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 THE GREAT WAY
 
 THE GREAT WAY 
 
 A STORY OF 
 
 THE JOYFUL 
 
 THE SORROWFUL 
 
 THE GLORIOUS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
 MCMXXI
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY 
 
 MITCHELL KENNERLEY 
 
 First Edition, August ig2l 
 
 Second Edition September 1921 
 
 ALL RIGHTS, INCLUDING DRAMATIC AND 
 MOVING PICTURE RIGHTS, RESERVED 
 
 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
 PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND BY CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD.
 
 TO 
 
 HELEN FREEMAN 
 BECAUSE SHE REMINDS PEOPLE OF BEAUTY 
 
 2083489
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PROLOGO 
 
 BOOK I 
 THE EPIPHANY ON THE ROAD 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 1. THE IUMBLA OF THE FLOWERS 1 
 
 2. THE STREET OF CARMEN 12 
 
 3. THE ROYAL 23 
 
 4. CABALLERO OF THE MOON 39 
 
 5. FLOWERS OF THE 6UN 46 
 
 6. TRAFFIC 49 
 
 7. THE TIME GOD TOOK 64 
 
 8. "HER STEPS TAKE HOLD ON HELL" 69 
 
 9. INMACULADA NOCHE 66 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 THE VOICE OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 
 
 10. THE DEVOURERS 71 
 
 11. 60METHING TO DO 77 
 
 12. THE WHEEL 82 
 
 13. THE UNTYING OF THE ROPB 89 
 
 14. MANDRA'GORA 92 
 
 15. LA GITANA 98 
 
 16. PLAZA DE TOROS 113 
 
 17. AN ENGLISH WORD 119 
 
 18. THE WORLD'S HEART 126 
 
 19. THE HOUSE OF THE GREAT VOICE 138 
 
 20. "AT LAST i KNOW!" 148 
 
 21. THE DISH OF SILVER 151 
 
 22. A FLOWER OF THE ENGLISH 8UN 169 
 
 23. SCORES 193 
 
 24. GRAN fodTO 202 
 
 25. MONEY 213 
 
 BOOK III 
 THE PAINTED DESERT 
 
 26. THE ATTRACTION OF OPPO8ITE8 218 
 
 27. IN THE LITTLE RED BOOK 228 
 
 28. PEOPLE 246 
 
 29. LET THE DEAD PAST BURY ITS DEAD 258 
 
 30. THE LITTLE RED BOOK AGAIN 274 
 
 31. THE WARM SHADOW 277 
 
 32. THE MIRACLE OF ROSES 299 
 
 33. THE LITTLE RED BOOK IS POSTED 316 
 
 34. THE GREAT WAYWARD ONE 330 
 
 35. CONTRITION 357 
 
 36. PASEAR 381 
 
 BOOK IV 
 THROUGH THE BAD VALLEY 
 
 37. THE NIGHT AND THE NIGHTINGALE 398 
 
 38. vissi D'ARTE 428 
 
 89. THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM 434 
 
 40. LA GRAN VIA 451 
 
 41. THE WAY 489 
 
 a
 
 For the lips 
 
 Of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, 
 and her palate is smoother than oil : 
 
 But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp 
 as a twoedged sword. 
 
 Her feet go down to death; her steps take 
 hold on hell. 
 
 Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, 
 her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know 
 them. PROVERBS v. 3-6.
 
 PROLOGO 
 
 LA GRAN VIA sweeps on everywhere. 
 
 It sweeps from God to this earth, and from this earth 
 back to God again. 
 
 Perhaps it is God. We do not know, and while we are 
 staying on this earth, we never will. Amen. It would be 
 pleasant to find out later on, and we may; meanwhile, 
 whether or no, in some small way or another you, I, 
 must tread the Great Way. 
 
 Vaguely, some two "wheres" deep in our two souls, we 
 both know the great secret already, you and I. 
 
 But we have no words at hoof to put it into. And 
 therein lies the yoke that hangs on our necks, yours and 
 mine, as we go along together, up hill and down. 
 
 Suddenly, in the relief of going down a steep hill or 
 the joy of striving to struggle up a new one, I turn to 
 you and try, as I have tried so many times before, to say 
 to you as you have been trying, perhaps, to say to me: 
 
 "// it were not this struggle, it would be some other. 
 The Great Way never ends. Oh, learn if you do not 
 know it, having learned, remember, though for each 'one' 
 of us it begins in some earthly place, and would seem to 
 end in some earthly place, I beseech you learn and remem- 
 ber, remember: La Gran Via itself starts rolling at the 
 knees of God."
 
 BOOK I 
 
 THE EPIPHANY ON THE ROAD 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE RAMBLA OF THE FLOWERS 
 
 FOR the sweetest girl in Spain, it began at Cadiz, that 
 little peninsula of the great peninsula which lies simmer- 
 ing in the balm of the Atlantic, as if Spain and Portugal 
 were a doubled up fist (and God knows about that!) with 
 a diminutive finger stretched out into the sea for the 
 town to stand on, white and glittering above and against, 
 the blue. 
 
 Here, in the city which, since Carthage owned and 
 glorified it for its abnormal wealth of tin and silver has 
 till recent generations been the old world's sea-garden of 
 luxury, here was Dulce born. 
 
 But not in luxury. The town till lately fabulous in 
 riches was now what it bids fair to stay: beautiful in 
 poverty, lazy in misfortune, rich only in palms and 
 memories and in jewels set into the walls of its yellow 
 cathedral; and famous this long while for the delight of 
 its girls and softly indolent with its sensuous men that 
 loll contentedly, between watches of languorous work, at 
 their small, slow, continuous glasses of Amontillado, in 
 the barely carriage-wide twisting streets, and under the 
 sun and drooping verdure of the water-front like flecks 
 in a delicate canvas, for anent her sensual beauty Cadiz 
 has one virtue, instinctive and incongruous: it is clean, 
 clean, clean. 
 
 Here, between the narrow, tall rows of pastel-tinted 
 
 1
 
 2 The Great Way 
 
 houses, twisting-columned and balconied and grilled, 
 white and cream-coloured, green and pink, Dulce learned 
 to walk. And to talk even before that, from the girls 
 the sung-of girls ! of Cadiz very beautifully, as it 
 happened, for she took, like a fish to running water, by 
 an instinct sheer as that which makes Cadiz clean, to the 
 castellano, so that she was soon correcting those same 
 sung-of girls, and was never, if you will make the favour, 
 senorita, found biting off the tails of her words in the 
 surrounding manner of her comrade Andalusians. 
 
 Then, one night, from the heat of poverty and press- 
 ing custom and oppressing religion, she walked out of it 
 all, alone, in secret, along the causeway lapped by the cool 
 waves of the ocean, to the mainland, and commenced her 
 own particular Gran Via, which led her deviously, terribly 
 through Sevilla, where she danced for a while in the 
 streets, with a small tambourine and smaller feet and 
 sang a little, too. The voice was clear, and wonderfully 
 sweet. But it was too unstable ... or too something, 
 anyway, to be much successful with Spanish-folk in the 
 open air, which seemed to play tricks, make impolite 
 demands, upon it. ... And therefore casting aside all 
 thought of it with a debonair gesture of the mind, very 
 much as she would bodily have tossed by a recalcitrant 
 rose or violet, without even this frail armament of sound 
 she went on ... to other cities, kind but less kind . . . 
 and through the tumbling country north and north, as if 
 the magnetic pole were drawing her, and still on, to the 
 east a little, but forever north and forever north, and into 
 the province where Spain is old Spain no longer, but 
 bustling and active though lazier at that than even 
 Italy; where churches and convents have been burned 
 down in sudden blind rage, where socialism and anar- 
 chism and a bullet are all alike, and alike misunderstood 
 and alike used ; where a big bright gay and rich city, not 
 noble like Madrid yet larger still, has sprung up from a 
 village in the plain to be the port of entrance into Spain 
 the sparkling bangle of the Pyrenees, the modern garden
 
 The Rambla of the Flowers 3 
 
 of the Mediterranean, the Little Paris of the south of 
 Europe Barcelona. To this yellow seething city, Dulce's 
 feet were led by La Gran Via. 
 
 And this day, as the evening sunlight slanted from the 
 blue and lavender and pearl-white of the foothills and the 
 sky, it was leading her along the city's Gran Via Diag- 
 onal, through the golden haze that shone on herds of 
 snow-white bearded goats, into the Plaza Cataluna, and 
 across its palm-lined paths to the Paseo Gracia, and 
 along, along, along to the suburb at the foot of the 
 pretty little mountain of the watch-tower, Tibidabo, and 
 back, disheartened and glad both, and again across the 
 brilliant Plaza into the lovely Ramblas of the Old City. 
 
 God ! God ! What a life this, without a voice harsh 
 enough to raise, in a town where music comes only from 
 blind folk anyway, and dancing is paid for in theatres ! 
 Dio ! Dio ! Dio ! But with a sigh she said she did 
 not care, and thought she meant it. Perhaps she did, 
 for she was beautiful enough, and knew she was, even 
 in a country of very beautiful women; and she had not 
 starved yet, and her one room in the Calle del Carmen, 
 a street as full of bustle and loud noise and food and 
 finery and drink and good-nature as any other in Spain, 
 was comfortable enough and, thanks to God, her chest 
 full of clothes and tambourine enough in addition, she 
 hoped, to voice enough after all, if necessary. It would 
 be too bad to scream with so nice a voice, but still . . . 
 if the worst came up again ! 
 
 So with a heart at bottom light enough, she walked, 
 with and against the tides of labourers and business- 
 men and gentlemen strolling homeward-bound, into the 
 Rambla Caneletas, and on under the towering planeta 
 trees to the Rambla of the Estudios, across which gazes 
 the fashionable little Royal, with its green and yellow 
 wicker tables and chairs set on the sidewalk, and along 
 it under the scream of birds that has dubbed it Rambla 
 of the Sparrows, to the next, Rambla of the Flowers. 
 Here, suddenly, she stopped. Just beyond her, buying a
 
 violet boutonmiere at the stand of an exquisitely pretty, 
 hatless girl, stood a man's figure that she recognized, 
 although through the shifting crowd she could but 
 glimpse it. He was tall, stalwart, lighter-skinned, lighter- 
 haired than the graceful limbed Spanish men about him. 
 His derby hat was worn American fashion ; his suit of 
 rough yellow-white was more loosely worn than their 
 melting browns and greens. He was smiling at the 
 swarthy, pretty girl as she pulled and patted the violets 
 Into his coat. For a second Dulce hesitated; then she 
 walked straight up to him, holding out her hand : 
 
 "How yo doo doo? Fleece to say yo 'gain. Preety 
 efening, no?" 
 
 In his surprise and confusion, he had taken her hand 
 for a brief moment; now, with a laugh, he dropped it. 
 
 "So you speak English? You deserve some flowers 
 for that! Make me the favour to choose them your- 
 self." And having dropped another coin into the flower- 
 girl's hand, he walked away, leaving her staring after 
 him. 
 
 "Name of white God, but you are bold," said the 
 flower-girl, gazing at her with admiration. "I would 
 not be selling stale violets if I had your pluck. But 
 you did not succeed, at that. Let me tell you something 
 for nothing. He is a Mejicano, and you would have 
 done better if you had spoken Spanish." 
 
 "Holy God, but what a liar you could be!" exclaimed 
 Dulce. "He, a Methicano! As for Spanish, you simple- 
 ton, I never speak it. I speak castellano. If he is a 
 Methicano, do him the favour to pronounce him right ! 
 But he never is he spoke good English !" 
 
 "You do not know whether it was good or not," 
 said the flower-girl. "He is just what I say. As for 
 your own tongue, call it madridese, not castellano, if 
 you are going to lisp like a noblewoman. Your speech 
 is as thick as two thieves full of pea-soup. He is from 
 Mejico, I tell you, and he stays right over there, at the 
 Continental Hotel, where he is acquainted with some
 
 The Rambla of the Flowers 5 
 
 Americans. He is as rich as he looks, for he has coffee 
 in the morning here at the Royal, and his lapel is under 
 my finger for a violet before he drinks it. Now, use 
 you this information as you choose, but let me tell you 
 to be careful, and not to play such a trick as you did 
 too near the hotel, lest his American lady acquaintances 
 pour boiling water on you, or have you arrested, or some- 
 thing. These North Americans come here knowing noth- 
 ing not so much as the meaning of the word 'peseta' 
 and yet before you know a peseta yourself they do some 
 clever thing that puts you in jail. And for my part, I 
 will say that I admire them for it, for I am quite a 
 respectable young woman, and I have no contempt at all 
 for virtue in foreigners." 
 
 "Be careful of your tongue !" said Dulce quickly. "Ch- 
 in the name of the Virgin you will have something from 
 me, you gutter-hen, that will draw more blood than boil- 
 ing water does ! Do you think that I will let you air 
 your voice at me, unless with pretty manners and about 
 your own cheap business? Keep that coin he gave you 
 for my flowers and buy a gag with it, will you, or do 
 you mean to stand there like an old she-goat with a beard 
 and tell me I am not respectable?" 
 
 "I would not tell you that for a million-peseta lottery 
 ticket," said the flower-girl, "for I would never get it. 
 But I would for two cents." 
 
 Dulce looked at her, slowly, from head to foot and 
 back again. 
 
 "Well," she said, thoughtfully, "I will not kick you in 
 the stomach for that, much as you deserve it, for I am 
 such a peculiar girl that if I love anything I love the 
 truth. So he is a Methicano? How did you find out 
 that?" 
 
 "He buys his flowers of me," answered the girl, "and 
 we chat. In my trade, that is well enough. And I only 
 spoke to you out of kindness, thinking you could not 
 know Barcelona very well. I have seen you trudging it 
 often enough, God knows, and things are seldom done
 
 6 The Great Way 
 
 that way here. Such as are bad are bad indoors. If 
 I do you a wrong I am sorry for it. Do you know 
 Barcelona?" 
 
 "Better than you do, if you are as virtuous as you 
 pretend," said Dulce, "and in the name of God's white 
 mother I can scarcely believe it. I have never seen you 
 before to notice you. Why have you noticed me?" 
 
 "There is little else to do," replied the flower-girl, 
 "except to think about those who go by often. And any 
 poor girl would envy you with your face." 
 
 "Now that I notice it, you are very pretty," said Dulce. 
 "If you had a dress like mine, you would be as hand- 
 some, or more so. And let me tell you that you need not 
 envy me. There is plenty of fun for everyone in the 
 world, I suppose, but I have little that I do not pay a lot 
 for. I would like to be a flower-girl myself, if it were not 
 too late. But it is. If you really are respectable, you 
 will not understand that ; but so it is, so take my word 
 for it." 
 
 "I really am," said the flower-girl, "but I do envy 
 you, at that, with such fashionable clothes and manners 
 as you have. I have often thought of your way, but I 
 do not know enough, and I would be afraid. I am a fool, 
 I guess." 
 
 "You are no fool," said Dulce, "or you would not have 
 spotted me the quick way you did. And to be as pretty 
 as you are and respectable too, is not for many a poor 
 girl." 
 
 "It is handsome of you to say so," said the girl, "when 
 you are so fashionable as well as lovely. And you have 
 a beautiful nature, too, for not hitting me a punch on my 
 face when I spoke to you as I did. Would you mind 
 kissing me before you go?" 
 
 For a moment Dulce stared at her. "You do not 
 mind, when we have both told the truth?" 
 
 "It would make me proud," said the girl, "when you are 
 so distinguished and ravishing. I have always admired 
 you, and felt angry when you went by looking so proud."
 
 The Rambla of the Flowers 7 
 
 "Holy God, but I am no one to be proud !" said Dulce, 
 kissing her. "I should like a respectable friend, and if 
 you will love me as much as I love you, we will be pleasant 
 and affectionate with each other. I am really not as bad 
 as you think, for I am as poor as you are, I am sure, 
 and only do it for my living. And I have no one to 
 confide in, for I have a lover and he knows nothing of 
 it." 
 
 "I know you have a lover," said the flower-girl, "for he 
 has bragged about you." 
 
 "What?" cried Dulce, with wide eyes. 
 
 "I know no more of him," said the girl, "than I do of 
 the Mejicano, nor in any other way. He was here ten 
 minutes ago, and bought two reales' worth of roses for 
 you. Knowing how fashionable you are, I put in a 
 jacinta, in the middle, for nothing, to sweeten it. Will 
 you wear these home to him, too?" And she pinned to 
 her a large handful of heavy violets. 
 
 "Well, well, but you are a keen one !" marvelled Dulce. 
 "What do you not know? We will be great friends, I 
 can see. What time do you go home for your own 
 supper?" 
 
 "I go home in an hour," said the girl, "but not for 
 supper. I had lunch to-day, so for to-night's supper it 
 is my sister's turn. She has lunch to-morrow." 
 
 "Are you as poor as that?" cried Dulce. "If you get 
 off, though, you can have supper with me." 
 
 The girl's pretty eyes widened vastly. "You will let 
 me?" 
 
 "But I will let nothing else !" exclaimed Dulce. "What 
 is your attractive name?" 
 
 "Lola." 
 
 "And mine is Dulce. Mind you pronounce it as I do, 
 'Dool-thay,' or I will not like it. You Catalans claw up 
 the Spanish tongue! I will teach you to pronounce cas- 
 tellano. Do you know the hosier's shop, in the Calle 
 Carmen? I live over that. I chose it for location, you 
 see, not for fashion. Four flights. Come at seven. Keep
 
 8 The Great Way 
 
 the money that the Methicano gave you for me, and 
 bring something to eat that you especially like yourself. 
 Jaime works in the coal-yards at Mont Juich, and this 
 is pay day. So he is sure to bring in a bottle of wine 
 with him if those flowers were for me ! If they were not, 
 you will help me beat him up, will you not, darling?" 
 
 "In the name of God I will !" cried her friend. 
 
 "And after supper," continued Dulce, "we will go for a 
 drink to the Royal." 
 
 "The Royal !" Lola's eyes stretched far in their excite- 
 ment, and then fell by instinct down along her dull red 
 dress. 
 
 "I have one very beautiful costume," said Dulce, "that 
 I will wear, and another that is quite lovely too, though 
 a little old-fashioned, that I can pound you into. Puff 
 you rather, for it will be too big. Mine is blue silk, very 
 light in colour, and in making it I copied a Paris picture. 
 Delicate blue silk, just the right amount too low, yet with 
 long hanging sleeves. And a short, tight skirt. I wear a 
 large pale yellow drooping hat with it. The other one 
 is white lace far too big for either of us, as I say, but 
 we can tighten it around you somehow, with pink rib- 
 bons." 
 
 "Mi Dios !" gasped Lola. "The Royal !" 
 
 "Good-bye, darling," said Dulce ; and they kissed again. 
 "Come at sharp seven, with whatever you like." 
 
 "Adios !" cried Lola. "You are an elegant friend for 
 me, instead of kicking me as I know you ought." 
 
 "And you are very handsome, and were gracious about 
 the violets," added Dulce. 
 
 "They are a little stale, so I could not sell them any- 
 way," deprecated Lola. 
 
 "They will last to-night," said Dulce, "and with the 
 roses and jacinta, and some French scent that I have, we 
 will smell very lovely. Adios !" 
 
 "Adios, my beloved!" And Dulce went on down the 
 Rambla to the Street of Carmen.
 
 CHAPTER H 
 
 THE STREET OF CARMEN 
 
 HAVING climbed the dark stairs and sharply closed her 
 door, she slung down her hat on to the bed, pulled her 
 table into the centre of the room, examined the contents 
 of her cupboard, walked loudly across her creaking floor 
 to the window-sill and with her elbow swept aside its pots 
 of mignonette, gazed down into the street and as far as 
 she could into the adjoining square, drew in her head, 
 and having dragged from under the bed a wooden box 
 that held her finery, knelt beside it for a long while, 
 hurling one thing after another across to the snowy 
 counterpane until it was covered, from rail to pillow, 
 ivith a mad succession of promiscuous colours from per- 
 fect lace to rotten velvet, from lovely personal linen to 
 men's red handkerchiefs for the bull-fight. 
 
 Before she could be satisfied that the best was tossed 
 forth, a knock, unaccustomed sound, came at the door 
 and she sprang up. 
 
 Lola stood eagerly trembling on the threshold, her 
 brown hair re-combed, a white rose to the rear of it, and 
 a package hugged firmly in the crook of her arm. 
 
 "Come in, darling!" cried Dulce, hauling her forward. 
 "Jaime is not home yet what do you think of that? 
 I begin to distrust those flowers ! But we will never 
 mind, my dearest, if he has had the bravery to deceive 
 me. We will have a grand supper in any case, and go 
 to the Royal alone if necessary. Look at the bed there, 
 and the colours on it ! It is gay, what ? It looks better 
 than with him in it, I assure you." 
 
 She pushed Lola on to it, crumpling the bright fabrics 
 
 9
 
 10 The Great Way 
 
 to the pretty girl's anguished discomfiture, and took away 
 her package. 
 
 "Poor Jaime! He is so stupid, I sometimes grow 
 impatient. There he works in the coalyards day by day, 
 and never thinks of anything more clever ! I often say to 
 him, 'You make it a virtue to yourself, that you work 
 for both, never thinking I am worth something better.' " 
 
 "I am sure, darling, you are worth something more 
 clever," said Lola, sitting stiff with awe among the finery. 
 "But how he must respect you ! And surely, he washes 
 off the coal, does he not?" 
 
 "When when I insist," said Dulce. "But what I say 
 is, why get it on? He could be a scene-shifter just as 
 well, and he is, sometimes, but it is only when they need 
 extras at the Opera. I say often: 'If you were not 
 stupid, you would shift scenes through the season at 
 the Opera, too, which is fashionable ! and trust God to 
 care for you in the summer.' Well, it hurts his feel- 
 ings, and then I cry, like a fool. But he is stupid, or he 
 would know I could never make a week's wages run a 
 month." 
 
 "Still, how you must love him !" sighed Lola. 
 
 "Oh, yes, yes," said Dulce. "I would never stop with 
 him, if I did not love him madly." 
 
 "It must be wonderful to love someone," said Lola. "I 
 I have thought him handsome; and with the smudges 
 off- 
 
 "Oh, yes, yes," said Dulce again. "You must know, 
 that I would never be a sponge to him, if I did not love 
 him passionately. But he is dull, Lola, as vou shall see. 
 Holy God, but you have brought mussels ! Are you fond 
 of them? Cooked, too, and that was sensible, for we 
 could never cook them here. Jaime will have rice with 
 him if he comes with those flowers ! Mi Dio, but we 
 will fix him if he has deceived me ! Set the table, dear." 
 
 This was a natural thought, for Lola was busy setting it. 
 
 "How clever you are at that!" Dulce paused as she 
 sprinkled her violets with water, and as she did so, some-
 
 The Street of Carmen 11 
 
 thing as bright as the scattering drops caught her notice, 
 and her lips parted in her astonishment. 
 
 "Lola, what are you crying for?" 
 
 Lola gulped pathetically. 
 
 "I am envious, beloved. You have such a happy and 
 fashionable life, with a devoted lover, and so much to 
 eat ! I would never be intelligent enough !" 
 
 "You are not intelligent when you say as much," 
 answered Dulce. "To be sure, I am clever, and I know 
 it. But so are you, at selling flowers, and smiling so 
 gaily at dull strangers who never think of you again. I 
 never could do that. As for my lover and enough to eat, 
 both are poor food considering what I ought to have, but 
 I am cheerful nevertheless. Besides, I have parted with 
 what I can never have back, and that is no fun when one 
 thinks of it. I would never admit so much to anyone but 
 you, which shows my devotion to you; but it is true, let 
 me tell you." 
 
 "That is just what I would be afraid of," said Lola. 
 "I think I am a coward by nature. I cry sometimes 
 when I get so hungry. But I always get frightened from 
 your way, by what an old woman in our house said to me 
 one night when she caught me thinking about it." 
 
 "What right has an old hag to frighten you?" said 
 Dulce. "What did she say?" 
 
 "She said a fearful thing. She said, 'Look here, girl. 
 Do you know what it is to be a bad woman ? There is an 
 old saying: She Mils herself. But first she kills her 
 parents, friend, and lover. That is what it is, girl/ 
 Then do you wonder I am frightened, Dulce?" 
 
 Dulce was silent for a moment. 
 
 "Yes, yes. Mi Dio, that is dreadful!" she said with 
 a little shudder. "But, Lola, why do you not,' then, fear 
 to be my friend?" 
 
 Lola jumped to her and threw her arms about her. 
 
 "Darling, I am not that much a coward !" 
 
 Dulce kissed her. "Dearest," she said, "old women 
 are the same as priests. They frighten one at nothing.
 
 12 The Great Way 
 
 God forbid I should tell anyone to be bad, Lola. But I 
 am no coward, and let me tell you something: if you 
 must be good, be it for its own sake, and not out of 
 fright. What I have to say to myself is, I did not put 
 myself in this world, and I will not be unhappy in it 
 because I saved my neck the only way I could. Spilt 
 wine is bad for a white cloth, I admit, but I shall never 
 try to clean it with tears till I am dull enough to take 
 myself to the next world. Which I would, rather than 
 sniffle in this one. What good is it? Besides, I must eat 
 occasionally, and Jaime, devoted or not, being a coal- 
 heaver, you see, must eat three times a day. What made 
 you say the Methicano was so rich?" 
 
 "His clothes and his air and his doing nothing. Are 
 you still thinking of him, Dulce?" 
 
 Dulce laughed. "Of course I am. Who would not?" 
 
 Lola gazed wonderingly at her. "But but why, since 
 you know his station?" 
 
 "You are a baby, Lola !" 
 
 "But why?" 
 
 "Because, if you must have the truth, because I think 
 I could really love a man like that station or not, poor 
 or not." 
 
 "When you love Jaime?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, yes, I love Jaime passionately," said Dulce 
 quickly. "But he is stupid, dearest." 
 
 "And you are so clever, my darling!" Lola gazed 
 lingeringly at the riot of colour on the bed. 
 
 "Well, here is someone who is not !" cried Dulce, spring- 
 ing up and stepping to the door. 
 
 She threw it open, and Jaime, strangely clean and 
 odorous of barber and bouquet, stood blinking at the 
 extravagance of candle-light and colours. 
 
 "We have company, my pet !" cried Dulce, kissing 
 him fondly. "And I see she is no liar, nor you either, 
 for you have brought the flowers according to your story 
 to her. And the wine! But how you must love me 
 Lola darling, it is Amontillado! Stop staring, Jaime!
 
 The Street of Carmen 13 
 
 I too know your flower-girl, and she is here for supper! 
 We have been acquainted for an hour, and are very 
 intimate." 
 
 Lola was blushing, with bright averted eyes, and 
 Jaime stood with open mouth, staring blankly at Dulce, 
 his dark serious face struck dully into surprised lines, 
 his dog's eyes fastened on his comrade with wondering 
 dog's love. 
 
 "Quick !" whispered Dulce, impatiently plucking at 
 his fingers. "Act the gentleman, will you? Put on some 
 caballero manners and greet her in style! This is an 
 occasion ! Go do it !" 
 
 With abrupt effort of stumbling, willing obedience, 
 Jaime walked forward and bowed over Lola's nervous 
 outstretched hand. 
 
 "You are charming!" said Jaime with agonized polish 
 and miraculous success. "You are very charming. I 
 should like to pass the night with you !" 
 
 "Thank you very much," said Lola, blushing modestly 
 and curtsying, "but make me the favour to wait until I 
 am married." 
 
 "And you say you are not clever, dear!" cried Dulce, 
 delighted. "I could not have done more prettily myself, 
 Lola. It was a lady's answer! Come here, Jaime, and 
 kiss me I am proud of you! Now, Lola darling, sit 
 down. You are the guest. Jaime will wait on us. We 
 will both tell him how we met. It started in a quarrel, 
 Jaime, because we disagreed about a passer-by as I was 
 stopping at Lola's stand for some violets. She said 
 he was a Methicano when I would have had him from 
 Nueva York. And she was right, the clever thing! Pull 
 that cork, dearest, and sit down with us." 
 
 And presently they were eating noisily and talking 
 as much so, to the clink of forks and glasses and the loud 
 music of laughing . . . like castanets against a happy 
 tune. . . . 
 
 "Holy God, but it is eight o'clock !" cried Dulce. "We 
 are going to the Royal, Jaime, and Lola will be no easy
 
 14 The Great Way 
 
 girl to dress. She is too pretty to be anything but 
 fashionable." 
 
 "The Royal?" stammered Jaime. 
 
 "Why not? It is your pay day and you know I 
 found twenty-five pesetas this week. Had you forgotten 
 that?" 
 
 "I have never known such luck!" said Jaime to Lola. 
 "She has found paper money three weeks running, and 
 moreover she finds silver more than seldom in the street! 
 She is so modest, she looks forever at the ground. Even 
 without the money it brings her, I like her modesty !" 
 
 "She is in every way clever," said Lola, softly. 
 
 "Look," cried Dulce. "Here is your gown, Lola. 
 What do you say to it?" 
 
 Lola gasped as her hostess pulled up the mound of 
 lace. 
 
 "Madre de Dios, but I could never wear it! I would 
 blush every minute, trying to be a lady !" 
 
 "Nonsense," said Dulce. "Jaime, smoke faster. You 
 would grumble if I put you in the hall while we dress, so 
 make a thick smoke. Have you a brother, Lola?" 
 
 "Two," said Lola. "Why?" 
 
 "That is all right, then," said Dulce. "Smoke as you 
 like, Jaime. But, then, as we are gentlefolk to-night, 
 for manners' sake put on airs and make the smoke thick. 
 Come, my dear!" 
 
 Summoning Lola to the side of the bed, she sat on 
 the edge of it and unpinned her frock. "Dios, but I see 
 you have nice habits about you, dearest ! There you 
 are now just a few respectable linens and a woman. But 
 in two minutes you will be a lady." 
 
 Whatever she was, it she was in that time lost to 
 view utterly below her throat in a drooping cone of tar- 
 nished lace that streamed about her figure like a cloud 
 that upheld her pretty head, while it solidified in folds 
 upon the floor. 
 
 "Dio, Dio, will you look at her?" laughed Dulce. "She 
 is like a Murillo saint, is she not? But you will look no
 
 The Street of Carmen 15 
 
 saint when I get the ribbons on you !" And she began to 
 loop up the skirt, tying it in layers against itself with 
 deft pink knots and bows, and baring the pretty arms to 
 the elbows by similar works of art upon the shoulders. 
 "Well, well, you are a work of art, at that, though no 
 Murillo ! You look funny, but stylish at the same moment. 
 Have you seen the pictures of the new Paris fashions? 
 There are stranger ones than this, let me tell you. That 
 loop the one down there below your knees is exact, 
 only the waist was tight. That we cannot do, for it would 
 never look as if it were on purpose. As you are, no one 
 will think you a mistake, anyway. Turn around, darling. 
 I have a buckle of brilliants for that same loop, right 
 between your knees. But we need a sash first. Here, 
 catch this !" And she drew a lengthy ribbon from the 
 confusion of stuffs on the bed. Its satin scraped swiftly 
 between Lola's fingers and the great wealth of lace 
 bunched in above her waist and stayed there, pressed by 
 the broad pink band knotted and drooping through a 
 quick, crisp bow with long trailing ends. "Now, the 
 buckle!" 
 
 "Dio !" gasped Lola, gazing almost in terror down at 
 herself, and Jaime's eyes grew large with admiration. 
 
 "Now," said Dulce, "help me," and together they 
 disarrayed her and spread forth the soft blue silk. 
 
 "Do you see that, my dear?" inquired Dulce, stretch- 
 ing forth her arm. "That is a lesson for you, when one 
 is as poor as I am ! Let me tell you, though I may go 
 without my dinner I do not go without my lotion-pot. 
 It is half the battle to keep cheerful. You will learn 
 much from me, Lola." 
 
 The blue silk glided down from over her head and clung 
 sheening about her. 
 
 "Dio mio !" exclaimed Lola. "If I thought you beau- 
 tiful before " and her voice stopped in token of her 
 
 delight. 
 
 "It is simple," said Dulce. "But that is more than 
 half the battle to have a thing fit you. There, we are
 
 16 The Great Way 
 
 done, my dear, except for hats. Now, Lola, hats are the 
 very last point in fashion. My yellow kind was done for 
 years ago, but that helps it, in my case, for I know how 
 to tip it, and if you wear an wnus'wal thing well, then the 
 battle is done, and nothing to say. What do you think 
 of it?" 
 
 Having pinned it with one hand, she slapped it with 
 the other as she questioned. 
 
 Lola gasped again, and the slow voice of Jaime said: 
 "You are beautiful, Dulce mia !" 
 
 "Mind I stay your 'mia' !" cried Dulce. "When I am 
 dressed like this, I tremble for you, Jaime !" 
 
 Jaime trembled for himself as she said it. 
 
 "Now for your hat, Lola. With all that white, you 
 need a black one. White hats are fatal. They are dis- 
 gusting. Never buy one, Lola, whether you marry or 
 whatever you do. No matter what a shopman says to 
 you about them, he lies. They decorate a window, but 
 never a woman. Black is the secret, especially for dark 
 women, and that is why we Spaniards are forever in 
 mourning. I wear the yellow for two reasons contrast, 
 and because I can. Well, I have only one black one. 
 Here. Holy Mother, but you look a dream in it. How 
 lucky ! Jaime, we will finish the wine now, to put even 
 more sparkle into Lola, and it will make us just in time, 
 in the fashionable crowd before the theatre. Come, draw 
 up!" 
 
 Again the voices babbled over the tinkle of glasses. 
 But suddenly Dulce forgot to drink, and the polite small- 
 talk of her charms ran between Jaime and Lola while 
 she gazed at the wall, her thoughts far off somewhere 
 beyond it and her eyes grave and fixed. 
 
 "What ails you, Dulce?" asked Jaime. 
 
 "Yes, darling!" cried Lola. "Have you heard what 
 Jaime and I have said about you?" 
 
 "No, I am sad," said Dulce. 
 
 "Sad?" cried Lola. 
 
 "Sad?" cried Jaime.
 
 The Street of Carmen 17 
 
 "Well, well, I have excuse enough!" said Dulce. "I 
 was thinking it is the thirteenth of the month." 
 
 "And are you superstitious, dear, very?" asked Lola. 
 
 "Not very," answered Dulce. "But what month is it? 
 October, no ? Well, this is an unlucky day for the Span- 
 ish poor. On October the thirteenth, Ferrer was shot." 
 
 "But Dulce mia," said Jaime, staring, "what business 
 is that of yours?" 
 
 "Yes, darling," cried Lola, "why should that sadden 
 you?" 
 
 "Are you Spaniards?" demanded Dulce, her voice re- 
 proachful. "And are you poor? Must not every 
 Spaniard, except the Government and the priests, think 
 of him every little while ? Well, never mind. They will be 
 putting a statue to him sometime, having murdered him 
 as they have done to Colon, who discovered everything on 
 earth for us except the North Pole. Let me tell you that 
 Ferrer loved the people. The people, I tell you ! Mi Dio, 
 there is excuse for Lola, who is a baby; but you are a 
 man, Jaime, or ought to be. Dio mio, but I could weep 
 whenever I think of it ! And as one of the people I have 
 more reason to weep than you know, Jaime ! Lola knows 
 more there than you do ! A girl can tell things to a girl ! 
 But I must not sadden you. Only, it is so new to see you 
 two sitting there together, and to have some family life! 
 It made me think of the future, and your asking me to 
 marry you, Jaime ! How stupid it was of you !" 
 
 "But I never meant it for an insult, Dulce !" cried 
 Jaime. "I thought you had forgiven it long ago !" 
 
 "Well, never mind," said Dulce. "I was thinking also 
 of Ferrer, who loved poor people. And got shot for it. 
 And I was thinking, too, that when people try to kill 
 the dear sweet good-looking king for the matter I could 
 claw them, whether they are poor or not ! The stupid 
 fools, they never stop to think it was not the king did it ! 
 As you both can see, I am a peculiar girl, and I give more 
 thought to public matters than the next man does. Let 
 me tell you what I have been told : it was the priesthood
 
 18 The Great Way 
 
 killed Ferrer, for it would never do for poor people, as I 
 am, to read and write, as I can. Well, when the king 
 understood he would have pardoned him. No one need 
 talk to me against the king. But the priesthood and 
 mind, now, that I choose my word and do not say religion, 
 or the Church the priesthood won. Such is our country 
 for poor folks !" 
 
 "Dulce, Dulce!" stammered Jaime, as Lola's eyes 
 stared widely. "Be careful what you say! You do no 
 know any such thing!" 
 
 "I believe it," answered Dulce, "and indoors I will 
 say what I like. I have heard it said openly in the street, 
 and not only that, but in the Royal, by aristocrats. And 
 it makes me sad!" 
 
 "Do not be sad, darling!" pleaded Lola. "See you 
 have made me cry already !" 
 
 "Holy God!" exclaimed Dulce, breaking into tears. 
 "Life is a very sad thing ! Sometimes I think what might 
 happen to Jaime any minute. Or to me, which is much 
 worse for I am clever enough to take care of both of us, 
 while he is not, poor stupid darling! Lola, my own, 
 promise me that if I should be terribly injured, or die, or 
 be shot, or disappear, you will marry him and take care 
 of him, will you, Lola ? Perhaps you could make a scene- 
 shifter of him ! If I die, or anything awful happens, will 
 you marry Lola for my sake, Jaime?" 
 
 And she sobbed aloud. 
 
 "Yes, Dulce mia, yes!" wept Jaime. "I will do any- 
 thing you ask me to '" 
 
 "And you do not answer me, Lola!" sobbed Dulce 
 loudly. 
 
 "Yes, beloved, yes, if he will have me!" sobbed Lola. 
 "I can never be so clever for him as you are, but I will 
 do my best to save, and we will buy a big monument for 
 you!" 
 
 "Holy God !" wept Dulce. "We must be going to the 
 Royal. Think how I will weep over you in heaven,
 
 The Street of Carmen 19 
 
 watching you together! Come, set your hat right, 
 darling! How sad life is, when we think of death!" 
 
 "Oh! Oh! Oh! Yes! Oh!" sobbed Lola. 
 
 "Oh! Dulce! Oh! Oh!" sobbed Jaime. 
 
 "Oh! Oh! Oh!" sobbed Dulce; and together they 
 proceeded downstairs and through the narrow calle into 
 the Ramblas, to the Royal.
 
 CHAPTER IH 
 
 THE ROYAL 
 
 THE pretty place was crowded, and Lola, hanging to 
 both of them tight and close, burned deep red with self- 
 consciousness as they pushed their way through the nar- 
 row aisles of tables under the yellow and green awning 
 into the restaurant. 
 
 "We must sit here," said Dulce, as chairs were set 
 back for them from a small glass-topped table, "till 
 theatre time. Then we can have places outside. Which 
 chair will you have, Lola? Here, where you can look 
 out, or here, where you can see the special dining-room 
 back there?" 
 
 "Here," whispered Lola, sinking into the chair with 
 its back toward the door, and feasting her eyes on the 
 exquisite blue and silver little room beyond, which filled 
 up a vista of preserved fruits and rainbow-tinted con- 
 fections in files of glass cases for one side, and white- 
 napkined tables and pretty women and dark handsome 
 men for the other. 
 
 "Cervesa tres," said Dulce to the uniformed waiter 
 who stood bowing while Jaime sat hesitating. "Stop 
 fidgeting, Jaime." And as Lola still gazed about, and 
 Dulce hummed, "Do Not Cry, Bebete," to the tinkle and 
 thrum of a band of street musicians, three beers were set 
 upon their table, and once more they drank, once more 
 their voices resounded against each other. 
 
 "We get as many eyes as matadors would," whispered 
 Dulce. "We are certainly handsome, Lola, and these 
 clothes are very lovely. Jaime, if you would sit straight 
 and speak more carelessly to the waiter you would be 
 more worthy of us. Holy God, but I am happy !" 
 
 20
 
 The Royal 21 
 
 "So am I!" whispered Lola. 
 
 "That is right, darling! And you, Jaime?" 
 
 "I would be a little happier," said Jaime, "in that nice 
 cafe down by the dock, where the noise is so comfortable. 
 Still, I am very happy, Dulce !" 
 
 Again Dulce hummed, now a little more loudly, as 
 another trio of fiddle, guitar and mandoline halted outside 
 in its stroll. 
 
 "Lola, did you see that lady nod and smile at me? I 
 swear to you that is simply because she has seen me before 
 somewhere, or else purely on account of our attractive 
 appearance. We are friendly, we Spaniards, are we not? 
 We are a queer people, Lola if you have never noticed 
 it more democratic than the whole rest of the world, 
 for all our caste and our fine young king. And he is more 
 so than the rest of us. I happen to know it from a friend 
 at Madrid. No wonder holy God saves his life every five 
 minutes !" 
 
 "Dulce, Dulce mio," pleaded Jaime, "make me the 
 favour not to talk so here so loud !" 
 
 "Why not?" demanded Dulce. "I am happy, and I 
 am saying only good things of both king and people!" 
 She beckoned the waiter. "Hombre ! Aqui ! Is there 
 room outside now?" 
 
 "Si, si, senorita!" smiled the handsome boy. "Will 
 you make me the favour to come with me?" 
 
 "Bring three more beers, then, senor, and put us at a 
 table on your side, mind!" And the three, Lola again 
 bright with embarrassment, rose and followed him to the 
 sidewalk, Jaime slouching in a brave effort to swagger. 
 
 With their surrounding neighbours they made a strange 
 company. Here was an aristocrat, old, pious, absinthe- 
 drinking, who had bowed to them as they sat down by 
 him, and moved his glass that they might share his table, 
 their own being too small for three. There, in front of 
 them, were a man without a collar, and his hatless wife, 
 smiling and exchanging pretty civilities, unembarrassed, 
 with them and with patricians alike. Even as Dulce had
 
 22 The Great Way 
 
 voiced so tactlessly, Democracy was here beneath the 
 awning, whether gold Monarchy reared its head at 
 Madrid, whether rouged Anarchy slept in some quiet room 
 across the way. The summer-like October night was 
 beautiful with stars and soft with Spanish air that stirred 
 the great leaves of the snake-skinned planeta trees before 
 them in the Rambla. Now came the click and scrape of 
 a brown leaf, falling dead to the trodden yellow dirt before 
 its time. Now, the rustle of a wakeful bird stirring above, 
 gently breaking the silence of the great feathered army 
 that strangely haunts the trees of this one short block, 
 sharply drawing its boundaries at corner and corner 
 above the daily bird-market of its gayer-plumed fellows 
 who had slipped away, at sun-down, in myriads of little 
 wooden cages. Off below the further trees was an angular 
 glimpse of the next Rambla, Lola's Rambla, its big 
 branches shadowing its empty flower-stands, its white 
 street lights falling across to the scrolled stone front of 
 the old baroque Church of Xuestra Senora, and helping to 
 cast its dreaded Jesuit shadow into Dulce's street. Now 
 and then, between them and the hard yellow earth of the* 
 Rambla, street-cars, some with horses, some without, 
 bobbed by under the spreading planetas; just opposite, 
 the theatre drank up the people rambling toward it from 
 up and from down. Ever and again, twos and threes of 
 blind musicians strummed and sang, their little boy-apiece 
 garnering centimos from both kindly rich and kindly poor. 
 Once a piano on wheels, dragged by a small long-eared 
 mule, drew up at the kerb, and the mule's still smaller 
 leader, a diminutive girl, climbed earnestly on to the 
 hither wheel and played the brow-beaten piano more 
 earnestly still, while her father fingered a mandoline and 
 sang, his blind eyes eternally rolled up. . . . And now 
 more music, more musicians always blind, blind, blind. 
 
 "That is from a fearful sin !" whispered Dulce to Lola. 
 "What a pity, what a pity! Do you notice, darling, 
 how informed I am?" 
 
 Their second beers were drawing to a close, and she
 
 The Royal 23 
 
 leaned luxuriously back in her chair, glancing about for 
 the waiter. 
 
 "I am happy !" she said suddenly. "I have never been 
 so happy in my life !" 
 
 "Nor I," said Lola. 
 
 "Nor nor I," said Jaime. 
 
 Again she looked about for the waiter, and clapped 
 her hands for him ; but though he was nearby and turned, 
 he did not come to her at once, for he was in conversation, 
 so serious that for a whole instant at a time he would 
 forget to puff his cigarette, with a gentleman in evening 
 clothes a few tables away. 
 
 Dulce, waiting patiently to catch his glance, overheard 
 their exchange of words. 
 
 "You tell me what, my boy? That I am in your debt 
 for a peseta?" 
 
 "If you will excuse me, yes, Caballero. It was in 
 change, a mistake on my part." 
 
 "Well, here it is, and welcome, hombre. But I do not 
 remember it. When was this?" 
 
 "Three days ago, seiior." 
 
 "Three days ? No wonder I was puzzled ! But why 
 did you not tell me at the time or as soon as you found 
 it out?" 
 
 "I had but just seen you, senor, and I mistook you 
 for an Americano. So I thought you did not understand 
 our money, and I would wait until you did, senor. I did 
 not wish to confuse you." 
 
 "I thank you, hombre. You were thoughtful. But 
 what did the manager say? Did he not complain?" 
 
 "He did not know, senor." 
 
 "Then you paid it yourself? But I know something 
 of wages here you get but a small sum, and at the 
 latter part of the week, you could not afford to be three 
 days without this money!" 
 
 "No, Caballero. But I could less afford to hurt your 
 feelings !" 
 
 The boy's eyes went toward Dulce, to reassure her of
 
 24 The Great Way 
 
 his attention; and the gentleman, though so lately mis- 
 taken for an American, evidently was not mentally alien 
 to Spanish nature, for he offered the youth no money 
 largess of interest on the peseta, but noticing that in his 
 earnestness his cigarette had actually gone out, he took 
 the stale thing from his fingers, tossed it to the sidewalk, 
 and proffered his case. Then he as promptly showed 
 himself not fully familiar here, either, anyway as to 
 tobacco habits ; for a limping street-scavenger had 
 pounced for the fallen stub, and as he saw the wretched 
 thing pick the wretched thing up, the gentleman with a 
 shiver leaned swiftly forward and gave him, too, a 
 cigarette, not knowing that this living-maker had gar- 
 nered the refuse not to smoke himself, but to take back 
 to the factory. 
 
 The waiter had stepped toward Dulce; and as he did 
 so, inhaling ecstatically, and his expression a conflict 
 between that ecstasy and an apparent regret that he had 
 lighted a thing of such quality now instead of saving it 
 for his wedding night or the day of his First Communion, 
 and as his Caballero sat back from amazing the scavenger, 
 she. saw the gentleman's face. 
 
 "Dio mio, Lola, but it is the Methicano!" she 
 whispered. 
 
 "Yes, Dulce, I have been watching him. And he has 
 seen you, too." 
 
 "And remembers me?" 
 
 "I am sure of it !" 
 
 Dulce glanced swiftly toward Jaime, but she could not 
 see his face, for the waiter now had hidden that away. 
 
 "Hombre," she asked, "what is that pretty drink that 
 the gentleman has?" 
 
 "Vermouth, senorita. And vermouth is a drink for any 
 gentleman !" 
 
 "Three vermouths, hombre!" 
 
 Lola looked rapidly at Jaime as the waiter stepped 
 away. A small dull cloud had come into his face. But
 
 The Royal 25 
 
 Oulce's prompt hand came down upon his arm, and it 
 vanished. 
 
 "Jaime," she said, her voice as caressing as her name, 
 "that is the Methicano that I told you of! Except for 
 the dispute about him Lola and I would not be intimate 
 friends this minute think of that! And though he will 
 not know it, we will drink to him when the vermouths 
 come, no, Jamie?" 
 
 "What you like, Dulce mia." 
 
 "Well, Jaime, I like friendship, for one thing !" 
 
 "And me, Dulce, for another?" 
 
 The question was so unlike him that she stared at him 
 in surprised silence before she answered. 
 
 "You are stupid, Jaime. Never ask girls for com- 
 pliments. Wait for them to be offered, then even you 
 may get a few !" 
 
 "I adore you, Dulce!" He whispered it, and mantled 
 in the sudden deep colour that swept her face as she 
 motioned him to silence, she looked instinctively toward 
 the gentleman in evening clothes. Lola's eyes saw Jaime's 
 see theirs. The waiter, with three glasses, stepped 
 between. 
 
 "Are you well served, Caballero?" And with this high 
 tribute to Jaime, he smiled at him and then at Dulce. 
 
 "Well served, well served, friend !" stammered Jaime, 
 flushing. 
 
 "Indeed, prettily served, prettily!" cried Dulce. "See, 
 Jaime, the waiter takes me for your wife. You fetched a 
 compliment where you did not look for it, just as I said!" 
 And at her words he brightened. 
 
 "I need not name the toast," she added, touching his 
 glass and Lola's with her own. And she and Lola drank 
 with eyes a-sparkle, while Jaime merely sipped, his eyes 
 less happy. 
 
 The Mexican gentleman had turned his chair a little 
 toward them. 
 
 "What do you two say," said Dulce, setting down her 
 glass, "to having some oysters? Lola, my dear, nothing
 
 26 The Great Way 
 
 than oysters could be more fashionable, or show off one's 
 manners to better advantage!" 
 
 Lola's eyes glistened. 
 
 "Oysters, Dulce mia? see Jaime, I have been bold 
 enough to use your own word to her! Dulce, darling, I 
 have eaten many Portuguese oysters, but never iced by a 
 restaurant ! Only, my friend, mi querida, you will be 
 spending a fortune if your eyes stay that bright !" 
 
 Dulce clapped her hands for the waiter so loudly, and 
 called "Aqui! Hombre! O! Aqui!" so often, that the 
 handsome boy came running. 
 
 "Three plates of oysters, friend ! And be sure to bring 
 the forks that are most delicate, and plenty of ice. Have 
 you noticed, hombre," and she detained him by her slender 
 fingers on his sleeve, "how pretty the ice looks in the 
 lights of the window here, with the glassed fruits doubled 
 in it?" 
 
 "Yes, I have noticed, senorita, but the ice is not so 
 bright as your eyes !" And the boy was gone. 
 
 "I do not like oysters," said Jaime. 
 
 "Well, Jaime dearest," said Dulce, sighing, "I know 
 they are not good-looking. And all I can think is, that 
 the first man who ever ate one, must have been a nasty 
 dirty thing. But to clever people, they are delicious; 
 and if you cannot be gentilhombre enough to swallow 
 them, give yours to Lola, who you can see craves them 
 despite her low birth." 
 
 "Darling," said Lola timidly, catching her with 
 trembling fingers by the arm, "could we Hot send back 
 the oysters if you thought them over?" 
 
 Dulce stared at her. 
 
 "Why?" she demanded. 
 
 "They they taste like a tin watch," said Lola. 
 
 Dulce's stare widened. 
 
 "A what?" 
 
 "When I was a very young child I ate my watch one 
 day, when we were especially hungry," said Lola. "I 
 have always remembered it."
 
 The Royal 27 
 
 "Well," said Dulce slowly, "in such a case I would 
 never make you eat them, Lola " 
 
 "Oh," cried Lola, eagerly catching her arm again, 
 "indeed, I promise you I would enjoy them, darling! I 
 love to be reminded of the time I had a watch had a 
 watch to wear, I mean! You see, we never got it back. 
 My sister who sleeps with me says she hears it tick, 
 which used to frighten me. But it never had ticked, 
 Dulce, and since I am grown up I have found that out. 
 And you must know by now, my Dulce, that I love you 
 more than anything on earth, and would never dare to 
 offend you, even for poor Jaime's sake, lest I break my 
 heart; but I feel friendly with Jaime because he loves 
 you, which puts him and me in the same hospital. And 
 I think he has his feelings hurt over the oysters !" 
 
 Dulce turned slowly from Lola to Jaime, and back 
 again, a little surprised anger mixing with her wonder. 
 
 "Do you think, Lola, that I am getting the stupid 
 boy into debt? I can assure you he is the one who will 
 pay, but tfyat is for manners, and not out of his wages! 
 Let me tell you, I would order a watch for you, if they 
 served them here! Have you forgotten, darling, the find 
 of paper money that first /, and then he, mentioned to 
 you? / am not likely to forget that money, I can 
 promise you that, Lola !" And as Lola caught her hand 
 under the table and pressed it feverishly, she raised her 
 other hand and poked Jaime's cheek with friendly tolerance. 
 
 "You can have such manners, Jaime, when you like! 
 So do eat the oysters and enjoy them. Think, you are 
 several years older than I am, and you act like a child, 
 sulking when there is nothing to sulk at! Can you not 
 be pleasant, when I have such a happiness in finding a 
 great friend to give me amusement and affection? Any- 
 way, here they are, you baby !" 
 
 She patted the waiter's arm, sending him away. 
 
 "Lola, there is nothing like oysters to show elegance 
 with, as I told you. Now, I have no doubt the Methicano
 
 28 The Great Way 
 
 is still looking at you, and you can show a lady's manners 
 to him if you will watch how 7 eat them !" 
 
 In the small space of chairs and tables under the 
 awning humanity had thinned a little, leaving enough for 
 intimate gaiety ; and friendly looks and laughs were pass- 
 ing from table to table. In the softly lighted Rambla 
 leaves were still clicking now and then, as though death 
 had no heart to be less suave than the falling of an occa- 
 sional brown leaf on to yellow-brown ground. Though 
 grown seldom and more seldom, music still came up, and 
 was now tinkling in a row of three blind men and a 
 bright-eyed boy. Through its melody a carriage ground 
 its eternal red-spoked circles to a stop before the restau- 
 rant, and the tall Mexican rose and went out to it, and 
 stood at the kerb for a moment smiling, and deprecant, 
 hat in hand. Dulce noticed how deferentially the hat 
 stayed at his side. 
 
 The detail, so deep in the spiritual mark that it made 
 upon her, was an inevitable one, for her filched view of 
 him was from sidelong eyes eyes that lent her, for these 
 quick few moments of her stilled posture, a transient, 
 smooth dash of Orient vivid as a colour, subtly mixed 
 with her peninsular loveliness as hue or figure of an 
 Eastern manton with the habit or the indolent air of 
 Spain. 
 
 "To-morrow?" she could hear him say. "Certainly, 
 and with pleasure! I had given you up. Surely I under- 
 stand. You are tired. To-morrow ! Good night !" 
 
 Dulce knew that she could glimpse, too, if she would, 
 between the surrounding heads as the carriage rolled 
 away, the fair, frank lines of lovely foreign faces she 
 was sure they would be lovely; the soft sheen of blonde 
 hair she was certain it would be the exquisite feminine 
 gold that glinted always in her thoughts of the human 
 beings of England and America. 
 
 But though she had swiftly planned her swift debonair 
 movement to do so, against the impending instant that 
 now had come with the Methicano's courtly "Good night/'
 
 The EoydL 29 
 
 a thing swifter, a power strong as an articulate voice, 
 had come against her, and Dulce did not look. 
 
 It was the moment, eternally recurrent but potent only 
 seldom, and then, vigorous, dynamic with the nameless 
 force named destiny, when some precious flower of the 
 casual sends its perfume, vocal as speech, from around 
 a turn in the path of life, saying, "I am good and beau- 
 tiful ; seize me ; drink the wine of my newly inspirational 
 nature ; make me yours !" or else, "Fear me ; shun me ; go 
 by me, blinded-eyed and breathless ; my splendour is 
 leopard-skinned, my scent is poison!" 
 
 Youth and health hear both these messages. It is 
 only the weary pyramid of years or else the pain that is 
 crowned with thorns that can teach that the two voices 
 are one voice, that the speech is wordless and only a 
 perfume ; that, because the soul is translator, the first cry 
 is to the pure, the other to the unhappy. 
 
 To Dulce, in this moment of the pinnacle of her 
 curiosity, the sudden voice was that of humanity's huge 
 loyal friend of which she had made her hot outstanding 
 enemy: Society. And to such percentage of her soul as 
 was capable of cowardice, Dulce could not look. 
 
 The grind of the red-spoked circles passed behind her 
 and with it, the brief shadow of the bogie from upon 
 her. The tall foreigner, his hair softly gleaming in the 
 artificial light and light-coloured, in contrast with his 
 black clothes, as that that she had imagined for his 
 vanished ladies, had returned to his chair. 
 
 "After all, do you not enjoy the oysters, Jaime?'* 
 
 Lola was gladly swallowing, forming her fingers along 
 her fork in likeness of Dulce's, forgetting the taste of 
 the passing oyster in her eagerness to learn the delicate 
 manner. 
 
 "Did you hear me, Jaime ?" 
 
 Jaime's eyes were upon his plate. He had dutifully 
 swallowed, but his eyes did not raise, according to their 
 custom, like those of the happy dog that has done well. 
 
 "Never mind him, Lola," said Dulce. "He sulks,
 
 30 The Great Way 
 
 the stupid boy, once in so often. Did I tell you, dear, 
 that oysters are fashionable, or did I not, answer me 
 that? See, the Methicano has ordered some! Aqui! 
 Hombre ! Three vermouths !" 
 
 A woman back of her was whispering to her husband. 
 
 "It is not right! The foreigner is without shame, 
 with her man there beside her! It is not the girl's fault. 
 She is common and so pretty! These foreign men are 
 without shame!" 
 
 "It is the girl's fault," whispered back the husband. 
 "She knows better, with her man right there! She is 
 shameless !" 
 
 "You take the man's part !" said the woman impatient- 
 ly. "He is a foreigner, and has a contempt for our 
 customs ! Take me away !" 
 
 "Dulce!" whispered Jaime, imploringly, suddenly look- 
 ing up. "Dulce !" 
 
 But she did not answer him. She was talking to Lola. 
 
 "My dear, when I am as gay as this, I really feel as if 
 I could be a lady! I know I could! I am not boasting 
 when I keep saying I am clever! I have been a little of 
 an actress, you know, for once, when my luck was down, 
 I was two whole nights in the chorus of the Alcazar. 
 That was where I learned to use my fingers with these 
 graceful gestures. And if your Methicano chooses to 
 watch, my dear, it is none of Jaime's business, and never 
 will be till he knows enough to pay the whole rent. Holy 
 God, but I am happy !" 
 
 And she ate her last oyster and lifted her glass of 
 dwindling vermouth. 
 
 "Do you not feel as if we were ladies, Lola?" 
 
 A trio, blind, and with its customary fourth of brown- 
 eyed boy, had halted with mandoline, and voice this time, 
 and violin, upon the sidewalk, and a thin ServiUana 
 filtered through the company. 
 
 "Dio, but I would like to dance !" cried Dulce. "That 
 takes me back to Sevilla quicker than a train could!" 
 And her arms waved above the glittering table, her white
 
 The Royal 31 
 
 slender fingers snapping in the rhythmic cracking beats 
 of casta/nuelas, and her eyes meeting, meeting again, and 
 perhaps again, the foreign eyes that were constantly 
 upon her. As the tune stopped, she again sought Lola's 
 hand beneath the table, but dropped it to fetch her purse 
 from out her waist, and put two coppers on the plate that 
 the small boy was proffering at their table. 
 
 "Play more, boy ! Tell them to play more !" 
 
 The small boy bowed. "Si, senorita ! Gracias !" And 
 after a moment the thin voice of the blind woman rose 
 again: "Do not cry, do not cry, Bebete!" and Dulce 
 hummed with it. 
 
 Lola bent her head nearer to her friend's, to listen, 
 and as the notes came to the lingering refrain, it was 
 Dulce's humming voice that the people were hearing. 
 
 An approving laugh, a ripple of urging hands came at 
 the end, and the plate of the smiling small boy was quickly 
 filled all over again. 
 
 Dulce smiled even more than he did, all about her; and 
 as the blind three, smiling with the strange sympathetic 
 humour of the blind, twanged into Barcelona's favourite 
 song of the hour, she stood up in her place, and her voice 
 broke into the dulcet words of the apache waltz, the 
 "Cavalier de la Luna." 
 
 "We have no use for the dance new and catchy, 
 We damn good sorts who slide up through the night, 
 We want the real moonlit waltz named Apache, 
 Supple, seductive, quick, wicked and light! 
 Silently each chap grabs hold of his sweet one; 
 Then makes her skirt flirt the dirt to the moon; 
 Swiftly, abruptly he hands her a neat one; 
 Then comes the whirlpool tune 
 La la la la la la la!" 
 
 And, swift upon the lilting chuckle of the stanza's end, 
 Dulce's voice came into the sensuous refrain and distilled 
 itself exquisitely through the silence of the quiet Ramblas :
 
 32 The Great Way 
 
 "Friends, this is the Brown Walts, 
 
 Plain-girls-and-boys-o'-the-town -waltz, 
 
 Come-pick-me-up-knock-me-down -waltz, 
 
 Where you solicit, and kiss it or miss it 
 
 Oh, la la! 
 
 Yes, this is the Moon Waltz, 
 
 This is the laugh-of-the-loon waltz, 
 
 Just-try-to-kiss-me-too-soon waits 
 
 Night! . . . and light! . . . and 
 
 Ha-ha-ha!" 
 
 An instant's burst of approving hands, of quick cries 
 of "Sh-sh-sh!" and, her cadenced voice graphic as her 
 swaying body, she glided into the refrain's repetition with 
 its further words exhilarant, insinuant, intoxicant. 
 
 "Oh, this is the tune, friends! 
 We're Cavaliers of the Moon, -friends! 
 Each boy swoops down like a loon, friends, 
 Wild with moon-madness, moon-badness, moon-gladness 
 Oh, ta ta! 
 
 Ah, you know the brown tune! 
 This is the talk-o'-the-town tune! 
 This is the rip-in-the-gown tune 
 Dance! . . . and trance! . . . and 
 Ha-ha-ha !" 
 
 Chatter had ceased entirely, and that strange little 
 miracle that grows up suddenly among men once in a 
 long space had come upon the guests of the Royal to the 
 tune of the insinuating French song the little social 
 miracle of community of vision, uniquity of feeling: what 
 Dulce felt, they saw. To all of them, in their oneness of 
 mood, the Ramblas, the restaurant vitality, the essence 
 of Little Paris all about them, became Big Paris, but the 
 big Paris of its detours, its by-paths of architecture and 
 of humanity, lit by her voice, which was the moonlight 
 the green moonlight of great spaces, but which perforce 
 streamed down into the narrow streets and upon the evil 
 people which were her song; streets and people narrow
 
 The Royal 33 
 
 and evil, yet whose love love whatsoever can be trans- 
 lated into romance and beauty by those who sit without 
 and think of it ... or sing of it. ... 
 
 And as if he were there to picture the Apache, Jaime's 
 collar had turned up about his ears, and he was shrunk 
 down and back in his chair like someone forgotten and 
 sleeping. 
 
 Again a loud burst of approving hands, cries, now, of 
 "More! More!" and Dulce sang again, her body sway- 
 ing to the melody, line and line on to the reaching of the 
 giddy refrain again: 
 
 "Oh, this is the tune, friends! 
 We're Cavaliers of the Moon, friends! 
 Each boy swoops down like a loon, fr " 
 
 With a sickening crash, her table fell; and another. 
 Two women screamed. Jaime had jumped and swooped. 
 The waiter was running, and another waiter. Lola's arms 
 went about her. 
 
 The tall foreigner was on his feet, blood seeping down 
 his sleeve. The waiters and three men held Jaime. 
 
 "Holy God! Holy God!" said Dulce, and she shrank 
 back against the window. 
 
 The musicians crept away. 
 
 There was a babble of voices. 
 
 People were leaving. 
 
 A municipal guard came running down the Rambla. 
 
 The green stripes on his white uniform made a con- 
 fusing zig-zag in her eyes as he jumped by her into the 
 crowd, and she stood helplessly against the window, 
 trembling. She was alone there. Everyone had left her. 
 Even Lola had left her. She saw the empty tables, and 
 the street in front of her, and heard the din of voices at 
 one side. Above it, she heard the tall foreigner's voice. 
 
 "Let him go. Let him go. It is nothing, I tell you. 
 He may be drunk. It was my fault. Let him go. I tell 
 you it is nothing."
 
 84 The Great Way 
 
 Then again came the hateful din of voices, and she 
 clung desperately, with slipping hands, to the window 
 back of her. Hot terrified tears sprang to her eyes as 
 she felt her palms sliding downward on the glass, but 
 suddenly she felt Lola's arms around her again. 
 
 "Darling ! Darling ! Dulce ! It is nothing ! My God, 
 oh, my God, your face! Darling, darling, it is nothing, 
 I tell you ! They will let him go ! Dulce, they are going 
 to let him go ! Dulce, Dulce, I will scream if you look so ! 
 Your face! Oh, Dio mio, your face! Dulce, I tell you 
 they will let him go! The Mejicano says that it is 
 nothing, so they will let him go ! Dulce ! Dulce!" 
 
 "Get him away, then," whispered Dulce. "Get him 
 away, and lose him for me! Get him away, do you hear?" 
 And as Lola left her again, again she sank back against 
 the window, covering her face, trembling. 
 
 The municipal guard came over to her, but she would 
 not take down her hands, or answer him, and when he had 
 left her, once more she felt that she was alone hopelessly, 
 utterly alone. 
 
 She knew that Lola was gone, that Jaime was gone. 
 
 Even the din of voices now seemed distant. 
 
 But when she dropped her hands like two dead sticks 
 of wood and looked about her, she saw faces not only 
 here, not only there, but everywhere inquisitive faces, 
 gazing curiously at her. The two waiters stood by, 
 hesitating in the doorway. 
 
 As her hands had dropped, and her dazed eyes stared 
 about, the voices had dropped, too, into dead silence. And 
 as if he were some figure in a picture, she saw the tall 
 foreigner, still by his table with the blood on his slashed 
 sleeve, standing, watching her. 
 
 She felt hideous colour sweeping up from her throat, 
 but even as she tried to take her eyes from him, she saw 
 him step toward her, his head raised, his hat falling in his 
 hand to his side ... as it had fallen when he walked out 
 to that carriage. . . .
 
 The Royal 35 
 
 She felt his elbow lifted near her, toward her ; and she 
 heard his voice. 
 
 "Senorita, I must bring you to your home. Will you 
 make me the favour to take my arm?" 
 
 She struggled in her dry throat for three words: "I 
 am ashamed!" And then struggled again, for though 
 she felt them in her mouth they made no sound. "I am 
 ashamed !" But still they would not sound, and gulping, 
 she placed her shaking arm under his, and followed by 
 hushed voices and staring eyes they walked out into the 
 Rambla.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 CABALLEEO OF THE MOON 
 
 HER mind whirled as, leaning against him for mental 
 support though she was bodily shaken too, she walked 
 beside his tall figure into the Calle del Carmen passing 
 Lola's dark deserted flower-stand, passing the baroque 
 church with its semi-modern, semi-Moorish arabesques, 
 passing the blackened shops into the blacker hallway. 
 Here she broke from his arm and climbed before him. 
 Igniting her candles she stared with eyes that did not 
 blink in the waver of flaring light, at the gaudy riot of 
 clothes and ribbons, at the deserted chairs, at the wreck 
 of the recent little feast, now far back in memory as if 
 the sudden arm of Jaime's knife had hacked it away from 
 her life and cast it back across a century. 
 
 Rising among the stale food was a bottle not quite 
 empty, and she absently lifted it and set it, with a glass 
 rinsed at her washstand, at the edge of the table, in a 
 space swept by one clattering swathe of her arm. 
 
 "Make me the favour to drink that," she said. "It is 
 worthy of you, no matter what your caste. It is Amon- 
 tillado"; and as he sat mechanically at her bidding she 
 hurled herself face-downward across the bed, dry-eyed, 
 soundless ; save for a twitching at her wrists and ankles, 
 motionless. 
 
 When she had heard him push aside the bottle and 
 glass, she roused herself, coming to a sitting posture on 
 the edge of the disordered bed, pushing back her hair with 
 both hands, their fingers trembling. 
 
 She felt his eyes upon her in a waiting look. Her own 
 were cast down, her under lip was dented by her small 
 white teeth. Presently she looked up, breathing quickly 
 
 36
 
 Caballero of the Moon 37 
 
 but meeting his eyes squarely, with a quality of forced 
 fearlessness in her dark steady gaze. Her voice was low, 
 not steady at all yet determined, with the same forced 
 character. 
 
 "Caballero ... I do not know whether in Methico 
 you have a great meaning in that word, but we have here 
 in old Spain. . . . Caballero, I have this to tell you . . . 
 that I am ashamed for the first time in my life. Never 
 was I ashamed before, even in the beginning, when I 
 left my father's home far down in the south in Cadiz. 
 And I have not even blushed since very early in the fight ; 
 yet I blushed over there at the Royal to-night, inside 
 of me if not outside, where I know I was very white, if 
 I can believe what my sick stomach told me. I am blush- 
 ing even now, for my soul, if I have one, got redder still 
 when you came over to me, like a Don to a Dona in 
 trouble, and said as no man ever said to me before, that 
 you would fetch me home. . . . Caballero." 
 
 Though he seemed to strive for some word, he did not 
 answer, and his eyes had fallen before hers. 
 
 "That soul of mine, if there is anything left of it to 
 go where it belongs when I die, had got as red as your 
 arm still must be where Jaime knifed you. You make 
 light of that, and you may be correct enough; but I 
 would cheerfully and gladly see him cut into small pieces 
 and fed to a dog for it, although the day I die myself I 
 will still be fond of him, poor idiot thing, after the way 
 I aways have been fond of him, such as that is. And as 
 for you, Caballero, I would as cheerfully and gladly get 
 down on my knees and pray to you as I used to do, and 
 still pretend to do, to the Virgin and her Saints. I would 
 cheerfully and gladly let you take me out in broad day- 
 light and kick me the whole length of the Gran Via, as a 
 show for the people at noon, from here to the bull-fight, 
 through all the streets where I have made my living, so 
 you left enough life in me to kiss your hand at the end. 
 . Caballero."
 
 38 The Great Way 
 
 He raised the hand she spoke of with a tremor of 
 protest. 
 
 "I would, Caballero. I would let you kick me up the 
 whole steep hill of Mont Juich, and throw me off the top 
 of it, over the fortress wall where Ferrer was shot, and 
 my ashamed soul would be kissing that hand all the way 
 down till my body hit the dirty black coal-yards or the 
 clean blue Mediterranean." 
 
 "It was my fault," he said, looking 1 up swiftly and 
 then down again. "And and you should not talk like 
 that! What gives you such thoughts? They are 
 terrible!" 
 
 "In my line, life is terrible," said Dulce. 
 
 Again he looked at her, again his swift lids fell, cover- 
 ing the vague disturbance in his eyes. 
 
 "Shall I alter my thoughts for you, Caballero? I am 
 a Spanish woman, and I can do even that for you. Life 
 is not terrible then, if you say not. The men never think 
 so, for they do not have to. They bring their money to 
 the Trudge Market, and there are we doing the " 
 
 Once more his swift look met her eyes. 
 
 "To the what?" 
 
 "To the Trudge Market. That is what I call it. I 
 am quite clever, and I occupy myself thinking a lot while 
 I trudge, and calling things names." 
 
 "You you are a strange girl." 
 
 "Yes," said Dulce, "that is just what I often call 
 myself, and it has a lot of different meanings, too. There 
 is one place in the Bible, which I got the devil for read- 
 ing, by the way, especially as the one I got hold of was 
 not the regular Spanish Bible, though it was in Spanish, 
 where it uses that same word 'strange' to mean just such 
 women as keep the Trudge " 
 
 "You you must not talk like that !" 
 
 "I have noticed that men do not like it. So I should 
 have known better. But you are the first one that I ever 
 wanted to obey. If you say I must not, then I must not." 
 
 In their silence, he rose suddenly and walking over
 
 Caballero of the Moon 39 
 
 to her clothes-box, began slowly to replace, with nervous 
 fingers, the gay fabrics scattered about it on the floor. 
 As his unaccountable labour came nearer to the bed, 
 she slid off of it abruptly with a strange look of fright, 
 and sat staring at his movements, wonderingly, from a 
 chair. 
 
 She drank in every line of his slender face, dark though 
 so much lighter than a Spanish Spaniard's ; of his slender 
 body, graceful as the bodies of her countrymen but taller 
 somehow, she thought, stronger; of his light, waving, 
 glinting, heavy hair, heavy like money, yet vital, full of 
 life. Only his deep eyes she could not see. She had not 
 known their colour yet. In the sunlight, she had been too 
 filled with excitement; in the candlelight, though it had 
 shone it had not shown. 
 
 "Caballero, make me the favour to tell me your name 
 before you go. The given name. The last I do not 
 ask." 
 
 "Jose. Jose Luis. My friends call me Jose Luis 
 both." 
 
 He had reached the bed and was lifting the gay ribbons 
 in clusters in his hands. 
 
 "Why why, Caballero, do you put the things away?" 
 
 He did not turn as he spoke. 
 
 "We. . . . They. ..." 
 
 "Cab senor " She spoke sharply, in a kind of 
 
 terror. "Senor, I senor, though I spoke to you to-day 
 and you knew what I was and why I spoke to-night, I 
 have not asked that of you I did not expect that 
 Caballero, I have not forgotten your arm. I will bind 
 it for you before you go. Yes, yes ! I plead with you 
 to come here !" 
 
 She had risen from the chair and he came and stood 
 before her. 
 
 "It is truly nothing, senorita." 
 
 "It is everything. Dulce is my name." 
 
 "It is nothing, Dulce." 
 
 "I did not hope for you to call me so, senor. I thank
 
 40 The Great Way 
 
 you. And I thank God. Make me the favour to take off 
 your coat." 
 
 He did as she bade him, in silence. 
 
 "And the linen shirt, Caballero." 
 
 Hesitating for a moment, he disengaged the wounded 
 arm. 
 
 "Oh !" she breathed, sharply drawing in her breath. 
 
 "It is dry already, you see. It is not much." 
 
 "It is very much. The undershirt is it expensive?" 
 
 "No, Dulce." There was a little nervous quiver in his 
 laugh and she flushed crimson as she stepped to her 
 rickety dressing-table. 
 
 She returned to him with a pair of small scissors in her 
 hand. 
 
 "Can you lift the arm, Caballero?" 
 
 "Yes Dulce." 
 
 "Make me the favour to rest it on my shoulder." 
 
 She trembled violently as he did so, and the scissors 
 shook as she raised them to the sleeve. Slowly, cau- 
 tiously, quivering, she cut the sleeve away from around 
 the clotted spot. Once it pulled perceptibly and again 
 she drew in her breath. "Holy God!" 
 
 "It did not hurt." 
 
 "It hurt me, Caballero." She drew off the severed 
 sleeve and dropped it to the floor. 
 
 "Dio mio! Can a man's arm be so white? It is as 
 white and smooth as mine!" Then she bit her lip and 
 stooped to regain the sleeve. Cutting a long strip from 
 it she stepped to the washstand and dipped the end of it in 
 water. She pressed the wet cloth to the sticky remnant 
 on his arm. At last it fell away. 
 
 "That, white Caballero of the Moon, I shall keep for 
 ever and ever. It is so red it shall remind me to be 
 ashamed for the rest of my life." 
 
 "You must not say that, Dulce. It was my fault." 
 
 "If you say so, it must have been. But I know better." 
 
 She was trembling again as she tenderly and more 
 tenderly bound the wound.
 
 Caballero of the Moon 41 
 
 "There it is done now, Caballero." She turned away 
 from him and stood by the window, her voice almost a 
 whisper and trembling as her body as she spoke. "Cabal- 
 lero, will you do one more sweet thing for me? Just 
 one more sweet thing? Will you let me call you by your 
 name before you go?" 
 
 "I I do not intend to go, Dulce." 
 
 She turned swiftly, her shaking hands stretched out 
 instinctively before her. 
 
 "Senor, senor, I beg of you! I cannot pay you that 
 way ! In the name of white God I cannot ! Oh, I be- 
 seech you ! Let us have plain speech, senor ! I tell you, 
 since what you have done I would walk with bare feet 
 through hell for you. Only not that! Oh, I I do not 
 know how to tell you what I mean! Help me by trying 
 to understand, senor! Though there is better blood in 
 me from my line, far back, than you might think, still 
 I am an ignorant girl, senor, and though I can sing a 
 song, or could ape a lady with a little training, still my 
 speech, for all its castellano lisp and drawl, is unedu- 
 cated, and I do not know as I stand here how to tell you. 
 Look straight in my eyes, Caballero, and try to under- 
 stand the few stupid words as I say them : Caballero, it is 
 through you that I am ashamed! You have taught me 
 to be ashamed of how I live! Caballero, all the pride left 
 standing in me from an old race of haughty people, fallen 
 into the starving dust of Cadiz as they may be, is burning 
 with shame is squirming, so help me holy Virgin ! as 
 you look into my eyes and hear me tell you now that to 
 have you stay here would be like my having a holy pure 
 man-saint to stay with me ! ... So in the name of God, 
 senor, I plead with you to go !" 
 
 His slender face grew slowly red, then slowly white 
 as, still gazing into her eyes, he stepped closer and closer 
 to her. He seemed to be vainly summoning words that 
 refused to come. She thought, as his face came near to 
 hers, that the colour she had hunted in his eyes was violet 
 it was so deep a blue. A huge fear, queer to her, new,
 
 42 The Great Way 
 
 and terrible, lit her own big eyes and sent strange trem- 
 bling up and down her body. She needed unreasoningly 
 to cry out, and could not. Her eyes were holding his, 
 his holding hers, in a riveting power. She felt his naked 
 arm again upon her shoulder, throbbing against the cours- 
 ing quiver of her shaking form. She lifted her hands 
 to shut away her face, striving and striving to bring 
 them upward in the whelm of soul terror that had come 
 upon her, but they merely stayed hovering between his 
 body and hers and she felt the fingers of his free hand 
 groping to find them. 
 
 At last his voice came, low, halting, husky. 
 
 "I leant to stay! I I want to stay!" 
 
 Her eyes, unable to waver, widened even more, two ter- 
 rified brilliant black discs of questioning, searching, ago- 
 nizing unbelief, her lips opened as if to scream. 
 
 "Holj God!" she whispered. "Holy God!"
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 FLOWERS OF THE SUN 
 
 GOLD morning sunlight poured slanting into the room, 
 gilding the potted mignonette along the window-sill. 
 Dulce tiptoed through it softly to her door, and having 
 pulled this close behind her, leaned out over the deep 
 square well, into which parody of a patio the soiled roof- 
 glass filtered a diluted sky-colour down to the street level. 
 
 "Aqui ! Hombre pequeno ! Here, you, limpia botas ! 
 Come up here!'* 
 
 A small yellow pretty-faced boy scrambled up to her. 
 
 "Clean boots, senorita?" 
 
 "No, little botas. Here are two pesetas. Keep a real 
 for yourself, and spend the rest for roses. Red ones, 
 and good ones, with long stems. Go to the girl nearest 
 the corner, on that side. Mind that, now, and do not 
 say where you came from. And mind you come up 
 quietly." 
 
 "Gracias, senorita !" And he scrambled down. 
 
 Dulce went softly back into the room, and put it in 
 order, setting its discard bit by bit outside the door, and 
 decking her dressing-table with green and blue ribbons 
 where the sunlight shimmered on from the tender green 
 mignonette ; fetching new water, smoothing his clothes in 
 layers within the cupboard, covering her chest and the 
 dull chairs with Castilian laces and two vast, rich-coloured 
 mantles of Manila ; all to the music of his quiet breathing. 
 
 Ever and again she stood by his pillow, gazing down 
 at him. "Sleep on, Jose Luis ! Sleep on, my own !" 
 
 When the boy came she kissed him and sent him away 
 with a second real and a whisper. "The saints bless you 
 for coming quietly." 
 
 43
 
 44 The Great Way 
 
 Once more she stood beside the bed, the flowers in 
 her hands. "Sleep on, my own ! If it were not a wicked- 
 ness greater than any I have ever done, I would wish 
 you should never wake! That you were dead, having 
 kissed me. That you would never kiss again, except such 
 saints as desired it!" She began to lay the flowers, one 
 by one, upon the coverlet. "Mi Dios, but it looks as if 
 I had my wish, and I were paying for it!" She smiled 
 as she put another rose, and another, over his body. 
 "There, my beloved, my all but God, you will feel that 
 on your cheek when you wake up ! If it kisses you there, 
 it is no more than I have done, God be thanked !" 
 
 She went to the window and leaned out, gazing into 
 the awakened street. Shops were open. Men strolled 
 leisurely by to work. Already music was abroad. Al- 
 ready, Jaime must be in the coal-yards, smeared with 
 black powder. 
 
 "Where did the poor thing sleep, I wonder? Dio, 
 Dio, but I cannot bear to think of a broken heart this 
 day !" 
 
 "Do not cry, do not cry, Bebete!" floated up to her 
 in the shrill voice of a blind woman to the tinkle of a 
 mandoline. 
 
 "You are right, you poor blind thing, I shall not !" she 
 sighed. When she drew in her head, he was blinking, 
 wondering at the colourful, sun-lighted room, at the soft 
 sweet fragrance of its air. 
 
 In a voice as soft and sweet, "Jose ! Jose Luis !" she 
 cried ; and slipping to her knees, encircled his limp arm 
 in both of hers, then lifted forward his head and kissed 
 the thick glinting sunlit hair. "It is time for coffee. 
 And time for rolls. And you are not dressed. What 
 would Saint Peter say? Look at the clock!" 
 
 "Would he say that? Are there clocks in heaven, 
 Dulce? Yes I see one!" 
 
 "My own ! You talk so at this hour? But I have 
 earned it, for look at the flowers to greet you, Caballero ! 
 While you slept, I have been out to the Rambla, buying
 
 Flowers of the Sun 45 
 
 them for you. Can you believe it, Jose Luis? Holy 
 God, what a liar I am ! When you love someone with 
 all your soul and whatever brains you have, I suppose it 
 is fashionable to tell the truth! I sent a boy for them." 
 
 He clasped her hand about a rich red bloom and 
 brought the fingers and the flower to his lips. 
 
 "They are like you, my sweet." 
 
 "What did you call me?" 
 
 "My sweet. It is your name in English." 
 
 "Talk to me in English, Jose Luis. I know only 
 oysterce and biff-steck which should be enough for any- 
 one, I suppose, after all! Especially when you put that 
 other strange word 'pleece' to them. I will go out while 
 you dress, and buy breakfast. Will you be quick?" 
 
 "Kiss me before you go." 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Yes, instantly!" 
 
 "No !" She bent down close to him. "No. No. No. 
 No." 
 
 Then she went to the door. But she turned, and came 
 back to him. 
 
 "But I always do things by sevens it is lucky. There- 
 fore: No. No. No."
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 TRAFFIC 
 
 "WHAT does it all mean, I wonder!" 
 
 They were on Tibidabo, high above the city, whose 
 arteries stretched below them as if drawn on a map. This 
 afternoon the sky was cloudless, the warmer middle hours 
 having drunk up through the thirsty sun all the gentle 
 haze that had lain on sea and mountains in the morning; 
 now the ether stretched up into one vast clear blue, and 
 beyond the city lay as vast a sheet of blue deeper yet as 
 brilliant, touched, miles and miles away, by the mark of 
 the Balearic Isles; while behind them, the hills extended 
 in higher and higher piles of white and green and lavender 
 into mazes of circling mountain forms that led the tortu- 
 ous way to the Pyrenees. 
 
 "What, Duke?" 
 
 "All this!" 
 
 Yet when she said "all this" she did not intend the 
 beauty spread about them, though her eyes were absorb- 
 ing it contemplatively; she referred to the beauty that, 
 apart from all seas and skies and mountains, was within 
 them, between them. They sat on a little balcony of a 
 deserted pavilion, perched over the funicular railway whose 
 car climbed steeply up toward them now and again, to 
 bring a few passengers or to fetch a few away. The 
 month was growing cool, and it was late in the year for 
 many visitors* They sat alone, undisturbed, above the 
 big panorama. 
 
 "I do not know, Dulce. I suppose everyone wonders 
 what life means." 
 
 "Yet you did not like it when I called it terrible. I 
 
 46
 
 Traffic 47 
 
 have very often wondered. But never this way, Jose 
 Luis, never this way !" 
 
 Talkative as her nature was, her every fibre demand- 
 ing the expression of herself, and few of words as her 
 lover's habit seemed, yet she had learned more of him 
 than he of her. 
 
 She had learned of his home in Mexico, a little of the 
 story of his mixed parentage: of his Mexican mother, 
 asleep, he said, under a great coverlet of gardenias a 
 Mexican flower; his favourite flower; rich, queerly white, 
 and with the lost perfume of Eden, and beyond these 
 words, ineffable . . . though he had said so as if striving 
 for more wherewith to describe them and stretch his speech 
 away from the sacred name they spelled for him, so that 
 there had crept into her cheeks a colour of pink that had 
 been both of gratitude that he had mentioned her at all, 
 and of pain, and that hastily she had hidden from him, 
 helping him on to talk of the strange lovely flower and its 
 strange lovely scent; of his father, a roving expatriate 
 less of the States, indeed, for these he had abandoned 
 after mere citizenship, than of England, whence he had 
 wandered in his youth, with the visionary programme of 
 the English younger son to find, finally, silver and a 
 wife in the second country of his adoption childless till 
 late in life, an old man, in fact, when Jose Luis was born, 
 and now so sadly, for it was even after the son's recent 
 parting from his home "asleep," with the Mexican 
 flowers and the Mexican Flower they covered ; of the boy's 
 education, fashionable after a fashion, and the custom 
 that sent such colonial sons of money to Paris and old 
 Spain always Paris, and old Spain. But in his own 
 case, London too, for he had been to London. 
 
 "But you love best Nueva York, no, Jose Luis?" 
 
 "Yes, I love best Nueva York." 
 
 "Then I love best Nueva York, too." 
 
 He thought and called himself American : with a double, 
 possibly a conflicting pride in his assertion of attitude 
 and word, the pride of Mexico in her separation from
 
 48 The Great Way 
 
 Spain, though he clung, in speech, aristocratically to the 
 maternal castellano aristocratically as Dulce; pride in 
 his father's long naturalizationship in the great domi- 
 nating continental country bordering their "Alehico" 
 in which one word he stepped definitively away from 
 Dulce's madridese to little Lola's "j" in speaking the writ- 
 ten "x" which little Lola probably could not write. 
 
 "I said always, 'I shall live in Nueva York when padre 
 mio is asleep.' . . . Yet, Londres is nice much older, 
 nicer than Nueva York. I did not love it till I went there. 
 . . . Perhaps I love Londres best." 
 
 "Then then I, too, love Londres best. Yes, I love 
 Londres best, too." 
 
 And he would laugh. 
 
 Yet, it was that same London that she feared and that 
 she both craved and dreaded for their talk. She knew 
 vaguely of a distant cousin, distant in blood as in geog- 
 raphy, he had said, in one of the fragments making up 
 her vividly imagination-coloured little patchwork of data. 
 And her heart welled up against her own words that she, 
 too, loved London best; and against that England that 
 had taken Gibraltar, that Gibraltar that seemed, some- 
 how, to paint its shadow of failure across the salt waters 
 all the way up to poor little Cadiz yes, with England 
 sitting on it, cross-legged like a retired tailor who had 
 pitched his shears over into the Mediterranean ! . . . Dis- 
 tant from Methico, yes, but did she seem so distant to him 
 now, this cousin? Was she distant at all? Lola had said 
 his friends were American, but what did Lola know? To 
 Lola, poor little ignorant thing, English and Americans 
 would be even more alike than to herself! . . . She had 
 never disliked America even on account of her kindless 
 war with Spain . . . stupid as that had been, and how 
 clever of them, too, winning so quickly, and how generous, 
 paying so large a price for Los Filipinos, that had been 
 so great a nuisance to dear Spain so long! While that 
 England, who took everything . . . ! Ah, was she, per- 
 haps, this cousin, the imagined American beauty at whose
 
 Traffic 49 
 
 loveliness, and at whose companion's, she had been afraid 
 to look turning coward at the mere intuition of their 
 gold patricianism? 
 
 "Jose," she said suddenly after a long silence in which 
 they had been gazing across to the beautiful remote 
 islands, "having had you in my life, I think I could now 
 die happy if I could be a lady once, only for a night! 
 And for that matter I could ape it, Jose Luis, so that no 
 lady ever born could find the difference. Let me tell you 
 I am cleverer than you know, my own. For instance, if 
 you would take me to see those ladies whom you know at 
 the Continental, to a dinner or something, you would 
 not be ashamed of me, I assure you !" 
 
 He smiled, patting her hand. 
 
 . "Indeed, it would be feasible, my dear! For instance, 
 you could say that your father had been a friend of my 
 father, a rich gentleman who had to go up to Paris for a 
 week for some transactions on the Bourse, and you having 
 come to him with letters, and he having no near relative 
 to trust, he had left me in your charge, asking you to 
 show me some attentions in his absence. Could anything 
 be more natural or refined?" 
 
 Jose laughed. 
 
 "Ah, you may laugh, Jose Luis ! But I would be in 
 earnest if you gave me the least encouragement. Do you 
 think I cannot look and act the lady?" 
 
 Half-smiling, half-defiant, she rose, and a subtly deli- 
 cate change vaguely defined itself in her whole face and 
 bearing as she began to murmur scarcely audible exclama- 
 tions at the pretty scenes turning this way and that, 
 lifting an imaginary lorgnon, looking at Jose Luis, look- 
 ing through him. And having moved languorously to the 
 balcony rail, she stood with one gloved hand upon it in a 
 posture of complete, apparently unconscious dignity and 
 grace. 
 
 "Was it well done, my own?" 
 
 "You would be a great actress, Dulce !" 
 
 "That is both kind and unkind, Jose Luis !"
 
 50 The Great Way 
 
 "You know how I intended it, Dulce." 
 
 "Yes, yes. And it is just what I have often said, for 
 that matter. Yes, I could be a great actress. Or a great 
 anything else, I feel sometimes. I felt so when I was for 
 three nights in the chorus at the Alcazar. And I have 
 
 been feeling so again, since since She broke off 
 
 as she herself blushed ; and again they were long silent. 
 
 "Jose Luis : Her eyes had grown grave and 
 
 distant, a touch of mist in them. 
 
 "Yes, Dulce?" 
 
 "I am very thoughtful, for all my chatter and and 
 happiness. Tell me something, Jose Luis. What is this 
 thing that that I have been? What is this wickedness 
 that I have done? That is my trouble although I say 
 far too many, and make up a lot, I do not know enough 
 words. I am trying to find out words for the wickedness 
 of the Trudge Market, Jose Luis." 
 
 His handsome face grew almost boyish in its troubled 
 thoughtfulness. 
 
 " 'Traffic' is a word, I suppose, if you can understand 
 it, Dulce." 
 
 " 'Traffic,' yes. I can understand that. But in what? 
 That is not fully it, Jose Luis." 
 
 His voice was quite low as after a hesitant pause he 
 answered: "I suppose it is traffic in God, Dulce." 
 
 "Ah!" she cried, circling his arm in her hands with a 
 little shiver. " 'Traffic in God' ! What terrible words, 
 Jose Luis! Now it is my turn to say, what terrible 
 words !"
 
 CHAPTER VH 
 
 THE TIME GOD TOOK 
 
 IN his long absences, at first full of happy wonder for 
 her, wonder that gave her bliss-filled solitudes, she 
 dreamed, laughed, sang, sewed, renewed and re-renewed 
 the room, shifting its furniture, changing its colours, its 
 flowers, its perfumes. By now, her habit of speech had so 
 grown upon her that she talked to him whether he was 
 there or not. 
 
 "My own, do you like that? Yes, you do, my silent 
 one. So why not say so? Because perhaps you are 
 talking to someone else, on whose soul may purgatory 
 sit forever like a hen on a china egg. Come soon, my 
 own !" 
 
 And again : " 'My own . . . my own !' What an 
 expression it is! ... I wish I had ten small my owns 
 and that you had ten, Jose, making I suppose twenty my 
 owns only I never could do any sum except subtraction ! 
 I do not wish it really, I would be so ugly, but I would 
 so like to name ten Methico and Nueva York and 
 Gardenia and Royala and Vera Cruz and Silver Mine, 
 and the other ten Re-hee-nald and Pair-thee-val and Ruby 
 and Vi-i-olet and Day-zee and Zo-ee. And one, the most 
 darling of all our my owns, if she was very, very homely 
 I would name Gwen-do-1, y, n, lean, Gwendolean ; and 
 if she was very, very beautiful, like you and me, I would 
 name her Ja-a-ane! Would not that be clever?" 
 
 And she became so fond of this thought that she began 
 talking also to Jane and Gwendolyn, and even mentioned 
 her to Jose Luis when he was really there. 
 
 "It rained while you were out a long Gwendolean 
 
 51
 
 52 The Great Way 
 
 morning, my own ! But now the sun is out, instead of 
 you ! Only look what a Jane afternoon !" 
 
 And she named the sharply-cut sun and shadow halves 
 of the bull-ring Jane and Gwendolyn. 
 
 When the hours turned more than usually idle, and 
 idleness itself grew unamusing, she would herself wander 
 forth. To-day she had gone down to the statue of Colon 
 at the foot of the Ramblas, wound around past the coal- 
 yards, and climbed Mont Juich, whereon, outside the 
 fortress, she had told a sympathetic sentry a long ram- 
 bling story about her happiness. 
 
 "He is twice as tall as you, amigo ! If we ever go to 
 war with Methico, you will all be killed you, and all your 
 friends ! Think of that !" 
 
 On passing into the Flores she had been glad for her 
 own sake but for her little friend's too that Lola was 
 not there. 
 
 "Poor little thing! I hope she is having lunch to-day, 
 as well as some supper to look to ! And I hope she and 
 Jaime will keep their vow to me and get married. They 
 promised they would if anything should happen. Well, 
 much has happened and nothing could be more sensible!" 
 
 On her journey back, down the mountain, she had 
 stopped at the Casa Blanca, a pretty grape-vined inn by 
 the descending wayside, irrelevantly christened white with 
 its four walls plastered as pink as a string of corals, 
 and had drunk their health and then Jose's in deep 
 draughts of vermouth, gazing off over the still blue waters 
 of the Mediterranean as the high sun fell slowly lower, 
 and marvelling, in a sporadic mood of curious thought- 
 fulness, at the comparable sweep of her new own 
 existence. 
 
 "I ... as pure and worthy of heaven as a married 
 woman for a whole week ! Maria, God and all angels bless 
 thee for picking up this miracle out of a nasty street- 
 brawl ! And this is I . . . Dulce. . . . This thing, all in 
 the space of seven days! Well, when you stop to think 
 of it, my own, that is the time God took to make the
 
 The Time God Took 53 
 
 world. . . . No, more than that time after all, when you 
 really think of it, for He made it actually in six, and 
 then rested. . . . And there, in the end, my own case 
 does fit, precisely, for so have I! ... Ah, what divine 
 rest there is in love ! . . . And He might wranake it, too, 
 for that matter. . . . Though I do not believe He could, 
 now the thing is whizzing! It always takes longer to 
 undo a thing you have done. ... If you can undo it 
 at alir*" 
 
 Then she meandered on down the mountain-side, steal- 
 ing occasional figs from over the low stone wall for the 
 joy of the crimes, and in repayment, at scrupulous 
 twinges of her conscience, dropping small unexpected 
 coins at the diminutive sordid huts of the garden owners 
 as she passed. 
 
 She walked so slowly downward that the pasear of the 
 officers and their families overtook her when the fortress 
 yard was closed at five o'clock, and at the base labourers 
 were going already homeward from the coal-yards. She 
 shuddered at the thought of meeting Jaime, and hastened 
 a little. 
 
 Farther on, she breathed easily again ; and she began 
 striving, suddenly, to analyze a new, strange feeling that 
 she had when out-of-doors. . . . Stumbling suddenly 
 upon its secret, she blushed furiously. It was the queer 
 comfort of walking without looks from side to side . . . 
 of walking, walking without need or purpose . . . with- 
 out glancing to the right or to the left. . . . 
 
 Would he be at home, perhaps ? It would be happiness 
 unutterable to come in upon him there, without having 
 to wait, listening. It was still early, though later than 
 he had as yet come home. She humoured her desire, and 
 turned her steps into the long way about, through the 
 wide boulevard out to the New Arena, and back into the 
 heart of the city by way of the long tree-lined Gran 
 Via* The slow creep of coming darkness jumped forward 
 with a sudden bound. Lights came from the wine shops. 
 A star shone out over the blackened fortress. ^Tingling
 
 54 The Great Way 
 
 with the glow of excitement in her small adventure she 
 went on and on and on as she had so many endless 
 times gone on and on, yet with this exquisite miracle of 
 difference that lit her heart, lit the Gran Via on past 
 the dark Arena, on and on. . . . 
 
 Soft candle-light gleamed from under the door and the 
 lit heart bounded with rapture. 
 
 "My own! My own! You are here! Was it long? 
 Was it long?" 
 
 "But a little while, Dulce." 
 
 He was standing at the window, an elbow propped 
 beside the mignonettes. He reached out his other hand 
 to her, and as she took it in both of hers she saw that he 
 was in evening dress, as on that night seven days so 
 very long ago. 
 
 Quick, grateful tears jumped into her eyes. 
 
 "Well, well, my own, the supper will be worth it !" 
 
 "To-night, I am going out to dinner, Dulce." 
 
 She dropped his hand as if it had suddenly burned her. 
 For a moment, the little tragedy overwhelmed her. But 
 she caught herself, driving her nails into her palms, and 
 when she spoke her voice was very steady. 
 
 "Very well, dear. I would be wrong to ask otherwise. 
 By myself, I will drink your health. You know that." 
 
 He patted her hand, then, as when she had found him, 
 gazed out of window. 
 
 She stirred about, setting the table with food and wine. 
 Her quick occasional glances discovered him thought- 
 ful, preoccupied. At last she sat down on the bed. 
 
 "Jose Luis, only what you give me can be mine. Six 
 days ago I said to you: 'I will ask nothing, or if I ask, 
 answer so little as you choose. In a few short hours, you 
 have given me happiness to fill a lifetime. You know what 
 I have been. You can owe me nothing.' All that I said, 
 and by all that I will abide. But I am going to tell you 
 this about myself, my caballero. Why at this time, I do 
 not know, except that I feel all at once very lonely and 
 frightened. Will you look me in the eyes, Jose Luis, as
 
 The Time God Took 55 
 
 on that night a week ago, when I first asked you to? 
 Thank you, my own ! It is this, Caballero : What I have 
 been, through you / am not. And I never will be again. 
 Never. After you leave me, if I should live through that, 
 then never, never, never again. I have taken that vow. 
 And I will keep it. I have wished for you to know that, 
 Jose Luis." 
 
 His eyes faltered before hers and they looked away 
 from each other. 
 
 "I -I am going to ask you something, Jose Luis. I 
 remember what I said. Answer me or not, as you choose. 
 The ladies who drove by the Royal that night you dine 
 with them?" 
 
 "Yes, Dulce." 
 
 "The young one, you have told me, is pretty. Your 
 father was almost American, Jose Luis. Do you like 
 American good-looks?" 
 
 "Sometimes, Dulce." 
 
 After a long silence she slipped from the bed, and hav- 
 ing gone across to him, spoke over his shoulder. Her 
 voice had an unaccustomed sound a strained new effort 
 in it. 
 
 "Jose Luis my my own, once more, answer me or 
 not, as you choose. Only, be kind now instead of later. 
 Do you marry her, Jose Luis?" 
 
 "Possibly, Dulce." 
 
 He did not turn, and for a long time she stood silent 
 behind him, steadying her body and her voice. 
 
 "You are going to England. But on the way, when 
 you should leave here, you were to go to Paris. When 
 do you go to Paris, Jose Luis?" 
 
 "To-morrow, Dulce."
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 "HER STEPS TAKE HOLD ON HELL" 
 
 THE clock ticked between them in the quiet room, only 
 its maddening click, click answering her low moaning, 
 which came, like the reflex of a twitching nerve, less and 
 less often from the bed. 
 
 At last, with desperate hands wiping an imaginary 
 weight from his temples, he rose and stood over her. 
 
 "Dulce, you will forget me presently. Sooner, I think, 
 than I will forget you." 
 
 "Damn you, may you burn in hell for that !" 
 
 They were her first words, and she flashed upright with 
 them, her nails biting the bedclothes, her face blazing at 
 him from where she sat with her knees touching his. 
 
 "Dutce!" 
 
 "I mean it ! There is a case for my right, and I mean 
 it! Shall I sit here like a speechless animal and let you 
 stamp with such words on such a love as the Virgin never 
 let live before while I have lungs to scream with that 
 you lie?" 
 
 "Dulce," he cried, his hands at his temples again, "you 
 make me feel like a coward, a criminal, a beast !" 
 
 "Saint or man or beast, you are what my soul eats 
 and drinks !" She pushed him away, sweeping him so 
 roughly with her hands that he fell more than sank upon a 
 chair, and clenching tight her fingers, like a thing in a 
 cage she paced through and through the room. 
 
 "For the love of Christ, feed me a little longer! You 
 are rich and idle, you have no work to do, you have no 
 family here to hurt or shame. Unless, indeed, that woman 
 M your cousin! Oh, you need not start, with either sur- 
 
 56
 
 "Her Steps Take Hold on Heir 57 
 
 prise or anger, for I have put two and two together 
 making one! And if she is not, they must, in truth, be 
 American savages, deserving no fine points of etiquette s 
 or would they travel with you? For you need not tell me 
 they go with you to Paris I know it ! Would any 
 Spanish lady? But I I ask nothing! I do not wish 
 to know! And if I did I would not ask! 7 stay, you 
 see, within my boundary, even as you knife me! A 
 Spanish woman stays where she belongs ! Oh, Jose, Jose, 
 lie to those women, lie to them ! You have lied to them 
 already lie again ! You admitted to me you were afraid 
 they might hear of your being with someone at the bull- 
 fight, which they were too nice to go to the only reason 
 you ever took me! so you told them of it. What did 
 you say to them of that? Tell me what you said to them ! 
 It concerns me and I have a right to ask !" 
 
 "Something, Dulce, such as you suggested to me the 
 other day. That your father was a friend of my father. 
 That he asked me to attend you while he was away." 
 
 "Tell them that again ! Say you must stay here for 
 a few days yet! Jose, Jose! My life goes with you on 
 that train to Paris !" 
 
 "Dulce, I must not ! Even if I could, it would be 
 wrong. You " 
 
 "Wrong? Dio mio, I could put back my head and 
 laugh at that!" 
 
 "I know, Dulce, I know! Only your nature and your 
 sweetness to me keep you from saying, 'Why not right 
 and wrong a week ago?' But I, too, have learned some- 
 thing in a week. Dulce, let me tell you, if I can, what 
 I have learned to feel. You have said yourself, plain 
 speech is only right between you and me. Try to under- 
 stand as you have asked of me. Dulce, 'this thing you 
 are,' as you yourself have called it " 
 
 She halted her mad pacing for an instant. 
 
 " 'Are'? How dare you? Am I a liar with the rest 
 of it?" 
 
 He flushed crimson.
 
 58 The Great Way 
 
 "Dulce, this thing you were that, poor little girl, you 
 do not understand. It " 
 
 "I do understand!" She flung it back at him across 
 her shoulder, for she was tramping again, with desperate 
 eyes that did not look at him. 
 
 "I do not think you do. There is a thing, Dulce, 
 called 'Society.' Heaven knows my part in it has been 
 poorly borne. A man's usually is, I suppose, compared 
 with a woman's in things like this. I suppose that is 
 why there is such a thing as 'what you were.' But while 
 such things must be or are Dulce, they should have 
 nothing to do with such such love as you show for me. 
 It is too too terrible, Dulce!" 
 
 Once more her voice flew at him over her shoulder, 
 stinging. 
 
 "So it is your turn at 'terrible' again, is it? Well, 
 have you finished, priest?" 
 
 "Dulce !" he pleaded. "Dulce !" 
 
 "For if you have, I have this much to say: I know all 
 that you have just read out, and more." 
 
 "Then, am I not right, Dulce?" 
 
 "No !" She turned, the word a shout, the hungry eyes 
 blazing, her whole face quivering. He drew back further 
 on his chair, involuntarily, as beneath a blow, and from 
 the surge and beat of her prowling passion that had grown 
 to a thudding pound upon his senses, he was freed only 
 to pale under the words that came first bitten from her 
 lips, then thrown forth in a scattering torrent. 
 
 "Right? Holy God! Right? The very Virgin you 
 think of is laughing at you! If anything in God's 
 universe can wipe out and do away, like a dry rag does 
 spilt water, that thing is such a love such a love as my 
 love, do you hear, you who talk right and wrong? I 
 knew my happiness must end. I knew I was only one 
 kind of thing in what you call Society, I knew, as soon as 
 I could think at all after I met you and loved you, that 
 I had been something worse than I had ever dreamed I 
 was, I knew that if I chose to be worthy of that love and
 
 "Her Steps Take Hold on Heir 59 
 
 true to it, which I swore and swear still I will be for ever 
 and ever, I must not only be decent after you left me, 
 but that I must try to pay back into that immaculate 
 'Society' for what I had done and done that was mdecent. 
 How, God knows, but I knew that I must, or else go 
 down into the gutter again a thousand times deeper as 
 to my soul than before because I would know what I was 
 doing. Yet with all that new understanding, which I 
 suppose God expects me to thank Him for, I could not 
 know that you would leave me in a week ! I thought I 
 could pile, and stack, and stack up my happiness till I 
 had enough to see me through when the death-bell rang! 
 But now -" 
 
 She paced again, her clenched hands striking at her 
 sides and at his brain. 
 
 "Did you think of my side when you said 'Society'? 
 Do you know what it means to walk, and walk, and walk 
 to earn your bread as I earned mine? Can you think 
 what it will mean to give up that hellish trudge, trudge, 
 trudge, to earn it some other way? Trudge yourself for 
 a while, and when you meet God, see if you want Him 
 to leave you !" 
 
 "Dulce !" his voice begged her. "Dulce !" 
 
 "Oh," she laughed, "only a fool would ask a man to 
 think! He comes to market, and pays, and goes, and 
 is done with it. And if you give him more than he 
 bargained for, is he grateful? No! He thinks only of 
 the embarrassment of his riches ! 7 know how a man's 
 mind works ! You helped to teach me ! 'Dulce, you 
 make me feel a beast, a coward!' Did I call you so? 
 In your memory you will put the words in my mouth, 
 you will think I said them. You blame me even for your 
 own emotions ! So God knows I can scarcely expect you 
 to let me have any ! But who made them grow to the 
 size they are? I will not say you roused them you 
 could not help that. But knowing them, you fed them! 
 Why did you stay? I told you to go I told you how I 
 felt! You said you wanted to stay! Moreover, it was
 
 60 The Great Way 
 
 no market matter, you with your piled-up basket on your 
 arm! No money soiled it! You respected that decency 
 you did not offer me any. You knew that I would strike 
 you if you did!" 
 
 She stood suddenly over him with one clenched shaking 
 hand upraised. 
 
 "Were you going to? Were you going to before you 
 left? Shall I strike you now?'* 
 
 "Dulce! Dulce!" his voice again besought her. "All 
 that you say is right, horribly right! It is what I tried 
 to make you understand! I am going so that I shall 
 do you no more harm! I have been wrong from the be- 
 ginning, quite, quite wrong!" 
 
 "Oh, priest, priest!" she cried, and again her animal 
 tread thumped through the room. "Have you no words 
 to your name but right and wrong? Be a man, Jose! 
 Be at least a man, and make a man's answer that 
 boughten women must pay in some coin or other! They 
 must, but is it fair, is it fair when women are not born 
 equal, when some are born free and some are not? What 
 chance have / had, tell me that? Perhaps over in your 
 strange America girls can stay good, poor or not, and 
 stay out of the convents into the bargain. But here, 
 what chance was there for a girl like me? My God but 
 we were poor, I tell you, and my mother and father were 
 good, and proud too and at my expense, for God in 
 His goodness to me saw fit to make me not only a girl, 
 but a girl with an elder sister. Do you have our customs 
 in Methico, or are you too near to the free States? With 
 all the money gone to marry my sister, for me, let me tell 
 you, it was dry up in a convent or stay alive in the streets, 
 and even now I would not choose the other if I could start 
 again! In a convent, could I have loved you or any- 
 one? A priest perhaps, and a hypocrite in a smeared 
 white robe I would never be! So soon as now, I tell you 
 I would have been a snarling, bitter thing, crossing myself 
 at Protestants and hating myself and the God whose 
 uniform I wore. , . And what has the other Gran Via
 
 "Her Steps Take Hold on Hell" 61 
 
 been, tell me that? Or shall I tell you? You do not 
 know ! How could you know the chewing agony of walk- 
 ing, walking, walking, day and night, for bread that was 
 hacked off my body ? Trudge, trudge, trudge holy God, 
 the hundreds of miles that I have trudged! And what 
 do I face now when you shall go, denying me the short 
 little joy that you could give me? Do you know? Have 
 you ever thought? Women are not quite the same as 
 men, remember! Have you thought of the habitual need 
 created in this stalking corpse of mine that I am going 
 to deny from the moment you go because you came into 
 my life and purified me? Look at that need and think of 
 it ! Look at the torture, while she hunts other work, of 
 the woman who has given herself, again and again and 
 again and again and again, without her soul's sanction 
 given and given and given her body, with a laugh per- 
 haps, never with love or a tear!" 
 
 She stopped before him, dry-eyed, ravenous. 
 
 "Think of that, you who cast me out so hideously 
 soon, and stay a little longer! Think of all that, think of 
 my vow, think of the love you taught me, think of the 
 market where I have spent my life, think of the men, 
 like you, who have come to buy, think of the thing the 
 transactions built me into, think of the teeth I must grit 
 to be anything else, think of the weeks of work instead 
 of walk, of the years on end of scrub instead of trudge, 
 think of my sunlight when you let me think you cared, 
 think of my nightmare when I see you go, and stay with 
 me a little while, my own my own, my life, my saint, 
 my vision of God a little while, a little, little while !" 
 
 The taut wire of her rigid body gave way and she fell 
 between his knees, sinking her head on arms that clutched 
 his coat. 
 
 His face was very white, his voice unsteady. 
 
 "Dulce, my sweet, I must go to-morrow !" 
 
 "Dio, Dio !" she sobbed, tears aiding her at last. 
 "But" and she looked up at him with imploring face
 
 62 The Great Way 
 
 "you will come back to-night? You intend that, Jose 
 Luis? Swear to me swear to me!" 
 
 "I swear that I intend to come to-night!" 
 
 "You wiU come, in the name of God?" 
 
 "I witt come." 
 
 "Thank God for so much!" She sat back from him, 
 propped by her hands on the floor, her eyes closed. 
 "Thank God! Thank God!" 
 
 She repeated it over and over, not opening her eyes 
 as he kissed her swiftly, or as he left the room.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 INMACULADA NOCHE 
 
 SHE forced herself to eat and drink. She trembled from 
 the quantity of wine, for the food repelled her and she 
 swallowed little of it. The time stretched frighteningly 
 long before her and she protracted the task of clearing 
 the hated meal away. This done, a slowly formulating 
 thought crystallized itself in her mind and she set slowly, 
 deliberately about another task. Bit by bit she cleaned 
 the room, dusting, sweeping, washing as though she were 
 a drudge in a lodgings, dependent for her pennies on the 
 speckless result of her labour. She polished the windows 
 and her candlesticks of silver these her one rich goods, 
 other than her Manila shawls and the cheaper silver of 
 her dressing-table. All trace of food and wine she swept 
 away. She watered her plants of mignonette and washed 
 their little leaves, and later set the pots about the room, 
 fetching out the tender colours of the blooms with near-by 
 candles. 
 
 Then she pulled forth her wooden chest and brought 
 its myriad hues upon the middle of the floor, a riotous 
 pile in the soft flickering light. 
 
 The mantones de Manila, huge shawls wherein the 
 traditions of Spain and the Orient became one warp and 
 woof of glowing tones, she disposed about to the full 
 worth and show of their lustre; one upon the bed, 
 another drooping richly from its foot; two more upon 
 two chairs; a fifth, white superimposed with embroidered 
 roses of magenta and cerise and leaves of flaring greens, 
 upon the floor, that his feet might tread upon it. One, 
 her last, she left aside. A mass of lace and ribbons re- 
 
 63
 
 64 The Great Way 
 
 mained half in, half out, the box. . . . Thanks to God, 
 time had gone more swiftly than she had hoped. 
 
 Slowly, very slowly, she undressed, standing at last 
 among her discarded garments and the scattered spoil of 
 lace and ribbons like some fair white great-eyed goddess 
 trapped in some human maze and doubtful of her beauty 
 amid earthly accoutrements, hungrily searching for it in 
 that faulty glass above the dressing-table. . . . 
 
 Kneeling, from behind the small white curtains of this 
 equipage she drew out fresh linens, and redressed. 
 Little by little she made her toilet like some unassisted 
 royalty, hunting through the box for things undonned the 
 whole long week, and standing finally before the glass for 
 the dozenth time as she knotted a rich crimson sash 
 below her waist like a queen of gypsies. Her dark soft 
 hair was newly dressed ; she perfumed but did not adorn 
 it. "Strange man! Strange man!" she thought, for he 
 had praised that scent. "I never cared for it how I 
 love it now!" She took more wine, and in the glow of 
 it, with a thrill of sudden desperate gladness she hummed 
 to herself the refrain of the fatal Apache waltz, as she 
 wound more and more ribbons, yellow, blue, red, green, 
 into her gitana's dress. Finally she put the box away, 
 pushing it far under the bed to hide its harshness from 
 the beautifully coloured room, and reserving three things 
 from it ; her tamboril one whose tinkle sounded the true 
 silver praises of the great seat of tambourines, Cadiz ; her 
 red-and-yellow-tasseled castanuelas, a precious pair, 
 exquisitely toned, from Sevilla; and her dancing-slippers 
 small, gold-coloured, sole souvenir of her brief starva- 
 tion in costly, regal Madrid. . . . All these she flung 
 upon the bed, and the last manton she flung upon herself 
 with prelude of that initial toss and swirl from which 
 the fabric settles, deftly urged with fingers and elbows, 
 into its final droop of utter grace. 
 
 "Sevilla ! He has been never in Sevilla ! He does 
 not know the dancing girls there ! Dio mio !" 
 
 She tossed her slippers back to the floor, stepped into
 
 Inmaculada Noche 65 
 
 them, took still more wine, a last hungry glance in her 
 mirror. The unrouged cheeks had begun to glow a little ; 
 and she sat down to wait. 
 
 It was quite late already. She was passionately re- 
 gretful, yet thankfully glad, that she had not asked his 
 hour. The agonizing distrust of love told her that he 
 would have been in any case beyond it. It was well not 
 to have asked. 
 
 An hour passed. It was late, late. With a sudden 
 glad throb she remembered that the Opera came to-night, 
 opening the Liceo. Perhaps more than perhaps they 
 were at the Opera Traviata. To keep her spirits patient 
 she hummed the thrilling, joyous aria. . . . "Ah! Fors 
 e lui ..."... "Holy God, how I could sing that if I 
 had a chance !" And she did sing it a little, there and 
 then, running through it with now a few of the words, 
 and to these to one of them with a sudden new thought 
 arbitrarily adding a letter, so turning the simple Italian 
 word to a Spanish one dearer to her at this curious little 
 instant than any other in the whole of espanol, and Cata- 
 lan, and castellano : "Ah ! Fors e Luis ! . . . " 
 
 Another hour. He must have gone to the Opera. 
 And now, she could hear the carriages dispersing by in 
 the Rambla. He must come soon for they stopped but 
 a step away, those women, at the Continental. . . . With 
 the lonely sound of the rolling carriage-wheels her misery, 
 struggle with it as she would, rose up once more. 
 
 Seven short days ! . . . Well, the Campanile had fallen 
 in seven seconds, probably. . . . And anyway, would 
 have done, in six, if God had chosen that He, and not the 
 world He had made, should rest that seventh second! 
 Yes, on a fourteenth of July. . . . She remembered the 
 date, somehow, though without a year to it perhaps be- 
 cause it was Bastille Day, for the Bastille, though in an- 
 other century, had fallen on July the fourteenth, as ugly 
 a thing as the Campanile was beautiful. So beautiful 
 and ugly things alike must fall. . . . Possibly the Pyra- 
 mids would fall some day. ... So why should people
 
 66 The Great Way 
 
 build Pyramids ? Seven short days ! Seven short days 
 from the date when Ferrer was shot shot blindfold, too, 
 like Mario on the parapet in La Tosca. . . . How daringly 
 she had said: "It always takes longer to undo a thing," 
 as if God Himself had been a mere builder of Pyramids! 
 In but one day longer than He had taken to make it, 
 God had unmade the whole world! . . . Ah, does God 
 never rest again? 
 
 A footfall sounded in the corridor and stifling a mad 
 cry she sprang up and seized the tambourine from the 
 bed. As she ran to the middle of the room the candle- 
 flames flickered on her gypsy costume, kindling its gay 
 colours to iridescent fire, and lighting the deep tones of 
 the heavy mantle to a splendid glow of black and gold 
 and Chinese reds and strange dull yellows as she lifted 
 the tambourine and struck her left hand upon her hip. 
 
 "Come in, come in, mi Caballero !" 
 
 The door opened and a small boy, "clean-boots" of 
 the Continental, stood blinking at her, an envelope in his 
 hand. 
 
 She took it in silence, in nerveless fingers that nearly 
 let it flutter to the floor. The little "clean-boots" went 
 away, closing the door behind him. She was alone again, 
 staring blindly before her. 
 
 MY DULCE, It is better this way. Better for both you and 
 me. Believe that, and forgive me. I could not bear it, neither 
 could you. Without intending it I have done you a great 
 wrong. Forgive me. JOSE Luis. 
 
 For a few moments she stood in the soft light among the 
 wonderful colours. Then God seemed to be mercifully 
 shutting them away, in a vague whirl like a spinning 
 prism, and she crashed down and was motionless across 
 the white silken manton de Manila that she had spread 
 for his feet.
 
 BOOK n 
 
 THE VOICE OUT OF THE WILDERNESS 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE DEVOURERS 
 
 DAWN was upon the Mediterranean. It had finished its 
 slow crawl out of the Orient, and was about to walk, like 
 Christ, across the sea. 
 
 But Mataro lay in dense darkness still. 
 
 Mataro, as far as words mean anything, is a town. 
 But in reality, she is nothing but a dirty old woman, 
 straggling down a hillside with her feet in the water. Her 
 ribs are wide stairs of crumbling stone, protruding 
 through her skin of yellow dirt and leading up across her 
 heart to her shoulders on the hill. And two streets, flung 
 out on either side, one toward France and one toward 
 Barcelona, are her vegetating arms. The one that has 
 clutched out so many years for France has germinated 
 towering chestnut trees, which intermingle above like the 
 nave-lines of a cathedral; the other, lazily stagnating in 
 her own more sterile country, has reared, in far lines of 
 erect branching files, great snake-barked, large-leaved 
 planetas. Her head is a church, half buried in the hill- 
 side. 
 
 By sunlight, she is like a time-worn beauty, brightened 
 with rouge on her death-bed, for her houses display gay 
 colours through her filth. 
 
 But now, her withered loveliness was invisible, for she 
 lay fast asleep, in heaviest dark, just twitching in a few 
 rheumatic muscles as she felt the approach of dawn. Some 
 
 67
 
 68 The Great Way 
 
 of these muscles were fishermen's wives, cooking by candle- 
 light. Still more painful ones, nearer her wet feet, were 
 fishers themselves, dragging up their sails. And, quite 
 close to her heart, upon one of her ribs, was one wide- 
 awake, quivering nerve, vibrating yet stoically calm in its 
 unthinking agony. 
 
 It was a nun. Under the one night-light of Mataro, 
 she stood, on one of the steps, with folded arms, her back 
 to the huge arm that pointed at France below its caver- 
 nous trees, and gazing, as some starved prisoner might 
 gaze at life, along the other great limb that stretched, 
 among its branches of ghostly sycamore, toward Barce- 
 lona. And this nun beneath the light, with those thin, 
 folded arms, sunken-shouldered yet erect in the rigid fall 
 of her worn black habit, without female curves, without 
 any human curves at all, was yet like a curving, deliberate, 
 ominous question-mark written by an atheist below a sym- 
 bol of Christ. 
 
 And the symbol was there, too, directly above her 
 parchment-coloured, wax-faced head. Let into the wall 
 of the little house on the corner, it hung under the lamp 
 in a glass-coloured oaken box a small figure of Christ 
 on a cross, palely waxen and bleeding dark red wax, suf- 
 fused about with pink and blue and yellow waxen flowers 
 deader than flowers pressed for love in a book, dead as the 
 face of the nun, whose barren fire flamed only in its black, 
 piercing eyes; so piercing that through the still blacker 
 hour before dawn they saw, stealing swiftly forward be- 
 tween the ghost-like heavy sycamore trunks, a woman's 
 figure. 
 
 Vague to the sight, but surely, it came on and on, 
 beneath the gracious, thick planeta leaves, toward the nun, 
 nearer, and nearer, like the stealthy approach of climax 
 through a poem, or the tramp of an actress to the high- 
 light of a dim canvas set. 
 
 And when it spied the nun, the one life showing in the 
 sepulchral town, it came directly up to her, and raised its 
 eyes.
 
 The Devourers 69 
 
 "Sister, can I find work here?" 
 
 "Get out!" said the nun's lips, tightly-moving and red 
 in her yellow face as if they were one of the waxen wounds 
 in the Christ above her head. 
 
 "Sister," exclaimed the shivering girl in haste, "I do 
 not come as a pauper to the town! You need not fear 
 it ! But I must have work to do ! I only ask you, can I 
 get it here?" 
 
 "Get out!" said the nun. The girl had met her eyes 
 in her hurried fervent speech, and as they watched her 
 from above the thin closed lips now, the girl knew that 
 they were reading her life-work, word by word, through 
 and through, and a quick angry flush came into her white 
 cheeks. 
 
 "How do you dare? How do you dare to cross your- 
 self at me ? You do not know whether I am a Catholic or 
 not!" 
 
 "Get out!" said the nun. And the shivering figure, 
 after a glance upward at the waxen one that had to hang 
 so still, bent her head resolutely and, through the dark 
 cathedral-like street of silent chestnut-trees, went away. 
 
 But the nun suddenly ran after her, and seized her in 
 the dark. Her tight lips moved swiftly now, and her 
 voice shook, in her scared impulse. 
 
 "We must not have your sort here. But I will give 
 you a whole loaf of bread, if you will tell me your story !" 
 
 Dulce laughed bitterly. "I will tell you not for 
 bread, which I shall work for but for the sake of telling, 
 of telling!" 
 
 "Hush!" whispered the nun, her fingers denting her 
 waxy lips. "Come!" and she dragged her by the wrist 
 back toward the light, and past it down to the edge of a 
 dry river-bed, dotted with pools of a stagnating torrent 
 from the Pyrenees, and across a tottering plank into a 
 scow stranded in the mire. "Sit there ! Speak low ! 
 Here is your bread ! Have you been very bad ?" 
 
 "Keep your bread !" whispered Dulce, fiercely. "I will 
 tell you because I promised, and because it will help my
 
 70 The Great Way 
 
 mind, perhaps. Poor thing, I see what you are! I am 
 a wretched thing, God knows, but you you are what I 
 feared to be, instead of what I am, and you make me glad 
 in this very hour of my punishment that I chose as I did !" 
 
 "Do you dare to insult me?" hissed the whispering 
 nun. 
 
 "I dare always to tell the truth !" whispered Dulce. 
 "And I tell you that as you sit opposite me now, I see 
 exactly what I saw and feared and refused to be, in the 
 hour of my choice! God pity me, but you, more!" 
 
 "Well, well," whispered the nun, "I only bargained 
 with you, out of kindness, for your story, so let us not 
 quarrel. Tell me, are you with child?" 
 
 "No!" cried Dulce, forgetting to whisper. "I would 
 to God I were !" 
 
 "You are bad, are you not?" exclaimed the nun, clasp- 
 ing her hands. 
 
 "Not in that," said Dulce calmly. "Wherein I am 
 bad, is in sitting here and telling your sort of my sins. 
 To know me briefly, then, once for all, I have been in the 
 Trudge Market, and you, with your pretty imagination, 
 can understand what that term means. And now I have 
 left it, and left it forever. Thus, you know exactly how 
 bad I have been, and after what manner. But to give you 
 good measure for your kindly loaf of bread, I will tell you 
 what my present badness is, as we sit here this minute. 
 The Trudge Market is a market that sells emotions. But 
 like any other market, the butcher's, for instance, there 
 are certain worthless goods that are not fit to sell. And 
 my present sin is, that having left the market forever, I 
 yet sit down here with you, and chew at the bones that 
 were thrown behind the counter." 
 
 **You you are quite horrible," whispered the breath- 
 less nun. 
 
 "I am no more horrible than you," said Dulce. 
 "Those bones are only un-sold emotions, remember. And 
 you do something not so different you eat your own 
 heart; eat it, and eat it, and eat it."
 
 The Devourers 71 
 
 "But," hesitated the nun, "I cannot do anything else, 
 for I cannot leave my my " 
 
 "Mar Sanctuary," said Dulce. 
 
 "Just so," said the nun. "And why did you leave 
 yours?" 
 
 "Because I loved one of my customers. And because 
 he, finding it out, and knowing that he therefore could not 
 honestly pay in full, ran away from the bad debt. So I, 
 being responsible for it, ran away from the market." 
 
 "Perhaps he will come back again, to pay honestly," 
 said the nun. 
 
 Dulce shivered. "Do not say romantic things of that 
 sort, nun !" 
 
 "But," whispered the nun, "was his body beautiful?" 
 Her whisper grew hastily lower. "You need not look at 
 me with contempt like that! I only asked because, if it 
 was, his soul might become beautiful too, and fetch him 
 back, to honourably pay !" 
 
 "You are romantic, hideously romantic," answered 
 Dulce, "because your life forbids you to know life!" 
 And she shivered again. 
 
 Less black, grey, more grey, pearl grey, stepped the 
 dawn across the great sea toward Mataro; and as if to 
 discourage its delicacy, the river-bed was sending up all 
 about them a brownish, ugly mist. 
 
 "But," persisted the nun, "it might be! Look! 
 There on the bank is a figure peering at us, trying to 
 define us through the mist ! God works miracles it 
 might be he ! Tell me, is the tall fine shape like him ?** 
 
 "Yes, yes," said Dulce, wearily, and closing her eyes, 
 "it is like him, truly. But that is only because of your 
 ravenous imagination and my ravenous pain." 
 
 "Well, it is gone, now, anyway," sighed the nun. 
 "And if it was a miracle of God, perhaps it was one in 
 my behalf, for though I have always kept my thoughts 
 pure, even in my prayers, I yet have prayed often and 
 often that I might see something pretty, or have some 
 pretty thing seek to look at me. And yet, hateful as you
 
 72 The Great Way 
 
 'have been to me in the things that you have said, I could 
 still wish that this might have been a miracle for you, for 
 I have never yet heard such a story as you told. Here 
 is your loaf of bread for it. The light is coming. I must 
 go." 
 
 "As for saying hateful things to you," cried Dulce 
 angrily, "I have said nothing to you but the truth, and 
 I said that not hating you, but pitying you! Who am 
 I to hate anyone, tell me that, after what I have told 
 you! In our souls, we are both starving creatures, and 
 you offer me a soiled loaf of bread for feeding your mind ! 
 All the wickedness that I have said to you is that we are 
 alike, that we are both eaters-of-men, you in your way 
 and I in mine. And now you have made us cannibals in 
 another sense quarrelling eating each other!" 
 
 "It is light ! It is daylight !" cried the frightened nun. 
 "I must not be found talking with a bad woman like 
 you! Take your bread quickly, and get out!" 
 
 "I came here seeking something!" cried Dulce pas- 
 sionately. "And what have I? I came seeking work, 
 and failing that, a word a word of light, no matter how 
 small ! And you give me this, and I tell you I will not 
 take it !" 
 
 "Get out!" screamed the nun, furiously; and as Dulce 
 fled across the plank to the shore, she hurled the loaf 
 after her. 
 
 Instinctively, Dulce picked it up to hurl it back. But, 
 quite as instinctively, she shrank from such ugliness, and 
 putting it under her arm she hastened through the crum- 
 bling stomach of the town, and again into the shadowed 
 street of chestnut-trees, and away.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 SOMETHING TO DO 
 
 JT was high noon. 
 
 It was beyond Caldetas, where once the Moors held 
 sway, and where they come as ghosts at sundown still, 
 to plague and frighten Spanish Christians and such 
 French ones, too, as have now crept down around the 
 Pyrenees. 
 
 And it was inland, for her way, a white road twisting 
 back of her through a hot yellow valley, was separated 
 by only one line of hills from a sparse desolate village 
 with a name almost as long as its distance from the sea 
 Viladecabades, which looks straight upon the face of the 
 vast Holy Mountain, that huge grey monster of slate that 
 rises unique and sheer from the maze of foot-hills, up- 
 holding the monastery that once upheld the Holy Grail. 
 
 Here, where Dulce had trudged, perhaps Parsifal had 
 journeyed; but Dulce, unlearned of legendry and Chris- 
 tian mysteries, did not know that. 
 
 Here, too, perhaps had passed Kundry herself, who, 
 dyed crimson in sins, had cursed herself with bloody 
 laughter; but Dulce, for all her similar sin and madness, 
 did not laugh. 
 
 She was sitting in the road, against a rock, which felt 
 no harder than a small chunk of bread she was trying to 
 swallow, bitten from a loaf that had been as white as the 
 roadway and was now as dirty. Beyond her, this glaring 
 white dusty road snaked suddenly up a hillside of little 
 cork-trees to a little yellowish church with fantastic 
 Moorish windows; but she gave it no heed, and did not 
 even realize that both the church and she were sitting 
 
 73
 
 74 The Great Way 
 
 almost in the shadow of the Holy Mountain the onlj 
 shadow that she noticed was one that she saw suddenly 
 in front of her, and which frightened her almost to her 
 feet, for it lay, black on the white road, in the form of 
 some human monster, with big horns. 
 
 "Do you need help, girl?" 
 
 Dulce gasped with relief at the kind voice and the 
 figure it came from, whose poor Spanish and wide-winged 
 linen headgear showed her to be a French sister instead 
 of a gargoyle. 
 
 "I want work," said Dulce, choking from the slowly 
 descending bit of bread. "I had no right to eat that. 
 Oh !" and she cast the bitten loaf from her with a shiver. 
 "Now it will return to me, I suppose, on such dry waters 
 as it came from. But I thought it might fetch me to 
 some work if I could swallow it." 
 
 "I can fetch you as far as the church," said the French 
 sister, "and there you shall have work, and something 
 clean to eat beforehand. We are just now from France, 
 whence we were driven, and there is scrubbing needed 
 indeed in this country of yours !" They went together 
 through the golden landscape, the sister kindly urging 
 her elbow, and into the yellow church. 
 
 And after she had eaten her bread and drunk her 
 goafs-milk, there proved certainly floors to scrub and 
 walls to scrub, and she fell even more gratefully, greedily 
 upon these, with a queer gladness creeping through her 
 agony of soul. And as the afternoon slipped toward 
 evening, into the soul slipped a rhythmic song of scrub- 
 bing. . . . Scrub, scrub, scrub. . . . Thank God, the 
 French demanded cleanliness ! . . . Scrub, scrub, 
 scrub. . . . 
 
 Bright evening came, and with the benefice of her pres- 
 ence shining on speckless floors and gleaming walls, she 
 let herself stand idle for a moment, gazing through a 
 rounded window at the glory of sundown spread above 
 the foot-hills, preparing the funeral of her first searching 
 day.
 
 Something to Do 75 
 
 "Daughter!" 
 
 She turned quickly, surprised at the voice, then more 
 surprised at the human beauty standing, like herself, 
 against the golden halo of sunset. It was a priest, whose 
 hood had fallen back against his cassock, revealing a head 
 whose sunlit splendour thrilled her and baffled, almost 
 frightened her, for it brought her an ungraspable, fleet- 
 ing memory. Its lovely face was not young rather, old 
 beyond its years, and suffused, along with the sunlight, 
 with the spirit of youth. It was bent down a little, to 
 meet her eyes. 
 
 "After labour done, rest, my child. And to-night, 
 come to me for confession." At the feared words, she 
 shrank back against the wall. 
 
 "Is is it necessary, father, that I should confess?" 
 
 "We gave you work. Consider, should you stay with 
 us unabsolved? You told your need. We gave." 
 
 His logic chanced with straight weight upon the one 
 possible leverage of her soul. 
 
 "Then then I will come to you. But tell me, father, 
 have have I not seen you, father, in Sevilla?" 
 
 "I am thus far south from France, where Christ is 
 no longer even crucified. I have been never in Sevilla, 
 child." 
 
 He was gone, leaving her staring after him. His 
 piteous syllables about France had not caused her wide- 
 eyed seeking look; she was accustomed to her country's 
 austerity toward nations of giddier religious tenor. It 
 was his last words that had renewed the escaping memory 
 which his sunset-haloed beauteous head had stirred as a 
 breeze of Tantalus brevity stirs water surrounded by 
 dark protective trees renewed it, and confused it. Then 
 as he vanished, she caught the words securely, and held 
 them. "They were my own I said them to myself last 
 night of of Jose Luis : 'He has been never in Sevilla' ; 
 God, will I for ever be gouged with little words like that? 
 I was getting out my castanuelas for him! . . . But 
 that face. , ."
 
 76 The Great Way 
 
 Her eyes caught the highest glory of the radiating 
 light, the head seemed outlined against it again, and truer, 
 better-lighted recollection came like sunset-glow through 
 the tree-darkness to her. 
 
 The day when she had bought those same castanets in 
 Seville, she had gone also to the Hospital of La Caridad 
 and into its little baroque church, for whose walls Murillo, 
 two and a half centuries before, had painted eight of his 
 greatest pictures. No more than she knew that far, far 
 longer ago Kundry may have trudged on some hellish 
 errand a few rods from where she stood in the sunset 
 now, did Dulce know that some of these pictures had been 
 raped Kundry-like away from Spain by Soult, Napoleon's 
 great combination general and picture-dealer, for France, 
 who still loved Murillo's Christs if she no longer cared 
 for Christ Himself. But she did know that as she had 
 entered that second-rate edifice of first-rate Brotherhood, 
 the Young John the Baptist, holding the Infant Saviour, 
 and glowing as exquisitely on that Hermanidad wall as 
 the space of sunlit window with the priest's head against 
 it had glowed here now, was the first great Murillo that 
 she had ever seen, in its actual body, except the wonder- 
 ful Saint Catharine at home in Cadiz. Yet if not in 
 actual body, one other great Murillo, at least one, in its 
 active, very active soul, she had known, and not only in 
 Cadiz, but literally "at home" in Cadiz ; known, and 
 loved, as she had happened to know, and had not hap- 
 pened to love, the people in that home of which, both 
 picture and people, she had been, as it chanced, reminded 
 with a life-lasting mark that very same night afterward in 
 that very same Sevilla, while she was dancing in the 
 street. . . . She had never known the name of it, nor 
 bothered to think about what land its original had been 
 stolen to, but it was the master's overmastering "Saint 
 Francis of Padua," too with a baby Christ, and with 
 near-by cherub-held Saint John Lilies, and a nearly as 
 near-by cloud of light-germinated cherubs. Perhaps even 
 the clumsy colours of the copy had held no distemper
 
 Something to Do 77 
 
 for her early in her knowledge of it. Yet it was very 
 early too that through its chromo-screech she had heard 
 the undertone song of its soul, and learned for Murillo 
 a child-love that was family with the Murillo wide-world 
 love, yet partook too of unconscious perception that 
 would afterward consciously found and justify a buckling, 
 octave-esque and poignant love from instinctive art-sym- 
 pathy, and from brain . . . love understanding people, 
 and ignorant feeling, love understanding aesthetics, and 
 their fight with arithmetic. 
 
 Buckling now, memory .swiftly bringing from Seville 
 to far Cadiz flashed fully to her that the hitch of this 
 priest to Sevilla was not the young John Baptist, that 
 "joy of all mothers" world- radiating along with its nick- 
 name from the little Caridad, but was simply Murillo, 
 the Murillo of eternally miraculous vaporoso, the vapo- 
 roso of those Caridad walls, of this sunset on these walls 
 here and now, of a great genius's latterly years wherein 
 an unearthly glow came through him to earth and par- 
 ticularly, peculiarly, the Murillo of that Paduan Saint 
 Francis. 
 
 This priest's had been that same beautiful bent face, 
 very slightly bending, as if over that responsive, caress- 
 ing roly-poly Jesus, against the same soft, "vaporoso," 
 yet here brighter light. 
 
 And at this dead memory resurrected into this living 
 picture, all fear of confession to this man vanished from 
 her soul. 
 
 For there seemed kindness in him; and kindness is 
 the sweetest of all medicines: one good to take from any 
 hand, even if one desires it from one only.
 
 CHAPTER XH 
 
 THE WHEEL 
 
 YET in the black night that came with little catches of 
 wind through the fantasy of the Moorish window of his 
 cell, flickered in by a single candle's light, his face was 
 less like the tender, sweet Murillo. Its age prevailed 
 upon its youth ; the eye-socket's harmed the exquisite con- 
 tour of the cheeks ; and she faltered as the great eyes 
 looked up at her across his bare small table. He opened 
 his lips to speak, but her own prevented. 
 
 "Father, before my confession to the Church, if I must 
 make it, will you not talk to me, a little, as a friend?" 
 
 "My child, I must be no one's friend save as a priest ! 
 Consider! Do you know nothing of the magnificent aus- 
 terity of priesthood?'* 
 
 "Oh," she cried, tremblingly, her hands lifting a little 
 toward him as if their muscles alone, and not her wish, 
 impelled them, and a little catch in her voice from a sense 
 of disappointment that would have been small to her in 
 converse yesterday with any being but one, but that was 
 great and bitter in her weary weakness now, "if I did not 
 know of it, I think I begin to know! Indeed, I think I 
 understand you better than you did me! Then, as my 
 friend a priest, will you not let me tell you of myself, not 
 in confession, but just so and then help me if you can? 
 Father," and she hastened her words on to stop his stop- 
 ping them, "my life has been a street life, full of evil 
 again and again, by which I earned my bread. But, my 
 last such sin I do not repent of and I should mention 
 I took no bread from it, by the way. It fetched me from 
 the other, and say as you will, God sent it to me. It 
 
 78
 
 The Wheel 79 
 
 taught me all I know, and I know this : I must pay back 
 in some way, into the world into Things, if you can 
 understand me for what I have done. Oh, the thought 
 is horrible no, I must not say that! but anyway, 
 terrible !" 
 
 He was watching her mysteriously, intensely, with his 
 inscrutable brilliant eyes. In his calm, high degree of 
 concentration, wherein he sat totally motionless, he had 
 changed again. His youth had returned to him, the 
 glitter of the studying eyes dispelling the gloom of their 
 sockets and making the contours of the face once more 
 so lovely that he should have been painted for a church. 
 But even so he was not the Murillo. He might have been 
 an angel now; but never more for the hungry girl before 
 him that thing of vaporoso, the tender young Paduan 
 Francis. His was a brooding spirit, one of fire quiet 
 and white-hot. And this, vivid against blackness ; and 
 yet, from France though he might be, or from wherever, 
 Rome itself, Limbo, mere, sheer Christendom, still this 
 something else that he seemed to her was something else 
 Spanish Spanish despite its dominant tone was black, 
 pervasive black, its only colours the amalgamate fierce 
 essence of colours, white. Those golden vapours of 
 Murillo, she had learnt further by heart, after Seville, in 
 her brief, high-lit, hungry sojourn in Madrid, where she 
 had had more art to eat than bread; and the Museo del 
 Prado had shown her other things than the sunlight of 
 Spanish paint, and again her mind in its hour's odd mode 
 was putting out tentacles. But she was listening. 
 
 "As your friend a priest, in friendly priestly reply to 
 what you have volunteered to me, I will tell you one all- 
 important thing. There is one all-powerful way to repay 
 all sin: the Church, my child." 
 
 She shivered, unaware of shivering, and thinking her- 
 self quite calm, like himself, and as were her words, for 
 the tense quiet of the beautiful spirit before her had re- 
 lent her confidence. 
 
 "That is no way for me, father. And before I can
 
 80 The Great Way 
 
 know what way, I must more fully understand myself. 
 And there, you can help me somewhat, if you will. 
 There is something in the Bible, a particular some- 
 thing, that I would like you to read out to me. Is 
 that a Bible, father?"' 
 
 And she pointed to a great, aged book upon hi;s 
 table. 
 
 "It is a testament, the old, in an abandoned language, 
 the Vulgate." 
 
 "I think I can find it there, and you could translate 
 for me." 
 
 She had already drawn the big volume toward her, but 
 his voice in one word, and his right hand in one gesture, 
 drove her in an electrical terror back from it. 
 
 "Slowly!" 
 
 Resonant, loud and clear, it had come from the young 
 stately man like the stroke of a great bell in an alarm- 
 clang; the gesture with which the white hand had briefly 
 cleaved the air toward her had held indeed all the austere 
 magnitude of priesthood. White and black, as if he were 
 cameo made of flesh and velvet, and flickered over by the 
 golden candle-fire, he was like a pure demon, some crea- 
 ture from before the throne of God, infused by divine 
 purpose with the right of wrath. She had shrunk away 
 gradual step by gradual step into the very doorway, 
 where she stood with wide staring eyes gazing at the 
 phenomenon of him. 
 
 "You show a strange, bold spirit, girl !" 
 
 "Yes, that that is I, exactly !" she succeeded in whis- 
 pering; but he froze her to silence with his own silence, 
 and his eyes. 
 
 "From words chosen by yourself, you come to me a 
 penitent, I think one to be led, not one to lead ! Then 
 shall you reach out for my book, and point out to me what 
 to do for you? Answer me this: you say with a prompt 
 metal assurance that the convent is no way for you ; how 
 do you know that it is not a way? How do you know 
 that it is not the way the only way?"
 
 The Wheel 81 
 
 Her voice was still husky under the spell of his fierce 
 authority, but again she succeeded in using it. 
 
 "I I know myself," she said. 
 
 "You have just told me that what you needed was 
 fuller understanding of yourself !" 
 
 Despite his hot logic she felt a shade of injustice in 
 the swift words, and her voice grew momentarily stronger. 
 
 "To that extent, indeed I know myself! To that ex- 
 tent I have always known! And if you wish to more 
 understand me than just my word, all that I have felt 
 about convents was proven to me at dawn to-day, when 
 I asked a nun at Mataro for work and after reviling me 
 she talked to me in the river-bed, bargaining with me 
 for all the wickedness of my story. I knew then that 
 I had been right when as a child I chose the sunlight of 
 the streets instead, for it was horrible, she was horrible !" 
 
 He rose, tall, slight, straight, like a glittering arrow 
 pointing heavenward, though his arm and slender hand 
 and trembling forefinger were directed forthright toward 
 herself, and her heart seemed to sink, and stop, and 
 freeze, as if these were a weapon. 
 
 "A holy nun, of the Church, horrible? Take care! 
 Shall you dare say so, you, a scarlet woman?" 
 
 Yet she dared to stammer: 
 
 "Is every human being in the Church good, not only 
 in the body but in the mind?" 
 
 She trembled in his wonderful presence as she asked 
 it, but his eyes were justly searching hers and he received 
 it with dispassion. 
 
 "If she seemed evil to you it was the devil in your own 
 soul painted her!" 
 
 There was a sob in the full voice with which she sud- 
 denly cried out : 
 
 "Oh ! Oh ! The devil is not in my soul !" 
 
 "Girl, who are you to know?" 
 
 The resounding belfry-tone with which he had cried 
 back his reply made her sway in the doorway, and reverted 
 her to the entire possession by fear that had sent her
 
 82 The Great Way 
 
 tottering back from the testament at his first commamd 
 to her. 
 
 "You who decry a sacred woman of life-sacrifice to 
 God's work, you who say that her way is not one for you, 
 which indeed it is not for any woman of determined sin, 
 tell you me this: Are you, or have you ever been, or 
 pretended to be, a Christian? The word 'Catholic' I 
 do not use, for there is but one Christian in the world 
 the Catholic !" 
 
 With a little moan of desperate confusion, she opened 
 the eyes that she had closed in the blaze of his look, and 
 met his, with face quivering, through a silent moment 
 in which she sought to plumb her mind and soul for the 
 truth. 
 
 "I do not know," she said. "I think I was a Chris- 
 tian, when I was a child. Anyway, I was born a Catholic. 
 But though I supposed I still was, can I have been a a 
 Christian all those years I was committing that sin? Is 
 such a combination possible? Who am I indeed that I 
 should know? And as for now, when I am sinful no 
 longer for I have stopped, forever, oh, forever, I assure 
 you! I still do not know, for where I used to believe 
 everything, sins or no sins, now there are some things I do 
 not believe ! At this moment I cannot tell you what they 
 are, for my mind is sickly. But one, for a great instance, 
 I can tell you I do not believe in hell. No, except as it 
 sits around us here on earth, where I have lived in it. Yes, 
 the more I think about God, the less I believe in it, and 
 except for the rest that I may have to trudge through 
 here, I do not believe that there is any more !" 
 
 "Daring soul," he cried, and his words were vibrant 
 with something almost like pain in the richness of his 
 exhortation, "beware that if God does not hear your 
 every word because of His infinitude of businesses, I, His 
 representative, do ! Beware ! As such representative I 
 declare to you there is hell, and from my whole conviction 
 as a studied man, I charge you as you look me in the 
 eyes to learn from me now that if there is any hell for
 
 The Wheel 83 
 
 any human beings, for -fallen-away Catholics there is a 
 special and a double hell doubly deep, doubly isolate, 
 of lakes of doubly potent flame wherein to the seared and 
 wrenched soul eternal damnation seems doubly infinite !" 
 His finger pointed at her again and her body twisted in 
 the doorway as if its white heat had touched her. "And 
 such, a Catholic fallen away, you boldly dare to state 
 yourself to be!" 
 
 "These are words," she gasped, seeking wildly within 
 herself for strength though terror had suffused her eyes 
 beyond her power to wipe away. "You speak them and 
 believe them, but my soul does not tell me that they are 
 true !" 
 
 "Wretched soul!" rang his voice loudly and awfully. 
 "What should or can it know to tell you that would 
 surmount the knowledge and the word of God the Christ? 
 I do not condemn you, for His Church forbids me; but 
 with all my authority I repeat : Beware ! Who are you 
 to know that in rejecting the cloister as the way, at 
 smallest a way, for the retracing of your crimson path, 
 you do not commit a sin worse than any, yes, worse than 
 the total all, of all your sins?" 
 
 Shaken throughout and all over by the spiritual fright- 
 fulness of the thought, she stepped a pace toward him, 
 as if her uncontrolled body were starting to fall, or her- 
 self were drawn inevitably forward by the power of his 
 majestic beauty and the command of his overmastering 
 righteousness. And aware of the fierce potency of such 
 fear as had swept her at his dread suggestion, she gave 
 a low helpless little moan, a little sobbing childish outcry, 
 and bending her head between crouched shoulders covered 
 her face with her hands away from the vivid sight of him. 
 
 "I warn you," his voice tolled swiftly on, with the 
 seeming outcome, to her mental and physical senses, of 
 harder and harder metals stricken together, "in dedica- 
 tion to the Church and her service lies a sinner's safety: 
 so much is definite truth, indubitable. You have asked 
 help; I will help you to a cloister* Whereas otherwise,
 
 what know we of your end that has no end? Choose! 
 For pictures of your precipice, within this cell where now 
 you stand is the Truth, the Inner Light I represent it; 
 outside, where you have trod and desire still to tread, 
 beyond these doorways, is the desolation of abomination 
 like to the black thick night to be seen there through that 
 window the Outer Darkness. Choose ! For within lies 
 a way infallibly right, while take again the path without, 
 and how do you know, who are you and who am even 
 I to know, that your refusal of God's proffer now, or the 
 mere very thought before the word of your denial of hell, 
 may not be not alone the deepest yet of all your sins, but 
 indeed the one unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy 
 Ghost?" 
 
 At the stroke of it, like that of an iron bar upon a 
 bone, her bent frame shook as if the little waves of terror 
 that rushed through her soul were actualized into physical 
 ones that surged over her body, and a scream came into 
 her throat, and the first sound of it escaped her. 
 
 But she cut it short as if with a knife at her neck, 
 perhaps in fear of herself hearing it. Dropping her hands 
 from the whitened terror of her face she saw again, and 
 at its high utmost, the seeming miracle of his exquisite 
 illuminated figure. And even right here, her abrupt brain 
 reached out and one of its tentacles touched that other 
 matter of the Prado : Murillo ? For all its cameo classi- 
 cism, pure Greek or pure Modern, the vision before her 
 was to her hallucinating mind a thing risen from some 
 witches' broth of the black art of Goya the necromantic 
 spirit-flame of a demoniac Sabbath soup. 
 
 With stark features, staring-eyed and open-lipped, she 
 met his beautiful blazing eyes again, for one hideous 
 instant. Then, with another little low helpless cry she 
 turned and rushed out of the cell.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE UNTYING OF THE ROPE 
 
 IT was evening, near some poppy-fields. Once more, 
 evening, as she struggled toward these pretty fields across 
 a little white bridge. She did not know that they were 
 poppies ; she knew only that beyond them a hill, green as 
 a jewel or an Irish farm, held high in air a little town, 
 and she was wondering if she could reach it, even on her 
 hands and knees. But when she came beside the fields in 
 the growing twilight, she halted there, held by a sense of 
 mingled fertility and peace that crept to her from the 
 long ranks of red and yellow fading with the dusk, as if 
 the drowsing flowers were a group of quiet, understanding 
 friends, going to sleep together for the night. She wished 
 she were their friend, and might sleep with them. 
 
 "Friend, are you a stranger in this town? You look 
 very tired!" 
 
 The woman who met her timid gaze seemed to be read- 
 ing all of her pain and weariness, and none whatever of 
 her sin. Her voice had been soft and sweet, yet with a 
 queer ring, like the touch of metal or the poignant seep 
 of a bird's tone. Dulce stood spellbound, unable to 
 answer her, and the woman took her arm without further 
 waiting and led her up the steep highway to a small house 
 poised over the valley. Within, she lighted candles and 
 set forth supper while Dulce, sunk upon a chair, wept hot, 
 slow tears that she could not seem to quell. Looking 
 about at last, she saw in one corner a great wire cage, 
 and hopping about the floor and bed and fluttering about 
 the woman, numerous little green birds trained birds, 
 Dulce thought. They ate, from the woman's hand, while 
 
 33
 
 86 The Great Way 
 
 she and Dulce ate, the girl in silence, the woman talking 
 softly of the little town, which God, she said, had wonder- 
 fully blessed with a wonderful priest, who was good to 
 Christian, beast and pagan ; with pretty, happy citizens, 
 who were kind to strangers; and with industry, which 
 made it well-to-do, and happy. 
 
 "And you, little friend? You are a wanderer? You 
 seek a home, perhaps?" 
 
 "Yes," said Dulce, "I am a wanderer. But what I 
 seek is work. Any work that is not the work I did, which 
 was the one unforgivable sin." She flushed in saying it 
 to this woman's ears. "If not," she added, paling hard 
 upon the flush, "the sin itself against the Holy Ghost." 
 
 "Of that, dear," said the woman, "either the sin you 
 meant or that nameless one, you must not talk, or even 
 think, until you are rested, and your mind is straight. 
 That is the one great way for minds as weary as yours 
 to think of the future, not of the past." 
 
 Tears sprang to Dulce's eyes again. "The prettiest 
 word in our whole Spanish tongue scarcely describes you 
 Mi Dio, but you are Simpatica !" 
 
 "That happens to be my name, dear," said the woman, 
 smiling. 
 
 "Well, well, but I have always believed in words !" ex- 
 claimed Dulce. "And I am sure that when I can tell you 
 of myself, you will be able to help me in what, beyond 
 work, I am hunting for. Can I find work, and then 
 lodging, here?" 
 
 "Naturally, for the present, you will stay with me. And 
 your name, dear?" 
 
 "Dulce." 
 
 "And you deserve it, Dulce," said the woman, softly. 
 "To-morrow, you shall talk to me if you choose, but cer- 
 tainly to our priest, the godliest man in Spain. Indeed, 
 I think I hear his footstep now!" 
 
 "I am afraid of priests!" cried Dulce, in terror. 
 
 "Not this one, dear!" said Simpatica, and she ran to 
 the door. "Padre! Oh, Padre!"
 
 The Untying of the Rope 87 
 
 "You need me, daughter?" said a sweet kind voice, 
 and the priest entered. 
 
 "She needs you, Padre ! Her name is Dulce." 
 
 "A pretty name, a pretty face, Simpatica. Look up, 
 my child. No matter what your trouble, you need not be 
 either frightened or ashamed with us." 
 
 Forcing her eyes up, Dulce met his gaze, and some- 
 thing seemed to lift from body, mind, and soul ; she found 
 herself weeping in the woman's arms, clinging with one 
 small hand to the great firm fingers of the portly priest. 
 
 "Give me something to do!" she sobbed. "Something 
 decent to do !" 
 
 "My child," said the gentle father, "you are very, very 
 tired. But you shall have work to do, when you are 
 able. Your craving for it shows a mind quite right at 
 bottom. Good night, good girl!" 
 
 Sleep came upon the little bright birds in their big 
 bright cage. . . . And upon Dulce, in the great, snowy 
 bed, whereby Simpatica stood long looking down at the 
 white, lined, lovely face, which whispered through its 
 troubled dreams, over and over : "Something to do ! . . . 
 Something decent, decent to do !" . . . And after a time, 
 it came upon Simpatica, beside her . . .
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 MANDRAGORA 
 
 SHE dwelt in the village, in the hearth of an old woman 
 whose house was scarce bigger than Dulce, and who 
 gained the few cents' rent by stopping with a larger 
 friend across the green. And day by day inch by inch, 
 if thoughts have measurements the "trudge, trudge, 
 trudge" faded in her brain, even the less terrible "scrub, 
 scrub, scrub" ceased its pounding in her turbulent spirit, 
 and the nobler repetition, "work, work, work" began to 
 hum, and gradually to sing, in the sore mind: work in 
 lace-making . . . work in the vineyards, where few women 
 worked women occasionally, or occasional women . . . 
 work in bottling wine ... in preserving fruits . . . 
 work, work, work. . . . 
 
 First of all, in the bright morning when she had gone 
 forth with Simpatica, she had been allowed to work in 
 the poppy fields, helping the little orphan-boys who grew 
 flowers for market; and here in the sunshine, surrounded 
 by the urgent, serious children, she felt as though the 
 little white bridge in the valley had truly led her into 
 some new world. Before her rose the hill, tall and 
 peaked-looking among its round companions, topped by 
 its pretty village of white and blue and green and pink, 
 like old Cadiz itself, and ribboned from the bottom upward 
 by its twisting yellow highway. It was a fair, fair place 
 in which to work, work, work. 
 
 From the beginning, kind peasant eyes and lips smiled 
 at her, the eyes admiring and friendly, the lips calling 
 her prettily by name. 
 
 She learned to rest when each day's work was done. 
 
 88
 
 Mandrdgora 89 
 
 She learned to be familiar. She learned to smile, as she 
 was smiled at. And she learned something else, too. 
 
 This was when her voice had been found out, in an 
 unconscious moment of reckless, joyous work. And she 
 soon thereafter learned to sing for the pleasure of the 
 folk . . . and later, for her own pleasure, even . . . for 
 it taught her that the enormous ache at the bottom of her 
 soul thus poured itself forth, forgetting itself while she 
 sang. . . . The vineyarders, going home at evening, 
 would call to her, demanding her music for the early 
 night, on the green . . . that pretty, lovely green, where, 
 though the out-of-doors was certainly bigger than the 
 out-of-doors of crowded Seville, somehow, too, it seemed 
 easier to sing prettily in as if, perhaps, the Murillo- 
 like golden vaporoso that hung over this little hill-town 
 and gilded the air all the way between it and the dis- 
 tantly perceptible Pyrenees, made that air a softer, more 
 gracious piece of paper to write sounds upon. . . . 
 
 And at last, one late afternoon, with the roughly-gentle 
 praising peasant voices lingering in her ears, she went 
 of her own accord to the old priest. 
 
 She found him surrounded by his little boys, who having 
 finished their work among the poppies, were come to his 
 house for a lesson in natural history; and as they 
 scampered away at his bidding, leaving her alone with 
 him, her courage wavered, and her face turned white a 
 little. 
 
 "Padre," she said hastily, yet sitting, in obedience to 
 his gesture, in his own great chair, "I do not think I 
 should call this confession, though little by little, if you 
 will allow it, I will confess to you. But may I do it in 
 the form of of just tcdkvng?" 
 
 "My dear," said the portly old father, smiling at her 
 with his kind, grave eyes, "by what other means should 
 true confession be?" 
 
 Quick gladness coloured Dulce's cheeks and brightened 
 her dusky eyes. 
 
 "Father, will you begin with a favour to me? There
 
 90 The Great Way 
 
 are some verses in the Bible that I read once, long ago. 
 Padre, would you read them to me, now?" 
 
 "Yes, my dear. But can you tell me what or where 
 they are?'* 
 
 "I think I can. Anyway, Re Solomon said them in 
 the beginning of a very long talk, and the first one I want 
 mentions a honeycomb." 
 
 The priest sought out a large volume, and with a little 
 pucker in his brows turned the leaves slowly. Presently 
 he read : 
 
 " 'My son, attend to my wisdom, and incline thine ear 
 to my prudence. . . . That thou mayest keep thoughts, 
 and thy lips may preserve instruction. Mind not the de- 
 ceit of a woman. . . . For the lips of a harlot 
 
 "That is it, that is it!" cried Dulce eagerly. "Only, 
 in the book that had happened my way, it said instead 
 'strange woman.' Well, both expressions apply equally 
 to me, whether they mean the same thing or not. Make 
 me the favour to read on, Padre !" 
 
 " ' are like a honeycomb dropping, and her throat 
 
 is smoother than oil. . . . But her end is bitter as worm- 
 wood, and ! The old priest hesitated. 
 
 "Go on," said Dulce, as she might have said to a 
 dentist. 
 
 " ' sharp as a twoedged sword. . . . Her feet go 
 
 down into death, and her steps go in as far as hell. . . . 
 They walk not by the path of life, and her steps are 
 wandering and unaccountable. . . . Now, therefore, my 
 son ' " 
 
 "Thank you, Padre, that is enough," said Dulce. "Now, 
 that is myself, as you would easily see if you knew 
 me. The 'strange' or the other, terrible word in your 
 book, is perfectly true. And the lips like a honeycomb, 
 and the throat smoother than oil, mean my voice, evi- 
 dently. Then, it says I have a rather cheerless end, does 
 it not? Then, the 'path of life' is exactly what I always 
 call to myself 'La Gran Via.' But my steps do walk 
 it, and the book / had did not contradict that. It said
 
 Mandrdgora 91 
 
 my ways were movable, though, and so they are, for I 
 certainly am a wanderer, and not quite accountable just 
 now, just as it says right here. As for that wormwood 
 at the end, perhaps it can be avoided, if I not only behave 
 myself, as I am trying to do already, but find out how, 
 which I am seeking to find out. Religion is not it, nor 
 merely being good. There is something else, and perhaps, 
 when you know me better, you can help me find it." 
 
 "You are a strange girl!'* said the Padre; then bit his 
 lips. 
 
 "That is just what I told you," said Dulce, "and you 
 have not hurt my feelings. I am especially strange in 
 regard of my fondness for words, and besides wanting 
 to hear those verses again, so that I can never forget 
 them, I had another purpose in coming to you to-day 
 about a word. Padre, Simpatica, who loves you so 
 dearly, and whom I as dearly love, I may almost say, 
 knows everything about me everything I had words for. 
 And I suppose you know a lot of it, from her. Well, I 
 am better here not happier, for there was no happiness 
 to start on. But in this holy little town of yours, with 
 you so gentle and understanding to the little boys and 
 the grown people and everything and everyone, I feel in 
 a way that I have only to-day found a word for. Your 
 poppy-fields put it into my head, I suppose. It is *man- 
 dragora.' That has several meanings good and bad. 
 Well, every word touching me must be both, I guess 
 for a long time to come, anyway. Now, I am very 
 honest, so I have come to you about it. Will you let 
 me, knowing me for what I am or was, rather stay 
 here, working for my keep, of course, but as if I were 
 taking mandragora? The poppy-fields, Simpatica, the 
 kind townsfolk, who enjoy my singing, all of these are 
 like a drug to me, that I think will quiet my pain till 
 I can think, and go on hunting. Without going to church, 
 without church confession, may I stay, without any prom- 
 ise to you that I will be a Catholic again stay, until I 
 see clearly ?"
 
 92 The Great Way 
 
 The priest gently took her hand in both of his own 
 great hands. 
 
 "My child, I think I understand you partly. Marriage 
 is one preventive of grave sins. The Church is another 
 and a greater one. I will pray that the Church at least 
 will win your heart. Meanwhile, dear child, take your 
 'mandragora' to that heart's content ! Go wander now, 
 through the poppy-fields. And when you find some new 
 pretty word, come again, my dear!" 
 
 The evening sunlight slanted on the quiet fields as at 
 the priest's welcome bidding she wandered through them, 
 and then on into the shade of a great acacia tree beyond, 
 where rich violets grew, thrilling her with memories. 
 "Methican eyce !" she whispered to them in English, bend- 
 ing down to caress them. "You are Methican eyce my 
 own, my own !" 
 
 "Dulce!" The voice was so soft that it startled her 
 more than a loud one would have done. From a group 
 of climbing vineyarders, one had come across to her from 
 the highway. 
 
 "Dulce, we are left alone. May I talk to you of your 
 singing?" 
 
 He was a youth whose soul, if one Spaniard's soul can 
 love music more than another's, had most completely 
 swayed to the lilting cadences of her in the open air on 
 the village green. 
 
 "May I, Dulce?" 
 
 "Of course, Gil." 
 
 "It is an angel's voice, Dulce!" His own grew low 
 and sudden. "It takes me to heaven, Dulce ! I love you !" 
 His swift arm was around her waist even as she shrank 
 back. "I love you ! Be my wife, Dulce !" 
 
 "Gil! Gil! Let me go! Gil, for God's sake!" 
 
 "I cannot, Dulce ! Tell me nothing, but that you will 
 be my wife ! I have talked to the padre, and to Simpatica. 
 I know all that they know ! Nothing matters, Dulce ! 
 They bid me wait ! I cannot wait !" 
 
 She was in his arms, her arms tied, powerless. His
 
 Mandrdgora 93 
 
 bronze face was close over hers, his red lips kissed her 
 mouth. . . . And again. . . . And again. 
 
 "Tell me you will be my wife, my own, my own!" 
 She was struggling frantically, helplessly. 
 "Let me go, Gil ! You torture me, torture me !'* 
 "Dulce, my own, tell me you will be my wife!" 
 "Yes, Gil ! Yes, if you will let me go now! Yes, if you 
 will come to me to-morrow!" 
 
 The scarlet lips kissed her again, passionately, the 
 tight arms released her. She ran wildly to Simpatica's 
 house and burst open the door. 
 
 "Simpatica, may I sleep with you to-night?" 
 "Yes, Dulce, yes! What is the matter, dear?" 
 "Nothing ! Nothing ! But I must sleep with you !" 
 And as on that first night when Simpatica had found 
 her by the poppy-fields, the little birds at last slept in the 
 corner, and Dulce slept. And again Simpatica stood by 
 the bed, looking down at the lovely face, and at the 
 strangely troubled lips, that now murmured through the 
 uneasy sleep : "Dawn, by the Mediterranean. . . . Noon, 
 where nations meet. . . . Night, through a Moorish win- 
 dow. . . . Evening, by the poppy-fields. . . . Trudge. 
 . . . Scrub. . . . Work. . . . For the lips of a strange 
 woman. . . . Her end is . . ." 
 
 And later, Simpatica slept herself, beside her. But 
 when she waked, the strange visitor was gone. Nor was 
 she found in her own house, nor anywhere else in the little 
 town.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 LA GITANA 
 
 "HOYE !" 
 
 "Hoye! Hoye!" 
 
 "Ho-o-oy-e!" . . . "Ho-o-oy-e!" . . . "Ho-o-oy-e!" 
 
 The cry, in wild musical rhythm, calling and answering, 
 quickening, went through the moonlit night, forward and 
 backward across the stirring camp, whose flaring bonfires 
 lighted crags and gulches, wild trees, rough stones. The 
 Pyrenees massed black and desolate against the starry 
 sky toward all points of the compass, yet here in their 
 stony heart dwelt song and laughter, colour of fabric, 
 grace of woman, strength of man, warmth of fire, gracious 
 smell of food and rich taste of wine, with roof of sky as 
 dear as frescoed ceiling, floor of dirt and shard, blanket- 
 strewn, as precious as marble or carpeting; walls of de- 
 serted towering rock, dressed with moss and earth and 
 shrub, as fair and familiar as panelled walls of home. It 
 was home; changeable night by night, yet very home, 
 after the grave panorama of the day home with gay 
 company, love, life, laughter, card-games, tears, and chil- 
 dren. And at this moment, song. 
 
 "Hoye !" 
 
 "Hoye !" 
 
 "Hoye!" . . . "Ho-o-oy-e!" . . . "Hoye!" 
 
 One figure, by a fire set apart in a chosen niche of 
 smoothed flint over the gorge, brewed something hot, all 
 alone. She was childless* or else her children fared 
 nearer the fiery centre. She hummed by herself, content 
 without a husband, or awaiting one. The only figure 
 near her, less shadowy because motionless, was also a 
 woman, seated in silence on a rotting trunk near by. 
 
 94
 
 La Gitana 95 
 
 "Who are you?" aslced the gypsy suddenly, in sur- 
 prise. She had come nearer the silent woman and in a 
 streak of moonlight, seen her face. "I thought you one of 
 us, but are you so?" 
 
 The figure made no reply, and the gitana shook her 
 shoulder good-humouredly enough, and asking: "When 
 did we pick you up, say?" 
 
 The taciturn figure still vouchsafed no answer, and 
 when the gypsy had come in front of her, and bending, 
 peered closely at her countenance, a new expression swiftly 
 aged her own ageless face and she muttered queer words, 
 in a rapid cadence, staring the woman keenly in the eyes. 
 
 "Now, girl, speak up ! Are you alive at all ?" 
 
 "Yes, yes, I am alive! Holy God, I am alive!" 
 
 "Follow me." 
 
 Stiffly the figure rose and followed her the few steps 
 to the fire. 
 
 "Give me your hand, girl here, close to the light." 
 
 She lifted the cold palm and held it, by its wrist, close 
 to the blaze. 
 
 "Well, well, what I see there! Behind you you may 
 well say 'Holy God!' And ahead of you great name of 
 Egypt, 'Holy God' again !" 
 
 A shiver went through the stone of the statue. 
 
 "Yet girl, girl, but there is esperanza there!" 
 
 "Hope? Hope?" Now a different tremor came through 
 the dead wretch, as though a spring had stirred a paste 
 virgin into motion. 
 
 "Yes, girl, written from ai to ah, with essay and erray 
 on the way, all made up of little crosses of misery!" 
 
 As she spoke the hand was wrenched away between 
 her fingers and the girl recoiled with a low cry: "You 
 have burned me !" 
 
 "Well, well, girl, I had to rouse you somehow! Come, 
 we will mend it now, and when all is done, your blood 
 will be coursing. A little pain of body is a sponge for 
 pain of mind!" 
 
 She drew her towards her little oblong black tent, a
 
 96 The Great Way 
 
 geometrical blot more sable than the rock itself against 
 the moon-greened and fire-ruddied sky, and leaving her 
 before the breeze-stirred opening, stooped through, and 
 reappeared with rag and oil. 
 
 "Hold that!" She poured the oil. "Hold that!" She 
 wound the rag. Her voice, without touch of harshness, 
 was yet sharp and short. "Now lift up your arms. Keep 
 them out straight!" 
 
 With little throat-sounds of hurt and effort, the girl 
 obeyed, standing like some weird figurine of the rock, 
 flickeringly lit. 
 
 "In little," muttered the gitana, "she is like the huge 
 grotesques that crown the Sacred Mountain!" 
 
 And leaving her carven thus with the small moan of 
 life in her stone, she went briefly to the fire, to return with 
 a china cup, filled with hot liquid from her iron pot. 
 
 "Drink, girl!" And slowly, painfully, the statue 
 drank. 
 
 "Can you eat soon, think you?" asked the gypsy. 
 
 "I think so," whispered the stone figure. 
 
 "That is well. Speech will come after that." 
 
 She went about the fire, stirring, preparing, and the 
 girl's figure sank down, steadying itself with its uninjured 
 hand by the tent-flap, and still clinging to this, slowly 
 stretched its limbs. 
 
 "Were you sitting on that log before we came?" asked 
 the gitana. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "How long?" 
 
 "I do not know." 
 
 "You heard and saw us come and pitch the camp, and 
 light the fires, and knowing us for gypsies, neither ran 
 away nor joined us?" 
 
 "I thought it was hell, perhaps. I did not know." 
 
 "Why hell?" asked the gypsy good-humouredly ; but 
 with a prompt purpose of soothing that was spiritually 
 softer than mere good humour.
 
 La Gitana 97 
 
 "Well, I had lately heard quite a lot about hell," said 
 the figurine. 
 
 "Well, well, we shall eat soon," said the gitana. She 
 stirred the fire and food again, glancing once and often 
 at the silent girl, who was gradually silent no longer, for 
 in the fire's warmth and the faster creeping of her blood 
 her voice, unsounding first, then a small hum, then actual 
 words, took up the continuing fitful music of the 
 camp : 
 
 "Hoye! . . . Hoye! . . . Ho-o-oy-e! . . . Ho-o-oy-e!" 
 
 It fled above the settlement sweet and lonely as the 
 moaning laughter of a swooping loon fleeing homeward 
 among the black crags, or from one water to another in 
 their chasm-deeps. 
 
 "You were quick to catch that sound !" said the gypsy 
 across her work. 
 
 "I can sing like an angel," answered the girl. "A devil 
 or something told me so in the woods the other night. I 
 did not see him, but it was a man-devil. I heard his voice 
 distinctly." 
 
 "Well, well, it is quite likely," said the gitana. "Luck- 
 ily, you are with gypsies now, and devils do not come near 
 us. So you will sleep in peace to-night, at least. Now, 
 let us eat." 
 
 They ate from tin bowls, with large spoons, and life 
 came more and more into the girl, and the pain of her 
 numb body grew less and less. The singing had died down, 
 but words and laughter in the camp continued. 
 
 "Let us talk," said the gitana, setting aside the bowls. 
 "Come, sit with me near the light and we will try to see 
 the future. Is your hand well? I will not burn you 
 again." 
 
 "It is quite well. I am not afraid of you !" 
 
 "Ah!" said the gypsy, with a crisp, practical timbre 
 of satisfaction. "That is well, for I tell you you need 
 not be. There are bad gypsies, but are there not some 
 bad folk who stay at home? Though some of the unkind 
 things may be true, there is a lot of nonsense said about
 
 98 The Great Way 
 
 us. Some people do not even like to touch us, of these, a 
 few saying to justify themselves that we do not like to be 
 touched, just because long ago, yes, centuries back, there 
 was in Little Asia a folk of soothsayers, serpent-charmers, 
 called Athinganoi, meaning Touch-Me-Not. But / am no 
 Touch-Me-Not, for I, girl, am of those who know yes, 
 know, if word from father to son and son's daughter to 
 daughter means anything that our people were, ancf 
 therefore in soul now are, Egyptians, as all of us, Spanish, 
 French, Bohemian, or what-not, are called in contempt. 
 As for me, I am for generations of the forty thousand 
 Spanish, but before that, I and mine were Egyptian, I 
 say, and Egyptian I proudly enjoy to be called yes, 
 whether in despising tone or no !" 
 
 The proud Egyptian deftly, gently unbound the girl's 
 hand, seated her by the fire, and put an arm supportingly 
 around her waist. At this, the girl looked anxiously into 
 her face. 
 
 "Your name is not Simpatica, perhaps?" 
 
 "No. Mercedes. Half the girls in Spain are named 
 that, I admit, but with me, it is a proud name, from my 
 line. Still, I am not ashamed of its vulgar meaning of 
 Charities. In our case, there was a purposeful reason; 
 and in any case, they have their place in life." 
 
 "I am fond of words and meanings," said the girl. "I 
 never thought before of the name Mercedes meaning the 
 word mercedes. I must remember that. And what were 
 those words you said to me at first when I was sitting on 
 the log?" 
 
 "Hokus-pokus words, girl. They were no spell more 
 than to make you think so." 
 
 The large anxious eyes grew unhappy, disappointed. 
 
 "Then my hand what you said Hope that was false 
 too?" 
 
 "No. No, though I suppose I would have said it any- 
 way. We will look further presently. Think, girl ! While 
 you have flesh left on you that can hurt when it burns,
 
 La Gitana 99 
 
 there is also hope no ? But there is much written in your 
 hand, too." 
 
 "In your own name, that is true Mercedes? It is not 
 one of your 'charities' to tell me so ?" 
 
 "It is true. In my own name, I swear it !" 
 
 "Thanks! Thanks to Holy God!" And the girl's 
 head fell to the gypsy's shoulder. "Friend, friend, I begin 
 to remember!" 
 
 She was weeping. 
 
 The gypsy held her close, letting her sob quietly, 
 unrestrainedly. 
 
 "It is said of us," she spoke on in a matter-of-fact, 
 soothing voice, "that we were of the seed of Canaan, and 
 that we were scattered all over the earth, and served as 
 slaves of slaves. But again, that is a tale of Asia, while 
 as to us Egyptians, it is said that our wandering was sent 
 upon us because our kind showed no charity to Joseph and 
 Mary when they sought refuge in Egypt. It may be 
 true. It may not. And there lies the purposeful reason 
 of my name it was in devout pride against that very 
 accusation that my line chose it and favoured it. True 
 or no, we are baptized the whole generality of us in 
 the Christian faith. How long, girl, have you been in 
 the mountains?" 
 
 "I do not know. Many nights, I think." 
 
 "Without food?" 
 
 "Sometimes without." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "A man asked me to marry him." 
 
 "That is well worth running from sometimes. In yout 
 case, why?" 
 
 "You will not understand me." 
 
 "I will understand you. I am a gypsy. I understand 
 much of you already." 
 
 "I I am eighteen. Since I was sixteen, I have been 
 bad for money." 
 
 "And will not be again nor even marry?" 
 
 "And wtti not ! That is it ! That is it !"
 
 100 The Great Way 
 
 "Since how long?" 
 
 "I am not sure. Two months, I think." 
 
 Into the gitana's eyes came a great light of pity. She 
 made no answer for a moment, but patted her hand, and 
 presently she looked straight and long into her eyes and 
 said: 
 
 "Do not forget that word *hope.' I meant it. Your 
 mind is clearer now. Take it in. I am a visionary, and 
 I see more and more as we sit together here. Of all the 
 words written thus far on your soul, that one leads you 
 farthest. And it is far!" 
 
 "Thank God !" cried the trembling girl. "Thank God ! 
 I would go mad else ! I think that I have been already 
 mad! Was I mad when you found me here on that log 
 to-night?" 
 
 "With hunger, child. And with with pain, sad, sad 
 pain!" 
 
 She drew her closer, tenderly, and let one of her brown 
 hands press gently, shieldingly, against the erratically 
 beating heart. 
 
 "But," she said, starting, "there is a hard lump there !" 
 
 "There is a hard lump inside it," said the girl, bitterly. 
 "There has been this long while !" 
 
 "I do not mean that," said the gitana. "You wear 
 something over it!" And her fingers had begun to trem- 
 ble. 
 
 The girl drew a little away from her, and her own 
 hand, white in the mingling moonlight and firelight, went 
 sharply up against the heart they talked of. 
 
 "Ah," she cried, and there was a sobbing ring that 
 was of both ecstasy and anguish in the suddenly passion- 
 ate voice, "there is the weight of centuries upon it ! In- 
 deed, neither am I a Touch-Me-Not, for your fingers have 
 rested upon the only part of me that has never been 
 bought or sold!" 
 
 "But I tell you I do not mean your heart, girl !" cried 
 the gypsy excitedly. "I mean the thing that you love
 
 La Gitana 101 
 
 enough to wear hidden against a heart that loved as yours 
 must love !" 
 
 Now it was the girl that started, and she met the eyes 
 of old Egypt with mingled timidity and wonder. 
 
 "So do / mean that !" she said. "And it is strange 
 enough that your fingers should have trembled like my 
 body itself instantly they felt this matter, for it is one 
 that has to do with Egypt, and old Egypt yes, if, as 
 you say, word from father to son and son's daughter to 
 daughter means anything, Egypt of at least a thousand 
 years before your line showed charities, or failed to show 
 them, to Joseph and the Virgin !" 
 
 "What is your meaning, girl?" And the gypsy's voice 
 trembled now, unconsciously as the brown hands in their 
 instinctive reach toward the girl's bosom. "You will 
 show it me, this thing?" 
 
 "Yes," answered the girl, "for you have been good to 
 me ah, how good! and besides, this talk of Egypt 
 makes it right as right as it is strange ! For it is almost 
 beyond strange that you should have trembled so instantly 
 at the feel of this, and knowing nothing of it indeed, 
 perhaps you truly have divination, as you say ! Well, 
 believe it or not, I have my family's word, and they were 
 harsh as to matters of truth, take my word ! I am not of 
 a bad Spanish line, myself, and long ago, there were 
 personages in it. Well, some great Spaniard did a favour 
 to the Egyptian Government whether it was before or 
 after any reason for hurt feelings over Gibraltar, anyway 
 he did it some matter of some kind of charities ... a 
 word again! . . . To repay him, Egypt delayed, in his 
 honour, a festival, till he could get there. It had been 
 hunting, that Government, hunting, hunting for a certain 
 tomb in the catacombs, with the mummy of a Rameses 
 princess in it. She was of the house of Rameses the First, 
 founder of the Nineteenth Dynasty, whatever that means 
 for I have a clever memory for the little history I have 
 been told, besides this being a special family matter. Well, 
 the opening of the tomb was made in this man's presence,
 
 102 The Great Way 
 
 and it was all exact, and there she was. And because 
 she had died a virgin, she had been dedicated to the 
 goddess Astarte, and her mummy wound around with 
 Astarte beads little beads of turtoise, and of glass, I 
 understand, and of some kind of mud or something. Now, 
 these were given to this specially honoured guest. And 
 later, although he so prized them, indeed, because he so 
 prized them, he gave them to a friend who had done him 
 some priceless favour. Think what a gift ! But, you 
 see, it was for a favour of the soul. And by a third such 
 gift, it came* into my family, and then, to me, skipping 
 my parents, for it was my grandmother said 7 should have 
 it. My grandmother loved me and and believed in me! 
 Well, since since I have told you I have been bad for 
 money, can you think what this, this thing means to me 
 this part of me, for the immense meaning of it makes it 
 a part of me the only material part of me that has never 
 been bought or sold?" 
 
 And she fetched something out of her bosom, clutched 
 preciously in one hand, and with the other lifted a cord 
 from around her neck. 
 
 As the trembling, almost panting gypsy leaned nearer 
 with uplifted shaking fingers, the girl opened her palm 
 and on it was a diminutive bag, arduously hand-sewn, 
 made of soft, fine balbriggan, and stained with dull brown 
 spots. 
 
 "I used to wear them around my neck," she said, "but 
 they are strung only on a thin thread, and I was afraid 
 for them, and lately made this beautiful little case for 
 them, you see!" 
 
 The beautiful little case was part of a man's under- 
 shirt. The brown spots had once been red. 
 
 She opened it, and drew forth the things that for at 
 least three thousand years had been innocent of money. 
 
 Fragilely their infinitesimal weight sped them down- 
 ward and poised them between her finger-tips and the 
 quivering finger-tips of the gypsy, and in the flare of the 
 firelight displayed their intricate beauty of colour, vast
 
 La Gitana 103 
 
 age, and significance. They were little tubular beads. 
 Their whole length was several feet. One would be a 
 half-inch in length, another more, another very, very 
 small indeed. There were perhaps a hundred of them,, 
 perhaps eighty: they were so fragmentary, so many were 
 broken, it would have been impossible to count them. 
 Some were of opaque rich glass, some were of pottery, 
 some were of turquoises hollowed out. They were blue, 
 and another blue, and green blue. Though age dwelt 
 seemingly with every one, and mellowness of colour, there- 
 fore, dominated their effect, the sheen and splendid glaze- 
 like polish of the glasses and turquoises presented by the 
 fire-flare gave hues of blue accentuated thrillingly : pea- 
 cock-blue, robin's-egg blue, electric blue. Some tones were 
 so deep that only their vivid shine and vitality kept them, 
 from nearing lapis ; and the greens buried but not hidden 
 in the resplendent tones would have suggested grass, so 
 poignant were they, but that they had a higher, a more 
 brilliant cry. And these colours were set out, and inter- 
 rupted, and involved by the pottery beads, which were 
 softly dull, and faded, from their likely original intention 
 of conforming with the rest, to delicately sensitive tones 
 of Nile, and of forthright brown. 
 
 "They are different in the daytime," said the girl. "In 
 the sunlight, they are both more beautiful, and less. It 
 seems almost like magic. I cannot explain. They simply 
 are different." 
 
 "Life is magic, and life is different day and night," 
 ssid the gitana. She spoke simply. Yet it was with a 
 little laughing pant that made the girl look startled at 
 her, for suddenly the gypsy seemed old, old, ages old, old 
 even, in her suggestion, as the Astarte beads that had 
 been unwound after centuries and centuries of burial from 
 the varnished earthenware of the virginal Princess 
 Rameses. Gypsy women age quickly ; but this one seemed 
 to the gazing girl to have done all of her disproportionate 
 surviving of piled-up time in a few moments. Her face 
 was exquisitely, spiritually ancient as it rose there from
 
 104 The Great Way 
 
 her suddenly conspicuous snowy neck-cloth, with which 
 her fine whiteness of unconsciously shown teeth took part 
 against the darkness, noticeable as the lustre of her black 
 eyes as they met and re-met the dark ones of the girl 
 across the frail blue and green lines of colours, that, 
 so glintingly, delicately pendant between them, were saved 
 from a complete droop downward by her awe-shaken, lov- 
 ing upheld finger-tips. 
 
 "Devla ! Devla !" she was saying the odd Romany 
 word for God, repeating it and repeating it again. 
 "Devla ! Ah, girl, girl, but this is strangely wonderful ! 
 We will see them together in the daylight. But for 
 now, put them by! Their different beauties by sun and 
 moon are not of moment. What is of moment is their 
 meaning to you! What I said of hope I may say now 
 again, and ten times over again ! How could you ever 
 have lost it, you who can think and feel as you think and 
 feel about a thing like this? What I discerned in your 
 hand I discern now in your soul! With the mere possi- 
 bility of such an emotion as the one you have for this, you 
 will go far, far, Devla knows how far! Where did you 
 get such feelings? Consecration what a vast idea it 
 is!" 
 
 "Ah!" ejaculated the girl, starting again. "What an 
 idea, what a word! Consecration! I never thought of 
 that before. I will think of it always now!" 
 
 "But put them by," repeated the gitana, "and then, 
 at once, yes, while I am thus stirred, then for your 
 hand! Smart as we gypsies are at cards, they are not 
 for your sort, and I admit it; and for that matter, we 
 are far more adept at palmistry. Our power in it goes 
 beyond our own knowledge and reasoning! . . . Ah!" 
 
 The little cry was at the vanishing of the lovely old 
 colours. The girl's trembling fingers had returned the 
 beads to the little balbriggan bag, the bag to her trem- 
 bling bosom. Her lips were murmuring almost breath- 
 lessly, "Consecration! Consecration!" 
 
 The gitana took her by the wrist and led her once
 
 La Git ana 105 
 
 more toward the rippling entrance of the sable-black tent 
 and close to the leaping fire. 
 
 "This hand of yours is strange, girl !" 
 
 "That I know it fouls everything I touch !" 
 "The past we both know," said the gitana. "Well, 
 then, the future. . . ." She stood crouch-shouldered, 
 brooding over it. ... "Strange . . . strange, and . . . 
 terrible. I see with you great crowds of people vast 
 crowds throngs as if, for instance, you were at the 
 bull-ring. . . . But you are not of the crowd strange, 
 not even m it. You are alone . . . always strangely, in 
 some terrific way, alone where there are crowds. I was 
 not wrong when I said . . . terrible. I will be truthful. 
 ... I will tell nothing that I do not see read out noth- 
 ing that is not in. ... These lines ... all mingling to- 
 gether, they run the world around, and back again . . . 
 home, forever and forever back where you started. . . ." 
 
 "Ah, Holy God !" breathed the girl sharply. 
 
 "What a gran via ! . . . You would never be one of 
 us, or I would say 'Be with us.* Your roving is not of 
 our sort. What life is there. How terrible ! . . . Yet, 
 with it all, hope, hope . . . for you travel the Great Way 
 verily hand m hand with love, though always so alone! 
 Just now, in your strange roving, you seek some- 
 thing " 
 
 "Yes!" cried the girl eagerly. "Yes! Yes!" 
 
 "What, I cannot read." 
 
 "Oh!" cried the girl. It was a little swift moan of 
 disappointment. 
 
 "My gypsy mind stops at it. But seek, girl, seek! 
 Never cease seeking " 
 
 "Ah!" It was a sharp ejaculation. 
 for you find it !" 
 
 "A-a-ah !" The girl had cried out again, with a long 
 fluttering breath. 
 
 "There it lies in your palm it cannot escape you. 
 Not if you seek it. It awaits you. You could escape it, 
 and your hand would alter. But even so, it would always
 
 106 The Great Way 
 
 await you. It grows up soon, soon, before your eyes, 
 your palm now says, like like a great a great pyramid 
 yes, a pyramid like the Great Pyramids of my fore- 
 fathers* Egypt !" 
 
 "Pyramid!" cried the excited girl. "Pyramid! I said 
 they might fall some day ! This night, you say my hand 
 says one is growing up for me! 'Pyramid'! Again I 
 say, what a word, what a word !" 
 
 "Yes," exclaimed the gitana, "and the thing you seek 
 is something both as great and as simple. It is some- 
 thing that is everywhere about you, and that is in yourself, 
 inside of you! Ah, girl, if your hand but bade me, you 
 should stay with us, and find your bodily peace in gypsy 
 manner meaning three things, the gypsy Trinity, which 
 is all a gypsy needs: Nature, Nature, Nature, just as a 
 singer's only three needs are Voice, Voice, Voice. But if I 
 turned you from the seeking of your own need, bidding 
 your will-power alter your hand, as I, a very gitana, 
 have admitted could be, I should do nothing, you, should 
 do nothing, but retard your fate no utmost thing could 
 go beyond that and alter it. And fate your fate is 
 standing right here with you and me to-night . . . not a 
 bodily presence, yet right here with us, either right yonder 
 against the black rock, or else in there, behind us !" And 
 her arm swept excitedly toward her inky little canvas 
 home. "It makes my vision strong and clear, and I see 
 that pyramid that you seek, and I see you climbing it, 
 watched by seas of people deserts of people. And 
 though I see you climbing to many other great heights, 
 like mountain heights, though I see you desolate, terrible, 
 peaked, like the mountains, and among the mountains, 
 against the stars, and as solitary, first, first it is that 
 pyramid that you must seek and find. Perhaps it does not 
 exist yet. When you have learned its nature, from your 
 own soul, you may have to build it ! Hope, and strength 
 when strength returns to you, will enable you ! It is well 
 that your gran via led you here, like the vagrants rumour 
 accuses us of joining unto ourselves whenever we can to
 
 La Gitana 107 
 
 aggrandize our numbers. To-night, you shall sleep with 
 me deeply, and close to me, as if you were lately young, 
 and I your mother. From clean mind to clean mind 
 there is a medicine in the touch of flesh and flesh. And 
 while your hand bids, stay with us. But your own way 
 lies in cities. That pyramid of yours is no out-of-doors 
 gypsy thing. We are journeying down to the Sierra 
 Nevada. You shall leave us at the first great city on the 
 way." 
 
 "I thank you, and I thank God," cried Dulce, "for 
 whatever little time I may stay with you !" 
 
 "A little time indeed, girl," said the gitana, "for the 
 first great city calls you, and to-morrow we move on 
 toward Barcelona."
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 PLAZA DE TOROS 
 
 A WOMAN sat at the bull-ring, alone in the crowd. It 
 was in the Neuva Plaza, the New Place of Bulls, in the 
 suburb Hostafranchs, the big circus of red brick crown- 
 ing its little hill so prettily feathered with green young 
 locusts and within, all Barcelona that could mass into 
 space for some seventeen thousand two-legged animals to 
 watch the coloured death of a few four-legged ones. 
 
 This woman was dark-eyed, dark-haired; but still no 
 Spaniard. 
 
 And she was alive with interest like a native, speak" 
 ing now and then to those about her with ease in the 
 Spanish tongue; yet puzzled if replies were in Catalan, 
 and in need of gesture in answer to her free Castilian. 
 
 "You are French, no, senora?" asked a man at her 
 side, and his brows went up most politely when she shook 
 her head. "English?" 
 
 "No, senor. American." 
 
 "Ah, American ! I have a cousin in Buenos Aires !" 
 
 "I am not from South America, senor. I am from the 
 Estados Unidos." 
 
 "Ah! And where would that be, senora? In Aus- 
 tralia?" 
 
 "No, no, friend. I am from Nueva York." 
 
 "Ah, so? Nueva York! Now I know! Nueva York is 
 very tall, is it not?" 
 
 "Yes, very tall indeed. Is that Chiquito now?" 
 
 "Yes, yes ! Your pretty eyes are quicker than a Span- 
 iard's, senora ! That is Little Chico !" 
 
 And the roar breaks. 
 
 108
 
 Plaza de Toros 109 
 
 She watched the red-wet game with eager interest 
 tingling to its music and its loud thrilling noise of throats, 
 following its run and rush and jumping flash of colours 
 with eyes that flashed as swiftly. Yet these swift eyes, 
 that had been so politely referred to by the Spaniard, had 
 in them no game-lust, no brutality. The fervour with 
 which they absorbed this grace of danger-conquering art 
 was the avid keenness of one who by nature, by instinct, 
 seeks and studies the corner things of life the corner 
 things that in assimilation make possible the queer term 
 "experience." 
 
 "There are good bull-fights in Nueva York, seiiora?" 
 
 "No, senor, no hai nada. There, we think them cruel." 
 
 "Cruel? Well, yes, perhaps if one thinks of it. It is 
 hard for the horses. But it is very pretty." 
 
 "Yes, it is very pretty." 
 
 She watched the bright-hued figures, red, pink, yellow, 
 blue, green, gold, silver ; spangled, glittering ; with their 
 flutter of gaudy cloaks, their running, their escaping, their 
 thrusting of striped banderillas; the whole crossed, like a 
 kaleidoscope with a crack in it, by the sudden mad bellow- 
 ing rush of hulking brown or black as a bull plunged 
 further toward his waiting death. 
 
 But once, from chance, she looked at one of the 
 thronged two-legged. Afterward she looked again; and 
 then, frequently. 
 
 It was a woman near by, whose face, a moment at a 
 time, then longer, tore the American's keen eyes from the 
 fight and at last engrossed them a young Spanish 
 woman, alone like herself in itself strange, for a young 
 Spanish woman whose gaze was riveted upon the great 
 spectacle, yet whose whole countenance, albeit she rose 
 or sat to see according to the crowd, seemed unalive, 
 expressionless. 
 
 A bull died, and another, and another. A fourth, and 
 with it the American's fascinated absorption. Cruel to 
 very tragedy in its bright accoutrement of colours and 
 sunlight, yet it paled for her beside the tragedy hidden
 
 110 The Great Way 
 
 from her, all but the fact of it, by this girl's pale face, 
 which seemed to her like some creator's painting of a soul's 
 mystery. A fifth bull died. 
 
 Between the American woman and the Spanish girl the 
 wild mob was standing, pulled to its Spanish feet by 
 Spanish sentiment, raucously cheering, madly stamping, 
 hurling hats and canes and kisses to Chiquito as he made 
 his bowing pasear around the ring. It was only a month 
 since Fuentes had been himself hurt, instead of his bull! 
 What a pity to-day, then accidents are so rare, and so 
 exciting! No! Shame! Yes! No! 
 
 Was the girl fearful for Chiquito, thought the Amer- 
 ican could that be it? Women were said to have lost 
 their reason through this fighter. But if her case were 
 of that sort, she would be shrilly crying, throwing caresses, 
 displaying her mania proudly to the mob ; and the woman, 
 lifting herself by a man's elbow and craning, saw that she 
 was not. 
 
 The throng settled down again upon the grey stone 
 tiers. And she watched the girl quite constantly now, 
 scarcely sparing glances to the remainder of the fight. 
 She saw the same unwavering eyes upon every movement, 
 the same unlighted face. . . . The sixth bull died. 
 
 The afternoon's deaths and joy were over. The vast 
 crowd poured out, to the jingle of the huge, beautiful, 
 richly caparisoned horses that hooked and dragged forth 
 from the arena the dilapidated carcasses of their worthless 
 brethren that had died in the last fight. 
 
 And as their dead victor, the bull, was dragged tune- 
 fully after them by the neck, two women, unnoticed save 
 that one was noticed by the other, were alone with the 
 blood that seeped into the sawdust in the gradual twilight 
 of the great deserted shell. 
 
 "Is there anything that I can do to help you?" 
 
 The girl started, for the voice had come abruptly, 
 from behind her, and before answering she gazed long 
 and thoughtfully at the woman so suddenly close to her, 
 so inexplicably standing in the dusk on the stone tier above
 
 Plaza de Toros 111 
 
 her. The figure was returning her gaze with the same 
 curious quality of mind and look that, before she noticed 
 the girl, she had given to the bull-fight. 
 
 "I did not mean to frighten you. I spoke to you to 
 ask if I could help you." 
 
 At this the girl found her voice. 
 
 "Excuse me, sefiora! I am slow-witted lately! To 
 answer your question, I do not know whether you can help 
 me or not." 
 
 "So you are in trouble?" said the woman. 
 
 "Yes, sefiora, though in somewhat less than I was in, 
 still in great trouble." 
 
 "Will you tell me of it?" 
 
 "Thank you," said Dulce. "I will tell you, senora, 
 with pleasure. And briefly, too, so that you can know 
 quickly whether you still wish to help me. First, then, 
 I have been bad, very bad, and been so for a long time. 
 Two whole years, I think. And for money understand 
 that. So much for whether you really wish to help me. 
 And in the second place, wihich concerns my second 
 trouble, I have been lately mad, I think. Anyway, my 
 wits fell apart, a while back. Then a woman helped me 
 a gypsy. You are the third to do that. No, the fourth 
 or so, for a nun two nuns I guess had been kind, 
 though less kind. It is all very strange. Will you make 
 me the favour to tell me why you spoke to me?" 
 
 "Because you sat here so dully after the fight was 
 over. And because I had been watching you long before 
 that. Why did you sit here in that way?" 
 
 "I do not know quite," said Dulce. "My wits are 
 still thick, I guess, though they are better. I I am 
 trying to find out something. I cannot put it in words, 
 and that is the trouble, for if I could, I either would not 
 have to ask, or would probably find that the first person 
 I met could explain it to me this thing that I am trying 
 to find out. The bull-fight has something of it. Even the 
 gypsy could not tell me what it was. But at least she 
 was sure that my way my Gran Via lay in great cities.
 
 112 The Great Way 
 
 Well, Barcelona is something of a city, perhaps a great 
 one after its own fashion, and so I came here from the 
 caravan. The gypsy said that what I seek has to do with 
 great crowds. And that is why I came to the fight. In 
 spite of terrible memories that sat waiting here for me 
 in this arena. It was those memories that made me sit 
 here so stupidly, I guess. But however that may be, there 
 was fate in it, you see. Because even if you left me this 
 second, and I never saw you again on account of what I 
 have told you of my character, still it has had fate in it, 
 for you have pounded home to me that women are kind to 
 women." 
 
 "I have no intention of 'leaving you this second.' And 
 do not call it my kindness. Call it my curiosity. And 
 whatever you choose to call it, I do wish to help you. Are, 
 you poor?" 
 
 "Yes," said Dulce, "but not penniless yet." 
 
 "Did you intend to work?" 
 
 "Yes, as soon as I could after to-day." 
 
 "At what?" 
 
 "I do not know. Anything decent except coal-heaving, 
 and not that only for personal reasons. Work is scarce 
 here for a girl like me. I had hoped never to see Bar- 
 celona again till t^ie gitana told me what she did." 
 
 "Would you be my maid?" asked the American. 
 
 Dulce stared at her incredulously. 
 
 "You actually mean that, not knowing me? Or rather, 
 knowing me for what I am, as I have spoken myself to 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes, I mean just that. I am an American, so put 
 it, as you Spaniards do, to my American queerness, if 
 you like. I seldom travel about with a maid. A maid 
 in travelling is a nuisance. But I really need one for my 
 stay in Paris. There, a woman does not quite like to be 
 quite alone. I go to Paris to-morrow." 
 
 " '/ go to Paris to-morrow'!" cried Dulce, her hands 
 unconsciously lifting to her heart with her staring repeti-
 
 Plaza de Toros 113 
 
 tion of the words. "Dio mio, but there is fate in 
 this!" 
 
 "I like you," said the American's quiet voice. "Sitting 
 here as if you were a fixed study for some kind of an 
 artist, and yet unaware of it, you have interested me, I 
 would like to know your story, and to help you. But first 
 of all, I need a good maid for Paris and I detest French- 
 women as maids. 'Detest' is a thoughtless word. I 
 mean something politer and worse. Simply, they are 
 lady-maids, not ladies '-maids. Remember that, when the 
 time comes for you to choose one for yourself which it 
 very likely will, for I can see you are diestra, which we 
 call in English 'clever.' What you do not know, you 
 will learn quickly. Will you go?" 
 
 Dulce was trembling. "Holy God, but there is fate in 
 it! I am mad on the subject of words, and that word 
 'diestra,' 'clevairr,' is one that I have forever used about 
 myself ! There is fate in words !" 
 
 "In this one," said the American, smiling, "this diestra, 
 you Spaniards have a second meaning, that of 'right 
 hand,' the same as your mano derecha. Such things, we 
 poor Americans learn in our conventional, terribly cor- 
 rect lessons in Spanish, or French, or well, we would in 
 Hebrew too, I suppose; and they stay in our minds, in- 
 stead of enough grammar. About 'diestra,* you would 
 have to be my right hand, you see. The fate in it, there- 
 fore, might be a hard one !" 
 
 Dulce was still trembling, and more than ever. 
 
 "Hard or not, senora, there is fate in this ! For one 
 thing, this fact that you hunt for meanings in words, as I 
 do!" 
 
 "You go then?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 They went from the dusking arena, out into the great 
 way of the Street of the Cortes. It was the day's twilit 
 hour in which Dulce had joyously traversed it on her long 
 way home from Mont Juich that seventh day, on which 
 God had restlessly unmade her world. Fair lights gleamed
 
 114 The Great Way 
 
 along it through the great bounty of the planeta trees. 
 The plaza at the foot of the arena was deserted. No 
 carriage was to be had. The American would not board 
 a tram. They walked. 
 
 At last the big Plaza of the Cataluna glittered ahead, 
 its glow shining sidewise into the Ramblas, its square 
 brilliance intensifying its own deep-green drooping palms 
 and hard, bright yellow dirt. They came into it crossing 
 the head of the lovely Ramblas. 
 
 "I stop at the Continental," said the lady. 
 
 "The Continental !" breathed Dulce, shrinking back. 
 
 They entered it, and went up to the woman's rooms.
 
 CHAPTER XVH 
 
 AN ENGLISH WORD 
 
 HERE they dined, the woman for a time as silent as the 
 girl easing her with silence; then, equally helping her 
 by casual speech. 
 
 "How do you wish me to dress ?" asked Dulce suddenly, 
 during dessert. 
 
 The answer was prompt. 
 
 "To start with, as my companion, not my maid. For 
 travelling, it is as well, I think. When we are settled in 
 Paris, differently, perhaps. We will see." 
 
 "I have some very handsome bits of this and that 
 in a box near-by," said Dulce. "I am rapid, and what we 
 have called clever, at things of the sort; and if you care 
 to send a porter as far as the Calle del Carmen for it, you 
 might approve of something I could slap together. As I 
 am, I look like the devil or to be exact, a tramp." 
 
 "I had thought," said the woman, "that you might wear 
 something of mine. But of course you shall have your 
 box." 
 
 "Let us try the box first," said Dulce. "There are 
 some things that I want to give you out of it, anyway." 
 
 The woman looked at her in surprise, but checked her 
 curiosity in silence. A porter was dispatched to the 
 address in the Carmen, and pending the box Dulce stirred 
 about the lady's wardrobe. 
 
 "Your trunks are how many? Four, That is not as 
 crazy as most Americans. And by the way, if my talk 
 is disrespectful forgive it for the present. I have never 
 been a maid before, you see, and to-night I am very, very 
 much excited." 
 
 115
 
 116 The Great Way 
 
 "Talk just as you choose," said the American. "It 
 will not offend me." 
 
 "May I be damned before I hurt your feelings, though," 
 said Dulce. 
 
 She was packing deftly, tenderly yet quickly. 
 
 **What underclothes you have! And I had always 
 thought that Americans were economical and tawdry 
 about such matters ! Some liar told me so ! You must 
 be wealthy. You have beautiful, expensive things, but no 
 faintest idea how to dress. The Queen of Spain spends a 
 hundred and fifty thousand francs a year on her clothes. 
 Poor thing, she is English, and German before that, and 
 has to. You see, I am particular to say francs, not 
 pesetas, because she. buys them in Paris. I will make you 
 look more a queen on next to nothing, later Paris, or 
 anywhere else." 
 
 When the box arrived she turned to it immediately, 
 as if to hasten a dreaded task ; but she paused, as she was 
 lifting the cover, to say abruptly : 
 
 "By the way, you intended to pay me some wages, I 
 suppose?" 
 
 A little embarrassed colour came into the American's 
 cheeks, a little disappointment into her eyes. 
 
 "Of course. I had thought we would discuss it later, 
 that is all. I intended to give you exactly what you con- 
 sidered fair and right." 
 
 "I thought so," said Dulce. "That is just your charac- 
 ter. You are hopelessly extravagant. What with rail- 
 road fares, and my keep in hotels, you ought to have me 
 for nothing, with perhaps a little bit over to indulge my 
 pride, and for the sake of business. How much did you 
 pay for that hat, for instance?" 
 
 The American's eyes were struggling with a smile. 
 
 "A hundred francs, I think." 
 
 "There you are," said Dulce. "It was never worth 
 fifty. If I had been with you, the shopman's face would 
 have been well slapped. You see, living in Catalonia here, 
 even we southern Spaniards get to be great bargainers, in
 
 An English Word 117 
 
 self-defence. Though I will say for myself, having told 
 you the worst of me I could, that in my own terrible 
 business I never did, not once, make a brawl about the 
 money part. Something inside me, stopped me abso- 
 lutely. But to consider what would become of you in the 
 Tr in the same circumstances of course, the thought 
 sounds absurd, because at your age you never could start 
 such an outrage, quite aside from the positive tornado in 
 your mind that I can see my mere thinking aloud has writ- 
 ten on your face. Only, what you said to me to-day about 
 my likely enough having my own maid some day, was a 
 very deep, true thought, whether you were deep about 
 it at the moment or not. For things can change com- 
 pletely about, for anybody as an instance, and simply 
 another form of the same involved matter, a man might 
 honourably marry you and take every cent of all your 
 money, and you would have to be somebody's maid. Never 
 mine, even for the sake of poetry, because after what you 
 have done to-day I would simply give you the maid-money 
 to live on till you could sue him for it back, and hell 
 take pride, and him. But none of this could happen 
 to-night, or to-morrow, and what I started to say was, 
 that whatever wages you meant to give me, you must lessen 
 somewhat as a matter of business, for I intend to learn 
 English out of you, which is not your fault. For in- 
 stance, what would you call all this my being your maid 
 out of a clear sky, and going to Paris with you? I am 
 morbid on the subject of English, on account of a love- 
 matter of my own, and I want to know." 
 
 "Why, I suppose," said her mistress with gentle hesi- 
 tation, "that we would call this your 'instalment. 5 I 
 can think of no other word to fit exactly what I think 
 you mean." 
 
 "Thank you," said Dulce, turning back to the box. 
 "Instalment." And she began to bring forth the contents 
 in batches : "Instalment." "Instalment." "Instalment." 
 "Instalment," until everything was piled upon the floor; 
 her mistress the while considering, and deciding against,
 
 118 The Great Way 
 
 any interruption of her earnest study by reference to the 
 word's chance concern with her chance action. 
 
 As her servant spread forth the Manila mantons, the 
 lady's combined silent tenderness and amusement were 
 lost in an ejaculation of delight. 
 
 "They are for you," said Dulce. "These, and those 
 candlesticks, are what I spoke of." 
 
 "Mio Dios, girl!" cried the American. "You " 
 
 "Do not offer to pay for them," said Dulce calmly. 
 "Make me the favour not to. Dio mio, but you have been 
 good to me ! And these three, anyway, I could not sell 
 nor the candlesticks. They were in my family. They are 
 very valuable. My mother and father, if they had had 
 the pleasure of your acquaintance, would probably have 
 told you I stole them. But that would have been a lie. 
 I had them from my grandmother, who really loved 
 me." 
 
 She was talking against the woman's protests, and fold- 
 ing the rich fabrics into one of her trunks. 
 
 "There is no way out of it you see I have no trunk, 
 so that even what does stay mine must go into your 
 luggage. While as to the meaning, the sentiment-angle, 
 such others as I had, that I could sell, I did sell, and was 
 quick about it, too. I had had them from the junk- 
 market here. Among them, even one that I had planned 
 should become dearest of all, dearer than its worth that I 
 screeched the junk-market out of, dearer than any family 
 or anything but well, thought of family, and all from 
 the mere touch to it of of an American boot, by the 
 way. When that little plan failed, it happened to be 
 midnight, an hour when the junk-market was closed, so, 
 knowing something about hunger and those yonder not 
 to be done for that way, I sold them with it to the old 
 woman who runs the Carmen house I lodged in. One 
 must be practical for instance, so far as family is con- 
 cerned, those that I have put in your trunk you could sell 
 for food, and no second thought about it. My family 
 a sister, and a rude one, in Sevilla and yours, are con-
 
 An English Word 119 
 
 tinents, not to mention drawing-rooms, apart. Make me 
 the favour to think as I do about them." 
 
 The American woman's voice was very low, though clear, 
 and gentler than ever, as she said: 
 
 "It will be decided later." 
 
 "It is settled," said Dulce, startling the woman less 
 with her decisiveness than with her grasp and intentional 
 use of the word her mistress had somewhat arduously 
 picked from her Spanish for reference to their stay in 
 Paris. And the girl's next speech made another surprising 
 jump. 
 
 "May I call in the room-maid for a purpose?" 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 Across the bed Dulce placed a hat, a gown, fresh linen, 
 from the pile; and into her mistress's trunks the rest of 
 the finer linens. All the remaining gaudy confusion on the 
 floor she threw back into the box. The room-maid had 
 entered. Dulce turned to her. 
 
 "Answer me this, girl, and speak truthfully. You are 
 poor?" 
 
 "Very, senorita." 
 
 "And good ? Or for that reason bad ? Speak truthfully 
 again, now!" 
 
 The girl flushed, speechless from either surprise or anger 
 or from both. 
 
 "Well, well, your face answers, clearly enough," said 
 Dulce. "Now, I know all about such matters, so be honest 
 with me, and do your part of a bargain. Take out that 
 box, and everything in it is yours. Quite a little value 
 is inside it, and for your sort, more than a little. Take it 
 all; and in return, for my sake for my sake, I tell you 
 to the money value of it as close as you can figure, stay 
 good for a while. You understand me. I can see that you 
 do. Take it ? and mind you obey !" 
 
 When the startled maid was gone, she found the Amer- 
 ican regarding her with quizzical, half-closed eyes ; yet 
 eyes that had none of the languor of drooped lids, had
 
 120 The Great Way 
 
 much that was further-reaching than quizzical in their 
 questioning thoughtfulness. 
 
 "You are a strange girl !" she said. 
 
 "Very," said Dulce. "I have often said so myself." 
 And she added, in her abrupt manner: "It happens to be 
 another of my favourite words about my own character. 
 And speaking of that, what would be your word in English 
 for what I did to that girl just now? Or by means of 
 her, rather? You saw and heard what I did, but I will 
 explain it to you a little, and perhaps then you can 
 tell me the word. I paid her, you see, and what I paid 
 was the first French franc, or Methican peso, or so, of a 
 great big debt that I have to pay. Now, what would you 
 call that?" 
 
 The American pondered, biting her lip in her serious- 
 ness of thought, for she knew by now that with this girl, 
 at this striking hour of her strange spirit, words were 
 serious matters, deep as waters, powerful as wines. 
 
 "Why, my girl," she said at last, "strangely enough .it 
 is the same word that I told you before with a different 
 meaning. I have already thought of this, for so it applied 
 to your portions of things as you piled them on to the) 
 floor. But now, concerned especially with money, it is 
 much more perfectly to the point, and is the same word 
 exactly, and the only one I know in English for it 'in- 
 stalment' !" 
 
 Dulce stared at her incredulously for a moment, then 
 sat down almost dazedly on the edge of the bed. 
 
 "I knew there was a lot in words," she said. "I told 
 you there was fate in all of this !" 
 
 In the bright morning, in the Estacion de Francia, she 
 trembled so violently that her mistress wondered; and 
 helped her, rather than received her help, into the train. 
 ... It was from this place, probably at this hour, that 
 he had gone . . . perhaps, in this very car. . . . 
 
 As with a jolt of its couplings it drew from the yard 
 her heart, too, jolted; but she looked out of window and
 
 An English Word 121 
 
 with the motion, and the softness of the grey-damasked 
 luxurious compartment, she grew gradually calm. 
 
 Away from the sea, past the giant skeleton of the new 
 cathedral, past the ruined castle back of Mataro, on away 
 from Mataro itself, on away from Caldetas, into the green 
 and yellow hills, the long train ran twisting, twisting, 
 twisting, twisting; but with its iron nose forever sniffing 
 toward Paris.
 
 CHAPTER XVHI 
 
 THE WORLD'S HEART 
 
 THEY had understood each other's name Dulce, Mrs. 
 Rugg and in some part, history, by the time they were 
 "settled" in Paris, in a hotel turned just off the Avenue 
 de 1'Opera, at one of the city's unceasing angles, in the 
 rue de 1'Echelle, their windows gazing down to the Palais 
 Royal and its endless traffic, which Dulce's enthralled 
 eyes drank up in fascinated awe. 
 
 "Settled" was the lady's term for their domestication, 
 in its own English now, instead of roundabout in her cas- 
 tellano, for by now she had sensed as well as known the 
 girl's avidity for foreign words, yet was still to be ever 
 and anon startled by the swift intuition and extraordinary 
 memory which, she found, had led them before the close 
 of a week into a grammarless jargon of Spanish and 
 French patterned with bold grotesques of American ver- 
 nacular. 
 
 As to their understanding of the two names, it gave 
 on to marked differences of feeling. Mrs. Rugg was 
 pleased with Dulce's, and commented prettily that she 
 deserved it. * 
 
 "That," said Dulce, "has been mentioned before," and 
 she rambled into an account of Simpatica, and thence 
 into other reminiscences of the holy little town in the foot- 
 hills so near the Mountain of the Grail; and in turn her 
 mistress, who had climbed Montserrat, told Dulce of its 
 wonderful legend. 
 
 "How ignorant I am!" exclaimed Dulce. "Now, evi- 
 dently of all things in my own country, I should have seen 
 that! Just as you say you are ashamed to know the 
 
 122
 
 The World's Heart 123 
 
 bull-fight, not because it is such a lot of blood, but because 
 you have never seen Niagara Falls, which is such an un- 
 common amount of water !" 
 
 And she asked innumerable questions about everything 
 else that even approached the United States. 
 
 "I do not say 'America,' you see. I am not so stupid 
 about geography as the man at the bull-fight that you 
 mentioned. There are many Spaniards just like him, who 
 think that California is Manila, and Canada Methico. 
 You can scarcely blame them, for the mere shape of this 
 world is confusing to a vulgar mind. But I am differ- 
 ent. I know the Estados Unidos when I hear them 
 talked of! And if Spaniards may believe one-tenth of 
 what they do hear talked of, things are certainly very 
 different over there. Society things. Marriages, for in- 
 stance. We I mean Spanish aristocrats, and I am at 
 least a fraction of one think your customs about mar- 
 riages very free and shocking. But for my own part, I 
 think that if we were more like you and lovers knew a 
 great deal about each other I mean within reason, of 
 course before they got married, it would save a lot of 
 unhappiness afterwards. Americans hate our strict way, 
 and I really cannot blame them. Let me tell you, for 
 instance . . ." 
 
 Mrs. Rugg thought herself listening, but so intent had 
 become her gently studious gaze upon the girl's features 
 that for a few moments she realized no vocal sense. As 
 if there were indeed some active virtue in the white witch- 
 craft of crystal-gazing, and her maid's dark eyes were 
 crystals, she seemed to see in them staidly moving figures 
 of young girls and old duennas, duennas no poor little 
 family of little Cadiz could afford, and it was with a 
 feeling of startlement for her that the syncopation of 
 Dulce's small meandering recital was ended by an abrupt 
 leap of the girl's speaking mind back to the United 
 States again: 
 
 "Now, what would have happened in such a case in the 
 United States, Mrs. Mrs. Rr r "
 
 124 The Great Way 
 
 Despite her quick gift for words, she had great diffi- 
 culty with Mrs. Rugg's harsh name, a fact which in this 
 instance rescued the American from the difficulty of an 
 answer. Dulce's sensitive ear could not quite grasp the 
 two g's, and written out, their defiance of the Spanish 
 alphabet overpowered her completely. When in addition 
 she learned the name's meaning, she became more dissat- 
 isfied than ever. 
 
 " 'Rug* !" she exclaimed in Spanish. "Who ever heard 
 of such a thing for a pretty woman? You should be a 
 Turk! Still, it is part and parcel, I suppose, with your 
 being an 'Americana,' which means a jacket, and a man's 
 at that the coat of his business-suit. I suppose the 
 hideous things were invented in your country. Well, I 
 admit it would seem odd for a gentleman to wear velvet 
 trousers and a sash to the Bourse. ... I had no such 
 thought when I suggested a plan with a dreadful lie in it 
 about the Bourse one time. . . . And I admit, too, that I 
 have seen an American suit that I loved very much, and 
 that I suffered when I saw the coat slashed up. . . . But 
 Rr r 
 
 Finally, she abandoned her efforts altogether, and called 
 her nothing at all, until several days later, when she sud- 
 denly christened her mistress "Dona Rina." This was 
 upon her having learned that Rina was Mrs. Rugg's first 
 name. 
 
 "I have been trying to think something out," she said. 
 " 'Dona Rina' sounds as if it were one word, some espe- 
 cially pretty Spanish name, but 'Dona,' of course, is a 
 title, so that it really has a lot of respect in it." 
 
 Mrs. Rugg smiled as the American's multiplying inter- 
 est in her curious companion doubtless would have allowed 
 her to smile no matter what address she had adopted. 
 This interest of the older woman's had been quickened 
 by one detail very early in their association Dulce's 
 prompt estimate of her: 
 
 "I know what you are you are tediosa. Ennuyte
 
 The World's Heart 125 
 
 Bored. No?" And the shot had gone appropriately 
 home. 
 
 "I am not really, Dulce. With my own circumstances, 
 yes. Not with things, however. I am interested, inter- 
 ested, interested. In you, for example." 
 
 "I understand perfectly," Dulce had said. "I know, 
 exactly what you mean by 'things.' 7 am a 'thing,' beyond 
 doubt. But exactly what kind, God knows, and when I 
 find out, I will be very interesting indeed. Om will bet! 
 Did that make sense?" 
 
 She said this with a seriousness that in some degree 
 was forever with her, and that would deepen, for long 
 hours together, into a sombre spirit that turned the Amer- 
 ican's pleasure in her to positive pain. But she never over- 
 urged her confidence. The girl's history and its acute 
 spiritual significance to her seeped out little by little 
 in abrupt small philosophies betraying the far tangents 
 of her brooding mind, and in long passionate silences that 
 in idle hours would come upon her and set her lips tight 
 and darken her eyes to a dull, mystic black. 
 
 "I wish I could help you, Dulce," Mrs. Rugg would say, 
 coming up behind her. 
 
 "Perhaps you could, Dona Rina, if only I could help 
 myself a little first. I think, somehow, that I will under- 
 stand presently. Anyway, the gypsy said I would, and 
 at once up you pop like a Punch and Judy show and fetch 
 me to Paris. So doubtless I am intended to find here 
 what I am hunting for. There is fate in it. I think you 
 can tell me a lot, as soon as I know what to ask you. 
 The trouble is there." 
 
 "You should not brood so much. Shall we go out, 
 Dulce?" 
 
 "Yes," and Dulce would dress them both for the street, 
 herself as "companion" still, not servant, and they would 
 fall upon the shops. 
 
 At first, despite the luring regal glitter of the rue de 
 la Paix and the Parisian uniquity of the great circling 
 boulevards, she had feared the streets, suffused with a
 
 126 The Great Way 
 
 dread of glimpsing, even of meeting face to face, the 
 sovereign of her strange thoughts. But as the intricate 
 vastness of the spider's-web of Paris dawned more and 
 more upon her imagination, she lost, gradually, the sense 
 of this danger, and with awakened inquisitiveness began 
 to involve her mistress in assaults of shopping that evolu- 
 tionized the American from chrysalis to butterfly one 
 that lit fearfully upon its purse now and then, only to 
 find this remarkably undepleted. 
 
 "You are a marvel, Dulce !" 
 
 "I told you I would be, Dona Rina. You are as pretty 
 as I am, now. By the way, is that offensive?" 
 
 Mrs. Rugg laughed and coloured. 
 
 "From anyone else, it would be tragic. But I seem to 
 understand the things you say, and how you say them. 
 You hurt me precisely once, and I was not offended, really, 
 then." 
 
 **What was it Dona? I will punish myself, you may 
 be sure !" 
 
 "I do not wish you to punish yourself. It was that 
 night in Barcelona. You said I had no faintest idea how 
 to dress. It hurt because it was true. You have proven 
 it now, and repaired it, too." 
 
 "I must be more careful of my tongue," said Dulce, 
 reflectively. "For I long, Dona Rina, literally long, to 
 be a lady to be a lady in every possible way. And I 
 have the instincts, I think. For instance, on the train 
 . . . when that wicked old merchant with the wife and 
 babies in Stuttgart insulted us at Toulouse and tried to 
 stay in our compartment. Now, knowing me, as you do, 
 for what I am or was, rather who was I to resent it 
 as I did? One would naturally suppose that I would have 
 been perfectly vulgar and taken it as a matter of course, 
 whereas instead I was absolutely an outraged patrician, 
 telling him he would roast in hell, the baboon. Do you 
 remember?" 
 
 "I shall never forget !" said Mrs, Rugg. 
 
 Day after day, they would drive for successive hours,
 
 The World's Heart 127 
 
 the woman intent upon the girl's masked yet graphic 
 mind as it absorbed the inexhaustible panorama. Dulce's 
 lips would be most silent when her eyes most spoke. Mile 
 upon mile she would sit without speech, the eyes dreaming 
 as they drank. Once she said : 
 
 "It is the heart of the world, I think." 
 
 "You have a touch of the poeta in you, Dulce." 
 
 "I have indeed, Dona Rina. You have no idea how 
 much." 
 
 Then silence again, all the way home; that brooding 
 silence with the lips set, the dusky eyes far off, hot with 
 their battle of seeking. 
 
 To-day mistress and maid were happily aimless, ram- 
 bling like Spaniards from shop to shop in the Avenue de 
 1'Opera, looking rather than buying. They stopped at 
 the window of a music shop. 
 
 " 'Valse Brune,' " said Dulce, reading from a popular 
 song-sheet. "What soft words ! The French is pretty, is 
 it not?" 
 
 "I have kept telling you so, Dulce. Shall we buy the 
 song? Do you read music, Dulce?" 
 
 "No. Yes. I do not know. A little, when I have 
 heard a thing. Let me see. . . ." She moved on a step 
 and stood before a copy of the song that was laid open. 
 "Why, yes, I can ! And do you know what this is, Dona 
 Rina? It is my favourite song, the Apache waltz the 
 Cavalier de la Luna ! And I always thought it was a 
 Spanish song! We call it sometimes La Apache." 
 
 She began to hum it, following the notes with her eyes. 
 But suddenly, inexplicably, she found the eyes blind with 
 tears. Mrs. Rugg pressed her arm silently. She knew 
 that part of the story. And they walked on. 
 
 "There," said Dulce abruptly, as they stood on what 
 Mrs. Rugg termed an "isle o' safety," surrounded by the 
 whirling traffic of the Place de 1'Opera, "there, Dona Rina, 
 is the most beautiful building in the world. Little as I 
 have seen of the world, there is no doubt of it. It is 
 ravishing!" And she nodded toward the Opera.
 
 128 The Great Way 
 
 "You may go to Rome some day," said Mrs. Rugg, 
 "and think as the Romans think of some of their buildings. 
 Still, I will not really dispute you." Presently they were 
 passing round the side of it, by the big gilded statue, 
 and Dulce, in her inevitable craving for new words, halted 
 them before the small opera-poster. 
 
 " 'Melba' ! What a lovely word ! That is absolute music 
 in one word. Is it a great singer?" 
 
 "The greatest in the world, most people think. Shall 
 we hear her, Dulce ?" 
 
 "Holy God, yes!" And they hastened to a ticket 
 agency. 
 
 "Now, if I were a great singer," said Dulce as they 
 came out, ."/ would certainly have trouble finding a name 
 as pretty and liquid as that for myself . . . Nellie 
 Melba," and she lilted the two words, correctly, and with 
 exquisite tenderness. "But I should find it somehow. . . . 
 I am always clever at such matters." 
 
 They were hesitating on the sidewalk in the sunshine, 
 bereft of object, and once more stalled by the whirlwind- 
 whirlpool of traffic sweeping into the Place from the 
 boulevards. 
 
 "The Ramblas are a bit like them. Suppose we go to 
 the Luxembourg Gardens, Dona Rina, and see the autumn 
 flowers again Spain has flowers, but nothing like that 
 intentional luxury at the Luxembourg !" 
 
 The American had fallen into a habitual recourse to her 
 whimsical leadership, giving her a loose rein of caprice, 
 which in Dulce's hands was always guided by some earnest, 
 unspoken mood; and accordingly they wandered, afoot, 
 across the island and through the old quarter to the 
 Luxembourg, and in among the luxurious rows of thou- 
 sands of chrysanthemums and asters and geraniums. 
 
 "What a city !" breathed Dulce. "Just look at all this, 
 that everyone can see without even the asking ! How they 
 think, here, of the people! Or, is it the people that does 
 the thinking?" 
 
 "You make me think," said Mrs. Rugg.
 
 The World's Heart 129 
 
 "See, it is already closing time, Dona Rina. I meant to 
 ask you something here in the gardens, but I got think- 
 ing instead. Suppose we go down into the little garden 
 on the cathedral island, and watch the sunset. We will 
 not be turned out of that. . . . And I am anxious to ask 
 you this thing." 
 
 So they walked back, and half across the Pont Neuf 
 onto the Cite, and Dulce led eagerly down through the 
 bridge into the diminutive Garden of the Vert-Galant. 
 They found themselves alone in it with the dimming trees, 
 the great glinting breasts of the Seine gliding by. The 
 great heart of the world was beating beyond them and 
 above them with streams of traffic, like giant corpuscles, 
 rushing through its arteries in the dusk, as they sat 
 quietly watching the last lavender streaks of sunset and 
 the silver reflections of the bridge-lights in the water. 
 
 "May I ask you this question, Dona Rina?" 
 
 "Make me the favour to, my dear." 
 
 Dulce pressed her hand at this first word of spoken 
 affection. 
 
 "There could be no better place to ask it, Dona Rina. 
 . . . This pretty little park, here at the very point of 
 the old island in the middle of this wonderful town, seems 
 to me to be the very heart of the world's heart . . . and 
 what I wish to ask you is this: Dona Rina, what is the 
 meaning of 'Society'? The meaning of the word? Not 
 fashion. I know that meaning. And not a certain class 
 of people, high or low or medium. I understand that. But 
 just Society? The word itself, with a capital, say, and 
 no 'el' or 'la' or 'le' or 'the' in front. What is the 
 signification of it? I use a long word there, and I think 
 I do correctly, for I have been thinking this question out 
 for a long time. Since even before I knew you. What is 
 it, Dona Rina?" 
 
 "I I will try to answer you, Dulce," said the elder 
 woman; and she fell silent, hunting for words. 
 
 "I have heard," Dulce went on, "the expression 'A debt 
 to Society.' Well, I can understand that, so far as the
 
 130 The Great Way 
 
 debt goes. As you must know, I owe such a debt. ... A 
 frightful one. ... So much I know perfectly well. But 
 what M this thing, Dona Rina, that I owe it to?" 
 
 "It is a hard, hard question, Dulce." Mrs. Rugg's 
 voice was low, and more gentle than her servant had ever 
 heard it before, and with a touch of trouble in it. "Dulce, 
 I too have a story, and I too owe a debt, thougli the 
 story is different, and therefore my debt, I suppose, must 
 be different too. I was married, you know for certain 
 little dry facts about me you naturally do know ; and my 
 husband is alive, which is quite news to you. I I kicked 
 him out, Dulce, and to kick a man out is a terrible thing 
 to have to do. ... I had to. . . . Well, that tells you 
 nothing, except that necessarily it means some dreadful 
 chapters in my life, dreadful teaching chapters, teaching 
 unsuspected things of oneself, and of others ; and that 
 therefore thereby I probably understand something of 
 this problem of yours, and of your effort to know just 
 what it is you owe, and what you owe it to, and just how 
 to pay it. Society, dear, first of all, is people, just 
 people and what you, dear, owe to 'just people' I can- 
 not say. It is too big and personal a thing for me to 
 dare to put my hands on if I could. But what everyone 
 with any power, any power and any brains combined, 
 owes to People, or Society, is, I suppose, what we call 
 'the greatest good to the greatest number.' Does that 
 convey anything to you? Does that help, even a little, 
 Dulce?" 
 
 "Yes !" cried Dulce gladly. "Yes, yes ! 'The greatest 
 good to the greatest number!' That is a wonderful 
 phrase !" 
 
 "How to do that greatest good, Dulce, I do not know 
 even in my own case. Because, I guess, I have lacked 
 power, lacked even direction of myself, and never so much 
 as struggled to know what was right for me to do, as you 
 are struggling. If I had, I might be of some value to 
 'Society* now, for I have always been thirsty for knowl- 
 edge not of persons, Dulce, but of People. See how we
 
 The World's Heart 131 
 
 come around in a circle to that word ! I remember when, 
 I was a small girl just able to delve in books, I used 
 to wonder and wonder, as I read story after story, 'Why 
 is it that nobody tells stories about People? About 
 Peoples?' And such stories histories, Dulce have been 
 written. Yet books, even such books, have never held the 
 answer to my own problem. For to me, they were still 
 just stories, fascinating stories, from which I learned 
 only that the answer was somewhere in my own soul, and 
 nowhere else. And there, Dulce, I have been too cowardly 
 to hunt. . . . You, dear, are brave. You are hunting* 
 there in your own soul nobly, unafraid." 
 
 Darkness, full darkness spotted only with golden and 
 silver lights like strings of stars, had closed in upon them 
 as they sat in the little garden between the coursing 
 waters. 
 
 "I am afraid, but I have got to hunt there,*' said Dulce, 
 simply. 
 
 "Why, Dulce?" Mrs. Rugg asked it in an almost 
 frightened whisper. 
 
 "Or go mad," said Dulce, as if she had not heard 
 her.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE HOUSE OF THE GREAT VOICE 
 
 THEY went early to the Opera, and from above the great 
 stairway looked down upon it and the arriving crowds. 
 Dulce's eyes were wide with an astonishment that turned 
 gradually to silent rapture as Dona Rina guided her 
 through the promenades. She feasted on the painted 
 walls, the gorgeous ceilings. She insisted upon dragging 
 Mrs. Rugg down the whole great stairway again . . . and 
 up again . . . and through the glittering promenades 
 again. "I have never seen anything so lovely ! No, even 
 the outside did not hint it !" 
 
 At last she consented to go back to their seats. 
 
 "No, you must sit at my right hand, Dona Rina 
 remember you said I was to be your 'mano derecha.' Then 
 I can get at the back of your neck better if those three 
 hairs flop out again. Well, well, sitting down we cer- 
 tainly look as well as these Frenchwomen, anyhow. Our 
 gowns are pretty! Do you remember the row I had to 
 make them cut mine low enough? And that was not on 
 account of my character, Dona Rina, truly. It was 
 purely because I really am rather lovely in that direction, 
 so why not? Now, being all ready and waiting for the 
 curtain, and with no one more to step on us what would 
 you call that? Would you call that 'settled,' too?" 
 
 "Yes," said Mrs. Rugg, emphatically, "and something 
 else is 'settled, too' that you are going to stay with me 
 for the rest of my natural life." 
 
 "I would like to, Dona Rina," said Dulce gravely. 
 "But how can one tell? The only thing that never fails 
 to stay with you straight through life is fate. Fate was 
 
 132
 
 The House of the Great Voice 138 
 
 at the bull-fight. Fate may be here at the opera to- 
 night." 
 
 "Have you been often to the opera, Dulce?" 
 
 "Yes, quite often. Once at Madrid, with the man who 
 but I told you all that. And frequently in Barce- 
 lona, at the Liceo." 
 
 "You have heard Boheme before, then?" 
 
 "No, never Boheme. Traviata, and Carmen several 
 times Carmen. And quite a few Italian ones besides 
 Traviata. Carmen is by a Frenchman, is it not? That 
 is very strange. It is strange, to begin with, that we have 
 no Spanish operas. For we are a musical people, right 
 through our bones, and love music, I think, much more 
 than these French appear to. Yet we write no great 
 operas. We cannot live without music in the streets, day 
 and night. And here, there is no street music, although 
 they wrote Carmen. If they can do that, why no music 
 in the streets? Perhaps they love flowers more. Paris 
 seemed very hollow and empty to me, till I realized what 
 the trouble was." 
 
 The opera began. 
 
 Dulce listened, instantly and continuously, as if she 
 were a dry sponge, and the sound water. Mrs. Rugg was 
 more intent upon Dulce than upon the music. She was 
 watching for the moment when the girl should hear the 
 first note of the great voice that was coming. And sud- 
 denly, Dulce started as with a spiritual shock. 
 
 A tremor went through her. Then she sat back like 
 some voluntary statue, soundless, motionless. . . . 
 
 At the fall of the curtain, she did not join in the 
 thunder. And when it finally died away, she turned briefly 
 to her companion. 
 
 "I I did not know there was anything in the world 
 (ike that ! I did not know that the whole Gran Via ever 
 gave one anything like that! May we walk in the cor- 
 ridors till the next act, Dona Rina, and look at the beauti- 
 ful stairway again? One must always be walking in one
 
 134 The Great Way 
 
 way or another Melba, for instance, hunting for that! 
 I I am very nervous." 
 
 "Then of course we shall walk, dear." 
 
 And once more they stood at a point giving on to the 
 famous stairway, in a corridor filled with slowly wander- 
 ing crowds to whose rich glitter Dulce had now turned her 
 back, for she was gazing down upon the beautiful ladder 
 of architecture as if the top of any ascending head might 
 be covering the fate she had talked of. 
 
 "Dona Rina," she murmured, "you have called me 
 'poeta,' and as a 'poeta,' I would call this, I think, 'The 
 House of the Great Voice.' ' 
 
 "Yes, dear," answered Mrs. Rugg gently. "And," she 
 added swiftly, "the stairway of it does deserve your 
 eyes !" 
 
 The last crisp words had been as instinctive as they 
 were quick, for the American, as if through the very 
 finger-tips which she had laid upon the girl's beautiful 
 naked shoulder, had felt eyes fastened strangely on the 
 white shining skin, and defensively, defiantly, Mrs. Rugg 
 was seeking those eyes. 
 
 When they met hers, they seemed to her to be of a 
 colour that was almost violet, that was peculiarly beauti- 
 ful in the shadow of the young man's heavy yellow hair; 
 they were filled, too, with a conflicting startlement and 
 doubt that made them pathetic, and it was with an almost 
 personal shudder at their power of fascination that she 
 launched at the man, in one long, fierce, daring stare, her 
 whole proud heritage of American womanhood, her whole 
 passionate protection of the unconscious girl beneath her 
 fingers. 
 
 His face flushed to a deep red. For one instant the 
 eyes seemed to plead with her to let him more fully see 
 the woman in the rich and elegant gown whom she was 
 covering from him. But Mrs. Rugg's eyes unyieldingly 
 drove him mercilessly back into the crowd from which he 
 had so suddenly stepped. She saw him offer his arm to a 
 young girl who was looking confusedly about near-by.
 
 The House of the Great Voice 135 
 
 With a last desperately endeavouring and unsuccessful 
 glance back of him, he was gone. 
 
 Dulce stood suddenly erect and turned to her. 
 
 "What is the matter, Dona Rina? I felt your fingers 
 trembling on me. Are you tired of seeing me star-gazing? 
 Shall we go back to our seats?" 
 
 They left the small lacuna of humanity where they had 
 stood amid the swarming surge, and drifted back with 
 the tide of crowds into the auditorium. When they were 
 again "settled," Dulce softly asked: 
 
 "Do you know, Dona Rina, why I used the word 'star- 
 gazing,' when I had been looking down? It it was 
 because I thought I might see him,. I imagine he must 
 be still in Paris somewhere. How human we are, always ! 
 Here I have been dreading that very thing, for one sight 
 of him would probably put me back, back, back along 
 the road I am trying to travel. And to-night I feel 
 fate so strongly in this house, that I think that marvellous 
 voice is leading me somewhere. I seem to feel each note 
 of it fetching me a step nearer what the gitana talked 
 of ... great crowds . . . and the voice, note by note, 
 seems to build up like a pyramid. . . . And yet, feeling 
 all that, feeling it like feeling a friend trying to urge 
 me along the Great Way, I had to stare down the beauti- 
 ful ladder, hoping for the terrible pain and set-back of 
 seeing him. And it was there I looked, because, in the 
 strangest way, I always seem to picture him as climbing 
 up toward me struggling up yet never reaching me, 
 for everything gets dark. Everything got dark in that 
 big well of the stairway for a moment. So now I am 
 trembling with anxiety to hear that voice again, Dona 
 Rina. There is light for me in that voice. I feel dark- 
 ness and fate in this house, yet that voice seems to light 
 up all the shadows of that big stage to me it seems to 
 light up those terrible dim canvas wings." 
 
 "Dulce," said Mrs. Rugg, her voice troubled, "I I 
 am glad to have you say that about being set back not 
 wanting to be. I begin to understand you so well, that I
 
 136 The Great Way 
 
 fear for you, with you; and just now, as you were looking 
 down 'the beautiful ladder,' I caught a man appraising 
 you I can call it nothing else, though to be just I think 
 he could not help it. And I was so frightened for you in 
 case you saw, that I glared at him glared him out of 
 countenance so that he slunk away. Was that an im- 
 pertinence to you, Dulce? Did I do right?" 
 
 "I thank you for it, Dona Rina Dona Rina dear" 
 said Dulce softly. There was sudden darkness in the 
 house. The act began. 
 
 Once, and then again, Mrs. Rugg heard her whisper to 
 herself: "Holy God! . . . Holy God!" 
 
 And thus the remainder of the play passed for them 
 almost in silence. 
 
 At breakfast the next morning Mrs. Rugg said: 
 "Dulce, I am going to Versailles this afternoon to a 
 friend's house. Shall you go? It is for you to decide." 
 
 Dulce hesitated a moment. "N-no, Dona Rina, I we 
 we would both be embarrassed." She added, after a 
 few moments : "Dona, there is no way for me to tell you 
 how good you are to me. Asking me to your friend's 
 house, for instance. But then, you know how good vou 
 are." 
 
 They were her first voluntary words since the close 
 of the opera. Her mood of silence had been deeper, more 
 painful to see, than ever before. Her brooding, mani- 
 folded, was upon her, suffusing her eyes with their hungry 
 look of troubled, speechless need, crying out in their dark 
 misty silence the desperate anxiety of her seeking. 
 
 "I have to go, Dulce, or I would not leave you as you 
 are to-day. I shall worry at your being alone. Unless 
 you will promise me to do something or go somewhere. 
 You have not been in the Louvre. Will you go there?" 
 
 "What is the Louvre?" 
 
 "That enormous building around the Tuileries gardens. 
 The museum. The greatest in the world." 
 
 "Oh, yes," said Dulce, listlessly. "I suppose I ought
 
 The House of the Great Voice 137 
 
 to go to it, now I am here. As I used to go sometimes 
 to the Prado. Yes, I will go there, Dona Rina." 
 
 "I think I shall drive to Versailles. I will drop you 
 at the entrance to the Louvre. With your 'touch of the 
 poeta,' Dulce, you are sure to enjoy it." 
 
 "If it is beautiful, of course I shall, Dona Rina." And 
 after luncheon Mrs. Rugg set her down at the entrance 
 from within the gardens. 
 
 "It closes at four, I think, Dulce. Anyway, you should 
 be home before me. Promise me not to go anywhere 
 else, Dulce!" 
 
 "I promise, Dona Rina." 
 
 "Remember how I would worry if you were not home. 
 Good-bye, dear." 
 
 "Good-bye, Dona Rina." 
 
 They had said the farewell in English, and the repeated 
 word stayed in Dulce's mind as the motor sped away. 
 She went into the great Palace as if her step through 
 the grey portal in some mysterious way were shutting 
 her in truth from her kind benefactress, and the thought 
 was strongly, unreasoningly with her as her eyes travelled 
 through her first careless, unstudied glance at the tre- 
 mendous hall. Only its size grasped her senses, and as 
 with a message of loneliness. 
 
 Then, as the perspective lengthened magically before 
 her vision, a little quick breath escaped her with a tangible 
 sound, and in one of the impulses peculiar to her she 
 went straight forward to a guard at the foot of the 
 big stairway, and addressed him in a quick mixture of 
 garbled French and Spanish. 
 
 "Friend, I am a Spaniard, but a few days at Paris. 
 What is the word in French for to hang? Comprend tu 
 moi? There is something here dans les halles ici 
 which is pendiente pendiente y gentil!" 
 
 "Ah, oui, mademoiselle !" said the guard suddenly ; and 
 he graphically raised his hands. "Gentil? Les articles 
 des arts ils sont tres 'gentil'! Est-il comme 9a, made- 
 moiselle ?"
 
 138 The Great Way 
 
 As she wandered on and up the broad stairway, a 
 curious thrill went through her, queerly recurring as she 
 climbed, sweeping through her again and again as her 
 slow, awed ramble first brought her to a halt before the 
 Victory, then bore her up and on, into one of the trans- 
 verse galleries, where the commingling colours of a thou- 
 sand pictures stretched glowing before her and around 
 her. She paused, again and again, breathlessly before 
 one and another and another till the overpowering sense 
 of too great luxury whirled her mind back to the Victory 
 and the quiet colour of its marble, and she tried to 
 retrace her steps. 
 
 But they were lost as a desert track under the wind. 
 She had turned somewhere . . . and forgotten . . . and 
 she was in a new gallery, its huge vista marching away 
 before her like the vast mystic spaces of a dream. 
 
 It seemed to her dazzled eyes and brain as though 
 miles of rich beauty were reaching endlessly, infinitely, 
 through the great house. 
 
 "It is a Gran Via in itself !" she breathed ; and these 
 words were to flash and re-flash in her memory like some 
 particularity of a beautiful gem's facet. On and on she 
 walked, bewildered more and more, her amazement grow- 
 ing from awe very near to fright ... on and on through 
 this great way, through the great rooms that a waiting 
 monarch had expectantly prepared for Catharine de 
 Medici, on and on through this house whose ravishing 
 accoutrement cried out aloud the rape of Europe for her 
 terrific wealths of form and colour, the form and colour 
 given to Spirit ... on through the amassment of beauty 
 representative of Peoples and of Time of years, cen- 
 turies, ages, epochs, of nations dead, alive, and dying. 
 . . . She was dumbstruck, beyond the one poor question 
 that rose and strove to speak through her striving, be- 
 dazed mind: "What does it all mean? What does it all 
 mean ?" 
 
 Fluctuations of spirit rose and fell in her, waves of a 
 strange joy never before tasted, surging through her soul
 
 The House of the Great Voice 139 
 
 productive with sensations of colour that seemed to be- 
 come sound ... as if she were in the glowing power of 
 a strong, unfamiliar wine. . . . 
 
 Yet, for all its oversweeping strength and strange- 
 ness, a wine with one element that was not unfamiliar, 
 that was in very essence familiarity, historically personal 
 familiarity. It was a golden intoxicant; and in it, 
 through it, had been detailed flashes: Murillos, superb, 
 superlative Murillos, but flashes too poignant to be quaffed 
 separately out of their rich vessels now, details truly, 
 only, in this greater, this huge vaporoso ubiquitous 
 here. . . . 
 
 On and on she walked still, marvelling with fresh glad- 
 ness at each recurrent sweep and throb of her emotion. 
 . . . Snatches of unformulated thought came to her, alive 
 again out of the mists of her early childhood, thoughts 
 early as any memories of the Paduan Francis on the wall 
 imaginative, wild little thoughts that had defied, as her 
 child lips had not dared defy, the fond, fervently fearing 
 old grandmother who had drawn, for that very early mindj 
 miracles and mysteries of her old, great Faith. They 
 were little, instinctive, fluttering thoughts, forgotten long 
 ago, but evidently not dead . . . not dead. . . . 
 
 On, on, through corridors of Egyptology into further 
 and still further rooms, rooms alive with more and more 
 of paintings, of pottery, of jewels, and furniture, and 
 fabrics, and more pictures, pictures, pictures. . . . 
 
 "And all this, all this, is here for People just People 
 for Society!" 
 
 As she breathed the words the queer new joy swept 
 over her once more. 
 
 "What does it mean? What does it all mean?" 
 
 She paused, with a little startled cry, in a gallery very 
 rich with Murillo again, and with Velasquez. 
 
 "So Spain really has given, too given so that it 
 counts, and shows ! Given forever, part of of This! 
 Thanks to God for that! Thanks to God!" Then she 
 went on, on, on in the silent glow and labyrinthine tumult
 
 140 The Great Way 
 
 of luxuriant colour, while through the great house a voice 
 seemed to gather and speak to her ... a vast, murmur- 
 ing, inarticulate voice, mysterious, miraculous, of sheer 
 spirit, yet which spoke, whispering to her intricately 
 sensitive mind, to her boundless susceptibility, with all 
 the beauty, all the music, of that great voice of the night 
 before. . . . Shadows crept along the Seine, yet Dulce 
 still crept through the dusking galleries, walking . . . 
 walking into this exquisite new-found life along floors 
 that Marie Antoinette had walked . . . lifting her head 
 the more to drink in her new-found life between walls at 
 sight of whose mere outside shell Marie Antoinette, trun- 
 dling to death, had bowed her proud head in memory of 
 all the hidden beauty, and wept. . . . 
 
 "We close, mademoiselle ! We close ! You must go !" 
 
 She was standing on the wide stairs again, breathing 
 in the marble softness of the Victory, the poised onrush 
 of its Samothracian wings. A guard was shaking her 
 by her shoulder, and presently she found herself, shaking 
 verily from shoulders to feet, in the dim gardens of the 
 Tuileries. She moved slowly to a seat beneath the 
 spectral form of a great naked woman's statue, and sat 
 down, quivering. 
 
 For a long while she sat there in the quick and quicker 
 darkness, breathing heavily, shivering heedlessly in the 
 chill night-wind of November that swept mercilessly 
 through the distant Arch of Triumph and down through 
 the whole length of the mammoth lane of gardens. 
 
 Suddenly she started up, turned toward the rue de 
 Rivoli, and began to run fearlessly, swiftly.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 "AT LAST i KNOW!" 
 
 MRS. RUGG had been nervously waiting in her room 
 and was standing, expectant, eagerly anxious, when Dulce 
 whirled in and swooped excitedly upon her. 
 
 "At last I know! Holy God, Dona Rina, at last I 
 know!" 
 
 "What is the matter, Dulce? You have frightened me 
 terribly! What is it?" 
 
 "My hunt is over, Dona Rina! At last I know!" 
 
 "Try to be quiet, Dulce! You must eat, dear you 
 may tell me later !" 
 
 And she paid no heed to the stream of ejaculatory 
 speech, but with "mistress" long forgotten she now 
 slipped through the transition from comrade to maid in 
 her own turn, and managed to take away the girl's hat 
 and wraps, to ring for wine, to make her drink it. 
 
 "See see what I bought for you, Dulce on the bed 
 there ! I was so nervous and frightened about you that 
 I had to go out and walk and walk, and I got this for 
 you the Valse Brune! I thought we would get in a 
 piano I can play a little. And you can sing it for me !" 
 
 But she could no longer stem the girl's dammed up 
 flow of words, and Dulce, her eyes madly lit, and her 
 dormant Latin gesture drawing her hands and arms into 
 rapid movement, sprang to her feet and broke into her 
 characteristic wild pacing of the floor. 
 
 "Dona Rina, I have got to leave you!" 
 
 "Leave me, Dulce? Dulce!" 
 
 "Yes ! Yes ! Let me tell you ! I have words at last ! 
 I have the word! It was all meant, Dona Rina! My 
 
 141
 
 142 The Great Way 
 
 meeting you, Paris, the Opera, the Louvre! Most of 
 all, the Louvre ! I found out there ! I found there what 
 I was hunting for. Thank God ! At last I know ! And 
 it was all but one little word, just one think of that! 
 Yet, it is exactly as if I knew a whole new language ! 
 That word is Art, Dona Rina, Art, do you hear? I 
 myself have heard it, and said it, hundreds and even 
 thousands of times, I suppose, and never knew what it 
 meant until to-day, when a great voice seemed to tell me, 
 there in the Louvre. . . . Even last night, when I heard 
 that great voice, I did not comprehend, though since I 
 have heard the greater one in the Louvre, the other comes 
 even closer home to me ! Do you think that I am crazy, 
 Dona Rina?" 
 
 "No, dear, no, but I am frightened!" 
 
 "You would not be frightened, Dona mia, if you under- 
 stood. So I will try to speak more slowly. For I have 
 the words now, and if I only can speak slowly enough 
 for you to hear them, you will understand ! Dona, 
 dear, dear Dona Rina, it is all as clear as glass to me, 
 now, this secret that I have been aching and straining 
 and eating my heart to find. That is wonderful, is it 
 not? Especially since the gypsy told me it would be so, 
 and that it would be in a great city, and that I must 
 leave the caravan at Barcelona, where instantly I meet 
 you! Dio, Dio, you know a lot about me, Dona Rina, 
 you know all of the story part. But let me tell you, the 
 rest of me I myself did not know until to-night !" 
 
 She sat down suddenly, after her old fashion in her 
 old poor room, on the edge of Mrs. Rugg's bed, but she 
 gave her listener no pause for answer. 
 
 "Just think, Dona Rina, of having a whole great palace, 
 and all its wonderful rich treasures, murmuring to you, 
 speaking to you, telling you their story and their mean- 
 ing! There in the Louvre, that miracle happened to me 
 a sheer miracle, just as straight from God, whoever 
 He is, or whatever He is. ... And part of the miracle 
 is, that I am not afraid to say such questioning things
 
 "At Last I Know!" 143 
 
 any more such questioning things as 'whoever,' and 
 'whatever.' Dona Rina, I am not afraid of a/nythvng 
 any more, except being bad. Just suddenly, I seemed to 
 understand, and I am not afraid! 
 
 "I am not even afraid of blood any more, since I heard 
 that voice, and you do not know what that is for a 
 Spaniard, Dona Rina, a Spanish girl born in the red 
 shadow of the convent ! 
 
 "No, I tell you that even as I say the words, I am 
 no longer afraid of blood, and the fearful idea of blood 
 sacrifice! In the bull-fight, yes, yes, it now, I think, 
 would horrify me there, where I never used to be afraid 
 . . . but in religion ? No ! 
 
 "Those are terrible words, perhaps, Dona Rina, but 
 not half so terrible as some that my my Jose Luis said 
 to me when I made him find words for for what I did. 
 He said it was 'Traffic in God,' and and that, Dona 
 Rina, is the only thing I have any fear of now!" 
 
 "And that, dear," said Dona Rina gently, "you need 
 never fear again oh, surely, surely !" 
 
 "Not only that, Dona Rina, but I know, now, how 
 to pay back for what I did how to pay back into Society 
 for what I stole from it. The great voice told me to-day : 
 Art. And the money I get from it but that part is a 
 small incidental matter between me and God, whereas 
 the art itself is a matter between me and the People 
 'just people.' . . . Do you understand me a little, Dona 
 Rina?" 
 
 "Yes, yes !" cried the woman, her troubled eyes brim- 
 ming over as she spoke. "Yes! But why did you say 
 you were going to leave me, Dulce? I will help, my dear, 
 not hinder!" 
 
 "Dear, dear Dona, all that is fate!" cried Dulce. 
 "You know how strongly I feel fate, and I know what 
 I must do ! Last night began it began my waking up, 
 though I did not fully wake until to-day. At the Opera, 
 I was stirring and struggling in my sleep, pleading with 
 that voice to help wake me, but it took to-day's bigger
 
 144 The Great Way 
 
 voice to do so muchl Dona Rina, you do not know it, 
 and I myself never realized it before, but / have a voice, 
 a great voice, and I felt it and in my sleep knew it last 
 night, when that angel was singing and I had to sit hold- 
 ing tight to myself not to open my own throat, as she 
 would lift back her lovely white one as she does, and 
 sing with her! . . . And this afternoon, that greater 
 voice whispered to me what I could do with mine! You 
 see, Dona Rina, the Louvre and not the beautiful Opera 
 was the real House of the Great Voice. 
 
 "And whatever my own may be not Melba's, of course, 
 for God is never good to people, I imagine, twice exactly 
 alike whatever mine may be, / can put that other voice 
 into it that voice that cries out for People from the 
 walls of the Louvre!" 
 
 "I understand, Dulce !" cried Mrs. Rugg. "And I will 
 help oh, I will help ! For you are not going to leave me ! 
 And I am so glad that we are right here in Paris, the 
 most perfect place in the world for all such things we 
 will inquire and plan right away we will begin to-mor- 
 row !" 
 
 But Dulce shook her head sadly. 
 
 "The reason I must leave you, Dona Rina, is because 
 I must start all over again from the very beginning of 
 the road where I started out wrong and bad before, to 
 begin the work of all this. For the work is a terribly 
 big, hard work, and I must start quickly. It is like a 
 big pyramid that I must climb or build whichever way 
 you choose to call it. I see now what the gypsy meant. 
 Thank God I am clever, and have more brains than you 
 might think; and as for mere work, I can do the hardest 
 that could be thought of, and the greatest amount of it 
 that could possibly be piled up for me, so long as it 
 so long as it is is not what I used to do, Dona Rina 
 so long as I do not have to go to the the Trudge Market 
 any more!" Abrupt hot tears rolled down her face and 
 Mrs. Rugg impulsively sprang to her and folded her in 
 her arms.
 
 "At Last I Know!" 145 
 
 "You never shall need to, dear! And why is this 
 any reason that you should leave me? Remember how 
 I 'want to help you, how I am able to help you !" 
 
 But though Dulce raised her hands to tighten the warm 
 clasp of the arms about her, again she shook her head. 
 
 "No, dear, dear Dona Rina. It must be with no one's 
 money just by my own work. You have done enough 
 all that it was meant you should do. You have taught me 
 better than ever before that women are good to women, 
 and that has helped me to make a vow, that all my life 
 I too will be good to women, as well as I know how. 
 And I must not take your money, Dona Rina. What I 
 make and pay back must be utterly of my own mat- 
 ing." 
 
 "But," cried the distressed woman, instinctively seiz- 
 ing what straw of advantage she could from the tempest 
 of the girl's hectic splendour of reasoning, "remember 
 what you yourself said, Dulce, in Barcelona, that very 
 first night, sweet and pitiful and amusing then, but tragic 
 now if you repudiate it that if I were in need, you would 
 not let me be your maid, you would give, till I had won, 
 and and could pay back, which you did not say. How 
 much greater your case to fight, dear Dulce, how much 
 happier, afterward, your repayment! Be consistent 
 dear!" 
 
 "Ah, no, no, no, it is not the same case, dear Dona ! 
 Your very heart knows the nature of what there al- 
 ready is for me to repay! My Dona Rina, your heart 
 knows!" 
 
 "But how can you do all of this alone, Dulce? How 
 can you? How will you start how, where?" 
 
 "I do not know how yet. But it shall be at Cadiz." 
 
 "At Cadiz, Dulce? My dear, my dear, are you quite 
 mad?" 
 
 "Perhaps. I shall see it all quite clearly, and that 
 much I see now. I tramped out of Cadiz once on my 
 wrong Gran Via, and I shall tramp in again to start my 
 right one."
 
 146 The Great Way 
 
 "Dulce, Dulce," pleaded the weeping woman, "how can 
 it all end?" 
 
 "That, Dona Rina, even the gitana could not see. But 
 I must start over from the very beginning, that much 
 I know. I have money enough to get on the express to 
 Madrid, and there I can work, and earn my fare down 
 to Cadiz. A man was kind to me in Madrid once yes, a 
 man. He tried to stop me when well, when I was hungry 
 once. He will give me decent work, in a little oyster-shop 
 that he keeps." 
 
 "But, Dulce, your wages and the the candlesticks 
 and mantones " 
 
 "No, Dona Rina. Besides all I truthfully said and felt 
 about them, they are nothing to what you have given 
 me. And you know well you paid my wages long ago, 
 Dona Rina." 
 
 "But what shall I give you from myself, Dulce? I 
 know you will take no money will you take a jewel, 
 Dulce? Any jewel I have?" 
 
 "I will take simply what you bought for me, Dona 
 Rina, in your thoughtfulness, and when I was worrying 
 you, too the Valse Brune" 
 
 "Oh, Dulce; Dulce; you " 
 
 "I will never forget you. I never can! But that will 
 be a keepsake. Put your name on it. And your love for 
 me if you will. And that will be all.'* 
 
 "But you will write to me, Dulce? You will write?" 
 
 "It it is better not, I think. At first there wo aid 
 be only hard knocks to tell, and I I spell like the devil. 
 Dear Dona, we shall meet again in the Gran Via. I feel 
 it! There is so much fate in this, let fate attend to it 
 all ! That is how I feel, and I must start again absolutely 
 alone, as if I were starting for the first time. I must !" 
 
 Again tears came to Dulce, blinding her. And in this 
 moment of her passionate resolution her Dona, with all 
 that was hers, and that ached in her possession to be 
 given, fell powerless before it and had only tears to be 
 able to give.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE DISH OF SILVEK, 
 
 THE Mirage of Atlantis. . . . 
 
 The Queen of the Sea. . . . 
 
 The Garden of the Oceans. . . . 
 
 The Spanish Venice. . . . 
 
 Such is Cadiz, deserving all her list of names since 
 first she was the prodigal daughter of Carthage prodigal 
 in wealth, more prodigal of luxury. . . . 
 
 Luxury in which Hannibal lolled while his fleet decked 
 itself on the surrounding waters. . . . 
 
 Luxury in which Hamilca Barca, turning his back to 
 his unhappy child Salammbo while she wove herself into 
 the fatal meshes of Tanit's zai'mph at home in Africa, 
 stood with his keen eyes appraising Cadiz's riches as 
 Roman soldiers appraised her dancing-girls. . . . 
 
 Pompey and Caesar quarrelled over her, as if they had 
 been women and she what she then was called the Polished 
 Jewel. . . . 
 
 And as if the vast waters through which her shell- 
 stone rises were not enough of deluge, history deluged her, 
 again and again, with peoples : 
 
 Greeks. . . . Romans, naming her City of Venus. . . . 
 
 Arabs. . . . Moors, naming her Dish of Silver. . . . 
 
 And Spaniards, naming her every pretty thing that 
 they could think of. 
 
 Rich she has been, and poor, and wiped out, and re- 
 peopled, and forgotten, and famous again, swinging from 
 fortune to fortune like the pendulum of a clock until she 
 was entirely Spanish, and sank, not into the salt waters 
 whence she sprang, but into languor, like a passionate 
 woman satisfied and sleeping. . . . 
 
 147
 
 148 The Great Way 
 
 And there she lies yet, dreaming, perhaps, of younger 
 days and far-past loves, content, like her present nation, 
 in memories of treasures that made her, even so late as 
 when England lost her thirteen States, much richer, in 
 mere money, than London! 
 
 Even now, shimmering out of the blue ocean against 
 the blue sky in all the soft splendour of her white stone 
 and Italian marbles, which climb inward from the very 
 water's edge of low buttressed wall to the heart of her 
 diminutive self, blending and hiding her many hues in one 
 big gleaming white until, on close approach by ship or 
 across her narrow causeway between the waves, she unveils 
 her ageless beauty in fine pastel of pink and green and 
 blue and gentle yellows, patterned with the dark grace 
 of falling palms in rank and file and cluster, lies this 
 dreaming city. 
 
 Alas for salt water, symbol of grief and symbol of 
 calamity! yet all the salt water of the Atlantic has not 
 washed away the poem Cadiz; and thus, in poet's own 
 truth, she looks to-day, if to-day's sun is forth. . . . 
 
 Across the causeway, from the great peninsular on to 
 the little one, home to ihis prodigal daughter a prodigal 
 daughter returned, not with humility, yet with eyes furtive 
 somewhat, for in the sea-wind she tasted the poignant- 
 blowing breath of her nativity, which frightened her as 
 she walked trembling into the fair sunlit Plaza of Isabel. 
 
 It was early morning, and she was hungry. 
 
 At Madrid, she had found that her old friend of the 
 oyster-shop was no more or anyway, there no more; 
 he had gone into the Great Mystery of death, or else 
 the still greater one of the life of a retired oyster-opener. 
 And she had walked from the capital the very centre of 
 Spain to Cadiz. . . . Months. . . . 
 
 Her latest money was nearly spent, but that was no 
 new worry to her, and it was not at parting from them 
 that she turned pale as she set out two coppers, at a 
 wine-shop opposite the water-front, for some bread and 
 a small glass of russet-coloured Amontillado. It was
 
 The Dish of Silver 149 
 
 because she had known, since she was no higher than 
 the table, the friendly face of the old hombre who took 
 the coins with a courteous "gracias" for the fraction 
 bonus ; and that he went away, unrecognizant, brought 
 with the very pain of it a throb of thankful satis- 
 faction. 
 
 Deeper in the city, at a shop near to the cathedral, 
 she bought a fan for half a peseta, daring the face of 
 the woman behind the counter. Again she was not known, 
 though soap and lace and scent had met her coins here 
 throughout former years; and confident now, and with a 
 consequent little flutter of spirit, she bought a handker- 
 chief too though she noticed that it took her last real 
 to reinforce the fan in assisting her dingy costume, and 
 went boldly into the streets again, and through them 
 whereso she chose, unfearing though she carefully did 
 not choose the Rosario . . . where certain two old people 
 used to live. . . . 
 
 Her purpose was set, and clear to her vision as a fish 
 in crystal water, whether or no she might succeed in 
 grasping it ; but before the day's task, she had a pil- 
 grimage to make, devout and exacting in this new vision 
 of hers as any godly zealot's, and she pointed her steps, 
 by way of the Paseo del Sur, to the Capuchin Convent. 
 Having passed the vivid-coloured Shepherdess Virgin who 
 sits in a glass case with her large straw hat, and having 
 made a grave reverence to it for the warding nun's sake, 
 she entered the sanctuary and stood, with all the devotion 
 of a travelling foreigner, before the high altar, gazing 
 up at the rich soft beauties of the "Betrothal of Saint 
 Catharine" painted there. 
 
 All the miracle and wonder of the House of the Great 
 Voice came back to her, sacred like a confirmation in her 
 new understanding, her opened book. Here had Murillo 
 lived, breathed, worked. Here on this very spot, he had 
 stood, as she now stood, evening after evening as he made 
 and made this thing, gazing up at his labour . . . until 
 his own evening came and the fatal scaffold fell from
 
 150 The Great Way 
 
 before it, this his last great deed, the scaffold that he 
 had climbed smiling, martyrlike, for the life of the world's 
 history, dashing him down to death as she might one 
 day fall in her last song, in the last plunge of her Gran 
 Via. . . . 
 
 "Murillo, Spanish like myself, ignorant, at the begin- 
 ning, as myself, afterward living and dying in golden 
 glories of his own making out of Spanish air, and Spanish 
 colours and thoughts and emotions. . . . Gracias a Dios, 
 there are more great Spaniards ! . . . Thanks to God, 
 there will be one more still !" 
 
 And with this solemn seriousness of inward speech, she 
 paid the poor sweet-faced nun who tended not only the 
 door but the insane in the abandoned convent, paid the 
 waiting beggar in the courtyard, and was gone. Coppers, 
 even the very last ones how much they could pay for in 
 Spain ! 
 
 She was busy, afoot, for some hours, indefatigable in 
 persistent inquiries here, there, and yonder, throughout 
 the entire business part of town, but restricted to the 
 scattered, buried little world of the Teatro; and quite 
 early after midday she had a small fund of smaller talk 
 that flushed her pale cheeks with nervous eagerness, and 
 was hastening beyond the lovely Plaza de Loreto into 
 the quietest district of the city. 
 
 For all its eagerness and momentary flush, that face, 
 she realized with a pang, must prove little in her favour. 
 She had caught sight of it in the cracked mirror of an 
 eating-shop where she had talked, not eaten and had 
 the broken symbol frightened her, which it certainly would 
 have done, once, it could not have cast out a whiter 
 face, a face more hungry, more changed, more written 
 on of need, and pain, and unearthly, unyouthful queer- 
 ness. 
 
 But she thrust away the fretting memory of it, and 
 with set lips and resolute eyes marched into her street 
 and approached a house letting into a small, dead-looking 
 theatre.
 
 The Dish of Silver 151 
 
 At the door, however, sudden, overpowering timidity 
 whelmed her, and she leant against the masonry beside 
 it, thankful that the street was empty of eyes to see her 
 daring or her cowardice. It was a very small street* 
 Indeed, a very, very small street, a bakingly, shimmer- 
 ingly sunlit street, very narrow, of yellow housewalls, all 
 of them of delicate-coloured stucco, a street most notice- 
 ably secluded, solitary, quiet, not only because it was in 
 the most unfrequented district of the town, an outskirt, 
 or what might perhaps even better be called a cotillon 
 of Cadiz, but because it was not just high noon, but higher 
 noon, when it is far from well for folk to be out of 
 doors. The one beside which Dulce drooped was small, 
 but a matter of large decoration : twisted and beautifully 
 tinted columns and overpiece, marvellously old, flanked 
 and crowned its doorway as if this had sprung up from 
 the street and must be kept within the right bounds of its 
 place with as good looks as possible, and making a sole 
 and unconscious advertisement for the lost little theatre 
 by their show of fair pastel colours and lovely graceful- 
 ness of carven lines in the otherwise unbroken cream- 
 hues of the curving street. 
 
 To a happy person, the whole environ would have mur- 
 mured the word "Peace." To Dulce, it said "Need!" 
 with all the force of the sunlight, the sharp brilliance of 
 diamonds to the starving; and herself murmuring "Mi 
 Dio ! Mi Dio !" yet calling not upon God but upon a 
 god lately hers, the nameless, glittering god that had 
 seemed to shine down upon her in the convent of the 
 pitiful insane, she straightened back her drooping shoul- 
 ders and reached her hand toward the door. 
 
 But her hand did not reach it. Instead, it reached 
 her hand, bruising it and sweeping nearly by her face, 
 as though it had been hurled open by blind fury; and 
 Fury itself, not blind, but with eyes ablaze, and hot lips 
 cursing, issued into the street in a fat Spanish woman, 
 who was dressed in chic mourning and whose powder 
 was damp and red with rage.
 
 152 The Great Way 
 
 "Saint Catharine ! Saint Margaret ! Saint Mary 
 Magdalen ! Saint Hell !" she cried, and fell upon Dulce 
 as if the pale girl had been her hope, her friend, her sister, 
 and her husband. 
 
 "They are devils, devils, when I have spent eighteen 
 dollars for my costumes ! And they call me fat, fat! 
 Saint Swill! Do you think I was not fat when they 
 engaged me?" 
 
 "Senorita," said Dulce softly, judging her to be a 
 senora, "I assure you I am sorry for the injustice, for I 
 am a very sympathetic girl; and besides, I heard gossip 
 all over, this morning, of their brutality to you, and that 
 you would be no woman of spirit if you stood much 
 more !" 
 
 "And I will not!" cried the diva. "Let me tell you, I 
 have resigned every single day, and this time I mean it! 
 Do you believe me?" 
 
 Dulce seemed shocked. 
 
 "I would believe nothing else of any lady^ she said. 
 "Is there any little service I could do for you?" 
 
 "Yes. Go up and cut their throats for me!" cried 
 the diva. 
 
 "Well, I will do my best as to that, be sure, for I 
 have come to see the wicked things on business," said 
 Dulce. "Are you truly leaving them? Surely they will 
 send for you back again !" 
 
 "If they ask for my direction," exclaimed the large 
 singer, "tell them to go to purgatory, for that is where 
 they told me to go, and therefore, naturally, where they 
 will not find me! Thanks to God, I have spoiled their 
 opening for them here, if no further, for there is certainly 
 no one else like me in Spain, and it would not surprise 
 me if they took the boat back to Italy to-night, when 
 one is sailing, and picked some Neapolitan out of the 
 gutter. Are you looking for chorus? They are devils, 
 girl, but I wish you luck. If they go on at all without 
 me, they will need you and more !" 
 
 "You will make a great gap, I am sure!" said Dulce,
 
 The Dish of Silver 153 
 
 "And if your voice is as pretty as your face, you must be 
 a charming singer! What a pity for them to let you 
 leave! What is the matter with them?" 
 
 "Bad temper, the shameless devils !" cried the canta- 
 triz. "I never knew such tempers ! The Maestro is dif- 
 ferent, and appreciated my demands. He is an angel! 
 But I am a lady of ideas and character, and in the con- 
 fusion he could not pacify us. He understands music, 
 
 but the other two !" And she broke off to her saints 
 
 again, and from them to a kindly repeated: "Good luck, 
 girl!" 
 
 "Thank you," said Dulce, and they kissed, and the 
 diva rolled noisily down the street. 
 
 "Now," thought Dulce, turning again toward the 
 house, "either luck indeed or those saints of hers must 
 have been with me to get me here at such a moment ! And 
 in this starving town of all places, and at the very first 
 throw !" And this happy philosophy carried her bruised 
 hand in a joyous little gesture toward the door again. 
 But if, after the wicked way of thinking of the East, 
 God's finger is fate, and one that writes history before 
 it happens with its nail, then Dulce must have been set 
 down beforehand not to pass the beautifully scroll- 
 columned door of the pretty yellow stuccoed house, for 
 even as she thus reached again, again it opened, and hub- 
 bub as large as the large lady's burst forth from back of 
 it nor was this quite a miracle, for the sum-total-equal 
 of her clamour was here made up by a triumverate of 
 excitables : a Jew, a Catalonian, a musician. 
 
 These three very doubtful parts of speech, in their 
 extravagant haste, seemed to have seized one another and 
 leapt down the stairs like brotherly suicides, or else to 
 have been pushed off by some sane person with a rude 
 sense of humour at the top ; but having arrived strangely 
 upright in the street, they stopped as short as their noise, 
 and as though dazzled by the sun-shimmer as indeed 
 they were, for the fierce power of high noon was now, 
 at two o'clock, still uppermost, together with the added
 
 154 The Great Way 
 
 bake of those hundred and more minutes since the meri- 
 dian. But their daze was further and more haplessly due 
 to the fact that the little street was so curved that its 
 vistas closed in near at either hand, and the direction 
 taken by their diva was thus harder to know than if she 
 had fluttered upward to the sky. Even there the Jew's 
 eyes sought her, and in coming worldward again they 
 encountered Dulce. In the same moment his two com- 
 panions noticed her. 
 
 "Well," demanded one, "what do you want here?" 
 It was the Catalonian, and Dulce knew at once, now that 
 his voice rose free of the mutual outcry, that though 
 Spanish, he was no Andalusian, for the quick, ragged 
 speech held harsh traces of the north. Nor were his com- 
 rades natives of Cadiz, for this figure nearest her, she 
 saw, was a Spaniard but a Jew, dark-bearded with his 
 skin of olive showing through, and with white teeth and 
 black eyes that could all bite; the third, as obvious of 
 context, was Latin, but no Spaniard a Neapolitan, she 
 decided, long and narrow and white of face, with looping 
 thick black hair and deep fire-flecked brown eyes that 
 were lit with childish curiosity the Maestro, Dulce de- 
 cided further, for his hands were slender and nervous, 
 and twitched all the while as if their flesh sought keys to 
 play or times to beat. 
 
 "Work," she had answered, before she had thought 
 all this, for which she had ample pause after her prompt 
 monosyllable, as it had thrown the Jew and the Cata- 
 lonian into fresh astonishment, and her gaze had held the 
 inquisitive brown eyes of the long thin childlike 
 musician. 
 
 "Well? Well?" cried the Jew impatiently at last, and 
 the first questioner, a man of business apparently, showed 
 his authority and bore out the Jew with a quick addition 
 to his angry word : 
 
 "Chorus?" 
 
 "Yes, if not a part," said Dulce. 
 
 "Part?" cried the man contemptuously. "Come, do
 
 The Dish of Silver 155 
 
 not waste our time! Can you sing? Say what you can 
 do and what you have done !" 
 
 "I have been in the chorus once. For several nights, at 
 the Alcazar in Barcelona." 
 
 "Is that all?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And you bother us, with no more to offer?" 
 
 "It is useless," interposed the Jew. "We need some 
 chorus. But we need experience, or looks, or both, if we 
 can get them. What we need most now is pretty 
 girls." 
 
 "I am very pretty," said Dulce. 
 
 At his incredulous stare her voice became impatient. 
 
 "I should know, should I not? For I have been with 
 myself all my life, and you have been far away from me 
 till this minute thank heaven ! And let me tell you that 
 when I am in spirits I am one of the prettiest girls in 
 Spain. Prettier at any rate than any Frenchwoman. I 
 have just been in Paris, and I know!" 
 
 The two men looked at each other, and despite their 
 rising anger, began to laugh. The Maestro, though 
 nearer to a child's mind than either of them, did not even 
 smile. 
 
 "Go away ! Go away !" said the Jew. "If you faced 
 an audience, they would let you know your looks !" 
 
 "They would laugh !" said the business man. 
 
 "They would weep !" said the Jew. 
 
 As she turned the despised face away to hide its pain, 
 she heard a third voice a quiet and gentle one. 
 
 "Well, friends, could you ask anything more than that, 
 in an actress ?" 
 
 It was the voice of the Maestro, calm and serious, with 
 a touch of startling demand in it; and Dulce, with a 
 swift grateful glance at him, boldly turned her tears, 
 which were now brave and angry ones, upon the two. 
 
 "Exactly! And while you used up time insulting me, 
 you were preventing my telling you that not only am I
 
 156 The Great Way 
 
 clever but I have a perfectly wonderful, beautiful voice 
 besides !" 
 
 The Jew and the Catalonian were dividing their new 
 astonishment between Dulce and the Maestro, who now 
 spoke again with soft, quick words. 
 
 "It is your decision as well as mine, my friends. But 
 can you not see my point? The girl has comedy and 
 tragedy, and the figure shows that only in the face is she 
 thin like me! What she said was funny, like the clown, 
 though she was angry, like a serious part! I could have 
 laughed at your faces, senores, while she was talking ! So 
 would the people, sometimes, at hers, while she was sing- 
 ing, but they would laugh with a tear, if her voice sings 
 as it talks ! And she says the voice is fine, friends. Shall 
 we try it, no? It might be for the senora's part!" 
 
 The Jew gasped, but the business man was silent. The 
 Maestro turned to Dulce, who at his last words had begun 
 to tremble, with a great sickening, joyous heart-leap. 
 >he felt faint at the resurge of it, in which her mind 
 seemed swimming desperately swimming, for she knew 
 that she must not pay this Jew and this out-Heroding 
 Jew, a Catalonian, one tithe of facial joy, yet she must 
 speak, and speak quickly, for the Maestro stopped silent, 
 waiting for her. And the instant before she could grasp 
 assurance and push it into her voice seemed endless to 
 her. Starvation was at the bottom of her second's cavern- 
 ous weakness, starvation that she had not thought about, 
 weakness at which she passingly wondered, in the lightning- 
 flash thought of the drowning. Then words leapt to her 
 mind, her tongue; her elbow swinging her hand to her 
 hip with the jaunty slap of a bolero. She pretended to 
 have been sulking instead of fainting, and with a little 
 pout she looked at the Jew and the business man. 
 
 "As a matter of fact, I am a very great singer by 
 nature, so to speak, and out of luck at the moment, which 
 is luck for you, but with a wonderful future, as this 
 charming Italian gentleman recognized. He, you see, is
 
 The Dish of Silver 157 
 
 intelligent, while you two are everything that fat woman 
 probably called you !" 
 
 The closing impoliteness of her speech was purposeful, 
 and intelligently so, for she knew her Jew and her Cata- 
 lonian, and meant her words as the needed lash to dogs 
 in the danger-moment when they do not know robber 
 from mistress. But the whip she had chosen was unfor- 
 tunate. She should have thrown any crushing thing at 
 them rather than their lost prima donna. 
 
 "Which way did she go ?" demanded the business man. 
 
 "Yes," cried the Jew instantaneously, "which way? 
 That is a devil, but that is also a nice big woman !'* 
 
 As she heard the echo of her blunder, and a great 
 rushing weight seemed to sink down through her, drag- 
 ging her heart after it, the Maestro spoke swiftly. It was 
 as if a current from her sensation had reached and urged 
 him. 
 
 "Yes, friends, very much of a nice woman too much, 
 if you are wise, and if this girl can sing !" 
 
 Her heart leapt again, almost deathly in its dizzy reac- 
 tion after reaction; but the ragged-voiced northerner 
 spoke abruptly, concisely suddenly redolent of his 
 geography as a bit of pink earth from the Catalonian 
 Plain. 
 
 "No ! I have decided ! I like decisions ! We must 
 find her! But we will give up this dirty town all covered 
 with water. Whether we find her or not, we will go to 
 Italy to-night. She is not too big for Italy in Italy 
 they listen, they do not look. And in two hours we must 
 have our tickets !" 
 
 "But," cried the Jew, "can we find her in two hours? 
 It was two hours last time ! Can we this time ?" 
 
 "We know her habits !" said the business man, tritely. 
 "We can do it in just two hours, this time if we know 
 which way she started !" 
 
 "Yes," cried the Jew, "we both know her nice large 
 habits! If we know which way! Which way did she 
 go?"
 
 158 The Great Way 
 
 And they both turned upon Dulce, as thoughtless of 
 her, save for their important purpose, as if they had 
 never encountered her: 
 
 "Which way? Which way?" 
 
 Droop-shouldered, she was standing in their midst like 
 a stopped mechanism, a thing lately animate, of which 
 some vital part had deadened. The troublous heart had 
 ceased to hamper her, as if after its mad ricochetting it 
 had found the place it had sought somewhere outside 
 her. Her mind, instead of it, was madly racing in a 
 hot course of logic so lightning-swift that its vivid flash 
 showed her even the calmly smiling irony of her 
 moment. 
 
 She knew, now, that for days she had been too hungry. 
 She knew that if she did not earn her next bread, she 
 must beg it. She knew for she knew every cobblestone 
 in Cadiz that one direction of the little street led into 
 a quarter likely to twist their noses into a circuitous whirl 
 that might send them twice around the city. She knew 
 that her answer was a little answer between herself and 
 God, and that if she lied only He and herself would know 
 it. The two horrid voices of the Catalonian and the 
 Jew, for in their simplicity they never thought of her 
 opportunity, nor even saw at all the battle in her eyes, 
 were still rasping in her ears, with growing impatience 
 pressing her. 
 
 "Do you not hear us?" . . . "Which way?" 
 
 With a little catch in her breath, she raised her arm. 
 
 "That way," she said, and pointed in the correct direc- 
 tion. 
 
 And the two were gone before her arm had dropped 
 heavily against her side from its gesture gesture such 
 as a soul might use in deliberately sending itself to hell 
 and someone else's to heaven. 
 
 Her head sank slowly forward, and she stood like a 
 wax figure that had begun to melt in the sunshine. 
 
 The long, childlike Italian came up behind her and laid 
 a thin hand gently, with a pitying little pat, on one of
 
 The Dish of Silver 159 
 
 the drooping shoulders. His deep, queerly vibrant voice 
 spoke as one understanding nature to another. 
 
 "Remember the great Roman singer who is now the 
 world's sensation. She started in the street selling 
 flowers !" 
 
 Dulce, after a shiver, staring ahead of her answered 
 huskily. 
 
 "/ started in the street selling something different !" 
 
 He turned helplessly away and disappeared back into 
 the little theatre, his shrug and headshake and racial 
 casting out of hands all together in one motion saying in 
 Latin wordlessness, "I am sorry !" 
 
 Alone in the brilliantly yellow street, she shrank back 
 to the stucco wall of the building and leant against it. 
 Quite all strength was not gone from her, but the last was 
 going, seeming to seep away as some tangible thing, as 
 tears, might do, drop by drop, eaten up by the heat of the 
 street heat as hungry for tears as she was for food. 
 Her eyes and face downcast, her cheek against the wall, 
 she seemed to speak to the sidewalk: 
 
 "It began here. Perhaps it is to end here." 
 
 And slowly, unresistingly, for she knew resistance to 
 be unavailing now, she sank down, down, scratching the 
 white cheek and at the pain of it, her only defensiveness 
 an impulse of her hands back of her, as long ago against 
 the slippery windows of the Royal till she was a sick 
 mass of crazy clothes and listless flesh huddled upon the 
 baking pavement, her fresh, pretty fan and handkerchief 
 now ridiculous patches of cleanliness standing out upon 
 what might readily have been a pile of refuse left by the 
 surge of life upon immaculate Cadiz. 
 
 Cumulative exhaustion from the long journeying, from 
 Barcelona through the North, and back, and to Paris, and 
 back, back, back, like a creature on a string, the physical 
 miles and the spiritual tramp of it, at last in one abrupt 
 defiance from abused body and recklessly expended soul, 
 had whelmed and overwhelmed her. That the soul is not 
 inexhaustible she had not known till now, and now she
 
 160 The Great Way 
 
 knew, and knew with the despairing conviction that the 
 lesson had been taught at the hopeless and bankrupting 
 cost of finality. She knew that this should not be the 
 end even of this episode; that she still might plead her 
 cause for the mere little chorus part which was all, 
 after all, for which initially she had come. But intuition, 
 so slow and seldom to discover good news, so strangely 
 given to the pointing of ill, told her that even this she 
 could not now secure, that having refused the big they 
 would refuse the little; that this was the end, not alone 
 of this, but of all dream-materials, for life itself seemed to 
 swim madly before her, instead of standing clear, and 
 upright, and normal and life thus distorted is of the 
 nature of death. 
 
 But there was still enough of conscious living in her 
 for her mind to form a thought, and for her lips to 
 move, if not for sound to come from them, and as her 
 whole being had so long been a protest, she protested 
 now not against God any god but to Him, and 
 against annihilation. Dulce lifted up her wretched eyesj 
 and prayed. 
 
 "Holy God, I have been impolite to You sometimes. 
 Indeed, in some of my thoughts I have been quite quite 
 hateful about You, which I think is quite likely just 
 the opposite of Your own character. Holy God, if You 
 ever did miracles, You can still do them, and I think 
 from the way I feel that I need a miracle now, that there 
 are no miracles left in myself to trudge ahead with, and 
 that if I am to tramp one step further it is time for a 
 little one from You. Indeed, no matter what, it would 
 seem very big to me any little miracle that would keep 
 me, till I am strong again, in both food and and decency. 
 Oh, if You only would, I Oh, Holy God, I do not wish 
 to seem as if I were trying to make a a bargain with 
 You, but the idea is in my thoughts by instinct, and I 
 might as well be truthful to You, and if You will only 
 do some big-little thing now when I need it so, I will 
 try always after this to be very respectful to You and
 
 The Dish of Silver 161 
 
 about You, and, no matter what it might be, yes, no 
 matter wliat, no matter where it might lead me, nor what 
 terrible pain it might bring afterwards, if You chose, I 
 would pay it cheerfully, and not complain, so You sent 
 it now, when I need it so, I promise You !" 
 
 The silent prayer, with its pitiful spirit of covenant, 
 was as if written for God by the moving lips instead 
 of spoken, and therefore not so soon in reaching Him, 
 for the little street stopped there surrounding her as 
 soundless in its ultra heat as the petition in its ultra 
 longing, and her look and face, after an instinctive 
 glance to each side, sank again toward the merciless 
 pavement. A confused noise sounded in her ears. It was 
 like conflicting voices, and she thought it an effect of 
 her starvation God's only answer. But it died & : 
 and a moment afterward, startlingly clear in its clo j 
 to her, a single, and moreover a singular and a j 
 voice spoke. 
 
 "Are are you ill?" 
 
 Dulce looked up, and as if the automatic acti 
 mind upon body were more powerful than purpose- 
 purpose of prayer, a little sound escaped her ? j'./^ 611 
 queer little ghost of sound, but still an articu]' fv 
 
 so fragrant of miracle was the vision L, " 1 sound, 
 & T . f i that met her 
 
 vision. It was, in fact, only a young g^j , 
 
 frailly human, who, beset by voluble Carij 71 * ' n .* 
 had escaped them and their importuning " , guides, 
 moment since into the seeming solitude of th* y.,,* 1 a 
 
 But in the thoughts that had framed % C V S des et * 
 little petition to sovereign Power there L j i perate 
 trite pictures so very natural to ide^ erai, 
 
 , .. r , ., a i 14. as Ol tjl at Power 
 
 and its attributes flashing thoughts ^r OT ,~ k i , 
 
 dry lips spelled "miracle"; and the l^JS^g** 
 her now looked like an angel to her irinking feyS^. .. 
 Dulce's mind, forever the sensitively i mag i na tive ai^t- 
 mind, the beautiful girl was entirely o* ^ov en ly colour^ 
 white, and pink, but only most delicately pink, u^^ gold, 
 sun-gold, as if her soft hair were a halo, and, in some
 
 162 The Great Way 
 
 matter or manner, silver, yes, silver, even if this seeming 
 were only from her voice, which was of a high though so 
 quiet timbre, strange and unaccustomed to Dulce, and 
 which spoke again. 
 
 "Yes, you you are ill ! You must let me help you !" 
 
 There was a hesitant distress in the chiming words. 
 
 Dulce did not answer. She could not as yet, though 
 she was gathering strength to do so, gathering it straight 
 and lulsomely from the exquisite presence before her. 
 She simply gazed, and the girl gazed back at her, her 
 eyes pitiful, fascinated and horrified, but quite unwaver- 
 ing through her little space of continued hesitancy as to 
 what she should say next, or do. It seemed to Dulce, as 
 her mind cleared itself of mystical imaginings, that as the 
 
 va>8 of earth, not heaven, her loveliness and her tints 
 
 _ l pSll I 
 
 S 11 " i ){ the most perfect and supreme of earthly things 
 
 wel ly, flowers. In her whiteness, and the dull green 
 
 nal ? 'r gown, she was like a slender lily standing there, 
 
 * . ig a little the very flower of rapturous sacredness, 
 
 yer. The fair, troubled, gazing eyes were, by in- 
 
 .P 1 ^ e thought, forget-me-nots. And in truth, in this 
 
 j traordinary moment something deep, and signifi- 
 
 t)oignant beyond that moment's situation and 
 
 cant, a - passing between these two most opposite 
 
 its needs, was f , , & , , , . r 
 
 r r I>iAces open-mouthed worship of such pure 
 
 ^tituted a heavy tribute of frankincense that 
 sing service to a pauper would equalize, and 
 iier part, knew, as deeply innocent and pure 
 
 the gi ' yj know in the presence of the deathly or 
 
 natures feel artci . r , , , . , ; , 
 
 LI *u+ she was gazing, through the rich dark 
 the ternble, that 
 
 . ^ ,7> at her, upon a naked, shivering, and 
 eyes that stared u\ 
 
 er hands had unconsciously reached toward, 
 
 _ quite touchii' Dulce ' Xt was not that she con - 
 
 sously, or unconsci^ 51 ^' shrank although she was like 
 virginity itsel^ t ^ nttfl K over this squalid discard of the 
 strppt. -<5nehad by instinct started to lift her up, and by 
 instinct paused to think what to do with her. Angels
 
 The Dish of Silver 163 
 
 can afford to steep their hands in filth and to lower their 
 wings in mud, for their whiteness is fairer, their rainbow 
 hues are more brilliant for every such encounter. 
 
 With such whiteness and such brilliance gathered into 
 her gazing soul and thence, in a faint reflection, into her 
 voice, Dulce spoke. 
 
 "It it is a strange matter, your speaking to me, 
 senorita ! More strange than you can think. Women, 
 one after another, are forever coming up behind me or 
 before me, in your case ! with help to offer. Just when 
 God is most absent-minded about one, it is strange that 
 women should not be !" 
 
 "Perhaps, girl, God is in everything even women," 
 said the girl softly. 
 
 "Ah," cried Dulce, and a cry it was, for the voice was 
 stronger now, and it was beautiful with earnestness, "you 
 are right, right! He is in you that I know! Oh, I 
 had just asked Him for a miracle, and it you came, 
 and I had made Him a promise, and with my first breath 
 when He answered me I broke it ! But I did not mean 
 
 to, and I tell Him again now I never will, really! Oh " 
 
 and by now she had struggled to her feet, the beautiful 
 girl assisting, steadying her "if you would help me, 
 though this is my native town of which I know every 
 stone, and you are a stranger, whom / should welcome 
 and help, could you give me, or get me, some work?" 
 
 "Work?" exclaimed the girl. "You are sick, sick! 
 
 Wait " And she propped her into the corner of the 
 
 theatre doorway. "I was very cross just now to some 
 guides, and now I need one !" And she ran to the corner 
 around which she had escaped the importunates and called 
 "Man! Man!" the "Hombre, Hombre," tinkling from 
 her like an excited little bell. "That one you the big 
 one! You, yes, you!" And she ran swiftly back. 
 
 To Dulce, the man who followed her looked like some 
 figure in a dream, and indeed he was so huge that one 
 neither ill nor imaginative might have gasped at him, a 
 monster of humanity resplendent in its mere lumbering'
 
 164 The Great Way 
 
 size, and so gorgeous in colours, both of labourer's cos- 
 tume and of golden and olive visage, that he might have 
 stood with noble appropriateness for the Nation's por- 
 trait. His vast shadow swept along the yellow house- 
 fronts and seemed to swallow, like a wave, both Dulce 
 and her exquisite Samaritana as the girl turned to him. 
 
 "Lift this girl up! Carry her to the Hotel de 
 Francia !" 
 
 "The de Francia !" murmured Dulce as he swept her 
 like a shadow itself into his arms and holding her like a 
 light fabric across them lifted her to what seemed to her 
 a dizzy height. "In the Plaza de Loreto ! Oh, two streets 
 lead into it one is the Rosario ! Oh, make me the favour 
 to go in by the right-hand street! There there are 
 ghosts in the Rosario !" 
 
 "Hush, hush !" said the beautiful girl, soothingly. "We 
 will not go by the Rosario do you hear, man?" 
 
 "Gracias !" gasped Dulce, and "Work !" she whis- 
 pered as she swooned in the huge arms that bore her 
 forward in their strange little caravan. "Work! Some- 
 thing to do!"
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 A FLOWER OF THE ENGLISH SUN 
 
 FULL of soft shadows and curtain-filtered sunlight, the 
 big room seemed brooding as a person might brood in the 
 drowse that seems by nativity itself to hang like some fair 
 and delicate nostalgia over Spain in the hours of long 
 spoke-like solar rays that follow the actual siesta hour. 
 Grant shadow, and air will respond to the call of the 
 senses throughout any time in little oceanic Cadiz, and 
 this chamber was cool as it was spacious and Spanish 
 though it was Spanish very simple and Spanish very re- 
 cent, for as drawing-room of the most expensive suite in 
 the de Francia it had been furnished as if, rather, to 
 emulate the dignified but trite hotel patio from whose 
 galleries it let off: a certain elegance with the quality 
 in quotation marks marked the room; its grand piano 
 was more grand than piano, and palms truly beautiful 
 palms flanked the pre-eminent and, because of its weight, 
 the irremediable position of this ; and over against the 
 lovely lace curtains of the tall French balcony-windows, as 
 if intentionally to set them afire, was a most hideous, 
 most inhuman equipage, designed in fulsome hardware 
 as an ideal representation of humanity and beauty a 
 plaster, Habana-turbanned negress, life-size as far as she 
 went, which was fortuitously only to her bosom, smiling 
 from coast to coast, and holding at the end of a decollete 
 arm a cigar with a gas-jet in it. 
 
 Then there were some beauties sheer and perfect in the 
 dim airy room on the piano, in a crystal-like bowl, and 
 lusciously harmonizing with the deep drooping green of 
 the regimental palms, a mass of rich violets; in a low 
 
 165
 
 166 The Great Way 
 
 chair near the closed-out little balcony, the girl, so human 
 yet so kindred to the angels, who had saved Dulce's life, 
 or reason, or perhaps both, or anyway so Dulce thought, 
 a week ago. 
 
 For a week had passed, and a strange week, vague, 
 like a fantasy, yet vivid, and never to be forgotten, for 
 these two extraordinarily opposite creatures. Two bed- 
 rooms opened off this grandiose parlour, and Dulce was 
 in one of these sleeping, the girl thought, but she was 
 not sleeping. Dulce was well now, or again thought 
 she was, and insisted so as emphatically as she did that 
 she had been saved from true calamity, from "the end," 
 a sad end of some kind if not the great weird adven- 
 ture death, by her new chance friend, her "miracle- 
 friend." 
 
 "Friend" was a marked and a. great word between 
 them it had happened to become so, several days 
 ago. 
 
 That Dulce was well, or nearly so, but the one step of 
 intervening nerve-weakness away from as excellent health 
 as could appropriately be for such a mind and tempera- 
 ment as hers when without conscious progress in their 
 soul purposes, was a fact due to that interim's tender 
 care, and less to that care itself than to that tenderness 
 of it, which she had drunk in like an instinctive econo- 
 mist, a swiftly recognizant opportunist, as a life-giving 
 property, without heed to its reason or circumstances, and 
 to show gratitude for afterward, with all the strength 
 accrued from it. And it was without stint or question, 
 that it was given. What the girl had seemed that day 
 and that long communicative moment in the street, when 
 Dulce had gazed up with thoughts of godly magic into the 
 turquoise eyes, she not only had continued to seem, but 
 was, and continued to be. 
 
 Early, in the periods of delirium, as logical an out- 
 come of that vulgar ailment starvation as of its refined 
 companion-trouble, a teased and over-striving mind, when 
 sombre fragments of the tossing history thus temporarily
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 167 
 
 culminating murmured from the strange patient or gusted 
 cruelly from her in louder, less moaning words, there had 
 been for the ministering girl, by no means inconsistently 
 with her suffering for "her suffering guest, a pitying yet 
 thralling fascination. 
 
 Before the only radical departure of her serene life 
 had fetched her to Spain, this girl had dreamed of Spain. 
 It had been her Land of Dreams, and, in them, not a mere 
 land of castles. Although or perhaps because she was 
 scarcely older than Dulce, and by count of living and suf- 
 fering enormously younger, she had clairvoyance the 
 clairvoyance of supreme chastity and supreme inexperi- 
 ence, and to her Spain far off had grown so real that 
 sometimes she had told herself: "Without having seen, I 
 think I can see it all: By such intensity of sunlight, its 
 colours are crude, by such density of shadows, its figures 
 are grotesque ; but within the colours is softness, within 
 the figures, reality. That land possesses horror, fear, 
 joy, romantic love. Its soul is sinister, inevitable and 
 gay. Nemesis is that soul's guardian. If it took on the 
 figure of a girl, she would be a dancing girl. But I see 
 her, too, among tones that are mostly very grey and blue 
 moving against a high, oppressive wall, and again, I 
 see her near the earth that gaunt, hungry, isolated 
 Spanish clay." 
 
 Now, having in so swift and so extraordinary a way 
 known Dulce, and having been to her, even so briefly, 
 what mothers and fathers sometimes cannot be to their 
 children, she might have said to her, had she chosen to 
 express the thought : "If I go no further, look no more, I 
 have seen it all." 
 
 For to her, Dulce was that girl-figure, the Soul of 
 Spain. The fair girl's vision was now a living, breath- 
 ing, pulsating thing, beginning with the vital activity of 
 that big hot tableau in the little shimmering street when 
 the guide had been like a giant sketch of Spain's coloured 
 Sierras sweeping up toward succour her frail and bat- 
 tered offspring, and since filled out and out with picture
 
 168 The Great Way 
 
 and picture, first from those fierce and sometimes ter- 
 rible phases of delirium, and later, with the nearer and 
 nearer approach to lucidity and then the full regainment 
 of a clear mind, from Dulce's deliberate speech given 
 always with a bewitching reticence to this spotless listener, 
 yet trenchant, too, from her insistent honesty; so that 
 with very, very little actually told, the girl knew vir- 
 tually, rather than practically, all, and saw it as she 
 might have seen a painting, comprised of a series of paint- 
 ings, wherein were places without names, yet vivid by 
 means of sharp scenes, little vistas, and people without 
 histories, but the more fully human by thus seeming to 
 represent just elements, feelings. 
 
 Dulce and Dulce's story stretched before her mind as 
 something richly similar, perhaps, to America's wondrous 
 possession, the Gobelin tapestries of Don Quixote. But, 
 for the tints, faint tones, of this treasure, were substi- 
 tuted a mysterious dimness of connecting background, 
 against which stood forth almost vehement brilliances of 
 episode and of significances, of which the sunlight, doubly 
 tense and yellow by force of shadows, was Sorolla's, and 
 of which the things of shadow, doubly deep and ominous 
 from the sunlight, were Zuloaga's. Some of these 
 shadows, even El Greco, and certainly Goya, might have 
 painted, so full of ghosts were they as when she spoke 
 again, in her delirium, of the little street of the Rosary 
 so near to them, and of the old people formerly there 
 whom she imagined to have cursed her, while sometimes 
 into the sharp sunlight would creep a little soft golden 
 haze, in some disconnected aspirational words of reach- 
 ing after unborn art or of yearning over still-born love, 
 that Murillo might have had a hand in. 
 
 And to the nursing, gently resuscitating "miracle 
 friend," Dulce had become in turn a miracle, even before 
 the depth and lodestone of their accidental contact had 
 resolved themselves into recognizance, and been expressed, 
 and become new history a miracle that she cherished for 
 its nature, shudder as she had sometimes to shudder at
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 169 
 
 some of the faces of the new facets of life turned to 
 her. 
 
 Nor were the beautiful girl's care and labour a matter 
 of entire ease, of the charity or love brought a little 
 bit this side the stars by the fact of being without sac- 
 rifice. Though she was her own mistress, and had proven 
 it unnumbered times these seven days, though she was 
 theoretically and technically free to pursue this some- 
 what Quixotic windmill-tilt of hers in the dear Spain of 
 her now fulfilled imagination, she was not free by any 
 means as Dona Rina had been, not able to undertake it 
 and proceed with it without encountering other mills of a 
 wilder and a more windmillish kind. 
 
 For the flower-like creature was indeed accompanied 
 by, and possibly derived a part of her exquisite flower 
 effect from contrast with, every conceivable growth and 
 luggage of trite conventionality, and her Accompanying 
 Relative, a matron all in capitals, had, at the entrance 
 of the caravan, risen, astounded, as she was quite natural 
 and right in doing and being; and then, less literally but 
 quite as actively had risen more ; and more ; and more, to 
 heights, dizzying heights to observe, of motion, emotion, 
 intonation. 
 
 This lady was handsome, with a certain classical, horse- 
 like handsomeness that implies a flattered youth and ex- 
 cuses much, or she would have been appalling, and in 
 fact she was considerably appalling anyway. With a 
 Titanic and unconscious strength, she carried England 
 about with her everywhere she went, and her exclusive 
 Island soul abhorred the soul of the Peninsular. She did 
 not love Dulce, either instantly or gradually, and she 
 could not understand why any member of her family 
 suddenly should. 
 
 She said this, which was not at all unreasonable. And 
 she also said that she could not understand why a heathen, 
 a pagan, a Catholic, a guttersnipe, a gypsy, should be 
 fetched from the entrails of an unheard-of town, and 
 thrust into her bed. She said that people did not do
 
 170 The Great Way 
 
 such things, that the Church of England did not pre- 
 scribe the cleansing and burnishing of sewers as a part 
 of the casual Christian duty of gentlewomen. She said! 
 that it was her young relative's romantic notions that had 
 brought them to this heinous country in the first place, 
 just as it had been ridiculous sentimental nonsense of 
 that young relative's that had made her study Spanish, 
 and that she hoped that when she married, which she fur- 
 ther prayed would be extremely soon, she would find, 
 as decent, normal, English people found, that life was 
 not romance; and that if, in the meantime, she must act 
 like a book, to let it be, for God's sake, a clean book, 
 by the Duchess, and not a rude volume by Zola. She 
 said that she now regretted every day, hour, minute of 
 the weeks they had foolishly waited on this gruesome 
 polka-dot in the sea for a telegram before starting home 
 for England, and that she would forthwith start for Eng- 
 land, alone if necessary; that the perennial madness in 
 the family was not in her side of it, but that as it had 
 broken forth with violence in her fair kinswoman's having 
 gone forth alone that afternoon, and was probably con- 
 tagious, she might as well be raving mad herself at once, 
 and would herself go out alone, and sit on the boat until 
 it sailed on the front of the boat, where she could at 
 least look forward to England. And she had lunged 
 toward her hat, a hat entailing gestures, and had gone 
 out, alone. 
 
 And this she had done every successive day, except 
 one, the one, as it happened, when the boat unexpectedly 
 sailed and another, convenient for her as a Cleopatra's 
 barge, had taken its place in the Bdhia. 
 
 Under the girl's delicate, almost sacred exterior, there 
 must have been something of a nun's almost stubborn 
 resistant power, for none of the volcanic speech each day 
 and various times a day before the daily exit, words and 
 action suggesting both Hercules and Herculaneum, had 
 for one instant swerved her, while to all of it she gave 
 only gentle rejoinder or, failing strength for that, equally
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 171 
 
 gentle silence until to-day, when the put-upon aristo- 
 crat had at the apex of clamour called Dulce a Papist 
 and an Anarchist. And a little exhausted reproach had 
 crept into the girl's voice and sounded in her supremely 
 simple protest: 
 
 "Aunt ! Aunt !" 
 
 "Niece! Niece! Niece!" cried her aunt. "O-o-o-oh, 
 if we had only gone to the Riviera!" 
 
 And with this euphonious but unscientific co-ordina- 
 tion of thought she plunged for the hat, an action now as 
 polished and perfect as anything to be seen at the bull- 
 fight. 
 
 If this hat was not made of fur, and feathers, and 
 cloth, and bows of ribbon, and embroidery, and glass 
 fruit, and cotton flowers, and velvet foliage, it seemed to 
 be, on this hot day, it was so unmistakably a hat, and so 
 round, and detailed, and cumulative. And she went to 
 the boat. 
 
 Thus the girl was alone in the big brooding room, and 
 thinking Dulce asleep, was resting for sometimes Dulce 
 had slept even through these matters happily for her 
 even comparative peace of mind, stirred, as it was, at best, 
 by the situation of which she was the unhappy yet 
 happy cause. 
 
 Yet, only a moment after to-day's start for the boat, 
 Dulce came into the bedroom doorway, and stood framed 
 by it like a portrait, an uplifted hand against the frame, 
 and gazing at her friend. 
 
 The girl reclining in her low chair did not yet see her. 
 And Dulce saw, at its full and in this quiet light, and set 
 off suggestively by the green graceful palms and purple 
 massive violets, the beauty that had seemed heavenly to 
 her, and come to her as from heaven, a week ago this 
 moment, and perhaps more perfect now than at any 
 moment of her consciousness since: the broad, low brow, 
 white to the inevitable thought of serenity, and minutely 
 veined as lily-petals, between the fine-spun, slightly curl- 
 ing hair of positively sunlight-colour, and the slender
 
 172 The Great Way 
 
 cheeks, again wax-like and white as lily-cups yet with 
 hints of faintly tinted rose-petals; the lips, like an open- 
 ing and deeper-coloured rose ; the straight, short nose, the 
 blue and very long-lashed eyes; the slender, very slender 
 body, naiadesque, and dressed again in delicate green; 
 and somewhere with it all, seeming to hover about, im- 
 palpably, still that winging impression of silver, which 
 would seem palpable, a colour with the other colours, as 
 soon as her voice was heard, brook-like with its rising and 
 falling liquid inflections a voice which, like the wondrous 
 complexion, was a product of her peculiar, damp-climated 
 island nativity, that of the sharp, blond-producing North 
 made fecund by the whim of the gracious Gulf Stream. 
 She was entirely sylvan, while so unmistakably the result, 
 indelible, of the intensively, cultivatedly racial. 
 
 And her soul was like her, her life was like her, 
 beautiful. She would presumably have always, as she 
 had always had, a happy, peaceful life; for she was of 
 such a nature that even when Great Sorrow would as he 
 would stand near her, she would not know it. He would 
 pass her by quite as if he were a darkened ship, blinded 
 by her beauty on the sea because close as she would be 
 to him he would turn his face away from her, made pitiful 
 by her beauty. She would take Sorrow into her very 
 house; but she would never know the name of her guest. 
 
 Such is the impregnable armour of unconscious saints. 
 For to know that she gave pain, inevitable, deep pain, to 
 some loved fellow-being, would have been utterly, irre- 
 vocably destructive to her. The most trenchant of all 
 professed readers of the human heart, most epicureanly 
 precise of all painters of the mysterious human mind, has 
 written that fine temperaments, without fine surroundings, 
 cease to exist. This is absolutely true. And given the 
 circumstance of known sorrow from herself to one she 
 loved, a kindred phenomenon would have occurred upon 
 this girl. The most sordid environment would not have 
 altered her she would have altered it. But certainty 
 that she could represent pain, that she comprised it, would
 
 A Flower of the English Swn 173 
 
 constitute for her a bitter setting of the whole world, 
 and would in some sort kill her, for change by its very 
 nature is gradual death, just as it is immediate life, and 
 she would thereupon become so replete a thing of sorrow 
 herself that she would no longer possibly be Isabel. 
 
 That was her name, from her mother, a rare patrician 
 Isabella who thought, perhaps, the rich, sweet old- 
 fashioned title too staidly regal for the delicious blossom 
 the girl from her babyhood had been, and had altered it to 
 its crystalline form at her happy christening. 
 
 All this spiritual signification of Isabel and her nature 
 Dalce had not analytically discerned, yet had felt, and 
 was feeling again, more than ever poignantly, now, as she 
 gazed, and was sensitively, fulsomely appreciating, 
 through, in turn, her own clairvoyance a clairvoyance 
 quite different from Isabel's, that, namely, of all women 
 who have known passion, save some clodden few who can 
 drink fire without tasting it. 
 
 But it was with the lovely name that her conscious 
 thoughts were chiefly engaged, while this, again, was not 
 the subject of her first words. Almost hating to stir the 
 fair pensive tableau, she said softly : 
 
 "You said to me I might put on this pretty dress !'* 
 
 With a little start, of surprise, and a second one, of 
 sheer pleasure at the unexpected, doorway-framed picture, 
 the girl turned, and returned her gaze. 
 
 Pale a little, and the dark eyes, dark hair thus a little 
 darker, more mysterious; weak just a little, so that the 
 posture, from the uplifted hand against the frame, held 
 just a trace of totally unaware appeal; and in this lacily 
 delicate gown of Isabel's, she was a supreme meta- 
 morphosis of the drearily garbed body and hungrily 
 staring soul of a week ago. All that eager soul was 
 there, but it now came forth from the eyes shining with 
 hope and faith instead of glittering with despair; and in 
 the supposedly simple frock, in which she had earnestly 
 striven to look, and thought she did look, exceedingly 
 Cadizianly "neat," and "clean," she was instead an
 
 174 The Great Way 
 
 epitome of piquing, half-buoyant, half-languorous, 
 negligent femininity. The dress was half-low necked; its 
 colour, like Isabel's cheeks, was waxen lily-white, with a 
 suggestion, just a suggestion, of colour-of- rose-petal. It 
 was indeed an ostensibly simple frock, most simple. But 
 it was Isabel's and it had a grace, a fugitive elegance, 
 an intention, that visualized titled sempstresses named 
 Lilith, Rosamund, and probably Lallaga. And without 
 the faintest thought of genius, Dulce had taken from 
 their soft little balbriggan bag and hung around her 
 neck the long string of Astarte beads simply because 
 their colours in the sunlight were like those of Isabel's 
 eyes, and this fact she meant to mention. 
 
 Thus around her neck, in the daylight, and moreover 
 the daylight of this room at this moment, their colours 
 were almost faint, they were so tender, unassertive, and 
 chalk-like, as if they were only a thought that had been* 
 put into material expression with pastels. They might 
 have been composed mainly of exceedingly old blues and 
 most diluted greens, with here and there several small 
 pottery ones standing forth in dull, literal purple, to 
 accentuate the contented delicacy of all the rest. 
 
 To those eyes that were enough like turquoises to 
 resemble them, Isabel's eyes, Dulce now was still, as in 
 the foreign girl's fantastic, panoramic vision of her, the 
 Soul of Spain, but, by her changed and diverse mood and 
 raiment, that soul in a still further phase and sphere. 
 
 And truly as she stood thus in the framing doorway 
 as upon the threshold of some new and spirit-intriguing 
 episode, only one Spanish artist, living or dead, and he 
 Spain's most debauchedly romantic, could have sufficiently 
 painted her Fortuny. And he would probably, if pos- 
 sible, have rushed back from heaven, chancing hell over 
 again, to do it and instantly, before she could budge 
 from her position. The long gaze between these two 
 would have supplied his subject, with its quality of the 
 imminant to fill his ubiquitous need of the engaging. The 
 high, light colours of Isabel's beauty and that beauty
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 175 
 
 itself would have weighted with him to the measure of a 
 whole crowd of meticulous figures in any costume-period. 
 The palms, the violets, and the tall French windows, which 
 he would have hurled open to let in the delicately scrolled 
 balcony and a flood of gold, were literally there to his 
 taste as to his hand. And over against his centering 
 crescendo Dulce the big grotesquerie of the grinning 
 plaster negress, disseminated through his medium into a 
 myriad suggestions and shadowy potentialities, would 
 have nearly satisfied for once his completely insatiable 
 imagination. Finished, he would have done what he prob- 
 ably always longed to do and that as presumably his art 
 had never let him do because he had never actually seen it, 
 though he had hunted for it travelling as a child through 
 the Catalonian hills with his tinted puppet-show as had 
 Dulce with the drama hidden inside her a co-ordinated 
 and concrete dream of Spain and Venice, Paris, and the 
 tropics. 
 
 She stepped from the framing doorway and came across 
 to Isabel. In their long look of exchanged admiration, 
 each quite unconscious of it in the other, her pretty 
 speech about the pretty dress had been forgotten, for- 
 gotten, too, Isabel's intended chiding of her having with- 
 out permission dressed at all. Slipping down to a sitting 
 posture on the floor before Isabel's low chair, Dulce took 
 her hands, and said as simply as she had spoken before: 
 
 "I want to ask something of you. Another favour. 
 In your case, always another. It was not quite so in 
 Dona Rina's case because I did not feel so. It was 
 my fault, you see, and not dear Dona Rina's. But I have 
 learned much since from you. There is still more to 
 learn from this experience, much more, something larger 
 and deeper. But anyway, I have had to learn already 
 against a certain kind of pride of mine, perhaps that 
 there are some things, and some times when, it is right 
 to take and take, whether or not one can repay. Well, 
 in a little room I had once, in another city from here the 
 little room I called my mignonettes, that I had on the
 
 176 The Great Way 
 
 window-sill for I was always naming things, you know 
 'flowers of the sun.' I have happened to be thinking 
 of them lately and I have named you my 'Flower of the 
 English sun.' " 
 
 "How lovely !" exclaimed Isabel. 
 
 "But the favour I wanted you to make me," Dulce 
 went on, "is for you to let me call you by your own 
 name." 
 
 "Oh do!" cried the girl, with glad impulse. 
 
 "It is the name of a Plaza, big and full of sunlight, 
 here at home in little Cadiz," said Dulce, "beautiful Cadiz, 
 which you have made 'home' to me for the second time. 
 And the Plaza Isabel has only sunlight, no darkness, in 
 my memory as you will always have Isabel." 
 
 On her reference to "memory," its apparent thought 
 of their parting, a little cloud, swiftly followed by sun- 
 shine again, as might have been characteristically in that 
 Plaza, and here as from a happy, secret thought of her 
 own, came into this Isabel's blue eyes; but she only said: 
 
 "I am glad you wished this and it is the right thing, 
 quite, after what we have discussed, and followed, about 
 the word 'amiga* Dulce." 
 
 In one of their first clear talks, and after Dulce's 
 voluntary confidences, made in a few sweeping, graphic 
 strokes, with the whole arm, as it were ; and upon their 
 first embarrassed direct reference to the trials of and 
 from the classical aunt, made necessary at last by a 
 more than routine uproar, howsoever followed by the rou- 
 tine departure which always gave their communion just a 
 fragrant touch of the delightful flavour of forbidden fruit, 
 Dulce, in the refreshing after-silence, had said: 
 
 "Aside from these present troubles, I would like to 
 ask you something. It it is indeed something quite im- 
 portant to me. Has has your Aunt Gibraltar some- 
 thing especially to do with the word 'Society'? Some- 
 thing, so to speak, intimate to do with it intimate in a 
 nice sense, of course? If you do not see what I mean, 
 take that word, 'Society'; and if you drew a picture of
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 177 
 
 it, as an American Indian would, instead of writing it 
 down, would would she be that word, with, let us say, 
 a great exclamation mark?" 
 
 "I I think perhaps she would!" Isabel had ventured. 
 And Dulce had sighed: 
 
 "I begin to see my difficulties, then!" 
 
 And Isabel's gently urging questions had brought from 
 her a short but vivid description of one of the elements 
 of her big manifold purpose in life, full of wonderfully 
 exposing lights and of thrill for the listener, till Dulce, 
 with a little fluttering tone of sad finality, had concluded : 
 
 "You and your aunt, you see, are Society. Yes, you 
 too. You are easily satisfied, you dear, dear woman, but 
 that is just your individual character, which even so is 
 just as much the opposite of mine as hers is, and which 
 even so, and granting even better birth than such as I 
 have, would make you befriend me, but forbid you to be 
 my friend." 
 
 Isabel had been silent, but it was because tears were 
 gathering in her eyes, whose light gleamed through them, 
 and when she spoke the words were swift and short. 
 
 "It will not and it shall not !" 
 
 The speech and its manner wefe her one adoption, 
 indeed, achievement, of vehemence, startling by contrast 
 with its source the vehemence of a calm nun, which 
 made it like lightning in a cloister. 
 
 In that moment her aunt's cause, if it had ever been 
 potential, even in possibilities for the future, had been 
 forever lost. 
 
 And also from that moment, to the sick and struggling 
 Dulce, now ill, but forever struggling, Dulce the creature 
 of blood and of imagination, who sought by instinct, and 
 inexhaustibly, for the meanings that usually underlie, 
 and are so often hidden by, the episodes and the relations 
 of life, just as she did regarding its elements, which in 
 truth are always closely concerned with the episodes and 
 the contrasts, to this Dulce this "miracle" of episode so 
 blindly prayed for in the street and so swiftly granted,
 
 178 The Great Way 
 
 became a miracle of relationship, and with its elemental 
 meaning clear to her. 
 
 More than in the case of Lola, human, and real, and 
 warm as that had been; more, even, far more, than in 
 the kind, the beautifully gracious instance of Dona Rina, 
 her glowing brain's interpretation of this thing was the 
 idea, definitively idealized, of friendship, whose Idea itself, 
 ideally represented by the beautiful and so beautifully 
 confessed friend before her, took on such new scope, such 
 deeper and such poetical significance for her that Isabel, 
 swiftly if gradually, and permanently, was to be hence- 
 forth in Dulce's life not the pretty ballade of Lola; not 
 the story, colourful and generous, which in its highest 
 interpretation in Spain and in Spanish would have been 
 the romance of Dona Rina; but, even if the short huge 
 word did not present itself to her, the Epic of Friendship 
 an epic that exists only in hearts and souls, and has 
 never been written because it must comprise not the soul- 
 flower of a single nation, but the blossom of an element of 
 the entire world, and universal language is not yet. 
 
 From this she had drunk health, faith renewed; from 
 this, hope, strength strength, she thought, to leave her, 
 when that sad moment of aching severance, sadly and 
 achingly nearing and necessary, she supposed, should 
 come; strength not very bodily as yet, but enough so, 
 she gladly knew, not only to work again, but to get 
 work as she had done, for instance, not so very long 
 ago in the steel-works at Toledo crossing swords to 
 do it! 
 
 And she supposed that sad moment indeed sadly near, 
 this afternoon. 
 
 "Isabel," she softly said, prettily, tenderly articulating 
 the name for the second time, "you came to me as an 
 answer to a prayer, in which I had told God that I would 
 cheerfully bear afterward any pain growing out of its 
 answering ; and as if He had all your favouritism for me, 
 the road runs backward in this case I am always giving 
 pain if only small pains to you. Here have I asked,
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 179 
 
 and you given me, a special favour, the moment when I 
 have just driven your nearest relative away from you!" 
 
 "She will come back," said Isabel. 
 
 "It is quite dangerous, this time," said Dulce. "I 
 think the boat really does sail to-night!" 
 
 "She will come back," said Isabel again. "They will 
 not give her supper on the boat. We know that." 
 
 "Then, too, if your telegram should come to-day, you 
 might want to catch the boat yourself," continued Dulce, 
 "and you could for one of the things I am clever about 
 is packing, and that much, at least, I could do for you in 
 repayment, with the idea of it, I mean, before I I lose 
 you." 
 
 Again the light as of a happy secret thought came into 
 Isabel's eyes, but as yet, again, she did not speak it. 
 
 "Nothing remains to be paid," she said, gently. "At 
 first, you see," and she pointed towards the bedroom from 
 which Dulce had come, "I studied you as if you were 
 some new-found book of foreign matters " 
 
 Dulce, with no thought of interrupting her, yet inter- 
 rupted, with a little crying echo of the words : 
 
 "As if I were 'some new-found book of foreign 
 matters' !" 
 
 "Yes, that I had happened to pick up in that chance 
 little street, and bring home to look for treasures in ; and 
 nothing can remain to be paid because by now I have 
 found, not printed treasures, though similar things I did 
 find, but a living treasure a real, a living friend. That 
 is the way I think and feel about it." 
 
 Dulce pressed her hands, with tender, clinging 
 warmth; but though an answer to that treasure-speech 
 was in her heart and mind as in the hands, her 
 first words, and ones that came after a long moment of 
 pensive silence, held to the thought of the phrase that 
 she had echoed. 
 
 " 'Books of foreign matters,' I have noticed, are usu- 
 ally little red books, as stout as they are red, sometimes, 
 but somehow in my mind they have always the word
 
 180 The Great Way 
 
 'little' about them. And your speaking about me that 
 way, a way I truly understand, dear Isabel, has made 
 me think again of one of my special odd thoughts that 
 I have sometimes: that I would like, sometime or other, 
 to make myself into a little book a little, very fashion- 
 able, expensive red-covered book. And just your having 
 said that about me, makes me determined now that some- 
 time I will. I mean, as you right away know, of course, 
 just a little book in which to put down some of my 
 thoughts. And in such a case, it would indeed be a little 
 book of 'foreign matters' in a sense. One of my thoughts, 
 Isabel, dear, such an important thought, is of the great, 
 difference God has made in Society, let us say again 
 between men and women. To begin with made to be, 
 yes, though about Society, perhaps just allowed to be, 
 not entirely approving it Himself. Only that would be 
 not a foreign matter, would it, but a common matter to 
 the whole world, would it not? So for my book, meaning 
 me, the thought I think I would have to put down for all 
 that would be, Isabel, that men do not suffer at the closing 
 of doors. And women do. We women. Yes, I am quite 
 sure, now, that sometime I will do that if for no more 
 than to make my handwriting somewhat more stylish than 
 it is! An elegant little red book. But by the time I 
 could do all that, no one could buy me! As for the 
 closing of doors, dear Isabel, you spoke of finding treasure 
 in me; but ah, what treasures you keep finding for me, 
 to gather strength and faith from when when a door 
 is closed. Already I must be having and be strengthen- 
 ing that thought, for the time when oh, when you are 
 gone!" 
 
 Once more the curious happy light shone in Isabel's 
 eyes. 
 
 "You are going with us," she said quietly. 
 
 "Oh!" cried Dulce. 
 
 It was a little cry, a little gasp; her hands in a swift 
 impulse caught Isabel's again. In the brilliant flash of 
 its surprise, she saw not only all its delight for her, but
 
 A Flower of the English Sim 181 
 
 all the girl's temerity in it: its problem, its difficulties, 
 magnifying the gift. But her rapture was short-lived. 
 She dropped the hands ; her eyes turned away. 
 
 "I I would go to the end of the earth with you or 
 for you," she said, "to to any end except England. 
 You see," and there was a little tremulousness in her 
 voice as in the eyes with which she met Isabel's wondering 
 gaze, "you see, it is the the great angry place that he 
 has gone to !" 
 
 "Ah," cried Isabel, "my poor dear, I understand! I 
 do! But," and her voice grew light again, "England is 
 so big, and London, why bigger! You do not realize! 
 And," she continued swiftly, eagerly, "here is the vastly 
 important part of it. When I am married I will be very 
 wealthy. You knew that, did you not?" 
 
 "Yes," said Dulce, "and I am happy for you in that 
 thought, because, as I can now know without asking, you 
 marry because, and only because, you love. Without 
 that, and with the money, it would be wrong as wrong 
 as as something else, for instance, though 'Society' 
 would not say so would would just silently lie about it. 
 I was worried at first. But now I am very, very happy 
 about it." This was little of all she had thought, dreamed, 
 hoped; for the selfishness of love that inclined her to 
 make her own love the whole universe, had given way com- 
 pletely when she dreamed of happiness for Isabel, demand- 
 ing a million perfections in the man who should have her. 
 She had understood that the expected telegram was to be 
 from him, and that presumably he was to follow it, from 
 some far place, to fetch her a hint of chivalry that she 
 approved. She had venturingly hoped that this, and her 
 own leaving of Isabel, might overlap just a little, and 
 had even treated herself to a small imagined scene alone 
 with him in which was made clear that henceforth one 
 of her unfailing life-purposes would be to see that dire 
 doom be his unless he proved himself impossibly worthy 
 of her friend. She would not object, for Isabel's own 
 beatific sake, to his being rather old in fact, quite old,
 
 182 The Great Way 
 
 say twenty-eight or even twenty-nine; but he must have 
 no other flaw. 
 
 "And that 'Society,' " said Isabel, "has to do with 
 it too. You see, the fact of that great wealth will greatly 
 increase my duty toward Society, and first, yes, first of 
 all, dear Dulce, there is that great voice of yours." 
 
 Dulce was crying softly, but her bravery grew with 
 her tears. 
 
 "No, Isabel," she said. "You will remind me of what 
 I myself have just said that sometimes it is right to 
 take and take. But not that. Not in my case. From 
 you if from anyone, but that, not even from you. I admit 
 that it is different again from Dona Rina, but even so, 
 my feeling that that must be all from my own work is 
 deeply beyond depth a part of my Gran Via." 
 
 "I will persuade you," said Isabel with quiet confidence. 
 "And if I cannot, he will. He would wish it, just as he 
 would wish me to have violets here, my favourite flower, 
 while he has to be away, just as if he were here to give 
 them which is the reason I have them ; he would wish it, 
 this other, bigger thing, because he is the Ttmd that would 
 a man such as I know you would wish for me, good, 
 tender, gentle in his thoughts. You will learn this." 
 
 . The knowledge that she might share even briefly in 
 this part of Isabel's life brought Dulce's hands, wet now 
 with warm tears, again upon Isabel's. 
 
 "You have given bountifully, given for both of you, 
 in offering," she said. "And before that, you have given 
 gold and gold like that," and she rose, now, and walked 
 across to the great French windows and drew them wide 
 open, flooding the room with sunlight, "in the fact, my 
 Isabel, of your friendship, that I can have you for my 
 friend without danger to you because I am, oh, so truly, 
 no longer what I was. You know, Isabel, women like 
 me the former me are supposed to ruin everything they 
 touch. There is a terrible old proverb about it. It says : 
 'She kills herself. But first she kills her parents, friend, 
 and lover.' "
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 183 
 
 Isabel shuddered and from memory, for she had 
 heard it, elusively, read out from this her "book of foreign 
 matters," fragmentarily, in that period of delirium, 
 among several things in very truth new-found to the wide- 
 eyed ministering girl which had made her exclaim to her- 
 self, involuntarily, "What terrible words !" 
 
 "And," continued Dulce, "perhaps I did kill my par- 
 ents ! They lived right out there," and she pointed across 
 the little plaza, "in that little street, the Rosario. I 
 have seen my sister, once, since since I walked out of 
 it. One night in Sevilla, when I had come from the 
 Caridad where I had seen a wonderful Murillo that re- 
 minded me of home here, and of how I had walked out, 
 that very night she saw me dancing in the Seville streets, 
 trying to keep such heavy thoughts out of my feet, and 
 she would not speak to me; and when, in a kind of hot 
 pride, I threw away my dance and persisted, because, 
 after all, the little family money that equally shared would 
 have kept me out of the convent and from the Trudge 
 Market too, had gone to get her married in Sevilla, she 
 turned on me, and said: 'TJiey are dead. You killed 
 them, you. They died of shame!' Sisters ! Are brothers 
 like that, I wonder? Somehow, I think not another 
 difference between men and women. Anyway, I did not 
 believe what she said, or pretended to myself I did not, 
 for I had not heard the proverb then. But I tell you I 
 have learned it since by heart, and that was why, when 
 you rescued me that day, of all the streets in Spain I 
 could not bear to be carried through the Rosario, the 
 little street of the Rosary. I am not afraid of ghosts 
 save such ghosts. There they would have stood, like 
 Society that great demanding Society that has to be 
 satisfied!" 
 
 Her hands had lifted with the words, and with the 
 last, one of them fell in a vivid gesture against her bosom, 
 and it caught her fingers in the rope of forgotten beads. 
 
 "Ah," she cried, her voice altering to a swift gladness, 
 and her hands lifting the fair things out before her in the
 
 184 The Great Way 
 
 sunlight, "here, Isabel, here is a different kind of rosary, 
 here is the part of me that never has been bought or sold ! 
 I put them on because they are the colour of your eyes. 
 Think, they are thousands of years old, and never have 
 they changed hands except in loving gift! They are 
 Astarte's, from the body of a virgin princess of old Egypt, 
 and were in my family for God knows how many years 
 of those thousands of years !" 
 
 With a little outcry of fascination Isabel had come 
 over and was holding them with her, her fingers touching 
 Dulce's. 
 
 They shimmered. They were so exquisitely definite 
 and vivid now that it was as if the very shine itself of the 
 sun, not mere light from it, lighted and were moreover 
 an integral part of them. They were robin's egg, cobalt, 
 and turquoise; and where the sheer blue had finally, 
 irresistibly run into an unmistakable green because it 
 encountered the pathetic pottery, the green was that 
 which a young, frail, aristocratic girl bears above her 
 sometimes in unconsciously expressing her nature with the 
 ribbons that she weaves in her hair. Old things are so 
 tired, or so wise, they do not scream ; else the cobalt, the 
 turquoise, the robin's-egg must have done other than hang 
 resting in silence there, between the four caring hands, so 
 very vital and so very static were they. All the beads, 
 together, were like rare, especially desired waters brought 
 to meet under one whim of the sun: the profound 
 Mediterranean and the tender Nile, and the ocean of the 
 tropics. 
 
 "And in my family, Isabel, perhaps because we were 
 tall-thinking Spaniards, there was a story that if you 
 touched them with money, they would shrink up, and up, 
 if you were not careful to touch them so no more, until 
 they choked you ! Ah, I have never put them to that test, 
 it is so beautiful a thought not to have disproved. And I 
 think of them so much as truly so a part of me the only 
 part of that kind ! that 7 could never even give them 
 away, save at my death, unless, as it should perfectly be,
 
 A Flower of the English Sun 185 
 
 to a great and perfect friend such as you, for some big 
 purpose and reason that could never be even imagined 
 till they suddenly arose ; or unless unless to to him 
 which I can can imagine too easily, and must not im- 
 agine, because in such a thought as that, in in in that 
 picture, my Isabel, there there would be an altar!" 
 
 The voice choked, but Isabel would not drop the beads 
 to let her turn away. Chaining the girl to her with them, 
 she looked straight into her eyes. 
 
 "And why not?" said Isabel. 
 
 Dulce started violently. 
 
 "Oh, no, no !" she cried, trembling all over. "The Gran 
 Via is already vast and difficult enough !" 
 
 "Dear," said Isabel, "there is something I have wanted 
 to ask you about. It is some phrases that while you 
 were so ill you repeated over and over. One was, 'You 
 are romantic, hideously romantic !' You were talking to a 
 nun. Talking with her pitiably, and in some dim, spectral 
 place, yet that was a real place, I am sure, not an im- 
 aginary one. And after a long time, I learned that what 
 she had said to you was, that 'he* might come back 'to 
 honourably pay.' Why 'hideously' romantic, Dulce? To 
 me, her thought was beautifully so. You were bruised, 
 sore, bleeding then. You are not now. Indeed, might he 
 not? All things are possible with God. Great, exquisite 
 is your faith for all other things of the Gran Via. Could 
 you not have such a faith, as well?" 
 
 In its profound divination, its tenderness of calm 
 thought and deliberate plan, it was Friendship's supreme 
 offering, transcendent over the proffered money they had 
 discussed, transcendent over the terror in which Dulce 
 was pitiably sobbing, a terror which was turning to that 
 of a great light, feared for its very intensity, that would 
 lead her from her present abject weakness into a great 
 approaching exaltation that was already at work in her 
 because as she gazed with helplessly immovable eyes at 
 Isabel, held even more strongly while with even more 
 exquisite delicacy now by their mutual look than by the
 
 186 The Great Way 
 
 fragile beads still bridging them together, she was seeing 
 with electrical clarity that every symbol in life is a matter 
 of interpretation, that all evil is capable of good as all 
 good of evil, and that the soul that should have been the 
 nun's under the Christ at Mataro was standing here before 
 her in this girl who was clothed in those flowers from the 
 waxen Christ instead of a habit. And in her mute ac- 
 ceptance of the miracle-gift, the epic of friendship be- 
 tween them slipped from its bounds of mere poetry how- 
 ever great, into the boundlessness of life's highest ele- 
 ment, and in that moment became a Sacrament. 
 
 In the celestial strength of it Dulce, with a cry, was 
 again the superhuman, exalte body and spirit that she had 
 become from the House of the Great Voice, that she had 
 been that last hour of Paris with Dona Rina and more, 
 for the great causes were superlatively more. 
 
 "Oh," was her cry, and the sob in it was ecstatically 
 joyous, "God might allow it, if I can give enough! If 
 I can really achieve the pyramid the gypsy talked of I 
 Oh, I feel it all, and more than ever before ! The voice ! 
 The pyramid! The crowds! Oh, in that giving to the 
 crowd, it now will be like giving my soul to him, because 
 I will be not only paying back, but becoming worthy of 
 him! I will be walking hand in hand with love, though 
 alone, as the gitana said, alone until all is paid, if all 
 ever is paid. How strange that one need be ashamed only 
 of bodily nakedness that Society allows one to strip 
 one's soul naked, and give it to the crowd, without 
 shame! Ah, it is all clear, now, without even unhappi- 
 ness for me any more, real unhappiness, if only I always 
 am enough giving, and find oh, God grant it! that I 
 have, and always have, enough to give!" 
 
 "And you see now," said Isabel, with shining eyes, 
 "why his being in England does not matter, or rather, 
 why it matters beautifully! You will be starting near 
 him!" 
 
 "Ah, no, dear, no!" said Dulce, with a smile even 
 in the big sadness of it, "For the Gran Via, you see, i
 
 A { Fl&wer of the English Sum, 187 
 
 not like that. It simply is not. I must go as far away 
 from him as possible until until " 
 
 "And when I must go, perhaps any day," said Isabel, 
 "almost as our friendship becomes real to us, you will 
 talk of our parting, of its ending?" 
 
 "Ending?" cried Dulce. "Neither one of us could end 
 it! It has been! Can you doubt my love for you, and 
 can you think it a matter hurt by time or geography? 
 Remember my little friend that I told you of !" 
 
 She turned again to the balcony and pointed outward 
 and upward. 
 
 "Lola ! Why, even if I never met her again, and I 
 think somehow that I never will, she is still my friend, 
 and I am hers ! How could anything as real as that ever 
 cease to be? I met and knew her swiftly, as I did you. 
 And if the matter of it is no longer in this world, then 
 I am sure it must be a little star somewhere, or some- 
 thing like it, that will be giving its light to me along the 
 Gran Via sometimes, even when I do not know it! And 
 with you and me, how much, much more! So it would 
 be too with Dona Rina, who came to me into the Way 
 even more as you did; and as with dear Dona Rina I 
 felt that we would meet again, with you, Isabel, I know. 
 Even if we did not, my Isabel, after you have gone, so 
 it will be with us that matter of starlight !" 
 
 A sound startled them from their absorption a knock- 
 ing from the corridor. 
 
 "Your telegram !" exclaimed Dulce. "I know it is !" 
 
 "Perhaps!" said Isabel, and started toward the door, 
 but Dulce caught her back. 
 
 "I want to be your maid, as I was Dona Rina's, for 
 one moment, and especially in this thing! Yes, yes! 
 For the meaning of it!" And she ran before her and 
 brought the envelope back triumphantly. "It is, you 
 see!" 
 
 "Why," exclaimed Isabel, reading it, "I must go to 
 the station at once ! This has been downstairs for hours, 
 and it is this train the one just coming in!"
 
 188 The Great Way 
 
 Even as she spoke, Dulce, gaily swift in her prettily 
 played role, was ready with her hat, and a moment later 
 was waving to her in the gallery-corridor over the patio. 
 Then she ran back through the room and out onto the 
 little scrolled balcony. She was sure Isabel would look up, 
 and Isabel did, pausing for a smiling moment, a flower 
 in the sunshine against the bright diminutive flower- 
 garden of the diminutive plaza. Across its toy distance 
 of green and blue and yellow houses she turned once more, 
 for Dulce to wave again. Then she disappeared, into the 
 Rosario.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 SCORES 
 
 THE dancing gold of the sun was that of the descendant 
 hour. It was indeed near the matter of starlight. Rapt 
 in the full vibrant thought of her Gran Via, Dulce stood 
 in this its interstice of peacefulness deeply breathing in 
 its calm and inspiration. And when after a long moment 
 of this debonair drinking she almost unconsciously flung 
 her arms rapturously upward, alone on the dainty balcony 
 and in the whole little plaza, she was less like an old 
 caryatid in the pearly, rosy frock than some lovely mod- 
 ern French statue of tinted marbles. The very silence of 
 sculpture surrounded her from the deserted room, from 
 the deserted square. 
 
 But this was broken much as a statue might imagin- 
 ably have been by such dissonances and she was brought 
 to an awareness of her startling attitude, by a small Babel 
 of voices, and one that specialized one voice, exclaiming 
 above the others: 
 
 "Yes, it is she!" 
 
 It was the triumvirate of theatre, business, and music; 
 the Jew, the Catalonian, and the Maestro. 
 
 "No !" "Yes !" "No !" 
 
 "Yes! Yes!" "No! No!" "Yes! Yes!" 
 
 "Yes, it is, but in a nice dress!" And the Maestro 
 called up to her : "We want to see you !" 
 
 Dulce was the statue no longer. She was trembling- 
 with excitement, but happily not shattered to pieces, for 
 she was swift, brilliantly swift, with bravado. 
 
 "You were not nice to me the other day!" she called. 
 "I have some employment just now, and I will not let 
 you see me till to-night!" 
 
 189
 
 190 The Great Way 
 
 "7 was nice to you the other day !" cried the Maestro. 
 "We must see you ! Come here !" 
 
 "Come here!" replied Dulce, airily. "I am too fashion- 
 able to go there!" 
 
 And making good her words she turned from the bal- 
 cony with a defiant toss of her head and ran thrilling into 
 the room. Already it was dusky and she flooded it with 
 electric light and ran on and flung open the door. She 
 could hear their excited voices ascendant on the patio 
 stair, and briefly they were in the room, all talking at 
 once, as suddenly and violently present as they had been 
 that day in the street, and all performing, loud as the end 
 of Faust, in an explanatory chorus to Dulce: 
 
 "We could not find her, that nice fat woman! Devil! 
 Bruja! She escapes! She repents! Thinking we sail, 
 she goes on board the boat ! Thinking she stays, we 
 change our tickets ! It sails !" 
 
 "Boats are dangerous things that way !" said Dulce. 
 "I was saying so only to-day!" 
 
 "And, after a week Sh-sh-sh-oo-oo-oo-er ! we find 
 /ow/" said the Maestro. His marvellously articulated 
 "sure," the only English word he had ever learned, come 
 to him from some foreign lips and gathered into his 
 sensuous being as a parrot gathers in a curse or a caress, 
 indelibly, appealed to him, with its delicious distortion 
 of the forbidden "u," as an enticing expletive, somehow 
 pure yet somehow fascinating, and he used it as he might 
 have used a heliotrope evening suit on all, though only, 
 very great occasions. Between his contributions he had 
 been gazing all about, and his long nose was inhaling the 
 violets while even more blissfully the Jew's soul was in- 
 haling the great smiling negress and her cigar. 
 
 "That is a nice woman !" said the Jew. 
 
 "Come both here to business," said the Catalonian. 
 
 The Maestro, thin, tall, gaunt, eager, gentle creature, 
 unmistakably Naples peasant but as inevitably sheer lyric, 
 with those soft, fire-flecked brown eyes, the longish, loopy, 
 heavy, dead-black hair and dead-white, large, almost
 
 Scores 191 
 
 cadaver-like features, was carrying a great music-score 
 quite as he might have carried a mattress with him, to 
 sleep on anywhere, as if they had fully expected to find 
 Dulce with a piano attached to her wherever it was they 
 found her; and he did not show the least surprise, now 
 that they did. From all his ways as from all his features, 
 it was absolutely impossible to know whether this was 
 a very old young man or an old man vastly young; and 
 pre-eminent about him was something virginal. Whatever 
 his state, whether monastic or barbarous in its facts, the 
 truth of him was that his real wife was Art her soul 
 was music, her body, as a rule, was a piano. Her form, 
 to him, was mere matter of indifference: whether she was 
 three-legged or an upright stump, and wherever he ran 
 across her, she was his, and he performed upon her. But 
 he would have abandoned her to go live in a cave with a 
 griffin, if it could sing. 
 
 "You told us," he said to the outwardly calm but in- 
 wardly surging Dulce, "that you have a singing voice. 
 Do you understand the notes, signora?" He named her 
 with this Italian "madame" as though it meant with him 
 some special courtesy. 
 
 "No yes I am not sure Why, of course I do!" 
 said Dulce. "Like all poor girls in the Barcelona theatres, 
 I learned by ear from the Maestro and the band. But I 
 am a very strange girl, as I have found out in a number 
 of ways, and I have noticed especially, that once I know 
 a tune, I seem to recognize the notes if I see them after- 
 wards on paper. It was that way, for instance, with 
 the 'Cavalier de la Luna,' which I sing exactly as well 
 as Raquel Meller can. Let me tell you, that if I look 
 
 at this " Even as he had opened his lips to bid her, 
 
 she had stepped to the piano, on which he had stood open 
 the big score. He swung about on the stool, and struck 
 a key for her, watching her with some amusement, more 
 anxiety. 
 
 Dulce began to hum, but she stopped short after a fev 
 notes.
 
 192 The Great Way 
 
 "No, no. I lack confidence, because these two other 
 men have been so disagreeable the other day!" 
 
 "You must not lack confidence," he said. "I see some- 
 thing in you. You have a beautiful face. You look like 
 me. Your nose goes the same way." 
 
 "Does it?" cried Dulce, nervously startled. 
 
 "Yes, several ways." And he reached up and put a 
 long finger on her nose. "No? Yes? No? So and so, 
 and so? But all to the same end. The same end as mine. 
 Music. I like you !" 
 
 "Oh, thank you!" gasped Dulce. "And if you will 
 but play a little, I can sing it afterwards, from memory. 
 Then, I will always remember the way the notes look, I 
 am sure. It is a queer thing with me, that I cannot 
 explain." 
 
 "Perhaps you are a genius, like me !" he said. "7 never 
 had to learn the notes at all! Never!" 
 
 He played a few bars from an aria, Dulce listening 
 intently. But instead of singing it, she turned to him 
 with raised eye-brows. 
 
 "Why, that is quite pretty, is it not?" she exclaimed. 
 Then she hummed the air softly, correct in every note, 
 her eyes travelling the page as she did so. 
 
 "You have surely studied music, yes, signora?" 
 
 "When I was very young, two or three lessons. I was 
 four years old perhaps. And it was here in Cadiz I 
 am truthful, you see. We had a little money at that 
 time." 
 
 "Then you are a wonderful mimic, a wonderful 
 ear!" 
 
 "Very wonderful indeed," said Dulce. "You have yet 
 to know." 
 
 He took his hands from the keys and folded them 
 resolutely. 
 
 "You can hum all that again without the piano?" 
 
 "Of course !" said Dulce. 
 
 "Do so, then !" and she did so. 
 
 "And this?" He played further, double as much. She
 
 Scores 193 
 
 hummed it all promptly, swaying a little with the melody 
 as it grew. 
 
 "That is pretty! Who wrote it?" And she looked 
 at the top of the page. "Why, Valverde! Joachin Val- 
 verde our own marvellous Quinito ! No wonder it is 
 pretty !" 
 
 "But we have yet to hear the voice, signorina. The 
 first bars, now you remember them? Sing them then. 
 And I mean sing. The full voice." 
 
 "You mean loud as loud as I can?" 
 
 "Yes, as loud as you can." 
 
 Dulce stared at him. 
 
 "But name of God ! Indoors, that would be very vul- 
 gar, would it not?" 
 
 He laughed gurglingly. 
 
 "We have yet to know, signora !" 
 
 "But if I put my head back !" protested Dulce. 
 
 "Why, you have never heard such a racket!" 
 
 "Perhaps not. Let me hear one now." 
 
 Dulce threw up her chin, her throat open, and sang 
 the melody slipping, intoxicated with her power, from 
 tone to tone on to the end. Perhaps she had never truly 
 heard her own voice before. The sound, full, limpid, pure, 
 poured out with the natural abandon of a bird's, joyous 
 as a child's, but big, filling the room, lilting, natural, glad 
 yet poignant with pathos. When she stopped, the sound 
 died away into a stillness as absolute as that which suf- 
 fuses a great audience about to burst into wild noise. She 
 was frightened at the noise she had just made herself, 
 and at their silence. 
 
 "What did I tell you?" she demanded. 
 
 Her question snapped the spell in which the musician 
 sat, and jumping to his feet he turned excitedly to his 
 companions. 
 
 "Dio, Dio, but it is the bel canto, the bel canto !" 
 
 The Jew shot him a look of caution, the Catalonian 
 spoke to him rapidly. 
 
 "You think you could teach her?"
 
 194 The Great Way 
 
 "Teach her? I have nothing to teach! I have but 
 to play the notes !" 
 
 "If we give you this fine part, senora " The busi- 
 ness-man addressed her, but the Jew interrupted him. 
 
 "A grave risk, you understand !" 
 
 " can you agree," continued the Catalonian, "to 
 
 be ready in three days? We can offer you your expenses 
 and a hundred pesetas weekly." 
 
 Dulce was quivering, and at mention of the sum was 
 speechless; but in her very confusion a quick thought 
 came to her rescue, and she turned her gasp of joy to 
 one of seeming horror. 
 
 "For such a lovely voice? Remember, I have lived 
 in Paris, and a hundred francs is ridiculous. Two hun- 
 dren, I think, no?" 
 
 "Well, well, with your expenses a hundred and fifty ?" 
 
 "Well, for the present, yes," said Dulce, "for I recog- 
 nize the sort I am dealing with. You may have heard the 
 saying: that there are no Jews in Barcelona because the 
 Catalonians are still stingier. But to start with, we will 
 call a hundred and fifty fair enough." 
 
 "Bruja!" snapped the Jew. "It is far more than fair! 
 The play is but an hour-piece, and you need but two 
 costumes !" 
 
 "But I shall dress very fashionably," said Dulce. 
 
 "Let us hope so," said the Catalonian. "We lose 
 money as it is, for thanks to that other devil we cannot 
 now get a theatre here. Beginning next week, we are 
 engaged for the Tivoli in Barcelona." 
 
 "Barcelona. . . . The Tivoli !" gasped Dulce. "There 
 is fate in this !" 
 
 "A drowning, perhaps," grinned the Jew, "for we are 
 going by ship direct, not rail and you said yourself 
 boats are dangerous! And this one might be for your 
 bargain, for are you going to be sea-sick, or do you know 
 how to learn music on a boat?" 
 
 "Of course I can learn music on a boat! Why not?" 
 said Dulce.
 
 Scores 195 
 
 "Very well," said the business-man with finality, "we 
 take the Trasatlantica, sailing at light to-morrow morn- 
 ing, getting in Monday. Time for one rehearsal with 
 scenery. Open at night. We will now sign a contract, 
 girl." 
 
 "No," said Dulce promptly, "for I might wish to 
 sing in the Grand Opera at any moment. I am very 
 honest and would give you fair warning ahead, just as 
 I would expect you to do me. So a contract is not 
 necessary." 
 
 The two men stared at each other. 
 
 "All right," said the Jew. "That works both ways ! 
 We are going to the boat now. Come. Are you ready?" 
 
 "Not not quite!" gasped Dulce. "I will meet you!" 
 
 "No ! No !" they both cried, frightened. 
 
 "Go get her ticket," said the Neapolitan, blandly. "I 
 will bring her. Go on !" And the two, shrugging their 
 four shoulders, went forth, leaving her alone with her 
 Maestro. 
 
 "Oh, you are so good!" she cried. "But even you 
 must leave me! I will meet you outside, in the Plaza. 
 You will understand ! I must be alone, before I start on 
 this for at least one, one moment !" 
 
 He looked into her eyes, gravely, then with a slow, 
 divine smile. 
 
 "7 can trust you!" he said, the words slow as the 
 smile, his head nodding with satisfaction. "Shoo-er! But 
 can you trust yourself? You are too excited !" 
 
 "We we can both trust me not to be a thief," she 
 said, "so leave that," and she pointed to the score, "and 
 I will have to bring it to you !" 
 
 Again he smiled like a seraph, again his words were 
 slowly spoken. 
 
 "Yes, yes, you have the temperament! I will wait out 
 there!" 
 
 "I will be there!" she cried. "Indeed, for you I am 
 running away from someone else. Mind you appreciate 
 it ! for, oh, it is someone who must not see me, that she
 
 196 The Great Way 
 
 may be a little the less hurt ! So if you see an elegant lady 
 and gentleman coming, whistle do not fail ! You can- 
 not mistake, for she is so beautiful she will look like sun- 
 shine, even in the starlight ! Whistle tliat!" 
 
 And she pointed again to the score. 
 
 "I will whistle it," he said. "Part of what you sang 
 the cigarette song." 
 
 In the doorway he turned and looked at her, and once 
 more smiled that slow smile. 
 
 "/ can trust you!" he said. 
 
 Alone, once more, with a long, long breath, her hands 
 clasped before her, she gazed toward the balcony, and 
 then, the hands still so held, she walked across and 
 stepped through the tall windows for one, one more long, 
 ecstatic moment upon it, now in the quiet fullness of 
 night and starshine, and stood gazing down at the silent 
 tiny square, its blackened toy garden, the lantern, now 
 agleam with yellow, hanging from the yellow church 
 almost within reach of her hand and shedding its radiance 
 over the clean cobblestones across to the two absurdly 
 narrow streets leading in. 
 
 "Oh ! So the Gran Via can be by water too ! Strange 
 I had never thought of that! Oh, what a clean, clean 
 way to start again !" 
 
 She dared no further moment. 
 
 She came swiftly in, across to Isabel's writing-desk, 
 and took up a pen, the words "Darling Isabel" clear in 
 her mind ; but suddenly and equally clear there leapt back 
 to her her words to Dona Rina: "I I spell like the 
 devil," and she dropped the pen. 
 
 For a long instant she stood with her back to the desk, 
 her hands clasped against her bosom, which was rising 
 and falling with the surge of a new thought that had 
 come to her. Then the hands fastened decisively tight on 
 the Astarte beads, lifted them swiftly from around her 
 neck. She ran over to the piano, hung them, with their 
 now electric-lighted and rich, shining, indeed, glazed blues 
 and greens, in the purple violets ; swiftly bent and touched
 
 Scores 197" 
 
 both them and the petals with her lips; and sped into 
 the bedroom. 
 
 When after wonderfully few moments she returned for 
 the score, she was in her dark, worn skirt and waist. And 
 when she closed and lifted the heavy score, heavy more- 
 over, it almost seemed to her excited prescience, with 
 destiny, its big-lettered name on the cover flashed before 
 her, and she nearly dropped it. 
 
 LA GRAN VIA it read. 
 
 "Holy God!" she gasped. "And I have ever doubted 
 anything!" 
 
 As she stood gazing at it in trembling wonder, the big 
 book held before her on both arms, a whistle, the whistled 
 lilting notes of the cigarette song, came distinctly out of 
 the starlight of the plaza. 
 
 With a violent start she clasped the score with one 
 arm against her breast, ran to the further bedroom, and 
 noiselessly out of it into a side corridor of the patio 
 gallery. A few seconds later she was with the waiting 
 Maestro at the corner of the church; he took the score, 
 took her arm ; still a few seconds later, he had led her, 
 unprotesting though her heart beat wildly, into the dark 
 Rosario, where she had learned to walk . . . out of which 
 she had walked, before, into her Gran Via. . . . After 
 them through the silver night of the ocean city came only 
 the calling whistle of its patrolling guards, signalling in 
 the quiet starlight.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 GBAN EXITO 
 
 AS the big ship drew out of the Bahia, Dulce stood at 
 the rail in the radiant early morning, watching the slow 
 retreat of white Cadiz against the blue sky. She had 
 never gone to sea before, and a thrill of excitement was 
 in her. 
 
 But her mind, despite the little ocean of music surging 
 from boundary to boundary of it for she had studied 
 with the Maestro all night and almost overflowing from 
 her fatal success and with thoughts of the torrents of 
 work that must suffuse the slender handful of days and 
 nights, was yet calm: curiously, quite deliberately calm, 
 at its own imperious dictation. 
 
 She had told herself, that rapturous last long moment 
 in the little balcony, as she gazed into the starlit plaza, 
 that thus her mind must be; that until her role was 
 mastered, the notes sure and unforgettable on her tongue, 
 and the words pinned securely in her memory, and the 
 steps easiest of all for her as ready in her toes as the 
 most hereditary of Peninsular dances, she must not think 
 beyond the circle of these things, must not look either 
 backward at the old Gran Via or forward along the new 
 one; that at utmost best the time for the bulk of all this 
 arduous task would be the two days on the ship; and 
 even in decocting and determining all this, reflecting, too, 
 that as to what had happened and what was about to 
 happen with so much suddenness to her, later on she 
 could and certainly would! consider it all; and even 
 that, then, do quietly, slowly, surely. 
 
 And with that instinctive grasp and use of imaginative 
 things that so often helped her in her paucity of learning, 
 
 198
 
 Gran Exito 199 
 
 she had decided then and there on the little balcony that 
 the silence and the starlight paralleled the calm that she 
 would need; and she had striven vividly to picture them, 
 and to lay away the thought of them, to her purpose. 
 
 She remembered them now, as she stood with her hand 
 on the deck-rail in the soft light of a day rare in her native 
 section of the world rare because for all of Cadiz's glit- 
 ter as it sank away, there was a haze in the air that subtly 
 held a quality of mist . . . the sun would disappear, to- 
 day, before his time. 
 
 "This is indeed an 'exito' one that must become a 
 Gran Exito ! How different from the other start ! I 
 suppose no two beginnings are ever quite alike. . . ." 
 
 Cadiz was gone . . . somewhere down into the salt 
 water like lost Atlantis. Dulce was alone, Cadiz behind 
 her for the second time forever, if she so chose now! 
 and the true Gran Via was begun. She would be 
 utterly alone, with God and salt water, to-night. The 
 ugly words of the Jew came back to her, but they brought 
 to her only a little wistfully happy smile: "No, I was 
 never born to drown, except in the meaning of tears, 
 perhaps !" 
 
 She began to think slowly, carefully, weighingly. Fate 
 was with her, so much she believed unquestioningly. Her 
 big conviction, the revelation of art that had torn the 
 wall of ignorance from before her yearning, untutored 
 mind just as that other miracle, an understanding of hu- 
 man love, had wiped the soot from it, was as real and 
 sparklingly clear to her to-day on the face of the waters 
 as it had been that mad hysterical evening with Dona 
 Rina in Paris, as it had been that life-clarifying epoch 
 of an instant with exquisite Isabel yesterday; and was 
 dwelling with her serenely as a pure religion. 
 
 For to her big desirous spirit, lacerated in the cruel 
 kindergarten of the Trudge Market and burnt clean by. 
 its muddy fire, her conviction was a religion essentially, 
 and, in its beautiful sense of a "bringing back," a religion 
 literally . . . and her faith in it was as great, and in its
 
 200 The Great Way 
 
 basic acceptation by her as simple, as the inherited faith 
 of any primitive daughter of her old, sweet, simple race. 
 
 She thought she saw, too, her Gran Via clear to the 
 fulfilment of this religion, insofar as that might, indeed 
 must, be allowed thought now. The beginning was already 
 made, and with a God-given endowment, for with all the 
 purposeful reserve of tlie two managers she had com- 
 prehended their satisfied, almost fearful discovery of a 
 phenomenal voice. And the next step, the only one neces- 
 sary to consider with care until it had been taken, was 
 not only prepared, but to her characteristically confident 
 mind supremely easy, for it was merely so to succeed on 
 Monday night that the verdict "gran exito" should be 
 loudly plastered on every fence in Spain. 
 
 Later, there must be, she knew, long months, perhaps 
 long years, of drastic study, monumental. But that was 
 a distance off, because first she must have the money to 
 pay for it. And as for the terrible pesetas that she had 
 sworn to pay back into the market, that thought of all 
 thoughts here concerned was not a calm one, and she 
 knew she must forswear harbouring it, save sunk to the 
 very deepest of soul- waters, just now. 
 
 Her eyes, grown misty as the sky had grown, were 
 fascinated to weariness by the swift passing of the blue- 
 green water, and she dropped back into a deck-chair, 
 lowering her lids a little to keep the strolling, chattering 
 passengers from intruding Spanish-wise into her quiet- 
 ness ; and hour by hour the day slipped toward noon 
 and afternoon slipped toward sundown. A thick, soft 
 line grew distantly out of the sea, and with a little quiver 
 of delight she thought: "That must be Africa! I am 
 already seeing continents in my Gran Via !" And she 
 wondered whether the far blue haze above the line could 
 be the fabulous Mountains of the Moon. Afterward her 
 dreams must have melted from waking into sleep, for she 
 started dazedly when the Maestro touched her arm. 
 
 "Do you not wish to see, signorina?" 
 
 Her deck was quite deserted, and in vague curiosity
 
 Gran Eacito 201 
 
 she followed him to the other side of the ship, where 
 passengers were lined all along the rail. 
 
 The sun was covered somewhere behind her in the 
 west, and before her, far across the waters, grey against 
 the dull pearl of the sky, a delicate miracle rose in two 
 huge mist-like crests, two giant, solid shadows toned 
 with tender hints of lavender, mysterious and unreal, 
 melting slowly into one Titan ghost of stone. 
 
 Dulce caught her breath at the filmy vision, dragon of 
 a continent, symbol of a nation . . . the symbol of it, for 
 that nation, broken ; the love of it, and the rock of it, 
 unbreakable. . . . Much, often, as her thoughts, her talk, 
 had been of it, she had never seen it before. . . . Then 
 Gibraltar, like Cadiz, was gone; her ship was gliding 
 into to-night's dark grey waters of the Mediterranean. . . . 
 
 A night, a day, another new sun, a glittering heavenly 
 sea, bluer than paint, and Little Gibraltar, guarding 
 Little Paris, was standing before her; the red earth and 
 red rock of fortress-crowned Mont Juich, descending to 
 the waters' edge at Barcelona's entry. 
 
 Overswept by memories, but gloriously free of her 
 terrible walking, she drove up the Ramblas, past the 
 Continental "Everything shall be new!" across the 
 Plaza Cataluna to the Hotel Inglaterra. "Inglaterra, 
 Isabel's land!" She had no desire for food, but some 
 instinct told her that she must not dine like a Spaniard 
 just before the performance, so she forced herself to a 
 noon breakfast, and then walked the brief square to the 
 Tivoli, into its drinking-garden, and thence through the 
 big low auditorium to the stage. At last her rehearsal 
 was over, and that of the "Espectdculo," which was to 
 precede the little opera, began. In the wings, the Maestro 
 was praising her with warm, gentle hands and lighted 
 eyes. Even the Jew had lost his frightened look; in his 
 eyes and those of the Catalan the gradual expression of 
 respect was growing. 
 
 "You will be here at eigh t- thirty ? Or assuredly by a 
 quarter to nine, senorita?"
 
 202 The Great Way 
 
 "Is that necessary, senor? We do not begin, you 
 say, till after ten.'* 
 
 "It is better! It is better!" cried the Jew nervously. 
 
 "Very well, senor, if it will spare you a frenzy. But 
 give me some more money, s'il vous plait quite a lot. 
 I need an expensive manton. How much have I had so 
 far a week's worth?" 
 
 "Fully two weeks' worths, senorita !" cried the Catalan. 
 "Can you not " 
 
 "No, senor, I can not! You have said that I must 
 be well dressed, and do you suppose I would consent to 
 anything else in any case? You are going to have a long 
 run on my account, too, remember that !" 
 
 "Let us hope so ! Let us hope so !" cried the Jew 
 with a sigh, as his fellow-manager handed her money. 
 
 "Remember I politely said Vil vous plait,' a French 
 word, senores. I cannot blame you for not exactly know- 
 ing it, especially as we have nothing just right for it in 
 Spanish. But it means something quite like 'make the 
 favour,' and you might have recognized the tone of it! 
 Anyway, I have explained it now, and in addition I now 
 say 'thank you.* Manners are much in this world!" 
 And with mutters of "Devil! Devil!" floating after her, 
 she was gone. 
 
 Her part in the slender little comedy of music, a "one 
 hour play" with swiftly shifted scenes and no pauses, 
 was neither long nor, for one of Dulce's lightness of foot 
 and fearless confidence of voice and action, at all arduous; 
 and three times in the remaining hours she rehearsed it 
 inwardly, mentally singing every note, with every word, 
 building new gestures, new movements, new expressions 
 into it. Three times ; till at last she was fully satisfied, 
 and her brain a little weary, so that she put it all from 
 her, knowing that the first tones of the orchestra would 
 bring it all back. And to keep busy (and thence pacified) 
 the mechanically moving musical sense, she hummed and 
 re-hummed the Cavalier de la Luna, inquisitively studying 
 out its notes and French syllable-phrasing from her Paris
 
 Gran Eaeito 203 
 
 copy . . . thinking of Dona Rina . . . deciding to carry 
 it lovingly with her to the theatre as a mascot. She had 
 no fear of her voice, her dancing, her memory. But 
 her memories. . . . These, she did fear a little, wondering 
 if she could put them all into the voice ... if perhaps 
 they would instead swarm up and overwhelm the voice, 
 and her . . . Jose Luis . . . that terrible immaculate 
 night . . . Melba . . . the Louvre. . . . 
 
 She had promised quarter to nine; but "It will be just 
 as sensible to scare them a little," she decided, and ac- 
 cordingly, though she summoned a carriage at half-past 
 eight, she gave directions far more reaching than the 
 distance of the palm-lined little stretch to the Tivoli. 
 
 "The Calle de las Cortes, friend, out to the bull-ring, 
 and around all of it, and out into the Gran Via, and down 
 to the Gracia, and then to the Tivoli." 
 
 It was a pasear of memories . . . with underneath 
 them, the hum of her role once more. She had finished 
 the last subconscious note of it and swung again into the 
 Apache waltz as the carriage swung into its few short 
 blocks of the Gracia, when, suddenly, she stopped 
 humming. 
 
 It was a thick, soft night. The two side-street corners 
 with the fashionable "Novedades" and the casual "Tivoli" 
 cheek by jowl were within sight; and stretching out from 
 her own theatre through the rich darkness burned the 
 opera's title in great shining magenta-pink electric lights : 
 "LA GRAN VIA." 
 
 To see it thus, written in the air, and concerning her, 
 in such roseate letters against the warm smudge of this 
 city's languorous night, had brought tears, a swift help- 
 less rush of them, to her cheeks. When she had been 
 driven under it to the stage door, she hastily paid her 
 driver a double fare, and marched into the dark corridor 
 to the stage. 
 
 "Well, well, that is all right, senores!" she answered 
 calmly to the wild relieved swearings of the* managers, 
 and went with no further ado to her dressing-room.
 
 204 The Great Way 
 
 Distinguished from all her companions, she did not have 
 to share it, and so was happily alone, for as yet she could 
 afford no maid, and persuaded herself that she did not 
 want one, buoyantly visionary as were her thoughts of 
 Dona Rina, and especially that very early comment of 
 that dear woman's over in the bull-ring. . . . 
 
 Above the confusion outside her door came to her the 
 brass clang of the Espectdculo, "The Magnificent Pecca- 
 dillos of Don Juan," which were loudly blaring to an 
 end, even in Spanish imagination, for at least one night. 
 Dulce's body was trembling all over, but her mind was 
 not. Her voice and feet would steady at the music. She 
 knew that. . . . Don Juan crashed with his large loves 
 into silence. . . . 
 
 The Maestro came to her with a kind word. "Thank 
 you, Maestro," she said through the door. "I am not 
 afraid." A few moments later she heard the first tones 
 of the overture. 
 
 When the call-boy came to her room he did not find 
 her. She was already in the wings, waiting. The whole 
 score was familiar to her now, and she stood humming 
 and slightly swaying to the rhythms. Her heart was 
 tumultuous. . . . Gracias a Dios, no one spoke to her. . . . 
 
 She had left her face very pale, with lips brilliantly 
 carmined, after the new French fashion she had seen. 
 Her very simple gown was of white, a deep rose at its 
 waist none in her soft dark hair, which was parted 
 and drawn into a low knot at the back of her beautifully 
 modelled head, which thus was almost black against the 
 marble white of her neck. The white gown was cut very 
 low just a little lower than anything she had ever seen 
 in Spain. Held behind her, and drooping from the hips 
 and over her lovely naked arms, was the manton that 
 also she had ferreted out to-day from the junk market, 
 this, for which she had determinedly bargained indeed, 
 but wit'h no such noise as she had described to Dona 
 Hina, for her lilting musical inward rehearsing had been 
 in progress the while. And it was a manton sensuous
 
 Gran Earito 205 
 
 and rich as music with which she had come forth and 
 with which she was standing here now old, far, far older 
 than she, a heavy Oriental fabric from the far, far 
 Philippines, black and gold, with stabs of red and yellow 
 and old blues, darkly beautiful as that of the French 
 Breval's "Carmen" ; while in Dulce's eager waiting eyes 
 was a lustre such as Spain's great Zuloaga had seen 
 when he painted the Frenchwoman in it a lustre as if 
 a rosy light of life itself were burning before her and 
 burnishing her features in deliberate place of the tavern- 
 fire of Spain's super pigment-master's masterly Romance. 
 And too, she was quite like the great thing in more than 
 her rich manner of countenance and her Chinoesque 
 manton, for the light, in verity, was from within, an 
 expression that, externally mingling with, and painting 
 her in, the gas-flare of the wings, exposed her soul, and 
 in this moment that taut soul was an apotheosis of the 
 two opposed forces of her nature and her life it was both 
 virtuosic and mature. 
 
 Lost as she was in the music that with each phrase 
 fetched her nearer to her great instant, yet the great 
 memories were flashing in a radiating stream before her. 
 She remembered, afterward, having wondered, swiftly, 
 intensely, if the riot-coloured vision of the Louvre could 
 show in her eyes and sound in her voice, as she had told 
 Dona Rina it would. . . . Then a few words of spoken 
 dialogue smote in her ears, followed swiftly by a fatal 
 phrase of the orchestra, and Dulce, calmly beautiful as 
 a swaying exotic flower, was no longer in the wings, but 
 walking at last into her natural home. . . . 
 
 Her final consciousness of herself and of the past was 
 a vague, instinctive insistence of her mind upon the struc- 
 ture, plain to her lately developed sense as an architec- 
 tural design, that she had conceived of her role. After 
 that, she was in the living present, moving, singing. 
 
 She scarcely heard her voice until, as it grew seem- 
 ingly of its own will bigger and bigger in the unfamiliar 
 freedom of the great auditorium, she became aware of the
 
 206 The Great Way 
 
 stillness of the hundreds the complete stillness of willing 
 silence, rare indeed for the thoroughly Spanish Tivoli, 
 which for a voice was to a nicety crowded. She felt the 
 dropping of cigarettes and the lifting drift of their blue 
 smoke, the stealthy, quiet bending forward of heads; 
 but most of all, last as first, the utter and unnatural 
 silence of her country-people. In it, clear and lilting and 
 full, liberated and limpid, seeming to float, and poise, 
 and float on again, Dulce's voice was singing its way 
 that was to lead, in very truth, through long, long 
 distances. 
 
 Her own voice was singing; her own people were 
 listening. 
 
 Her own, and her own; and she herself was listening 
 now, too, even as she poured and poured it out, to the 
 voice that was to sound around the world. 
 
 Quivering as she leaned against a canvas set, she 
 heard from the wings the stamping, the shouts, the mad 
 clapping. And through it all, she heard the hoarse ex- 
 citement of the two managers, crying snatches of sen- 
 tences beside her. . . . "Gran exito ! Success ! . . . 
 Gran exito, senorita!" 
 
 And it was. ... A great End, that was a great 
 Beginning. . . . 
 
 "Of course," shouted Dulce. "I told you all along 
 it would be!" 
 
 Suddenly remembering, she rushed to her dressing- 
 room for her swift costume change ; made it ; rushed back. 
 
 "You are in time, senorita, you are in time !" 
 
 She was dressed in scarlet now. She went on swing- 
 ing with the orchestra-lilt. Despite the costume the house 
 recognized her, and the band paused at the momentary 
 noise. She blew a kiss to the mass of yelling faces, and 
 the great silence came again instantly as she opened her 
 lips. . . . 
 
 Again the storm broke, and madder than before. "A 
 chorus," she thought, both thankful and regretful, "and 
 it is over!" But the play was halted. "Again!" they
 
 Gran Exito 207 
 
 were roaring, above the stamp of sticks and feet. "Again ! 
 Again!" And flushing with delight at an assenting nod 
 from the Maestro, she sang . . . and again . . . and 
 again. A trinket from a woman fell at her feet, and 
 Dulce, taking her white flowers from her scarlet dress, 
 kissed them and threw them, and ran into the wings, and 
 there, exhausted from excitement, stopped short. But the 
 stamping and shouting did not. The chorus stood awk- 
 wardly about on the stage, waiting, with witless-looking 
 wit. It did not occur to her to go on and bow. The Jew 
 and the Catalonian both rushed up to her. 
 
 "Can you interpolate?" 
 
 "They demand more, senorita!" 
 
 "Do you know something, anything, that you could sing 
 without orchestra ?" 
 
 "The 'Valse Brune'?" said Dulce. "Any orchestra 
 would know that." 
 
 "The 'Valse Brune'? What is it?" 
 
 "The Apache waltz the 'Cavalier de la Luna* you 
 must know 'La Apache'!" 
 
 "Yes! Yes! Sing it! Be quick!" 
 
 "I will for more money that is only fair. Shall I 
 have it?" 
 
 "Bruja !" cried the Jew wickedly. "Are you the devil's 
 own? Do you hold us up when ?" 
 
 "You say they demand more so do I, then!" said 
 Dulce flatly. "I am no robber! I have a good purpose 
 m it, do you hear? Shall I have it?" 
 
 "Yes!" screamed the terrified Catalan. "Yes! Yes! 
 Go on!" 
 
 Dulce stepped to the stage and in the redoubled din 
 whispered down to the Maestro: "La Apache." 
 
 He smiled ; and as a rustle of expectant curiosity went 
 through the house she stepped hastily again into the 
 wings. She tore off her dark-striped gypsy sash and 
 knotted it swiftly about her head. Then, her shoulders 
 stooped a little, her gait slouching, her face transformed 
 to all the sombre tone and meaning that her old terrible
 
 208 The Great Way 
 
 life had been, to the preluding notes of the song she 
 walked out slow, brooding, sinister. 
 
 At the first strains of the familiar melody the silence 
 had been broken by a rustle of applause that died with 
 a snap as she appeared. With her love of effect and her 
 keen sense for the unexpected, she turned her memory 
 to the Paris version of the song, and the voice for which 
 they were waiting rose through the hushed theatre in the 
 sensuous words of the French. 
 
 "Us ne sont pas des gens a valse lente 
 Les bons rodeurs qui glissant dans la nuit. 
 Us lui preferent la valse entrainante 
 Souple, rapide, ou I'on tottrne sans bruit." 
 
 On and on the lovely voice insinuated through the 
 rhythmic lines, rising and falling, on and on to the word- 
 less phrase of the orchestra which swings, as her ominous 
 tense body prepared to swing, into the lilting brilliance 
 of the passionate refrain; and then she changed to the 
 soft liquid beauty of her own tongue and Theirs. 
 
 Into the great voice there crept a great cry ; and there 
 was a great cry in the heart, as in the words : 
 
 "Oh, this is the tune, friends! 
 We're Cavaliers of the Moon, friends! 
 Each boy swoops down like a loon, friends. . . ."
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 MONEY 
 
 THAT thick soft night, in a street of the Gran Via 
 Diagonal, whose name in its simplicity marked up a great 
 symbol on the house-corners, a queer thing happened. 
 
 Spain as the city was at rest : no missile had lately 
 hurtled at the King, no conspirator met bullet or garrote; 
 and even this her greatest and most turbulent cosmopolis 
 was humdrumming and had been long without excite- 
 ment, and it must be to-morrow before she would wake, 
 in her gossip-arteries, to the available if questionably 
 large news of the advent of a singer, said to have been 
 of her people, who had just now torn open a handful of 
 Spanish hearts and senses in "La Gran Via." Anarchy's 
 claws were drawn in, if in no more than a muscular 
 process of digesting something, and Society slumbered; it 
 was an everyday night. 
 
 It was late. Theatres even the dawdling Tivoli were 
 done. The gay city was gone or going home or un- 
 home, to sleep, or to other matters. In the tall shadow 
 of a quiet house a man and a woman were speaking; she, 
 cheaply garbed in fetching black; he, more expensively 
 dressed, and with fetching voice jocose and suited to 
 their parley. 
 
 To an observer, had there been such, it would have 
 proven an every-night thing, as common as vulgarity 
 and as necessary as poverty. 
 
 Yet to such an observer on this thick soft night, a 
 sight very strange would have arisen suddenly, like a 
 gust in a desert, or a lightning-flicker in weird clouds at 
 sea. 
 
 While between this man and this girl passed banter 
 
 209
 
 210 The Great Way 
 
 and protest, by them passed a woman afoot, and unac- 
 companied, and indeed, plainly garbed, yet with a large 
 and so handsome mam-ton so shieldingly wrapped about 
 her as to mark with a legitimate reason her being here, 
 now, and alone, and thus constituting this, too, in itself, 
 some every-night thing, comfortable, pretty, and as com- 
 mon as industry or money. 
 
 But, on the yonder corner, she stopped short, turned, 
 and swept swiftly back along the shadowing house-fronts 
 of the Gran Via, the heavy lustrous manton now swaying 
 to the rapidity of her stride. 
 
 The two figures which she now seemed purposefully 
 to approach had first stared, then shrunk further into the 
 shadow; but her determination revealed itself, and she 
 walked directly and unhesitatingly up to them, her bright 
 eyes showing their steady gaze to the man. 
 
 "You seek," she said, "to buy this woman. Perhaps 
 she asked you to. It is of no difference either way 
 you are not going to do it. You need not gape at me. 
 If it were not for men like you, women would not have to 
 take such money as yours. Go!" 
 
 He still stared at her, flushing with shame and anger. 
 And she still kept her eyes steadily on his face. Her 
 arm rose in an imperious, pointing gesture. 
 
 "Get out!" 
 
 It was the hard, inflexible word of the nun under the 
 red wax blood of Christ at Mataro vulgar, but so in- 
 tentionally, deliberately so in its manner, its tone, in all 
 but the voice itself, that it was lifted above the nature of 
 vulgarity. Masculinely scared in the searing flare of her, 
 the man left. 
 
 The astonished girl in the shadow found her voice 
 at that. 
 
 "How do you dare," it was the angry answer to the 
 nun "how do you dare to come into my affairs?" 
 
 The startling woman's words were ready and swift. 
 
 "Because I have been in exactly such affairs myself. 
 Because no matter what you have been, and why, this
 
 Money 211 
 
 thing is wicked, horrible, pitiful! I do not know your 
 life except the part of it shown to me as I passed you. 
 But that much, let me tell you, I do know! I now have 
 money, honest money, but for a while I was as bad as 
 any girl of my age well could be, and now that I am 
 able to pay back, I am trying to every centimo that I 
 ever took that way, do you hear? Every centimo! May 
 the Virgin blast the fact that I kept no count, for it for 
 bids my counting now, and in my strange unhappy mind 
 I may perhaps never know that all has been repaid ! See, 
 I am going to give you money, girl!" 
 
 She was with trembling fingers unfastening a heavy 
 purse that had been clutched under her mantle. 
 
 "I will not take it !" cried the trembling girl, shrinking 
 back under the mad heat of the woman's words. "I am 
 afraid of you ! I will not take it !" 
 
 "You will take it!" cried the woman fiercely. "You 
 shall take it!" 
 
 And with one hand seizing out a fistful of uncounted 
 silver and copper, and holding the terrified girl tightly 
 with the other, she thrust the weighty coins into her 
 dress her collar, her bodice, anywhere. 
 
 "It is better money than he would give you! And 
 more! Now I have done my part, and may God grant 
 that you do yours ! I have given you much, much ! 
 How much I do not know, for there were two others 
 to-night but it is nearly all I had with me, leaving 
 enough for one more, perhaps ! You can afford, now, to 
 be good for a time at least, and while it does last, oh, 
 think, think! You might get other work and start again ! 
 Think what you traffic in, girl ! Whether you had excuse 
 or not, I do not blame you who am I that I should? 
 Yet it is traffic in God ! Traffic in God !" 
 
 And suddenly sweeping away, she took up her own 
 traffic, disappearing like a spectre into the limbo of the 
 thick soft night. 
 
 Nor was this strange incident held solitary by the 
 confines of Barcelona, gay, indolent Little Paris. With
 
 212 The Great Way 
 
 stranger and still more strange architectural canvases 
 backgrounding its hot spiritual action upon hard glitter- 
 ing matter and with its vehement figure diversely cos- 
 tumed, sometimes obscurely cloaked and again recklessly 
 splendid, the hectic hands graphically jewelled, the sud- 
 den presence stepping from a swift, smoothly running, 
 abruptly halted car, a modern goddess out of the ma- 
 chine, picturesquely terrible; in Great Paris, where in its 
 obscurer cruel streets the woman's tears in her vehicle 
 too often followed bad laughter that she had heard or 
 felt upon her words and act ; in Berlin, in Rome and 
 too, beyond salt waters wider than the Mediterranean's ; 
 even in cold, jingling-belled Saint Petersburg ... in- 
 deed, in many great cities of the great way of the great 
 world, it was to repeat and repeat and re-repeat itself.
 
 BOOK III 
 THE PAINTED DESERT 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 THE ATTRACTION OP OPPOSITES 
 
 "WHAT are you writing, Wanda?" 
 
 The woman who spoke was a little princess. First of 
 all, she was a little American; the "princess" was to 
 boot. And, as she was in the terse habit of putting it, 
 the prince had evidently thought so until she had suc- 
 ceeded in converting the verb into a noun on the other 
 foot. Just now she did not know where he was, and did 
 not care beyond an over-acute inquisitiveness, a charac- 
 teristic that she had but now displayed in her question 
 to her friend. 
 
 The pen scratched on and there was no reply. 
 "Wanda" was a name suited, as such matters go, to 
 this other woman, who sat at a luxuriously appointed 
 Sheraton desk, writing in a limp-red-leather-covered little 
 book. Daisy such had been the small American's name 
 before she was Madame la Princess Marguerite said 
 frequently enough that "Wanda" sounded always remi- 
 niscent of a sinuous, tigrish Polish or Austrian spy of 
 dubious affections, yet that it did express, as prettily as 
 a name could, her special friend, about whom there was 
 nothing dubious or Austrian or Polish or tigrish. A 
 certain worldly magic of action she did have, an elusive- 
 ness of movement, a touch herein of Cosmopolis rather 
 than of mere Europe, that disclosed itself even now in 
 her calm posture at the desk the unconsciously artful 
 
 213
 
 214 The Great Way 
 
 capacity for suggesting, with a line of garment here, a 
 droop of shoulder there, a casual gesture of arm, that she 
 was tall, or not, or statuesque, or precieuse. 
 
 "Wanda, what are you writing?" 
 
 The little princess had risen; and from a delicate 
 picture of indeterminate lines scrawled hazily along a 
 couch and drooping in a trail of soft tints to the floor, 
 had crystallized to a defined little body like a small 
 pink flower tipped with God's sunshine, but clouded by a 
 gauze bow for an indoor party. She stood wavering by 
 the desk like a diminutive, breeze-stirred, insistent growth, 
 and in the continued unresponsiveness of her busy, silent 
 comrade, took up from it one of its rare statuettes of 
 Tuscan terra-cotta, gazed long at it as if it reflected her 
 own minute and lovely person which it fairly did and 
 sighed in all her classic tragedy of being not noticed. 
 
 "Wanda?" 
 
 Wanda de 1'Etoile laid down her pen reluctantly and 
 directed her beautiful eyes with disapproval at the little 
 princess. 
 
 "Daisy, if you must pull out petals 'He loves, he 
 loves not' do destroy yourself that way, not me!" 
 
 "A-ha! So it is a love letter then or a love diary, 
 what?" 
 
 "Not as you could possibly understand the word 'love,' 
 Daisy." 
 
 "Wanda, you're a pest! And please don't call me 
 'Daisy.' I detest it!" 
 
 "You detested 'Marguerite' a short while ago. It 
 reminded you of 'infamous, nasty scenes' with your hus- 
 band. Poor, poor man ! Why did you change your name 
 for him the first, I mean? The last, you had to, by 
 law. But the first? It might quite well have stopped 
 with 'Daisy,' or 'Forget-not-me.' ' 
 
 She took up her pen with determination, and the little 
 princess, after an attempt to glare like a lion and 
 managing only to stare like a pansy, sighed again; em- 
 ployed one of her tiny hands in an equally futile endeavour
 
 The Attraction of Opposites 215 
 
 to stand the statuette on its head; and with a third sigh 
 meandered home to the couch. 
 
 The only similarity in these oddly assorted friends lay 
 in the mutual fact that they were gentlewomen ; and they 
 were this with a difference: one was so by sheer instinct, 
 the other by birth perhaps more, it would often seem, 
 perhaps mere, it would seem sometimes. 
 
 The latter, little Marguerite, was utter Anglo-Ameri- 
 can inclined to the Anglo in point of speech, while in ap- 
 pearance (blonde, bisque, dainty and as modern as the 
 book she was not reading) she was the distinctive thing 
 that means not only just one country but just one city 
 New York. Wanda, obviously though so elusively, was 
 as foreign as her name ; a woman beautiful, dark but not 
 black, with lustrous, shadow-lashed eyes, and lines of 
 mouth particularly exquisite when she laughed or spoke. 
 
 The rare adjective "sumptuous" had not come amiss 
 for this face ; and her serious beauty of personality and 
 person, of grave spirituality shrined in calm grace of 
 body, doubtless had for the trixie little princess that 
 curious but by no means uncommon phenomenon the "at- 
 traction of the opposite," which the miniature "royalty" 
 domesticated with her as doubtless had for Wanda. 
 
 "Sumptuous" was a word also for the foreign woman's 
 accoutrements, which subtly subdued the trite luxury of 
 this New York hotel apartment. The minute appoint- 
 ments of the delicate desk to the Etruscan glimmer of 
 the terra-cotta of its ornament added the soft shine of 
 dull gold in its equipage. Here and yonder, pictures 
 spoke of tastes both selective and deeply personal. Even 
 the disturbing little princess was like some objet-d'art, 
 a whimsical, trifling possession, a dainty Dresden china 
 figurine moving about in a toy scene of toy society. And 
 her own lovely figure, withal its ease of costume betoken- 
 ing this afternoon a stay-at-home plan, betrayed reckless 
 expenditure in the rich simplicity of her house-gown, the 
 fingers of a richly skilled maid in her arrangement of 
 hair.
 
 216 The Great Way 
 
 "Wanda !" 
 
 "Yes, Daisy," said Wanda, calmly and without looking 
 up, "yes. It is a love letter a love diary and at this 
 moment I am spending my valuable afternoon telling my 
 cavalier all details about you." 
 
 "Now," said the princess, profoundly, after an in- 
 stant's pause, "if that were the truth, Wanda, you 
 wouldn't have told it!" 
 
 And as if deserving complete relaxation after the 
 weighty intellectual process of this rejoinder, she lapsed 
 into considerable silence. 
 
 And presently, Wanda laid down her pen, with a little 
 sigh of her own in its passing, and locked away the book, 
 humming. The princess pretended indifference and turned 
 a leaf of the printed one she held. Wanda's hum strayed 
 into softly phrased lines. 
 
 "Silencieux, Us enlacent leurs belles, 
 Melant la cotte avec le cotillon 
 Legers, legers Us portent avec elles 
 Dans un gai tourbillon." 
 
 The rough-edged, yellow-covered volume, "Les Pommes 
 de Jacquot-Jacquette," half flew, half fell from the im- 
 patient hand of the little princess, and its noisy flutter and 
 thump put a stop to the unfinished song. 
 
 "I didn't mean to interrupt, Wanda. I wanted to 
 listen. What is that tune?" 
 
 "Have you never heard it?" 
 
 "I've heard you hum it a lot, that's all." 
 
 "A little Georges Krier song. It was popular in Paris 
 a few years ago. I do not know if it ever came here." 
 
 "It's pretty." 
 
 "Very." 
 
 "We're both dull to-day, Wanda. Are you staying in 
 to-night?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Would you if I asked you dine with Dmitri and 
 me?"
 
 The Attraction of Opposite* 217 
 
 "You will have more enjoyment without me, my dear. 
 Therefore, no." 
 
 "But ought I to go without you? I'm not a bit 
 sure ' 
 
 Wanda laughed. 
 
 "Daisy, you think me cross, to-day. I am not. But 
 but you are so foolish. Why should you not dine with 
 Dmitri alone?" 
 
 "Do you call it foolish, Wanda, to watch the pro- 
 prieties? Not that there's anything wrong, or even im- 
 proper, in my dining with Dmitri. But being separated 
 from Sergius and everything the look of the thing " 
 
 "Daisy," said Wanda slowly, "from the various mil- 
 lions of people in New York, perhaps a few hundreds 
 let us say two or three thousands to be very safe know 
 you exist. And perhaps those are worrying about your 
 conduct. And perhaps they are not." 
 
 "Wanda, you're deliberately cruel to-day!" 
 
 "I am deliberately sensible, and fond of you." 
 
 There was something even slower than her speech a 
 something pensive, almost brooding in the movement 
 with which the quiet woman, this curiously sweet Wanda 
 de 1'Etoile, rose and walked across to a window, where 
 she stood between its sun-gilded curtains gazing out with 
 her back to the reproved little princess. When she turned, 
 slowly again, there was a further something in her pos- 
 ture and her look which brought the other woman im- 
 pulsively toward her. 
 
 "Wanda, I'm so fond of you that sometimes I posi- 
 tively hate you ! I know I'm only the size of a straw, to 
 begin with, and then you have ways, perfectly silent ways, 
 of making me feel as if a hurricane had blown, or as if a 
 horse had eaten me!" 
 
 "I do not think I am like a horse or a hurricane, 
 Daisy." Wanda drew her down upon the window-seat, 
 circling her tenderly with her arm. "Let me tell you 
 what it is I do think. My dear, I think we are a strange 
 couple to be sympathetic friends. Because we seem to be
 
 218 The Great Way 
 
 not sympathetic at all. Yet we are intimate, the word 
 you Americans use so much, like the French. I want to 
 tell you something. You will misunderstand it, I fear 
 very much, instantly and perfectly, and the end of it will 
 be, very likely, you will fly into a rage and go out with 
 Dmitri and on my account disenjoy your dinner, and 
 come in late and weep and kiss me and say you love me, 
 and if I am sleepy, you will call me a horse or something. 
 Yet, my dear, I keep on hoping you will sometime under- 
 stand, so I am going to say it. It is this : you have in 
 English a saying, 'A drop in the bucket.* Dear, you are 
 a drop in the bucket of my life. Dear, can you under- 
 stand so much, before I go on?" 
 
 "Yes, Wanda, yes," said the little princess, stammer- 
 ing in a struggle of anger and fright and affection. "I 
 understand I'm only a little casual thing to you, of no 
 importance! I understand that that is what you mean 
 don't you?" 
 
 "To begin, yes for I have to talk to you like a simple 
 book of language. Now, if that is so, why do we live 
 together, why do we take the trouble to have disputes, 
 why do I have an interest in your unfortunate marriage 
 and your 'love affairs/ and why you an interest in me, 
 whom you know nothing, really, about ? Simply and only 
 because we love each other is that it?" 
 
 "Yes, Wanda, that's it, that's it!" cried the little 
 princess eagerly. 
 
 "And yet, Marguerite, there must be a purpose some- 
 where in such a matter, and as you have no thought- 
 about purpose about anything, then I must be the one with 
 a purpose, is it not so ? Shall I tell you what my purpose 
 is with my pretty little pink and white drop in the 
 bucket?" 
 
 "Yes, Wanda!" cried the princess, weeping now, and 
 wondering vaguely why she wept. 
 
 "It is a small part of a big purpose, Daisy, the pur- 
 pose to be kind but that is an unkind word! to be of 
 help, if I can, to every woman I meet. Now, because
 
 The Attraction of Opposites 219 
 
 you happen to be closer to me, I would rather be of help 
 to you than to anyone else, 'and unhappily you give me 
 the least of possibilities. When you know your need, ask 
 me to help, dear little Daisy. But you do not know 
 your need.'* 
 
 "I need you, Wanda, because I care more for you than 
 for anything else on earth !" 
 
 "No, Daisy." Wanda slowly shook her head. "No, 
 you do not. I would not want you to. I would prefer 
 you loved your husband more than anything else on earth, 
 or if you would not, could not love him, then some man 
 whom you could make happy. As it is, quite likely you 
 do care more for me than for other people, but what you 
 love 'more than anything else on earth' is yourself. You 
 will never understand life, and so will never deeply enjoy 
 it, until you love some person, or thing, or art, or just 
 people, more than your life. And for you, it must be a 
 person, I think. Art you would not even flirt with it; 
 things and people the briefest of amours. It will be, if 
 you ever learn at all, some Sergius or Dmitri who will 
 amuse you for more than a honeymoon or a dinner who 
 will amuse you quite out of yourself. 
 
 "Meanwhile, here you hover about me in my life, as if 
 nothing had any importance except the little matters of 
 every day, the little emotions and disappointments and 
 jealousies. To be sure, we gain something by it. You 
 gain a certain understanding that I give you, a certain 
 companionship for your lonely little unsatisfied soul, and 
 I get respectability." 
 
 "Respectability, Wanda?" The princess's eyes wid- 
 ened and stared with incredulity. 
 
 "Not the thing itself, exactly I do not quite need that. 
 But the feeling of it. In a way, you are neither fish, flesh, 
 nor fowl, as you call it. Is that an unpleasant joke? 
 I am not clever enough in English to be certain. I mean, 
 you are neither married, nor unmarried, nor divorced. 
 But you are an aristocrat you are very silly, but you are 
 a lady. So when you sought out my society in Paris,
 
 220 The Great Way 
 
 and showed such a fancy for me, and even wanted to be 
 my intimate friend, and even would live with me, I was 
 flattered !" 
 
 Again the princess stared, too astonished to be angry 
 at the transient word "silly." 
 
 "But so are you a lady, Wanda!" 
 
 "You have made me feel that I have achieved that. 
 You made me feel it then, in Paris. But I am timid 
 enough still to wish to keep that feeling about me. That 
 is what I gain. And you must not cry, and say it is only 
 that, and that I do not love you. I do. Not because 
 you serve a purpose, but in spite of it. You see, Dai 
 
 Mar " The voice became almost a rhythm in her 
 
 hesitant seeking for the just expression of her thought. 
 "I mean, whatever you are, American or Russian or the 
 French in which you call yourself, you are forever prima- 
 vera always a flower. No matter what you should do, 
 swear or scream, let us say it would be a lady screaming 
 and swearing. Such things can be comprends tu moi? 
 Positively, I can picture that if you should take too 
 much wine, you would be a little tipsy flower." 
 
 "Why, Wanda, what a brutal, unjustified thought!" 
 cried the wide-eyed little princess. "I've only been drunk 
 once in my life, and I only did that to make Sergius 
 beat me !" 
 
 Wanda sighed. 
 
 **You will never understand me, little primavera, even 
 while your own words prove me ! That was an outrageous 
 trick for you to do, yet I can be sure you took your 
 beating like an aristocrat !" 
 
 "But I didn't get it !" cried the princess. "The brute 
 wouldn't hit me! And why should you, Wanda? For 
 this is a lecture, because you started by telling me I was 
 only a drop in a pail, or something! It sounded like 
 Sergius and was probably the truth, as it certainly was 
 with him!" 
 
 "My dear, I was serious to-day, as I always am when 
 I write in that secret little red book of mine ; and I began
 
 The Attraction of Opposites 221 
 
 thinking, how you miss life the way you speak of love, 
 and of 'being in love.' If by some chance I should give 
 you that book to read I have had a thought lately that 
 by a possibility I might in case I died, perhaps, though 
 I have no intention whatever to die, or something of an 
 equal important instance should ever Well, if you should 
 read it, my dear, you would know better than you do 
 now what love is. You would know that for real persons, 
 for truly living persons, there is no such small thing as 
 'falling in love' that for them, it simply is love, without 
 any 'in' about it." 
 
 "I I see a little bit what you mean, Wanda," said 
 the princess, with again a trace of child-like tears. "I 
 know I'm not worth your friendship ! I know I'm silly, 
 with nothing important to my back but my title! And 
 I know I make men dangle, and disgust you ! But you 
 are such a friend to me, and you do fail so to appreciate 
 how much I care for you, that I fly into rages and 
 outrages from sheer fright that you'll get tired of me, 
 and leave me lonelier than I was before ! I'm so afraid 
 of that, that I'm jealous even of Arnold!" 
 
 "Daisy!" The voice was extreme, reproachful. 
 
 "Is Arnold coming here to dine with you to-night, 
 Wanda?" 
 
 "Yes with me if you choose to make it so ; with us 
 if you care to stay at home." 
 
 "So that's why you're so anxious to make me dine 
 with Dmitri!" 
 
 Wanda turned to her with a little sigh. When she 
 spoke her voice was controlled, but its quality was posi- 
 tive. 
 
 "Do exactly what you wish. I think that Arnold is 
 fond of you, I know that I am. If you go out, try to do 
 so without hurt feelings ; and if you come in early, you 
 will see whether we welcome you gladly or not." 
 
 "Wanda, you're angry ! Forgive me !" 
 
 "I am not angry. I will not forgive you because I do 
 not need to forgive you."
 
 222 The Great Way 
 
 "You are, Wanda! Yes, when people use all 'I ams' 
 and 'will nots' and 'do nots' instead of plain 'I'ms' and 
 'won'ts' and 'don'ts,' they're in a cold frenzy !" 
 
 "Daisy, I was not wasn't born to English. I do the 
 best I can do with it. Make me the favour to be satis- 
 fied! I am not I amn't angry!" 
 
 "Oh !" wailed the princess. "Oh ! 'Make me the favour' ! 
 Now I know you're in a passion with me!" 
 
 "Daisy," said Wanda, patiently again, "in my own 
 tongue, there is no word for 'please,' so that 'please' 
 was one of my hardest words in English to appreciate 
 although, strangely, so strangely, I confess it was one of 
 the very first I ever spoke in it as such things happen, 
 sometimes. In my tongue, there are for it only such ex- 
 pressions as 'make the favour,' or so on." 
 
 Yet, despite this educational and quite generous ex- 
 planation it was quite wretchedly that the little princess 
 trailed off to dress for Dmitri. 
 
 Her friend turned again to the window and gazed out 
 at the far, busy avenue. 
 
 "People ! People ! People !" sighed Wanda de PEtoile.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 IN THE LITTLE RED BOOK 
 
 MY own, my own! After long weeks, again I talk to 
 you. And from where can you say? From America, 
 from the Estados Unidos that you loved, from your be- 
 loved Nueva York ! Yes, at last I am here, in the land of 
 the conquerors, and I am waiting in a perfect tremble of 
 fright to conquer those conquerors ! I have been told 
 harsh tales of the music lovers of New York, tales so 
 harsh as to frighten anyone, the very bravest. But I find 
 them difficult to believe, for here have I been for weeks, 
 having came on purpose long before the season, and no- 
 where do I find anything but kindnesses ! Though I con- 
 fess to a shudder at the great Opera House. I have 
 been in it, for a glance, and it is cold, cold as a piece 
 of hard, red stone. How I could dread that night ! 
 
 Well, all of this, my Jose Luis, concerns you little, 
 you somewhere off beyond unknown distances from me. 
 All that concerns me that could possibly concern also you, 
 is my love for you, the great daring love that has made 
 me write to you this little red book, with my heart full 
 of the tremulous prayer to God that if you could know 
 of that love that has so lived and gone to purification 
 through the fire of living knowledge ! you might per- 
 haps have the patience the interest to read on and 
 through, and that you might perhaps say to yourself at 
 the end: "Is one man in a million loved like this? Might 
 not I, perhaps ? . . . 
 
 . . . Dio, Dio, but there, even without daring to finish, 
 I have put down daring words, my own ! . . . 
 
 I have but now read over many past pages, and what 
 
 223
 
 224 The Great Way 
 
 a tower of Babel is my little red book! Some Spanish, 
 because it is our tongue, native to us, in which our voices 
 have long past spoken to each other, my beloved. And 
 now some English, because that, too, was your tongue 
 and is at last, gracias a Dios, more than a little mine. 
 (How, how I have seized at it since I have really came 
 here! I have came to believe it is my daughter tongue!) 
 And then, ever and again some French, because I know 
 you understand it like the others, being so educated as 
 you are, and so clever, and I am so very fond of it, and 
 I have been so much in Paris, where I have begun my 
 little book to you. And also because it can say certain 
 little odd things as cannot other languages. Yet how 
 strange, Jose Luis, that I should have to say to you three 
 whole languages to tell you only three words for all that 
 my whole writing can say, all in all, at worst or best, is: 
 I love you. . . . 
 
 But in that simple "love you," how much history I 
 have had to tell ! I have lately read through and through 
 to see if I have told all importances, and almost all I 
 have. I have told you of the long road, through the dark 
 of the dawn when you left me, up to the heart of the 
 mountains and the gitana who prophesied my fortune all 
 but the end. (All but the end, so that in my ignorance 
 of that end and in my in a great nameless hope, I 
 dare even to write to you, as I do and ever and again 
 do, this my little book.) I have told you of Dona Rina, 
 wonderful, sweet, American Dona Rina, whom I have 
 thought God will send one day ah, let us hope for many 
 days ! again into my Gran Via because it is a part 
 of my way so to think. . . . And of Paris, and of the 
 House of the Great Voice, and of Cadiz, and the miracle 
 of fortune there the double miracle, two miracles of for- 
 tune there. I meant, the voice fortune. But that would 
 have been anyway, as sun must follow moonlight must 
 needs have been (what dear odd things are there in your 
 great dear large strange English, my Jose!) . . . and 
 first, that miracle of Cadiz that was not "must needs,"
 
 In the Little Red Book 225 
 
 just pure God's miracle, my Isabel. . . . Isabel who 
 means violets, means them next in my memory to as did 
 your eyes . . . my Isabel who means violets, and England 
 and Friendship, England, that land so harsh in my imagi- 
 nation, that seemed to have highway-manned you from me 
 as it seaway-manned Gibraltar, and that since, in that 
 my very same imagination, for still is England but im- 
 agination with me, has seemed the very picture, the very 
 name, Friendship, through my miracle of violets, Isabel. 
 . . . Isabel whom I do not simply think God will send, 
 Isabel whom surely God will send one day again into my 
 Gran Via, if only long enough for me to take her into my 
 arms and tell her how much I still love her. . . . Still 
 love? Forever, through future as back through past, 
 as yes, in such a respect as that as I love you. For 
 in something of eternal verity, in some elusive slant of 
 the eyes, or whimsical tilt of the nose, Love and Friendship 
 are strange unmistakable cousins, dear, are they not? 
 . . . And then the rest . . . the long struggle . . . the 
 work, work, work, instead of the old walk, walk, walk. 
 And, at last, of the great change, the great, slow change, 
 sudden to know, when all began to be proven, and my faith 
 shown right when it began to be not just work, work, 
 work, but work and triumph, work and triumph ; and then, 
 nombre de Dios, entirely triumph, triumph, triumph, with 
 the work holding it by the hand, but so gently as to be 
 only joy! . . . 
 
 Will it be so here, here in the cold city of the world's 
 great test? I can say to you yes or no presently, my 
 own. For my little red book knows, like all love, very 
 little of time a page will mean a day, or a month, or a 
 year. Or perhaps ten, twenty pages will mean only ten, 
 twenty minutes of my love for you. And so has it been 
 in the last few pages that anxious weeks are spent, and 
 to-night, my own, I sing. . . . 
 
 Yes, my own, my own, it has been triumph! ... It 
 is still to-night or at the worst to-morrow morning and 
 though at last I am at home, my wraps are still about
 
 226 The Great Way 
 
 my shoulders or my feet, to where I have allowed them 
 slip irregardful, to say no falsehoods, while I have breath- 
 less unlocked my desk to tell you so much: Triumph! 
 My own, my darling, I can hear it yet ! I can feel it yet ! 
 Oh, what it is to sing for these people and to know that 
 they listen, they listen more, they approve, they stamp 
 not with shoes and sticks, Jose Luis, but stamp one 
 great ! All the way home in my car I would say to myself, 
 how can I exactly put it to him? And there have I put 
 it just right, proving to you my cleverness with the Eng- 
 lish tongue you know I used to say to you I was cleverer 
 than you knew. And they have stamped me great to- 
 night ! This has happened to me, to me, here in the Nueva 
 York we are taught at home to fear and justly fear! 
 Not that I had need to doubt not that I ever did truly 
 doubt But to know! And to hear it yet in my ears 
 that noise, its kind, the individualness of it ! It is an ap- 
 plause the like of no other house, no other nation ! Good 
 night, my own! A soft grey light, like a pearl, comes 
 in through the window. I love you 
 
 It has occurred to my mind, my own, that there are 
 some things that I have not told you in this my Little 
 Red Book when alas, it is now nearly three little red 
 books ! yes, two things especially. The first one is and 
 it is such a bright, gold, cold winter day shining into 
 this Nueva York hotel that I feel cheer enough to touch 
 the terrible subject, even to you the first one is, that I 
 seem to have gone safely beyond my payment of my money 
 debt to the Trudge Market. I have told you in these 
 my little books how I felt about that debt, and how I was 
 tortured by a morbid fear, a fear that I never would, or 
 could, be satisfied that the whole was paid back, because 
 I had kept no count when I was taking money from 
 that hideous market. I have told you a little, indeed, 
 much, too much, when I remember how you shivered to 
 the discord of such music from me, and yet too little, 
 because while I was yet so frightened and morose about
 
 In the Little Red Book 227 
 
 it I could not somehow say even in many words what 
 I can say in few words, somehow, now, of how I tried 
 to pay back the money part riding through the streets 
 until I saw such women as I had been, and then offering 
 them money to desist for at least so long as the money 
 should last. Well, it stands to reason and I fear I 
 sometimes quite lost mine, in those terrible transactions! 
 that I soon had thus repaid far more than I had ever 
 taken, for I paid in handfuls of money, gold, dear, when 
 my voice had grown to gold, and never counting and 
 God knows, though I suppose it is a hateful thing to men- 
 tion, / was never paid that way! . . . 
 
 Dear, gradually and very, very slowly, peace crept 
 upon me in this matter, and there came a certainty that 
 surely I had paid all, and more. . . . Yet that fear of 
 tlie actual figure walked with me at times like a night- 
 mare or a ghost, a Ghost of Society, so that I, what is 
 called a lady and with no doubt at all has the little world 
 of one about her, would trudge back and forth in that 
 little world of educated things and people, would trudge 
 and trudge and trudge among her pretty properties, her 
 rare this and her rarer that, and would pray to God, 
 saying: "God, shall I never know, know that all is paid?" 
 And at last God answered me very unexpectedly and very 
 sharply. 
 
 There had been periods of forgetfulness, of what I 
 would call to myself neglect, when I did not think of it at 
 all, periods in which I am sure I grew and developed better 
 and more normally; and these times would be followed 
 by moods of the old madness, when I would rush into a 
 motor-car and through the streets "just once more," 
 "just once more," "just once more," that I could be 
 quite certain I was not under the amount. 
 
 My own, I did this unnecessary thing once too many 
 times. God's answer came. (It does, you know, my 
 own, when a thing is done once too many.) You see, I 
 did it here in His free Estados Unidos, here in your 
 intelligent, sufficient-self Nueva York. I had chosen that
 
 228 The Great Way 
 
 hideous place, Third Avenue lower Third Avenue. I had 
 heard it called by its pet-name, the Bowery, and having 
 looked this out from some dictionaries until I could add 
 up what I supposed must be the meaning, I thought i^ 
 must be very lovely, in the style of the Ramblas. This 
 was in my ignorance, of course, not alone of your Estados 
 Unidos, but of Flemish, for you see there is no grand 
 opera, or at least I hope there is not, in the Dutch tongue, 
 my own. Well, when I have came to this Avenue in my 
 first inquisitive pasear of Nueva York, and expecting 
 flowers, and intertwisting trees, you can imagine or 
 rather, I hope very much that you cannot, my dear! 
 And when I saw the pity ah, the lack of pity ! the hate- 
 fulness oh, it was too much, and late at night the mood 
 to do something, to to pay brought me back there in 
 my car. 
 
 And instead of some understanding, some gratitude 
 from the girl, or at least some cowardice from the man, 
 or even the surprise that had many times covered my 
 flight, do you know how can I tell you? well, do you 
 know and can you believe it? that I am nearly im- 
 prisoned, my own? Yes, the lady is proud, and makes 
 a haughty outcry, so that there is instantly a crowd, so 
 instantly that my chauffeur cannot flee us the spot, and 
 so that despite all the money I have with us, and my 
 chauffeur's capability (and what a wondrous race of be- 
 ings, my own, are the American chauffeur!) I am ar- 
 rested, and go in a most terrible caravan to the Magis- 
 trate. I hope that you have never been pinched, my own, 
 which is the terrible word my chauffeur used, reminding 
 me of the garrote, as we are brought before this dignitary. 
 And there, what with my mortification and my panic, 
 God knows what would have happened to me and my 
 career but for still my chauffeur's gifted nature, who 
 whispers me what to do, and I have to pretend I am 
 insane to try to stop sin ! . . . And indeed, there is some 
 truth in that, my own! . . . (While even so it was most 
 fortunate that I am an excellent actress!) . . .
 
 In the Little Red Book 229 
 
 Well, it was God's answer to me. I knew that in- 
 stantly; and that His command was, that I was never to 
 do it again. 
 
 So I am free of that! Free! And freer than ever this 
 instant, at last having told you if you can understand 
 that, Jose Luis. . . . Free of the Trudge Market debt, 
 dear ! Free ! And I thank God and you, my own ! . . . 
 
 Days and days have passed. Though with so few 
 performances, how time rushes by in this marvellous New 
 York season ! So, my darling, though no page turned, 
 more than hours indeed tell my little dots, before even 
 yet is told the second of the two most special things in 
 my mind for you, and which demands courage even now 
 to tell, not the variety of courage for that last writing, 
 for as that was dreadful, this is all happily wonderful, 
 yet needing greater bravery still more greatly, and as 
 well a happy mood therefore I write it down at last, to- 
 night, while I am alone and so very, very, very happy. 
 You see, I have just now sung Violeta, and if you knew 
 all that longed to be and did not be in this my little red 
 book, no more would you need me to tell you I am 
 happy, though still would I have to write a gran galeato 
 as to all those verys. For you see, my "Traviata" was 
 at a matinee, a most different, a most disconcerting (I 
 love that last word, Jose Luis!) yet most dear audience. 
 It is very favourite with me, the "Traviata," so favourite 
 that, as also I am very wonderful in it, I chose it for my 
 premiere in Nueva York, and then for a whimsy changed 
 from that to Juliette, a role entirely new for me, partly 
 from thinking it cowardly to do something certain (you 
 will remember I told you I was frightened at thoughts 
 of this town, and I did some self-punishment on the 
 matter) and partly because at every great debut I have 
 tried something new. Well, I grew almost sorry, for 
 there were delays afterward, one and another accidents, 
 until to-day. And I am happy. For with most singers,
 
 230 The Great Way 
 
 I think, the "Traviata" is a portrait that is painted once 
 and for all, not changing except to grow mellow and 
 more beautiful with time; while to me so dear is it, that 
 always I study to put in something new, and more, and 
 better. And to-day at last I have done a little thing 
 escaping me till now. It is only my entrance. And at 
 last, here have I put what I longed to put somewhere, 
 somehow I am a lady in that moment, and therefore for 
 the whole opera, Jose Luis. It is something such as 
 ah, my own ! I did for that moment, for you, that day 
 at the watch-tower on Tibidabo . . . only, applied as 
 should be right with the lady of the camellias! Yes, I 
 am happy. And so must it go on with me as to La 
 Traviata, until I know that she is my final expression of 
 her. That will arrive suddenly, some time, from some 
 strange, great mood. Under what strange, great mood 
 of the Great Way will that be ? Even to-day meant much 
 of something, something to me just the adventure of 
 singing her to that big, dear, different audience, of feeling 
 that audience feel. Am I too precious about her? I 
 think not. I think it is well to tint and tint the white 
 diamonds of that role. "Violeta" itself is a step forward 
 in petal-colour from "Marguerite." 
 
 But alas! I have begun one subject to you, my own, 
 and continued another if I have boasted myself a painter 
 to you, let alone my spelling I will never be a great 
 authoress, my own, of books to the taste of Elise, my 
 maid, and Daisy, a little friend who is dome-sticked 
 or is it dome-stuck? with me. 
 
 My own, that remaining very special thing in my mind 
 is simply this: in the whole of my now several-and-a-half 
 little red books, I have never told you why it is that 
 I had the thought to write them, why it is that I should 
 think of you as possible, in any way, to my new self, why 
 it is that I have ever even dared to dream. . . . 
 
 It is because, first, my own, of that same miracle at 
 Cadiz, my Isabel, of something that came to me from 
 her, a thing that I have came since to think of as a sacra-
 
 In the Little Red Book 231 
 
 ment between her and me, so great were the giving and 
 the gift of it. So great that I gave to her afterward, 
 instead, as would have been otherwise my natural act of 
 giving to you, the 'one thing of my property, the one 
 material part of me that that had never been bought or 
 sold. ... So can you wonder you would not if you 
 could know of all this as I could speak it you with my 
 voice that I have spoken of my love for her in the same 
 breath of ink with my love for you? . . . But of these 
 strange sacred spiritual matters that are so difficult for 
 the pen, for my poor pen, I will leave most to your 
 thoughts, and to such words of cleverer mood as are 
 here and there in Little Red Book First, and Little Red 
 Book Second, and so on, and come to the truth that I 
 have been cowardly postponing, because it trembles me 
 so. And after all, that miracle, that Sacrament, was 
 but part, but the overture, of my great reason. Well . . . 
 
 It is because, Jose Luis, my own, I know that you 
 did not after all marry. 
 
 God forgive me, that is too large a fact for me to 
 say. I mean only, dear, that I know you did not marry 
 according your intention of that time. All that you told 
 me was "possibly." I remember the word now as if 
 your adored voice were saying -it again to me in that 
 little room of mine in the Carmen. But to me then it 
 meant "Certainly." I put on it a capital letter, you see, 
 because it is so louder a word than "possibly." I never 
 doubted that it meant "Certainly." 
 
 Well, I know that you did not marry her. 
 
 My own, that very first year, when my voice was all 
 to me because it was the begvrming, the new beginning, 
 and had came to be all to someone else, to my Maestro, 
 whom I had came to love, and yet love, next with me to 
 my Isabel, as she is next with me to you, and whom I 
 had really begun to love, I think, when he said our noses, 
 his and mine, went the same way well, those same noses 
 had within a year taken us and our dear, queer little 
 company as far as Venice. And we were canalling our
 
 232 The Great Way 
 
 poor great way to our poor little theatre; when, as if 
 sent oilt of God's own harbour for my sake (so personally 
 kind is God sometimes) an English party in a gondola 
 passed us. And as they did, with me so near that I 
 could have touched them, one of them was saying, "After 
 all, that erratic Jose Luis's marriage was put off! One 
 might have known it!" Ah, my own, my own, my hand 
 shakes now to think of it! Is it not miraculous I was 
 not fallen into the canal and drowned? I was, with 
 tears, a prophecy I had sadly made for myself once, as 
 we chased them, for how we chased them, and how my 
 wonderful Maestro helped the gondolier to speed us after 
 for he, my lover as one's loving family might, if one 
 had a such, be one's lover, understood somewhat indeed, 
 much, because much understanding me. Had it been a 
 baton that he seized from the gondolier, no more love 
 and genius could he have shown, and we did come up. 
 And then they were saying, "How beautiful Venice is!" 
 Think of it ! Yet, even so, Venice was beautiful to me 
 that day, for I knew that it was, as it is, after that 
 manner that the Great Way must always be, and I was 
 content with what I had learned. I would have been, 
 to God Himself, an ingrate otherwise! For it said to 
 me there on that flashing sunlit canal, that that broken 
 engagement was not just a fact, but that it had been, in 
 some way, a matter of some great truth, something that 
 my shaken mind must not be too daring in its thoughts 
 of. Yes, such a conviction reached me like a message, 
 a call to me, straight through space and across the 
 waters, clear as if the Great Voice itself had again spoken 
 to me ! And there then happened to me, my own, still 
 one more miracle. Yes, my own, from that moment, tliat 
 great sobbing in here, though you cannot see my hand 
 lift to show you as I write it, that great sobbing that 
 had been with me without end, without a moment's pause, 
 ceased in me. Like Floria in "La Tosca," I had already 
 lived for Art and Love, but I had not breathed! And 
 from that moment I began to breathe indeed, I mean
 
 In the Little Red Book 288 
 
 that it was a physical thing. From that day, that Venice 
 night as I sang, my breathing was different, musically 
 better, and my Maestro was so happy! Oh, the sun- 
 light of Venetian waters! Ever since, sunlight, too, has 
 been something different. 
 
 So you did not marry her, Jose Luis. For if I know 
 you, or life, or music, or anything in the world, I know 
 this, that you did not tell her of me. That much sacred- 
 ness, my own, I know you gave to the little cheap room 
 in the Calle Carmen. Therefore I know that she did not 
 give you up (what woman would, could, anyway?) but 
 that you gave up her. 
 
 For what reason, my own? Oh and it is the thought 
 that I did not dare to indulge that Venice day! for 
 what reason? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps because of 
 something kin to something that / began to feel for So- 
 ciety just then? Perhaps because of some new feeling on 
 your part, not quite new in your thoughts, for something 
 of it was there and you spoke it from them to me, some 
 new, and growing feeling, growing from your thoughts 
 into your actions not for me, dear, but for what the 
 terribleness of our our relationship meant in the scheme 
 of the world? 
 
 Or perhaps greater miracle! because of something 
 you felt for me indeed? But Dio, Dio, how did I dare to 
 write down that? 
 
 Oh, my own, my own, I should pray to God that it 
 was the former. 
 
 Yet my faulty heart, having conquered the battle of 
 the flesh for itself, yearns that it may rather have been 
 that latter, and lifts itself up to God quite unashamed in 
 the huge selfishness of that desire. . . . 
 
 And yet, my darling, despite all this that I have 
 just explained you, despite my sacramental communion 
 with Isabel, which in a great imaginative way was like 
 her bringing of you back to me in possibility, and despite 
 that news of God to me on the wonderful Venice Canal, 
 so slow to the habit of Faith is timid human nature, when
 
 234 The Great Way 
 
 first I actually began the Little Red Book, it was just 
 to talk to you. Just to tease and torment myself with 
 the imagination of it the imagination of your nearness. 
 Then, as the unexpected relief and comfort of writing it 
 grew more and more close about my heart, there stole in, 
 subtly, subtly before I could be awdre, the desire, then 
 the intention almost that it should be actually in truth 
 for you to read, God granting the possibility. I have 
 of late forgive me if the speech is plain or the vanity 
 great, my beloved believed myself to be worthy of your 
 love not only that, but of the best love that you have 
 in yourself to give to any woman. Let God judge me 
 for having dared to say that, Jose Luis ! And I have felt 
 that if anything in the world could make you believe that, 
 ever, it would be this same little red book, in which I 
 have written my soul out to you my new soul. . . . Un- 
 der what circumstances it could possibly come into your 
 hands; under what strange condition of impulse or of 
 meeting, if we ever again should meet, I would have cour- 
 age to send it or to put it into your hands, my mind 
 cannot imagine. Yet to the mind whose every little nerve 
 is desire, unimaginable circumstances seem possible, even 
 imaginable 
 
 * 
 
 Sometimes, dear, I have the thought: "If ever he 
 should come again into my Gran Via, would he even recog- 
 nize me?" (To-day, did you see I have gone forward 
 writing as if were no interval? When indeed I have gone 
 forward toward the grave, my own, what with that little 
 friend in my apartments, and having to sing other grand 
 operas too! But then after all, in my love for you 
 there is no interval, believe that, my own !) "Would he 
 even recognize me?" And despite all the strange changes 
 in me, that have left little of the young girl of the Ram- 
 bias, I know that instantly you would. It could not be 
 otherwise. For cruel as fate may be, shudder as I may to 
 think of some of its cruelties that I have seen, I have a 
 great beautiful conviction that my life, therefore my love
 
 In the Little Red Book 235 
 
 for with me, dear, they are the same cannot end hav- 
 ing been completely empty. And that would mean, in 
 turn, that there were some moments in that little room 
 in the little Street of Carmen when, whether you knew it 
 yourself or not, you loved me. Yes, loved me. I breathe 
 it. Can one breathe with pen and ink instead of a throat 
 and air? Then I have just breathed it, so delicately that 
 a blotting-paper could take it out. 
 
 I breathe it again, more faintly still so great is my 
 belief, yet so terrible my doubt; I believe, that in little 
 unknowing moments you loved me. ... It is my 
 creed. . . . 
 
 Granting that so, it would be impossible you should 
 not know me instantly. ... I spend hours and hours of 
 my life wondering where you are . . . how you are. . . . 
 Yes, even who you are, for your last name, my own, I 
 never knew. . . . Are you an idle man still, or have you 
 taken up your dear gone padre's great businesses in 
 Mexico how I hate that ugly "x," about which I quar- 
 relled with Lola the day I spoke to you, but which I 
 now know in my education is correct, indeed necessary, 
 to write, while it stops also correct to speak it aitch. 
 "Aitch"! Now am I educated? or by some chance have 
 you become perhaps an artist of some kind, or some other 
 kind of famous person? I think not any of these unless 
 the first, the great rich businesses, for though I have 
 just now said I do not know your name, my eye would 
 have caught instantly the "Jose Luis" out of a whole large 
 newspaper page of smallest newspaper print. . . . As 
 it sprang at me like a star, no, like a sun itself, out 
 of the sunlight of that oh how sunlit canal that Venice 
 day! . . . 
 
 If the miracle I dream of should happen and we should 
 meet, how changed you would find me! I am right, in- 
 deed I think I am, when I say that of that girl of the 
 Ramblas but little is left staying. Sometimes I feel that 
 I am not myself, even a self, at all, for I feel that I am 
 almost totally but little bits, little thises and thats, of
 
 236 The Great Way 
 
 other people. Because I have built myself so much out of 
 others, out of what I have seen and heard. Since I have 
 came here I am told that I am a little like Nordica. How 
 that delights me! I know that in one respect I am. I 
 had seen her often, and had thought her an heroic. And 
 do you know that upon meeting her, which I had the joy 
 to do one time, I found that she she, Nordica ! was 
 less tall than myself? And it put a wonderful tiling into 
 my mind : I knew then that forevermore afterward, I could 
 look any size I might choose to on the stage. And the 
 singing angel she showed me how to do it. In one min- 
 ute she showed me! ... 
 
 But oh, my dear, my dear, what I began to say to-day, 
 here in the middle of my latest little red book, was not 
 that my personality and and looks, if I may say are 
 changed and and better! (Yes!) 
 
 I was going to write with self-flattery if it must seem 
 so that my soul is changed! Do you think I love you 
 as I used to? Never! Never! . . . Yes, the nature of 
 that old love is there. (And if it is God's truth, then it 
 is a truth that may be written, that I think, I believe, that 
 He gives me the right of the nature of that love with 
 you.) Yet it is a different love, Jose Luis! Oh, what a 
 different, different love! ... It is a love, dear, through 
 which I could happily die having once just laid the palm 
 of my hand upon your forehead, if you would lay your 
 hand upon that hand. ... I believe, sometimes I am cer- 
 tain that I know, that I have now a good soul! Oh, with 
 a new soul, is not the past dead, Jose Luis? With a 
 totally new soul, is not the past wiped out? Yet I have 
 times of fear fear that all this change is only like a 
 cosmetic, a coat of paint an americana, to make a tragi- 
 cal cleverness of words (as I remember I did one time, 
 without one single tact, to dear Dona Rina !) yes, like a 
 costume perhaps the skin of a snake like a something 
 that covers me only as this beautiful bit of Etruscan 
 terra-cotta covers in my ink . . . that ink with which I 
 try to express my soul. ... Is it perhaps that my soul
 
 In the Little Red Book 237 
 
 is rightly so expressed by ink? . . . Ah, surely not! 
 For Dio, sometimes I think I have been boiled in nitric 
 acid enough to make more than only the outer shell 
 Etruscan ! . . . 
 
 My own, I have never told you of my funny little 
 friend Marguerite Daisy is more right, for she is Amer^ 
 ican. I have spoken of her, yes possibly more than 
 once. Instance, I did even to-day. So doubtless you 
 know what is the case (how I persist to speak as if you 
 were indeed to read what I write, even just as it is a quite 
 opposite possibility that I am arriving to tell of now!) 
 that she is my close friend, alive with me in my apart- 
 ments. So it is, anyway; but it happens now, through 
 some thoughts of mine lately, that I must make her plain 
 to you. But I must take care my writings in English, 
 my dear, for I think I have there said something against 
 Daisy's looks, which are beautiful. Anyway, then, she is 
 an American, young, rich, indulged likewise self-in- 
 dulged and pretty, who marries a Russian title, truly 
 believing herself, I truly believe, "in love." I also truly 
 believe that she truly believes herself a good Catholic. 
 Therefore she leaves her mistake, that is, her husband, in 
 a fearful rage, yet does not divorce it ; and remains quite 
 miserable ever since to advantage, for she is hereby the 
 higher prize to danglers-on, and moreover the prettier for 
 what she considers grief. And to greater advantage than 
 even she herself, with all her valuation of that title, knows, 
 too, for such very difficulties may divert some second 
 calamity of too much haste. Now, my own, smile if you 
 will at me saying so, but 7 do not think her a good Catho- 
 lic let me say it that in that matter she is not at all 
 what I think other people ought to be ! Of course in the 
 end she will not stay undivorced, for she will ultimately 
 be what herself inside is, and Catholic or not, that whole 
 Daisy is Church of English, incarnate and in miniature. 
 Anyway, and which I am much interested to find sud- 
 denly out, having already said that much to myself from 
 my observations of people, she is but a Catholic adopt.
 
 238 The Great Way 
 
 And for what a reason can you imagine, my own? Be- 
 cause it is smart to be a Catholic here in this country, 
 where nobody else is, and shows her to be travelled ! My 
 own! Now, smart, my own, is one of the American slangs 
 I do not quite understand, though by diligence I will 
 yet, for the book says to sting and burn, or to be clever. 
 But it also means something that Daisy is and wants 
 to be more so, so she is a Catholic ! Yet my dear, so 
 far as her marriage is concerned, what she really is is a 
 Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Greco-Russian, for by 
 that Church was she performed in marriage or she could 
 not have got her title ! In my liking for words I learned 
 the name, but could not in Russian because Daisy knows 
 no Russian except some pet-names. And that Catholic 
 Church, my dear, allows divorce! So where is one? And 
 where is Daisy? 
 
 Again anyway, she was in Paris last season, and seeks 
 me out there simply out of a fancy to know me, and hav- 
 ing heard me in Petersburg the winter I was quite a 
 Russian furore. Then afterward she becomes sincerely 
 fond of me. Well, because of this and a hundred more 
 pretty, unreasonable reasons about her, I have a great 
 tenderness for her. I wish, oh how I wish, that I could 
 make her happy ! I cannot yet, cannot even tend toward 
 it within a friend's boundary, I mean, for I can think of no 
 instrument to my hand, no knife, no chisel, that would 
 open her mind. It will open like a blossom under a 
 shower. Some pretty day a day in May it would be, I 
 think all those splendid Churches in her brain will totter 
 and dissolve and be no more, and the faith that just so 
 happens to be my chosen one, the simple knowing and 
 feeling of love, will take her. And all those great Cathe- 
 drals will survive her, and not one stone the looser for 
 what 7 would think her meantime falsehoods and blandish- 
 ments upon them! 
 
 And why have I this trifling bouquet importantly to 
 my heart? My own, life is full of love, but so many ships 
 and trains of it go by us ! Nor do we ever give without
 
 In the Little Red Book 239 
 
 receipt that is, if one has an eye to see, a heart to feel 
 an instance, though to say how and why would need 
 for itself a whole little red book, because of this little 
 Marguerite at home, my own Marguerite is better at the 
 Opera. Yes, believe it since I have known her, some- 
 thing more of daintiness, something more of pathos. ... 
 And still, why all this to you? I have arrived to it. 
 
 You know I love to help women. Dona Rina and 
 others exquisite Simpatica, for an example educated 
 me to that love, though I like and pride myself to think 
 I had at least some of it by nature; and my Isabel, I 
 think, completed that education "turned me fbrth," I 
 think the English says, as from a whole school of life 
 in it. And I have been so discouraged of ever helping 
 Daisy, that it has seemed to me that only the hearing or 
 the seeing, the understanding of some such love as mine 
 for you, could help her at all to see life with larger, 
 gentler, less selfish, self-hurtful eyes. 
 
 And so I have decided this: that if I ever should find 
 that its first purpose is hopeless, or I ever should for 
 some great reason turn from that purpose, having found 
 that God did not intend my little book for your eyes 
 those violet eyes, my own, my Jose Luis ! then, I should 
 give it to Daisy. A foolish, possibly, a possibly useless, 
 a perhaps overintimate thing to do ... yet the love 
 that tries to show itself here from time to time, from page 
 to page even, so far as the trying is concerned, words, 
 only words as it can succeed to comprise within here its 
 little red covers, might better be expended in that way, 
 than wasted wasted. . . . And might thus be indeed, 
 my dear, it might! that silver shower that would open 
 the springtime blossom of her pretty rosebud mind. . . . 
 She knows nothing of my old life ; not unnaturally, noth- 
 ing; and all that would be a great shock to her a mor- 
 tification, possibly, though I may wrong life itself, not to 
 say sweet little Daisy with her eyes almost as loyal a 
 flower-blue as my Isabel's, to speak so bitterly as that. 
 But any shock from it could do her no harm, for it would
 
 240 The Great Way 
 
 but help her to see would all that shock part what 
 love and faith can be (yes, and can do, if again it is self- 
 flattery allows me say it) despite the sordid and terrible 
 in life. Nor could her knowing it hurt me not even in 
 some material, unimportant way; for she is fidelity itself 
 to me I know indeed I have just named to you the 
 colour of her eyes ! and a confidence to her would be 
 sacred. 
 
 Well, well, if this is by fate for your violet eyes, my 
 own, then I have been but speaking once more to you 
 my inmost thoughts, my daily life; if for Daisy's so 
 lighter blue ones, then they will perhaps open, and cer- 
 tainly understand, by this late page, why my little red 
 book has been meant, after all, for her for her, little 
 Daisy who thinks me so severe upon her, for her, little 
 Marguerite, out of all the people all the flowers in the 
 world! But I will not think that just now! . . . My 
 heart would grow very weighty if I did, very, very 
 weighty, my Jose. . . . This afternoon, Daisy has been 
 about near me as I wrote, pesting me whom she has 
 but now called a pest plaguing me with questions. How 
 little she dreams what I have been writing, despite her 
 demand and demands that I should tell her! . . . 
 
 And through her chatter, my darling (I like that word 
 "chatter," and I like "darling") have I succeeded to 
 put down according my intentions all of the neglected or 
 forgotten things (or feared things!) that had gone not 
 formerly into my little red book? No, no, there is one 
 more, that I must hasten while I think of it In one 
 way more of which I have not yet told you, I have greatly 
 changed: I do not say Great White Mother of God any 
 more. 
 
 It is not fashionable here, or any other such astonish- 
 ment-expressions. 
 
 But I will say it again presently on account of Daisy's 
 Greco, or Roman, or Episcopalian no, catholic interrup- 
 tions, if I do not finish ! She has been silent for two 
 minutes, which is ominous it means, she will momentar-
 
 In the Little Red Book 
 
 241 
 
 ily throw her book about ! For to-day, good-bye, good- 
 bye, my Jose Luis, my violet-eyed, my own ! 
 
 ff 
 *~ 
 
 ^" 
 
 _1 
 
 UXM
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 PEOPLE 
 
 MADAME DE L'ETOILE and Daisy must both have 
 lost count of the deceptive winter afternoon's time, Wanda 
 with her absorbed writing of her book, the little princess 
 with her basket-ball game with "The Apples of Jacquot- 
 Jacquette," for as Wanda turned away from the now 
 twilit curtains, possibly stirred by the diluted sound of 
 a telephone ring, her maid came in with aji announce- 
 ment that betrayed an hour lost somewhere. 
 
 "Mr. Arnold Rutgers, Madame." 
 
 "He may come up, Elise." 
 
 "I told him so, Madame." 
 
 Madame's eye-brows and shoulders moved a little, but 
 her voice sounded no impatience. 
 
 "Then I will see him before I dress. It is later than 
 I thought." 
 
 "Yes, Madame." 
 
 It was evident that Elise knew the time; and quite 
 without her announcement of the imminent Mr. Rutgers 
 it would have been plain from Elise's appearance that an 
 hour at the very least had escaped the prima donna. 
 
 Elise was a pretty woman^ very pretty ; and in this 
 interregnum, a professional moment in an unprofessional 
 costume, she was chic to smartness in a tailor-made 
 coat and skirt, a beautifully slapped hat, and carrying 
 Jacquot-Jacquette. This was not Daisy's book. The 
 name of that was "Les Pommes de Jacquot-Jacquette." 
 Nor was Elise carrying that dainty creature, its heroine, 
 either, but another creature, named in her honour a 
 small, silky, quivering, pitiably high-bred, pricelessly 
 
 242
 
 People 243 
 
 hideous Belgian dragon. Elise was looked at when she 
 took the air if Jacquot took it with her. 
 
 "Mr. Rutgers, Madame." 
 
 Wanda greeted him with a touch of the hand, a touch 
 of words. The distinguished young man answered in 
 kind. His only very distinct salutation was to Elise. 
 
 Elise curtsied, dragon and all. But though her pos- 
 ture and atmosphere spoke a certain aristocratic bored 
 patience, she did not go. She had not been dismissed. 
 And it happened at that moment that she was desired, 
 for Daisy's voice waved suddenly in from her room. 
 
 "Elise, have you any idea where Jacquot-Jacquette 
 is?" 
 
 "In my arms, Madame la Princesse !" replied Elise. 
 
 "Oh, bete ! Non, non ! Mon roman ! Mon roman ! 
 Mon roman !" called the princess's voice impatiently, and 
 she burst in upon them. "Elise, you spiteful great big 
 fool, you knew I meant my book! Oh, Arnold!" 
 
 Obviously too, and very, the little princess had lost 
 track of the clock, as she had not supposed Mr. Rutgers 
 here as yet. But she was not displeased to have dis- 
 closed herself to him in this wise, for she was beautifully 
 done for dinner, while as yet without her wraps speci- 
 fically, she was in a very low-necked gown, as low as it 
 possibly could be, and made still a yard lower by a yard 
 of chiffon tied into a bow around her small lovely throat. 
 
 "Well, I'm glad you're here, Arnold, for if Elise will 
 slam out on the exact minute, at least there's someone 
 here to help on my cloak !" 
 
 "You're not dining with us, Daisy?" he smiled. 
 
 "No. Wanda didn't want me." 
 
 Wanda entered no protest, but she had a cavalier. 
 
 "She did, Daisy. And I didn't." 
 
 Arnold Rutgers was a rather exquisitely courteous 
 man. It was by dint of this fact that he could success- 
 fully say precisely that to the little princess. And in just 
 such moments Daisy was just such a Little Princess. 
 Though she might not have measured up to him in a
 
 244 The Great Way 
 
 pugilists' ring, she was quite as tall as any drawing- 
 room. 
 
 She looked at him with a slow smile such a smile as 
 might appear on the face of a beautiful kitten if it could 
 stand on its hind legs, as Daisy could, and articulate a 
 few frail wisps of intellect, such as Daisy had. 
 
 "Arnold," she said, with that smile, and her little 
 paws clasped exquisitely under her chiffon whiskers, 
 "Arnold, you are delicious !" 
 
 She was thus delicious herself because Mr. Rutgers 
 was a man, and a very good-looking man. If a woman 
 had said it to her, or anything like it, she would have 
 done one of two other things: if an ugly woman, she 
 would merely have smiled that same smile and silently 
 eaten that woman's canary behind her back ; if a beau- 
 tiful woman, she would have paused for one instant, and 
 then, swollen to three times her natural size, flown at her 
 with a yowl never heard in this world except from its 
 one actual representation of hell on earth, a back fence. 
 
 "Never mind about the book, Elise, because I'm dining 
 out anyhow. But how the old scratch it could vanish 
 between the last time I happened to drop it and the next 
 time I needed it, dazes me. So do be civil for once in 
 your life, Elise, and if you do see it, PICK IT UP!" 
 
 "Yes, Madame la Princesse!" 
 
 And Daisy floated back to her room. 
 
 "Elise," said Wanda, "I will dress myself to-night." 
 
 "Yes, Madame," said Elise. "I knew otherwise you 
 would have reminded me an hour ago." 
 
 Again a little something happened to Wanda's eye- 
 brows and shoulders, but again the voice was fully patient. 
 
 "So you may go, Elise. But about Daisy's book, do 
 find it to-night, for you will be back before she likely 
 will, when she might want it and I might be asleep. It 
 disappeared for hours last night and made a wretched 
 evening. So I am anxious for her to finish it. And the 
 sooner she does, Elise, the sooner you may have it to 
 finish."
 
 People 245 
 
 "Thank you, Madame. I finished it last night," said 
 Elise. 
 
 Floatingly as the princess, she left them, and Wanda's 
 guest turned to her with a smile. 
 
 "I see men's problems are small ones. But then, their 
 luxuries are fewer, too. I suppose one can't be valeted, 
 and have one's favourite dog exercised, at one and the 
 same moment." 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile gazed at him incredulously for a 
 long moment silently, then with a gasping question. 
 
 "Can you tell me, Arno, you thought that dog was 
 mine?" 
 
 In his own turn for startlement he found no reply, nor 
 was there time for one, for a sudden little heat of words 
 came from her from Madame de 1'Etoile, whose subtle 
 calm was one of her loveliest beauties. 
 
 "All this time you have been believing that? That is 
 an outrage! Have you looked at it? There is nothing 
 like that in my character! It has been always my belief 
 that people who do not love their servants do not deserve 
 to have any, but let me confess to you, Arno, Elise is 
 a catastroaf ! Elise is why we have to live in this strange 
 thing called Apartement-Hotel, instead of a privater and 
 more particular place congenial to me ! Elise is why that 
 dragon Belgique lives with us ! That pitiful faceless thing 
 is Elise' 's chimera, not mine! Nor could I do anything 
 but admire them when they would not allow us into the 
 Ritz ! Nor is that all of Elise, either ! Elise's whole parts 
 of speech are oui, oui, oui; madame, madame, madame; 
 and when I make a very clever joke and say 'My dear, 
 my only Elise, will you not just once say "us, Madame"?' 
 she says again 'Oui, madame!' and is silent, and nothing 
 happens ! Or else, there happen just such confusing sen- 
 tences as just now about Daisy's book which make me 
 suspicious that her soul is not monosyllabic, in the least ! 
 I would disband her, but that I have ruined her with 
 patience for anyone else, who would in consequence brutal- 
 ize her, and but that I am determined I shall love her
 
 246 The Great Way 
 
 yet if I can by means of trying long enough! Ah, well, 
 well . . . glory be to God anyway ! There was a time 
 I had no maid at all !" 
 
 The completed come-and-go of her little outburst found 
 his eyes ashine, for travelled as this man was in human 
 souls as in earthen cities, this woman had for him always 
 the fascination as of a tinted Latin town for the American 
 temperament. And his chance to-day into a small domes- 
 tic vortex of her left him glad, glad not only in general, 
 but of a detail. For with all his meticulous love of her 
 varied rich and dainty appurtenances even, for her sake, 
 a love of Daisy, who seemed a rightly whimsical part and 
 parcel of her entourage always he had found himself 
 unable to love the shivering Belgian dragon as a spangle 
 of her glittering pasear. Surely, he had been dull ; he 
 should have known there was nothing like that in her 
 character. And now in the great light of her petty news, 
 even the pitiable shiver of the poor doomed little degen- 
 erate beast became a justified part of her equipment. 
 This queer woman, like the star that was her name, lighted 
 up anything, even Elise, even Elise's dragon. He had not 
 answered, for she understood his silences, and such perfect 
 spontaneity as hers might not understand his poignant 
 enjoyment of it; and their mutual quietness was broken 
 by the inrush of Daisy to depart for her dinner first, to 
 be groomed into her cloak by this present cavalier and 
 her arms overflowing with luggage : the cloak, and a fan 
 enormous, far more enormous than she, and with which 
 she purposed to herald the re-entrance of fans into 
 fashion. 
 
 "Thanks, Arnold. Yah lub-lu tea-byea-yah! Or do I 
 mean the other of the two things I know in Russian? My 
 God, Wanda, there's Jacquot right under your desk ! 
 And you always swear you never touch it !" 
 
 "You threw it at me," said Wanda. 
 
 "Why, Wanda, what a ghastly lie! Well, lub-lu for 
 short. Mouthy thing means *I love you,' and I learned 
 it to please my husband. The one I was starting for when
 
 People 247 
 
 I saw *Jacquot r means 'Good-bye' and I learned that 
 on his account, too ! Wish I'd studied more of the beastly 
 stuff. I need it for Dmitri. Well, I'll use one of them on 
 him to-night. Perhaps I'll use both !" 
 
 And with a final pin-wheel whirl she rattled out to her 
 saucer of milk with Dmitri, beautifully unconscious that 
 with Arnold Rutgers present she had been an entrancing, 
 an entirely different kitten from the one that with equal 
 sincerity she was alone with Wanda in the long hours 
 of the day and sometimes the longer ones of the night; 
 and leaving many things beside impressions behind her: 
 On Wanda's lips, a kiss ; in the air, a drift of one from 
 her finger-tips to Arnold and a faint essence of heliotrope. 
 With them both, a promise to enjoy herself and to return 
 early: "Never fret! I've got to be back before Elise, be- 
 cause this is her hat. The nasty beast wouldn't sell it to 
 me !" On the window-seat, the fan fortunately, in a way, 
 for it was safer forgotten here than forgotten in public. 
 And alone in the deepening twilight together, these two. 
 
 "That is a perilous thing she has done about the hat," 
 said Wanda. "And I am rather sorry about the fan, too, 
 although it is valuable. For she has taken the book with 
 her by mistake instead, and the fan would only be stolen, 
 whereas Jacquot-Jacquette will be recovered, and be 
 brought here by a liveried servant of Dmitri's to-morrow 
 morning about six o'clock, to be put only into my hands, 
 in person ; and not by mistake either on the servant's part, 
 but because Daisy is known to be careless with it." 
 
 "Why six o'clock?" he demanded. 
 
 "Because Daisy might want it at six o'clock," she an- 
 swered. 
 
 "Burn it!" he suggested. 
 
 "I would not dare no more than I would dare to burn 
 Elise's ! I am in despair, really, now that we know Elise 
 has finished it. For if Elise lets fall that to Daisy as she 
 did to us, Daisy will have a good excuse not to hasten with 
 it. Daisy is honourable, you see, and she promised Elise 
 to hurry if Elise would hurry with a letter to Dmitri one
 
 248 The Great Way 
 
 day. Yes, I am despondent, for I glanced into it lately. 
 There are fifty chapters, and from the mussed pages, 
 Daisy has read five." 
 
 "I'll take her to my studio, and finish it aloud to her." 
 
 "She would be found asleep in your studio. It would 
 not do." 
 
 Remembering that to-night, as in the long ago, she was 
 without a maid, she had risen to disappear against dinner 
 accurately, supper, for she was to create the meal with 
 her own hands ; and with, it always seemed to him, a deli- 
 cate something of the pure art with which she created a 
 character. 
 
 "Why do you trouble to dress, Wanda? What need?" 
 he queried. 
 
 Her reply was with a slow, arbitrary little smile. 
 
 "You would deprive an opera-singer of her vanity?** 
 
 Again the curious shine came into his eyes. One more 
 facet ! 
 
 And now, with only the glint of it and the inner glow 
 of his devotional attitude, he was quite alone, among her 
 rich-coloured, sombrely twilighted properties. 
 
 Familiarly, yet a little awe-struck even now, he moved 
 about the room, in its growing darkness so softly pendent 
 between its walls streaked with the last flickers of rosy 
 western light his tread as soft, his fingers as softly touch- 
 ing, with hesitant reverence, this and that and the other 
 that were personal to her, peculiar to her. He paused with 
 almost a quiver by the Sheraton desk, knowing that he 
 could not touch, even most of all reverently, what he had 
 seen her most reverently touch, and that he knew to be 
 locked away within it. For the big artist, like the small 
 princess, knew of the little red book, though his wonder, 
 unlike Daisy's, had been silent. Again unlike Daisy, and 
 with the broad charity of men, even the most passionate, 
 he did not return the little princess's jealousy. He was 
 almost, though perhaps with a smile, reverent of her, too, 
 as of one more possession of Wanda's an accoutrement 
 characteristic, personal, as high-bred as the dragon Bel-
 
 People 249 
 
 and a trifling, dainty dream instead of a nightmare, 
 and with some equally loving reason, he had no doubt, to 
 account for it. ... Yes, one more facet. 
 
 For in his meticulous brain-concept of her, this woman 
 in her inseparable art and human natures was a stone of 
 water so pure and so blue that in her very brilliance she 
 needed peculiar backgrounds, and in her very instincts of 
 unpremeditated emotion, automatically acquired them. 
 
 Not only was his attitude devotional, but it had been 
 so from the first time he had seen and heard her. Even 
 to-day, withal his permitted nearness to her, the fact of 
 his privileges did not for any instant wear down his sense 
 of grateful favouredness. 
 
 That "first time he had seen and heard her" had been 
 "among the people," that concrete yet vague locality 
 wherein she herself, strangely yet characteristically, 
 seemed, by some mental means of placing herself there, 
 most happy on that day when she had for the first time 
 in the United States sung her famous "Traviata." 
 
 This growingly famous Arnold Rutgers was, in his own 
 right, not so much an unusual man as an unusual art-man, 
 for though art's sun and moon may have risen for him, 
 they did not likewise set for him, in painting he loved art, 
 therefore all arts. Albeit a disciple of pencil, brush and 
 canvas, he loved the art of taut-pulled string and sounding 
 metals and chiselled human voice. Painting may have been 
 for him all the breath of self-expressing life ; but he broad- 
 ly, charitably knew that it was not the whole breath of 
 art-life, as again that breath was not the whole power of 
 simple unqualified Life. And next in devotion with him 
 to his own art-parent, he loved the art-parent Music. 
 
 To "La Traviata" went Arnold Rutgers habitually, 
 exactly as goes a child to a migratory, periodic carrousel, 
 knowing that by proper dint of journey and expenditure 
 there is to find a diamond in a tinsel oyster. 
 
 That first time he had seen and heard Wanda de 
 1'Etoile, it had come across his mind with a certain lonely 
 timbre of thought almost bleakly, like the thin shafts
 
 250 The Great Way 
 
 of winter sunlight filtering into the gallery that his whim 
 of the day had chosen come with a sense of unfamiliarity, 
 nearly of loneliness, that he was hearing the big hand- 
 organ epic of flesh-pot and soul-yearn as if he had never 
 heard it before as if he must brace his mind, his nerves, 
 to draw within himself all that could be drawn to build 
 a perfect memory of all that he was yet to hear. 
 
 The impression, penetrant, suggestive, had come to 
 him as Wanda had sunk down on the rococo couch near 
 the right wings. "Mano derecha" she had termed it 
 afterward, and the trivial phrase had lingered always in 
 his brain as she had spoken it like a snatch of melody. 
 
 Debonairly she had carried on Nellie Melba's blithe 
 reform of the New York institution's outre version of 
 "The Lady of the Camellias," and debonairly she had 
 entered, a lovely Violeta in swaying and resetted crino- 
 line, together with an added whim of her own, namely, on 
 the arm of a cavalier a great lady in her pathetic 
 achievement of mood, and a great lady dressed for an 
 occasion, too, befanned and decolletce and radiant, her 
 posture and gait and costume, the swing and the rhythm 
 and sway of them, suggesting a ship for its stateliness, 
 but a cockleshell craft for its daintiness. 
 
 An impulsive, self-hushing ripple had gone through the 
 matinee house, and had she sung not a note she would 
 have been, already and past dispute, the Diva, the Prima 
 Donna in excelcis. 
 
 And it is possible that Violeta had never been as greatly 
 sung as it was that day. 
 
 Arnold Rutgers, at least, was certain that it had not. 
 In the end of the ball-room scene, in the shower of bitter 
 money, both the man in him and the artist in him quivered 
 with something very like a shudder. Afterward, he could 
 not remember whether it was through hearing or through 
 sight, by the singing or by the look of her, that he had 
 been momentarily soul-stricken. But there had been some- 
 thing more than any Marguerite, than any Violeta, in 
 the tragic flower of those few instants' pouring music
 
 People 251 
 
 and flashing vision of her. The intellect guiding that voice 
 and that soul had through the bruising tinkle of that 
 money-shower propelled some terrible thing root-deep in 
 the universe, and the electricity of it had coursed not only 
 to Arnold Rutgers but through the whole vast building. 
 
 Also afterward, he laughed himself away from the im- 
 aginative thought that the nameless communication held 
 some obscure fatality for him. 
 
 Yet even now, remembering, he trembled a little, evert 
 here, among her household deities of golden-handled pen, 
 delicate fabric, slender, richly tapestried chairs, glinting 
 bits of Toledo, while he marvelled at the fortune of his 
 nearness and of her own familiar nearness, on the other 
 side, to the boundary that she drew. 
 
 He had sought her swiftly, consciously presuming, yet 
 determinedly. When at last he had met her, crowded at 
 her in a chattering, eager, infuriating reception-line, he 
 knew that her moment's hand-clasp and glance were for 
 only his own memory, not for hers, that his time, effort, 
 anxiety to this silly end had been wasted. And when 
 ultimately he was successful, it had been through the 
 simple expedient of a card with "Business" pencilled below 
 his name, and an explanation five minutes later, poured 
 forth from the inwardly bent knees of his luck, that he 
 must he used no further word paint her. 
 
 His mind had leaped after her mind as, through inter- 
 view after interview, a delicacy here, an intellectual, half- 
 inexpressed prejudice there, prevented one costume, an- 
 other. 
 
 Traviata and upon this very natural initial choosing, 
 for a brief instant they had thought they had it. But 
 after that brief instant she had shaken her head in the 
 serious, lovely movement that he had later come to know 
 by heart. 
 
 "Traviata now is mine, friend, I truly believe of all 
 the world. Yes, since that performance here, that one 
 you heard, truly I believe it. But Traviata my poor, 
 poor Violeta ! I am never letting her alone ! Ah, with
 
 252 The Great Way 
 
 your profession, you will understand I am forever paint- 
 ing her! And I would prefer someone else did not paint 
 my Wayward One until I have finished !" 
 
 And at this, after his own even briefer instant of fear 
 that he faced an actress's temperamentalism, there had 
 for the first time come into his eyes that curious shine. 
 . . . The first facet. . . . 
 
 Mimi and something like a sad memorv shot her look. 
 "No. That I would like. But Mimi is Melba's. Mimi 
 never can be mine as she is hers." 
 
 One deferment, and he was glad of more, for they 
 had led her to say: "You will if you will see me in 
 many parts, for there is a whole winter of them before 
 us." And his eager questions had brought about for him 
 rare, memory-storing glimpses of her exquisite costumes. 
 
 Over the suggested vision of her impending Kundry, 
 they had both stood enthralled he at the daring imagina- 
 tiveness of its delicately poignant colours, its clusters, its 
 very horns of jewellery invoking to the brain some beast 
 of Apocalypse; she, in delight at his breathless apprecia- 
 tion, and for a long moment nearly tempted. 
 
 But again, and suddenly, she had shaken her head. This 
 had been the case of her delicacy; though she had said, 
 and had looked at him with utter unconcern as she said 
 it : "Never Kundry. For you can see from this, as Kun- 
 dry, friend, I am shockingly, dreadfully, nearly naked!" 
 
 Carmen and a bright, grave light had filled her eyes. 
 
 "That truly tempts me. But Breval has been painted 
 as Carmen, as Carmen will probably never be painted 
 again !" Her casual, offhand knowledge of the picture 
 for this, too, was early in their knowledge of each other 
 had delighted him. "And also, Mr. Rutgers, Carmen 
 would never show me as I a as I desire to be." 
 
 And at last she had said one day, turning to him abrupt- 
 ly with something more pregnant, more deep and even 
 more mysterious in her manner than he had ever before 
 discovered in it: "I have decided, if you will humour me. 
 No costume at all. Do not look so amazed! I mean,
 
 People 253 
 
 anything you may choose out of what you have seen 
 upon me here at home. Yet, Mr. Rutgers, in a character 
 dearer to my heart than any other. Paint me, please, as 
 a lady." 
 
 And Arnold Rutgers's "Wanda de 1'Etoile," indeed 
 the portrait of a lady, hangs now in the Metropolitan, 
 quite near the Zuloaga Breval. 
 
 But to-day, as he stood so gently, so wonderingly in 
 the faded light by her small beautiful desk, it was hang- 
 ing in his studio, where it bulked dimly, subtly in his 
 daily life as might a shrine to a devout Catholic. 
 
 When he had first determined to know her and had 
 set with so stubborn a fever to the task of it, he had not 
 paused long enough to ask himself if he was in love with 
 her. When he did take breath to ask himself seriously 
 that, he had been as feverishly glad to own it. 
 
 Now, with the innermost beauty of Wanda's demanded 
 fine distinction, he was not "in" love with her; he loved 
 her. As, standing so near to her hidden little red book, 
 he was imaginatively phrasing the great fact to himself, 
 that fact of love, a fact great enough to attain the stature 
 and the miraculous nature of a truth, had come into its 
 fulsome golden being in him with all the gradualness, yet 
 sudden glory, of a sunrise. . . . 
 
 "But, Arno, it is perfectly dark! It is black, winter 
 night ! I do not see you, even ! Why did you not turn 
 on the light?"
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 LET THE DEAD PAST BURY ITS DEAD 
 
 SHE was serving him, gracefully, attentively, after her 
 gentle foreign woman's fashion a fashion that had for- 
 bidden him to fetch and carry, even to trundle in for her 
 the "curate's-assistant" with its surplice of lace and 
 silver, its weight of wine and food. When he had heard 
 her voice from the doorway he had answered her, through 
 the room's darkness, "Because I was thinking of light, 
 Wanda. Of a light greater than electricity or even sun. 
 And if you were looking at the mirror you would see me, 
 Wanda. I can see the gleam of your eyes in it, even with 
 your head turned away; and you would see that gleam 
 reflected in mine." 
 
 She had laughed softly. 
 
 "You are not an American, Arno, after all ! You say 
 impossible, pretty things !" 
 
 Then she had felt for the switch and flooded the room 
 with a suave radiance of the tenderly tinted shades, of 
 her roseate figure, its decolletee frock of rich petal-colour. 
 
 The gown, her neck, her hair were gleaming now, 
 beyond the rose-drenched candelabra. He was sure he 
 had never seen anyone, not Wanda herself, more lovely, 
 in a lovelier moment. He had never known anyone who 
 could transform, with the gesture of a wine-glass or the 
 delicate passing of a dish, the essence of a markedly in- 
 formal supper to that of a function. Thus her art 
 touched, seemingly, everything. Supper with her was a 
 combination of the intimate with the stately ; the familiar 
 with the decorous ; the simple with the elaborate ; the 
 sketched with the pigmented. And that, despite her in- 
 
 254
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 255 
 
 triguing little oblique excuse, was why she had dressed 
 for it. Vanity? Facets! . . . 
 
 "Oh, Wanda," he exclaimed suddenly, hunting in his 
 jacket, "I've found that criticism that tickled me so! 
 Read it." And he handed her a clipped bit of newspaper. 
 
 "Thank you, Arno. My curiosity about myself is 
 never used up !" 
 
 Wanda studied it slowly, puzzling carefully over some 
 of the words. 
 
 "Maggie used to swim and dandle flowers under 
 Cosima " 
 
 She looked up, her face blank. "Maggie swim Frau 
 Wagner's first name? Why, Arno, this means nothing! 
 Is it a crazy person?" 
 
 "Read on," he smiled. 
 
 "Maggie used to swim and dandle flowers under Cosima; 
 one may put it so in order to exactly place the dramatic semi- 
 colon in front of her appearance here among us, where, when 
 she swims, it is not as a Rhine Maiden, but as a comet into 
 our ken; where she is no longer dandling flowers among the 
 chorus, but floating among the stars. In other words, she 
 is no longer Maggie, but Wanda de 1'Etoile, helping to make 
 the music of the spheres." 
 
 Again Wanda looked up. "But my name was never 
 Maggie !" 
 
 Again he smiled. "Read on." 
 
 "This writer heard Maggie when she was a squawky flower- 
 girl at Bayreuth. If her name was not Maggie, it was doubt- 
 less the equivalent of it in the land of her birth just one 
 indistinguishable name in a list of six or a dozen bracketed 
 names who swam, or threw flowers, or ejaculated with spears 
 and bridled with tall white pinions for famous Briinnhildes. 
 Yet in that nameless, squawky, sixth or dozenth voice there 
 was the mysterious, unforgettable something that haunts, 
 that one never forgets, that sings not: 'Ho-yo-to-ho !' but 'I 
 am the new generation ! I shall sing Briinnhilde one day as 
 she does not!' Such was Wanda de 1'Etoile. What she is now, 
 what she was last night, the world knows."
 
 256 The Great Way 
 
 Lost in thought, Wanda creased the bit of printing 
 between her fingers. 
 
 "Arno," she said presently, "I am not now surprised 
 you were 'tickled* at this, being my friend. For it is 
 kind. It appreciates. Here in America, despite I would 
 not pay bribes because I would think it wicked, as did 
 that too stout Briinnhilde who thence had to go home, 
 still there has been so much kindness ! Oh, so much ! Yet 
 I confess that all of this I do not understand. I do not 
 see what fun he had to call me Maggie !" 
 
 "What was your name, Wanda?" 
 
 "At Bayreuth? I do not remember what I there called 
 myself, scarcely any more than this writer does. Several 
 dreadful German things, out of manners to the country. 
 I was there one year, for training. And it did what 
 you call "worlds" for me. Yet I think God Himself was 
 surprised at me for wanting to sing the German tongue. 
 My wars with it have paid me two things. One, that 
 when I have sung it, which will now be soon, I will be 
 called the greatest Kundry. I have that conviction. The 
 other, that they have prepared me perhaps perhaps 
 one day to sing Isolde! Who sent me to Bayreuth 
 really was Isolde!" 
 
 With the rich word, softly, richly spoken, there was 
 a far-off look in her eyes, as if it named a far-off time. 
 
 "Yes," said Arnold Rutgers, a far-off look in his eyes 
 too, and a queer quiver in his voice, "how you could sing 
 Isolde!" 
 
 "Perhaps, Arno, perhaps. What a test! For I am 
 more ambitious than even you dream of, dear friend as 
 you are. And for reasons that you do not know dear 
 friend as you are. Arno, I utterly wish to be great 
 truly, greatly great !" 
 
 "But you are already great ! Truly great ! The slow, 
 unwilling world says so !" 
 
 "I am not Melba." 
 
 "But you are Wanda de 1'Etoile." 
 
 "I have not Melba's voice, Arno."
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 257 
 
 "And Melba has not your soul." 
 
 "You must not say that, Arno. Melba kissed me once, 
 and I think it was the greatest moment of my life. . . . 
 No, not of my life, but of my career. I had sung Boheme, 
 and when I saw her sitting in the house, enough by itself 
 to frighten any human soul to death, it it reminded 
 me of something ... of one night in Paris. . . . Arno, 
 I did not know how or what I sang the rest, of the act. 
 And when she asked to see me in my dressing-room, 
 and told me how I had sung, and I looked in her lovely 
 face and knew she did not pity me, but was telling me 
 the truth, I cried and cried enough to spoil my voice 
 for a week, except that joy never spoils anything. One 
 thing she said was, 'People have said a singer needs 
 three things, Voice, Voice, Voice.' That itself was another 
 strange memory for me, for that had been said to me 
 once, when the whole great way of my life my Gran 
 Via was prophesied for me. And then she said, 'I have 
 those three things. If I had your soul, I would be the 
 greatest singer in the world.' . . . Arno, could there be 
 a greater soul than the soul that, even out of an ecstatic, 
 queenly moment, to someone who was seeking and strug- 
 gling, would say that?" . 
 
 They were silent for a time; then Arnold said gently: 
 
 "And the soul that is greater than any I have known, 
 has pointed a moral and adorned a pretty tale, to make 
 me forget to ask again what its earthly name was when 
 it was a heavenly child. Is not that so?" Wanda's "is 
 nots" had infected the American. 
 
 "Why should you wish to know what my name was, 
 Arno?" 
 
 "Because I long to know everything about you." 
 
 "Ah!" Wanda shook her head with a strange, sad 
 smile. "No, very dear friend. You would be sorry if 
 you did know. You you idealize me." 
 
 "I do not idealize you, I idolize you." 
 
 "Arno, Arno, you must not say that!" She cried it, 
 almost, pain vibrant in her exquisite voice. "Listen to
 
 258 The Great Way 
 
 me: you and Daisy are my nearest and dearest of my life 
 just now you, more even than Daisy, because it is won- 
 derful to me to have a friend in a good man, and you are 
 the only one of that kind that I have had in all my life 
 except, and different again, my Maestro. It is possible 
 here in the States. In my native country it would be, I 
 think, not possible again except, for instance, my be- 
 loved Maestro. Shall you change all that, and make my 
 life more empty, by offering me something I would have 
 no right to take?*' 
 
 "Why no right, Wanda? You tell me so over and 
 over, but without saying why, except vaguely, sadly that 
 there is a good reason. That 7 have no right even to 
 beg you, would seem reasonable enough, for I have nothing 
 to offer that is great enough for you, except my love. 
 But you say that is not it. Tell me, Wanda : great as 
 you are, beyond other people, something higher than 
 most things of the world, yet with a great love offered 
 you, would you not think of marriage? Would you never 
 think of it at all?" 
 
 "Amo," she said, her eyes grave and dreamy, her 
 voice very slow, "there was a time when I did not could 
 not think of marriage for myself at all. Even far 
 ahead. Could not afford it in any way soever. But here, 
 things are such a different spirit from the spirit at home 
 that I have sometimes thought I am trying to say, I 
 have changed a little a little in what is named here the 
 'point of view.' I have thought that perhaps I did have 
 that right. I mean, that I might have it in certain cir- 
 cumstances. But I am not yet sure in that point of 
 view. It is young with me, like a baby that might grow 
 up to astonish one in some way. For I have had it only 
 since I have came to America." 
 
 Arnold smiled, his troubled gravity broken for a 
 moment. 
 
 "Not 'came,' dear, 'come.' ' 
 
 "'Come'? Thank you, Arno. Since I come here." 
 
 "Not 'since I come,' Wanda dear, but 'have come.' "
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 259 
 
 "But that is what I said to begin, Arno ! Are you 
 never satisfied? I think you are not so clever as you 
 pretend! 'Did come' is in the book, and when one day 
 I have said 'Since I did come to America' you chose to 
 know better than the book and told me 'came,' and to- 
 night I have begun with 'came,' and you tell me 'come'! 
 What am I to believe?" 
 
 "Never mind, dear," laughed Arnold. 
 
 "But I mind very much!" cried Wanda indignantly. 
 "You know I am proud of my cleverness at languages, 
 yet you must confuse me for ever !" 
 
 "Let's return to your 'point of view,' dear. That's 
 more important than your English." 
 
 " 'Let's' ! 'That's' ! I am sure those are poor enough 
 English! Well, since I have came here, I have seen this 
 different spirit about what is right and what is wrong. 
 You are the greatest people in the world in some ways 
 the most open and charitable, I think. But, Arno, to 
 demand all the charity of a big nation from one individual 
 of it, even the sweetest and kindest, would be too much. 
 Comprends tu moi ?" 
 
 "Dear," said Arnold Rutgers, leaning across the glow- 
 ing table and placing his darker hand on the fingers that 
 lay white upon the white cloth, shining in its rosy light, 
 " dear and surely you must let me call you so when 
 you have used the foreign 'thou' to me you should 
 never, in speaking to me of ourselves, use the word charity. 
 You like to have lessons in English; here is a lesson 
 deeper and greater than all of grammar: 'Charity' is 
 the cruellest, most terrible word in the English tongue!" 
 
 "It it was not cruel to me, Arno," she said, "the first 
 time my mind came upon it with real thought of its 
 meaning. Charities 'Mercedes' was the name of a 
 beautiful old woman I think she was old, old as words, 
 I know she was beautiful, beautiful as words who saved 
 my life one pitiable night pitiable? Pitiful too! who 
 prophesied for me my Great Way. She is the one I have 
 spoken to you when we talked of Melba just now. Cruel?
 
 260 The Great Way 
 
 Mercedes was not cruel, Arno ; she only was truthful with 
 me, fully truthful, as I am trying with you to be!" 
 
 "The virtues of charity," he answered quietly, "are 
 that it 'suffereth long and is kind.' I would suffer long 
 for you, Wanda. Till doomsday, I would be kind to you. 
 Yet 'charity'? Who am I that I should be charitable 
 to you? When I've told you I loved you and wanted to 
 marry you, have you demanded what my life has been? 
 If it has even occurred to you to wonder, has it occurred 
 to you to ask? Never. . . . Dear, have / ever asked 
 you?" 
 
 Her eyes were dim and did not look at him as she 
 whispered: "Yes, even to-night, Arno." 
 
 "Wanda! Wanda! Could you have understood it so? 
 You didn't ! That was uncharitable, from you to me ! 
 I said I longed to know your name, to know the little, 
 early things, to picture you as a child !" 
 
 "I know ! I know ! That was unkind from me to you ! 
 It was a little bit of wicked bitterness. Forgive me! 
 Dear, dear friend, I see that we must at last talk seriously 
 of this marriage matter. I have hoped we need not. . . . 
 Arno, I believe with all my heart that no matter what 
 I told you of myself, you would say, *I do not care, 
 Wanda.' You would still say, 'You are so great and 
 famous, and my love for you is so great and complete, 
 that for us there is not this strange difference that God 
 has made to be, or perhaps only allowed to be, between 
 what a man may do and what a woman may do.' I be- 
 lieve that you would say that. But even if I could say 
 it with you, Arno, praying that my past my 'past' 
 the way it is called in italics and in quotation marks 
 through God's mercy might never, never rise to strike 
 you on the face, still there would be two reasons. Two 
 great reasons. And one of them is, here am I a singer, 
 an artista, a famous one to be sure, a cantatriz, to climb 
 further up in my native tongue, but still an artista, sprung 
 up from the people of an old line in my dear coun- 
 try, yet a line sunk down in the people. And you
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 261 
 
 are a gentleman. You are an aristocrat. Your name 
 would measure with the names of nobles in my country, 
 mine measures with your aristocracy here only as a printed 
 one at the Opera. And of your family, you, Arno, are 
 what you call the 'scion.' " 
 
 "Wanda," he said earnestly, trembling with a hope 
 unfelt before, "granting the right or wrong of all that, 
 don't you know what my family consists of? My younger 
 sister. No one else, absolutely no one!" 
 
 "What a boy you are, dear friend! You are at times 
 such as this, so like a boy that it makes me ashamed to 
 keep you even for my close, friendly friend !" 
 
 "I may be, Wanda, to you, though I'm older than 
 you." 
 
 "With a sister twenty, you have told me. Arno, we 
 must not forget that sister ! How little you know women ! 
 That is why I have called you 'what a boy.' She would 
 know in a day what you would not discover in a life- 
 time! Arno, I believe in God's name that to-day, to- 
 night I am as truly, purely worthy to marry even you 
 in most ways, as as a woman with without " 
 
 "I understand, dear." 
 
 "Yet, Arno, that old life is history, if it is not present 
 truth. And even if that sister of yours could not read 
 as most women can read, must you not think of her?" 
 
 "My dear," he said, with a quietness deeply serious 
 but untroubled, "my sister has not thought of me in that 
 sense. American brothers and sisters are very inde- 
 pendent, Wanda. They are willing to love each other 
 without demands and dominations. Let me tell you some- 
 thing!" And his eyes shone with his one little victory 
 for which he had used one of her little phrases. "You 
 know my sister is in Paris, with friends. She at twenty 
 has become engaged to someone I never saw, never be- 
 fore heard of. Wanda, I've written her and written her 
 about you. She would love you and not for my sake 
 either, believe me, but for your own, her own. If I 
 don't know women, Wanda, I know one woman my
 
 262 The Great Way 
 
 sister. She has written me, 'She must be lovely, very 
 lovely.' And another time, 'I believe you're at last in 
 love, Arnold. And it's high time.' While of this man, 
 Wanda, to whom she's entrusted her life, her name 
 our name, as your thoughts would deal with it she writes 
 only that she loves him pages pouring out that, with 
 'handsome' in every other line. And at the end what do I 
 know of him? That he's handsome. And I couldn't go 
 on the witness-stand, my dear, as to that. And am I 
 shocked or angry? No. Because I trust her. Would 
 she question my right, my judgment? No. Because she 
 
 trusts me. Wanda ' and his hand tightened upon 
 
 hers and his voice quivered into low intensity "Wanda, 
 will you marry me?" 
 
 She drew her hand slowly away and rested her chin 
 in the hollow of it, lowering her eyes and turning partly 
 from him. 
 
 "The chances are in favour of this man. . . . Chances 
 are always in favour of men ! . . . Probably your little 
 sister, whom you trust, will give you no reason to regret 
 that trust. But that very same matter of trust the very 
 point and nature of it, Arno ! How of her trust in you? 
 Shall you, deliberately, bring into her life, as her lawful 
 sister, a Oh, I do know some English! a demi-rep?" 
 
 The word leapt out as if to strike him. 
 
 "Wanda !" he cried. 
 
 "Did it hurt you?" She sprang up with hot, pas- 
 sionate tears. "I said it to hurt you ! I wanted to know 
 if you still would beg me to marry you!" 
 
 He too had sprung up. 
 
 "I do beg you to marry me ! I love you !" 
 
 "It was sweet to have a good man ask and ask me! 
 I said it to have all the sweetness of that all before 
 I said utterly 'No' !" 
 
 "Why do you say no? Why?" He tried to take her 
 in his arms but she struggled away. 
 
 "Did I not say there were two reasons? You have 
 struck down only one! Shall I tell you that other? How
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 263 
 
 cruel I was how charitable, with your definition! not 
 to tell it first !" 
 
 "What is it? Tell me, Wanda ! Tell me!" 
 
 She turned toward him with her cheeks yet wet, but 
 her eyes passionless, bright merely with the dry light of 
 tense fervour. 
 
 "Dearest, closest friend, it is that I that I do not 
 love you. Oh, I love you indeed indeed! But not so, 
 not so! It is not that way! It is not the great way! 
 It is not La Gran Via !" 
 
 With hands tight clenched, she again turned away her 
 eyes. 
 
 He came up behind her and placed his gentle hands 
 upon her shoulders. 
 
 "I have known you did not love me that way. I 
 do not ask you to. I ask you to marry me. It might 
 be afterward. It might grow! I ask only the chance. 
 of its growing. Wanda, be my wife ! Be the bearer of 
 my name that you put so high! Make me proud that 
 you would take that gift ! Bear not only that be the 
 mother of my children !" 
 
 "I do not deserve them!" she whispered, striving to 
 keep erect the head that he strove to draw against his 
 heart. 
 
 "Think of it, Wanda! Think a little while, just a 
 little while, before you say 'utterly no 5 ! Dear, I can 
 tell what your lovely mind keeps going back to more, 
 so much more than it should! that word, and all you 
 meant by it. Dear, again your own pretty expression, 
 'let me tell you something': You are always crying out 
 for people, Wanda. 'The' people. Dear, there is a line 
 of verse that a people's poet wrote for the people, and 
 that stands out beyond the power of the rest of all 
 his simple verses for all people, high and low, to read. 
 Dearest, that message is: 'Let the dead past bury its 
 dead.' Will you think of that for a little, Wanda? For 
 just a little, before saying 'Utterly no'?" 
 
 She drew away from him, and turned, and let her
 
 264 The Great Way 
 
 hands slip down his sleeves till they caught his fingers. 
 
 "How wonderful you are!" she said, looking in his 
 eyes. "Yes, I will promise you so much !" 
 
 "Then I will leave you, dear. I know that with you 
 a promise is a sacred thing. It needs no tying. Oh 
 one moment !" 
 
 Again his hand went into his jacket pocket where the 
 newspaper clipping had been. 
 
 "Wanda, will you let me give you this? I have never 
 given you anything but flowers. Something, not words, 
 but something from you, has said that flowers must be 
 the only thing from me. But you have given me so 
 much, Wanda! You will accept this?" 
 
 And a soft cry at the beauty came from her as there 
 sped, from his finger-tips to her instinctively uplifted 
 ones, and hung between them glittering, a string of beads 
 a rosary of carven gold and crystal. 
 
 Momentarily, she stood spellbound, with aesthetic de- 
 light and with memory memories of the gypsy again, 
 when between her and the woman named Charities had 
 hung thus pendant and glittering in firelight a string 
 of beads ; of Isabel, when between her and the girl named 
 Sacrament thus had hung drooping and shining in sun- 
 light a string of beads. But for the old glow and 
 wonder of old wondrous Egypt then and there, were a 
 white pure glitter and new miracle from these rose-cut 
 pebbles of Brazil silently tinkling with lights like dew- 
 drops, falling in their sunny gold chain to her pink fingers 
 here and now. 
 
 Their thought, their symbol, their colour of a minia- 
 ture cascade, seemed to span a gulf. And her first words 
 of hesitation, softly spoken, were amusing, and were sad. 
 
 "For me a rosary! You know I am not a strict 
 goer to churches, Arno !" 
 
 "I have neither known nor cared," he said, " nor 
 thought ! They have beauty your kind of beauty. They're 
 from a famous collection. They're from your country. 
 They're very old, like Spain. They were in the Guzman
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 265 
 
 family. Perhaps Eugenie knew them. But first and last, 
 they look like you. They are like you. They are what 
 you are to me. You will have them?" 
 
 Mist mingled with the light in her eyes. Yet hard as 
 he was, harder than the stones, to resist, still resistance 
 came from her. 
 
 "Would it not be Arno " 
 
 "A chain chaining your promise to you? Did I not 
 say I knew that needed no binding? Can you think that, 
 when I forgot this thing in my pocket, and remembered, 
 in that same pocket, the newspaper clipping?" 
 
 "Then " 
 
 And she let it come from his fingers to her own . . . 
 indeed fair, delicate as drops of dew on a sunbeam, in- 
 deed, as just such a dream translated into matter as it 
 massed smally, creamily on to the shell-pink palm of her 
 hand. 
 
 And having allowed this, her words were replete with 
 acceptation. 
 
 "How completely lovely ! I do not know very much 
 about rosaries, Arno. Indeed not as much as the very 
 worst Spaniard should. But whatever my faiths and 
 feelings, yet are rosaries to me one of the most beautiful 
 thoughts ever in the world chaplets, chaplets of jewels, 
 or, like these, even gems, clung to by armies of aestheti- 
 cized thoughts. How careful I was to pronounce that 
 word slowly, and how prettily I suceeded upon it, too! 
 But this much that is churchly, I do remember, that 
 mysteries attach on them, on rosaries, Arno churchly 
 or not, all of our mysteries that our lives can have: the 
 Joyful, the Dolorous, the Glorious. What more, in the 
 whole Great Way? The Joyful, the Sorrowful, the 
 Glorious ; but I chose your word dolorous because so near 
 to our own dear 'Dolores,' so soft, so sweet, so sad, and 
 that our people will name people, little, helpless girl- 
 people, so thoughtfully, and thoughtlessly, and terribly! 
 Yes, the Joyful, the Sorrowful, the Glorious, our mys- 
 teries; I ask you, Arno, what further ones, in the whole
 
 266 The Great Way 
 
 Great Way? -And my own odd, personal thoughts put 
 miracles to them, too. I do not remember whether mys- 
 teries and miracles concern each other in churches. But 
 the words seem kindred. And whether from the word 
 for I am peculiarly fond of words whether just from 
 the word rosary, or from something I have read, always 
 I concern with them a Miracle of Roses. It is something 
 about Saint Isabel for again a word, a name, has hap- 
 pened to make me read more about that saint than any 
 other! This rosary at least, Arno, if no other rosary, 
 is truly a little miracle of roses !" 
 
 She was still holding it caressingly, lifting it with her 
 fingers, letting it fall and form again with soft heaviness 
 on her palm ; and he made no answer for he felt a further 
 thought coming from her and presently her pensive 
 steady eyes drew his to one of the room's suavely tinted 
 pictures. 
 
 "How strange a thing, association of ideas ! Murillo. 
 ... I said to-night, my trials with the German tongue 
 had paid me two things, and that may have sounded 
 that I gained no more in Germany. But no. I discovered 
 suddenly that picture there, Arno the real, the original, 
 I mean. If I have memories of any painting, I have, 
 and I had had, of that, my beloved Saint Francis of 
 Padua. Memories from my earliest home, which was 
 Cadiz. Memories, through one terrible reminding night 
 of it, from Sevilla. Memories from a more than terrible 
 moment of a black hour in a Moorish church in the foot- 
 hills of the Pireneos. I did not recognize the message 
 then, but Murillo in all those different moments, joyful, 
 dolorous, as in after moments glorious, was speaking to 
 me, trymg to speak to me, through the vast distances 
 of his vaporoso, of Art. Well, it was in Berlin that I 
 suddenly found out where was that great loved Murillo 
 of my Spain's. When I could have known for years for 
 the asking, I suppose, or for the looking in a book. Yet 
 that instant's transport back along the Gran Via as 
 through the vaporoso to my home, taught me more I
 
 Let the Dead Past Bury Its Dead 267 
 
 think than a book, or great many of questions. Of such 
 things is one's art so much made up and to you, can I 
 talk in this way so much more with understanding paid 
 me back, than with anyone else, Arno ! Association of 
 ideas ! There is a danger in it ! Here in Nueva York, 
 I went to see the wonderful Rodins in a mood of home- 
 sickness for Paris one day, and taking Daisy, a fatal 
 measure, but yet learning the 'Main de Dieu,' for all my 
 love of it before, as never before, because 'at home' in 
 the Luxembourg it is bronze, here in your wealth it is 
 a spiritual wealth of marble. And from that wondrous 
 marble too, I learned to love the 'Cupid and Psyche,' 
 which I had never loved because other Cupid-and-Psyches 
 were to me sentimental, were love without depth, shallow, 
 like the expression 'falling in love,' 'being in love.' There 
 was wrong association of ideas, you see it had made me 
 mistake and neglect this pure beautiful Rodin one from 
 which the pure marble for a moment chanced in charity 
 to me to wipe the interfering, sentimental wings away 
 away from my brain, I mean, not from the statue, thank 
 God! But shall I teach you Art, Arno? Only, it is that 
 of such things, such moments, I suppose, that we our 
 finally painted souls are made; of things like that 
 Murillo, and this little Miracle of Roses ! And the strange 
 little thought I started for, and have but just arrived to, 
 is, ah, association of ideas indeed! Arno, you have 
 asked gently, sweetly about my very early life. Well, 
 the little street that I was born in, in little Cadiz, was 
 the Rosario !" 
 
 And lifting the dewy and golden miracle she dropped 
 it around her throat, where it lay glinting on the white 
 neck above the roseate frock. 
 
 Very gently, he made no answer to all that she had 
 said, except: 
 
 "You sing to-morrow night, Wanda?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Traviata!" 
 
 "Yes."
 
 268 The Great Way 
 
 He smiled, a curious quality of tenderness in his smile. 
 "You will not let that disturb you? Promise me!" 
 
 She hesitated. "The " 
 
 "The 'Camille' notion that distant sister in the story. 
 You see, dear, I understand your over-impressionable 
 mind so well! You will not let that influence you?" 
 
 "N-no." 
 
 "I will be there. The whole of New York hasn't a 
 camellia. Gardenias?" 
 
 "Gardenias !" She had almost started. And again 
 in her eyes a little shadow struggled with the light. "I 
 I love them even more. Something like them, we call 
 at home jacintas." 
 
 "Jacintas, then. Good night, dear." 
 
 "Good night Arno." 
 
 She stood for a long time gazing out into the dark- 
 ness ; first seeing him walk away, then wondering when 
 the night's quiet would be broken by the hoot of a motor 
 fetching Daisy, or the hoot of Elise learning the news of 
 her hat. 
 
 "She has stayed late, after all. She will be 'in love' 
 with Dmitri, when she comes in. Dio, Dio, how many 
 people in the world know what is love?" 
 
 She began to walk and walk, to pace through and 
 through the lustrous room, her hands at her temples 
 occasionally with a scarcely conscious gesture lifting the 
 rosary and holding a little measure of the dewy beads 
 across her forehead, as if their coolness helped concentra- 
 tion of thought. At last she paused beside the little 
 Sheraton desk, and stood there, her face raised, her fingers 
 feverishly hesitating on the key.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 THE LITTLE RED BOOK AGAIN 
 
 MY own, be close, be near to me to-night ! I am in great 
 need ! Suddenly, I am in great need ! Be with me ! 
 
 I need my faith in my love for you. I need it as I 
 have never needed it until now! I need my faith in 
 myself ! I feel the need to write down in words my love 
 for you, that I may see it before me with my own eyes ! 
 Yes, I, / have such a need I, whose pride in my love 
 and my fidelity to my love was absolute. My own, I 
 cannot tell you why not now. My brain is too hot and 
 sick at myself. My need is to tell you and tell you, again 
 and again, that my love remains unalterable, unequalled ! 
 . . . Yes, unalterable! ... I turn to the great beloved 
 exquisite fact of it, as a doubtful ship to a rocket, or the 
 North star. O my Caballero of the Moon, guide me ! 
 
 O my Jose, Jose Luis, I must try to-night more than 
 ever before in my little book to tell you what you are to 
 me, what my love is to me, what the miraculous possibility 
 of your love means to me! 
 
 My own, my Jose, since the old too-short days I have 
 learned much of many things, and among it all, I have 
 learned much of words some of the much that in those 
 days I so thirsted to know. And do you know what you 
 were to me so long ago what my sudden love was to me? 
 
 Oh, my own, my own, to-night, with something of 
 that desired much of words, and in our sweet, dear Span- 
 ish, one thing that is together yours and mine, dear, 
 and with all of my little studies and self-decorations taken 
 away from me, I will tell you what you were, and what 
 it was. 
 
 269
 
 270 The Great Way 
 
 You and that love were Epiphany. "Epiphany," so 
 mysterious, so mystical and beautiful, has a simple mean- 
 ing, Jose Luis. It means simply "manifestation," simply 
 "appearance." My sudden vision of love was to me an 
 Epiphany on the road, the Great Road. And as it is so 
 hard, so very hard, to separate the feeling from what it 
 feels for, to me you were the Epiphany, the bright light. 
 
 And later, when the Great Road had led me on into 
 the wilderness, and I travelled blindly there, in its con- 
 fusion and its seeming endlessness, alone and with no 
 eyes to direct me, another thing of beautiful religious 
 symbol happened : a great voice came crying in the wilder- 
 ness, the voice of God, and it proved (oh, thanks to God!) 
 to be my own great voice, and made straight my way! 
 Yet had I been asleep in the wilderness, could I have 
 heard that voice? No. And all the time I had been kept 
 awake, my darling, by the bright light, by the bright 
 light of Epiphany, of you, shining all that while for me 
 in the desolation ! 
 
 And where am I now? O, Dio, Dio, where am I now? 
 Surely I am no longer in the wilderness ! Then where 
 am I? Am I in the valley of death, the valley of the 
 shadow of death? Does one more such symbol confront 
 me, and am I in some bad valley? 
 
 Ah, my own, my own ! Let my vision of you be closely, 
 securely with me now! I am told, dear, that with some 
 who love, the faces of the dearest-absent are difficult to 
 conjure. That sorrow, I have never had. I can always 
 clearly, dearly see you, my Jose Luis. And something 
 tells me that my vision of you this moment is as you are 
 this moment that you have not changed. I think that 
 the sand-grains of the uncounted hours have fallen lightly 
 on you. I think that they are written on your face, but 
 in very pretty, educated writing. . . . 
 
 O my own, where am I? To where, to what, do I go? 
 Am I indeed in the Valley of the Shadow now, am I 
 entering some grave and terrible place in the Gran Via 
 such as the enormous shadowy fissure cleft by God in the
 
 The Little Red Book Again 271 
 
 Sacred Mountain, up, up, beyond the convent, the famous 
 and awful Valle Malo? . . . Am I there? . . . 
 
 O my own Epiphany, shine for me still in my Gran 
 Via, as you did then on the road, as you did in the wilder- 
 ness when I was wandering through it come to me still 
 closely in my dreams, shine brightly for me if this is 
 indeed my Bad Valley, and not something lesser, shine 
 brightly for me through my Valle Malo !
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 THE WAKM SHADOW 
 
 SEVERAL matters were happily out of place happily, 
 because they were not homeless, nor even away from home. 
 Merely they had moved to new tenements. 
 
 One of these was Madame de PEtoile's little red books. 
 They had left the "living-room" and lived now in what 
 their owner said should be called, if the English tongue 
 had logic, the dying-room her bed-chamber. This had 
 removed them from the meandering and audible neigh- 
 bourhood of the Princess Daisy, who never ventured upon 
 Madame de 1'Etoile's privacy here unless to waken her 
 in the dead of night to some new brand of foolishness 
 about Dmitri, or in the morning, hours before breakfast, 
 to ask if she had any embroidery silk number 3-x Blush- 
 of-Malta grade one, and a few moments later to say it 
 was so funny that Wanda did not like to embroider, for 
 occupation if nothing else, and that Wanda's reply that 
 she embroidered her voice was meaningless, at least in 
 English, though it might have some cruel, oblique, in- 
 sinuating significance in Spanish; or in the afternoon 
 during Wanda's siesta, to look under the bed for "The 
 Apples of Jacquot-Jacquette," on the chance that the last 
 time she dropped them they might have rolled there from 
 the next room and past Madame de 1'Etoile without that 
 self-centred singer having noticed it. Other than this the 
 princess did not here intrude. But this great advantage 
 to the little red books had not come about through any 
 raw, rude purpose of the diva. It had precipitated 
 through the receipt of a surprising and delightful package 
 at the hotel to-day. 
 
 Another of the matters beautifully out of place was 
 
 272
 
 The Warm Shadow 273 
 
 Madame de PEtoile herself. Indeed, she was at the 
 Opera. Routine enough ; routine such as breath or bread. 
 But she was in a role pristinely new to her. Again, the 
 very nativity-air of temperament. But it was a role in 
 an arduously foreign tongue; and in the prejudgment 
 of her vast audience the star was a billion miles general 
 astronomical statistics away from anything she had any 
 business to be doing embroidery, for instance. 
 
 The third matter out of place, and much further out 
 than either Madame de 1'Etoile or her book, was an Italian 
 in the United States. (This Italian.) 
 
 He was at the Opera just now, theoretically an ideal 
 surrounding for him while thus so far from home; but 
 he was shivering, shivering from head to foot, with an 
 emotion whose external show upon him was as if every 
 forte phrase of the drama of sound were an attack of 
 German blacksmiths on his body. 
 
 And even the opera itself this day, according to a 
 tradition never yet quite forgotten by the old and cranky, 
 was as out of place as anything in the wide art-world 
 could be, for it was indigenous, and according to scripture 
 immolate, to Bayreuth; while here, in New York's great- 
 est theatre, crammed with more strata of humanity than 
 were numbered by the layers of the huge house itself, 
 its most unique and most singularly periodic audience, 
 vibrant with all social symbolisms from gang to Geth- 
 semane, the great Grail tragedy of holiness and lust 
 intoned and gonged its strange, diverse, and sonorous 
 panoramic way. 
 
 And when the winter afternoon had slipped into full 
 winter night, the long functional intermission gone past 
 and the second act disclosed its weird opening mystery of 
 evilly imaginative castle of half Moorish and half magic 
 architecture, the lone Italian was not the only man in the 
 house who shivered. Far across from him, and in the 
 gentleness of his love for a friend tolerating a very weary 
 and wearying little "Royalty" at his side, was Arnold 
 Rutgers. " Klingsor was calling "Kundry, here! Kundry,
 
 274 The Great Way 
 
 here!" and it was with all the mingled expectancy and 
 fear of a precieur that he sat waiting for her answering, 
 uncannily dreadful screams. 
 
 For these few brief moments were, among many 
 favourite moments of the long strange opera, the most 
 favourite with him. 
 
 And as this woman emitted the fearful tones, he turned 
 quite cold. 
 
 His shudder was not that of the sheer satisfaction of 
 a sensuous hope not merely appeased, but overwhelmed, 
 as by that handful of long-drawn terrible cries of damna- 
 tion his had been. The chilling thrill held much more. 
 Nor was the rest of it but the shiver gleaned from 
 Traviata, with its intuitional sense of fatality for him. 
 Recurrent, that had gripped him; but he had not loved 
 her then. . . . And now . . . God pity who loved her 
 whom she did not love. . . . Yet in the rapid fire ice-fire 
 of his flashing thoughts he escaped the absurdity of 
 his imagination only to shudder anew at the intellectual 
 quality of genius propelling the art with which she had 
 not sung, nor screamed, but created those cries, at the 
 horrible consciousness through which this new singer, 
 replete with youthfulness in all but her art, had with hot 
 streaks of searing passion not endowed, but explained, 
 the fierce woman of bleeding laughter. . . . 
 
 As she had sunk moaning out of vision as into the 
 pit, he had closed his eyes, to hoard with sharp inner 
 impress the brief picture of her. In the white shrouding 
 robe, cast upon by its veiling strange blue light, she had 
 been more than ever before and moreover for the first 
 time to his literal visual sense the white stone of pure 
 blue water of his imagination. A pure stone, limpid. 
 But a pure stone with the purple hoot of hell in it. Facets. 
 . . . He knew, now, how his night would be spent after 
 these next hours were done and he had fetched home the 
 wilting little flower at his side and tucked her into the 
 groom of the hotel. They would be spent walking the 
 streets . . . walking. . . . And when his eyes opened the
 
 The Warm Shadow 275 
 
 enchanted and enchanting glum castle had vanished, 
 Kundry's sun-drenched narcotic paradise realmed the vast 
 stage, and another moment for which he had lived almost 
 breathlessly to-night was imminent before him. The 
 murmurous rhapsody of the flowery maidens sank away 
 . . . and she was before him . . . and the unfolding mo- 
 ment made him breathless for an instant quite entirely, 
 despite his warning from his glimpsing taste of it before- 
 hand. For it both was and was not she before him. In 
 that exquisite outcry of colours and jewel-lights and 
 imaginative forms exotically habiting the white lovely 
 figure, glowed the heavenly harlot, the doomed irrevoc- 
 able whore and snake and smiling opiate of the ages. 
 . . . While before the strange woman de 1'Etoile lay the 
 hours of her own test, not Parsifal's, of her battle mag- 
 nificent, not his. Hours. . . . 
 
 Through them, the peaceful little drawing-room at 
 home, robbed of even its warm little red leather books, 
 waited as it had done since quite early afternoon, empty 
 of life, even of the sad life of Jacquot-Jacquette, who was 
 shivering like Mr. Rutgers and the Italian at the Opera ; 
 empty even of sound, save the ticking of a clock, and, 
 hourly, another and inexcusable noise from the same in- 
 strument. For it was a cuckoo-like and foolish clock, 
 that every hour, as if an exact moment made any differ- 
 ence about unhappiness, opened its door and protested, 
 whether anyone was there or not ; a cuckoo-like but not a 
 cuckoo clock, for the little bird who stepped out of it had 
 a lyre-bird's tail, and like the roost it lived in was so 
 trivial and so dainty, so silly and so like the little princess 
 that upon that personage's frantic infatuation for it 
 Wanda had gratefully and shamelessly made it over to 
 her. In the little bird's throat was a little voice, that 
 also came out, just like the little bird itself, and said any- 
 thing from one to twelve, as the case might be, in a sound 
 of silver innocence. It would have needed an enormous 
 villain to have said anything oblique about the character 
 of this little bird. It and its home were a positive monu-
 
 276 The Great Way 
 
 ment to the art and the snowy morality of Switzerland. 
 
 And as if God, who had permitted Jacquot-Jacquette 
 in the world, felt sorry at having 1 allowed something still 
 more pitiable, at its heartbreaking peep of midnight to 
 the empty room, three or four figures came in. 
 
 There were Madame de PEtoile, her maid, and her 
 musical director. The optional fourth, if Elise and 
 Jacquot-Jacquette were truly a separable group, was the 
 shivering Belgian dragon. And indeed, a confused or 
 inaccurate mind might have imagined another creature 
 from the book of Natural History into this trinity so 
 oddly framed together by their prodigal wraps against 
 the cold, for the musical director was encased by a fur 
 coat so large, so thick and ostensible, so reckless of sur- 
 roundings and so long of hair, that with nothing of his 
 humanity but his big brown eyes shining out of it as they 
 did, he looked like a polar bear. 
 
 This was the third dislocated matter of the evening, 
 the Italian in the United States ; and the vast rugged and 
 ruglike shag that would have made him splendid at the 
 Opera as both Fasolt and Fafner in The Rheingold was 
 one of his agencies against disaster in so hazardous a part 
 of the geography. 
 
 Happily, most happily uprooted and potted for a hot- 
 house winter he, but not by any virtues of North America 
 only by virtue/ of Madame de I'Etoile and her triumphs, 
 the deep-breathing satisfaction of proximity to her. For 
 this child of Naples, who had wriggled up out of the 
 Italian soil with a bland wide-eyed gaze and an earring- 
 to-earring smile for the whole visible world and especially 
 for the Mediterranean, who had sailed that ocean un- 
 counted times, from stem to stern, from Genoa to Gibral- 
 tar and Cadiz to Barcelona, who had never been sea-sick 
 and who knew a boat from leeward to steward, and 
 who usually had embarked on a vessel that looked as 
 if it would teeter-tawter at the thought of a bath-tub, 
 had firmly (as indeed many precocious persons do) 
 stopped short at the Atlantic.
 
 The Warm Shadow 277 
 
 There was a difference between the Atlantic and the 
 Mediterranean, and no one could deny it. Least of all 
 could Madame de PEtoile, with her love of truth, an 
 element of her nature best-known to this man of all those 
 whom she loved or who loved her; and withal, her in- 
 ability, in this large case of a notorious ocean to deal with, 
 to make him see her fine point of distinction between 
 facts and truths, between statistics and principles. There 
 were dragons in that sea, though he did not tell her so. 
 There they were, there, for this great and brave man 
 anyhow, who had already faced Elise's monster on land 
 without one squirm or quaver; while, first and last, no 
 oceanic, submarine Jacquot-Jacquette of cathedral size 
 and seaweed on its tail compared in fabricated awfulness 
 with that sea itself. That love had forced his foot on 
 board the frail leviathan devised by man in his shallow 
 egoism to carry them to safety through such perils had 
 meant a soul that was an angel's soul with fists of 
 martyrs' steel. But to the United States Madame de 
 PEtoile would go, and to the United States had gone her 
 Maestro, following his Star. Columbus was an Italian, 
 too. 
 
 He had emerged from his prairie-dog hole of fur, 
 letting it mound up on the floor behind him, and crystal- 
 lizing to the comparative decollete of an evening-suit, a 
 thin sparkling-eyed figure of light-like lines and a blaze 
 of diamonds ; and she, semi without and semi with Elise's 
 one-handed help had slipped from her swathings too, and 
 in a soft rare frock was perched rather exhaustedly, not 
 quite daring to relax, on the edge of the couch. And 
 though something other than their many bandages that 
 had warmed them through their wordless drive home an 
 electric-like current of rich telepathic happiness was 
 coursing between these two and await for speech, her first 
 words were to the maid. 
 
 "Elise, will you see if Daisy is yet home?" 
 
 "She is asleep, Madame," said Elise. 
 
 As they had but this moment entered, Wanda's sur-
 
 278 The Great Way 
 
 prise at the promptitude of this answer betrayed itself. 
 
 "Are you sure, Elise? She was at the performance. 
 How do you know?" 
 
 "I would not say so if I were not sure, Madame. She 
 went to sleep during the Communion Scene. I saw her, 
 as we were watching in the wings. And now she is asleep 
 here. I heard her, as we came in." 
 
 Wanda was momentarily silenced not by Elise's 
 ubiquitous logic, which she knew by heart, but to the 
 romantic mind of Madame de 1'Etoile the idea of a loudly 
 sleeping princess was news, somehow. A "little tipsy 
 flower" had been a voluntary simile of her own. But a 
 snoring forget-me-not . . . ! And in search for a tactful 
 rejoinder she came upon a neglected thought that seemed 
 to her a most fortunate one. 
 
 "Oh, Elise, I found such a pretty book for you on a 
 stall this morning! It is in English, but of words so 
 simple that even I could read the whole first page. So if 
 you are not sleepy, you may amuse yourself with it now. 
 I am sure it is pretty. I chose it by the title 'A Modest 
 Passion.' " 
 
 "Thank you, Madame, but I have read it," said 
 Elise. 
 
 "Oh, I am sorry!" said Wanda, disconcerted. "I did 
 not suppose you had read anything in English." 
 
 "I had not, Madame. But I was certain you must 
 have intended it for me. I knew that Parsifal was very 
 long. So while you were singing the temptation scene, I 
 read *A Modest Passion' through, Madame." 
 
 "If," said Wanda thoughtfully, "if Madame la 
 Princesse is is as sound asleep as you say, you might 
 tip-toe in and get Jacquot-Jacquette to finish!" 
 
 "Thank you, Madame," said Elise, and thus dismissed 
 with a bonus and a prized one, for it led her to believe 
 Madame had forgotten the erstwhile and betrayed nefari- 
 ous finishing of that fateful volume she departed; but 
 first practising a formality. Aside from the living prize 
 Jacquot-Jacquette she had not been empty-handed of
 
 The Warm Shadow 279 
 
 priceless treasure, and with graceful precision she prof- 
 fered Madame de 1'Etoile her jewel-box. 
 
 Then she and the poor shivering bete-noire of her were 
 gone; and in this their first moment of coveted solitude 
 together, even along with Madame's slight gesture of the 
 jewel-box to the couch beside her, her companion was 
 electrically a step toward her, his long arm and its 
 Rubaiyat forefinger pump-handling the air pointer-wise 
 at her, and his autumn-pool eyes shining rich competition 
 with the glitter of diamonds on the sawing hand; and as 
 if the latest tongue of her fond adoption must be mo- 
 mentarily his child too to sufficiently pleasure her, he 
 spoke in English. 
 
 "I did not wanted you to sang it! Fiercely with 
 fervour cried me against you! And to-night you again 
 teach me morever f orover our music-lesson : / can trust 
 you! Shoo-oo-oo-er!" 
 
 And thus for once strangely using his favourite and 
 formerly one English word where it belonged, he smiled 
 a smile that vanished into a different, a deeper facial 
 exudition of happiness at the responding words that swept 
 from her seated figure all its vestige of lassitude and lifted 
 her hands exquisitely toward him. 
 
 "Yes, darling, yes after all your patience, all your 
 devotion, all your care for me through the Gran Via 
 yes!" 
 
 And then, as if all vital value of it for them had been 
 consumed by his little explosion of almost resentful happi- 
 ness in her triumph and her own usage for him of the 
 exquisite English word of caress, they dropped their 
 foreign language, and their little at-home sacred-musical- 
 festival-play topping the vast one at the Opera to-night 
 was in a tongue ineffable, Spanish, Italian, a Latin un- 
 writable, yet as if composed for them by some neo-classic, 
 neo-modern opera-author who had mixed the traditions, 
 which were her voice, with ultra innovations, which were 
 his. His air-sawing, diamonded hand had fallen glitter- 
 ing into his pocket, mechanically, with the mechanism of
 
 280 The Great Way 
 
 human animal instinct, and fetched out a mussed array 
 of Manila cigarettes, and the air and colours of the pretty 
 room were clouded with Bohemian billows of smoke even 
 as with Peninsula rapidity of deed upon thought she had 
 risen and with her exhaustion gone as if it had not been, 
 swept across to the piano ; and a loud Neapolitan protest 
 followed her. 
 
 "Yet indeed never can you be trusted! You shall not 
 sing when I have smoked ! It was a long opera and you 
 must not sing! It was a long opera and I must smoke! 
 And I must not smoke if you sing!" 
 
 With her reply her eyes were starry with a moment's 
 far-off pensiveness of starlight, her voice was soft as star- 
 light, near to forget-me-not, despite their so different 
 colour, with memory, nearer still to that blossom with 
 tenderness for him. 
 
 "The whole audience smoked in the Tivoli in Barce- 
 lona ! . . . Before that, before you knew me, in the 
 Alcazar even the women in the audience smoked! And 
 if you do not smoke, I will not sing!" 
 
 At that mention of the Alcazar, reminiscence poign- 
 anter for him to whom it did not belong than even to 
 her to whom it did, a little choke stopped his new remon- 
 strance. She had fetched the jewel-box to the piano with 
 her; all the wealth of it, that she had elected to wear as 
 Kundry, lay in the rosy lamplight shimmering, frostily 
 shivering, animatedly, livingly as Jacquot-Jacquette ; and 
 with one hand she lifted out one loved trinket of old pearls 
 and a ruby as with the other she strayed over the key- 
 board drawing from it notes, delicate as the jewels, from 
 the "Air des Bijoux" of Faust. 
 
 "Paris! Paris gave me this! It has in it a bit of du 
 Barry's heart that was cut out of her body after she was 
 guillotined, and kept through the generations and set for 
 me inside a jewel that she wore an ear-ring this ring. 
 And as I was no longer anything like her, I could wear 
 it for them for the people for Paris ; and I did. And 
 do. Paris. ."
 
 The Warm Shadow 281 
 
 She broke off, and her voice strayed into the song 
 softly, bits of it ; fulsomely, all of it. Facets. . . . 
 
 "It was after I had sung them that, that Paris sent 
 it to me. Do you remember?" 
 
 And very softly, his eyes toward the floor, his chin 
 in his hand, he answered: 
 
 "I remember!" 
 
 "And these!" Her hand lifted another loveliness from 
 the rich chest. "They threw me these, in Petersburg, 
 right in the theatre yes, as I sang as as 7 sang! 
 They gave, nor would they take back again, afterward, 
 despite I thought they ought, on account of Russian 
 emotion emotion at this." 
 
 And the voice that was lovelier than the jewels swept 
 joyously into La Traviata, the "Ah, fors e lui" which 
 was so great, and so right, a part of her fame. 
 
 "Do you remember?" 
 
 And again it was very softly that he answered: "I 
 remember !" 
 
 "And this!" 
 
 And at the first note he started and an ejaculation 
 came from him : "Rome !" for the wonderful voice, sud- 
 denly profound with colour, had vibrated the room with 
 the opening organ-tone of "O Patria mia !" And pres- 
 ently, without written music but with a wonderful music 
 of its own, the voice was again addressing him: "They 
 gave me, that night, only noise, but such a loving, under- 
 standing noise! Dio ! And just as I was feeling a little 
 lonely there, because no fond foolish jewelry was given 
 me, and this being an Egyptian opera, and I no longer 
 having the pretty Egyptian beads I loved, and being 
 God knew how far from the friend who did have them, 
 the friend I loved so much more, just at that lonely 
 moment, Rome gave me this!" 
 
 And she held aloft from the treasure-box a resplendent, 
 glittering thing her wonderful bandeau of brilliants 
 radiant, like Rome; stately like Rome. 
 
 "Your crown !" he cried, declaring it. "Yes, your
 
 282 The Great Way 
 
 crown, for that was greatest of all yes, yes, to me, the 
 greatest of your great nights !" 
 
 "Except," she said softly, "perhaps, my 'Traviata' 
 here, which I admit, if only for your sake, was an after- 
 noon; and except, perhaps perhaps to-night! But ah, 
 my dear " for she saw in his brown-gold eye-pools a 
 ripple of storm for the forbidden music she had to-night 
 indulged in, "do you remember this?" 
 
 And her fingers rippled into the gaiety, her voice into 
 the lyrical sweetness, of the "Cigarette Song" from Gran 
 Via. 
 
 It was a strange capping of Gounod and of Verdi, 
 but cap it was, with bells, and colours, and a triumphant 
 feather, for she sang it now as she had not sung it in 
 the Spanish Tivoli, as she had not, and even with life 
 hanging with its whole weight to her tones could not have 
 sung it, in the Hotel de Francia of the little Plaza de 
 Loreto. And upon the last harping tinkle of it his 
 answering voice was passionate. 
 
 "/ remember that? It was after you had looked at 
 those notes, and said 'That is pretty,' and I had said '/ 
 can trust you,' and I was standing in the little Plaza 
 and I whistled that for you, because I saw those English 
 coming, and you had said to me you were running away 
 from them for me it was then that I knew you were the 
 darling of my brain, and that I would always fear for 
 you ; that " 
 
 His voice choked, and she finished for him : 
 
 "That our noses would always go the same way! But 
 darling, darling, you say 'fear* for me, and with with 
 tears to-night ?" 
 
 "Remember," he said huskily, "I am your father and 
 your mother, two hundred years old apiece, and for every 
 one of those old four hundred years, proud of you !" 
 
 "Oh !" she breathed, and there was in her own voice 
 a sudden little sob. "What words !" 
 
 "And 'fear'?" his words swept on. "Fear is the lot 
 of parents! And you ask 'To-night?' Yes, to-night
 
 The Warm Shadow 283 
 
 more than some other times, for though my torment in 
 that great big red barn is over, I had it to experience, 
 as I had the Atlantic ! And there will be more of your 
 whimsies ! I will live torments again ! There is your 
 monstrous habit of new roles for new places, and we have 
 not sung yet in Zulu-Land! I have even London yet 
 to undergo. You will not sign your beautiful contract 
 for London. You know how they thirst for your Traviata 
 there, and you will not sign it. And I know why for 
 I know you, you, you. At last you will sign it. And 
 then whimsie ! Yes, I know you ! I can believe, in my 
 worst moments of despair, that when at last you should 
 go to London, you would make your first appearance 
 there in 'Isolde' !" 
 
 "Why," she exclaimed, gazing at him with brows raised, 
 and eyes wide in either a child's naivete or a serpent's 
 subtlety, "why, that is exactly what I plan to do !" 
 
 He had been pacing, diamonded-hands mobile as a wind- 
 mill, and this sank him, groaning and the hands clasped 
 like a Magdalene's on top of his head, the fire of the 
 diamonds smothered in black brilliantined hair. 
 
 Merciless in her stirred thoughts she had turned back 
 to the keyboard, and softly, exquisitely, chorded sugges- 
 tions of the Liebestod seeped from it; but whatever her 
 intention, her voice did not touch it, as if it were too 
 sacred a thing even for her home, and for him, as yet; 
 and as if something of this sped to him through their 
 telepathic line of understanding, he looked up, his storm 
 blown over, his face exquisite with tenderness as some 
 amateur Christ's above the calmed waves of it. 
 
 "I know what you want. Here have I let you sing 
 and myself smoke. Here have you sung a whole after- 
 noon and night the whole German Baedeker, and you sit 
 up till morning singing to please me in a side-street 
 music-hall of tobacco, when what you want is to write 
 your own Baedeker! Yes, I know your own red-covered 
 book! And your only word of longing was in those 
 piano tones there ! I know your thoughts ! I will prove
 
 284 The Great Way 
 
 it. I knew a thought of yours five minutes ago, when 
 after singing for me of Paris, and Petersburg, and Rome, 
 to make me happy, you said to-night was your perhaps 
 great night. Do you remember your own thought then? 
 You were thinking for I know you ! 'These United 
 States have given me no jewels to hold up to his proud 
 eyes. These unemotional United States, I must love for 
 the jewels of appreciation they give'! That was your 
 thought, and I knew it ! And you want now, you have 
 wanted every minute, your little books that I smoke you 
 away from!" 
 
 There were tears in her eyes as she sat gazing at him, 
 but she brushed them away with joyous words. 
 
 "Darling, a lie to you would be a useless lie, and I 
 have thought of my little books, and sometimes here in 
 these United States I have thought as you say about my 
 pretty jewelry. But my thought of five minutes ago, 
 though you divined it in a way, was directly opposite to 
 the way you read it. For I have had a present here, in 
 these Estados Unidos, and so strange, so strangely 
 beautiful a present, coming out of that same nameless 
 heartbeat as Rome's, or Petersburg's, or my heart's Place 
 de 1'Opera's. And you must see it indeed, is it not 
 partly yours? It is in there yes, to-night we will be 
 outrageous, and you shall come into my bedroom! In- 
 deed, as truthful persons in our glory, did we not sleep 
 in one bed, all five of us, one night? Do you remember 
 that? It was on the way to Geneva where I enjoyed the 
 Opera so, for it made the same noise the bull-fight does at 
 home! Come!" And she took him with one hand, the 
 jewel-box with the other. "This, as you will see, goes 
 into my beautiful United States present, instead of my 
 United States present into it!" 
 
 And here, on a table set for it beside her bed, was the 
 extraordinary present a thing black-leather covered, 
 that thus, with its eyes closed, seemed to his wide-open 
 staring ones a plain oblong box, and looked like a travel- 
 ling salesman's sheathed battle-axe ; but that, upon her
 
 The Warm Shadow 285 
 
 unlocking it with an incredibly small key, and his un- 
 controllable fingers winning over hers to the toy task of 
 opening it, unfolded itself into a beautiful piece of furni- 
 ture of intricate workmanship, a miniature desk, of 
 leather, and wood, and delicate metal fixtures, of diminu- 
 tive drawers and shelves and compartments, Orient- 
 suggesting in its involution and minute success of plan, 
 and its several parts building up like a stairway narrow- 
 ing in perspective. Thus had she been loved by some 
 quaint ingrowing mind that could spend and had spent 
 itself and its hands upon such a device for her possible 
 pleasure manifestation, quite literally manifestation, of 
 a love esoteric and as deeply innocent as esoteric. 
 
 Together, and to an accompaniment of his guttural 
 squeals of delight, they constructed it, and as it mounted 
 under their careful hands to the likeness of the side of a 
 pyramid : 
 
 "One more reason why I love this gift!" she whis- 
 pered. "And see also little shelves, and little leather 
 books ! They are literature-books, not music. Yet, 
 nothing else but books that have become operas ! A little 
 Pelleas, a little Romeo, a little Carmen ! And room for 
 
 more 
 
 i" 
 
 "I know which more !" he cried, and opening the lowest 
 part, he disclosed triumphantly her case of red-bound 
 treasures, which had fitted to a tune of precision in a half 
 of the lowermost space of it. 
 
 She made no denial. Only she said gently: 
 
 "My jewel-case, in there!" 
 
 "It is this jewel-case you want," he said, "and you 
 shall have it. I am glad you have your little jewel- 
 Baedeker-library in here in this, and in this room. 
 Away from nuisances. I know you. Having found your 
 mistake, you would not have moved your writing without 
 this chance reason. But I am glad your singing with 
 ink is removed from that Throne Room from that 
 Royalty, that Crowned Head, that Empress of Russia, 
 that Queen of Scorpions ! You should be in bed ; and
 
 286 The Great Way 
 
 I would make you, I would chastise you to there, but 
 that I know that this will rest you more. And it will 
 not be driving me, your parents, away. I will sit in 
 there, and smoke my cigarettes until they are gone. And 
 if you have finished before they are, come back in there 
 and we will say good night. And if the cigarettes are 
 finished first, the good night does not matter. We will 
 not say it. I will not interrupt you." 
 
 Wordlessly, she looked at him, touched his cheek with 
 her fingers; and wordlessly, he left her bedroom and 
 closed the door. 
 
 Motionless, she gazed at that gently closed door for 
 a moment, her face a mask of wonder at the wonder of 
 human feeling; then she seated herself and lifted out the 
 newest of the little red books. 
 
 To-night, my own, be glad, be glad with me! I have 
 sung Kundry ! Once more, how happy I am ! For it was 
 another triumph, and for here, my greatest. For I know 
 the verdict, and can tell you before to-morrow's papers 
 because in this case, you see, some of the great critics 
 ah, so kindly ! have been to my dressing-room ; and the 
 public mind, that mind of my people, I can sometimes read 
 without help of periodico print. And my own, from things 
 beforehand, and from things now, the chief excitement 
 seems to be, because 7 should sing it so. Why not? Well, 
 on account of my other great roles, it seems. People think 
 them a strange assortment Mimi, Traviata, Carmen, 
 Juliette, and now, Kundry. (And Tosca. If I had sung 
 her. I think of her among them, for she is in me, living 
 though await. For some reason, as if from some reason 
 making me wait without telling me why, I have never al- 
 lowed her yet ; and ah, there is a part ! That last cry 
 . . . when hope is over, and knowing that, she leaps! . . . 
 Dio! . . .) Well, this diversity on my part is unusual, 
 perhaps, but why so very wonderful ? I think myself it is 
 because Americans, accustomed to do anything and every- 
 thing, and never thinking to pause at anything or every-
 
 The Warm Shadow 287 
 
 thing, consider us foreigners as able to do only one thing 
 supremely well each, according to nation. Yet has not 
 something similar been greatly done? Nordica again! 
 She sings Traviata, she sings Kundry ! And she sings 
 Isolde! . . . Dio ! Dio ! . . . And if she has not sung 
 Carmen, has not Calve sung that and Marguerite? Well, 
 so have I! And again I say, Why Not? Alas, they allow 
 my Carmen great, but generations after she is dead, Car- 
 men will still be Calve and rightly so unless her ghost 
 gets into a factory-fight with Minnie Hauk's. I am in- 
 clined to think Calve's will win anyway, for thank God I 
 have heard her. I am still too young to have heard Minnie 
 Hauk. (What is the matter with that English? Some- 
 thing!) But they place my Carmen next, anyway. They 
 say I put the very streets of Sevilla in her, and perhaps I 
 do. ... I know those streets of Sevilla! It was there 
 that first. . . . But I have said that my soul is new. . . . 
 
 One thing they grant me with "the whole heart": that 
 no one ever has sung, that no one ever will sing, the little 
 song "The Daughters of Cadiz" as I do. That makes me 
 happy, and I sing it at ever}' excuse I always put it into 
 "The Barber of Sevilla," where Rossini's song was lost. 
 And how annoyed it makes the audiences, my own, that I 
 do not instead sing a Strauss waltz until they have heard 
 me sing "Les Filles de Cadiz" ! . . . 
 
 Of the Kundry, my own, there is one thing said about 
 me to-night that arouses my heart's interest. It is that 
 as Kundry there is about me, and even in my voice, a 
 something barbaric, a something Moorish, as if I had 
 brought it with me from my country from there in the 
 North, where is said to have been the Holy Grail at 
 Montserrat, there in the cleft of the Holy Mountain, our 
 Sagrada Montana. And I have never been there! How 
 sorry and ashamed that makes me feel ! And I have but 
 lately, in my thoughts and studies of Parsifal and Kundry, 
 found that I must have walked almost under the very 
 shadow of it in my terrible Gran Via, before I came to 
 the blessed little town in the foot-hills of which I have
 
 288 The Great Way 
 
 told you. How high, how wonderful it must be, standing 
 like a magical rampart there with its great grotesques on 
 its top thousands of feet above the River Llobregat ! Do 
 you know, my own, that when I think very much about 
 it, likening it in my mind to some sorcerer-fabrication of 
 Klingsor's, I have a strange prophetic feeling about the 
 Sagrada Montana? I have a feeling that besides all my 
 desire and my intention to go sometime to it, I am to go. 
 There is about it in my imagination something so high, 
 so wonderfully high, so toward God, that it seems to call 
 to my ambition, my aspiration. . . . Am I morose again 
 as I was about that terrible money till God stopped 
 me when I feel that perhaps it would be to sing my 
 "swan song"? . . . 
 
 But I am happy . . . and let me tell you something! 
 To-day, as if a tribute to my Kundry in American faith 
 and generosity even before I sang it, someone, someone 
 just from among people, has sent me a beautiful present. 
 Oh But I must tell you about that later, for another 
 love, a love known to me, my Maestro's, waits in the next 
 room patiently, patiently while I talk to you. And I must 
 go back to him for "good nights" in our Spanish, yours 
 and mine, and in a polyglot, mine and his, when I have 
 told you just one more thing about Traviata. To-night 
 I can, for my Kundry, and my Maestro, and my beautiful 
 present, all drive me to, but till now I was too angry, and 
 then too downcast at myself. For my own, I am deeply 
 filled with remorse over something. I have boasted to you 
 that I try to be kind to women, try always to love them. 
 Even Elise. And my OWH, I do try to love Elise, and even 
 her gargoyle. But my own, there have to be some people 
 in the world one does not love. It is wrong, of course, 
 absolutely, but it is a fact. And with Elise, perhaps there 
 is some excuse for me a sad excuse! that I was not 
 born to having lady's-maids. For it would seem to be the 
 awful truth that in this combination, the lady is 
 Elise being from France, where every woman is so alarm- 
 ingly aristocratic, whether in a blanchisserie or not. If
 
 The Warm Shadow 289 
 
 Elise went into society, she would wear one ear-ring and 
 an orang-outang, and be applauded for it. If I did that, 
 I would not be. Being of the people, I have to earn ap- 
 plause by hard work as I did to-night. However, I am 
 not downhearted. If I could learn to sing Kundry, per- 
 haps I can yet learn to love Elise. Anyway, you know 
 how I do love "La Traviata." The Wayward One ! (How 
 pretty in English!) Well, there is a beautiful priraa 
 donna here, who is lovely to me when I have first came 
 here. Of the whole opera house, the most lovely and wel- 
 coming. She is beautiful. Even now I admit it. Even 
 her nose is beautiful. But she sings through it. Well, she 
 had never sung Traviata through it. You know how there 
 were delays and delays of my singing it, once I had 
 changed my mind about it for my American debut. 
 Rather, you do not know how, and now 7 do. My own, 
 can you believe such a thing? It is because she was a 
 politician! An unsuccessful one, but imagine such a 
 thing ! My lovely Traviata! Anyway, I sang it. After- 
 ward, so has she. But still less will you believe what a ter- 
 rible thing / have done. For, my own, I have committed 
 a low and unworthy action. One of the sensations here of 
 my beautiful Traviata is the very end of Act One. It has 
 been very famously done before. Just what 7 do well, I 
 do not steam-whistle it, and I do not tremolo it, or sew 
 buttons on it, or wave a flag with it. Perhaps I can best 
 tell it you that in that instant I prove that I am not only 
 a great coloratura, but a great lyric singer. It is some- 
 thing that even the most beautiful nose could not possibly 
 do. It needs a throat, and several things beside as was 
 found out later. For meantime 7 had found out, and I 
 was there, from both good manners and evil curiosity. 
 And as she is a great actress I admit that at that try- 
 ing point she takes those lovely notes and turns them into 
 a sensational scream of laughter. And it was then, at 
 that great moment of her melodrama triumph with her 
 following, that I seized my terrible revenge, for I was all 
 prepared. I had tried to calm my indignation, but my
 
 290 The Great Way 
 
 mind had festered. And in that intermission, by a subtle 
 means that she could not discover me well, I might as 
 well confess to you the means by an anonymous messen- 
 ger boy, I have gaven her a box of bird-seed! 
 
 My own, can you ever respect me again? But my con- 
 science has tortured me, for my own, for several days she 
 was very ill, so ill I have wondered if she had not taken it 
 for what it was worth, and eaten it ! Nor can I be quite 
 certain of my life either, for I have met her at a party 
 since, and could not be quite assured from her kisses 
 whether they were because she had unmasked me, or to 
 cover up her own crimes against me. I was almost afraid 
 to open that beautiful package that came to-day! But 
 my own, my own, though it has eased me to confess to you, 
 God forgive me for something else I had forgotten my 
 Maestro! . . . 
 
 She went swiftly to the door and opened it, and a little 
 sound of hurt conscience came from her; for she was 
 greeted only by blackness and a drift of dying cigarette- 
 smoke. Softly as if the drifting odour were a loved pres- 
 ence, she closed the door again, with a long sigh at the 
 sense of replete solitude the action gave her. 
 
 My own, how very selfish I can be, even to my nearest, 
 dearest ! He had gone, not even for a "good night" 
 willing to take me from you ! But I can be glad of it 
 and of my aloneness without too great selfishness, because 
 that lack of a Dios seems to-night to mean, somehow, that 
 still is his gentle presence here with me, helping me like 
 to-day's beautiful present to write on to you freely in that 
 aloneness with you that I craved. 
 
 My own, hotly, frightenedly my little red book talked 
 to you one night, red, ruddy-blood-colourcd like its cover, 
 black, black-of-night like its ink talked of the strange 
 geography of the Great Way, of the Epiphany, with its 
 light, the Wilderness, with its voice, with its voice of 
 pages cried desperately out to you asking if this could
 
 The Warm Shadow 291 
 
 be its Valle Malo. Surely, surely, my own, it cannot be, 
 and what I cry out to you to-night is, what, then, can 
 it be? Because to-night itself, this night of Kundry and 
 the Grail, when we would suppose the Sagrada Montana 
 and that Bad Valley torn in its breast would the more 
 paint my thoughts, has instead, somehow, told me other- 
 wise. Into that Kundry of mine went all those thoughts, 
 and there they lie, in her strange exquisite costume, so 
 to speak, for the present. Thus much is my brain a 
 nicely adjusting one. But my own, what is this part of 
 La Gran Via? It is a beautiful part in many ways. My 
 life is very blessed with much love even from Daisy, 
 indeed ; even from Elise, I actually think, if someone tried 
 to murder me, for instance she would at least show her 
 gargoyle at my assailant. And it is a life very fuU of 
 pretty colours colours of art, and of elegance, and beau- 
 tiful harnesses to wear when I would trot about to parties. 
 And best of all, far best, it has a calm, yes, quite con- 
 stantly, except, of course, in the opera house where it is 
 quite right I should be a Vesuvius, and except in my little 
 book, where, right or wrong, I have to be one ; a calm that 
 I had touched, and been storing bit by bit within, but that 
 came greatly with the going from me at last, through 
 God's touching me, in turn, upon the shoulder, of that 
 terrible Trudge Market money. Yet there is something 
 wrong, my own, with this stretch of the great road ; either 
 something wrong, or something lacking, or else, just 
 something that I have not the vision to understand. As 
 long ago, and as I afterward supposed never would be 
 again, my mind seeks seeks a word, a name. That, if 
 I could find it, for you know how words have been always 
 touchstones for me, my own, that would vanish the clouds. 
 Not that the Great Way is clouded. That miraculous 
 universal thing is clear. Even this part of it, for have I 
 not told you it is colourful? Why, it is brilliant! The 
 clouds are in me! 
 
 And shall I tell you what I need? For I know every 
 fibre in me tells me what I need at this moment of the
 
 292 The Great Way 
 
 Way. My own, I need Isabel, my Isabel from whom I 
 ran away, and rightly, doing it as I did in faith, utter 
 faith, that tee would be again, be again, "she and I," 
 when it was right, when it should be God's choosing, not 
 just hers, or mine. Have I lost that faith? Or am I 
 just a person who is a little bit tired in church, and not 
 a heretic ? I do not know ! I know only that she is what 
 I need, need my Isabel, my Sacrament. She would 
 strengthen me, guide me. She would know, as she saw 
 and knew that sacramental day. For there is a definite 
 need of guidance, my own. There is a definite thing that 
 I know about and struggle with, and that I have not told 
 you. Perhaps, needing, and lacking, my Isabel, some 
 guidance will come, some substitute guidance, from with- 
 out or from within. If from within, the first step toward 
 it, my own, is to urge it outward by confession to you, to 
 see it in words staring up into my face. To-night, I can. 
 I shrink to do it, and I must. I dare not, and I will. 
 Yes, presently I will dare. 
 
 But first, I have not told you quite the full truth about 
 the bird-seed. To do so will help, will force my pen in. 
 I said I have gaven it by a messenger boy. I did not 
 lie, I quibbled. I even quibbled it into a literal fact, by 
 leaving out the hyphen from "messenger-boy." A messen- 
 ger, yes. A boy? Yes, to me, though older than I am. 
 A man, my own, and, such were my purpose and subtlety, 
 a beautiful young American caballero, so that if his ap- 
 pearance is reported to her, it is an elegant, aristocratic 
 young gentleman of the kind she would have adored to 
 subdue, of that splendid kind of American good-looks so 
 fascinating to women. (As if any kind of good-looks, 
 except female ones, were not!) And moreover, my own, 
 a gentleman who is all generosity and chivalrousness, who 
 would be horrified to do such a thing and would quite 
 likely have refused to ! 
 
 Dear, I have written in my strange little book often 
 and often of Arno, of my good man friend, all kindness, 
 all gentleness, all unselfishness; and from these references
 
 The Warm Shadow 293 
 
 you must be aware how I pathetically still write as if 
 you as if you had read! that he, like Daisy, and like 
 my Maestro, is a part of my life, a familiar part. 
 
 Yes, that bird-seed has driven me; the pen is face to 
 face with the matter. 
 
 My own, I have not kept the deeper part of that part 
 from my little book to keep it from you, but to keep it 
 from myself. I have feared to look too near at what he 
 offered me. I have feared myself and feared for my 
 fidelity to you, in presence of the beauty, the peace and 
 the rest, which he has held out for me in his generous, 
 understanding hand. 
 
 To tell you of beautiful presents being held out to me, 
 dear, is easy! But of my own mind having had one in- 
 stant's pause as to this gift? Of that mind's confusion? 
 
 Can I tell it you? Yes, to-night I can, with before 
 me this loving present from which I now write to you, dear 
 tribute from a heart, meaning the heart, of that my 
 great wonderful Friend "just people," holding for me 
 only the joy-task of simple taking, so different from the 
 problem-tribute of a dear, dear friend; and with aroimd 
 me, somehow, either from Isabel, or God allow me the 
 thought from from you, a feeling of love that is near 
 me, close to me, like some warm shadow, that seems to- 
 night to protect me, to somehow comfort me, like a 
 guardian angel, yes, like the warm shadow of a guardian 
 angel's wings. 
 
 Thus I can. And must, for only so, as yet, can there 
 perhaps reach my seeking mind a little light. . . . 
 
 And a little light had reached, if not the seeking mind, 
 at least through the windows of the outer room, before 
 she lay breathing easily, peacefully, in this one. Through 
 the rich curtains and across the floor it crept stealthily 
 till it dispelled one shadow that had lain, like a guardian 
 angel though recumbent and asleep, across her closed 
 doorway. With the light's golden-fingered reaching of 
 it it rose, and shook itself instinctively and thoroughly
 
 294 The Great Way 
 
 as if it had circled around several times before lying down 
 there; looked at the closed door listening cautiously, 
 deeply, tiptoed to the room's other door, and vanished 
 through it, to appear in the lobby and to the astonishment 
 of the desk-clerk pausing before that sleepy functionary 
 with a huge shrug, graphically raised eyebrows, and an 
 outflung gesture of empty hands. 
 
 "Cigarette?" 
 
 The speechless clerk handed him one and the dishevelled 
 shadow, deeply inhaling this first instalment of breakfast, 
 sauntered into Fifth Avenue, and happily down that splen- 
 did great silent way, whistling the Cigarette Song from 
 La Gran Via.
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 THE MIRACLE OF HOSES 
 
 IT was still sharp, bright winter in New York, it was still 
 a kind of crisp money-gold that came through Wanda's 
 creamy-fabricked curtains in the afternoon, lighting her 
 and Arnold such of it as remained over, first here, then 
 yonder, from the blotting figure of Elise, who now at this 
 window, then at the other, and afterward, but never 
 finally, at this one again, was absorbedly busy. 
 
 For there was one duty imposed by her song-bird mis- 
 tress that Elise positively enjoyed, and that was the 
 daily one of feeding the birds, resident or transient, of 
 whatever geography themselves, birds of passage too, had 
 temporarily alighted in the birds who could not sing, 
 and who as likely could not easily get enough to eat. In 
 common with so remarkably many women who have no 
 discernible love for humanity, Elise liked animals, and 
 especially, as exampled in the rich hideous Jacquot- 
 Jacquette, any that were either grotesque or very dainty 
 and well exampled, for the wretched Belgian was not a 
 compound in name only, but in these concrete qualities 
 too. And particularly, Elise liked these cold little English 
 sparrows in New York, who shivered so very like 
 Jacquot-Jacquette. Therefore this dutv dear to Madame 
 de 1'Etoile's heart in Madame's list of instructions, a list 
 loose in general and tight in particularities, Elise fulfilled, 
 and overfulfilled. She would joyously as she had done 
 just now hurl wide the windows at any senseless hour to 
 crumb the sills, no matter what the weather, quite cheer- 
 fully giving Madame pneumonia if that chanced as an 
 incidental ; just as she would and did as cheerfully and 
 senselessly make exquisite toast for them which they liked 
 
 295
 
 296 The Great Way 
 
 no better than bread, and would really have preferred not 
 to wait about for, though she hated as the devil hates a 
 crucifix to make even burned toast for the princess. In- 
 deed, Elise liked birds. She could with delight have cut 
 Daisy's throat when Wanda gave her that idiotic clock, 
 and likely would have done, had it happened in France 
 where murderesses are applauded; and had Wanda but 
 known timely of this state of mind, doubtless Elise would 
 long before that have got it. 
 
 Yet Wanda and Arnold were alone, indeed the more so 
 from this absorbed presence of Elise as evidenced by the 
 gale intermittently gusting on them, for the very fact of 
 it somehow precipitated the courage he lacked when com- 
 pletely solitary with her. And Wanda felt this and was 
 strangely nervous. 
 
 She knew his patience. She knew his willingness to 
 meet her every wish, her every mood. Yet as weeks had 
 passed with no expressed hint from him of the suspense 
 that trembled through his bearing, lit his eyes, and crept 
 into his voice, she had begun guiltily to fear some urge, 
 some question, and it did come to-day. 
 
 "No," she said, shaking her head with lips pressed 
 together and eyes that avoided his. "No, Arno. I 
 cannot talk again of it now. Did you expect me to?'* 
 
 *'No dear." And after a silence he added: "I'm 
 ashamed of myself, Wanda. I should be thankful that 
 you promised even to think of it. And I ami thankful. 
 Believe that, Wanda." 
 
 "Arno," she said slowly, "it is but fair to tell you this. 
 That I have thought. And that I am as I was in my 
 mind. I cannot see wrong from right. I see and see 
 more wrong, and more right, till I am worse and worse 
 troubled and confused, instead of either the one or the 
 other 'more' helping me. Soon, at my New York season's 
 end, I will be going away to Paris. This dear, appre- 
 ciating Nueva York asks me to stay longer than my con- 
 tract, and my dear is it now any dearer? Paris is 
 lenient with me. But I long somehow for my springtime
 
 The Miracle of Roses 297 
 
 in Paris, according my plan as looked forward to. And 
 to be gone away from you that will help, perhaps help 
 me in my mind." 
 
 "Wanda, I too will be in Paris." 
 
 "You insist upon going where I go ? That is not right 
 or kind is not you!" 
 
 "I do not insist on going where you go. My sister has 
 asked me to go over to meet her fiance." 
 
 "Ah! Forgive me!" 
 
 "And perhaps perhaps she will meet mine, Wanda?" 
 
 "Perhaps, Arno. Yes, I will say perhaps." She 
 looked at him strangely, a poignant glitter growing, as 
 if against much, then more, of her will-power, in her eyes. 
 "It is wicked for me to say even so slight a word as that 
 'perhaps,' because it is so utterly unlikely !" 
 
 "Not as wicked as 'utterly no' !" he flashed uncon- 
 trollably, uncharacteristically. 
 
 "So utterly unlikely, Arno ! For the more I think, the 
 more I know the truth of that great reason I told you of 
 that I must it be in trying words again, for both sakes ? 
 - that I I do not love you that way. And with you for- 
 giving me that, how selfish would I be, taking all the good 
 and giving none, and almost surely giving harm! 
 Arno -" 
 
 The distant sound of the telephone cut her short. 
 
 "Elise, the telephone ! Elise !" 
 
 Arnold had to call this name "Elise," and then both of 
 them together, before the same Elise reluctantly closed 
 the windows of charity on the long bread-lines of British 
 poor standing outside ; and even then, as if to put her dis- 
 temper tangibly on record, she paused to snap down the 
 shades, thus plunging the room in a most disagreeable 
 twilight before speeding to the noisome instrument. 
 
 "Let me finish, Arno. Friend, I said 'giving harm,' 
 and you know my meaning. That past would rise up at 
 the most cruel moment, horrible and satirical somehow. 
 Would it not? Is not that life? Is not that life, when 
 one has of ended life? Would I not be offending it again,
 
 298 The Great Way 
 
 if I if I met your wish? Arno, you look at all the 
 color-de-rosa of life ! Would there be any colour of 
 roses, Arno, when up across the rosy sun steps some figure 
 that knew me as I when I " 
 
 Elise reappeared. 
 
 "Madame, a Mrs. Rugg wishes to see you." 
 
 "Mrs. who?" 
 
 "Mrs. Rugg." 
 
 "Tell them spell it !" 
 
 "I did, Madame, and it was Mrs. Rugg. 
 R u g g." 
 
 "Tell tell them send her up at once !" 
 
 Her paleness startled him as he saw her gazing after 
 Elise's retreating figure. 
 
 "This is someone you used to know, Wanda?" 
 
 "Yes, Arno, this shows exactly what I was just now 
 speaking to you !" 
 
 "Then why see her, dear?" 
 
 "Because I love her ! Arno, listen to me quickly ! Do 
 not go out. Stay and meet this lady. But I do not know 
 like what the meeting will be. So, ask me if you shall 
 bring me some flowers. Then if I say roses, I will mean 
 all is happy, so go and do not come back to-day. But 
 if I shall say violets violets for an unhappiness? But 
 I cannot think enough quickly so, yes, there is another 
 way for thinking of the violets, and if I say violets, go for 
 a few minutes only. . . . Only long enough to bring them. 
 . . . Why do I do this, Arno? Do you wonder? Is it a 
 silly melodrama trick, of which I have lately accused a 
 beautiful woman in my own hard, hard profession? You 
 can see, now, that we never can face the past, we women, 
 never ! Not even the kind and beautiful part of it ! Will 
 you do this silly thing for me? Will you do what I 
 asked?" 
 
 "Yes, dear, yes !" 
 
 "You see, I can quickly devise nothing more sensible. 
 And if there is not that color-de-rosas that I so fatally 
 spoke, then, oh, then, it will not be the other for just an
 
 The Miracle of Roses 299 
 
 opposite sign, but it will truly be violets that I will need, 
 yes, need, violets for another memory of mine !" 
 
 "Yes, yes, dear!" he said again; and again Elise came 
 through the doorway. 
 
 "Mrs. Rugg, Madame." 
 
 It was Dona Rina ; but Dona Rina with such a curious, 
 unfathomable difference that the brief space of greeting 
 and of presenting Arnold to her old friend left Wanda 
 puzzled, with chilled impulses, and deeply, inexpressibly 
 hurt. Though she had met her with eager, almost 
 trembling hand, there had not been so much as a gleam 
 of warmth in the American's eyes. This, Wanda assured 
 herself, was sheer consideration for her; it would have 
 been characteristic of Dona Rina, she argued, to be thus 
 for the opening moment even had they met alone, to give 
 her time and chance for any role she might wish to as- 
 sume. Yet even with a stranger there, the eye could tele- 
 graph, the hand could be warm any one of a dozen little 
 subtleties could be, between such close-brought friends as 
 these had been ; and even in spite of her own mad panic of 
 a few moments ago she had found herself, as her former 
 patroness entered, armed with all tools to penetrate any 
 formality, chisel swiftly away any awkwardness. And she 
 realized that she not only had not been met half-way, but 
 had not been come toward by a single step. 
 
 And one more thing, material purely, photographed 
 itself instantly and painfully on her sensibility Dona 
 Rina's clothes. Not that she had fallen back into her old 
 undiscerning manner of wearing them. Quite otherwise, 
 all that her strange maid in Paris had taught her re- 
 mained unforgotten, was indelibly there. It was the 
 clothes themselves. Wanda could feel her own soft silk 
 fur-edged house-gown literally biting at her guest's in- 
 expensive "suit" a "suit" worn with a good, brave air, 
 but not so much as tailored a suit out of a shop. It 
 disturbed her, worried her, and the more so because she 
 had received the graphic registration intuitively almost 
 rather than visually and so poignantly that ungracious,
 
 300 The Great Way 
 
 almost unwelcoming as she knew the dull twilight of the 
 room to be, she also knew that she was actually comfort- 
 ing the guest by not switching the lights on. 
 
 "I have called, Madame de 1'Etoile," Mrs. Rugg had 
 explained briefly, "to ask if, either now or at some more 
 convenient time, you would give me an interview." 
 
 "With with much pleasure!" stammered Wanda, 
 utterly at a loss. 
 
 "This afternoon, I fear I'm interrupting you. If you 
 would make an appointment " 
 
 "I fear I'm the one that interrupts this afternoon," 
 put in Arnold, and Wanda's heart gave a doubting throb 
 between thankfulness and regret for her device and her 
 remembering cavalier. "When you came, Mrs. Rugg, I 
 was about to go out for Madame de 1'Etoile. I must 
 attend to your flowers now, Wanda, if they're to be in 
 time for you." 
 
 "Oh, yes, Arno ! Thank you ! They must be violets, 
 remember nothing but violets !" 
 
 "I shall find them. And you too, I hope, Mrs. Rugg, 
 when I return." 
 
 Wanda hoped for light when he should be gone, but 
 none came. The expression in the tired-looking woman's 
 eyes did not change. Whatever the barrier between them, 
 Wanda felt it to be as adamant as what she had intuitively 
 divined to be her old companion's new quality, new exter- 
 nally if not new in soul a hard, nearing to bitter, pride. 
 
 "Suppose, Mrs. Rugg, we make the interview another 
 day, and this afternoon just 'chat,' and have tea? That 
 will be pleasant, yes?" 
 
 "Very, Madame. And thank you." 
 
 "It is here to hand, indeed, the right-hand, you see! 
 And what kind of interview, Mrs. Rugg? I do not quite 
 understand. You see, my English is not perfect, clever as 
 I used to think myself!" 
 
 It was as near as she dared come, and it brought no 
 response. 
 
 "The conventional interview, Madame. Your methods.
 
 The Miracle of Roses 301 
 
 Your little likes and dislikes anything you are willing to 
 tell of your personal life. What are your favourite roles, 
 what your ambitions. The same old questions." 
 
 "Ah, I see a little !" And a very little light had broken 
 upon Wanda. "An interview for a periodico or some 
 similar purpose?" 
 
 "Of course, Madame!" It was Mrs. Rugg's turn for 
 surprise. "I am reporter for the woman's page of the 
 Star. I supposed your maid had explained, for I natur- 
 ally explained fully to her, on the telephone !" 
 
 "I begin to understand much!" exclaimed Wanda. 
 "And all of the maid part, I understand and am sure 
 that you can !" Again she drew daringly close through 
 the temptation of the chance past subject, but with deep 
 caution from her most recent discouragement. "I am in 
 all just such ways punished, you see, for failing in memory 
 at the right moment, or perhaps quite disregarding at 
 that moment, some advice as to Frenchwomen for maids 
 from a dear friend! Allow me confirm that good advice 
 now, Mrs. Rugg!" 
 
 The reply to this held her nerve-taut. 
 
 "I do understand, and I have proffered that advice 
 myself, I admit, Madame de 1'Etoile. And I give advice 
 even more nowadays, but scarcely about ladies'-maids. 
 The column of advice I give in my paper, you see, is, 
 between ourselves, rather for ladies'-maids, and love-lorn 
 ladies'-maids, at that, Madame, than for ladies! Then, 
 as relief from it, I have, as you see, these interviews with, 
 for instance, great opera-singers !" 
 
 For a long instant, Wanda was without return of 
 words, as she strove not to judge the thing, but simply 
 to get away from it into a harbour instead of a quicksand 
 of topic. So huge had it been with possibilities of cruelty, 
 whether fully intentional or but partly aware of its iron, 
 that she by instinct refused to believe life had done this 
 to the woman before her, and forcing to an end her breath- 
 less silence she said: 
 
 "It is a pleasant omen for our interview, that as I
 
 302 The Great Way 
 
 chose 'Etoile' for my professional name, so have you 
 chosen it for the name of your instrument. You write 
 for your Star, these pretty column matters, and your 
 interviews with singers and so on, for for what you call 
 your 'fad'? A happy omen I the singer, you the inter- 
 viewer, 'del'Etoile'!" 
 
 Dona Rina smiled ruefully. "'Fad'? Far from it, 
 Madame ! I do it to earn my living !" 
 
 The sad, strange little English word "rue" written so 
 unmistakably though so unconsciously in that smile had 
 swept away from Wanda all fear that there was deliberate 
 cruelty in this woman before her, whether bitterness in- 
 deed were there or not, and her swift words were in a help- 
 lessly spontaneous impulsion. 
 
 "Oh, I am so sorry, so sorry !" she cried. 
 
 "I I am quite proud of my profession, Madame!" 
 As she spoke, Mrs. Rugg flushed slowly and painfully. 
 
 "Forgive me!" cried Wanda, wounded and flushing 
 in her turn. "Believe me, I am the happier on that ac- 
 count to give the interview. Let us make it a notable one. 
 If you will come on Thursday afternoon to the opera 
 house, I am then rehearsing, and you could see and learn 
 much of my work from the rehearsal. Then if you will 
 come afterwards here and dine with me at home, whereat 
 I could be leisurely with you, I can tell you all of the per- 
 sonal little things and matters. So?" 
 
 "You are gracious, Madame, very, very gracious! It 
 will mean far more to me than you can imagine ! I cannot 
 thank you not rightly !" She rose abruptly. "Your tea 
 was delicious. As you are to give me so much precious 
 time on Thursday, I will ask no more now." 
 
 Wanda too had risen, and a strange incredulous look 
 was gathering in her eyes as the business-like, inexpen- 
 sively-dressed woman buttoned her small glove. As she 
 looked up and met the gaze of the diva with eyes still 
 unchanged, and held out the small gloved hand, Wanda 
 sought swift courage for her speech. If disaster were to 
 follow it, then disaster; nothing could be worse than the
 
 The Miracle of Roses 303 
 
 doubting torture of that ladies'-maids speech, unless simi- 
 lar and subtler torture for hours on Thursday. And when 
 she took the proffered hand, she did not release it. 
 
 "Mrs. Rugg, let me tell you something something that 
 may be quite ridiculous. If it is, will you forgive me?" 
 
 "Certainly, Madame de 1'Etoile!" And Dona Rina's 
 voice held a timbre of surprise made fully courteous by its 
 ingenuousness. 
 
 "My mind has the strange thought, Mrs. Rugg, that 
 there has been a very great mistake between you and 
 me to-day. I cannot believe it possible, yet something 
 seems to say to me that that you do not remember me 
 that that you do not know who I am! Can I have 
 been right?" 
 
 And lifting one of her hands from the one she had been 
 so firmly holding, and still held, Wanda reached to the 
 wall and flooded the room with rose radiance. They stood 
 looking long into each other's eyes, a vague mystification 
 that had been in Dona Rina's slowly growing into doubt- 
 ing joy and amazement the dark eyes very big, her face 
 quite white. 
 
 "You you are not " 
 
 "Yes !" cried Wanda. "Yes I am, Dona Rina !" And 
 with one mutual cry they were in each other's arms. 
 
 A few moments later they were seated again, opposite 
 each other, their chairs drawn near together, their hands 
 clasped. 
 
 "Then I am so so very different, Dona Rina?" 
 
 "You wonder you you miracle! And I may call you, 
 as in the old days " 
 
 "Call me Wanda, dear, if you will. The other is so 
 long dead, I I Do you object to Wanda?" 
 
 "Whatever you like Wanda. Though I will think 
 you in Spanish, and I fear every time, you being now 
 only more you! Dear, dear Wanda, I can't believe yet! 
 I see the miracle before me, finished and identified, and 
 can't yet believe what you've done truly, truly as I 
 believed in you always! To think, I have actually seen
 
 304 The Great Way 
 
 you and heard you several times, and have never sus- 
 pected! And not that I ever forgot you, dear. Perhaps 
 it is partly because the opera for me nowadays means the, 
 gallery, or no opera and in spite of my 'Etoile,' too, 
 for there are no press tickets for newspaper-men of my 
 kind, unless I were willing to go through a bull-fight for 
 them ! And I haven't had this fortunate Star thing long 
 enough to do that with safety anyway. And I was think- 
 ing of you especially when I got it, and had to choose a 
 name of you and of opera, dear, and what you said that 
 strange, sadly beautiful day in the Place de 1'Opera 
 about finding a name pretty enough if circumstances were ! 
 Well, you have found your right one, dear, dear Wanda, 
 and mine, if you and I may not enjoy it, will probably 
 please that fateful maid of yours, if she knows a word 
 or two of English! It is Betsy Bliss! So, actually I 
 have sat up there at the opera listening to you, watching 
 you, and thinking, 'Oh, if only that could be my dear 
 little maid, my dear little strange genius! Where is she? 
 How is she? Was I right, was I strong, to allow her 
 right, for all her noble strength, that terrible Paris 
 night?' And it was my dear little maid, all the time! 
 oh, my dear, my dear, what must you have thought at 
 what I said about ladies'-maids love-lorn ladies'-maids? 
 Why did you tolerate me here one instant more? Because 
 it was you you: sweet! Wanda, it passes belief, this 
 thing that you've done! For not only does a new soul 
 shine from your eyes, but beautiful? My dear, you were 
 pretty, God knows, the prettiest thing I ever saw. But 
 now but you know what you are !" 
 
 "Yes," said Wanda, through her tears. "But with 
 
 it all, you know what I w But Dona Rina's hand 
 
 went swiftly, imperiously across her mouth. 
 
 "Well, well, but I am of no importance, Dona Rina, 
 when I find out that you are poor, you! It is my turn 
 for how? And why? How can it be?" 
 
 "Simply enough, dear. The world is that way. You 
 said as much, the first night we knew each other! As
 
 The Miracle of Roses 305 
 
 it chose to happen in my case, all my money was in stocks, 
 and one day they went, that's all. The only particular 
 how of such cases, dear, is that they're over at three 
 o'clock in the afternoon, precisely, instead of some in- 
 definite hour of the day or night, as might be in some 
 other form of the same thing. Nothing is truly safe in 
 this world no money thing. The only way one could be 
 safe would be to have so much money, in so many different 
 things, that the world itself would have to end to end 
 them all!" 
 
 "But, Dona Rina, / am rich now. So rich as I think 
 you never were, though of course I do not know. And 
 between such friends " 
 
 Wanda had launched plunging into her words, for the 
 best wave-away possible of the history she daringly hoped 
 to submerge, but it rose inevitably before her with all the 
 strength of Dona Rina's intrinsic philosophical rights 
 added to that of its own indelible facts like a thus doubly 
 sturdy breakwater. 
 
 "No, Wanda, no." And quiet and firm as the words 
 Dona Rina's hands grew gently tighter on Wanda's. 
 "Dear, do you remember when you had to start in to 
 work, and I begged you to let me help? That terrible 
 Paris night I've already spoken of? Of course you re- 
 member! And would you let me? And did I press you? 
 No, I understood. So it must be now. It is life. It is 
 what you used to call reverently, almost sacredly, La 
 Via La Gran Via. And also, it is turn and turn about." 
 
 "Oh!" cried Wanda, helpless, indeed a vessel in 
 distress, awash in its own tears. "Could I ever have 
 known you would say the same words to me just those 
 few 'No. La Gran Via'! Dear, dear Dona Rina, it 
 is not quite the same ! I was used to poverty, a comrade 
 of it, you have never been ! I was beginning early a 
 very girl! For all your prettiness, dear, you are not! 
 And I had that that terrible debt to to Society to pay, 
 that one must pay quite alone, and you " 
 
 "Wanda dear, everyone has some such debt to pay.
 
 306 The Great Way 
 
 You may have been solitary in your payment of it, unique, 
 in your own wonderful manner of regarding it and doing 
 it; but alone? Again that word: no. Every member of 
 Society has dues to pay, some in one form, some another, 
 according to different rulings a generous, general rule 
 that makes Society the big, sweeping association that it is. 
 Do you remember we discussed this, in a way in the 
 little park under the Pont Neuf and I told you I had 
 never found out what my debt was? It was the simple 
 debt of labour. And I am paying it now." 
 
 "Oh, Dona Rina, you are right, I suppose! But 
 promise me you are not just paying me back the debt of 
 my own words?" 
 
 "Dear, certainly I am not. I never could pay you 
 back for them, for they've sustained me, after teaching 
 me. Only in loving you I can pay back, perhaps. And 
 Wanda the mantones that you made me keep you 
 remember?" 
 
 "Yes, yes?" 
 
 "That lesson you taught deeply too I accepted it, 
 when the time came, as a simple gospel like the other. 
 I clung to them till I had nothing else. Then I sold them." 
 
 "I am glad! And they brought you something?" 
 
 "A sum that took my breath away and kept it in my 
 body! Wanda, I never would have permitted it at the 
 time if I had known even approximately ! And the candle- 
 sticks, dear? I couldn't after I realized about the 
 shawls, I'd have kept the candlesticks to light up my coffin, 
 rather!" 
 
 "Oh, I am so glad!" cried Wanda. "Not about the 
 coffin, dear, but about the mantones and they have 
 brought a thought to me, Dona Rina. We will talk no 
 more of money. I will grant you to be perhaps as right 
 about that as I was long ago. But a little personal thing. 
 In a short time I go away for my Paris season. My 
 dear, I am downloaded with things I might never wear. 
 Would you let me give you a trunkf ul of my clothes ?" 
 
 Dona Rina searched her eyes in silence for a moment.
 
 The Miracle of Roses 307 
 
 "Yes, my dear, willingly and gladly," she said. 
 
 "Oh, I am glad! Remember, you have promised! 
 Would you take two trunks?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Three?" 
 
 Dona Rina laughed. "You have made me a Cata- 
 Ionian bargainer ! One and a half !" 
 
 "Very well. But you have reached a poor agreement, 
 for I promise you in clothes I am very, very extravagant ! 
 And I have a beautiful plan, Dona Rina! You shall be 
 with me often, often, which would be anyway, but much, 
 and I will have in a modiste, and we will have it all done 
 here at home and with chat? Dio, what chat! It is 
 arranged ! Ah, my dear, let us look at some of my dresses 
 now! And this or that whatso you might fancy you 
 would say so, no?" 
 
 And half laughing, half weeping, she dragged her into 
 her bedroom, arbitrary as in their strange Parisian days, 
 and threw open the doors of closets crammed with wonder- 
 ful garments. . . . 
 
 When they came again into the drawing-room, Elise 
 was entering it. 
 
 "Mr. Rutgers has returned, Madame. Shall he come 
 in?" 
 
 "Ask him wait a very few moments. I will call." She 
 turned to Dona Rina hastily. "Heart's friend, one of 
 my heart's very dearest friends, believe me or not, God 
 sent you this moment again into my Gran Via to help 
 me to do right. There was another guidance my heart 
 cried out for a a matter of violets. I have tried to 
 have faith that in its place some guidance would be, and 
 now has God sent to me a a matter of roses. We are 
 to be much together, and afterward, all this you can 
 understand. But for to-day this moment this little: 
 Dona Rina, you will see you will see Mr. Rutgers often 
 here. Study him. Study his goodness, his generosity, 
 his his gentlehood, Dona Rina. And then, knowing me
 
 308 The Great Way 
 
 as you know me, for what I was, help me to decide 
 whether whether ' 
 
 Dona Rina, searching her face, grasped her hands 
 tight, suddenly. 
 
 "Providing he is all you say and I can trust you there 
 whether to accept that happiness in life? Oh, Wanda, 
 you have paid your debt ! And you re-pay it, every time 
 you sing! If that would be happiness to you, dear, or 
 even just calm content, take it, take it !" 
 
 "Study him, Dona Rina, and his good nature which 
 does not mean in English what 7 mean by it in my hastened 
 English now! Yes, make that study, dear, before you 
 say so ! I have been honest with him as honest as he 
 will allow, which I think in my judgment of this matter 
 has been a fully right amount of honesty. But study it, 
 study over him, before you say so. Then help me, help 
 me!" 
 
 She went to the door and called "Arno !" 
 
 He came in with a great silver-twisted mass of purple 
 violets. 
 
 "She is still here, Arno, as you hoped. And they 
 might have been roses, Arno, after all !" Exquisitely 
 laughing, she disclosed their stagecraft to Dona Rina. 
 "So, Arno, it is color-de-rosa, and thus much, I was wrong 
 in our talk ! Yes, it is a Miracle of Roses !" And her 
 cheeks took on a little of the spoken colour as she met his 
 eyes with the phrase. "Yes, a true miracle indeed, when 
 roses grow from violets your violets, my dear!" And 
 with both hands she held them toward her friend. 
 
 "Ah, how I must have have bewildered you, Wanda, 
 those first few minutes !" cried that friend, holding them 
 tenderly close. "Hurt you, if only the word could have 
 any Spanish politeness thus wrong-side-out! And Mr. 
 Rutgers, you too knew that I was an old friend, when I 
 did not know it myself! How strange an old friend you 
 must have thought me !" 
 
 "Shall I go for roses now?" he asked. 
 
 "It is my turn at errand-boy," she smiled back, "and
 
 The Miracle of Roses 309 
 
 I take my turn on the spot. For I leave with you the 
 most beautiful rose in the world !" 
 
 They were standing, for Dona Rina had once more 
 risen to go. Wanda, with a sudden recollection, caught 
 her hand to detain her. 
 
 "Dona, I forgot to tell you! I am living now with 
 what a pretty, amusing little friend of whom I am so 
 fond and who occupies here with me. And you will meet 
 her 
 
 This was proven very strictly true, for a door slammed 
 loudly, a warm gust of fabrics breezed through the hall- 
 way and into the room, and little Daisy, heroic-scaled of 
 hat and sables, was upon them. 
 
 In the following swift moment of introduction she was 
 not the flower, but the alighting butterfly in its breath- 
 less interval of poise, a poise through whose perfect mask 
 her eyes, in comprehending Mrs. Rugg, listed two things 
 with underscore that she did not like "the cut of her 
 jib," according to the item as she afterward read it aloud; 
 and the hand affectionately clasping Wanda's. But with 
 her manner clothed, as it were, in the long trained velvet 
 habit of amenity, she instantly covered the stranger's 
 meagreness of outfit within her gates as by the unlimited 
 mantle of her own gorgeousness, and smiled upon her as 
 though she had loved her, instead of hated her, at first 
 sight. 
 
 "Wanda," said Dona Rina a moment later, "you 
 mustn't go with me to your door. But perhaps your very 
 sweet friend will?" 
 
 The Apostolic Greco-Russian princess was thoroughly 
 startled at having a courtesy suggested to her, in- 
 genuously as it had been; but she smiled again like a 
 cluster of cupids and led Mrs. Rugg with gracefully flut- 
 tering pomp through the corridor. 
 
 It was evident that the two conversed before sunder- 
 ing, from the length of time that she was gone. It was 
 more evident when she arrived back on the threshold of 
 the room, her eyes blazing.
 
 310 The Great Way 
 
 - "Wanda, what's the matter with that woman? Is 
 she crazy? She gave me a lecture in the hall as if she 
 owned you! To the edification of the elevator boy, she 
 desired me to appreciate you ! Me appreciate you! She 
 wanted me to be good to you and helpful, and to value 
 your friendship! If she's one of those astounding souls 
 that mean well, she did teach me one thing that I never 
 did appreciate before, and that is the meaning of the word 
 impertinence! Why, Wanda, she had an air of positive 
 proprietorship of you !" 
 
 Wanda knew that Dona Rina had not said would 
 not have been allowed by either her instincts or her life- 
 habits to say these tactless and hapless things; knew 
 definitely as had she heard it that her friend had made to 
 her friend, in waiting for the lift, some comment as 
 gracious and as graceful as that fair speech to Arnold 
 about the rose of the world. But she knew also that 
 Daisy was not a liar, that she merely had heard the words, 
 whatever they were, in the large type and with the 
 plenteous astonishment-marks of "The Apples of Jacquot- 
 Jacquette" or, nay, "A Modest Passion"; and she was 
 thoughtfully aware, too, that weeks of Doiia Rina's visits 
 lay before them, and that there were horns to be seized 
 now, at once, or else a shattered china-shop to be got 
 through afterward. Therefore, though her own speciality 
 in life was singing, having more than Dona Rina's 
 temerity she conjured the bull-fight before her as well as 
 she could, and thus was silent for a long moment, hesitant, 
 then determined, as she replied quietly: 
 
 "No one at present in my life has a greater right to 
 such an air." 
 
 "Wanda!" The hurt little princess fell limply into a 
 chair, her butterfly wings aflop like bandarillas. "This 
 from you to me!" 
 
 The queer little occasional something happened to 
 Wanda's eye-brows as she glanced at Arnold, and her 
 hands went out from her sides in a helpless little gesture. 
 
 "People! People!" her lips silently formed, re-
 
 The Miracle of Roses 311 
 
 signedly. And she disappeared into her bedroom, leaving 
 Daisy to spring from her chair and run to Arnold, forget- 
 ful for once of her jealousy there, and seizing him con- 
 vulsively by the arm, to burst into unstately, familiar 
 tears upon his shoulder. 
 
 And Arnold, with something of the tenderness that 
 came automatically, like an exhalation called forth by one 
 specific direction, from him to Wanda indeed, with much 
 of it, as if this associate receptacle for it were a legitimate 
 and rightly provided one and with all of the fine and 
 waxless gravity of the elderly youthful, comforted her; 
 petting and indulging and excuselessly ruining the already 
 damaged little royalty as if she had been entirely the small 
 child that she largely was.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 THE LITTLE RED BOOK IS POSTED 
 
 PARIS ! Again Paris ! Once more Paris ! 
 
 And I write to you, my darling, from a sacred spot. 
 I have came to the Normandy, in the rue de PEchelle, and 
 by good fortune was enabled to have what my sentiment 
 desired, the rooms in which I lived here with Dona Rina, 
 and from which I went out to begin over again my Gran 
 Via. I am alone herein now, quite alone the more so, in 
 an impolite sense, from Elise being with me. How great, 
 how strange, the change between then and this, in my 
 whole life ! Yet in spirit, Dona Rina is here with me. 
 
 I have told you, dear, how she came again into my 
 life, and of how very altered had been hers in that same 
 interim (interim is a new word I have just discovered 
 for me on board the ship) as changed, the other way 
 about, as I have just said was my own. Nor must I 
 pause at that use there (with such a little gulp as I am 
 controlling) of my dearest, my most sacred expression, 
 for that sad fact about Dona Rina has brought about 
 some new changes in my life. And when I called that 
 life "my own," was I not right, after all? Are not you 
 my life? Are you not? But Foremost (another nauti- 
 cal discovery!) foremost, and I must needs to smile be- 
 tween tears as I write it, Daisy has left me. Absolutely 
 left me, Jose Luis, abandoning the steamer we have months 
 ago engaged for together, and barking a week before me. 
 (Something wrong, but I am hasty, I am troubled, and 
 together upon all I sing to-night.) And all this from 
 little Daisy, my pretty-petalled little Marguerite, on 
 account of Dona Rina. She would not understand. Noth- 
 
 312
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 313 
 
 ing could make her understand. Dona Rina in those re- 
 maining weeks was much with me at our rooms, and 
 Daisy was polite. Polite so as to grieve one. Then when 
 Dona Rina would go, tears, anger, resentment. At last 
 our modiste matters ended matters. She said all that was 
 not "dress-making," a word she had herself taught me for 
 it, that it was instead "too much," which seems in English 
 to mean not alone de trap, but something more extrava- 
 gant. She could not contain it in her disposition, and in 
 a rage she sails for here, nor has she written to me nor 
 has she been to see me. I believe her intention is to 
 reside here and go once more into French society as 
 much, I suppose, as she can without a husband. So much 
 I judge from the Herald. The French papers are more 
 strict they do not mention her. 
 
 But my darling, line by line I put away, and put away, 
 what I must tell you, and which trembles my pen as I 
 write. . . . Let me then plunge in, my own, as into a new 
 role of which, when the last moment and the actual mo- 
 ment of the orchestra demand, despite all my protests that 
 I am not afraid, I am afraid. . . . 
 
 My own, my darling (how I hesitate, and how I turn, 
 desperately, to that beautiful English word!) a great, 
 great difference has taken place in my mind, and I talk to 
 you for the last time for the last time, to you, my breath 
 of life, my Jose Luis, my own. 
 
 I have wondered, tormented myself, how I would tell 
 to you what has taken place, for "taken place" is right 
 for this thing which is a matter of but my mind, not my 
 heart, so that I did not say, in my pitiful guilty con- 
 science, taken place in me. And now, after all, it is 
 already told, and in that one sentence that I wrote, you 
 know. "You know" ! Oh, oh, pitiably, how pathetically, 
 I still write as if you had read, as if you were to read! 
 Well, it tells how near has been your presence in my soul, 
 my own ! And to me, with that one sentence you know, 
 you who are never to know ! 
 
 It was not because I found the name for that part
 
 314 The Great Way 
 
 this part, ending to-night of the Great Way, my own. 
 A word I found, yes : Quandary. Quicksand. Quicksand 
 is better, no, not better, nearer; but it was not quick, it 
 was slow torture. Perhaps I will one day find out from 
 some better knowing of English that Quicksand was right 
 indeed. But it remains that no name did I find, a name 
 like Epiphany, and Wilderness, and Valle Malo. Only 
 that word, quandary. And so it stayed to the end, the 
 end of my dear Nueva York, in every other wise so 
 strangely, queerly beautiful quandary. Even with the 
 telling of it to you, from within, even with lovely Dona 
 Rina, from without, as if God had sent her to me in my 
 need in place of my beautiful Isabel, so it stayed. 
 Quandary. 
 
 And this, despite I will confess that all that became 
 mine in vision from Dona Rina, was of nature to sway me 
 toward just what has taken place with me ; quandary still, 
 despite that, in my very fear that too much did she con- 
 sider it right, through her love for me, I struggled against 
 her. 
 
 And then on the ocean, on my solitary, empty voyage 
 across, a lonely space in the Gran Via, because my dear, 
 dear Maestro is afraid of large fishes and monster- 
 disasters and stays shut tight away below, having been 
 left by little Daisy, having left Dona Rina, with time and 
 space wonderful, calm space in which to think, I fell 
 victim, my own, my Jose, to that picture of peace and 
 rest and and love, love gaven beautifully, undemand- 
 ing. I saw the great waters stretching away, I saw the 
 vastness of distance, the magnitude of distance and of 
 chance, I saw the magnitude of shipwreck in solitude, and 
 these matters came upon my mind and entered it the 
 vastness of your distance from me, my own, my beloved; 
 the safety from chance and from shipwreck in the harbour 
 of the love he offers me. I began even to think, "Is The 
 Other right is it right, in the presence of this that God 
 and Arno offer me in fulsomeness?" . . . 
 
 God forgive me, I turn from you from my own to
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 315 
 
 him! In what way will the past spring up to blight him 
 and me? Can it in any way? For I have been honest! 
 And he has answered always, "I am not afraid. If it 
 should come, I would face it for both." Then if he does 
 not fear, need I? Need I fear for him, for us, him and me? 
 
 So at last I have told myself, "Perhaps this is what 
 the gitana could not see. Perhaps this is what was 
 meant. I will." 
 
 I have not yet told him. He has reached Paris to-day, 
 to see his little sister and to know her fiance. He brings 
 that little sister here soon, before the Opera. And I will 
 have this news for him. 
 
 How I dread that little sister, lest she instantly read 
 me ! Yet there I know I am a coward, and a very wrong 
 coward. I have thought much of all that, and I am sure, 
 sure that I do not wrong her. Yet strangely I could wish 
 that she and this meeting were not for to-night. 
 
 It is with a curious calm, after all, something of that 
 ocean-calm, that I have told you, Jose Luis. The words 
 have seemed cold to me as the pen made them. Yet the 
 pen shakes, my own ; I can promise you, that my heart 
 pounds in a smothered way, crying out to me its 
 reproaches at what I do to it. ... 
 
 I must tell you that last night, what without even little 
 Daisy to throw books at me, I was so lonely that I made 
 my will, trying to school myself away from some of the 
 notorious temperament and carelessness of opera-singers, 
 according some papers and teachings of attorneys, and 
 having told you of dear Dona Rina's sudden poverty, now 
 I can tell you that if anything should happen to me, such 
 as a cyclone (if or that same calm ocean spoke of cyclones 
 too, till I could not but sympathize my poor darling 
 Maestro somewhat) then Dona Rina would be suddenly 
 wealthy again. I have told you that in spirit she was 
 with me here. Let me tell you that night before last, was 
 my opening at the Opera. I sang Mimi. The first time 
 I ever heard Mimi, was here at the Paris Opera . . . and 
 with Dona Rina. . . . Has my little red book after book
 
 316 The Great Way 
 
 told of that night, you who are never to read? Dio ! . . . 
 And now, the Opera was sold out on my account mine! 
 ... so that I knew I was to be greatly welcomed. Yet in 
 my loneliness I dreaded it. From Daisy, not a word, not a 
 flower. I told myself over, over : "Dona Rina is with me ! 
 Dona Rina is with me !" All the first act I said it ; and 
 then, to my dressing-room a cablegram is brought to me: 
 "I am with you. Rina." How right I had been ! And poor 
 Dona Rina, with her little, little salary. To her, a cable- 
 gram must have been very oh, exceedingly expensive! 
 
 But my own, my eye has glanced the clock, and it creeps 
 toward the Opera. 
 
 And before that ah, before even that, my darling, it 
 creeps through the moments left to you and me! At any 
 minute now, they may be here Arno, and his little, happy 
 sister, who may not be quite so happy if she reads into my 
 soul that soul that I have so daringly declared was en- 
 tirely new! Her name is Mary the pretty English 
 "Mary," to my ear, whether from musicalness or from 
 prejudice, so much prettier than Marie or our own Maria. 
 If she is as sweet as simple as her name, surely, surely 
 I need not be so frightened of her ! 
 
 My own, how much there can be in a name ! As long 
 as I shall live, I shall have a strange no, never that 
 word ! a sweet, a heavy feeling, yes, sweet and heavy 
 both, like the scent of violets, through my heart at sight 
 or sound of "Jose Luis." Have you liked, I wonder, my 
 own chosen name, Jose Luis? The de 1'Etoile, was for 
 aspiration ; aspiration with a memory-tint of Cadiz and of 
 Isabel starlight. And the Wanda well, for euphony, 
 for I had to have a pretty name; while partly, in my 
 strange love of words, though you might, might indeed 
 of necessity, smile at it if you knew me to be telling you 
 this, dear partly, for the meaning of the word, as I then 
 thought to be, in English for my long, long journey, my 
 Gran Via, my wandering. For I knew a little English 
 then, that dangerous thing a little, just enough not to 
 know the right difference when I chose it, my own.
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 317 
 
 Ah, how I love you, Jose Luis ! How I will always, 
 always love you ! And how late for me to tell you again, 
 as I am coming to the moment of sending them, these my 
 poor, poor little red book, to little Daisy, my little angry 
 Princess ! Perhaps they will return her to me in a flood 
 of tears, a whirling, a stormy version of that silver shower 
 I have spoken you; and perhaps she will just quietly 
 read . . . and think ... as one would do, perhaps, on 
 receiving a legacy again, a silver shower! . . . 
 
 . . . As you, my own, will never, now, read and think! 
 . . . Ah, my own, my Jose, I love you! Do you remem- 
 ber, I wonder, how there was always a special tenderness 
 in my meaning when I would say but "Jose" instead of 
 "Jose Luis?" I used then to wonder if you knew. . . . 
 I love you ! I love you ! . . . And you are never to know ! 
 You are never to know, more than you knew tlien! . . . 
 Elise, dear, is answering the telephone. Perhaps they are 
 already here, my own ! . . . 
 
 Elise was crossing the room to her. 
 "Mr. Rutgers, Madame, and Miss Rutgers." 
 "Send word I will go down in a few moments, Elise." 
 Wanda took up her pen bravely, but it scratched waver- 
 ingly, awkwardly across the page. 
 
 Yes, it is they, waiting for me. For the last time, 
 to-night it will be for you that I sing, my darling! And 
 how I will sing ! Believe that ! It is Traviata. . . . To 
 you, for the last time. To my own, for the last time. 
 How I will sing! After this it will be for my new life. 
 For my husband. . . . 
 
 Good-bye, good-bye, my beloved, my violet-eyed, my 
 own ! Good-bye, my Jose Luis, you who are never to 
 read my little red book, in which my red heart cries to 
 you ! I post it to the little princess. . . . Good-bye ! 
 
 I turn from you to those who await me, representing
 
 318 The Great Way 
 
 my via nueva who know me only as Wanda, Wanda 
 
 of the stars. I turn to them from you 
 
 After I have to you, O my dream of God, 
 Signed myself 
 
 DULCE DE L'ETOILE. 
 
 The pen dropped to the desk with a sharp, unaccus- 
 tomed little clatter. Resolutely, she drew from their 
 small case the preceding little books, resolutely placed 
 them, with their latest comrade, in a heavy linen en- 
 velope, directed it. Resolutely she brought out her jewel- 
 box, closed together the intricate little travelling-desk, 
 handed the jewel-box and her little keys to Elise. Resolu- 
 tion failed only at actual sealing of the strong, long 
 envelope. She knew that even in this it would not fail, 
 downstairs. She stood with it held shut in her hand, her 
 lips, tremulous a little, compressing to firmness as her 
 fingers increased their pressure. 
 
 "Elise, make me the favour to give me my rosary." 
 
 "Oui, Madame." 
 
 With a little breath sharply indrawn, she took from 
 Elise's capably prompt hand and placed around her neck 
 the delicately sumptuous cord of gold and crystals with 
 its minutely carven emblem of sacrifice. 
 
 "Have you my cloak?" 
 
 "Oui, Madame." 
 
 They hurried through the corridor and into the lift. 
 Below, in the long brilliant entrance-hall of the hotel she 
 walked swiftly to the desk without glancing toward the 
 reception room. 
 
 "Give me a messenger, please, to carry a letter for 
 me." 
 
 "Certainly, Madame!" The response in English, 
 with an English timbre, for the clerk was a Londoner, 
 sent a sick little pain through her heart. She knew 
 telepathically that this youth knew she was in pain, and 
 for better strength she did not meet his eyes. "Come 
 this way, boy !" She walked toward the reception room.
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 319 
 
 the messenger at her side, her eyes still tensely lowered. 
 Before the two steps leading up to the little room she 
 halted. 
 
 "Read carefully this address!" She was holding the 
 big envelope before him, not releasing it. "The letter 
 is valuable. Take a cab. Give it only into the hands 
 of Madame la Princesse herself. If she is from home and 
 you are not allowed to wait, return it to me at the Opera. 
 I am Madame " 
 
 "de PEtoile, distinguee du monde, Madame !" 
 
 "Thanks. Give it to no one but myself or my maid. 
 There will be instructions at the Opera. You know my 
 maid, here? You understand?" 
 
 She nodded toward where Elise hovered with her 
 wraps in the background. 
 
 "She will give you cab money. You understand per- 
 fectly?" 
 
 "Oui oui Madame!" 
 
 She lifted the envelope toward her lips, the crude 
 process of so sealing it a stored-up excuse for a final, 
 a stealthy caress, but her gesture changed. 
 
 "Wait! You have a pencil? Quick! Thanks." 
 
 She opened back the flap and scrawled hastily, 
 tremblingly across the inner side of it. 
 
 "Once more, once more, good-bye, my own! I can 
 see the two standing there, watching me, waiting for me 
 to come. It is over! I turn from You! Good-bye! 
 Good-bye !" 
 
 She sealed it, handed it back to the boy, felt him van- 
 ish. Then her body, almost automatically, took its first 
 step on toward the little reception room, toward the two 
 lives, the new life, patiently waiting to receive her there. 
 But she paused again. 
 
 The years that had been hers, playing upon a swift 
 instinct of her whole being and nature, bade her drink 
 in one more, a last, deep draught of them, one long 
 instant, while those years yet were actually hers, before 
 the threshold, and before its crossing. And in impulse
 
 320 The Great Way 
 
 of self-protection, of armament, as it were, against the 
 first moments of spiritual ache and need that would in- 
 evitably be, and perhaps swoop down inevitably soon, 
 after her deliberate tread into the cold, new waters of a 
 life strange to her whole life as heart of a hemisphere to 
 heart of a hemisphere, she sent her glance unseeingly 
 past the little room and let her gaze, as for her final, full- 
 breathing time-flash of soaring liberty, dwell slowly along 
 the wide corridor of the hotel. In the consuming eyes 
 was a great wistfulness the thing that had stirred pity 
 in the chance desk-clerk, and betrayed it into his voice 
 and of which she was quite unconscious again now, for 
 she was thinking herself strong. And basically, she was 
 strong, for it was almost immediately to the forgetfulness, 
 will-powered forgetfulness for the brief moment, of her 
 awaiting guests that, with the poignant look leaving her 
 gazing eyes, her thoughts centred, for that purposefully 
 seized instant of mental adventure, upon the bit of life- 
 gossamer that was happening to drift through the Nor- 
 mandy lobby as she turned. 
 
 The picture, chance or destined, might not, indeed, 
 have deserved the world's very greatest eye in its owner's 
 greatest moment that, for instance, of an Empress when 
 about to sign the declaration of a devastating war or a 
 merciful peace. But that of the very great singing 
 actress, in her thus-far greatest moment, it did deserve, 
 and also her immediately lavished thought upon it, sim- 
 ply because of the native texture of her minutely appre- 
 ciative, swiftly assimilating mind, for this t able aus-viv ant 
 was frailly, beautifully odd. It was ugly, it was exquisite, 
 and it was extraordinarily sweet in its grotesqurie. 
 
 A short round lady, followed by a starchy maid, very 
 much as Madame de 1'Etoile herself was rearguarded by 
 Elise, was progressing from the desk, where she had just 
 made a rowdy rumpus over a completely foolish some- 
 thing-nothing, toward the lift, with such naughty oaths, 
 in the rough English tongue, as "Saucy," and "Never 
 again," and "Listen to me," addressed, presumably, to a
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 321 
 
 vision, floating before her, of the villain-hearted Desk 
 Clerk from whom she had just now swept away. 
 
 Despite this public show of untranquil spirits, she was 
 unmistakably one whose like, as the fair Duchesse de 
 Noailles has said, God Almighty would think twice before 
 condemning namely, a person of quality. Her figure 
 was erect, with its posture not undeservedly haughty, and 
 with something rightly impressive in all its low and 
 curving lines, in spite of her indifference or perhaps her 
 inclination, even to her effect upon the casual standers 
 and sitters about. Perhaps this was itself a sign of 
 station. Her walk was emphasized and energetic, though 
 not swift, because of the size and arrangement of her 
 person. It looked like something made by an amateur, 
 with plenty of material, tactlessly disposed; yet her con- 
 duct of it was assured and stately. Alongside the enor- 
 mous round ostrich-plumed queenly hat slanting over her 
 profile, her face, an enamelled net-work like a piece of lace 
 under glass, was pinker than any other face near by. 
 She was an essential, an apt thumbnail comment upon the 
 Heart of the Great World: upon Paris. 
 
 But the sum total of her was of small import in the 
 light of her luggage; for held forth in front of her on a 
 level with her angry bosom, with a nice posture of her 
 plump little fingers, she was carrying a quite large and 
 very lovely birdcage. It was not of modern gilded kind, 
 but was made of slender sticks, or of reeds, or wicker, 
 and was round, and conically topped, and placid and 
 charming, and suggested England, and a rose-trellised 
 haystack, and pure poor girls named Amy Ames by the 
 poet Laketalk. And in the cage was a treasure possibly 
 unique, and anyway delicate, poetic, precious. 
 
 It was a pair of parakeets ; and their wondrous beauty, 
 so singular that it lifted above the exotic, was as in- 
 stantaneously arresting, and in its appeal as refined and 
 as primitive, both, and as irresistible, as a spray of moss- 
 rosebuds with their minareting leaves, or an old-fashioned 
 filigree valentine.
 
 322 The Great Way 
 
 The spiritual effect of the two parakeets, through the 
 sense of sight and its action upon the imagination, was 
 indefinable in its thrill elusive, confusing. But the 
 means of their unescapable effect of aesthetics were static 
 and tangible and swiftly known: their colours, which 
 were at once most definite and most conservative. It was 
 their wealth of these, perhaps, together with the fine 
 natures of the various hues, and the unprecedented com- 
 binations of the opposed yet juxtaposed styles, that made 
 these parakeets almost ineffable. They were rich, and 
 they were startling, without any brilliance whatever. 
 They were neither large nor small, but approximately on 
 the scale of tanagers ; and this medium size prevented their 
 being flagrant, like the great parrot-prides of public 
 gardens, whose looks shriek like their voices, yet also 
 gave happier leeway to the delicious painting of their 
 habits than would have done the measure of the little 
 slaves that tell fortunes for twopenny idiots in the streets. 
 Their design was simply rings, or circular stripes, like 
 that of any other parakeets that are designed at all; but 
 where the average parakeet is almost all over a plain 
 vivid green, with a contrasting headdress and perhaps 
 necklace, these fascinating creatures bore a numerous 
 succession of other than green colours, in widths sym- 
 metrically marked, some broad, some narrow, from head 
 to tail wherein, in a few of the stiff, down-pointing 
 feathers, was their only green, as if here alone they chose 
 to display the conventional basis of their uniform (they 
 were quite alike, like soldiers); and even here the trite 
 green was obscured by other feathers of heavy red and 
 yellow. This last fact would have had them from the 
 United States ; yet their heads and shoulders, and the 
 colour next, were a soft, dull, soothing red and a soft dull 
 blue, as if instead they were the unparalleled Rosella- 
 bird; and after that, carefully interlined with strips of 
 dove-toned gray and heavier cordings than this of the 
 favourite blue, were many circlets, properly formed as 
 bracelets, of divers suavely graded shades of colours of
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 323 
 
 roses, as if their native place were India. A curving little 
 plume apiece, one inch in length, curled piquingly back- 
 ward from the head, and was lavender-tinted. 
 
 Even with their beauty so prison-striped over as it 
 was by the bars of the cage, the sight of them was ador- 
 able, and not the least devastated by their cries, which 
 they sent angrily forth by infection from the lady, using 
 all their small bitter voices sharply and tartly, as if they 
 saw before them, too, the vision of the Clerk, and were 
 helping her screech at its black, black wickedness. Of 
 course they did not and were not; as birds are the most 
 unintellectual of all supposedly intelligent creatures, next 
 to fishes. But opposite to fishes, they are sensitive, and 
 the parakeets, by dint of vocal nerve-centres, were in full 
 sympathy with their mistress, so that if that Clerk had 
 a conscience in the matter, their noises must have racked 
 him. These were to the effect in general, though not 
 specifically, that God Almighty certainly would not have 
 had to think twice before condemning that person, while 
 the details were of a more worldly tenor. In a voice of 
 tinkling metal she was saying "Saucy" again, and 
 "Leave to-morrow," and the parakeets repeated these in 
 the noise named "squawk": "LEEEEVE!" "TO- 
 MORROW!" 
 
 To the curious among the people by, it would have 
 been a pleasure to learn what the big see-saw was about 
 whether her dinner or a lost diadem. But she did not 
 seem one to be approached by strangers. She even said 
 "Outrageous !" now, and the parakeets said, as best they 
 could, "OUTRAGEOUS!" 
 
 Then, suddenly, as they quite neared the lift, her 
 passion changed its nature. Having by accident lowered 
 her eyes a little, and thus abruptly seen her parakeets, and 
 totally forgetful of the Clerk, with her free hand she 
 hurled wide their prison door, and bade them out with a 
 lingeringly dulcet, loudly ecstatic cry to them: 
 
 "O-o-o-oh, my ravishers!" 
 
 She probably did not know what ravishers meant (for
 
 324 The Great Way 
 
 there was nothing in her appearance to suggest that 
 she did, from experience). But her cry, at that, was con- 
 spicuous. Folk were staring and some of them, more at 
 her than at her parakeets. But Madame de 1'Etoile's 
 absorbed and absorbing look was not a stare it was of 
 the nature, still, of an earnest, deep and trenchant, preg- 
 nant gaze. There had come to her, at first sight and 
 sound of the distinguished lady, a tantalizing reminder 
 of someone else, its full reminiscence seemingly ungrasp- 
 able ; then her struggle for it had ceased as she had seen 
 the dainty rarity in the cage, and another cell of memory 
 had been stirred instead, and, swiftly, its full vision had 
 leapt within her a vision of quiet poppy fields at evening, 
 of a little white house on the highway of a hillside, of a 
 tender woman, and of a strange company of many little 
 birds. And then, as if upon the strength of this, the first 
 matter of memory recurred and crystallized. It was the 
 tenderly beautiful parakeets that had recalled the tender 
 woman, and a little hill-town. But what their great lady 
 of indignant importance had been like, was an angry 
 diva ... in a little sunlit street ... in a little sunlit 
 seaport. . . . 
 
 At her rapturous summons, the rainbow twain had 
 fluttered forth and upward, thus giving to such sight as 
 was engaged upon them their full romance of beauty, and 
 made an ethereal, tinted hovering in the air, over the top 
 of the cage, whereupon they descended, and with little 
 shiverings, and little sounds and little bites, perched and 
 wooed. 
 
 Nodding her head and mammoth hat at them, the lady 
 stepped onward; and all four, the matron (if she were 
 one), and the maid, and the paramour parakeets, went 
 into the lift. 
 
 A thought of the woman who stood gazing at its shut 
 door was that it was carrying, in the direction of God, a 
 being of the Animal Kingdom, yet who considered herself 
 apart from it, above it; who was indeed a type, perhaps 
 a symbol, of highest civilization, and yet who represented
 
 The Little Red Book is Posted 325 
 
 in herself the essence of all that was untrue and un- 
 natural ; and with her, two little creatures of most humble 
 place in that despised animal estate, yet that represented 
 much, very much, if as certainly not all, that was natural 
 and beautiful. 
 
 The tiny miracle of casual life, fragile and diminutive 
 and esoteric as a small leaf in a big wind, had used but 
 a few short seconds. The lively picture was as if it had 
 never been painted; and Madame de 1'Etoile knew that 
 she must think of another matter. The two patiently 
 waiting figures so brief a distance from her reclaimed her 
 eyes, as her thoughts. 
 
 With head suddenly erect, a smile gathering for the 
 girl upon her lips, she went up the carpeted little steps 
 into the pretty room and across to them. 
 
 She gave a hand to Arnold, with a swift, fleeting look 
 of silent welcome; then she looked down into the flower- 
 like face of the expectant girl and took both of her hands 
 in a warm, gentle clasp. 
 
 "Ah, my dear, you are your brother's sister! How 
 pretty ! How pretty !" Her heart was so rapid, her 
 effort to keep its throb from her voice so tense in its 
 achievement, that she could not hear what the girl was 
 murmuring. Gracefully, she leant and kissed her fore- 
 head. Arnold was speaking now words that also had no 
 distinct meaning for her, and still clasping the delicate 
 fingers that had clung to hers she turned to him with a 
 lifted hand, an irresistible deprecant smile. 
 
 "Forgive me, Arno! To-night I am all engaged with 
 your pretty sister !" 
 
 She turned again to the girl, and drew her away, 
 gently but swiftly, to a small couch across the room. 
 
 "My dear," she said, "there must be a little word be- 
 tween you and me at once. There has been something on 
 our minds, my dear, yours and mine, has there not? And 
 I desire to take that burden from yours now, quickly. I 
 am not going to marry your brother."
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 THE GREAT WAYWARD ONE 
 
 THE startled girl tried to speak, but failed, and merely 
 gazed at her confusedly. 
 
 "Say nothing, my dear. We will know each other 
 better, for your brother is a devoted and dear friend to 
 me. And that is all. And therefore we can talk some 
 other time, at leisure. But so much it was right for you 
 to know as soon as possible. For the thought must have 
 troubled you the idea of an an opera-singer for a 
 brother's wife Be relieved, my dear." 
 
 Again she kissed her, and to prevent an answer moved 
 back with her toward Arnold. 
 
 "Friends, I must leave you now. You will pardon me? 
 It is later than I knew." 
 
 "But Wanda !" exclaimed Arnold. "May we not take 
 you? We had hoped ' 
 
 She interrupted him gently. "I had intended, Arno, 
 that you should drive with me in my car. It is waiting. 
 But I find myself nervous to-night. A singer must be 
 allowed temperament, moods, no? You will forgive me?" 
 
 "Yes, yes, Wanda! But are we not to see you again? 
 After the opera?" 
 
 "Of course! Call for me! I had most expected it 
 and you will not disappoint me?" 
 
 She saw his own disappointment vanish from his eyes 
 less perhaps at her words than at their feeding on some- 
 thing in her costume to which they were drawn and re- 
 drawn. She realized that it was the rosary, realized with 
 sudden poignancy the deep and planned significance to 
 him of her wearing it. ... And its mysteries for him 
 
 326
 
 The Great Wayward One 327 
 
 were to be sorrowful, not joyful. . . . Would they one 
 day through the slow miracle of sheer nature turn 
 glorious in those kind, those feeding eyes? . . . She 
 spoke hurriedly. 
 
 "And oh Arno, do not be troubled that the per- 
 formance will be late. To-night, it seems, I need one 
 half an hour. I wish to give a very fine performance, 
 and you remember my habit to concentrate at the last 
 moment in my car when I have indulged myself in ner- 
 vousness ! Indeed, I know you will vouch me to your 
 sister, that I am not very temperamental yet we will 
 confess to her how Daisy's tantrum kept that proud New 
 York Metropolitan audience waiting more than a half 
 hour ! Ah, of what we will talk at supper, to your sister !" 
 
 She was still holding Mary's arm in hers. She released 
 it, touched swiftly, with delicate finger-tips, the delicate 
 azalea cheek. She held out the hand to Arnold. She was 
 gone. . . . 
 
 She leaned back in the car with a relaxation of her 
 whole taut body; Elise, intuitive and uneasy, fidgeting 
 beside her, and waiting for her instructions for the 
 machine. It had not moved: in Madame de PEtoile's 
 very brief but also very adamant code of instructions for 
 her employed, the car never did move, until her direction 
 came (with Elise much in the role, as it were, of a tele- 
 phone) formally as if she were quite likely, any evening, 
 to say "Dalmatia" instead of "The Opera House." And, 
 after a few brief seconds emerging crisply from her 
 collapse-like inertia, she said something quite as startling 
 as Dalmatia now. 
 
 "Hotel Richelieu, rue de PEtoile, Elise." 
 
 Reasons aside from thoughts of Dona Rina, and prom- 
 inently its adjacence to the Opera, had led Wanda to the 
 Normandy; Daisy for temporary hearthstone had chosen 
 the small Richelieu, with its daintiness, its charm of little 
 street, its creamy flavour and its quiet not from real 
 appetite, for she enjoyed noise and splendour in hotels,
 
 328 The Great Way 
 
 but from tastefulness, as inherent a feature of her as her 
 nose or nosegay. 
 
 Bewildered by her mistress's queer pronouncement, 
 Elise was staring at her. 
 
 "Mais / Madame /" 
 
 "Do as I tell, Elise !" 
 
 Elise did as had been told; and the surprised hesita- 
 tion of the chauffeur was turned in turn upon Elise. But 
 Elise had heard the great singer's voice, which she knew 
 better than the public did because she dealt with its speak- 
 ing character; and by dint of eyes not repetition she 
 proved capable with the machine-god. They shot curvet- 
 ing into the Place Palais Royal instead of up the Avenue 
 de 1'Opera. 
 
 Still Elise did not trust her great lady's mood. 
 
 "Surely Madame sings to-night? Madame she knows 
 the hour?" 
 
 "Make me the favour to be hushed, Elise !" 
 
 Elise made the favour to be hushed; and not because 
 the voice had been unkind, for it had not been. Rather 
 it was electrical with excitement, the excitement of a 
 vividly potential being in a moment of conscious business 
 with Destiny, and that had upon the alert servant an 
 effect of scare. And Elise gulped, with a sudden, miscel- 
 laneous remark that was just possibly not a lie. 
 
 "I am very fond of you, Madame !" 
 
 "You ought to be," said Wanda. 
 
 Neither was this speech unkind, for only intention can 
 qualify swift actions, and her single purpose had been to 
 vocalize something that would put a stop to Elise's 
 earnest building of herself into a superlative nuisance that 
 would have to be cast untimely forth from its situation, 
 or even from the car. It had sped on through the big, 
 foggily graceful stone memories of Marie Antoinette and 
 with lightning eventuality into the Champs-Elysees, 
 epitome of Parisian night in its light and length; lamp- 
 strung and lovely. 
 
 "L'Arc de Triomphe de VEtotie!"
 
 The Great Wayward One 329 
 
 The words in her deep and arbitrary love of words 
 phrased themselves to her with a suggestion, curiously 
 never thought of by her until now, of significance because 
 of her own chosen name, and she turned to the window, 
 with nervous force dislodged and lowered it, and peered 
 out. 
 
 Distant, dim and small, just a smudge on the night, 
 larger, larger, dim but less dim, greyer, the triumphant 
 Arch of the Star was rushing toward her. 
 
 Her action had been as impulsive as if the thing would 
 have a message for her ; and it did. 
 
 They were close upon it now; not very close. And 
 somewhere in its loved familiar lines there was something 
 alien to her memories of it. Rather it had in this fact 
 a quality of dream, thus abruptly recurrent, as swiftly 
 escaping; and she sat back in the car with knitted brows. 
 
 For the third time to-night, and in a distance of but 
 few minutes only, though indeed minutes of so innumer- 
 able thoughts, memory in its special sense had stirred 
 within her and stirred her; and this time, as upon the 
 first, with tantalization in this instance, with its pi- 
 quing quality infiltrated with the grey colour of shadow ; 
 of the spectral, the haunting, the yearning. To reach the 
 diagonal little rue de 1'Etoile running sidewise out of the 
 Star they were to pass through the. arch, and it must be 
 looming at them now; not yet upon them quite. Swiftly, 
 she leaned again from the window. 
 
 It was in no real interest in an unusual aspect of the 
 great monument, but in the driven-human instinct, tanta- 
 mount to impulsion, that sends the mind in hot hunt of 
 the thought that evades it. And she leaned now far out 
 of the car, gazing up and ahead, and more and more 
 having to lift back her eyes, at the blue-green inky sky 
 and the softly grey arch daubed meltingly against it. 
 
 Again, Paris held for disclosure to hers or to other 
 passing and chance-attentive eyes a scrap of its incal- 
 culable odd straws of humanity, mood and conduct. The 
 queer something about the Arc de Triomphe was a figure
 
 330 The Great Way 
 
 upon its top, stilly postured, vivid as a symbol, statuesque, 
 yet unmistakably stranger to the stone, indubitably 
 human. And it was desolate, in its impression, too; a 
 ripe thing as an opposite, in her hyper-keen perceptions 
 of to-night, to the sort-etching of the wide and low figure 
 of the angry lady of the parakeets flotsam of Paris, 
 as she possibly ! jetsam. As a very modelling of Soli- 
 tude in the whirling, lit metropolis it stood there, a thing 
 of the mists, as high and lonely as a loon ; and those 
 grey mists, that may have been an effect more of the 
 great grey arch than of the night, unlocked her vision 
 to the sought thought: turning themselves, those mists, 
 to murk, and the warm nightlights to the twilights of raw 
 dawn. Mentally, she was seated not in a luxurious vehicle, 
 but in a scow besmirched in the bank of a dry riverbed, 
 gnawing the husks of devoured emotion in strangle, hard- 
 passioned words; and in the darkness of the car, Elise's 
 cloak-shrouded figure was not that of her paid hireling, 
 but of a servant of God's House a nun. . . . She had 
 turned toward Elise, drawino- in and away from the vision 
 of mist that had turned brown in her eyes . . . browner 
 than the waltz that had led to all the mist-dissipating light 
 for a little while of her life. So thick and real 
 spiritually was the heaviness about her that no start save 
 of pain could have come from her had Elise leaned 
 through it and said, "Look ! There on the bank ! . . . 
 Tell me, is the tall fine shape like him?" But her thoughts 
 at the captured memory did not stay sombre: even as she 
 had impulsively drawn back from it, the strangely situated 
 figure high above her had proven itself beyond all question 
 human, for its arms had moved, suddenly, as if even des- 
 perately, out and upward, and her last second of her 
 totally short glimpse of it had carven it in her mind as a 
 thing of immense and lonesome aspiration. And swift to 
 read into special meanings for herself every chance un- 
 usualness of to-night she caught it to her soul as a further 
 writing on her high, arduous wall. . . . "Yes, yes, I am 
 not alone alone! I have seen another soul that craves
 
 The Great Wayward One 331 
 
 and reaches forth prayerfully m the desert with its hungry 
 hands!" 
 
 The great arch had swept around them, rushed back 
 of them. With all her rich penetrating love and wide 
 meandering knowledge of Paris, she had not known that 
 one might go to the top of the Arc de Triomphe. To 
 gain permission for such an ascendant pilgrimage at 
 night, what an ardour of purpose must have possessed 
 that searching soul that she imaginatively felt to be so 
 kindred, in its solitude, to her own! . . . Abruptly she 
 turned from her gazing into the light-dotted darkness. 
 
 "Indeed, Elise, you must excuse me. In my nervous- 
 ness, I was but safeguarding a large spiritual emergency 
 when I have said that comment to you." 
 
 "Oui, Madame," said Elise. 
 
 "Anyway, I have but told you the truth with it, and 
 the truth is the great thing that everybody should look 
 at forever. To go on telling it, you were also right to 
 be worried about the Opera. My plan at the hotel was 
 to send you there at once to say I am delayed one half 
 an hour, but this matter of the truth filled my mind to 
 carelessness. As it is, you can go from the Richelieu, 
 and in the car, and the management will have become just 
 properly anxious. At my first appearance in opera, 
 Elise, I made the management most improperly anxious 
 you should have heard them, or rather, you should not ! 
 and I gave a great performance you should have heard 
 me, too! Well, I shall give a great performance to- 
 night !" 
 
 The swiftly running speech came to a stop with the 
 car; but below its graphic atmosphere she painted as 
 rapid a predella from 'step and sidewalk. 
 
 "Go very fast, and by the Boulevard Haussmann. 
 Send back the car instantly. . . . And be prepared for 
 a tidal-wave when I have came! Tell them exactly one 
 half an hour's delay. I will have been three-quarters 
 total sum, yet I am truthful we will save one quarter 
 by a putting on hastily and a leaving off my criticisms.
 
 332 The Great Way 
 
 You should be happy, Elise, with moreover my singing, 
 for indeed, indeed, I shall give a great performance! 
 Yes, it should be perhaps as yet my greatest !" And 
 with a gesture that seemed to hurl the car forward with- 
 out Elise's command, she turned and hurried into the 
 Richelieu. 
 
 In her quarters, which were the most expensive in this 
 rather patrician refuge, and in better taste despite that 
 fact than was quite suitable to her instincts for gaiety, 
 Daisy was seated, the little red books in her lap and her 
 helpless hands there too, not dreaming that Wanda was 
 descendant upon her, not knowing that her chiffon bow 
 was a mass of ruin from the silver rain that had coursed 
 down her petals, not knowing what to do, not knowing 
 anything definite, in short, except that she was bitterly 
 Mnhappy and horribly frightened. After the elegantly 
 (anguaged manner of folks who breakfast abed, Daisy 
 had supped in her own room, with nothing but her title 
 to accompany her, not having imagination enough to 
 avoid such a pass, not even enough to sup i'-th'-dining- 
 room and scrape a flirtation with the waiter. So she had 
 begun to boo-hoo even before the arrival of the little red 
 books. 
 
 Truly life had lately been rude to the little princess, 
 and now, after a chilly, lonesome ocean voyage, domiciled 
 here in Paris and in state, her amusement resources were 
 few, and none at all her escapes from the kindless truth 
 that of all rude recent matters she had been rudest of all 
 to herself in her whole whirligig action ruder even than 
 life, which would have given her a chance; ruder even 
 than she herself, not only in results but in texture of 
 etiquette, to a worthier friend of Wanda's indeed than slie 
 had ever been ( that nasty slinking brown-eyed shop-tailed 
 Mrs. Rugg). It was bitter, this to know. But when 
 Daisy perforce faced a truth, she did it childwise, exactly 
 as she faced a caramel. It was a caramel, or it was not. 
 A spade was not an emerald. Or if it was, this would 
 be hard to prove. And with these sad thoughts recurrent
 
 The Great Wayward One 333 
 
 and unconquerable, with eyes tight closed Daisy diluted 
 her soup the louder. Splash. Gulp. Nor was it soup 
 she gulped, which a princess would not do, but a large 
 lumpy longing for Wanda. 
 
 For such a gruesome evening as unfolded there was, 
 of course, or were, The Apples of Jacquot-Jacquette 
 one or two. Delicious, untasted chapters. But least of all 
 could Daisy swallow these. For a particular and dreadful 
 memory of her auto-expulsion from Eden haunted those 
 apples now. 
 
 Toward the New York close, as she was brandishing 
 her self-inflicted flaming sword, a question had arisen 
 a question that was a very spectre, a hapless thing that 
 might readily all along have been foretold; a question as 
 to the real ownership of that priceless volume, paradoxi- 
 cally priceless, for its market value was on easy record. 
 Because of a mutual vice, the vice of shopping, the only 
 thing wherein they really liked each other, Elise and Daisy 
 always owed each other money unless for a very few 
 minutes once a month, always ; in amounts varying from 
 two francs, a case of chocolate, to sixty-eight dollars, a 
 case of manicure tools. And on the day of Wanda's last 
 New York matinee, a day of apparently foreordained 
 fatalism, when she had from a positively nameless whim 
 dispensed with Elise's help, and for a role, at that, need- 
 ing more make-up than any other she sang, and while 
 Daisy in the apartment debated whether dignity flatly 
 demanded that she give Wanda back the Swiss clock or 
 flatly demanded that she keep it, up had grown between 
 her and Elise, alone together, with no possible referee, 
 the hellish doubt as to which had paid for those paper 
 apples. 
 
 What ensued had one good upshot: that poor little 
 clock was put out of its misery for ever and ever and 
 ever, smashed into a myriad fluffs and spirals and splin- 
 ters, its little voice never to plaint its loneliness again, its 
 little insides nevermore to whiz. 
 
 But that was the only happy thing that happened,
 
 334 The Great Way 
 
 for Daisy and Elise had been so absorbed in scratching 
 each other that unfortunately they did not begin to 
 scream until they saw the blood all over Wanda's desk, 
 and the elevator-boy who found them sitting on the floor 
 hugging each other and howling with terror had not 
 stopped satisfied with sending for a doctor but had sent 
 to the opera house for Madame de 1'Etoile, and with such 
 proficient acumen that he had nearly ruined a perform- 
 ance of A'ida. And Wanda the Coloured Woman had es- 
 caped from suffocation in an Egyptian tomb to rush, 
 still at least two-thirds a coloured woman, home to a 
 drawing-room drenched with Daisy's and Elise's blood 
 and to learn at last something of the real meaning, if 
 not the real pronunciation, of the word "catastroaf." 
 Moreover Wanda could not patch the case with money, 
 her first instinct, for bandaged and helpless and their 
 physician gone, the two white ladies' fright had departed 
 and their anger returned, and neither one would take it. 
 And then the desperate semi-African, either inspired or 
 of phenomenal memory, had realized that she could black- 
 mail Elise, and she did it. 
 
 She remembered that Elise had finished the book, and 
 lied about it. Elise got money; Daisy got the book. 
 
 But it was an unhappy day, that whole A'ida matinee 
 day; for Wanda could not concentrate that night, not 
 even upon her own little red book. 
 
 Nor could Daisy concentrate upon it now, as she sat 
 with its multiple of several and their torn envelope in her 
 lap, frightened and weeping in the Richelieu. 
 
 When they had arrived upon her in their packet as an 
 ominous dessert to that almost untasted supper, a great 
 heart-leap at the outer handwriting had shot her finger 
 under the flap and wrenched it open ; but with sight of the 
 contents, one astonished and confirming glance at the 
 inner script had flashed back upon her a vivid memory 
 of that bright money-gold winter afternoon when Wanda, 
 sweet, grave and gentle, had told her of some such 
 possible contingency as this, and omen gripped her.
 
 335 
 
 From that evening until this one, she had forgotten 
 it utterly; but it was sharply with her now, and after 
 any such odd pregnant conversation, no little princess 
 would have to have read "A Modest Passion," or even 
 "Jacquot," to be excusable for assuming in such as this 
 moment that catastrophe with all its syllables had fallen, 
 or was about to fall, upon a loved Wanda de 1'Etoile. 
 And these two novels this little princess had read "A 
 Modest Passion" in full, for the print was still larger; 
 while she had reasons to think that before the very last 
 end of Jacquot-Jacquette there was to be a scene of 
 dragging the Seine for* that dlainty heroine another 
 causation than the fight with Elise for not quite finishing 
 it yet, and a rather delicious one. 
 
 But to have such an episode enter into real life, and 
 her real life, was not delicious a bit, and Daisy quavered, 
 with the little books in her little hands. She believed in 
 her heart, partly because her heart wanted her to believe, 
 and partly from roughly accurate intuition, that Wanda 
 was at the Opera, where she was to sing "La Traviata" 
 to-night, as she knew from the Herald, which she looked 
 in every day for her own name, to find only Wanda's. 
 And this conviction gave her a just respite from as yet 
 calling the police, which would have made her very ill, 
 or seeking Arnold, whose address she did not know. She 
 longed hungrily for Arnold, longed in this emergency to 
 bury her nose in him and drench his bosom instead of 
 her own ; but by those little books in her lap she was 
 stirred in too deep a way to yowl for the moon, and her 
 little soul was busy with sounder processes. 
 
 Initially, she knew she was meant to read them. So 
 much was patent. The wordless message, the packet's 
 mere direction, said that clearly. And Wanda's assumed 
 interval at the Opera House gave her opportunity, oppor- 
 tunity which might, in turn, cast light brilliant light. 
 But, as yet anyway, she could not, and she would not. 
 
 Could not because of tears, and would not because 
 every basic instinct, every mental habit, every unnoticed
 
 336 The Great Way 
 
 Sut recorded life-observation of the whole little princess 
 forbade her to, and in issuing the mandate explained 
 courteously that there was a mistake somewhere if not 
 a sheer mistake, namely one of accident, then a mistake 
 of Wanda's own, the lapsing impulsion of a very great 
 and momentarily blinded temperament. 
 
 Then, as the tear-streams partially subsided, read them 
 she did in part, in a very small handful of little snatches, 
 a cautious, frightened sentence here, a fascinated, awe- 
 struck discovery yonder, and rightly self- justified in both 
 her gingerly action and the decision that came from it, 
 and that slapped the books sharply shut and completely 
 whitened her face with scare and yearning wretchedness. 
 Had the little princess been in the habit of talking to her 
 guardian angel she would have told him now that indeed 
 he had been correct in his rap upon her shoulder. 
 
 For these books, the little princess now definitely knew, 
 were not for the little princess, beyond the beautiful 
 and quite sufficient fact of Wanda's love in sending them 
 to her. To read them was her right, by an act of Wanda's 
 will, a right very much such as that purveyed by a will 
 and testament, in this case a will and a testament ! 
 of sheer love. But that long celestial forefinger tapping 
 her shoulder just as clearly wrote that this was no last will 
 and testament. 
 
 One more thing would she read, and with a crystal 
 conscience, if she could find it without seeing too much 
 along the road. These already glimpses had been early 
 in the multiple little book. . . . Trudge Market. . . . 
 Society. . . . She sought nearer the end, and with in- 
 stinct and approximate mental arithmetic, without disas- 
 ter found the undated day when she had so interrupted 
 Wanda, and they had talked. And here, discovering that 
 it had concerned herself, the little princess read ... to 
 the end of that day . . . and closed the little book, and, 
 other than those early, shudder-stirring phrases, and 
 beyond this special chapter not only meant for her but 
 destined for her, closed it forever, so far as she was con-
 
 The Great Wayward One 337 
 
 cerned ; and had the whole Inquisitions, Italian, Spanish^ 
 French and German, been distilled into one capsule torture 
 to fit her miniature person and applied thereto, it could 
 not have made her open it again, or open her eyes if it 
 was opened before them. 
 
 And covering the whole little red company with their 
 torn envelope that they might not be deluged the while 
 she held them tight clasped on her little knees, she sat 
 there weeping as silently as she could manage, wondering 
 how soon she could pull herself with a decent appearance 
 to the Opera, and what she would do if she found big 
 startling placards, and not Wanda, there; and was thus 
 sitting when the door before her was flung open. 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile had a way, a determined the while 
 a largely unconscious one, of having her way, in the minor 
 matters of life, in certain moods. And part of her great 
 way to-night had been to reach the little princess un- 
 announced. The last New York scenes of Daisy's panther- 
 pinwheel chapter of Exodus had given Wanda no straw 
 for belief that the princessly pride would ever be lowered 
 unless beaten down. Therefore when she learned at the 
 Richelieu, where she was not known, that Daisy was at 
 home and that her packet had been delivered, the strange 
 prima donna performed some instantaneous miracle, just 
 what she never knew, nor ever did anyone else concerned 
 in it, whereby she learned the location of Daisy's rooms 
 and moreover reached them before a telephone message 
 could if, indeed, one ever tried to. 
 
 And one long moment afterward, they had reached 
 each other. 
 
 In that one long moment of silent gaze, the little 
 covered books and the helpless tear-wet hands in Daisy's 
 lap had told Wanda a plain story, the one she had hoped 
 for; and Wanda's lovely face, its happy relief chasing 
 tensity away though it still left excitement, had told as 
 plain a one to Daisy one that might well have made 
 her literally gossip with that guardian angel and tell 
 him, this time: "We were right!"
 
 338 The Great Way 
 
 Then had come, without words at first, and afterward 
 with many, their embrace, and Daisy's newest silver 
 shower, and their paddle, on the flood of it, across their 
 gulf ; the whole followed by Wanda's swift, almost breath- 
 less explanation, for withal her clear-brained self-pos- 
 session, extraordinary even in view of its business neces- 
 sity, to-night she was hectic. 
 
 It was with an eye inclusive of the merciless clock (a 
 terribly plain one, without even a baboon on it!) that 
 she phrased a vital part of it: 
 
 "I had a purpose, dear. It was in the hope to make 
 you understand some things for your own sake; but only 
 if, and when, a greater purpose of mine had ceased, and 
 these could be for you. And that purpose had not ceased. 
 I only supposed it. It could not. And I knew that, and 
 knew it not too late for the preventing of great wrong, 
 wrong on my part, only by the grace of God or Truth. 
 For I knew it one minute, or perhaps less than one 
 minute, after I sent them to you, for a corresponding 
 packet of Truth was that same instant on its way to me, 
 across the hotel corridor. A little vision, a little genre 
 picture, with God's Truth for me in it painted in it, 
 more briefly and better than any writing of mine has 
 done here a little, little thing, like the smallest ever 
 found oyster, with the biggest ever found pearl inside. 
 I had been wrong, was planning more wrong; I suddenly 
 knew it, and I did not do it. I had sent you my littlei 
 books. That was not wrong, it merely was mistaken. I 
 see truth to-night as one can at best but seldom see it 
 see it even to phrases. Well, what I had sent my little 
 books to you in was not an envelope, and was not a wrong 
 act, but was friendship's whimsical chivalry. Remember 
 those words, dear. The realness of my friendship to you 
 will not be hereafter whimsical. Whimsies I will keep 
 for the Opera, where they are more in keeping with Truth. 
 I have some for to-night! Well, from that pearl- 
 oyster I knew it was in friendship's whimsical chivalry 
 that my little books had gone to you. I came after them.
 
 The Great Wayward One 339 
 
 I thought if I hurried you likely would not yet have read 
 them. And you had not. No?" 
 
 "No, darling Wanda!" exclaimed the little princess, 
 gazing straight into her eyes. "I knew I was meant to, 
 but something told me to wait, at least wait, and I did, 
 and hadn't read a word ! Not one ! I could feel there 
 wasn't any letter inside, and I hadn't even opened them. 
 I put them right back in the envelope! So I hadn't read 
 even one letter of one word !" 
 
 And thus with exquisite little lie upon exquisite little 
 lie the little princess built, perhaps for the first time in 
 her life, a big beautiful truth, a truth as lovely and as 
 real as a Dresden china figurine tells in saying it is a 
 princess, when it comprises a truer and more beautiful 
 idea of one than any flesh and blood could possibly do. 
 
 And Wanda, seeing to-night only the beauty and truth 
 of this one, believed every word she said, and bidding her 
 for lunch to-morrow, with a last swift glance at the un- 
 Swiss, un-animaled clock and a swift yet lingering kiss 
 on the rose-petal lips, sped once more past the still 
 lightning-struck lobbyists of the Richelieu, into her re- 
 arrived and diligently waiting car, and to the buzzing, 
 less patiently waiting crowded Opera. 
 
 In the brief, flashing whirr to it from her recaptured 
 friend, with her thoughts concentratedly organizing for 
 her next task, arbitrarily a ch'ance yet fitting phrase a 
 not infrequent occurrence flashed to her from the little 
 red books now held tightly in her own lap instead of her 
 little Daisy's, and with a new application : " 'Violeta 5 
 itself is a step forward in petal-colour from 'Margue- 
 rite.' " When she had written it, she remembered very 
 keenly, she had meant Marguerite Gautier, not the pretty 
 little Goethe-Gounod lady, though she was discoursing of 
 art, and not the pretty little princess, though she was 
 discoursing too of life. And now her word-penchent was 
 affixing the notion to Daisy. But none the less, every 
 such accidental thought was grateful to her intensively 
 personal mood of to-night. ... It seemed but a moment
 
 340 The Great Way 
 
 when the moon-made shadow of the soft, glorious Opera 
 House was upon her. . . . 
 
 Even so the performance in the Place de 1'Opera, 
 heart of the world, that night, was more than a half 
 an hour late, for Wanda herself had been almost, if not 
 quite, more than a half-hour late; but that stalled crowd 
 was to be repaid, and over again, for that interval of 
 snapping, rude Parisian boredom. 
 
 No more than on that strange little debut night at the 
 Tivoli in La Gran Via, did Wanda, in business, ever 
 apologize for anything. It was a trying but a trenchant 
 and worth-knowing fact to impresarios, that de 1'Etoile 
 did not have to. 
 
 On each of the rare several occasions when she had 
 kept crowds waiting on the edge of their own teeth and 
 ready to hoot, the noise upon her appearance had been 
 rapturous noise, of the kind that could have afforded 
 her, if she had wanted such a thing, a bolero snap of her 
 fingers at any director of nerves worn threadbare who, 
 if he had gone after her with a horsewhip, would have 
 found his hand palsied and his will-power devastated by 
 her smile instead. 
 
 Yet, that famous smile and all, she was nearer the 
 bolero mood to-night as she achieved her dressing-room, 
 unaware of any daggered managerial thoughts or sounds 
 if there had been any a mood, indeed, of selfishness, for 
 that was what she told herself, in her self-unsparing 
 phraseology, she was allowing herself to-night. It was a 
 lovely kind of selfishness in the main, and its one high 
 point of otherwise, as to one heart in that house that she 
 must make ache on her account if it did not ache in- 
 tuitively already, she knew she must, for the sake of 
 thousands of other people, not allow to sadden her, for 
 thereby it might sadden her beautiful Violeta. 
 
 The room, she found, was unusually full of flowers 
 among them, a great weight of hyacinth-hearted orchids. 
 She knew, without looking, that they were from Arnold ; 
 and having dropped her cloak behind her into the middle
 
 341 
 
 of the floor she lifted the heaviness of ravishing extrav- 
 agant things and pitched them past Elise into a corner. 
 
 She knew that this would horrify Elise, and was not 
 a bit sorry, on that account, to do it; but her actuation 
 had been that she knew equally well that Marguerite 
 Gautier would have done it. And with this keytone to 
 her flower of to-night as it would bloom to-night at last 
 her strange hot-house blossom that was violet and 
 marguerite and camellia, she drew forward her elaborate 
 make-up box, her eyes kindling to this newest, perhaps 
 her last actually creative, task of reincarnating Verdi's 
 Dumas's and Verdi's de 1'Etoile's and Dumas's and 
 Verdi's Wayward One. 
 
 With her very motion of those luscious orchids into the 
 corner hurtling motion, intentional wantonness she 
 had been making a promise to Arnold, a sacred promise 
 that she would sacredly keep, specifically, to give him, 
 as she had already proffered and would give to Daisy, 
 all the sweetness that could be, in his case all that his 
 pain would allow him to take, from the new self, the 
 renewed being of winged victory that through the re- 
 mainder of her Great Way she now believed she could 
 be. Her intellect had pitched the orchids, not failing to 
 note and register, as they hurtled, a connotation by the 
 way of that word "pitch" with musical pitch; while her 
 heart had simultaneously made that pact with Truth, and 
 Arnold Rutgers, and herself. And as her fingers dived 
 swiftly into the make-up box now and went deftly about 
 their business, she was still two women ; and one of them 
 was hunting for another word a word that she had 
 spoken to-night, or if not spoken, thought so poignantly 
 that it had valued as sound with her, and thereupon been 
 mentally, and rot just mentally but spiritually, pigeon- 
 holed, and it was tagged "Elise." It was something 
 either spoken or at least hitched to Elise, then, not to 
 Daisy and necessarily born, therefore, in the car. Some- 
 thing she had long striven for, and suddenly articulated 
 or visualized by chance . . . Desert ! . . . That was it.
 
 342 The Great Way 
 
 Desert. That Arc de Triomphe figure "another soul 
 that craved and readied forth prayerfully in the desert." 
 That was put safely away, then : Desert . . . and as 
 Elise turned to gathering up the scattered clothes and 
 mangled orchids, the two women at the mirror began to 
 merge into one woman. 
 
 Once, they paused rouge-stick in hand, and stared 
 at each other as the word-will-o'-the-wisp danced before 
 her again, now some word a propos of this make-up 
 business, to go with that word Desert. But there would 
 be ample time for thought late to-night perhaps, or if not, 
 to-morrow; and with Desert and this latest uncaptured 
 brain-flash pigeon-holed together, the merger-miracle of 
 the two women became complete. 
 
 On the rich pure loveliness of Wanda de 1'Etoile the 
 singing actress superimposed the pallid, peculiar mask of 
 her first, youthful braving of the restless, smoking Span- 
 ish audience of that Barcelona Tivoli sheer, dead, white 
 pallor, with lips sharply, intensely carmined; a mask 
 as metallically Parisienne as the strange girl she had 
 sKbwn to the public then, as exotic as the crushed orchids 
 that Elise was resurrecting in the corner. And she drew 
 back her dark hair, parted, beautiful, and unadorned, 
 into a low knot between her naked shoulders as it had 
 been that night, and as the real "Lady of the Camellias" 
 is traditioned to have done. 
 
 When she stood ready, through the overture, trembling 
 yet confident, even defiant, she was a queer, a true, a, 
 new, an old Camille; nor did she forget for to forget 
 anything peculiar to her work of artistry was as far from 
 Wanda de 1'Etoile as her arbitrarily chosen name was 
 from the earth that New York entree of her "Traviata." 
 Paris had never seen that ; Paris would see it now. 
 
 Its spirit, daintily elegant and fascinatingly strange to 
 this portrait of to-night, a magic frame for the extraor- 
 dinary soul of it, was wafting up to her like a perfume 
 from the great crinoline dress and its roses and rosettes 
 and nature of roses. And when, lifting her arm and
 
 The Great Wayward One 343 
 
 placing it in that of her waiting cavalier, the dazzled 
 cavalier of a protean woman in one vivid tableau vivant, 
 she stepped out upon the famous stage to face her Paris 
 and to sing, as the last little red book had promised she 
 would sing for her heart's so nearly lost desire, a hectic 
 flush from her real flesh stealing up through the painted 
 pallor, and paused, with her mouth open, impudently 
 holding back the orchestra and Violeta's first note for a 
 full, breathless, dangerous moment, a visionary, conscious 
 Marguerite Gautier of every facet, false of gaiety, in- 
 stinct with bravado, a bold-eyed woman hanging to life 
 with one hand while life itself slipped away, a very symbol 
 of the white plague, Paris saw, as Paris so peculiarly can 
 see, and appreciated, and noised. . . . 
 
 And another New World memory flashed back to her, 
 and one that was also another promissory note of the 
 little red book: 
 
 "And so must it go on with me as to 'La Traviata,' 
 until I know that she is my final expression of her. That 
 will arrive suddenly, some time, from some strange, great 
 mood. Under what strange, great mood of the Great 
 Way will that be?" 
 
 And at that noise, she knew. 
 
 In their vivid reversion to her those words, and their 
 answer, were written in radiant letters in her vision now ; 
 a writing on that wall of faces before her; letters of 
 phosphorus, on that sea of faces . . . that roaring sea, 
 roaring its ownership of her . . . its, the people's . . . 
 that had cast up to where it belonged this pure amber 
 on to a shore of the Great Way . . . and in exact mem- 
 ory of the little book her mind leapt back to, and repeated 
 now, the words exactly preceding those of this present 
 phosphorus: "Yes, I am happy!" . . . and then far 
 forward, though again back, to the same little book's, 
 though not the same little volume's, almost last words of 
 to-night, words, gracias a Dios, not to be near its last: 
 "How I will sing for you." . . . 
 
 "But am I singing?" she asked herself countless times ;
 
 344 The Great Way 
 
 and countless times her own voice answered her, not only 
 with all its greatest greatness of the past, but with a 
 new ring, a new metallic vibration that was tossed, and 
 tossed, and tossed about upon a prismatic architectural 
 bubble of art that she had never felt in her throat, never 
 seen in her farthest vision, before. And that new metal 
 had been a precious, a spiritual metal. Wanda de 1'Etoile 
 could have successfully impersonated a fire-alarm any 
 time she chose ; but she had never yet elected to sing like a 
 gong and she had not done so to-night. Facets. . . . The 
 first act was over. 
 
 The chorus was gossiping, in wondering, slant-eyed 
 groups. And she thrilled at the sight and the little hush- 
 ing hum of it as she quitted the noise to be folded out by 
 the curtain and made her way to her room ; no stack of 
 morning newspapers could have told her more, or con- 
 firmed her so much, and at so fair a moment. 
 
 "And I did not once look at Arno ! Poor boy ! That 
 
 is life !" But it had happened to be life only because 
 
 she had not dared to look toward him, until that con- 
 firmation just now; until the voice was assured, the figure 
 unbreakable, for the night; until the beginning clamped 
 firmly to the end. Thought of him, she had ; and against 
 that thought, side by side with it, she had placed another 
 for counterweight of someone else hanging, somewhere 
 in that great house of the great voice, on every tone of 
 it, and on every look of her who owned and uttered it, 
 and someone whom she knew she was making happy 
 and happier, with every tone and every look; someone 
 who, always on these great nights, was miraculously 
 never very far from her, never too close on great nights 
 of debut, or of premiere, perhaps a preciously chosen 
 inch further away, rather than closer, in his fear of his 
 nerves unnerving her; on accidental great ones such as 
 this, forewarned, it positively always seemed, by some 
 alchemy of intuition, perhaps a few excited inches nearer, 
 ready for her wireless message to come nearer still, or
 
 345 
 
 to go further away ; always a shadow, but always a 
 shadow warm and self directing. 
 
 And as she prepared swiftly for the second act, phoenix- 
 ing from the elaborate dress into the delicious cottage 
 one and its odd hat homely as a little house with her 
 face the lovelier under the roof of it, she sent Elise for 
 him. 
 
 He, quite as well as she did, knew her voice and her 
 Violeta proof against armies now, and rushed in angrily. 
 
 "Thirty-two minutes late!" he cried. "I will go back 
 to my grandparents in Italy! Thirty-two years toward 
 my grave since my supper ! I will be a nice, fitting play- 
 mate for them now!" 
 
 On the golden flecks in his dark brown eyes, unique 
 and fascinating as buttercups dancing in coffee, she 
 feasted for a long instant, love bubbling to ascendancy 
 over her suppressed gaiety, and then, with an impulsion 
 of her whole heart to him, tacit, quite as if they had 
 reviewed together every phase of her recent hours and 
 were met now to decide when to hand down full judgment 
 upon the whole, and calm of demeanour, but with a 
 swirl into their gibberish of a dozen climates, she said : 
 
 "Mariana, darling! Si, and I so much must talk to 
 you ! Ah, ah, mucho, muy, caro carissimo ! Now in- 
 stantly if we but could! But even with Violeta done, 
 at the close I have still work dutiful, hard work. And 
 to-morrow for luncheon, Daisy " 
 
 His eyebrows shot heavenward like black parentheses 
 fallen forward and then bounced up by their stomachs. 
 
 "Spiders for luncheon !" he cried. 
 
 "Yes, yes, mi caro, Daisy! But that is but a detail 
 of my happiness ! And we will be glad together after- 
 ward. Come and take me somewhere think of some- 
 where gay ! We will be spendthrif ty ! Come and bring 
 with you all the cigarettes not yet smoked in Paris, to 
 the hotel, at four o'clock to-morrow !" 
 
 "You are la Traviata to-night !" he cried, and his cry 
 was both a paean and a protest, an acclamation and an
 
 346 The Great Way 
 
 accusation. "You are la Traviata ! Wayward, wayward, 
 wayward! Whimsie, whimsie, whimsie! Toadstools for 
 luncheon ! Cigarettes ! Gaiety ! I will be four-hundred 
 and four years old at four o'clock to-morrow!" But his 
 brown pools of eyes were ecstatic as he kissed her hands 
 and left her. 
 
 "Elise," she exclaimed, as she did a last bit of con- 
 struction-work, never let out to Elise, on the roof of her 
 delightfully absurd hat, and mentally christening it for 
 hereafter "the birdcage," with a connoting thought of 
 cottages and of all that had led her to this Wayward 
 One of to-night, "I would like, if I were really insisted 
 upon to an encore, I would really like, to-night, to do it, 
 and to sing 'La Apache' !" 
 
 And had Wanda de 1'Etoile uncharacteristically in- 
 dulged this characteristic whim, there would have been in 
 the words, as in the heart there was, a great cry. . . . 
 
 And quite suddenly, quite deliberately though so un- 
 premeditatedly, in and from -the pretty garden of that 
 second act's cottage scene, that great cry did go out in 
 words, words that did not hold its message, but whose 
 golden sound did, and the soul of that sound; went out 
 to seek, if it could, through the mysterious potential or 
 impotential ether, another soul, that was but an unknown 
 figure to her mind. It was toward the close in the last 
 of her rich musical doings before the poor lover's strip- 
 ping of love's riches. Always that impending touch of 
 "Manon" in the thing, that quaint touch of book-within- 
 a-book, was dear and real and pitiful to her. And as if 
 everything of this night must somehow concern itself with 
 her Traviata, the figure far up, now far off, on the Arc 
 de Triomphe, desolate and unmistakably akin to her- 
 self in longing, came back to her. And in a long, a 
 suffering cry of Violeta's, she sent that heart-cry of "La 
 Apache" and of Wanda de 1'Etoile out to it, to answer 
 it, somehow; somehow to comfort it. "You alone are 
 not alone!" it said. And fortified by the strengthening
 
 The Great Wayward One 347 
 
 beauty of so sheer and so pure an act of love, she looked 
 for the first time at Arnold's box. 
 
 Instantly upon that swift glance there was a movement 
 there, and through the air vibrating with her voice some- 
 thing curved in an arc before her eyes and fell at her feet. 
 It was a great armful of camellias. Customarily, it was 
 in the next act, in that golden money-shower that she 
 turned to a rain of blood, that opera-house customs were 
 shattered by forbidden tributes to her Violeta. This, came 
 as if life must even so instantly repay that sending of 
 soul bread upon the waters of the air toward the Arc de 
 Triomphe. . . . Life at once repaying an act of pure love 
 with an act of love as pure. For the girl had thrown 
 them. She had seen her. Where, how, had she and 
 Arnold got such a treasurable thing as these? She kissed 
 them as she floatingly ran from the stage. Afterward, 
 she carried them still as she passed silently back of it 
 seen by the audience, unseen by her fellow characters 
 thus healing the dainty rift they had made in the night's 
 white statue of art with the very wax of them hereby 
 poured into the crevice, and loving them in her Camille's 
 pathetic moment for the girl to see. 
 
 But once more in her dressing-room she did a very 
 different thing with them. Elise, who liked flowers at 
 least half as much as she liked birds, was mothering the 
 abused orchids in the worst fit of the sulks of her whole 
 career with Madame de 1'Etoile, and Madame de 1'Etoile 
 was brilliantly enjoying these. To Madame de 1'Etoile 
 the orchids were to the camellias as garnets are to white 
 sapphires. She was not willing to powder the white 
 sapphires as she had powdered the garnets, but she lifted 
 them high and gave them one safe, conservative, but 
 horrid-looking shock on the dressing table; and Elise, 
 taken unaware, growled. If she had lashed her tail 
 among jungle plants, she could not have made a more 
 delicious sound; but a little sound, too, had escaped her 
 mistress. 
 
 As the great gardenia-white flowers separated under
 
 348 The Great Way 
 
 the deft daring blow, a bit of paper had fallen from them, 
 and totally forgetful of Elise and her fascinating imita- 
 tion of the zoo, she picked it up. 
 
 "As you have just taken my breath away, so you took my 
 breath away earlier this evening. I did not know what to say 
 to you! Madame, oh, dear, dear Madame, I want you to marry 
 my brother ! I want you to ! MARY." 
 
 Tears, sad, surprised, triumphant tears sprang to 
 Wanda's eyes. She closed them a moment, lifting the 
 virginal camellias to her face, a face poignant with tender 
 beauty as this strange version of Camille's story rushed 
 through her heart to paint it there : Marguerite's lover's 
 sister "that distant sister," Arno had called her 
 begging the wayward one to marry her brother ! Dios ! . . . 
 
 "Elise," she said, the tears commanded away, "I can 
 sing La Traviata !" 
 
 "This morning's Matin said not, Madame," said Elise. 
 
 This news was so piquantly unexpected that Wanda 
 dropped her lip-stick. "Well, well," she silently reflected, 
 "life will have its revenges upon wrong-doing! I indeed 
 should never have gaven that bird-seed!" But even so 
 she was unwilling Elise should add up the moment's pause 
 she had got. 
 
 "A pretty young woman like you, Elise," she said, 
 "should not read the newspapers. They print sensational 
 things, of which that is a sample. You might read of 
 your own murder some morning! Come, Elise, we both 
 know that tremendous ball-dress is sensational for us as 
 for the audience!" 
 
 Her thoughts of Elise were widely different from her 
 words. Even as this de 1'Etoile-Dumas-Verdi lady of 
 camellias had waywardly tormented Elise with them, 
 Wanda had been thinking of Elise's happiness, thinking 
 how she had ruined her with indulgence, thinking how 
 she might perhaps pay back for that ruination at any 
 disproportion of expenditure. "It might be possible.
 
 The Great Wayward One 349 
 
 Yes . . . with such persons as Elise, such matters can 
 be done, and rightly enough, by money. . . . And I have 
 enough money. . . . Too much money. . . . Yes, to- 
 morrow." 
 
 Money . . . Elise and money. ... It was the last 
 thought of the emergent woman remerging into the 
 "Traviata" as Wanda, magnificent in huge black moon- 
 spangled ball-gown, sallied forth into the splendour and 
 the money-torture of her next business with life. After 
 that, a bit of business with death; and then. . . . 
 
 The last act was over. 
 
 Paris had stayed through even the final dying notes 
 of that act of death ; and upon the silence of its passing 
 had once more loosed its thunder. 
 
 That dear Parisian noise ! . . . resurrecting noise, 
 resuscitating noise, nectar in her collapsible moment of 
 utter weariness weariness that she pushed aside as if 
 by one swift gesture of her two hands, for the right 
 facing of her next business, the night's last, a bit of death- 
 in-life, she told herself for the sake of her love of phrases ; 
 and it was again carrying the great camellias, and pil- 
 lowed too upon the rich wreck of orchids it was so she 
 held them, herself a brilliant figure with but the ghost of 
 tiredness in her eyes that she met Arno and the pretty, 
 eager girl. 
 
 Arnold was poised, jubilant at her wonder-night but 
 quiet in the turmoil it had brought him; and it was the 
 girl whose excitement and anxiety betrayed themselves 
 with a rather sweet frankness, either inclusive or careless 
 of Arnold in her expulsion of them. It was a swift, 
 truthful glimpse for Wanda of Mary Rutgers. 
 
 "Do me a favour, Madame no Wanda. I'm so tired, 
 take me home to the Ritz and go on with Arnold! Can 
 you imagine anyone but you being tired by what you've 
 done?" 
 
 Wanda knew it was sincere desire thoughtful, the 
 girl's best estimate of what might help her brother. 
 
 So she said simply: "As you will, for to-night, my
 
 350 The Great Way 
 
 dear!" And to Elise, "The Ritz." There they dropped 
 the girl ; at the Normandy, Elise ; then at Wanda's simple, 
 ready suggestion "Leg Boulevards," sped briefly on to 
 some big bright restaurant somewhere along the big curv- 
 ing way of the Italiens and the Capucins. Just where, 
 just what, Wanda never knew; whether the Riche, the 
 Americains ; something of the kind, for she had deliber- 
 ately desired its kind of lights, its kind of colours. 
 
 And suddenly, as if the full lifting of clouds from her 
 vision had drunk up for her further ease even the hardest 
 the one really hard detail of this long, long vivid road- 
 mark evening of the Great Way, as the wine diamonded 
 between them in the graceful festive glasses, suddenly 
 she knew that Arnold knew and not from the fair Mary 
 Rutgers, whose truthful words, even whose straight lovely 
 eyes, would never have betrayed her, but from the 
 night . . . from herself this night. And the fact made 
 easier the short, simple sentence that somehow through 
 the facets of the night had crystallized itself for her to 
 speak to him, and fortified her, though in any case she 
 would deliberately have used it, strengthened her for even 
 the word of caress with its possible fleeting instant-frac- 
 tion of dangerous mislead: 
 
 "Arno dear, I am sorry that I wore the rosary to- 
 night." 
 
 Nor could she remember afterward, any more than the 
 name of the place, just what his replying words had been 
 only their lights, their colours. Though she had known, 
 with her combined experience and divination of him, that 
 he would be brave, kind, tender of her, non-protestant, 
 she knew now only the rare colour, rare light, of it all; 
 only that she had never before either experienced or 
 divined how brave, how gentle, how unasking. 
 
 And there followed, in clear, undevious words from 
 her, because they could, because the creative mood of the 
 night upon her continued now in her huge weariness as 
 muscular overaction can continue in sleep, a swift, fruit- 
 ful, few-lined graphic map of what she hoped for their
 
 The Great Wayward One 851 
 
 love as friends, their contact as before, and as soon, as 
 much, as he was willing for ; fruitful, because he took what 
 she proffered, took, thereby giving. And in her gladness 
 at that, she went backward a little, told him a little, the 
 little that was right, of the little she was able, of causes : 
 the lifting of mist from about her right perception ; inner 
 mist, because life itself for her had been very simple, if 
 but the vision had been simple too ; the clarity of that per- 
 ception now. She did not tell details; they would have 
 been cruel : the parakeets ; the wearing of the rosary in- 
 tentionally, not carelessly, and of intention of gladness for 
 him; but again a small trenchant map of leading lines 
 displayed the intermediate wrong and the concluding 
 righteousness of her. 
 
 There was no cant in her philosophy; there had been 
 none in her proposal of dear friendship, straight as that 
 had looked at, warmly grasped, very simple, time-lined 
 sentiment. Perhaps one sentence of her told the most 
 important of it all: "You see, Arno dear, I knew finally, 
 that it would not have been truthfulness, as truthfulness 
 appears to me to be; it somehow seems not meant that 
 I should ever be someone very far away, and at once 
 very long away, from what seems truthfulness." 
 
 "No, Wanda," he said in simple, very deep agreement. 
 
 That seemed to base them, take away all confusion; 
 to end something, begin something; and consonant with 
 the night as if she were still La Traviata, she asked him 
 to send for more champagne. It should baptize their new 
 era, though she did not say so; and in their wait for 
 it, calmly she leant across the table, serenely indifferent 
 to the bright gay place as she had been in entering with 
 Wanda de 1'Etoile written all over her in camellias and 
 orchids, brought his face toward her with her two hands, 
 and kissed his forehead. 
 
 Over the new yellow diamonds, and" with a pensive look 
 abrood in her eyes, her great night swerved toward an 
 end for them in a little reversion of her to the causes 
 again, but differently now, for it was confiding, somewhat,
 
 852 The Great Way 
 
 confiding a little of some of the groping that still remained 
 for her, just a touch of this from dear friend to dear 
 friend. 
 
 "It has something much to do with a big word, 
 Arno. You have in English a big, curious word 
 Sophistication. It is a word easy to understand at first. 
 I grasped it quickly. And in that quick meaning, it 
 concerned me in Nueva York. Almost all of me there, 
 was that word. My temptation away from truthfulness 
 grew from so very much in me of what that word is. 
 But it was not throughout me. No. It is something 
 I should have in me to an extent. You have a right 
 extent of it. It is a thing of some rightness, and of 
 much fascination. Well, in my fascination by the 'word, 
 I found it out more fully, and at more trouble than with 
 most words, too. And thereby, I found out properties 
 in it that are as dangerous as the thing itself. Perhaps 
 you have never thought of them. Well, philosophy is 
 the seeking of wisdom the seeking or the love what 
 difference? A wonderful word, a wonderful thing. And 
 a sophist was a philosopher, but only of a certain kind. 
 I learned much when I had got back to that word sophist. 
 Can you be patient with my dictions, Arno? Anyway, 
 I have learned many slangs while I am in New York, 
 and one of them, a remarkable slang, is sheister. And 
 that is just what a sophist was a sheister philosopher. 
 And it all arrives to this, that woman I was, or was 
 trying to be, in Nueva York, and all: that whatever 
 worldliness I had came to, and whatever all of it I may 
 keep underneath, I do not think that I am a sheister 
 philosopher, Arno." 
 
 He smiled the old Nueva York smile that seemed to 
 be indigenous to discussions of language. 
 
 "No, dear," he said, "I'm quite sure you are not a 
 sheister philosopher !" 
 
 "And " she said, and an impulsive, happily im- 
 pulsive and vitally eager thought exclusive to this night
 
 The Great Wayward One 353 
 
 notched it once more for them, "and you will paint 
 another portrait of me, Arno?" 
 
 "Yes dear." 
 
 "And it shall be now that so suddenly it can be, 
 Arno it shall be La Traviata?" 
 
 And bravely over his night, all the gladness that could 
 be in eyes so stricken, kindled.
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 CONTRITION 
 
 CONTRITION, confession, absolution. 
 
 It was to a subconscious rhythm of these golden words 
 that Wanda stirred in the fairly early sunlight for it 
 was by prearrangement with this second golden matter 
 that she was awakened, through leaving undrawn some of 
 her window-curtains the night before. It streamed in 
 across her bed at a particular angle, and from the rue de 
 1'Echelle, for though it had first arrived at the Normandy 
 from the natural general direction of the Bourse a soft 
 word about hard matters with always a poignant memory 
 for her and the Comique a word with for her nothing 
 comic, because here had been one of her very first really 
 great opera experiences (aside from their own) with her 
 Maestro her desire for this morning had not been to be 
 roused by it quite so soon as would be from these quarters, 
 and the open curtains were therefore those to the little 
 Street of the Ladder; to her a vividly suggestive name 
 absorbed and pondered by her in her first, strange visit 
 to Paris, when her mistily brooding eyes had drunk in so 
 much that she never spoke, and a name that would alone 
 have called her back to the Normandy if thoughts of 
 Dona Rina had not been call enough. . . . 
 
 Contrition. . . . Confession. . . . Absolution. ... A 
 churchly trinity, yet recurrent and beautifully musical to 
 Wanda who frankly named herself unchurchly. . . . Con- 
 trition, complete if possible; and an approach to com- 
 pletion had indeed been yesterday . . . last night. So 
 ran her gradually quickening sun-stirred thoughts, like a 
 little chain of golden links running backward into their 
 
 354
 
 Contrition 355 
 
 welding to some childish teaching, harsh then, lyrical now, 
 and forward, into this day, which must be made as won- 
 derful a day as yesterday had been a great, a wonderful 
 night. . . . Confession ; that would be, this afternoon, at 
 four o'clock, to her Maestro, who at four o'clock would 
 be four hundred and four years old in gentleness and 
 understanding. . . . Absolution ; this, too, would be from 
 him, presumably from him who of all the world alone 
 (barring one distant, ah, how longed-for friend, and to 
 whom indeed, if possibility were, the confession were due !) 
 could comprehend her in a matter so sacramental. . . . 
 Contrition, confession, absolution. And the most beau- 
 tiful of these is contrition. 
 
 But before this spiritual matter at four o'clock, was 
 work to do, hence this notable prearrangement with the 
 curtains looking to the rue de 1'Echelle so drenched with 
 climbing symbol as with climbing sunlight; and work far 
 off, if very strictly looked at, from any such doings as 
 contrition, confession, absolution. For indeed, her morn- 
 ing's task comprised a deep-laid plot, a thing of polity, 
 diplomacy by implication, poisonous, which subornation 
 in though its mildest forms, and though by whatever 
 means, in its last analysis undeniably is. 
 
 And to just such an end Wanda, with Elise's help, 
 dressed early uncommonly so, for an after-opera morn- 
 ing, and even for Madame de 1'Etoile, uncommonly well. 
 Therefore it was about only one minute more than eleven 
 o'clock, and Wanda was only about one degree less beau- 
 tiful than an angel, when she appeared before the hotel 
 desk and began her blandishments. 
 
 Her very first was partly ingenuous, for she founded 
 it on a rumour that the simple word "clerk" had a special 
 pronunciation for the British Islands, and consequently 
 she addressed the desk clerk as "Mister Clark," because 
 he was English, and thinking to please him which, in- 
 cidentally, it enormously did. 
 
 She had purposely not seen his face last night, but 
 had reason to remember well his voice, and found her
 
 856 The Great Way 
 
 day well augered by the fact that it was indeed this same 
 clerk that was on duty this morning. And within a 
 remarkably short time after her salutation she achieved 
 data whereby she realized that if she so much succeeded 
 in her ensuing errand that an acquaintanceship, casually 
 not unimaginable, as well as her object, happened to be 
 provoked by it, she would have added to the very slender 
 peerage department of her calling-list. For the owner of 
 the parakeets, she had learned, was nor less nor other 
 than the Countess d'Orancy. 
 
 Furthermore, she knew from this delightful "Mr. 
 Clark," that Madame la Comtesse was an American, and 
 her baptismal name Paulownia; with addendum that she 
 was absolutely the only American (or if not quite that, 
 Wanda judged, at least one of the very few million Ameri- 
 cans) who had ever gotten so much as one golden hoof 
 inside the real the survivant and actual Faubourg St. 
 Germain. She knew the floor, direction, and number of 
 the countess's suite ; and, most important, that unmolested 
 she might go there, in line with her proceeding last night 
 at the Richelieu, unannounced, regardless not only of the 
 general hotel rule, but of the additional private and per- 
 sonal and adamant very particular rule of this very 
 particular countess. She had learned with certainty, as 
 indeed she had surmised before she came downstairs, that 
 "Mr. Clark" was not in love with this countess, because 
 of that same violent scolding that he had got so con- 
 spicuously in public last night ; and had gleaned that, on 
 the other hand, "Mr. Clark" was by now quite as defin- 
 itely in love with herself, so that she had caught herself 
 considering just which role she would seem prettiest in 
 to the very young, to give him tickets for; while as for 
 her nefarious undertaking, she could go forward with it 
 assured that her admirer, "Mr. Clark," would, in case of 
 fire, for instance, any such dido as the countess had 
 clipped up in the lobby last night, take all blame upon 
 his own shoulders, indeed, tell any lie whatever for 
 Madame de 1'Etoile, such as that himself in person had
 
 Contrition 357 
 
 taken her card and explanation of her mission to another 
 suite, and given them to a thin, beautiful young woman in 
 mistake for the countess. 
 
 As Madame de 1'Etoile went thus fortified upon her 
 buoyant way, tabulating her data and her advantages, 
 Paulownia seemed to her a most lovely name. She did 
 not know as yet (quite likely because "Mr. Clark" him- 
 self did not know) that it belonged along with Daisy in 
 the botany rather than the peerage department, signify- 
 ing a tree that for a very brief season blooms luxuriant 
 lavender blossoms and then for the rest of the year drops 
 garbage all over the Southern United States, and espe- 
 cially all over Virginia. "Paulownia" sounded stately and 
 beautiful to Wanda, and she assumed it a derivative of 
 Paul; while the suggestion of Virginia added to it led 
 her imagination, as she ascended peerageward in the lift, 
 to visualize helplessly the stout little countess as prancing 
 rudely naked through a wood in a storm, with a gentle- 
 man, likewise immodest or thoughtless, prancing beside 
 her, and a useless if artistic fabric flapping over their 
 heads. And this hapless instance of her reckless tendency 
 toward association of ideas brought her up short before 
 the countess's door, in a moment of distinct pause to 
 control it and at least temporarily do away with it for the 
 proper furtherance of her purpose, which was no more 
 nor less than by any means short of positively foul to 
 achieve, acquire, possess, own and thereupon irrevocably 
 depart with, those parakeets. 
 
 With the countess reconstructed along the plump, 
 clothed lines of last night's angle-hatted vision of her, 
 and bulwarked by thoughts of first aid, in event of phys- 
 ical jeopardy, from that entrancing, that positively cdbal- 
 lero Clark Esquire, Madame de 1'Etoile knocked ; and was 
 replied to by the starchy train of last night's pageant, 
 the spick maid of span similarity to Elise. 
 
 Madame was conducted in without furore; and with 
 her name deposited orally on this maid, quite casually as 
 if its engraven tablet had preceded it, was left alone. She
 
 358 The Great Way 
 
 discerned chiefly, rising among knick-knacks, what-nots, 
 and other trash-basket elements of the dictionary, a mag- 
 nificent piano, with a hoary name that spelled perfection 
 of its period, the kind of piano that people are born and 
 brought up on, and that seemed to her to be dreaming that 
 it dwelt in marble halls, and about to talk in its sleep of 
 how much nicer Rigoletto is in English than in Italian, 
 for example, where it says "Over the Summer Sea" in 
 place of "Women are Unreliable" ; and just as it did turn 
 over on its elbow and mumble to her that it was part of 
 the countess's trousseau and had come to Paris with her 
 in a sailing-packet, its mistress (doubtless its mistress 
 with a naughty little-finger always high in air if the other 
 one had to be touching it) interrupted the singer's reverie 
 in person, and without a single naughty-mistress-motion 
 about her. 
 
 She was hatless, which astonishingly lessened her por- 
 tentousness; her cracked enamel was much pinker and 
 more cobweb-like by sunlight; and the more than ever 
 rotund little temple of her soul was habited to-day by a 
 tight-fitting dress of huge Scotch plaid. 
 
 She had exquisite manners, and spoke exquisite French, 
 in a high, tinkling voice that had not a syllabic dissonance 
 anywhere in it, and that had made even the rowdy rattle 
 of last night a sort of corrupt, a la mode music. Her 
 little pink hands appropriately wore marquise rings, and 
 suggested that she had somewhere about, though not 
 to be let loose in the morning, a pet diamond turtle. 
 She sat full in the streaming sunlight despite its gossip 
 about her enamel, the little hands folded every time be- 
 tween each two French gestures, and on the edge of her 
 chair, her little back so straight that Wanda's, similarly 
 postured because she was a guest, and an unbidden one 
 at that, began to ache from the psychology of it. Obvi- 
 ously Madame the Countess had assumed that the mission 
 of the interesting and beautiful woman before her had 
 not been wound upon horns in advance through some 
 new villiany (which was quite true) of that saucy clerk
 
 Contrition 359 
 
 downstairs; but no urge or overt expectancy came from 
 her, while it was also quite as obvious that she expected 
 illumination in due time. 
 
 "Now, why is that woman a lady, and why am I not 
 one?" thought Wanda transiently, and with a transient 
 sigh equally transient, because it sprang from a brand 
 of thoughts that in all innocent unconsciousness phrase 
 themselves as truths, while subconsciously they auto- 
 matically function as lies. Facts. . . . Truth. . . 
 That mysterious, sublime, eternal difference! . . . 
 
 The two ladies had begun, and were continuing, to 
 discuss and to a fair proportion of agreement settle, 
 various matters of concern to the State, if not the Uni- 
 verse: That it was how very pleasant to live in Paris, 
 especially with spring in the air that anticipatory sense ! 
 and especially, too, at the Normandy. That indeed, 
 the Normandy was very charming, and fairly set up, ex- 
 cept that living in any hotel, any, there were always, and 
 indeed must be, one admits, hotel clerks. True, but, well v 
 there were Clerks and Clarks. The one downstairs was 
 handsome, surprisingly so. Handsome? Possibly, yes, 
 but saucy. Very saucy. Oh? Well, handsome people 
 were more likely to be saucy the world spoils them more. 
 Doubtless one got more from people, if one were hand- 
 some. And a propos of that, how very handsome, on 
 the whole, American people were, Madame de 1'Etoile hav- 
 ing just come from a visit to the United States, bringing 
 away with her that impression good-looking, that was, 
 in such a varied way, and especially the women, as com- 
 pared, for instance, with madame's own race, the Spanish, 
 who were apt to be of but one pattern of good-looks, or 
 with Frenchwomen, the best-dressed in the world variety 
 there but uniformly homely. Madame de 1'Etoile, with 
 her happy memories of the appearance of Americans, in- 
 deed planned to return to the United States, and to travel 
 more, especially to the South, about which she had enor- 
 mous curiosity as yet entirely unsatisfied, beyond ac- 
 quaintance with one product from there, which chanced to
 
 360 The Great Way 
 
 have come, by the way, from Richmond, Virginia, an ex- 
 traordinary article for the toilet, named "Lovers' Kisses 
 Soap," which Madame did not favour herself, because of 
 the nature and quantity of the scent in it, but of which 
 she had given a gross to her music-teacher. 
 
 And here Wanda, who had in truth become almost as 
 fascinated by the delightful countess as "Mr. Clark" 
 below stairs had been by herself, and borne so favourably 
 onward by her subject of the rumoured South in general, 
 clasped her hands forward with a most earnest exclama- 
 tion: 
 
 "Tell me, are you a cruller?" 
 
 After a moment's interval of bewilderment, following 
 all too soon on her recovery from a passing fear that this 
 fascinating visitor had come to sell Lovers' Kisses Soap, 
 the countess replied that she was not a cruller; nor a 
 mulatto, nor an octroon, nor a coal-black negress. "Nor," 
 she concluded with clarity and startling suddenness, "any 
 other kind of a Spaniard, either!" 
 
 Wanda reflected that any chance devastation she had 
 wrought to her hostess's feelings had been repaid in 
 sorts, and more than repaid ; but she swiftly reflected also 
 that she was a voluntary guest, and with a design re- 
 quiring philosophy to boot with skill ; and further, that a 
 battle got under way without declaration of purpose 
 was part way to loss already, and that unless she seized 
 this moment for attack her moments would be few, and 
 no more than sufficient to retire with grace upon some 
 ignominious lie that would save both herself and her 
 Caballero Clark, and withal no loot to lull it. 
 
 Therefore with a swift batter of words upon the un- 
 wary enemy, engaging, colourful, of trenchant phrases 
 and vivid side-lights upon its extreme spiritual import to 
 her, she unfolded her errand, its practical phases to com- 
 prise, on the one side, her taking away of the parakeets; 
 on the other, her leaving with the countess something in 
 their place ; anything, that was, except the vulgar product 
 money, which of course she knew could not procure such
 
 Contrition 361 
 
 parakeets, unless, indeed, in sheer graciousness the coun- 
 tess would stoop to the seeming of such vulgarity to the 
 extent of something she might, on sheer principle, have 
 done herself without this winter, instance a new piano, or 
 a motor car; but more likely, as Madame de 1'Etoile 
 scarcely expected any such whimsical chivalry of friend- 
 ship from the countess to a stranger, some jewel of 
 Madame's, except, of course, such as might be very 
 significant and personal gifts, any of her jewels at all, of 
 which she had worn many, as many as the hour, taste, 
 and her gown had allowed, while there were many more 
 upstairs. 
 
 The countess gazed at her stared. And for an end- 
 less-seeming time that stare was all she did, and all she 
 seemed to be. Nor was it a rude, or haughty, or even 
 angry stare. In all its expanse of enamel-pink and ex- 
 pansion of Daisy-blue Peerage eyes its only element was 
 astonishment ; astonishment that left no room for any 
 iother emotion, until, through some sudden mental occur- 
 rence, one more quality entered it anxiety, that grew 
 to alarm, and that Madame de 1'Etoile could not at once 
 understand, but that alarmed her, in turn, but not soon 
 enough, so that quite suddenly and with no preventive, a 
 disconcerting thing happened. 
 
 Without one sound, the countess fell not backward, 
 but forward, and rolled face first downward, and then 
 upward, on the floor. 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile remained for one moment frozen 
 at the abrupt debacle effect of her morning's campaign, 
 her thoughts leaping naturally to Mr. Clark, discarding 
 him for this kind of emergency and leaping on to Elise, 
 whom she knew to be undeniably excellent for sick people 
 after Elise had made them sick, and then, as it was not 
 Elise who had made the countess sick, on again by asso- 
 ciation of ideas to the fallen peeress's own starched maid, 
 the logical first aid now ; and she sped gazelle-like in that 
 aid's direction. 
 
 Together they bestowed the golden head on a hand-
 
 362 The Great Way 
 
 painted pillow, and together undertook further ministra- 
 tions, some from bottles, Wanda guilefully omitting any 
 mention of cause of disaster, and skilfully filling her share 
 of the conversation with exclamatory sorrow for its oc- 
 currence, and on her part Margot her new comrade's 
 name the while she sponged her mistress as busily 
 soothed their visitor, assuring her that this had been 
 known to happen, though in her own experience, to be 
 sure, only once before, and that upon Madame la Com- 
 tesse's receipt of the news of Ladislas's marriage. And 
 despite their sad occupation, Wanda could not help not- 
 ing how further reminiscent of Elise this Margot was, for 
 whereas Elise was so monosyllabic and Margot so pre- 
 eminently the reverse, the diction of this Margot, written 
 down, would have served Elise with a worthy successor 
 to "A Modest Passion." 
 
 Ladislas, it seemed, was the Count, Madame la Com- 
 tesse's son, in the Consular Service of his country, with 
 a history of notable appointments including Madrid, until 
 his marriage, when, or scandalously shortly after when, 
 he had been sent to batten on the moors (Margot evidently 
 assumed they were Moors) of Guatemala, and kindred 
 districts from some one of which the parakeets had been 
 sent to the countess, a tender but a tactless present, 
 pointing out as it did some jungular and noisesome neigh- 
 bourhood to the countess's already over-sensitive vision, 
 which however had but made the parakeets the dearer to 
 the sweet, pure, maternal countess. Wonderful, ever won- 
 derful to Margot the fruits and fair flowers of maternal 
 love. As for Ladislas, he, a splendid diplomat, had yet 
 been slow to learn the statute of his personal limitations, 
 and on the presumptive strength of his title had over- 
 shot for an American fortune, starting with Mathilde 
 Morris, and when she would none of him, taking, foolish- 
 virgin-wise, an interval at the joys of bachelorhood again 
 before trying for Marjorie Temple, who at the period 
 when he tried for Mathilde, would unquestionably have 
 *eized gladly upon him, and so on and so on, always just a
 
 Contrition 363 
 
 rung too high for his contemporary age and novelty, until, 
 when he was finally actually pushed in the face by Jasmine 
 Nussbaum of Los Angeles, he had reverted to Paris and 
 fallen upon evil days and worse nights in the form of one 
 Fifi, of the Moulin Rouge. Not that Ladislas was a dis- 
 solute count quite the contrary; so that even so, in 
 Margot's opinion, all might have yet been well, but for 
 his very act of honourably marrying Fifi ; for it was his 
 carrying Fifi about with him as a countess that had got 
 him hastened from Madrid to Guatemala ; while as for the 
 real countess, although, pure, lovely lady as she was, she 
 has disapproved of Fifi from the start, it was only upon 
 learning of the holy wedlock that she had passed into a 
 swoon, and Margot thus reassured Madame de 1'Etoile 
 once more as to the present misfortune not so quietly, 
 that other time, either, but after a scream that pierced 
 the Great White Throne of Heaven. Quite likely this 
 present less important swoon, Margot thought, consider- 
 ing the polite silence of it all and all, had come from 
 Madame de 1'Etoile having reminded her in some way of 
 Fifi. 
 
 Unflattering as this theory, quite unintentionally, 
 might be, the correct one, which Wanda after her first 
 disconcertion had grasped swiftly and fully, was in a way 
 even more so namely, the countess's conviction that she 
 was a dangerous lunatic. It was not the first time, of 
 course, that Madame de 1'Etoile had been mistaken for a 
 maniac; but the previous occasion she had purposely 
 gone to, as a matter of expediency, while this one ap- 
 peared as a likely ruin of her object. Still, her divina- 
 tion at least mapped in advance her course of behaviour 
 when the countess should revive, and the lady's uncon- 
 sciousness meantime had led to helpful knowledge of her 
 history ; and as if the chances of active battle were indeed 
 shaping in Wanda the Adventuress's favour, Margot had 
 just nicely completed serving up her delicious dish of dirt 
 when the royalty sat bolt upright, as suddenly and as 
 straight of back as if she never had collapsed supine in
 
 364 The Great Way 
 
 Morpheus's embrace, except that she was sitting on the 
 floor instead of on the chair. 
 
 Mentally, she was as yet less stable. Her memories 
 of recent events were kaleidoscopic. And discerning this, 
 Wanda swept ahead of Margot into the breach, lifted her, 
 soothed and smelling-bottled her so gracefully and ten- 
 derly as to eradicate all perturbing signs in herself of 
 dangerous mania, and even as she groped for a safe 
 subject of re-entering talk, the very happiest of chances 
 fell from Margot, who if she did not read the newspapers 
 anyhow looked at the pictures, and who now paid back 
 Wanda for her own maid's cup of newspaper poison last 
 night by innocently letting fall a reference to the lovely 
 guest being an opera singer. 
 
 And at this a second change, abrupt and revolutioniz- 
 ing as the swoon had been, came over the countess. The 
 parakeets were forgotten. So was Margot, who chastely 
 withdrew. And illuminant as had been the genre tableau 
 of the night before, a swift flashing life-history was dis- 
 closed to Wanda a long, briefly told, only half-con- 
 sciously betrayed pathetic history of a woman who could 
 have sung . . . save that . . . who had wanted to 
 sing . . . save that. . . . No wonder, thought Madame 
 de 1'Etoile, as from almost no words whatever she saw 
 and understood it all, no wonder the memory-spirit of a 
 prima donna had auraed that fat little body as it sput- 
 tered its dulcet anger in the lobby. And as she felt, from 
 a little contraction in her throat, the first warning of 
 tears, she staved them away by asking the countess if she 
 would like to have her sing a little right now. 
 
 The Countess d'Orancy would; and Wanda swiftly 
 went to the piano, strolled her fingers over it for a hint 
 of its timbre, and then let her voice into "The Girls of 
 Cadiz," the first thing she always thought of for special 
 or emergency occasions. There were a little startlement 
 of the Normandy room at the measure of the golden voice, 
 a little startlement of the long-disused old instrument; 
 but presently all was atune; presently after, she had
 
 Contrition 365 
 
 slipped by similar instinct, and without interim, into 
 Debussy's "Mandoline" ... a brief heaven to Wanda, 
 anyway, always at whose end she glanced over her 
 shoulder with some question as to a choice, only to ques- 
 tion and to look no more, for sight of that little bolt-up 
 weeping countess, gazing and weeping, weeping and gaz- 
 ing,jsimply could not be borne, and music too. And she 
 stuck to music. 
 
 She sang for an hour; Trauiata so soon again, when 
 she had thought, and planned, it should be long before 
 again ; Juliette her waltz ; Caro Nome ; rambling, a very 
 Spaniard, unconscious though so intentional, wandering, 
 stopping at any shop-window of song, hither and yon, 
 anything; everything; and forgetful of everything, except 
 what she was doing, and her love of doing it. 
 
 And at the end of the hour, the countess sent her home. 
 
 She knew something about singing, this Countess 
 Paulownia ; and the remark that Margot had dropped had 
 been something about Madame de 1'Etoile having sung 
 at the Opera the night before. 
 
 "Because, you see, you will be coming again soon, 
 my dear, will you not?'* she explained as she lifted her 
 tear-swollen face for Wanda to kiss good-bye. "You 
 have promised me that, haven't you?" 
 
 Wanda promised again ; and searching her eyes, and 
 assured of it, the little up-gazing countess fetched some- 
 thing from behind her straight up-and-down little back. 
 It was the cage of birds who could not sing. 
 
 In the corridor, through a long moment exactly as 
 before she passed the door inward-bound, Wanda stood 
 collective collective in an almost guilty sense, in one 
 great particular and again with a vision of the countess 
 to dispel, but so very different a one: fully clothed, in 
 absurdly large-scaled plaid, and of piteous, tear-washed 
 enamel. But except for the moment, when she needed 
 it entirely away from her spirits, she wanted to dispel 
 it and she would very, very gradually, and through 
 many hours of that coming Paris springtime. When those
 
 366 The Great Way 
 
 birds in their exquisite conical cottage had appeared from 
 behind that Scotch plaid back, she had had an instant's 
 violent reaction, a desire to hurl her crest of battle-tide 
 in spray to the four winds; but she remembered that she 
 had had a delicately yet deeply esoteric purpose in her 
 design, a purpose with a motive of deep love in it, a 
 spiritual impulsion that carried its chivalric whimsicality 
 into the profound, to the exact measurement that it had 
 carried herself to the heights; and sheer justice itself 
 urged upon this that she now could pay for the birds as 
 nothing her barter had proffered could have done no 
 jewel of hers, or number of jewels ; while there were plenty 
 of motor cars left in the world, if her own failed, which 
 it certainly would not do, to serve for that same Printemps 
 de Paris, while that old piano, with its spinet-like voice, 
 would serve well enough too with her own voice added 
 to it ! ... 
 
 Therefore with the completion of her whirling cycle of 
 thoughts and her eyes ashine with the happy triumph of 
 her first mission-labour of this wonderful day, she pro- 
 ceeded loot-wreathed to the lift, wherein, however, she 
 said "Down!" instead of her intended "Up!", because 
 Daisy, least of all in her thoughts thus far of the morn- 
 ing though safely docketed in their background against 
 mishap, had suddenly come forward in them as near at 
 hand, there would be no time for procrastinate discussions 
 of outer emporiums, so that their luncheon of reunited 
 state must be here, and luncheon at the Normandy, for 
 such an occasion, would need garnishing. Snails, for 
 instance. . . . Quite wonderful in their eventual results, 
 if properly directed. ... (In one great love, very great 
 if not ennobling, Madame de 1'Etoile and the princess were 
 akin.) And she re-emerged in the lobby, birdcage, birds 
 and all, and unconsciously ecstatic, swam across it, like 
 a cinema-trick of last night's picture run backward 
 from lift to desk instead of desk to lift, diffusive rapture in 
 place of tabloid rage, in truth a Ravisher marvellous 
 etymology of Paulownia ! especially to any amongst the
 
 Contrition 367 
 
 onlookers who had onlooked last night, and of whom at 
 least there was one, and the only one who had fully dis- 
 enjoyed last night's film. 
 
 Wanda breathlessly accosted him. 
 
 "I am successful, Mr. Clark! I nearly sent for you, 
 but there was her maid! You did not know, of course, 
 but these are what I went for, and I have them! I can 
 never thank you ! You must see some of my public per- 
 formances but indeed, I very, very much fear you wuld 
 even more have enjoyed this one! When I proposed it, 
 she fell facewards on the floor !" 
 
 "Mr. Clark" almost fell facewards on her neck, but 
 he saved himself and her by dint of business-training 
 and an apparent listening with all this ardour to her in- 
 structions for luncheon, which in automatically reverting 
 to him afterward gave him some awful moments of doubt 
 as to his own sanity as snails crawled over his brain; 
 and Wanda, still shining-eyed, still breathless, and her 
 thoughts forwarding, while her left-over impulsion from 
 last night should serve, to the next portentous move, truly 
 a vast one in concept, of her vivid day, vanished like a 
 seraph upward, vaporosoed and bird-surrounded, to beard 
 Elise. 
 
 En route, it occurred to her that anent her spoils of 
 war there would be a very octave of emotional moments 
 for Elise first a moment musical d'exftase au clair de lime, 
 when she learned that these illgotten gains were indeed 
 Wanda's property and brought home as such, and then, 
 as soon afterward as Wanda dared and Wanda dared 
 virtually anything to-day a moment of ineffable hell 
 when she (Elise) found out that the parakeets were not to 
 live with them, and moreover, hell ghastlier yet, that she 
 (Elise) was herself to enact the gruesome role of their 
 conveyor elsewhere. 
 
 This last seemed quite a shame, even to this unscrupu- 
 lous adventuress de 1'Etoile, as she had learned, that un- 
 happy A'ida afternoon, of the psychology of the cuckoo 
 clock. And had Daisy been the designed beneficiary of
 
 368 The Great Way 
 
 these parakeets she certainly would not have chosen Elise 
 for the errand not after promising Daisy last night to 
 give her the best of her friendship and not its whimsicality. 
 It simply so happened that the deposit of those epoch- 
 making birds just where she felt they should rest in her 
 history, and the drawing of a long, repletely happy 
 breath upon the knowledge of it, required a journey some 
 yards out of France, and comprised an errand of so 
 fragile texture that she knew of no one to entrust it safely 
 and comfortably to outside her own self, unless Elise 
 Elise with that profound inner self which she knew to 
 be as accurate as the devil, and just the right spirit for 
 this purpose of angelic metal, while Wanda, quite aside 
 from not wishing to conduct the thing in person, had very 
 double duties here in Paris duties at the Opera ; duties, 
 now, with* the Peerage, that the parakeets, in the first 
 place, be properly paid for. Besides, so far as any tor- 
 turing of Elise was concerned by the necessities, the 
 whole design but led forward in thought to something of 
 far greater importance to Elise. 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile longed to be alone was longing 
 for it almost as she never had longed. She wanted 
 with the full two English flavours of the word she both 
 needed and desired the psychology of solitude. Literal 
 aloneness, instance dressing herself, even at the Opera 
 if necessary, would constitute a great percentage of such 
 psychology; while the sending of Elise upon an errand 
 of dimensions would be but an appropriate opening num- 
 ber of the Elise programme she had inspirationally pat- 
 terned. As anybody else's maid, Elise was simply un- 
 imaginable (especially as the impediment was one's own 
 fault). Elise was pretty. Elise, endowed, or less cul- 
 tivatedly put, with somebody else's wheels greased, would 
 not have to be anybody else's maid, Somebody's, if 
 anybody's, and not long at that, needing only a church 
 or so. And thereby, warned Madame de 1'Etoile's 
 thoughts in one of their racing contacts with English, 
 hung a dangerous question of the morale of words. . . .
 
 Contrition 369 
 
 But rapidly as ran her thoughts to-day, the lift had not 
 been entirely idle, either, and she was facing her own 
 door and the first of those prophesied moments. 
 
 There it was, that moment, inside, as if expecting her, 
 and she had not overprophesied, for so was the moon- 
 light there, and not from the rue de 1'Echelle, either, nor 
 from the Place Royale, but from Elise, as should have 
 been, Vextase and all, the clair streaming from her not 
 in great vulgar spikes, as from the sun, but in great 
 oblong beams, as from the lune, and in which sat Watteau 
 and Boucher and Fragonard painting fans, whilst, amidst, 
 Elise appeared as Rachel, Lecouvreur, Bernhardt and 
 Duse in their rarest role, that of the cuckoo of Paradise 
 clock, darting in and out of herself over Madame de 
 1'Etoile's, nee the Comtesse d'Orancy's parakeets. 
 
 When sunlight had been restored, and the parakeets 
 hung in it, and their luncheon been prepared, and Wanda 
 prepared for hers, this comprising a redisposal of jewel- 
 ry and a slight softening of hair, and the two of them, 
 she and Elise, against the imminent Daisy hour of one, 
 having got to a rather pretty task, that of composing 
 a nosegay for Daisy out of last night's bouquets (Elise, 
 so consistently consonant with people who do not like 
 people, being so rather sweet and nice about flowers too), 
 Wanda, stems in hand and piles of fallen blooms around 
 her, came at that same planned bearding of Elise and 
 not without recurrent thought, considering her chosen 
 subject, of the hidden dangers of the fascinating English 
 tongue. 
 
 The thing that between them they were planning for 
 Daisy somehow Wanda took a gladness from thinking 
 Daisy also, who had not been there, would yet share 
 partially in that wonderful last night was a quite lovely 
 thing, some of the orchids having lasted so, despite their 
 tossing, and the great rare camellias proffering flawless 
 instances, and it was with their four hands doing together 
 a moderate-sized miracle of tasteful loveliness with a big
 
 370 The Great Way 
 
 beautiful hunk of brocade ribbon, that Wanda popped 
 her all vital question to Elise. 
 
 She did it in fairly straightway fashion, and without 
 special danger on that account, Elise knowing her oral 
 methods so well, and she so -well knowing Elise's laconic 
 mentality. It was merely the size and nature of this 
 particular subject, with its avenues for inference and 
 ramification, that had given her as much pause as it had, 
 and that gave her as much circumlocution as it did. 
 
 "Elise," she said, "I earn my living, and so do you. 
 I am an opera singer, and you are not. One must con- 
 sider the future. Mine is cared for, with a little over. 
 Otherwise, such matters are serious. Elise, have you 
 ever thought of marrying?" 
 
 "Yes, Madame. I was married yesterday," said Elise. 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile was, in truth, not a "sheister 
 philosopher." She did not, upon receipt of this matri- 
 monial news, give a scream that would have pierced the 
 Great White Throne of Heaven. Her wisdom-seeking 
 had been of a genuine kind that had taught her the 
 capability, as well as the value, of silence upon certain 
 very great surprises, and instead of thus shaking the Lord 
 and the Normandy to their foundations, she went on 
 tying the beautiful brocade bow on the Princess Daisy's 
 nosegay with an outward calm of such duration that 
 Elise's marriage seemed to have passed over with the 
 quietness of an angel or a liaison, until she said: 
 
 "As soon as my so important engagements get over 
 with, we must discuss an agreeable wedding-gift for you, 
 Elise. Meantime, you might think up some points about 
 your husband that would be helpful to mention." 
 
 "Yes, Madame," said Elise. 
 
 "But," continued Madame, quite as if buoyed onward by 
 this excellent answer, "one thing we might settle at once, 
 for it is something I had already planned for you, and 
 it fortunately seems to fit even better as things are. I 
 want you, Elise, to take a trip into Spain for me, to to 
 carry those, parakeets where they really belong, which is
 
 Contrition 371 
 
 a little town in the Pyrenean foothills some journey out 
 of Barcelona. It is very important to some of my per- 
 sonal feelings that they should safely go there, to a friend 
 who was once my hostess long ago, and with a discreet, 
 quite discreet, message of my love and welfare to her, and 
 to the priest of the town. I know you will remember 
 all this, though I will repeat it leisurely. But I would 
 like the main of it from my mind now that this pretty 
 friend of mine, whose little trained birds you will enjoy, 
 Elise, is to know I have not forgotten my love to her, 
 and that it is shown in these birds which meant much to 
 me in a great moment of my life that she would have un- 
 derstood and sympathized with. Her very name, by the 
 way, is 'Sympathetic One.' And to do this rightly for 
 me, I have no no friend, Elise, but you none to be so 
 trusted as you with such birds, not to mention some 
 money in form of jewels that I will send to the padre for 
 his church purposes. Naturally, with the Opera I cannot 
 spare myself to such a trip. And now it would greatly 
 please me in addition, to think it would comprise a pretty 
 wedding-journey for you and your husband. I suppose 
 we may consider so much 'settled,' Elise?" 
 
 "We were going to the Lake of Como, Madame, but 
 I will ask my husband," said Elise. 
 
 Philosophic calm was but briefly needed here, for the 
 telephone announced Daisy happily, for snails, despite 
 their reputation, must not be kept waiting, and Daisy 
 was already late; not by intention, truly, on this im- 
 portant occasion, but because she had come by the rue de 
 la Paix, that glittering monster so conveniently situ- 
 ated to corrupt such persons of weak character as happen 
 to live at the Richelieu and call upon friends at the Nor- 
 mandy. 
 
 And Wanda hastened down to find her at the desk, 
 with a large burden of foolish presents piled on it for 
 her, all of which could be, it seemed (and would be), 
 exchanged a harbinger of a spring busy with talk, jour- 
 neys and ramifications; and with these and the glorious
 
 372 The Great Way 
 
 nosegay and a volume of greetings exchanged, they pro- 
 ceeded gorgeously weighted to the luncheon-room, Wanda 
 not forgetting to leave over her shoulder a climactically 
 head-spinning smile for Mr. Clark, who stood gazing 
 dazedly after this miracle-woman who was one minute 
 bedecked with bunches of feathers plucked living and by 
 force from countesses, and the next with orchids and 
 camellias that she hung on princesses, before sallying 
 onward to eat snails ! He had hoped doubtfully, be- 
 wilderedly, that the snails were to be for the parakeets. 
 But no. She was not wearing them for lunch. Perhaps 
 she had eaten them. And what had she done to her hair? 
 Why was she several times as beautiful each time she 
 appeared? And he gave a customer about a hundred 
 pounds' worth of rooms for a hundred francs. 
 
 Perhaps just the day itself, continuance of the night, 
 was doing that deed of climbing beauty in Wanda; mak- 
 ing all the golden hay it could out of her before weari- 
 ness could set in ; for even the luncheon had its added 
 wine-glass and literally, for it comprised the happy acci- 
 dent that the Countess d'Orancy happened to be lunch- 
 ing thus publicly this morning, too, and with one fell 
 swoop of mood Madame de 1'Etoile waved clattering 
 aside not only Peerage stately etiquette but all Daisy- 
 dangers of female contretemps, and plunged the two titles 
 together. A great running of garfons, forth and back 
 and to and fro, took place. The countess, too, loved 
 snails. And too, the princess and the countess loved each 
 other. Mood ! . . . Faith can move mountains. . . . 
 Mood, put in practice, might move chewing-gun. . . . 
 
 And returned, and alone, to Elise again, just rightly 
 before four with a neat margin for achieving a street- 
 gown, one further piece of news worked rightly with 
 Wanda for her day. 
 
 "My husband will be very pleased to go to Spain, 
 Madame," said Elise. 
 
 "Thanks, Elise," said Wanda. 
 
 And somewhat later, as the out-of-doors costume
 
 Contrition 373 
 
 neared its soft little hat, Elise, ordained to help the day 
 along toward uniquity, spoke again, and thus soon after 
 a most indefinite appointment to do so. 
 
 "I can think of nothing of importance to tell you 
 about my husband, Madame except that he has a very 
 fine position." 
 
 "Ah?" said Wanda, genuinely glad. "And and what 
 kind of position, Elise?" 
 
 "I meant social position, Madame," said Elise. 
 
 "You you will wish, Elise," said Wanda after a mo- 
 ment's pause, and herself wishing to reach some satis- 
 fied balance in the circumstances, "now that you are are 
 Ms maid if you still are instead of still mine, to be 
 making your plans for your home, and so on. And I hope 
 it will be at some convenient world-centre where I might 
 reach you in some sudden need of mine. You see, I will 
 have no maid at all for a period for it will probably be 
 a long time before I come across anyone exactly like 
 you." 
 
 "My husband will decide where we shall live when we 
 return from Spain, Madame," said Elise. 
 
 Again the telephone, this time precise with the hour 
 as if it had been a cuckoo, saved Wanda from thoughts 
 of profound philosophy, and plunged her to profounder, 
 in whose extremes she was fully at home; and again 
 the lobby and a conspicuous friend claimed her again 
 the desk, indeed, for it was here that the mixed per- 
 fumes of cigarettes and Lovers' Kisses Soap would have 
 guided her even if she had been blinded by the accom- 
 panying glare of diamonds. The centre and purveyor 
 of the fragrance and dazzle was conversing and sharing 
 his Manila cigarillos with Mr. Clark, who, fortunately 
 off duty at four o'clock sharp, was inhaling as deeply 
 as he, marvelling, and being relaxedly fortified by the 
 heavy narcotic for one more, for to-day a final, vision 
 of the wonder-woman. Yes; changed again, and instead 
 of just several times more beautiful, a hundred times, 
 with those suave touches of fur, a hundred times more
 
 374 The Great Way 
 
 'devastating, not with the smile, which he was nervously 
 prepared for, but with her articulation of "darling 1 " 
 (Darling!) to this this! visitor. Visitor? Brigand? 
 Pirate ? Martian ? When he awoke, they were gone. . . . 
 
 They were gone into an awaiting vehicle, and one more- 
 over that was not a horseless-carriage, forceful, mod- 
 ern, space-annihilating, but one horseful and forceless, 
 dawdling, old-Parisian ; and she leant back as if she were 
 driving through the Ramblas at home in Spain, quiet at 
 his side, quite wordless, and quaffing strength, in this 
 first moment of inevitable tiredness, from this understand- 
 ing presence of her prospective confessor. "Somewhere 
 gay" was what she had last night directed him, and she 
 wondered, now a little fearfully, whereto indeed he was 
 taking her. And soon, almost with a little choke for 
 her at this fresh lesson against fear of any kind where 
 there is love, and in iteration of the constant wonder of 
 this being's divination, she found themselves, after a 
 clumping jog through the dear Gauche of old Paris, in a 
 desertedly quiet little restaurant near the Luxembourg; 
 in the Quartier; not quite of it. And without consulting 
 her, of the one stork-like waiter in sight he ordered, in 
 an Esperanto-polyglot pronunciation that was planet* 
 away from French, but a voice that not the Frenchest 
 of waiters upon foreigners would have dared to pretend to 
 misunderstand, 
 
 "Ab-sm-ty!" 
 
 Through the life-and-mood-giving pearl seep of it 
 through her body, thoughts, easier and easier thoughts, 
 came to her for her confessional; but preventive of all 
 their initial articulate need came from him as the jog' 
 trot vehicle and the restorative absinthe had come, in 
 one sudden, commanding demand from him across the 
 table in the instant when he found her revivant eyes 
 rightly ashine: 
 
 "Tell you me this instantly: 7* all this because you 
 marry him, or because you do not?" 
 
 Never before had Arnold, in such a light, been spoken
 
 Contrition 375 
 
 between them, and with tears in the brightened eyes, happy 
 tears at the ease of it all now, she looked fully at him 
 and said simply: 
 
 "Darling, it is because I do not." 
 
 And even after what soul-reading had just been 
 shown, even she, for all her own soul-reading of him, was 
 startled by the joy-cry that leapt from him. 
 
 "Then you are yourself again!" was the cry. "Once 
 more, you are de 1'Etoile, the, my de 1'Etoile !" 
 
 "So," she choked, whisperingly, "you knew so well, 
 as well as that knew better than I !" 
 
 And with gradually joy-steadied voice Confession 
 grew like a rich flower of the sun out of the choking whis- 
 per and Absolution, pure as only a passion flower can 
 be pure, from the guttural words of his satisfaction, once 
 he knew that the Little Red Books were to be themselves 
 again, that his star was not to be dragged from its orbit 
 by any mere world. 
 
 Much as she had known of taking and of gift, from 
 people, and peoples, and to them, nothing in her life had 
 equalled, or approximated, in giving, in comprehension, 
 in selflessness, this, since that Cadiz day, since that thing 
 of Sacrament to which Sacrament now returned, reor- 
 dained her . . . since Isabel. 
 
 "Understanding ... what a thing it is ! Understand- 
 ing . . . what a thing, what a word!" she said over and 
 over to herself; and aloud: "All I need, now, after 
 your telling me, confirming me, darling, that I ha$ been 
 wrong, that now I am right, is a word no, a name; 
 a name for the place the space that was wrong in the 
 Gran Via, now that I have passed it. I had a flash of 
 it flashes last night. I promised myself I would track 
 it to its hiding-place to-day. And what with parakeets, 
 and Elise, and titled persons, I have failed as yet!" 
 
 And her eyes had taken on, though so happily, so 
 almost peacefully, their seeking look. 
 
 "Whimsie!" he cried, dictatorially. ''Word? Name? 
 Nothing else but whimsie! You do not need any word!
 
 376 The Great Way 
 
 You do not need any name, except de 1'Etoile! It is 
 enough that this business of paint is over with! Paint, 
 paint ! It was not you, it was your life you were allowing 
 to be painted!" 
 
 And this time, it was from her that a startling cry 
 came. 
 
 "I have it !" her cry was. "Your words, upon a word 
 and thoughts of mine last night, have brought it to me! 
 Sophistication. . . . Quicksand. . . . Desert. . . . Make- 
 up and paint. . . . Yes, that part of my life and all that 
 it meant, the worldliness, the easiness, yes, and empti- 
 ness, all of the comfort and none of the pain of Art . . . 
 are named for me now, and for my Great Way, forever. 
 And strangely, there is such a place, with just that 
 name, in America, where so much of it grew toward over- 
 coming me. . . . Yes, all of real life I was bringing to 
 the Opera, putting into my voice, my acting, my stage 
 portraits, and all the paint, all the canvas and emptiness 
 of the Opera's great stages, I was turning into my life. 
 So that that life, though I did not know it, was all a 
 desert, and a painted one! Darling, that part of my 
 Gran Via was the Painted Desert!" 
 
 "And the next part," he said, prompt, advantage-tak- 
 ing, "is London" 
 
 "Ah!" And with the instinctive exclamation, hand- 
 outward a little forefending gesture escaped her even in 
 her glow, even in the wonder of the day's flawless conduct 
 of her renaissance. 
 
 Undeviating, he ignored it with calm assumption, with, 
 too, a certain suspicious demand: 
 "What will you sing there?" 
 
 A certain mist came into her eyes, but it was a peace" 
 ful mist, not a groping one. 
 
 "I do not know. What does it matter?" 
 "It matters only torment, that you could end at once! 
 Whimsie! But I will allow you whimsie, only knowing 
 that you go. You go to London?" 
 "Yes, I go to London."
 
 Contrition 377 
 
 "Ah!" And again, his this time, the word was in- 
 stinctive, again his voice had been a guttural cry; and 
 prepared for her, prepared like Nemesis, he drew a big 
 thick folded paper from his pocket, along with a bigger, 
 a thicker pen, a fountain-pen, a pen so childishly large 
 that it looked as if it had been made by man, as God 
 made the camel, to cross successfully and come triumph- 
 antly out of any desert in the world. 
 
 But she was young in her wonderful renaissance, in- 
 deed, less than twenty-four hours old in it, as yet, and 
 from such actuality as this she shrank back. 
 
 "Ah, darling," she cried, "that, I cannot, no, must 
 not, do to-day ! Not to-day ! Let me feel myself, let me 
 know, a little more strongly first ! I promise, yes, I 
 promise, that I will go. But when? Possibly then, ac- 
 cording that paper. But even for that, there are some 
 weeks* time yet ! Give me a little, long free breath of 
 Paris springtime!" 
 
 He gazed at her a moment ; then, as of old days four- 
 hundred-year-old days he said: 
 
 "7 can trust you" 
 
 "Yes," she answered, "you can now trust me, darling, 
 fully. Fully, now that I have left behind me forever 
 that Painted Desert!"
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 PASEAE 
 
 ELISE left for Spain, and the Pyrenean foothills; left 
 from the Quai d'Orsay, on a pretty day, golden, flowery, 
 that seemed to say, "Printemps de Paris!" . . . left sur- 
 rounded by well-wishers, luxuries, luggage. Parakeets. 
 Presents. Printemps de Paris. Wanda was there. Daisy 
 was there. The Countess d'Orancy was there. Arnold 
 was there. Mary Rutgers, and Margot, and Mary Rut- 
 gers's fiance were there. Mr. Clark was not there. He 
 saw them leave leave the hotel. And all the rest saw 
 Elise leave leave for Spain. Printemps de Paris. Daisy 
 gave her a great many of the presents. One of the pres- 
 ents was a clock. It could not tell the time, but it could 
 yell. It had a pink magpie in it. Daisy nearly kept 
 it. Daisy cried, when Elise left for Spain. Printemps 
 de Paris. And, oh Madame de PEtoile afterward re- 
 membered Elise's husband left for Spain, and the Pyre- 
 nean foothills. If Elise had not been bearded, she had 
 anyhow been moustached and waxed; yes, Madame de 
 PEtoile was quite sure she had seen a waxed moustache 
 somewhere, through the bars of a birdcage. Printemps 
 de Paris. 
 
 With this festooned episode at the Quai d'Orsay, the 
 longed-for psychology of solitude was officially instituted 
 for Madame de 1'Etoile, and her Paris Springtime proved 
 itself a succession of golden days, silvery nights, for 
 which she sought, and swiftly found, a convenient and 
 pretty christening-term, and one again that if not deep- 
 dyed of actual churchly hue, was of religio-sesthetic tints : 
 she called this time of her richer and richer glowing renais" 
 
 378
 
 Pasear 379 
 
 sancfc her "Miracle of Jewels" ; with Faith that its spring- 
 tide growths and discoveries would prove beautiful stones, 
 at least some of them gems, and all of them precious; 
 and with Faith replying to her. 
 
 One gem indeed came gradually there into place in the 
 golden day-links, for it was painted truly, surely as if 
 carven her portrait, Arnold's portrait, of her great 
 Wayward One, now his ; and afterward, the great world's, 
 as hers already was, and more lasting, materially, than 
 hers, for as his portrait of her as a Lady hangs in the 
 Metropolitan, this hangs in the Luxembourg, patiently 
 waiting, or else impatiently, however may be with an 
 inanimate thing as living and as seemingly full of soul as 
 this, for Arnold's death, and the moment, ten years after 
 that sad incident, when it can go to live more fully in 
 the Louvre. But of purer gem colour to Wanda than 
 such future likelihoods, was the gradual painting out 
 from his handsome face a certain look that had lived 
 there since her great wayward night . . . and the equally 
 subtle, quite unconscious painting in of a less sorrowful, 
 a contented, yes, even a happier tint. . . . Printemps 
 de Paris ! . . . 
 
 She saw much of Daisy. A delightful "mucho"; for, 
 as the little princess's erstwhile pique had led her flounc- 
 ingly to take out a lease of that Richelieu royal suite 
 seemingly for miniature royalty and a place perfectly 
 appropriate for Daisy or ivory chessfolk to dwell in 
 Wanda was neither "domesticked" nor "domestuck" with 
 her. And the rue de la Paix's monstrous demands upon 
 them were a sort of pleasant stimulant-narcotic to Wanda 
 instead of an exhaustive. 
 
 But most of all perhaps, and anyway with greatest 
 tenderness, her hours other than those of her studies and 
 the Opera went to Paulownia: Countess no more, Pau- 
 lownia now only in part specifically, Paula. She knew 
 what that tree was like, if Wanda did not, and would 
 not be known by it, even in the spring, except in legal 
 documents. Rotund, enamelled little Paula, then. Drives
 
 380 The Great Way 
 
 and music, music, motor-drives and music ; and this bit of 
 the botany, scarcely thought of as Peerage Department 
 now, grew tight like a morning-glory around the diva's 
 heartstrings. There was an ample space of such strings 
 for a vine-flower of propinquity to climb upon and curl 
 around, so aptly after the close, brief nearness of Dona 
 Rina green, a bit sadly green in her Paris Springtime 
 thoughts, right as it all was, that little story, rightly as 
 it all must eventuate, only pensive, not quite unhappy, 
 even now, as the loved heroine of it, so far away, bravely 
 climbed her own ladder, and so doing, was paid by life in 
 the very fact of her paying it. But it was well, it was 
 a glad thing, to have warmth near-by too, right here in 
 the little Street of the Ladder itself. And somehow, it 
 was largely aside from the parakeets and their spiritual 
 obligation that Wanda's affection grew so sturdy; some- 
 how, it was around thoughts, ever current and recurrent 
 thoughts, of Ladislas, and the Heaven's-Throne-rending 
 little tale of that son which so piteously haloed her sweet, 
 lonely little Paula. How was it the young and espe- 
 cially the middle-aged young! so disregarded the old, 
 and most especially, the old and fat? Was that simply 
 life thus showing life to be nothing else but death? . . . 
 She could not find it in her to blame Fifi overmuch. She 
 remembered that herself had been an artista. . . . And 
 the thought led her on to think, too, of herself in rela- 
 tion to the old to parents and of what had been said 
 to her of that in the dancing streets, the old dancing 
 streets, of old Sevilla. . . . 
 
 But such thoughts, though of such indeed are rosaries 
 and renaissances made, she would not greatly allow her- 
 self, and for the right colouring of her springtime jewel- 
 string (and "rosary" she let herself call it now, instead 
 of mere "miracle," as a present for herself, to pay back 
 for that one sad thought) she gave herself, withal her 
 pensiveness of peaceful philosophy, to things of gaiety 
 parties even. Parties of Arnold, and Daisy, and Paula, 
 and Mary Rutgers, and Mary's fiance (marvelling par-
 
 Pasear 381 
 
 ticularly at how the princess and the countess continued 
 to love each other! Or rather, at the princess's con- 
 tinuing love of the countess. Could titles have to do with 
 love? Alas, the mere little "Dona" had been a large pre- 
 cipitant of the reverse "catastroaf" in Nueva York!). 
 So that on her great and indeed growingly greater 
 Opera nights, Wanda's whole Botany-Peerage would 
 bloom in one box together as if on the window-sill of 
 a king's tenement, for all the world to see ... a large, 
 lovable dot in itself on the furthering miracle-string of 
 that rosary of jewels. 
 
 And in herself a rose, by hint of texture and by virile 
 sweetness, Mary Rutgers proved, and it was that im- 
 pression that Wanda secured, and lastingly held, as to the 
 whole of Mary and of Mary's placidly pretty love-match ; 
 and exclusively, for distinct portraiture of its hero 
 Wanda somehow did not memorably achieve. A handsome 
 young man, as heroes go, and ought to go. A type. Yes, 
 that was it, a type, for though he was not English, he 
 would suggest to her, at the festivities at which they 
 mingled, the desk clerk of the hotel and then stop, 
 abruptly stop, suggesting further, so that Wanda, in her 
 chance after-thoughts of him away from him, could never 
 rightly diffuse him from "Mr. Clark," although one was 
 very brune and the other very blond. But which? And 
 which one's collar was it that did not go the same way? 
 So that indeed, driving with Paula in the Bois she bowed 
 to Mr. Clark so very deeply one afternoon that Paula 
 by reflex action bowed quite deeply too, and Mr. Clark, 
 thus put upon by Fate, spent a sleepless night on Wan- 
 da's account thereafter, while Wanda spent an equally 
 sleepless night on his, deciding and redeciding whether it 
 were ethically and duly right for her to hint to Arnold 
 that she had caught Mary's fiance in the Bois du Bou- 
 logne with a lovely ingenue who was not Mary ; and with 
 pitiless daylight felt indeed she must, despite her own 
 conscience-strickening past life, until Paula said to her, 
 after some hesitation, at breakfast :
 
 382 The Great Way 
 
 "You look tired, dear, as if you hadn't slept well, so 
 I specially oughtn't to say anything un-good-looking : 
 But, dear, / have had a perfectly sleepless night, and it's 
 best sooner than later to tell you why. And with all 
 your kind-hearted notions about comradeship, and Span- 
 ish democracy, and so on, I really feel, sweetheart, that 
 you shouldn't have bowed quite so elaborately to that 
 saucy desk clerk in the Bois yesterday. Here in the 
 hotel, darling, it is none of my affair how much you 
 break his heart. That is one of the casualties of his 
 unhappy business position, and he must go through it. 
 But it's literally unscrupulous of you, Wanda darling, 
 to dazzle him blind in the street, and wouldn't be a bit 
 like you if you stopped to think." 
 
 Wanda did stop to think, tea-cup in air, and after 
 a long moment of dazed silence, said: 
 
 "Yes. You are quite right. That was a great mis- 
 take of mine in the Bois. I must be much more cau- 
 tious !" 
 
 Thus the nights passed not sleepless all of them, 
 happily . . . and the days happily sleepless all of 
 them, with the early-birding of this Paula and that 
 Wanda, with their positively parakeet love of sunshine 
 . . . for the song-bird, in happy trivialities, and in one 
 great significance: the growth as on truly a sparkling 
 rosary-string of her Miracle of Jewels. 
 
 And then, not with a trumpet-cry at dawn, but cas- 
 ually in manner, as even the richest days will do, came a 
 day that was the jewel-day of all, one that in its gar- 
 nering for her of pure stones might well form the happy, 
 un-Golgothasd symbol, if such could be on any rosary, 
 to be the carven-gemmed pendant of the chain. 
 
 It was at a time when the swiftly sure portrait was 
 assured, where accident short of death could but with 
 difficulty injure its creation, and interruption be but of 
 petty good or harm ; and eager, unusually so because the 
 day held no other plan of specialized enjoyment, she went
 
 Pasear 383 
 
 for her appointed time to Arnold's beautiful studio ; and 
 she did not sit that day. 
 
 Something withheld her from the actual threshold. 
 Withheld her, guardian angel-like. It was voices ; rather, 
 one voice, it seemed, but one that certainly was not 
 talking to itself, and moreover seemed not even quite itself 
 for it was dramatic, while it was Arnold's voice. Arno 
 dramatic ! . . . Thought of contretemps, in a feministic 
 sense, would not have held her back, for that was be- 
 yond all thinking. Guardian angel, then ; and as the door 
 was welcomingly open, she listened. And Arnold's voice 
 went on went dramatically on ; and there was a sob, a 
 sob from another voice. A royal voice ; a refined, a royal 
 sob. Somehow, in the dramatic words which had caused 
 it, there was something familiar, as if known before, 
 but not heard. And suddenly, she knew; and knew, too, 
 that Arnold had forgotten her appointment. This indeed 
 was miracle, a jewel miracle. Arnold was doing something 
 he had proffered to do to do in her behalf long ago : 
 he was reading "Jacquot-Jacquette" aloud, aloud to a 
 Little Princess. Yes, he was chewing away bit by bit, 
 as she, thus aided, was swallowing whole, the last, the 
 very last, of those Edenesque and history-making apples. 
 Wanda knew that they were nearly gone ; knew that quite 
 presently, in a very few seconds more, there was a clas- 
 sical, a climactic sentence, a sentence epoch-suggesting 
 in potentiality, probably as really great a sentence as 
 any in the whole fifty chapters of "Les Pommes de Jac- 
 quot-Jacquette." That sentence was on the very last 
 page, and that sentence was: 
 
 "Jacques! Jacquot! Jacquetie! Jacquot-Jacquette!" 
 
 Printemps de Paris. 
 
 And Wanda fled; a quiet, a happy, heart-filled flight; 
 fled to Paula, not to talk, but to express to tell just 
 "I am happy!" that she was happy from the fullness 
 of friendship that is not whimsical. 
 
 Through her brief journey back to the Normandy, her 
 one thought of want, of want that seemed unlikely of
 
 384 The Great Way 
 
 fulfilment, was of Paula herself, a longing that there might 
 be some wonderful bit of happiness for little Paula that 
 was not just a voice, or Bois-panorama?d motor-cars, or, 
 as so selfishly to-day, a share of news of somebody else's 
 happiness, such as her own this minute. And she almost 
 wondered if she ought, as she longed, to burst in upon 
 her with those words "I am happy !" and she was not 
 allowed to, for though burst in she did, it was to an 
 outburst from Paula: 
 
 "Oh, Wanda, Wanda, I'm so happy! Wanda, Fifi's 
 dead ! Fifi's dead ! Oh, Wanda, Fifi's dead ! Oh, Wanda, 
 Wanda, Wanda !" 
 
 Fifi was dead, there was no doubt about that. For 
 a voluminous letter was in Paula's hand, and largely in 
 the air, waving; and any reflection in Wanda's mind of 
 generalizing sadness that death, death to anyone in the 
 world, and especially to any artista, could be, as it so 
 legitimately could, a matter of complete, rapturous happi- 
 ness to any soul as entirely sweet as the one glowing 
 through its enamel before her, was wiped from thought 
 by Paula's next volatile, staccato, breathless and breath- 
 taking announcement: 
 
 "Ladislas of course has gone in mourning, and perhaps 
 Central America has too though I doubt it but the 
 Consulate hasn't, we can be sure of that, and I'm going 
 out to buy a red dress to wear ! I've never worn a red 
 dress in my life and didn't suppose anything could ever 
 induce me to, but I'm going to wear one down to dinner 
 to-night, the reddest dress in Paris ! And you must go 
 with me, darling, for your eyes are better than mine, 
 and we must be sure we pick out the brightest one! Oh, 
 Fifi'g dead!" 
 
 And she disappeared to dress in plaid for the parade 
 after the funeral garment, and promptly appeared Mar- 
 got, taking her place and neglecting her to her task, 
 with a double excuse to partake of a double joy: the 
 joy of even a glimpse of Madame de 1'Etoile, who had 
 enraptured her life by having her several times in her
 
 Pasear 385 
 
 dressing-room at the Opera to "assist" at the miracle of 
 toileting an actual opera-singer; and the joy of rehears- 
 ing to her this Central American sensation. 
 
 Fifi certainly was dead. She had died in agony, the 
 most awful agony, following convulsions. The Wages 
 of Sin had been paid like a great thunderbolt rolling from 
 the blue floor of heaven. She had been bitten by a Gila- 
 Monster. If aid does not come promptly after the Gila- 
 Monster, there is no hope. God had meant it, for the 
 Gila-Monster is not Central American and no precau- 
 tions had been taken against one biting Fifi. And yet 
 one had come all the way from the neighbourhood of 
 the Rio Grande and bitten her. Bitten her all over. 
 And when aid had come, she was screaming but could not 
 speak, for she was having convulsions. She had convul- 
 sion after convulsion. And when she was dead, she had 
 turned black, black from head to foot. That was how 
 it was known to have been a Gila-Monster, although it 
 had got away, and bitten no one else in Central America. 
 So God had meant it, meant that Fifi should die, and 
 turn black, black for people to see, as black outside as 
 she had been within. Not to mention what a fix in which 
 to be shown up before the Great White Throne. Fifi was 
 dead. Printemps de Paris. Dead as a door-nail, and 
 black from head to foot. 
 
 Indeed, Madame de 1'Etoile was not sorry to turn, 
 herself, from black to brightest red, in company with 
 Paula. And forth they went, and bought a brighter red 
 than any Wanda had ever seen outside an arena; and 
 as fortunately it could not be got fixed for Paula's round 
 figure to wear forthright out of the shop, so that she 
 likely would set fire to only the inside of the hotel, Wanda 
 proposed and put into effect a rambling journey, remi- 
 niscent tenderly of her meanderings from dresses to Beer- 
 sheba with Dona Rina glowingly rejoicing in her pres- 
 ent friend's touching, strange big happiness, glowingly 
 rejoicing in her own starting down the Avenue de 
 1'Opera, and stopping indolently here and yon. A book-
 
 386 The Great Way 
 
 store lured her. It was the shop where she and Doiia 
 Rina had discovered the Valse Brume a music-shop she 
 had then thought, a book-shop, and a famous one, she 
 now knew. And within, something still new in gladness, 
 wonderful gladness, was await for her. She had little 
 love of the basic colour red . . . except in little books. 
 And a little red book among new, imported springtime 
 products, called here to her eyes and then her fingers. 
 It was a fair little volume of reminiscence, essayesque, 
 modestly personal. A transient-looking, casual little 
 book. But her eyes widened, her heart bounded. "By 
 Rina Rugg" it said. Almost, tears were in her eyes.. 
 And then, when she had turned a page, they were in her 
 eyes, swiftly were on her cheeks. For, "To Wanda" it 
 had further said. And that was all there was of dedica- 
 tion ... so like Dona Rina ; no hint of the past with 
 a poignant name unknown to the world ; no culling of the 
 little prestige of the "de 1'Etoile" that was so known 
 to it. ... 
 
 Paula did not ask why she was crying, but she told 
 her; and into the sunshine of this wonderful day the two 
 went forth again, each with a little red book . . . each 
 with many little red books, as many as was wise and 
 profitable to take away from the present supply, to show 
 and to talk about to all the noteworthies they knew. . . . 
 
 They paused again near-to, for Wanda to send a cable- 
 gram to a distant friend whose happiness meant heart- 
 overrunning happiness to herself . . . this jewelled day 
 ... a long, a spendthrift's cablegram, with several dif- 
 ferent times "darling Rina" in it. ... 
 
 And then, again at Wanda's request, on they went 
 across Paris, into the Cite, and down through the bridge, 
 down, into the little Garden of the Gallant Green, and 
 Wanda sat once more and once more with a loved friend, 
 too between the silver streamers of the Seine divided by 
 it, and under the accumulating lavender of the sunset. 
 . . . Overhead, too, the giant corpuscles of the city life- 
 blood glowed by in the bridging artery from hand to hand
 
 Pasear 387 
 
 of Paris . . . from the right hand to the left hand, from 
 the left hand to the right. . . . 
 
 With the coming of real dusk, she dispatched Paula 
 home, in a car that would hasten against that red robing 
 for a Normandy dinner ; and herself went afoot, leisurely, 
 between the long wonderful lines of twinkling lights, up 
 through the city, along that splendid great stretching 
 continuance of the Boul "-Miche," the Boulevard de Se- 
 bastopol, happily, anticipatingly as she had gone that 
 Seventh Day from Mont Juich round about through the 
 Gran Via, and to a certainty, to-day, of the opposite of 
 heartbreak; into the great circling boulevards where the 
 Porte St. Martin and the Porte St. Denis neighbour 
 them and each other, and along them, past the Bonne- 
 Nouvelle, to the Poissoniere, and thence Montmartreward, 
 but not very far, for it was in a little narrow hotel in 
 the bending rue Cadet that the Maestro dwelt and smoked. 
 
 And without need of miracle to accomplish it here, she 
 went up unannounced, and threading her way by a certain 
 heavy odour of Manila, reached his room, and knocked, 
 and entered, and seated herself very quietly therein. 
 
 "Darling," she said, "I am here to tell you something, 
 but first, I am going to ask you a question, which answer 
 if you can. I wonder if you can? It is not for any spe- 
 cial reason of the moment; and it is simply this: How 
 is it that you understand me so deeply, minutely, and 
 well; by what miracle-gift is it that you do?" 
 
 He looked at her gravely, his gold-brown eye-pools 
 seeming very calm, and very deep ; and there was but 
 little pause before his answer. 
 
 "I know something of the sensitive temperament," he 
 said, simply. 
 
 After a longer pause than his, and her own eyes deep 
 with thoughtfulness, she said: 
 
 "Yes, you wovld answer very, very simply, and I sup- 
 pose that that is what it is. Yes, what you have said 
 tells all of the soul of it, though so little, so very little, of 
 the quantity! . . . And now," she added, "perhaps I am
 
 888 The Great Way 
 
 not, after all, going to tell you what I said I would, for 
 what need? You see, what I am here for to-day, a day 
 of miraculous jewels, is a thing rather to do, than to tell." 
 
 And with the golden-brown pools illuminated, but silent 
 in his joy, he unfolded and placed the great thick paper, 
 unscrewed and placed the greater, thicker pen, before 
 her. And save for the scratching of this great pen, it 
 was in a replete silence, a silence of happiness, full and 
 daring happiness, that she at last signatuied the por- 
 tentous paper with the one great word: 
 
 de I'Etoile.
 
 BOOK IV 
 THROUGH THE BAD VALLEY 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 THE NIGHT AND THE NIGHTINGALE 
 
 ENGLAND! 
 
 It was a written word, yet a word ejaculated, as if 
 vocally, as if the flowing, reckless ink of it were a means 
 to ecstasy as worthy, as easy, as articulation itself. 
 
 England! 
 
 Again with the black silence of night it noised itself 
 abroad upon the white paper, with again large, free- 
 handed letters despite the shocked marginal boundaries of 
 a little red-leather-covered book; with again a great as- 
 tonishment-mark, as if England were indeed a thing to be 
 astonished at no matter what the cost of such wide-eyed- 
 ness and open-mouthedness of handwriting. 
 
 England! 
 
 Despite the rare, lovely calm of the woman who wrote, 
 the word was like a cry; despite the white-gowned figure 
 emanating poise by its posture and deliberateness, and, 
 against it, the blackness of the big word's texture, it was 
 like a cry of thrilling joy. 
 
 It was interregnum that strange hour from the Latin 
 dictionary which seems to find its perfect gem-instances 
 only in Britain as if the insinuating forefinger of the 
 North reached out purposefully from its spoke-like hand 
 of metal-hard lights to touch and beautify the warm 
 Gulf Stream's child Civilization, so recklessly indulged 
 in on this spot. 
 
 389
 
 390 The Great Way 
 
 To-day, this hour was the twilighted gem gradually 
 fetching the night of Madame de 1'EtohVs London debut. 
 The pure white diamonds of the Thames, upheld like 
 queer stars above it, were, as if its steel-glittering move- 
 ment were indeed too rapid, sluggish as it was, for the 
 symbolical flour in it, flaring to yellowish crown-jewels 
 along the Embankment. Ready to permeate the early 
 summer night stood all the solidity, all the materialized 
 mystery of London. 
 
 And though this beautified room had necessarily closed 
 visually out the strolling parade of minutes of light and 
 minutes of shadow doomedly passing each other, and 
 turned itself brilliant with electricity, it must have but 
 the more closed in the essence of the great metropolitan 
 mood and splendour with this woman who could so ex- 
 press herself, and something more than herself, into the 
 one repeated word that she wrote: 
 
 England! 
 
 Beautified this room truly was. It was a room not 
 beautiful in itself, unless by dint of its ghosts, for it was 
 a dressing-room in Covent Garden ; lovable, perhaps, from 
 a ghost of Minnie Hauk, or perhaps from a ghost of 
 Schalchi; but suddenly now, with its loveliness of ghosts, 
 which are creatures of but woodwork and memory, made 
 beautiful too to gaze at, by the coming, with her ac- 
 coutrements arbitrary and determined as the Gulf 
 Stream's, of this breathing creature. As cheerfully and 
 recklessly as the Gulf Stream had brought humanity to 
 England, she had brought a caravan of art to Covent 
 Garden. 
 
 Walling the back of the once naked spaciousness of the 
 room drooped huge curtains of old blue colour, their 
 brocaded heaviness hinting of tapestry, and in their wide, 
 old-rose-tinted borders quite proving it. The rich rare 
 things backgrounded a grand piano of sumptuously deli- 
 cate lines, while two exquisite bouquets of dead colours 
 answered each other across the place two screens, pan- 
 elled, high, delicate, gilded-edged: one, closing away the
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 391 
 
 doorway to the room, composed of Fragonards, the other, 
 shutting likewise from view her dressing-space, a rival 
 miracle made of Watteaus; so that, through the room's 
 glow of gay loveliness, across its rich stretch of French 
 carpet, a carpet typically Parisian, black, a deep, a 
 soft black sprinkled with yellow primroses for pattern, 
 there was a constant contretemps in the very air be- 
 cause, to the languid and marvellously mannered "L'ln- 
 different" of Watteau, were flung back the Fragonard 
 "Happy Hazards of the Swing." 
 
 The three walls left to rival the rich old blue curtains 
 did so with pictures too fine copies, finely coloured, of 
 masters older, perhaps, than even the curtains indeed. 
 There were Murillos the "Betrothal of Saint Catherine," 
 of Cadiz, and the "Saint Francis of Padua"; and others, 
 such as did not tell in some or other betraying way of 
 the Peninsula, possessions of the next great temperamen- 
 tal love of their owner Louvre-possessions, here in du- 
 plicate, simple coloured prints to start with, then simply 
 varnished, and afterward again varnished, until they had 
 gained the very glow-look of oil, the very fragrance of 
 Louvre colour. 
 
 On the desk, Dresden figurines were parading with its 
 terra cotta ones, while into this mixed company had crept 
 as if for sympathy, it was so very small a tiny hand- 
 tinted copy, minutely framed in rich dull gold, as if in- 
 deed it were a very large picture, of Botticelli's "Spring." 
 
 Even a suggestion of purely social function joined in 
 the miracle-makeshift of this richly blossoming room, for 
 just at the back of the white-gowned figure at the desk 
 was a diminutive circular table, lace-drenched, silver- 
 glinting, feasible only for service of some theatrical 
 guest, or else, if for its mistress really to dine before 
 some ensuant role, undoubtedly for her to dine very much 
 as Lilli Lehmann did to sing Isolde on a drink of water 
 and a bowlful of rice. While as undoubtedly this woman 
 would have done so with all of the elegance, though cer- 
 tainly none of the cause, of the ennuied lady in the
 
 392 The Great Way 
 
 Arabian Nights who ate Her bowlful with marked grace 
 of holden prong and one grain at a time, for appear- 
 ances, because she went out (by implication against her 
 husband's rules) quietly at night to eat corpses in the 
 graveyard. 
 
 Nor were the bouquets of this room halted with either 
 this luxury or luxury of pictures, for midway between 
 the two rich spots where stood the screen of Fragonards 
 "La Cage," and "La Poursuite," and "Les Souvenirs,'* 
 and ever, as if it intended to stop, or continue, right 
 there for ever, that eternal "Les Hazards Heureux de 
 PEscarpolette," instead of going home to Hertford 
 House, and the answering screen of Watteaus "The 
 Indifferent One," and "A Masquerade," and "Perfect 
 Harmony," and a wealthy bit of detail from "The De- 
 parture for Cytheria" appeared nature herself or her 
 representative as in a visiting-card, for the piano was 
 piled high with luxuriant examples of alive flowers, a soft 
 Babel of perfumes, a lovely wealth of vivid colours. Not 
 quite a riot, for they were carefully laid forth, as if for 
 any after-moment's right selection from them; and not 
 quite a mass, for their riches, gamuting from pansies 
 through roses on and on to orchids, had not been allowed 
 to stop from view an ornament conspicuously placed, 
 before the flowers thought of coming there, upon that 
 piano. It was a statuette, a pure and precious miniature 
 of the "Victoire de Samothrace," not very small, not 
 large ; an arbitrary copy, of whitest marble, instead of the 
 soft cream-colour of its great sponsor in the Louvre ; the 
 scarred triumph of its onrush unchecked by this startling, 
 snowy classicism of version-colour, and her pedestal the 
 battered hunk of ship that belonged to her, but here, 
 ploughing this sea of flowers, metamorphosed to a bat- 
 tered hunk of exquisitely carven ebony. 
 
 Some copy of this winged, earthen and heavenly thing 
 was always near this woman, if not feasibly a statuette, 
 at the least some small plaster-cast, then, some picture, 
 large or small; as if Superstition, unwilling to desert her,
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 393 
 
 had merely abandoned its old, dangerous morbid pseudo- 
 religious forms and transcendentalized itself into a right- 
 eous, evolutionary thing for companionship with her. 
 
 If she had been a stenographer, a post-card photograph 
 of it would have stood like a goddess on her machine 
 and made her spell better than she did as a prima donna. 
 As she was a prima donna, this next-door-to-priceless 
 version of marble and ebony stood on her piano, and 
 made her sing even more deliciously than she spoke or 
 spelled. 
 
 And to-day, to-night, she partook even personally of 
 the Victory, for she, too, was in classically white drap- 
 eries, which from her sitting posture the more suggested 
 its sweep in their white wake at the back of her across 
 the ebony-coloured carpet with its sprinkled yellow prim- 
 roses, there as if intentionally to respond to the little 
 ebony ship's waving ocean of flowers on the piano. 
 
 It was a soft gown clinging finely, in long simple lines, 
 about her, relieved in its snowy sheen only by a rope 
 of heavy green jade beads that were purposefully as 
 unlike as possible to beads that once many times she 
 had worn, and that occasionally, in the absorption of 
 her writing, she lifted with both hands and held a little 
 measure of across her forehead, as if their coolness helped 
 concentration of thought ; for she was not, as yet, dressed 
 for whatever role she was to sing to-night, save for her 
 hair, which was elaborately prepared, piled high, in or- 
 nate mounting waves, as if for a meticulous period of 
 manners. Her face also was deliberately white, the lips 
 brilliantly carmined, in that daring combination which 
 she could so paramountly employ for her own delight as 
 a lady, as well as for a great crowd's delight as a watching 
 crowd. 
 
 Among the rich utensils of her desk were mixed a hand- 
 mirror, a rouge-box, that she had fetched from behind the 
 Watteau screen ; a lip-pencil had fallen to the floor. 
 
 Unless in her teens teeming with heart's-blood thump- 
 ing beneath a Sevillian jacket and thumped against by a
 
 394 The Great Way 
 
 tambourine, perhaps this woman had never been more 
 beautiful. 
 
 For, in radiant place of the pulsing beauty-quality of 
 vital young youth, and of its successor, that of the inno- 
 cently false languor and untrue repose reflected from 
 what she had learned with her unerrant vision to call a 
 "painted desert," there shone now the beauty-quality of 
 happiness a supreme quality, of happiness not supreme, 
 merely in itself triumphant, the happiness of achievement 
 in difficult world and more difficult self, clamped superbly 
 to Faith. 
 
 As she sat and with so deliberate movements of white 
 chiselled arms wrote in her little book, she was a signifi- 
 cant, an assuredly painted picture of sophistication, but 
 of sophistication that itself was neither of paint nor of 
 desert sand, its clearly marked qualifications being a suave 
 worldly dignity, accustomedness, delicate serenity. It 
 was as if Sophistication with her had, like Superstition, 
 refused to leave her, and, in order to be allowed to stay, 
 metamorphosed itself into a righteous, an evolutionary 
 thing, a thing that she had therefore gladly taken with 
 her in her sudden winged flight out of the quick-sanding 
 desert to the coast and to the heights, coast and heights 
 akin, and dwelling together, as they wonderfully do in 
 California, as they still more miraculously do in the fully 
 liberated geography of the soul. 
 
 Thus Sophistication had succeeded in continuing with 
 her, for just thus was this woman loved, apparently, by 
 forces as by people of whom a loving instance made itself 
 felt here, in one of the accoutrements of her desk ; for 
 upon it another desk was superimposed: a fascinating 
 miniature thing, its various minute component parts built 
 up into a partial shape of pyramid. 
 
 The woman loved it, not knowing whom to love; and 
 that it occupied a sacred place upon her desk of Sheraton 
 sacred obviously, as it was guarded by a sharply defined 
 demarkation of several utensils of blue-steel, gold-inlaid 
 Toledo-ware, but chiefly a sharp, weighty paper-cutter
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 395 
 
 (as who should say "Siegfreund!", or "Daemmerliebs- 
 kind!") was in danger of finding its secret nailed on both 
 the town pump and the church door by the fact that its 
 little black leather shelves were filled, or nearly filled, by 
 little red leather books. Not now were they in their own 
 private case, but this lived safely near-by them, in fact, 
 in this same residence, for in two special depths of it the 
 diva's Cellini-suggesting jewel-case, to the left, fitted with 
 but a wee growl, while to the right the little-red-leather- 
 book-case fitted exactly, without a growl at all. 
 
 Minutiae! ... Of a life, expressed thus, by combined 
 chance and intent, in a flotsam- jetsam bit of a life's 
 apparel. For even in the rare hand-made jewel-box, there 
 was a special compartment and an empty one, as 
 jewelry goes, for it held but a little fragment of inde- 
 cipherably stained balbriggan, with no accompanying 
 baubles to protect. And its emptiness of other-ware did 
 not sadden this woman. Here around it in the remainder 
 of the box were her crystal rosary, her various jewelled 
 and gemmed trinkets of the great world's great music- 
 capitals. All her high-light treasures. Only there was 
 not here, as if an empty grave in sooth meant a living 
 body, a string of old, strangely blue, strangely green, 
 delicately wistful beads. As if to make it a very symbol 
 of Giving, she had left the dainty small compartment 
 dedicated to emptiness and the fragmentary balbriggan. 
 The thought of it with her was a matter of prayer and 
 faith prayer that the neck those beads surrounded might 
 bear no other yoke; faith that the heart they drooped 
 against might one day, one starlit night, be held against 
 her own, fulfilling her prophecy of the violet days, the 
 inspired day, of Cadiz. 
 
 And as the moments sped, and the Traviata-like 
 feathered-pen either sped or deliberately paused against 
 the moment of Madame de 1'Etoile's London premiere, 
 the woman's present beauty was not alone from all these 
 things. Its two calms of classicism and sophistication 
 were urged, and intensified, and teased by a mood, a
 
 396 The Great Way 
 
 mood that would have painted her cheeks if it could, and 
 that as it could not, painted the air a mood of impendant 
 debut, of expectancy, of holiday, of very May-Day, 
 though it was not May; for as she wrote she satisfiedly 
 read aloud, like charges brandished against the armour 
 of her classical appearance, some of the passages that she 
 wrote in her book ; and she did this most characteristically, 
 not merely speaking aloud to herself as idiots are wrong- 
 accused of monopolizing; but doing so with someone 
 present, and as if that someone positively did not matter. 
 
 For Madame de 1'Etoile was not alone. 
 
 As if a great art collector had passed a semester after 
 semesters toward a final exhibition of precious taste, and 
 at the then eleventh hour turned his examination paper 
 from a masterpiece into a hardware store by one fell 
 addendum of gauche grotesquerie, there was one more chief 
 decoration in this lovely room. 
 
 Stiffly on a fragile French gilt chair, midway, indeed, 
 centrifugally between many things, the piano, and the 
 Fragonard screen, and Madame de 1'Etoile, and the 
 Watteau screen, and the flowers, and the devil, and the 
 deep sea, and forty and fifty, sat Becket. 
 
 Elise having fallen by the great wayside into matri- 
 mony, Madame de 1'Etoile, with equally delightful reck- 
 lessness, had embarked for the British Islands unattended ; 
 and almost disheartened by the scant likelihoods among 
 innumerable applicants to her newspaper-advertised need, 
 had in a dangerously late moment, and after but one long, 
 all-drinking look at her, engaged the Becket as her lady's- 
 maid. Maid was a necessary misnomer for this treasure, 
 which was not a virginal one, for Becket was not Becket 
 alone, and Jane Becket, but Mrs. Jane Becket. 
 
 If Jane had been the great God Budd, a holy idol made 
 of mud, she would have been similar, but she would not 
 have been entirely herself, for she would so have been a 
 little too softly Oriental. As she was, she was herself 
 entirely.
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 397 
 
 God had gouged Jane out of wood that only He knew 
 the name of, with great square hacks. 
 
 If she had been Gibraltar instead of Jane, there would 
 have needed no name of a life-insurance sign printed hugely 
 in stereotype or electric lights across her to identify her. 
 Had she been one of Madame de 1'Etoile's successive 
 little red books instead of one of her successive lady's- 
 maids, there would have needed no such writing across 
 her as Madame was engaged in now, of that word 
 "England!" 
 
 As she sat so like an island on her fragile French gilt 
 chair, she was in beautiful, dutiful agony. Despite the 
 shocking experience of matrimony (a shock that must 
 have been to Jane such as only a last outrage of the Gulf 
 Stream can account for) she was a mammal of great 
 purity of mind. Partly and sadly only partly because 
 of this arbitrary reading aloud, she thought her mistress 
 was insane (Madame's third experience of this gloomy 
 kind) instead of perceiving the simple and far happier 
 truth that she was drunk. 
 
 Least of all would have occurred to Jane the manner 
 and means of her getting drunk with happiness. 
 
 England! 
 
 After long hours, again I have talked to you, my own, in 
 England talked much, being as I am, always myself entirely 
 in my little red book, and even in England, I find your 
 England, the England that you loved, and loved even more 
 than you loved your Estados Unidos, and once more I am 
 await, and now, this time, this wonderful time, await without 
 one single fright, to conquer still one more Conqueror! 
 
 And it was with a great flourish, first of her arm and 
 then of her pen, that once more she breathed and wrote it : 
 
 England! That word means violets, Isabel most of all 
 that word means you my own Jose Jose Luis . . . but 
 anyway, violets, Isabel, and
 
 398 The Great Way 
 
 Once more there was a great flourish of her lovely 
 white-draped arm and lovely feathered pen, once more 
 she spoke quite aloud, to the sharp physical nervous jolt 
 of God's own oaken Becket: 
 
 Traditions! Ah, my own, until now I have been a woman 
 of manana. To-day, I am the woman of to-night ! And oh, 
 my own, nothing, nothing that I can have said possibly to 
 you in my whole little red books has told myself to you more 
 than does that sentence ! If at last, after and after and after 
 all, you are ever to read, you will now know that there has 
 been in this world a love that trembled often, and that wavered 
 once yes, did waver once but once only, and in a woman 
 then who was not I, but only a painted thing that looked 
 like me a prettily tinted hour-glass of sand (except in 
 my figure, dear, which was as lovely then almost as it is 
 now) that marked the time, and only thought itself Time, 
 and Truth, and Space and all Realities. ... I have confessed 
 to you how I stopped paying in the streets as I used, how 
 God sharply answered me in a way to show me the uncertain 
 amount was overpaid. Now, my Jose, because something 
 indeed, and something large, remained not yet fully paid 
 now, as to that great debt to People, to Society ah, my 
 Jose, there now is a happy thing that I can tell you. It is 
 that if I sing to-night as I believe and intend I will sing, then 
 to-night, oh, to-night I honourably think will have paid that 
 great debt ! Yes, and I say so now and here before the trial 
 of it, because there will be the ending, indeed, this time, the 
 real moreover, dear, the true ending, of my Little Red 
 Book, for then it, and I, can afford to simply sit, and wait, 
 and sing for you. For People too always, always. But 
 without duty. And I am happy ! 
 
 As if the taxing force of so daring an assertion had 
 brought her to momentary pause, and with it reminded 
 her that she was not entirely alone, she suddenly laid down 
 the pen. But as though nothing, not even the present 
 duty of authority, could quite tear her from the subject 
 of her little book, it was casually, and without looking 
 up, that she said to her waiting maid, her agonizedly
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 399 
 
 waiting lady's-maid, Becket, Jane Becket, God's Becket's 
 Jane: 
 
 "Gwendolean, sit down !" 
 
 "Yes, madam!" cried Becket, instantaneously, terri- 
 fiedly standing up. Her cry of Madame's title was with- 
 out an "e," but Madame had spelling of her own to care 
 for, and was proceeding with it. 
 
 Yes, my own, I have with my voice, my honest means, 
 reached England, which for so long has seemed always to me, 
 in the far distance, though but an island in the ocean, yet the 
 very pinnacle of my earthly climbing toward you ! And from 
 to-morrow, if I have sung, as I will sing, to-night, I will 
 
 dare, and I dare now to tell you that I will dare, to But 
 
 before I do dare that word, my own, let me tell you how 
 very prominent I am! Though but hours, almost, indeed, 
 scarcely days, since I have came here, I have been already 
 forth into society. I am very distinguished ! And I find that 
 the English and American speaking races differ in their lan- 
 guage. The English mispronounce the pretty word "Opera." 
 In London, it is Grand Uproar ! And when I explain them 
 about it, and making an English countenance mispronounce it 
 for them the way they do, they laugh at me! And the more 
 and more when I then say again, in my anger, "Grand Up- 
 roar!" Well, there will be some grand uproar to-night, my 
 own. And then I will dare, and now at last dare to tell you 
 that I will dare, really, really at last, to hope! 
 
 Again it was as if the very exuberance of her written 
 expression felled the quill from her hand, and this time, 
 as if the word "hope" were one that must lift the eyes, 
 she saw Becket, and for a long moment contemplatively 
 absorbed the vision of her. 
 
 "Oh," she said at last, "I see ! Stand up !" 
 
 And Becket instantly, obediently, sat down. 
 
 Madame went on writing. Once she looked up sus- 
 piciously to see whether Becket had dared to rise again, 
 but God's own was seated in dutiful motionless agony on 
 the sweet gilt chair, and Madame continued writing
 
 400 The Great Way 
 
 satisfiedly, to the end of her page, and then with a long 
 relieving sigh, sat back. 
 
 "That was right, the way you obeyed me, Gwendolean ! 
 I am very pleased with you." 
 
 Becket almost rose, but by terrific will-power remained 
 seated, her hands stretched forth. 
 
 "Oh, madam," she cried, clasping them in prayer, "if 
 you would only let me stand in your presence !" 
 
 "Nor 
 
 Madame had cried it so swiftly, loudly, that Becket 
 had popped straight up, as if the power had been cham- 
 pagne and she a cork, and with a great gesture Madame 
 spoke more swiftly, loudly still: "STAND UP!" 
 
 And Becket sank down moaning. 
 
 "I do it," explained Madame serenely, "to make my 
 servants comfortable. How can / be comfortable as I 
 turn myself into little red books if I know that you for 
 ever more stand up ? No, no ! That was not an order ! 
 You were doing very nicely, and I was appreciating it. 
 You are very obedient. We begin to understand each 
 other. At the least, I you. Anyway, be cheerful, Gwen- 
 dolean ! You will love me afterward. They all do !" 
 
 Becket again clasped forth her hands in prayer. 
 
 "Oh, madam," she cried, "I would love you now, sitting 
 or standing, if you would only call me by my right name : 
 Jane!" 
 
 Madame seemed almost to have sprung up herself, so 
 huge and spontaneous was her Latin gesture. 
 
 "NO ! NO ! I have a special reason ! There is some- 
 thing in my history makes me do it." 
 
 "Oh, madam," cried Becket in pitiful desperation, hold- 
 ing herself to the chair, "I have no wish to poke into your 
 private past, but I am sure you can have no just reason 
 for calling me Gwendolean !" 
 
 "Ah, but I have!" said Madame de 1'Etoile. "You 
 remind me of a little room I had once, and of some 
 thoughts I had there that were a help to me in dressing 
 prettily at that time! And the way I spell you in such
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 401 
 
 a fashionable English way," and her voice became 
 exquisite in her care of her pronunciation, "G-W-E-N- 
 D-O-L-Y-N, Gwendolean, you see you have an / Onega 
 in you !" 
 
 "I have what in me?" Becket, half rising, half sink- 
 ing, cried it in despair and terror. "So help me God, 
 madam, of what do you accuse me?" 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile, gazing at her with enormous con- 
 templation, clasped her hands ecstatically. 
 
 "My Gwendolean, I assure you you seem to me to be 
 a pure, unadulterated kind of woman ! I accuse you of 
 nothing, except of compassing one letter of the alphabet. 
 In English, it is the strangest letter next to double-you, 
 and is called Y, oo-eye, but in Spanish it is named the 
 Greek I, / Griega. And of that itself you are not guilty, 
 except in having accepted a position with me, and thereby 
 privileging me the right to christen you. Because, 
 Gwendolean, everyone who comes into my service begins a 
 wonderful, miraculous new existence !" 
 
 "But I did not need a new existence, madam !" pleaded 
 Becket, pitiably desperate. "I am sure you do not mean 
 your charges, madam!" 
 
 After an instant's thought, Madame de PEtoile reverted 
 to her little book. 
 
 My own, I am so gay, I am going actually to play the 
 grand pianoforte ; but first let me tell you one, one more thing, 
 my own ! On this night, leaving aside all my other triumphs, 
 yes, even this greatest of them all about to be, think of this, 
 my own: J have a beautiful maid, named Gwendolyn! 
 
 She resolutely put the little book away upon its shelf, 
 but spoke to it even as she did so. 
 
 "Now I can do what I love next best to talking to 
 you, my own!" 
 
 She went over to the piano. One great book stood 
 upon it. It was a score of La Tosca, solitary, possessive, 
 apparently, of the room, of the night. Of her white,
 
 402 The Great Way 
 
 languidly active hands, one strayed over the keys, the 
 other through the leaves; but it was far on in the bulky 
 book that her voice, first a mere humming, then with full 
 tones, joined, with a fall to the keyboard of that other 
 hand, the sounding notes of the piano. Absorbedly, she 
 was thinking, feeling, partially phrasing, "Vissi d'Arte, 
 vissi d'Amore." But as if the wrapping lyricism that she 
 had brought about herself were too precious a cup to 
 quaff entire at this transient sand-grind of the running 
 hour, she stopped abruptly, wilfully upon the note that 
 would have fetched the room resonant as a gold and silver 
 organ with the longing passion of her voice had she in- 
 dulged it that great swelling note which lifts the hotly 
 yearning melody from one phase to another, indeed as if 
 from one melody to a transcendentalized entity of music. 
 This stopping right here was happy enough for her, whose 
 mind could and presumably did continue it; but it was 
 very unhappy for Becket, who passionately yearned for 
 her to drop that other boot of Vissi d'Arte e A more on 
 the ceiling with the loudest thud possible. For this had 
 happened before; more than once before; and God's 
 Becket's nerves had involuntarily taken to counting those 
 tones of Tosca^s lament and to longing to know, arith- 
 metically, which note it was that began, and did not 
 continue to know whether it was the sixty-first, or sixty- 
 second or sixty-third vocal tone ; to longing, and to fear- 
 ing that never would they know, so difficult was it not to 
 count the piano tones too, which were naturally uncount- 
 able. But her treadmill torture was now interrupted by 
 further vocal tones, speaking ones that demanded mili- 
 taristic attention, for with hands clasping themselves 
 determinedly against further playing into her lap, 
 Madame spoke sidewise to her lady's-maid: 
 
 "Gwendolean, when I have lost my voice, I am going 
 to be a painters' model, on account of my vivacity. Gwen- 
 dolean, look !" And Becket shot to her feet. "No, 
 Gwendolean, while I perform this, you have positively got 
 to stand!" And Becket sat down. "That is right. Now,
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 403 
 
 look first at that Fragonard screen over there." And 
 Becket in earnest agony looked. "That central one, 
 Gwendolean, is called 'Les Hazards Heureux de 
 1'Escarpolette,' which for general purposes means, after 
 all, only 'The Swing.' Is not the lady spirited as she 
 bounds through the air, never minding her slipper that 
 flies off, whether or not it shall hit her cavalier? Now, 
 to prove to you I can save us from starvation in our old 
 age, Gwendolean, look at me! This tableau very vivant 
 of mine is called, 'Fragonard, Swinging' !" 
 
 And Madame de 1'Etoile, with a flight of her hands 
 upward, a perilous hurling of her body backward, swirled 
 around upon the piano-stool, her small feet stretched for- 
 ward, her Grecian garments a fluttering whirlpool, the 
 whole of her and of her breathless motion indeed a 
 tableau vivant of the rococo lady so like that only a deep 
 realty of art could have wrought so superb an absurdity. 
 And furthermore, realism fled merging into the literal, for 
 her little slipper had projectiled through the air, and with 
 such fatal precision sped straight home to the sacred 
 centre of Mrs. Becket, that a sharp gasp came not from 
 her but from the gifted prima donna. 
 
 "Indeed, indeed, I did not intend it, Gwendolean! 
 Yes, you may sit down for a moment, in the circumstances. 
 Forgive me! But I see from your face that you do not 
 suspect me. Be optimistical, for I am not like this every 
 
 day. In fact, very seldom. You see Thank you, 
 
 Gwendolean." 
 
 She had leant forward, her hands clasped about her 
 knee, and Becket, piously thankful for work to do, had 
 knelt and was returning the errant slipper to its dainty 
 silkened foot. 
 
 "You see, this is a very great night for me. Imagine, 
 I am to sing in Covent Garden! Consider my promi- 
 nence ! Why, the great singer Mary Garden named 
 herself after this theatre if you will only believe it, 
 Gwendolean ! And in that little misfortune just now, 
 Gwendolean, I am merely like the Irish caballero, who was
 
 404. The Great Way 
 
 accused that he beat his wife, and in defence he answered 
 that he had never once lifted his hand against her when 
 he had his boots on. That is a wonderful story, Gwen- 
 dolean, as dazzling and confusing as my diamonds. Great 
 scholars contend as to whether he was innocent or guilty. 
 Now, that other picture, the one next to 'L'Escarpo- 
 lette' " And with a low smothered moan Becket, after 
 her all-short reprieve, returned to her gilded chair, and 
 Madame proceeded to the be-laced and be-silvered minia- 
 ture dining-table "is called 'La Cage,' and study the 
 upheld little finger of the hand holding the birdcage, 
 Gwendolean ! Have you seen anything else so degagee ? 
 You will this moment! Look! 'Fragonard, Serving 
 Soup'!" 
 
 And she lifted toward her ear a rococo ladle, and gazed 
 across at Becket. Becket was weeping. 
 
 "I know these studies are hard for you, Gwendolean, 
 but this shows you how, if I cannot get painters' model- 
 ling to do from my vivacity, I can from my elegance. 
 One must be trained for emergencies, and if I should 
 return to Germany, and decide there, for instance, that 
 you had talent for the stage, all this would be good for 
 you, for they are thorough there, and your lot would be 
 harder than as my maid-in-waiting. Doubtless one of 
 your first parts would be the withasouptureencomingin- 
 maid ! Have you not your camera about you, Gwendo- 
 lean ? You should be taking my photographs ! You could 
 sell them after to-morrow for large sums !" 
 
 Becket was sobbing. 
 
 "It is a large sum that keeps me with you, madam ! 
 I love you, indeed, but I 'ave made a very great sacrifice 
 for you, madam ! 'Arsh words at 'ome ! My 'usband 
 objected to my wardrobing a diver! 'E could not under- 
 stand you was a woman ! And now 'e understands you is 
 Annette Kellermann !" 
 
 "Alas, Gwendolean," sighed Madame, "I cannot swim 
 through your tears, anyway ; so let us plunge into work ! 
 You were so contented putting on my slipper! My part
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 405 
 
 is arduous to-night, and its harness is arduous too, so let 
 us rehearse once more!" And with a concluding loud 
 sob, one of joy, Becket started toward her. 
 
 "But wait one moment, Gwendolean. Yes, just one 
 moment I promise you! I have just thought of some- 
 thing, and I am even more important to myself as an 
 authoress than as a diver!" 
 
 And with Becket left in torture between the etiquettes 
 of standing and sitting, a delicate, an elfin situation, 
 Madame went to the desk, re-secured the little red book, 
 and wrote. 
 
 My own, though I have boasted to you I have been into 
 English society, I did not equally confess to you that my 
 personality sometimes gives the wrong thrill. Some things are 
 more rigid than even in the Estados Unidos. In England it is 
 not fashionable to say "Holy God, what a pudding!" even to 
 please your hostess. Grand Uproar again ! 
 
 Leaving the small volume open and idle, as if further 
 vital matters of authorship might occur to her, she turned 
 past the little table and toward the screen of Watteaus ; 
 and hard upon her motion Becket sped to her, and in her 
 speeding, marked herself with capacity, broke herself out 
 with a stigmata of mechanical engineering. In her flying 
 voyage, equally suggestive of the "Winged Victory" and 
 a guinea-hen, swooping up from the floor the fallen lip- 
 pencil, sweeping as with her other wing from the desk 
 its companion implements, she yet outdistanced Madame 
 de 1'Etoile's hand to the screen and stood a slab of it 
 aside, thus adding, in this fair little district of the room, 
 to the function-colour of the diminutive dining-table, snow- 
 tint and silver, a dainty vista of colour-of-boM*?otr. Silver 
 again, for there was a glimpse of a garment of sheer 
 glittering silver, but chiefly pink, and pink, a succession 
 of pinks, shaded, graded, a very crown of them, for 
 dominating here was a hat, huge, and huger with ostrich- 
 plumes ; innumerable ; of graduated sizes, graduated rose-
 
 406 The Great Way 
 
 tones, down into the palest, from up into the Blush-of- 
 Malta that Daisy would have lusted for ; and with ribbons 
 great, drooping ribbons, of the kind that loop under the 
 chin, and that do not do any good to the chin, or to the 
 hat, but only to the heart, and to the eyesight. But 
 with this Madame was not now concerned; nor, quite as 
 yet, with a great staff that leaned behind it. 
 
 "Now, Gwendolean, in this role, as I tried to show 
 you at rehearsal yesterday, and when, indeed, you were 
 very praiseworthy, I must be very so-and-so as I go in. 
 Even more so than in most grand uproars. Now, in that 
 last terrible moment, I must not even have to speak to 
 you. So, when this arm does this, exactly so, it means 
 you are to give me my bouquets of flowers which 
 bouquets of flowers, on this particular night, we will 
 decide later " 
 
 But Becket, in a desperate ambition that would have 
 fortified her to interrupt Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke 
 and John, cut her short untimely. 
 
 "Oh, madam, will you not please decide now? Thank- 
 ing you in the past, your last summons will be soon, and 
 your future call is presently !" 
 
 And as she had cleaved Madame's sentence she cleaved 
 the air, travelling like an aviatrix to the piano and back 
 even as she spoke, and piled upon her a great sheaf of 
 orchids. 
 
 Debonairly Madame received them in the crook of her 
 akimboed arm, and debonair was her reply. 
 
 "Excellent waiting-woman, I have missed only one call 
 in my whole career, and that was from the King and 
 Queen. You see, they did not come! But they are com- 
 ing to-night, so be cheerful, Gwendolean ! Never fear for 
 us, for in action you are wonderful. Now, when this arm 
 
 does this, so " And she swept her right arm wide 
 
 with a great gesture level with her shoulder, "then : My 
 staff!" 
 
 Praise had not undone Becket. It had not been pre- 
 mature. She had received it with due gratitude and from
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 407 
 
 it due stimulus. And neither had Madame's great gesture 
 and posture done her much harm, magnificent as they 
 were, startling as were the seeming heightening of her to 
 a thing like the Victory, and the statuesque portrait of 
 her with that reckless wealth of orchids and that forth- 
 flung marble arm. These miracles, Becket had glimpsed 
 yesterday, and they merely helped toward her downfall^ 
 giving her one instant's breathless pause in which Madame 
 repeated the gesture and the command, "My sta-a-aff !" 
 
 It was this repeated word, so simple, and with it, 
 Madame's countenance, so involved, that brought about 
 the Becket's wrack and ruin. 
 
 For in that instant's surprising pause of Becket's, 
 irresistible temptation had come upon Madame as she 
 gazed at her, and with that very English word she had 
 made a very English face, the electricity of her mood 
 outstripping with it even her graphic Fragonards a face 
 as vivid as her intonation very British-wise of "Sta-a-aff ! 5> 
 a more than very English face, like King George on a 
 postage-stamp, or even off it, a face that Becket should 
 have liked, save that Becket evidently feared things where 
 they did not belong, so that she stood paralyzed, motion- 
 less but for tears coursing from her eyes, and fascinated r 
 as if the opera-singer were a snake, and she no longer a 
 Victory or a guinea-hen, but a collapsible and temporarily 
 undirigible sparrow. And possibly from a sudden real 
 fear of her own for the triumph of her night, possibly, 
 quite possibly, from a thrilled and overpowering instinct 
 to do wrong, Madame de 1'Etoile made the huge gesture 
 once more, and the command too, but in a variant form 
 and so loudly that she astonished even herself: 
 
 "My cane Jane!" 
 
 And into clamorous dolour Becket burst as loud as 
 any diver, and as salt and wet, and fled, again the 
 aviatrix, the Victory, the guinea-hen, back to her gilded 
 chair, and sat upon it, streaming and handclasped and 
 moaning. 
 
 Motionless, unthinking to drop either the orchids or
 
 408 The Great Way 
 
 the marble arm, the diva gazed upon her fatal work, 
 casting about for remedies. 
 
 And one came, in the God-given nature of an inter- 
 ruption, from across the room indeed from across the 
 Fragonards that basically had levered all this misery. 
 
 Over the screen appeared a lax, thin hand, peculiarly 
 signalling, its little finger as far outstretched as that of 
 "La Cage" itself, and with the further elegance of an 
 enormous diamond ring upon it; and as around the edge 
 peered the Maestro's face, and into the room came the 
 rest of him too, with the silence and suavity of some 
 warm shadow stretching toward the sun without which it 
 could not exist, gone were Becket and English accents 
 from the singer's mind. For still one moment she stood 
 as she had been, replete with orchids, outflung arm and 
 white loveliness of sweeping draperies, drinking in not the 
 cavernous admiration in his startled eyes, for she did not 
 think of it, but the love in them; and then with both arms 
 clasping round the great orchids, she started toward him. 
 
 But her dispelling movement bringing him toward her, 
 brought the relieved and subsiding Becket into his line 
 of adventure, and he stopped short, up-eyebrowed, at 
 this other picture. It did not frighten her. Much likelier 
 might sophisticated persons have been frightened, for this 
 child dressed for a party, as he certainly was to-night, 
 was a thing rare as Becket after its different manner 
 a thing of diamonds and of hair brushed most carefully 
 back, but the more profound in its ebony rush for that, 
 and of pomade, and a red carnation, and brilliantine, and 
 a whole bottle of the most awful smell on earth, Sucheau's 
 "Wanda de PEtoile" perfume. 
 
 In Becket's devout relief at such comparative luxuries 
 as his presence, even his voice as he gazed widely at her, 
 widely indeed because she was entire news to him, did not 
 alarm her. 
 
 "Shoo-oo-oo-er !" he said, and the strange word was 
 Gilead balm to Becket.
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 409 
 
 As if the stranger portrait needed a footnote for 
 visitors, Madame de 1'Etoile explained it. 
 
 "She is my Agony Column. I cut her out of a news- 
 paper. She thinks I am a monster, because I have gaven 
 her a beautiful name !" 
 
 With all his unconscious emanations of weird gentle- 
 ness, he looked studiously from the Becket to the de 
 1'Etoile, and back again to the drying weeper. 
 
 "Shoo-oo-oo-er!" he said, addressing her soothingly 
 again, nodding his head understandingly. "It is a terrible 
 thing to be alone with the insane!'* And a great light 
 of grateful love, the kind of love that would make a 
 woman marry her grandfather's physician, came into 
 Becket's eyes for him. 
 
 "Well, well," sighed Madame de 1'Etoile, "I suppose 
 I am rather too much myself to-night! Gwendolean, go 
 out and look at the stage-hands until you are happy !" 
 
 "Oh, madam, you wrong me !" cried Becket "My 
 'usband, madam, 'as threw me down stairs on yout 
 account, but 'e ain't never took away my character !" 
 
 "Yes, yes !" insisted Madame imperiously, fearful of 
 another flood toward. "Go look at every one of them, 
 until you are as happy as I am!" 
 
 Becket went, indeed thankful enough to go, but heavily 
 weeping again, and with a last hope for justice: 
 
 "It is false, madam !" 
 
 When she had disappeared, Madame de 1'Etoile, orchids 
 and all, went straight into the Maestro's arms. 
 
 "These are not mine," he said, tenderly touching the 
 rich flowers, tenderly jesting, "and yet you carry them!" 
 
 She looked up at him, leaning back a little in the 
 embrace that yet held her. 
 
 "They are yours therefore I carried them to you!" 
 
 His arms released her, to clasp the flowers in his delight 
 at her sweet swift coquetry. 
 
 "To remember your greatest night !" 
 
 "Our greatest night !" she answered gently.
 
 410 The Great Way 
 
 He hugged the orchids with one arm, her, with the 
 other. 
 
 "You are too sweet, my own !" 
 
 Her eyes looked up at him quickly, then lowered, and 
 her words were marvellous with a double dignity, that of 
 both reserve and full love. 
 
 "I I would not allow to call me that anyone else on 
 earth, except 'my own.' But it is your right, your 
 privilege, darling, for I am your own. You have created 
 me. You did not create who I used to be; but you have 
 created who I am, Wanda de 1'Etoile !" 
 
 "That," he said swiftly, with a sudden impulse of hot 
 fire, "that is why I always at this hour, on these grand 
 nights, fear for you! All the times I have trusted you, 
 all times you have made me near madness with pride and 
 happiness; yet trusting you, my own, all those times I 
 have distrusted God, I suppose, for all musicians are very 
 egotistical. Of course, in my case, that is all right, for 
 I am a great genius. But it is a great genius's nerves, 
 too, that I have for you. Reassure me, that, this night, 
 you are not afraid?" 
 
 Her reply was with a sweeping literal abandon of 
 gesture, in its one word was a lovely, confident quality 
 of laughter. 
 
 "Afraid!" 
 
 He clasped her back to him almost self-reproachfully. 
 
 "It is perhaps that for those nights, you will always 
 choose a role new for you. If but in each new country you 
 would but sing something that we know makes you great ! 
 I think that is one reason I am four hundred years old! 
 You could change now Traviata, Giulietta, Gilda if 
 you would. Wanda de 1'Etoile is the one who is allowed 
 to do anything yes, upon the very rise of the curtain, if 
 she chose!" 
 
 "And upon the very rise of the curtain, cheat them 
 even this English them, who took Gibraltar?" 
 
 "Anyway, I thank God," he cried, and threw his hands 
 resignedly in air with a long Italian groan at the very
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 411 
 
 memory that brought him comfort, "you at least are not 
 attacking them, as you threatened, with a performance of 
 Isolde!" 
 
 "Darling, you are like Gwendolean!" she cried. "Be 
 cheerful ! I intend doing it yet, and here in England too, 
 if if and I will be a greater Isolde than I had ever 
 imagined, for I find out I am very Irish. I have done 
 suddenly something Irish to Gwendolean. If she thinks 
 her husband was cruel, will you believe me, darling, let 
 alone the name Gwendolean, I have gaven her my slipper 
 on her stomach!" 
 
 He looked swiftly at her, suspiciously. 
 
 "With intention?" he demanded. 
 
 She gazed back at him with wide-eyed innocence. 
 
 "There is no answer! How can I know? Even great 
 scholars dispute it !" 
 
 She was irresistible, yet he stubbornly resisted, love's 
 fear driving him. 
 
 "Tosca is no part for you to-night! It it is no part 
 for you at any time ! Tinsel ! Rubbish ! Dish-water and 
 a candlestick!" 
 
 He lied but he was a father, and a mother. 
 
 She gazed at him blandly, her sunny voice shaded with 
 a hairbreadth of seriousness. 
 
 "It was a part for Ternina. It was a part for Mary 
 Garden. Shall I mention any more kinds of poetry?" 
 
 He broke in with swift viciousness. 
 
 "It is a part for the lady you have gaven the bird-seed, 
 also !" 
 
 Her moment's pensive downward look was ominous. 
 
 "I have never confessed to you the full of that evil 
 nor even to my book. There was one further dastardly 
 action. To the bird-seed I added the largess of a cuttle- 
 fish-bone ! But fortunately, it is a part for other persons 
 too, despite her statesmanship. Remember, you your- 
 self sobbed like Gwendolean at that Garden party in the 
 Comique in Paris. You let me sob, too, though you knew 
 how bad that was for me in those days. . . . But you
 
 412 The Great Way 
 
 must not cry now! No, no ! Consider, darling, we have 
 set forth against England, and I must be subtle not 
 cumbersome like the Armada ! It is with subtlety I am 
 conquering for us ! You see, the English are fond of 
 history, and despite their pretence to the contrary, they 
 are sentimental, and like anniversaries especially. Now, 
 this is the fourteenth of June, and the Battle of Marengo, 
 while poor Floria had her equal hardships, was June the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth. So if we win to-night before 
 midnight, we will have had even some of the anniversary 
 correct! Remember we are Napoleon's forces or are 
 we the Austrian or were those the same? I am not as 
 educated as I thought! But anyway, the whole thing was 
 a Grand Italian Uproar, and so will our version be ! For 
 instance, that is a nice La Scala tenor we have for to- 
 night. Did you notice at rehearsal? In the Agony 
 Scene, he screamed like Gwendolean in a lemon-squeezer. 
 Let us make a note of lemon-squeezer. I must procure 
 one against my critics to-morrow !" 
 
 Though he had known his cause was lost before he 
 broached it, and was additionally helpless now in the 
 springtide torrent of her mood, yet like a bulldog and a 
 mule and Gwendolyn, he still protested. 
 
 "All of your reasons and excuses are falsehoods! You 
 sing it only because you want to, and want to see me die 
 once more of heart-disease, and for no other two reasons ! 
 You are not Milka Ternina. You are not Mary Garden. 
 You are not Emma Eames. You are Wanda de 1'Etoile. 
 And you are not La Tosca." 
 
 "Not for nearly fifteen minutes yet !" she said blandly, 
 and he groaned. "And then . . . ! Besides, darling, be 
 thoughtful there is one more reason. One of the at- 
 tributes to a prima donna is to be vainglorious, a word 
 I have just found out of the English prayer-book, and in 
 this night's gown I am handsomer than in any other 
 even Kundry's. Can you believe such a thing? I swear 
 to you it is true, darling ! It is a dangerous gown I fear 
 to have you see us together! You may fall in love with
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 413 
 
 me. And if you do not, it may be as bad another way 
 I may likely fly into a rage of pique and fall in love with 
 you, on account of your indifference! Would it not be 
 dreadful, darling, if you and my gown were to change me 
 out of my career into a vampire, and I should rush about 
 after you, as late as nine o'clock at night? What would 
 be the fate of our money, if I were not in my dressing- 
 room at eight o'clock? I would have to became a movies- 
 actress ! I think we would better weep about it, for there 
 are great dangers in my having selected this new role for 
 to-night !" 
 
 "There is a great danger in you, to-night !" he cried, 
 suddenly taking her face between his hands. "It is this 
 joyful danger-point that always so frightens me, and 
 never has it been quite, never quite, as it is this moment 1 
 You, de PEtoile, could never fail, no," and he pointed, 
 with long shaking finger, upward: "no more than the 
 stars you are named for. But you might, suddenly, in 
 one of these grand moods, go so far away! Sing Tosca 
 and Isolde both at once if you must, for you could! But 
 consider the loneliness for me, if, one of these over-keyed 
 nights, suddenly, you were only Wanda de 1'Etoile, and 
 no longer my own!" 
 
 Her eyes as she gazed up at him had grown search- 
 ing, rich summer succeeding the gay May in them. 
 
 "I will this moment reassure you ! I see, ah, I see " 
 
 and swiftly her voice grew to its full tenderness: "you, 
 like me, are remembering that night we 'remembered.' 
 That Nueva York night, when we remembered even 
 
 Cadiz ! Well " She went swiftly across to the piano 
 
 and seated herself, and it was with now a wealth of pas- 
 sionate earnestness that she spoke over her shoulder: 
 "I promise you that after to-night, you will always 
 remember this /" 
 
 Again her fingers preluded "Vissi d'Arte, vissi 
 d'Amore," but now it was in full voice from the first note 
 onward that she sang it, full, clear, an outpouring, filling, 
 vibrating the room as she had done the room in the Plaza
 
 414 The Great Way 
 
 de Loreto that first day, that Cadiz day overflowing the 
 room indeed, so that just without, postured dutifully as 
 a figurehead, Becket, at the promising plenitude, in- 
 stinctively, hopefully counted: "Sixty-one, nine, sixty- 
 one, one-hundred-and-thirty-eight, sixty-two stage- 
 hands !" She had not meant to say "Stage-hands." That 
 was false, false, an innocent accident, a word that had 
 slipped forth from nervous shock because again upon that 
 Apocalyptically numbered note the voice had stopped its 
 song, the more dreadfully to her for its preceding volume ; 
 while within, Madame de 1'Etoile, as if the rich vocal thing 
 had been uplifting more than in its rising wave, more than 
 in its spiritual qualification, had sprung up, her arms 
 flung passionately forth toward him who had been suffer- 
 ing so very differently over La Tosca. 
 
 "O-o-oh, *Vissi d'Arte, vissi d'Amore'! What words! 
 'In me, look you, Art ! In me, look you, Love !' And you 
 wonder, yes, you, that I have chosen an opera for the 
 sake of words, for my greatest night, for England! Even 
 as they are clawed around into the libretto, think, think 
 of them as to me: 'For Art I have lived ! For Love I have 
 lived !' How wonderful, as I think it in English ! What a 
 tongue! And have I succeeded to reassure you with it in 
 your own sweet Italian? Yes, yes, I see it there on your 
 nose that I did, and if you still doubt, I tell you I am 
 going to sing to-night as I have never sung before, and 
 sing it as it has never been sung before ! That second is 
 quite natural, as I have never sung it, and I am something 
 from another world anyway! But besides that, I am 
 
 going to sing to-night " And her eyes went across 
 
 to the little desk: "not only with all those jewels in my 
 voice, summed up, just as in my Kundry I wore them 
 all, but with all of those treasures, too !" And she 
 pointed. "Those, my little red book, myself! Are you 
 reassured?" 
 
 It was indeed patent upon his nose and all over him 
 that he was, and with her lifting of his mood, perfect 
 as the uplift of that melody, her own springtime had
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 415 
 
 seized him. With the shot of his eyes, following her 
 pointing finger, to the desk, and their spying of the little 
 red volume thereupon open, unguarded, save by that 
 innocuous paper-cutter, he was instantly a vivid child 
 not only at a party, but at a May-Day party. Two great 
 ejaculations, two great accusing gestures fled from him. 
 
 "A-ha! A-ha! Careless in your happiness! At last 
 I can read every word !" 
 
 And giddy as the Fragonard "Poursuite," they rushed 
 for it together but with the lady flying in pursuit. 
 
 "No, no!" she cried in her whirl behind him. "It is 
 uninteresting ! I swear to you, it is a cook-book ! When 
 I have lost my voice, I am going to be a cook !" 
 
 He had secured it. She stopped his hands flutteringly, 
 pleadingly. 
 
 "No, no ! You would not enjoy it 3 It is a geography !" 
 
 "You said it was a cook-book !" 
 
 She was lightning-like. 
 
 "Both ! A Cook's Tour book ! In our old age I am 
 going to be a guide to English ladies ! Was it not a 
 beautiful travelling English lady I first promised I would 
 write it? I will prove it to you! I swear to you I will 
 read out from it to you!" 
 
 And he let her have it. 
 
 "Yes, just listen: the very first day we have came 
 here I have written this: ' London is not as wet a$ it is 
 painted'!" 
 
 "I will take it back if you are deceptive! That is 
 not all you wrote !" 
 
 "It is a guide to Grand Uproar listen: 'Should a 
 great artist who prides herself upon information use a 
 Spanish paper-cutter from Toledo, steel inlaid with gold, 
 to kill a French baritone in an Italian uproar?' ' 
 
 Abruptly, he took her face again between his two 
 hands. 
 
 "You have left off two words from that question: 
 my own!" And as she laid the little book back upon the 
 desk with a little catch of her voice, a low. dim tone
 
 '416 The Great Way 
 
 came into his. "I do not have to look into the book for 
 that! You ask him all your questions! Do you think 
 I would have read one word in it? I do not have to! 
 It is yourself, your soul, in there, and / know you, and 
 your soul like a book! Yet the jealousy of parents is the 
 most ardent, yes, the most pitiable, of all jealousies, my 
 own, and many times, I could have killed him with a 
 Toledo paper-cutter!" 
 
 "Ah," she cried, the voice softly golden, the reproach 
 in it only a whisper of silver, "can you say so after that 
 wonderful Paris day when we found the name for the 
 desert I was in ? You, who helped to chide me out of that 
 desert, not with chiding but with understanding and 
 with beautiful desire, back toward him, helped me by 
 absolving me as of my greatest wrong, though throughout 
 my confessional softening my harsh chiding of myself? 
 You, you of all the world, must know, do know, proved 
 for ever that exquisite Paris afternoon as if, when there 
 was not, there had been need of your proving that you 
 knew, as you still know, why I am able to sing as you 
 would have me, able to sing a* / will sing to-night! 
 You, of all, must understand why to-night I am happy 
 so happy that even in my little book I dared to say: 
 'After to-night, my debt will have been paid. . . . After 
 to-night, I may begin to dare to hope!' ' 
 
 "So happy," he exclaimed, seizing her shoulders, "that 
 one further degree of it now, one further degree of it in 
 you so unused to it, and all over again would I fear for 
 you " 
 
 "All over again will you be Gwendolean?" she cried. 
 "Fear not for me, when you know I have only one fault 
 in my character too lofty a passion for words, as with 
 'Vissi d'Arte' and, indeed, I confess, with 'Vissi 
 d'Amore* ! What a confession ! But for instance, if they 
 must persist to translate all grand uproars into English 
 words, why not that grand one?" She pointed to the 
 piano and spoke its grandiose name with almost pitying 
 contempt: "The pianoforte the Soft-Loud! Soft-
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 417 
 
 Loud!" And breaking from him she ran to it and struck 
 a horrible little note upon it treble, with mercilessly 
 jigging finger, and then a frightful crash upon it bass. 
 
 His hands fled to his ears. 
 
 "My own, my darling, how can you yourself bear it?" 
 
 "To-night," she cried back on him with joyous aban- 
 don, "I can bear anything!" 
 
 He captured her again by the shoulders. 
 
 "But can you? Heed, my own, what I said of those 
 far-off stars it is but a chance step from the happy 
 pinnacle of the world forth into their spaces, like Tosca 
 from her parapet ! I will be confessional, as were you 
 in Paris ; I have a great genius's peculiar thoughts and 
 visions of what he has made, and you, my own, in what 
 we have together made, are a great human pyramid, not 
 a cluster of diamonds, though you can at will sing 
 diamonds ; not a white beautiful statue like that Victory 
 there, though you often and often carve beautiful white 
 statues with your voice; but a thing able to be those 
 things, yet never being them, being always a great thing 
 as human as the great crowds you sing for! Of all the 
 things I adore in you, that is what I most adore. And 
 yet I know the very delicateness of your very greatness. 
 That is why I tremble at your lovely abandon to happi- 
 ness, I who should enrapture at it, this your great London 
 night. One more small reason for that happiness, and 
 all over would I fear, yes, even after your singing to 
 me of that 'Vissi d'Arte, vissi d'Amore' ! Forgive me 
 my repetition of fear I will desist almost momentarily. 
 It is that one of these nights, these moments, by your 
 excessive use of your whole self you will be suddenly not 
 you. Not my own, but a star, a shower of diamonds, a 
 white statue yes," and his voice broke, "the 'Vissi 
 d'Arte,' without the 'Vissi d'Amore'!" 
 
 The wealth of the imaginative picture, the poverty of 
 that breaking voice, filled her own words to overflow with 
 earnestness, yet pushed from them no drop of her rich 
 faith, gay serenity.
 
 418 The Great Way 
 
 "But this night, you know that I will, that I must be 
 all of those things, and Wanda de 1'Etoile, your Wanda 
 de 1'Etoile, too ! Father-ond-mother, let me sing to-night 
 as I choose, and from mafiana I promise you I will for 
 evermore be full of ee-ee-easiness! I will cook everything 
 in my book, and sing the way they do in Italy ! Listen !" 
 
 And with a swoop down upon her of her Fragonard 
 temptation, she broke into the breathless phrases of the 
 "Rigoletto" quartette, a very vision of a fat woman 
 fat, gasping fat as the diva in the Cadiz street. 
 
 "Ah !" he exclaimed, hands in air, helplessly capti- 
 vated by her. "Sing for him to-night, then, as you 
 choose !" 
 
 One battle of Marengo was over; her arms went about 
 him gratefully. 
 
 "And let me tell you," he said, tenderly, gravely, his 
 relinquishment complete and he his selfless self again, 
 "with my same genius's thoughts that have kept me awake 
 on your account last night, I had quite suddenly another 
 one so simple a thought ; and why, my darling, have you 
 never had it? The telephone book. For I think no other 
 English gentleman would be christened such a name. And, 
 my own, in all the millions of time you have been spending 
 writing these little red books, I am sure you could have 
 read the whole London telephone book, every word of it !" 
 
 She shook her head wistfully. 
 
 "You think I have never thought of it? But that 
 would not be the way; not the Great way! It must be 
 God's choosing, just as it was when we knew well, what 
 we learned that sunlit day on the Venice canal. Do you 
 remember tliat? . . . And that sobbing that we have 
 spoken of stopped. . . . And how happy, lovingly happy, 
 you were for us both, as I was, selfishly, for myself ! Do 
 you remember? And how Venice, ever thereafter, was only 
 another beautiful word for sunlight! Thus it must be, 
 darling, for England. England ! Still another word for 
 sunlight violets and sunlight Isabel and sunlight my 
 beautiful sunlit Isabel, who I hope wears around her lovely
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 419 
 
 throat that one one other part of me, the treasure-part 
 that has only been gaven and taken, that has never been 
 bought or sold !" 
 
 Tenderly, hesitant with tenderness, he said: 
 
 "Perhaps yes, very perhaps she will be in this 
 audience to-night!" 
 
 "Sunlight at night?" And she trembled a little. "No, 
 no ! I must not ask for miracles ! Not such miracles as 
 that! No, I think not, for the Great Way is not quite 
 like that either, I imagine. I I have desired it too 
 passionately. So I do not expect it !" 
 
 From behind the Fragonards, Becket entered, in quite 
 splendid condition, because she had work to do, for which 
 she lived, instead of Art and Love as stiff as a marionette 
 and as correct in her part, moving gingerly forward as 
 if there were grooves in the floor, and someone had puffed 
 her from behind as someone opposite pulled her with a 
 string ; and carrying a package. She came to a wavering 
 but successful standstill before the personage de 1'Etoile. 
 
 "Your second call, madam, and here is another 
 bundle." 
 
 It was obviously of flowers, and Madame's gesture 
 waved it luxuriously toward the Maestro. 
 
 "I have plenty give them to him !" 
 
 The marionette did excellently a hands-up motion of 
 shock, although dropped not the bundle. 
 
 "Unopened, madam?" 
 
 "Unopened, Gwendolean! We have enough for our 
 funeral, lady's-maid, mine and yours. All the stage- 
 hands and scene-shifters will be there, on your side; and 
 that same King and Queen, over here, on mine !" 
 
 Becket nearly wept again, but saved herself with a 
 desperate cry of duty. 
 
 "It is your second call, madam!" 
 
 "True, my own," said the Maestro, warningly. "But 
 you have time to look at these ! Did you send them 
 yourself, that you are so disinterested?" 
 
 "No," said Madame, "but I can look right through the
 
 420 The Great Way 
 
 box. There have been seated at that dinner-party last 
 night several young English penguins who did not disdain 
 me despite I said Holy God about the pudding. That 
 box is full of o-r-c-h-i-d-s, an English word pronounced 
 meadow, and if you do not prize it, give it to my gentle- 
 woman, Gwendolean. Gwendolean, there are some flowers, 
 from a young gentleman, for you !" 
 
 "Then I shall unwrap them to show you. Yes," he 
 cried at her threat to turn away, "for it is not you to be 
 unkind to anybody!" 
 
 She turned back perforce at that. 
 
 "Ah ! But I warn you now forevermore beforehand, 
 there will be a card in it : E-n-r-o-u-g-h-t-x-y, pronounced 
 Sinjun; or else C-1-e-r-k, Darby!" 
 
 "They are violets," said the Maestro. 
 
 "Violets!" And for that one word her teasing voice 
 was altered. "Then I will keep this young man myself, 
 Gwendolean, and later, according as you are good or 
 naughty (Naughty!), I will give you some even more 
 English flowers some Day's eyes, or Pan's eyes. No, 
 English is such a wonderful language, I think Gwen- 
 dolean's flower would be Sheep's eyes. Yes, I will give 
 you some sheepsies, Gwendolean !" 
 
 "And," broke in the Maestro triumphantly, "no more 
 were they orchids, then no more is there a card, either! 
 It is a letter !" 
 
 Incorrigible, she waved it off as she had done the box: 
 "I know every word of it !" 
 
 He read aloud, forcing her to listen! " 'Do you 
 remember ' 
 
 "Ah!" she cried interrupting. "Famous words of 
 yours and mine, my dear, but in this case? Yes, I re- 
 member! He took too many c-a-m-p-a-i-g-n, pronounced 
 potatoes!" 
 
 Again he read, insistently. " 'Do you remember 
 Isabel?' " 
 
 There was a lightning-instant's silence in the room,
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 421 
 
 then there came from Madame de 1'Etoile a great, swift, 
 spontaneous cry. And her hands lifted. 
 
 "Oh, and I have just said the Great Way is not like 
 that ! Oh, when I lack Faith, Faith is poured down upon 
 me!" She rushed to him, reaching. "Yes, yes, you shall 
 not brutalize me with it as you did about my book !" 
 
 "You gave it to me, it is mine !" 
 
 "Yes," she cried, "yours, because Isabel is part of 
 me!" 
 
 At the intriguing sweetness of it he relinquished the 
 fluttering paper; she kissed it swiftly, ardently; started 
 to read it ; and found that she could not, for tears. 
 
 'After all, darling, you will have to read it to me !" 
 
 And with her face hidden against him, the Maestro read. 
 
 " 'Do you remember Isabel ? From your pictures I think 
 that I have found my dearest friend, among the stars. // 
 you do remember Isabel and violets send one word now 
 that you will see me after the performance. It will make one 
 of the happiest moments of my life, for I want you to see 
 that life has to me, also, been very kind; I want you to meet 
 my husband.' " 
 
 "Oh," her voice trembled up to him as he gazed down 
 into her lifted eyes, upon the exquisite, upturned tremu- 
 lous-lipped face, "oh tears! It is so long, so long since 
 I have cried ! Oh, darling, darling, this is an omen, the 
 only one that I truly believe in, an omen of the whole 
 Great Way! From this moment I will never doubt the 
 final end! Gwendolean, go instantly no, there is not 
 time! I have delayed us, and you must dress me in a 
 whirl-whined! Go you, darling, and bring me back the 
 English from whom I ran away for you ! Bring them 
 yourself right to my door, and you, darling, see me 
 at the close ! Do it, do it, for I can promise you now, 
 promise even as I could not those minutes ago, that this 
 night I will sing Floria Tosca as I have never sung before, 
 and that I will sing Floria Tosca as it has never been 
 sung before !"
 
 422 The Great Way 
 
 And in silence, the complete silence of utter sympathy 
 and unutterable understanding, he went. Only he stopped 
 for one long, quaffing look at the beauty of her from the 
 Fragonard screen; and at the profound love of that look 
 she called to him: 
 
 "Fear not nothing, nothing, can injure your own or 
 her destiny now !" 
 
 Then with his vanishment she turned swiftly to Becket 
 
 "Come, we are in a very Latin hurry !" 
 
 "I do not know Latin, madam !" cried Becket in terro^ 
 deep terror, yet she was again the aviatrix, the guinea- 
 Victory, the engineer electrical, speeding beside her regal 
 employer to the Watteau nook, swirling into it with her. 
 
 "Yes, yes, in motion you are wonderful, Gwendolean, 
 and I assure you I am not nervous ! There cha-a-arming, 
 Gwendolean! As for Latin hurry, if anything should 
 really go wrong at the last call, you would have to run 
 after me, for example, and hurl my hat on to me from 
 God knows how far in the rear, for I never undertake it 
 till that fearful instant. . . . Any such hat as this. . . . 
 Thank you, Gwendolean. . . . Excellent. ... I know 
 what I shall do for you out of all my English flowers, 
 besides the sheep's-eyes I will give you some cow's-lips, 
 Gwendolean ! As you do not know Latin, it is fortunate 
 I studied English like everything ! As an instance, speak- 
 ing of all these vegetables, if you should bounce that hat 
 off my bean like Gadski's wig one night, you would be 
 avenged in full for that slipper, but the uproar would be 
 the wrong one ! Ah, quick those violets !" For from 
 across from them she had heard the Maestro's voice in a 
 gentle murmur to her guests. "And then go fetch my 
 friends in!" 
 
 They re-emerged, and still was Becket masterly, seem- 
 ing to pluck the violets out of the air with one hand while 
 she closed away the tiny boudoir with a deft slap of the 
 other upon its screen, and with the same action, as if she 
 had been a great painter or at least his instrument, back-
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 423 
 
 grounded, with its sprightly guarding group of Watteaus, 
 the moment's ravishing portrait of Wanda de 1'Etoile. 
 
 For though with the rapidity and precision of a com- 
 bined harvester and groceryman unsheathing and then 
 parcelling an ear of corn they had left the woman of 
 classical drapery behind, she had not become Floria Tosca 
 quite as yet. 
 
 Staff, hat and the famous flowers awaited their destined 
 seconds still. Only the gown thus far hinted her a 
 simple thing, but extravagantly simple, of sheer, solid, 
 glittering, unrelieved silver from the snow-coloured shoul- 
 ders to its path on the floor, a thing subtle in its prodigal 
 daring, too, with its lines pushing the imagination con- 
 fusingly to both the Empire and the Directorate. No 
 colour touched her or that silver, save that vivid carmine 
 of the lips, and, in the instant later, the royal purple stain 
 of the violets upon the gown as Becket planted them in 
 her. And it was Becket had the tall staff. Whether she 
 had had it in her mouth, or lured it to her straight 
 through the screen with something for itself to eat, could 
 not be known. But have it she did, and in her flight across 
 the room at Madame's order to fetch in the guests, she 
 managed to stand it, firm as the column of ivory that it 
 seemed to be, in readiness beside the desk. 
 
 "Wait!" 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile had cried it suddenly, as she stood 
 expectant, almost frightened at her impending joy, her 
 starry eyes fastened on the Fragonard screen ready to 
 drink its coming vision of sunlight and starlight. 
 
 "Take the violets till I motion for them again. 
 Now !" 
 
 She glanced her again to the doorway, went 
 tremblingly, joyously to the desk, sat, and hastily, 
 quiveringly wrote. 
 
 My own, my own, I now know, yes, as only Faith complete 
 knows how to know, that you are coming back to me. For
 
 424 The Great Way 
 
 oh, my own, Isabel, my Isabel, this night, this moment has 
 came back! 
 
 She put the little red book tremulously, with poignant, 
 lingering finality, home upon its shelf in its case; and as 
 Becket with resplendent propriety fetched in her visitors 
 she was seated there with her eyes flutteringly closed, 
 an exquisite glittering jewel pendant under each of them, 
 the shaking hand drawing back from the little book to 
 press tight against her heart. She knew that Isabel was 
 before her, near her, gazing at her ; knew, with her highly 
 sensitized intuition that her silence, the closed eyes, her 
 seated posture might have, in her magnificently altered 
 worldly circumstances, for the moment almost any strange 
 interpretation for the lovely girl; but in this instant of 
 instants she was allowing herself every qualitative vibra- 
 tion of soul-renewing, vivid living. 
 
 Isabel indeed was gazing, gazing as the Maestro had 
 gazed, and more herself ineffably lovely in a soft mist- 
 tinted evening-frock, without further colour save for a 
 string of strange blue-green beads drooping over her white 
 bosom, she was gazing as, on that first day in Cadiz, she 
 had been gazed at as if this vision of sheer silver and of 
 closed, silver- jewelled eyes were a glimpse of heaven. 
 
 And still were those eyes closed, though the two jewels 
 trembled away from them, as Madame de 1'Etoile spoke 
 her first words to her friend : 
 
 "I told you, that day, I would sometime make myself 
 into a valuable little red book!" 
 
 She rose, and with outstretched arm received the 
 precious violets again from Becket, and swept them 
 delicately against her heart. 
 
 "Before I even looked at you, I had to finish it !" 
 
 With the last words she at last met Isabel's eyes, stood 
 motionless, superb, suddenly poised in the happiness of 
 her great moment, then went toward her, longing, first 
 intending, to take her heart's friend in her arms, but 
 helplessly prevented by the wealth of lovingly held flowers.
 
 The Night and the Nightingale 425 
 
 "Oh," cried Isabel, joyously, almost excitedly, and her 
 own hand holding back with difficulty from the lovely 
 outreached one, "oh, and before one real word, before we 
 reaUy meet again, you must be satisfied about my life, as 
 I am about yours you must meet my husband !" 
 
 It swept back the happy nightingale's mind to re- 
 membrance of another, a negligible but a courtesy-de- 
 manding presence there, swept her reaching hand toward 
 the man standing at her Isabel's side, and bringing a new 
 smile of friendly welcome to her lips, she looked at him. 
 For an instant her brain, her faculties, her instincts de- 
 serted her stopped, as if her heart had stopped. It was 
 Jose Luis.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 vissi D'ARTE 
 
 FOR an instant; one in whose tidal rushing flow and 
 torrential resurge time, place and feeling were a helpless, 
 hopeless intertwist of things uncontrollable; and upon 
 which instinct, last to desert her and first to return, had 
 swept wide her arm to keep its proffered hand from meet- 
 ing his a great, back-flung gesture of shocked horror. 
 
 And with the very disaster of its crashing, graphic 
 outcry of her soul made naked, brain and faculties leapt 
 after instinct back to her, directed her hand to a straw 
 to grasp, a straw with which to beat that spiritual naked- 
 ness into another mould; for the fingers had touched the 
 Tosca staff, and the current of the physical and mental 
 supporting stamina of it coursed through her spirit and 
 body, wiped the fleet torture from her features and carved 
 them in marble. 
 
 The splendid brain functioning with all the precision 
 and vast dispassion of a clock, she brought her eyes 
 very casually away from his face toward her arm, brought 
 the beautiful imposing staff of ebony and ivory and 
 tasselled silver cords deliberately forward and planted it 
 between them, her arm magnificently postured with it, and 
 met his eyes again deliberately, and with a deliberate 
 greeting. 
 
 "How yo doo doo?" 
 
 She never knew whether he made an articulate answer; 
 she knew only that brain and capacities had carried her 
 superbly far, only to leave her ironically deficient, for 
 her English had for a lightning-flash of time fallen miles, 
 years, away from her, and her frigidly formal saluta- 
 
 426
 
 Vissi d'Arte 427 
 
 tion to him now had been, with all their completely foreign 
 accent and mistake of order, her fatal first words to him 
 in the Rambla of the Flowers. This, in itself, was well, 
 not ill helped the dimensions of the gulf of ice she was 
 creating, the unbridgable distance between herself and 
 these two English people. But she knew also, and knew 
 it desperately, as she heard her own strange-sounding 
 voice, that the remainder of that speech, dynamic, preg- 
 nant with catastrophe, was literally upon her lips, articu- 
 lation inevitable, too imminent to hold back, and it was 
 with a cruelly hurtful tightening of her fingers on the 
 staff, a further subtle digging of it into the flower-strewn 
 carpet, that the leap of her intellect wrenched the words 
 as they left her into creation not destruction. With 
 electric-swift thought she sent them, along with a 
 languid, smiling droop of eyes, to Isabel: 
 
 "Fleece to say yo 'gain !" 
 
 And poised, vigorously steadied by the success, the 
 very sound, of all the debonair brutality of their diverted 
 application, she could have held back the one remaining 
 phrase, and intentionally did not ; intentionally used it, 
 perfectly as she would have used a chance-to-hand colour 
 for a phrase of music: 
 
 "Preety efening, no?" 
 
 She knew that Isabel was replying words that made 
 a pitiful bell-like sound of mingled eagerness and wonder- 
 ing confusion; but the words did not matter. The two 
 the pair would be gone in a very few seconds, gone 
 for ever and for ever, if she could hold before them 
 through such a little space her spiritual posture as she was 
 holding her body and that planted staff. And for fortifi- 
 cation in it, she allowed herself an instant's complete 
 possession by this night's, this moment's fact, its pain 
 too hideous to be felt as yet, but clear to her vision in 
 all its significance as a gargoyle against the noonday 
 sun ; and to her madly reacting mind the grotesque body 
 of that monster was the suddenly visible minute economy 
 with which God had reserved her, in an intricately fes-
 
 428 The Great Way 
 
 tooned and warding fool's paradise, pristine for this 
 moment of the corner-butcher's knife : a paradise of blind- 
 ness from a thousand small chances of circumstance. 
 Chance one, her silly intuitive fear of Society itself that 
 had made her, from some sheer God-suggested sense of 
 sheer decency, look away from that carriage in the Rambla 
 instead of staring at it as she first intended to do and 
 should have done; and of still smaller chances, hundreds, 
 hundreds chances of talk, and worse of delicious, 
 whimsical reticences through that Cadiz week, the very 
 star-dust of Fate thrown in her eyes to keep her as blind 
 as the exquisitely innocent English girl ; blindness for 
 herself the more complete because her eyes had been so 
 wide open in their recklessness of Faith eyes that had 
 looked right up from the starving cobbles and deliberately 
 bargained for this with God: "If only now when I need 
 it so ... and no matter what it might be ... no mat- 
 ter what terrible pain it might bring afterwards, if You 
 chose. . . ."! 
 
 And such, then, was the body of the monster; but 
 bodies are only instruments, and this grinning thing had 
 a soul, and that gargoyle soul staring out of its basilisk 
 eyes at her was the picture, straight here before her, of 
 his being here thus willing to be there, willing to meet 
 her, willing to meet her with his wife, whose maid and 
 whose soul companion, essence-of-spirit comrade, she had 
 been; willing to meet her knowing what he knew, and as 
 he thus necessarily would show himself to be : a cad, and a 
 cad with the final touch of God's smiling finger on his 
 lapel the touch of a gardenia. 
 
 A moment of facing a gargoyle in excelsis, the first 
 torturing twist of whose horn in her had been the need 
 to efface, instantaneously, the effect of that fatal moment 
 which, brief but illuminating as a forked lightning-streak, 
 must, while it paralysed, have nakedly displayed her. 
 
 That first twist, she had magnificently met, for the 
 girl was disarmed her bewildered, hurt, pitiable words, 
 as she struggled bravely for right ones, were saying so.
 
 Fissi d'Arte 429 
 
 "My my note told you this would be one of the hap- 
 piest moments of my life !" 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile slightly bowed. 
 
 "I, too, am very happy, very happy !" 
 
 "We are are stopping in town, at the Savoy." The 
 doubtful little waver had despite her valiant sweetness 
 come uppermost in Isabel's voice, and her husband's took 
 up its difficult burden for her. 
 
 "You will have supper with us there after the per- 
 formance ?" 
 
 "Thanks, monsieur," said Madame de 1'Etoile, "I have 
 supper always alone. In a life like mine it has certain 
 advantages to be always alone." 
 
 "Madame will immensely disappoint my wife !" he ex- 
 claimed. "Make me the favour to break a rule for my 
 wife's sake !" 
 
 She looked briefly into his eyes. 
 
 "I used to break rules, and found it did not pay!" 
 And she turned back to Isabel. "You have been very 
 kind !" 
 
 With her rejoinder almost a little gasp escaped the 
 beautiful English girl. 
 
 "Au revoir!" she breathed. 
 
 Madame de 1'Etoile bowed to them both. 
 
 "Good-bye !" 
 
 As Becket with promptly renewed decorum fetched 
 the two back whence she had brought them and formally 
 vanished with them behind the Fragonard screen, Madame 
 de 1'Etoile stood unmoving; the staff still planted un- 
 wavering in the carpet as if it were a rod propping the 
 outstretched arm of a statue, even her eyes motionless, 
 fastened on the screen as if they penetrated it, looked 
 through it and out through the doorway to the vast stage 
 where momentarily she must follow them, follow to sing; 
 motionless completely, until Becket reappeared with a 
 rush and a gasp : 
 
 "Your last call, madam I could see the boy coming !'* 
 
 And then her one movement was a swift, abrupt motion
 
 430 The Great Way 
 
 of her left arm, which lifted and dropped the violets as if 
 she hated them. Becket seized them up, sped behind the 
 Watteau screen, dropped them on the dressing-table there 
 and fled back with the huge pink-feathered Tosca hat; 
 and again the left arm of the statue moved helping her 
 to place it, arranging the great looping ribbons under the 
 chin, falling to position rigidly again. And then Becket 
 sprang to the piano and waited at attention for the com- 
 mand for flowers astute, stirred to alertest capability 
 in this her own hardest moment by an electricity in the 
 air that moved her and that she did not understand a 
 thing that came from a smile in the beautiful room, a 
 smile that was not upon her mistress's face, but that that 
 face was gazing at, the sardonic grin that was emanating 
 from a monster and that had spread itself all over the 
 Opera, heart of the world ; over all England ; over the 
 world itself; over the whole Great Way; over the Gran 
 Via of the Universe, from star to star . . . the smile of 
 a gargoyle which the face gazing at it, in order to give it 
 the power thus to smile, had taken from, and itself put on, 
 its unmoving nature of stone. 
 
 Then the eyes moved, for one long instant, to the 
 piano, and the right arm moved, lifting the staff and 
 terribly gesturing with it in one sharp, straight motion 
 three times repeated, toward four great masses of flowers, 
 the dart of the tall beautiful stick writing in the air as 
 vividly as if it had articulated "Those! Those! Those! 
 Those!" Then the staff went back to the same yellow 
 primrose it had crushed into the carpet, the eyes to that 
 centre of stony space before her. Ancient Greece and 
 Ancient Rome painted their statues, and for a handful 
 of flashing seconds it was as if Becket were a Greek or 
 Roman artisan further painting this one of silver and 
 ivory, its touch of ebony, its great hat of varied pinks 
 and its dash of bright rouge upon its marble, as she 
 weighted the violet-emptied arm with a mass of brilliant 
 orange-coloured marigolds, a huge cluster of light blue
 
 Fissi d'Arte 431 
 
 pansies, a wealth of pink roses dripping with streamers 
 of silver lace, and a sheaf of royal-purple hyacinths based 
 with poignant deep magenta peonies. Then done with her 
 rich portrait Becket sped to and hurled aside the Frago- 
 nard screen, flung wide the doorway to the stage; and 
 through this came the distant sounds of the orchestra, the 
 near sound of a voice the call-boy's. 
 
 "Madame de I'Etotte! Madame de VEtoile!" 
 For one instant still the statue of silver and vivid 
 colours with its fixed eyes stood on unmoving. Then once 
 more the staff lifted, and Madame de 1'Etoile swept for- 
 ward to sing as she had never sung before, and to sing 
 Floria Tosca as Floria Tosca had never been sung before.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM 
 
 BECKET was re-carven on a carven chair a piteous 
 figure, now, of grief and of its worse friend, terror. And 
 she was the rightly concentric symbol of a scene of rich 
 desolation suggested only, but as if suggested by 
 pattern, for each quarter of the beautiful room held a 
 high-coloured mark : its four corners owning now the four 
 chosen bouquets, bouquets no longer, accurately pitched 
 to the four walls against which they lay, lacerated mari- 
 golds, battered pansies, scattered roses, bruised and wilt- 
 ing hyacinths. And act two had also brought its scars 
 in here, like tributes on a sacrificial altar, for a rare Greek 
 gown of white and gold drooped like the flowers against 
 Becket's chair, slashed to ribbons by the Toledo paper- 
 cutter, which lay on the hem of it, telling its tale that 
 Scarpia's imitation blood had not been enough for the 
 thirst of it. Evidently too Becket had been forbidden to 
 touch it or the gown, whose furious wounds cried out for 
 decent hiding; because as she leaned forward, and gingerly 
 picked up from the carpet, just before her, Floria's golden 
 laurel wreath to see if that was injured too, it was with a 
 cautious ear to the sounds of distant orchestra and voices 
 filtered into the silence here. And when, while she did it, 
 the treacherous Scarpia shots on the parapet rang out, 
 and shot Becket to the soul with nervous terror, even so 
 she was not so unwary after the night that she had already 
 spent as to regain her ordered posture on her chair- 
 pedestal until she had exactly replaced the circlet of 
 golden leaves on the floor, calculating anxiously from the 
 yellow primroses. 
 
 432
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 433 
 
 Scarcely was her taut body back where it belonged, 
 when it shivered, shivered all over, for rehearsal had 
 taught her the main arithmetic of this opera, at the 
 Tosca's voice in its last poignant, clarion note diluted 
 in reaching her, yet terrible even here, vibrant, agonized 
 and agonizing as Floria leapt from the parapet greeting 
 death with her final soul-cry of passionate demand for 
 justice, justice "Before God's throne!" 
 
 Scarcely, too, was there interim between that cry and 
 its consequence for Becket. Long since, though the 
 "bonair" of it still glowed the place the Fragonard 
 screen had been set back away from the door. It would 
 have suffered if it had not been, as Becket had learned 
 two hours ago, at the end of Act One. It was then also 
 she had learned that the swirl of Tosca into the place 
 was instant upon the curtain fall that her creator was 
 taking no curtain-calls. But that had not taught Becket 
 (as why should it?) that she would actually take none 
 at the close, and she shivered anew at the immediateness 
 of it after, when as if by a forerunning gust of her the 
 door was hurled open and as if on the wings of that des- 
 perate cry Madame de 1'Etoile rushed in and past her like 
 a beautiful tatter of whirlwind, her blue cloak streaming 
 back of her as if literally from that dizzy fall of Floria 
 through space, and thrusting the Watteau screen clatter- 
 ing away from her as she had hurled the door, turned 
 by her dressing-table, a winged Victory gone mad and 
 suddenly halted in its waves, and that terrible voice of 
 Tosca's crying out of the stark marble face in a fierce 
 command : 
 
 "Go close that door and hold it ! Run !" 
 
 Becket sped to the door and tried further to obey, but 
 all her Gibraltar strength and spirit could not hold it 
 against the attack of musical Italy whose voice stormed 
 through it. 
 
 "Let me by! Who are you to dare to keep me from 
 her?" And the Maestro, ashake with passion as she
 
 434 The Great Way 
 
 with fright, towered over her. "Go you, outside, and stay 
 there until I come out!" 
 
 Having failed her mistress, with a sob she did this 
 new bidding, and from closing the door hotly upon her 
 he turned to face that figure across the room from him, 
 to go toward it, to stand halted by the flare of its cry 
 at him: 
 
 "Need I tell you again that I am again a woman of 
 manana? I will not talk to you to-night no, not to 
 my mother and father, not if you were my children! 
 Until to-morrow, I bid you go outside as you have bidden 
 her!" 
 
 "I will talk to you !" he cried passionately, desperately, 
 
 in an agony of terrified love. "Ah, my own, my own " 
 
 It was furiously, frenziedly that her words cut him 
 short : 
 
 "Do not call me that!" 
 "What I feared for you has come to you !" 
 He shivered as he said it; and her swift answering 
 words were a deliberate lash. 
 
 "Did you come to complain about my singing?" 
 Cut to the soul by the thong of it, he wiped helpless 
 tears away. 
 
 "You were miraculous ! They are mad about you ! 
 Yes, mad, mad, these same difficult Londoners! And 
 you insult them, refusing your curtain-calls !" 
 
 "I sang for them," she slashed, "and as no one ever 
 has sung for therri ! I have gaven them what they paid 
 for! What more should I give? Thanks? Let me tell 
 you, 7 am not thanking even God, to-night !" 
 
 "Once! n he pleaded. "There still is time! Just once 
 before the curtain!*' 
 
 "7 have said," she answered. "Till to-morrow, go!" 
 His last plea abandoned the audience; by instinct drew 
 his two hands forth heartbrokenly, despairingly, for him- 
 self alone: "My own!" And the hands dropped hope- 
 less, empty, at her cry of rage at the words. Husky, 
 tremulous, he said: "Forgive me! I am suffering!"
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 435 
 
 "A-a-a-ah!" she cried, the long contemptuous ejacula- 
 tion a very shrug of musical sound. "Only women suffer 
 at the closing of doors ! GOT' 
 
 Outside that closed door, closed now as for an eternity 
 because in his imagination it would be an eternity until 
 to-morrow, Becket, her fright of him gone at the sight 
 of him, reached out a hand, quite unconsciously as if she 
 were a mechanical doll built to pat poor folks, as he 
 blindly passed her. She had been await, eagerly await, 
 for in her other hand something was clutched tight, tight 
 as in a mechanism, something with which, as if it were 
 somehow a protection to her in the daring she must em- 
 bark on, she ran swiftly to Madame. 
 
 "Madam, your two friends that were here " 
 
 "I told you I would see no one !" cried Madame fiercely. 
 "Have you disobeyed me?" 
 
 "They beg so hard, madam!" 
 
 Her mistress seized her shoulder with one hand, with 
 the other pointed toward the door. 
 
 "You followed his orders! Will you obey those 
 strangers, too, instead of me?" 
 
 "The lady is crying, and I felt so sorry for her, 
 
 madam! And she begs in the name of these " And 
 
 Becket, abruptly as if a penny had been put in her, 
 opened her tight fist palm upward and displayed there 
 the things that pennies must not touch the Astarte 
 beads ; and mechanically recited her lesson : "She begs 
 in the name of these that you will see her, madam !" 
 
 A shiver came over the woman, a moment of struggle 
 at the twist of the gargoyle horn, then it was with a 
 hard laugh in answer to the new grimace of episode that 
 she took the tenderly smiling things from Becket's hand. 
 
 "Tell her," and she spoke slowly to register the reply 
 lesson in the mechanism, "tell her: she is very kind to 
 return my property to me!" 
 
 With a gulp for reply, Becket left her. And in the 
 silence Madame de PEtoile seated herself at the dressing- 
 table and for a long moment gazed at herself in its mirror.
 
 486 The Great Way 
 
 As she gazed on, intent, intense, brooding, suddenly she 
 became aware of something, as of something seen in a 
 pool, and horribly fascinating to her. It was the violets 
 that had stopped undisturbed there since she had dropped 
 them revoltedly to the floor hours agone, and Becket had 
 recovered them. 
 
 Still looking at them in the pool of mirror, she felt for 
 them, secured them. And then having wrenched her eyes 
 away to look down at them, she lifted them, and struck 
 them, and again, and again and again, on the edge of the 
 dressing-table. 
 
 "It was he used to give them to you! He! Now you, 
 you give them to me!" 
 
 A stroke and a rhythmic, hot accent of word . . . and 
 again, again. It was not the mere wantonness of a 
 wayward one now. It was the first articulation and con- 
 ducting of the stirring, fermenting melody of revolt that 
 with that motion, hours since, to repel the flowers from 
 her, had silently begun its composition in the nightingale's 
 heart ; the beautiful bouquet a malignant baton, the white- 
 hot dulcet words a song of hate. 
 
 And when she had battered the lovely thing to 
 brutally scattered fragments, she seized up the Astarte 
 beads, and again gazing into the mirror, put them slowly, 
 deliberately, with a soundless laugh, around her neck. It 
 was Part Two, silent but unmistakable for spirit ears to 
 hear, of her terrible song, throbbing on with movements 
 inevitably rhythmical as she went from the dressing-table 
 to the desk, and back again fetching her jewel-box, and, 
 again at gaze into the mirror-pool, selected and donned 
 her bandeau of brilliants, and selected and donned more 
 jewels, more, with weighing, calculating fingers and eyes 
 that would have called them, if the song had spoken here, 
 "Loot! Loot/" 
 
 Almost the set lips were smiling "Loot!" as Becket 
 re-entered the silent, surcharged room and with a beau- 
 tiful determination of purpose in her very fear, came up 
 behind her.
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 437 
 
 "Madam," she said, "will you not please to let me 
 help you some way? Madam, indeed, indeed, as a kind- 
 ness to me? Beforehand, I fear I did not please, because 
 I thought you was insane, madam! Now I know better, 
 madam ; you are in trouble !" 
 
 The pool-gazing face turned slowly to Becket, and 
 brilliant with its rich bedizenment fixed her with its dark 
 eyes. 
 
 "Attend tu! You are to do exactly what I say! 
 Take the car, and go home to your own home and 
 dismiss the chauffeur for the night. On the way, find a 
 public car and send it here to wait for me till I come 
 out. A public car! You failed me once to-night you 
 
 failed me " And a glittering finger pointed : " at 
 
 that door! Will you fail again?" 
 
 "No, oh, no, madam!" exclaimed Becket. "But you 
 frighten me, and I wish to be with you !" 
 
 "/ wish to be alone! I have a purpose to wish to be 
 alone, right here!" And the question, in the exact tones 
 of its first asking, asked again: "Will you fail again?" 
 
 "No, no, dear madam, I will not fail again !" 
 
 "I am glad. Good night." With a miserable look 
 back of her, Becket started away; but the voice recalled 
 her. "Wait. I I am very fond of you Jane. Kiss 
 me." She lifted an arm around Becket's neck, drew down 
 the tear-swollen face, and kissed its lips. "Good night." 
 
 Alone, the reflection of her servant's receding figure 
 vanished from the pool of glass, she swept together the 
 drooping violets scattered on the dressing-table two 
 handfuls gazed down at their withering comrades on 
 the floor, rose and walked to the door, reopened it and 
 gazed out across the great space of boards. 
 
 The stage was already dim. 
 
 A last few of the stage-hands were still at work in the 
 dusky light. 
 
 Standing back on to the sill of the dressing-room so 
 that she was framed sharply by the crisp lines of the 
 doorway, she lifted her violet-filled hands slowly above
 
 488 The Great Way 
 
 her head in the remaining instinct of her night's terrific 
 impulsion of drama, and as if with its last vibrations 
 crushed a thick perfume out of the purple flowers into 
 the dim-ooloured air. 
 
 Then, twisting the stricken things in her falling hands, 
 she began to walk forward and back through the room. 
 Again and again, she walked forward, back. Forward, 
 back wtre not enough ; and, the clenched hands of it some- 
 times at her sides, sometimes lifted to press the hot bruised 
 blossoms passionately against her face, the silent throb 
 of her terrible melody carried her to the four flowery cor- 
 ners of the room, the corner of the marigolds, the corner 
 of the pansies, the corners of the roses and the hyacinths. 
 They were not enough; and as if they marked the boun- 
 daries of a cage, and the open door a way to freer con- 
 fines, she passed through it to the great painted desert of 
 the stage, and on and on, and back, and again, on, from 
 side to side of it, her steps falling more and more into the 
 pace of a prowling animal. 
 
 If God was answering the silent awful song of her 
 soul from somewhere above her, it appeared only in the 
 wavering of a dark, vague canvas set. A stage-hand 
 stepped toward her, pointing and about to speak, but she 
 only glanced up, and shrugged, and at the contemptuous 
 motion, and the sight of her face, he wavered an instant, 
 like the helpless set, then went hastily away. 
 
 Out of the painted desert and its dim-lit night, her 
 strange way and her rhythmic silence led her back into 
 the brilliant nightingale cage of flowers. And centred in 
 it, suddenly, she halted. The desert path was strewn with 
 most of the violets that had been in her hands. The last 
 petals that stopped in them she lifted in the two palms, 
 and deliberately, to know the full bitterness of violets, ate 
 them. Then dashing the emptied hands together, she 
 looked slowly upward. 
 
 "So, God, that is how You had it planned ! Very well ! 
 God, I defy You utterly !" 
 
 With the cessation of motion the beating melody had
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 439 
 
 changed from the rhythm of silence to the rhythm of 
 sound. 
 
 "So, after my long struggle, that is how You had it 
 fixed ! What was the use, then ? For what have I fought 
 to become good, and to express You? Are You a sarcas- 
 tic, sneering God? Evidently! Very well! At least I 
 now know that, and there ends some of Your power! Is 
 it not so? 
 
 "To-night, You have answered me and my long at- 
 tempt. Now I shall answer You. Hereafter, I shall live 
 as I choose. You know perfectly, that I turned from the 
 streets and their life, and staggered upward. And for 
 that, what have I? I have bitterness, horrible, unbear- 
 able bitterness. Is that the reward of leaving an unthink- 
 ing life for a thinking one? Then I shall go back again! 
 The pendulum has swung ! 
 
 'Since time began for me, at the Epiphany, it has 
 swung from pole to pole for me swung from the wrong 
 side of hell to the other side of heaven. 
 
 "Now, let it swing back! Let it swing as it will with 
 me, without my thinking or caring, until time stops, and 
 I hang motionless in death with the rest of the unthink- 
 ing, uncaring world ! From now on, I shall not think or 
 care, except for what time's moment brings, and to have 
 my all of what that world calls 'life,' and 'living.' 
 
 "Hereafter, I shall live exactly howsoever I desire. 
 And if the world has a calamity in the fact that my voice 
 suffer, then You, God, will suffer more, for You gave it 
 to me. 
 
 "Anyway, the voice has been mine, and I have been 
 worthy of it, and fulfilled it, and there the matter ends. 
 
 "And there, God, is Your tragedy! What has been 
 given by You, cannot, even by You, be taken from me! 
 What has been, even You cannot alter! For instance, 
 I had him, for a whole week, in the Calle del Carmen ! 
 
 "And having taken him away from me; and then after 
 long years having taken the hope of him from me, with 
 one dagger into me from Your having sent me that hope
 
 440 The Great Way 
 
 at all, inspired me with it, and another and worse one in 
 the form of my own natural, pitiable, mere thought of in- 
 fidelity to it; and finally, to-night, after having let me 
 with complete contrition turn back again to beautiful 
 vision and replete, completer Faith, shown it all, all, as 
 a hideous laugh at me, what more can You do? I ask 
 You what more can You do? 
 
 "Take away the fact of that week? No. Or stop me 
 from that backward swing of the pendulum to the old 
 life, that old life that I lived with a purpose, the purpose 
 of keeping body and soul together in the world You threw 
 me down into, and that now I shall live without the hateful 
 necessity? No. 
 
 "Or, after all, can You? Can You stop me? If You 
 can, how are You going to? What new distorted grin 
 of fate can You think of now, with which to frighten me 
 off from it? 
 
 "For let me tell You something that I shall play 
 a different part in that life now! Now, 7 am the one 
 with money ! 7 shall be the one that need not think ! 
 I shall be the one that need not suffer the one to close 
 doors, to hurl them shut, without the need of pain ! Thir 
 time, 7 shall be the man! Where money need be paid inter 
 the Trudge Market, 7 shall pay !" 
 
 Pendulum-swing or prowl of baited creature, the 
 melody was now of double rhythm, rhythm of motion to- 
 gether with rhythm of sound, for again she was walking, 
 walking, walking; and a laugh broke from her, its music 
 waving with the sway of her skirts to the mad time of her 
 terrible pacing. 
 
 "Again, the old walk, walk, walk, walk, walk! 
 
 Yet " And again the laugh gusted out from the room 
 
 and along the dusky stage: " 1 need not walk now! 
 
 Now I need only summon !" 
 
 The stage was almost black. One light shone, far 
 across from her. One stage-hand hovered ghostlike in the 
 wavering shadows.
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 441 
 
 "I have told You in words, God, that I utterly defy 
 You. Now I tell You so in act." 
 
 She stepped forward into the doorway and its streak 
 of illumination that ran from the rich nightingale cage 
 out against the wings. 
 
 "Do You see that poor dirty stage-hand over there? 
 Probably You do, for the world says You watch the 
 meanest of Your creatures. Well, watch me, too, as I 
 step back into the gutter! You who set the pendulum 
 in motion, watch it swing in me, in me, de 1'Etoile, who 
 struggled her way upward from poverty and its spiritual 
 dirt to money and its spiritual caste ! Watch me go 
 defiantly back along the Gran Via, not from necessity 
 now, but because I choose and because I dare, because 
 when I strove toward You and set my teeth to believe in 
 You, You injured and laughed at and bruised me ! Yours 
 is the Great Way watch how I travel it, then !" 
 
 Laughing, she gazed across the great stage and im- 
 periously beckoned the solitary stage-hand toward her. 
 As she leaned back against the doorway he came over 
 with shambling, hesitant gait a short, street-type of man 
 with his cap pulled to one side of his head. 
 
 "Come here, boy." He came close to her, but em- 
 barrassed, and with averted face, and she laughed softly. 
 "I see you are the last man here. Well, the last man 
 shall be the first! Come in here! What is the matter?'* 
 And she laughed again. "Are you gliied to those wings, 
 like an angel?" 
 
 She drew him in through the doorway, and he sub- 
 mitted fascinated at the touch of her fingers, reluctant 
 like a shy adolescent boy, keeping his eyes from her, his 
 hands twisting themselves together as if they longed to 
 have his cap in them. 
 
 "Boy, you know who I am, I suppose? But I need 
 not have asked that you have seemed to be at my heels 
 the whole performance! You look the Apache from the 
 dark arteries of obscurest Paris ! It is obvious that God 
 sent you to London especially for me! I noticed your
 
 442 The Great Way 
 
 cap from under my hat. We wear them at exactly the 
 same angle! I think you have had actually the im- 
 pertinence to admire me ! Well, your impudence is to be 
 strangely rewarded yes," and she repeated the word 
 wickedly: "strangely! I have a car waiting for me. I 
 am not going home to-night. I wish you to ride with me." 
 
 He did not answer, and she laid a hand upon his arm. 
 
 "You know I am Madame de PEtoile. And I mean 
 what I say. I do not care that you know who I am." 
 
 Again he did not answer. His back was toward her, 
 and she laid both her hands upon his shoulders. When 
 she spoke now, her beautiful voice was the wheedle of the 
 streets, its heavenly music purring in innuendo, exquisite, 
 horrible. 
 
 "I tell you I do not care that you know who I am! 
 I wish you to go with me." 
 
 She could feel him trembling under her hands, but still 
 he was silent. 
 
 "Come !" she whispered, drawing him backward toward 
 her, with her arms slipping slowly round his neck, and 
 then with her cheek pushing off his cap and burying her 
 lips in his black hair. "What is the matter with you? 
 Have you a wife that you are afraid of?" 
 
 "2Vo/ w The short syllable was low and husky, 
 though with a helpless passion in it that had seemed to 
 force him to speak it. 
 
 She laughed, drawing him still closer against her. 
 
 "But," she exclaimed with her low laughing tones al- 
 most incredulous, "you are not going to tell me, boy, that 
 you are scrupulous you, of your class? Good! More 
 and more then, I can do the utmost that I could wish to 
 do! As you are scrupulous, like a woman, what is your 
 pricef" 
 
 He started to look at her, but could not make himself, 
 and the twisting motion of his body in her embrace turned 
 to an impulsion of flight from her through the doorway, 
 and wrenched from her a commanding, an equally instinc- 
 tive, cry.
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum MS 
 
 "Wait!" 
 
 He slumped in the fierce mandate of it, quivering. 
 
 "You have seen and heard to-night, me, Madame de 
 1'Etoile. Come, then, I am Madame de PEtoile, mind, 
 and I am not used to being disobeyed!" 
 
 He was trembling more and more in her arms, yet 
 again he did not answer in words, while slowly, as if 
 compelled more by some burning impulse in himself than 
 by her burning lips or the contemptuous words that had 
 fallen from them, he put his hand into his trouser pocket 
 and having withdrawn it, held up to her, back over his 
 shoulder, a tight fistful of money. 
 
 As she realized what it was her answering voice began 
 as a laugh derisive, that slid swiftly into tones of anger 
 and ended in a cry of rage but rage which, though it 
 tore through the entire entity of her, body and soul, yet 
 did not tear away her hands from him, but coursed 
 through their clinging and dug her fingers into him so 
 that his head and shoulders were crushed back against 
 her bosom. 
 
 "You poor, pathetic fool! Did you think that you 
 could pay me? Yet I could love you for being willing to, 
 you poor thing at a few shillings a week ! Do you insult 
 me, or is it tribute? Shall I love you, literally love you, 
 or hate you, stamp on you? Put it away, I tell you!" 
 
 At her screaming order his hand obediently fell; yet 
 he stubbornly kept his shaking fist around the money and 
 would not return it to his pocket. 
 
 "You poor fool," she said again, holding him power- 
 less against her, and laying her quivering face upon his 
 head, "I believe that in your beastly man's pride you 
 thought you could pay me you, a low, pathetic labourer, 
 pay me, a woman rich in money beyond your dreams, 
 rich in power beyond the dreams of the richest bad men 
 of social London! I tell you, boy, I offered myself to 
 you! And if my contemptuousness has so angered you 
 that you would dare deny me, I will not have you kicked 
 out of the house to-morrow, as I could, I will yet buy
 
 444 The Great Way 
 
 you! I have offered you money. If I must, I will take 
 the jewels off of my hands and cast them before you! 
 What frightens you so? The very bedazzlement of what 
 I offer you? Let me teach you more of the jewelry then! 
 Boy man I have not had my arms even thus far around 
 a man's heart for years ! Years ! And you thought that 
 I would take your little money! And you still have it 
 in your hand! How do you dare, when I have said to 
 put it away? I will show you the power of money with 
 me I will show you a fire in my eyes that will light it 
 into flames to sear your hand ! Let me tell you some- 
 thing ! I am a woman who has defied God, and I will not 
 be defied ! Turn around and look at me ! Turn around, 
 I tell you, and look me in the eyes !" 
 
 And as she drew away her passionate hands he turned, 
 shaking horribly from head to foot, and looked into them. 
 
 "So," he said, "you are, and were, what Lola said you 
 merer 
 
 She stared for a second, then with a wild cry recoiled 
 from him, the hands fluttering, seeking for support upon 
 the canvas set. 
 
 "Holy God! Holy God! 3 aimer 
 
 She raised the hands to cover her face, but as if, 
 robbed of their grasp upon the canvas, her weakness were 
 too great for her, she swept them blindly back of her 
 again, clinging as she had clung to the window of the 
 Royal in the Rambla, long ago. 
 
 "God ! God ! You have answered me !" she whispered. 
 
 He took a faltering step toward her, and she stared 
 at him dazedly, almost unbelievingly. 
 
 "So my little friend Lola betrayed me!" 
 
 Though his step had faltered before her, his hands 
 clinched with his words. 
 
 "No, Madame de VEtoile, with all your jewelry and 
 money to command and summon, you shall not say that 
 word 'betrayed' about Lola, who worshipped you as I 
 did!" 
 
 "Yet," she whispered, still staring pitiably at him,
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 445 
 
 "she told that about me, to you " And a little sob 
 
 crept into her voice: "she, my little friend! Oh, tell me 
 about her, Jaime, if you know! What became of her?" 
 
 "Yes," he said, slowly, bitterly, "I can tell you about 
 Lola ! We did everything you told us to. We got married 
 because we promised you we would if something should 
 happen to you. I turned to a scene-shifter because you 
 said I should, and trusted God to care for us in the 
 summer. And He did. You were like a saint to me and 
 Lola. And when at last God was blessing us with a 
 child, we hoped it would be a girl-child, so that we could 
 name it after you ! Yes, even I, the father, hoped that 
 our first child would be a girl-child, for your sake. But 
 even a good woman can be jealous, and it was when I said 
 that once too often, with her in her condition which you, 
 Madame de PEtoile, a woman knowing nothing of such 
 matters, yet even so might try to understand ! it was 
 then when I said that once too many, that she cries out 
 on me, 'You love me, your wife, less than her, and if it ** 
 a girl-child, I shall therefore call her "Bitter," "Bitter" 
 instead ! Do you know what our Saint was ? Do you 
 know how your rent used to be paid? Do you remember 
 the money she used to find in the street ? She found it m 
 the street, yes, but not by looking at the ground! She was 
 a bad girl!' And do you know what I did at those words, 
 'She was a bad girl'? 7 hit her!" 
 
 The woman before him, staring at him, drinking in his 
 words, had made no answer save once, and again, a plain- 
 tive little "Oh !" but here at his terrible imitatory gesture 
 she cried sharply out as if she had herself been brutally 
 struck, and again her hands struggled for their support 
 back of her. 
 
 "And when the child is born, 7 name her not Dulce, 
 but Dolores, for with my blow and the birth Lola dies, 
 and dies on your account!" 
 
 A moan came from the woman before him. Her hands 
 were helpless now. The strip of the painted desert that 
 she had clung to was less prop than had been even the
 
 446 The Great Way 
 
 slippery glass of the far-off Rambla window ; and she sank 
 slowly to the floor. From her crushed, sitting posture her 
 voice came in a terrible faint whisper. 
 
 "And it was Lola told me : 'She kills herself. But first 
 the kills her parents, friend, and lover'! God, you have 
 answered me!" 
 
 He stood over her with his speech more rapid in the 
 conflict of his two fighting emotions, the desire to hurt, 
 and the rending of unconquerable love. 
 
 "And to-night, you cheat me out of even my revenge! 
 When, since the time Dolores was born, I have kept on 
 shifting scenes as you told me to, but doing it in this 
 England watching to have my revenge upon you, because 
 it was for an Englishman that you betrayed me, now 
 since I have found you, I cannot, for despite you are all 
 covered with your high station and your jewelry, you 
 are in a great trouble and I am sorry for you and I can 
 do nothing! I did not know what I would do, for I could 
 never hit you as I hit Lola, having thought about it 
 beforehand ! And when I have known you are an opera- 
 singer, and will sing the Traviata, I think I will wait, 
 and the money I have saved, the sum you must have 
 helped with on the rent, I will throw at you in that opera, 
 but when I saw you at rehearsal, saw you at last, I 
 thought I could not wait for Traviata, and I will go out 
 when to-night comes and on the stage while you are sing- 
 ing, tell your crowd what you were ! And to-night comes, 
 and I have not the heart, for I see that Englishman here 
 to see you, and with another woman! And I know then 
 that he has thrown you out for her, as you threw out me 
 for him, and I have not the heart left in me against you !" 
 
 Only another little moan came from her in the bitterness 
 of it. 
 
 "But," and his voice flared to determination in a gust 
 of recaptured hate through his desolate love, "thus much 
 heart I have left, that you have got to take back that 
 money for the rent you helped to pay, yes, this money 
 that I have here in my hand !"
 
 The Swing of the Pendulum 447 
 
 And at that twist of the gargoyle horn a cry, words, 
 came from her. 
 
 "Oh, Jaime, Jaime!" she begged him, shrinking back 
 from the hand, struggling with her own hands on the 
 floor. 
 
 "Yes ! Yes ! You must take it !" he cried desperately. 
 "You must, you must! Anything, anything I would do 
 for you, Madame de 1'Etoile, except not make you take 
 back this money for the rent !" 
 
 And despite her pitiful outcry he seized her, and over- 
 bore the terribly fluttering hands, and thrust the money 
 down into the bosom of her gown. Then with a sob he 
 dropped her, for he thought he had choked her. 
 
 His hands and their money had touched the Astarte 
 beads, and with the flashing thought of their exquisite 
 tradition they seemed to her to have shrunk like a noose 
 around her throat, and a strangling cry had come from it. 
 
 Through her stark gaze upward at his terrified face 
 and shaking figure, she succeeded in speaking to him. 
 
 "You have not hurt me, Jaime, except my feelings." 
 
 Another and a different sob broke from him and he 
 stepped back to her, and fetched the money out of her 
 frock. 
 
 "Even that, I cannot do to you !" 
 
 He stepped forward into the light of the beautiful room 
 and threw it despairingly into the four corners, among the 
 thrown-away flowers, and stood himself among them 
 wilted and drooping as they, bent-shouldered. 
 
 She had struggled shaking to her feet. 
 
 "Oh, Jaime," she whispered, going slowly over to 
 him, "you would never understand ! Jaime, is there noth- 
 ing in the whole wide world that I can do for you?" 
 
 He hung his head, and threw out his hands from his 
 sides in a hopeless gesture. 
 
 "Yoirgave me Lola. And she is dead." 
 
 "Oh, Jaime, Jaime," she pleaded, "all these years I 
 have not been as I was to you just now! Oh, Jaime, 
 will you not let me give you these, yes, all these," and
 
 448 The Great Way 
 
 her hands not only lifted their own glitter, but lifted on 
 to the glitter of her hair, "for your little Dolores?" 
 
 "No, no!" he cried sharply, merciless again. "If 
 if it was a man-child, perhaps you could not hurt it, but 
 yes, I will, I do want to hurt your feelings, any way I can, 
 and my grtrZ-child shall not wear your jewels, Madame de 
 1'Etoile!" 
 
 For a moment, her head sank completely; then she 
 looked up at him. 
 
 "So there is nothing, nothing I can do for you, Jaime?" 
 
 He stood before her in silence for a moment. 
 
 "No," he said then, shaking his head, "I think there 
 is nothing we can do for each other, on account of your 
 character." 
 
 With quivering lips, she nodded, her eyes away from 
 him for an instant, then seeking his again. 
 
 "Good-bye, Jaime." 
 
 "Good-bye, Dulce." 
 
 Almost unconsciously, and like two miserable, unhappy 
 children, they kissed each other farewell, their hands cling- 
 ing together for a moment. Then Jaime, pulling his cap 
 still further down over his eye, shambled, stoop-shouldered, 
 from the room. 
 
 When he had disappeared, she stood gazing before her 
 until the sounds of his heavy footfalls had died fully 
 away. 
 
 "God, You have answered me !" she whispered. 
 
 She looked dazedly, strangely about the room, went to 
 the dressing-table for her jewel-box, to the desk for her 
 other box of jewels, the case of little red books, and 
 clutching them against her under her cloak, went swiftly, 
 silently out.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 LA GEAN VIA 
 
 THE Sagrada Montana is a thing vast and very beauti- 
 ful, and its history is very wonderful and strange. In 
 Catalan, the language of the Catalonian peasants, it is 
 called Montsagrat, Sacred Mountain; to all other 
 'Spaniards, it is known as "Montserrat" serrated moun- 
 tain, notched mountain, mountain with upturned teeth, 
 like the teeth of a saw. 
 
 It is Spain's guardian and miracle of the Pyrenees, 
 rising sudden, unaccountable and isolate out of the great 
 plain of Catalonia, overwhelming with its huge immobile 
 grandeur the soft round foothills swelling and aspiring 
 all about. 
 
 It is a mammoth mountain of sheer stone. It towers 
 four thousand feet above the surrounding hills. 
 
 In the distance, its great bulk lifting to triumph the 
 cragged line of wild stone forms along its top, it looks 
 like a legendary and impossible castle, ineffable in power, 
 quietness, and beauty. 
 
 It is pure grey in colour. 
 
 And the purity of this rough stone grey is set exotically 
 and arrestingly in the midst of perfect and contrasting 
 hues. 
 
 Though Spam is a bright and southern country, it is 
 here as if God had not intended the sharp sunlit painting 
 of an Italy or a Mediterranean Africa ; it is as if He had 
 taken His palette of colours and thoughtfully mixed His 
 tints and then deliberately sifted them down through a 
 sieve of fine air choosing pink and white to dominate 
 the hills with modifying streaks of gentle green, and leav- 
 
 449
 
 450 The Great Way 
 
 ing the chance of sky to make the whole acute or suave 
 with its mood of haply brilliant blue, or happily cobalt 
 thinned with haze. 
 
 Such are these big and little foothills of the Pyrenees 
 that undulate and slowly raise the Catalonian plain 
 small round and oval mountains of pink and red-pink 
 earth, ridged and beautifully lined with natural terraces 
 of crumbling white stone, as if they were ancient tinted 
 amphitheatres, conical instead of concave to outlook a 
 panorama of Life instead of a concentric play of it and 
 climbed over by the yellow and green of straggling vine- 
 yards and dotted with the deeper and pyramidal green of 
 little cork trees. 
 
 And from out of them abruptly, stands the Sagrada 
 Montana, unreasoning and final from its immense base 
 to its fantastic crown of tortured stone, as if the maddest 
 of architects had built it there in a deathly ecstasy. To 
 the pilgrim whose vision comes upon it unexpectant, it 
 is unreal, miraculous like a mirage, or a grotesquerie of 
 cloud. For in this austere yet ever sensuous country, 
 why, suddenly, a bare and dominant mastodon of granite? 
 
 Almost pendulous in its quality of beauty, yet gigan- 
 tically strong, like a Colossus, in its effect of standing 
 boldly and confidently on the earth, it is grey, grey, for 
 ever wonderfully grey. Grey everywhere ; save in one spot 
 where, near its centre, two-thirds toward its top, clings 
 the yellow-brown Monastery of the Montserrat, an eyrie 
 cloister built of yellow bricks, seemingly intermingled 
 with, only dimly segregate from, the massive rock. To 
 the eye looking upward from the terrible base, it is merely 
 as if God had here stained the grey granite with the 
 faint yellow of dripping water. 
 
 And indeed, at certain seasons, water gushes jifst 
 above this high and distant spot, through the very body 
 of the granite monster. For though discernible from 
 below only as a dark line, like a vein in the big grey body, 
 here above the monastery lies the wild, rugged fissure 
 of the sacred pile, the fearful Voile Malo, the "Bad
 
 La Gran Via 451 
 
 Valley," that leads from the high niche of the holy settle- 
 ment, on up and up, and through and through, the 
 wondrous mountain ever higher and higher, through this 
 last third of its dreadful height, to its utmost top. 
 
 In His creation of it, God had one more thought: He 
 placed at the foot of the giant, like a liquid serpent ward- 
 ing it, the beautiful and winding Llobregat, Spain's 
 prettiest and most tortuous brown river, which cuts and 
 cuts its way about the base, through a fair circuitous 
 valley of the multitudinous pink and white round hills. 
 
 But at that time, when the stone mountain and its 
 guardian river were but newly created, there was no Voile 
 Malo. 
 
 Then, the Sacred Mountain was a thick, unimpregnated 
 mass of solidity: peopled all over with vegetation, to be 
 sure, green and flourishing on its heavy unresponsive grey, 
 but without any rend and tear of artery through the heart 
 or lungs of it. It was quite solid. 
 
 Then Christ came into the world, and left it; making 
 in it and bequeathing to it the most awful and immeas- 
 urable space of history destined for it, and culminating 
 this record with the most lasting and exquisite of all the 
 world's deaths. 
 
 And at the moment of that death, of the actual escape 
 of His spirit from the poor lacerated carrion thus aban- 
 doned on the cross, far away in Spain the great stoical 
 granite mountain screamed and wept, and in its protest 
 and horror rent itself asunder, and held up for God's 
 sympathy and approval a great wound in its breast. 
 
 So the Bad Valley was created because, and at the 
 moment when, the terrific Man died. 
 
 Perhaps the storm and bleeding of that huge catas- 
 trophe were written on the walls of this Voile Malo, in 
 characters of crevice and fissure, in some un-readable 
 language of God's own. 
 
 It is possible. Yet this "bad" valley is truly a place 
 of equally unutterable peace and quietness, and the actual
 
 452 The Great Way 
 
 terror and morbid thunder-and-lightning fright of the 
 Crucifixion do not breathe from it or in it. 
 
 The reason for this is very simple. God's answer to 
 all mysterious and humanly unanswerable things, is Time. 
 And here in the Voile Malo His slow pendulum has swung 
 forth and back, grazing the rough angry walls for years 
 and more years and then hundreds of years, until all the 
 hideousness and morbidness of the tragedy are gone, and 
 only the grandeur and solemnity and symbol and beauty 
 remain. That is God's beautiful way. His grand way. 
 
 Then, later on, the Sacred Mountain took its first erect 
 step, like an infant after crawling its step into tangible 
 history, a step timorous yet decisive, holding fast to the 
 guiding hand of God and lifting its foot waveringly for- 
 ward, setting it down upon the terra firma of desultory 
 manuscript, keeping it bravely there until the queer, tor- 
 tured nature of the Middle Ages happily resolved and 
 expressed itself in the great art of Printing, and died 
 upon the rude altar of Architecture that it had built for 
 itself died smiling, with its arms stretched out to its 
 child which had killed it: the printing-press. 
 
 And while it was taking this early baby step, the Sacred 
 Mountain had looked down and seen, as it were, some of 
 God's small insects climbing up about its doubtfully de- 
 scending foot a small incidental swarm of ants, patiently 
 building a little yellow-brown ant-hill. 
 
 Of its own very nature patient, even in its youth, the 
 Mountain did not stamp the ant-hill away; and so new 
 history began, and throve. 
 
 The black ants were monks ; the ant-hill was the yellow 
 monastery. 
 
 The Mountain smiled. 
 
 It had no need to crush the builders or their building. 
 The ant-hill was destined to be withered or let live by 
 God or Time, according to the will of Time or God. The 
 Sacred Mountain could afford to smile. God's pendulum 
 was long: it was now only eight centuries since the death 
 of Christ.
 
 La Gran Via 453 
 
 The ants worked on and prospered. But Time, too, 
 even more indefatigably than ants, is for ever at work; 
 and the slow pendulum swung and swung and crumbled 
 the ant-hill. Yet the black ants were ever fervent and 
 patient, and built and re-built the yellow monastery. 
 
 And it is^ said, by word of mouth, and, since, by the 
 long-ago parchment manuscripts painfully written so 
 painfully as the use of blood for ink quite often before 
 the rosy dawn of printing, and, still since, by many a 
 printed word, too, that God, like the Mountain, smiled 
 upon these ants for their zealous insistence, and reward- 
 ingly put into their keeping the Holy Grail, and therefrom 
 into their history Parsifal, and Kundry, and Amfortas. 
 
 It may be so. For could anything be more fabulous 
 than such a Sacred Mountain? 
 
 Just now, in our own little Time of very different 
 wonders, near to the base of the mountain and on this 
 side of the river Llobregat, there is a crude and homely 
 little railroad station, called Monistrol. 
 
 Into all this beauty, out of the arriving train from 
 Barcelona, a woman stepped onto the platform of this 
 mean wooden station of Monistrol. In the golden sun- 
 shine, out of the thick of her pre-occupation, she gasped 
 at the beauty before her and around her (for she gazed 
 vaguely about) ; a beauty that, though dwelling in every 
 possible direction of the eye, seemed especially to concen- 
 trate, and run in a determined track, straight toward the 
 grey mystery of stone immediately opposite her. Swiftly 
 she remembered that her railway journey was not yet over, 
 and she hurried across the platform, went through a tall 
 gate, and took her place in the absurd, strong little train 
 that climbs from the main railroad to the level of the 
 famous monastery. 
 
 Chug! Chug! Chug! The song of climbing had begun 
 for the sturdy, childish little engine. 
 
 Gazing out into the vast landscape she felt, although 
 they were but a few seconds gone, that already they were 
 ascending, she and the little engine that already they
 
 454 The Great Way 
 
 were leaving the mere world behind. They had passed a 
 few dwellings. Now they crossed a bridge that spanned 
 the muddy-brown yet silvery Llobregat. 
 
 Her mind could not put its finger on the spot or on 
 the moment of the beginning of the real ascent. She 
 knew that she was rising, rising, that the toy train was 
 twisting, twisting. 
 
 She looked down upon the circles and crescents and 
 ovals of diminishing hills, drawing in sharply her breath 
 again at sight of the growing yet more and more diminu- 
 tive panorama of terraced pink and white and green, at 
 the increasing, multiplying nearness and shadow of the 
 grey stone monster that they were climbing up upon; 
 that now in reality brushed its shoulder against the small 
 phlegmatic train, scraping the glass of a window with a 
 loosened projection of its rough stone, while from her 
 own outer side of the vehicle she was staring down across 
 sheer declivitous depth, where the flank of the car, God 
 saving its unerring wheels, hung verily out over space, 
 space that conceived and re-conceived the golden sunshine 
 in a more and more minutely spun web of thin gilt, over 
 the further and further falling hills of incessant pink, 
 incessant white, incessant green. 
 
 And now, the train like an insect burrowed its nose 
 directly into the side of the stone mountain, and after an 
 instant of blackness, a few rods of man-made tunnel in an 
 out-shooting, inaccessible detail of the monster, drew in 
 on to a ledge of grey rock its destination. 
 
 She stepped down from the car with the curious, and 
 correct, impression that she was leaving all modernity, 
 all recent and confusing human invention, behind her. 
 And here, standing, as the woman was standing, in the 
 jurisdiction of God's whim, was the erstwhile yellow ant- 
 hill, the world-known monastery, the Monasterio del 
 Montserrat. 
 
 She had walked toward the portal letting into the 
 courtyards of the sacred buildings, but even on this brief 
 way, startled by the scream of the departing train, she
 
 La Gran Via 455 
 
 had turned, and in the open space left clear by the 
 vanished little inventive toy of humanity, had caught a 
 sudden view across the huge cleft on which the monastery 
 hangs, and of all the exquisite loveliness of the place; 
 and under the courtyard portal she fell down upon her 
 knees, turned half^ backward, in the impulsive instanta- 
 neousness of her posture, toward the beauty of the oppos- 
 ing grey-green mountain-side and its mad yet peaceful 
 terraces and climbing, clinging statues of brilliant white 
 marble that tell, in their startling snowy relief against 
 the towering rock, the terrible story of Christ's ascent of 
 Calvary. 
 
 "Dio ! Dio !" she stammered. "Did I call myself a 
 Spaniard, when I had not seen that? Did I sing 'Kundry' 
 when I had not seen that?" 
 
 And like Kundry, she was limp and pathetic as, having 
 lifted herself up and with effort crossed the courtyards of 
 the monastery, she drew herself slowly into the edifice of 
 the Holy Grail. 
 
 The dim church, lustrous through its constant dusk 
 with the dull-glowing she,en of its luxurious gold and its 
 candle-light, was sparsely peopled, its congregation 
 mainly peasant pilgrims, simple, devout, and happy. 
 Service was monotonously, soothingly under way. Two 
 hundred candles, about the altar and pendulous above it 
 in gently vibrating candelabra, burned against the streak- 
 ing, filtered sunlight. The chant of priests and respon- 
 sive, slow male choir quavered Latin over the bent peasant 
 heads. 
 
 The service done, she went, knowing the small traditions 
 of the place, forward through the nave and past side- 
 shrines to a stair behind the altar, and mounting its spiral 
 approached the brown, Moorish Virgin who sits in a votive 
 niche balconied high above the chancel, smooth and stoic 
 as a female Buddha. She kissed it. Then she left the 
 church. 
 
 She halted in the vestibido, dazzled and confused by 
 the abrupt glare of midday sun shimmering on the court-
 
 456 The Great Way 
 
 yards, and the white statues of the ravishing mountain- 
 side. Before the church, seated on the pavement, reclined 
 a family of peasants, chatteringly devouring their meal. 
 One of them promptly rose and after the national custom, 
 despite his awe and bashfulness at her attire, pressed her 
 to share their food. 
 
 When she had risen, wonderfully strengthened by the 
 rough fare of hard sausage and hard bread and pink early 
 wine, she stepped toward the dirty, pretty mother of the 
 numerous family, a woman thin and old from childbearing, 
 not from years. 
 
 "Madre," she said, laying her hand on the tired, youth- 
 ful frame that struggled respectfully to its feet, "would 
 you remember me?" 
 
 "Indeed, before God, senora, to have eaten with a lady, 
 could my kind forget it?'* 
 
 "Yet let me give you a keepsake for you to use, madre, 
 as you may see fit, for the 'keepsake' part can easily be 
 from memory indeed. It is not to pay for my food no, 
 no! But to thank you for harbouring one who might 
 have been a foreigner in your land. As it is, I am Spanish. 
 Go you with God." And she dropped a heavily jewelled 
 ring into the thin gnarled hand, and went toward the gar- 
 dens which, beyond the back of the church, run to the 
 brink of the ledge and overhang the beautiful far, far 
 valleys. 
 
 The gasping woman followed her and clung to her. 
 
 "Senora! Senora! Let me say to you what my hus- 
 band must not hear!" 
 
 Her eyes were glittering, and she was shaking so that 
 the jewels were glittering like them on her palm. 
 
 "We made this pilgrimage on foot to ask a miracle 
 of God ! Our house and little farm are mortgaged and 
 we had not wherewith to pay! And the Blessed Virgin 
 has intervened for us and answered us! You have an- 
 swered us, with a miracle of jewels! Are you the Virgin? 
 Are you the Madonna?" With a quivering hand she 
 stroked the woman's cloak that was so ashine in the sun-
 
 La Gran Via 457 
 
 light. "Let me make confession to you, then ! I was 
 tired, tired! And had the miracle not happened ah, I 
 knew how I could make one mouth the less to feed !" 
 
 With a shudder, her stranger-friend grasped her 
 shoulders, then let the seizing hands glide up to the thin 
 face. 
 
 "I understand ! The Virgin understands ! But you? 
 No ! No ! It is not Spanish ! And you have children 
 you have a husband ! Yet, dear, the Virgin understands ! 
 What she would say to you is, go you with God, not to 
 Him ! Remember, you are loved!" 
 
 She pointed back to the group of laughing children, 
 and went on into the sunlit gardens. 
 
 When she came to the end of the brilliantly flowered 
 path and looked about her, the realization of height made 
 her again draw in her breath with a sharp little sound. 
 
 Above her, the intense gay blue of the sky was mapped 
 over with thick bulks of white, shining, moving cloud. 
 Below her, the far serpentine valley of the Llobregat 
 twined among the countless distances of soft pink hills. 
 Between that blue of the distant sky and the pink of the 
 seemingly far more distant hills, the two colours appeared 
 to meet and amalgamate in patches of lavender that 
 floated through the gold of the sunlight between earth and 
 heaven. On her right hand, across from her and as high 
 in air as herself, stood the series of white religious statues 
 immovably climbing, climbing, against the grey flank of 
 the mountain beyond the gorge. 
 
 She lifted up her face and her trembling hands. 
 
 "Already, I have climbed high, O mi Dio, have I not?" 
 
 Turning, she retraced her way among the many- 
 coloured flowers of the gardens, past the nestling church, 
 and into the courtyards. 
 
 For the hospitality of the Monasterio del Montserrat, 
 no pay is asked. Those who stop in the whitewashed 
 convent rooms and sleep in the whiter linens, will probably 
 be grateful. And the offerings of their gratitude are
 
 458 The Great Way 
 
 made, if made at all, to a clerk in a little office of the 
 monastery, as they go away. 
 
 She went across the paving-stones to this office, and 
 approached the clerk. 
 
 "I have an offering to make, Senor." 
 
 "You have slept here, Senora?" 
 
 "No, Senor. But I wish to make the gift to-day." 
 She drew from beneath her cloak a carven box. It held 
 the whole remainder of her burden of jewels. None other 
 wealth, of any kind, was left to her now . . . unless, 
 perhaps, the rich creamily beautiful cloak itself . . . 
 unless, perhaps, the richly blue simple string of beads 
 suavely accompanying it around her throat were worldly 
 valuable. . . . She did not open the jewel-box and knew 
 that his country's courtesy would prevent him from it 
 in her presence for she did not wish great notice taken 
 of her. But even so he stared at it, and at her. "But, 
 Senora, such a gift is not in my province ! To make such 
 an offering you must see " 
 
 "See whom you choose, amigo. Attend to it for me, 
 so?" 
 
 "Excuse me, excuse me, but no, Senora !" For he had 
 felt the weight of it, extraordinary for a thing so fragile, 
 and had hastened, first his words, and then himself away, 
 against the dread possibility of seeming rudeness. When 
 he returned it was with a bjack-robe, old and fair of 
 face, calm, as would be here, and quiet, soft, and sweet, 
 as would be too. 
 
 And to the prayer-gemmed hands of this old monk the 
 woman consigned this last material burden of hers. 
 
 "Senora," he said, "our custom is to take only when 
 our hospitality has been taken. Mariana, then " 
 
 "But this afternoon," she said, "I go on up to the 
 peak of San Jeronimo and you must know, padre, that 
 some day or other, even for us Spaniards there will be no 
 manana !" 
 
 "My dear," he smiled gently back to her smile, "for
 
 La Gran Via 459 
 
 Spaniards who believe in God, always there is a to- 
 morrow !" 
 
 "But this this kind of gift," she said, hesitant from 
 pressing its nature but pressed to her argument, "must 
 be left in your care while I am gone, so if yours to- 
 morrow, why not yours to-day? Shall you make me 
 carry it with me? For padre even so little a package 
 as this can be a burden when when one is trying to 
 climb! . . . And I understand it is a long climb, is it 
 not?" 
 
 "Indeed yes, and for a woman, Sefiora ! There lies 
 the Bad Valley !" She had closed his two hands upon 
 the jewel-box, her own emanating the feminine per- 
 suasiveness that renders malleable even the exclusive 
 lovers of Christ ; and holding it now in one hand and 
 unopened, for he was as Spanish as his clerk with the 
 other he pointed, his gesture beginning just yonder with 
 some rough-hewn steps, and sweeping onward widely 
 across the fissure. "I can read the history of its creation, 
 a history as wonderful as that this very church should 
 afterward have possessed the Holy Grail, rewritten in 
 your eyes as you gaze at it, for you are evidently one 
 who reads. May you read but such beauties always ! 
 There begins the wound of it. There it lies !" 
 
 "Yes, padre, I have read I I know something of 
 the Valle Malo! So I go first directly up those steps?" 
 
 "It is the way. But you have procured a guide, yes?" 
 
 "No, padre, I do not wish a guide." 
 
 "But alone? It is impossible, my child! And for a 
 woman, more than impossible! Shall I call a guide for 
 you?" 
 
 "No ! No ! I am a Spaniard I do not need a guide 
 in Spain !" And to stop his coming further protest she 
 hastened: "Anyway, it is safe to go a little way, is it 
 not?" 
 
 "Yes, yes, Sefiora, if you are not afraid of the dizzy 
 steps. It is safe to go as far up as the great gorge just 
 above as far as the steps are hewn out. But no further,
 
 460 The Great Way 
 
 and only in the light. And the sun goes down swiftly 
 here, once it starts, my child !" 
 
 "Ah," she said, "and that darkness as of Golgotha 
 is coming again quickly! And I must start through it! 
 But I am not afraid! I thank you, Father! Go you 
 with God!" 
 
 "Go you with God, my dear!" And he called after 
 her: "And there on the chasm-side, hold fast to the 
 rail!" 
 
 She crossed the little plaza that stood, holding up the 
 toy railway station and a diminutive market, between the 
 portal and the towering rock, and began the ascent. The 
 dirt path led suddenly into the ruggedly out-hewn steps, 
 which rose cruder and cruder along the side of the gorge. 
 Looking back, she saw the monastery and its church and 
 vivid-coloured gardens spread in sharp design just below 
 her; and in the midst, lovely as an intentional part of 
 pattern, the motionless figure of her old new friend like 
 a crucifix of ebony in the courtyard. 
 
 For with his present he had been like a child on 
 Christmas morning and with likely more reason than a 
 child-of-the-world's, here where to these black-dressed 
 children of white hearts every night that shows a star 
 is Christmas night, and every afternoon that allows a 
 cloud is Good Friday afternoon, and every single dawn, 
 rain, shine, or thunderbolt, is Easter dawn and almost 
 instantly he had opened the box, enjoying its tiny key, 
 and then, at the brilliantly sunlit dazzle into his eyes of 
 its magnificent display, he had cried out, eyes wide gazing 
 after her, arms wider, forthflung in his dumbfoundment. 
 
 From this last friend, this vivid picture of him, she 
 looked on momentarily around her. On one side of her 
 rose the huge surface of rock, on the other, empty space 
 dropped itself fearfully down through the narrow chasm. 
 Framed by its rugged walls, there met her eyes a bright, 
 tinted picture of sky and clouds and of the far-off valley 
 below. 
 
 Across its beautiful colours, like a moat in sunshine a
 
 La Gran Via 461 
 
 little black thing was crawling. It was the toy train, 
 creeping once more up from Monistrol. Once more, man's 
 invention had come within her vision. 
 
 "But it has nothing to bring me, O God!" she said, 
 and turning her back upon it, she went slowly on. 
 
 The rock up which the rough steps led was a frag- 
 ment of the mountain which had looked, from the 
 monastery, like an oval pebble set on end. 
 
 It was two hundred feet high. 
 
 It was but one of innumerable formations, gigantic 
 and grey and conical, that rose all about. The walls 
 closed in behind her. The early twist of the huge chasm 
 had shut away the monastery. She was alone, in a wilder- 
 ness of primeval stone. Not rough and peaked, but 
 smooth and massively gentle like mad inverted stalactites, 
 the wild forms reared above her through the air. She 
 was in the Voile Malo. 
 
 She went on and on, her breath caught and caught 
 again at the multiplying loveliness of the weird and mon- 
 strous shapes. Infinitely higher than the rocks, against 
 the glowing blue sky hung one glittering cloud, pure white 
 as a poised dove. 
 
 Before her, softly green amid the riotous grey, a little 
 grove of pines stood on a plateau of shelving granite. 
 
 She pressed forward to it, and turned among the 
 stunted trees to look down upon the strange magnificence 
 of the gorge. Her arms leapt out in a passionate gesture, 
 and physical speech broke from her. 
 
 "So, I have passed you, I have passed you, Voile 
 Malo! I have passed you at last, and human things and 
 people can touch me no more ! See, I am beyond you ! 
 What thing or person, in the whole human world, can 
 strike, can bruise me now? The world that lies below 
 you, now lies also below me ! God has granted that I 
 have passed you ! He bade me climb, and I have done 
 His bidding! I have still to climb but you are passed, 
 is it not so, Valle Malo? All things pass ! Once it was 
 trudge, trudge, trudge. That is long gone, and now it
 
 462 The Great Way 
 
 is but climb, climb, climb! Yes, it is even you that I 
 have now passed in my climb to God's Market, to-day !" 
 
 She knew that the Bad Valley still stretched on and 
 on ahead ; but to the poetry of her mind, as to the poetry 
 of the simple Catalonian peasant's, the symbol of it con- 
 centrated and spent itself in the beautiful desolate gorge 
 that she indeed had just passed, and now, as she pushed 
 through the grove of pines and up the shard-strewn trail 
 into the further wildernesses of stone, the exaltation of 
 the heights was upon her. 
 
 Of necessity a great terror lay at the bottom of her 
 soul. But it was truly at the bottom of that soul, numb 
 and insignificant under the blissfully evaporating weight 
 of her worse terror, that of the world from which she 
 fled; and with her back to the fearful emblematic chasm, 
 and her gradually slower and slower steps leading on and 
 up through the intermingled stone and verdure, an un- 
 speakable peace came more and more upon her, creeping 
 down to her from its eternal brooding on the sublime 
 heights surrounding her and before her. 
 
 She was in the region of the huge stone grotesques 
 that build up the fantastical crown of the Sacred Moun- 
 tain. Here, there, and everywhere, wonderful in their 
 weird shapes marked out against the sky, they stood grey 
 and naked and immobile like Titan sentinels. 
 
 And as she went marvelling on and on, one and then 
 another and another and another, seemed to take on more 
 than accidental form. From their mere likeness to great 
 battlements and towers, nearer and more near they pro- 
 gressed to shapes of giant boasts: a monster crouching 
 cat ; a fabulous dromedary ; an elephant far vaster than a 
 mastodon, its distorted trunk trickling down along the 
 blue of the heavens like a rivulet of granite. They had 
 the filmy trick and fascination of clouds, in which men 
 read startling forms. But unlike clouds, they were real, 
 stable, as though created thus deliberately. It was as if 
 God, aeons ago in the dim age of His making of the 
 astounding pinnacles, had had some fleeting thoughts of
 
 La Gran Via 463 
 
 forms of life He would later undertake, and His vague 
 shadowy ideas had caught themselves, and been tangible- 
 ized, in the formative nature of the molten stone. 
 
 Here in the isolation, where time was of as little import 
 as the elements, where elements and time were things of 
 sheer sequence, not pregnant consequence, the coming of 
 sunset, though it told the human creature who had come 
 into the region that she must have climbed for hours, yet 
 brought her no feeling of surprise, beyond that of its 
 radiant glory. 
 
 "Verily, 'here Time and Space are one'!" she 
 breathed ; and the strange words from the great Grail 
 drama, always queer to her, held now some new signifi- 
 cance, as if the familiarity that had been for her in their 
 oddness had been prophetic, of a sympathy, stirred then, 
 with something that had become real finally, here and 
 now, buckling the distant painted panoramic fascination 
 to the immense actuality of these corresponding vaster 
 marvels in the "now and here" that were one; while all 
 the queerness stopped in it still, keeping the thought, the 
 sense, with all this added sensation, still a thing ineffable 
 literally, no more to be told than it already was in those 
 almost senseless words. It seemed to her, here and now, 
 as if they must inevitably have been written, whether from 
 near or far, into the greatest of all art-expressions of the 
 Grail significances, in attempt to suggest in helpless 
 tangibility something of the one quality common to all the 
 elements of God something of ... this; her thoughts 
 wending with her as if art, a spirit, must follow any who 
 came out of wildernesses and touched it once, no matter 
 how soon, or far, or immolate they might go back away 
 from it into wilderness again. . . . For this, in absolute 
 sooth, fact and truth, was wilderness wilderness very, 
 though wilderness sublime. 
 
 As she went reverently on again in the bright shimmer, 
 a turn of her hard shelving path brought her opposite a 
 solitary great desolate grotesque that halted her in silent 
 wonder before it.
 
 464 The Great Way 
 
 It was a face a woman's distorted face, aspiring 
 stark against the sky, bent back, with closed eyes lifted 
 to God. It was ugly, hideous the face of what the world 
 in its cruel brevity of thought would call a hag. It was 
 agonized. It was a face of age, tremendous age; yet its 
 pain seemed that of a woman in child-labour. And withal 
 its torture, the horrible twisted mouth seemed to smile 
 to smile ineffably through its anguish, as if its eternal 
 stone trouble held the ecstatic triumph and peace of 
 Creation. 
 
 The woman who gazed up at her was seized with a 
 sense of shame that she stood in this presence clothed 
 as she was, in costly garments. But her instinctively 
 lowering eyes fell upon the hands that had as instinctively 
 lifted in awe toward it, and seeing that they were bare, 
 she remembered that she had already paid h^r full tribute 
 of baubles. Satisfied, she went on, with one lingering 
 backward look ; and the increasing cold of the winds that 
 swirled down at her from the summit told her it was well 
 that she had not followed her impulse, if she still would 
 climb, and stripped off, to lay before that terrific entity, 
 the heavy cloak. 
 
 As she went up and up, more and more steeply, her 
 path dimming and sometimes quite vanishing at great 
 slanting spaces_of slippery stone, suddenly through the 
 moaning of the wind a different yet a kindred howling 
 reached her ears: it was the baying of hounds, warning 
 her that she neared the peasant's lodge basing the utmost 
 pinnacle of San Jeronimo. 
 
 Looking through a passage of the rocks, she could 
 see the tall slope and its naked little chapel against the 
 burning sunset. This was man's highest attainment of 
 the mountain. But, sacramental, finely religious as the 
 attainment was, still it spelt the world of humanity, and 
 she turned her back upon it. 
 
 Through another stone rift, before her rose another 
 far grey peak, and in the anxious measure of her eyes
 
 La Gran Via 465 
 
 it looked even higher a very little higher. And gladly, 
 she started toward it. 
 
 It stood isolate and forbidding as any of its grotesque 
 companions ; but though its approach was arduous and 
 full of small dangers, the formation was that of a slowly 
 rising ridged plateau, and its conquest proved only a 
 struggle with slipping shards, her aid little stunted trees 
 that bent resentfully, threateningly under her seizure, and 
 her last enemy glassy surfaces of glazed slate sandstone 
 between foothold and foothold. 
 
 With a last effortful step, she came abruptly out upon 
 the summit. 
 
 As she stood there she was like a carven figure topping 
 a giant idol, supreme in air above the world. 
 
 In a great disc surrounding her, in a great half-sphere 
 overhead, were the regal colours of sunset. 
 
 Red. 
 
 Gold. 
 
 And countless tones of violet, from the soft blue- 
 lavender of clouds floating out near the molten sun, to 
 the deep purples thickening in the east. 
 
 She seemed cut away on the very apex of earthy 
 things. "Stone Watchwoman" old legend would have 
 called her. San Jeronimo was behind her, shut off from 
 her. 
 
 "Have I now climbed high? At last, O God, at last!" 
 
 The flat rock hung out over space, and she ran toward 
 the edge and paused but a step from it. 
 
 The world that she had deserted lay spread in an 
 endlessly stretching map below her, prodigal, limitless in 
 its sublime multitude of coloured hills, their ceaseless 
 variety of undulations making a smoothness, in her far 
 vision, like the smoothness of a most finely rippling sea. 
 Though she cast her eyes directly down the fearful drop 
 of huge mountain-side, she could not see the monastery. 
 It was somewhere lost to vision among the myriad serra- 
 tions. Though she could see the pink and white and 
 green and yellow of the melting hills, she could not see
 
 466 The Great Way 
 
 Monistrol. Though she herself was wrapped like a 
 Madonna in a glory of light, the valleys were already 
 shifting from their brilliant garb of day into their dim 
 and dimmer clothes of night. About her, here and there 
 in the lavender and violet, a few pale silver stars were 
 shining. Beneath her, the light on the skin of the snaking 
 Llobregat was changing from a shimmer to a gleam. 
 
 The maddeningly dizzy height fell sheer below her 
 fascinated eyes. But despite the torn winds that she could 
 hear moaning wildly hither and yonder among the lonely 
 peaksj she knew that she was supremely secure in will- 
 power until the precise moment that was God's own, and 
 hers. 
 
 A sudden gust eddied around her, swirling her delicate 
 skirts and her cloak spirally, into the likeness of a vortex 
 of tinted sand or of tinted water. Perfectly balanced, she 
 leaned back confidently, daringly against the whirl of air. 
 It ceased. There was again complete stillness. 
 
 And standing there with her feet a few perilous inches 
 from space, through the creeping, softly multiplying dark- 
 ness of the coming velvet night, her head lifted back 
 with upturned face like that of the tortured woman in 
 perennial stone somewhere below her, Dulce once more 
 addressed herself to God.
 
 CHAPTER XLI 
 
 THE WAY 
 
 "SO, I am at the end of my Gran Via, O God! One step 
 more, and the Great Way at last is over for me ! 
 
 "It is for other steps, O God, that I try to pay with 
 this one. 
 
 "For having looked to the right and to the left, I now 
 look only ahead, where no eyes can see anything. 
 
 "I have tried and tried in every other way to pay. 
 
 "Perhaps this is the great way. Perhaps this is full 
 payment, expiation. 
 
 "For blindly leaving Cadiz, I paid oh, I paid ! with 
 that next blind step that so soon followed Cadiz, O God, 
 with its terrible bargain that I did not think about or 
 understand. 
 
 "For that blind step I have tried also to pay and to 
 to honourably pay ! Well, I think, I think, at last I 
 will have paid. 
 
 "I say I did not think about or understand it, yet 
 everyone, no matter how thoughtless or how blind, under- 
 stands somewhat, and there must necessarily have been 
 some badness in me. For that badness I have tried to 
 pay. I have tried to pay for it in money, for one thing. 
 I suppose You despise money, God. But I thought it was 
 right to pay back in that, and until You showed me that 
 it would be wrong to go on paying so, I paid and paid. 
 
 "As for this last wrongdoing, Dio mio, this defiance 
 against that unwritten commandment of Yours which 
 people say is as great as any of Your written command- 
 ments, the one against self-destruction, for this I ask no 
 leniency, I make no apology. For I know that You 
 understand. 
 
 467
 
 468 The Great Way 
 
 "And though I have said that it ends the Gran Via 
 for me, yet I do this knowing that it is never finished. 
 
 "I know that with this blind present step it only begins 
 again for me, in some manner known only to You. 
 
 "For I have learned that the Gran Via goes every- 
 where before birth, and beyond death; and that I have 
 known only a little of it. 
 
 "Yet I dare, O God, to take this one step more this 
 last step of the little of Your great way that I have 
 known, which will be also the first of the little, or much, 
 of it, that I am, through it, yet to know. 
 
 "I, Wanda of the Stars, find myself only Dulce again, 
 and step out to try to find my name among those stars, 
 that dot the Gran Via beyond my present understanding. 
 I step out, as blindly as I stepped out from Cadiz in the 
 beginning, in order to escape." 
 
 As she had spoken, at each word the quickening dark- 
 ness had gone a step of its own across the sky, turning 
 the lingering purples one by one to black ; and as if her 
 mention of the stars had been a command to them, they 
 had come suddenly out by twos and threes and then 
 myriads, armying the black firmament as with softly 
 glinting battalions and finally whole regiments, that shed 
 upon it, and down through the night from it, a wan, 
 exquisite green. 
 
 "I offer no excuse, O Dio mio, just as I offer none 
 for the wickedness of my trying to defy You, to swing 
 Your pendulum back. You understood that. 
 
 "I tried to step backward along Your Gran Via against 
 Your will, and You did not intend it and You did not allow 
 it. Oh, You are such a loving, gentle God ! For to tell 
 me so was Your only reproach of me! You meant that 
 I should go on climbing. Well, I have climbed! 
 
 "Oh, Dio mio, that climbing! Even now, with but 
 one more small step to take, I could yield to prayer and 
 implore You to reward me for the years of climbing ! To 
 turn my bitterness to the sweet that my parents meant in 
 naming me ! For, O God, such is the vitality and despera-
 
 The Way 469 
 
 tion of Your human insects that at this very instant 
 there persists in me the yearning that some word of Yours 
 whisper to me that sometimes at heart he desired me, 
 that at some time since that instant in the Rambla of the 
 Flowers, his soul desired to hold speech with mine ! Yes, 
 just such has been always mine, O God, and is mine 
 now, even, coward-like I suppose, exactly as is my Faith, 
 un-coward-likc I am sure ; a yearning that Your voice 
 might speak to me some such exquisite thing, here on 
 this pinnacle of the wilderness above the world, like a 
 new Epiphany on the great road. 
 
 "You know, O God, for if ever You were paying atten- 
 tion to me You were just then, I am sure, that it was 
 in such a manner of yearning that I took my little red 
 book and posted it again, this time into his hotel, and 
 not into a little princess where it belonged, instead of 
 to a substitute; and by myself, knowing You watching 
 me, instead of by a messenger. Ah, even in my very 
 bitterness and even angriness, all pride was already gone 
 from me, O God, when I did that one step, You see, 
 nearer to You. 
 
 "Do I quibble, I who have not bragged, but indeed 
 earnestly said, earnestly believing, that I especially love 
 the truth? I think, O God, that I do not quibble, for 
 what my thought was, in saying it must have brought me 
 nearer to You, is this : Was it not right that, such a love 
 having been his, he should know of it? Indeed, indeed, 
 was not much of such Tightness of thought and action in 
 me then? 
 
 "And in my so-doing, that second and right posting 
 of my little book, I think that all yearnings of earthen 
 kinds ceased for me, O God, because I knew that all such 
 kinds were what You had chosen to strip me of. 
 
 "And my last words to You with this voice that You 
 temporarily put into my keeping should not be of regret 
 for what You saw fit to take away, but of supplication 
 that in my new Gran Via, the Gran Via of the stars, 
 of the spaces and of the planets and of the constellations,
 
 470 The Great Way 
 
 of the Milky Way that stretches above me now from 
 Dulce to You, I may be free of the Trudge Market where 
 I sold my body and perhaps oh pity me! my soul! 
 Will it be the same henceforth paying, paying, paying 
 for having sold that body, when I have completely re- 
 nounced and sacrificed it and left it far behind? Perhaps 
 there is no such word or even meaning in the Universe 
 as 'far.' But ah !" 
 
 And her arm stretched forth fearfully, though her eyes 
 gazed fearfully upward: 
 
 "From the top of the Sacred Mountain to the black 
 face of the twisting Llobregat is a great way!" 
 
 Th*e arm fell back to her side; the eyes fell in a long 
 gaze down, down ; then lifted again. 
 
 "Shall I not then have paid? 
 
 "Or can it be that indeed the bargain entered my soul? 
 
 "In leniency to that soul, O Dio mio, credit me with 
 this much, as You now look down upon me, me standing 
 here alone and sacrificial upon the mountain-top: that 
 I did not drag my loved-one down from any pinnacle, 
 that my fall did not mean descent for him ! 
 
 "I do not know, God, why You make men and women 
 different. Though I was to have written upon that matter 
 in my little red book, I have never known why the matter 
 was wrong for me and not for him. And I do not ask. 
 I do not know, I have never found out, whether You even 
 intended it to be so. It is possible that the world looks 
 at it as You do not, and that men and women are equally 
 to blame. 
 
 "But apparently You mean it to be just as it is, and 
 where I sinned in the little Street of the Carmen, pre- 
 sumably he did not. 
 
 "Credit me this, at least, O Dio mio, that that I 
 did him no harm. Credit me, that bad as I may be, at 
 least in this last step of my expiation, I am not dragging 
 him down with me. So much of the prophecy remains 
 unfulfilled, does it not? So much You grant me, O mi
 
 The Way 471 
 
 Dio, is it not so? And so much is at least somewhat 
 beautiful to think of, is it indeed not so, Dio mio, entre 
 nous, in this our lonely moment together, Yours and 
 mine ?" v 
 
 Even the winds did not answer her. They had sunk 
 down, moaning, among the crags, and thence torn away, 
 off far into the heavens, sweeping clear the sky before her 
 so that it was pure, deep, bright with its army of stars, 
 and driving the clouds together in hurrying ranks that 
 became battalions, regiments of their own, till they were 
 like a great opposing host, banked in masses behind her. 
 
 Her face was still uplifted; her arms reached out to- 
 ward the new brightness of the sky. 
 
 "And so much, mi Dio, as my sin was against the 
 great whole of Society, I think that I have actually paid. 
 For I tried in a far, far bigger way to pay with the 
 voice that You had said should be mine to take care of, 
 and to do with. 
 
 "God, have You seen me try? 
 
 "Or to You am I but a worm that tries to crawl into 
 Your sight, the leaf of a tree that tries to wave across 
 Your vision, a grain of sand that tries to glitter in Your 
 eyes ? Do You see what separate persons try to do, or are 
 You so very high that You see us only in masses, and ages, 
 and huge grouped accomplishments? 
 
 "I suppose You must see churches, God great epoch- 
 making cathedrals, great yearnings of whole peoples, like 
 Notre-Dame. But do You see the little cathedrals made 
 by individuals? Can it be, O God, that You read books? 
 Do You examine pictures and statues? Can it be that 
 through all the music of the spheres that surround You, 
 You have heard me sing? Can it be possible that for one 
 instant of Your enormous Time I have held the Universe 
 still because You paused to listen to me?" 
 
 Far, far below her, a dim cluster of lights here, and 
 a dim cluster there, and a dim cluster yet farther away 
 shone softly in the darkness of the valley where little 
 towns were resting; shone soft and dim as if the earth
 
 472 The Great Way 
 
 repeated the sky as if the lights of the peasant homes 
 were but the reflection of the stars, as if truly, in God's 
 eyes the architecture of even whole communities were but 
 star-dust. 
 
 "If I have done that, then I need not have been calling 
 to You now, for then You have already known that I have 
 tried to build a picture, a statue, a cathedral, for the 
 People, a book for them, even if it was seemingly but a 
 little red book for one alone, still, a book, with my voice, 
 for the People Your People!" 
 
 Through the starlight, the voice she spoke of went up 
 as softly as the dim lustre of the valley. But into the 
 last words a vibrant note of passion had suddenly crept, 
 and lifting her arms she cried: 
 
 "Lest You have never heard, I will sing to You here, 
 now ! Hearing, You shall see all of me, as I am ! Then 
 judge me! I will hold back nothing! I am alone with 
 You, and I shall make myself believe that there is good, 
 some good in me, I shall make You believe it ! Listen to 
 me, and see me, not as I made myself in the Trudge 
 Market, not as I made myself afterward in the Market of 
 Art, but as You have brought me to be, good and bad, 
 as I stand, as I stand here, as I stand poised here! 
 Listen, and hear me make the stars stand still !" 
 
 In the utter silence she leaned back, with opened lips, 
 for one breathless moment, as if to hold the stars in wait 
 as she might have held the audience of an earthly theatre. 
 Then she swayed a half step forward, and from the breast 
 that quivered over the very verge of the exalted rock, 
 came the clarion cry of Valkyrie goddesshood, its "Ho-yo- 
 to-ho !" ringing her command out to the stars. 
 
 "Ho-yo-to-ho !" It seemed to speed around the vast 
 circle of the heavens, and as if it were a signal to the 
 massed army of clouds behind her, a disseminating motion 
 stirred them and they began to move slowly again around 
 the sky toward her. 
 
 They were at liberty to move. 
 
 It was the stars that she had commanded to stand still.
 
 The Way 473 
 
 And herself thrilled, removedly from herself as if she 
 had been one of them, by the beauty of the brief thing 
 she had done, her body seeming to echo it, her soul 
 exquisitely calmed, she stepped satisfiedly back a pace 
 along her rocky Gran Via of God's moment and hers, 
 and sank into a little harsh nook of stones and stunted 
 pine tree, to plan her next earthly-voiced bit of song to 
 God, and with smiling-natured thoughts clustering for- 
 ward to forward it. And their ringleader was : Had she 
 ever, even in a Sevilla street, supposed she could not sing 
 rightly in the open air? And her lips smiled silently up 
 to God her present answer: a question upon a question: 
 "I have climbed high, mi Dios, have I not?" 
 
 A great sense of Creation was with her, a sense of it 
 that was of all of the beauty with its flavour of agony 
 of that Stone Woman somewhere below. And her plan 
 for song seemed perfected, perfected by the thought and 
 symbol of that word "Creation," and she rose and stepped 
 instinctively forward again. And there was now no need 
 in the firmament for moving stars, for her voice swept 
 into a nameless song of mingled tongues ; of mingled 
 musics ; old, new, French, Italian, Spanish ; whose colours 
 and whose delicate vitalities filled the air with crystal- 
 clear successions of pure tones like very showers of fall- 
 ing stars showers that to her intoxicated mind seemed 
 to be her whole art-nature fulfilling itself by displaying 
 its beauty naked to God and then falling to death. 
 
 And again she sank down, clinging with deep ecstatic 
 relaxation to the little dwarfed pine tree and its rock, 
 satisfied that she had done well, done, said her newest 
 little arbitrary thought, better, for instance, than ever 
 in any former theatre she had done, yes, done well even 
 in herself, by herself, Creating. 
 
 And she had Created, was Creating; for a Catalonian 
 peasant, lodgekeeper of San Jeronimo, heard an angel 
 sing on the top of the Sacred Mountain of Montserrat 
 that night; and had his wife to witness with her ears 
 there and her tongue; and had dogs that could not be
 
 474 The Great Way 
 
 witnesses, but that had been soothed into quietude by the 
 beauty of the voice. And another legend nowadays lives 
 along with the Holy Grail at Montserrat. 
 
 And with breathing refreshed, breathing that she was 
 now sure yes, satisfied could never be tormented by 
 an earthly sob again, again she contemplated what she 
 next should sing to God, and again she lifted up her 
 body, and lifted up her face, and sang. 
 
 And again the song had sweepingly changed. 
 
 The first troop of the marching clouds had come within 
 her vision. The army was defiling. 
 
 It was the beginning of their great pasear before her 
 through the Spanish air. 
 
 And whether the song took on their nature, or their 
 soft forms were moulded by her voice, the passionate 
 never-written melody that now fled up to God was the 
 pent music of her long abnegation of love, the smoulder 
 of the smothered desire of the long years ; and as it burst 
 from her in wordless flames of wild unsatisfied yearning, 
 the pale thin clouds that floated by were to her eyes like 
 parades of starlit, pitiable nuns, all like the wan yellow 
 nun at Mataro, all tramping desperately along toward 
 God as best they could, driven, and helpless, and blind 
 to the stars they passed but too thin to hide the stars 
 from other eyes. 
 
 They disappeared ; and as the wild song of renunciation 
 melted after them, new clouds, new music came. 
 
 It was now terrible music, terrible lilting music, brown 
 music, of obscure beauty, as the great voice kept her 
 promise to hold back nothing, to show herself completely, 
 the naked bad as fully as the naked good. And as the 
 pulsing, insinuating rhythms exotically joined the night, 
 they were now terrible clouds that passed before her, 
 thick clouds which in the nature of their beauty must 
 obscure the stars. She shut her eyes, and poured and 
 poured out the perhaps evil period of her music as if to 
 bring forth its fullness quickly and be done with it, to
 
 The Way 475 
 
 let the last lingering element of it quiver fofe ever from 
 her nature. 
 
 And quiet, contemplative, she sat with those eyes still 
 closed in the little happy, harsh throne of rock and dwarf- 
 tree. She knew what she wished to sing last of all to 
 God. How strange, that it should be thus that at last 
 she was to sing it ! 
 
 When she reopened her eyes she saw only the bright 
 quiet stars again. The sky was cloudless. 
 
 And quietly, but strongly, she again rose and stepped 
 forward, and to the very verge. 
 
 And the glad wealth of ravishing song that now rushed 
 from her toward the sky's shining hosts was the music 
 of her fullest art-ambition, and the only music that could 
 sound the ambition of her love adored music, silently 
 adored until now, the music of Isolde. 
 
 With her whole art, her whole will, her whole un- 
 nameable Faith, she projected it straight out at those 
 stars. 
 
 In the huge conviction of her music-ecstasied soul, 
 they were standing still to listen. 
 
 It was to the stars alone that Dulce sang her love-song 
 on and on, note by note nearer to the death-hymn at its 
 end. 
 
 Ecstatically soft, again and again the lullaby of death 
 breathed out upon God's hushed Gran Via. 
 
 So still, so tender were the moments and the elements, 
 that it was as if God, with even His work done, were 
 listening with His stars as for the last time the voice 
 uttered the immaculately dying phrases. And as she 
 swayed gently with their melody more and more delicately 
 poised over the edge, in her imagination building the stars 
 into the body of her dead love at her feet, the darkness 
 of the sky was as subtly, as if in its own imagination, 
 fainting into tones. Its colour was soft; a pale colour 
 of grey that had come from black, and that only hinted 
 of an unshining white-blue that would as inevitably come 
 from grey.
 
 476 The Great Way 
 
 The voice with infinite gentleness sank through the 
 last note, a%d stopped to rise again in quick, desperate 
 human words. 
 
 "Then farewell, and I greet You, O mi Dio ! Must 
 I go to You with my arms stretched up to plead with 
 You, or will You let me fold them on my breasts, as if 
 I were a pure Madonna? Oh, mi Dio, let this one last 
 step be to Your liking! Will You answer me?" 
 
 And God answered. 
 
 "Dulce!" 
 
 Suffused with astonished terror at the agonized sound, 
 she turned. It had been God's answer in the voice that 
 she so long had thought of as the voice of God. The 
 arms for whose guidance she had prayed went neither 
 upward nor to her bosom; they sprang out, imploringly, 
 before her. 
 
 She seemed to see only the stars madly moving stars. 
 But even doubt left her and left the last vibrations of her 
 wild cry of unbelief, for arms had seized her, seeming to 
 strike her, as the strangled moaning shout of that voice 
 had struck her. Nor could doubt recur to her, for the 
 bruising clasp of those arms filled her reaching soul with 
 the sickening joy of the actual touch of flesh and flesh 
 an ecstasy that, though it mingled more and more with 
 the seeming rush of wings about her, did not cease; and 
 still did not cease; and yet did not cease; and seemed 
 to generate and prolong itself ; and prolong, and prolong, 
 and prolong itself, into a great way a great way that 
 stretched out from all her senses that were deliciously 
 assailed by the odour of the little dwarf pine tree nook, 
 and the mercilessly crushing arms that had carried her 
 there, and were protecting her from the harshness of its 
 very protection, and the voice, that voice, which as her 
 face streamed helpless, helpless tears, was helplessly, help- 
 lessly kissing it, and streaming down at it helpless, help- 
 less words. 
 
 "Oh, my own, my own, my own! You would have 
 done that and after your little books! Were they not
 
 The Way 477 
 
 enough for my heart and soul to live through? But I 
 have you at last O God, God, You have answered me! 
 I have you in my arms, never to be taken away from 
 me again ! Dulce ! I love you ! I love you ! Do you 
 know what those three words mean? They are all of 
 life ! And I have the vanity to know that they are to you, 
 having read your little books ! Oh, my dear, my sweet, 
 it was a horible blunder at the opera ! Isabel did not 
 tell me how she knew Madame de PEtoile, or why she 
 wanted to see you ! I saw in your eyes what you thought 
 of me, and / suffered as you did, though I did not know 
 that you were suffering then yoa, the great lady, who 
 must have despised me until she ceased to care, long ago ! 
 "Dulce, my Dulce, all this time I have been looking, 
 waiting, searching, longing for you calling you ! The 
 very night I left you I went back and tried to find you 
 yes, I followed a figure that I saw in the small hours in 
 the Carmen, out along the Mediterranean road to Ma- 
 taro, thinking it you not to tell you I loved you, for 
 I did not know yet that I did, but to try to do something 
 right. And I thought I saw you in Paris, at the Opera, 
 and thought afterward I had been mistaken. Yet always 
 I hunted. And I tried again in Cadiz, when I had just 
 given up the hope of it and had learned of you so miracu- 
 lously from Isabel. Oh, Dulce, Dulce ! And in the mean- 
 time, I had thought, and felt, yes, felt too, and decided 
 I would not marry. But I found she cared, and I 
 thought that was what I must do. But even so, I stayed 
 in Spain, and hunted, hunted. And all through this time 
 of my marriage, which I thought might make me forget, 
 I have only remembered, with times of the worst suffering 
 on earth, Dulce, that I hope you, dear, never will have 
 suffered resignation. And from that I would wake to 
 new need, the need to hope, and I would call you. Yes, 
 I began that imaginative calling that first year, right 
 after my marriage, and always I have been calling you, 
 from high places. Once I went back to Spain, and called 
 you in the watch-tower of Tibidabo, and afterward I stood
 
 478 The Great Way 
 
 again and again in the Rambla of the Flowers, watching 
 the little Royal, and wishing you would walk out of those 
 swinging doors and again speak to me! And when we 
 have been in Paris, I have run from Isabel, yes, from 
 dear, pure, unknowing Isabel, and gone to the Etoile, 
 and to the top of the Arc de Triomphe, and called, called, 
 called you from there called to you across waters and 
 through spaces: Dulce, Dulce, Dulce! Yes, when I had 
 followed you after the opera at Covent Garden, and after 
 the dear, dear little red books at the Savoy, and had 
 managed to trace you, and saw you in Paris stepping into 
 the train at the Quai d'Orsay, and was barred out, one 
 second too late, then in my torture I went as I had used 
 to do, to the Arc de Triomphe, and called you again, a 
 long, long call, Du-u-ulce! And it was that cry, with the 
 prayer from my heart in it, that you heard just now 
 I know that you heard it coming, coming, just as your 
 voice was actually guiding me up and up through the 
 rocks and darkness to reach you and save you yes, I 
 know that it was what made you pause for that last 
 question of God over the edge, where my soul would 
 have followed you into darkness, my Dulce, my darling, 
 my soul, my life, my own !" 
 
 "Oh," she breathed, drinking in his last kiss ecstati- 
 cally, drawing away from him, rising, "oh, I can stand 
 now>' 
 
 And standing beside her in the rose-growth of the 
 dawn, his arm around her shoulders, he cried joyously: 
 
 "And we can start down together now! Together 
 into the new life that is to be ours after all the waiting 
 and learning, all the suffering, all your little red books 
 and all my calling; the life that we shall live according 
 to your every desire, with you the guide, only choosing 
 and asking, and that I shall live entirely for you, leaving 
 you only at your bidding, otherwise always beside you! 
 Oh, my own, my sweet, you do look strong enough now, 
 the strength shines there in your face, and now, instantly, 
 we can start down together !"
 
 The Way 479 
 
 And his caressing hands drew her toward the descent. 
 
 "Darling," she breathed, standing where she was, one 
 of her hands lifting, "tell me once more, just once, look- 
 ing me in the eyes, and then my soul need never question 
 it again you love me?" 
 
 "I have told you," he said, his eyes shining, "that these 
 three words mean the whole of life : / love you!" 
 
 For a long moment she stood with her face uplifted in 
 an abandon of quiet rapture; and then she said: 
 
 "Then, darling, try to comprehend this : You and I 
 must not now, or at any time, together, start down. 
 You and I together must go always simply on, and on! 
 Oh, Jose, after that" and she pointed to the abyss that 
 was growing full of golden mists, "and after this, our- 
 selves I am almost a madwoman ; but as I am now, I can 
 best understand God, and though I adore you, and now 
 know that that you love me we we must not have 
 that beautiful life you plan, my own!" 
 
 "Dulce !" he cried. 
 
 "Think!" she said gently, quietly. "There is your 
 marriage !" 
 
 "Dulce," he cried trembling, "what is that to our love?" 
 
 "It is everything to our love, Jose Luis !" 
 
 "Darling, darling," he cried, "what do you mean? 
 Surely, surely, such a love as ours justifies anything!" 
 
 "Yes !" she said, smiling quietly, rapturously. "Yes, 
 it justifies even such an infinitude of trustfulness as fills 
 my soul and must fill yours! Are many people blessed 
 as you and I are? Has there been a greater love?" 
 
 And he cried out passionately : "No !" 
 
 "Then, dear, it must have no stain, even the most 
 forgivable, most justified stain! It must be so capable, 
 so proud in its capability, that it can be in our eyes like 
 a rich pure jewel on the hand ! I am a free spirit. You 
 have the world to consider and Isabel." 
 
 "She would divorce me," he said simply. 
 
 And as simply she answered : "You are a Catholic."
 
 480 The Great Way 
 
 "Oh, my own," he burst out passionately, "my own, 
 why at this moment of all moments " 
 
 "Because, darling," she said, swiftly, but very quietly, 
 "in my bliss, my ineffable happiness at the goodness 
 of God, I understand His meanings as never before. What 
 are these things, these bodies, to you and me? We have 
 our love ! We know at last ! We know, Jose, my own ! 
 What do we need, more than that vast, indescribably 
 beautiful fact? And, my Jose, remember tho reason of 
 your marriage, reason greater afterward than before: 
 Isabel loves you!" 
 
 "Not as you and I love !" he cried. 
 
 "Not only is she your wife," said Dulce softly. "She 
 is Isabel. A part of me belongs to her!" And she lifted 
 from around her throat and held out to him the Astarte 
 beads. "My darling, take these back to her. Tell her 
 you followed me. Dear, sunlit soul, never knowing that 
 sorrow is her guest, she will always think you did it for 
 her sake. These are the part of me, my Jose Luis, that 
 belongs to Isabel the treasure of mine that that had 
 never been bought or sold that will mean, for ever to 
 you and me, the beauty, yes, the Tightness of our love." 
 And she finished with exquisite gentleness : "Are we 
 right, my own?" 
 
 He looked into her eyes for a silent long moment; 
 then, straightening his shoulders, his voice husky, he 
 said: "Yes." 
 
 "Tell her that if the Great Way ever joins our paths 
 again, hers and mine, never again will I refuse to see 
 her, Jose Luis !" 
 
 "And your life?" he cried, suffering, suddenly irreso- 
 lute, helpless. "What will it be? Where will you be? 
 What will you do?" 
 
 "I do not know yet!" she exclaimed readily, calmly. 
 "I will simply do whatever God tells me to do. What 
 does it matter, whether I spend it singing for you, to 
 People, in theatres, or praying for you, to God, in a 
 convent? I could be a nun, now, or I can still sing
 
 The Way 481 
 
 now Isolde! God will tell me presently. You see, my 
 darling, it simply does not matter!" 
 
 "What matters," he cried out, "is that we we might 
 doubtr 
 
 "Doubt?" she cried with an exquisite little flutter of 
 laughter. "Doubt, when this, our love, is one from which 
 God, in my little books and in your calling from high 
 places, has burned and burned away all alloy until it is 
 utterly pure, pure metal?" 
 
 He caught her back into his arms and bent over her 
 with his cry: 
 
 "The pure metal of God, that will last " 
 
 "For ever," she whispered, letting him lift her face 
 up to his kiss, "and ever!" 
 
 And with the kiss, with passionately solemn repetition 
 of it, and of her words, he said: 
 
 "For ever and for ever !" 
 
 "I will watch you," she said, her hands leading him 
 to the descendant slope of the rock, and gently, caress- 
 ingly urging him, lingeringly, a little, and a little, and a 
 little, away from her, "till you grow small, small, small 
 in the distance, or until you are hidden by the wonderful, 
 aspiring crags, my own !" 
 
 He had done her silent bidding, letting himself down 
 so that now in the gold and rose light of the full re- 
 splendent day that had grown with the fullness of their 
 love around them she was like some lovely statue to which 
 his face gazed wonderingly up ; and suddenly came a break 
 in his courage, and his hands clasped her feet desperately, 
 even his brow bending to them for an instant, and. then 
 his voice lifting to her desperately with his eyes. 
 
 "Oh, Dulce, Dulce, should we not oh, I have no words 
 to put it into, but should we not somehow, somewhere, 
 go together, up mountains and down? Deep in our two 
 souls do we both know that we are right? Are we fair 
 to ourselves, now that we have found each other, you and 
 I after after all this Great Way?"
 
 482 The Great Way 
 
 She bent slightly over him, but with exaltation, with 
 arms flung wide. 
 
 "Oh, my own," she cried, "my own, I now know that 
 there is one thing, though but one thing, further than the 
 Great Way God has told me and that is: the Greater 
 Way!"
 
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