Gift. 11-28-66

THIS

HIS is the story of a moral adventure. The man who had it was named Dana Coolidge Peabody, and he lived in the Peabody house on a certain common in Brookline, a sequestered triangle, shaded by elms and unimpeachable poplars, looked out upon by the eyes of very old brick dwellings, white-pillared, ivy-chased, time-honored, and full of memories. The money was mostly in copper, but that was attended to down in State Street.

Dana Peabody was nobody's fool. Far from a certain wide-spread notion, he was not a "fritterer." He had been at pains to organize his life in some detail; otherwise he would never have been able to get done the things he wished to do. Every Saturday evening he attended the symphony concert; he played rather well on the piano, privately, and had done half a dozen small compositions. He had tickets sent him for all the worth-while exhibitions in Newbury Street, and he painted a little himself. Every holiday he sent out a thin volume of poems he had done: perhaps twice a month he took tea with one or another of the Cambridge poets. No one who knew Dana Peabody could think of him as the fag-end of an old stock, for, while he realized to the full extent, and did a certain spiritual homage to, the Peabody line, still the idea

of "going on the name" was repugnant to him. The day when he received his diploma over in Cambridge he had made. this covenant with himself: "I must express something."

Perhaps he had not yet expressed much more than a shadow-a shadow emerging from the Peabody door at four o'clock every afternoon to walk; a clean-cut, black-and-gray shadow moving precisely along the yellow fronts of the apartment buildings which encroached more insistently with every passing season between him and Beacon Hill; a shadow in walking-coat and silk hat, grasping a Malacca stick one third of its length below the head. He might be seen so a little later in the Fens, and at half after five back again at the Peabody door, unless it was a Tuesday or a Friday, on which days he returned earlier to have tea with Elinor Coolidge, just across the little common.

He ought to marry Elinor. In a way, he was bound to marry Elinor. He and Elinor were all that were left in the common. In one way or another the families had dropped off: people had come in to take their places. He thought of it a great deal; it weighed upon him, sometimes even when he was at his work-at his music or his painting or his poetry. And he knew that she thought of it a great deal. It would have been strange

had she not. Once, when coming out of her house after a tea-taking, he glanced over his shoulder and found her watching him from a window with an expression of dejection and weariness; perhaps it was nothing but her grayness.

"Really, I ought to," he said to himself as he went up the Peabody steps.

He gave a tea. He possessed a certain inborn horror of a "scene," and he had a feeling that Elinor might do something uncomfortable were he to speak to her in the privacy of her own home across the common. She might not. When he came to think it over, he really knew remarkably little about Elinor Coolidge. Nevertheless, he gave the tea.

He had only a few people, perhaps a dozen. There was a man for the piano, -from the symphony, -and after the man had done something, Dana played one of his own things, a brief pastoral which he had just finished. At the end he got up, flushing slightly when his friends implored him to go on, went out into the next room, and found Elinor Coolidge.

"Don't you want to come into the study and see the new picture?" he said. "The one I've been doing."

That seemed altogether the happiest way to go about it. She would naturally say the picture was good. It would be easy, after that, to say, "I wish you really thought so, Elinor," and she would ask why.

He stood by the canvas, touching the frame with his long, delicately brown fin

gers.

"I'm afraid you won't like it," he murmured.

"Oh, but I do, Dana."

"I wish-" He turned to face her, his throat uncommonly dry.

"But, Dana," she hurried on, "I-I don't quite get it. I'm terribly stupid, I know-but what is it all about?"

He could not help biting his lower lip. It was not so much her quite unexpected attitude of criticism, but she had disturbed the time-table of his avowal. He fingered his chin, and lifted himself on his toes.

"Oh, it's an impression, a mood. I'm afraid I 'm a bit of a radical in this sort of thing. Do you mind, Elinor? You see, I am trying to say something in my work. I must express something, Elinor." "What?"

Looking up, more than half scandalized, he found her regarding him with the same expression of dejection and weariness he had noticed before. He opened his lips two or three times before he spoke.

"Why-why-the real thing, my dear

girl."

"And what is the real thing?"

He took off his large, black-rimmed glasses and began polishing them with a handkerchief. Poor man, he did not know what to say. He was amazed at Elinor, and more than a little exasperated.

"You look tired," he said.

A faint amusement twisted her lips. "I am tired, Dana. It does n't matter. What I'm thinking is that this thing you call the 'real thing' is n't often very patient about getting itself expressed, is it? Not very subtle? Because it 's too-too scorching. It 's apt to use pretty homely methods, for instance-will you look!"

Following her nod he turned toward the half-open door of the music-room.

"I don't quite understand-" He hesitated, puckering his high, well-shaped forehead. "If you mean Reggie Howe filling his case from my cigarettes, why that is-"

"Is the 'real thing,' Dana."

He lifted his eyebrows in a polite mys tification.

"The real thing," she went on in a low, tight voice, "not because he is stealing cigarettes,-yes, stealing. Why not? -but precisely because he has to. Not many people know-his bankers and myself, perhaps."

She gave him no time, but hurried on, facing him squarely, almost defiantly, with more color than he had imagined her capable of.

"I am thinking of marrying him, Dana. He has asked me."

The man sat down very abruptly. His

wrists crawled out of their cuffs to dangle over the arms of the chair, startlingly long and limp and pallid; a faint perspiration came out on his brow, making it shine more than usual.

"I say!" he mumbled. He jumped up with an almost hysterical ferocity. "Why, my dear girl, Reggie Howe is a crook. I tell you everybody in Boston knows he 's a crook."

"He's more than that, Dana; he 's a broken crook."

There was something almost wistful in his blankness. Again he had to open his lips two or three times before he said anything.

"You-you 're engaged to him, Eli

nor?"

"Not exactly. I'm only thinkingwondering."

"But why-why do you even think? Why? Why?"

She waved her hands, as if in weary mimicry of his own gesture.

"That's it, Dana. Why? Perhaps it 's only because I'm hungry and thirsty for any kind of active noun."

He sat for a long time after the tea-guests had gone, staring out of a window that gave upon the common. It had been drizzling all afternoon, and now, in the darkening gusts of evening, Elinor's house across the way appeared very far off, illusive, and wobbly.

For some reason he had never thought of that house as having a door on the other side, giving upon a world of events and men. Gray Elinor! It struck him as somehow vaguely immoral, almost unchaste. He had once seen her at a ball in a gown of flame-color, but with a certain intellectual laziness he had put it away as in the nature of a concession, which naturally she would have to make from time to time.

He felt uncommonly long, light at one extremity and heavy at the other, like a captive balloon with an iron anchor-a virgin balloon, which had never before hazarded the sky, rocked by strange, dark gusts. He had been irritated more than

once in his life; never before had he been angry. Absurd, hot lusts of revenge swept him; and being so new-born in an emotional sense, he was attacked by unconventional desires to stick out his tongue and make faces at the house on the opposite side of the common. A maid came into the room noiselessly to clear away the tea-things, and, without turning, he quizzed her in an ironical monotone, heavy with his spleen against Elinor Coolidge.

"And what is your clever theory as to the 'real thing,' Annie?"

The maid started, and had trouble with a saucer. Perhaps she was thinking that a hitherto impeccable employer was at length beginning to show his true colors. Whatever her thought, sorrowful or other, she murmured an inclusive, "Yes, sir," and got herself out by a creaking door.

A tongue of lamplight crawled across the floor with the shadow of a man-servant in it. Dana turned a curiously unlively face.

"Dinner? Oh, yes, yes, in a minute. Now shut that door, will you?"

Getting to his feet by and by, he groped his way into the study, snapped on the lights, and stood before the picture which had failed him, his hands clasped behind his back and his feet a little way apart, like a schoolmaster.

"It is n't good," he said aloud, after a moment. He made an impulsive motion to turn the thing to the wall, but stayed himself in time and drew back, shocked, his cheeks coloring.

"Look here," he protested, "I'll not be taken in so by a pat phrase. Elinor is fond of the picturesque-rather too fond." He repeated the last phrase with a growing sense of its strength. "I sha'n't hesitate to tell her the next time I see her. Or, I say-"

Turning away abruptly, he went out into the entryway, put on a hat and coat, and took up the Malacca stick, forgetting in his preoccupation that rain fell. "It sounds as though it ought to mean something, Elinor," he developed his attack in

a forensic undertone. "Only, you see, it does n't."

"What in the world am I doing this for?" he asked himself when he had walked a dozen rods along the gravel path.

He stopped and stared distractedly across the common, standing motionless for a long time, slim and gray, like the poplars fading upward into the soggy twilight. The water, escaping the brim of his shiny hat, began to drip down in front of his nose. A man and a woman trundling a barrel-organ found him so, let down the small third leg of the contraption, and, with the almost miraculous hopefulness of their species, began to grind out the "Blue Danube Waltz," the man working mistily over the crank, the woman holding an inverted tambourine in one hand while with the other she mopped the moisture from her brown forehead.

"It ought not to be allowed," Dana protested impatiently. "The police are getting lax again." Then, as if realizing suddenly the absurdity of his position, he moved off hastily toward his own house, his face blazing. A moment later he returned, however, true to the blood, the menacing Malacca in front, like a rod of authority to wave these wanderers back into their limbo region of kitchenettes.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded of the old man, who had given over cranking now and stared with lusterless eyes at the bole of a near-by poplar. The fellow continued to brood at the poplar-bole, ignoring the question. Dana advanced, pointing his stick directly at the offender's face, and raised his voice to an unaccustomed pitch.

and he heard the young woman explaining in a rich, musical voice, husky just now with the wet:

"He no spik, my fadder. He no hear notting. He deaf and-how you call it no can spik?" "Dumb?"

He felt immediately that he had been tricked into speech with her. Neither was anything in the world further from his mind than a lifting of his hat: he was surprised to find it in his hand, and put it back hastily, his cheeks burning. To add to his mortification, his instinctive gesture had not escaped the girl, who smiled up at him with more than a hint of coquetry, showing her teeth, which were large and firm and white.

"Well," he muttered, shaking his damp shoulders and scowling at the head of his stick, “I—er—I asked you what you were doing here?"

She waved her hands about in a gesture at once uncouth and splendid.

"Mucha money here. Reecha. Grande house. My fadder he no wanta come. He one beeg fool, my fadder. Know notting. Alla time wanta stay where it is mucha childs, leetle money. He lovahe lov-va," she rocked her folded hands in her neck with a burlesque of sentimentality,-"he lova see childs dance when he turna crank. Dat 's all-turna crank -childs dance. He know notting, my fadder."

Dana looked at the grinder, standing so dull and dumpy, staring at nothing, and a kind of rancorous glee moved his soul.

"This," he said to himself, "is too good to have happened. An object lesson in the 'real thing,' according to Elinor. The

The old man smiled in a dull, ambiguous way, possibly insulting. It must be borne in mind that Dana had just passed through the most shocking experience of his life, and his nerves were bad.

"Look here!" he bellowed, frankly taking leave of his temper. But before he could go further, a hand touched his arm,

-'turna crank-childs dance.' What more simple and homely?" He stepped back on the walk and permitted himself an indulgence which he had never before practised in a public place: he laughed aloud.

"She must see this. Oh, Elinor must see this! I say there, come along, will you?"