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Title: The best short stories of 1918, and the yearbook of the American short story
Editor: Edward J. O'Brien
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918, AND THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY ***
*The*
*Best Short Stories*
*of 1918*
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,” ETC.
BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1918, by The Boston Transcript Company.
Copyright, 1918, by The New York Tribune, Inc.
Copyright, 1918, by The Frank A. Munsey Company, Harper & Brothers, The
Story-Press Corporation, Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., The Curtis
Publishing Company, The Atlantic Monthly Company, Charles Scribner’s
Sons, The Pictorial Review Company, The Stratford Journal, The Century
Company, and P. F. Collier & Son, Inc.
Copyright, 1919, by Achmed Abdullah, Edwina Stanton Babcock, Charles
Caldwell Dobie, George Humphrey, Arthur Johnson, Sinclair Lewis,
Harrison Rhodes, Fleta Campbell Springer, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Edward
C. Venable, Mary Heaton O’Brien, Frances Gilchrist Wood, William Dudley
Pelley, Gordon Hall Gerould, Katharine Holland Brown, Burton Kline, Mary
Mitchell Freedley, Katharine Prescott Moseley, and Julian Street.
Copyright, 1919, by Small, Maynard & Company, Inc.
TO ARTHUR JOHNSON
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,
publishers, and literary agents:
To the Editor of The All-Story Weekly, The Frank A. Munsey Company,
Harper and Brothers, The Story-Press Corporation, the Editor of The
Bookman, Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., The Curtis Publishing Company, The
Atlantic Monthly Company, Charles Scribner’s Sons, The Pictorial Review
Company, The Stratford Journal, The Century Company, P. F. Collier &
Son, Inc., Captain Achmed Abdullah, Miss Edwina Stanton Babcock, Mr.
Charles Caldwell Dobie, Mr. George Humphrey, Captain Arthur Johnson, Mr.
Sinclair Lewis, Mr. Harrison Rhodes, Mrs. Fleta Campbell Springer, Mr.
Wilbur Daniel Steele, Mr. Edward C. Venable, Mrs. Mary Heaton O’Brien,
Mrs. Frances Gilchrist Wood, Captain Gordon Hall Gerould, Miss Katharine
Holland Brown, Mr. Burton Kline, Mrs. Mary Mitchell Freedley, Miss
Katharine Prescott Moseley, Mr. Julian Street, and Mr. Paul R. Reynolds
(on behalf of Mr. William Dudley Pelley).
Acknowledgments are specially due to _The Boston Evening Transcript_ and
_The New York Tribune_ for permission to reprint the large body of
material previously published in their 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 1919 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
INTRODUCTION
THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918
A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY
CRUELTIES
BUSTER
THE OPEN WINDOW
BLIND VISION
IMAGINATION
IN MAULMAIN FEVER-WARD
THE FATHER’S HAND
THE VISIT OF THE MASTER
IN THE OPEN CODE
THE WILLOW WALK
THE STORY VINTON HEARD AT MALLORIE
THE TOAST TO FORTY-FIVE
EXTRA MEN
SOLITAIRE
THE DARK HOUR
THE BIRD OF SERBIA
AT ISHAM’S
DE VILMARTE’S LUCK
THE WHITE BATTALION
THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918
ADDRESSES OF AMERICAN MAGAZINES PUBLISHING SHORT STORIES
THE BIOGRAPHICAL ROLL OF HONOR OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
THE ROLL OF HONOR OF FOREIGN SHORT STORIES IN AMERICAN MAGAZINES
THE BEST BOOKS OF SHORT STORIES OF 1918: A CRITICAL SUMMARY
VOLUMES OF SHORT STORIES PUBLISHED, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918: AN
INDEX
THE BEST SIXTY AMERICAN SHORT STORIES
ARTICLES ON THE SHORT STORY, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918
MAGAZINE AVERAGES, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918
INDEX OF SHORT STORIES IN BOOKS, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918
INDEX OF SHORT STORIES PUBLISHED IN AMERICAN MAGAZINES, JANUARY TO
OCTOBER, 1918
_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.
INTRODUCTION
In reviewing once more the short stories published in American
periodicals during the year, it has been interesting, if partly
disappointing, to observe the effect that the war has had upon this
literary form. While I believe that this effect is not likely to be
permanent, and that the final outcome will be a stiffening of fibre, the
fact remains that the short stories published during the past ten months
show clearly that the war has numbed most writers’ imaginations. This is
true, not only of war stories, but of stories in which the war is not
directly or indirectly introduced. There has been a marked ebb this year
in the quality of the American short story. Life these days is far more
imaginative than any fiction can be, and our writers are dazed by its
forceful impact. But out of this present confusion a new literature will
surely emerge, although the experience we are gaining now will not
crystallize into art for at least ten years, and probably not for
longer. If this war is to produce American masterpieces, they will be
written by men of middle age looking back through the years’ perspective
upon the personal experience of their youth. Such work, to quote the old
formula, must be the product of “emotion remembered in tranquillity.”
Not long ago Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, the keenest of the younger critics,
was pointing out to us the value of a usable past. Such a usable past
has clearly failed us in this emergency, but the war is rapidly creating
a new one for us, if we have the vision to make use of it. During the
past four years English writers have had such a past to fall back upon,
when their minds failed before the stupendous reality of the present,
and so they have come off better than we on the whole. It was such a
usable past, to point out the most signal instance of it, that inspired
Rupert Brooke’s last sonnets, which will always stand as the perfect
relation of a noble past to an unknowable present.
But if we are to make our war experience the beginning of a usable past,
we must not sentimentalize it on the one hand, nor denaturalize it
objectively on the other. Yet that is precisely what we have been doing
for the most part, even in the better war stories of the past year. The
superb exception is Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “The Dark Hour,” published
last May in _The Atlantic Monthly_.
I can do no better than to refer the reader to Henry Seidel Canby’s two
admirable articles during the past year, in which he has developed these
points far more adequately than I can pretend to do here. In his essay,
“On a Certain Condescension Towards Fiction,” published in _The Century
Magazine_ last January, and in the companion article entitled
“Sentimental America,” published last April in _The Atlantic Monthly_,
he has diagnosed the disease and suggested the necessary cure. While I
am not a realist in my sympathies, and while the poetry of life seems to
me of more spiritual value than its prose, I cannot help agreeing with
Professor Canby that our literary failure, by reason of its
sentimentality, is rooted in a suppressed or misdirected idealism, based
on a false pragmatism of commercial prosperity, and insisting on
ignoring the facts instead of facing and conquering them.
To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the
benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and
principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the
task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary
fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists,
may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in
formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than
dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead.
What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh
living current which flows through the best 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 January to October inclusive,
1918. During the past ten 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 skilful 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. 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 between January first and October
thirty-first, 1918. 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 influence my judgment consciously for or
against a story. 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. 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.
The Yearbook for 1918 contains three new features. I have compiled an
index of all short stories published in a selected list of volumes
issued during the year; another index is devoted to critical articles on
the short story, and noteworthy reviews published in English and
American magazines and newspapers this year; and I have added exact
volume and page references to the index of short stories published in
American magazines.
As in past years it has been my pleasure and honor to associate this
annual with the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews Hallet,
and Wilbur Daniel Steele, whose stories, “Zelig,” “Making Port,” and
“Ching, Ching, Chinaman,” seemed to me respectively the best short
stories of 1915, 1916, and 1917, so it is my wish this year to dedicate
the best that I have found in the American magazines as the fruit of my
labors to Arthur Johnson, whose stories, “The Little Family,” “His New
Mortal Coil,” and “The Visit of the Master” seem to me to be among the
finest imaginative contributions to the short story made by an American
artist this year.
_Edward J. O’Brien._
_Bass River, Massachusetts_,
November 6, 1918.
THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918
A SIMPLE ACT OF PIETY
_By_ ACHMED ABDULLAH
From _The All-Story Weekly_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Frank A. Munsey Co._
_Copyright, 1919, by Achmed Abdullah._
His affair that night was prosy. He was intending the murder of an old
Spanish woman around the corner, on the Bowery, whom he had known for
years, with whom he had always exchanged courteous greetings, and whom
he neither liked nor disliked.
He did kill her; and she knew that he was going to the minute he came
into her stuffy, smelly shop, looming tall and bland, and yellow, and
unearthly Chinese from behind the shapeless bundles of second-hand goods
that cluttered the doorway. He wished her good evening in tones that
were silvery, but seemed tainted by something unnatural. She was
uncertain what it was, and this very uncertainty increased her horror.
She felt her hair rise as if drawn by a shivery wind.
At the very last she caught a glimmer of the truth in his narrow-lidded,
purple-black eyes. But it was too late.
The lean, curved knife was in his hand and across her scraggy
throat—there was a choked gurgle, a crimson line broadening to a crimson
smear, a thudding fall—and that was the end of the affair as far as she
was concerned.
――――
A minute later Nag Hong Fah walked over to the other end of Pell Street
and entered a liquor-store which belonged to the Chin Sor Company, and
was known as the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.” It
was the gathering-place for the Chinese-born members of the Nag family,
and there he occupied a seat of honor because of his wealth and charity
and stout rectitude.
He talked for about half an hour with the other members of his clan,
sipping fragrant, sun-dried Formosa tea mixed with jessamine-flowers,
until he had made for himself a bullet-proof alibi.
The alibi held.
For he is still at liberty. He is often heard to speak with regret—nor
is it hypocritical regret—about the murder of Señora Garcia, the old
Spanish woman who kept the shop around the corner. He is a good customer
of her nephew, Carlos, who succeeded to her business. Nor does he trade
there to atone, in a manner, for the red deed of his hands, but because
the goods are cheap.
He regrets nothing. To regret, you must find sin in your heart, while
the murder of Señora Garcia meant no sin to him. It was to him a simple
action, respectable, even worthy.
For he was a Chinaman, and, although it all happened between the
chocolate-brown of the Hudson and the murky, cloudy gray of the North
River, the tale is of the Orient. There is about it an atmosphere of
age-green bronze; of first-chop chandoo and spicy aloe-wood; of gilt,
carved statues brought out of India when Confucius was young; of faded
embroideries, musty with the scent of the dead centuries. An atmosphere
which is very sweet, very gentle—and very unhuman.
The Elevated roars above. The bluecoat shuffles his flat feet on the
greasy asphalt below. But still the tale is of China—and the dramatic
climax, in a Chinaman’s story, from a Chinaman’s slightly twisted angle,
differs from that of an American.
To Nag Hong Fah this climax came not with the murder of Señora Garcia,
but with Fanny Mei Hi’s laugh as she saw him with the shimmering bauble
in his hands and heard his appraisal thereof.
――――
She was his wife, married to him honorably and truly, with a narrow gold
band and a clergyman and a bouquet of wired roses bought cheaply from an
itinerant Greek vendor, and handfuls of rice thrown by facetious and
drunken members of both the yellow race and the white.
Of course, at the time of his marriage, a good many people around Pell
Street whispered and gossiped. They spoke of the curling black smoke and
slavery and other gorgeously, romantically wicked things. Miss Edith
Rutter, the social settlement investigator, spoke of—and to—the police.
Whereas Nag Hong Fah, who had both dignity and a sense of humor, invited
them all to his house: gossipers, whisperers, Miss Edith Rutter, and
Detective Bill Devoy of the Second Branch, and bade them look to their
hearts’ content; and whereas they found no opium, no sliding panels, and
hidden cupboards, no dread Mongol mysteries, but a neat little
steam-heated flat, furnished by Grand Rapids via Fourteenth Street,
German porcelain, a case of blond Milwaukee beer, a five-pound humidor
of shredded Kentucky burlap tobacco, a victrola, and a fine, big Bible
with brass clamp and edges and M. Doré’s illustrations.
“Call again,” he said as they were trooping down the narrow stairs.
“Call again any time you please. Glad to have you—aren’t we, kid?”
chucking his wife under the chin.
“You bet yer life, you fat old yellow sweetness!” agreed Fanny; and
then—as a special barbed shaft leveled at Miss Rutter’s retreating back:
“Say! Any time yer wanta lamp my wedding certificate—it’s hangin’
between the fottygraphs of the President and the Big Boss—all framed up
swell!”
――――
He had met her first one evening in a Bowery saloon, where she was
introduced to him by Mr. Brian Neill, the owner of the saloon, a
gentleman from out the County Armagh, who had spattered and muddied his
proverbial Irish chastity in the slime of the Bowery gutters, and who
called himself her uncle.
This latter statement had to be taken with a grain of salt. For Fanny
Mei Hi was not Irish. Her hair was golden, her eyes blue. But otherwise
she was Chinese. Easily nine-tenths of her. Of course she denied it. But
that is neither here nor there.
She was not a lady. Couldn’t be—don’t you see—with that mixed blood in
her veins, Mr. Brian Neill acting as her uncle, and the standing pools
of East Side vice about her.
But Nag Hong Fah, who was a poet and a philosopher, besides being the
proprietor of the Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, said that she looked
like a golden-haired goddess of evil, familiar with all the seven sins.
And he added—this to the soothsayer of his clan, Nag Hop Fat—that he did
not mind her having seven, nor seventeen, nor seven times seventeen
bundles of sin, as long as she kept them in the sacred bosom of the Nag
family.
“Yes,” said the soothsayer, throwing up a handful of painted ivory
sticks and watching how they fell to see if the omens were favorable.
“Purity is a jewel to the silly young. And you are old, honorable
cousin—”
“Indeed,” chimed in Nag Hong Fah, “I am old and fat and sluggish and
extremely wise. What price is there in purity higher than there is
contained in the happiness and contentment of a respectable citizen when
he sees men-children playing gently about his knees?”
He smiled when his younger brother, Nag Sen Yat, the opium merchant,
spoke to him of a certain Yung Quai.
“Yung Quai is beautiful,” said the opium merchant, “and young—and of an
honorable clan—and—”
“_And_ childless! _And_ in San Francisco! _And_ divorced from me!”
“But there is her older brother, Yung Long, the head of the Yung clan.
He is powerful and rich—the richest man in Pell Street! He would
consider this new marriage of yours a disgrace to his face. Chiefly
since the woman is a foreigner!”
“She is not. Only her hair and her eyes are foreign.”
“Where hair and eyes lead, the call of the blood follows,” rejoined Nag
Sen Yat, and he reiterated his warning about Yung Long.
But the other shook his head.
“Do not give wings to trouble. It flies swiftly without them,” he
quoted. “Too, the soothsayer read in the painted sticks that Fanny Mei
Hi will bear me sons. One—perhaps two. Afterward, if indeed it be so
that the drop of barbarian blood has clouded the clear mirror of her
Chinese soul, I can always take back into my household the beautiful and
honorable Yung Quai, whom I divorced and sent to California because she
is childless. She will then adopt the sons which the other woman will
bear me—and everything will be extremely satisfactory.”
And so he put on his best American suit, called on Fanny, and proposed
to her with a great deal of dignity and elaborate phrases.
――――
“Sure I’ll marry you,” said Fanny. “Sure! I’d rather be the wife of the
fattest, yellowest Chink in New York than live the sorta life I’m
livin’—see, Chinkie-Toodles?”
“Chinkie-Toodles” smiled. He looked her over approvingly. He said to
himself that doubtless the painted sticks had spoken the truth, that she
would bear him men-children. His own mother had been a river-girl,
purchased during a drought for a handful of parched grain; and had died
in the odor of sanctity, with nineteen Buddhist priests following her
gaily lacquered coffin, wagging their shaven polls ceremoniously, and
mumbling flattering and appropriate verses from “Chin-Kong-Ching.”
Fanny, on the other hand, though wickedly and lyingly insisting on her
pure white blood, knew that a Chinaman is broad-minded and free-handed,
that he makes a good husband, and beats his wife rather less often than
a white man of the corresponding scale of society.
Of course, gutter-bred, she was aggressively insistent upon her rights.
“Chinkie-Toodles,” she said the day before the wedding, and the gleam in
her eyes gave point to the words, “I’m square—see? An’ I’m goin’ to
travel square. Maybe I haven’t always been a poifec’ lady, but I ain’t
goin’ to bilk yer, get me? But—” She looked up, and suddenly, had Nag
Hong Fah known it, the arrogance, the clamorings, and the tragedy of her
mixed blood were in the words that followed: “I gotta have a dose of
freedom. I’m an American—I’m white—say!”—seeing the smile which he hid
rapidly behind his fat hand—“yer needn’t laugh. I _am_ white, an’ not a
painted Chinese doll. No sittin’ up an’ mopin’ for the retoin of my fat,
yellow lord an’ master in a stuffy, stinky, punky five-by-four cage for
me! In other woids, I resoive for my little golden-haired self the
freedom of asphalt an’ electric lights, see? An’ I’ll play square—as
long as you’ll play square,” she added under her breath.
“Sure,” he said. “You are free. Why not? I am an American. Have a
drink?” And they sealed the bargain in a tumbler of Chinese rice whisky,
cut with Bourbon, and flavored with aniseed and powdered ginger.
――――
The evening following the wedding, husband and wife, instead of a
honeymoon trip, went on an alcoholic spree amid the newly varnished
splendors of their Pell Street flat. Side by side, in spite of the
biting December cold, they leaned from the open window and brayed an
intoxicated pæan at the Elevated structure which pointed at the stars
like a gigantic icicle stood on end, frozen, austere—desolate, for all
its clank and rattle, amid the fragrant, warm reek of China which
drifted from shutters and cellar-gratings.
Nag Hong Fah, seeing Yung Long crossing the street, thought with drunken
sentimentality of Yung Long’s sister whom he had divorced because she
had borne him no children, and extended a boisterous invitation to come
up.
“Come! Have a drink!” he hiccuped.
Yung Long stopped, looked, and refused courteously, but not before he
had leveled a slow, appraising glance at the golden-haired Mei Hi, who
was shouting by the side of her obese lord. Yung Long was not a
bad-looking man, standing there in the flickering light of the
street-lamp, the black shadows cutting the pale-yellow, silky sheen of
his narrow, powerful face as clean as with a knife.
“Swell looker, that Chink!” commented Fanny Mei Hi as Yung Long walked
away; and her husband, the liquor warming his heart into generosity,
agreed:
“Sure! Swell looker! Lots of money! Let’s have another drink!”
Arrived at the sixth tumbler, Nag Hong Fah, the poet in his soul
released by alcohol, took his blushing bride upon his knee and
improvised a neat Cantonese love-ditty; but when Fanny awakened the next
morning with the sobering suspicion that she had tied herself for life
to a drunkard, she found out that her suspicion was unfounded.
The whisky spree had only been an appropriate celebration in honor of
the man-child on whom Nag Hong Fah had set his heart; and it was because
of this unborn son and the unborn son’s future that her husband rose
from his tumbled couch, bland, fat, without headache or heartache, left
the flat, and bargained for an hour with Yung Long, who was a wholesale
grocer, with warehouses in Canton, Manila, New York, San Francisco,
Seattle, and Vancouver, British Columbia.
――――
Not a word was said about either Yung Quai or Fanny. The talk dealt
entirely with canned bamboo sprouts and preserved leeches, and pickled
star-fruit, and brittle almond cakes. It was only after the price had
been decided upon and duly sealed with the right phrases and palm
touching palm—afterwards, though nothing in writing had passed, neither
party could recede from the bargain without losing face—that Yung Long
remarked, very casually:
“By the way, the terms are cash—spot cash,” and he smiled.
For he knew that the restaurant proprietor was an audacious merchant who
relied on long credits and future profits, and to whom in the past he
had always granted ninety days’ leeway without question or special
agreement.
Nag Hong Fah smiled in his turn; a slow, thin, enigmatic smile.
“I brought the cash with me,” he replied, pulling a wad of greenbacks
from his pocket, and both gentlemen looked at each other with a great
deal of mutual respect.
“Forty-seven dollars and thirty-three cents saved on the first business
of my married life,” Nag Hong Fah said to his assembled clan that night
at the Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment. “Ah, I shall
have a fine, large business to leave to the man-child which my wife
shall bear me!”
――――
And the man-child came—golden-haired, blue-eyed, yellow-skinned, and
named Brian in honor of Fanny’s apocryphal uncle who owned the Bowery
saloon. For the christening Nag Hong Fah sent out special
invitations—pink cards lettered with virulent magenta and bordered with
green forget-me-nots and purple roses; with an advertisement of the
Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace on the reverse side. He also bestowed
upon his wife a precious bracelet of cloudy white jade, earrings of
green jade cunningly inlaid with blue feathers, a chest of carved
Tibetan soapstone, a bottle of French perfume, a pound of Mandarin
blossom tea for which he paid seventeen dollars wholesale, a set of red
Chinese sables, and a new Caruso record for the victrola.
Fanny liked the last two best; chiefly the furs, which she wore through
the whirling heat of an August day, as soon as she was strong enough to
leave her couch, on an expedition to her native pavements. For she held
fast to her proclaimed right that hers was the freedom of asphalt and
electric light—not to mention the back parlor of her uncle’s saloon,
with its dingy, musty walls covered with advertisements of eminent
Kentucky distilleries and the indelible traces of many generations of
flies, with its gangrened tables, its battered cuspidors, its
commingling atmosphere of poverty and sloth, of dust and stale beer, of
cheese sandwiches, wet weeds, and cold cigars.
“Getta hell outa here!” she admonished a red-powdered bricklayer who
came staggering across the threshold of the back parlor and was trying
to encircle her waist with amatory intent. “I’m a respectable married
woman—see?” And then to Miss Ryan, the side-kick of her former riotous
spinster days, who was sitting at a corner table dipping her pretty
little up-turned nose into a foaming schooner: “Take my tip, Mamie, an’
marry a Chink! That’s the life, believe me!”
Mamie shrugged her shoulders.
“All right for you, Fan, I guess,” she replied. “But not for me.
Y’see—ye’re mostly Chink yerself—”
“I ain’t! I ain’t! I’m white—wottya mean callin’ me a Chink?” And then,
seeing signs of contrition on her friend’s face: “Never mind.
Chinkie-Toodles is good enough for me. He treats me white, all right,
all right!”
――――
Nor was this an overstatement of the actual facts.
Nag Hong Fah was good to her. He was happy in the realization of his
fatherhood, advertised every night by lusty cries which reverberated
through the narrow, rickety Pell Street house to find an echo across the
street in the liquor-store of the Chin Sor Company, where the members of
his clan predicted a shining future for father and son.
The former was prospering. The responsibilities of fatherhood had
brought an added zest and tang to his keen, bartering Mongol brain.
Where before he had squeezed the dollar, he was now squeezing the cent.
He had many a hard tussle with the rich Yung Long over the price of tea
and rice and other staples, and never did either one of them mention the
name of Yung Quai, nor that of the woman who had supplanted Yung Quai in
the restaurant-keeper’s affections.
Fanny was honest. She traveled the straight and narrow, as she put it to
herself. “Nor ain’t it any strain on my feet,” she confided to Miss
Ryan. For she was happy and contented. Life, after all, had been good to
her, had brought her prosperity and satisfaction at the hands of a fat
Chinaman, at the end of her fantastic, twisted, unclean youth; and there
were moments when, in spite of herself, she felt herself drawn into the
surge of that Mongol race which had given her nine-tenths of her blood—a
fact which formerly she had been in the habit of denying vigorously.
She laughed her happiness through the spiced, warm mazes of Chinatown,
her first-born cuddled to her breast, ready to be friends with
everybody.
It was thus that Yung Long would see her walking down Pell Street as he
sat in the carved window-seat of his store, smoking his crimson-tassled
pipe, a wandering ray of sun dancing through the window, breaking into
prismatic colors, and wreathing his pale, serene face with opal vapors.
He never failed to wave his hand in courtly greeting.
She never failed to return the civility.
Some swell looker, that Chink. But—Gawd!—she was square, all right, all
right!
――――
A year later, after Nag Hong Fah, in expectation of the happy event, had
acquired an option on a restaurant farther up-town, so that the second
son might not be slighted in favor of Brian, who was to inherit the
Great Shanghai Chop Suey Palace, Fanny sent another little cross-breed
into the reek and riot of the Pell Street world. But when Nag Hong Fah
came home that night, the nurse told him that the second-born was a
girl—something to be entered on the debit, not the credit, side of the
family ledger.
It was then that a change came into the marital relations of Mr. and
Mrs. Nag Hong Fah.
Not that the former disliked the baby daughter, called Fanny, after the
mother. Far from it. He loved her with a sort of slow, passive love, and
he could be seen on an afternoon rocking the wee bundle in his stout
arms and whispering to her crooning Cantonese fairy-lilts: all about the
god of small children whose face is a candied plum, so that the babes
like to hug and kiss him and, of course, lick his face with their little
pink tongues.
But this time there was no christening, no gorgeous magenta-lettered
invitations sent to the chosen, no happy prophecies about the future.
This time there were no precious presents of green jade and white jade
heaped on the couch of the young mother.
She noticed it. But she did not complain. She said to herself that her
husband’s new enterprise was swallowing all his cash; and one night she
asked him how the new restaurant was progressing.
“What new restaurant?” he asked blandly.
“The one up-town, Toodles—for the baby—”
Nag Hong Fah laughed carelessly.
“Oh—I gave up that option. Didn’t lose much.”
Fanny sat up straight, clutching little Fanny to her.
“You—you gave it up?” she asked. “Wottya mean—gave it up?”
Then suddenly inspired by some whisper of suspicion, her voice leaping
up extraordinarily strong: “You mean you gave it up—because—because
little Fanny is—a _goil_?”
He agreed with a smiling nod.
“To be sure! A girl is fit only to bear children and clean the household
pots.”
He said it without any brutality, without any conscious male
superiority; simply as a statement of fact. A melancholy fact,
doubtless. But a fact, unchangeable, stony.
“But—but—” Fanny’s gutter flow of words floundered in the eddy of her
amazement, her hurt pride and vanity. “I’m a woman myself—an’ I—”
“Assuredly you are a woman and you have done your duty. You have borne
me a son. Perhaps, if the omens be favorable you will bear me yet
another. But this—this girl—” He dismissed little Fanny with a wave of
his pudgy, dimpled hand as a regrettable accident, and continued,
soothingly: “She will be taken care of. Already I have written to
friends of our clan in San Francisco to arrange for a suitable disposal
when the baby has reached the right age.” He said it in his mellow,
precise English. He had learned it at a night-school, where he had been
the pride and honor of his class.
Fanny had risen. She left her couch. With a swish-swish of knitted
bed-slippers she loomed up on the ring of faint light shed by the
swinging petroleum lamp in the center of the room. She approached her
husband, the baby held close to her heart with her left hand, her right
hand aimed at Nag Hong Fah’s solid chest like a pistol. Her deep-set,
violet-blue eyes seemed to pierce through him.
But the Chinese blood in her veins—shrewd, patient—scotched the violence
of her American passion, her American sense of loudly clamoring for
right and justice and fairness. She controlled herself. The accusing
hand relaxed and fell gently on the man’s shoulder. She was fighting for
her daughter, fighting for the drop of white blood in her veins, and it
would not do to lose her temper.
“Looka here, Chinkie-Toodles,” she said. “You call yerself a Christian,
don’t yer? A Christian an’ an American. Well, have a heart. An’ some
sense! This ain’t China, Toodles. Lil Fanny ain’t goin’ to be weighed
an’ sold to some rich brother Chink at so many seeds per pound. Not
much! She’s gonna be eddycated. She’s gonna have her chance, see? She’s
gonna be independent of the male beast an’ the sorta life wot the male
beast likes to hand to a skoit. Believe me, Toodles, I know what I’m
talkin’ about!”
But he shook his stubborn head. “All has been settled,” he replied.
“Most satisfactorily settled!”
He turned to go. But she rushed up to him. She clutched his sleeve.
“Yer—yer don’t mean it? Yer can’t mean it!” she stammered.
“I do, fool!” He made a slight, weary gesture as if brushing away the
incomprehensible. “You are a woman—you do not understand—”
“Don’t I, though!”
She spoke through her teeth. Her words clicked and broke like dropping
icicles. Swiftly her passion turned into stone, and as swiftly back
again, leaping out in a great, spattering stream of abuse.
“Yer damned, yellow, stinkin’ Chink! Yer—yer—Wottya mean—makin’ me bear
children—yer own children—an’ then—” Little Fanny was beginning to howl
lustily and she covered her face with kisses. “Say, kiddie, it’s a
helluva dad you’ve drawn! A helluva dad! Look at him—standin’ there!
Greasy an’ yellow an’— Say—he’s willin’ to sell yer into slavery to some
other beast of a Chink! Say—”
“You are a—ah—a Chink yourself, fool!”
“I ain’t! I’m white—an’ square—an’ decent—an’—”
“Ah!”
He lit a cigarette and smiled placidly, and suddenly she knew that it
would be impossible to argue, to plead with him. Might as well plead
with some sardonic, deaf immensity, without nerves, without heart. And
then, womanlike, the greater wrong disappeared in the lesser.
“Ye’re right. I’m part Chink myself—an’ damned sorry for myself because
of it! An’ that’s why I know why yer gave me no presents when lil Fanny
was born. Because she’s a girl! As if that was my fault, yer fat,
sneerin’ slob, yer! Yah! That’s why yer gave me no presents—I know! I
know what it means when a Chink don’t give no presents to his wife when
she gives boith to a child! Make me lose face—that’s wottya call it,
ain’t it? An’ I thought fer a while yer was savin’ up the ducats to give
lil Fanny a start in life!
“Well, yer got another guess comin’! Yer gonna do wot I tell yer, see?
Yer gonna open up that there new restaurant up-town, an’ yer gonna give
me presents! A bracelet, that’s what I want! None o’ yer measly Chink
jade, either; but the real thing, get me? Gold an’ diamonds, see?” and
she was still talking as he, unmoved, silent, smiling, left the room and
went down the creaking stairs to find solace in the spiced cups of the
Palace of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment.
She rushed up to the window and threw it wide. She leaned far out, her
hair framing her face like a glorious, disordered aureole, her loose
robe slipping from her gleaming shoulders, her violet eyes blazing fire
and hatred.
She shouted at his fat, receding back:
“A bracelet, that’s what I want! That’s what I’m gonna get, see? Gold
an’ diamonds! Gold an’ diamonds, yer yellow pig, yer!”
It was at that moment that Yung Long passed her house. He heard, looked
up, and greeted her courteously, as was his wont. But this time he did
not go straight on his way. He looked at her for several seconds, taking
in the soft lines of her neck and shoulders, the small, pale oval of her
face with the crimson of her broad, generous mouth, the white flash of
her small, even teeth, and the blue, sombre orbit of her eyes. With the
light of the lamp shining in back, a breeze rushing in front past the
open window, the wide sleeves of her dressing-gown fluttered like
immense, rosy butterfly-wings.
Instinctively she returned his gaze. Instinctively, straight through her
rage and heartache, the old thought came to her mind:
Swell looker—that Chink!
And then, without realizing what she was doing, her lips had formed the
thought into words:
“Swell looker!”
She said it in a headlong and vehement whisper that drifted down,
through the whirling reek of Pell Street—sharp, sibilant, like a
message.
Yung Long smiled, raised his neat bowler hat, and went on his way.
――――
Night after night Fanny returned to the attack, cajoling, caressing,
threatening, cursing.
“Listen here, Chinkie-Toodles—”
But she might as well have tried to argue with the sphinx for all the
impression she made on her eternally smiling lord. He would drop his
amorphous body into a comfortable rocker, moving it up and down with the
tips of his felt-slippered feet, a cigarette hanging loosely from the
right corner of his coarse, sagging lips, a cup of lukewarm rice whisky
convenient to his elbow, and watch her as he might the gyrations of an
exotic beetle whose wings had been burned off. She amused him. But after
a while continuous repetition palled the amusement into monotony, and,
correctly Chinese, he decided to make a formal complaint to Brian
O’Neill, the Bowery saloon-keeper, who called himself her uncle.
Life, to that prodigal of Erin, was a rather sunny arrangement of small
conveniences and small, pleasant vices. He laughed in his throat and
called his “nephew” a damned, sentimental fool.
“Beat her up!” was his calm, matter-of-fact advice. “Give her a good old
hiding, an’ she’ll feed outa yer hand, me lad!”
“I have—ah—your official permission, as head of her family?”
“Sure. Wait. I’ll lend ye me blackthorn. She knows the taste of it.”
Nag Hong Fah took both advice and blackthorn. That night he gave Fanny a
severe beating and repeated the performance every night for a week until
she subsided.
Once more she became the model wife, and happiness returned to the stout
bosom of her husband. Even Miss Rutter, the social settlement
investigator, commented upon it. “Real love is a shelter of inexpugnable
peace,” she said when she saw the Nag Hong Fah family walking down Pell
Street, little Brian toddling on ahead, the baby cuddled in her mother’s
arms.
――――
Generously Nag Hong Fah overlooked his wife’s petty womanish vanities;
and when she came home one afternoon, flushed, excited, exhibiting a
shimmering bracelet that was encircling her wrist, “just imitation gold
an’ diamonds, Chinkie-Toodles!” she explained. “Bought it outa my
savings—thought yer wouldn’t mind, see? Thought it wouldn’t hurt yer
none if them Chinks hereabouts think it was the real dope an’ yer gave
it to me”—he smiled and took her upon his knee as of old.
“Yes, yes,” he said, his pudgy hand fondling the intense golden gleam of
her tresses. “It is all right. Perhaps—if you bear me another son—I
shall give you a real bracelet, real gold, real diamonds. Meanwhile you
may wear this bauble.”
As before she hugged jealously her proclaimed freedom of asphalt and
electric lights. Nor did he raise the slightest objections. He had
agreed to it at the time of their marriage and, being a righteous man,
he kept to his part of the bargain with serene punctiliousness.
Brian Neill, whom he chanced to meet one afternoon in Señora Garcia’s
second-hand emporium, told him it was all right.
“That beatin’ ye gave her didn’t do her any harm, me beloved nephew,” he
said. “She’s square. God help the lad who tries to pass a bit o’ blarney
to her.” He chuckled in remembrance of a Finnish sailor who had beaten a
sudden and undignified retreat from the back parlor into the saloon,
with a ragged scratch crimsoning his face and bitter words about the
female of the species crowding his lips. “Faith, she’s square! Sits
there with her little glass o’ gin an’ her auld chum, Mamie Ryan—an’
them two chews the rag by the hour—talkin’ about frocks an’ frills, I
doubt not—”
Of course, once in a while she would return home a little the worse for
liquor. But Nag Hong Fah, being a Chinaman, would mantle such small
shortcomings with the wide charity of his personal laxity.
“Better a drunken wife who cooks well and washes the children and keeps
her tongue between her teeth, than a sober wife who reeks with virtue
and breaks the household pots,” he said to Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer.
“Better an honorable pig than a cracked rose bottle.”
“Indeed! Better a fleet mule than a hamstrung horse,” the other wound up
the pleasant round of Oriental metaphors, and he reënforced his opinion
with a chosen and appropriate quotation from the
“Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King.”
――――
When late one night that winter, a high wind booming from the north and
washing the snow-dusted Pell Street houses with its cutting blast, Fanny
came home with a jag, a chill, and a hacking cough, and went down with
pneumonia seven hours later, Nag Hong Fah was genuinely sorry. He turned
the management of his restaurant over to his brother, Nag Sen Yat, and
sat by his wife’s bed, whispering words of encouragement, bathing her
feverish forehead, changing her sheets, administering medicine, doing
everything with fingers as soft and deft as a woman’s.
Even after the doctor had told him three nights later that the case was
hopeless and that Fanny would die—even after, as a man of constructive
and practical brain, he had excused himself for a few minutes and had
sat down in the back room to write a line to Yung Quai, his divorced
wife in San Francisco, bidding her hold herself in readiness and
including a hundred dollars for transportation—he continued to treat
Fanny Mei Hi with the utmost gentleness and patience.
Tossing on her hot pillows, she could hear him in the long watches of
the night breathing faintly, clearing his throat cautiously so as not to
disturb her; and on Monday morning—he had lifted her up and was holding
her close to help her resist the frightful, hacking cough that was
shaking her wasted frame—he told her that he had reconsidered about
little Fanny.
“You are going to die,” he said placidly, in a way, apologetically, “and
it is fitting that your daughter should make proper obeisance to your
departed spirit. A child’s devotion is best stimulated by gratitude. And
little Fanny shall be grateful to you. For she will go to a good
American school and, to pay for it, I shall sell your possessions after
you are dead. The white jade bracelet, the earrings of green jade, the
red sables—they will bring over four thousand dollars. Even this little
bauble”—he slipped the glittering bracelet from her thin wrist—“this,
too, will bring a few dollars. Ten, perhaps twelve; I know a dealer of
such trifles in Mott Street who—”
“Say!”
Her voice cut in, raucous, challenging. She had wriggled out of his
arms. An opaque glaze had come over her violet-blue eyes. Her whole body
trembled. But she pulled herself on her elbows with a terrible,
straining effort, refusing the support of his ready hands.
“Say! How much did yer say this here bracelet’s worth?”
He smiled gently. He did not want to hurt her woman’s vanity. So he
increased his first appraisal.
“Twenty dollars,” he suggested. “Perhaps twenty-one. Do not worry. It
shall be sold to the best advantage—for your little daughter—”
And then, quite suddenly, Fanny burst into laughter—gurgling laughter
that shook her body, choked her throat, and leaped out in a stream of
blood from her tortured lungs.
“Twenty dollars!” she cried, “Twenty-one! Say, you poor cheese, that
bracelet alone’ll pay for lil Fanny’s eddycation. It’s worth three
thousand! It’s real, real—gold an’ diamonds! Gold an’ diamonds! Yung
Long gave it to me, yer poor fool!” And she fell back and died, a smile
upon her face, which made her look like a sleeping child, wistful and
perverse.
――――
A day after his wife’s funeral Nag Hong Fah, having sent a ceremonious
letter, called on Yung Long in the latter’s store. In the motley,
twisted annals of Pell Street the meeting, in the course of time, has
assumed the character of something epic, something Homeric, something
almost religious. It is mentioned with pride by both the Nag and the
Yung clans; the tale of it has drifted to the Pacific Coast; and even in
far China wise men speak of it with a hush of reverence as they drift
down the river on their painted house-boats in peach-blossom time.
――――
Yung Long received his caller at the open door of his shop.
“Deign to enter first,” he said, bowing.
Nag Hong Fah bowed still lower.
“How could I dare to?” he retorted, quoting a line from the “Book of
Ceremonies and Exterior Demonstrations,” which proved that the manner is
the heart’s inner feeling.
“_Please_ deign to enter first,” Yung Long emphasized, and again the
other gave the correct reply: “How should I dare?”
Then, after a final request, still protesting, he entered as he was
bidden. The grocer followed, walked to the east side of the store and
indicated the west side to his visitor as Chinese courtesy demands.
“Deign to choose your mat,” he went on and, after several coy refusals,
Nag Hong Fah obeyed again, sat down, and smiled gently at his host.
“A pipe?” suggested the latter.
“Thanks! A simple pipe of bamboo, please, with a plain bamboo mouthpiece
and no ornaments!”
“No, no!” protested Yung Long. “You will smoke a precious pipe of jade
with a carved amber mouthpiece and crimson tassels!”
He clapped his hands, whereupon one of his young cousins entered with a
tray of nacre, supporting an opium-lamp, pipes and needles and bowls,
and horn and ivory boxes neatly arranged. A minute later the brown opium
cube was sizzling over the open flame, the jade pipe was filled and
passed to Nag Hong Fah, who inhaled the gray, acrid smoke with all the
strength of his lungs, then returned the pipe to the boy, who refilled
it and passed it to Yung Long.
For a while the two men smoked in silence—men of Pell Street, men of
lowly trade, yet men at whose back three thousand years of unbroken
racial history, racial pride, racial achievements, and racial calm, were
sitting in a solemn, graven row—thus dignified men.
Yung Long was caressing his cheek with his right hand. The dying,
crimson sunlight danced and glittered on his well-polished finger-nails.
Finally he broke the silence.
“Your wife is dead,” he said with a little mournful cadence at the end
of the sentence.
“Yes.” Nag Hong Fah inclined his head sadly; and after a short pause:
“My friend, it is indeed reasonable to think that young men are fools,
their brains hot and crimson with the blinding mists of passion, while
wisdom and calm are the splendid attributes of older men—”
“Such as—you and I?”
“Indeed!” decisively.
Yung Long raised himself on his elbows. His oblique eyes flashed a
scrutinizing look and the other winked a slow wink and remarked casually
that a wise and old man must first peer into the nature of things, then
widen his knowledge, then harden his will, then control the impulses of
his heart, then entirely correct himself—then establish good order in
his family.
“Truly spoken,” agreed Yung Long. “Truly spoken, O wise and older
brother! A family! A family needs the strength of a man and the soft
obedience of a woman.”
“Mine is dead,” sighed Nag Hong Fah. “My household is upset. My children
cry.”
Yung Long slipped a little fan from his wide silken sleeves and opened
it slowly.
“I have a sister,” he said gently, “Yung Quai, a childless woman who
once was your wife, O wise and older brother.”
“A most honorable woman!” Nag Hong Fah shut his eyes and went on: “I
wrote to her five days ago, sending her money for her railway fare to
New York.”
“Ah!” softly breathed the grocer; and there followed another silence.
Yung Long’s young cousin was kneading, against the pipe, the dark opium
cubes which the flame gradually changed into gold and amber.
“Please smoke,” advised the grocer.
Nag Hong Fah had shut his eyes completely, and his fat face, yellow as
old parchment, seemed to have grown indifferent, dull, almost sleepy.
Presently he spoke:
“Your honorable sister, Yung Quai, will make a most excellent mother for
the children of my late wife.”
“Indeed.”
There was another silence, again broken by Nag Hong Fah. His voice held
a great calmness, a gentle singsong, a bronze quality which was like the
soft rubbing of an ancient temple gong, green with the patina of the
swinging centuries.
“My friend,” he said, “there is the matter of a shimmering bracelet
given by you to my late wife—”
Yung Long looked up quickly; then down again as he saw the peaceful
expression on the other’s bland features and heard him continue:
“For a while I misunderstood. My heart was blinded. My soul was seared
with rage. I—I am ashamed to own up to it—I harbored harsh feelings
against you. Then I considered that you were the older brother of Yung
Quai and a most honorable man. I considered that in giving the bracelet
to my wife you doubtless meant to show your appreciation for me, your
friend, her husband. Am I not right?”
Yung Long had filled his lungs with another bowlful of opium smoke. He
was leaning back, both shoulders on the mat so as the better to dilate
his chest and to keep his lungs filled all the longer with the fumes of
the kindly philosophic drug.
“Yes,” he replied after a minute or two. “Your indulgent lips have
pronounced words full of harmony and reason. Only—there is yet another
trifling matter.”
“Name it. It shall be honorably solved.”
Yung Long sat up and fanned himself slowly.
“At the time when I arranged a meeting with the mother of your
children,” he said, “so as to speak to her of my respectful friendship
for you and to bestow upon her a shimmering bracelet in proof of it, I
was afraid of the wagging, leaky tongues of Pell Street. I was afraid of
scandal and gossip. I therefore met your wife in the back room of Señora
Garcia’s store, on the Bowery. Since then I have come to the conclusion
that perhaps I acted foolishly. For the foreign woman may have
misinterpreted my motives. She may talk, thus causing you as well as me
to lose face, and besmirching the departed spirit of your wife. What
sayeth the ‘Li-Ki’? ‘What is whispered in the private apartments must
not be shouted outside.’ Do you not think that this foreign woman
should—ah—”
Nag Hong Fah smiled affectionately upon the other.
“You have spoken true words, O wise and older brother,” he said rising.
“It is necessary for your and my honor, as well as for the honor of my
wife’s departed spirit, that the foreign woman should not wag her
tongue. I shall see to it to-night.” He waved a fat, deprecating hand.
“Yes—yes. I shall see to it. It is a simple act of family piety—but
otherwise without much importance.”
And he bowed, left the store, and returned to his house to get his lean
knife.
CRUELTIES
_By_ EDWINA STANTON BABCOCK
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Edwina Stanton Babcock._
The bell tinkled as Mrs. Tyarck entered the little shop. She looked
about her and smiled pityingly. The dim cases and counters were in dusty
disarray, some cards of needlework had tumbled to the floor, a drawer
showing a wrinkled jumble of tissue-paper patterns caught the last rays
of the setting sun.
“Of all the sights!” was Mrs. Tyarck’s comment. “She needs some one to
help her. She needs new taste. Them buttons, now, who’d buy ’em? They
belong to the year one.”
Scornfully the shopper eyed the shelves where were boxes of buttons
dating back to periods of red and black glass. There were transparent
buttons with lions crouching within; there were bronze buttons with
Japanese ladies smiling against gay parasols; speckled buttons with
snow, hail, and planetary disturbances occurring within their
circumscribed limits, and large mourning buttons with white lilies
drooping upon their hard surfaces. Each box had a sample button sewn on
its cover, and these sample buttons, like eyes of a bygone century,
glimmered watchfully.
Mrs. Tyarck penetrated a screen of raw-colored worsteds suspended in fat
hanks from a sort of clothes-line stretched above the counter. She
sought the proprietor of the little shop. In the back of the store,
barricaded by a hodge-podge of scattered merchandise, was a door leading
to a private room. Toward this door she directed a commanding voice:
“Frenzy! Frenzy Giddings! How long I got to wait here?”
There was an apologetic stir in the back room, the genteel click of a
spoon in a saucer, soft hurried creakings, then a bony hand pushed back
a faded curtain. Miss Frances Giddings, known among her acquaintances as
“Frenzy,” peered from the privacy of her kitchen into the uncertainties
of the shop.
“I shall be with you presently.”
When the tall figure finally emerged, her feet shuffled in
carpet-slippered indecision, her glasses glimmered irresolutely. In
another woman there might have been, out of recognition of Mrs. Tyarck’s
impatience, bustling haste and nervous despatch. In Miss Frenzy Giddings
there was merely slow, gentle concern.
“I am at a loss to explain my unreadiness,” said the punctilious,
cracked voice. “Usually on prayer-meeting nights I am, if anything, in
advance of the hour, but to-night I regret exceedingly that, without
realizing the extent of time, I became over-absorbed in the anxieties of
my garden. Now select the article you desire and I will endeavor to make
amends.”
“What ails your garden?” asked Mrs. Tyarck, carelessly adding, “I come
in for some new kitchen toweling; that last I got down to the other
store was slazy.”
Miss Frenzy, with careful inefficiency, lifted down and arranged on a
dusty counter three bolts of toweling. With deliberation as unconscious
as it was accustomed, she unwrapped the three, the cracked voice
explaining, “The perturbation to which I allude is the extraordinary
claims made upon me by rose-worms.”
Mrs. Tyarck, peering in the dim light, carefully examined the toweling.
She pulled a few threads from one bolt and, with the air of one who
protects herself against systematic fraud, proceeded ostentatiously to
chew them.
“This here toweling gone up any?” The threads of the assayed linen still
lingered on her thin lips as she decided. “If it’s the same price it
was, I’ll take two yards.” Then, returning to the question of lesser
importance, “Well, I can’t help you none with them worms until you tell
me whether they’re chewers or suckers.”
Miss Frenzy, putting on a second pair of glasses over those she
habitually wore, now essayed the project of cutting off the two yards of
toweling.
“Chewers or—er—ahem, suckers? I really cannot say. Shall you be
astonished at my negligence when I tell you that I have not yet taken
the measures to determine whether these worms are, as you so grotesquely
term them, chewers or—er—ahem, suckers?”
Mrs. Tyarck laughed sarcastically. “For Heaven’s sake, Frenzy Giddings!
it’s a wonder to me you know _anything_, the time you take with your
words! You ain’t acquainted with your own stock, I see, for here you’ve
cut me off two yards of the twenty-cent when I asked for the ten-cent.
Well, it’s your mistake, so I’ll take it as if ’t wuz what I’m payin’
for; but look here, Frenzy, you’ve no call to be wool-gatherin’ _your_
time of life.”
The rough criticism had no effect upon the native elegance of the old
shopkeeper. She smiled at Mrs. Tyarck’s outburst with an air of polite,
if detached, sympathy. Dropping her scissors, she turned to the window,
poking her head between hanging flannel nightgowns to remark:
“Pleasant weather and many taking advantage of it; were I not occupied
I, too, should promenade.”
Mrs. Tyarck meanwhile creaked about the little store on a tour of
inspection. Some especially frivolous sets of “Hair Goods” underwent her
instant repudiation. “I wear my own, thank God!” she exclaimed, adding,
“it’s good enough for Tyarck and me.” Picking up a cluster of children’s
handkerchiefs, she carried them to the window for more complete
condemnation, muttering: “Ark-animals and butterflies! Now what’s all
_that_ foolishness got to do with the nose?” As Mrs. Tyarck stood
apostrophizing the handkerchiefs there was a whir outside the store, the
toot of a claxon, a girl’s excited laugh, the flash of a scarlet jersey
and tam-o’-shanter. The two women, lowering their heads after the
furtive fashion that obtains in country districts, took the thing in.
They stared after the automobile.
“Pleasure-riding, I see,” remarked the near-sighted Miss Frenzy. “Young
folks appreciate the automobiles; the extreme velocity seems peculiarly
to gratify their fancy!”
Mrs. Tyarck pursed up her lips; she looked with narrow speculation after
the pair, her thin face hardening.
“Them two is going out to the Forked Road Supper House,” she prophesied.
“No daughter of mine wouldn’t be allowed to set foot in that place.
Well, you’re lookin’ at two of a kind. That red sweater of hern won’t
help her none.”
Miss Frenzy, now sorting change in slow pensiveness, demurred. “She is
young,” she remarked. “She entered the store recently for some scarlet
wool for that very jersey” (Miss Frenzy was at pains to avoid the word
“sweater”), “and I observed her young cheeks—quite like peaches, yes,”
insisted Miss Frenzy, sentimentally, “quite like peaches—I could wish
that she should be careful of her complexion and not ride too
extensively in the cold air.”
“There’s more to be thought of than complexions, these days,” said the
other woman, coldly. There was relentless judgment in her face, but she
went on: “Well, ’tain’t meetin’-time yet. Say I step back and take a
look at them worms ’n’ see ef there’s anything I can recommend.”
The thin figure of the shopkeeper preceding her, and Mrs. Tyarck casting
looks of disparagement on all she passed, the two took their way into
the little garden. Here, enclosed by high palings, shut away from
everything but sun and air, was Miss Frenzy’s kingdom, and here there
came a sudden change in her manner. She did not lose the careful
elegance of the polite shopkeeper, but into gesture and voice crept an
authority, the subtle sense of ownership and power invariably felt by
those who own a bit of land, who can make things grow.
“Step judiciously,” she admonished her visitor; “my cucumber-frames are
somewhat eliminated by the tall verdure: here and there I have set out
new plants. I should deplore having my arrangements disturbed.”
Mrs. Tyarck sniffed. “You and your garden!” she ejaculated; but she
resolutely made her way, eyes squinting with curiosity. Settling her
hat, whose black wing stuck out with a virtuous swagger, Mrs. Tyarck
gave herself all the married woman’s amusement over the puttering
concerns of a spinster.
Soon, however, as the two women stole farther into the dense square of
growing things, the envy of the natural flower-lover crept into her
sharp comments. “My!” she said, jealously—“my! ain’t your white duchy
doin’ good? Say, look at them gooseberries! I suspect you don’t have no
particular use for ’em?” It was said of Mrs. Tyarck that she was skilful
at paving the way for gifts of any kind. She made this last suggestion
with a hard, conscious laugh.
All around the little garden was a fence like the high fences in London
suburbs. Close against it honeysuckle poured saffron cascades, a
mulberry-tree showed the beginning of conical fruitage. Blackberry vines
sprayed white stars over a sunny bit of stone wall. Amid a patch of
feathery grasses swayed the prim carillons of canterbury-bells; soft
gaieties of sweet-williams and phlox were massed against the silvery
weather-boarding of Miss Frenzy’s kitchen. As the two women, skirts held
high, paused in front of the white-rose bush the indefatigability of the
chewers and suckers was revealed. Already thousands of young rose leaves
were eaten to the green framework. Miss Frenzy, with a sudden
exclamation, bent to a branch on which were clusters of dainty buds.
“Ah-ah! _Millions!_” she whispered. Then, tremulously defying the worms:
“_No, no, no! How dare you? Hi, hi, hi!_ there’s another! Ugh! Look
here! Mercy! See that spray!”
With every ejaculation, shudderingly emitted, the bony hand went out
like lightning, plucked something gingerly from a leaf, gave it a swift,
vindictive pinch, and abhorrently tossed it away.
“That’s right,” nodded Mrs. Tyarck. “Squeeze ’em and heave ’em—it’s
about all you can do. They’ll try to take advantage of you every time!
There’s no gratitude in worms! They ain’t pertikler. It don’t mean
nothing to them that roses is pretty or grows good. They want to eat.
Squeeze ’em and heave ’em! It’s all you can do!”
There was a distant tinkle of the store bell. Miss Frenzy, absorbed in
her daily horror, did not hear this. “Ugh! Ugh!” she was moaning. Again
the long hand went out in a capturing gesture. “There—there! I told you
so; quantities more, _quantities_! Yet last night I was under the
impression that I had disposed of the greater majority.”
Mrs. Tyarck’s attention was diverted from the rose-worms and
concentrated on the deserted shop. “I heard the bell,” warned that
accurate lady. Then, reprovingly: “Don’t you never have any one to keep
store when you’re out here? You’ll lose custom, Frenzy. What’s more, if
you ain’t careful, you’ll lose stock. Ivy Corners ain’t what it used to
be; there’s them Eastern peddlers that walks around as big as life, and
speakin’ English to fool everybody; and now, with the war and all, every
other person you see is a German spy.”
As she spoke a large form appeared in the back doorway of Miss Frenzy’s
shop and a primly dressed woman entered the garden. She had a curiously
large and blank face. She wore a mannishly made suit of slate-gray, wiry
material, and her hat had two large pins of green which, inserted in
front, glittered high on her forehead like bulbous, misplaced eyes. This
lady carried a netted catch-all distended with many knobby parcels and a
bundle of tracts. As she saw the two in the garden she stretched her
formless mouth over the white smile of recently installed porcelain, but
the long reaches of her face had no radiance. The lady was, however,
furnished with a curious catarrhal hawking which she used
parenthetically, like comment. What she now had to say she prefaced with
this juridic hawking.
“Well, there ain’t no responsibility here, I see! Store door open,
nobody around! Them two young ones of Smedge’s lookin’ in at the things,
rubbin’ their dirty hands all over the glass case, choosin’ what’s their
favorite dry-goods! All I can say is, Frenzy, that either you trust
yourself too much or you expect that Serapham and Cherabum is going to
keep store for you.”
Mrs. Tyarck turned as to a kindred spirit, remarking, with a
contemptuous wink: “Frenzy’s rose-worms is on her mind. Seems she’s
overrun with ’em.”
Mrs. Capron, the newcomer, strode up the little path to the scene of
action, but at the sharp exclamation of Miss Frenzy she halted.
“Have a care!” said the gaunt shopkeeper, authoritatively. She waved a
bony hand in ceremonious warning. “I should have warned you before,”
explained Miss Frenzy, “but the impediment in your way is my cat-trap.
It would seem that I am systematically pestered with marauding cats. The
annoyance continuing for some time, I am obliged to originate devices
that curtail their penetrations.”
Mrs. Capron, indignantly whisking her skirt away from a strange-looking
arrangement of corset steels and barrel staves connected by wires,
strode into some deep grass, then gave vent to a majestic hawk of
displeasure:
“What’s this I got on my shoes? Fly-paper? For the land’s sake! Now how
in the name of Job do I get that off?”
Mrs. Tyarck, ingratiatingly perturbed, came to the rescue of her friend;
the two wrestled with adhesive bits of paper, but certain fragments,
affected by contact, fulfilled their utmost prerogative and were not
detachable. When they were finally prevailed upon to leave the shoe of
Mrs. Capron, they stuck with surprising pertinacity to the glove of her
friend. The outcries of the two ladies were full of disgust and
criticism.
“Well, Frenzy Giddings! You need a man in here! Some one to clean up
after you. All this old paper ’n’ stuff around! It’s a wonder you don’t
get into it yourself, but then _you_ know where to step,” they said,
grudgingly.
Miss Frenzy hardly heard them; she was still peering carefully under the
leaves and around the many clusters of babyish rosebuds. “Ah-ah!” she
was still saying, shudderingly. Out went her hand with the same
abhorrent gesture. “After all my watchfulness! Another, and another!”
Mrs. Capron, indignant over this indifference to her fly-paper
discomfort, now sought recognition of the damages she had sustained:
“I dun’no’ will this plaguey stuff ever come off my mohair! Well, I’ll
never set foot in _here_ again! Say, Frenzy, I can send up one of my
boys to-morrow and he’ll clean up for you, fly-paper and all, for ten
cents.”
For a moment Miss Frenzy hesitated. She stood tall and sheltering over
the rose-bush, the little shawl thrown over her shoulders lifted in the
breeze. She looked something like a gray moth: her arms long and thin
like antennæ, her spectacled eyes, gave her a moth’s fateful look of
flutter and blindness before light and scorching flame.
“You are most kind, but”—with a discouraged sigh—“it cannot be done.”
“It can’t be done?” hawked Mrs. Capron.
Mrs. Tyarck turned a sharp look of disapproval around the little garden,
saying in a low tone, “It’s reel sloven in here; she’d ought to do
something for it.”
“Yes,” insisted Mrs. Capron, “you want cleaning up in here; that’s what.
That seedy grass! Them ragged vines! Your flowers overrun you—and that
there fly-paper—”
Miss Frenzy sought to change the subject. With an air of obstinacy that
sat curiously upon her, she directed the attention of her visitors to a
young tree shooting up in green assurance.
“My mystery,” she announced, with gentle archness. “Not planted by human
hands. Undoubtedly a seed dropped by a bird in flight. A fruit-tree, I
suspect—possibly cherry, but whether wild or of the domestic species
remains to be seen; only the fruit will solve the enigma.”
Mrs. Capron and Mrs. Tyarck regarded the little tree carelessly. “Wild,”
they pronounced as one woman, adding: “Wild cherry. When it’s big, it
will dirty your yard something fearful.”
“I had a friend,” related Mrs. Tyarck. “Her husband was a Mason. Seems
she had a wild cherry-tree into her yard and she could never lay out a
piece of light goods for bleachin’ without fear of stains, and then the
flies and the sparrers racketin’ around all summer—why, it nearly druv
her crazy!”
Miss Frenzy ignored these comments. “My mystery,” she repeated, with
reflecting eyes. “The seed dropped by a bird in flight. Only the fruit
will solve the enigma.” With an air of ceremonious explanation, Miss
Giddings turned to the two visitors. “I should acquaint you,” she
remarked in soft courtesy, “with the fact that, much as I regret the
necessity of the fly-paper, it is, as you might say, _calculated_.”
“Calculated!” With a gasp Mrs. Tyarck took off and began to polish her
glasses; she kept two hard little eyes fixed on the speaker.
Mrs. Capron forgot to hawk. “_Calculated?_”
“It is to arrest the depredations of ants,” confessed Miss Frenzy. She
looked from one to the other with great dignity, supplementing: “I have
long suffered greatly from the onslaughts of ants, both red and black.
With the fly-paper, judiciously placed, I have hoped to curtail their
activities.”
It had grown a little grayer of twilight; the two visitors, trapped as
it were within the high board enclosures, fenced all about with sweeps
of tangled vine, the pale glimmering of ghostly blossoms, felt
uncomfortable. With slow suspicion they moved away from one so frankly
the author of gin and pitfall; from one who could so calmly admit that
bits of fly-paper dribbling about her garden paths were “calculated.”
“Who was it,” whispered Mrs. Tyarck, darkly—“who was it once said that
Frenzy was sort of odd?” The two visitors moved instinctively toward a
way of exit. With one more sigh Miss Frenzy reluctantly followed them.
As they cast about in their minds for means of final reproof, she paused
at the kitchen door. There, where a rain-barrel stood under a leader,
was a bit of soap in a flower-pot saucer; seizing it, the old shopkeeper
began vigorously washing her hands.
“Five waters,” sighed Miss Frenzy—“five waters, before I can feel that
my hands are in any degree cleansed!”
The others stood watching her. Instantly they seized the opportunity.
“Well, I should think so.” Mrs. Capron hawked her superior virtue. “I’m
glad to hear you say that, Frenzy. Nice work indeed you’ve been doin’
with them hands! Murderin’ and slayin’! Why can’t you live and let live
(unless, of course, it’s rats or mosquitoes)? Now you go and get the
blood of them innercent worms on your shoulders! Why couldn’t you let
’em go on feedin’ where their Creator wanted ’em to feed?”
They looked at her.
“All them different cruelties,” they commented—“fly-paper to track them
ignorant ants onto, and that there trap for cats.... Well, you got more
spots onto your soul than soap can take off. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ it
says. Why”—this burst of feeling from Mrs. Tyarck—“why, it’s all I can
do to set foot on a spider!”
“And look at me with wasps!” exclaimed Mrs. Capron. “How many wasps I’ve
let go for their enjoyment of life, even though, for all I know, next
thing they might sting me or one of mine.”
Mrs. Capron, getting warm and virtuous, sat down in the kitchen doorway.
Opening the netted catchall, she took out therefrom a bundle of tracts.
This lady was the important local officer of many humanitarian societies
and lost no opportunity to improve the morale of her community. The
tract she selected for Miss Frenzy was of an impressive blue with the
title, “Deal Tenderly with the Humble Animals that Cannot Speak.”
“Now think of them ants,” exhorted Mrs. Capron. She looked hard at Miss
Frenzy Giddings. “Think of them thoughtless ants runnin’ onto that
fly-paper and not able to call out to the others what’s happened to
’em!”
“You’re like me,” said Mrs. Tyarck. Taking her handkerchief, she wet it
in the rain-barrel and obsequiously attempted to rub off a slight
fly-paper stickiness still on the mohair of her friend. “You’re like me.
I’m that tender-hearted I can’t even boil a lobster. I was so from a
child. Come time the kettle boils it’s Tyarck always has to put the
lobster in—me all of a tremble!”
“And flies,” suggested Mrs. Capron—“there’s a many thinks that flies has
got souls (though not the Board of Health). But even flies—look at me! I
keep sugar and molasses for ’em in their own saucer, and if they come to
their last end that way, why, they must die likin’ it, and it’s what
they chose for theirselves.”
Mrs. Capron drew the string of her netted catchall tight. She hawked,
drew her upper lip down over the lower, and buttoned up the
tight-fitting coat of mohair.
“Them cruelties of yourn will haunt you, Frenzy,” summed up both ladies;
“there’s verses in the Bible for just such things,” exclaimed the
visitors together; then they all went in, the two friends turning their
attention to Miss Giddings’s household arrangements, offering her advice
and counsel as to her clothes and the management of her kitchen range.
There were no more words about the cruelties except that that night in
the long, wandering prayer in which Mrs. Capron, as leader of the
meeting, had ample opportunity to score against any one whom she fancied
delinquent, or against whom she had a private grudge, she inserted into
her petition:
“And from all needless cruelties, keep us, O Lord. The bird that hops
onto our sill”—Mrs. Capron did not specify whether sparrow or
nightingale, but she implored fervently—“help us to remember it’s one of
Thy birds and set no snare for it, and the—er—the innercent creepin’
things mindin’ their own business and praisin’ Thee—defend ’em from our
impident croolties ... help us to live and let live and refrain from all
light-minded killin’ and irreligious trap-settin’.”
Little Johnnie Tyarck, sitting big-eared and thin-faced alongside of his
mother’s angular orisons, rubbed puzzled eyes. Johnnie wondered if Mrs.
Capron, always severe in her attitude toward boys, could possibly have
learned about those twenty-five hop-toads he had corralled in a
sewer-pipe, carefully stopping up the ends of the pipe with mud and
stones. The interned hop-toads had haunted Johnnie—and yet—and yet—
Well, there was something insolent and forthputting about hop-toads—they
breathed with their stomachs, had morose mouths, and proved themselves
crassly superfluous and useless in the general scheme. Some one, it had
seemed to Johnnie, should discipline hop-toads.
Behind Johnnie’s wispy little head was the grizzled one of Mr. Bloomby,
the ragman. Mr. Bloomby, it was understood, was invariably haled to
prayer-meeting by Mrs. Bloomby, a person of extreme virtue.
As Mrs. Capron’s prayer to be defended from cruelties proceeded, Mr.
Bloomby became rather hot under the celluloid collar he had extracted
from recent collections of rags—he wondered if it could have possibly
got round that he had once built a fire, a small but provocative fire,
under a recalcitrant mule in order to persuade the mule to draw a load
which he, Mr. Bloomby, deemed entirely adapted to the mule’s capacity.
Mr. Bloomby mentally confronted the inexperienced Supreme Being with
data as to mules and the way a mule would try to get even with you.
But there was one person on whom Mrs. Capron’s prayer made little, if
any, impression. Miss Frances Giddings bowed her sallow face into her
wobbly, gloved hand. “Five waters must I pass my hands through, O Lord,”
she prayed, “but never will I neglect Thy roses!” Into her mind swept
clouds of fresh, heavenly bloom. With a dedication to beauty that she
did not know was pagan, she lost herself in the dream of eternal
gardening.
Nevertheless, the story of Frances Giddings’s “cruelties” got about.
There was much discussion over the dark revelations made by Mrs. Capron
and Mrs. Tyarck. Morning wrappers conferred in basements; lead-wrapped
crimps met in cellars; in church there were eyeglasses that glittered
judgment. Just how was the village of Ivy Corners to look upon a person
whose backyard was full of contraptions—this one for cats, that one for
locusts; pitfalls for inquiring chickens, fly-paper for migrating ants!
Under the amazing elasticity of village imagination it was finally
evolved and told with indrawn breath that there had been cruelty like
that “in the family.” A Giddings, ancestor of Miss Frances, forgotten
till now, but revamped for especial significance, was said to have been
“dog-catcher,” and in this governmental disguise to have inflicted
incredible torments upon the stray animals of his impounding. Then came
horrified descriptions of Miss Frenzy, head tied up, a flaming wad of
newspaper on a broom, attacking the diaphanous intrenchments of
caterpillars. These recitals, all working up to an hysterical crescendo,
were pounded like so many coffin-nails in the final burial of a shy,
gentle personality. Little by little the impression grew stronger that
Miss Frenzy, though still out of jail, was both cruel and “queer,” and
between these judgments and her sensitive appreciation of them, the
tall, stooping figure was seen less and less among intimate gatherings
of Ivy Corners.
Months passed before another name came up for discussion; this time it
was the name of the girl in the scarlet cap and sweater; a poor enough
little country name; a name hardly destined for tragedy, but when the
older townswomen had finished with it, it had become a foul
thing—fouler, poor defenseless young name, than the great red-ember
names of Catherine de’ Medici or the Empress Faustine. When autumn
dragged its gritty brown leaves into the gutters of Ivy Corners this
name, too, had become nearly buried. The little scarlet coat had
vanished from the town, but every door-knob seemed to be aware of its
history, every window was alert and cold to face it down. White
curtains, carefully tied back, seemed to wait primly for the moment when
they also would be called to impress themselves upon any one who should
be so bold as to try to win their immaculate favor.
Yet one winter night when the wind-blown trees seemed to try to claw the
stars out of the sky, the girl in the scarlet coat did come back. There
was a push at Miss Frenzy’s door, the little shop bell jumped with a
scared jangle. It was almost midnight; shadows shivered under the
electric lights and the village streets were empty; a prickling drift of
snow sifted past the blue bleakness of the windows. Things were at the
relentless hour; a second desperate pull sent the store bell into a
frightened spasm.
“Who’s there?” quavered Miss Frenzy. She sat up; then, looking like a
nut-colored Persian in her strange-figured wrapper, she got out of bed
and held high the lamp that burned all night on her chair. The cold made
her gray face quiver, but she shuffled bravely into the store where the
street light still flickered its bleak question.
On the shop floor lay a figure. Its abandon had a stark quality, as if
it had been buffeted and abandoned to unappeased tortures of the
elements. The old spinster, lamp in hand, leaned shivering over it. It
was a little scrap of life’s tragedy that had blown like a dead leaf in
Miss Frenzy’s path; she was not prepared for it. “Not dead? Not dead?”
she quavered. Well, yes, it was dead. Miss Frenzy could see animation,
the thing we call “life,” but even she knew that it was dead youth, with
all its fairy powers lost, that she looked upon. She bent closely to
stricken lips that muttered a tuneless kind of song:
“_The night train.... If I go back, if I go back ..._” There was a long
silence and then the young voice chanted, deliriously, “_In Miss
Frenzy’s garden ... the fences are high ..._”
The girl’s body lay with the stamp of primal woe fixed indelibly upon
it. It was wastage in the social scheme, yet it had something of torn
petal, of wind-blown butterfly, of wings that had been frozen while
fluttering at the very center of the flower of life. Protest dragged at
Miss Frenzy’s heart.
“_Young_,” muttered the cracked voice. “_Young._” The tears tore to the
near-sighted eyes. Out of the old maid’s defeated being came the curious
sense of being true to something; of loyalty to hidden forces life had
hitherto kept her from recognizing. As she might have raised a vestal
virgin struck down by her flame she raised the piteous form. Staggering
to her deserted bed, Miss Frenzy laid the girl in its warmth. She drew
off the wrecked red clothing, she made a hot drink and got it somehow
between the locked lips. “There, there!” sobbed Miss Frenzy. She knew
that “There, there” was what mothers said to their hurt children, and
yet she was not a mother—and this—oh, this was not a child!
When at last the exhausted frame shuddered down to sleep the old
storekeeper moved away, shutting the bedroom door. She went back into
the shop and roamed restlessly hither and yon. The electric light had
gone out and dawn was stealing in. On every hand some article of woman’s
clothing interrogated her. Lace collars, immaculate in their set
pattern, swayed fastidiously from her absent touch; the cards of buttons
eyed her curiously; bolts of smooth, conventional satin ribbon conveyed
calm judgments. With a frightened look, she turned out the lamp and sat
sleepless at the store window....
All that winter Miss Frenzy held her little fort alone; her gentle face
grew sterner, her careful speech more and more stilted. To all
inquiries, curious, suave, or critical, she returned the invariable
statement:
“I have long been in need of an assistant. This young girl is bright and
willing; her friends have, most regrettably, cast her off—” A dark flush
would come into Miss Frenzy’s face as she forced herself to add: “It
appears that she has had a sad experience.... I intend to befriend her.”
An attitude like this held by a character already under the ban of local
disapproval seemed to have only one significance for the leaders of
thought in Ivy Corners. It conveyed to such leaders blatant immorality,
the countenancing of a sinner who should be made to pay the full penalty
for a misstep. Mrs. Tyarck, head held high, was theatrically outraged.
With superb ostentation she took to patronizing the “other” dry-goods
shop, where, in order to put down vice, she bought things of which she
disapproved, did not want, or already possessed duplicates. At this
store she made gloomy remarks, such as, “Ef we ain’t careful we’ll be
back ag’in in Godom and Sommarah.” No one noticed the slight inaccuracy
of pronunciation, but the angle of the wing on Mrs. Tyarck’s hat
proclaimed to the world at large the direction of her virtuous
sentiments.
Mrs. Capron, however, laid a loftier plan of attack. Entering the little
shop of an evening, she would plant herself before the counter, sigh
heavily, and produce from the knobby catch-all a tract. This she would
hand to the drooping girl in attendance, saying, solemnly, “_There is
things, young woman, as will bear thinkin’ on._” Several days later the
methodical Mrs. Capron would return with another tract, commanding, as
one in authority, “Give that to your mistaken benefactor.” She would
then hawk once with juridic deliberation, stare into the stricken young
face, and majestically depart.
But spring, which, when it brings the surge of sap in the trees, also
brings back something like kindness and pity in the withered human
heart, came to Ivy Corners with its old tender ministry, until the very
tufts of grass between the village stones had an air of escape from
confining limitations; and until the little store’s isolation was
pierced by one or two rays of human warmth. The minister’s wife called.
One or two mothers of large families invented shopping errands in order
to show some measure of interest in the young life Miss Frenzy was
helping back to usefulness and sanity. The girl’s shamed eyes, eyes that
would probably never again meet the world’s with the gaze of square
integrity, often rested like tired birds in looks of sympathy and
encouragement. Such persons as displayed these qualities, however, were
sharply disapproved by the more decided voices in village conclaves.
“There is things which has limits,” criticized Mrs. Tyarck. This lady,
in her effort to convey her idea of sustained condemnation, even went so
far as once more to enter the little shop to inquire the price of some
purple veiling hanging seductively in the window. Miss Giddings herself
waited on the shopper; the girl sat near by cutting fresh paper for the
shelves.
“I ain’t here because I’m any the less scandalized,” began Mrs. Tyarck
in a loud whisper. “Your own reputation was none too safe, Frenzy, that
you should go and get a Jezebel to keep store for you. Are you goin’ to
reduce that veilin’ any? I know it’s loud, but Tyarck always wants I
should dress young.”
Then there was short silence. The veiling was measured and cut off. Miss
Giddings wrapped up the purple net without speaking. Under her glasses
her eyes shot fire, her long face was suffused, but she spoke no word.
Mrs. Tyarck leaned over the counter, her face poked between rows of
hanging black stockings, taking on a look of bland counsel.
“It’s on account of them cruelties of yours,” she explained—continuing
with ostentatious secrecy, “you ain’t in no position to take up for this
girl, Frenzy.”
Then the whispers grew louder and louder until they were like hisses.
Mrs. Tyarck’s head darted forward like a snake’s. At last in the back of
the store the girl’s head fell forward, her weak shoulders were shaken
by helpless sobs.
The hands of the old shopkeeper fumbling with the package trembled, but
Miss Frenzy appeared outwardly calm. Before counting out change,
however, she paused, regarding the shopper musingly.
“Pardon me. Did I rightly hear you use the word ‘cruelties’?” she
questioned. To an onlooker her manner might have seemed suspiciously
tranquil.
“Yes—cruelties,” repeated the other, patronizingly. “There’s no use
denying it, Frenzy—there’s that fly-paper loomin’ up before you! There’s
them cat-traps and killin’ devices, and, as if it wasn’t bad enough,
what must you do but go and take up with a girl that the whole town says
is—”
There was a sudden curious cessation of the speaker’s words. This was
caused by a very sudden action on the part of Miss Giddings. Desperately
seizing on a pair of the hanging black stockings, she darted with
incredible swiftness around the end of the counter. With a curious sweep
of her long arms she passed the black lengths around the shopper’s
mouth, effectively muffling her.
“Cruelties!” gasped the old shopkeeper. “Cruelties indeed! You will
[gasp] be so good [gasp] as to take the word cruelties and go home and
reflect upon it.”
“Hey?” gasped Mrs. Tyarck. “Hey? Now, now, now!” Over the black gag her
eyes looked frightened and uncomprehending. She suddenly saw herself in
the grasp of the heaver and squeezer, of the chewers and suckers, and
was full of consternation. “You’ve no call to get excited, Frenzy,” she
mumbled through the cottony thicknesses of stocking; then, as she worked
her mouth out of its leash, “I’ll have the law on you, Frenzy Giddings!”
“Leave the store!” was Miss Frenzy’s sole response. She said it between
set jaws. She suddenly let go of the stockings and they dropped to the
floor. She picked up the parcel of purple veiling and cast it through
the door into the gutter. She stood, tall and withering, pointing with
inexorable finger; then, as Mrs. Tyarck, the gag removed, began to
chatter fierce intimations of reprisal the old shopkeeper’s eyes again
flashed.
“Cruelties!” repeated Miss Frenzy, dwelling scornfully upon the
word—“cruelties! Yes, I understand your reference.” She kept on pointing
to the open door. “You refer to the worms, to those creatures that ate
and defaced helpless roses; tender young things that couldn’t help
themselves.... Very well. I am still, as it were, inexorable toward
worms! So,” with a shrill, excited laugh, “I still heave them and
squeeze them. Therefore depart—worm! Leave the store!”
“_Worm?_” questioned Mrs. Tyarck, faintly. This lady had suddenly lost
all her assurance, the very upstanding wing in her hat became
spiritless. She looked aghast, puzzled. Her eyes, like those of a person
in a trance, wandered to the package of purple veiling lying outside in
the gutter, and she tried to rally. “Worm! Now look here, Frenzy
Giddings, I don’t know whether it’s assault and battery to call a person
such names, or whether it’s slander, but I tell you the law has had
people up for saying less than ‘worm.’”
“But I said ‘worm,’” repeated the old shopkeeper, firmly—“worms,
contemptible and crawling, chewers and suckers of reputations; you and
Mrs. Capron, the whole town (with lamentably few exceptions) are a nest
of small, mean, crawling, contemptible worms.... Worms, I repeat,
worms!”
“Frenzy Giddings!” whispered the shocked Mrs. Tyarck. She stood frozen
in horror under the last hissing, unsparing indictment, then turned and
fled. As she scuttled, almost whimpering, through the door she was
followed by the ceaseless, unsparing epithet, “Worm!”
The shopkeeper’s protégée found her stiff and still unyielding, bowed
over the counter, her forehead reddened with shame, her hands twisted
together in self-loathing.
“Get me some hot tea, my dear,” gasped Miss Frenzy. She still shook and
her voice was as the voice of a dying person. The fine raiment of
courtesy and punctilious speech that she had all her life worn had been
torn from her by her own fierce old hands; in her own gentle eyes she
was hopelessly degraded. Yet she smiled triumphantly at the anxious
young face of the girl as she proffered the steaming tea. “Young,”
muttered Miss Frenzy, her eyes following the movements of the other.
“Young.”
At last she roused herself and went slowly toward the door of the little
private room, the girl hurrying to assist her. She paused, took the dark
young head between her wrinkled hands, and kissed it. “I called her a
‘worm,’ my dear,” said Miss Frenzy. “It was a regrettable circumstance,
but she accused me of cruelties—cruelties?... I called her a ‘worm.’”
The old shopkeeper’s eyes twinkled. “On the whole, I am glad I did so.”
Later, when the roses came again and the two sat with their sewing in
the little garden, Miss Frenzy cheerfully remarked upon the entire
absence of rose-worms. “Without conceit,” she remarked—“without conceit,
I should be inclined to say that the Lord has endorsed my activities.”
She looked affectionately at the slender figure sewing near the
honeysuckle and called attention to the young cherry-tree shooting up in
green assurance.
“My mystery!” announced Miss Frenzy. “Not planted by human hands. The
seed doubtless dropped by a bird in flight. Whether the fruit will be
sweet or bitter is to me a matter of pleasing conjecture.”
BUSTER
_By_ KATHARINE HOLLAND BROWN
From _Scribner’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons._
_Copyright, 1919, by Katharine Holland Brown._
Lucien, Mrs. Bellamy’s impeccable chauffeur, brought me home from Mrs.
Bellamy’s bridge that green-gold summer afternoon of 1914. Looking down
from the cliff road, all Gloucester Harbor was a floor of rippled
amethyst. When we turned into the forest drive the air breathed deep of
pine fragrance, heady as new wine.
“How few people are driving to-day, Lucien! Yet it’s so perfect—”
“One driver approaches, mademoiselle.” Lucien’s solid gray shape bore
hard on the wheel. The big car swerved, shot half-way up the bank. I
screamed. Past us like a streak of white lightning tore a headlong white
monster, muffler cut out, siren whooping. Its huge wheels grazed our
hubs; with a roar, it shot round the curve, plunged down the steep grade
toward Gloucester, and vanished. Its shriek rang back to us like the
shriek of a lost soul.
“Lucien! That car must have been making eighty miles an hour!”
“Mademoiselle speaks truth.” Lucien, frankly shaken, took off his cap
and wiped a very damp brow. “It is the car of the great Doctor Lake, he
who is guest of Madame Hallowell, at Greenacres.”
“Doctor Lake! That stodgy old specialist!” I was a bit shaken myself.
“Nonsense. He never ventures out of a crawl.”
“Pardon, mademoiselle. It is the car of Doctor Lake. But at the wheel
sat not monsieur the doctor. Instead, there sat, and drove”—here Lucien
forgot himself completely—“that demon boy.”
“Buster!” I groaned. For there was only one demon boy on all Cape Ann,
and that was my second cousin Isabella O’Brien’s only son, Richard Parke
O’Brien, rechristened Buster since the days of his tempestuous infancy.
Isabella (born Sears and Brattle Street, but she ran away and married
Octavius O’Brien, descendant of an unknown race, at eighteen, and has
lived ever since in the wilds of Oklahoma)—Isabella, I say, had sent her
child to visit Aunt Charlotte and myself, while she and her Octavius
went camping in the Yosemite. From her letters we had inferred that she
needed a vacation from her Civic League work. Later, we came to realize
that her base secret aim had been to win a vacation from Buster. What we
two sedate Back Bay spinsters had endured from that unspeakable child!
Octavius O’Brien is a large, emphatic man with large, emphatic ideas as
to the rearing of children. Buster once summarized his father’s method
in a few simple words.
“Here in New England, when I want to learn how to do anything, you and
Aunt Charlotte say: ‘Dear me, Richard, wait till you grow up. Then
you’ll understand.’ Down in Oklahoma, dad just gives me a check and
says: ‘Go to it.’”
Such eclecticism bears startling fruits. The maddening thing about
Buster’s activities was that his blackest crimes, once sifted down,
proved not to be crimes at all. Merely the by-products of his inquiring
disposition. Although, to quote Aunt Charlotte, if your house is burnt
down over your head, it matters little to you whether it was fired for
malice or from a scientific desire to see how long it would take to
burn.
To-day, as we drove on, I looked back on the summer. As a rule, our
months at the shore are compact of slow and tranquil days, but this
season had fled past like a demented moving-picture film. Buster had
arrived at 9 A. M. the 8th of June. By noon he had made his presence
felt. During the next five days he took the gas-range apart, to see how
it worked, and put it together again, but inaccurately, so that it blew
up and all but annihilated a perfectly good cook. I had to raise
Louisiana’s wages three dollars a week. He drained all the water out of
the fountain pool, to see how long it would take to refill it; then, at
sight of a wayfaring organ-grinder he rushed away, to bribe the man to
open up his instrument and let him see how its harmonious innards
worked. Thus, he left nine fat, venerable goldfish to flop themselves to
a miserable end. To be sure, he sniffled audibly at dinner that night
and almost declined dessert; which didn’t bring back aunt’s beloved
Chinese carp, alas! He tried to teach Gulliver, the Leonards’ Great
Dane, to do German police-dog stunts. Gulliver, who is young, obedient,
and muddle-headed, took his training seriously to heart and made
breath-taking leaps at the Leonards’ gardener’s throat, to the up-blown
pride of both Buster and the gardener. Unhappily, he saw fit to show off
his new accomplishment on an irascible New York banker, to whom
Commodore Leonard was trying his best to sell his early Pullman place at
Beverly Farms. As Buster hotly declared, if the banker hadn’t squealed
and acted such a sissy, Gulliver would have stopped with a mere snap at
his lapel. But his cries so excited the poor pup that by the time the
horrified commodore came to his aid most of the banker’s raiment was in
tatters, to say nothing of his dignity. Commodore Leonard lost his one
chance of the year to unload that white elephant of a house. At that, he
congratulated himself because the banker didn’t sue him for damages.
Subdued and chastened, Buster took himself off to the harbor to seek
diversion among the ancient mariners who had already found in him a
stimulating audience. He spent, I judge, a pleasant afternoon. He rode
back on the Magnolia ’bus just at dinner-time. He did not return alone.
Proudly he strode up the steps, one eye cocked over his shoulder at the
bland and tarry skipper who swaggered, all too jovially, behind. Eagerly
he ran to the palsied Aunt Charlotte.
“Aunt Charlotte, this is my friend, Captain Harrigan, of the _Lottie
Foster_. The captain has come to dinner and to spend the evening, and
he’s promised to tell us all his adventures and draw the plans for my
racing yacht, when I get one, and teach me how to make her torpedo-proof
and—and everything! Cap Harrigan, meet Aunt Charlotte!”
Well, as Aunt Charlotte and I agreed later, we were bound and helpless.
The child was so brimful of glad hospitality. You couldn’t strike him in
the face by rebuffing his friend. But oh, the hours that followed! As
Louisiana put it later, the genman wasn’t plumb drunk, but he cert’ny
was happy drunk. The instant dinner was ended Aunt Charlotte fled
up-stairs, locked her door, and pushed the bureau against it. I stayed
on deck, a quaking Casabianca, till 11 P. M. Then, by way of a mild
suggestion, I turned down the lights; and Captain Harrigan, now in
mellow tears at the reminiscences of his own boyhood, kissed my hands
and took a fervent leave.
“But Richard, child! The man was intoxicated! Disgustingly intoxicated!”
“Gosh, was he? Well, he was bully and interesting, anyhow. Look at all
those sailors’ knots he’s taught me. And the story he told about
crossing the equator the first time, and the one about the admiral who
was always three sheets to the wind and wouldn’t tie his
shoe-strings—what does three sheets to the wind mean, anyhow? And he’s
showed me how to read a compass and all about sextants and transits,
too. Gee, I bet I could steer a dreadnought, after what he’s taught me
to-night.”
“He certainly was full of information. But don’t invite any more drunken
sailors to the house, dear. Bring your friends home whenever you wish,
but make sure first that they’re sober.”
“Well, I will. Though I kind o’ hate to ask ’em.”
With that I let the matter drop. You could not blame the child. Back of
every calamity that he brought upon us lay his ravenous curiosity, his
frantic longing to know how the world was made and ruled. But to-day was
different. No hunger for knowledge could warrant a boy of fifteen in
seizing the sacrosanct car of the most famous of Boston specialists, and
going joy-riding down the Gloucester hills. Buster should be seriously
rebuked.
Incidentally, I’d been playing bridge all afternoon with two stern
dowagers and one irritable maiden lady, all crack players, while I’m a
hopeless amateur. I had on a tea-rose crêpe de chine and the waitress
had spilled coffee on it. Further, I was wearing brand-new
patent-leather slippers. Yes, Buster would receive his full deserts.
Buster pranced home at dusk, afire with triumph from his crested red
head to his comically massive young feet. Pallid and grave, Aunt
Charlotte and I confronted him on the piazza.
“H’lo, Cousin Edith. Say, is dinner ready? Cracky, I could eat a whole
barbecue!”
“Richard! Where is Doctor Lake’s car?”
Buster gasped slightly, but his jauntiness never flinched.
“Over at Mrs. Hallowell’s garage, of course.”
“You have just left it there. Richard, don’t you realize what a lawless
thing you have done? To take another person’s car without permission—”
“I did too have permission!” Buster’s red crest reared. His black eyes
flamed. “I had her opened up, and was studying the engine—gee, some
peach!—and I told the doctor’s chauffeur that I’d bet him a box of
Gibraltars I could take that car clear to Doctor Lake’s Boston office
and back in two hours and not get pinched. And he said, ‘I’m from Saint
Joe, son. You gotta show me.’ So I jumped aboard, and I’d beat it down
the drive before he could say boo. And I made it in one hour and
fifty-seven minutes, though I had to waste ten minutes, and a dollar
besides, on the doctor’s mutt of a doorman—making him understand why he
must sign his name to a card saying I’d reported there at five sharp.
The big dummy, I don’t believe the real reason has dawned on him yet.
But you oughter seen that chauffeur wilt when I whizzled her in, two
minutes ago!”
“I feel wilted myself. When I think of the apologies I must make to
Doctor Lake—”
“Apologies? What for? He ought to be delighted. It was a corking speed
test for his car. Down that stem-winder cliff, let me tell you, she just
naturally hung on by her eyebrows.”
“Richard, the chauffeur did not mean to give you permission. You know
that.”
“W-Well. What if he didn’t?”
“Richard, you are inexcusable.” Aunt Charlotte ruffled her feathers and
dashed into the fray. Whereat Richard exploded.
“Gee, ain’t it fierce? Ain’t it, now! How’s a fellow to learn about cars
and engines and things if folks won’t ever give him a chance to try ’em
out? And I’ve got to find out how to do things and make things and run
things; I’ve _got_ to know!”
His solid fists clinched; his voice skittered comically from a bass
bellow to an angry treble crow. I choked. He was so exactly like a
pin-feathered young Shanghai rooster, hotly contending his right to live
his own life, against two glum, elderly hens. But that didn’t deter me
from marching him over to Madam Hallowell’s later.
“Nonsense, my dear Miss Edith!” Thus Doctor Lake, just a bit too
Olympian in large white waistcoat and eminent calm. “It was my
chauffeur’s doing. He will answer to me. I beg you, give the matter no
more thought.”
None the less, in his bland eye lurked a yearning to seize on Buster and
boil him in oil. Buster saw that look.
“Grown-up folks are so darn stingy!” he mused bitterly as we went away.
He aimed a vicious kick at the box hedge. “You’d think any man would be
glad to let a fellow take his car to pieces and study it out, then test
it for speed and endurance, ’specially when the fellow has never owned
anything better than a measly little runabout in all his life. But no.
There he stands, all diked out like a cold boiled owl, with his eyes
rolled up and his lip rolled out—‘My chauffeur will answer to me.’ When,
all the time, he’d lick the hide off me if he just dasted. Old stuffed
shirt!”
“You need not speak so disrespectfully—”
“I wouldn’t—if folks wasn’t so disrespectful to me.” His eyes began to
flash again, his sullen under-lip to quiver. “‘Learn it all,’ they tell
you. ‘Investigate every useful art.’ That’s what everybody pours down
your throat, teachers, and relations, an’ all the rest of ’em. How do
they s’pose I’m going to learn about things if they lock everything up
away from me? And I’ve got to find out about things; I’ve _got_ to
know!”
I didn’t say anything. What was the use? You might as well scold an
active young dynamo for wanting to spark. But mild little Aunt Charlotte
was quite sputtery, for her.
“Isabella and her Octavius have reared their child to have the tastes of
a common mechanic. It is too ridiculous. Richard needs to understand
problems of finance, not of cogs and axle-grease. If only American
parents would adopt the German methods! _They_ teach their children what
is best for them to know. They don’t permit their young people to waste
time and money on wild-goose flights.”
“N-no.” I shivered a little. For some reason, the annual percentage of
school-boy suicides in Prussia flashed through my mind. When you
multiplied that by a nation— “But perhaps it’s as well that we give our
boys more rope.”
“To hang themselves with?” sniffed Aunt Charlotte. I subsided.
So did Buster, for some weeks—weeks so peaceful, they were all but
sinister. Across the ocean, a harebrained student murdered a reigning
duke and his duchess. It made the newspapers very unpleasant reading for
several days. Across the harbor, the yacht-club gave the most charming
dinner dance of the year. Down East Gloucester way, a lank and
close-mouthed youth from Salem had set up a shack of a hangar and was
giving brief and gaspy flights to the summer populace at five dollars a
head. Whereat Buster gravitated to East Gloucester, as the needle to the
pole. He bribed Louisiana to give him his breakfast at seven; he
snatched a mouthful of lunch in the village; he seldom reached home
before dusk.
“Richard, you are not spending your allowance in aeroplane rides?”
“Say, listen, Cousin Edie. Where’d I get the coin for five-dollar jitney
trips? I’m overdrawn sixty dollars on my allowance now, all on account
of that beanery down the harbor—”
“The beanery? You haven’t eaten sixty dollars’ worth of beans!”
Buster jumped. He turned a sheepish red.
“Gosh, I forgot. Why—well, you see, the boss at that joint has just put
in the grandest big new oven ever—iron and cement and a steam-chamber
and everything. One day last week he had to go to Boston, and I asked
him to let me fire it for him. It was the most interesting thing, to
watch that steam-gauge hop up, only she hopped too fast. So I shut off
the drafts, but I wasn’t quick enough. There were forty-eight pounds of
beans in the roaster, and they burnt up, crocks and all, and—well,
between us, we hadn’t put enough water in the boiler. So she sort
of—er—well, she blew up. I wired dad for the money, and he came across
by return mail. Dad’s a pretty good sport. But I’ll bet he doesn’t
loosen up again before Labor Day.”
Well, I was sorry for the baker. But Buster, penniless, was far less
formidable than Buster with money in his purse.
The green and golden days flowed on. The North Shore was its loveliest.
But the newspapers persisted in being unpleasant. Serbian complications,
amazing pronunciamentos, rumors that were absurd past credence; then,
appalling, half-believed, the winged horror-tale of Belgium. Then, in a
trice, our bridge-tables were pushed back, our yacht dinners forgotten.
Frowning, angrily bewildered, we were all making hurried trips to the
village and heckling the scared young telegraph-operator with messages
and money that must be cabled to marooned kinsfolk at Liverpool or
Hamburg or Ostend. “This moment! Can’t you _see_ how important it is?” A
day or so more and we were all buying shoes and clothes for little
children and rushing our first boggled first-aid parcels to the wharf.
And, in the midst of all that dazed hurly, up rose Mrs. John B.
Connable. Aglow with panicky triumph, she flung wide the gates of Dawn
Towers, her spandy-new futurist palace, to the first bazaar of the
Belgian relief!
As one impious damsel put it, Belgium’s extremity was Mrs. Connable’s
opportunity. Seven weary years, with the grim patience of stalwart
middle age and seventeen millions, has Mrs. John B. labored to mount the
long, ice-coated stair that leads from a Montana cow-camp to the
thresholds of Beacon Hill. Six cruel seasons have beheld her falter and
slip back. But on this, the seventh, by this one soaring scramble, she
gained the topmost gliddery round. A bazaar for the Belgians? For once,
something new. And Dawn Towers, despite its two-fisted châtelaine, was
said to be a poet’s dream.
Well, we went. All of us. Even to Madam Hallowell, in lilac chiffon and
white fox fur, looking like the Wicked Fairy done by Drian; even to Aunt
Charlotte, wearing the Curtice emeralds, her sainted nose held at an
angle that suggested burnt flannel. I’ll say for Mrs. Connable that she
did it extremely well. The great, beautiful house was thrown open from
turret to foundation-stone. Fortune-tellers lurked in gilded tents; gay
contadinas sang and sold their laces—the prettiest girls from the Folies
at that; Carli’s band, brought from New York to play fox-trots;
cleverest surprise of all, the arrival, at five o’clock, of a lordly
limousine conveying three heavenborn “principals,” a haughty young
director in puttees, a large camera. Would Mrs. Connable’s guests
consent to group themselves upon the beach as background for the
garden-party scene of “The Princess Patricia”—with Angela Meadow, from
the Metropolitan, as the Princess, if you please, and Lou-Galuppi
himself as the villain?
Mrs. Connable’s guests would. All the world loves a camera, I reflected,
as I observed Madam Hallowell drift languidly to the centre-front, the
chill Cadwalladers from Westchester drape themselves unwittingly but
firmly in the foreground, the D’Arcy Joneses stand laughingly holding
hands in the very jaws of the machine. But Doctor Lake was the
strategist of the hour. Chuckling in innocent mirth, he chatted with the
radiant Angela until the director’s signal brought the villain
swaggering from the side-lines; then, gracefully dismayed, he stepped
back at least six inches. If the camera caught Angela at all, the doctor
would be there—every eminent inch of him.
“Ready—camera!”
The joyous chatter stilled. On every face fell smug sweetness, as a
chrism. Clickety-click, click-click—
Then, amazingly, another sound mingled with that magic tick, rose,
drowned it to silence—the high, snarling whine of a swift-coming
aeroplane.
“Keep your places, please! Eyes right!”
Nobody heard him. Swung as on one pivot, the garden-party turned toward
the harbor, mazed, agape. Across that silver water, flying so low its
propeller flashed through diamond spray, straight toward the crowd on
the beach it came—the aeroplane from East Gloucester.
“There, I _knew_ he’d butt in just at the wrong minute! I ordered him
for six, sharp!” Mrs. Connable’s voice rang hotly through the silence.
“Hi, there! Land farther down the beach; we ain’t ready for you. Go on,
I tell you! Oh, oh, my gracious goodness me! He’s a-headin’ right on top
of us—”
That was all anybody heard. For in that second, pandemonium broke. The
great, screaming bird drove down upon us with the speed of light, the
blast of a howitzer shell. Whir-r-rip! The big marquee collapsed like a
burst balloon. Crash! One landing-wheel grazed the band-stand; it tipped
over like a fruit-basket, spilling out shrieking men. Through a dizzy
mist I saw the garden-party, all its pose forgot, scuttle like terrified
ants. I saw the scornful Cadwalladers leap behind an infant pine. I saw
D’Arcy Jones seize his wedded wife by her buxom shoulders and fling her
in front of him, a living shield. I saw—can I believe?—the august Doctor
Lake, pop-eyed and shrieking, gallop headlong across the beach and
burrow madly in the low-tide sands. I saw—but how could my spinning
brain set down those thousand spectacles?
However, one eye saw it all—and set it down in cold, relentless
truth—the camera. True to his faith, that camera-man kept on grinding,
even when the monster all but grazed his head.
Then, swifter even than that goblin flight, it was all over. With a
deafening thud, the aeroplane grounded on a bed of early asters. Out of
the observer’s seat straddled a lean, tall shape—the aviator. From the
pilot’s sheath leaped a white-faced, stammering boy. White to his lips;
but it was the pallor of a white flame, the light of a glory past all
words.
“H’lo, Cousin Edie! See me bring her across the harbor? Some little
pilot!” Then, as if he saw for the first that gurgling multitude, the
wrecked tent, the over-turned band-stand: “Gee, that last puff of wind
was more than I’d counted on. But she landed like thistledown, just the
same. Just thistledown!”
I’ll pass over the next few hours. And why attempt to chronicle the day
that followed? Bright and early, I set forth to scatter olive-branches
like leaves of Vallombrosa. Vain to portray the icy calm of the Misses
Cadwallader, the smiling masks which hid the rage of the D’Arcy Joneses.
Hopeless to depict the bland, amused aplomb of Doctor Lake. To hear him
graciously disclaim all chagrin was to doubt the word of one’s own
vision. Could I have dreamed the swoop of that mighty bird, the screech
of a panic-stricken fat man galloping like a mad hippopotamus for the
shelter of the surf?
As for Mrs. John B. Connable—hell hath no fury like the woman who has
fought and bled for years to mount that treacherous flight; who, gaining
the last giddy step, feels, in one sick heartbeat, the ladder give way
from under. I went from that tearful and belligerent empress feeling as
one who has gazed into the dusk fires of the Seventh Ledge.
“We’ll have to give a dinner for her, and ask the Cadwalladers and
Cousin Sue Curtice and the Salem Bronsons. That will pacify her, if
anything can.” Thus Aunt Charlotte, with irate gloom. There are times
when Aunt Charlotte’s deep spiritual nature betrays a surprising grasp
of mundane things.
“Especially if we can get that French secretary, and Madam Hallowell.
Now I’m off to soothe the aviator. Where did I put my check-book?”
The aviator stood at his hangar door, winding a coil of wire. His lean
body looked feather-light in its taut khaki; under the leathern helmet,
his narrow, dark eyes glinted like the eyes of a falcon hooded against
the sun. Blank, unsmiling, he heard my maunder of explanation. Somehow
his cool aloofness daunted me a bit. But when I fumbled for my
checkbook, he flashed alive.
“Money? What for? Because the kid scraped an aileron? Forget it. I ain’t
puttin’ up any holler. He’s fetched an’ carried for me all summer. I’m
owin’ him, if it comes down to that.”
“But Richard had no right to damage your machine—”
“Well, he never meant to. That squally gust put him off tack, else he’d
’a’ brought her down smooth’s a whistle. For, take it from me, he’s a
flier born. Hand, eye, balance, feel, he’s got ’em all. And he’s patient
and speedy and cautious and reckless all at once. And he knows more
about engines than I do, this minute. There’s not a motor made that can
faze him. Say, he’s one whale of a kid, all right. If his folks would
let me, I’d take him on as flyin’ partner. Fifty-fifty at that.”
I stiffened a trifle.
“You are very kind. But such a position would hardly be fitting—”
“For a swell kid like him?” Under his helmet those keen eyes narrowed to
twin points of light. “Likely not. You rich hill folks can’t be expected
to know your own kids. You’ll send him to Harvard, then chain him up in
a solid-mahogany office, with a gang of solid-mahogany clerks to kowtow
to him, and teach him to make money. When he might be flyin’ with me.
Flyin’—with me!” His voice shook on a hoarse, exultant note. He threw
back his head; from under the leathern casque his eyes flamed out over
the world of sea and sky, his conquered province. “When he might be a
flier, the biggest flier the world has ever seen. Say, can you beat it?
_Can_ you beat it?”
His rudeness was past excuse. Yet I stood before him in the oddest
guilty silence. Finally—
“But please let me pay you. That broken strut—”
“Nothing doing, sister. Forget it.” He bent to his work. “Pay me? No
matter if my plane did get a knock, it was worth it. Just to see that
fat guy in white pants hot-foot it for deep water! Yes, I’m paid.
Good-by.”
Then, to that day of shards and ashes, add one more
recollection—Buster’s face when Aunt Charlotte laid it upon him that he
should never again enter that hangar door.
“Aunt Charlotte! For Pete’s sake, have a heart! I’ve got that plane
eatin’ out of my hand. If that plaguy cat’s-paw hadn’t sprung up—”
“You will not go to East Gloucester again, Richard. That ends it.” Aunt
Charlotte swept from the room.
“Gee!” Buster’s wide eyes filled. He slumped into the nearest chair.
“Say, Cousin Edie! Ain’t I got one friend left on earth?”
“Now, Richard—”
“Can’t you see what I’m tryin’ to put over? I don’t expect Aunt
Charlotte to see. She’s a pippin, all right, but that solid-ivory dome
of hers—”
“_Richard!_”
“But you’re different. You aren’t so awful old. You ought to understand
that a fellow just has to know about things—cars, ships, aeroplanes,
motors, everything!”
“But—”
“Now, Cousin Edith, I’m not stringin’ you. I’m dead in earnest. I’m not
tryin’ to bother anybody; I’m just tryin’ to learn what I’ve got to
learn.” He leaped up, gripped my arm; his passionate boy voice shrilled;
he was droll and pitiful and insolent all in a breath. “No, sirree, I
ain’t bluffin’, not for a cent. Believe me, Cousin Edith, us fellows
have got to learn how everything works, and learn it quick. I tell you,
we’ve _got_ to know!”
――――
Well.... All this was the summer of 1914. Three years ago. Three years
and eight months ago, to be exact. Nowadays, I don’t wear tea-rose crêpe
frocks nor slim French slippers. Our government’s daily Hints for Paris
run more to coarse blue denim and dour woollen hose and clumping rubber
boots. My once-lily hands clasp a scrubbing-brush far oftener than a
hand at bridge. And I rise at five-thirty and gulp my scalding coffee in
the hot, tight galley of Field Hospital 64, then set to work. For long
before the dawn they come, that endless string of ambulances, with their
terrible and precious freight. Then it’s baths and food and swift, tense
minutes in the tiny “theatre,” and swifter, tenser seconds when we and
the orderlies hurry through dressings and bandagings, while the senior
nurse toils like a Turk alongside and bosses us meanwhile like a
slave-driver. Every day my heart is torn open in my breast for the pain
of my children, my poor, big, helpless, broken children. Every night,
when I slip by to take a last peep at their sleepy, contented faces, my
heart is healed for me again. Then I stumble off to our half-partitioned
slit and throw myself on my bunk, tired to my last bone, happy to the
core of my soul. But day by day the work heaps up. Every cot is full,
every tent overflowing. We’re short of everything, beds, carbolic,
dressings, food. And yesterday, at dusk, when we were all fagged to
exhaustion, there streamed down a very flood of wounded, eight
ambulance-loads, harvest of a bombed munitions depot.
“We haven’t an inch of room.”
“We’ve got to make room.” Doctor Lake, sweating, dog-tired, swaying on
his feet from nine unbroken hours at the operating-table, took command.
“Take my hut; it’ll hold four at a pinch. You nurses will give up your
cubby-hole? Thought so. Plenty hot water, Octave? Bring ’em along.”
They brought them along. Every stretcher, every bunk, every crack was
crowded now. Then came the whir of a racing motor. One more ambulance
plunged up the sodden road.
“Ah! _Grand blessé!_” murmured old Octave.
“_Grand blessé!_ And not a blanket left, even. Put him in the
coal-hole,” groaned the head nurse.
“Nix on the coal-hole.” Thus the muddy young driver, hauling out the
stretcher with its long, moveless shape. “This is the candy kid—hear me?
Our crack scout. Escadrille 32.”
“Escadrille 32?” The number held no meaning for me. Yet I pushed nearer.
_Grand blessé_, indeed, that lax, pulseless body, that shattered flesh,
that blood and mire. I bent closer. Red hair, shining and thick, the red
that always goes with cinnamon freckles. A clean-cut, ashen young face,
a square jaw, a stubborn, boyish chin with a deep-cleft dimple.
Then my heart stopped short. The room whirled round me.
“Buster!” I cried out. “You naughty, darling little scamp! So you got
your way, after all. You ran off from school, and joined the
escadrille—oh, sonny-boy, don’t you hear me? Listen! Listen!”
The gaunt face did not stir. Only that ashy whiteness seemed to grow yet
whiter.
“We’ll do our best, Miss Preston. Go away now, dear.” The head nurse put
me gently back. I knew too well what her gentleness meant.
“But Doctor Lake can save him! Doctor Lake can pull him through!”
“Doctor Lake is worn out. We’ll have to manage without him.”
“Don’t you believe it!” I flamed. Then I, the greenest, meekest slavey
in the service, dashed straight to the operating-room, and gripped
Doctor Lake by both wrists and jerked him bodily off the bench where he
crouched, a sick, lubberly heap, blind with fatigue.
“No, you sha’n’t stop to rest. Not yet!” I stormed at him. Somehow I
dragged him down the ward, to my boy’s side. At sight of that deathlike
face, the limp, shivering man pulled himself together with all his weary
might.
“I’ll do my level best, Miss Edith. Go away, now, that’s a good girl.”
I went away and listened to the ambulance-driver. He was having an ugly
bullet scratch on his arm tied up. He was not a regular field-service
man, but a young Y. M. C. A. helper who had taken the place of a driver
shot down that noon.
“Well, you see, that kid took the air two hours ago to locate the
battery that’s been spilling shells into our munitions station. He
spotted it, and two others besides. Naturally, they spotted him. He
scooted for home, with a shrapnel wound in his shoulder, and made a bad
landing three miles back of the lines, and broke his leg and whacked his
head. Luckily I wasn’t a hundred yards away. I got him aboard my car and
gave him first aid and started to bring him straight over here. Would he
stand for that? Not Buddy. ‘You’ll take me to headquarters first, to
report,’ says he. ‘So let her out.’
“No use arguing. I let her out. We reported at headquarters, three miles
out of our way, then started here. Two miles back, a shell struck just
ahead and sent a rock the size of a paving-brick smack against our
engine. The car stopped, dead. Did that faze the kid? Not so you could
notice it. ‘You hoist me on the seat and let me get one hand on the
wheel,’ says he, cool’s a cucumber. ‘There isn’t a car made but will
jump through hoops for me.’ Go she did. With her engine knocked galley
west, mind you, and him propped up, chirk as a cherub, with his broken
leg and his smashed shoulder, and a knock on his head that would ’a’
stopped his clock if he’d had any brains to jolt. Skill? He drove that
car like a racer. She only hit the high places. Pluck? He wrote it.
“We weren’t fifty yards from the hospital when he crumpled down, and I
grabbed him. Hemorrhage, I guess. I sure do hope they pull him through.
But—I don’t believe—”
Soon a very dirty-faced brigadier-general, whom I used to meet at dances
long ago, came and sat down on a soap-box and held my hands and tried to
comfort me, so gently and so patiently, the poor, kind, blundering dear.
Most of his words just buzzed and glimmered round me. But one thought
stuck in my dull brain.
“This isn’t your boy’s first service to his country, Miss Edith. He has
been with the escadrille only a month, but he has brought down three
enemy planes, and his scouting has been invaluable. He’s a wonder,
anyhow. So are all our flying boys. They tell me that the German
youngsters make such good soldiers because they’re trained to follow
orders blindfold. All very well when it comes to following a bayonet
charge over the top. But the escadrille—that’s another story. Take our
boys, brought up to sail their own boats and run their own cars and
chance any fool risk in sight. Couple up that impudence, that
fearlessness, that splendid curiosity, and you’ve got a fighting-machine
that not only fights but wins. All the drilled, stolid forces in
creation can’t beat back that headlong young spirit. If—”
He halted, stammering.
“If—we can’t keep him with us, you must remember that he gave his best
to his country, and his best was a noble gift. Be very glad that you
could help your boy prepare himself to bestow it. You and his parents
gave him his outdoor life and his daring sports and his fearless
outlook, and his uncurbed initiative. You helped him build himself, mind
and body, to flawless powers and to instant decisions. To-day came his
chance to give his greatest service. No matter what comes now, you—you
have your royal memory.”
But I could not hear any more. I cried out that I didn’t want any royal
memories, I wanted my dear, bad, self-willed little boy. The general got
up then and limped away and stood and looked out of the window.
I sat and waited. I kept on waiting—minutes on gray minutes, hours on
hours.
Then a nurse grasped my shoulders, and tried to tell me something. I
heard her clearly, but I couldn’t string her words together to make
meaning. Finally, she drew me to my feet and led me back to the
operating-room.
There stood Doctor Lake. He was leaning against the wall and wiping his
face on a piece of gauze. He came straight to me and put out both big,
kind hands.
“Tell me. You needn’t try to make it easy—”
“There, there, Miss Edith. There’s nothing to tell. Look for yourself.”
Gray-lipped, whiter than ashes, straight and moveless as a young knight
in marble effigy, lay my boy. But a shadow pulse flickered in that bound
temple, the cheek I kissed was warm.
“No,” said Doctor Lake very softly. “He won’t die. He’s steel and
whipcord, that youngster. Heaven be praised, you can’t kill his sort
with a hatchet.”
He leaned down, gave Buster a long, searching look. His puffy, fagged
face twisted with bewilderment, then broke into chuckles of astonishment
and delight.
“Well, on my word and honor! I’ve just this moment recognized him. This
_blessé_ is the imp of Satan who used to steal my car up the North
Shore. He’s the chap who steered that confounded aeroplane into the
garden-party.... I’ve always sworn that, let me once lay hands on that
young scalawag, I’d lick the tar out of him!”
“Well, here’s your chance,” snivelled I.
He did not hear me. He had stooped again over Buster. Again he was
peering into that still face. Over his own face came a strange look,
mirthful, then deep with question, profoundly tender; then, flashing
through, a gleam of amazing and most piteous jealousy, the bitter, comic
jealousy of the most famous of all middle-aged American surgeons for
insolent, fool-hardy, glorious youth.
Then he turned and went away, a big, dead-tired, shambling figure. And
in that instant my boy’s heavy eyes lifted and stared at me. Slowly in
them awoke a drowsy sparkle.
“Hello, Cousin Edith. When did you blow in?”
I didn’t try to speak. I looked past him at Doctor Lake, now plodding
from the room. Buster’s eyes followed mine. Over his face came a smile
of heaven’s own light.
“Old stuffed shirt,” sighed Buster with exquisite content. He turned his
gaunt young head on the pillow; he tucked a brawny fist under his cheek.
Before I could speak he had slipped away, far on a sea of dreams.
THE OPEN WINDOW
_By_ CHARLES CALDWELL DOBIE
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Charles Caldwell Dobie._
“It happened just as I have said,” Fernet reiterated, tossing the
wine-dregs from his glass.
The company at the table looked instinctively toward the kitchen. Berthe
was bringing a fresh pot of coffee. They all followed Fernet’s example,
lifting their empty glasses for her to serve them in their turn.
The regular boarders of the Hôtel de France, after the fashion of folks
who find their meal a duty to be promptly despatched, had departed, but
the transients still lingered over their _café noir_ and cognac in the
hope that something exciting might materialize.
As the sound of Fernet’s voice died away, a man who had been sitting in
an extreme corner of the room scraped back his chair and rose. Fernet
looked up. The man was a hunchback, and, instead of paying for his meal
and leaving, he crossed over and said to Fernet, in the most perfect
French imaginable:
“I see, my young fellow, that you are discussing something of interest
with your friends here. Would it be impertinent for me to inquire into
the subject?”
Fernet drew out a chair for the newcomer, who seated himself.
“By no means. We were discussing a murder and suicide. The murdered man
was an Italian fisherman who lodged at the Hôtel des Alpes Maritimes,
the suicide was a musician named Suvaroff.”
“Ah,” said the hunchback, cracking his fingers. “Why a murder and
suicide? Why not two murders?”
“Because,” returned Fernet, pompously, “it was abundantly proved to the
contrary. This man Suvaroff suffered from neuralgia; the Italian
fisherman was given to playing the accordion at all hours of the night.
Suvaroff was, in addition, a musician—a high-strung person. The
Italian’s playing was abominable—even his landlady says as much. In
short, Suvaroff deliberately killed this simple-minded peasant because
of his music. Then, in a fit of remorse, he killed himself. I leave it
to any one here to dispute the fact. Besides, I was on the coroner’s
jury. I should know what I am talking about.”
“Oh, without doubt,” agreed the hunchback, smiling amiably. “But, as I
remember, the knives in both cases were plunged hilt-deep into the backs
of the victims. One does not usually commit suicide in this fashion.”
Fernet coldly eyed the curiously handsome face of his antagonist. “It
seems you know more about this thing than a coroner’s jury,” he sneered.
“It seems I do—granting that such an important item was left out of the
evidence.”
“Then, my good sir, will you be good enough to tell me who _did_ kill
Suvaroff, since you do not admit that he died by his own hand?”
The hunchback cracked his fingers again. “That is simple enough.
Suvaroff was killed by the same person who stabbed the Italian.”
“And who might that be, pray?”
The hunchback rose with a malignant smile. “Ah, if I told you that you
would know as much as I do, my friend.”
And with that he walked calmly over to the proprietor, put down
thirty-five cents for his meal upon the counter, and without another
word left the room.
A silence fell upon the group. Everybody stared straight ahead, avoiding
the eye of his neighbor. It was as if something too terrifying to be
remarked had passed them.
Finally, a thick-set man at Fernet’s right, with a purple wart on his
cheek, said, uneasily, “Come, I must be going.”
The others rose; only Fernet remained seated.
“What,” said another, “haven’t you finished?”
“Yes,” returned Fernet, gloomily, “but I am in no hurry.”
He sat there for an hour, alone, holding his head between his hands.
Berthe cleared off the soiled plates, wiped the oilcloth-covered tables,
began noisily to lay the pewter knives and forks for the morning meal.
At this Fernet stirred himself and, looking up at her, said:
“Tell me who was the hunchback who came and sat with us? Does he live
here—in San Francisco?”
“His name is Flavio Minetti,” she replied, setting the lid back upon an
uncovered sugar-bowl. “Beyond that I know nothing. But they tell me that
he is quite mad.”
“Ah, that accounts for many things,” said Fernet, smiling with recovered
assurance. “I must say he is strangely fascinating.”
Berthe looked at him sharply and shrugged. “For my part, he makes me
shiver every time I see him come in the door. When I serve him my hand
shakes. And he continually cracks his fingers and says to me: ‘Come,
Berthe, what can I do to make you smile? Would you laugh if I were to
dance for you? I would give half my life only to see you laughing. Why
are you so sad?’ ... No, I wish he would never come again.”
“Nevertheless, I should like to see him once more.”
“He comes always on Thursdays for chicken.”
“Thanks,” said Fernet, as he put on his hat.
――――
Fernet walked directly to his lodgings that night. He had a room in an
old-fashioned house on the east side of Telegraph Hill. The room was
shabby enough, but it caught glimpses of the bay and there was a gnarled
pepper-tree that came almost to its windows and gave Fernet a sense of
eternal, though grotesque, spring. Even his landlord was unusual—a
professional beggar who sat upon the curb, with a ridiculous French
poodle for company, and sold red and green pencils.
This landlord was sitting out by the front gate as Fernet entered.
“Ah, Pollitto,” said Fernet, halting before the old man and snapping his
fingers at the poodle who lay crouched before his master, “I see you are
enjoying this fine warm night.”
“You are wrong,” replied the beggar. “I am merely sitting here hoping
that some one will come along and rent my front room.”
“Then it is vacant?”
“Naturally,” replied the old man, with disagreeable brevity, and Fernet
walked quickly up to his room.
“Why do I live in such a place?” he asked himself, surveying the four
bare walls. “Everything about it is abominable, and that beggar,
Pollitto, is a scoundrel. I shall move next week.”
He crossed over to the window and flung it open. The pepper-tree lay
before him, crouching in the moonlight. He thought at once of Flavio
Minetti.
“He is like this pepper-tree,” he said, aloud, “beautiful even in his
deformity. No, I would not trade this pepper-tree for a dozen of the
straightest trees in the world.” He stepped back from the window, and,
lighting a lamp, set it upon a tottering walnut table. “Ah, André
Fernet,” he mused, chidingly, “you are always snared by what is unusual.
You should pray to God that such folly does not lead you to disaster.”
He went to the window and looked out again. The pepper-tree seemed to be
bending close to the ground, as if seeking to hide something. Presently
the wind parted its branches and the moonlight fell at its feet like a
silver moth before a blackened candle.
André Fernet shivered and sighed. “Yes,” he repeated, again and again,
“they are alike. They both are at once beautiful and hideous and they
have strange secrets.... Well, I shall go on Thursday again, and maybe I
shall see him. Who knows, if I am discreet he may tell me who killed
this ridiculous musician Suvaroff.”
And with that he suddenly blew out the light.
On the next Thursday night, when Fernet entered the dining-room of the
Hôtel de France his glance rested immediately upon Flavio Minetti. To
his surprise the hunchback rose, drawing a chair out as he did so, and
beckoning Fernet to be seated next him. For a moment Fernet hesitated,
Berthe was just bringing on the soup.
“What! Are you afraid?” she said, mockingly, as she passed.
This decided Fernet. He went and sat beside Minetti without further ado.
“Ah, I was expecting you!” cried the hunchback, genially, as he passed
the radishes.
“Expecting _me_?” returned Fernet. His voice trembled, though he tried
to speak boldly.
“Yes. Women are not the only inquisitive animals in the world. What will
you have—some wine?”
Fernet allowed Minetti to fill his glass.
Other boarders began to drift in. Minetti turned his back upon Fernet,
speaking to a new-comer at his left. He did not say another word all
evening.
Fernet ate and drank in silence. “What did I come for and why am I
staying?” he kept asking himself. “This man is mocking me. First of all,
he greets me as if I were his boon companion, and next he insults me
openly and before everybody in the room. Even Berthe has noticed it and
is smiling. As a matter of fact, he knows no more than I do about
Suvaroff’s death.”
But he continued to sit beside the hunchback all through the meal, and
as fruit was put on the table he touched Minetti on the arm and said,
“Will you join me in a _café royal_?”
“Not here ... a little later. I can show you a place where they really
know how to make them. And, besides, there are tables for just two. It
is much more private.”
Fernet’s heart bounded and sank almost in one leap. “Let us go now,
then,” he said, eagerly.
“As you wish,” replied Minetti.
Fernet paid for two dinners, and they reached for their hats.
“Where are you going?” asked Berthe, as she opened the door.
Fernet shrugged. “I am in his hands,” he answered, sweeping his arm
toward Minetti.
“You mean you will be,” muttered the hunchback, in an undertone.
Fernet heard him distinctly.
“Perhaps I had better leave him while there is yet time!” flashed
through his mind. But the next instant he thought, contemptuously: “What
harm can he do me? Why, his wrist is no bigger than a pullet’s wing.
Bah! You are a fool, André Fernet!”
――――
They stepped out into the street. A languorous note was in the air; the
usual cool wind from the sea had not risen. A waning moon silvered the
roof-tops, making a pretense of hiding its face in the thin line of
smoke above Telegraph Hill.
The hunchback led the way, trotting along in a fashion almost Oriental.
At the end of the second block he turned abruptly into a wine-shop;
Fernet followed. They found seats in a far corner, away from the
billiard-tables. A waiter came forward. They gave their orders.
“Be sure,” said Minetti to the waiter, “that we have plenty of anisette
and cognac in the coffee.”
The man flicked a towel rather contemptuously and made no answer.
“Now,” Minetti continued, turning a mocking face toward Fernet, “what
can I do for you, my friend?”
Fernet was filled with confusion. “I ... you ...” he stammered. “Really,
there is nothing. Believe me—”
“Nonsense,” interrupted Minetti. “You wish to know who killed Suvaroff.
But I warn you, my friend, it is a dreadful thing to share such a
secret.”
He looked at Fernet intently. The younger man shuddered. “Nevertheless,
I should like to know,” Fernet said, distinctly.
“Well, then, since you are so determined—it was I who killed him.”
Fernet stared, looked again at the hunchback’s puny wrists, and began to
laugh. “_You!_ Do you take me for a fool?” And as he said this he threw
back his head and laughed until even the billiard-players stopped their
game and looked around at him.
“What are you laughing at?” asked the hunchback, narrowing his eyes.
Fernet stopped. He felt a sudden chill as if some one had opened a door.
“I am laughing at you,” he answered.
“I am sorry for that,” said Minetti, dryly.
“Why?”
The hunchback leaned forward confidentially. “Because I kill every one
who laughs at me. It—it is a little weakness I have.”
The waiter came with two glasses of steaming coffee. He put them down on
the table, together with a bottle of cognac and a bottle of anisette.
“Ah, that is good!” cried the hunchback, rubbing his hands together.
“The proprietor is my friend. He is going to let us prepare our own
poison!”
Fernet felt himself shivering. “Come,” he thought, “this will never do!
The man is either mad or jesting.” He reached for the anisette.
“Let me pour it for you,” suggested Flavio Minetti. “Your hand is
shaking so that you will spill half of it on the floor.”
The hunchback’s voice had a note of pity in it. Fernet relinquished his
hold upon the bottle.
“Don’t look so frightened,” continued Minetti. “I shall not kill you
here. The proprietor is a friend of mine, and, besides—”
“What nonsense!” cried Fernet, with a ghastly smile. “But I must
confess, you did make my blood run cold for a minute.”
Minetti stirred some cognac into his glass. “And, besides,” he finished,
coldly, “I give everybody a sporting chance. It adds to the game.”
――――
That night André Fernet was restless. He lay on his bed looking out at
the blinking lights of the harbor. “I must stop drinking coffee,” he
muttered to himself.
Finally he fell asleep, and when he did he had a strange dream. It
seemed that the pepper-tree outside his window suddenly began to move in
the night breeze and its long green boughs became alive, twisting like
the relentless tentacles of a devil-fish. Its long green boughs became
alive, crawling along the ground, flinging themselves into the air,
creeping in at André Fernet’s open window. He lay upon the bed as he had
done earlier in the evening, watching the harbor lights. Slowly the
green boughs writhed over the faded carpet, scaled the bedpost and fell
upon the bed. André Fernet waited, motionless. He felt the green
tentacles close about his legs, clasp his hands, slide shudderingly
across his throat. Yet he made no move to free himself. It was only when
he felt a breath upon his cheek that he turned slightly, and instead of
the tentacle-like boughs of the pepper-tree he fancied himself staring
down at the hands of Flavio Minetti.... He awoke with a start. The sun
was pouring in at the open window. He got up quickly. A noisy clatter
issued from the passageway. Fernet opened his door. Two men were
carrying a trunk up the stairs. Pollitto, the beggar, walked behind.
“Ah, I see you have rented your front room,” said Fernet, stepping out.
“Yes,” returned the other. “It was taken as early as six o’clock this
morning—by a hunchback.”
Fernet stopped breathing. “A hunchback? Was his name Flavio Minetti?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
Fernet tried to smile. “He is a friend of mine,” he answered, as he
walked back into his room. “Perhaps it would be better if I moved away,”
he thought. “I do not like this room. Heaven knows why I have stayed
this long. Is this fellow Minetti really mad or merely making sport of
me? I should not like to have him think that I am afraid of him. As for
his story about Suvaroff, that is, of course, ridiculous. If I thought
otherwise I should go at once to the.... No, it is all a joke! I shall
stay where I am. I shall not have it said that a little, mad, puny,
twisted fellow frightened André Fernet out of his lodgings. Besides, it
will be curious to watch his little game. What a beautiful morning it
is, after all! And the pepper-tree—how it glistens in the sun! I should
miss that pepper-tree if I moved away. But I must stop drinking _cafés
royal_. They upset one. I do not know whether it is the coffee, or the
cognac, or the anisette, or all three. Of course, that dream I had
toward morning means nothing—but such dreams are unpleasant. I hate this
place. But I shall not move now. No, I shall wait and see what happens.”
――――
Fernet did not see Minetti for some days. Indeed, he had dismissed the
whole thing from his mind, when, one night, returning home early to get
out of a drizzle, who should stop him on the stairway but the hunchback.
“Ah, so here you are!” called out Fernet, gaily, in spite of his rapidly
beating heart. “I have been waiting for you to call on me ever since I
heard that you were lodging under the same roof.”
“I have been busy,” replied the hunchback, laconically.
Fernet threw open his bedroom door and waved Minetti in.
“Busy?” he echoed, as he struck a light. “And what do you find that is
so absorbing, pray?”
“You know my specialty,” replied Minetti, flinging off his cap.
Fernet looked up sharply. A malignant look had crept into the
hunchback’s face.
“Oh, there is no doubt of it, he is quite mad!” said Fernet to himself.
Then aloud: “Yes, I have been wanting to talk to you more about this.
Take a seat and I shall make some coffee. For instance, do you always
employ the knife in despatching your—”
“Scarcely,” interrupted Minetti, quickly. “Slow poison has its
fascinations. There is a very delicate joy in watching a gradual
decline. It is like watching a green leaf fading before the breath of
autumn. First a sickly pallor, then a yellowing, finally the sap dries
completely, a sharp wind, a fluttering in the air, and it is all over. I
have tried nearly every slow way—except mental murder. I fancy that,
too, would be exquisite.”
“Mental murder.... I do not understand.”
Minetti stretched himself out and yawned. “Accomplishing the thing
without any weapon save the mind.”
Fernet picked up the coffee-pot and laughed. “Why, my dear fellow, it is
too absurd! The thing cannot be done. You see I am laughing at you
again, but no matter.”
“No, as you say, it is no matter. You can die only once.”
Fernet’s laughter stopped instantly. He went on with his preparation for
coffee. Minetti changed the subject.
It turned out that there was no sugar in the cracked bowl. Fernet was
putting on his hat to go out for some, when the hunchback stopped him.
“Sugar will not be necessary,” he said. And as he spoke he drew a vial
from his vest pocket and laid it upon the table beside the cups. “You
know what these are, of course.”
“Saccharine pellets?” inquired Fernet as he threw aside his hat.
Minetti replied with a grunt. Fernet poured out the coffee, set a spoon
in each saucer, laid three French rolls upon a blue plate. Then he sat
down.
“Permit me!” said Minetti, reaching for the vial and rolling a tiny
pellet into his palm.
Fernet held up his cup; the hunchback dropped the pellet into it. Then
he corked the vial tightly and laid it aside.
“You forgot to serve yourself,” said Fernet.
“So I did!” answered Minetti, nonchalantly. “Well, no matter. I very
often drink my coffee so—without sweetening.”
Fernet drew back suddenly. Could it be possible that.... The hunchback
was staring at him, an ironical smile was on his lips. Fernet shuddered.
“Drink your coffee!” Minetti commanded, sneeringly. “You are on the
verge of a chill.”
Fernet obeyed meekly. He felt for all the world like an animal caught in
a trap. He tried to collect his thoughts. What had the hunchback been
talking about?
“Slow poison!” muttered Fernet, inaudibly to himself.
“What is that you are saying?” demanded the other.
“You were speaking of slow poison. How do you go about it?”
“Oh, that is easy! For instance, once in London I lodged next door to my
victim. We became capital friends. And he was always calling me in for a
bite of something to eat. Nothing elaborate—a bun and a cup of tea, or
coffee and cake. Very much as we are doing now. He died in six months.
It is no trick, you know, to poison a man who eats and drinks with
you—especially drinks!”
As he said this the hunchback reached for the coffee-pot and poured
Fernet another cupful. Then he uncorked the vial again and dropped a
pellet into the steaming liquid.
“I do not think that I wish any more,” protested Fernet.
“Nonsense! You are still shivering like an old woman with the palsy. Hot
coffee will do you good.”
“No,” said Fernet, desperately, “I never drink more than one cup at a
sitting. It keeps me awake, and next morning my hand shakes and I am fit
for nothing. I need a steady hand in my business.”
“And what may that be, pray?”
“At present I am a draftsman. Some day, if I live long enough, I hope to
be an architect.”
“If you live long enough? You forget that you have laughed at _me_, my
friend.”
Fernet tried to appear indifferent. “What a droll fellow you are!” he
cried, with sudden gaiety, rubbing his hands together. And without
thinking, he reached for his coffee-cup and downed the contents in
almost one gulp. He laid the cup aside quickly. He could feel the sweat
starting out upon his forehead.
“There, you see,” said Minetti, “the coffee has done you good already.
You are perspiring, and that is a good sign. A hot drink at the right
moment works wonders.”
――――
The next morning Pollitto stopped Fernet as he swung out the front gate
to his work.
“What is the matter with you?” exclaimed the beggar, in a surprised
tone.
“Why ... what?” demanded Fernet, in a trembling voice. “Do I look so
...? Pray, tell me, is there anything unusual about me?”
“Why, your face.... Have you looked at yourself in the glass? Your skin
is the color of stale pastry.”
Fernet tried to laugh. “It is nothing. I have been drinking too much
coffee lately. I must stop it.”
It was a fine morning. The sun was shining and the air was brisk and
full of little rippling breezes. The bay lay like a blue-green peacock
ruffling its gilded feathers. The city had a genial, smiling
countenance. But Fernet was out of humor with all this full-blown
content. He had spent a wretched night—not sleepless, but full of
disturbing dreams. Dreams about Minetti and his London neighbor and the
empty sugar-bowl. All night he had dreamed about this empty sugar-bowl.
It seemed that as soon as he had it filled Minetti would slyly empty it
again. He tried stowing sugar away in his pockets, but when he put his
hand in to draw out a lump a score or more of pellets spilled over the
floor. Then he remembered saying:
“I shall call on Minetti’s London neighbor. Maybe he will have some
sugar.”
He walked miles and miles, and finally beat upon a strange door. A man
wrapped in a black coat up to his eyebrows opened to his knock.
“Are you Flavio Minetti’s London neighbor?” he demanded, boldly.
The figure bowed. Fernet drew the cracked sugar-bowl from under his arm.
“Will you oblige me with a little sugar?” he asked, more politely.
The black-cloaked figure bowed and disappeared. Presently he came back.
Fernet took the sugar-bowl from him. It struck him that the bowl felt
very light. He looked down at his hands. The bowl had disappeared; only
a glass vial lay in his palm. He removed the cork—a dozen or more tiny
round pellets fell out. He glanced up quickly at Minetti’s London
neighbor; a dreadful smile glowed through the black cloak. Fernet gave a
cry and hurled the vial in the face of his tormentor. Minetti’s London
neighbor let the black cloak fall, and André Fernet discovered that he
was staring at himself.... He awakened soon after that and found that it
was morning.
When he brushed his hair his hand had shaken so that the brush fell
clattering to the floor. And he had spilled the cream for his morning
coffee over the faded strip of carpet before the bureau. It had ended by
his eating no breakfast at all. But he had drunk glass after glass of
cold water.
After Pollitto’s words he trembled more and more like a man with the
ague, and before every saloon-door mirror he halted and took a brief
survey of his face. Pollitto was right—his skin was dead and full of
unhealthy pallor. It was plain that he could not work in his present
condition. His trembling fingers could scarcely hold a pencil, much less
guide it through the precise demands of a drafting-board. He decided to
go to the library and read. But the books on architecture which always
enthralled him could not hold his shifting attention. Finally in despair
he went up to the librarian and said:
“Have you any books on poison?”
The woman eyed him with a cold, incurious glance.
“Historical or medical?” she snapped out, as she went on stamping
mysterious numbers in the pile of books before her.
“Both!”
She consulted a catalogue and made a list for him.
He sat all day devouring books which the librarian had recommended. He
did not even go out for lunch. He read historical and romantic instances
with a keen, morbid relish; but when it came to the medical books his
heart quickened and he followed causes and effects breathlessly. By
nightfall he had a relentless knowledge of every poison in the calendar.
He knew what to expect from arsenic or strychnine or vitriol. He learned
which poisons destroyed tissues, which acted as narcotics, which were
irritants. He identified the hemlock, the horse-chestnut, the deadly
toadstools. In short, he absorbed and retained everything on the
subject. It seemed that the world teemed with poisons; one could be sure
of nothing. Even beautiful flowers were not to be trusted.
He was so upset by all he had read that he could scarcely eat dinner. He
went to an obscure _pension_ in a wretched basement, where he was sure
he would be unknown, and, after two or three mouthfuls of soup and a
spoonful of rice boiled with tomato, he rose, paid for his meal, and
went out to tramp up and down past the tawdry shops of middle Kearny
Street. He was trotting aimlessly in the direction of Market Street when
he felt a tug at his coat-sleeve. He turned. Minetti was smiling
genially up at him.
“Come,” said the hunchback, “what is your hurry? Have you had coffee
yet? I was thinking that—”
Fernet’s heart sank at once. And yet he managed to say boldly: “I have
given up drinking coffee. You can see for yourself what a wretched
complexion I have. And to-day I have scarcely eaten.”
“Pooh!” cried Minetti. “A cup of coffee will do you good.”
Fernet began to draw away in futile terror. “No!” he protested, with
frightened vehemence. “No, I tell you! I won’t drink the stuff! It is
useless for you to—”
Minetti began to laugh with scornful good-humor. “What has come over
you?” he drawled, half-closing his eyes. “Are you afraid?”
And as he said this Fernet glanced instinctively at the puny wrists, no
bigger than a pullet’s wing, and replied, boldly:
“Afraid? Of what? I told you last night I need a steady hand in my
business, and to-day I have not been able to do any work.”
Minetti’s mirth softened into genial acquiescence. “Well, maybe you are
right. But I must say you are not very companionable. Perhaps the coffee
you have been drinking has not been made properly. You should take
_something_. You do look badly. A glass of brandy?... No?... Ah, I have
it—coffee made in the Turkish fashion. Have you ever drunk that?”
“No,” replied Fernet, helplessly, wondering all the time why he was
foolish enough to tell the truth.
“Well, then,” announced the hunchback, confidently, “we shall cross over
to Third Street and have some Turkish coffee. I know a Greek café where
they brew a cup that would tempt the Sultan himself. Have you ever seen
it made? They use coffee pounded to a fine powder—a teaspoonful to a
cup, and sugar in the same proportion. It is all put in together and
brought to a boil. The result is indescribable! Really, you are in for a
treat.”
“If it is sweetened in the making,” flashed through Fernet’s mind, “at
least we shall have no more of that pellet business.”
“Yes—the result is quite indescribable,” Minetti was repeating, “and
positively no bad effects.”
And as he said this he slipped his arm into Fernet’s and guided him with
gentle firmness toward the Greek café in question. Fernet felt suddenly
helpless and incapable of offering the slightest objection.
A girl took their orders. She had a freckled nose and was frankly Irish.
Naturally, she did not fit the picture, and Fernet could see that she
was scornful of the whole business.
“Two coffees ... medium,” Minetti repeated, decisively. “And will you
have a sweet with it? They sell taffy made of sesame seeds and honey. Or
you can have Turkish delight or a pastry dusted with powdered sugar.
Really they are all quite delicious.”
Fernet merely shrugged. Minetti ordered Turkish delight. The girl wiped
some moisture from the marble table-top and walked toward the
coffee-shelf.
“So you were not able to work to-day?” Minetti began, affably. “How did
you put in the time?”
“At the library, reading.”
“Something droll? A French novel or—”
“Books on _poison_!” Fernet shot out with venomous triumph. “I know more
than I did yesterday.”
“How distressing!” purred Minetti. “Ignorance is more invulnerable than
one fancies. Of course we are taught otherwise, but knowledge, you
remember, was the beginning of all trouble. But you choose a
fascinating, subject. Some day when we get better acquainted I shall
tell you all I know about it. Poison is such a subtle thing. It is
everywhere—in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we
eat. And it is at once swift and sluggish, painful and stupefying,
obvious and incapable of analysis. It is like a beautiful woman, or a
great joy, or love itself.”
Fernet glanced up sharply. The hunchback had slid forward in his seat
and his eyes glowed like two shaded pools catching greedily at the
yellow sunlight of midday. Fernet shuddered and looked about the room.
Groups of swarthy men were drinking coffee, or sipping faintly red
draughts of cherry syrup and sweet soda. At a near-by table a group of
six shuffled cards and marked their scores upon a slate. And, of course,
there were those who played backgammon, rattling the dice and making
exaggerated gestures as they spurred on their adversaries with genial
taunts.
The girl came back carrying cups of thick steaming coffee and soft
lemon-colored sweetmeats speared with two tiny silver forks. She set the
tray down. Minetti reached for his coffee greedily, but Fernet sat back
in his seat and allowed the waitress to place the second cup before him.
As she did so the table shook suddenly and half of the hot liquid
spilled over on the marble tabletop. Fernet jumped up to escape the
scalding trickle; the girl gave an apologetic scream; Minetti laughed
strangely.
“It is all my fault!” cried the hunchback. “What stupidity! Pray be
seated. My young woman, will you give the gentleman this coffee of mine?
And get me another.”
“Pardon me,” Fernet protested, “but I cannot think of such a thing!” And
with that he attempted to pass the coffee in question back to Minetti.
But the hunchback would have none of it. Fernet broke into a terrified
sweat.
“He has dropped poison into it!” he thought, in sudden panic. “Otherwise
why should he be so anxious to have me drink it? He kicked the table
deliberately, too. And this cup of his—why was it not spilled also? No,
he was prepared—it is all a trick!”
“Come, come, my friend,” broke in Minetti, briskly, “drink your coffee
while it is still hot! Do not wait for me. I shall be served presently.
And try the sweetmeats; they are delicious.”
“I am not hungry,” replied Fernet, sullenly.
“No? Well, what of that? Sweetmeats and coffee are not matters of
hunger. Really, you are more droll than you imagine!” Minetti burst into
a terrifying laugh.
“He thinks I am afraid!” muttered Fernet.
And out of sheer bravado he lifted the cup to his lips. Minetti stopped
laughing, but a wide smile replaced his diabolical mirth. The girl
brought fresh coffee to the hunchback. He sipped it with frank
enjoyment, but he did not once take his gaze from Fernet’s pale face.
“Well,” thought Fernet, “one cup of poison more or less will not kill
me.... It is not as if he has made up his mind to finish me at once. He
is counting on the exquisite joys of a prolonged agony.” And he
remembered Minetti’s words: “It is like watching a green leaf fading
before the breath of autumn. First a sickly pallor, then a yellowing, a
sharp wind, a fluttering in the air....” He tossed off the coffee in one
defiant gulp. “He thinks that he has me in his power. But André Fernet
is not quite a fool. I shall go away to-morrow!”
――――
They went home as soon as Minetti finished his coffee. Fernet felt a
sudden nausea; by the time he reached his lodgings his steps were
unsteady and his head reeled. Minetti was kindness itself.
“Let me help you into bed,” he insisted. “You must have a congestion.
Presently I shall heat some water and give you a hot gin.”
Fernet was too sick to protest. Minetti started the gas-stove and filled
the kettle and went into his room for gin. Fernet dragged himself out of
his clothes and crawled in between the sheets. Minetti came back. Fernet
lay with his eyes half-closed, shivering. Finally the water boiled, and
the hunchback brought Fernet a huge tumbler of gin and water with bits
of lemon-peel and cloves floating in it. It tasted so good that Fernet
forgot his terror for the moment. But when the tumbler was empty he felt
helpless; he could scarcely lift his arms; so he lay flat upon his back,
staring up at the ceiling. He tried to recall scraps of what he had been
reading all afternoon. What was the name of the poison that left one
paralyzed? He could not remember. He found his movements becoming more
and more difficult; he could scarcely turn in bed. Minetti brewed
another toddy. Fernet could not hold the glass! He tried to push the
tumbler away from his lips, but his efforts were useless. Minetti
hovered above him with a bland, gentle smile, and Fernet felt the warm
liquid trickling into his mouth and down his throat. In the midst of all
this he lost consciousness.... Once or twice during the night Fernet had
a wakeful interlude. Whenever he opened his eyes he saw Minetti sitting
before the open window, gazing down at the twisted pepper-tree.
“Yes, they are both alike!” passed dimly through his mind. “They both
are at once beautiful and hideous and they have strange secrets! It is
no use, I must go away—to-morrow.”
In the morning Minetti was standing by the bed. “I have sent for the
doctor,” he said. But his voice sounded far away.
――――
The doctor came shortly after ten o’clock. He was a little wizened,
dried-up old man with a profound air.
“He is a fraud!” thought Fernet. “He knows nothing!”
“Ah,” said the doctor, putting a sly finger against his sharp nose, “our
friend here has a nervous collapse. He should have a nurse!”
“A nurse!” exclaimed Minetti, with indignation. “And, pray, what do you
call me? Do you not think that—”
“Well, we shall see! we shall see!” replied the doctor, rubbing his
hands together. “But he will need all sorts of delicacies and—”
Minetti moistened his lips with sleek satisfaction. “You cannot name a
dish that I am not able to prepare.”
“How about a custard? To-day he should eat something light.”
“A custard is simplicity itself,” answered the hunchback, and he cracked
his fingers.
Minetti went out with the doctor, and came back shortly, carrying eggs
and a bottle of vanilla extract and sugar. Fernet lay helpless, watching
him bustling about. Finally the delicacy was made and set away in a pan
of water to cool. At noon Minetti brought a blue bowl filled with
custard to the bedside. It looked inviting, but Fernet shook his head.
“I am not hungry,” he lied.
The hunchback set the bowl down on a chair so that Fernet gazed upon it
all day. The hunchback did not leave the room. He sat before the open
window, reading from a thick book. Toward nightfall Fernet said to him:
“What do you find so interesting?”
Minetti darted a sardonic glance at his patient. “A book on _poison_. I
did not realize that I had grown so rusty on the subject. Why, I
remember scarcely enough to poison a field-mouse!”
He rose and crossed over to the bedside. “Do you not feel ready for the
custard?”
Fernet cast a longing eye upon the yellow contents of the blue bowl.
“No. To tell the truth, I never eat it.”
Minetti shrugged.
“But I should like a glass of water.”
The hunchback drew water from the faucet. Fernet watched him like a
ferret.
“At least,” thought Fernet, “he cannot drop poison in the water
secretly. It is well that I can see every move he makes at such a time.
I should not like to die of thirst.”
A little later Minetti removed the bowl and threw out its contents.
Fernet looked on with half-closed eyes.
“What better proof could I have?” he mused. “If the custard were
harmless he would eat it himself. I must get away to-morrow.”
But the next day he felt weaker than ever, and when the doctor came
Minetti said, in answer to questions:
“I made a delicious custard yesterday and he ate every bit.... An oyster
stew? ... with milk? I shall see that he has it at noon.”
“God help me!” muttered Fernet. “Why does he lie like this? I must get
the doctor’s ear and tell him how things stand. I shall eat
nothing—nothing! Thank Heaven I can drink water without fear.”
At noon the oyster stew was ready. But Fernet would have none of it.
“Oysters make me ill!” he said.
Minetti merely shrugged as he had done the previous day, and set the
savory dish upon a chair before the bed. It exuded tantalizing odors,
until Fernet thought he would go mad with longing. Toward evening
Minetti threw out the stew. And as before, when the doctor called the
hunchback said:
“He ate a quart of stew and there were plenty of oysters in it, I can
tell you. Do you think that a chicken fried in olive-oil would be too
hearty?”
Fernet groaned. “This is horrible—horrible!” he wept to himself. “I
shall die like a starving rat with toasted cheese dangling just beyond
reach. God help me to rouse myself! Surely the effects of the poison he
has given me must soon wear off.... There he is, reading from that big
book again. Perhaps he is contriving a way to put poison in my water
even though I am able to watch him when he draws me a drink....
Poison—poison everywhere. It can even be administered with the prick of
a needle. Why did I read about it? Chicken fried in olive-oil ... what
torture!”
――――
The chicken fried in olive-oil was a triumph—Fernet knew all this by the
wisps of appetizing fragrance which drifted from the sizzling pan.
Minetti made a great stir over the preparations. The tender flesh had to
be rubbed thoroughly with garlic and well dusted with salt and pepper.
And a quarter of a bottle of yellow-green olive-oil was first placed in
the pan. When everything was ready and the chicken cooked to a turn,
Minetti carried it to Fernet with a great flourish. Fernet gritted his
teeth and turned his face away. He did not have the courage to invent an
excuse. Minetti laid it on the chair as usual. For two hours Fernet was
tortured with the sight of this tempting morsel, but at the sound of the
doctor’s step upon the stair the hunchback whisked away the chicken.
“His appetite?” Minetti said, echoing the doctor’s query. “Why, one
could not wish for better! Only this morning he despatched a chicken as
if it had been no more than a soft-boiled egg. As a matter of fact, he
is always hungry.”
“Well, well,” beamed the doctor, “that is the best of signs, and it
happens that way very often in nervous cases. You are a capital nurse,
my good man, and by the end of the week, if you keep feeding him up in
this fashion, he should be as hearty as a school-boy.”
At that moment Minetti was called down-stairs by his landlord. Fernet
struggled to lift himself; the doctor bent toward him.
“This hunchback,” Fernet gasped, “he is trying to poison me. Already I
have drunk four or five of his concoctions, and that is why I am in this
condition ... helpless. And he is lying when he says that I have eaten.
I have touched nothing for three days.”
The doctor laid the patient back upon the pillow.
“Poison you, my friend? And for what reason?”
“Because I laughed at him. In God’s name, Doctor, see that you keep a
straight face in his presence or else—”
The doctor patted Fernet’s hand and straightened the sliding bedclothes.
By this time Minetti had come back. The doctor and the hunchback
whispered together in a far corner. Minetti laughed and tapped his head.
At the door Fernet heard the doctor say:
“Just keep up the good work and the idea will pass. It happens that way
very often in nervous cases. I shall not look in again until the first
of next week unless....”
Fernet groaned aloud.
“I must get away to-morrow.... I must get away to-morrow!” he kept on
repeating.
――――
By the end of the week the smell of food held no temptations for Fernet.
Minetti stopped cooking. And when a glass of water was drawn from the
faucet Fernet had difficulty in forcing his vision to answer the strain
of a searching gaze.
“When my sight fails me,” Fernet thought, dimly, “I shall either die of
thirst or take the consequences.”
When the doctor finally came again Fernet closed his eyes and pretended
to be asleep.
“He seems thinner,” remarked the doctor, as if he had made an important
discovery.
“Well, to tell the truth,” replied the hunchback, “he has lost his
appetite. I have fed him milk and eggs, but—”
“There is nothing to do but be patient,” said the doctor. “Medicine will
do him no good. Just rest and food. Even a little starvation will not
hurt him. People eat too much, anyway.”
At this Fernet opened his eyes and broke into a laugh that startled even
Minetti. The doctor looked offended.
“Well, he is in your hands,” the old fraud said, pompously, to the
hunchback. “Just keep up the good work—”
Fernet laughed again.
“He is hysterical,” proclaimed the doctor, with an air of supreme
wisdom. “It happens that way very often in nervous cases.”
And he walked out with great solemnity.
“Ah, I have offended him!” thought Fernet. “Well, now they will finish
me—_together_!”
――――
There followed days of delicious weakness. Fernet lay for the most part
wrapt in the bliss of silver-blue visions. It seemed as if years were
passing. He built shining cities, received the homage of kings,
surrendered himself to the joys of ripe-lipped beauties. There were
lucid intervals shot through with the malignant presence of Minetti and
the puttering visits of the doctor. But these were like waking moments
between darkness and dawn, filled with the half-conscious joy of a
sleeper secure in the knowledge of a prolonged respite. In such moments
Fernet would stir feebly and think:
“I must get away to-morrow!”
And there would succeed almost instantly a languid ecstasy at the
thought that to-morrow was something remote and intangible that would
never come.
At times the hunchback seemed like nothing so much as a heartless gaoler
who, if he would, might open the door to some shining adventure.
Gradually this idea became fixed and elaborated. Fernet’s sight grew
dimmer and dimmer until he followed the presence of Minetti by the
sounds he made.
“He is jingling something,” Fernet would repeat, weakly. “Ah, it must be
his keys! He is searching for the one that will set me free!... Now he
is oiling the lock.... He has shut the door again. I am to be held
awhile longer.... I am a caged bird and just beyond is the pepper-tree.
It must be glistening now in the sunlight. Well, let him lock the door,
for all the good it will do him. Is not the window always open? When the
time comes I shall fly out the window and leave him here—alone. Then we
shall see who has the best of this bargain.”
And all the silver-blue visions would steal over him again, to be
pierced briefly by the arrival of the wizened doctor.
“It is he who keeps me here!” Fernet would say to himself. “If it were
not for him I could fly away—forever. Well, presently even he will lose
his power.”
One day a strange man stood at his bedside. Minetti was there also, and
the old fraud of a doctor. The strange man drew back the covers and put
his ear to Fernet’s fluttering heart and went through other tiresome
matters.... Finally he smoothed back the covers again, and as he did so
he shook his head. He spoke softly, but Fernet heard him distinctly.
“It is too late.... You should have called me sooner. He wishes to
die.... There is nothing to be done.”
“Yes, yes—it happens this way very often in nervous cases.”
“I have done my best. I have given him food and drink. I have even
starved him. But nothing seemed to do any good.”
“No,” said the stranger; “it is his mind. He has made up his mind
that.... You can do nothing with a man when....”
Fernet closed his eyes.
“A man! They think I am a man. What stupidity! Can they not see that I
am a bird?... They have gone out. He is locking the door again.... I can
hear the keys jingle.... Well, let him lock the door if it gives him any
pleasure. The window is open and to-night....”
The footsteps of the departing visitors died away. A chuckling sound
came to André Fernet and the thump of ecstatic fists brought down upon a
bare table-top. The voice of Flavio Minetti was quivering triumphantly
like the hot whisper of a desert wind through the room:
“Without any weapon save the mind! Ha! ha! ha!”
Fernet turned his face toward the wall. “He is laughing at _me_ now.
Well, let him laugh while he may.... Is not the window open? To-morrow I
shall be free ... and he?... No, _he_ cannot fly—he has a broken
wing.... The window is open, André Fernet!”
BLIND VISION
_By_ MARY MITCHELL FREEDLEY
From _The Century Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Century Company._
_Copyright, 1919, by Mary Mitchell Freedley._
Four months of pleasant meetings led to the superficial intimacy that
war makes possible, so that I regretted the moving of the hospital and
the need of a rest which took me to Paris.
It was there, one dreary evening in late November, that Marston’s name
was brought to my dim little apartment, with the request that, if
possible, I receive him at once. I was about to sit down to a lonely
dinner, and the prospect of his company delighted me. Then he came into
the room.
I had last seen him with his friend Esmè as they stood together waving
me good-by, the rich, heavy summer sunshine all about them, though
something more than a trick of golden light flooded their faces. They
were both vitally alive in widely different ways; and yet they strangely
seemed to be merely parts of each other. Esmè was an erratic dreamer and
seer of visions, and lacked always, even in the unimportant aspects of
living, any sense of the personal, the concrete; Marston, in curious
contrast, was at all times practical, level-headed, full of the luster
of life.
The man who stood hesitatingly just inside my door was not Marston, but
some stone-sculptured image of the gay, glad boy I had known.
The cry I could not choke broke through his terrible immobility, and he
spoke, the words sounding unreal, as though he had memorized them for a
lesson and rehearsed their very intonation.
“I had to come. I had to tell some one. Then I will go away. I don’t
know where; just away. You knew him, knew I loved him. Will you let me
tell you? Then I will go away.”
It flashed across my mind in the second before I found words that I had
half wondered why Esmè was not with him. It seemed impossible that even
their bodies could be separated.
I tried to lead him to the fire and remove his overcoat, but he pushed
me from him.
“No, no; don’t touch me. You don’t know, don’t understand. I’ve hunted
two weeks trying to find some one—you, any one who knew us to whom I
could tell it.” He hesitated, and I waited. His voice took on a curious
quality of childlike appeal as he went on: “You know I loved him, know
I’d given my life for his, don’t you?” Such phrasing was utterly unlike
Marston, but I had seen their friendship in all the glory of its
intensity, and I knew no sacrifice would have been too great. I assured
him of this, and, remembering my nursing, insisted that he eat,
promising to listen to anything he wanted to tell me.
We sat facing each other across the spread table, but neither of us
thought of the food after the first few mouthfuls. Twice in the early
part of his story I filled his glass with claret, but I cannot recollect
his drinking any.
“You must think this strange of me, but I’m not really mad, not now. You
see, I’ve lived with the horror ever since they gave me leave—just
afterward, trying to find some one I could talk to, some one who would
help me go on and finish the things we’d—
“I want to make it all as clear as possible, but I’ve got to tell it my
own way, and that isn’t clear.
“Do you remember Brander? We brought him over once or twice. He was a
mighty decent sort of fellow. Somehow, though, I hated his being such
friends with Esmè, I’d been his only one for so long, you see. Brander
was born in India, and somehow Esmè found it out; from hearing him curse
in a dialect, I think. They used to talk some unheard-of jargon to each
other and enjoyed it.
“Well, one day Brander got smashed in a fight up the lines, along the
British front, and was dying. He kept asking for Esmè, calling his name,
and when Esmè got word of it, of course he started at once. He took one
of the baby Nieuports; they’re fast, and not much of a target from
below. He knew the Germans had a masked battery which he’d have to
cross.
“I thought I’d like to see him across the enemy country, so I let him
get a good start, and then I went up. I lost sight of him in a
cloud-bank, and must have flown beyond him, for when I cleared it, he
was behind and below me, and coming toward him a big German
fighting-plane.
“Esmè’s wasn’t a fighting-machine, and he should have tried to get away;
but he must have seen the German a second after I did and judged it too
late. He fired his revolver once, then suddenly seemed to lose control
of his machine, and dropped to the level of the other. He must have
thought he was done for and made his decision on the instant, counting
it better to try to ram the German plane and go down to death together
than to take the millionth chance of landing and let the enemy escape.
He went head on at the other, and they fell, woven as one machine, just
inside the German lines.
“Somehow I got back to our fellows; God knows I wish I hadn’t.
“Every man in our escadrille paid in his own way unconscious tribute to
Esmè’s memory. We were awfully and justly proud of him,—it’s something
to have died for France,—but for all of us the fun, the excitement, of
the work had gone, been snuffed out. No one turned corkscrew
somersaults, Esmè’s great stunt; no one did any of his special tricks
any more, not even to show off before the new men.
“We got one of those French immortelle wreaths, tied to it his name and
the number of the machine he was driving and dropped it inside their
lines. The next morning just at sunrise one of their men flew over our
hangars and threw down a stone. Painted on it in German was, ‘Your dead
sends thanks’! That’s just like them, brutal, and the last word on their
side.
“There’s always work to be done in war, each day’s effort to be made,
and the mercy of constant doing helped me. I used to try to forget the
fighting and the horrors and go back to the old days.
“Esmè never was like other men in certain ways—all the early things that
were unconsciously part of him, I suppose. Even as a little shaver at
school he couldn’t be made to understand the ‘why’ of a school-boy’s
code. He used to rush headlong into anything and everything, and he
generally came out on top. He did the most outrageous things calmly,
unthinkingly, and we always made excuses, forgave him, because he was
Esmè. At college the men were sometimes rather nasty to him, partly
because he couldn’t understand their points of view; and he used to
stare a minute and then loll away. He never hurried,—perhaps it was his
Oriental blood,—but he always got there, and could make his very lolling
an insult.
“I used to wonder just what it was that made Esmè a great aviator. He
was a phenomenally good pilot, although he himself never seemed to
realize his remarkable ability. His losing control of his machine that
day was inexplicable. But one can’t tell. That high up the slightest
thing uncounted on means death. Those days after—
“A month went by. One morning our anti-aircrafters started, and we
rushed to see what was doing, and there, just a blot against the
unclouded sky, was a plane turning corkscrew somersaults one after
another as it came lower and lower. I went mad for a few minutes; _only_
Esmè could turn corkscrews in such a way. I got the captain, and begged
him to give orders for our gunners to stop. I must have made him feel
the certainty of the wild thing I believed, for he gave the order. It
was one of our own machines, in it Esmè, alone—Esmè in the flesh before
us, drawn and haggard and old, but Esmè.
“At first he couldn’t speak. We called it strain; perhaps in any other
man we shouldn’t, even in our minds, have given it its real
name—emotion. He was like a girl. When I put my arm across his shoulders
in the old, familiar way, he began to weep silently.
“The fellows were awfully decent and drifted away out of kindness,
leaving him alone with me. We went to our tent, the one we’d shared
together, and there, after a little while, he told me how it all
happened.
“When the two machines fell together in a tangled heap, by some
miraculous chance he was unhurt. The German was dead before they landed,
he thought.
“Then began the slow, torturing weeks. They kept at him day and night,
night and day. They never left him alone, not just guards, but some one
always near him whose only business it was to _watch_ him.
“He was a marked man. The Germans knew him to be our best, perhaps the
best aviator in all the Allied armies, and they needed him. They tried
every sort of hellish torture on him, things one mustn’t think about, to
get him to take up one of their photographers over the French trenches,
knowing he could do certain notorious tricks which would prove him our
man and so render the taking of the necessary pictures comparatively
safe. He stuck it out, growing weaker and weaker, until the order came
that he was to take up their man in his own machine (they’d used their
diabolical skill to reconstruct it), or— Perhaps if it had been an order
to shoot him then and there, his courage would have held out; but the
other— He was broken, weakened, driven; he gave in.
“They’d taken photographs for miles along the French and British fronts
when Esmè noticed the strap which held the camera man was loosened. The
man was busy adjusting the films for a new set. Esmè pulled, the strap
gave way; he lurched the machine suddenly, and turned it over,—his
famous somersault trick,—and then, without looking back or down, made
for our camp.
“Sometimes one forgets to guard one’s expression. I suppose mine showed
the horror I couldn’t help feeling. He put his hand out to touch me, but
I jumped up and moved away. ‘Marston,’ he said, ‘what’s the matter?
Aren’t you glad? There wasn’t any other way but to give in to them.
_You_ don’t know what it’s like to feel yourself dying by inches, a
little piece more every day, all the time knowing you can’t die
_enough_, and then the chance to be free once more, in the air, clean;
you only fifty miles away, and one man between us—one man. What was his
life among so many? It’s war, Marston; war.’
“I failed him then. I didn’t stop to think of his overwrought condition,
mentally and physically. He simply wasn’t responsible. I had a quick
vision of the way the other men would take it, of how I’d try and try to
explain Esmè’s action because it was Esmè’s, and all the time I’d know
the explanations weren’t any good. We have a code all our own; no rules,
no mention ever made of its interpretation—just an aviator’s honor.
“Now, looking back, I can’t think why Esmè’s dropping the man out seemed
so hideous. It did, though, and I failed him. He wanted to hear me say
the words of welcome he’d counted on, and I just stood and looked at
him. He was making queer, whimpering little noises, with his mouth
wobbling all over his face, and I watched him. He was suffering, and I
looked on.
“After a while the whimperings turned into words, and the words started
with giggles. ‘A-aren’t you g-glad, Marston? A-aren’t you g-glad?
A-aren’t you?’
“I turned on him, all the friendship and the memories of the years
behind swept away. I didn’t know what I was saying. I’m not sure now;
something about the things one doesn’t do, that it wasn’t war the way we
fought it to drop a man thousands of feet who was only doing his duty.
It was murder. Over and over I said it—that word murder. He wasn’t my
friend; he was a murderer!
“I went out of the tent to escape his staring, pleading eyes—child’s
eyes. Even while I was saying the words I knew he didn’t understand. He
had done what he thought justifiable, necessary, he wanted to get back
to me, and I called him a murderer.
“Once just as I started for the mess to get him something to eat I
thought I heard him call my name; but I went on. I needed more time.
“I was gone perhaps ten minutes. When I reëntered the tent it was empty.
Esmè was nowhere about, but I didn’t think of looking for him then, for
I thought he’d probably joined one of the other men. Later I got
worried, and we started a search. He wasn’t in our camp. No one had seen
him.
“We waited and wondered. I prayed. Then I found a little scribbled note
knocking about among my things.
“We never found any trace even of him or the smallest clue, just the
note; that’s all I have left of Esmè. Here it is:
‘You’ve tried to tell me your opinion of the trick I played on
an enemy. In any other arm of the service what I did would have
gone, been all right, been smart. Isn’t that what you meant,
Marston? But with our boys, because we’ve chosen to have a
different, a higher standard, because we fight cleanly, what I
did was—dirty. Well, I understand. You and the other men _are_
different; I’m not, but I can pay. I’m going back. Don’t try to
stop me before I reach their lines. You can’t. I go to render
unto Cæsar. A life for a life. To give them at least my death,
since I can no longer offer even that proudly to France.’
“There has been bravery and heroism in the war, but Esmè went back; he
knew to what—yet he went.
“God grant he is dead! I tried to make words express an inexpressible
thing. All my life to live out—remembering, knowing I killed my friend!”
Perhaps Marston went on speaking; I don’t know. I only remember the
broken stem of his glass, the stain that was spreading slowly over the
white cloth, and the dripping, dripping red of his hands.
IMAGINATION
_By_ GORDON HALL GEROULD
From _Scribner’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons._
_Copyright, 1919, by Gordon Hall Gerould._
As I gave my coat and hat to the boy, I caught sight of Orrington,
waddling into the farther reaches of the club just ahead of me. “Here’s
luck!” I thought to myself, and with a few hasty strides overtook him.
It is always good luck to run upon Harvey Orrington during the hour when
he is loafing before dinner. In motion he resembles a hippopotamus, and
in repose he produces the impression that the day is very hot, even in
midwinter. But one forgets his red and raw corpulency when he has
settled at ease in a big chair and begun to talk. Then the qualities
that make him the valuable man he is, as the literary adviser of the
Speedwell Company, come to the surface, and with them those perhaps
finer attributes that have given him his reputation as a critic.
Possibly the contrast between his Falstaffian body and his nicely
discriminating mind gives savor to his comment on art and life; but in
any case his talk is as good in its way as his essays are in theirs.
Read his “Retrospective Impressions” if you wish to know what I
mean—only don’t think that his colloquial diction is like the fine-spun
phrasing of his essays. He inclines to be slangy in conversation.
I overtook Orrington, as I say, before he had reached his accustomed
corner, and I greeted him with a becoming deference. He is fifteen years
my senior, after all.
“Hello,” he said, turning his rather dull eyes full upon me. “Chasing
will-o’-the-wisps this afternoon?”
“I’ve been pursuing you. If you call that—”
“Precision forbids! It can’t have been will-o’-the-wisps.” Orrington
shook his head with utter solemnity. “I don’t know just what their
figure is, but I’m sure it’s not like mine. Come along and save my life,
won’t you?”
“With pleasure. I hoped you might be free.”
“Free as the air of a department-store elevator—yes. I’ve got to meet
Reynolds here. He’s waiting for me yonder. You know Reynolds?”
“Yes, I know him.”
Every one knows Reynolds, I need hardly say—every one who can compass
it. The rest of the world knows his books. Reynolds makes books with
divine unconcern and profuseness: almost as a steel magnate makes steel.
He makes them in every kind, and puts them out with a fine flourish, so
that he is generally regarded as master of all the literary arts. People
buy his output, too, which is lucky for Reynolds but perhaps less
fortunate for literature; they buy his output—that is the only word to
use—by the boxful, apparently. An edition in his sight is but as the
twinkling of an eye before it is sold out. One can’t wonder that
Reynolds is a little spoiled by all this, though he must have been a
good fellow to begin with. He’s really a kind-hearted and brave man now,
but he takes himself too seriously. He is sometimes a bore. Only that he
would never recognize the portrait I am making of him, I should hardly
dare to say what I am saying. Physically, he is undistinguished: he
looks like a successful lawyer of a dark athletic type who has kept
himself fit with much golf and who has got the habit of wearing his
golfing-clothes to town. It is his manner that sets him apart from his
fellows.
“I’m glad you know him.” Orrington chuckled as we drew near the corner
where Reynolds was already seated. “I’d hate to be the innocent cause of
your introduction.”
Reynolds rose and extended gracious hands to the two of us. “You add to
my pleasure by bringing our friend,” he said to Orrington.
I fear that I acknowledged the compliment by looking foolish. It was
Orrington’s corner that we were invading, if it was any one’s, and, in
any case, Reynolds doesn’t own the club.
“I need tea to support my anæmia,” said Orrington gruffly. “If the rest
of you wish strong drink, however, I’m not unwilling to order it.
They’ve got a new lot of extremely old Bourbon, I am informed, that had
to be smuggled out of Kentucky at dead of night for fear of a popular
uprising. I should like to watch the effect of it on one or both of
you.”
“I’m willing to be the subject of the experiment,” I said. “What about
you, Reynolds?”
Reynolds cocked his head slightly to one side. “Though I dislike to
deprive our good friend of any æsthetic pleasure, I think I will stick
to my own special Scotch. I do not crave the dizzy heights of
inebriety.”
“First time I ever knew you to be afraid of soaring, Reynolds,”
commented Orrington. “I trust you won’t let caution affect your literary
labors. It is one of the biggest things about you, you know, that you
aren’t afraid to tackle any job you please. Most of us wait about,
wondering whether we could ever learn to manage the Pegasus biplane, but
you fly in whatever machine is handy.”
“Perhaps you think I adventure rashly.” It was neither question nor
positive statement on the part of Reynolds, but a little compounded of
both. He seemed hurt.
“Not at all.” Orrington’s tone was heartily reassuring. “You get away
with it, and the rest of us get nowhere in comparison.”
“I have always believed,” said Reynolds, “that a proper self-confidence
is a prime requisite for literary success. In all seriousness, I am sure
both of you will agree with me that none of us could have reached his
present position in the world without some degree of boldness. We have
seized the main chance.”
“Then it got away from me,” I felt impelled to say. I could see no
reason for accepting the flattery that Reynolds intended.
“You may believe it or not, as you please, Reynolds, but I’m incapable
of seizing anything.” Orrington paused to direct the waiter, but went on
after a moment, with a teacup in his fat hand. “As a matter of fact,
I’ve never collared anything in my life except a few good manuscripts.
Some mighty bad ones, too.” He chuckled.
“Ah! You know the difference between the good and the bad better than
any one else in the country, I fancy. I always feel diffident when I
send copy to you.” Reynolds somehow conveyed the impression, rather by
his manner than by his words, of insufferable conceit. He made you
certain that he was ready to challenge the assembly of the Immortals in
behalf of anything he wrote.
“Oh, you’re in a position to dictate. It’s not for us to criticise,”
Orrington answered very quietly. “By the way, I ventured to suggest our
meeting here partly because I wished to know when your new book would be
ready. Speedwell’s been worrying, and I told him I’d see you. Thought it
would bother you less than a letter or coming round to the office.”
“My book!” Reynolds struck an attitude and wrinkled his forehead. “My
dear fellow, I wish I knew.”
Orrington set down his cup and looked at Reynolds quizzically. “You must
know better than anybody else.”
“It’s a question of the possibilities only.” Reynolds lifted his head
proudly. “I will not fail you, Orrington. I have never yet left any one
in the lurch, but I have been exceedingly busy of late. You can’t
realize the pressure I am under from every side. So many calls—my time,
my presence, my words! I must have a fortnight’s clear space to get my
copy ready for you. Within the month, I feel sure, you shall have it.”
“That’ll do perfectly well. We don’t wish to bother you,” said Orrington
briefly, “but you know as well as I do that the public cries for you.
Speedwell gets restive if he can’t administer a dose once in so often.”
“What is the book to be?” I ventured to ask.
Reynolds bridled coquettishly. It was too absurd of a fellow with his
physique and general appearance: I had difficulty in maintaining a
decent gravity. “My book!” he said again. “It isn’t precisely a novel,
and it isn’t precisely anything else. It is a simple story with perhaps
a cosmic significance.”
“I see.” I didn’t, of course, but I couldn’t well say less. I knew,
besides, pretty well what the book would be like. I had read two or
three of Reynolds’s things. The mark of the beast was on them all,
though variously imprinted.
“By the way of nothing,” said Orrington suddenly, “I had an odd
experience to-day.”
“Ah! do tell us,” urged Reynolds. “Your experiences are always worth
hearing. I suppose it is because your impressions are more vivid than
those of most men.”
Orrington pursed his mouth deprecatingly and lighted a cigarette.
“There’s no stuff for you fellows in this. You couldn’t make a story out
of it if you tried. But it gave me a twinge and brought back something
that happened twenty years ago.”
“What happened to-day?” I asked, to get the story properly begun.
“Oh, nothing much, in one way. I’ve been talking with a young chap who
has sent us a manuscript lately. The book’s no good, commercially—a
pretty crude performance—but it has some striking descriptive passages
about the effects of hunger on the human body and the human mind. They
interested me because I thought they showed some traces of imagination.
There isn’t much real imagination lying round loose, you know: nothing
but the derived and Burbankized variety. So I sent for the fellow. He
came running, of course. Hope in his eye, and all that sort of thing. I
felt like a brute beast to have to tell him we couldn’t take his book,
though I coated the pill as sweetly as I could.
“He took it like a Trojan, though I could see that he was holding
himself in to keep from crying. He was a mere boy, mind you, and a very
shabby and lean one. I noticed that while I talked encouragingly to him,
and I finally asked what set him going at such a rate about starvation.
I might have known, of course! The kid has been up against it and has
been living on quarter rations for I don’t know how many months. There
wasn’t an ounce of imagination in his tale, after all: he had been
describing his own sensations with decent accuracy—nothing more than
that.”
“Poor fellow!” I interrupted. “We ought to find him some sort of job. Do
you think he’d make good if he had a chance?”
Orrington shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I don’t know, I’m sure. I
talked to him like a father and uncle and all his elderly relations, and
I asked more questions than was polite. He’s in earnest at the moment,
anyhow.”
“But if he’s actually starving—” I began.
Orrington looked at me in his sleepy way. “Oh, he’s had a good feed by
this time. You must take me for a cross between a devil-fish and a
blood-sucking bat. I could at least afford the luxury of seeing that he
shouldn’t try to do the Chatterton act.”
Reynolds took a sip of whiskey, then held up his glass to command
attention. “Dear, dear!” he said slowly, with the air of settling the
case. “It’s a very great pity that young men without resources and
settled employment try to make their way by writing. They ought not to
be encouraged to do so. Most of them would be better off in business or
on their fathers’ farms, no doubt; and the sooner they find their place,
the better.”
“Still, if nobody made the venture,” I objected, “the craft wouldn’t
flourish, would it? I think the question is whether something can’t be
done to give this particular young man a show.”
“I’ve sent him to Dawbarn,” said Orrington almost sullenly. “He wants a
space-filler and general utility man, he happened to tell me yesterday.
It’s a rotten job, but it will seem princely to my young acquaintance. I
shall watch him. He might make good and pay back my loan, you know.”
“It does credit to your heart, my dear Orrington—grub-staking him and
getting him a job at once.” Reynolds frowned judicially. “I doubt the
wisdom of it, however. A young man ought to succeed by his own efforts
or not at all. Of course I know nothing of this particular case except
what you’ve just told us, but I can’t see from your account of him that
he has much chance to lift himself out of the ranks of unsuccessful hack
writers. You admit that h
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