The Project Gutenberg eBook, Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather

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Title: Youth and the Bright Medusa

Author: Willa Cather

Release Date: September 30, 2004 [eBook #13555]

Language: English

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YOUTH AND THE BRIGHT MEDUSA

by

WILLA CATHER

1920

“We must not look at Goblin men,

We must not buy their fruits;

Who knows upon what soil they fed

Their hungry, thirsty roots?”

CONTENTS

COMING, APHRODITE!

THE DIAMOND MINE

A GOLD SLIPPER

SCANDAL

PAUL’S CASE

A WAGNER MATINEE

THE SCULPTOR’S FUNERAL

“A DEATH IN THE DESERT”

The author wishes to thank McClure’s Magazine, _The Century

Magazine_ and Harper’s Magazine for their courtesy in permitting

the re-publication of three stories in this collection.

The last four stories in the volume, Paul’s Case, A Wagner Matinee,

The Sculptor’s Funeral, ”A Death in the Desert,” are re-printed from

the author’s first book of stories, entitled “The Troll Garden,”

published in 1905.

Coming, Aphrodite!

I

Don Hedger had lived for four years on the top floor of an old house on

the south side of Washington Square, and nobody had ever disturbed him.

He occupied one big room with no outside exposure except on the north,

where he had built in a many-paned studio window that looked upon a court

and upon the roofs and walls of other buildings. His room was very

cheerless, since he never got a ray of direct sunlight; the south corners

were always in shadow. In one of the corners was a clothes closet, built

against the partition, in another a wide divan, serving as a seat by day

and a bed by night. In the front corner, the one farther from the window,

was a sink, and a table with two gas burners where he sometimes cooked

his food. There, too, in the perpetual dusk, was the dog’s bed, and often

a bone or two for his comfort.

The dog was a Boston bull terrier, and Hedger explained his surly

disposition by the fact that he had been bred to the point where it told

on his nerves. His name was Caesar III, and he had taken prizes at very

exclusive dog shows. When he and his master went out to prowl about

University Place or to promenade along West Street, Caesar III was

invariably fresh and shining. His pink skin showed through his mottled

coat, which glistened as if it had just been rubbed with olive oil, and

he wore a brass-studded collar, bought at the smartest saddler’s. Hedger,

as often as not, was hunched up in an old striped blanket coat, with a

shapeless felt hat pulled over his bushy hair, wearing black shoes that

had become grey, or brown ones that had become black, and he never put on

gloves unless the day was biting cold.

Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the

rear apartment—two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west.

His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors,

which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy

of the occupant. The rooms had been leased, long before he came there, by

a trained nurse who considered herself knowing in old furniture. She went

to auction sales and bought up mahogany and dirty brass and stored it

away here, where she meant to live when she retired from nursing.

Meanwhile, she sub-let her rooms, with their precious furniture, to young

people who came to New York to “write” or to “paint”—who proposed to

live by the sweat of the brow rather than of the hand, and who desired

artistic surroundings.

When Hedger first moved in, these rooms were occupied by a young man who

tried to write plays,—and who kept on trying until a week ago, when the

nurse had put him out for unpaid rent.

A few days after the playwright left, Hedger heard an ominous murmur of

voices through the bolted double doors: the lady-like intonation of the

nurse—doubtless exhibiting her treasures—and another voice, also a

woman’s, but very different; young, fresh, unguarded, confident. All the

same, it would be very annoying to have a woman in there. The only

bath-room on the floor was at the top of the stairs in the front hall,

and he would always be running into her as he came or went from his bath.

He would have to be more careful to see that Caesar didn’t leave bones

about the hall, too; and she might object when he cooked steak and onions

on his gas burner.

As soon as the talking ceased and the women left, he forgot them. He was

absorbed in a study of paradise fish at the Aquarium, staring out at

people through the glass and green water of their tank. It was a highly

gratifying idea; the incommunicability of one stratum of animal life with

another,—though Hedger pretended it was only an experiment in unusual

lighting. When he heard trunks knocking against the sides of the narrow

hall, then he realized that she was moving in at once. Toward noon,

groans and deep gasps and the creaking of ropes, made him aware that a

piano was arriving. After the tramp of the movers died away down the

stairs, somebody touched off a few scales and chords on the instrument,

and then there was peace. Presently he heard her lock her door and go

down the hall humming something; going out to lunch, probably. He stuck

his brushes in a can of turpentine and put on his hat, not stopping to

wash his hands. Caesar was smelling along the crack under the bolted

doors; his bony tail stuck out hard as a hickory withe, and the hair was

standing up about his elegant collar.

Hedger encouraged him. “Come along, Caesar. You’ll soon get used to a new

smell.”

In the hall stood an enormous trunk, behind the ladder that led to the

roof, just opposite Hedger’s door. The dog flew at it with a growl of

hurt amazement. They went down three flights of stairs and out into the

brilliant May afternoon.

Behind the Square, Hedger and his dog descended into a basement oyster

house where there were no tablecloths on the tables and no handles on the

coffee cups, and the floor was covered with sawdust, and Caesar was

always welcome,—not that he needed any such precautionary flooring. All

the carpets of Persia would have been safe for him. Hedger ordered steak

and onions absentmindedly, not realizing why he had an apprehension that

this dish might be less readily at hand hereafter. While he ate, Caesar

sat beside his chair, gravely disturbing the sawdust with his tail.

After lunch Hedger strolled about the Square for the dog’s health and

watched the stages pull out;—that was almost the very last summer of the

old horse stages on Fifth Avenue. The fountain had but lately begun

operations for the season and was throwing up a mist of rainbow water

which now and then blew south and sprayed a bunch of Italian babies that

were being supported on the outer rim by older, very little older,

brothers and sisters. Plump robins were hopping about on the soil; the

grass was newly cut and blindingly green. Looking up the Avenue through

the Arch, one could see the young poplars with their bright, sticky

leaves, and the Brevoort glistening in its spring coat of paint, and

shining horses and carriages,—occasionally an automobile, misshapen and

sullen, like an ugly threat in a stream of things that were bright and

beautiful and alive.

While Caesar and his master were standing by the fountain, a girl

approached them, crossing the Square. Hedger noticed her because she wore

a lavender cloth suit and carried in her arms a big bunch of fresh

lilacs. He saw that she was young and handsome,—beautiful, in fact, with

a splendid figure and good action. She, too, paused by the fountain and

looked back through the Arch up the Avenue. She smiled rather

patronizingly as she looked, and at the same time seemed delighted. Her

slowly curving upper lip and half-closed eyes seemed to say: “You’re gay,

you’re exciting, you are quite the right sort of thing; but you’re none

too fine for me!”

In the moment she tarried, Caesar stealthily approached her and sniffed

at the hem of her lavender skirt, then, when she went south like an

arrow, he ran back to his master and lifted a face full of emotion and

alarm, his lower lip twitching under his sharp white teeth and his hazel

eyes pointed with a very definite discovery. He stood thus, motionless,

while Hedger watched the lavender girl go up the steps and through the

door of the house in which he lived.

“You’re right, my boy, it’s she! She might be worse looking, you know.”

When they mounted to the studio, the new lodger’s door, at the back of

the hall, was a little ajar, and Hedger caught the warm perfume of lilacs

just brought in out of the sun. He was used to the musty smell of the old

hall carpet. (The nurse-lessee had once knocked at his studio door and

complained that Caesar must be somewhat responsible for the particular

flavour of that mustiness, and Hedger had never spoken to her since.) He

was used to the old smell, and he preferred it to that of the lilacs, and

so did his companion, whose nose was so much more discriminating. Hedger

shut his door vehemently, and fell to work.

Most young men who dwell in obscure studios in New York have had a

beginning, come out of something, have somewhere a home town, a family, a

paternal roof. But Don Hedger had no such background. He was a foundling,

and had grown up in a school for homeless boys, where book-learning was a

negligible part of the curriculum. When he was sixteen, a Catholic priest

took him to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to keep house for him. The priest

did something to fill in the large gaps in the boy’s education,—taught

him to like “Don Quixote” and “The Golden Legend,” and encouraged him to

mess with paints and crayons in his room up under the slope of the

mansard. When Don wanted to go to New York to study at the Art League,

the priest got him a night job as packer in one of the big department

stores. Since then, Hedger had taken care of himself; that was his only

responsibility. He was singularly unencumbered; had no family duties, no

social ties, no obligations toward any one but his landlord. Since he

travelled light, he had travelled rather far. He had got over a good deal

of the earth’s surface, in spite of the fact that he never in his life

had more than three hundred dollars ahead at any one time, and he had

already outlived a succession of convictions and revelations about his

art.

Though he was now but twenty-six years old, he had twice been on the

verge of becoming a marketable product; once through some studies of New

York streets he did for a magazine, and once through a collection of

pastels he brought home from New Mexico, which Remington, then at the

height of his popularity, happened to see, and generously tried to push.

But on both occasions Hedger decided that this was something he didn’t

wish to carry further,—simply the old thing over again and got

nowhere,—so he took enquiring dealers experiments in a “later manner,”

that made them put him out of the shop. When he ran short of money, he

could always get any amount of commercial work; he was an expert

draughtsman and worked with lightning speed. The rest of his time he

spent in groping his way from one kind of painting into another, or

travelling about without luggage, like a tramp, and he was chiefly

occupied with getting rid of ideas he had once thought very fine.

Hedger’s circumstances, since he had moved to Washington Square, were

affluent compared to anything he had ever known before. He was now able

to pay advance rent and turn the key on his studio when he went away for

four months at a stretch. It didn’t occur to him to wish to be richer

than this. To be sure, he did without a great many things other people

think necessary, but he didn’t miss them, because he had never had them.

He belonged to no clubs, visited no houses, had no studio friends, and he

ate his dinner alone in some decent little restaurant, even on Christmas

and New Year’s. For days together he talked to nobody but his dog and the

janitress and the lame oysterman.

After he shut the door and settled down to his paradise fish on that

first Tuesday in May, Hedger forgot all about his new neighbour. When the

light failed, he took Caesar out for a walk. On the way home he did his

marketing on West Houston Street, with a one-eyed Italian woman who

always cheated him. After he had cooked his beans and scallopini, and

drunk half a bottle of Chianti, he put his dishes in the sink and went up

on the roof to smoke. He was the only person in the house who ever went

to the roof, and he had a secret understanding with the janitress about

it. He was to have “the privilege of the roof,” as she said, if he opened

the heavy trapdoor on sunny days to air out the upper hall, and was

watchful to close it when rain threatened. Mrs. Foley was fat and dirty

and hated to climb stairs,—besides, the roof was reached by a

perpendicular iron ladder, definitely inaccessible to a woman of her

bulk, and the iron door at the top of it was too heavy for any but

Hedger’s strong arm to lift. Hedger was not above medium height, but he

practised with weights and dumb-bells, and in the shoulders he was as

strong as a gorilla.

So Hedger had the roof to himself. He and Caesar often slept up there on

hot nights, rolled in blankets he had brought home from Arizona. He

mounted with Caesar under his left arm. The dog had never learned to

climb a perpendicular ladder, and never did he feel so much his master’s

greatness and his own dependence upon him, as when he crept under his arm

for this perilous ascent. Up there was even gravel to scratch in, and a

dog could do whatever he liked, so long as he did not bark. It was a kind

of Heaven, which no one was strong enough to reach but his great,

paint-smelling master.

On this blue May night there was a slender, girlish looking young moon in

the west, playing with a whole company of silver stars. Now and then one

of them darted away from the group and shot off into the gauzy blue with

a soft little trail of light, like laughter. Hedger and his dog were

delighted when a star did this. They were quite lost in watching the

glittering game, when they were suddenly diverted by a sound,—not

from the stars, though it was music. It was not the Prologue to

Pagliacci, which rose ever and anon on hot evenings from an Italian

tenement on Thompson Street, with the gasps of the corpulent baritone who

got behind it; nor was it the hurdy-gurdy man, who often played at the

corner in the balmy twilight. No, this was a woman’s voice, singing the

tempestuous, over-lapping phrases of Signor Puccini, then comparatively

new in the world, but already so popular that even Hedger recognized his

unmistakable gusts of breath. He looked about over the roofs; all was

blue and still, with the well-built chimneys that were never used now

standing up dark and mournful. He moved softly toward the yellow

quadrangle where the gas from the hall shone up through the half-lifted

trapdoor. Oh yes! It came up through the hole like a strong draught, a

big, beautiful voice, and it sounded rather like a professional’s. A

piano had arrived in the morning, Hedger remembered. This might be a very

great nuisance. It would be pleasant enough to listen to, if you could

turn it on and off as you wished; but you couldn’t. Caesar, with the gas

light shining on his collar and his ugly but sensitive face, panted and

looked up for information. Hedger put down a reassuring hand.

“I don’t know. We can’t tell yet. It may not be so bad.”

He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended,

with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure,

inspired respect,—if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her door

was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive

trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall.

II

For two days Hedger didn’t see her. He was painting eight hours a day

just then, and only went out to hunt for food. He noticed that she

practised scales and exercises for about an hour in the morning; then she

locked her door, went humming down the hall, and left him in peace. He

heard her getting her coffee ready at about the same time he got his.

Earlier still, she passed his room on her way to her bath. In the evening

she sometimes sang, but on the whole she didn’t bother him. When he was

working well he did not notice anything much. The morning paper lay

before his door until he reached out for his milk bottle, then he kicked

the sheet inside and it lay on the floor until evening. Sometimes

he read it and sometimes he did not. He forgot there was anything of

importance going on in the world outside of his third floor studio.

Nobody had ever taught him that he ought to be interested in other

people; in the Pittsburgh steel strike, in the Fresh Air Fund, in the

scandal about the Babies’ Hospital. A grey wolf, living in a Wyoming

canyon, would hardly have been less concerned about these things than was

Don Hedger.

One morning he was coming out of the bathroom at the front end of the

hall, having just given Caesar his bath and rubbed him into a glow with a

heavy towel. Before the door, lying in wait for him, as it were, stood a

tall figure in a flowing blue silk dressing gown that fell away from her

marble arms. In her hands she carried various accessories of the bath.

“I wish,” she said distinctly, standing in his way, “I wish you wouldn’t

wash your dog in the tub. I never heard of such a thing! I’ve found his

hair in the tub, and I’ve smelled a doggy smell, and now I’ve caught you

at it. It’s an outrage!”

Hedger was badly frightened. She was so tall and positive, and was fairly

blazing with beauty and anger. He stood blinking, holding on to his

sponge and dog-soap, feeling that he ought to bow very low to her. But

what he actually said was:

“Nobody has ever objected before. I always wash the tub,—and, anyhow,

he’s cleaner than most people.”

“Cleaner than me?” her eyebrows went up, her white arms and neck and her

fragrant person seemed to scream at him like a band of outraged nymphs.

Something flashed through his mind about a man who was turned into a dog,

or was pursued by dogs, because he unwittingly intruded upon the bath of

beauty.

“No, I didn’t mean that,” he muttered, turning scarlet under the bluish

stubble of his muscular jaws. “But I know he’s cleaner than I am.”

“That I don’t doubt!” Her voice sounded like a soft shivering of crystal,

and with a smile of pity she drew the folds of her voluminous blue robe

close about her and allowed the wretched man to pass. Even Caesar was

frightened; he darted like a streak down the hall, through the door and

to his own bed in the corner among the bones.

Hedger stood still in the doorway, listening to indignant sniffs and

coughs and a great swishing of water about the sides of the tub. He had

washed it; but as he had washed it with Caesar’s sponge, it was quite

possible that a few bristles remained; the dog was shedding now. The

playwright had never objected, nor had the jovial illustrator who

occupied the front apartment,—but he, as he admitted, “was usually

pye-eyed, when he wasn’t in Buffalo.” He went home to Buffalo sometimes

to rest his nerves.

It had never occurred to Hedger that any one would mind using the tub

after Caesar;—but then, he had never seen a beautiful girl caparisoned

for the bath before. As soon as he beheld her standing there, he realized

the unfitness of it. For that matter, she ought not to step into a tub

that any other mortal had bathed in; the illustrator was sloppy and left

cigarette ends on the moulding.

All morning as he worked he was gnawed by a spiteful desire to get back

at her. It rankled that he had been so vanquished by her disdain. When he

heard her locking her door to go out for lunch, he stepped quickly into

the hall in his messy painting coat, and addressed her.

“I don’t wish to be exigent, Miss,”—he had certain grand words that he

used upon occasion—“but if this is your trunk, it’s rather in the way

here.”

“Oh, very well!” she exclaimed carelessly, dropping her keys into her

handbag. “I’ll have it moved when I can get a man to do it,” and she went

down the hall with her free, roving stride.

Her name, Hedger discovered from her letters, which the postman left on

the table in the lower hall, was Eden Bower.

III

In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room

from Miss Bower’s, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on

hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor. When he opened his closet

door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and

he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.

Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes

and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court. The closet

was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon

he set himself to the task. First he threw out a pile of forgotten

laundry and tied it up in a sheet. The bundle stood as high as his middle

when he had knotted the corners. Then he got his shoes and overshoes

together. When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition,

a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,—a knot hole,

evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room. He had never

noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped

and squinted through it.

Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad,

doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror. Hedger did not

happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her. Nudity was

not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he

continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman’s body so

beautiful as this one,—positively glorious in action. As she swung her

arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy

seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips. The soft

flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh

together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and

twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure

light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture. Hedger’s

fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the

whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode

in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged

into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the

up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.

He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen.

When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that

had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that

grew under her left arm-pit. Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked

unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her

bedchamber.

Disappeared—Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden

shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold

sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet. The spot was enchanted; a vision

out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there

in Helianthine fire.

When he crawled out of his closet, he stood blinking at the grey sheet

stuffed with laundry, not knowing what had happened to him. He felt a

little sick as he contemplated the bundle. Everything here was different;

he hated the disorder of the place, the grey prison light, his old shoes

and himself and all his slovenly habits. The black calico curtains that

ran on wires over his big window were white with dust. There were three

greasy frying pans in the sink, and the sink itself—He felt desperate.

He couldn’t stand this another minute. He took up an armful of winter

clothes and ran down four flights into the basement.

“Mrs. Foley,” he began, “I want my room cleaned this afternoon,

thoroughly cleaned. Can you get a woman for me right away?”

“Is it company you’re having?” the fat, dirty janitress enquired. Mrs.

Foley was the widow of a useful Tammany man, and she owned real estate in

Flatbush. She was huge and soft as a feather bed. Her face and arms were

permanently coated with dust, grained like wood where the sweat had

trickled.

“Yes, company. That’s it.”

“Well, this is a queer time of the day to be asking for a cleaning woman.

It’s likely I can get you old Lizzie, if she’s not drunk. I’ll send Willy

round to see.”

Willy, the son of fourteen, roused from the stupor and stain of his fifth

box of cigarettes by the gleam of a quarter, went out. In five minutes he

returned with old Lizzie,—she smelling strong of spirits and wearing

several jackets which she had put on one over the other, and a number of

skirts, long and short, which made her resemble an animated dish-clout.

She had, of course, to borrow her equipment from Mrs. Foley, and toiled

up the long flights, dragging mop and pail and broom. She told Hedger to

be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed

him a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation

of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashing

soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie

and made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got

rid of her. Shutting the door on his failure, he hurried off with his dog

to lose himself among the stevedores and dock labourers on West Street.

A strange chapter began for Don Hedger. Day after day, at that hour in

the afternoon, the hour before his neighbour dressed for dinner, he

crouched down in his closet to watch her go through her mysterious

exercises. It did not occur to him that his conduct was detestable; there

was nothing shy or retreating about this unclad girl,—a bold body,

studying itself quite coolly and evidently well pleased with itself,

doing all this for a purpose. Hedger scarcely regarded his action as

conduct at all; it was something that had happened to him. More than once

he went out and tried to stay away for the whole afternoon, but at about

five o’clock he was sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.

The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,—and he had always

considered his will the strongest thing about him. When she threw herself

upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath. His

nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out

the sweat on his forehead. The dog would come and tug at his sleeve,

knowing that something was wrong with his master. If he attempted a

mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.

When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of

the couch, sat for hours without moving. He was not painting at all now.

This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done,

and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of

work. He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from

models for years, and a woman’s body was no mystery to him. Yet now he

did nothing but sit and think about one. He slept very little, and with

the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman

as if he had been with her all the night before. The unconscious

operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement. His

brain held but one image now—vibrated, burned with it. It was a

heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness.

Women had come and gone in Hedger’s life. Not having had a mother to

begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had

been casual. He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians

and with the peasant women of foreign countries. He had friends among the

silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington

Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country. He felt

an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out

of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum,

he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on

upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders

hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard

them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he

believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.

He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles,

effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in

embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough,

he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in

thought, and in the universe.

He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so

broken up his life,—no curiosity about her every-day personality. He

shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower’s coming and

going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl who

wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way,

that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in a room

full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleeping

colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, and

disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad, or

as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own. And

for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or

Alexandria, or Veronese’s Venice. She was the immortal conception, the

perennial theme.

The first break in Hedger’s lethargy occurred one afternoon when two

young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her music

room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away with

them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food

himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them coming

down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of them

sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger found

absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down the

stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back.

They had supper in the oysterman’s basement and then sat down in front of

their own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal

glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for

men. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying

canes, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them across

the Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated about

something. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the

other:

“Don’t you think she has a beautiful talent?”

His companion threw away his match. “She has a beautiful figure.” They

both ran to catch the stage.

Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom.

For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through

that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window,

smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her

until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and

turned out the light.

The next morning, when Miss Bower went out, Hedger followed her. Her

white skirt gleamed ahead of him as she sauntered about the Square. She

sat down behind the Garibaldi statue and opened a music book she carried.

She turned the leaves carelessly, and several times glanced in his

direction. He was on

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