waved his hands. We grew impatient. We came to the point of demanding either his music or our money. He made us a spiritual prostration and relinquished our shilling in pain. Perhaps there was some law. There was no time for investigation or for bickering, and, had there been, this serene and ancient town was not the place for it. We went away, and he followed us through one street and another, racked by that obscure inhibition. We tried to get rid of him, but so great was his desire to give us the thing we wanted, and so strangely thwarted, that he clung to us as a shadow. And then, just as we had come to the pitch of violence, he dived into an alleyway, to reappear after an instant, radiant of face, in possession of a small, wriggling, black man, into whose hands he thrust the guitar. Light broke upon us; the whole trouble was that we had mistaken the impresario for the virtuoso. And it was this small black man who drove us out of that delectable city. He played, but his playing was neither exotic nor cloying; it was melancholy and lugubrious to a degree, and of so nerve-racking a monotony that we took to our car in the end and fled, along the narrow, many-colored streets, up the winding hill road, and away across the inland sea of sugar-cane. Sacred Idleness BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE WORK? Not to-day! Ah! no-that were to do WORK? Not The gracious face of heaven a surly wrong, Bright day so manifestly made for song And watch the lordly unindustrious sky, Work? Why, another year-one never knows Nay! while the marvel of the May is ours, Decking the mystic text with blue and gold- Let's watch the dogwood, holding silver trays The Poet BY LAWRENCE PERRY VEN in Mesopotamia we had hints of the case of Eric Jermyn, the "soldier poet." London, as it appeared, or, more strictly speaking, certain circles in London, had made Jermyn an issue. Two armed camps, speaking in the sense of social metaphor, held for the one or the other, while the War Office looked on sardonically silent. I had never met Jermyn, but his reputation before the war as leader of a group of brilliant decadents was universal. He had gone into the O. T. C. at the outbreak of hostilities behind a perfect barrage of vers libre-some of it his own, more and yet more of it the outpouring of his circle. A line or two still lingers: At the altar of Hate-an Altar but purified In blood, the stripling singer Stands to wedlock with an embattled harri dan. The rest escapes me. It was the sheerest futurist rot. Major Miles-Dorgan, who had a voice, used to quote it at mess, until in self-defense we made an antiphonal chant of it. When Jermyn emerged with a lieutenant's commission there was further burning of incense, no whiff of which reached me, fortunately, I at the time being en route eastward. At the Horse Guards, at all events, they seem to have been unimpressed. He was set to drilling recruits in Hyde Park, and they kept him at it nearly a year, when, in a moment of aberration, or inspiration, as one may feel about it, he was sent to France with a London regiment. Consequences were immediate, or practically so. Following a charge of the Scotch and English-including Jermyn's regiment-a unit, which went over the top to clean up, did its work badly, with the result that the Londoners were caught in an enfilading machine-gun fire and literally spat out of existence. Every commissioned officer was either killed or wounded, with the exception of Jermyn. He had not participated in the charge, was, in fact, found nerveless and staring, lying half in and half out of the trench. Either he was actually shell-shocked-the front-line trenches had been under heavy artillery fire-or he was an extraordinary actor. It is no simple matter to fake shell-shock. They suspected him at the field hospital; but the surgeons were divided in their opinions; their differences became acrimonious as Jermyn day after day persisted-whether consciously or otherwise-in his symptoms. Cowardice in the face of the enemy, of course, means death. There's no way out; the name is read to the army and the firing-squad is assembled. It is simply inexorable. Jermyn just missed it. The court martial couldn't quite make it a case of sheer cowardice, so instead of the brick wall he was invalided home, the commanding general subscribing somewhat grudgingly, as it seemed, to the verdict. Later he was gently discharged from the army on the rather vague charge of disability -not qualified even for home service. I am inclined to think Jermyn was secretly overjoyed; but the opportunity was too good for a congenital poseur to miss. He wandered about London with the stride and deep-set melancholy of Hamlet glowing in his dark eyes, a target, or an inspiration, as the case might be, for the editor, the paragrapher, or the tea-table. It must have been stirring. ring. An eminent therapeutist diagnosed Jermyn's chief, in fact his only malady, as a lack of manly intestines; an equally eminent physicist gestured the opinion aside with booming scorn. So much had reached us when I departed from the land of the Turk on my first extended leave, bearing homeward a few honors, more or less cheaply gained, and a wound which had just accomplished, her dinners and evenings ceased to be troublesome. I found London made to order-supremely and unwearyingly delightful even to an American who, after ten years of almost complete expatriation as a London playwright, and three years as a British officer, had returned from the turmoil with a poignant longing for the lights of New York and the embraces of loved ones. Yes, New York, which had refused my plays until the time came when it had to take them second hand from London. However, leave was short and London would do quite. It was May-last May, to be precise; the city in her loveliest investiture of vernal green, and bud and blossom and delicate sunlight and balmy windrush, of which I drank as though it were the elixir of Paracelsus; and, indeed, as may be imagined, it had all the stimulating and revivifying effect attributed to that fabled decoction. There was, you may be sure, no thought of Eric Jermyn as I took my way through the thoroughfares, bound nowhere in particular, thinking of nothing in truth, unless it was that the people one doesn't meet in the West End one doesn't meet anywhere. Piccadilly, for example, was one solid stream of those whom one knew or would like to know-in attire ranging from olivedrab and the somber garb of officialdom to the most inspiring gowns and most beautiful of faces. Progressing, as though in air, saluting, or returning a salute, now and again pausing for a handclasp or a word, I at length turned down Bond Street and ran full upon Sybil Dauriac (Miss Partington in "The Modern Camelot" at the Savoy), whom I had known when she first took London by storm early in 1912-a dark-haired, keen-eyed girl whose fire and intelligence on the stage were held to be altogether anomalous to an avocational indulgence in literature of the pastel sort-delicate as rare lace, and as beautiful-which had, in. conjunction with her professional prestige, given her an extraordinary position in the metropolis. Rarely original in her social conceits, and daring and interesting as well as at her beautiful house in Portland Place had developed into quite the rage, and an invitation bearing her name was a cachet either of rank or artistic individuality. viduality. This was beginning when I entered the war; further particulars had come by hearsay, or through the breezy columns of the Sketch and the Tatler. Personally, the war had taken me quite out of her life-but not out of her recollection, as her radiant smile attested. "Leslie Gaunt-or Captain Gaunt, V. C., of course!" she cried. "This is really delightful. We heard you were a dead hero-then a live one; which is ever so much nicer." She smiled again, nodding. "We've missed your pen; but we couldn't have done without your sword." per Which was very handsome, of course, even though it left me fuddled and without a word. So completely had she filled the picture, so overwhelming the renewal of her dynamic spell, that I had marked the presence of a third son very much as one marks a vague street-lamp in a fog. Now as I turned awkwardly to the man, for, of course, it was a man, in a groping effort for some diversion which would enable me to approximate a less school-boyish poise, I found myself facing still another undoubted personality. He was a beautifully slender man, but it was the face that held me. It was dark, mobile, effeminate-painfully temperamental, a quality enhanced by raven hair of something more than the conventional length, and slumbering brown eyes, beautiful as those of a stag and yet something in them, something vague and impalpable, constituting perhaps more of an impression than anything tangible withal something that never was in the orbs of any noble stag. It was a face, a figure for the velvet suit, the slouch-hat, the glowing tie of the minor poet, the minnesinger; or perchance the painter of miniatures of lovely women. I glanced inquiringly at Sybil, who gestured, as though in her eyes, burning intensely now, study ing me with an expression I did not understand. "Captain Gaunt, this is Mr. Jermyn... Eric Jermyn, you know?" she added, with rising inflexion. I nodded and reached out my hand, a bit mechanically I'm afraid, while she hurried on in a manner very unlike her: "I'm having sort of a 'rag' at Portland Place to-night a week, after the theater -rather out of the ordinary, I hope. You're not leaving London to-day?" I laughed. "Having just arrived, certainly not. But even if I were should wait over-that is, if I'm to understand I'm bidden-” "Why, of course," she interrupted, sharply. Her face flushed. "General Cavendish will be there, and Sir Derric Cecil the War Office, you know? And Lady Jane Ketchell; you'll know them all.... Mr. Jermyn, of course-' She laid subtle emphasis upon the last. "Oh, you'll see. I'm hoping you will find it quite in the old manner. "Jolly! I know I shall—with a certain inimitable improvement. I-" "Leslie," she interpellated, in a characteristically abrupt departure from conversational relationship, moving closer to me with that extraordinary undulatory step of hers, wafting before her an elusive perfume which was less an odor than a personal essence. "Leslie, have you been to your club, any of your clubs or any place where you've talked or heard?" "Heard?" I regarded her dazedly. "Oh, any of the things one does hear in London. Gossip-" I gestured an interruption. "Dear lady, I arrived in London late last night. Aside from my rooms-I've been nowhere. As a matter of fact, I was just bound for-" A second later, through a thaumaturgy which was all Sybil's own, I was bound for her motor at a near-by curb. She was strangely silent as we rode to Portland Place, which gave me some opportunity to know Jermyn. Heaven knows I had no preconceived prejudice against the fellow; throughout, I mean in Mesopotamia, I had been, I think, rather sorry for him, an emotion, as it speedily developed, utterly wasted. For Jermyn, frankly, had been sulking under my undivided attention to Sybil Dauriac, and, like the bud unfolding to rain, he opened to my first signification of regard for him as a living personality. He talked burning, smoldering talkalmost Irvingesque. I had heard about him of course-? He eyed me jealously, accusingly, I thought, until I nodded affirmatively. Í Thenceforward, until the motor was within a short distance of Portland Place, the eternal ego knew no cease, soaring on lurid wings. The voice was couched in low, monodical strain so that for aught I knew he might have been reciting his plaints and pæans in blank verse something long ago thought out and shaped into measure. There was undoubtedly the design to transmit an impression of a soul fiercely stalwart under martyrdom, and superficially this idea was conveyed; but only superficially. For beneath all I had the sense of Jermyn's absorbing enjoyment of his plight, a deep-seated satisfaction in the rôle he was playing. His peroration I recall-I don't really know why-but I recall it word for word, although for the life of me I cannot now say whether it was apropos of preceding outbursts or not. "Gaunt," he said, "there is that courage which suggests to me lilies in an alabaster vase; another courage which I conceive as red roses in a sang de boeuf jar-the one white, innocent, pure; the other bloody, swashbuckling, half swank and half instinct-the sort alone that most men recognize, or at least understand. Can you understand the former? If you can, perhaps I have not spoken in vain." He leaned back wearily and closed his eyes while I, who had uttered no word, nor even nodded, quite dazed in fact by the luxuriance of metaphor and simile, turned to Sybil Dauriac. She, at least, had followed him. Now, flushed, her lips parted, she was watching him intently, her expression something, I decided, that required interpretation. But for the moment the man obsessed me. It wasn't his pyrotechnics - I didn't mind them; no, beyond all that he was unhealthy, not at all in the usual sense of the term as applied to a man |