Looking back on it, Philip thought he could not
have devised if he had tried a more worn and mechani-
cal beginning for something that was to smash through
his carefully constructed Yale self and scheme of
existence as a bullet goes through a plaster duck in a
shooting gallery. For want of anything better to do he
had gone to the movies with Ken Gavin one Monday
night in October, a night warm as milk with the last
sweetness of Indian Summer. The jumping grasshop-
per-figures on the screen were flashing through the
sloppy motions of that stupidest of our new conventions,
a “sure-fire" comedy-everybody was throwing custard
and losing their trousers and saying, “You tell 'em,
pieface”—Philip wondered idly at the yahoo insolence
of the producer who could water such near-beer humor
through five long reels and the steadfast idiocy of the
theater owner who would run it, for even a sledge-
hammer on the head of the First Murderer in the piece
failed to rouse the audience to any sign of appreciation
beyond the staccato mastication of gum, except for
three small boys in the very front seats who shrieked
with unabated delight at each new sore kick from be-
hind. The film was just starting to mix in Philip's
mind with Coventry Patmore's Odes and a picture of
Io he wanted to do, as well as an Arab sheik who ap-


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 115
peared out of nothing with the urbanity of a leopard
and began to talk about Sylvia, when a high, whinnying
giggle from a skirted bundle next to Ken woke him
out of his doze. He scowled at them reprovingly, an-
noyed to be brought back to the frantic comedy and the
cabbagey scent of the Polack family behind him. Play-
ing “ footie” with the jitney demi-vierges of New Haven
was a Freshman sport he had always drawn away from
with supercilious distaste. He turned blinkingly reso-
lute eyes at the sad uproar on the screen, but the giggles
went on and were followed by little squeals—“the mat-
ing call of Woolworth’s to the Vice Crusader,” Dick had
called them, and the two heads drew closer and closer in
hushing talk. Scraps of it drifted over Philip's way,
“Say, you're cer'n'ly a speedy guy on first acquain-
tance !” “You Yale birds all act alike to us poor little
unprotected girls!” “Now, Lizzie, be calm, be calm!”
“No, I won't, but who's your friend with the icy eye, a
prof. or a female detective?”
Philip's mind idled back to his only experience of
real “necking”-a party with three, half-a-candlepower
minor lights of a number two road company at a beach
whose chief reason for existence was the cheap liquor
and cheaper dancing at its hotel. He had left after
perspiringly embracing a fattish girl with blond sausage
curls in a secluded corner, and spent fifteen minutes
in the entry-washroom brushing his teeth with four dif-
ferent tooth pastes to get the feel of her damp ripe mouth
away from him. That had been enough—the whole
process was so mixed up with Jockey Club scent and the
smell of bad gin that he was no longer even amused at


116 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the prideful accounts of a few expurgated Casanovas of
his acquaintance of their dealings with “some girl, that
little Peggy, some wild girl!” The film tagged to its
end, and an educational one began with a weary parade
of hunted-looking Japanese divers. Philip and Ken
stumbled out into the cool air.
“Going back to the room ?” asks Ken. Philip yawns.
“ Guess so. Nothing much else to do-getting a cut
in my eight o'clock.”
“Think I'll sneak up and get the car and take that
kid we were next to out for a run. I like that baby, you
know, she's got a mean eye. Want to come ? "
“Uh-uh,”
“Say, she's got a friend that's pretty snappy-little
brunette. Come on along, we can have a time-trickle
out somewhere and dance. I know where they've got
the heck of a good coon orchestra."
“But look here, Ken-14”
Philip wishes devoutly he could have remembered to
plead a test in the morning. Moral scruples are so
viciously hard to avow.
“Oh, I know you aren't one of the little Don Juans of
the class, Phil, but if this lady can shake a hoof that's
as wicked as her line, she's there. All you've got to do
is dance with her friend. But it's the dickens going out
alone, much more fun in a party. Come ahead, I'll
blow you to it and it won't hurt you. Think what in-
spiration you'll get—whole epics and epics. And the
Stutz is running as sweet as ice-cream right now."
“Oh, all right_but I don't have to talk to these silly
wenches, do I?”


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 117
“Rats, no. Spout them some verse if you feel in-
clined to, or act like a prehistoric man. That's the best
stunt-this strong, silent but, oh, so gentle stuff gets
away like a bat out of a fire. Are you set?”
“If we make it Dutch.”
“Well, if you insist. It won't hurt us much-she
didn't look too expensive. Want to come up while I
tune the car?”
“ Absolument-you're on.”
Philip thinks it incumbent on him to assume a know-
ing, rather satanic sort of sprightliness, as much like
his idea of a prominent turfman as possible. His heart
is stuttering a little but Ken takes the whole affair as
so much a matter of course that he soon calms down.
“ Treat these little sardines just like infants, and
they'll behave," he says as the car slides out of the
garage. Philip nods.
They find the two girls waiting for them outside a
drug-store, pick them up, Ken's discovery in front be-
side him, and the "little brunette” in the back seat
with Philip, and the car purrs off again like a cat over
a cream-saucer.
“Oh, say," Ken flings back over his shoulder, “I for-
got introductions. Ladies, pardon me!”-snickerings
and “ Gee, you're a funny sketch ! ” from his red-haired
friend.
“Not so funny as you are, sister, by two shades of
Irish Peroxide. Miss Jenny Argyle, Mr. Bill Arbroath.
Miss”
“ Stillman, Milly Stillman,” supplies Miss Argyle.
“Mr. Bill Arbroath.” Philip gasps a second, but


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 119
high white glacé kid shoes and her voice and laugh are
a succession of high flats. The Stillman girl is as
different as country strawberries are from soda-fountain
strawberry syrup. Black hair, black as a blackbird's
feather; black eyes, black and sootily warm as the glow
of a flame on black onyx; mouth like a child's kissing
a poppy; through her skimpy, chic, silly dress each line
of body and limb so clean and effortless Philip's fingers
itch to sculpture her in the light fantastic stuff of an
evening cloud. She cannot be more than seventeen,
she has all the pride and witchcraft of first youth still
upon her—youth even flamboyantly wasteful in its giv-
ing when it has so inexhaustibly much still to spend.
Philip stares at her, his breath taken deep into his
throat. A little fateful hammer that titters and pulses
begins to tap like sticks on a drum inside his brain.
“What did your friend say your name was ? ” he
realizes that he is saying, and that his voice is as clat-
tering and stupid as the knocking together of two pieces
of dry wood.
“ Stillman. Milly Stillman.” Her voice has the little
creamy slur that belongs to soft Irish.
“Do you like me, Milly Stillman ?” The question
is idiotic but he asks it as fiercely as if he were playing
inquisitor at the Last Judgment.
“Sure I like you. You look like a handsome, nice
fella," and she laughs, untroubledly, three delicate high
notes like water falling into a silver basin.
“ All you Yale boys are nice but some of you get
rough! Oh, my! Oh, dear!” She shakes her head with
the sideways quickness of a kitten, then turns rather


120 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
grave. “You aren't one of the rough lads, Mr. Bill
Arbroath ? " she says.
Philip blushes absurdly.
“Not very," he says and she is whole-heartedly
amused.
“Well, you're a queer fella with your curly hair and
your slippy talk. I like queer fellas.” A hand, of
which she seems quite unconscious wanders out and rests
beside him. He tries to pluck up courage to take hold
of it and finally does so, touching it as if it were a bomb
or a biting lizard. Then his fingers close over it hun-
grily. A sensation of fluid strength, of sparkling light-
ness and ease, flows into him like a ripple.
“00–00—I love to ride,” and she stretches her free
paw up at the stars that have not yet had time to glit-
ter and be hard, that flow and are large all over the sky
with the soft flaring radiance of burning wax. They are
rushing at forty miles an hour past tall trees made of
shadows and the white ghost-spire of a phantom church.
“I love to ride and I love to dance. Do you love to
dance, Bill? I'm going to call you Bill, because you're
a friend of mine. I'd rather dance than eat—and I'd
rather eat than sleep-and I'd rather sleep than talk-
except to people like you, Bill, who aren't mean about
what a girl says to them when they take her out. Can
you dance, Bill, 'cause if you can't you're going to be
taught!”
“Yeah-rottenly—but with you—I'd be crazy to
you're so sweet,” The disjointed words tumble over
each other.
“You're a kidder, Bill—and you don't kid well, but


"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY_LOVERS” 121
I like you—and don't break my wrist with your hand,
Bill, it's parta me and I've gotten sorta fond of it,”
“Oh, Lord, I'm sorry!” He releases his grasp
abruptly. She wrinkles her nose.
“I didn't mean to tell you it burnt you, Bill"
He notices her hands enchantedly; they are as rest-
less as little waves; they talk, reason, swear, worry, ex-
postulate, rejoice, drop beaten. Slender, thin, strong and
hurried, they are possessed with that flush of nervous
and palpitating life one feels under the hot feathers of
a bird. ...
“ Last stop, people everybody out!” yelps Ken, ex-
tricating himself from Miss Argyle. From the square
wide-porched hotel that the four turn toward, arms
linked, bleats a snatch of brassy jazz, blatant and fast.
“I want to dance,
I want to dance,
I want to dance with the big white Mo-on ! ”
hums Milly, snapping her fingers, a thousand long,
“os” in the last word. She whirls Philip around and
one-steps across the grass with him under the waving
starlight.
The rest of that elfin evening went past like water
under a bridge. Throughout it Philip seemed floating
in a lily-pad pool of lucid music, with Milly like a
breathing cloud always within his arms. She said little,
a piece of slang now and then made quaint by her voice,
but she sank herself in her dancing as a swimmer does in
a wave or a poet in his verse, and her feet seemed only
to tiptoe the floor she trod like a moth. Philip had


122 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
always danced as he played bridge, fairly enough but
without the fanatic absorption of the master. Now he
realized that dancing might be a complete occupation
and religion—why dervishes danced devotedly and the
reason for the fever of dancing that attacked a mad year
in the Middle Ages when all Italy seemed bitten by the
tarantula, the dancing insect, and whole cities danced
till the weak fell dead in the streets. He knew, he was
part of the sun-dance of light over water, the death-
dance of leaves and autumn dust, the swan's minuet of
thistledown and singing wind. And "Milly-Milly-
Milly ” went the blood through his heart and “Milly-
Milly-Milly” went the catch through his mind, a tune
beaten out by delicate dancers, stepping lightly in the
white glass house of the soul.
About one o'clock Philip and Milly were resting out
on a porch-Philip holding both her hands since one
didn't seem to be enough, when Ken and Miss Argyle
appeared, draggled as wet crows and a little peevish.
“For Pete's sake, where you people been?” said
Ken. “We looked all over the beach for you and
thought you must have ditched us and started to walk
back, so we took the car and went down the road a couple
of miles and couldn't find you."
“We been dancing—just dancing, dancing!”
lilted Milly with a sparrow's toss of her head.
Driving home over shadow-checkered roads, through
scattery villages huddled up in sleep, Nights blanket
pulled over their ears, Milly suddenly grew quiet and in
the end fell asleep on Philip's shoulder with the uncon-
cern of a child in the boughs of a safe tree. Philip felt


"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 123
the life come back into his feet--they began to burn and
hurt. He put his arm about her body and held her
80, relaxed and warm, her heart beating, without kissing
her, without thought. For the second time in his life
he felt eternal. The stars above them looked down with
cold eyes of light-and within him he felt a life like
theirs without end or beginning move and order him with
the muscles of a giant. He was whole, not one fragment
of his body that was not strung to the pitch of a con-
cert-violin, yet the utter life that possessed him as fire
possesses the substance of a leaf, was as passionless as
a ray of the moon on ice—bodiless silver, light magnifi-
cence, cool and clean. Miss Argyle in the front seat
wriggled, said, “ Ah, cut it, cut it!” The car jerked
round a corner and made more speed.
Milly was waked when they finally nosed out her
house, far in the suburbs on a side-street that cut across
Chapel. “Won't your folks mind ?” asked Miss Argyle
in a terrified whisper. “God knows it's a quarter past
two!”
Milly rubbed her eyes open again with the back of
her hand. “Not a chance I've got a latch-key-father
thinks I'm asleep ”
The shabby street was silent in a tired and shining
doze. Philip took her to her door-she put her mouth
up to be kissed like a good little school-girl.
“ Thanks, Bill, it was an awful grand party.” She
yawned, winked her eyes.
.“ When'll I see you next, Milly, Milly?”
“When you like, Bill dear. Not to-morrow. Next
day at the drug store, maybe. You could take me to


124 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the movies if you wanted to, Bill, and we could talk.
You're the nicest fella I ever went with, I think.” They
drew closer into the stuffy gloom of the doorway. She
shook her shoulders. “Good night, I'm tired and
father wants his breakfast so awful early.”
He looked at her mouth and wanted her forever and
ever. So he turned her face between his hands and de-
liberately, as if taking part in a ritual, kissed her frailly
on the round of her cheek. She sighed. “That was
lovely, Bill,” she said sleepily. Then the key clicked
into the lock and she was gone. Philip slept that night
as if he had been drugged with the perfume of a garden
of tiny flowers.
So began for both of them a loving which, as it pro-
gressed, gave Philip more and more the sensation of
being the only person awake in a world of perambulating
dreams. The College and what part he took in it-
even his Senior Society affairs which always held for
him immense comfort in gaiety and friendship-grew
steadily more unreal, more like the stage “set” for a
musical comedy, seen by daylight in an empty theater.
The exterior doings of existence dropped gradually away
from him-it was a quiet, steady, humorous automaton
that got up, washed its face, attended meetings of the
Lit. board, said “Hello” to every one it recognized on
the Campus, went to bed. His essence and conscious
part was entirely circumscribed by Milly and could no
more put on being away from her than a thought half-
known in the mind can without words. And the autom-
aton served him well, developing powers of dissimu-
lation that would have admitted it to an unreformed


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS”
125
57
Society of Jesuits and attributes of secrecy that would
have done credit to a modern safe. In spite of which,
as young male friends have the noses of hunting-leopards
in smelling out a love-affair, his fever was not quite as
cleverly hidden as he might have wished. But it was
supposed in general, and especially by Reggy and Steve
who held a three hours' conclave on it in his room in
Connecticut, that he was frantically épris of “that 1915-16
girl out in California” and that she had turned him
down—a theory to which the scanty letters he ever got
from Sylvia lent much color. Ken of course spread the
story of the first party, but here Philip for the first time
in his life found tangible advantage in a good moral
reputation, for his class was amused for a week and
then promptly forgot. He never went out with Ken
again, and though he and Milly often ran into Jenny
Argyle, she decided for some reason or other to hold
her tongue. Indeed she put on a grandmotherly atti-
tude toward them that cheered Philip as much as it
irritated Milly-she regarded them as two playful
youngsters wholly lacking in her own business serious-
ness and cash-purpose and tossed them informative
scraps now and then from a past and present as ex-
tended as it was gaudy.
Moreover, such cases as Philip's and Milly's were the
extreme exception. Whatever may be said by mild min-
isters on the danger of mothers sending their sons to
college, there is no doubt that both precocious mar-
riage and immature vice find a fifty times flaccider
power of resistance in the honest young working man
or the sheltered boy at home. Of Philip's class of


126
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
THE 57
BEGINNI
three hundred and fifty, about two-thirds would have
been willing to go on a “petting-party” with girls like
Milly, ten or twelve-and certainly not more--might
have proceeded to extremes had they found her attrac-
tively lacking in virtue, only one or two would have ever
thought of falling in love with her. But Philip, for
good fortune or bad, was the thirteenth currant-bun in
the baker's dozen. Sensitive, worshiping beauty,
humor and friendliness as a Parsee worships the sun,
he found all three in Milly and so clung to her from
the moment he met her with the stubborn simplicity of
an unruly child with a knife.
And here had better be given what facts about Milly
Philip ever was able to know. Her father, a broken-
down painless-dentist, with a constant penetrating
fragrance of yesterday's whiskey about him from his tal-
lowy hair to the shoes cut open over his corns, had mar-
ried in the hey-day of his existence a pretty housemaid
three years over from Ireland. At that time he figured
as a mild minor buck in bowling-clubs and the back
rooms of more home-like saloons, wore plaid waistcoats
and a solid gold tooth on his watch-chain and could
color a meerschaum pipe better than anybody in the
neighboring five blocks. But the wife had died of ty-
phoid when Milly was six years old, Dr. Stillman had
become interested in Old Crow and absorbed it with
the regularity of a medical prescription, his more re-
spectable trade had flounced away, the scrubby doctor's
mustache that was the glory of his youth had been
shaved off, and he had edged farther and farther out-
side his old prosperous neighborhood by a series of de-


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 127
creasingly successful moves. Now, sunk to a battered
half-house in a street that trailed off into frank slums
three blocks away, the dirty brass plate with “ Ulysses
G. Stillman-Dental Surgeon," was the one dingy rem-
nant of bourgeois gentility left to him. He still had
patients and made enough to keep himself and Milly-
but for amusements the latter had to take what she
could get, and being pretty and slangy and wanting a
good time she got drawn in with a small ring of her
school-friends who were taken out in cars, danced amor-
ously with, and kissed as frequently as possible by the
more daring or sophomoric of the College. It was a
juggler's life, a continual tricky balancing between giv-
ing enough so as to be taken out on another party and
not giving too much, with the inevitable “fall ” and
its consequences—though in the latter case the male
wild-oat in question was rather more likely to be an
old friend from one of the cartridge factories or one
of the smart lads whose only business seems to be with
street-corners than even the most callous of Sheff. ath-
letes.
Milly liked the adventure of it, discounted the dangers,
and walked through such little flames as she encoun-
tered unseeing as a Minor Prophet, kept straight by a
natural cleanness she had from her mother, as innate
and unconscious as the sap that runs through a tree.
She had never fallen in love till she met Philip and
had accepted the random kisses that came her way with
some gusto but more philosophic indifference as the
necessary price for dancing with able partners. For
the only passion she had was for good dancing, and


128
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
that was almost austere in the lonely seriousness with
which she pursued it. Her father, when wholly sober
which was infrequent, loved her devotedly, but in gen-
eral felt only the faded responsibility for her that he
did for what vague remains of good furniture were
still left them; if both were there to be looked at dur-
ing breakfast, lunch and dinner, that ended his con-
cern.
From October to April Philip and Milly met every
day and evening that they could. Philips Senior So-
ciety nights were exempt as was Sunday evening at first
when her father stayed at home and went to sleep in
his chair over rye and the Sunday papers. Mornings were
almost always impossible and afternoons much cut into
by classes. But three or four nights a week, as soon as
she had washed the supper dishes and Dr. Stillman
had returned to his three drinks an hour at McCabe's,
she and Philip would trot out and explore the world.
Occasionally they dared one of the beaches, Savin
Rock, or even the Taft Grill for dancing, but there
Philip was pretty sure to meet some one he knew and
he could not try too often. So they hunted out strange
dance-halls where the admission was “ 25c. for gentle-
man, lady free” and a shirt-sleeved orchestra played
discords to hugging couples. Twice Philip had all he
could do to avoid fights with townies, in spite of the
fact that he had disguised himself as well as possible
in a waist-belted suit and bright green socks, and when
he was finally able to purchase the wreck of a second-
hand car after a correspondence with his father that
was worthy of Talleyrand, they went out of New Haven


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 129
altogether and sought minor and often very disreputable
road-houses not likely to be frequented by students or
Milly's friends. Once indeed they were caught in a
raid-a moving-picture affair of blue policemen with
clubs and cowering waiters—and hid playing tit-tat-toe
in the kitchen for an hour-and-a-half to come out and
find the spiky-goateed proprietor concealed under a rug
in their car. They had driven a quarter of a mile down
the road before he arose like a ghost on Resurrection Day
and as Milly said made her heart go on like a cuckoo-
clock. He offered them anything in the house they
wanted from lobster Newburg to Santa Cruz rum, and
they thanked him politely, took his card and never went
back.
And then there was the adventure of the Bolivian
millionaire, very drunk, very affable, who sat down
at their table one night and started matters by ordering
three quarts of sparkling Burgundy. Milly sipped a
glass and refused to take any more as it felt like safety-
pins coming undone inside her head, so he sent it around
to the Hungarian orchestra and before the evening was
over the latter were playing an improvised Bolivian
National Anthem that rocked the glasses off the table
and the Bolivian was saying, “I have no children. You
will come down to Bolivia and be my chilsren and I will
have you eat off gold.” They declined the invitation and
the Bolivian was just wrapping his waistcoat around
his head to perform the dance of the mule-skinners of
Bolivia when the lights were turned off and they slipped
away in the dark, pursued by his plaintive Spanish
cries.


130 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Most remarkable of all was the impromptu Christ-
mas party on the first day of vacation, when Philip,
coming early after lunch, found Milly and Jenny Argyle
in the midst of improvising costumes for a masquerade-
social to be given by the Little Sisters of St. Micah
under the auspices of a most respectable church. Jenny
concocted out of curtain-rings, glass beads and her
warmest petticoat a cannibal-chief costume for Philip
that he said looked like a Sandwich Islander's bad
dream, Milly was a pink Pierrette and Jenny reserved
for herself the bare knees of a Highland milk-maid-
“At least I don't know if it's a milk-maid or an ad
for oatmeal I've made of myself but it shows off my
legs like a streak and they're the best part of me."
They supped lightly from delicatessen food, Philip
nearly scaring a baby into fits as he stalked to the
corner grocery with a raincoat over his costume. Then
Philip decided that as it was Christmas they must be
waits—the car was luckily outside-and by Christmas
songs and what Philip claimed were revivals of the
morris-dances, they collected three dollars and forty-eight
cents to restore the Temple at Jerusalem from a row
of families as fatly respectable as their houses in the
wilds beyond Park Street and west. A self-important
bystander demanded a license for begging and they re-
ferred him to the Little Sisters of St. Micah, Jenny
tripped him into a snow-drift as he started after them
and they were gone while he was still making choking
appeals to the police through a mouth full of snow. It
all ended in Philip and Milly winning the prize for
fancy dancing, awarded by a Little Sister as prim as a


132 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
tinized the loose golden cord that bound them together,
shook their heads, and pulled the fetter taut with a
jerk.
A dozen small accidents from a bad cold to an un-
expected squabble over the election of the next Record
Board had kept Philip from seeing Milly, except once
for an unsatisfactory snatch of ten minutes, for very
nearly a week. When he crunched through the light
fluffy snow to her door on a brilliantly cold evening
late in March, she answered his ring but he saw she
was not dressed for going out.
“What's the matter, Milly dear?” he looked closer
her eyes had had tears in them. “Do you feel badly?
You said we could go out to that Green Kettle place
and dance.”
“I don't know, Philip. I've been blue as the sky all
day—just thinking and wondering like I used to when
I was in grammar-school. Come on in—I've made a
fire for us.” She led the way to a small, crampedly-
furnished back-parlor where a handful of coal burnt
and sissed in a choked little grate. The room was as
warm as breath and dark as a pocket.
His eyes were still dazzled by the abrupt gloom
when Milly put her hands behind his neck and their
lips met in a long fantastic kiss. He did not know how
long he stood there, obliterated in her as if he were
drinking wine, but when the embrace broke into two
shaken and separate persons again he was trembling
as if he had fallen on fiery ice. The heat of that single
moment had changed them both, body and heart and
wish, as the hotness of a spurting flame brings out


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 133
writing in invisible ink on blank paper. It was a cos-
tume-party world they had inhabited so long-—a world
as sparkling as a bubble with all the foamy colors a
child gives to its games. They had lived through a por-
celain fairy-taleswung and danced in a kind and
airy vision. And the sky had been silk to look at and
the earth silk to touch as they wandered through a
country of unrealities like two sun-motes in the hollow
of a silk cocoon. This was finished. The wind that blew
over them now out of deep life was a fertile wind, but
it left them naked as scarecrows or the truth. They
were to have youth again and the darkness of complete
rapture, stiff pride, despair, and the knowledge of good
and evil, but never again first innocence.
They sat before the fire all evening, talking at ran-
dom. When they kissed the kisses were long and had
hurt in them and stinging joy.
“Milly, oh dear, oh sweet!” said Philip, who had
to make phrases. “Do you know, Milly, it's just as if
we were drowning now? Going down and down in
sleepy, sucking black water."
Milly shuddered and twisted his hand she had between
hers.
“I never felt funny like this about any one, Phil,"
she says simply. “Not even about you before. I feel
grand and loving you always and a little wicked.”
“ Wicked ? "
“I don't think you're wanted to love anybody with all
of you. With all of you from your hair to the bottoms
of your feet. They can't want you to, it makes you
80 crying happy."


134 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“I love you as much and as much more. I'll love
you till I'm nothing but dirt the wind blows or water
under the sea. I could die now, Milly, I love you so and
it's so wonderful to kiss you."
Milly stretched five slender fingers at the fire. “I
wish I was as beautiful as queens,” she said gravely.
Then presently, “Kiss me now, on my eyes when I shut
them. Oh, Philip, but I like your mouth and your
curly hands ! ”
“I like the soft of your throat and the smell of your
hair. I could kiss your hair forever and ever, Milly!”
“Never tell Them that,” she says, rapping gently on
the floor, and her wide eyes darken as sea darkens under
the shadow of an eagle as she stares with a stupefied hap-
piness that is almost terror at the picture-making blaze
and Whatever may be looking at them from beyond it.
“If you're talking about God, he might as well hear
it as not. I don't care if he hears—I don't care if any-
body hears. Your hair smells like violets and I could
kiss it forever.”
“It would get in your mouth at the end,” says the
practical Milly.
After this they were swept along by events and each
other like the scud of a summer storm. Their love-
making grew intenser and narrower, they could hardly
bear the pressure of themselves on themselves without
the other. Occasionally they returned to mere light-
heartedness—they went on picnics as the weather grew
warmer, sometimes taking Jenny Argyle along as a pre-
tense of a chaperone and then they carried on with the
laughter and pretty bustle of young deer. Once, also,


"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 135
when Milly's father was away they raided and rough-
housed his grim airless “ dental-parlor," doing all the
things that people have ever wanted to do with a free
hand at the distorted tools of dentistry, even to boring
woodpecker holes in the wall with the electric drill.
But such gaiety came only by snatches, for the most
part they were broodingly expectant like men waiting si-
lent before a window for a flash of lightning to awake
and tear the sky. Philip asked her four times to marry
him and she refused in each case absolutely flatly and
would give no reason except “I would shame you and
make you sorry before your people, Phil. I am not the
girl you should want.” He consulted Jenny Argyle on
the subject and she argued with Milly with the exas-
perated patience of a court interpreter with a stubborn
female witness. But to everything she said Milly would
docilely agree and say all that was very true but she
was entirely decided not to marry Phil.
Philip cut classes wildly and went on probation for
the first time in his whole four years. His marks went
down like mercury in a thermometer during a cold snap,
and the fact that he might yet flunk out of college be-
came ghastly clear. His sleep was a phantasmagoria
of reeling dreams and while he ate obediently of what-
ever tasteless material was placed before him, he had a
look that made John say he was undoubtedly a case of
demoniac possession and Steve remark that that was
what came from ruining your liver by not always eat-
ing over at his joint. As for Milly she began to find
nerves all over herself that she had never suspected
and prayed to have some one or something tell her


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY_LOVERS” 137
won
pushed softly. It was unlocked and opened instantly
with a startling creak.
There was a thump of bare feet on the floor above,
then Milly's voice, drowsily low, from the head of
the stairs. “That you, Jenny darling? Shut the
door.”
Philip obeyed-it closed with another denouncing
whine. Then in the voice of an asthmatic conspirator,
“It's me, Milly dear. Philip."
Silence, heavy and thick as restless oil sucked over
and drowned his words. He paused with one hand on
the banister.
Milly's voice came again, tensely changed but
drowsier, weighted with sleep.
“Philip—I thought it was Jenny Argyle—she was
coming to stay with me-Father's gone over to Aunt
Kitty's in Bridgeport for two days. I-I guess Jenny
isn't coming now-it's so late.”
Philip felt his heart thud inside him as if it were
being beaten by a multitude of tiny waves. His voice
sank lower, tuned to her voice's drowsiness, grew dark
with its slumber.
“ Can I come up?” he said, and the last word echoed.
A heavy stupor of silence fell between them, it seemed
for ages.
Then “Yes” floated down from the indistinctness
above, like the whisper of a Chinese bell rubbed once
with the hand.
He ascended with the slow, unseeing tread of a som-
nambulist. She was waiting for him, she was dressed
in loose white and her hair was down below her waist.


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 139
followed it. Also, from the foot of the stairs a girl's
voice, quacking and high.
“Mill-y!”
Pause. Jenny Argyle pets an escaped rusty curl back
into place with a hand full of glassy rings.
“Mill-y !”
Milly, drifting like a radiant silver bubble in the
black whirlpool of drenching sleep, stirs a little. Her
fingers close tighter on Philip's fingers.
“Mil-lee ! ”
Nothing but flecks of early light on the purple flowers
of the stair-carpet. Nothing but the scuffle and run-
ning of a little gust of wind that has got caught between
floor and ceiling and is fussing like a bird to get out.
“Happy days, she must be kin to the Seven Sleepers
-and they had to get up some-time!”
Jenny ascends the stairs quietly, full of that glow
of pitying virtue that is the delighted possession of all
those who wake up others. She pushes open the door
of Milly's room, her mouth round for an arousing
screech.
“Well—I'll—be" and what she has to say goes off
into an utter whisper.
They are sleeping with the abstracted smiles of the
happy dead and the saturated peace of babies after a
bottle. They are very pretty to look at, rippled over
as they are by the dark soft stream of Milly's hair.
Jenny stands there with her breast going pitter
for two minutes at least. Then a smile, not at all like
theirs, comes upon her gradually and perks her coarse
desiring mouth into something sardonic and wise with


140 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the wisdom of the burnt-and get something that is
most infinitely kind.
“ The kids," she says to herself in an awed sort of
rustle. “The poor little, nice, crazy kids ! ” and she
closes the door with profound care and tiptoes back down
the stairs again, to take the last three in a little dancing
jump. By the door she pauses once more and shakes
her hat.
“Oh, gee, I'm sorry—honest to God, I'm sorry ! ”
she repeats like a meek satirical litany, but her eyes are
sparks as she says it. She crams her striped toque down
over her head.
“Ah, Peter, you ain't young more than once," she
delivers as her final decision, chuckles lightly and
bounces off down the street.
“Phil, are you glad?”
“Oh, Milly, I can't be!”
“Are you glad for yourself?"
“Yes, but—"
“Well, I'm glad for myself."
Philip never could hear robins squabbling over a
worm or smell elm-leaves on a hot spring morning
without crushed pain and a fighting ecstasy at the
strings of his heart. He remembered Milly's bare arms,
as cream-smooth for hands to touch as calla-lilies, and
the busy cleverness of her fingers when she knotted up
her hair, wise eyes bright as a sparrow's peering at the
swimming phantom in the mirror's pallor. Milly sit-
ting cross-legged in the bowl of a chair, her small feet


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 141
playing and curling like leaves in autumn. Milly flat
in front of a fire with a book in both hands and the
cherry flush of the flame against her seeking face.
Milly burlesquing something he had done with the mock-
ing of a lovely imp—Milly's long slumber in the dawn-
light, her breast rising and falling, certain and even
sweet-Milly's eyes as she turned them to him from the
pillow, deep nights, courageous and beaten and heavy
with love.
They were married on Saturday in New York be-
fore an unhealthy old Justice of the Peace, who spent
most of the ceremony telling them the exact amount of
his fee and looked suspiciously sure that he was getting
counterfeit money when Philip overpaid him. They
spent a night and a day of bizarre honeymooning at the
Hotel Lafayette and in Greenwich Village, then Philip
had to get back to his classes and furious printed com-
munications from the Dean's Office. What Dr. Still-
man thought of his daughter's absence was hidden in a
whiskeyfied haze-she flatly told him she was going
down for the week-end with Jenny Argyle and left him
worriedly mixing up a silver filling that kept on being
added to unconsciously after her announcement, till
it was large enough to stop the back-tooth of a lion.
Jenny Argyle was the only person by necessity told
the whole story--Philip knew there would be explo-
sions enough from Phil when he finally got the news
and at that time an undergraduate could not marry and
stay in College. After Philip received his degree in
June and Milly insisted on his working for it with a
persistence of which he had not believed her capable,


142 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
and most of his text-books in the end gravitated out to
her room where she could keep a defiant watch on him-
there would be time enough to think of what to do
next. And so started a most rich and curious month and
a popular report that Phil Sellaby had gone completely
off his nut because nobody ever saw him except in chapel
and at recitations. The College waited for homicidal
mania with pleased expectancy.
Only one scene outside of Milly stuck in Philips
mind at all of those four weeks. It was Tap Day, a
late Tap Day and on a breathless and honey-heavy May
afternoon.
... Philip found himself walking on the Campus
from the gap in the fence in front of Durfee. Battell
clock had just beaten out a quarter of six. There was a
crowd on the Campus, a pallid, strained, waiting crowd.
He walked around it once completely, peering for Jack
Elbridge, the man he was sent out to tap, his face rigid
as chalk, his hands pulsing. He noticed, with the
meticulous clarity of a man under torture, that not one
of the crowd spoke to another in outright voices and
that most were glaring steadily at the ground. Three
lines of John Castine's flashed into his mind:
“I have heard a hundred half-lights murmur their
little fears,
The Dwight Hall Vice, the Dull but Nice, the
One Who Orders Beers,
I have seen that poor dumb pleading look, as in
prebutchered steers,”
and he nearly snickered and broke his stiff-collared dig-
nity into bits. Then a wave of sheer funk went over


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS”
143
him-Jack Elbridge didn't seem to be on the Campus
at all—could Keys or Bones have taken him off while
he, Philip, was mooning over irreverent rhymes? Des-
perately he started to circle the crowd again like a
sheep-dog around a flock of stubborn lambs. Thank
God, there he was, with a sick grin on his face, too, and
his hands jumping as he made play with a lighted ciga-
rette he had evidently given up all hope and was lis-
tening to such thorny Job's comfort as sincere and lov-
ing friends can always give. Philip made straight for
the center of the crowd-it fell away before him like
the Red Sea before the chariots of the Israelites—bored
in behind the wholly unconscious figure, quite sure that
he was coming for some one else, took a long breath and
smote it on the back like a piston.
“Go to your room!”
“Yeah!” and all the strained hot nervousness of the
whole crowd came out of their throats in a bursting
yell. Jack Elbridge trotted on through them to Berke-
ley Oval and Philip stalked responsibly behind him,
internally smiling all over his soul.
But as soon as he remembered Milly his nerves strung
up again, for she had managed to contract the first of
a summer cold, from him, too, he imagined, as the little
hack of a cough of his Junior year had returned with
the first slushy weather and still hung irritatedly upon
him.
The rest of the month was pure Milly and in it he
learned more and faster than he had been able to do
through the whole of his expensive education. She was
not, to put it mildly, an intellectual, but her mind was


144. THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
singularly fresh and apprehensive and she responded
to books and other manners with the sensitive quick-
ness of a compass-needle to iron. Besides this, she was
intensely companionable and her intuitions matched
and equaled all the logic he had been proudly able to
dig out of books. Sometimes he would wonder, when
they parted, how much of himself he was now and how
much of her, the two separate natures had so mingled
in both like the pollen of neighboring flowers. He
adored her, and loved her and never was tired of her
and the month became a sunny sonata, no less rapturous
because all of its grace-notes came from a single crying
theme. Even the gadfly of writing and painting buzzed
and left him—for once he was too full with Life to have
any wish to record it. He scattered the days about with
the carelessness of a deity, he and Milly held the bright
spinning globe of the world, tiny, flattened down at the
poles, patched over with sandy continents and silver
seas, in the hollow goblet of their four hands ...
Then the causeless insult came. One night near the
last day of May he noticed that Milly's eyes were droop-
ing and heavy and her hands dry and hot as he took them
up. She coughed once or twice and he asked her to
see a doctor, for each cough seemed to knife through
her body.
She died of acute double pneumonia eight days later.
Philip spent the next two weeks utterly without feel-
ing. At times he was even dully comfortable, it was
as if the touch of a surgical instrument had excised
certain centers out of his brain. He could move and
walk about and even think, but for anything that he


“FRANKIE AND JOHNNY-LOVERS” 145
did he could find no reason, he did it merely because the
voices of people told him to and must be obeyed even
if one walked like a man under cocaine through inter-
minable streets that were not worth opening eyes to
see. As for Milly, the name throbbed somewhere inside
him and would not let him rest, but everything else
had gone out like the flame of a match. Philip was as
patient as a lost dog these weeks, and as gentle, as if
all life he had had been taken away from him like the
air under the glass of a vacuum-pump.
Dr. Stillman knew that they had been married, and
John and Reggy and Steve and Dick, so Milly had been
buried with her wedding-ring on her finger. Philip
had shut his eyes at the beginning of the barbarous
funeral-service and kept them shut to the end, imprison-
ing a blind and horrible revolt that tore him with a
wild desire to take Milly in her coffin away from all
these nightmare people and keep her beside him till
he broke his heart and died. Phil and Lucia had not
been informed—and they were not coming on for his
problematical graduation. Dr. Stillman seemed vaguely
conscious of great loss, and kept looking around the
room as if expecting Milly to come in. At nights he
would go to the foot of the stairs and call up them,
“Milly!” listen eagerly and go back to his whiskey on
shuffling feet. John took charge of what arrangements
had to be made and was pointed out as Milly's ruinous
lover by all the little boys and old gossips along the
block.
Philip took no examination and did not graduate.
John and Steve spread the report of a sudden nervous


146 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
breakdown to the Dean and around the class. Most of
the truth leaked out, in the parti-colored costumes truth
wears when passed from mouth to mouth, but the four
friends managed to stop some of the worst of the lies.
Finally, on the afternoon of Baccalaureate Sunday,
Philip was alone with John in John's and Reggy's room
- they had all been as gentle as mothers with him, all
the four. Philip lifted his head from the book in front
of him and the unceasing pictures that were always
before his eyes.
“I think I'll go up to Montreal and enlist in the
Royal Flying Corps," he said tiredly. “You remember
Fat Carhart, 1915, he did it this winter. He said they
shipped you across in a couple of months.”
John looked at him. “Seriously?”
“ Seriously. Best thing in the world to do.”
“Mind if I come along with you, old fel'?”
Philip gaped at him vacantly.
“ Don't be a damn fool, Castine! Why on earth
should you ?”
“Best thing in the world to do.” John quoted with
a diffident grin. “ Got to get into things somehow.
Talked it over with Steve—he says no go on the am-
bulance stuff. Wants us all to be English officers in
whipcord uniforms. He'd come in a second. How
about it?”
Philip rose and shook the lean nervous hand up and
down.
“Oh, Castine, you blasted old fool!” he said and
burst out of the room with his eyes full of tears.
Some saving iota of common-sense inspired the five


"FRANKIE AND JOHNNY_LOVERS” 147
of them to take a preliminary physical examination the
next morning. After it was over the doctor called
Philip into the room where he kept his scales and his
articulated skeleton.
“Mr. Sellaby,” he said, smoothing his chin, “I am
sorry to have to tell you that you have most of the
primary symptoms of tuberculosis ... Now a year in
Arizona or Colorado ...»
The arms of the doctor's chair came suddenly at
Philip and he fainted for the first and only time in his
life.
That night he was lying in his bed, staring up at the
ceiling with dry and prickly eyes. Two currents of
emotional thought fought over him, sweeping through
him in the waves of chills-and-fever. Under one he felt
a sullen thick delight that the business of limping about
in a world of echoes and shadows would, if he merely
paid no attention to it, be so soon and so definitely over.
And with this came the remembrance of Milly, like the
asking note of a bugle blown from the earth, a deathly
perfume that hunted him and clung to him so that the
only desire he had was to fall and annihilate himself in
its piercing fragrance of wet violets and let whatever
mechanics of being still kept him alive collapse back
into their proper dust. The other wave was just blind
vicious fear of death—fear that approached a madhouse
vision in its intensity—and when it had taken him up
in its teeth and torn him and left him quivering it was
followed by a whisper from his rocking will that he
still had a task to sweat at and carry through. He was
not quite utterly like other people, the icy whisper said,


148 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
for better or worse he had charred into his mind the
triple-forked flame of the artist-maker. By that signa-
ture he had been since his birth ordered up into a battle
that had no cowards. “And there's no dis-charge in
the war," went through his head again and again like
the squawk of a cheap phonograph by a sickbed.
“ There's no dis-charge in the war-r.” Then the fear
would come or the scorching longing to be quit and
strive over him with the grips of exhausted wrestlers,
until it seemed that his trouble would end automatically
with a slurring break of something inside his brain.
He lay there, and the night grew, and as the stars
tramped higher the dark became a little cool. From
Wolseley, all the way across two streets and the Campus
on chance ebbs of wind came the faint drums and mos-
quito-voiced fiddles of the Senior Promenade.
Once he got up and looked through every drawer in
Dick's desk for the little .22 pistol he kept in it, no
body knew why. But Dick had anticipated him and the
thing was hidden.
After his excursion he went back and lay down again
under the incessant iron fingers of his riddle. At times
his head seemed clogged and stupid with blood that
subsided and left him wrapped in a sheet of vacant
cold. And forward-back, forward-back, with the tick
and recurrence of a clock swayed his two desires. At
last they beat him down between them into what seemed
to be a doze. At least he called it so when he thought
of it connectedly, and yet he heard each quarter of
that hour strike in turn and its proper order.
The scent that was Milly, the scent of the flowers he


BOOK IV
COLD MOUNTAINS
(1916-1917)





PHIL and Lucia met him at Frickett and stayed there
with him for a week. When they left Philip found him-
self enriched by the memory of Lucia's presence, an
absurdly warm, and expensive sweater, six pairs of the
best wool socks, a hot-water bag, which he threw down
a cañon, and a quantity of intense good advice from
Phil on the “Pull yourself together and be a man!”
order that acted upon him as mustard would on a burn.
Casual life—the casualness even of his own fairly con-
siderable success in investing inherited money-had
shaken youth's audacious elasticity out of Phil, he had
grown a little hard, a little crumbling, like the rubber
on the butt of an old pencil. Philip was still in the
stage of grief in which loss, though borne, is as every-
where as light and shadow, and the combination of
Phil's hearty appetite and bracing words of consola-
tion made him mentally seasick with a nausea of gro-
tesque fancies. Moreover, he could never have Lucia
to himself, Phil was constantly coming around the
corner or into the room with a strong cigar and a quota-
tion from Shakespeare or the Bible, his voice soothingly
low, his eye alert as a dentist's. Philip was not relieved
when they wentfor that took away Lucia's healing-
ness—but he said good-by with equanimity and spent
the rest of the evening grilling himself in his bunk of
a room with the feeling that he was a very ungrateful
son.
153


154 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
of laugh badly whitters and a fan
What he thought of Frickett he put into letters to
John Castine; his epistles home were dutiful but deodor-
ized and hence of a good deal less value. “Ah, John,"
he began, “and what was the first thing I saw as I
marched up and down the windy platform of Frickett
Junction, provoking the clerk in the pink shirt and
baby-blue sleeve garters and a face that looked as if it
had been badly whittled out of yellow pine to dry gasps
of laughter at my childish attempts to walk on one of
the rails ? (The train service between Frickett and
its spawn is every hour and a half and I had arrived at
the wrong half.) It was hold your breath, my Kipling
subaltern !-a Cowboy, a real Cowboy with feather-bed
chaps and a Mex. saddle and a yellow-eyed cayuse. I
rubbed my eyes I gathered my satiric soul in my hands
— Avaunt Douglas Fairbanks, O Bill Hart, O Diamond
Dick, the Daredevil of Demon Gulch, I know you too
well,' I cried, or would have if my lungs hadn't been full
of alkali dust. 'Go back to the movies, you five-reel
mammoth feature and leave me to Frickett Junction
and coughs and peace!', but it didn't evaporate-it
stayed—while I watched it it rolled a punk cigarette
with one hand. I felt like Annie Oakley—this is the
bad, bad six-shooter West, John, though indeed it's al-
most effete East from the place where I belong. You
will hear of me next branding bullocks with the Lazy
Lit. Triangle or eloping on a calico pony with Mamie,
the Dance Hall Queen ..."
“You ask about Frickett and the country around it-
the only simile I can think of is the more horizontal


COLD MOUNTAINS
155
part of the Bump the Bumps at Coney Island, much the
same configuration and exactly the same dirty red or
light-beer-colored ground. The only tennis-court in the
placeat one of the young Sons of the Mine's grand-
pianoed, mission-furnitured, Long Island bungalows-
slants up hill about twenty degrees and if you paste a
ball over one of the backstops it rolls down two hun-
dred feet into a gully. They have had to build the base-
ball-park at Frickett Junction, five miles down, on
the only piece of comparatively flat ground in three
counties, and that piece is due to an earthquake or some
such natural jest and was never intended by the De-
signing Architect. ... The town is a sand-pitted half-
mile of frame shacks and tents, nothing over two stories,
but a pressed-brick bank and a graft post-office whose
imitation marble pillars glitter at the eternal sun like
a set of false teeth. Take San Esteban, where I come
from-you've seen it-pull it out like an accordion,
abolish most of the churches and one or two of the
saloons, and throw it down like a necklace of brown
wooden beads in a cup between a lot of tall, cold moun-
tains and there is Frickett, Arizona. The married
miners' section is small and pretty decent-rows and
rows of unpainted, sun-cracked, one or one-and-a-half-
story doll houses all turned out by the lot and as like as
checkers but clean and with perambulators and dusty
geraniums on the short front porches; also miners' feet
in the evening in blue and white socks, a continual in-
cense to the lares of the American home. The major-
ity of the single miners live in boarding houses, tough
or tame according to districts, though some, as in West-


156
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
ern novels, camp out in tents. I'm in one of the tamer
boarding-houses occupied mostly by foremen and other
non-coms and lesser lights of the Co.
“Up past the mine, approachable on foot, is Red
Light Town, bustling at all times and lit at night by a
venomous shine of unshaded electrics. Farther up, oh, a
good deal farther up, and you go by a different road so as
not to be solicited by battered Cleopatras in kimonos, lies
Valhalla, the abode of the gods, cool bungalows mainly,
but a very few nice imitation Spanish ranchos with
open courts and red-tiled roofs. These hold the élite
-the lusciously-wealthy offspring of the Rusty Moun-
tain Co., who wear tucks or bare shoulders for dinner
the Young Harvard superintendents and managersa
few rich casuals, lungers like myself, who are well and
fat as seals out here but can only go back East under sen-
tence of death, and to whom, consequently, everything
from Chicago to Boston is as dear 'as to cadets in Hin-
dostan, the fading remnant of their liver. They are
as strangely assorted as things sold at a church-bazaar,
and most of them quite amusing and companionable
with the spontaneous free-masonry of the confirmed
T. B. One admirable silvery antique of a doctor, who
can recite pages out of Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' and
thinks Pope the greatest poet that ever contributed to
the paper-shortage, and is always in a stew about the
unnatural healthiness of Frickett-he was a gynæcologi-
cal expert before he came here and most of the rare
births roundabout are accomplished with the ease and
celerity known to rabbits. There is also an Assyrian-
nosed friendly Jew, who made a fortune in the N. Y.


COLD MOUNTAINS
157
theater and got T. B. along with it; and his tales of
various stars and asteroids are purple in the extreme.
But he is a generous cuss, has the only stock of French
cognac in town and a period victrola with God knows
how many good records in it. So I go up to the doc for
an old-fashioned whiskey cocktail and medical advice
and wild arguments on Pope vs. Shelley; and to Sam
Cohen for liqueur brandy and Chopin and more Chopin
till the room starts to sail away like a genteel balloon
into a sky full of gold-colored fluffiness and I forget
I ever had lungs or lights that were used for anything
but breathing ..."
“... Every time I draw a pay-check, and that's
as frequently as they'll let me, I'm astonished honestly
and heartily at the lax munificence of Big and Bloated
Corporations. Why, they're giving me ninety-eight dol-
lars and some odd cents each month—and, as wages
more or less run with the price of copper, if copper only
goes up enough, they will shortly hand me out yet more.
I don't see how in God's name I can be worth that much
real money to anybody outside my family during the
obligatory years. Then I go down town and pay a
quarter for a shave and ten cents for a New York paper
and notice that my board costs nearly as much as if I
were eating at Mory's. (These are 1917 prices
S. V. B.) and feel like the down-trod wage-slave that it
is not so awful much after all. However, I can live on
it with comfort though without particular enjoyment or
gust—the latter ceased when you know.
“ Considering the work I do, yes, it is gratuitously


158 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
liberal. I told you I was surveying and you say you
picture me wandering saw-toothed hills with a ball and
chain and a vague, inefficient smile. You are clair-
voyantly correct. I think I have climbed every hill
within ten miles of Frickett-I am beginning to know
the lot of them like my pajamas. Also, as I am a sort
of a general errand-boy and handy-man, I have dug
post holes, paid off men, checked ore cars, twice gone
down into the mines with a crew, but the last was ac-
cidental for I am a delicate plant and must be kept out
in the open air and well-fertilized. Also excavating
mysterious diggings in earth's bowels and helping erect
barbed-wire fences are my specialties.
“I never knew anything about the eight, ten or twelve-
hour day before or the effect of hard work, not games,
but work that actually takes all the pith and sense out
of you. Now I claim to be an authority on it all. I
know the lead, stupid, somnolent effort that gets nothing
done in the last twenty minutes before knocking off at
noon—the virtuous brightness and speed of early morn-
ing—the death-in-weariness attack that comes just in
front of the final whistle. Also the bed at 8:30 P. M.,
because you are too drunk-tired to hold your eyes open,
and the cheated feeling at six the next morning when
you've just shut off the alarm-clock that yesterday you
didn't do one damn thing but work, and sleep went by
so fast and hard you knew nothing about it. Now my
muscles are hardening, and my hands-I am a Piece
of the Cuticle of the Calloused Proletariat. I eat with
the zest of a cougar, I brown like toast. And, John, even
at nights, I am too damn sleepy to read! ..."


COLD MOUNTAINS
159
.
Tact.
“... Your letters are infrequent and so are mine
-and it is unavoidable, for such is the blasting effect
of continuous hard labor on the finer sensibilities. How-
ever, I have good news for little Philip—the Doc says
that while there's evidently something old and fruity
the matter with my internals, it's the queerest case of
threatened T. B. he ever diagnosed and sometimes he's
tempted to think it's something else entirely. Long life
to his stethoscope-I only hope he doesn't saddle me
with leprosy or botts instead. Sellaby the Muscular
Muse of Molokai, the title is tripping enough, but I'd
just as soon shirk the fact.
“By a course of judicious silences and a little pyro-
technic cursing in your own best manner, I have man-
aged to get quite chummy with some of the miners. The
Harvard lads and the Gods of the Mountain in general
(except for the Doc and Sam Cohen) hold aloof and
don't seem to be haled into bliss by my winning smile.
So with them I cultivate the Higher Interior Snottiness.
But the work-gangs are good boys-everything from
sour Scotch to indeterminate Hunky and the Irish to
fizz up the mixture in their usual ways. Some of them
belong to the I. W. W. and its headquarters, over a
pool parlor and run as 'The Frickett Mutual Benefit
Association,' has the only good modern library and most
of the interesting talk in town. While there I, for the
most part, preserve a discreet and absorbent silence
except once when I got into a mixup with an old line
Marxist on Fabian methods as opposed to sabotage and
was routed by more quotations than you ever saw on
an English exam., much to the stealthy amusement of


COLD MOUNTAINS
161
out here, endurably if vegetably happy. But even such
cow-happiness as that I find that I hoard with the sedu-
lous patience and concealments of a conspirator-I am
afraid about it and that something will take it away
from me. Also at times I rebel_about as effectively
as an ant alone in the middle of a stove. This realized,
for the unbearable sensation of bound powerlessness that
follows-no, not bound for no one is enough concerned
with you even to bind you, there is no crack open for
escape and even if there were the above would still stare
at that hopeless attempt with the same bright enormous
indifference with which it regards your crippled gyra-
tions now—for this pinioning of spirit and mind, like
a chicken sent to the butcher's, there is no cure at all
but irony, that ineffable clear attar of scorn and pain.
Irony suffereth long and is kind, is not puffed up.
Blessed are the ironists for none of them want to in-
herit the earth. Irony believeth nothing, endureth all
things. Oh, all ye works of a persistent Irony, bless ye
that Irony, praise It and magnify It forever. And so
on with the rest of the Litany and Beatitudes.
“This is not a complaint and it is not as a complaint
that you will take it-it is a medical statement of facts
in reply to your query. All that is implied in it I know
you will recognize without need for re-reading-our
moods are too kin for you ever to fail me in a major
matter. As for work of another kind from the one that
gives you a healthy sweat, I don't know when I'll be fit
for it, not now certainly, never perhaps. I have cer-
tain talents, as we both have had to admit, and I have
played with them and made toy-trains of them as we


162 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
both know. If I am ever let really use them again, I
shall not be particularly surprised—but I shall be
thankful. It is all on the clay knees of the Ironic
Spirit
“ Your talk about Oxford and the shaved lawns and
the flying men dining in Hall makes me spiritually
homesick or greensick or both. Lord Lucifer, will we
ever get drunk on English ale in a tavern together?
Yes, by Baal, and take cockshies at dons and intellectual
poets with pewter tankards and write hedge-verse under
a hedge with the tinkers who remember about George
Borrow. I tried the red-eye native to Frickett with a
new acquaintance the other evening—the hairiest man
I ever saw, a chest like a yak's or a doormat. Result,
passed out cold at 10 P. M. in a minor dive quoting
the 'Shropshire Lad,' woke up 2 A. M. and walked
home to Mrs. Grady's with a head that seemed full of
lighted pinwheels through a freezing bath of blue night.
Got up 6 A. M. as usual and worked ten hours, feeling
like a burnt out wick the while and ready to put my
lunch most of the time. Man I was helper to, Mac
Gregory, the Marxist Scotchman, very sympathetic, let
me sleep an hour at noon, and kept telling me of his
wild young days in Edinbro' and a party he and some
friends had with milk and eggs and three cans of
shellac ..."
“ You to be at Oxford-you score, blast your tortoise-
shell grin, you score! Oh, go pipeclay your silly wings!
I bet you look like a Cockney T. G. in your baggy, beery,
bloody English uniform! Think of me as an inefficient


COLD MOUNTAINS
163
specter among a host of efficient specters on a copper-
colored mountain ..."
“... My I. W. W. friends get more interesting and
informative all the time. They split into three classes
the sweets, the sours, and the half-and-halfs. The sweets
are the Utopians, the theorists, all varieties from my
modernized Highland cateran of a Scotch Marxist to
an animal of a Polish Jew, the bright, greasy kind,
who is Secretary of the local branch here and has all
the latest direct-action, gory-revolution palaver at the
ends of his long, scrimy finger-nails. Some are just
unbearable wind-bags, all constant arguers, most as
stodgily, solidly Socialists and Anarchists as other
people are Republicans or Quakers or Benevolent In-
dians. They propound large theories of indiscriminate
massacre but take it out in talk-they are as ready to
squabble and fire off long set speeches and bicker till
they fall asleep in their seats over the pettiest details
of the plumbing of Arcadia as ever a congress of Ph.D.’s
is over a disputed spelling in a worthless Elizabethan
play—they duel about the pure commune as opposed
to the soviet with the acid strife of close relatives over
a rich uncle's will. I like to listen to them—they are
in general so heavily respectable and so set in their ideas
and the Semites so convinced that they are dangerously
advanced.
“ The sours, on the other hand, are the real hard-boiled
boys, the men with grievances eating them up, the
fighting core and élan of the I. W. W. Some are mere
filibusters and frondeurs but most, at one time or an-


164 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
other, have suffered very definite injustice and are ready
to come back at Those on Top with dynamite or any-
thing else that's handy. They are the Faubourg St.
Antoine of the country and mostly recruited from the
two-fisted, brass-knuckled class of floating skilled or
semi-skilled workers, structural iron men, miners, rivet-
ers, and all such other Dekes of the laboring world. The
Masses, I think, had a story about one of them. Hop-
fields worker gets pinched and beat up as I. W. W.
They find his red membership card. “Will you quit
the I. W. W.?' 'No.' 'We'll tear up this card.'
Go ahead-I can get another one from headquarters.'
"We'll tear up that!' 'Tear and be damned—you'll
never tear what's on it out of my heart!' Rather bom-
bastic and over-fluent for a genuine sour but-it gets
the spirit quite admirably. The sours believe in the
approaching class-war and the ultimate victory of the
One Big Union,' as Peter the Hermit did in his Cru-
sade. They make up about 15 per cent. even in the
I. W. W. which is the Jacobin Club of the present labor
movement. The sweets come possibly to 15 per cent.
The rest, the loitering majority, is half-and-half, the
dough of the bread where the sweets are crust and the
sours yeast. They are just like the rank-and-file good
sheep of any party, they take the kicks, believe in the
platform, subscribe the funds and in general come when
called. Pardon this long digression on superficial data
-its all getting important here, especially as the sours
are increasing their percentage and more of the half-
and-half are turning sour, for which both special con-
ditions at Frickett and the wide labor ferment all over


COLD MOUNTAINS
165
the country are responsible. The sours are the cream
of the lot to talk to ... I am having a desultory
nibble at all brands of socialism ..."
“... I took a walk the other evening up past Prosti-
tutes' Row, in which you might be interested. No, it
was not for purposes your offensive mind will instantly
leap to, you with your R. F. C. commission and half a
dozen assorted Countesses and bar-maids to serve your
immoral ends. But the spectacle was indeed a curious
one and worth recording.
“I sauntered slowly up the road away from Frickett
as lonely and eerily sad as a coyote in full moonlight
except that I did not express myself in howls. There
were other men ahead, two boisterous, one furtive, so
I stopped and sat down on a stone till they had gone
out of sight. The night was lazy and warm as a sleeping
dog and the mountains in front of me stood up like a
scene cut out of black paper against the liquid welling
billow of white-silver behind them where the moon had
not yet risen but only trickled through in spurts and
crevices of dripping light like quicksilver running over
black cloth. I regarded the moon with an eye as cold
as hers, an eye full of irony. Then I proceeded, the
friends of Venus having passed out of vision, walked
five minutes, turned a corner and came out into a glow-
ing street.
“It was raw with lights and lined on either side by
houses about the size and shape of box-cars. Occasion-
ally there was a larger hut or middle-sized tent, pre-
liminary dance-halls I surmise, for from them proceeded


166 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
music, shrieking and thin, and the thump of feet.
Sometimes the box-cars were diversified by names
‘Josy, 'Mexique' and 'Little Evelyn '-one had
*Idlewild,' ah, there was a spiritual soul !—but in gen-
eral they were without name or number. In many the
blind of the front-window was drawn and yellow. In
others, one viewed inhabitants before a mirror, refresh-
ing the paint no doubt. In other still the inhabitants
walked the porch in kimonos or rocked, and with them
all, as with Pater's Mona Lisa, the eyelids were a little
weary. They called at me, they displayed charms and
moved about. Come up and see me, dearie!' 'I'm
Rosie, I'm an awful nice friend to you boys.' 'Won't
you come in, honey?' 'Say, sweetness, what's your
hurry?' and all such banter. I promenaded the street
imperturbably, a chill goblin in a forest of cawing gob-
lins. At its end I smoked a cigarette and looked at the
mounting huge cheese of the moon.
“ Once I saw a man come out of ‘Idlewild,' a man in
a white Panama hat. He looked as ridiculously out of
place as he would have at a formal wedding or in hell.
He had all the satisfied sleekness of a cat as he made off
down the road. I examined him for pad-feet and a
waving tail. If I didn't sleep so wearily hard at night
that hat of his would mix unfortunately with my
dreams.
“ When I had looked enough at the moon, I went back,
tasting my mouth and finding it bitter. This time the
cries that pursued me were more insistent, even a little
strained. I was spoiling trade apparently by my demure
behavior. A mulatto, purplish with powder, even rose


168
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“I am your golden corpse, my friend,
A corpse that you have seen.
Never again you'll make me live
Nor ever kill me clean."
The next was hot and galloping,
A skull within a cloak.
His fingers were like clicking bones,
He coughed before he spoke.
“ To see What Was, my empty boy,
Has sacked you like a town!
And dare you look at me, at me,
And stare What Will Be down?
“I am the shadow at your soul,
The nightmare that you see.
When all your fires are silly ash
Men will remember me.
must be es
bile I swept baut like
“ Drink to the poison you must be !”
And, shrieking out like birds,
The two swept back along the track
While I fought long for words.
“ Though broken up like Folly's speech
And vainer than her boasts,
I have one shield I shall not yield
For any troop of ghosts!
“ A bloody taste is in my mouth,
A black sardonic smart.
Sweet is the wine of honest men,
But this wine's from my heart.
“ The mind that has such gall to drain
No torments can dismay.
And there is bitter peace for him
Who drinks his heart away.


COLD MOUNTAINS
169
“Pass on like foam before the wave,
Lost specters of a youth!
For though that draught grows old with pain,
Its least bleak drop is Truth.”
They dimmed like water in the sun,
They faded with a cry.
And left me like an angry tree
That surges at the sky.
I tossed my hat above the boughs
And spat and swaggered South.
The black heart's blood within my lips,
The verses on my mouth.
“... Wilson's last note to Germany is over all the
papers—I suppose America will be in it in a month now
at most, in spite of the ideas of my wiciouser colleagues
in the I. W. W. on the subject. Well, in five more years,
if the war drags out that long, I may even pilot a Spad
myself, who knows? Then watch out, you Daredevil of
the Clouds, you Yale Face!...”
So Philip got through the winter and the spring
and a multitude of puzzled consultations with his doc-
tor. The day after America declared war he tried to
enlist and was rejected with what he complained of as
almost indecent haste. April passed and May-it was
very nearly a year since Milly had died. He kept her
feasts still and always and carefully, and pain would
come in a recurrent stroke, squeezing down over his
heart like a hand, but in him, as in a city that has been
rocked to its foundations by earthquake, the major shock


COLD MOUNTAINS
171
any degree of certainty, it followed that canvas and
paper were, where he was concerned, to stay blank. And
if he couldn't write with his arterial blood he wouldn't
write with anything else and make tushery or costume-
romance. And so much is probably too much about his
moods—the progress of a mental or physical convales-
cent is a genuine saga enough but apt to be a stupid one
as well, if minutely recorded, unless the convalescent in
question is one of those two fascinating people, myself-
or you.
Philip got as hard as a brickbat and astonishingly
healthy, except for rare spasms that left him weak and
rancid with nerves; so healthy in fact that his doctor in-
sisted on calling in various specialists. He was given a
raise by the Company, and the raise was not wholly due
to the skying price of copper. They were losing men
and he was spoken of in weary conferences between
divisional superintendents as a “steady young chap with
a chance."
The I. W. W. and Sam Cohen took fewer of his off
hours, the “ doc” and an elegant young Princeton pro-
consul with a Farmington wife, boisterous year-old baby,
and something mysterious the matter with his pancreas,
more. “ I'm afraid I'm gradually being made a respect-
able citizen, John,” he wrote, “and, O Lord, as the story
goes, how I do dread it! But it's good to have some-
body to talk football and the New York deb. gossip with
and have them give you tea out of luster china and real
marmalade full of orange-strings with fat pieces of
toast. Also whiskey that isn't alcohol plus caramel and
pure spirits of wildfire. But why should I tell these


172 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
things to you when you are buying Pol Roger at some
absurd number of depreciated francs a case?”
Meanwhile the mines began to grow sultry and rest
less, little clumps of men gathered in the street after
the knock-off whistle, there was much loud talking in
saloons, and the words that went through the mass of
the miners like a fuse through a bunch of fire-crackers
were “ Six a day or quit,” “Two men on a machine,"
“Strike.” The grievances were real enough—most
other mines in the state worked two men on a machine,
a proceeding that made for safety on the men's part
and expense on that of the company; six dollars a day
with war-prices bought no more than three-and-a-half
two years before. On the other hand the American Army
private was getting thirty dollars a month. But neither
worker or employer had perspective—both saw the im-
mediate thing and nothing beyond it, the miner the
extra nickel on the price of a can of beans, the boss the
extra dollars spread like grit over his payroll to cut his
war-profits. It must be remembered that the country
at large was still in the “Business as Usual” period of
the second month after the declaration of war. And
through the bungalows of Valhalla was trotted a rustling
Red bogey-man and “it's all these dirty foreigners
they aren't Americans—and that damn I. W. W. crowd.”
And between the sunburnt rows of shacks that made up
Frickett went the word by grapevine telegraph, “The
big stiffs are going to get a bunch of gunmen up from
the city and freeze us out.” So the pot seethed and
simmered and began to boil over-and there appeared to
stir it one of those “strong” men in authority who


.. COLD MOUNTAINS
173
seem born for the purpose of making colossal mistakes.
Philip was down at I. W. W. headquarters two nights
before the strike vote was taken. It was sweltering
June and the tin roof over the “ Frickett Mutual Bene-
fit Association " radiated heat like the lid of a steaming
kettle, but the three long rooms like bath-houses put end
to end were packed and sweaty with men. Philip had
come with Mac Gregory and saw a few known faces in
the jam; Sour Scattergood, the philosophical anarchist
who had once taken part in a riot led by William Morris
and still carried two white welts from his cheek to his
jaw from an affray with the Liverpool police; Izzy
Wicez, the Polish secretary, dirty and scented, nuzzling
about the crowd like a cur-dog picking up scraps; Bud
Egan, a kicking colt of a twenty-year-old, the best
rough and tumble fighter in town; Honest Louis, the
steady, peaceable Swiss who read the Appeal to Reason
as if it were a direct revelation from the Creator and
settled the various little disputes that were brought to
him to judge with the even-handed justice of Justinian;
twenty or thirty of the keenest and most intelligent men
in their gangs; a sprinkling of fire-eaters and trouble-
makers; a host of the vast indifferent. The crowd had
the heaving restlessness of oily water, they talked little
and mostly about big-league baseball, the war, the prices.
“ The fules, the silly bits of fules, they dinna ken what
they're here for,” grunted Gregory.
“Well, what are they here for, Mac?”
“A parcel of nonsense. The strike commeettee's in
session yon”—he waved his stubby hand at the front
room—“but what gude can they do the commeettee by


174 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
crackin' wi' other fules like themsel'? All they need is
some word to tell their wives, the fushless people!”
“Will the strike come off, do you think? ”
“I dinna ken. It's a cuddy's trick, strikin' the noo."
Bud Egan wormed over toward them.
“Mac, Phil,” but his eyes were wary as he glanced
at the latter.
“ Think they'll put it across to-night, Mac?” he asked
lippingly.
“I dinna ken, lad. I dinna ken.” But he cracked
knotty fingers, calloused and scarred from the handles
of tools, against each other and his eyes were bright
blinks of gray.
“ Aye, but I'd like fine to be in a strike, a real strike,
just the one more time.” His mouth set rigid as the
lips of a vise. “A real strike wi' heads broken in the
streets." He repeated, “ A real strike. Mon!”
“I haf seen too many strikes bust into half,” came
a deep boom over his shoulder, Honest Louis, “ they are
no good. The Company bring up their scaps and the
bulls they lift up their clups, and that is all. And
then your name is on the black-list and the next time you
get a job and you strip your clothes for them to look
at your sveet pretty self—the doctor peeks through his
four eyes at you and says, ‘Bum heart! No good! Ged
oudt!' And you—proot!” He exhaled a balloon of blue
tobacco smoke. Mac chuckled creakingly—the physi-
cal examination required by the companies and its
use to disqualify undesirables was an open joke at the
time.
“Say, I'd like to see them try that business on me!”


COLD MOUNTAINS
175
lipped Bud Egan. “Say, I'd like to see any wise guy
tell me I'm sick!”
“They'll tell you you're sick enough any time, Bud,
and prove it, if you don't act sweet and nice to every
stinking scissors-bill of a foreman that's too good to
eat lunch with his own gang,” put in Sour Scattergood
and “ Sour, Sour, my vriendt, you are not the lad that
should tell the boy to be sveet," from Honest Louis.
“When we have the One Big Union, Sour, ve will make
you eat six kinds of sveet pie a day," and the four went
off into a discussion of the crimes of the A. F. of L., the
bosses, and Gompers. “He iss a jellyfish, that Sam, a
jellyfish with glasses," while Philip scrouged back
against the wall and looked around him. Everywhere
was the same queasy whisper of question and answer,
the same talk, drifting and purposeless as seaweed, the
same uneasy milling to and fro like cattle before a
thunder-storm.
A starchy voice burst out of a group across from him,
shrill as a tin whistle. “ The war? To hell with the
war! The bosses get fat on it and the poor boobs who
enlist get a 'Gates Ajar'-that's all! Oh, America's the
hell of a fine country for the guy with a million iron
men but it's the hell of a punk country,” A leather-
faced miner was talking to a friend who kept chewing
a wedge of tobacco over and over like a cow with a
familiar cud. “And Joe he writes me from camp and
says he's been made a corporal. Pretty fine, Buck?”
“ Sure.” “Well, I write and tell him what the hell
does that mean and how high is a corporal, for it just
seems like it was a minute ago when me and Molly put


170 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the little sneezer into his first pair of long britches, eh,
Buck?” “Sure.” “An'he sends me a postcard back
and says a corporal ranks a K.P. but is way down below
a shavetail like the wheels is under a tin lizzie. Why,
Molly and me thought we'd split when we got that post-
card, wouldn't you, Buck ? " " Sure.” Mutual wheez-
ings of mirth and expectoration. A saloonkeeper in a
flopping white vest went nosing from one bunch of
talk to the next like a little, mild, worried rat. “Say,
boys, now don't you go and strike on us—you'll do us
all dirt if you strike. Why, I was just going to get a
nice big plate-glass mirror up from Phønix to put over
the bar in my place, and now if you boys go and strike
on us, it'll go and bust business wide open and I won't
be able to get a thing, not a thing. My God, why did I
ever locate in a mining town, anyhow? I've done a
lot of nice things for you boys, you know—"
But such high spots of chatter were infrequent. Most
of the random constituents of the Irish stew of humanity
just stared about, whittled at the window-sills, smoked
steadily or spat inaccurately toward the three tin cus-
pidors. The minutes perspired away, Philip dripped
and leaned against the wall. The reëntrance of Izzy
Wicez, full of unpleasant importance, shut off the vague
growling hum of the talk completely. Izzy flapped his
arms like wings for perfect silence—he mounted on top
of a bookcase.
“Men," he yelled in a high whine and the room
grew suddenly electric and thick and tense"menI
have an announcement to make to you. For the strike
committee.” Mac Gregory was knocking one fist against


COLD MOUNTAINS
177
the other fist, Sour Scattergood had the beatific eyes of
a saint before a judgment, Honest Louis looked puzzled
and hot and scared.
“ The strike committee has not yet been able to de-
cide anything. They will meet here to-morrow at the
same time. Thank you.” He jumped down, disinflated,
and an explosion of laughter followed his words. All
tension evaporated instantly like a bubble stuck through
with a straw. The crowd started to dribble away, a
few humorous and indecent comments on Izzy spotting
the general disgusted noise of talk and feet.
“Ah, Christ,” said Bud Egan peevishly, “ that's the
way it always is. Wouldn't you know it?”
“No strike," murmured Honest Louis inside his
throat. “No strike—that is gudt. Now I can buy the
express-wagon for my kid." He smiled immensely.
Sour Scattergood fell into the unprintable and Mac
Gregory relapsed to dialect. Philip felt as relieved as
if he had been hauled up again to firm earth after
swinging on fraying ropes in a bosun's chair slung
over the edge of a precipice.
Nevertheless, eight days later, the miners struck.
Philip heard talk about trouble, saw straws of trouble
floating and dipping in the soup of every-day conversa-
tion, but trouble, in any capitalized or carnivorous form,
materialized not at all. He had been sent on a week's
trip, half-survey, half-inspection, to an undeveloped
property of the Company's some fifty miles up state as
aide to the Princeton proconsul. Smoking beside a
camp-fire with the intense night stars above them crowd-


178 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
ing the plushy sky for place, all the concerns of Frickett
and the universe in general seemed as far removed and
unimportant as a dance of midges in June. When he
got back, two-thirds of the miners were out, the streets
filled with them as if every day were Sunday. There
was no real disorder, only a few loose threats from
boys or drunks. His boarding-house was largely ten-
anted by foremen and shift-bosses, loudly confident of
the strike's collapse inside a month. There was picket-
ing at the mouths of the mine and mine offices, and
guards around the mine-properties, but both bosses
and workers were disciplined except now and then in
epithet.
The whole town had the atmosphere of a poker game
with two pat-hands trying to bluff each other out.
Once, going over to the mine-office for his pay, Philip
passed Mac Gregory on picket. A sour and friendly
grin came over the man's face.
“ Come on over and join the party, laddie!” he yelled
companionably; and Philip, " Sorry, Mac, but you guys
are holding up the war.” All the sympathies of his
mind were with the Company as long as they played
fair—the fact at issue now was to beat Germany, that
effort the strike retarded and so must be broken as soon
as possible. On the other hand, his feelings and emo-
tions ranged completely beside the men—what fair wages
and decent living and working conditions they had, had
been, in general, battered out of unwilling companies by
force and the one weapon of the strike. Also an uneasy
thought kept humming inside his head wondering if it
were wholly worth while to abolish injustice abroad, if


COLD MOUNTAINS
179
while doing so, injustice was set steadier in the saddle
at home.
“ These loudmouths who talk about the damn ignorant
laborers are gradually dyeing me carmine," he wrote
John. “Their only solution for the labor-problem is a
machine gun-oh, when will anybody show up Amurri-
canism ? Amurricanism is subscribing $10,000 to the
Liberty Loan and ditching the Government out of $50,-
000 on streaky contracts. It is marching in Prepared-
ness parades and saying you can't look out for employees
who enlist. · It is calling Spy' and Traitor' and
‘Bolshevik’ like a bad little boy on a street-corner and
then breaking food-regulations in private like a bad
little boy stealing candy. All Amurricans wear the
Amurrican flag on their collars and have tricolor ice-
cream on the Fourth of July. They want blank lettres-
de-cachet and clean cells in a mammoth Bastille for
all
“ Socialists (every kind from Charles Edward Russell
to Bill Heywood),
“Writers (except of cheerful, patriotic stories about
Pershing's Sammies),
“ Furriners,
“Suffragists (damn hens !)
“ Cripples,
“Opponents of the President,
“Admirers of the President,
“ Personal Enemies,
“People Who Can't Support Selves or Family on
What They're Paid,
“Free Speakers,


180 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ Art (except piecrust movies and smutty magazines),
“ Interesting People.
“ Some day you and I will write a history of the Amur-
ricans. It will begin with the Congress that badgered
and baited Washington, go down through To the
Victors Belong the Spoils!', the Carpet-baggers and
the Wavers of the Bloody Shirt, past the Pure Brass
and Bad Canned Meat or Hanna Epoch and end up
with Anthony Comstock and the Committee on Public
Information. And, oh dear, it will make the 'Inno-
cents Abroad' seem as humorless as the book of Jere-
miah. Not that I don't dislike the milk-shake Nihilist
and the poison-ivy professional walking delegate of the
type that ruled when the Unions tyrannized San Fran-
cisco just as much. I do. But the latter are fewer,
right now at least, and the Amurrican ramps about unas-
suaged."
The draft came and Philip registered for it. The
specialists summoned by his doctor and paid by Phil
had arrived, looked respectable through pince-nez and
delivered an opinion. The tuberculosis diagnosis was,
though tempting, false. The trouble was peculiar, con-
nected with the canals of the ear and a once-infected
tooth. Philip thought they had the attitude of Pro-
bation Officers with a wayward but attractive girl as
they spoke tenderly of the canals of his ears. He must
have an operation. He must be drained— “The whole
thing makes me sound like a piece of marsh they want
to reclaim for cultivation," is the tag-end of a letter.
He would certainly not be fit for military service for
two years, probably not for five, and the operation had


COLD MOUNTAINS
181
best be postponed a month or two that the system might
be still further built up.
When they had left the room with the stateliness of
departing penguins, Philip executed three steps of a
double-shuffle and started chanting the chorus of
“ Christopher Colombo" before he remembered where
he was. He had not recognized how binding and leaden
the sentence of permanent disablement had been upon
him, until now it was suddenly lifted at a touch. It
was like walking after walking in armor-like waking
out of the racing disquiet of fever and looking at the
sun on the wall and feeling cool and knowing you were
going to get well.
“If they only hadn't looked so blessed important I'd
have bought them all the liquor there was in town!” he
confided to his Princeton friend. The other shook hands
ceremoniously.
“ Which is the cue for ?”
“Well, really, I think you owe me one. You don't
get cured of T. B. every twenty-four hours."
“It would have about the same effect on my
Scotch, Phil, if you did," sighed Princeton. “Now
where on earth does Louise think she keeps the ice-
pick?”
"By the way,” said Princeton, later in the evening,
“I think they're going to pull off a trick play in a
couple of days that will bust this strike into little
pieces.”
“ So? What's the idea ?”
“Well, I really don't know very much about it-some
stunt of that film-hero sheriff of ours. What I do know


182 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
is confidential. You won't spread it to the scarlet com-
rades?”
“Not unless it's anything important.”
“Maybe so, maybe not. Except that the Company
and a lot of the substantial people in town are getting
pretty sick of the present mess. It's holding up our
government shipments, you know. And everybody's
scared out of their shoes if you go and say “Boo!
I. W. W.!' to 'em.”
“I know that, good Lord, the strike's been peaceable
enough so far.”
“Well, it's going to stay peaceable. The sheriff's up
on his ear and the thing's to be settled, one way or
tother, before the end of the week.”
“ Federal troops ?”
“Nothing as drastic as that. Phil, has anybody in
the Company ever called you for being so thick with
the hard-boileder of the miners ?”
“No," stiffily; “ didn't know I was so important to
the Company."
“Now don't go off your head. But I've heard some
ungodly things and stopped them as well as I could—
from hearing that you were one of the big guns in the
National I. W. W. to having told me confidentially
that you and Bennet Starbox were planning to wreck
the mines with TNT.”
“Well, I don't even belong to the I. W. W.—for
one thing I don't agree with them about the war. And
Bennet Starbox is the best lawyer in town and doesn't
know me by sight. But, good Lord, how screamingly
silly!"


COLD MOUNTAINS
183
“It is, but you know how people get. Look here,
I've got a job I want done up Cripple Cañon this week-
will you go up and do it?”
“ And have all the poor fools you've been talking
about say that I fled from whatever vague wrath you're
prophesying to come? Not for this child."
“It isn't that—it'll show where you stand, that's all.”
*“ On the fence?”
“No-with us.”
“But suppose I'm not with you?” The little red
devil of argument is cakewalking around in Philip's
head.
“You're bound to be. Look here—there may be
trouble there may not be. If there is, are you going
to act like a simp or not?”
“Like a simp, Peter, whatever happens."
Peter laughs in spite of himself.
“Oh, damn it all! I can talk myself dry but I sup-
pose you will.”
In a black early morning Philip is stirred into half-
aliveness by many feet going past under his window.
The feet do not have the casual clop and shuffle of a
crowd, they crackle like a marching column, thudding
by in ranks and under orders. He wonders what the
dickens has happened-an accident at the mine?
blinks at the radium figures of his wrist-watch and sees
it is only a quarter past four. When he wakes again,
with a sudden leap from dream to complete conscious-
ness, it is six and the room is dripping with a pale
pearly wash of even light.


184 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
He dresses and goes down to breakfast, marveling at
the corpse-like quiet of the house. Something curious
must be doing, the air is as thick and fateful as air
before a wind-storm. On the long table is a clutter of
dirty dishes that no one has taken away and the pink
toothpick-glass has turned turtle and scattered its little
wood nastinesses around like spillikins. He calls.
“Oh, Mrs. Grady!”
There is a scurry from the kitchen like the noise of
a frightened cat. A head with a knob of streaky gray
hair-fluffy and wild as if it had been pulled out of
the middle of an old mattress—pokes cautiously through
the door.
“For the love of the Holy Virgin, who's that?”
“ Only me, Mrs. Grady, Mr. Sellaby. What's up?
Why has everybody gone out ?”
The head takes courage and, emerging, shows itself
stuck on to a figure like that of a badly-stuffed rag doll,
wearing a dirty blue silk sacque, the cast-off of some
wealthier doll, over an apron spotty with kitchen acci-
dents.
“Praise be, Mr. Sellaby, but I thought all the time
it was one of thim murderin' wobblies! They're cleanin'
thim out of town, the bize are the sheriff, God bless
his eyes, has put it all in the pa-aper!”
“ Cleaning who out?”
“ The rids, sirr, the rids. They've got a thousan'
speci-al deppyties with guns, and a thousand from the
Citizens' Protectible Le-ag with more guns, and they're
roundin' thim up by the Post-Office and shootin' thim
down by lashins and lots and I wouldn't go out in the


COLD MOUNTAINS
185
street if I was you! Grady's with the Protectible Le-ag
and they've give him a gun and a club and if he doesn't
come back with a bomb put through his stomach I'm
not the honest woman I've been for these thirrty years.
But read it, darlin'," and she thrusts into Philip's hand
a newspaper screaming with headlines that are, by some
unconscious satire, a most vivid red.
Philip glances at the third extra the Frickett Ban-
ner has published in fifteen years. “Keep Off the
Streets To-day, Women and Children! ! !” roars the
opening sentence. Then, in a double-ruled box down
the front of the page, “ Proclamation! !”
“All loyal Americans ... by the authority vested
in me as Sheriff of Frickett County ... to arrest on
charges of vagrancy, treason and being disturbers of
the peace of Frickett County, all those strange men
who have congregated here from other parts and sections
of the country for the purpose of harassing and intimi-
dating all men who desire to pursue their daily toil ...
rights as Americans ... we can no longer stand or
tolerate such conditions ... This is no labor trouble
... etc., etc.” At the end a flaring signature, Thomas
D. Vanguard, Sheriff of Frickett County. The
“strong” man has known his hour and run head down
into his folly.
At first Philip is inclined to laugh—some of the
statements are so pompously ridiculous. As if every-
body didn't know that it has been one of the most or-
derly strikes in the history of copper! As if any one
were expected to believe this fairy-tale of a multitude
of blood-lusting Bolsheviks springing up from behind


186 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
every clump of sagebrush for the one purpose of dis-
turbing the peace of Frickett County! Then he looks
at Mrs. Grady and sees that her face is gray. “It's
lucky we are at all, not to have all our throats cut by
thim wobblies while we slep’,” she says, her hands
trembling over her apron. But the thing is prepos-
terous! But,
A little slow flame of anger begins to fume and heat
in Philip's mind. Whatever the rights or wrongs of
the strike itself, this business has nothing to do with
either. It is not American, it is not even Amurrican,
it is blatant exercise of fist-law by bull-minded stupidi.
ties in power.
“ Can you give me a sandwich and a cup of coffee,
Mrs. Grady?” he says. “I think I'll go out for a while
and see the fun.”
About this time Sour Scattergood, the philosophical
anarchist, his sock feet propped on the rungs of a
chair, his back to the wall, is reading with great ap-
proval a paper-covered volume of Robert G. Ingersoll's
speeches, nodding his lean, scarred head, like the head
of a tired cab-horse to the ten-cent-store-jewelry glit-
ter and flow of the prose. A neat black revolver lies
on the pillow of the bed beside him, uglily out of place.
There is a turmoil outside that shakes the rickety
stairs. Hands rattle the door-knob, pound on the flimsy
door.
“ Scattergood! Oh, you Scattergood !” shouts a suety
voice.
Scattergood lays his book on the bed, marking the


COLD MOUNTAINS: 187
page. “What's up?" he says pleasantly. He is an-
swered by the yell of a dozen throats.
“Come out here, Scattergood, we're going to ship you
out of town! Come out, you damn Red! Take your
medicine ! ”
Scattergood removes his spectacles and puts them on
the bed beside the book.
“ Got a search warrant?” he asks in a high voice,
“or a warrant for my arrest ? ”
“Don't need one for guys like you! We've got the
goods on you! Come on out—there are a bunch of us
here with guns ! ”
Scattergood's hand fists over the neat black revolver.
“Go to hell,” he remarks distinctly.
A shout comes back like the belling of dogs who have
treed a coon. A panel of the door splits in under a
pistol butt. Scattergood shifts his chair a trifle, takes
scrupulous aim and fires.
The spat of the sound like the pop of a big hot chest-
nut splitting open is followed by an instant of utter
silence and the wet voice of a man saying, “ Christ! I
got it!” Then the Citizens' Protective League breaks
down the door.
Ten minutes later the room is full of the vacant, gold-
dusty peace of a summer morning. There are spots
and streakings of blood, already darkening, like the
stains on a butcher's block where the Citizens have car-
ried their dead man down the stairs. Scattergood's
spectacles and book lie on his bed—a gust of air
rufies the pages of the “ Speeches of Robert G. Inger-
soll.” Scattergood's feet protrude without curiosity


188 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
from his door into the hallway, an air of extreme de
tachment in their gray socks. A fly hums in through a
window and flirts busily down to inspect him.
Philip gets out into the street about seven despite
the religious protestations of Mrs. Grady. He looks up
it and down it-and in both directions it is perfectly
empty like the street of one of those shells of towns
that a boom has made, deserted and left lying like an
eviscerated tin can in the sun and the sand. He walks
two blocks up toward the drugstore and is startled at the
loud solitary sound of his own feet. Suddenly five men,
armed with rifles, slide out of a saloon and cross the
street toward him at a dog-trot.
“Here, stranger, what's your business ?”
Philip produces his identification-pass to the mine-
offices.
“ Got anybody who knows who you are?"
Philip names the Princeton proconsul.
“Guess you're all right-sorry we haven't an extra
gun, you could come along with us. You can get a
gun and a badge over at the sheriff's office if you want
one."
Philip smiles. “Thanks.”
“No trouble.” They are very polite. “Sorry to stop
you but that's our job."
6 Sure.”
They trot back to their ambush. Philip notices that
they have the hot serious eyes and clipped speech of
little boys playing a game. The meeting gives him a
thrill of pure adventure, it is such ridiculously good


COLD MOUNTAINS
189
melodrama. Going past the drugstore a long “Ssss”
hisses into his ear like a sigh of escaping steam. He
turns, the proprietor, a fat keg of a man, who rejoices in
celluloid collars and tie-clips, is beckoning him franti-
cally.
“Better come inside for a spell,” he whispers as a
leading villain might say “ Hist!” “ They have just
went and killed three men in the house next door. I
heard the shots as plain. And then there was groans ! ”
The fact that murders and groans were nothing but a
disturbance caused by a near-sighted girl falling down
the back-stairs and believing them a trap laid by the
I.W.W., for her special benefit, has not reached him yet
to spoil the taste of his fantasy.
Philip hesitates. “Think I'll go up to the Post-
Office.”
“You'll get shot sure! They're shooting 'em down
in rows up there!”
Philip nods. “I guess they won't shoot me,” he says
and turns the corner.
The Post-Office, a pillared architectural blight in
the center of town, is the point on which the five armed
posses of special deputies and Leaguers have been or-
dered to converge with their prisoners. As Philip ap-
proaches it, he notices that some forty or fifty uneasy
miner-pickets are still undisturbedly guarding the
mouth of the mine. Suddenly and in a dramatic flash,
like a scene seen out of a Pullman window at night,
a small compact gang of armed Citizens swarms out
under the false Greek portico of the Post-Office itself
and is on the miners like ants on a piece of apple. There


190 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
is a babble of talk from the latter, and some ironic
cursing and shouting, then they are marched down in
front of the Post-Office and the Citizens stand guarde
ing them in careless postures. One prisoner asks per-
mission to get a drink of water from the office cooler
and emerges, wiping his mouth. Most of them sit down
or sprawl in the scanty shade-two start playing stick-
knife and get as absorbed as if they were ten years old.
The Citizens are extremely casual, a couple of them
bring out chairs and make themselves comfortable in
the road. A sentinel crosses over to Philip.
“What's your business, Bill?”
Again the identification-pass and the name of Peter
Lascelles. The sentinel offers tobacco, which is declined.
“ Guess we'll clear 'em all out of here by noon to-day,"
he remarks as he goes back to his post.
Philip starts to turn back toward Mrs. Grady's, half
his anger taken away by the obvious good humor with
which the affair is being conducted on both sides. As
he does so, though, the end of the street is black with
the head of a singular procession. Posse One has done
its job and returned on schedule there must be three
hundred Citizens in hollow column swinging rifles or
flourishing pistols as they saunter along. In the center
of the human sandwich like the pips inside the cut
half of a pear is an indiscriminate mass of miners and
loafers with a sprinkling of white-shirted business men.
One woman of thirty-five is near the middle of the
column and she carries her head up as proudly as if it
were set on a pike. In the front rank, between two
overalled miners, walks the immaculate Bennet Starbox,


COLD MOUNTAINS
191
who has openly told his friends that he thought the
strikers had cause to strike.
So Philip, for the first time, saw the bitterest force
for disintegration in America, the mob. They came at
a measured pace, they were under commands, they car-
ried arms, but the mind and will of every Citizen there
was sunk into the mind and will of the weakest and
silliest and most bullying and brawling in their ranks.
The parade came closer and closer, as strange a prodigy
on the everyday street as a dragon, a beast with the
brains of a hen and the body of an elephant, a beast
that had the brutality and force of a tiger and the
jackal cowardice of a street-cur snapping at men's
ankles. Philip looked at it and felt physically sick.
The marching halted, the prisoners were herded to
gether.
A loud red-faced man came by Philip, patting his
rifle as some uncles pat children's heads. “Pretty good
stuff !” he sang to himself. “ Pretty good stuff! Run
all these dirty Reds out of town and give 'em a coat
of tar and feathers, that's the ticket! Pretty good stuff
—hey, brother?” and he jerked Philip playfully in
the ribs with the butt of his weapon. The hearty gesture
set all the dry fierce rage Philip had kept in for two
hours crackling like burning brushwood.
“You big stiff !” he shouted passionately, “you big
fat stiff! I think it's the dirtiest thing I ever saw !”
His voice fell heavily off into astonished silence as
a body falls into a pool. He stood there with hands
twitching and a tingle of hot blaspheming mirth ran
all over him.


192 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“Get in with the rest of those wobblies, you lousy
Red !” said the red-faced man, recovering from his
0-mouthed amazement, and this time he poked Philip in
the stomach with the barrel of his rifle.
Philip once tried to assemble and write out the events
of the next three days in an hour-to-hour diary. He
only got about half-way through the task and then tired
of it, but this is about the way it would have run.
8 A. M. Still lined up in front of the P. O. What
a mixed-pickle lot of people, all swept out struggling
together in this general patriotic “house-cleaning," with
about as much in common with each other as the original
population of the Ark! One of those pale grubs of
boys that run pool-rooms and spit through their teeth
is whimpering, “I'll get these stinkers yet, by Christ
by Christ, I'll get the dirty stinkers yet!” A miner,
a six-foot statue in dusty bronze, argues mildly with
him. “It ain't right, buddy, and the Gov'ment'll stop
it. Why, I've lived and done my job here in Frickett
twelve whole years!” A Greek, who owns a scrap
of a grocery down-town, rolls liquid eyes and seven-
teen-jointed curses at the C. P. L. sentinel. “I leave
a store-a boys run off wiť a stuff—a woman an'
a keeds they have nothing to eat an'a die!” Bud Egan
is telling anybody who will listen, “Well, after this I
packs a gun when I goes to work. I packs a gun in my
pants and any squeeze that butts into me gets somepin'
outa it.” Truly, a sort of Ishmael's parliament of lost
dogs and under dogs !


COLD MOUNTAINS
193
8:30 A. M. Good Lord, are they going to deport all
the miners in Frickett? There must be nearly two
thousand of us now. That roast-beef-faced fool who
petted me with the gun is talking about Amurrica. I'll
bet a crayon-portrait of Washington that he's draft
age and one of Jefferson full of whiskers thrown in
that he'll claim exemption.
9:30 A. M. Five miles of slogging through rusty
dust, the whole straggling curio-collection of us, to the
ball park at Frickett Junction. Accompanied by bois-
terous wit of the “ Better look out, we may be going to
wash you!” type. Chivied into the ball park while
guards about as heavily armed as British battle-cruisers
parade grandly up and down with an eye to their own
picturesqueness. As one of them is round as a squab
and another perishing skinny, they are not too impres-
sive against the skyline. Attempted singing of the
“Star Spangled Banner” by Citizens and Special
Deputies, quite successful at first and we join in. We
are instantly told to keep our mouths shut, patriotic
airs are not for the likes of us. The band gets three
bars ahead of the crowd and sticks there like a fly in
cold syrup and the second verse, which our wardens carol
as if it were solely composed of "tya-tah-ta-ta-ta-ta,"
completes the rout. Three would-be martyr I. W. W.'s
strike up the Internationale in a reedy pipe. We hear
it carefully to the end in complete silence, most of us
taking it for a praiseworthy attempt at comic vocalism.
“Now give us an honest-t-God funny one."
10:30 A. M. More suspects keep being shoved in all
the time, just why I don't know. I suspect the Deputies,


194
194 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
of rolling poker-dice as to whether a man is deportable
or not—they could have done the job in just as superbly
intelligent a fashion by picking every other man with
brown eyes. We are not allowed in the grandstand-
the Citizens fill the grandstand—but on the lower rows
of the bleachers we may rest. We revolve up and down,
to and fro, like batter being beaten around in a dish.
Most of us have the dazedest, most lost expression I
have ever seen on faces. The handful of strike-leaders
and agitators are sore clean through—they get together
and argue like a baseball team that has led every inning
up to the ninth and then watches the umpire throw the
game to their opponents because he likes the pretty color
of their uniforms. But the crowd, on the whole, isn't
sore—it's just stupefied, as if water had started to run
up hill.
Honest Louis comes up with a grin like a gargoyle.
“Well, Phil Sellaby, and why zum Hölle are you
here?”
“Well, Louis, and why are you here yourself?”
“Some one push a long gun under my nose and say,
‘You, Louis, take a walk.' So I walk with him. But
I do not admir his soc-ial circul!" and he wags a thumb
at the guards.
“ Same here. Where's Mac?”
“ Swearing his oatmeal-soul from off him with the
strike committee. He will be here in ein Bisschen. He
says he will come and shelter little Louis from the
naughty big boys with the guns."
Mac arrives, gray granite with cursing, but he snorts
amusedly as we greet each other again all round.


COLD MOUNTAINS
195
11:30 A. M. At last we know what's going to hap-
pen to us! We are to be shipped to Liberty, N. M.
(ominous name!)—and not, I imagine, in Pullman cars.
“ And, thank God, the State of Arizona is rid of you ! ”
ends some bawling Citizen orator. (Cheers.) The State
of Arizona is rid of us by dumping us on the State of
New Mexico. Will New Mexico pass the buck, too, and
us along with it, I wonder? If she does we ought to
see a good deal of the country.
12:30 P. M. A sennet. Alarums. Excursions. Exit
the dangerous Reds-2,000 of them in 24 cattle and box-
cars without food, though many luxurious cars have ac-
tually a whole bucket or so of drinking-water. As an
exhibition of the Mailed Fist-there are probably few
parallels in American History. Well, it is something
to know that you are going to be a historical parallel,
even if you and 86 other humans-I counted 'em ten
minutes ago with some difficulty—are jammed into a
slatted cattle-car meant for and recently inhabited by a
dozen cows.
It is hot enough in this car to fry eggs on the floor,
if we had any to fry, and there are enough assorted
stenches from the 87 sweaters to set a chemical labora-
tory analyzing for ten years. It is funny; just as on a
shipwrecked raft or a pre-Napoleonic Europe, in this
little, stinking, rolling community of ours the strong
man takes control; this time it is Mac, and under his
guidance we have already adopted one desert-island rule.
There is not room for all or two-thirds of all to sit.
So the weaker, selected by Public Opinion (and very
fairly, some men trying to beg off) sit at cramped ease,


198 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
carrying on, in me at least, the actions of breakfast time
and lunch time. Most of us settled into a lumpish doze.
One man, a big fellow and looking as hard as nails, is
suddenly violently carsick. I hope it isn't contagious,
that's all. He apologizes prodigally between convul-
sions, rolling at us the terrified eyes of a nauseated
horse.
7:30 P. M. Cool, thank God.
8:30 P. M. Cold, my Lord! A desert and biting cold
that you only get in Arizona and New Mexico. The
temperature drops like a bucket down a well ten minutes
after sunset.
9:30 P. M. Night, fallen all over the car and the
country like chilly soot. A few red sparks where people
smoke I can't really, on as vacant a tummy as mine,
besides they may set fire to the car and griddle us all
like pancakes. There are only a couple of armed Alivvers
left on the road—now and then they buzz up like fire-
flies and yell spiteful remarks. Guards on the roof, of
course, guards on the engine and in a few of the
cars. I shouldn't mind if we went under a very low
bridge.
10:00 P. M. Arrived Liberty, N. M. Parked out in
the yards. Some food shoved in by anonymous bene-
factors—I get segment of hot dog and one WHOLE
tamale. And water, greasy, but water. Whee God
bless our home! Whole affair absurdly like picnic.
Satisfied crunchings as of lions at meal time from all
over car. Honest Louis, “Oh, girlies, don't you
feed or annoy the wild Red animals!” Howls like
leopard and switches imaginary tail, much to every


COLD MOUNTAINS
199
one's amusement. A session of dirty stories sets in.
I'm going to sleep.
12 M. Wake up to find somebody's boots around my
throat. We're on the move again. More sleep-too
much trouble to poke person belonging to boots, though
they are no rose-garden.
NEXT DAY
3:00 A. M. Stopped again, outside jerkwater depot
and usual flea-and-sand-bitten desert town, of forty
houses size and shape of condemned horse-cars. Sign
on station “ Cholo" then cut off by end of car. Cholo
-what? Irritates me unmentionably not to be able to
see the rest of that fool sign.
3:15 A. M. Mac, Honest Louis and self being near-
est door, find the same is not locked and so crawl out
to investigate. Promptly shot at from roof, merely as
warning, I imagine, for shots hit dust about forty feet
ahead. A dozen or so stabs of red fire. Strident voice,
“Get back into that car, you bastards !” We obey,
meek, chastened.
5:00 A. M. Wildest collection of dreams imaginable
- probably due to boots as most of them concern death
by strangulation. One, however, disconnected and very
perfect-Io of the old Greek fable walking through field
of most marvelous and impossible flowers, hollyhocks
like towers of silks and scent, she, silver as a new dime
and naked as the harvest moon. Superb idea for poem-
-must remember it somehow.
6:00 A. M. Dawn-first a red crack in the East like


200 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
a break in a piece of gray-purple china. Widens-pours
over the desert and the town like scarlet dye—the hot
round ball of the sun, hard with heat, pops up spectacu-
larly, a fire-balloon, leaving the sand and the houses
breathless with day as it floats higher.
8:30 A. M. This car is not a pretty spectacle. In
it 87 men have been shut since twelve noon yesterday,
smoking, spitting, eating, sleeping, performing natural
functions.
8:30 A. M. Oh, the blasted American sense of humor
-it is bigger than love or hope or fear or fate or death
or patent-medicines ! In this box-car pilgrimage an
equal number of any other race would have gone mad
or murdered. These people merely flop around and
smile and swap cut-plug and yarns and lies. And a
bunch of them have wives and families in Frickett,
three-fourths have been deported for no cause and all
without vestige of law, any one may be in jail or at
the end of a patriotic lyncher's rope to-morrow for all
they know. They have a courage and a silence that
could shut up the Sphinx and a disreputable mirth that
would make Peter the Apostle fall off the jasper walls.
9:30 A. M. Hunger, thirst and fatigue come, I see,
to have definite colors in body and mind, the last a sort
of gelatinous dirty-tapioca gray. Hunger is crimson as
a grenadier's coat and sits around in your stomach like
à cat, pushing out and retracting his needling little
claws. Thirst figures as burning blue, the blue of the
sky we see through the slats of the cars, and indus-
triously sandpapers your throat till swallowing makes
it raw.


COLD MOUNTAINS
201
10:30 A. M. till 12:00 Midnight. Thirst; hunger;
natural functions. Exhaustion and the laughter of ex-
haustion. What a caricature, what a carrot-doll, what
a ridiculous atomy of a wishbone-puppet is any man in
the broad fat palm of a comic and cosmic Irony like
this. Here we are, all eighty-seven of us, scuttering
over that palm like so many enlarged fleas. Suppose
it shut-what is flea-eternity ?-a juicy inexhaustible
arm to discover and bite? “Plays such fantastic tricks
before high heaven as makes the angels weep."
Grit in the mouth. Ideas about Democracy. Not a
democracy of the full belly. Not a democracy of words
and Fourth of July orations. But a real democracy.
An arisen spirit. A wind-blown fire. A salty laughter.
And God's face and God’s body made out of the million
dirty faces and dirty bodies of an infinite number of
tired, dirty, comradely men.
I believe this train of box-cars is one of the few real
democracies in America and the universe at large. They
ought to send us all over the country—and very possibly
they will—as a rolling exhibit A of how the trick can
be done.
All the same I wish they'd deported us at the very
beginning of the week. There would then be a chance
that some of us would have on clean shirts.
Irony, delicate, bitter food of the clear-eyed, careless
and melancholy solution for all base frets, wave of
foam and brine where the mind may drown eternally and
lie like a drowned man on the floor of the indifferent
sand, loose hands playing with coral and shells and
men's white thigh bones; be with me now, be with me


202 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
and cover me—for without you I am going to be just
as emetically sick as a dog.
Power of brain over matter. The qualm passes.
Nothing left but my old pals, hunger and thirst, doing
business at the same undistinguished stand. And
both of them are getting merely gnawing and dull
like safety-razor blades one has shaved with once too
often.
Coolness. Night again like a salve on the body.
Sleep and vicious dreams of immense meals of steak
and great tubs of all the icily-clinking drinks in the
world. Democracy—we're all little crumbs of Democ-
racy—a loaf of Democracy in 24 slices of box-cars, baked
crusty and toothsome and sweet in the stinging sun.
Take. Eat. For this is the body of Democracy. ...
Even if all these visions of gorges and wakings to
find them lies went on for weeks, I'd be glad I'm here
and not in Frickett or sitting up on top of one of these
cars with a C.P.L. badge and the heart of a fool and
a shiny loaded gun.
NEXT DAY
The Regular Army, by all the satires, has gone and
adopted us! And the President has sent an inquisitive
little telegram to the Governor of the State and to
Thomas D. Vanguard, Sheriff of Frickett County, ask-
ing reasons for the sudden exercise of unconstitutional
powers on American citizens. Why, we must even occupy
a column on the front page of the New York papers!
And we have a special escort of U. S. Cavalry just like


COLD MOUNTAINS
203
a foreign ambassador, and two carloads of army food
are due to arrive some time in the near future, and
we're even going to set up a pretty little camp for our-
selves half way between Liberty, New Mexico, and the
Mexican border-
The procession from the train out of Liberty to our
camp site was most extraordinary. Two thousand rather
more than less filthy, shambling ragamuffins, gaunt in
the eyes and shaky in the knees with two days of little
food and less water, reeling down a sandy road with
jingling guardian-angel squads of regulars fore and aft,
sun-mahoganied, fit and humorous, the whole Rogue's
March yelling “ John Brown's Body” at the top of its
lungs. It was like a turnout of all the broken toys in
a giant baby's nursery—a general review of every dilap-
idated human patch or tatter from the general ragbag
of the world. I got so weak laughing I could hardly
stand up and Honest Louis and Mac had to take me
between them to get me along at all. Then the three
big water tanks where our camp was to be and two thou-
sand stone-naked men trying to bathe at the same time
in one of them—a sight to make a convention of Boston
intellectuals fall over dead by battalions. And the
food—the big rations of food-canned beef, canned to-
matoes and bread—they wouldn't give us seconds on
it, afraid that some of us would expand too much and
so pass away, but firsts were enough, Lord knows! My
emptiness embraced that food like a rich uncle returned
from the oil fields.
Then we pitched camp-again under the instructions
of the regulars and a more comfortable and neater


204 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
camp never existed—it's as tidy as a New England
kitchen and as clean as the deck of a yacht. And the
night—and the red eyes of the cooking fires in the
evening—and talking to Mac and Louis under a sky
like a black satin dress covered with tiny bangles-me
smoking one of the few good cigarettes of the last year,
bummed from a sergeant who once upon a time be-
longed to A. D. If we got the inferno of democracy
yesterday and the day before, these are the sports and
pleasures of it.
NEXT DAY
Work all day, putting in shower-baths and occasional
tent-floors, stringing telephone wire from Liberty and
other general fixings. Everybody anxious to lend a
hand. Only discord-Izzy Wicez, the Polish I. W. W.
secretary. He shirked work and was warned three times
and went on shirking. So we ducked him in the water
tank with the hearty approval of the Regulars, and he
spouted water, and after that was a good Indian. This
is the simple life, all right, and the satisfying one, led
rather in the hunting spirit of the well-greaved Achæans.
And the talk goes from Napoleon to General Booth and
back again by way of Christ and Judge Gary and Luther
Burbank.
The draft comes off this week. Must get hold of a
list as soon as possible.
End of Philip's Diary


COLD MOUNTAINS
205
Philip found that his draft-number was sixth in the
order of call, stayed in the camp another week till it
was reasonable to suppose that he should be summoned
for physical examination, and then went back to
Frickett, not without material doubts as to whether
his second exit from thence would be on foot, on a rail,
or prone with his hands folded across his chest. He
might, quite possibly, have had the examination trans-
ferred, but the thought simply didn't happen to occur
to him and besides he felt rather pleased with his own
foolhardiness.
He parted from Louis and Mac with love and no
ceremony. The last ten days had twisted the three close
together. “When you make your pile, keep a piece of
it for leetle Louis," the fat Swiss grinned, “and with-
oudt you this camp vill be less fun than a twelve-hour
shift and no time off.” “Good luck, lad!” said Mac,
bruising his fingers. “Keep your chest warm these
nights and I'll write you how this dogfight comes out-
though, bucko lad, but I'm no great hand with a pencil ! ”
Then the two fell into an exchange of sorrowful curses
that lasted until both sank hopelessly asleep.
Philip slipped out of camp an hour before dawn, past
the sleepy back of a guard who was thinking of a Mexi-
can girl in Phoenix, and got into Liberty in time to
catch the early train. His clothes were crumpled but
clean enough—he had had a chance to wash them—and
the station-agent sold him a ticket like any one else.
The train was slow and he arrived in Frickett about two
in the afternoon. He walked up from the station to
Mrs. Grady's nervously alert, with a boyish feeling that


206 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
if he didn't look over his shoulder continually some-
thing behind him would hit him in the back. But, even
discounting his active imagination, the town had a
hangdog look. It had come out of its brief intoxica-
tion cold-sober and still ached with the bursting head
of the following morning. Moreover, its ears were ring-
ing with the sarcastic comments of other towns' news-
papers and the mushroom tales of what utterly foolish
things it, in its sudden drunkenness, had done. If
Philip had marched up the center of the street with a
Red flag in his hand, he might have been hesitatingly
asked what he was advertising, but that would have been
all.
He did succeed, however, in scaring Mrs. Grady very
nearly out of her feeble wits when he walked in and
demanded his mail. After she had sat down on the
dining-room floor and fanned herself with her apron
and given a confidential account of all her sensations
to her favorite saint, she finally produced the expected
notice from the draft-board which she had just been
about to forward wildly to Philip, care of President
Wilson. “Not knowin' your permanint address, Mr.
Sellaby, and I hope you'll pardon the liberty, but they
said he was takin' care of all you lads that was shipped
away.”
The notice ordered him to report for examination the
next morning, so he lay perdu till a little before the
knock-off whistle and then called up Peter Lascelles.
The latter, after one gulp of astounded surprise issued
an invitation to dinner and to stay the night, as he
thought it would be safer. “ Sorry-we'll have to more


COLD MOUNTAINS
207
or less hide you during the evening-Louise is giving
a dinner-party—but I'm damned if I'm going to have
your blood on my head, and they might get peevish with
you at Mrs. G's.”
So Philip made himself as inconspicuous as possible
-the Lascelles' house was fortunately far back from the
road-entered without being observed, and was given
dinner upstairs by Peter himself from the wreck of
Louise's party. He felt quite like a Secret Service man
in the heart of Berlin and was enormously gratified
when Peter, entering with a fragmentary job lot of
vegetables, solemnly drew down the blind, saying, “ You
mustn't be seen here, you know, if it's avoidable. And
there's always the chance "
Peter also found that he had neither money beyond
eight dollars and thirty-two cents nor any idea at all
of what he was going to do if he were rejected for the
draft. He lent him a hundred dollars and advised him
to go home and consult the San Francisco specialist
recommended by his doctor about his lungs. Philip
took both cash and advice with open arms. He could
neither go back to Camp Democracy nor stay in Frickett.
If he didn't have tuberculosis, there was no need for
him to stay in Arizona at all. Once his classification in
the draft was definitely settled there would probably be
some sort of war-work that he could do. He went down-
town to the draft board and was rejected for all mili-
tary service, his own doctor officiating at the obsequies,
inside of half an hour. The officials, the doctor, knew
fully both who he was and the fact that he had been
deported, and ignored both facts with a bland posi-


208 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
tiveness that made Philip feel as if he had suddenly be-
come invisible. One man even asked him, with no hint
of sarcasm, if he didn't find Arizona climate the best
medicine in the world for lung-trouble. He shook
hands with his doctor and got from him a letter of
introduction to his San Francisco colleague, said
good-by to Sam Cohen and Mrs. Grady, had a final cock-
tail with Peter and Louise Lascelles, and left for Frickett
Junction and California on the one-thirty train.
“But what did you acquire out of your excursioning
around in a box-car, you silly Bolshevik?” asked Peter,
as he set down his glass.
“Fleas,” Louise suggested primly, “and then? Go
on."
Philip flushed a little.
“.Oh, democracy in general," he said haltingly.
“ And a particular comprehension of wide life and a
little death and all hell-on-wheels ! ”


BOOK V
AMATEUR THEATRICALS
(1917-1918)


212 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
PHILIP hadn't realized how hard it would be to ex-
plain matters to Phil. Talking together in the cool of
the library that had always seemed to Philip the ideal
den for a leather bear, it was so buff-colored and dim
and secluded, both voices sedulously low and pleasant
but with something made out of conflict sawing and
snarling under the tones and ready to bay out with the
sudden scream of a whistle if the genteel voices were
raised just a little, little bit higher-Philip knew he
hadn't realized by the tenth of a decimal fraction just
how very hard it would be.
He had dropped off at San Esteban that afternoon
without warning or telegram, wanting to surprise Lucia,
tasting lingeringly in anticipation all through the blowsy
day in a daycoach that seemed full of spilled box-
lunches and babies with prickly heat, the tingling pleas-
antness of that surprise. He discovered that Lucia was
at San Francisco—kept there over the week-end by an
important meeting of the Red Cross. Lizzie, the maid
they had had ever since he could remember, opened the
door for him and gave him the information with the
well-bred civility due to a visiting minister. When he
had expected and braced himself against a middle-aged
Irish rush for his neck, this left him chilly and stiff.
She relented after a little, even bullied him with some
of her old fervor over the question of clean clothes, but
her voice had a sorrowing affection in it the while that
puzzled him; it was the stern pity of a Calvinist nurse-
maid for a charge that has contracted measles in some
imbecile escapade outside of bounds. The water in the
tub ran tepid when Philip tried to take a cold bath.


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 213
Phil would not be back until after supper, and supper
alone might as well have been composed of baked Apples
of Sodom. It was served by Lizzie in dejection, to an
accompaniment of civil but mournful sighs.
As he burnt his tongue on the bitter little demitasse
that concluded it, Lizzie, with the pained face and sup-
pliant eyes of an invalid martyr who has just been re-
prieved against her will, came in and laid a pile of as-
sorted journals beside his chair.
“Ye might like to look at the papers, Mr. Philip,"
she said grimly. “Ye're in 'em!”
Then she vanished like a ghost at cockcrow before he
had time to ask her any questions.
He began to turn over the papers idly. They were
in order, he saw-all the news of San Francisco and the
Coast for the last three weeks. He glanced in the sports
in one at the society column-it seemed good to read
about all the petty details of City affairs again, it gave
him as keen a flavor of home as the sight of a pepper-
tree—it revived his wilted feelings like a judicious cock-
tail. Mrs. Jimmy Traintor had just given another
of her big dances. The Chronicle clamored for a reform
administration and war with Japan. The Seals were
leading the league.
Then his eyes wandered down into the account of the
Frickett deportations and he jumped as if somebody
had left a red-hot horseshoe in his chair.
He read them over, every one of them, down to the
Stinging Lizard, that vicious little journal of back-
stairs tittle-tattle that apes so successfully the black-
mailer's bad manners of its Eastern contemporaries.


216 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
disgraced the family.” When this figure repeated this
for the tenth time with the blind stare of a bribed judge
charging a jury, Philip said, “ To hell—to hell— to hell
with the family!” and, as the figure pursed up its mouth
in the amazed wrath of an insulted wax god, stamped
out of the room.
The voice of the figure pursued him, thin and scratchy
like a worn out phonograph record.
“When you can come here in the uniform of your
country, sir, your father will enjoy your cleverness a
good deal more!”
The stagy coarseness of the sentence struck Philip
in the face like a piece of dirt.
“Can't you understand even now that I've tried to
get into the army and they've thrown me out?” he flung
back in a last despairing effort.
“You seem to have been healthy enough to stand
the physical hardships of being deported as a Nihilist,"
came the spaced, iced words of the figure.
“Oh, Christ!” said Philip and went out of the front
door.
When he was gone the figure rose from its chair, shak-
ing a little still with the dyspeptic wrath it had not
quite wholly controlled and tapped a cigarette on the
smooth hairlessness of its palm. It had been “ giving
the young man a straight talking to.” It smiled, its
face was hot with virtue and indigestion. It sank back
into a chair and felt like the elder Brutus. It had
spared neither rod nor child—and every one of the star-
spangled conventionalities had been scrupulously ob-
served.


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 217
Philip walked till the sun came up over the marshes
and his head had ceased to seethe and devise the most
crushing repartees that had never been uttered. When
he passed through the next small town, he saw that he
was a third of the way to San Francisco and he kept on,
the exhilaration of his wrath still strong in him like
brandy. About seven o'clock in the morning, however,
his feet began to weigh as if they were made of stone,
and he realized that he had had no sleep all night. He
approached a suitable barn and was bayed at by a toothy
black dog. He longed for another town and a hotel,
but the road seemed as suddenly townless as if it ran
over the sea. Finally, hungry and sweltering, he came
to a rotten, deserted wharf with a cabin on it which
looked as if any puff of wind that had made up its own
mind could blow it to bits of wood. He entered-it
stank of fish long dead but it had a sort of mortuary
coolness to it and a bench where he could stretch out.
A rowboat as crazy as the cabin was tethered to a ring
in a pile—but to this he paid no attention.
When he woke, after an uneasy dream of something
formless stooping over him, it was to hear the concussion
of hurried oars on water. He ran out into a world
blazing with noon—a red-haired man in overalls had
the rowboat and was pulling with bitter vigor across
the strait. He shouted, and the man bent to his oars with
the stubborn energy of a man fleeing plague. The boat
dwindled. Philip laughed and went back to get his
coat.
His mood was less humorous when, after combining
two skipped meals in an enormous platter of ham and


218 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
eggs at“ The Railway Hotel-La Vaca,” he came to pay
for his refreshment and discovered that his wallet and
all his money except for ten dollars kept in a watch
pocket had disappeared. He took the road again, invent-
ing vast rhymed curses on red-haired men and men
who went about in rowboats, and all Judas-topped
thieves who sneaked upon wharves and robbed poor
travelers. He had meant to take a train for San Fran-
cisco, instead he walked and thanked Heaven for good
shoes and the leathering experiences of Arizona.
The day's inventions included a panful of sour milk
thrown at him by the nervous wife of a truck-farmer
whom he came suddenly upon from behind and asked
for a drink of water. A fresh peach pie presented with-
out money or price by a spectacled grandma who vaguely
assumed him on some important military mission in
disguise. A sleep in a barn—a stray spark from a cig-
arette-five minutes of agonized trampling at a small
but nasty fire-an artistic raking of hay over the burnt
patch on the floor when the fire was finally out-and
some heart-felt thanks to his boots and the Ironic Spirit.
Early rising and an uneasy departure under the accusa-
tory yaps of a fat, round puppy.
The sky, flower-blue at first, then heating to a color
like the blue of melting blue glass. The road curved
into runes, snaky or straight. White dust and a
droughty smell wherever he turned. Wayside adven-
tures—two stolid lovers whose Ford he cranked and set
going again—a verminous tramp with the face of a
nasty girl who followed him with horrible companion-
ableness for two hot miles and finally desisted only


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
219
under threat of a punch in the eye-the cool vacant
porch and aisle of a village church with an old man
praying devoutly in a pew, and two boys dumbly fighting
as to whose turn it was next to swing on the bell-rope
-country getting fenced and housed and tennis-courted
and suburban. He could have got into Oakland that
night if he had wished, but preferred to sleep deep under
an alfalfa stack instead.
He arrived at San Francisco about ten the next morn-
ing, called up Lucia at Red Cross Headquarters and
found she had gone back to San Esteban the previous
night. He went down to a Y. M. C. A. and wrote her
a long, difficult, explaining letter. Seeing a sign “En-
list in the Marines," he gave a bored recruiting sergeant
and alert doctor the trouble of rejecting him. His ten
dollars had now shrunk to five and in the last two days he
had walked over forty miles. He felt as if life had
come to a full stop—as if the spirit that ruled and wrote
him had run out of commas and put the largest and
blackest period possible after both Arizona and San
Esteban and all their appurtenances. He drifted about
the streets all day like a scrap of torn newspaper, and
toward evening swung into an alley just off the Barbary
Coast where two negroes and a Mexican were shooting
crap.
He entered the game without ceremony–he was dirty
and lounging enough by now to attract no comments
and lost two dollars out of his five in three passes. The
dice came round to him at last, he rolled and rubbed
them in his palm, they were warm, he felt a ripple of
perfect confidence wash through him.


220 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ Shoot two bucks," he said casually. It was covered.
He rattled the clicketing cubes on the sidewalk.
“ Little Phoebe ! ” he chanted. “My own lil', lil
Phæbe! Come on, you Phæb'!”
Little Phæbe obliged in two rolls after a spectacular
instant in which she almost transformed herself into a
goblin seven.
“ Lets 'em ride! I looks at 'em and I lets 'em ride ! ”
The pips showed five and three.
“ Ada from Decatur! A five and a three. A six and
a two. A mess of fours. Roll, you thighbones, roll!”
The lady from Decatur hesitated, was coy.
“ Ada! Ada! Hot dice, white dice, dice full o'
grease, come and eight for Philip, two fours apiece ! ”
The bones surrendered to lyric rhyme, they laid down
two fours with the shy subservience of a well-trained
waiter. One of the negroes rolled profound and sorrow-
ful eyes. The Mexican swore like a spitting cat in
Spanish.
“ Lets 'em ride!” said Philip largely and was covered,
though with more of courageous despair than hope. He
made his point again in a single throw.
“ White boy, you is hot to-night-you is hot as Mam-
my's stove!” gulped the other negro.
“Shoot the wad !” Philip answered, adding three
dollars from his pocket to the sixteen already on the
ground. The first negro dug a hand like a black ham
into the loose of his trousers.
“I covers it all!” he growled, and slapped down a
crushed plaster of bills. Philip rattled the dice again,
he felt as if he were made of springs—he knew the gal-


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
221
loping thrill of riding Luck and Chance like a couple
of barebacked horses.
“Big Dick !” he moaned to the bones that clattered
like spilt teeth. “ Come, Big Dick!”
“Sebben!” grunted the negro. “Oh, you sebben!
Sebben years in jail and sebben great angels of the
Lawd! Let him sebben!”
“Big Dick, you know your baby ! ” whined Philip,
and Big Dick did.
Half an hour later Philip had eighty-five dollars in
his pocket and eight on the sidewalk. The Mexican,
completely cleaned out, confined himself to looking on,
and the negroes were praying to voodoo gods.
“He sevens ! ” chanted Philip. “He sevens !” The
big buck instantly sevened on his second pass and gave
a bellow like a charging ram.
“You's a h’ant, white boy! You's a h'ant!” he
roared. “It ain't nach-ul to treat nice clean dice like
that!”
Philip picked up the money and took the dice. His
first throw was a natural. The negro made a sudden
dive for his shoe.
“You hold his fists and feet while I carve him, Sam ! ”
he shrieked. “He's put witch-grease on my bones an'
I'm gwine tuh slice him like a ham!”
Sam gripped Philip's feet with long apish arms as
he tried to rise. His friend wrenched a beaming steel
thing out of his sock.
“Hold him!” he panted. “You hold him still and
I'll lesson him to voodoo my bones ! ”
Philip jerked one foot away and kicked Sam violently
!"


222 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
on the chin. The other negro, plunging to the attack,
fell whack over the Mexican's outstretched leg, his razor
chinking on the stones, his head butting into Sam's
belly. A great “Whoosh ! ” went out of Sam like the
noise of a burst paper bag and Philip was running up
the crook of a dirty lane with the Mexican behind him.
At first Philip freely suspected the latter of good
intentions, even slowed his stride to allow him to catch
up. Then he saw that the negro's razor shimmered and
glinted in one tight brown fist like a splinter from an
evil moon. Philip sprinted—the Mexican sprinted
and closed in-Philip's feet seemed to stick in the earth
at every stride. The Mexican was running him down
like a greyhound, he felt in his neck already where the
slicing edge would settle like a wasp. The alley turned
corkscrew fashion and came out on the greasy cobbles
of the waterfront. Philip turned with it as it turned
and rushed at the Mexican, with a blink of his eyes as
he ran in under the dirty sheen of the blade. He shook
the man like a sack, he shook the razor out of his scratch-
ing fingers and sent him spinning into a wall. And a
street-car, a heavenly street-car, grated drowsily past
the crimps' boarding houses and bawdy saloons, clanging
a mournful bell. Philip ran for it like a hunted cat;
a sidewalk tough stepped out to trip him, spat, and
decided it was not worth while. He swung on the run-
ning-board of the car and scrambled inside to the peev-
ish surprise of a sleepy Chief Petty Officer and three
neat poor women. He took the air into his lungs again
and felt it sweeter than any air he had ever known.
He glanced back once before the car swerved round


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 223
a comer. The Mexican, a diminished and violent figure,
was standing in the middle of the street, looking sadly
down at a glistening thing in his hand.
“Hey, Bill!” yelped the conductor angrily. “ Come
back here and pay your fare_don'tcha see this here's
a pay-as-you-enter car?”
To describe the devious route which finally landed
Philip at Los Angeles would be like giving the separate
biography of each dot that stands for a house in the map
of a city to scale. There were high spots—at one time he
nearly got himself inducted into the Refrigerated Meat
Division of the Quartermaster Corps, and was saved
or lost by the fact that the ex-shoe-clerk second lieu-
tenant in charge had a vicious prejudice against college
men. He spent three weeks in the hop fields, eating
and working and sleeping in a cloud of yeasty, savory
dust, got the back of his neck sunburnt anew to the
point of peeling agony and made new friends with the
workers who ranged from shipping-clerks out for vaca-
tion money to whole families gone gypsying from grand-
father to grandchild, and living eight in a tent with
every kindness and vice and species of vermin that flesh
is heir to.
His funds had given out in the interval and he tried
tramping with a little butterball of a contented hobo
whose monicker, Dago Slim II, was, he proudly in-
formed Philip, “right under the washstand in pencil
in every depot toilet on the old S. P.” This ended
when, after nearly losing a leg in an inexpert attempt
to hop the blind baggage of an east-bound fast freight,


224
THE
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
he and Dago Slim II were arrested on a charge of
chicken-stealing the moment they set foot in a little
town near Sacramento. Cindery as he was, with a rust
of dried blood reddening his hair, Philip managed to
get an interview with the town marshal, found him a
graduate of Leland Stanford, disclosed his own affili-
ations with Yale, and, by means of immense important
hints as to an undisclosable connection with the De-
partment of Justice in investigating I. W. W. activities
in the labor camps, got himself and his companion off
after a good night's sleep in a speckless airy cell. “'Tis
an illuminating experience to be in jail, John,” Philip
wrote. “There's nothing like it-every young man
should try it once, just to find out why monkeys rattle
and bite at their cage bars.”
After the hop-fields incident was over, he made south
through Stockton and Fresno, and in the latter city
was whistling his way along a side street when a beauti-
fully dressed old gentleman with the white floating
whiskers of a mountain goat suddenly stopped him
with the remark, “ Young man, I am God.”
“How interesting," said Philip. “Very glad to
meet Your Reverence in Fresno."
The old gentleman looked sorrowful.
“I do not mind you youngsters being flippant," he
said ponderously, “but I think you should treat your
Maker with more respect.” And Philip suddenly saw
that his eyes were as bright and empty as pieces of
washed glass.
They wandered down the street very amicably, and
God was just confiding to Philip his personal remi-


226
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
ceeding away into its internals. So he knew that he
had come to Movie Paradise, and, like every other un-
employed person or thing in the city, started haunting
the studios for a job.
It was in a “society” film that he finally got his
chance. The well-barbered, two-stomached director was
talking matters over with an assistant inside the low
wooden fence that shut off the sacred inner offices from
the long waiting room where a lugubrious crowd of
“extras” ranging from “ good motherly types” to mere
floating constituents of a lyncher's mob or a German
army, turned wistful animal eyes from the stiff wooden
benches.
“Look here!” the director was saying, “this is an
élite scene, see? Biltmore stuff-Rolls-Royce stuff-
country house on Long Island with ten butlers and a
private ticker stuff. It's a dancera Newport dance at
a place like Vincent Astor's. It's so swell that not one
of the crowd even bolts for the champagne when it
comes, they sip it, they just sip it and feel ennuied.
It'll knock every nine-o'clock town in the country for a
gool if we do it right! And what happens? We get a
lot of extras and we dress 'em all up like plush hor-
ses, fit to kill. And we start to take. And the
whole foul bunch acks like waiters—that's what they
ack like, cheap waiters—they ack like the Mike McGraw
Tenpin Club and Social Circle's Annual Fishbake. My
God, I can put all my brains into the picture and I can
stuff it full of jack, and I can work a star till she'll
let me tell her the right way to powder her nose and


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
227
put on her corsets—but I can't make ladies and gentle-
men out of a hundred two-case-a-day hams in fifteen
minutes; no, not in fifteen years! For God's sake, Billy,
get me crooks, get me bums, get me bananas, get me all
the sweepings of town, but get out of here and don't
come back till you've got me a block of extras that'll
ack refined !”
Billy, slick hair parted in the middle, slick clothes
seamed at the waist, slick shoes the color of fresh blood,
tripped over to the fence.
“Any of you people ever been to college?” he bawled
in a voice like a klaxon.
Philip, a clean youth with a prominent fraternity
pin, a gummy-lipped boy in a check cap, two sport-
sweatered girls and a gray-haired woman arose.
“ Gosh!” said Billy disgustedly.
He ran over them with his finger.
“You, Mrs. Boocock, chaperone. You'll do. You
girls—what school ?”
“U. of C.” Both giggled at once like twins.
“ You?” He looked at the gummy-lipped boy with
disapproval.
“St. Agatha's. Freshm'n,” the boy said mouthily.
“ Ah right. Got a dress suit?”
“ Nah.”
“Six bits is all you rate then.”
The gummy-lipped boy muttered deeply but nodded
his head.
“ You ?” The clean youth confessed to Lehigh. He
turned to Philip.
“Princeton,” the latter said sweetly. He was not


228 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
intensively proud of the other college samples so far
displayed.
“Ah right-you report about ten-get your cards.
Any of you that's got dress suits or dresses get two, the
rest one and a half.”
He looked at the clown's brigade as it filed away.
“Pretty punk,” he remarked very clearly, “but I
think I may be able to dig up some real ones.”
Philip found himself conducting a class ini ball-
room etiquette before the picture was finally taken.
The director swore like a mule driver at the end of a
first rehearsal.
“You're better than that other bunch of yaps, but,
Great Henry, you certainly ack like a wagon load of
bad carrots,” he ended, exhausted. “Here, you Prince-
ton man!” He singled out Philip with a wag of his
thumb. “Take that pink young woman with the spit
curls and show this lot of vegetables how to dance."
Philip seized on the partner suggested, a wide-eyed
snickerer, and succeeded in putting her through the
paces of a decorous fox-trot to the squeals of a tired
piano and greasy saxophone.
“That's better," yapped the director. “That's the
stuff. But it ain't quite, quite ” and he circled his
pudgy arms in the air.
“If the music wasn't so utterly vile it would be a
good deal easier to dance to it,” Philip offered, with
his voice as distinct as possible.
The director turned on him as if he were going to
knock him down with his megaphone. Instead, “ Yeah,"


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 229
he admitted suddenly. “Yeah-you're dead right. But
what's the use of wastin' good music on boobs like this
lot?”
“It's your business.” Philip made the concession.
“But if you want to have these boobs dance like
anything but a bunch of sick rag dolls you'll have
to give them the best jazz band in town—they need it!”
The director turned suddenly to his familiar.
“Billy," he said, “you call up the Sandringham
and find out how much they'll take for their orchestra
for one afternoon. Make it fast.”
“Now, Princeton, my lad,” he finished, flipping back
to Philip, “ you show these baby birds how every little
thing ought to go. Half of 'em, that is; I'll go and take
the other half myself.”
A mad three hours followed. The ballroom, need-
less to say, was a studio interior, a glass-roofed slice of
two-thirds of a plaster palace. The guests were in full
evening dress in the glare of high noon, their faces
ghastly with screaming paints that would make beauti-
fully natural complexions on the deceptive screen. The
star was an overstrung regular actress with the temper
and temperament of an ash cat. And more and more
as the paunchy sweating director wrought and molded
the inchoate mess of sloppy humanity in front of him
did Philip admire his friendly courage and Buddha-like
patience. He never swore while actually working; he
was as gentle as a nun and as firm as a nurse with a
cranky child. And gradually with interminable pains,
the soup of extras took on some semblance of gentility
and manners.


230 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Philip copied his stubbornness in persistence as well
as he might. He taught girls from unheard-of small
colleges that cheek-to-cheek dancing is not practised in
the middle of the floor at the most exclusive functions
and that it is not necessary to hug your partner like a
teddybear to give an impression of ease and gay social
abandon. He showed pompadoured males that one may
cut in on a girl without slapping her previous possessor
on the back like a drunken sailor and that while a gentle
lizardly wavering of the shoulders may be respectable,
the python clutch went out with large white kid gloves.
From the handkerchief carried protruding from the cor-
sage like a favor to the handkerchief used prominently
in the stag line, from the skirt that shouted aloud the
presence of knees rather than informally suggesting
them to the turned-down collar worn with a dress-suit,
he issued a series of " don’ts” as numerous as the gen-
eral orders of a chief-of-staff. He reduced three young
women to teary faces by making them go back and put
on corsets and unclocked stockings, and got a challenge
to come out and fight like a man from the gummy-lipped
boy when he told the latter to dance more like a verte-
brate and less like a rubber frog. But he succeeded, he
succeeded inordinately. And it was only when the
Sandringham orchestra had arrived in taxis and tuned
up, and the director waved to him to take the star and
dance her for the first thirty feet of film till the great
Stanwood Fane (carelessly posed so as to fight her
acutely for every inch of footage) should cut in that he
realized how extreme his success had been.
“It looks very nearly human now," Philip observed


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 231
in one of the pauses after the director had yelled “ Stop
Camera !” to attend to a minor detail.
“Human? My God, it even looks decent-Oh, Auntie,
won't this lay them out in the sticks? It will. It will,”
the great man mumbled through his cigarette. Then
he looked up at Philip sharply.
“Smoke?” he said. “Have one. You come around
to-morrow. I want to talk to you. I always play my
hunohes, and I've got a hunch right now you got a
future.”
Philip realized as he inserted two fingers into the
paper package that once more he had the gaudy raw
ball of Luck at his feet.
They were running over “Serpents of Sin” in the
projection-room before Elgar Hay, the director, Billy,
his devil, Philip, and some others. The ball scene
flashed on. Philip with a queer jump of his mind saw
himself, a black-and-white enlarged automaton dancing
and bowing and smiling with the rest of the dumb flat
giants that flicked over the screen like shadows across
a wall.
Elgar Hay saw the döppel-ganger too, and reverted
to bucolics.
“ Fresno raisins !” he simmered, chewing softly.
“Hey, Princeton, where did you get that face? ”
“Grew. What's the matter with it?”
“Oh, nothin'. Nothin' at all. Only it screens—that's
all—it screens like a blessed Greek temple.”
“I always took good photographs,” said Philip, im-
modestly.


232 THE THE BEG
BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“You can't ack,” went on Hay. “A baby could see
you can't ack. But you know.it, and there's things you
can do where you won't have to ack a little bit. The
public's gettin' restless at all this hick stuff," he
mused. “I had a kick on my last cow-fed picture the
other day. Two months ago itd a turned them away
from the doors in droves. They're just like school kids,
you never can tell what they'll want.” He sat comatose
till the reel was over, his eyes blank and cogitating.
Then, “ Oh, Sam,” he asked gently, “ Sam. Will you
just run that dance-set once more?”
“Sure," came a voice from a nest built into the roof.
Hay watched this time, in eager silence, paying special
attention to the dancing shadow of Philip. When it
was quite over.
“ Billy!” he said, and his voice had the sharpness of
reveille.
“ Yep.”
“ Got any young college man scenarios ? Doug. Fair-
banks stuff without the circus stunts—you know ? "
Billy took a little black notebook out of his vest.
“Guess so. Randy Spiker can dish up somepin'.
Want it quick? A week ?”
“Quicker than that. I'm going to play something
across the board. Nothing flighty or wild—clean com-
edy with a bunch of heart throbs. Two days. Look
here. This is it.”
He outlined the story in jerks. As “ The Way of a
Man” is still running two years later, in patched,
punctured, spotty reels in the theaters whose admission
tickets are only six cents with amusement tax, and its


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 233
effect on any audience from cutaways to mackinaws is as
certain as that of water on dried apples—it seems
hardly necessary to put under the microscope here the
jellyish protoplasm of a production that has made a con-
tinent laugh and cry in the ways it wanted to. But Hay
was as insistent as a tackhammer in driving his main
point home.
“ This guy isn't any hero," he repeated and repeated,
“not a piece of a hero at all. He's just human. Just
them. He goes to college but he doesn't win any football
games or lead any promenades. The other guy does that.
When he gets into the war he's just a second looey like
the rest of his crowd. The other guy's the big cheese.
And then—" He smiled like a little boy with a jam-pot.
“I got a trick that'll take them all away in hearses !”
he confided, and in three slangy sentences sketched out
the two-minute scene just before the end of the fourth
reel that draws tears as surely as rubbing the eyes with
an onion.
Even Billy, who made it his business never in any
event to be either surprised or respectful looked at the
swag little deity with something approaching awe.
“You got it,” he said, and made notes with furious
zeal.
“You take hold of these snakes here yourself, you
and Mike, and cut Fane wherever you've got an idea
he may not notice it. I'm going where I can think.
I'll see Spiker in my office in an hour-get hold of him.
As for you”-he turned to Philip—“you come along.
Don't say anything, for God's sake, just sit around and
let me look at you while I'm thinking."


234
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ Say!” Billy called as the two stumbled out of the
pocket of dark. “Who's going to take the footage in this
new one?”
Hays stabbed Philip in the kidneys with his forefinger.
“ This guy, if I can use him," he said, and they
departed.
Hay was right-Philip could not act. He had no
voice, in the first place, and a stage and an audience would
have reduced him to as pallid a stupor of fright as a fall
into a nest of serpents. If his class in college had balloted
for the handsomest man in it, he would not even have
been able to command his own vote. But the camera,
that tricky magician that reduces heavenly color to a
smear of gray and regular good looks to the smouched
pale insipidity of the face of a paper doll, played Whistler
with his crooked, laughing nose, gray eyes and faunish
ears. It gave him the distinction of a white peacock
and the subtle uneven grin of a merry satyr. It lent
vagabond leanness to the legs he had never dared put
into knickerbockers and accentuated each scoffing point
of his gaunt, long-fingered hands. Philip recognized
himself on the screen, but that was all; when he looked
into a mirror the contrast was too pitiful for words.
And Hay played up every angle of his new incarnation
with the remorselessness of a man trying to sell a fool a
horse.
“You'll be gettin' a hundred and fifty mash notes a
week, Pete, when we get through with your lovely face in
this bunch of close-ups !” he simmered enthusiastically
while Philip writhed. “All you got to do is walk around


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
235
and look natural-look natural and yearn right into
the box's eye!” Philip mocked him, obeyed and yearned,
and the stubby god swore with extreme delight.
It was just that, just looking natural or over-natural,
and the whole movie-world was such a phantasm of
unreality that Philip went through his paces in it with
zest and a fiery irony of mirth. To hold a romantic
posture two minutes longer than any human thing with
a sense of shame could bear to do, so that it registered
properly—to go sliding through every motion of life
too fast or too slow—to sob great glycerine tears over
the shoulder of a fluffy girl with a face painted in
streaks like a Congo medicine man's—to be drawing an
absurdly luxurious salary that seemed to go up in
jumps each week—all this was too creamy a jape to mar
by carelessness.
He had taken the name of Peter Sands for display
purposes-Peter for Peter Lascelles and Sands for
Arizona—and it seemed to him as the weeks blew by
like leaves that Peter grew more and more of an inde-
pendent personality that took most of the labor and
play of standing in front of the camera off Philip's
shoulders. “I've sold my soul to a jocular devil,”
Philip thought, “but at least he's giving me the world
and the flesh along with it.”
Hay had turned up trumps as usual, he had a habit
in life of cutting aces from the middle of the pack.
The public was wearying of the simple, blue-jeans
hero, they were sick to agony of the mustached, white-
gardeniaed hero, the six-shooting, trailing-spurred hero
had ridden his loping pinto out of their affections as


236 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the war came closer and closer like a falling shell.
Philip was one of the first of the normal heroes—the
hero a fraction better than normal—who did all the
things the soda-fountain clerk had always wanted to
do and yet showed such flashes of consoling imbecility
the while that the soda-fountain clerk felt nobly sure
that he could do those very things himself if he were only
once given a fair chance. And to this conception Philip
added a swart mirth and sardonic gallanting of his
own that caught the taste of the shop-girl and unoccu-
pied woman like a new kind of candy. And “The Way
of a Man," moreover, was the first “war-picture” that
had dealt less with elaborate blank-cartridge carnage
and more with the average sensations of the average case.
Because of the dervish energy of Hay, the film was
ready for release the end of December. Philip liked
and admired the squat sorcerer better all the time,
especially when he realized how greatly he differed
from the typical idea of the typical director. For one
thing, he smoked cigarettes instead of cigars; cigars,
he confided frankly to Philip, always made him violently
sick. He had gone through the rocket-rise of the rest
of the business; the son of a prune-rancher, he had gone
to agricultural college for two years, seen the first spotty
beginnings of the films in the college “ Opera House,”
and instantly given up prunes forever to follow his star.
He had the American capacity of squeezing the last
atom of work out of his subordinates; and while ner-
vous as a bride while a picture was actually in the mak-
ing, was extremely un-American in his lack of worry
as to its after monetary success or failure. Despite


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 237
this he had made his million in ten years, and 1917
saw him swimming like a goldfish in a golden flood. The
greater part of his success he ascribed in secret to a small
nude celluloid doll with a pink ribbon around its navel
that he carried in the vest pocket over his heart, never
showed to any one, and never let out of his touch for a
second. He had picked it up in the road the day he got
his first job in the movies, known it as Fortune, and
cherished it ever after with the proud superstition with
which a serpent in a Russian fairy tale guards the duck's
egg that contains its death.
Hay had talent in many directions and genius in
one, that of flooding a picture with all the light it
would bear. He told Philip once quite solemnly and
unprofanely that he thought the command, “ Let there
be light!” was the biggest and most sensible ideas in the
whole Bible and that the Old Testament could very
well have shut up shop and let it go at that. Also there
was to be found in him, besides the vast personal egoism
of a dreamy girl, an instinct as certain as it was un-
schooled for clean sweeping line and the large calms
of beauty. He had no feeling whatever for words and
the subtitles he thought of were Victorian grotesques, but
he could make a field and an apple tree letting fall its
blossoms appear on the wavering silver sheet like a
snatch of red Adam's mournful dream.
Besides him, as Philip rose swiftly in the social scale
and found that curt nods from sixteen-year-old stars
changed to long tête-à-têtes on the screen-hoggishness
of their leading men, he began to get some general
conception of the whole arabesque and painted world


238 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
into which he had stumbled. The clue to it all was
artificiality and easy money from studios that were steel
and stucco copies of Renaissance châteaus to febrile,
sex-precocious little girls, who drew salaries in the
thousands and lived in the conjugal intimacy of a
bedroom-farce when they should have been getting ready
to put their hair up and bid hidden, weeping farewells
to their favorite dolls. It was a world that revolved
like the spinning wheel of stiff horses in a merry-go-
round to a syncopation of all the jazziest musical-comedy
tunes. It was a world in which temperament abounded
like an overdose of paprika on fish—a world where
every one seemed to revel in pink-and-purple striped
limousines, cellars full of expensive cordials and perma-
nent cases of actor's head. Not that its inhabitants
did not work and work hard—when they worked it was
with the hypnotic energy of slaves on a sinking galley,
when they played it was with the spectacular abandon of
hasheesh-eaters. Of course there were quiet ones and
saving ones, gentle ones and honest ones, but the loud
ones were so in the forefront and so dizzied Philip with
their colors and their clamor that it felt as if he were
being shaken up inside a kaleidoscope and he had no
time to take his eyes from the fizzing pinwheels of tints
and spitting lights in front of him to seek the meek
ones out. Into the swim he went, head over heels, like
a dive into a paint pot.
There was Char-ruls Springset, for instance, that hill
of flesh, and his partner “Hurry-up” Selleck, thin as
a pin. Together they fell down trick stairs and broke
wax bottles over each other's heads to the infatuated


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
239
roars of the country at large. Both pursued each new
comic effect with the deadly intentness of adders, each
was viciously jealous of the other, and they battled for
the center of the screen like two Chicago nouveaux-riches
for a select dinner-invitation. Both carried large in-
surance policies against any diminution or addition of
bulk respectively, both weighed four times a day with the
religious lugubriousness of middle-aged women, both
pursued the same lights of love and the Decameron
of the amours of Ribs and Lath, as they were irrever-
ently called, would have fitted out a year's amusement
for Marguerite de Valois.
There was little Daisy Dilley, the acknowledged first
attraction of the pictures, the “ Everybody's Home-
Town Girl," to whom stout manicured Middle Western
clubwomen made pilgrimages of gush from their
“burgs” and “villes.” In spite of astonishing wealth
following equally astonishing poverty and a rapid suc-
cession of four husbands and three divorces, little Daisy
had retained the candor, the simplicity and the reti-
cence of a hardy garden. Philip thought of pinks and
phlox when he saw her-of a privet-hedged lawn and a
white pool and cool brick paths. There were vampires
of the screen with good-natured husbands and bobbing
little girls in private—there were ingénues with the open
faces of pansies and a vocabulary in which a Parisian
Apache would have felt at home. There were any num-
ber of overdressed young men, and most of them used
scent, either in private, where it was a vice, or in public,
where it became a disease. There was a Harvard man
who had played the lead in two Hasty Pudding shows,


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
241
Philip was tired, she was insistent, they misunderstood
each other and it took all her courage to prevent things
happening that would have pained them both beyond
remedy. Then she gave up the attempt and went back
to San Esteban, leaving them both rather sick and
strained at heart.
Meanwhile the war fell over the world like rain and
every now and then the pressure and noise of it would
come tearing at Philip's ears like a saw over steel. This
did not conduce to healthy sleep, but Los Angeles streets
held daily every uniform from a Roman centurion's to
that of one of Napoleon's Old Guard, so that when real
soldiers passed in swinging lines of drab they seemed
but one more eddy of the play-acting, false-fronted
cosmos into which he had slipped, that was all. Then
in January, when he was deep in his second picture
a straight war film this was to be three things hap-
pened: he met Sylvia again, the Pancha Verschoyle af-
fair began to give trouble, and he got a long letter from
Dick Sheldon.
Pancha Verschoyle was almost middle-aged, according
to the movies—she admitted to twenty-five among best
friends. She had started on the cheaper burlesque
wheel with an individual song-and-dance act opening
and closing in one and consisting chiefly of skin-tights
and dubious patter. From this she had been rescued by
Elgar Hay, who saw in her salacious blonde vivacity the
makings of an original eccentric comedian. But she
would not have taken advice or directing from a cherub,
and when he dropped her after three weeks of squabbles
and tears she went over to Incando Films, his principal


242 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
rival, and played secondary villainess parts with weasel-
like agility and success. From this she had risen to
“vamping”, reformed when the sinuous destroyer of
souls began to lose vogue, and was now, as a leading
innocent in bread-and-butter dramas dealing with the
misadventures of young wives, on the highroad to success
and her own company.
Philip had made her acquaintance in the rôle of un-
successful life-saver. Incando Films had been doing a
shipwreck picture in Catalina Bay. A big scene was
the rescue of Pancha and her pajamas from the billows
and a subsequent towing of her by the hero to the beach
of a desert island. The director had asked Pancha be-
fore shooting the set if she wanted an experienced swim-
mer to double for her in the parts that required actual
submergence—the wreck and everything about it was
to be as realistic as possible. Pancha had once taken
a course of swimming lessons in the shallow end of an
indoor pool and, having the heart of a gamecock, an-
swered carelessly that she guessed she could do the job
all right herself. Philip, at the time, with Daisy Dilley,
her sister and her present husband, had chartered a
glass-bottomed boat and was floating about admiring
the strange sea-gardens. The sight of a film being taken
drew them instantly to the location.
When Pancha, shivering in her thin silk trousers,
stood by the rail of the sinking barge, whose side had
been camouflaged to the appearance of a section of a
liner, she wished from the bottom of her soul that her
previous hours of aquatics had been put to more prac-
tical use than that of flirting with her instructor. But


244 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
Pancha's next sensation was caused by some one kneel-
ing on her stomach and kneading her arms up and down
in an attempt to pump her out.
“ You blasted idiots," she said feebly, “I could have
drowned all day there for all the attention you paid
to me. Oh, Lord !” and the pumping process was as-
sisted.
Philip had not arrived quite in time, she had been
hauled up from her third sinking by the long arms of a
bashful supe. But she heard about his dash to the
rescue and the sacrifice of a new pair of white flannel
trousers later and asked him to tea in her overgrown
bungalow at Hollywood. He came, and before the hour
was over she had decided that she wanted him to play
with for a while and set herself about the business of
getting him with as little bashfulness as she would have
shown in going shopping for hats.
Now Pancha, née Hilda Swenson, for that was what
she had been christened, though she had the morals of
à raccoon, had been able to pet her body for the
last three years as a raccoon pets and washes its fur.
She knew it was as beautiful as she could make it-she
even gave her shoulders little love-bites now and then
when she stood bare before her mirror and she had
the inborn faculty of making men unobtrusively aware
of it and dowagers admit its effectiveness. At times,
when she was particularly pleased with herself, her skin
had the liquid brilliance of light through sheer silk,
her flesh would seem to glow of itself like a lamp with all
the abundant youth and original sin that possessed it
lover-wise. Moreover, she had a flip tongue, a heartless


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
245
valor, and the simplicity of a modern débutante in ask-
ing for what she wanted.
It showed no particular perspicacity in Philip that
he knew very well what she wanted of him after the
third time he had attended one of her teas for two
that were served in a cushiony room full of soft glooms
and candles and the scent of violet powder. But it
amused him to play Joseph from the country when she
was so obviously eager for the role of Potiphar's wife,
and the illegal Potiphar in question was none other
than Stanwood Fane, who had the conceit and the stupid-
ity of an ostrich and whom Philip found it very pleasing
indeed to annoy. His irony kept him from more and
whenever Milly wandered into his dreams he would
wake with a thick feeling in his throat in the morning
and resolve to insult Pancha permanently when next
he saw her. The resolve was not kept, for Philip, with
his money that flowed in so effortlessly and all the other
monogrammed silk-underwear appurtenances of a star,
was getting soft and full and flabby in body and thought.
Going out to Pancha’s, playing with Pancha, was like
sinking back into the cushions of a sofa, and he was at
a loose end now and had lost all hardy desire for the
starvation and tricks of wandering. His body had kept
him out of a man's or a poet's part in the war that had
eaten up his friends—now he would let his body go along
as it would and, like a tired horse, choose the pleasant-
est paths and the softest footing.
He could never put on the misfit private's uniform
he wore in “Hearts of Valor” without Puckish disgust
at himself and everything about him—and because of


246 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
this, probably, Elgar Hay swore frequently that the
new picture would make him a millionaire all over
again, for Philip threw into his acting all the impetus of
his starved scorn and stubborn dreams. In the picture,
while the camera was actually clicking, he found some
sort of release, he could take himself seriously, believe
for a moment that the fire-pots and smoke-bombs and
artificial trenches had actually some coherent relation
to that long line of holes in the earth and dying men
that ran from Switzerland to the sea. When the camera
stopped he felt the bleak hurt of a child snatched sud-
denly out of the middle of an intoxicating game and
put back again into dresses. “ There are three classes
of beings in the world now," he wrote to Lucia, “men,
women and physically unfit. I belong to the third half-
sex and we bear about the same relation to normal hu-
manity that eunuchs do." But because of his fever for
work “Hearts of Valor” was sure of a finish in rec-
ord time. Elgar Hay had already mapped out another
one-a spy-play this time with a Kaiser and a studio
Berlin.
The climax came, as Philip's did, all at once and with
the decision of a pool ball knocking down a row of toy
bricks. He often wore his uniform after working hours
-it was a private's for one thing and annoyed other
stars who went about as elaborate French aviators or
British majors. Besides, when he wore it in the street,
he could imagine for instants that he was part of the
mass of healthy people and not a buffoon as separate
from the run of his kind as a diseased animal is from
sound animals. Occasionally it would give him unbear-


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 247
able twinges and make him feel like a soiled mas-
querader in stolen clothes, but he saluted with a punc-
tiliousness that would have aroused unholy laughter in
a real buck private, and even such senseless acts gave
him an unreasonable relief from his own thoughts.
Both attitudes of mind were indubitably quite foolish,
but it might be remembered that Philip was not even
yet very old.
He ran into Sylvia one day in the lobby of the Grant-
more, when the picture had kept him late and he had
come in to dinner with Hay and a friend without having
time to alter his protective coloration. She had a can-
teen-worker's uniform on and was frankly and extremely
glad to see him. She came at him with both hands out-
stretched.
“Why, Philip, how perfectly great!” she said and
then, “And when did you get into this man's army,
old fellow ? "
His voice stuck in his throat as he shook hands with
her. He was utterly, stabbingly miserable—he would
have given everything he had for the wit to lie.
“Sorry, Syl,” he told her, and his voice was stupid
with bitterness, “ but you see I'm not in yours or this
or any man's army. I'm a movie-actor, Syl, and these
are my working clothes."
She stood looking at him as if he had slapped her in
the face.
“ Phil!” she said and “I don't understand!” in a
queer little cry.
Philip heard a noise in his ears like the sound of
ice breaking up in a river. His face must have looked


248 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
inhuman for “ Are you sick ? ” she said and put a hand
on his arm. He smiled with movements of his mouth.
“Oh, no, I'm perfectly healthy. Just slacking.”
If she had either believed him or laughed at him he
might have kept her there for hours and told her the
whole of it. He felt a torrent of speech behind his
lips—it beat at them, praying to get out. But-
“You aren't!” she said fiercely. “You aren't. You
couldn't get in. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!”
It seemed to him that her pity at the instant was more
than he could endure. It burned through him as if she
were pointing at a crippled hand.
“So am I," he said stiffly. “When are you going
across ? "
They talked for ten minutes about meaningless things
and parted with indefinite promises to write each other.
She was sailing from New York in three weeks, “If I'm
lucky.” When Philip joined Hay and a man in a green
suit in the dining-room, he discovered that he was sweat-
ing as if he had been marching with a pack under the
sun. He drank all three teacup-cocktails in successive
gulps—a proceeding that was put down to the eccentric
rudenesses of genius.
“Hay,” he said, as the benevolent Manhattans began
to fume over and blur the bad quarter of an hour,
“when we clean up this damn film I'm going off to
Wake Island for a rest. It's only got a population of
six, I hear, and they never even heard of a war. I'm
through.”
“Well,” Hay remarked imperturbably, “we only got
the big battle stuff to shoot.”


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 249
A week later the film had been completed. Philip,
dog tired, had come back to his rooms at the Grantmore
for a bath and dinner before the riotous celebration
that Hay had arranged at the studio for a select few.
While he was eating, in the comfortable undress of
underwear, the food that had been sent up to him, he
noticed that his secretary had put some mail on his
dressing-table. The secretary was a recent purchase, a
middle-aged woman ex-school-teacher who took to the
movies as she would have taken to drugs, shamefacedly
but under the influence of a force too strong for her,
and absorbed a comfortable salary in an efficient way.
Philip picked the letters up-one had a B. E. F. post-
mark and was censored. He laid it aside and opened
another, mauve-colored with scent that stuck to the
fingers.
It had no preliminaries and read:
“Why don't you come out and see me about ten
to-night, Phil ? I want to talk to you. I have
settled with Stan for good.
"P"
Philip chucked this into the wastebasket, rescued it,
reread it and then carefully tore it up. He had no idea
of playing Antony to Pancha's Cleopatra now that
Cæsar had been given his congé.
The others were unimportant, “mash-notes " chiefly,
selected by his conscientious secretary with an arid
humor. The only other one unopened was the foreign
one and that Philip finally settled to read. The


250 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
first sentence made the room seem to rock around
him.
“DEAR PHIL:
“I suppose you saw John's death in the casualty
lists, but I know you'd want any details we could
write ”
John! He had written to John three days ago.
“ Supercilious as ever ... there are no words ...
we had gotten closer than most brothers get ..." His
eye skipped down the page.
“ The last action was so characteristic of him. John
was one of the best pilots in the group and had twice
been recommended for the Flying Cross. Always doing
things on his own in that snotty, superior, crazy way
he had. Well, he and an English kid from Cambridge,
Fluffy Rockett, went out together that morning on a
patrol. They got separated a little Fluffy was new
at the job and were attacked by a whole squadron,
some of Richthofen's old Flying Circus, I think, for
Fluffy said they just seemed to fall right out of the
sky. Both beat it back to the field, but something must
have happened to John's engine, or perhaps he was hit,
for Fluffy looked back once and saw two German planes
square on top of him, loosing off machine guns, and then
saw him go into a tail spin. He almost straightened
out once but the Germans kept forcing him down and
in the end he crashed behind their lines. Fluffy couldn't
do anything, he had three Huns on his own back and
just got away by bull-luck. The Huns dropped a letter
over later saying they'd buried him and giving his name


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 251.
and rank. I know how hard this will hit you, Phil-
it has made all of us as sick as we could be and you
and John were pretty nearly best friends. I only wish
you were here with us to get a crack at the Boche who
got him ”
Philip read the rest of the letter with great care and
twitching eyes. There was only one other sentence in it
that did not slide off his mind like a waterdrop from
polished wood. “Steve is in hospital of course, after
his scrap, but sends his best with the rest of us.”
There is a complete grief and humiliation of the
spirit that has no resource at all but a certain whimsy
of laughter. In the next half hour as he dressed in his
uniform again-Hay's party was to be in costume
Philip laughed rather more than was good for him.
As he started his car to drive it to the studio a sort
of swinging dizziness took hold of him and he felt as a
man just dismissed from a hospital feels who has not
yet had time to adjust himself to the loss of a leg or
an arm. He had thought himself an adept in irony, but
when he had mixed for a few minutes in the squawking
confusion of men and women and drinks and confetti,
he knew that he had never realized in his life what cheap
and scathing irony certain seconds can hold. The whole
business of toasts and speeches and yelling laughter was
like an aimless walk through a second-rate part of hell.
He wanted with a stifling passion dark and silence and
a chance to think about John. Since he could not have
these he sucked at the sour irony before him and man-
aged to drink a good deal with no more result than if he
had poured the cocktails into his shoes. About ten-


252
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
thirty he managed to look at his watch it was while
he was sitting out in an alcove with Bessie Arbiter, and
she was asking him, with a loose, unhappy smile if he
thought her husband would notice anything if she drank
a couple more stingers. “Oh, Peter, I need them bad ! ”
He remembered Pancha's rather large invitation, said
he'd talk it over with George Arbiter, man to man, and
80 got rid of Bessie, and escaped.
“ John's dead,” kept running through his head.
“ John's dead and I'm alive-isn't it funny? Sounds
like a nursery rhyme or a piece of Mother Goose.
John's dead. If things were the other way there'd be
some sense in it—but there isn't any sense in anything.
John's dead. I'm alive and John is dead.”
He swung the nose of the car around towards Holly-
wood. Since the path that had courage and John in it
had fallen out of existence, he would make what speed
he could along the perverse one and run down a steep
place into the sea with the rest of the snouted animals.
Pancha’s bungalow had a high porch with vines and
a discreet light still burning over the door. He rang,
wasted a moment, rang again impatiently. It was really
highly unladylike of the devil not to meet you half
way when you had once decided to go to her. He swore,
rattled the knob and walked in. Pancha’s undressed
voice came far-off through the sudden pungent dusk of
the rooms.
“Who's that?"
“Peter Sands. I got your note but didn't have time
to phone you."
The voice became suddenly alive with a note that was


AMATEUR THEATRICALS 253
as eager and clear as the scent of a bag of musk.
“Oh, Peter-I'm sorry, but I've went and gone to bed.
You can come and call a little if you want to, though.
I won't get up and let you in—it wouldn't be nice.”
“ Couldn't stand life another minute without seeing
you, Pancha. Where on earth do you keep your room,
anyhow? I'm as blind as an owl in sunlight here."
She laughed pussily.
“ Straight ahead of you from the door, Pete dear.
Look out and don't kill yourself on my pet furniture,
it's scattered all over the place. **
Philip took two steps, barked his shins and heard her
laugh again. He had a picture of a great white shameless
cat, purring and licking itself in the middle of a silken
bed. He rubbed his shins and began to tack across the
room with the straining eyes of a deaf man in the middle
of a street. He got through it without further accident
-there were three more and the last of all was Pancha's.
“ Ah, Pancha, open your door!” he said in the voice
of a querulous husband.
Another laugh, sleepy and gurgling, came out to him
like the warmth of a stroking hand. His eyes were more
used to the gloom now, he stepped forward confidently,
in the right direction, he thought. Then a ghastly remi-
niscence of Milly went like ether over his limbs, drug-
ging his heart
He stopped as if he had stumbled and stood a moment
hardly knowing how to breathe. The whole world
seemed for that instant to turn round inside his head.
He suddenly knew both what he was and what he was
doing. He saw himself all over, inside and out, and


AMATEUR THEATRICALS
255
The scent of violets was frail with Philip all the way,
a fading wraith of clear fragrance, and he talked to it
at times almost as if he had Milly there beside him.
When they found out about Philip's injury next
morning, the latter was kept in bed and treated with
the exclusive care of a rich woman's sick Chow. Hay
got the finest surgeon in Los Angeles on the telephone,
and bribed him with an unheard-of price for instant
attention.
The surgeon arrived, and found out in five seconds
that Philip's only trouble was a badly sprained ankle.
He was a tall man, white-haired and scornful, with a face
that, when he saw Philip's “Hearts of Valor” uniform
on top of a wardrobe trunk, looked as if it had been cut
out of frosty steel.
“What was the use, please, of bothering me with a
case like this?” he said curtly as he took his bag to
go. “I have work to do-we're training men at the
hospital—and no business to waste time on healthy
exempted film stars."
“Mr. Sands is physically unfit for service,” said Hay.
“Unfit? He's as fit as any man I ever saw, or will
be very shortly. What's the matter with him?"
Hay produced Philip's draft-card and showed it, to
the other's annoyance. The surgeon was instantly in-
terested and set down his bag.
“Do you mind my examining your heart and lungs ? »
he said briskly, taking assent for granted. He punched
the tubes of a stethoscope into his ears and applied it
to Philip's chest.


256 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“ Say ah !” he commanded fiercely. “Now, possibly,
you may give me some sort of chance to earn my ridicu-
lous fee.”
When the usual process and some special frills were
over, the surgeon looked at Philip with sleety eyes.
“If you have any real desire to get into your country's
service,” he said, “I can perform an operation that will
leave you fit inside of two months. It will be an expen-
sive operation and very possibly a painful one. I shall
ask you to decide about it at once, too, Mr. Sands, as
my time, while not as valuable as yours, has some value
nevertheless."
“ You can make me fit?” asked Philip amazedly.
“ Yes. The trouble is not organic. Any resemblance
to tuberculosis is entirely superficial. You have led a
very healthy life for the last year or so and, to tell you
the truth, the organ has healed as much as it could of
itself. Well?”
Philip grinned.
“ Just as soon as you're ready for me, sir, I'm ready
for you."
And a week later, in spite of Hay's anxieties and ex-
postulations, Philip, prone, was rolled on a rubber-
wheeled table into a white room full of antiseptic figures
and glittering steel.
“Breathe in deeply!” said a voice in his ear. His
hands were folded in a prayerful attitude, a cone pressed
down over his face. He strangled and coughed and
began to breathe choking sweet, and then fell out of his
body entirely into a pit full of stinging blackness.


BOOK VI
THE TINSEL HEAVEN-A DREAM
(1918)





260 THE THE BEGI
BEGINNING OF WISDOM
where was the same wide empty brightness, the same
lone pale expanse, like an endless feather in the wing
of a great white bird.
“I'll play,” he said, and squatted down in front of
them like a tailor.
“We thought you would,” giggled Clotho.
The small deadly thing that belonged to the Three
took dice out of its mouth and flung them down.
Philip hesitated. “I haven't any money!” he yam-
mered, “or any clothes, either, for that matter,” he
added, observing himself completely for the first time.
“You have yourself," answered the Severer. “The
stakes are lower than those we are accustomed to play-
ing for, but one must make exceptions for youth, eh,
sisters?" and the others nodded their heads like palsied
women.
“Your dice," said the Spinner peevishly and dropped
a pair of burnished things into the shaky cup of his
hand.
Philip took them. They seemed quite ordinary dice,
except for the fact that the pips were wet and came
off red on his fingers.
“On the first cast, your body; on the second, your
soul; on the third, your mind," pronounced Lachesis,
“for those happen to be the rules of our little
game.”
Philip rattled the dice about and they chattered in
his hands as his own teeth were chattering in his head.
All the dice-talk he had ever known had gone out of
him and he could remember nothing but scraps of in-
fantile prayers.


THE TINSEL HEAVEN-A DREAM 261
“Now I lay me,” he whispered as he rolled them,
and the hairs of his head stood up.
The dice showed ace and ace.
“Snake eyes !” said the Spinner of Threads. “I'm
afraid that that was a foregone conclusion.”
She rose stiffly, as if she walked on crutches, and the
Twister sat down in her place. As they shuffled and
changed seats Philip felt depart from him all the pride
of the flesh, all the pulsing ardors of the body, all the
leaping heat and delight of blood and bones. He be-
came wavering and thin as the steam of a kettle and
had no more substance now than a fistful of air, for the
creature of the Fates had sprung on him and stripped
his body off his back as a cook strips the green pod from
a pea. It lay there at his feet, a baggy huddle, and the
face was turned up at him like the face of a horrible
doll.
He plucked up the dice again in a ague of inhuman
terror, and this time as he cast he had no words left
to say.
The dice showed deuce and deuce.
“ That's a hard point, Philip!” grinned Lachesis and
Philip snatched at the dice and shook them and threw
them away from him with all the force of his soul, but
they seemed to halt in the air and fell gently as snow-
flakes and quite of their own accord. Philip did not
even need to look at them, for as they settled down and
were still, a thing like a brilliant bird flew out of his
mouth, and with it went love and peace and the seven
wise virtues.
Atropos, the Severer, hunched over to face him for


262 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
the last decision. She petted the bones all over her dry
palm and the look in her eyes was subtle and mocking
and assured. But Philip looked at her and knew that
his mocking was greater than her mocking, and he burnt
like a driftwood fire with hate of her and thrusting
rebel hardiness, for with the loss of body and soul all
fear had passed.
“ Step on that slut, you dice!” he cried as she cast,
and the words echoed violently up to the vault of
Heaven.
The dice showed three and three.
“ Jimmy Hicks ! ” murmured Atropos cautiously.
“ Jimmy Hicks! We are now Jimmy Hicksing, Philip!
We are starting out to build ourselves a big, brick
house!”
“ You'll never live in that house,” Philip bawled with
all the lean rage of his mind. “It's a three-way point
but she sevens! She sevens till the snakes run out of
her shoes ! ”
The dice chuckered over the cloud, lay down, were as
plain to understand as print. Atropos stared at what
they said with dumb unbelief.
“Read 'em and weep!” yelled Philip. “Read 'em
and weep!”
He gathered up the saving seven and turned on the
Twister. “ Soul !” he shouted and clattered the cubes
at her feet like shot. “How's that for a natural ? "
Clotho made snarling assent.
“Body!” he said, and the chills-and-fever counte-
nance of the Spinner dusked like cooling iron as she saw
her own pet spaniel of Luck turn and bark against her.


THE TINSEL HEAVEN-A DREAM 265
larly Christian angel and believed with such thorough
heartiness in the Church Efficient.
“By the way,” said Philip, anxiously, “hate, you
know—that still exists, even here? With the rest of
the passions ?”
“We have to deal with the souls of human beings,"
said the angel, dryly.
They passed by a gilt paper parapet and found a soul
sobbing there as if it would break in two. The angel ap-
proached it with elaborate affection and there was some
talk and manly words and pattings on the shoulder,
but when they went away, the soul was sobbing worse
than ever.
“Her sister is in Hell,” the angel boomed smugly.
“At least we are not quite sure that there is a Hell, but
if there should be I am afraid there is no doubt whatever
that her sister is in it. The saved sister wishes to re-
join the damned one wherever she may be, but that of
course is not permitted.”
“And the saved one cannot forget, and there isn't
any Lethe here, either?” said Philip.
The angel seemed shocked. “Oh, dear, no!” he said
with a flutter of pinions. “Of course I know that some
of the old Fathers once adhered to that doctrine, but
really it is quite a Pagan idea.”
Philip felt all the hot angry essences in his soul stir
up like broth from the bottom of a pot. He doubled
his fists—but there is no way of killing angels.
They came upon a fat silly soul with a harp, who sat
on a glittering pavement and chanted melodiously and
constantly, “Heaven is sweet and I am saved! Heaven


268 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
stopping suddenly in the middle of a courtyard that
shone as if it had been made of white porcelain. It was
cardboard, though, for he dinted it with his heel. The
angel, having no body, seemed piously surprised at this
demonstration of strength.
“Come back?” he repeated, a trifle puzzled.
“ Send messages,” said Philip irritatedly. “Mediums
-tipping tables ouijas—all that sort of thing. And
if they do-why in His name don't they ever talk co-
herently and sensibly for more than five minutes at a
time?”
The angel flickered with the tints of a lunar rainbow
at the utterance of the Name of the Divine.
“ That is managed by a Bureau of Mortal Informa-
tion," he answered. “ Propaganda, I suppose you would
call it. St. Praxed is in charge and the material is syn-
dicated to the various mediums. By the way, have you
seen our latest arresting message, 'All the Comforts of
Home in Heaven or Astral Cigarettes for the Saved'?
He has some first-class advertising men to prepare the
copy."
“ And this is Heaven, apparently,” said Philip
biliously.
The angel seemed to grow taller and his face was
illuminated by a radiance startlingly unlike the reflec-
tion of light on tinsel.
“How do you know that this is Heaven?” he whis-
pered gently. “It may only be the vacant shadow of a
thought in your own mind.”
“You mean—" said Philip, surprised.
“I mean that nothing may exist at all,” said the


270
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
been blind from birth and had never even seen his own
awl and threads. Now he saw, and he went around
Heaven whistling. Philip looked at him for a few sec-
onds of Eternity and then went away because he was
both awed and abashed.
“ You see there are some points about Heaven after
all,” said the angel mockingly, and Philip stopped in
front of a shimmering pasteboard tower and beat against
it with his hands till the tower rocked.
“I cannot understand," he howled furiously. “There
is no sense or order in anything and yet there is such
joy and sorrow here that it tears me apart. Take me
away and show me the reasons of things, for in Heaven
as well as in Earth there is nothing that I can under-
stand.”
“Well, what did you expect to find here?” asked the
angel.
“I don't know," Philip cried. “Oh, I don't know
at all. But there must be one or two reasons at least
for things as they are, or I will go mad and run around
naked through all this tinsel.”
“ That would neither create any disturbance nor
help your present unfortunate state of mind,” said the
angel, reflectively. “As a matter of fact, when you ask
for reasons, you ask to be taken to God. It is not a
course I should have advised, but he who appeals to
Cæsar, to Cæsar let him go."
“ That remark seems sacrilegious, for an angel," said
Philip through his teeth.
“I am an angel,” announced that creature proudly,
“and hence, being composed of infinite religion, it


THE TINSEL HEAVEN-A DREAM 271
is evident tha. I could not be sacrilegious if I
tried.”
“I hate intellectual arrogance," muttered Philip.
“But, as I have told you, I possess no intellect,” went
on the angel smoothly, “ so how ”
“Oh, take me to God, for Heaven's sake!” said
Philip, “or anywhere else that is out of your moral
presence ! ”
So Philip was taken before the Face of the Almighty.
He had expected—he was a reader of modern novels—
to find a business-like God in spectacles in the middle
of strange experiments in a perfectly-equipped chemical
laboratory. But again, the prophecies of things were
oddly changed.
God was middle-aged and sat on His proper Throne,
surrounded by the vocal Beasts of the Apocalypse, full
of songs and eyes. But the Audience-Chamber was
lit by a kind of heavenly electricity and there were
comfortable, modern chairs with cushions for the older
prophets, for Heaven had changed since Creation and
the steam-engine. They had even presented the Record-
ing Angel with a card-index system and each soul was
cross-referenced at least six times with a different colored
card each time. This annoyed the Recording Angel, who
was set in his ways, and he was thinking of taking his
first vacation since Genesis.
There was some delay before Philip could put his
questions, for a prominent Archbishop had just writ-
ten a pastoral letter on the extravagance of the poor that
had been brought up to the Throne with the testy com-
ments of St. Peter. In fact, “ Bosh ! ” in a stubby


272
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
handwriting was scrawled right across an elegant plea
for misunderstood millionaires. This pause Philip em-
ployed in the contemplation of God. There was nothing
in God that was strange or alien or efficient-he was the
God whom Philip had always visioned vaguely as a
strong, kind and terrible man, when in the brittle days
before he went out to boarding-school he had said his
prayers on his knees beside his bed. Philip looked at
the lion face, at the august face, at the face that shone
like snow under winter sun, and all the irony of his
mind went out like a candle, and his knees shook and
his body bowed down to the floor.
The discussion of the Archbishop was finished. Philip
approached the mountainous knees, feeling very small
and like a fly in that shining amplitude. All the beasts
sang louder and turned upon him multitudes of blazing
eyes.
God lifted his hand over Philip like a forky cloud.
“ Well, my son—?" said the voice of God.
“I want reasons," said Philip meekly.
“Reasons ? ” said God, but the voice was thick, and
middle-aged.
Philip lifted his eyes very slowly and a black horror
of soul came upon him.
“I think I met you in Fresno,” he said uncertainly,
for he had looked into the eyes of God and they were
as bright and empty as pieces of washed glass.
“You may have," said God and he hid a smile with
his hand.
But Philip had been overtaken by fury.
“ This is a sham!” he cried violently till the star-


THE TINSEL HEAVEN—A DREAM 277
yellow teeth and ran away, for their delusions fell dead
around them like winter flies when Philip's thought,
washed clear with that gall, had seen them. He lay
still on the rack, and he was bound, but the bonds meant
nothing.
Then the girl stooped over him and kissed him lightly
on the eyes.
“I am your soul,” she said laughingly," and now let
us go away from here, for you have much to do and
many things to make me.”
And the ropes fell off from Philip like leashes of
wind and he arose and took a stringless harp that stood
in the corner and made such insolent music on it that
the heavens trembled about him like a house of cards.
Once more the great solemn Face hung over him like
a tilted sky.
“Well, my son?” said the voice that was summer
thunder.
Philip and his companion had been running a race
down the ring-finger of the Hand. Now they stopped,
and the girl smoothed her dusky hair back out of her
eyes.
“I don't know that I want any reasons," said Philip
vainly. “We are only thoughts, my Lord, and you are
as I, and no thought can destroy another thought
through all the eternities.”
“You are beginning to see, a little,” said the tones
of earthquake.
“As for reasons," said Philip, “I will do what comes
to my hand and abide the issue. For I have scorn again





It took Philip two months to get out of the hospital
and another one to get into the army. Meanwhile he
discovered with mild amusement that Hay's Yankee
shrewdness—the kind one associates with nasals in the
speech and codfish and east wind-meant to hold him
to the cancelation clause in his contract, so that after
Philip had paid his hospital bills and the gorgeous
forfeit to Hay, he left the pictures with as little actual
cash in pocket as he had when he entered them, though
he still possessed some thousands of dollars in Liberty
Bonds. Hay, whose generosities and greeds were cryptic
and alike in their suddenness, offered to take the latter
off his hands at par and Philip assented for as much as
was needful to cover the convalescent's vacation that fol-
lowed his operation. The frosty surgeon arranged mat-
ters with a local Draft Board-Philip's classification
was changed to Al--and by a little ingenuity he man-
aged to get himself inducted into the Field Artillery
where his status as a Yale man, when Yale was the only
college to possess an F.A.R.O.T.C., might count for
something. He departed for camp about the middle of
June with a contented spirit and a document full of
American eagles, Whereases and Greetings. Two weeks
of the vacation had been spent with Lucia-Phil was
off making patriotic speeches most of the time, but
there had been several cheerlessly amicable meetings
between father and son in which both took great pains
changed to cal, Draft Boosty surgeoz
281


282 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
to behave well before Lucia and the servants and neither
said what he thought. The day before Philip left
Los Angeles he got a formal congratulatory letter from
his father, between whose lines could be read much
heavy self-satisfaction. Philip tore it up, answered it
with one word “ Thanks” and put San Esteban behind
him.
The most glamorous parts of being drafted were the
heroic pictures of death or the D.S.C. that would run
through his mind to the jeers of the ribald parts of
him, going down in the train. When he actually got
to camp he found it rather like a gigantic, rigid outdoor
boarding-school with reformatory manners, run by and
for men, whose members were chosen by lot and whose
vacations depended largely on the luck of the draw. It
was a grown-up Kitchell fairly run, with a tenseness
of purpose in every small second of the day that made
college seem like a lotus-eater's island. There was the
first week, when dazed Italians wandered desolately
about trying to buy a yard of picket line or find the
officer who kept the key of the parade-ground—when
calisthenics created unheard-of muscles only to make
them sore as stubbed toes—when an appetite was no
longer well-mannered or even civilized but a ravening
physical emptiness that had to be stuffed into quiescence
as a mattress is stuffed full of hair—when Philip had
his first experience of peeling a washboiler full of scald-
ing hot potatoes on K.P. Philip jumped like a startled
aunt at any and every bugle call and spent most of his
spare time, it seemed to him, in saluting second-lieu-
tenants, policing barracks, or buttoning the thousands


TERRA FIRMA
283
of errant buttons on his uniform. He took care of
those buttons like a mother with a croupy child, yet one
of them was always sure to be flapping from some un-
suspected place whenever he came under the disciplined,
burning eyes of his superiors. He and all the new men,
poor goblins, wished fervently for eyes wherever they
had buttons and for automatic recording gramophones
instead of ears, for they were always doing the wrong
thing in a desperate hurry or waiting dazedly for fur-
ther orders until it was too late to do the right thing at
all. The city ones recovered the power of heavy sleep,
when the night hours were like solid blocks of ebony
laid firmly and softly on each other, edge to edge, till
dawn and the whinnying bugle broke them apart. And
they all discovered such an interest in eating that for
some the problem of extra pie became as intense a
concern as was the salvation of his soul to a Spanish
saint.
But even when the first ten days were up, they began
to walk and talk differently, pick up doughboy slang,
roll their own and fit steadily into the machine. They
were broader, they stood up straighter, they tanned in
every color from brick to burnt olive-there developed
a certain team pride in the piece, in the squad, in the
battery, in the brigade. The making of a battery of
artillery out of a disconnected job-lot of raw men and
half-cooked officers is as interesting and arduous a
process as birth by Cæsarian section and the labor-pains
are distributed down to the cooks. When July was
passing into August and dust lay like heavy talcum on
the throat in hot route marches and fools emptied their


284
THE BEGIN
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
canteens the first half-hour, Philip took stock of his new
possessions and decided that they were satisfactory.
Item-Officers.
Captain Lisbee, the lucky best of the First Platts-
burg experiment, just, tireless and always ready to
learn, du Guesclin three years out of Harvard with a
Florence Nightingale hatred of messiness, dirt and care-
less subordinates, as well as much of Florence's hard,
humorous sincerity. His men exasperated him in secret
with their human lack of instantaneous comprehension
of new situations and their human anxiousness to be
led, but he took care of them as if they were orphans
he had to bring up. They laughed at his broad flat
“a”'s and continual baths, but he could have taken
them all across a plain as hot as a frying-pan into
direct machine-gun fire.
Lieutenant Hastings, capable, conscientious, colorless,
cool. An ex-West Pointer, and a little supercilious
toward the New Army with the bored tolerance of the
undistinguished professional toward the able amateur.
Followed and obeyed with accuracy but without en-
thusiasm.
Lieutenant Whittle, a young somber idealist of a San
Francisco millionaire. The least apt of the lot at
handling men but with a patience that redeemed most
of his actual mistakes. Tolerated rather than liked or
hated, and nicknamed “Little Jeff” for the bustling,
loose-jointed way in which he busily ran about.
Lieutenant Stannard, Philip's direct superior who
tried to hide a weak mouth with a nail-brush mustache,


TERRA FIRMA : 285
and shifty eyes by turning them up at the sky when he
talked to you. Very cordially detested as a temper-
ridden Achilles of the “duty before decency” stripe.
Large gory threats were whispered in the company room
or after Taps of what would happen to him if the bat-
tery ever went into action. The British private, after
four years of war, had transferred what venom he had
against the ruling Powers to Staff Officers or safe,
plump Generals at Headquarters, but the American pri-
vate, being new at the game, took it all out on his own
immediate non-coms and lieutenants in the old demo-
cratic way.
Item-Men.
These ranged from the University of Texas first-
sergeant with hair and manners to officers as slick and
smooth as a wet rubber raincoat to a middle-aged hired-
man from a peach-ranch with hands like roots who had
trustingly brought two flannel nightshirts to camp and
so acquired a nickname that stuck to him like a piece
of flypaper. They were a mixeder lot than the Frickett
miners, drawn from every class and many of the trades
in the Republic, but the backbone of the battery was the
ranchworkers and the city clerksmit split about fifty-
fifty between them and the pallid stamina of the latter
matched the former's uncoördinated strength at every-
thing that did not call for muscles in bulk alone. There
was, or tried to be, the battery bully, ’Lige Denan, who,
after swelling about for two weeks with mouth on one
side of his face in the approved hard-boiled fashion,
got into a dispute in mess line with a large cow-like


286 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
being from San Diego and that evening found himself
being as thoroughly and scientifically beaten as if each
of his opponent's hands was a living hammer before
he could gasp out “ 'Nuff !” and discover that the San
Diegan was the proprietor of “ Professor Monte's Box-
ing and Athletic Academy.”
There was the battery funny-man, a scrawny little
mole-face who had grown like a barnacle on the San
Francisco water-front. He had the quacky voice of a
tin duck and knew all the underground folk-ballads of
the United States from “ Down on the Lehigh Valley”
to “My Girl's a Lulu.” His wit was gnomish and as
American as ice-cream soda, and he got laughs fat
vaudeville comedians would have given their false noses
for when the battery broke ranks at the end of a greasy
day of unsparing heat and sweat. He composed the
litany of “C” Battery, roared out whenever possible at
all times of ease and stress.
Micky (interlocutor) : Well, fellas, and who's Uncle
Sam's pure-hearted little Sunday-school boys ?
Chorus (enormously sardonic): Us, God damn it!
Micky (pained): Dear, dear, and what did Uncle
Sam's pure-hearted little Sunday-school boys do all day?
Chorus (a roar): Shovel!
Micky (with a wicked drawl) : And what, oh, what,
did Uncle Sam's pure-hearted little boys spend all day
shoveling?
But here we had better leave him.
There was also the battery butt, a tow-headed Swede


TERRA FIRMA
287
with blue gollywog eyes. He was so eager to follow in-
structions—so pathetically anxious to do as he should-
so utterly certain of never by any possibility being in
the right place at the right time. His feet were not
unduly large but he spent most of his waking hours in
falling over them—it was a legend that he had once
stumbled and fallen flat on his face on encountering a
stray dropped safety-pin in the middle of the company
street. He was always on K.P. for misdemeanors and
there led the terrified existence of a persecuted puppy
under the voice and hand of the blustering cook who
hated “hynephated Amurricans ” with crusading zeal.
Ole was constantly putting salt in the pies instead of
sugar and mixing raw potatoes with cooked apples,
“they ban look so moo-ooch alike.” He was shown a
dozen times how to make coffee but persisted in regard-
ing dried beans as a necessary ingredient till the whole
mess threatened to boil both him and the cook in their
own pots. There was the battery dog-robber, a plump,
plausible oily lump of a Greek who licked non-commis-
sioned boots and greased non-commissioned palms and
applied for a three-day pass every fortnight with a new
unpronounceable relative sick each time. There were
the sergeants and corporals themselves, those you could
work and those you couldn't, those who stood on their
position and their warrants like pouter-pigeons on a
roof, and those that were “pretty good scouts," the
serene and the bluffers, the loud, the silly, the quiet,
the effective, the dogs in office, the infinitely various
children of men.
Philip had dreaded his identification with Peter


290 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
it next and I made him swaller his tongue. He didn't
know it, he was too full of happy-juice, he just made
a lot of funny noises and pretty soon he died. I didn't
do anything to her, not even leave a letter, she was
different, she wasn't the cute little kid she used to be,
and you never can tell with Chinks. They was a couple
of spots of blood on the floor and I wiped 'em up with
my sleeve. Then I went back.”
He sighed.
“All the papes said he kicked out with heart disease.
They gave him the swellest funeral you ever saw, fire-
crackers till it sounded as if hell was poppin' all over
Chinatown and a big silver joss and a p-rade and lots
of punk. I guess they must a thought he swallered his
tongue accidental, and anyway they didn't want to put
the bulls wise to the hop-joint he'd been running on the
side and they'd never gotten their piece out of. Anyhow
they didn't bother me."
He rolled over uneasily, squeaking the springs of his
"
...
cot.
to +
“She and the kid both died when it came,” he said
softly. “Too muchee hop. And then I started sniffin'
the white stuff.”
But the tale of how he took to heroin, became a
“snow-bird” and finally broke the habit, in so far as
it can be broken, after a two years' horrible wrestle
by sheer violence of will, was another saga, true or
false, but one that Philip didn't happen to hear that
night.
As a final flourish, the middle of a chance letter of
Philip's to Dick does as well as any.
t
ia
to


TERRA FIRMA
291
“ They are as various a bunch as the letters you find
in alphabet soup. A plumber, a sign painter, four
chauffeurs, many farmers or farmers' sons or hired men.
A couple of stenographers, a broken down Yale repro-
bate who gives me no peace, a barber, three bartenders,
the last of whom kept a bawdy-house on the side. But
his wife has taken over his job now that he is in the
army and manages it, he tells me, quite effectively
another case of a woman releasing a man for war-ser-
vice. ..."
Item-Horses.
Philip had always thought himself a fair enough
rider, even though he had ridden little or not at all for
the last year and a half. He was therefore free of the
unholy awe that assailed the more cityish of his fellow
recruits at the first encounter with creatures whom they
regarded with much the same dread as geography lions.
But the beasts that had been shipped to “C” Battery
were savages, technically broken because a buster had
ridden them once but wild as headhunters and hating all
men like Amazons. Philip was kicked once and bitten
twice in the first quarter-hour of riding drill and after
that lost all reverence and respect for that noble animal,
the horse.
Feeding them, harnessing them 'up, were as adven-
turous experiences as riding surf in a sieve. “You
sneak up on the brute from his rear when he isn't look-
ing,” Philip explained later, at length. “You take fair
aim and kick his rump over to the other side of the
stall. You then slide in with your buckets, keeping


292 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
both eyes at once on teeth and feet or you'll know it.
You deposit the feed, he tries to bite you and you whang
him in the jaw. In grooming him, always be ready to
kick him in the stomach on small provocation or you
will be slain. I tried gentling and soothing mine for
a few downtrodden days, but it was no more use than
reading the Gettysburg Address to a painted cannibal.
I clucked like a hen at him in the most approved English
'ostler way and patted his pink nose and he very nearly
had my thumb off before I could jerk it away. More-
over, it's no use to treat him like a gentleman for as
soon as one horse gets to know you and only kicks you
now and then as a matter of principle, he gets switched
to another stall or some rank sergeant gets hold of
him and you have the whole thing to go over again with
a fresh new devil unleashed whose previous valet never
came nearer a horse than the wooden ones in the merry-
go-round before he got in the army.
“ And watering the things, my aunt! It isn't a
column, it isn't a march, it's a charge, a dead run away
of the whole blame barebacked battery till they hit the
river like a bursting shell and the horses try to slip and
roll over on you so that you'll drown. The sight is
stupendous in the pink early emptiness of dawn, hun-
dreds of horses gone loco and running like stags with
all the officers and non-coms in sight cursing their lungs
out because we can't hold them in, and we sticking on
anywhere from the ears to the end of the tail, a bunch
of scared, khaki-colored centaurs (if you can imagine
such things) with the horse part always ready to bust
off and break away. One thing—it does teach you to


TERRA FIRMA
293
ride-at the end of it most of us could have straddled a
primeval moose with equanimity.
“My pick of them all was The Goat, he used to eat
sections of his harness when I wasn't looking and then
get, oh, so sick! till he wore the stable-sergeant away.
Once I'll swear he had two brass buckles off his head-
stall for dessert—when I kicked him next I could hear
them jingling around in him like sleigh-bells. He was
a sweet thing with a face like Torquemada, long yellow
ivories and a rocking-chair canter. I gave him two
cakes of chocolate the day we were mustered out and he
bit me friendlily on the cheek-pure affection, it wouldn't
have hurt an egg.”
Item-Guns.
No wonder that guns used to be baptized at the
foundry like children and have polysyllabic names and
elegant Latin mottoes scrolled into their backs—for
Philip soon discovered that each gun in “C” Battery
had the individuality of a demigod, though all were as
mathematically alike as human ingenuity could make
sure of. “Benny" came first, so named because of the
coughing gorilla-like bark he made when he spoke and
an obscure racial jest connected with Jews. Two-Gun,
sulky as a sow, and picking up all kinds of dirt with
astonishing ease. Three, “Greasy Ann” that waddled
along with her limber like a washerwoman. Four,
“ Little Joe,” since her crew were all frantic crap-
shooters. Philip belonged to Benny, and he got to
know the sleek steel animal as a bridge-shark knows the
cards in his opponent's hands. From the soft chock


294 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
of the breech-block that smacked home like a closing
metal mouth to the dot of a flag from the signal pit
showing that Benny had plumped square on his target
again and the burnt chemical whiff of smokeless powder
in his nose and on top of his tongue, Philip acquainted
himself with every trick and idiosyncrasy of the play.
The guns were still virgins, of course, for they had
not killed as yet. When they had, good gunners would
regard them with odd worship as a combination of wife,
god and favorite horse. Now, after two months of it,
with the battery shaking into shape, the unmarried,
the young and the heedless thought of them and the
whole business of the army secretly as huge fabulous
playthings in a keen and dangerous game, though pub-
licly all cursed out the entire system from the first
sergeant's liver to a lack of milk in the Java with
the heartiness of soul and epithet that has been the
peculiar possession of privates since the Tenth Legion's
disreputable jests on Cæsar's bald head. Only the mar-
ried, the men over thirty and the few sensitive souls
to whom the perspiring publicity of barracks and
showers was like an enforced hair-shirt looked ahead
and saw France and action and death dropping toward
them as softly and surely as a falling parachute with
the drilled march-past of each rapid twenty-four hours.
Man always mercifully believes himself and his chief
friends immortal until definitely proved otherwise if
he did not all Earth would be a congress of shivering
children in scientific hot-houses by now.
But this is a digression from the guns. Philip, Brick
Bennett, a man named Lewis and an inarticulate farmer


296 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
grease a goose. They been doubling up forced marches
on us till I musta lost ten pounds in two days."
This produced a laugh, for Brick was as skinny and
strong as a horse's leg.
“ Any time we don't spend half the day out here and
get fried in the sun like eggs, I'm a Swede," put in
Philip diffidently. “There must be some reason for it,
the little boys with the new brass bars don't love to
come out here and sweat so much.”
“You're right, my son, you're right and you've said
a faceful.” Brick grew pontifical. “In three weeks
we'll be down at Jackson. In three more weeks
we'll be going across. In a month after that we'll be
honest-Injun Sammies”—he lent the word an accent of
indescribable scorn—"and Benny here will be getting
all hot in the throat and the bunch of us will hafta
look around and pick up pieces of Simp.” He grinned
annoyingly.
“Yey w-w-w-w-won't!” sputtered Stevens. “You-
you—you—" He opened and shut his mouth, started
again, “You-you-you—" By this time the whole
gun crew was choking and snickering. “You—you'll be
dead first, you Brick!” he ended triumphantly, leaving
the latter in convulsions.
“Oh, turn off the alarm-clock," he gasped. “Turn
off the alarm-clock, darling, wifie’s awake!”
“H-h-hell ! ” gulped his butt disgustedly. “H-h-
hell!”
“ Calm down, Simp boy,” advised Lewis, a taciturn,
efficient cog. “You ain't going to spit at the Germans,
you know, you're going to shoot them.”


TERRA FIRMA
297
“I wonder if it scares you as sick as they say it
does when the other guy's shells start coming over,” said
Philip casually.
“Sure," answered Brick. “We'll all be scareder than
pups.”
“ The geeks on the other side'll be just as scared.”
This was Lewis.
“ M-m-maybe they will, but h-how the heck will we
know it?”
“ Use your 'magination, Simp, if you've got one."
“Oh, we may be scared but I guess we'll keep on
shooting,” said Brick lightly.
“Surewe got to. And anyway we ain't got such
a rotten job as the doughboys."
“D-do you know, I wouldn't mind that so much,
B-Brick, i-it's getting bumped by somebody you can't
see that's the bum idea.”
A slight nervous tension, the tension of the untried,
twitched over the sitting or sprawling figures.
“If you're dead, you're dead," announced Brick
didactically. “That's all. What's the difference how
you get put away?"
“ L-lots. Y-you don't believe in im-immortality,
Brick?"
He rose and stretched his arms. “Immortality-
hell!” he said, but “I dunno," he added at once, with
puzzlement. “ The priest, God bless his fat soul for
he's been a decent man to me, used to talk a lot about
what would happen to me when I died. But look here
-here I am "-he hit himself on the chest—"Brick
Bennett. If somebody comes along and blows a hole


298 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
in me, where am I? Up the flue? I'm alive now-you
can't show me I'll be living then—any part of me I give
a damn about. That's why I'm going to keep alive as
long as I can and Lord help the man who tries to stop
me.”
“ The Bible says,” said Lewis, who was a Methodist.
“I know what it says, but it said it about a lot of
sheenies, didn't it? Well, I'm not a sheeny. I'm Irish.
It's a g-r-r-rand race!” He waved his long arms and
laughed.
“So God help the little French girls and the connyac
too when I get amongst them, for I'm going to keep
alive as long as I can.”
“You're a materialist, Brick,” said Philip.
“ Sure I am—it's a nice long word. And what do
you think-you went to a college once?”
Philip remembered the tinsel heaven.
“It's too darn hard to explain," he said gingerly,
“ but I think I go on, even after somebody fills me
full of lead pills. I think we all go on. Even you,
Brick.”
“ That's lovely of you. How about the Simp?"
“Oh, nothing could ever bust him. But the thing,
the force that's working with us is caught on its own
fishnet. It can't get loose from us now if it wanted to,
it's made us too subtle and too amusing to cook in any-
body's hell or put away on ice in anybody's heaven.
We go on and we get changed as we go on. Maybe we
come back here in body after body."
“That's all bunk,” said Lewis decisively. “You got
Heaven and God and the Bible and Hell and Christ.


TERRA FIRMA
299
You act right and God will take care of you. You don't
and you better look out.”
“Th-that's so," said the Simp. “ Th-that's so. I'm
re-religious myself.”
“I like Sellaby's idea a whole lot better," said Brick,
stirring up dust. “All the same if I ever do come back,
by swipes, I hope I'm a millionaire ! ”
“You—you'll be a white wing, th-that's what you'll
be !” snapped Stevens, angrily.
“Now, Simp, what rude, rude words !” He scuffled
dust at the stutterer's face.
“ Listen," said Lewis. “Two mornings ago when I
was on sick-call, the Doc was spreading it with that
fat 'A' Battery Major. And he said "
A sharp coughing order split the calm like a stick
ruffling lazy water. The lolling shapes snapped up into
their places. There was nothing in the world but wind-
less skies, brown earth, sunburnt toy-soldier rows of
stiff men and squatting guns, and heat.
Item-Snapshots.
The “Y” reading and writing room. “Write to
Your Mother!” “Write to Your Mother!” Every-
where are signs, signs full of exclamation-points, signs
sedulously affectionate, signs about keeping pure, signs
jovially Christian, taking Christ by the arm, signs of a
piece with the professional heartiness of the sparrow-
shaped secretary who bobs about like a bird in a red-
triangled uniform and will call sergeants “ dear boys."
The long tables are crowded with heads, torsos, and
writing hands, the air is misty because there are so many


302 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
itself like a bath of fragrant water and leaves him
swingingly refreshed.
He might be Adam just wakened under the apple-
tree or the last Esquimaux watching the stars fall out
of the sky, he is so alone. There are other sentries
but the beats are long and leave little chance for stolen
talk or cigarettes. He is completely by himself and
achingly happy. The hours pass like dark falling
feathers, he walks in a glittering trance with the rustle
and sight of water in his ears and eyes.
All the same when his relief comes in and he yawns
away in a most unmilitary manner, he knows that he
couldn't have stood it a second longer without falling
asleep as he stood, like a tired horse. ...
Route-march, jingle and squeak of the harness, slur
of the wheels through dust, clacket and pad of horse-
hoofs, grunt of the limbers complaining like fat old
men, the strong noise of human voices trying to sing.
“Oh, it's hi-hi-hee in the Field Artilleree.
Shout out your numbers loud and strong !-
One! Two! »
“A” Battery slaps the numerals out of its ten-score
throats with the crash of the elephants salute to royalty.
“B” Battery starts vocalizing on its own account. “The
artillery, the artillery, with the dirt behind their ears,"
it bellows.
“ The artillery, the artillery, that laps up all the
beers,
The cavalry, the infantry,


TERRA FIRMA
303
chantey-mata currents ITO Micky, you
Tid! Let's Seam.
And the God damn engineers !
They couldn't lick the artillery in a hundred thou-
sand years.
“C” Battery is not to be silenced, it calls on its
chantey-man for the large, almighty song that has drifted
home on odd currents from the A.E.F.
“Hey, Micky! Oh, Micky, you mick! Give 'em
Hinky Dinky, Micky! You tell 'em, kid! Let's go ! ”
Micky raises his fluting treble, pure as fresh cream.
“A Mademoiselle from Gay Paree!” he lilts.
“Par-lay voo!” from the chorus, full throated, mak-
ing the horses put back their ears.
“A Mademoiselle from Gay Paree!”
“Par-lay voo! ”
“A Mademoiselle from Gay Paree"
The notes soar, liquid and floating; the chorus chops
them off like an ax.
“Th-there's going to be more truth than potry for
you in that tune, B-Buck," mutters Stevens, trying to
recover his breath. The song goes on.
Past a wall of Lombardy poplars like green feather-
dusters on end, past an orange-grove picked out with a
few late, red-golden bubbles of fruit, over a bridge that
sharpens all noise, back to dust that muffles it like felt.
Sweat and the smell of leather and dust and horses,
dark stains on the horses' backs, the dust stirred to
blobby, schemeless designs as if a beast with a thousand
stumpy legs and wheels were passing.
“ The General got the Cross of War!
Par-lay voo!


304
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
The General got the Cross of War!
Par-lay voo!
The General got the Cross of War!
But nobody knows what he got it for!
Hinky, dinky par-lay voo!”
The identical little boy with the flag that there is on
every road, frantically waving, giving vent to an ecstatic,
piping “Yeah!” as the battery clinks and chumbles
along. The hard ease of sitting on the caisson—the
heat, direct and intense but dry and clear, heat that
would brown this paper to the color of pale toast but is
not the sunstroke kind—a long, thirsty drink of some
colored stuff mostly fizz and foam in everybody's mind
if they ever get back to camp. The horse of an officer
whickers, blowing out nostrils, at the sight of a mare in
a fenced field who runs over to the bars with the sweep-
ing grace of a canoe and stretches a long roan neck wist-
fully at the harnessed, obedient parade of possible hus-
bands. Ribald comments flicker down the column.
“Oh, Farmer, have you a daughter fair?
Par-lay voo!
Oh, Farmer, have you a daughter fair?
Par-lay voo!”
Fat Wilson wipes his dripping face. “Must be going
to fight the Japs this trip!” he wheezes. “Seems 's if
we're half-way to the Pacific already!” Drab-uni-
formed, khaki with dust, grinning and singing and
talking, the horses straining, the guns jolting, the
wheels squealing, they simmer down the road and are
out of sight, a thousand or so young men, hard as nails,


306 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
and all the manifold perils of the great deep. The last
days were both sober and flushed. “They're fighting
mad to get a crack at the Boche!” said a colonel,
preeningly. Well, they were, three-quarters of the time.
The brigade as a whole had the pride and wonder and
doubts of a Kentucky thoroughbred before the feel of
her first real race track under new shoes.
The great vivid instrument quivered, hesitated, re-
flected, joked at its qualms, swore to give a bitterly
good account of itself and fulfil the stubborn purpose
for which it was made. The last six months had been
teaching a giant baby how to walk, now the child was
on its feet, about to take the first firm step towards the
dark cloud, the dark pool which lay ahead, the dark
semblance, the dark ignorance, which with a few steps
more it must wholly enter, to live in, suffer in, come
back from, or be consumed.
This was all in steamy Carolina at the idle, maple-
leaf-colored height of a southern fall. So, like every
other body of troops between Maine and Oregon—if you
believe in what you are told—the brigade was just on
the point of sailing when the Armistice fell into the
middle of it like a grenade.
They rejoiced officially and cursed in private. There
is no doubt that the vast majority of them were stun-
ningly disappointed, and those who were secretly glad
proclaimed their discomfiture in the most blaspheming
tones. They had been tempered, drilled and exercised
for anything from five months to a year, tuned up till
the whole brigade ran together like the engine of a
millionaire's limousine-and then, at the end of it all,
nade


TERRA FIRMA
307
marched square into an anticlimax to the sound of an
ironic bugle. “Ah, hell, it was such a nice war while
it lasted !” said Brick disconsolately. Relief did not
come till later-they had never seen action at all.
“Papa, what did you do in the Great War?" growled
the stable sergeant, an old regular. “I curried up a lot
of wall-eyed plugs, me son, while me buddies went out
and got plugged at Chatto-Teary! If the little geezer
ever asks me questions like that, I'll push in his face !"
The days until the brigade was finally demobilized
were the most staringly dull that Philip had ever spent.
The whole business and end of existence had lost its
salt. What was the use of drilling or marching or
obeying orders if you weren't going to fight? The
hours passed in mechanical duties, slackly done, in a
fever of gambling, in long parliaments as to what they
were going to do when they got out. It was the excep-
tion who was able to say flatly that he was going to
take up his old job where he had left it-most had
been wrenched violently from the life in which they had
grown up, traveled out into larger air, seen men and
cities, grown restless as crows and hungry for some-
thing undefined. The city boys imagined themselves
farmers till they talked to the boys from farms who
looked back on their monotony and crampedness with
vast distaste and wanted to get to the city where some-
thing was doing all the time. “I hear it's pretty
easy to be an electrician if you take some courses," said
a bootblack, pleadingly. A cigar-store clerk was going
to study dentistry. A farm hand had bandit visions
of driving a taxi. A dozen asked Philip for advice on


308
THIE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
getting into the movies—for his secret was more or
less out. As for Philip himself, a plan began to form
in his mind.
When they reached Los Angeles on the government's
transportation, red-chevroned and taking immense de-
light in ostentatiously ignoring officers and M. P.'s,
Philip, Brick Bennett, Simp Stevens and Philip's bud-
die, the ex-taxi-driver and dope-fiend, had a historic
dinner in celebration at the Grantmore. It was an
affair of as many courses as a Middle Western city's
banquet to a mayor who has just been whitewashed by
the Grand Jury, and when the first half-inch of ash
had been knocked from cigars, Philip, who had been
able to get hold of Elgar Hay by much hurried tele-
phoning, adjourned them to a private room and pro-
duced two quarts of five-star Haig and Haig. Next
morning they parted, Stevens back to raise alfalfa,
Brick for “the best damn garridge in Mendocino
County," Moke Wickering on the Oakland train. Then
Philip loafed through a whole large day, spending most
of his ready cash on a Turkish bath and unfamiliar
civilian clothes, the trousers of which, especially, flapped
80 loosely about his ankles that he felt nervous and
undressed. He went out to dinner with Hay that night
and they talked till two.
In the first place, Philip didn't want to go back into
the films at all. If he did, he wanted a free hand and
entire supervision of everything in his pictures from
the original script to the titles and final cutting. He
realized that this was something to which Hay could
not possibly accede, and he did not greatly care. The


TERRA FIRMA
309
films, as they were made at present, it seemed to him,
bore in general the same ingenuous and illegitimate re-
lation to the arts that advertising copy did to literature.
Besides, he had other work to do, and he could not waste
time.
The two parted with respect and entire incompre-
hension.
“ You aren't going to ditch me now and ack for In-
cando, are you, Pete?” Hay asked doubtfully as they
shook hands.
“ Incando? Rats!” said Philip. “No, I'm not go-
ing anywhere in the films at all. I'm going off where
I can get by myself and write some poetry.”
Hay stared at his retreating back.
“ Poetry?” he said. “ Poetry? Well—I'll—be
burnt!”
So next morning Philip found himself, like most
of the just demobilized army, out of a job.
He had the impulse to rush back to San Esteban, but
again both pride and sense interfered. Phil had never
written him a line since his stiff acknowledgment of
the fact of Philip's enlistment, and while Lucia said
much of “Your father's pride in you,” Philip looked
dubiously at the picture of himself turning up at his
father's door, quite penniless except for a few bonds
which Phil would undoubtedly regard as treasonably
unpatriotic of him to sell. He felt that the rôle would
be less that of the prodigal son than the fatted calf, a
burnt-offering to Phil's bad temper. Besides, he knew
in himself for the first true time since college, knocking
like a hammer, the driving impulse to make glistening


310 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
shapes and angry stars with words. And for this he
wanted three things, seclusion, loneliness, and some
physical work for his body part of the time.
He sold a hundred-dollar bond-his army pay had
gone in learning not to draw to a pair and a kicker-
and spent a week in employment agencies discovering
that the words “ Just discharged from the army,” or even
“ from the A.E.F.” were not always lucky-pieces to
bring instant offers of occupation to their fortunate
possessor. “The longer the pay-roll, the shorter the
memory,” thought Philip unjustly, for the large cor-
porations as a class were as fair and unfair as the
small employers. It gave him a sardonic twist now
and then to see or read of gold-striped men selling
newspapers or begging or trying to stumble their way
through some of the giant creepers of red tape that
hedged the various bureaus of vocational training. He
made a note on a scrap of old newspaper that fitted the
case. “In the Middle Ages, the ingratitude of princes
was proverbial. We have progressed—and royalty's
place and business in that as in other things has been
most efficiently taken over by enlightened democracies.”
He got a job driving a team and held it for a week,
but it left him at the end of the day too tired to think
or write, so he quit it without remorse as soon as he
had drawn his pay. He parted from the horses however
with apples and some sentimental regret-one of them
had a wicked sidewise slash of the head in biting that
reminded him of the Goat. He tried being an elevator
boy in the employ of a concern that had loudly an-
nounced its policy of “A Job for Every One of Our


TERRA FIRMA
313
lance of a starving spider lest some eccentricity of the
perverse heating-apparatus slay thousands of his charges
at a breath. He took a savage pleasure in eating eggs
for breakfast—the joy of the South Sea Islander who
feasts on the baked persons of his private enemies. Des-
pite all hindrances however and especially the thirst
for sleep which, because of his sudden exchange of night
for day attacked him at any and all moments when he
was not actually in bed-he finished the opening chorus
and first fifty blank verse lines of his “Io," rang and
altered and burnished and reburnished them as a bell-
founder tests and tinkles a great young chime of bells,
and knew that they were the best work he had ever done
and that they had taken into themselves as a man drinks
wine every sparkle and thrust of the sudden new elo-
quent force that had hold of him like squeezing fingers.
And then came the slaughter of the innocents. He dozed
off between two and three of a placid morning and woke
up to find the room rather chillier than usual. The
heating-apparatus had died quietly in that hour, that
was all, and the incubators were full of holocaust and
dead little chickens. Philip faced the avenging wrath
of their owner with a heart naked with joy at release
from peepings and pinfeathers, got away as soon as he
could, sans wages or character, and turned up again at
Los Angeles like a lost bad penny. He took the begin-
nings of “Io” with him, and a distaste for cold chicken
that lasted him all his life.
It was wholly by chance that he finally got what he
wanted—Stafford Grant, a scientific farmer with a small
but intensively cultivated fruit and truck ranch, came


314 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
into town looking for a handy man to boss his handful
of Japanese laborers, ride a horse, run a Ford if neces-
sary, and do it all for as little as he would give. Philip
liked the set of his mouth and his obvious enthusiasm
for his ranch and the country in general-like many of
the most fervent Westerners, he was an adopted son,
born and brod in Massachusetts. And Philip's college
and service record appealed to Grant as much as his
nominal price—he had gone to Massachusetts Agricul-
tural himself and was one of the new type of business-
like small proprietors with a knack for machinery and
a knowledge of soil-analyses and government bulletins
before whom the goat-whiskered, slipshod farmer of
“Way Down East," who spurted tobacco-juice and un-
bearable dialect at the slightest provocation, had van-
ished like a misplaced caricature from a Life of the
seventies. They settled what terms were to be settled
that evening and eight months of steady, hard, high-
hearted work began.
It was in these months that Philip was able to group
and appraise the various disconnected and vagrant kinds
of life through which he had passed as a naturalist
groups and appraises the genera of a novel species, re-
lating each individual by some particular attribute of
cry or color or structure to the articulate whole. He
would be twenty-six in November, and he saw that con-
sidered by any sensible standards, his adventurings since
he left New Haven must be dismissed as the peripatetics
of an ironic, wandering dream, having no part or bear-
ing at all on what those who take correspondence courses
to strengthen the will call innocently, “ The Business of


TERRA FIRMA
315
Life.” He had seldom been sensible, however, and cer-
tainly never business-like, and he did not believe in the
uselessness of those years.
They seemed to him an education of body and mind by
everything from Aladdin-like riches to three days' thirst
beside which the much talked about “University of
Hard Knocks” appeared like a finishing school for
wealthy sub-débutantes. He could imagine no better
post-graduate work with essentials and biting prepara-
tion for experience on the emery-wheel of a world full
of people, than that which he had had. His mind was
one of those that are sure to begin in facile brilliance,
a kind of false dawn of the intellect, but must come to
any true growth late and after pains unless they are to
exhaust themselves on a dozen little shiny victories of
easy talent and easier money before the bodies that be-
long to them reach thirty. Instead of this, instead of
scattering what gift he had like a basketful of half-ripe
hothouse pears, he had been forced to conserve every
seed and spore of it like a pirate's treasure, and gener-
ally against his will. It meant salvation, no less, for he
had passed the stage of being only a clever young man.
He would not make parlor conjuring tricks any more
with words or paints—the soil in him, leathered with
heat and cracked with sun, shook now to the thunder of
spring rains, delayed and overwhelming—it waxed fat
and fertile and was ready to put forth an astonishing
harvest.
What luck he had had, what illimitable luck! A little
twist in things and he might have left college to enter
a school of design or an advertising agency, started


TERRA FIRMA
317
“When thou hearest the fool rejoicing, and he
saith, “It is over and past,
And the wrong was better than right and hate
turns into love at the last,
And we strove for nothing at all, and the gods
are fallen asleep,
For so good is the world a-growing that the evil
good shall reap!'
Then loosen thy sword in the scabbard, and settle
thine helm on thine head,
For men betrayed are mighty, and great are the
wrongfully dead!”
He hummed the deliberately archaic lines over to
himself, hot with the large, plain words and the prance
of the meter. Then he saw that one of the Japanese was
creating uninstructed havoc with a sprayer, jumped off
and ran down to stop him. Philosophy, borrowed or
gengine, was over for the day. '
And the days swept along like racing skaters over
thin ice. Philip woke at dawn and worked till sunset,
but it was not back-aching use of physical strength of
the kind that chloroforms the mind, it was rather work
that occupied and kept out of mischief his body and the
part of his consciousness that busied itself automatically
with such things as eating and dressing and talking
the weather or politics. The creative element in him
sat as aloof as an enchanter under his stuffed crocodile
and gazed into a crystal ball where there eddied through
fabulous darkness or visionary lights all the subtle and
illuminated shapes of the countries at the back of the
sky and under the secrecy of the sea. They materialized
like fiery spooks in the haunted rooms of a soul, they


318 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
took on crying flesh in words, they stood up like djinns
in a desert, taller than stars.
IIe had one day, Sunday, completely freema conces-
sion to his ridiculous wages—and he spent it from nine
to six in his small neat room that smelled of brown
soap and spring grass, putting down in a tideless surf
of energy, as fast as his pencil would write, the colored
tissues of the tapestry of “Io” that his mind had
webbed in secret through the first six days of the week.
He wrote from rough, illegible notes, made in bed under
the spotlight of an electric torch when he should have
been sleeping, but he could compare the actual composi-
tion of the poem itself to nothing but the chipping away
and uncovering of a new bronze statue, limb by limb,
from its mold. It was unique in his experience the
verse flowed with the released and effortless strength
of an electric current-he did not have to alter one line
in twenty, and when he did exactly the right correc-
tion was unhesitatingly supplied. One Tuesday evening
he made fuller notes than usual—the lines began to
take hands and run down the red-lined pages of his
stenographer's note-book almost without volition-he
no longer wrote, he existed in a breathless, burning cen-
ter of force, as calm as the middle of a whirlwind, as
bright and exquisite as a turning wheel of white, molten
glass.
“Io," he whispered. “Io! Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord!”
Nothing was in the world but his scribbling hand
and the little dancing and fighting dolls in his mind,
that he had made, like God the creator, out of dirt and
breath. He saw all the million eyes of Argus, the watch-


TERRA FIRMA
319
*
*
*
of
zin berts
Shop
zal met
ful beast, shudder like jewels before a flame as Apollo
stood over him, the silver kingly bowstring tugged back
to his ear, the feather of the ravenous shaft like a gay
piece of silk against his curls. . . . Zeus mourned, the
earth was terrified at his trouble, in the lands of Hyper-
boreans strange gods with the eyes of sea-crabs hatched
before Chronos out of the cold gray egg of Time, crept
back to ruinous altars and prophesied to their abomi-
nable worshipers that Zeus would die. ... The stiff
fingers scrambled on, the point of the pencil grew blunt
and soft ...
Philip was aware, when the hypnosis of making
ceased, that there was a curious light at his window.
He got up, exhausted and cramped, and looked out into
a gray world of morning. He went through the long
day like a drunken man and resolved that he had better
not do that any more.
But the knifing joy of such hours, the joy that is
conception and giving birth and recognition all in one,
was his all Sunday and every Sunday till the poem was
done. He had the clean bodily delight in it that a dog
has in running down a fox and the spiritual effacement
and happy annihilation that comes with complete ob-
literation into the service of a cause or the words of
a prayer. Moreover, he was being used to his fullest
extent for the first time in his life, every power and
active particle in him strained on its highest overtone,
mind and body working to extreme capacity like the
engines of a liner butting through a January storm. He
had had an elaborate allegorical plan for "Io " at first
where the girl pursued by a god was the soul, perhaps,
ceriemateri
es sur
olitar-
Jling tre
of dirt on


320
THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
or liberty, and Argus stood for “ Amurricanism” and
Apollo walked about as Box-Car Democracy. But as
soon as he actually began to compose, he threw this piece
of mechanism overboard and reduced its essential fea-
tures to a few straight lines. An allegory remained when
he had finished, an allegory for anybody who wanted an
allegory, but the poem was not woodenly built around it
and for its sake.
The last quarter was the hardest to do of all, and
lasted through the beginning of June.
On the second Sunday in June, about three o'clock
in the afternoon, Philip finished making a fair copy of
the final forty lines there were no typewriters on the
ranch-got up and stretched with limitless content, then
sat down again, dipped his pen in the soggy bottom of
the inkbottle and signed his full name at the bottom of
the sheet with a rotund flourish. Then he put the com-
pleted thing away in a drawer under a nest of collars
and went out to a little grove of stunted live-oaks that
bunched together like a ballet of crippled dancers at the
top of an uncultivated hill.
The hill belonged to Grant. Next year, when there
was money enough, he would bring it under the plow
but now it was the same burnt, brown giant's muffin it
had been since the Yosemite redwoods were three feet
high, a wild, patient, mountainous, living thing with the
sleepy heat of a big warm animal under the westing
sun.
Philip couched himself against the knees of a live-
oak and looked into the center of the sky, a blue shadow,
a blue gauze that yielded before the sight like faint


TERRA FIRMA
321
smoke and shimmered away through infinities upon
infinities. The blue core of a flower that the eyes
roved into like bees and yet could not touch the utter
softness of its heart and gather its deep honey—the blue
mid-wave of a sea that the thought plunged at like a
white diver, like a falling knife of ivory, only to be lost
in depth beyond glinting and glooming depth, never to
return with the deeply-sunken pearls. Philip did not
think as he looked at it, he did not feel, though
he was very tired; he knew only that something was
past.
He had made, he was the mother who bears a child
and the father who begets it. He was the child itself,
a living nakedness, violent and sensitive, without sight,
without speech, without comprehension, with nothing
but the five blind mouths of the senses and somewhere,
hidden away in its pink ignorance like a drop of glitter-
ing rain, a soul. He had gone through the hourly desire
and the hourly despair-through the convulsion of love
and the destruction of bringing forth-now something
in the world had being that was as vague as foam and
lifeless as stones in a field before he touched it with
his hand—now a rushing spring, a wise image, a burst-
ing seed. He was broken with a peace like the peace
Death brings as enchanted drink in the hushing cup of
the poppy, and yet, as he looked at the sky, it seemed
to him that, if he wished, he could take it and tear it
in two like a breadth of blue cloth.
After a while he turned his head on his arm and fell
asleep. He smiled in his sleep at the arrogance of the
dreams he had. When he woke the sky was gay as a


324 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
letters stopped for two weeks altogether and a telegram
came instead.
“ Your father seriously ill. Come home at once.
“ MOTHER."
Philip arrived at San Esteban after a day and a night
in which compunction and memories of Phil in his own
boyhood had played a continuous double Canfield that
never solved out inside his mind. He saw where often
he had mistaken the mere hardness and shelliness of
youth for strength and its bluster for logic—and while,
look back often as he might, he could not see on the
whole how he could have acted otherwise, he was bitten
always by the teeth of that small revolving wheel that
scores on us uselessly in times of finality how differently
if we had stopped here, or talked to somebody there, or
taken another road than the one that had fate on it,
all things in the world might be. And when Lucia met
him at the station and the first passion of their greeting
was over, as the car began to climb the white sloping
road under the arch of disheveled trees where he had
made battles once for hours at a time with eucalyptus-
nut-soldiers, all he knew under the sky for that instant
was that he was coming home.
Phil had passed the crisis of his pneumonia before
Philip came, but he was very weak and Philip did not
see him at all till some days later. When they met it
was under the aseptic supervision of nurses, Philip
viewed him lying on the bed, a wax image of himself
that spoke painfully as if any words at all belonged to


TERRA FIRMA
325
vas
a foreign language. Even when Phil was well they
never formally made up their dispute or directly alluded
to it. Philip. with the hasty wish to settle things of
the young, wanted to talk it all out and bury it, but
whenever he tried to start Phil began to look delicate
and wonder if it wasn't almost time for his tonic or his
walk or his eggnog, and so the affair remained up in
the air, and there desiccated in time like a raisin and
blew away.
Phil had become the consciously model invalid as
soon as he was sure of getting well and when convales-
cence flowed back into positive health he adopted a new
and harmless pose that of the exquisitely aging old
beau with a sigh, a gold headed cane and perfect man-
ners—that made things much easier for everybody con-
cerned. He was barely fifty, but his hair showed
feathers of white-the ruddiness and fever of living had
gone out of him, he gave up tennis for golf and later
won prizes for putting—his existence became more and
more a conservation, a series of petty victories over di-
gestion and modern errors in taste and common mis-
pronunciation-he had not yet got to the point of writ-
ing letters to the newspapers signed “Old Playgoer"
but he would come to it in time. Maiden ladies said he
kept up wonderfully for his age.
Between Philip and himself there was endless mutual
amusement, for Philip knew how to take his father now.
They fenced with buttoned foils, careful never to hurt.
Day by day Philip thought his father became more and
more like a sedulous imitation of an essay by Charles
Lamb. He recovered much affection for that essay-


BOOK VIII
THE FEAR OF THE LORD
(1919-1920).





330 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
hole in the ground that a new storm is already begin-
ning to patch with pallid flurries of snow, so elemental,
so outdoors, so cruelly large and unheated a resting-
place for Uncle Ashbel, looking curiously crumpled in
his smooth frock-coat-the fast indecorous trot of the
returning procession of dingy hacks, like a flight of
lame old blackbirds-Philip gets over to the warmth of
the Blackstone as fast as possible and is there grabbed
hold of by both hands the minute he steps into the lobby
by a bronze-faced, rolling stranger with a limp and
the roaring welcome of an affectionate elephant, Steve,
two months back from France. Dick and Reggy blow
in together on the next train from New York and
the four go up to Steve's and talk for hours and
hours.
They have four large, hasty years, stuffed full of life
and running over as a sausage is stuffed with meat, to
spread out and digest together in a single evening; and
the talk, while it begins consecutively, soon loses all
order and proportion and goes back and forward and
sideways like a giants game of hop-scotch between
France and England and war and Italy and America
and jail and the sea and ranching and what's the point
of the Bolsheviks ? and thirst and love. Dick has a
cautious mustache, there are hawk-like puckers about
Reggy's eyes, Steve has lost his cherub’s rotundity and
grown massive. Philip knows he must look as changed
and yet the same as they, but cannot imagine quite how.
They state facts-Philip is publishing his book, Reggy
has been engaged for three months and expects to be
married in April, Dick is going in for a Ph.D. and


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 331
teaching, Steve is starting at the bottom in wholesale
drugs; ten years and he may be being restrained as a
trust or giving new dormitories to Yale. They are all
a bit diffident with each other at first—the other three
especially so with Philip—but the initial tensions of
unfamiliar politeness soon pass—they get rapidly ac-
quainted again—they dig down through the earth and
leaves silted over their friendship and by the middle of
dinner they have found it and dragged it out whole,
clear and solid as a carved block of lapis buried deep
under ruin and years. That will not alter, that cannot
burn or break, that is permanent, a fixed centrifugal
force. A sense of wonder, a shudder of everlastingness,
sure as sleep, wild and eloquent as the central thought
of a single deathless mind that reclines a divine, calm
substance in the hollow between the two candles of
birth and death, comes over them all as they sit at the
table. They will do this many times in their stroll be-
tween nothingness and nothingness and always go away
fed, soul, body and thought. Or so they think in the
impudence that Time finds stubborn as a curl to smooth
impact and spoil.
cover, like the
Exit first youth, however, like the corpse of a king
in yellow armor, borne out with torches and slaves.
They know it is gone, the light-headed, frantic, winged
thing, the careless glamorous fool; sweet odors blow
back from its last processional with the wizard keenness
of spice thrown into a fire; the delicate body chars
down to a cynic ash, wind eats it, it is utterly consumed.
They see that it is so, that it must be so, and salute that
imperial departure with reverence and satire and clear


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 333
walk and in five minutes was wet through to the skin.
Home was a long half-mile away and the rain fell as
if it had never rained in the world before and the
skies were exhaustlessly delighted with their brand-new
accomplishment. As for the suitcases, they had turned
to pig-iron as soon as he started to carry them. He
slogged on desolately through the wet, a soggy spectacle
with his hat-brim falling down over his eyes. All that
came into his head as a marching tune was a pollyinan-
ity some one had sent him once on a Christmas card to
accompany a hand-painted book-marker—“It is not rain-
ing rain to me, 'Tis raining daffodils ! ” and he cursed
the cheery sentiments hurriedly but effectively, his
soaked mind with no room for anything but blind hearty
lust for hot new food and fires. He dropped the suit-
cases at the second turn in the road, shook the cramp
out of his fingers, picked them up again, and plugged
on without looking ahead. There was suddenly a skit-
tering noise behind him followed by the quack of a
horn, he jumped like a shying horse and landed with
both feet in a puddle, swearing. A little pink roadster
slithered to a stop beside him. He looked at it with
dumb hate.
“Well, what in—" he began.
Then he saw that Sylvia Persent had the steering-
wheel and that she was shaking all over with laughter.
She opened the door.
“ Come in out of the rain, you poor imbecile,” she
chuckled, “and don't stand staring there as if you'd
never seen me before in your life.”
“I haven't,” said Philip flatly, but he wedged himself


334 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
in with his suitcases and they started to shake hands
and make greetings.
“But where"
“But when did you—"
They began and stopped simultaneously, looked at
each other, laughed.
“Yesterday,” said Sylvia. “Mother's up at Aunt
Anne's and I'm recuperating from a breakdown from
overwork—or that's what they tell me. At least that's
why they wouldn't let me stay over when the Division
came home. But I'm the healthiest invalid you ever
saw-I've learned to make cocoa for about a million
men at a time and shoot craps and swear in French and
wear flannel underclothes and-oh, Lord, it's pleasant
to see you Phil for I'm crazy to talk and so are you
and we've got weeks to tell it all—"
“Years,” said Philip.
.
To analyze the alterations of character under stress
is to pass a long strip of moving picture film slowly
through your fingers. Between this picture and the
next the changes are infinitesimal-between the first
and last of the series they may be as wide as Asia. The
war had not suddenly converted Sylvia from a débutante
two years “out” to a Y. W. C. A. Joan of Arc-it had
rather accentuated certain salient qualities of valor and
humor and by substituting the friendly and rather im-
personal adoration of some thousands of men at a time
for the personal possessive amorousness of college
seniors and rising young business men, had cured her
of two things, scalp-hunting, from fraternity pins to


THE FEAR OF THE LORD
337
bubble of a world gray-and-black with the clinging dyes
of cold smoke and the wet shine of branches drooping with
rain—a world like the top of a mountain covered with
journeying clouds. Through the ash and twilight of
this universe moves dreamy, wise Sylvia, a sparkling
phantasm, a gilded shape, and Philip stumbles after
her among wisps and apparitions like a man following
the wings of a bright bird through a wood full of trolls.
Ever since their absurd reunion on the road, he has
known what is the matter with him with the certainty
of the fey. The proud angel has stooped from his sky
and Aung his lance. This love has not come, as his
love for Milly did, with the butterfly gestures of a
dancer and the swift soft hares of youth running wild
in the blood—it is a melting of all he knows and feels
and is like metal over a flame, to cast him anew when
it has finished into an unknown thing or pour him out
in bubbles of slag on the ground. Pain, fear and wor-
ship, delight and a strangled burning like thirst in
fever—he goes up and down through them all like a
chip on a seesaw. And Sylvia is so intensively uncon-
scious, so stubbornly cool and boyish, that his sense of
humor grows to the disproportions of a deformity and
stops him again and again when he is most the fabulous
egoist by merely showing him his own face in the dis-
tortions of its mirror that images most men and all
lovers too stumpy or lean or pale.
They have gone down to the edge of the bay on an
afternoon that is white and wraithy with fog. The
water heaves in front of them like pools of heavy gray
oil, causelessly unquiet, shut off fifty yards away by


THE FEAR OF THE LORD
339
the rowboat and were very Perseus about rescuing me.
Then your father came out and stubbed his bare foot on
a rock and told us he'd like to drown us both like pup-
pies.”
“You wouldn't hardly speak to me for two days."
“I should say not-I got left out of the pack-trip to
Pyramid on account of it. Worthless being ! "
“That was nice all the same, then, up there,” says
Sylvia, chinking two flat stones in her hand.
“Um. Sylvia, how long are you going to stay?"
“You sound beautifully hospitable. Till mother
comes back from Aunt Anne's. Another week, perhaps.
It's heavenly of your mother to take me in like this. I
was pretty tired. You?”
“I'm not sure. Go back to Grant, possibly, I like the
work—and with Uncle Ashbel's money and grand-
mother's—write anyway-anything so long as it isn't
precious or precocious. Blow around like a kite in a
wind till something cuts the string. This world, and
another, Sylvia, and the game's up. But I'm pleased
with the game."
“You oughtn't to be allowed to land in so many
places that send you back to 'Messenger-boy, Square
one,” says Sylvia rebelliously. Then she adds, feeling
sure of her own clarity, “I don't mean you-I mean
me.”
“I think" answers Philip uncertainly. Then he
stops, for he is looking at her face. Her eyes are as du-
bious as a confessor's, and yet somehow full of anxiety
and delight. He takes one of her hands up angrily
and shakes the stones out of it.


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 343
two night-soaked hills and take possession of the stars
and the sky. With all which, he could have given a
description of every one of her more important mental
and physical qualities and failings that an impersonal
jury of archangels would have thought exact-but he
knows that not one of her traits or tricks or manners,
not her courage nor her silver vanity, her sensitive folly
nor her headlong genius for comradeship, matters more
than the buttons on her dress beside the luminous diverse
changeling thing, herself. So with half of him in the
mood of “How could I ever deserve," and the other
tattered with the pure need of a starving baby, “ She
must love me I'll die if she doesn't-she must-she
must!” he manages to get through the night and come
down to breakfast.
He had meant to make breakfast sensational, a grim
picking at bits of food, but he dozed off completely
about four o'clock and Lucia took pity on him and let
him sleep till ten. He was healthily engrossed in bacon
and eggs when Sylvia came down, looking rather tired
of being intrepid. They discussed tennis and the make-
up of the Davis Cup Team hardworkingly through the
meal and were very polite.
They went into the living-room, hardly looking at
each other, and Sylvia cushioned herself with a book in
front of the fire of eucalyptus wood that burnt in gusts
with a bright, aromatic flare. Philip stood at the
window, looking out at the shifting facelessness of
the mist. Neither spoke, the only sound was the snap
and spurt of the fire and Sylvia turning her pages a
little too fast.


346 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
was incomparably the finer artizan. The world that
Langland saw and smelt was a world so recklessly mod-
ern in many ways a field full of folk and the seven
deadly sins; Meed, the moneyed and her servants, Wis-
dom and Wit, bribing judges and officers with the
mannered ease of corporation-counsel; the sheepish mul-
titude starting out to seek Saint Truth and thinking
much better and more sensibly of it in the first half-
hour. It was a letterless world and a world poorer in
money, a world where the Church had actual power
over bodies and souls and however Cis, the cobbler,
might hate the idea of a hell full of flames and a har-
per's heaven, he never once thought of disbelieving in
them—but a world where the quiet essentials, love, hate,
labor, fear, prodigal pride and a twilight seeking for
faith, were much the same. Philip smiled and thought
of many paper-radicals when he read of Wastrel and
his dispute with Piers Plowman, who lived by his hands
like Adam his ancestor.
“ Then gan a wastrel rise in wrath and would have
fought with Piers,
Threw down his glove, a Breton man, a braggart,
Bade Piers go with his plough for a cursed starvel-
ing.
“ Wilt thou or wilt thou not, we will have our will
Of thy flour and thy flesh, will take it when we
please.
Ay and make merry with it for all thy grudging."
Courteously the knight, as his manner was,
Warned wastrels all and bade them do better.
“I was not wont to work,” says Wastrel," and I
will not begin—"


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 347
“Hunger came in haste, took Wastrel by the
mouth,
Wrung him by the belly, brought water to his eyes,
Beat both his boys. He near burst their ribs.
Had not Piers with a pease leaf prayed Hunger
cease
They had like been in their graves."
Wastrel was still alive, fat and roaring, though now
he made eighty-five cents an hour of an eight-hour day
and would not work a whole week through for love or
unions.
Philip bought his cigarettes and started back home,
but the sky, gray and bulging all the morning, finally
decided on rain and a spatting shower drove him up on
the porch of St. John's Church. The door was open and
he sought stuffy shelter inside. He found a back pew
under a window that mottled his book with deep reds
and purples and settled himself to read, completely
alone.
He read how the pilgrims, true and false, came to
Piers, the poor Plowman, and how he only of the com-
pany knew the way to Saint Truth—how he plowed
his half-acre with knights and fine ladies to help him-
how they came by the road to Truth at last in spite of
Wastrel and Meed and the educated malice of Divinity.
And then followed the last great vision, as simple and
heart-breakingly sincere as a nursery rhyme, of how
Piers, the People's Christ, went down to hell and took
the damned souls out of it, and then, before the triumph
of Anti-Christ and the resuscitated kingdom of Greed
and Covetise, disappeared. But


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 349
selves with east wind of a dozen flavors in the search
for anything in which they could utterly believe. They
could not believe in the church. Restless, neurasthenic,
impotent, the old food without strength or savor, all
life chewed out of it, the new foods merely the old one
served up again, overheated and badly spiced, giving
spiritual indigestion to those who nibbled at them-
millions of men and women seeking like sick animals for
a salt-lick for some shape or vestige of St. Truth.
The church empty, the tavern shut, faith flat on its
back with the church, gone by with the tavern what was
left of two most large-hearted things, the liberal heat
and humor of mind that has made Mr. Pickwick an im-
mortal and the mood of sacrificial libation and rejoicing
in every fruit and mystery of the earth that saw Bacchus
as young and a god. The world shuddering like a man
in a chill with the afterclap of the war, nothing better
to live or die for than the efficiency of graphs on a chart
and the success that is measured by a fat waistcoat
and incipient hardening of the arteries at forty-all
the machinery of success-books and uplift-pamphlets and
house-organs gearing and speeding up flesh and brain
to go through as many swift motions each minute of the
day as possible, without question as to their use or lack
of use. Exercise taken like a pill for the sake of greater
efficiency in office-hours-classes of sad fat business-men
throwing medicine balls at each other in the electrically-
lit cave of an indoor gymnasium. Love, the double
miracle of gay sex and gallant spirit; people hot-eared
with shame or sweaty with lust at the thought of the
first, discounting the second because they hadn't time


350 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
for such things, they had to telephone or attend a gin-
ger-up meeting of their sales-staff or go to the movies.
A field full of rotten grain, thought Philip fretfully,
turning these phrases like knives over and over in his
mind.
He thought of the Heaven of childhood, when tinsel
is as solid as steel in gods and toy swords, that kind,
small place somewhere on top of the sky. That Heaven
and all its saints had fallen to pieces when he first dis-
covered cruelty that was both causeless and unpunished
—it had been replaced in a measure by living, in a
measure by the crude atheism of twenty that thinks it
wickedly fine to defy the lightnings that never descend.
Then had come Milly, and after the loss of her, much
irony, a working-doctrine of irony that healed as it
seared the mind with its freezing wit. Now even irony
would not answer completely any more, in face of Sylvia
and the vast unreasonableness of life.
Nevertheless Philip held on to his irony like a bar of
iron in the next few minutes. For it seemed to him
that he could see through the familiar husk of the
church in which he sat and the larger pod of the whole
spinning globe it clung to, and that pews and heavens
and earth were transient and infirm; cold gestures of
air that for an instant of self-deception had taken on
shapes less solid to the touch than snow. They tore
like the screens of a Japanese paper-house, they hung
in the air like the mirages of a mind at war with itself,
beyond them was nothing, and they had neither consist-
ency nor cause nor form.
He built towers and towns and forests out of them


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 351
craftily, and they shook back under his hands to vapor
and rain. They dried up like a drop of water in the
hot sun, they left nothing but a boundless emptiness as
far as the eye could see. And in the middle of this
thin huge emptiness he stood alone.
He tried to speak but the words stuck to his throat.
« There must be something," he said desperately.
“ Beauty ... Pride ..."
He made a rose and saw that it blossomed, and a
sword with a keen edge. When he took his fingers from
the shapes they were dust that dissolved into finer and
finer particles till he could not even see of what pigmy
atoms the dust had been made.
“Love," he said, but the word was sucked into vacancy
as a stream dries into sand. There were no echoes from
the windy immensity in which he stood.
Then an emotion that was like nothing he had ever
felt, like eyeless fear, like white reverence, like the con-
fident homage of a courageous son, like the headlong de-
fiance of swimming against strong sea, came into him
as drink goes into the body and he denied the appear-
ances around him for life or death.
He regarded the space into which he had been thrown
like a broken ball, the space which had neither gods
nor realities, the uncreated, undestroyed eternal form-
lessness that swims like a bottomless sea outside of life
and all the delusions of the sun.
“There is something," he said steadily, “ something
better than my own sod. Something living as lightning
and merciful as rain. Something neither to be adored
as an image nor hated as a foe. but a thing to be followed


354 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
clean sky driftingly patterned with blue patches and
the scattered white wool of clouds.
“Nice,” said Sylvia. Her lips were as cold as a mer-
maid's as he kissed them. The sound of a man's feet
near them broke up the indecorous embrace.
He was a laboring man about fifty years old—one of
the fishermen from the Portuguese colony by his look
and dress. Philip remembered dimly having seen him
somewhere once-but the memory was mixed with
dreams and he had not spent much time in San Esteban
in the last eight years.
The man turned his head and looked at them with
calm gentle eyes. Then he smiled over white teeth.
“Good Luck!” he said cheerfully. They thanked
him, Sylvia rather prettily, and he stopped for a moment
considering them.
“ You have been in there?” he said slowly, waving his
hand toward the church. They assented.
"IMI-used to go there too,” he announced. “There
and other places like that.” He smiled as if at a great
secret joke of his own. “Now I stay outdoors,” he said.
“It is better that way.”
“It certainly is less stuffy," said Sylvia conversation-
ally.
“Much.” He stroked his beard. “And you can-
find things more easily. People can find you, too, and
that is an advantage in my trade.”
“ Fishing?” Philip asked.
He fairly grinned, the grin of a pleased boy.
“ Sometimes," he said over his laughter. “But I
was always a handy man with my tools as well.”


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 355
He looked at them for a swift and aging instant as a
carpenter looks at a couple of straight, proper chairs.
They both put their hands on each other, they did not
know why.
“Well, you are nice children, both of you!” he ended
suddenly. “Good night! ”
He swung his hand at them and went off down
street, a tool-box under his arm.
“I like his condescension ! ” said Sylvia indignantly.
“Nice children! From a village wop who probably
beats his own whenever they get in his way! He talks
like one of my ancestors ! ”
“Maybe he is,” said Philip with wry amusement.
“And on the whole, you know, Syl, I'm just as glad he
regards us as good material.”
For he had seen into the eyes of the stranger as he
went whistling away, and the face was young as the
sunrise, but the eyes were curiously gray and vivid like
pieces of clean glass.
They went up to their house. It was on top of a hill
and nothing was left of it but a weathered door-frame
and a red lump of a broken chimney and around it the
fields were as lush with long grass as if they had never
been under the scythe.
“Whoever lived here, anyway, Phil ?” said Sylvia,
her arms about her knees as they sat together on a
stone where the dining-room table had been and looked
out through the gray rectangle of posts that framed
like a picture the golden mists that settled like roosting
birds in the valley.


356 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“I'm not sure I heard about them once. Pioneers,
I think. They came all the way from New Hampshire
in an ox-cart and stayed here and raised children here
in the fifties and sixties. Then the old people died and
the children moved away. They must have had quite
a time stubborn old men and women in check shirts
and white beaver hats and ginghams and sunbonnets. I
found a rusty derringer once in the blackberry bushes
the first year I came back from school and was
out exploring. And they had the woman's spinning
wheel down on exhibition in the Palace window.
She was old stock said she couldn't abide store
cloth.”
“We're going to have quite a time for the next fifty
years," said Sylvia.
“ Aren't we? Aren't we? Even with flivvers and
victrolas."
“With everything there is. With everything there
will be. With you and me.”
They were silent for a while, hands tight in each
other's, looking at the clouds go by like the future,
color of moon, color of midnight, blonde with lights,
full of sun and thunder and rain Philip bent over
and tugged up a long stalk of grass by the roots. Fer-
tile earth clung solidly to the fibers, heavy earth smelling
good with first Spring and crumbling to pieces like
brown cake.
“Fat soil,” he mused. “With a little trouble any.
thing in the world would grow here."
“Our house," said Sylvia possessively.
He laughed and quoted :


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 357
“ Some shall sew the sacks for fear the wheat be
spilt,
And ye wives that have wool work it fast.
Look forth your linen, labor ye hard on it.
See the needy and naked, take thought how they
lie.
Throw clothes upon them. Truth would love that.
For I shall give the poor a living as long as I
live,
For the Lord's love in Heaven unless the land
fail.”
“ The land won't fail.” Sylvia cut him off.
“Not this land. It never has since Portola's time.
It never will except for fools and gentlemen farmers.”
“We aren't gentlemen farmers. We're intelligent,
modern, highly-educated—”.
“We're the new pioneers. We're the sons and
daughters of Belial who knew not the Lord, in church
at least, and drank up his vintage-irony when he wasn't
looking. We're a portent and an astonishment and a
horror to all the rocking-chair people who ever shivered
over “This Side of Paradise.' We'regolly, what does
it matter? 'Save sacred Love and sacred Art'-"
“Nothing is good for long.'”
“ The two things I swore I'd never marry,” said Sylvia
presently, “were a poet and a man who raised vege-
tables."
“I had moral ideas about ex-débutantes,” Philip
confessed.
“ What does it matter?”
“What does it matter ? "
Sylvia took his hand and held it up against the sun.


358 THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM
“If you were a genuine letters-and-biography poet
the light would shine through it tenuously,” she com-
plained indignantly.
“If you were the right kind of person to write poems
about, your hands would look like crepe de chine."
“What's the matter with them? They're nice. I
like my hands."
"I do too when cleaner,” said Philip. They squabbled
undignifiedly and made peace. He took her head in
the hollow of his shoulder and they leaned back against
a bush and saw with infinite charity and gentleness all
the spaceless wastes of ragged sky and trampling hills.
“Oh, great, holy, blaspheming God!” whispered
Philip suddenly. “It's good to be young. It's good to
be young and in love."
Sylvia mocked him out of the Vision of Piers in a
voice like falling silver leaves.
“By Christ!' says a gentleman, 'he teacheth us
the best,
But on this theme truly never was I taught;
‘But lead me,' says he, and I will learn to plow.
I will help thee labor while my life lasteth.'"
“While our life,” amended Philip, “ for this is only
the start of the first lesson."
He closed his eyes—Sylvia was very near. And then
for the last meeting till breath should go out of his
body, he had a daydream of the Fates. But this time
they were neither terrible, nor august like aunts, nor
particularly important. They were three little scuttling
gray animals the size of ladybugs, and they ran about


THE FEAR OF THE LORD 359
in a busy timid stupor, caught between his hand and
Sylvia's hand. ....
From the porch of a house in California, Philip
looks out at evening over his new fields. Sylvia is be-
side him, a warm, slumberous Sylvia. The poem that is
only rhymes in the head and scribbled paper will be a
book, the unborn child learn to walk under the little fig
trees that have not borne fruit yet, stretch its hands and
cry for the high purple bunches. Preachers will preach
and old men moralize and young men drink and
another thousand poets publish volumes of verse as the
earth goes round the sun. But Philip and Sylvia, wise
with a buried wisdom, will not greatly care. For they
know the whole ungodly round world was made for
them and their children, and they have forty-odd years
of cavalier life to spend, like the devil among the indo-
lent sons of God, going to and fro on this earth and
walking up and down in it.
THE END.