The 42nd Parallel

J. Ward Moorehouse

He was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on the Fourth of July. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse could hear the firecrackers popping and crackling outside the hospital all through her laborpains. And when she came to a little and they brought the baby to her she asked the nurse in a trembling husky whisper if she thought it could have a bad effect on the baby all that noise, prenatal influence you know. The nurse said the little boy ought to grow up to be very patriotic and probably president being born on the Glorious Fourth and went on to tell a long story about a woman who’d been frightened by having a beggar stick his hand out suddenly right under her nose just before the child was born and the child had been born with six fingers, but Mrs. Moorehouse was too weak to listen and went off to sleep. Later Mr. Moorehouse came by on his way home from the depot where he worked as stationagent and they decided to call the kid John Ward after Mrs. Moorehouse’s father who was a farmer in Iowa and pretty well off. Then Mr. Moorehouse went round to Healy’s to get tanked up because he was a father and because it was the Glorious Fourth and Mrs. Moorehouse went off to sleep again.

Johnny grew up in Wilmington. He had two brothers, Ben and Ed, and three sisters, Myrtle, Edith and Hazel, but everybody said he was the bright boy of the family as well as the eldest. Ben and Ed were stronger and bigger than he was, but he was the marbles champion of the public school, getting considerable fame one term by a corner in agates he maneuvered with the help of a little Jewish boy named Ike Goldberg; they managed to rent out agates to other boys for a cent a week for ten.

When the Spanish War came on everybody in Wilmington was filled with martial enthusiasm, all the boys bothered their parents to buy them Rough Rider suits and played filibusters and Pawnee Indian wars and Colonel Roosevelt and Remember the Maine and the White Fleet and the Oregon steaming through the Straits of Magellan. Johnny was down on the wharf one summer evening when Admiral Cervera’s squadron was sighted in battle formation passing through the Delaware Capes by a detachment of the state militia who immediately opened fire on an old colored man crabbing out in the river. Johnny ran home like Paul Revere and Mrs. Moorehouse gathered up her six children and pushing two of them in a babycarriage and dragging the other four after her, made for the railway station to find her husband. By the time they’d decided to hop on the next train to Philadelphia news went round that the Spanish squadron was just some boats fishing for menhaden and that the militiamen were being confined in barracks for drunkenness. When the old colored man had hauled in his last crabline he sculled back to shore and exhibited to his cronies several splintery bulletholes in the side of his skiff.

When Johnny graduated from highschool as head of the debating team, class orator and winner of the prize essay contest with an essay entitled “Roosevelt, the Man of the Hour,” everybody felt he ought to go to college. But the financial situation of the family was none too good, his father said, shaking his head. Poor Mrs. Moorehouse who had been sickly since the birth of her last child had taken to the hospital to have an operation and would stay there for some time to come. The younger children had had measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever and mumps all year. The amortization on the house was due and Mr. Moorehouse had not gotten the expected raise that New Year’s. So instead of getting a job as assistant freight agent or picking peaches down near Dover the way he had other summers Johnny went round Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania as agent for a bookdistributing firm. In September he received a congratulatory note from them saying that he was the first agent they had ever had who sold a hundred consecutive sets of Bryant’s History of the United States. On the strength of it he went out to West Philadelphia and applied for a scholarship at the U of P. He got the scholarship, passed the exams and enrolled himself as a freshman, indicating BS as the degree he was working for. The first term he commuted from Wilmington to save the expense of a room. Saturdays and Sundays he picked up a little money taking subscriptions for Stoddard’s Lectures. Everything would have gone right if his father hadn’t slipped on the ice on the station steps one January morning in Johnny’s sophomore year and broken his hip. He was taken to the hospital and one complication after another ensued. A little shyster lawyer, Ike Goldberg’s father, in fact, went to see Moorehouse, who lay with his leg in the air in a Balkan frame, and induced him to sue the railroad for a hundred thousand dollars under the employers’ liability law. The railroad lawyers got up witnesses to prove that Moorehouse had been drinking heavily and the doctor who had examined him testified that he showed traces of having used liquor the morning of the fall, so by midsummer he hobbled out of hospital on crutches, without a job and without any compensation. That was the end of Johnny’s college education. The incident left in his mind a lasting bitterness against drink and against his father.

Mrs. Moorehouse had to write for help from her father to save the house, but his answer took so long that the bank foreclosed before it came and it wouldn’t have done much good anyway because it was only a hundred dollars in ten dollar bills in a registered envelope and just about paid the cost of moving to a floor in a fourfamily frame house down by the Pennsylvania freightyards. Ben left highschool and got a job as assistant freightagent and Johnny went into the office of Hillyard and Miller, Real Estate. Myrtle and her mother baked pies evenings and made angelcake to send to the Woman’s Exchange and Mr. Moorehouse sat in an invalid chair in the front parlor cursing shyster lawyers and the lawcourts and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

This was a bad year for Johnny Moorehouse. He was twenty and didn’t drink or smoke and was keeping himself clean for the lovely girl he was going to marry, a girl in pink organdy with golden curls and a sunshade. He’d sit in the musty little office of Hillyard and Miller, listing tenements for rent, furnished rooms, apartments, desirable lots for sale, and think of the Boer war and the Strenuous Life and prospecting for gold. From his desk he could see a section of a street of frame houses and a couple of elmtrees through a grimy windowpane. In front of the window was in summer a conical wiremesh flytrap where caught flies buzzed and sizzled, and in winter a little openface gas-stove that had a peculiar feeble whistle all its own. Behind him, back of a groundglass screen that went part way to the ceiling Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller sat facing each other at a big double desk, smoking cigars and fiddling with papers. Mr. Hillyard was a sallowfaced man with black hair a little too long who had been on the way to making a reputation for himself as a criminal lawyer when, through some scandal that nobody ever mentioned as it was generally agreed in Wilmington that he had lived it down, he had been disbarred. Mr. Miller was a little roundfaced man who lived with his elderly mother. He had been forced into the realestate business by the fact that his father had died leaving him building lots scattered over Wilmington and the outskirts of Philadelphia and nothing else to make a living from. Johnny’s job was to sit in the outer office and be polite to prospective buyers, to list the properties, attend to advertising, type the firm’s letters, empty the wastebaskets and the dead flies out of the flytrap, take customers to visit apartments, houses and buildinglots and generally make himself useful and agreeable. It was on this job that he found out that he had a pair of bright blue eyes and that he could put on an engaging boyish look that people liked. Old ladies looking for houses used to ask specially to have that nice young man show them round, and business men who dropped in for a chat with Mr. Hillyard or Mr. Miller would nod their heads and look wise and say, “Bright boy, that.” He made eight dollars a week.

Outside of the Strenuous Life and a lovely girl to fall in love with him there was one thing Johnny Moorehouse’s mind dwelt on as he sat at his desk listing desirable five and sevenroom dwelling-houses, drawingroom, diningroom, kitchen and buder’s pantry, three master’s bedrooms and bath, maid’s room, water, electricity, gas, healthy location on gravelly soil in restricted residential area: He wanted to be a songwriter. He had a fair tenor voice and could carry Larboard Watch Ahoy or I Dreamed I Dwelt in Marble Halls or Through Pleasures and Palaces Sadly I Roam very adequately. Sunday afternoons he took music lessons with Miss O’Higgins, a shriveled little Irishwoman, unmarried, of about thirtyfive, who taught him the elements of the piano and listened with rapture to his original compositions that she took down for him on musicpaper that she had all ready ruled when he came. One song that began

Oh, show me the state where the peaches bloom

Where maids are fair… It’s Delaware

she thought good enough to send to a music publisher in Philadelphia, but it came back, as did his next composition that Miss O’Higgins — he called her Marie by this time and she declared she couldn’t take any money from him for her lessons, at least not until he was rich and had made a name for himself — that Marie cried over and said was as beautiful as MacDowell. It began

The silver bay of Delaware

Rolls through peachblossoms to the sea

And when my heart is bowed with care

Its memory sweet comes back to me.

Miss O’Higgins had a little parlor with gilt chairs in it where she gave her music lessons. It was very heavily hung with lace curtains and with salmoncolored brocaded portieres she had bought at an auction. In the center was a black walnut table piled high with worn black leather albums. Sunday afternoons after the lesson was over she’d bring out tea and cookies and cinnamon toast and Johnny would sit there sprawled in the horsehair armchair that had to have a flowered cover over it winter and summer on account of its being so worn and his eyes would be so blue and he’d talk about things he wanted to do and poke fun at Mr. Hillyard and Mr. Miller and she’d tell him stories of great composers, and her cheeks would flush and she’d feel almost pretty and feel that after all there wasn’t such a terrible disparity in their ages. She supported by her music lessons an invalid mother and a father who had been a wellknown baritone and patriot in Dublin in his younger days but who had taken to drink and she was madly in love with Johnny Moorehouse.

Johnny Moorehouse worked on at Hillyard and Miller’s sitting in the stuffy office, chafing when he had nothing to do until he thought he’d go mad and run amok and kill somebody, sending songs to the music publishers that they always sent back, reading the Success Magazine, full of sick longing for the future: to be away from Wilmington and his father’s grumbling and pipesmoking and the racket his little brothers and sisters made and the smell of corned beef and cabbage and his mother’s wrinkled crushed figure and her overworked hands.

But one day he was sent down to Ocean City, Maryland, to report on some lots the firm had listed there. Mr. Hillyard would have gone himself only he had a carbuncle on his neck. He gave Johnny the return ticket and ten dollars for the trip.

It was a hot July afternoon. Johnny ran home to get a bag and to change his clothes and got down to the station just in time to make the train. The ride was hot and sticky down through peachorchards and pinebarrens under a blazing slaty sky that flashed back off sandy patches in scraggly cornfields and whitewashed shacks and strips of marshwater. Johnny had taken off the jacket of his gray flannel suit and folded it on the seat beside him to keep it from getting mussed and laid his collar and tie on top of it so that they’d be fresh when he got in, when he noticed a darkeyed girl in a ruffled pink dress and a wide white leghorn hat sitting across the aisle. She was considerably older than he was and looked like the sort of fashionably dressed woman who’d be in a parlorcar rather than in a daycoach. But Johnny reflected that there wasn’t any parlorcar on this train. Whenever he wasn’t looking at her, he felt that she was looking at him.

The afternoon grew overcast and it came on to rain, big drops spattered against the car windows. The girl in pink ruffles was struggling to put her window down. He jumped over and put it down for her. “Allow me,” he said. “Thanks.” She looked up and smiled into his eyes. “Oh, it’s so filthy on this horrid train.” She showed him her white gloves all smudged from the windowfastenings. He sat down again on the inside edge of his seat. She turned her full face to him. It was an irregular brown face with ugly lines from the nose to the ends of the mouth, but her eyes set him tingling. “You won’t think it’s too unconventional of me if we talk, will you?” she said, “I’m bored to death on this horrid train, and there isn’t any parlorcar though the man in New York swore that there was.”

“I bet you been traveling all day,” said Johnny, looking shy and boyish.

“Worse than that. I came down from Newport on the boat last night.”

The casual way she said Newport quite startled him. “I’m going to Ocean City,” he said.

“So am I. Isn’t it a horrid place? I wouldn’t go there for a minute if it weren’t for Dad. He pretends to like it.”

“They say that Ocean City has a great future… I mean in a kind of a realestate way,” said Johnny.

There was a pause.

“I got on in Wilmington,” said Johnny with a smile.

“A horrid place, Wilmington… I can’t stand it.”

“I was born and raised there… I suppose that’s why I like it,” said Johnny.

“Oh, I didn’t mean there weren’t awfully nice people in Wilmington… lovely old families… Do you know the Rawlinses?”

“Oh, that’s all right… I don’t want to spend all my life in Wilmington, anyway… Gosh, look at it rain.”

It rained so hard that a culvert was washed out and the train was four hours late into Ocean City. By the time they got in they were good friends; it had thundered and lightened and she’d been so nervous and he’d acted very strong and protecting and the car had filled up with mosquitoes and they had both been eaten up and they’d gotten very hungry together. The station was pitchblack and there was no porter and it took him two trips to get her bags out and even then they almost forgot her alligatorskin handbag and he had to go back into the car a third time to get it and his own suitcase. By that time an old darkey with a surrey had appeared who said he was from the Ocean House. “I hope you’re going there too,” she said. He said he was and they got in though they had no place to put their feet because she had so many bags. There were no lights in Ocean City on account of the storm. The surreywheels ground through a deep sandbed; now and then that sound and the clucking of the driver at his horse were drowned by the roar of the surf from the beach. The only light was from the moon continually hidden by driving clouds. The rain had stopped but the tense air felt as if another downpour would come any minute. “I certainly would have perished in the storm if it hadn’t been for you,” she said; then suddenly she offered him her hand like a man: “My name’s Strang… Annabelle Marie Strang…. Isn’t that a funny name?” He took her hand. “John Moorehouse is mine… Glad to meet you, Miss Strang.” The palm of her hand was hot and dry. It seemed to press into his. When he let go he felt that she had expected him to hold her hand longer. She laughed a husky low laugh. “Now we’re introduced, Mr. Moorehouse, and everything’s quite all right… I certainly shall give Dad a piece of my mind. The idea of his not meeting his only daughter at the station.”

In the dark hotel lobby lit by a couple of smoked oillamps he saw her, out of the corner of his eye, throw her arms round a tall whitehaired man, but by the time he had scrawled John W. Moorehouse in his most forceful handwriting in the register and gotten his roomkey from the clerk, they had gone. Up in the little pine bedroom it was very hot. When he pulled up the window, the roar of the surf came in through the rusty screen mingling with the rattle of rain on the roof. He changed his collar and washed in tepid water he poured from the cracked pitcher on the washstand and went down to the diningroom to try to get something to eat. A goat-toothed waitress was just bringing him soup when Miss Strang came in followed by the tall man. As the only lamp was on the table he was sitting at, they came towards it and he got up and smiled. “Here he is, Dad,” she said. “And you owe him for the driver that brought us from the station… Mr. Morris, you must meet my father, Dr. Strang… The name was Morris, wasn’t it?” Johnny blushed. “Moorehouse, but it’s quite all right…. I’m glad to meet you, sir.”

Next morning Johnny got up early and went round to the office of the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company that was in a new greenstained shingled bungalow on the freshly laidout street back of the beach. There was no one there yet so he walked round the town. It was a muggy gray day and the cottages and the frame stores and the unpainted shacks along the railroad track looked pretty desolate. Now and then he slapped a mosquito on his neck. He had on his last clean collar and he was worried for fear it would get wilted. Whenever he stepped off the board sidewalks he got sand in his shoes, and sharp beachburrs stuck to his ankles. At last he found a stout man in a white linen suit sitting on the steps of the realestate office. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “Are you Colonel Wedgewood?” The stout man was too out of breath to answer and only nodded. He had one big silk handkerchief stuck into his collar behind and with another was mopping his face. Johnny gave him the letter he had from his firm and stood waiting for him to say something. The fat man read the letter with puckered brows and led the way into the office. “It’s this asthma,” he gasped between great wheezing breaths. “Cuts ma wind when Ah trah to hurry. Glad to meet you, son.”

Johnny hung round old Colonel Wedgewood the rest of the morning, looking blue-eyed and boyish, listening politely to stories of the Civil War and General Lee and his white horse Traveller and junketings befoa de woa on the Easten Shoa, ran down to the store to get a cake of ice for the cooler, made a little speech about the future of Ocean City as a summer resort—“Why, what have they got at Atlantic City or Cape May that we haven’t got here?” roared the Colonel — went home with him to his bungalow for lunch, thereby missing the train he ought to have taken back to Wilmington, refused a mint julep — he neither drank nor smoked — but stood admiringly by while the Colonel concocted and drank two good stiff ones, for his asthma, used his smile and his blue eyes and his boyish shamble on the Colonel’s colored cook Mamie and by four o’clock he was laughing about the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina and had accepted a job with the Ocean City Improvement and Realty Company at fifteen dollars a week, with a small furnished cottage thrown in. He went back to the hotel and wrote Mr. Hillyard, inclosing the deeds for the lots and his expense account, apologized for leaving the firm at such short notice but explained that he owed it to his family who were in great need to better himself as much as he could; then he wrote to his mother that he was staying on in Ocean City and please to send him his clothes by express; he wondered whether to write Miss O’Higgins, but decided not to. After all, bygones were bygones.

When he had eaten supper he went to the desk to ask for his bill, feeling pretty nervous for fear he wouldn’t have enough money to pay it, and was just coming out with two quarters in his pocket and his bag in his hand when he met Miss Strang. She was with a short dark man in white flannels whom she introduced as Monsieur de la Rochevillaine. He was a Frenchman but spoke good English. “I hope you’re not leaving us,” she said. “No, ma’am, I’m just moving down the beach to one of Colonel Wedgewood’s cottages.” The Frenchman made Johnny uneasy; he stood smiling suave as a barber beside Miss Strang. “Oh, you know our fat friend, do you? He’s a great crony of Dad’s. I think he’s just too boring with his white horse Traveller.” Miss Strang and the Frenchman smiled both at once as if they had some secret in common. The Frenchman stood beside her swinging easily on the balls of his feet as if he were standing beside some piece of furniture he owned and was showing off to a friend. Johnny had a notion to paste him one right where the white flannel bulged into a pot belly. “Well, I must go,” he said. “Won’t you come back later? There’s going to be dancing. We’d love to have you.” “Yes, come back by all means,” said the Frenchman. “I will if I can,” said Johnny and walked off with his suitcase in his hand, feeling sticky under the collar and sore. “Drat that Frenchman,” he said aloud. Still, there was something about the way Miss Strang looked at him. He guessed he must be falling in love.

It was a hot August, the mornings still, the afternoons piling up sultry into thundershowers. Except when there were clients to show about the scorched sandlots and pinebarrens laid out into streets, Johnny sat in the office alone under the twoflanged electric fan. He was dressed in white flannels and a pink tennis shirt rolled up to the elbows, drafting the lyrical description of Ocean City (Maryland) that was to preface the advertising booklet that was the Colonel’s pet idea: “The lifegiving surges of the broad Atlantic beat on the crystalline beaches of Ocean City (Maryland)… the tonic breath of the pines brings relief to the asthmatic and the consumptive… nearby the sportsman’s paradise of Indian River spreads out its broad estuary teeming with…” In the afternoon the Colonel would come in sweating and wheezing and Johnny would read him what he had written and he’d say, “Bully, ma boy, bully,” and suggest that it be all done over. And Johnny would look up a new batch of words in a dogeared “Century Dictionary” and start off again.

It would have been a fine life except that he was in love. Evenings he couldn’t keep away from the Ocean House. Each time he walked up the creaking porch steps past the old ladies rocking and fanning with palmleaf fans, and went through the screen doors into the lobby he felt sure that this time he’d find Annabelle Marie alone, but each time the Frenchman was with her as smiling and cool and potbellied as ever. They both made a fuss over Johnny and petted him like a little dog or a precocious child; she taught him to dance the “Boston,” and the Frenchman, who it turned out was a duke or a baron or something, kept offering him drinks and cigars and scented cigarettes. Johnny was shocked to death when he found out that she smoked, but somehow it went with dukes and Newport and foreign travel and that sort of thing. She used some kind of musky perfume and the smell of it and the slight rankness of cigarettesmoke in her hair made him dizzy and feverish when he danced with her. Some nights he tried to tire out the Frenchman playing pool, but then she’d disappear to bed and he’d have to go off home cursing under his breath. While he undressed he could still feel a little tingle of musk in his nostrils. He was trying to make up a song:

By the moonlight sea

I pine for thee

Annabelle Marie…

Then it ’ud suddenly sound too damn silly and he’d stride up and down his little porch in his pajamas, with the mosquitoes shrilling about his head and the pound of the sea and the jeer of the dryflies and katydids in his ears, cursing being young and poor and uneducated and planning how he’d make a big enough pile to buy out every damn Frenchman; then he’d be the one she’d love and look up to and he wouldn’t care if she did have a few damn Frenchmen for mascots if she wanted them. He’d clench his fists and stride around the porch muttering, “By gum, I can do it.”

Then one evening he found Annabelle Marie alone. The Frenchman had gone on the noon train. She seemed glad to see Johnny, but there was obviously something on her mind. She had too much powder on her face and her eyes looked red; perhaps she’d been crying. It was moonlight. She put her hand on his arm, “Moorehouse, walk down the beach with me,” she said. “I hate the sight of all these old hens in rockingchairs.” On the walk that led across a scraggly lawn down to the beach they met Dr. Strang.

“What’s the matter with Rochevillaine, Annie?” he said. He was a tall man with a high forehead. His lips were compressed and he looked worried.

“He got a letter from his mother… She won’t let him.”

“He’s of age, isn’t he?”

“Dad, you don’t understand the French nobility… The family council won’t let him… They could tie up his income.”

“You’ll have enough for two… I told him that.”

“Oh, shut up about it, can’t you?…” She suddenly started to blubber like a child. She ran past Johnny and back to the hotel, leaving Johnny and Dr. Strang facing each other on the narrow boardwalk. Dr. Strang saw Johnny for the first time. “H’m… excuse us,” he said as he brushed past and walked with long strides up the walk, leaving Johnny to go down to the beach and look at the moon all by himself.

But the nights that followed Annabelle Marie did walk out along the beach with him and he began to feel that perhaps she hadn’t loved the Frenchman so much after all. They would go far beyond the straggling cottages and build a fire and sit side by side looking into the flame. Their hands sometimes brushed against each other as they walked; when she’d want to get to her feet he’d take hold of her two hands and pull her up towards him and he always planned to pull her to him and kiss her but he hadn’t the nerve. One night was very warm and she suddenly suggested they go in bathing. “But we haven’t our suits.” “Haven’t you ever been in without? It’s much better… Why, you funny boy, I can see you blushing even in the moonlight.” “Do you dare me?” “I doubledare you.”

He ran up the beach a way and pulled off his clothes and went very fast into the water. He didn’t dare look and only got a glimpse out of the corner of an eye of white legs and breasts and a wave spuming white at her feet. While he was putting his clothes on again he was wondering if he wanted to get married to a girl who’d go in swimming with a fellow all naked like that, anyway. He wondered if she’d done it with that damn Frenchman. “You were like a marble faun,” she said when he got back beside the fire where she was coiling her black hair round her head. She had hairpins in her mouth and spoke through them. “Like a very nervous marble faun… I got my hair wet.” He hadn’t intended to but he suddenly pulled her to him and kissed her. She didn’t seem at all put out but made herself little in his arms and put her face up to be kissed again. “Would you marry a feller like me without any money?” “I hadn’t thought of it, darling, but I might.”

“You’re pretty wealthy, I guess, and I haven’t a cent, and I have to send home money to my folks… but I have prospects.”

“What kind of prospects?” She pulled his face down and ruffled his hair and kissed him. “I’ll make good in this realestate game. I swear I will.” “Will it make good, poor baby?” “You’re not so much older’n me… How old are you, Annabelle?” “Well, I admit to twentyfour, but you mustn’t tell anybody, or about tonight or anything.” “Who would I be telling about it, Annabelle Marie?” Walking home, something seemed to be on her mind because she paid no attention to anything he said. She kept humming under her breath.

Another evening they were sitting on the porch of his cottage smoking cigarettes — he would occasionally smoke a cigarette now to keep her company — he asked her what it was worrying her. She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him: “Oh, Moorehouse, you’re such a fool… but I like it.” “But there must be something worrying you, Annabelle… You didn’t look worried the day we came down on the train together.” “If I told you… Gracious, I can imagine your face.” She laughed her hard gruff laugh that always made him feel uncomfortable. “Well, I wish I had the right to make you tell me… You ought to forget that damn Frenchman.” “Oh, you’re such a little innocent,” she said. Then she got up and walked up and down the porch.

“Won’t you sit down, Annabelle? Don’t you like me even a little bit?”

She rubbed her hand through his hair and down across his face. “Of course I do, you little blue-eyed ninny… But can’t you see it’s everything driving me wild, all those old cats round the hotel talk about me as if I was a scarlet woman because I occasionally smoke a cigarette in my own room… Why, in England some of the most aristocratic women smoke right in public without anybody saying ‘boo’ to them… And then I’m worried about Dad; he’s sinking too much money in realestate. I think he’s losing his mind.”

“But there’s every indication of a big boom coming down here. It’ll be another Atlantic City in time.”

“Now look here, ’fess up, how many lots have been sold this month?”

“Well, not so many… But there are some important sales pending… There’s that corporation that’s going to build the new hotel.”

“Dad’ll be lucky if he gets fifty cents out on the dollar… and he keeps telling me how rattlebrained I am. He’s a physician and not a financial wizard and he ought to realize it. It’s all right for somebody like you who has nothing to lose and a way to make in the world to be messing around in realestate… As for that fat Colonel I don’t know whether he’s a fool or a crook.”

“What kind of a doctor is your father?”

“Do you mean to say you never heard of Dr. Strang? He’s the best known nose and throat specialist in Philadelphia… Oh, it’s so cute…” She kissed him on the cheek “… and ignorant…” she kissed him again… “and pure.” “I’m not so pure,” he said quickly and looked at her hard in the eyes. Their faces began to blush looking at each other. She let her head sink slowly on his shoulder.

His heart was pounding. He was dizzy with the smell of her hair and the perfume she wore. He pulled her to her feet with his arm round her shoulders. Tottering a little, her leg against his leg, the stiffness of her corset against his ribs, her hair against his face, he pulled her through the little livingroom into the bedroom and locked the door behind them. Then he kissed her as hard as he could on the lips. She sat down on the bed and began to take off her dress, a little coolly he thought, but he’d gone too far to pull back. When she took off her corset she flung it in the corner of the room. “There,” she said. “I hate the beastly things.” She got up and walked towards him in her chemise and felt for his face in the dark. “What’s the matter, darling?” she whispered fiercely, “Are you afraid of me?”

Everything was much simpler than Johnny expected. They giggled together while they were dressing. Walking back along the beach to the Ocean House, he kept thinking: “Now she’ll have to marry me.”

In September a couple of cold northeasters right after Labor Day emptied the Ocean House and the cottages. The Colonel talked bigger about the coming boom and his advertising campaign, and drank more. Johnny took his meals with him now instead of at Mrs. Ames’ boardinghouse. The booklet was finished and approved and Johnny had made a couple of trips to Philadelphia with the text and the photographs to get estimates from printers. Running through Wilmington on the train without getting off there gave him a pleasant feeling of independence. Dr. Strang looked more and more worried and talked about protecting his investments. They had not talked of Johnny’s engagement to his daughter, but it seemed to be understood. Annabelle’s moods were unaccountable. She kept saying she was dying of boredom. She teased and nagged at Johnny continually. One night he woke suddenly to find her standing beside the bed. “Did I scare you?” she said. “I couldn’t sleep… Listen to the surf.” The wind was shrilling round the cottage and a tremendous surf roared on the beach. It was almost daylight before he could get her to get out of bed and go back to the hotel. “Let ’em see me… I don’t care,” she said. Another time when they were walking along the beach she was taken with nausea and he had to stand waiting while she was sick behind a sanddune, then he supported her, white and trembling, back to the Ocean House. He was worried and restless. On one of his trips to Philadelphia he went round to The Public Ledger to see if he could get a job as a reporter.

One Saturday afternoon he sat reading the paper in the lobby of the Ocean House. There was no one else there, most of the guests had left. The hotel would close the fifteenth. Suddenly he found himself listening to a conversation. The two bellhops had come in and were talking in low voices on the bench against the wall.

“Well, I got mahn awright this summer, damned if I didn’t, Joe.”

“I would of too if I hadn’t gotten sick.”

“Didn’t I tell you not to monkey round with that Lizzie? Man, I b’lieve every sonofabitch in town slep’ with that jane, not excludin’ niggers.”

“Say, did you… You know the blackeyed one? You said you would.”

Johnny froze. He held the paper rigid in front of him.

The bellhop gave out a low whistle. “Hotstuff,” he said. “Jeez, what these society dames gits away with’s got me beat.”

“Didye, honest?”

“Well, not exactly…’Fraid I might ketch somethin’. But that Frenchman did… Jeez, he was in her room all the time.”

“I know he was. I caught him onct.” They laughed. “They’d forgot to lock the door.”

“Was she all neked?”

“I guess she was… under her kimono… He’s cool as a cucumber and orders icewater.”

“Whah didn’t ye send up Mr. Greeley?”

“Hell, why should I? Frenchman wasn’t a bad scout. He gave me five bucks.”

“I guess she can do what she goddam pleases. Her dad about owns this dump, they tell me, him an ole Colonel Wedgewood.”

“I guess that young guy in the realestate office is gettin’ it now… looks like he’d marry her.”

“Hell, I’d marry her maself if a girl had that much kale.”

Johnny was in a cold sweat. He wanted to get out of the lobby without their seeing him. A bell rang and one of the boys ran off. He heard the other one settling himself on the bench. Maybe he was reading a magazine or something. Johnny folded up the paper quietly and walked out onto the porch. He walked down the street without seeing anything. For a while he thought he’d go down to the station and take the first train out and throw the whole business to ballyhack, but there was the booklet to get out, and there was a chance that if the boom did come he might get in on the ground floor, and this connection with money and the Strangs; opportunity knocks but once at a young man’s door. He went back to his cottage and locked himself in his bedroom. He stood a minute looking at himself in the glass of the bureau. The neatly parted light hair, the cleancut nose and chin; the image blurred. He found he was crying. He threw himself face down on the bed and sobbed.

When he went up to Philadelphia the next time to read proof on the booklet:

OCEAN CITY (Maryland)

VACATIONLAND SUPREME

He also took up a draft of the wedding invitations to be engraved:

Dr. Alonso B. Strang

announces the marriage of his daughter

Annabelle Marie

to Mr. J. Ward Moorehouse

at Saint Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church,

Germantown, Pennsylvania, on November fifteenth

nineteen hundred and nine at twelve noon

Then there was an invitation to the reception to be sent to a special list. It was to be a big wedding because Dr. Strang had so many social obligations. Annabelle decided on J. Ward Moorehouse as more distinguished than John W. and began to call him Ward. When they asked him about inviting his family he said his mother and father were both invalids and his brothers and sisters too little to enjoy it. He wrote his mother that he was sure she’d understand, but that as things were and with Dad the way he was… he was sure she’d understand. Then one evening Annabelle told him she was going to have a baby.

“I thought maybe that was it.”

Her eyes were suddenly scaringly cold black in his. He hated her at that minute, then he smiled blue-eyed and boyish. “I mean you being so nervous and everything.” He laughed and took her hand. “Well, I’m goin’ to make you an honest woman, ain’t I?” He had the drop on her now. He kissed her.

She burst out crying.

“Oh, Ward, I wish you wouldn’t say ‘ain’t.’”

“I was just teasing, dear… But isn’t there some way?”

“I’ve tried everything… Dad would know, but I don’t dare tell him. He knows I’m pretty independent… but…”

“We’ll have to stay away for a year after we’re married… It’s rotten for me. I was just offered a job on The Public Ledger.”

“We’ll go to Europe… Dad’ll fix us up for our honeymoon… He’s glad to get me off his hands and I’ve got money in my own right, mother’s money.”

“Maybe it’s all a mistake.”

“How can it be?”

“How long is it since you… noticed…?”

Her eyes were suddenly black and searching in his again. They stared at each other and hated each other. “Quite long enough,” she said and pulled his ear as if he were a child, and went swishing upstairs to dress. The Colonel was tickled to death about the engagement and had invited them all to dinner to celebrate it.

The wedding came off in fine style and J. Ward Moorehouse found himself the center of all eyes in a wellfitting frock coat and a silk hat. People thought he was very handsome. His mother back in Wilmington let flatiron after flatiron cool while she pored over the account in the papers; finally she took off her spectacles and folded the papers carefully and laid them on the ironing board. She was very happy.

The young couple sailed the next day from New York on the Teutonic. The crossing was so rough that only the last two days was it possible to go out on deck. Ward was sick and was taken care of by a sympathetic cockney steward who spoke of Annabelle as the “Madam” and thought she was his mother. Annabelle was a good sailor but the baby made her feel miserable and whenever she looked at herself in her handmirror she was so haggard that she wouldn’t get out of her bunk. The stewardess suggested gin with a dash of bitters in it and it helped her over the last few days of the crossing. The night of the captain’s dinner she finally appeared in the diningroom in an evening gown of black valenciennes and everybody thought her the bestlooking woman on the boat. Ward was in a fever for fear she’d drink too much champagne as he had seen her put away four ponies of gin and bitters and a Martini cocktail while dressing. He had made friends with an elderly banker, Mr. Jarvis Oppenheimer and his wife, and he was afraid that Annabelle would seem a little fast to them. The captain’s dinner went off without a hitch, however, and Annabelle and Ward found that they made a good team. The captain, who had known Dr. Strang, came and sat with them in the smokingroom afterwards and had a glass of champagne with them and with Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheimer and they heard people asking each other who could that charming scintillating brilliant young couple be, somebody interesting surely, and when they went to bed after having seen the lighthouses in the Irish Sea, they felt that all the seasick days had been thoroughly worth while.

Annabelle didn’t like it in London where the dark streets were dismal in a continual drizzle of sleet, so they only stayed a week at the Cecil before crossing to Paris. Ward was sick again on the boat from Folkestone to Boulogne and couldn’t keep track of Annabelle whom he found in the dining saloon drinking brandy and soda with an English army officer when the boat reached the calm water between the long jetties of Boulogne harbor. It wasn’t so bad as he expected being in a country where he didn’t know the language and Annabelle spoke French very adequately and they had a firstclass compartment and a basket with a cold chicken and sandwiches in it and some sweet wine that Ward drank for the first time — when in Rome do as the Romans do — and they were quite the honeymoon couple on the train going down to Paris. They drove in a cab from the station to the Hotel Wagram, with only their handbaggage because the hotel porter took care of the rest, through streets shimmering with green gaslight on wet pavements. The horse’s hoofs rang sharp on the asphalt and the rubbertired wheels of the cab spun smoothly and the streets were crowded in spite of the fact that it was a rainy winter night and there were people sitting out at little marbletop tables round little stoves in front of cafés and there were smells in the air of coffee and wine and browning butter and baking bread. Annabelle’s eyes caught all the lights; she looked very pretty, kept nudging him to show him things and patting his thigh with one hand. Annabelle had written to the hotel, where she had stayed before with her father, and they found a white bedroom and parlor waiting for them and a roundfaced manager who was very elegant and very affable to bow them into it and a fire in the grate. They had a bottle of champagne and some paté de fois gras before going to bed and Ward felt like a king. She took off her traveling clothes and put on a negligee and he put on a smoking jacket that she had given him and that he hadn’t worn and all his bitter feelings of the last month melted away.

They sat a long time looking into the fire smoking Muratti cigarettes out of a tin box. She kept fondling his hair and rubbing her hand round his shoulders and neck. “Why aren’t you more affectionate, Ward?” she said in low gruff tones. “I’m the sort of woman likes to be carried off her feet… Take care… You may lose me… Over here the men know how to make love to a woman.”

“Gimme a chance, won’t you?… First thing I’m going to get a job with some American firm or other. I think Mr. Oppenheimer’ll help me do that. I’ll start in taking French lessons right away. This’ll be a great opportunity for me.” “You funny boy.” “You don’t think I’m going to run after you like a poodledog, do you, without making any money of my own?… Nosiree, bobby.” He got up and pulled her to her feet. “Let’s go to bed.”

Ward went regularly to the Berlitz school for his French lessons and went round to see Notre Dame and Napoleon’s tomb and the Louvre with old Mr. Oppenheimer and his wife. Annabelle, who said that museums gave her a headache, spent her days shopping and having fittings with dressmakers. There were not many American firms in Paris so the only job Ward could get, even with the help of Mr. Oppenheimer who knew everyone, was on Gordon Bennett’s newspaper, the Paris edition of The New York Herald. The job consisted of keeping track of arriving American business men, interviewing them on the beauties of Paris and on international relations. This was his meat and enabled him to make many valuable contacts. Annabelle thought it was all too boring and refused to be told anything about it. She made him put on a dress suit every evening and take her to the opera and theatres. This he was quite willing to do as it was good for his French.

She went to a very famous specialist for women’s diseases who agreed that on no account should she have a baby at this time. An immediate operation was necessary and would be a little dangerous as the baby was so far along. She didn’t tell Ward and only sent word from the hospital when it was over. It was Christmas day. He went immediately to see her. He heard the details in chilly horror. He’d gotten used to the idea of having a baby and thought it would have a steadying effect on Annabelle. She lay looking very pale in the bed in the private sanatorium and he stood beside the bed with his fists clenched without saying anything. At length the nurse said to him that he was tiring madame and he went away. When Annabelle came back from the hospital after four or five days announcing gaily that she was fit as a fiddle and was going to the south of France, he said nothing. She got ready to go, taking it for granted that he was coming, but the day she left on the train to Nice he told her that he was going to stay on in Paris. She looked at him sharply and then said with a laugh, “You’re turning me loose, are you?” “I have my business and you have your pleasure,” he said. “All right, young man, it’s a go.” He took her to the station and put her on the train, gave the conductor five francs to take care of her and came away from the station on foot. He’d had enough of the smell of musk and perfume for a while.

Paris was better than Wilmington but Ward didn’t like it. So much leisure and the sight of so many people sitting round eating and drinking got on his nerves. He felt very homesick the day the Ocean City booklet arrived inclosed with an enthusiastic letter from Colonel Wedgewood. Things were moving at last, the Colonel said; as for himself he was putting every cent he could scrape up, beg or borrow, into options. He even suggested that Ward send him a little money to invest for him, now that he was in a position to risk a stake on the surety of a big turnover; risk wasn’t the word because the whole situation was sewed up in a bag; nothing to do but shake the tree and let the fruit fall into their mouths. Ward went down the steps from the office of Morgan Harjes where he got his mail and out onto Boulevard Haussmann. The heavy coated paper felt good to his fingers. He put the letter in his pocket and walked down the boulevard with the honk of horns and the ring of horse’s hoofs and the shuffle of steps in his ears, now and then reading a phrase. Why, it almost made him want to go back to Ocean City (Maryland) himself. A little ruddy sunlight was warming the winter gray of the streets. A smell of roasting coffee came from somewhere; Ward thought of the white crackling sunlight of windswept days at home; days that lashed you full of energy and hope; the Strenuous Life. He had a date to lunch with Mr. Oppenheimer at a very select little restaurant down in the slums somewhere called the Tour d’Argent. When he got into a red-wheeled taximeter cab it made him feel good again that the driver understood his directions. After all it was educational, made up for those years of college he had missed. He had read through the booklet for the third time when he reached the restaurant.

He got out at the restaurant and was just paying the taxi when he saw Mr. Oppenheimer and another man arriving down the quai on foot. Mr. Oppenheimer wore a gray overcoat and a gray derby of the same pearly color as his moustaches; the other man was a steelgray individual with a thin nose and chin. When he saw them Ward decided that he must be more careful about his clothes in the future.

They ate lunch for a long time and a great many courses, although the steelgray man, whose name was McGill — he was manager of one of Jones and Laughlin’s steel plants in Pittsburgh — said his stomach wouldn’t stand anything but a chop and a baked potato and drank whisky and soda instead of wine. Mr. Oppenheimer enjoyed his food enormously and kept having long consultations about it with the head waiter. “Gentlemen, you must indulge me a little… this for me is a debauch,” he said. “Then, not being under the watchful eye of my wife, I can take certain liberties with my digestion… My wife has entered the sacred precincts of a fitting at her corsetière’s and is not to be disturbed… You, Ward, are not old enough to realize the possibilities of food.” Ward looked embarrassed and boyish and said he was enjoying the duck very much. “Food,” went on Mr. Oppenheimer, “is the last pleasure of an old man.”

When they were sitting over Napoleon brandy in big bowlshaped glasses and cigars, Ward got up his nerve to bring out the Ocean City (Maryland) booklet that had been burning a hole in his pocket all through lunch. He laid it on the table modestly. “I thought maybe you might like to glance at it, Mr. Oppenheimer, as… as something a bit novel in the advertising line.” Mr. Oppenheimer took out his glasses and adjusted them on his nose, took a sip of brandy and looked through the book with a bland smile. He closed it, let a little curling blue cigarsmoke out through his nostrils and said, “Why, Ocean City must be an earthly paradise indeed… Don’t you lay it on… er… a bit thick?” “But you see, sir, we’ve got to make the man on the street just crazy to go there… There’s got to be a word to catch your eye the minute you pick it up.”

Mr. McGill, who up to that time hadn’t looked at Ward, turned a pair of hawkgray eyes on him in a hard stare. With a heavy red hand he reached for the booklet. He read it intently right through while Mr. Oppenheimer went on to talk about the bouquet of the brandy and how you should warm the glass a little in your hand and take it in tiny sips, rather inhaling it than drinking it. Suddenly Mr. McGill brought his fist down on the table and laughed a dry quick laugh that didn’t move a muscle of his face. “By gorry, that’ll get ’em, too,” he said. “I reckon it was Mark Twain said there was a sucker born every minute…” He turned to Ward and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t ketch your name, young feller; do you mind repeating it?” “With pleasure… It’s Moorehouse, J. Ward Moorehouse.” “Where do you work?” “I’m on The Paris Herald for the time being,” said Ward, blushing. “Where do you live when you’re in the States?” “My home’s in Wilmington, Delaware, but I don’t guess I’ll go back there when we go home. I’ve been offered some editorial work on The Public Ledger in Philly.” Mr. McGill took out a visiting card and wrote an address on it. “Well, if you ever think of coming to Pittsburgh, look me up.” “I’d be delighted to see you.”

“His wife,” put in Mr. Oppenheimer, “is the daughter of Dr. Strang, the Philadelphia nose and throat specialist… By the way, Ward, how is the dear girl? I hope Nice has cured her of her tonsilitis.” “Yes, sir,” said Ward, “she writes that she’s much better.” “She’s a lovely creature… charming…” said Mr. Oppenheimer, draining the last sip out of his brandyglass with upcast eyes.

Next day Ward got a wire from Annabelle that she was coming up to Paris. He met her at the train. She introduced a tall Frenchman with a black vandyke beard, who was helping her off with her bags when Ward came up, as “Monsieur Forelle, my traveling companion.” They didn’t get a chance to talk until they got into the cab together. The cab smelt musty as they had to keep the windows closed on account of the driving rain. “Well, my dear,” Annabelle said, “have you got over the pet you were in when I left?… I hope you have because I have bad news for you.” “What’s the trouble?” “Dad’s gotten himself in a mess financially… I knew it’d happen. He has no more idea of business than a cat… Well, that fine Ocean City boom of yours collapsed before it had started and Dad got scared and tried to unload his sandlots and naturally nobody’d buy them… Then the Improvement and Realty Company went bankrupt and that precious Colonel of yours has disappeared and Dad has got himself somehow personally liable for a lot of the concern’s debts…. And there you are. I wired him we were coming home as soon as we could get a sailing. I’ll have to see what I can do… He’s helpless as a child about business.”

“That won’t make me mad. I wouldn’t have come over here anyway if it wasn’t for you.”

“Just all selfsacrifice, aren’t you?”

“Let’s not squabble, Annabelle.”

The last days in Paris Ward began to like it. They heard La Bohème at the opera and were both very much excited about it. Afterwards they went to a café and had some cold partridge and wine and Ward told Annabelle about how he’d wanted to be a songwriter and about Marie O’Higgins and how he’d started to compose a song about her and they felt very fond of each other. He kissed her again and again in the cab going home and the elevator going up to their room seemed terribly slow.

They still had a thousand dollars on the letter of credit Dr. Strang had given them as a wedding present, so that Annabelle bought all sorts of clothes and hats and perfumes and Ward went to an English tailor near the Church of the Madeleine and had four suits made. The last day Ward bought her a brooch in the shape of a rooster, made of Limoges enamel and set with garnets, out of his salary from The Paris Herald. Eating lunch after their baggage had gone to the boat train they felt very tender about Paris and each other and the brooch. They sailed from Havre on the Touraine and had a completely calm passage, a gray glassy swell all the way, although the month was February. Ward wasn’t seasick. He walked round and round the firstclass every morning before Annabelle got up. He wore a Scotch tweed cap and a Scotch tweed overcoat to match, with a pair of fieldglasses slung over his shoulder, and tried to puzzle out some plan for the future. Wilmington anyway was far behind like a ship hull down on the horizon.

The steamer with tugboats chugging at its sides nosed its way through the barges and tugs and carferries and red whistling ferryboats of New York harbor against a howling icybright northwest wind.

Annabelle was grouchy and said it looked horrid, but Ward felt himself full of enthusiasm when a Jewish gentleman in a checked cap pointed out the Battery, the Custom House, the Aquarium and Trinity Church.

They drove right from the dock to the ferry and ate in the red-carpeted diningroom at the Pennsylvania Station in Jersey City. Ward had fried oysters. The friendly darkey waiter in a white coat was like home. “Home to God’s country,” Ward said, and decided he’d have to go down to Wilmington and say hello to the folks. Annabelle laughed at him and they sat stiffly in the parlorcar of the Philadelphia train without speaking.

Dr. Strang’s affairs were in very bad shape and, as he was busy all day with his practice, Annabelle took them over completely. Her skill in handling finance surprised both Ward and her father. They lived in Dr. Strang’s big old house on Spruce Street. Ward, through a friend of Dr. Strang’s, got a job on The Public Ledger and was rarely home. When he had any spare time he listened to lectures on economics and business at the Drexel Institute. Evenings Annabelle took to going out with a young architect named Joachim Beale who was very rich and owned an automobile. Beale was a thin young man with a taste for majolica and Bourbon whisky and he called Annabelle “my Cleopatra.”

Ward come in one night and found them both drunk sitting with very few clothes on in Annabelle’s den in the top of the house. Dr. Strang had gone to a medical conference in Kansas City. Ward stood in the doorway with his arms folded and announced that he was through and would sue for divorce and left the house slamming the door behind him and went to the Y.M.C.A. for the night. Next afternoon when he got to the office he found a special delivery letter from Annabelle begging him to be careful what he did as any publicity would be disastrous to her father’s practice, and offering to do anything he suggested. He immediately answered it:

DEAR ANNABELLE:

I now realize that you have intended all along to use me only as a screen for your disgraceful and unwomanly conduct. I now understand why you prefer the company of foreigners, bohemians and such to that of ambitious young Americans.

I have no desire to cause you or your father any pain or publicity, but in the first place you must refrain from degrading the name of Moorehouse while you still legally bear it and also I shall feel that when the divorce is satisfactorily arranged I shall be entitled to some compensation for the loss of time, etc., and the injury to my career that has come through your fault. I am leaving tomorrow for Pittsburgh where I have a position awaiting me and work that I hope will cause me to forget you and the great pain your faithlessness has caused me.

He wondered for a while how to end the letter, and finally wrote

sincerely JWM

and mailed it.

He lay awake all night in the upper berth in the sleeper for Pittsburgh. Here he was twentythree years old and he hadn’t a college degree and he didn’t know any trade and he’d given up the hope of being a songwriter. God damn it, he’d never be valet to any society dame again. The sleeper was stuffy, the pillow kept getting in a knot under his ear, snatches of the sales talk for Bancroft’s or Bryant’s histories, .. “Through peachorchards to the sea…” Mr. Hillyard’s voice addressing the jury from the depths of the realestate office in Wilmington: “Realestate, sir, is the one safe sure steady conservative investment, impervious to loss by flood and fire; the owner of realestate links himself by indissoluble bonds to the growth of his city or nation… improve or not at his leisure and convenience and sit at home in quiet and assurance letting the riches drop in to his lap that are produced by the unavoidable and inalienable growth in wealth of a mighty nation…” “For a young man with proper connections and if I may say so pleasing manners and a sound classical education,” Mr. Oppenheimer had said, “banking should offer a valuable field for the cultivation of the virtues of energy, diplomacy and perhaps industry….” A hand was tugging at his bedclothes.

“Pittsburgh, sah, in fortyfive minutes,” came the colored porter’s voice. Ward pulled on his trousers, noticed with dismay that they were losing their crease, dropped from the berth, stuck his feet in his shoes that were sticky from being hastily polished with inferior polish, and stumbled along the aisle past dishevelled people emerging from their bunks, to the men’s washroom. His eyes were glued together and he wanted a bath. The car was unbearably stuffy and the washroom smelt of underwear and of other men’s shaving soap. Through the window he could see black hills powdered with snow, an occasional coaltipple, rows of gray shacks all alike, a riverbed scarred with minedumps and slagheaps, purple lacing of trees along the hill’s edge cut sharp against a red sun; then against the hill, bright and red as the sun, a blob of flame from a smelter. Ward shaved, cleaned his teeth, washed his face and neck as best he could, parted his hair. His jaw and cheekbones were getting a square look that he admired. “Cleancut young executive,” he said to himself as he fastened his collar and tied his necktie. It was Annabelle had taught him the trick of wearing a necktie the same color as his eyes. As he thought of her name a faint tactile memory of her lips troubled him, of the musky perfume she used. He brushed the thought aside, started to whistle, stopped for fear the other men dressing might think it peculiar and went and stood on the platform. The sun was well up now, the hills were pink and black and the hollows blue where the smoke of breakfastfires collected. Everything was shacks in rows, ironworks, coaltipples. Now and then a hill threw a row of shacks or a group of furnaces up against the sky. Stragglings of darkfaced men in dark clothes stood in the slush at the crossings. Coalgrimed walls shut out the sky. The train passed through tunnels under crisscrossed bridges, through deep cuttings. “Pittsburgh Union Station,” yelled the porter. Ward put a quarter into the colored man’s hand, picked out his bag from a lot of other bags, and walked with a brisk firm step down the platform, breathing deep the cold coalsmoky air of the trainshed.