N

II

ARA ALEXIEFF, wrapped

in a woolen coat and leaning back in the corner

of Claveloux's limousine, looked at the young doctor whenever the arc lights of the city streets threw their increasing, and then diminishing, radiance upon his strong but too stern face. He was conscious of her

gaze; he was conscious of her silence. It created a sense of calm companionship, of understanding, of undisclosed riches of personality.

He was content to look now and then toward her sensitive young countenance, which was inspecting his with that frank eagerness of youth, with some unaccountable expectation, with a certain tenderness, suggesting the solicitude of a mother. Her face, he knew, could not be described readily; much of its beauty came from a spiritual mist which hovered about her features as if these deep eyes and that shimmering coppery hair and petal skin were not quite of the earth. Yet the touch of her fingers upon his, warm, vital, expressive, remained like something which she had left in his hand and which he still kept clasped there, hoping that it would not dissolve and vanish.

"I am glad that you are coming with me," she said at last. "I did not think you would."

"Why not?"

"Because you are saving of yourself," she answered. "Selfish?" He laughed.

"Not selfish," she said. "But catalogued in your own mind. You Americans-the best of you perhaps do not live. You function."

He made a gesture of imperfect understanding. "You conceive yourselves as instruments of accomplishment," she explained. "That is quite magnificent! But if your accomplishments are to add anything to the happiness of the world, they must not be attained at the expense of knowing how to live."

Claveloux looked at her reprovingly.

He had

By Richard Washburn Child

Illustrated by W. T. Benda

If ever a wholly charming and a wholly unconventional heroine has graced the pages of fiction, it is Nara Alexieff. You met her last week at Mrs. Vanessa Yates's gold-plated dinner party on Fifth Avenue. Like the other guests, you were curious about her; especially because she made an obvious impression on the cut-and-dried young doctor, Emlen Claveloux. As he escorts her home to her shabby garret under the Ninth Avenue L, with all the horrors of the Bolshevik revolution in her memory, she turns to him with the cool remark: "You are a pathetic lost child: you have forgotten how to play!"

started out with an impulse to treat her as an adorable child worthy of saving, worthy of development, but somehow he found her taking leadership and overturning matter-of-fact convictions which he had never questioned deeply.

"After all, it is of no consequence if inventors and manufacturers make a superb material world, or even if you, with your scientific research, detect germs of disease and kill them, if, after all that striving, men and women have lost the art of rich and varied capacity to live and feel and mount high upon spiritual eminence," said Nara. "The weak

ness, the absurdity of your civilization, Dr. Claveloux, is that it has tried so hard to give mankind health and comforts and quite overlooked the fact that on the summit of material gain men and women may be stupid, dazed, pathetic, inexpressive, lost children.' "And you think I am one of them."

"Of course I do," she replied. "Perhaps I am," he said, weighing the possibility. "You must learn to give yourself." "To work? I do."

"Yes-intensely," she answered. "But I mean to life to human understanding, sympathy-" "And indulgence in pleasure?"

"If that is the only way you can find," she began. "You have forgotten how to play."

Claveloux leaned toward her. "Yes," said he with intensity. "We have forgotten how to play. You should have seen the one I talked to to-night-a servant. He-"

Nara had an uncanny gift of knowing in advance the ends of his sentences. She said: "He had a white face-a rough-looking man for a butler's assistant. I saw that man."

"How did you know that I was speaking of him?" "Because he was one who looked as if he had forgotten how to play too," she said.

"He works in a factory," said Emlen. "All day long he does three motions eight hundred times an hour."

"So that he can buy the unnecessary things which other men make with their three motions done over and over-like a bad dream."

"Yes," said the young doctor. "Exactly that." "The keynote of your civilization," she said with complete contempt. "What has he gained?"

"A body half dead," Claveloux answered with the first tone of emotion she had heard from him. "A worn-out life. A sick child-dying, he says. And at last a peep into Vanessa Yates's ball, where that which equals his wages for a year is spent on a spray

13

"I asked him," said Claveloux, tearing the slip out of his notebook.

"Ah!" said Nara, with a cry of joy. "You did that? You entered the personal world!"

Claveloux folded the bit of paper.

"Give it to me," said she. "If I find these people need you, I will send for you."

"Thank you. Apparently you, too, sometimes live in a personal world."

"I live in nothing else!" she exclaimed.

Claveloux said: "I am afraid there is danger that you invest it with that which you call magic." "And I am afraid that you invest your world with nothing but cold, hard facts."

"Dependable, in any case," he replied.

He turned away from hall, regretful, wondering

E turned away from her, feeling that some gulf

why he should care. They were under the elevated structure now, and, even though it was after eleven, children were still playing upon the sidewalks below the fronts of buildings trellised with fire escapes. One could sense the urban vortex of life, the inexplicable herding of human beings, the swarm. He wondered at the impulse to examine one of these rather than the next. It was personal significance, he had to admit, which had fastened his attention upon this girl at his side. There was romance in the daughter of a Russian noble, used to luxurious splendor, whom fate had picked up and plunged into poverty and inconsequence in the swarming slums, and whom fate again had plucked out and thrown back into the magnificence of the Yates environment. But, after all, he knew that the romance of Nara Alexieff was not in these dramatic facts; it was in herself. Or in him?

"I want to get out here," she said. "Button your coat over your evening clothes. We can walk the rest of the way."

He looked at her inquiringly. "Because we are going to the only corner in the world which remains my own," she said. "Here I may come back if I leave Mrs. Yates, and I do not want these people who live here to believe that I am any Cinderella bringing a prince to her lodgings."

She pushed open a door at the foot of a narrow stairway, leading up toward a feeble gas flame which flickered shadows upon scarred plaster walls and broken balustrades, remnants

of roses, the flash of gold and silver, the warm, perfumed atmosphere, the wide spaces he had just left.

He shook his head.

"Come over here," she said, leading him by the hand. "There! Here are a few pieces of wood left. I have a fireplace, you see-the size of a toy, to be sure. The matches."

HE paper and wood leaped into flame, reflected in

a

as if the miniature hearth were seen again at an immense distance. Warm air began to ascend at once, and Nara, filling a small brass kettle at some faucet in the corner, balanced it upon the wood where water drops running down its fat little sides dropped, hissing, on to the hot bricks.

"Sit there," she commanded, pulling a chair out of the shadows. "It is a swaying, feeble old seat, but safe and comfortable, nevertheless."

She stared into the yellow light with the expression of one who looks across the sea at the glow of a sunset infinitely distant. The golden light, giving illumination to her face, was reflected in her eyes, on her hair, and upon the moist surface of her halfparted lips.

Claveloux felt for a moment as if he were only a detached spirit which, sensing her loneliness and the reasons why she had desired to leave the Yates home for an hour or two and return to her own little retreat, had, unseen and unknown to her, accompanied her as she went.

"The water is boiling," she said suddenly, and,

"Because of the man who first introduced us." "Who?"

"Pinanni-Adam Pine," she answered in a low tone. The emotion which surged up within Claveloux was perplexing to him. This girl who sat at his feet was not his. He had no right to cross-examine her. She was nothing to him. He had never felt any jealousy in all his life. But at the suggestion that the young sculptor had known her, at the thought that the relationship of the two was still undefined, that Pine had spent weeks and perhaps months modeling her hands, finding in them the expression of some extraordinary and vital message, Emlen was filled with a sense of evil, of illness, of emptiness, as if, opening a treasure chest, the upturned lid disclosed that something which should have been his had gone.

He was tempted to seize her by the slender shoulders with his strong hands and, twisting her body so that he could look down into her upturned face, say to her: "Tell me what your friendship with this man has been!" Instead he pressed his lips together over the words: "You know him very well?" "Yes," she answered, and clasped her hands about her knees.

He exhaled a long-held breath. "He is nothing to you-now?"

"Nothing," she said. "Nothing but a genius." "Nara Alexieff!"

She looked up at him, startled by his intensity. "I want to kiss you."

"And do you want to kiss others?" "No."

of a pretentious residence of times gone by. The creaking hallways were sour with a dank odor; the stairs gave forth their complaint because feet had once more disturbed them. Past locked doors, which appeared to be entrances to feather workers' sweatshops, Claveloux and his new hostess climbed to the top landing, where, looking up, one could see, through the broken pane in the skylight, a rectangle of purple-black sky with its pattern of stars.

"My castle," said Nara, and unlocked the door. The chill of her unoccupied garret was a dead cold, as if cold were a black, tangible material into which the flame of a candle on a little table cut a slash with the knife of its rising flame. Gradually the light went expanding toward the sloping walls of smoky plaster, toward the broken mantelpiece where a little Chinese Buddha sat with an eternal cynicism upon its face sharing a perch with a box of matches and a sugar bowl, toward the bed, covered with a shawl, in the corner, and toward the reflecting surface of tiny windowpanes.

"Do you think we shall have less happiness here?" she asked.

Claveloux pictured the color, the music, the breath

thrusting her hand up into the dark, brought forth two glasses and the tea. "This is the short way to make tea, Dr. Claveloux, but, at least, it will be warm."

He sipped the aromatic brew when she had poured it out, leaning forward now and staring into the firelight himself.

"What are you thinking of?" she asked, peering up into his face.

"I was wondering whether you would stay under the patronage of Vanessa Yates."

"I said I would not," she replied. "You were right. Self-expression cannot be had very well when I am merely riding in luxury upon the fact that I am an interesting refugee who can be introduced as one of an aristocracy laid low by a revolution. After all, the dearest thing we have is the free expression of ourselves."

"Mrs. Yates must have affection for you too," he said. "You must have appealed to something in her which is eternally interested in kindness. You must have had a personal significance to her." "I have lost it," said Nara. "Why?"

"I thought not," she said. "You may kiss me if you like." His lips touched her cheek. "You did not turn toward me?" he said.

"But my lips-your lipsthey are for love."

"Yes," said he, assenting. "You are right. They are for love."

She gazed, unblinking, for a long time at the flames, pushed the end of one of the sticks of wood with the tip of one of her shabby slippers, and then pulled off both of them to warm her small, flexible feet in the glow.

"What is love?" she asked. "I do not know," said Claveloux.

"And there you are quite right," she affirmed. "I think there are as many kinds of love as there are people in the world. No one of them means the same thing as the next. There is the love of parent for child, there is friendship, there is gayety and a passing yearning for caresses. haps a great love is all of these coming together. But how wise is it to put aside love when it happens to be less, or only one, of these impulses? Can love ever be an evil thing when it is generous and kind, Dr. Claveloux?"

Per

"I suppose one ought to save love for its greater purposes," he said.

Her answer struck into him like a wounding instrument. She said: "Does it not grow the faster because it is allowed to blossom as it pleases?"

He dropped his hands to her wrists, clutched in his grip.

"Tell me of yourself," he said. "Nara Alexieff, tell me where you came from, what brought you here?"

"Tell you of my childhood?" "Yes, and more."

"Everything? Of the terrible days I have known, my new friend?"

"Yes, tell your new friend," Claveloux said intensely. "Tell me!"

"My life has all been one sweep of experience," she replied reflectively. "It was a little like a slate upon which there had been no writing, and nowShe stopped.

"We are almost strangers," she said, "but I mean something to you already. Otherwise you would not care to hear. I am glad that I mean something to you."

Sand

HE had enjoyed a childhood of unusual peace and beauty of environment. No possible stretch of the imagination of man could have admitted the possibility that this childhood rested upon a volcano which would blow life into unrecognized fragments. No extreme of fancy could have made a forecast of the result to Nara of a great finger of Destiny which would plunge into the pie of life, pluck her out like a tiny morsel, remold her, and was to use her for fate's purposes in a city and among personalities upon the other side of the world.

She had learned that a human being often is conscious of the presence of Destiny even before Destiny discloses its motives. A moment arrives when the soul trembles.

This moment came to her one evening when she had ridden home through the dusk.

She had not been able to understand why her father, Boris Alexieff, his great body huddled down in his fur coat among the heavy fur robes, had been so silent.

"I shall send you and your mother to Petrograd,"

he said with startling suddenness. His voice was deep and solemn as it had been ever since he had come back wounded from the retreat from Warsaw. "You will go to America."

"It is because of danger-you think that?"

Under the robes he put his great hand upon hers. He said: "You are nineteen. You have matured as your mother matured, slender and a child, but in the mind older and wiser than most brute men of us ever become. The new government is no more. Everything is in the hands of irresponsible men. No one knows where it will end."

She had always been in advance of girls of her age in intellectual maturity. Looking back now, she realized it. She had written verses that quite astounded her mother. They were not in keeping with the nature she had inherited from the American beauty her father had married; light and lyric as these verses were, they were only gay with the gayety of one who sings to quiet a panic in the heart. Now, riding with her father in the three-horse sleigh, she voiced that gayety and that panic, saying, as they drove through the dark evergreens toward the lights of the rambling gabled house: "Who knows? Perhaps it is best for mother and for me-and for you to go to America."

"I would be ruined," he said, and then, regretting that he had alarmed his daughter, he added, as if to give another reason more important: "There are no ties in America. Alice, your mother, had few relatives. In twenty-one years those few are lost. America is a closed chapter for us."

"Not for me!" she said, prophetically. "Not for I think I hear some call from there. I heard it as a child. I hear it always, always."

me.

...

clear again

Days came when Nara could even see the blight upon Russia. It had caught them all! There was no going to America now. She would look out the window, across the rolling country of the valley to the eastward; she would look toward the town below the ridge which cut the sky into a jagged fringe by the upthrust of its dark tree tops, toward the domes and minarets of the Russian church and the gray hall where the police quarters had been and the white houses and the unpainted weather-gray cottages and the red station of the railroad perched above the ice-closed river. All were still, bright in the sunlight like miniature and gayly colored toys abandoned by some sick child. Even a little train of cars and an iron engine faced another train of cars and another iron engine. But nothing moved. No wood smoke came from these locomotives. The toys of modern life had slipped from the control of a civilization of rotting fingers.

one before the winter sun had

risen, Nara awoke to find her window a red glowing rectangle.

By the time she had dressed, the first of dawn had filled the house with cold, gray light. She went down into the library and met face to face a soldier in a shabby, torn uniform, his boots bound to his legs with windings of torn silk brocade.

"Hey there, colonel. Here's a woman," he shouted gayly.

There was no answer because his voice was drowned by the clatter of moving furniture. Nara could see men in uniforms all shabby, carrying silver, the samovar, linen from the dining room. Wagons were creaking outside (Continued on page 22)

"R

Where Do the Savings Go?

EADING maketh a full man," said Bacon. He might have added: "And thinking maketh a wise man. People have been doing an unusual amount of reading and thinking lately, and our guess is that everyone in America has been reading and thinking along different lines than has been his habit. Never since America became a nation have its people taken so much interest in such subjects as general business conditions, taxes, Federal Reserve statements, and the tariff. Even as recently as five years. ago men and women did not pay much attention to some of the subjects that are to-day so important.

A great writer about finance has been studying the amount of money that is paid out, month after month, for worthless or fraudulent stock certificates. He says that as high as $200,000,000 has been spent in one year in Iowa for "blue sky" stock, and he estimates that nearly as much was spent in one year in Kansas. At that rate we would like to have some one give us an accurate estimate of how much hard-earned money goes out of the pockets of the public of the other forty-six States every year into the pockets of promoters of businesses that have no chance for success.

What did you lose-not necessarily by putting money into fake enterprises, but into ventures which you know now you should have carefully avoided? Wouldn't it be most helpful, we thought, if all this money could be loaned to capable business men who would be willing to pay a fair rate of interest for it and who would use it in developing businesses of merit, producing either worthy goods or needed service?

We know that there are many agencies at work trying, with the help of the strong arm of the law, to protect the unwary and uninitiated investor. And our wonder, therefore, was not how could this waste be stopped, but why do people "fall" for the highly speculative venture and the Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford salesmanship. So we went to see a very rich and very successful business man that we know, having in mind the Chinese maxim: "A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years' study of books." This man made his money by hard work, shrewd management of his own business affairs, and careful investments.

"Why should this be so?" we said. "Why do not the people of America put all these millions every year into safe and sane ventures, or at least into enterprises that have some earmarks of safety?"

"Because," he replied, "the people of America are not investmentwise. They are too secretive about their financial affairs. They will run quickly to their doctor or their lawyer with their troubles, but they like to back their own judgment when it comes to investing their surplus. You often hear it said that the people of this country do not know how to save. That is not so. They do save, but so many of them do not know what to do with their savings. All the millions that you have been telling me about was money that had been saved." "What can be done about it?" we asked.

"Well," he said, "you cannot make people wise by passing laws. Laws do not teach people how to think."

"Then do you suggest," we said, "that an effort should be made to educate people to know more about investments?"

"Not necessarily," he replied, "but they should be educated to appreciate the fact that when they have money to invest they should talk to some one who knows something about investments. Like health, it's a matter that calls for the expert. I presume the five most important topics of everyday conversation in this country are

(1) politics, (2) religion, (3) sports, (4) the movies, and (5) money; but I should say that the five things that a man most frequently thinks about are (1) his family, (2) his business or his job, (3) his health, (4) his recreation, and (5) his investments. The first four he is willing to talk about with anyone. His investments he likes to keep his mouth shut about. That is where he makes a mistake.

"If every man who invests had to have a list of his investments published every thirty days in his local newspaper, you would see him going to some one who was competent to give him advice before acting. If the contents of all the safe-deposit boxes had to be published, there would not be so many investment skeletons hid away.

"It is a national characteristic of the average American that he thinks he knows how to handle his own private affairs. He considers the investing of his surplus or savings a very private matter. When some glib salesman puts a proposition up to him, he likes to decide as to its merits for himself. If he wins, he takes pride in telling other people how smart he is, and if he loses he hopes no one will find it out. I should think that Collier's could do its readers a good turn by suggesting that they seek trained advice in the matter of their investments. If they do, they will be better off and the whole country will be better off."

"Probably the best thing to do," we replied, "is to print what you have just said to us." And here you are.

MA

Edward Mandell House

ANY voices. Many opinions. Many books. The men who have been at the head of American affairs for eight years are flinging their opinions of themselves and of each other through the printing press. So far we find nowhere a fair and balanced estimate of one man who more than most others will be remembered.

We say that you cannot find in the annals of America a parallel to Colonel House. Except when he felt it his duty to become a peace commissioner, he has steadfastly refused political offices and honors. He has shrunk from publicity. He has patiently borne abuse. There are those who will say that all he has advised is folly; there are those who will say that all he has counseled is pure wisdom. We agree with neither, and for the moment care little for that discussion. But this we know, and know full well, that he has laid at the feet of his countrymen and of humanity all that the service of a man not endowed with the health and physical resource of one who can be a fighter could give-the service of a student, a reader of books, of men, and of his times, the service of a counselor and a striver for high ends.

He has followed the precept of Roosevelt: "Spend and be spent." To that he has added: "And ask nothing." The value of his contributions, those accepted and those rejected by the recipient of his patient and unrewarded loyalty, time will weigh; self-effacement, gentleness, constancy, regard for his fellow man, devotion to the cause of the conviction of men's minds, as opposed to their conscription or corruption, are qualities undenied by any man who has known him as he is.

These have been his contributions to the monument of ideals of American citizenship. Some have said that Wilson made him; it is a lie. Some have said that Wilson used him; this is the truth. And so that his living in these days, rather than his death in the distant future, may mark the beginning of America's gratitude, take knowledge of him only from those who have known him at first hand at home, and from Clemenceau, Balfour, Robert Cecil, and those others, friend or foe, who have known him and often opposed him, eye to eye, abroad.

So, and so only, we will as a people, whether we have gone along the path of his ideas or have opposed them, mark down now, before it is too late for him to know, the measure of a great heart and a pure mind. Neither has known passion other than that of service; and for that undying fact House is entitled to be remembered when partisanship and clashing opinions have slid into the shadows of the past.

in our world, we should see almost nothing of them in the news of the day.

While badness is yellow news, we are safe.

Before you write to your newspaper to complain about its headlines and its front-page stories, remember that nine-tenths of all this bad news is evidence that badness still remains the unusual and therefore the dramatic, sensational, and yellow stuff.

Nevertheless, Collier's is ready to agree that most newspapers have been leaning too heavily on this fact. And we wonder why some one has not begun to make goodness-not the goody-goody kind, but warm, lively, healthy goodness-interesting in spite of its being so commonplace.

If you write to the editor of the paper you read every morning, and remind him that there is both news and drama in old-fashioned stories of accomplishment, endeavor, and adventure, the chances are that you will make your mark on the front page of his newspaper.

Three Italians

a young advertising man in Los Angeles. On all sides he had been hearing the same story: "No business."

When the Italians entered he thought they were begging. Then the idea of robbery flashed upon him. But the spokesman of the group came forward, spread a newspaper on the desk, and pointed to a small advertisement.

Then he laid two $20 gold pieces on the paper. "Want an ad," he said. "You tell them about our fine place?" And he handed over a piece of paper giving the name of a shoe-shining stand near Twenty-first Street and Central Avenue, fully a mile from the business district of the city.

This happened in 1914, a period of serious worry and depression. The man who passes the story along says it taught him in dull times to open a little earlier, work a little harder during the day, and keep open a little later. "There is always business to be had," he says, "if I make my own conditions and don't accept them ready-made." Salesmen or Order Takers?

make such headway in dull times in America when he can neither read nor speak the language? The answer may be that, not being able to read the market page or the ticker, and not understanding rumors about impending business depression, he does not have so many things to be afraid of.

All he knows is that business is slack. So he opens a little earlier in the morning, keeps open a little later at night, and, not having acquired extravagant habits, has an umbrella of savings to tide him over a rainy day.

Three Italians, roughly dressed, came into the lonesome office of

in a big New York terminal and looked at the various cigars displayed. Then he turned to the clerk. "Have you any light domestic cigars?" he asked. "I don't recognize the brands I see here."

The salesman looked at the customer stupidly. "Dunno," he replied. "I'll ask Al. Hey, Al, any lidomesty cigars here?"

"Quit kiddin', you roughneck," said Al. "Say, Bob, did you sell that flivver yet-" and so on for several minutes, while the customer waited.

Finally the customer turned away. Half to himself and half to the world in general, he murmured: "Thank God for Omaha!"