Within it, on the old plaster, were scratched or pencilled initials of generations, set close together in pairs. Sometimes a scroll surrounded them, and a flourish had been awakened by a young man's triumph; but, for the most part, the betrothed obeyed ancient custom baldly, and the combined letters of their names recorded the beginning of a life's union, without any addition from art. Businesslike men added the date; while, here and there, some bruised spirit had been at the trouble to climb again and cross out the record, with two harsh strokes of knife or pencil. To be asked 'to walk to the Windmill' was a confession of love from man to woman; and that a woman should invite any man to take her there seemed a step not consonant with maiden modesty. Yet, now, this unparalleled thing happened, and, to his undying amazement, Ann, of all coy and uncompromising girls, appointed the significant tryst for Neddy.

'All right,' she said. 'Meet me upalong at Windmill, half after five, Saturday.'

She was gone before he had time to still his astonishment. He stood and stared after her for ten minutes. A more modest man must have refused to believe his ears; but Neddy had long accounted himself as out of the common, and supposed that this was Ann's subtle way of indicating she thought the same.

And, meantime, the girl, homeward bound, met the second of those who adored her: John Turtle, the Westgate horseman. He was bringing a plough team back from a distant croft, and instantly slid off the heavy, gray mare he sat upon. John stood six feet three

a lean, long-faced man with a heart of gold and a brain of putty. He wore little brown whiskers and had a narrow, high forehead wrinkled with won

der at the puzzle of living. He was twenty-nine, a pearl of price to any master, and a man of religious convictions and highest principles. He loved obstinately and even hopefully, for he knew that the prayer of the righteous man is answered, soon or late, and he felt that by his manner of life he deserved Ann Purchase more than all the others put together.

'Be it in reason to ax you to come walking Sunday afternoon, Ann?' he inquired. ""Tis a longful time since

'Not Sunday, John. But this I'll do: I'll meet you at the Windmill half after five o' Saturday. Can you manage it?'

"The Windmill? "Manage it!" God's light, do 'e know what you be saying, Ann Purchase?'

Apparently, she did; but she only nodded and smiled and then was off, while John, his legs straddled in the road and his forehead heavy with wonder, stared after her. So long he stood that the great mare looked round and uttered a gentle snort of protest. Her work was done and she wanted her beans; for Jervis Willes of Westgate loved his plough horses and treated them generously. The foundations of the deep fell open in John's mind. He was frightened and he was also shocked.

"To think as her was so addicted to me and hid it all these months!' he murmured aloud. And when I've axed her to go there, her face said "no" a hundred times.'

He grew calmer as he returned home, but his mind was not built to take in such a proposition without jolting from the rut. He reflected so deeply what he should wear on Saturday at half after five, that he forgot the gray mare's beans. She ate her hay, and in her equine soul was a dim, dumb disappointment at something due, but withheld.

II

ANN came first to the meeting-place, and she was happy on one side of her heart, doubtful on the other. The glory of a recent adventure had put her much above herself on the occasion of falling in first with Neddy and then with John. Out of a light heart, whose lightness in no wise depended on their good will and faithful affection, she had let humor run away with her; and now she perceived that the situation from their point of view must contain small matter for laughter. She sat on a stone outside the old Windmill, with her chin between her hands, watching for certain hats to loom up over the ridge that fell sharply away beneath her. The hill had been under wheat this year, but now it only bristled with stubble, that caught the gold from a westering sun in late October. Light brushed the arrish and set many a filament of gossamer glittering there; while far below, through the blue haze, an oriflamme of autumn was broken here and there in the bossy breast of an elm.

Ann found time to wonder whether the cap of the cowman or the horseman's wideawake would first bob over the great slope. 'Be it as 't will,' she thought, 'us must hope for the best.' She had done this steadfastly through all her brief years.

At half-past five, the hats appeared side by side, and the heads in them indicated, by violent gesticulations, a common anger. Neddy's bobbed fiercely and abruptly; John's swayed on his long and birdlike neck with deprecatory curves -'like a gypsy-rose in the corn,' thought Ann. Neddy wore his working clothes, as she expected; but Mr. Turtle had found time to put on a market suit with new russet leggings and a tie as yet unseen at Compton. It was of mustard yellow, with stars of livid purple scattered upon it.

They came beside her, together, heated and inflamed. Indeed, they ceased not to wrangle when they stood at her feet, and John appeared disposed to cry, while Neddy allowed himsell foul language.

'When you've done slack-jawing perhaps you'll behave,' said Ann, glad of the emotional strain, since it made her task the easier.

'What do this mean, Ann Purchase?' asked Neddy Blades, mopping his furious face.

'Here's a fearful come-along-of-it, Ann,' added John, 'for 't is contrary to nature you've bid us both andand contrary to your nice ways you should have axed either for that matter. 'T was the man's part, not yourn.'

'We be both come, however,' declared Neddy, and so, perhaps, you'll be good enough to say which you wanted. And damn quick too. This here loose-bellied shadow says you called him, and I've told him he's a liar, you'd best to do the same.'

'Lie in your face!' answered John. 'I know plain English when I hear it, and be what I may, I ain't deaf.'

'Sit down,' commanded the girl. "Sit down and calm down and don't be a pair of zanies. I think very well of you both, and 'twas to spare trouble and and - and one thing and another I told 'e both to come here.'

'What's the good of both, you mad creature?' asked Neddy. You know very well what the Windmill means. How can I offer for you and say what's in my mind afore that monkey-faced fool? And well you know that if he done it afore me, I'd smash in his mouth.'

'Don't you fear,' retorted John warmly; 'I ain't going to speak to the woman till you be sent about your business, you coarse wretch.'

'Do listen,' begged Ann, but Neddy was in no mood to listen.

'Speak, and answer,' he said. ""T is in a nutshell, I reckon, and I'll spare you any soft speeches, since you don't want no love-making, seemin❜ly. Be you going to be my missis, or ban't you? If you be, then tell me to kick this slack-twisted item down the hill; and if you ban't, then why the blazing hell am I up here?'

The fates were kind to Ann. They led her out, and she answered cheerfully.

'I am going to be your missis, Ned. That's all right, my dear.'

"Then, Ann Purchase, perhaps you'll throw a light on what you said to me,' murmured John Turtle.

'And I'm going to be your missis too, John!'

Neddy exploded in a volume of blistering but pardonable expletive. 'How the What the Be there bats in your belfry, girl? Share me

with that

[The Observer]

MR. CHARLES CHAPLIN

BY ST. JOHN ERVINE

LATELY, my head being exceedingly bloody, but, I trust, unbowed, I went forth in share of comfort, and, by great good fortune, came upon a picture palace where a film featuring Mr. Charlie Chaplin was being exhibited. I hesitated on the threshold of the theatre for a few moments, dubious for the first time in my life of Mr. Chaplin's power to dispel my dismal humor. 'I may have to endure a succession of pictures in which young women with big eyes and baby faces and incredibly innocent looks are wooed by rough diamonds whose principal means of earning a livelihood seems to consist of leaping on and off the backs of surpassingly swift ponies and find that Charlie Chaplin fails to solace me for the tedium they occasion!' I said to myself, as I loitered on the doorstep. I remembered the name of a man whose friendship I had firmly rejected because he could not discover any merit in Mr. Chaplin. I could not continue to know a person so deplorably lacking in taste and judgment as that. But now, in such a state of dubiety was I that I wondered whether, after all, he had not been in the right. Perhaps Mr. Chaplin was not funny! ..

It was not until I had reminded myself of the diversity of opinion in the world that I was able to pull myself together and enter the picture palace. There are moments in which one foolishly believes that meritable things immediately receive recognition — at least from meritable persons. I actually wrote this sentence on one occasion: "The mountains nod to each other over the heads of the little hills.' I had forgotten that Tolstoi allowed little merit to Shakespeare; that Dr. Johnson

amazingly preferred Samuel Richardson to Henry Fielding; that Meredith most ineptly disparaged Dickens, and considered that Pickwick Papers was perishable stuff. (And now Meredith himself is under a cloud, but Dickens persists!) And in our own time, has not Mr. Chesterton belittled Mr. Hardy? Remembering these things, I took courage and resolved to trust in my own faith and judgment. I advanced boldly to the box office, paid money for a seat, and then entered the darkened auditorium.

I had remarkable luck. I took my seat just in time to see the beginning of a Chaplin film. Hardly had I sat down when that quaint, pathetic, wistful, self-dubious figure shuffled into the circle of light. He glanced about him in an uncertain fashion, twirled his cane twice, adjusted the position of his hat so that it became more unstable, twitched his features as if he were saying, 'Well, what's the good!' and then walked down the street with that air of engaging incompetence which is the characteristic of all great comedians. And while, enchanted, I watched him pursuing his adventurous career, I began to wonder what is the peculiar quality which has endeared this comic little man, who spent his early life somewhere in the neighborhood of the Walworth-road, to the whole world. Here am I, a dreary highbrow, who would go miles to see Charlie Chaplin on a film. There are you, who may be a low-brow or a no-brow-at-all, willing also to travel great distances for a similar purpose. What is the quality possessed by this Cockney in California which reconciles such incompatibles in the bonds of laughter?

I have a most vivid recollection of the first occasion on which I saw a Chaplin film. It was in France. A party of very tired and utterly depressed men came down one of those

interminable, ugly straight roads that take the spirit out of travelers. They were moving down from the 'line' to 'rest billets' after an arduous spell in outposts.

The weather had been very hard and bitter, so that the ground was frozen like steel, and many of the men had sore feet and walked with difficulty. The roads were covered with snow that had turned to ice, and at frequent intervals a man would lose his balance and fall heavily to the ground with a great clatter of kit and rifle, and a sergeant or a corporal would curse without enthusiasm. Three times during that desolate journey the parties were shelled, once with gas. One heard the gas shells going over, making that queer splashing noise that gas shells make on their journeys, and wondered whether one would have enough desire for life left to induce one to put on a gas mask! . . I remember the party losing its way in a road where the snow was soft and knee-deep, in a road where misery had settled down so deeply on the men that no one swore and there was a most terrible silence, broken only by the sound of a man crashing on to the ground as he slipped on frozen places or by the sighs and groans of utterly exhausted boys. And I remember one of them, a very cheery lad from Dublin, suddenly losing heart for the first time in my knowledge of him, and turning to me and saying, 'God Almighty's very hard on us, sir!'

In that state of dejection, tired and dirty and very verminous, with unshaven faces and eyes heavy with sleep and with a most horrible feeling that it did not matter who won the war, that lost party staggered into the rest billets at three o'clock in the morning and was told that at the end of the week, instead of the promised Divisional rest they would receive orders to return to the line!

-

I recall now that following that night of exhaustion came the job of cleaning up, a morning of bathing and scraping and louse-hunting, and then, in the evening, after tea, with some recovery of cheerfulness, the men went off to the big barn in which the Divisional Concert Party gave its entertainments. There they sat, massed at the back of the barn, looking strangely childlike in the foggy interior, and listening without much demonstration to some songs. Their irresponsiveness was not due to inappreciation, but to something more terrible than individual fatigue to an overwhelming collective fatigue, to a collective disgust, to the dreadful loathing of one's kind that comes from continuous association in congested quarters. And then the singing ended, and the lights were diminished, and the 'pictures' began. Into the circle of light thrown on the screen came the shuffling figure of Charlie Chaplin, and immediately the men forgot their misery and fatigue, and a great welcoming roar of laughter broke from them. That small, appealing, wistful, shuffling, nervous figure, smiling to disarm punishment, had only to show himself, and instantly a crowd of driven men forgot where they were and to what they were doomed and remembered only to laugh. That is an achievement which is very great.

But the mere statement of such a thing does not explain the peculiar quality of Charlie Chaplin. What is it in him that makes him distinct from all other men in his profession? I do not pretend to know what it is that separates him from other men, any more than I know what it was that made Shakespeare supreme and unique in his generation; but there are certain things about him which make him noticeably different from other film actors. He is almost the only one of his profession who can carry his personality through

the camera. Marvelously he retains the third dimension on the screen, whereas others cannot muster more than two dimensions and sometimes fail even to muster one. When you look at other comedians on the film you are conscious of photographs of men, but when you look at Mr. Chaplin you are conscious only of a distinct human being. Like all great comedians whom I have seen,- for example, Dan Leno or James Welch, he demands primarily, not your laughter, but your pity.

A great comedian is like a child in his attitude toward the world, entirely trusting, rather helpless and a cause of laughter, not so much by deliberation as by sheer inability to cope with a complicated world. All the fun made by Mr. Chaplin comes, not from attempts to be clever, but from failures to be as other people are. Bergson, in his book on Laughter, tells his readers that laughter is the result of something mechanical being imposed upon something living-an explanation that does not appear to me to be complete or satisfactory. I do not know whether Mr. Chaplin can make philosophical speculations, but I do know that by his conduct he can explain much that puzzles philosophers; and it seems to me at times that Mr. Bergson might profitably study Mr. Chaplin before he produces a revised edition of Laughter.

[The Nation and the Athenæum] SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE

BY GEORGE SANTAYANA

O solitudo, sola beatitudo, Saint Bernard said; but might he not have said just as well, O societas, sola felicitas? Just as truly, I think; because when a man says that the only happiness is this or that, he is like a lover saying that Mary Jane is the one woman in

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