Strong Hearts | Page 4

meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I met
him oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's
sidewalk chat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze
of his fine skin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while
certain changes began to show for the worse, until one day in the
summer of the fifth year he tried to hurry by me. I stopped him, and
was thinking what a handsome fellow he was even yet, with such a
quiet, modest fineness about him, when he began, with a sudden agony
of face, "My schooner's sold for debt! You know the reason; I've seen
you read it all over me every time we have met, these twelve
months--O don't look at me!"
His slim, refined hands--he gave me both?-were clammy and tremulous.
"Yes," he babbled on, "it's a fixed fact, Smith; the cracked fiddle's a
smashed fiddle at last!"
I drew him out of the hot sun and into a secluded archway, he talking
straight on with a speed and pitiful grandiloquence totally unlike him.
"I've finished all the easy parts--the first ecstasies of pure license-- the
long down-hill plunge, with all its mad exhilarations--the wild vanity of
venturing and defying--that bigness of the soul's experiences which
makes even its anguish seem finer than the old bitterness of tame
propriety--they are all behind me, now?-the valley of horrors is before!
You can't understand it, Smith. O you can't understand----"
O couldn't I! And, anyhow, one does not have to put himself through a
whole criminal performance to apprehend its spiritual experiences. I
understood all, and especially what he unwittingly betrayed even now;
that deep thirst for the dramatic element in one's own life, which, when
social conformity fails to supply it, becomes, to an eager soul, sin's
cunningest allurement.
I tried to talk to him. "Gregory, that day the dogs jumped on you--you
remember?--didn't you say if ever you should reach this condition your
fear might save you?"

He stared at me a moment. "Do you"--a ray of humor lighted his
eyes--"do you still believe in spasms of virtue?"
"Thank heaven, yes!" laughed I.
"Good-by," he said, and was gone.
I heard of him twice afterward that day. About noon some one coming
into the office said: "I just now saw Crackedfiddle buying a great lot of
powder and shot and fishing-tackle. Here's a note. He says first read it
and then seal it and send it to his aunt." It read:
"Don't look for me. You can't find me. I'm not going to kill or hurt
myself, and I'll report again in a month."
I delivered it in person on my way uptown, advising his kinswoman to
trust him on his own terms and hope for the best. Privately, of course, I
was distressed, and did not become less so when, on reaching home,
Mrs. Smith told me that he had been there and borrowed an arm-load of
books, saying he might return some of them in a month, but would
probably keep others for two. So he did; and one evening, when he
brought the last of them back, he told us fully, spiritual experiences and
all, what had occurred to him in the interval.
The sale of the schooner had paid its debt and left him some cash over.
Better yet, it had saved Sweetheart. On the day of his disappearance she
was lying at the head of the New Basin, distant but a few minutes' walk
from the spot where we met and talked. When he left me he went there.
At the stores thereabout he bought a new hatchet and axe, an extra
water-keg or two, and a month's provisions. He filled all the kegs,
stowed everything aboard, and by the time the afternoon had half
waned was rippling down the New Canal under mule-tow with a strong
lake breeze in his face.
At the lake (Pontchartrain), as the tow-line was cast off, he hoisted sail,
and, skimming out by lighthouse and breakwater, tripped away toward
Pointe-aux-Herbes and the eastern skyline beyond, he and Sweetheart
alone, his hand clasping hers--the tiller, that is--hour by hour, and the

small waves tiptoeing to kiss her southern cheek as she leaned the other
away from the saucy north wind. In time the low land, and then the
lighthouse, sank and vanished behind them; on the left the sun went
down in the purple black swamps of Manchac; the intervening waters
turned crimson and bronze under the fairer changes of the sky, while in
front of them Fort Pike Light began to glimmer through an opal haze,
and by and by to draw near. It passed. From a large inbound schooner
gliding by in