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IV--FERGUS

V--THE PROFESSOR

VI--ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS

KAREN

Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever.

I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay, and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of epigram. Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines. You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then you quarreled.

When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education, the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to appreciate this personal cult of Karen's. She was so clearly finer and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her, that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured. It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so subject to sudden disaster. Karen's notes were always a little more brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support. She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood, and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul, and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.

I am quite sure that Karen's system of personal relations was platonic. She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an "affair." She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared. Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex, her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places.

Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen, a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various repellant "tones" or my failure to catch just the quality of certain people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her "cads." They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness. But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a mood. She never recognized any of the na?ve collisions of men and women.

Karen often seemed keenly to wonder at this unsatisfactoriness of men. She cultivated them, walking always in her magic circle, but they slipped and grew dimmer. She had her fling of feminism towards the end of her year. She left the university to become secretary for a state suffrage leader. Under the stress of public life she became fierce and serious. She abandoned the picturesque peasant costumes which she had affected, and made herself hideous in mannish skirts and waists. She felt the woes of women, and saw everywhere the devilish hand of the exploiting male. If she ever married, she would have a house separate from her husband. She would be no parasite, no man's woman. She spoke of the "human sex," and set up its norms for her acquaintanceships.

When I saw Karen later, however, she was herself again. She had taken up again the tissue of personal relations. But in that reconstituted world all her friends seemed to be women. Her taste of battle had seemed to fortify and enlighten that ancient shrinking; her old annoyance that men should be abruptly different from what she would have them. She was intimate with feminists whose feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely conscious of the cloven hoof of the male. Karen, in her brooding way, was able to give this philosophy a far more poetical glamor than any one I knew. Her woman friends adored her, even those who had not acquired that mystic sense of "loyalty to woman" and did not believe that no man was so worthy that he might not be betrayed with impunity. Karen, on her part, adored her friends, and the care that had been spent on unworthy men now went into toning up and making subtle the women around her. She did a great deal for them, and was constantly discovering godlike creatures in shop and street and bringing them in to be mystically mingled with her circle.

Naturally it is Karen's married friends who cause her greatest concern. Eternal vigilance is the price of their salvation from masculine tyranny. In the enemy's country, under at least the nominal yoke, these married girls seem to Karen subjects for her prayer and aid. She has become exquisitely sensitive to any aggressive gestures on the part of these creatures with whom her dear friends have so inexplicably allied themselves, and she is constantly in little subtle intrigues to get the victim free or at least armisticed. She broods over her little circle, inscrutable, vigilant, a true vestal virgin on the sacred hearth of woman. Husbands are doubtless better for that silent enemy whom they see jealously adoring their wives.

Karen still leaves trails of mystery and desire where she goes, but it is as a woman's woman that I see her now, and, I am ashamed to say, ignore her. Men could not be crowded into her Jamesian world and she has solved the problem by obliterating them. She will not live by means of them. Since she does not know how to live with them she lives without them.

SOPHRONISBA

I should scarcely have understood Sophronisba unless I had imagined her against the background of that impeccable New England town from which she says she escaped. It is a setting of elm-shaded streets, with houses that can fairly be called mansions, and broad lawns stretching away from the green and beautiful white church. In this large princeliness of aspect the na?ve stranger, like myself, would imagine nothing but what was grave and sweet and frank. Yet behind those pillared porticos Sophronisba tells me sit little and petrified people. This spacious beauty exists for people who are mostly afraid; afraid of each other, afraid of candor, afraid of sex, afraid of radicals. Underneath the large-hearted exterior she says they are stifled within. Women go queer from repression, spinsters multiply on families' hands, while the young men drift away to Boston. Dark tales are heard of sexual insanity, and Sophronisba seems to think that the chastest wife never conceives without a secret haunting in her heart of guilt. I think there are other things in Sophronisba's town, but these are the things she has seen, and these are the things she has fled from.

Sophronisba is perhaps forty, but she is probably much younger than she was at eleven. At that age the devilish conviction that she hated her mother strove incessantly with the heavenly conviction that it was her duty to love her. And there were unpleasing aunts and cousins who exhaustingly had to be loved when she wished only spitefully to slap them. Her conscience thus played her unhappy tricks through a submerged childhood, until college came as an emancipation from that deadly homesickness that is sickness not for your home but intolerance at it.

No more blessed relief comes to the conscience-burdened than the chance to exchange their duties for their tastes, when what you should unselfishly do to others is transformed into what books and pictures you ought to like. Your conscience gets its daily exercise, but without the moral pain. I imagine Sophronisba was not unhappy at college, where she could give up her weary efforts to get her emotions correct towards everybody in the world and the Three Persons in the heaven above it, in favor of acquiring a sound and authorized cultural taste. She seems to have very dutifully taken her master's degree in English literature, and for her industrious conscience is recorded somewhere an unreadable but scholarly thesis, the very name of which she has probably forgotten herself.

For several years Sophronisba must have flowed along on that thin stream of the intellectual life which seems almost to have been invented for slender and thin-lipped New England maidens who desperately must make a living for themselves in order to keep out of the dull prison of their homes. There was for Sophronisba a little teaching, a little settlement work, a little writing, and a position with a publishing house. And always the firm clutch on New York and the dizzy living on a crust that might at any moment break and precipitate her on the intolerable ease of her dutifully loving family. It is the conventional opinion that this being a prisoner on parole can be terminated only by the safe custody of a man, or the thrilling freedom of complete personal success. Sophronisba's career has been an indeterminate sentence of womanhood. She is at once a proof of how very hard the world still is on women, and how gaily they may play the game with the odds against them.

I did not meet Sophronisba until she was in the mellow of her years, and I cannot disentangle all her journalistic attempts, her dives into this magazine and that, the electrifying discovery of her by a great editor, the great careers that were always beginning, the great articles that were called off at the last moment, the delayed checks, the checks that never came, the magazines that went down with all on board. But there were always articles that did come off, and Sophronisba zigzagged her literary way through fat years of weekly series and Sunday supplements and lean years of desk work and book-reviewing. There are some of Sophronisba's articles that I should like to have written myself. She piles her facts with great neatness, and there is a little ironic punch sometimes which is not enough to disturb the simple people who read it, but flatters you as of the more subtly discerning. Further, she has a genuine talent for the timely.

There has been strategy as well as art in her career. That feminine Yankeeness which speaks out of her quizzical features has not lived in vain. She tells with glee of editors captured in skilful sorties of wit, of connections laboriously pieced together. She confesses to plots to take the interesting and valuable in her net. There is continuous action along her battlefront. She makes the acceptance of an article an exciting event. As you drop in upon her for tea to follow her work from week to week, you seem to move in a maze of editorial conspiracy. Her zestfulness almost brings a thrill into the prosaic business of writing. Not beguilements, but candor and wit, are her ammunition. One would expect a person who looked like Sophronisba to be humorous. But her wit is good enough to be surprising, it is sharp but it leaves no sting. And it gets all the advantage of being carried along on a voice that retains the least suggestion of a racy Eastern twang. With the twang goes that lift and breathlessness that makes everything sound interesting. When you come upon Sophronisba in that charming dinner group that she frequents or as she trips out of the library, portfolio in hand, with a certain sedate primness which no amount of New York will ever strain out of her, you know that for a few moments the air is going to be bright.

How Sophronisba got rid of the virus of her New England conscience and morbidities I do not know. She must have exorcised more demons than most of us are even acquainted with. Yet she never seems to have lost the zest that comes from standing on the brink and watching the Gadarene swine plunge heavily down into the sea. She has expelled the terrors of religion and the perils of thwarted sex, but their nearness still thrills. She would not be herself, neither would her wit be as good, if it were not much made of gay little blasphemies and bold feminist irreverences. There is the unconscious play to the stiff New England gallery that makes what she says of more than local relevance. In her serious talk there lingers the slight, interested bitter tang of the old Puritan poison. But current issues mean much to Sophronisba. These things which foolish people speak of with grave-faced strainings after objectivity, with uncouth scientific jargon and sudden lapses into pruriency, Sophronisba presents as a genuine revelation. Her personal curiosity, combined with intellectual clarity, enable her to get it all assimilated. Her allegiance went, of course, quickly to Freud, and once, in a sudden summer flight to Jung in Zurich, she sat many hours absorbing the theories from a grave, ample, formidably abstract, and--for Sophronisba--too unhumorous Fra?lein assistant. What Sophronisba got she has made into a philosophy of life, translated into New England dialect, and made quite revealingly her own. Before journalism claimed her for more startling researches, she would often give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus sent flying.

Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them are.

Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first.

MON AMIE

She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine. She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of ideals.

She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately, with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was nineteen and had just completed her studies.

She told me one afternoon as we took our first walk through the dusky richness of the Mus?e Cluny, that the shock of death had disclosed to her how fleeting life was, how much she thought of death, and how much she feared it. I used the lustiness of her grandmother's eighty-four years to convince her as to how long she might have to postpone her dread, but her fragile youth seemed already to feel the beating wings about her. As she talked, her expression had all that wistful seriousness of the French face which has not been devitalized by the city, that sense of the nearness of unutterable things which runs, a golden thread, through their poetry. Though she had lived away from Brittany, in her graver moments there was much in her of the patient melancholy of the Breton. For her father's people had been sea-folk,--not fishermen, but pilots and navigators on those misty and niggardly shores,--and the long defeat and ever-trustful suffering was in her blood. She would interpret to me the homely pictures at the Luxembourg which spoke of coast and peasant life; and her beautiful articulateness brought the very soul of France out of the canvases of Cottet and Breton and Carri?re. She understood these people.

But she was very various, and, if at first we plumbed together the profoundest depths of her, we soon got into shallower waters. The fluency of her thought outran any foreign medium, and made anything but her flying French impossible. Her meager English had been learned from some curious foreigner with an accent more German than French, and we abandoned it by mutual consent. Our conversation became an exchange of ideas and not of languages. Or rather her mind became the field where I explored at will.

I think I began by assuming a Catholic devotion in her, and implied that her serious outlook on life might lead her into the church. She scoffed unmitigatedly at this. The nuns were not unkindly, she said, but they were hard and narrow and did not care for the theater and for books, which she adored.

She believed in God. "Et le th??tre!" I said, which delighted her hugely. But these Christian virtues made unlovely characters and cut one off so painfully from the fascinating moving world of ideas outside. But surely after fourteen years of religious training and Christian care, did she not believe in the Church, its priesthood and its dogmas?

She repudiated her faith with indescribable vivacity. A hardened Anglo-Saxon agnostic would have shown more diffidence in denying his belief in dogma or the Bible. As for the latter, she said, it might do for children of five years. And the cutting sweep of that "enfants de cinq ans" afforded me a revealing glimpse of that lucid intelligence with which the French mind cuts through layers and strata of equivocation and compromise.

Most Frenchmen, if they lose their faith, go the swift and logical road to atheism. Her loss was no childish dream or frenzy; she still believed in God. But as for the Church and its priesthood,--she told me, with malicious irony, and with the intelligence that erases squeamishness, of a friend of hers who was the daughter of the priest in charge of one of the largest Parisian churches. Would she confess to a member of a priestly caste which thus broke faith? Confession was odious anyway. She had been kept busy in school inventing sins. She would go to church on Easter, but she would not take the Eucharist, though I noticed a charming lapse when she crossed herself with holy water as we entered Notre Dame one day.

Where had she ever got such ideas, shut up in a convent?--Oh, they were all perfectly obvious, were they not? Where would one not get them? This amazing soul of modern France!--which pervades even the walls of convents with its spirit of free criticism and its terrible play of the intelligence; which will examine and ruthlessly cast aside, just as my vibrant, dark-haired, fragile friend was casting aside, without hypocrisy or scruple, whatever ideas do not seem to enhance the clear life to be lived.

The motherly Anglo-Saxon frame of mind would come upon me, to see her in the light of a poor ignorant child, filled with fantastic ideals, all so pitifully untested by experience. How ignorant she was of life, and to what pitfalls her daring freedom must expose her in this unregenerate France! I tried and gave it up. As she talked,--her glowing eyes, in which ideas seemed to well up brimming with feeling and purpose, saying almost more than her words,--she seemed too palpably a symbol of luminous youth, a flaming militant of the younger generation, who by her courage would shrivel up the dangers that so beset the timorous. She was French, and that fact by itself meant that whole layers of equivocation had been cut through, whole sets of intricacies avoided.

As we walked in the Luxembourg and along the quays, or sat on the iron chairs in the gardens of the Parc Monceau or the Trocad?ro, our friendship became a sort of intellectual orgy. The difficulty of following the pace of her flying tongue and of hammering and beating my own thoughts into the unaccustomed French was fatiguing, but it was the fascinating weariness of exploration. My first idle remarks about God touched off a whole battery of modern ideas. None of the social currents of the day seemed to have passed her by, though she had been immured so long in her sleepy convent at Bourges. She had that same interest and curiosity about other classes and conditions of life which animates us here in America, and the same desire to do something effective against the misery of poverty.

I had teased her a little about her academic, untried ideas, and in grave reproof she told me, one afternoon, as we stood--of all places!--on the porch of the Little Trianon at Versailles, a touching story of a family of the poorest of the Parisian poor, whom she and her mother visited and helped to get work. She did not think charity accomplished very much, and flamed at the word "Socialism," although she had not yet had its program made very clear to her.

But mostly she was feminist,--an ardent disciple in that singularly uncomplicated and happy march of the Frenchwomen, already so practically emancipated, toward a definite social recognition of that liberation. The normal Frenchwoman, in all but the richer classes, is an economic asset to her country. And economic independence was a cardinal dogma in my friend's faith. She was already taking a secretarial course, in order to ensure her ability to make her living; and she looked forward quite eagerly to a career.

Her blazing candor lighted up for me every part of her world. We skirted abysses, but the language helped us wonderfully through. French has worn tracks in so many fields of experience where English blunders either boorishly or sentimentally. French is made for illumination and clear expression; it has kept its purity and crispness and can express, without shamefacedness or bungling, attitudes and interpretations which the Anglo-Saxon fatuously hides.

She listened eagerly, but I think she did not quite understand. If one were not frankly a doll, was not life a great swirl to be grappled with and clarified, and thought and felt about? And as for her personality, the more she gave the more she had. She would take the high risks of friendship.

She was of that young France with its luminous understanding, its personal verve, its light of expression, its way of feeling its ideas and thinking its emotions, its deathless loyalty which betrays only at the clutch of some deeper loyalty. She adored her country and all its mystic values and aspirations. When she heard I was going to Germany, she actually winced with pain. She could scarcely believe it. I fell back at once to the position of a vulgar traveler, visiting even the lands of the barbarians. They were her country's enemies, and some day they would attack. France awaited the onslaught fatalistically. She did not want to be a man, but she wished that they would let women be soldiers. If the war came, however, she would enlist at once as a Red Cross nurse. She thrilled at the thought that perhaps there she could serve to the uttermost.

And the war has come, hot upon her enthusiasms. She must have been long since in the field, either at the army stations, or moving about among the hospitals of Paris, her heart full of pride and pity for the France which she loved and felt so well, and of whose deathless spirit she was, for me, at least, so glowing a symbol.

FERGUS

My friend Fergus has all the characteristics of genius except the divine fire. The guardian angel who presided at his birth and set in order all his delicate appreciations just forgot to start flowing the creative current. Fergus was born to suffer the pangs of artistic desire without the gushing energy that would have moulded artistic form. It was perhaps difficult enough to produce him as it was. There is much that is clearly impossible about him. His father is a bluff old Irish newspaper compositor, with the obstinately genial air of a man who cannot believe that life will not some day do something for him. His mother is a French-Canadian, jolly and stout, who plays old Irish and French melodies on the harp, and mothers the young Catholic girls of the crowded city neighborhood in which they live. She has the slightly surprised background of never realized prosperity. Fergus is an old child, and moves in the dark little flat, with its green plush furniture, its prints of the Great Commoner and Lake Killarney, its Bible texts of the Holy Name, with the detached condescension of an exiled prince. He is very dark and finely formed, of the type that would be taken for a Spaniard in France and an Italian in Spain, and his manners have the distinction of the born aristocrat.

The influences of that close little Catholic society in which he was brought up he has shed as a duck sheds water. His mother wished him to be a Jesuit. The quickness of his mind, the refinement and hauteur of his manner, intoxicated her with the assurance of his priestly future. His father, however, inclined towards the insurance business. Fergus himself viewed his future with cold disinterestedness. When I first met him he had just emerged from a year of violin study at a music school. The violin had been an escape from the twin horrors that had menaced him. On his parents' anxiety that he "make something of himself" he looked with some disdain. He did, however, feel to a certain extent their chagrin at finding so curious and aristocratic a person in their family, and he allowed himself, with a fine stoicism as of an exiled prince supporting himself until the revolution was crushed and he was reinstated in his possessions, to be buried in an insurance broker's office. At this time he spent his evenings in the dim vaulted reading-room of a public library composing music, or in wandering in the park with his friends, discussing philosophy. His little music notebook and Gomperz's "Greek Thinkers" were rarely out of his hand.

Harmony and counterpoint had not appealed to him at the Conservatory, but now the themes that raced and rocketed through his head compelled him to composition. The bloodless scherzos and allegros which he produced and tried to play for me on his rickety piano had so archaic a flavor as to suggest that Fergus was inventing anew the art of music, somewhat as our childhood is supposed to pass through all the stages of the evolution of the race. As he did not seem to pass beyond a pre-Bachian stage, he began to feel at length, he told me, that there was something lacking in his style. But he was afraid that routine study would dull his inspiration. It was time that he needed, and not instruction. And time was slipping so quickly away. He was twenty-two, and he could not grasp or control it.

When summer was near he came to me with an idea. His office work was insupportable. Even accepting that one dropped eight of the best hours of one's every day into a black and bottomless pit in exchange for the privilege of remaining alive, such a life was almost worse than none. I had friends who were struggling with a large country farm. He wished to offer them his services as farmhand on half-time in exchange for simple board and lodging. Working in the morning, he would have all the rest of his pastoral day for writing music.

Before I could communicate to him my friends' reluctance to this proposal, he told me that his musical inspiration had entirely left him. He was now spending all his spare time in the Art Museum, discovering tastes and delights that he had not known were in him. Why had not some one told him of the joy of sitting and reading Plato in those glowing rooms? The Museum was more significant when I walked in it with Fergus. His gracious bearing almost seemed to please the pictures themselves. He walked as a princely connoisseur through his own historic galleries.

When I saw Fergus next, however, a physical depression had fallen upon him. He had gone into a vegetarian diet and was enfeebling himself with Spartan fare. He was disturbed by loneliness, the erotic world gnawed persistently at him, and all the Muses seemed to have left him. But in his gloominess, in the fine discrimination with which he analyzed his helplessness, in the noble despair with which he faced an insoluble world, he was more aristocratic than ever. He was not like one who had never attained genius, fame, voluptuous passion, riches, he was rather as one who had been bereft of all these things.

Returning last autumn from a year abroad, during which I had not heard a word of Fergus, I found he had turned himself into a professional violin-teacher. The insurance job had passed out, and for a few weeks he had supported himself by playing the organ in a small Catholic church. There was jugglery with his salary, however, and it annoyed him to be so intimate a figure in a ritual to which he could only refer in irony. Priests whose "will to power" background he analyzed to me with Nietzschean fidelity always repelled him.

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