“I ‘m sorry I can’t speak to her now,” he explained, rapidly twirling a paper-cutter between his long fingers. “She won’t be free until four o’ clock. She will be so pleased that I ‘m almost tempted to call her at once. But she’s so overworked, poor girl, and she will go out so much.”

  “My dear Kenneth, how does she ever manage it all? She must have nerves of iron.”

  “Oh, she’s wonderful, wonderful!” he exclaimed, brushing his limp hair back from his forehead with a perplexed gesture. “As to how she does it, I really don’t know much more than you. It all gets done, somehow.” He glanced quickly toward the partition, through which we heard the steady clicking of a typewriter. “I scarcely know what she is up to until her proofs come in. I usually go at those with her.” He darted a piercing look at me, and I wondered whether he had got a hint of the malicious stories which found their way about concerning his varied usefulness to Bertha.

  “If you’ll excuse me for a moment, Philip,” he went on, “I’ll finish a letter that must go out this afternoon, and then I shall be quite free.”

  He turned in his revolving-chair to a desk littered deep with papers, and began writing hurriedly. I could see that the simplest kind of composition still perplexed and disconcerted him. He stopped, hesitated, bit his nails, then scratched desperately ahead, darting an annoyed glance at the partition as if the sharp, regular click of the machine bewildered him.

  He had grown older, I noticed, but it was good to see him again — his limp, straight hair, which always hung down in a triangle over his high forehead; his lean cheek, loose under lip, and long whimsical chin; his faded, serious eyes, which were always peering inquiringly from behind his thick glasses; his long, tremulous fingers, which handled a pen as uncertainly as ever. There was a general looseness of articulation about his gaunt frame that made his every movement seem more or less haphazard.

  On the desk lay a heap of letters, the envelopes marked “answered” in Kenneth’s small, irregular hand, and all of them, I noticed, addressed to Bertha. In the open drawer at his left were half a dozen manuscript envelopes, addressed to her in as many different hands.

  “What on earth!” I gasped. “Does Bertha conduct a literary agency as well?”

  Kenneth swung round in his chair, and made a wry face as he glanced at the contents of the drawer. “It’s almost as bad as that. Really, it’s the most abominable nuisance. But we ‘re the victims of success, as Bertha says. Sometimes a dozen manuscripts come into her for criticism in one week. She dislikes to hurt any one’s feelings, so one of us usually takes a look at them.”

  “Bertha’s correspondence must be something of a responsibility in itself,” I ventured.

  “Oh, it is, I assure you. People are most inconsiderate. I ‘m rather glad, though, when it piles up like this and I can take a hand at it. It gives me an excuse for putting off my own work, and you know how I welcome any pretext,” he added, with a flushed, embarrassed smile.

  “What are you doing, anyhow? I don’t know where you’ll ever learn industry if Bertha can’t teach you.”

  “I ‘m working, I ‘m working,” he insisted, hurriedly crossing out the last sentence of his letter and blotting it carefully. “You know how reprehensibly slow I am. It seems to grow on me. I’m finishing up some studies in the French Renaissance. They’ll be ready by next fall, I think.” As he spoke, he again glanced hurriedly over the closely written page before him; then, stopping abruptly, he tore the sheet across the middle. “Really, you’ve quite upset me. Tell me about yourself, Philip. Are you going out to Olympia?”

  “That depends upon whether I remain here or decamp immediately for China, which prospect is in the cards. Olympia is greatly changed, Harrison tells me.”

  Kenneth sighed and sank deeper into his chair, reaching again for the paper-cutter. “Ruined completely. Capital and enterprise have broken in even there. They’ve all sorts of new industries, and the place is black with smoke and thick with noise from sunrise to sunset. I still own my house there, but I seldom go back. I don’t know where we’re bound for, I ‘m sure. There must be places, somewhere in the world, where a man can take a book or two and drop behind the procession for an hour; but they seem impossibly far from here.”

  I could not help smiling at the deeply despondent gaze which he fixed upon the papercutter. “But the procession itself is the thing we’ve got to enjoy,” I suggested, “the mere sense of speed.”

  “I suppose so, I suppose so,” he reiterated, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. “The six-day bicycle race seems to be what we’ve all come to, and doubtless one form of it’s as much worth while as another. We don’t get anywhere, but we go. We certainly go; and that’s what we ‘re after. You’ll be lucky if you are sent to China. There must be calm there as yet, I imagine.”

  Our conversation went on fitfully, with interruptions, irrelevant remarks, and much laughter, as talk goes between two persons who have once been frank with each other, and who find that frankness has become impossible. My coming had clearly upset him, and his agitation of manner visibly increased when he spoke of his wife. He wiped his forehead and hands repeatedly, and finally opened a window. He fairly wrested the conversation out of my hands and was continually interrupting and forestalling me, as if he were apprehensive that I might say something he did not wish to hear. He started and leaned forward in his chair whenever I approached a question.

  At last we were aware of a sudden slack in the tension; the typewriter had stopped. Kenneth looked at his watch, and disappeared through a door into his wife’s study. When he returned, Bertha was beside him, her hand on his shoulder, taller, straighter, younger than I had left her — positively childlike in her freshness and candor.

  “Didn’t I tell you,” she cried, “that we should do fine things?”

  III

  A FEW weeks later I was sent to Hong-Kong, where I remained for two years. Before my return to America, I was ordered into the interior for eight months, during which time my mail was to be held for me at the consul’s office in Canton, the port where I was to take ship for home. Once in the Sze Chuen province, floods and bad roads delayed me to such an extent that I barely reached Canton on the day my vessel sailed. I hurried on board with all my letters unread, having had barely time to examine the instructions from my paper.

  We were well out at sea when I opened a letter from Harrison in which he gave an account of Kenneth Gray’s disappearance. He had, Harrison stated, gone out to Olympia to dispose of his property there which, since the development of the town, had greatly increased in value. He completed his business after a week’s stay, and left for New York by the night train, several of his friends accompanying him to the station. Since that night he had not been seen or heard of. Detectives had been at work; hospitals and morgues had been searched without result.

  The date of this communication put me beside myself. It had awaited me in Canton for nearly seven months, and Gray had last been seen on the tenth of November, four months before the date of Harrison’s letter, which was written as soon as the matter was made public. It was eleven months, then, since Kenneth Gray had been seen in America. During my long voyage I went through an accumulated bulk of American newspapers, but found nothing more reassuring than occasional items to the effect that the mystery surrounding Gray’s disappearance remained unsolved. In a “literary supplement” of comparatively recent date, I came upon a notice to the effect that the new novel by Bertha Torrence Gray, announced for spring publication, would, owing to the excruciating experience through which the young authoress had lately passed, be delayed until the autumn.

  I bore my suspense as best I could across ocean and continent. When I arrived in New York, I went from the ferry to the “Messenger” office, and, once there, directly to Harrison’s room.

  “What’s all this,” I cried, “about Kenneth Gray? I tell you I saw Gray in Canton ten months ago.”

  Harrison sprang to his feet and put his finger to his lip.

  “Hush! Don’t say another word! There are leaky walls about here. Go and attend to your business, and then come back and go to lunch with me. In the meantime, be careful not to discuss Gray with any one.”

  Four hours later, when we were sitting in a quiet corner of a café, Harrison dismissed the waiter and turned to me. “Now,” he said, leaning across the table, “if you can be sufficiently guarded, you may tell me what you know about our friend.”

  “Well,” I replied, “it would have been, under ordinary circumstances, a commonplace thing enough. On the day before I started for the interior, I was in Canton, making some last purchases to complete my outfit. I stepped out of a shop on one of the crooked streets in the old part of the city, and I saw him as plainly as I see you, being trundled by in a jinrikisha, got up in a helmet and white duck, a fat white umbrella across his knees, peering hopefully out through his glasses. He was so like himself, his look and attitude, his curious chin poked forward, that I simply stood and stared until he had passed me and turned a corner, vanishing like a stereopticon picture traveling across the screen. I hurried to the banks, the big hotels, to the consul’s, getting no word of him, but leaving letters for him everywhere. My party started the next day, and I was compelled to leave for an eight-months’ nightmare in the interior. I got back to Canton barely in time to catch my steamer, and did not open your letter until we were down the river and losing sight of land. Either I saw Kenneth, or I am a subject for the Society for Psychical Research.”

  “Just so,” said Harrison, peering mysteriously above his coffee cup. “And now forget it. Simply disabuse yourself of any notion that you’ve seen him since we crossed the ferry with you three years ago. It’s your last service to him, probably.”

  “Speak up,” I cried, exasperated. “I’ve had about all of this I can stand. I came near wiring the story in from San Francisco. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  “Well, here’s to whatever withheld you! When a man comes to the pass where he wants to wipe himself off the face of the earth, when it’s the last play he can make for his self-respect, the only decent thing is to let him do it. You know the yielding stuff he’s made of well enough to appreciate the amount of pressure it must have taken to harden him to such an exit. I ‘m sure I never supposed he had it in him.”

  “But what, short of insanity—”

  “Insanity? Nonsense! I wonder that people don’t do it oftener. The pressure simply got past the bearing-point. His life was going, and going for nothing — worse than nothing. His future was chalked out for him, and whichever way he turned he was confronted by his unescapable destiny. In the light of Bertha’s splendid success, he couldn’t be churlish or ungracious; he had to play his little part along with the rest of us. And Bertha, you know, has passed all the limits of nature, not to speak of decorum. They come as certainly as the seasons, her new ones, each cleverer and more damnable than the last. And yet there is nothing that one can actually put one’s finger on — not, at least, without saying the word that would lay us open to a charge which as her friends we are none of us willing to incur, and which no one would listen to if it were said.

  “I tell you,” Harrison continued, “the whole thing sickened him. He had dried up like a stockfish. His brain was beaten into torpidity by the mere hammer of her machine, as by so many tiny mallets. He had lived to help lessen the value of all that he held precious, to disprove all that he wanted to believe. Having ridden to victory under the banners of what he most despised, there was nothing for him but to live in the blaze of her conquest, and that was the very measure of his fall. His usefulness to the world was over when he had done what he did for Bertha. I don’t believe he even knew where he stood; the thing had gone so, seemed to answer the purpose so wonderfully well, and there was never anything that one could really put one’s finger on — except all of it. It was a trial of faith, and Bertha had won out so beautifully. He had proved the fallacy of his own position. There was nothing left for him to say. I ‘m sure I don’t know whether he had anything left to think.”

  “Do you remember,” I said slowly, “I used to hold that, in the end, Kenneth would be measured by what he didn’t do, by what he couldn’t do? What a wonder he was at not being able to do it. Surely, if Bertha couldn’t convince him, fire and faggots couldn’t.”

  “For, after all,” sighed Harrison, as we rose to go, “Bertha is a wonderful woman — a woman of her time and people; and she has managed, in spite of her fatal facility, to be enough sight better than most of us.”

  Eleanor’s House

  “SHALL YOU, THEN,” Harriet ventured, “go to Fortuney?” The girl threw a startled glance toward the corner of the garden where Westfield and Harold were examining a leak in the basin of the little fountain, and Harriet was sorry that she had put the question so directly. Ethel’s reply, when it came, seemed a mere emission of breath rather than articulation.

  “I think we shall go later. It’s very trying for him there, of course. He hasn’t been there since.” She relapsed into silence — indeed, she had never come very far out of it — and Harriet called to Westfield. She found that she couldn’t help resenting Ethel’s singular inadeptness at keeping herself in hand.

  “Come, Robert. Harold is tired after his journey, and he and Ethel must have much to say to each other.”

  Both Harold and his wife, however, broke into hurried random remarks with an eagerness which seemed like a protest.

  “It is delightful to be near you here at Arques, with only a wall between our gardens,” Ethel spurred herself to say. “It will mean so much to Harold. He has so many old associations with you, Mrs. Westfield.”

  The two men had come back to the tea-table, and as the younger one overheard his wife’s last remark, his handsome brown face took on the blankness of disapproval.

  Ethel glanced at him furtively, but Harriet was unable to detect whether she realized just why or to what extent her remark had been unfortunate. She certainly looked as if she might not be particularly acute, drooping about in her big garden-hat and her limp white frock, which had not been very well put on. However, some sense of maladroitness certainly penetrated her vagueness, for she shrank behind the tea-table, gathering her scarf about her shoulders as if she were mysteriously blown upon by a chilling current.

  The Westfields drew together to take their leave. Harold stepped to his wife’s side as they went toward the gate with their guests, and put his hand lightly on her shoulder, at which she waveringly emerged from her eclipse and smiled.

  Harriet could not help looking back at them from under her sunshade as they stood there in the gateway: the man with his tense brown face and abstracted smile, the girl drooping, positively swaying in her softness and uncertainty.

  When they reached the sunny square of their own garden, Harriet sank into a wicker chair in the deep shadow of the stucco wall and addressed her husband with conviction:

  “I know now, my dear, why he wished so much to come. I sensed it yesterday, when I first met her. But now that I’ve seen them together, it’s perfectly clear. He brought her here to keep her away from Fortuney, and he’s counting on us to help him.”

  Westfield, who was carefully examining his rose-trees, looked at his wife with interest and frank bewilderment, a form of interrogation with which she was perfectly familiar.

  “If there is one thing that’s plainer even than his misery,” Harriet continued, “it is that she is headed toward Fortuney. They’ve been married over two years, and he couldn’t, I suppose, keep her across the Channel any longer. So he has simply deflected her course, and we are the pretext.”

  “Certainly,” Westfield admitted, as he looked up from his pruning, “one feels something not altogether comfortable with them, but why should it be Fortuney any more than a hundred other things? There are opportunities enough for people who wish to play at cross-purposes.”

  “Ah! But Fortuney,” sighed his wife, “Fortuney’s the summing up of all his past. It’s Eleanor herself. How could he, Robert, take this poor girl there? It would be cruelty. The figure she’d cut in a place of such distinction!”

  “I should think that if he could marry her, he could take her to Fortuney,” Westfield maintained bluntly.

  “Oh, as to his marrying her! But I suppose we are all to blame for that — all his and Eleanor’s old friends. We certainly failed him. We fled at the poor fellow’s approach. We simply couldn’t face the extent of his bereavement. He seemed a mere fragment of a man dragged out from under the wreckage. They had so grown together that when she died there was nothing in him left whole. We dreaded him, and were glad enough to get him off to India. I even hoped he would marry out there. When the news came that he had, I supposed that would end it; that he would become merely a chapter in natural history. But, you see, he hasn’t; he’s more widowed than before. He can’t do anything well without her. You see, he couldn’t even do this.”

  “This?” repeated Westfield, quitting his gardening abruptly. “Am I to understand that she would have been of assistance in selecting another wife for him?”

  Harriet preferred to ignore that his tone implied an enormity. “She would certainly have kept him from getting into such a box as he’s in now. She could at least have found him some one who wouldn’t lacerate him by her every movement. Oh, that poor, limp, tactless, terrified girl! Have you noticed the exasperating way in which she walks, even? It’s as if she were treading pain, forbearing and forgiving, when she but steps to the tea-table. There was never a person so haunted by the notion of her own untidy picturesqueness. It wears her thin and consumes her, like her unhappy passion. I know how he feels; he hates the way she likes what she likes, and he hates the way she dislikes what she doesn’t like. And, mark my words, she is bent upon Fortuney. That, at least, Robert, he certainly can’t permit. At Fortuney, Eleanor is living still. The place is so intensely, so rarely personal. The girl has fixed her eye, made up her mind. It’s symbolic to her, too, and she’s circling about it; she can’t endure to be kept out. Yesterday, when I went to see her, she couldn’t wait to begin explaining her husband to me. She seemed to be afraid I might think she hadn’t poked into everything.”