Coming, Aphrodite! / Willa Cather

I

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on

the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.

He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north,

where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court

and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very

cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners

were always in shadow.
In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built

against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day

and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window,

was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked

his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog's bed, and often

a bone or two for his comfort.

The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly

disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told

on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very

exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about

University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was

invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled

coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and

he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler's. Hedger,

as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a

shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that

had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on

gloves unless the day was biting cold.

Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the

rear apartment--two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west.

His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors,

which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy

of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by

a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went

to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it

away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing.

Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young

people who came to New York to "write" or to "paint"--who proposed to

live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired

artistic surroundings.

When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man who

tried to write plays,--and who kept on trying until a week ago, when the

nurse had put him out for unpaid rent.

A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur of

voices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of the

nurse--doubtless exhibiting her treasures--and another voice, also a

woman's, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All the

same, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The only

bath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall,

and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath.

He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn't leave bones

about the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onions

on his gas burner.

As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was

absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at

people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly

gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with

another,--though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual

lighting. When he heard trunks knocking against the sides of the narrow

hall, then he realized that she was moving in at once. Toward noon,

groans and deep gasps and the creaking of ropes, made him aware that a

piano was arriving. After the tramp of the movers died away down the

stairs, somebody touched off a few scales and chords on the instrument,

and then there was peace. Presently he heard her lock her door and go

down the hall humming something; going out to lunch, probably. He stuck

his brushes in a can of turpentine and put on his hat, not stopping to

wash his hands. Caesar was smelling along the crack under the bolted

doors; his bony tail stuck out hard as a hickory withe, and the hair was

standing up about his elegant collar.

Hedger encouraged him. "Come along, Caesar. You'll soon get used to a new

smell."

In the hall stood an enormous trunk, behind the ladder that led to the

roof, just opposite Hedger's door. The dog flew at it with a growl of

hurt amazement. They went down three flights of stairs and out into the

brilliant May afternoon.

Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oyster

house where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on the

coffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust, and Caesar was

always welcome,--not that he needed any such precautionary flooring. All

the carpets of Persia would have been safe for him. Hedger ordered steak

and onions absentmindedly, not realizing why he had an apprehension that

this dish might be less readily at hand hereafter. While he ate, Caesar

sat beside his chair, gravely disturbing the sawdust with his tail.

After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog's health and

watched the stages pull out;--that was almost the very last summer of the

old horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begun

operations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow water

which now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies that

were being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older,

brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; the

grass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue through

the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky

leaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, and

shining horses and carriages,--occasionally an automobile, misshapen and

sullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and

beautiful and alive.

While Caesar and his master were standing by the fountain, a girl

approached them, crossing the Square. Hedger noticed her because she wore

a lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of fresh

lilacs. He saw that she was young and handsome,--beautiful, in fact, with

a splendid figure and good action. She, too, paused by the fountain and

looked back through the Arch up the Avenue. She smiled rather

patronizingly as she looked, and at the same time seemed delighted. Her

slowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: "You're gay,

you're exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you're none

too fine for me!"

In the moment she tarried, Caesar stealthily approached her and sniffed

at the hem of her lavender skirt, then, when she went south like an

arrow, he ran back to his master and lifted a face full of emotion and

alarm, his lower lip twitching under his sharp white teeth and his hazel

eyes pointed with a very definite discovery. He stood thus, motionless,

while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through the

door of the house in which he lived.

"You're right, my boy, it's she! She might be worse looking, you know."

When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger's door, at the back of

the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs

just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old

hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and

complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular

flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since.) He

was used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, and

so did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedger

shut his door vehemently, and fell to work.

Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had a

beginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, a

paternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling,

and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was a

negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest

took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest

did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy's education,--taught

him to like "Don Quixote" and "The Golden Legend," and encouraged him to

mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the

mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,

the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department

stores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only

responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no

social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he

travelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good deal

of the earth's surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his life

had more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he had

already outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about his

art.

Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on the

verge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of New

York streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection of

pastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at the

height of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push.

But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn't

wish to carry further,--simply the old thing over again and got

nowhere,--so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a "later manner,"

that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, he

could always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expert

draughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time he

spent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, or

travelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chiefly

occupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine.

Hedger's circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, were

affluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now able

to pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away for

four months at a stretch. It didn't occur to him to wish to be richer

than this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other people

think necessary, but he didn't miss them, because he had never had them.

He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he

ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas

and New Year's. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the

janitress and the lame oysterman.

After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that

first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When the

light failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did his

marketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman who

always cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, and

drunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went up

on the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever went

to the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress about

it. He was to have "the privilege of the roof," as she said, if he opened

the heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and was

watchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirty

and hated to climb stairs,--besides, the roof was reached by a

perpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of her

bulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any but

Hedger's strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but he

practised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was as

strong as a gorilla.

So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on

hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He

mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to

climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master's

greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm

for this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and a

dog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kind

of Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great,

paint-smelling master.

On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in

the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one

of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with

a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were

delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the

glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound,--not

from the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue to

Pagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italian

tenement on Thompson Street, with the gasps of the corpulent baritone who

got behind it; nor was it the hurdy-gurdy man, who often played at the

corner in the balmy twilight. No, this was a woman's voice, singing the

tempestuous, over-lapping phrases of Signor Puccini, then comparatively

new in the world, but already so popular that even Hedger recognized his

unmistakable gusts of breath. He looked about over the roofs; all was

blue and still, with the well-built chimneys that were never used now

standing up dark and mournful. He moved softly toward the yellow

quadrangle where the gas from the hall shone up through the half-lifted

trapdoor. Oh yes! It came up through the hole like a strong draught, a

big, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional's. A

piano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered. This might be a very

great nuisance. It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you could

turn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn't. Caesar, with the gas

light shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted and

looked up for information. Hedger put down a reassuring hand.

"I don't know. We can't tell yet. It may not be so bad."

He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended,

with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure,

inspired respect,--if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her door

was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive

trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall.

II

For two days Hedger didn't see her. He was painting eight hours a day

just then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that she

practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she

locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. He

heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.

Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the evening

she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn't bother him. When he was

working well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper lay

before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked

the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimes

he read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything of

importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.

Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other

people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the

scandal about the Babies' Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming

canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was

Don Hedger.

One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the

hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a

heavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a

tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her

marble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.

"I wish," she said distinctly, standing in his way, "I wish you wouldn't

wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I've found his

hair in the tub, and I've smelled a doggy smell, and now I've caught you

at it. It's an outrage!"

Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairly

blazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to his

sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. But

what he actually said was:

"Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,--and, anyhow,

he's cleaner than most people."

"Cleaner than me?" her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and her

fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs.

Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog,

or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of

beauty.

"No, I didn't mean that," he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish

stubble of his muscular jaws. "But I know he's cleaner than I am."

"That I don't doubt!" Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,

and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe

close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was

frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and

to his own bed in the corner among the bones.

Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and

coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had

washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar's sponge, it was quite

possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The

playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who

occupied the front apartment,--but he, as he admitted, "was usually

pye-eyed, when he wasn't in Buffalo." He went home to Buffalo sometimes

to rest his nerves.

It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub

after Caesar;--but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned

for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized

the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub

that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left

cigarette ends on the moulding.

All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back

at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he

heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into

the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.

"I don't wish to be exigent, Miss,"--he had certain grand words that he

used upon occasion--"but if this is your trunk, it's rather in the way

here."

"Oh, very well!" she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her

handbag. "I'll have it moved when I can get a man to do it," and she went

down the hall with her free, roving stride.

Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on

the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.

III

In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room

from Miss Bower's, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on

hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet

door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and

he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.

Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes

and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closet

was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon

he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgotten

laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middle

when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoes

together. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition,

a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,--a knot hole,

evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had never

noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped

and squinted through it.

Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad,

doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not

happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was

not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he

continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman's body so

beautiful as this one,--positively glorious in action. As she swung her

arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy

seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The soft

flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh

together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and

twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure

light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger's

fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the

whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode

in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged

into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the

up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.

He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen.

When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that

had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that

grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked

unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her

bedchamber.

Disappeared--Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden

shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold

sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a vision

out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there

in Helianthine fire.

When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet

stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a

little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different;

he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes

and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that

ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three

greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself--He felt desperate.

He couldn't stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter

clothes and ran down four flights into the basement.

"Mrs. Foley," he began, "I want my room cleaned this afternoon,

thoroughly cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?"

"Is it company you're having?" the fat, dirty janitress enquired. Mrs.

Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate in

Flatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms were

permanently coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat had

trickled.

"Yes, company. That's it."

"Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman.

It's likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she's not drunk. I'll send Willy

round to see."

Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor and stain of his fifth

box of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes he

returned with old Lizzie,--she smelling strong of spirits and wearing

several jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number of

skirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated dish-clout.

She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiled

up the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger to

be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed

him a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation

of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashing

soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie

and made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got

rid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dog

to lose himself among the stevedores and dock labourers on West Street.

A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in

the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he

crouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious

exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there

was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl,--a bold body,

studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself,

doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action as

conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once

he went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at about

five o'clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.

The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,--and he had always

considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herself

upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. His

nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out

the sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at his sleeve,

knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted a

mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.

When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of

the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now.

This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done,

and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of

work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from

models for years, and a woman's body was no mystery to him. Yet now he

did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and with

the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman

as if he had been with her all the night before. The unconscious

operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. His

brain held but one image now--vibrated, burned with it. It was a

heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness.

Women had come and gone in Hedger's life. Not having had a mother to

begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had

been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians

and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among the

silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington

Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He felt

an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out

of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum,

he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on

upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders

hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard

them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he

believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.

He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles,

effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in

embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough,

he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in

thought, and in the universe.

He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so

broken up his life,--no curiosity about her every-day personality. He

shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower's coming and

going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl who

wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way,

that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in a room

full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleeping

colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, and

disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad, or

as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own. And

for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or

Alexandria, or Veronese's Venice. She was the immortal conception, the

perennial theme.

The first break in Hedger's lethargy occurred one afternoon when two

young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her music

room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away with

them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food

himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them coming

down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of them

sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger found

absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down the

stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back.

They had supper in the oysterman's basement and then sat down in front of

their own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal

glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for

men. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying

canes, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them across

the Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated about

something. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the

other:

"Don't you think she has a beautiful talent?"

His companion threw away his match. "She has a beautiful figure." They

both ran to catch the stage.

Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom.

For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through

that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window,

smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her

until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and

turned out the light.

The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her. Her

white skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square. She

sat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried.

She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in his

direction. He was on the point of going over to her, when she rose

quickly and looked up at the sky. A flock of pigeons had risen from

somewhere in the crowded Italian quarter to the south, and were wheeling

rapidly up through the morning air, soaring and dropping, scattering and

coming together, now grey, now white as silver, as they caught or

intercepted the sunlight. She put up her hand to shade her eyes and

followed them with a kind of defiant delight in her face.

Hedger came and stood beside her. "You've surely seen them before?"

"Oh, yes," she replied, still looking up. "I see them every day from my

windows. They always come home about five o'clock. Where do they live?"

"I don't know. Probably some Italian raises them for the market. They

were here long before I came, and I've been here four years."

"In that same gloomy room? Why didn't you take mine when it was vacant?"

"It isn't gloomy. That's the best light for painting."

"Oh, is it? I don't know anything about painting. I'd like to see your

pictures sometime. You have such a lot in there. Don't they get dusty,

piled up against the wall like that?"

"Not very. I'd be glad to show them to you. Is your name really Eden

Bower? I've seen your letters on the table."

"Well, it's the name I'm going to sing under. My father's name is Bowers,

but my friend Mr. Jones, a Chicago newspaper man who writes about music,

told me to drop the 's.' He's crazy about my voice."

Miss Bower didn't usually tell the whole story,--about anything. Her

first name, when she lived in Huntington, Illinois, was Edna, but Mr.

Jones had persuaded her to change it to one which he felt would be worthy

of her future. She was quick to take suggestions, though she told him she

"didn't see what was the matter with 'Edna.'"

She explained to Hedger that she was going to Paris to study. She was

waiting in New York for Chicago friends who were to take her over, but

who had been detained. "Did you study in Paris?" she asked.

"No, I've never been in Paris. But I was in the south of France all last

summer, studying with C----. He's the biggest man among the moderns,--at

least I think so."

Miss Bower sat down and made room for him on the bench. "Do tell me about

it. I expected to be there by this time, and I can't wait to find out

what it's like."

Hedger began to relate how he had seen some of this Frenchman's work in

an exhibition, and deciding at once that this was the man for him, he had

taken a boat for Marseilles the next week, going over steerage. He

proceeded at once to the little town on the coast where his painter

lived, and presented himself. The man never took pupils, but because

Hedger had come so far, he let him stay. Hedger lived at the master's

house and every day they went out together to paint, sometimes on the

blazing rocks down by the sea. They wrapped themselves in light woollen

blankets and didn't feel the heat. Being there and working with C---- was

being in Paradise, Hedger concluded; he learned more in three months than

in all his life before.

Eden Bower laughed. "You're a funny fellow. Didn't you do anything but

work? Are the women very beautiful? Did you have awfully good things to

eat and drink?"

Hedger said some of the women were fine looking, especially one girl who

went about selling fish and lobsters. About the food there was nothing

remarkable,--except the ripe figs, he liked those. They drank sour wine,

and used goat-butter, which was strong and full of hair, as it was

churned in a goat skin.

"But don't they have parties or banquets? Aren't there any fine hotels

down there?"

"Yes, but they are all closed in summer, and the country people are poor.

It's a beautiful country, though."

"How, beautiful?" she persisted.

"If you want to go in, I'll show you some sketches, and you'll see."

Miss Bower rose. "All right. I won't go to my fencing lesson this

morning. Do you fence? Here comes your dog. You can't move but he's after

you. He always makes a face at me when I meet him in the hall, and shows

his nasty little teeth as if he wanted to bite me."

In the studio Hedger got out his sketches, but to Miss Bower, whose

favourite pictures were Christ Before Pilate and a redhaired Magdalen of

Henner, these landscapes were not at all beautiful, and they gave her no

idea of any country whatsoever. She was careful not to commit herself,

however. Her vocal teacher had already convinced her that she had a great

deal to learn about many things.

"Why don't we go out to lunch somewhere?" Hedger asked, and began to dust

his fingers with a handkerchief--which he got out of sight as swiftly as

possible.

"All right, the Brevoort," she said carelessly. "I think that's a good

place, and they have good wine. I don't care for cocktails."

Hedger felt his chin uneasily. "I'm afraid I haven't shaved this morning.

If you could wait for me in the Square? It won't take me ten minutes."

Left alone, he found a clean collar and handkerchief, brushed his coat

and blacked his shoes, and last of all dug up ten dollars from the bottom

of an old copper kettle he had brought from Spain. His winter hat was of

such a complexion that the Brevoort hall boy winked at the porter as he

took it and placed it on the rack in a row of fresh straw ones.

IV

That afternoon Eden Bower was lying on the couch in her music room, her

face turned to the window, watching the pigeons. Reclining thus she could

see none of the neighbouring roofs, only the sky itself and the birds

that crossed and recrossed her field of vision, white as scraps of paper

blowing in the wind. She was thinking that she was young and handsome and

had had a good lunch, that a very easy-going, light-hearted city lay in

the streets below her; and she was wondering why she found this queer

painter chap, with his lean, bluish cheeks and heavy black eyebrows, more

interesting than the smart young men she met at her teacher's studio.

Eden Bower was, at twenty, very much the same person that we all know her

to be at forty, except that she knew a great deal less. But one thing she

knew: that she was to be Eden Bower. She was like some one standing

before a great show window full of beautiful and costly things, deciding

which she will order. She understands that they will not all be delivered

immediately, but one by one they will arrive at her door. She already

knew some of the many things that were to happen to her; for instance,

that the Chicago millionaire who was going to take her abroad with his

sister as chaperone, would eventually press his claim in quite another

manner. He was the most circumspect of bachelors, afraid of everything

obvious, even of women who were too flagrantly handsome. He was a nervous

collector of pictures and furniture, a nervous patron of music, and a

nervous host; very cautious about his health, and about any course of

conduct that might make him ridiculous. But she knew that he would at

last throw all his precautions to the winds.

People like Eden Bower are inexplicable. Her father sold farming

machinery in Huntington, Illinois, and she had grown up with no

acquaintances or experiences outside of that prairie town. Yet from her

earliest childhood she had not one conviction or opinion in common with

the people about her,--the only people she knew. Before she was out of

short dresses she had made up her mind that she was going to be an

actress, that she would live far away in great cities, that she would be

much admired by men and would have everything she wanted. When she was

thirteen, and was already singing and reciting for church entertainments,

she read in some illustrated magazine a long article about the late Czar

of Russia, then just come to the throne or about to come to it. After

that, lying in the hammock on the front porch on summer evenings, or

sitting through a long sermon in the family pew, she amused herself by

trying to make up her mind whether she would or would not be the Czar's

mistress when she played in his Capital. Now Edna had met this

fascinating word only in the novels of Ouida,--her hard-worked little

mother kept a long row of them in the upstairs storeroom, behind the

linen chest. In Huntington, women who bore that relation to men were

called by a very different name, and their lot was not an enviable one;

of all the shabby and poor, they were the shabbiest. But then, Edna had

never lived in Huntington, not even before she began to find books like

"Sapho" and "Mademoiselle de Maupin," secretly sold in paper covers

throughout Illinois. It was as if she had come into Huntington, into the

Bowers family, on one of the trains that puffed over the marshes behind

their back fence all day long, and was waiting for another train to take

her out.

As she grew older and handsomer, she had many beaux, but these small-town

boys didn't interest her. If a lad kissed her when he brought her home

from a dance, she was indulgent and she rather liked it. But if he

pressed her further, she slipped away from him, laughing. After she began

to sing in Chicago, she was consistently discreet. She stayed as a guest

in rich people's houses, and she knew that she was being watched like a

rabbit in a laboratory. Covered up in bed, with the lights out, she

thought her own thoughts, and laughed.

This summer in New York was her first taste of freedom. The Chicago

capitalist, after all his arrangements were made for sailing, had been

compelled to go to Mexico to look after oil interests. His sister knew

an excellent singing master in New York. Why should not a discreet,

well-balanced girl like Miss Bower spend the summer there, studying

quietly? The capitalist suggested that his sister might enjoy a summer on

Long Island; he would rent the Griffith's place for her, with all the

servants, and Eden could stay there. But his sister met this proposal

with a cold stare. So it fell out, that between selfishness and greed,

Eden got a summer all her own,--which really did a great deal toward

making her an artist and whatever else she was afterward to become. She

had time to look about, to watch without being watched; to select

diamonds in one window and furs in another, to select shoulders and

moustaches in the big hotels where she went to lunch. She had the easy

freedom of obscurity and the consciousness of power. She enjoyed both.

She was in no hurry.

While Eden Bower watched the pigeons, Don Hedger sat on the other side of

the bolted doors, looking into a pool of dark turpentine, at his idle

brushes, wondering why a woman could do this to him. He, too, was sure of

his future and knew that he was a chosen man. He could not know, of

course, that he was merely the first to fall under a fascination which

was to be disastrous to a few men and pleasantly stimulating to many

thousands. Each of these two young people sensed the future, but not

completely. Don Hedger knew that nothing much would ever happen to him.

Eden Bower understood that to her a great deal would happen. But she did

not guess that her neighbour would have more tempestuous adventures

sitting in his dark studio than she would find in all the capitals of

Europe, or in all the latitude of conduct she was prepared to permit

herself.

V

One Sunday morning Eden was crossing the Square with a spruce young man

in a white flannel suit and a panama hat. They had been breakfasting at

the Brevoort and he was coaxing her to let him come up to her rooms and

sing for an hour.

"No, I've got to write letters. You must run along now. I see a friend of

mine over there, and I want to ask him about something before I go up."

"That fellow with the dog? Where did you pick him up?" the young man

glanced toward the seat under a sycamore where Hedger was reading the

morning paper.

"Oh, he's an old friend from the West," said Eden easily. "I won't

introduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye.

I can't be sure about Tuesday. I'll go with you if I have time after my

lesson." She nodded, left him, and went over to the seat littered with

newspapers. The young man went up the Avenue without looking back.

"Well, what are you going to do today? Shampoo this animal all morning?"

Eden enquired teasingly.

Hedger made room for her on the seat. "No, at twelve o'clock I'm going

out to Coney Island. One of my models is going up in a balloon this

afternoon. I've often promised to go and see her, and now I'm going."

Eden asked if models usually did such stunts. No, Hedger told her, but

Molly Welch added to her earnings in that way. "I believe," he added,

"she likes the excitement of it. She's got a good deal of spirit. That's

why I like to paint her. So many models have flaccid bodies."

"And she hasn't, eh? Is she the one who comes to see you? I can't help

hearing her, she talks so loud."

"Yes, she has a rough voice, but she's a fine girl. I don't suppose you'd

be interested in going?"

"I don't know," Eden sat tracing patterns on the asphalt with the end of

her parasol. "Is it any fun? I got up feeling I'd like to do something

different today. It's the first Sunday I've not had to sing in church. I

had that engagement for breakfast at the Brevoort, but it wasn't very

exciting. That chap can't talk about anything but himself."

Hedger warmed a little. "If you've never been to Coney Island, you ought

to go. It's nice to see all the people; tailors and bar-tenders and

prize-fighters with their best girls, and all sorts of folks taking a

holiday."

Eden looked sidewise at him. So one ought to be interested in people of

that kind, ought one? He was certainly a funny fellow. Yet he was never,

somehow, tiresome. She had seen a good deal of him lately, but she kept

wanting to know him better, to find out what made him different from men

like the one she had just left--whether he really was as different as he

seemed. "I'll go with you," she said at last, "if you'll leave that at

home." She pointed to Caesar's flickering ears with her sunshade.

"But he's half the fun. You'd like to hear him bark at the waves when

they come in."

"No, I wouldn't. He's jealous and disagreeable if he sees you talking to

any one else. Look at him now."

"Of course, if you make a face at him. He knows what that means, and he

makes a worse face. He likes Molly Welch, and she'll be disappointed if I

don't bring him."

Eden said decidedly that he couldn't take both of them. So at twelve

o'clock when she and Hedger got on the boat at Desbrosses street, Caesar

was lying on his pallet, with a bone.

Eden enjoyed the boat-ride. It was the first time she had been on the

water, and she felt as if she were embarking for France. The light warm

breeze and the plunge of the waves made her very wide awake, and she

liked crowds of any kind. They went to the balcony of a big, noisy

restaurant and had a shore dinner, with tall steins of beer. Hedger had

got a big advance from his advertising firm since he first lunched with

Miss Bower ten days ago, and he was ready for anything.

After dinner they went to the tent behind the bathing beach, where the

tops of two balloons bulged out over the canvas. A red-faced man in a

linen suit stood in front of the tent, shouting in a hoarse voice and

telling the people that if the crowd was good for five dollars more, a

beautiful young woman would risk her life for their entertainment. Four

little boys in dirty red uniforms ran about taking contributions in their

pillbox hats. One of the balloons was bobbing up and down in its tether

and people were shoving forward to get nearer the tent.

"Is it dangerous, as he pretends?" Eden asked.

"Molly says it's simple enough if nothing goes wrong with the balloon.

Then it would be all over, I suppose."

"Wouldn't you like to go up with her?"

"I? Of course not. I'm not fond of taking foolish risks."

Eden sniffed. "I shouldn't think sensible risks would be very much fun."

Hedger did not answer, for just then every one began to shove the other

way and shout, "Look out. There she goes!" and a band of six pieces

commenced playing furiously.

As the balloon rose from its tent enclosure, they saw a girl in green

tights standing in the basket, holding carelessly to one of the ropes

with one hand and with the other waving to the spectators. A long rope

trailed behind to keep the balloon from blowing out to sea.

As it soared, the figure in green tights in the basket diminished to a

mere spot, and the balloon itself, in the brilliant light, looked like a

big silver-grey bat, with its wings folded. When it began to sink, the

girl stepped through the hole in the basket to a trapeze that hung below,

and gracefully descended through the air, holding to the rod with both

hands, keeping her body taut and her feet close together. The crowd,

which had grown very large by this time, cheered vociferously. The men

took off their hats and waved, little boys shouted, and fat old women,

shining with the heat and a beer lunch, murmured admiring comments upon

the balloonist's figure. "Beautiful legs, she has!"

"That's so," Hedger whispered. "Not many girls would look well in that

position." Then, for some reason, he blushed a slow, dark, painful

crimson.

The balloon descended slowly, a little way from the tent, and the

red-faced man in the linen suit caught Molly Welch before her feet

touched the ground, and pulled her to one side. The band struck up "Blue

Bell" by way of welcome, and one of the sweaty pages ran forward and

presented the balloonist with a large bouquet of artificial flowers. She

smiled and thanked him, and ran back across the sand to the tent.

"Can't we go inside and see her?" Eden asked. "You can explain to the

door man. I want to meet her." Edging forward, she herself addressed the

man in the linen suit and slipped something from her purse into his hand.

They found Molly seated before a trunk that had a mirror in the lid and a

"make-up" outfit spread upon the tray. She was wiping the cold cream and

powder from her neck with a discarded chemise.

"Hello, Don," she said cordially. "Brought a friend?"

Eden liked her. She had an easy, friendly manner, and there was something

boyish and devil-may-care about her.

"Yes, it's fun. I'm mad about it," she said in reply to Eden's questions.

"I always want to let go, when I come down on the bar. You don't feel

your weight at all, as you would on a stationary trapeze."

The big drum boomed outside, and the publicity man began shouting to

newly arrived boatloads. Miss Welch took a last pull at her cigarette.

"Now you'll have to get out, Don. I change for the next act. This time I

go up in a black evening dress, and lose the skirt in the basket before I

start down."

"Yes, go along," said Eden. "Wait for me outside the door. I'll stay and

help her dress."

Hedger waited and waited, while women of every build bumped into him and

begged his pardon, and the red pages ran about holding out their caps for

coins, and the people ate and perspired and shifted parasols against the

sun. When the band began to play a two-step, all the bathers ran up out

of the surf to watch the ascent. The second balloon bumped and rose, and

the crowd began shouting to the girl in a black evening dress who stood

leaning against the ropes and smiling. "It's a new girl," they called.

"It ain't the Countess this time. You're a peach, girlie!"

The balloonist acknowledged these compliments, bowing and looking down

over the sea of upturned faces,--but Hedger was determined she should not

see him, and he darted behind the tent-fly. He was suddenly dripping with

cold sweat, his mouth was full of the bitter taste of anger and his

tongue felt stiff behind his teeth. Molly Welch, in a shirt-waist and a

white tam-o'-shanter cap, slipped out from the tent under his arm and

laughed up in his face. "She's a crazy one you brought along. She'll get

what she wants!"

"Oh, I'll settle with you, all right!" Hedger brought out with

difficulty.

"It's not my fault, Donnie. I couldn't do anything with her. She bought

me off. What's the matter with you? Are you soft on her? She's safe

enough. It's as easy as rolling off a log, if you keep cool." Molly Welch

was rather excited herself, and she was chewing gum at a high speed as

she stood beside him, looking up at the floating silver cone. "Now

watch," she exclaimed suddenly. "She's coming down on the bar. I advised

her to cut that out, but you see she does it first-rate. And she got rid

of the skirt, too. Those black tights show off her legs very well. She

keeps her feet together like I told her, and makes a good line along the

back. See the light on those silver slippers,--that was a good idea I

had. Come along to meet her. Don't be a grouch; she's done it fine!"

Molly tweaked his elbow, and then left him standing like a stump, while

she ran down the beach with the crowd.

Though Hedger was sulking, his eye could not help seeing the low blue

welter of the sea, the arrested bathers, standing in the surf, their arms

and legs stained red by the dropping sun, all shading their eyes and

gazing upward at the slowly falling silver star.

Molly Welch and the manager caught Eden under the arms and lifted her

aside, a red page dashed up with a bouquet, and the band struck up "Blue

Bell." Eden laughed and bowed, took Molly's arm, and ran up the sand in

her black tights and silver slippers, dodging the friendly old women, and

the gallant sports who wanted to offer their homage on the spot.

When she emerged from the tent, dressed in her own clothes, that part of

the beach was almost deserted. She stepped to her companion's side and

said carelessly: "Hadn't we better try to catch this boat? I hope you're

not sore at me. Really, it was lots of fun."

Hedger looked at his watch. "Yes, we have fifteen minutes to get to the

boat," he said politely.

As they walked toward the pier, one of the pages ran up panting. "Lady,

you're carrying off the bouquet," he said, aggrievedly.

Eden stopped and looked at the bunch of spotty cotton roses in her hand.

"Of course. I want them for a souvenir. You gave them to me yourself."

"I give 'em to you for looks, but you can't take 'em away. They belong to

the show."

"Oh, you always use the same bunch?"

"Sure we do. There ain't too much money in this business."

She laughed and tossed them back to him. "Why are you angry?" she asked

Hedger. "I wouldn't have done it if I'd been with some fellows, but I

thought you were the sort who wouldn't mind. Molly didn't for a minute

think you would."

"What possessed you to do such a fool thing?" he asked roughly.

"I don't know. When I saw her coming down, I wanted to try it. It looked

exciting. Didn't I hold myself as well as she did?"

Hedger shrugged his shoulders, but in his heart he forgave her.

The return boat was not crowded, though the boats that passed them, going

out, were packed to the rails. The sun was setting. Boys and girls sat on

the long benches with their arms about each other, singing. Eden felt a

strong wish to propitiate her companion, to be alone with him. She had

been curiously wrought up by her balloon trip; it was a lark, but not

very satisfying unless one came back to something after the flight. She

wanted to be admired and adored. Though Eden said nothing, and sat with

her arms limp on the rail in front of her, looking languidly at the

rising silhouette of the city and the bright path of the sun, Hedger felt

a strange drawing near to her. If he but brushed her white skirt with his

knee, there was an instant communication between them, such as there had

never been before. They did not talk at all, but when they went over the

gang-plank she took his arm and kept her shoulder close to his. He felt

as if they were enveloped in a highly charged atmosphere, an invisible

network of subtle, almost painful sensibility. They had somehow taken

hold of each other.

An hour later, they were dining in the back garden of a little French

hotel on Ninth Street, long since passed away. It was cool and leafy

there, and the mosquitoes were not very numerous. A party of South

Americans at another table were drinking champagne, and Eden murmured

that she thought she would like some, if it were not too expensive.

"Perhaps it will make me think I am in the balloon again. That was a very

nice feeling. You've forgiven me, haven't you?"

Hedger gave her a quick straight look from under his black eyebrows, and

something went over her that was like a chill, except that it was warm

and feathery. She drank most of the wine; her companion was indifferent

to it. He was talking more to her tonight than he had ever done before.

She asked him about a new picture she had seen in his room; a queer thing

full of stiff, supplicating female figures. "It's Indian, isn't it?"

"Yes. I call it Rain Spirits, or maybe, Indian Rain. In the Southwest,

where I've been a good deal, the Indian traditions make women have to do

with the rain-fall. They were supposed to control it, somehow, and to be

able to find springs, and make moisture come out of the earth. You see

I'm trying to learn to paint what people think and feel; to get away from

all that photographic stuff. When I look at you, I don't see what a

camera would see, do I?"

"How can I tell?"

"Well, if I should paint you, I could make you understand what I see."

For the second time that day Hedger crimsoned unexpectedly, and his eyes

fell and steadily contemplated a dish of little radishes. "That

particular picture I got from a story a Mexican priest told me; he said

he found it in an old manuscript book in a monastery down there, written

by some Spanish Missionary, who got his stories from the Aztecs. This one

he called 'The Forty Lovers of the Queen,' and it was more or less about

rain-making."

"Aren't you going to tell it to me?" Eden asked.

Hedger fumbled among the radishes. "I don't know if it's the proper kind

of story to tell a girl."

She smiled; "Oh, forget about that! I've been balloon riding today. I

like to hear you talk."

Her low voice was flattering. She had seemed like clay in his hands ever

since they got on the boat to come home. He leaned back in his chair,

forgot his food, and, looking at her intently, began to tell his story,

the theme of which he somehow felt was dangerous tonight.

The tale began, he said, somewhere in Ancient Mexico, and concerned the

daughter of a king. The birth of this Princess was preceded by unusual

portents. Three times her mother dreamed that she was delivered of

serpents, which betokened that the child she carried would have power

with the rain gods. The serpent was the symbol of water. The Princess

grew up dedicated to the gods, and wise men taught her the rain-making

mysteries. She was with difficulty restrained from men and was guarded at

all times, for it was the law of the Thunder that she be maiden until

her marriage. In the years of her adolescence, rain was abundant with her

people. The oldest man could not remember such fertility. When the

Princess had counted eighteen summers, her father went to drive out a war

party that harried his borders on the north and troubled his prosperity.

The King destroyed the invaders and brought home many prisoners. Among

the prisoners was a young chief, taller than any of his captors, of such

strength and ferocity that the King's people came a day's journey to look

at him. When the Princess beheld his great stature, and saw that his arms

and breast were covered with the figures of wild animals, bitten into the

skin and coloured, she begged his life from her father. She desired that

he should practise his art upon her, and prick upon her skin the signs of

Rain and Lightning and Thunder, and stain the wounds with herb-juices, as

they were upon his own body. For many days, upon the roof of the King's

house, the Princess submitted herself to the bone needle, and the women

with her marvelled at her fortitude. But the Princess was without shame

before the Captive, and it came about that he threw from him his needles

and his stains, and fell upon the Princess to violate her honour; and her

women ran down from the roof screaming, to call the guard which stood at

the gateway of the King's house, and none stayed to protect their

mistress.

When the guard came, the Captive was thrown into bonds, and he was

gelded, and his tongue was torn out, and he was given for a slave to the

Rain Princess.

The country of the Aztecs to the east was tormented by thirst, and their

king, hearing much of the rain-making arts of the Princess, sent an

embassy to her father, with presents and an offer of marriage. So the

Princess went from her father to be the Queen of the Aztecs, and she took

with her the Captive, who served her in everything with entire fidelity

and slept upon a mat before her door.

The King gave his bride a fortress on the outskirts of the city, whither

she retired to entreat the rain gods. This fortress was called the

Queen's House, and on the night of the new moon the Queen came to it from

the palace. But when the moon waxed and grew toward the round, because

the god of Thunder had had his will of her, then the Queen returned to

the King. Drought abated in the country and rain fell abundantly by

reason of the Queen's power with the stars.

When the Queen went to her own house she took with her no servant but the

Captive, and he slept outside her door and brought her food after she had

fasted. The Queen had a jewel of great value, a turquoise that had fallen

from the sun, and had the image of the sun upon it. And when she desired

a young man whom she had seen in the army or among the slaves, she sent

the Captive to him with the jewel, for a sign that he should come to her

secretly at the Queen's House upon business concerning the welfare of

all. And some, after she had talked with them, she sent away with

rewards; and some she took into her chamber and kept them by her for one

night or two. Afterward she called the Captive and bade him conduct the

youth by the secret way he had come, underneath the chambers of the

fortress. But for the going away of the Queen's lovers the Captive took

out the bar that was beneath a stone in the floor of the passage, and put

in its stead a rush-reed, and the youth stepped upon it and fell through

into a cavern that was the bed of an underground river, and whatever was

thrown into it was not seen again. In this service nor in any other did

the Captive fail the Queen.

But when the Queen sent for the Captain of the Archers, she detained him

four days in her chamber, calling often for food and wine, and was

greatly content with him. On the fourth day she went to the Captive

outside her door and said: "Tomorrow take this man up by the sure way, by

which the King comes, and let him live."

In the Queen's door were arrows, purple and white. When she desired the

King to come to her publicly, with his guard, she sent him a white arrow;

but when she sent the purple, he came secretly, and covered himself with

his mantle to be hidden from the stone gods at the gate. On the fifth

night that the Queen was with her lover, the Captive took a purple arrow

to the King, and the King came secretly and found them together. He

killed the Captain with his own hand, but the Queen he brought to public

trial. The Captive, when he was put to the question, told on his fingers

forty men that he had let through the underground passage into the river.

The Captive and the Queen were put to death by fire, both on the same

day, and afterward there was scarcity of rain.

* * * * *

Eden Bower sat shivering a little as she listened. Hedger was not trying

to please her, she thought, but to antagonize and frighten her by his

brutal story. She had often told herself that his lean, big-boned lower

jaw was like his bull-dog's, but tonight his face made Caesar's most

savage and determined expression seem an affectation. Now she was looking

at the man he really was. Nobody's eyes had ever defied her like this.

They were searching her and seeing everything; all she had concealed from

Livingston, and from the millionaire and his friends, and from the

newspaper men. He was testing her, trying her out, and she was more ill

at ease than she wished to show.

"That's quite a thrilling story," she said at last, rising and winding

her scarf about her throat. "It must be getting late. Almost every one

has gone."

They walked down the Avenue like people who have quarrelled, or who wish

to get rid of each other. Hedger did not take her arm at the street

crossings, and they did not linger in the Square. At her door he tried

none of the old devices of the Livingston boys. He stood like a post,

having forgotten to take off his hat, gave her a harsh, threatening

glance, muttered "goodnight," and shut his own door noisily.

There was no question of sleep for Eden Bower. Her brain was working like

a machine that would never stop. After she undressed, she tried to calm

her nerves by smoking a cigarette, lying on the divan by the open window.

But she grew wider and wider awake, combating the challenge that had

flamed all evening in Hedger's eyes. The balloon had been one kind of

excitement, the wine another; but the thing that had roused her, as a

blow rouses a proud man, was the doubt, the contempt, the sneering

hostility with which the painter had looked at her when he told his

savage story. Crowds and balloons were all very well, she reflected, but

woman's chief adventure is man. With a mind over active and a sense of

life over strong, she wanted to walk across the roofs in the starlight,

to sail over the sea and face at once a world of which she had never been

afraid.

Hedger must be asleep; his dog had stopped sniffing under the double

doors. Eden put on her wrapper and slippers and stole softly down the

hall over the old carpet; one loose board creaked just as she reached the

ladder. The trap-door was open, as always on hot nights. When she stepped

out on the roof she drew a long breath and walked across it, looking up

at the sky. Her foot touched something soft; she heard a low growl, and

on the instant Caesar's sharp little teeth caught her ankle and waited.

His breath was like steam on her leg. Nobody had ever intruded upon his

roof before, and he panted for the movement or the word that would let

him spring his jaw. Instead, Hedger's hand seized his throat.

"Wait a minute. I'll settle with him," he said grimly. He dragged the dog

toward the manhole and disappeared. When he came back, he found Eden

standing over by the dark chimney, looking away in an offended attitude.

"I caned him unmercifully," he panted. "Of course you didn't hear

anything; he never whines when I beat him. He didn't nip you, did he?"

"I don't know whether he broke the skin or not," she answered

aggrievedly, still looking off into the west.

"If I were one of your friends in white pants, I'd strike a match to find

whether you were hurt, though I know you are not, and then I'd see your

ankle, wouldn't I?"

"I suppose so."

He shook his head and stood with his hands in the pockets of his old

painting jacket. "I'm not up to such boy-tricks. If you want the place

to yourself, I'll clear out. There are plenty of places where I can spend

the night, what's left of it. But if you stay here and I stay here--" He

shrugged his shoulders.

Eden did not stir, and she made no reply. Her head drooped slightly, as

if she were considering. But the moment he put his arms about her they

began to talk, both at once, as people do in an opera. The instant avowal

brought out a flood of trivial admissions. Hedger confessed his crime,

was reproached and forgiven, and now Eden knew what it was in his look

that she had found so disturbing of late.

Standing against the black chimney, with the sky behind and blue shadows

before, they looked like one of Hedger's own paintings of that period;

two figures, one white and one dark, and nothing whatever distinguishable

about them but that they were male and female. The faces were lost, the

contours blurred in shadow, but the figures were a man and a woman, and

that was their whole concern and their mysterious beauty,--it was the

rhythm in which they moved, at last, along the roof and down into the

dark hole; he first, drawing her gently after him. She came down very

slowly. The excitement and bravado and uncertainty of that long day and

night seemed all at once to tell upon her. When his feet were on the

carpet and he reached up to lift her down, she twined her arms about his

neck as after a long separation, and turned her face to him, and her

lips, with their perfume of youth and passion.

* * * * *

One Saturday afternoon Hedger was sitting in the window of Eden's music

room. They had been watching the pigeons come wheeling over the roofs

from their unknown feeding grounds.

"Why," said Eden suddenly, "don't we fix those big doors into your studio

so they will open? Then, if I want you, I won't have to go through the

hall. That illustrator is loafing about a good deal of late."

"I'll open them, if you wish. The bolt is on your side."

"Isn't there one on yours, too?"

"No. I believe a man lived there for years before I came in, and the

nurse used to have these rooms herself. Naturally, the lock was on

the lady's side."

Eden laughed and began to examine the bolt. "It's all stuck up with

paint." Looking about, her eye lighted upon a bronze Buddah which was

one of the nurse's treasures. Taking him by his head, she struck the bolt

a blow with his squatting posteriors. The two doors creaked, sagged, and

swung weakly inward a little way, as if they were too old for such

escapades. Eden tossed the heavy idol into a stuffed chair. "That's

better," she exclaimed exultantly. "So the bolts are always on the lady's

side? What a lot society takes for granted!"

Hedger laughed, sprang up and caught her arms roughly. "Whoever takes you

for granted--Did anybody, ever?"

"Everybody does. That's why I'm here. You are the only one who knows

anything about me. Now I'll have to dress if we're going out for dinner."

He lingered, keeping his hold on her. "But I won't always be the only

one, Eden Bower. I won't be the last."

"No, I suppose not," she said carelessly. "But what does that matter? You

are the first."

As a long, despairing whine broke in the warm stillness, they drew apart.

Caesar, lying on his bed in the dark corner, had lifted his head at this

invasion of sunlight, and realized that the side of his room was broken

open, and his whole world shattered by change. There stood his master and

this woman, laughing at him! The woman was pulling the long black hair of

this mightiest of men, who bowed his head and permitted it.

VI

In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction,--as young

people often do, as mature people almost never do. Eden came in late one

afternoon. She had been with some of her musical friends to lunch at

Burton Ives' studio, and she began telling Hedger about its splendours.

He listened a moment and then threw down his brushes. "I know exactly

what it's like," he said impatiently. "A very good department-store

conception of a studio. It's one of the show places."

"Well, it's gorgeous, and he said I could bring you to see him. The boys

tell me he's awfully kind about giving people a lift, and you might get

something out of it."

Hedger started up and pushed his canvas out of the way. "What could I

possibly get from Burton Ives? He's almost the worst painter in the

world; the stupidest, I mean."

Eden was annoyed. Burton Ives had been very nice to her and had begged

her to sit for him. "You must admit that he's a very successful one,"

she said coldly.

"Of course he is! Anybody can be successful who will do that sort of

thing. I wouldn't paint his pictures for all the money in New York."

"Well, I saw a lot of them, and I think they are beautiful."

Hedger bowed stiffly.

"What's the use of being a great painter if nobody knows about you?" Eden

went on persuasively. "Why don't you paint the kind of pictures people

can understand, and then, after you're successful, do whatever you like?"

"As I look at it," said Hedger brusquely, "I am successful."

Eden glanced about. "Well, I don't see any evidences of it," she said,

biting her lip. "He has a Japanese servant and a wine cellar, and keeps a

riding horse."

Hedger melted a little. "My dear, I have the most expensive luxury in the

world, and I am much more extravagant than Burton Ives, for I work to

please nobody but myself."

"You mean you could make money and don't? That you don't try to get a

public?"

"Exactly. A public only wants what has been done over and over. I'm

painting for painters,--who haven't been born."

"What would you do if I brought Mr. Ives down here to see your things?"

"Well, for God's sake, don't! Before he left I'd probably tell him what I

thought of him."

Eden rose. "I give you up. You know very well there's only one kind of

success that's real."

"Yes, but it's not the kind you mean. So you've been thinking me a scrub

painter, who needs a helping hand from some fashionable studio man? What

the devil have you had anything to do with me for, then?"

"There's no use talking to you," said Eden walking slowly toward the

door. "I've been trying to pull wires for you all afternoon, and this is

what it comes to." She had expected that the tidings of a prospective

call from the great man would be received very differently, and had been

thinking as she came home in the stage how, as with a magic wand, she

might gild Hedger's future, float him out of his dark hole on a tide of

prosperity, see his name in the papers and his pictures in the windows on

Fifth Avenue.

Hedger mechanically snapped the midsummer leash on Caesar's collar and

they ran downstairs and hurried through Sullivan Street off toward the

river. He wanted to be among rough, honest people, to get down where the

big drays bumped over stone paving blocks and the men wore corduroy

trowsers and kept their shirts open at the neck. He stopped for a drink

in one of the sagging bar-rooms on the water front. He had never in his

life been so deeply wounded; he did not know he could be so hurt. He had

told this girl all his secrets. On the roof, in these warm, heavy summer

nights, with her hands locked in his, he had been able to explain all his

misty ideas about an unborn art the world was waiting for; had been able

to explain them better than he had ever done to himself. And she had

looked away to the chattels of this uptown studio and coveted them for

him! To her he was only an unsuccessful Burton Ives.

Then why, as he had put it to her, did she take up with him? Young,

beautiful, talented as she was, why had she wasted herself on a scrub?

Pity? Hardly; she wasn't sentimental. There was no explaining her. But in

this passion that had seemed so fearless and so fated to be, his own

position now looked to him ridiculous; a poor dauber without money or

fame,--it was her caprice to load him with favours. Hedger ground his

teeth so loud that his dog, trotting beside him, heard him and looked up.

While they were having supper at the oyster-man's, he planned his escape.

Whenever he saw her again, everything he had told her, that he should

never have told any one, would come back to him; ideas he had never

whispered even to the painter whom he worshipped and had gone all the way

to France to see. To her they must seem his apology for not having horses

and a valet, or merely the puerile boastfulness of a weak man. Yet if she

slipped the bolt tonight and came through the doors and said, "Oh, weak

man, I belong to you!" what could he do? That was the danger. He would

catch the train out to Long Beach tonight, and tomorrow he would go on to

the north end of Long Island, where an old friend of his had a summer

studio among the sand dunes. He would stay until things came right in his

mind. And she could find a smart painter, or take her punishment.

When he went home, Eden's room was dark; she was dining out somewhere. He

threw his things into a hold-all he had carried about the world with him,

strapped up some colours and canvases, and ran downstairs.

VII

Five days later Hedger was a restless passenger on a dirty, crowded

Sunday train, coming back to town. Of course he saw now how unreasonable

he had been in expecting a Huntington girl to know anything about

pictures; here was a whole continent full of people who knew nothing

about pictures and he didn't hold it against them. What had such things

to do with him and Eden Bower? When he lay out on the dunes, watching the

moon come up out of the sea, it had seemed to him that there was no

wonder in the world like the wonder of Eden Bower. He was going back to

her because she was older than art, because she was the most overwhelming

thing that had ever come into his life.

He had written her yesterday, begging her to be at home this evening,

telling her that he was contrite, and wretched enough.

Now that he was on his way to her, his stronger feeling unaccountably

changed to a mood that was playful and tender. He wanted to share

everything with her, even the most trivial things. He wanted to tell her

about the people on the train, coming back tired from their holiday with

bunches of wilted flowers and dirty daisies; to tell her that the

fish-man, to whom she had often sent him for lobsters, was among the

passengers, disguised in a silk shirt and a spotted tie, and how his wife

looked exactly like a fish, even to her eyes, on which cataracts were

forming. He could tell her, too, that he hadn't as much as unstrapped his

canvases,--that ought to convince her.

In those days passengers from Long Island came into New York by ferry.

Hedger had to be quick about getting his dog out of the express car in

order to catch the first boat. The East River, and the bridges, and the

city to the west, were burning in the conflagration of the sunset; there

was that great home-coming reach of evening in the air.

The car changes from Thirty-fourth Street were too many and too

perplexing; for the first time in his life Hedger took a hansom cab for

Washington Square. Caesar sat bolt upright on the worn leather cushion

beside him, and they jogged off, looking down on the rest of the world.

It was twilight when they drove down lower Fifth Avenue into the Square,

and through the Arch behind them were the two long rows of pale violet

lights that used to bloom so beautifully against the grey stone and

asphalt. Here and yonder about the Square hung globes that shed a

radiance not unlike the blue mists of evening, emerging softly when

daylight died, as the stars emerged in the thin blue sky. Under them the

sharp shadows of the trees fell on the cracked pavement and the sleeping

grass. The first stars and the first lights were growing silver against

the gradual darkening, when Hedger paid his driver and went into the

house,--which, thank God, was still there! On the hall table lay his

letter of yesterday, unopened.

He went upstairs with every sort of fear and every sort of hope clutching

at his heart; it was as if tigers were tearing him. Why was there no gas

burning in the top hall? He found matches and the gas bracket. He

knocked, but got no answer; nobody was there. Before his own door were

exactly five bottles of milk, standing in a row. The milk-boy had taken

spiteful pleasure in thus reminding him that he forgot to stop his order.

Hedger went down to the basement; it, too, was dark. The janitress was

taking her evening airing on the basement steps. She sat waving a

palm-leaf fan majestically, her dirty calico dress open at the neck. She

told him at once that there had been "changes." Miss Bower's room was to

let again, and the piano would go tomorrow. Yes, she left yesterday, she

sailed for Europe with friends from Chicago. They arrived on Friday,

heralded by many telegrams. Very rich people they were said to be,

though the man had refused to pay the nurse a month's rent in lieu of

notice,--which would have been only right, as the young lady had agreed

to take the rooms until October. Mrs. Foley had observed, too, that he

didn't overpay her or Willy for their trouble, and a great deal of

trouble they had been put to, certainly. Yes, the young lady was very

pleasant, but the nurse said there were rings on the mahogany table where

she had put tumblers and wine glasses. It was just as well she was gone.

The Chicago man was uppish in his ways, but not much to look at. She

supposed he had poor health, for there was nothing to him inside his

clothes.

Hedger went slowly up the stairs--never had they seemed so long, or his

legs so heavy. The upper floor was emptiness and silence. He unlocked

his room, lit the gas, and opened the windows. When he went to put his

coat in the closet, he found, hanging among his clothes, a pale,

flesh-tinted dressing gown he had liked to see her wear, with a

perfume--oh, a perfume that was still Eden Bower! He shut the door behind

him and there, in the dark, for a moment he lost his manliness. It was

when he held this garment to him that he found a letter in the pocket.

The note was written with a lead pencil, in haste: She was sorry that he

was angry, but she still didn't know just what she had done. She had

thought Mr. Ives would be useful to him; she guessed he was too proud.

She wanted awfully to see him again, but Fate came knocking at her door

after he had left her. She believed in Fate. She would never forget him,

and she knew he would become the greatest painter in the world. Now she

must pack. She hoped he wouldn't mind her leaving the dressing gown;

somehow, she could never wear it again.

After Hedger read this, standing under the gas, he went back into the

closet and knelt down before the wall; the knot hole had been plugged up

with a ball of wet paper,--the same blue note-paper on which her letter

was written.

He was hard hit. Tonight he had to bear the loneliness of a whole

lifetime. Knowing himself so well, he could hardly believe that such a

thing had ever happened to him, that such a woman had lain happy and

contented in his arms. And now it was over. He turned out the light and

sat down on his painter's stool before the big window. Caesar, on the

floor beside him, rested his head on his master's knee. We must leave

Hedger thus, sitting in his tank with his dog, looking up at the stars.

* * * * *

COMING, APHRODITE! This legend, in electric lights over the Lexington

Opera House, had long announced the return of Eden Bower to New York

after years of spectacular success in Paris. She came at last, under the

management of an American Opera Company, but bringing her own _chef

d'orchestre_.

One bright December afternoon Eden Bower was going down Fifth Avenue in

her car, on the way to her broker, in Williams Street. Her thoughts were

entirely upon stocks,--Cerro de Pasco, and how much she should buy of

it,--when she suddenly looked up and realized that she was skirting

Washington Square. She had not seen the place since she rolled out of it

in an old-fashioned four-wheeler to seek her fortune, eighteen years ago.

"_Arrêtez, Alphonse. Attendez moi_," she called, and opened the door

before he could reach it. The children who were streaking over the

asphalt on roller skates saw a lady in a long fur coat, and short,

high-heeled shoes, alight from a French car and pace slowly about the

Square, holding her muff to her chin. This spot, at least, had changed

very little, she reflected; the same trees, the same fountain, the white

arch, and over yonder, Garibaldi, drawing the sword for freedom. There,

just opposite her, was the old red brick house.

"Yes, that is the place," she was thinking. "I can smell the carpets now,

and the dog,--what was his name? That grubby bathroom at the end of the

hall, and that dreadful Hedger--still, there was something about him, you

know--" She glanced up and blinked against the sun. From somewhere in the

crowded quarter south of the Square a flock of pigeons rose, wheeling

quickly upward into the brilliant blue sky. She threw back her head,

pressed her muff closer to her chin, and watched them with a smile of

amazement and delight. So they still rose, out of all that dirt and noise

and squalor, fleet and silvery, just as they used to rise that summer

when she was twenty and went up in a balloon on Coney Island!

Alphonse opened the door and tucked her robes about her. All the way down

town her mind wandered from Cerro de Pasco, and she kept smiling and

looking up at the sky.

When she had finished her business with the broker, she asked him to look

in the telephone book for the address of M. Gaston Jules, the picture

dealer, and slipped the paper on which he wrote it into her glove. It was

five o'clock when she reached the French Galleries, as they were called.

On entering she gave the attendant her card, asking him to take it to M.

Jules. The dealer appeared very promptly and begged her to come into his

private office, where he pushed a great chair toward his desk for her and

signalled his secretary to leave the room.

"How good your lighting is in here," she observed, glancing about. "I met

you at Simon's studio, didn't I? Oh, no! I never forget anybody who

interests me." She threw her muff on his writing table and sank into the

deep chair. "I have come to you for some information that's not in my

line. Do you know anything about an American painter named Hedger?"

He took the seat opposite her. "Don Hedger? But, certainly! There are

some very interesting things of his in an exhibition at V----'s. If you

would care to--"

She held up her hand. "No, no. I've no time to go to exhibitions. Is he a

man of any importance?"

"Certainly. He is one of the first men among the moderns. That is to say,

among the very moderns. He is always coming up with something different.

He often exhibits in Paris, you must have seen--"

"No, I tell you I don't go to exhibitions. Has he had great success? That

is what I want to know."

M. Jules pulled at his short grey moustache. "But, Madame, there are many

kinds of success," he began cautiously.

Madame gave a dry laugh. "Yes, so he used to say. We once quarrelled on

that issue. And how would you define his particular kind?"

M. Jules grew thoughtful. "He is a great name with all the young men, and

he is decidedly an influence in art. But one can't definitely place a man

who is original, erratic, and who is changing all the time."

She cut him short. "Is he much talked about at home? In Paris, I mean?

Thanks. That's all I want to know." She rose and began buttoning her

coat. "One doesn't like to have been an utter fool, even at twenty."

"_Mais, non_!" M. Jules handed her her muff with a quick, sympathetic

glance. He followed her out through the carpeted show-room, now closed to

the public and draped in cheesecloth, and put her into her car with words

appreciative of the honour she had done him in calling.

Leaning back in the cushions, Eden Bower closed her eyes, and her face,

as the street lamps flashed their ugly orange light upon it, became

hard and settled, like a plaster cast; so a sail, that has been filled by

a strong breeze, behaves when the wind suddenly dies. Tomorrow night the

wind would blow again, and this mask would be the golden face of

Aphrodite. But a "big" career takes its toll, even with the best of luck.