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The best short stories of 1919, and the yearbook of the American short story

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Title: The best short stories of 1919, and the yearbook of the American short story

Editor: Edward J. O'Brien


        
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THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1919
             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," ETC.

     BOSTON
  SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
     PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1918, by Margaret C, Anderson, Charles Scribner's Sons,
Smart Set Company, Inc., and The Century Company.

Copyright, 1919, by The Boston Transcript Company.

Copyright, 1919, by The Century Company, Harper & Brothers, The
Bellman Company, The Pictorial Review Company, The Ridgway Company,
The Curtis Publishing Company, The American Hebrew, and The McCall
Company.

Copyright, 1920, by Gulielma Fell Alsop, Sherwood Anderson, Edwina
Stanton Babcock, Djuna Barnes, Frederick Orin Bartlett, Agnes Mary
Brownell, Maxwell Struthers Burt, James Branch Cabell, Horace Fish,
Susan Glaspell Cook, Henry Goodman, Richard Matthews Hallet, Joseph
Hergesheimer, Will E. Ingersoll, Calvin Johnston, Howard Mumford
Jones, Ellen N. La Motte, Elias Lieberman, Mary Heaton O'Brien, and
Anzia Yezierska.

Copyright, 1920, by Small, Maynard & Company, Inc.



       *       *       *       *       *

                      TO
                ANZIA YEZIERSKA

       *       *       *       *       *




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 Century Company, Miss Margaret C. Anderson, Editor of The Little
Review, Harper & Brothers, The Bellman Company, The Pictorial Review
Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, The Ridgway Company, The Curtis
Publishing Company, The Smart Set Company, Inc., The Editor of The
American Hebrew, The McCall Company, Miss G. F. Alsop, Mr. Sherwood
Anderson, Miss Edwina Stanton Babcock, Miss Djuna Barnes, Mr. Frederick
Orin Bartlett, Miss Agnes Mary Brownell, Mr. Maxwell Struthers Burt, Mr.
James Branch Cabell, Mr. Horace Fish, Mrs. George Cram Cook, Mr. Henry
Goodman, Mr. Richard Matthews Hallet, Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer, Mr. Will
E. Ingersoll, Mr. Calvin Johnston, Mr. Howard Mumford Jones, Miss Ellen
N. La Motte, Mr. Elias Lieberman, Mrs. Mary Heaton O'Brien, and Miss
Anzia Yezierska.

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 published during 1920 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 _Bass
River, Cape Cod, Massachusetts_.

E. J. O.




CONTENTS[1]


[Note 1: 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.]

                                                                    PAGE
INTRODUCTION. By the Editor                                         xiii

THE KITCHEN GODS. By G. F. Alsop                                       3
  (From _The Century_)

AN AWAKENING. By Sherwood Anderson                                    24
  (From _The Little Review_)

WILLUM'S VANILLA. By Edwina Stanton Babcock                           34
  (From _Harper's Magazine_)

A NIGHT AMONG THE HORSES. By Djuna Barnes                             65
  (From _The Little Review_)

LONG, LONG AGO. By Frederick Orin Bartlett                            74
  (From _The Bellman_)

DISHES. By Agnes Mary Brownell                                        82
  (From _The Pictorial Review_)

THE BLOOD-RED ONE. By Maxwell Struthers Burt                          96
  (From _Scribner's Magazine_)

THE WEDDING-JEST. By James Branch Cabell                             108
  (From _The Century_)

THE WRISTS ON THE DOOR. By Horace Fish                               123
  (From _Everybody's Magazine_)

"GOVERNMENT GOAT." By Susan Glaspell                                 147
  (From _The Pictorial Review_)

THE STONE. By Henry Goodman                                          167
  (From _The Pictorial Review_)

TO THE BITTER END. By Richard Matthews Hallet                        178
  (From _The Saturday Evening Post_)

THE MEEKER RITUAL. By Joseph Hergesheimer                            200
  (From _The Century_)

THE CENTENARIAN. By Will E. Ingersoll                                225
  (From _Harper's Magazine_)

MESSENGERS. By Calvin Johnston                                       237
  (From _The Saturday Evening Post_)

MRS. DRAINGER'S VEIL. By Howard Mumford Jones                        269
  (From _The Smart Set_)

UNDER A WINE-GLASS. By Ellen N. La Motte                             297
  (From _The Century_)

A THING OF BEAUTY. By Elias Lieberman                                305
  (From _The American Hebrew_)

THE OTHER ROOM. By Mary Heaton Vorse                                 312
  (From _McCall's Magazine_)

"THE FAT OF THE LAND." By Anzia Yezierska                            326
  (From _The Century_)

THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY, NOVEMBER,
1918, TO SEPTEMBER, 1919                                             351

Addresses of American Magazines Publishing Short
Stories                                                              353

The Biographical Roll of Honor of American Short
Stories                                                              355

The Roll of Honor of Foreign Short Stories in
American Magazines                                                   364

Volumes of Short Stories Published, November,
1918, to September, 1919: An Index                                   366

Articles on the Short Story, October, 1918, to
September, 1919                                                      372

Magazine Averages, November, 1918, to September,
1919                                                                 381

Index of Short Stories Published in American Magazines,
November, 1918, to September, 1919                                   384




INTRODUCTION


I should like to take the text for my remarks this year on the American
Short Story from that notable volume of criticism, "Our America" by
Waldo Frank. For the past year, it has been a source of much questioning
to me to determine why American fiction, as well as the other arts,
fails so conspicuously in presenting a national soul, why it fails to
measure sincerely the heights and depths of our aspirations and failures
as a nation, and why it lacks the vital _elan_ which is so
characteristic of other literatures. We know, of course, that we are
present at the birth of a new national consciousness in our people, but
why is it that this national consciousness seems so tangled in evasion
of reality and in deep inhibitions that stultify it? Mr. Frank suggests
for the first time the root of the cancer, and like a skilful surgeon
points out how it may be healed. His book is the first courageous
diagnosis of our weakness, and I think that the attentive and honest
reader will not feel that he is unduly harsh or spiritually alienated
from us. Briefly put, he finds that our failure lies in not
distinguishing between idealism in itself and idealization of ourselves.
We regard a man who challenges our self righteousness and self
admiration as an enemy of the people. What we call our idealism is
rooted in materialism and the goal we set ourselves virtuously is a goal
of material comfort for ourselves, and, that once attained, perhaps also
for others.

"No American can hope to run a journal, win public office, successfully
advertise a soap or write a popular novel who does not insist upon the
idealistic basis of his country. A peculiar sort of ethical rapture has
earned the term American.... And the reason is probably at least in part
the fact that no land has ever sprung so nakedly as ours from a direct
and consciously material impulse...."

Mr. Frank goes on to point out that because our dreams are founded on a
material earth, they none the less have a hope of heaven, and that the
American story is really a debased form of wish fulfilment. "While the
American was active in the external world--mature and conscious
there--his starved inner life stunted his spiritual powers to infantile
dimensions.... What would satisfy him must be a picture of the contents
of real life, simplified and stunted to the dream-dimensions of the
infant. And with just this sort of thing, our army of commercialised
writers and dramatists and editors has kept him constantly supplied.

"There is nothing more horrible than a physically mature body moved by a
childish mind. And if the average American production repels the
sensitive American reader the reason is that he is witnessing just this
condition.... The American is aware of the individual and social
problems which inspire the current literatures of Europe. He is
conscious of the conflicts of family and sex, of the contrasts of
poverty and wealth. Of such stuff, also, are his books. Their _body_ is
mature: but their mental and spiritual _motivation_ remains infantile.
At once, it is reduced to an abortive simplification whereby the reality
is maimed, the reader's wish fulfilled as it could only be in fairyland.
But the fairyland is missing: the sweet moods of fairyland have withered
in the arid sophistications of American life.... And yet the authors of
this sort of book are hailed as realists, their work is acclaimed as
social criticism and American interpretation. And when at times a
solitary voice emerges with the truth, its message is attacked as morbid
and a lie.

"It is easy to understand how optimism should become of the tissue of
American life. The pioneer must hope. Else, how can he press on? The
American editor or writer who fails to strike the optimistic note is set
upon with a ferocity which becomes clear if we bear in mind that hope is
the pioneer's preserving arm. I do not mean to discredit the validity of
hope and optimism. I can honestly lay claim to both. America was builded
on a dream of fair lands: a dream that has come true. In the infinitely
harder problems of social and psychic health, the dream persists. We
believe in our Star. And we do not believe in our experience. America
is filled with poverty, with social disease, with oppression and with
physical degeneration. But we do not wish to believe that this is so. We
bask in the benign delusion of our perfect freedom.... Yet spiritual
growth without the facing of the world is an impossible conception."

Mr. Frank instances the case of Jack London as an example of how
inhibition may crush an artist, while rewarding him with material
success. "The background of this gifted man was the background of
America. He had gone back to primal stratum: stolen and labored and
adventured. Finally, he had learned to write. Criticism grew in him. He
pierced the American myths. He no longer believed in the Puritan God....
But what of this experience of passion and exploration lives in his
books? Precisely, nothing. London became a 'best-seller.' He sold
himself to a Syndicate which paid him a fabulous price for every word he
wrote. He visited half the world, and produced a thousand words a day.
And the burden of his literary output was an infantile romanticism under
which he deliberately hid his own despair. Since the reality of the
world he had come up through was barred to his pen, he wrote stories
about sea-wolves and star-gazers: he wallowed in the details of bloody
combat. If he was aware of the density of human life, of the drama of
the conflict of its planes, he used his knowledge only as a measure of
avoidance. He claimed to have found truth in a complete cynical
dissolution. 'But I know better,' he says, 'than to give this truth as I
have seen it, in my books. The bubbles of illusion, the pap of pretty
lies are the true stuff of stories.'"

You may say that this is a hard saying. Perhaps it is. But as I was
writing this morning, I received a letter from which I shall quote as a
living human document. It came to me from an American short story writer
whose work I have not had occasion to mention previously in these
studies. This artist has done work which ranks with the very best that
has been produced in America, but it very seldom finds its way into
print for the very reasons that Mr. Frank has mentioned. There is no
compromise in it. It offers us no vicarious satisfaction of our self
esteem. "I have only a blind, consuming passion of ideas. And this blind
passion of ideas drove me and hounded me till I had to tear loose from
everything human to follow it. For two years I lived in savage
isolation. I thought myself strong enough to live alone and think alone,
but I am not. What writes itself in me is too intense for the light
weight American magazines. My last story took me months to write and I
had to ruin it by tacking on to it a happy ending or starve."

Now you may say that the writer of this letter should not have isolated
himself from humanity. But in reality he did not. His stories are
instinct with the very pulse of humanity. The American editor fears
their reality, and so the writer really found that humanity had turned
from him. Meanwhile, the unpublished work of this writer, who is dying,
is America's spiritual loss. In the same way America lost Stephen Crane
and Harris Merton Lyon and many another, and is losing its best writers
to Europe every day. This annual volume is a book of documents, and that
is my excuse for quoting from these two writers. You will find the
indictment set forth more fully by a master in a recent novel, "The
Mask," by John Cournos, another writer whom America has lost as it lost
Whistler and Henry James.

It is not easy to play the part of Juvenal in this age, and I shall not
do it again, but it is because my faith in America is founded on her
weaknesses as well as her strength that I make this plea for sincerity
and artistic freedom. America's literature must no longer be the product
of a child's brain in a man's body, if it is to be a literature, and not
a form of journalism.

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
formulae, 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 of our work, and the
psychological and imaginative reality which our 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 November, 1918, to September,
1919, inclusive. During these eleven months, 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 skillful selection and
arrangement of his material, 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 group 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
yearbook 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, an even finer distinction--the 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
our 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 eleven months under consideration.
These stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks
prefixed to the title, and are listed in the special "Rolls 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 an English story,
nor a translation from a 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.

As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this
annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet,
Wilbur Daniel Steele, and Arthur Johnson, so it is my wish to dedicate
this year the best that I have found in the American magazines as the
fruit of my labors to Anzia Yezierska, whose story, "Fat of the Land",
seems to me perhaps the finest imaginative contribution to the short
story made by an American artist this year.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.

OXFORD, ENGLAND,
    October 29, 1919.




THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1919

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.




THE KITCHEN GODS[2]

[Note 2: Copyright, 1919, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1920,
by Gulielma Fell Alsop.]

BY GULIELMA FELL ALSOP

From _The Century_


The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard, in their fantastic
green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened.
Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their
faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the
wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was
mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as
straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness;
but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved
among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house
where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the
wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the
devil-catchers, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge
china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came
the sounds of early morning--the click of wooden sandals on cobbled
streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh
vegetables or carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city.
The gate-keeper was awake, brushing out his house with a broom of twigs.
He was quite bald, and the top of his head was as tanned and brown as
the legs of small summer children.

"Good morning, Honorable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The lilies
have opened."

An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-aproned, cluttered across
the courtyard with two pails of steaming water.

"Good morning, Honorable One. The water for the great wife is hot and
heavy." She dropped her buckets, the water splashing over in runnels and
puddles at her feet, and stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an
auspicious day."

From the casement-window in the right balcony a voice called:

"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"

It sounded elderly and querulous, a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to
dominate. The great wife's face appeared a moment at the casement. Her
eyes swept over the courtyard scene--over the blooming lilies, and
Dong-Yung standing among them.

"Behold the small wife, cursed of the gods!" she cried in her high,
shrill voice. "Not even a girl can she bear her master. May she eat
bitterness all her days!"

The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare
boards of the ancestral hall beyond.

"The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honorable One,
shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids."

Dong-Yung nodded. The flower-girl came slowly in under the guarded
gateway. She was a country child, with brown cheeks and merry eyes. Her
shallow basket was steadied by a ribbon over one shoulder, and caught
between an arm and a swaying hip. In the flat, round basket, on green
little leaves, lay the wired perfumed orchids.

"How many? It is an auspicious day. See, the lilies have bloomed. One
for the hair and two for the buttonholes. They smell sweet as the breath
of heaven itself."

Dong-Yung smiled as the flower-girl stuck one of the fragrant, fragile,
green-striped orchids in her hair, and hung two others, caught on
delicate loops of wire, on the jade studs of her jacket, buttoned on the
right shoulder.

"Ah, you are beautiful-come-death!" said the flower-girl. "Great
happiness be thine!"

"Even a small wife can be happy at times." Dong-Yung took out a little
woven purse, and paid over two coppers apiece to the flower-girl.

At the gate the girl and the gate-keeper fell a-talking.

"Is the morning rice ready?" called a man's voice from the room behind.

Dong-Yung turned quickly. Her whole face changed. It had been smiling
and pleased before at the sight of the faint, white lily-petals and the
sunlight on her feet and the fragrance of the orchids in her hair; but
now it was lit with an inner radiance.

"My beloved Master!" Dong-Yung made a little instinctive gesture toward
the approaching man, which in a second was caught and curbed by Chinese
etiquette. Dressed, as she was, in pale-gray satin trousers, loose, and
banded at the knee with wide blue stripes, and with a soft jacket to
match, she was as beautiful in the eyes of the approaching man as the
newly opened lilies. What he was in her eyes it would be hard for any
modern woman to grasp: that rapture of adoration, that bliss of worship,
has lingered only in rare hearts and rarer spots on the earth's surface.

Foh-Kyung came out slowly through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged
it like a bright border. The doors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the
decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along
the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honor. Long
crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to
floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom, imperial
yellow, and turquoise blue, gleamed like a lighted lamp in the shadowy
morning light of the room.

Foh-Kyung stooped to smell the lilies.

"They perfume the very air we breathe. Little Jewel, I love our old
Chinese ways. I love the custom of the lily-planting and the day the
lilies bloom. I love to think the gods smell them in heaven, and are
gracious to mortals for their fragrance's sake."

"I am so happy!" Dong-Yung said, poking the toe of her slipper in and
out the sunlight. She looked up at the man before her, and saw he was
tall and slim and as subtle-featured as the cross-legged bronze Buddha
himself. His long, thin hands were hid, crossed and slipped along the
wrists within the loose apricot satin sleeves of his brocaded garment.
His feet, in their black satin slippers and tight-fitting white muslin
socks, were austere and aristocratic. Dong-Yung, when he was absent,
loved best to think of him thus, with his hands hidden and his eyes
smiling.

"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her
shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree.

"And the beech-blossoms," continued Foh-Kyung. "'The earth is the
Lord's, and the fullness thereof.'"

"The foreign devil's wisdom," answered Dong-Yung.

"It is greater than ours, Dong-Yung; greater and lovelier. To-day,
to-day, I will go to their hall of ceremonial worship and say to their
holy priest that I think and believe the Jesus way."

"Oh, most-beloved Master, is it also permitted to women, to a small
wife, to believe the Jesus way?"

"I will believe for thee, too, little Lotus Flower in the Pond."

"Tell me, O Teacher of Knowledge--tell me that in my heart and in my
mind I may follow a little way whither thou goest in thy heart and in
thy mind!"

Foh-Kyung moved out of the shadow of the ancestral hall and stood in the
warm sunlight beside Dong-Yung, his small wife. His hands were still
withheld and hidden, clasping his wrists within the wide, loose apricot
sleeves of his gown, but his eyes looked as if they touched her.
Dong-Yung hid her happiness even as the flowers hide theirs, within
silent, incurving petals.

"The water is cold as the chill of death. Go, bring me hot water--water
hot enough to scald an egg."

Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung turned to the casement in the upper right-hand
wing and listened apprehensively. The quick chatter of angry voices
rushed out into the sunlight.

"The honorable great wife is very cross this morning." Dong-Yung
shivered and turned back to the lilies. "To-day perhaps she will beat me
again. Would that at least I had borne my lord a young prince for a son;
then perhaps--"

"Go not near her, little Jewel. Stay in thine own rooms. Nay, I have
sons a-plenty. Do not regret the childlessness. I would not have your
body go down one foot into the grave for a child. I love thee for
thyself."

"Now my lord speaks truly, as do the foreign devils to the shameless,
open-faced women. I like the ways of the outside kingdom well. Tell me
more of them, my Master."

Foh-Kyung moved his hands as if he would have withdrawn them from his
apricot-colored sleeves. Dong-Yung saw the withheld motion, and swayed
nearer. For a moment Dong-Yung saw the look in his eyes that engulfed
her in happiness; then it was gone, and he looked away past her, across
the opening lily-buds and the black rampart of the wall, at something
distant, yet precious. Foh-Kyung moved closer. His face changed. His
eyes held that hidden rapture that only Dong-Yung and the foreign-born
priest had seen.

"Little Jewel, wilt thou go with me to the priest of the foreign-born
faith? Come!" He withdrew his hand from his sleeve and touched Dong-Yung
on the shoulder. "Come, we will go hand in hand, thou and I, even as the
men and women of the Jesus thinking; not as Chinese, I before, and thou
six paces behind. Their God loves men and women alike."

"Is it permitted to a small wife to worship the foreign-born God?"
Dong-Yung lifted her eyes to the face of Foh-Kyung. "Teach me, O my Lord
Master! My understanding is but young and fearful--"

Foh-Kyung moved into the sunlight beside her.

"Their God loves all the world. Their God is different, little Flower,
from the painted images, full of blessings, not curses. He loves even
little girl babies that mothers would throw away. Truly his heart is
still more loving than the heart of a mother."

"And yet I am fearful--" Dong-Yung looked back into the shadows of the
guest-hall, where the ancestral tablets glowed upon the wall, and
crimson tapers stood ready before them. "Our gods I have touched and
handled."

"Nay, in the Jesus way there is no fear left." Foh-Kyung's voice dropped
lower. Its sound filled Dong-Yung with longing. "When the wind screams
in the chimneys at night, it is but the wind, not evil spirits. When
the summer breeze blows in at the open door, we need not bar it. It is
but the summer breeze from the rice-fields, uninhabited by witch-ghosts.
When we eat our morning rice, we are compelled to make no offering to
the kitchen gods in the stove corner. They cannot curse our food. Ah, in
the Jesus way there is no more fear!"

Dong-Yung drew away from her lord and master and looked at him
anxiously. He was not seeing her at all. His eyes looked beyond, across
the fragile lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he
saw in the world. Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet
springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on her shoulder.

"Your words are words of good hearing, O beloved Teacher. Nevertheless,
let me follow six paces behind. I am not worthy to touch your hand. Six
paces behind, when the sun shines in your face, my feet walk in the
shadow of your garments."

Foh-Kyung gathered his gaze back from his visions and looked at his
small wife, standing in a pool of sunshine before him. Overhead the lazy
crows flew by, winging out from their city roosts to the rice-fields for
the day's food.

"Tea-boiled eggs!" cried a vender from beyond the wall. A man stopped at
the gate, put down his shoulder-tray of food, and bargained with the
ancient, mahogany-scalped gate-keeper. Faint odors of food frying in oil
stole out from the depths of the house behind him. And Dong-Yung, very
quiet and passive in the pose of her body, gazed up at Foh-Kyung with
those strange, secretive, ardent eyes. All around him was China, its
very essence and sound and smell. Dong-Yung was a part of it all; nay,
she was even the very heart of it, swaying there in the yellow light
among the lily-petals.

"Precious Jewel! Yet it is sweeter to walk side by side, our feet
stepping out into the sunlight together, and our shadows mingling
behind. I want you beside me."

The last words rang with sudden warmth. Dong-Yung trembled and
crimsoned. It was not seemly that a man speak to a woman thus, even
though that man was a husband and the woman his wife, not even though
the words were said in an open court, where the eyes of the great wife
might spy and listen. And yet Dong-Yung thrilled to those words.

An amah called, "The morning rice is ready."

Dong-Yung hurried into the open room, where the light was still faint,
filtering in through a high-silled window and the door. A round, brown
table stood in the center of the room. In the corner of the room behind
stood the crescentic, white plaster stove, with its dull wooden
kettle-lids and its crackling straw. Two cooks, country women, sat in
the hidden corner behind the stove, and poked in the great bales of
straw and gossiped. Their voices and the answers of the serving amah
filled the kitchen with noise. In their decorous niche at the upper
right hand of the stove sat the two kitchen gods, small ancient idols,
with hidden hands and crossed feet, gazing out upon a continually hungry
world. Since time was they had sat there, ensconced at the very root of
life, seemingly placid and unseeing and unhearing, yet venomously
watching to be placated with food. Opposite the stove, on the white
wall, hung a row of brass hooks, from which dangled porcelain spoons
with pierced handles. On a serving-table stood the piled bowls for the
day, blue-and-white rice patterns, of a thin, translucent ware, showing
the delicate light through the rice seeds; red-and-green dragoned bowls
for the puddings; and tiny saucer-like platters for the vegetables. The
tea-cups, saucered and lidded, but unhandled, stood in a row before the
polished brass hot-water kettle.

The whole room was full of a stirring, wakening life, of the crackling
straw fire, of the steaming rice, all white and separate-kerneled in its
great, shallow, black iron kettles, lidded with those heavy hand-made
wooden lids, while the boiling tea water hissed, and spat out a snake of
white steam.

With that curious democracy of China, where high and low alike are
friendly, Dong-Yung hurried into her beloved kitchen.

"Has the master come?" asked the serving maid.

"Coming, coming," Dong-Yung answered. "I myself will take in his
morning rice, after I have offered the morning oblations to the gods."

Dong-Yung selected two of the daintiest blue-and-white rice-pattern
bowls. The cook lifted off the wooden lid of the rice-kettle, and
Dong-Yung scooped up a dipperful of the snow-white kernels. On the tiny
shelf before each god, the father and mother god of the household,
Dong-Yung placed her offering. She stood off a moment, surveying them in
pleased satisfaction--the round, blue bowls, with the faint tracery of
light; the complacent gods above, red and green and crimson, so
age-long, comfortably ensconced in their warm stove corner. She made
swift obeisance with her hands and body before those ancient idols. A
slant of sunshine swept in from the high windows and fell over her in a
shaft of light. The thoughts of her heart were all warm and mixed and
confused. She was happy. She loved her kitchen, her gods, all the
familiar ways of Chinese life. She loved her silken, satin clothes,
perfumed and embroidered and orchid-crowned, yet most of all she loved
her lord and master. Perhaps it was this love for him that made all the
rest of life so precious, that made each bowl of white rice an oblation,
each daily act a glorification. So she flung out her arms and bent her
head before the kitchen gods, the symbol of her ancient happiness.

"Dong-Yung, I do not wish you to do this any more."

Dong-Yung turned, her obeisance half arrested in mid-air. Foh-Kyung
stood in the doorway.

"My lord," stammered Dong-Yung, "I did not understand your meaning."

"I know that, little Flower in my House. The new meaning is hard to
understand. I, too, am but a blind child unused to the touch of the
road. But the kitchen gods matter no more; we pray to a spirit."

Foh-Kyung, in his long apricot-colored garment, crossed the threshold of
the kitchen, crossed the shadow and sunlight that striped the bare board
floor, and stood before the kitchen gods. His eyes were on a level with
theirs, strange, painted wooden eyes that stared forth inscrutably into
the eating centuries. Dong-Yung stood half bowed, breathless with a
quick, cold fear. The cook, one hand holding a shiny brown dipper, the
other a porcelain dish, stood motionless at the wooden table under the
window. From behind the stove peeped the frightened face of one of the
fire-tenders. The whole room was turned to stone, motionless, expectant,
awaiting the releasing moment of arousement--all, that is, but the
creeping sunshine, sliding nearer and nearer the crossed feet of the
kitchen gods; and the hissing steam fire, warming, coddling the hearts
of the gods. Sun at their feet, fire at their hearts, food before them,
and mortals turned to stone!

Foh-Kyung laughed softly, standing there, eye-level with the kitchen
gods. He stretched out his two hands, and caught a god in each. A
shudder ran through the motionless room.

"It is wickedness!" The porcelain dish fell from the hand of the cook,
and a thousand rice-kernels, like scattered pearls, ran over the floor.

"A blasphemer," the fire-tender whispered, peering around the stove with
terrified eyes. "This household will bite off great bitterness."

Foh-Kyung walked around the corner of the stove. The fire sparked and
hissed. The sunshine filled the empty niche. Not since the building of
the house and the planting of the tall black cypress trees around it, a
hundred years ago, had the sunlight touched the wall behind the kitchen
gods.

Dong-Yung sprang into life. She caught Foh-Kyung's sleeve.

"O my Lord and Master, I pray you, do not utterly cast them away into
the burning, fiery furnace! I fear some evil will befall us."

Foh-Kyung, a green-and-gold god in each hand, stopped and turned. His
eyes smiled at Dong-Yung. She was so little and so precious and so
afraid! Dong-Yung saw the look of relenting. She held his sleeve the
tighter.

"Light of my Eyes, do good deeds to me. My faith is but a little faith.
How could it be great unto thy great faith? Be gentle with my kitchen
gods. Do not utterly destroy them. I will hide them."

Foh-Kyung smiled yet more, and gave the plaster gods into her hands as
one would give a toy to a child.

"They are thine. Do with them as thou wilt, but no more set them up in
this stove corner and offer them morning rice. They are but painted,
plastered gods. I worship the spirit above."

Foh-Kyung sat down at the men's table in the men's room beyond. An amah
brought him rice and tea. Other men of the household there was none, and
he ate his meal alone. From the women's room across the court came a
shrill round of voices. The voice of the great wife was loudest and
shrillest. The voices of the children, his sons and daughters, rose and
fell with clear childish insistence among the older voices. The amah's
voice laughed with an equal gaiety.

Dong-Yung hid away the plastered green-and-gold gods. Her heart was
filled with a delicious fear. Her lord was even master of the gods. He
picked them up in his two hands, he carried them about as carelessly as
a man carries a boy child astride his shoulder; he would even have cast
them into the fire! Truly, she shivered with delight. Nevertheless, she
was glad she had hidden them safely away. In the corner of the kitchen
stood a box of white pigskin with beaten brass clasps made like the
outspread wings of a butterfly. Underneath the piles of satin she had
hidden them, and the key to the butterfly clasps was safe in her
belt-jacket.

Dong-Yung stood in the kitchen door and watched Foh-Kyung.

"Does my lord wish for anything?"

Foh-Kyung turned, and saw her standing there in the doorway. Behind her
were the white stove and the sun-filled, empty niche. The light flooded
through the doorway. Foh-Kyung set down his rice-bowl from his left hand
and his ivory chop-sticks from his right. He stood before her.

"Truly, Dong-Yung, I want thee. Do not go away and leave me. Do not
cross to the eating-room of the women and children. Eat with me."

"It has not been heard of in the Middle Kingdom for a woman to eat with
a man."

"Nevertheless, it shall be. Come!"

Dong-Yung entered slowly. The light in this dim room was all gathered
upon the person of Foh-Kyung, in the gleaming patterned roses of his
gown, in his deep amethyst ring, in his eyes. Dong-Yung came because of
his eyes. She crossed the room slowly, swaying with that peculiar grace
of small-footed women, till she stood at the table beside Foh-Kyung. She
was now even more afraid than when he would have cast the kitchen gods
into the fire. They were but gods, kitchen gods, that he was about to
break; this was the primeval bondage of the land, ancient custom.

"Give me thy hand and look up with thine eyes and thy heart."

Dong-Yung touched his hand. Foh-Kyung looked up as if he saw into the
ether beyond, and there saw a spirit vision of ineffable radiance. But
Dong-Yung watched him. She saw him transfigured with an inner light. His
eyes moved in prayer. The exaltation spread out from him to her, it
tingled through their finger-tips, it covered her from head to foot.

Foh-Kyung dropped her hand and moved. Dong-Yung leaned nearer.

"I, too, would believe the Jesus way."

In the peculiar quiet of mid-afternoon, when the shadows begin to creep
down from the eaves of the pagodas and zigzag across the rice-fields to
bed, Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung arrived at the camp-ground of the
foreigners. The lazy native streets were still dull with the end of
labor. At the gate of the camp-ground the rickshaw coolies tipped down
the bamboo shafts, to the ground. Dong-Yung stepped out quickly, and
looked at her lord and master. He smiled.

"Nay, I do not fear," Dong-Yung answered, with her eyes on his face.
"Yet this place is strange, and lays a coldness around my heart."

"Regard not their awkward ways," said Foh-Kyung as he turned in at the
gate; "in their hearts they have the secret of life."

The gate-keeper bowed, and slipped the coin, warm from Foh-Kyung's hand,
into his ready pocket.

"Walk beside me, little Wife of my Heart." Foh-Kyung stopped in the wide
graveled road and waited for Dong-Yung. Standing there in the sunlight,
more vivid yet than the light itself, in his imperial yellow robes, he
was the end of life, nay, life itself, to Dong-Yung. "We go to the house
of the foreign priest to seek until we find the foreign God. Let us go
side by side."

Dong-Yung, stepping with slow, small-footed grace, walked beside him.

"My understanding is as the understanding of a little child, beloved
Teacher; but my heart lies like a shell in thy hand, its words but as
the echo of thine. My honor is great that thou do not forget me in the
magnitude of the search."

Dong-Yung's pleated satin skirts swayed to and fro against the imperial
yellow of Foh-Kyung's robe. Her face colored like a pale spring blossom,
looked strangely ethereal above her brocade jacket. Her heart still beat
thickly, half with fear and half with the secret rapture of their quest
and her lord's desire for her.

Foh-Kyung took a silken and ivory fan from an inner pocket and spread it
in the air. Dong-Yung knew the fan well. It came from a famous jeweler's
on Nanking Road, and had been designed by an old court poet of long ago.
The tiny ivory spokes were fretted like ivy-twigs in the North, but on
the leaves of silk was painted a love-story of the South. There was a
tea-house, with a maiden playing a lute, and the words of the song,
fantastic black ideographs, floated off to the ears of her lover.
Foh-Kyung spread out its leaves in the sun, and looked at it and smiled.

"Never is the heart of man satisfied," he said, "alone. Neither when the
willow fuzz flies in the spring, or when the midnight snow silvers the
palms. Least of all is it satisfied when it seeks the presence of God
above. I want thee beside me."

Dong-Yung hid her delight. Already for the third time he said those
words--those words that changed all the world from one of a loving
following-after to a marvelous oneness.

So they stepped across the lawn together. It was to Dong-Yung as if she
stepped into an unknown land. She walked on flat green grass. Flowers in
stiff and ordered rows went sedately round and round beneath a lurid
red brick wall. A strange, square-cornered, flat-topped house squatted
in the midst of the flat green grass. On the lawn at one side was a
white-covered table, with a man and a woman sitting beside it. The four
corners of the table-cloth dripped downward to the flat green grass. It
was all very strange and ugly. Perhaps it was a garden, but no one would
have guessed it. Dong-Yung longed to put each flower plant in a dragon
bowl by itself and place it where the sun caught its petals one by one
as the hours flew by. She longed for a narrow, tile-edged path to guide
her feet through all that flat green expanse. A little shiver ran over
her. She looked back, down the wide graveled way, through the gate,
where the gate-keeper sat, tipped back against the wall on his stool, to
the shop of the money-changer's opposite. A boy leaned half across the
polished wood counter and shook his fist in the face of the
money-changer. "Thou thief!" he cried. "Give me my two cash!" Dong-Yung
was reassured. Around her lay all the dear familiar things; at her side
walked her lord and master. And he had said they were seeking a new
freedom, a God of love. Her thoughts stirred at her heart and caught her
breath away.

The foreigners rose to greet them. Dong-Yung touched the hand of an
alien man. She did not like it at all. The foreign-born woman made her
sit down beside her, and offered her bitter, strong tea in delicate,
lidless cups, with handles bent like a twisted flower-branch.

"I have been meaning to call for a long time, Mrs. Li," said the
foreign-born woman.

"The great wife will receive thee with much honor," Dong-Yung answered.

"I am so glad you came with your husband."

"Yes," Dong-Yung answered, with a little smile. "The customs of the
foreign born are pleasant to our eyes."

"I am glad you like them," said the foreign-born woman. "I couldn't bear
not to go everywhere with my husband."

Dong-Yung liked her suddenly on account of the look that sprang up a
moment in her eyes and vanished again. She looked across at the priest,
her husband, a man in black, with thin lips and seeing eyes. The eyes
of the foreign woman, looking at the priest, her husband, showed how
much she loved him. "She loves him even as a small wife loves,"
Dong-Yung thought to herself. Dong-Yung watched the two men, the one in
imperial yellow, the one in black, sitting beside each other and
talking. Dong-Yung knew they were talking of the search. The
foreign-born woman was speaking to her again.

"The doctor told me I would die if I came to China; but John felt he had
a call. I would not stand in his way."

The woman's face was illumined.

"And now you are very happy?" Dong-Yung announced.

"And now I am very happy; just as you will be very happy."

"I am always happy since my lord took me for his small wife." Dong-Yung
matched her happiness with the happiness of the foreign-born woman,
proudly, with assurance. In her heart she knew no woman, born to eat
bitterness, had ever been so happy as she in all the worlds beneath the
heavens. She looked around her, beyond the failure of the foreign
woman's garden, at the piled, peaked roofs of China looking over the
wall. The fragrance of a blossoming plum-tree stole across from a
Chinese courtyard, and a peach-branch waved pink in the air. A wonder of
contentment filled Dong-Yung.

All the while Foh-Kyung was talking. Dong-Yung turned back from all the
greenness around her to listen. He sat very still, with his hands hid in
his sleeves. The wave-ridged hem of his robe--blue and green and purple
and red and yellow--was spread out decorously above his feet. Dong-Yung
looked and looked at him, so still and motionless and so gorgeously
arrayed. She looked from his feet, long, slim, in black satin slippers,
and close-fitting white muslin socks, to the feet of the foreign priest.
His feet were huge, ugly black things. From his feet Dong-Yung's eyes
crept up to his face, over his priestly black clothes, rimmed with stiff
white at wrist and throat. Yes, his face was even as the face of a
priest, of one who serves between the gods and men, a face of seeing
eyes and a rigid mouth. Dong-Yung shuddered.

"And so we have come, even as the foreign-born God tells us, a man and
his wife, to believe the Jesus way."

Foh-Kyung spoke in a low voice, but his face smiled. Dong-Yung smiled,
too, at his open, triumphant declarations. She said over his words to
herself, under her breath, so that she would remember them surely when
she wanted to call them back to whisper to her heart in the dark of some
night. "We two, a man and his wife"--only dimly, with the heart of a
little child, did Dong-Yung understand and follow Foh-Kyung; but the
throb of her heart answered the hidden light in his eyes.

The foreign-born priest stood up. The same light shone in his eyes. It
was a rapture, an exaltation. Suddenly an unheard-of-thing happened. The
outside kingdom woman put her arms around Dong-Yung! Dong-Yung was
terrified. She was held tight against the other woman's shoulder. The
foreign-born woman used a strange perfume. Dong-Yung only half heard her
whispered words.

"We are like that, too. We could not be separated. Oh, you will be
happy!"

Dong-Yung thought of the other woman. "In her heart she is humble and
seemly. It is only her speech and her ways that are unfitting."

"We are going into the chapel a moment," said the priest. "Will you
come, too?"

Dong-Yung looked at Foh-Kyung, a swift upward glance, like the sudden
sweep of wings. She read his answer in his eyes. He wanted her to come.
Not even in the temple of the foreign-born God did he wish to be without
her.

A coolie called the foreign-born woman away.

The priest, in his tight trousers, and jacket, black and covered with a
multitude of round flat buttons, stood up, and led the way into the
house and down a long corridor to a closed door at the end. Dong-Yung
hurried behind the two men. At the door the priest stood aside and held
it open for her to pass in first. She hesitated. Foh-Kyung nodded.

"Do not think fearful things, little Princess," he whispered. "Enter,
and be not afraid. There is no fear in the worship of Jesus."

So Dong-Yung crossed the threshold first. Something caught her breath
away, just as the chanting of the dragon priests always did. She took a
few steps forward and stood behind a low-backed bench. Before her, the
light streamed into the little chapel through one luminous window of
colored glass above the altar. It lay all over the gray-tiled floor in
roses and sunflowers of pink and gold. A deep purple stripe fell across
the head of the black-robed priest. Dong-Yung was glad of that. It made
his robe less hideous, and she could not understand how one could serve
a god unless in beautiful robes. On the altar beneath the window of
colored flowers were two tall silver candlesticks, with smooth white
tapers. A wide-mouthed vase filled with Chinese lilies stood between
them. The whole chapel was faintly fragrant with their incense. So even
the foreign-born worshipers lit candles, and offered the scent of the
lilies to their spirit God. Truly, all the gods of all the earth and in
the sky are lovers of lit candles and flowers. Also, one prays to all
gods.

The place was very quiet and peaceful, mottled with the gorgeous,
flowerlike splashes of color. The waiting candles, the echoes of many
prayers, the blossoms of worship filled the tiny chapel. Dong-Yung liked
it, despite herself, despite the strangeness of the imageless altar,
despite the clothes of the priest. She stood quite still behind the
bench flooded and filled with an all-pervading sense of happiness.

Foh-Kyung and the black-robed priest walked past her, down the little
aisle, to a shiny brass railing that went like a fence round before the
altar. The foreign-born priest laid one hand on the railing as if to
kneel down, but Foh-Kyung turned and beckoned with his chin to Dong-Yung
to come. She obeyed at once. She was surprisingly unafraid. Her feet
walked through the patterns of color, which slid over her head and
hands, gold from the gold of a cross and purple from the robe of a king.
As if stepping through a rainbow, she came slowly down the aisle to the
waiting men, and in her heart and in her eyes lay the light of all love
and trust.

Foh-Kyung caught her hand.

"See, I take her hand," he said to the priest, "even as you would take
the hand of your wife, proud and unashamed in the presence of your God.
Even as your love is, so shall ours be. Where the thoughts of my heart
lead, the heart of my small wife follows. Give us your blessing."

Foh-Kyung drew Dong-Yung to her knees beside him. His face was hidden,
after the manner of the foreign worshipers; but hers was uplifted, her
eyes gazing at the glass with the colors of many flowers and the shapes
of men and angels. She was happier than she had ever been--happier even
than when she had first worshiped the ancestral tablets with her lord
and master, happier even than at the feast of the dead, when they laid
their food offerings on the shaven grave-mounds. She felt closer to
Foh-Kyung than in all her life before.

She waited. The silence grew and grew till in the heart of it something
ominous took the place of its all-pervading peace. Foh-Kyung lifted his
face from his hands and rose to his feet. Dong-Yung turned, still
kneeling, to scan his eyes. The black-robed priest stood off and looked
at them with horror. Surely it was horror! Never had Dong-Yung really
liked him. Slowly she rose, and stood beside and a little behind
Foh-Kyung. He had not blessed them. Faintly, from beyond the walls of
the Christian chapel came the beating of drums. Devil-drums they were.
Dong-Yung half smiled at the long-known familiar sound.

"Your small wife?" said the priest. "Have you another wife?"

"Assuredly," Foh-Kyung answered. "All men have a great wife first; but
this, my small wife, is the wife of my heart. Together we have come to
seek and find the Jesus way."

The priest wiped his hand across his face. Dong-Yung saw that it was wet
with tiny round balls of sweat. His mouth had suddenly become one thin
red line, but in his eyes lay pain.

"Impossible," he said. His voice was quite different now, and sounded
like bits of metal falling on stone. "No man can enter the church while
living in sin with a woman other than his lawful wife. If your desire is
real, put her away."

With instant response, Foh-Kyung made a stately bow.

"Alas! I have made a grievous mistake. The responsibility will be on my
body. I thought all were welcome. We go. Later on, perhaps, we may meet
again."

The priest spoke hurriedly.

"I do not understand your meaning. Is this belief of such light weight
that you will toss it away for a sinful woman? Put her away, and come
and believe."

But Foh-Kyung did not hear his words. As he turned away, Dong-Yung
followed close behind her lord and master, only half comprehending, yet
filled with a great fear. They went out again into the sunshine, out
across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway, back into the Land
of the Flowery Kingdom. Foh-Kyung did not speak until he put Dong-Yung
in the rickshaw.

"Little Wife of my Heart," he said, "stop at the jeweler's and buy thee
new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and
have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red
circles on the smile of thy cheeks. To-night we will feast. Hast thou
forgotten to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good Buddhists
rejoice?"

He stood beside her rickshaw, in his imperial yellow garment hemmed with
the rainbow waves of the sea, and smiled down into her eyes.

"But the spirit God of love, the foreign-born spirit God?" said
Dong-Yung. "Shall we feast to him, too?"

"Nay, it is not fitting to feast to two gods at once," said Foh-Kyung.
"Do as I have said."

He left her. Dong-Yung, riding through the sun-splashed afternoon,
buying colored jewels and flowery perfume and making herself beautiful,
yet felt uneasy. She had not quite understood. A dim knowledge advanced
toward her like a wall of fog. She pressed her two hands against it and
held it off--held it off by sheer mental refusal to understand. In the
courtyard at home the children were playing with their lighted animals,
drawing their gaudy paper ducks, luminous with candle-light, to and fro
on little standards set on four wheels. At the gate hung a tall
red-and-white lantern, and over the roof floated a string of candle-lit
balloons. In the ancestral hall the great wife had lit the red candles,
speared on their slender spikes, before the tablets. In the kitchen the
cooks and amahs were busy with the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck
everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light
on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the
night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless
shadow. She wished--

"Dong-Yung, Flower in the House, where hast thou hidden the kitchen
gods? Put them in their place." Foh-Kyung, still in imperial yellow,
stood like a sun in the doorway.

Dong-Yung turned.

"But--"

"Put them back, little Jewel in the Hair. It is not permitted to worship
the spirit God. There are bars and gates. The spirit of man must turn
back in the searching, turn back to the images of plaster and paint."

Dong-Yung let the wall of fog slide over her. She dropped her
resistance. She knew.

"Nay, not the spirit of man. It is but natural that the great God does
not wish the importunings of a small wife. Worship thou alone the great
God, and the shadow of that worship will fall on my heart."

"Nay, I cannot worship alone. My worship is not acceptable in the sight
of the foreign God. My ways are not his ways."

Foh-Kyung's face was unlined and calm, yet Dong-Yung felt the hidden
agony of his soul, flung back from its quest upon gods of plaster and
paint.

"But I know the thoughts of thy heart, O Lord and Master, white and
fragrant as the lily-buds that opened to-day. Has thy wish changed?"

"Nay, my wish is even the same, but it is not permitted to a man of two
wives to be a follower of the spirit God."

Dong-Yung had known it all along. This knowledge came with no surprise.
It was she who kept him from the path of his desire!

"Put back the kitchen gods," said Foh-Kyung. "We will live and believe
and die even as our fathers have done. The gate to the God of love is
closed."

The feast was served. In the sky one moon blotted out a world of stars.
Foh-Kyung sat alone, smoking. Laughter and talk filled the women's wing.
The amahs and coolies were resting outside. A thin reed of music crept
in and out among the laughter and talk, from the reed flute of the cook.
The kitchen was quite empty. One candle on the table sent up a long
smoky tongue of flame. The fire still smoldered in the corner. A little
wind shook the cypress-branches without, and carried the scent of the
opened lilies into the room.

Dong-Yung, still arrayed for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the
corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven brass wings of the
butterfly, and lifted out the kitchen gods. One in each hand, she held
them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a
bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground before them.

"Forgive me, O my kitchen gods, forgive my injurious hands and heart;
but the love of my master is even greater than my fear of thee. Thou and
I, we bar the gates of heaven from him."

When she had finished, she tiptoed around the room, touching the chairs
and tables with caressing fingers. She stole out into the courtyard, and
bent to inhale the lily fragrance, sweeter by night than by day. "An
auspicious day," the gate-keeper had said that morning. Foh-Kyung had
stood beside her, with his feet in the sunshine; she remembered the
light in his eyes. She bent her head till the fingers of the lily-petals
touched her cheek. She crept back through the house, and looked at
Foh-Kyung smoking. His eyes were dull, even as are the eyes of sightless
bronze Buddhas. No, she would never risk going in to speak to him. If
she heard the sound of his voice, if he called her "little Flower of the
House," she would never have the strength to go. So she stood in the
doorway and looked at him much as one looks at a sun, till wherever else
one looks, one sees the same sun against the sky.

In the formless shadow she made a great obeisance, spreading out her
arms and pressing the palms of her hands against the floor.

"O my Lord and Master," she said, with her lips against the boards of
the floor, softly, so that none might hear her--"O my Lord and Master, I
go. Even a small wife may unbar the gates of heaven."

First, before she went, she cast the two kitchen gods, green and gold,
of ancient plaster, into the embers of the fire. There in the morning
the cook-rice amahs found the onyx stones that had been their eyes. The
house was still unlocked, the gate-keeper at the feast. Like a shadow
she moved along the wall and through the gate. The smell of the lilies
blew past her. Drums and chants echoed up the road, and the sounds of
manifold feastings. She crept away down by the wall, where the moon laid
a strip of blackness, crept away to unbar the gates of heaven for her
lord and master.




AN AWAKENING[3]

[Note 3: Copyright, 1918, by Margaret C. Anderson. Copyright, 1919,
by The John Lane Company.]

BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON

From _The Little Review_


Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes and thick lips. She was tall
and strong. When black thoughts visited her she grew angry and wished
she were a man and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in the
millinery shop kept by Mrs. Nate McHugh and during the day sat trimming
hats by a window at the rear of the store. She was the daughter of Henry
Carpenter, bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, Ohio, and
lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end of Buckeye
Street. The house was surrounded by pine trees and there was no grass
beneath the trees. A rusty tin eaves-trough had slipped from its
fastenings at the back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal drumming noise that
sometimes persisted all through the night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life almost unbearable
for his daughter, but as she emerged from girlhood into womanhood he
lost his power over her. The bookkeeper's life was made up of
innumerable little pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning
he stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat that had become
shabby with age. At night when he returned to his home he donned another
black alpaca coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the
streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose. The
trousers to his street suit were placed between the boards and the
boards were clamped together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped
the boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining
room door. If they were moved during the day he was speechless with
anger and did not recover his equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter. She,
he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of the girl's mother
and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a
handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud
she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and
then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard, a reporter on the Winesburg Eagle. Secretly she loved another
man, but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused her much
anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith's
Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of relief to
her feelings. She did not think that her station in life would permit
her to be seen in the company of the bartender, and she walked about
under the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a
longing that was very insistent in her nature. She felt that she could
keep the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was somewhat
uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's saloon. His fists were large
and his eyes unusually small but his voice, as though striving to
conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle in
Indiana. When sold the farm brought in eight thousand dollars which Ed
spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy
of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with
awe. Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages
through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women,
playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose wardrobes
cost him hundreds of dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point
he got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With his fist he
broke a large mirror in the wash-room of a hotel and later went about
smashing windows and breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of
hearing the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in the eyes
of clerks, who had come from Sandusky to spend the evening at the resort
with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the surface amounted
to nothing. He had succeeded in spending but one evening in her company.
On that evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's livery barn
and took her for a drive. The conviction that she was the woman his
nature demanded and that he must get her, settled upon him and he told
her of his desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin trying
to earn money for the support of his wife, but so simple was his nature
that he found it difficult to explain his intentions. His body ached
with physical longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking the
milliner into his arms and holding her tightly, in spite of her
struggles, he kissed her until she became helpless. Then he brought her
back to town and let her out of the buggy. "When I get hold of you again
I'll not let you go. You can't play with me," he declared as he turned
to drive away. Then, jumping out of the buggy, he gripped her shoulders
with his strong hands. "I'll keep you for good the next time," he said.
"You might as well make up your mind to that. It's you and me for it and
I'm going to have you before I get through."

* * *

One night in January when there was a new moon George Willard, who was,
in Ed Handby's mind, the only obstacle to his getting Belle Carpenter,
went for a walk. Early that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck's
pool room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town butcher.
Seth Richmond stood with his back against the wall and remained silent,
but George Willard talked. The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys
and they talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein. He
said that women should look out for themselves that the fellow who went
out with a girl was not responsible for what happened. As he talked he
looked about, eager for attention. He held the floor for five minutes
and then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the barber's trade
in Cal Prouse's shop and already began to consider himself an authority
in such matters as baseball, horse racing, drinking and going about with
women. He began to tell of a night when he with two men from Winesburg
went into a house of prostitution at the County Seat. The butcher's son
held a cigar in the side of his mouth and as he talked spat on the
floor. "The women in the place couldn't embarrass me although they tried
hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in the house tried to get
fresh but I fooled her. As soon as she began to talk I went and sat in
her lap. Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her. I taught her to
let me alone."

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main Street. For days
the weather had been bitter cold with a high wind blowing down on the
town from Lake Erie, eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the
wind had died away and a new moon made the night unusually lovely.
Without thinking where he was going or what he wanted to do George went
out of Main Street and began walking in dimly lighted streets filled
with frame houses.

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he forgot his
companions of the pool room. Because it was dark and he was alone he
began to talk aloud. In a spirit of play he reeled along the street
imitating a drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in
shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a sword that jingled
as he walked. As a soldier he pictured himself as an inspector, passing
before a long line of men who stood at attention. He began to examine
the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped and began to
scold. "Your pack is not in order," he said sharply. "How many times
will I have to speak of this matter? Everything must be in order here.
We have a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be done
without order."

Hypnotized by his own words the young man stumbled along the board
sidewalk saying more words. "There is a law for armies and for men too,"
he muttered, lost in reflection. "The law begins with little things and
spreads out until it covers everything. In every little thing there must
be order, in the place where men work, in their clothes, in their
thoughts. I myself must be orderly. I must learn that law. I must get
myself into touch with something orderly and big that swings through the
night like a star. In my little way I must begin to learn something, to
give and swing and work with life, with the law."

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street lamp and his body
began to tremble. He had never before thought such thoughts as had just
come into his head and he wondered where they had come from. For the
moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of himself had been
talking as he walked. He was amazed and delighted with his own mind and
when he walked on again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of
Ransom Surbeck's pool room and think things like that," he whispered.
"It is better to be alone. If I talked like Art Wilson the boys would
understand me but they wouldn't understand what I have been thinking
down here."

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago, there was a
section in which lived day laborers. As the time of factories had not
yet come the laborers worked in the fields or were section hands on the
railroads. They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar for
the long day of toil. The houses in which they lived were small cheaply
constructed wooden affairs with a garden at the back. The more
comfortable among them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts George Willard walked into
such a street on the clear January night. The street was dimly lighted
and in places there was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him
there was something that excited his already aroused fancy. For a year
he had been devoting all of his odd moments to the reading of books and
now some tale he had read concerning life in old world towns of the
middle ages came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled forward
with the curious feeling of one revisiting a place that had been a part
of some former existence. On an impulse he turned out of the street and
went into a little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived the
cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the strong smell of
animals too closely housed and letting his mind play with the strange
new thoughts that came to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure
in the clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The poor
little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke from the chimneys
mounting straight up into the clear air, the grunting of pigs, the women
clad in cheap calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the
footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off to the stores
and saloons of Main Street, the dogs barking and the children
crying--all these things made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness,
oddly detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his own thoughts,
began to move cautiously along the alleyway. A dog attacked him and had
to be driven away with stones and a man appeared at the door of one of
the houses and began to swear at the dog. George went into a vacant lot
and throwing back his head looked up at the sky. He felt unutterably big
and re-made by the simple experience through which he had been passing
and in a kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting them into
the darkness above his head and muttering words. The desire to say words
overcame him and he said words without meaning, rolling them over on his
tongue and saying them because they were brave words, full of meaning.
"Death," he muttered, "night, the sea, fear, loveliness." George Willard
came out of the vacant lot and stood again on the sidewalk facing the
houses. He felt that all of the people in the little street must be
brothers and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to call
them out of their houses and to shake their hands. "If there were only a
woman here I would take hold of her hand and we would run until we were
both tired out," he thought. "That would make me feel better." With the
thought of a woman in his mind he walked out of the street and went
toward the house where Belle Carpenter lived. He thought she would
understand his mood and that he would achieve in her presence a position
he had long been wanting to achieve. In the past when he had been with
her and had kissed her lips he had come away filled with anger at
himself. He had felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and
had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had suddenly become too
big to be used.

When George Willard got to Belle Carpenter's house there had already
been a visitor there before him. Ed Handby had come to the door and
calling Belle out of the house had tried to talk to her. He had wanted
to ask the woman to come away with him and to be his wife, but when she
came and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance and became sullen.
"You stay away from that kid," he growled, thinking of George Willard,
and then, not knowing what else to say, turned to go away. "If I catch
you together I will break your bones and his too," he added. The
bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself
because of his failure.

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran hurriedly
upstairs. From a window at the upper part of the house she saw Ed Handby
cross the street and sit down on a horse block before the house of a
neighbor. In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his head in
his hands. She was made happy by the sight and when George Willard came
to the door she greeted him effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She
thought that as she walked through the streets with young Willard, Ed
Handby would follow and she wanted to make him suffer.

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter walked about under
the trees in the sweet night air. George Willard was full of big words.
The sense of power that had come to him during the hour in the darkness
of the alleyway remained with him and he talked boldly, swaggering
along and swinging his arms about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter
realize that he was aware of his former weakness and that he had
changed. "You will find me different," he declared, thrusting his hands
into his pockets and looking boldly into her eyes. "I don't know why but
it is so. You have got to take me for a man or let me alone. That's how
it is."

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went the woman and the
boy. When George had finished talking they turned down a side street and
went across a bridge into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The
hill began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upwards to the Winesburg Fair
Grounds. On the hillside grew dense bushes and small trees and among the
bushes were little open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and
frozen.

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George Willard's heart began
to beat rapidly and his shoulders straightened. Suddenly he decided that
Belle Carpenter was about to surrender herself to him. The new force
that had manifested itself in him had he felt been at work upon her and
had led to her conquest. The thought made him half drunk with the sense
of masculine power. Although he had been annoyed that as they walked
about she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the fact that she
had accompanied him to this place took all his doubts away. "It is
different. Everything has become different," he thought and taking hold
of her shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her, his eyes
shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her upon the lips she
leaned heavily against him and looked over his shoulder into the
darkness. In her whole attitude there was a suggestion of waiting.
Again, as in the alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into words and,
holding the woman tightly, he whispered the words into the still night.
"Lust," he whispered, "lust and night and women."

* * *

George Willard did not understand what happened to him that night on the
hillside. Later, when he got to his own room, he wanted to weep and
then grew half insane with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and
was sure that all his life he would continue to hate her. On the
hillside he had led the woman to one of the little open spaces among the
bushes and had dropped to his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by
the laborers' houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude for the new
power in himself and was waiting for the woman to speak when Ed Handby
appeared.

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he thought had tried to
take his woman away. He knew that beating was unnecessary, that he had
power within himself to accomplish his purpose without that. Gripping
George by the shoulder and pulling him to his feet he held him with one
hand while he looked at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a
quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man sprawling away
into the bushes and began to bully the woman, who had risen to her feet.
"You're no good," he said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with
you. I'd let you alone if I didn't want you so much."

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard stared at the scene
before him and tried hard to think. He prepared to spring at the man who
had humiliated him. To be beaten seemed infinitely better than to be
thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and each time the
bartender, catching him by the shoulder, hurled him back into the
bushes. The older man seemed prepared to keep the exercise going
indefinitely but George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he
lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the arm and marched
her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through the bushes. As
he crept down the hillside his heart was sick within him. He hated
himself and he hated the fate that had brought about his humiliation.
When his mind went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was
puzzled, and stopping in the darkness, listened, hoping to hear again
the voice, outside himself, that had so short a time before put new
courage into his heart. When his way homeward led him again into the
street of frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to run,
wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood that now seemed to him
utterly squalid and commonplace.




WILLUM'S VANILLA[4]

[Note 4: Copyright, 1919, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1920, by
Edwina Stanton Babcock.]

BY EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK

From _Harper's Magazine_


The letter came while Mr. Pawket was chopping wood. His ax rested on a
stump and piles of white chips breathed fragrance around him as he stood
watching the buckboard of the Rural Free Delivery wind down the country
road.

The Rural Free Delivery consisted of a white horse, a creaking
buckboard, and a young woman of determined manner. A Rough Rider's hat
sat with an air of stern purpose on the Rural Free Delivery's dark head,
and a pair of surgeon's gauntlet gloves heightened her air of official
integrity.

As the buckboard approached the group of tulip-trees opposite Mr.
Pawket's residence he shoved back his hat and pulled a blue-spotted
handkerchief out of his hip pocket; passing the handkerchief over his
face, he greeted the Rural Free Delivery:

"Hot enough fer yer?"

It was really not so very hot, but if Mr. Pawket had not asked this
question he would have felt lacking in geniality. He did not, however,
go forward to intercept possible mail. There was the little iron box
with his name on it nailed to the tulip-tree; there was the red signal
to be adjusted. It pleased Mr. Pawket to realize that the government had
all this planned out for his special convenience and he was careful not
to upset regime. He watched the Rural Free Delivery climb down from the
buckboard, go to the little box on the tree, deposit one letter, lock
the box, and set up the signal. When the ceremony was concluded Mr.
Pawket came out from behind the barn. Walking with the heavy,
bent-kneed tread of the life-long farmer, he leaned upon the bars by the
cow-sheds.

"Many gitten 'em to-day?" he inquired.

The Rural Free Delivery climbed back into the buckboard; she pulled on
the gauntlets, replying with black-eyed reserve:

"Finn's folks had two--a asthma circler and a letter from that son they
thought was drownded. Mis' Sweetser's got a paper--- the one her
daughter is a manicurer sends her. And there's a box yet for the Grant
girl--her graduatin'-dress, I expect--seems she's too high-toned to wear
anything but machine-made."

The Rural Free Delivery whipped up the white horse and the stern
contours of the Rough Rider hat disappeared down the winding, shadowed
road. At last Mr. Pawket, rousing from the reverie induced by news of
the resurrection of Finn's boy, took down the bars and crossed the road
to the post-box. Dragging from his pocket a cluster of huge barn keys,
he sought among them for the infinitesimal key of the box. This small
key had the appearance of coquetting with Mr. Pawket--it invariably
disappeared behind the larger keys and eluded his efforts to single it
out; it seemed to him flirtatious, feminine; and as he stood like an old
Druid invoking the spirit of the tulip-tree, he addressed this small key
with benevolent irony.

"You'm a shrimp, that's what you are," Mr. Pawket said to the key.
"Nothin' but a shrimp.... Why in tarnation don't they have a key you can
see?... I'd hate to lose you on a dark night, I would," eying the key
severely.

But the shrimp key at least did its work, and Mr. Pawket with
unconcealed feelings of wonder and concern drew forth from the box the
letter. It was a large, rich-looking letter. The envelope was thin and
crackly, embossed with purple designs of twisted reptiles coiling around
a woman's face, and in one corner were small purple letters forming the
words "Hotel Medusa." The handwriting on the envelope was bold and
black, and the dark seal bore impress of a small winged form that Mr.
Pawket took to be a honey-bee. He regarded the letter suspiciously,
studying it from every position as he entered the kitchen door.

"Say, Mother, here's a letter. What'll I do with it?"

Mrs. Pawket came sighing from the washtub. She wrinkled her forehead as
one harried by the incessant demands of the outside world. Wiping her
hands on her wet apron, she took the letter, regarding it
contemptuously.

"Leave it be on the parlor mantel," advised Mrs. Pawket. "The twins is
comin' up the road. I can hear them hollerin' at that echo down by the
swamps. Leave it be; they'll attend to it."

Mr. Pawket, having carried out this injunction, stood by the door
considering whether it was worth while to go back to his chopping. The
sun was in the middle of the sky; he sniffed odors of the kitchen and
discerned a rich atmosphere known to his consciousness as "dinner-time."

"Now I'm here I may as well stay," he remarked to his wife. He sat
heavily down in a Turkey-red-covered rocking-chair, quoting facetiously:

    "Ef yer never want to be sad and sorry
    Just keep away from hurry and worry."

"The Rural says Finn's folks has heard from that young feller was
drownded."

Mrs. Pawket raised a disapproving face from contemplating a small kettle
of Irish stew, remarking, severely: "Much the Rural knows about it.
She's into everybody's business."

Mr. Pawket demurred. "Well, carr'in' the mail and all, she's liable to
sense a good deal. Some says she's always been foreknowledged. 'Twuz the
Rural foretold the blizzit last winter; 'twuz the Rural found out Hank
Jellaby's nephew was married. Wasn't it her knowed all the time who sot
Mullins's barn afire? There's a good many depends on the Rural for
keeping up with things."

Soon the sun was a green glare through the tulip-trees; that meant it
was half past twelve, and the twins raced in. They were hoarse from
intriguing with the echo in the swamp; but as they entered the gate
(careful to swing it the wrong way and squeeze through) they discussed
a tingling problem in mental arithmetic.

"If Mrs. Fenton gave her son two wapples" (snuffle), "and her nephew one
naple" (snuffle), "and two wapples to her son's friend, reservin' one
napple for herself and conservin' four rapples for the household, what
would be the sum of these given napples multiplied by four?"

Reciting this appalling chorus, the twins faced their grandfather, who,
poising his battered sun-hat on his knees, from the depths of his
arm-chair looked proudly, if fearfully, upon them.

"Say, Gramp', kin' you answer it?" demanded the twins.

Standing before him in the kitchen doorway, they mouthed it,
curly-headed, croaking synchronous challenge. They scraped their shoes
on a scraper near the door; one peered furtively under a covered dish on
the table while the other washed hands and face in a tin basin under the
grape-arbor. Together they made strange "snorting" noises of repressed
masculinity as, seizing knife and fork from the pile in the center of
the table, they took seats, elbows on plates, instruments waving in air.

"Kin you answer it?"

Mr. Pawket hedged. He also drew a chair up to the table and, spearing a
slice of bread with his knife, bent bushy brows.

"'Kin I answer it?' Well, that's a nice question. Would yer teacher like
me to answer it? No, he wouldn't. It's for your learnin', ain't it? Not
for mine. I'm all finished with them conundrums. Of course," went on Mr.
Pawket, airily--"of course I never done figurin' like that when I was a
boy. Them apples, now. Seems to me it all depends on the season. Ef the
lady was a widder, like as not she was took advantage of. I mistrust she
wouldn't be no judge of apples; not bein' a farmer, how could she know
that there's years when apples is valleyble, and other years when you
insult the pigs with 'em? But then--you talk about apples--Well, as for
a fine apple, whether it's Northern Spy or Harvest Moon...." Thus Mr.
Pawket skilfully directed the conversation into channels more familiar.

At last the twins, in a fine, concerted action of chewing, balanced
large slices of buttered bread on the flats of their hands, eyed their
grandparents, and, after swallowing with peculiar heavy efforts of the
epiglottis, remarked, simultaneously:

"Willum is comin' home."

Mr. Pawket started. He reached for his spectacles, solemnly polished
them, and put them on. Mrs. Pawket, bearing a large leaning tower of
griddle-cakes toward the table, halted as one petrified.

The twins bent over their plates, humped their shoulders, observing,
"That's what they all say down to the Center."

"Mr. Sykes heard it into the feedstore."

"Mis' Badger says it."

"They was all talkin' about it into the undertaker's."

"He's going to build a new house."

"His wife thinks she's goin' to like it here."

Mr. Pawket took off his spectacles. His wife! Willum with a wife?

The twins, now devouring griddle-cakes, turned on him with unmoved
faces.

"It's going to be a show-place. The butcher can tell yer all about it--a
grand house like a big railroad station, all gold pipes and runnin'
water."

One twin turned the syrup-jug upside down; there ensued a slight scuffle
between the two, each ardently attempting to hold his plate under the
golden falling globules.

"They'm goin' to have five ottermobiles, and one for the cook to run
herself around in; there's goin' to be one room all canary-birds, and
there's goin' to be a g'rage with painted winders and a steeple like a
church."

Mrs. Pawket sat down. She fanned herself with her apron.

"Set up to the table and eat, Mawther," feebly advised Mr. Pawket.

The twins, rapidly and scientifically consuming griddle-cakes, jaws
working, unemotional eyes watching the effect of their statements,
continued:

"They goin' to build on Cedar Plains."

"She's got the ideers."

"He's got the money."

"Just their ice-box alone is goin' to cost 'em two hundred dollars."

Mr. Pawket, with sudden irritation: "Now, now, now, that ain't sensible,
that ain't. Willum had ought to have talked it over with me. I'd like to
'a' reasoned with him. I could have showed him catalogues.... And them
two buildin' on Cedar Plains--it's onreasonable. It'll come hard on his
wife. She won't have no near neighbors; and look at how far they'll have
to go for weddin's and fun'rals and all."

Mrs. Pawket, suddenly bethinking her, rose and went into the "front"
room, or parlor, where, from a large mantelpiece ranged with
sugary-looking vases stuffed with brilliantly dyed grasses she plucked
the recently arrived letter. Looking at it upside down and with
nonchalance of disapproval, she put the letter before the twins,
commanding:

"Do as Grammar tells you and read it."

"That's right," said Mr. Pawket, spooning up gravy. He retucked a
kitchen towel in his neck, approving: "I don't know but what we ought to
read it. There may be sumpin' in it somebody wants we should know."

The twins handled the letter casually; they attacked the superscription
with glib unconcern.

"Hot-hell Medusa." began one twin, confidently.

He was instantly corrected by the other twin. "Yah--it is not
Hot-hell--it's _Ho_tel Medusa, It'ly. Yah!"

"It'ly? It'ly?" mused Mr. Pawket. "Well, I made out the I T, all right.
Now I ought to 'a' guessed the rest, It'ly bein' a place I'm familiar
with."

The twins were in conference.

"Medusa--you know who she was," remarked the elder twin by four seconds.

"Don't, huh? Snakes for hair--hey? Look at you and you turn into
stone--hey?"

"Shut up! She did not!"

"Shut up! She did!"

But the other twin busied himself with the post-mark.

"A. Malfi," he painfully deciphered....

"Say, Gramp', what's a Malfi?"

His brother remained engrossed with the embossed head of Medusa.

"Snakes for hair--turned 'em to stone--cut off her head," he chanted, in
blissful retrospect.

Mr. Pawket, reaching across the table, seized this student by the
collar. "Now, now, now! Whose head you cuttin' off?"

"Hern," explained this bloodthirsty twin. "She was a bad woman."

"Hey! Hey! Hey!" roared Mr. Pawket, with sudden severity. "None of that
talk here! You mind your own business, young man. Don't you give us none
of that gab." He turned to Mrs. Pawket: "What did I say about that new
young feller that's come to teach school? He ain't here for no
good--that's what I said!" Mr. Pawket studied the face on the envelope
with a sort of curious horror, concluding, "Ef she's what you say she
is, see to it that you don't take no more notice of her capers."

The twins now registered aggrieved expressions; they scratched curly
heads with perturbed spoons. "Medusa's hist'ry." They roared it in hurt
explanation.

After some discussion of the curious anatomical outline of the supposed
honey-bee on the seal, Mrs. Pawket finally slit the envelope with a
dinner-knife, and the twins, holding the letter between them, gave a
dashing, if slightly incorrect, reading.

     "AMALFI--IT'LY--HOTEL MEDOOSA.

     "DEAR MR. AND MRS. PAWKET,--This letter is from William Folsom, the
     little orphan boy for whom you did so much. What do you think? This
     boy who boarded with you summers is coming back to America with his
     wife, an Italian lady you are both sure to love! On account of
     unforeseen business necessity, Mrs. Folsom and I are forced to give
     up our charming ... vill ... villain ... villy...."

Here one twin ran down. The other twin looked over his brother's
shoulder, breathing thickly.

"Vanilla," he chewingly instructed.


     "Vanilla ... our charming vanilla, and on account of recent
     dev-dev-devil-elope-ments we are leaving It'ly at once. You
     remember the fine old property my father owned, called Cedar
     Plains? As I remember, it was not far from your farm where I spent
     so many happy summers. It is on Cedar Plains that Mrs. Folsom and I
     plan to erect our new home, an I ... talian van ... vill ... v...."

"Vanilla." This time it was Mr. Pawket who blandly supplied the word.

     "I shall count on you as good friends and neighbors and I am
     anxious to have my wife meet you. We have placed the building of
     our new home in the hands of an architect friend of mine who is to
     be on the spot until all is completed. Our beloved household
     furnishings have already been shipped to America and we are living
     for the present in this hotel. We shall come home by a somewhat
     cir-cus-to-us route, not arriving until our new home is ready for
     us. Won't you two good friends take Mr. Badgely as a boarder, and
     do give him that stunning old room I used to have?

     "With the kindest good wishes to you both,

     "Your boy,

     "WILLIAM FOLSOM."

The twins, having completed what had been for them a daring undertaking,
now looked about for release from an atmosphere grown suddenly boresome.
The elder by four seconds went to the door and, affecting intense
maturity, spat out from it. The younger, dipping his head in the
water-butt near the leader, took a small comb from his pocket and, using
the disturbed water-butt as a mirror, began parting into ideal
smoothness his upward-turning locks.

The first twin, seeing his brother's back turned, dug into his pockets
and, having brought out with an air of modest pride a fish-line, a
morsel of gingerbread, a bit of resin, human tooth, part of a human
bone, a kitten's skull, a chewed piece of gum, and an incredibly
besmirched Sunday-school card, extracted from these omens a large rusty
screw, which he proffered to his grandmother, muttering, "For your
Everything Jar." With a sudden shame at having been seen sympathizing
with the interests of a woman, this twin then seized his hat and fled
whooping down the road to school, followed by his brother, who, holding
between his vision and the sun a small bit of crimson glass, exulted in
the contemplation of a deep red universe.

Mrs. Pawket, bundling the dinner-dishes into a pan and pouring hot water
from the teakettle over them, sighed. Mr. Pawket, having again retired
to the Turkey-red-covered chair, watched his wife somewhat dazedly; he
was still thinking of the contents of "Willum's" letter.

"Comin' home by a cir-cus-to-us route," he soliloquized ... "and
devil-elopements. I suppose he knows what he's doin', but it all sounds
kindy resky to me. Did you get it that A. Malfi was his wife's maiden
name? Don't it sound sorter like a actress to you? One of them sassy,
tricky furriners, I'll bet. 'N' a vanilla--what call has Willum got to
build a vanilla, his age? A mansion, now--I could onderstand how the boy
would hanker for a mansion--he always had big feelin's, Willum had--but
a vanilla! Say, you ever seen one of them there contraptions?"

Mrs. Pawket, washing the dishes, hung up the soap-shaker and cast her
eyes upward as in an effort of memory. She reached for a dish-towel,
replying, somewhat evasively, "Where my mother come from they had 'em
a-plenty; there was one on every street."

Her husband regarded her with deep respect. "Ye don't say?"

Mrs. Pawket squeezed out the dishmop with a thoughtful air; she cast a
hasty, authoritative glance at the range, banging the door shut with a
decision that made Mr. Pawket jump as she snapped:

"Just the same, this here ain't no place for a vanilla. A vanilla around
these parts would be the same as if you was to wear your Sunday silk hat
out a-plowin'. They hain't got good judgment, them two hain't."

The old farmer regarded his wife with serious attention. Lighting his
pipe, he lay back in the Turkey-red chair, puffing in silence. At last
he laid the pipe down and, laboriously pulling off his boots, hummed an
air which had for its sole motif the undynamic suggestion:

    "By and by
     By and by
     By and by. By and by. By and by."

At last the thumping of stocking feet ceased with the drone of the
drowsy voice; a bit of sunlight filtering first through the tulip-trees,
then through the little low kitchen window, let it be seen that Mr.
Pawket had lapsed into slumber. His wife looked at him with an
expressionless face. Wringing her hands out of the dish-water, she
carried the pan to the door; with contemptuous words of warning to some
chickens near by, she flung the contents on the grass. Going further
into the door-yard she dragged up some bleached clothing and stuffed it
into a clothes-basket. Choking the range full of coal, wrenching into
place a refractory coal-scuttle, she turned the damper in the stove-pipe
and set the stove-plates slightly a-tilt. Then she seized the tin
wash-basin, and, setting up a small mirror against the window, loosened
her hair and dragged her face and head through a severe toilet whose
original youthful motive of comeliness had been lost in habitual effort
of tidiness. This done, Mrs. Pawket donned a clean white apron and
draped around her neck a knitted orange tie which she pinned with a
scarlet coral breast-pin.

Having thus dressed for the afternoon and for the feared, desired, but
seldom experienced visitation called "company," Mrs. Pawket took from
her pocket the screw her grandson had bestowed upon her. Suddenly, with
the expression of one who in the interests of art performs dangerous
acrobatic feats, she dragged a chair in front of a cupboard. Climbing,
with many expressions of insecurity, on this chair, Mrs. Pawket reached
a bony hand into the cupboard, groping on the top shelf for an object
which her fingers approached tremulously. This object with considerable
care Mrs. Pawket brought down to earth and set upon the kitchen table.
It was a short, stumpy bowl or jar, upon which curious protuberances of
all kinds clustered. The protuberances encircled the jar in something
like the way fungus circles a tree hole, in strange and various
patterns.

Mrs. Pawket, the light deepening in her eyes, took from her apron pocket
the screw; holding it very daintily in one work-worn hand, with the
other she dove into further recesses and produced, wrapped in an oily
bit of newspaper, a large lump of putty.

Now a solemn ritual began. Breaking off a bit of the putty, Mrs. Pawket
welded it on the jar near the other protuberances; while the putty was
soft she fixed in it the screw, arranging that implement by a method
best calculated to display its screw characteristics. Then Mrs. Pawket's
eyes grew darker, a flush came into her wrinkled cheeks; she wrung the
moisture from her brow in a sort of agony of creative pleasure. As one
who performs an action sacred in its heightened detachment and
mechanical efficiency, she rummaged with desperate insistence on another
and higher shelf of the cupboard, this time bringing forth a very small
vial of gilt varnish and an equally small paint-brush with which to
apply it. Mrs. Pawket then observed that her hand was shaking and chid
herself severely:

"Look at me! Soon as I see how pritty this here Everything Jar is
gettin' to be, I go and get excited. If I'm goosefleshed now, what'll I
be when the Everything is finished?"

But the Everything Jar was a long way from finished and the unsatisfied
ache of the creative artist made heavy Mrs. Pawket's breast. She
surveyed the ceramic, half-erupt with a medley of buttons, screws,
safety-pins, hooks, knobs, all covered with their transforming gilt, and
tried to imagine how it would seem to have it completed. Then the
ultimate anxiety beset her--when completed, should the Everything be
bestowed upon the minister's family or--this a recent and daring
inspiration--should it be conferred upon Willum's wife, the mistress of
the proposed vanilla? Mrs. Pawket was fairly tortured by uncertainty.
She shook the sleeping Mr. Pawket by the shoulder.

"Say, look at the Everything. I just now put on that last screw. Ain't
it handsome?"

As he blinked at the fantastic jar gleaming with golden excrescences, a
deep sense of beauty thrilled Mr. Pawket.

"Hey, Maw," he chuckled. "That's the best yet. My! ain't it pritty? It
beats that lamp-shade ye made out er the tinfoil. Now the question is,
who ye goin' to give it to?"

"It's fer the vanilla," returned Mrs. Pawket, calmly.

Mr. Pawket put up his hand and wrung out his ear; he thought he could
not have heard aright; such aplomb, such dashing assurance as was his
wife's! His gray beard vibrated with curiosity.

"For the vanilla," the artist repeated, firmly. "I take it Willum's wife
won't be too proud to accept a notion or two fer her parlor. 'Tain't
likely that she, being so long in a furrin country, has had much chance
to go through the stores and pick out bric-a-brac. I don't know but what
she would be thankful for an ornament or so."

"Ornaments?" Mr. Pawket dwelt reverently upon the word. "Ornaments? I
dunno but what you got it right, though I wouldn't never have thought of
it myself." He leaned over the table the better to gloat upon the golden
jar. "Well," he summed up--"well, wimmen do beat all for mind-readin'.
First she sets up house-keepin', it's _ornaments_ she's goin' to hanker
fer--something fer the center-table most likely; and here you, who she
'ain't never see, stands all ready with an Everything fer her!"

A few days after the excitement produced by Willum's letter the
architect arrived. He was a tall, old-young man with the preoccupied air
of having reduced all human existence to exact diagrams. He was,
however, strangely intoxicated by the quiet and beauty of his country
surroundings. On the evening of his arrival he installed himself happily
in the spare room of the Pawkets' farm-house, acting, as Mrs. Pawket
marveled, as "if he hadn't never lived up in them classy city beehives."

Mr. Badgely, however, seemed to the farmer and his wife unnaturally
ecstatic over the ordinary manifestations of the physical universe. He
would stand for hours looking off over soft sunrise country; he would
hang over the bars by the cow-sheds, staring down the red road or
gazing pensively up at the ancient outlines of the Pawkets' homestead.
When the old farmer went up to him with knockkneed, rheumatic tread,
inquiring, "Well, how goes it?" the architect would reply:

"Oh, heavenly! Such depth! Such substance! Such integrity!"

When Mr. Pawket, fearing such brain lesions as he could not diagnose,
saw that these epithets were directed toward his own home in its
tulip-tree setting, he would range himself alongside of the architect,
eye his residence critically, and expectorate as he avowed:

"It wants roofing. Come vacation I'm goin' ter put the twins to scrapin'
them pesky mossback shingles; then I may go with the tide and buy me a
fancy tin roof."

Mr. Badgely would sweep him with an unseeing look. He would stretch five
very long fingers toward the facade of the farm-house, muttering, "Of
course not the dormers; they obtrude, I think, and the note is
pseudo-foreign. We should try to evolve something absolutely American,
don't you think? But the pilasters, the door paneling, positively Doric
in their clean sobriety! The eastern development, now; there may have
been reason for the extreme slant toward the east--it orients well, but
with a certain shock...."

"Shock? I guess yes," Mr. Pawket would reply. "'Twuz struck by
lightnin', tore down considerable." Then Mr. Pawket would remember that
Willum had asked him to be all the help he could to the architect, so he
would cast his eyes up to the sun as one who dovetails multitudinous
engagements, remarking: "What say we go down to Cedar Plains now? Fool
around a little. Kindy block the thing all out, as it were."

Once Mr. Pawket had added, "Ef we can't do nothin' else, you can tell me
ef you want any of them trees left a-standin'."

The dreaming architect had turned on him like one under sudden electric
compulsion; he shook himself into unbelievable alertness.

"The--er--trees? Left standing?"

Mr. Pawket smiled indulgently. He scratched a match on the seat of his
overalls and lighted his pipe, answering between puffs: "I guess you 'm
new to the business, ain't ye? Don't ye know, boy, the fust thing ye do
when ye set out to build a house is to lay all the trees low? Some does
it with dunnamite; some does it with mules and swearin'--anything to
root out the pesky things."

An extraordinary look of terror had swept the architect's face.

"Nervous," noted Mr. Pawket, "nervous! Maw'll have to feed him up with
buttermilk and put drops into his coffee. Them city people is always
nagged into nerves." The old man continued in fatherly fashion:

"Now, you wantin' to make all clear for anything as sizable as a
vanilla, fust thing we do is to 'scratch off the trees.' I can git you
plenty fellers handy with ax and saw, but when it comes to them cussed
roots, why, then, you 'm goin' to want dunnamite."

The architect bowed his head thoughtfully. As the two took the little
bronzed path leading to the natural park-land dark with tapering cedars,
he gave a puzzled look at the old farmer. At last he seemed struck by an
idea and said, slowly:

"Do you know, Mr. Pawket, we architects are often a little vague; we
need so much to--er--confer--and--er--ahem!--consult. Now, really, I
should be so interested. Just what are your personal preferences with
regard to the construction of an Italian villa?"

Mr. Pawket was for the moment slightly dazed. He surmised that the
question placed him somewhat at a disadvantage; yet, somehow, it seemed
to him that he knew a good deal about Italian villas. Gathering together
certain impressions derived from the conversation of the twins, from a
picture seen on a calendar, from the one lurid film of his experience,
and from certain opulent descriptions of the building of the Tabernacle,
it seemed to him that he knew a little something about occult species of
architecture. He not immodestly presented his ideas.

"I take it"--squashing ruminatively through puddles--"I take it that the
vanilla idee is kinder intricate, ain't it?--somethin' fancy and grand
like a castle? Two or three cupolos, er course, and all run around with
stoops and balconies; marble staircases inside." Mr. Pawket added this
carelessly as one used to the larger handling of details. "High
sideboards set out in silver in the dinin'-room--a reel handsome
phonnygraft into the front room and statoos on the gateposts."

The architect receiving this preliminary sketch with such silent
respect, Mr. Pawket gained courage and resumed:

"Wall-papers I ain't so sure about." The old farmer took out a large
clasp-knife and, paring his thumb-nail, continued, somewhat loftily: "I
presume that is as the lady of the house commands. Some favors blue, but
there's a many as is great hands for red. I see a house once had dead
animals, stuffed codfish, and shot ducks all over the wall-paper into
the dinin'-room; 'twuz reel tony! As fer the yard--well, I mistrust that
Willum, bein' sociable and always interested into the open air, would
want circular seats around whatever trees was left standin'. Ye could
paint 'em red, white, and blue, ye know. And he'd like a pond, maybe,
with a white swan shovin' back and forth."

* * *

At last came the day when vans of imported laborers arrived and began
quick breaking of ground and laying of foundations on Cedar Plains.
Parts of the superb heating system, the installing of which was the
architect's special care, numerous white bath-tubs--these things were
deposited before the eyes of the excited Mr. Pawket, who, in the absence
of the owner of the proposed villa, felt that he must be very vigilant
in overseeing. Every day the old man appeared at Cedar Plains, boots
spattered, overalls greased and clayey, making his anxious comments to
the architect, who received them thoughtfully, with the air of putting
all suggestions into immediate execution.

So the building of the "vanilla" proceeded, but it proceeded under the
stigma of an outraged countryside. The "show-place" confidently
predicted seemed not to evolve; outside of insane expenditures for
heating and bathing and the sanitary care of laundry and food, there
were few evidences that the villa was to be magnificent. Development
after development not only puzzled the neighboring farmers, but incensed
them. Men driving by "Willum's vanilla" pointed it out, tongue in
cheek, with derisive whip; their women folks, veiled and taciturn,
leaned forward in curious wonder to condemn silently. Such complacent
agriculturists as owned "ottermobiles" came from miles away to view the
thing; they halted their machines by the roadside and went in parties up
through the tapering cedars to where stood the slowly rising square
white walls, which they stared at with patronizing guffaws. It was the
fashion for the youth of Brook Center to spend Sunday afternoons down in
Cedar Plains, where among the dark trees they found the rosy trail of
arbutus; where strawberries hung in the rank green grass, and where, of
autumn days, wandering over the sweet stubble, they confessed to each
other those innocent melancholies of beings that have never known
sorrow.

On the edge of the plains where the russet path met the highway was an
old well. Here the brooding boys and girls were accustomed to bring
their loves and quarrels; here they hoisted the bucket from its
glittering black depths, poured water on tight bunches of anemone, fern,
and Dutchman's breeches, took long, gasping country drinks, and played
all the pranks youth plays when relaxed beside its subtle, laughing
ally--water. As the Sunday sun went down the boys and girls discussed
the strange phenomenon of the new house whose enigmatic walls gleamed
through the fields of their once free rovings. They uttered dark
hearsay: "Some says them two is crazy; that's why they been chased out
er It'ly." The twins, playing stick-knife in the soft turf that edged
the road, flatly contradicted this:

"They are not crazy, neither; they 'm as common sense as you are."

"Well, ef they ain't crazy, why they goin' to have stone floors? Why
they got them big old stone jars that come yesterday? Why ain't they
goin' to have no stair carpets? Why ain't they goin' to have no
window-curtings?"

"They are, too, crazy, and they gone and built that old vanilla right on
where we used to pick checkerberries, and he's goin' to put a outlandish
Dago top right on this here well, the kind they have in It'ly where they
all wear rags and eat lemon-skins."

"Nobody won't keep me from drinkin' out of this well when it's got a
Dago top."

"Nobody won't never stop me from goin' on Cedar Plains if I've got a
mind ter. I got as good a right as they got."

"I'd just as soon heave a rock right now at that there vanilla. I don't
care for it. I ain't afraid of no tin-faced I-talian dudes."

At last came a letter announcing the proposed arrival of the villa
furniture. The buckboard with the white horse halted again under the
tulip-tree and this time Mr. Pawket with unwonted sense of haste
intercepted the letter. The Rural, whose Rough Rider hat was now
discarded for a black-velvet tam-o'-shanter adorned with a coquettish
pink rose, rigidly resigned it to his eager grasp.

Mr. Pawket, for all his preoccupation, was not blind to the pink rose;
he quickly got its sense and made the usual deduction.

"When does the weddin' take place?" he asked, facetiously.

The rigidity around the corners of the Rural's mouth did not lessen as
she replied with the evasion Brook Center found piquant, "Next day after
Never."

Having successfully warded off inquiry as to personal plans, the Rural
returned to her rightful prerogatives of newsmonger, demanding:

"How's Mis' Pawket's Everything gittin' along? I got a couple
shoe-buttons fer her. She'd better hurry up and finish it; I hear there
is four more in town startin' Everything Jars. Seems there's a sort of
rivalry of who's goin' to be the first to get a Everything into the
vanilla."

A look of calamity shaded Mr. Pawket's face, but he accepted the two
shoe-buttons with dignified reserve.

"All she needs now is a harness buckle and a couple peanut-shells," he
explained, nonchalantly. "I can get them fer her easy enough; the twins
have been helping her some, one with a sinker and the other with a hook
and eye. 'Tain't likely any one can git their jar in afore hern. I
wouldn't advise nobody to nerve themselves up to it. There's been
rumors," added Mr. Pawket, gravely--"there's been rumors as some one is
tryin' to git up a rockery fer the vanilla. Now I wouldn't advise 'em
to. The lady will want to tinker with that herself. But if everybody is
itchin' to help, why don't they take up a nice collection er white
door-knobs to trim up the garden paths?"

The mail maiden smiled a contemptuous smile; her black eyes held like
sediment the look of repudiation.

"Ah, door-knobs!"--scornfully. "What's the use Of givin' up your curios
and souvenirs to folks like that? They don't know how to appreciate it!
I got a better use for my door-knobs. They 'm peculiar, them two is;
they don't know nothin'. You heard that about the bedrooms, I presume?"

Mr. Pawket, a worried look settling on his kind face, peered up at the
Rural; he took off his sun-hat and fanned himself with it.

"The bedrooms?" he questioned, falteringly. "D' ye mean that comical
cage-like where they goin' to sleep outdoors?"

The Rural smiled scornfully; she adjusted the pink rosebud with a
haughty, gauntleted hand.

"I mean the walls," shortly. "Plaster walls. Yes, sir, that's what I
mean and I know what I'm talkin' about--rough walls, plaster, like a
cellar. I know what I'm talkin' about, for it's my intended has the job;
he's 'most crazy about it, my intended is, it's gone all over the Center
and every one laughin' and teasin' him about it.... She's wrote it
herself in a letter with that same honey-bee onto the envelope. 'I want
the bedroom walls to be rough plaster,' that's what she's went and
wrote, 'of a pale yellow colorin' Mr. Badgely will choose. Please allow
him to mix the color' (ain't it awful?) 'and put it on very rough' (she
says). 'I want the grain especially coarse and rich' (she says).
'_Coarse and rich_'!" The Rural lifted dramatic eyes, inquiring again,
"Ain't that _terrible_?"

Mr. Pawket hesitated. An idea of loyalty possessed him; he made a feeble
attempt at seeming to support the unknown lady's taste.

"Er course, as I look at vanillas--" he began, weakly.

But the Rural interrupted him with a vicious clip of her lean brown
jaws. "Vanillas?" with scornful inflection. "_Vanillas?_" She lashed the
white horse into a sprawling stagger as she snapped, "She don't know
nothin' about vanillas!" and rattled confidently away, calling back,
scornfully; "She don't know nothin'; she 'ain't never had no
instruction; she don't reelize that there's such things as wall-papers.
'Coarse and rich,'" sneered the Rural. She peered back over her trim
young shoulder, adding: "They say their furniture has come. Everybody is
down to the junction, studyin' it. I'm glad it ain't mine."

It was true that the furniture had arrived. Braving the vicissitudes of
sea routes; badly shipped by an Italian warehouse, and roughly handled
at an American port, still the furniture had arrived. It had been dumped
out of its crated cars at the little Brook Center station. To the lover
of Flemish and Spanish carving, to the connoisseur of Genoese cabinets
and Italian intarsia, to the student of time-fumed designs and forms,
the coming of this furniture might well have been an event; for by a
freak of destiny, on the little platform of an obscure country junction
were assembled the hoardings of centuries of tradition, the adored
heirlooms of a long line of ancestry. One huge case, half wrecked,
showed the gleam of Florentine brasses; another, crated and roped,
revealed faded Genoese brocades; slender broken legs and edges of carved
flaps protruded from battered sheathings. To some minds all this might
have spelled a certain sort of poetry; to the curious group assembled at
the junction it spelled eccentricity and, what was worse, a fixed and
immoral shabbiness of existence!

The junction agent pointed out a half-crated table standing by itself;
it looked inconceivably old and was of a timber unknown to Brook Center.
Its rickety four legs, wrapped separately, tapered off into carvings of
opulent nymphs and the wild, laughing faces of dryads and fauns--these
legs were observed by the curious groups at the junction to be badly
worn and honeycombed with worm-holes.

"For the vanilla," it was whispered from one to another; the junction
agent, hand over mouth, bowed himself backward in mirth. "They say it's
all from her home, and this is the dinin'-room table. My! My! My! ain't
it awful, all them old, ancient things?"

Mr. Pawket, affecting a connoisseurship unconsciously copied from the
architect, bent over the table, examining it; with vague puzzlement he
passed his hand over its cut and hacked surface--surface on which
hundreds of monks of the time of Clement III had whetted their restless
knives.

"I don't onderstand it; I don't onderstand it"--the old farmer feebly
shook his head--"unless it's she ain't used to nothin' better and he's
kep' his mouth shut. 'Twould be like Willum to pertend he didn't care;
he was always biddable. M' wife could feed him anythin' from pot-cheese
to pork; he was always a great hand to keep the peace."

The junction master watched in leering silence the brittle collection of
household fittings being lifted into carts. "Well, I guess I'm glad it
ain't _me_ is goin' to have 'em for neighbors," he observed, feelingly.
"They 'll fall back on you a good deal, one thing and another; they 'm
pretty well broken down in pocket--you can see that."

Mr. Pawket in dumb disappointment climbed up into his wagon and stooped
to take the reins. For a few moments he chewed violently with his front
teeth before he spat desperately into the junction geranium-bed,
asserting with dignity:

"Oh, I guess you got no call to worry. 'Tain't as if they didn't have no
friends in this country. Willum's sort of son to me, my own boy bein'
long dead. Ef the worst comes to the worst I don't know but what I could
make a fist to help him out. Whoa, there!" Mr. Pawket, rising in his
seat, backed his team truculently. "Ef anythin's needed," he observed,
superbly, "I shall see to it myself--'twould n't take me long to buy him
a dining-room table and a few little fixin's so's he could hold up his
head in the world."

All the way home Willum's friend pondered the thing. Once when the
horses stopped to drink at a wayside trough he slapped his knee fiercely
and said: "That's the ticket! Yes, sir, that's the size of it!" At
dinner, after the twins had taken their departure, he suggested his plan
to his wife; to his immense relief she met the thing in his own spirit.

"A golden-oak dinin'-table, anyway," argued Mr. Pawket. "One or two
fancy fixin's so they can hold up their heads in the world."

"And shut people's mouths," agreed his wife. "That hotel-keeper's girl,
now, I never see any one more sassy--she with an Everything only half
done and sayin' she's goin' to be the first to get one into the vanilla,
and yet talkin' something terrible behind them and their furniture's
backs."

"How's your Everything?" asked Mr. Pawket, suddenly; a grim
determination shot into the eyes under his hairy brows.

For answer his wife rose. Unwrapping some white mosquito-netting, she
presented to view a large, bulbous object encircled with protuberances,
excrescenced with golden knobbiness--this object, strangely sticky,
smelled something like bananas; it was the Everything, completed and
unveiled. Mr. and Mrs. Pawket gazed upon it in silent admiration. As
they stood lost in contemplation of its conglomerate goldiness, there
came the sound of a sprightly whistle and light step, and the architect
appeared in the doorway.

Mr. Badgely had by this time become an intimate member of the farm
household. The two old people beamed upon him; Mr. Pawket waved him
excitedly toward the table, announcing:

"Well, sir, it's finished. Take it or leave it; I don't know as you
could find one any handsomer."

Mr. Badgely started theatrically. He was clad in white flannels and a
white silk shirt; a golden-brown tie matched the brown of a dreaming
fire in his eyes, and there were brown silk socks upon his shapely
calf-skinned feet. The Pawkets, even in their absorption, noted that, if
not really young, the architect suggested something very like youth. His
dapper figure now bent reverently over the kitchen table on whose
red-and-white-checkered cloth reposed the gold jar; he drew a long
breath.

"The--er--Everything!" he murmured. After a long and careful scrutiny of
the golden object, he turned to Mr. Pawket.

"Really--it--it defies description--it is so--er--genuine! I confess I
never have seen anything quite like it--anywhere. Mrs. Pawket, I do
congratulate you."

"There's a rage for 'em now," explained Mr. Pawket, proudly, "but 't was
she started the first one. She began the hull thing; we was foolish
enough to mention ourn to the hotel-keeper's daughter, and now, as fur
as I can gather, there's six Everythings started right here in Brook
Center."

Mr. Badgely showed deep emotion. "Really, six Everythings? You surprise
me. I had no idea the community boasted such--er--creative feeling."

The old farmer looked at the young man, then at his wife. "Tell him what
you goin' to do," he commanded. Mrs. Pawket, however, twisted nervously
at the end of the white mosquito-netting and said she felt too shy. Mr.
Pawket with manly decision relieved her of the burden of explanation.

"Seems she's had it in her mind to finish that there Everything in time
to have it on the center-table in the vanilla," he said; "and now she's
gone and got me so het up with interest that I got to take a hand, too.
Now, fer instance, the furniture--" The old man hitched himself nearer
to the architect, saying in sepulchral tones of parental anxiety:
"'Tain't fer me to interfere, but I seen the stuff. I been down to the
junction and see what they got. Well, say, ain't it pitiful, all that
old, ancient furniture?"

Mr. Badgely nodded his head with another sort of concern. "Perfectly
rotten carelessness. But I've sent to town for a corking man who handles
these things; he's coming out to-morrow with his staff. After all, it's
merely a question of understanding period, and American restoration is
diabolically clever."

But the old farmer waved the younger man grandly aside. "That's as may
be; that's as may be," he said, hastily. "Put it in the kitchen or use
it in the g'rage--I ain't one to advise waste; but see here, my young
man"--he stared impressively into the architect's face--"I knowed
Willum's folks. I know what he's used to and what he's got a right to
expect. Ef he's lost money, that ain't none of my business, and ef he's
married an Eyetalian, that ain't no reflection on _her_. As I take it,
they 'm all sorter down at heel in It'ly, and it seems they got now so
they don't know no better. But I knowed Willum's folks. I know he should
hold up his head in his own country."

A faint color stole into Mr. Pawket's gray-bearded face. Mrs. Pawket's
eyes were fixed admiringly on her husband. Mr. Badgely bent his head in
respectful listening. Mr. Pawket struck an attitude close to the
Everything Jar. He was glad that the twins, with their habit of shrewd
analysis, were not there as he said:

"I ain't rich--but," with a significant cough, "I ain't no one to stand
by and see the hull Center pokin' the finger er shame at Willum and his
furniture. The vanilla ... well, what's done is done, and it can't be
helped: seems it's what they set their hearts on and some folks like to
be strange-appearin', but the furniture--well, it don't suit, that's
all! Willum's the kind should have what 's all the go--plush and satin
and chenille-like." The old farmer looked at the architect meaningly; he
felt himself suddenly a man of the world; he stood almost straight in
his wrinkled boots, looking around the little kitchen fiercely and
roaring: "Golden oak or bird's-eye maple! I got catalogues. Spare no
expense. Get him what he needs. I'll back you!"

It was a moment full of significance. The architect, a man of many
subtle perceptions, was quite aware of it. He himself had been worried
over the general attitude of the country community toward the villa,
which, he could see, had deeply disappointed and mortified anticipation.
Rumors had reached him that the neighborhood not only repudiated the new
building on the grounds of general distaste, but that a movement of
ostracism had begun by which the intents and purposes of the occupants
of the villa were to be balked and frustrated. Brook Center, so Mr.
Badgely had divined, was keen for patronizing the newly arrived Italian
lady with gifts of decorated umbrella-stands, lamp-shades, and
door-mats; but, on the other hand, it had severely decided not to be
patronized by the expected householders. Supplies of milk and cream
could not be promised; fresh eggs, it appeared, were needed for home
consumption; pranks were planned by the young people to further
humiliate the supposedly downtrodden and financially embarrassed Willum.
There had even been talk of filling up the well--now topped by a
graceful Italian canopy--with mud and stones; and one enterprising
spirit had already chalked upon the bucket, "We don't want no Dagos to
Brook Center." In short, it had begun to seem to the architect that the
immediate atmosphere was unpropitious for a serene home-coming. Now, as
he faced the eager old farmer, something like a solution dawned on him.

"Er--expense"--the architect repeated Mr. Pawket's word--"er--do I
understand, sir, that besides that very rare and (ahem!) imposing
specimen of Mrs. Pawket's handiwork--this Everything Jar--do I
understand you to mean that you are so good as to wish to assist in
the--er--interior furnishings?"

The old farmer eyed him with delight.

"That's the ticket," he roared. "You got it right; you're the man for my
money." He struck an attitude of almost intoxicated satisfaction,
roaring again: "Golden oak, that's what; none too good for such as him.
Get him what he's used to. _Him_ with that old, ancient furniture!" Mr.
Pawket pressed a roll of extremely faded one-dollar bills into the
architect's hand, repeating: "A golden-oak set fer the dinin'-room. I
know where they have it slick and shinin'. Take yer catalogue and make
yer pick. Cost! By the great gander! what do I care fer cost?" A fervor
like that of a whirling dervish seized the old farmer. "Golden oak!" he
roared. Red-plush parlor suite." His gaze, falling upon the Everything,
became radiant. He hitched his suspenders with broad effects of swagger,
repeating once more, "It's what he's used to and the best ain't too good
for how he was brought up."

* * *

At last arrived the morning of the day when the owners of the villa
were expected, and it found the architect in a curious mixture of dread,
amusement, doubt, and eagerness. The villa, its tiled roof melting
softly through the filed tapers of dark cedars, was, he knew, what it
should be. He walked about the winding drives, his eyes dwelling upon
clumps of imported cypress and rare fruit-trees, his approving glance
sweeping over vistas landscaped by his own art, which clever art had set
stone benches in lovely little dells or by pools where a mossy nymph
sprayed the surrounding ferns.

Everything was as it should be. The walls of the white villa would soon
be softened by young vines newly sprouting; the terraces had stretches
of arcades and flowers; large terra-cotta pots filled with acacias and
oleanders massed well against the white of the steps and the blue of the
country sky. The whole scene was almost Italian--sunny, graceful,
restful. The architect smiled happily and knew himself justified of his
undertaking.

But within--within, where most he had dreamed mellowness--where most he
had desired the sense of ripe and harmonious surroundings? Oh, the thing
was too horrible, too outrageous! Could they possibly understand? Could
William Folsom and this Italian wife of his ever be made to see how
unavoidable, inevitable it had all been? Badgely, anxiously gnawing his
lower lip, shook his head. "I'm a fool," he muttered; "and yet I vow I
know of no other way. Talk about vendettas! they are queer here, really
queer--if one were sufficiently to antagonize them!..."

The architect directed his steps to the big stucco garage, still a
little raw-looking with its green shutters and tiles; there he
encountered the head of the workmen who were engaged in restoring the
much-suffering villa furniture. The alert, gray-clad man met him at the
door and shook his head deprecatingly.

"Don't ask me about those heavenly things!" He waved despairing hands.
"They are too lovely. I've been quoting Tasso to that little signorina
of a writing-desk. But, dear man, we can't possibly install any of it
for at least a month. These things are exquisite, priceless, but so
antique they've got to be mothered like babies. The chests are about
the only things in condition, and they've lost their hinges and I've got
to have the lovely brasses copied."

Stepping into the smartly cushioned car, Mr. Badgely sat himself down.
He gave the order dreamily. With a perturbed yet dauntless expression he
lay back on the soft cushions, gazing up to the whirling green of the
trees as the car flew along the country road.

"It all depends on her--it really all depends upon her. If she's the
real thing she'll understand and play the game; if she isn't--" He shook
his head, put one long leg over the other, and groaned.

When, however, the train stopped at the Brook Center Junction and
William Folsom, laughing, waved his hat, Mr. Badgely drew a long breath
of relief, for at Folsom's side stood a tall, graceful cosmopolite, a
being dark-eyed, daring, with the keen, lovable face of the aristocrat
of the spirit--in short, a perfection of feminine understanding in very
assured tailoring.

"She'll do," the architect told himself. His greetings were suave and
deliberate, but of necessity, almost before the car sprang away from the
junction, he began to explain that which was heavily on his mind.
William Folsom leaned back in the car, his shining eyes dwelt upon old
landmarks; he chuckled as he listened.

"You see, dear lady, your welcome is to be of the people--the
_forestiere_--I wonder if I can make you understand in so short a time
as we have? The entire countryside is at the villa now; they all told me
they were coming to greet you--so"--he shot a look at Folsom--"I invited
them."

The owner of the vanilla gave a mild war-whoop. "Oh, I say, this is
enchanting! Badgely, old chap, I can picture your sufferings." Then,
with a droll look at his wife: "She understands, bless her! She isn't
the idol of her own town for nothing!" Folsom turned and sketched the
architect's perturbation to his wife.

"Have the goodness to mention the--er--Everything," insisted Mr.
Badgely, grimly. "Have you ever seen one? No? Well, then, you needn't be
so funny." He added desperately: "They are there now arranging
the--er--golden oak and the (ahem!) the red-plush suite." He shuddered,
reiterating: "Really, Billy, the thing was _necessary_. I didn't dare
refuse. You've no idea how these people are antagonized by an Italian
villa. It seems sort of shameful to them. They foam at the mouth. Why,
unless I had been tactful you'd have had vendetta and Mafia and
everything else wished on you."

Mrs. Folsom tried to comprehend. "The poor Littles!" She had a marvelous
voice full of bird-like stirrings. Then she looked thoughtfully at the
architect. "But we will say to them 'Forget it,'" adding, with a little
pride, "I am learning William's slangs."

"Dear old gump, you forget that I was brought up in this very
neighborhood." Folsom soothed the despairing architect, but he laughed
immoderately. "His precious artistic sensibilities are having perfect
duck fits," he shouted. "He's as mad as a wet hen."

But Mrs. Folsom leaned back, taking fresh breaths of air. "This is a
green country," she announced, "and you have a little brown brook that
winds, and great trees like cathedrals. Do you think that with all this
around me I shall be staying to the _salon_ remarking continuously upon
the Jar of Everythings?"

Both men laughed and the architect kissed her hand.

When the car swept around the white shell drive and halted by the lower
terrace, Folsom, with a whoop like a boy, sprang out; he ran joyfully
forward, for there stood the old couple whose faces, to his home-coming
sense, seemed like those of parents. Mr. Pawket trembled slightly; he
stood high-collared and coattailed, upon the glittering steps. Mrs.
Pawket, in black silk, clove to his arm. The twins, in the heated
wretchedness of Sunday clothes, stepped forward, and in the interests of
sentiment stuck forth two wads of tightly bound pink roses. The Rural,
blushing in a costume of very bright blue, wearing elbow mitts, and
carrying a pink feather fan, introduced a sweet-smelling young man as
"my intended."

Among the small groups of peering and excited neighbors was Mr. Fripp,
the junction agent.

"Seems there's a good deal of excitement in the air. We 'ain't all been
out like this sence the mad dog was shot down to Galloway's." When this
gentleman was presented to Mrs. Folsom he drew himself up, looked at her
suspiciously, and said, "Pleased to meet you." He cast the eye of a
worldling over her quiet traveling costume and retired to nudge the
Rural and remark: "Well, I see the furniture money 'ain't been spent on
_her_ back."

The lady of the vanilla looked about her with pure happiness. She met
all introductions radiantly, sniffing rapturously at the twins' roses,
lifting first one, then the other stodgy bunch.

"But you are all so kind!" The clear voice rippling with novelty and
excitement gave a sense of thrill to the occasion. The mistress of the
vanilla held Mrs. Pawket's perspiring hand.

"To know this lady--like the mother of Weeliam--and Mr. Pawket, my first
American of the famous farmer trrribes!"

The stranger's insecurity of English had its immediate triumph. The
countryside had expected that she would chatter Italian like a predatory
organ-grinder, but around this picturesque _naivete_ they clustered as
they would around a lost child. Jessica Folsom met the architect's eyes
triumphantly, but he edged to her side and bent to whiff the roses,
muttering, "The worst is yet to come."

However, the slender figure of Mrs. Folsom drifted from one to the other
of her welcomers, unembarrassed, friendly, appealing. She put them
immediately at their ease as she announced:

"We shall all at once have tea. On the terrace--my little _festa_! I,
who find the home of my fathers in your new green country." A lovely
color coming into her dark face, she burst into undulating Italian. "The
first Dago she's spoke sence she's got here," commented Mr. Fripp, in an
undertone. Once more he creaked up to the mistress of the villa, saying,
loudly:

"Too bad about the furniture!"

The new-comer turned upon the junction agent liquid, long-lashed eyes.
"Ah the _garnitures_ of Bella Fortuna, they have been--how do you say
it, Weeliam?--dislocated, smashed in traveling the great waves." She
appealed anxiously to the junction agent. "I fear they are in great
distress of breaking, but"--a light came into the appealing dark
eyes--"but in your so practical country shall we not find the new?"

Mrs. Pawket, hearing this, suddenly nudged her husband, and Mr. Pawket
realized that his moment had come. He took one or two ponderous steps
forward, wiping his brow, clearing his throat. In his buzzing brain he
sensed a great occasion, like a wedding or a funeral. He got a glimpse
of Mrs. Pawket nodding her head urgently and mouthing his words after
him as he roared:

"That's as may be; that's as may be." Again Mr. Pawket cleared his
throat. He felt, as he afterward expressed it, "like he was grindin' a
corn-hopper with nothing into it." Suddenly his gaze fell upon Willum,
his boy, now a glad-looking man with a tender light in his eyes and his
arm around his dark-eyed wife. This, Mr. Pawket felt, was as it should
be. It gave him sudden eloquence.

"I dunno," he said, and he bent a severe eye upon the Rural, Mr. Fripp,
and the hotel-keeper's daughter--"I dunno but what we was gettin' a
little sour-hearted, here in Brook Center. There has been some spites
and a good many mean doin's and sayin's--namin' no names. What we didn't
have was big feelin's. Everybody was nesty and nifty, and we all thought
we know'd it all; but it seems that yet for all we didn't know much
about vanillas nor that they could turn out so purty as this here
vanilla has gone and turned."

William Folsom poked the architect in the ribs. "Hear! Hear!" he
murmured, in a subdued voice.

Mr. Pawket mildly waited for these asides to conclude before he resumed:
"Howsomever, it seems that one dear to us"--he fixed his eyes on Willum,
but in spite of him his gaze wandered off to Willum's lady--"one dear to
us has got back from foreign lands and built a vanilla." The old farmer
turned to Mrs. Folsom with a burst of eloquence. "Sence that has
happened, by gum! our whole lives is changed and we know more about
It'ly than I ever thought we should; and so with regards to this here
new vanilla house and a few little presents and one thing and another,
why, all I can say is, Mrs. Folsom, we've gone and did as we'd be done
by."

There was something very like a cheer at the conclusion of these
remarks. Meanwhile, at a sign from the architect, the great carved doors
of the villa swung open and the little group pressed in.

They stepped into the cool, dim court with its paved floors and
delicately woven stairways. Mrs. Folsom clasped her hands with pleasure
over a wide window-seat which gave on a western slope where the gold sun
was speared by the tall black trees. But Folsom, to whom the architect
gave a nervous cue, hurried to the _sala da mangiare_, and thrust back
its sumptuous Genoese curtains.

There under the iron candelabra of the Medicis stood a shining table of
varnished splendor; on it, as if hoping to deaden its aggressive luster,
was a marvelous strip of Paduan lace, while around its stodgy newness
were six smug chairs of a very palpable "golden oak." Folsom threw up
his hands in apparent joy and astonishment.

"Great Harry!" The young man's voice was extraordinarily exalted. He
bent over and touched the varnished surfaces with a reverent hand. "A
perfectly new dining-table--a present--a complete set of absolutely
unused chairs! Oh, I say! This won't do--it's preposterous! Somebody has
been getting gay." The young man first looked suspiciously at the
architect, then turned and with severe eyes surveyed Farmer Pawket's
shamefaced elation.

"So it's you, sir," he said. "Now look here!" Folsom strode up and put
his firm hand on the old man's chest. "Brace up and tell what you know
about this. Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't do it. No, you
can't hide behind Mother Pawket." Folsom's grave glance reduced Mrs.
Pawket to a helpless flutter. "She's probably put you up to it; she's a
designing woman." Folsom went eagerly over to the dark-eyed Italian
lady. "Jessica dearest, look at all this. Golden oak. _Store furniture_,
by Jove! Mr. Pawket's gift to you and me."

The lady of the vanilla did not betray Mr. Badgely's hope of her.
Widening her lovely eyes at the rich solidities before her, she slipped
to the old man's side and seized his hands. A strange sense of fog
enveloped Mr. Pawket; he stole a scared glance sidewise at the Rural.
"It was all for me," the vibrant voice insisted. "This Weeliam he is
_favorito_--he thinks the whole world is for his gift; but kind Signor
Pawket thinks only of me; he knew"--with exquisite slow arrangement of
accents--"how interested and happy I should be to at once understand the
practical American ways--and he knew, with such understanding, how I
must save and guard the poor destructed--what you call
them?--_foornitures_, of my own people."

"Now, now, now!" protested Mr. Pawket, feebly.

Mr. Fripp, however, nodded to the Rural. "Well, it seems she knowed all
the while that that there furniture warn't no good."

At last, at the architect's somewhat desperate solicitation, they all
turned their steps to the _salon_. Mr. Badgely, making pathetic
dumb-show, dragged William Folsom to the rear.

"Nerve yourself," he whispered, "nerve yourself. I'm afraid it's going
to be worse than I feared. It seems that there were actually six of
them--only one is not quite finished. The competition was very
tense--and they all arrived in my absence. Old man, hold me! I'm about
all in!"

Mr. Folsom, with appropriate concern, put his arm about his friend.
Together they braced to meet any shock. When at last they lifted their
eyes it was to stand locked in awe and admiration. Over the shoulders of
the group in front of them they could see into the _salon_. It was
furnished with a sofa and six chairs upholstered in scarlet plush. There
was also a center-table on which was spread a red plush cover. On this
table, each with a card tied with a ribbon bow and bearing the name of
its maker, stood ranged in solid splendor six golden "Everythings."




A NIGHT AMONG THE HORSES[5]

[Note 5: Copyright, 1918, by Margaret C. Anderson. Copyright, 1920,
by Djuna Barnes.]

BY DJUNA BARNES

From _The Little Review_


Toward dusk, in the summer of the year, a man dressed in a frock coat
and top hat, and carrying a cane, crept through the underbrush bordering
the corral of the Buckler farm.

As he moved small twigs snapped, fell and were silent. His knees were
green from wounded shrubbery and grass, and his outspread hands tore
unheeded plants. His wrists hurt him and he rested from time to time,
always caring for his hat and knotted yellow cane, blowing through his
moustache.

Dew had been falling covering the twilight leaves like myriad faces,
damp with the perspiration of the struggle for existence, and half a
mile away, standing out against the darkness of the night, a grove of
white birches shimmered, like teeth in a skull.

He heard the creaking of a gate, and the splashing of late rain into the
depths of a dark cistern. His heart ached with the nearness of the
earth, the faint murmur of it moving upon itself, like a sleeper who
turns to throw an arm about a beloved.

A frog began moaning among the skunk cabbages, and John thrust his hand
deep into his bosom.

Something somnolent seemed to be here, and he wondered. It was like a
deep, heavy, yet soft prison where, without sin, one may suffer
intolerable punishment.

Presently he went on, feeling his way. He reached a high plank fence
and sensing it with his fingers, he lay down, resting his head against
the ground.

He was tired, he wanted to sleep, but he searched for his hat and cane
and straightened out his coat beneath him before he turned his eyes to
the stars.

And now he could not sleep, and wondered why he had thought of it;
something quick was moving the earth, it seemed to live, to shake with
sudden immensity.

He heard a dog barking, and the dim light from a farm window kept
winking as the trees swung against its square of light. The odor of
daisies came to him, and the assuring, powerful smell of the stables; he
opened his mouth and drew in his moustache.

A faint tumult had begun. A tremor ran under the length of his body and
trembled off into the earth like a shudder of joy,--died down and
repeated itself. And presently he began to tremble, answering, throwing
out his hands, curling them up weakly, as if the earth were withholding
something precious, necessary.

His hat fell off, striking a log with a dull hollow sound, and he
pressed his red moustache against the grass weeping.

Again he heard it, felt it; a hundred hoofs beat upon the earth and he
knew the horses had gone wild in the corral on the other side of the
fence, for animals greet the summer, striking the earth, as friends
strike the back of friends. He knew, he understood; a hail to summer, to
life, to death.

He drew himself against the bars, pressing his eyes under them, peering,
waiting.

He heard them coming up across the heavy turf, rounding the curve in the
Willow Road. He opened his eyes and closed them again. The soft menacing
sound deepened, as heat deepens, strikes through the skin into the very
flesh. Head on, with long legs rising, falling, rising again, striking
the ground insanely, like needles taking terrible, impossible and
purposeless stitches.

He saw their bellies, fawn colored, pitching from side to side, flashing
by, straining the fence, and he rose up on his feet and silently,
swiftly, fled on beside them.

Something delirious, hysterical, came over him and he fell. Blood
trickled into his eyes down from his forehead. It had a fine feeling for
a moment, like a mane, like that roan mare's mane that had passed
him--red and long and splendid.

He lifted his hand, and closed his eyes once more, but the soft pounding
did not cease, though now, in his sitting position, it only jogged him
imperceptibly, as a child on a knee.

It seemed to him that he was smothering, and he felt along the side of
his face as he had done in youth when they had put a cap on him that was
too large. Twining green things, moist with earth-blood, crept over his
fingers, the hot, impatient leaves pressed in, and the green of the
matted grass was deathly thick. He had heard about the freeness of
nature, thought it was so, and it was not so.

A trailing ground pine had torn up small blades in its journey across
the hill, and a vine, wrist-thick, twisted about a pale oak, hideously,
gloriously, killing it, dragging it into dust.

A wax Patrick Pipe leaned against his neck, staring with black eyes, and
John opened his mouth, running his tongue across his lips snapping it
off, sighing.

Move as he would, the grass was always under him, and the crackling of
last autumn's leaves and last summer's twigs--minute dead of the
infinite greatness--troubled him. Something portentous seemed connected
with the patient noises about him. An acorn dropped, striking a thin
fine powder out of a frail oak pod. He took it up, tossing it. He had
never liked to see things fall.

He sat up, with the dim thunder of the horses far off, but quickening
his heart.

He went over the scene he had with Freda Buckler, back there in the
house, the long quivering spears of pot-grass standing by the window as
she walked up and down, pulling at them, talking to him.

Small, with cunning fiery eyes and a pink and pointed chin. A daughter
of a mother who had known too many admirers in her youth; a woman with
an ample lap on which she held a Persian kitten or a trifle of fruit.
Bounty, avarice, desire, intelligence--both of them had always what they
wanted.

He blew down his moustache again thinking of Freda in her floating
yellow veil that he had called ridiculous. She had not been angry, he
was nothing but a stable boy then. It was the way with those small
intriguing women whose nostrils were made delicate through the pain of
many generations that they might quiver whenever they caught a whiff of
the stables.

"As near as they can get to the earth," he had said and was Freda angry?
She stroked his arm always softly, looking away, an inner bitterness
drawing down her mouth.

She said, walking up and down quickly, looking ridiculously small:

"I am always gentle, John--" frowning, trailing her veil, thrusting out
her chin.

He answered: "I liked it better where I was."

"Horses," she said showing sharp teeth, "are nothing for a man with your
bile--poy-boy--curry comber, smelling of saddle soap--lovely!" She
shrivelled up her nose, touching his arm: "Yes, but better things. I
will show you--you shall be a gentleman--fine clothes, you will like
them, they feel nice." And laughing she turned on one high heel, sitting
down. "I like horses, they make people better; you are amusing,
intelligent, you will see--"

"A lackey!" he returned passionately throwing up his arm, "what is there
in this for you, what are you trying to do to me? The
family--askance--perhaps--I don't know."

He sat down pondering. He was getting used to it, or thought he was, all
but his wordy remonstrances. He knew better when thinking of his horses,
realizing that when he should have married this small, unpleasant and
clever woman, he would know them no more.

It was a game between them, which was the shrewder, which would win out?
He? A boy of ill breeding, grown from the gutter, fancied by this woman
because he had called her ridiculous, or for some other reason that he
would never know. This kind of person never tells the truth, and this,
more than most things, troubled him. Was he a thing to be played with,
debased into something better than he was, than he knew?

Partly because he was proud of himself in the costume of a groom, partly
because he was timid, he desired to get away, to go back to the stables.
He walked up to the mirrors as if about to challenge them, peering in.
He knew he would look absurd, and then knew, with shame, that he looked
splendidly better than most of the gentlemen that Freda Buckler knew. He
hated himself. A man who had grown out of the city's streets, a fine
common thing!

She saw him looking into the mirrors, one after the other, and drew her
mouth down. She got up, walking beside him in the end, between him and
them, taking his arm.

"You shall enter the army--you shall rise to General, or Lieutenant at
least--and there are horses there, and the sound of stirrups--with that
physique you will be happy--authority you know," she said shaking her
chin, smiling.

"Very well, but a common soldier--"

"As you like--afterward."

"Afterward?"

"Very well, a common soldier."

He sensed something strange in her voice, a sort of irony and it took
the patience out of him:

"I have always been common, I could commit crimes, easily, gladly--I'd
like to!"

She looked away. "That's natural," she said faintly, "it's an instinct
all strong men have--"

She knew what was troubling him, thwarted instincts, common beautiful
instincts that he was being robbed of. He wanted to do something final
to prove his lower order; caught himself making faces, idiot faces, and
she laughed.

"If only your ears stuck out, chin receded," she said, "you might look
degenerate, common, but as it is--"

And he would creep away in hat, coat and cane to peer at his horses,
never daring to go in near them. Sometimes when he wanted to weep he
would smear one glove with harness grease, but the other one he held
behind his back, pretending one was enough to prove his revolt.

She would torment him with vases, books, pictures, making a fool of him
gently, persistently, making him doubt by cruel means, the means of
objects he was not used to, eternally taking him out of his sphere.

"We have the best collection of miniatures," she would say with one knee
on a low ottoman, bringing them out in her small palm.

"Here, look."

He would put his hands behind him.

"She was a great woman--Lucrezia Borgia--do you know history--" She put
it back again because he did not answer, letting his mind, a curious
one, torment itself.

"You love things very much, don't you?" she would question because she
knew that he had a passion for one thing only. She kept placing new
ladders beneath his feet, only to saw them off at the next rung, making
him nothing more than a nervous irritable experiment. He was uneasy,
like one given food to smell and not to taste, and for a while he had
not wanted to taste, and then curiosity began, and he wanted to, and he
also wanted to escape, and he could do neither.

Well, after he had married her, what then? Satisfy her whim and where
would he be? He would be nothing, neither what he had been nor what
other people were. This seemed to him, at times, her wish--a sort of
place between lying down and standing up, a cramped position, a slow
death. A curious woman.

This same evening he had looked at her attentively for the first time.
Her hair was rather pretty, though too mousy, yet just in the nape of
the neck, where it met the lawn of the collar it was very attractive.
She walked well for a little woman too.

Sometimes she would pretend to be lively, would run a little, catch
herself at it, as if she had not intended to do it, and calm down once
more, or creeping up to him, stroking his arm, talking to him, she would
walk beside him softly, slowly, that he might not step out, that he
would have to crawl across the carpet.

Once he had thought of trying her with honesty, with the truth of the
situation. Perhaps she would give him an honest answer, and he had
tried.

"Now Miss Freda--just a word--what are you trying to do. What is it you
want? What is there in me that can interest you? I want you to tell
me--I want to know--I have got to ask someone, and I haven't anyone to
ask but you."

And for a moment she almost relented, only to discover that she could
not if she had wished. She did not know always what she meant herself.

"I'll tell you," she said, hoping that this, somehow, might lead her
into the truth, for herself, if not for him, but it did not. "You are a
little nervous, you will get used to it--you will even grow to like it.
Be patient. You will learn soon enough that there is nothing in the
world so agreeable as climbing, changing."

"Well," he said trying to read her, "And then?"

"That's all, you will regret the stables in the end--that's all." Her
nostrils quivered. A light came into her eyes, a desire to defy, to be
defied.

And then on this last night he had done something terrible, he had made
a blunder. There had been a party. The guests, a lot of them, were
mostly drunk, or touched with drink. And he too had too much. He
remembered having thrown his arms about a tall woman, gowned in black
with loose shoulder straps, dragging her through a dance. He had even
sung a bit of a song, madly, wildly, horribly. And suddenly he had been
brought up sharp by the fact that no one thought his behavior strange,
that no one thought him presumptuous. Freda's mother had not even moved
or dropped the kitten from her lap where it sat, its loud resolute purr
shaking the satin of her gown.

And he felt that Freda had got him where she wanted him, between two
rungs. Going directly up to her he said:

"You are ridiculous!" and twirled his moustache, spitting into the
garden.

And he knew nothing about what happened until he found himself in the
shrubbery crawling toward the corral, through the dusk and the dampness
of the leaves, carrying his cane, making sure of his hat, looking up at
the stars.

And now he knew why he had come. He was with his horses again. His
eyes, pressed against the bars, stared in. The black stallion in the
lead had been his special pet, a rough animal, but kindly, knowing. And
here they were once more, tearing up the grass, galloping about in the
night like a ball-room full of real people, people who wanted to do
things, who did what they wanted to do.

He began to crawl through the bars, slowly, deftly, and when half way
through he paused, thinking.

Presently he went on again, and drawing himself into the corral, his hat
and cane thrown in before him, he lay there mouth to the grass.

They were still running, but less madly, one of them had gone up the
Willow Road leading into a farther pasture, in a flare of dust, through
which it looked immense and faint.

On the top of the hill three or four of the horses were standing,
testing the weather. He would mount one, he would ride away, he would
escape. And his horses, the things he knew, would be his escape.

Bareback, he thought, would be like the days when he had taken what he
could from the rush of the streets, joy, exhilaration, life, and he was
not afraid. He wanted to stand up, to cry aloud.

And he saw ten or twelve of them rounding the curve, and he did stand
up.

They did not seem to know him, did not seem to know what to make of him,
and he stared at them wondering. He did not think of his white shirt
front, his sudden arising, the darkness, their excitement. Surely they
would know, in a moment more.

Wheeling, flaring their wet nostrils, throwing up their manes, striking
the earth in a quandary, they came on, whinnied faintly, and he knew
what it was to be afraid.

He had never been afraid and he went down on his knees. With a new
horror in his heart he damned them. He turned his eyes up, but he could
not open them. He thought rapidly, calling on Freda in his heart,
speaking tenderly, promising.

A flare of heat passed his throat, and descended into his bosom.

"I want to live. I can do it--damn it--I can do it. I can forge ahead,
make my mark."

He forgot where he was for a moment and found new pleasure in this
spoken admission, this new rebellion. He moved with the faint shaking of
the earth like a child on a woman's lap.

The upraised hoofs of the first horse missed him, but the second did
not.

And presently the horses drew apart, nibbling here and there, switching
their tails, avoiding a patch of tall grass.




LONG, LONG AGO[6]

[Note 6: Copyright, 1919, by The Bellman Company. Copyright, 1920,
by Frederick Orin Bartlett.]

BY FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT

From _The Bellman_


When the brakeman swung back the door and with resonant indifference
shouted in Esperanto "Granderantal stashun," Galbraithe felt like
jumping up and shaking the man's hand. It was five years since he had
heard that name pronounced as it should be pronounced because it was
just five years since he had resigned from the staff of a certain New
York daily and left to accept the editorship of a Kansas weekly. These
last years had been big years, full of the joy of hard work, and though
they had left him younger than when he went they had been five years
away from New York. Now he was back again for a brief vacation, eager
for a sight of the old crowd.

When he stepped from the train he was confused for a moment. It took him
a second to get his bearings but as soon as he found himself fighting
for his feet in the dear old stream of commuters he knew he was at home
again. The heady jostle among familiar types made him feel that he had
not been gone five days, although the way the horde swept past him
proved that he had lost some of his old-time skill and cunning in a
crowd. But he did not mind; he was here on a holiday, and they were here
on business and had their rights. He recognized every mother's son of
them. Neither the young ones nor the old ones were a day older. They
wore the same clothes, carried the same bundles and passed the same
remarks. The solid business man weighted with the burden of a Long
Island estate was there; the young man in a broker's office who pushed
his own lawn mower at New Rochelle was there; the man who got aboard at
One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street was there. There was the man with a
Van Dyke, the man with a mustache and the fat, smooth-shaven man and the
wives, the sisters and the stenographers of all these. They were just as
Galbraithe had left them--God bless 'em.

Swept out upon Forty-second Street, he took a long, full breath. The
same fine New York sky was overhead (the same which roofed Kansas) and
the same New York sun shone down upon him (even as in its gracious
bounty it shone upon Kansas). The thrill of it made him realize as never
before that, though the intervening years had been good to him, New York
was in his blood. His eyes seized upon the raw angular buildings as
eagerly as an exiled hill-man greets friendly mountain peaks. There are
no buildings on earth which look so friendly, once a man gets to know
them, as those about the Grand Central. Galbraithe noticed some new
structures, but even these looked old. The total effect was exactly as
he had left it. That was what he appreciated after his sojourn among the
younger cities of the West. New York was permanent--as fixed as the pole
star. It was unalterable.

Galbraithe scorned to take cab, car or bus this morning. He wanted to
walk--to feel beneath his feet the dear old humpy pavement. It did his
soul good to find men repairing the streets in the same old places--to
find as ever new buildings going up and old buildings coming down, and
the sidewalks blocked in the same old way. He was clumsy at his
hurdling, but he relished the exercise.

He saw again with the eyes of a cub reporter every tingling feature of
the stirring street panorama, from gutter to roof top, and thrilled with
the magic and vibrant bigness of it all. Antlike, men were swarming
everywhere bent upon changing, and yet they changed nothing. That was
what amazed and comforted him. He knew that if he allowed five years to
elapse before returning to his home town in Kansas he wouldn't recognize
the place, but here everything was as he had left it, even to the men on
the corners, even to the passers-by, even to the articles in the store
windows. Flowers at the florist's, clothing at the haberdasher's, jewels
at the jeweler's, were in their proper places, as though during the
interval nothing had been sold. It made him feel as eternal as the
Wandering Jew.

Several familiar landmarks were gone but he wondered if they had ever
been. He did not miss them--hardly noticed any change. New buildings
fitted into the old niches as perfectly as though from the first they
had been ordained for those particular spots. They did not look at all
the upstarts that all new buildings in Kansas did.

He hurried on to Park Row, and found himself surrounded by the very
newsboys he had left. Not one of them had grown a day older. The lanky
one and the lame one and the little one were there. Perhaps it was
because they had always been as old as it is possible for a boy to be,
that they were now no older. They were crying the same news to the same
indifferent horde scurrying past them. Their noisy shouting made
Galbraithe feel more than ever like a cub reporter. It was only
yesterday that his head was swirling with the first mad excitement of
it.

Across the street the door stood open through which he had passed so
many times. Above it he saw the weatherbeaten sign which had always been
weatherbeaten. The little brick building greeted him as hospitably as an
open fire at home. He knew every inch of it, from the outside sill to
the city room, and every inch was associated in his mind with some big
success or failure. If he came back as a vagrant spirit a thousand years
from now he would expect to find it just as it was. A thousand years
back this spot had been foreordained for it. Lord, the rooted stability
of this old city.

He had forgotten that he no longer had quarters in town, and must secure
a room. He was still carrying his dress-suit case, but he couldn't
resist the temptation of first looking in on the old crowd and shaking
hands. He hadn't kept in touch with them except that he still read
religiously every line of the old sheet, but he had recognized the work
of this man and that, and knew from what he had already seen that
nothing inside any more than outside could be changed. It was about nine
o'clock, so he would find Hartson, the city editor, going over the rival
morning papers, his keen eyes alert to discover what the night staff had
missed. As he hurried up the narrow stairs his heart was as much in his
mouth as it had been the first day he was taken on the staff. Several
new office boys eyed him suspiciously, but he walked with such an air of
familiarity that they allowed him to pass unquestioned. At the entrance
to the sacred precinct of the city editor's room he paused with all his
old-time hesitancy. Even after working five years for himself as a
managing editor, he found he had lost nothing of his wholesome respect
for Hartson. The latter's back was turned when Galbraithe entered, and
he waited at the rail until the man looked up. Then with a start
Galbraithe saw that this was not Hartson at all.

"I--I beg pardon," he stammered.

"Well?" demanded the stranger.

"I expected to find Mr. Hartson," explained Galbraithe.

"Hartson?"

"I used to be on the staff and--"

"Guess you're in the wrong office," the stranger shut him off abruptly.

For a moment Galbraithe believed this was possible, but every scarred
bit of furniture was in its place and the dusty clutter of papers in the
corner had not been disturbed. The new city editor glanced suspiciously
toward Galbraithe's dress suit case and reached forward as though to
press a button. With flushed cheeks Galbraithe retreated, and hurried
down the corridor toward the reportorial rooms. He must find Billy
Bertram and get the latter to square him with the new city editor. He
made at once for Billy Bertram's desk, with hand extended. Just beyond
was the desk he himself had occupied for so long. Bertram looked up and
then Galbraithe saw that it was not Bertram at all.

"What can I do for you, old man?" the stranger inquired. He was a fellow
of about Bertram's age, and a good deal of Bertram's stamp.

"I'm looking for Billy Bertram," stammered Galbraithe. "Guess he must
have shifted his desk."

He glanced hopefully at the other desks in the room but he did not
recognize a face.

"Bertram?" inquired the man who occupied Bertram's desk. He turned to
the man next to him.

"Say, Green, any one here by the name of Bertram?"

Green lighted a fresh cigarette, and shook his head.

"Never heard of him," he replied indifferently.

"He used to sit here," explained Galbraithe.

"I've held down this chair fifteen months, and before me a chump by the
name of Weston had that honor. Can't go back any further than that."

Galbraithe lowered his dress suit case, and wiped his forehead. Every
one in the room took a suspicious glance at the bag.

"Ever hear of Sanderson?" Galbraithe inquired of Green.

"Nope."

"Ever hear of Wadlin or Jerry Donahue or Cartwright?"

Green kicked a chair toward him.

"Sit down, old man," he suggested. "You'll feel better in a minute."

"Ever hear of Hartson? Ever hear of old Jim Hartson?"

"That's all right," Green encouraged him. "If you have a line in that
bag you think will interest us, bring it out. It's against office rules,
but--"

Galbraithe tried to recall if, on his way downtown, he had inadvertently
stopped anywhere for a cocktail. He had no recollection of so doing.
Perhaps he was a victim of a mental lapse--one of those freak blank
spaces of which the alienists were talking so much lately. He made one
more attempt to place himself. In his day he had been one of the star
reporters of the staff.

"Ever hear of--of Galbraithe?" he inquired anxiously.

By this time several men had gathered around the two desks as interested
spectators. Galbraithe scanned their faces, but he didn't recognize one
of them.

"Haven't got a card about your person, have you?" inquired Green.

"Why, yes," answered Galbraithe, fumbling for his case. The group
watched him with some curiosity, and Harding, the youngest man, scenting
a story, pushed to the front. With so many eyes upon him Galbraithe grew
so confused that he couldn't find his card case.

"I'm sure I had it with me," he apologized.

"Remember where you were last night?" inquired Green.

"Just got in this morning," answered Galbraithe. "I--here it is."

He drew out a card and handed it to Green. The group gathered closer and
read it.

"Harvey L. Galbraithe, Trego County Courier."

Green solemnly extended his hand.

"Glad to meet you, Mr. Galbraithe. Up here on business, or pleasure?"

"I used to work here," explained Galbraithe. "I came up on a vacation to
see the boys."

"Used to work on this sheet?" exclaimed Green, as though doubting it.

"I left five years ago," answered Galbraithe.

"Holy Smoke!" exclaimed Green, with a low whistle. "You are sure some
old-timer. Let's see--that's over fifteen hundred days ago. When did you
come on?"

"Just before the Spanish War," answered Galbraithe eagerly. "Hartson
sent me to Cuba."

Harding came closer, his eyes burning with new interest.

"Gee," he exclaimed, "those must have been great days. I ran across an
old codger at the Press Club once who was with Dewey at Manila."

He spoke as Galbraithe might speak of the Crimean War. He pressed the
latter for details, and Galbraithe, listening to the sound of his own
voice, allowed himself to be led on. When he was through he felt
toothless, and as though his hair had turned gray.

"Those were the happy days," exclaimed Harding. "The game was worth
playing then--eh, old man?"

"Yes," mumbled Galbraithe. "But don't any of you know what has become of
Hartson?"

"Haydon would probably remember him--"

"Haydon?" broke in Galbraithe. "Is he here?"

He looked wistfully about the room to the corner where the exchange
editor used to sit.

"He died last spring," said Green. "Guess he was the last leaf on the
tree."

"He came on five years ahead of me," said Galbraithe. "He and I did the
barrel murders together."

"What was that story?" inquired Harding.

Galbraithe looked at Harding to make sure this was not some fool joke.
At the time nothing else had been talked of in New York for a month, and
he and Haydon had made something of a name for themselves for the work
they did on it. Harding was both serious and interested--there could be
no doubt about that.

The details were as fresh in Galbraithe's mind as though it were
yesterday. But what he was just beginning to perceive was that this was
so because he had been away from New York. To those living on here and
still playing the old game that story had become buried, even as
tradition, in the multiplicity of subsequent stories. These younger men
who had superseded him and his fellows, already had their own big
stories. They came every day between the dawn and the dark, and then
again between the dark and the dawn. Day after day they came
unceasingly, at the end of a week dozens of them, at the end of a month
hundreds, at the end of a year thousands. It was fifteen hundred days
ago that he had been observing the manifold complications of these
million people, and since that time a thousand volumes had been written
about as many tragedies enacted in the same old setting. Time here was
measured in hours, not years. The stage alone remained unchanged.

Galbraithe made his feet, so dazed that he faltered as with the palsy.
Harding took his arm.

"Steady, old man," he cautioned. "You'd better come out and have a
drink."

Galbraithe shook his head. He felt sudden resentment at the part they
were forcing upon him.

"I'm going back home," he announced.

"Come on," Harding encouraged him. "We'll drink to the old days, eh?"

"Sure," chimed in Green. The others, too, rose and sought their hats.

"I won't," replied Galbraithe, stubbornly, "I'm going back home, I tell
you. And in ten years I'll be twenty-five years younger than any of
you."

He spoke with some heat. Harding laughed but Green grew sober. He placed
his hand on Galbraithe's arm.

"Right," he said. "Get out, and God bless you, old man."

"If only Haydon had been here--" choked Galbraithe.

"I expect he's younger than any of us," replied Green, soberly. "He's
measuring time by eternities."

Galbraithe picked up his bag.

"S'long," he said.

He moved toward the door, and the entire group stood stock still and
without a word watched him go out. He moved along the narrow corridor
and past the city editor's room. He went down the old stairs, his
shoulders bent and his legs weak. Fifteen hundred days were upon his
shoulders. He made his way to the street, and for a moment stood there
with his ears buzzing. About him swarmed the same newsboys he had left
five years before, looking no older by a single day. Squinting his eyes,
he studied them closely. There was Red Mick, but as he looked more
carefully he saw that it was not Red Mick at all. It was probably Red
Mick's younger brother. The tall one, the lanky one and the little lame
one were there, but their names were different. The drama was the same,
the setting was the same, but fifteen hundred days had brought a new set
of actors to the same old parts. It was like seeing Shakespeare with a
new cast, but the play was older by centuries than any of Shakespeare's.

Galbraithe hailed a taxi.

"Granderantal stashun," he ordered.

Peering out of the window, he watched the interminable procession on
street and sidewalks. He gazed at the raw angular buildings--permanent
and unalterable. Overhead a Kansas sun shone down upon him--the same
which in its gracious bounty shone down upon New York.




DISHES[7]

[Note 7: Copyright, 1919, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1920, by Agnes Mary Brownell.]

BY AGNES MARY BROWNELL

From _The Pictorial Review_


"Well, I guess that's the last of that!" Myra Bray said grimly, and
blinked at the smashed fragments of the cup.

It had been so fragile, that even the sound of its breaking was thin and
evanescent like a note blown, not struck. Now as it lay on the floor, it
seemed dwindled to nothing more than the fine gilt stem that had been
its handle, and irregular pinkish fragments like fallen petals.

"Myry Bray! Butterfingers!" Myra apostrophized herself, and darted a
quick, sidelong glance in the direction of old Mrs. Bray, her
mother-in-law.

It had been old Mrs. Bray's cup. This was old Mrs. Bray's house. When
Myra married Marvin Bray it had been with the understanding that they
must make their home with his mother, now that Nellie was gone.

Old Mrs. Bray said nothing. The pink cup had belonged to Nellie;
Marvin's had been blue. They had been old-time Christmas gifts; and they
had never been used. They were too fine to use. All those years they had
stood side by side on an upper shelf of the safe, along with the
majolica pickle-dish, the cracker-jar that Abbie Carter had painted in a
design of wheat-heads, the lemonade-set that George's wife had presented
upon the occasion of a visit, and a collection of little china
souvenirs--trays and miniature pitchers with "Souvenir of the Springs"
inscribed upon them.

"At least the saucer's safe," ventured Myra, after a pause. She had only
just come to live with old Mrs. Bray. She wondered how she would take
it. "Well--might's well sweep up the muss!"

Old Mrs. Bray spoke. Myra thought she detected a quiver in her voice:

"Pick 'em up," her mother-in-law directed, "and put 'em here in my
apron." Myra obeyed. Old Mrs. Bray gathered up her apron and went away
to her room. She did not emerge till nearly supper-time.

Once Myra had gone to her door. It was inhospitably closed. Myra thought
she detected a faint chinking sound. "Now I wonder"--thought Myra--"is
she agrievin' or asulkin'? I'd ruther it was asulkin'--an old pink chiny
cup! I'd buy her another, only I s'pose it wouldn't make it up to
her--Nellie's and all. Mebbe if I hurried and put off my waist, I could
finish up her challis. She don't need the challis, and I do the waist.
But mebbe it might take her mind off--losin' Nellie and then losin' the
cup. I expect that come hard to Mother Bray."

Myra smoothed her hair and put on a fresh afternoon percale. To see Myra
with her thin brown face, her slicked-back black hair which showed white
threads like ravellings, in her afternoon house-dress of gray percale,
one would never have taken her for a bride. Yet Myra had a very bridal
feeling, sitting in her own home, with her own sewing, instead of
running the machine in the shop, as she had done before her marriage.
That it was, in reality, her husband's mother's home, and her husband's
mother's sewing, scarcely altered the case. It was home, not shop. She
had been married in August, when work fell slack. Now it was October.
She had not broken anything until to-day.

Myra sewed and rocked and looked up at the framed portraits of Marvin
and Nellie and Frank as children--the girl in queer plaid, and a locket;
the boys in gilt-braided suits. Old and crude as the drawing was, it had
a look of them--that steady, serious look of Marvin which he had never
lost, and Nellie's--bold and managerial. Frank had died. Poor mother.
She had known trouble.

At five, old Mrs. Bray came stiffly out. She had a curious, secretive
air, not in the least mournful nor accusative, as Myra had feared. Myra
held up the dress--a soft, gray challis with lavender pipings. Old Mrs.
Bray's eyes widened like a pleased child's.

"Want to try it on?" suggested Myra.

"It ain't done!"

"To the last hook." She began to assist her mother into the new dress.

Mrs. Bray was a pretty old woman. There was about her an effect of
fragile bloom like that of her old cup. In her gray-and-lavender she was
like a quaint pastel.

"There!" cried Myra, standing off to view the effect.

"I ain't agoin' to take it off!" declared old Mrs. Bray suddenly; and
waited for the remonstrance.

Nellie had always said: "Why, mother! Of course you'll take it off right
away! Wear your good clothes out at home!"

To her surprise, Myra assented. "Keep it on, and let Marvin see how fine
you look."

"Wun't you need me about supper?"

"Now you just set and let me get supper alone to-night."

"I'll set the table," decided old Mrs. Bray. "I guess just laying plates
won't hurt it none."

Myra set about her biscuits. Marvin had to have his hot bread. Suddenly
she heard a little splintering crash, followed by a whimpering
wail--"Myry! Oh, Myry! I've broke the sasser!" The last remnants of
Nellie's saucer, with their pink, fluted edges like ravished petals, lay
spread out at old Mrs. Bray's feet.

"Now ain't that just too bad! (I s'pose she was touching it, for old
times' sake--and her trembly old fingers and all, she let it slip.)
Never mind, Mother; you got the blue one yet. And mebbe that saucer can
be mended--"

Her mother with a jealous sweep of old hands, gathered up the fragments
of the broken saucer. "I don't want mended dishes," she said
resentfully, and went stiffly away to her room.

That night, when they were alone, Myra told Marvin about Nellie's cup
and saucer. "And I just know she's akeeping of the pieces, and amourning
over them," she finished. "Such things get to have associations. I
'most wish it had been your cup that got broke. She's got you, and
Nellie's gone."

"Gone--what's a hundred miles!"

"I'm afraid she misses Nell."

"Now don't you go getting notions in your head. Nell was a master hand
for work, but she didn't keep things up a mite better than you--not so
good, to my notion. You're restfuller. Nell couldn't rest herself nor
let anybody else. Nell couldn't atouched them biscuit--fact!"

"I try to keep things up as much like Nell as I can. I'd ruther use
white table-cloths myself, but Nell always used the checkered. And my
own chiny set the folks gave me--but I know Mother'd feel strange
without her old white ones. There's lots of pretty chiny in the safe,
but Nell always used it so careful. I've never used a piece. And yet,
just adustin' that pink cup I had to go and drop it! I don't s'pose it
was ever drunk out of."

"What's the good," argued Marvin, "of having things too fine to use?"

"You and me, Marvin, think the same about them things. But Nell and
Mother--they're different."

"You're a good woman, Myry."

It pleased Myra to be told that she was good, and that her biscuits
surpassed those of the capable Nell. But such compliments, for all their
practicality and worth, sent no flush to her sallow cheek.

In her woman's magazine, which came to her monthly, lovers (and more
rarely, husbands) were always breathing into the heroine's ear, "I love
you. How beautiful you are!" or sentiments in that tenor. Marvin had not
told her he loved her. He had asked her seriously and respectfully to
marry him, when it became apparent that the efficient Nell was about to
wed. And he had never told her that she was beautiful. She could not
have believed him if he had.

Two days after the accident to the pink cup, the majolica pickle-dish
was found shattered in front of the safe, when Marvin came out to start
the kitchen fire. No one could account for its being there. The safe
doors were ajar, and they decided that the majolica dish must have got
pushed too near the edge of the shelf, and that a sudden jar had
dislodged it. The safe doors were never remembered to have been left
open before; the majolica dish had always sat well back; and nothing
more jarring than Marvin's step disturbed the habitual quiet of the
house. Still, how else account for it? "Mebbe Tom leaped up and done
it," suggested old Mrs. Bray. The sleepy Tom, a handsome Tiger-stripe,
sunk in bodily comfort, seemed to eye her reproachfully. He had not
leaped in years.

Old Mrs. Bray carried away with her the fragments of the majolica
pickle-dish and that afternoon, and other afternoons, she passed in the
solitary privacy of her room.

Still her retirement seemed to work her no ill. From these solitary
vigils she always emerged dressed in her gray-and-lavender. Ordinarily
the ladies Bray wore percale on week day afternoons--fresh ones, but
prints for all that. That had been Nell's way. Although old Mrs. Bray
had a closet hung with good wool dresses, and even one festival silk.

Myra's trousseau had been so simple as scarcely to deserve the name. She
had been married in a neat, dark suit, turned out in the shop where she
had been employed for more than seven years. Myra had been "on skirts"
for most of the seven years; and her dress had been almost a
uniform--skirt and blouse. But she had secretly sewed for herself
another sort of dress--house-dresses for the afternoon, of inexpensive,
but delicate and light-colored fabrics, made a little "fussy." These she
never wore. Old Mrs. Bray never wore fussy clothes; and it had not been
Nell's way. The gray-and-lavender challis had been in the nature of an
experiment. Old Mrs. Bray was plainly pleased; but she rarely wore it.
She said it would make it common.

So the Brays, as in Nellie's regime, continued to wear the common gray
percales, and to eat off the common white crockery. And with a strange,
bewitched pertinacity, the fine, decorative bits of china, shut away on
their upper shelf in the safe continued to get themselves broken.

Once it was one of the glasses of George's wife's lemonade-set. These
glasses had ornate gilt bands about the brim, and painted flowers upon
the side. Taking down the set one day, to show George's wife's gift to a
caller (gifts were never gifts in fee simple in the Bray household.
Always part possession seemed vested in the donor) old Mrs. Bray let
slip one of the glasses. The fragments lay in a path of sun, struck
through and through with light, they seemed to possess a strange, new
iridescence.

"Now ain't that too bad!" sympathized the caller. "Spoils the whole set.
You want to get every bit of that glass up and in the ash-can. Glass is
awful to grind in."

Old Mrs. Bray gathered up the pieces. They sent out strange gleams like
rude gems. Myra and the caller watched sympathetically the eager
abruptness of her departure.

"Your mother-in-law is some shaky," observed the caller. "She hadn't
ought to go to handle such delicate things."

"I expect she won't come out again," Myra said. "It always makes Mother
feel bad to break things."

Old Mrs. Bray did not come out again till after the caller had departed.
She had on her gray-and-lavender dress. "Always when Mother breaks a
dish seems like she goes and puts on her gray-and-lavender," thought
Myra; but she only said, "You look nice in that dress, Mother."

"I know I do," returned old Mrs. Bray serenely, "but I don't aim to make
it common, Myry."

At holiday time, Nell and her husband came for a visit. Nell immediately
proceeded to take the reins of government. She was a big, good-looking
woman, younger than Myra. She had a large, well-modeled face with bloomy
cheeks, golden brown eyes, fringed thick as daisies, and crisply
undulating waves of dark hair. She disposed of their greetings in short
order, retired to her old room to change into serviceable work things,
and issued her ultimatum.

"Now don't go to any fuss, Myry. John and me ain't company. Treat us
like the family. You've changed the roaster, ain't you, Myry? This ain't
near so good a place for it. I've brought you one of my hens,
Mother--all dressed and ready. We'll have it for dinner. Now Myry, don't
you go to getting out a white table-cloth. Get one of them red-checkered
ones. I s'pose those are your weddin' dishes--well, leave 'em be, now
you got them down. But we won't use 'em common--the old white ones is
plenty good enough. Folks that use their best every day has got no best.
You might get the potatoes on now, Myry."

"Let me finish settin' the table, Myry," pleaded old Mrs. Bray. A moment
later there was a crash, "Oh, Nellie! Oh, Myry! I didn't go to do it! My
arm breshed it."

"Marvin's souvenir pitcher his Aunt Mat give him one Fair time! It must
a' be'n fifteen year old!"

"I didn't go to do it!" quavered old Mrs. Bray.

"Who ever heard of such a thing? Of course you didn't do no such crazy
thing! But that don't save its being broke. Here--let me sweep it up."

"Don't you sweep them pieces up!" shrilled her mother.

This voice of high command on the part of her little old subservient
mother gave Nell pause. She stood, dust-pan in hand, looking down upon
that stiffly stooping figure garnering into her gathered apron a little
heap of splintered china.

"Mother must be getting childish," Nell said to Myra, when old Mrs. Bray
had trotted stiffly away with her spoils.

Myra did not reply. She hoped Nell would not discover that ravished
shelf of prized old china.

"Well--Nell got ye in hand?" inquired Nell's husband, John Peebles, at
dinner. The good-natured wink which accompanied the words, the hearty
voice and friendly manner, robbed the words of offense. They seemed
rather a humorous gibe directed against Nell. These two got along
excellently well. There was about John Peebles an effect of tender
strength, re-assuring and at the same time illuminating--responsive to
weakness, but adamant to imposition. Even the managerial Nell had not
succeeded in piercing that armored side of him--his 'thus far and no
further.'"

"Aw--you!" said Nell, adoringly.

"I bet Nell's met her boss!" grinned Marvin. "He don't go so fur as to
beat ye, does he, Nell?"

"Smarty!" returned Nell. Her eyes crinkled up at the corners. She had
met her match, and she knew it and gloried in it. But she didn't want
any sass from the family.

She had none. They submitted without demur. The dish-pan sunned in the
old place. The towels dried along a line of her own stretching. "John
and me don't mean to make you any work," she assured them. They made no
work. It seemed there had never been so much leisure.

"Myry," inquired Nell, "where's that other glass that goes with George's
wife's lemonade-set?"

"Oh, it must be 'round som'ers," Myra returned vaguely.

"Round som'ers! Why ain't they all together?" Nell prodded in further
search.

"Where's my pink gilt cup and saucer Aunt Em gimme one Christmas?"

"Ain't it there?" ventured Myra, with a cowardly shrinking from
confession, not so much on her own account as for old Mrs. Bray. There
was the majolica pickle-dish, the gilt, beflowered lemonade-glass, Abbie
Carter's cracker-jar, certain of the fragile souvenir pin-trays stacked
in a corner of the shelf.

"Here's Marvin's blue one. It's funny where them things can be. I always
kept them here together, on this shelf."

"They're som'ers," Myra repeated vaguely.

Old Mrs. Bray had sat throughout this conversation, making buttonholes
in a new gray percale. Once, when Nell was back at the sink, she reached
out a wavering, fat old arm, and gave Myra's apron-string a tug, as a
bad child pulls a cat's tail in a sort of impish humor. Her eyes, blue
and shining as a child's saucer, looked very wise. A little laugh
clucked in her throat.

"Mother--you feel chilly? You want to keep out of drafts," cautioned
Nellie from the sink.

"Never felt more chipper!" averred old Mrs. Bray.

She had not spent an afternoon in her room since Nell's arrival. To-day,
however, after dinner, she withdrew with an air of intending to remain
there for some time. She took her buttonholes with her. It was likely
that Nell could not content herself until she had searched every
cupboard and pantry for the missing treasure.

"I declare--it is the beatin'est thing! Whatever can have become of
them?" she apprized Myra. "You find much time to read, Myry?"

Myra found time to read her woman's magazine from cover to cover, in the
course of the month. Some things she read more than once--those frankly
impossible stories in which the heroines were always beautiful and
always loved. Myra had never known a heroine; the women of her
acquaintance were neither beautiful nor adored; and were probably quite
comfortably unaware of this lack.

"I'm getting notional," Myra accused herself fearfully. The Family
Doctor Book, a learned and ancient tome, confirmed these suspicions. It
treated of this, and related matters, with a large assurance, like a
trusty confidant.

"Funny how long Mother stays in her room!" wondered Nell.

"Mebbe she's fell asleep. Old people need all the sleep they can get.
It's mostly so broken."

"I'm agoing to see!" deposed Nell.

Myra had never invaded that withdrawn privacy. But Nell, with her
grenadier step, went swiftly and threw open the door.

"What on earth! Mother!"

Old Mrs. Bray's voice streamed quavering out, "Oh, Nellie! Don't scold
me! Myry!--"

Somehow Myra was there--past the affronted Nell in the door. In the
instant silence they made a strange tableau.

Old Mrs. Bray in her fine gray-and-lavender gown was seated before her
little wash-hand-stand. The floral pitcher in its floral bowl had been
set to one side on the floor. What covered the towel-protected top of
the stand, was Nellie's looted treasure.

There were the fragments of the pink cup and saucer; the leaf-green and
brown majolica bits that had been the pickle-dish; the iridescent curved
sides of George's wife's lemonade-glass; Aunt Em's shattered souvenir
pitcher; Abbie Carter's cracker-jar with its smashed wheat-heads. Myra
only looked bewilderedly; but on Nell's gaping face apprehension
succeeded stupefaction and dissolved in its turn into a great brimming
tenderness.

"Scold you, Mother? Oh, Mother--what must you think me! (Oh, poor
Mother--poor Mother--she's gone daft!)"

"I always admired pretty broken bits of chiny," old Mrs. Bray confessed.
"But the pitcher was a accident--reely it was, Nellie. I never went to
let that fall. My arm breshed it. But the sasser and the pickle-dish and
George's wife's lemonade-glass and Abbie Carter's cracker-jar--I done
them apurpose. And I can't say I regret the pitcher, nuther."

"Yes, Mother! Yes, yes! It's all right; I understand. (Myry, don't you
leave her! I thought she was gettin' childish, but Oh--to think--I'll
have John go for Doc Bradley right away. Let 'er amuse herself--but
don't you leave her alone a minute! Poor Mother! Poor old Mother!
Aplayin' with broken chiny dishes!)"

"What's Nell awhisperin' to ye?" inquired old Mrs. Bray, sharply.
"There's nothin' to whisper about as I know. Did ever you see anything
purtier than this pink chiny piece, Myry? It broke so clean, and curved
as a petal. And this here piece of George's wife's lemonade-glass--it's
handsome as a brooch. See how the flower come out! Why, Myry, I've set
here and fairly eat off these dishes!"

"Yes, Mother. But sha'n't we put them up now! Some one might drop
in--Nell bein' here."

She could not bear that Marvin and John and the doctor should see this
pitiful child's play.

Old Mrs. Bray assented with the utmost good nature. She drew up a box of
lacquer and proceeded to lay her china service carefully and dextrously
away. She set the box quite openly along the shelf beside her bonnet-box
and the snug, little brown round pasteboard roll that held her little
old round muff. Presently they heard steps in the sitting-room. Some one
had dropped in--but it was only Marvin and John and old Doc Bradley.

Marvin's face held a look of scared apprehension; John's withheld
judgment; Nell was frankly red-eyed. She had been walking fiercely back
and forth in the yard unable to face again that piteous picture.

The only unclouded faces there were Doc Bradley's and old Mrs. Bray's.
She gave him a shrewd look. He returned it in kind. "So--o--" said old
Mrs. Bray, noting their various scrutiny. There was even an effect of
state about her as she settled herself in her special rocker. But she
said, quite simply and conversationally,

"Do you want I should tell you about them dishes?"

"Well--it was thisaway. And understand--I don't blame nobuddy. Folks are
different. I always loved pretty dishes, but I never got to use 'em.
First on account of you being little"--she eyed Nellie and Marvin with
benignant allowance--"and after that, because of Nell always bein' agen'
using things common. She's like her father. He was thataway. He was a
good man, but he 'lowed good things shouldn't be used common. And then
when Myry come with her purty weddin' dishes and all, I'd hoped she'd be
sort o' different--more like me. But seem like she favored Nell. But I'd
never thought of breakin' them if it hadn't a be'n for the pink cup.
That give me the idee. That very night I broke the sasser to it. I
figured I'd get the use of them dishes some way."

Old Mrs. Bray clucked pleasantly, and resumed.

"I'd always wanted to wear one o' my good dresses afternoons, too.
Well--Myry made me one. And she was reel good about wantin' me to wear
it common. I had a good man. I've had good children. I've lived a long
life. But two things I wanted, I never had--pretty dishes to use, and to
be dressed up afternoons. Myry makin' me that dress turned my head, I
reckon. And the pink cup finished it."

"I take the full blame. It was me done both--broke the cup and sewed the
dress"--spoke up Myry. "And it's you I favored all along, Mother. If you
knew how I've honed to set the table with my weddin' dishes. And I could
show you--I've got some things you've never
seen--house-dresses--pink--sprigged--"

"Meanin' no offense, Nellie--and Marvin--you can't help bein' like your
pa. I guess I'm just a foolish old woman."

"We're all like we're made," sounded the oracular accents of Mr.
Peebles. "Joke's on you all right, Nell."

"I guess I'm it," she admitted cheerfully.

Doc Bradley looked sharply at Myra when she let him out. Perhaps he
noted the pathos of that thin face; those speaking eyes, that seemed to
confess a secret longing.

"If you should feel the call, just break a few dishes on your own
account!" he advised her. "I like to see folks get what they want. If
they want it bad enough, they'll get it." He thought it might be a
dress, perhaps--something pretty. Women in Myry's case have odd notions.

Myry had an odd notion. She wanted to be told that she was beautiful and
loved.

"You little black stringy thing!" she told herself fiercely. "He's fond
of you. And good to you. He's like his pa; he won't show it common. And
anyways--you beautiful!"

But every month she read, with a new and avid interest, those
far-fetched, extravagant tales of beautiful and beloved women.

During the remainder of Nell's stay, old Mrs. Bray and Myra felt a
certain delicacy about inaugurating the use of the white cloths, the
wedding china, and the pretty bits on the safe-shelf. But when the
Peebles's visit was over, the table achieved a patterned whiteness and a
general festive appearance. Old Mrs. Bray donned the gray-and-lavender
every afternoon, and Myra bloomed out in pink print. She scarcely ever
went abroad now, but for all that, her world was infinitely widened.
Once Marvin, dangling from two spread fingers a tiny yoke, inquired
doubtfully, "Do you think it's big enough to go round his neck?"

He was always urging her to have help in, and not to tire herself out.
But curiously, he never noted the pink print any more than if it had
been dull slate. That had not been his pa's way; and it was not his way.
But he was good to her. What more could a woman ask?

After Nell came, he felt aggrieved--quite useless and in the way. The
women were always displaying things--digging them out from the bottoms
of drawers--clouds of soft, white things, with here and there a rift of
color in tassel or tufting.

There came a night when he sat alone. In the beginning, he had tried to
read--he picked up her woman's magazine, eyeing it curiously, that these
silly, floppy sheets should hold, as they did, women's e

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