THE CHARLATAN Ruth Bowen So, you know of ideals . . . you know of their frailty . . . perhaps then, you will understand. The very young know of what things I speak. Youth now aware of a delicious expectancy at having the fullness of life flaunted before them. Youth continuously taunted by alluring suggestions and vague imaginings. However, one cannot hasten the onrush of Life. Perhaps this mere inability lures the individual to recede into a world all his own. And here one waits wonderingly . . . and waiting fashions fantastic illusions from the fragments of his impressions and his dreams. People may presume to venture into our fabricated world. A creature of flesh and blood once entered my sanctuary. At the time, I often wondered at the changes I would know should any of harbored fancies see the grimness of reality. Quite sometime ago I became absorbed in literature; the concrete and the abstract in poetry and fiction fascinated me. This led to a creation of the personality, philosophy, even the emotional temperament of every literary artist. I had as my fragile basis only delicately shaded meanings I found in the writings of each. One afternoon, while studying the library shelves, the name of a new author scintillated like bits of gold from a dull green cover. How had he escaped me? I seized the book from the shelf and began thumbing through it. . . . "The infinite is not a space set between the posts of Here and There; for who can say of what atom in what grain of sand our sun may be a part ..." What a colorful style! "Have you considered that each pearl of vapor in the morning mist may have beheld its Caesars; that every mote of dust may have borne the substance of uncounted Odysseys; and that each drop of dew may be hallowed with the temples of its myriad nations? . . . In what eye may this universe of time be but a tear drop?" He was enchanting! Even his name was suggestive Jan Carle. That which he wrote would be in an abstract, contemplative vein, tinged with a shade of the reflective which I had grown so much to admire in Hearn. Of course, I read the book which, needless to say, was followed by an intensive perusing of practically all of his works. A few treatises and essays like his one devoted to "Mistakes" decided me that the ac- quaintance of a man possessing such a profound sense of understanding and exhibiting an unusually deep insight would be a definite asset in my formative years. With visions of a pair of kind eyes smiling now and then at my absurd story and responding courteously, if not eagerly, to my barrage of questions ranging into the infinite, from the ridiculous to the sublime, encompassing the remotest aspects of human life, I sped over the plains toward California. In Los Angeles I gained, with much difficulty, an audience with Mr. Carle. My first minor disillusionment came before a single word had passed between us. For he was old, and a fingering of his watch chain was the nervous accompaniment to the lone strain his eyes played as he glowered down at me. Instead of his being dark with a sensitive mouth as I had pictured, he was gray and with only a slit to interrupt the monotony between nose and chin. I had anticipated a slight variation in the physical make-up of my illusive writer, which would have been understandable, but his voice, when he blurted out, reminded one of withered leaves being pushed along the sidewalk by an autumn wind. He greeted me with a curt: "Is there something you want? I'm a very busy man!" From that moment on his exhibited sense of superiority began smothering me as though his supercilious attitude were a physical force. I struggled against it, but to no avail. It was too deeply imbedded and suddenly too obviously evident. I studied the rough bark on the Redwood to his right and groped for words that had retreated, momentarily, into some dark recess of my memory. In a few moments I made my apologies and turned to go. Three wrinkles introduced a forced smile; he extended a stiff hand and hastily returned to the house. The click-click of a door being locked bounded over the lawn to reach my ears. I stood immobile, stunned. Jan Carle had not only destroyed his own illusion, but he had shattered for me ideals not his own, ideals involving a noble people in a noble profession. I looked up. Passing in spectral review on the green hedge before me marched Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, Stevenson, Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, Gray, Scott not as my impressionable nature had envisioned them, but as they truly might be! I shut my eyes hard, reached out for the white gate, and closed it softly behind me. twenty-two IN THE MIDST OF LIFE Walter Cable Out of what, I wonder, springs this incredible fascination about death which, through countless ages, has dogged the thoughts and hopes of men? Can it be the awakening stir of a wanderlust that lies buried deep within us, or is it just the engrossing magic of something we do not understand? Or can it be fear of that final plunge into the unknown that holds us enthralled, and insinuates itself into every waking moment of life? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Perhaps it is only a foretasting, as in anticipation, of what must inevitably come to each of us which has kept us through the years constantly toying with this strange Nothing that we simultaneously court and seek to avoid. Yet to live consciously even for a moment is to realize full well its tantalizing power and its fantastic nearness just beyond the veil of sight. In the years that have been theirs, men have come far. They have circled the earth and learned its nature, they have traversed the sea and photographed its depths, they have changed the flaming rays of the sun into a healing flame, and they have prepared an anodyne for every pain, an antidote for every poison. Yet in all of their wild flights of creative imagining, no height they have reached has ever equalled their most audacious dream that of immortality. A life beyond death that does not end has been the fond hope of every kind and tongue of Man. And it has been death that has given rise to that hope, because in it men have sought to escape the inevitability of death. Much of the fascination of death and of man's struggle to conquer it has been reflected in the world's literature. How else could it be when literature is but a reflection of life, of which death is a part? Yet in all the pages that have to do with death, I have never found a book that treats of it so winsomely as does Lawrence Edward Watkin's On Borrowed Time. Reading that book with its kindly, human warmth recalled to me my own first encounter with the reality of death. I had met it impersonally before, of course, but I was too young then, and it wasn't until years after my grandparents died that the real loss of their passing came home to me. It was on just such a fine spring day as sets the heart and feet to skipping and the eye to piercing dim blue distances. I had a dog, a small, brownish sort of pup, possessed of an impish soul and a head full of what intelligence so rarely begotten in human beings. I loved that dog with all the passion of adolescence. It seemed to me that he was the only friend I ever knew who responded in kind to the affection I bestowed on him. To be looked upon as god-like, even by a dog, does strange things to the human soul. On this fine day he didn't waken me, nor was there any sign of him after repeated calls. I suspected certain indiscretions with a Scottish light o'love that belonged to the house across the way. Well, the family doctor stopped by, and in his gruff way told me I'd better go down the road a pace and get my dog. I found him all twisted in a last vain effort to find a comfortable position in which to die. I shall not forget the picture of that huddled brown heap by the roadside. For one blind moment I hated men and cars and the world in general. He was stiff when I picked him up; here was death in my arms and in my arms there was nothing. I called and I whistled to him, and then I think I screamed. There was no answer, not even so much as a wag or a lifted ear. I had a funeral that afternoon, with just myself and my pup. The flag over my fort was at half-mast, and I'll do battle today with the man who sees anything silly or unpatriotic in it. Then I took him to the only wooded spot I knew; it must have been all of a half-mile away, and I dug his grave. I told myself all the Bible quotations I'd ever heard at funerals "O Death where is they sting, O grave, thy victory!" "He that believeth in me ..." "In my Father's house are many mansions ..." and in all the instances where I have been in the presence of death in the years since then I've never uttered one of them. I know too well the hollow mockery of words in the presence of grief. I buried him, and uncovered his head so I could pet him again, and stayed with him until it became dark and I was cold and surprisingly hungry. I liked On Borrowed Time, partly because it made me remember this incident after all these years, and partly because in itself it is lovable. All the warmth of good-humored affection seems to be centered in it. I suspect indeed, I know that the author loved his characters, even the inscrutable Mr. Brink who, as Death, perched for an indefinite time in the backyard apple tree. For on the flyleaf of the book, the author tells that the little boy is his own son, and Gramp his wife's father. This, it seems to me, is the essence of all good literature; that it makes us remember, and that it puts into words some of the things we've seen and felt and heard. twenty-three