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_ Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor
Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street,
looking about him with the pleased air of a man
of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
He had lived there as a student, but for
twenty years and more, since he had been
Professor of Philosophy in a Western
university, he had seldom come East except
to take a steamer for some foreign port.
Wilson was standing quite still, contemplating
with a whimsical smile the slanting street,
with its worn paving, its irregular, gravely
colored houses, and the row of naked trees on
which the thin sunlight was still shining.
The gleam of the river at the foot of the hill
made him blink a little, not so much because it
was too bright as because he found it so pleasant.
The few passers-by glanced at him unconcernedly,
and even the children who hurried along with their
school-bags under their arms seemed to find it
perfectly natural that a tall brown gentleman
should be standing there, looking up through
his glasses at the gray housetops.
The sun sank rapidly; the silvery light
had faded from the bare boughs and the
watery twilight was setting in when Wilson
at last walked down the hill, descending into
cooler and cooler depths of grayish shadow.
His nostril, long unused to it, was quick to
detect the smell of wood smoke in the air,
blended with the odor of moist spring earth
and the saltiness that came up the river with
the tide. He crossed Charles Street between
jangling street cars and shelving lumber
drays, and after a moment of uncertainty
wound into Brimmer Street. The street was
quiet, deserted, and hung with a thin bluish
haze. He had already fixed his sharp eye
upon the house which he reasoned should be
his objective point, when he noticed a woman
approaching rapidly from the opposite direction.
Always an interested observer of women,
Wilson would have slackened his pace
anywhere to follow this one with his impersonal,
appreciative glance. She was a person
of distinction he saw at once, and, moreover,
very handsome. She was tall, carried her
beautiful head proudly, and moved with ease
and certainty. One immediately took for
granted the costly privileges and fine spaces
that must lie in the background from which
such a figure could emerge with this rapid
and elegant gait. Wilson noted her dress,
too,--for, in his way, he had an eye for such
things,--particularly her brown furs and her
hat. He got a blurred impression of her fine
color, the violets she wore, her white gloves,
and, curiously enough, of her veil, as she turned
up a flight of steps in front of him and disappeared.
Wilson was able to enjoy lovely things
that passed him on the wing as completely
and deliberately as if they had been dug-up
marvels, long anticipated, and definitely fixed
at the end of a railway journey. For a few
pleasurable seconds he quite forgot where he
was going, and only after the door had closed
behind her did he realize that the young
woman had entered the house to which he
had directed his trunk from the South Station
that morning. He hesitated a moment before
mounting the steps. "Can that," he murmured
in amazement,--"can that possibly have been
Mrs. Alexander?"
When the servant admitted him, Mrs. Alexander
was still standing in the hallway.
She heard him give his name, and came
forward holding out her hand.
"Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson? I
was afraid that you might get here before I
did. I was detained at a concert, and Bartley
telephoned that he would be late. Thomas
will show you your room. Had you rather
have your tea brought to you there, or will
you have it down here with me, while we
wait for Bartley?"
Wilson was pleased to find that he had been
the cause of her rapid walk, and with her
he was even more vastly pleased than before.
He followed her through the drawing-room
into the library, where the wide back windows
looked out upon the garden and the sunset
and a fine stretch of silver-colored river.
A harp-shaped elm stood stripped against
the pale-colored evening sky, with ragged
last year's birds' nests in its forks,
and through the bare branches the evening star
quivered in the misty air. The long brown
room breathed the peace of a rich and amply
guarded quiet. Tea was brought in immediately
and placed in front of the wood fire.
Mrs. Alexander sat down in a high-backed
chair and began to pour it, while Wilson sank
into a low seat opposite her and took his cup
with a great sense of ease and harmony and comfort.
"You have had a long journey, haven't you?"
Mrs. Alexander asked, after showing gracious
concern about his tea. "And I am so sorry
Bartley is late. He's often tired when he's late.
He flatters himself that it is a little
on his account that you have come to this
Congress of Psychologists."
"It is," Wilson assented, selecting his
muffin carefully; "and I hope he won't be
tired tonight. But, on my own account,
I'm glad to have a few moments alone with you,
before Bartley comes. I was somehow afraid
that my knowing him so well would not put me
in the way of getting to know you."
"That's very nice of you." She nodded at
him above her cup and smiled, but there was
a little formal tightness in her tone which had
not been there when she greeted him in the hall.
Wilson leaned forward. "Have I said something awkward?
I live very far out of the world, you know.
But I didn't mean that you would exactly fade dim,
even if Bartley were here."
Mrs. Alexander laughed relentingly.
"Oh, I'm not so vain! How terribly
discerning you are."
She looked straight at Wilson, and he felt
that this quick, frank glance brought about
an understanding between them.
He liked everything about her, he told himself,
but he particularly liked her eyes;
when she looked at one directly for a moment
they were like a glimpse of fine windy sky
that may bring all sorts of weather.
"Since you noticed something," Mrs. Alexander
went on, "it must have been a flash of the
distrust I have come to feel whenever
I meet any of the people who knew Bartley
when he was a boy. It is always as if
they were talking of someone I had never met.
Really, Professor Wilson, it would seem
that he grew up among the strangest people.
They usually say that he has turned out very well,
or remark that he always was a fine fellow.
I never know what reply to make."
Wilson chuckled and leaned back in his chair,
shaking his left foot gently. "I expect the
fact is that we none of us knew him very well,
Mrs. Alexander. Though I will say for myself
that I was always confident he'd do
something extraordinary."
Mrs. Alexander's shoulders gave a slight
movement, suggestive of impatience.
"Oh, I should think that might have been
a safe prediction. Another cup, please?"
"Yes, thank you. But predicting, in the
case of boys, is not so easy as you might
imagine, Mrs. Alexander. Some get a bad
hurt early and lose their courage; and some
never get a fair wind. Bartley"--he dropped
his chin on the back of his long hand and looked
at her admiringly--"Bartley caught the wind early,
and it has sung in his sails ever since."
Mrs. Alexander sat looking into the fire
with intent preoccupation, and Wilson
studied her half-averted face. He liked the
suggestion of stormy possibilities in the proud
curve of her lip and nostril. Without that,
he reflected, she would be too cold.
"I should like to know what he was really
like when he was a boy. I don't believe
he remembers," she said suddenly.
"Won't you smoke, Mr. Wilson?"
Wilson lit a cigarette. "No, I don't suppose
he does. He was never introspective. He was
simply the most tremendous response to stimuli
I have ever known. We didn't know exactly
what to do with him."
A servant came in and noiselessly removed
the tea-tray. Mrs. Alexander screened
her face from the firelight, which was
beginning to throw wavering bright spots
on her dress and hair as the dusk deepened.
"Of course," she said, "I now and again
hear stories about things that happened
when he was in college."
"But that isn't what you want." Wilson wrinkled
his brows and looked at her with the smiling
familiarity that had come about so quickly.
"What you want is a picture of him, standing
back there at the other end of twenty years.
You want to look down through my memory."
She dropped her hands in her lap. "Yes, yes;
that's exactly what I want."
At this moment they heard the front door
shut with a jar, and Wilson laughed as
Mrs. Alexander rose quickly. "There he is.
Away with perspective! No past, no future
for Bartley; just the fiery moment. The only
moment that ever was or will be in the world!"
The door from the hall opened, a voice
called "Winifred?" hurriedly, and a big man
came through the drawing-room with a quick,
heavy tread, bringing with him a smell of
cigar smoke and chill out-of-doors air.
When Alexander reached the library door,
he switched on the lights and stood six feet
and more in the archway, glowing with strength
and cordiality and rugged, blond good looks.
There were other bridge-builders in the
world, certainly, but it was always Alexander's
picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted,
because he looked as a tamer of rivers
ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy
hair his head seemed as hard and powerful
as a catapult, and his shoulders looked
strong enough in themselves to support
a span of any one of his ten great bridges
that cut the air above as many rivers.
After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to
his study. It was a large room over the
library, and looked out upon the black river
and the row of white lights along the
Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all
what one might expect of an engineer's study.
Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful
things that have lived long together without
obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none
of Alexander's doing, of course; those warm
consonances of color had been blending and
mellowing before he was born. But the wonder
was that he was not out of place there,--
that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable
background for his vigor and vehemence. He
sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in the
cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright,
his hair rumpled above his broad forehead.
He sat heavily, a cigar in his large,
smooth hand, a flush of after-dinner color in
his face, which wind and sun and exposure to
all sorts of weather had left fair and clearskinned.
"You are off for England on Saturday,
Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me."
"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a
meeting of British engineers, and I'm doing
another bridge in Canada, you know."
"Oh, every one knows about that. And it
was in Canada that you met your wife, wasn't it?"
Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her
great-aunt there. A most remarkable old lady.
I was working with MacKeller then, an old
Scotch engineer who had picked me up in
London and taken me back to Quebec with him.
He had the contract for the Allway Bridge,
but before he began work on it he found out
that he was going to die, and he advised
the committee to turn the job over to me.
Otherwise I'd never have got anything good
so early. MacKeller was an old friend of
Mrs. Pemberton, Winifred's aunt. He had
mentioned me to her, so when I went to
Allway she asked me to come to see her.
She was a wonderful old lady."
"Like her niece?" Wilson queried.
Bartley laughed. "She had been very
handsome, but not in Winifred's way.
When I knew her she was little and fragile,
very pink and white, with a splendid head and a
face like fine old lace, somehow,--but perhaps
I always think of that because she wore a lace
scarf on her hair. She had such a flavor
of life about her. She had known Gordon and
Livingstone and Beaconsfield when she was
young,--every one. She was the first woman
of that sort I'd ever known. You know how it
is in the West,--old people are poked out of
the way. Aunt Eleanor fascinated me as few
young women have ever done. I used to go up from
the works to have tea with her, and sit talking
to her for hours. It was very stimulating,
for she couldn't tolerate stupidity."
"It must have been then that your luck began,
Bartley," said Wilson, flicking his cigar
ash with his long finger. "It's curious,
watching boys," he went on reflectively.
"I'm sure I did you justice in the matter of ability.
Yet I always used to feel that there was a
weak spot where some day strain would tell.
Even after you began to climb, I stood down
in the crowd and watched you with--well,
not with confidence. The more dazzling the
front you presented, the higher your facade
rose, the more I expected to see a big crack
zigzagging from top to bottom,"--he indicated
its course in the air with his forefinger,--
"then a crash and clouds of dust. It was curious.
I had such a clear picture of it. And another
curious thing, Bartley," Wilson spoke with
deliberateness and settled deeper into his
chair, "is that I don't feel it any longer.
I am sure of you."
Alexander laughed. "Nonsense! It's not I
you feel sure of; it's Winifred. People often
make that mistake."
"No, I'm serious, Alexander. You've changed.
You have decided to leave some birds in the bushes.
You used to want them all."
Alexander's chair creaked. "I still want a
good many," he said rather gloomily. "After
all, life doesn't offer a man much. You work
like the devil and think you're getting on,
and suddenly you discover that you've only been
getting yourself tied up. A million details
drink you dry. Your life keeps going for
things you don't want, and all the while you
are being built alive into a social structure
you don't care a rap about. I sometimes
wonder what sort of chap I'd have been if I
hadn't been this sort; I want to go and live
out his potentialities, too. I haven't
forgotten that there are birds in the bushes."
Bartley stopped and sat frowning into the fire,
his shoulders thrust forward as if he were
about to spring at something. Wilson watched him,
wondering. His old pupil always stimulated him
at first, and then vastly wearied him.
The machinery was always pounding away in this man,
and Wilson preferred companions of a more reflective
habit of mind. He could not help feeling that
there were unreasoning and unreasonable
activities going on in Alexander all the while;
that even after dinner, when most men
achieve a decent impersonality, Bartley had
merely closed the door of the engine-room
and come up for an airing. The machinery
itself was still pounding on.
Bartley's abstraction and Wilson's reflections
were cut short by a rustle at the door,
and almost before they could rise Mrs.
Alexander was standing by the hearth.
Alexander brought a chair for her,
but she shook her head.
"No, dear, thank you. I only came in to
see whether you and Professor Wilson were
quite comfortable. I am going down to the
music-room."
"Why not practice here? Wilson and I are
growing very dull. We are tired of talk."
"Yes, I beg you, Mrs. Alexander,"
Wilson began, but he got no further.
"Why, certainly, if you won't find me
too noisy. I am working on the Schumann
`Carnival,' and, though I don't practice a
great many hours, I am very methodical,"
Mrs. Alexander explained, as she crossed to
an upright piano that stood at the back of
the room, near the windows.
Wilson followed, and, having seen her seated,
dropped into a chair behind her. She played
brilliantly and with great musical feeling.
Wilson could not imagine her permitting
herself to do anything badly, but he was
surprised at the cleanness of her execution.
He wondered how a woman with so many
duties had managed to keep herself up to a
standard really professional. It must take
a great deal of time, certainly, and Bartley
must take a great deal of time. Wilson reflected
that he had never before known a woman who
had been able, for any considerable while,
to support both a personal and an
intellectual passion. Sitting behind her,
he watched her with perplexed admiration,
shading his eyes with his hand. In her dinner dress
she looked even younger than in street clothes,
and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency,
she seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating,
as if in her, too, there were something
never altogether at rest. He felt
that he knew pretty much what she
demanded in people and what she demanded
from life, and he wondered how she squared
Bartley. After ten years she must know him;
and however one took him, however much
one admired him, one had to admit that he
simply wouldn't square. He was a natural
force, certainly, but beyond that, Wilson felt,
he was not anything very really or for very long
at a time.
Wilson glanced toward the fire, where
Bartley's profile was still wreathed in cigar
smoke that curled up more and more slowly.
His shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions
and one hand hung large and passive over the
arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple
velvet smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised,
had chosen it. She was clearly very proud
of his good looks and his fine color.
But, with the glow of an immediate interest
gone out of it, the engineer's face looked
tired, even a little haggard. The three lines
in his forehead, directly above the nose, deepened
as he sat thinking, and his powerful head
drooped forward heavily. Although Alexander
was only forty-three, Wilson thought that
beneath his vigorous color he detected the
dulling weariness of on-coming middle age.
The next afternoon, at the hour when the river
was beginning to redden under the declining sun,
Wilson again found himself facing Mrs. Alexander
at the tea-table in the library.
"Well," he remarked, when he was bidden
to give an account of himself, "there was
a long morning with the psychologists,
luncheon with Bartley at his club,
more psychologists, and here I am.
I've looked forward to this hour all day."
Mrs. Alexander smiled at him across the
vapor from the kettle. "And do you
remember where we stopped yesterday?"
"Perfectly. I was going to show you a
picture. But I doubt whether I have color
enough in me. Bartley makes me feel a faded
monochrome. You can't get at the young
Bartley except by means of color." Wilson
paused and deliberated. Suddenly he broke
out: "He wasn't a remarkable student, you
know, though he was always strong in higher
mathematics. His work in my own department
was quite ordinary. It was as a powerfully
equipped nature that I found him interesting.
That is the most interesting thing a teacher
can find. It has the fascination of a
scientific discovery. We come across other
pleasing and endearing qualities so much
oftener than we find force."
"And, after all," said Mrs. Alexander,
"that is the thing we all live upon.
It is the thing that takes us forward."
Wilson thought she spoke a little wistfully.
"Exactly," he assented warmly. "It builds
the bridges into the future, over which
the feet of every one of us will go."
"How interested I am to hear you put it
in that way. The bridges into the future--
I often say that to myself. Bartley's bridges
always seem to me like that. Have you ever
seen his first suspension bridge in Canada,
the one he was doing when I first knew him?
I hope you will see it sometime. We were
married as soon as it was finished, and you
will laugh when I tell you that it always has a
rather bridal look to me. It is over the wildest
river, with mists and clouds always battling
about it, and it is as delicate as a cobweb
hanging in the sky. It really was a bridge into
the future. You have only to look at it to feel
that it meant the beginning of a great career.
But I have a photograph of it here." She drew a
portfolio from behind a bookcase. "And there,
you see, on the hill, is my aunt's house."
Wilson took up the photograph. "Bartley was
telling me something about your aunt last night.
She must have been a delightful person."
Winifred laughed. "The bridge, you see,
was just at the foot of the hill, and the noise
of the engines annoyed her very much at first.
But after she met Bartley she pretended
to like it, and said it was a good thing to
be reminded that there were things going on
in the world. She loved life, and Bartley
brought a great deal of it in to her when
he came to the house. Aunt Eleanor was very
worldly in a frank, Early-Victorian manner.
She liked men of action, and disliked young
men who were careful of themselves and
who, as she put it, were always trimming
their wick as if they were afraid of their oil's
giving out. MacKeller, Bartley's first chief,
was an old friend of my aunt, and he told her
that Bartley was a wild, ill-governed youth,
which really pleased her very much.
I remember we were sitting alone in the dusk
after Bartley had been there for the first time.
I knew that Aunt Eleanor had found him much
to her taste, but she hadn't said anything.
Presently she came out, with a chuckle:
`MacKeller found him sowing wild oats in
London, I believe. I hope he didn't stop him
too soon. Life coquets with dashing fellows.
The coming men are always like that.
We must have him to dinner, my dear.'
And we did. She grew much fonder of Bartley
than she was of me. I had been studying in
Vienna, and she thought that absurd.
She was interested in the army and in politics,
and she had a great contempt for music and
art and philosophy. She used to declare that
the Prince Consort had brought all that stuff
over out of Germany. She always sniffed
when Bartley asked me to play for him. She
considered that a newfangled way of making
a match of it."
When Alexander came in a few moments later,
he found Wilson and his wife still
confronting the photograph. "Oh, let us
get that out of the way," he said, laughing.
"Winifred, Thomas can bring my trunk down.
I've decided to go over to New York
to-morrow night and take a fast boat.
I shall save two days." _
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