place, Millicent was pouring out afternoon tea. She was wearing a pale blue dress which revealed deliciously the clear pink and white of her complexion. She held the tea-pot aloft in her right hand, while her left hand, ringless, rested on the edge of the tray. Near her, in the chair which he had occupied on the occasion of his first visit, sat the Gargoyle. But he did not seem to Millicent any longer to resemble a gargoyle. She felt that his very fine, dark, humorous eyes dominated every other feature. They were full of laughter and full of nonsense. And laughter and nonsense, she now saw, were the most charming-and indeed the most valuable qualities in the world. It was impossible to overestimate their charm or their value. "Daddy isn't coming down to tea to-day," said Millicent. "He's not very well. He's resting." "He's getting idle," said Maurice. "Is it as nice tea as you get at the Crown?" good!" There was no bitterness and no pretense in Millicent's exclamation. But in a moment it might have been observed that she gave the smallest of sighs. Maurice was unaware of the sigh. He was busy with his own thoughts. "It's an extraordinary thing," he said at last. "Wherever I go, I seem to have an effect of some sort." "You're very conceited," criticized Millicent, looking at him disapprovingly. "Very. And don't we all have some effect?" "Perhaps.' He nodded his head. "When I I came here first Mrs. Howard-" "Oh, bother Mrs. Howard!" cried Millicent laughing. "And you... "What about me?" "Well, you were engaged." "I've forgotten," said Millicent. "Almost as nice," he teased. "Of Rich." course, Mrs. Howard-" "Yes, I know she's perfect." A pretended frown crossed Millicent's face. "This afternoon," proceeded Maurice, "as I was strolling up here, I ran into young Everard. That was what made me late. You know, although he's a puppy, he's not an absolute fool." "No, I suppose not. he going?" Where was "He didn't say. Out to Parrott's Farm, I suppose. He tells me that Mrs. Manners has given in over that." "They're engaged? Oh, how "That leaves only you . . . me . . Millicent . . ." ... and She made no reply; and the Gargoyle, as if discouraged, fell suddenly silent. With a quick glance, Millicent saw that he had become very grave. His expression was serious; his eyes were lowered. That grin, which she was beginning to find so subtly reassuring, was absent from his face. A terrible constraint seized them both. It lasted-oh, endlessly, until Millicent seemed to feel a little cold spot, which was her heart, sinking gradually lower and lower, and becoming heavier, heavier... Tears gathered behind her eyes; her smile was forced. She raised her tea-cup very calmly to her lips, to show that she was entirely mistress of herself; and she set the cup down again untasted, with her lips and her fingers trembling. But just as she was beginning to feel like a little girl who is in disgrace, Millicent received an inspiration. It darted through her mind like quicksilver. It was an inspiration that came straight from Mother Nature, who must have been hovering there in protection of her children. Millicent, in fact, reached out her hand and took a piece of cake. Nothing in that, you will say. It is done every afternoon. But listen! It was not the same cake as that one which had produced the earlier catastrophe, but the twin sister of that cake. It contained currants, and it crumbled. And Millicent, putting into her mouth a first piece of this providential cake, and very archly glancing during the process at the Gargoyle, unseen by him allowed herself shamelessly and deliberately to choke. It was not a very serious choke-not a choke such as Mrs. Manners had suffered, or even a choke such as Millicent herself... It was merely a little cough or two, or at most three or four... And having choked once, she must needs choke again. In choking, she laughed . . . It was nothing. Neither in point of time nor danger was it anything at all. And yet the choke and her laughter brought warm blood into the Gargoyle's cheeks. It brought a light to his eyes. Slowly, slowly, from between her eyelashes,Millicent saw the grin return to the Gargoyle's face, and expand, and at last envelop him entirely. At this point Millicent closed her eyes fast. Her little handkerchief was held close to her lips. She seemed almost to lose consciousness, even to fall into a dream. And in dreams, as all know, the strangest things happen-the strangest, most incredible, and at the same time (often enough) the most agreeable things. When next Millicent opened her eyes it was to find that she was no longer mistress of herself. Maurice's arm was drawn closely about her. She was pressed to his side. His ugly gargoyle-like face, decorated and suffused with a grin of delight such as would have melted a heart of stone, was irresistibly near to hers. His eyes were so deep and so near that she could see herself drowning in them. "Thank you," Millicent murmured gratefully. "I... Oh, Maurice!" Mr. Pearson, who had changed his mind about coming down to tea, looked in at that moment through the French windows; but as he was a wise old man he withdrew quite hastily and in silence. It was a sacrifice for him to go without his tea; but he would have sacrificed more than his tea just then. Indeed, as he sauntered about the garden, Mr. Pearson was smiling to himself as though a secret wish of his own had just been fulfilled. D THE WITHERED ARM And What It Did for the Kaiser JOSEPH JASTROW O MEN make history or does history make men? This engaging query has as ready a solution as the puzzling priority of the hen or the egg. The psychologist is committed to seek in human events no less than in human lives, the play of personality, to find the common motive forces in careers significant and insignificant. For in whatever setting, the nobilities and achievements, the inconsequences and failures, the vices and degradations of men are of one nature, one source. Man's nature and his works are equally exhibits of his traits; they are his making and undoing. Much of circumstance is of the same human making, the working of the same psychological forces, but on so monumental a scale that the beating of any ordinary pair of wings against them is helpless. The heroic is exceptional. The human story is the shifting interplay of personality and social circumstance, both ultimately of one origin. Now and then a commanding personality converts a cry in the wilderness into the reality of history. In the course of empire, in the stress of economics, in the formulations of philosophy, in the expressions of literature, appear the issues of human urges playing their part in the span of a life; a conflict humble or glorified among universal needs and their satisfaction in a thousand settings. In recorded fact or liberated fancy the dramatic may enlarge the worthy to the heroic and conceive the superman. Yet glory and power may lie in circumstance, with personality lacking in distinction or even handicapped by the clinical frailties of the human lot. The modern note in psychology aims at insight through analysis. Looking upon the drama of personality contending with circumstances or bending them to motive or ambition, it claims a voice in the interpretation of human behavior called history. 20 In one momentous instance the theme may find an emblem in the withered arm of the last of the Kaisers. Herr Emil Ludwig is his psychobiographer. He sets forth that because Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Hohenzollern was born in 1859 with a minor deformity, his subsequent behavior was such as to precipitate in 1914 that heroic catastrophe that in detachment we call the World War. When Freud comes to replace Grimm in nursery tales, children may read "The Story of the Withered Arm"; or some psychoanalytic Poe may tell the college version as "The Strange Case of an nation, instead of insisting, centuries Inferiority Complex." The problem of William II, like that of many of us, was a problem in personality but was given a definiteness by fate of birth and a stage by fate of circumstance which he roughhewed into history; the problem of concealing, outwitting, defying a withered arm. Despite it, because of it would say the Freudian Adler —with a motivation like that of the tongue-tied lad who became Demosthenes, but with dire contrast in issue he made of himself a good rider, a skilled if bagging marksman, a martial figure in appearance, an overlord in reality. "The moral victory over his physique was his destruction." In these oracular words his biographer has carved his epitaph for Wilhelm's exiled eyes to read. History, then, is biography on a grand scale, and biography is the psychoanalysis of personality. One withered arm upsets the peace and transforms the map of Europe and shapes the map of life of millions of souls animated by the same urges and compulsions, because of the consequential stage that the maneuvering of human motives called politics provides for the star players. The issue hangs not upon the hazard of a diplomatic stroke, but upon the uncertainties of a psychoneural constitution. If the accoucheurs had been more skilful, or if the loyal child had been of other psychic make-up, or if despite his station the young man could have been diverted from Berlin to Hollywood and persuaded to accept the tinsel glory and the matinée idolatry of a "movie" too late, upon the divinity that once did hedge a king; what we agree to call history might have been a different story, and all of us might be living and thinking differently. So far as this is true, is all this doom the cost of permitting one neurotic individual to act out in fateful reality what many of his kind live in the indulgence of fantasy, or experience through the creations of literature, or in what reasonable romance life affords? The play that many a striving self produces in a private Freudian "little theater" with sporadic uprushes into reality, follows the same plot that holds the stage in the the momentous worldtheater so fatefully circumstanced for the last of the Kaisers. The persistent key-note in low life and high life and in the "all highest" is the parent motive of domination. The nurse's, the parent's, the schoolmaster's, the economist's, the statesman's problem is all one: to control and adjust the ego-lust, the desire for dominance, the will to prevail. Yet, if crudely restrained or crushed, ambition would fail, and the servitude of dumb driven cattle be the common lot. Masters and slaves in some measure we must be, though in no dread approximation to a Nietzschean world; for the hazard of it is emblazoned in Freudian characters on the deserted palace walls of the withered arm. 22 The modern mind pursues two directive insights, two large comprehensions of the public human drama on whatever official stage it may be set. The one is the motivation plot called psychology; the other the "reel" of incident and circumstance called history. Conflicting enterprises, conferences, parliaments, decrees, drawn battles, maneuvers, strategies, armistices, alliances, treaties, victories, subjections, compromises, tell the one tale; the consequential one. Ambitions, rivalries, lusts, dreads, animosities, triumphs, debasements, tell the other; the psychological one. The double trend -manifest content, and latent meaning and determination-that Freud discovers in the network of the dream, pervade reality. The ostensible plot, the staged conscious conflict makes the record of the conventional historian. By bringing forward the latent subconscious version, the psychologist remodels the technique. We are no longer content, refuse to be blinded by the glamour of diplomacy, the confusion of action, the alleged inevitability of man-made forces. We look behind the scene for the decisive motivation, the unacknowledged ambitions and repressions. The suppressed secret plot is hidden but not securely buried in the psychoanalytic crypt of Adamitic urges. History supplies the censored version for the populace and the text-books, and to uphold national pride and engage academic profundity. The exposures released by the post-war dismissal of the Freudian censor, contribute to the emancipation of our "now-it-may-be-told" era. 21 The case of Wilhelm Hohenzollern as reported by a social worker would make an interesting assignment. An unfortunate heredity, a birth palsy, a childhood troubled with nervous and allied maladies, disturbed family relations, an unsympathetic mother showing marked preference for her more normal children, a father distrustful and depreciative of his first-born son and heir, absence of sisterly and brotherly affection; fear of betraying physical weakness unbecoming to a soldierly station and destined career, a natural vanity reinforced by fawning associates; a lack of true companions, of adequate corrective control, of respected guides, philosophers or friends; a temperament imperious and bullying by nature as well as by prerogative, with no discipline of enforced adjustment; surrounded by turbulent cross currents of antipathies and dissensions; an impulsive, restless, rebellious, indiscreet, overweening, distrusted, fear-ridden youth, resorting to concealment and pose; all converging inevitably into a seriously maladjusted personality, a tragic combination of a handicapped nature with an aggravating nurture. - A devoted marriage-if that were possible to so ego-bound an individual-to a perfect mate endowed with skill or charm to subdue unruly nerves, might have brought the redemption of home life; but as actually arranged was uninspiring and invited further estrangement and avenues of escape for unsatisfied urges. In the Ludwig version: "What went on behind closed doors in this conjugal relation of a gifted nervous man with a sweetnatured, narrow-minded, devout country-girl was revealed to few and by fewer reported; compassion for the hapless consort of an hysterical autocrat disarmed all criticism." A noble friendship might have brought salvation or mitigation. Of |