W^TERPRICHARD EATON 
 
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 BE MORRIS UNDERBILL 
 
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 11,11 
 
CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 BEQUEST 
 
 OF 
 
 STEWART HENRY BURNHAM 
 1943 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PS 3509.A89R9 
 
 The runaway place;a May idyl of Manhatta 
 
 3 1924 022 377 463 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022377463 
 
THE 
 
 RUNAWAY PLACE 
 
 A MAY IDTL OF 
 MANHATTAN 
 
 BY 
 
 WALTER PRICHARD EATON 
 
 AND 
 
 ELISE MORRIS UNDERHILL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HQLT AND COMPANY 
 J 909 
 
COPYRXGHT, 1909 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 Published May, igoQ 
 
 QVIHIt It BODEtt COMPAHy PRESS 
 KAHWAY, N. J. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 In Which We Run away to the Year 
 
 BEFORE Last 3 
 
 Containing the Adventure of the Sending 
 Boat and the Iliad of the Doughnut 
 
 Chapter II 
 
 The Magic Casement 39 
 
 Containing The Other Side of the Hill and 
 The Little Lady of Shalott. 
 
 Chapter III 
 
 Child Philip as Essayist .... 75 
 Containing How to be Happy though in New 
 York 
 
 Chapter IV 
 A Bugler before the Wall . . . 100 
 
 Chapter V 
 
 The Old Men Who Played Croquet . 122 
 Containing The Tale of the Bibliomaniacal 
 Cabbie 
 
iv CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter VI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Gluebird and the Dutch Baby . i6o 
 
 Chapter VII 
 
 Concerning Pollparrots, Porcelains, 
 AND the Hand of God .... 198 
 
 Chapter VIII 
 The Touch of Schumann . . . 227 
 
 Chapter IX 
 The Pessimistic Pelican .... 247 
 
THE RUNAWAY PLACE 
 
Around Saint Gaudens' golden group 
 A little child pursues his hoop. 
 Nor sees the twitching charger led 
 By Victory, above his head; 
 Of war and memories of war 
 He knows not; Life lies all before; 
 Just now sufficient for the day 
 It is to seize the moment's play; 
 And so around Saint Gaudens' group 
 The little child pursues his hoop. 
 
 Beyond the child we blithely mark 
 The long green garden of the Park, 
 And hear a call that will not down 
 For all the clamor of the town, 
 A Piper's call to run away 
 Until the weary feet can play. 
 Until the soul forgets its pain 
 And dares to be a child again: 
 The summoning grows fainter? Hark- 
 The Piper's marching up the Park! 
 
THE RUNAWAY PLACE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY TO THE 
 YEAR BEFORE LAST 
 
 T TTCTORY, her wings agleam, was lead- 
 ing General Sherman southward down 
 the Avenue with conquering stride. Over- 
 head, the fresh young green that sprayed the 
 trees hung like a soft veil, and over that, the 
 blue of a May morning. The gay proces- 
 sion of carriages rolled by on the asphalt. 
 The green hip-roof of the new Plaza Hotel 
 shone in the sun, far aloft above the bare 
 cliff-wall of the building, which suggests curi- 
 ously a man without eyebrows. Nurse-maids 
 and children were alive in the paths as far 
 as the eye could see. And Philip Stoughton, 
 pausing by Saint Gaudens' bronze to look 
 
 3 
 
4 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 about him, was well content. And why not? 
 The belated Spring had come at last with a 
 rush and burst of leaf and blossom; and he 
 was out of a job, to enjoy it at his boundless 
 leisure. 
 
 Philip Stoughton cherished no delusions as 
 to " the dignity of labor." He admitted its 
 too frequent necessity, but further he would 
 not go. No activity, he would have told you, 
 that was not so joyfully indulged in as to be- 
 come play, could be called dignified, because 
 it is the right of every person to be happy, 
 and to compel that person into unwilling or 
 non-enthusiastic activity argues an essential 
 lack of dignity in the scheme of things. In 
 other words, he would have spoken of the 
 indignity of labor. " The child and the ar- 
 tist," he would have added, " because their 
 activities are the most spontaneous, are the 
 most dignified members of society." 
 
 It is hardly necessary now, perhaps, to 
 state that Philip Stoughton was a boyish 
 young man who aspired to a literary reputa- 
 tion. 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 5 
 
 However, one has to yield a little to a 
 theory, held so strongly that it induces the 
 theorizer to forego, not only his " undigni- 
 fied " daily toil, but the weekly reward there- 
 for. Stoughton had signed his name to the 
 pay-roll of a down-town firm for the last 
 time that very morning, and now he stood 
 beneath the gleaming, triumphant bronze, as 
 care-free as a bird, his eye, to be sure, alert 
 for "copy," (for in his happiest or idlest 
 moments, the artist's instinct is alive), but in 
 his heart longing for a playmate. Spring was 
 all about him — even the asphalt smelled of 
 it. The long, green garden of the Park 
 stretched invitingly northward. He tilted 
 his hat back the fraction of an inch on his 
 forehead, and swung in up the path. 
 
 By just what process of suggestion the 
 ducks in Lake Swan Boat made him think of 
 Mozart, it would perhaps be hard to guess. 
 There were ducks floating gracefully in the 
 water, and ducks waddling gawkily on the 
 bank. One even came grunting and wab- 
 bling up to him, in dumb appeal for food. As 
 
6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 it stood there in stupid supplication, it sug- 
 gested Masetto — ^yes, that was it, Masetto, 
 while the lords and ladies danced the minuet, 
 and Don Giovanni stole his love away ! That 
 was the picture which fired the train of sug- 
 gestion : from a duck to Mozart was the jump 
 of an instant. Stoughton walked on whistl- 
 ing, and what he whistled was, "La ci 
 darem." He had finished it once, and was be- 
 ginning it over again, in love with the tune, 
 as he pulled up an incline to a rustic summer- 
 house. He had finished the Don's first lus- 
 cious, tempting phrase (if the real Don Juan 
 went about singing tunes like that Leporello's 
 list is quite intelligible!) and paused for 
 breath, when from the summer-house the tune 
 was taken up in a frailer whistle, and Zerlina 
 made known her hesitation. 
 
 He bounded up the path into the rustic shel- 
 ter, and looked eagerly about. Nobody was 
 there save a girl, who sat with her back to 
 the southern sun, looking idly out across the 
 Park. She paid no attention to him, she gave 
 no sign that she was aware of his presence. 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 7 
 
 He stood facing her, in the center of the 
 summer-house, and whistled the next phrase 
 of the duet, the Don's second theme. There 
 was no reply. The girl still looked idly out 
 over the Park. 
 
 " Must I do the whole duet myself? " said 
 he. 
 
 The girl brought her gray eyes slowly 
 around to focus upon him with a cool, steady 
 glance. " Sir," she said. 
 
 Stoughton laughed. " OE, come now," he 
 remarked cheerfully, " there are six good 
 reasons why you shouldn't adopt that 
 attitude." 
 
 The girl was still silent. She was on the 
 defensive, and a bit frightened, it seemed, at 
 what she had undoubtedly brought upon her- 
 self. Whether she had intended to bring it 
 upon herself was what most interested Stough- 
 ton just then, and that was what, he knew, 
 would be most difficult to find out. 
 
 " Don't you want to know what any of the 
 reasons are? " he asked. 
 
 " Perhaps not," said the girl. 
 
8 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Good ! Then I'll tell you," said he, hold- 
 ing up his left hand, fingers spread, and tally- 
 ing off the reasons with the other. " First, 
 we both love Mozart, and that constitutes a 
 spiritual bond. Second, we are both young 
 and not unattractive (pardon my qualified 
 flattery of you, since the phrase also applies 
 to me!), but alone, which Nature never in- 
 tended young and attractive persons of oppo- 
 site sexes to be. Third, it's a magazine short- 
 story tradition that we should get acquainted 
 in Central Park, so we must in the cause of 
 literature. Fourth, Pm only ten years old to- 
 day, and want somebody to play with, oh, 
 drefful bad! Fifth, it's a May morning. 
 And, sixth, you've put your foot — I mean 
 your whistle — into it now, and cannot retreat 
 with honor." 
 
 The girl flushed a little under her red hat, 
 and a barrier dropped from her eyes. Watch- 
 ing her keenly, he saw it drop, and she knew 
 he saw it, and flushed deeper. She was a 
 small woman, a trifle pale and tired as if from 
 toil, and there was something almost wistful 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 9 
 
 in her face as she inquired, though smiling, 
 " What was that fourth reason? " 
 
 Stoughton scratched his head. " Dear me, 
 I got them off so fast — oh, yes ! — fourth, I'm 
 only ten this morning, and want somebody to 
 play with dreffuUy." 
 
 " You're really only ten? " she inquired. 
 
 " Really." 
 
 " How did you manage it? " 
 
 " Oh, it's easy," he laughed. " First, you 
 get spring fever; then you realize that man 
 wasn't made to work, but to play, and throw 
 up your job. And then you run away to Cen- 
 tral Park." He swept his hand toward the 
 north. " This is the great Run-away Place, 
 right in the heart of town," he added. " You 
 step into a picture-book world, and anything 
 may happen. You see, something has hap- 
 pened already! You are ten years old be- 
 cause you believe again in wonders, and, lo I 
 — a playmate. Come on back with me, little 
 playmate, to the year before last! " 
 
 And he swept her a low picture-book bow 
 and held out his hand. 
 
lo THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 The girl looked at him with a little catch 
 in her breath. " The year before last! " she 
 said. " Oh, more than that 1 Take me back 
 more than that 1 " 
 
 " You can't come at all if you're literal," 
 he laughed. " But I know you're not. Your 
 name, by the way, is Marie." 
 
 The girl stood up and took a step toward 
 him. Then she paused, plucked at her skirt 
 with one hand, hung her head, a finger in her 
 mouth, and asked in a baby voice, " What's 
 your name, 'ittle boy? " 
 
 " Minth's Philip," he lisped, falling gaily 
 into the game. " Turn on 'n thee the thwan 
 boats." 
 
 But she had grown up again, and shook her 
 head gravely. " No, little boy," she said, 
 " that wouldn't do at all. You caught me off 
 my guard for a minute. See, I admit it. I'm 
 foolish, if you choose, or just like the others. 
 But you will be a nice boy, and run away 
 now." 
 
 " I will be a nice boy, and do nothing of 
 the sort," he answered. " Nor will I say, or 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY ii 
 
 think, you're like the others — which isn't true. 
 Nor will I argue with you. There is nothing 
 to argue. Either you want to play with me 
 or you don't want to play with me, and that's 
 all children know or need to know. Instead, 
 I'll answer for you. Answer : you do want to 
 play with me." He fell once more into the 
 game. " Tum on!" he cried, imperiously 
 stamping his foot. 
 
 The girl looked at him a moment, very 
 solemnly. Then she smiled, gave her head a 
 kind of defiant little toss, and they moved out 
 of the summer-house together. 
 
 " Mind you, Philip," said she, " I'm com- 
 ing because you're only ten to-day. Your 
 other reasons were no good at all.^' 
 
 " Not even the last, Marie? " he inquired. 
 
 " Oh, that least of all," she said with a 
 laugh. 
 
 " May I grow up again for a moment? " 
 said he, as they skipped down the path. 
 
 " Why? " she asked. 
 
 " I want to argue that last point with you." 
 
 " You may not — to-day," she answered. 
 
12 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Good I " he cried. " It's a promise ! I 
 don't want to now I " 
 
 The girl turned very red for a child of 
 ten, and Philip was triumphant. Southward 
 smoked the city; the great apartment houses 
 faced frowning down; the lofty hotel gables 
 gleamed in the sun; somewhere there was a 
 smothered rattle and roar of traffic; and 
 northward, Into the welcome green of the 
 Park, up tree-lined paths, and past flowers 
 and green grass, they sped — two children 
 searching for adventure 1 
 
 ^F T 'P ^F ^ 
 
 And by and by, oh, a long, long way off 
 from Fifty-ninth Street, where the big grown- 
 up world ends, they came upon a mighty lake, 
 and then befell them a wonderful adventure, 
 which is known as 
 
 Zbe SBventure of tbe Senbtng :(Soat. 
 
 {^Gentle Reader, do you know what is a Sending 
 Boat? A Sending Boat is a mighty, marvelous craft 
 to bear one into Old Romance, and you learn 
 all about it (if you care to learn more than is here 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 13 
 
 set down) in a certain true fairy tale made by Wil- 
 liam Morris, and called " The Water of the Won- 
 drous Isles." It was because Child Philip and 
 Child Marie discovered that each had read and 
 loved this book, that they elected to play Sending 
 Boat, which has to be played, of course, in Early 
 English. And if you wonder at the Early English 
 which here follows, do not blame us. We did not 
 write it, as presently you will learn, if you are 
 patient. '[ 
 
 Whilom, as tells the tale, came two chil- 
 dren, a man child hight Philip and a girl 
 child hight Marie, (who was so fair to look 
 upon that many passersby turned to gaze be- 
 neath the red hat that sat full saucily upon 
 her head) — came these children unto the 
 banks of a mighty lake, to a spot hard by a 
 boat house, where were many boats that a man 
 might hire for a space by the payment of a 
 silver coin. And so they stayed before the 
 boat house, and right eagerly did they look 
 out upon the water, gleaming in the sun, 
 whereon swans sailed gracefully. Eke were 
 there both white swans and black swans with 
 
14 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 red bills, and little brown ducks beside. And 
 there were boats moored all in a row by the 
 bank; and of canoes a few; but mostly the 
 boats were row-boats. 
 
 Then spake the child hight Philip, Yon 
 water is the Water of the Wondrous Isles, 
 and mayhap on the farther shore, a long day's 
 journey hence, shall we find the little House by 
 the Wood, and therein the Black Knight and 
 Birdalone. Shall we adventure forth upon 
 the deep? 
 
 And answered the child hight Marie : Oh, 
 yes, let's hire a canoe and go find Birdalone ! 
 I've always wanted to meet her ! 
 
 Despite, spake Philip, your strange lan- 
 guage, which I scarce may understand, I deem 
 you give consent, and would fain look upon 
 the sweet form of Birdalone. Come, we will 
 learn the secret of the Sending Boat. 
 
 So they went before an olden carle, whose 
 eyes were weak and watery, with great spec- 
 tacles over them, and the beard of him was 
 white and long; and of him they bought a 
 little check, for he was full short of sight for 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 15 
 
 all his spectacles, and knew not they were but 
 children. Another carle, who stood by the 
 landing, took of them this check, and made 
 question of them thus: Do you know how to 
 handle a canoe ? They tip over easy. 
 
 And the man-child was about to wax 
 mightily wroth, but Child Marie laid restrain- 
 ing hand upon his arm, whispering : Thy sense 
 of humor. Boy Philip, would'st thou mislay 
 it? 
 
 So Boy Philip put his wrath away and 
 quoth most humbly, Sir, I think I do. 
 
 And then he would have made request for 
 a knife or some sharp thing to prick his arm 
 withal till the blood should come, that he 
 might smear the Sending Boat bow and stem. 
 But he reflected how the carle wot not at all 
 that it was a Sending Boat, and so might he 
 be hard put to find reason in the request. 
 Therefore he accepted a paddle, and the two 
 children fared forth over the deep water. 
 
 But when they had passed around the point 
 of rocks hight Chip-sparrow Point, for that 
 they saw in a bush just over the water's edge 
 
1 6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 two chip-sparrows struggling with the prob- 
 lem of domestic architecture (Child Marie 
 affirmed they could not agree where to put 
 the pantry) , Philip laid down the paddle, and, 
 pricking his arm with a hatpin right quickly 
 supplied by Child Marie, smeared with the 
 blood which flowed, the Sending Boat both 
 bow and stern, and therewith he spake these 
 words of the magic spell : 
 
 The Child Philip's blood now 
 
 Hast thou drunk, stern and bow, 
 
 Awake, then, awake! 
 
 And the westward way take : 
 
 The way of the Wender forth into the Park, 
 
 For the will of the Sender is bent on a lark. 
 
 Then Child Philip dipped his paddle 
 lightly in astern, that he might, perchance, as 
 he explained, steer the boat clear of rock or 
 reef, and breathless they waited for the spell 
 to work. The Sending Boat stirred, and then 
 shot out swiftly across the waters of Black 
 Swan Bay. Westward, far off, they saw 
 gleaming mountains, level-topped and smok- 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 17 
 
 ing like tired volcanoes. On one hand a great 
 wood came down to the very edge of the 
 water, and therein was neither wood-reeve nor 
 wayjwarden to be seen, and men held it to be 
 mighty great and terrible to adventure in. 
 But the children in the Sending Boat feared 
 naught of it, out on the water, nor did they 
 fear to see, over the top of Chip-sparrow 
 Point, the roof of the boat house fade from 
 sight. They set their faces westward over 
 the Shining Water, and the Sending Boat 
 sped on. 
 
 By and by it shot under the great arching 
 span of a bridge that straddled from one bank 
 clear to the other with a single leap, and was 
 hight Pansy Bridge, for that at either end, in 
 jars of carven stone, were pansy flowers grow- 
 ing, with the faces, if you look at them quite 
 closely, of little men and women, it may be 
 of kings and queens, for mostly they wear 
 purple. And beyond Pansy Bridge the lake 
 spread out most mightily, so that the children 
 were sore put to see the shores on either side, 
 or whither they were going, save that on the 
 
1 8 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 right lay a green eyeot, and ducks thereon 
 making a great quacking. 
 
 Ever westward sped the Sending Boat, and 
 anon they were ware of a shore and trees 
 thereon, and amid the trees a little hut stand- 
 ing, so that they cried out as it were with one 
 voice: Birdalone's house by the wood! 
 Then the Sending Boat came to a stop close 
 to the shore, but not so close as that her bow 
 keel grazed the gravel, for within the boat, 
 under the rail, was a blue sign bearing the 
 mystic characters: 
 
 NOTICE 
 
 The Department of Parks 
 
 Orders that Persons Using this Boat 
 
 MAKE NO LANDINGS 
 
 Except at the Boat House. 
 
 Now these characters meant that a spell 
 had been laid upon the boat aforetime, by a 
 mighty band of magicians bight Park Com- 
 missioners, for that it could only make land- 
 ing at the boat house of the olden carle, he of 
 the spectacles. 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 19 
 
 So then, as ye may well guess, Child Marie 
 and Child Philip did right eagerly turn in 
 their places and gaze at Birdalone's house, 
 searching if they might discover Birdalone 
 herself, or any sight of her. But naught they 
 saw at first, save a great monster hight collie- 
 dog in those parts, which came down to the 
 bank, barking most lustily at them; and a 
 little smoke from the chimney, that savored 
 of onions. Whereat Child Marie's nose went 
 up, and thus she spake : Nay, Birdalone is not 
 there, methinks, else would the mid-day meal 
 be not so churlishly savored. 
 
 But Child Philip answered naught, being 
 wise, since in his heart to him the savor of 
 boiled onions was good. Yet he doubted not, 
 however, that Child Marie was right. And 
 anon came forth from the hut a fell glower- 
 ing dame of many summers, to Eang a dish 
 clout on the line : so then they wit well that 
 Birdalone was not there, having fled, mayhap, 
 to Green Eyeot, or unto the far parts across 
 the gleaming waters. 
 
 Sore disappointed were they as they spake 
 
ao THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 unto the Sending Boat again the spell, whereat 
 it stirred and turned and shot out over the 
 deep. But Child Marie was not down- 
 hearted. Who knows, quoth she, but we 
 may yet find Birdalone, or at least fall in 
 with some strange adventure ere the voyage 
 be done? 
 
 And even as she spake, there came floating 
 to them over the water a strange somewhat 
 they deemed at first a tiny log. But when 
 they brought it dripping forth, they wot it was 
 a roll of manuscript bound with a band of 
 rubber, and how it came there neither one nor 
 the other could tell, though it seemed some 
 careless manchild of the guild hight authors 
 must have dropped it from his pocket on the 
 edge of the water, or it might be from a boat, 
 and wot not of his loss. 
 
 Child Marie shook therefrom the water, 
 and with gingerly care to hold it far from the 
 dainty gown in which she was dight, undid 
 it on the floor of the Sending Boat. Eke was 
 there no author's name therein, but the tale 
 was done neatly into print on a machine hight 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 21 
 
 a typewriter, and albeit the ink had run and 
 blurred in places, for that the water had 
 soaked in among the leaves. Child Marie 
 could read it well enough. And as the Send- 
 ing Boat glided across the Shining Water and 
 under the banks of the Great Forest, she read 
 this strange tale to Child Philip, which was 
 called, according to the author who had set 
 it down, 
 
 Zbe f Ifad of tbe Dougbnut. 
 
 " No, I shall not go there again this sum- 
 mer," said Penrose, emphatically. 
 
 " Why not? " asked Cutting. " I thought 
 you regarded It as the most nearly ideal sum- 
 mer resort in Maine, which means anywhere, 
 according to your bigoted view. Sometimes 
 I suspect you of being a Yank." 
 
 " I did, I do," Penrose answered, ignoring 
 the comment. " But the presence of certain 
 other people who regard it in the same light 
 makes it intolerable. Until I hear that the 
 old crowd frequent it no more, I shall seek 
 pastures new to tan in. They used to be such 
 
aa THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 a congenial crowd, too, till last summer. The 
 doughnut is to blame." 
 
 "The doughnut!" exclaimed Cutting. 
 "How in the name of goodness did the 
 doughnut figure? " 
 
 " How did it not figure? " said Penrose, 
 sadly. " It is a long tale, a melancholy tale. 
 But I will try to tell you. 
 
 " To begin at the beginning, as the novel- 
 ists used to do in the good old days of the 
 three-decker, when people had time to read, 
 you must know that the great farmhouse and 
 its adjoining ' cottage ' in Bethel have long 
 been taken each summer by almost the same 
 crowd of people. Summer after summer they 
 have tramped together up the mountain be- 
 hind the house, and picnicked on its top, in 
 sight of the grand sweep of the Presidential 
 Range. Summer after summer they have 
 journeyed to Gorham, and made the trip up 
 Washington through Adams' Ravine. Sum- 
 mer after summer they have gone through 
 Grafton Notch on buckboards to the Range- 
 ley Lakes, and sniffed with annual exdama- 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 23 
 
 tions of joy the mingled odor of pines and 
 fresh water. And summer after summer 
 evening they have sat in the big parlor, and 
 listened while one read aloud, or played cards, 
 or discussed topics of interest, in the most 
 idyllic spirit of brotherly and sisterly love. 
 The food was good, the beds good, the com- 
 pany good, the air and scenery superlative. 
 It was the ideal. 
 
 " And it would have remained so for all 
 time if the doughnut had not entered last 
 July, like the apple on Oljmipus, to cause 
 schism, disruption, open hostility. 
 
 " You see, the party was about equally di- 
 vided geographically. A score of us came 
 from New York or Southeastern Connecti- 
 cut, and a score, the rest of the crowd, came 
 from the vicinity of Boston. There was 
 a music critic in the New York division, who 
 once wrote a book on Wagner, in the big 
 front bedroom of the main house, and had 
 to keep that room forever after because any- 
 body else who tried it had bad dreams. He 
 and I were leaders on our side in the con- 
 
24 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 troversy that arose. I don't say this in a 
 boasting spirit; far from it. I have always 
 been too ready to debate on all occasions, and 
 this time I paid high for my fault. But truth 
 compels me to admit that I was a leader. I 
 felt there was a principle at stake. 
 
 " The Boston party, naturally enough, was 
 led by a woman and a very young and self- 
 assertive young man just out of Harvard. 
 The woman was a spinster, not your comic- 
 paper Boston type, but a stout, handsome, 
 witty, well-dressed creature that one sus- 
 pected had remained single from choice — ^un- 
 til one had learned her uncomfortable con- 
 troversial temperament. The young man was 
 beneath notice, one would like to say; only 
 one cannot. He would never stay beneath 
 notice. He was the best swimmer, the best 
 tennis and golf player, the best mountain 
 climber, the most accommodating rascal to 
 the women, the best reader of an evening, 
 the best looking male in the place; at least, 
 so the ladies thought. But ladies are never 
 good judges of masculine beauty 1 If he 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 25 
 
 hadn't been there, I shouldn't have taken the 
 opposite side so bitterly as I did and then, 
 perhaps, I might have " 
 
 " You might have what? " said Cutting. 
 
 " Well, I might have somebody to dam 
 my stockings for me, if you must know," said 
 Penrose. " She was of the Boston party, had 
 been to Bethel every summer since she was a 
 little child. I saw her grow up into the finest 
 girl, oh. Cutting, the finest, altogether most 
 adorable girl you ever set eyes on! Why, if 
 Bethel were in the middle of the desert, it 
 would be a summer paradise — ^with her there. 
 And I came to love her, as every man of sense 
 has to. I told her so, one day down by the 
 Sunday River, and she laughed and skipped 
 a stone three times, and I said she made my 
 heart skip the same way; and she laughed 
 still harder, and said I was an old dear. 
 Think of that, you brute, and stop your own 
 laughing! She called me an 'old dear,' 
 though I'm not thirty-five, or not much more ! 
 And she wouldn't say any more then; but I 
 was happy and hopeful. I knew she never 
 
26 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 called that young Harvard upstart an ' old 
 dear.' " 
 
 " I hope not," said Cutting. " They re- 
 sent such familiarity — ^Harvard men. But 
 how about the doughnuts? " 
 
 " I'm coming to them. Well, one day we 
 had crullers on the table; you know, those 
 round rings of dough, fried in a kettle, that 
 aren't half bad with coffee — if you have the 
 digestive apparatus of an ostrich. I asked 
 the Boston spinster to pass me ' the crullers.' 
 
 " ' You mean the doughnuts, don't you ? ' 
 said she, sweetly. 
 
 " Now, I know pretty generally what I 
 mean, and I don't care to be picked up in 
 my speech by a woman. ' I mean the crul- 
 lers,' said I, haughtily. ' I see no doughnuts 
 on the table.' 
 
 " ' And I see no crullers,' said she. ' I 
 cannot be expected to pass what I don't see, 
 in other words, to handle the intangible.' 
 
 " ' The intangible is often visible, though,' 
 said the Harvard upstart, butting in. ' Wit- 
 ness the view from our mountain top.' 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 27 
 
 " * Yes,' said the music critic, ' and you can 
 always be relied on to pass it. You're a 
 Bromide, and you quote Bangs. I suppose 
 you're aware that your illustration is taken 
 from the mouth of the Cheerful Idiot? ' 
 
 " ' You can never claim the adjective,' re- 
 torted the Harvard upstart, with his usual in- 
 solence. ' But we wander from the subject. 
 Are those things on the table, which Mr. Pen- 
 rose desires, doughnuts or crullers, that's the 
 question. And I'll answer it. They are 
 doughnuts.' 
 
 " ' They are not,' snapped the music critic. 
 * They are crullers. Anybody who knows 
 anything, knows that doughnuts are spherical 
 in shape, solid, and made of different ma- 
 terial. Your education on tKs point, as on 
 some others I might mention, has been sadly 
 neglected.' 
 
 " ' Why don't you lay the blame on the 
 elective system ? ' asked the Upstart. ' Now, 
 I don't know how Wagner would compose a 
 doughnut motif — save that it would be sad 
 and low — but I do know that a cruller is six 
 
28 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 inches long, composed of two twists of dough 
 curled about each other. A doughnut is what 
 we have on the table.' 
 
 " And here the discussion became general. 
 To a unit, the New York and Connecticut 
 people took my side, affirming that the objects 
 offered on the table were crullers, and that a 
 doughnut was a spherical mass of raised ma- 
 terial, solid, or containing a bit of jelly. The 
 twist affairs were, if they were anything, a 
 variety of crullers, we were willing to concede. 
 The Boston and Massachusetts party, with 
 similar unanimity, stoutly maintained that 
 doughnuts were the ring affairs on the table, 
 that crullers were the twists; and they would 
 not concede that real doughnuts had any 
 standing in court whatever. Most of them 
 had never even seen or heard of the real 
 doughnut. I never knew till then how pro- 
 vincial Boston and Massachusetts, if they are 
 two places, really are. 
 
 " The controversy was carried outside the 
 house, into the solemn stillness of the moun- 
 tain twilight. We forgot to watch the sun- 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 29 
 
 set shadows creep over the high hills. We 
 forgot to take our evening stroll through the 
 dewy meadows. We forgot to read or to 
 play cards. All that evening, divided into 
 two camps, we discussed with warmth that 
 gradually developed into positive ill-feeling, 
 the tremendous question : ' What is a dough- 
 nut? ' 
 
 " The Harvard Upstart thought he had 
 clinched the whole question when he quoted 
 the magazine advertisement taken from a 
 still more ancient proverb : ' To make a 
 doughnut, take a hole and put some dough 
 around it.' But this was met with a storm 
 of rebuttal. Proverbs are notoriously 
 wrong; the proverb was probably coined by 
 some ignorant Bostonian; a magazine will 
 print any falsity, so long as it is paid for; 
 names may shift their meaning, and the dis- 
 cussion is over the present definition of the 
 term: and the like. 
 
 " When we retired that night, I was in a 
 hot rage, which was by no means cooled 
 when I saw the Harvard Upstart bidding 
 
30 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Her goodnight on the veranda of the ' cot- 
 tage ' next to the main house, where I slept. 
 She had taken but little part in the contro- 
 versy, but her sympathies were plainly on the 
 mistaken side. 
 
 " The following day, the discussion was 
 resumed at breakfast, and was aggravated by 
 a large plateful of the offending food left 
 over from the night before. We had been 
 so excited then that we had neglected to eat 
 it up. Already a noticeable division of the 
 household had begun. When we set off for 
 a tramp that morning, the cruller party, 
 headed by myself and the music critic, wanted 
 to climb Bear Mountain. The doughnut con- 
 tingent got a fool notion into their heads that 
 it would be better to tramp across the river in 
 the meadows, though the day was ridiculously 
 hot. The result was that we each went our 
 separate way. I was too stuffy to give in, 
 and so were the rest of our side, and I wit- 
 nessed the melancholy spectacle of the Up- 
 start setting out with Her at his side, while 
 I walked in the opposite direction, with a 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 31 
 
 simpering young thing from Danbury, who 
 bored me till I was positively rude. 
 
 " Well, the hostilities kept up, fed by re- 
 newed controversy every time crullers were 
 served at table, which was rather often. If 
 we played foursomes, it was always two 
 Doughnuts against two Crullers. Croquet 
 and tennis games became tests of merit be- 
 tween the parties to the great controversy. 
 We no longer travelled in a big bunch, but 
 in two bunches; if the Crullers went fishing, 
 the Doughnuts went the other way for ber- 
 ries. If the Doughnuts wanted a drive, they 
 found the Crullers had engaged all the teams, 
 and invited enough extra guests from the 
 hotel up in the village to use them. 
 
 " A new arrangement of seating at table 
 soon worked itself out, and across the inter- 
 vening space we positively glared at each 
 other, like Guelfs andGhibellines. The music 
 critic grew more ill-natured, the Boston spin- 
 ster more caustic in her remarks about New 
 York and New Yorkers generally. I became 
 more pigheaded and stuffy than ever, ready to 
 
32 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 take the opposite side on aay question. Only 
 the Harvard Upstart retained his cheerful, 
 disgusting good nature, a fact not hard to 
 understand when he enjoyed Her companion- 
 ship so much more than I did, now that the 
 camp was divided against itself. 
 
 "Well, to make a long story short, the 
 time came for me to go back to the city, and 
 I corralled Her one evening at twilight, in 
 spite of the efforts of the Upstart to thwart 
 me, and led her down to our little cosey cor- 
 ner on the bank of the Sunday River. The 
 deep pool where the river broadened out was 
 still as glass, and mirrored the mountain tops 
 and the evening star, which laid its silvery 
 track right to our feet. It was the hushed, 
 solemn hour of the day, when the soul should 
 be at peace, and love supreme. 
 
 " I addressed her passionately. I told her 
 again of my love, of my devotion ; I reminded 
 her that on this very spot a month before she 
 had been at least kind to me, giving me hope. 
 And I asked her for a final answer before I 
 went back — an answer that would make me 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 33 
 
 either the happiest man in the world or the 
 most miserable. All the eloquence that was 
 in me, in the hour, in the occasion, I poured 
 forth." 
 
 " Quite in the approved fashion," said 
 Cutting, in his dry way. " And what did she 
 say?" 
 
 " She said," continued Penrose mournfully, 
 " that she had loved me a little — that per- 
 haps she had loved me more than a little, and 
 might have come to love me enough to marry 
 me — ^before the doughnut-cruller controversy. 
 But that controversy, she declared, had 
 shown me to her what I am — ^stubborn, bent 
 on my own way, not open to reason. Then 
 she looked up at the darkening hills, paused 
 a moment, while the great hush of the world 
 poured around us, and said softly : ' If you 
 will admit that you're wrong, if you will ac- 
 knowledge that a doughnut is a round ring, 
 such as we have at table here, I'll — I'll marry 
 you still.' " 
 
 Cutting laughed. 
 
 " Don't laugh, you brute," said Penrose. 
 
34 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " It was no laughing matter, I assure you. 
 It was ridiculous, if you will. Was ever a 
 man put in a more ridiculous position than 
 that? But it was not laughable, I loved her 
 too much." 
 
 " I still think it laughable," said Cutting. 
 " It was so easy to win her, after all." 
 
 "What!" cried Penrose. "Easy? Do 
 you think I would give up a principle for a 
 woman's foolish whim? I admit that for a 
 moment I was tempted. She looked so lovely 
 there in the dusk. And I loved her so ! But 
 I was not tempted long. I told her that if 
 she really loved me she would make no such 
 ridiculous demand as that. She would not 
 ask a man to sacrifice his principles. I told 
 her, in short, that I could not accede to her 
 request. It was a test she had no right to re- 
 quire. 
 
 " She said, ' Very well,' quite calmly, 
 though I think she was a little pale, and rose 
 to her feet. At that instant the solemn hush 
 was broken by the call of a bird in the thicket 
 close to us. The insects, as by prearranged 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 35 
 
 signal, began their evening hum ; and the wind 
 sprang up, rippling the pool, so that the star 
 track went out in the soft commotion. 
 
 " We walked back to the house in silence, 
 and she retired at once. The next morning I 
 left. As I climbed into the rig to go to the 
 station, I saw Her and the Upstart setting 
 forth on a fishing trip." 
 
 " Well," said Cutting, after a long silence. 
 " You have given her up for good, eh ? And 
 the Upstart, did she marry him? " 
 
 " She 
 
 and here the tale stopped abruptly, for that 
 the water had washed the last sheet away, or 
 mayhap a water bird had pecked thereat, 
 under the impression that reading maketh a 
 full duck. Child Marie looked and looked, 
 making search among all the other sheets, but 
 no ending could she find. 
 
 Alas, cried Child Philip, the tale leaves us 
 overmuch in doubt, for I would fain know 
 if by chance he won the fair dame he longed 
 for, or if he stood steadfast to his error. The 
 
36 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Lady or the Doughnut, might it now be 
 called. 
 
 Then Child Marie : Error, say you? Nay, 
 it was she who was in error, though me- 
 thinks it like he longed for her so sore that 
 he gave way to her belief. Wit ye well, 
 Child Philip, those round rings of dough 
 aforesaid are crullers. 
 
 Wit ye well, cried Child Philip angrily, 
 they are not! They are everywhere hight 
 doughnuts by all who know. 
 
 Crullers! said Child Marie. 
 
 Doughnuts! shouted Child Philip. 
 
 And the Sending Boat shook and was near 
 to capsizing. 
 
 Be they what they may, quoth Child Marie, 
 with a sudden gurgle, I would I had one, or 
 maybe two, this minute. 
 
 And Child Philip, laughing too, cried out : 
 Would I had a full dozen, fresh from the 
 frying kettle: for long have we adventured, 
 and the hour of midday has passed. And 
 thus was disasterous controversy averted. 
 
 So then he sped the Sending Boat for 
 
IN WHICH WE RUN AWAY 37 
 
 home, and under Pansy Bridge they glided, 
 and the roof of the boat house loomed in 
 sight. Past Chip-sparrow Point, up to the 
 dock, sped the Sending Boat, where the carle 
 awaited them to help them forth, and the 
 other carle, the olden one, still sat at his little 
 window to take of adventurers their piece of 
 silver. Nor did he discover even now — ^being 
 weak eyed and old, as aforesaid — that they 
 were but children. 
 
 So they walked to the gate of the Run- 
 away Place, and Child Philip, with many 
 words and much pleading, won from his com- 
 panion a promise that on the morrow she 
 would once more meet him in the summej- 
 house that crowns the mount known to those 
 who are wise in Park-lore as Mount Mozart. 
 Then parted they, not, ye may guess, without 
 a backward glance and a flash of the eyes. 
 And Child Philip, left alone upon the corner, 
 looked about him and saw that men and 
 women were going to and fro with serious 
 faces, intent upon their toil, whereat he smiled 
 softly, quietly, to himself. 
 
38 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 [Here endeth the tale which is called. Of the 
 Adventure of the Sending Boat, which was set 
 down by Child Philip that evening in his chambers 
 to be read in after-while to Child Marie, together 
 with the manuscript which is called. The Iliad of 
 the Doughnut, found floating on the Shining 
 Water.} 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE MAGIC CASEMENT 
 
 T^ICTORY was still leading General 
 Sherman southward with conquering 
 stride, under a blue May sky, when Philip 
 Stoughton entered the Park the following 
 morning. The gay carriages rolled by, the 
 green roof shone in the sun. Yet there was 
 something wistful in his mood ; and as he be- 
 gan the ascent to the summer-house, the im- 
 mortal minuet came with a certain sadness 
 from his lips. He paused to listen. The 
 girl was answering him from her seat under 
 the rustic shelter. Her whistle was faint, a 
 woman's whistle, so faint that he lost it now 
 and again in the screams of nearby children, 
 the call of birds, the rattle of traffic from 
 the roadway. It, too, was sad — sad as every 
 perfect tune must be when caught amid the 
 more discordant noises of the world — sad 
 
 39 
 
40 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 with its own perfection. Yet just now it was 
 sad with a certain added wistfulness, so that 
 he knew her mood, too, had changed. 
 
 " Good-morning, Marie," he said. " You 
 have come ! " 
 
 She looked at him brightly, yet gravely. 
 " Did you doubt that I would? " she asked. 
 
 " I hoped that you would," said he. " I 
 wrote a little story about the Sending Boat 
 last night on the chance that we would play 
 together again and I might read it to you. 
 But I wasn't sure that the Run-away Place 
 would mean enough to you to overcome the 
 sort of scruples most women have." 
 
 The girl smiled. " Like Zerlina," she 
 said, " I would and yet I would not ! But, 
 also like Zerlina, you see I'm here ! Perhaps, 
 Boy, you can't guess how much the Run- 
 away Place means to me." 
 
 He looked at her closely. " Wistful little 
 Marie," he said, and there was almost a 
 caress in his voice, as his glance fell steadily 
 on her pale face. " Wistful little Marie ! I 
 don't know what it is ; I don't want to know 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 41 
 
 — now. All in good time, you will tell me. 
 But now we will go back into the day before 
 yesterday again, only we shall not run to-day, 
 I guess, but saunter slowly and let old mem- 
 ories of childhood have their way with us. 
 Shall we do it that way? " 
 
 The girl looked at him gravely. " Yes," 
 she murmured, " we will do it that way. But 
 how did you know that was the way I wanted 
 to do it this morning? " 
 
 " I'm a boy — ^you forget," he answered. 
 " Boys understand many things that are 
 sealed to them later, which is why grown-ups 
 pluck so clumsily amid the heart-strings of a 
 friend." 
 
 " But how did you know about the mem- 
 ories?" 
 
 "Ah! that's because you are a K.S.," he 
 smiled, " or because I am a K.S. — ^which 
 means Kindred Spirit, you know. All K.S.'s 
 love, in their quieter moments, to indulge in 
 'minute and tender retrospect,' to go back 
 slowly over the paths of their lives into the 
 dear days of childhood. That is the way 
 
42 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 they refresh their spirits, that is the way 
 they keep young." 
 
 " Boy," said she, "you are a K.S.! You 
 are wonderful! Let's go back, back, backl " 
 
 And by and by, in their wanderings, they 
 came upon a high bank, and on the bank 
 was set a stone tower with steps leading up to 
 it, and they climbed the steps, and before 
 them was spread a sheet of water, which they 
 greeted with a little cry of pleasure. Into the 
 tower there was let a door of iron grating, 
 like a dungeon door, which stood open now. 
 
 So they entered, and climbed up damp 
 winding stairs of stone, till suddenly on the 
 landing there opened before them in the stone 
 a little casement, and in this casement was 
 framed a picture out of a dream — ^blue, quiet 
 water stretching North, without a boat on its 
 rippled surface, lonely water that might have 
 been in the wilderness. Far away, where the 
 water ceased, were green trees against the 
 hazy distance and then the great blue sky. 
 To left and right the vivid, grassy banks and 
 the blossoms of the Park just peeped into the 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 43 
 
 picture, to give it softness and grace. But 
 never a sign was there of tiie teeming town. 
 The damp walls of the tower, closing in 
 around the casement frame, shut out the 
 world. And they stood at gaze, those two, 
 and sighed with the sudden pleasure of it, and 
 Philip murmured, " Keats 1 " 
 She quoted, slowly: 
 
 " Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 
 
 " And yet," he reflected, " it's really not 
 that at all. Here is no foam, no perilous sea, 
 nothing forlorn. It's not Keats at all, yet it 
 strangely affects one; it brings a quiver and 
 stir into my imagination — old memories 
 wake, just as if this window in Central Park 
 were a magic casement, or were the falling 
 cadence of the most haunting, stanza in an ode 
 by Keats." 
 
 "Oh, Boy, Boy!" cried Marie, "a win- 
 dow in Central Park I How can you say it? 
 Don't you know that this is a magic case- 
 ment ? That's why your imagination stirs and 
 
44 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 wakes. Every window that lets the eye out 
 of a dark place and frames suddenly a picture 
 of green things or water, is a magic casement, 
 has something of the quality of poetry. But 
 this one is a magic casement indeed, for I can 
 see through it into the dim land behind To- 
 day, the dear, dim land of long ago 1 " 
 
 Philip drew close to her on the narrow 
 landing and she turned her face up to his. 
 
 " How well you understand things, don't 
 you ? " he smiled. She colored, smiling at 
 him in her grave, pleased way, but saying 
 nothing. Then they faced once more the 
 casement which held its still, sweet picture, 
 and for a time he frowned in silence, as if the 
 memories were gathering behind his brow. 
 Finally he spoke: 
 
 "The call of water stretching out! The 
 still, hot sun! That long hill beyond the 
 schoolhouse that used to look as if the sea 
 lay just on the other side ! Later, in college, I 
 read somewhere in Ruskin — ' Modern Paint- 
 ers,' I think — that a level hill against the sky 
 used to give him the same sense of the sea. 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 45 
 
 That's why I like Ruskin. How they come 
 back to me, those dead memories 1" 
 
 " Tell me about them," said a voice at his 
 side. 
 
 He began slowly, hesitatingly, as if the 
 pictures were forming with difficulty, and he 
 whimsically cast the story into the third per- 
 son. But as he talked, his words came more 
 freely, till at the end they were running with 
 a kind of eloquence, and the girl listened very 
 quietly, looking up into his face — though he 
 did not know it — with covert admiration. 
 And the story he told was called : 
 
 c:be ©tber SlDe of tbc tiitt. 
 
 The boy lay under a cluster of choke- 
 cherry trees at the edge of the mowing, and 
 watched a farmer slouch across the stubble, 
 surrounded to the knees by a swarm of 
 startled grasshoppers. Beyond the distant 
 river-meadow he could see a thin film of heat 
 rising from the railroad bed, and now and 
 then he caught the glint of steel, as if the 
 rails were alive and stirring. Still farther 
 
46 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 away was a long, level hill, and then — the 
 sky, the blue, deep, mysterious sky. 
 
 His ^yes, chameleon like, deepened too as 
 he gazed, and grew big with dreams. He did 
 not hear the hot click, click of the mowing 
 machine in the next field, the shouts of the 
 driver, the dry shrill of insects in the grass. 
 He did not even hear a step beside him and 
 the rustle of skirts. 
 
 " Why, Philip," said a voice that brought 
 him to his feet and the blood to his face, " I 
 nearly stepped on you! Is this the way you 
 help with the mowing? I was coming to 
 watch you work." 
 
 The boy shifted uneasily. " Dad didn't 
 need me," he said. " We ain't goin' to begin 
 on the meadow hay until to-morrow. Will 
 you — ^will you set down? " 
 
 He motioned awkwardly to the patch of 
 shadow under the choke-cherries. 
 
 The girl — she was perhaps ten years his 
 senior — smiled ever so little, spread out her 
 dainty skirt, and sank with a wonderful grace 
 on the grass. He watched her with uncon- 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 47 
 
 cealed admiration. " A man has to shut him- 
 self up like a jack-knife to set down," he said. 
 "You just come down like — like a maple 
 leaf!" 
 
 " It's the skirt," she smiled. " You can't 
 
 see." 
 
 The boy grew painfully red, and took his 
 place beside her in a silence that for a time 
 she made no effort to break. Then she said, 
 " I'm going home Monday, Phil, did you 
 know it ? " 
 
 The boy's mouth quivered, but he did not 
 answer. She continued, " Your funny schools 
 up here begin in August, don't they? You'll 
 be going back to your books on the same 
 day. I suppose you're sorry for that." 
 
 " Might as well go to school as anythin' 
 else," he replied. 
 
 She did not ask him why. Instead she 
 pointed toward the distant hill. " See, 
 Philip," she said, "while you're in school 
 sometimes this winter you can look out of the 
 window and think that I'm on the other side 
 of that hill. Will you?" 
 
48 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 He gazed at her with astonished eyes. " I 
 guess I will," he said. 
 
 "We've had lots of fun this summer, 
 haven't we ? " she went on, gayly. " And 
 you've been a dear boy to me, Phil, and 
 shown me all the lovely things in the country, 
 and taught me that real rabbits are brown in- 
 stead of white — wasn't I stupid not to know 
 that? — and I shall never forget you. Per- 
 haps ril come back next summer, and we can 
 go fishing all day up river. We never got 
 that party this summer, did we? " 
 
 " How far on the other side of the hill will 
 you be ? " he asked. 
 
 She laughed. " Maybe a hundred miles," 
 she said. " I'll be in a big city by the ocean, 
 where the ships come in. Did you ever see the 
 ocean ? " 
 
 " Once," he answered. " It frightened 
 mel" 
 
 "Frightened you? Why?" 
 
 The boy thought a moment. " I don't 
 know," he said. " It was a year ago. Uncle 
 Amos took me to Boston, and we went to 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 49 
 
 Nantasket, and I went down near it, and It 
 seemed to be calling me away, away far off, 
 to something I didn't know nothing about. 
 I — I hear it calling yet when I look at that 
 hill." 
 
 "You funny boy," said she. "What do 
 you mean? " 
 
 " I can't explain," he answered. " Only 
 you don't see nothing beyond that hill, and 
 it looks as if the ocean was just over there. 
 The sky goes down behind it just like it does 
 into the ocean. When I look at it a long time 
 it makes me afraid the way the sea did." 
 
 He pulled up a weed and tossed it into the 
 pasture. " I feel the same way looking at you 
 sometimes," he added. 
 
 The girl shot a quick glance at him. 
 "Philip," she said soberly, " you mustn't be a 
 silly boy." 
 
 " I can't help it," he answered doggedly, 
 "—the way I feel, can I ? " 
 
 She had no rejoinder for this, looking away 
 almost in embarrassment. The boy was aware 
 of a subtle change. He moved a little closer 
 
so THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 to her, and laid his fingers on her skirt, strok- 
 ing it ever so little. Gently the girl put out 
 her hand to remove his fingers, with a quiet, 
 " Don't, Philip " — and a brown, strong hand 
 closed over hers and held it fast. He lifted it 
 to his face, and rubbed his cheek against it, 
 looking at her with big, eager eyes. 
 
 "I'm not afraid any more, I'm happy!" 
 he said suddenly, creeping against her side. 
 At the touch of her he shivered, and as sud- 
 denly the tears came, and he buried his face 
 on her breast. He did not know what was the 
 matter. The sobs just came, as if he were 
 choking with a great disturbance within, that 
 somehow the touch of her caused. His face 
 felt her bosom heave and he was almost sick 
 with the fragrance of her, the new, strange 
 fragrance. Then he felt her bosom grow 
 calmer. She lifted his face and kissed him 
 on the lips. 
 
 " Philip," she said, " I shall never come 
 back from the other side of the hill, because — 
 because you will never be afraid of me any 
 more 1 " 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 51 
 
 Then she left him. 
 
 He was eating bread and milk at mid-day, 
 Monday, when she drove by on her way to 
 the station. The boy ran out to say good- 
 bye, and she put a faded brown book in his 
 hands. 
 
 " I found it up at the house," she said. 
 " They said I could have it for you. Some 
 day, if you study hard, you will know what 
 the title means. But please think when you 
 read it, Phil, of the Lady on the Other Side 
 of the Hill. Good-bye ! " 
 
 "Good-bye," said the boy dully, with an 
 awkward shake of the hand. He did not 
 finish his bread and milk, but trudged back 
 toward the schoolhouse with his faded brown 
 book in his hand. " Thalatta, a book for the 
 Sea Side," he read on the title page, and op- 
 posite, in her own hand, his name and hers. 
 Some other name, In faded ink, had been 
 erased. 
 
 He hid the book under his blouse as he drew 
 near the school, that sat unshaded by the 
 dusty road, over the brown river and the 
 
52 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 railroad crossing, with its warning signs like 
 gallows posts. But once safe behind his desk, 
 he slyly brought his treasure forth again, and 
 dipped furtively into its pages. It was his 
 first poetry, and time began to slip by. He 
 read now with a puzzled frown, now with 
 quickened heart-beat for a ballad. And at 
 last he read something that he has never for- 
 gotten, that long afterwards he found in the 
 original German, with a pang of recognition : 
 
 The sea hath its pearls, 
 
 The heaven hath its stars; 
 But my heart, my heart, 
 
 My heart hath its love. 
 
 Great are the sea and the heaven, 
 
 Yet greater is my heart, 
 And fairer than pearls and stars 
 
 Flashes and beams my love. 
 
 Thou little, youthful maiden. 
 Come unto my great heart! 
 
 My heart and the sea and the heaven 
 Are melting away with love. 
 
 He heard his name called and hastily hid 
 the book. The boy behind tried to prompt 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 53 
 
 him, but he was in a daze, and failed Igno- 
 miniously. Yet he curiously did not care. He 
 sat down again and looked out of the open 
 window. There lay his hill — his hill and hers. 
 Formed of a great even billow of close- 
 cropped pasture that gathered all across the 
 plain and swelled up against the blue, and 
 bearing along its summit a crest of gray stone 
 wall, it stood out sharp against the sky line 
 and hid every trace of what might lie on the 
 farther side. There was indeed something im- 
 pressive in the way the blue arch curved down 
 behind the ridge, something suggestive, some- 
 thing that filled you with wonder at all that 
 lay beyond, even as the sea itself. Scattered 
 clouds of pearly gray were banking now be- 
 yond the summit, faintly glowing with pink 
 on their hazy edges, as they do out over the 
 waters. Again the boy's eyes were big with 
 dreams, but he was not frightened any more. 
 The sea was over there, he knew it. If he 
 should mount that pasture wall the blue ocean 
 would stretch before him, calling by its music 
 and its mystery, by its spirit of dreams, by 
 
54 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 its sense of the infinite — calling to larger life 
 and sweet, half-guessed emotions. He lis- 
 tened for the sound of the distant surf. 
 
 So he sat there by his desk, very still, gaz- 
 ing over the wall crested ridge deep to where 
 the sky dropped down, and dreamed away the 
 long, hot afternoon, while the droning buzz 
 of the school room sang unheeded in his ears 
 and fractions and spelling were the things 
 unreal. 
 
 When he had done with the story there was 
 silence. Philip looked out through the case- 
 ment, with eyes that saw beyond the present, 
 eyes that were wistful as those of a little boy. 
 The girl looked covertly at him, and if he 
 had faced upon her quickly he would have 
 surprised something very like tears behind 
 her long lashes. Finally she spoke: 
 
 " Did you — did the boy never see his lady 
 on the other side of the hill again?" she 
 asked. 
 
 Philip shook his head. " Of course not, 
 that would spoil everything." 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 55 
 
 And if he had again faced upon her 
 quickly, he would have discovered the hint of 
 a passing flash of pleasure in the eyes which 
 watched his face. But he did not turn. The 
 mood of memory was still too strong upon 
 him. And she said, " So you were a little 
 country bred boy? " 
 
 " I grew up out of the soil, like a beet or a 
 cabbage," he laughed. " And the country 
 calls me still, calls me sometimes in the spring 
 till I almost die of longing." 
 
 " Why don't you go back there ? " 
 
 " There's a thing called ambition ; but, tut, 
 tut! what are we talking about? That's 
 grown-up language, only fit for stupid people 
 and stupid places — ^not here and now." 
 
 He turned upon her almost sharply, and 
 this time he did surprise a wistfulness in her 
 face. His own mood faded, and he put out 
 his hand impulsively on hers, which rested on 
 the casement ledge. 
 
 " You see, I'm a great selfish lout of a coun- 
 try boy running on about myself," he cried. 
 " Now out with it, little Marie 1" 
 
S6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 She withdrew her hand gently. " I was not 
 raised a beet or a cabbage," she smiled. " I 
 grew up in a window box, I guess! For I 
 was born and reared in this desert of brick 
 and asphalt. And there were always people 
 all about me, as well as houses and streets. 
 The people were worse than the houses. Al- 
 ways the people — I could never get away 
 from them ! Yet I wanted to, even then. But 
 sometimes we went into the country, and I 
 lived a bit in the lands I read about. I was a 
 terribly greedy reader, little boy! But even 
 in the country the people followed me. Some- 
 times it seems as if my life had been a long 
 chase to get away from just folks! Do you 
 know what I mean? " 
 
 He nodded, smiling, though he really but 
 dimly understood, and she went on : 
 
 " But once — one glorious summer — ^I got 
 away, quite away; and this magic casement 
 has brought it back to me, the memory of 
 that escape, for I found a magic casement 
 then, too, that looked out over blue water to 
 Camelot." 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 57 
 
 "As far as that?" said he. 
 " As far as that ! " she answered. " I'll 
 try to tell you about it." 
 And the story was called : 
 
 XLbe ILittle Xadg ot Sbalott. 
 
 All day I had tried to escape Jessica and 
 Jean, to read my book, my dear book, of 
 knights and ladies, tourneys and quests, which 
 was none the less thrilling and beautiful when 
 I could not quite understand it. All day they 
 had sought me out in each new hiding place 
 and with the stupidity and dulness of thirteen 
 had teased me to come away from that stuffy 
 old book, and have some fun. Not that they 
 really wanted me, but the summer day was 
 long and they never could imagine new plays 
 for themselves. 
 
 From the cherry tree to the hay loft, from 
 the lower garden to the curtained window 
 seat in the library, they had followed, their 
 teasing voices scattering the silence around 
 the white hermit's cell and mixing with the 
 clash of shields. And now they were coming 
 
58 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 again. I could hear them wondering " where 
 I was this time," and oh, the meanness of it I 
 If they only got hold of that book they would 
 hide it where I couldn't find it for one while 1 
 " She's stuck up," I heard Jessica say, " be- 
 cause she likes to read more than we do." 
 Stuck up I Because I would rather play with 
 fairies and princes and great ladies than at 
 their foolish games! Oh, the stupids 1 
 
 But I could stand it no longer. Like a 
 shadow I crept from the library and up the 
 back stairs. Up, up, I went in a breathless 
 hurry, thinking to sit on the topmost step till 
 the hunters should grow weary, and turn their 
 attention elsewhere. Past the top floor land- 
 ing I sped blindly in my haste, then turned a 
 jog in the wall, and brought my nose too sud- 
 denly against a little door. I suppose it had 
 always been there, but we children rarely went 
 above stairs in the few hours we spent indoors. 
 I stood and looked at it, and listened — ^but 
 there was no sound except a big fly whidi 
 droned sleepily at being disturbed. 
 
 At last the voices were still. Then I saw a 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 59 
 
 little rusty key hanging on a nail in the wall, 
 and I reached out and took it in my hand. 
 My heart gave a thump as I thought of Blue 
 Beard and Ali Baba and a dozen fairy tales 
 all in a jumble, and something said in my ear, 
 "You are going to have an adventure!" 
 And I closed my eyes and said right out, 
 " Oh, please, let it be a lonely one ! " Then 
 I put the key in the lock, turned hard on it, 
 for it was rusty, and opened the little door — 
 and there was the adventure. 
 
 It began with a little flight of twisty stairs. 
 I shut the door behind me and crept up softly, 
 there was such a hush all about, but when I 
 got to the top, I said, " O ! " so loud I made 
 myself jump, and then I stood still and 
 looked. 
 
 What I saw was a big, square room with a 
 slanting top, that felt as if it had been asleep 
 a very long time, for the dust was thick and 
 there wasn't anything in it that ^asn't a 
 great many years old. Of course I knew I 
 was in the garret, but I wouldn't have be- 
 lieved a garret could be so lovely as this. I 
 
6o THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 wondered why Aunt Adela had never told us 
 about it, and why there weren't a lot of trunks 
 and broken chairs and other things around. 
 But there weren't. The only trunks I could 
 see were three small ones trimmed with big 
 nails, and on the tops of them the nails 
 spelled " P. W." Then I knew they must 
 have belonged to grandmother's oldest little 
 girl, who would have been my Aunt Priscilla 
 if she had lived till I came. I remembered 
 that she was only sixteen when she died, and 
 how she had been the flower of the family, 
 they said; and I wanted to open the little 
 trunks very badly, but I thought that would 
 be mean. 
 
 I was almost afraid to walk around, it was 
 so still. But then I wanted to explore the cor- 
 ners, and look out the little window with the 
 queer panes, which were so covered with dust 
 that the sun seemed to be shining through a 
 mist. At last I crossed over to it on tip-toe, 
 and pulled and pulled. I was almost ready 
 to give up, when it came open with a jerk 
 and scratched my finger. But what did that 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 6i 
 
 matter, for out of the window I saw almost 
 the whole world ! 
 
 There was the lawn and the garden, with 
 the wall of trees at the foot, and then the pas- 
 ture and the orchard, and then more pastures 
 that spread out like the green squares of my 
 patchwork. Then there was a river, with 
 a white sail moving on it, and beyond again 
 a little city with faint towers, and farthest of 
 all some hills that were very blue, with the 
 clouds dropping over the edge like the boats 
 that sail out of your sight at the seashore. 
 
 I could have stood there all day thinking 
 of the wonderful tales that kept running in 
 my head, but it was afternoon and I must 
 explore my secret while the sun was still light- 
 ing it. I crept softly around, feeling all the 
 time as though I were discovering treasures, 
 for there was an old, high-backed sofa where 
 I could sit and read, two little chairs, a great 
 bureau with a drawer full of books, and, oh, 
 it was too good to be true ! — a real spinning- 
 wheel. 
 
 I had been trying to make up my mind who 
 
62 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 I was, but the minute I saw the wheel and 
 remembered my scratched finger, I knew that 
 I was the Sleeping Beauty. So I pulled a low 
 chair in front of the wheel, where I could 
 look through the window, and began to turn 
 it, slowly at first, then faster, till it began to 
 sing a little song. I looked at the trees at 
 the foot of the garden and wondered how 
 high they would be when I had slept a hun- 
 dred years; I looked at the twisted stairway 
 and wondered when the wicked fairy would 
 come. And there was the real scratch 
 on my finger. The sun came in through the 
 little window, the bees hummed outside, the 
 wheel hummed in the room — and the next 
 thing I knew, my head bumped the back of 
 the chair, and I opened my eyes and said, 
 " How did you find me ? " because I had been 
 dreaming about the prince. 
 
 But there was no answer. The shadows 
 were all about the room. The sun had gone 
 down. Far away I heard a bell ringing. So 
 I knew that I wasn't a princess any more that 
 day. I took a last look out of the window 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 63 
 
 before I closed it. Then I crept down the 
 twisty stairs and locked the little door, and 
 never remembered till I was sitting at the tea- 
 table that I had left my book behind me and 
 had forgotten to read a word. 
 
 I was so busy thinking about my castle, and 
 wondering who I would be the next day, that 
 I didn't hear very much of what they 
 were talking about, till I caught the name 
 " Priscilla." Then I stopped dreaming 
 pretty quick, and listened as hard as I could. 
 Aunt Adela was talking to Uncle Stuart. 
 They were looking at me, and she was saying, 
 " I never noticed it before, but that child cer- 
 tainly has a look of Priscilla's younger pic- 
 tures." 
 
 Uncle squinted up his eyes as if he were 
 looking a long way off, and said, " I don't 
 know but you're right, Adela. At any rate, 
 she's more like her in temperament than either 
 of ours." 
 
 I wasn't quite sure what he meant by tem- 
 perament, but all of a sudden it came to me 
 that perhaps she had liked to go up in the 
 
64 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 old garret to play by herself, and that was 
 the reason her things were up there, and it 
 had been always kept as I had found it — and 
 I loved it more than ever. I went over to 
 Uncle Stuart. " Did she like to read and 
 imagine things ? " I asked him. 
 
 " Who? Priscilla? " he questioned. 
 
 " Yes," said I, " the one you were just 
 talking about." 
 
 " I believe she did," he said slowly. 
 " Mother always said she was a great dream- 
 er. She might have been a poet. It's a 
 pity she didn't live to grow up," he finished 
 with a sigh. 
 
 But I hardly heard him. A thought had 
 come into my head, a thought of a new play, 
 and I could scarcely wait to begin it. I ran to 
 the library, took down an album of old photo- 
 graphs, and hunted till I came to a page filled 
 with pictures of the little girl Priscilla. Some 
 were standing, some sitting, some were just of 
 her head. But the one I liked best of all was 
 where she was looking out of a window. 
 
 I took the book over to Aunt Adela. 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 65 
 
 "May I have this for a little while?" I 
 asked. " I'll be very careful of it." 
 
 " Why, you funny child," said my aunt, 
 "what do you want it for?" 
 
 " Just to look at," I said. " I like to 
 think about her because she imagined things, 
 too." 
 
 "Very well," said Aunt Adela, "don't 
 lose it." She slipped the picture out of the 
 page and handed it to me. 
 
 After I was in bed and the light was out I 
 took the picture from under my pillow and 
 whispered to it. 
 
 " To-morrow," I said, " you're going to 
 play with me in the garret — just us alone — 
 and you're going to look out of the real little 
 window again, and see the city with the 
 towers, which is where the knights live, and 
 I'll read to you out of my book, and maybe 
 some poetry, too, though sometimes the words 
 are hard for nine and a half." 
 
 Priscilla didn't answer, but I had hardly 
 expected she would, so I tucked her back 
 under my pillow and went to sleep to dream 
 
66 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 that I was a captive maiden in a tower 
 guarded by two witches who looked like Jes- 
 sica and Jean, and that Sir Launcelot came 
 to rescue me and put me in a photograph 
 album, and so I got out unseen. 
 
 All morning I went round with Priscilla 
 in my pocket. When the twins weren't look- 
 ing I would take her out and whisper to her, 
 and tell her not to be impatient, though I 
 guess she wasn't the only one who needed to 
 be told that. After lunch Aunt Adela said 
 she was going for a drive and we could go if 
 we wanted to. I waited to see what the 
 twins were going to do. Yes, they wanted to 
 go. Then Priscilla and I would stay home. 
 Aunt Adela was waiting for me to choose. 
 
 " Thank you. Aunt," I said, " if you don't 
 mind I think we would rather not go this 
 afternoon." 
 
 Aunt Adela looked surprised. "JVe?" 
 she said, " but the twins are going." 
 
 Then I knew that I had spoken about 
 Priscilla, too, and I grew very red and un- 
 comfortable. I wasn't really happy again 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 67 
 
 until I saw the back of the carriage go out 
 the gate. Then I took Priscilla in my hand 
 and flew up the back stairs. 
 
 I opened the little door, and there was my 
 castle with the sun shining through the misty 
 window, and my knight-book on the couch. 
 First I must put Priscilla where she could look 
 out of a real window, then I would read to her 
 and we would imagine. I fastened the pic- 
 ture against the wall so that she could look 
 at the river and the towers, then I said,' 
 " Priscilla, I s'pose you know that's Camelot 
 over there? " 
 
 The picture nodded its head ever so little. 
 
 " Well," I said, " we are going to play a 
 very sad story to-day, because I feel just like 
 imagining about sad things, and the lady in 
 the story was a very sad person indeed. You 
 see, she used to stand by the casement, which 
 is just what we are doing, only she couldn't 
 stop to look out, though she wanted to ever 
 so badly — ^because there were so many in- 
 teresting and wonderful people, like knights, 
 that kept riding by. But all the time she 
 
68 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 had to keep weaving their pictures and she 
 could only look at them in a mirror, which 
 ' hung before her all the year,' the book says. 
 I should think she'd have got pretty tired. 
 
 " Well, one day while she was weaving and 
 weaving. Sir Launcelot came riding along. 
 He was the most beautiful knight in the 
 world, and his armor was so bright it looked 
 like a flame, and he was singing as he rode by 
 the river. The lady saw him in her mirror, 
 and she couldn't help it, but went to the win- 
 dow and looked out just like we're doing. 
 Then the mirror cracked from side to side, 
 so she knew she must die. I wish I knew 
 why. She went out of her tower and down 
 to the river and there she found a boat, so 
 she lay down in it, and it floated on the 
 stream to Camelot. When it got there the 
 lady was dead and all the people and the 
 knights came down to the water to see her, 
 and they crossed themselves for fear, all ex- 
 cept Launcelot, who wai the bravest knight 
 in the world, and the kindest. He just 
 looked at her, and saw how beautiful she 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 69 
 
 was; then he said, ' God in His mercy lend 
 her grace.' I guess He did if Sir Launcelot 
 asked him." 
 
 I felt so sad by this time with imagining 
 about the lovely dead lady, that before I 
 knew it two tears splashed on the window 
 sill, and then two more, but I didn't care if 
 Priscilla did see, because I felt so nice inside. 
 I always liked to feel sad that way, when the 
 thoughts were just imagining ones — and then 
 the sun made the tears look like diamonds on 
 the dusty sill. 
 
 So I told Priscilla I was the kind girl in 
 " Diamonds and Toads," but she was looking 
 far over the towers, and I knew she was 
 wishing that a knight would come riding by, 
 so I didn't interrupt her, because that is a 
 lovely play. So I played it too, until it be- 
 gan to get dark. Then I kissed Priscilla 
 good-night and closed the window, for the 
 nights were rather cool. 
 
 " To-morrow," I said, " we'll play Elaine. 
 Then some other day we'll play ' Sister Ann, 
 Sister Ann, do you see anything coming? ' 
 
70 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 which will be very exciting, because there's 
 nearly always a cloud of dust somewhere." 
 
 And I got so interested thinking of the 
 plays we would have that I forgot I was in a 
 secret and talked out loud. But when I 
 remembered, and put my hand over my 
 mouth, there wasn't any sound, so I knew the 
 secret was safe. 
 
 It was quite the best one I ever had. 
 Priscilla and I played it all summer, and you 
 couldn't think how many stories you can be 
 when you have a castle of your own with a 
 window where you can see a river and a city 
 with towers. Long before we had finished 
 imagining, and I still had a great deal of the 
 knight-book to read, it was time to go back 
 to the city. 
 
 The afternoon before we were to leave, I 
 went up the twisty stairs for a last visit. 
 Priscilla was still looking out of the window 
 — she never seemed to get tired of it. But I 
 took her down gently. 
 
 " You must come too," I told her, " I 
 promised Aunt Adela you would, and anyway 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 71 
 
 the castle would be cold in winter. But next 
 summer we will both come back," I added, 
 for I could see a shadow fall on her face. 
 
 There was a lump in my throat that was 
 not quite a pleasant one, but it had to be 
 done, so we went around and said good-bye 
 to everything, and last of all to the three little 
 trunks where the nails spelled " P. W." on 
 the covers. Priscilla felt worst about leav- 
 ing those, but my worst feeling was when I 
 closed the window for the last time. The 
 sun looked very misty, and I don't think it 
 was all the dust on the window panes. 
 
 After tea I took Priscilla to Aunt Adela. 
 " Thank you for lending her to me," I said. 
 " She's been very comforting." 
 
 " What on earth " said Aunt Adela. 
 
 " Well, you see," I said, trying to explain, 
 " we're interested in the same things, and 
 it's very pleasant to have someone interested 
 in the same things you are." 
 
 But Aunt Adela only stared; then she said, 
 " Child, dreaming has gone to your head. 
 It's lucky school begins Monday." 
 
72 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 So I knew she was too grown up to under- 
 stand. Poor Aunt Adela ! But Priscilla and 
 I understood. 
 
 The next day we left for the city. Just 
 before we reached the turnpike, there was a 
 bend in the road where you saw the house for 
 the last time. I was in the back seat of the 
 carriage so that I could look at it till the last 
 minute. We turned into the bend, and just 
 then the sun, which had been under a cloud, 
 flashed out all of a sudden, and there was 
 my little window! All the panes were gold 
 and blue like jewels. For a minute they 
 shone and sparkled and twinkled at me. 
 Then the road dipped down and the wall of 
 trees shut my castle from my sight. 
 
 The girl's voice died away, and the two 
 stood looking in silence out of the little win- 
 dow across the reservoir and the Park, their 
 shoulders close together. Finally the boy 
 spoke. 
 
 " Whether it's towered Camelot or the blue 
 plain of the sea, always it is far away, ' over 
 
THE MAGIC CASEMENT 73 
 
 the hills and far away I ' It seems but a step 
 when we are children, but we never get to it." 
 
 " But we have got to it," she urged, " we 
 have run back to it just now, in memory." 
 
 " No, we have run back into sight of it 
 again, that is all." 
 
 " Oh, Boy," said she, " now you are talk- 
 ing sad, grown up talk. You mustn't." 
 
 " But I must," he answered. " It is good 
 to dream as a child again, to feel the clouds 
 of glory trail. But it is unspeakably sad, too, 
 for what has become of those dreams ? Why 
 have we not found them ? How can we find 
 them now? What others can we find to 
 answer in their places?" 
 
 " Have you found no other lady beyond 
 the hill? " she queried. 
 
 " Have you seen Sir Launcelot ride by? " 
 he answered. 
 
 Again there was silence. He looked at 
 the girl so close beside him, at her sober, 
 dreaming, wistful face. To find another 
 lady beyond the hill — to be her Sir Launce- 
 lot! 
 
74 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " I wonder! " he half whispered. 
 
 The girl moved hastily away from the case- 
 ment. " I must be going now," she said. 
 But she cast a farewell look behind. " Dear, 
 dear casement I " were her parting words. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 CHILD PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 
 
 pHILIP was quite sure that he had belated 
 
 spring fever. Spring fever in him did 
 
 not manifest itself alone by a great longing to 
 
 escape from New York : for that longing he 
 
 knew most of the time. Nor did it manifest 
 
 itself in a mighty desire to go swimming : for 
 
 that he had most of the time also. He once 
 
 defined winter as a long wait in a tank for 
 
 Coney Island to open. In him spring fever 
 
 manifested itself in an irresistible impulse to 
 
 write causeries. Was it not Sainte-Beuve 
 
 who defined a causerie as an open letter to all 
 
 whom it may concern ? Philip, however, had 
 
 a better definition. According to him, a 
 
 causerie is *' the sort of stuff no editor will 
 
 print." Therefore, an irresistible impulse to 
 
 write causeries is, in a struggling young 
 
 author of to-day, nothing more nor less than 
 
 75 
 
76 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 an outbreak of idealism. (Or, do you say, 
 foolishness? It is much the same!) But, 
 finding himself suddenly seized with the im- 
 pulse, Philip simply said, " Spring fever." 
 
 He made no effort to resist the impulse. 
 The charm of writing a causerie is much like 
 the charm of reading one; it resides in the 
 unpremeditation, the impulsiveness, the com- 
 pulsion to chat. To chat! How little time 
 or place is there for chat in (iur modem maga- 
 zines, where there is so much chatter! Chat 
 is the intimate revelation, in kindly inter- 
 course, of one man's soul and opinions. One 
 only chats when life is going slowly by, and 
 never with a muck rake in one's hand. One 
 chats, thought Philip, when one has spring 
 fever. 
 
 But, after all, there is an art behind the 
 printed chat — or should be. An author's 
 causeries, like a woman's impulses, are always 
 the result of careful consideration. Philip 
 knew this, who had so often read aloud, to 
 himself, the Essays of Elia, almost ready to 
 cry with mingled delight, envy and despair at 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 77 
 
 their subtly cadenced periods. So, as he 
 loafed about the city that day after Child 
 Marie and he had wandered back into child- 
 hood by the wistful way of memory, with 
 what he called spring fever urging him to 
 go home and bubble over upon paper deli- 
 ciously melancholy reflections that nobody 
 would print, he kept trying to steer these re- 
 flections toward a definite point. The only 
 trouble was, he kept forgetting the point. 
 
 Finally, he ate a solitary dinner at his 
 " club " — his " club " being a certain ancient 
 hotel down where the Avenue begins, where 
 the coffee is French and fragrant, and the 
 magazines, in black leather bindings, French 
 and spicy. Then he went home to his rooms, 
 high above the Square where the cross gleams 
 b]?^ night, and by day sunny, red-brick, beauti- 
 ful houses look down in aristocratic benignity 
 on the little children of the poor, and the 
 window panes are growing purple. 
 
 First he locked his door. Then he took off 
 his coat and rolled up his sleeves. Then he 
 put a half completed manuscript of a very 
 
78 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 marketable story with a very happy ending, 
 deep into a drawer. Then he filled six 
 pipes, lit one of them, and laid the rest, with 
 a box of matches, in a row on his desk. Next 
 he placed a pile of clean copy paper in front 
 of him, and sat down to write. 
 
 As a preliminary he made a figure " i " in 
 the corner of the top sheet. Then he won- 
 dered why Marie looked so tired afid wistful, 
 and drew a pen sketch of an elephant, one of 
 the few animals he could delineate success- 
 fully, as he considered the problem. Then 
 he got up and crossed to the piano, playing a 
 few bars of the andante of Mozart's second 
 sonata. Philip was sadly deficient in tech- 
 nique, but he had imagination. The music, 
 in that odd way music has, contrived to put 
 him into the necessary mood. He went back 
 to his desk, picked up his pen, and wrote 
 steadily. Evidently the words came freely. 
 There was no interruption to the scratch, 
 scratch of his pen, save when he paused to 
 light a fresh pipe. Finally, as the early milk 
 wagons were rattling through the Square, he 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 79 
 
 tipped back in his chair and began without 
 rising to undress. The first sheet of his 
 manuscript bore the heading, 
 
 •fcow to be IbappB tbougb In flew fotft. 
 
 Lest, in the flattering event of some read- 
 er's pushing his way middistance into this dis- 
 course, the cry should be raised as if in tri- 
 umph of discovery, " That is, after all, the 
 trouble with him! " I will state at the outset 
 that I am a bachelor, and by preference — 
 whose preference I need not be expected to 
 disclose. Let a man affirm that he is lonely, 
 discontented, at odds of the spirit with his 
 environment, and the first remark his friends 
 address to him in consolation — especially if 
 they be themselves single — Is, " You ought to 
 get married." Flying in the face of daily ex- 
 ample and historical record, they affirm, as 
 it were, that marriage Is a sure dispeller of 
 discontent, a panacea for loneliness and the 
 thousand miserable moods of sadness the iso- 
 lated human spirit knows. 
 
 Now, nothing Is plainer, of course, than 
 
8o THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 the fact that discontent, even if it vanish like 
 the morning mists at the daybreak of matri- 
 mony, too often settles down again in a good, 
 steady drizzle before noon ; that no loneliness 
 in this lonely world can equal the void which 
 separates some husbands from some wives; 
 and that a spiritual moodiness existing before 
 the nuptial day is not to be driven out of a 
 man's system by the shock of wedding bells. 
 Schopenhauer married would have been the 
 same philosopher as Schopenhauer single, or 
 more so. Not willing to concede, then, that 
 my moods result inevitably, or even probably, 
 from the fact that I live in a state of " single 
 cussedness," I once more aiErm boldly and 
 deny that the afErmation should count against 
 me, that I am a bachelor! 
 
 I am perfectly ready to admit you that 
 matrimony might elevate me, or any other 
 man, into a sphere of such serene harmony 
 and peace that the vexations of mortal en- 
 vironment would be as naught, that New 
 York Itself, in fact, would sink so far below 
 the window of our flat as to tell to our en- 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 81 
 
 raptured eyes (should we care to raise the 
 shade) but as a dirty smudge on the green 
 shoulder of the world. Though I have had 
 little experience in matrimony, it may be ad- 
 mitted without dispute that I have had quite 
 my share of experience in those delectable 
 skirmishes which precede it, and if I have 
 never been mortally — I mean matrimonially 
 — wounded, I have more than once been 
 sorely hit. Perhaps, for all you know, Gentle 
 Reader, I have even looked into the Promised 
 Land, perhaps I buried my hopes one bitter 
 midnight In the Vale of Moab, where weep- 
 ing cuplds turned the sod and no man saw, 
 perhaps I too know the green felicity and 
 the never-to-be-forgotten sweet promise of 
 frultfulness which that land affords. But I 
 only admit this felicity might be. And I do 
 most earnestly protest against the illogical 
 assumption that because it sometimes is, the 
 converse proposition Is true, namely, that un- 
 happiness and discontent are the result of 
 being single. Because a man drinks whiskey 
 and becomes jovial, it does not follow that 
 
82 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 your sober and melancholy fellow is melan- 
 choly because he Is sober. 
 
 Therefore, once and for all, let us have 
 done with this conventional, ill-considered, 
 rather tiresome advice (usually accompanied 
 with a disgusting slap on the shoulder), this 
 hollowly hearty, " Get married, old chap 1 " 
 and, confessing fairly that the question of 
 matrimony is at best but a side issue, face 
 the great problem. How to be happy though 
 in New York. 
 
 One of the joUiest of book plates is that 
 designed for the author of the " London 
 Lyrics," by Kate Greenaway. She was his 
 later, as George Cruikshank had been his 
 earlier illustrator ; but nothing she did for the 
 text was quite so delightful as the book plate, 
 with " Fear God, fear naught " above, and 
 " Frederick Locker " below, and between, 
 those inimitable two young people sitting be- 
 neath a Kate Greenaway tree laden with fruit 
 and the Locker arms, while far away across 
 sunny fields rises the distant panorama of 
 London, crowned with St. Paul's dome. 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 83 
 
 It all seems quite natural, even to the 
 solemn owl perched on a bit of fence be- 
 neath the tree. No doubt just such kiddies 
 do exist within sight of London Town, and 
 no doubt they sit beneath just such a tree, 
 tired of reading, but not at all drawn to 
 pluck the tempting fruit, as round and red 
 as their dear cheeks. No doubt they exist 
 within London Town itself, and surely Mr. 
 Barrie knows where to find them. But the 
 other day I tried the fanciful experiment 
 of copying them faithfully out, minute line 
 for line, with pencil and water colors, kid- 
 dies and apples and owl and funny tree, all 
 save the distant panorama of London across 
 the sunny fields. In place of that, I drew 
 in the sky line of New York as it looked 
 the morning I began to work. They had 
 three new sky-scrapers up before I finished. 
 
 The result was unutterably melancholy. 
 
 The kiddies, who had seemed their jovial 
 selves before I added this last touch, were 
 suddenly converted into an infant Adam and 
 Eve, who had eaten of the fruit of the Tree 
 
84 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 of Knowledge, which grew above them. The 
 owl seemed very like our old friend Satan, in 
 feathered guise, and the sunlight had faded 
 from the intervening spaces. It was a curi- 
 ous phenomenon, and I puzzled long over the 
 picture to see if I could detect any flaw in the 
 copying. No, the copy was faithful: and 
 when I washed out the sky line of New York 
 and substituted that of London, as in the 
 original drawing, rising in a long, low pyra- 
 mid to the central dome, the picture lost its 
 grotesqueness, becoming once more sunny, 
 charming, natural. The fruit was once more 
 sweet. 
 
 This chance experiment led me to pry 
 more minutely into the moods and atmosphere 
 of New York City, the Titan of the Western 
 world, that squats clumsily on the too small 
 space of Manhattan Island and watches the 
 myriad ships come up the Bay. Surely, 
 thought I, a town that cannot harbor two of 
 Kate Greenaway's darling brood, even in its 
 suburbs, cannot give soil to a Kate Green- 
 away tree, must have something the matter 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 85 
 
 with it. Through this curious by-way was I 
 led consciously up to the great problem, How 
 to b'e happy though in New York. 
 
 That the problem is a great one, a cloud of 
 witnesses at once attest, none other than the 
 theaters, music halls, vaudeville houses, glit- 
 tering restaurants, and all the patrons of these 
 places. Attempting to keep New York 
 happy is, indeed, an industry that owns mil- 
 lions of real estate, employs thousands of men 
 and women, and makes the fortunes of a 
 few. (I wonder if that makes them happy?) 
 Even our cafes may be divided into two 
 classes, the places to eat in and the places to 
 spend money in. Those of the second class 
 belong solely to this amusement industry, 
 quite separate from the industry of keeping 
 New York fed; to be sure, they call on the 
 food (and drink) industry for material as- 
 sistance and a thinly veiled excuse; but the 
 glittering restaurant really exists to cater not 
 to the desire for food, but to the love of ex- 
 citement, of amusement; not to the hungry 
 but to the bored. 
 
86 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Ah, Is it not just this, just boredom, just 
 loneliness, that drives to such cafes so many 
 of the young and once pure in heart, there to 
 find in the " lobster palaces," as we call them, 
 if not happiness, at least company and luxury 
 and freedom from the awful face of Want? 
 Could virtue glitter so, be so gay, smell so 
 savory, would evil have to lurk behind those 
 penciled eyes? God's arch foe is not Lucifer 
 but Loneliness. 
 
 Primarily, at any rate, the glittering res- 
 taurant has as little to do with feeding people 
 as the theater with educating them. A 
 hungry man has as little place in one of these 
 cafes as an Intelligent man at a musical 
 comedy. Broadway, then, upper Broadway, 
 from the gusty Flatlron to the thirsty Circle, 
 blazing with lights like no other place on 
 earth, alive with cabs and motors and actors 
 out of a job, and women with diamonds and 
 dirty nails; lined with restaurants and thea- 
 ters — shouts with its myriad voices the mighty 
 desire to be amused, the mighty effort to satis- 
 fy this desire. The roll of carriages, the 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 87 
 
 popping of corks, the flash of a stocking, the 
 crash of rag time, the outpouring of a tenor's 
 " golden voice " at $2,500 per hour, the as- 
 similation of lobster, the plays of Shakespeare 
 (sometimes) and Clyde Fitch, the old drama 
 of the moth and the flame, when the moth is 
 often young and a man, and the flame bril- 
 liant with a peroxide radiance — all this is but 
 a part, but the Rialto's answer to the great 
 problem. How to be happy though in New 
 York. 
 
 However, I am not going into a moral 
 bluster, picking up my intellectual skirts with 
 the mental daintiness of a Harvard English 
 professor, at mention of these thousands who 
 approach the problem through the Great 
 White Way. The goodly proportion of 
 them who are not compelled by circumstances 
 to be found in New York of an evening, but 
 who remain here of their own volition, de- 
 serve no better fate ; It were time worse than 
 wasted to flash ideals before their eyes. And 
 on the remainder I can look with a certain 
 comfortable pity, a pity such as one feels for 
 suffering in a play. Are they not compelled. 
 
88 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 like me, to pass their lives in New York, 
 poor things? Consequently they have no 
 homes (a home is impossible south of Yonk- 
 ers) , no neighbors, no ties of locality and com- 
 munal spirit; they are not quite real; I am 
 sure their souls are like their complexions. 
 And they have nothing real to do. 
 
 Nothing to do ! That is the trouble with 
 our stage to-day, with our great city where 
 the destiny of our stage is shaped, with our 
 civilization. When people have nothing to 
 do, they will do anything — they will even go 
 to a Cohan comedy ! They must kill time at 
 any price. Thus bad art flourishes as the 
 price, lax standards prevail, and a glaring 
 mediocrity marks our stage, and our visible 
 civilization. Art, indeed, varies directly in 
 quality with the number of other interests in 
 life, and civilization with the proportion of 
 neighborliness. Because I, too, am cooped 
 up without neighborly interests and a home, 
 in this city of sky-scrapers, subways and ennui, 
 and know the nothing-to-do unrest which gets 
 into the blood like sunflower sap, facing a 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 89 
 
 man squarely to a blazing amusement sign, I 
 pity these patrons of the Rialto. But it is a 
 comfortable pity, for the very simple reason 
 that I am a philosopher in my way. What 
 can I do about It? (A philosopher, you will 
 observe, is a man who can explain anything 
 but get excited about nothing). 
 
 That isn't the whole reason, either; no 
 philosophical reason ever is. I know it isn't, 
 because my pity is stirred by another feature 
 of life in this city which I am quite as power- 
 less to remedy; but God knows this pity is not 
 comfortable! Perhaps you, too, have been 
 moved to the same emotion by the same cause ; 
 but I doubt it. The Rialto and its peculiar 
 life and atmosphere are known to every one; 
 some even call it New York. It is very far 
 from that. Go with me to the Bowery any 
 night at six o'clock, and stand on a corner 
 near Spring Street for fifteen minutes, and I 
 will prove to you that there is a city within 
 the city, such as you never dreamed. The 
 rush at Brooklyn Bridge, the stream of hu- 
 manity uptown at night, is as nothing to this 
 
90 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 spectacle of mine. Yet no " Seeing New 
 York " coaches ever make it a point of their 
 pilgrimage; no New Yorkers ever show it to 
 their visitors as one of the sights of the town ; 
 unnoticed as the sun-rising and the inevitable 
 march of night, daily this spectacle Is spread 
 for eyes to see ; the most significant, the most 
 tremendous, the most unutterably melancholy 
 spectacle the teeming town affords. 
 
 To the west lie the sweat-shops, lining 
 Broadway in deep blocks a dozen stories high, 
 flanking every side street between Grace 
 Church and the old Canal. To the east, be- 
 tween the Bowery and the river, lies the great 
 tenement city, life and death clashing in its 
 attics, love and horror buried in its cellars, 
 the most thickly populated section of the 
 globe, the abiding place of a hundred tribes 
 and races. At six o'clock the factories dis- 
 gorge the mass of toilers, men and women, 
 girls and boys, little children, which they 
 swallowed up in the morning and extracted 
 vitality from all day. 
 
 And this disgorged mass of humanity, this 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 91 
 
 army of slaves to the passion for underwear, 
 with one accord and a sound as of many 
 waters troubled, turns eastward toward the 
 tenement city. At every cross street the 
 multitudes burst into the Bowery like a flood 
 let loose. They cross the broad thorough- 
 fare in black swarms, blocking travel, split in- 
 to irregular sections by passing cars, crawling 
 like great snakes under the straddling spans 
 of the elevated road. And then the van- 
 guard is swallowed up in the hiving tenement 
 town beyond. But there seems no end to the 
 streams. Out of the west they come, and 
 cross, and vanish into that wofully tiny sec- 
 tion of the free earth's crust, and more fol- 
 low, and more, and more. How does that 
 teeming, sweating hive hold them all? Will 
 they never stop pouring into it? Look up as 
 far as an eye can see, down as far the other 
 way, the Bowery Is black with the swarming 
 army, the great daily migration — homeward. 
 Home! What chance for homes where 
 they abide ? What place for a family where 
 there are so many children? What oppor- 
 
92 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 tunity of neighborllness where there are so 
 many neighbors ? What hope for art where 
 there is so much ignorance, for civiHzation 
 where there is so Httle soap ? Yet hear them ; 
 they are chattering in half a hundred tongu.es, 
 singing In quite as many keys, laughing, 
 shouting. They, too, must try to be happy; 
 theirs, too, is the great quest ! At night they 
 will be on the streets, at their poor theaters, 
 in their dance halls and cafes; you may see 
 them searching, searching for something to 
 do, for their birthright to be happy. But 
 many of them you will not see, though they 
 also are searching. It Is better that you 
 should not. Some of these invisible ones are 
 girls, young girls. That lithe, trim figure of 
 a maid who crossed the Bowery with head 
 held high at six o'clock is of their number. It 
 is better you should go home now, as I do, 
 and shut yourself in from the pity, the hor- 
 ror of It all. You, too, must be happy, even 
 In New York; It is your birthright. 
 
 4: * 4c 4: 4: 3|c 
 
 Here, high above the Square, my Square, 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST, 93 
 
 the door locked, books comfortably looking 
 down at me from their tall cases, the Rialto 
 and the Bowery alike slip out of memory, and 
 I become interested in myself. 
 
 To become interested in one's self is not 
 easy. Most people fancy it is; but that is 
 because they have never tried it. To be in- 
 terested in yourself, you must have two selves. 
 Most people have only one. That is why 
 they are called selfish. The self I am in- 
 terested in reads many books, and I watch 
 him like a critic and kindly librarian. 
 
 Sometimes, to be sure, he wanders about 
 town, made very happy by the stray wonder- 
 bits of beauty that he finds in this city we are 
 in the habit of calling ugly. To stand in 
 Gramercy Park of an evening and, looking 
 north, first at the cosy red-brick houses and 
 the treeSj slowly to lift his eyes above them 
 to see the monstrous, pale bulk of the new 
 tower booming up against the stars, is to 
 him an indescribable delight. So, on a misty 
 day, is the Flatiron Building towing Broad- 
 way northward, like some great liner of the 
 
94 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 land; and upper Broadway by night when 
 driving steam plumes go by the Times tower 
 like clouds cutting off a mountain summit; 
 and sunset down a side street; and Japanese 
 twilights when across the open spaces the 
 great slab walls of the sky-scrapers are but 
 a deeper shade of the sky, picked out with 
 golden lights. A thousand vistas of beauty 
 pierce their way out of the sordidness of our 
 city, for the seeing eye. What right have we 
 to call New York ugly? We never look at 
 it I 
 
 Never-the-less, the other chap called Me 
 always comes home at last for final satisfac- 
 tion in his books. Always some grain of 
 ugly dust blows up the pleasant vista. Al- 
 ways the sunset fades, the Japanese twilight 
 deepens into gloom. But books remain, 
 eternal comforters. 
 
 I once went away from New York into the 
 country, and sat at night on a New England 
 hillside, alone with my God, my pipe and the 
 whippoorwills. In the thicket below me, 
 on the height above, far out through the dark 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 95 
 
 valley, rose the long, clear, half sad, half 
 cheerful whistle of the nightingales of the 
 North. 
 
 " Why must silly men be forever writ- 
 ing ' nature books ' ? " I said to myself. 
 " What do I care what a whippoorwill looks 
 like, or when he builds his nest, or where? 
 Why should anybody care ? It were quite as 
 well if the whippoorwill had no body at all, 
 so long as his whistle lived I That is the im- 
 portant thing, the only thing that matters, for 
 it is the soul of the bird and his environment, 
 the common sense and not very poignant 
 melancholy of the New England summer 
 night. And who needs a nature book to tell 
 him what this whistle sounds like, still less to 
 read its meaning?" 
 
 Then I looked out over the dark, still 
 world, that swung visibly eastward under the 
 patient stars. My soul was taken up into im- 
 mensity. "D ^n all books!" I added, 
 
 aloud. 
 
 That, of course, is the healthy view — out- 
 side of New York. But in New York books 
 
96 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 are, after all, essential for salvation, which is 
 why perhaps they are so little read here. If 
 there be any to whom the Rialto is vain 
 and the East Side intolerable; for whom the 
 great nervous streets of this city are as im- 
 prisoning canons, for all their vistas here and 
 there into Beauty; with whom there ever 
 walks the haunting ghost of fairer ways and 
 days, of lost youth and a forgotten, sweet 
 power of imaginative life, to them I speak, 
 and to them only. If any others have fol- 
 lowed me this far, I am very sorry, but I 
 must ask them to turn back. I am going to 
 shut the door of my castle — ^my library — and 
 talk soberly with the chosen few. 
 
 I shall not be long, my friends (for I may 
 call you friends, though you are to me but 
 shadows?). Truly sober talks are never 
 long. A few words, the bold outline sketch 
 of a mood, and all is accomplished. The 
 mind of the auditor leaps forth to clothe and 
 color the skeleton, and the two, speaker and 
 listener, sit silent before the finished work. 
 
 It is a House of Life we would create to 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 97 
 
 be happy; in our imaginations, since we can- 
 not buy such in the New York real estate 
 market. (That we cannot buy any houses in 
 the real estate market does not alter the 
 case ! ) But each of us must be his own Ros- 
 setti, for each desires something other than 
 the rest in the adornment of the fagade, 
 the arch of the windows, the furnishing of the 
 rooms, the height of the chamber. Don't 
 build with too much fiction. Truth is often 
 a stranger to fiction. There is more solidity 
 of foundation in the mastery of an intellectual 
 idea; hence more pleasure in contemplating 
 the completed edifice. Read a great work of 
 science at least once every six months ; it will 
 take you two months to do it. James's 
 " Varieties of Religious Experience " is good. 
 So are Martineau's sermons, and with them 
 you build solid and carve sweet, solemn 
 images over the door as well. Adorn your 
 walls with the wonderful water color gems of 
 the Elizabethan lyric poets, to sing to you as 
 you pass from room to room; and in the 
 spacious dining-room, where you go to grow. 
 
98 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 let Shelley or Isaiah or Shakespeare or Car- 
 ducci paint you a fresco, as you choose. It 
 were well, too, to have Heine's sardonic smile 
 on the landing, to keep fermenting deep in 
 your nature a due sense of humor. 
 
 And upstairs the world is yours, whatever 
 sweet dreams you desire, and for company 
 your own fancy, kept alive by the daily touch 
 with genius; your own fancy peopling your 
 rooms with faces wished for, with faces loved 
 and lost, spreading without your windows 
 golden stretches of that magic land beyond 
 the sunset, which, as you grow older, you will 
 learn, if your childhood was happy, is none 
 other than the dear countryside where you 
 grew up, and learned to love a maid, and 
 speak the name of Home. 
 
 3|c !|: H: * 4: 
 
 Thus I talk to them — these chosen, shadow 
 friends — and they rise silently and depart. 
 And my own words come back in a surge over 
 my heart, echoing like the sea as it mounts the 
 shore. That land beyond the sunset, which 
 is none other than the dear countryside where 
 
PHILIP AS ESSAYIST 99 
 
 you grew up — and learned to love a maid — 
 and speak the name — of Home. It Is late, 
 too late, to read; I will go to bed. Ah I 
 Why do I hesitate, draw back? The pillow 
 lies white and inviting. The single pillow 
 . . . and learned to love a maid — and 
 speak the name of Home ! 
 
 Yes, Dear Reader, you who cried out im- 
 pulsively when I began, " That is, after all, 
 the trouble with him ! " and were rebuked 
 (perhaps) when I so completely and over- 
 whelmingly refuted you, it is your turn now 
 again I 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 
 
 A DAY or two later Philip came upon 
 Marie on the lower slopes of Mount 
 Mozart, laying down the law to a nurse 
 maid. She was so occupied with her mis- 
 sionary task that she did not notice his ap- 
 proach. 
 
 " Don't you know any better than that? " 
 she was saying to the awed nurse maid. 
 "You're not fit to have charge of a baby I 
 The idea of letting the poor little thing sleep 
 with the blazing sun full on its eyes ! Don't 
 you know that might injure the child's eyes 
 permanently? Now remember, when you 
 have it out doors in the future, either pull the 
 shade of the carriage down to protect it, or 
 face it away from the sun." 
 
 " Yiss, Mum," said the astonished nurse 
 maid, beginning to wheel her charge away. 
 100 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL loi 
 
 " You suggest Nehemiah, the prophet," 
 said Philip, with a laugh. 
 
 " I fail to get the connection of ideas," 
 Marie answered. She was still possessed of 
 her indignation, and in no mood for laughter. 
 She seemed, indeed, rather far away from 
 him, and he felt an unreasoned rage against 
 the infant. 
 
 " Maybe there isn't much," said he. " Only 
 old Nehemiah set all the Jews to rebuilding 
 the walls of Jerusalem, each over against his 
 own house, didn't he? It's merely a case of 
 reforming the world by reforming what lies 
 nearest each man's hand. It always struck 
 me as a pretty good way." 
 
 " Well, it makes me mad," said Marie, " to 
 see poor little helpless babies put in charge of 
 ignorant nurse maids, and made to suffer for 
 it all their lives. Someday that child, per- 
 haps, will have trouble with his eyes ; he will 
 get headaches in school, and be apparently 
 dull and irritable, and be considered a bad 
 child; and maybe he will get punished un- 
 justly, which will sour his temper for life. 
 
I02 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 And what will really be the matter is nothing 
 in the world but a nurse maid's carelessness." 
 
 " We are serious to-day," said Philip. 
 
 " We have to be serious once in a while," 
 said the girl, laughing, and trying to shake off 
 her mood, which, in truth, gave her a sug- 
 gestion of executive self-reliance that was 
 rather disconcerting to the man. Perhaps it 
 is always a little disconcerting to a man to 
 find executive self-reliance In a woman, but 
 certainly so when he Is bent on playing a 
 game of sentiment. 
 
 They strolled rather gravely through the 
 Run-away Place, talking of common things, 
 till they were confronted by a baby with a 
 bugle. The baby, which was a boy baby 
 about half past four, faced them on the path, 
 raised his bugle to his lips, and blew a mighty 
 blast — at least, a mighty quantity of breath 
 was expended, though the resultant sound was 
 somewhat disproportionate, and hardly set the 
 wild echoes flying. 
 
 "What wouldst thou, Childe Roland?" 
 inquired Philip. 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 103 
 
 Childe Roland appeared a trifle nonplussed 
 at this answer to his summons, and fled pre- 
 cipitately down the path to his mother. Philip 
 watched him, smiling. 
 
 " How like the rest of us," he said. " We 
 march up to the Great Unknown, and blow a 
 great blast of defiance — and then we run 
 away. And usually the Great Unknown is 
 quite harmless, like you and me, even kindly 
 disposed. In fact." 
 
 " Do you really want to be a philosopher? " 
 asked Marie. 
 
 " JVant to be? I can't help being," he re- 
 plied, grandiloquently. 
 
 The deep down twinkle of a secret purpose, 
 a twinkle he was beginning to know, gathered 
 in Marie's eyes. 
 
 " Have you a pencil, and some paper, and 
 a watch? " she asked. 
 
 He fished in his pockets. " All of them," 
 he answered. 
 
 " Then sit down on this bench, and do just 
 as I tell you. We will now conduct an investi- 
 gation in pure science. The proper study of 
 
I04 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 mankind is children. We will observe Childe 
 Roland for half an hour." 
 
 Philip looked puzzled. " The proper study 
 of mankind is womankind — or woman un- 
 kind," he said. " I don't want to study 
 Childe Roland for half an hour. Besides, 
 maybe he won't stay here half an hour." 
 
 " Then we will follow him," she answered. 
 " You do as I say. However, we will make 
 it fifteen minutes." 
 
 The command was peremptory. 
 
 " Yes, marm," he said meekly, " But 
 please stop Willie Smith kicking me under the 
 desk." 
 
 " Willie," said Marie, turning on the seat, 
 " stop kicking Philip. I don't want to speak 
 to you again ! " 
 
 " You sound quite professional," said 
 Philip. 
 
 Marie smiled to herself. " Now behave, 
 and do as I tell you," she said. " What time 
 is it?" 
 
 He told her. 
 
 " Good," she replied. " We will begin in 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 105 
 
 three minutes, exactly on the hour. Have 
 your paper ready. We will watch Childe 
 Roland carefully, and you will put down 
 everything he does, particularly everything 
 that involves muscular movement." 
 
 "Will I?" said Philip. "Won't I get 
 neuritis? Childe Roland seems to me pre- 
 tematurally lacking in repose. And why will 
 I?" 
 
 " First, you will because you are nice, and 
 don't want me to get neuritis," said Marie. 
 " And second, you will because you want to 
 be scientific." 
 
 " But it doesn't sound scientific, it sounds 
 silly." 
 
 " A great many scientific things sound silly 
 to the unlearned," said Marie, grandly. 
 " Now begin. See, Roland has blown his 
 bugle again. Put that down quick." 
 
 So Philip put down at the top of a sheet 
 of paper, " Blew bugle," and turned to watch 
 the little boy. 
 
 Have you ever watched a child at play for 
 fifteen minutes, and tried to set down on paper 
 
io6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 everything he did, every motion that he 
 made? To take down a verbatim report of 
 one of Bishop Brooks' addresses must have 
 been very much such a feat. Philip grew in- 
 terested. He watched and wrote, and wrote 
 and watched, chuckling to himself every now 
 and then. Childe Roland continued at his 
 " motor activities," quite unconscious of being 
 an experiment. But Childe Roland's mother 
 kept a suspicious eye on the pair of watchers. 
 
 When the fifteen minutes had expired, 
 Marie said, " Now read what you have writ- 
 ten." 
 
 And this is what Philip read : 
 
 FIFTEEN MINUTES WITH A BABY DYNAMO, OR, 
 WHY I AM NOT A PARENT 
 
 Blew bugle 
 
 Sat down 
 
 Got up 
 
 Ate a peanut 
 
 Found a newspaper 
 
 Brought paper to mother 
 
 Asked mother to read paper 
 
 Didn't listen 
 
 Ran to near-by tree 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 107 
 
 Ran back again 
 Sounded on the bugle horn 
 Ate another peanut 
 Ran to mother 
 Ran away again 
 
 Tripped over stick and dropped bugle horn 
 Cried 
 
 Was picked up and kissed 
 Stopped crying 
 Picked up a stick 
 Dug with stick 
 Dirt flew in mother's face 
 Was slapped 
 Cried again 
 Stepped on bugle horn 
 Picked it up 
 Tried to sound upon it 
 No sound 
 
 Tried again, pufBng out cheeks with effort 
 No result, and cried again 
 Brought bugle to mother 
 Was lectured 
 
 Threw bugle horn on ground 
 Saw a squirrel 
 Chased squirrel up a tree 
 Saw little boy 
 Hugged little boy 
 Ran to mother 
 
 Got a piece of chalk and drew picture of a girl 
 on the concrete walk. [Sir Caspar Purdon Clark, 
 
io8 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 director of the Museum of Art, passing by, saw it, 
 and exclaimed, " Ah, a sketch by Glackens ! Shock- 
 ing, shocking! "] 
 
 Threw chalk away 
 
 Waved arms up and down 
 
 Ran to mother 
 
 Stepped on her toe 
 
 Was slapped 
 
 Cried again 
 
 Saw a squirrel 
 
 Held out peanut to squirrel 
 
 Squirrel came for nut 
 
 Clapped hands for joy, and ran to tell mother 
 
 Mother's interest perfunctory 
 
 Ran down path 
 
 Was called back 
 
 Asked, "Why?" 
 
 Kicked bugle horn 
 
 Sat down 
 
 Stood up 
 
 Jiunped 
 
 Chased a squirrel 
 
 Came back to mother 
 
 Asked mother for something 
 
 Mother gave him tin soldier 
 
 Played with tin soldier 
 
 Dropped tin soldier 
 
 Mother picked it up 
 
 Took it again 
 
 Broke head off tin soldier 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 109 
 
 Cried 
 Sat down 
 Stood up 
 Fell down 
 
 Fell on chalk, and drew another portrait figure 
 (Everett Shinn, this time) 
 Stood up 
 Ran around 
 Sat down 
 
 Picked up bugle horn 
 Tried to sound it 
 No sound 
 Cried again 
 Still crying — time up 
 
 " It seems too bad to give this interesting 
 story an unhappy ending," said Philip, " but 
 Truth — ^we must have Truth, you know! 
 Now, if you don't mind, will you tell me the 
 Why?" 
 
 " Just a little investigation of the motor 
 activities of children, for my personal satis- 
 faction," answered Marie. " I've been won- 
 dering if the schools for the little tots do all 
 they ought to do for the best interests of 
 the tots, all they might do, in fact." 
 
 " I've always said, myself," remarked 
 
no THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Philip, sagely, " that education is getting too 
 full of frills and Froebelows." 
 
 Marie ignored this frivolity. 
 
 " How many things did Childe Roland do 
 with his body in fifteen minutes? " she asked, 
 leaning over the sheet of paper. 
 
 Philip counted them. 
 
 " Somewhere round seventy, that I've got 
 down," he answered. " I won't swear that 
 I didn't miss any. In fact, I guess I missed 
 most of the variations. I had time only for 
 the themes." 
 
 "You see what the problem is?" Marie 
 went on. " Does the school provide any ad- 
 equate opportunity for the muscular develop- 
 ment of the child who comes to it at four, 
 five or six years of age ? Does it give oppor- 
 tunity for the physical exercise upon which 
 the development of the brain so largely de- 
 pends? Up to seven years, a child sleeps 
 twelve hours out of the twenty-four. What 
 he does in the other twelve, if left to him- 
 self, that is, to Nature, Childe Roland ha$ 
 answered in two words — he plays. 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL in 
 
 " Two words is good ! " said Philip, hold- 
 ing out the paper. 
 
 " The waking life of a natural child is 
 simply and solely a play life," Marie went on, 
 intent upon her subject. " And it is so for 
 reasons that have their foundations deep in 
 biology and racial development " 
 
 " I once read Baldwin ! " Philip interjected. 
 " It all comes back to me now! " 
 
 The girl was hurt. " Very well," she said, 
 " I won't go on, if you don't wish it. I 
 thought you wanted me to explain why we 
 watched the baby. Excuse me. We will 
 talk about something more interesting." 
 
 Philip grew penitent instantly. " Forgive 
 me," he cried. " But I couldn't help it — 
 those phrases — ' biology '■ — ' racial develop- 
 ment ' — they bring back the wise head of 
 Professor Royce, wagging behind the desk, 
 and poor little me wildly trying to understand 
 and going down for the third time in the deep 
 sea of psychology. Please go on. I do 
 want to know. Perhaps I can understand 
 with you as professor." 
 
1 12 THE RUN- AWAY PLACE 
 
 "Well," said Marie, not entirely molli- 
 fied, " the child plays, and if left to himself 
 he plays at those things which will tend to 
 his best development. That is his instinct. 
 It is foolish to suppose that only animals have 
 instincts. He plays at those things which 
 have made for biological fitness since the 
 dawning of the race. And those activities of 
 his are mostly concerned with the movements 
 of the large muscle groups, and they are con- 
 stant in nothing but change. And this activ- 
 ity is expressive of the child and indicative 
 of his needs because he instinctively does the 
 things his body demands." 
 
 " Just as a kitten chases a spool," said 
 Philip. 
 
 " Exactly," said Marie. " Now, the point 
 is here, and you would see it plainer if you 
 had made a fifteen minute observation of a 
 child in a kindergarten or a lower primary 
 school — Isn't the little child in school, under 
 present conditions, subjected to artificial mus- 
 cular restriction for a quarter, at least, of his 
 waking time, and through this restriction is he 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 113 
 
 not doomed, perhaps, to a lesser brain devel- 
 opment? " 
 
 "Sure he is!" cried Philip. "Now I 
 know what's the matter with me ! " 
 
 Then he hastened to add, more seriously, 
 " But you can't have Run-away Places all over 
 big towns, and you can't always have parents 
 who know how to teach. Some of 'em who 
 could aren't willing to. You've got to have 
 schools." 
 
 " Yes," said Marie, " you've got to have 
 schools of course. But sooner or later you've 
 got to realize that the schools must be divided 
 into smaller classes, that they must give 
 greater opportunity for large physical work 
 and play. Every school ought to have a gar- 
 den. A kindergarten is not a garden at all 
 when it's forty small, active baby dynamos 
 cooped up in one tiny room, with a tired 
 teacher trying to hold the lid down." 
 
 " ' A tired teacher trying to hold the lid 
 down,' " said Philip. " So that's the matter 
 with you? " 
 
 " Who said there was anything the matter 
 
114 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 with me?" she inquired. "Why will you 
 reduce everything to personalities? " 
 
 " The singular noun, please," said Philip. 
 
 " It is usually supposed to be a woman who 
 reduces everything to personalities," said she. 
 
 " It usually is," he answered. 
 
 " / don't," said Marie. 
 
 Philip smiled broadly. 
 
 "Thus proving it?" he inquired. 
 
 " I knew you would say that," she retorted. 
 
 "But not quite soon enough!" said he. 
 " Alas I you will be admitted to Plato's Ideal 
 Republic, though; and I sha'n't." 
 
 "Why?" she asked. 
 
 " Because you are a teacher, or a scientist, 
 or something wise like that. And I'm only a 
 poet. Plato, you remember, sadly but firmly 
 kicked the poets out." 
 
 " I thought you were a philosopher," said 
 Marie. 
 
 " That was half an hour ago," he an- 
 swered. " I have decided since to be a poet." 
 
 " Poets are well enough in their way," she 
 remarked. 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 115 
 
 "But not in anybody else's way?" he 
 asked. 
 
 " That depends " she began. 
 
 " On what? " said he. " On the poetry? " 
 
 " No," she replied, " on the poet." 
 
 " Oh," said Philip. " And will you give 
 specifications of desirability?" 
 
 " A certain impersonality in poets is de- 
 sirable," she answered. " Or shall I say, a 
 certain childishness ? " 
 
 " But I don't agree with you at all," said 
 he. " The essence of poetry is its personal- 
 ity. The more personal, the better the 
 poetry." 
 
 " Nonsense," Marie replied. " Look out 
 now over the Run-away Place. See that 
 sweep of green lawn, and the moving car- 
 riages, and the splashes of gold sunlight, and 
 far off, between the trees, that pile of build- 
 ings like a single great castle guarding its 
 huge estate. If you wrote a lyric about it, 
 there would be nothing personal in your 
 poem." 
 
 " If I wrote a lyric about it," he answered, 
 
ii6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " there would be nothing that wasn't personal 
 in my poem." 
 
 The girl started to reply; but she met his 
 glance, and grew uneasily silent. 
 
 " No, not a thing," he went on. " It is a 
 gay and colorful scene, I admit — ^just now. 
 But why is it a gay and colorful scene ? Tell 
 me that." 
 
 " Because the Lord and Frederick Law 
 Olmsted made it such," she replied. 
 
 Philip smiled. " I am willing to credit 
 Olmsted with Central Park," he said, " but 
 I can hardly bring myself to blame the Lord 
 for Senator Clark's mansion or the Plaza 
 Hotel; though, as the French say, the Lord 
 must be modest, since He made man in His 
 image. No, your answer is wrong. Try 
 again." 
 
 " It is the only answer I have," she replied, 
 stolidly. 
 
 " Well," said he, " it is a gay and colorful 
 scene, an appropriate frame for a lyric, be- 
 cause you are you and I am I and we are here 
 together. Isn't that the answer ? " 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 117 
 
 " Don't you suppose it is a gay and colorful 
 scene for that man on the next bench?" she 
 asked. 
 
 " Isn't that the answer? " 
 
 " It is the same scene for everybody who 
 looks upon it. It would be the same scene 
 if you were in Salem and I was in Siam," she 
 remarked. 
 
 "Isn't that the answer?" 
 
 "Look!" she cried. "How rosy that 
 drift of steam is from the castle roof. It 
 looks like a plume, or a banner. That's it, a 
 banner I " 
 
 " Isn't that the answer? " 
 
 " No ! " said Marie. 
 
 " Isn't that the answer? " 
 
 " It — it might be, if you were only sensi- 
 ble," she admitted slowly. 
 
 " What is sensible ? " he asked. 
 
 " Sensible is being ten years old, as you 
 promised to be," she replied. 
 
 " But a little while ago you would have it 
 that I grow up, and be scientific," he com- 
 plained. 
 
ii8 THE RUN-AwAY PLACE 
 
 "That is quite different," said she. "I 
 don't want you to grow up, and be silly." 
 
 "Marie," said he suddenly, "who are 
 you?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " Come," he urged, " I am Childe Roland, 
 blowing my bugle before the Great Un- 
 known." 
 
 Still she shook her head. 
 
 " I find you this morning," he went on, 
 " not in a Run-away Place mood at all. I 
 find your other self, your out-there-south-of 
 Fifty-ninth-Street self, in the ascendant. I 
 don't know anything about that self, except 
 that it appears to be powerful learned. I 
 haven't any admission to that self. You peep 
 out at me from the Dark Tower for a mo- 
 ment, and then pull up the draw-bridge in 
 my face. You won't listen to my bugle call." 
 
 " But aren't you terrified at the Great Un- 
 known?" she asked, glancing at him out of 
 the side of her eyes. 
 
 "Not terrified, but baffled," he replied, 
 " and grievously hurt." 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 119 
 
 " Hurt? " She unconsciously let a note 
 of solicitude into her voice. 
 
 " Yes, hurt," he cried. " You don't play- 
 fair. When there's a bugler at your gates 
 you should go out and see what he wants. 
 That's in the rules." 
 
 "What — ^what does he want?" said 
 Marie, in a low voice. 
 
 Philip leaned toward her on the bench. 
 " He wants to come in," said he. 
 
 The girl's fingers were pulling at her hand- 
 kerchief. " Without knowing what is in- 
 side? " she queried. 
 
 " He has seen a child on the battlements 
 and a face at the door," said Philip. 
 
 " But the little child has come out to meet 
 him," she said. " Is that not enough? " 
 
 " No," he answered, " that is not enough." 
 
 " Perhaps nobody but the child has heard 
 the bugle," she said. 
 
 " But the face at the door? " he asked. 
 
 " That might have been an accident," she 
 replied. 
 
 •' Are all bwt the child deaf? " said Philip, 
 
I20 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Yes, that is it, they are all deaf," she 
 answered, hastily. 
 
 " Then I shall blow again, and blow a 
 mighty blast," said he. 
 
 " They are all ver^y deaf," said Marie, 
 
 " I don't believe that," he retorted, trying to 
 look into her face. " I will not believe that." 
 
 " You — ^you will have to," she replied. 
 
 " But the little girl— won't she tell them? " 
 said he. 
 
 "She is a prisoner; they never listen to 
 her," Marie answered. " And they only let 
 her run out a little way now and then." 
 
 " Then she shall be freed," cried Philip, 
 " if I have to blow the walls down ! " 
 
 " You called me Nehemiah, so now you'll 
 be Joshua? " she smiled. 
 
 " Any one you like," said he, with no trace 
 of a smile on his face; " but the walls shall 
 fall, and I shall enter the Great Unknown 1 " 
 
 The girl rose. 
 
 " That sounds like a threat," she said. 
 
 " That sounds like a defiance," he replied. 
 
 " Perhaps it is," said she. " And the little 
 
BUGLER BEFORE THE WALL 1 2 1 
 
 girl — she will have to be kept under lock and 
 key during a state of siege." 
 
 " Till when? " said Philip, anxiously. 
 
 " Till the siege is over," smiled Marie. 
 
 " For ever and ever, till to-morrow? " he 
 asked. 
 
 " I said, till the siege is over," she replied. 
 
 " Can't there be a truce, just to give her 
 fresh air? " said he. 
 
 Marie shook her head. " I said, till the 
 siege is over," she reiterated. " Good bye." 
 
 She moved as if to go. 
 
 Philip stood irresolute. Finally he made 
 a gesture as if flinging something away from 
 him. 
 
 " I have thrown away the bugle horn," he 
 announced. 
 
 " Then the little prisoner can come out 
 again," replied Marie, smiling back at him. 
 
 She moved away, down the path. 
 
 Suddenly he called after her. " The bugle 
 didn't smash I " he cried. But whether she 
 heard or not he could not tell. She gave 
 no sign. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE OLD MEN WHO PLAYED CROQUET 
 
 '"T^HEY were sitting at a table by a window 
 in the Casino. The window was opened. 
 The warm spring breeze bore in to them 
 the fragrance of young grass growing and 
 the smell of gasolene. It is very probable 
 that the latter odor was in the ascendant; but, 
 as Child Marie pointed out, it is well to 
 have a selective smeller. Occasionally, if one 
 sniffed very eagerly and quickly between cars, 
 one could detect the fragrance of young grass 
 growing. 
 
 It was something of an adventure for Child 
 Marie to be sitting in the Casino at all, but 
 to be sitting brazenly at a window table, 
 screened off from the rest of the room, with 
 a member of the hostile sex, unchaperoned 
 — ^well, that was, to put it mildly, an inno- 
 vation. At least, that is what she told Philip, 
 
THE OLD MEN 123 
 
 and a certain hilarity in her spirits seemed to 
 bear her statement out. Philip was non- 
 chalantly smoking a cigarette and flicking the 
 ash into his ice cream saucer. 
 
 " I hate cigarettes," he remarked casually. 
 
 " Then why do you smoke them ? " she 
 inquired. 
 
 " From a painful sense of duty," he replied. 
 " When really grown up people are being 
 wicked as we are now, the gentleman always 
 smokes a cigarette, and flicks the ash non- 
 chalantly into the dregs of his dessert. There 
 must be a deep psychological connection be- 
 tween villainy and cigarettes. I wish I knew 
 what it is." 
 
 " Couldn't a villain smoke a pipe ? " asked 
 Marie. 
 
 He looked at her scornfully. " I fear you 
 do not attend the playhouse," he said. " He 
 could no more do it than a fat man could be 
 
 romantic." 
 
 Marie looked gayly out over the Run-away 
 Place. It was very live that afternoon with 
 birds and children and nurse maids and taxi- 
 
124 THE RUN- AWAY PLACE 
 
 cabs and limousines ; an endless procession of 
 motor vehicles purred by on the drive, two 
 abreast, and others stood waiting under the 
 trees while their occupants were in the Casino. 
 Behind, in the room, was the buzz of talk, 
 the clink of glasses; waiters hurried to and 
 fro. The gay scene had something almost 
 foreign about it, something Viennese. One 
 listened for the heady rhythm of a Strauss 
 waltz, to set the whole animated picture to 
 appropriate music. Marie gave a sigh of 
 satisfaction. " Life is very pleasant," she 
 said. 
 
 " It must be," answered Philip, " so many 
 people have complained that it is short." 
 
 Marie knit her brows. " I'm afraid that's 
 clever," said she. " I hope, Boy, you won't 
 be clever. Anybody can be clever. The 
 really clever person is the one who isn't." 
 
 " Then you're not," he grinned. " Your 
 remark reminds me of Carlyle, who wrote the 
 gospel of silence in twenty volumes." 
 
 " They are silence for me," she smiled, and 
 looked once more out on the gay Park, with 
 
THE OLD MEN 125 
 
 renewed satisfaction. " I feel as if we'd run 
 away to Vienna," she said. 
 
 " So do I," he answered. " This scene 
 reminds me so much of Vienna. Don't you 
 adore Vienna? " 
 
 " I guess so," she replied, with the shade 
 of a smile, " I was never there." 
 
 " Neither was I," said Philip. 
 
 Further reminiscences of travel were inter- 
 rupted by the arrival of a motor party at 
 the nearest table in the room behind, one 
 might say a typical motor party. It consisted 
 of four persons, a man and three women. 
 Philip peeped through the curtains, and has- 
 tily computed their combined weight at 796 
 pounds, in which total the man's weight was 
 not the most conspicuous item. 
 
 " We've heard for some hundreds of 
 years," said he, " about the Fair Sex. I'm 
 going to write an epoch making essay on the 
 Fat Sex." 
 
 " With a sub-title, ' Schopenhauer in the 
 Tenderloin'?" asked Marie. 
 
 *' Not at all," h? answered. " If the issue 
 
126 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 only were so local! But It isn't — it is uni- 
 versal. Diana of the Crosswinds, down there 
 on the Madison Square Garden tower, justi- 
 fies the pun I once made about her. I 
 said Saint Gaudens had imagined a vane 
 thing " 
 
 " Did you say that? " asked Marie. 
 
 " Yes, I did. And it's a good joke, too ! 
 A vain thing she is, indeed, for she is a 
 feminine ideal. In all her divine nudity she 
 catches the sunlight on her slender limbs, and 
 the winds of heaven caress her for love of 
 her loveliness, her springing grace and lithe, 
 keen power. And down below, their eyes 
 on the shop windows, her mortal sisters pass 
 along in endless procession, trussed up on 
 heels of dizzy height, encased in corsets, 
 buried beneath hats of unimaginable ugliness 
 with brims almost as wide as the ladies below. 
 Incapable of active exertion, fat, unlovely. 
 And them we still call the Fair Sex I It is a 
 sad comment on what our own sex must be." 
 
 "Hear, hear!" cried Child Marie. 
 "What a gallant gentleman you are. I'm 
 
THE OLD MEN lay 
 
 glad I have to work so hard. I suppose you 
 wouldn't look at me if I were fat? " 
 
 " Not if I could help it," he laughed. 
 
 Marie shook her head sadly. " You're 
 right, though," she said leaning toward him 
 and speaking low. " Did you see that two 
 hundred pounds of loveliness in lavender sit 
 down just now ? " 
 
 " No, I only heard." 
 
 " Well, she sat down with the abrupt final- 
 ity of the well corseted fat woman. It's al- 
 ways sadly funny. You know how it is with 
 such a woman. Conversation ceases for the 
 moment. She must concentrate on her task. 
 She moves ponderously to the selected seat, 
 faces away, assumes a put-your-trust-in-Grand- 
 Rapids-and-let-her-go expression, and slumps. 
 Being so well upholstered (the lady, not the 
 chair) she feels no pain. Rather do that 
 little grunt and the creak of — of something 
 invisible, signify the strain of a sudden change 
 in attitude, as when a heavily laden schooner 
 comes about on the other tack. For an in- 
 stant surprise at the sudden slump is written 
 
128 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 on her face. Then she beams at the success- 
 ful outcome and resumes the conversation." 
 
 Philip glanced again at the two hundred 
 pounds of loveliness in lavender. It was now 
 engaged in the pleasant occupation of consum- 
 ing three chocolate eclairs and a high ball. 
 
 " Poor thing," he remarked, " she's had no 
 lunch for an hour! I wonder what she'd do 
 if she had to walk? Can you fancy her on 
 the Crawford Bridle Path?" 
 
 " Can you fancy her outside of a city at 
 all, except in a motor car?" said Marie, 
 seriously. " She's an urban product. I think 
 I want to go away from here." 
 
 Just then the man in the motor party spoke 
 up loudly, smacking his lips first as he set 
 down his glass. 
 
 " What's the use of going to the country," 
 he said to his companions, " when you can sit 
 right here and see the green grass and hear 
 the birdies — and call a cab ? " 
 
 " I think I want to go, too," said Philip. 
 
 But he went laughing. 
 
 As they stood for a moment on the steps, a 
 
THE OLD MEN 129 
 
 hansom trailed by. The driver, a lank, sol- 
 emn, elderly gentleman with a plug hat, see- 
 ing them, signaled for a fare. They shook 
 their heads, and he drove on, to be swallowed 
 up in the stream of motor traffic, a two- 
 wheeled anachronism. 
 
 " Poor thing," said Marie, " he looks a 
 ghost out of the past, like a bicycle or a 
 bustle." 
 
 " I wonder what becomes of the cabbies? " 
 said Philip. " When the Elevated road was 
 electrified all the engine drivers got jobs as 
 motor men. But when the hack trade was 
 taxicabbed the chauffeurs all seem to have 
 come from a totally different sphere of life. 
 Look at them as they go by. They are all 
 young and natty and keen eyed, with little 
 mustaches, and the air of lady killers." 
 
 " They are willing to kill anybody," Marie 
 interjected. 
 
 " In fact," he continued, " they seem to 
 belong almost to a different race of beings 
 from the long-faced, funereal gentlemen, or 
 the round-faced, rubicund, jolly-monkish gen- 
 
130 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 tlemen, who used to cruise around Union 
 Square in deep seagoing cabs, looking for 
 temporarily disabled citizens to tow to the 
 home haven for salvage money. The cabs 
 and hansoms are fast disappearing, but you 
 never see their drivers at the wheel of a taxi. 
 What becomes of these picturesque adorn- 
 ments of our rapidly vani^ing civilization? " 
 
 " I can't tell you," said Marie. " Perhaps 
 they retire to their country estates." 
 
 They were wandering through the Park by 
 now, and had cwne to a green lawn on a little 
 plateau under the east wall, whereon were 
 several elderly gentlemen silently and solemnly 
 engaged in playing croquet. Marie and 
 Philip paused to observe them. They were 
 extremely serious over their pastime. One, 
 a tall, thin gentleman, was evidently finishing 
 some sort of a tournament match with a short, 
 rubicund gentleman. This match was keenly 
 watched by all the other old gentlemen who 
 were not playing under the second set of 
 arches. 
 
 As the tall, thin old gentleman nursed his 
 
THE OLD MEN 131 
 
 red ball through the home stretch and drove 
 both red and blue out against the stake, the 
 spectators moved in a solemn, silent phalanx 
 up to him, and gravely shook him by the hand. 
 Meanwhile the short, rubicund opponent, as 
 if ashamed of his defeat, tucked his mallet 
 under his arm and hastened with it toward 
 a little house that stood near by, under the 
 trees. He seemed to be muttering something 
 to himself. The game was instantly begun 
 again by other players. 
 
 Child Marie looked up and down the walk 
 where she and Philip stood, in perplexity. 
 
 " Is it just us? " she asked. " See, nobody 
 else is paying the slightest attention to them. 
 Nobody else seems to see them at all! " 
 
 " I've been thinking the same thing," an- 
 swered Philip, in an awed whisper. " That 
 lawn isn't a play ground. Folks aren't al- 
 lowed on it. Yet nobody is interfering with 
 them. Nobody's stopped to look down on 
 them from over the Avenue wall, either. I 
 don't believe anybody does see them but you 
 and me — and I'm not sure about you." 
 
132 THE RUN- AWAY PLACE 
 
 " I'm going to find out," she answered, and 
 turned to a pleasant faced nurse maid who was 
 passing. 
 
 " Do you know what game those old gentle- 
 men are playing? " she asked. 
 
 The nurse maid looked in the direction her 
 finger pointed, puzzled. 
 
 " I don't see no old men," she said. " Only 
 somebody mowing the grass." 
 
 And she passed on, with a backward glance 
 at the pair who were regarding each other in 
 mute astonishment. 
 
 Presently they turned simultaneously to- 
 ward the lawn. Yes, the old gentlemen were 
 still at it, and the short, rubicund old gentle- 
 man had returned from the little house, minus 
 his mallet, and now stood near one stake under 
 a tree, looking on. In defiance of all Park 
 regulations Marie and Philip straddled the 
 low fence and walked across the soft turf till 
 they stood directly behind him. 
 
 " Pardon us," said Philip. 
 
 The short, rubicund old gentleman evi- 
 dently had not heard them approach. He 
 
THE OLD MEN 133 
 
 gave a start of surprise, almost as if he were 
 pulling back on something. 
 
 "Whoal" he said. 
 
 Then he turned around and touched his 
 hat, which was an oddly old-fashioned stove 
 pipe, shading green with age. 
 
 " Pardon me. Miss," he said, " and you. 
 Sir. But folks so seldom address us here." 
 
 " Why is that? " they both asked. 
 
 " Well, it's this way — they don't see us." 
 
 " But how did we see you?" asked Philip. 
 " We know the rest don't." 
 
 " Want an automobile? " inquired the rubi- 
 cund old gentleman. 
 
 " I do not, I hate 'em," said Philip. 
 
 " So do I, especially the smell," said Marie. 
 " But what has that to do with our question ? " 
 
 " That's your answer," said the old gentle- 
 man, genially. He was not, they observed, 
 such a very old gentleman ; and neither were 
 the others, still silently engaged In their cro- 
 quet. There was something oddly old fash- 
 ioned about them, which gave them their 
 aspect from a distance of extreme antiquity. 
 
134 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " But," said Philip, " we don't understand 
 you." 
 
 "Why," said the rubicund one, brushing 
 his old hat on his sleeve, " it's simple enough. 
 We're invisible in the Park to everybody who 
 sports a benzine buggy, or wants to sport 
 one. That's why you startled me so. I ain't 
 been spoke to here before, since a year ago 
 come next month. Waldorf Willie over 
 there — he's the tall one that just licked me 
 because I was up all night finishin' Royce's 
 ' Philosophy of Loyalty,' and my eye was 
 off — ^Willie's never been spoke to, and he's 
 been playin' here goin' on three year come 
 next July." 
 
 " I see," said Marie. " It's all quite plain 
 
 now." 
 
 "But I don't see at all," said Philip. 
 " It's not a bit plain." 
 
 " Boy," she whispered, " the hat — the 
 ' Whoa ' — his gesture — ^Waldorf Willie — 
 don't you see ? They are the cabbies! " 
 
 Philip drew in a long breath. " Gee, I 
 believe you're right I " he exclaimed. " That's 
 
THE OLD MEN 135 
 
 why you have to hate motor cars to see 
 them." 
 
 " Of course." 
 
 "But the Park authorities, how do they 
 come to let you play on this lawn?" asked 
 Philip. 
 
 The old cabbie laughed. " They don't 
 know," he answered. " They all want 
 bubbles too. Even the guy over there run- 
 nin' the horse mower, he wants an auto 
 mower. We pull up the arches when we see 
 him comin', and put 'em down again when 
 he's past." 
 
 " Couldn't he mow right through them? " 
 inquired Marie. 
 
 " Certainly not ! " exclaimed the cabbie. 
 " They are real arches." 
 
 "But why do you play croquet?" said 
 Philip. 
 
 "Why shouldn't we play croquet?" said 
 the cabbie. 
 
 As there seemed to be no conclusive answer 
 to this, Philip watched the games for a bit 
 in silence. 
 
136 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " It's an odd way you play, anyhow," he 
 said presently. 
 
 " We appointed a rules committee two 
 years ago," said the cabbie, " to eliminate the 
 brutality from the game." 
 
 " The what? " exclaimed the children. 
 
 " The brutality," answered the elderly 
 gentleman. " We no longer use flamingoes." 
 
 " Have you eliminated the Queen of 
 Hearts, too ? " asked Marie. 
 
 " Mercy," said the cabbie, "she eliminated 
 herself! She bought an eighty horse power, 
 bright red tourin' car some while ago, 
 and was smashed up speedin'. Hadn't you 
 heard?" 
 
 Philip passed his hand over his brow. 
 "No," he said. "It didn't get into the 
 papers, I guess." 
 
 " Funny," remarked the cabbie. " I don't 
 s'pose you saw Waldorf Willie's poem the 
 other day, either, did you ? " 
 
 They shook their heads. 
 
 " It was called ' An Ode on a Distant Pros- 
 pect of a Hansom Cab,' It was written en- 
 
THE OLD MEN 137 
 
 tirely in taximeter ; really quite clever. I wish 
 I had a copy to show you." 
 
 " How odd," said Marie, 
 
 " What's odd? " asked the old cabbie, with 
 some asperity. 
 
 " Why — ^why — a cabbie's knowing Gray's 
 poems, and writing odes," said Marie. 
 
 " Not at all, not at all," the other replied. 
 " I suppose you've heard of Francis Thomp- 
 son ? Well, he drove a cab, didn't he ? " 
 
 As he undoubtedly did drive a cab, and 
 as the old gentleman was plainly rather 
 touchy on the point, Marie hastened to change 
 the subject. 
 
 " You spoke of reading Prof. Royce's 
 ' Philosophy of Loyalty,' " she said. " Are 
 you a disciple of Prof. Royce? " 
 
 " Oh, no," answered the cabbie, cheery 
 once more, " / am a Pragmatist." 
 
 " Gee," said Philip, " don't tell me you are 
 a member of the Harvard Club ! " 
 
 " The nearest I ever got to that," answered 
 the other, " was the curb. No, Sir, I learned 
 myself." 
 
138 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 (" He done a good job," whispered Marie 
 in Philip's ear.) 
 
 " Did you do it all while you were driving 
 a cab?" asked Philip. 
 
 " Yes, Sir. The Tenderloin drove me to 
 drink — of the Pierian Spring. I developed 
 bibliomania in self defence. Would you like 
 to hear about it? " 
 
 His rubicund face shone with amiable van- 
 ity. To refuse him would have been cruel. 
 But neither wished to refuse. 
 
 " Come and sit on a bench," said Marie, 
 " and tell us." 
 
 He shook his head. " No," he answered. 
 " I dassn't. Somebody is sure to sit down 
 on me." 
 
 " I'll put my cane across you," said Philip. 
 To this the old gentleman consented. They 
 hunted out a secluded bench, and with Philip's 
 stick across his lap he sat between them and 
 told the tale of 
 
THE OLD MEN 139 
 
 Ubc :t3il)Iiomaniacal Cabbie 
 
 " There's nothin' to this line o' dope the 
 near high-brows hand out, who write books 
 about ' In Key with the Eternal Verities,' and 
 such like," he began, " and the Ethical Tor- 
 ture teachers, too — I mean this dope that any- 
 body can make himself what he wants to be, 
 ■if he wants to be it hard enough. It's like the 
 from-the-log-cabin-to-the-White-House pipe 
 dream that any boy can be President, they 
 used to hand us down in the old North Moore 
 Street school when I was a kid. The will to 
 believe in yourself is all very well, if it don't 
 end by sourin' you on the cosmos when your 
 vanity gets the jolt that's waitin' for it. God 
 started out to make me a poet — He gave me 
 an Irish mother. But He botched the job 
 by givin' me an English father. I tried to 
 mend the bungle for myself an' be a Keats. 
 I ended by bein' a cabbie. 
 
 " The best compromise I could strike with 
 my environment was to collect books, since 
 I couldn't write 'em. I've never turned out 
 
I40 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 a poem like Shelley, but I got a copy of the 
 first edition of 'The Cenci,' an' there was 
 only two hundred and fifty of 'em printed! 
 Many a time, as I've waited out in the slush 
 for a G. M. Cohan show to get over, so's 
 I could take my fare an' his fat fairy to some 
 gilded lobster palace, waited blowin' on my 
 fingers an' swingin' my arms, and looked at 
 by my fare when he did come like the scum 
 under his feet, many a time, I say, I've 
 thought how I'd be ashamed to go to a G. M. 
 Cohan show, but my fare, he wouldn't read 
 six pages of ' The Cenci,' an' couldn't tell 
 a first from an East Aurora re-print bound 
 in lame — I mean limp — leather, lined with a 
 piece o' yellow silk petticoat. It was a damn 
 lot o' comfort, I want to tell yer — I begs your 
 pardon. Miss! " 
 
 " Not at all," said Marie. " I agree with 
 you entirely." 
 
 " Well, now, you're the right sort, you are," 
 said the cabbie. " I'll bet your beau here went 
 to college and learnt all about books easy. It 
 wa'n't easy for me. I couldn't go to college, 
 
THE OLD MEN 141 
 
 I had to go to work in the stable. Saint 
 Gaudens, him as made the bronze statue down 
 there of the gent who said, ' War is Hell,' 
 he had genius. He didn't go to no college, 
 neither, but he could make things with his 
 hands, an' he'd have carved his way up if 
 he'd started as low as I did. But I didn't 
 have no genius drivin' me. I just knew I 
 loved to read, and I made rhymes about 
 things — mostly my teachers ; and my old Irish 
 mother, God rest her soul, told me tales of 
 the fairies back in the old country. But when 
 I went to work I just took natural to the 
 stables, an' never knowed there was anythin' 
 else I could do. Fact, I don't know it now — 
 there wa'n't nothin' else. God made me a 
 cabbie." 
 
 The old man lapsed into silence, rubbing 
 his hat. 
 
 " But the collecting? " Philip prompted. 
 
 " Well, you see, it was this way," he con- 
 tinued; " a cabbie has lots o' time to think. 
 Most folks has more time to think than they 
 ever use, I reckon. I got to thinkin' one day 
 
142 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 that what a man did for a livin' didn't so 
 much matter as how he lived. It was easy 
 enough to say we was as good as the folks 
 we drove to the opera, but I'd never really 
 believed that line o' con, though I'd handed 
 it out over the bar, like the others. But, 
 thinks I this day I'm tellin' you of, I can 
 be just as good as the swells. Not that I 
 could ever eat with 'em, and talk with 'em, 
 and be one of 'em. There were some of 'em 
 I wouldn't want to talk with, and that's 
 straight. But, thinks I, there must be things 
 a man turns over in his nut which don't have 
 nothin' to do with birth or money, which a 
 cabbie can have as well as a swell — ideas and 
 things; and maybe, thinks I, they're just as 
 good an' can make him just as happy as a 
 brown stone house, and joy rags, and an opera 
 box. 
 
 " So I took to wonderin' what one o' these 
 things was that I could get ahold of, never 
 dreamin' it might be books, till one day, 
 waitin' for a fare on Fourth Avenue, I picks 
 up a copy of Chaucer out front of a second 
 
THE OLD MEN 143 
 
 hand shop, an' opened to somethin' I never 
 forgot. Old Mortality used to open his 
 Bible chance like, an' go by what he read. 
 Well, I've went by what I read in Chaucer. 
 It was hard readin' for me then. You know 
 Artemus Ward says Chaucer was a great pote, 
 but he couldn't spell. But I made out the 
 meanin'. I've never forgot them lines. 
 They go this way: 
 
 " And as for me, though than I konne but lyte, 
 On bokes for to rede I me delyte, 
 And to hem yive I feyth and full credence, 
 And in myn herte have hem in reverence 
 So hertely, that ther is game noon, 
 That fro my bokes maketh me to goon." 
 
 "Isn't there one game, croquet?" put in 
 Marie, slyly. 
 
 The old cabbie grinned. " Maybe so," 
 he said. " But not in them days. Well, I 
 just set to work to learn myself about books. 
 Of course, I'd read story books, and maga- 
 zines, and some his'tries. But I wanted to 
 know about real books, an' to have real books 
 of my own. When I think o' them days! 
 
144 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Well, I even dreamed o' writin' a book my- 
 self, a poetry book. I sat up nights grindin' 
 at it for a month — an' then I read Keats, an' 
 tore it all up." 
 
 " To have the courage ! " said Philip, half 
 to himself. 
 
 "Well, it come hard," said the cabbie. 
 " But, Lor', what stuff it was ! So that learnt 
 me one thing — I wa'n't no poet. After that 
 I just stuck to readin' and coUectin'." 
 
 " But," said Philip, " you say you have a 
 first of ' The Cenci.' That's one of the 
 rarest of Shelley items. How did you learn 
 about firsts, and how could you afford to 
 buy them? " 
 
 " It was a dead man's butler that put me 
 next," he answered. 
 
 Marie and Philip looked at him in wonder. 
 
 " Fact," he continued. " The family lived 
 down on East Fifteenth Street, which was 
 some swell in them days — old Knickerbocker 
 family, fine old father with a big library, an' 
 children who cared more for the ponies. 
 Well, I used to bring home the son from 
 
THE OLD MEN 145 
 
 places often, an' got to know the butler — 
 sometimes needed his help. Pardon these 
 details, Miss! One day the old fellow died 
 an' then, a bit after, the butler showed me 
 fifty bones he'd got from a second hand book 
 dealer for a barrel o' pamphlets an' stuff the 
 family'd cleaned off the old man's shelves. 
 Thinks I, I'll go see it. I liked the old man, 
 an' I had a hunch there might be some New 
 York historical stuff in the barrel. Drivin' 
 around the streets all day, you get a hankerin' 
 to know somethin' about their history. 
 That's how I learnt all the Park gates here 
 have names. Ever know that? That's the 
 Stoodent's Gate down at the Plaza. It's the 
 Children's Gate on the Avenue, at Seventy- 
 second Street. Odd, ain't It, how nobody 
 ever calls 'em by their names? 
 
 " Well, I went to the dealer's, and. Holy 
 Tootin' Taxicabs, what do you think? He 
 had twenty o' them old books an' pamphlets 
 priced at over fifty plunks apiece, and was 
 gettin' it, too! 
 
 "That put me wise, all right, all right. 
 
146 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 First, I began by hangin' round the old book 
 shops, and talkin' with the dealers. Then I 
 slipped up to Bangs' when I could get off, 
 an' studied priced catalogues. I didn't read 
 nothin' for months but stuff about coUectin.' 
 An' when I thought I knew a bit about it, 
 I began to watch the death notices in the 
 papers. 
 
 " It was the old fellers I was after, who'd 
 lived in the same house for a life-time. No- 
 body lives in a house in this town for a life- 
 time any more. 'Bout once in twenty — maybe 
 not so often — the butler'd have old stuff from 
 clearin' up the library, he was glad to let me 
 look over. That's how I started my collec- 
 tion. I was makin' good money an' livin' 
 single, so's I had plenty to spend. I began 
 to gather in American firsts at figures you 
 wouldn't believe, an' sellin' duplicates enough 
 to give me money to take a flyer now and 
 then at Bangs' for the big stuff, so for a while 
 I was buyin' fast. 'Course, I bought a heap 
 o' dead ones. But I got the junk weeded out 
 now, and I got 800 beauts, I tell you. An' 
 
THE OLD MEN 147 
 
 what's more, I've read 'em all. Them an' 
 croquet, what more does a man want? I 
 guess the swells don't put it over me much, 
 after all I" 
 
 " What have you got? " said Philip. 
 
 " Well, I ain't no John Carter Brown, nor 
 a J. Pierpont Morgan. I ain't got a First 
 Folio of Shakespeare nor a Bay Psalm Book, 
 nor a whole row o' tall Caxtons. I ain't got 
 any incunabula that are worth much, 'cept to 
 me. I got one or two wormy ones just to 
 show how printin' began. They do well 
 enough, and you can get 'em cheap. 'Course, 
 I'd like to own the Psalter of Mentz, the 
 first dated book. The edition dated 1459, 
 two years later, sold for most $25,000 in 
 1884. I'd have to run a taxicab to buy that 
 — and it ain't worth it ! I ain't got no Cax- 
 tons, either. All the rich bugs is after Cax- 
 tons now. They're way up where the Elze- 
 virs used to be, most as high as the Elzevirs 
 is said to be in fool novels. When I begun 
 coUectin', the Elzevirs had begun to go down, 
 but the Aldines were still up. They've 
 
148 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 knocked them down now, too. I got two 
 myself. Alas, the fall in their values shows 
 the decline of classic culture ! " 
 
 And the old cabbie sighed profoundly. 
 
 But he soon cheered up and continued his 
 catalogue. " The first really good books I 
 got," he said, " were Baskervilles. I ain't got 
 the Folio Bible of 1763, but I got the three 
 volume Congreve, with the Kneller portrait, 
 and the Esop, with the pretty vignettes. The 
 Baskerville Press is goin' to be more appre- 
 ciated than it is some day; that feller could 
 print, I tell you ! I bought 'em in the open 
 market and they represent some waitin' in 
 front o' lobster palaces, an' don't you forget 
 it. But most o' my good stuff come out of 
 the butlers' barrels, and it's Americana. T'be 
 sure, I got ' The Cenci ' off a butler, an' the 
 first edition of the Rubaiyat " 
 
 " What I " cried Philip, " don't tell me you 
 have that?" 
 
 " I sure have," said the cabbie. " Paid 
 five bones for it, along with a lot o' New 
 York pamphlets and some junk. That was 
 
THE OLD MEN 149 
 
 the day I most got the elephant folio of 
 Audubon's Birds." 
 
 Again the cabbie sighed deeply. 
 
 " They were hard up, that family," he went 
 on. " I offered the daughter fifty dollars 
 for the Audubon, prayin' she didn't know. 
 And I guess she didn't; she was nothin' but 
 a kid. But just then the widdy come into 
 the room, an' gummed the game. That's 
 where I was stung a couple o' thousand, 
 maybe more." 
 
 He ruminated a moment in silence. 
 
 " I got a first of Higginson's ' New Eng- 
 lands Plantation,' " he continued, " out of 
 another barrel. That's good for five hundred 
 plunks any time. And I got a first of 
 Lowell's Commemoration Ode. I guess 
 that's goin' some." 
 
 " Hold on I " cried Philip. " There are 
 limits, you know! Don't tell me you got 
 that out of a barrel." 
 
 "How else would I get it? You don't 
 s'pose I could buy it in open market, do you, 
 an' me a cabbie? I soaked my fares some 
 
150 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 in my day, but I wa'n't no Shylock. I got 
 a ' White Footed Deer,' too, off the same 
 butler. Both of 'em was covered with dust. 
 They're under cover now, you can bet." 
 
 " Who wrote ' The White Footed Deer ' ? " 
 asked Marie. 
 
 " Bryant," said Philip. " This is Incredi- 
 ble. I'm going to haunt dead men's doors." 
 
 " Maybe I was born lucky," said the old 
 cabbie. " I got a first of ' Alice In Wonder- 
 land ' and ' Through the Lookin' Glass ' 
 'cause the kids had growed up an' didn't want 
 'em no more. And — here's a good one! — 
 one day, way back twenty-eight years ago, I 
 took a bally Britisher up from the steamer to 
 his hotel, an' he left a book in the cab, an' 
 never come for it. Guess what it was? " 
 
 "Tell me," said Philip. " FU believe 
 anything." 
 
 " It was Burton's ' Kasidah.' Ever read 
 it?" 
 
 "Yes, I've read it," answered Philip, a 
 little testily. " I've got it. My edition cost 
 two fifty, though, and was printed in 1900. 
 
THE OLD MEN 151 
 
 There were only one hundred copies of the 
 first — ^yours. They bring something like two 
 hundred and fifty when one of them turns 
 up." 
 
 " Exactly," said the old cabby, wiith a 
 genial smile, " exactly. You know, I get my 
 Omar out o' that, instead of FitzGerald. In 
 the old days when we had horse cars in New 
 York I used to listen to 'em comin' through 
 the side streets, jinglin', janglin' above the 
 roar, an' say to myself, over an' over, 
 
 Wend now thy way with brow serene, fear not 
 thy humble tale to tell; — 
 
 The whisper of the Desert-wind, the Tinkling of the 
 Camel's bell. 
 
 Sometimes I'd shut my eyes, an' most make 
 myself think for a minute I was in the desert. 
 An' somehow the lines made me feel better, 
 more contented, maybe, with bein' a cabbie. 
 I was some sore when the old horse cars 
 was taken off. That's the great thing about 
 books — ^you keep 'em at home, where they're 
 always waitin' for you, patient like; but you 
 take 'em out with you, too, an' they come 
 
152 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 at you sudden in bits, sometimes, makin' the 
 place where you are or the thing you're doin' 
 all glorified." 
 
 "Oh, lovely! " cried Marie, clapping her 
 hands. 
 
 The old cabbie beamed appreciation upon 
 her. 
 
 " Say, let an illiterate old collector give 
 you two young uns a tip," he said. " Now, 
 this is straight. You two'll get spliced some 
 day " 
 
 Marie turned fiery red, and Philip raised 
 his hand to protest, but the old cabbie laughed 
 jovially, and was not to be rebuked. 
 
 " You'll get spliced some day," he went 
 on, this time turning to Philip, " and you'll 
 have the dough to do it, which I didn't — to 
 support a madam and a book shelf at the 
 same time, I mean. Now you love 'em both, 
 see? I ain't sayin' maybe I couldn't 'a' kept 
 a wife, but there wa'n't no wife for me in 
 my class. There ain't many women folks 
 who understand an' love books, nohow; they 
 may say they do, but they'd just as soon have 
 
THE OLD MEN 153 
 
 a last edition as a first, maybe sooner. And 
 there ain't none in the class I come from. 
 But your girl, here, she's different. Now, 
 you two'U start a little library an' it'll grow 
 and grow, an' be a comfort to you both all 
 your life long." 
 
 " That depends on whether you have to 
 move — the comfort, I mean," said Marie, 
 coloring hotly when she thought of the con- 
 text. 
 
 " Folks move too much," said the old fel- 
 low. " It's the curse of the age. But when 
 you get books, get good uns. Don't believe 
 this con about editions not matterin'. That's 
 bromide stuff. A man who'll read a poem 
 in a cheap reprint when he could read it in 
 a first would wear a paste diamond when he 
 could have the real stone. And it ain't only 
 what's in the books that counts; it's havin' 
 the fun o' coUectin' 'em, the pride o' ownin' 
 'em. You can't collect nothin' that's more 
 worth coUectin', and any man who don't col- 
 lect somethin' — ^well, he may be layin' up for 
 himself treasures in heaven, but it's more 
 
154 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 likely he's layin' up to a bar. I tell you, 
 it don't matter who you are or what kind o' 
 folks you sprung from, Man's got an instinct 
 to gather round him some little bit o' the 
 good things o' this world, an' it's one o' the 
 instincts that boosts him up above the beasts, 
 I don't give a tarnation damn — excuse again, 
 Miss — what the preachers say. 
 
 " Goin' on forty year I've steered a cab 
 round this village an' been the scum under 
 rich dames' silken shoes; but up in my room 
 under the roof of a house where they wouldn't 
 soil their skirts by enterin', I've been layin' 
 up treasures that have made more of a man 
 o' me than some o' them ladies — ^which is 
 Irish ; that for goin' on thirty year have been 
 waitin' for me when I gets home at night, 
 like a reception of the best society ; that have 
 put lines o' poetry into my head an' comfort 
 into my heart; that have learned me to see 
 things interestin' and beautiful as I drove 
 round the town; and that, any time I get 
 hard up, can be turned into cash every bit 
 as good as stocks and bonds. They ain't 
 
THE OLD MEN 15^; 
 
 never learned me to talk right grammar, but 
 ain't the body more than the raiment? " 
 
 " A great, great deal more," said Marie, 
 smiling at him. 
 
 " But," said Philip, " won't you let us see 
 your books some time? The first of Fitz- 
 Gerald's Rub " 
 
 The old cabbie had suddenly risen. 
 
 " I must be goin' " he said hastily. 
 
 Before either could detain him he had 
 stepped into the path, and moved quickly 
 away. To their astonished eyes, he seemed 
 to slip directly through a baby carriage. They 
 were looking into the sun ; perhaps it blinded 
 them. In another moment there was no old 
 man to be seen. 
 
 " There ain't no such animal I " gasped 
 Philip, sinking back on the bench. 
 
 " Come on, quick! " said Marie. 
 
 They hastened to the croquet lawn. All 
 the old men had vanished. Again they 
 climbed the rail. There were no stakes nor 
 arches. Yet, where the arches had been, the 
 
156 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 grass seemed to be worn. Just then they saw 
 a Park officer hurrying toward them, ges- 
 ticulating angrily — and they fled. 
 
 " It was good advice, just the same," 
 panted Child Marie, as she sat down in the 
 summer-house by the rocks. 
 
 Child Philip sat down beside her. 
 
 " It was very good advice," he answered. 
 " I'll bet there is something in that dead man's 
 butler game." 
 
 " Boy," said Marie, " I don't mean that 
 at all. I mean about having good books, 
 and the contents of good books, in the back- 
 ground of your consciousness to add meaning 
 and beauty to the more or less humdrum and 
 sordid daily facts of life." 
 
 " Naturally," said Philip. " Don't be a 
 bromide." 
 
 She looked at him quickly, hurt. 
 
 " Pardon me, Marie," he cried, with in- 
 stant penitence, putting out his hand. " But 
 I can't get over his having a first of the 
 Rubaiyat." 
 
 " Are you sure he has ? " said Marie. 
 
THE OLD MEN 157 
 
 " I'm not sure of anything ! Yes I am, 
 too. I'm sure of one thing." 
 
 "And that is?" 
 
 " How many books have you got? " asked 
 Philip. 
 
 " I don't know, two hundred, maybe. Of 
 course, they aren't firsts, as you say. A great 
 many of them I fear are lasts. And I'm sure 
 I haven't any incunabula — whatever they are. 
 But what has that got to do " 
 
 " I've got about eight hundred," Philip re- 
 marked as if to himself. " A lot of them 
 are reference books I have to own. One 
 can't work in the Astor Library, dirty old 
 hole. Of course, there'd be some dupli- 
 cates " 
 
 "What are you talking about?" asked 
 Marie. 
 
 He looked at her oddly. " I was just 
 thinking," he answered, "of something the 
 old cabbie said." 
 
 He continued to look at her, and moved 
 closer on the bench. She shrank as If fright- 
 ened. 
 
158 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Did you notice," he said, " that the old 
 cabbie never knew we were children?" 
 
 " You — you seem glad." 
 
 " I am, I am very glad. He was, maybe, 
 a discerning old collector after all, who 
 knows? " 
 
 Marie rose quickly. 
 
 " We are children," she said. " We must 
 be children, do you understand? If you 
 grow up, Boy, I shall never come here to the 
 Run-away Place again. That was our bar- 
 gain; you must keep it." 
 
 " Maybe I mustn't, maybe I won't, maybe 
 I can't," he replied, smiling up at her. 
 
 But his smile was not returned. Her face 
 had grown very grave. 
 
 " If you won't," she said, " I am very 
 sorry, for I shall never see you again. Good- 
 bye." 
 
 He sprang to her side. 
 
 " I won't, I won't, honest Injun," he cried. 
 " I'll be a child, an infant. I'll google and 
 drule. Only come again." 
 
 She smiled at him gravely. 
 
THE OLD MEN 159 
 
 " You needn't google and drule," she said. 
 " But next time you musn't be over ten, and 
 you must play very nicely. You mustn't pick 
 up the bugle. Will you promise ? " 
 
 He raised his right hand. 
 
 " So help me 1 " he said. 
 
 So at the little gate in the wall at Sixty- 
 seventh Street she left him. He watched 
 her out of sight, and then turned toward the 
 lawn where the old men had played croquet. 
 In the centre of it, quite alone, a squirrel was 
 sitting on his hind legs, eating a peanut. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE GLUEBIRD AND THE DUTCH BABY 
 
 '"T^HE Bluebird stood on his wooden perch 
 behind the glass doors of the cabinet, 
 and looked out over the kindergarten room, to 
 where, beyond the windows, the trees in the 
 court yard were beginning to put on their 
 summer green. 
 
 All through the long, cold months he had 
 stood so, wondering to see the bare limbs of 
 autumn, wondering still more to see the white- 
 ness of winter, and to feel the icy breath that 
 crept sobbing through the key-hole, on the 
 days when the room stood empty and silent. 
 This, then, this cold breath, was the meaning 
 of all those strange South feelings that drove 
 one to forsake nest and comfort every year, 
 and to fly, fly, fly till one almost dropped. He 
 had never really understood why until now. 
 How fortunate one had those irresistible 
 
 i6o 
 
THE GLUEBIRD i6i 
 
 South feelings! He shivered as he remem- 
 bered the cold that came creeping through the 
 key-hole. 
 
 Only once since he had come to live there 
 had he left the cabinet, so he would have re- 
 membered the occasion, even if it had not been 
 connected with great events. The first of 
 these events was the coming of a tree, a hem- 
 lock, which appeared in the room one day. 
 Then the cabinet door was unlocked, and he 
 was taken out, and his wooden perch fastened 
 to one of the branches, while a ring of danc- 
 ing children shouted, " Fly, bluebird, fly ! " 
 and, " Sing us a song ! " He had tried, but 
 his voice was gone. 
 
 The second event was that after this one 
 brief, gay adventure, he had kept watch over 
 an empty room for many days — how long they 
 seemed I — ^while outside the window there was 
 much whiteness, and the wind in the key-hole 
 moaned every night. Then came a day when 
 the room was again full of children and chat- 
 ter, and he remembered it well, because on 
 that day the Dutch Baby first came to smile at 
 
1 62 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 him, which was the last and greatest event 
 that happened to the Bluebird. 
 
 He had never been a proud fellow as birds 
 go. Of course, it was only natural that he 
 should favor blue as a choice of costume, and 
 he sometimes had a consciousness that the 
 manners of the Robin family were not so 
 delicate as his own — consider the question of 
 keeping in the public eye, for instance ! But 
 after the coming of the Dutch Baby, it took 
 all his strength of mind to remain modest, for 
 from that first morning when the smile had 
 crept through the key-hole, like a breath of 
 summer, and a moist finger had plastered a 
 moist kiss on the glass immediately protecting 
 his beak, the Dutch Baby had had eyes for 
 nothing else. 
 
 The Bird wished sometimes that it could 
 hear what the Dutch Baby was saying as he 
 stood in front of the cabinet, with adoring 
 eyes, but the glass prevented that, and how 
 seldom the door was opened! Not that he 
 had minded this very much during the long, 
 cold time, but now those days of eerie winds 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 163 
 
 were over, and a great longing filled his soul, 
 a longing to leave his wooden perch in the 
 cabinet and once more to feel the swinging 
 branch beneath his feet, to rock like a blue 
 flower in the breeze, to play " Hunt the 
 worm " with other sprightly comrades. He 
 was afraid to try his voice, but once in the 
 free air, who knew what might happen? 
 Perhaps — perhaps he might even fly! And 
 ever and again he looked wistfully at the 
 young green beyond the windows. 
 
 And then there came a morning when the 
 Dutch Baby stood in front of the cabinet with 
 a face of exalted solemnity, a solemnity aris- 
 ing not from sorrow but from a too deep sense 
 of anticipation. For many minutes he stood 
 there, motionless, then slowly and with the 
 same triumphant gravity he began to dance. 
 Up and down and one — two — three, up and 
 down and one — two — three, while the strains 
 of " The Mosquito Parade " floated into the 
 room. The teacher stopped in the doorway : 
 
 " The wine of spring," she murmured. 
 
 The Dutch Baby turned around, stopped 
 
1 64 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 one leg in mid-air, and said without punctua- 
 tion, " Goot-morning I haf a kiss for you see 
 mine socks the day it iss when der Gluebird 
 out comes for him I dance." 
 
 Long training had enabled teacher to digest 
 morsels of this sort without an effort. She 
 shook hands, admired the socks, took the kiss, 
 and produced the key to the cabinet. The 
 Bluebird's dreams were coming true! He 
 was to spend a day in the great world again. 
 The Dutch Baby received him as a devout 
 worshiper receives the holy bread. 
 
 "Ach, mein Gluebird!" he crooned, and 
 ran his fore-finger from tip to tail, " Ach, 
 mine Gluebird ! So goot you are. Like der 
 sky iss you back, und der rest like mein socks. 
 All day near me you shall stay, und after — " 
 here he stopped, and in his eyes began to grow 
 the light of a great purpose — " und after to 
 der Park we will go, und play, und play, und 
 play!" 
 
 " Hans," said teacher, " what are you 
 talking about?" 
 
 " To mine Gluebird wass I speaking," came 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 165 
 
 the dignified answer. " So long hass he not 
 heard me! Could I to mein house bring 
 him ? Und to-morrow he should come back." 
 
 " No, Hans," said teacher. " You come 
 to-morrow, and the Bluebird will be waiting 
 for you here." 
 
 The Dutch Baby said nothing, but the light 
 of the great purpose still glowed. 
 
 Now see on what slender threads our for- 
 tunes hang, the Bluebird's on a yard of black 
 veiling which, blown by the breeze from the 
 window, was hiding under the dressing table 
 in Dutch Baby's mutter's room, while mutter 
 herself hunted through bureau drawers with 
 one eye on the clock. 
 
 " For you he'll surely wait," said the Dutch 
 Baby's tante, " Never will he start for home 
 alone." 
 
 But tante had not seen the glow of the great 
 purpose, nor did she know that at the very 
 moment of her comforting assurance, the 
 Dutch Baby, with the Bluebird buttoned close 
 to his knocking heart, was standing tip-toe on 
 the comer of the street. To the east lay 
 
i66 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 home, convention, the commonplace, to the 
 west, freedom, adventure, glory — in a word, 
 the Park. A thousand green fingers beckoned 
 alluringly, a thousand invisible cords wound 
 themselves about the brown and yellow socks 
 and pulled away from duty. The poise for 
 flight became merged into flight itself, and 
 with feet that scarce touched the stones the 
 Dutch Baby flew toward the beckoning green 
 fingers at the end of the street. 
 
 Only once did he pause for breath — or was 
 is that? — ^when at last he had passed within 
 the enchanted gateway, and a donkey bestrid- 
 den by a rufiled cherub crossed the path in 
 front of him. He cautiously undid the top 
 button of his coat, and drew the Bluebird's 
 head into the light of day. 
 
 " Ach, mein Gluebird," he whispered, 
 " many moneys it takes to ride, udderwise 
 would I ride mit you. But soon we will play." 
 
 The Bluebird said nothing, — was not his 
 voice gone ? Yet how green the trees were ! 
 And that smell of earth, how well he remem- 
 bered it I And what banquets it suggested! 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 167 
 
 Could it be that his mouth was watering? 
 But the Dutch Baby was again in flight, and 
 the swift and unaccustomed rush of air, 
 against a face so long shut from it, drove the 
 Bluebird's thoughts quite away. 
 
 How fast the Dutch Baby could travel 1 
 On, on, he sped, past summer-houses, across 
 roads, under bridges, and finally up a little in- 
 cline to a smooth, green place, which stretched 
 out vastly on both sides of a broad path where 
 the trees arched overhead. At intervals the 
 Bluebird could see great stone pieces, with 
 figures atop, standing on the green. The 
 Dutch Baby glanced around him. 
 
 " Behind der shentleman will we sit," he 
 said, " on der grass, und den you shall come 
 out." 
 
 " You see," Child Philip was saying, argu- 
 mentatively, " I am absolutely ready and will- 
 ing to fulfill my promise, but you do not help 
 a bit. I am ready and willing to be ten, and 
 not a day over, but here you are walking more 
 or less demurely in the garb of maturity, you 
 
i68 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 who insisted on being children. If the per- 
 fectly natural impulse should seize me to ride 
 a donkey, or drive a goat carriage, or make 
 my tummy sick on the carousel, you wouldn't 
 dare do it, too. A fine child, you are ! " 
 
 Marie began to twinkle. " I'd do any of 
 them, if you would," she said, " particularly 
 the goat carriages in the Mall — if it wasn't 
 for the statues ! " 
 
 " If you were really a child you wouldn't 
 mind the statues — you'd rather like 'em. 
 Coward, I dare you to keep your own promise 
 and be ten for the afternoon." 
 
 Marie stopped suddenly, and looked up at 
 him with eyes in which a mysterious gleam 
 had replaced the twinkle. 
 
 " Over there," she said, pointing, " is some- 
 thing folk call the Mall, and if we should 
 cross it over the road, we'd see the statues. 
 But there is another way, an enchanted way. 
 Follow me." 
 
 She ran swiftly down a descending path, 
 through a dark cavern that echoed one's foot- 
 steps, Philip pounding after. They mounted 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 169 
 
 stone steps at the farther end, and found 
 themselves under ancient, arching trees. And 
 just at that instant the Dutch Baby and the 
 Bluebird sat down behind Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 Child Marie grasped Philip's arm and 
 pointed to the small, dark object in the rear 
 of the pondering statue. 
 
 " What do you see? " she exclaimed.. 
 
 Philip looked, and they moved silently 
 nearer. The Dutch Baby was taking the 
 Bluebird tenderly from his bosom and putting 
 him on the grass, smoothing a ruffled tail- 
 feather with eager fingers. 
 
 " Ach, mein Gluebird," they heard him 
 say, " here iss der Park. Now could you fly, 
 
 und sing, und catch der " He paused 
 
 and wrinkled his forehead. " Auf English I 
 cannot tell it, but you could of them eat," he 
 finished triumphantly, " und on der ground 
 dey lif und choomp." 
 
 The Bluebird listened with upturned beak. 
 Around him blew again the free air of spring; 
 the grass tickled his feet, and in his nostrils 
 quivered the sense of a near-by worm. Above 
 
I70 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 his head green branches waved, and a jaunty 
 robin ran along the edge of the path. But 
 he did not move. There was a strange stiff- 
 ness in his legs, and though he knew he ought 
 to be hungry, he wasn't. His wings, too, how 
 heavy they felt! 
 
 Child Marie and Philip drew nearer, but 
 the Dutch Baby heeded them not. With 
 twinkling legs he gyrated in front of the 
 passive Bluebird. 
 
 " See! " he cried, " like dis you should fly, 
 und now I am really a bird ! " 
 
 He climbed two steps up the stone pedestal 
 of the statue, and with outstretched arms 
 launched himself on the wings of faith. 
 
 Child Marie gave an involuntary exclama- 
 tion. " He'll hurt himself," she whispered. 
 " We ought to stop him." 
 
 " Sh ! " said Philip. " No child gets hurt 
 in a fairy tale." 
 
 The Dutch Baby picked himself up. " A 
 bird I wass," he proudly said, " und on der 
 ground wass I looking for what to eat. Now 
 you should do it," he continued to the bird. 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 171 
 
 " On der step will I put you, und den off der 
 step shall you fly." 
 
 The Bluebird did his best, and, the stone 
 being slippery to his unaccustomed feet, his 
 flight and the Dutch Baby's were strangely 
 similar. 
 
 " Ach, you goot Gluebird," crooned the 
 baby, resetting him on his feet, " you could 
 fly choost der same like me." 
 
 Then for the first time he looked up and 
 saw Child Marie and Philip. He regarded 
 them gravely. Philip took off his hat. 
 
 " Good-afternoon," he said, " we should 
 like to play with you if you don't mind. And 
 would you please tell us how old you are? " 
 
 The Dutch Baby held up an earthy palm. 
 " All of dose am I," he said pointing to his 
 fingers. 
 
 " We are ten," said Philip politely, " but 
 we hope you will not think that too old." 
 
 The Dutch Baby looked sceptical. " Gretch- 
 en haf fiinf more fingers as me," he said, 
 " und Gretchen haf not to be a young lady." 
 
 " Never mind about Gretchen," said Philip. 
 
172 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " You come out here and you will find us bet- 
 ter to play with than that bird. We'll do 
 exactly as you say." 
 
 The Dutch Baby pondered for a moment, 
 while again the light of a great purpose grew 
 in his eyes. Then he stooped down and 
 gathered the bird once more to his bosom. 
 
 " Choost what I say will they do," he mur- 
 mured. " Den to der donkeys, und der goats, 
 und der wasser boats will we go. Ach, mein 
 Gluebird! Soldiers will we be, und sailors, 
 und round we will go on der run-away horses, 
 und peanuts will we buy I " 
 
 He finished with a sigh of joy. 
 
 The Bluebird assented passively. He 
 wished he could overcome the lassitude that 
 dragged at his legs. They seemed as power- 
 less as his voice, and he could not understand 
 it — he, the sprightly, the active, who erstwhile 
 had outdistanced all his fellows in the north 
 and southward flights. He was glad to find, 
 however, that his quiescence did not lessen 
 his charm for the Dutch Baby. For a 
 moment after the new-comers spoke in their 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 173 
 
 slighting way he had trembled, but the Baby 
 was loyal. And now the Baby turned to 
 Philip and Child Marie. 
 
 " Come," he said," first we will haf a car- 
 riage play." 
 
 " Yes? " said Philip, " First we will have a 
 carriage play? That will be very nice. How 
 do you play it? " 
 
 Child Marie began to chuckle. " I know 
 how, — I certainly do," she whispered. " I've 
 done it a thousand times. Oh, Boy Philip, if 
 only your legs weren't quite so long! " 
 
 "My legs?" said Philip, "What have 
 they to do with it? " 
 
 Marie laughed again. " It's a pity we 
 can't rejuvenate our bodies as well as our 
 souls," she said. 
 
 " And it's a pity that you're talking like 
 seventy instead of seven," retorted Philip. 
 " Stop it at once." 
 
 The Dutch Baby had been trotting ahead 
 of them toward the upper end of the Mall. 
 Now he paused in front of a row of infinitesi- 
 mal carriages. The motive powers lay in- 
 
174 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 dolently on the ground wagging their beards 
 like ancient farmers. 
 
 " Get in," he commanded. " Der driver 
 I am, und to me you should pay der change." 
 
 Philip looked at Child Marie. " I under- 
 stand your mirth," he said grimly, " but I 
 won't be a quitter, not if it smashes the car- 
 riage. Only, if I go this time, you've got 
 to go next." 
 
 " All right," said Marie, " you first." 
 
 Philip raised one foot to enter the chariot. 
 
 " Here, you," rose a raucous voice, and an 
 attendant in livery sprang from a nearby 
 bench. " Youse is too big to go in that there ; 
 it's fer children." 
 
 " Pardon me," said Philip, " I know that. 
 I'm just ten myself." 
 
 " Ah, go on," said the gentlemanly attend- 
 ant, " quit yer kiddin ! " 
 
 " Exactly what you're forcing me to do," 
 said Philip politely. " But this young lady 
 here," he continued, "mayn't she ride? I 
 hardly think she would over-burden your 
 chariot." 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 17^ 
 
 The attendant eyed Marie, " Yere," he 
 said, " she kin if she wants ter, she ain't big 
 enough to hurt it none." 
 
 Child Marie turned and regarded Philip 
 witheringly. "Meanl" she said. "Just 
 wait till we get to the carousel. That's 
 strong." 
 
 The Dutch Baby had climbed to the 
 driver's seat, and urged the reluctant goats 
 to their feet. Now he turned to the attend- 
 ant. 
 
 " You should stay here," he commanded. 
 " My carriage it iss." 
 
 Child Marie nodded. " I'll see that he 
 goes all right," she whispered. Then she 
 got in and sat down. " I never realized be- 
 fore how grown-up my knees are," she ob- 
 served, as the Dutch Baby cracked his whip 
 and the chariot started down the length of the 
 Mall. He laughed aloud. 
 
 "Ach, mein Gluebird," he said joyfully, 
 " am I not der fine driver! Und my horses, 
 how fast they go 1 All der peeples look to 
 see how fine I drive." 
 
176 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 They certainly looked, but Child Marie 
 was acutely conscious that the passenger and 
 not the driver was the object of their gaze. 
 
 Philip and the attendant waited their com- 
 ing. " Again we should go," said the Dutch 
 Baby enthusiastically, as the money was 
 gravely handed over by Philip. " Sooch a 
 fine driver I am 1 " 
 
 But Child Marie hastily descended. " I 
 think not," she said. " There won't be time 
 for all the other plays if we go again." 
 
 Philip laughed. " Has it lost its flavor? " 
 he inquired. " Oh, Child Marie, didn't you 
 really enjoy it? " 
 
 The girl reddened. " I certainly didn't, 
 very much," she said. " I felt more or less 
 foolish. And now I feel foolish to think I 
 felt so. It's nasty and complex. It didn't 
 used to be so. Anjway, I didn't see one of 
 the statues ! " 
 
 " Cheer up," said Philip, " It takes some 
 time to get acclimated. Maybe the next play 
 will go better." 
 
 The Dutch Baby stood looking on. " Der 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 177 
 
 next play," he announced, " will be der 
 donkeys." 
 
 Philip and Child Marie looked at each 
 other, then laughed simultaneously. 
 
 " Didn't you use to do it? " he inquired. 
 
 "Of course I did, didn't you?" she 
 answered. 
 
 " Equally of course; and you said you'd do 
 it again." 
 
 " I know I did," said she, " and I thought 
 I meant it. At least, I almost thought so." 
 
 " I quite did," said Philip. " It will be 
 grand ! " 
 
 "Ain't you coming by me?" queried the 
 Dutch Baby. 
 
 Philip nodded. " Lead on," he said, " we 
 are if you'll let us." 
 
 The Dutch Baby drew the girl to one side. 
 " When I hit him you should run," he whis- 
 pered. 
 
 "Hit him?" said Marie. 
 
 " Ja," said the other, " it iss tag." 
 
 " All right, where shall I run to ? " she 
 whispered back. 
 
178 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 The Baby deliberated. " I said to der 
 donkeys we would go, but first on der run- 
 away horses shall we ride," he said. " You 
 should run dere," and he indicated the path 
 to the carousel with a lordly gesture. 
 
 " Look here," said Philip, " if you two 
 don't stop whispering, I'm going home. It's 
 not fair." 
 
 The Dutch Baby sidled up to him and gave 
 him a resounding thump on the leg. " Tag ! " 
 he shouted, and sped down the path after 
 Marie, who was already diminishing into 
 perspective. 
 
 Philip jammed on his hat, seized his 
 glasses, and pursued. Far ahead, a slim, blue 
 Atalanta fled before him. In the middle dis- 
 tance, a small pair of brown and yellow legs 
 twinkled over the ground, and at his heels a 
 joyous terrier, sprung from nowhere, yapped 
 and capered. 
 
 " Go it, young feller," shouted an onlook- 
 ing urchin. 
 
 " Ah, his goil kin beat him," taunted an- 
 other. 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 179 
 
 Philip rapidly over-hauled the Dutch Baby. 
 " Tag yourself," he cried, bending to clap the 
 diminutive shoulder. 
 
 The Dutch Baby did not pause. " You 
 should got to catch her," he panted, " I come 
 after." 
 
 "All right," said Philip, "here goes if 
 you say so, but you'd better come along with 
 me — I might get lost." 
 
 " Nein," said the other, " der Gluebird 
 likes I should go slower now, und you should 
 tag der girl, und den you will find der run- 
 away horses." 
 
 Philip nodded, and again took up the pur- 
 suit of a small blue speck just disappearing 
 around the corner. In his young days he had 
 covered the low hurdles in twenty-five flat, but 
 Child Marie had a good start, and not for 
 nothing had she been known in the distant 
 past as the best runner on the block. When 
 Philip arrived at the carousel a slightly 
 disheveled and gently panting young lady was 
 seated on one of the benches, with her back 
 to the path. 
 
i8o THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 He tip-toed up, and tapped her on the 
 shoulder. " Tag," he said, " you're it ! " 
 
 " Tag nothing 1 " said Marie, turning upon 
 him indignantly. " This is hunk, and you 
 know it. I beat you all to pieces." She gig- 
 gled. " I always did beat all the boys." 
 
 " Beat me? " said Philip, " of course you 
 beat me. Didn't I stop and talk to the 
 Dutch Baby for a couple of hours? Why 
 wouldn't you beat me? " 
 
 " By the way," said Marie, " where is the 
 Dutch Baby?" 
 
 " Oh, he'll be along," said Philip. " The 
 Bluebird got tired of traveling by express." 
 
 A small voice spoke at their elbow. " Haf 
 you der tickets? " it said. 
 
 " Oh, here you are," said Philip. " Dutch 
 Baby, do you really like to ride on that 
 thing?" 
 
 The Dutch Baby looked greedily at the en- 
 closure, where a circle of prancing animals 
 pursued each other with dizzy speed, and the 
 voice of Die Lustige Witwe was heard in the 
 land. 
 
THE GLUEBIRD i8i 
 
 " Sure," he said, " als besser as anything. 
 A soldier I am, und in my hand a sword I 
 hold — und strike, und strike, und strike." 
 
 His voice became a chant, and his eyes took 
 on a far-away expression in which one could 
 see a long line of warlike German ancestors. 
 
 Philip turned to Marie, " Don't say that 
 you like it, too," he pleaded. 
 
 "Like it?" she returned, "like it? — I 
 love it ! " And her eyes grew misty with 
 memory, and Philip could see that he and the 
 Dutch Baby were as if they were not. 
 
 " Marie," he begged, " please don't go 
 away, or, if you must, take me with you. I 
 feel like an anachronism." 
 
 Marie smiled, a vague, half-listening sort 
 of smile. " I was very little," she said, " as 
 little as Dutch Baby, and the nurse was red 
 haired, and her name was Abina — ^Abina Mc- 
 Carthy. She used to bring me here every 
 day, and I would ride for hours while she 
 talked to the Man in Charge. He never let 
 me buy my tickets. I've often wondered if 
 he isn't responsible for the curvature of my 
 
182 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 brain. It all comes back, to me now. I can 
 almost hear the tune." 
 
 And she gave a reminiscent little sigh, 
 
 " Child Marie," said Philip abruptly, 
 " some day will you show me a picture of 
 little You?" 
 
 The girl re-entered the present, with a 
 jump. "Why?" 
 
 " Because it is a picture of little You," said 
 Philip. 
 
 She looked away from him and her eye- 
 lids fluttered. 
 
 " Will you? " he persisted. 
 
 " A great many things can happen some 
 day," she said evasively. 
 
 A small voice broke the somewhat tense 
 pause. " Over dere, choost where you are 
 looking, iss where are der tickets," it said 
 politely. 
 
 Philip still looked at the girl intently. 
 " No," he said, " you have made a mistake. 
 There are no tickets where I was looking. 
 One doesn't go there by ticket at all." 
 
 The Dutch Baby looked puzzled. " But 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 183 
 
 In his hand he haf dem," he insisted, " und 
 der Gluebird is wanting to ride." 
 
 Philip laughed. "The Bluebird, eh? 
 Keep it up, young one," he said. " That 
 same disinterested altruism has made many a 
 saint's reputation." 
 
 " Ja ? " said the Baby. " Auf English you 
 do not talk now." 
 
 Philip walked over to the Man in Charge. 
 " Four tickets, please," he said. 
 
 "Four?" said Marie. 
 
 " Sh! " said Phihp, " you forget the Blue- 
 bird." 
 
 He handed two to the Dutch Baby. 
 " There you are — for you and your impatient 
 friend," he said. 
 
 The Baby took them solemnly, and offered 
 one to the Man in Charge. " On der same 
 horse we sit," he explained, " und den two 
 rides can we haf." 
 
 Marie laughed. " Imagination has small 
 chance against thrift, when the battle Is on 
 German territory," she said. 
 
 The Dutch Baby looked at her inquiringly, 
 
1 84 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Auf English you do not speak, neider," he 
 said. " Gretchen haf not words like dose." 
 
 The giddy steeds came to a standstill at 
 that moment, and he walked over to them. 
 
 " Der black one I will ride," said the Baby. 
 " Large he is, und strong, und two can he 
 carry." 
 
 He climbed up and grasped the sword. 
 " Now you on der next," he shouted to Marie. 
 *' Und you behind," he signified to Philip with 
 a gesture of command. 
 
 Marie sprang to the saddle and arranged 
 her skirts. " I've been dipped in the foun- 
 tain of youth," she cried gleefully. 
 
 Philip turned pale. " The results be on 
 your head," he said to Marie. " I shall be 
 dippy in the fountain of youth ! If I have to 
 be borne to the hospital, promise you will 
 come along." 
 
 " You can write me poems like Henley," 
 said she. 
 
 " Out of the dark that covers me ! " cried 
 poor, pale Philip, as the machine began its 
 slow revolution. 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 185 
 
 The horses were now turning faster and 
 faster in their never-ending, ever-vain pursuit. 
 
 " Take der swords, soldiers we are! " they 
 heard above the shriek of the calliopic organ 
 box. " For der gold ring you could get 
 anudder ride ! " 
 
 But Marie and Philip heeded not. Grasp- 
 ing the uprights in front of them, they shut 
 their eyes, and wished for death. The 
 monsters whirled madly on. Would they 
 never tire of their hideous revolutions ? On, 
 on, endlessly on! The Merry Widow had 
 been waltzed ofE the stage and back again, 
 before the maddened animals had satiated 
 their lust for speed. 
 
 Philip dropped dizzily from his charger, 
 and tottered toward Marie. She was leaning 
 sick and faint against the side of the house. 
 
 " I thought you said you liked it," he mur- 
 mured weakly. 
 
 " Don't be a beast," she gasped. " Help 
 me to a bench." 
 
 The Dutch Baby from his height looked 
 down at them scornfully. " Soldiers do not 
 
1 86 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 so ! See me," he said, brandishing the spike 
 in his hand. 
 
 " All right," said Philip. " When the bat- 
 tle is over you can come outside and gather 
 up the corpses." 
 
 Marie sat down on a bench, and leaned 
 her head in her hand. " Can it be that I 
 really did that for hours at a time?" she 
 groaned. " Oh, Boy, I must be dreadfully 
 grown up ! " 
 
 " I always was, as far as that pleasure is 
 concerned," he retorted. " I never could 
 stand it, so there's no disillusion for me. 
 Poor child, don't feel so sad about it. There 
 are still the swan boats, and donkeys, and 
 peanuts." 
 
 " In my present state, the thought of pea- 
 nuts and boats is not exactly calculated to con- 
 sole. Do you suppose he'll insist on carrying 
 out his entire program ? " 
 
 The Dutch Baby came toward them hold- 
 ing the Bluebird in his hand. The bird had a 
 wild, dazed look in his eye and his feathers 
 were ruffled. 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 187 
 
 "He didn't enjoy it either," said Marie, 
 breaking into a little laugh. " It's perfectly 
 evident he was as disturbed as we were. I'm 
 sure it's upset his stuffing, too." 
 
 ("Stuffing?" thought the Bluebird, 
 "Stuffing? Can she mean me ?" ) 
 
 " Young man," said Philip to the Baby, " I 
 see something in your eye. What is it? " 
 
 " Ja," said the Baby, " it iss peanuts. Der 
 Gluebird iss hungry." 
 
 Philip handed him ten cents. " Go and 
 gorge," he said. 
 
 "Nein," said the Baby. "You should 
 come also. To der donkeys we go now, und 
 her und me are der squirrels, und you should 
 feed us." 
 
 They purchased the peanuts and again 
 walked eastward. Philip turned to Marie. 
 
 " Now," he said, " I understand why you 
 are not afraid of mice — or say you're not. 
 You're really related to them, and the Dutch 
 Baby, with the unerring instinct of childhood, 
 has discovered it. Of course you are a squir- 
 rel." 
 
1 88 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Marie placed the tips of her fingers to her 
 bosom, with an air of apologetic but expectant 
 politeness, and looked at him with her head 
 on one side. 
 
 " By jiminy," he said, " you do look like 
 one, if only your nose weren't so retrousse. 
 Never-the-Iess, here is a peanut." 
 
 She took It and put it in her pocket. " I'll 
 store it away against next winter's cold," she 
 said. 
 
 The Dutch Baby looked on disapprovingly. 
 " You are not a goot squirrel," he said. 
 " You come too quick." 
 
 Philip shook his head. " The second mis- 
 take, Dutch Baby," he said. " She comes so 
 slowly that sometimes it seems as though she 
 were not moving at all." 
 
 The color flamed up in the girl's face and 
 she walked on swiftly. 
 
 " Hurry, Baby," she said. " It's getting 
 late, and perhaps the donkeys will have gone 
 to bed." 
 
 But the Baby did not heed her. He had 
 run on a few steps, and now crouched down 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 189 
 
 in the middle of the walk in the attitude of 
 expectant squirrelism. The Bluebird stood 
 also in the center of the path. Philip held out 
 a nut and whistled. The Dutch Baby sidled 
 a few steps nearer, then turned and again 
 ran away. The Bluebird remained in uncer- 
 tain poise, his beak in the air, his eyes fixed 
 on the tree-tops. 
 
 ("How fortunate I never cared for pea- 
 nuts," he thought.) 
 
 Philip whistled once more, and the Baby 
 turned, ran back a little way, stopped, and 
 again took the expectant attitude. " He 
 would and yet he would not," sang Philip 
 softly. 
 
 But now with an access of courage he crept 
 up to the outstretched hand, seized the nut, 
 and scampered to a nearby tree, where he 
 squatted down and nibbled till it was gone. 
 Then he came walking back. 
 
 " Der rest to der Gluebird you should gif," 
 he said, and put the bag which Philip handed 
 him in his pocket, " See ! I wass a real sqyir- 
 
 rell" 
 
I90 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Philip turned to Marie. " Please don't 
 copy him," he said. 
 
 They rounded a corner and came suddenly 
 upon the donkeys. A small girl was astride 
 of one, frightened yet happy, after the man- 
 ner of her sex. Philip took off his hat, and 
 made a low bow to Marie. There was a 
 touch of irony in his tone. 
 
 " Princess, your steed awaits you," he said, 
 " or is it a palfrey? " 
 
 " Alas," she answered, " it is a donkey, just 
 a plain — a very plain, donkey." There was 
 a tired little droop to the corners of her 
 mouth and her elasticity was gone. " It's no 
 use. Boy," she continued, " I should hate it, 
 and feel like a fool into the bargain. I'm 
 hopeless. I know I have ankles ! " 
 
 She ended with a laugh that was more a 
 sigh. 
 
 Philip regarded her quizzically. Perhaps 
 he pitied, but he gave no sign. However, he 
 made no motion to ride a donkey himself. 
 
 Instead, he said, " I think we'll both sit 
 here and watch the Baby and then set him 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 191 
 
 face toward home and mother. I wonder if 
 she knows where he is, by the way? " 
 
 The Dutch Baby was regarding the don- 
 keys with a critical eye. He now laid his 
 hand on the largest. " Dis one I should 
 ride," he said. 
 
 " Come here, young man," said Philip. 
 " Something has just occurred to me. Speak- 
 ing colloquially, does your mother know 
 you're out? " 
 
 The Baby looked at them both, while a 
 solemn twinkle grew in his eye. Then he 
 spoke. 
 
 " Der Gluebird it wass what brang me," he 
 said. " How should he tell when he cannot 
 to speak, und, besides, mein mutter haf he 
 not seen." 
 
 Marie gave a horrified exclamation. " I 
 never thought about his mother," she cried. 
 " He seemed so adequate. Poor woman 1 
 She's probably dragging the river." 
 
 Philip took him by the hand with determi- 
 nation, and started northward. 
 
 " We'll go donkey-riding another day," he 
 
192 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 said, " or rather you can. Put this in your 
 wallet." 
 
 The Baby took the coin and tucked it care- 
 fully in his trouser pocket. 
 
 " All right," he said cheerfully. " Anud- 
 der day will I be der choUy miller on der 
 donkey." 
 
 " Here's the gate," said Philip. " Shake 
 hands, will you? " 
 
 The Baby gravely offered a much used 
 palm. 
 
 "Good-bye, Dutch Baby," said Marie, 
 " and please was it nice to have us to play 
 with?" 
 
 The Baby looked from one to the other, 
 then shook his head. 
 
 " I wass der driver und der soldier und der 
 squirrel," he said. " You wass only playing." 
 
 And he and the Bluebird crossed the Ave- 
 nue, and started down Seventy-second Street. 
 
 Marie and Philip stood in the Children's 
 Gate, and watched him diminish. Before he 
 turned into a speck he looked back, and waved 
 his hand, which held something tightly. 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 193 
 
 " The ' Gluebird ' is saying farewell," said 
 Philip. 
 
 Marie turned, with a gesture of disgust. 
 " I know what is the matter with us," she 
 said, "we're stuffed/ We can't play, or 
 imagine, or make believe, any more than that 
 bird can fly, or sing, or dig worms. We're 
 stufed. It's tragic, but it's true. And the 
 Dutch Baby knew it, too. He said, ' I wass 
 der driver, und der soldier, und der squirrel. 
 You wass only playing.' Fancy his saying 
 that ! " She laughed, but there was a catch 
 in her voice. " So we're symbolized by a 
 stuffed bluebird! The sky is our glass case. 
 Good-night, I must go." 
 
 She put out her hand. Philip took it, and 
 held it. 
 
 " Why do you make such a tragedy out of 
 being grown up ? " he asked. 
 
 "Isn't it a tragedy?" 
 
 He shook his head. " That depends, that 
 all depends," he said. 
 
 "Depends on what?" she asked, gently 
 pulling on her hand. 
 
194 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " On you," he answered. 
 
 " Please," said Marie, " that is my hand 
 you have. I find I need it myself." 
 
 She smiled, but a kind of ominous dignity 
 had crept into her tone. 
 
 Philip released the hand. " Pd like to 
 shake you, and not by the hand," he said, with 
 a half smile. 
 
 " Why? " she inquired with some surprise. 
 
 " For that tone, which always terrorizes a 
 man, if you must know," he replied. " And 
 the worst of it is, the man is never sure 
 whether he ought to be terrorized." 
 
 If he had expected the obvious retort, he 
 was, in his turn, surprised. Marie did not 
 fight back. Instead, a look of fear came over 
 her face, and she spoke with simple frankness. 
 
 " We are grown up, there's no getting 
 round it," she said, "and just for that reason 
 you musn't see me any more. I cannot be 
 grown up with you." 
 
 "Will you tell me why?" he asked. 
 
 She shook her head. " No," she said, 
 "except that you won't leave the bugle alone." 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 195 
 
 " And you won't come here to the Run- 
 away Place any more? " 
 
 Again she shook her head, " I've got to go 
 to work again next week, anyway," she said 
 evasively. 
 
 " But you won't, you can't, say good-bye 
 like this. You'll at least come to-morrow, or 
 next day? " 
 
 " I — I can't to-morrow," she replied, weak- 
 ening under his gaze. 
 
 "Then Sunday?" 
 
 " I— I oughtn't." 
 
 " Thank you ! " said he. " Now tell me 
 this, aren't you the least little bit glad you're 
 not ten?" 
 
 The girl glanced up the Avenue. 
 
 " The 'bus is coming," she said, and started 
 to move away. 
 
 He caught her by the wrist and looked at 
 her hard in the eyes. " Answer me," he said, 
 imperiously. 
 
 " Not when you ask me like that," she 
 retorted. 
 
 " Answer me," he pleaded. 
 
196 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Well, what if I am — sometimes? It isn't 
 very often." 
 
 "Is it when you are in the Run-away 
 Place?" 
 
 She kept her head averted. 
 
 " Please look at me," he said. 
 
 " There's another 'bus coming," she an- 
 swered. 
 
 " You are only ten," said he, and dropped 
 her wrist. " It's just play — that's all it 
 means to you. Good-bye." 
 
 " Oh ! Oh ! " She fluttered between 
 
 him and the oncoming stage. Her eyes filled 
 with tears, but he did not see, for he kept his 
 face averted. She opened her mouth as if to 
 say more, but just then he made as if to turn, 
 and suddenly mindful of the tell-tale moisture, 
 she fled to the corner, and sprang upon the 
 step of the 'bus. It started on quickly. She 
 looked back to wave her hand; that at least 
 she could trust herself to do. But he was 
 looking another way. 
 
 " But there is Sunday," she thought, biting 
 her lip to fight back the tears. It might have 
 
THE GLUEBIRD 197 
 
 comforted her to know that he was thinking 
 the same thought. 
 
 And on the morrow the Bluebird stood 
 again behind the glass doors of the cabinet, 
 and looked out over the room to the green, 
 waving branches beyond the window. But in 
 his soul the longing was stilled. 
 
 " Times are not what they were," he 
 sighed. " Can it be that I am growing old? " 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 OF POLLPARROTS, PORCELAINS AND 
 THE HAND OF GOD 
 
 /IS Philip finished the last paragraph, and 
 x\. laid down his book, there arose a shout- 
 ing of small boys from the street below, and 
 he went out on his balcony to investigate. At 
 least seventy-five urchins were busily engaged 
 in pelting something in an elm tree, and others 
 were arriving every moment. Twice as many 
 more men and women were watching the fun. 
 Looking up into the tree, Philip saw, almost 
 on a level with his sixth story windows, a 
 parrot sitting on a limb, looking strangely out 
 of place, with his gay green coat and red trim- 
 mings, in this dusty, ragged elm. He was 
 paying no attention to the innumerable spar- 
 rows who hopped about on the surrounding 
 twigs and surveyed the intruder with twitters 
 of astonishment. He was paying less atten- 
 198 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 199 
 
 tion to the rain of stones around him, which, 
 in point of fact, endangered those below far 
 more than him. Philip heard somebody on 
 the street inquire politely if he wanted a 
 cracker, but he made no reply, only taking a 
 firmer hold of the twig with his aged-looking 
 claws, and shivering in the cold air, for the 
 day was chill for May. 
 
 Poor bird, born to a warmer clime and the 
 seclusion of the tropic jungle, his liberty had 
 come too late ! In the dusty elm over Wash- 
 ington Square he was a more pathetic captive 
 than in his cage. He swayed on his twig 
 more and more stolidly as daylight faded. 
 The problem of how to get supper and how to 
 get warm was too much for him, A police- 
 man scattered the boys, who had finally suc- 
 ceeded in hitting a tramp on a park bench in 
 the head. A few pedestrians lingered, look- 
 ing up. Then they, too, passed on. The 
 sunset pink died over the heights of Hoboken, 
 and the lamps of the city flared out. But 
 opposite his balcony, a black speck in the trac- 
 ery of twigs, Philip could still see the poor 
 
200 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 parrot clinging to his perch. Then the twi- 
 light passed into night, and he was visible no 
 more. 
 
 But Philip continued to think of him, 
 mourned somewhere In this big town no doubt 
 by a little child, a pampered pet for whom 
 liberty meant death and captivity salvation, a 
 lost, green wing-feather In a drab world, a 
 very paradox of a parrot. And he forgot 
 to reflect on the book he had been reading, 
 and read nothing else, for puzzling over the 
 riddle. 
 
 The next day he sought Child Marie, for 
 it was the promised Sunday. 
 
 " O, Portia, Interpret," he said, when he 
 had duly narrated the episode. Of their last 
 parting he made no mention. And she said, 
 " Was his green a very gay green, and did he 
 look very tropicy ? " 
 
 And when Philip nodded, she went on, 
 " He meant Pan In Wall Street, a dreamer in 
 a dry goods house. He meant there are some 
 folks who are so constituted that, In a world 
 constituted like this, they can't look after 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 201 
 
 themselves. You've lost a button off your 
 coat." 
 
 " But why was he ever allowed out of 
 Brazil? That's the brutal part of it all," 
 said Philip, pulling at the thread where the 
 button had been. " I've got the button some 
 place." 
 
 " Parrot in the leafless tree ..." she be- 
 gan. Then she hesitated. " That last line 
 would have to go, ' I should know what God 
 and man be,' " she continued. " That won't 
 do, though it's quite as good as Tennyson's 
 rhythm. But why would you strive to pluck 
 the heart out of the mystery? It's so futile! 
 You can't do it. Even Charlie had some 
 doubts why his aunt was allowed out of 
 Brazil, and wiser men than you have failed to 
 solve the mystery of the parrot." 
 
 " So life is epitomized by a parrot! " said 
 he. " The other day it was a bluebird." 
 
 " Precisely," said she. " But we shall be 
 sentimentalizing like Sterne over the starling, 
 if we are not careful. Let's go for a walk 
 through the museum." 
 
202 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Child Philip demurred, pouting. " I hate 
 museums," he said, " musty old places full 
 of paintings that all ' tell a story,' and fool 
 pottery. Let's not go for a walk through the 
 museum." 
 
 " You forget," said Child Marie, gently, 
 " that this museum is in the Run-away Place, 
 so it must be nice, not like other museums. 
 Besides, it's Sunday afternoon, and the people 
 will be more fun than the pictures. They 
 always are on Sundays." 
 
 Philip grew chirpy. " So it is in the Rim- 
 away Place," he said, " so it is Sunday, and 
 there'll be lots of people. I'd forgotten about 
 its being Sunday. Sunday does have its uses. 
 Why aren't you in church ? " 
 
 " I am," said Child Marie, with a wry 
 smile. 
 
 He looked at her soberly. " I suspect I 
 am very wicked," he said. 
 
 " I suspect you are," she answered. 
 
 " But— but " 
 
 "Yes?" she queried. 
 
 " Why do you let me he? " 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 203 
 
 The girl looked at him oddly, almost as if 
 she were afraid. 
 
 "I — I don't know!" she said; and she 
 moved hastily down the path from Mount 
 Mozart. 
 
 As Philip moved by her side, he was aware 
 of a curious sense of being more alive than 
 usual, perhaps because she was such an alive 
 little being herself. 
 
 " I don't so much want to play as to feel, 
 this afternoon," he said. 
 
 " Feel what? " she asked. 
 
 " I don't know; anything, everything. I'm 
 kind of a spiritual octopus to-day, with feelers 
 out in all directions for impressions. All the 
 world is clamoring for me to pay attention to 
 it!" 
 
 Marie turned her head away. " I know," 
 she said. " Perhaps that's why I went to 
 church this afternoon ! " 
 
 Philip paused at the turnstile of the mu- 
 seum, while a blue baby waddled under the 
 stile without grazing its bonnet, and scam- 
 pered to feel the toes of a marble lady who 
 
204 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 seemed somewhat unduly conscious of her 
 lack of costume. 
 
 " I'm sure something wonderful is going 
 to happen," he said, "my feelers are tin- 
 gling." 
 
 Marie smiled, " This place is full of won- 
 ders," she said, " even if you don't like it." 
 
 " Oh, I like it well enough," he answered, 
 " when I get by these awful native statues. 
 I love the Egyptian people, who are always 
 smiling. They sit in their cases and grin, not 
 at you, but at something far off over your left 
 shoulder. They all look terribly wise, like 
 the Mona Lisa." 
 
 Presently he tore Child Marie from rapt 
 contemplation of the little marble portrait of 
 Queen Tii, which gazes down the main stair- 
 case on the Rodin at the base. 
 
 " I must think who it is she Iboks like," 
 cried Marie. " It will haunt me till I re- 
 member." 
 
 "I should think it would," said Philip. 
 " I prefer the Rodin." 
 
 They went down the stairs, past the crowds 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 205 
 
 swarming through the Fifth Avenue entrance, 
 and stood before that nude bronze figure, at 
 once the triumph of modern realism and 
 imaginative suggestion, one of the most vital 
 bronzes, surely, in the country. To Philip, 
 at least, there was a haunting beauty in its 
 touch of the earth, its unglorified nudity, and 
 for him its indefinable sense of life was so 
 potent that almost, in a twitch of sunlight on 
 the back, he could fancy a muscle quivered. 
 
 The incoming crowds jostled him ; he heard 
 faintly the chattering comments of those who 
 paused to look, also. But chiefly he saw a 
 brown field at twilight, and water, and a rude 
 hut, and a slain body, and a nude figure, 
 poised with the grace of an animal, looking 
 dumbly toward the sky. 
 
 Marie's voice brought him back. 
 
 " Is it so wonderful? " she asked. 
 
 " It is just what one of my feelers was cry- 
 ing for," he smiled. 
 
 " It took you far away," said she. 
 
 Philip drew close to her quickly. " It is 
 a horrid statue, I hate it ! " he said. 
 
2o6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 She looked at him hastily, and colored. 
 " In the Run-away Place," she said, " we — 
 we — ought to keep together." 
 
 They followed the crowd aimlessly for a 
 time. The blue baby they met frequently. 
 Usually it was insisting on being held up to 
 inspect at close range the effigies of old 
 knights and ladies lying peacefully on their 
 tombs. But it cried also, to play with the 
 toes of Moses and manifested great interest in 
 the tombs of the Medicis. 
 
 " It has excellent taste," said Child Marie. 
 
 Presently they found themselves in front of 
 Cabanel's canvas, " The Birth of Venus," 
 which Philip said belonged to the candy box 
 cover school of art. 
 
 Suddenly Marie gave a cry of triumph. 
 " It's a maid we used to have! " she said. 
 
 "Well, well! " said Child Philip, looking 
 more intently at Venus, " I'm sorry I wasn't 
 then a visitor at your house ! " 
 
 Child Marie blushed rosily. " I mean 
 Queen Tii, of course ! " she exclaimed, with a 
 rather feeble attempt at stiffness. 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 207 
 
 " Oh, pardon me," said Philip, most 
 meekly. " I misunderstood." 
 
 " For that," said she, " you shall be made 
 to look at every picture that ' tells a story.' " 
 
 Philip glanced around the room. " Of 
 course, they are the ones everybody is looking 
 at," he said. " Let's listen to the comments 
 of these seekers after light." 
 
 The galleries by now were crowded with a 
 great throng of people, of all ages and races, 
 the Sunday afternoon throng at the Metro- 
 politan Museum, which averages 6,500 per- 
 sons a Sunday. There were various ragged 
 little boys, scarce railing high, who crowded 
 before the battle scenes of Detaille and the 
 other Frenchmen, and had no eyes for any- 
 thing else. There were young lovers from 
 the East Side, who wandered frankly arm in 
 arm, even hand in hand, from masterpiece to 
 masterpiece, and looked at each other. 
 
 " This is art for Cupid's sake," said Child 
 Marie, watching two of them pass. 
 
 A retort was on Philip's lips, but he did not 
 make it. He pondered it, however, for a 
 
2o8 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 time in silence, and forgot to watch the crowds 
 in watching Child Marie. She darted eagerly 
 where the press was thickest about a picture, 
 edged her way to the shoulder of some woman 
 who was making comments to a companion, 
 and presently would dart back again to 
 Philip, her face beaming, and repeat what she 
 had heard. 
 
 They stood some time in front of Schenck's 
 big picture of sheep huddled in a blizzard, 
 and Marie was all ears. She had already ex- 
 pressed one art criticism herself, with an air 
 of finality. " Why do people paint sheep? " 
 she had asked. Rather liking sheep himself, 
 and particularly admiring the skill with which 
 Schenck has rendered the cold, blown snow In 
 the wool of their windward flanks, he had 
 wisely said nothing. Two women came up 
 beside them, 
 
 " You see that cross off in the distance ? " 
 said one, " well, I've a friend who says that 
 detracts from the picture. Fm sure I don't 
 see why. But, anyhow, / think an artist 
 ought to have the right to put anything Into 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 209 
 
 his picture he wants to. It's his picture, ain't 
 it?" 
 
 " Certainly it is," said the other woman. 
 " I gave them sheep to a friend of mine for a 
 wedding present and they was much appre- 
 ciated." 
 
 " Is that an argument against matri- 
 mony? " whispered Phihp. 
 
 " No, against friends," answered Marie, 
 as they moved on. 
 
 Close by hangs " The Last Token." That 
 picture, also, is much admired by the Sunday 
 afternoon throngs. An early Christian maid- 
 en stands in the arena, looking up with a 
 pleased expression, to see who has thrown the 
 rose that lies at her feet. Meanwhile tigers 
 are creeping near to devour her, at least sup- 
 posedly for that purpose. They do not seem 
 very enthusiastic. 
 
 " Maybe they are Fletcherizing, and aren't 
 really hungry yet," suggested Philip. 
 
 But his flippancy was rebuked by a little 
 East-side Fluffy Ruffles, who just then came 
 aggressively up to the rail, with a girl com- 
 
210 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 panion. " Ain't that a sweet one, Mamie 1 " 
 she cried enthusiastically, shifting her gum. 
 " Her sweetheart's throwed her a rose, and 
 the tigers are goin' to eat her. My, I think 
 it's touchin' ! " 
 
 " Now you see why the story pictures are 
 here, don't you, Boy?" asked Child Marie, 
 with a serious note in her voice. 
 
 " I won't, I won't, I won't ! " he exclaimed, 
 " I won't admit it. It's a compromise. I 
 hate compromises." 
 
 " Then come and find the Rogers' groups," 
 said Child Marie. 
 
 " Rogers' groups ! Have they Rogers' 
 groups here?" he exclaimed. "I adore 
 Rogers' groups. America has produced three 
 really great sculptors, Saint Gaudens, Barnard 
 and Rogers." 
 
 " And you regard them, in the order 
 named, with faith, hope and charity? " smiled 
 Marie. 
 
 " Ingenious, but unconvincing," said he. 
 " Rogers was a great man. Nobody could 
 have one of his groups around the home with- 
 
THE HAND OF GOD an 
 
 out learning what art isn't — ^which is the first 
 step in learning what it is." 
 
 Before the Rogers' statuette of Ichabod 
 Crane and the Headless Horseman they found 
 two men and a woman standing, the men in 
 immaculate frock coat, the woman with or- 
 chids at her bosom. The three spoke Eng- 
 lish, but with the trace of a foreign accent. 
 
 " How quaint ! " said one of the men. 
 " What does it represent? " 
 
 The woman bowed over the inscription, her 
 gold pince-nez at her eyes. " I believe it is 
 some American legend," she said. " It hap- 
 pened up the Hudson, near the town where 
 Rockefeller lives, Tarrytown, is it? Maurice 
 spoke of it one day when he came home from 
 school." 
 
 "Fancy their having legends!" said the 
 man. 
 
 "And this In New York!" whispered 
 Marie. " They live here." 
 
 " They help elect our Mayor and Gover- 
 nor, no doubt," said Philip. " But I can't get 
 excited over that, with these Rogers' groups 
 
212 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 so wrongly mounted. It breaks my heart to 
 see them treated so I " 
 
 "How? "asked Child Marie. 
 
 " Why just set on pedestals, like any ordi- 
 nary statuary I They ought to stand on little 
 marble-top tables, made out of black walnut, 
 with the head of Minerva carved on the ends, 
 and carved urns between the feet. A silk 
 scarf ought to be flung with studied careless- 
 ness around the base of each statue, and the 
 whole, if possible, stood in the bay window, 
 where the neighbors can see it." 
 
 "Did you come from Brooklyn, Boy?" 
 she asked. 
 
 " Oh, not that ! " said he. " But I did 
 come from Massachusetts." 
 
 They moved on with the throng, and pres- 
 ently found themselves in a group in contem- 
 plation of a picture by Hovenden called " Je- 
 rusalem the Golden." A sick lady sits in a 
 chair, and a man sits sadly beside her, while 
 off in the corner somebody is seen playing 
 the piano. Nearly all the spectators were de- 
 bating whether or not the lady had consump- 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 213 
 
 tion. Some said she had, some said her face 
 showed too much color. But all were in- 
 tensely interested. 
 
 " Courage, Camille! " said Philip, address- 
 ing the lady in the picture. 
 
 A sweet young thing who hung upon her 
 escort's arm frowned at him angrily. " It's 
 always nice to have your friends play sad 
 tunes when you're dying, ain't it ? " said she, 
 to her escort, in a tone meant for Philip to 
 hear. 
 
 But the escort was on Philip's side. " I'd 
 rather have ' Harrigan ' than a hymn tune," 
 he said. 
 
 "And this is art!" said Philip, as they 
 moved away from the still admiring group. 
 " Poor George Fuller! See here, one of his 
 misty, soft portraits, with the tone of an old 
 master about it and that note of struggling, 
 half inarticulate poetry he never failed to sug- 
 gest — and not a soul bestowing on it so much 
 as a passing glance ! " 
 
 " But we see it," whispered Child Marie. 
 
 " I want them to see it ! " he cried out, with 
 
214 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 sudden earnestness. " The beauty is here, 
 and they won't look, they don't know! It 
 stirs me, it cries to me — and yet they hear 
 nothing. I don't want to feel apart from 
 them like this, as if I were better than they 
 are. I want to share it with them." 
 
 " Boy," said she, " you want the impos- 
 sible." 
 
 " Isn't that always most worth wanting? " 
 he asked, looking earnestly at her. 
 
 Again the shrinking, half frightened look 
 came into her eyes, and she turned away. 
 
 " Yes ! " she breathed, almost fiercely. 
 
 In the next gallery she sank down on a 
 bench to rest, and he beside her. They were 
 facing the famous picture of Paul and Vir- 
 ginia running through the storm. A woman 
 with two small boys came up, and began to 
 expound the painting to her offspring. 
 
 " He doesn't mind the storm, so long as he 
 has her," explained the mother. " You see 
 how she is looking off at something, fright- 
 ened. But he is just looking at her. The 
 expression is wonderful. I remember the first 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 215 
 
 time I ever saw that picture ; it was years ago. 
 Your father and I saw it together. It is one 
 of the greatest paintings in the museum." 
 
 She continued to regard the canvas, almost 
 forgetful of her boys, who looked at it with 
 brief interest, and then turned away to a near- 
 by battle scene. 
 
 Philip turned to his companion. " One 
 of the greatest paintings in the museum ! " he 
 whispered. " What are Manets and Sar- 
 gents and Turners and Millets to her? 
 ' Paul and Virginia ' gave her her romance." 
 
 "The little story is all there, isn't it?" 
 whispered back Marie. 
 
 He drew a little closer. " Fancy making 
 love at the inspiration of that picture ! " said 
 he. 
 
 " It does seem incredible, doesn't it," she 
 replied, looking at the picture. 
 
 "Does it?" said he, bending toward her, 
 "I wonder!" 
 
 She looked at him, startled, and rose hastily. 
 " Don't — you — there's another Rodin we 
 haven't seen," she said. 
 
2i6 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 There was a tense silence between them as 
 they moved out of the gallery. Marie kept 
 a little ahead, as if she were fleeing from him. 
 He could not see whether she was angry or 
 not. 
 
 They found the Rodin by the crowd about 
 it. It stood, a lump of white marble, within 
 a railing in the centre of one of the picture 
 galleries. Over the railing hung a circle of 
 curious faces, and Marie pressed in among 
 them. He followed, and they stood side by 
 side looking down at the lump of white rock 
 called " The Hand of God," ringed by the 
 peering, puzzled faces. 
 
 Out of the rough marble is thrust up a 
 huge, strong hand, and this hand, in turn, is 
 grasping a smaller mass of the rough stone 
 in its palm. Out of that smaller mass two 
 nude figures, a male and a female, are emerg- 
 ing. These figures are not clasped in 'em- 
 brace ; rather are they coming to a twin birth. 
 Their bodies are doubled, the one around the 
 other, in the birth posture. Their eyes are 
 closed. Yet they are of adult stature—- 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 217 
 
 Adam and Eve, perhaps, the eternal male, 
 the eternal female, twin born. 
 
 The marble plainly puzzled the crowd. 
 " It ain't finished is it? Probably the sculp- 
 tor began it and then died," shrilled a 
 woman's voice. 
 
 "But God's got six fingers 1" someone 
 else exclaimed, viewing the composition from 
 a rear angle that showed only Adam's foot. 
 
 " It's a hand holding a baby," a father was 
 explaining to his children, as they passed with 
 a casual glance. 
 
 But Marie and Philip moved slowly around 
 the rail, paying scant attention to the com- 
 ments over their shoulders. This lump of 
 half carved marble, set in its circle of peering 
 human faces, was speaking to them new and 
 subtle things. 
 
 " He holds us in the hollow of His hand," 
 whispered Marie. 
 
 " There is something strangely poignant," 
 Philip answered, " in the way the man's head 
 rests against the woman's bosom. His eyes 
 are not yet opened, yet he knows where to 
 
21 8 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 lay his head. ' Das Ewig-weibliche zieht uns 
 hinan! ' It was ordained from the begin- 
 ning. It is the law back of the universe, back 
 in the cosmic lump God held in his hand I " 
 
 Marie's hands grasped the rail tightly. 
 She made no answer. But presently she said, 
 " How white and soft the marble is where 
 Rodin has brought his flesh to a finish ! " 
 
 " He is the greatest living master of tex- 
 ture," Philip answered. 
 
 He tried to speak calmly, but he could not. 
 He was battling with an impulse to lay his 
 hand down hard on the rail over hers, to 
 embody all critical comment in a long, hungry 
 look into her eyes. Her body suddenly 
 thrilled him, her close presence at his side 
 was beyond words sweet. Perhaps, by some 
 intuition, she knew this, for she turned ab- 
 ruptly to depart, and they were suddenly con- 
 scious of the press of people about them, 
 ringing the marble lump. 
 
 Instinctively they hastened through the 
 galleries, tingling with their own sensations, 
 avoiding the anticlimax of mere paint, or of 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 219 
 
 senseless comment from the crowd. Alive 
 when he entered the museum, Philip was now 
 in that condition of emotional sensitiveness 
 when the soul waits on tip-toe for a miracle. 
 
 " What is going to happen? " he whispered 
 excitedly into Marie's ear, though there was 
 no need for whispers. 
 
 Her own eyes were large with a kind of 
 wonder and joy and fear. 
 
 " I don't know, I don't know," she said, 
 half breathlessly. 
 
 TTieir way led them Into the great gold 
 room where the Oriental porcelains are; and 
 suddenly they knew that the adventure was 
 upon them. Those thousand vases of perfect 
 shape and exquisite color stood around them 
 under transparent glass, and breathed a visible 
 silence on their lips. Pure as flames, pure 
 as thin flames burning in still air around an 
 altar, they were. And yet they were not at 
 all like that. That blue was the yearning 
 blue of the dawn sky, when a quiet robin 
 twitters In the grass; that pink the virgin 
 pink of the eastern sea rim when the day Is 
 
aao THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 dying. As the shell holds the music of the 
 deep, these perfect shapes of color infinitely 
 tender, infinitely alluring, sad with their own 
 perfection, held the light of dawn and even- 
 ing in their enamelled depths, 
 
 " Look ! " she whispered, touching his 
 hand, " the light does not come in from above. 
 It is shed like a radiance out the vases them- 
 selves! " 
 
 And it was even so. A soft glow perme- 
 ated the lofty room and passed upward, re- 
 flected from the gold walls, out through the 
 ground glass skylights overhead. An over- 
 powering sensation came upon Philip that 
 they were standing on a hilltop in a land 
 of flowers. Behind them the hills piled up, 
 blue on bluer fold, and before them a valley 
 of roses and trees In soft bloom and pool- 
 beaded streams fell away to the far plain 
 of the sea. Somewhere a robin sang, a single 
 robin softly, and in all the world there were 
 only she and he, old as the curve of the 
 sea rim, young as the morning cloud. 
 
 " Boy," he heard her whisper, " we have 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 221 
 
 been here before, you and I, I don't know 
 when. The cherry blossoms hung just so." 
 
 Had she really spoken? He turned to 
 see. The light of wonder was in her eyes. 
 And in her mind had been the same picture, 
 and in her heart — in her heart had there been 
 the same aching gladness? He must know! 
 
 " Was it sweet to be there, just you and 
 I ? " he whispered. 
 
 She looked at him a long, struggling mo- 
 ment. There was joy and there was terror 
 and there were tears in her eyes. But before 
 she answered there came a kind of smile, 
 fighting up, and what she said was, " I think 
 there was a parrot in a tree there." 
 
 His soul came down from its tip-toe ab- 
 ruptly. So she would not answer I She had 
 not been moved enough for that. 
 
 " So Brazil was wrong," said he, himself 
 with a wry, disappointed smile ; " it should 
 have been Japan. I didn't know they had 
 parrots in Japan. But the mystery remains, 
 why was he ever allowed out of Japan? " 
 
 " Yes," she said, in a low voice, almost 
 
222 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 like a sob, turning away, " the mystery re- 
 mains! " 
 
 " Marie, Child, what is it? " he asked with 
 quick tenderness. 
 
 She smiled up at him. "It is nothing, 
 truly," she said. 
 
 They went with the black swarm of people 
 down the great steps to the Avenue, for the 
 closing gong had sounded, and walked south- 
 ward along the Park walk, the Run-away 
 Place on one side, lying green into the low 
 afternoon sun, on the other the mansions of 
 the rich. They loitered on, almost in silence, 
 till the Park was behind them, and the sun 
 had set. She had never allowed him to ac- 
 company her out of the Run-away Place be- 
 fore. As the city swallowed them, a new 
 sense of protection came over him, an added 
 tingle of reality in her presence by his side. 
 
 And as he walked in silence in the fast 
 gathering twilight, he wondered by what 
 mysterious threads of destiny their lives had 
 been drawn together. The carriages rolled 
 endlessly by on the Avenue, the stream of 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 223 
 
 pedestrians brushed them on the walk, the 
 great city, opening its myriad eyes to the 
 dusk, lay all about, teeming, Titanic, alive. 
 Yet out of this myriad spawn of the primeval 
 monad they two had come together, and 
 were now walking side by side, in inti- 
 mate, sweet silence, they two apart from all 
 the rest. Was it any less wonderful than 
 the mood in the museum ? Was it not more 
 wonderful, for it was tingling with reality, 
 it would last? Over the crowds and car- 
 riages, over the city, he seemed to see spun 
 a great filmy net, like the ghost of a Cyclo- 
 pean spider's web, and all the spokes con- 
 verged in upon them. They were fast in 
 the centre, and the threads went out to the 
 ends of space. He rubbed his eyes, and she 
 smiled up at him questioningly. 
 
 " It is nothing," said he, " it is every- 
 thing." 
 
 " You must either get eyeglasses or more 
 sleep," she replied, with a most practical air. 
 
 Presently she stopped and pointed west- 
 ward down Thirtieth Street. 
 
224 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Against the last red banner of the defeated 
 day, a church spire many blocks distant stood 
 up alone and lovely. In our modern Baby- 
 lon of sky-scrapers, it is almost impossible to 
 glimpse any longer a spire against the sky. 
 Commerce out-tops religion, and the tallest 
 temple is made a pigmy by its next door 
 neighbor, the thirty story office building. 
 The most aspiring architectural form that 
 man has devised is, in New York, unable to 
 tell of Its aspiration. But here, looking 
 through the heart of the Tenderloin, down 
 the vista of a thrice notorious street, the 
 sudden, unexpected note was struck, the beau- 
 tiful spire, clear-cut and slender, yearned up 
 above the sordid roofs into the west. 
 
 " Your own Back Bay across the Charles 
 could show nothing more lovely than that," 
 she said; "nothing so lovely, in fact, for It 
 would lack the charm of the unexpected, the 
 heightening of contrast. You need a Singer 
 tower, to appreciate the State House dome." 
 
 " If I were in college I should write a 
 grandiloquent daily theme about it," said 
 
THE HAND OF GOD 225 
 
 Philip, " making it the symbol of the soul's 
 aspiration." 
 
 " Why don't you anyway? " she asked. 
 
 " Because I have looked to-day in 'the 
 Hand of God," he answered, " and seen there 
 only a man and a woman." 
 
 He spoke with tense earnestness. Again 
 the frightened look came into Marie's eyes, 
 and a look of struggle, too. 
 
 " Boy," she said, " you are not a boy, you 
 can't be a boy. Oh, you won't be a boy! 
 You won't leave the bugle alone ! You must 
 leave me now, and you must promise once 
 more not to follow." 
 
 " As you wish," he answered, " but not till 
 I know when I am to see you again." 
 
 There was a battle fighting behind the 
 girl's eyes. 
 
 " I don't know," she finally said. " My 
 little vacation is over. It can't be week days, 
 and it can't be Sundays any more. I — I 
 can't lie again as I have to-day." 
 
 " It must be some time, and soon! " said 
 he. 
 
226 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 She shook her head. " I'm afraid not," 
 she answered. 
 
 "But why, why?" 
 
 " Because you aren't a boy any longer ! " 
 
 " Yes, all the more because I'm not a boy 
 any longer, all the more, do you hear? " 
 
 "No, no, no!" she pleaded. "If you 
 care, you won't ! " 
 
 " Yes, I say," he cried, and tried In his 
 eagerness to take her hands. 
 
 She drew herself up, repelling him. 
 
 " Don't ! " she said. " Don't ! I can't see 
 you any more — ^not now, not for a long time, 
 perhaps. I am going now; you have prom- 
 ised not to follow. Some Saturday afternoon 
 I may be on Mount Mozart, I can't promise 
 more than that. I shouldn't promise that! 
 Oh, I don't promise that ! " 
 
 The tears suddenly rushed into her eyes. 
 She turned abruptly from him, and almost 
 ran down the street. 
 
 He made no effort to follow, standing 
 blankly, gazing at her retreating figure. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 
 
 ' I ""HE June heat had come on, the horrid 
 June heat, and Philip Stoughton worked 
 at his novel with a syphon of soda on the 
 desk and his clothes on a chair. Up in 
 the New England hills his family still, no 
 doubt, wore wraps of an evening when they 
 went out on the pasture knoll to watch the 
 sun set behind distant Graylock; and some- 
 times his vision carried him up there, and 
 he felt the cool, sweet air on his brow. The 
 rattle of traffic down under his window, the 
 ceaseless roar of the great city, the din and 
 dust and heat, smote on his nerves like stabs. 
 He loathed the grim, ugly town. The 
 country called to his heat-worn nerves with 
 a thousand siren voices. But somewhere else 
 in this heat and horror lived Child Marie, 
 
 and he knew now that he could not leave her, 
 227 
 
228 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 he knew with the certainty that all his hungry, 
 lonely days since she left him that Sunday 
 afternoon had given him. If he only knew 
 half as well where she lived, how quickly 
 would he smash all his promises to bits, he 
 thought, and rush to find her. 
 
 Every Saturday noon had seen him in the 
 summer-house on Mount Mozart, and every 
 Saturday sunset lighted his dejected steps 
 down the path and out of the Run-away Place, 
 that now was almost hateful to him, with its 
 load of memories: yet day after hot day he 
 had wandered in it, in the chance hope of 
 meeting her; day after hot day he had paced 
 the residence streets of the town, watching 
 for the sight of her in some window, in some 
 door. He had haunted school houses. At 
 times her image so obsessed him that he fan- 
 cied he saw her in a crowd, and he would dash 
 eagerly after, only to meet inevitable dis- 
 appointment. He thought always how tired 
 she must be, how worn. The memory of 
 her farewell, of her frightened face, of her 
 rush of tears, he could not lose. It haunted 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 229 
 
 him. Sometimes the blind pity of it would 
 sweep over him and send him out searching 
 at all hours. His hunger for her grew daily, 
 fed on the loneliness, mounted to a passion 
 that could not be denied. 
 
 This insufferably hot June night he threw 
 down his pen at eight o'clock, and gave up 
 all thought of work for the evening. There 
 was a moon rising red over the steam of the 
 city. He wanted her, he wanted her beyond 
 all things else. He thought with a grim 
 smile of the philosopher's statement that it 
 is impossible to feel affection with the glass 
 below zero or above eighty. He wanted her 
 so badly that he felt his yearning must compel 
 her, too, so that if he went out into the town 
 their footsteps would draw together. 
 
 And, let the Society for Psychic Research 
 make what of it they can, some unreasoned 
 impulse led him across Washington Square, 
 and there, on the corner of Macdougal Street, 
 he met her, tired and worn and pale, coming 
 up from the stewing, malodorous slums to 
 the south. 
 
230 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 She grew paler still when she saw him; 
 then the color flooded into her face and her 
 gasp of recognition was almost like a sob 
 of joy, a sob she would have suppressed, but 
 could not. He barred her passage, and as she 
 perforce stopped right before him he looked 
 down into her face and said, " I knew I 
 should meet you." 
 
 " How did you know? " she asked, a little 
 troubled. " Have you broken your promise, 
 Boy?" 
 
 " No," said he. " But I wanted to meet 
 you so badly that J just knew I should! " 
 
 "Ah, do you, too, believe that?" she ex- 
 claimed. 
 
 " I wonder — ■ — " he began. 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " I wonder if you helped? " 
 
 " You must let me go home now," she said, 
 endeavoring to pass him. 
 
 He slipped quietly along by her side. 
 
 " No," he said, " I mustn't do anything of 
 the sort. Let you go now? Not muchl 
 You see that beautiful, green gasolene 'bus? 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 231 
 
 Like the ' old three decker,' that's taking 
 tired people to — the Run-away Place. The 
 fare is ten cents, which isn't exorbitant, when 
 you consider the destination." 
 
 " No, no," she remonstrated. " I must go 
 home!" 
 
 " Yes, yes," said he. " You must do noth- 
 ing of the kind I " 
 
 And he led her across the street, and up 
 the little winding stairs to the roof of the 
 'bus. She went half in protest, half with a 
 kind of exultant freedom. But she had to 
 go. This night he was not to be resisted. 
 When they alighted, 'Victory was leading 
 General Sherman down the Avenue, like 
 a golden ghost frozen on a pedestal, and the 
 Park was soaked in moonlight. 
 
 " I have never been in the Park at night 
 before," said Child Marie. " If Pm afraid 
 may I take your hand? " 
 
 " I hope it's very, very spooky! " answered 
 Child Philip. 
 
 And away they fled, down a path toward 
 Lake Swan Boat, under the moon. 
 
232 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 Have you, Gentle Reader, ever gone to 
 the Run-away Place under the moon on a 
 summer night? Probably you have not. 
 Probably you are always the least bit scorn- 
 ful of the Park by day, and by night you 
 suppose it a place where the underworld 
 comes up to court, and naughty men of the 
 upper world take ladies driving in taxicabs. 
 Probably, too, your mamma thinks as you do, 
 so, if you are a girl, you had better seek the 
 adventure on the sly — shocking advice, is it 
 not ? And yet in your heart you do not think 
 so, for you know you ought always to spare 
 your mother needless pain. 
 
 And the adventure you must surely seek. 
 Any one who knows the Park only by day, 
 but half knows it, at best. No one who has 
 failed to see it under the moon on a summer 
 night, a misty summer night, can have any 
 conception of the transformation, of the 
 fairyland it then becomes in the very heart 
 of town, the dream-spot, soaked in beauty, 
 out of the pages of an old romance. 
 
 So these two tired run-aways found It, and 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 233 
 
 in silence and wonder they sped on, while the 
 dream spell worked around them. 
 
 Well as they knew the Park by day, it 
 was strange and mysterious to them now. 
 Ever they passed figures on the paths, saw 
 other figures dimly, on benches, heard laughs 
 and whispers. And the figures were always 
 in pairs, one of them usually dressed in white. 
 There was nothing strange about it. It 
 seemed the natural law of this enchanted 
 garden. Presently they came out on an open 
 glade. To the left the dark boles of great 
 trees climbed up a knoll. To the right the 
 moon-blanched green lay quiet under the night 
 sky. Ahead of them in the misty distance, 
 Cleopatra's needle rose up like a thin, pale 
 spectre. Far off somewhere was a rumble 
 of traffic, the never-ending hum of the great 
 city. But it was subdued here, like the under- 
 tone of surf on a distant beach. Only the 
 arc lamps on the drives made blue patches in 
 the faint mist, which were out of harmony 
 with the scene. Two lovers rose from a 
 bench in front of them, and vanished up a 
 
434 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 hidden path among the trees. Two other 
 lovers came out of the shadow and took their 
 places. Child Marie drew a deep breath, and 
 paused. 
 
 " Did you ever see ' A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream ' on the stage? " she said. " Perhaps 
 it's the arc lamps, perhaps it's because I really 
 know this isn't fairy land, but just our Park, 
 that makes it all seem like that dream play 
 to me. Just so the lovers move in and out 
 of the dim shadows at their cross purposes. 
 I keep looking for Puck." 
 
 Philip laid his hand on her arm. " Not 
 the stage," he said, "not the smell of the 
 scene-loft, and the false green lights, not 
 even if the play is Shakespeare I Oh, Child 
 Marie, this is fairyland!" 
 
 " Yes, Boy, I know it is," she answered. 
 " I know it is. Only I can't take it all in 
 at first." 
 
 Slowly they moved to the west, along a 
 heavily wooded path where on one side rose 
 a bank and on the other was a deep guUey 
 where a street crossed the Park, very properly 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 235 
 
 sunk down out of sight. And presently they 
 passed up a little incline, in the deep shadow 
 of flowery shrubs, and emerged suddenly on 
 an open space of stone, gleaming white under 
 the moon. 
 
 For a moment they did not realize where 
 they were. Then they both uttered a little 
 cry. Southward, where the moon rode over 
 the tree tops, nothing was visible but the 
 dark foliage, and to left and right the trees 
 shut out the view. But northward all was 
 open to the night sky, and right in front of 
 them, cutting its white outlines against the 
 purple, rose their tower of stone, the ancient 
 tower like a castle out of old romance. They 
 sprang upon the platform at its base, for 
 the moment quite vacant, and tried the door 
 to the tower. It was locked, but though they 
 could not reach their magic casement, throu^ 
 the larger casement at the base they could 
 find framed a picture of the still, dark water, 
 the indistinct shore beyond, and the deep 
 northern sky, where the Dipper gleamed 
 faintly through the haze of heat that rose 
 
236 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 from the city, reddened on the horizon from 
 the invisible lights of Harlem. 
 
 It was a picture bathed in the witchery of 
 moonlight on the water, and when they turned 
 from it to look out on the gleaming white 
 platform, guarded by its parapet of stone, 
 the ghost of Hamlet's father, or some shining 
 knight-at-arms, or a lily maid in robes of 
 crimson paled by the moon, might have been 
 walking there, and they would not have been 
 surprised. As they watched, two figures did 
 come out of the black shadow of bushes, by 
 the path they themselves had come, and 
 moved across the white stones to the parapet. 
 The man's arm was about the girl, and, ob- 
 livious to the watchers in the shadow of the 
 tower, as they leaned on the coping looking 
 northward he stooped over and kissed her. 
 The girl buried her face in his sleeve, and 
 he drew her still closer. 
 
 " She is so happy, let us leave them alone," 
 said Child Marie. 
 
 So they slipped away, still unobserved, 
 though perhaps it would have made no differ- 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 237 
 
 ence to the pair who continued to lean upon 
 the parapet. 
 
 And presently, as they walked down a 
 broad path flecked with gold, where the 
 moonlight sifted through the branches over- 
 head, they caught sight of water between the 
 trees, water pricked with reflected dots of 
 light from the lamps on the other side. 
 Hastening on, they crossed Pansy Bridge, and 
 on a litttle beach where the water lapped up 
 to their feet they found a vacant bench, and 
 sat them down to gaze upon the most won- 
 derful sight their eyes had ever beheld. 
 
 " Boy," said she, drawing a deep breath, 
 " I must be literal ! Tell me, is this New 
 York? Is this our Park? Am I really 
 awake? " 
 
 " One doesn't need faith, hope, charity, 
 and a child's power of imagination to find 
 this wonderful and lovely ! " he answered. 
 " Who, riding by over there in an Eighth 
 Avenue car, would guess that we, a few hun- 
 dred rods away, are in the heart of fairy- 
 land!" 
 
238 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 They turned slowly around on their bench 
 and drank in the whole scene. Behind them 
 rose a deep, velvet lawn to a grove of great 
 trees on a knoll, a silent, vacant lawn, as if 
 some stately manor house lay sleeping behind 
 those shadows, under the round moon. 
 Eastward Pansy Bridge spanned the black 
 water, from leafy bank to bank, its still re- 
 flection completing the perfect oval. West- 
 ward, far above and beyond the pond, the 
 line of lights, the trees, rose a great dim 
 procession of dark shapes, here and there 
 checkered with golden squares of light, the 
 vast apartment hotels along the Park front. 
 But now, over the trees and under the sky, 
 reddened by the invisible lights of the city, 
 they were not hotels, they were ghost-ships 
 steaming by, monster liners of the night, their 
 starboard lights agleam, seen in a dream 
 mirage, unreal, ethereal, yet mighty and mag- 
 nificent. 
 
 But, looking northward, even they were 
 forgot. The boy and girl on the bench saw 
 only the Shining Water under the moon, 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 239 
 
 stretching out past the dark eyeot and the 
 Forest Perilous, growing more and more 
 misty as it receded, till finally it was lost in 
 haze and shadow, as if it had no ending. A 
 swan moved silently from the bushes on the 
 bank, trailing a tiny golden wake across the 
 dark water. Somebody on Pansy Bridge, 
 some indistinguishable lover, perhaps, was 
 whistling softly a commonplace little tune, 
 that yet was transformed by the magic of 
 the moon, even as the Park itself, into a thing 
 wistful and lovely and strange. On the next 
 bench a couple sat in silence, or, if they were 
 speaking, it was in a whisper too low to be 
 heard. And when Philip spoke, he, too, 
 spoke in a whisper. 
 
 " I suppose you never read George Moore's 
 ' Memoirs of My Dead Life ' ? " he said. 
 
 " I know enough about them to know it 
 wouldn't do for me to confess it if I had," 
 she smiled. "Why?" 
 
 " Well," said he, " in that book, in ' The 
 Lovers of Orelay,' Doris sings Schumann's 
 ' Nut Tree ' to Moore, and it inspires him to 
 
240 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 call Schubert's and Schumann's songs ' the 
 moonlit lakes and nightingales of music' I 
 never realized before quite the full truth of 
 that description. But now I do — now I 
 should like to hear you sing ' Die Nussbaum,' 
 and no other song in the world, unless it 
 be one of Schubert's. There's just this throb 
 and ache in their haunting, romantic music, 
 just the moonlit unreality, the vague, almost 
 too sensuous and too beautiful sadness and 
 yearning of this scene." 
 
 " That's grown up language, Boy," she 
 whispered. 
 
 " This is a grown up scene. Girl," he 
 whispered back. " Did you ever hear the 
 Kneisels play a Schumann quartet? " 
 
 " Yes," said she. 
 
 " Didn't it make you feel like this? " 
 
 " Yes," said she, more softly still. 
 
 He moved closer to her on the bench. 
 One little hand lay on her lap, and he touched 
 it. It lay quite still under his touch, and 
 her eyes looked steadily out across the misty 
 pond. Gradually his own hand closed over 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 241 
 
 it, and it nestled warmly into his palm. A 
 thrill passed between them, and their shoul- 
 ders leaned together. 
 
 " The moonlit lakes and nightingales of 
 music," he whispered in her ear; " such things 
 be in the world, dear little Girl. See the 
 moon mist on the Shining Water, and hear 
 the crickets in the grass. Beauty and dreams 
 and passion, loveliness that aches with its 
 own fullness, right in the midst of our hot, 
 dirty, toiling town. Poor little girl who is 
 so tired, so tired, let it rest on your eyes, and 
 your ears, and your heart, till you forget 1 " 
 
 She leaned more heavily on his shoulder, 
 but made no sound. Stooping forward, he 
 looked in her face, and saw the mist shining 
 in her eyes. And then an impulse surged 
 over him, sweet, mighty, irresistible. He 
 gathered her close in his arms, and kissed 
 her. She buried her face on his sleeve, as 
 the girl had done at the tower, and sobbed. 
 
 Presently she raised her face to his, and 
 the tears were shining on her cheeks where 
 the moonlight struck them. 
 
242 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Kiss me again 1 " she whispered. 
 
 And then she rose and stood before him 
 gravely. 
 
 " Boy," she said, " I must go home 1 " 
 
 He reached for her hands, but she put 
 them behind her back. 
 
 " No, no," said she hastily. " I must go 
 home ! You must take me to a car I " 
 
 Still he remained seated. " Girl," he 
 asked, "who are you?" 
 
 " You know — Marie," she answered. 
 
 " No, we are grown up now, — who are 
 you?" 
 
 She shook her head. " You mustn't ask, — 
 you musn't ask." 
 
 "Mustn't ask!" he cried. "Why, now 
 I must ask! " 
 
 "Oh, no, no, nol" she answered. "Be 
 Child Philip, and let me be Marie! Don't 
 you see, don't you understand? It can't be 
 anything else. That's who we are in the 
 Run-away Place; and all the rest doesn't 
 matter." 
 
 "Doesn't matter?" he said, rising and 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 243 
 
 taking her shoulders between his hands. 
 " Doesn't matter ? Of course it matters now, 
 for I love you ! " 
 
 The girl shivered at the words. " I — 
 I — you — I mustn't see you again ! " she said. 
 
 " You shall see me again," he answered. 
 " You shall see me again, to-morrow ! And 
 you shall tell me now who you are! " 
 
 The girl looked up in his face, quivering 
 between the hard grip of his hands. A tear 
 still shone on her cheek, and her eyes, in 
 the moonlight, were misty. 
 
 " Would you love me any more if you 
 knew?" she asked. "Isn't it sweeter to 
 have loved me without knowing ? I've found 
 it so ! " 
 
 He drew her toward him, kissing her again, 
 and her lips answered his. 
 
 " You are mine, mine, mine, whoever you 
 are ! " he whispered. " But we are going 
 back into the world now, together, and we 
 must know." 
 
 " Could you take me if you didn't know? " 
 she breathed, her face close to his. " Could 
 
244 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 you take me, this very night, and run far 
 away, farther even than this" shore of the 
 Shining Water, farther than the last light 
 of the town, far away from the heat and the 
 worry and the work ? " 
 
 " Do you mean it? " he cried, rising on her 
 words like wings. " I'll take you northward, 
 over the moonlit miles, across streams and 
 valleys, up, up, into the cool, high hills, where 
 the breeze sweeps and the stars shine and 
 the whippoorwills shall sing our nuptial song ! 
 Come, my Beloved ! " 
 
 She wrenched herself from his embrace. 
 " Stop, Boy, stop ! " she exclaimed. " What 
 am I letting you say? Oh, you don't know, 
 you don't know. You are freedom, happi- 
 ness, the joy-of-life, everj^thing! You've 
 stolen away my senses, you and the moonlight. 
 I'm going now; you mustn't follow. No- 
 body will molest me. You mustn't follow, 
 I say. Please, if you love me ! " 
 
 " You shall not go till you tell me who you 
 are, or where you live, or when I can see 
 you," he cried, detaining her. " Do you 
 
THE TOUCH OF SCHUMANN 245 
 
 think I'm going to give you up this way? 
 Do you?" He held her wrist almost 
 roughly. " What do you take me for? " 
 
 " Day after to-morrow, then, the summer- 
 house, at four," she answered. " Oh, please 
 let me go ! " 
 
 He searched her face hungrily, and her 
 eyes fell, as if they dared not meet his. Then 
 he dropped her wrist. 
 
 " Very well," he said, " as you wish." 
 
 But when he had released her, she did not 
 stir for a moment. Then she came forward, 
 kissed his shoulder, and sped swiftly away 
 down the shore of the Shining Water. He 
 watched her disappear into the shadows. 
 After she was gone he sat down on the bench, 
 pulled a pipe out of his pocket, filled and lit 
 it, and stared moodily into the moon mist 
 up the lake. Presently he became aware of 
 the harsh roar and rattle of cars over on 
 the avenue. The pond smelled stale. Two 
 men passed along the little beach in front of 
 him talking loudly with frequent oaths. The 
 touch of Schumann had vanished. He got 
 
246 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 up and walked hastily out of the Park, his 
 soul filled with doubts and wonders. Once 
 in the street, her kiss seemed as unreal as the 
 fairyland behind him, spun out of dream- 
 stuff. When he reached home his head ached 
 dully, and his body was exhausted. He was 
 like a man in whom the whole tide of being 
 was at dead ebb. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE PESSIMISTIC PELICAN 
 
 AT quarter of four on the appointed day 
 x\. he passed by Victory without a glance 
 and almost ran up the incline to the summer- 
 house. The tide of life had flooded back 
 again now, and was beating high against 
 the shores. The minutes were hours till she 
 came. He seized her hand, and looked hard 
 into her eyes. They met his with a light he 
 had never seen before, as if some shade had 
 been raised, the ultimate reservation put aside. 
 He knew without words that she was his. A 
 song sang in his heart as he rested his hands 
 on her shoulders, holding her away from him 
 to smile into her face. There were hollows 
 in her cheeks, and the sight of them hurt him. 
 " Tired little face ! " he said. " Can we 
 go soon up into the hills where the wind shall 
 blow back the color? " 
 
 247 
 
248 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 " Happy face now ! " she answered, " for 
 it has dared to ' follow the gleam.' " 
 
 They moved northward slowly into the 
 heart of the Park. " Do you, do you, more 
 than anything in the world? " she asked, 
 squeezing his arm. 
 
 " More than anything in the world," he 
 answered, " or anything beyond it I " 
 
 " Then I can tell you, and you'll under- 
 stand. You always understand. I had to 
 tell him last night. Oh, Boy, it was not easy. 
 I fear I hurt him, you can understand that. 
 But you cannot understand how I hurt myself, 
 because you are only a boy after all, if you 
 are a wonderful one. Now you know why 
 I couldn't listen to your bugle at the gates. 
 And now you know how wicked I was even 
 to let the little girl out to play with you. 
 Did you never guess? And didn't you de- 
 spise me for it ? " 
 
 " Despise you? " he replied, drawing close 
 to her. " How little you understand ! De- 
 spise you for going at your happiness ? Per- 
 haps I did guess, a little. I won't say that 
 
THE PESSIMISTIC PELICAN 249 
 
 I didn't. But I loved you. I loved you so 
 much that I knew in my heart the walls would 
 crumble. And I waited." 
 
 " I should have been awfully jealous if I'd 
 guessed such a thing about you," said Marie, 
 tucking her arm for an instant in his. 
 
 He shook his head. " No you wouldn't," 
 he said. " Jealousy isn't the complement of 
 love; it has nothing to do with love. It is 
 a complement of personal vanity. The 
 ' pangs of jealousy ' are really the pains of 
 wounded personal pride. Perhaps I was 
 tempted to be jealous, to hate him. But I 
 had to put such feelings away from me, for 
 they are a sign of smallness, and I cannot be 
 small where you are concerned, Marie. I 
 cannot have anything petty in our love." 
 
 She pressed his arm, in silent reply. 
 
 " But won't you please be a little bit sorry 
 for him, then ? " she asked. 
 
 Philip shook his head. 
 
 " No," he answered, " I can't be sorry for 
 him, either. Maybe I could if I knew him ; 
 maybe I should not have taken you if I had 
 
250 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 known him, though I doubt it. I guess I've 
 got what Ibsen calls a ' Viking conscience.' 
 When I see my happiness I go straight for it. 
 If I should stop to pity by the way, the bird 
 might escape ; and, after all, to catch the bird 
 is success in life. Maybe that's a child's 
 philosophy, or rather instinct. But I can't 
 help it. God made me a free thing, and when 
 my heart's singing a song of you, a triumph 
 song, there's no room for any other note." 
 
 " The ' Viking conscience ! ' " said the girl, 
 " Yes, that's it I That's what I have been 
 striving toward all my life! God tried to 
 make me a free thing, too, I guess, only he 
 made me a woman, so that his work was but 
 half done. That night, by the Shining 
 Water, the old Viking struggled up. I dared 
 to dream of flying with you. Would you 
 have taken me ? " 
 
 " Yes," said he. 
 
 "Without knowing who I am?" 
 
 " Without knowing who you are ! " 
 
 " And thought no wrong? " 
 
 " And thought no wrong! " 
 
THE PESSIMISTIC PELICAN 251 
 
 " Ah, but I would not have dared to go, 
 even now I would not dare to go. Yet there 
 would be no wrong, would there, for we love 
 each other? " 
 
 Their hands met at their sides, and for 
 a moment they forgot the nursemaids on the 
 benches. 
 
 " You see," she continued, " I'm a little 
 cowardy-custard still, and I dread the hour 
 of taking you home. All my life I've been 
 hedged round with dear proprieties. I love 
 some of them very much, when they are 
 persons. But I could not let them stand be- 
 tween me and you, never that, Boyl I've 
 yielded to them year in and year out, they've 
 sunk into the nature of me, so that sometimes 
 I've quite forgotten even to flutter against 
 the bars. But when I went home that last 
 night I — I — ^well, there was no fluttering 
 about it. I stood at the bedroom window and 
 looked out across the housetops that were 
 all shining in the moon, and just knew that — 
 I should have to have you, or diel Yes, 
 Boy, it's as bad as that ! I guess there's only 
 
252 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 one thing will give a woman a ' Viking con- 
 science ' — love. You see, I knew at last that 
 I loved you ! " 
 
 " Didn't you know it till then? " 
 
 " Perhaps I did," she smiled, " but I hadn't 
 admitted it, even to myself. I had just run 
 to the Park to meet you like a thirsty deer 
 to the pool. Besides, it was all so sudden — 
 only a few weeks. Do you realize that? " 
 
 "And he, didn't you love him?" asked 
 Philip. 
 
 She shook her head. " No," she answered. 
 " I wonder if you can understand? Oh, you 
 must understand ! You must know that you 
 are everything, now, always, forever! He 
 was one of the proprieties. He was like 
 church on Sunday or the family birthday 
 parties. He was dear and good and con- 
 ventional, and he hadn't been a boy for ever 
 so many years. He had forgotten how to 
 be a boy and play with me. Sometimes, when 
 I came home from work — it's hard work 
 down in the Settlement, that uses my grown-up 
 self all up — something in me wanted to be 
 
THE PESSIMISTIC PELICAN 253 
 
 played with, but there was no little playmate, 
 nobody to meet the need. Always everybody 
 would be talking serious matters, and on 
 Sunday nights they sang hymns in the parlor, 
 till I've seen the time when I could have 
 screamed, and would have, too, if there'd 
 been anybody to know why I did it! Boy, 
 some Sunday I want to stay quite away from 
 church, and play golf all day, and go hear 
 a vaudeville concert in the evening 1 " 
 
 " I'll never ask you to go to church but 
 the once ! " he laughed. " But," he added, 
 seriously, " if you didn't love him " 
 
 " Ah ! " said she, " I thought I did. I 
 thought I knew what love was. Even I al- 
 most thought that I was happy. Sometimes 
 I think that women don't know so much as 
 they are credited with, even intuitively. And 
 even when they do, they cheat themseves. 
 They know they want to love, and be loved, 
 and that need, that desire, drives them into 
 terrible compromises. Maybe they don't 
 know any better, maybe only deep down in 
 their hearts is there any hint that what they 
 
254 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 are cherishing is but the poor pale shadow. 
 Heaven help them if it's too late when the 
 reality walks into their lives and suddenly the 
 veil falls from their eyes, and the passion 
 sweeps over them I Boy, I'll tell you every- 
 thing — or almost everything! I began to 
 doubt that day in the tower, when I found I 
 was jealous of your lady on the other side of 
 the hill — I began to doubt because I was 
 jealous, and because you thrilled me, and 
 because I let you thrill me, and because I 
 promised to come again, even after that. 
 You see, I did have a little of the ' Viking 
 
 conscience I ' " 
 
 " Dear girl," he said, " you too know 
 that just to catch the bird is success." 
 
 " Yes, I know it — now 1 " She pressed his 
 arm. " And then, under the spell of the 
 moon, your Schumann moon, I just forgot 
 everything, because I saw the bird fluttering 
 so near my hand, and I reached for it. Oh, 
 it was good to be free, to be wild, to go 
 straight for your happiness! I knew when 
 you kissed me, and I returned your kiss, that 
 
THE PESSIMISTIC PELICAN 255 
 
 I had never even dreamed what love is. I 
 didn't know before it was that, that there 
 could be anything like that! It swept over 
 me like a wave, and even if I did run away 
 from you, Boy, I ran on air. My running 
 away was the last gasp in me, I think, of the 
 theory I was reared in — that anything so 
 pleasant must be wicked 1 " 
 
 She finished with a little laugh. 
 They had come to a pause in front of the 
 large bird cage in the Zoo, their steps having 
 strayed unheeded. 
 
 " You do, don't you? " she suddenly asked 
 again, leaning hard against his side. 
 
 His fingers sought hers. " More than 
 anything in the world," he answered. 
 
 The pink pelican was waddling just on the 
 other side of the net. He looked up at the 
 words and regarded the pair solemnly. 
 
 "Fink Pelican," said Philip, "this is 
 Marie, my Betrothed. We ran away and 
 fell in love, which we hadn't oughter, not 
 being properly introduced, and, besides, she 
 thought she loved another man." 
 
256 THE RUN-AWAY PLACE 
 
 The solemn bird made no sound, no mo- 
 tion, but continued to regard them fixedly. 
 
 " We are very happy, Mr. Pelican," said 
 she. "You might look as though you sym- 
 pathized." She leaned her head lightly 
 against Philip's shoulder as she spoke. 
 
 The pelican deliberately turned away from 
 them, drew one foot up under him, bent his 
 long pink neck back between his wings, hid 
 his head under the feathers, wabbled once or 
 twice to get a perfect balance, and went to 
 sleep. 
 
 " He's a pessimist," said Philip. 
 
 "Poor, foolish bird!" said Child Marie, 
 with a happy little laugh. 
 
 When they came out upon Victory leading 
 General Sherman down the Avenue, it sud- 
 denly occurred to both that something had 
 still been omitted. 
 
 " Mayn't I know whom Pm going to 
 marry? " he asked. 
 
 "And I what my name is going to be? " 
 she answered. 
 
 So, solemnly, with great formality, they 
 
THE PESSIMISTIC PELICAN 257 
 
 exchanged cards, and laughed, for they were 
 neighbors, and climbed aboard a southward 
 going 'bus. 
 
 " Good bye, dear Run-away Place," she 
 whispered, looking back. " We caught the 
 bird of happiness in you I " 
 
 THE END 
 
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