The Pagans by Arlo Bates

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"I shall have no name," Arthur returned. "Only--
_L'homme est mort. Soit_.
How does that strike you?"

"Ah," she cried impulsively, "how does any thing strike me? You play at
being wretched as sentimental school girls do, when in their case it is
slate pencils and pickled limes and in your case it is vanity. If you
were half as miserable as you pretend, you'd have blown your brains out
long ago, or deemed yourself the veriest craven alive. I've no patience
with such attitudinizing."

"You are partly right," he admitted, "but do any of us find the savor
of life so sweet as to make it worth while?"

Something in his voice, a ring of what might be pity in his tone,
humiliated Helen. She suspected that he thought her outburst arose from
a too great fondness for himself, for grief at parting and at giving
him up to another. She struggled to regain her calmness; she felt the
impossibility of contradicting the belief which she was sure existed in
his mind; she was conscious that to say, "I do not love you," would
appear to him proof incontrovertible that the reverse was true. Her
throat contracted painfully and she cast down her eyes lest the tears
in them should be seen.

"The Caffres," Fenton continued, after an instant's pause, "are said to
be so fond of sugar that they will eat a handful of sand rather than
lose a grain or two that has fallen to the ground; it seems to me life
is the sand and joy in the proportion of the sugar. I'm not willing to
take the sand, and I protest against it. There is no morality in it."

"There is no morality in any thing but death," Helen returned drearily.

"Death!" echoed Fenton. "Do you call that moral! Death that crushes the
emotions, that kills the passions, that pollutes the flesh; the monster
which debauches all that is sacred in the physical, that degrades to
the level of the lowest all that is high in the intellectual--is this
your idea of the moral? The coarsest rioting of sensual life is sacred
beside it. Death moral? _Mon Dieu_, Helen, how you do abuse
terms!"

Fenton was continually treading upon the dangerous edge between pathos
and bathos, between impressiveness and absurdity. Had he not possessed
extremely sensitive perceptions which enabled him to judge swiftly and
exactly of the effect of his declamations, and the keenest sense of the
ludicrous that helped him to turn into ridicule whatever could not be
made to pass for earnest, much of his extravagant talk would have
excited amusement and, not impossibly, contempt, instead of producing
the half serious effect he desired. He could impart a vast air of
sincerity to his speech, moreover, and could even for the moment be
sincere. In the present case his earnest and real feeling saved this
outburst from the somewhat theatrical air which the words might easily
have had if spoken at all artificially.

"The history of mankind," went on the artist, in a sort of two-fold
consciousness, deeply feeling on the one hand what he was saying, but
on the other endeavoring to direct the conversation to generalities in
which would be lost the dangerous personal remarks which threatened,
"the whole history of mankind is a protest against death as an insult,
an outrage. All religions are only mankind's defiance of death more or
less largely phrased."

"No," Helen said. "Not our defiance; our confession of a craven fear. I
am afraid of death. I don't dare take my life."

"We are talking," responded her companion, in his turn leaving the
table and approaching the window, "like a couple of unmitigated ghouls.
I acknowledge your right to put aside your life if it bores you; man
has at least that one inalienable right. But why should you? Art is
left still."

"Art," she repeated with profound sadness; "yes, but a woman is never
content with abstractions. She demands something more definite. And, by
the way, Will came to see me yesterday."

"Yes! What did he want?"

"He said he only came to see how I was. I think he recognizes that now
he has come from Europe our secret is sure to leak out soon, and is
looking the ground over to see how it is best to behave. He was very
entertaining; I never enjoyed him more thoroughly."

"He's a model husband," Fenton observed thoughtfully. "As well as you
like each other, I'll be hanged if I can see why you don't live like
other people."

"It is precisely because we don't live like other people," was the
reply, "that we do like each other so well. We are the best of friends;
we were the worst possible husband and wife. I hated him officially,
and---There! Why must you bring all that up again? Let the dead past
bury its dead."

"But the past won't bury its dead. It sits over their corpses like a
persistent resurrectionist, in a fashion which is irresistibly
disheartening. Did it never strike you, by the way, what a droll
caricature might be made on that line? Time as a decrepit old sexton,
you know."

"So few people can joke on those subjects that it would appeal to a
very limited audience, I'm afraid."

"Oh, that's true of every thing that is good for any thing."

"Unfortunately the converse is not true, for every thing appealing to a
small audience is by no means good."

"Not even marriage?"

"Still harping on matrimony," said Helen, laughing. "What will you do
after the knot is really tied? You speak in the mournful tone of one
who reads _'Lasciate ogni speranza'_ upon his wedding horseshoe."

"Oh, not quite," he laughed back, "for after marriage a man can always
amuse himself, you know, by looking at any woman he may meet and
fancying how much worse off he might be if he had married her instead
of his wife."

"Well," Helen remarked, turning, "your conversation is amusing and
doubtless deeply instructive, but I must go to the studio. My
bas-relief will hardly complete itself, I suppose, and I've a splendid
offer for it, to decorate a house in Milton. It is to be paneled into
the side of an oak stairway at the back of the main hall. Isn't that
fine?"

X.

O, WICKED WIT AND GIFT.
Hamlet; i.--5.

Anomalies are doubtless as truly the product of law as results whose
logic is evident, and the strange relations between Mrs. Greyson and
her husband were therefore to be considered the outcome of fixed causes
from which no other result was possible.

Married when scarcely more than a girl, shy, undeveloped and ignorant
of the world, Helen came from a secluded life, which had been pretty
equally divided between the library of her dead father and the woods
surrounding the country village where she lived. She had never even
fancied that she loved Dr. Ashton; but she had married him as she would
have obeyed any other command of the stern aunt who had presided
severely over her orphaned childhood. He, half-a-dozen years her
senior, had been enamored of her wonderful beauty and modest
intellectuality; and, being accustomed always to gratify the impulse of
the moment, he had married her with a precipitancy as characteristic as
it was reckless. It was owing to a certain mutual scorn of
conventionalities that Helen and her husband at length decided to
separate. Without the aid of the law and without scandal, they settled
back into single liberty, the wife taking again her father's name. They
had spent their married life abroad, where Dr. Ashton had remained
until a short time previous to the opening of our story, and as neither
husband nor wife had been in their single life known in Boston, and as
Helen was chary of new acquaintances, their relations had thus far
remained undiscovered. Helen, at least, recognized how improbable it
was that this secrecy would long remain inviolate, but she went quietly
on her way, letting events take their own course.

Arthur Fenton was an old friend of her husband whom Helen had met in
Europe, but had known intimately only during her Boston life. She had
found him sympathetic, responsive and entertaining, and as any lonely
woman clings to the companionship of an appreciative man, she had clung
to the friendship and comradeship of the artist.

Going across the Common towards the studio on this sunny morning, when
the air was brisk and bracing, the naked trees clearly and delicately
defined against the sky, Helen's thoughts went back to her past; to her
shy, secluded girlhood, to the years of her married life, and to the
way in which she had been living since she and her husband parted. She
reflected with a smile, half pity, half contempt, of the proud,
reticent girl who had pored over books and drawings in the musty,
deserted library at home, almost wondering if she were the same being.
She looked from the Joy Street mall across the hollow which holds the
Frog Pond, the most charming view on the Common, yet not even the
golden sparkle of the water or the beautiful line of the slope beyond
could chase from her mind the picture of the high, dim old room, lined
to the ceiling with book-shelves, dingy and dusty from neglect. She
seemed to hear still the weird tapping of the beech-tree boughs against
the tall narrow windows, and still to smell odor of old leather; she
remembered vividly the dull dizziness that came from stooping too long
over some volume too heavy to hold, above which, half lying upon the
carpetless floor, she had bent with drooping golden curls. She
remembered, too, the remoteness of the real world from the ideal sphere
in which her fancy placed her; how unimportant and unsubstantial to her
had appeared the events of daily life as compared with the incidents of
the world the old books in the musty library opened to her. The life of
these magic tomes was the real, and that humdrum state through which
her visible pathway lay was the dream. To the imaginative girl, half
child, half poet, her marriage had prospectively seemed merely an
accident of the trivial outside existence which surrounded without
penetrating her true being; and the sharpness of the rude awakening
from this childish misconception still pierced the woman's proud soul.

No woman recalls her childhood without regret, and despite the
philosophy she had cultivated, Helen felt a deep sadness as the old
days, somber and dull though they had been, rose before her. She
hurried her step a little as if to escape her past, when a pleasant
voice at her elbow said:

"Good morning, Helen. Upon what wickedness are you bent now. You go too
fast to be on a good errand."

"Good morning, Will," she answered, without turning, for the voice
brought the speaker before her mental vision as plainly as her eyes
could have done. "I was just thinking of you, and of the days when you
found me at home."

"Yes," responded Dr. Ashton, "what were you thinking of them?"

"Nothing very pleasant," she answered with a sigh. "What a gorgeous day
it is. Arthur has been breakfasting with me."

"Arthur is going to be married," remarked her companion good humoredly.
"I've just been out to buy him a wedding present."

"What is it?"

"Oh, something he chose himself. It is not safe to tell you, though."

"Haven't I proved my discretion?" Helen said lightly. "I thought that
by this time you'd be willing to trust me with your most deadly
secrets."

"This is a deadly secret, indeed," he returned, taking from his pocket
a small morocco case.

"Oh, jewelry," Helen said, with an accent of disappointment. "I should
never have suspected you of such commonplaceness, Will."

"Not jewelry; a jewel," retorted Dr. Ashton, opening the case and
displaying a tiny vial.

"Will!" Helen exclaimed, stopping suddenly and catching her husband by
the arm, "you won't give him that?"

"Why not? I promised him long ago that I'd get it for him, and he
particularly asked for it as a wedding gift."

"Oh, Will; don't do it! He'll use it sometime when he's blue; he'll----"

"Nonsense," responded the physician, restoring the case to his pocket.
"I've diagnosed his case perfectly. He isn't very robust, he's
infernally sensitive, and he's no end morbid. He fancies he may want to
kill himself, and I dare say he will have leanings that way. Most of us
do. He has wanted to a good many times before now, and he is likely to
again, but he won't do it. He's too soft-hearted. He might get up steam
enough as far as courage goes, but he'd never forget other people and
their opinion. He couldn't bear to hurt others, and still less could he
bear the idea of their blaming him. He is precisely the man who cannot
take his own life."

"But what puts it into his head just now? Why should he marry if he
dreads it so?"

"It is all of a piece with his morbidness. He is really in love with
Miss Caldwell, I think, but he has brooded over the matter as he broods
over every thing, and seeing the uncertain nature of matrimony, he like
a wise man provides for contingencies. There may be something behind
that I don't know of, but I think not. He'll feel easier if he has
this, and I am honestly doing him a favor, if it isn't in the way he
thinks."

"I do not know," persisted Helen, "but I do wish you wouldn't do it.
How would his bride feel if she knew?"

"I don't know her," Dr. Ashton returned coolly, "so of course I can't
tell how sensible she is; but in any case I can trust Arthur's
discretion."

"She's orthodox," said Helen, "or, no, I think she is not so bad as
that; but she would regard the idea of suicide as unspeakably wicked.
At least I think so; I never saw her but once. Oh, I do hate to have
Arthur marry her. It's dreadful!"

"Of course; it's dreadful to think of any man's marrying, for that
matter," he returned with a smile, "but he is a man who was sure to do
it sooner or later."

"He's a man of so much principle," Helen mused, half aloud.

"Principle," sneered her companion laughingly, "principle is only
formulated policy."

"I am dreadfully tired of epigrams," sighed Helen as they walked down
West street. "Whether Arthur learned the habit of you or you of him I
don't know; but the pair of you are enough to corrupt all Boston. I do
wish you'd give me that case. I'm sure I need it far more than Arthur
does. He's going to be married, his pictures are praised and are
beginning to sell, he has life before him and every thing to live for,
while I have nothing."

"Life is before you, too," answered her husband gravely, putting his
hand upon her arm to prevent her flying under the wheels of a carriage
which in her absorption she had not noticed. "Look here, Helen; it
wouldn't be any better if Arthur wanted to marry you. You are too
melancholy alone without having him to push you deeper into the slough
of despond."

"You are mistaken, Will," was the quiet response. "I am fond of Arthur,
very fond, indeed; but not in that way. I am a fool to grieve about his
marriage; I own that, though after all I've lived through I ought to be
too hardened to care. But you must acknowledge that it isn't very
pleasant for me to see him deliberately going away to marry a woman who
would consider me a Bohemian, and very likely anything but respectable,
because you and I choose to be comfortable apart instead of miserable
together. If I were not so utterly alone in the world, losing a friend
would not be so great a matter, perhaps; but he is all I have now,
Will."

"It is hard, old lady; that's a fact. I wish I could straighten things
out for you, but I don't see how I can."

"No," Helen said drearily, "nobody can."

XI.

WHOM THE FATES HAVE MARKED.
Comedy of Errors; i.--I.

Upon entering the small studio where her bas-relief stood, Helen found
Herman there before her. He had removed the wet cloths from the clay
and was examining the work with close attention.

"You need a model for this figure," he said, indicating the month of
May. "You must take that turn of the shoulder from nothing but life."

Helen came and stood beside him, looking at the work. The instinct of
the artist for the moment superseded all other feelings in her mind,
and she forgot alike her own troubles and the ill-omened gift with
which her husband purposed remembering the nuptials of her friend.

The figure of May of which Herman spoke was that of a beautiful young
girl casting backward a wistful look at the fallen flowers which she
had dropped but might not stay to gather up again. The splendid
movement of the youthful figure, thrown forward in her running, but
with one shoulder turned toward the spectator, so that the upper
portion of the beautiful bosom was seen, formed one of the finest
details of the composition.

"Yes," the sculptor said again, "you must have a model for that, and I
have one coming this morning. To be honest, I came up here hoping you'd
need her. I believe she is a good girl, and I do not like the idea of
her being about among the studios."

He went on to speak of the figure, adding suggestions of treatment,
feeling and posing; and as he talked he was conscious of needlessly
prolonging the conversation for the mere pleasure of being near this
woman, and of secretly cherishing some vague feeling that not only
would Ninitta be safe under Mrs. Greyson's guardianship, but that some
solution of the complexities in which he found himself involved would
result from bringing together the two women so closely connected with
his life.

He went away into his own studio at length, but Helen had scarcely got
fairly to work before he reappeared with Ninitta.

Ninitta was much the same in outward appearance as upon the previous
day, but between this morning's mental state and that of yesterday
there was a great gulf. The Italian's character was a strange if not
wholly unique mixture of simplicity and worldly wisdom. All her
experiences, her life as a model in various parts of the world, her
hardships and successes, while teaching her only too sharply the
follies and vices of mankind, had never for an instant shaken her faith
in Grant Herman. He was her god. It is even doubtful if any thing he
could have done would have destroyed her belief in his integrity and
nobility of soul. When he left her, she acquiesced, it is true, but
with a wild passion of anguish. She knew he misjudged, but she chose to
phrase it to herself that he was deceived; his rashness and
hot-headedness were to her only so many fresh evidences of his
greatness of character. She was not the first woman who has vaguely felt
that unreasoning jealousy and passion are admirable or even
essential attributes of virility, and who has worshiped a man as much
for his faults as for his virtues.

To the dream of meeting Herman with the proofs that he had been
deceived, Ninitta had clung unyieldingly through the dreary years since
the death of Hoffmeir, who had been kind to her for the sake of his
shattered friendship with Herman, and for the sake, too, of his own
hopeless love for herself. It was from mingled shyness and pride that
Ninitta had waited for a summons from the sculptor after she had
reached Boston; but when she had at last gone to his studio it was with
keen emotion. She had not considered that both herself and her old-time
lover had changed in the seven years of separation. She had not
reflected that believing her false he could not but have endeavored to
forget her. She could not know that contact with the world, if it had
not made him ashamed of his youthful enthusiasm, had at least showed
him how the marriage he had contemplated would have appeared in the
eyes of worldly wisdom, and had so educated him that reason was less
helpless before passion than of old.

But to-day Ninitta was a different woman, changed by the agony of a
night into which had been compressed the bitterness of years. She had
been too sharply wounded at being greeted by a hand-shake in place of
the too well remembered kisses, with commonplace kind inquiries instead
of an embrace, not to realize at least how entirely the relations
between herself and Herman were changed. She did not understand the
alteration, it is true. To do that would have required not only a
knowledge of facts of which she could have no cognizance, but far
keener powers of reason than were centered in Ninitta's shapely head.
Only of one thing she was sure; there the instinct of her sex stood her
in good stead. She was convinced that some other woman had won the
sculptor's love from her. When she came into Helen's studio this
morning she watched sharply for some token which should show her the
relations in which the two artists stood to each other; but she could
detect nothing significant. Mrs. Greyson was intent only upon her work,
and whatever the sculptor may have felt at the meeting of Helen and
Ninitta, he made no outward sign.

The model showed a quickness of comprehension in taking the pose
required, and the shoulder she bared was of so exquisite mold that
Helen's keenest artistic powers were aroused. Ninitta understood the
art of posing as a painter knows the use of brush and colors; she had
for it an inborn capacity impossible except in the child of an art
land. Moved by the inspiration of that most beautiful bust, Mrs.
Greyson worked enthusiastically, scarcely noticing when her master left
the room, an indication of indifference which the model did not fail to
note.

XII.

WHAT TIME SHE CHANTED.
Hamlet; iv.--7.

It was February, and the night but one before the day fixed for Arthur
Fenton's marriage. He was spending the evening with Mrs. Greyson, and
it chanced that Grant Herman and Fred Rangely were also there. The
sculptor went seldom to the house of his pupil, and when he did visit
her, he satisfied some fine, secret delicacy by taking always a friend
with him. Helen was sufficiently Bohemian or sufficiently unworldly to
care little if people criticised her way of living. She had inherited a
small property which made her comfortable and independent; and she
declined being hampered by a chaperon.

"My art is my chaperon," she wrote to an elderly relative who wished to
come to Boston and matronize her. "A woman who is daring enough to be
an artist is regarded as bold enough to take care of herself, I
suppose. At least nobody troubles me, and I ask nothing more."

On the present occasion Arthur Fenton asked leave to light his cigar,
and although Herman felt this something of a profanation, it was not
long before he and Rangely added their wreaths to the smoke garlands
which hung upon the air, and had not the hostess become somewhat
accustomed to tobacco in foreign _ateliers,_ it is to be doubted
if she could have complacently endured the fumes which arose.

All subjects of heaven and earth came drifting into the talk, and at
length something evoked from Rangely his opinion of Emerson.

"Emerson was great," he said, "Emerson often recalled Goethe in
Goethe's cooler and more intellectual moods; but Emerson lacked the
loftiness of vice; he was eternally narrow."

"'The loftiness of vice,'" echoed the hostess. "What does that mean? It
sounds vicious enough."

"Emerson," Rangely returned, "knew only half of life. He never had any
conception of the passionate longing for vice _per se;_ the
thrill, the glow which comes to some men at the splendid caress of sin
in her most horrible shape. Do you see what I mean? He couldn't imagine
the ecstasy that may lie in mere foulness."

"No," replied Helen, "I'm afraid I don't quite see. Though I am sure I
ought to be shocked. Do you mean that he should have been vicious?"

"Certainly not; but it was his limitation not to be tempted; not to be
able to project himself into a personality which riots in wickedness
far more intensely than a saint follows righteousness."

"If you mean that he could not have been wicked if he tried, that, I
own, was in a sense a limitation."

"Yes; and a fatal one. No man can be wholly great who understands only
one half of human impulses."

"But what do you mean by wickedness?" demanded Herman, a little
combatively.

"Oh," laughed Rangely, "I'm not to be entrapped into giving
metaphysical and theological definitions. I mean what we are expected
to call wickedness, conventionally speaking. I've an old cad of a
parson in my new play and I am trying to decide if it will do to have
him advocate a grand scheme for reforming the world by reversing
definitions and calling those things men choose to do virtues, and
dubbing whatever man detests, vices."

"That is rather more clever than orthodox," Helen laughed. "How is your
play getting on, Mr. Rangely?"

"Oh, fairish, thank you. The trouble is that the drama went out of
fashion long ago. First they replaced it by dresses and scenery, but
now every thing has given way to souvenir programmes; so I've got to
write up to a souvenir or I sha'n't make any thing out of the play."

"I hoped you were above such mercenary considerations."

"I am trying to make myself so," he retorted. "I think about three
successful plays would be tonic enough to bring my conscience up to
proper art levels."

Herman had taken little part in this colloquy, smoking in silence, and
regarding his companions. Fenton had thus far been even more quiet,
scarcely contributing a word to the conversation; and the sculptor's
thoughts turned upon the handsome young fellow, sitting in one of his
favorite twisted attitudes in a German chair, his beardless face paler
than usual, though a red spot glowed in either cheek, and his dilated
pupils betrayed his excitement. He was smoking steadily, but with
little apparent knowledge of either his cigar or his surroundings.

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