W

HEN a man comes into Maxim's-the pre-war Maxim's-at ten o'clock of a spring night, just when gayety has reached a zenith, sits down beside you, nods with an air of acquaintanceship to the head waiter, gives him a twenty-franc piece, and requests him in excellent French to have the orchestra play the love-song from "Samson and Delilah," the incident has about it something of interest. When the man in question leans back with speculative intensity in his farsighted gray eyes and a half-smile hovering about his determined, clean-shaven mouth your interest vacillates between admiration and dislike. No matter how

charmingly done, it would impress a spectator as procedure not altogether to be commended if-in hell, say-a shade from a happier climate were to walk rapidly through, carrying in each hand a bucket of water untastable by the lambent-eyed spectres lined up on either side of him. There is about such an action an especial kind of imaginative cruelty.

Out of the babble of voices, the laughter; into the cigarette smoke and the smell of flowers and perfume suddenly threaded the lovely ribbon of the music. A woman across the way laid down her fork and stared; a boy beside her, freshcolored, charming in his evening clothes, raised his head. One had an impression of a score of amusing stories suspended in

mid-air; one had an impression of leaving a stifling city in mid-August and coming to a place where pine forests reach down to a blue-and-white sea. Only it isn't fair to take people to such a coast when immediately they must return to the fetid alleys where they live. I turned to the man beside me.

"Do you do this sort of thing often?" I asked.

He started, as if up to the moment he had not been acutely aware of my presence; then he smiled. It was a charming smile, disarming, good-tempered, alert. He pushed back his glass of champagne. "No." He shook his head. "No; I don't do this sort of thing often. No, never before, as a matter of fact." He studied the quiet, a trifle astonished, greatly sobered people around him. "Probably," he continued, "I shall never do it again. It isn't exactly what the English call 'cricket,' is it? And yet life's largely a matter of moments, isn't it? and what's best-unrelieved sordidness, or perhaps for once a lark singing above the courtyard of a tenement? Well, I wanted to see, anyway." He reflected. "My impulses are not always kindly," he concluded.

Ingenuousness and subtlety are a rare combination; I studied my new-found companion with interest. He was a slight, tall man of thirty-five or thirtyseven, and his dress clothes expressed to the smallest detail the unusual qualities of precision and intuition. His dark hair was prematurely gray-carefully parted and brushed back from his forehead-and underneath it was a keen and youthful face an exceptional face, distinctly American in its spare lines and clean-cut chin, and yet with a look about it as if its possessor had seen intimately many lands. Moreover, it was the face of a man who both thought and acted; of a man who had read and a man who had driven ships, or ridden horses, or perhaps both, against winds. Above the fresh coloring of the cheeks were a few little lines and above these again a warm and permanent sunburn; and the thin mouth held a suggestion of grimnesses that could be instantly recaptured should occasion arise the grimnesses of a mouth accustomed to taste without complaining the incessant

vagaries of nature. There is no confusing the inevitable lurking grimness of an outdoor man with the thin acerbity of his indoor neighbor. About the former is a concomitant humor.

We ordered supper; we talked; around us the laughter swelled again.

And life is that way, isn't it? Altogether a matter of chance, except that you can't altogether escape the sense that back of the chance is perhaps an ultimate design. One so often does find important events, important friends-to-be, on a steamer casually taken; on a mountain trail casually chosen; out of the blue; without forewarning. I might so easily have missed Hugh Craig that night. I was on the point of leaving Maxim's when he came in and took the seat beside me.

He had been born, it seems, in Pennsylvania, the northern part of the State, where his father had foundries and a huge acreage. I achieved a picture of a life almost feudal: a great old-fashioned house; workmen, until recently, at all events, descendants of men who had worked for the Craigs since before the War of Independence; wide fields; and a town with, at one end of it, immense iron-shops that lay upon the greenness of the surrounding country like soot knocked from a stovepipe onto a lawn. Craig had a family-a father with a long white beard and certain undiscussable ideas of right and wrong. I gathered that he had worked too hard ever to experience any God except one who was an expert bookkeeper -a sort of minor bureaucrat whose mind never overlooked a single cent on the debit or credit side, no matter how many gold pieces you might otherwise fling to a starving world. There was also a mother, a gentle, charitable soul whose preoccupation was the town and countryside over which, without any questioning on her part of social justice, she found herself mistress. Like many women she labored with hands not too intelligent to assuage the cunning wrongs of a system upon which her men-folk were concentrating all their energies to the task of making it more and more unbearable. Then there was a sister, who had married a Spaniard, and an elder brother who apparently, in the eyes of Craig's father, was all that Craig himself was not. Here,

you perceive, was an older generation and two survivals of that generation, and a fifth member of the family who was not a survival at all. Between him and all the rest of his kin was distinct cleavage; and as a rule cleavage makes for history. One surmised the modern vast and vague discontent, a searching for new and -but here is the difficulty-workable ideals.

You must understand mewhat I learned of Craig at that first meeting was not in any connected way-not as a narrative, not by direct statement. He was, as I subsequently discovered, the last man in the world to talk his soul out to any one about his personal relationships. Nor was he enough of an egotist to indulge himself in the contemporaneous pastime of deprecating the old order of things and applauding the new. In fact, at that time he was regretting the passing of the old-deplored the breaking down of standards, the resulting confusion. "How the deuce," he said, "is a man to keep his head up in this maelstrom? How can he preserve the integrity of his soul in a 'panic' world? Everything is either nibbling away at it, or else seeking to engulf it." You see, he seldom talked personally at all-almost altogether about abstract matters. But he had the gift of illuminating sentences, sentences that illustrated a point, or explained an incident, and by means of these you eventually pieced together some sort of a portrait. In such a way I learned that he had been a sheep-herder in Arizona; a cattleman in Montana; a settler in Australia; for six lurid months a sailor before the mast; that he had an especial feeling for trades and, in a secondary sense, for sport-anything, you understand, possessing the magic conjunction of hand and mind; that required what he called "Attic directness" and that at one time he had learned the art of blacksmithing. As for the mere making of money, he was contemptuous. Any one could make money if they were willing to give up everything else to that one end. He had given up

ten solid years. Now he had all the money he wanted, and had retired. Ostensibly he was engaged in a tour of the world for the purpose of playing polo wherever polo was to be had.

We paid our bills, and put on our coats and top hats, and walked out into the street. We were unaware that life, in an unpleasant, simian fashion, was at the moment preparing to leap out at us. Life seemed to have a habit of treating Craig in this way.

A young man, a woman beside him, was waiting for his motor under the awning. I had noticed him sitting directly opposite us in the restaurant. He belonged to an easily recognizable type. He was big and bulky and blondhaired; his clothes were expensive and his gestures were those of a person carefully trained in outward things. No doubt he was rich; no doubt he had been to some great university; I was willing to wager that he came from New York and drove a powerful "motor" with a twofisted disregard of other people's rights. In short, he was the sin

ister but not unattractive figure that America-in its older communitiesis at present producing in rather alarming quantities. He leaned upon his walkingstick and as Craig passed remarked to his companion:

"There's the bounder that tried to break things up."

I don't think he particularly intended Craig to hear; but at the same time I don't think he particularly cared if he did hear.

The effect upon Craig was interesting. He stopped and turned to me. "Do you think," he asked in a slow, precise voice, "that they are talking about me?" There was an odd underlying amusement in his voice. I experienced the restless alertness that impending danger gives one. Back of us I heard a slight rustling movement. Craig faced about and took off his hat and went up to the couple.

He addressed the young man very politely. "You are quite right," he said, "in objecting to what I did, but you are

quite wrong in the tone and words you used just now. They showed that you think the world is divided into two classes -the people you like and bounders; and that's a filthy philosophy. Besides, you must never be rude to any one. For instance, I consider you the most objectionable product of a fairly objectionable age, but up to the moment I've been too polite to tell you so." He paused and regarded the young man's excellently fitting white waistcoat. Suddenly his pointed finger shot out and buried itself in the slightly too convex waist-line. It was the most insulting gesture I have ever seen. "You rotten pup!" he hissed. "You haven't even the decency to keep your fat down!" And, with amazing quickness, he leaped back out of range as the young man struck.

"Don't!" he commanded. "Don't! Wait a minute! We'll get arrested! Come around the corner!" He turned to the woman. "Madam," he said, "would you prefer to have my friend wait here with you, or will you accompany us? No-" as she made a movement to interfere. "Don't do that! If you do we'll fight just where we are, and then we'll all go to jail."

The woman shrank back. I was beginning to realize that Craig had the impressiveness and the suggestion of menace that exact obedience.

It was a curious little affair the moonlight and a deserted street leading off the Rue Royale witnessed. About it was a hint of rapiers and fluttering cloaks, despite the grim directness of modern combat. "We won't take off anything but our overcoats," said Craig; "we may have to run for it." He handed me his; then whirled and struck. The change of mood was astonishing. There were no preliminaries, none of the careful courtesy of the preceding conversation and walk; instead, a metamorphosis into something as terrific, as hurtling, as the charge of a wildcat. Craig, I saw at once, was a trained man, but a trained man with all the un

trained

bully's

overpowering bewil

deringness

of movement. Here was no gentlemanly intent. You perceived a background of mining-camps and border saloons.

For a minute or so there was nothing to be heard in the silent street but the shuffling and the quick breathing of the fighting men. In the shadows of a doorway the woman cowered with her hands over her eyes. Then, suddenly, I saw Craig do an unbelievable thing; with agonizing force he brought his knee up into his opponent's solar plexus. The young man raised a white, incredulous, staring face, before he slowly sank to the ground and rolled over on his back, gasping for breath. Craig examined him briskly. "He's all right," he said. He put on his overcoat and calmly adjusted his collar. "Madam," he said to the woman, "I'll send a cab here." He surmised astonished distaste on my part. "Yes," he admitted, "it's disgusting-the whole thing. I know that." As we walked off in the direction we had come, he vouchsafed a partial explanation. "I used to try to fight rottenness squarely," he said; "but now I finish it off and get rid of it as soon as possible."

We drove in an open carriage to my hotel. I was still excited and distressed, but Craig was entirely gay and discursive and unperturbed. I remember the full moon over the trees, and the scent of chestnut blossoms, and the smell of wet asphalt, and the clock-clock of our horse's feet. We said good-by to each other. A sudden inexplicable intimacy held us silent for a moment. I watched Craig clamber back into the carriage and drive off. There was with me a curious impression that this polished, subtle, abruptly savage and ruthless young man was on a quest that would not end with the playing of polo. There was an underlying suggestion of a crusade. The cabman's whip might have been a spear.

From Spain after a while came a postcard with a picture on it of the Royal Palace in Madrid. "Playing polo," it read. "Rotten polo." Subsequently, following

an interval of twelve months, was a letter from Japan. Craig was

immensely impressed by the theory of personal dignity held by the Japanese, the dignity with which each man, no matter what his position, holds himself and is permitted to hold himself by his neighbors. He saw in it a possible relief for the "engulfing black muck of democratic selfishness." Then I heard no more of him for two years. On an afternoon in June I ran into Kneass in a New York club.

Kneass is a professor of biology and, behind extremely nearsighted goggles, one of the most amusing men I know. We dined together on the roof-garden. "By the way, I came across a friend of yours the other night," said Kneass. He tried to peer at me over his spectacles. "His name was Hugh Craig. He was one of the most charming fellows I've ever met and-he was very drunk."

I expressed interest and regret. "You needn't do that," resumed Kneass. "It wasn't unpleasant drunkenness. He'd just landed from a three years' trip around the world. Almost anybody, you know-" And he thereupon unfolded to me an odd tale, a story the perception of which would have been possible only to the mind of a man interested in the hidden drama of human motives.

"You see," he explained reflectively, "it was the queerest thing I have ever witnessed. As a rule, intoxication falls into one of three classes-stupidity, carelessness, or viciousness; but I don't think I ever before saw a man challenge it deliberately without a trace of insolence or bravado, either-and fight it out as one would fight any other kind of fight. Throw down the glove to poison, as it were." His near-sighted spectacles became misty, as the spectacles of nearsighted people are likely to become when they are very much moved. "Of course," he resumed, "I don't know whether in the beginning his action was intentional or not-perhaps he found that without realizing it he had taken more than he intended, but from that point on the issue was clear to me at least; as far as the

others were concerned, I don't think they suspected Craig of being drunk at all-he was just as amusing, you see, just as alert and charming as ever; but he was engaged in a mortal struggle. I divined the

agony of it-the coiled resistance of a mind that refuses to allow itself to be subjugated by anything. An illuminating side-light on the whole situation was that obviously he was refusing the easiest recourse toward regaining sobriety. He didn't want to take any undue advantage of his adversary, if you understand what I mean. He was giving alcohol a more than fair field, and then seeing whether or not he couldn't beat it on its own ground. He not only drank placidly all that was offered to him, but he purchased more himself. Thanks, I will have a light."

Kneass sat back in his chair and puffed at his cigar. "It was rather monstrous," he said, slowly exhaling; "rather frightening. A stark struggle of will usually is. One had the impression of a man fighting with every atom of muscle he possessed against the enveloping folds of a great serpent. I hope this friend of yours doesn't do such things often. If he does he'll kill himself."

I remarked that I had seen Craig only once in my life, but that I did not think he was given to many such unequal contests.

"I'm not sure," hesitated Kneass. "He rather impresses me as a man given to unequal contests. There is some underlying motive at work there. But I don't think his contests are with drink as a rule. He isn't a drinking man. You can tell by his eyes. And the most curious thing-the most curious thing of all-was

I'm on the house committee here, you know-that the next day Craig sent in his resignation. Why? He wasn't in the least objectionably drunk."

I rather expected, after this, the note which I got from Craig a few days later asking me to visit him at Scarboro-Scarboro was the name of his family place. I am glad I went. I attained, at all events, a dim idea of what he was after.

We had been riding, I remember, and were sitting on a fence near the stables