ices in some way to that country when she and her allies so needed
assistance. But the lists of those who offered their lives then may be
searched in vain for Shelby's name.

I heard vaguely that he had gone to Borneo in September, 1914; and there
he remained, "to avoid such a nasty mess as the world had come to." You
see, his was a process of evasion. He loved romance when it was sweet
and beautiful; but he had not the vision to understand that there is
also a hard, stern, iron romance--the romance of men's companionships in
difficult places.

How he did it, I never knew; but he returned from Borneo a year later,
and handed to his publishers a novel called "The Blowing Rose," which
dealt, as its title would indicate, with anything but the War--a
sentimental tale of the old South, full of lattices and siestas through
long, slow afternoons, and whispered words of love, and light
conversations at dusk, and all that sort of rot. And all the while,
outside his door the guns were booming; at the gates of the world a
perilous storm had broken. The earth was on fire; but while Rome burned,
he, like Nero, played a fiddle--and was content.

Then he wrote a comedy of British manners, and nothing would do but that
he must himself journey to London in war-time to see about its
production there.

Stanton and I happened to see him the day before he sailed. We met him
face to face on Fifth Avenue, and he bowed to us. We returned the
salute, little dreaming that never again would we see him.

For Shelby sailed on the _Lusitania_.

There must be a hiatus here, too; for no one saw him die. The story runs
that he must have been in his cabin when the awful moment came--that he
was drowned like a rat in a trap. I wonder. And I wonder if he knew in
that agonizing instant that he was doomed? But was it not better to die
than to emerge again from so great a calamity--so historical an
episode--as he had once before emerged, and find himself again
inarticulate? At least there can be some glory for him now; for one
likes to think that, after all, he might have told us how he felt in so
supreme a moment, and linked it, through his delicate art, with his San
Francisco sensations. Could those have been revived, and put upon paper?
Could Shelby ever have made a fine gesture, know himself as we knew him,
and told the truth.

I doubt it. For, looking over his published works tonight, I find only
one or two epigrams worthy of a brief existence.