Prescott-Russell en Numérique

Russell Leader, 24 Dec 1931, page 7

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Youd nt ht ' ~» Dever have." £2 ee -------- a-- oot ! WOMAN WHO { WAITED Was It Loyalty or Love That Made Sylvia Refuse Grahame's Proposal? b By Dorothy Stather *- ~-0- Sylvia lifted the flowers out of the long, expensive-looking box with gen- tle hands. Orchids, proud, exotic-looking things, seeming in. their very fragility to dis- dain the ordinary modes of life. That was like Grahame, too, thought Sylvia. He, too, was aloof, striding head and shoulders above his fellow men. : ; . There was no doubt about Grahame Hartley's success in life--even his ene- mies had to admit that. Everything he touched turned into gold--the Midas touch. She placed the flowers in a vase of water and hesitated before opening the square, massive-looking envelope that had accompanied them. It lay there on the table, as if in mute challenge to the other letter which had come by the same post, a letter written on cheap white station- ery in a rather shaky handwriting. She sighed as she slit open the big envelope. It contained, as she expect- ed, an invitation to dine with Grahame that evening. He would ring up later. That was all, but she knew that it meant a very great deal more. It meant that she couldn't put off her de- cision much longer. If it hadn't been for Hugh, who had caught her dreams and held them .in the hollow of his hand, she would not have hesitated to have become Gra- hame Hartley's wife. Yet it was five years since Hugh had gone to America to make his for- tune-- for her. He had gone so glori- ously full of life and hope. And then, after the first year, came sudden silence. Month after month passed, but neither she nor his mother ever heard from him again. And all their en- quiries proved fruitless. With Hugh had gone all her love, her youth, her faith in man -- until Grahame Hartley came into her life. If she refused him, what remained to her?--work, and the dread of the future that overtakes lonely women, the long empty years stretching ahead. Sylvia looked at the orchids, sighed, and opened the little cheap envelope. "It seems such a long time since I saw you, dear," wrote Hugh's mother, "Can't you spare me a week-end soon? I'm very lonely sometimes. It's five years since Hugh went, but he'll come back to us both, never fear, and find us waiting." ; Her lips quivered. For deep down in her heart she knew it was that hope of Hugh's return which held her back from accepting another man's love. It was a perfect evening of late sum- mer. Grahame Hartley had driven her down in his new car to a riverside club. Coming back in the moon-splashed darkness, she felt herself drifting, drawn by a tide too'strong to resist. In a quiet path by.the river he pulled up and.laid his hand over hers. "Sylvia, won't you. give me your ans- wer to-night? I've been patient, my dear. I must know qne way or an- .. other." She twisted her fingers in her lap.' "Grahame, it's difficult. I like you tremendously, you know 'that, but I can't give you the love you deserve. That part of me, the real part, is dead --vyou know the story." "Yes, I know, Lut, dear, you're think: ' ing of what is past. Let'us take the happiness the present offers.' He laid his hand over hers.: "And I believe I can make you happy, Sylvia." - " "Her voicé trembled as she answered. ! "I beMeve you "ould, Grahame, but, You see, it isn't as if we knew for cer- tain what had happened to Hugh--we 4 : : Ll . I know," he said in his understand: ing way. "But after four years--well, I don't grudge the other man your «faith, my- dear. "You're so good to me, Grahame," she whispered. "I'm tempted, I admit . it, and comradeship--after: all; that stands for a lot in marriage, doesn't it?" ; The unconscious pathos.in her votes Stirred the.man greatly, He said quiet ly 5 : aa a "I believe it does. But you are tired. 1 won't press you any more to-night. Think it over again; we'll meet to- morrow night. Now I'll drive you Outside her flat he held her hand. "I will call for you to-morrow, and you will give me your answer?" "I promise," she said. She woke next morning with the sunlight streaming into her room. For a while she lay drowsy, agreeably aware that it was Saturday and that she had to go to the office. All night she had been dreaming of Hugh, as .|terday's love still lives.' a -- Miss Betty May of Englewood, N.J., is seen here with Chrysan- themums which-won first prize in white class at a recent exhibition of horticultural society in New York City. os he used to be, so full of life, of plans-- | And so at the cottage gate an old and he'd seemed so near. woman watched her go and her eyes 'She sat up, pushing back her hair. were dim with tears, : : What was it Grahame had said about | Forgive me, Hugh," she whispered, yesterday's love belonging to the past, !"I had to tell her--but your mother's But did it? : still here, lad -- waiting."--Pearson's Her love for Hugh still clung to her Weekly. in spite of all. A sudden inspiration | came to her. Che - : the little Hampshir» IL dow B : Interesting Re ira-Lire keep faith with Hugh perhaps for the By Professor Julian Huxley last time. In The Strand Magazine B -- As the train carried her into the country, she made up her mind to tell Hugh's mother. She would under- stand, surely, and be glad that she was to find happiness with another man. But when she arrived at the little cottage, and found Janet Grant's warm welcome awaiting her, she could not bring herself to say anything to quench the light in those brave old eyes. ; As the two women sat over tea in Man happens to be the most success- ful of a whole series of diverse and fascinating experiments to deal with the problems of the world; but we are not therefore the most beautiful or the most ingenious. Birds branched off from reptiles somewhere about a hundred million 3 years ago, and were remodelled for the dusk, talking of the man whose fight go that their forelimb was irre- ay bound Ais togetlier, ft Was vocably converted into a wing. They Jo Byhis = h She wars Bong i clung obstinately to one important 0 ine pasi, Uwihg: ever again © character of their reptilian ancestry-- days with Hugh. . : (the-shelled egg, and thus debarred b ! en come hack aud } Snow yoru themselves from ever being born into e waiting, sweetheart,' "he had said. ihe world at such an advanced state Anois ie ud rome 1 iv ot oven bs sos to Po answer. ® "and other higher --ammals. denly suffocating in the little room. In respect of their minds just as She got up with an impulsive move- yuh ag their bodies, birds have de-, ment, sir ot i : a : j veloped along other lines than mam- Mother,' she sai 1, gentiy laying her) mals. Mammals have gradually per- hand op her knee, "I want to tell you footed intelligence and the capacity something. : each other, she told the ather woman ROWE 814 fixity of the iastincts have h Bl hg diminished; birds have kept instinct of the new love that had come into her as the mainstay of their behaviour, life, and of the answer she had PIO-: and while they possess some intelli- Tnised to give that night. ce !gence, it is used merely to polish up I am going now %o write to Gra- ne outfit of inheritéd instincts. The hame, to tell him he was wrong. Yes- ¢ n¢ part of their brain, known to be 5 : ie the seat of imtelligence and learning, Sue kised- Hugh's mother lightly on remains-relatively small, while' other he bases ond Jr's hon a | parts, known to be the regulating ma- the Ps sl bh = ) om su + | chinery for more automatic and emo- wi Snder > Jung pad an ; tional actions, are in birds relatively ote REEL : give me, jarger than in 'four-footed creatures. Sep ah ut this i 800 on Can't| perhaps the most obvious way in te a i her from which birds differs ftom. men' iy nBIE the parlor as she came down the stairs ' 5 a i something ia her tense attitude ar-! complicated things, without ever Ho Toad ie girl's eon, tehed ' ting taught. Flying, for instance, With a oT oman stretched out a all its. complexity of balancq and, aero: "Sylvia, is that letter? Give it | uucal adjustment, comes, untghght,| t 4 Lid ge ov ¢ | Young bitds very frequently: © take: Jo me 3 ild, you must not sen a thir first flight when their parents > 'a f sight. Th tori ) i Janet Grant took the letter from her, ! ey aks ther es pt iH and tearing it across, threw it.into the goom a1) to be erroneous. Some kinds re . ¢ of, birds, once their young are full Flin she EAL two bright spots fledged, do try to lure them away trom 0 an Li es Inst the nest, but this is merely to encour , : ; USL age them to tuke the-plunge. There a you, SP ustung which I have hid- 44 'no instruction by "the old bird, anid fea ms a nuow, but jo conscious imitation by the'younzg. : ; =: Still more wonderful is it that-a bird: 1 208 eto tn Fv never bese om oo 3b to il 3 aii : ->% taught." Young 'birds, mating for the eg here Is Ft all, hyo first time, can make perfectly good in § you think Ale Was the: jess, * and nests" of the wuswal type fine, true lad you dreamed of" . She. found among theif particular Species. paused and drew a sharp quivering 8, Some people 'suggest that the young breath. "He'll hover foe back--to pirqg may have gained the necessary you, Sylvia, My boy's in prison. {knowledge from contemplating the "Mother:" gasped Sylvia. structure '0f the nest: in which 'tHey x Oh, it's true, said the elder woman ore brought up, but this theqry is sadly.. "I've kept it:from you too lone, 'negatived by fhe fA" PHa A i Over there he soon got into a bad set, i ' ) 5 K Bo ie : So% PT scrambles out ofits tusne] dmmediate- gambling, and drink. He confessed as ly upon Ao = does not bestow 3. = 2 nde me bi, a JeRgman Le; there was a girl. It was for. jer § Tublijy sands. decaying. "jamveswcghat did wrong, I believe, that Hirst A AIST Yh visa da adon ond then he nas Hever tun Straight. | mating' comes, it will build a mound 'Mother," Sylvia eried, you've known this all along!" Lover, young birds reared by hand in "Yes, I've known." slo a 5 a % ; An 'artificialhests MeRthtey bli Sylvia's heart=aghed for the other per kind.of nest for their species. A onan, ut in her own was a strange finch will have the impulse to weave 1 eV ta iance. 'coarse material into a rough cup, and Pi ® ral now i it was the bond yey, 4 line this with a finer material; 01 loyalty--not love, that had held her {14 tajlorbird takes leaves and sews to her promise to Hugh. That girlish" em together; and the house-martin dream of yesterday was but a pale' cojects mud or clay and consiricts a shadow against the deep tide of love cup against the side of a cliff or a that welled up in her heart' for the "house. : other man, Birds in a state of broodiness will for learning by experience, and the]: but my Hugh was always Pasily [1edys wg shiburkdy® of the - Atistrafiageaegionstiniaginition bind up the present with B56 Much as a lobiciupdn Be Motkd 'of fi ies of selfsu trembling, : just as ité angegtorshavesdd ngs Migros . 'pro- ["@long now?" asked the kindly neigh- have the impulse to sit on eggs, but if eggs are not available, then on some- thing else. Crows have brooded on golf-balls, gulls on brilliantine tins, and penguins on lumps of ice. Contrary to general opinion, birds have no real affection for their young. They have a strong, emotional, irra- tional concern, not entwined with rea- son, memory, personal affection, and foresight. When a nestling dies there is, no sign of sorrow, although there may be some agitation if a whole brood is stolen. When a chick be- | comes ill, it is definitely neglected. 'It '| would seem that the bird is only im- fpelled to parental action when there like gaping or) dis some activity, squawking, on the part of the children. Perhaps the familiar cuckoo pro- vides us with the completest proof of deposited as an egg in the mest of some other quite different species of bird, and having hatched out in double- rest 'of the contents of the nest, wheth- er these be eggs or young birds. It has a slightly hollow, hyper-sensitive back, < and the touch of any object there drives him frantic, so that, no matter what it is--eggs, young' birds, nuts or marbles--he walks backward and upward to the edge of the nest and tilts it overboard. It is neither cruelty nor malice aforethpught, it*is merely instinct. -~ ; When the foster-mother comes home, she is.not distressed in the least, but sets about at once feeding the change- ling, and paying no attention to her own offspring, even though some of them may be dangling just outside the nest. "Even when the young cuckoo from its foster-parents, and so bulky that they have to perch on its head to feed it, the older birds do not seem: disconcerted as human beings cer- tainly would. The well-known "broken-wing" trick is usually set down as a remarkable example of intelligence, but all the evidence points to this, too, as being merely instinctive--a trick not invent- ed by the individual bird but patented by the species. It is, in fact, on a par with the purely automatic "shamming dead" which many insects practice, and is the inevitable outcome of the animal's nervous. machinery when it is. stimulated in a particular way. Besides instinctive actions, we could multiply instances of unintelligent be- haviour among birds. If a strange egg iS' put among a bird's own eggs, the mother may either accept it or intelli- gently turn it out of the nest and con- tinge to sit: But a quite common re- action is for it to turn the strange egg out and then desert the nest. But because birds are mainly in- stinctive and not intelligent in their actions, it does not follow that their minds are lacking in intensity or variety: in fact, ttey experience a wide range of powerful emotions. There is an intense satisfaction in brooding and feeding its'young; where there is danger, birds suffer very real fear; in song, the bird gives vent to a deep current of feeling; the emotions aroused during their courtship display often make them oblivious of danger; and they are as subject as men to the emotions of jealousy -- rival cocks sometimes fight to the death. Bird-mind has sufficient subtlety to indulge in play: birds have been. seen dropping small objects in midair, and swoop down to catch them before they reach the ground, with the greatest evidence of enjoymernt.. Some birds, for "éxample, the raves, have a real sense of humor although of a rather low order. Two will cofabine to tease a dog or a cat, one occuping its atten- tion from the front, and the other stealing behind to tweak its tail. ¥ But being without the .power of con- céptual thought, birds still differ in a fundamental - way .from ourselves, Their emotion is not linked up with: the future or with the past as in the human mind. Their fear is just fear: it is notithe fear of death, nor can it anticipate pain, nor become an ingledi- ent of a Yasting "complex." They can- not worry. or torment themselves. The bird motler is not concerned with the fate of an individual offspring; and" when the young grow up and her inner physiology changes, taere is no intel- fect¥al framework making a continu- ing personal or individual interest pos- sible. Jur powers of thought and our he' future and the : the bird's lifg. must be almost wholly & patchwork, a 1 ants, vo LI ent % Another :\Bad Turn | "How's your friend-Hadsum getting bour. . the dissimilarity of birds' minds with our own. A young cuckoo, having been. quick time, proceeds to evict all the! grows into a creature entirely different | r Canadian Indian In Fiction A number of Canadian writers have recognized the unique artistic and dramatic effects to be derived from In- dian life. Fortunately, none of them has written a "Hiawatha." That is to say, the Canadian Indian has not been conventionalized and idealized into an epic hero mildly allegorized. The Canadian Indian has various qualifica- 4 tions for appearing in literature, with- out being elaborated into a copper-col- ored Aeneas or Prometheus, or a solar deity. For one thing, the Indian myth- 'ology, product of naive minds in close contact with primitive nature at her wildest and grandest, has literary value, sometimes quaint and some- times impressive. Again, the Indian character, ranging from its merely physiological aspects -- endurance, keenness of sensory perceptions, and | so on--up to its more complex ming- ling of dignity, courage, and fierce savagery, is full of dramatic elements, displayed to the fullest effect against the background of eventful life on the prairie, mountain, and river. Finally there is the tragedy which inexitably followed his contact with the white invader. ; The impulse to study the Indian in the flesh and not fancifully did not come - first through literature but through painting. The adventurous artist Paul Kane showed the inex- haustible fund of picturesque scene and incident provided by the Indians of the plains. - He and his successor, Edmund Morris, have left on canvas invaluable records of the red man as hie was, while some of his fading glory survived. . While in poetry Canada has no "Hia- watha," in prose she has a "Last of the Mohicans." Indeed, Richardson's "Wacousta," produced contemporan- eously with Cooper's books, seems to be inheriting at this late date the es- teem that Cooper has gradually been losing. Since Richardson's time, how- ever, the Indian's role in Canadian fie- tion has been a minor qne Apparently the dramatic elements, which we have found effectively used in poetry, have not appealed to anyone as valuable for the more sustained effort of a novel. -- Lionel Stevenson, in "Appraisals of Canadian Literature." oe x3 Scientist Declares Death Is Busiest at Night The question of the time of day at which most deaths occur has engaged the attention of the French scientist, Lavastine, we are told in the Neues Wiener Journal (ienna). We read: "On the strength of carefully collect- ed statistical material Lavastine has come to the conclusion that the pre- dominant majority of deaths occur at night. "Most people die during the time of sleep, between seven o'clock in the evening and six in the morning. More rarely death occurs in the hours which man usually spends awake. Thus La- hospital under his direction about 120 patients died at night, whereas ac- cording to the records only sixty-eight deaths occurred in the daytime. It ig interesting that the French scientist, although he expressly em- phasizes his rejection of astrology, traces this back to cosmic influences, still unknown to us. "Moreover, he has concerned him- self with the problem of the hour of birth, and has collected extensive ma- terial from the memoranda of Parisian hospitals for women. Here, too, it may be proven from statistics that the number of birthg in night-time is much larger than by day." . s id TE [EE Hf po peohy tt 2 Loo Mexican "Home Dish" .. Declared to be: Importation * "Mexico City. Chile con carne," as it is known in the United States, is not a Mexican dish, writes a correspond- ent: The Christian Science Monitor. It really is not,«fe® in Mexico the real "@drne comchile." The first consists' Of-un Alleged! Mexican bean soup, while the real article'fs a sort of meat stew with chile sauce. , Here is the true story of "chile con carne." It is in reality a Texas product, manufac- tured and canned in the United States as a Mexican importation, and is gen- erally recommended to northern visit- ors to the Mexican border agga Mexi- can dish. Its popularity is great and it has become generally accepted as a "native dish of Mexico," and a lure to Mexican borders tourists ..So wide- spread 'has been 'jts, popularity, how- ever, that this supposedly Mexican pro- » co, where it has become accepted as a "Mexican" dish imported from the Tillings shrugged his. sgulders: {Well e's PraA®iing .satifactor ily," he replied, "but he's still in con- valescence, you know." "I'd no idea," said the neighbour. "I United States, #Higit appeald: to the Mexicans fheinselves, 4° : Gg Gil thought he'd got over his operation two months ago." | "He did, but then he got his doctor's bii}," samo tha reply. Farmer--"Two years." City Man-- "How do you know?" Farmer--"By looking at her horns." City 'Man-- "What a fool I am. I might have seem that abe bas two hava' -- Animal Lae, vastine observed Jast year that in the duct has actually 'migrated into Mexi- | City Man--"How old is this cow?" .. . TT

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