Chapter 12. A Journey Into Mean Streets

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_ CHAPTER XII. A JOURNEY INTO MEAN STREETS

Darrow's little car was waiting before the entrance; and as soon as Stephen had taken his place by the old man's side, they shot forward into the smoky twilight. A policeman, standing in the circle of electric light at the corner, held up a warning hand; and then, as he recognized Darrow, he nodded with a smile, and there stole into his face the look of deference which Stephen had seen in the Governor's eyes. Glancing up at the sombre ruggedness of the profile beside him, the younger man asked himself curiously from what source of character or Circumstance this old man had derived his strange impressiveness and his Authority over men. With his gaunt length, his wide curving nostrils, his thick majestic lips, he looked, as Stephen had first seen him, a rock-hewn Pharaoh of a man. An unusual type to survive in modern America--republican and imperial! Did he represent, this carpenter who was also a politician, the political despotism of the worker--the crook and scourge of the labourer's power?

Suddenly, while he wondered, Darrow turned toward him. "What do you think of the Governor?"

"I hardly know," answered Stephen thoughtfully. "It is too soon to ask; but I think he is honest."

"He is more than honest," rejoined the other quietly. "He is human. He understands. He belongs to us."

"Belongs?" Stephen repeated the word with a note of interrogation.

Very slowly the old man answered. "I mean that he is more than anything that he says or thinks. He is bigger than his message."

"I suppose he stands for a great deal?"

"A man stands only for what he is, not for an inch more, not for an inch less. The trouble with all the leaders we've had in the past was that their thought outstripped their characters. They believed more than they were and they broke down under it. I'm an old man now. I've watched them come and go."

"You think that Vetch is a great leader?"

"I think he is a great leader, but I don't mean that I think he will ever lead us anywhere."

"You feel that he is losing his grip on the crowd?"

Up from Main Street the workers were pouring out of the factories; and while they moved in a dark stream through the light and shadow on the pavement, the faces flowed past Stephen with a pallid intensity which made him think of dead flowers drifting on a river. In all those faces how little life there seemed, how little individuality and animation!

"When I was a small kid I used to live by the seashore," said the old man presently in his dry, emphatic tones. "Many is the time I've stood and watched the tide coming in, and I never once saw it come in that it didn't go out again."

"Then you believe that the tide is turning against Vetch?"

For a minute, while they sped on in the obscurity of a side street, Darrow meditated.

"No, sir, I ain't saying that much--not yet. But the way I calculate is something like this. Vetch came in on a wave of popular emotion, and a wave of popular emotion is just about like the tide of the sea. It may rise a certain distance, but it can't stand still, and it can't go any farther. It's obliged to turn; and when it turns, it's pretty sure to bring back a good deal that it carried with it. A crowd impulse--as they call it in the pulpit and on the platform--is a dangerous thing. It's dangerous because you can't count on it."

"It looks to me as if Vetch counted upon it a little too much."

"That's his nature. He was born on the sunny side of the street. He thinks because he sees the way to help people that they want to be helped. I've been mixed up in politics now for fifty years, and in the labour movement, as they say, ever since it began to move in the South--and I've found out that people don't really want to be helped--they want to be fooled. Vetch offers 'em facts, and all the time it ain't facts they're wanting, but names."

"I see," assented Stephen. "Names that they can repeat over and over until they get at last to believe that they are things. Long reverberating names like Democratic or Republican--"

Darrow laughed grimly. "That's right, sir, that's the way I've worked it out in my mind. The crowd will come a little way after a fact; but in the end it gets tired because the fact won't work magic, like that conjure-stuff of the darkeys, and then it turns and goes back to the old names that mean nothing. Only when a crowd moves all together it's dangerous because it's like the flood-tide and ebb-tide of the sea."

"And the most irritating part of it," said Stephen, with an insight which had sometimes visited him in the trenches, "is that it gets what it deserves because it can always have whatever it wants--even the truth and honest government."

They were passing rows of narrow old-fashioned tenement-houses, standing, like crumbling walls of red brick, behind sagging wooden fences; and suddenly, while Stephen's eyes were on the lights that came and went so fitfully in the basement dining-rooms, Darrow stopped the car in the gutter of cobblestones, and motioned in silence toward the pavement. As Stephen got out, he glanced vaguely round him at the strange neighbourhood.

"Where are we?"

"North of Marshall Street. A quarter which was once very prosperous; but that was before your day. This is one of several rows of old houses, well-built in their time, better built, indeed, than any houses we're putting up now; but their day is over. The cost of repairing them would be so great that the agent is deliberately letting the property run down in the hope that this part of the street will soon be turned over to negroes. The negroes are so crowded in their quarter that they are obliged to expand, and when they do, this investment will yield a still higher interest. Coloured tenants stand crowding better than white ones, and they will pay a better rent for worse housing. As it is the rent of these houses has doubled since the beginning of the war."

"Good God!" said Stephen. "Do we stop here?"

"I want you to see Canning, the man the Governor told you about. He can't pay his rent, which was raised last Saturday, and the family is moving to-morrow."

"He ought to be paid for living here. Where will he go?"

"Oh, people can always find a worse place, if they look long enough. Canning was in the war, by the way. He's got some nervous trouble--not crazy enough to be taken care of--just on edge and unstrung. The war used him up, I reckon, and anxiety and undernourishment used up his wife and children. It all seems to have come out in the baby--queerest little kid you ever saw--born about a year ago. Mighty funny--ain't it?--the way we let children just a few squares away from us grow up pinched, half-starved, undersized, uneducated, and as little moral as the gutters can make 'em, and all the time we're parading and begging and even collecting the pennies out of orphan asylums, for the sake of the children on the other side of the world. But it's a queer thing, charity, however you happen to look at it. My father used to say--and he had as much sense as any man I ever met--that charity is the greatest traveller under the sun; and even if it begins at home it ain't ever content to stop there over night."

Standing there in the dim street, before the silent rows of bleak houses with their tattered window-shades and their fitful lights, Stephen stared wonderingly at the gaunt shape of the man before him. For the first time he was brought face to face with the other half of his world, with the half of the world where poverty and toil are stark realities. This was the way men like Darrow were thinking, men perhaps like Gideon Vetch! These men saw poverty not as a sentimental term, but as a human experience. They knew, while he and his kind only imagined. With a sensation as acute as physical nausea, a sensation that the thought of the Germans used to bring when he was in the trenches, there swept over him a memory of the social hysteria which had followed, like a mental pestilence or famine, in the track of the war. The moral platitudes, the sentimental philanthropy, and the hypocritical command of conscience to put all the world, except our own cellars, in order, where were these impulses now in a time which had gone mad with the hatred of work and the craving for pleasure? Yet he had once thought that he was returning to a world which could be rebuilt on a foundation of justice, and it was this lost belief, he knew, which had made him bitter in spirit and unfair in judgment.

The gate swung back with a grating noise, and they entered the yard, and walked over scattered papers and empty bottles to the narrow flight of brick steps, which led from the ground to the area in front of the basement dining-room. As Stephen descended by the light from the dust-laden window, a chill dampness rose like a fog from the earth below and filled his nostrils and mouth and throat--a dampness which choked him like the effluvium of poverty. Glancing in from the area a moment later, he saw a scantily furnished room, heated by an open stove and lighted by a single jet of gas, which flickered in a thin greenish flame. In the centre of the room a pine table, without a cloth, was laid for supper, and three small children, in chairs drawn close together, were impatiently drumming with tin spoons on the wood. A haggard woman, in a soiled blue gingham dress, was bringing a pot of coffee from the adjoining room; and in one corner, on a sofa from which the stuffing sagged in bunches, a man sat staring vacantly at a hole in the rag carpet. Tied in a high chair, which stood apart as if it were the pedestal of an idol, a baby, with the smooth unlined face not of an infant, but of a philosopher, was mutely surveying the scene.

More than anything else in the room, more even than the sodden hopelessness of the man's expression, the hopelessness of neurasthenia, this baby, tied with a strip of gingham in his high chair, arrested and held Stephen's attention. Very pallid, with the pallor not of flesh but of an ivory image, with hair as thin and white as the hair of an old man, and eyes that were as opaque as blue marbles, the baby sat there, with its look of stoical philosophy and superhuman experience. And this look said as plainly as if the tiny mute lips had opened and spoken aloud: "I am tired before I begin. I am old before I begin. I am ending before I begin."

Darrow knocked at the door, and the woman opened it with the coffee-pot still in her hand.

"So you've come back," she said in a voice that was without surprise and without gratitude.

"I came back to ask what you've done about a place. This gentleman is with me. You don't mind his stepping inside a minute?"

"Oh, no, I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She drew back as she answered, and the two men entered the room and stood gazing at the stove with the look of embarrassment which the sight of poverty brings to the faces of the well-to-do.

"When are you moving?" asked Darrow, withdrawing his gaze from the glimmer of the embers in the stove, and fixing it on the steam that issued from the coffee-pot.

"In the morning. We've found a cheaper place, though with rent going up every week, it looks as if we'd soon have nowhere worse to move to, unless it's gaol alley." Her tone dripped bitterness, and the lines of her pale lips settled into an expression of scornful resignation.

Without replying to her words, Darrow nodded in the direction of the young man, who had never looked up, but sat in the same rigid attitude, with his vacant eyes staring at the hole in the carpet.

"Any better?"

"How can he be better," returned the woman grimly, "when all he does is to walk the streets until he's fit to drop, and then drag himself home and sit there like that for hours, too worn out even to lift his eyes from the floor. This is the last coffee I've got. I've been saving it since Christmas, but I made it for him because he seems more down than usual to-night." Then a nervous spasm shook her thin figure, and she added in a fierce whisper: "He's sick, that's the matter with him. He ain't sick enough to be in a government hospital, but he'd be better off if he was. Even when he gets work he ain't able to stick to it. The folks that hire him don't have any patience. As long as he was over yonder in France it looked as if every woman in America was knitting for him; and now since he's back here he can't get a job to keep him and the children alive."

"How have you fed the children?"

"On what I could get cheapest. You see how sickly and peaked they look, and it's been awful damp in these rooms sometimes. The doctor says he ain't sick; it ain't his body, it's his mind. He says he's had a kind of horror inside of him ever since he came home. He's turned against everything he used to do, and even everything he used to believe in."

"That's hell!" exclaimed Stephen suddenly; and at her surprised glance, he added, "I've been there and I know. Nerves, they say, but just as real as your skin." He looked away from her to the man on the sofa. "To have _that_, and be in poverty!" Turning away from the father, his glance met the calm eyes of the baby fixed on him with that gaze which was as old and as pitiless as philosophy.

"Ma, may I help myself?" screamed one of the children, drumming loudly on the table. "I'd rather have bread and molasses!" cried another; and "Oh, Ma, when we move to-morrow will you let me take the kitten I found?"

"Well, I've talked to the Governor," said Darrow, in his level voice which sounded to Stephen so unemotional, "and I think we can find a job for your husband."

Suddenly the man on the sofa looked up. "I voted against him," he whispered angrily.

Darrow laughed shortly. "You don't know the Governor if you think he'd hold that against you," he replied. "But for that little weakness of his he might not be a political problem."

"That's the way he goes on," remarked the woman despairingly. "Always saying things straight out that other people would keep back. He don't care what happens, that's the whole truth of it. He don't care about anything on earth, not even his tobacco."

"Life!" thought Stephen, with a dull pain in his heart. "That's what life is!" And the old familiar feeling of suffocation, of distaste for everything that he had ever felt or thought or believed, smothered him with the dryness of dust. Going quickly over to the sofa, he laid his hand on the man's shoulder, and spoke in a high ringing voice which he tried to make cheerful. "It will pass, old fellow," he said, and could have laughed aloud at the insincerity of his tone. "I know because I've been there." And he added cynically, as a kind of sacrifice on the altar of truth: "Everything will pass if you only wait long enough."

The man started and looked up. With an air of surprise he glanced round the dingy room, at his wife, at the whimpering children, at the dispassionate baby enthroned in his high chair, and at the majestic profile of Darrow. "It's the rottenness of the whole blooming show," he said doggedly. "It ain't just the hole I'm in. I could put up with that if it wasn't for the rottenness of it all."

"I know," replied Stephen quietly. "There are times when the show does look rotten, but we're all in it together."

Then, because he felt that he could stand it no longer, he turned abruptly, and went out into the dusk of the area. In a few minutes Darrow joined him, and in silence the two men felt their way up the brick steps to the bare ground of the front yard.

"I don't know what I ought to do, but I've got to do something," said Stephen, when he had opened the gate and passed through to the pavement where the car waited. Lifting his sensitive young face, he stared up at the row of decaying tenements. "What places for homes!"

For a moment Darrow looked at him without speaking; and then he answered in a voice which sounded as impersonal as the distant rumble of street cars. "I thought you might be interested because these houses, these and the other rows on the next block or two, are part of the Culpeper estate."

"The Culpeper estate?" repeated Stephen in an expressionless tone; and raising his eyes again he looked up at the bleak houses. In that instant, it seemed to him that he was seeing, not the sharp projection of the roofs against the ashen sky, but a long line of pleasant and prosperous generations. Beyond him stood his father, beyond his father stood his grandfather, beyond the tranquil succession of his grandfathers stood--what? Civilization? Humanity?

"Do you mean," he asked quietly, "that we--our family--own these houses?"

"The whole block, and the next, and the next. It is the Culpeper estate. You've never seen 'em before, I reckon. I doubt even if your father has ever seen 'em. The agent attends to all this, and if the agent didn't see that the rents were as high as people would pay, or were paying in the next places, he would be soon out of a job. I'm not blaming him, you know. I've got a son-in-law who is a real estate agent. It's just one of the cases where it's nobody's fault, and everybody's."

Without replying, Stephen turned away and got into the car. He felt bruised and sick, and he wanted to be alone, to think things out by himself in the darkness. "This is only one instance," he thought, as they started down the dim street toward the white blaze of the business quarter in the distance. "Only one out of millions! In every city. All over the world it is the same. Wherever there is wealth it casts its shadow of poverty."

"I used to bother about it too when I was young," said the old man at his side. "I used to feel, I reckon, pretty near as bad as you are feeling now, but it don't last. When you get on a bit you'll sort of settle down and begin to work it out. That's life. Yes, but it ain't the whole of life. It ain't even the biggest part. Those folks we've been to see have had their good times like the rest of us, only we saw 'em just now when they were in the midst of a bad time. Life ain't confined to a ditch any more than it is to what Gideon calls a lily-pond. Keep your balance, that's the main thing. Whatever else you lose, you must be sure to keep your balance, or you'll be in danger of going overboard."

"Do you mean that there is no remedy for conditions like this?"

The old man pondered his answer so long that Stephen thought he had either given up or forgotten the question.

"The only remedy I have ever been able to see is to work not on conditions, but on human nature," he replied. "Improve human nature, and then you will improve the conditions in which it lives. Improve the rich as well as the poor. Teach 'em to be human beings, not machines, to one another--that's Gideon's idea, you know,--humanize--Christianize, if you like it better--civilize. It's a pretty hopeless problem--the individual case--charity is all rotten from root to branch. If you could see the harm that's been done by mistaken charity! Why, look at my friend, Mrs. Page, now. She tried to work it out that way, and what came of it except more rottenness? And yet until the State looks after the unemployed, there is obliged to be charity."

"Do you mean Mrs. Kent Page?" asked Stephen in surprise, and remembered that his mother had once accused Corinna of trying to "undermine society."

"She is one of my best friends," answered the old man, with mingled pride and affection. "I go to see her in her shop every now and then, and I reckon she values my advice about her affairs as much as anybody's. Well, when she came home from Europe she found that she owned a row of tenements like this one, and her agent was profiteering in rents like most of the others. I wish you could have seen her when she discovered it. Splendid? Well, I reckon she's the most splendid thing this old world has ever had on top of it! She went straight to work and had those houses made into modern apartments--bathrooms, steam heat, and back yards full of trees and grass and flowers, just like Monroe Park, only better. The rent wasn't raised either! She put that back just where it was before the war; and then she let the whole row to the tenants for two years. You never saw anything like the interest she took in that speculation--you'd have thought to hear her that she was setting out to bring what the preachers call the social millennium."

"She never mentioned it to me," said Stephen, with interest. "How did it turn out?"

Darrow threw back his great head with a laugh. "I don't reckon she did mention it, bless her! It don't bear mentioning even now. Why, when she went back last fall to see those houses, she found that the tenants had all moved into dirty little places in the alley, and were letting out the apartments, at five times the rent they paid, to other tenants. They were doing a little special profiteering of their own--and, bless your life, there wasn't so much as a blade of grass left in the yards, even the trees had been cut down and sold for wood. And you say she never mentioned it?"

"How could she? But, after all, I suppose the question goes deeper than that?"

"The question," replied Darrow, with an energy that shook the little car, "goes as deep as hell!"

They were driving rapidly up Grace Street; and as they shot past the club on the corner, Stephen noticed the serene aristocratic profile of Peyton at one of the brilliantly lighted windows. A little farther on, when they turned into Franklin Street, he saw that the old print shop was in darkness, except for the lights in the rooms of the caretaker and the lodgers in the upper storey. Corinna had gone home, he supposed, and he wondered idly if she were with Benham? As they went on they passed the house of the Blairs, where he caught a glimpse of Margaret on the porch, parting from the handsome young clergyman. The sight stirred him strangely, as if the memory of his dead life had been awakened by a scent or a faded flower in a book. How different he was from the boy Margaret had known in that primitive period which people defined as "before the war"! It was as if he had belonged then to some primary emotional stratum of life. All the complex forces, the play and interplay of desire and repulsion, of energy and lassitude, had developed in the last two or three years.

On either side, softly shaded lights were shining from the windows, and women, in rich furs, were getting out of luxurious cars. It was the world that Stephen knew; life moulded in sculptural forms and encrusted with the delicate patina of tradition. Here was all that he had once loved; yet he realized suddenly, with a sensation of loneliness, that here, not in the mean streets, he felt, as Vetch would have said, "stranger than Robinson Crusoe." Something was missing. Something was lost that he could never recover. Was it Vetch, after all, who had shown him the way out, who had knocked a hole in the wall?

When Darrow stopped the car before the Culpeper gate, Stephen turned and held out his hand. "Thank you," he said simply. "I shall see you again."

Crossing the pavement with a rapid step, he entered the gate and ran up the steps to the porch between the white columns. As he passed into the richly tempered glow of the hall, it seemed to him that an invisible force, an aroma of the past, drifted out of the old house and enveloped him like the sweetness of flowers. He was caught again, he was submerged, in the spirit of race.

A little later, when he was passing his mother's door, he glanced in and saw her standing before the mirror in her evening gown of gray silk, with the foam-like ruffles of rose-point on her bosom and at her elbows, which were still round and young looking.

Catching his reflection in the glass, she called out in her crisp tones, "My dear boy, where on earth have you been? You know we promised to dine with Julia, and then to go to those tableaux for the benefit of the children in Vienna. She has worked so hard to make them a success that she would never forgive us if we stayed away."

"Yes, I know. I had forgotten," he replied. Why was he always forgetting? Then he asked impulsively, while pity burned at white heat within him, "Is Father here? I want to speak to him before we go out."

"He came in an hour ago," said Mrs. Culpeper; and as she spoke the mild leonine countenance of Mr. Culpeper, vaguely resembling some playful and domesticated king of beasts, appeared at the door of his dressing-room.

"Do you wish to see me, my boy?" he asked affectionately. "We were just wondering if you had forgotten and stayed at the club."

"No, I wasn't at the club. I've been looking over the Culpeper estate--a part of it." Stephen's voice trembled in spite of the effort he made to keep it impersonal and indifferent. "Father, do you know anything about those old houses beyond Marshall Street?"

It was the peculiar distinction of Mr. Culpeper that, in a community where everybody talked all the time, he had been able to form the habit of silence. While his acquaintances continually vociferated opinions, scandals, experiences, or anecdotes, he remained imperturbably reticent and subdued. All that he responded now to Stephen's outburst was, "Has anybody offered to buy them?"

"Why, what in the world!" exclaimed Mrs. Culpeper, who was neither reticent nor subdued. From the depths of the mirror her bright brown eyes gazed back at her husband, while she fastened a cameo pin, containing the head of Minerva framed in pearls, in the rose-point on her bosom.

"To buy them?" repeated Stephen. "Why, they are horrors, Father, to live in--crumbling, insanitary horrors! And yet the rent has been doubled in the last two or three years."

From the mirror his mother's face looked back at him, so small and clear and delicately tinted that it seemed to him merely an exaggerated copy of the cameo on her bosom, "I hope that means we shall have a little more to live on next year," she said reflectively, while the expression that Mary Byrd impertinently called her "economic look" appeared in her eyes. "What with the high cost of everything, and the low interest on Liberty Bonds, and the innumerable relief organizations to which one is simply forced to contribute, it has been almost impossible to make two ends meet. Poor Mary Byrd hasn't been able to give a single party this winter."

Before Stephen's gaze there passed a vision of the dingy basement room, the embittered face of the woman, the sickly tow-headed children, the man who could not lift his eyes from the hole in the carpet, and the baby with that look of having been born not young, but old, the look of pre-natal experience and disillusionment. And he heard Darrow's dry voice complaining because the well-to-do classes still gave to starving orphans across the world. After all, what was there to choose between the near-sighted and the far-sighted social vision? How narrow they both appeared and how crooked! Darrow would let all the children of Europe starve as long as their crying did not interfere with the aims of his Federation of Labour; Stephen's sister Julia, with her instinct for imitation and her remote sense of responsibility, would step over the poverty at her door, while she held out her hands, in the latest fashionable gesture of philanthropy, to the orphans in France or Vienna. And beside them both his mother, who because of her constitutional inability to see anything beyond the family, perceived merely the fact that her own child would be disappointed if the tableaux for the benefit of starving children somewhere did not go off well. The question, he realized, was not which one of the three points of view was the most admirable, but simply which one served best the ultimate purpose of the race. Selfishness seemed to have as little as altruism to do with the problem. Was Corinna, who had failed in philanthropy and chosen beauty, the only wise one among them?

"But children are living in these houses," he said, "and not only living--they are forced to move out because the rent has become so high that they must find a worse place. I've just seen it with my own eyes. Three sickly little children and a dreadful baby--a baby that knows everything already."

A quiver of pain crossed Mr. Culpeper's handsome features; but he said only, "I will speak to the agent."

"Won't you look into it yourself?" asked Stephen hopelessly. "The agent is only the agent--but the responsibility is yours--ours. Of course the agent doesn't want to make expensive repairs when he can get as high rent without doing so. He knows that people are obliged to have a roof over them; and if the roofs are too bad for white people, he can always find negroes to pay anything that he asks. Can't you see what it is in reality--that we are preying on the helpless?"

Turning suddenly from the mirror, Mrs. Culpeper crossed the floor hastily and put her arms about her son's shoulders. Her face was very motherly and there was a compassionate light in her eyes, "My dear, dear boy," she murmured in the soothing tone that one uses to the ill or the mentally unbalanced. "My dear boy, you must really go and dress. Julia will never forgive us." In her heart she was sincerely grieved by what he had told her. She would have helped cheerfully if it had been possible to her nature; but stronger than compassion, stronger even than reason, was the instinct of evasive idealism which the generations had bred. He understood, while he looked down on her white hair and unlined face, that even if he took her with him to that basement room, she would see it not as it actually was, but as she wished it to be. Her romanticism was invulnerable because it had no contact, even through imagination, with the edge of reality.

And he knew also, while she held him in her motherly arms, that something had broken down within his soul--some barrier between himself and humanity. The wall of tradition and sentiment no longer divided him from Darrow, or Gideon Vetch, or the man who could not look at anything but the hole in the carpet. Never again could he take his inherited place in the world of which he had once been a part. For an instant a nervous impulse to protest, to startle by some violent gesture that look of gentle self-esteem from the faces before him, jerked over him like a spasm. Then the last habit that he would ever break in his life, the very law of his being, which was the law of order, of manners, of self-control, the inbred horror, older than himself or his parents, of giving himself away, of making a scene of his own emotions, this ancestral custom of good breeding closed over him like the lid of a coffin.

With a smile he looked into the anxious face of his father. "Isn't there some way out of it, Dad?"

The muscles about Mr. Culpeper's mouth contracted as if he were going to cry; but when he spoke his voice was completely under control. "I can't interfere, son, with the way the agent manages the property," he answered, "but, of course, if you have discovered a peculiarly distressing case--if it is an object of charity--"

He paused abruptly in amazement, for Stephen was laughing, laughing in a way, as Mrs. Culpeper remarked afterward, that nobody had ever even thought of laughing before the whole world had become demoralized.

"Damn charity!" he exclaimed hilariously. "I beg your pardon, Mother, but if you only knew how inexpressibly funny it is!" Then the laughter stopped, and a wistful look came into his eyes, for beyond the broken walls he saw Patty Vetch in her red cape, and around her stretched the wind-swept roads of that hidden country.

A minute later, as he left the room, his mother's eyes followed him anxiously. "Poor boy, we must bear with him," she said in melting maternal accents. _

Read next: Chapter 13. Corinna Wonders

Read previous: Chapter 11. The Old Walls And The Rising Tide

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