The Black Drop the Macmillan Company New York Boston Chicago Dallas Atlanta San Francisco

The Old Corner Book Store, Inc. Mass. Boston, THE BLACK DROP THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO THE BLACK DROP BY ALICE BROWN AUTHOR OF THE PRISONER," "BROMLEY NEIGHBORHOOD," ETC. ||0tit THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1919 All rights reserved COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY ALICE BROWN. Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1919. Nortoooli J. S. Gushing Co. Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. THE BLACK DROP THE BLACK DROP SINCE the war has knocked out from under us the foun dations of old conformities, it is difficult to decide whether to write the story of those men and women who walk the pages of that reality called fiction before 1914 or after. For they would be found, if they are malleable enough to be worth writing about at all, distinctly different people before and after that date. This story is about the Tracys, and the Tracys, when the world fell apart and tried to weld itself together again, were not the Tracys who were acted on by the catastrophe and the welding process. They often looked back, individuals of the fam ily, at their old selves of a few years agone and felt, in a dazed groping, that such Tracys weren t recognizable by present standards. Then they had been at ease in a secure prosperity, living delightfully at Grasslands, their inher ited estate on the Massachusetts coast, and able to spend an occasional month in New York or Boston, or the more aggressive springs in Florida. Norris, the father of the family, who wrote novels much respected by the intellectual upper class and compiled textbooks that brought in an absurd income for the amount of live interest he put into them, was sagging a little toward the least picturesque at titude of middle life. He had not done what youth had led him to believe he might do. He had neither tapped the B 1 2 THE BLACK DROP Muses fount nor held a mirror up to nature with any distinctive brilliancy, and at times he felt this bitterly. But the bitterness came less and less frequently, as he went further into the doldrums of physical moderation, and he realized, with a wry humor of acquiescence, that some day it would cease to come at all. Then he would be old, and in that he would again acquiesce until the tide of life ebbed and ebbed, still gently and inexorably, and he would be dead. But he knew all the great calls upon him, whether he had answered them adequately or not, had pretty well ceased. He had worked and loved. There was the end of it. Whatever life, the deceptive taskmistress who is always offering lures for her own hidden ends, might want done now, she would thrust into younger hands. In October, 1916, the family moved up to Boston and they had been there a week before Charles, the eldest son, married and living within an easy walking mile, had come to see them. Charles had bought the house at the West End and offered it to them rent free, reminding them they had not left Grasslands in two years, and it was time they did. It wasn t going to do the Allies any good, he said, for them to stay down there, economising and stewing about things that weren t their business anyway, only to make bandages and send stuff over to France. We d got to go on living, whatever happened to France. Business as usual was the only sane slogan, and if we lived up to that we should find ourselves in a position to help the Allies out when the infernal muddle was cleared up. If we didn t, we should be as deep in the soup as they were now. His father listened to him, opened his mouth, shut it again, was glad John, the other son, wasn t there to hear, since he was only too ready to get up a scrap with Charles (which really didn t do any good in the end because THE BLACK DROP 3 Charles wasn t to be moved by scrapping) and said mildly Charles might be right about a winter in town and they d think it over. And it proved on consultation that Emily, his wife, agreed with him, though it would have taken all the domestic gods in conclave to decide whether she did this of her own free will or because she thought he wanted it. Norris refused his son s gift of the lease because, when he had known anything actual about Charles s affairs, they were always in a precarious state of flux so on a ; and Charles compromised nom inal rental. And when the family, after a fleeting glimpse at the house by Norris and his younger son, John, had come up with the servants, whose faithfulness took back to an elder time, they found it of a rare perfection. It was an old house " on the hill " with a view of the Charles and the to trees and an oblique pathway for eye green ; within, though it was undeniably shabby, this was the shabbiness of age and homely living. It looked as if it had suffered nothing from time, but simply coincided in the kindly use human beings had given it. It didn t seem like a house the Tracys had hired, but one they had inher ited and of which they knew the backward steps from age to youth. It had all the concomitants of beauty in a building of the right period: shutters, wainscoting, open fireplaces of a dulled and mellowed brick and generous hearths. It was fittingly provided with beautiful furni ture of an antique type, and the general harmony of the " whole thing, like the marriage of true minds," enabled them to settle with an amazing lack of difficulty. Why had they come up from Grasslands where Norris had been so snugly fitted in for his entire lifetime, writing his schoolbooks which earned him money and his novels which didn t, that his neighbors would have said you 4 THE BLACK DROP couldn t pry him out for more than a flitting, here or there? Why, except that Charles had urged them to it? Norris, after he forgot Charles was urging, gave him self plausible reason for it. John, the second son curt name for a handsome blonde youth with a dashing profile line and a limp that kept him from robust pursuits was on fire with eagerness to do something tremendous for the war, and there was nothing he could do adequate to his desires. He, like his father, had a knack at words. They d got to serve him for weapons since the limp and the recurrent pain of it held him down and was going to hold him, he was told, all his mortal days. He began writing, fiery things, advisory, beseeching things, and got them in wherever he could, sometimes as letters only. And while he fumed at the war, his father grew gray over it and said one night to his wife in the moon-lighted splendor of their room at Grasslands a chamber of care now, since Europe was on fire, dear shrines destroyed, dear heart of England aching: " Emily, what if we should move up to town? " You could hardly ever tell what Emily was thinking. She had lived that effective masquerade of woman s ser vice to men and houses for over thirty years now, and Norris knew he didn t easily find out what she wanted done only what she thought best should be done. And now, in their moon-lighted seclusion, he was at once aware he had taken the wrong time and setting to interrogate her. He couldn t even see her face, smooth, sympathetic mask as it was of her yieldingness and earnest foresight for the family good. The moonlight had blotted her out, as ef fectually as darkness. There she was, her hair a shadow and her face an outline merely, drowned on her pillow. But after all, he told himself, if he had put the question THE BLACK DROP 5 by day, and tried to strike out some spark of her personal will or liking, he wouldn t have succeeded. She answered him at once: " You mean on account of John? " Now he hadn t at all meant on account of John, but he seized upon it as a more or less valid pretext. " t " Don you think yourself," he said, John would make better headway if he could be in town, chum in with other " fellows and perhaps get a job on a paper? " " t Yes," she said. It isn quite the same, living down here and going up every week." They said no more that night. He judged it best to let her think it over and besides he was so of ; enamored giving a simple reason for a complex motive that he wanted to think that over, too. He had his own private sense of humor that nobody, except his father perhaps, a man really old and crippled by gout, ever tapped. What was the reason he wanted to move away from Grasslands? Was it because Charles had suggested it, had made the practical detail of it easy and set the pace of their prep aration? Not at all, he would have said.

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