Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 67, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 November 1919 — WHITE MAN [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WHITE MAN

CHAPTER I. Andrea Pellor stood on the edge of the cliff at the back of' the Indian Ocean hotel and gazed out across twenty-five miles of moonlit bay. It was not for lack of a partner that she stood alone. She had promised this very extra to four insistent men, but had excused herself to one after another of them, “Just for a moment Just while I powder my nose.” They had all seen her run up the stairs in the main hallway; they had not seen her travel steadily on through the length of the hotel and come down the ladder-like exit into the garden. Why had she done it? That was a Question that she herself could not have answered but that did not occur to her as a matter for solution, eo often had a similar Impulse snatched her momentarily away from a crowded world. Andrea bad a past, but very little history. She was the inly daughter of Lord Pellor of Pellor, a land-poor baron who could distribute five titles among his five sons but very little cash. As a result Andrea had lived the life, if life you can call it, of tabulated impoverished English gentlewomen : Everything that the traffic will bear for the meif of the family and for the girl Just enough frocks at her coming out to dissemble the bait that clothes the hook that catches the man with millions. During her first season offers had come to her; not the measured advances of buyers in the marriage market, for about the brow of such budding maidenhood as had been hers there hangs a guardian halo that blinds the eyes of sane-aged men, but the o’erleaplng onslaughts of youthmaddened hearts. It was In her fifth season that the arbiters of her fate raised the shears of destiny and clicked them. He who fell to her lot was a man of bumble origin who had reached the ripe age of fifty-eight without ever having had time to marry. His life, with a difference, had been JuSt as narrow, hidebound and conventional as had hers. The difference was that he had traveled the stereotyped Dick Whittington trail to high finance rather than the social highway. He had started out In Africa with a pack of cheap Jewelry, an open mind and an easy conscience, and had emerged after twenty-five years as one of the few Gentiles in the combine that controls the world’s diamond output. His wealth was so great that an ultimate peerage was almost a matter of course. But, as usual, an aristocratic marriage had to come first.

The contract was ae cold-blooded as any ever perpetrated by a royal house. Allowances, carefully graded, were stipulated to be paid at fixed times to Andrea’s parents and to each of her five hrothers. She herself came In for a large and Inalienable marriage settlement and was further secured in such details as to where the town residence was to be located as well as to the number and nature of the country places which were to be maintained! When the document was finally completed It was casually submitted to Andrea for approval. Nobody dreamed that she would doubt for a moment that those In family authority were most able to decide what was best for her and nobody was right. She merely skimmed through the typewritten pages of the prenuptial agreement, satisfied herself that a vast sum of money was destined to the upkeep of Pellor, and dreamy-eyed with sudden memories, nodded her adorable head in consent. All doubtless would have taken Its appointed course had ndt the European war put In its mightily disconcerting finger. Surprising things happened in South Africa, Andrea’s affianced sailed on twenty-four hours’ notice. The diamond mines closed down, took a short nap, and then suddenly awakened to the fact that America alone was demanding as much of their product as had the whole world before it turned its entire attention to making munitions and paying for them. Andrea’s betrothed found himself harnessed to his Job, possibly for the duration of the war. As a result it was decided in family conclave that It was incumbent upon Andrea to take advantage of a providential detail of two of her brothers on the Nyassaland expeditionary force and accompany them, surrendering St. George’s chapel for a quiet marriage in the colonies. It was a blow, bnt the fact that the entire set of tapered allowances would, not start until the sacrificial ceremony had taken place more than offset the loss in pomp. Andrea started for Africa escorted not only by the aforementioned brothers, but by old Aunty Gwen, hale and hearty at seventy In spite, or perhaps by reason, of having been frightened out of many years’ growth. So here thejg were^

by GEORGE AGNEW CHAMBERLAIN

l\ author of h KI I JOHN BOGARDUS KEC fl l -sadg: 1 L THC BOBBj‘isSeil.L J <Ww l

Aunty and she, on the point of parting with the two boys at the last possible port up the coast and whose Inhabitants had seized upon the occasion to give a grand ball in the mode of the English, who have ever danced, courted and loved best when on the eve of battle. Andrea drew a long and quivering sigh. Tomorrow the boys would be gone. Tomorrow Aunty Gwen and she would depart in state In. the private car her affianced, tot) busy to the last for the soft preliminaries of love, had sent down from the high veldt. Tomorrow tomorrow would indeed mark the beginning of the end. “The end of what?” cried something within her —that same something that had so often spumed her to momentary escape. She felt t great despondency, a terror of the morrow that would bring the end of nothing but that nevertheless would mark the death of part of Andrea Pellor. Then a more startling emotion seized her. She realized, almost with the sharpness of a recoil, that she was on the verge of becoming forever a woman without a history. She looked back and saw that she had never done one outre thing; she looked forward and saw that she probably never would; she looked down and — At her very feet was the coping that edged the almost precipitous cliff. Upon the pale stretch of sand was a far-away blur, a dark, wide-winged blot. She concentrated her unbelieving gaze upon It until she made it out beyond a doubt. It was an airplane. Two "midget figures moved around it busily. Andrea watched the midgets dreamily and thought of all the stories she had read about flying machine elopements. As she stood there her diaphanous second-best party dress and her loosened hair stirred by the splceladen breezes of an Indian ocean dawn and her eyes full of the still, fairy light of a tropic moon, the thing drying Its vast wings on the distant sands seemed like a giant moth, strayed from some Arabian Night and sent in answer to the cry of childhood’s valiant fancy. Who were those midget dots? Were they men or genii? Whence had they come and whither would they go? Did they talk with tongues or like Brown-

les, with their toes and eyes? Andrea wondered all these things, suddenly stopped wondering, skipped up the lad-der-like stair from the garden to her room, snatched np a warm cloak affair which buttoned In a high collar at her neck and that fell sheer in everwidening folds from her shoulders to her ankles,-and in less time than It would take to say Jack Robinson a hundred and fifty times she was slipping and sliding down the path of many slants. She came upon the airplane so suddenly that she forgot to be disappointed at its gross materialism. It was very real Indeed; So were the men who attended it. One was the tallest, blackest, nakedest native she had yet seen, a mighty statue In imlmagined bronze, paganly clothed only at the loins with a spotted pelt. The other was a white man gone brown in the, sun. He was neither very young nor old, he carried himself erect with the

bearing of a man who is full-grown 1 and knows It, and when he moved be 1 gave an exhibition of long, thin muscles under a perfect central control. His mouth seemed to be possessed of a smile that never wavered In spite of the fact that he held, a piece of wire between his teeth and was otherwise Intent on a number of things. It was the black man who first sensed Andrea's presence and gave warning to his master in a low, guttural, rolling string of flowing vowels. The white man did not look round; he merely shrugged his shoulders and went on with his Job. Andrea watched him in silence until she was convinced that everything that could be done to tie machine was about to be accomplished and Its proprietor on the verge of flying away and then, emboldened by that unwavering smile, she said in such a voice as children use when pleading for cake, “Please, Mr. Man, take me with you.” She knew a good deal about flying machines; she knew they couldn’t stay up very long and that if they were worth anything at all they invariably came back to where they started from like weft-trained pigeons. She had left her door locked and she figured that she would be back long before Aunty Gweh could work herself up to the point of having it broken in. When her voice rang across the silence of the false dawn, clear and light as a silver bell giving tongue across snow, the white man started and dropped the wrench he was manipulating. He caught it in midair; then let it fall to the ground deliberately and turned to look her over. She was certainly something to see and to wonder at Her eyes of Irish blue danced with a light younger than her face—* light that attends the eternal wistful child within us—but beneath their shining gaze were shadows and her cheeks were over-pale. Just to one side of her rounded chin was a bit of black courtplaster, shameful mask of a tiny sign of too much chocolates and too little exercise. She was slim enough to look tall In spite of that cloak-like affair of dark blue glove cloth that fell from her shoulders to her ankles in ever-widening folds. Through all his inspection the man’s face never changed. He looked her over deliberately, Judged deliberately, and deliberately let down the little ladder that gave access to the observer’s seat. He helped her up without a word, strapped her in and then turned to pour out voluble instructions in dialect to the bronze statue that stood at attention, black eyes fixed qn his master’s face, red lips repeating like a prompter in a Latin theater all that his master said. The white man clambered to the driver’s seat, placed before Andrea’s, and shouted a word of command. The plane swayed, moved slowly forward, raced fast down the sand and faster, untU with a billowy lift it rose straight in tne eye of the rising sun. Andrea started to draw a full breath of absolute Joy and Instead swallowed an entire gale of wind. It almost burst her open. She had to clench her teeth to conquer it, and with her hands made a vizor for her eyes, a wind mask for her mouth. She wanted to sing, but she was inarticulate in the face of an element at large and sparring for another chance to rush down her throat. She felt the cheated song racing around in her blood, swelling her heart, Informing all her limbs with a new Joy, a new life. She swayed this way and that, looked up and down; then she leaned far out to study the rugged brown face of Mr. Man, the face that always smiled. From where she Sat at bis shoulder the goggles were not so complete a mask. She looked and her eyes' became fixed in a fascinated stare. Two deep lines lay like parentheses from the man’s nostrils to tbs corners of his mouth. They made bis mouth look as though it smiled, but the man was not smiling. Suddenly she knew that through It all, from the moment he had laid bis masked eyes upon her, he had never smiled. Her heart turned cold.

CHAPTER 11. Up to the moment of the sudden chilling of her exultant blood, Andrea had been almost oblivious of the din of the engine. Now she could think of nothing else. The deafening roar that made speech futile was a very real barrier; it Imprisoned her, held her like the bars of an Iron cage, and even beat her remorselessly with Its rapidfire explosions of defying sound. She sank back on her seat, panting and sobbing. She was frightened. Never since the day when as a little child a closet door closed and locked upon her and inexorable darkness had held her for moments that were such an eternity had she known such terror. The feeling that had come to her then came to her now—darkness, a sinking of the heart down, down through an interminable void an<l, tumbling after It, body, soul, a leg or two and a clutching hand, all come apart In the maelstrom of fear. The present nightmare did not last for long. Andrea gradually realized that In fact she was quite grown up, not a child at all but a strong and reasonably healthy young woman who had ridden straight to hounds at many a five-barred gate before which men had often paled. What was she frightened about? A man? Why, in the vulgar vernacular of across the water, men had been her aliment for years I Her backbone stiffened with a snap, she assumed her natural erect and square-shouldered carriage, and, leaning forward from the hips, laid her hand on the man’s arm. Gentle action

falling to command his attention, she tugged at him, then shook him. He showed no sign and Andrea’s lips gradually set in a thin straight line. Doubling up her fists she started to pummel him into submission. The onslaught was sudden, and it was reasonable to suppose that the man would half Jump out of his skin to their mutual peril. She was prepared for that but not for what really transpired. The man merely raised his shoulders at the first blow and paid no heed whatever to the ones that followed in rapid diminuendo, ceasing suddenly when Andrea painfully realized that such fists as hers were never intended for stone crushers. She sat back filled with wonder and a vague admiration for the construction of the male frame. In the meantime the airplane continued to mount steadily into the chilly morning blue. She looked about her and down. The world was very far away and very small. It looked like something that one might forget and leave behind entirely. She tried in vain to pick out the tiny roof that was sheltering Aunty Gwen through her morning nap. Tears once more came into her eyes and then receded as a new idea came to the assistance of her hard-pressed dtermination. She stooped over, took off one dainty satin slipper, and after a foolish glance upward to assure herself that the man couldn’t possibly look, undid certain fasteners with fingers that could see in the dark, and subsequently removed one of her best party, heavy silk champagne-colored stockings. This done, she sat back with the stocking in her lap and stared long and pensively at the man sitting before her Intent on the business of going somewhere at the rate of a hundred miles an hour. That thought electrified her. A hundred miles an hour meant fifty for every half hour, and thirty minutes had certainly passed since she had delivered her person into the trap of a kindly smile that was not. She took a long breath, leaned forward, slipped the stocking deftly around the man’s neck, tied it in a single slipping knot and pulled. The results were immediate. The man headed the airplane up for a last grab at altitude, started it on a long, straight downward glide and cut off his engine. The blessed stillness that followed was so ineffably sweet that Andrea had to give vent to one great sigh before she spoke, and while she was doing that the man calmly drew a hunting knife from his belt and severed the restraining strands of a stocking that only a moment before had been almost worthy of the ankle It had clothed and adorned. “Oh!” gasped Andrea. “Is that all you had to say?” asked the man. Into the vast and rushing stillness his calm voice dropped words as cool and hard as pellets of. ice. Andrea choked with rage. She had to swallow a lump in her throat before she could gasp, “I want to go back—at once.”

“You asked me to take you with me,” said the man in the same calm voice, “and I don’t happen to be going back.” “Not going back I” stuttered Andrea, trying valiantly to collected. “I did ask to c—come, b —b*ut it’s every woman’s privilege to ch —change her mind. “When I first looked at yon I saw a smile that was kindly and chivalrous. How could I know that your smile is nothing but camouflage made up of of dissipation, and your hideous goggles nothing but a mask for bard eyes? I thought you were a man, but you’re nothing but a beast, willing to torment a girl who has foolishly put herself in your power* “My dear girl,* said the man, “you asked me to bring you with me, and like a fool I did. Now, like a woman, you are crying because I didn't bring yon and leave you at the same time. Same old story. Women are forever wanting to eat their cake and have stilL” # T am not crying," said Andrea, "and my name isn't *my dear girl’ but the Honorable Andrea Pellor." She paused on that weighty announcement. “Really?” said the man, unmoved. “Brother In the Flying Corps. Nice, humdrum noble family, as I remember It. Well?” “Don’t 1” cried Andrea. “Don’t start that horrible noise again. I want to talk to you. I want to—oh, what are you going to do with me?” There was a pathetic threat of tears in the question that should have melted the rockiest heart, but it failed. “I have no Intention of doing anything with you beyond what you asked for, and no Interest,” said the man quietly. He reached once more for the throttle. “Stop!” cried Andrea. “I must know what you mean. How’can I talk to you with that awful din going on?” “Oh, you’ll have lots of time to talk,” said the man, and no sooner were the words out of his mouth than they were almost wiped off the slate of memory by the sudden roar of the engine. Andrea sank back in her seat, crumpled up in body and mind, and cried like a baby. Great big sobs came tumbling up and out of her swelling throat. For the first time in many years she felt that she wanted her mother and at once. “Oh, mummy! mummy!” she sobbed like a little child, and a moment later, Just exactly like a little child, she stopped crying, sniffed twice, blinked her eyes dry and presently smiled for no special reason, Just as a dawn smiles when Its sun breaks out from the dewy clouds of morning. What had happened? Why, a most Important thing. She had suddenly realized

that no one could hear her crying; not even herself l "Every person one meets,” thought Andrea, following the line of her discovery, "has to be climbed. Boms people are • insignificant mounds and you Just walk over them; others are high cliffs that it takes a long time to climb but that give you fresh and wider views the higher you go. And then there are others,” she continued with a vindictive look at the stolid back*in front of her, ‘tthat are Just great round hard bowlders.” Her mouth drew down at the corners, but she would not succumb again to feeling sorry for herself. Instead she shielded her eyes once more and took stock of the various handiworks of God. The world was good to look upon that morning. It was twirling by in a strange rotative movement that gave it an Illusive appearance. It was like a new toy in the way of panoramas. Things started to come nearer, changed their minds and then swept Into the past, lingering long on a steep horizon as though they hesitated before an irrevocable plunge. Andrea found that by holding back her skirts she could look straight down. She did so off and on for half an hour and the things she saw told her much. Forest and plain, forest and plain swept under and away in an endless gentle undulation cut twice by long, wandering silver bands. From high In the air those bands were nothing—mere strips of ribbon that a child could step over. *But down there? She knew that down below they were mighty rivers, doubtless teeming with hippos, crocodiles and snakes i The engine missed fire —once, twice. Andrea would scarcely have noticed the fact had it not been for its extraordinary effect on the man. All his pose dropped from him. He became galvanized into nervous life and did several things rapidly with twitching fingers. The engine missed again, and be half rose in his seat, craned his neck, turned his face to one side and looked down. In the glimpse she caught she saw that the lines around his mouth had suddenly deepened incredibly. His eyes seemed to fix with a certain relief on a spot, a clearing;

far ahead. He settled back tensely and made for It. The engine backfired with the rippling report of a gatling gun, coughed and stopped. The man gripped the steering gear tightly and tipped the machine’s nose down for a long, reaching volplane. On the backs of his hands Andrea saw little gleaming bulbs of sweat. Swerving to escape the crest of a tree, he made a reasonably successful landing, In spite of his agitation. The aifplane took the ground In the wide beaten, circle of a native kraal, shot across It and then came to a violent stop with wings burled in the mud-plastered walls of two separate huts. The shock cast Andrea forward; Instinctively she threw her arms around the man’s neck.’ She felt the quivering of his whole body as though It were shaking with an ague. To her astonishment he became for an instant almost pitiable. But only for an instant; then he nerved himself, climbed out of the machine and helped her down. She gave a long sigh of relief and looked up at him with a half smile on her face. He had taken off his goggles. His eyes were gray and large. They stared at without Beeing her and In them was a visible trouble as of some deep and hidden struggle. Andrea gazed at him, her lips parted in wonder. At last he felt her eyes upon him and a deep flush mounted from his neck and swept upward, lighting the tan of his face with a subdued glow. “If that happened to* me,” thought Andrea, ‘Td be as red as a: field of popples.” “I —I fyeg your pardon,” stammered the man and started walking up and down with quick strides. Andrea knew Instinctively that he was warming up muscles that had been suddenly frozen, steadying shaking knees and shaky heart; She turned her eyes from him and gazed around to get her first gUmosa

of as real Africa. From the very start it left her puzzled. She stood at th# far side of a great circular court, beaten hard and swept clean as a floor. Within its bounds were two acacia trees, thickly fronded, wide-spreading. Around the court, thirty high-peaked huts stood like sentinels. Behind the huts other but far structures swarmed —chicken bouses, strongly withed, granaries on four stilts, pigeon cotes, a stockaded cattle kraal and a smaller goat fold. But what puzzled her were the Africans themselves. A flying machine had dropped in their midst and discharged two fair if not exceptional specimens of a white and dominant race, yet the blacks continued their various occupations and disoccupations apparently unperturbed. Whatever their occupation they made no sudden move of variation; even their tongues kept still. In the shade of on,e of the vast acacias there was a veritable concourse of men. They sat for the most part on their heels smoking white, slow-burning cheroots. Two only could be said to be working. They were very old and sat with their backs against the trunk of the tree, their legs stretched straight out before them and at their sides neat bundles of stripped palm leaves. They were weaving baskets. The men at least were not tongue-tied. They seemed to be going through some oral ceremony. First one and then another would take the cheroot from his lips and make a single remark; then the rest would all grunt in unison and with a deep-chested expelling of all the breath in their bodies that gave almost the effect of an explosion. It annoyed Andrea that her companion seemed to share Jhe stoic calm of the natives in what to her mind ought to have been an occasion of much excitement and chatter. It never occurred to her that he was unmoved because he could understand what the men were saying and was merely bored. At the moment the wheels of the flying machine had struck the ground the apparently interminable and, to Andrea, meaningless chant had been started by the native chief, a wizened figure distinguished in dress from his companions only by the ebony-black ring of polished wax that he wore like a halo of darkness on his dosecropped and grizzled head. The white man threw up his head and clapped his bands once. The chief grunted; silence fell. He spat to one side and spoke deliberately. “Let us arise to greet the master.” They came forward and stood in A long file. The chief took one step Ur advance, raised #ls right hand and fastened his gaze on the white man’s face. His own seemed to be working in a sudden excitement. “Bal-ye-tel” he roared, and there followed, so quickly that it seemed but another syllable of the salutation, a mighty grunt from the depths of thirty chests, “Huh 1”

In a moment the whole scene underwent a startling transformation. The file broke and became garrulous. Children stopped their play and ran to* Join in the rabble. The men dropped their work and crowded Into a compact group from which came suddenly a cry that startled Andrea and Jerked her around to face it as though sha had been yanked by a string. The cry was shrill, high, continuous, It was produced by rounding the open mouth and working the tongue laterally In a vibration as rapid ag that of a serpent’s. It was ghastly to watch, Incredible in the rapidity ofthe ululatlon, but once heard, unforgetable. It lasted much longer than Andrea could have held her breath, let alone used it, and ceased as suddenly; as It had begun, “All very Interesting,” said Andrea turning to her companion, “but why didn’t they do it before?” *He looked at her absently. “There Is a ceremonial,” he said, “a dignity, about the African that is absurd till you've known it for years.” “For years?” repeated Andrea. “It— * is this your home?” He shook his head. “No, Africa—this sort of thing—ls never home to a white man. It’s a place where he goes to forget his sins. I’ve been using It—whenever life has given me a chance—as a sun bath for the soul.” Andrea stared at Mm, a puzzled frown on her brow. She wondered why his bluntness did not offend her, wondered if It would ever fall to her

lot to Bear nim say a spnsgless tmng or laugh aloud. While she still wondered he turned from her and began calling out meaningless words: “Shilling! Five I Tin hat I’ Bathtub! Overcoat 1” - At each name, for names they were, a native stepped forward. They were aU bright-faced youngsters, fourteen or fifteen years of age, and their garb, made up of a clean cloth bonnd tightly around slim hips and falling to the knees, and a red fez with tassel intact, marked them as houseboye—trusted pickaninnies who alone had the right to enter the white man’s quarters and were oollectlvely his recognized mouthpieces in conveying orders. “Bathtub!” repeated the white man. A youngster quickly saluted and stepped out of the line, grinning from ear to ear at being distinguished even for a moment above his fellows. With a jerk of his head toward Andrea the white man began to talk rapidly. Bathtub’s eyes rolled from his face to Andrea’s and back again. They widened, they narrowed, and, each of the three times the white man said “Kiboco” with a peculiar emphasis, they seemed to wince. Andrea interrupted, “What doe* •Kiboco’ mean, please?” "It means 8 whip of raw rhino hide,” said the man. “An Implement that draws blood with a whisper.” Andrea went white; her eyes blazed. “So you whip your servants?” sha said with curled lips.

“I have whipped a boy once,” answered the man coolly. “They have never forgotten.” He turned to her. “This boy, Bathtub, is yours. If he ever fails you I shall thrash him within an inch of his nine lives.” He dismissed the boy with a nod. Bathtub stepped before his mistress, saluted, grinned the broadest, most friendly grin Andrea had ever seen, and without waiting for the smiling answer of her eyes was off like an arrow. So taken up was Andrea with watching the white man as he Issued a rapid fire of orders to his remaining lieutenants that when Bathtub returned, saluted, and led her beneath the lesser of the acacia trees she could not believe her eyes, fbr they showed her a canvas wash basin on stilts, a clean towel laid over the back of a chair, another chair before a camp table laid with a clean cloth and burdened with two sizzling fried eggs, hot toast, marmalade, a pot of tea and an absurd squat bottle with the stems of wild flowers rammed down Its throat. Sh* 4ook off her cloak and Bathtub promptly hung it to air over a low branch of the tree; then, while she bathed her face and hands, he stood by with the towel, and when she was through with that he drew her chair for her and poured her tea. Children began crowding around. He drove them back, and, dragging his toe, marked a wide circle on the ground with the table as center. Up to that mark and no farther came the children and squatted In a staring but silent ring. Andrea sat down and gazed over their heads at the kraal in general and at the white man in particular, for from him radiated an activity incredible in comparison with the languor that had preceded It Her eyes fell to the table and she realized two things: she was unusually, marvelously hungry and the table was set for one. ‘•Doesn’t your master eat?” she asked of Bathtub. “My master makes ready cala for missis.” “What is ‘cala? ” Bathtub frowned In an effort lo catch up with a word that was on the verge of escaping from his meager vocabulary. “House!” he suddenly exploded and grinned with satisfaction. Andrea lowered the fork that was half way to her month. “Makes ready a house —for me?” Her eyes narrowed. “I will hot need a bouse. Tell him.” Bathtub’s grin broadened. “Sorry, Missis,” he said, “law like that; every Missis one hut, every hut one tax.*’ Andrea stared at him open-mouthed and then, blushed furiously. “I mean that I will not stay here,” she explained angrily. “Tell your master I wish to speak with him —at once. Wait a minute. You call him M’sungo. What does that mean?” ‘•White man,” said Bathtub, and departed to call his master. The white man gave a last order and then pbeyed Andrea’s summons. As he stepped Into the shade of the acacia he took off his hat and mopped his wet brow. “Too bad w© can’t keep cool, like the morning,” he said. “I didn't send for you to talk about /he yegrtber,” said .Andrea, ‘Yea have

oeen raining orders; now let me give Just one. You are to get that machine In shape and take me back nowtoday." The man’s eyes met her gaze steadily but gradually his body began to tremble. He put one hand out to the

spare chair as though to steadj Ultpself. “I want you to believe me,” he said in a low voice, “when I tell you that what you ask is impossible." He turned as though to leave her. “Walt,” cried Andrea. There was something In, the way he spoke that even went beyond persuasion and robbed her of her mainstay—her anger against him. “But—” she stammered and stopped. '.“Ob, what Is to become of me?” “If I could take you back I would—now,” said the man dully. “When you asked to come with me I knlw of course that you were unaware of the fact that I was not returning. An impulse drove me to grant your request or the grounds that it is really of very little consequence what happens to any given Individual. Impulses pass but decisions are often Irretrievable; this was one of them.” . “Why?" asked Andrea earnestly, and then repeated more urgently, “Why Is It?” The man’s eyes wandered toward the airplane but he did not answer her Insistent question. “No real harm will come to you,” he said Instead, “but even so I am sorry. Logic is a treacherous thing,” he added absently, “when applied to humanity. I told you that I didn’t deal in personalities. I lied. There Is something about the warmth of an Individual person that melts cold reason.”

He left her abruptly and disappeared within a near-by hut. She watched him go with a feeling of partial desertion that gradually was absorbed by a sensation that was new to her —a consciousness that when this extraordinary man spoke he left his words behind him, not as transients but as permanent guests of the mind. There was something stark about his frankness as though it had been caught in some whirlwind of life and been stripped of conventional clothes In the way of meaningless phrases, but for all Its nakedness it Inspired not fear but a rebellious trust. „ . (TO BE CONTINUED)

“Please, Mr. Man, Take Me With You."

He Settled Back Tensely and Made For It

"If I Could Take You Back I Would Now."