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Booker T. Washington - "An Autobiography"

J. M. Synge - "The Playboy of the Western World"

Andrew Lang - "The Library"

Plato - "Critias"

The Brick Moon, et. al.

E >> Edward Everett Hale >> The Brick Moon, et. al.




She tried to go out to the door to find even the
Dane who had brought her there, but she was given to
understand that he was coming again for her, and that she
must wait till he came. As for her brother, there was no
brother there, nor had been any. The poor girl had been
trapped, and saw that she had been trapped; she had been
spirited away from everybody who ever heard of her
mother, and was in the clutches, as she said to my mother
afterward, of a crew of devils who knew nothing of love
or of mercy.

They did try to make her eat and drink,--tried to
make her drink champagne, or any other wine; but they had
no fool to deal with. The girl did not, I think, let her
captors know how desperate were her resolutions. But her
eyes were wide open, and she was not going to lose any
chance. She was all on the alert for her escape when, at
eleven o'clock, the Dane came at last whom she had been
expecting so anxiously.

The girl asked him for her brother, only to be put
off by one excuse or another, and then to hear from him
the most loathsome talk of his admiration, not to say his
passion, for her.

They were nearly alone by this time, and he led her
unresisting, as he thought, into another smaller room,
brilliantly lighted, and, as she saw in a glance, gaudily
furnished, with wine and fruit and cake on a side-
table,--a room where they would be quite alone.

She walked simply across and looked at herself in the
great mirror. Then she made some foolish little
speech about her hair, and how pale she looked. Then she
crossed to the sofa, and sat upon it with as tired an air
as he might have expected of one who had lived through
such a day. Then she looked up at him and even smiled
upon him, she said, and asked him if he would not ask
them for some cold water.

The fellow turned into the passage-way, well pleased
with her submission, and in the same instant the girl was
at the window as if she had flown across the room.

Fool! The window was made fast, not by any moving
bolt, either. It was nailed down, and it did not give a
hairs-breadth to her hand.

Little cared she for that. She sat on the window-
seat, which was broad enough to hold her; she braced her
feet against the foot of the bedstead, which stood just
near enough to her; she turned enough to bring her
shoulder against the window-sash, and then with her whole
force she heaved herself against the sash, and the entire
window, of course, gave way.

The girl caught herself upon the blind, which swung
open before her. She pulled herself free from the sill
and window-seat, and dropped fearless into the street.

The fall was not long. She lighted on her feet and
ran as only fear could teach her to run. Where to, she
knew not; but she thought she turned a corner before she
heard any voices from behind.

Still she ran. And it was when she came to the
corner of the next street that she heard for the first
time the screams of pursuers.

She turned again, like a poor hunted hare as she was.
But what was her running to theirs? She was passing our
long fence in Fernando Street, and then for the first
time she screamed for help.

It was that scream which waked me.

She saw the steeple of the church. She had a dim
feeling that a church would be an asylum. So was it that
she ran up our alley, to find that she was in a trap
there.

And then it was that she fell against my door, that
she cried twice, "Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" and that the
good God, who had heard her, sent me to draw her in.

We had to learn her language, in a fashion, and she
to learn ours, before we understood her story in this
way. But at the very first my mother made out that the
girl had fled from savages who meant worse than death for
her. So she understood why she was so frightened at
every sound, and why at first she was afraid to stay with
us, yet more afraid to go.

But this passed off in a day or two. She took to my
mother with a sort of eager way which showed how she must
have loved her own mother, and how much she lost when she
lost her. And that was one of the parts of her sad story
that we understood.

No one, I think, could help loving my mother; but
here was a poor, storm-tossed creature who, I might say,
had nothing else to love, seeing she had lost all trace
of this brother, and here was my mother, soothing her,
comforting her, dressing her wounds for her, trying to
make her feel that God's world was not all wickedness;
and the girl in return poured out her whole heart.

When my mother explained to her that she should not
let her go away till her brother was found, then for the
first time she seemed perfectly happy. She was indeed
the loveliest creature I ever put my eyes on.

She was then about nineteen years old, of a delicate
complexion naturally, which was now a little browned by
the sea-air. She was rather tall than otherwise, but her
figure was so graceful that I think you never thought her
tall. Her eyes were perhaps deep-set, and of that
strange gray which I have heard it said the goddesses in
the Greek poetry had. Still, when she was sad, one saw
the less of all this. It was not till she forgot her
grief for the instant in the certainty that she might
rest with my mother, so that her whole face blazed with
joy, that I first knew what the perfect beauty of a
perfect woman was.

Her name, it seemed, was Frida,--a name made from the
name of one of the old goddesses among the Northmen, the
same from whom our day Friday is named. She is the half-
sister of Thor, from whom Thursday is named, and the
daughter of Wodin, from whom Wednesday is named.

I knew little of all this then, but I did not wonder
when I read afterward that this northern goddess was the
Goddess of Love, the friend of song, the most beautiful
of all their divinities,--queen of spring and light and
everything lovely.

But surely never any one took fewer of the airs of a
goddess than our Frida did while she was with us. She
would watch my mother, as if afraid that she should put
her hand to a gridiron or a tin dipper. She gave her to
understand, in a thousand pretty ways, that she should be
her faithful, loving, and sincere. servant. If she would
only show her what to do, she would work for her as a
child that loved her. And so indeed she did. My dear
mother would laugh and say she was quite a fine lady now,
for Frida would not let her touch broom nor mop, skimmer
nor dusting-cloth.

The girl would do anything but go out upon an errand.
She could not bear to see the other side of the fence.
What she thought of it all I do not know. Whether she
thought it was the custom in America for young men to
live shut up with their mothers in enclosures of half an
acre square, or whether she thought we two made some
peculiar religious order, whose rules provided that one
woman and one man should live together in a convent or
monastery of their own, or whether she supposed half New
York was made up, as Marco Polo found Pekin, of
cottages or of gardens, I did not know, nor did I much
care. I could see that here was provided a companion for
my mother, who was else so lonely, and I very soon found
that she was as much a companion for me.

So soon as we could understand her at all, I took the
name of her brother and his address. When he wrote last
he was tending a saw-mill at a place about seven miles
away from Tuckahoe, in Jersey. But he said he was going
to leave there at once, so that they need not write
there. He sent the money for their passage, and
promised, as I said, to meet them at New York.

This was a poor clew at the best. But I put a good
face on it, and promised her I would find him if he could
be found. And I spared no pains. I wrote to the
postmaster at Tuckahoe, and to a minister I heard of
there. I inquired of the Swedish consuls in New York and
Philadelphia. Indeed, in the end, I went to Tuckahoe
myself, with her, to inquire. But this was long after.
However, I may say here, once for all, to use an old
phrase of my mother's, we never found "hide nor hair" of
him. And although this grieved Frida, of course, yet it
came on her gradually, and as she had never seen him to
remember him, it was not the same loss as if they had
grown up together.

Meanwhile that first winter was, I thought, the
pleasantest I had ever known in my life. I did not have
to work very hard now, for my business was rather
the laying out work for my men, and sometimes a nice job
which needed my hand on my lathe at home, or in some
other delicate affair that I could bring home with me.

We were teaching Frida English, my mother and I, and
she and I made a great frolic of her teaching me Swedish.
I would bring home Swedish newspapers and stories for
her, and we would puzzle them out together,--she as much
troubled to find the English word as I to find out the
Swedish. Then she sang like a bird when she was about
her household work, or when she sat sewing for my mother,
and she had not lived with us a fortnight before she
began to join us on Sunday evenings in the choruses of
the Methodist hymns which my mother and I sang together.
So then we made her sing Swedish hymns to us. And before
she knew it, the great tears would brim over her deep
eyes and would run down in pearls upon her cheek.
Nothing set her to thinking of her old home as those
Sunday evenings did. Of a Sunday evening we could make
her go out with us to church sometimes. Not but then she
would half cover her face with a veil, so afraid was she
that we might meet the Dane. But I told her that the
last place we should find him at would be at church on
Sunday evening.

I have come far in advance of my story, that I might
make any one who reads this life of mine to understand
how naturally and simply this poor lost bird nestled down
into our quiet life, and how the house that was
built for two proved big enough for three. For I made
some new purchases now, and fitted up the little middle
chamber for Frida's own use. We had called it the "spare
chamber" before, in joke. But now my mother fitted
pretty curtains to it, and other hangings, without
Frida's knowledge. I had a square of carpet made up at
the warehouse for the middle of the floor, and by making
her do one errand and another in the corner of the garden
one pleasant afternoon in November, we had it all
prettily fitted up for her room before she knew it. And
a great gala we made of it when she came in from
gathering the seeds of the calystegia, which she had been
sent for.

She looked like a northern Flora as she came in, with
her arms all festooned by the vines she had been pulling
down. And when my mother made her come out to the door
she had never seen opened before, and led her in, and
told her that this pretty chamber was all her own, the
pretty creature flushed crimson red at first, and then
her quick tears ran over, and she fell on my mother's
neck and kissed her as if she would never be done. And
then she timidly held her hand out to me, too, as I stood
in the doorway, and said, in her slow, careful English,--

"And you, too--and you, too. I must tank you both,
also, especially. You are so good--so good to de poor
lost girl!" That was a very happy evening.

But, as I say, I have gone ahead of my story. For
before we had these quiet evenings we were fated to have
many anxious ones and one stormy one.

The very first day that Frida was with us, I felt
sure that the savages would make another descent upon us.
They had heard her scream, that was certain. They knew
she had not passed them, that was certain. They knew
there was a coal-bin on the other side of our fence, that
was certain. They would have reason enough for being
afraid to have her at large, if, indeed, there were no
worse passion than fear driving some of them in pursuit
of her. I could not keep out of my mind the beastly look
of the Irishman who asked me, with such an ugly leer on
his face, if there were no passage through. Not that I
told either of the two women of my fears. But, all the
same, I did not undress myself for a week, and sat in the
great easy-chair in our kitchen through the whole of
every night, waiting for the least sound of alarm.

Next to the savages, I had always lived in fear of
being discovered in my retreat by the police, who would
certainly think it strange to find a man and his mother
living in a shed, without any practicable outside door,
in what they called a vacant lot.

But I have read of weak nations in history which were
fain to call upon one neighbor whom they did not like to
protect them against another whom they liked less.
I made up my mind, in like wise, to go round to the
police-station nearest me.

And so, having dressed myself in my black coat, and
put on a round hat and gloves, I bought me a Malacca
walking-stick, such as was then in fashion, and called
upon the captain in style. I told him I lived next the
church, and that on such and such a night there was a
regular row among roughs, and that several of them went
storming up the alley in a crowd. I said, "Although your
men were there as quick as they could come, these fellows
had all gone before they came." But then I explained
that I had seen a fellow hanging about the alley in the
daytime, who seemed to be there for no good; that there
was a hand-cart kept there by a workman, who seemed to be
an honest fellow, and, perhaps, all they wanted was to
steal that; that, if I could, I would warn him. But
meanwhile, I said, I had come round to the station to
give the warning of my suspicions, that if my rattle was
heard again, the patrolmen might know what was in the
wind.

The captain was a good deal impressed by my make-up
and by the ease of my manner. He affected to be
perfectly well acquainted with me, although we had never
happened to meet at the Century Club or at the Union
League. I confirmed the favorable impression I had made
by leaving my card, which I had had handsomely engraved:
"MR. ROBINSON CRUSOE." With my pencil I added my
down-town address, where, I said, a note or telegram
would find me.

I was not a day too soon with my visit to this
gentleman. That very night, after my mother and Frida
had gone to bed, as I sat in my easychair, there came
over me one of those strange intimations which I have
never found it safe to disregard. Sometimes it is of
good, and sometimes of bad. This time it made me certain
that all was not well. To relieve my fears I lifted my
ladder over the wall and dropped it in the alley. I
swung myself down and carried it to the very end of the
alley, to the place where I had dragged poor Frida in.
The moon fell on the fence opposite ours. My wing-fence
and hand-cart were all in shade. But everything was safe
there.

Again I chided myself for my fears, when, as I looked
up the alley to the street, I saw a group of four men
come in stealthily. They said not a word, but I could
make out their forms distinctly against the houses
opposite.

I was caught in my own trap!

Not quite! They had not seen me, for I was wholly in
shadow. I stepped quickly in at my own slide. I pushed
it back and bolted it securely, and with my heart in my
mouth, I waited at my hole of observation. In a minute
more they were close around me, though they did not
suspect I was so near.

They also had a dark-lantern, and, I thought,
more than one. They spoke in low tones; but as they
had no thought they had a hearer quite so near, I could
hear all they said.

"I tell you it was this side, and this is the side I
heard their deuced psalm-singing day before yesterday."

"What if he did hear psalm-singing? Are you going to
break into a man's garden because he sings psalms? I
came here to find out where the girl went to; and now you
talk of psalm-singing and coal-bins." This from another,
whose English was poor, and in whom I fancied I heard the
Dane. It was clear enough that be spoke sense, and a
sort of doubt fell on the whole crew; but speaker No. 1,
with a heavy crowbar he had, smashed into my pine wall,
as I have a right to call it now, with a force which made
the splinters fly.

"I should think we were all at Niblo's," said a man
of slighter build, "and that we were playing Humpty
Dumpty. Because a girl flew out of a window, you think
a fence opened to take her in. Why should she not go
through a door? and he kicked with his foot upon the
heavy sloping cellar-door of the church, which just rose
a little from the pavement. It was the doorway which
they used there when they took in their supply of coal.
The moon fell full on one side of it. To my surprise it
was loose and gave way.

"Here is where the girl flew to, and here is
where Bully Bigg, the donkey, let her slip out of
his fingers. I knew he was a fool, but I did not know he
was such a fool," said the Dane (if he were the Dane).

I will not pretend to write down the oaths and foul
words which came in between every two of the words I have
repeated.

"Fool yourself!" replied the Bully; "and what sort of
a fool is the man who comes up a blind alley looking
after a girl that will not kiss him when he bids her?"

"Anyway," put in another of the crew, who had just
now lifted the heavy cellar-door, "other people may find
it handy to hop down here when the `beaks' are too near
them. It's a handy place to know of in a dark night, if
the dear deacons do choose to keep it open for a poor
psalm-singing tramp, who has no chance at the station-
house. Here, Lopp, you are the tallest,--jump in and
tell us what is there;" and at this moment the Dane
caught sight of my unfortunate ladder, lying full in the
moonlight. I could see him seize it and run to the
doorway with it with a deep laugh and some phrase of his
own country talk, which I did not understand.

"The deacons are very good," said the savage who had
lifted the cellar-door. "They make everything handy for
us poor fellows."

And though he had not planted the ladder, he was the
first to run down, and called for the rest to follow.
The Dane was second, Lopp was third, and "The
Bully," as the big rascal seemed to be called by
distinction, was the fourth.

I saw him disappear from my view with a mixture of
wonder and terror which I will not describe. I seized my
light overcoat, which always hung in the passage. I
flung open my sliding-door and shut it again behind me.
I looked into the black of the cellar to see the
reflections from their distant lanterns, and without a
sound I drew up my ladder. Then I ran to the head of the
alley and sounded my rattle as I would have sounded the
trumpet for a charge in battle. The officers joined me
in one moment.

"I am the man who spoke to the captain about these
rowdies. Four of them are in the cellar of the church
yonder now."

"Do you know who?"

"One they called Lopp, and one they called Bully
Bigg," said I. "I do not know the others' names."

The officers were enraptured.

I led them, and two other patrolmen who joined us, to
the shelter of my wing-wall. In a few minutes the head
of the Dane appeared, as he was lifted from below. With
an effort and three or four oaths, he struggled out upon
the ground, to be seized and gagged the moment he stepped
back. With varying fortunes, Bigg and Lopp emerged, and
were seized and handcuffed in turn. The fourth
surrendered on being summoned.

What followed comes into the line of daily life and
the morning newspaper so regularly that I need not
describe it. Against the Dane it proved that endless
warrants could be brought immediately. His lair of
stolen baggage and other property was unearthed, and
countless sufferers claimed their own. I was able to
recover Frida's and her mother's possessions--the locks
on the trunks still unbroken. The Dane himself would
have been sent to the Island on I know not how many
charges, but that the Danish minister asked for him that
he might be hanged in Denmark, and he was sent and hanged
accordingly.

Lopp was sent to Sing-Sing for ten years, and has not
yet been pardoned.

Bigg and Cordon were sent to Blackwell's Island for
three years each. And so the land had peace for that
time.

That winter, as there came on one and another idle
alarm that Frida's brother might be heard from, my heart
sank with the lowest terror lest she should go away. And
in the spring I told her that if she went away I was sure
I should die. And the dear girl looked down, and looked
up, and said she thought--she thought she should, too.
And we told my mother that we had determined that Frida
should never go away while we stayed there. And she
approved.

So I wrote a note to the minister of the church which
had protected us so long, and one night we slid the
board carefully, and all three walked round, fearless of
the Dane, and Frida and I were married.

It was more than three years after, when I received
by one post three letters, which gave us great ground for
consultation. The first was from my old friend and
patron, the Spaniard. He wrote to me from Chicago, where
he, in his turn, had fallen in with a crew of savages,
who had stripped him of all he had, under the pretext of
a land-enterprise they engaged him in, and had left him
without a real, as he said. He wanted to know if I could
not find him some clerkship, or even some place as
janitor, in New York.

The second letter was from old Mr. Henry in
Philadelphia, who had always employed me after my old
master's death. He said that the fence around the lot in
Ninety-ninth Avenue might need some repairs, and he
wished I would look at it. He was growing old, he said,
and he did not care to come to New York. But the Fordyce
heirs would spend ten years in Europe.

The third letter was from Tom Grinnell.

I wrote to Mr. Henry that I thought he had better let
me knock up a little office, where a keeper might sleep,
if necessary; that there was some stuff with which I
could put up such an office, and that I had an old
friend, a Spaniard, who was an honest fellow, and if he
might have his bed in the office, would take
gratefully whatever his services to the estate proved
worth. He wrote me by the next day's mail that I might
engage the Spaniard and finish the office. So I wrote to
the Spaniard and got a letter from him, accepting the
post provided for him. Then I wrote to Tom Grinnell.

The last day we spent at our dear old home, I
occupied myself in finishing the office as Friend Henry
bade me. I made a "practicable door," which opened from
the passage on Church Alley. Then I loaded my hand-cart
with my own chest and took it myself, in my working
clothes, to the Vanderbilt Station, where I took a brass
check for it.

I could not wait for the Spaniard, but I left a
letter for him, giving him a description of the way I
managed the goats, and directions to milk and fatten
them, and to make both butter and cheese.

At half-past ten a "crystal," as those cabs were then
called, came to the corner of Fernando Street and Church
Alley, and so we drove to the station. I left the key of
the office, directed to the Spaniard, in the hands of the
baggage-master.

When I took leave of my castle, as I called it, I
carried with me for relics the great straw hat I had
made, my umbrella, and one of my parrots; also I forgot
not to take the money I formerly mentioned, which had
lain by me so long useless that it was grown rusty
and tarnished, and could scarcely pass for money till it
had been a little rubbed and handled. With these relics
and with my wife's and mother's baggage and my own chest,
we arrived at our new home.



BREAD ON THE WATERS
A WASHINGTON CHRISTMAS

[No. This story also is "Invented Example." But it
is founded on facts. It is a pleasure to me, writing
fifty-four years after the commission intrusted to me by
the late Mrs. Fales, to say that that is a real name, and
that her benevolence at a distance is precisely
represented here.

Perhaps the large history of the world would be
differently written but for that kindness of hers.

I was a very young clergyman, and the remittance she
made to me was the first trust of the same kind which had
ever been confided to me.]


CHAPTER I

MAKE READY

"Only think, Matty, papa passed right by me when I was
sitting with my back to the fire and stitching away on
his book-mark without my once seeing him! But he was
so busy talking to mamma that he never saw what I was
doing, and I huddled it under a newspaper before he
came back again. Well, I have got papa's present done,
but I cannot keep out of mamma's way. Matty, dear, if
I will sit in the sun and keep a shawl on, may I not
sit in your room and work? It is not one bit cold
there. Really, Matty, it is a great deal warmer
than it was yesterday."

"Dear child," said Matty, to whom everybody came so
readily for advice and help, "I can do better for you
than that. You shall come into the study; papa will be
away all the morning, and I will have the fire kept up
there,--and mamma shall never come near you."

All this, and a thousand times more of plotting and
counterplotting, was going on among four children and
their elders in a comfortable, free-and-easy seeming
household in Washington, as the boys and girls, young men
and young women were in the last agonies of making ready
for Christmas. Matty is fully entitled to be called a
young woman, when we see her. She has just passed her
twenty-first birthday. But she looks as fresh and pretty
as when she was seventeen, and certainly she is a great
deal pleasanter though she be wiser. She is the oldest
of the troop. Tom, the next, is expected from Annapolis
this afternoon, and Beverly from Charlotte. Then come
four boys and girls whose ages and places the reader must
guess at as we go on.

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