acter to let his people become puppets, and philosophy-the Barrie of "What Every rather too fond of them, also. There seems Woman Knows" matching the Barrie of to be no reason why Mr. Buchanan "The Little Minister" or "A Window in should not go on treating of the life about Thrums," or the Eugene Walter of "The him in this same half-playful, half-earnest Easiest Way" matching or striving to manner, and give us many more delightful match-shall we say, a Žola? And just as comedies. the stories in which we, as Americans, take the most pride and read with the most pleasure and profit are most often those about our own life, so the stage stories similarly to affect us must treat of our own life. Unless our theatre possesses a body of seriously written drama-and even comedy may be seriously written-which we can recognize and enjoy as a truthful picture of our society and discuss as a possible comment upon our society, it has no true national character; we have no true native drama. And until this happens, also, the stage will not be recognized by the bulk of the community as a serious force in the social life, nor even as a very important branch of the fine arts-if, indeed, the two can be separated. When we write here the name of Booth Tarkington, we think with genuine appreciation of his talent for persuasive narrative and warm human sympathy. But as an observer of the stage, we cannot admit that in his recent work in collaboration with Harry Leon Wilson he has been using his rare gifts. Even in so successful and appealing a play as "The Man from Home," there seems some sacrifice of truth to character in the portrayal of European persons, in order by such easy means to throw into heroic relief his wonderful Hoosier. Immediate popular success is not always a sign of leadership. In Mr. Tarkington's case, as a dramatist, it has been rather a sign of instinctive mastery of stage convention. Our younger dramatists now desire to say something, and our younger theatregoers desire to hear something said. Few writers with much to say have Mr. Tarkington's narrative gifts and picturesque invention. Our prayer should be that Mr. Tarkington somehow acquire a little more iron in his outlook upon life, a little of Mr. Walter's savagery of purpose. There is room on the stage always, of course, for foreign work, for the classics, for poetry, for music, for farce and dancing and pictures and fun. For the story, either grave or gay, told solely for its own sake, there is room, too. Indeed, to have something to say in the theatre means first of all, let us repeat, to have a good story to tell. But just as in printed literature the best stories are those which truthfully reflect life and give us the savor of the author's philosophy about it, so the best stage stories are those which are similarly true and similarly informed with But looking at the progress made by our dramatists, often in the face of obstacle, during the past two decades, and considering the genuine, earnest work of many of our young playwrights to-day, we can safely say that we have, even now, a body of native drama which gives our theatre the dignity of a real purpose and is making it a true servant of the community. With the many forces now at work to attract men of character and education into the exceptionally lucrative (when successful) field of dramatic authorship, the American stage in the next two decades should reverse the process of the past fifty years, and export plays rather than import them. It should, at any rate, see a body of native plays produced characterized by a firmer technique, more literary distinction, more truth to contemporary character and a finer purpose, than ever before. Perhaps, indeed, it may see the rise of an American Sudermann or Barrie-but let us not push prophecy too far! AUTHOR OF THE ONE WITH THE RED BROWN HAIR, ETC. ILLUSTRATIONS BY WALTER JACK DUNCAN E LEANOR PERRITON had awakened with a start as if some sharp noise had broken her sleep. She had dozed off into unconsciousness again. And again, how long afterward she did not know, she found her eyes wide open and her ears listening from a premonition of evil. For a moment she could not remember where she was. The bare, rough board walls over the eaves, the black stove pipe that ran from the floor to the ridge, the rude furniture, the line of men's clothes that hung listlessly on the nails like criminals in chains, she saw through a gloom that was not lightened much by the square of window at the foot of her cot. The sharp contrast between these surroundings and those to which she had been accustomed through her girlhood awoke in her the memory of some insistent demands made by her to join somewhere her husband, who was engaged in a gigantic undertaking of some kind. She remembered that she had been married several months. Yesterday for some business reason her husband had been forced to go to some city not far away. Then she remembered where she was. She was the only woman in the "camp"! As she rose to go to the window she was conscious that this little room above the "Offices of the Construction Engineer" seemed stuffy and overheated. She wondered if she had a fever; in the seven weeks that she had been at the "work" where everything was cold, ice and snow, this was the first time that she had felt really warm. Some of the apparently eternal snow and ice still clung to the towering ridges of Mannix Butte across the yawn of the river bed, and the full moon, popping out of scout clouds, which preceded a marching, black bank of their fellows, whitened the jagged valley of the Red Rope River and threw dark purple shadows of isolated pines that had dared the "bad lands." The rock ledges that projected here and there in precipitous deserts of gray gravel, where the snow had melted with the early spring, seemed more prominent and threatening than they ever had in the sunlight. The region was one of gigantic proportions. To realize this in full measure it was necessary to have men and their habitations upon its horizontal and perpendicular expanses. As Eleanor Perriton looked out over the lesser shacks of the construction camp with their lights and black, tar-papered roofs, the barracks, stables, tool shelters of a thousand men, as she saw the dark specks moving about like ants in the excavations beyond and below, and watched the tiny, bobbing flecks of light from their lanterns, the awe of the undertaking which her husband had planned, and now had nearly executed, seized her as it always seized her when she gazed upon its pretentious, man-made miracles. The "work" was thirty miles up a bare country, uninhabited except by occasional sheep ranchers whose flocks found some nourishment along the way of the Red Rope. The shacks that had been built at the site of the Mannix Falls Power Company's future station constituted a temporary town. Above this settlement was a coffer dam scooped up from the river bed and as large as three city blocks. It had the daring to hold back the river in a wide lake between the walls of the buttes, and on the dry side of it a hole had been dug for the dam foundation-an excavation the width of the river bed and seventy feet below the surface of the lake, into which for a period of two or three weeks the dump trains, the rumbling concrete mixers, the huge chutes and a gang of haste-maddened men had poured nineteen hundred tons of stone, gravel and cement every twenty-four hours. Cube after cube of the dam had been set in this way until the buttress had extended half across from the other precipitous shore. Eleanor never tired of watching the work; her whole attitude toward her husband had changed from the moment she first had stood with him on an eminence below the camp and had seen the vast upheaval of earth, the scoopings, gauges, scratchings, borings, blastings, and to her had come the shouts of many men, the shriek of wire cables, the puffings of donkey engines, the rumble of construction trains, the smell of steam and of the bituminous smoke, which, wafted out of the pit, stained with its smirchy trail the white-clad sides of the cliffs. As she looked out of the window now, even after the cloud bank from the west had gulped the moon, she could see the whole panorama. She could see the water swirling viciously above the upper coffer dam in the black, wind-whipped lake, she could see it foaming half a mile below beneath the lower coffer dam. Across the top of this lower dam a dump train, with its engine dropping hot coals from the fire box, was lurching, bearing four cars of dirt torn by the steam shovels out of the groove in the river which would one day be the trail-race of the power station. She could see the little dark spot at the bottom of the dam excavation, made by the water that filtered in through a fault in the ledge foundation. It was with this pool that five massive centrifugal pumps were unceasingly fighting, discharging untiringly through great canvas pipes endless columns of water as thick as tree trunks. And between all this maze of construction, derricks, engines, eternal turmoil and noise, and the stillness and solitude of the cliffs on the far bank, ran a flume, a mighty plank trough on massive timber braces, as wide as a city cross-street, built to follow the curve of the shore and carrying between its sides an insane rush of water at the speed of eighteen miles an hour. She could see the white wave-tops in it now, lapping the edges of the top planks, piling over each other like sheep running through a passageway, in haste to get out at the other end. She could hear the roar of the water as it flung out into the river again, and as she looked and listened she shivered. From the moment when she had first realized the drama of the project, even her external attitude toward her husband had changed. She had hitherto known a city home and a country house, where all that affluence could buy of comfort and service, all that family tradition could supply of polite manners and respectable customs, had been enjoyed by her as a matter of course. There had been a boarding school and then social life and finally a marriage. John Perriton, her husband, in the first year of their life together, had apparently burned out his experience in his affection. So it had seemed to her. He had, so far as she could see, gone back to a passion for his profession, back to a consuming madness for some activity, the nature of which she could not well imagine and for which she, consequently, had no respect. Even their companionship had lost its warmth, from whose fault it was impossible to say. She found that she no longer seemed to interest him. He had spent his evenings poring over plans of the Red Rope Dam. She had seen the legends on the blueprints. Then, finally, like an unleashed dog, he had gone eagerly from her to spend the winter in this Dakota barren. It had not seemed to her that there could be anything about building a dam that was beyond the realm of things technical, commonplace and material. It was the confession that she had made to herself that after all the marriage had been a mistake, which caused her to be alarmed at their separation. She had become hardened to the idea, false as it was, that he no longer loved her, but the fancy that she would soon no longer love him filled her with unreasoning terror. In spite of all that he or his family could argue, she had insisted upon following him to the barrens early in March. Her intuition had not been wrong. Although his undertaking still seemed to consume the whole of his daily supply of mental and spiritual energy, so that nothing apparently was left for her, yet her eyes had opened to the drama which so held him. She had seen the fire of creation in his eyes day in and day out, hour after hour, week after week; had been infected by his daring, chance-taking spirit and had felt the strength of will which kept him at the fight all the days and some of the nights, with his hair in disorder, black rings under his eyes and his jaws set like the jaws of a metal vise. During their engagement and short married life hitherto she had known little of the true romance of man's conquest over matter, less of the true nature of John Perriton, her husband. In the weeks at the camp since he had greeted her with a half-concealed wry face, she had passed through the new sensations of respecting him and of finally falling completely in love, with a passion based upon stronger grounds than mere sentimentality or fancy. Her heart sang of it, her will determined to draw from her husband a return of the same quality of affection. Lifted completely out of the life she had always led and set down in a community of builders and laborers, the only woman among ten hundred men, she had devoted her energies at first to making comfortable the quarters of her husband and his older, cold-mannered, self-satisfied assistant, Nathan Rumsey. A week had not passed, however, before she found that in spite of total unfamiliarity with matters of the kind, her whole mind was bent toward learning the story of the drama which was being played before her. It was a drama! For in the space between the two coffer dams a wide river had been lifted out of its bed and in the yawning hole there grunted and sweated great gangs of sullen laborers, there puffed and groaned huge engines, pumps and machinery in a desperate race against spring. A million and a half dollars had gone into the work in seven months. A whim of the river might wash it away in six minutes. Completion of the dam had to be accomplished before any freshets had swollen the river to a point where the wooden flume would no longer carry it and, bursting the plank walls or pouring over the top, the indignant waters would inundate the site of the work. Should this happen, the next swelling of the river might carry away the coffer dam. To win this race would mean a triumph; to lose it would be to lose project, machinery and perhaps men. Man and nature had met there in a desperate contest. Each day the dam under construction crept farther toward the goal of the opposite shore; each day spring, with its warmth, melting of mountain snows, ice jams and freshets, marched nearer from the south. Already the flume shook with mad, racing water. Already the big pumps contested the leakage into the pit inch by inch, losing or gaining. Already the jealous Rumsey, foreseeing Perriton's defeat, was advising compromising with the enemy and taking measures of retreat. "Build the dam!" Perriton had said. "Let the flume alone. We'll beat the river!" "But we're hard pressed already," Rumsey had argued, plucking at his prematurely gray hair. "See the owners then," Perriton had answered, conscious of his assistant's disloyalty. "While I'm in charge here, we'll win or lose, just as we are working now. I'll be back here in a day and a half. You're taking orders from me and I say keep on! Give the men life-preservers when they work below the water level and get the concrete in! Get it in!" Eleanor remembered this dialogue. She had sensed the character of the older engineer almost from the first. She had spoken of it to her husband, who had shaken his head patronizingly. But she had been right. A woman might be of help after all. She felt just now, when the slightest matters counted one way or the other in this throwing of dice with nature, this struggle between winter and spring, this fight between man and river, now at the crisis, that she might by some unforeseen chance take a hand in the game. As well as a girl might, she had learned the strategies of the contest, had trained her senses to the signs of gain or loss. Now, standing before the little bedroom window, she imagined that the sense of impending evil with which she had awakened perhaps had some connection with the unusual activity down in the river bed. She could hear among the familiar sounds of rumbling rock crushers and panting dump trains more than the usual reverberation of hoarse shouts. It seemed to her as if the Red Rope itself, swirling by the upper coffer dam and plunging down the full flume, was speaking more viciously than ever. She threw open the window. From her lips came an exclamation of surprise. A blast of wind blew the hair back from her forehead, and it was warm! Even as she stood there, frightened by the old terror of a rising thermometer, there sounded on the upper window pane the slap of two drops of rain. Rain! Eleanor ran for a morning gown which hung over the trunk in the corner. She could hear the sound of some one walking about in the office below. By the flare of a match she saw that it was not yet midnight and as if the panic which had seized the camp had filled the very air with germs of contagion, she found herself shaking as she descended the stairs. Rumsey was alone in the office. He looked up at her with a half-frightened expression on his white, tired face, as she appeared like a vision through the doorway. He had on a leather jacket, stained with machine grease, and evidently he had just come in, for the green-shaded light above him shone upon drops of water which still stood upon his cap or which had fallen from it upon the disorder of correspondence and blueprints. "What is the matter?" he said. "Is there anything I can get for you?" "No," she said, watching his expression. "The warmth-the rain." Then He stared back at her for a moment. he said slowly and incisively: "Yes. I am afraid it will throw us. There has been a steady rise since noon-an extraordinary rise, Mrs. Perriton, since nine o'clock to-night. I have had no sleep. I've been watching the flume. It is at the brim. One or two planks |