Autodidacticism: They actually have a name for people like us.

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) or self-education (also self-learning and self-teaching) is education without the guidance of masters (such as teachers and professors) or institutions (such as schools).

Generally, an autodidact is an individual who chooses the subject they will study, their studying material, and the studying rhythm and time. An autodidact may or may not have formal education, and their study may be either a compliment or an alternative to formal education. Many notable contributions have been made by autodidacts.

 The term has its roots in the Ancient Greek words αὐτός (autós, lit. 'self') and διδακτικός (didaktikos, lit. 'teaching'). The related term didacticism defines an artistic philosophy of education.

STRAWBERRY SPRING: A short story by Stephan King

Springheel Jack.

I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how they take me back. All that was eight years ago, almost to the day. Once, while it was going on, I saw myself on nationwide TV - the Walter Cronkite Report. Just a hurrying face in the general background behind the reporter, but my folks picked me out right away. They called long-distance. My dad wanted my analysis of the situation; he was all bluff and hearty and man-to-man. My mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn't want to come home. I was enchanted.

Enchanted by that dark and mist-blown strawberry spring, and by the shadow of violent death that walked through it on those nights eight years ago. The shadow of Springheel Jack.

In New England they call it a strawberry spring. No one knows why; it's just a phrase the old-timers use. They say it happens once every eight or ten years. What happened at New Sharon Teachers' College that particular strawberry spring. . . there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has figured it out, they've never said.

At New Sharon, the strawberry spring began on 16 March 1968. The coldest winter in twenty years broke on that day. It rained and you could smell the sea twenty miles west of the beaches. The snow, which had been thirty-five inches deep in places, began to melt and the campus walks ran with slush. The Winter Carnival snow sculptures, which had been kept sharp and clear-cut for two months by the sub-zero temperatures, at last began to sag and slouch. The caricature of Lyndon Johnson in front of the Tep fraternity house cried melted tears. The dove in front of Prashner Hall lost its frozen feathers and its plywood skeleton showed sadly through in places.

And when night came the fog came with it, moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues and thoroughfares. The pines on the wall poked through it like counting fingers and it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, under the little bridge down by the Civil War cannons. It made things seem out of joint, strange, magical. The unwary traveller would step out of the juke-thumping, brightly lit confusion of the Grinder, expecting the hard clear starriness of winter to clutch him . . . and instead he would suddenly find himself in a silent, muffled world of white drifting fog, the only sound his own footsteps and the soft drip of water from the ancient gutters. You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo and Sam go hurrying past, or to turn and see that the Grinder was gone, vanished, replaced by a foggy panorama of moors and yew trees and perhaps a Druid-circle or a sparkling fairy ring.

The jukebox played 'Love Is Blue' that year. It played 'Hey, Jude' endlessly, endlessly. It played 'Scarborough Fair.

And at ten minutes after eleven on that night a junior named John Dancey on his way back to his dormitory began screaming into the fog, dropping books on and between the sprawled legs of the dead girl lying in a shadowy corner of the Animal Sciences parking lot, her throat cut from ear to ear but her eyes open and almost seeming to sparkle as if she had just successfully pulled off the funniest joke of her young life - Dancey, an education major and a speech minor, screamed and screamed and screamed.

The next day was overcast and sullen, and we went to classes with questions eager in our mouths - who? why? when do you think they'll get him? And always the final thrilled question: Did you know her? Did you know her?

Yes, I had an art class with her.

Yes, one of my room-mate 's friends dated her last term.

Yes, she asked me for a light once in the Grinder. She was at the next table.

Yes, Yes, I

Yes. . . yes. . . oh yes, I

We all knew her. Her name was Gale Cerman (pronounced Kerr-man), and she was an art major. She wore granny glasses and had a good figure. She was well liked but her room-mates had hated her. She had never gone out much even though she was one of the most promiscuous girls on campus. She was ugly but cute. She had been a vivacious girl who talked little and smiled seldom. She had been pregnant and she had had leukemia. She was a lesbian who had been murdered by her boy-friend. It was strawberry spring, and on the morning of 17 March we all knew Gale Cerman.

Half a dozen State Police cars crawled on to the campus, most of them parked in front of Judith Franklin Hall, where the Cerman girl had lived. On my way past there to my ten o clock class I was asked to show my student ID. I was clever. I showed him the one without the fangs.

'Do you carry a knife?' the policeman asked cunningly.

'Is it about Gale Cerman?' I asked, after I told him that the most lethal thing on my person was a rabbit's-foot key chain.

'What makes you ask?' He pounced.

I was five minutes late to class.

It was strawberry spring and no one walked by themselves through the half-academical, half-fantastical campus that night. The fog had come again, smelling of the sea, quiet and deep.

Around nine o'clock my room-mate burst into our room, where I had been busting my brains on a Milton essay since seven. 'They caught him,' he said. 'I heard it over at the Grinder.'

'From who?'

'I don't know. Some guy. Her boy4riend did it. His name is Carl Amalara.'

I settled back, relieved and disappointed. With a name like that it had to be true. A lethal and sordid little crime of passion.

'Okay,' I said. 'That's good.'

He left the room to spread the news down the hall. I reread my Milton essay, couldn't figure out what I had been trying to say, tore it up and started again.

It was in the papers the next day. There was an incongruously neat picture of Amalara - probably a high-school graduation picture - and it showed a rather sad-looking boy with an olive complexion and dark eyes and pockmarks on his nose. The boy had not confessed yet, but the evidence against him was strong. He and Gale Cerman had argued a great deal in the last month or so, and had broken up the week before. Amalara's roomie said he had been 'despondent'. In a footlocker under his bed, police had found a seven-inch hunting knife from L. L. Bean's and a picture of the girl that had apparently been cut up with a pair of shears.

Beside Amalara's picture was one of Gale Cerman. It blurrily showed a dog, a peeling lawn flamingo, and a rather mousy blonde girl wearing spectacles. An uncomfortable smile had turned her lips up and her eyes were squinted. One hand was on the dog's head. It was true then. It had to be true.

The fog came again that night, not on little cat's feet but in an improper silent sprawl. I walked that night. I had a headache and I walked for air, smelling the wet, misty smell of the spring that was slowly wiping away the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches of last year's grass bare and uncovered, like the head of a sighing old grandmother.

For me, that was one of the most beautiful nights I can remember. The people I passed under the haloed streetlights were murmuring shadows, and all of them seemed to be lovers, walking with hands and eyes linked. The melting snow dripped and ran, dripped and ran, and from every dark storm drain the sound of the sea drifted up, a dark winter sea now strongly ebbing.

I walked until nearly midnight, until I was thoroughly mildewed, and I passed many shadows, heard many footfalls clicking dreamily off down the winding paths. Who is to say that one of those shadows was not the man or the thing that came to be known as Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no faces.

The next morning the clamour in the hall woke me. I blundered out to see who had been drafted, combing my hair with both hands and running the fuzzy caterpillar that had craftily replaced my tongue across the dry roof of my mouth.

'He got another one,' someone said to me, his face pallid with excitement. 'They had to let him go.'

'Who go?'

'Amalara!' someone else said gleefully. 'He was sitting in jail when it happened.

When what happened?' I asked patiently. Sooner or later I would get it. I was sure of that.

'The guy killed somebody else last night. And now they're hunting all over for it.'

'For what?'

The pallid face wavered in front of me again. 'Her head. Whoever killed her took her head with him.'

New Sharon isn't a big school now, and was even smaller then - the kind of institution the public relations people chummily refer to as a 'community college'. And it really was like a small community, at least in those days; between you and your friends, you probably had at least a nodding acquaintance with everybody else and their friends. Gale

Cerman had been the type of girl you just nodded to, thinking vaguely that you had seen her around.

We all knew Ann Bray. She had been the first runner-up in the Miss New England pageant the year before, her talent performance consisting of twirling a flaming baton to the tune of 'Hey, Look Me Over'. She was brainy, too; until the time of her death she had been editor of the school newspaper (a once-weekly rag with a lot of political cartoons and bombastic letters), a member of the student dramatics society, and president of the National Service Sorority, New Sharon Branch. In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth I had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date - turned down on both counts.

And now she was dead. . . worse than dead.

I walked to my afternoon classes like everyone else, nodding to people I knew and saying hi with a little more force than usual, as if that would make up for the close way I studied their faces. Which was the same way they were studying mine. There was someone dark among us, as dark as the paths which twisted across the mall or wound among the hundred-year-old oaks on the quad in back of the gymnasium. As dark as the hulking Civil War cannons seen through a drifting membrane of fog. We looked into each other's faces and tried to read the darkness behind one of them.

This time the police arrested no one. The blue beetles patrolled the campus ceaselessly on the foggy spring nights of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth, and spotlights stabbed in to dark nooks and crannies with erratic eagerness. The administration imposed a mandatory nine o'clock curfew. A foolhardy couple discovered necking in the landscaped bushes north of the Tate Alumni Building were taken to the New Sharon police station and grilled unmercifully for three hours.

There was a hysterical false alarm on the twentieth when a boy was found unconscious in the same parking lot where the body of Gale Cerman had been found. A gibbering campus cop loaded him into the back of his cruiser and put a map of the county over his face without bothering to hunt for a pulse and started towards the local hospital, siren wailing across the deserted campus like a seminar of banshees.

Halfway there the corpse in the back seat had risen and asked hollowly, 'Where the hell am I?' The cop shrieked and ran off the road. The corpse turned out to be an undergrad named Donald Morris who had been in bed the last two days with a pretty lively case of flu - was it Asian last year? I can't remember. Anyway, he fainted in the parking lot on his way to the Grinder for a bowl of soup and some toast.

The days continued warm and overcast. People clustered in small groups that had a tendency to break up and re-form with surprising speed. Looking at the same set of faces for too long gave you funny ideas about some of them. And the speed with which rumours swept from one end of the campus to the other began to approach the speed of light; a well-liked history professor had been overheard laughing and weeping down by the small bridge; Gale Cerman had left a cryptic two-word message written in her own blood on the blacktop of the Animal Sciences parking lot; both murders were actually political crimes, ritual murders that had been performed by an offshoot of the SDS to protest the war. This was really laughable. The New Sharon SDS had seven members. One fair-sized offshoot would have bankrupted the whole organization. This fact brought an even more sinister embellishment from the campus rightwingers: outside agitators. So during those queer, warm days we all kept our eyes peeled for them.

The press, always fickle, ignored the strong resemblance our murderer bore to Jack the Ripper and dug further back - all the way to 1819. Ann Bray had been found on a soggy path of ground some twelve feet from the nearest sidewalk, and yet there were no footprints, not even her own. An enterprising New Hampshire newsman with a passion for the arcane christened the killer Springheel Jack, after the infamous Dr John Hawkins of Bristol, who did five of his wives to death with odd pharmaceutical knick-knacks. And the name, probably because of that soggy yet unmarked ground, stuck.

On the twenty-first it rained again, and the mall and quadrangle became quagmires. The police announced that they were salting plainclothes detectives, men and women, about, and took half the police cars off duty.

The campus newspaper published a strongly indignant, if slightly incoherent, editorial protesting this. The upshot of it seemed to be that, with all sorts of cops masquerading as students, it would be impossible to tell a real outside agitator from a false one.

Twilight came and the fog with it, drifting up the tree-lined avenues slowly, almost thoughtfully, blotting out the buildings one by one. It was soft, insubstantial stuff, but somehow implacable and frightening. Springheel Jack was a man, no one seemed to doubt that, but the fog was his accomplice and it was female. . . or so it seemed to me. If was as if our little school was caught between them, squeezed in some crazy lover's embrace, part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood. I sat and smoked and watched the lights come on in the growing darkness and wondered if it was all over. My room-mate came in and shut the door quietly behind him.

'It's going to snow soon,' he said.

I turned around and looked at him. 'Does the radio say that?'

'No,' he said. 'Who needs a weatherman? Have you ever heard of strawberry spring?'

'Maybe,' I said. 'A long time ago. Something grandmothers talk about, isn't it?'

He stood beside me, looking out at the creeping dark.

'Strawberry spring is like Indian summer,' he said, 'only much more rare. You get a good Indian summer in this part of the country once every two or three years. A spell of weather like we've been having is supposed to come only every eight or ten. It's a false spring, a lying spring, like Indian summer is a false summer. My own grandmother used to say strawberry spring means the worst norther of the winter is still on the way - and the longer this lasts, the harder the storm.

'Folk tales,' I said. 'Never believe a word.' I looked at him. But I'm nervous. Are you?'

He smiled benevolently and stole one of my cigarettes from the open pack on the window ledge. 'I suspect everyone but me. and thee,' he said, and then the smile faded a little. 'And sometimes I wonder about thee. Want to go over to the Union and shoot some eight-ball? I'll spot you ten.'

'Trig prelim next week. I'm going to settle down with a magic marker and a hot pile of notes.'

For a long time after he was gone, I could only look out the window. And even after I had opened my book and started in, part of me was still out there, walking in the shadows where something dark was now in charge.

That night Adelle Parkins was killed. Six police cars and seventeen collegiate-looking plain clothes men (eight of them were women imported all the way from Boston) patrolled the campus. But Springheel Jack killed her just the same, going unerringly for one of our own. The false spring, the lying spring, aided and abetted him - he killed her and left her propped behind the wheel of her 1964 Dodge to be found the next morning and they found part of her in the back seat and part of her in the trunk. And written in blood on the windshield - this time fact instead of rumour - were two words: HA! HA!

The campus went slightly mad after that; all of us and none of us had known Adelle Parkins. She was one of those nameless, harried women who worked the break-back shift in the Grinder from six to eleven at night, facing hordes of hamburger-happy students on study break from the library across the way. She must have had it relatively easy those last three foggy nights of her life; the curfew was 'being rigidly observed, and after nine the Grinder's only patrons were hungry cops and happy janitors - the empty buildings had improved their habitual bad temper considerably.

There is little left to tell. The police, as prone to hysteria as any of us and driven against the wall, arrested an innocuous homosexual sociology graduate student named Hanson Gray, who claimed he 'could not remember' where he had spent several of the lethal evenings. They charged him, arraigned him, and let him go to scamper hurriedly back to his native New Hampshire town after the last unspeakable night of strawberry spring when Marsha Curran was slaughtered on the mall.

Why she had been out and alone is forever beyond knowing - she was a fat, sadly pretty thing who lived in an apartment in town with three other girls. She had slipped on campus as silently and as easily as Springheel Jack himself. What brought her? Perhaps her need was as deep and as ungovernable as her killer's, and just as far beyond understanding. Maybe a need for one desperate and passionate romance with the warm night, the warm fog, the smell of the sea, and the cold knife.

That was on the twenty-third. On the twenty-fourth the president of the college announced that spring break would be moved up a week, and we scattered, not joyfully but like frightened sheep before a storm, leaving the campus empty and haunted by the police and one dark spectre.

I had my own car on campus, and I took six people downstate with me, their luggage crammed in helter-skelter. It wasn't a pleasant ride. For all any of us knew, Springheel Jack might have been in the car with us.

That night the thermometer dropped fifteen degrees, and the whole northern New England area was belted by a shrieking norther that began in sleet and ended in a foot of snow. The usual number of old duffers had heart attacks shovelling it away - and then, like magic, it was April. Clean showers and starry nights.

They called it strawberry spring, God knows why, and it's an evil, lying time that only comes once every eight or ten years. Springheel Jack left with the fog, and by early June, campus conversation had turned to a series of draft protests and a sit-in at the building where a well-known napalm manufacturer was holding job interviews. By June, the subject of Springheel Jack was almost unanimously avoided - at least aloud. I suspect there were many who turned it over and over privately, looking for the one crack in the seemless egg of madness that would make sense of it all.

That was the year I graduated, and the next year was the year I married. A good job in a local publishing house. In 1971 we had a child, and now he's almost school age. A fine and questing boy with my eyes and her mouth.

Then, today's paper.

Of course I knew it was here. I knew it yesterday morning when I got up and heard the mysterious sound of snowmelt running down the gutters, and smelled the salt tang of the ocean from our front porch, nine miles from the nearest beach. I knew strawberry spring had come again when I started home from work last night and had to turn on my headlights against the mist that was already beginning to creep out of the fields and hollows, blurring the lines of the buildings and putting fairy haloes around the street lamps.

This morning's paper says a girl was killed on the New Sharon campus near the Civil War cannons. She was killed last night and found in a melting snowbank. She was not she was not all there.

My wife is upset. She wants to know where I was last night. I can't tell her because I don't remember. I remember starting home from work, and I remember putting my headlights on to search my way through the lovely creeping fog, but that's all I remember.

I've been thinking about that foggy night when I had a headache and walked for air and passed all the lovely shadows without shape or substance. And I've been thinking about the trunk of my car - such an ugly word, trunk -and wondering why in the world I should be afraid to open it.

I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night.

And oh dear God, I think so too.

THE CAPTURED SHADOW: A short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  

BASIL DUKE LEE shut the front door behind him and turned on

the dining-room light. His mother's voice drifted sleepily downstairs :

"Basil, is that you?"

"No, mother, it's a burglar/'

"It seems to me twelve o'clock is pretty late for a fifteen-year-old

boy."

"We went to Smith's and had a soda."

Whenever a new responsibility devolved upon Basil he was "a

boy almost sixteen," but when a privilege was in. question, he was

"a fifteen-year-old boy."

There were footsteps above, and Mrs. Lee, in kimono, descended

to the first landing.

"Did you and Riply enjoy the play?"

"Yes, very much."

"What was it about?"

"Oh, it was just about this man. Just an ordinary play."

"Didn't it have a name?"

"< Are You a Mason?'"

"Oh." She hesitated, covetously watching his alert and eager face,

holding him there. "Aren't you coming to bed?"

"I'm going to get something to eat."

"Something more?"

For a moment he didn't answer. He stood in front of a glassed-in

bookcase in the living room, examining its contents with an equally

glazed eye.

"We're going to get up a play," he said suddenly. "I'm going to

write it."

"Well that'll be very nice. Please come to bed soon. You were

up late last night, too, and you've got dark circles under your

eyes."

From the bookcase Basil presently extracted "Van Bibber and

Others," from which he read while he ate a large plate of straw

softened with a half pint of cream. Back in the living room he sat

for a few minutes at the piano, digesting, and meanwhile staring at

the colored cover of a song from "The Midnight Sons." It showed

three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially

along Broadway against the blazing background of Times Square.

Basil would have denied incredulously the suggestion that that was

currently his favorite work of art. But it was.

He went upstairs. From a drawer of his desk he took out a com-

position book and opened it.

BASIL DUKE LEE

ST. REGIS SCHOOL

EASTCHESTER, CONN.

FIFTH FORM FRENCH

and on the next page, under Irregular Verbs :

PRESENT

je connais nous con

tu connais

il connait

He turned over another page.

MR. WASHINGTON SQUARE

A Musical Comedy by

BASIL DUKE LEE

Music by Victor Herbert

ACT I

[The porch of the Millionaires' Club, near New York.

Opening Chorus, LEILIA and DEBUTANTES :

We sing not soft, we sing not loud

For no one ever heard an opening chorus.

We are a very merry crowd

But no one ever heard an opening chorus.

We f re just a crowd of debutantes

As merry as can be

And nothing that there is could ever bore us

We're the wittiest ones, the prettiest ones.

In all society

But no one ever heard an opening chorus.

LEILIA (stepping forward) : Well, girls, has Mr. Washington

Square been around here today?

Basil turned over a page. There was no answer to Leilia's question.

Instead in capitals was a brand-new heading :

HIC! HIC! HIC!

A Hilarious Farce in One Act

by

BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[A fashionable apartment near Broadway, New York City. It is

almost midnight. As the curtain goes up there is a knocking at the

door and a jew minutes later it opens to admit a handsome man in

a full evening dress and a companion. He has evidently been imbib-

ing, for his words are thick, his nose is red, and he can hardly stand

up. He turns up the light and comes down centre.

STUYVESANT: Hicl Hie! Hie!

O'HARA (his companion) : Begorra, you been sayin' nothing else

all this evening.

Basil turned over a page and then another, reading hurriedly, but

not without interest.

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN : Now, if you are an educated man, as you

claim, perhaps you can tell me the Latin word for "this."

STUYVESANT: Hie! Hie! Hie!

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN : Correct. Very good indeed. I

At this point Hie ! Hie ! Hie ! came to an end in midsentence. On

the following page, in just as determined a hand as if the last two

works had not faltered by the way, was the heavily underlined be-

ginning of another :

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts

by BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[All three acts take place in the library of the VAN BAKERS* house in

New York. It is well furnished with a red lamp on one side and

some crossed spears and helmets and so on and a divan and a general

air of an oriental den.

When the curtain rises Miss SAUNDERS, LEILIA VAN BAKER

The Captured Shadow 349

ESTELLA GARBAGE are sitting at a table. Miss SAUNDERS is an old

maid about forty very kittenish. LEILIA is pretty with dark hair.

ESTELLA has light hair. They are a striking combination.

"The Captured Shadow" filled the rest of the book and ran over

into several loose sheets at the end. When it broke off Basil sat for

a while in thought. This had been a season of "crook comedies" in

New York, and the feel, the swing, the exact and vivid image of the

two he had seen, were in the foreground of his mind. At the time

they had been enormously suggestive, opening out into a world much

larger and more brilliant than themselves that existed outside their

windows and beyond their doors, and it was this suggested world

rather than any conscious desire to imitate "Officer 666" that had in-

spired the effort before him. Presently he printed ACT II at the head

of a new tablet and began to write.

An hour passed. Several times he had recourse to a collection of

joke books and to an old Treasury of Wit and Humor which em-

balmed the faded Victorian cracks of Bishop Wilberforce and Sydney

Smith. At the moment when, in his story, a door moved slowly open,

he heard a heavy creak upon the stairs. He jumped to his feet,

aghast and trembling, but nothing stirred; only a white moth

bounced against the screen, a clock struck the half-hour far across

the city, a bird whacked its wings in a tree outside.

Voyaging to the bathroom at half-past four, he saw with a shock

that morning was already blue at the window. He had stayed up all

night. He remembered that people who stayed up all night went

crazy and, transfixed in the hall, he tried agonizingly to listen to him-

self, to feel whether or not he was going crazy. The things around

him seemed prenaturally unreal, and rushing frantically back into

his bedroom, he began tearing off his clothes, racing after the vanish-

ing night. Undressed, he threw a final regretful glance at his pile of

manuscript he had the whole next scene in his head. As a com-

promise with incipient madness he got into bed and wrote for an

hour more.

Late next morning he was startled awake by one of the ruthless

Scandinavian sisters who, in theory, were the Lees' servants. "Eleven

o'clock!" she shouted. "Five after!"

"Let me alone," Basil mumbled. "What do you come and wake me

up for?"

"Somebody downstairs." He opened his eyes. "You ate all the

cream last night," Hilda continued. "Your mother didn't have any

for her coffee."

"All the cream ! " he cried. "Why, I saw some more."

"That's terrible," he exclaimed, sitting up. "Terrible ! "

For a moment she enjoyed his dismay. Then she said, "Riply

Buckner's downstairs," and went out, closing the door.

"Send him up!" he called after her. "Hilda, why don't you ever

listen for a minute? Did I get any mail?"

There was no answer. A moment later Riply came in.

"My gosh, are you still in bed?"

"I wrote on the play all night. I almost finished Act Two." He

pointed to his desk.

"That's what I want to talk to you about," said Riply. "Mother

thinks we ought to get Miss Halliburton."

"What for?"

"Just to sort of be there."

Though Miss Halliburton was a pleasant person who combined the

occupations of French teacher and bridge teacher, unofficial chaperon

and children's friend, Basil felt that her superintendence would give

the project an unprofessional ring.

"She wouldn't interfere," went on Riply, obviously quoting his

mother. "I'll be the business manager and you'll direct the play, just

like we said, but it would be good to have her there for prompter

and to keep order at rehearsals. The girls' mothers'll like it."

"All right," Basil agreed reluctantly. "Now look, let's see who

we'll have in the cast. First, there's the leading man this gentleman

burglar that's called The Shadow. Only it turns out at the end that

he's really a young man about town doing it on a bet, and not really

a burglar at all."

"That's you."

"No, that's you."

"Come on ! You're the best actor," protested Riply.

"No, I'm going to take a smaller part, so I can coach."

"Well, haven't I got to be business manager?"

Selecting the actresses, presumably all eager, proved to be a diffi-

cult matter. They settled finally on Imogene Bissel for leading lady ;

Margaret Torrence for her friend, and Connie Davies for "Miss

Saunders, an old maid very kittenish."

On Riply's suggestion that several other girls wouldn't be pleased

at being left out, Basil introduced a maid and a cook, "who could

just sort of look in from the kitchen." He rejected firmly Riply's

further proposal that there should be two or three maids, "a sort of

sewing woman," and a trained nurse. In a house so clogged with

femininity even the most umbrageous of gentleman burglars would

have difficulty in moving about.

"I’ll tell you two people we won't have," Basil said meditatively

"that's Joe Gorman and Hubert Blair."

"I wouldn't be in it if we had Hubert Blair," asserted Riply.

"Neither would I."

Hubert Blair's almost miraculous successes with girls had caused

Basil and Riply much jealous pain.

They began calling up the prospective cast and immediately the

enterprise received its first blow. Imogene Bissel was going to

Rochester, Minnesota, to have her appendix removed, and wouldn't

be back for three weeks.

They considered.

"How about Margaret Torrence ?"

Basil shook his head. He had vision of Leilia Van Baker as some-

one rarer and more spirited than Margaret Torrence. Not that Leilia

had much being, even to Basil less than the Harrison Fisher girls

pinned around his wall at school. But she was not Margaret Tor-

rence. She was no one you could inevitably see by calling up half an

hour before on the phone.

He discarded candidate after candidate. Finally a face began to

flash before his eyes, as if in another connection, but so insistently

that at length he spoke the name.

"Evelyn Beebe."

"Who?"

Though Evelyn Beebe was only sixteen, her precocious charms had

elevated her to an older crowd and to Basil she seemed of the very

generation of his heroine, Leilia Van Baker. It was a little like asking

Sarah Bernhardt for her services, but once her name had occurred

to him, other possibilities seemed pale.

At noon they rang the Beebe 's door-bell, stricken by a paralysis of

embarrassment when Evelyn opened the door herself and, with polite-

ness that concealed a certain surprise, asked them in.

Suddenly, through the portiere of the living room, Basil saw and

recognized a young man in golf knickerbockers.

"I guess we better not come in," he said quickly. *

"We'll come some other time," Riply added.

Together they started precipitately for the door, but she barred

their way.

"Don't be silly," she insisted. "It's just Andy Lockheart."

Just Andy Lockheart winner of the Western Golf Championship

at eighteen, captain of his freshman baseball team, handsome, suc-

cessful at everything he tried, a living symbol of the splendid,

glamorous world of Yale. For a year Basil had walked like him and

tried unsuccessfully to play the piano by ear as Andy Lockheart was

able to do.

Through sheer ineptitude at escaping, they were edged into the

room. Their plan suddenly seemed presumptuous and absurd.

Perceiving their condition Evelyn tried to soothe them with pleas-

ant banter.

"Well, it's about time you came to see me," she told Basil. "Here

I've been sitting home every night waiting for you ever since the

Davies dance. Why haven't you been here before?"

He stared at her blankly, unable even to smile, and muttered:

"Yes, you have."

"I have though. Sit down and tell me why you've been neglecting

me! I suppose you've both been rushing the beautiful Imogene

Bissel."

"Why, I understand " said Basil. "Why, I heard from somewhere

that she's gone up to have some kind of an appendicitis that is "

He ran down to a pitch of inaudibility as Andy Lockheart at the

piano began playing a succession of thoughtful chords, which resolved

itself into the maxixe, an eccentric stepchild of the tango. Kicking

back a rug and lifting her skirts a little, Evelyn fluently tapped out

a circle with her heels around the floor.

They sat inanimate as cushions on the sofa watching her. She was

almost beautiful, with rather large features and bright fresh color,

behind which her heart seemed to be trembling a little with laughter.

Her voice and her lithe body were always mimicking, ceaselessly

caricaturing every sound and movement near by, until even those

who disliked her admitted that "Evelyn could always make you

laugh." She finished her dance now with a false stumble and an awed

expression as she clutched at the piano, and Basil and Riply

chuckled. Seeing their embarrassment lighten, she came and sat down

beside them, and they laughed again when she said: "Excuse my

lack of self-control."

"Do you want to be the leading lady in a play we're going to give ?"

demanded Basil with sudden desperation. "We're going to have it at

the Martindale School, for the benefit of the Baby Welfare."

"Basil, this is so sudden."

Andy Lockheart turned around from the piano.

" What're you going to give a minstrel show ?"

"No, it's a crook play named "The Captured Shadow." Miss Halli-

burton is going to coach it." He suddenly realized the convenience of

that name to shelter himself behind.

"Why don't you give something like "The Private Secretary"?"

interrupted Andy. "There's a good play for you. We gave it my last

year at school."

"Oh, no, it's all settled," said Basil quickly. "We're going to put

on this play that I wrote."

"You wrote it yourself?" exclaimed Evelyn.

"Yes."

"My-y gosh ! " said Andy. He began to play again.

"Look, Evelyn," said Basil. "It's only for three weeks, and you'd

be the leading lady."

She laughed. "Oh, no. I couldn't. Why don't you get Imogene?"

"She's sick, I tell you. Listen "

"Or Margaret Torrence?"

"I don't want anybody but you."

The directness of this appeal touched her and momentarily she

hesitated. But the hero of the Western Golf Championship turned

around from the piano with a teasing smile and she shook her head.

"I can't do it, Basil. I may have to go East with the family."

Reluctantly Basil and Riply got up.

"Gosh, I wish you'd be in it, Evelyn."

"I wish I could."

Basil lingered, thinking fast, wanting her more than ever ; indeed,

without her, it scarcely seemed worth while to go on with the play.

Suddenly a desperate expedient took shape on his lips :

"You certainly would be wonderful. You see, the leading man is

going to be Hubert Blair."

Breathlessly he watched her, saw her hesitate.

"Good-by," he said.

She came with them to the door and then out on the veranda,

frowning a little.

"How long did you say the rehearsals would take?" she asked

thoughtfully.

II

On an August evening three days later Basil read the play to the

cast on Miss Halliburton's porch. He was nervous and at first there

were interruptions of "Louder" and "Not so fast." Just as his audi-

ence was beginning to be amused by the repartee of the two comic

crooks repartee that had seen service with Weber and Fields he

was interrupted by the late arrival of Hubert Blair.

Hubert was fifteen, a somewhat shallow boy save for two or three

felicities which he possessed to an extraordinary degree. But one

excellence suggests the presence of others, and young ladies never

failed to respond to his most casual fancy, enduring his fickleness of

heart and never convinced that his fundamental indifference might

not be overcome. They were dazzled by his flashing self-confidence,

by his cherubic ingenuousness, which concealed a shrewd talent for

getting around people, and by his extraordinary physical grace.

Long-legged, beautifully proportioned, he had that tumbler's balance

usually characteristic only of men "built near the ground." He was

in constant motion that was a delight to watch, and Evelyn Beebe

was not the only older girl who had found in him a mysterious prom-

ise and watched him, for a long time with something more than

curiosity.

He stood in the doorway now with an expression of bogus rever

ence on his round pert face.

"Excuse me," he said. "Is this the First Methodist Episcopal

Church ?" Everybody laughed even Basil. "I didn't know. I thought

maybe I was in the right church, but in the wrong pew."

They laughed again, somewhat discouraged. Basil waited until

Hubert had seated himself beside Evelyn Beebe. Then he began to

read once more, while the others, fascinated, watched Hubert's efforts

to balance a chair on its hind legs. This squeaky experiment con-

tinued as an undertone to the reading. Not until Basil's desperate

"Now, here's where you come in, Hube," did attention swing back

to the play.

Basil read for more than an hour. When, at the end, he closed the

composition book and looked up shyly, there was a burst of spon-

taneous applause. He had followed his models closely, and for all its

grotesqueries, the result was actually interesting it was a play.

Afterward he lingered, talking to Miss Halliburton, and he walked

home glowing with excitement and rehearsing a little by himself

into the August night.

The first week of rehearsal was a matter of Basil climbing back

and forth from auditorium to stage, crying, "No ! Look here, Connie ;

you come in more like this." Then things began to happen. Mrs. Van

Schellinger came to rehearsal one day and, lingering afterward, an-

nounced that she couldn't let Gladys be in "a play about crimi-

nals." Her theory was that this element could be removed; for

instance, the two comic crooks could be changed to "two funny

farmers."

Basil listened with horror. When she had gone he assured Miss

Halliburton that he would change nothing. Luckily Gladys played

the cook, an interpolated part that could be summarily struck out,

but her absence was felt in another way. She was tranquil and tract-

able, "the most carefully brought-up girl in town," and at her with-

drawal rowdiness appeared during rehearsals. Those who had only

such lines as "I'll ask Mrs. Van Baker, sir," in Act I and "No,

ma'am," in Act III showed a certain tendency to grow restless in be-

tween. So now it was :

"Please keep that dog quiet or else send him home ! " or :

"Where's that maid ? Wake up, Margaret, for heaven's sake ! " or :

"What is there to laugh at that's so darn funny?"

More and more the chief problem was the tactful management of

Hubert Blair. Apart from his unwillingness to learn his lines, he was

a satisfactory hero, but off the stage he became a nuisance. He gave

an endless private performance for Evelyn Beebe, which took such

forms as chasing her amorously around the hall or flipping peanuts

over his shoulder to land mysteriously on the stage. Called to order,

he would mutter, "Aw, shut up yourself," just loud enough for Basil

to guess, but not to hear.

But Evelyn Beebe was all that Basil had expected. Once on the

stage she compelled a breathless attention, and Basil recognized this

by adding to her part. He envied the half -sentimental fun that she

and Hubert derived from their scenes together and he felt a vague,

impersonal jealousy that almost every night after rehearsal they

drove around together in Hubert's car.

One afternoon when matters had progressed a fortnight, Hubert

came in an hour late, loafed through the first act and then informed

Miss Halliburton that he was going home.

"What for?" Basil demanded.

"I've got some things I got to do."

"Are they important?"

"What business is that of yours?"

"Of course it's my business," said Basil heatedly, whereupon Miss

Halliburton interfered.

"There's no use of anybody getting angry. What Basil means,

Hubert, is that if it's just some small thing why, we're all giving'

up our pleasure to make this play a success."

Hubert listened with obvious boredom.

"I've got to drive downtown and get father."

He looked coolly at Basil, as if challenging him to deny the ade-

quacy of this explanation.

"They why did you come an hour late ?" demanded Basil.

"Because I had to do something for mother."

A group had gathered and he glanced around triumphantly. It was

one of those sacred excuses, and only Basil saw that it was dis-

ingenuous.

"Oh, tripe! "he said.

"Maybe you think so Bossy."

Basil took a step toward him, his eyes blazing.

"What'dyousay?"

"I said 'Bossy.' Isn't that what they call you at school?"

It was true. It had followed him home. Even as he went white

with rage a vast impotence surged over him at the realization that the

past was always lurking near. The faces of school were around him,

sneering and watching. Hubert laughed.

"Get out ! " said Basil in a strained voice. "Go on ! Get right out ! "

Hubert laughed again, but as Basil took a step toward him he re-

treated.

"I don't want to be in your play anyhow. I never did."

"Then go on out of this hall."

"Now, Basil ! " Miss Halliburton hovered breathlessly beside them.

Hubert laughed again and looked about for his cap.

"I wouldn't be in your crazy old show," he said. He turned slowly

and jauntily, and sauntered out the dooj.

Riply Buckner read Hubert's part that afternoon, but there was a

cloud upon the rehearsal. Miss Beebe's performance lacked its cus-

tomary verve and the others clustered and whispered, falling silent

when Basil came near. After the rehearsal, Miss Halliburton, Riply

and Basil held a conference. Upon Basil flatly refusing to take the

leading part, it was decided to enlist a certain Mayall De Bee, known

slightly to Riply, who had made a name for himself in theatricals

at the Central High School.

But next day a blow fell that was irreparable. Evelyn, flushed and

uncomfortable, told Basil and Miss Halliburton that her family's

plans had changed they were going East next week and she couldn't

be in the play after all. Basil understood. Only Hubert had held her

this long.

"Good-by," he said gloomily.

His manifest despair shamed her and she tried to justify herself.

"Really, I can't help it. Oh, Basil, I'm so sorry!"

"Coudn't you stay over a week with me after your family goes?"

Miss Halliburton asked innocently.

"Not possibly. Father wants us all to go together. That's the only

reason. If it wasn't for that I'd stay."

"All right," Basil said. "Good-by."

"Basil, you're not mad, are you?" A gust of repentance swept over

her. "I'll do anything to help. I'll come to rehearsals this week until

you get someone else, and then I'll try to help her all I can. But

father says we've got to go."

In vain Riply tried to raise Basil's morale after the rehearsal that

afternoon, making suggestions which he waved contemptuously

away. Margaret Torrence? Connie Davies? They could hardly play

the parts they had. It seemed to Basil as if the undertaking was

falling to pieces before his eyes.

It was still early when he got home. He sat dispiritedly by his

bedroom window, watching the little Barnfield boy playing a lone-

some game by himself in the yard next door.

His mother came in at five, and immediately sensed his depression.

"Teddy Barnfield has the mumps," she said, in an effort to dis-

tract him. "That's why he's playing there all alone."

"Has he?" he responded listlessly.

"It isn't at all dangerous, but it's very contagious. You had it when

you were seven."

"H'm."

She hesitated.

"Are you worrying about your play? Has anything gone wrong?"

"No, mother. I just want to be alone."

After a while he got up and started after a malted milk at the soda

fountain around the corner. It was half in his mind to see Mr. Beebe

and ask him if he couldn't postpone his trip East. If he could only

be sure that that was Evelyn's real reason.

The sight of Evelyn's nine-year-old brother coming along the

street broke in on his thoughts.

"Hello, Ham. I hear you're going away."

Ham nodded.

"Going next week. To the seashore."

Basil looked at him speculatively, as if, through his proximity to

Evelyn, he held the key to the power of moving her.

"Where are you going now?" he asked.

"I'm going to play with Teddy Barnfield."

"What ! " Basil exclaimed. "Why, didn't you know" He stopped.

A wild, criminal idea broke over him; his mother's words floated

through his mind : "It isn't at all dangerous, but it's very contagious."

If little Ham Beebe got the mumps, and Evelyn couldn't go away

He came to a decision quickly and coolly.

"Teddy's playing in his back yard," he said. "If you want to see

him without going through his house, why don't you go down this

street and turn up the alley?"

"All right. Thanks," said Ham trustingly.

Basil stood for a minute looking after him until he turned the

corner into the alley, fully aware that it was the worst thing he had

ever done in his life.

Ill

A week later Mrs. Lee had an early supper all Basil's favorite

things: chipped beef, French-fried potatoes, sliced peaches and

cream, and devil's food.

Every few minutes Basil said, "Gosh! I wonder what time it is,"

and went out in the hall to look at the clock. "Does that clock work

right?" he demanded with sudden suspicion. It was the first time the

matter had ever interested him.

"Perfectly all right. If you eat so fast you'll have indigestion and

then you won't be able to act well."

"What do you think of the program ?" he asked for the third time.

"Riply Buckner, Jr., presents Basil Duke Lee's comedy, 'The Cap-

tured Shadow/ "

"I think it's very nice."

"He doesn't really present it."

"It sounds very well though."

"I wonder what time it is?" he inquired.

"You just said it was ten minutes after six."

"Well, I guess I better be starting."

"Eat your peaches, Basil. If you don't eat you won't be able to

act."

"I don't have to act," he said patiently. "All I am is a small part,

and it wouldn't matter " It was too much trouble to explain.

"Please don't smile at me when I come on, mother," he requested.

"Just act as if I was anybody else."

"Can't I even say how-do-you-do?"

"What?" Humor was lost on him. He said good-by. Trying very

hard to digest not his food but his heart, which had somehow slipped

down into his stomach, he started off for the Martindale School.

As its yellow windows loomed out of the night his excitement be-

came insupportable ; it bore no resemblance to the building he had

been entering so casually for three weeks. His footsteps echoed

symbolically and portentously in its deserted hall; upstairs there

was only the janitor setting out the chairs in rows, and Basil won-

dered about the vacant stage until someone came in.

It was Mayall De Bee, the tall, clever, not very likeable youth they

had imported from Lower Crest Avenue to be the leading man.

Mayall, far from being nervous, tried to engage Basil in casual con-

versation. He wanted to know if Basil thought Evelyn Beebe would

mind if he went to see her sometime when the show was over. Basil

supposed not. Mayall said he had a friend whose father owned a

brewery who owned a twelve-cylinder car.

Basil said, "Gee!"

At quarter to seven the participants arrived in groups Riply

Buckner with the six boys he had gathered to serve as ticket takers

and ushers ; Miss Halliburton, trying to seem very calm and reliable ;

Evelyn Beebe, who came in as if she were yielding herself up to

something and whose glance at Basil seemed to say : "Well, it looks

as if I'm really going through with it after all."

Mayall De Bee was to make up the boys and Miss Halliburton the

girls, Basil soon came to the conclusion that Miss Halliburton knew

nothing about make-up, but he judged it diplomatic, in that lady's

overwrought condition, to say nothing, but to take each girl to Mayall

for corrections when Miss Halliburton had done.

An exclamation from Bill Kampf, standing at a crack in the cur-

tain, brought Basil to his side. A tall bald-headed man in spectacles

had come in and was shown to a seat in the middle of the house,

where he examined the program. He was the public. Behind those

waiting eyes, suddenly so mysterious and incalculable, was the secret

of the play's failure or success. He finished the program, took off his

glasses and looked around. Two old ladies and two little boys came

in, followed immediately by a dozen more.

"Hey, Riply," Basil called softly. "Tell them to put the children

down in front."

Riply, struggling into his policeman's uniform, looked up, and the

long black mustache on his upper lip quivered indignantly.

"I thought of that long ago."

That hall, filling rapidly, was now alive with the buzz of conversa-

tion. The children in front were jumping up and down in their seats,

and everyone was talking and calling back and forth save the several

dozen cooks and housemaids who sat in stiff and quiet pairs about

the room.

Then, suddenly, everything was ready. It was incredible. "Stop!

Stop ! " Basil wanted to say. "It can't be ready. There must be some-

thing there always has been something," but the darkened audi-

torium and the piano and violin from Geyer's Orchestra playing

Meet Me in the Shadows belied his words. Miss Saunders, Leilia Van

Baker and Leilia's friend, Estella Carrage, were already seated on

the stage, and Miss Halliburton stood in the wings with the prompt

book. Suddenly the music ended and the chatter in front died away.

"Oh, gosh ! " Basil thought. "Oh, my gosh ! "

The curtain rose. A clear voice floated up from somewhere. Could

it be from that unfamiliar group on the stage ?

I will, Miss Saunders. I tell you I will!

But, Miss Leilia, I don't consider the newspapers proper for young ladies

nowadays.

I don't care. I want to read about this wonderful gentleman burglar they

call The Shadow.

It was actually going on. Almost before he realized it, a ripple of

laughter passed over the audience as Evelyn gave her imitation of

Miss Saunders behind her back.

"Get ready, Basil," breathed Miss Halliburton.

Basil and Bill Kampf, the crooks, each took an elbow of Victor

Van Baker, the dissolute son of the house, and made ready to aid

him through the front door.

It was strangely natural to be out on the stage with all those eyes

looking up encouragingly. His mother's face floated past him, other

faces that he recognized and remembered.

Bill Kampf stumbled on a line and Basil picked him up quickly

and went on.

Miss SAUNDERS: So you are alderman from the Sixth Ward?

RABBIT SIMMONS: Yes, ma'am.

Miss SAUNDERS (shaking her head kittenishly) : Just what is an alderman?

CHINAMAN RUDD: An alderman is halfway between a politician and a

pirate.

This was one of Basil's lines that he was particularly proud of

but there was not a sound from the audience, not a smile. A moment

later Bill Kampf absent-mindedly wiped his forehead with his

handkerchief and then stared at it, startled by the red stains of

make-up on it and the audience roared. The theatre was like that.

Miss SAUNDERS : Then you believe in spirits, Mr. Rudd.

CHINAMAN RUDD: Yes, ma'am, I certainly do believe in spirits. Have you

got any?

The first big scene came. On the darkened stage a window rose

slowly and Mayall De Bee, "in a full evening dress," climbed over

the sill. He was tiptoeing cautiously from one side of the stage to

the other, when Leilia Van Baker came in. For a moment she was

frightened, but he assured her that he was a friend of her brother

Victor. They talked. She told him naively yet feelingly of her admira-

tion for The Shadow, of whose exploits she had read. She hoped,

though, that The Shadow would not come here tonight, as the family

jewels were all in that safe at the right.

The stranger was hungry. He had been late for his dinner and so

had not been able to get any that night. Would he have some crackers

and milk ? That would be fine. Scarcely had she left the room when

he was on his knees by the safe, fumbling at the catch, undeterred

by the unpromising word "Cake" stencilled on the safe's front. It

swung open, but he heard footsteps outside and closed it just as

Leilia came back with the crackers and milk.

They lingered, obviously attracted to each other. Miss Saunders

came in, very kittenish, and was introduced. Again Evelyn mimicked

her behind her back and the audience roared. Other members of the

household appeared and were introduced to the stranger.

What's this? A banging at the door, and Mulligan, a policeman,

rushes in.

We have just received word from the Central Office that the notorious

Shadow has been seen climbing in the window! No one can leave this house

tonight !

The curtain fell. The first rows of the audience the younger

brothers and sisters of the cast were extravagant in their enthusi-

asm. The actors took a bow.

A moment later Basil found himself alone with Evelyn Beebe on

the stage. A weary doll in her make-up she was leaning against a

table.

"Heigh-ho, Basil," she said.

She had not quite forgiven him for holding her to her promise after

her little brother's mumps had postponed their trip East, and Basil

had tactfully avoided her, but now they met in the genial glow of

excitement and success.

"You were wonderful," he said "Wonderful ! "

He lingered a moment. He could never please her, for she wanted

someone like herself, someone who could reach her through her

senses, like Hubert Blair. Her intuition told her that Basil was of a

certain vague consequence; beyond that his incessant attempts to

make people think and feel, bothered and wearied her. But suddenly,

in the glow of the evening, they leaned forward and kissed peace-

fully, and from that moment, because they had no common ground

even to quarrel on, they were friends for life.

When the curtain rose upon the second act Basil slipped down a

flight of stairs and up another to the back of the hall, where he stood

watching in the darkness. He laughed silently when the audience

laughed, enjoying it as if it were a play he had never seen

before.

There was a second and a third act scene that were very similar.

In each of them The Shadow, alone on the stage, was interrupted by

Miss Saunders. Mayall De Bee, having had but ten days of rehearsal,

was inclined to confuse the two, but Basil was totally unprepared for

what happened. Upon Connie's entrance Mayall spoke his third-act

line and involuntarily Connie answered in kind.

Others coming on the stage were swept up in the nervousness and

confusion, and suddenly they were playing the third act in the mid-

dle of the second. It happened so quickly that for a moment Basil

had only a vague sense that something was wrong. Then he dashed

down one stairs and up another and into the wings, crying :

"Let down the curtain ! Let down the curtain ! "

The boys who stood there aghast sprang to the rope. In a minute

Basil, breathless, was facing the audience.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "there's been changes in the cast

and what just happened was a mistake. If you'll excuse us we'd like

to do that scene over."

He stepped back in the wings to a flutter of laughter and applause.

"All right, Mayall ! " he called excitedly. "On the stage alone. Your

line is: 'I just want to see that the jewels are all right/ and Connie's

is: 'Go ahead, don't mind me.' All right! Curtain up!"

In a moment things righted themselves. Someone brought water

for Miss Halliburton, who was in a state of collapse, and as the act

ended they all took a curtain call once more. Twenty minutes later

it was over. The hero clasped Leilia Van Baker to his breast, confess-

ing that he was The Shadow, "and a captured Shadow at that" ; the

curtain went up and down, up and down; Miss Halliburton was

dragged unwillingly on the stage and the ushers came up the aisles

laden with flowers. Then everything became informal and the actors

mingled happily with the audience, laughing and important, con-

gratulated from all sides. An old man whom Basil didn't know came

up to him and shook his hand, saying, "You're a young man that's

going to be heard from some day," and a reporter from the paper

asked him if he was really only fifteen. It might all have been very

bad and demoralizing for Basil, but it was already behind him. Even

as the crowd melted away and the last few people spoke to him and

went out, he felt a great vacancy come into his heart. It was over, it

was done and gone all that work, and interest and absorption. It

was a fyollowness like fear.

"Good night, Miss Halliburton. Good night, Evelyn."

"Good night, Basil. Congratulations, Basil. Good night."

"Where's my coat? Good night, Basil."

"Leave your costumes on the stage, please. They've got to go

back tomorrow."

He was almost the last to leave, mounting to the stage for a mo-

ment and looking around the deserted hall. His mother was waiting

and they strolled home together through the first cool night of the

year.

"Well, I thought it went very well indeed. Were you satisfied ?" He

didn't answer for a moment. "Weren't you satisfied with the way it

went?"

"Yes." He turned his head away.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," and then, "Nobody really cares, do they?"

"About what?"

"About anything."

"Everybody cares about different things. I care about you, fo;

instance."

Instinctively he ducked away from a hand extended caressingly

toward him: "Oh, don't. I don't mean like that."

"You're just overwrought, dear."

"I am not overwrought. I just feel sort of sad."

"You shouldn't feel sad. Why, people told me after the play "

"Oh, that's all over. Don't talk about that don't ever talk to me

about that any more."

"Then what are you sad about?"

"Oh, about a little boy."

"What little boy?"

"Oh, little Ham you wouldn't understand."

"When we get home I want you to take a real hot bath and quiet

your nerves."

"All right."

But when he got home he fell immediately into deep sleep on the

sofa. She hesitated. Then covering him with a blanket and a com-

forter, she pushed a pillow under his protesting head and went

upstairs.

She knelt for a long time beside her bed.

"God, help him! help him," she prayed, "because he needs help

that I can't give him any more."