Hazelton had formed the habit of cursing fate and De Vilmarte, and, to revenge himself, of threatening De Vilmarte's exposure, and he continued to do these things. And De Vilmarte let his mind stray far in contemplating Hazelton's possible vileness, and in doing this he himself became vile. What he could not recognize was the definite place where Hazelton's vileness stopped. His life was like a fair fruit rotten within.

It was the summer of 1914, and Hazelton, whose drunkenness before had been occasional, now drank always, and forever in the background of De Vilmarte's mind was this powerful figure with its red face and black hair and truculent bearing, drunken and obscene, who carried in his careless hand the honor of the De Vilmartes. At any moment Hazelton could rob Raoul of his pride, embitter his mother's last hours, and make him the laughing stock of his world. Raoul became like an entrapped animal running around and around the implacable barriers of a cage. It is a terrible thing to have one's honor in the hands of another.

He thought of everything that might end this torment, and he found no answer. Madness grew in him. Wherever Raoul de la Tour de Vilmarte went, there followed him unseen a shadow, swart, dark, and red-faced. It followed him, mouthing, "Ra-o-u-l-R-a-o-u-l!" like a cat. "R-a-o-u-l! R-a-o-u-l!" from morning till night. When De Vilmarte was at a table in a café a huge and mocking shadow sat beside him, and it said, wagging its head in a horrid fashion, "There's death in our little drama, hein, mon vieux?"

The fate that had made their interests one, bound them together. They sought each other out to spend strange and tortured hours in each other's company, while in the depths of Raoul's heart a plan to end the torture was coming to its own slow maturity, and grew large and dark during the hot days of July. He could not continue to live. The burden of his secret weighed him down. Nor could he leave Hazelton behind him, the honor of the De Vilmartes in his hands.

The bloody answer to the riddle leaped out at him. Hazelton's deaththat was the answer. Then De Vilmarte

could depart in peace. could depart in peace. For two mad, happy days he saw life simply. First Hazelton, then himself.

One day he stopped short, for he realized he could not go until his mother-went. He must stay a whileuntil she died.

He had to wait until she died. He watched her, wondering if his endurance would outlast her life. He tried not to let her see him watching-for he knew there was madness in his eyes—and he would go out to find his dark shadow, for often it was less painful to be with him than away from him-he knew then what Hazelton was up to. He spent days in retracing the steps which had brought him to this desperate impasse. They had been easy, but he knew that weakness was at the bottom of it-perhaps, unless he did it now, he would never doit-perhaps an unworthy desire for life. -and love-might hold back his hand.

So De Vilmarte lived his days and nights bound on the torturing pendulum of conflict.

Suddenly Europe was aflame. France stood still and waited. And as he waited, with Europe, Raoul for a moment forgot his torment. War is a great destroyer, but among other things it destroys the smaller emotions. Its licking flame shrivels up personal loves and hates. When war was declared, old hates were blotted out, and hopeless lovers trembling on the brink of suicide were cured overnight. Small human atoms were drowned in the larger hate and the larger love. Men ceased to have power over their own lives since their lives belonged to France.

He

So when war was declared, choice was taken from Raoul's hands. A high feeling of liberation possessed him. walked along the street, and suddenly he realized that instead of going toward his home he was seeking his other half, the dark shadow to whom he had been so bound.

On Hazelton's door a note was pinned, addressed to him.

"My friend," it said, "you have luck! You will have your regiment, while nothing better than the ambulance, like a sale embusque, for me. If harm comes to you, don't fear for your mother."

This letter made him feel as though Hazelton had clasped his hand. He no longer felt toward Hazelton as an enemy, since France had also claimed him.

Madness had brushed him with its dark wings. By so slender a thread his life and Hazelton's had hung! Yes-and his honor!

"Thank God!" he said, "for an honorable death!" It was the last personal thought that was his for a long time. War engulfed him. Instead of an individual he was a soldier of France, and his life was broken away from the old life which now seemed illusion, the days which streamed past him like pennants torn in the wind.

Later, in the monotony of trench warfare, he had time to think of Hazelton. He desired two things-to serve France, and to see Hazelton. Raoul wanted a word of friendship to pass between them, and especially he wanted to tell Hazelton that he need not worry about his wife. He wrote to him, but got no answer. Life went on; war had become the normal thing. The complexities of his former life receded further and further from him, and became more phantasmal, but the desire to see Hazelton before either of them should die remained with Raoul.

When he was wounded it was his last conscious thought before oblivion engulfed him. There followed a halfwaking - pain a penumbral land through which shapes moved vaguely; the smell of an anesthetic, an awakening, and again sleep. When he wakened fully he was in a white hospital ward with a sister bending over him.

"In the next bed," she said, "there is a grand blessé." She looked at him significantly. "He wishes to speak to you-he is a friend of yours."

In the next bed lay Hazelton, the

startling black of his shaggy hair framing the pallor of his face.

With difficulty Raoul raised his head. They smiled at each other. From the communion of their silence came Hazelton's deep voice.

"Why the devil," he said, "did we ever hate each other?”

Raoul shook his head. He didn't know. He, too, had wanted to ask Hazelton this.

"It has bothered me," said Hazelton. "I wanted to see you-" His voice trailed off. "I've wanted to ask you why we have needed this war-deathto make us know we don't hate each other."

"I don't know," said De Vilmarte. It was an effort for him to speak; his voice sounded frail and broken.

66

"Raoul," Hazelton asked, tenderly, 'where are you wounded? Is it bad?" "I don't know," Raoul answered again.

"It's his head," the sister answered for him, "and his right hand."

Hazelton raised his great head; a red mounted to his face; his old sardonic laughter boomed out through the ward. With a sharply indrawn breath of pain: "Oh, la-la!" he shouted. "Cré nom! 'Cré nom! What luck-imperishable! I'm dying your right hand-your right hand!" He sank back, his ironic laughter drowned in a swift crimson tide.

The nurse beckoned to an orderly to bring a screen.

Tears of grief and weakness streamed down Raoul's face. To the last his ill luck had held. He hadn't been able to make his friend understand, or to make amends. His right hand was wounded, and he could no longer serve France.

The sister looked at him with pity. She tried to console him.

"Death is not always so mercifully quick with these strong men," she said.

HERE are times when one wearies of literature; when one reads

T over one's first book,

reflects how good it was, and how greatly one was misunderstood; when one considers the perils and misadventures of so accidental a life and likens one's self to those dogs described by Pliny, who run fast as they drink from the Nile for fear they should be seized by the crocodiles; when one tires of following Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer's advice, "to sit down in the back garden with pen, ink, and paper, to put vine leaves in one's hair and to write"; when one remembers that in Flaubert's view the literary man's was a dog's life (metaphors about authors lead you back to the dog), but that none other was worth living. In those moods, one does not agree with Flaubert; rather, one agrees with Butler:

Those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense and one for rhyme,
I think's sufficient at one time.

One sees life like Mr. Polly, as a rotten, beastly thing." One sighs for adventure, to be a tramp or a trust magnate. One knows that one will never be so popular as Brown's Meat Extract; thence is but a step to picture oneself as less worthy.

We novelists are the showmen of life. We hold up its mirror, and, if it look at us at all, it mostly makes faces at us. Indeed, a writer might have with impunity sliced Medusa's head; she would never have noticed him. The truth is that the novelist is a despised creature. At moments when, say, a learned professor devotes five columns to showing that a particular novelist is one of the pests of society, the writer feels exalted. But as society shows no signs of wanting to be rid of the pest, the novelist begins

to doubt his own pestilency. He is wrong. In a way, society knows of our existence, but does not worry; it shows this in a curiously large number of ways, more than can be enumerated here. It sees the novelist as a man apart as a creature fraught with venom, and, paradoxically, a creature of singularly lamblike and unpractical temperament.

Consider, indeed, the painful position of a respectable family: its sons make for Wall Street every day; its daughters for Fifth Avenue and fashion, or for the East Side, good works, and social advancement. Imagine that family, which derives a steady income, shall we say in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars a year, enough to keep it in modest comfort, confronted with the sudden infatuation of one of its daughters for an unnamed person, met presumably on the East Side where he was collecting copy. You can imagine the conversation after dinner:

SADIE: "What does he do, Papa? Oh, well, he's a novelist."

PAPA: "What! A novelist? One of those long-haired, sloppy-collared ragamuffins without any soles to their boots? Do you think that because I've given you an automobile I'm going to treat you to a husband? A saloon loafer!" (We are always intemperate.)

"A man whom your mother and sisters " (Our morals are atrocious.) "I should not wonder if the police . . . ." (We are all dishonest, and yet we never have any money.) "I was talking to the minister . (We practise no religion, except that occasionally we are Mormons.)

...

And so on, and so on. Papa won't have it, and if in the end Papa does have it (which he generally does when Sadie has made up her mind), he finds that Sadie's eyes are not blacked, but that Sadie's husband's boots are blacked; that the wretched fellow keeps a balance at the bank, can ride a horse, push a