"KAETTERHENRY" carved upon it; below that:

"August Ernst 1859-1922"

and below that a space. But she had not bought her own marker. Johnnie had got rid of the monument man for her. She had had a photograph taken of the lot when the stone was put up, and she cherished that.

She kept a vase on August's grave, which she filled with flowers in the summer, although the bunches of sweet peas and cosmos frequently withered before she could get out with a fresh bouquet. She had had a small bridal-wreath bush set out in a corner of the lot. This summer she was going to have a border of that little pink love-in-a-mist around the grave. She wanted her lot to look as well as any in the cemetery.

She told the children that she did not lack for company. Another elderly widow who had been a farmer's wife, Mrs. Wall, lived on the next street in a large, square house painted pale blue. Emma called for Mrs. Wall, and they went to the prayer-meeting and the evening church service together, and to the missionary meeting and the aid. It "made it nice for both of them," people said.

Mrs. Wall came over sometimes in the evening. They sat together, sometimes in the front room or "just out in the kitchen." Mrs. Wall knew more of what was going on than Emma did, although she said that she did n't hear so much now that she did n't have a man coming home from town. They talked over illnesses and approaching weddings and of those whom they had seen going past their

houses that day. Emma told Mrs. Wall about her operation, and Mrs. Wall told her about those of sisters and sisters-in-law and brothers. They talked about the birth of children and grandchildren. Each one found a consolation in detailing to the other the last illness and death of her husband, sitting in the twilight, sympathizing and condoling and narrating. Emma said it helped her to have some one to tell these things to. She would not have told them to her children.

The two women talked of religion together, of what they thought heaven was going to be like, of the way that they thought God looked at things. Emma had no such mystic fervor as her old father, but the hymns, the prayers, the familiar words, were an emotional satisfaction. They comforted her.

They talked of their troubles, said of them that such things were hard to bear; they did n't always see why they must be Johnnie's getting such a poor wife and turning away from the church, Grandma Stille's helplessness, Mr. Wall's sufferings from cancer. These women had both worked hard. Now they were getting old, and many things had not turned out as they had thought they would.

Mrs. Wall sometimes said:

I

T must have been about 1970 that I first met Randolph Schuyler. I had, it is true, noticed him before that time going in and out of his house in Charlton Street, but I had thought no more about him than that he obviously belonged to the old régime which even then seemed so dim. Our actual meeting came about, I remember, by accident. Having backed gradually up his stoop in order to see over the heads of a sidewalk full of people who had gathered to watch a Klan parade go by, I had the misfortune to tread upon the toes of the old gentleman who had just emerged from his doorway. He met He met my apologies, which I doubtless made profuse because of my feeling that he would hardly understand our honest modern manners, with a pardon at once so kindly and so ironic that I found my interest in him many times enlarged. A few days later I greeted him on the street, and not long after that took occasion to carry to his house in person a letter which the postman had carelessly left in my box. The details of our ripening acquaintance have now escaped my memory, but I am not likely soon to forget the memorable evening when, having been invited to dine with him, I stumbled upon his secret.

Here was a man who had been overlooked not only by the Prelimi

nary Census of 1929, but also by the Final Inquisition of 1940, and who dissented, so far as I could learn, from every sovereign tenet of the Fundamentalists.

Why I did not immediately turn him over to the police is a mystery to me. I had been taught in as strict a school as any in Manhattan, and at Amherst had heard with conviction the prescribed lectures on Fundamentalism, Americanism, and Censorship. There was, however, something diabolical about the charm of this cheerful rebel, and I succumbed, as I venture to think most men would have done in the circumstances. My defection proves, it seems to me, that the Fathers of the Inquisition were right in their ruthlessness toward the heretics in those bitter days. A few such survivors as Schuyler would have imperiled the whole victory.

"You are clever to guess my secret," he said when my face had suddenly betrayed my horror. "I suppose I should be more worried than I am. The secret, as a matter of fact, has been something of a burden. It has condemned me to an extraordinary loneliness. If you report me to the police, I shall be first a nine-days' scandal and then a living example just long enough to die for my offenses. Little as I care for these aspects of fame, I cannot truly say that they are

all, I have lived for thirty years among Fundamentalists of an unrelieved orthodoxy, and the most uncomfortable exit from the world has therefore its advantages."

I dare say it was some quirk of curiosity which got the better of me, for I thereupon solemnly promised, to my own astonishment, that I would keep his secret.

"In that case," he thanked me, "I can do no less than be quite frank with you. If, as I suspect, you are merciful because you consider me a sort of specimen too rare to be lightly thrown away, I must try to make your museum entertaining. What shall I tell you first?"

"But how-how-" I stammered. "How did I avoid the inquisitors? I simply do not know. You are of course aware, though you are too young to remember, that New York was the last region to be subdued. Our own Fundamentalists had to summon aid from the Ku-Klux Klan in the South, the White Ribbon Legion in the Middle West, and the Watch and Ward Crusaders in Massachusetts. Even then the task was difficult. I do not like to think of the blood which flowed in Greenwich Village. At the time I was so desperate that I made no effort to save myself. This may explain my incredible good fortune, if I may call it that. The Final Inquisition through some error passed me by, I lived here quietly undisturbed, and in the end I came to breathe freely once again. Out of the millions of the unpersuaded possibly there were others whose fate was similar to mine, but I was too discreet to look for them, and no one of them ever found me out. I honestly

believe that I am now the last heretie in the United States. You will forgive me if I take a certain pleasure in the distinction."

$2

"Have you," I asked, perhaps too gently, "no sense of sin?"

"None whatever. And I have generally observed that those who have a strong sense of sin have very little of any other kind. After all, consider where that feeling comes from. To have it a man must be sure that he has done what is displeasing to the gods; and to be sure of that he must know what the gods require of men. Now, I have gone here and there over the earth a great many thousand miles without ever happening upon a god, talking to him, or learning the demands which he and his fellows make of me and mine. I have questioned numerous men who were sure they were in the counsels of the gods, yet I have never entirely trusted one of them. The best of such men disagree among themselves, doubtless for the reason that they all argue from what I, in my modest fashion, must call inadequate evidence. They tell me that the gods whispered their secrets to men who lived long ago, and who wrote their knowledge down in books. Reading these books, however, I find them full of manifest absurdities regarding history and science and full of manifest contradictions regarding morals. I can consequently do no better than choose among them the precepts and examples which confirm my own experiences. But this I do with other books which no one calls inspired. Nor do I find myself more thoroughly convinced when I examine the great traditions which, first based

upon the holy books, are in some quarters held to have broadened down and gradually to have included the whole truth. Looking over the chronicles of these traditions, I discover that they have regularly resisted novel truths and persecuted the truthseekers as long as it was possible, never learning anything from the fact that they have so often had eventually to confess themselves mistaken and honor persons whom formerly they dishonored. As neither the books nor the traditions bring me face to face with the gods whom they proclaim, I suspend my judgment and do not scourge myself for deeds which this or that authority calls unlawful."

"What appalling egotism!" I burst forth, partly to shield myself from his supple arguments. "You set yourself up against all the collective wisdom of mankind."

Schuyler smiled brightly.

"Why, so I must seem to you to do. It is so long since I have discoursed with a contemporary that I had quite forgotten how insolent an independent thought would look to him. But let me remind you that groups of men, large or small, have their egotisms, too, which often clash with din and fury. And my researches, to say nothing of my recollections, assure me that the smaller groups have not seldom overthrown the larger, and that mere individuals in their time have brought majorities round to their way of thinking."

Here I saw that I had the better of the argument and, though I was Schuyler's guest and junior, I did not hesitate to press it.

"Then you must admit the logical consequences of your position. You see truth emerging from the clashes of

one party with another. Why can you not perceive that the truth has finally emerged, after centuries of wrangling, into the clear light of Fundamentalism? If truth has a history, as you maintain, it is naturally most powerful in its latest form."

"This is most refreshing," said the incorrigible old man. "I see I have denied myself a considerable amount of entertainment by getting out of touch with the younger generation. It may distress you, but I do not believe that truth, for all it has a history, is necessarily progressive. It moves, I note, in cycles, ebbs and flows, rises and falls, advances and slips back. I have always suspected it to be one of the whimsical devices of the gods, about whom I know so little, that the reason, after reaching a certain point, is once more engulfed by a wave of sentiment or ignorance and then has slowly to struggle into power again. It had struggled to that certain point at the beginning of this century, whereupon the uninstructed and the unimaginative, as if envying it its prosperity, rose and destroyed it. As I view the matter, this was merely another barbarian invasion. I so viewed it in 1940. If I had been shaped of the clay of martyrs I might have fought the Final Inquisition and lost my head for my pains. Instead, I bowed my head as the civilized Greeks no doubt did when they saw their reasonable opinions being overturned by the jangling Oriental sects which had invaded their world. My world was being invaded by barbarians who hated science and the reason. They were stronger than I. I smiled and settled down in my own dominions in Charlton Street. The barbarians have furnished me one unbroken comedy ever since."

I saw I could not endure this blasphemy any further, so I turned the conversation from theology to politics.

§ 3

In this realm, it turned out, Randolph Schuyler was no less incorrigible than in the other. Though he was, as his name indicated, of strictly native stock, he made merry at the expense of true Americanism.

"How the trail of Amerigo Vespucci comes down through the ages! Amerigo probably never made the voyages he bragged about, but he wrote a book and thus fixed his name on the new hemisphere. In something of this same fashion the outspoken AngloSaxons, though they have had the help of many other races in building the United States, have fixed their language, or one a good deal like it, upon the nation, and so claim the whole credit for the undertaking. At the time of the Final Inquisition about one tenth of the Americans were colored, and about one sixth Catholic, and a large proportion so decidedly not Anglo-Saxon that they were not even Nordic; yet the White Protestant Nordics forced their will upon the rest and made the Government an unblushing oligarchy."

"Surely you realize the importance of having one country, one flag, one speech, one culture."

"I realize the importance of such a unity to the oligarchs, but I am afraid the importance to the country is not so great. Recalling the folk-songs of the negroes, and their powerful emotional impulses, I think the land is a much less desirable place to live in, now these particular Americans have been condemned to the rank of songless, sullen helots. Recalling the

secular light-heartedness of the Catholics, though I never liked their theology, and the international sympathies of the Jews, I take emphatically less pleasure in the American scene, now all these tribes have been obliged to settle down to a drab Protestantism and a touchy nationalism. It seems to me that the Fathers of the Inquisition were about as wasteful of precious human materials as their ancestors had been of the natural resources of the continent."

"Then why don't you go back—” "To the land from which I came, whatever be its name? Forgive me if I cap verse with you out of an old song which was sung during the Preliminary Census. But I am refreshed to a pitch of frivolity by your question. I have lived, you see, so long to myself that I had forgotten that such witty repartee still exists. As to your question itself, I might be willing to go back if it were not for one thing, which is that I am, in my way, an American, and have nowhere else to go. I belong to an American minority. Come to think of it, I am the American minority. In the circumstances I feel almost what a Fundamentalist would call a duty to stay here. I believe the country ought to have a minority within its borders. Doubtless in the blithe economy of the gods I have been spared to play this necessary rôle. To be sure, I have not been conspicuous, but that is because the majority is at the moment so overwhelming. If another party of dissent arises, I shall declare myself and hand on to its members the torch which I have kept alight, however feebly, within my prudent bosom. When that fortunate day appears, the young minority, remem