The Day of the Beast by Zane Grey

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"I suppose you played what we used to call kissing games?" queried
Lane.

A sweet, high trill of laughter escaped Bessy's red lips.

"Daren, you are funny. Those games are as dead as Caesar.... This
bunch of boys and girls paired off by themselves to spoon.... As for
myself, I don't mind spooning if I like the fellow--and he hasn't been
drinking. But otherwise I hate it. All the same I got what was coming
to me from some of the boys of the Strong Arm Club."

"Why do they give it that name?" asked Lane, remembering Colonel
Pepper's remarks.

"Why, if a girl doesn't come across she gets the strong arm.... I had
to fight like the devil that last afternoon I went there."

"_Did_ you fight, Bessy?"

"I'll say I did.... Roy Vancey is sore as a pup. He hasn't been near
me or called me up since."

"Bessy, will you promise to stay away from that place--and not to go
joy-riding with any of those boys--day or night--if I meet you, and
tell you all about my experience in the war? I'll do my best to keep
the time you spend with me from being tedious."

"It's another bargain," she returned deliberately, "if you just don't
spend enough time with me to make me stuck on you--then throw me down.
On the level, now, Daren?"

"I'll meet you as often as you want. And I'll be your friend as long
as you prove to me I can be of any help, or pleasure, or good to you."

"Hot dog, but you're taking some job, Daren. Won't it be just spiffy?
We'll meet here, afternoons, and evenings when mother's out. She's
nutty on bridge. She makes me promise I won't leave the yard. So I'll
not have to lie to meet you.... Daren, that day at Helen's, the minute
I saw you I knew you were going to have something to do with my
future."

"Bessy, a little while ago I made sure you had no romance in you,"
replied Lane, with a smile. "Now as we've gotten serious, let's think
hard about the future. What do you want most? Do you care for study,
for books? Have you any gift for music? Do you ever think of fitting
yourself for useful work?... Or is your mind full of this jazz stuff?
Do you just want to go from day to day, like a butterfly from flower
to flower? Just this boy and that one--not caring much which--all this
frivolity you hinted of, and worse, living this precious time of your
youth all for excitement? What is it you want most?"

She responded with a thoughtfulness that inspired Lane's hope for her.
This girl could be reached. She was like Lorna in many ways, but
different in mentality. Bessy watched the gyrations of her shapely
little foot. She could not keep still even in abstraction.

"A girl _must_ have a good time," she replied presently. "I've done
things I hated because I couldn't bear to be left out of the fun....
But I like most to read and dream. Music makes me strange inside, and
to want to do great things. Only there _are_ no great things to do.
I've never been nutty about a career, like Helen is. And I always
hated work.... I guess--to tell on the level--what I want most is to
be loved."

With that she raised her eyes to Lane's. He tried to read her mind,
and realized that if he failed it was not because she was not baring
it. Dropping his own gaze, he pondered. The girl's response to his
earnestness was intensely thought-provoking. No matter how immodestly
she was dressed, or what she had confessed to, or whether she had
really expected and desired dalliance on his part--here was the
truth as to her hidden yearning. The seething and terrible Renaissance
of the modern girl seemed remarkably exemplified in Bessy Bell, yet
underneath it all hid the fundamental instinct of all women of all
ages. Bessy wanted most to be loved. Was that the secret of her
departure from the old-fashioned canons of modesty and reserve?

"Bessy," went on Lane, presently. "I've heard my sister speak of Rose
Clymer. Is she a friend of yours, too?"

"You bet. And she's the square kid."

"Lorna told me she'd been expelled from school."

"Yes. She refused to tattle."

"Tattle what?"

"I wrote some verses which one of the girls copied. Miss Hill found
them and raised the roof. She kept us all in after school. She let
some of the girls off. But she expelled Rose and sent me home. Then
she called on mama. I don't know what she said, but mama didn't let me
go back. I've had a hateful old tutor for a month. In the fall I'm
going to private school."

"And Rose?"

"Rose went to work. She had a hard time. I never heard from her for
weeks. But she's a telephone operator at the Exchange now. She called
me up one day lately and told me. I hope to see her soon."

"About those verses, Bessy. How did Miss Hill find out who wrote
them?"

"I told her. Then she sent me home."

"Have you any more verses you wrote?"

"Yes, a lot of them. If you lend me your pencil, I'll write out the
verse that gave Miss Hill heart disease."

Bessy took up a book that had been lying on the seat, and tearing out
the fly-leaf, she began to write. Her slim, shapely hand flew. It
fascinated Lane.

"There!" she said, ending with a flourish and a smile.

But Lane, foreshadowing the import of the verse, took the page with
reluctance. Then he read it. Verses of this significance were new to
him. Relief came to Lane in the divination that Bessy could not have
had experience of what she had written. There was worldliness in the
verse, but innocence in her eyes.

"Well, Bessy, my heart isn't much stronger than Miss Hill's," he said,
finally.

Her merry laughter rang out.

"Bessy, what will you do for me?"

"Anything."

"Bring me every scrap of verse you have, every note you've got from
boys and girls."

"Shall I get them now?"

"Yes, if it's safe. Of course, you've hidden them."

"Mama's out. I won't be a minute."

Away she flew under the trees, out through the rose bushes, a white,
graceful, flitting figure. She vanished. Presently she came bounding
into sight again and handed Lane a bundle of notes.

"Did you keep back any?" he asked, as he tried to find pockets enough
for the collection.

"Not one."

"I'll go home and read them all. Then I'll meet you here to-night at
eight o'clock."

"But--I've a date. I'll break it, though."

"With whom?"

"Gail and a couple of boys--kids."

"Does your mother know?"

"I'd tell her about Gail, but that's all. We go for ice cream--then
meet the boys and take a walk."

"Bessy, you're not going to do that sort of thing any more."

Lane bent over her, took her hands. She instinctively rebelled, then
slowly yielded.

"That's part of our bargain?" she asked.

"Yes, it certainly is."

"Then I won't ever again."

"Bessy, I trust you. Do you understand me?"

"I--I think so."

"Daren, will you care for me--if I'm--if I do as you want me to?"

"I do now," he replied. "And I'll care a thousand times more when you
prove you're really above these things.... Bessy, I'll care for you as
a friend--as a brother--as a man who has almost lost his faith and who
sees in you some hope to keep his spirit alive. I'm unhappy, Bessy.
Perhaps you can help me--make me a little happier.... Anyway, I trust
you. Good-bye now. To-night, at eight o'clock."

Lane went home to his room and earnestly gave himself up to the
perusal of the writings Bessy Bell had given him. He experienced
shocks of pain and wonder, between which he had to laugh. All the
fiendish wit of youthful ingenuity flashed forth from this verse.
There was a parody on Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break," featuring
Colonel Pepper's famous and deplorable habit. Miss Hill came in for a
great share of opprobrium. One verse, if it had ever come under the
eyes of the good schoolteacher, would have broken her heart.

Lane read all Bessy's verses, and then the packet of notes written by
Bessy's girl friends. The truth was unbelievable. Yet here were the
proofs. Over Bessy and her friends Lane saw the dim dark shape of a
ghastly phantom, reaching out, enfolding, clutching. He went
downstairs to the kitchen and here he burned the writings.

"It ought to be told," he muttered. "But who's going to tell it? Who'd
believe me? The truth would not be comprehended by the mothers of
Middleville.... And who's to blame?"

It would not do, Lane reflected, to place the blame wholly upon blind
fathers and mothers, though indeed they were culpable. And in
consideration of the subject, Lane excluded all except the better
class of Middleville. It was no difficult task to understand lack of
moral sense in children who were poor and unfortunate, who had to
work, and get what pleasures they had in the streets. But how about
the best families, where there were luxurious homes, books, education,
amusement, kindness, love--all the supposed stimuli needed for the
proper guidance of changeful vagrant minds? These good influences had
failed. There was a greater moral abandonment than would ever be
known.

Before the war Bessy Bell would have presented the perfect type of the
beautiful, highly sensitive, delicately organized girl so peculiarly
and distinctively American. She would have ripened before her time.
Perhaps she would not have been greatly different in feeling from the
old-fashioned girl: only different in that she had restraint, no
deceit.

But after the war--now--what was Bessy Bell? What actuated her? What
was the secret spring of her abnormal tendencies? Were they abnormal?
Bessy was wild to abandon herself to she knew not what. Some glint of
intelligence, some force of character as exceptional in her as it was
wanting in Lorna, some heritage of innate sacredness of person, had
kept Bessy from the abyss. She had absorbed in mind all the impurities
of the day, but had miraculously escaped them in body. If her parents
could have known Bessy as Lane now realized her they would have been
horrified. But Lane's horror was fading. Bessy was illuminating the
darkness of his mind.

To understand more clearly what the war had done to Bessy Bell, and to
the millions of American girls like her, it was necessary for Lane to
understand what the war had done to soldiers, to men, and to the
world.

Lane could grasp some infinitesimal truth of the sublime and horrible
change war had wrought in the souls of soldiers. That change was too
great for any mind but the omniscient to grasp in its entirety. War
had killed in some soldiers a belief in Christ: in others it had
created one. War had unleashed the old hidden primitive instincts of
manhood: likewise it had fired hearts to hate of hate and love of
love, to the supreme ideal consciousness could conceive. War had
brought out the monstrous in men and as well the godlike. Some
soldiers had become cowards; others, heroes. There were thousands of
soldiers who became lions to fight, hyenas to snarl, beasts to debase,
hogs to wallow. There were equally as many who were forced to fight,
who could not kill, whose gentleness augmented under the brutal orders
of their officers. There were those who ran toward the front, heads
up, singing at the top of their lungs. There were those who slunk
back. Soldiers became cold, hard, materialistic, bitter, rancorous:
and qualities antithetic to these developed in their comrades.

Lane exhausted his resources of memory and searched in his notes for a
clipping he had torn from a magazine. He reread it, in the light of
his crystallizing knowledge:

"Had I not been afraid of the scorn of my brother
officers and the scoffs of my men, I would have fled
to the rear," confesses a Wisconsin officer, writing
of a battle.

"I see war as a horrible, grasping octopus with
hundreds of poisonous, death-dealing tentacle that
squeeze out the culture and refinement of a man,"
writes a veteran.

A regimental sergeant-major: "I considered myself
hardboiled, and acted the part with everybody,
including my wife. I scoffed at religion as unworthy
of a real man and a mark of the sissy and weakling."
Before going over the top for the first time he tried
to pray, but had even forgotten the Lord's Prayer.

"If I get out of this, I will never be unhappy again,"
reflected one of the contestants under shell-fire in
the Argonne Forest. To-day he is "not afraid of dead
men any more and is not in the least afraid to die."

"I went into the army a conscientious objector, a
radical, and a recluse.... I came out of it with the
knowledge of men and the philosophy of beauty," says
another.

"My moral fiber has been coarsened. The war has
blunted my sensitiveness to human suffering. In 1914 I
wept tears of distress over a rabbit which I had shot.
I could go out now at the command of my government in
cold-blooded fashion and commit all the barbarisms of
twentieth-century legalized murder," writes a Chicago
man.

A Denver man entered the war, lost himself and God,
and found manhood. "I played poker in the box-car
which carried me to the front and read the Testament
in the hospital train which took me to the rear," he
tells us.

"To disclose it all would take the genius and the
understanding of a god. I learned to talk from the
side of my mouth and drink and curse with the rest of
our 'noble crusaders.' Authority infuriated me and the
first suspicion of an order made me sullen and
dangerous.... Each man in his crudeness and lewdness
nauseated me," writes a service man.

"When our boy came back," complains a mother, "we could hardly
recognize for our strong, impulsive, loving son whom we had
loaned to Uncle Sam this irritable, restless, nervous man
with defective hearing from shells exploding all about him, and
limbs aching and twitching from strain and exposure, and with
that inevitable companion of all returned oversea boys, the
coffin-nail, between his teeth."

"In the army I found that hard drinkers and fast
livers and profane-tongued men often proved to be the
kindest-hearted, squarest friends one could ever
have," one mother reports.

So then the war brought to the souls of soldiers an extremity of
debasement and uplift, a transformation incomprehensible to the mind
of man.

Upon men outside the service the war pressed its materialism. The
spiritual progress of a thousand years seemed in a day to have been
destroyed. Self-preservation was the first law of nature. And all the
standards of life were abased. Following the terrible fever of
patriotism and sacrifice and fear came the inevitable selfishness and
greed and frenzy. The primitive in man stalked forth. The world became
a place of strife.

What then, reflected Lane, could have been the effect of war upon
women? The mothers of the race, of men! The creatures whom emotions
governed! The beings who had the sex of tigresses! "The female of the
species!" What had the war done to the generation of its period--to
Helen, to Mel Iden, to Lorna, to Bessy Bell? Had it made them what men
wanted?

At eight o'clock that night Lane kept his tryst with Bessy. The
serene, mellow light of the moon shone down upon the garden. The shade
appeared spotted with patches of moonlight; the summer breeze rustled
the leaves; the insects murmured their night song. Romance and beauty
still lived. No war could kill them. Bessy came gliding under the
trees, white and graceful like a nymph, fearless, full of her dream,
ripe to be made what a man would make of her.

Lane talked to Bessy of the war. Words came like magic to his lips. He
told her of the thunder and fire and blood and heroism, of fight and
agony and death. He told her of himself--of his service in the hours
that tried his soul. Bessy passed from fascinated intensity to rapture
and terror. She clung to Lane. She kissed him. She wept.

He told her how his ideal had been to fight for Helen, for Lorna, for
her, and all American girls. And then he talked about what he had come
home to--of the shock--the realization--the disappointment and grief.
He spoke of his sister Lorna--how he had tried so hard to make her
see, and had failed. He importuned Bessy to help him as only a girl
could. And lastly, he brought the conversation back to her and told
her bluntly what he thought of the vile verses, how she dragged her
girlhood pride in the filth and made of herself a byword for vicious
boys. He told her the truth of what real men thought and felt of
women. Every man had a mother. No war, no unrest, no style, no fad, no
let-down of morals could change the truth. From the dark ages women
had climbed on the slow realization of freedom, honor, chastity. As
the future of nations depended upon women, so did their salvation.
Women could never again be barbarians. All this modern license was a
parody of love. It must inevitably end in the degradation and
unhappiness of those of the generation who persisted on that downward
path. Hard indeed it would be to encounter the ridicule of girls and
the indifference of boys. But only through the intelligence and
courage of one could there ever be any hope for the many.

Lane sat there under the moonlit maples and talked until he was
hoarse. He could not rouse a sense of shame in Bessy, because that had
been atrophied, but as he closely watched her, he realized that his
victory would come through the emotion he was able to arouse in her,
and the ultimate appeal to the clear logic of her mind.

When the time came for him to go she stood before him in the clear
moonlight.

"I've never been so excited, so scared and sick, so miserable and
thoughtful in all my life before," she said. "Daren, I know now what a
soldier is. What you've seen--what you've done. Oh! it was grand!...
And you're going to be my--my friend.... Daren, I thought it was great
to be bad. I thought men liked a girl to be bad. The girls nicknamed
me Angel Bell, but not because I was an angel, I'll tell the world....
Now I'm going to try to be the girl you want me to be."

CHAPTER XIV

The time came when Daren had to make a painful choice. His sister
Lorna grew weary of his importunities and distrustful of his
espionage. One night she became violent and flatly told him she would
not stay in the house another day with him in it. Then she ran out,
slamming the door behind her. Lane remained awake all night, in the
hope that she would return. But she did not. And then he knew he must
make a choice.

He made it. Lorna must not be driven from her home. Lane divided his
money with his mother and packed his few effects. Mrs. Lane was
distracted over the situation. She tried to convince Lane there was
some kind of a law to keep a young girl home. She pleaded and begged
him to remain. She dwelt on his ill health. But Lane was obdurate; and
not the least of his hurts was the last one--a divination that in
spite of his mother's distress there was a feeling of relief of which
she was unconscious. He assured her that he would come to see her
often during the afternoons and would care as best he could for his
health. Then he left, saying he would send an expressman for the
things he had packed.

Broodingly Lane plodded down the street. He had feared that sooner or
later he would be forced to leave home, and he had shrunk from the
ordeal. But now, that it was over, he felt a kind of relief, and told
himself that it was of no consequence what happened to him. All that
mattered was for him to achieve the few tasks he had set himself.

Then he thought of Mel Iden. She had been driven from home and would
know what it meant to him. The longing to see her increased. Every
disappointment left him more in need of sympathy. And now, it seemed,
he would be ashamed to go to Mel Iden or Blair Maynard. Such news
could not long be kept from them. Middleville was a beehive of
gossips. Lane had a moment of blank despair, a feeling of utter, sick,
dazed wonder at life and human nature. Then he lifted his head and
went on.

Lane's first impulse was to ask Colonel Pepper if he could share his
lodgings, but upon reflection he decided otherwise. He engaged a small
room in a boarding house; his meals, which did not seem of much
importance, he could get anywhere.

This change of residence brought Lane downtown, and naturally
increased his activities. He did not husband his strength as before,
nor have the leisure for bad spells. Home had been a place of rest. He
could not rest in a drab little bare room he now occupied.

He became a watcher, except during the stolen hours with Bessy Bell.
Then he tried to be a teacher. But he learned more than he thought. He
no longer concentrated his vigilance on his sister. Having failed to
force that issue, he bided his time, sensing with melancholy portent
the certainty that he would soon be confronted with the stark and
hateful actuality. Thus he wore somewhat away from his grim resolve
to kill Swann. That adventure on the country road, when he had
discovered Swann with Helen instead of Lorna, had somehow been a boon.
Nevertheless he spied upon Lorna in the summer evenings when it was
possible to follow her, and he dogged Swann's winding and devious path
as far as possible. Apparently Swann had checked his irregularities as
far as Lorna was concerned. Still Lane trusted nothing. He became an
almost impassive destiny with the iron consequences in his hands.

Days passed. Every other afternoon and night he spent hours with Bessy
Bell, and found a mounting happiness in the change in her, a deep and
ever deeper insight into the causes that had developed her. The
balance of his waking hours, which were many, he passed on the
streets, in the ice cream parlors and confectionery dens, at the
motion-picture theatres. He went many and odd times to Colonel
Pepper's apartment, and took a peep into the club-rooms. Some of these
visits were fruitful, but he did not see whom he expected to see
there. At night he haunted the parks, watching and listening. Often he
hired a cheap car and drove it down the river highway, where he would
note the cars he passed or met. Sometimes he would stop to get out and
make one of his scouting detours, or he would follow a car to some
distant roadhouse, or go to the outlying summer pavilions where
popular dances were given. More than once, late at night, he was an
unseen and unbidden guest at one of the gay bathing parties. Strange
and startling incidents seemed to gravitate toward Lane. He might have
been predestined for this accumulation of facts. How vain it seethed
for wild young men and women to think they hid their tracks! Some
trails could not be hidden.

Toward the end of that protracted period of surveillance, Lane knew
that he had become infamous in the eyes of most of that younger set.
He had been seen too often, alone, watching, with no apparent excuse
for his presence. And from here and there, through Bessy and Colonel
Pepper, and Blair, who faithfully hunted him up, Lane learned of the
unfavorable light in which he was held. Society, in the persons of the
younger matrons, took exception to Lane's queer conduct and hinted of
mental unbalance. The young rakes and libertines avoided him, and
there was not a slacker among them who could meet his eye across cafe
or billiard room.

Yet despite the peculiar species of ignominy and disgrace that
Middleville gossips heaped upon Lane's head and the slow, steady
decline of his speaking acquaintance with the elite, there were some
who always greeted him and spoke if he gave them a chance. Helen Wrapp
never failed of a green flashing glance of mockery and enticement. She
smiled, she beckoned, she once called him to her car and asked him to
ride with her, to come to see her. Margaret Maynard rose above dread
of her mother and greeted Lane graciously when occasion offered.
Dorothy Dalrymple and Elinor always evinced such unhesitating
intention of friendship that Lane grew to avoid meeting them. And
twice, when he had come face to face with Mel Iden, her look, her
smile had been such that he had plunged away somewhere, throbbing and
thrilling, to grow blind and sick and numb. It was the failure of his
hopes, and the suffering he endured, and the vain longings she
inspired that heightened his love. She wrote him after the last time
they had passed on the street--a note that stormed Lane's heart. He
did not answer. He divined that his increasing loneliness, and the
sure slow decline of his health, and the heartless intolerance of the
same class that had ostracized her were added burdens to Mel Iden's
faithful heart. He had seen it in her face, read it in her note. And
the time would come, sooner or later, when he could go to her and make
her marry him.

CHAPTER XV.

To be a mystery is overpoweringly sweet to any girl and Bessy Bell was
being that. Her sudden desire for solitude had worried her mother, and
her distant superiority had incited the vexation of her friends. When
they exerted themselves to win Bessy back to her old self she looked
dreamily beyond them and became more aloof. Doctor Bronson, in reply to
Mrs. Bell's appeal to him, looked the young woman over, asked her a few
questions, marveled at the imperious artifice with which she evaded
him, and throwing up his hands said Bessy was beyond him.

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