Professor's Progress. Iv: A Novel of Contemporaneous Adventure

I

LATIMER rose the next morning some time after dim sounds in the kitchen and the outhouses intimated that the girl and her father were astir. But when he was dressed and downstairs, it was still early enough to fall in with Manning’s suggestion of a sheltered cove in the river just below the house, where one might bathe with comfort if one overlooked the sharp-edged stones on the bottom. Latimer acquiesced all the more readily because his sleep had not been of the best. Part of the night he had been reviewing, wide-eyed, a painful number of flaws in his discourse with Manning. By changing his pillow to the foot of the bed and back again, he succeeded in going to sleep; but it was ill resting on the platform of the Auditorium and trying to make your voice carry its message of an Ultimate Purpose over the blare of a fullsized union orchestra under Mrs. Jamieson’s direction. It was the sight of his heavy-eyed guest that caused Manning to suggest the swimming-hole.

The sky was overcast, with a threat of rain. As Latimer made his way to the river, he was more than ever conscious of several points in Manning’s argument that called for a more explicit reply. But with the first shiver of his body to the chill of the mountain stream the world began to adjust itself, and as he splashed out vigorously the sun broke through the clouds. At the swing of that familiar baton, the nonunion orchestra in the tree-tops struck up in full strength, the surface of the stream fell into a shimmering Oriental dance, and Manning’s objections were revealed in all their flimsy nakedness.

‘Why are not all of us sun-worshippers?’ said Latimer, as he threw the tingling cool of the water into his face from the hollowed cup of his upturned palms. ‘The reason may be — Oh!’ He had stepped with his full weight on a sharp flint and he jerked his foot out of the water prepared for the necessity of cotton and peroxide. With relief he found that the skin was not broken. Still, that might be a reason why people did not universally pray to the sun from a pebbly bottom. His clear eye at breakfast delighted his host.

The sky was gloomy once more when he shouldered his knapsack. Manning’s caution that it would surely rain before noon he dismissed as unworthy of a man and a tried pedestrian. Would he come again, soon, by Sunday, perhaps? They might then go up to the Big House, inhabited, as Margaret had told him, by so many queer people. It would be worth Latimer’s while, insisted Manning; but he was thinking really of himself. He had not exhausted his visitor.

‘I will come back,’ said Latimer, and shook hands with Manning. He took Margaret’s hands between his own and held them for some time. ‘Thank you very much, Margaret,’ he said.

‘For what, Dr. Latimer?’ she asked. He blushed, stammered slightly, and saved himself.

‘For the color of your eyes, my dear.’

At the gate he turned back.

‘What would it cost to put a selfstarter into that automobile of yours?’ he asked.

Manning looked at him in surprise.

‘ Why, there’s one coming down next week,’ he said. ‘You see, I’ve sold a piece to the Poultry Grower’s Journal on “ Mobilizing the Incubator.” ’

II

It was Latimer’s intention to head back for Williamsport and Harriet. This might be done, without retracing one’s route, by striking out across the hills and turning north along the eastern slope. It was a much easier climb than the road out of Williamsport. Less than an hour brought him to the summit, and then it was a steady drop through cornfields and meadows crisscrossed with trickling water, by which the cattle were feeding — the beautiful eugenic herds that ministered to the high butter-fat standards of the great city. The clouds were low; it would rain before nightfall, but not long before that. Surely there was time for the snatch of sleep under the trees, which his growing drowsiness demanded; it was habit reinforced by the reaction from his morning bath. He stretched out on the edge of a broad shallow of granite-paved water and pulled out Quentin Durward. From the other side a contemplative Jersey watched and gave approval. Between the pages of Walter Scott and that gentle, sympathetic gaze across the stream, it was only a matter of minutes before his eyes closed.

A wet puff of wind roused him and brought him to his feet. There was thunder in the near distance, and the clouds were sweeping up from the west at a rate that made it a problem of minutes for Latimer to find Shelter. It would not be a difficult matter in this thick-studded farmland. Only it was not a farmhouse that offered itself first, but an ancient barn now converted to the uses of a public garage.

‘May I turn in until the storm is over?’ asked Latimer of one in besmeared overalls who sat tilting back against the wall just inside the double doors of the barn and dozed, apparently.

The proprietor looked up at Latimer out of a pair of very light blue eyes that were not at all heavy with sleep, massaged his chin, with thumb and index finger, looked out over his shoulder at the mad drive of the clouds, spit judicially, and said, ‘I reckon you better.’

He indicated a chair on the other side of the doorway.

‘It will keep up some time when it comes,’ said Latimer, turning his chair so as to command through the doorway the massed darkness piling in from the west, the hill-tops already lost in the mist, and the sudden little tremor of the leaves in the anxious hush before the downpour.

‘You can’t always tell,’ said the other, with complete lack of conviction.

Latimer stared.

‘I hope you won’t take it as a personal animadversion,’ he said, ‘but the non-committal nature of your reply makes me wonder once more at the seeming inability of country folk to make a definite assertion. Why, for instance, is it that no farmer will ever tell you how many miles it is to anywhere? Unlike us of the city, you who travel in buggy or haywagon are not occupied with your newspaper or conversation when in transit. When your eyes are not fixed on a spot somewhere between the horse’s ears, you must be looking at the road. You know its every turn and stretch. Why, then?’

The garage-master’s cigar went from one corner of the mouth to the other by a single dento-labial manœuvre that would have delighted a philologist.

‘It don’t make the least difference to people out here,’ he said, ‘if it’s five miles or ten. Out here we hitch up in time so as to get back in time; that’s all. Miles is an artificial thing.’

‘You’re a philosopher?’

‘ Wagons and general repair work was my line. Now it’s mostly automobiles. The only people who are interested in miles are those who can afford to go anywhere at any time. They pull up here and ask how far to Kingston. You tell ’em and they say, “That’s a hundred and fifty miles since breakfast.” Now those hundred and fifty miles might be anywhere, I reckon.’

‘True,’ said Latimer.

From beyond the hills the growl of thunder came rolling up and broke in a great crash overhead. The face of the earth was rigid with suspense.

‘“Gas, 28 cents,” ruminated Latimer, studying the signs before the door. ‘Gas, I presume is gasoline. But what do you mean by Free Air?’

The garage-master looked at him in wonder.

‘For the tires,’ he said.

‘ But that is the same air we breathe.’

The other grinned.

‘Ever try to fill a 36-inch tube by hand ?’

‘The cost of inflation, to be sure!’ cried Latimer. ‘I am a tyro in motorscience. Strange, though! One may now say as free as the air on condition only that one buys something with the air, like gas at 28 cents. It is one disadvantage under which the rich labor as compared with the poor. These do have their air free.’ The first drops fell cool on his face. ‘It looks as if you might be compelled to shut up shop for the afternoon.’

The proprietor got up and stood in the doorway, his cigar drooping heavy with thought.

‘ Well, I don’t know. They come by in all weather. Some of them like the splash of the mud.’

‘And seeing them come and go raises no desire to be up with them and out into the world?’

The other grinned.

‘Seein’ the world costs, even if the air be free.’ He searched his pockets for a match and, finding none, was just as content. ‘I guess you see just as much by staying here and havin’ the world come to you. There’ll be sometimes a dozen cars stopping in the course of a day. That’s fifty people you see, face to face. You ain’t likely to see that many if you climbed into a car yourself and went out inspectin’ the world.’

‘Only here you see them under the same limited aspect,’ Latimer insisted. ‘Either they want gas or oil or free air.’

‘Yep,’ said the owner. ‘And when you’ve done a thousand miles in your machine, you’ve met about a dozen men who sell gas or air or chicken dinners.’ Once more he searched for matches and fell back into baffled resignation. ‘ Don’t you think you’d get tired going through the same game on their holidays they do all the rest of the year at home?’

‘What game?’ said Latimer.

‘The man in front drives like mad all day, and the ladies sit still and look at the scenery. Man at the wheel has no time for that. When they stop for the night, he’s too tired for conversation.’

(Now by this time it must be obvious to the discerning reader that for some pages back he has been in the presence of a philosophic tinker. As for the bacon, that is to come immediately.)

Without warning the show began. A zigzag of violet flame shot down into the grove across the road, signaling the last desperate bombardment before the charge. While their ear-drums were still aching with the fury of the thunder salvos, the rain came down in a sweeping barrage, the yellow dust in the road had turned to steaming chocolate, and the wagon-ruts were overflowing gulleys.

The men rose to draw their chairs out of the swirl of the storm, but the owner did not resume his seat. He stood in the doorway and listened.

‘Had dinner?’ he said.

It was a loosening of the flood-gates. Latimer was instantly assailed by the swirling tides of famine. He dived into his knapsack.

‘I have with me an ample provision of hard-boiled eggs,’ he said. ‘Also fruit, chocolate cake, soda crackers, salt and pepper.’ It was Margaret who had thought of the salt and pepper at the last moment. ‘I should be happy to have you share with me.’

From a cupboard the other man brought forth bread, a sizeable tin pail, and a basin containing eggs. At sight of the pail Latimer straightened on his chair.

‘Not bacon?’ he said.

His host nodded. ‘You’d better save your provisions for supper, if you prefer this.’

‘Oh!’ said Latimer.

On an empty packing-case in one corner the proprietor placed a small kerosene stove, and on that a skillet. Latimer laid out his share of the feast, bustling about in the divine aroma from the frying-pan. He brought up the two chairs from the doorway, while his host began breaking eggs into the pan. Suddenly the latter stopped, listened, and moved to the door.

‘Car coming,’ he said. ‘Big machine.’ And he cleared a pathway from the door to the rear of the barn.

‘You expect them to turn in?’

‘They better,’ said the proprietor.

The heavy, mustard-colored car ran past the garage, slackened, slipped, stopped, and began churning its way back. The driver had caught sight of shelter too late. He now manœuvred his retreat so deftly as to evoke a glance of expert approval from the judicial garage-master. In spite of the protection of top, side-curtains, and wind-shield, the three men who emerged from the car were, two of them, in damp discomfort, and the driver wet to the skin.

Thomas Carlyle thought that, if you were to strip a roomful of people of their clothes, the essential democracy of man would be demonstrated. But an easier way, more in harmony with the requirements of modern decorum, would be to put a number of men into motor-dusters; and if such coats should be sodden with rain, the semblance of human equality would be complete. At first Latimer saw only three men in soggy apparel and uniform ill-temper. That the driver was likewise the owner of the magnificent car was plain from the easy manner in which he turned over the machine to the garage-master, with a few quiet words of direction.

‘One of our rulers,’ thought Latimer, embracing in one swift glance of appraisal the tall, trim-shouldered figure, the iron-gray hair, the clean-modeled nose and chin, the close-clipped moustache, which, set above a thin-carved mouth, is the distinguishing mark of our best American physiognomy. He looked ownership; not offensively so, but immediately, unquestionably authentic.

Of his companions Latimer decided that the short, pudgy, bald-headed gentleman with a professional beard was of Teuton origin. The third stranger was native again; a man under forty, of the fairly ordinary type which the magazines usually describe as keen and aggressive.

The owner of the car and the keenfaced young man gave one glance at Latimer, and one at the frying-pan, and then turned away to perform their share of a tourist’s duty in a garage, which consists in looking on as intensely as may be while the mechanic is at work. But the third member of the party threw his coat and hat into the tonneau and revealed himself to Latimer in a flash as a lovable human creature.

‘Pacon!’ he shouted, thrusting his nose much closer to the delectable dish than good manners, not to say safety, permitted. ‘And we have breakfasted at seven o’clock. What a breakfast! Half-cooked ham gulped down to the dedriment of the indestinal secretions! And the coffee — my Gott!’

‘You are heartily welcome to what you see,’ said Latimer.

‘You are not a guest here?’

‘I am, but likewise half-owner of what is on the table.’

‘Yes, but for five strong men, of whom three have breakfasted at seven o’clock; and such a breakfast!’

‘There is more in our host’s tin pail, and I can vouch for his kindliness,’ said Latimer.

The bald-headed famine victim sank into a chair with a vast sigh of felicity. ‘The meganism of an automobile is something that has never interested me,’ he said; and with two slices of bread he dredged a sliver of bacon from the pan. One slice of bread with the bacon went to its destiny, the other came back and scooped up a magnificent portion of egg and gravy.

‘Life has its atvendures,’ he said, as soon as the facilities offered; ‘but also it has its combensations.’ He searched the barn for Latimer’s car. ‘You are embarked upon a pedestrian tour?’

‘Rather late in life,’ said Latimer, ‘I have succumbed to the lure of the out-of-doors. My name is Latimer. I’m from the city.’

‘I too; Hartmann is the name. And you find it not disappointing?

‘The contrary — delightful; only not altogether in consonance with the classic model.’

‘Not quite Cheorche Porrow, hey? The wind on the heath, the tends of the Romany Rye? Gasolene fumes, rather?’

‘Quite so. But, on the other hand, some of the essentials persist. For instance — ’ and Latimer indicated the frying-pan. ‘If you will allow a kerosene stove for a fire of dry twigs, we are by the road, virtually in the open, on the edge of a wood, the storm in our ears — now what else does it need to fill up the picture?’

Hartmann paused with two slabs of bread suspended over the skillet like one of the witches in Macbeth, I, 1. He stared a moment, then shouted, —

‘A dinker! Don’t say you have found a dinker, with a little din stove and bellows — and a tonkey?’

‘A tinker precisely, though without the accessories you specify. Our friend there.’ And Latimer pointed to the garage smith, at that moment peering under the lifted hood of the car. ‘ Modernized, to be sure, but genuine enough in the possession of the one quality which makes tinkers what they are?’

‘Bacon, you mean?’

‘Well, then, I should have said, two faculties: bacon, of which you have already tasted; and homely wisdom, of which I had a goodly portion before you came, and to the quality of which I can testify.’

Hartmann clutched at his unanointed bread slices with the joy of a great illumination.

‘But, my Gott, I am sdupid! For two weeks I have been traveling with the greatest of them all, the greatest in America, and I have not known it.’

Latimer was puzzled. ‘We were speaking of tinkers.’

‘ Brecisely. You have heard of him.’ He nodded toward the owner of the car. ‘Foreman—Cornelius J. Foreman of the International Can and Car Company. He began, you will remember, by soldering tin cans for the preserved vechetable trade. Since then he has picked up side lines — tin-plate, steel rails, beams, automobile parts, ships, munitions.’

‘When a man of business reaches that stage,’ said Latimer, ‘it is my impression that his interest is no longer in producing real things but in financing them. Strictly speaking, Mr. Foreman is not a tinker but a capitalist.’

‘Even so,’ replied Hartmann. ‘In other words, the highest tevelopment of the dinker’s trade. He patches up leaky corporations. He polishes up darnished credit. He organizes, reorganizes, gonsolidates, absorbs — as I said, a dinker.’

‘And the young man?’ said Latimer.

‘That’s my good friend Hamlin Filbert, efficiency expert.’

The automobile had now received all the supervisory attention it needed. Foreman and the young man with the executive eye walked to the door, took just one sufficient glance to show them that they were weatherbound for some time, and turned to the packing-case, where room was somehow found for them. The garage-owner put down his oil-can and turned cook. Hartmann pondered the moral problem whether he was entitled to a share in the new supply of eggs which the host brought forth from the cupboard and was now assimilating with fresh bacon into a heavenly mess. From this reverie he tore himself to make the required introductions, with special emphasis on his own happy conceit of Cornelius J. Foreman, Tinker.

‘Fine,’ said Foreman. ‘Now tell Mr. Latimer something about yourself.’

But Hartmann suddenly became tongue-tied with shyness, and Foreman expounded.

‘Dr. Hartmann has kindly consented to collaborate with me in a project I have now under way.’

‘It’s dis way,’ cried Hartmann, in a desperate attempt to shift the focus of interest from himself. ‘Fifty miles from here, in the Bennsylvania hills, Mr. Foreman has a big plant which before the war used to produce more salmon dins and fruit-jar covers than the compined outbut of — what shall I say? — Tenmark and Sweden?’

‘You might throw in Spain and Guatemala,’ said Foreman.

‘To-day it produces munitions,’ said Hartmann. ‘And we are rebuilding Fairview into a model town. Mr. Foreman was always inderested in his workers. But undil recently the broject involved very serious financial considerations. Fortunately, the war’ —

He stopped short, fearing that his narrative was verging on satire, but Foreman calmly went on with his meal.

‘Fire ahead; you’re doing fine,’ he said.

‘The asdounding brosperity the country is now enjoying,’ said Hartmann, ‘has brought the great plan to fruition. We are building. Our present mission is a final survey of the watersubbly.’

For Latimer the first pleasing vision of a comfortably housed and safeguarded factory population was spoiled by the presence of the keen-faced efficiency expert. He saw the new Fairview, with its sanitary homes, — no doubt in the sixteenth-century English village architecture,—its community hall, its open-air swimming-pool probably, and about the heart he felt the cramp of formula from which he was fleeing.

‘Tell me this,’ he said: ‘does your plan provide freedom for your workers as well as health and recreation?’ For the first time Filbert spoke up.

‘A healthy man is a free man. Seventy-eight per cent of dependency among the poor is directly due to illness.’

’I read only the other day of an efficiency specialist,’ said Latimer quite inconsequentially. ’He found out that the middle-aged women stenographers were being paid according to their years of service, although they averaged twelve words to the minute less than the girls a year out from business school. He therefore readjusted the salary schedule on a words-to-the-minute basis. For that may a patient God take pity on his soul!’

The next moment he was racked with shame.

‘Every profession has its muckers,’ said Filbert quietly. ‘We shall ultimately live down ours.'

‘Mr. Filbert has not been taking the bread out of the mouths of my employees,’ said Foreman. ‘He has helped me increase wages twenty-five per cent in the last two years.’

‘And output?’ said Latimer.

‘Thirty-five per cent,’ replied Foreman. ‘And when Dr. Hartmann gets through with Fairview, wages and output will be still higher.’

‘Dr. Hartmann?’ said Latimer; and Foreman showed his surprise.

‘I imagined you had identified him before this,’ he said. ‘Hartmann is the T.B. specialist at the New Medical College, and head of the East Side Hospital for Industrial Disease.’

‘In other words,’ said Hartmann, who squirmed and blushed under the scrutiny directed toward him, ’another dinker. That makes three.’

‘How three?’ said Foreman.

‘There is our friend the blacksmith over there,’ said Hartmann, ’and you, and myself, whose sbecialty is patching up human bots and kettles. That makes three. No, by Gott, four, four! My friend Filbert will not object to choining the class as a dinkerer of nerve-energy and muscular fatigue. What?’

Filbert accepted the badge with a grin.

‘Hartmann’s tinkering being the hardest of all,’ said Foreman, with obvious affection for the man.

‘No; not at all the hardest,’ cried Hartmann. ‘The simblest. Yes. I work with the simblest tools. You have a thousand machines in your blants, Foreman. You have a most imbressive collection of hammers, saws, files, wrenches, bits, chacks, pumps, oilers, what not. But you need them all. I, too, make a great show of machinery. My office is gluttered up with X-ray machines and arterial gauges. But that is pluff. My real tools are three.’

‘Yes?’ said Latimer.

‘Eggs, milk, and air,’ said Hartmann.

‘Fortunately the latter comes free, save for the well-to-do,’ said Latimer, pointing to the sign outside.

Hartmann’s face darkened.

‘Dat is the devil of it all,’ he cried. ‘My friend Foreman, when he buys his gasoline and oil, gets his air free; but my batients on the East Side, when they buy milk and eggs, have yet to buy their air, and it is the most expensive of the three. In fact’ — and here Hartmann was full charge on his hobby

— ‘give me enough free air and I want liddle else. I want windows in every room, so that I can build sleeping dents. It’s a simble matter. You arrange the awning so that the patient’s body is all inside the room and only the head brotrudes. But I must have windows

— hundreds, thousands, dens of tousands of them.’

‘You’ll have them in Fairview,’ said Foreman.

Hartmann’s face glowed.

‘Fairview will be all windows, with shust enough building material to frame them.’ Then, suddenly and in the happiness of his heart, ‘Mr. Latimer,’ he cried, ‘why don’t you choin this merry dinker’s party? Come with us to Fairview!’

‘We’d be delighted,’ said Foreman.

‘Perhaps I might qualify,’ said Latimer wistfully. ‘I, too, in my time, when I was in active service on the campus, did some tinkering with the minds and souls of young men.'

‘Bravo!’ shouted Hartmann. ‘It beats Cheorche Porrow! Five jolly dinkers!’

III

‘I will come gladly,’ said Latimer.

‘ Only tell me this, Hartmann. The common man upon whom we have been practicing our trade — after this war, will he consent to being tinkered with as before? Or will he insist on a larger share in mending his own pots and kettles?’

‘You mean —’ said Hartmann.

‘Just this,’ said Latimer. ‘Here is a great mass of raw and half-shaped material which we may call the common life, and here are the four of us whose business it has been to tinker with this raw material in our several lines; to whom you might add many others — the military tinker, the ecclesiastical tinker, the æsthetic tinker, and the rest, and every one of us pretty well convinced that we were the people, and that the common man could not possibly get on without us — without my educational formula, or your milk-andegg formula, or Mr. Foreman’s buying and selling formula, or Mr. Filbert’s fatigue curves. How does the war affect our pretensions? What chance do we stand after peace is signed?’

‘Something, but not very much,’ said Foreman cheerfully. ‘The war has shown us all up.’

‘There will always be need for leadership,’ objected Filbert.

‘Leadership,’ laughed Foreman. ‘A joke, and after the war we will admit it. You don’t agree, Mr. Latimer?’

‘I don’t disagree, but I am surprised. Surely, if any one is entitled to believe in exceptional gifts and exceptional services, it is you—a hackneyed phrase, but after all, a Captain of Industry.’

Foreman grinned.

‘Call it accident, Mr. Latimer, and you will about hit it. I’m not a leader. I am a lucky bit of driftwood bobbing along on the crest of a great wave which you have called the common life; the common life of a people of one hundred millions. It’s luck. Just as good men as I am have failed. If Foreman had n’t organized the International Can and Car, a fellow named Jones would have done it. After all, the people must have their canned salmon and barbed wire. The war has found us out, I tell you. Leadership! Organization! Bunk! The war would have petered out long ago if half a billion people had n’t revealed unsuspected capacities for going without food. That’s what our leadership has amounted to.'

‘Without leadership Germany would have collapsed two years ago,’ said Filbert.

‘ Without leadership Chermany might now be in a bosition to look a tecent man in the eye!’ cried Hartmann. ‘Even if it is my father’s country which he left two chumps ahead of the drill-sergeant. Chermany! The most thoroughly dinkered nation in history, and its soul has gone to the devil.’

‘No, there I refuse to follow you,’ said Latimer, leaning forward to put a hand on Hartmann’s shoulder. ‘It is precisely my point that, in spite of its tinkerers, the soul of the German people has not been sold to the ancient enemy: it beats somewhere, blinded, wounded, but with the current of life in it. Just as my boys at college managed to grow into life in spite of us on the faculty. Just as Hartmann’s patients frequently get well — I beg your pardon.'

‘But it is quite right,’ shouted Hartmann. ‘Eggs, milk, air, and let dem alone!’

‘Even before the war, it seems to me that we were turning away from the magic of formula to the simplicities of the common life,’ said Latimer. It has been away from pills and drugs to eggs, milk, and air. Away from gerund-grinding and trigonometrical gymnastics to — free air. Away from ecclesiasticism toward — well, let us say, free air. And so in the factories and the mines — though a little.'

‘We’ll get there yet,’ said Foreman.

‘Will you run your factories after the war under orders from the I. W.W. ? ’ said Filbert.

‘I’ve fought them and I imagine I can get on with them,’ said Foreman.

Latimer’s face glowed.

‘ So that, in spite of the war, in spite of the pain and the loss, you think the common life will run on after the war? And freer, richer, perhaps?’

‘I think so,’ said Foreman gravely.

‘It is a happy thought,’ said Latimer almost to himself. He walked to the door and looked at the sky. ‘There is no sign of letting up.’

‘Do you play augtion?’ shouted Hartmann.

‘Occasionally and badly,’ said Latimer; and in the course of the next hour and a half he proved the absolute truth of the second part of his statement. Then the sun came out.

They made Fairview after dark, partly because of a blow-out which spoiled for them the glory of the setting sun behind hills of hemlock and birch, and partly because the roads would not dry fast enough to let Foreman exploit his twelve cylinders to the limit. After two attempts at letting her out, one resulting in the aforesaid blow-out and the other in a swerve toward the ditch, which caused Latimer to turn pale and brace himself in his seat, Foreman turned the wheel over to Filbert with a shake of disgust, and sulked in contemplation over the speedometer the rest of the way.

Politely disregarding that gloomy protest by his side, Filbert held the car down to a safe twenty-five miles an hour, and took the curves without timidity but without bluster.

They crossed a wooden bridge and ran swiftly over the railway tracks, through the reedy flats out of which the massed chimneys of the International Can and Car shot up into the dark, mercifully softened from their indescribable noon-day ugliness. It was another ten minutes up grade to their destination, the home of one of the International’s resident managers, as Hartmann explained, who was also the boyhood friend of the president of the company when Fairview was a small mill town and Foreman delivered grocer’s parcels after school hours. The party was to dine with the Bauers, and Latimer made little difficulty in acquiescing with Hartmann’s argument that one more guest would not matter.

Ten minutes were enough to reveal Fairview as a community living in the state of double transition which is so common in our older industrial towns. It was like the strata of civilization which Latimer’s favorite Babylonian excavators are so fond of digging up, only that the epochs were twenty years instead of twenty centuries apart. Latimer caught traces of primitive Fairview in the decayed sheds and homes along the creek over which they entered the town, the shingled postoffice, the open doors of a smithy which gave a glimpse of wagon-litter, of men with hands in their pockets conversing to the rhythm of plug cut, and children, overflowing from the smithy to the sidewalk and into the roadway. Most authentic survival of all was the row of elms and locusts which arched the road and rose to the crest of the hill, with a promise of mystery.

That was old Fairview. Along the side streets Latimer saw flashes of a newer and infinitely depressing Fairview, born out of the smoke and ashes belcning from the chimneys on the flats. An alien people had inundated these former lanes of PennsylvaniaGerman cleanliness and turned them into alleys of congestion. The old houses were now tenements. The old gardens, outlined by bleak survivals of white wooden palings, were now a framework for hideous lines of intimate family garb, for discarded household goods, for the elementary domestic functions which the old American reticence had kept primly behind lowdrawn shades and closed shutters. It reminded Latimer of an overgrown boy breaking out of his clothes — this blur of heads protruding from windows in neighborly and resonant conversation, of open doors giving vistas into the interior of kitchens, of mothers nursing their young on the porch-steps, and of children swarming everywhere.

Between these old homes of an aboriginal population and the hundreds of ugly frame barracks that flanked them and outnumbered them, there may have been a difference of thirty years in age, but new and old were in the same stage of grime. This was the industrial town, which had sprung up around the factory chimneys without order and without care on the part of the International stockholders and managers.

‘There,’said Hartmann, slapping Latimer on the shoulder and waving promiscuously in the dark.

They were now half a mile, perhaps, above the meadows. Latimer peered into the night and saw the vague forms of strange creatures which were derricks, stone-crushers, road-rollers. The pale geometrical lines and curves were the avenues and crescents and terraces of the newest Fairview. He caught the glint of timber scaffoldings, and here and there the ghostly white face of a mortar-bed; metal forms which were brick piles; and shadowy rows of angles, gables, curves, which he judged to be the completed homes of the Fairview in the making.

‘We have thirty houses ready,’ said Hartmann. ‘The nearest of them is well up above the fog from the meadows. To-morrow you will see.’

To the left, through the side streets, Latimer had a glimpse of electric globes which dimmed the quiet illumination of their own tree-shaded road and plainly outlined the principal commercial street of Fairview, running parallel with them. At every intersection streams of light ran down the side streets toward them from Fairview’s Great White Way. He heard the clang of a trolley-car, the noise of motors, the hum of a community’s conversation en promenade. Under the arc lights he caught glimpses of the gigantic colored posters which are the mural art of the ‘movie’ age.

IV

Dinner at the Bauers’ was not a prolonged affair, inasmuch as Foreman had much business to cram into his two days’ stay in Fairview. Seven persons sat down to table — our own party of four, their hosts, and a young lieutenant son in khaki, on a short furlough from the cantonment, where he was imparting to the recruits of the national army the very fresh stock of military technique that he had acquired in three months at Plattsburg.

In the talk between Foreman and his boyhood friend, now one of perhaps a half hundred subordinates of the same rank in the employ of the International Car and Can, Latimer was pleased to find a happy absence either of condescension or of that forced amenity which would have amounted to exactly the same thing. Foreman was plainly living up to his creed of luck as the foundation of his own prosperity. A turn of the wheel the other way, and Bauer might have been president of the International and Foreman one of his useful assistants. Of Bauer’s attitude one had to judge by manner rather than by words, since it was obvious from the first that the conversation would be entirely dominated by the future field-marshal. Mrs. Bauer was a simple and silent house-mother.

It was inevitable that Latimer should inquire after the progress made in the training of America’s new armies.

‘We’ll hand the Kaiser his, all right,’ said the Second Lieutenant, O.R.C., ‘but it won’t be the fault of the people who planned and built the camps.'

‘ What’s the matter with the gamps? Health arranchements all right, ain’t they?’ sputtered Hartmann, partly with indignation, and partly because of a heavy spoonful of rice pudding.

‘You could n’t kill our fellows if you tried,’ said the second lieutenant. ‘But what our specialists don’t know about ventilation and drainage is quite a little bit. You should hear Major Corbin tell about the way they do things in France. I ’ll have some more of the pudding, dad.'

‘Do you always get three helpings in camp?’ asked Mr. Bauer.

‘ The boy has had very little, William,’ said Mrs. Bauer.

‘And the spirit of our young men?’ said Latimer.

‘Nothing like it in history,’said the lieutenant. ‘At least, not since Napoleon’s first campaigns, says Major Corbin. When we once start, good night! ’

‘But that is splendid!’ cried Latimer. Rather curtly he waved aside the girl at his elbow who was offering him coffee, and almost immediately, ‘I’m sorry,’ he said and looked up at her and wondered. He judged her normally a hearty, fresh-colored young woman obviously of Slav origin; but now she went about her work as if in a daze, he thought, and there were blue rings around her eyes. Then to the young officer, ‘And how long will the war last? ’ he said.

‘Till June, 1919,’ said young Bauer. ‘Germany’s reserves will hold out until then.’

‘You don’t think financial pressure might force her to make peace before then?’ said Foreman.

‘ Not in the least. It’s all a matter of paper money. Major Corbin says it’s all rot about bankruptcy and war.’

Such other doubts concerning the issues and contingencies involved in the war as may have troubled any one at the table, were speedily allayed by young Bauer with the help of Major Corbin, before he excused himself on the plea that he must return to camp next morning, and with his mother retired for a final review of problems of the wardrobe.

The other men remained with their cigars, while the maid, after the simple standards of the Bauer household, busied herself with clearing the table. Once more Latimer caught the unhappy look in her eyes, and his gaze in turn did not escape the attention of Bauer.

‘The poor girl has been crying,’ he said when she had left the room. ‘She heard from home this afternoon.’

‘Home?’ queried Latimer.

‘Somewhere in Galician Poland,’said Bauer. ‘There were three brothers and a mother. Two have been killed; the youngest is in hospital.

And the mother is a refugee. I wonder’ — to Foreman — ‘if the people at Washington might help us trace her.’ ‘Wire to Golding,’ said Foreman.

Business matters carried off Foreman and Hartmann for the rest of the evening, and Latimer gratefully accepted Filbert’s offer of his company for a stroll through town. At his own request they made their way down-hill toward the grim alleys of which he had caught just an impression. It was some time after the supper-hour in Fairview. The doorsteps and porches showed groups of bare-armed and collarless men gossiping from between lips tightly wrapped round the stem of corncobs. Among the elder people the segregation of the sexes was strictly observed, and there were separate groups of women, in the front yards and on the kitchen-steps, each the centre of bands of infant skirmishers who swarmed over the sidewalks and into the shadows. They should have been in bed an hour ago, thought Latimer, disapproving; but he rejoiced in the vitality of their shrill voices.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said suddenly and stopped short, peering down straight at his feet. He had nearly fallen over a youth of perhaps three years, sex not stated, who, in the middle of the road, was calmly planted in a child’s-size arm-chair. Whereupon the young native rose, with the chair permanently affixed behind, trotted off, and resumed his contemplation on another section of the pavement.

Latimer was discovering in Fairview a new world which he might have studied any day in New York City, if chance had brought him into the proper quarters for observation. But that is always the case with foreign travel.

They had been walking the better part of two hours when Latimer felt depression settling down on him. Probably it was mere physical weariness, but an ache seized upon his heart. ‘Where is all this to end, Filbert?’ he

said. ‘Is this life?’

‘I was thinking,’said Filbert quietly,

of the settlers in the Ohio bottoms about the year 1800. Have you ever read Henry Adams’s first chapter?’

’Pioneers? ’said Latimer, embracing Fairview in one sweep of the arm.

‘I like to believe so,’ said Filbert.

Latimer put his arm over the other man’s shoulder.

‘I want you to forgive me, Filbert.’

‘For what?’

‘For that brutal remark of mine about the efficiency expert and the stenographers.’

Filbert laughed.

‘Dr. Latimer, I never gave it a thought and should have forgotten it by this time if I had.’

‘ Then my apology is what you would technically describe as a lost motion?’ said Latimer. ‘Let us turn into Main Street.’

But on the first corner they reached in that dazzling thoroughfare, Latimer stopped and pointed excitedly to a poster in front of a ‘movie’ theatre.

‘Miss Winthrop,’ he said.

‘I’ve seen her frequently — on the screen, that is,’ said Filbert.

‘I have met her in person,’ said Latimer, trying hard not to be supercilious.

‘Oh!’ said Filbert, with something like awe. ‘Should you like to go in?’

‘By all means,’ said Latimer; and then, turning abruptly, raised his hat in the direction of a group of young girls who fell into line behind them.

‘Good evening,’ he said; and turned back to his companion.

‘An acquaintance in Fairview?’ said Filbert.

‘ It’s that housemaid at the Bauers’.’

(To be continued)