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THE LOST ONE

"As I told you, M'sieur, the two ladies and yourself."

"No other?"

She smiled, and a network of wrinkles engulfed her face.

"No M'sieur, no other."

Once on the street, I looked up at the the house. My sitting room window had two windows; ten feet from them and at the same elevation were two similar windows. From the room behind them had is sued the sounds that had terrified me. From those windows my eyes sought again the statue of Etienne Dolet. All of the street lamps were now lighted, and the figure did not stand out with the illuminated precision that it had when the first lamp had burned behind it. The figure was arresting. The young man's head, splendidly poised, is held high, and his right hand is raised, as though to compel your attention. My eyes again sought the statue-and unconscious of the passage of time-I stood on the pavement and watched. It was as though I expected the upraised hand to fall, or the lips to utter some command. Pedestrians jostled me, and presently, the young ladies from the Sorbonne came in, and spoke to me. Much against my will, I returned to my rooms. But no sound disturbed me.

The next evening, as the light was lit behind Dolet-for I was watching from my window-the voice began singing. The song was again, "Ah! fors e lui," and the voice was if anything louder-and to me

more terrible than it had been the night before. The conviction that I had come to, during the day-that I was the victim of my own nerves-left me. It was not possible to listen to that voice.

Putting a few things into a bag, I literally fled from the place, and hailing a cab, directed it to the home of a physician and friend of mine, Dr. Chalamet, on the Boulevard Siebas. As we left the dark and winding streets of old Paris and crossed the Pont Neuf, the state of panic I had been in subsided.

On reaching my friend's home-and while I waited for him to receive me-I tried to think of some pretext for my

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Some

call. For what were the facts? one had sung as I sat in the dark-and I rushed across Paris for help. My cheek burned-and I decided to invite Chalamet to the theatre, though I knew that he cared very little for it.

In a few moments, he entered the large, high-ceilinged room in which I waited, and greeted me with warm cordiality. He is a man of about my own age tall, dark, with an unusually reserved and formal manner. Tonight, he seemed delighted to see me, and in a few moments-after he had ordered coffee to be brought to us-he told me why.

"Congratulate me, my dear Arnold, I have received today an appointment that I have longed for, for years. I have been given charge of the state hospital for the insane." And he told me something of his work as a neurologist.

"So much may be done but tell me, my friend, what good luck brings you here?"

really

Without intending to- and against my will-I told him of the incident and my absurd behavior.

Chalamet listened to me quietly, and expressed neither amusement nor doubt. When I had finished speaking, he lit a cigarette, and began walking up and down the apartment. Presently, he halted before me.

"My dear Arnold, I have a proposition to make. Do you stay here, in my house, until tomorrow night at this hour. I will go this evening to your rooms in the Rue Monge, and tomorrow night, will return to you here."

I protested, but he silenced me. "No, please, it will be an adventure, and I have a theory-a very interesting one that I think this experience will demonstrate."

Not altogether reluctantly, I saw him set out alone-and myself enjoyed a thorough rest. The next afternoon, as the day drew in I thought of him with anxiety, but punctually, at eight o'clock (the hour of my arrival the previous evening), he appeared.

"And what have you discovered?" I demanded of him.

He did not answer me at once, but opened the volet de fenetre. Outside was the light and shadow, the movement and activity of Paris. Life, in a myriad manifestations, moving about us.

In

"Look out there, my dear Arnold. each of those individuals is a brain, to think, a heart, to feel-a spirit to aspire. Merged in crowds, they still remain irrevocably separate-terribly alone. And they wish to remain alone-they want always to be removed from the mass of humanity by rising above it. They wish to be different from their fellows by being superior. The ego is capable of astonishing flight, and equally remarkable descents."

He let the curtain fall, and settled himself in an armchair.

"Last night when I reached the Rue Monge, I noticed particularly the situation of the Dolet statue-it faces and commands the windows of the room you had described. On entering the house, I encountered your landlady moving upstairs, with a covered dish in her hand. On my approach, she thrust it in back of her, and permitted me to pass her on the stairs. A half hour later, I lit a candle and explored the hall-the dish was outside of the room, next mine, that obviously had an occupant, though I heard no sound until the hour that you told me to expect the singing."

"Did you hear?"

A slight shudder passed over Chalamet's face.

"I heard-and I recognized. Ten years ago there appeared at the Paris Opera House a Swedish woman-of great beauty-and natural voice. She was, however, of a temperament too cold— too reserved for what should be the most expressive art in the world. She had signed for a long engagement, but the management did, I believe, try to settle with her, that they might save the season from ruin. She, however, clung to the written agreement, and they had to submit. And then began the tragedy-the accomplishment of which you and I have heard.

""La Marguerite,' as she was called, changed her manner of living. She had

been a hard worker, and had never cared for the society of men. During the months that she fought to win the public, she changed this. Her beauty helped her to become notorious. But there were strange rumours. Lover succeeded lover with rapidity-she went from experience to experience, but her face remained the same, and her voice still lacked the warmth, the tendrene and fire, that a woman who has lived must express in even her speaking voice. She became a laughing stock-a curiosity. Her name was changed to the Jungfrau. The last appearance she made was in La Traviata.

"As she stepped forward to give the famous aria, and the conductor raised his baton-she was hissed-she has never been seen in public since, but I was called in consultation at the Hospital de la Salpetriere. La Marguerite had a curious mania. If any one raised their hand and took the attitude of a musical conductor, then, and then only, she would sing-and it was always the aria from Traviata.

"I had been called in consultation by a man of wealth, who had been La Marguerite's lover. When I told him that her case was hopeless, he asked that she be placed in some remote and cheerful lodging-and that he would be responsible for her. The Rue Monge is evidently that lodging, and Mme. Lilas does not intend to take the world into her confidence."

"Then," said I, "the light on the statue and its attitude made her fancy that she was again on the stage-what a curious thing, Chalamet, that she had all the equipment and still could not sing-what is your theory?"

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Muckraking the Muckraker

By Hamilton Mercer

A

GITATION is a specific for the pa

ralysis that attacks the body politic. Wherefore, the agitator, though he be of all men the most despised, is really in the long run a benefactor of his age and generation.

At every mile post along the highway of history there has stood a prophet, with a warning voice pitched to a scale suitable to the importance of his mission.

These were the muckrakers of history. Every service that has been rendered to society in every age and in every land has been developed through a process of muckraking. It is a process esteemed not for its method but for the good that comes of it. And like all good things, it performs its service in the face of opposition, sometimes bitter, sometimes indifferent, but always formidable in greater or less degree.

The stigma that has gathered about the word is only relative. It arises from a perversion of the point of view. It is the kicked dog that howls.

Some one comes in contact with the hot end of the muckraker's rake and his protest is taken up by sympathetic spirits. Simultaneously the circles of polite outlawry became the breeding place of a campaign designed to discredit the muckraker.

Elijah was a muckraker of the pessimistic type.

Noah was a muckraker of a more sanguine type.

The former dared to attack royalty. He incurred the hot displeasure of Jezebel and in his dejection sought comfort and refuge under a stark juniper tree. Despair drove him to see only in evil the world and he ran from it-ran a whole day without food.

Noah, on the other hand, assailed society in the mass, but always kept sweet. Although his propaganda was as unpopular as piety in those antedeluvian days, he never relaxed, nor did he lose the vision which finally materialized in the ark and in the flood.

The dung-beetle burrows deep in filth and is never happy except when it is reveling in the center of the garbage heap. Likewise, there is a form of iniquity which can be reached and destroyed only by the fierce light of publicity.

A species of aptera, we are told, whose generations are as old as the granite mountains, apparently cannot survive a single ray of sunlight. Darkness is both their shield and their shroud. Between them and certain forms of unrighteousness there is a strange analogy.

As light is to the former, so is the muckraker to the latter. The one is as much an antidote as the other.

militant

Theseus of Athens was a muckraker. Though he slew nine men and a sow on his way to Athens, society laid a heavier burden upon him. He must needs abolish the system of tribute which required the annual sacrifice of many young Athenians, and he did it by slaying the Minotaur.

Socrates, a muckraker of the old school, was dominated by the "divine voice." He muckraked his way to fame by the route that lies through a martyr's grave. He was a stench in the nostrils of the highbrows of his day. He was charged with flouting the state-owned gods and of setting up new divinities contrary to the statutes made and provided. Conventionalism triumphed by a majority of 60 votes, however, over the protests of Xenophon who declared Socrates never did anything profane or un

MUCKRAKING THE MUCKRAKER

holy, and Pluto who considered him so broad that he might fitly be called a "citizen of the world."

Confucious was a muckraker along politico-religious lines. He strove to lift the yoke of oppression from the backs of his fellows and was, in all respects, a well-rounded alarmist. "The government," said he to one of his disciples in discoursing on the predicament of a hapless woman who had exposed herself to wild beasts, "is fiercer and more feared than a tiger." That Confucious did not die in jail is a circumstance that argues against the assumption that ancient speech was hedged in any way by espionage laws.

Demonology has always arrayed itself against frank discussion. The suppression of free speech is one of the devices of Satan. All the evil spirits are credited with preferring darkness to light. "Let us alone," said one of them of ancient record. "What have we to do with thee, thou Jesus of Nazareth? Art thou come to destroy us?"

And in this Jesus of Nazareth we have the soul of frankness. "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hyprocrites!" was the blunt way in which he condemned self-righteousness. "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers; how can ye escape the damnation of hell!" Seven times in that same address did he throw the charge of hypocrisy back into the teeth of that close corporation of self-willed Israelites.

Paul, Roman citizen and son of Abraham, challenged big business on its own ground and almost muckraked himself into jail. He dared the mob to denounce Diana, and Demetrius, Ephesian captain of industry, hastily called a council of his fellow-craftsmen. Without waiting to be introduced, he plunged into a tirade against the Pauline peril, speaking under the head "good of the order."

"By this craft we have our wealth," thundered Demetrius. He and his associates had capitalized the ignorance and

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superstition of the Ephesians. They had built up a profitable industry in the manufacture of silver shrines to Diana. "Moreover," he continued, "ye see and hear that not alone in Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away people, saying that they be no gods that are made with hands."

As head of the Manufacturers' Association of Ephesus, Demetrius doubtless Iwould have been justified in calling on his government for troops, but a responsive rabble, which quickly formed itself into a mob, spared him that pains. And so his name comes down to us along with that of Paul's, but it is catalogued in a list of undesirables such as Judas and Ananias and Dives and Pilate-a galaxy that sheds no glory on the pages of history.

Still another class of plutocrats, who chafed under the lash of the fearless Roman, "bound themselves with a curse neither to eat nor drink till they had killed Paul."

Then there was that "voice in the wilderness," which could not be silenced even in the throne-room. Clad in the overalls of Judea he rebuked Herod to his face for his scandalous relations with Herodius, his sister-in-law. He also warned his own people that it would get them nothing to glory in their ancestry, since God was able of the stones that lined the banks of Jordan to "raise up children unto Abraham."

Men and magazines that really serve humanity muckrake on occasion. There is not a reform that did not begin in a protest or a movement for the popular uplift that did not have to fight its way to fruition. Soft words may turn away wrath, but they will never awaken a dead public conscience.

Journals with the brilliant records for achievement have been muckrakers in a sense, although it may have given pleasure to their editors to call it by another

name.

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