The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story
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Title: The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story
Editor: Edward J. O'Brien
Contributor: Sherwood Anderson
Konrad Bercovici
Maxwell Struthers Burt
Irvin S. Cobb
Lincoln Colcord
Charles Joseph Finger
Waldo David Frank
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Susan Glaspell
Richard Matthews Hallet
Frances Noyes Hart
Fannie Hurst
Manuel Komroff
Frank Luther Mott
Vincent O'Sullivan
Wilbur Daniel Steele
Harriet Maxon Thayer
Charles Hanson Towne
Mary Heaton Vorse
Release date: June 28, 2006 [eBook #18709]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1922
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18709
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THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1921
AND THE
YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY
Edited by
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN
Editor of "The Best Short Stories of 1915"
"The Best Short Stories of 1916"
"The Best Short Stories of 1917"
"The Best Short Stories of 1918"
"The Best Short Stories of 1919"
"The Best Short Stories of 1920"
"The Great Modern English Stories," Etc
Boston
Small, Maynard & Company
Publishers
Copyright, 1920, by John T. Frederick, Charles J. Finger, The Dial
Publishing Company, Inc., Charles Scribner's Sons, The International
Magazine Company, Harper & Brothers, and Smart Set Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1921, by The Boston Transcript Company.
Copyright, 1921, by B.W. Huebsch, The Century Company, John T.
Frederick, George H. Doran Company, The Dial Publishing Company, Inc.,
The Pictorial Review Company, The Curtis Publishing Company, The Crowell
Publishing Company, Harper & Brothers, Charles Scribner's Sons, The
International Magazine Company, and Smart Set Company, Inc.
Copyright, 1921, by Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Copyright, 1922, by Maxwell Struthers Burt, George H. Doran Co., Lincoln
Colcord, Waldo Frank, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Doubleday, Page &
Co., Glasgow, Susan Glaspell Cook, Richard Matthews Hallet, Frances
Noyes Hart, Fannie Hurst, Manuel Komroff, Frank Luther Mott, Vincent
O'Sullivan, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Harriet Maxon Thayer, Charles Hanson
Towne, and Mary Heaton Minor.
Copyright, 1922, by Small, Maynard & Company, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Press of the Murray Printing Company
Kendall Square, Cambridge
TO A.E. COPPARD
BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Grateful acknowledgment for permission to include the stories and other
material in this volume is made to the following authors, editors and
publishers:
To the Editor of _The Century Magazine_, the Editor of _The Bookman_,
the Editor of _The Dial_, the Editor of _The Pictorial Review_, the
Editor of _The Saturday Evening Post_, the Editor of _The American
Magazine_, the Editor of _Scribner's Magazine_, the Editor of _Good
Housekeeping_, the Editor of _Harper's Magazine_, the Editor of _The
Cosmopolitan_, the Editors of _The Smart Set_, The Editor of _The
Midland_, Boni & Liveright, Inc., George H. Doran Co., B.W. Huebsch,
Doubleday, Page & Co., Sherwood Anderson, Konrad Bercovici, Maxwell
Struthers Burt, Irvin S. Cobb, Lincoln Colcord, Charles J. Finger, Waldo
Frank, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Ellen Glasgow, Susan Glaspell,
Richard Matthews Hallet, Frances Noyes Hart, Fannie Hurst, Manuel
Komroff, Frank Luther Mott, Vincent O'Sullivan, Wilbur Daniel Steele,
Harriet Maxon Thayer, Charles Hanson Towne, and Mary Heaton Vorse.
Acknowledgments are specially due to _The Boston Evening Transcript_ for
permission to reprint the large body of material previously published in
its pages.
I shall be grateful to my readers for corrections, and particularly for
suggestions leading to the wider usefulness of this annual volume. In
particular, I shall welcome the receipt, from authors, editors, and
publishers, of stories printed during the period between October, 1921
and September, 1922 inclusive, which have qualities of distinction and
yet are not printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice. Such
communications may be addressed to me at _Forest Hill, Oxfordshire,
England_.
E.J.O.
CONTENTS[1]
PAGE
INTRODUCTION. By the Editor. xii
BROTHERS. By Sherwood Anderson. 3
(From _The Bookman_)
FANUTZA. By Konrad Bercovici. 13
(From _The Dial_)
EXPERIMENT. By Maxwell Struthers Burt. 28
(From _The Pictorial Review_)
DARKNESS. By Irvin S. Cobb. 52
(From _The Saturday Evening Post_)
AN INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS. By Lincoln Colcord. 82
(From _The American Magazine_)
THE LIZARD GOD. By Charles J. Finger. 109
(From _All's Well_)
UNDER THE DOME. By Waldo Frank. 130
(From _The Dial_)
FRENCH EVA. By Katharine Fullerton Gerould. 142
(From _Scribner's Magazine_)
THE PAST. By Ellen Glasgow. 168
(From _Good Housekeeping_)
HIS SMILE. By Susan Glaspell. 194
(From _The Pictorial Review_)
THE HARBOR MASTER. By Richard Matthews Hallet. 207
(From _Harper's Magazine_)
GREEN GARDENS. By Frances Noyes Hart. 240
(From _Scribner's Magazine_)
SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY. By Fannie Hurst. 253
(From _The Cosmopolitan_)
THE LITTLE MASTER OF THE SKY. By Manuel Komroff. 288
(From _The Dial_)
THE MAN WITH THE GOOD FACE. By Frank Luther Mott. 300
(From _The Midland_)
MASTER OF FALLEN YEARS. By Vincent O'Sullivan. 321
(From _The Smart Set_)
THE SHAME DANCE. By Wilbur Daniel Steele. 337
(From _Harper's Magazine_)
KINDRED. By Harriet Maxon Thayer. 362
(From _The Midland_)
SHELBY. By Charles Hanson Towne. 386
(From _The Smart Set_)
THE WALLOW OF THE SEA. By Mary Heaton Vorse. 401
(From _Harper's Magazine_)
THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY,
OCTOBER, 1920, TO SEPTEMBER, 1921 419
Addresses of American and English Magazines
Publishing Short Stories. 421
The Biographical Roll of Honor of American Short Stories. 424
The Roll of Honor of Foreign Short Stories
in American Magazines. 428
The Best Books of Short Stories: A Critical Summary. 430
Volumes of Short Stories Published in the United
States: An Index. 437
Volumes of Short Stories Published in England and
Ireland Only. 440
Volumes of Short Stories Published in France. 442
Articles on the Short Story: An Index. 443
Index of Short Stories in Books. 457
I. American Authors. 458
II. English and Irish Authors. 461
III. Translations. 463
Magazine Averages. 466
Index of Short Stories Published in American Magazines. 469
I. American Authors. 471
II. English and Irish Authors. 500
III. Translations. 505
INTRODUCTION
I was talking the other day to Alfred Coppard, who has steered more
successfully than most English story writers away from the Scylla and
Charybdis of the modern artist. He told me that he had been reading
several new novels and volumes of short stories by contemporary American
writers with that awakened interest in the civilization we are framing
which is so noticeable among English writers during the past three
years. He asked me a remarkable question, and the answer which I gave
him suggested certain contrasts which seemed to me of basic importance
for us all. He said: "I have been reading books by Sherwood Anderson,
Waldo Frank and Ben Hecht and Konrad Bercovici and Joseph Hergesheimer,
and I can see that they are important books, but I feel that the
essential point to which all this newly awakened literary consciousness
is tending has somehow subtly eluded me. American and English writers
both use the same language, and so do Scotch and Irish writers, but I am
not puzzled when I read Scotch and Irish books as I am when I read these
new American books. Why is it?"
I had to think for a moment, and then the obvious answer occurred to me.
I told him that I thought the reason for his moderate bewilderment was
due to the fact that the Englishman or the Scotchman or the Irishman
living at home was writing out of a background of racial memory and
established tradition which was very much all of one piece, and that all
such an artist's unspoken implications and subtleties could be easily
taken for granted by his readers, and more or less thoroughly
understood, because they were elements in harmony with a tolerably fixed
and ordered world.
I added that this was more or less true of the American writer up to a
date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892.
During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date,
there has been an ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents
thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the
contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by the
dynamic creative energies, physical and spiritual, of many races.
My suggestion to Mr. Coppard was that gradually the Anglo-Saxon, to take
the most readily understandable instance, was beginning to absorb large
tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the
experience of Scandinavian and Russian and German and Italian, of Polish
and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic, and that
all these widening tracts of remembered racial experience interacting
upon one another under the tremendous pressure of our nervous, keen, and
eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos in many creative
minds. I said that Mr. Anderson and the others, half consciously and
half unconsciously, were trying to create worlds out of each separate
chaos, living dangerously, as Nietzsche advised, and fusing their
conceptions at a certain calculated temperature in artistic crucibles of
their own devising.
Mr. Coppard said that he quite saw that, but added that the particular
meaning in each case more or less escaped him. And then I ventured to
suggest that these meanings were more important for Americans at the
present stage than for Europeans, because American minds would grasp
readily at suggestions that harmonized with their own spiritual pasts,
and seize instinctive relations and congruities which had previously
escaped them in their experience, and so begin to formulate from these
books new intuitive laws. I suggested, moreover, that from the point of
view of the great artist these books were all more or less magnificent
failures which were creating, little by little, out of the shock of
conflict an ultimate harmony, out of which the great book for which we
are all waiting in America might come ten years from now, or five years,
or even tomorrow.
To this he replied that he felt I had supplied the clue which had
baffled him, and asked me if I did not discover a chaos of a different
sort in English life and literature since the armistice. I agreed that I
did discover such a chaos, but that it seemed to me a chaos which was an
end rather than a beginning, a chaos in which the Tower of Babel had
fallen, and men had come to babble with more and more complete
dissociation of ideas, or else, on the other hand, were clinging
desperately to such literary and social traditions as had been left,
while their work froze into a new Augustanism comparable to that of the
early years of the eighteenth century.
Next year, in conjunction with John Cournos, I shall begin in a parallel
series of volumes with the present series, to present my annual study of
the English case. Meanwhile, for the present, I deal once more with that
American chaos in which I have unbounded and ultimate faith. From now on
I should like to take as my motto almost the last paragraph written by
Walt Whitman before he died: "The Highest said: Don't let us begin so
low--isn't our range too coarse--too gross?--The Soul answer'd: No, not
when we consider what it is all for--the end involved in Time and
Space." Or, as the old Dutch flour-miller put it more briefly: "I never
bother myself what road the folks come--I only want good wheat and rye."
To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the
benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and
principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the
task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary
fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists,
may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in
formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than
dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead.
What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh,
living current which flows through the best American work, and the
psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have
conferred upon it.
No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic
substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is
beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair
to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination
than we display at present.
The present record covers the period from October 1920, to September
1921, inclusive. During this period, I have sought to select from the
stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life
imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. Substance is
something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than
something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a
story only attain substantial embodiment when the artist's power of
compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth.
The first test of a short story, therefore, in any qualitative analysis
is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected
facts or incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of
substance.
But a second test is necessary if the story is to take rank above other
stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living substance into
the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skilful selection and
arrangement of his materials, and by the most direct and appealing
presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.
The short stories which I have examined in this study, as in previous
years, have fallen naturally into four groups. The first consists of
those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of
substance or the test of form. These stories are listed in the year book
without comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of
those stories which may fairly claim that they survive either the test
of substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim to
possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am
glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them to which a reader
responds with some part of his own experience. Stories included in this
group are indicated in the yearbook index by a single asterisk prefixed
to the title.
The third group, which is composed of stories of still greater
distinction, includes such narratives as may lay convincing claim to a
second reading, because each of them has survived both tests, the test
of substance and the test of form. Stories included in this group are
indicated in the yearbook index by two asterisks prefixed to the title.
Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which
possess, I believe, the even finer distinction of uniting genuine
substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such
sincerity that these stories may fairly claim a position in American
literature. If all of these stories by American authors were
republished, they would not occupy more space than five novels of
average length. My selection of them does not imply the critical belief
that they are great stories. A year which produced one great story would
be an exceptional one. It is simply to be taken as meaning that I have
found the equivalent of five volumes worthy of republication among all
the stories published during the period under consideration. These
stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks prefixed
to the title, and are listed in the special "Roll of Honor." In
compiling these lists I have permitted no personal preference or
prejudice to consciously influence my judgment. To the titles of certain
stories, however, in the "Rolls of Honor," an asterisk is prefixed, and
this asterisk, I must confess, reveals in some measure a personal
preference, for which, perhaps, I may be indulged. It is from this final
short list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected.
It has been a point of honor with me not to republish a story by an
English author or by any foreign author. I have also made it a rule not
to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume.
The general and particular results of my study will be found explained
and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume.
In past years it has been my pleasure and honor to dedicate the best
that I have found in the American magazines as the fruit of my labors to
the American artist who, in my opinion, has made the finest imaginative
contribution to the short story during the period considered. I take
pleasure in recalling the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews
Hallet, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Arthur Johnson, Anzia Yezierska, and
Sherwood Anderson. In my opinion Sherwood Anderson has made this year
once more the most permanent contribution to the American short story,
but as last year's book is associated with his name, I am happy to
dedicate this year's offering to a new and distinguished English artist,
A.E. Coppard, to whom the future offers in my opinion a rich harvest of
achievement.
EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.
Forest Hill, Oxon, England,
November 23, 1921
THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1921
Note.--The order in which the stories in this volume are printed is not
intended as an indication of their comparative excellence; the
arrangement is alphabetical by authors.
BROTHERS[2]
By SHERWOOD ANDERSON
(From _The Bookman_)
I am at my house in the country and it is late October. It rains. Back
of my house is a forest and in front there is a road and beyond that
open fields. The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly into
plains. Some twenty miles away, across the flat country, lies the huge
city, Chicago.
On this rainy day the leaves of the trees that line the road before my
window are falling like rain, the yellow, red, and golden leaves fall
straight down heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are
denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be
carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing
away.
Yesterday morning I arose at daybreak and went for a walk. There was a
heavy fog and I lost myself in it. I went down into the plains and
returned to the hills and everywhere the fog was as a wall before me.
Out of it trees sprang suddenly, grotesquely, as in a city street late
at night people come suddenly out of the darkness into the circle of
light under a street lamp. Above there was the light of day forcing
itself slowly into the fog. The fog moved slowly. The tops of trees
moved slowly. Under the trees the fog was dense, purple. It was like
smoke lying in the streets of a factory town.
An old man came up to me in the fog. I know him well. The people here
call him insane. "He is a little cracked," they say. He lives alone in a
little house buried deep in the forest and has a small dog he carries
always in his arms. On many mornings I have met him walking on the road
and he has told me of men and women who were his brothers and sisters,
his cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law. The notion has possession
of him. He cannot draw close to people near at hand so he gets hold of a
name out of a newspaper and his mind plays with it. One morning he told
me he was a cousin to the man named Cox who at the time when I write is
a candidate for the presidency. On another morning he told me that
Caruso the singer had married a woman who was his sister-in-law. "She is
my wife's sister," he said, holding the little dog closely. His gray
watery eyes looked appealingly up to me. He wanted me to believe. "My
wife was a sweet slim girl," he declared. "We lived together in a big
house and in the morning walked about arm in arm. Now her sister has
married Caruso the singer. He is of my family now." As some one had told
me the old man had never been married I went away wondering.
One morning in early September I came upon him sitting under a tree
beside a path near his house. The dog barked at me and then ran and
crept into his arms. At that time the Chicago newspapers were filled
with the story of a millionaire who had got into trouble with his wife
because of an intimacy with an actress. The old man told me the actress
was his sister. He is sixty years old and the actress whose story
appeared in the newspapers is twenty, but he spoke of their childhood
together. "You would not realize it to see us now but we were poor
then," he said. "It's true. We lived in a little house on the side of a
hill. Once when there was a storm the wind nearly swept our house away.
How the wind blew. Our father was a carpenter and he built strong houses
for other people but our own house he did not build very strongly." He
shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got into trouble.
Our house is not built very strongly," he said as I went away along the
path.
For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered
every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a
murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for
the deed. The tale runs something like this--
The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged,
worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman, and lived with his
wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-Second Street. He
loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was
employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the
city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy
stolid-looking man with gray eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman
in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a
sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop, had a
desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets containing
the record of the work done by each man in his department. When he
looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at her desk. The notion
got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely. He did not think of
trying to draw close to her or of winning her love. He looked at her as
one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October
when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. "She is a
pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can she be thinking
about as she sits there by the window at work?"
In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his
apartment in Thirty-Second Street and into the presence of his wife and
his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home he
carried her figure about with him in his mind. As he stood by a window
in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central railroad
tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there beside him.
Down below women walked in the street and in every woman he saw there
was something of the Iowa girl. One woman walked as she did, another
made a gesture with her hand that reminded of her. All the women he saw
except only his wife and his mother-in-law were like the girl he had
taken inside himself.
The two women in his own house puzzled and confused him. They became
suddenly unlovely and commonplace. His wife in particular was like some
strange unlovely growth that had attached itself to his body.
In the evening after the day at the factory he went home to his own
place and had dinner. He had always been a silent man and when he did
not talk no one minded. After dinner he, with his wife, went to a
picture show. When they came home his wife's mother sat under an
electric light reading. There were two children and his wife expected
another. They came into the apartment and sat down. The climb up two
flights of stairs had wearied his wife. She sat in a chair beside her
mother groaning with weariness.
The mother-in-law was the soul of goodness. She took the place of a
servant in the home and got no pay. When her daughter wanted to go to a
picture show she waved her hand and smiled. "Go on," she said. "I don't
want to go. I'd rather sit here." She got a book and sat reading. The
little boy of nine awoke and cried. He wanted to sit on the po-po. The
mother-in-law attended to that.
After the man and his wife came home the three people sat in silence for
an hour or two before bedtime. The man pretended to read a newspaper. He
looked at his hands. Although he had washed them carefully grease from
the bicycle frames left dark stains under the nails. He thought of the
Iowa girl and of her white quick hands playing over the keys of a
typewriter. He felt dirty and uncomfortable.
The girl at the factory knew the foreman had fallen in love with her and
the thought excited her a little. Since her aunt's death she had gone to
live in a rooming house and had nothing to do in the evening. Although
the foreman meant nothing to her she could in a way use him. To her he
became a symbol. Sometimes he came into the office and stood for a
moment by the door. His large hands were covered with black grease. She
looked at him without seeing. In his place in her imagination stood a
tall slender young man. Of the foreman she saw only the gray eyes that
began to burn with a strange fire. The eyes expressed eagerness, a
humble and devout eagerness. In the presence of a man with such eyes she
felt she need not be afraid.
She wanted a lover who would come to her with such a look in his eyes.
Occasionally, perhaps once in two weeks, she stayed a little late at the
office, pretending to have work that must be finished. Through the
window she could see the foreman, waiting. When every one had gone she
closed her desk and went into the street. At the same moment the foreman
came out at the factory door.
They walked together along the street, a half-dozen blocks, to where she
got aboard her car. The factory was in a place called South Chicago and
as they went along evening was coming on. The streets were lined with
small unpainted frame houses and dirty-faced children ran screaming in
the dusty roadway. They crossed over a bridge. Two abandoned coal barges
lay rotting in the stream.
He went along by her side walking heavily, striving to conceal his
hands. He had scrubbed them carefully before leaving the factory but
they seemed to him like heavy dirty pieces of waste matter hanging at
his side. Their walking together happened but a few times and during one
summer. "It's hot," he said. He never spoke to her of anything but the
weather. "It's hot," he said; "I think it may rain."
She dreamed of the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young
man, a rich man owning houses and lands. The workingman who walked
beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked
with him, stayed at the office until the others had gone to walk
unobserved with him, because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in
his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to her. In
his presence there was no danger, could be no danger. He would never
attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was
safe with him.
In his apartment in the evening the man sat under the electric light
with his wife and his mother-in-law. In the next room his two children
were asleep. In a short time his wife would have another child. He had
been with her to a picture show and presently they would get into bed
together.
He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of a
bed from where, in another room, his mother-in-law was crawling under
the sheets. Life was too intimate. He would lie awake eager,
expectant--expecting what?
Nothing. Presently one of the children would cry. It wanted to get out
of bed and sit on the po-po. Nothing strange or unusual or lovely would
or could happen. Life was too close, intimate. Nothing that could happen
in the apartment could in any way stir him. The things his wife might
say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the goodness of
his stout mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without pay--
He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a
newspaper--thinking. He looked at his hands. They were large, shapeless,
a workingman's hands.
The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he went
out of the apartment and walked in silence through miles of streets. It
was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a sea, along the
crest of a mountain. The night was clear and silent and the stars shone.
She also was a star. It was not necessary to say words.
Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out of
dim, star-lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the
stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the
stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she has being."
One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the
bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now in the courts being tried
for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the
evening of the murder he had taken his wife as usual to a picture show
and they started home at nine. In Thirty-Second Street, at a corner near
their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. That incident may have put the
idea of killing his wife into the man's head.
They got to the entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a
dark hallway. Then quite suddenly and apparently without thought the man
took a knife out of his pocket. "Suppose that man who darted into the
alleyway had intended to kill us," he thought. Opening the knife he
whirled about and struck his wife. He struck twice, a dozen
times--madly. There was a scream and his wife's body fell.
The janitor had neglected to light the gas in the lower hallway.
Afterward, the foreman decided that was the reason he did it, that and
the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. "Surely," he told himself, "I could
never have done it had the gas been lighted."
He stood in the hallway thinking. His wife was dead and with her had
died her unborn child. There was a sound of doors opening in the
apartments above. For several minutes nothing happened. His wife and her
unborn child were dead--that was all.
He ran upstairs thinking quickly. In the darkness on the lower stairway
he had put the knife back into his pocket and, as it turned out later,
there was no blood on his hands or on his clothes. The knife he later
washed carefully in the bathroom, when the excitement had died down a
little. He told everyone the same story. "There has been a holdup," he
explained. "A man came slinking out of an alleyway and followed me and
my wife home. He followed us into the hallway of the building and there
was no light." The janitor had neglected to light the gas. Well there
had been a struggle and in the darkness his wife had been killed. He
could not tell how it had happened. "There was no light. The janitor had
neglected to light the gas," he kept saying.
For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to
get rid of the knife. He took a long walk and threw it away into the
river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting
under the bridge, the bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings
he walked to the street car with the girl who was virginal and pure, who
was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.
And then he was arrested and right away he confessed--told everything.
He said he did not know why he had killed his wife and was careful to
say nothing of the girl at the office. The newspapers tried to discover
the motive for the crime. They are still trying. Some one had seen him
on the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged
into the affair and had her picture printed in the paper. That has been
annoying for her, as of course she has been able to prove she had
nothing to do with the man.
* * * * *
Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of
the city and I went for a long walk in the early morning. As I returned
out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose family
has so many and such strange ramifications. For a time he walked beside
me holding the little dog in his arms. It was cold and the dog whined
and shivered. In the fog the old man's face was indistinct. It moved
slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the upper air and with the
tops of trees. He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and whose
name is being shouted in the pages of the city newspapers that come to
our village each morning. As he walked beside me he launched into a long
tale concerning a life he and his brother, who had now become a
murderer, had once lived together. "He is my brother," he said over and
over, shaking his head. He seemed afraid I would not believe. There was
a fact that must be established. "We were boys together, that man and
I," he began again. "You see we played together in a barn back of our
father's house. Our father went away to sea in a ship. That is the way
our names became confused. You understand that. We have different names
but we are brothers. We had the same father. We played together in a
barn back of our father's house. All day we lay together in the hay in
the barn and it was warm there."
In the fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled
tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It swung back and forth
like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the
story the lips were trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the
relationship of men and women became confused, a muddle. The spirit of
the man who had killed his wife came into the body of the little old man
there by the roadside. It was striving to tell me the story it would
never be able to tell in the courtroom in the city, in the presence of
the judge. The whole story of mankind's loneliness, of the effort to
reach out to unattainable beauty tried to get itself expressed from the
lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness, who stood by the
side of a country road on a foggy morning holding a little dog in his
arms.
The arms of the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine
with pain. A sort of convulsion shook his body. The soul seemed striving
to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog down
across the plain to the city, to the singer, the politician, the
millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in
the city. The intensity of the old man's desire was terrible and in
sympathy my body began to tremble. His arms tightened about the body of
the little dog so that it screamed with pain. I stepped forward and tore
the arms away and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining. No doubt
it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared
at the dog lying at his feet as in the hallway of the apartment building
the worker from the bicycle factory had stared at his dead wife. "We are
brothers," he said again. "We have different names but we are brothers.
Our father you understand went off to sea."
* * * * *
I am sitting in my house in the country and it rains. Before my eyes the
hills fall suddenly away and there are the flat plains and beyond the
plains the city. An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest went
past my door and the little dog was not with him. It may be that as we
talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It may be
that the dog like the workman's wife and her unborn child is now dead.
The leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are falling
like rain--the yellow, red, and golden leaves fall straight down,
heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are denied a last
golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be carried away,
out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.
FANUTZA[3]
By KONRAD BERCOVICI
(From _The Dial_)
Light and soft, as though the wind were blowing the dust off the silver
clouds that floated overhead, the first snow was falling over the barren
lands stretching between the Danube and the Black Sea. A lowland wind,
which had already hardened and tightened the marshes, was blowing the
snow skywards. The fine silvery dust, caught between the two air
currents, danced lustily, blown hither and thither until it took hold of
folds and rifts in the frozen land and began to form rugged white ridges
that stretched in soft silvery curves to meet other growing mountains of
snow. The lowland wind, at first a mere breeze playfully teasing the
north wind, like a child that kicks the bed-sheets before falling
asleep, increased its force and swiftness, and scattered huge mountains
of snow, but the steadily rising drone of the north wind soon mastered
the situation. Like silver grain strewn by an unseen hand the snow fell
obliquely in steady streams over the land. A great calm followed. The
long Dobrudgean winter had started. In the dim steady light, in the wake
of the great calm, travelling towards the Danube from the Black Sea, the
"marea Neagra," four gipsy wagons, each drawn by four small horses,
appeared on the frozen plains. The caravan was brought to a standstill
within sight of the slowly moving river. The canvas-covered wagons
ranged themselves, broadwise, in a straight line with the wind. Between
the wagons enough space was allowed to stable the horses. Then, when
that part of the business had been done, a dozen men, in furs from head
to toe, quickly threw a canvas that roofed the temporary quarters of the
animals and gave an additional overhead protection from the snow and
wind to the dwellers of the wheeled homes.
While the unharnessing and quartering of the horses and the stretching
of the canvas roof proceeded, a number of youngsters jumped down from
the wagons, yelling and screaming with all the power of their lusty
lungs. They threw snowballs at one another as they ran, some in search
of firewood and others, with wooden pails dangling from ends of curved
sticks over the left shoulder, in search of water for the horses and for
the cooking pots of their mothers.
Soon afterwards, from little crooked black chimneys that pointed
downwards over the roofs of the wagons, thick black smoke told that the
fires were already started. The youngsters came back; those with the
full water pails marching erectly with legs well apart; the ones with
bundles of firewood strapped to their shoulders leaning forward on
knotted sticks so as not to fall under the heavy burden.
When everything had been done, Marcu, the tall gray-bearded chief,
inspected the work. A few of the ropes needed tightening. He did it
himself, shaking his head in disapproval of the way in which it had been
done. Then he listened carefully to the blowing of the wind and measured
its velocity and intensity. He called to his men. When they had
surrounded him, he spoke a few words. With shovels and axes they set
energetically to work at his direction, packing a wall of snow and wood
from the ground up over the axles of the wheels all around the wagons so
as to give greater solidity to the whole and to prevent the cold wind
from blowing underneath.
By the time the early night settled over the marshes, the camp was quiet
and dark. Even the dogs had curled up near the tired horses and had gone
to sleep.
Early the following morning the whole thing could not be distinguished
from one of the hundreds of mountains of snow that had formed over
night. After the horses had been fed and watered, Marcu, accompanied by
his daughter, Fanutza, left the camp and went riverward, in search of
the hut of the Tartar whose flat-bottomed boat was moored on the shore.
Marcu knew every inch of the ground. He had camped there with his tribe
twenty winters in succession. He sometimes arrived before, and at other
times after, the first snow of the year. But every time he had gone to
Mehmet Ali's hut and asked the Tartar to row him across the Danube, on
the old Roumanian side, to buy there fodder for the horses and the men;
enough to last until after the river was frozen tight and could be
crossed securely with horses and wagon. He had always come alone to
Mehmet's hut, therefore, the Tartar, after greeting Marcu and offering
to do what his friend desired, inquired why the girl was beside the old
chief.
"But this is my daughter, Fanutza, Mehmet Ali," Marcu informed.
"Who, Fanutza? She who was born here fourteen winters ago on the plains
here?"
"The same, the same, my friend," Marcu answered as he smilingly
appraised his daughter.
Mehmet Ali looked at the girl in frank astonishment at her size and full
development; then he said as he took the oars from the corner of the
hut: "And I, who thought that my friend had taken a new wife to himself!
Allah, Allah! How fast these youngsters grow! And why do you take her
along to the Giaour side, to the heathen side, of the river, friend?" he
continued talking as he put heavy boots on his feet and measured Fanutza
with his eyes as he spoke.
"For everything there is only one right time, say I, Marcu," the chief
explained, in measured solemn voice. "And so now is the time for my
daughter to get married. I have chosen her a husband from amongst the
sons of my men, a husband who will become the chief when I am no longer
here to come to your hut at the beginning of every winter. She shall
marry him in the spring. I now go with her to the bazaars to buy silks
and linens which the women of my tribe will fashion into new clothes for
both. And may Allah be good to them."
"_Allah il Allah_," Mehmet assured Marcu. "And who is he whom you have
chosen from amongst your men?"
"I am old, Mehmet, I would otherwise have chosen a younger man for my
daughter; but because I fear that this or the following winter will be
the last one, I have chosen Stan, whose orphaned daughter is Fanutza's
own age. He is good and true and strong. Young men never make careful
chiefs."
"That be right and wise," remarked Mehmet, who was by that time ready
for the trip. During the whole conversation the young gipsy girl had
been looking to her father when he spoke and sidewise when Mehmet
answered.
At fourteen Fanutza was a full-grown woman. Her hair, braided in
tresses, was hanging from underneath a black fur cap she wore well over
her forehead. Her eyes were large and brown, the long eyebrows were coal
black. Her nose was straight and thin and the mouth full and red. Withal
she was of a somewhat lighter hue than her father or the rest of the
gipsy tribe. Yet there was something of a darker grain than the grain in
her people that lurked beneath her skin. And she was light on her feet.
Even trudging in the deep snow, she seemed more to float, to skim on
top, than to walk.
Unconcerned she had listened to the conversation that had gone on
between her father and the Tartar in the hut of the boatman. She had
hardly been interested in the whole affair, yet, when Mehmet Ali
mentioned casually as soon as he was outdoors that he knew a man who
would pay twenty pieces of gold for such a wife as Fanutza was, she
became interested in the conversation.
"I sell horses only," Marcu answered quietly.
"Yet my friend and others from his tribe have bought wives. Remember
that beautiful Circassian girl?" the Tartar continued without raising or
lowering his voice.
"Yes, Mehmet, we buy wives but we don't sell them."
"Which is not fair," Mehmet reflected aloud still in the same voice.
By that time they had reached the river shore. Mehmet, after rolling
together the oil cloth that had covered the boat, helped the gipsy chief
and his daughter to the stern. With one strong push of the oar on the
shore rock, the Tartar slid his boat a hundred feet towards the middle
of the stream. Then he seated himself, face towards his passengers, and
rowed steadily without saying a single word. The gipsy chief lit his
short pipe and looked over his friend's head, trying to distinguish the
other shore from behind the curtain of falling snow. The boat glided
slowly over the thickening waters of the Danube. A heavy snowstorm, the
heaviest of the year, lashed the river. When Mehmet had finally moored
his boat to the Roumanian side of the Danube, he turned around to the
gipsy chief and said:
"Be back before sundown. It shall be my last crossing of the year. For
when the sun rises the waters will be frozen still. The gale blows from
the land of the Russians."
"As you tell me, friend," answered Marcu while helping his daughter out
of the boat.
When the two had gone a short distance Fanutza turned her head. Mehmet
Ali was leaning on an oar and looking after them. A little later, a
hundred paces further, she caught fragments of a Tartar song that
reached her ears in spite of the shrill noises of the wind.
Marcu and his daughter entered the inn that stood a few hundred feet
from the shore. The innkeeper, an old fat greasy Greek, Chiria
Anastasidis, welcomed the gipsy chief. Not knowing the relationship
between the old man and the girl, he feared to antagonize his customer
by talking to the young woman. He pushed a white pine table near the big
stove in the middle of the room and after putting two empty glasses on
the table he inquired "White or red?"
"Red wine, Chiria. It warms quicker. I am getting old."
"Old!" exclaimed the Greek as he brought a small pitcher of wine. "Old!
Why, Marcu, you are as young as you were twenty years ago."
"This is my daughter, Fanutza, Chiria, and not my wife."
"A fine daughter you have. Your daughter, eh?"
"Yes, and she is about to marry, too."
After they had clinked glasses and wished one another health and long
years the innkeeper inquired:
"All your men healthy?"
"All. Only one-eyed Jancu died. You remember him. He was well along in
years."
"_Bogdaproste._ Let not a younger man than he was die," answered
Anastasidis as he crossed himself.
After Marcu had declared himself warmed back to life by the fine wine he
inquired of Anastasidis the price of oats and straw and hay. The
innkeeper's store and his warehouse contained everything from a needle
to an oxcart. The shelves were full of dry goods, socks, shirts, silks,
belts, fur caps, coats, and trousers. Overhead, hanging from the
ceiling, were heavy leather boots, shoes, saddles, harness of all kinds,
fishers' nets, and even a red painted sleigh that swung on heavy chains.
In one corner of the store blankets were piled high, while all over the
floor were bags of dry beans and peas and corn and oats. At the door
were bales of straw and hay, and outside, already half covered with
snow, iron ploughs hobnobbed with small anchors, harrows, and bundles of
scythes that leaned on the wall.
"Oats you wanted? Oats are very high this year, Marcu."
And the bargaining began. Fanutza sat listlessly on her chair and looked
through the window. A few minutes later, the two men called one another
thief and swindler and a hundred other names. Yet each time the bargain
was concluded on a certain article they shook hands and repeated that
they were the best friends on earth.
"Now that we have finished with the oats, Chiria, let's hear your price
for corn? What? Three francs a hundred kilo? No. I call off the bargain
on the oats. You are the biggest thief this side of the Danube."
"And you, you lowborn Tzigane, are the cheapest swindler on earth."
Quarrelling and shaking hands alternately and drinking wine Marcu and
the Greek went on for hours. The gipsy chief had already bought all the
food for his men and horses and a few extra blankets and had ordered it
all carted to the moored boat where Mehmet Ali was waiting, when
Fanutza reminded her father of the silks and linen he wanted to buy.
"I have not forgotten, daughter, I have not forgotten." Fanutza
approached the counter behind which the Greek stood ready to serve his
customers.
"Show us some silks," she asked.
He emptied a whole shelf on the counter.
The old gipsy stood aside watching his daughter as she fingered the
different pieces of coloured silk, which the shopkeeper praised as he
himself touched the goods with thumb and forefinger in keen appreciation
of the quality he offered. After she had selected all the colours she
wanted and picked out the linen and neckerchiefs and ear-rings and tried
on a pair of beautiful patent leather boots that reached over the knees
and had stripes of red leather sewed on with yellow silk on the soft
vamps, Fanutza declared that she had chosen everything she wanted. The
bargaining between the Greek and the gipsy was about to start anew when
Marcu looked outdoors thoughtfully, stroked his beard and said to the
innkeeper:
"Put away the things my daughter has selected. I shall come again,
alone, to bargain for them."
"If my friend fears he has not enough money--" suavely intervened
Anastasidis, as he placed a friendly hand on the gipsy's arm.
"When Marcu has no money he does not ask his women to select silk,"
haughtily interrupted the gipsy. "It will be as I said it will be. I
come alone in a day if the river has frozen. In a day or a week. I come
alone."
"Shall I, then, not take all these beautiful things along with me, now?"
asked Fanutza in a plaintive yet reproachful tone. "There is Marcia who
waits to see them. I have selected the same silk _basma_ for her. Have
you not promised me, even this morning--?"
"A woman must learn to keep her mouth shut," shouted Marcu as he angrily
stamped his right foot on the floor. He looked at his daughter as he had
never looked at her before. Only a few hours ago she was his little
girl, a child! He was marrying her off so soon to Stan, although it was
the customary age for gipsies, against his desire, but because of his
will to see her in good hands and to give to Stan the succession to the
leadership of his tribe.
Only a few hours ago! What had brought about the change? Was it in him
or in her? That cursed Tartar, Mehmet Ali, with his silly offer of
twenty gold pieces! He, he had done it. Marcu looked again at his
daughter. Her eyelids trembled nervously and there was a little
repressed twitch about her mouth. She returned his glance at first, but
lowered her eyes under her father's steady gaze. "Already a shameless
creature," thought the old gipsy. But he could not bear to think that
way about his little daughter, about his Fanutza. He also feared that
she could feel his thoughts. He was ashamed of what passed through his
mind. Rapidly enough in self-defense he turned against her the sharp
edge of the argument. Why had she given him all those ugly thoughts?
"It will be as I said, Anastasidis. In a day or a week. When the river
has frozen, I come alone. And now, Fanutza, we go. Night is coming close
behind us. Come, you shall have all your silks."
The Greek accompanied them to the door. The cart that had brought the
merchandise to the boat of the waiting Mehmet was returning.
"The water is thickening," the driver greeted the gipsy and his
daughter.
They found Mehmet Ali seated in the boat expecting his passengers.
"Have you bought everything you intended?" the Tartar inquired as he
slid the oars into the hoops.
"Everything," Marcu answered as he watched his daughter from the corner
of an eye.
Vigorously Mehmet Ali rowed till well out into the wide river without
saying another word. His manner was so detached that the gipsy chief
thought the Tartar had already forgotten what had passed between them in
the morning. Sure enough. Why! He was an old man, Mehmet Ali. It was
possible he had been commissioned by some Dobrudgean Tartar chief to buy
him a wife. He had been refused and now he was no longer thinking about
her. He will look somewhere else, where his offer might not be scorned.
That offer of Mehmet had upset him. He had never thought of Fanutza
other than as a child. Of course he was marrying her to Stan--but it was
more like giving her a second father!
Suddenly the old gipsy looked at the Tartar who had lifted his oars from
the water and brought the boat to an abrupt standstill. Mehmet Ali laid
the paddles across the width of the boat and looking steadily into the
eyes of Marcu, he said:
"As I said this morning, Marcu, it is not fair that you should buy wives
from us when you like our women and not sell us yours when we like
them."
"It is as it is," countered the gipsy savagely.
"But it is not fair," argued Mehmet, slyly watching every movement of
his old friend.
"If Mehmet is tired my arms are strong enough to help if he wishes,"
remarked Marcu.
"No, I am not tired, but I should like my friend to know that I think it
is not fair."
There was a long silence during which the boat was carried downstream
although it was kept in the middle of the river by skilful little
movements of the boatman.
Fanutza looked at the Tartar. He was about the same age as Stan was.
Only he was stronger, taller, broader, swifter. When he chanced to look
at her his small bead-like eyes bored through her like gimlets. No man
had ever looked at her that way. Stan's eyes were much like her own
father's eyes. The Tartar's face was much darker than her own. His nose
was flat and his upper lip curled too much noseward and the lower one
chinward, and his bulletlike head rose from between the shoulders. There
was no neck. No, he was not beautiful to look at. But he was so
different from Stan! So different from any of the other men she had seen
every day since she was born. Why! Stan--Stan was like her father. They
were all like him in her tribe!
"And, as I said," Mehmet continued after a while, "as I said, it is not
fair. My friend must see that. It is not fair. So I offer you twenty
gold pieces for the girl. Is it a bargain?"
"She is not for sale," yelled Marcu, understanding too well the meaning
of the oars out of the water.
"No?" wondered Mehmet, "not for twenty pieces of gold? Well, then I
shall offer five more. Sure twenty-five is more than any of your people
ever paid to us for a wife. It would shame my ancestors were I to offer
more for a gipsy girl than they ever received for one of our women."
"She is not for sale," roared the gipsy at the top of his voice.
By that time the Tartar knew that Marcu was not armed. He knew the chief
too well not to know that a knife or a pistol would have been the answer
to his second offer and the implied insult to the race of gipsies.
Twenty-five gold pieces! thought Fanutza. Twenty-five gold pieces
offered for her by a Tartar at a second bid. She knew what that meant.
She had been raised in the noise of continual bargaining between Tartars
and gipsies and Greeks. It meant much less than a quarter of the
ultimate sum the Tartar was willing to pay. Would Stan ever have offered
that for her? No, surely not. She looked at the Tartar and felt the
passion that radiated from him. How lukewarm Stan was! And here was a
man. Stopped the boat midstream and bargained for her, fought to possess
her. Endangered his life for her. For it was a dangerous thing to do
what he did and facing her father. Yet--she will have to marry Stan
because her father bids it.
"I don't mean to offend you," the boatman spoke again, "but you are very
slow in deciding whether you accept my bargain or not. Night is closing
upon us."
Marcu did not answer immediately. The boat was carried downstream very
rapidly. They were at least two miles too far down by now. Mehmet looked
at Fanutza and found such lively interest in her eyes that he was
encouraged to offer another five gold pieces for her.
It was a proud moment for the girl. So men were willing to pay so much
for her! But her heart almost sank when her father pulled out his purse
from his pocket and said:
"Mehmet Ali, who is my best friend, has been so good to me these twenty
years that I have thought to give him twenty gold pieces that he might
buy himself a wife to keep his hut warm during the long winter. What say
he to my friendship?"
"That is wonderful! Only now, he is not concerned about that, but about
the fairness of his friend who does not want to sell wives to the men
whose women he buys. I offer five more gold pieces which makes
thirty-five in all. And I do that not for Marcu but for his daughter
that she may know that I will not harm her and will for ever keep her
well fed and buy her silks and jewels."
"Silks!" It occurred to the gipsy chief to look at his daughter at that
moment. She turned her head away from his and looked at the Tartar, from
under her brows. How had he known?
"A bargain is a bargain only when two men agree on something, says the
Koran," the gipsy chief reminded the Tartar boatman. "I don't want to
sell her."
"So we will travel downstream for a while," answered Mehmet Ali and
crossed his arms.
After a while the gipsy chief who had reckoned that they must be fully
five miles away from his home across the water made a new offer.
"A woman, Mehmet Ali, is a woman. They are all alike after you have
known them. So I offer you thirty-five pieces of gold with which you can
buy for yourself any other woman you please whenever you want."
Fanutza looked at the Tartar. Though it was getting dark she could see
the play of every muscle of his face. Hardly had her father finished
making his offer, when Mehmet, after one look at the girl, said:
"I offer fifty gold pieces for the girl. Is it a bargain?"
Fanutza's eyes met the eyes of her father. She looked at him
entreatingly, "Don't give in to the Tartar," her eyes spoke clearly, and
Marcu refused the offer.
"I offer you fifty instead that you buy yourself another woman than my
daughter."
"No," answered the Tartar, "but I offer sixty for this one, here."
Quick as a flash Fanutza changed the encouraging glance she had thrown
to the passionate man to a pleading look towards her father. "Poor, poor
girl!" thought Marcu. "How she fears to lose me! How she fears I might
accept the money and sell her to the Tartar!"
"A hundred gold pieces to row us across," he yelled, for the night was
closing in upon them and the boat was being carried swiftly downstream.
There was danger ahead of them. Marcu knew it.
"A hundred gold pieces is a great sum," mused Mehmet, "a great sum! It
has taken twenty years of my life to save such a sum--yet, instead of
accepting your offer, I will give you the same sum for the woman I
want."
"Fool, a woman is only a woman. They are all alike," roared the gipsy.
"Not to me!" answered Mehmet Ali quietly. "I shall not say another
word."
"Fool, fool, fool," roared the gipsy as he still tried to catch
Fanutza's eye. It was already too dark.
"Not to me." The Tartar's words echoed in the girl's heart. "Not to me."
Twenty years he had worked to save such a great sum. And now he refused
an equal amount and was willing to pay it all for her. Would Stan have
done that? Would anybody else have done that? Why should she be
compelled to marry whom her father chose when men were willing to pay a
hundred gold pieces for her? The old women of the camp had taught her to
cook and to mend and to wash and to weave. She must know all that to be
worthy of Stan, they had told her. And here was a man who did not know
whether she knew any of these things who staked his life for her and
offered a hundred gold pieces in the bargain! Twenty years of savings.
Twenty years of work. It was not every day one met such a man. Surely,
with one strong push of his arms he could throw her father overboard. He
did not do it because he did not want to hurt her feelings. And as the
silence continued Fanutza thought her father, too, was a fine man. It
was fine of him to offer a hundred gold pieces for her liberty. That
was in itself a great thing. But did he do it only for her sake or
wasn't it because of Stan, because of himself? And as she thought again
of Mehmet's "Not to me," she remembered the fierce bitterness in her
father's voice when he had yelled, "All women are alike." That was not
true. If it were true why would Mehmet Ali want her and her only after
having seen her only once? Then, too, all men must be alike! It was not
so at all! Why! Mehmet Ali was not at all like Stan. And he offered a
hundred pieces of gold. No. Stan was of the kind who think all women are
alike. That was it. All her people were thinking all women were alike.
That was it. Surely all the men in the tribe were alike in that. All her
father had ever been to her, his kindness, his love was wiped away when
he said those few words. The last few words of Mehmet Ali, "Not to me,"
were the sweetest music she had ever heard.
Marcu waited until it was dark enough for the Tartar not to see, when
pressing significantly his daughter's foot, he said:
"So be it as you said. Row us across."
"It is not one minute too soon," Mehmet answered. "Only a short distance
from here, where the river splits in three forks, is a great rock. Shake
hands. Here. Now here is one oar. Pull as I count, _Bir, icki, outch,
dort_. Again, _Bir, icki, outch, dort_. Lift your oar. Pull again.
Two counts only. _Bir, icki._ So, now we row nearer to the shore. See
that light there? Row towards it. Good. Marcu, your arm is still strong
and steady and you can drive a good bargain."
Again and again the gipsy pressed the foot of his daughter as he bent
over the oar. She should know of course that he never intended to keep
his end of the bargain. He gave in only when he saw that the Tartar
meant to wreck them all on the rocks ahead of them. Why had he, old and
experienced as he was, having dealt with those devils of Tartars for so
many years, not known better than to return to the boat after he had
heard Mehmet say, "It is not fair!" And after he had reflected on the
Tartar's words, why, after he had refused to buy all the silks and
linen on that reflection, not a very clear one at first, why had he not
told Mehmet to row across alone and deliver the fodder and food. He
could have passed the night in Anastasidis' inn and hired another boat
the following morning if the river had not frozen meanwhile! He should
have known, he who knew these passionate beasts so well. It was all the
same with them; whether they set their eyes on a horse that captured
their fancy or a woman. They were willing to kill or be killed in the
fight for what they wanted. A hundred gold pieces for a woman! Twenty
years' work for a woman!
The two men rowed in silence, each one planning how to outwit the other
and each one knowing that the other was planning likewise. According to
Tartar ethics the bargain was a bargain. When the boat had been pulled
out of danger Mehmet hastened to fulfil his end. With one jerk he
loosened a heavy belt underneath his coat and pulled out a leather purse
which he threw to Marcu. As he did so he met Fanutza's proud eye.
"Here. Count it. Just one hundred."
"That's good enough," the gipsy chief answered as he put the purse in
his pocket without even looking at it. "Row, I am cold. I am anxious to
be home."
"It will not be before daylight, chief," remarked Mehmet Ali as he bent
again over his oars and counted aloud, "_Bir, icki, Bir, icki_."
An hour later, Fanutza had fallen asleep on the bags of fodder and was
covered by the heavy fur coat of the Tartar. The two men rowed the whole
night upstream against the current in the slushy heavy waters of the
Danube. A hundred times floating pieces of ice had bent back the flat of
the oar Marcu was handling, and every time Mehmet had saved it from
breaking by a deft stroke of his own oar or by some other similar
movement. He was a waterman and knew the ways of the water as well as
Marcu himself knew the murky roads of the marshes. The gipsy could not
help but admire the powerful quick movements of the Tartar--yet--to be
forced into selling his daughter--that was another thing.
At daylight they were within sight of Mehmet's hut on the shore. The
storm had abated. Standing up on the bags of fodder Marcu saw the black
smoke that rose from his camp. His people must be waiting on the shore.
They were a dozen men. Mehmet was one alone. He will unload the goods
first; then, when his men will be near enough, he will tell Fanutza to
run towards them. Let Mehmet come to take her if he dare!
A violent jerk woke the gipsy girl from her sleep. She looked at the two
men but said nothing. When the boat was moored, the whole tribe of
gipsies, who had already mourned their chief yet hoped against hope and
watched the length of the shore, surrounded the two men and the woman.
There was a noisy welcome. While some of the men helped unload the boat
a boy came running with a sleigh cart.
When all the bags were loaded on the sleigh Marcu threw the heavy purse
Mehmet had given him to the Tartar's feet and grabbed the arm of his
Fanutza.
"Here is your money, Mehmet. I take my daughter."
But before he knew what had happened, Fanutza shook off his grip and
picking up the purse she threw it at her father, saying:
"Take it. Give it to Stan that he should buy with the gold another
woman. To him all women are alike. But not to Mehmet Ali. So I shall
stay with him. A bargain is a bargain. He staked his life for me."
Marcu knew it was the end. "All women are alike," he whined to Stan as
he handed him the purse. "Take it. All women are alike," he repeated
with bitterness as he made a savage movement towards his daughter.
"All, save the ones with blood of Chans in their veins," said Mehmet Ali
who had put himself between the girl and the whole of her tribe. And the
Tartar's words served as a reminder to Marcu that Fanutza's own mother
had been the daughter of a Tartar chief and a white woman.
EXPERIMENT[4]
By MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT
(From _The Pictorial Review_)
When she had reached that point of detachment where she could regard the
matter more or less objectively, Mrs. Ennis, recalling memories of an
interrupted but lifelong friendship, realized that Burnaby's behavior,
outrageous or justifiable or whatever you choose to call it, at all
events aberrational, was exactly what might have been expected of him,
given an occasion when his instincts for liking or disliking had been
sufficiently aroused. Moreover, there was about him always, she
remembered, this additional exceptional quality: the rare and fortunate
knowledge that socially he was independent; was not, that is, subject to
retaliation. He led too roving a life to be moved by the threat of
unpopularity; a grandfather had bequeathed him a small but unshakable
inheritance.
As much, therefore, as any one can be in this world he was a free agent;
and the assurance of this makes a man very brave for either kindness or
unkindness, and, of course, extremely dangerous for either good or evil.
You will see, after a while, what I am driving at. Meanwhile, without
further comment, we can come directly to Mrs. Ennis, where she sat in
her drawing room, and to the night on which the incident occurred.
Mrs. Ennis, small and blond, and in a white evening gown of satin and
silver sequins that made her look like a lovely and fashionable mermaid,
sat in her drawing room and stretched her feet out to the flames of a
gentle woodfire. It was seven o'clock of a late April night, and
through an open window to her left came, from the little park beyond the
house, a faint breeze that stirred lazily the curtains and brought to
the jonquils, scattered about in numerous metal and crystal bowls, word
of their brothers in the dusk without. The room was quiet, save for the
hissing of the logs; remote, delicately lighted, filled with the subtle
odor of books and flowers; reminiscent of the suave personalities of
those who frequented it. On the diminutive piano in one corner, a large
silver frame, holding the photograph of a man in French uniform, caught
here and there on its surface high lights from the shaded wall-lamp
above. In the shelter of white bookcases, the backs of volumes in red
and tawny and brown gave the effect of tapestry cunningly woven. Mrs.
Ennis stared at the logs and smiled.
It was an odd smile, reflective, yet anticipatory; amused,
absent-minded, barely disturbing the lines of her beautifully modeled
red lips. Had any of Mrs. Ennis's enemies, and they were not few in
number, seen it, they would have surmised mischief afoot; had any of her
friends, and there were even more of these than enemies, been present,
they would have been on the alert for events of interest. It all
depended, you see, upon whether you considered a taste for amateur
psychology, indulged in, a wickedness or not. Mrs. Ennis herself would
not have given her favorite amusement so stately a name; she was aware
merely that she found herself possessed of a great curiosity concerning
people, particularly those of forcible and widely different
characteristics, and that she liked, whenever possible, to gather them
together, and then see what would happen. Usually something did--happen,
that is.
With the innocence of a child playing with fire-crackers (and it wasn't
altogether innocent, either), in her rôle of the god in the machine she
had been responsible for many things; several comedies, perhaps a
tragedy or two. Ordinarily her parties were dull enough; complacent
Washington parties; diplomats, long-haired Senators from the West,
short-bearded Senators from the East, sleek young men and women, all of
whom sat about discussing grave nonsense concerning a country with which
they had utterly lost touch, if ever they had had any; but every now and
then, out of the incalculable shufflings of fate, appeared a combination
that seemed to offer more excitement. Tonight such a combination was at
hand. Mrs. Ennis was contented, in the manner of a blithe and beautiful
spider.
Burnaby, undoubtedly, was the principal source of this contentment, for
he was a young man--he wasn't really young, but you always thought of
him as young--of infinite potentialities; Burnaby, just back from some
esoteric work in Roumania, whither he had gone after the War, and in
Washington for the night and greatly pleased to accept an invitation for
dinner; but essential as he was, Burnaby was only part of the tableau
arranged. To meet him, Mrs. Ennis had asked her best, for the time
being, friend, Mimi de Rochefort--Mary was her right name--and Mimi de
Rochefort's best, for the time being, friend, Robert Pollen. Nowadays
Pollen came when Madame de Rochefort came; one expected his presence. He
had been a habit in this respect for over six months; in fact, almost
from the time Madame de Rochefort (she was so young that to call her
Madame seemed absurdly quaint), married these five years to a Frenchman,
had set foot once more upon her native land.
In the meeting of Pollen and Burnaby and Mary Rochefort, Mrs. Ennis
foresaw contingencies; just what these contingencies were likely to be
she did not know, but that an excellent chance for them existed she had
no doubt, even if in the end they proved to be no more than the humor to
be extracted from the reflection that a supposedly rational divinity had
spent his time creating three people so utterly unalike.
The gilt clock on the mantelpiece chimed half-past seven. The jonquils
on the piano shone in the polished mahogany like yellow water-lilies in
a pool. Into the silence of the room penetrated, on noiseless feet, a
fresh-colored man servant. Despite such days as the present, Mrs. Ennis
had a way, irritating to her acquaintances, of obtaining faithful
attendance. Even servants seemed to be glad to wait upon her. Her
husband, dead these six years, had been unfailingly precise in all
matters save the one of drink.
"Mr. Burnaby!" announced the man servant.
Burnaby strode close on his heels. Mrs. Ennis had arisen and was
standing with her back to the fireplace. She had the impression that a
current of air followed the entrance of the two men. She remembered now
that she had always felt that way with Burnaby; she had always felt as
if he were bringing news of pine forests and big empty countries she had
never seen but could dimly imagine. It was very exciting.
Burnaby paused and looked about the room doubtfully, then he chuckled
and came forward. "I haven't seen anything like this for three years,"
he said. "Roumanian palaces are furnished in the very latest bad taste."
He took Mrs. Ennis's outstretched hand and peered down at her with
narrowed eyelids. She received the further impression, an impression she
had almost forgotten in the intervening years, of height and leanness,
of dark eyes, and dark, crisp hair; a vibrant impression; something like
a chord of music struck sharply. Unconsciously she let her hand rest in
his for a moment, then she drew it away hastily. He was smiling and
talking to her.
"Rhoda! You ought to begin to look a bit older! You're thirty-six, if
you're a day! How do you do it? You look like a wise and rather naughty
little girl."
"Hush!" said Mrs. Ennis. "I wear my hair parted on one side like a
debutante to give me a head-start on all the knowing and subtle and
wicked people I have to put up with. While they are trying to break the
ice with an ingenue, I'm sizing them up."
Burnaby laughed. "Well, I'm not subtle," he said. He sank down into a
big chair across the fireplace from her. "I'm only awfully glad to be
back; and I'm good and simple and amenable, and willing to do nearly
anything any good American tells me to do. I love Americans."
"You won't for very long," Mrs. Ennis assured him dryly. "Particularly
if you stay in Washington more than a day." She was wondering how even
for a moment she had been able to forget Burnaby's vividness.
"No," laughed Burnaby, "I suppose not. But while the mood is on me,
don't disillusion me."
Mrs. Ennis looked across at him with a smile. "You'll meet two very
attractive people tonight, anyway," she said.
"Oh, yes!" He leaned forward. "I had forgotten--who are they?"
Mrs. Ennis spread her arms out along the chair. "There's Mary
Rochefort," she answered, "and there's Robert Pollen, who's supposed to
be the most alluring man alive."
"Is it doing him any good?"
"Well--" Mrs. Ennis looked up with a laugh.
"You don't like him? Or perhaps you do?"
Mrs. Ennis knit her brows in thought, her blue eyes dark with
conjecture. "I don't know," she said at length. "Sometimes I think I do,
and sometimes I think I don't. He's very good-looking in a tall, blond,
pliable way, and he can be very amusing when he wants to be. I don't
know."
"Why not?"
Mrs. Ennis wrinkled her nose in the manner of one who is being pushed to
explanation.
"I am not so sure," she confided, "that I admire professional
philanderers as much as I did. Although, so long as they leave me
alone--"
"Oh, he's that, is he?"
Mrs. Ennis corrected herself hastily. "Oh, no," she protested. "I
shouldn't talk that way, should I? Now you'll have an initial prejudice,
and that isn't fair--only--" she hesitated "I rather wish he would
confine his talents to his own equals and not conjure young married
women at their most vulnerable period."
"Which is?"
"Just when," said Mrs. Ennis, "they're not sure whether they want to
fall in love again with their own husbands or not." Then she stopped
abruptly. She was surprised that she had told Burnaby these things;
even more surprised at the growing incisiveness of her voice. She was
not accustomed to taking the amatory excursions of her friends too much
to heart; she had a theory that it was none of her business, that
perhaps some day she might want charity herself. But now she found
herself perceptibly indignant. She wondered if it wasn't Burnaby's
presence that was making her so. Sitting across from her, he made her
think of directness and dependability and other traits she was
accustomed to refer to as "primitive virtues." She liked his black,
heavily ribbed evening stockings. Somehow they were like him. It made
her angry with herself and with Burnaby that she should feel this way;
be so moved by "primitive virtues." She detested puritanism greatly, and
righteously, but so much so that she frequently mistook the most
innocent fastidiousness for an unforgivable rigidity. "If they once do,"
she concluded, "once do fall in love with their husbands again, they're
safe, you know, for all time."
She looked up and drew in her breath sharply. Burnaby was sitting
forward in his chair, staring at her with the curious, far-sighted stare
she remembered was characteristic of him when his interest was suddenly
and thoroughly aroused. It was as if he were looking through the person
to whom he was talking to some horizon beyond. It was a trifle uncanny,
unless you were accustomed to the trick.
"What's the matter?" she asked. She had the feeling that back of her
some one she could not see was standing.
Burnaby smiled. "Nothing," he said. He sank back into his chair. "That's
an odd name--the name of this alluring fellow of yours, isn't it? What
did you say it was--Pollen?"
"Yes. Robert Pollen. Why, do you know him?"
"No." Burnaby shook his head. He leaned over and lit a cigarette. "You
don't mind, do you?" he asked. He raised his eyes. "So he's conjuring
this Madame de Rochefort, is he?" he concluded.
Mrs. Ennis flushed. "I never said anything of the kind!" she protested.
"It's none of our business, anyway."
Burnaby smiled calmly. "I quite agree with you," he said. "I imagine
that a Frenchwoman, married for a while, is much better able to conduct
her life in this respect than even the most experienced of us."
"She isn't French," said Mrs. Ennis; "she's American. And she's only
been married five years. She's just a child--twenty-six."
"Oh!" ejaculated Burnaby. "One of those hard-faced children! I
understand--Newport, Palm Beach, cocktails--"
His voice was cut across by Mrs. Ennis's indignant retort. "You don't in
the least!" she said. "She's not one of those hard-faced children; she's
lovely--and I've come to the conclusion that she's pathetic. I'm
beginning to rather hate this man Pollen. Back of it all are subtleties
of personality difficult to fathom. You should know Blais Rochefort. I
imagine a woman going about things the wrong way could break her heart
on him like waves on a crystal rock. I think it has been a question of
fire meeting crystal, and, when it finds that the crystal is difficult
to warm, turning back upon itself. I said waves, didn't I? Well, I don't
care if my metaphors are mixed. It's tragic, anyhow. And the principal
tragedy is that Blais Rochefort isn't really cold--at least, I don't
think he would be if properly approached--he is merely beautifully lucid
and intelligent and exacting in a way no American understands, least of
all a petted girl who has no family and who is very rich. He expects,
you see, an equal lucidity from his wife. He's not to be won over by the
fumbling and rather selfish and pretty little tricks that are all most
of us know. But Mary, I think, would have learned if she had only held
on. Now, I'm afraid, she's losing heart. Hard-faced child!" Mrs. Ennis
grew indignant again. "Be careful my friend; even you might find her
dangerously pathetic."
Burnaby's eyes were placidly amused. "Thanks," he observed. "You've told
me all I wanted to know."
Mrs. Ennis waved toward the piano. "There's Blais Rochefort's
photograph," she retorted in tones of good-humored exasperation. "Go
over and look at it."
"I will."
Burnaby's black shoulders, bent above the photograph, were for a moment
the object of a pensive regard. Mrs. Ennis sighed. "Your presence makes
me puritanical," she observed. "I have always felt that the best way for
any one to get over Pollens was to go through with them and forget
them."
Burnaby spoke without turning his head.
"He's good-looking."
"Very."
"A real man."
"Decidedly! Very brave and very cultivated."
"He waxes his mustache."
"Yes, even brave men do that occasionally."
"I should think," said Burnaby thoughtfully, putting the photograph
down, "that he might be worth a woman's hanging on to."
Mrs. Ennis got up, crossed over to the piano, and leaned an elbow upon
it, resting her cheek in the palm of her upturned hand and smiling at
Burnaby.
"Don't let's be so serious," she said. "What business is it of ours?"
She turned her head away and began to play with the petals of a near-by
jonquil. "Spring is a restless time, isn't it?"
It seemed to her that the most curious little silence followed this
speech of hers, and yet she knew that in actual time it was nothing, and
felt that it existed probably only in her own heart. She heard the clock
on the mantelpiece across the room ticking; far off, the rattle of a
taxicab. The air coming through the open window bore the damp, stirring
smell of early grass.
"Madame De Rochefort and Mr. Pollen!" announced a voice.
Mrs. Ennis had once said that her young friend, Mimi de Rochefort,
responded to night more brilliantly than almost any other woman she
knew. The description was apt. Possibly by day there was a pallor too
lifeless, a nose a trifle too short and arrogant, lips, possibly, too
full; but by night these discrepancies blended into something very near
perfection, and back of them as well was a delicate illumination as of
lanterns hung in trees beneath stars; an illumination due to youth, and
to very large dark eyes, and to dark, soft hair and red lips. Nor with
this beauty went any of the coolness or abrupt languor with which the
modern young hide their eagerness.
Mary Rochefort was quite simple beneath her habitual reserve; frank and
appealing and even humorous at times, as if startled out of her usual
mood of reflective quiet by some bit of wit, slowly apprehended, too
good to be overlooked. Mrs. Ennis watched with a sidelong glance the
effect of her entrance upon Burnaby. Madame de Rochefort! How absurd! To
call this white, tall, slim child madame! She admired rather enviously
the gown of shimmering dark blue, the impeccability of adolescence. Over
the girl's white shoulder, too much displayed, Pollen peered at Burnaby
with the vague, hostile smile of the guest not yet introduced to a guest
of similar sex.
"Late as usual!" he announced. "Mimi kept me!" His manner was subtly
domestic.
"You're really on the stroke of the clock," said Mrs. Ennis. "Madame de
Rochefort--Mr. Burnaby--Mr. Pollen." She laughed abruptly, as if a
thought had just occurred to her. "Mr. Burnaby," she explained to the
girl, "is the last surviving specimen of the American male--he has all
the ancient national virtues. Preserved, I suppose, because he spends
most of his time in Alaska, or wherever it is. I particularly wanted you
to meet him."
Burnaby flushed and laughed uncertainly. "I object--" he began.
The fresh-colored man servant entered with a tray of cocktails. Madame
de Rochefort exclaimed delightedly. "I'm so glad," she said. "Nowadays
one fatigues oneself before dinner by wondering whether there will be
anything to drink or not. How absurd!" The careful choice of words, the
precision of the young, worldly voice were in amusing contrast to the
youthfulness of appearance. Standing before the fireplace in her blue
gown, she resembled a tapering lily growing from the indigo shadows of a
noon orchard.
"Rhoda'll have cocktails when there aren't any more left in the
country," said Pollen. "Trust Rhoda!"
Mary Rochefort laughed. "I always do," she said, "with reservations."
She turned to Burnaby. "Where are you just back from?" she asked. "I
understand you are always just back from some place, or on the verge of
going."
"Usually on the verge," answered Burnaby. He looked at her deliberately,
a smile in his dark eyes; then he looked at Pollen.
"Where were you--the War?"
"Yes--by way of Roumania in the end."
"The War!" Mary Rochefort's lips became petulant. One noticed for the
first time the possibility of considerable petulance back of the shining
self-control. "How sick of it I grew--all of us living over there! I'd
like to sleep for a thousand years in a field filled with daffodils."
"They've plenty scattered about this room," observed Pollen. "Why don't
you start now?"
The fresh-colored man servant announced dinner. "Shall we go down?"
said Mrs. Ennis.
They left the little drawing-room, with its jonquils and warm shadows,
and went along a short hall, and then down three steps and across a
landing to the dining-room beyond. It, like the drawing-room, was small,
white-paneled to the ceiling, with a few rich prints of Constable
landscapes on the walls, and velvet-dark sideboards and tables that
caught the light of the candles. In the center was a table of snowy
drapery and silver and red roses.
Mrs. Ennis sank into her chair and looked about her with content. She
loved small dinners beautifully thought out, and even more she loved
them when, as on this night, they were composed of people who interested
her. She stole a glance at Burnaby. How clean and brown and alert he
was! The white table-cloth accentuated his look of fitness and muscular
control. What an amusing contrast he presented to the rather languid,
gesturing Pollen, who sat opposite him! And yet Pollen was considerable
of a man in his own way; very conquering in the affairs of life;
immensely clever in his profession of architecture. Famous, Mrs. Ennis
had heard.
But Mrs. Ennis, despite her feminine approval of success, couldn't
imagine herself being as much interested in him--dangerously
interested--as she knew her friend Mary Rochefort to be. How odd! From
all the world to pick out a tall, blond, willowy man like Pollen! On the
verge of middle age, too! Perhaps it was this very willowiness, this
apparent placidity that made him attractive. This child, Mary Rochefort,
quite alone in the world, largely untrained, adrift, imperiously
demanding from an imperious husband something to which she had not as
yet found the key, might very naturally gravitate toward any one
presenting Pollen's appearance of security; his attitude of complacence
in the face of feminine authority. But was he complacent? Mrs. Ennis had
her doubts. He was very vain; underneath his urbanity there might be an
elastic hardness.
There were, moreover, at times indications of a rather contemptuous
attitude toward a world less highly trained than himself. She turned to
Pollen, trying to recollect what for the last few moments he had been
saying to her. He perceived her more scrutinizing attention and faced
toward her. From under lowered eyelids he had been watching, with a
moody furtiveness, Mary Rochefort and Burnaby, who were oblivious to the
other two in the manner of people who are glad they have met.
Mrs. Ennis found herself annoyed, her sense of good manners shocked. She
had not suspected that Pollen could be guilty of such clumsiness; she
questioned if matters had reached a point where such an attitude on his
part would be justifiable under any circumstances. At all events, her
doubts concerning his complacency had been answered. It occurred to Mrs.
Ennis that her dinner-party was composed of more inflammable material,
presented more dramatic possibilities, than even she had divined. She
embraced Pollen with her smile.
"What have you been doing with yourself?" she asked.
He lifted long eyebrows and smiled faintly.
"Working very hard," he said.
"Building behemoths for billionaires?"
"Yes."
"And the rest of the time?"
"Rather drearily going about."
She surveyed him with wicked innocence.
"Why don't you fall in love?" she suggested.
His expression remained unmoved. "It is so difficult," he retorted, "to
find the proper subject. A man of my experience frightens the
inexperienced: the experienced frighten me."
"You mean--?"
"That I have reached the age where the innocence no longer possible to
me seems the only thing worth while."
Mrs. Ennis wrinkled her nose daintily. "Nonsense!" she observed, and
helped herself to the dish the servant was holding out to her. "What you
have said," she resumed, "is the last word of the sentimentalist. If I
thought you really meant it, I would know at once that you were very
cold and very cruel and rather silly."
"Thanks!"
"Oh, I'm talking more or less abstractly."
"Well, possibly I am all of those things."
"But you want me to be personal?"
Pollen laughed. "Of course! Doesn't everybody want _you_ to be
personal?"
For an instant Mrs. Ennis looked again at Burnaby and Mary Rochefort,
and a slightly rueful smile stirred in her eyes. It was amusing that
she, who detested large dinners and adored general conversation, should
at the moment be so engrossed in preventing the very type of
conversation she preferred. She returned to Pollen. What a horrid man he
really was! Unangled and amorphous, and underneath, cold! He had a way
of framing the woman to whom he was talking and then stepping back out
of the picture. One felt like a model in all manner of dress and
undress. She laughed softly. "Don't," she begged, "be so mysterious
about yourself! Tell me--" she held him with eyes of ingratiating
sapphire--"I've always been interested in finding out just what you
are, anyway."
Far back in Pollen's own eyes of golden brown a little spark slowly
burst into flame. It was exactly as if a gnome had lighted a lantern at
the back of an unknown cave. Mrs. Ennis inwardly shuddered, but
outwardly was gay.
How interminably men talked when once they were launched upon that
favorite topic, themselves! Pollen showed every indication of reaching a
point of intellectual intoxication where his voice would become
antiphonal. His objective self was taking turns in standing off and
admiring his subjective self. Mrs. Ennis wondered at her own kindness of
heart. Why did she permit herself to suffer so for her friends; in the
present instance, a friend who would probably--rather the contrary--by
no means thank her for her pains? She wanted to talk to Burnaby. She was
missing most of his visit. She wanted to talk to Burnaby so greatly that
the thought made her cheeks burn faintly. She began to hate Pollen. Mary
Rochefort's cool, young voice broke the spell.
"You told me," she said accusingly, "that this man--this Mr. Burnaby,
has all the primitive virtues; he is the wickedest man I have ever met."
"Good gracious!" said Mrs. Ennis.
"The very wickedest!"
Pollen's mouth twisted under his mustache. "I wouldn't have suspected
it," he observed, surveying Burnaby with ironic amusement. There was
just a hint of hidden condescension in his voice.
Burnaby's eyes drifted past him with a look of quiet speculation in
their depths, before he smiled at Mrs. Ennis.
"Roumania has changed you," she exclaimed.
He chuckled. "Not in the least! I was simply trying to prove to Madame
de Rochefort that hot-bloodedness, coolly conceived, is the only
possible road to success. Like most innately moral people, she believes
just the opposite--in cool-bloodedness, hotly conceived."
"I moral?" said Mary Rochefort, as if the thought had not occurred to
her before.
"Why, of course," said Burnaby. "It's a question of attitude, not of
actual performance. The most moral man I ever knew was a habitual
drunkard. His life was spent between debauch and disgust. Not, of
course, that I am implying that with you--"
"Tell us what you meant in the first place," commanded Mrs. Ennis.
"Something," said Burnaby slowly, "totally un-American--in short,
whole-heartedness." He clasped his sinewy, brown hands on the
table-cloth. "I mean," he continued, "if, after due thought--never
forget the due thought--you believe it to be the best thing to do to
elope with another man's wife, elope; only don't look back. In the same
way, if you decide to become, after much question, an ironmonger, be an
ironmonger. Love passionately what you've chosen. In other words, life's
like fox-hunting; choose your line, choose it slowly and carefully, then
follow it 'hell-for-leather.'
"You see, the trouble with Americans is that they are the greatest
wanters of cake after they've eaten it the world has ever seen. Our
blood isn't half as mixed as our point of view. We want to be good and
we want to be bad; we want to be a dozen utterly incompatible things all
at the same time. Of course, all human beings are that way, but other
human beings make their choices and then try to eradicate the
incompatibilities. The only whole-hearted people we possess are our
business men, and even they, once they succeed, usually spoil the
picture by astounding open scandals with chorus-girls."
Mrs. Ennis shook her head with amused bewilderment. "Do you mean," she
asked, "that a man or woman can have only one thing in his or her life?"
"Only one very outwardly important thing--publicly," retorted Burnaby.
"You may be a very great banker with a very great background as a
husband, but you can't be a very great banker and at the same time what
is known as a 'very great lover.' In Europe, where they arrange their
lives better, one chooses either banking or 'loving'." He smiled with
frank good humor at Pollen; the first time, Mrs. Ennis reflected, he had
done so that night. A suspicion that Burnaby was not altogether
ingenuous crossed her mind. But why wasn't he?
"You're a man, Pollen," he said; "tell them it's true."
Pollen, absorbed apparently in thoughts of his own stammered slightly.
"Why--why, yes," he agreed hastily.
Mrs. Ennis sighed ruefully and looked at Burnaby with large, humorously
reproachful eyes. "You have changed," she observed, "or else you're not
saying but half of what you really think--and part of it you don't think
at all."
"Oh, yes," laughed Burnaby, "you misunderstand me." He picked up a fork
and tapped the table-cloth with it thoughtfully; then he raised his
head. "I was thinking of a story I might tell you," he said, "but on
second thoughts I don't think I will."
"Don't be foolish!" admonished Mrs. Ennis. "Your stories are always
interesting. First finish your dessert."
Pollen smiled languidly. "Yes," he commented, "go on. It's interesting,
decidedly. I thought people had given up this sort of conversation long
ago."
For the third time Burnaby turned slowly toward him, only now his eyes,
instead of resting upon the bland countenance for a fraction of a
second, surveyed it lingeringly with the detached, absent-minded stare
Mrs. Ennis remembered so well. "Perhaps I will tell it, after all," he
said, in the manner of a man who has definitely changed his mind. "Would
you like to hear it?" he asked, turning to Mary Rochefort.
"Certainly!" she laughed. "Is it very immoral?"
"Extremely," vouchsafed Burnaby, "from the accepted point of view."
"Tell it in the other room," suggested Mrs. Ennis. "We'll sit before the
fire and tell ghost stories."
There was a trace of grimness in Burnaby's answering smile. "Curiously
enough, it is a ghost story," he said.
They had arisen to their feet; above the candles their heads and
shoulders were indistinct. For a moment Mrs. Ennis hesitated and looked
at Burnaby with a new bewilderment in her eyes.
"If it's very immoral," interposed Pollen, "I'm certain to like it."
Burnaby bowed to him with a curious old-fashioned courtesy. "I am sure,"
he observed, "it will interest you immensely."
Mrs. Ennis suddenly stared through the soft obscurity. "Good gracious,"
she said to herself, "what is he up to?"
In the little drawing room to which they returned, the jonquils seemed
to have received fresh vigor from their hour of loneliness; their
shining gold possessed the shadows. Mary Rochefort paused by the open
window and peered into the perfumed night. "How ridiculously young the
world gets every spring!" she said.
Mrs. Ennis arranged herself before the fire. "Now," she said to Burnaby,
"you sit directly opposite. And you"--she indicated Pollen--"sit here.
And Mimi, you there. So!" She nodded to Burnaby. "Begin!"
He laughed deprecatingly. "You make it portentous," he objected. "It
isn't much of a story; it's--it's really only a parable."
"It's going to be a moral story, after all," interjected Mrs. Ennis
triumphantly.
Burnaby chuckled and puffed at his cigarette. "Well," he said finally,
"it's about a fellow named Mackintosh."
Pollen, drowsily smoking a cigar, suddenly stirred uneasily.
"Who?" he asked, leaning forward.
"Mackintosh--James Mackintosh! What are you looking for? An ash-tray?
Here's one." Burnaby passed it over.
"Thanks!" said Pollen, relaxing. "Yes--go on!"
Burnaby resumed his narrative calmly. "I knew him--Mackintosh, that
is--fifteen, no, it was fourteen years ago in Arizona, when I was
ranching there, and for the next three years I saw him constantly. He
had a place ten miles down the river from me. He was about four years
older than I was--a tall, slim, sandy-haired, freckled fellow,
preternaturally quiet; a trusty, if there ever was one. Unlike most
preternaturally quiet people, however, it wasn't dulness that made him
that way; he wasn't dull a bit. Stir him up on anything and you found
that he had thought about it a lot. But he never told me anything about
himself until I had known him almost two years, and then it came out
quite accidentally one night--we were on a spring round-up--when the two
of us were sitting up by the fire, smoking and staring at the desert
stars. All the rest were asleep." Burnaby paused. "Is this boring you?"
he asked.
"Oh, no!" said Mrs. Ennis; she was watching intently Pollen's
half-averted face.
Burnaby threw away his cigarette. "At first," he said, "it seemed to me
like the most ordinary of stories--the usual fixed idea that the
rejected lover carries around with him for a year or so until he forgets
it; the idea that the girl will regret her choice and one day kick over
the traces and hunt him up.
"But it wasn't the ordinary story--not by a long shot. You'll see. It
seems he had fallen in love with a girl--had been in love with her for
years--before he had left the East; a very young girl, nineteen, and of
an aspiring family. The family, naturally, didn't look upon him with any
favor whatsoever; he was poor and he didn't show the slightest
inclination to engage in any of the pursuits they considered proper to
the ambitions of a worthy young man. Rather a dreamer, I imagine, until
he had found the thing he wanted to do. Not a very impressive figure in
the eyes of whitespatted fatherhood. Moreover, he himself was shy about
trying to marry a rich girl while she was still so young.
"'She was brought up all wrong,' he said. 'What could you expect? Life
will have to teach her. She will have to get over her idea, as one gets
over the measles, that money and houses and possessions are the main
things.' But he knew she would get over it; he was sure that at the
bottom of her heart was a well of honesty and directness. 'Some day,' he
said, 'she'll be out here.'
"Apparently the upshot of the matter was that he went to the girl and
told her--all these ideas of his; quit, came West; left the road open to
the other man. Oh, yes, there was another man, of course; one
thoroughly approved of by the family. Quaint, wasn't it? Perhaps a
little overly judicial. But then that was his way. Slow-moving and sure.
He saw the girl at dusk in the garden of her family's country place;
near a sun-dial, or some other appropriately romantic spot. She kissed
him nobly on the forehead, I suppose--the young girl gesture; and told
him she wasn't worthy of him and to forget her.
"'Oh, no, I won't,' he said. 'Not for a minute! And in five years--or
ten--you'll come to me. You'll find out.' And then he added something
else: 'Whenever things have reached their limit,' he said, 'think of me
with all your might. Think hard! There's something in that sort of
stuff, you know, where two people love each other. Think hard!' Then he
went away."
A log snapped and fell with a soft thud to the ashes beneath. Burnaby
was silent for a moment, staring at the fire.
When he spoke again, it was with a slow precision as if he were trying
with extreme care to find the right words.
"You see," he said, "he had as an added foundation for his
faith--perhaps as the main foundation for it--his knowledge of the other
man's character; the character of the man the girl married. It was"--he
spoke more hastily and, suddenly raising his head, looked at Mary
Rochefort, who, sunk back in her chair, was gazing straight ahead of
her--"an especial kind of character. I must dwell on it for a moment,
and you must mark well what I say, for on it my parable largely depends.
It was a character of the sort that to any but an odalisk means eventual
shame; to any woman of pride, you understand, eventually of necessity a
broken heart. It was a queer character, but not uncommon. Outwardly very
attractive. Mackintosh described it succinctly, shortly, as we sat there
by the fire. He spoke between his teeth--the faint wind stirring the
desert sand sounded rather like his voice." Burnaby paused again and
reached over for a cigarette and lit it deliberately.
"He was a man," he continued, "who apparently had the faculty of making
most women love him and, in the end, the faculty of making all women
hate him. I imagine to have known him very well would have been to leave
one with a mental shudder such as follows the touching of anguilliform
material; snake-like texture. It would leave one ashamed and broken, for
fundamentally he was contemptuous of the dignity of personality,
particularly of the personalities of women. He was a collector, you
understand, a collector of beauty, and women, and incidents--amorous
incidents. He carried into his personal relationships the cold
objectiveness of the artist. But he wasn't a very great artist, or he
wouldn't have done so; he would have had the discrimination to control
the artist's greatest peril. It's a flame, this cold objectiveness, but
a flame so powerful that it must be properly shaded for intimate use.
Otherwise it kills like violet rays. Women wore out their hearts on him,
not like waves breaking on a crystal rock, but like rain breaking into a
gutter."
"Good Lord!" murmured Mrs. Ennis involuntarily.
Burnaby caught her exclamation. "Bad, wasn't it?" he smiled. "But
remember I am only repeating what Mackintosh told me. Well, there he was
then--Mackintosh--hard at work all day trying to build himself up a
ranch, and he was succeeding, too, and, at night, sitting on his porch,
smoking and listening to the river, and apparently expecting every
moment the girl to appear. It was rather eerie. He had such a convincing
way; he was himself so convinced. You half expected yourself to see her
come around the corner of the log house in the moonlight. There was
about it all the impression that here was something that had a touch of
the inevitability of the Greek idea of fate; something more arranged
than the usual course of human events. Meanwhile, back in the East, was
the girl, learning something about life."
He interrupted himself. "Want a cigarette?" he said to Pollen. "Here
they are." He handed over the box. "What is it? A match? Wait a moment;
I'll strike it for you. Keep the end of the thing steady, will you? All
right." He resumed the thread of his narrative.
"In four years she had learned a lot," he said; "she had become
apparently almost a woman. On a certain hot evening in July--about seven
o'clock, I imagine--she became one entirely; at least, for the moment,
and, at least, her sort of woman. I am not defending what she did,
remember; I am simply saying that she did it.
"It was very hot; even now when dusk was approaching. The girl had been
feeling rather ill all day; feverish. She had not been able to get away
to her country place as yet. Into the semidarkness of the room where she
was came her husband. That night she had determined, as women will, upon
a final test. She knew where he expected to dine; she asked him if he
would dine with her.
"'I can't,' he said. 'I'm sorry--'
"Possibly nothing immediate would have happened had he not added an
unspeakable flourish to his portrait. He reached out his arms and drew
the girl to him and tried to kiss her condescendingly; but I suppose his
hands found her, in her clinging gown, soft to their touch. At all
events, they tightened upon her in an unmistakable way. She pulled
herself away. 'Let me pass!' she said. 'You--you--!'--she could think of
no words to suit him. You see, she understood him completely, now. He
was a collector, but a collector so despicable that he was even
unwilling to trade one article for another. He wanted to keep on his
shelves, as it were, all the accumulation of his life, and take down
from time to time whatever part of it suited his sudden fancy.
"The girl went up to her own room, and very carefully, not knowing
precisely what she did, changed into a black street dress and removed
all marks of identification. Her eyes swam with feverishness. While she
was dressing, she bathed in hot water her arms where her husband's hands
had been. She concluded that it was not what he had done--had constantly
done--but what he was that made life unbearable. When she was through
she went downstairs, and out of the front door, and walked slowly toward
the center of the town and the railway station."
"And is that all?" asked Mary Rochefort, after a while.
"Oh, no," said Burnaby; "it's only the beginning. Mackintosh was in the
hills beyond his ranch, hunting horses. He was camped in a little valley
by himself. On this particular day he had been out since sun-up and did
not get back until just about dusk. He picketed the horse he had been
riding, and built a small fire, and began to cook his supper. All around
him, brooding and unreal, was the light you get in high mountain places.
The fire shone like a tiny ruby set in topaz. Mackintosh raised his head
and saw a woman coming out of the spur of aspen trees across the creek
from him. He wasn't surprised; he knew right away who it was; he knew it
was the girl. He watched her for a moment, and then he went over to her,
and took her hand, and led her to the fire. They didn't speak at all."
"And you mean," asked Mrs. Ennis, "that she did that? That she came all
the way out to him, like that?"
"No," retorted Burnaby, "of course not. How could she? She wasn't even
sure where he was living. At the moment she was in a hospital out of her
head. You see, I didn't know whether to believe Mackintosh or not when
he said he saw her that night, although I am sure he believed he
did--such things are beyond human proof--but what I do know is that he
came straight down from the hills, and boarded a train, and went East,
and found the girl, and, after a while, came back with her." He looked
at the fire. "They were the most completely happy people I have ever
seen," he continued. "They were so calm and determined about themselves.
Everything immaterial had been burned away. They knew they were playing
on the side of fate. And so," he concluded, "that's the end of my
parable. What do you make of it?"
The curtains, stirred by the breeze, tip-tapped softly; in the silence
the fire hissed gently. Pollen spoke first, but with some difficulty, as
if in the long period of listening on his part his throat had become
dry. "It's very interesting," he said; "very! But what's it all about?
And you certainly don't believe it, do you?"
"Of course I do," answered Burnaby calmly. "You should, too; it's true."
Mary Rochefort looked up with an exclamation. "Gracious!" she said. "I
had no idea it was so late! My motor must be waiting." She got to her
feet. She looked very white and her eyes were tired; the translucent
quality of the earlier hours was gone. "I'm worn out," she explained.
"I've been going about too much. I must rest." She held her hand out to
Mrs. Ennis; over her shoulder she spoke to Pollen. "No," she said.
"Don't bother. I'll take myself home, thanks."
"I'll see you to your car," he stammered.
She turned to Burnaby. "Good night!" she said. Her voice was lifeless,
disinterested; her eyes met his for an instant and were withdrawn.
"Good night," he said.
Mrs. Ennis stood by the door for a moment before she walked slowly back
to the fireplace. From the street outside came the whirring of a motor
and the sound of Mary Rochefort's voice saying good-by to Pollen.
Mrs. Ennis rested an arm on the mantelpiece and kicked a log
thoughtfully with a white-slippered foot; then she faced about on
Burnaby.
"I suppose," she said, "you realize that you have spoiled my party?"
"I?" said Burnaby.
"Yes, you!" Her small, charming face was a study in ruefulness, and
indecision whether to be angry or not, and, one might almost have
imagined, a certain amused tenderness as well. "Don't you suppose those
people knew of whom you were talking?"
Burnaby, peering down at her, narrowed his eyes and then opened them
very wide. "They couldn't very well have helped it," he said, "could
they? For, you see"--he paused--"the girl who came West was Mrs.
Pollen."
Mrs. Ennis gasped in the manner of a person who is hearing too much.
"Mrs. Pollen?"
"Yes. You knew he had been divorced, didn't you? Years ago."
"I'd heard it, but forgotten." Mrs. Ennis clasped her jeweled hand. "And
you dared," she demanded, "to tell his story before him in that way?"
"Why not? It was rather a complete revenge upon him of fate, wasn't it?
You see, he couldn't very well give himself away, could he? His one
chance was to keep quiet." Burnaby paused and smiled doubtfully at Mrs.
Ennis. "I hope I made his character clear enough," he said. "That, after
all, was the point of the story."
"How did you know it was this Pollen?" she asked, "and how, anyway,
would Mary Rochefort know of whom you were talking?"
Burnaby grinned. "I took a chance," he said. "And as to the second, I
told Madame de Rochefort at dinner--merely as a coincidence; at least, I
let her think so--that I had once known in the West a Mrs. Pollen with a
curious history. Perhaps I wouldn't have told it if Pollen hadn't been
so witty." He picked up a silver dish from the mantelpiece and examined
it carefully.
"One oughtn't to have such a curious name if one is going to lead a
curious life, ought one?" he asked. He sighed. "You're right," he
concluded; "your friend Mary Rochefort is a child."
Mrs. Ennis looked up at him with searching eyes.
"Why don't you stay longer in Washington?" she asked softly. "Just now,
of course, Mary Rochefort hates you; but she won't for long--I think she
was beginning to have doubts about Pollen, anyway."
Burnaby suddenly looked grave and disconcerted. "Oh, no!" he said,
hastily. "Oh, no! I must be off tomorrow." He laughed. "My dear Rhoda,"
he said, "you have the quaintest ideas. I don't like philandering; I'm
afraid I have a crude habit of really falling in love."
Mrs. Ennis's own eyes were veiled. "If you're going away so soon, sit
down," she said, "and stay. You needn't go--oh, for hours!"
"I must," he answered. "I'm off so early."
She sighed. "For years?"
"One--perhaps two." His voice became gay and bantering again. "My dear
Rhoda," he said, "I'm extremely sorry if I really spoiled your party,
but I don't believe I did--not altogether, anyhow. Underneath, I think
you enjoyed it." He took her small hand in his; he wondered why it was
so cold and listless.
At the door leading into the hall he paused and looked back "Oh," he
said, "there was one thing I forgot to tell you! You see, part of my
story wasn't altogether true. Mrs. Pollen--or rather, Mrs.
Mackintosh--left Mackintosh after five years or so. She's in the
movies--doing very well, I understand. She would; wouldn't she? Of
course, she was no good to begin with. But that didn't spoil the point
of my story, did it? Good-by, Rhoda, my dear." He was gone.
Mrs. Ennis did not move until she heard the street door close; she
waited even a little longer, following the sound of Burnaby's footsteps
as they died away into the night; finally she walked over to the piano,
and, sitting down, raised her hands as if to strike the keys. Instead,
she suddenly put both her arms on the little shelf before the music-rack
and buried her head in them. The curtains tip-tapped on the window-sill;
the room was entirely quiet.
DARKNESS[5]
By IRVIN S. COBB
(From _The Saturday Evening Post_)
There was a house in this town where always by night lights burned. In
one of its rooms many lights burned; in each of the other rooms at least
one light. It stood on Clay Street, on a treeless plot among flower
beds, a small dull-looking house; and when late on dark nights all the
other houses on Clay Street were black blockings lifting from the lesser
blackness of their background, the lights in this house patterned its
windows with squares of brilliancy so that it suggested a grid set on
edge before hot flames. Once a newcomer to the town, a transient guest
at Mrs. Otterbuck's boarding house, spoke about it to old Squire Jonas,
who lived next door to where the lights blazed of nights, and the answer
he got makes a fitting enough beginning for this account.
This stranger came along Clay Street one morning and Squire Jonas, who
was leaning over his gate contemplating the world as it passed in
review, nodded to him and remarked that it was a fine morning; and the
stranger was emboldened to stop and pass the time of day, as the saying
goes.
"I'm here going over the books of the Bernheimer Distilling Company," he
said when they had spoken of this and that, "and you know, when a
chartered accountant gets on a job he's supposed to keep right at it
until he's done. Well, my work keeps me busy till pretty late. And the
last three nights, passing that place yonder adjoining yours, I've
noticed she was all lit up like as if for a wedding or a christening or
a party or something. But I didn't see anybody going in or coming out,
or hear anybody stirring in there, and it struck me as blamed curious.
Last night--or this morning, rather, I should say--it must have been
close on to half-past two o'clock when I passed by, and there she was,
all as quiet as the tomb and still the lights going from top to bottom.
So I got to wondering to myself. Tell me, sir, is there somebody sick
over there next door?"
"Yes, suh," stated the squire, "I figure you might say there is somebody
sick there. He's been sick a powerful long time too. But it's not his
body that's sick; it's his soul."
"I don't know as I get you, sir," said the other man in a puzzled sort
of way.
"Son," stated the squire, "I reckin you've been hearin' 'em, haven't
you, singin' this here new song that's goin' 'round about, 'I'm Afraid
to Go Home in the Dark'? Well, probably the man who wrote that there
song never was down here in these parts in his life; probably he just
made the idea of it up out of his own head. But he might 'a' had the
case of my neighbor in his mind when he done so. Only his song is kind
of comical and this case here is about the most uncomic one you'd be
likely to run acrost. The man who lives here alongside of me is not only
afraid to go home in the dark but he's actually feared to stay in the
dark after he gets home. Once he killed a man and he come clear of the
killin' all right enough, but seems like he ain't never got over it; and
the sayin' in this town is that he's studied it out that ef ever he gets
in the dark, either by himself or in company, he'll see the face of that
there man he killed. So that's why, son, you've been seein' them lights
a-blazin'. I've been seein' 'em myself fur goin' on twenty year or more,
I reckin 'tis by now, and I've got used to 'em. But I ain't never got
over wonderin' whut kind of thoughts he must have over there all alone
by himself at night with everything lit up bright as day around him,
when by rights things should be dark. But I ain't ever asted him, and
whut's more, I never will. He ain't the kind you could go to him astin'
him personal questions about his own private affairs. We-all here in
town just accept him fur whut he is and sort of let him be. He's whut
you might call a town character. His name is Mr. Dudley Stackpole."
In all respects save one, Squire Jonas, telling the inquiring stranger
the tale, had the rights of it. There were town characters aplenty he
might have described. A long-settled community with traditions behind it
and a reasonable antiquity seems to breed curious types of men and women
as a musty closet breeds mice and moths. This town of ours had its town
mysteries and its town eccentrics--its freaks, if one wished to put the
matter bluntly; and it had its champion story-teller and its champion
liar and its champion guesser of the weight of livestock on the hoof.
There was crazy Saul Vance, the butt of cruel small boys, who deported
himself as any rational creature might so long as he walked a straight
course; but so surely as he came to where the road forked or two streets
crossed he could not decide which turning to take and for hours angled
back and forth and to and fro, now taking the short cut to regain the
path he just had quitted, now retracing his way over the long one, for
all the world like a geometric spider spinning its web. There was old
Daddy Hannah, the black root-and-yarb doctor, who could throw spells and
weave charms and invoke conjures. He wore a pair of shoes which had been
worn by a man who was hanged, and these shoes, as is well known, leave
no tracks which a dog will nose after or a witch follow, or a ha'nt.
Small boys did not gibe at Daddy Hannah, you bet you! There was Major
Burnley, who lived for years and years in the same house with the wife
with whom he had quarreled and never spoke a word to her or she to him.
But the list is overlong for calling. With us, in that day and time,
town characters abounded freely. But Mr. Dudley Stackpole was more than
a town character. He was that, it is true, but he was something else
besides; something which tabbed him a mortal set apart from his fellow
mortals. He was the town's chief figure of tragedy.
If you had ever seen him once you could shut your eyes and see him over
again. Yet about him there was nothing impressive, nothing in his port
or his manner to catch and to hold a stranger's gaze. With him,
physically, it was quite the other way about. He was a short spare man,
very gentle in his movements, a toneless sort of man of a palish gray
cast, who always wore sad-colored clothing. He would make you think of a
man molded out of a fog; almost he was like a man made of smoke. His
mode of living might testify that a gnawing remorse abode ever with him,
but his hair had not turned white in a single night, as the heads of
those suddenly stricken by a great shock or a great grief or any greatly
upsetting and disordering emotion sometimes are reputed to turn. Neither
in his youth nor when age came to him was his hair white. But for so far
back as any now remembered it had been a dullish gray, suggesting at a
distance dead lichens.
The color of his skin was a color to match in with the rest of him. It
was not pale, nor was it pasty. People with a taste for comparisons were
hard put to it to describe just what it was the hue of his face did
remind them of, until one day a man brought in from the woods the
abandoned nest of a brood of black hornets, still clinging to the
pendent twig from which the insect artificers had swung it. Darkies used
to collect these nests in the fall of the year when the vicious swarms
had deserted them. Their shredded parchments made ideal wadding for
muzzle-loading scatter-guns, and sufferers from asthma tore them down,
too, and burned them slowly and stood over the smoldering mass and
inhaled the fumes and the smoke which arose, because the country
wiseacres preached that no boughten stuff out of a drug store gave such
relief from asthma as this hornet's-nest treatment. But it remained for
this man to find a third use for such a thing. He brought it into the
office of Gafford's wagon yard, where some other men were sitting about
the fire, and he held it up before them and he said:
"Who does this here hornet's nest put you fellers in mind of--this gray
color all over it, and all these here fine lines runnin' back and forth
and every which-a-way like wrinkles? Think, now--it's somebody you all
know."
And when they had given it up as a puzzle too hard for them to guess he
said:
"Why, ain't it got percisely the same color and the same look about it
as Mr. Dudley Stackpole's face? Why, it's a perfect imitation of him!
That's whut I said to myself all in a flash when I first seen it
bouncin' on the end of this here black birch limb out yonder in the
flats."
"By gum, if you ain't right!" exclaimed one of the audience. "Say, come
to think about it, I wonder if spendin' all his nights with bright
lights burnin' round him is whut's give that old man that gray color
he's got, the same as this wasp's nest has got it, and all them puckery
lines round his eyes. Pore old devil, with the hags furever ridin' him!
Well, they tell me he's toler'ble well fixed in this world's goods, but
poor as I am, and him well off, I wouldn't trade places with him fur any
amount of money. I've got my peace of mind if I ain't got anything else
to speak of. Say, you'd 'a' thought in all these years a man would get
over broodin' over havin' killed another feller, and specially havin'
killed him in fair fight. Let's see, now, whut was the name of the
feller he killed that time out there at Cache Creek Crossin's? I
actually disremember. I've heard it a thousand times, too, I reckin, if
I've heard it oncet."
For a fact, the memory of the man slain so long before only endured
because the slayer walked abroad as a living reminder of the taking off
of one who by all accounts had been of small value to mankind in his day
and generation. Save for the daily presence of the one, the very
identity even of the other might before now have been forgotten. For
this very reason, seeking to enlarge the merits of the controversy which
had led to the death of one Jesse Tatum at the hands of Dudley
Stackpole, people sometimes referred to it as the Tatum-Stackpole feud
and sought to liken it to the Faxon-Fleming feud. But that was a real
feud with fence-corner ambuscades and a sizable mortality list and
night-time assassinations and all; whereas this lesser thing, which now
briefly is to be dealt with on its merits, had been no more than a
neighborhood falling out, having but a solitary homicide for its
climatic upshot. So far as that went, it really was not so much the
death of the victim as the survival of his destroyer--and his fashion
of living afterwards--which made warp and woof for the fabric of the
tragedy.
With the passage of time the actuating causes were somewhat blurred in
perspective. The main facts stood forth clear enough, but the underlying
details were misty and uncertain, like some half-obliterated scribble on
a badly rubbed slate upon which a more important sum has been overlaid.
One rendition had it that the firm of Stackpole Brothers sued the two
Tatums--Harve and Jess--for an account long overdue, and won judgment in
the courts, but won with it the murderous enmity of the defendant pair.
Another account would have it that a dispute over a boundary fence
marching between the Tatum homestead on Cache Creek and one of the
Stackpole farm holdings ripened into a prime quarrel by reasons of
Stackpole stubbornness on the one hand and Tatum malignity on the other.
By yet a third account the lawsuit and the line-fence matter were
confusingly twisted together to form a cause for disputation.
Never mind that part though. The incontrovertible part was that things
came to a decisive pass on a July day in the late '80's when the two
Tatums sent word to the two Stackpoles that at or about six o'clock of
that evening they would come down the side road from their place a mile
away to Stackpole Brothers' gristmill above the big riffle in Cache
Creek prepared to fight it out man to man. The warning was explicit
enough--the Tatums would shoot on sight. The message was meant for two,
but only one brother heard it; for Jeffrey Stackpole, the senior member
of the firm, was sick abed with heart disease at the Stackpole house on
Clay Street in town, and Dudley, the junior, was running the business
and keeping bachelor's hall, as the phrase runs, in the living room of
the mill; and it was Dudley who received notice.
Now the younger Stackpole was known for a law-abiding and a
well-disposed man, which reputation stood him in stead subsequently; but
also he was no coward. He might crave peace, but he would not flee from
trouble moving toward him. He would not advance a step to meet it,
neither would he give back a step to avoid it. If it occurred to him to
hurry in to the county seat and have his enemies put under bonds to
keep the peace he pushed the thought from him. This, in those days, was
not the popular course for one threatened with violence by another; nor,
generally speaking, was it regarded exactly as the manly one to follow.
So he bided that day where he was. Moreover, it was not of record that
he told any one at all of what impended. He knew little of the use of
firearms, but there was a loaded pistol in the cash drawer of the mill
office. He put it in a pocket of his coat and through the afternoon he
waited, outwardly quiet and composed, for the appointed hour when
single-handed he would defend his honor and his brother's against the
unequal odds of a brace of bullies, both of them quick on the trigger,
both smart and clever in the handling of weapons.
But if Stackpole told no one, some one else told some one. Probably the
messenger of the Tatums talked. He currently was reputed to have a leaky
tongue to go with his jimberjaws; a born trouble maker, doubtless, else
he would not have loaned his service to such employment in the first
place. Up and down the road ran the report that before night there would
be a clash at the Stackpole mill. Peg-Leg Foster, who ran the general
store below the bridge and within sight of the big riffle, saw fit to
shut up shop early and go to town for the evening. Perhaps he did not
want to be a witness, or possibly he desired to be out of the way of
stray lead flying about. So the only known witness to what happened,
other than the parties engaged in it, was a negro woman. She, at least,
was one who had not heard the rumor which since early forenoon had been
spreading through the sparsely settled neighborhood. When six o'clock
came she was grubbing out a sorghum patch in front of her cabin just
north of where the creek cut under the Blandsville gravel pike.
One gets a picture of the scene: The thin and deficient shadows
stretching themselves across the parched bottom lands as the sun slid
down behind the trees of Eden's swamp lot; the heat waves of a
blistering hot day still dancing their devil's dance down the road like
wriggling circumflexes to accent a false promise of coolness off there
in the distance; the ominous emptiness of the landscape; the brooding
quiet, cut through only by the frogs and the dry flies tuning up for
their evening concert; the bandannaed negress wrangling at the weeds
with her hoe blade inside the rail fence; and, half sheltered within the
lintels of the office doorway of his mill, Dudley Stackpole, a slim,
still figure, watching up the crossroad for the coming of his
adversaries.
But the adversaries did not come from up the road as they had advertised
they would. That declaration on their part had been a trick and device,
cockered up in the hope of taking the foe by surprise and from the rear.
In a canvas-covered wagon--moving wagons, we used to call them in Red
Gravel County--they left their house half an hour or so before the time
set by them for the meeting, and they cut through by a wood lane which
met the pike south of Foster's store; and then very slowly they rode up
the pike toward the mill, being minded to attack from behind, with the
added advantage of unexpectedness on their side.
Chance, though, spoiled their strategy and made these terms of primitive
dueling more equal. Mark how: The woman in the sorghum patch saw it
happen. She saw the wagon pass her and saw it brought to standstill just
beyond where she was; saw Jess Tatum slide stealthily down from under
the overhanging hood of the wagon and, sheltered behind it, draw a
revolver and cock it, all the while peeping out, searching the front and
the nearer side of the gristmill with his eager eyes. She saw Harve
Tatum, the elder brother, set the wheel chock and wrap the lines about
the sheathed whipstock, and then as he swung off the seat catch a boot
heel on the rim of the wagon box and fall to the road with a jar which
knocked him cold, for he was a gross and heavy man and struck squarely
on his head. With popped eyes she saw Jess throw up his pistol and fire
once from his ambush behind the wagon, and then--the startled team
having snatched the wagon from before him--saw him advance into the open
toward the mill, shooting again as he advanced.
All now in the same breath and in a jumble of shock and terror she saw
Dudley Stackpole emerge into full sight, and standing clear a pace from
his doorway return the fire; saw the thudding frantic hoofs of the nigh
horse spurn Harve Tatum's body aside--the kick broke his right leg, it
turned out--saw Jess Tatum suddenly halt and stagger back as though
jerked by an unseen hand; saw him drop his weapon and straighten again,
and with both hands clutched to his throat run forward, head thrown back
and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled
scream--it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus--and
saw him fall on his face, twitching and wriggling, not thirty feet from
where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more
firing.
As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say
with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even
seven, she thought. After the opening shot they rang together in almost
a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum's gun and
two in Stackpole's seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the
coroner that night and to the coroner's jurors next day that five shots
had been fired.
On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to
this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum
stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon,
Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again
offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon
him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man
frozen stiff.
Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for
her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin
and scrouged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she
timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already
persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade,
were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground.
Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being
stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the
bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and
they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust
of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to
harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading
the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and
to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb
in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or
sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.
While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his
senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was
that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he was, and the main instigator
and central figure of sundry violent encounters in the past, should have
failed to hit the mark at which he fired with his first shot or with his
second or with his third; and the second, a still greater wonder, was
that Dudley Stackpole, who perhaps never in his life had had for a
target a living thing, should have sped a bullet so squarely into the
heart of his victim at twenty yards or more. The first phenomenon might
perhaps be explained, they agreed, on the hypothesis that the mishap to
his brother, coming at the very moment of the fight's beginning,
unnerved Jess and threw him out of stride, so to speak. But the second
was not in anywise to be explained excepting on the theory of sheer
chance. The fact remained that it was so, and the fact remained that it
was strange.
By form of law Dudley Stackpole spent two days under arrest; but this
was a form, a legal fiction only. Actually he was at liberty from the
time he reached the courthouse that night, riding in the sheriff's buggy
with the sheriff and carrying poised on his knees a lighted lantern.
Afterwards it was to be recalled that when, alongside the sheriff, he
came out of his mill technically a prisoner he carried in his hand this
lantern, all trimmed of wick and burning, and that he held fast to it
through the six-mile ride to town. Afterwards, too, the circumstance was
to be coupled with multiplying circumstances to establish a state of
facts; but at the moment, in the excited state of mind of those present,
it passed unremarked and almost unnoticed. And he still held it in his
hand when, having been released under nominal bond and attended by
certain sympathizing friends, he walked across town from the county
building to his home in Clay Street. That fact, too, was subsequently
remembered and added to other details to make a finished sum of
deductive reasoning.
Already it was a foregone conclusion that the finding at the coroner's
inquest, to be held the next day, would absolve him; foregone, also,
that no prosecutor would press for his arraignment on charges and that
no grand jury would indict. So, soon all the evidence in hand was
conclusively on his side. He had been forced into a fight not of his own
choosing; an effort, which had failed, had been made to take him
unfairly from behind; he had fired in self-defense after having first
been fired upon; save for a quirk of fate operating in his favor, he
should have faced odds of two deadly antagonists instead of facing one.
What else then than his prompt and honorable discharge? And to top all,
the popular verdict was that the killing off of Jess Tatum was so much
good riddance of so much sorry rubbish; a pity, though, Harve had
escaped his just deserts.
Helpless for the time being, and in the estimation of his fellows even
more thoroughly discredited than he had been before, Harve Tatum here
vanishes out of our recital. So, too, does Jeffrey Stackpole, heretofore
mentioned once by name, for within a week he was dead of the same heart
attack which had kept him out of the affair at Cache Creek. The rest of
the narrative largely appertains to the one conspicuous survivor, this
Dudley Stackpole already described.
Tradition ever afterwards had it that on the night of the killing he
slept--if he slept at all--in the full-lighted room of a house which was
all aglare with lights from cellar to roof line. From its every opening
the house blazed as for a celebration. At the first, so the tale of it
ran, people were of two different minds to account for this. This one
rather thought Stackpole feared punitive reprisals under cover of night
by vengeful kinsmen of the Tatums, they being, root and branch, sprout
and limb, a belligerent and an ill-conditioned breed. That one suggested
that maybe he took this method of letting all and sundry know he felt no
regret for having gunned the life out of a dangerous brawler; that
perhaps thereby he sought to advertise his satisfaction at the outcome
of that day's affair. But this latter theory was not to be credited. For
so sensitive and so well-disposed a man as Dudley Stackpole to joy in
his own deadly act, however justifiable in the sight of law and man that
act might have been--why, the bare notion of it was preposterous! The
repute and the prior conduct of the man robbed the suggestion of all
plausibility. And then soon, when night after night the lights still
flared in his house, and when on top of this evidence accumulated to
confirm a belief already crystallizing in the public mind, the town came
to sense the truth, which was that Mr. Dudley Stackpole now feared the
dark as a timid child might fear it. It was not authentically chronicled
that he confessed his fears to any living creature. But his fellow
townsmen knew the state of his mind as though he had shouted of it from
the housetops. They had heard, most of them, of such cases before. They
agreed among themselves that he shunned darkness because he feared that
out of that darkness might return the vision of his deed, bloodied and
shocking and hideous. And they were right. He did so fear, and he feared
mightily, constantly and unendingly.
That fear, along with the behavior which became from that night
thenceforward part and parcel of him, made Dudley Stackpole as one set
over and put apart from his fellows. Neither by daytime nor by
night-time was he thereafter to know darkness. Never again was he to see
the twilight fall or face the blackness which comes before the dawning
or take his rest in the cloaking, kindly void and nothingness of the
midnight. Before the dusk of evening came, in midafternoon sometimes, of
stormy and briefened winter days, or in the full radiance of the sun's
sinking in the summertime, he was within doors lighting the lights which
would keep the darkness beyond his portals and hold at bay a gathering
gloom into which from window or door he would not look and dared not
look.
There were trees about his house, cottonwoods and sycamores and one
noble elm branching like a lyre. He chopped them all down and had the
roots grubbed out. The vines which covered his porch were shorn away. To
these things many were witnesses. What transformations he worked within
the walls were largely known by hearsay through the medium of Aunt
Kassie, the old negress who served him as cook and chambermaid and was
his only house servant. To half-fearsome, half-fascinated audiences of
her own color, whose members in time communicated what she told to their
white employers, she related how with his own hands, bringing a crude
carpentry into play, her master ripped out certain dark closets and
abolished a secluded and gloomy recess beneath a hall staircase, and how
privily he called in men who strung his ceilings with electric lights,
although already the building was piped for gas; and how, for final
touches, he placed in various parts of his bedroom tallow dips and oil
lamps to be lit before twilight and to burn all night, so that though
the gas sometime should fail and the electric bulbs blink out there
still would be abundant lighting about him. His became the house which
harbored no single shadow save only the shadow of morbid dread which
lived within its owner's bosom. An orthodox haunted house should by
rights be deserted and dark. This house, haunted if ever one was,
differed from the orthodox conception. It was tenanted and it shone with
lights.
The man's abiding obsession--if we may call his besetment thus--changed
in practically all essential regards the manners and the practices of
his daily life. After the shooting he never returned to his mill. He
could not bring himself to endure the ordeal of revisiting the scene of
the killing. So the mill stood empty and silent, just as he left it that
night when he rode to town with the sheriff, until after his brother's
death; and then with all possible dispatch he sold it, its fixtures,
contents and goodwill, for what the property would fetch at quick sale,
and he gave up business. He had sufficient to stay him in his needs. The
Stackpoles had the name of being a canny and a provident family, living
quietly and saving of their substance. The homestead where he lived,
which his father before him had built, was free of debt. He had funds
in the bank and money out at interest. He had not been one to make close
friends. Now those who had counted themselves his friends became rather
his distant acquaintances, among whom he neither received nor bestowed
confidences.
In the broader hours of daylight his ways were such as any man of
reserved and diffident ways, having no fixed employment, might follow in
a smallish community. He sat upon his porch and read in books. He worked
in his flower beds. With flowers he had a cunning touch, almost like a
woman's. He loved them, and they responded to his love and bloomed and
bore for him. He walked downtown to the business district, always alone,
a shy and unimpressive figure, and sat brooding and aloof in one of the
tilted-back cane chairs under the portico of the old Richland House,
facing the river. He took long solitary walks on side streets and
byways; but it was noted that, reaching the outer outskirts, he
invariably turned back. In all those dragging years it is doubtful if
once he set foot past the corporate limits into the open country. Dun
hued, unobtrusive, withdrawn, he aged slowly, almost imperceptibly. Men
and women of his own generation used to say that save for the wrinkles
ever multiplying in close cross-hatchings about his puckered eyes, and
save for the enhancing of that dead gray pallor--the wasp's-nest
overcasting of his skin--he still looked to them exactly as he had
looked when he was a much younger man.
It was not so much the appearance or the customary demeanor of the
recluse that made strangers turn about to stare at him as he passed, and
that made them remember how he looked when he was gone from their sight.
The one was commonplace enough--I mean his appearance--and his conduct,
unless one knew the underlying motives, was merely that of an
unobtrusive, rather melancholy seeming gentleman of quiet tastes and
habits. It was the feeling and the sense of a dismal exhalation from
him, an unhealthy and unnatural mental effluvium that served so
indelibly to fix the bodily image of him in the brainpans of casual and
uninformed passers-by. The brand of Cain was not on his brow. By every
local standard of human morality it did not belong there. But built up
of morbid elements within his own conscience, it looked out from his
eyes and breathed out from his person.
So year by year, until the tally of the years rolled up to more than
thirty, he went his lone unhappy way. He was in the life of the town, to
an extent, but not of it. Always, though it was the daylit life of the
town which knew him. Excepting once only. Of this exceptional instance a
story was so often repeated that in time it became permanently embalmed
in the unwritten history of the place.
On a summer's afternoon, sultry and close, the heavens suddenly went all
black, and quick gusts smote the earth with threats of a great
windstorm. The sun vanished magically; a close thick gloaming fell out
of the clouds. It was as though nightfall had descended hours before its
ordained time. At the city power house the city electrician turned on
the street lights. As the first great fat drops of rain fell, splashing
in the dust like veritable clots, citizens scurrying indoors and
citizens seeing to flapping awnings and slamming window blinds halted
where they were to peer through the murk at the sight of Mr. Dudley
Stackpole fleeing to the shelter of home like a man hunted by a terrible
pursuer. But with all his desperate need for haste he ran no
straightaway course. The manner of his flight was what gave added
strangeness to the spectacle of him. He would dart headlong, on a sharp
oblique from the right-hand corner of a street intersection to a point
midway of the block--or square, to give it its local name--then go
slanting back again to the right-hand corner of the next street
crossing, so that his path was in the pattern of one acutely slanted
zigzag after another. He was keeping, as well as he could within the
circles of radiance thrown out by the municipal arc lights as he made
for his house, there in his bedchamber to fortify himself about, like
one beset and besieged, with the ample and protecting rays of all the
methods of artificial illumination at his command--with incandescent
bulbs thrown on by switches, with the flare of lighted gas jets, with
the tallow dip's slim digit of flame, and with the kerosene wick's
three-finger breadth of greasy brilliance. As he fumbled, in a very
panic and spasm of fear, with the latchets of his front gate Squire
Jonas' wife heard him screaming to Aunt Kassie, his servant, to turn on
the lights--all of them.
That once was all, though--the only time he found the dark taking him
unawares and threatening to envelop him in thirty years and more than
thirty. Then a time came when in a hospital in Oklahoma an elderly man
named A. Hamilton Bledsoe lay on his deathbed and on the day before he
died told the physician who attended him and the clergyman who had
called to pray for him that he had a confession to make. He desired that
it be taken down by a stenographer just as he uttered it, and
transcribed; then he would sign it as his solemn dying declaration, and
when he had died they were to send the signed copy back to the town from
whence he had in the year 1889 moved West, and there it was to be
published broadcast. All of which, in due course of time and in
accordance with the signatory's wishes, was done.
With the beginning of the statement as it appeared in the _Daily Evening
News_, as with Editor Tompkins' introductory paragraphs preceding it, we
need have no interest. That which really matters began two-thirds of the
way down the first column and ran as follows:
"How I came to know there was likely to be trouble that evening at the
big-riffle crossing was this way"--it is the dying Bledsoe, of course,
who is being quoted. "The man they sent to the mill with the message did
a lot of loose talking on his way back after he gave in the message, and
in this roundabout way the word got to me at my house on the Eden's
Swamp road soon after dinnertime. Now I had always got along fine with
both of the Stackpoles, and had only friendly feelings toward them; but
maybe there's some people still alive back there in that county who can
remember what the reason was why I should naturally hate and despise
both the Tatums, and especially this Jess Tatum, him being if anything
the more low-down one of the two, although the youngest. At this late
day I don't aim to drag the name of any one else into this, especially a
woman's name, and her now dead and gone and in her grave; but I will
just say that if ever a man had a just cause for craving to see Jess
Tatum stretched out in his blood it was me. At the same time I will
state that it was not good judgment for a man who expected to go on
living to start out after one of the Tatums without he kept on till he
had cleaned up the both of them, and maybe some of their cousins as
well. I will not admit that I acted cowardly, but will state that I used
my best judgment.
"Therefore and accordingly, no sooner did I hear the news about the dare
which the Tatums had sent to the Stackpoles than I said to myself that
it looked like here was my fitting chance to even up my grudge with Jess
Tatum and yet at the same time not run the prospect of being known to be
mixed up in the matter and maybe getting arrested, or waylaid afterwards
by members of the Tatum family or things of such a nature. Likewise I
figured that with a general amount of shooting going on, as seemed
likely to be the case, one shot more or less would not be noticed,
especially as I aimed to keep out of sight at all times and do my work
from under safe cover, which it all of it turned out practically exactly
as I had expected. So I took a rifle which I owned and which I was a
good shot with and I privately went down through the bottoms and came
out on the creek bank in the deep cut right behind Stackpole Brothers'
gristmill. I should say offhand this was then about three o'clock in the
evening. I was ahead of time, but I wished to be there and get
everything fixed up the way I had mapped it out in my mind, without
being hurried or rushed.
"The back door of the mill was not locked, and I got in without being
seen, and I went upstairs to the loft over the mill and I went to a
window just above the front door, which was where they hoisted up grain
when brought in wagons, and I propped the wooden shutter of the window
open a little ways. But I only propped it open about two or three
inches; just enough for me to see out of it up the road good. And I made
me a kind of pallet out of meal sacks and I laid down there and I
waited. I knew the mill had shut down for the week, and I didn't figure
on any of the hands being round the mill or anybody finding out I was
up there. So I waited, not hearing anybody stirring about downstairs at
all, until just about three minutes past six, when all of a sudden came
the first shot.
"What threw me off was expecting the Tatums to come afoot from up the
road, but when they did come it was in a wagon from down the main
Blandsville pike clear round in the other direction. So at this first
shot I swung and peeped out and I seen Harve Tatum down in the dust
seemingly right under the wheels of his wagon, and I seen Jess Tatum
jump out from behind the wagon and shoot, and I seen Dudley Stackpole
come out of the mill door right directly under me and start shooting
back at him. There was no sign of his brother Jeffrey. I did not know
then that Jeffrey was home sick in bed.
"Being thrown off the way I had been, it took me maybe one or two
seconds to draw myself around and get the barrel of my rifle swung round
to where I wanted it, and while I was doing this the shooting was going
on. All in a flash it had come to me that it would be fairer than ever
for me to take part in this thing, because in the first place the Tatums
would be two against one if Harve should get back upon his feet and get
into the fight; and in the second place Dudley Stackpole didn't know the
first thing about shooting a pistol. Why, all in that same second, while
I was righting myself and getting the bead onto Jess Tatum's breast, I
seen his first shot--Stackpole's I mean--kick up the dust not twenty
feet in front of him and less than halfway to where Tatum was. I was as
cool as I am now, and I seen this quite plain.
"So with that, just as Stackpole fired wild again, I let Jess Tatum have
it right through the chest, and as I did so I knew from the way he acted
that he was done and through. He let loose of his pistol and acted like
he was going to fall, and then he sort of rallied up and did a strange
thing. He ran straight on ahead toward the mill, with his neck craned
back and him running on tiptoe; and he ran this way quite a little ways
before he dropped flat, face down. Somebody else, seeing him do that,
might have thought he had the idea to tear into Dudley Stackpole with
his bare hands, but I had done enough shooting at wild game in my time
to know that he was acting like a partridge sometimes does, or a wild
duck when it is shot through the heart or in the head; only in such a
case a bird flies straight up in the air. Towering is what you call it
when done by a partridge. I do not know what you would call it when done
by a man.
"So then I closed the window shutter and I waited for quite a little
while to make sure everything was all right for me, and then I hid my
rifle under the meal sacks, where it stayed until I got it privately two
days later; and then I slipped downstairs and went out by the back door
and came round in front, running and breathing hard as though I had just
heard the shooting whilst up in the swamp. By that time there were
several others had arrived, and there was also a negro woman crying
round and carrying on and saying she seen Jess Tatum fire the first shot
and seen Dudley Stackpole shoot back and seen Tatum fall. But she could
not say for sure how many shots there were fired in all. So I saw that
everything was all right so far as I was concerned, and that nobody, not
even Stackpole, suspicioned but that he himself had killed Jess Tatum;
and as I knew he would have no trouble with the law to amount to
anything on account of it, I felt that there was no need for me to
worry, and I did not--not worry then nor later. But for some time past I
had been figuring on moving out here on account of this new country
opening up. So I hurried up things, and inside of a week I had sold out
my place and had shipped my household plunder on ahead; and I moved out
here with my family, which they have all died off since, leaving only
me. And now I am about to die, and so I wish to make this statement
before I do so.
"But if they had thought to cut into Jess Tatum's body after he was
dead, or to probe for the bullet in him, they would have known that it
was not Dudley Stackpole who really shot him, but somebody else; and
then I suppose suspicion might have fell upon me, although I doubt it.
Because they would have found that the bullet which killed him was fired
out of a forty-five-seventy shell, and Dudley Stackpole had done all of
the shooting he done with a thirty-eight caliber pistol, which would
throw a different-size bullet. But they never thought to do so."
Question by the physician, Doctor Davis: "You mean to say that no
autopsy was performed upon the body of the deceased?"
Answer by Bledsoe: "If you mean by performing an autopsy that they
probed into him or cut in to find the bullet I will answer no, sir, they
did not. They did not seem to think to do so, because it seemed to
everybody such a plain open-and-shut case that Dudley Stackpole had
killed him."
Question by the Reverend Mr. Hewlitt: "I take it that you are making
this confession of your own free will and in order to clear the name of
an innocent party from blame and to purge your own soul?"
Answer: "In reply to that I will say yes and no. If Dudley Stackpole is
still alive, which I doubt, he is by now getting to be an old man; but
if alive yet I would like for him to know that he did not fire the shot
which killed Jess Tatum on that occasion. He was not a bloodthirsty man,
and doubtless the matter may have preyed upon his mind. So on the bare
chance of him being still alive is why I make this dying statement to
you gentlemen in the presence of witnesses. But I am not ashamed, and
never was, at having done what I did do. I killed Jess Tatum with my own
hands, and I have never regretted it. I would not regard killing him as
a crime any more than you gentlemen here would regard it as a crime
killing a rattlesnake or a moccasin snake. Only, until now, I did not
think it advisable for me to admit it; which, on Dudley Stackpole's
account solely, is the only reason why I am now making this statement."
And so on and so forth for the better part of a second column, with a
brief summary in Editor Tompkins' best style--which was a very dramatic
and moving style indeed--of the circumstances, as recalled by old
residents, of the ancient tragedy, and a short sketch of the deceased
Bledsoe, the facts regarding him being drawn from the same veracious
sources; and at the end of the article was a somewhat guarded but
altogether sympathetic reference to the distressful recollections borne
for so long and so patiently by an esteemed townsman, with a concluding
paragraph to the effect that though the gentleman in question had
declined to make a public statement touching on the remarkable
disclosures now added thus strangely as a final chapter to the annals of
an event long since occurred, the writer felt no hesitancy in saying
that appreciating, as they must, the motives which prompted him to
silence, his fellow citizens would one and all join the editor of the
_Daily Evening News_ in congratulating him upon the lifting of this
cloud from his life.
"I only wish I had the language to express the way that old man looked
when I showed him the galley proofs of Bledsoe's confession," said
Editor Tompkins to a little interested group gathered in his sanctum
after the paper was on the streets that evening. "If I had such a power
I'd have this Frenchman Balzac clear off the boards when it came to
describing things. Gentlemen, let me tell you--I've been in this
business all my life, and I've seen lots of things, but I never saw
anything that was the beat of this thing.
"Just as soon as this statement came to me in the mails this morning
from that place out in Oklahoma I rushed it into type, and I had a set
of galley proofs pulled and I stuck 'em in my pocket and I put out for
the Stackpole place out on Clay Street. I didn't want to trust either of
the reporters with this job. They're both good, smart, likely boys; but,
at that, they're only boys, and I didn't know how they'd go at this
thing; and, anyway, it looked like it was my job.
"He was sitting on his porch reading, just a little old gray shell of a
man, all hunched up, and I walked up to him and I says: 'You'll pardon
me, Mr. Stackpole, but I've come to ask you a question and then to show
you something. Did you,' I says, 'ever know a man named A. Hamilton
Bledsoe?'
"He sort of winced. He got up and made as if to go into the house
without answering me. I suppose it'd been so long since he had anybody
calling on him he hardly knew how to act. And then that question coming
out of a clear sky, as you might say, and rousing up bitter
memories--not probably that his bitter memories needed any rousing,
being always with him, anyway--may have jolted him pretty hard. But if
he aimed to go inside he changed his mind when he got to the door. He
turned round and came back.
"'Yes,' he says, as though the words were being dragged out of him
against his will, 'I did once know a man of that name. He was commonly
called Ham Bledsoe. He lived near where'--he checked himself up,
here--'he lived,' he says, 'in this county at one time. I knew him
then.'
"'That being so,' I says, 'I judge the proper thing to do is to ask you
to read these galley proofs,' and I handed them over and he read them
through without a word. Without a word, mind you, and yet if he'd spoken
a volume he couldn't have told me any clearer what was passing through
his mind when he came to the main facts than the way he did tell me just
by the look that came into his face. Gentlemen, when you sit and watch a
man sixty-odd years old being born again; when you see hope and life
come back to him all in a minute; when you see his soul being remade in
a flash, you'll find you can't describe it afterwards, but you're never
going to forget it. And another thing you'll find is that there is
nothing for you to say to him, nothing that you can say, nor nothing
that you want to say.
"I did manage, when he was through, to ask him whether or not he wished
to make a statement. That was all from me, mind you, and yet I'd gone
out there with the idea in my head of getting material for a long newsy
piece out of him--what we call in this business heart-interest stuff.
All he said, though, as he handed me back the slips was, 'No, sir; but I
thank you--from the bottom of my heart I thank you.' And then he shook
hands with me--shook hands with me like a man who's forgotten almost how
'twas done--and he walked in his house and shut the door behind him, and
I came on away feeling exactly as though I had seen a funeral turned
into a resurrection."
Editor Tompkins thought he had that day written the final chapter, but
he hadn't. The final chapter he was to write the next day, following
hard upon a denouement, which to Mr. Tompkins, he with his own eyes
having seen what he had seen, was so profound a puzzle that ever
thereafter he mentally catalogued it under one of his favorite
headlining phrases: "Deplorable Affair Shrouded in Mystery."
Let us go back a few hours. For a fact, Mr. Tompkins had been witness to
a spirit's resurrection. It was as he had borne testimony--a life had
been reborn before his eyes. Even so, he, the sole spectator to and
chronicler of the glory of it, could not know the depth and the sweep
and the swing of the great heartening swell of joyous relief which
uplifted Dudley Stackpole at the reading of the dead Bledsoe's words.
None save Dudley Stackpole himself was ever to have a true appreciation
of the utter sweetness of that cleansing flood, nor he for long.
As he closed his door upon the editor, plans, aspirations, ambitions
already were flowing to his brain, borne there upon that ground swell of
sudden happiness. Into the back spaces of his mind long-buried desires
went riding like chips upon a torrent. The substance of his patiently
endured self-martyrdom was lifted all in a second, and with it the
shadow of it. He would be thenceforth as other men, living as they
lived, taking, as they did, an active share and hand in communal life.
He was getting old. The good news had come late but not too late. That
day would mark the total disappearance of the morbid lonely recluse and
the rejuvenation of the normal-thinking, normal-habited citizen. That
very day he would make a beginning of the new order of things.
And that very day he did; at least he tried. He put on his hat and he
took his cane in his hand and as he started down the street he sought to
put smartness and springiness into his gait. If the attempt was a sorry
failure, he, for one, did not appreciate the completeness of the
failure. He meant, anyhow, that his step no longer should be purposeless
and mechanical; that his walk should hereafter have intent in it. And as
he came down the porch steps he looked about him, but dully, with sick
and uninforming eyes, but with a livened interest in all familiar homely
things.
Coming to his gate he saw, near at hand, Squire Jonas, now a gnarled but
still sprightly octogenarian, leaning upon a fence post surveying the
universe at large, as was the squire's daily custom. He called out a
good morning and waved his stick in greeting toward the squire with a
gesture which he endeavored to make natural. His aging muscles, staled
by thirty-odd years of lack of practice at such tricks, merely made it
jerky and forced. Still, the friendly design was there, plainly to be
divined; and the neighborly tone of his voice. But the squire,
ordinarily the most courteous of persons, and certainly one of the most
talkative, did not return the salutation. Astonishment congealed his
faculties, tied his tongue and paralyzed his biceps. He stared dumbly a
moment, and then, having regained coherent powers, he jammed his
brown-varnished straw hat firmly upon his ancient poll and went
scrambling up his gravel walk as fast as two rheumatic underpinnings
would take him, and on into his house like a man bearing incredible and
unbelievable tidings.
Mr. Stackpole opened his gate and passed out and started down the
sidewalk. Midway of the next square he overtook a man he knew--an
elderly watchmaker, a Swiss by birth, who worked at Nagel's jewelry
store. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of times he had passed this man upon
the street. Always before he had passed him with averted eyes and a
stiff nod of recognition. Now, coming up behind the other, Mr. Stackpole
bade him a cheerful good day. At the sound of the words the Swiss spun
on his heel, then gulped audibly and backed away, flinching almost as
though a blow had been aimed at him. He muttered some meaningless
something, confusedly; he stared at Mr. Stackpole with widened eyes like
one who beholds an apparition in the broad of the day; he stepped on his
own feet and got in his own way as he shrank to the outer edge of the
narrow pavement. Mr. Stackpole was minded to fall into step alongside
the Swiss, but the latter would not have it so. He stumbled along for a
few yards, mute and plainly terribly embarrassed at finding himself in
this unexpected company, and then with a muttered sound which might be
interpreted as an apology or an explanation, or as a token of profound
surprise on his part, or as combination of them all, he turned abruptly
off into a grassed side lane which ran up into the old Enders orchard
and ended nowhere at all in particular. Once his back was turned to Mr.
Stackpole, he blessed himself fervently. On his face was the look of one
who would fend off what is evil and supernatural.
Mr. Stackpole continued on his way. On a vacant lot at Franklin and Clay
Streets four small boys were playing one-eyed-cat. Switching his cane at
the weed tops with strokes which he strove to make casual, he stopped to
watch them, a half smile of approbation on his face. Pose and expression
showed that he desired their approval for his approval of their skill.
They stopped, too, when they saw him--stopped short. With one accord
they ceased their play, staring at him. Nervously the batsman withdrew
to the farther side of the common, dragging his bat behind him. The
three others followed, casting furtive looks backward over their
shoulders. Under a tree at the back of the lot they conferred together,
all the while shooting quick diffident glances toward where he stood. It
was plain something had put a blight upon their spirits; also, even at
this distance, they radiated a sort of inarticulate suspicion--a
suspicion of which plainly he was the object.
For long years Mr. Stackpole's faculties for observation of the motives
and actions of his fellows had been sheathed. Still, disuse had not
altogether dulled them. Constant introspection had not destroyed his
gift for speculation. It was rusted, but still workable. He had read
aright Squire Jonas' stupefaction, the watchmaker's ludicrous alarm. He
now read aright the chill which the very sight of his altered
mien--cheerful and sprightly where they had expected grim aloofness--had
thrown upon the spirits of the ball players. Well, he could understand
it all. The alteration in him, coming without prior warning, had
startled them, frightened them, really. Well, that might have been
expected. The way had not been paved properly for the transformation. It
would be different when the _Daily Evening News_ came out. He would go
back home--he would wait. When they had read what was in the paper
people would not avoid him or flee from him. They would be coming into
his house to wish him well, to reëstablish old relations with him. Why,
it would be almost like holding a reception. He would be to those of his
own age as a friend of their youth, returning after a long absence to
his people, with the dour stranger who had lived in his house while he
was away now driven out and gone forever.
He turned about and he went back home and he waited. But for a while
nothing happened, except that in the middle of the afternoon Aunt Kassie
unaccountably disappeared. She was gone when he left his seat on the
front porch and went back to the kitchen to give her some instruction
touching on supper. At dinnertime, entering his dining room, he had
without conscious intent whistled the bars of an old air, and at that
she had dropped a plate of hot egg bread and vanished into the pantry,
leaving the spilt fragments upon the floor. Nor had she returned. He had
made his meal unattended. Now, while he looked for her, she was hurrying
down the alley, bound for the home of her preacher. She felt the need of
his holy counsels and the reading of scriptural passages. She was used
to queerness in her master, but if he were going crazy all of a sudden,
why that would be a different matter altogether. So presently she was
confiding to her spiritual adviser.
Mr. Stackpole returned to the porch and sat down again and waited for
what was to be. Through the heat of the waning afternoon Clay Street was
almost deserted; but toward sunset the thickening tides of pedestrian
travel began flowing by his house as men returned homeward from work. He
had a bowing acquaintance with most of those who passed.
Two or three elderly men and women among them he had known fairly well
in years past. But no single one of those who came along turned in at
his gate to offer him the congratulation he so eagerly desired; no
single one, at sight of him, all poised and expectant, paused to call
out kindly words across the palings of his fence. Yet they must have
heard the news. He knew that they had heard it--all of them--knew it by
the stares they cast toward the house front as they went by. There was
more, though, in the staring than a quickened interest or a sharpened
curiosity.
Was he wrong, or was there also a sort of subtle resentment in it? Was
there a sense vaguely conveyed that even these old acquaintances of his
felt almost personally aggrieved that a town character should have
ceased thus abruptly to be a town character--that they somehow felt a
subtle injustice had been done to public opinion, an affront offered to
civic tradition, through this unexpected sloughing off by him of the
rôle he for so long had worn?
He was not wrong. There was an essence of a floating, formless
resentment there. Over the invisible tendons of mental telepathy it came
to him, registering emphatically.
As he shrank back in his chair he summoned his philosophy to give him
balm and consolation for his disappointment. It would take time, of
course, for people to grow accustomed to the change in him--that was
only natural. In a few days, now, when the shock of the sensation had
worn off, things would be different. They would forgive him for breaking
a sort of unuttered communal law, but one hallowed, as it were, by rote
and custom. He vaguely comprehended that there might be such a law for
his case--a canon of procedure which, unnatural in itself, had come with
the passage of the passing years to be quite naturally accepted.
Well, perhaps the man who broke such a law, even though it were
originally of his own fashioning, must abide the consequences. Even so,
though, things must be different when the minds of people had
readjusted. This he told himself over and over again, seeking in its
steady repetition salve for his hurt, overwrought feelings.
And his nights--surely they would be different! Therein, after all, lay
the roots of the peace and the surcease which henceforth would be his
portion. At thought of this prospect, now imminent, he uplifted his soul
in a silent pæan of thanksgiving.
Having no one in whom he ever had confided, it followed naturally that
no one else knew what torture he had suffered through all the nights of
all those years stretching behind him in so terribly long a perspective.
No one else knew how he had craved for the darkness which all the time
he had both feared and shunned. No one else knew how miserable a
travesty on sleep his sleep had been, first reading until a heavy
physical weariness came, then lying in his bed through the latter hours
of the night, fitfully dozing, often rousing, while from either side of
his bed, from the ceiling above, from the headboard behind him, and from
the footboard, strong lights played full and flary upon his twitching,
aching eyelids; and finally, towards dawn, with every nerve behind his
eyes taut with pain and strain, awakening unrefreshed to consciousness
of that nimbus of unrelieved false glare which encircled him, and the
stench of melted tallow and the stale reek of burned kerosene foul in
his nose. That, now, had been the hardest of all to endure. Endured
unceasingly, it had been because of his dread of a thing infinitely
worse--the agonized, twisted, dying face of Jess Tatum leaping at him
out of shadows. But now, thank God, that ghost of his own conjuring,
that wraith never seen but always feared, was laid to rest forever.
Never again would conscience put him, soul and body, upon the rack. This
night he would sleep--sleep as little children do in the all-enveloping,
friendly, comforting dark.
Scarcely could he wait till a proper bedtime hour came. He forgot that
he had had no supper; forgot in that delectable anticipation the
disillusionizing experiences of the day. Mechanically he had, as dusk
came on, turned on the lights throughout the house, and force of habit
still operating, he left them all on when at eleven o'clock he quitted
the brilliantly illuminated porch and went to his bedroom on the second
floor. He undressed and he put on him his night wear, becoming a
grotesque shrunken figure, what with his meager naked legs and his ashen
eager face and thin dust-colored throat rising above the collarless
neckband of the garment. He blew out the flame of the oil lamp which
burned on a reading stand at the left side of his bed and extinguished
the two candles which stood on a table at the right side.
Then he got in the bed and stretched out his arms, one aloft, the other
behind him, finding with the fingers of this hand the turncock of the
gas burner which swung low from the ceiling at the end of a goose-necked
iron pipe, finding with the fingers of that hand the wall switch which
controlled the battery of electric lights round about, and with a
long-drawn sigh of happy deliverance he turned off both gas and
electricity simultaneously and sank his head toward the pillow.
The pæaned sigh turned to a shriek of mortal terror. Quaking in every
limb, crying out in a continuous frenzy of fright, he was up again on
his knees seeking with quivering hands for the switch; pawing about then
for matches with which to relight the gas. For the blackness--that
blackness to which he had been stranger for more than half his life--had
come upon him as an enemy smothering him, muffling his head in its
terrible black folds, stopping his nostrils with its black fingers,
gripping his windpipe with black cords, so that his breathing stopped.
That blackness for which he had craved with an unappeasable hopeless
craving through thirty years and more was become a horror and a devil.
He had driven it from him. When he bade it return it returned not as a
friend and a comforter but as a mocking fiend.
For months and years past he had realized that his optic nerves,
punished and preyed upon by constant and unwholesome brilliancy, were
nearing the point of collapse, and that all the other nerves in his
body, frayed and fretted, too, were all askew and jangled. Cognizant of
this he still could see no hope of relief, since his fears were greater
than his reasoning powers or his strength of will. With the fear lifted
and eternally dissipated in a breath, he had thought to find solace and
soothing and restoration in the darkness. But now the darkness, for
which his soul in its longing and his body in its stress had cried out
unceasingly and vainly, was denied him too. He could face neither the
one thing nor the other.
Squatted there in the huddle of the bed coverings, he reasoned it all
out, and presently he found the answer. And the answer was this: Nature
for a while forgets and forgives offenses against her, but there comes
a time when Nature ceases to forgive the mistreatment of the body and
the mind, and sends then her law of atonement, to be visited upon the
transgressor with interest compounded a hundredfold. The user of
narcotics knows it; the drunkard knows it; and this poor self-crucified
victim of his own imagination--he knew it too. The hint of it had that
day been reflected in the attitude of his neighbors, for they merely had
obeyed, without conscious realization or analysis on their part, a law
of the natural scheme of things. The direct proof of it was, by this
night-time thing, revealed and made yet plainer. He stood convicted, a
chronic violator of the immutable rule. And he knew, likewise, there was
but one way out of the coil--and took it, there in his bedroom, vividly
ringed about by the obscene and indecent circle of his lights which kept
away the blessed, cursed darkness while the suicide's soul was passing.
AN INSTRUMENT OF THE GODS[6]
By LINCOLN COLCORD
(From _The American Magazine_)
"You think the Chinese are prosaic," said Nichols from the darkness of
his corner. "I've listened to you closely. You fellows have been
discussing only superficialities. At heart, you and the Oriental are the
same. The Chinese are romantic, I tell you; they are heroic. Yes,
really. Let me tell you a tale."
Suddenly he laughed. "You won't be convinced. But strip my friend Lee Fu
Chang naked, forget about that long silken coat of his; dress him in a
cowboy's suit and locate him on the Western plains, and the game he
played with Captain Wilbur won't seem so inappropriate. You merely won't
expect a mandarin Chinaman to play it. You'll feel that China is too
civilized for what he did.
"Some of you fellows must remember the notorious case of Captain Wilbur
and the 'Speedwell;' but I'll briefly refresh your memories: He was a
well-known shipmaster of the palmy days, and his vessel was one of the
finest clippers ever launched on the shores of New England. But she was
growing old; and Wilbur had suffered serious financial reverses, though
the fact wasn't generally known.
"To make a long story short, he put the 'Speedwell' ashore in Ombay
Pass, on a voyage from Singapore to New York, and abandoned her as she
lay. Within a month after sailing, he was back again in Singapore with
his ship's company in three long boats and a tale of a lost vessel. No
hint of scandal was raised against the affair. The insurance companies
stood the gaff, the business was closed up without a hitch, and the name
of the 'Speedwell' passed simultaneously from the 'Maritime Register'
and from the books of her owners in America.
"Wilbur went immediately to Batavia, and there hired a schooner and crew
with the proceeds of his personal holdings in the vessel. He sailed for
Ombay Pass; after a period of magnificent sailorizing and superhuman
effort he floated the ship and patched her so that she would stay
afloat. When he appeared off Batavia roadstead with the 'Speedwell'
under topgallant-sails, it was the sensation of the port; and when it
transpired what he intended to do with her, the news flew like wildfire
about the China Sea. For he proposed to hold the ship as salvage; and
nothing, apparently, could be done about it. He found men willing to
advance him credit, bought off his Lascar crew, took the 'Speedwell' to
Hong Kong and put her in dry dock, and soon was ready for business with
a fine ship of his own.
"I was off on a trading voyage while these events were taking place. I
heard them first from Lee Fu Chang.
"'An extraordinary incident!' exclaimed Lee Fu in conclusion. 'I am
deeply interested. It is a crowning stroke that he has not seen fit to
change the name of the vessel. All is as it was before, when the
well-known and reputable Captain Wilbur commanded his fine ship, the
"Speedwell," on voyages to the East.'
"'Does the crowd have anything to do with him?' I asked.
"'None of his old associates speak in passing. He goes about like a man
afflicted with a pestilence. Apparently, he is not disturbed by this
treatment. He makes no protest, offers no excuse, takes no notice; in
the face of outrageous insult he maintains an air of dignity and
reserve, like a man conscious of inner rectitude.'
"'Did you talk with him, Lee Fu?'
"'Oh, yes. In fact, I cultivated his acquaintance. It relieved, as it
were, the daily monotony of virtue. Do not think that he is a simple
man. His heart in this matter is unfathomable, and well worth sounding.'
"'By Jove, I believe you liked him!'
"'No, not that.' Lee Fu folded his hands within the long sleeves of his
embroidered coat and laid them across his stomach in a characteristic
attitude of meditation. 'No, quite the opposite. I abhorred him. He
feels no remorse; he goes his way in peace from the betrayal of a sacred
trust. He is an arch-criminal.'
"'Aren't you laying it on a little thick?' I laughed.
"Lee Fu smiled quietly, giving me a glance that was a mere flicker of
the eyelids. 'Captain, let me tell you, murder is brave and honorable
compared to this. Consider what he did: Trained to the sea and ships,
after a lifetime of service to his traditions, he suddenly forsakes them
utterly. It is blasphemy which he has committed; blasphemy against the
gods who guide and sustain us, and without whose aid we cannot live. So
I abhor him--and am fascinated. If you will believe me, Captain, I have
not in all my talk with him received a single flash of illumination; no,
not one! There is no clue to his design. He speaks of his ship as others
do; he is a big, red-faced man with frank glances and open speech. I
swear to you, his heart is untroubled. And that is horrible.'
"I was a little amused at my friend's moral fervor. 'Perhaps he's
innocent,' I said.
"'You forget that he holds the vessel,' Lee Fu reminded me. 'To one of
your race, if no blood flows, then it is not so bad. But bear in mind
that a strong man within your circle has murdered the spirit--and wait
until the actual blood flows.'
"'What do you mean. Lee Fu?'
"'I mean that Captain Wilbur will bear watching. In the meantime, do not
fail to study him when opportunity offers. Thus we learn of heaven and
hell.'
"A few years went by, while the case of Captain Wilbur and the
'Speedwell' was in its initial stages of being forgotten. Nothing
succeeds like success; the man was growing rich, and there were many to
whom the possession of a fine vessel covered a multitude of sins. Some
of his old friends were willing after a while to let bygones be bygones.
Little by little, one began to see him again on the quarter-deck of an
evening, among the fleet captains. When, in time, it became unwise to
start the story against him for fear of misconstruction of the motive,
it was evident that he'd won his nefarious match against society.
"I'd met him a number of times during this interval. Indeed, he
compelled attention. That perfect urbanity, that air of unfailing
dignity and confidence, that aura of a commanding personality, of an
able shipmaster among his brethren, of a man whose position in the world
was secure beyond peradventure; these could spring only from a quiet
conscience or from a heart perfectly attuned to villainy. So unconscious
was his poise that one often doubted the evidence of memory, and found
one's self going back over the record, only to fetch up point-blank
against the incontestable fact that he had stolen his ship and had
betrayed his profession.
"'It is a triumph, a feat of character!' Lee Fu used to say, as we
compared notes on the case from time to time. 'I think that he has not
been guilty of a single minor error. His correctness is diabolical. It
presages disaster, like too much fair weather in the typhoon season.
Mark my word, Captain, when the major error comes it will be a great
tragedy.'
"'Must there be an error?' I asked, falling into the mood of Lee Fu's
exaggerated concern. 'He has carried it off so far with the greatest
ease.'
"'Yes, with the greatest ease,' Lee Fu repeated thoughtfully. 'Yet I
wonder if he has been properly put to the test. See how the world
protects him! But he is not invulnerable. Life will yet challenge
him--it must be. Can a man escape the gods? I wonder. That is why I
concern myself with him--to know his destiny.'
"'You admit, then, that he may be merely a stupid fool?' I chaffed.
"'Not stupid,' said Lee Fu. 'Yet, on the other hand, not superior to
life. Such faultless power of will is in itself no mean share of
ability. He is, as you might say, self-centered--most accurately
self-centered. But the challenge of the gods displaces the center of
all. He will be like a top that is done spinning. A little breath may
topple him. Wait and see.'
"Voyage followed voyage; and one time, when I had come in from Bangkok
and was on my way to Lee Fu's office I passed Captain Wilbur on the
opposite side of Queen's Road. It flashed across my mind that I hadn't
observed the 'Speedwell' in harbor.
"'The fact is, the successful Captain Wilbur has retired from active
service on the sea,' Lee Fu explained with a quizzical smile, when I put
the question. 'He is now a ship owner alone, and has favored Hong Kong
above all other ports as the seat of his retirement. He resides in a
fine house on Graham Terrace, and has chairmen in white livery edged
with crimson. Captain Nichols, you should steal a ship.'
"'Who goes in the "Speedwell"?'
"'An old friend of ours, one Captain Turner,' said Lee Fu slowly,
without looking in my direction.
"'Not Will Turner?'
"'The same.'
"I pursed up my mouth in a silent whistle. Will Turner in the
'Speedwell!' Poor old chap, he must have lost another ship. Hard luck
seemed to pursue him, gave him no rest on land or sea. A capable sailor
and an honest man, yet life had afforded him nothing but a succession of
black eyes and heavy falls. Death and sorrow, too; he had buried a wife
and child, swept off by cholera, in the Bay of Bengal. Turner and I had
landed together in the China Sea; I knew his heart, his history, some of
his secrets, and liked him tremendously for the man he was.
"Watching Lee Fu in silence, I thought of the relationship between Will
Turner and this extraordinary Chinaman. I won't go into the story, but
there were overwhelming reasons why they should think well of each
other; why Lee Fu should respect and honor Turner, and why Turner should
hold Lee Fu as his best friend.
"'I did not know of the plan until he had accepted,' Lee Fu was saying.
'I did everything in my power to dissuade him.'
"'Didn't Wilbur do the right thing?'
"'Oh, yes. But it is unthinkable, Captain, that he should command the
"Speedwell." The jealous gods have not yet shown their hand.'
"'Nonsense, Lee Fu!' I exclaimed, a little irritated. 'Since the thing
is done, hadn't we better try to be practical?'
"'Exactly,' said Lee Fu. 'Let us be practical. Captain, is it impossible
for the Caucasian to reason from cause to effect? There seems to be no
logic in your design; which explains many curious facts of history. I
have merely insisted that a man who would do one thing would do another,
and that, sooner or later, life would present to him another thing to
do.'
"'But I've known too many men to escape what you call destiny,' I argued
peevishly.
"'Have you?' inquired Lee Fu.
"That year I went into the Malay Archipelago for an extended cruise, was
gone seven months among the islands, and reached Hong Kong just ahead of
a bad blow. Typhoon signals were flying from the Peak as I came in; the
sky to the eastward had lowered and darkened like a shutter, and the
breeze had begun to whip in vicious gusts across the harbor. I carried
important communications for Lee Fu, so went ashore at once. The outer
office was full of gathering gloom, although it was still early
afternoon. Sing Toy immediately took in my name; and soon I was ushered
into the familiar room, where my friend sat beside a shaded lamp, facing
a teakwood desk inlaid with ivory, and invariably bare, save for a
priceless Ming vase and an ornament of old green bronze.
"'I am glad to see you, Captain,' he said dispassionately. 'Sit down. I
have bad news.'
"'Yes?' I queried, more than a little alarmed.
"Folding his hands across his stomach and slightly bowing his head, he
gazed at me with a level upturned glance that, without betraying
expression, carried by its very immobility a hint of deep emotion. 'It
is as I told you,' he said at last. 'Now, perhaps, you will believe.'
"'For heaven's sake, what are you talking about?' I demanded.
"'We had another typhoon this season, a very early one. It was this
typhoon into whose face our late friend Captain Turner took his ship,
the "Speedwell," sailing from Hong Kong for New York some four months
ago. Three days after sailing, he met the typhoon and was blown upon a
lee shore two hundred miles along the China coast. In this predicament,
he cut away his masts and came to anchor. But his ship would not float,
and accordingly sunk at the anchors.'
"'Sunk at her anchors!' I exclaimed. 'How could that be? A tight ship
never did such a thing.'
"'Nevertheless, she sunk in the midst of the gale, and all on board
perished. Afterwards the news was reported from shore, and the hull was
discovered in ten fathoms of water. There has been talk of trying to
save the ship; and Captain Wilbur himself, in a diver's suit, has
inspected the wreck. Surely, he should know if it is possible to salve
her! He says no, and it is reported that the insurance companies are in
agreement with him.' Lee Fu's voice dropped to a rasping tone. 'The
lives, of course, he cannot save.'
"I sat for some moments gazing at the green bronze dragon on the desk,
stunned by what I had heard. Turner gone? Even between us, who had seen
each other seldom in late years, there had been a bond. Weren't we known
as the two Eastern wanderers?
"'That is not all,' said Lee Fu suddenly. 'What more?' I asked.
"'Listen, Captain, and pay close attention. Some weeks after the loss of
the "Speedwell," it came to my ears that a man had a tale worth hearing.
He was brought; he proved to be a common coolie who had been employed in
the loading of the "Speedwell." This coolie had been gambling during the
dinner hour, and had lost the small sum that he should have taken home
as the result of several days' labor. Likewise, he feared his wife, and
particularly her mother, who was a shrew. In a moment of desperation, as
the lighter was preparing to leave for the night, he escaped and
secreted himself in the hold of the vessel.
"'He had long been asleep that night when he was suddenly awakened by a
sound on the ladder leading from the upper deck. It was a sound of
careful steps, mingled with a faint metallic rattling. A moment later a
foot descended on the floor of the between-decks, and lantern was
cautiously lighted. The coolie retreated quickly into the lower hold,
and from his post among the bales of merchandise was able to see all
that went on.'
"Again Lee Fu paused, as if lingering over the scene. 'It seems that
this late and secret comer into the hold of the "Speedwell" was none
other than her owner, Captain Wilbur,' he slowly resumed. 'The coolie
knew him by face, and had seen him come on board that afternoon.
Afterwards, through my inquiries, I learned that Captain Turner had
spent that night on shore. It was Captain Wilbur's custom, it seems,
frequently to sleep on board his ship when she lay in port. Have you
ever been in the lower hold of the "Speedwell," Captain Nichols?'
"'No, I haven't.'
"'But you recall her famous ports?'
"'Yes, indeed.' The incident at once came back to me in detail. The
'Speedwell' once had carried a cargo of ironwood from Singapore for a
temple up the Yangtse-kiang. In order to load the immense timbers, she
had been obliged to cut bow ports of extraordinary size, fifty inches in
depth, they were, and nearly seven feet in width, according to my
recollection.
"'It has been my privilege,' said Lee Fu, 'to examine carefully the
forepeak of this vessel. I had chartered her one time, and felt alarmed
for her safety until I had seen the interior fastenings of these great
windows that looked out into the deep sea. But my alarm was groundless.
There was a most ingenious device for strengthening the bows where they
had been weakened by the cutting of the ports. Four or five timbers had,
of course, been severed; but these were reproduced on the port itself,
and the whole was fashioned like a massive door. It lifted upward on
immense wrought-iron hinges; when it was lowered in place gigantic bars
of iron, fitted into brackets on the adjoining timbers, stretched across
its face to hold it against the impact of the waves. Thus the port, when
tightly caulked from without, became again an integral part of the hull;
I was told that there had never keen a trace of leakage from her bows.
And, most remarkable of all, I was told, when it became necessary to
open these ports for use, the task could easily be accomplished by two
or three men and a stout watch-tackle. This I am now prepared to
believe.
"'But, to resume the account of the coolie,' Lee Fu went on with
exasperating deliberation. 'This is what he saw: Our friend Captain
Wilbur descended into the lower hold and forward to the forepeak, where
there was little cargo. There he worked with great effort for several
hours. He had equipped himself with a short crowbar, and carried a light
tackle wrapped beneath his coat. The tackle he loosened and hung to a
hook above the middle of the port; it was merely for the purpose of
lowering the iron crossbars so that they would make no noise. Had one
fallen--'
"'Good God, Lee Fu, what are you trying to tell me?'
"'Merely an incident of the night. So, with the crowbar, Captain Wilbur
pried loose the iron braces, slinging them in his tackle and dropping
them softly one by one into the ship's bottom. It was a heavy task; the
coolie said that sweat poured from the big man like rain. Last of all he
covered the bars with dunnage, and rolled against the bow several bulky
bales of matting to conceal the work. Captain, when the "Speedwell"
sailed from Hong Kong in command of our honored friend, one of her great
bow ports below the water hung on its hinges without internal
fastenings, and held in place only by the tightness of the caulking. The
first heavy weather--'
"'Can this be possible?' I said through clenched teeth.
"'Oh, yes, so easily possible that it happened,' answered Lee Fu.
"'But why should he do such a thing? Had he anything against Turner?'
"'Captain, you do not understand. He merely was tired of the vessel; and
freights are becoming very poor. He wanted his insurance. He had no
thought of disaster so he now assures himself; what he had in mind was
for the ship to sink discreetly in pleasant weather. Yet he was willing
enough to run the chance of wholesale murder.'
"I got up and began pacing the floor; the damnable affair had made me
sick at heart, and a little sick at the stomach.
"'Thus the gods have struck,' said Lee Fu behind me, in that changeless
voice that for a moment seemed to concentrate the echo of the ages.
'There is blood at last, Captain--twenty-seven lives, and among them one
dear to us--enough even to convince one of your race that a crime has
been committed. But I was mistaken in much that I foresaw. The criminal,
it seems, is destined not to suffer. He has escaped the gods.'
"Can't you bring him to a reckoning? Isn't there some way--'
"Lee Fu shook his head. 'No, Captain, he is amply protected. What could
I accomplish in your courts with this fantastic tale, and for witnesses
a coolie and a sampan man?'
"I continued to pace the floor, thinking dark thoughts. There was a way,
of course, between man and man; but such things are no longer done in
the heart of civilization, except in sudden passion or jealousy.
"Pacing rapidly, and oblivious to everything but the four walls of the
room, I nearly ran into Sing Toy coming in with a message from the outer
office. He whispered a word in Lee Fu's ear.
"'Ah!' exclaimed Lee Fu sharply. I started, whirled around. His voice
had lost the level, passive tone; it had taken on the timbre of action.
"'Send him in,' he said in Chinese to Sing Toy.
"'Who is it?' I asked breathlessly.
"'The man we have been speaking of.'
"'Wilbur? What the devil does he want?'
"'Nothing,' answered Lee Fu, speaking swiftly. 'He merely came to make a
call. So he thinks; but I think otherwise. Beware of word or glance.
This chanced by arrangement. We are on the threshold of the gods.'
"Lee Fu remained standing as Captain Wilbur entered the room. His
hurried admonition still rang in my ears: 'Keep silence--beware of word
or glance!' But I couldn't have spoken intelligibly just then. To beware
of glances was a different matter. I stood as if rooted to the floor,
gazing point-blank at Wilbur with a stare that must have made him wonder
as to my sanity.
"'Good afternoon, Captain Wilbur,' said Lee Fu blandly. 'I think you are
acquainted with Captain Nichols, of the bark "Omega"?'
"'Oh, how-do, Nichols,' said Wilbur, advancing down the room. 'I've
missed you around town for a good while. Glad you're back. I suppose you
had the usual assortment of adventures?'
"I drew back to escape shaking his hand.
"'No,' I answered, 'nothing like the adventure that awaited me here.'
"He settled himself in a chair, directly in range of the light, smiled,
and lifted his eyebrows. 'So? Well, I can believe you. This office, you
know, is the heart of all adventure.' He bowed toward Lee Fu, who had
resumed his seat.
"'You honor me, Captain,' replied the Chinaman. 'Yet it is only life
which may be called the heart of adventure--life, with its amazing
secrets that one by one transpire into the day, and with its enormous
burden of evil that weighs us down like slaves.'
"Wilbur laughed. 'Yes, that's it, no doubt. Good, too, Lee Fu, plenty of
good. Don't be pessimistic. But I suppose you're right, in a way; the
evil always does manage to be more romantic.'
"'Much more romantic,' said Lee Fu. 'And the secrets are more romantic
still. Consider, for instance, the case of a dark secret, which by
chance has already become known. How infinitely romantic! Though the man
feels secure, yet inevitably it will be disclosed. When, a
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