*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 he shows little imagination.”

“Not yet; but he doesn’t write badly.”

“Ah! there are so many who don’t write badly, but who never go beyond
that.”

Orrington laughed, shaking even his heavy chair with his heavier mirth.
“Excuse me,” he murmured. “You’re very severe on us, Reynolds. You
mustn’t forget that most of us aren’t Shakespeares. Indeed, to be
strictly impersonal, I don’t know any member of this club—and we’re
rather long on eminent pen-pushers—who is. It won’t do any harm to give
my young friend his chance. To tell the truth, I think it’s a damned
sight better for him than the end of a pier and the morgue.”

I wondered how the mighty Reynolds would take the snub, and I feared a
scene. But I knew him less well than Orrington. He merely nursed his
glass in silence and looked sulky. After all, Orrington’s argument was
unanswerable.

To break the tension, I turned to Orrington with a question. “What
happened twenty years ago?” I asked. “You said you were reminded of it.”

Orrington was silent for a minute as if deliberating. He seemed to be
reviewing whatever it was he had in mind. “Yes, yes,” he said at last,
“that’s more of a story, only it hasn’t any conclusion. It’s as devoid
of a _dénouement_ as the life-history of the youth whom Reynolds wishes
to starve for his soul’s good.”

“You are very unjust to me,” Reynolds protested. “You speak as if I had
a grudge against the young man, whereas I was merely making a general
observation. It is no real kindness to encourage a youth to his ultimate
hurt.”

Orrington looked at him doubtfully. “I suppose not,” he said after a
moment’s pause. “I’ve often wondered what happened in this other case I
have in mind.”

“What was it?” asked Reynolds.

“It was a small matter,” Orrington began apologetically; “at least I
suppose it would seem so to any outsider. But it was a big thing to me
and presumably to the other fellow involved. I never knew anything about
him, directly.”

“I thought you said you had dealings with the other man,” I interjected.

“I did,” said Orrington, “but I never met him. It was this way. I was
editing a cheap magazine at the time, the kind of thing that intends to
be popular and isn’t. The man who published it was on his uppers, the
wretched magazine was at death’s door, and I was getting about half of
my regular stipend when I got anything at all—something like forty cents
a week, if I remember correctly. I was young, of course, so all that
didn’t so much matter. I was rather proud of being a real editor, even
of a cheap and nasty thing like—but never mind the name. It died many
years ago and was forgotten even before the funeral. I suspect now that
the publisher took advantage of my youth and inexperience, but I bear
him no grudge. I managed to keep afloat, and I liked it.

“Of course I had to live a double life in order to get enough to eat—a
blameless double life that meant all work and no play. A fellow can do
that in his twenties. After office hours I got jobs of hack writing, and
occasionally I sold some little thing to one of the reputable magazines.
It was hard sledding, though—a fact I emphasize not because my biography
is interesting, but because it has its bearing on the incident in
question.

“Well, one fine day I got hold of a job that was the best I’d ever
landed. I suspect I apostrophized it, in the language of that era, as a
‘peach.’ It was hack work, of course, but hack work of a superior and
exalted kind—the special article sort of thing. I went higher than a
kite when I found the chance was coming my way. I dreamed dreams of
opulence. Good Lord! I even looked forward to getting put up for this
ill-run club which we are now honoring by our gracious presences.”

Orrington stopped and shook with silent laughter till he had to wipe his
eyes. The joke seemed less good to me than to him, for I had been only
six months a member of the club and had not yet acquired the proper
Olympian disdain of it. Reynolds smiled. I fancy that he still regards
the club as of importance. In spite of his vast renown, he is never
quite easy in his dignity.

“One has no business to laugh at the enthusiasms of youth,” Orrington
went on presently. “I suppose it’s bad manners to laugh even at one’s
own, for we’re not the same creatures we were back there. It’s a
temptation sometimes, all the same. And I was absurdly set up, I assure
you, by my chance to do something of no conceivable importance at a
quite decent figure. But I never did the job, after all.”

He nodded his head slowly, as if he had been some fat god of the Orient
suddenly come to torpid life.

“You don’t mean that you came near starving?” I asked incredulously. The
pattern of the story seemed to be getting confused.

“No, no. I wasn’t so poor as that, even though I gave up the rich job
I’m telling you about. The point is that I was chronically hard up and
needed the money. I couldn’t afford to do without it, but I had to. It
was like this, you see. On the very day the plum dropped into my mouth,
a story came into the office that bowled me over completely. I hadn’t
much experience then; but I felt somehow sure that this thing wasn’t
fiction at all, though it had a thin cloak of unreality flung about it.
It was a cheerful little tale, the whole point of which was that the
impossible hero killed himself rather than starve to death. It was very
badly done in every respect, as far as I remember, but it gave me the
unpleasant impression that the man who wrote it knew more about going
without his dinner than about writing short stories. Of course I
couldn’t accept the thing for my magazine, though I could take most
kinds of drivel. Our readers didn’t exist, to be sure, but we thought
they demanded bright, sunshiny rubbish. I used to fill up our numbers
with saccharine mush, and I shouldn’t have dared print a gloomy story
even if it had been good.

“This wasn’t good. It was punk. But it bothered me—just as the
youngster’s book has been bothering me lately. I suppose I’m too
undiscriminating and sentimental for the jobs I’ve had in life.”

“You!” Reynolds objected. “Every one’s afraid of you. Haven’t I said
that I tremble, even now, when I send copy to you? It makes no
difference that I have the contract signed and every business
arrangement concluded.”

Orrington’s mouth twisted into a little grimace. “That’s merely my pose,
Reynolds, as you know perfectly well. I’m the terror of the press
because I have to be to hold my job. Inside I’m a welter of adipose
sentiment. My physical exterior doesn’t belie me. While dining, I quite
prefer to think of all the world as well fed; and, in spite of many
years’ training, I can’t see anything delightful in the spectacle of a
fellow going without his dinner because he’s ambitious. As a rule, I
prefer to discourage authors who are millionaires. That’s a pleasant
game in itself, but not very good hunting. All of which is beside the
point.

“I did hate, as a matter of fact, to turn down the little story I speak
of; and while I was writing a gentle note that tried to explain, but
didn’t, I had a brilliant idea. I suppose I was the victim of what is
known as a generous impulse. I’ve had so little to do with that sort of
thing that I can’t be sure of naming it correctly, but I dare say it
could be described in that way. I said to myself: ‘That son of a gun
could do those special articles just as well as I can, and it’s dollars
to doughnuts he’ll go under if he doesn’t get something to do before
long.’

“If you’ve ever had anything to do with generous impulses, you know that
they’re easier to come by than to put into practice. When I began to
think what I should lose by turning over my job to the other fellow, I
balked like an overloaded mule. After all, how could I be sure that the
man wasn’t fooling me? He might have imagined everything he had written,
after eating too much _pâté de foie gras_. I should be a fool to give a
leg up to somebody who was already astride his beast. I couldn’t afford
to do it. You know how one’s mind would work.”

“I regret to say,” I put in, “that I can see perfectly how my mind would
have worked. It would have persuaded me that I had a duty to myself.”

Orrington laughed quietly. “Don’t you believe it. Your conscience or
your softness—whatever you choose to call it—would have played the deuce
with your peace of mind. Mine did. I tore up my note and went out for a
walk. Naturally I saw nothing but beggars and poverty: misery stalked me
from street to street. I wriggled and squirmed for half a day or more,
but I couldn’t get away from the damnable necessities of the
story-writer.

“In the end I wrote him, of course—the flattering note I had intended,
and something more. I told him about my fat job and said I was
recommending him for it. By the same mail I wrote to the people who’d
offered me the chance, refusing it. I said I regretted that I couldn’t
undertake the commission as I had expected, but that I found my other
engagements made it impossible. I thought I might as well do the thing
in grand style and chuck a bluff while I was about it. I added that I
was sending a friend to them who would do the articles better than I
could hope to. I didn’t give the fellow’s name, but I told them he’d
turn up shortly.”

“What happened then?” I asked, for Orrington lighted another cigarette
and seemed inclined to rest on his oars.

He turned his dull eyes on me and smiled a little sadly. “What happened?
Why, nothing much, as far as I know. I suppose the other fellow got my
job and saved his body alive. I never inquired. I somehow expected that
he’d write to me or come to see me—he had my address, you know—but he
never did. I was a little annoyed, I remember, at his not doing so after
I’d cut off my nose for him, which is probably why I never tried to
follow him up. I never even looked up the articles when they were
published. But I’ve often wished I might meet the man and learn how he
got on.”

“You’ve never seen his name?” I inquired. “He can’t have done much, or
you’d have spotted him.”

“I suspect,” said Orrington, “that he sent in that story of his under a
pseudonym and that he may have done very well for himself since. What do
you think, Reynolds? I suppose you consider me a fool for my pains, on
the theory that no man ought to be helped out.”

Reynolds had been silent for some time. As I looked at him now I could
see that he was a good deal impressed by Orrington’s narrative. I wasn’t
surprised, for I knew him to be a generous fellow in spite of his
foibles.

“Yes, how about it, Reynolds?” I said.

“It is a very affecting story,” he answered. “You acted most generously,
Orrington, though you make light of it. I can’t believe that the young
man realized the sacrifice you made for him; otherwise his failure to
thank you, bad enough in any case, would be unspeakable. He can’t have
known.”

“But you insist that I’d better have let him alone,” persisted
Orrington, clearly with the intention of teasing our magnificent
acquaintance.

“That depends altogether on how it turned out, doesn’t it? You can’t
tell us whether the young man was worth saving or not.”

Orrington laughed contentedly. “No. That’s the missing conclusion, but
I’m not sorry to have given him a show. Besides, what I did wasn’t such
a noble sacrifice, after all. Having basked in your admiration for a
moment, I can afford to tell you. I’m not an accomplished hypocrite, and
I’d hate to begin at my age. Let me tell you what happened.”

I felt aggrieved. Had Orrington been working on our feelings for his
private amusement merely? “You said there wasn’t any conclusion,” I
growled.

“Don’t get huffy,” Orrington returned imperturbably. “The story hasn’t
any ending, as I warned you. Only my part in it turned out rather
amusingly. I hope I shouldn’t be fatuous ass enough to brag about the
incident if there were anything in it that demanded bouquets. I suspect
the bubble of noble actions often bursts just as mine did.”

“What do you mean?” asked Reynolds—reasonably enough, I thought.

“Only this,” Orrington went on. “It turned out that the people who had
offered to let me do the articles were tremendously impressed by my
turning them down. The letter I wrote them must have been a corker.
Somehow or other they got the notion that I was a very busy man and a
person of importance. They ought to have known better, of course, but
they evidently adopted that silly idea. They talked about me to their
friends and cracked me up as a coming man. The upshot of it was that I
began to be tempted with most flattering offers of one sort and
another—before long I had my choice of several things. My
self-constituted backers were rather powerful in those days, so it was
useful to be in their good books. I left my moribund magazine and got so
prosperous that I began to grow fat at once. Serene obscurity has been
my lot ever since; and I’ve never got rid of the fat.”

“That’s a happy ending,” I remarked lazily. “It’s very like a real
conclusion. What more do you want?”

“Oh, for the sake of argument, I’d like to prove that I was right and
that Reynolds’s theory is all wrong.”

“I’m exceedingly glad that it turned out so well for you,” said Reynolds
unctuously. “Then the young man whom you assisted didn’t need to feel
quite so much under obligation to you as we’ve been thinking?”

I was outraged. Reynolds was a great gun in literature, at least in the
opinion of himself and a huge circle of readers. He was also a dozen
years older than I. At the same time, I couldn’t allow him to disparage
what Orrington had done, merely because Orrington made light of it.

“You will observe,” I said with some heat, “that the effect on Orrington
was purely secondary and fortuitous. Orrington didn’t know he could
possibly gain by it when he took the bread out of his own mouth to feed
the young cur. I hope, for my part, that the fellow eventually starved
to death or took to digging ditches.”

Reynolds sat up very straight. His black eyes snapped with anger. “He
didn’t,” he burst out. “I happen to know him.”

“You know him!” I exclaimed, while Orrington goggled.

“Yes.” Reynolds had grown very red, but he looked defiant. “Since I’ve
been attacked like this, I may as well tell you. Not that I think it’s
anybody’s business but my own. Orrington didn’t suffer by what he did.”

“You don’t mean—” I began.

“I mean just what I say—no less and no more. I was the man in question,
and I admit that I ought to have thanked Orrington for his kindness. I
meant to, of course; but I set to work at once on those articles that
have assumed such importance in our discussion, and I was very busy. I
had to make them as good as I knew how. I assumed, naturally, that I had
merely received a useful tip from a man who didn’t care for the job.
I’ve always assumed that till this afternoon. I wanted the job badly,
myself.”

“Oh, well!” Orrington put in soothingly. “It doesn’t matter, does it?
I’ve explained that the incident really set me on my feet. You don’t owe
me anything, Reynolds. If I’d been a complete pig and kept the chance
for myself, I’d probably have been much worse off for it. You needed it
much more than I did, evidently.”

To my surprise, Reynolds was not quieted by Orrington’s magnanimous
speech. Instead, he jumped up in a passion and stood before us,
clinching and unclinching his fists like a small boy before his first
fight.

“That isn’t the point,” he said in a voice so loud that various groups
of men scattered about the room looked toward us with amusement. “I
admit that I was glad of the opportunity to do the articles, but I was
by no means in such straits as you suppose. So much for the critical
sense for which you have such a reputation!” He turned on Orrington with
a sneer.

Orrington remained very calm. He seemed in no wise disturbed by the fury
of Reynolds’s tirade, nor by his insufferable rudeness, but puffed at a
cigarette two or three times before he replied. “It’s a poor thing,
critical sense,” he murmured. “I’ve never been proud of what mine has
done for me. But you must admit that I paid you a pretty compliment,
Reynolds, in believing that your story was founded on real experience. I
don’t see why you need mind my saying that it wasn’t much of a yarn.
Nobody need be sensitive about something he did twenty years back.”

“I don’t care a hang what you thought about the story then, or what you
think of it now,” Reynolds snapped. “You might, however, grant the
existence of imagination. You needn’t attribute everything anybody
writes to actual experience. I never went hungry.”

So that was where the shoe pinched! Reynolds insisted on being proud of
his prosperity at all stages. I laughed. “You’ve missed something,
then,” I put in. “The sensation, if not agreeable, is unique. Every man
should feel it once, in a way. A couple of times I’ve run short of
provisions, and I assure you the experience is like nothing else.”

“That’s different,” said Reynolds a little more quietly. “I’m not saying
that I owe nothing to Orrington. I acknowledge that I do, and I admit
that I ought to have acknowledged it twenty years ago. I was anxious at
the time to get a start in the world of letters, and I was looking for
an opening. Orrington’s suggestion gave me my first little opportunity;
but it certainly didn’t save my life.”

“Then it was all imagination, after all,” Orrington said gently. “What a
mistake I made!”

“Of course it was all imagined!” Reynolds protested, and he added
naïvely: “I was living at home at the time, and I had a sufficient
allowance from my father.”

A twinkle crept into Orrington’s usually expressionless eyes. “I must
apologize to you, Reynolds, or perhaps to your father, for so mistaking
the circumstances of your youth. You have, at all events, lived down the
opprobrium of inherited wealth. You’ve supported yourself quite nicely
ever since I’ve known you.”

“As I remarked earlier,” Reynolds went on pompously, but in better
humor, “I have never thought it wise for young men to embark on the
literary life without sufficient means to live in comfort until they can
establish their reputations. In my own case I should never have
undertaken to do so.”

His declaration of principle seemed to restore him to complete
self-satisfaction, and it must have seemed to him the proper cue for
exit. As he was already standing, he was in a position to shake hands
with Orrington and me rather condescendingly; and he took himself off
with the swagger of conscious invincibility. I think he bore us no
malice.

Orrington looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “I told you I needed you
to save my life,” he said. “I hadn’t any notion, though, that this kind
of thing would happen. I’m sorry to have let you in for such a scene.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” I answered. “It has been rather amusing
and—well—illuminating.”

Orrington chuckled. “The devil tempted me, and I didn’t resist him
unduly. As a matter of fact, it has been quite as illuminating to me as
to you. I’ve been wishing for a dozen or fifteen years to try out the
experiment.”

“What experiment?” I was puzzled.

“Oh, putting it up to Reynolds, of course. I’ve wondered why he did it
and why he didn’t do it and, moreover, how he did it.”

“If you got light on a complication like that, you did better than I
did. Do you mind explaining?”

“Reynolds has explained sufficiently, hasn’t he? Of course I knew long
ago that he faked his story, but—”

“Then you knew it was Reynolds?” I interrupted.

“Knew? Of course I knew. Later, of course, much later. I never inquired,
as I told you, but I spotted him after he made his first big hit. The
man who had hired him to do those articles bragged about it to me—said
he’d given him his start, but allowed me some credit for establishing
the connection. I blinked, but didn’t let on I hadn’t known that
Reynolds and my supposedly starving young author were one and the same
person. By that time, of course, everybody was fully aware that Reynolds
had emerged from heavily gilded circles of dulness. I don’t know why
I’ve never had it out with him before. I suppose I shouldn’t have sailed
in to-day if he hadn’t been so snippy about the boy of whom I was
telling you. I couldn’t stand that.”

“I’m afraid,” I ventured to say, “that it won’t do Reynolds any special
good.”

Orrington rose ponderously from his chair and spread his hands in a
fantastic gesture of disclaim. “Who am I,” he asked, “to teach ethics to
a genius who is also a moralist—‘with perhaps a cosmic significance’?
The devil tempted me, I tell you, and I fell, for the sake of a little
fun and a little information. I’ve never known Reynolds’s side of the
story. Lord, no, it won’t do him any good. All the same, it will take
him a week to explain to himself all over again just why he acted with
perfect propriety in not acknowledging my little boost. I dare say his
book may be a few days later on account of it, and I shall have to nurse
Speedwell through an attack of the fidgets. A dreadful life, mine! No
wonder the business man is tired. You ought to thank God on your knees
every night that you haven’t been sitting all day in a publisher’s
office.”

He held out his hand very solemnly, and very solemnly waddled across the
big room, nodding every now and then to acquaintances who smiled up at
him as he passed.



                         IN MAULMAIN FEVER-WARD


_By_ GEORGE GILBERT
_Copyright, 1918, by The Story-Press Corporation._

Flood-time on Salwin River, Burma! _Pouk_ trees and _stic-lac_ in
flower. By day the rush, the roar of water fretting at the knees of
Kalgai Gorge, above which the Thoungyeen enters the main current. And
the music of the elephants’ bells as they come along the track bound
down or mayhap up to work in the teak forests. By night the languorous
scent of the _serai_ vines luring the myriad moths, the wail of the
gibbons, the rustle of the bamboos chafing their feathery leaves
together in the winds that just falter between rest and motion.

At Kalgai the traders pause in going up or down, over or across. From
everywhere they come, and coming, stay to chaffer, to chat, cheat,
scheme, love—aye and even slay! Why not? It’s life—raw life!

Take away the medicine. Give me rice curry and chicken and fish cooked
with green bamboo tips and sourish-sweet _pilou_ of river mussels. And
then a whiff of _bhang_ or black Malay tobacco that the gypsies of the
sea smuggle in....

My name? Paul Brandon will do. My father was a Stepney coster. Mother?
Oh, a half-caste Mandalay woman. Yes, they were married at the mission.
He took her home. I was born in London. But I ran away; came East....

Don’t mind if I babble, ma’am. And forgive me if I pull at the sheets.
Or if the sight of a white woman, old, patient, trying to be kind to me,
makes me shy. When my head clears, I’m white; when the fever mist comes
over my brain, I see things through my brown mother’s eyes.

Thanks for fixing the ice pack on my head. No, that mark on my forehead
is not from an old bruise. A Karen-Laos woman put it there with her
tattoo needles. It has a meaning. It is the Third Eye of Siva.

Thanks for pulling-to the shade. Those bamboo things the yellow and
brown folk use are not shades. They are full of holes where the weaving
is that holds them together. Why, you can see through them—see the most
unbelievable things....

Oh, yes, the mark on my forehead. A girl put it there with her needles.
Now that you touch it, it _is_ sore. Well, so would _your_ head be sore
if a giant python had smashed his wedge-shaped head in death stroke
against your wrinkled brow, executing the Curse of Siva.

How long have I been in Maulmain?... A week? Well, I won’t be here
another. But it’s queer how a man will drift—to his own people.

Thanks for the little morphine pills. Yes, I know what they are. Give me
a dozen, and they may take hold. A man who has smoked _bhang_, black
Malay tobacco and opium, and who has drunk _bino_ isn’t going to be hurt
by sugar pills. They only wake me up, steady me.

Why didn’t I know Pra Oom Bwaht was a liar?...

                                  ――――

Karen town on Thoungyeen River! Temple bells chiming or booming through
the mystic, potent dusk; mynah-birds scolding in the _thy-tsi_ trees.
Frogs croaking under the banyans’ knees in the mud. Women coming to
worship in the temples—women with songs on their full red lips and
burdens on their heads—and mighty little else on them. And the fat, lazy
priests and the monks going about, begging bowls in hand, with their
_cheelahs_ to lead them as they beg their evening rice.

Thanks for the lime juice, ma’am. Let me talk. It eases me.

To Karen town on Thoungyeen River—Karen town with its Temple of Siva—I
came long before the rains. This year? Mayhap. Last? What do the dead
years matter now?

To Karen town I brought wire rods for anklet-making, cloths, mirrors,
sweetmeats—an elephant’s load. Once there, I let my elephant driver go.

Three days of good trade I had, and my goods were about gone, turned
into money and antique carved silver and gold work. At the close of the
third day, as I sat in front of the _zana_, smoking, smoking, smoking,
listening to the buzz of the women and children, Pra Oom Bwaht came.

He was tall for a Karen man of the hills, all of five foot two. The
Karen plainsmen are taller. He sat a space beside me in silence—sure
mark of a man of degree among such chatterers.

“Have you seen the temples of Karen?” he asked finally.

Lazily I looked him over. He was sturdy—a brave man, I thought. He had a
cunning eye, a twisty mouth, and in his forehead’s middle a black mark
showing harsh against his yellow skin.

“What’s that?” I asked him, touching the mark. He winced when I did it.

“Dread Bhairava,” he said, using the Brahman word for Siva, Queen of the
Nagas. He was a snake-worshiper, then. Mighty little of these people or
their talk or dialects I don’t know.

“Come with me, white trader?” he asked me. “I am Pra Oom Bwaht.”

Idly I went. So, after visiting the other temples, we came to the Temple
of Siva, perched on its rocks, with the river running near and its
little grounds well kept. It was the hour of evening worship. The
worshipers, mostly women, were coming in with votive offerings.

But among them all there was a Laos girl, shapely as a roe deer,
graceful, brown, with flashing black eyes and shining black hair neatly
coiled on top of her pretty head, and with full red lips. As she passed,
Oom Bwaht just nudged me—pointed. She turned off at a fork of the path,
alone.

I glanced at Pra Oom Bwaht. His twisty mouth was wreathed in a smile.

“She lives at the end of that little path,” he tempted. “She is Nagy
N’Yang.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

He nodded again and went away. I turned down the side path after the
Laos girl....

There was a full moon that night. About the middle of the night we came
up the path to the temple again, the Laos girl and I.

“Come,” she had said to me when I had asked her for my heart’s desire,
“come to the temple, and I can prove it is folly.”

So we came. The temple door was open. The priests were gone—no one has
to watch a Naga temple at night. The dread of Siva is enough to protect
it.

A rift in the temple roof let in a shaft of white moonlight. It struck
upon the image of Siva. The image was seated on a white ox, carved of
some white stone. A sash around the image was made up of human heads; it
had six arms, each covered with carved snakes that were so lifelike they
seemed to writhe in the wavering light. In the middle of the god’s
forehead was the mark of the third eye—the scar of Siva.

We went slowly down toward the image. Before it was a huge chest. Nagy
N’Yang motioned me to sit on it. She sat beside me. Again I pleaded with
her for my heart’s desire.

She pushed me away.

“You are afraid to be near me,” I mocked.

“Hush,” she pleaded. “I am afraid—of yielding to you.”

I moved to clasp her, my heart leaping at her confession. She smote her
little hands sharply together. I heard a shuffling of softly shod feet
in the passage behind the image.

Wat Na Yang, chief priest of the temple, stood before us with his yellow
robes, his yellow skin, his hands calmly folded across his paunch. “What
seek ye, children?” he asked.

“The way of love,” I laughed. I plunged my hand into my robe and felt
the gold against my middle.

In the great chest on which we sat something awoke to life. I heard a
stir, a rustle, a noise as of straining.

“Nagy speaks,” the priest warned.

I felt the Laos girl shudder by my side.

“What is it?” I asked. I stood up. A creeping horror came over me.

Nagy N’Yang sprang up as I did and flung back the lid of the great chest
with a strength I had not expected. Out over her shoulder shot a long
coil, then another. When she stood erect in the moon-glow, a great rock
python was wrapped about her matchless form. The mark of Siva on her
forehead gleamed against her ivory brow like an evil blotch, yet it did
not take from her beauty, her alluring grace; nor did the immense bulk
of the python bear her down.

“The great serpent knows his own,” whispered the yellow priest. He
pointed with his fat forefinger. I saw the red tongue of the python play
over the ivory bosom of the girl.

Yet I did not shudder. It seemed fitting. They were so in harmony with
their surroundings.

The eyes of the python blazed in the moon-glow like rubies of the
pigeon-blood hue, then like garnets, then like glow-worms; then they
sank to a lower range of colors and finally to rest. He was asleep under
her caresses. She patted his wedge-shaped head, soothing him. Ah, that
it had been my head she thus fondled!

Suddenly Nagy N’Yang seized the great serpent just back of the head,
uncoiled it from her with a free, quick succession of movements and cast
it into the great chest again. Then, with a curious indrawing of the
breath, as if relieved from a nerve strain, she sat down on the chest.

“Well have I seen,” I said to her. “But little do I understand.”

“I may not wed,” she said. “I am Siva’s.”

“I can kill the snake—”

The thing in the chest stirred its coils uneasily.

“Be silent!” commanded the fat priest. “Would you slay little N’Yang?”

I shuddered. A great bat came in through the rift that let in the
moon-glow. In the trees over the temple a gibbon wailed in his sleep
like a sick child—“_Hoop-oi-oi-oi_”!

Wat Na Yang extended his arm before him in a gesture of dismissal.

“Go!” he commanded. Then he placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

Nagy N’Yang stood up, bowed her head and went down the path the
moonbeams made, went into the shadow near the door, and out.

The fat priest sat down on the chest beside me. The mottled terror in
the chest was still again.

“She was wed,” the priest began, “but on her wedding-day we claimed her.
Her husband cannot claim her. But if some one unwittingly kills the
great python, she will be free. It must be some one not a friend of the
husband. No one will kill the python here. She is temple-bound for
life—”

The bulk inside thrilled to life again. I heard the scales rustling as
the great coils rose and fell.

“Go, you!” he ordered. “The goddess likes you not. Even if you take the
girl, I can call her back or kill her by touching her flesh with a
single scale from the Naga in the chest.”

He walked with me to the door. At the portal we stood for a space,
silent.

The tiled entrance was flooded with moonlight. In the middle of it a
cobra lay, stretched out, seemingly asleep—a small cobra, deadly none
the less.

“You see,” the gross priest said, pointing to the deadly serpent there.
“Nagy’s spirit watches you here, too. But the girl she did not harm.”

Filled with some spirit of Western bravado I could not stifle, I stepped
close to the cobra and stamped on its head.

“That for all scaly serpents!” I jeered at him. I stood on the cobra’s
head while it lashed out its life.

The fat yellow priest watched me, and I could see hatred and horror
struggle for mastery on his face.

Coming close to me he began to talk in long, rolling sentences, of which
I here and there caught a word. But I caught the sense of what he was
saying.

Oh, yes—the fat priest. It was there, in front of the temple, that he
put on me, in Sanskrit, the Curse of Siva, ending:

    “With gurgling drops of blood, that plenteous stream
    From throats quickly cut by us—”

I laughed at him, threw a yellow coin at his face, kicked the dead cobra
into the door of the temple—and went down the path toward the Laos
girl’s hut.

At the hut door she sat, silent, wonderful.

“Come!” I commanded.

“Where?” she asked.

“To Kalgai town by Salwin River,” I answered. I took her in my arms.

Yes, I took her! Why not? She was mine, wasn’t she? Yes, I took her! Not
down the Thoungyeen River or the road along it. Why? We feared pursuit.
Five miles below Karen a little hill stream comes to the Thoungyeen
River. I never heard its name. We went up that to its springs and then
along to the Hlineboay Chuang.

We traveled slowly, afoot, on cattle-back, on elephant-back—as the
hill-folk could take us, or as we cared to go. Nagy N’Yang at first was
moody, but as we left her own village far behind and got among the
greater hills, she was gayer and gayer. I think when we came to
Shoaygoon Plains she was happy. I was. It was in Shoaygoon _zana_ that I
let her tattoo my forehead with the mark of Siva, to please her and
quiet her superstitious fears. It was wrong, yes, for all-whites; but
for me, with a brown mother? Mayhap not....

And so we came to Kalgai in Kalgai Gorge, and the rains were not yet
come.

We were early. The traders’ huts were not filled. Only a few were taken.
A Eurasian here, a Russian there, a Tibetan there, and yonder a Chinese.

So I had my choice of the best places and picked the best house in the
gorge—on the rock spit that juts into the gorge’s biggest bend over the
whirlpool.

The house we took was of teak beams and bamboo. For a few gold coins I
had its use, entire, with its mats, pots, kettles.

There was a little shilly-shallying of trade, which I did not get into.
Traders came up and down and across. I didn’t care for traffic just
then.

Nagy N’Yang was happy, she told me. I believed it. She went about her
little household tasks neatly.

“After the big rains,” I told her, “we two take boat for Maulmain and
beyond.” I was due for a trip up past Rangoon for temple brasses and
carved ivory. The air was heavy with the promise of the first of the
rains.

“Where you go, I go,” she laughed, stuffing my mouth with rice and fish.

She cuddled closer to me on the eating mat we had spread out.

A shadow fell across the open doorway. She screamed.

It was Pra Oom Bwaht, who smiled down on us with his twisty smile.

“Welcome,” I said.

He came in boldly and sat down.

“You went quickly from Karen,” he said simply.

I could feel my Laos girl wince as she leaned against me. I clutched the
dagger inside my robe.

Pra Oom Bwaht smiled his twisty smile.

“How come you here?” I demanded.

“Why should I not?” he asked. “Especially to see my sister—” He pointed
to Nagy N’Yang.

She sighed and laughed a little nervous laugh.

“I did not know,” I said, “that she was your sister. You are welcome to
our poor house.”

Pra Oom Bwaht smiled again, got up and stalked out. As he went, the
first patter of the rains came, beating up the dust in the space before
the door for a few seconds, then laying it all in a puddle of mud again
as a great dash of fury came into the storm. But it was only the first
baby rain, not enough to make Kalgai whirlpool talk out loud.

I turned to Nagy. She was staring out into the storm.

“I didn’t know he was your brother,” I said to her.

“All Laos are brother and sister,” she replied.

Well, I’ve found it best to keep out of native feuds and family jangles.
“Some old village quarrel back of it,” I thought.

                                  ――――

All night it rained, and in the morning the river was talking to the
cliffs in a louder voice. And the water was up and coming. Bits of drift
were floating.

Among the traders I found Pra Oom Bwaht settled in a little hut off by
himself. He had scant store of Karen cloths, Laos baskets, some hammered
brass. He was sitting on a big box, and it was covered with a mat woven
of tree-cotton fiber. He arose to meet me and came to the door.

“Let us chat here,” he said. “I like the sun better than the shade.”

It was queer to deny me a seat beside him, I thought; but I let it pass.
I was not paying much attention to details then.

So we sat in the doorway and watched the rain and heard the river
talking to Kalgai Gorge. Trade was slack and would be until the greater
rains came bearing boats and rafts from above and over and beyond, from
up the river and the little rivers coming into it.

I could make nothing of Pra Oom Bwaht, I say. I left him and went out to
chaffer a bit.

“Who knows the Karen fool?” Ali Beg, just down from Szechuan after
trading rifles to Chinese Mohammedans for opium, demanded of me from the
door of his own place.

“Why?” I asked.

“He trades like a fool, letting a rupee’s worth go for a pice.”

“Let him,” I laughed, “so long as he keeps away from me.”

“And yours?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Come in and drink of tea with me,” he invited.

So I went in and we sat eye to eye, face to face, across his little
teakwood table, each squatting on his heels, and drank tea and talked of
many things.

“Now that we have said all the useless things, tell me what is at the
bottom of thy heart,” Ali demanded. Up there the important things are
kept for the dessert of the talk.

He was an old friend, with his coal-black eyes, great hairy arms and
rippling black beard.

“Thus it was, heart of my soul,” I said, laying hold of a lock of his
beard up under his green turban, in token of entire truth-telling. “Thus
it was”—and I tugged at the lock of beard. So I told him the tale, from
the time of my going to Karen until the time of my coming to Kalgai town
and the arrival of Pra Oom Bwaht.

He sat a long time in silence.

Then he reached into his robe and drew out a fine dagger of Sikh smithy
work, hammered, figured on the blade, keen, heavy of hilt; in the tip of
the handle a ball of polished steel, hollow and filled with mercury. It
was a throwing knife.

“Take this,” Ali urged. “I taught thee how to cast it at a foe years ago
when we first went up the great river together. I go from here to-night
by boats toward Maulmain. It will fall out with thee as it will fall
out.”

I took the dagger because it was Ali’s gift, not because I was afraid.
Why should I fear anything that walked on two legs or four? Even though
it wore a tail or horns?

At nightfall I went back to my house on the rock spit. The stream was
roaring now—like a baby lion.

Nagy N’Yang was sitting in the open doorway as I came up the path. I saw
she had her chin in her hand and was thinking deeply.

“I saw him,” I made answer to the question in her eyes.

“Did he receive you well?”

“Except that he did not have me to sit beside him on his big trader’s
box in his hut, but took me to the doorway to talk. It was not
friendly.”

“Aha!” Just like that—soft, thoughtful.

“But what do I care for him, with his Karen cloths or hammered brass?” I
chattered at her. “Come to me, Sweet One of a Thousand Delights.”

                                  ――――

So the days and the evenings and nights went by, and the greater rains
followed the lesser. The river crept up and up and up, roaring now to
the cliffs, like old lions.

Then came a day when on going home at eve I stooped at the river’s brim
near the house we had on the rock spit, and felt of the water. It was
chilled. “The flood is full,” I thought. I had felt the snow-chill from
the Tibetan Himalayas in hoary Salwin’s yellow flood. When that comes,
the utmost sources of the world have been tapped for flood water.

“The river will begin to fall to-morrow,” I told Nagy N’Yang when I came
into the place. “We will go soon after, when the big trading is over.”

She smiled at me. Then she patted with her soft hand the place where she
had tattooed on my brow the mark of the third eye of Siva. It was
healed.

“I care not where we go, or if we go or stay, so long as you are with
me,” she whispered, close against my side.

After the evening meal we sat in the doorway and heard the river
talking. Often the big whirlpool sighed or moaned.

“It will almost cover our rock spit,” I said. I knew by the lift of it
by day and the noise of it by night that the flood was a mighty one and
would spend its chief force that night.

She nodded and nestled closer to me.

Out of the shade before us a greater shade silently loomed.

“I greet you, my sister and brother,” Pra Oom Bwaht said, standing
before us.

Nagy N’Yang shivered against my side. I felt the dagger under my robe.

A single beam from our brazier inside struck across his twisty face. He
stretched out his hand toward Nagy N’Yang.

“A gift for my sister,” he said.

She half reached her hand out, took it back, reached again and took it
back; then, as if impelled by a force too strong to resist, reached
again. Into her palm dropped something that shone for a tiny space in
the yellow gleam of the brazier’s ray. She shut her hand—caught it to
her breast. I thought it was a tiny golden bangle—then.

“Come,” said Pra Oom Bwaht. “Let us walk apart for a moment. I have
family matters to talk over. Your husband will permit.”

I wanted her to protest, but she did not. She got up calmly and went
with him out onto the rock spit. I was between them and the mainland.
They could not go away by river. No harm would come to her, it seemed.
“Some tribal custom to be attended to,” I thought. It is best not to be
too curious about such matters up among the hills of Burma and Siam,
ma’am. If you are, your wife suffers, not you.

For a long time I could hear them talking out there in the dark, with
the river talking in between whiles. Once I heard a sound like a great
sigh or sobbing moan. “The whirlpool at the river’s bed,” I thought,
“taking in a great tree or raft.”

Soon after that the back mat of the house lifted, and I thought they had
come in by that way. I sat, peering into the gloom inside, ready to
greet them, when something crashed on to the back of my head and I
forgot for a time.

I came back to memory in a daze and feeling much pain in my head. The
brazier flared beside me. Bending over me was Pra Oom Bwaht, with a
knife in his hand.

“Son of a pig!” he said.

“Where is Nagy N’Yang?” I asked.

He smiled at me—his cursed twisty smile.

“On the river’s brink she waits, bound to a great teak log lodged at the
end of the spit,” he cried hoarsely. “When the flood comes to its full,
she will float away—”

I spat full into his face. I thought it would make him slay me.

He wiped the spittle from his chops calmly. When an Oriental takes an
insult calmly, beware! There is more to come.

“She was my wife,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“Was or is, it makes no difference to me,” I stormed. “She is mine now.”

“She is Siva’s,” he jeered. “Think you that as she swirls down into the
whirlpool at the river’s bend the great river python, mother of all the
pythons, will not take her? Placed I the yellow scale of Nagy in her
hand for naught?”

I shuddered. The legend of the great river python at Kalgai Gorge had
been told to me oft. It slept in the great pool where the whirlpool
formed in flood-time and only came out for prey when the depths were
stirred by a monstrous flood such as this one, the natives said.

“Why did you tell me she was your sister?” I demanded.

“We made it up, she and I. She was wedded, as the priest told you, but
to me. I was listening in the bamboos when you planned your trip here
from Karen that night after the priest cursed you from the door of
Siva’s temple. I heard him curse you and saw you turn down the path to
our hut. If you had slain the python in the temple, without me helping,
she would have been freed. We planned that you should make love, a
little. Enough so you would kill the great snake and win her from it; I
to come after and take her. But you won her whole heart, curse you—”

Up went his hand to slay. While he had raved and chattered at me, my
head had been clearing. As he stiffened for the death stroke, I reached
for the down-coming hand and caught his wrist—the wrist whose sinewy
muscles were driving the knife home. I held his arm back. He clutched
for my throat with his other hand. We strove, and I rolled him and came
on top. Up I surged, dragging him with me. With one awful thrust I sent
him crashing against the wall.

He had barely come to rest against the teak beams before his hand went
up and I dodged—just as his knife whizzed past my ear. Plucking the
great dagger of Ali Beg from my bosom, I cast it, in the manner of the
Inner Mongolian Mohammedans. The great blade plunged forward. I had
pinned him to the wall as a butterfly collector pins a specimen to a
card in his collecting box.

I stepped forward to get my dagger. Pra Oom Bwaht, his throat full of
blood, his heart seared with black hatred, glared at me.

“The Curse of Siva remain on you and yours....”

So he died.

Plucking my dagger from him, I kicked over the glowing brazier and raced
for the rock spit’s end as he crashed down—mere battered clay.

As I came to it, the last of the rain for the night whipped my face,
reviving me. The moon peeped forth. There was no teak log there!

Another rift in the clouds made plain my error. The flood was over all
former flood-marks. The teak log, as the moon’s second peep showed, was
on the point of rocks, but they were now in the stream, many paces from
the present shore-line. The log, caught on the jagged stones, hung and
swayed. It was just on the point of going out. I could see a dark mass,
midway of the log. “It is Nagy N’Yang,” I thought. The hut was blazing
now from the brazier’s scattered coals, giving me plenty of light.

I glanced about the rock spit. A few paces to the right something black
showed in the gloom. I went to it quickly, hoping to find a boat. It was
a great chest. Feeling for the key or handle, I clutched a catch. I
turned it, threw up the lid, just as the moon came forth.

Out of the depths of the box reared a great python, hissing horribly. I
recoiled in terror. The box, as I saw in the moon-glow, was the snake
box of Karen temple, the one in which Nagy N’Yang’s serpent had been
kept.

Pra Oom Bwaht had had it carried to Kalgai Gorge and also to our rock
spit that night to suit some of his own black schemes of vengeance. His
bearers had carried the box unwittingly. While I trembled, the great
snake glided to the river’s brink and disappeared. I now had the big
chest and thought to use it as a rough boat to rescue my love.

Then I turned to view the teak log again. I tugged at the chest. It was
too heavy for me. Another fitful rift of moonlight came, and I saw the
giant teak log sway. Without waiting for more ill fortune, I plunged
into the river and swam through the swirling eddies for the log.

I just made it. But at the touch of my numbed finger on its root ends,
it started. The mere touch was enough to set it adrift. I clutched,
caught a root fiber, held, edged along the rootlet till I had a better
hold, drew myself up on to the root end of the huge log—and then heard
the sobbing moan of Kalgai whirlpool.

Already we were at the pool’s edge. The log began to whirl and sway. I
made a prayer for my Laos girl, that she might be unconscious during the
plunge below. If she were, she would live, as she would not be
breathing. As for me, I felt I could hold my breath the two minutes
necessary. I often had seen the logs go down the suck-hole and come up.
The average time was two minutes for that. What happened to them under
the pool I had no means of knowing. I hoped to be able to cling to the
log. The girl was bound fast.... The log up-ended and went down!

We swirled through great depths, and often I felt us hit against rocks
and other logs in the lower silences. At the pit’s bottom there seemed
no sound, but on the way down and up there was a great roaring. It
seemed that my lungs would burst. But I kept my breath, having, as you
see, great lung space. We began to rise, and as I felt it, something
slowed us down. I felt weak and was about to drop off when something
bound me to the great log, pressing me tightly against the mass of
roots. So we shot into the moonlight.

I was wrapped in the folds of the mighty python, who had thrown a coil
about the tree-trunk in the lowest depths of the pool! That immense
weight it was that had kept us from emerging sooner. We had come up
below the maelstrom upon emerging.

My right arm was free. I reached my belt with it and found my dagger
there. In the moonlight, over the coils of the monster, I could see the
ivory-white face of my Laos girl as she lay out on the huge log like a
crushed lily. I could not tell if she still lived or had died.

The motion of reaching for my dagger aroused the python. It thrust its
head back toward my face, questing with its tongue, that queer organ
with which it sees in the dark. I felt the darting, forked terror on my
dripping features. The python threw back its coil a bit and thrust at my
forehead with its wedge-shaped head, using the python’s death stroke. I
had still sense enough to draw my head to one side, but not before the
hornlike, rounded head-front had dazed me with a glancing blow on the
brow, where the mark of Siva had been tattooed by Nagy N’Yang.

Again I saw the beast draw back its head for a surer stroke. As it
struck, I held the dagger true in front of its oncoming head. The force
of the blow, not my strength, caused the blade of the dagger to sink
into the immense, hard, tense neck-muscles, through and through. The
snake, furious with pain, stricken to death, in one awful convulsive
struggle cast itself into the raging Salwin, taking the dagger of Ali
Beg with it. Why it did not take me down in its coils, I know not....

Yes, I _am_ sweating now. I feel better. My head is clearer....

I wish Nagy N’Yang were here to lay her cool, ivory-white hand on my
forehead where the python’s wedge-shaped head crashed against mine—on
the black mark of Siva....

But my fever is breaking.

Yes, I feel easier, much easier....

Yes, that is all of my story....

What? Ali Beg found us together on a giant teak log at the river’s bend
at Maung Haut, where he had stopped to trade? And, tightly clasped in
Nagy’s hand was something strange? Show it me!

It is the belly scale of a great river python.

_Burn it! Hold the night taper flame to it! Ah, that ends the fat
priest’s evil spell!_

Where is Ali Beg? Here! And Nagy? Here, too!!

Wheel our cots together, ma’am!

Only let me clasp her hand again. Thanks; _it is warm; she is alive_!

No; we won’t go up-country again. Why? Because when our first child
comes, I want it born outside—out from under the shadow of the dread
Curse of Siva!



                           THE FATHER’S HAND


_By_ G. HUMPHREY
From _The Bookman_
_Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead, and Company._
_Copyright, 1919, by George Humphrey._

The Dean and I were sitting after dinner discussing the shortage of
students at Oxford since the war began.

“You have no idea,” he was saying, “how strange it is to lecture to a
class of four or five when one has been accustomed to forty or fifty.
This morning, for instance....”

“Well, Dean,” I put in, “after the war there will be no lectures on
Latin poetry. The times are changing.”

The old man threw back his head, and his silvery beard waved in the
candle-light.

“Listen,” he began, “you remember the passage where a father was trying
to carve a picture of his son’s death?”

“_Bis patriae manus cecidere_,” I quoted. “Twice the hands of the father
fell. Icarus, was it not, for whom his father had made wings, and who
flew too near the sun and fell down to earth?”

He nodded. “_Bis patriae manus cecidere_—twice the father’s hands fell
to his sides. In our village in the first few months of the war, there
came an old man, a refugee from Alsace-Lorraine. By profession, he was a
monument carver, and out of the exercise of his craft he had acquired a
considerable familiarity with what one might call Phœnix-Latin, the kind
that is only called into being when ‘Our Esteemed Fellow-Townsman’ dies.
He had all the pedant’s love for the language. Often he would exchange
tags with me when I met him in the street.

“‘_Quomodo es?_ How are you,’ he would laugh in the tiny general store,
to the mystification of the little spectacled proprietress.

“‘_Bene, domine_,’ was my grave answer,—‘Very well, sir.’

“Soon he became very popular in the village, though he was regarded as
something of a crank. It appeared that he was of the old days when
Alsace-Lorraine belonged to the French. Of his private affairs we could
learn nothing, except that he had married young and that his wife had
died at the birth of a son. When he was questioned about his early life,
he would affect not to understand—‘_Je ne comprend pas, m’sieu_’—this
and a shrug of the shoulders was all that we could get out of him.

“Well, the old fellow prided himself on his excellent eyesight, and in
the fairly frequent air raids, he refused to go into shelter, preferring
instead to remain lying down on the hill outside the village, where he
would watch the hostile aeroplane pursued by our guns until it became a
speck in the distance toward London. Then he would trudge back again.

“‘The pigs are gone,’ he would reassure us in our cellars, shaking his
fist at the sky. ‘Ah the _cochons_! _Sus Germanicus!_’ and we would
crawl out again into God’s air, pleased to see him and knowing that
there was no longer any danger even if the ‘all clear’ signal had not
yet sounded. For he was always right. He knew from bitter experience.

“One day I saw him in conference with the little knot of sailors that
presided over our anti-aircraft defences. He was pointing to the sky
rather excitedly and telling them in his broken English something about
aeroplanes and ‘it is necessaire that they pass so,’ at the same time
indicating a track of sky.

“‘What is it?’ I asked the petty officer.

“‘He’s got an idea for bringing down the Germans,’ explained the man,
twitching his thumb rather contemptuously toward my old friend. ‘He says
they always pass over that point above the headland before they turn to
London. I never noticed it myself, but there may be something in it.
I’ll tell the captain.’

“‘_En hostes_,’ cried the old man in Latin to me, pointing to the place.
‘Behold the enemy. It is quite necessaire that he pass by here what you
call the landmark, is it not? The German precision, _toujours_ the
same.’

“I laughed and took him by the arm, down to the village, marvelling at
the intense hatred with which he spat out the words. ‘The German pigs,’
he muttered as we went along. ‘They have my country.’

“Soon after there came another raid. We heard the gunfire, without
paying much attention to it, so customary had it become. When the safety
siren was heard, we all went back to our occupations as usual. I
wondered why the old fellow had not appeared, and began to grow anxious,
thinking he might have been killed. I was just setting out to look for
him when I caught sight of him running toward me over a ploughed field,
stopping every other moment to pick up his battered black hat, and
looking, even at a quarter of a mile, as if he was full of news of some
kind. When he came within a hundred yards or so, still running, he
shouted something at me, raising his hands to the sky and then pointing
to the earth.

“‘_Fuit Ilium_,’ I heard. ‘Troy is fallen. The German is destroyed. They
have him shot, so,’ and he brought his arm from above his head to the
ground in a magnificently dramatic sweep.

“‘What is it?’ I asked as I reached him.

“Perspiring and mopping his face with the tricolor handkerchief that
some would-be wag had given him, he told his tale. The gunners had taken
his advice, and fired at the spot he told them, and a German aeroplane
had actually been brought down.

“That week the village was jubilant, and my old friend found himself
suddenly a hero. The local papers brought out a long account of the
affair, with a leader about the ‘victim of German autocracy, whom we are
proud to shelter in our midst. With the courage that we know so well in
our brave allies, he stayed out unprotected and discerned the weak spot
in the foe’s armor. We are proud of our guest.’ It was, indeed, a proud
time for our refugee.

“The naval authorities took over charge of the wrecked aeroplane, and
the remains of the fallen aviator were gathered together to be buried
the following week in the village cemetery. We were a simple,
kind-hearted community, far away in the country, and many of the
villagers had themselves sons fighting at the front. So we decided that
the village should erect a simple tombstone over the fallen enemy—the
resolution being made, I suspect, chiefly as the result of a sermon of
the worthy pastor, who pointed out that the dead man was more sinned
against than sinning, that he was the victim of the German system, and
that we ought not to think bitterly of a fallen foe who died at what he
conceived to be his duty.

“The next question was as to the inscription. The old Frenchman brought
out a book, which he explained was the ‘_Vade mecum_ for cutters of
tombs.’ From it he produced a marvellous quotation, which he said came
from Seneca. He was listened to now with respect, but I could see that
the idea was not popular. No one liked to oppose him, until I finally
remarked that something simpler would perhaps be better, and suggested,
‘Here lies a fallen German,’ with the date. The old refugee was
obviously very reluctant to give up his wonderful epitaph, but my
reading was clearly the favorite, and it was adopted in the end. The
obvious man to do the carving was the old stonecutter who had brought
down the aeroplane. He was given the commission.

“The burial took place, and the village went back to its normal routine,
the old man being supposed to be working on the inscription.

“It was about the time of the discussion of the epitaph that the relics
from the recent raid were exposed for view in the little museum at the
school. There was no address found on the body, and almost the only
personal effect that had survived the terrible fall was a photograph of
a woman, young and fair-haired, with the inscription, ‘Meine Mutter,’
which I translated to the admiring villagers as meaning, ‘My Mother.’
Nothing else. I went to tell the old Frenchman and ask him if he had
seen the curiosities. I found him sitting in the garden of the cottage
where he lived, in the little shed he called his workshop, where the
tombstone had been brought. To my surprise, he was lying on the ground,
and beside his open hand lay a chisel.

“‘What is it?’ I asked him.

“He started up when he saw me. ‘I was tired,’ he answered confusedly.
‘_Fatigatus opere_, weary with labor. _N’est-ce-pas?_’ and his poor old
face relapsed into a sad attempt at a smile.

“‘But you have not begun to labor,’ I answered, trying to joke away an
impending feeling of tragedy that I but dimly understood. ‘Why do you
not do the work?’

“‘Ah, I cannot. My hands are old, and I can no more.’

“Then I saw that his hands were shaking, and I grew alarmed. I could see
that the strain of the last few days was telling on him. He seemed years
older. So I gently helped him up and took him indoors, where the good
woman of the house put him to bed. I asked her how long he had been
sick, and she told me that he had gone out that afternoon, looking well,
and intending to buy a chisel and visit the little museum. She had not
seen him again till I brought him in from the garden.

“From that time the poor old man seemed to grow feebler and feebler, and
we began to think that his last joke had been cracked and all his
troubles ended. He seemed to lose all wish to live, lying on his bed
without a word, and only taking food when it was almost forced down his
throat. I frequently visited him and tried to console him. For the one
thing that now troubled him was that he would not be able to execute his
commission before he died. ‘Never have I promised and not perform,’ he
would say. ‘Oh, for one day of my _pristini roboris_—my youthful
strength.’

“I comforted him and told him, against my belief, that he would be out
cutting the inscription next spring. But he shook his head sorrowfully,
and at each visit he seemed to grow weaker and weaker. The climax came
quite suddenly. Summer had turned to fall, and I was taking my usual
walk by the light of the harvest moon, passing through the old
churchyard, where the German had been buried and the cross had now been
put, uncarved. For we boasted no other stonecutter in the village. I
went up to look at it, and by the moonlight I caught sight of the figure
of a man. Bending down, I saw my old friend, dead, by the work he had
promised. It was not till the next day that they found his chisel by the
tombstone, and about a dozen letters which he had chiselled. The
villagers thought that the old man had gone out of his mind, for the
letters on the stone were not the beginning of the epitaph we had agreed
on. They think so yet. For I never told them, and I am the only man who
can read what is written on the stone.”

Here the Dean was silent a moment or so.

“Well, what had he carved?” I asked.

“_Bis patriae m_ ... Twice the hand of the father failed. The dead man
was his son.”



                        THE VISIT OF THE MASTER


_By_ ARTHUR JOHNSON
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Arthur Johnson._

“Have you ever read any of Marian Haviland Norton?”

I didn’t expect, when I put the question, to fall right into a mine of
information. It was out of my line, moreover, to talk about authors and
books at dinner. But the topic had popped inconsequently into my head,
and there was certainly something about the quiet, sly-looking
Jane-Austenish woman at my left that inspired confidence.

“I’m distinctly curious about her,” I added. “She’s sprung up so soon,
so authoritatively. And she’s so new.”

Up to this point my companion had only listened more quietly, more
slyly, than ever; but her eyes now opened wide, her eyebrows went
whimsically high, and she turned to me with a twinkling smile.

“_New?_ You really think so?”

She gave me no time, either, to correct my statement.

“I didn’t suppose any one still thought that—except, possibly— Have
_you_ ever read Hurrell Oaks?”

I nodded gropingly.

“Miss Haviland was a teacher of mine at Newfair when it happened. That
was eight, ten years ago. D’you see?”

“I don’t ‘see’ anything.”

“But you do Hurrell Oaks—you’re, you’re really all ‘for’ him, I mean? So
you’d adore it. It’s pathetic, too. Though it is funny!” she cried, avid
to tell me more about whatever “it” was.

But the inevitable shift in table talk veered us apart at that moment;
and it wasn’t until after the long meal was over that we came together
again, and could choose a quiet corner away from interruptions.

“Here goes, now,” she began, “if you’re ready?”

                                  ――――

Miss Haviland must have been about thirty when I first saw her. She was
tall, handsome in an angular way. Her face was large, her features
regular, though somewhat heavy, her coloring brilliant, and her dark
hair grayish even then. She was of a stocky leanness, a ruggedness
indigenous to northern New England—and perhaps she did “come” from New
England; wanderers from those climes can flourish so prodigiously, you
know—which only made her pretentious garb and manner the more
conspicuous.

To see her at those college parties! She wore black evening-gowns, and a
string—a “rope,” I think you could call it—of imitation pearls, and
carried a fan always, and a loose wrap with some bright lining, and fur
on the neck and sleeves, which she’d just throw, as if carelessly, over
her shoulders. We used irreverently to say that she had “corrupted” (one
of her favorite words) the premise of the old motto, “When you’re in
Rome” to “Whether or not you’re in Rome,” so did she insist on being—or
trying to be—incongruously _grande dame_ and not “of” the _milieu_ she
was privileged to adorn. Without ever letting herself mix with those
gatherings really, she’d show her condescension by choosing a place in
the most mixing group, and there carry out her aloofness by just smiling
and peering reservedly at—at the way a man set a glass of water upon the
table, for instance, as if that constituted enough to judge him by; as
if he’d laid his soul, also, sufficiently bare to her in the process.
And she must have been, as you’ve seen, a resourceful observer; she had
a gift for reacting from people; though how much depended upon the
people and what they did and said, and how much upon what she
unconsciously—or consciously—adapted from Hurrell Oaks while she gauged
them, is a question. The result at least fits the needs of a gaping
public. But I’m drifting.

All this—in fact, everything about her—took George Norton by storm when
he turned up, fresh from a freshwater university farther west, to fill
the Slocum professorship. He found in her the splendor that he’d been
stranded away from in “real life,” and had never had time or imagination
to find in books. She represented great, glorious things beyond his
ken—civilization, culture, society, foreign lands across the sea for
which his appetite had been whetted by the holiday tour he took to
Bermuda after getting his A.B. with highest honors in history and
government. He was about forty or so, and lived alone with his mother.

Rumor had it (and it may have been well founded, it’s so difficult to
tell what goes on in the minds of those small, meek men), that he had
always wanted to discover an “Egeria-like woman,” and that, once he
stepped into Mrs. Braxton’s drawing-room and saw—and heard—Miss Haviland
discoursing on “The Overtones in Swinburne’s Prose,” his wildest hope
was realized. Be that as it may, his recognition must have been
overpowering to have won her attention so easily; for her standards
wouldn’t have permitted her, by any stretch of imagination, to think of
him as an Egeria’s man—however she may have felt she merited one.

But she wasn’t, with her looks and distinction and learning, the sort to
attract men readily. She was too self-sufficient and flagrant, to begin
with. She left no medium of approach suggested. She offered no tender,
winning moments. Her aspect for men, as well as for women, implied that
she thought she knew their ways and methods better than they did.... It
shows as a weakness in her stories, I think—the temerity with which she
assumes the masculine role, the possible hollowness of her assumptions
not once daunting her. Remember the one that begins, “I had just peeked
into the bar of the Savoy Hotel”? I could never, when I read it, think
of anything except just how Marian Haviland herself would look, in a
black evening gown and her other regalia, “peeking”—as she no doubt
longed to do. But I’m drifting again.... Her favor might have fired the
heart of a _grand seigneur_, I don’t know; to the men of Newfair it was
too much like a corrective. George Norton, I guess, was the only one who
ever craved it. He courted the slavedom of learning to be her foremost
satellite.

His courting went on at all the assemblages. The moment he entered a
room, you could see her drawing him like a magnet; and him drawn,
atom-like, with his little round beard and swallow-tail coat and
parsonish white cravat, to wherever she ensconced herself. No sooner
would he get near than she’d address a remark almost lavishly to
somebody on the other side, and not deign to notice until the topic had
been well developed, and then she would only frown distantly and say:

“Mr. Norton, how are _you_ this evening?”

But he would bob, and smirk consciously, up and down on his toes, and
slap one hand against the other in an appreciative manner; undismayed if
she looked away to talk quite exclusively to somebody else for another
five minutes, just perhaps glancing fugitively over at him again to
suggest:

“It’s too bad you must stand, Mr. Norton.” Or, when another pause came,
“Can’t you find a chair?”

But you could see her still holding him fast behind her while she
finished her own chat, and before she had leisure to release him at last
with some cue like:

“That chair, perhaps, over there—no, _there_, Mr. Norton.”

Nice little man. He would fetch the very one. He would even keep it
suspended in the air until she pointed out the exact spot and, with eyes
and eyebrows tense, nodded approval of her scheme—asking him, however,
after he was seated, to stand a moment, so she could move her own chair
a bit farther to the right, away from the person whose foot had been
planted, as she all the time knew, upon a rung of it.

He would yearn up to her presently and murmur, “A beautiful room, don’t
you think, Miss Haviland?”

At which she would wince, and whisper down in his ear; and he wag his
head and roll his eyes surreptitiously, sure of not appearing to observe
any details she was kind enough to instruct him on. He would smile
gratefully, proudly, after it was over, as if her words had put them
into a state of blissful communion.

I remember well the day I met them together when she told me Hurrell
Oaks was coming to Newfair. I can see her now as she sauntered across
the campus, in slow, longish strides, and the would-be graceful little
spring she gave when her feet touched the ground, and her head set
conveniently forward on her shoulders. She looked at me, and then smiled
as if to let me know that it wasn’t her fault if she had to take me all
in so at a glance. Why, in a glance like that she’d stare you up and
down. If your hat was right, she’d go on toward your feet, and if your
shoe-lacings were tied criss-cross instead of straight, it meant
something quite deplorable. And if she wasn’t fortunate enough to meet
you or anybody else on the way, she doubtless scrutinized the sky and
trees and grass with the same connoisseurship. I actually believe she
had ideas on how birds ought to fly, and compared the way they flew at
Ravenna with the way they flew at Newfair.

That was autumn of my senior year. Miss Haviland’s first book had been
published by then, and acclaimed by the critics. The stories, as they
appeared one by one in the magazines, had each in turn thrown Newfair
into a panic of surprise and admiration.

Nobody ever knew, you see, until they began, what Miss Haviland did
during the long periods she shut herself up in that little apartment of
hers in the New Gainsborough. If, as you say, she seemed to burst so
suddenly, so authoritatively, into print for you, think what it must
have meant for us when we saw such dexterity and finish unfurled all at
once in the pages of the _Standard_. Unbeknownst she had been working
and writing and waiting for years, with an indefatigable and indomitable
and clear-sighted vision of becoming an author. It was her aim, people
have told me since, from the time she was a girl.

She had been to Harvard, summers, and taken all the courses which the
vacation curriculum afforded—unnoticed, unapplauded, it is said, by her
instructors. She had traveled—not so widely, either, but cleverly,
eclectically, domineeringly, with her sole end in view. After five
minutes with only—say—a timetable, acquired, let us suppose, at Cook’s,
Topica, she could as showily allude to any express _de luxe_ there
mentioned—be it for Tonkin or Salamanca—as the most confirmed passenger
ever upon it. She had mastered French and Italian. And she had—first and
last and betweenwhiles—read Hurrell Oaks. I venture to say there wasn’t
a vowel—or consonant, for that matter—of the seventy-odd volumes she
hadn’t persistently, enamouredly, and enviously devoured.

At Newfair, people had by this time, of course, compared her “work” with
the “works” of Hurrell Oaks; but you know how few people have the
patience or the taste to “take him in”? And the result of comparisons
almost invariably was that Marian Haviland was better. She had
assimilated some of the psychology, much of the method, and a little of
the charm; and had crossed all her T’s and dotted her I’s, and revised
and simplified the style, as one person put it, for “the use of
schools”; and brought what Hurrell Oaks called “the base rattle of the
foreground” fully into play.

Instead of being accused of having got so much from him, she was
credited, one thought, with having given him a good deal. You might have
guessed, to hear people at Newfair talk, that _she_ was partly
responsible for the ovations being tendered him over the country during
the season of his return—the first time in fifteen years—to his native
land.

“Mrs. ——,” Miss Haviland explained, mentioning a well-known metropolitan
name, “has written me” (of course she would be the one literary fact at
Newfair to write to on such matters) “to ask if we can possibly do with
Mr. Oaks overnight.”

I gaped under my handkerchief at the fluency of her “do.”

“But I don’t just know how,” she went on, “we _could_ make him
comfortable. Mrs. Edgerton won’t be well in time. And he _mustn’t_ stay
at the Greens’.” She waxed indignant at the very possibility. “In _her_
guest-room, my dear? With those Honiton laces, and that scorbutic
carpet, and the whirligig pattern on the walls—and the windows giving on
the parti-colored slate roof of the gymnasium?”

I tried, in spite of myself, to think commensurately.

“And Mrs. Kneeland’s waitress wears ear-rings!... No. Now I’ve been
thinking—don’t hurry along so, George. You never keep in line! It spoils
the pleasure of walking when one constantly outsteps you like that.”

“Pardon,” said George, and fell back.

Miss Haviland winced and shifted her maroon parasol to the shoulder on
his side, and smiled attentively at me to sweeten the interval, and
continued:

“Now _I_, if you’re interested to hear—”

I was very interested, and told her so. It always piqued my curiosity,
moreover, to think why Miss Haviland picked me out—young as I was—for
such confidences. I believe it was mostly because I always stared at her
so; which she mistook, characteristically, for sheer flattery.

Even as she spoke, I was remarking to myself the frilled languor of her
dress, and her firm rather large-boned throat, and the moisture—for it
was hot—under the imitation pearls, and the competent grip of her hand
on the long onyx handle of her parasol.

She stopped short of a sudden. George took a few steps ahead. She lifted
her parasol over to the other shoulder and looked at him, and he fell
into line again, a sensitive, pleased, proud smile showing above his
little round beard.

“Now _I_ think it would be better—simpler, more dignified, and less
ghastly for _him_—if he came, say, to luncheon, and if we arranged for a
small, a very small, group of the people he’d care most to see—he
doesn’t, poor fellow, want to see many of us!—a _small_ group, I say, to
come—George! _Please!_ It makes me nervous, it interrupts me, and it is
very bad for the path.... Cover it up now with your foot. No—here—let me
do it.”

“Pardon,” said George, cheerfully.

Miss Haviland winced again. “I don’t know about _trains_,” she went on,
“but we can look one out for him” (she facilely avoided the American
idiom) “and then motor him to town in—in Mrs. Edgerton’s car. Don’t you
think that will be more _comme il faut_?”

“He’ll be so pleased, he’ll enjoy so much meeting _her_!” exclaimed
George to me, rising on his toes repeatedly and rubbing his small dry
hands together. “Won’t he?”

Miss Haviland turned to him severely, and at a signal he drew his arm up
and she slipped hers through it.

“To worry now _is_ a bit premature, perhaps,” she called back. “We’re
off to see the new Discobulus. I fear it’s modeled on a late Roman
copy.”

And I saw her, when I glanced over my shoulder a second later, pause
again and withdraw her arm to point to the Memorial Library.

“What will he think of a disgrace like that, George?” I heard her
imprecating.... “_What?_ You don’t _see_—that the architect’s left off a
line of leaves from the capitals? Come on.”

Hurrell Oaks may have been over-fastidious. Yes. But his discernments
were the needs of a glowing temperament; they grew naturally out of
ideals his incomparable sensitiveness created. Whereas hers—Marian
Haviland’s—though derived from him, had all the—what shall I
say?—snobbishness, which his lacked utterly. I can’t estimate that side
of her, even now, not in view of all her accomplishments, even, except
as being a little bit cheap.

I didn’t, of course, though, gather at her first mention of his coming
half that it meant to her. And she wouldn’t, I might have known, with
her regard for the _nuances_, have let it baldly appear. But I
discovered afterward that she had made all sorts of overtures—done her
utmost to divert him to Newfair. She didn’t know him; had never set eyes
on him; but her reputation, which was considerable even then, helped her
a good deal. For she solicited news of him from her publishers; and she
wrote Mrs. ——, whatever her name was, finally, when she learned that
that was the real right source to appeal to, a no doubt handsome letter,
whence came the reply Miss Haviland had quoted to me, but which, as I
also afterward found out, only asked very simply, “in view of the
uncertainty of Mr. Oaks’s plans,” whether or not he could, in case he
had to, “spend the night there.”

Well, it eventuated, not strictly in accord with her wire-pulling, that
Hurrell Oaks’s route was changed so he could “run through” in the late
afternoon “for a look at the college.” He was to be motoring to a place
somewhere near, as it happened, and the Newfair detour would lengthen
his schedule by only an hour or two. Word of it didn’t come to her
directly, either; that letter was addressed to the president. But it was
humbly referred to Miss Haviland in the course of things, and she took
the matter—what was left of it—into her own hands.

“No,” she answered, unyielding to the various suggestions that cropped
up. “But I’ll tell you what I am willing to do: I will give up my own
little flat. Living in London as he does, he will feel—quite at home
there.”

Funny though it is, looking back over it, it had also, when all was said
and done—particularly when all was done—its pathetic side. For Hurrell
Oaks was the one sincere passion of her life. He was religion and—and
everything to her. The prospect of seeing him in the flesh, of hearing
him _viva voce_, was more than she had ever piously believed could come
to pass.

However much she imitated him—and remember, a large following bears
witness to her skill—however she failed in his beauty and poetry and
thoroughbredness, she must have had a deep, a discriminating love of his
genius to have taken her thus far. No wonder she couldn’t, with her
precise sense of justice, _not_ be the chosen person at Newfair to
receive him. But nobody dared question the justice of it, really. Wasn’t
she the _raison d’être_ of his coming?—of his being anywhere at all, as
some people thought?

Her very demeanor was mellowed by the prospect. She set about the task
of preparation with an ardor as unprofessed as it was apparent. She
doffed the need of impressing any one in her zeal to get ready to
impress Hurrell Oaks.

Her tone became warm and affluent as she went about asking this person
and that to lend things for the great day: Mrs. Edgerton’s Monet, Mrs.
Braxton’s brocades; a fur rug of Mrs. Green’s she solicited one noon on
the campus as if from a generous impulse to slight no one. And even when
Mrs. Green suggested timidly that she would be glad “to pay for having
the invitations engraved,” Miss Haviland didn’t correct her. But—

“No, dear,” she said. “I think I won’t let you do that much—_really_.
There aren’t to be so many, and I shall be able to write them myself in
no time.”

I can see her now, fingering her pearls and peering as hospitably as she
could manage into Mrs. Green’s commonplace eyes, and George Norton
hurrying across the grass to catch a word with her without avail. He was
the only person whom she was, during those perfervid preliminaries, one
bit cruel to.

But him she overlooked entirely. She didn’t seem to see him that day at
all. She just peered obliquely beyond him, and, engrossed quite
genuinely, no doubt, in Mrs. Green’s fur rug, took her arm and strolled
off. She had lost, for the time being, all use for him. He was left
deserted and alone at the teas and gatherings, magnetized from one spot
to another whither she moved forgetfully away.

I met him in the park and pitied his shy, inept efforts not to appear
neglected.

“Well, I kind of think it may rain,” he essayed, half clasping his small
hands behind him and looking sociably up around the sky for a cloud.
“But I don’t know as it will, after all.” And then, “Have you seen Miss
Haviland lately?” he asked out in spite of himself.

“Not since yesterday’s class.”

“How’s the improvements coming?”

“All right, I guess. The new stuff for the walls arrived, I heard. It
hasn’t been put on yet.”

“Oh—she’s papering, is she?”

“And painting.”

He tried to sparkle appreciatively. “Well, it takes time to do those
things. You never know what you’re in for. She’s well?”

And he swayed back and forth on his heels, and teetered his head
nervously. Poor thing! The gap he had tried so hard to bridge was filled
to brimming now by the promised advent of Hurrell Oaks.

Miss Haviland called me on the telephone one afternoon as the day was
approaching to ask if I would lend her my samovar; and she wanted I
should bring it over presently, if possible, as she was slowly getting
things right, and didn’t like to leave any more than was necessary to
the last moment. So I polished the copper up as best I could and went
’round that evening to the New Gainsborough to leave it.

The building looked very dismal to me, I recall. A forlorn place it
seemed to receive the great guest. It had been a dormitory once, which
had been given over, owing to the inconveniences of the location, to
accommodate unmarried teachers. It was more like a refined factory than
an apartment-house. The high stoop had no railing, and the pebbles which
collected on the coarse granite steps added to the general bleakness of
the entrance. The inner halls were grim, with plain match-board
wainscots and dingy paint, and narrow staircases that ascended steeply
from meager landings. Miss Haviland’s suite was three flights up.

But when I got inside it, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Her door was slightly ajar—it was the way Miss Haviland avoided the
bother and the squalor of having to let people in—and at my knock she
called out in a restrained, serene tone, “Come!” And I stepped through
the tiny vestibule into the study.

It was amazingly attractive—Hurrell Oaks himself would have remarked it,
I’ll wager. Nobody except Marian Haviland could have wrought such a
change.

Of course there were Mrs. Edgerton’s Monet, and Mrs. Braxton’s brocades,
and—yes—Mrs. Green’s fur rug, to say nothing of numberless other
borrowed _objets_, to help out the lavishness of the effect; but the
synthesis was magnificent. Everything looked as if it had grown there.
One might have been in an Italian palace. And Miss Haviland, seated at
her new antique walnut desk with the ormolu mounts, looked veritably
like a chatelaine. She had always, too—I ought to have seen it before—a
little resembled a chatelaine, a chatelaine without a castle.

But she had for the moment her castle now—enough of it to complete the
picture, at any rate. There was a low smoldering fire on the hearth, and
the breeze that played through the open window just swayed the heavy
damask hangings rhythmically. My samovar, as I set it down on a carved
consol near the door, looked too crude and crass to warrant the excuse
of my coming.

She read my dazed approval in a glance and laid down her pen, and, with
one experienced _coup d’œil_ over the manuscript before her, leaned
back, clasping the edge of her desk with both hands and staring at me.
She was wearing one of those black evening gowns, and a feather fan was
in easy reach of where she sat; and I noticed all at once that the
string of pearls was dangling from the gas-jet above her head.

“The new fixtures—the electric ones—will be bronze,” she hastened to
say.

I shall never forget, not to my dying day, the sight I had of her
sitting there; in that room, at that desk, in a black evening
gown—_writing_! And the string of pearls she had slung across the
condemned gas-jet by way of subtle disarmament for her task! The whole
place had the hushed grand air of having been cleared for action by some
sophisticated gesture; as if—the thought whimsically struck me—she might
have just rung for the “second man” and bidden him remove “all the
Pomeranians” lest they distract her.

“It’s too lovely, Miss Haviland; I can’t tell you what I think it is,” I
exclaimed, blankly.

She stood up, reached for the rope of pearls, and slipped them over her
head.

“I want you to see the hall,” she said. “Isn’t it _chic_?... And the
bedrooms. The men will leave their hats in the south chamber—my room—in
here; and the women will have the other—this one.”

She preceded me. She was quite simple in her eagerness to point out
everything she had done. Her childlike glee in it touched me. And she
looked so tired. She looked, in spite of her pomp and enthusiasm,
exhausted.

“How he—how Mr. Hurrell Oaks will love it,” I cried, sincerely. “If he
only realized, if he only could know the pains you’ve taken for him.”

“_Pains?_”

She leaned forward and let me judge for myself how she felt. Her eyes
glowed. I had never seen her with all the barriers down.

“It isn’t a _crumb_ of what’s due him,” she pleaded. “Do you think I
expect he’ll love it? No. It’s only the best I could do—the best I _can_
do—to save him the shock of finding it all awful. Oh, I didn’t, I so
don’t want him to think we are—barbarians!”

She gave it out to me from the depths of her heart, and I accepted it
completely, with no reservations or comments. It was the one real
passion of her life, as I’ve said. She was laying bare to me the utmost
she had done and longed to do for Hurrell Oaks.

“To think that he is coming here!” she murmured. “I’ve waited and hoped
so to see him—only to see him—it’s about the most I’ve ever wanted. And
it’s going to happen, dear, in my own little rooms. He is coming to me!
Oh, you can’t know what he’s meant to me in all the years—how I’ve
studied and striven to learn to be worthy of him! _All_—the little all
I’ve got—I owe to him—everything. He’s done more than anybody, alive or
dead, to teach me to be interested in life—to make me happy.”

She threw her long arms around my shoulders and pressed me to her, and
kissed me on the forehead. The chapel clock struck ten.

“You’ll come, too, won’t you?” she asked, stepping back away from me in
sudden cheerfulness. “For I want you to see how wonderful he will be.”

She put her arms about me once more, and went with me to the door when I
left. In her forgetfulness of all forms and codes she had become a
perfect chatelaine. She opened the door almost reluctantly, and stepped
out on to the meager landing, and stood there waving her hand and
calling out after me until I had got well down the narrow staircase.

The day dawned at last. The hour had been set at five o’clock, as Miss
Haviland’s Shakespeare course wasn’t over until three-thirty, and the
faculty hadn’t seen fit, after “mature consideration,” to give her
pupils a holiday. But the elect of Newfair were talking about the event,
and discussing what to wear, and whether they ought to arrive on the dot
of five or a few minutes after, or if they wouldn’t be surer of seeing
him “at his best” by coming a few minutes before.

I met Professor Norton again in the park that morning.

“All ready for this afternoon?” I asked him.

His lips went tight together, and quivered in and out over his small
round beard as he tried to face me. And then he looked down away, and
began digging another hole in the gravel walk with the broad toe of his
congress boot. He shot a glance at me, in a moment, and gazed off at the
falling leaves.

“Aren’t you interested in Hurrell Oaks?” I persisted.

“I’m interested in everything Marian Haviland likes,” he declared,
boldly, focusing his eyes full upon mine. “But—but the apartment’s
small, and—and I reckon there wasn’t room.”

_Room?_ Was any place too _small_ for him? It made my blood—even at that
age—boil.

“She’s had enough to do to keep half a dozen busy,” I said, tactlessly.

“_Has_ she?” he echoed in hope. “How—how’s she got on?”

“She’s been wonderful,” I said, feeling kindlier toward her as I spoke.
“She’s made that apartment regal.”

“I’m glad, I’m glad! I knew she had it in her. Did the new sofa come?”

“Yes. Everything’s come. And you’d better come yourself at five o’clock.
I know she’s just forgotten—perhaps your invitation got lost like Mrs.
Purcell’s. She only got hers an hour ago, I heard.”

“Really, now! Well, I’ll just go home and see. I need a little nap, I
guess. I haven’t been sleeping very well. Good-by.”

And he held out his hand, and nodded to me several times, and gave me a
sad, cheery, uncertain smile.

It was too bad. I was sure Miss Haviland _had_ forgotten him. I didn’t
think—and I don’t think now—that she wilfully omitted to send him an
invitation. It was only that her cup was too full to remember his small,
meek existence. I wondered if I dared remind her. I was pretty busy all
day, however. And I had to get dressed and out by four, as I hadn’t
posted my daily theme yet, and the time would be up at half-past. But I
thought, even so late as then, that I’d better go by way of the New
Gainsborough, and if things seemed propitious, drop a hint to her, for I
felt free to say almost anything after my experience of the other
evening.

Things weren’t propitious, though, I can tell you.

I was still some distance from the building—it was about fifteen
minutes’ walk, I should say—when I heard somebody calling to me in a
distressed voice. I looked ’round behind me, and to the right and left;
and when finally I walked ahead I saw Miss Haviland fly out through the
swinging door of the New Gainsborough and stand there at the top of the
high granite stoop, beckoning frantically. She had on a mauve-colored
kimono, which she was holding together rather desperately in front, and
her hair was uncaught behind and streaming in the wind.

“Edith! Edith!” she called out. “Quick!”

She had never called me by my first name before. What could it be?—at
this late hour, too? She waited a second to be sure I was coming, then
dodged back under cover.

I ran. I sprang up the granite steps.

“See if you see anybody!” she commanded, breathlessly, peeping out at
me.

“No, I don’t,” I said, looking. “There’s nobody, Miss Haviland.”

“But there must be,” she insisted. “Look again! Look everywhere!”

I did so. “There _isn’t_, Miss Haviland,” I said back through the
opening. “Why won’t you believe me?”

“Go down again, do go right down,” she kept saying, “and _see_!”

I shook my head. But at that she leaped out on to the stoop and took me
by the shoulder and pushed me.

“Run out behind the building—oh, be quick!” she beseeched. “Look all
along the road, and if you see anybody, stop him and tell me!”

I ran. The road was empty. I came dazedly back. “There’s nobody in
sight,” I panted, “not a soul.”

“Run over to that tree where you can see ’round the turn in the avenue!”

I ran again. I stretched my eyes in vain, but there wasn’t a person of
any sort or description.

“Once more—_please_!” She started down the steps as I started up. “Over
by the chapel—you may find somebody walking. _Hurry!_”

I hurried. I was out of breath and hardly knew what I was doing.

“They’re all in, getting ready, Miss Haviland. How can you expect me to
find anybody now?” I asked, pointlessly, and in some indignation as I
reapproached her.

But she rushed down the steps and stopped me halfway, her mauve kimono
fluttering open, and the gilt high-heeled slippers she had donned in her
haste gleaming garishly against the unswept stone.

“Listen! Harken!” she whispered. “Do you hear a motor? Don’t you? Try
again!”

It was still as death.

I stared up at her in terror. Not till then did I realize how serious it
was. But I had never seen a woman look like that. I had never seen the
anguish of helplessness in the hour of need written so plain. Her eyes
seemed to open wider and wider—I had to turn away—and awful lines came
on her forehead. She stretched out both arms and uttered a long Oh-h!
that started in her throat and went up into a high-pitched note of pain.
She was to me positively like a wild woman.

I watched her slowly raise one hand and unclasp it; I saw within a
small, a very small, white paper thing, which she held closer to her
face and gaped at, as if she couldn’t believe the truth of what she saw.

“What is it? What is the matter, Miss Haviland?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she answered, quite calmly.... “_Listen!_ Don’t you hear—”

But she shuddered. “They’ll be coming, Miss Haviland. Really! You’ve no
time left.”

“Yes.”

She tried to smile. It was uncanny. It was hardly more than a distension
of her pale wide lips—a relic, merely, of spent resourcefulness. Then
the blankness went out of her face, her expression collapsed, and she
sobbed aloud.

“Miss Haviland! Miss Haviland! Do let me help you,” I begged, and I put
my arm through hers and led her inside the swinging door and up the
narrow stairs. “Mayn’t I do _anything_?”

She dragged herself heavily on by my side. But her sobs ceased after the
first flight. At the meager landing before her door she broke away and
stood erect and faced me and held out her hand. The abruptness of the
change in her awed me. I watched her push the hair from over her face
and tilt her head back and shake it and gather the folds of the kimono
nonchalantly together; and resume the old hard connoisseurship I had
seen her exercise from the beginning. Her eyes dilated tensely, and her
eyebrows went tensely up, and she gave me that envisaging smile as of
yore.

“It was nothing,” she said, “quite nothing. Won’t you step in and
wait?... I’m tired, I expect. I was alone here, do you see, taking my
bath. The servants” (Mrs. Edgerton’s servants!) “hadn’t come. And that
knock on the door upset me. I thought—I thought—it might be—the—the
caterer” (she winced at the word, and the wince seemed to help her to
proceed) “with the food. So I hurried out and down like mad.... Thanks
awfully, though. You’ll be back, surely? Please do.”

I did go back, of course. I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds—sad as it
was. There wasn’t such a long interval to wait, either. I wended my way,
and found the theme-box closed, and returned at about quarter past five.

When I entered, the assemblage was in full swing, and Marian Haviland,
in the black afternoon toilette she had sent to New York for in honor of
Hurrell Oaks’s visit, was scintillating in the midst. She had donned her
pearls, and subdued her cheeks unbecomingly, and tinted her lips; and,
going from one person to another, she would, in response to the
indiscriminating compliments they bestowed, just tap them each gaily on
the shoulder with her fan and explain that:

“Mr. Oaks was so sorry, but he couldn’t wait. Yes, he was wonderful,”
she would say, “_perfectly_. We had an immemorial hour together. I shall
never forget it—_never_.”

To this day I don’t blame her for lying. If she hadn’t lied she never
could have stood it. And she had to stand it. What else could she do?
She couldn’t hang a sign on the door and turn the guests away after all
their generous sacrifices to the occasion.

George Norton, needless to say, wasn’t there. She had forgotten—I insist
upon that much—to ask him. But two days later she announced her
engagement to marry him, and in another month’s time the knot was
actually tied.

                                  ――――

My companion stopped short there, and leaned back in her chair,
expectantly staring at me.

“Like Marian Haviland Norton’s readers,” I said, “I should like some of
the T’s crossed and the I’s dotted a little more plainly. Don’t spare
me, either, as far as the ‘base rattle of the foreground’ is concerned.
But tell me, please, literally just what you think happened.”

She showed her disappointment at that; looked almost aggrieved. Then she
laughed out in spite of herself.

“Hurrell Oaks didn’t expect a party,” she declared; “he didn’t, at all
events, mean to have one. He didn’t—_she_ was right about that—‘want to
see many of us.’ He didn’t want to see anybody. He just wanted to do his
manners. He couldn’t decently get out of that much. And, although he may
have been asked to come at exactly five—nobody, of course, knows how
_his_ invitation was worded—he reached Newfair earlier, perhaps
unintentionally so, and came instead at four, and knocked politely for
admittance. But Mrs. Edgerton’s servants, unfortunately, hadn’t arrived,
and Miss Haviland was, as she herself admitted, taking a bath. She was
no doubt actually _in the tub_ when Hurrell Oaks slipped his card under
the door.”



                            IN THE OPEN CODE


_By_ BURTON KLINE
From _The Stratford Journal_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Stratford Journal._
_Copyright, 1919, by Burton Kline._

The day’s work was finished and the entire job well started. I felt sure
we should meet old Bankard’s wishes fully. The rare old Virginia manor
and its wooded park were going to look again as the original designer
meant them to appear. Gordon, I know, agreed with me—Gordon, who was to
restore the house as I restored the grounds.

That evening he and I were sitting on a rusted iron bench in a corner of
the park that looked off over the hills, watching the summer dusk steal
up the eastern sky. I still wanted to talk of the day’s accomplishment,
but Gordon seemed to have grown—I was going to say dreamy, but he was
watchful instead.

Presently he drew out his watch and said, “In just about four minutes
you will hear it.”

“Hear what?”

“See that notch between those two hills about a mile and a half away
over there?” He pointed. “Keep your eye on that.”

“A blast?”

“Yes, a blast. But not the kind you think. Just watch.”

We smoked in silence, and my curiosity was about to break into speech
again, or ebb altogether, when it happened.

An ordinary freight train passed, but the locomotive, as it emerged from
the flat hillside and traversed the broad notch, let off a stream of
white puffs from its whistle, and then disappeared behind the other
hill, precisely like an episode on the stage.

In a moment the white puffs translated themselves from a sight in the
eye to a sound in the ear. And I tell the truth when I say that they
reproduced, with a mimicry that was startling, the notes of the last two
bars of “Annie Laurie.”

“What do you make of that!” Gordon turned and exulted to me over his odd
little discovery.

“How did you get on to it?”

“Oh, stumbled across it the first evening we were here. It goes every
day at this time, as regular as clock-work.”

“Some engineer with a sense of humor amusing himself,” I conjectured.

“But regularity isn’t amusement. He blows it every day at this time. And
always in the same way.”

I tried another hypothesis. “A code signal of some sort, most likely.”

“But what an odd code! What a poetic code, for a railroad!”

“Well, I’ve learned to expect a good deal of life in Virginia. It seems
to be different here.”

“Yes, it’s a code.... Of course it’s a code!” Gordon amended himself.
“But—I wonder if it’s a railroad code?”

“I see. A lover and his lass, eh? You’re crediting your railroad
engineer with your own romantic soul, Gordon.” I patted his arm, as
Jemima, our cook, rang her bell for supper. “Now there’s a code that I
can understand!” And we hurried in to the table.

By next evening the whole gang had heard of the curious signal from the
freight locomotive and assembled at the opening of the trees to hear it.
Precisely at the moment due the obedient freight train crossed the notch
in the distant hills, and as precisely as before the engine let off its
string of puffs that in a moment became in our ears those last two bars
of the song.

There were as many theories to account for it as there were men to hear
it. In the end the congress bore down Gordon and pronounced it a simple
railroad code, with the longs and shorts accidentally resembling the
tune, or made so by a whimsical engineer.

Nevertheless the phenomenon was interesting enough to compel a bit of
discussion about the fire in the great hall after we had despatched our
supper. The talk drifted away into the curious tricks that artisans come
to play with their implements—carpenters able to toss up edged tools and
catch them deftly, and the like. But Gordon was not to be weaned from
the subject of that whistle.

“There’s nothing to prevent that engineer from playing ‘Yankee Doodle’
on his whistle if he wants to. Haven’t you often lain awake at night
listening to the blasts of the locomotives? You can tell when an
engineer is ruffled, when he starts behind time out of the yard, and
knows he must be extra alert that night. His toot is sharp and
impatient. Or you can tell an engineer coming home from his run. His
whistle fairly sighs his own contentment.”

“La, Gordon,” some one yawned, “you’re a poetic soul!”

“Well, I believe in that engineer,” he defended. “Next time I go down to
the village I’m going to find out who blows that thing and why he does
it.”

He did go down to the village and he did learn the secret of the
whistle. It made a neat little story. The whistle was a code signal, of
a surety, and of precisely the sort that Gordon figured it was. He knew
his Virginia.

A fellow named George Roberts was the engineer of that freight, and his
imitation of “Annie Laurie” was truly a signal—to a sweetheart of his.
Rough devil at one time, this man Roberts, a tearing drinker and
fighter, he was fast on the way to ruin and discharge, when he fell in
love with this girl and braced up. Now every time he passed the little
house where she lived he tooted his whistle like that in salutation.

“To let her know he’s safe,” Gordon finished.

Of course we charged him with making it up, but in the end we came to
believe him. Every day for four weeks that whistle blew, always in the
same way, always in the same place, and always on the dot. And somehow
it had a sobering and softening effect upon the crowd of woodsmen that
we were. The men quarreled less frequently, I noticed, were more
considerate and helpful to each other. I swear we all felt the influence
of that engineer. I’ll wager every man jack of us meant on going home to
be a bit the more thoughtful to the wife. It cheered us all, that little
touch of honest romance. The world seemed a bit the better for it. We
even took to timing our supper not by Jemima’s bell but by George
Roberts’ whistle.

Then another strange thing happened. The signal ceased.

The first time we missed it we could scarcely believe our ears. But on
the second day it was silent, and the next. At the right time the train
crossed the notch, but no puffs came from the engine, no sound from the
whistle.

It gave us a drop. The world was as drab as ever. The cynics, of course,
spoke up at once.

“Guess your friend the engineer is no better than the rest of us,” one
of them jeered at Gordon. “He couldn’t keep it up.”

“Drunk again, probably,” jeered another.

“Maybe it’s only a little lovers’ tiff,” I argued in Gordon’s support.

“I’m going to find out,” Gordon finished the discussion.

And he did. Made a special errand to the village to find out. And
returned with a smile.

“They’re married,” he reported. “Off on their honeymoon. They’ll be back
in a week. Watch for the signal then.”

He was right. In a week the signal was resumed, but in another place.

“How’s that?” one of the men still girded at Gordon. “Guess he’s learned
to respect his wife’s throwing arm. He pipes up now from a more
respectful distance.”

“That’s easy,” Gordon let the caviller down gently. “He’s set her up in
a little house farther along the line. Naturally that’s where he would
whistle now.”

For three weeks more we heard the faithful signal, at its new place. A
little more faintly, but always punctual, always the same. And again the
men began to whistle at their work.

By then the job was nearly finished. In two or three weeks more we
should be leaving, and the whole crowd began to allege a touch of
regret. They protested it was because the old place was so beautiful,
but privately I think George Roberts and his tooting had something to do
with the homesickness. To whatever new place we might go, however
pleasant it might be, there was going to be a trifle that was lacking.

Then again a strange thing happened. Again the whistle stopped. For four
days it was silent.

“Family jar already!” came the usual good-natured jeer.

“She’s flung a plate and crippled his whistle arm.”

“Guess you’d better find out what’s the matter, Gordon,” a third man
recommended.

“I will,” said Gordon.

That evening he returned from the village without the smile.
Nevertheless, as he was still plodding up the long driveway, his head
down, his step slow, we actually heard the whistle as we sat waiting for
Gordon under the portico. There was no mistaking it. And yet its note
seemed different; there was a new tone to it, something like Gordon’s
air. And it seemed to come from still farther away.

Gordon paused as he heard it, and stood still, with his hat in his hand,
till it died away. Then he came up the steps and sat down. We all leaned
toward him.

“She fell ill,” he said. “They left her in the little cemetery down the
line. She’d always been delicate. And I suppose that’s where he’s
whistling now. To—to let her know he’s safe.”



                            THE WILLOW WALK


_By_ SINCLAIR LEWIS
From _The Saturday Evening Post_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company._
_Copyright, 1919, by Sinclair Lewis._


                                   I


From the drawer of his table desk Jasper Holt took a pane of window
glass. He laid a sheet of paper on the glass and wrote, “Now is the time
for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” He studied his round
business-college script, and rewrote the sentence in a small finicky
hand, that of a studious old man. Ten times he copied the words in that
false pinched writing. He tore up the paper, burned the fragments in his
large ash tray and washed the delicate ashes down his stationary
washbowl. He replaced the pane of glass in the drawer, tapping it with
satisfaction. A glass underlay does not retain an impression.

Jasper Holt was as nearly respectable as his room, which, with its
frilled chairs and pansy-painted pincushion, was the best in the
aristocratic boarding house of Mrs. Lyons. He was a wiry, slightly bald,
black-haired man of thirty-eight, wearing an easy gray flannel suit and
a white carnation. His hands were peculiarly compact and nimble. He gave
the appearance of being a youngish lawyer or bond salesman. Actually he
was senior paying teller in the Lumber National Bank in the city of
Vernon.

He looked at a thin expensive gold watch. It was six-thirty, on
Wednesday—toward dusk of a tranquil spring day. He picked up his hooked
walking stick and his gray silk gloves and trudged downstairs. He met
his landlady in the lower hall and inclined his head. She effusively
commented on the weather.

“I shall not be here for dinner,” he said amiably.

“Very well, Mr. Holt. My, but aren’t you always going out with your
swell friends, though! I read in the _Herald_ that you were going to be
star in another of those society plays at the Community Theater. I guess
you’d be an actor if you wasn’t a banker, Mr. Holt.”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t much temperament.” His voice was cordial, but
his smile was a mere mechanical sidewise twist of the lip muscles.
“You’re the one that’s got the stage presence. Bet you’d be a regular
Ethel Barrymore if you didn’t have to look out for us.”

“My, but you’re such a flatterer!”

He bowed his way out and walked sedately down the street to a public
garage. Nodding to the night attendant, but saying nothing, he started
his roadster and drove out of the garage, away from the center of
Vernon, toward the suburb of Rosebank. He did not go directly to
Rosebank. He went seven blocks out of his way, and halted on Fandall
Avenue—one of those petty main thoroughfares which, with their
motion-picture palaces, their groceries, laundries, undertakers’
establishments and lunch rooms, serve as local centers for districts of
mean residences. He got out of the car and pretended to look at the
tires, kicking them to see how much air they had. While he did so he
covertly looked up and down the street. He saw no one whom he knew. He
went into the Parthenon Confectionery Store.

The Parthenon Store makes a specialty of those ingenious candy boxes
that resemble bound books. The back of the box is of imitation leather,
with a stamping simulating the title of a novel. The edges are
apparently the edges of a number of pages of paper. But these pages are
hollowed out, and the inside is to be filled with candy.

Jasper gazed at the collection of book boxes and chose the two whose
titles had the nearest approach to dignity—Sweets to the Sweet and The
Ladies’ Delight. He asked the Greek clerk to fill these with the less
expensive grade of mixed chocolates, and to wrap them.

From the candy shop he went to a drug store that carried an assortment
of reprinted novels, and from these picked out two of the same
sentimental type as the titles on the booklike boxes. These also he had
wrapped. He strolled out of the drug store, slipped into a lunch room,
got a lettuce sandwich, doughnuts and a cup of coffee at the greasy
marble counter, took them to a chair with a tablet arm in the dim rear
of the lunch room and hastily devoured them. As he came out and returned
to his car he again glanced along the street.

He fancied that he knew a man who was approaching. He could not be sure.
From the breast up the man seemed familiar, as did the customers of the
bank whom he viewed through the wicket of the teller’s window. When he
saw them in the street he could never be sure about them. It seemed
extraordinary to find that these persons, who to him were nothing but
faces with attached arms that held out checks and received money, could
walk about, had legs and a gait and a manner of their own.

He walked to the curb and stared up at the cornice of one of the stores,
puckering his lips, giving an impersonation of a man inspecting a
building. With the corner of an eye he followed the approaching man. The
man ducked his head as he neared, and greeted him, “Hello, Brother
Teller.” Jasper seemed startled; gave the “Oh! Oh, how are you!” of
sudden recognition; and mumbled, “Looking after a little bank property.”

“Always on the job, eh!”

The man passed on.

Jasper got into his car and drove back to the street that would take him
out to the suburb of Rosebank. As he left Fandall Avenue he peered at
his watch. It was five minutes of seven.

At a quarter past seven he passed through the main street of Rosebank,
and turned into a lane that was but little changed since the time when
it had been a country road. A few jerry-built villas of freckled paint
did shoulder upon it, but for the most part it ran through swamps
spotted with willow groves, the spongy ground covered with scatterings
of dry leaves and bark. Opening on this lane was a dim-rutted grassy
private road, which disappeared into one of the willow groves.

Jasper sharply swung his car between the crumbly gate posts and along
the bumpy private road. He made an abrupt turn, came into sight of an
unpainted shed and shot the car into it without cutting down his speed,
so that he almost hit the back of the shed with his front fenders. He
shut off the engine, climbed out quickly and ran back toward the gate.
From the shield of a bank of alder bushes he peered out. Two chattering
women were going down the public road. They stared in through the gate
and half halted.

“That’s where that hermit lives,” said one of them.

“Oh, you mean the one that’s writing a religious book, and never comes
out till evening? Some kind of a preacher?”

“Yes, that’s the one. John Holt, I think his name is. I guess he’s kind
of crazy. He lives in the old Beaudette house. But you can’t see it from
here—it’s clear through the block, on the next street.”

“I heard he was crazy. But I just saw an automobile go in here.”

“Oh, that’s his cousin or brother or something—lives in the city. They
say he’s rich, and such a nice fellow.”

The two women ambled on, their chatter blurring with distance. Standing
behind the alders Jasper rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingers of
the other. The palm was dry with nervousness. But he grinned.

He returned to the shed and entered a brick-paved walk almost a block
long, walled and sheltered by overhanging willows. Once it had been a
pleasant path; carved wooden benches were placed along it, and it
widened to a court with a rock garden, a fountain and a stone bench. The
rock garden had degenerated into a riot of creepers sprawling over the
sharp stones; the paint had peeled from the fountain, leaving its iron
cupids and naiads eaten with rust. The bricks of the wall were smeared
with lichens and moss and were untidy with windrows of dry leaves and
cakes of earth. Many of the bricks were broken; the walk was hilly in
its unevenness. From willows and bricks and scuffled earth rose a damp
chill.

But Jasper did not seem to note the dampness. He hastened along the walk
to the house—a structure of heavy stone which, for this newish
Midwestern land, was very ancient. It had been built by a French fur
trader in 1839. The Chippewas had scalped a man in its very dooryard.
The heavy back door was guarded by an unexpectedly expensive modern
lock. Jasper opened it with a flat key and closed it behind him. It
locked on a spring. He was in a crude kitchen, the shades of which were
drawn. He passed through the kitchen and dining room into the living
room. Dodging chairs and tables in the darkness as though he was used to
them he went to each of the three windows of the living room and made
sure that all the shades were down before he lighted the student’s lamp
on the game-legged table. As the glow crept over the drab walls Jasper
bobbed his head with satisfaction. Nothing had been touched since his
last visit.

The room was musty with the smell of old green rep upholstery and
leather books. It had not been dusted for months. Dust sheeted the stiff
red velvet chairs, the uncomfortable settee, the chill white marble
fireplace, the immense glass-fronted bookcase that filled one side of
the room.

The atmosphere was unnatural to this capable business man, this Jasper
Holt. But Jasper did not seem oppressed. He briskly removed the wrappers
from the genuine books and from the candy-box imitations of books. One
of the two wrappers he laid on the table and smoothed out. Upon this he
poured the candy from the two boxes. The other wrapper and the strings
he stuffed into the fireplace and immediately burned. Crossing to the
bookcase he unlocked one section and placed both the real books and the
imitation books on the bottom shelf. There was a row of rather
cheap-looking novels on this shelf, and of these at least six were
actually such candy boxes as he had purchased that evening.

Only one shelf of the bookcase was given over to anything so frivolous
as novels. The others were filled with black-covered, speckle-leaved,
dismal books of history, theology, biography—the shabby-genteel sort of
books you find on the fifteen-cent shelf at a secondhand bookshop. Over
these Jasper pored for a moment as though he was memorizing their
titles.

He took down “The Life of the Rev. Jeremiah Bodfish” and read aloud: “In
those intimate discourses with his family that followed evening prayers
I once heard Brother Bodfish observe that Philo Judæus—whose scholarly
career always calls to my mind the adumbrations of Melanchthon upon the
essence of rationalism—was a mere sophist—”

Jasper slammed the book shut, remarking contentedly, “That’ll do. Philo
Judæus—good name to spring.”

He relocked the bookcase and went upstairs. In a small bedroom at the
right of the upper hall an electric light was burning. Presumably the
house had been deserted till Jasper’s entrance, but a prowler in the
yard might have judged from this ever-burning light that some one was in
residence. The bedroom was Spartan—an iron bed, one straight chair, a
washstand, a heavy oak bureau. Jasper scrambled to unlock the lowest
drawer of the bureau, yank it open, take out a wrinkled shiny suit of
black, a pair of black shoes, a small black bow tie, a Gladstone collar,
a white shirt with starched bosom, a speckly brown felt hat and a wig—an
expensive and excellent wig with artfully unkempt hair of a faded brown.

He stripped off his attractive flannel suit, wing collar, blue tie,
custom-made silk shirt and cordovan shoes, and speedily put on the wig
and those gloomy garments. As he donned them the corners of his mouth
began to droop. Leaving the light on and his own clothes flung on the
bed he descended the stairs. He was obviously not the same man who had
ascended them. As to features he was like Jasper, but by nature he was
evidently less healthy, less practical, less agreeable, and decidedly
more aware of the sorrow and long thoughts of the dreamer. Indeed it
must be understood that now he was not Jasper Holt, but Jasper’s twin
brother, John Holt, hermit and religious fanatic.


                                   II


John Holt, twin brother of Jasper Holt, the bank teller, rubbed his eyes
as though he had for hours been absorbed in study, and crawled through
the living room, through the tiny hall, to the front door. He opened it,
picked up a couple of circulars that the postman had dropped through the
letter slot in the door, went out and locked the door behind him. He was
facing a narrow front yard, neater than the willow walk at the back, on
a suburban street more populous than the straggly back lane.

A street arc illuminated the yard and showed that a card was tacked on
the door. John touched the card, snapped it with the nail of his little
finger, to make certain that it was securely tacked. In that light he
could not read it, but he knew that it was inscribed in a small finicky
hand: “Agents kindly do not disturb, bell will not be answered, occupant
of house engaged in literary work.”

John stood on the doorstep till he made out his neighbor on the right—a
large stolid commuter, who was walking before his house smoking an
after-dinner cigar. John poked to the fence and sniffed at a spray of
lilac blossoms till the neighbor called over, “Nice evening.”

“Yes, it seems to be very pleasant.”

John’s voice was like Jasper’s; but it was more guttural, and his speech
had less assurance.

“How’s the book going?”

“It is—it is very—very difficult. So hard to comprehend all the inner
meanings of the prophecies. Well, I must be hastening to Soul Hope Hall.
I trust we shall see you there some Wednesday or Sunday evening. I bid
you good-night, sir.”

John wavered down the street to a drug store. He purchased a bottle of
ink. In a grocery that kept open evenings he got two pounds of corn
meal, two pounds of flour, a pound of bacon, a half pound of butter, six
eggs and a can of condensed milk.

“Shall we deliver them?” asked the clerk.

John looked at him sharply. He realized that this was a new man, who did
not know his customs. He said rebukingly: “No, I always carry my
parcels. I am writing a book. I am never to be disturbed.”

He paid for the provisions out of a postal money order for thirty-five
dollars, and received the change. The cashier of the store was
accustomed to cashing these money orders, which were always sent to John
from South Vernon, by one R. J. Smith. John took the bundle of food and
walked out of the store.

“That fellow’s kind of a nut, isn’t he?” asked the new clerk.

The cashier explained: “Yep. Doesn’t even take fresh milk—uses condensed
for everything! What do you think of that! And they say he burns up all
his garbage—never has anything in the ash can except ashes. If you knock
at his door he never answers it, fellow told me. All the time writing
this book of his. Religious crank, I guess. Has a little income
though—guess his folks were pretty well fixed. Comes out once in a while
in the evening and pokes round town. We used to laugh about him, but
we’ve kind of got used to him. Been here about a year, I guess it is.”

John was serenely passing down the main street of Rosebank. At the
dingier end of it he turned in at a hallway marked by a lighted sign
announcing in crude house-painter’s letters: “Soul Hope Fraternity Hall.
Experience Meeting. All Welcome.”

It was eight o’clock. The members of the Soul Hope cult had gathered in
their hall above a bakery. Theirs was a tiny, tight-minded sect. They
asserted that they alone obeyed the scriptural tenets; that they alone
were certain to be saved; that all other denominations were damned by
unapostolic luxury; that it was wicked to have organs or ministers or
any meeting places save plain halls. The members themselves conducted
the meetings, one after another rising to give an interpretation of the
scriptures or to rejoice in gathering with the faithful, while the
others commented “Hallelujah!” and “Amen, brother, amen!” They were a
plainly dressed, not overfed, rather elderly and rather happy
congregation. The most honored of them all was John Holt.

John had come to Rosebank only six months before. He had bought the
Beaudette house, with the library of the recent occupant, a retired
clergyman, and had paid for them in new one-hundred-dollar bills.
Already he had gained great credit in the Soul Hope cult. It appeared
that he spent almost all his time at home, praying, reading and writing
a book. The Soul Hope Fraternity were excited about the book. They had
begged him to read it to them. So far he had read only a few pages,
consisting mostly of quotations from ancient treatises on the
prophecies. Nearly every Sunday and Wednesday evening he appeared at the
meeting and in a halting but scholarly way lectured on the world and the
flesh.

To-night he spoke polysyllabically of the fact that one Philo Judæus had
been a mere sophist. The cult were none too clear as to what either a
Philo Judæus or a sophist might be, but with heads all nodding in a row,
they murmured: “You’re right, brother! Hallelujah!”

John glided into a sad earnest discourse on his worldly brother Jasper,
and informed them of his struggles with Jasper’s itch for money. By his
request the fraternity prayed for Jasper.

The meeting was over at nine. John shook hands all round with the elders
of the congregation, sighing: “Fine meeting to-night, wasn’t it? Such a
free outpouring of the Spirit!” He welcomed a new member, a servant girl
just come from Seattle. Carrying his groceries and the bottle of ink he
poked down the stairs from the hall at seven minutes after nine.

At sixteen minutes after nine John was stripping off his brown wig and
the funereal clothes in his bedroom. At twenty-eight after, John Holt
had again become Jasper Holt, the capable teller of the Lumber National
Bank.

Jasper Holt left the light burning in his brother’s bedroom. He rushed
downstairs, tried the fastening of the front door, bolted it, made sure
that all the windows were fastened, picked up the bundle of groceries
and the pile of candies that he had removed from the booklike candy
boxes, blew out the light in the living room and ran down the willow
walk to his car. He threw the groceries and candy into it, backed the
car out as though he was accustomed to backing in this bough-scattered
yard, and drove off along the lonely road at the rear.

When he was passing a swamp he reached down, picked up the bundle of
candies, and steering with one hand removed the wrapping paper with the
other hand and hurled out the candies. They showered among the weeds
beside the road. The paper which had contained the candies, and upon
which was printed the name of the Parthenon Confectionery Store, Jasper
tucked into his pocket. He took the groceries item by item from the
labeled bag containing them, thrust that bag also into his pocket, and
laid the groceries on the seat beside him.

On the way from Rosebank to the center of the city of Vernon he again
turned off the main avenue, and halted at a goat-infested shack occupied
by a crippled Norwegian. He sounded the horn. The Norwegian’s grandson
ran out.

“Here’s a little more grub for you,” bawled Jasper.

“God bless you, sir. I don’t know what we’d do if it wasn’t for you!”
cried the old Norwegian from the door.

But Jasper did not wait for gratitude. He merely shouted: “Bring you
some more in a couple days,” as he started away.

At a quarter past ten he drove up to the hall that housed the latest
interest of Vernon society—the Community Theater. The Boulevard Set, the
“best people in town,” belonged to the Community Theater Association,
and the leader of it was the daughter of the general manager of the
railroad. As a well-bred bachelor Jasper Holt was welcome among them,
despite the fact that no one knew much about him except that he was a
good bank teller and had been born in England. But as an actor he was
not merely welcome: he was the best amateur actor in Vernon. His placid
face could narrow with tragic emotion or puff out with comedy; his
placid manner concealed a dynamo of emotion. Unlike most amateur actors
he did not try to act—he became the thing itself. He forgot Jasper Holt,
and turned into a vagrant or a judge, a Bernard Shaw thought, a Lord
Dunsany symbol, a Susan Glaspell radical, a Clyde Fitch man-about-town.

The other one-act plays of the next program of the Community Theater had
already been rehearsed. The cast of the play in which Jasper was to star
were all waiting for him. So were the worried ladies responsible for the
staging. They wanted his advice about the blue curtain for the stage
window, about the baby-spot that was out of order, about the higher
interpretation of the rôle of the page in the piece—a rôle consisting of
only two lines, but to be played by one of the most popular girls in the
younger set. After the discussions, and a most violent quarrel between
two members of the play-reading committee, the rehearsal was called.
Jasper Holt still wore his flannel suit and a wilting carnation; but he
was not Jasper; he was the Duc de San Saba, a cynical, gracious,
gorgeous old man, easy of gesture, tranquil of voice, shudderingly evil
of desire.

“If I could get a few more actors like you!” cried the professional
coach.

The rehearsal was over at half past eleven. Jasper drove his car to the
public garage in which he kept it, and walked home. There, he tore up
and burned the wrapping paper bearing the name of the Parthenon
Confectionery Store and the labeled bag which had contained the
groceries.

The Community Theater plays were given on the following Wednesday.
Jasper Holt was highly applauded, and at the party at the Lakeside
Country Club, after the play, he danced with the prettiest girls in
town. He hadn’t much to say to them, but he danced fervently, and about
him was a halo of artistic success.

That night his brother John did not appear at the meeting of the Soul
Hope Fraternity out in Rosebank.

On Monday, five days later, while he was in conference with the
president and the cashier of the Lumber National Bank, Jasper complained
of a headache. The next day he telephoned to the president that he would
not come down to work—he would stay home and rest his eyes, sleep and
get rid of the persistent headache. That was unfortunate, for that very
day his twin brother John made one of his infrequent trips into Vernon
and called at the bank.

The president had seen John only once before, and by a coincidence it
had happened that on this occasion also Jasper had been absent—had been
out of town. The president invited John into his private office.

“Your brother is at home; poor fellow has a bad headache. Hope he gets
over it. We think a great deal of him here. You ought to be proud of
him. Will you have a smoke?”

As he spoke the president looked John over. Once or twice when Jasper
and the president had been out at lunch Jasper had spoken of the
remarkable resemblance between himself and his twin brother. But the
president told himself that he didn’t really see much resemblance. The
features of the two were alike, but John’s expression of chronic
spiritual indigestion, his unfriendly manner, and his hair—unkempt and
lifeless brown, where Jasper’s was sleekly black above a shiny bald
spot—made the president dislike John as much as he liked Jasper.

And now John was replying: “No, I do not smoke. I can’t understand how a
man can soil this temple with drugs. I suppose I ought to be glad to
hear you praise poor Jasper, but I am more concerned with his lack of
respect for the things of the spirit. He sometimes comes to see me, at
Rosebank, and I argue with him, but somehow I can’t make him see his
errors. And his flippant ways—!”

“We don’t think he’s flippant. We think he’s a pretty steady worker.”

“But his play-acting! And reading love stories! Well, I try to keep in
mind the injunction ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ But I am pained
to find my own brother giving up immortal promises for mortal
amusements. Well, I’ll go and call on him. I trust that some day we
shall see you at Soul Hope Hall, in Rosebank. Good day, sir.”

Turning back to his work the president grumbled: “I’m going to tell
Jasper that the best compliment I can hand him is that he is not like
his brother.”

And on the following day, another Wednesday, when Jasper reappeared at
the bank, the president did make this jesting comparison; and Jasper
sighed: “Oh, John is really a good fellow, but he’s always gone in for
metaphysics and Oriental mysticism and Lord knows what all, till he’s
kind of lost in the fog. But he’s a lot better than I am. When I murder
my landlady—or say, when I rob the bank, chief—you go get John; and I
bet you the best lunch in town that he’ll do his best to bring me to
justice. That’s how blame square he is!”

“Square, yes—corners just sticking out! Well, when you do rob us,
Jasper, I’ll look up John. But do try to keep from robbing us as long as
you can. I’d hate to have to associate with a religious detective in a
boiled shirt!”

Both men laughed, and Jasper went back to his cage. His head continued
to hurt, he admitted. The president advised him to lay off for a week.
He didn’t want to, he said. With the new munition industries due to the
war in Europe, there was much increase in factory pay rolls, and Jasper
took charge of them.

“Better take a week off than get ill,” argued the president late that
afternoon.

Jasper did let himself be persuaded to go away for at least a week-end.
He would run up north, to Wakamin Lake, the coming Friday, he said; he
would get some black-bass fishing, and be back on Monday or Tuesday.
Before he went he would make up the pay rolls for the Saturday payments
and turn them over to the other teller. The president thanked him for
his faithfulness, and as was his not infrequent custom invited Jasper to
his house for the evening of the next day—Thursday.

That Wednesday evening Jasper’s brother John appeared at the Soul Hope
meeting in Rosebank. When he had gone home and had magically turned back
into Jasper this Jasper did not return the wig and garments of John to
the bureau but packed them into a suitcase, took the suitcase to his
room in Vernon and locked it in his wardrobe.

Jasper was amiable at dinner at the president’s house on Thursday, but
he was rather silent, and as his head still throbbed he left the house
early—at nine-thirty. Sedately, carrying his gray silk gloves in one
hand and pompously swinging his stick with the other, he walked from the
president’s house on the fashionable boulevard back to the center of
Vernon. He entered the public garage in which his car was stored.

He commented to the night attendant: “Head aches. Guess I’ll take the
’bus out and get some fresh air.”

He drove away at not more than fifteen miles an hour. He headed south.
When he had reached the outskirts of the city he speeded up to a
consistent twenty-five miles an hour. He settled down in his seat with
the unmoving steadiness of the long-distance driver: his body quiet
except for the tiny subtle movements of his foot on the accelerator, of
his hands on the steering wheel—his right hand across the wheel, holding
it at the top, his left elbow resting easily on the cushioned edge of
his seat and his left hand merely touching the wheel.

He drove in that southern direction for fifteen miles—almost to the town
of Wanagoochie. Then by a rather poor side road he turned sharply to the
north and west, and making a huge circle about the city drove toward the
town of St. Clair. The suburb of Rosebank, in which his brother John
lived, is also north of Vernon. These directions were of some importance
to him: Wanagoochie eighteen miles south of the mother city of Vernon;
Rosebank, on the other hand, north, eight miles north, of Vernon; and
St. Clair twenty miles north—about as far north of Vernon as Wanagoochie
is south.

On his way to St. Clair, at a point that was only two miles from
Rosebank, Jasper ran the car off the main road into a grove of oaks and
maples and stopped it on a long-unused woodland road. He stiffly got out
and walked through the woods up a rise of ground to a cliff overlooking
a swampy lake. The gravelly farther bank of the cliff rose
perpendicularly from the edge of the water. In that wan light distilled
by stars and the earth he made out the reedy expanse of the lake. It was
so muddy, so tangled with sedge grass that it was never used for
swimming; and as its only inhabitants were slimy bullheads few people
ever tried to fish there. Jasper stood reflective. He was remembering
the story of the farmer’s team which had run away, dashed over this
cliff and sunk out of sight in the mud bottom of the lake.

Swishing his stick he outlined an imaginary road from the top of the
cliff back to the sheltered place where his car was standing. Once he
hacked away with a large pocketknife a mass of knotted hazel bushes
which blocked that projected road. When he had traced the road to his
car he smiled. He walked to the edge of the woods and looked up and down
the main highway. A car was approaching. He waited till it had passed,
ran back to his own car, backed it out on the highway, and went on his
northward course toward St. Clair, driving about thirty miles an hour.

On the edge of St. Clair he halted, took out his kit of tools, unscrewed
a spark plug, and sharply tapping the plug on the engine block,
deliberately cracked the porcelain jacket. He screwed the plug in again
and started the car. It bucked and spit, missing on one cylinder, with
the short-circuited plug.

“I guess there must be something wrong with the ignition,” he said
cheerfully.

He managed to run the car into a garage in St. Clair. There was no one
in the garage save an old negro, the night washer, who was busy over a
limousine, with sponge and hose.

“Got a night repair man here?” asked Jasper.

“No, sir; guess you’ll have to leave it till morning.”

“Hang it! Something gone wrong with the carburetor or the ignition.
Well, I’ll have to leave it, then. Tell him— Say, will you be here in
the morning when the repair man comes on?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, tell him I must have the car by to-morrow noon. No, say by
to-morrow at nine. Now, don’t forget. This will help your memory.”

He gave a quarter to the negro, who grinned and shouted: “Yes, sir;
that’ll help my memory a lot!” As he tied a storage tag on the car the
negro inquired: “Name?”

“Uh—my name? Oh, Hanson. Remember now, ready about nine to-morrow.”

Jasper walked to the railroad station. It was ten minutes of one. Jasper
did not ask the night operator about the next train into Vernon.
Apparently he knew that there was a train stopping here at St. Clair at
one-thirty-seven. He did not sit in the waiting room but in the darkness
outside on a truck behind the baggage room. When the train came in he
slipped into the last seat of the last car, and with his soft hat over
his eyes either slept or appeared to sleep. When he reached Vernon he
went off the direct route from the station to his boarding house, and
came to the garage in which he regularly kept his car. He stepped
inside. The night attendant was drowsing in a large wooden chair tilted
back against the wall in the narrow runway which formed the entrance to
the garage.

Jasper jovially shouted to the attendant: “Certainly ran into some hard
luck. Ignition went wrong—I guess it was the ignition. Had to leave the
car down at Wanagoochie.”

“Yuh, hard luck, all right,” assented the attendant.

“Yump. So I left it at Wanagoochie,” Jasper emphasized as he passed on.

He had been inexact in this statement. It was not at Wanagoochie, which
is south, but at St. Clair, which is north, that he had left the car.

He returned to his boarding house, slept beautifully, hummed in his
morning shower bath. Yet at breakfast he complained to his landlady of
his continuous headache, and announced that he was going to run up
north, to Wakamin, to get some bass fishing and rest his eyes. She urged
him to go.

“Anything I can do to help you get away?” she queried.

“No, thanks. I’m just taking a couple of suitcases, with some old
clothes and some fishing tackle. Fact, I have ’em all packed already.
I’ll probably take the noon train north if I can get away from the bank.
Pretty busy now, with these pay rolls for the factories that have war
contracts for the Allies. What’s it say in the paper this morning?”

Jasper arrived at the bank, carrying the two suitcases and a neat,
polite, rolled silk umbrella, the silver top of which was engraved with
his name. The doorman, who was also the bank guard, helped him to carry
the suitcases inside.

“Careful of that bag. Got my fishing tackle in it,” said Jasper to the
doorman, apropos of one of the suitcases, which was heavy but apparently
not packed full. “Well, I think I’ll run up to Wakamin to-day and catch
a few bass.”

“Wish I could go along, sir. How is the head this morning? Does it still
ache?” asked the doorman.

“Rather better, but my eyes still feel pretty rocky. Guess I been using
’em too much. Say, Connors, I’ll try to catch the train north at
eleven-seven. Better have a taxicab here for me at eleven. Or no; I’ll
let you know a little before eleven. Try to catch the eleven-seven
north, for Wakamin.”

“Very well, sir.”

The president, the assistant cashier, the chief clerk—all asked Jasper
how he felt; and to all of them he repeated the statement that he had
been using his eyes too much, and that he would catch a few bass at
Wakamin.

The other paying teller from his cage next to that of Jasper called
heartily through the steel netting: “Pretty soft for some people! You
wait! I’m going to have the hay fever this summer, and I’ll go fishing
for a month!”

Jasper placed the two suitcases and the umbrella in his cage, and
leaving the other teller to pay out current money he himself made up the
pay rolls for the next day—Saturday. He casually went into the vault—a
narrow, unimpressive, unaired cell, with a hard linoleum floor, one
unshaded electric bulb, and a back wall composed entirely of steel doors
of safes, all painted a sickly blue, very unimpressive, but guarding
several millions of dollars in cash and securities. The upper doors,
hung on large steel arms and each provided with two dials, could be
opened only by two officers of the bank, each knowing one of the two
combinations. Below these were smaller doors, one of which Jasper could
open, as teller. It was the door of an insignificant steel box, which
contained one hundred and seventeen thousand dollars in bills and four
thousand dollars in gold and silver.

Jasper passed back and forth, carrying bundles of currency. In his cage
he was working less than three feet from the other teller, who was
divided from him only by the bands of the steel netting.

While he worked he exchanged a few words with this other teller.

Once as he counted out nineteen thousand dollars he commented: “Big pay
roll for the Henschel Wagon Works this week. They’re making gun
carriages and truck bodies for the Allies, I understand.”

“Uh-huh!” said the other teller, not much interested.

Mechanically, unobtrusively going about his ordinary routine of
business, Jasper counted out bills to amounts agreeing with the items on
a typed schedule of the pay rolls. Apparently his eyes never lifted from
his counting and from this typed schedule which lay before him. The
bundles of bills he made into packages, fastening each with a paper
band. Each bundle he seemed to drop into a small black leather bag which
he held beside him. But he did not actually drop the money into these
pay-roll bags.

Both the suitcases at his feet were closed, and presumably fastened; but
one was not fastened. And though it was heavy it contained nothing but a
lump of pig iron. From time to time Jasper’s hand, holding a bundle of
bills, dropped to his side. With a slight movement of his foot he opened
that suitcase, and the bills slipped from his hand down into it.

The bottom part of his cage was a solid sheet of stamped steel, and from
the front of the bank no one could see this suspicious gesture. The
other teller could have seen it, but Jasper dropped the bills only when
the other teller was busy talking to a customer or when his back was
turned. In order to delay for such a favorable moment Jasper frequently
counted packages of bills twice, rubbing his eyes as though they hurt
him.

After each of these secret disposals of packages of bills Jasper made
much of dropping into the pay-roll bags the rolls of coin for which the
schedule called. It was while he was tossing these blue-wrapped
cylinders of coin into the bags that he would chat with the other
teller. Then he would lock up the bags and gravely place them at one
side.

Jasper was so slow in making up the pay rolls that it was five minutes
of eleven before he finished. He called the doorman to the cage and
suggested: “Better call my taxi now.”

He still had one bag to fill. He could plainly be seen dropping packages
of money into it, while he instructed the assistant teller: “I’ll stick
all the bags in my safe, and you can transfer them to yours. Be sure to
lock my safe. Lord, I better hurry or I’ll miss my train! Be back
Tuesday morning, at latest. So long; take care of yourself.”

He hastened to pile the pay-roll bags into his safe in the vault. The
safe was almost filled with them. And except for the last one not one of
the bags contained anything except a few rolls of coin. Though he had
told the other teller to lock his safe he himself twirled the
combination—which was thoughtless of him, as the assistant teller would
now have to wait and get the president to unlock it.

He picked up his umbrella and the two suitcases—bending over one of the
cases for not more than ten seconds. Waving good-by to the cashier at
his desk down front and hurrying so fast that the doorman did not have a
chance to help him carry the suitcases he rushed through the bank,
through the door, into the waiting taxicab, and loudly enough for the
doorman to hear he cried to the driver, “M. & D. Station.”

At the M. & D. R. R. Station, refusing offers of redcaps to carry his
bags, he bought a ticket for Wakamin, which is a lake-resort town one
hundred and forty miles northwest of Vernon, hence one hundred and
twenty beyond St. Clair. He had just time to get aboard the eleven-seven
train. He did not take a chair car, but sat in a day coach near the rear
door. He unscrewed the silver top of his umbrella, on which was engraved
his name, and dropped it into his pocket.

When the train reached St. Clair, Jasper strolled out to the vestibule,
carrying the suitcases but leaving the topless umbrella behind. His face
was blank, uninterested. As the train started he dropped down on the
station platform and gravely walked away. For a second the light of
adventure crossed his face, and vanished.

At the garage at which he had left his car on the evening before he
asked the foreman: “Did you get my car fixed—Mercury roadster, ignition
on the bum?”

“Nope! Couple of jobs ahead of it. Haven’t had time to touch it yet.
Ought to get at it early this afternoon.”

Jasper curled his tongue round his lips in startled vexation. He dropped
his suitcases on the floor of the garage and stood thinking, his bent
forefinger against his lower lip.

Then: “Well, I guess I can get her to go—sorry—can’t wait—got to make
the next town,” he grumbled.

“Lot of you traveling salesmen making your territory by motor now, Mr.
Hanson,” said the foreman civilly, glancing at the storage check on
Jasper’s car.

“Yep. I can make a good many more than I could by train.”

He paid for overnight storage without complaining, though since his car
had not been repaired this charge was unjust. In fact he was altogether
prosaic and inconspicuous. He thrust the suitcases into the car and
drove out, the motor spitting. At another garage he bought a new spark
plug and screwed it in. When he went on, the motor had ceased spitting.

He drove out of St. Clair, back in the direction of Vernon—and of
Rosebank, where his brother lived. He ran the car into that thick grove
of oaks and maples only two miles from Rosebank where he had paced off
an imaginary road to the cliff overhanging the reedy lake. He parked the
car in a grassy space beside the abandoned woodland road. He laid a
light robe over the suitcases. From beneath the seat he took a can of
deviled chicken, a box of biscuits, a canister of tea, a folding cooking
kit and a spirit lamp. These he spread on the grass—a picnic lunch.

He sat beside that lunch from seven minutes past one in the afternoon
till dark. Once in a while he made a pretense of eating. He fetched
water from a brook, made tea, opened the box of biscuits and the can of
chicken. But mostly he sat still and smoked cigarette after cigarette.

Once a Swede, taking this road as a short cut to his truck farm, passed
by and mumbled “Picnic, eh?”

“Yuh, takin’ a day off,” said Jasper dully.

The man went on without looking back.

At dusk Jasper finished a cigarette down to the tip, crushed out the
light and made the cryptic remark: “That’s probably Jasper Holt’s last
smoke. I don’t suppose you can smoke, John—damn you!”

He hid the two suitcases in the bushes, piled the remains of the lunch
into the car, took down the top of the car and crept down to the main
road. No one was in sight. He returned. He snatched a hammer and a
chisel from his tool kit, and with a few savage cracks he so defaced the
number of the car stamped on the engine block that it could not be made
out. He removed the license numbers from fore and aft, and placed them
beside the suitcases. Then, when there was just enough light to see the
bushes as cloudy masses, he started the car, drove through the woods and
up the incline to the top of the cliff, and halted, leaving the engine
running.

Between the car and the edge of the cliff which overhung the lake there
was a space of about a hundred and thirty feet, fairly level and covered
with straggly red clover. Jasper paced off this distance, returned to
the car, took his seat in a nervous, tentative way, and put her into
gear, starting on second speed and slamming her into third. The car
bolted toward the edge of the cliff. He instantly swung out on the
running board. Standing there, headed directly toward the sharp drop
over the cliff, steering with his left hand on the wheel, he shoved the
hand throttle up—up—up with his right. He safely leaped down from the
running board.

Of itself the car rushed forward, roaring. It shot over the edge of the
cliff. It soared twenty feet out into the air as though it were a
thick-bodied aëroplane. It turned over and over, with a sickening drop
toward the lake. The water splashed up in a tremendous noisy circle.
Then silence. In the twilight the surface of the lake shone like milk.
There was no sign of the car on the surface. The concentric rings died
away. The lake was secret and sinister and still. “Lord!” ejaculated
Jasper, standing on the cliff; then: “Well, they won’t find that for a
couple of years anyway.”

He returned to the suitcases. Squatting beside them he took from one the
wig and black garments of John Holt. He stripped, put on the clothes of
John, and packed those of Jasper in the bag. With the cases and the
motor-license plates he walked toward Rosebank, keeping in various
groves of maples and willows till he was within half a mile of the town.
He reached the stone house at the end of the willow walk, and sneaked in
the back way. He burned Jasper Holt’s clothes in the grate, melted down
the license plates in the stove, and between two rocks he smashed
Jasper’s expensive watch and fountain pen into an unpleasant mass of
junk, which he dropped into the cistern for rain water. The silver head
of the umbrella he scratched with a chisel till the engraved name was
indistinguishable.

He unlocked a section of the bookcase and taking a number of packages of
bills in denominations of one, five, ten and twenty dollars from one of
the suitcases he packed them into those empty candy boxes which, on the
shelves, looked so much like books. As he stored them he counted the
bills. They came to ninety-seven thousand five hundred and thirty-five
dollars.

The two suitcases were new. There were no distinguishing marks on them.
But taking them out to the kitchen he kicked them, rubbed them with
lumps of blacking, raveled their edges and cut their sides, till they
gave the appearance of having been long and badly used in traveling. He
took them upstairs and tossed them up into the low attic.

In his bedroom he undressed calmly. Once he laughed: “I despise those
pretentious fools—bank officers and cops. I’m beyond their fool law. No
one can catch me—it would take me myself to do that!”

He got into bed. With a vexed “Hang it!” he mused: “I suppose John would
pray, no matter how chilly the floor was.”

He got out of bed and from the inscrutable Lord of the Universe he
sought forgiveness—not for Jasper Holt, but for the denominations who
lacked the true faith of Soul Hope Fraternity.

He returned to bed and slept till the middle of the morning, lying with
his arms behind his head, a smile on his face.

Thus did Jasper Holt, without the mysterious pangs of death, yet cease
to exist, and thus did John Holt come into being not merely as an
apparition glimpsed on Sunday and Wednesday evenings, but as a being
living twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.


                                  III


The inhabitants of Rosebank were familiar with the occasional
appearances of John Holt, the eccentric recluse, and they merely
snickered about him when on the Saturday evening following the Friday
that has been chronicled he was seen to come out of his gate and trudge
down to a news and stationery shop on Main Street.

He purchased an evening paper and said to the clerk: “You can have the
_Morning Herald_ delivered at my house every morning—27 Humbert Avenue.”

“Yuh, I know where it is. Thought you had kind of a grouch on newspapers
and all those lowbrow things,” said the clerk pertly.

“Ah, did you indeed? The _Herald_, every morning, please. I will pay a
month in advance,” was all John Holt said, but he looked directly at the
clerk, and the man cringed.

John attended the meeting of the Soul Hope Fraternity the next
evening—Sunday—but he was not seen on the streets again for two and a
half days.

There was no news of the disappearance of Jasper Holt till the following
Wednesday, when the whole thing came out in a violent, small-city,
front-page story, headed:

    PAYING TELLER

    _Social Favorite—Makes Get-away_

The paper stated that Jasper Holt had been missing for four days, and
that the officers of the bank, after first denying that there was
anything wrong with his accounts, had admitted that he was short one
hundred thousand dollars—two hundred thousand, said one report. He had
purchased a ticket for Wakamin, this state, on Friday, and a trainman, a
customer of the bank, had noticed him on the train, but he had
apparently never arrived at Wakamin.

A woman asserted that on Friday afternoon she had seen Holt driving an
automobile between Vernon and St. Clair. This appearance near St. Clair
was supposed to be merely a blind, however. In fact our able chief of
police had proof that Holt was not headed north, in the direction of St.
Clair, but south, beyond Wanagoochie—probably for Des Moines or St.
Louis. It was definitely known that on the previous day Holt had left
his car at Wanagoochie, and with their customary thoroughness and
promptness the police were making search at Wanagoochie. The chief had
already communicated with the police in cities to the south, and the
capture of the man could confidently be expected at any moment. As long
as the chief appointed by our popular mayor was in power it went ill
with those who gave even the appearance of wrongdoing.

When asked his opinion of the theory that the alleged fugitive had gone
north the chief declared that of course Holt had started in that
direction, with the vain hope of throwing pursuers off the scent, but
that he had immediately turned south and picked up his car. Though he
would not say so definitely the chief let it be known that he was ready
to put his hands on the fellow who had hidden Holt’s car at Wanagoochie.

When asked if he thought Holt was crazy the chief laughed and said:
“Yes, he’s crazy two hundred thousand dollars’ worth. I’m not making any
slams, but there’s a lot of fellows among our gentlemanly political
opponents who would go a whole lot crazier for a whole lot less!”

The president of the bank, however, was greatly distressed, and strongly
declared his belief that Holt, who was a favorite in the most sumptuous
residences on the Boulevard, besides being well-known in local dramatic
circles, and who bore the best of reputations in the bank, was
temporarily out of his mind, as he had been distressed by pains in the
head for some time past. Meantime the bonding company, which had fully
covered the employees of the bank by a joint bond of two hundred
thousand dollars, had its detectives working with the police on the
case.

As soon as he had read the paper John took a trolley into Vernon and
called on the president of the bank. John’s face drooped with the sorrow
of the disgrace. The president received him. John staggered into the
room, groaning: “I have just learned in the newspaper of the terrible
news about my brother. I have come—”

“We hope it’s just a case of aphasia. We’re sure he’ll turn up all
right,” insisted the president.

“I wish I could believe it. But as I have told you, Jasper is not a good
man. He drinks and smokes and play-acts and makes a god of stylish
clothes—”

“Good Lord, that’s no reason for jumping to the conclusion that he’s an
embezzler!”

“I pray you may be right. But meanwhile I wish to give you any
assistance I can. I shall make it my sole duty to see that my brother is
brought to justice if it proves that he is guilty.”

“Good o’ you,” mumbled the president. Despite this example of John’s
rigid honor he could not get himself to like the man. John was standing
beside him, thrusting his stupid face into his.

The president pushed his chair a foot farther away and said
disagreeably: “As a matter of fact we were thinking of searching your
house. If I remember, you live in Rosebank?”

“Yes. And of course I shall be glad to have you search every inch of it.
Or anything else I can do. I feel that I share fully with my twin
brother in this unspeakable sin. I’ll turn over the key of my house to
you at once. There is also a shed at the back, where Jasper used to keep
his automobile when he came to see me.” He produced a large, rusty,
old-fashioned door key and held it out, adding: “The address is 27
Humbert Avenue, Rosebank.”

“Oh, it won’t be necessary, I guess,” said the president, somewhat
shamed, irritably waving off the key.

“But I just want to help somehow! What can I do? Who is—in the language
of the newspapers—who is the detective on the case? I’ll give him any
help—”

“Tell you what you do: Go see Mr. Scandling, of the Mercantile Trust and
Bonding Company, and tell him all you know.”

“I shall. I take my brother’s crime on my shoulders—otherwise I’d be
committing the sin of Cain. You are giving me a chance to try to expiate
our joint sin, and, as Brother Jeremiah Bodfish was wont to say, it is a
blessing to have an opportunity to expiate a sin, no matter how painful
the punishment may seem to be to the mere physical being. As I may have
told you I am an accepted member of the Soul Hope Fraternity, and though
we are free from cant and dogma it is our firm belief—”

Then for ten dreary minutes John Holt sermonized; quoted forgotten books
and quaint, ungenerous elders; twisted bitter pride and clumsy mysticism
into a fanatical spider web. The president was a churchgoer, an ardent
supporter of missionary funds, for forty years a pew-holder at St.
Simeon’s Church, but he was alternately bored to a chill shiver and
roused to wrath against this self-righteous zealot.

When he had rather rudely got rid of John Holt he complained to himself:
“Curse it, I oughtn’t to, but I must say I prefer Jasper the sinner to
John the saint. Uff! What a smell of damp cellars the fellow has! He
must spend all his time picking potatoes. Say! By thunder, I remember
that Jasper had the infernal nerve to tell me once that if he ever
robbed the bank I was to call John in. I know why, now! John is the kind
of egotistical fool that would muddle up any kind of a systematic
search. Well, Jasper, sorry, but I’m not going to have anything more to
do with John than I can help!”

John had gone to the Mercantile Trust and Bonding Company, had called on
Mr. Scandling, and was now wearying him by a detailed and useless
account of Jasper’s early years and recent vices. He was turned over to
the detective employed by the bonding company to find Jasper. The
detective was a hard, noisy man, who found John even more tedious. John
insisted on his coming out to examine the house in Rosebank, and the
detective did so—but sketchily, trying to escape. John spent at least
five minutes in showing him the shed where Jasper had sometimes kept his
car.

He also attempted to interest the detective in his precious but spotty
books. He unlocked one section of the case, dragged down a four-volume
set of sermons and started to read them aloud.

The detective interrupted: “Yuh, that’s great stuff, but I guess we
aren’t going to find your brother hiding behind those books!”

The detective got away as soon as possible, after insistently explaining
to John that if they could use his assistance they would let him know.

“If I can only expiate—”

“Yuh, sure, that’s all right!” wailed the detective, fairly running
toward the gate.

John made one more visit to Vernon that day. He called on the chief of
city police. He informed the chief that he had taken the bonding
company’s detective through his house; but wouldn’t the police consent
to search it also? He wanted to expiate— The chief patted John on the
back, advised him not to feel responsible for his brother’s guilt and
begged: “Skip along now—very busy.”

As John walked to the Soul Hope meeting that evening dozens of people
murmured that it was his brother who had robbed the Lumber National
Bank. His head was bowed with the shame. At the meeting he took Jasper’s
sin upon himself, and prayed that Jasper would be caught and receive the
blessed healing of punishment. The others begged John not to feel that
he was guilty—was he not one of the Soul Hope brethren who alone in this
wicked and perverse generation were assured of salvation?

On Thursday, on Saturday morning, on Tuesday and on Friday John went
into the city to call on the president of the bank and the detective.
Twice the president saw him, and was infinitely bored by his sermons.
The third time he sent word that he was out. The fourth time he saw
John, but curtly explained that if John wanted to help them the best
thing he could do was to stay away.

The detective was “out” all four times.

John smiled meekly and ceased to try to help them. Dust began to gather
on certain candy boxes on the lower shelf of his bookcase, save for one
of them, which he took out now and then. Always after he had taken it
out a man with faded brown hair and a wrinkled black suit, signing
himself R. J. Smith, would send a fair-sized money order from the post
office at South Vernon to John Holt, at Rosebank—as he had been doing
for more than six months. These money orders could not have amounted to
more than twenty-five dollars a week, but that was even more than an
ascetic like John Holt needed. By day John sometimes cashed these at the
Rosebank post office, but usually, as had been his custom, he cashed
them at his favorite grocery when he went out in the evening.

In conversation with the commuter neighbor who every evening walked
about and smoked an after-dinner cigar in the yard at the right John was
frank about the whole lamentable business of his brother’s defalcation.
He wondered, he said, if he had not shut himself up with his studies too
much, and neglected his brother. The neighbor ponderously advised John
to get out more. John let himself be persuaded, at least to the extent
of taking a short walk every afternoon and of letting his literary
solitude be disturbed by the delivery of milk, meat and groceries. He
also went to the public library, and in the reference room glanced at
books on Central and South America—as though he was planning to go
south, some day.

But he continued his religious studies. It may be doubted if previous to
the embezzlement John had worked very consistently on his book about
Revelation. All that the world had ever seen of it was a jumble of
quotations from theological authorities. Presumably the crime of his
brother shocked him into more concentrated study, more patient writing.
For during the year after his brother’s disappearance—a year in which
the bonding company gradually gave up the search and came to believe
that Jasper was dead—John became fanatically absorbed in somewhat
nebulous work. The days and nights drifted together in meditation in
which he lost sight of realities, and seemed through the clouds of the
flesh to see flashes from the towered cities of the spirit.

It has been asserted that when Jasper Holt acted a rôle he veritably
lived it. No one can ever determine how great an actor was lost in the
smug bank teller. To him were imperial triumphs denied, yet was he not
without material reward. For playing his most subtle part he received
ninety-seven thousand dollars. It may be that he earned it. Certainly
for the risk entailed it was but a fair payment. Jasper had meddled with
the mystery of personality, and was in peril of losing all consistent
purpose, of becoming a Wandering Jew of the spirit, a strangled body
walking.


                                   IV


The sharp-pointed willow leaves had twisted and fallen, after the dreary
rains of October. Bark had peeled from the willow trunks, leaving gashes
of bare wood that was a wet and sickly yellow. Through the denuded trees
bulked the solid stone back of John Holt’s house. The patches of earth
were greasy between the tawny knots of grass stems. The bricks of the
walk were always damp now. The world was hunched up in this pervading
chill.

As melancholy as the sick earth seemed the man who in a slaty twilight
paced the willow walk. His step was slack, his lips moved with the
intensity of his meditation. Over his wrinkled black suit and bleak
shirt bosom was a worn overcoat, the velvet collar turned green. He was
considering.

“There’s something to all this. I begin to see—I don’t know what it is I
do see! But there’s lights—supernatural world that makes food and bed
seem ridiculous. I am—I really am beyond the law! I made my own law! Why
shouldn’t I go beyond the law of vision and see the secrets of life? But
I sinned, and I must repent—some day. I need not return the money. I see
now that it was given me so that I could lead this life of
contemplation. But the ingratitude to the president, to the people who
trusted me! Am I but the most miserable of sinners, and as the blind?
Voices—I hear conflicting voices—some praising me for my courage, some
rebuking—”

He knelt on the slimy black surface of a wooden bench beneath the
willows, and as dusk clothed him round about he prayed. It seemed to him
that he prayed not in words but in vast confusing dreams—the words of a
language larger than human tongues. When he had exhausted himself he
slowly entered the house. He locked the door. There was nothing definite
of which he was afraid, but he was never comfortable with the door
unlocked.

By candle light he prepared his austere supper—dry toast, an egg, cheap
green tea with thin milk. As always—as it had happened after every meal,
now, for eighteen months—he wanted a cigarette when he had eaten, but
did not take one. He paced into the living room and through the long
still hours of the evening he read an ancient book, all footnotes and
cross references, about The Numerology of the Prophetic Books, and the
Number of the Beast. He tried to make notes for his own book on
Revelation—that scant pile of sheets covered with writing in a small
finicky hand. Thousands of other sheets he had covered; through whole
nights he had written; but always he seemed with tardy pen to be racing
after thoughts that he could never quite catch, and most of what he had
written he had savagely burned.

But some day he would make a masterpiece! He was feeling toward the
greatest discovery that mortal men had encountered. Everything, he had
determined, was a symbol—not just this holy sign and that, but all
physical manifestations. With frightened exultation he tried his new
power of divination. The hanging lamp swung tinily. He ventured: “If the
arc of that moving radiance touches the edge of the bookcase, then it
will be a sign that I am to go to South America, under an entirely new
disguise, and spend my money.”

He shuddered. He watched the lamp’s unbearably slow swing. The moving
light almost touched the bookcase. He gasped. Then it receded.

It was a warning; he quaked. Would he never leave this place of brooding
and of fear—which he had thought so clever a refuge? He suddenly saw it
all.

“I ran away and hid in a prison! Man isn’t caught by justice—he catches
himself!”

Again he tried. He speculated as to whether the number of pencils on the
table was greater or less than five. If greater, then he had sinned; if
less, then he was veritably beyond the law. He began to lift books and
papers, looking for pencils. He was coldly sweating with the suspense of
the test.

Suddenly he cried “Am I going crazy?”

He fled to his prosaic bedroom. He could not sleep. His brain was
smoldering with confused inklings of mystic numbers and hidden warnings.

He woke from a half sleep more vision haunted than any waking thought,
and cried: “I must go back and confess! But I can’t! I can’t, when I was
too clever for them! I can’t go back and let them win. I won’t let those
fools just sit tight and still catch me!”

It was a year and a half since Jasper had disappeared. Sometimes it
seemed a month and a half; sometimes gray centuries. John’s will power
had been shrouded with curious puttering studies; long heavy-breathing
sittings with the ouija board on his lap, midnight hours when he had
fancied that tables had tapped and crackling coals had spoken. Now that
the second autumn of his seclusion was creeping into winter he was
conscious that he had not enough initiative to carry out his plans for
going to South America. The summer before he had boasted to himself that
he would come out of hiding and go south, leaving such a twisty trail as
only he could make. But—oh, it was too much trouble. He hadn’t the joy
in play-acting which had carried his brother Jasper through his
preparations for flight.

He had killed Jasper Holt, and for a miserable little pile of paper
money he had become a moldy recluse!

He hated his loneliness, but still more did he hate his only companions,
the members of the Soul Hope Fraternity—that pious shrill seamstress,
that surly carpenter, that tight-lipped housekeeper, that old shouting
man with the unseemly frieze of whiskers. They were so unimaginative.
Their meetings were all the same; the same persons rose in the same
order and made the same intimate announcements to the Deity that they
alone were his elect.

At first it had been an amusing triumph to be accepted as the most
eloquent among them, but that had become commonplace, and he resented
their daring to be familiar with him, who was, he felt, the only man of
all men living who beyond the illusions of the world saw the strange
beatitude of higher souls.

It was at the end of November, during a Wednesday meeting at which a
red-faced man had for a half hour maintained that he couldn’t possibly
sin, that the cumulative ennui burst in John Holt’s brain. He sprang up.

He snarled: “You make me sick, all of you! You think you’re so certain
of sanctification that you can’t do wrong. So did I, once! Now I know
that we are all miserable sinners—really are! You all say you are, but
you don’t believe it. I tell you that you there, that have just been
yammering, and you, Brother Judkins, with the long twitching nose, and
I—I—I, most unhappy of men, we must repent, confess, expiate our sins!
And I will confess right now. I st-stole—”

Terrified he darted out of the hall, and hatless, coatless, tumbled
through the main street of Rosebank, nor ceased till he had locked
himself in his house. He was frightened because he had almost betrayed
his secret, yet agonized because he had not gone on, really confessed,
and gained the only peace he could ever know now—the peace of
punishment.

He never returned to Soul Hope Hall. Indeed for a week he did not leave
his house, save for midnight prowling in the willow walk. Quite suddenly
he became desperate with the silence. He flung out of the house, not
stopping to lock or even close the front door. He raced uptown, no
topcoat over his rotting garments, only an old gardener’s cap on his
thick brown hair. People stared at him. He bore it with a resigned fury.

He entered a lunch room, hoping to sit inconspicuously and hear men
talking normally about him. The attendant at the counter gaped. John
heard a mutter from the cashier’s desk: “There’s that crazy hermit!”

All of the half dozen young men loafing in the place were looking at
him. He was so uncomfortable that he could not eat even the milk and
sandwich he had ordered. He pushed them away and fled, a failure in the
first attempt to dine out that he had made in eighteen months; a
lamentable failure to revive that Jasper Holt whom he had coldly killed.

He entered a cigar store and bought a box of cigarettes. He took joy out
of throwing away his asceticism. But when, on the street, he lighted a
cigarette it made him so dizzy that he was afraid he was going to fall.
He had to sit down on the curb. People gathered. He staggered to his
feet and up an alley.

For hours he walked, making and discarding the most contradictory
plans—to go to the bank and confess; to spend the money riotously and
never confess.

It was midnight when he returned to his house.

Before it he gasped. The front door was open. He chuckled with relief as
he remembered that he had not closed it. He sauntered in. He was passing
the door of the living room, going directly up to his bedroom, when his
foot struck an object the size of a book, but hollow sounding. He picked
it up. It was one of the booklike candy boxes. And it was quite empty.
Frightened he listened. There was no sound. He crept into the living
room and lighted the lamp.

The doors of the bookcase had been wrenched open. Every book had been
pulled out on the floor. All of the candy boxes, which that evening had
contained almost ninety-six thousand dollars, were in a pile; and all of
them were empty. He searched for ten minutes, but the only money he
found was one five-dollar bill, which had fluttered under the table. In
his pocket he had one dollar and sixteen cents. John Holt had six
dollars and sixteen cents, no job, no friends—and no identity.


                                   V


When the president of the Lumber National Bank was informed that John
Holt was waiting to see him he scowled.

“Lord, I’d forgotten that minor plague! Must be a year since he’s been
here. Oh, let him— No, hanged if I will! Tell him I’m too busy to see
him. That is, unless he’s got some news about Jasper. Pump him, and find
out.”

The president’s secretary sweetly confided to John:

“I’m so sorry, but the president is in conference just now. What was it
you wanted to see him about? Is there any news about—uh—about your
brother?”

“There is not, miss. I am here to see the president on the business of
the Lord.”

“Oh! If that’s all I’m afraid I can’t disturb him.”

“I will wait.”

Wait he did, through all the morning, through the lunch hour—when the
president hastened out past him—then into the afternoon, till the
president was unable to work with the thought of that scarecrow out
there, and sent for him.

“Well, well! What is it this time, John? I’m pretty busy. No news about
Jasper, eh?”

“No news, sir, but—Jasper himself! I am Jasper Holt! His sin is my sin.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that stuff—twin brothers, twin souls, share
responsibility—”

“You don’t understand. There isn’t any twin brother. There isn’t any
John Holt. I am Jasper. I invented an imaginary brother, and disguised
myself— Why, don’t you recognize my voice?”

While John leaned over the desk, his two hands upon it, and smiled
wistfully, the president shook his head and soothed: “No, I’m afraid I
don’t. Sounds like good old religious John to me! Jasper was a cheerful,
efficient sort of crook. Why, his laugh—”

“But I can laugh!” The dreadful croak which John uttered was the cry of
an evil bird of the swamps. The president shuddered. Under the edge of
the desk his fingers crept toward the buzzer by which he summoned his
secretary.

They stopped as John urged: “Look—this wig—it’s a wig. See, I am
Jasper!”

He had snatched off the brown thatch. He stood expectant, a little
afraid.

The president was startled, but he shook his head and sighed.

“You poor devil! Wig, all right. But I wouldn’t say that hair was much
like Jasper’s!”

He motioned toward the mirror in the corner of the room.

John wavered to it. And indeed he saw that day by slow day his hair had
turned from Jasper’s thin sleek blackness to a straggle of damp gray
locks writhing over a yellow skull.

He begged pitifully: “Oh, can’t you see I am Jasper? I stole
ninety-seven thousand dollars from the bank. I want to be punished! I
want to do anything to prove— Why, I’ve been at your house. Your wife’s
name is Evelyn. My salary here was—”

“My dear boy, don’t you suppose that Jasper might have told you all
these interesting facts? I’m afraid the worry of this has—pardon me if
I’m frank, but I’m afraid it’s turned your head a little, John.”

“There isn’t any John! There isn’t! There isn’t!”

“I’d believe that a little more easily if I hadn’t met you before Jasper
disappeared.”

“Give me a piece of paper. You know my writing—”

With clutching claws John seized a sheet of bank stationery and tried to
write in the round script of Jasper. During the past year and a half he
had filled thousands of pages with the small finicky hand of John. Now,
though he tried to prevent it, after he had traced two or three words in
large but shaky letters the writing became smaller, more pinched, less
legible.

Even while John wrote the president looked at the sheet and said easily:
“Afraid it’s no use. That isn’t Jasper’s fist. See here, I want you to
get away from Rosebank—go to some farm—work outdoors—cut out this fuming
and fussing—get some fresh air in your lungs.” The president rose and
purred: “Now, I’m afraid I have some work to do.”

He paused, waiting for John to go.

John fiercely crumpled the sheet and hurled it away. Tears were in his
weary eyes.

He wailed: “Is there nothing I can do to prove I am Jasper?”

“Why, certainly! You can produce what’s left of the ninety-seven
thousand!”

John took from his ragged waistcoat pocket a five-dollar bill and some
change. “Here’s all there is. Ninety-six thousand of it was stolen from
my house last night.”

Sorry though he was for the madman the president could not help
laughing. Then he tried to look sympathetic, and he comforted: “Well,
that’s hard luck, old man. Uh, let’s see. You might produce some parents
or relatives or somebody to prove that Jasper never did have a twin
brother.”

“My parents are dead, and I’ve lost track of their kin—I was born in
England—father came over when I was six. There might be some cousins or
some old neighbors, but I don’t know. Probably impossible to find out,
in these wartimes, without going over there.”

“Well, I guess we’ll have to let it go, old man.” The president was
pressing the buzzer for his secretary and gently bidding her: “Show Mr.
Holt out, please.”

From the door John desperately tried to add: “You will find my car
sunk—”

The door had closed behind him. The president had not listened.

The president gave orders that never, for any reason, was John Holt to
be admitted to his office again. He telephoned to the bonding company
that John Holt had now gone crazy; that they would save trouble by
refusing to admit him.

John did not try to see them. He went to the county jail. He entered the
keeper’s office and said quietly: “I have stolen a lot of money, but I
can’t prove it. Will you put me in jail?”

The keeper shouted: “Get out of here! You hoboes always spring that when
you want a good warm lodging for the winter! Why the devil don’t you go
to work with a shovel in the sand pits? They’re paying two-seventy-five
a day.”

“Yes, sir,” said John timorously. “Where are they?”



                   THE STORY VINTON HEARD AT MALLORIE


_By_ KATHARINE PRESCOTT MOSELEY
From _Scribner’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons._
_Copyright, 1919, by Katharine Prescott Moseley._

“There is only one letter for you,” said Ware’s sister, and she turned
the handle of the coffee-urn as she watched him slit the envelope, for
Ware had exclaimed: “By Jove! It’s from Vinton.” And then, after a
moment: “That’s a nice thing. Roberts posted this last night instead of
telephoning it up directly it came. He’s on the _——nia_, due in New
York—let me see—you have the _Herald_ there—look in the shipping, will
you? Are they sighted?”

Abigail took up the paper. “Docked last night at nine,” she said.

“Then he’ll have caught the midnight from New York. If he’s not stopping
in Boston he’ll be on the eight fifty-eight.”

“Is he coming here?”

“Yes, he says so. He’ll have quite a bit to tell if I know him.” And an
hour or so later Abigail Ware saw Vinton lift his eyes to the columns of
the white porch glistening in the morning sun behind her, and as he
sprang out of the motor and took her hand: “My foot is on my native
heath and my name is MacGregor!” he cried.

Abigail led the way into the dining-room. “Come in by the fire; I’ve
kept some coffee hot,” she said.

Vinton approached the warmth of the pine logs that were sending out
sparks against the screen of the Franklin stove. “There’s something
fearfully penetrating about the air over here at this time of year,” he
began. “Open fires are its saving complement.”

Abigail held out his cup.

“Warm as toast in England; perfect English spring this year.”

“Oh, no doubt of it; spring’s the time for England,” Ware asserted.

“Fall for New England,” said Ware’s sister. “But tell me,” she went on,
“you were talking of saving complements. What are the saving complements
over there just now?”

“There aren’t any.” Vinton’s voice was suddenly sombre.

“I should think not!” It came from brother and sister at once.

A moment passed before Vinton turned from the fire and let his eyes
wander from the pale yellow heads of the daffodils nodding in the
easterly May air outside to the cool tints of the Lowestoft bowl on
which some Chinese artisan a century before had picked out the initials
of a merchant-sailor grandfather in pale tints of blue and gold and
which now stood in the centre of the table filled with sprays of the
rhodora. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I suppose there are saving complements
of a sort if one is heroic enough to find them, but—well, one can
hardly— What shall I say? Everything over there—I mean all sorts of what
you’d call merely material objects—is being charged, I believe, with
some kind of spiritual essence that is going to be indefinitely active
to future contact.”

He looked across the table to where Ware sat with his chair a little
pushed back, and laughed. “The intolerant old Puritan thinks I’m off
again, doesn’t he?” he said almost archly. Then he glanced about the
room once more. “I think,” he continued, “that there is an extraordinary
beauty of a kind about our old houses over here—a charm, too, although
I’ve never been able to analyze it, for, after all, you know, there’s
nothing in them!”

“The Puritan,” he began to explain, “belonged peculiarly to the race
that in England had always opposed all of what one may call the sensory
elements that were of such immense appeal to the race of the Cavaliers,
for I believe that the two did spring from essentially different roots.

    “‘A primrose by a river’s brim
    A yellow primrose was to him,
    And it was nothing more.’”

“What more does it need to be?” Ware protested, and “Ah! there you are,”
Vinton responded. “But don’t you see, after all, such negation never
created”—he laughed a little again. “Never created an—an—”

“An eschatology?” supplemented Ware.

“A what? What on earth’s an eschatology?” gasped Ware’s sister.

“Say, for brevity, the material manifestation of spiritual things; not
quite theological, but ’t will serve,” Vinton returned, and was silent;
and after a time Abigail asked him what he thought of the legend of the
Angel of Mons. Then it was that Vinton began to be truly cryptic.
“What’s the use,” he said genially, “of talking about these things to
two people who are made of stuff as splendidly solid and insensitive to
the vibrations of what they’d call fantasy as their colonial pieces
themselves.”

Abigail sighed. “I’m sorry that I’m too insensitive to hear of these
saving complements of horror,” she said. “As for Billy, I suppose he
wants the facts.”

“The horror,” returned Vinton, “for the facts are all horror. If it
hadn’t been for the story that the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter told
me I should bring home nothing else.”

“Is this one of those manifestations you refuse to reveal to us?”

“It is the only one. It’s no use before Ware; perhaps some time—if you
will listen.”

“Go on,” said Ware; “‘_si non e vero, e ben trovato_’”.

“Oh, I’m not making it up.”

“Well, what do they say about the Russian advance, over there? Did you
see any of the big German guns in action?”

For days after this the conversation turned on the technical questions
of war, with which Vinton’s opportunities as a war correspondent had
made him familiar.

Then one night Vinton had come down from Boston on a late afternoon
train. He had been lunching at one of the clubs with friends who had
listed him to speak at two or three houses in aid of emergency funds. It
was tea-time and suddenly he rose, with his cup and saucer in hand, and
went over to one of the dining-room windows. “Hello,” he said. “We’re
going to get a northeaster, I’ll be bound.”

“The sheep-shearer’s due,” said Ware from his desk.

And it was that very night, when the great easterly gale was enveloping
the whole New England coast and was sending showers of sparks down the
big fire-place before which they sat, in a low-ceiled room which had
been the kitchen in colonial days, that Vinton told the story as he had
heard it from the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter.

                                  ――――

“It seems,” he began, “that the Mallories are of an immensely ancient
family in the southwest of England; the title is one of the oldest in
the realm, and one of the poorest. Away back in the time of the Tudor
they became Protestant under protest, and have remained so under
protest; only their chapel, like the worshipping places of the early
Christians, was taken down into the bosom of the earth and there it
rested, exhaling strange virtues over all the land above, and, as many
thought, harboring much of good that the newer order of things had cast
out. And so the Mallories are High-Church and when the Puseyites began
their revolt they were only approaching what the Mallories had been for
centuries. And about these delightful people there is none of the
fanaticism of the convert.

“When war broke out there were two beautiful daughters living, most of
their time, down there at Mallorie Abbey, and a son who went over with
the expeditionary force as soon as war was declared. This young man was
killed in action, under the most heroic circumstances. He was,
apparently, the type of young soldier who might have been one of
Arthur’s men, and I believe the clerical incumbent there used to quote
the lines of the Puritan Milton: ‘Arthur stirring wars under the earth
that hides him,’ or ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
unseen,’ as having a kind of ironic application to the whole Mallorie
domain. When I came back from France I was pretty well used up, and
Carteret Lyon asked me down to his place, which stands within four or
five miles of Mallorie, in the south. They are, of course, in mourning
and fearfully sad, but I met the eldest daughter at tea one afternoon,
and, being the most natural people on earth, and as I could tell her
some things she wished to hear about France, we became almost friends at
once. After that they made me welcome at Mallorie whenever I dropped in
at tea-time, and one day Lady Maurya took me over the abbey, telling me
as we went through the dim old place with its stained and mullioned
windows a lot of its curious, almost supernatural, history. Suddenly she
broke off from the narrative, on which it had seemed to me that her mind
had been only lightly fixed, and, sinking down on a window-seat in the
low, long hall we had been passing through, she looked up at me and
said: ‘Ah, this is nothing to something that has really happened here
within the year.’

“I asked her if she could tell me, and she answered that she wished to,
but that it was all so very extraordinary that she feared I would be
unable to believe it, and she felt that she could not hear it doubted.

“I said to her that I was the most believing man since the Dark Ages,
and so she told me.

“It was the anniversary of her brother’s death, and a quarter to three
in the morning had just struck from the clock on a kind of tower that
rises over the chapel and which has a circular stairway running down
into the middle of a small lady-chapel where her brother’s body (which
had finally been found after the engagement in which he had been killed)
had been buried. She and the other members of her family were keeping
vigil beside the tomb by turns while masses were being said, during the
twelve hours that were passing, and she was just mounting the stairs to
go to her room for a little rest, being nearly exhausted with fatigue
and emotion, when suddenly the tower and stairway, which had been in
inky darkness before, became as light as day. She knew in an instant
what it was, and, looking up, straight over her head she saw a Zeppelin
hovering exactly above where she stood and so low that it seemed to her
that she could see the crew and their preparations for the hideous work
afoot. Then she looked down and a single shaft of the search-light fell
directly on the heads of those who were gathered on their knees about
the tomb. They were praying, with their heads bent and their eyes
closed, for not one of them seemed to be aware of it, and the priests,
whose chanting came up to her fearfully from the altar, were protected
from it by the high reredos. There was something so dreadful and so
uncanny about it all that she was petrified, for she knew that
annihilation was hanging over her and all her family, without the shadow
of a doubt, for the aim was at the tower—which was a landmark for miles
around—and that it would fall before she could warn one of her people to
safety, when, as in a flash from nowhere, flying at a most terrific rate
of speed yet without a sound and straight at the Zeppelin, there
appeared an aeroplane. It approached almost within hailing distance of
the great thing without firing, and then, as the Zeppelin started a
little, the aeroplane began swirling about it. She could not tell how
long a battle went on between them without a single shot from either. It
seemed as if the aeroplane was winding the monster in some intangible
net, in which it turned and twisted and writhed, trying to get away into
the free air; and then, again without a single shot, it fell to earth.

“Every one of the crew had been killed when the men went out to it, and
while she and her sister watched from the top of the tower they saw the
aeroplane skim down and land just below them. Hastening below she threw
back a little door that opened to the ground, and there she came face to
face with the aeronaut. He wore no helmet, and, in this very early
light, for it was in the first days of the year, he looked as if he
stood in a shining black armor. His hair was golden, and the rising sun
touched it, and he was the most beautiful creature that she had ever
seen—so beautiful that she fell back against the wall behind her.

“Then the others came and showered him with thanks and insisted that he
should be their guest at Mallorie, and, to every one’s astonishment,
Lady Maurya’s mother called the man who had served her son for many
years and directed him to take the stranger to her son’s rooms, that had
not been open since the day he fell in battle, and also she said that as
they were of about the same height his wardrobe should be at the
stranger’s disposal. He accepted their invitation and stayed at Mallorie
Abbey for nearly a week, saying that there were a few things he must do
about his machine. And yet, during his whole stay, no one ever saw him
at work on it. In fact, although the Mallories never mentioned it to
him, they knew that there was much excitement, not only among their own
people but in the countryside, because since the moment he had come to
earth no one had been able to find the aeroplane. He would sometimes
play tennis with Lady Maurya and her sister the whole morning or
afternoon, and at sight of him in their brother’s flannels and with his
gayest kummerbunds and ties they felt no pangs, only a great comfort in
his presence, not exactly as if their brother was really back with them,
but as if he had power to fill them with the same sort of happiness they
had always felt when the young soldier was at home with them on leave.

“One night during that week a general officer back from France on an
important mission dined at the abbey. After dinner, something calling
the marquis out, the officer and the aeronaut, Lieutenant Templar, as he
called himself, were left alone. As the officer was bidding Lady Maurya
good-by, two hours later, he said: ‘This evening has been worth twenty
trips from France. I have learned that which may be of such value to us
that it will turn the tide of war. This young saviour of Mallorie Abbey
may be the saviour of Europe. But how does he _know_?’

“Then it was that Lady Maurya took Lieutenant Templar by himself, and
she brought him into the very hall where she told me the story, and she
said to him (and how could any creature of earth or heaven have resisted
her, for she has all the beauty and all the allurements of both?): ‘Why
were your wings all purple and gold when you came flying to save us that
morning?’

“And he answered her: ‘The shadow of the earth upon the skies, and a
touch of dawn.’

“‘But there was no dawn,’ she said. ‘And when you came to the great
monster why did your wings change to flaming scarlet, so bright that no
eyes could rest upon them?’

“‘The rising sun,’ he said.

“And she answered: ‘But there was no rising sun.’

“And then he looked at her for a long time while neither spoke, and at
last: ‘How could you send the thing to earth without a single shot?’ she
asked.

“And he answered, after a moment: ‘Because in me is all the strength of
that bright ardor which has led young warriors to die in battle for the
right since earth began. And now my strength is most mightily renewed
with the strength of all the lads who were the first to die for England.
Was not your brother one of these? Such souls are the stuff of which are
made the angels and archangels and all the heavenly host.’

“And as she looked at him, standing before her, it seemed to her, in the
dim light, that instead of the evening clothes he had been wearing she
saw again a glint of black armor as on the morning when he had first
come to them, and then, like Elsa, she asked him who he was, and he,
like Lohengrin, was gone.

“But from that day to this there has been no more sorrowing at Mallorie
Abbey.”

                                  ――――

The great northeaster had stopped its wild howling at the very moment
that Vinton was adding: “They have never known which of them it
was—whether it was Michael—or Gabriel—or Raphael!”

Ware poked the fire and said nothing.

“Do you believe it?” asked Ware’s sister.

“What an impossible word that word ‘believe’ is! What does it mean?”

“And do you like the idea—the idea of losing one’s identity in one great
superlative being like that?”

Vinton thought a moment, and then he said: “When I remember that all the
trouble on this earth comes in the train of that infernal thing we call
the ego it seems to me that the heavenly things must indeed arise from
its complete surrender. Yes,” he continued more slowly, “yes, I think I
like it very much.”



                        THE TOAST TO FORTY-FIVE


_By_ WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY
From _The Pictorial Review_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Pictorial Review Company._
_Copyright, 1919, by William Dudley Pelley._

In this little Vermont town of Paris, on the top floor of the red-brick
post-office block, over half a century have been located the quarters of
Farrington Post, Paris Chapter, G. A. R.

In the rooms of Farrington Post—under a glass case filled with countless
other relics belonging to Captain Jonathan Farrington’s company, that
marched away one hundred and seven strong that forenoon in ’61—has been
kept a bottle of rare old wine.

That wine was old when those stalwart young Vermonters who followed
Captain John Farrington were children. Through half a century it has
occupied its place in that glass case; during that long time it has been
viewed by many visitors to our town; over and over again has the story
of “The Toast to Forty-five” been told until that double-quart of
priceless vintage has become one of our chief sights of interest to the
stranger within the gates. It was not through accident or chance that
this bottle of wine was saved. Up to last August there was a pretty
sentiment connected with that bottle of wine and why it should have been
preserved thus throughout the years.

Up to last August, indeed! Because that bottle is no longer under the
glass case in the Grand Army rooms in the post-office block. It has been
taken from among those relics of yesterday; the seal has been broken;
the contents have been poured out. Glistening red as the blood which
those lads of ’61 shed for the principles in which they believed, that
liquor was consumed in the pledging of a toast.

                                  ――――

When the homefolks suggested that the county give a dinner to the
returned heroes on the sixteenth day of August, 1866—Bennington Battle
Day and a holiday in Vermont always—Dashing Captain Jack Fuller was not
the one to quash the suggestion. “Dashing Jack” had been the man to take
John Farrington’s place when John lost his life at Gettysburg. He was a
great dude, was Captain Jack; a lover of the dramatic and the
spectacular; with the pomp of soldiering verily in his blood and the
vanity of many generations of Fullers in his fiber.

On the night of August 16, 1866, “The Toast to Forty-five Banquet” was
held on the top floor of the old Vermont House. It took place in the big
room with the spring dance-floor. That old Paris hostelry was burned in
’73. In the course of that affair, Dashing Jack arose and made a
speech—likewise a proposal.

The flower of Vermont of the Sixties was gathered about those tables.
There were young men to whom fame and fortune afterward would come.
There were sturdy beautiful girls in quaint dresses that in succeeding
years would mother sons and daughters who are the pride and glory of
Vermont of the present. The lights shone on gloriously happy faces. Two
hundred voices turned the room into vocal pandemonium. It was several
minutes before Dashing Captain Jack could gain their attention and make
himself heard.

When finally all eyes were turned upon him, they saw that he was holding
high in his right hand a bottle of wine.

“Ye gallant sons and daughters of Vermont! Tonight is a great night!”
cried Jack in ringing, self-confident, magnetic tones. “We are attending
a dinner tonight that will be remembered in the history of our town and
State long after the last comrade now within sound of my voice has gone
to make his bivouac with the illustrious Company Forty-five—the name
which we have given the forty-five brave lads who marched away with us
but who were not destined by a higher providence to march back. On this
night, therefore, beholding this wine before me, it has occurred to me
to propose the inauguration of a rite—almost a sacred rite—the like of
which no Post has ever heard.”

The room was now very quiet. And Captain Jack reveled in the drama of
the scene.

“In this room,” he cried, “—in sound of my voice at this moment, are two
boys who will be the very last to join Company Forty-five. Sooner or
later we shall all be called to answer to our names in the Great Muster;
but some will be called sooner than others. There will certainly come a
day in the years which lie ahead when there will be only two remaining
of this company of sixty-two here to-night. Think of it, boys! Just
_two_! Look into one another’s faces and ask yourselves—who are those
two—which of you will they be?”

The room was strangely silent. The smiles died on the faces of many
women. Dashing Captain Jack indicated the wine he held in his hand.

“Here is the thing which I propose; to make the annual dinners of
Farrington Post different from any other reunions which shall ever be
held:

“I hold in my hand the last unsealed bottle of the vintage which we have
tasted to-night in our first toast in peace to the missing lads that
have made that peace possible. Let this last bottle be saved. Year after
year we will have our annual dinners. Year after year, as we gather
round the board, familiar faces will be missing. Many will fall by the
way. At last—will be only two comrades—of this roomful here to-night.
And when at last those two shall face one another and think back to this
first banquet in the dim and sacred past—when they alone remain—when
sixty have gone to join old Forty-five and they realize that perhaps
before another year is passed, they will have joined that illustrious
company also—let them break the seal on this bottle. Let them fill their
glasses. Let them clink those crystal rims together and drink the last
toast to those who have gone. And when the seal on this bottle thus is
broken, let our reunions be held no more.”

They drank, and the next morning the banquet was a thing of history.

                                  ――――

Year after year those veterans have gathered about the board and gazed
on that rare old vintage, wondering whether he was to be one of the two
to drink that final toast to Forty-five—and under what circumstances.
Each has realized that before another August sixteenth came around,
certain familiar faces were to be missing. Dashing Captain Jack started
something far more dramatic than he realized.

Poor Captain Jack! He married one of the Kingsley girls that year and a
little son was born to them. A month and a day after the birth of that
son he was killed in an accident on the old New York Railroad. He was
the first to join Forty-five!

Sixty-two men sat down to that first banquet. In 1900 the number was
thirty—less than half. In 1910 there were eleven veterans. Since 1910
the old soldiers have been going rapidly.

At the Post dinner of August 16, 1912, the ranks of Captain Jack’s
company had dwindled to four old men. There was Uncle Joe Fodder, the
commander; Martin Chisholm, who made his money in the grist-mill; Henry
Weston, who for seven years had been an inmate of the State Soldier’s
Home; and—old Wilbur Nieson, who spent his days hanging around the
street corners and stores.

The reunion ended as forty-six other reunions had ended, excepting that
they did not talk their battles over again so vehemently as on former
occasions. Indeed, they had talked themselves out. They were “waiting”
now, and the old bottle of wine set in the center of their table was a
symbol of fatalism, mute testimony to the inexorable law of human life.
Next day we reported it as usual in our local paper.

At about ten-thirty o’clock of the following evening—to be exact, the
seventeenth day of August, 1912—Mrs. Samuel Hod, wife of the
_Telegraph’s_ editor, while working in her kitchen, heard a frightful
scream come from somewhere in the neighborhood.

Mrs. Hod rushed to the door. Outside was a clear, warm summer night.
Across the picket fence that separated the Hod yard from the rear yards
of the houses facing on Pleasant Street, she could see a light in the
kitchen of the Fuller boy’s house—young Jack Fuller, grandson of Dashing
Captain Jack of years gone by. The neighborhood was very quiet during
those two minutes she stood there listening in her fright.

Then suddenly that scream was repeated—sharp, clear, terrible! It came
from the home across the picket fence. It was Betty Fuller screaming.
From the agony in the cries something ghastly had happened. Mrs. Hod ran
through her house and called to her husband. Sam helped his wife over
the back fence and they made their way under the Fuller clothes-line,
through the back shed, and into the little sitting-room.

Betty Fuller was down on the floor. She was face downward, her head
protected by her arm. Two feet from her, between the reading-table and
the door into the dining-room, was her nine-months-old baby. Holding
himself unsteadily between the casings of the hall door was young Jack,
his face the color of cold ashes, his lips parched, drops of sweat,
heavy as glycerin, standing on his forehead.

“What’s happened?” demanded Sam.

But he saw what had happened; and his wife saw; and so did the
neighbors. The baby’s crib was mute witness to what had occurred. It was
overturned—between Jack and his little family.

“Betty! Betty!” cried Mrs. Hod, kneeling down to the young mother’s
assistance.

“My baby! My only, only, little baby!” moaned the girl.

“Tell me,” roared Sam to the father, “how did this happen?”

“I came in—sick—I guess—I guess—I didn’t see the kid’s crib. I fell over
against it! I knocked it over—”

The neighbor woman had picked up the little body.

“It’s—dead!” she whispered hoarsely.

Sam whirled on Jack.

“Sick!” he roared. “Sick! The h—— you was sick! You was drunk! You’re
drunk now! See what you’ve done? You’ve killed your own kid—!”

At his words the girl shrieked again, that long agonizing terrible
shriek that brought more neighbors.

“It was an accident,” whispered the Fuller boy thickly.

“It wouldn’t have been an accident if you’d behaved yourself and cut out
this coming home drunk.”

The woman picked up the girl and got her to the sofa. Over and over she
kept moaning: “My baby! My only, only, little baby!”

The place filled with neighbors. After a while came Doctor Johnson—who
was our coroner—and Mike Hogan, our chief of police.

Mike was at a loss whether to arrest the father or not. Sam dispelled
his doubts.

“When the boy comes to himself and gets the stuff out of his brain,
he’ll feel bad enough, Mike,” the fatherly old editor said. “The memory
of it will be enough punishment. After all, he didn’t do it
intentionally.”

“He’s no good, sorr,” stormed Mike, indicating the young father while he
grew husky-throated at the pathos of the little mother’s grief.

“Yes, he is, Mike. This is really Dick Fuller’s—his father’s—fault. He
shouldn’t ever have left the lad ten thousand dollars and no
balance-wheel. Let these two children alone. It’s for them to settle
between themselves. Jack’s got the Fuller blood in him from away back;
and I think this will bring out his manhood. It’s a fearful price for a
young father to have to pay, Mike. But maybe, after all, it’s for the
best.”

The neighbors left the boy and girl to their tragedy.

The marriage of old Wilbur Nieson’s daughter Elisabeth to young Jack
Fuller had been talked of in our town for a month and a day. Richard
Fuller, son of Dashing Captain Jack, had grown to manhood, made
considerable money and died, leaving it to his boy, whereupon the lad
started straight for the devil.

Before he had come into his inheritance, he had been “keeping company”
with little Betty Nieson, who worked in the box-factory and lived with
her derelict father in the scrubby old Nieson place out Cedar Street on
the edge of town. The boy drank considerably and the rumor found its way
into our newspaper office that, despite his money, Betty would not marry
him until he had conquered the habit.

A town’s mind is a child’s mind and it readily sympathized with the
struggle that the Nieson girl was making in her poor blind handicapped
way to climb out of the environment which she had always known, and make
something of herself. Then suddenly one day Jack Fuller sold his racy
automobile. He and Betty were married and they furnished a modest home
on Pleasant Street. One-half of the town said it was because Jack had
gone through his inheritance. The other half said that it was his wife’s
influence over him. Certainly to all appearances the girl was making a
desperate and commendable struggle not only to raise herself up but to
compel Jack to be a man. Then the half of the home-folks which had
claimed the way Jack squandered his money had been at the bottom of his
marriage, were apparently in the right. For shortly after the pitiful
little marriage the boy was seen frequenting the Whitney House bar as
much as ever.

Now came this additional sorrow into the girl’s life. She had married
the lad trying to get away from the hereditary taint of the Nieson
blood. It had come to her now that there appeared to be a taint also in
the Fuller blood. She had lost her baby. The Hods said that there was a
light burning in the Fuller tenement all that night.

The baby was buried the next day. It was a pathetic little funeral, just
a prayer or two by Doctor Dodd of the Methodist Church, and then Blake
Whipple, the undertaker, took care of the interment.

The evening of the day that the poor little shaver was laid underground,
Mrs. Hod entered the tenement to console the bereaved girl. She entered
without knocking. She paused at the threshold, made rigid by the sight
before her.

For Jack Fuller was down on his knees before the girl he had married.
His finely-shaped head was buried in her lap. He was sobbing freakishly,
for men do not know how to weep. And the girl seated there on the sofa
was staring into unseeing space with a holy look upon her beautifully
plain face; her slender shapely fingers toying with the boy’s wavy hair.

“Never, never, never—will I touch a drop of the stuff as long as I live,
Betty,” he choked between his tears. “I don’t care—what the provocation
is—I won’t ever do it. I’ve been a cad, Betty. I haven’t been a Fuller
at all—but I’ll show you I can be. I’ll make up for this. We’ve lost the
baby, Betty—but it’s brought me to my senses. I’m—done! I swear it
before God, Betty. I’m—done!”

The girl never knew a neighbor was looking on, unable to withdraw
without disclosing her presence.

“If that’s the price, Jack,” she replied softly, divinely, “—if that’s
the price—and you’ll keep your word—I’ll pay it! Jackie dear—I love you.
I’ve loved you all along. But this has always been the way with me.
There was Dad. Rum got him—rum stole him away from me. When he was
himself he was all right. But he drank and then beat me—he made me want
to kill myself just because I was a Nieson—because his blood half
saturated with rum—was in my veins. I married you, Jackie—because I
hoped to pull myself up from being a Nieson. I hoped to show folks what
I wanted to be—what I tried so hard to be. Every one knows the Niesons
are worthless trash, the scum of the town. And I thought—being your
wife—the wife of a Fuller—things would be different. The liquor seemed
robbing me of you too, Jack. But if this—has given you back to
me—yes—I’ll pay the price. It’s all right, Jack. I’ll take your word
that you’ll never, never take a drop of the stuff again.”

Mrs. Hod succeeded in getting out without being discovered. She went
home and told her husband. Sam shook his head sadly.

“I hope so,” commented the worldly wise old newspaper man, who
frequently understood two-legged human folks better than they understood
themselves. “I hope so, indeed. I’d do anything under God’s heaven to
help him. But I’m afraid for him—afraid for him and the girl. It sure
will be hell for her if the lad breaks his promise—just _once_!”

But to his everlasting credit, let it be set down that the Fuller blood
came uppermost in Jack. He did not break his promise. But what the poor
boy went through in that succeeding six months only a reticent God in
His heaven knows.

Jack had sold his automobile for two hundred dollars. Now he transferred
what was left of his legacy from a checking account in the corner bank
to the savings department. He went to work for Will Pease mending
automobiles in the Paris Garage.

He grew thin and haggard with the struggle he was making. Some brainless
young roustabouts in our town tried to get him to drink again just for
the sake of winning him back to his old habits. They actually did get
him into a bar one night with a glass of liquor before him. Then I guess
it came to him what he was doing. The Fuller blood in him made a great
convulsion for the upper hand—and won! He smashed the glass into the
tempter’s eyes and stumbled out into the raw cold night—and home.

The boy came home to his childless wife one night and said:

“Betty—it’s hell!” he said. “I’m all burned out inside, Betty—”

“Jack,” she cried piteously, “you’re not going to give way after—after
the price—we paid.”

“Not if I can help it, Betty,” he replied. “But I need help, girl. I
need some sort of discipline that’ll straighten me out and help me
physically. Betty—I’ve got a chance—to get into the quartermaster’s
department of the Vermont National Guard—”

“You mean—be a soldier?” she cried.

“And why not, Betty?” he said. “My grandfather was a soldier. You know
what he did in the Civil War; what he means to the Grand Army men. It’s
in my blood, I guess, Betty—”

“Jack!” she cried. “Don’t leave me now! Don’t leave me alone! Don’t!
Don’t! There’s too many memories, Jack. I ain’t—brave enough, Jack!”

He sank down on the sofa and hid his burning face in his hands.

“God help me!” he groaned. “I want to win out, but I’m all wrong inside.
Oh, Betty!”

She tried in her poor pitiful way to help him. She did help him—a little
bit. But Jack was nearer right than he knew. He joined the Y. M. C. A.
that winter and went in for athletics. But two nights a week “on the
floor” wasn’t rigorous enough for him.

Pinkie Price, our star reporter, came into the newspaper office one
forenoon and exclaimed, “Hey, you know that Fuller chap that killed his
kid when he come home stewed? Well, what do you suppose he’s up to? You
know the preparedness scare and the trouble with Mexico and everything?
Well, he’s startin’ to raise a company right here in Paris—a company o’
real soldiers—so’s to have ’em ready in case we get into the Europe
scrap. They’re goin’ to drill four nights a week and Sundays in Academy
Hall.”

“It isn’t surprising,” commented Sam Hod. “He comes from a family of
soldiers. Well, I hope he does. If he’s captain of a company of men like
his grandaddy was in ’63 he’ll have his position to maintain and that
won’t mean flirting with whisky. Good for the boy! I said he had the
right stuff in him. Go see him and write his scheme up, Pinkie. The
_Telegraph_’ll give it all the preferred position it deserves.”

“Hey,” said Pinkie, shifting suddenly to another subject through the
association of ideas, “—d’yer know that old Martin Chisholm kicked off
last night? Yep; heart disease!”

Sam looked around the office at our faces.

“So ‘The Toast to Forty-five’ has narrowed down to Henry Weston, Uncle
Joe Fodder, and Wilbur Nieson! Too bad, too bad!”

Jack Fuller, out of regard for the little wife’s feelings, did not take
the quartermaster’s job. But he did organize the Paris Home Guard.
Soldier blood ran in his veins. The “Fuller Fire-eaters” as our town
named them, was a crack company. The place Jack held as head of that
company was as a tonic to the lad; it gave him something to think about,
to interest himself in when the hankering for the fellowship of our
three saloons became too powerful. When the trouble with Mexico became
acute there were weeks when the local boys, catching his enthusiasm,
drilled six nights in succession in their rooms up-stairs in the Cedar
Street Engine-house. They had regular army uniforms and were connected
somehow with the State National Guard—we never could just understand the
connection.

As for “The Toast to Forty-five,” the climax didn’t come in August,
1916. When Bennington Battle Day rolled around that year all three men
were still living who had been alive the reunion before.

In February the United States severed relations with Germany. In April
the United States declared war. In June ten million young Americans
enrolled themselves for the draft. And in July, when all the confusion
of the draft had cleared away, it was found that half of “Fuller’s
Fire-eaters” had been called upon to fill the Paris quota of Vermont’s
two thousand.

But Jack Fuller’s name was not drawn.

On a certain July night in the little tenement which they still kept on
Pleasant Street, the Fuller boy stood beside the table in the same room
where his small son had been killed in the overturning of the cradle a
while before, with his face as white as chalk and Betty before him on
her knees where she had sunk down in her misery, clutching him
convulsively.

“Don’t go and leave me, Jack,” she moaned. “Oh, Jack, don’t do it.
You’re all I’ve got, Jack—and there are so many unmarried men to go—!”

“My grandfather led the Paris boys in ’63, Betty,” he said hoarsely. “My
great-great-grandfather led a company in the battle of Bennington. The
country’s calling again, Betty. It’s up to a Fuller to take his place at
the head of the Paris lads once more. I’ve got the company, Betty.
They’re wild to enlist as a body and I can get the regular appointment
as their captain—”

“Wait till your turn comes in the draft, Jack. Don’t leave me, now,
Jack. There are so many unmarried men to go. If the country wants you so
bad that they call all the married men, I’ll try to be brave and give
you up, Jack. But wait for that—tell me you will!”

“I can’t stand it to see the boys I’ve drilled march away with another
chap at their head, Betty.”

“Jack!” she cried hysterically, “it was _you_ that took little Edward
away from me! And now—you’re taking yourself. You don’t have to go—yet.
You’re taking yourself—yourself—because—you don’t love me—”

It was the first time in two or three years that she had taunted him
with what he had done to their child. It reacted upon him as though she
had struck him a blow.

“Betty!” he cried hoarsely. “Don’t say that, Betty. You’re mad over this
thing—you’re asking me to hide behind the skirts of women—”

“Jack—I’ve had so much sorrow—first with Mother, then with Father, then
losing the baby so—now with you going away and leaving me—that I can’t
stand much more, Jack. I’ll go mad—really mad, Jack! I can’t go back and
live again with Father, and see his stumbling footsteps when he comes
home drunk, and hear his talk, and see him gibber—I’ll have nobody,
nobody, to live for! Oh, Jack!”

“You can be as brave as millions of other childless wives all over
America, able for a while to care for themselves. You told me once that
you hated the Nieson blood in you even if your father was a soldier. You
said after we were married that you were trying to pull yourself up and
be somebody. You said you were happy because our kids would have Fuller
blood in them. And now instead of coming up to the scratch in a real
crisis, Betty, you’re showing yellow and groveling round like a Nieson.
If I’m willing to run the chance of getting shot—”

But he did not go on. Her screams of hysteria began. And the little wife
who had stood so much broke down at last.

Doctor Johnson was called. He attended the girl for eight days. During
that time, only regard for Jack made the boys hold off in enlisting as a
unit altogether for France. Doctor Johnson said that if Jack volunteered
with them, and Betty heard he was going, the shock would kill her. So
the boy went around town, torn between love and duty.

And during those days something happened in our community. Wilbur Nieson
and Henry Weston died—within a few days of one another. Henry Weston
succumbed to kidney trouble which had afflicted him for years. And old
Wilbur Nieson—Wilbur Nieson had the “tremors” as we say up here in New
England—delirium tremens—one night in the rear of the Whitney House. The
boys in the livery found him. The Sons of Veterans buried him. So much
for the carefully cherished plans of humankind. For a half-century the
members of Farrington Post had saved that rare old Vintage for “The
Toast to Forty-five.” And there were not even two old soldiers left of
that original company to observe the sentiment. “The Toast to
Forty-five” could never be pledged, after all!

A couple of weeks slipped away. August sixteenth approached. The boy
came into the office of our little local paper one morning and said:

“I’ve made up my mind; I’m going to France. Instead of having our ranks
broken by the draft, all the ‘Fire-eaters’ are enlisting as a body in
the National Guard. And I—am going—with them.”

“But your wife?”

“It won’t be any harder for her to stay behind than it is for me to
leave. But I’ve got to get into this thing. Something inside of me is
firing me to do it. She’ll bear it—somehow.”

“When are you boys going?” asked Sam.

“We’ll be leaving somewhere around the twentieth.”

“The twentieth!” exclaimed Sam. In that moment something occurred to
him. “The twentieth!” he exclaimed over again. “And on the sixteenth—the
old army men were going to hold their last reunion if only those two
hadn’t died. Jack—!”

“Yes.”

“Why not—why not—why not have Paris give you boys a royal send-off on
that night—the night of the sixteenth—a dinner for you fellows the
sixteenth; a dinner for you fellows in place of the old Grand Army
reunion!”

“I guess the boys would be willing,” replied Jack with a sad smile.

We printed a long piece in our little local paper about it, that night.
Again the Vermont boys were going to war. Again a Fuller was to lead
them. Tickets for the farewell dinner were on sale at the Metropolitan
Drug-store, five dollars apiece, the proceeds to go to the Red Cross.

                                  ――――

Bennington Battle Day came. All preparations for the greatest banquet
Paris ever saw were completed. The time-worn custom of having the dinner
in the rooms of Farrington Post was abandoned. The Post rooms would
never hold the crowd. The dinner was to be held in the assembly hall of
the new high school. That was the largest floor-space procurable in
Paris.

Sam Hod had three sons in Captain Jack’s company—more than any other
father in Paris. He was designated as toastmaster for that epochal
dinner. At a long table at the head of the hall he was to sit with Uncle
Joe Fodder on his right and young Captain Jack Fuller on his left.
Beyond, on either side there were grouped officers of the company. Then
the rest of the places were filled up with the privates of Fuller’s
Fire-eaters and the public. The dinner was set for eight o’clock and by
ten minutes of eight there were hundreds of Parisians in the hallways
and on the sidewalk unable to get standing room in the dining-room, to
say nothing of obtaining a seat and a plate.

Promptly on the dot of eight, Otis Hawthorne, leader of the Paris Band,
tapped his baton on his music-stand.

With a great crash the apartment was filled to the furthermost crevices
with the thunderous tumult of “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Every man and woman in that hall rose to his feet. They sang that song.
They sang it as they had never sung it before. Because in that moment
the real meaning of the words came home to them.

    “—Oh, say, does the Star Spangled Banner yet wave,
    O’er the land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave?”

Sam Hod looked at his three lean boys in khaki, that in another week
would be only a memory. And his face shone with an emotion he had never
known the meaning of before. Women wept like—women. As the chorus died
away, cheer on cheer arose and floated out the lowered windows into the
soft summer night.

They resumed their chairs. Jack Fuller turned to the editor.

“Who’s this empty chair for on my left?” he demanded.

“Your wife, my son,” the editor replied simply, and Mrs. Hod brought the
girl in.

She was white and weak. How the editor’s wife had broken the news to
her—persuaded her to come to the hall and sit in the place of honor
beside her husband—has been something that we bewhiskered males in the
office of our little local paper have never been able to explain.
Perhaps Mrs. Hod’s sacrifice of those three tall Yankee lads in Fuller’s
Fire-eaters had something to do with it. Anyhow, Betty Fuller was
persuaded to come in.

She put out her hands blindly before her as she reached the head table
and heard them cheering her husband’s name—and her own. She felt her way
into her place. She glanced down into her husband’s surprised face and
gave a terrified semblance of a smile. Then the whole room seemed to
fuse before her. She has never been able to recollect connectedly the
events of that evening.

The dinner began, progressed, and, after the manner of all dinners, at
last ended. Sam Hod arose. He clinked on a water-glass with his knife.
The hallful saw him and gradually grew quiet.

It was a beautiful speech that the editor made. He began with the part
Vermont has played in every war in which America has ever engaged. He
told the story of the boys who marched away in ’61 behind John
Farrington. He recounted the story of Captain Farrington’s death; the
succession of “Jack Fuller the First” to the place of honor in the
Company, the brilliant war-record of the regiment. He told of the
home-coming; of the banquet fifty-two years before. He told smoothly of
the events leading up to America’s entry into the war. His quotation of
the President’s famous indictments against Germany brought ovation after
ovation from the home-folks, who were worked up to hysterical pitch. And
when it was over the editor said:

“To-night, before sitting down to this farewell banquet to our sons,
many of whom are going away from us never to return—to-night I was the
recipient of a strange request. It came from the last survivor of that
famous Company of Sixty-two who fifty-two years ago saw Dashing Captain
Jack Fuller of glorious memory, raise aloft this receptacle of rare
vintage and propose a dramatic thing.

“This was the request: By some strange fate the evening when the last
toast was to be given to the illustrious dead comes at the terrifically
tragic moment when the sons of many of these men are going forward to
offer their lives in a new democracy. It has been suggested that nothing
could have more approval from Dashing Captain Jack himself—or from all
of those one hundred and six brave men who have crossed from the
battlefields of earthly life into a blessed reward for their
altruism—than that this toast should be given after all—if not by the
two survivors, then by the leader of the local heroes who have
volunteered to go “Over There” and by their sacrifice make the earth a
finer, fairer, better place in which to dwell. “The Toast to
Forty-five,” famous for fifty-two years, will be given at last amid this
assembly of another quota of the Union’s soldiers about to go forth to
preserve the same great principle for which their fathers laid their all
upon the altar.”

There was silence for a time. Then came another attempt at another
ovation. But it died in the excitement of the thing transpiring at that
speaker’s table.

Sam Hod was opening the famous vintage.

The seal was broken. Out of that glass retainer came costly sparkling
liquor, fifty-two years the prize relic of Farrington Post. Sam reached
over. The two glasses of Uncle Joe Fodder and Captain Jack he filled to
the brim. He stepped back—back from between Uncle Joe and Captain
Jack—that they might click the rims of their slender goblets together.

“Gentlemen,” cried Uncle Joe in that breathless moment—“The
Toast—to—Forty-five!”

Every military man in that room arose to his feet.

Uncle Joe’s withered old lips moved in the sunken face. The skinny hand
holding the wine-glass trembled so that the beverage spilled over the
edge and splashed on the white table-cloth like a clot of blood.

“Here’s to the gallant Forty-five,” he cried in a high-pitched, crackly
voice. “Here’s to Captain John Farrington. And here’s to the men of
Company Sixty-two and their posterity. Here’s to—here’s to Captain Jack
Fuller and _his_ posterity—”

It was an unfortunate sentence at an unfortunate time.

_Jack Fuller’s posterity!_

Through the lad’s brain must have flashed a picture of a scene in his
sitting-room months before when he had paid a fearful price
for—something! He had promised— He had promised— He looked around the
room. Hundreds of eyes were upon him as he stood there, splendid and
erect in olive drab. He glanced around his own table, too. And in that
instant he saw—the pale, wan features of his wife!

His arm still holding awkwardly aloft the glass, Jack looked into the
faces of that crowd flanking the tables and walls of that great hall.

Something came to him—the scenes, the associations—reincarnation,
perhaps—the blood of his forefathers—heredity—in that great instant he
was prompted to do a great and dramatic thing for the joy of the
spectacular, the call of the dramatic.

Out of Joe Fodder’s toothless mouth came voiceless words—

“I’ve—gone and forgot my speech! You say something, Jack. You say it!”

Sam Hod racked his brain for words to save the situation. All Paris
waited. And then—in the silence—came a rich, strong, boyish voice:

“I’ll give a toast—to Forty-five!”

It was Captain Jack. Two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed upon him. He
knew perfectly that two hundred pairs of eyes were fixed upon him.

This is the thing that he did:

Deliberately into his dirty coffee-cup he poured the blood-red liquid.
As his grandfather would have done, with the same exaggerated flourish
the boy took from his pocket a snow-white handkerchief. With that napkin
he wiped flawlessly the delicate receptacle which had held the liquor.
Then he leaned over. From a glass pitcher he poured into that cleansed
wine-glass its fill of pure cold sparkling water. In an instant he held
it aloft.

“Fellows!” he cried. “A toast! a toast not with wine—for wine with its
blood-color belongs to the times which are going—which we hope are
passing forever—I’m drinking a toast with crystal water—emblematic of
the clean white civilization which is coming—for which we’re going ‘Over
There’ to fight and die.

“Here’s to every man who ever did a noble thing; volunteering his
strength to help protect the weak! Here’s to every lad who ever fought
out the terrible question in his heart and put the Greater Good above
his life-hopes and ambitions. Here’s to every soul that ever laid in the
dark, thinking of those at home, knowing that in the charge of dawn he
might become to them but a bitter-sweet memory of days when every hour
was a golden moment and time but a thing to pass away. Here’s to the
dead—the illustrious dead—those who fell in battle, those of Forty-five,
the men of Sixty-two, the men of every age and every land who fought the
good fight nobly, to the best that was in them—for the things they
believed to be right—and have gone to take finer and better orders under
a Greater General, the Commander of Commanders, the Prince of—Peace!”

He paused. He drew a long breath. He looked down the table. And he
continued: “But along with our toast for the soldiers of the dead,
boys—while the opportunity is ours—why not give also a toast—another
kind of toast—to the soldiers of the living? Not ourselves, boys—but the
ones—we’re leaving behind. It is little enough we can do for them!”

His gaze wandered up to his glass. In a strange, inspired voice, he
cried softly:

“A toast!—a toast, also, to the truest and best soldiers of all—the
mothers, the wives, and the girls we are leaving behind!

“Here’s to the toil-hardened hands who cared for us when as helpless
little kids, we were unable to care for ourselves. Here’s to the tears
they have shed over our little torn clothes; the pillows that have been
wet in the midnight with anxiety, longing, and heartache that we might
be spared to do our duty as men. Here’s to the anguish they have
suffered, the prayers they have prayed, the sacrifices they have made,
the toil they have borne—all to be laid on the altar of war, all to be
wiped out in a moment, perhaps, by a splinter of shrapnel or the thrust
of a bayonet. Here’s to the nobility of their anguish when they come to
learn we are no more; and the beauty of their faces when the divinity in
their hearts tells the story upon their care-lined foreheads that they
would climb the same weary Golgotha again—go through the same
Gethsemane—bear the same cross—though they knew all along the end which
it meant.

“Here’s to the wives we loved in the days before War came upon us.
Here’s to the promises they made us—to be ours until death came between
us. Here’s to the suffering they have borne for our thoughtlessness; the
hours when they have looked into the future and wondered if the love
that we promised was worth the price they were paying. Here’s to the
hopes and the fears, the joys and the sorrows that have come to
them—that are coming to them now—that are coming to them in the years on
ahead with ever greater portion. Here’s to their courage and noble
endeavor, given so pathetically to us chaps who sometimes—forget. May we
die as faithfully in the cause to which we have pledged ourselves as
they will live in the memory of what-might-have-been in the lean years
when there are forms sitting in fantasy beside them in the firelight and
our voices are heard in the homes we made with them—no more.

“And here’s to the girls we are leaving behind! Here’s to the kisses
they have given us under the stars of many summers—the memory of their
hands and their lips and their eyes! Here’s to the weight in their souls
and the pain that will hallow the memories that will haunt them through
the years. Here’s to the sighs and the shadows, the heart-hopes and the
longing! God grant in His goodness their fidelity is rewarded!

“These are the things to which we drink—the men of yesterday—and the
memory of their heroism which has been—and the women of to-day and whose
heroism is to be. With the great incentive of these two in our hearts,
boys—let us drink and go away to fight like men—to honor the first—to
sanctify the second.”

He clinked his glass against that of speechless Uncle Joe Fodder’s—and
they drank—Uncle Joe drinking his wine with a hand which trembled so
that the liquid stained his withered claw like a scarlet wound.

The hall was strangely silent.

Sam turned to his wife. “That boy never composed that beautiful speech
alone, Mary,” he said—“not impromptu like that!”

Down the hall an old lady whispered to her daughter:

“Alice! Alice!—His grandaddy made just such a speech—almost word for
word—the night John Farrington’s company bade us women-folks good-by.”

As the hall was being cleared for the big farewell dance, Sam came to
the boy.

“Laddie,” he demanded, “where did you learn that speech?”

“What speech?” asked the boy.

“You know _what_ speech—the toast!”

“I don’t know, Mr. Hod. I just looked at the faces—and the
wine—and—and—Betty!—and it just came out.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Sure, it’s the truth. What was it I said that was so awful wonderful?”

“Don’t you remember what you said?”

The boy laughed ashamedly. “—I couldn’t repeat it if it cost me my
life,” he replied. “It—just—came—out!”

Late that night the old editor lay in his bed thinking of many things.

“The things in life are far stranger than the things in story books,” he
said. Then in the velvet dark he whispered: “Strange! Strange!”

                                  ――――

Dashing Captain Jack Fuller, true to his blood and his birthright, went
away on the following day at the head of his sturdy volunteers. They
entrained at ten o’clock for Fort Ethan Allen.

Truly the boy did not remember the words of that toast which he gave
that memorable evening. But one thing he does remember. He remembers the
words of the girl he had married as he took her in his arms in those
last few sweet moments following the final breakfast in the little home:

“It was the Nieson in me that didn’t want you to go, Jack,” she choked
brokenly. “Up to last night I didn’t want you to go. But when you
wouldn’t drink the wine—when you had the courage to do what you did in
front of all those people—I was ashamed of my selfishness. Jackie
dear—I’m the proudest, happiest, miserablest woman in all this town!”

He pressed her to him. He kissed her—an embrace that left her weak and
limp.

“And you can count on me, Jack,” she said, “I’ll—do—my—duty—too! Even—if
you should never come back; remember I said—I was sorry for the way I’ve
acted; I’ll—do—my—duty—too!”

“Good-by, Betty!” he choked.

“Good-by—my soldier!” she lisped—bravely—piteously.

But she sent him away—with a smile!

She’s working now at her old place in Amos Wheeler’s box-shop. She
closed down the little home on Pleasant Street partly because she could
not keep up the expense, partly because she could not endure—the
memories. She’s living out in her father’s old place at the far end of
Cedar Street.

Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!

We know from his letters to our local paper, that Jack Fuller has
reached France. The girl is alone, earning five dollars a week in the
box-factory to support herself. The lad is “Over There” in the Whirlpool
and the Nightmare—and where the fighting is thickest, there we believe
Jack Fuller will be found.

But somehow, we feel that Jack Fuller will not fall. We feel there is
coming a great and a glorious day for our little town of Paris up here
in these mountains. In fancy we can see a morning when a great crowd is
going to mill around and through the platforms and the railroad yards of
our station. The hour is coming when a train whistle will sound far down
the Greene River valley. The minutes will pass. The whistle will sound
nearer. Finally in the lower end of the yards we will see a great furl
of seething smoke from an oncoming locomotive. Another and a third
whistle will shriek as a great high-breasted mogul comes bearing down
upon us, seeming to cry out to us from the decreasing distance: “I’ve
got them! I’ve got them! I’m bringing them back! Every mother’s son of
them! They’re in these coaches I’m pulling behind me now!” And the train
will come to a grinding stop, and amid cheer after cheer and the
gyrations of the Paris band seeking to blow itself inside out, down from
that train will come the soldiers of Uncle Sam—the boys who never have
been and never can be whipped—great bronzed men with lean jaws, faces
the hue of copper and muscles as hard as billets of steel. Car after car
will disgorge them—men who met the Great Problem, offered themselves,
ran the risk, fought the fight, gave their last full measure of
devotion, and have come back home to women who cannot trust themselves
to speak—only hold out their arms mutely.

And we feel certain that in that great day, after the Nightmare is over
and the world is a fairer, better world, that one of those great bronzed
heroes will gather up in his war-hardened arms a slender little girl in
the plainest of white shirt-waists and black skirts, with the paste
dried on the poor little workaday clothes and the worn shoes turning her
step over cruelly. He will gather her up while the tears fall clumsily,
for men do not know how to weep. And there will be no more weariness in
her homeward walk in that twilight. After all, not all the boys are
going to die. Many are coming back, hundreds of thousands of them. There
will be other toasts to Forty-five pledged by the living. It must be so,
for God still rules in His heaven and will make all right with the
world.

Yet just now—for Betty Fuller—the way is lonesome and her pillow is wet
with her tears in the midnight. But—

    She sent her man away with a smile.
    Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!
    All over America her name is legion!



                               EXTRA MEN


_By_ HARRISON RHODES
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Harrison Rhodes._

The pretty, peaceful Jersey farm-land slopes gently up from the Delaware
River to the little hill which Princeton crowns. It is uneventful
country. The railway does not cross it, nor any of the great motor trunk
roads. On the river itself there is no town of considerable size, though
on the map you read the quaint name of Washington Crossing for a little
hamlet of a few houses. This will remind you of the great days when on
these sleepy fields great history was made. But the fields have lain
quiet in the sun now for more than a century, and even the legends of
Revolutionary days are for the most part forgotten along these country
roads.

As for modern legends, the very phrase seems proof of their
impossibility. And in spite of her spacious and resounding past, New
Jersey’s name now seems to mean incorporations and mosquitoes and
sea-bathing and popcorn-crisp rather than either legend or romance. But
with the coming of the Great War strange things are stirring in the
world, and in the farthest corners of the land the earth is shaken by
the tramp of new armies. In the skies by day and night there is a sign.
And the things one does not believe can happen may be happening, even in
New Jersey.

The small events on the Burridge Road which are here set down cannot
even be authenticated. There are people down by the river who say they
saw a single horseman go through the village at dusk, but not one seems
to know which way he came. There is no ferry at Washington Crossing and
the bridge at Lambertville had, since three that afternoon, been closed
for repairs. What facts are set down here—and indeed they are scarcely
facts—were acquired because a chauffeur missed the road and a motor then
broke down. What story there is—and indeed there is perhaps not much
story—has been pieced together from fragments collected that afternoon
and evening. And if the chronicle as now written is vague, it can be
urged that, though it all happened so recently as last year, it is
already as indeterminate and misty as a legend.

We may, however, begin with undisputed facts. When her grandson enlisted
for the war old Mrs. Buchan became very genuinely dependent on the
little farm that surrounded the lovely old Colonial house on the
Burridge Road. (Meadows, and horses, and hay and the quality and price
of it, have much to do with our story—as, indeed, befits a rural
chronicle.) The farm had been larger once, and the hospitality which the
old house could dispense more lavish. Indeed, the chief anecdote in its
history had been the stopping there once of Washington, to dine and rest
on his way to join the army in New York. Old Mrs. Buchan, who, for all
her gentleness, was incurably proud, laid special stress on the fact
that on _that_ night the great man had not been at an inn—which was in
the twentieth century to cheapen his memory by a sign-board appeal to
automobile parties—but at a gentleman’s house. A gentleman’s house it
still was; somehow the Buchans had always managed to live like
gentlemen. But if George, the gay, agreeable last one of them, could
also live that way, it was because his grandmother practised rigid
heart-breaking economy. The stories of her shifts and expedients were
almost fables of the countryside. When George came home—he had a small
position in a New York broker’s office—there was gaiety and plenty. He
might well have been deceived into thinking that the little he sent home
from New York was ample for her needs. But when he went back his
grandmother lived on nothing, or less than that. She dressed for dinner,
so they said, in black silk and old lace, had the table laid with
Lowestoft china and the Buchan silver, and ate a dish of corn-meal mush,
or something cheaper if that could be found!

George Buchan’s enlistment—it was in the aviation service—had been
early. And very early he was ordered to France to finish his training
there. Two days before he expected his ship to sail the boy got a few
hours’ furlough and came to the Burridge Road to say good-by to his
grandmother.

What was said we must imagine. He was all the old lady had left in the
world. But no one ever doubted that she had kissed him and told him to
go, and to hold his head high as suited an American and a Buchan.
Georgie would perhaps have had no very famous career in Wall Street, but
no one doubted that he would make a good soldier. There had always been
a Buchan in the armies of the Republic, his grandmother must have
reminded him. And very likely Georgie, kissing her, had reminded her
that there had always been a Buchan woman at home to wish the men God
speed as they marched away, and told her too to hold her old head high.

There must have been some talk about the money that there wouldn’t be
now; without his little weekly check she was indeed almost penniless. It
is quite likely that they spoke of selling the house and decided against
it. Part of the boy’s pay was of course to come to his grandmother, but,
as she explained, there were so many war charities needing that, and
then the wool for her knitting— She must manage mostly with the farm.
There was always the vegetable-garden, and a few chickens, and the green
meadow, which might be expected to yield a record crop of hay.

We may imagine that the two—old lady and boy—stepped out for a moment
into the moonlit night to look at the poor little domain of Buchan that
was left. Under the little breeze that drifted up from the Delaware the
grass bent in long waves like those of the summer seas that Georgie was
to cross to France. As the Buchans looked at it they might have felt
some wonder at the century-old fertility of the soil. Back in the days
of the Revolution Washington’s horse had pastured there one night. Then,
and in 1812, and during the great battle of the States, the grass had
grown green and the hay been fragrant, and the fat Jersey earth had out
of its depths brought forth something to help the nation at war. Such a
field as that by the old white house can scarcely be thought of as a
wild, primeval thing; it has lived too long under the hand of man. This
was a Buchan field, George’s meadow, and by moonlight it seemed to wave
good-by to him.

“You aren’t dependent on me now, dear,” he may have said, with his arm
around his grandmother. “I just leave you to our little garden patch and
our chickens and the green meadow.”

“You mustn’t worry, dear. They’ll take care of me,” she must have
answered.

So George went away; and the night after, the night before he sailed,
the horseman and his company came.

                                  ――――

It was at dusk, and a gossamer silvery mist had drifted up from the
Delaware. He had hitched his horse by the gate. He was in
riding-breeches and gaiters and a rather old-fashioned riding-coat. And
in the band of his hat he had stuck a small American flag which looked
oddly enough almost like a cockade. He knocked at the door, quite
ignoring the new electric bell which George had installed one idle
Sunday morning when his grandmother had felt he should have been at
church. As it happened, old Mrs. Buchan had been standing by the window,
watching the mist creep up and the twilight come, thinking of Georgie so
soon to be upon the water. As the horseman knocked she, quite suddenly
and quite contrary to her usual custom, went herself to the door.

His hat was immediately off, swept through a nobler circle than the
modern bow demands, and he spoke with the elaboration of courtesy which
suited his age; for, though his stride was vigorous, he was no longer
young. It was a severe, careworn face of a stern, almost hard, nobility
of expression. Yet the smile when it came was engaging, and old Mrs.
Buchan, as she smiled in return, found herself saying to herself that no
Southerner, however stern, could fail to have this graceful lighter
side. For his question had been put in the softer accents of Virginia
and of the states farther south.

“I’ve lost my way,” he began, with the very slightest, small, gay laugh.
But he was instantly serious. “It is so many, many years since I was
here.”

Mrs. Buchan pointed up the road.

“That is the way to Princeton.”

“Princeton, of course. That’s where we fought the British and beat them.
It seems strange, does it not, that we now fight with them?”

“We must forget the Revolution now, must we not?” This from Mrs. Buchan.

“Forget the Revolution!” he flashed back at her, almost angrily. Then
more gently: “Perhaps. If we remember liberty!” He glanced an instant up
the road to Princeton hill and then went on. “They fought well then,
madam. As a soldier I am glad to have such good allies. But I was
forgetting. Yonder lies Princeton, and from there there is the post-road
to New York, is there not? I must be in New York by morning.”

Mrs. Buchan was old-fashioned, but she found herself murmuring amazedly
something about railroads and motor-cars. But he did not seem to hear
her.

“Yes,” he continued, “I must be in New York by morning. The first
transport with our troops sails for France.”

“I know,” she said, proudly. “My grandson, George Buchan, sails for
France.”

“George Buchan? There was a George Buchan fought at Princeton, I
remember.”

“There was. And another George Buchan in the War of Eighteen-twelve. And
a John in the Mexican War. And a William in eighteen sixty-three. There
was no one in the Spanish War—my son was dead and my grandson was too
young. But now he is ready.”

“Every American is ready,” her visitor answered. “I am ready.”

“You?” she broke out. And for the first time she seemed to see that his
hair was white. “Are you going?”

“Every one who has ever fought for America is going. There is a company
of them behind me. Listen.”

Down the road there was faintly to be heard the clatter of hoofs.

“Some joined me in Virginia, some as we crossed the Potomac by
Arlington, where there is a house which once belonged to a relative of
mine. And there were others, old friends, who met me as we came through
Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. You would not now know Valley Forge,” he
finished, half to himself.

The river mist had crept farther up and was a little thicker now. The
moon had risen and the mist shimmered and shone almost as if by its own
light. The world was indeed of the very substance of a dream. The
hoofbeats on the road grew nearer, and at last, while old Mrs. Buchan
stood in a kind of amazed silence, they came into sight, even then mere
shadowy, dim, wavering figures behind the gossamer silver veil which had
drifted there from the lovely Delaware. The horses looked lean and
weary, though perhaps this was a trick of the moonlight. Yet they
dropped their heads and began eagerly to crop the short, dusty grass by
the roadside. The moonlight seemed to play tricks with their riders,
too. For in the fog some of them seemed to have almost grotesquely
old-fashioned clothes, though all had a sort of military cut to them.
Some few, indeed, were trim and modern. But the greater part were, or
seemed to Mrs. Buchan to be, in shabby blue or worn gray. The chance
combination of the colors struck her. She was an old woman and she could
remember unhappy far-off days when blue and gray had stood for the fight
of brother against brother. Into her eyes the tears came, yet she
suddenly smiled through them—a pair of quite young men lounged toward
the fence, and then stood at ease there, the blue-clad arm of one
affectionately and boyishly thrown around the other’s gray shoulder.

“These go with you?” asked old Mrs. Buchan, still held by her memories.

“Yes. They are of all kinds and all ages, and some of them were not
always friends. But you see—” He smiled and pointed to the lads by the
fence. “One of them is from Virginia and the other from Ohio. Virginia
and Ohio fought once. But I only say that I can remember that Ohio was
part of Virginia once long ago. And is not Virginia part of Ohio and
Ohio part of Virginia again now? I should be pushing on, however, not
talking. It is the horses that are tired, not the men.”

“And hungry?” suggested Mrs. Buchan.

“The horses, yes, poor beasts!” he answered. “For the men it does not
matter. Yet we must reach New York by morning. And it is a matter of
some five-and-fifty miles.”

“Rest a half-hour and let the horses graze. You can make it by sunrise.”

Mrs. Buchan went a little way down the path. It was lined with pink and
white clove-pinks and their fragrance was sweet in the night.

“Open the gate there to the left, men,” she called out, and her voice
rang, to her, unexpectedly strong and clear. “Let the horses graze in my
green meadow if they will.”

They gave an answering cheer from out the mist. She saw the meadow gate
swing open and the lean horses pass through, a long, long file of them.

“But they will spoil your hay crop,” objected the horseman. “And it
should be worth a fair sum to you.”

Mrs. Buchan drew herself up. “It is of no consequence,” she answered.

He bowed again.

“But I don’t understand,” she almost pleaded, staring again at his white
hair and the little flag in his hatband that looked so oddly like a
cockade. “You say you sail to-morrow with my boy?”

“I think you understand as well as any one.”

“Do I?” she whispered. And the night suddenly seemed cold and she drew
her little shawl of Shetland wool more tightly about her shoulders. Yet
she was not afraid.

Her guest stooped and, rising, put one of her sweet-smelling clove-pinks
in his button-hole.

“If you permit, I will carry it for your boy to France. We are extra
men, supercargo,” he went on. “We shall cross with every boat-load of
boys who sail for France—we who fought once as they must fight now. They
said of me, only too flatteringly, that I was first in peace. Now I must
be first in war again. I must be on the first troop-ship that goes. And
I shall find friends in France. We have always had friends in France, I
imagine, since those first days. Of course, madam, you are too young to
remember the Marquis de la Fayette.”

“Yes, I am too young,” answered old Mrs. Buchan. And she smiled through
her tears at the thought of her eighty years.

“You’re a mere chit of a girl, of course,” he laughed—one of the few
times his gravity was relaxed. “Shall I know your boy, I wonder?” Then,
without waiting for her answer, “The George Buchan who fought at the
battle of Princeton was about twenty-two, slim and straight, with blue
eyes and brown hair and an honest, gallant way with him, and a smile
that one remembered.”

“You will know my boy,” she told him. “And I think he will know you,
General.”

Even now she swears she does not quite know what she meant by this. The
magic of the June night had for the moment made everything possible. Yet
she will not to this day say who she thinks the horseman may have been.
Only that George would know him, as she had.

“I want them all to know that I am there,” he had replied. “They will
know. They will remember their country’s history even as we remember.
And when the shells scream in the French sky they will not forget the
many times America has fought for liberty. They will not forget those
early soldiers. And they will not forget Grant and Lee and Lincoln. The
American eagle, madam, has a very shrill note. I think it can be heard
above the whistle of German shrapnel.”

                                  ――――

He drank a glass of sherry before he went, and ate a slice of
sponge-cake. Perhaps altogether he delayed a scant quarter of an hour.
The lean horses came streaming forth from the green meadow, a long, long
file; and while the moon and the river mist still made it a world of
wonder, the company, larger somehow than she had thought it at first,
clattered off up the Princeton road toward New York and salt water and
the ships.

The mist cleared for a moment and the great green meadow was seen, so
trampled that it seemed that a thousand horses must have trampled it. Al
Fenton, dignified by Mrs. Buchan as “the farmer,” had now belatedly
roused and dressed himself. He stood by the old lady’s side and
dejectedly surveyed the ruin of the hay crop. He is a sober, stupid,
serious witness of what had happened. And this is important; for when
the sun rose, and Mrs. Buchan opened her window, the breeze from the
river rippled in long green waves over a great green meadow where the
grass still pointed heavenward, untrampled, undisturbed. The Buchan
meadow could still, as George had believed it would, take care of his
grandmother.

This is the story, to be believed, or not, as you like. They do as they
like about it in Jersey. But old Mrs. Buchan believes that with each
American troop-ship there will sail supercargo, extra men. And she
believes that with these extra men we cannot lose the fight. George,
too, writes home to her that we shall win.



                               SOLITAIRE


_By_ FLETA CAMPBELL SPRINGER
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Fleta Campbell Springer._

We were sitting—three Frenchmen, a young American named Homan, and I—in
the café of one of those small Paris hotels much frequented, even then,
by officers on leave. It was the winter of 1912, when the Balkans were
playing out their colorful little curtain-raiser to the great drama
which followed—playing it, as they say in the theater, “in one,” using
only the very smallest part of the stage, and failing even in their most
climactic moments to completely conceal the ominous sounds from behind
the curtain where the stage was being set for the real business of the
play.

At the tables a sprinkling of English and Americans of the usual
transient type mingled with French from the provinces, and here and
there a swarthy Balkan in uniform accented the room.

It was the presence of those other Americans—two or three, I should say,
besides Homan and myself, though I hadn’t noticed particularly—that gave
the special significance to Homan’s exclamation when he discovered
Corey.

I saw him pause with his glass half raised—he was gazing straight past
me over my shoulder—and a smile, meant for me, came into his eyes.

“Look!” he said, “at the American!”

I turned, because his manner indicated clearly enough that I might,
squarely round in my chair, and immediately it was clear to me why he
had said just that. Any one would have said it—any other American, I
mean—which makes it more striking—and said it involuntarily, too. You
couldn’t have helped it. And yet you would encounter a dozen perfectly
unmistakable Americans every day in Paris without feeling the necessity
for any remark. It was simply that Corey was so typically the kind of
American you _wouldn’t_ encounter in Paris, or any other place, you
felt, outside his own country. The curious thing about him was that
instantly on seeing him, almost before you thought of America, you
thought of a particular and localized section of America. You thought of
the Middle West. There was something wholesome and provincial and
colloquial about him. He was like a boy you’d gone to grammar school
with—the kind of fellow to succeed to his father’s business and marry
and settle down in his home town, with New York City his farthest dream
of venture and romance.

Yet there he sat across the table from a dark-visaged Balkan officer who
was carrying on the conversation in careful English—it would have been
unimaginable that he should speak in anything _but_ English to him—and
it may have been the brilliance of this man’s uniform which kept one,
just at first, from seeing that he, too, our American, was wearing some
sort of uniform, khaki color, very workman-like and shipshape, which
might, if there had been the least chance of throwing us off, have
thrown us. But his round, good-natured, uncomplicated face, his light
brown hair and the way it was brushed—the very way it grew, like a
school-boy’s—the comfortable set of his broad shoulders, his kind of
energetic inclination to stoutness, and even the way he sat at the
table, were pure American Middle West and nothing else, no matter what
his uniform proclaimed. He was as American as the flag, as the opening
bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as American as Kansas, Missouri, and
Iowa.

And when, at young Homan’s exclamation, I had turned and found him
looking straight toward me, the twinkle of his eyes had the effect of a
friendly wave of his hand. He had, of course, as he said afterward,
“spotted us,” too. Then he had seen—and it amused him—the little play of
our discovery.

I was just turning back to applaud to Homan the obviousness of his
designation, and to wonder, with him, what the uniform meant, when my
eye was caught by a thin, brilliantly colored line drawn, it seemed,
just above the left breast pocket of his coat, and about the same
length.

My first impression of the man, of the familiarity of his type, had, I
suppose, been so strong as to dull for a moment my reaction to this
discovery. I had seen that vari-colored line often enough before, on the
uniforms of British officers or French; I had perhaps seen it on an
American, but certainly I had never seen it on an American like this. No
wonder the connection was slow to establish itself. It was a decoration
bar, and there must have been six ribbons at least, if not more.

For sheer incongruous association, I doubt if you’d find a more pat
example in a lifetime than the man I had, on sight, conceived this one
to be—the man I may as well say now he actually _was_—and that bar of
ribbons pinned on his khaki-colored coat.

Young Homan had caught it, too, and was sending past me his deliberate
stare of amazement.

It was not exactly as if we thought he hadn’t come by them honestly, but
more as if we suggested to each other that he couldn’t surely have got
them in the way decorations were usually got; it seemed somehow
impossible that he understood their importance. And there was still
something of that in our attitude when, later on, after dinner, we had
drifted into the _salon_ with the rest for our coffee, and by a kind of
natural gravitation had found ourselves in conversation with our
compatriot, whose jocose friendliness led young Homan to ask, half in
fun to be sure, where he had got all the decorations. He showed
certainly no very proper appreciation of their importance by his answer:

“Bought ’em, at the Galleries Lafayette. Get any kind you want there, y’
know.”

We laughed, all of us, for everybody had seen the cases of medals and
decorations at the Galleries. I believe for an instant the youngster was
half inclined to think he _had_ bought them. I know _I_ was. As some
kind of outlandish practical joke, of course. It seemed, absurd as the
idea was, so much likelier than that he could have been through the kind
of experiences which result in being decorated by foreign governments.
And such an imposing array! The scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor,
the green of the Japanese “Rising Sun,” the brilliant stripes of Russian
and English decorations, and strange ones I had never seen before!

You see, he had turned out much more Middle West than we had imagined.
In the first ten minutes of our conversation he had spoken of “home,”
and mentioned the name of the town—Dubuque, Iowa! And a few minutes
later he gave us, by the merest chance phrase or two, involving the fact
that his married sister lived “a block and a half down the street” from
his mother’s house, a perfectly complete picture of that street—broad
and shady and quiet, of his mother’s yellow frame house, and the other,
white with a green lawn round it, where his sister lived. And the point
was that he was making no effort toward such an effect. He was only
being himself.

His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and
addressed Corey as “Doctor” (I adjusted myself to _that_, still with the
Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon
the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He
told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the
importance of his mission—that he was in Paris for a few days looking up
anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in
the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a
sanitary section. They’d been out of anesthetics for some time
now—impossible to get them in—and they’d been operating, amputating the
poor devils’ legs and arms, _without_ anesthetics; and now at last he’d
left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could
be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that.

Corey, from Dubuque! In a makeshift Serbian field hospital, in that
terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations—wholesale,
as they must have been performed—on wounded Balkan soldiers; probing for
bullets in raw wounds—_that_ was a picture to set up beside the one we
had of him in Dubuque!

And yet—it wasn’t at all a question of doubt (we’d read it all in the
papers day after day); it wasn’t that we didn’t believe Corey was
telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for that—the picture
didn’t somehow succeed in painting itself—I can’t to this day say why.
Surely the Balkans just then—operations without anesthetics, the
pageantry and blood-red color of war—surely there was pigment of more
brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married
sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother’s. But
the picture wasn’t painted. Corey wasn’t the artist to do it. Not, mind
you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from
affectation, as a boy of fourteen.

I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I
were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I
couldn’t think of a man I’d rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I
believed him; I knew he’d been down there in the Balkans, as he said,
and was going back again to-morrow—but I went right on seeing him in
Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite
of offices his father had used before him.

He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the
illusion. He’d like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in
Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He
intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan
business. “I’m that type,” he said. “I never was meant to knock around
the world like this.”

And he _was_ that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible
he shouldn’t turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already,
one would think, made a sufficient divergence.

And that, I suppose—the feeling that no personality _could_ follow so
undeviating a line, so obviously its own path—was responsible for my
impression, when I came later to hear how completely he _had_ followed
it, of his being because of it much more unique than he could ever have
made himself by turning aside. True enough, there are people who, if
they heard the tale, might maintain that he could hardly have
accomplished a more striking divergence from type. I’ll have to confess
I thought so myself—at the first; certainly I thought so all the while I
listened, long afterward, to the quiet, though somewhat nasal, and
thoroughly puzzled voice of the gentle old man from Dubuque, who seemed,
as he recounted the story, to be seeking in me some solution of Corey’s
phenomenon.

I thought it even afterward, until, sitting there where he had left me,
I began slowly to orient the facts in relation to Corey’s character. And
then, all at once, it came to me that it was exactly because Corey
_hadn’t_ diverged that he did what he did. He went straight through
everything to his predestined end. Any other man would have had stages,
subtleties, degrees of divergence. But Corey knew none of those things.

It was from old Mr. Ewing of Dubuque that I had my first news of Corey
after that night in the Paris hotel.

He must have gone back to his army in the Balkans the next day, for we
were to have seen him that night again in case he had to stay over, and
when I asked I was told that Monsieur had gone.

Things kept reminding me of him. The names of streets and places in
Paris recalled his flat American mispronunciation of
them—mispronunciations which sounded half as if he were in fun and half
as if he didn’t know any better, or hadn’t paid enough attention to
learn them correctly. I believe he saw, or was subconsciously aware of,
his own incongruity. Still, one would think he’d have become, so to
speak, accustomed to himself in the strange rôle by then.

I think I must have spoken of him rather often to people, so long as I
remained in Paris; and it was, if not exactly curious, at least a little
less than one would expect, that I never came in contact with any one
else who knew him, until that day, a little while ago, when I met, in
the smoking-car of a west-bound train out of Chicago, the man who told
me all there was, or ever will be, for any man to tell about Corey.

He may have been sitting there near me all the time; I don’t know. But
then he was not the kind of man one notices in a smoking-car, or any
other place, for that matter. Certainly you would never suspect that so
gray and uninteresting an envelope could inclose the manuscript of a
story like Corey’s. You had seen hundreds like him before, and you knew
what they contained—stereotyped circular letters full of dull,
indisputable facts, nothing you wanted or cared to know. And it was
precisely because I wished later on one of those very dull facts that I
came to speak to my man.

The train coming to a sudden stop brought me out of my oblivion, and,
looking idly out of the window to see what place it might be, I was
seized by one of those fits of petty annoyance incident to such
interruptions, for the train had run so far past the platform that I
found it impossible to see the name of the station. I got myself out of
my comfortable position, and tried, by turning completely about, to see
back to the station. But we had gone too far. And then—I haven’t an idea
why, for it was of absolutely no importance to me—I looked about for
some one to ask. And nearest me, sitting rather uncomfortably upright in
his big leather chair, the little rack at his elbow guiltless of any
glass, and holding listlessly in his hand the latest popular magazine,
sat a gray-haired, gray-suited old gentleman, looking lonesomely out of
his window.

“I beg pardon,” I said. “Can you tell me what place this is?”

He turned gratefully at the sound of my voice. “It’s ——,” he told me.
I’ve never been able to recall what name he said, because, I suppose, of
what came after.

It was certainly not surprising that he should think, from my manner,
that I had some interest in the place, and he went on, after a moment’s
hesitating silence, to say, in his unobtrusive but unmistakable
Middle-West voice, that the town was a milling center—flour and meal,
and that kind of thing.

I saw that I had committed myself to something more in the way of
conversation than my laconic word of thanks for his information and a
lapse into silence. I wondered what I could say. He was such a nice,
kindly old gentleman, and he would never in the world have addressed any
one first. I hit upon the most obvious sequence, and asked if, then, he
was familiar with that part of the country. He said, oh yes, he was “a
native of Iowa.”

“Indeed?” I said, for lack of anything else to say, and his statement
not having been a particularly provocative one.

“Yes,” he said. “My home is Dubuque.”

Dubuque! Dubuque! What was it I knew about Dubuque? The name struck me
instantly with a sense of importance, as if it had rung the bell of a
target concealed out of sight. I sought about in my mind for a full
minute before I recalled, with a kind of start—Corey.

So many things had come in between—bigger things than any one man—and
overlaid all the pictures that had gone before. Overlaid them with
pigment so crude, so roughly applied, that one neither saw nor
remembered anything else. All the nations of Europe loosed in the Great
War, and America straining hard at her worn leash of neutrality. Small
wonder that Corey, of Dubuque, along with countless other memories of
that pale time, had faded into a dim, far perspective.

And yet, the sound of that name had brought him—as clearly as I had seen
him that night in Paris—before me. I heard his voice, felt the vigor of
his personality, saw him throw back his head and laugh. And here, in the
chair next my own, and ready to talk, sat a man who, by every rule of
probability and chance, would be able to tell me about him.

“I know a townsman of yours,” I said, and he evinced at once a kind of
mild and flattered surprise.

“From Dubuque?” he said. “Well, well! What’s his name?”

“Corey,” I said. “Doctor Corey.”

It had upon him a most unexpected effect; very much, it seemed, the same
effect his announcement had had upon me the moment before. He leaned
forward no more than an inch, but his mild gray eyes kindled with a kind
of excited intensity.

“You knew Jim Corey! Not here—not in Dubuque?”

“I met him in Paris,” I said, “quite a long while ago.”

“In _Paris_! Well, well—think of that!”

He shook his head, and regarded me suddenly with a stronger and new kind
of interest. I was, apparently, the first person he had ever encountered
who had really known Corey abroad, and I could see that the fact had
established me immediately in his mind as an intimate friend of Corey’s.
I suppose I should have told him that I had only seen Corey once; that I
couldn’t, as a matter of fact, claim more than a passing acquaintance.
But if I had, I should never have heard what I heard. And, anyway, it
wouldn’t have been, in the sense in which such things count, exactly
true—for it had never been, for me at least, a one night’s acquaintance.
I had seemed to know Corey better in that one night than one knows most
men in a month of companionship. Yes, it was something more than the
curiosity of a passing acquaintance that caused me to let the old fellow
keep his impression.

“It’s queer,” he said, suddenly, throwing up his head, and pressing open
the pages of his popular magazine as if he were about to begin to read,
“he was a kind of relative of mine. His father and I—third cousins on
our mothers’ side.” He broke off and regarded me again silently, and I
believe now that he was trying to persuade himself not to go on, not to
say anything more. But the temptation, the maximum, I might say, of
temptation, combined with the minimum of danger that he should ever see
me again, overcame his natural shyness and discretion. He seemed to
decide, upon my ejaculation, to go on.

“His house is just ’round the corner from mine. His wife lives there
now.”

“His wife!” The surprise was plain enough in my voice. And this seemed,
just for a second, to surprise him, too.

“You knew,” he said, “that he had married?”

I explained that I hadn’t seen Corey for several years, and added that I
had, however, understood that he was thinking of settling down. It put,
I could see, a different face upon what he had to tell, for he seemed to
adjust himself, as if he must now go back to something he had thought
already understood between us.

“You didn’t know, then,” he said, “that he was dead?”

Dead! Corey dead! So that was what he had to tell. There sprang up in my
mind a vague, indefinite vision of something heroic in connection with
the Great War. When, I asked, and where did he die?

“A little over three months ago, in Europe. I was his executor.”

There was something in the way he made his last statement which lent it
a kind of special importance. And it proved, indeed, in the end, the
fact of supreme importance. And here, as if it were due me, he told me
his name—Ewing; and I told him mine.

“Yes,” he said. “I made a trip to New York to see a man who’d been with
him before he died. He brought a message from Corey. Queer,” he said,
“that message. He must have been—a little off, you know, at the last.”

It was clear that something had occurred on his trip to New York which
had puzzled him then, and continued, in spite of his explanation, to
puzzle him still. It was evident in the way he went back, presently, to
the beginning, as if he were stating a problem or building up a case.

He began by saying that he supposed nobody in Dubuque ever had
understood Corey—“and yet”—he faced me—“you wouldn’t say he was hard to
understand?”

I said that he had seemed to me to have an extremely straightforward and
simple personality; that that, to me, had been one of his charms.

“Exactly!” he said, “exactly! That’s what we always thought in
Dubuque—and I’ve known Jim Corey since the day he was born. Why, he’d go
away on one of his trips, and stay a year, sometimes two, and the day
after he’d get back you’d think he’d never been out of Dubuque, except
he was so glad to be home.”

And, talking with a growing and homely fluency, the nasal quality of his
rather pleasant voice increasing according to the sharpness of his
interest, he proceeded to sketch in, with the fine brush of his
provincialism, all the details of that picture I had had so clearly of
Corey that night in Paris, more than four years before.

It was astonishing how right my picture had been; how they, who had
known him always, had been no better able than I to visualize Corey
outside Dubuque.

And it seemed to have been the merest chance which had led him, the year
of his graduation from medical school, to take his first trip away from
his native State. He had “put himself” through college, and had come out
with all the school had to give, wanting more. It was doubtful if Corey
had ever read a novel through in his life, but the college library
yielded up treasures in scientific and medical books whose plots he
remembered as easily as boarding-school girls remember the plots of
Laura Jean Libbey.

In the end he had happened to be engrossed in some experiments or other
with herbs, and it was that which led him to decide upon going to China.
He was going to study Chinese herbs. And he had gone, straight, without
any stops _en route_, as he did everything. But when he had been in
Pekin two weeks the Boxer Rebellion broke out, and there he was in the
thick of it; and a god-send he was, too, in the foreign legations,
fighting and caring for wounded by turns, day and night, youth and
strength and his fresh fine skill counting for ten in that beleaguered
handful of desperate men.

It was for that he had got his first decoration—Japan’s Order of the
Rising Sun, and a little later had come from France, for the same
service, and quite to the surprise of Corey, the scarlet ribbon of the
Legion of Honor.

There had been, of course, the appropriate furore—pictures and full-page
interviews in the San Francisco papers on his way home, and Dubuque
expecting to see him come back transformed, a hero, conscious of honors
won. But he had arrived, to their amazement, merely himself, and they
had accepted him, after a day or two, at his own valuation.

That was the first, and it seemed after that, although he was always off
to one of the far corners of the earth, they were never able to look
upon him when he came home as a distinguished traveler returned. He was
simply, as he seemed to wish to be, “Jim,” or sometimes “Doc” Corey come
home again. And yet they knew about the things he had done. They knew
where he had been. And they knew, too, about his decorations. They had
seen them on one or two occasions, when he had been the guest of the
evening at the “Business Men’s Banquet,” and he had “dressed up,” the
old gentleman said, in a full-dress suit and all his decorations. “Two
rows, all kinds, by then.” One could imagine him doing that, in a spirit
of comic masquerade. And one could imagine him also doing it merely to
please them.

His wife, after he was married, used to get out his decorations and show
them to her women friends, and at this Corey only laughed
good-humoredly. But she never showed them to men; she seemed to sense
how that would embarrass him.

I asked when he had married her, and who she was.

She had been visiting friends, he said, in Dubuque, when Corey came
back, he believed, from the Balkan War, in the spring of 1913. Pretty
quick work they made of it, too. In August that same summer they had the
wedding at her house in Des Moines. But it had surprised nobody. They
knew he’d been wanting to settle down; and she was just the right kind
of girl—nice and wholesome, and fond of her home. At last, he said, he
was going to begin to live.

He had dropped at once into his place, exactly as if he had never been
away at all—as if, after his graduation, he had come home to practise
his profession. There was nothing even about his house to indicate the
traveler; no obtrusive trophies of strange lands; no bizarre
knick-knacks. In a room in the attic were a half-full dunnage-bag, a
traveler’s kit, and an officer’s trunk, small size, the lid pressed down
but warped a little so that it would not lock. And in the corner three
pairs of heavy, discarded boots, gathering dust. That was all.

And he _was_ happy; naturally, sanely, unaffectedly happy. There was no
room for doubt about that. “Honesty,” Mr. Ewing called it. He used that
word over and over again in relation to Corey’s psychology at that time.
“And there wasn’t,” he said, “a hypocritical bone in Jim Corey’s body.”
One could see what he meant, and see, too, that it had, in his mind,
some obscure bearing on what came after.

He waited a little here before he went on, as if he were going over to
himself incidents too trivial to relate, but which would not separate
themselves from his memory of Corey in those days.

“Well,” he began, abruptly, rousing himself from his secret
contemplation, “there was that winter, nineteen-thirteen, and the next
summer, nineteen-fourteen; and then the European war began.”

“And he went!” I supplemented, involuntarily, since from the trend of
the narrative I had, of course, seen that coming.

“No,” said Mr. Ewing in a surprisingly quiet tone of contradiction. “No,
he didn’t. I was like you. _I_ thought he’d go.”

“You thought he _would_!” I exclaimed, for it seemed to me he had just
been trying to make me see how unshakably he had believed Corey to be
fixed in Dubuque.

“Certainly,” he said. “You’d think it would be only natural he’d want to
go. Wouldn’t _you_?” he asked, as if he had detected in my expression
some disposition not to agree.

“_I_ would,” I said, still wondering at the ease with which he had
brushed aside what I had foreseen was to be his climax. For my
imagination had long since outrun his story to the end of the usual
domestic tragedy, wherein Corey had, at the first call of adventure,
forsaken without a word his home and his wife, to find (had not Mr.
Ewing told me in the very beginning of his death, three months before,
some place in Europe?) his abrupt and unexpected dénouement.

There had been, then, something else. “But he did,” I put forth,
“finally go? You said, I think, that he died over there?”

“Oh yes—finally. But that, you see, wasn’t what counted. It wasn’t the
same. It was the way he went.”

“The _way_?” I repeated.

“Yes. He didn’t go the way, I mean, that I thought he’d go. The way
_you_ thought, too.”

I said I didn’t understand; that I couldn’t see what difference it made
_how_ he went, so long as he did go in the end.

“It made _all_ the difference,” said Mr. Ewing. “You see, he didn’t rush
off, at the first news of the fighting, the way you’d think a man would.
Why, we used to read the papers and talk over the war news together, and
every day I’d expect to hear him say something about going. He knew all
the places, and the way everything was over there, but he never seemed
to care to be there himself. He used to come round to my house just
before supper-time in the evenings and we’d sit on the porch and talk,
or maybe I’d go round to his porch. I asked him one day if he didn’t
want to go, and all he said was, ‘Why should I?’ And I said I didn’t
know, it seemed to me that he would. And he said he was comfortable for
the first time in his life; he never had liked bumping around in all
sorts of places; hated it as a matter of fact. I asked him why, if that
was the case, he’d kept it up for so long, all those years; and he
laughed, and said _he_ didn’t know; he never _had_ been able to figure
that out.”

Mr. Ewing fell silent here, tapping his right foot on the carpet a
little impatiently and looking speculatively, yet without seeing, at me.
I had the impression that he felt he had utterly failed, up to now, in
making some subtle point in his story clear, and was considering how
best he might make me see. I was sure of it when, after a longish pause,
he continued, for he seemed to have decided upon the abandonment of
subtleties altogether, and to give me, for my own interpretation, the
facts as they occurred.

Things had gone on without any change all that winter and the next
summer. In August Corey went to some sort of convention of medical men
in Philadelphia. He was to have been gone something over two weeks. At
the end of that time Mrs. Corey had received a letter saying that some
experiments in which he was specially interested had developed rather
unexpectedly, and Corey, together with several others, had been detailed
to stay on and work them out to their conclusion. He couldn’t say just
how many days it would take; he would let her know.

At the end of another two weeks Corey was still away. The first phase of
the experiments had unhappily come to grief, and they had had to begin
from the first again. It was annoying, but since they had gone into it,
there was nothing else to be done. He would leave for home on the moment
of the work’s completion. Meantime there would be little opportunity for
letter-writing. She was not to worry.

As the days went on Mrs. Corey began to regret not having gone along in
the beginning, as he had wanted her to do. Mr. Ewing stopped in now and
then to inquire. Her reticence made him wonder if she might not be
hearing. It was plain that she _did_ worry, but, as Mr. Ewing said, she
was not the talkative kind.

And then, one morning, just two months from the day he had left, Corey
arrived unexpectedly by the ten-fifty train. Mr. Ewing, passing the
house on his way home that evening, had been surprised to see Corey, in
his shirt-sleeves, trimming shrubs in the garden. And he had stopped to
welcome him back, and they had talked about the war in quite the old
way, so that from that evening on it was exactly the same as it had been
before Corey had gone to his convention in Philadelphia.

It appears that all this time a very natural intimacy was growing up
between these two, gentle old Mr. Ewing and Corey. And I can imagine
that Corey, who became, as it were, the instantaneous friend of every
one, had made in his life very few actual contacts, few, if any, real
and intimate friendships. And perhaps that was why this friendship,
based as it was on such small outward manifestations as talking over the
news in the daily papers together, had prospered. Then, too, there was
the relationship, distant enough to be free of demands.

Corey had returned from the Philadelphia trip the last week in October.
It was on a Sunday afternoon near the middle of December that Mr. Ewing,
sitting reading his weekly illustrated paper, looked up to see through
the window Corey coming quickly along the walk. Mr. Ewing was struck by
something peculiar in his friend’s appearance, something hurried in the
set of his hat and overcoat, yet as if he himself were entirely
unconscious of haste.

He turned in at the gate, and Mr. Ewing got up and opened the door.
Corey came through it, Mr. Ewing said, as if escaping from something
outside, something of which he was physically afraid. He almost pushed
past Mr. Ewing and into the room, and with scarcely a glance to make
sure they were alone, he spoke, and his voice was strained like a note
on a too taut violin string:

“She’s found it! _This_—where I’d had it hid!”

He held extended in his open hand, as if there were no longer any reason
for concealing it from any one, what appeared to Mr. Ewing’s bewildered
eyes to be a bit of ribbon, striped green and red, and a bit of bronze
metal attached.

“What is it?” he asked, stupefied by the completeness of the change that
had come upon the man before him.

“It’s the _Croix_!” Corey’s voice was impatient, “The _Croix de
Guerre_!”

Mr. Ewing stared at the bright-colored thing, trying to comprehend.
Corey still held it outstretched in his hand, and the bronze Maltese
cross with its crossed swords slipped through his fingers and hung down.
Corey’s voice was going on. Mr. Ewing had missed something.

“... So now she knows,” was the end of what he heard—and in that instant
his eye caught the words engraved on the cross, _République Française_,
and the full meaning of its being there in Corey’s hand burst suddenly
upon him.

The new French decoration! The _Croix de Guerre_!

“You’ve _been_ there?” he managed to say. “You’ve been over there?”

“How else would I get it?” said Corey, with a kind of abandon, as if he
were confessing now to some fullness of shame. “You see, she’s right. I
couldn’t resist.”

Mr. Ewing was lost. “Resist what?”

“This!” Corey closed his fingers now on the _Croix_. “A new decoration!”

And then, as if every atom of his great, strong body had suddenly
succumbed to some long-growing exhaustion, Corey dropped down into a
chair and threw out his arm across the table as if he would put away
from him as far as possible that offending decoration.

“But when?”—Mr. Ewing found himself reiterating—“when—when—you haven’t
been away—”

“Oh, yes,” said Corey. “You remember, in August.”

And here Mr. Ewing confessed that he thought for a moment that Corey
must be hopelessly mad. There was the question of time, and a dozen
other questions besides. It seemed out of the realm of possibility, out
of the realm of reason.

“How did you keep her from knowing?”

Mr. Ewing had not wanted to ask—had hoped the point would explain
itself—and Corey looked for a moment as if he might be planning an
evasion—then braced himself and looked Mr. Ewing straight in the eyes. A
faint expression of scorn came round his mouth, as if he spoke of
another—a scoundrel who hardly deserved his scorn.

“I left letters—dated ahead—with the scrubwoman at the laboratory to
mail.” He said it, took his eyes from Mr. Ewing’s, and then he appeared
to wait.

Mr. Ewing sat there filled with a kind of amazement, touched with fear
for what should come next, and suddenly he became conscious that Corey
was watching him with what seemed a tremendous anxiety, waiting for him
to speak. And a moment later, apparently no longer able to bear that
silence, Corey leaned nervously toward Mr. Ewing, and asked in the tone
of one seeking an answer of utmost importance: “You don’t see it? You
don’t see what she saw?”

“See what?” said Mr. Ewing—“what _who_ saw?” Yet he knew that Corey had
meant his wife. It was she who had found the _Croix_ ... but what did he
mean she had seen?

“Don’t keep it back—just to be decent! She said it was plain, plain
enough for anybody to see. What I want to _know_ is if everybody knew it
but me!”

“Knew what?” cried poor Mr. Ewing, lost more completely now than before.

“Knew why I’ve done all the things I’ve done—run all the risks. Why I
went over there this time, in August, without letting her know—God knows
_I_ didn’t know why!—why I’ve _always_ gone!”

“Why have you?” The question asked itself.

“Because I wanted the decorations! The damned orders and medals and
things! Because I couldn’t resist getting a new one—wherever I saw a
chance. Do you believe a man could be as—as _rotten_ as that, all his
life, and not know it himself?”

Slowly, then, Mr. Ewing began to see. And remotely it began to dawn upon
him—the thing “she” in her anger had done. For there was no doubt that
the thing was done. The man’s faith and belief in himself, in the
cleanness and simplicity of his own motives, were gone—and gone in a
single devastating blow from which he had not, and could never, recover.
And, searching for the right thing to say, Mr. Ewing stumbled, as one
always will, upon the one thing he should never have said:

“But you know better than that. You know it’s not so.”

Corey’s answer was not argumentative; it only stated, wearily, the fact
which from the first had seemed to possess his mind:

“No, I don’t know it’s not so. I’ve never been able to give any reasons
for doing the things myself. _You’ve_ asked me why.... I couldn’t tell.”

“Why, it was youth,” said Mr. Ewing, and one can imagine him saying it,
gently, as an old-fashioned physician might offer his homely remedy to a
patient whose knowledge exceeded his own. “Men do those things when
they’re young.”

And Corey, rejecting the simple, old-fashioned cure, made an attempt at
a smile for the kindness in which it was offered. “All men are young,
some time,” he said; “all men don’t do them.”

“But you happened to be the kind who would.” And at this Corey made no
attempt to smile.

“That’s it!” he said. “I _wasn’t_ the kind. I was the kind to stay at
home.... _I_ know that. I was always happier here in Dubuque. And
now—this last— You’d hardly say that was on account of my youth!”

“No—but it had got into your blood.”

Corey at this gave a start and looked up suddenly at Mr. Ewing. “Into my
blood— It’s the very word she used! When she admitted I might not have
known it myself, she said she supposed it was just ‘in my blood’!”

He made a gesture which began violently and ended in futility, and sat
silent, looking off steadily into space, as if hearing again all those
dreadful revelations of hers. And once or twice Mr. Ewing, who sat
helplessly by, waiting, perhaps praying, for some inspiration, made a
valiant but utterly vain effort to put out his hand, to show by some
mere physical act, if no other, his unshaken belief in his friend.

And so, when the need for speech had become imperative, Mr. Ewing found
himself saying something to the effect that these things pass; that she
had only been angry, and had said the first thing that had come into her
mind. And Corey, realizing the extremity into which he had led his
friend, rose and, either ignoring or not hearing, from the depth of the
chasm into which he had fallen, Mr. Ewing’s last remark, made some
hurried attempt at apology, and awkwardly moved toward the door.

Mr. Ewing had only been able to follow after, and say, lamely, and in
spite of himself, that he mustn’t say or do anything he might be sorry
for, and that they would see each other again. And then he stood in the
open door and watched Corey go down the path to the gate, and along the
walk, until he had turned the corner, and so out of sight.

And then he had gone back into the house and spent the remainder of that
afternoon trying to realize what had passed, trying to decide upon what
he should say the next time they met.

But he had reached no conclusion, and in the end had decided to leave it
to chance. And Chance had solved his problem with her usual original
simplicity. She took away the need for his saying anything at all; for
the following day the station cab drove up to Corey’s front gate and
stopped. The driver got down from his seat and went up the walk and into
the house. A moment later he came out again, bearing on his shoulder the
small-size officer’s trunk, the lid forced down now and locked, and in
one hand, dragging slightly, a full dunnage-bag. And after him followed
Corey. And no one followed him. No one came out on the porch to say
good-by. No one stood at the window. The driver put the trunk on the
seat beside him, and the dunnage-bag into the seat beside Corey. And
then, without a word or a sign, they drove away toward the station.

It was understood in Dubuque after the next few days that Corey had gone
to help in the war; he had received an urgent message from France.

And Mr. Ewing received, the day after Corey’s departure, a little note
of farewell, written in pencil, while he was waiting for his train, and
mailed at the station. It said merely good-by, and that he hoped he
would understand.

The next week Mrs. Corey closed up the house and went to Des Moines, to
stay with her people, she said, until her husband’s return.

And that was all Mr. Ewing had ever known of what passed between those
two, of the details that led to the sudden and final decision to go. And
it was all that he had heard of Corey until that day, three months ago,
when there came to him the unexpected letter from the man in New York,
telling of Corey’s death, and of a message and papers he had to deliver.
Mr. Ewing had replied at once that he would go, and had followed his
letter almost immediately. He had seemed to feel, ever since that Sunday
afternoon, when he had failed to be of use, an increasing sense of
responsibility.

He had met the man at his club; and I had, as he told of the meeting, as
he described the man, a curious impression of actually seeing them
there, in the big Fifth Avenue club, sitting in deeply luxurious chairs
and no table between—the gentle, gray-haired, gray-eyed, gray-garbed Mr.
Ewing, who had never been in New York City before; and the other, tall,
very tall, with black hair, black eyes, and brown burned skin, who
looked, Mr. Ewing said, as if he’d done all the things Corey had done.

It had been quite by chance that this man, whose name was Burke, and
Corey had been attached to the same section and were thrown in that way
a good deal together. And his very first statement had shown, with all
the force of the casual phrase, how tremendously Corey had changed.

“A queer fellow,” he said, “no one could understand.” And he was a man,
one would say, well accustomed to the queerest of men.

Mr. Ewing said yes, he supposed one would call him that, and asked just
in what way Burke had thought Corey queer.

And Burke, it seemed, had had more than enough to base the idea upon. He
cast about in his mind to select one out of the many queer things. And
he had hit upon the most revealing one of them all.

Corey, he said, had gone about covered with medals, two rows,
overlapping, on duty and off, all the time. That in itself was queer,
especially for an American. Most men wore bars, but Corey had worn the
whole thing. And yet, Burke said, he was the least egotistical man he
had ever known. And he had seen him wince when other men, passing, had
smiled at sight of his decorations. He could never make it out.

There was no wonder in that. Mr. Ewing, who knew Corey well, and had,
one might say, something to go on, couldn’t make it out. And no more,
for that matter, could I. There was something in it a little bizarre,
and certainly alien. Surely no normal Anglo-Saxon American had ever
indulged in such extremes of self-flagellation as that!

And then, abruptly and unbidden, there came into my mind a story of the
old West, the story of how in the pioneer days a gambler, sitting down
to play solitaire, laid his gun on the table beside him and, if he
caught himself cheating, administered justice first hand by shooting
himself. To be sure, in those days a man was pretty certain of playing a
straight game. Well, so had Corey been, too, sure of the straightness of
_his_ game. And I have heard it vouched for that, even in those robust
times, the thing had been seen to happen, and to come, with just that
appalling simplicity of psychology, from cause to effect, straight, and
without hesitation.

The analogy grew, for Burke averred that the queerest thing of all about
Corey was that he had been the only man he had ever seen lacking
entirely the emotion of fear. He volunteered on every sort of hazardous
enterprise, and came through safe when men beside him were killed, time
after time, protected, they had got to believe, by the inscrutable
quality of his fearlessness. It was, Burke said, as if against some
other secret consideration death to Corey counted nothing at all.

Then there was something a little peculiar in so silent a man having so
many friends. Corey silent! Remembering him, one could hardly credit
that change. Burke qualified that by saying that when he used the word
silent, he didn’t in any sense mean morose. Corey had never been that.
He merely hadn’t, as people somehow seemed to expect him to do, talked.
And what he had meant by “friends” he wished to qualify, too. He hadn’t
meant pals. There had been nothing so active as that. But there were
ways to tell when a man was well liked. For example, no one who knew him
had ever seen anything funny about Corey’s decorations, and they never
talked about it among themselves.

Somebody had once asked Corey how long he had been over the first time.
It was evident that he _had_ been there before, because of the _Croix de
Guerre_ he wore when he came. And Corey had answered, about six weeks,
or a little less.

“And you got the _Croix_ in that time?” An exclamation forced out of the
fellow’s astonishment, and bringing from Corey an answer without a hint
of rebuff, yet certainly nothing that a man could call brag.

“You forget,” he said, with an almost imperceptible glance down at his
two rows of medals—“I knew the ropes.”

The man had afterward said to Burke that he was sorry he’d asked. But he
didn’t see anything to be ashamed of in the _Croix_—and Corey wore it
where a fellow couldn’t help seeing. There was, Burke said, a queer kind
of apology in it. No, there had been nothing like brag in Corey’s
answer. There had been none of that in anything he had done. And he had
been, according to Burke, the best surgeon of them all, the best man at
his work. But of course he had come to disaster in the end. A man can’t
go on ignoring danger like that.

They were stationed at Jubécourt, outside Verdun, and for months the
struggle had raged, attack and counterattack, for the possession of Hill
304. Corey had gone up to the front _poste de secour_ at Esnes, where in
an underground shelter fitted up in what had been the basement of an
ancient château, reduced now to ruins by the German shells, he was
giving first aid to the wounded brought in from the trenches.

Word had come into the _poste_ one night that an officer, lying in a
trench dugout, was too far gone to move. And Corey had volunteered to
go, alone, on foot, along the zigzag communication trench that led to
the dugout, under the incessant shelling, and see what he could do. And
early that morning, about three o’clock, they had been carried in, Corey
and his officer—the only two who had come out of that trench alive.

From the officer they had the story of what Corey had done; not many
words, to be sure, and little embellishment, but such accounts need no
flowers, no figures of speech. The facts are enough, told in gasps, as
this one was, hurriedly, while yet there was strength, as one pays a
debt, all at once, for fear he may never again have gold to pay.

A trench torpedo had found its mark. And Corey, bending above him, had
deliberately braced himself, holding his arms out, and had received in
his stead the exploding pieces of shell. He raised himself on his elbow
to look at Corey, unconscious, on the next stretcher. He wanted it
understood. He sent for an orderly and dictated a message which he
managed to sign, and despatched it post-haste to Staff Headquarters. And
then he resigned himself to the hands of those about him.

The news had come in to Jubécourt by telephone, and just before dawn
Burke had gone up to see what could be done. When he reached the _poste_
Corey had regained consciousness, and was waiting for him. He had sent
word ahead that he was coming. And Corey was wounded, Burke said, in a
way no other man could have withstood. And the “queer” thing now was
that he knew it, and when Burke leaned over him there was a gleam in his
eyes as if he were keeping it there by his own will power.

He seemed relieved then, and began at once—he had saved a surprising
amount of strength—to speak. He knew Burke planned to go to New York,
and he wanted him to deliver some papers. They were in his bag, at
Jubécourt; he told him where he should find the key, and then he asked
Burke to write down Mr. Ewing’s name and address.

It was while Burke was crossing the dim, lamp-lighted room in search of
a pencil or pen that some one had stopped him to say that the General
was coming at eleven to confer upon Corey the _Medaille Militaire_. It
had given Burke a distinct kind of shock. Could it be, he wondered, that
_that_ was what Corey had saved himself for? For Corey knew, as well as
they, that the _Medaille Militaire_ was the one decoration never
conferred upon dead men. He had gone on and borrowed the pen, and on the
way back had asked if he might be allowed to tell Corey. It might, he
said, do him some good. That news had turned the balance for more than
one man.

But when, a few moments later, Burke, receiving permission, had told
Corey his news, he had been for a moment afraid that the balance _had_
turned—and in the wrong way. Corey had seemed hardly to comprehend, and
then a sudden unaccountable change had come over his face.

“The _Medaille_!” he gasped. “What time did you say?”

“Eleven,” Burke told him—“three hours from now.”

He seemed then to be considering something deep within himself, so that
Burke hardly heard when he said, “That’s time enough.” And Burke,
thinking that he had been measuring his strength against the time,
hastened a little awkwardly to reassure him. But Corey, ignoring his
assurance, had seemed to arrive at some secret conclusion.

“Did you put down the name?” he asked.

Burke had forgotten the name, and Corey told him again, patiently,
spelling out the address. He watched while Burke wrote.

“The papers all go to him.” He was silent a moment. Then: “Listen,” he
said. “Will you give him this message for me?”

Burke promised, whatever he wished, word for word.

“Tell him,” he said, “that it breaks a man’s luck to know what he
wants.”

“Yes,” said Burke. “Is there anything else?”

The strength had drained out of Corey’s voice with the last words. Again
he waited while he seemed to decide. And when he spoke, at last, a
strange gentleness had come into his tone, so that Burke was not
surprised to hear that the message was meant now for a woman.

“Tell him,” said Corey, “there’s no use letting _her_ know about the
_Medaille Militaire_.”

And although Burke had divined some obscure meaning in Corey’s words, he
was yet not quite certain that he had heard aright. “You mean that she’s
_not_ to know?”

Corey nodded his head, yes, and Burke saw that he was no longer able to
speak. Turning, he motioned an orderly to his side, and whispered that
he was afraid Corey would never last until eleven.

The orderly sped away, and a moment later the French doctor in charge
stood beside Corey’s stretcher, opening his hypodermic case.

And then, Burke said, he had done what seemed to him the “queerest”
thing of all. He had made a signal for Burke to come nearer, and when he
had leaned down, he said, “Remember to tell him I didn’t take _that_.”
He was looking at the hypodermic the doctor held in his hand.

“But the _Medaille_—” began Burke, and was stopped by the strangeness of
Corey’s expression. He had, he said, smiled a secret mysterious smile,
and closed his eyes with a curious look of contentment.

And even the French doctor had seen, by something in his faint gesture
of refusal, that Corey would never submit to his restorative. He put the
case down on a box, with a nod to the orderly, in case Corey should
change his mind.

And Burke had stayed by until the Division General, just half an hour
too late, had arrived at exactly eleven o’clock. Corey had not changed
his mind....

That, then, was the end of the story.

So much affected was I at the nature of poor Corey’s death that I almost
forgot Mr. Ewing, sitting there across from me in our comfortable
smoking-car, and that he might, in all decency, expect some comment from
me. Indeed, I think I should have forgotten altogether if I had not felt
after a little a relaxation of his long-continued gaze, and I knew he
was going to speak.

“Why,” he said, “do _you_ think he didn’t want her to know?”

So that was the thing which had puzzled him in New York, the thing which
still puzzled him now.

Well, it had puzzled me, too; and I could give him no answer, except to
confess that I didn’t know. But long after the train had passed through
Dubuque, and Mr. Ewing and I had said good-by, an answer, perhaps right,
perhaps wrong, presented itself to my mind.

If one followed Corey at all, one must follow him all the way; perhaps
he had wished to save her the pang of an added disgrace.



                             THE DARK HOUR


_By_ WILBUR DANIEL STEELE
From _The Atlantic Monthly_
_Copyright, 1918, by The Atlantic Monthly Co._
_Copyright, 1919, by Wilbur Daniel Steele._

The returning ship swam swiftly through the dark; the deep, interior
breathing of the engines, the singing of wire stays, the huge whispering
rush of foam streaming the water-line made up a body of silence upon
which the sound of the doctor’s footfalls, coming and going restlessly
along the near deck, intruded only a little—a faint and personal
disturbance. Charging slowly through the dark, a dozen paces forward, a
dozen paces aft, his invisible and tormented face bent forward a little
over his breast, he said to himself,—

“What fools! What blind fools we’ve been!”

Sweat stood for an instant on his brow, and was gone in the steady
onrush of the wind.

The man lying on the cot in the shelter of the cabin companionway made
no sound all the while. He might have been asleep or dead, he remained
so quiet; yet he was neither asleep nor dead, for his eyes, large,
wasted, and luminous, gazed out unwinking from the little darkness of
his shelter into the vaster darkness of the night, where a star burned
in slow mutations, now high, now sailing low, over the rail of the ship.

Once he said in a washed and strengthless voice, “That’s a bright star,
doctor.”

If the other heard, he gave no sign. He continued charging slowly back
and forth, his large dim shoulders hunched over his neck, his hands
locked behind him, his teeth showing faintly gray between the fleshy
lips which hung open a little to his breathing.

“It’s dark!” he said of a sudden, bringing up before the cot in the
companionway. “God, Hallett, how dark it is!” There was something
incoherent and mutilated about it, as if the cry had torn the tissues of
his throat. “I’m not myself to-night,” he added, with a trace of shame.

Hallett spoke slowly from his pillow.

“It wouldn’t be the subs to-night? You’re not that kind, you know. I’ve
seen you in the zone. And we’re well west of them by this, anyhow; and
as you say, it’s very dark.”

“It’s not that darkness. Not that!”

Again there was the same sense of something tearing. The doctor rocked
for a moment on his thick legs. He began to talk.

“It’s this _war_—” His conscience protested: “I ought not to go on
so—it’s not right, not right at all—talking so to the wounded—the
dying—I shouldn’t go on so to the dying—” And all the while the words
continued to tumble out of his mouth. “No, I’m not a coward—not
especially. You know I’m not a coward, Hallett. You know that. But just
now, to-night, somehow, the whole black truth of the thing has come out
and got me—jumped out of the dark and got me by the neck, Hallett. Look
here; I’ve kept a stiff lip. Since the first I’ve said, ‘We’ll win this
war.’ It’s been a matter of course. So far as I know, never a hint of
doubt has shadowed my mind, even when things went bad. ‘In the end,’
I’ve said, ‘in the end, of course, we’re bound to win.’”

He broke away again to charge slowly through the dark with his head
down, butting; a large, overheated animal endowed with a mind.

“But—do we want to win?”

Hallett’s question, very faint across the subdued breathings and
showerings of the ship, fetched the doctor up. He stood for a moment,
rocking on his legs and staring at the face of the questioner, still and
faintly luminous on the invisible cot. Then he laughed briefly, shook
himself, and ignored the preposterous words. He recollected tardily that
the fellow was pretty well gone.

“No,” he went on. “Up to to-night I’ve never doubted. No one in the
world, in _our_ part of the world, has doubted. The proposition was
absurd to begin with. Prussia, and her fringe of hangers-on, to stand
against the world—to stand against the very drift and destiny of
civilization? Impossible! A man can’t do the impossible; that’s logic,
Hallett, and that’s common sense. They might have their day of it, their
little hour, because they had the jump—but in the end! _in the end!_—
But look at them, will you! Look at them! That’s what’s got me to-night,
Hallett. Look at them! There they stand. They won’t play the game, won’t
abide at all by the rules of logic, of common sense. Every day, every
hour, they perform the impossible. Not once since the war was a year old
have they been able to hang out another six months. They’d be wiped from
the earth; their people would starve. They’re wiped from the earth, and
they remain. They starve and lay down their skinny bodies on the ground,
and they stand up again with sleek bellies. They make preposterous,
blind boasts. They say, ‘We’ll over-run Roumania in a month.’ Fantastic!
It’s _done_! They say, ‘Russia? New-born Russia? Strong young
boy-Russia? We’ll put him out of it for good and all by Christmas.’ That
was to cheer up the hungry ones in Berlin. Everybody saw through it. The
very stars laughed. _It’s done!_ God, Hallett! It’s like clockwork. It’s
like a rehearsed and abominable programme—”

“Yes—a programme.”

The wounded man lay quite still and gazed at the star. When he spoke,
his words carried an odd sense of authenticity, finality. His mind had
got a little away from him, and now it was working with the new,
oracular clarity of the moribund. It bothered the doctor
inexplicably—tripped him up. He had to shake himself. He began to talk
louder and make wide, scarcely visible gestures.

“We’ve laughed so long, Hallett. There was _Mittel-Europa_! We always
laughed at that. A wag’s tale. To think of it—a vast, self-sufficient,
brutal empire laid down across the path of the world! Ha-ha! Why, even
if they had _wanted_ it, it would be—”

“If they _wanted_ it, it would be—_inevitable_.”

The doctor held up for a full dozen seconds. A kind of anger came over
him and his face grew red. He couldn’t understand. He talked still
louder.

“But they’re _doing_ it! They’re doing that same preposterous thing
before our eyes, and we can’t touch them, and they’re— Hallett! _They’re
damn near done!_ Behind that line there,—you know the line I mean,—who
of us doesn’t know it? That thin line of smoke and ashes and black
blood, like a bent black wire over France! Behind that line they’re at
work, day by day, month after month, building the empire we never
believed. And Hallett, _it’s damn near done_! And we can’t stop it. It
grows bigger and bigger, darker and darker—it covers up the sky—like a
nightmare—”

“Like a dream!” said Hallett softly; “a dream.”

The doctor’s boot-soles drummed with a dull, angry resonance on the
deck.

“And we can’t touch them! They couldn’t conceivably hold that line
against us—against the whole world—long enough to build their incredible
empire behind it. _And they have!_ Hallett! How _could_ they ever have
held it?”

“You mean, how could we ever have held it?”

Hallett’s words flowed on, smooth, clear-formed, unhurried, and his eyes
kept staring at the star.

“No, it’s we have held it, not they. And we that have got to hold
it—longer than they. Theirs is the kind of a _Mittel-Europa_ that’s been
done before; history is little more than a copybook for such an empire
as they are building. We’ve got a vaster and more incredible empire to
build than they—a _Mittel-Europa_, let us say, of the spirit of man. No,
no, doctor; it’s we that are doing the impossible, holding that thin
line.”

The doctor failed to contain himself.

“Oh, pshaw! _pshaw!_ See here, Hallett! We’ve had the men, and there’s
no use blinking the truth. And we’ve had the money and the munitions.”

“But back of all that, behind the last reserve, the last shell-dump, the
last treasury, haven’t they got something that we’ve never had?”

“And what’s that?”

“A dream.”

“A _what_?”

“A dream. We’ve dreamed no dream. Yes—let me say it! A little while ago
you said, ‘nightmare,’ and I said, ‘dream.’ Germany has dreamed a dream.
Black as the pit of hell,—yes, yes,—but a dream. They’ve seen a vision.
A red, bloody, damned vision,—yes, yes,—but a vision. They’ve got a
programme, even if it’s what you called it, a ‘rehearsed and abominable
programme.’ And they know what they want. And we don’t know what we
want!”

The doctor’s fist came down in the palm of his hand.

“What we want? I’ll tell you what we want, Hallett. _We want to win this
war!_”

“Yes?”

“And by the living God, Hallett, we will win this war! I can see again.
If we fight for half a century to come; if we turn the world
wrong-side-out for men, young men, boys, babes; if we mine the earth to
a hollow shell for coal and iron; if we wear our women to ghosts to get
out the last grain of wheat from the fields—we’ll do it! And we’ll wipe
this black thing from the face of the earth forever, root and branch,
father and son of the bloody race of them to the end of time. If you
want a dream, Hallett, there’s a—”

“There’s a—nightmare. An overweening muscular impulse to jump on the
thing that’s scared us in the dark, to break it with our hands, grind it
into the ground with our heels, tear ourselves away from it—and wake
up.”

He went on again after a moment of silence.

“Yes, that’s it, that’s it. We’ve never asked for anything better; not
once since those terrible August days have we got down on our naked
knees and prayed for anything more than just to be allowed to wake
up—and find it isn’t so. How can we expect, with a desire like that, to
stand against a positive and a flaming desire? No, no! The only thing to
beat a dream is a dream more poignant. The only thing to beat a vision
black as midnight is a vision white as the noonday sun. We’ve come to
the place, doctor, where half a loaf is worse than no bread.”

The doctor put his hands in his pockets and took them out again, shifted
away a few steps and back again. He felt inarticulate, handless,
helpless in the face of things, of abstractions, of the mysterious,
unflagging swiftness of the ship, bearing him willy-nilly over the blind
surface of the sea. He shook himself.

“God help us,” he said.

“What God?”

The doctor lifted a weary hand.

“Oh, if you’re going into _that_—”

“Why not? Because Prussia, doctor, has a god. Prussia has a god as
terrible as the God of conquering Israel, a god created in her own
image. We laugh when we hear her speaking intimately and surely to this
god. I tell you we’re fools. I tell you, doctor, before we shall stand
we shall have to create a god in _our_ own image, and before we do that
we shall have to have a living and sufficient image.”

“You don’t think much of us,” the doctor murmured wearily.

The other seemed not to hear. After a little while he said:

“We’ve got to say black or white at last. We’ve got to answer a question
this time with a whole answer.”

“This war began so long ago,” he went on, staring at the star. “So long
before Sarajevo, so long before the ‘balances of power’ were thought of,
so long before the ‘provinces’ were lost and won, before Bismarck and
the lot of them were begotten, or their fathers. So many, many years of
questions put, and half-answers given in return. Questions, questions:
questions of a power-loom in the North Counties; questions of a
mill-hand’s lodging in one Manchester or another, of the weight of a
headtax in India, of a widow’s mass for her dead in Spain; questions of
a black man in the Congo, of an eighth-black man in New Orleans, of a
Christian in Turkey, an Irishman in Dublin, a Jew in Moscow, a French
cripple in the streets of Zabern; questions of an idiot sitting on a
throne; questions of a girl asking her vote on a Hyde Park rostrum, of a
girl asking her price in the dark of a Chicago doorway—whole questions
half-answered, hungry questions half-fed, mutilated fag-ends of
questions piling up and piling up year by year, decade after decade.—
Listen! There came a time when it wouldn’t do, wouldn’t do at all. There
came a time when the son of all those questions stood up in the world,
final, unequivocal, naked, devouring, saying, ‘Now you shall answer me.
You shall look me squarely in the face at last, and you shall look at
nothing else; you shall take your hands out of your pockets and your
tongues out of your cheeks, and no matter how long, no matter what the
blood and anguish of it, you shall answer me now with a whole answer—or
perish!’”

“And what’s the answer?”

The doctor leaned down a little, resting his hands on the foot of the
cot.

The gray patch of Hallett’s face moved slightly in the dark.

“It will sound funny to you. Because it’s a word that’s been worn pretty
thin by so much careless handling. It’s ‘Democracy’!”

The doctor stood up straight on his thick legs.

“Why should it sound funny?” he demanded, a vein of triumph in his tone.
“It is the answer. And we’ve _given_ it. ‘Make the world safe for
democracy!’ Eh? You remember the quotation?”

“Yes, yes, that’s good. But we’ve got to do more than say it, doctor. Go
further. We’ve got to dream it in a dream; we’ve got to see democracy as
a wild, consuming vision. If the day ever comes when we shall pronounce
the word ‘democracy’ with the same fierce faith with which we conceive
them to be pronouncing ‘autocracy’—that day, doctor—”

He raised a transparent hand and moved it slowly over his eyes.

“It will be something to do, doctor, that will. Like taking hold of
lightning. It will rack us body and soul; belief will strip us naked for
a moment, leave us new-born and shaken and weak—as weak as Christ in the
manger. And that day nothing can stand before us. Because, you see,
we’ll know what we want.”

The doctor stood for a moment as he had been, a large, dark troubled
body rocking slowly to the heave of the deck beneath him. He rubbed a
hand over his face.

“Utopian!” he said.

“Utopian!” Hallett repeated after him. “To-day we are children of
Utopia—or we are nothing. I tell you, doctor, to-day it has come down to
this—Hamburg to Bagdad—or—Utopia!”

The other lifted his big arms and his face was red.

“You’re playing with words, Hallett. You do nothing but twist my words.
When I say Utopian, I mean, precisely, impossible. Absolutely
impossible. See here! You tell me this empire of theirs is a dream. I
give you that. How long has it taken them to dream it? Forty years.
_Forty years!_ And this wild, transcendental empire of the spirit you
talk about,—so much harder,—so many hundreds of times more
incredible,—will you have us do that sort of a thing in a _day_? We’re a
dozen races, a score of nations. I tell you it’s—it’s impossible!”

“Yes. Impossible.”

The silence came down between them, heavy with all the dark, impersonal
sounds of passage, the rhythmical explosions of the waves, the breathing
of engines, the muffled staccato of the spark in the wireless room, the
note of the ship’s bell forward striking the hour and after it a hail,
running thin in the wind: “Six bells, sir, and—_all’s well_!”

“_All’s well!_”

The irony of it! The infernal patness of it, falling so in the black
interlude, like stage business long rehearsed.

“_All’s well!_” the doctor echoed with the mirthless laughter of the
damned.

Hallett raised himself very slowly on an elbow and stared at the star
beyond the rail.

“Yes, I shouldn’t wonder. Just now—to-night—somehow—I’ve got a queer
feeling that maybe it is. Maybe it’s going to be.—Maybe it’s going to
be; who knows? The darkest hour of our lives, of history, perhaps, has
been on us. And maybe it’s almost over. Maybe we’re going to do the
impossible, after all, doctor. And maybe we’re going to get it done in
time. I’ve got a queer sense of something happening—something getting
ready.”

When he spoke again, his voice had changed a little.

“I wish my father could have lived to see this day. He’s in New York
now, and I should like—”

The doctor moved forward suddenly and quietly, saying: “Lie down,
Hallett. You’d better lie down now.”

But the other protested with a gray hand.

“No, no, you don’t understand. When I say—well—it’s just the shell of my
father walking around and talking around, these ten years past. Prison
killed his heart. He doesn’t even know it, that the immortal soul of him
has gone out. You know him, doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical—‘the
Destroyer,’ they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man,
doctor; you’ve got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and
as mad. I can see him now,—to-night,—sitting in the back room in Eighth
Street, he and old Radinov and Hirsch and O’Reilly and the rest, with
all the doors shut and the windows shut and their eyes and ears and
minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war out. They’re old men,
doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to to-morrow. They mustn’t
see to-day. They must ignore to-day. To-day is the tragic interruption.
They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn’t so. All their
lives they’ve been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the
Day of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of
revolution. The barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were
almost in sight of the splendid dawn—the dawn of the Day of Barricades.
And then this war, this thing they call a ‘rich man’s plot’ to confound
them, hold them up, turn to ashes all the fire of their lives. All they
can do is sit in a closed room with their eyes shut and wait till this
meaningless brawl is done. And then, to-morrow—to-morrow—some safely
distant to-morrow (for they’re old men),—to-morrow, the barricades! And
that’s queer. That’s queer.”

“Queer?”

“It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and months now, there’s
been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of the world but
the sound of barricades.”

The voice trailed off into nothing.

To the doctor, charging slowly back and forth along the near deck, his
hands locked behind him and his face bent slightly over his breast,
there came a queer sense of separation, from Hallett, from himself, his
own everyday acts, his own familiar aspirations, from the ship which
held him up in the dark void between two continents.

What was it all about, he asked himself over and over. Each time he
passed the shadow in the companionway he turned his head, painfully, and
as if against his will. Once he stopped squarely at the foot of the cot
and stood staring down at the figure there, faintly outlined, motionless
and mute. Sweat stood for a moment on his brow, and was gone in the
steady onrush of the wind. And he was used to death.

But Hallett had fooled him. He heard Hallett’s whisper creeping to him
out of the shadow:

“That’s a bright star, doctor.”



                           THE BIRD OF SERBIA


_By_ JULIAN STREET
From _Collier’s Weekly_
_Copyright, 1918, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc._
_Copyright, 1919, by Julian Street._

“Here’s a queer item,” remarked the man at the window end of the long
leather-covered seat, looking up from his newspaper and apparently
speaking in general to the other occupants of the Pullman smoking
compartment. “There’s a dispatch here announcing the death from
tuberculosis of that Serbian who shot the Archduke of Austria at
Sarajevo. It seems he has been in prison ever since. I thought he had
been executed long ago.”

Four of us, strangers to one another, had settled in the smoking
compartment at the beginning of the journey from Chicago to New York,
and as we had been on our way nearly an hour it seemed time for
conversation.

“They didn’t execute him,” replied a man who sat in one of the chairs,
“because he was under age. It’s against the law, over there, to execute
a person under twenty-one. This boy was only nineteen.”

“The law wouldn’t have cut much figure over here in a case like that,”
replied the first speaker.

“Perhaps not,” returned the man in the chair, “but respect for law is
one of the few benefits that seem to go with autocratic government. I
don’t find that dispatch in my paper. May I borrow yours?”

The other handed over the journal, indicating the item with his finger.

“I had almost forgotten that fellow,” spoke up a third traveler. “The
rush and magnitude of the war have carried our thoughts—and for the
matter of that, our soldiers too—a pretty long way since the
assassination occurred. Yet I suppose historians, digging back into the
minute beginnings of the war, will all trace down to the shot fired by
that Serbian.”

“That’s what the paper says,” returned the one who had begun to talk.
“It speaks of ‘the historic shot fired in Serbia’ as the thing that
fired the world.”

“And in doing so,” declared the man who had borrowed the paper, “it
falls into a popular error. The shot was _not_ fired in Serbia, but in
Austria-Hungary, and the boy who did the shooting was an
Austro-Hungarian subject.”

“But that doesn’t seem possible,” interposed the man who had spoken of
the historical aspect of the case. “If he was an Austrian subject and
did the shooting in Austria, how could Austria make that an excuse for
attacking Serbia?”

The other looked from the window for a moment before replying.

“It was one of the poorest excuses imaginable,” he returned.
“Autocracies can do those things; that’s why they must be stamped out.
As you said, historians will trace back to the assassination. It so
happened that I was over there at the time and got a glimpse of what lay
back of the assassination—microscopic, unclean forces of which
historians will never hear, yet which seem peculiarly suitable in
connection with Austria’s crime. But I had better not get to talking
about all that.”

As though in indication of his intention to be silent, he closed his
mouth firmly. It was a strong mouth and could shut with finality.
Everything about him expressed strength and determination mixed, as
these qualities often are in the highest type of American business man,
with gentleness, good nature, and modesty. I liked his looks. He was the
kind of man you would pick out to take care of your watch and
pocketbook—or your wife—in case of emergency. I wanted him to go on
talking, and said so, and when both the other men backed up my request,
he began in a spirit evidently reluctant but obliging:

“For some years before the outbreak of this war,” he said, “I
represented a large American oil company in southeastern Europe, where
we had a considerable market. My headquarters were at Vienna, but my
travels took me through various countries inhabited by people of the
Serb race, and I found it advantageous to learn to speak the Serbian
tongue, both for business reasons and because I enjoyed making friends
among the people. In order to practice the language and form some
knowledge of the people, I made it a custom, when traveling, to stop at
small hotels used by the Serbs themselves, in preference to the more
cosmopolitan establishments; or, where the small hotels were not clean,
I would sometimes take a room with some Serbian family.

”In Bosnia there was one very attractive little city to which I was
always particularly glad to go. It was a place of thirty or forty
thousand inhabitants and lay in a lovely, fertile valley among the
hills; and you may judge something of it by the fact that the Serbs
coupled the adjective ‘golden’ with the town’s name. Not one American in
a thousand—probably not one in a hundred thousand—had ever heard of the
place then, yet it was the capital of Bosnia. The Austrian governor of
Bosnia had his palace there, and the life of the place was like that of
some great capital in miniature. One thing about the town which
interested me was the way in which its people and its architecture
reflected Bosnian history. In the first place there were many Serbs
there, the more prosperous of them dressing like conventional
Europeans—except that the fez was worn by almost all of them—and living
in low, picturesque Serbian houses, with roofs of tile or flat stone
shingle; the rest peasants in the Bosnian costume, who came in from the
outlying agricultural regions. But also there were Mohammedans—leftovers
from the days of Turkish dominion—and the town had minarets and other
architectural signs of the Turk. And last there were the Austrians—the
Austrian governor, Austrian soldiers in uniform about the streets,
Austrian minor officials everywhere; and in new buildings, parks, and
boulevards, Austrian taste. For, after taking Bosnia, under the Treaty
of Berlin, in 1878, the Austrians, knowing well that their grabbing
policy was criticized, went to some pains to beautify the Bosnian
capital, with the object, it is commonly understood, of impressing
visitors—and perhaps also the inhabitants themselves—with the ‘benefits’
of Austrian rule—as though palaces, parks, pavements, and prostitutes
were sufficient compensation to the Serbs for the racial unity and
freedom which have been denied them, first by one nation, then by
another.“

“But,” some one broke in, “up to the time of the present war, didn’t the
Serbs have Serbia?”

“The present kingdom of Serbia proper was inhabited by Serbs,” returned
the other, “but the Serbia we know is only a small part of what was,
long ago, the Serbian Empire. Since the fall of the empire, in the
fourteenth century, it has been the great ambition of the Serbs to
become again a unified nation. Bosnia was a part of the old empire, but
was conquered by the Turks, and later taken over by the Austrians. The
story I am about to tell shows, however, what an enduring race
consciousness the Bosnian Serbs have maintained.

“Our district manager for Bosnia lived in the town of which I have been
speaking, and when I first went there he took me to a small but
particularly clean and attractive hotel, run by an Austrian Serb. As is
usual in small hotels in Europe, the proprietor’s family took part in
the work of running the place; and as I used to stay there frequently,
sometimes for two or three weeks at a stretch, I soon came to know them
all well. As the years passed I became really attached to them, and
there were many signs to show that they were fond of me. Michael, the
father, exercised general supervision—though he was not above carrying a
trunk upstairs; Stana, the mother, kept the accounts and superintended
the cooking, which was excellent; the two daughters worked in the
kitchen and sometimes helped wait on table. Even the boy, Gavrilo, the
youngest member of the family, helped after school with light work,
though he studied hard and was not very strong. I often sat with them at
their own family table at one end of the dining-room; I called them all
by their given names, and addressed them with the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ of
familiarity.

“When I first knew Gavrilo he was twelve or thirteen years old. His
father, though of pure Serb blood, had acquired, with years and
experience in business, a certain resignation to the existing order of
things. He had seen several wars and revolutions, and as he grew older
had begun to think that peace under Austrian domination was better than
continual conflict, whatever the cause.

“The boy Gavrilo was, however, more like Stana, his mother. Stana could
grow old, but the flame in her, the poetry, the mysticism, and above all
the Serbian racial feeling, never diminished. Gavrilo learned the
Serbian folk stories and songs at her knee; also he learned from her
Serbian history, which, under Austria, was not taught in the schools;
for the Austrians have long desired to crush out Serbian racial feeling.

“Gavrilo and I became great friends. He was hungry for knowledge and
never tired of asking me about the United States and our freedom, free
speech, and free opportunity—all of which, of course, seemed very
wonderful to one growing up in a decadent, bureaucratic empire, made up
of various races held together against their will. In return I gathered
from Gavrilo a considerable knowledge of Serb history and legend—and you
may be sure that in what he told me, neither the Turks nor the Austrians
came off very well. Even as a lad he always referred to the Austrians as
_shvaba_—a Serbian word meaning something like our term boches—and by
the time he was sixteen he had promoted them to be _proclete shvaba_,
which may be freely translated as ‘damned boches.’

“For a long time I took his strong anti-Austrian utterances lightly,
considering them the result of boyish ebullience of spirit, but as he
grew nearer manhood, and the fierceness of his feeling seemed to
increase rather than diminish, I became concerned about him; for it is
no wiser for an Austrian Serb to call the Austrians _shvaba_ than it
would be for an Alsatian to call the Prussians boches.

“As Gavrilo grew up, his passionate racial feeling disturbed me more and
more, though, of course, I sympathized with it. I determined to make an
opportunity for a serious talk with him on the subject, and to that end
suggested that he go with me to the neighboring hills for a couple of
days’ gunning; for Bosnia abounds in game.

“Gavrilo proved to be a very good shot. He would shoot wild pigeons,
grouse, and woodcock from the hip, and he even brought along a pistol
with which he could hit a hare at a considerable distance. These
exhibitions of skill were, however, accompanied by remarks which did not
make it easier for me to broach the topic upon which I wished to speak
to him. When he would hit a pigeon he would exclaim: ‘There goes another
member of the Hapsburg family!’ or: ‘That one was a _shvab_ tax
collector!’ or, mock-heroically, ‘So much for you, you nobleman of
brilliant plumage with a _von_ before your name. No more will the
peasants step out of the road and bow down before you!’

“‘Look here, Gavrilo,’ I said, when we sat to rest upon a fallen tree,
‘you are a Serb, and that is something to be proud of, but after all,
you are an Austrian subject, and your forefathers have been Austrian
subjects for a long time. You have your home here, so why not make the
best of a bad bargain, and be like the rest of the young fellows?’

“‘You think I am not like them?’ he replied. ‘That is only because you
do not know them as you know me. Every _momche_ who is a worthy
descendant of the race that fought to the death at Kossovo—the Field of
the Black Bird—is of the _comitajia_. We younger fellows are to be
_comitajia_ also. We have our meetings in the same _kafana_ where the
others meet to make their plans. When we are a little older they will
take us in and we shall all work together.’

“‘But what is this work you speak of?’

“‘Whatever it is,’ he returned, ‘you may be sure it is in the interest
of our race.’

“‘But you speak of _comitajia_,’ I said. ‘Has not that word more than
one significance? I know the military scouts with bombs are _comitajia_,
but are not revolutionists called by the same term?’

“Gavrilo showed his strong white teeth in one of those extraordinary
mischievous smiles which now and then illuminated his face. Instead of
giving me a direct answer he said:

“‘Dear friend, I am glad to perceive that your knowledge of our beloved
Serbian tongue becomes daily more accurate.’

“‘But, Gavrilo,’ I protested, refusing to be put off with a jest, ‘to be
concerned in a revolution would be the worst thing that could happen to
you.’

“‘No, not the worst thing. Worse than being a Serb and joining in a
revolution would be to be a Serb and fail to lift a hand in the struggle
for freedom.’

“‘Revolutions,’ I said, sententiously, ‘do not pay, Gavrilo.’

“‘But since when has that been so?’ he countered quickly. ‘There was,
for instance, the French Revolution. Did not that pay? And there was the
American Revolution. Surely that paid! And there was the revolution of
Serbia against the Turks. That is paying too.’ His luminous black eyes,
so like those of a wild deer, snapped as he spoke. Then his expression
changed quickly to one of amusement over my discomfiture, and he added
with a little laugh: ‘I have an American friend—a gentleman who manages
the business of a large oil company over here. He can tell you, as he
has me, of the benefits of the American Revolution and of American
freedom. I promise you that some day you shall meet him face to face—let
us say to-morrow morning when he is shaving.’

“It seemed to me that I had taken an unfortunate line with him there, so
I tried another.

“‘Well, then, let us put it on selfish grounds. There is no great reason
why you, personally, should be dissatisfied. You have good prospects in
your father’s business. The thing for you to do, in the natural course,
is to marry and settle down. And certainly a man who has a sweetheart
such as yours hasn’t any business in a _comitajia_; for such things lead
to prisons and executions, not to domesticity.’

“‘What makes you think I have a sweetheart?’ he demanded, flushing.

“‘Haven’t I seen Mara?’

“‘Well, what of it?’

“‘If you can resist Mara,’ I told him, ‘you have more strength than I
would give you credit for.’ And it was quite true; for Mara, who lived
next door to the hotel, was a beautiful young thing, and they were much
together.

“‘Mara is a flirt,’ said he.

“‘What matter,’ I returned, ‘so long as she flirts most with you?’

“‘But does she like me best?’ he mused. ‘There is this fellow in the
Government railways who comes as often as he can to see her. He has the
advantage of being a connection by marriage, and is very handsome.
Really too handsome for a man. I am glad he does not live here all the
time.’

“‘You have the advantage of living next door,’ I encouraged. ‘The one
thing that might interfere is this idea of yours about being one of the
_comitajia_.’

“‘Still,’ he protested, shaking his head doubtfully, ‘a man’s first duty
is not to the woman he loves, but to the race he loves, because both she
and he belong to it. You know our old song?’ And he sang there in the
woods:

    “‘Doucho, _my soul, I love thee second best;_
    _Thou art the dearest part of Serbia to me;_
    _But after all thou art but a part, even as I am a part;_
    _And it is Serbia, always Serbia, that together we love most!_’

“Though not altogether satisfied with our conversation, I felt that in
appealing to the boy’s love for Mara I had struck the right note, and I
hoped that as time went on he would think more about her than about the
_comitajia_. For, though one may be heartily in sympathy with
revolutionary ideas, especially in the case of an oppressed race, one
does not like to see a youth of whom one is really fond, heading toward
disaster, even in such a cause. Moreover, as I have said, Gavrilo was
not as solidly built as the average Serb, and I had the feeling that the
burning spirit in him—and I assure you it was more like a living flame
than anything I have seen in the nature of man or woman—must either be
kept under control or else destroy his body.

“Consequently I was much relieved to see, as I returned from time to
time, that the boy-and-girl romance between Gavrilo and Mara was
naturally and charmingly developing into something more mature. This led
me to hope the more that, as he turned from a youth into a man, Gavrilo
would shed some of the violence of his revolutionary aspirations, and
from the indications I judged that such a thing was indeed coming to
pass. In order more fully to reassure myself, I more than once took
occasion to lead conversations with him into such channels that, should
he desire to do so, he could speak to me of the _comitajia_; but he
always let the openings pass, seeming eager, now, to speak only of the
lovely Mara.

“When, in the summer of 1913, I arrived for one of my periodical visits,
Gavrilo came rushing to my room, and seizing both my hands told me that
he and Mara were now betrothed. He was then eighteen and she
seventeen—for you understand, of course, that these dark South Europeans
develop younger than our people do. Both families were pleased, and I
felt that the dangers I had feared for Gavrilo were past, and was duly
thankful. I went out and bought a necklace for Mara, and when I gave it
to her, she and Gavrilo made me clasp it around her neck, and he said to
her, very seriously: ‘Yes, and our dear friend shall be the godfather of
our first child. Is it not so, Maro _doucho_?’ And Mara, taking me by
the hand, told me it was quite true, and that she was going to love me
as much as Gavrilo loved me, and that, moreover, they were going to have
hundreds of children, and that every one of the children should love me
too. It was all indescribably naïve and pretty until Gavrilo
unfortunately added: ‘Yes, our children will love you, and they will
love us, but most of all they will love the idea of a free Serb race.’

“At that a cloud passed over Mara’s face.

“‘Oh, Gavrilo!’ she cried impatiently, ‘shall we never hear of anything
but the Serb race? Is there nothing else in the world? Must that come
before your thought of your friend, here’—indicating me—‘before your
thought of me, of the children we hope to have, of everything? Must you
have Serbian freedom on your bread in place of cheese, and in your glass
in place of wine? Sometimes I think your eyes shine more brightly when
you speak of our race than when you call me _doucho_—my soul. I ask
myself, is it indeed the soul of Mara that he loves, or is it the soul
of the race?’

“‘Mara, my dear child,’ I put in, ‘I believe you are jealous.’

“‘Of whom, pray?’ she demanded, turning upon me and flinging her head
back proudly.

“‘Not of an individual,’ I answered, ‘but of a people.’

“‘Perhaps it is true,’ she returned with a shrug. ‘Well, what of it?’

“‘Only this: that a woman with nothing more concrete than a whole race
to be jealous of is in no very sad plight.’

“‘But I tell you I demand to be loved for myself!’ Mara flashed back.

“Gavrilo sighed deeply, as though at the hopelessness of making her
understand his point of view. Then, mournfully, he hummed:

    “‘_Thou art the dearest part of Serbia to me;_
    _But after all thou art but a part, even as I am a part;_
    _And it is Serbia, always Serbia—_’

“But Mara would not let him finish.

“‘Enough!’ she cried. ‘I detest that song! You know how I detest it!’

“Gavrilo looked at me and shook his head. ‘Oh, these women!’ he
exclaimed. ‘What they do to one!’

“Then, gazing reflectively at Mara, he added in the tone of one
attempting to be philosophical: ‘Well, when a little female looks as
angelic as my Mara, naturally we expect her to think like an angel too.’

“At this Mara’s anger departed as quickly as it had come. ‘There!’ she
exclaimed, flinging her arms about his neck and kissing him upon both
cheeks, ‘there spoke my own dear Gavrilo! Poor Gavrilo! What have I been
saying? You know I love the Serbs no less than you do! You do know it,
don’t you? Well, then, say so!’

“‘God forbid that I should believe otherwise!’ answered Gavrilo, kissing
her in return.

“As I left them I thought to myself that with Mara’s temperament, to say
nothing of the ‘hundreds of children’ she promised him, Gavrilo’s
married life would not prove monotonous, whatever else it might be.
When, in the course of the subsequent fall and winter, I saw them again,
they seemed as happy as a pair of wild birds.

“Once, in the spring, when I was with them, the _comitajia_ chanced in
some way to be mentioned, whereupon Mara at once darkened, saying to me:

“‘That is my one sorrow.’

“‘But why should it be?’ Gavrilo asked her. ‘Have I not plighted you my
word that I shall not take part in any—well, in any indiscretions that
may be proposed?’

“‘Yes, I have not forgotten. You said that as long as I loved you you
would be my good Gavrilo.’

“‘So,’ he returned gaily, ‘all you need do is to continue to adore me as
I deserve.’

“‘But you meet with them at the _kafana_,’ she said, uneasily.

“‘They are my friends,’ he answered. ‘Naturally, then, I meet with them.
All men meet at the _kafana_. It is the way of men. A little wine or
coffee or prune brandy and a little talk—that is all. I go also to
church, but that does not make me a priest. And besides, dearest Maro,
if I were not sometimes with the _momchidia_, how would I know the joy
of returning to you?’

“‘If the devil had your tongue,’ laughed Mara, ‘he could talk all the
saints out of heaven!’

“So it always was with Mara. Her ideas came and went—as Gavrilo once put
it to me—like humming birds flitting in and out amongst the flowers.
Never have I seen a human being turn from gay to grave, and back again,
as rapidly as she.

“Arriving at the little hotel in the early part of June, 1914, I found
them all full of plans for a great fête to be celebrated on
Vidov-dan—Kossovo Day—June 28. This day might be called the Serbian
Fourth of July, but it partakes also of the character of our Memorial
Day, for it is the anniversary of that tragic event in Serbian history,
the Battle of Kossovo, in which the Turks defeated the Serbs in 1389,
leaving the entire Serbian nobility dead upon the field. That is one
reason why Serbia has no nobles to-day. ‘Kossovo’ means ‘the field of
the black bird,’ the _kos_ being a black songbird resembling the
starling. But this was to be no ordinary celebration of the holiday, for
in the Balkan War of the two preceding years Serbia had consummated her
independence and humbled the Turks, and a part of the Serbian racial
dream was thereby realized. Mara, Gavrilo, and their parents united in
urging me to return for the festival, and before departing I agreed to
do so.

“True to my word, I arrived several days ahead of time. Gavrilo had not
returned from the academy when I reached the hotel, but Michael and
Stana gave me a warm welcome and produced the costumes they were
intending to wear, and I remember that Stana said I ought to have a
costume too—that even though I had not been so fortunate as to be born a
Serb, they proposed to adopt me.

“‘But you should see Mara’s costume!’ she exclaimed, when I admired
hers. ‘It is a true Serbian dress, very old, which came to her from her
great-grandmother. Such beautiful embroidery you never saw.’

“That made a good excuse for me to go and see Mara, whom I found sewing
in the little garden behind the house. The costume, which she showed me,
was indeed beautiful, and I admired it in terms which were, I hope,
sufficiently extravagant to please even a girl as exacting as she.

“While talking with her I observed a bird cage hanging on a hook by the
window and, never having noticed it before, asked if she had a new bird.

“In reply she merely nodded, without looking up from her work.

“I strolled over and looked at the bird.

“‘Why,’ I said, ‘this bird appears to be a _kos_, Maro.’ Probably there
was a note of surprise in my voice, for the _kos_ is not supposed to
live in captivity.

“Mara looked up sharply.

“‘Are you visiting blame upon me, then?’ she asked.

“‘Not at all,’ I answered, mystified at her tone. ‘I did not know that
the _kos_ could be tamed; that is all.’

“‘Did Gavrilo tell you to speak to me about this?’ she demanded.

“‘Certainly not,’ I answered. ‘I have not seen Gavrilo yet.’ Then,
crossing to where she sat, and looking down at her, I asked: ‘What is
the matter, Maro? How have I offended you?’

“Her eyes filled with tears as she looked up at me.

“‘You have not offended me, dear friend,’ she said. ‘It is only that I
am made miserable by this subject. My relative who is employed in the
railway caught this bird a few days since, placed it in a cage, and
presented it to me. And if he is a handsome young fellow, am I to be
censured for that? I am not his mother nor yet his father; I did not
make him handsome! And even so, what is a little bird, to make words and
black looks over?’

“‘You mean that Gavrilo is annoyed?’

“‘Since this bird came,’ she returned, ‘I have heard of nothing else. He
begs me to let it go. He insists that it will die. He says the man who
gave it me is cruel and that I am cruel too.’

“‘Then why not release it?’ I suggested. ‘It is dying in the cage,
Maro.’

“‘Let it die, then!’ she cried, and burst into a flood of tears.

“‘Now, Maro,’ I urged when the paroxysm had abated, ‘what is all this
about?’

“‘Well,’ she gulped, wiping her eyes, ‘a girl must have a little
character, must she not? She must make up her own mind occasionally
about some little thing! Is not that true? Is the man she loves to tell
her when to draw in her breath and when to let it go again? Is he to
tell her when to wink her eyes? Is she to cease to think and do only as
he thinks? Here came this young man—with the miserable bird. I desired
it not. Then came Gavrilo, black and angry like a storm out of the
mountains, ordering me to let the bird go. I wished to do as Gavrilo
said, but as my relative had caught it and given it to me I felt I
should first speak to him. Besides, he is older and knows a great deal,
being in the Government railroads. And what did he say? “Maro,” he said,
“you do as you wish. If you wish to be a little fool, humor this boy. He
is spoiled. He has everything as he desires it. They say you are to
marry him. Very well. But if you think always with his mind, and hold no
ideas of your own, I tell you you will make a wife no better than one of
those stupid Turkish women....” That is why I determined to retain the
bird. There is a _kos_ in every second tree. Well, then, is it not
better that this one die than that my soul shall wither? Why should I be
called Mara if I shall no longer be a separate being, but only Gavrilo
in another body?’

“As she finished, we heard Gavrilo calling her name from the street, and
a moment later he came in through the garden gate.

“I saw at once that he was agitated.

“‘So you have come!’ he cried, seizing my hands. ‘But, alas, my friend,
it is in vain. You have heard the evil tidings?’

“‘You mean about—?’ I had almost said ‘about the bird,’ but fortunately
he interrupted, exclaiming:

“‘Yes, about the festival.’

“‘What tidings?’ demanded Mara.

“Gavrilo threw his arms above his head in a gesture of helpless fury.

“‘Those _proclete shvaba_!’ he burst out. ‘They issued an edict only an
hour ago, forbidding entirely our festival of Vidov-dan!’

“‘No!’ cried Mara, dismayed, half rising from her seat.

“‘Yes. There shall be no celebration—not for the Serbs. Nothing!
Attempts to commemorate the anniversary will result in arrest. It is
announced that in place of our festival there will upon that day be
extensive maneuvers of the Austrian army and that Grand Headquarters
will be here in our city. We are given to understand that the Archduke
himself will come and hold the review. Could anything be devised more to
insult us upon our national holiday? Oh, of what vile tricks are not
these accursed _shvaba_ capable?’

“‘I am surprised,’ I said, ‘that the Archduke would be party to a thing
of this kind, for it is understood that he is pro-Serb. Certainly his
wife is a Slav.’

“‘The more shame to her, then, for marrying him,’ said Gavrilo, with a
shrug. ‘He is the spawn, of an autocrat who is in turn the spawn of
generations of autocrats. Scratch them and they are all the same. They
play the game of empire—the dirty game of holding together, against
their will, the people of seven races in Austria-Hungary; grinding them
down, humiliating them, keeping them afraid. No man, no group of men,
should have such power! It is medieval, grotesque, wicked!’

“‘More than that,’ put in Mara, ‘it is unwise. They take a poor way to
gain favor with us Serbs. For my part, I do not think it safe for the
Archduke to come here.’

“‘And there, my _mila_,’ he declared, with a shrewd, sinister smile,
‘your judgment is perhaps better than even you yourself suppose. Myself,
I doubt he will be fool enough to come. At the last we shall be
informed, with a grand flourish, that he is ‘indisposed.’ Not sick, you
understand. Royalties are never sick. It is not etiquette. Peasants are
sick. The middle-classes are ill. The great are only indisposed.
Anything else is vulgar. Well, I hope he will know enough to stay away.
Otherwise he may indeed become indisposed after his arrival.’

“‘What do you mean, Gavrilo?’ I asked.

“‘That the air of this place is not good for Austrian royalties just
now,’ he said. ‘It is Serbian air. There are the germs of freedom in it,
and such germs are more dangerous to autocrats than those of
_kuga_,—cholera.’

“‘Be frank,’ I urged. ‘Do you mean that the Archduke’s life is
threatened?’

“‘It is known,’ he replied, ‘that the governor has received warning
letters. The Archduke is advised not to appear here on our holiday. One
understands, moreover, that the Austrian secret police concur in this
advice. Which shows that the filthy beasts are not so stupid as they
might be.’

“‘Assure me, Gavrilo,’ Mara broke in, ‘that your _comitajia_ has nought
to do with this threat!’

“‘Long ago,’ he answered ‘I promised you that while you love me I will
not actively participate in anything violent. You may be sure, Maro,
_mila_, that I shall keep my word.’

“‘You keep your word always,’ she replied, ‘but these threats disturb me
and I gain comfort from your reassurances.’

“Gavrilo walked slowly over and looked into the bird cage.

“‘You are certain, then, that you do requite my affection?’ he asked her
over his shoulder.

“‘You are well aware,’ she said, ‘that I worship you.’

“‘Would that I were as well aware of it,’ he returned, ‘as that I am
nothing to be worshiped.’ Then after a pause he added: ‘If you do love
me, why not release this poor bird? See how wretchedly it huddles. Its
eyes are becoming dull. It will surely die. How can we Serbs talk of
freedom for ourselves, yet hold this wild creature prisoner? And of all
birds, a _kos_—the bird of Kossovo! Permit me to open the door of the
cage, Maro. Let us celebrate the Serbian holiday by liberating the poor
_kos_. _Shvabe_ cannot prevent that, with all their edicts.’

“Mara looked black.

“‘The holiday is not yet here!’ said she.

“‘When the day comes,’ he answered, ‘the _kos_ will be dead.’

“‘I wish it were already dead!’ she exclaimed petulantly. ‘I wish I had
never seen the accursed thing. It has brought me only sorrow!’

“‘Then,’ I interjected, ‘why not let it fly away?’

“‘I have told you both,’ she answered angrily. ‘This means more to me
than the life or death of a bird. It is a symbol. I have the feeling
that if it were to fly away all my will power would fly with it.’

“‘And to me also,’ returned the boy solemnly, ‘this means more than the
life or death of a bird. And likewise to me the _kos_ is a symbol. It
should be so to every Serb. Think of Kossovo! This is a bird linked with
our racial aspirations. If we free this one, we may, perhaps, ourselves
deserve freedom. Otherwise, what do we deserve? Do we merit more than we
ourselves give?’

“Having witnessed Mara’s agitation when she first told me of their
differences over the bird, I would now have stopped Gavrilo could I have
signaled him, but he was engaged in putting some green leaves through
the door of the cage. As he finished speaking, Mara rose, dropped her
sewing upon the ground, and bursting into tears ran into the house.

“‘Maro, _mila_!’ Gavrilo cried, attempting to catch her; but the door
slammed in his face.

“He was white as he turned to me. ‘Tell me,’ he cried in a tone
childlike and baffled, ‘can anyone understand the ways of woman? As men
grow older do they understand better, or is it always like this?’

“Deeply concerned about them as I was, the naïveté of this question
forced a smile from me.

“‘You must ask some man older than I,’ I answered.

“‘Perhaps we are not intended to understand them,’ he said reflectively.
‘No doubt the Lord made them as they are so that we should forever be
enthralled by them, as by any other enigma beyond comprehension. I enjoy
lying on my back at night, to gaze up at the stars and think profoundly
of eternity whirling about us, and the infinity of space, but I assure
you, when my lovely Mara becomes agitated those phenomena of nature
seem, by contrast, trifling matters. I believe that if one could but
understand Mara, one could understand the riddles of the ages.’

“I left Gavrilo in the garden. At dinner that night he was not with us.
I did not see him again until next evening, when I came upon him
whispering with three young men upon the stairs. As I passed them they
became silent, nor did I like the nervous smile with which Gavrilo
greeted me. On the day following I saw him go into a _kafana_ with the
same youths. I think he also saw me, and from the haste with which he
moved into the little café I gathered the impression that he was
avoiding me.

“On the day before the maneuvers I cornered him after luncheon. Clearly
he was keyed to a highly nervous tension.

“‘Gavrilo,’ I said, ‘do not tell me anything you do not wish to. I have
no desire to pry into your affairs. But I beg you to remember Mara and
your promise to her, and not to become entangled in any rash escapade.’

“For a moment he stood looking at me without answering. It was as though
he was carefully formulating a reply. Then he said:

“‘I _have_ remembered. I have positively refused to participate in
certain matters in which I have been pressed to become active. At this
moment that is all that I am enabled to say.’

“‘It is all I desire to know,’ I said. ‘Tell me, what of Mara?’

“‘All is well between us,’ he returned, ‘so long as one mentions not the
bird.’

“Later I found them together in the garden. Mara was, as usual, sewing.
While I sat and talked with her, Gavrilo started picking fresh leaves to
put into the bird cage. Mara, who had been telling me how, upon the
morrow, the Serbs were to leave their shutters closed all day, so that
they should not see the Austrians, ceased to speak as Gavrilo began
gathering the leaves, and watched him narrowly for a moment.

“‘Gavrilo,’ she said, ‘please put no more leaves into the cage.’

“‘Why not?’

“‘Because it is not well for him. He has been pecking at the leaves and
I think they poison him.’

“‘No,’ said Gavrilo.

“‘Yes,’ she insisted. ‘He appears miserable to-day.’

“‘But naturally!’ returned the youth. ‘That is not new. He is dying. See
how he is huddled with closed eyes in the corner of the cage.’ As he
spoke he plucked another leaf.

“Mara’s expression became ominous.

“‘If he should die,’ she said in a quavering voice, ‘it will be because
of the leaves which you have given him!’

“‘Impossible,’ Gavrilo replied. ‘Does not a bird live among the leaves?’

“‘I tell you,’ she exclaimed, ‘I have asked the old bird man about it.
He says some leaves are good and some are not. He is coming this evening
to see the _kos_ and give it medicine in its water.’

“I was relieved when Gavrilo pressed the point no farther but dropped
the fresh leaves on the ground. Feeling that a situation had been
narrowly averted, I thought best to leave them together.

“That evening, as I was walking toward the hotel from the square at the
center of the town, I saw him coming out of the _kafana_ with several of
the youths I had come to recognize as his friends. He joined me and we
walked along together. At Mara’s garden gate he halted, saying: ‘Let us
enter and see the poor bird.’

“‘No, Gavrilo,’ I said warningly. ‘It is not the bird we go to see, but
Mara.’

“‘So be it,’ he replied. ‘Let us then visit Mara.’

“Mara was not in the garden. Gavrilo called her name. She answered from
the house, and a moment later came out to meet us.

“As she emerged I saw her glance at the bird cage. Then she gave a
startled cry.

“‘Look!’ she wailed. ‘The _kos_ is dead!’

“It was true; there lay the bird upon its back among the dry leaves at
the bottom of the cage.

“For a time we stood in silence, regarding it through the bars. I knew
that Gavrilo and Mara were filled with emotion, and for my own part I
was surprised to discover how much the death of the bird seemed to mean
to me. When, a day or two before, they had spoken of symbolism in
connection with the _kos_, I knew what they meant, but did not feel it:
yet now I felt it strongly, as though I myself were a Serb, with a
Serb’s vision and superstition. It was not a dead bird that I saw, but a
climax in a parable—a story of scriptural flavor, fraught with uncanny
meaning.

“Gavrilo was the first to speak.

“‘Poor _kos_!’ he said in a low, tragic tone. ‘It is free at last. It
was written that it should not be captive when to-morrow dawns.’

“‘What do you mean?’ demanded Mara.

“‘I told you it was destined to die unless you let it go,’ he answered
gently.

“‘And as I would not let it go,’ she retorted, ‘you desired that it
should die, in accordance with your prophecy! Yes, that is it! You made
it die! You placed the leaves of henbane in its cage and killed it!’

“‘You are excited, Maro,’ he returned. ‘You must know that I desired the
poor bird to live. Let us dig a little grave here in the garden and bury
it, and cease to speak of it until we are calmer. We are
overwrought—both of us—because of the bitterness of to-morrow. Where is
the spade?’

“‘Do not touch the _kos_!’ she commanded: ‘It shall not be buried yet.’

“‘Why not?’ I interposed. ‘It will be better for us all.’

“‘The old bird man comes this evening,’ Mara flung back. ‘He will look
at the bird and know that Gavrilo has poisoned it with henbane.’

“‘But, Maro,’ I returned, ‘Gavrilo has said that he did not. You know
that he is truthful.’

“‘His words mean nothing!’ she cried. ‘Am I not a Serb? Do I not read
the meanings in events? Gavrilo lies. Gavrilo killed the _kos_. He is a
murderer. I hate him!’

“‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘You give me the truth at last!’

“‘Yes, the truth!’

“‘So much the better that I know in time!’ cried Gavrilo, and without
another word he ran frantically from the garden.

“As for Mara, she seemed almost on the brink of madness. I do not know
how long I remained there trying to reason with her, calm her, make her
see the folly and danger of what she had done. By the time her passion
had abated the late June twilight had settled over the town. Presently I
heard the garden gate open, and a moment later a venerable Serb
appeared.

“‘Wait!’ Mara said to me. ‘Now you shall learn that I was right!’

“Then, to the old man, she said: ‘You are too late to cure my bird, but
you are not too late to tell me from what cause came its death. Look at
this leaf that was placed in its cage. Is not that the henbane?’

“The old man took the leaf, inspected it, and shook his head.

“‘No,’ said he. ‘Let me see the bird.’

“‘It lies there in the cage.’

“He opened the cage door and, reaching in, removed the little body.

“‘Ah,’ he said, ‘a _kos_. Do you not know, my child, that birds of this
species cannot long survive captivity?’

“Mara hung her head.

“‘I have heard it said,’ she answered in a low voice.

“‘To imprison wild birds is cruel,’ remarked the old bird man. ‘These
birds, in particular, are the Serbs of the air. They are descended from
birds that saw the field of Kossovo. They desire only to be free.’ Then,
as Mara did not reply, he said: ‘Bring a light.’

“She went into the house and emerged with a lamp, placing it upon a
table near the door. The old bird man sat down beside the table and,
holding the bird near the light, brushed back the soft plumage of its
breast, much in the manner of peasant mothers whom one sees,
occasionally, searching with unpleasant suggestiveness in their
children’s hair.

“‘Look,’ he said, ‘the bird would have died of these, even had it
survived captivity. It is covered with animalculæ. In a cage it could
not rid itself of them as nature enables free creatures to do.’

“Looking at the bird’s breast, Mara and I could see the deadly vermin.

“‘Give me a spade,’ said the old man. ‘I will inter the bird here in the
garden.’

“Mara indicated a spade leaning against the wall. Then, turning with
beseeching eyes to me, she seized both my hands, and said in a low,
intense voice:

“‘Go, I pray you, and find Gavrilo! Tell him that I implore his
forgiveness. Say that I love him better than all the world and ask only
that he come to me at once.’

“I went directly to the hotel and to Gavrilo’s room. He was not there.
No one about the place had seen him. I then went to the _kafana_ which I
knew he patronized, but the proprietor declared that he knew nothing of
his whereabouts. Through the remainder of the evening I diligently
searched the town, going to the houses of all his friends, but nowhere
could I find a trace of him. Obliged at last to acknowledge myself
defeated, I returned to the hotel. Several times during the night I
arose and stole to his room, but daylight came without his putting in an
appearance. Early in the morning I went again to the _kafana_, but
though I learned there that the Archduke had arrived the night before
with his wife and his suite, and was housed at the governor’s palace, I
got no word of the missing boy. Wherefore, after breakfast, it became my
unpleasant duty to go to Mara, inform her of my failure, and comfort her
as best I might.

“She looked ill and terrified. I wished that she would weep.

“Thinking perhaps to find him in the central square of the town before
the Archduke, the governor, and the other officials set out for the
review, I was moving in that direction when there came to my ears the
dull sound of an explosion. Continuing on my way, I encountered as I
rounded the next corner a scattering crowd of men, women, and children,
running toward me, in the street.

“I asked two or three of them what had happened, but they ran on without
reply. Presently, among them, I saw one of the youths with whom I had
several times seen Gavrilo, and him I seized by the coat, demanding
information.

“‘Let me go!’ he cried. ‘Some one threw a bomb into the Archduke’s
carriage! They are arresting everyone. Get away!’ And he tugged
violently to escape my hold.

“‘Have you seen Gavrilo?’

“‘Not to-day.’

“‘Is the Archduke dead?’

“‘No. He warded off the bomb and it exploded beneath the carriage which
followed. For God’s sake, release me!’

“I did so, and walked on toward the square. Halfway down the block I met
some Austrian police. After questioning me briefly they let me go,
whereafter I questioned them. The horses drawing the second carriage had
been killed, they said, and some officers of the archducal suite
injured. The Archduke, however, insisted upon continuing to the review
and would presently pass. They advised me to return to my hotel.

“I had hardly reached my room when I heard a bugle and the clatter of
hoofs outside. Going to the window, I saw mounted men of the Royal
Austrian Guard advancing around the corner. Behind them, between double
rows of cavalry, came several landaus, carrying outriders, and driven by
coachmen in white wigs and knee breeches. As the first of these vehicles
came nearer, I saw that the occupants of the back seat were Francis
Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, heir apparent to the throne of
Austria-Hungary, and his morganatic wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg.

“The shutters of most of the houses were closed, but in a few windows I
saw faces, and there were scattered knots of people on the sidewalks,
closely watched by the policemen who rode ahead on horses and bicycles.
As the archducal carriage came along, hats were raised, and once or
twice I heard faint cheering, which the Archduke and his consort
acknowledged, he by touching the visor of his helmet, she by inclining
her head.

“As their carriage came below my window and I saw the expression of
condescending good will frozen on both their faces, and thought of the
constant apprehension there must be behind those polite masks, it struck
me as amazing that a man and woman could be found, in these times, to
play the royal part.

“As I was thinking thus I saw a dark-clad figure dart out suddenly from
somewhere on the sidewalk, below, pass swiftly between the horses of the
bodyguard, and reach the side of the royal carriage. Some of the
guardsmen leaped at once from their horses and there was a dash of
policemen toward the man, but before anyone laid hands upon him he
raised one arm, as though pointing accusingly at the Archduke and his
Countess, and there followed, in swift succession, two sharp reports.

“I saw the royal pair fall forward. Simultaneously the carriage stopped
and was at once surrounded by an agitated group of soldiers, policemen,
and servants; while another and more violent group pressed about the
individual who had fired the shots, beating him as they swept him away
down the street. Before they had gone a dozen yards, however, a high
official, who had jumped out of the second carriage, ran up and directed
them to take the man to the sidewalk. This brought the crowd in my
direction, and it was only as they turned toward me that I caught a
glimpse of the face of their prisoner. As I had dreaded, it was poor
Gavrilo.”

                                  ――――

For a moment all of us were too thunderstruck to speak. Somehow the
picture he had given us did not seem to be that of an assassin, as one
imagines such a man.

“You mean to say,” asked the man by the window slowly, “that this very
boy you’ve been telling us about was the one who shot the Archduke?”

“Yes,” said the other, “he was Gavrilo Prinzip of Sarajevo.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed the third. “The boy who brought on the war!”

“As we were saying earlier,” returned the one who had told the tale,
“historians will doubtless trace the beginnings of the war to Gavrilo’s
shot. Certainly Austria used the shot as her excuse, alleging that a
plot to kill the Archduke had been hatched in Serbia—which was
absolutely untrue, for Serbia was afraid of nothing so much as of giving
offense to Austria, knowing well that Austria was only seeking a pretext
to pounce upon her, precisely as she had earlier pounced upon Bosnia and
Herzegovina, annexing them.”

After a thoughtful pause he added: “Poor Gavrilo! I am glad to know that
he is free at last. Like Mara’s starling, he was not one to live long in
a cage. And it is perhaps because I was so fond of him, and also because
Austria’s excuse was so transparently despicable, that I shall always go
behind the shooting in thinking of the beginning of the war. As I
conceive it, it was Mara’s anger that released Gavrilo from the promise
which, otherwise, would have withheld him. And it was the death of the
caged starling that brought on her anger. And it was the animalculæ that
caused the bird’s death.”

“That is,” put in the man by the window, “you prefer to trace the war
down to such a small beginning as the death of that caged bird?”

“Rather,” replied the other, “to a still smaller and more repulsive
beginning—to the vermin which destroyed the bird. It seems to me I see
them always crawling through the explanations, apologies, excuses, war
messages, and peace overtures of the Teutonic autocrats.”



                               AT ISHAM’S


_By_ EDWARD C. VENABLE
From _Scribner’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons._
_Copyright, 1919, by Edward C. Venable._

It was a place where men went who liked to talk of curious things. It
was not, of course, advertised as that; there was no sign to the public
saying as much. Indeed, the only sign of any sort said “Wines, Ales, and
Liquors,” just below the name “Isham.” But, nevertheless, that is what
it distinctively was—a place where men went who liked to talk of curious
things.

It was a curious place to look at, too, in a way—the wrong way. It was a
three-story house among houses fifteen, twenty, and thirty stories high;
it was a house sixty years old, living usefully among houses, most of
which were scarcely as many months old. But sixty years is no great age
for a house in most places, and three stories is not out of the common.
It is thirty stories that are extraordinary. In the right way Isham’s
was a very ordinary place to look at, in very curious surroundings—only
it took a moment’s thought to find it out.

Old Isham himself, though, would have been curious anywhere in the
world. He was seventy years old, and he looked precocious. Perhaps
having lived so long in an atmosphere of “wild surmise” had robbed him
of the gift of wonderment, the last light of infancy to go out in the
world, and so he was absolutely grown up. That is what he was,
absolutely grown up. Looking into his face you could not imagine his
ever being surprised, quite without a previous experience of the
present. As one of his customers said, he could take the gayest
dinner-party that ever was, and with a single glance of his faded blue
eyes reduce it to a pile of dirty dishes and the bill. He was saturated
with the gayety of thirty thousand dinners. He never condescended to the
vulgarity of a dress suit, but always wore plain black with immaculate
linen. So he would move in the evening, ponderously—for he must have
weighed two hundred pounds—among the tables, listening imperturbably to
praise and blame. Yes, chops were almost always properly broiled, beer
had been flat from the beginning of the world—Lucullus with a dash of
Cato.

Twinkle Sampson was his oldest patron. He was as old as Isham, and had
been dining there once or twice a week ever since he was thirty; but he
was the antithesis of Isham in appearance. He had the face of a very
young child; it was all wonderment. The whole world was for him a wild
surmise. His hobby was astronomy. He liked, as he said, to talk about
the moon. Any of the heavenly bodies would interest him, but the moon
was his own peculiar sphere. His knowledge was for the most laboriously
gleaned, unassisted, from books; but twice in his life he had looked at
the moon through a great telescope, and those two occasions were to
Twinkle Sampson what one wedding and one funeral are to most men. He
looked like a moon-lover, too, a pale, weak reflection of masculinity.
The nearest he ever got to anger was when some ignorant person at
Isham’s threatened to divert the talk from his hobby when once he had
dragged it thither.

“I know a man—,” began one of these imprudently on one occasion.

“We don’t care if you know a million men,” interrupted Twinkle. “We want
to talk about the moon.”

And he sat for five minutes thereafter, blinking at the interloper like
an exasperated white-haired owl. Even in that outburst, though, he
characteristically took refuge in the plural.

Such little “flare-ups” were very, very frequent at Isham’s. Indeed,
they were inevitable, because there people talked of what they had
thought about. It is the talk for talk’s sake that is only a string of
wearying agreements; the drunkard over a bar, a débutante at a
dinner-table, a statesman among his constituents. Talk at Isham’s was
intelligently sharp, interrupted, disputative. And, in any case, Savelle
would have made it so. He was eaten up by the zeal of his cause, which
was Christianity and capitalism. Capitalism, he preached, was founded on
Christianity, was a development and an inevitable development of the
social implication of the Gospels. It was a curious plea; it had the
power of exasperating human beings otherwise kindly and meditative, such
as chiefly affected Isham’s, to something like fury when Savelle
eloquently expounded it. He called it Christian economics. He argued
that just as Christianity was developing the social relations of human
beings to one of pure love, so it was developing also their economical
relations to one of pure trust. The two developments had gone on side by
side throughout the Christian era, from the days when merchants hauled
ponderous “talents of silver” about with them in their trading, until
now, when one could control all the wealth of the world by the tapping
of a telegraph key. And not only was their growth thus synchronous, but
each was the exactest exponent of the other; it was only in Christian
countries, he explained, that the capitalistic system was to be found at
all, and in the quasi-heathen it was invariably established in exact
proportion with the spread of Christian ethics. He was full, too, of
frequent instances and recondite dates, such as the invention of the
bill of exchange by the Hebrews, and the advice of Jesus to his Apostles
anent carrying money about with them. There were only two crimes in
Christian economics, just as in the ethics; dishonesty, which he claimed
was the commercial form of the sin against the Holy Ghost, and
bankruptcy, or the refusal of trust, which was simply a denial of the
economic implication of the teaching of love one another. Socialism, of
course, was merely a new, subtle sacrilege, and Marx the newest
incarnation of anti-Christ. His faith or fanaticism would always burn
its fiercest in talking of these specific instances. Twinkle Sampson
would sit blinking astigmatically at him for an hour in silence when he
preached so. He was the only man of them all whom Twinkle Sampson never
interrupted, never tried to drag away to the moon.

It was only an occasional horrified Christian or exasperated Socialist
who ever diverted him, and then he would descend to embittering
personalities with disconcerting quickness. He was of French descent,
Gascon, a tall, fair, pale man, and had the racial instinct for combat.
In the daytime he was the Wall Street reporter for one of the evening
dailies, and people who knew him down there said he went about his work
in that district like a pious pilgrim in Judea. But what you did
daytimes never mattered at Isham’s. It was what you could say evenings
after dinner, in the back of the dining-room beside the bar, that
counted, and there Savelle, next to Twinkle, was the best listened-to
man in Isham’s.

And, measured by that scale, little Norvel was his farthest neighbor. He
was the least listened-to man, because he rarely spoke, and the best
listener. Indeed, he was the only genuine listener. The others listened
only under _force majeure_. He, on the contrary, would dine sparely, for
he was very poor, apparently, and sit smoking all evening until ten
o’clock, and go away without ever speaking to any one, except the waiter
who served, and a “Good evening” and “Good night” to Mr. Isham himself.
His prestige was due solely to one effort. He had propounded a query
which Isham’s had discussed more than any other ever raised there, more
than Twinkle’s lunar hypotheses, or Savelle’s Christian economics, and
which had never been settled. It was the one common topic among them.
Other subjects owed their existence and prosperity to the protection and
loyalty of one man, but little Norvel, having put his afoot, retired
into silence and cigar smoke, and left its life to the care of others.
He had injected the conundrum into a conversation of Twinkle Sampson’s
about the inhabitants of Mars, in whose existence Twinkle Sampson not
only believed, but took a far deeper interest than in those of his
fellow earthmen.

“If,” little Norvel began, “if Mars is inhabited by a race so similar to
ourselves—if—”

“Well, well, Mr. Norvel,” Twinkle Sampson interrupted, “that is fairly
well conceded, I think. If—what?”

“If,” continued little Norvel tranquilly, “if it is so, what means of
communication between us is there that is so unmistakably of _human
origin_ that a sight of it, or a sound from it, would immediately
convince them of our relationship?”

It had seemed, when the quiet little man first spoke, as if it was a
question easily brushed aside; but a little discussion, genuine Ishamic,
soon proved it to have greater weight. Norvel sat aside, contributing
nothing then or ever thereafter. Indeed, the only result the question
had, or seemed to have, for him was the winning by it of the deep
affection of Twinkle Sampson.

The early discussion of the matter eliminated all possibilities of the
sense of hearing. That one of the five senses had to be discarded from
the possibilities of communication. There is no sound which humanity can
create which nature, in some other form, cannot perfectly imitate.
Except laughter? That suggestion was Savelle’s. But it was not
successful, though he defended himself with his own peculiar fervor. It
appealed to the intense emotionalism of the man, that idea of the
ultimate expression of humanity being laughter. He took up its defense
as recklessly as his school of economics, and with something of the same
breadth of vision and indefinite reasoning. Laughter was, he claimed,
beyond the narrow limits of the question discussed, that very thing, the
ultimate expression of humanity. Man was distinctively not, as he has
been defined, the unfeathered biped, not the tool-using animal; he was
the animal who laughs, and in proof he instanced the great poet. When he
wished to imbue men with his own immense pessimism that the wrath of the
Zeus was not the mysterious working of nature but the malignity of men,
he made that terrible phrase, the most terrible ever spoken, “The
laughter of the gods.”

“Think of it yourselves,” he demanded. “Put it into your own words. The
laughter of God!” He was standing up then in the heat of his pleading.
“What that’s divine is left then? He can only be a man, a fearful
superman.”

But they beat down the orator with instances of gurgling brooks and
hyenas. He strove Homerically with his attackers, thundering his defense
of his vision until old Isham had to come up to the table and look at
them all with his faded blue eyes and precocious face of seventy years.
But though he failed of conviction his argument did just what he said;
it put the question outside the “narrow limits” Norvel had laid it in.
Savelle always did that with every question. After he had spoken the
phrase they all remembered was his—the ultimate expression of humanity.
It was by such phrases, such ideas, Isham’s lived, as a place to which
talk-hungry people learned to go.

Old Sampson, who always listened to Savelle, though he deplored his
tendency “to wander in his talk,” away from the moon and kindred
subjects, took a new lease of life from that night. At last a day had
come when people really liked to talk about the moon, or Mars, which was
almost as good. He became a mental manufacturer of objects of origin so
exclusively human that once they were conveyed to Mars, once that
difficulty overcome, would produce instant understanding. Almost nightly
he would turn up with a new one, and invariably some one would overthrow
his hopes by suggesting a _natural_, in distinction to his _human_,
phenomenon. He would always feebly defend his invention, and then fall
silent—apparently intent upon a new one.

It was Philbin, the novelist, whose hobby was “Weltpolitik,” and who
revelled in prophecies those days of a European cataclysm, who put him,
as it were, finally out of this particular misery.

“It seems to me,” complained Twinkle, in his plaintive voice, blinking
almost tearfully at the table-cloth, “as if nature imitates everything.”

“Twinkle,” said Philbin, who was sitting next to him, “lend me your
ears. I want ‘to whisper into their furry depths.’ Have you ever thought
of going yourself?”

Twinkle, lifting his eyes to the other’s face, blinked and shook his
head.

Savelle was the only man who did not laugh. He never laughed either at
Sampson or Philbin. “Don’t you see,” he cried sharply, in his eager
idea-driven way, “don’t you see what the man has discovered? Your ears
will need cropping soon. ‘_Nature imitates everything!_’ That is, he has
found, he has perceived, he is establishing by his own experiments that
man, after all his effort and his boasting, after all his science and
learning, which has made a joke of the teaching of Jesus and the poetry
of Milton, that this _creature_ itself has in turn _created_ nothing.
That man, after all, has only, can only, imitate nature.”

He let fall his fist on the table, looking around at his listeners. He
always had listeners at Isham’s, and perhaps nowhere else in New York.
For the moment he had forgotten his tiff with Philbin, had forgotten
Philbin himself, and was all for rushing ahead on his idea-driven course
to some unimaginable distance. But Philbin’s vanity never forgot
slights. It was not the words—he gave and took sharper every day of his
life—but the manner in which he was thrown aside as an unnoticeable
obstruction in the other’s path of thought, the rush past him of the
faster mind that mortified him. He knew Savelle, knew him better than
any one in the room did, for that was his business, and he knew how fast
he was going and how sharp he would fall, and then, like a mischievous
little boy, with his foot, he stuck out his tongue and tripped him.

“That’s contrary to every teaching of Christ you ever raved about,” he
said quickly.

Savelle did come down with rather a crash. Even his defenders admitted
that much. But then he had been going very fast. Moreover, he was a man
who habitually used too many words. He used too many to Philbin—a great
deal too many. Philbin’s faults were almost all on the outside, and even
through the casual communion of Isham’s he had made them pretty plain to
every man there. He was vain, slightly arrogant, over-given to sneering.
Savelle, in his defense of his position, managed to comment briefly upon
each quality, and he put into the personalities the same vigor that he
used to defend his theory of the universe. At the very best he showed a
lamentable lack of proportion. At the worst he was vulgarly offensive.

That is the danger of such talk as men plunged into at Isham’s; it lacks
proportion. Personalities and universalities get all mixed up, and
sometimes it takes long patience and a good deal of humor to straighten
out the tangle. Philbin and Savelle were in just such a tangle over
little Norvel’s query. And neither of them had patience and Savelle had
no grain of humor. If he had, he could not have come down from a
discussion of his theory of the universe to criticism of Philbin’s
personality. The matter was quite hopeless. The tangle only grew tighter
until there was only one way of ending it. Philbin took it. He was a
little man, and very nervous, and when he stood up his finger-tips just
touched the table, and he was trembling so they played a tattoo on the
table-cloth. Then he bowed and went out.

He had behaved the better of the two, but every one was glad to see him
go—except old Sampson, to whom anything like ill-feeling gave genuine
pain. He liked a placid world in which one could babble in amity about
the moon. But to the rest Philbin was a bore. His Weltpolitik was
uninteresting. His European cataclysm was a tale told by an idiot, full
enough of learning, but signifying little or nothing. One could imagine
baseball games on Mars, and make the matter realistic; but Philbin’s
imaginings dealt in palpable absurdities. Even at Isham’s talk had
limitations. Philbin had been a war correspondent in the Balkans, and
they thought it had upset his mind.

Savelle affected to ignore his going away, and went on with his
expounding of Twinkle Sampson’s discovery—so he was pleased to call it.
He ridiculed Philbin’s criticism more fiercely than before. He, Sampson,
had given a marvellously stimulating example, Savelle said, of what
religious thought meant, that it was not in man to create, only in God.
All that was human was imitation, even as man himself was God’s image.
In truth, Philbin’s attack had stimulated him, and he talked that night
better than he had ever talked. He felt that he had come off a second
best in the encounter, and he determined to wipe out the remembrance
from the memory of his hearers. Poor old Twinkle, hearing himself
eulogized for the first time in his life, probably, sat in silence,
winking almost tearfully, too amazed to be pleased.

And always after he made a point of emphasizing this theory of his—or of
Sampson’s—as he called it. It became the rival in this talk of Christian
economics. He did so without argument, for Philbin did not come back. A
Futurist painter, who had found out Isham’s purely by accident,
gradually took his place. At Isham’s places were always taken gradually.
To make up for it they were generally taken for a very long time.
Philbin’s was the first defection, in fact, since Twinkle’s low-toned
monologues about the moon, with old Isham for the only listener, in the
corner by the fireplace, had started it all eleven years ago. Philbin,
too, had never been in very good standing; his trick of sarcasm hurt too
many sensibilities. And then he was agnostic in everything, and Isham’s
collectively believed in almost everything. Every man of them, except
the Futurist painter who took his place and had scarcely known him, had
some little hurt somewhere to remember him by, and so, of course, wanted
to forget him.

They had almost succeeded, too, when suddenly that happened which
brought his name up in all thoughts, the war. That night, the night when
all rumors and surmises were solidified into the single, soul-stunning
fact, nobody mentioned his name, though each knew the others were
thinking of it. It seemed uncivil when they had each heard the rest make
such fun of his theories. But after a few days some bolder soul broke
the spell.

“Philbin—do you remember, he always prophesied it?”

But that was all, and Savelle sat silent even then.

In truth, the war changed Isham’s. Of course, it changed somehow almost
everything in the world, but it changed Isham’s peculiarly. Before it
had been a place where people went to talk of curious things, and now
the same people went there—Sampson and Savelle and little Norvel and the
Futurist painter, and old Isham himself was unchanged, nothing could
alter him, and they still talked of curious things, more curious things
than they had ever imagined before, but Isham’s had changed by ceasing
to be different, because everywhere people were talking of the same
things. Talk at Isham’s was just like talk on any street corner. In
fact, the world had caught up with Isham’s.

Then one night Philbin did come back. It was in the second year of the
great war, and it had been nearly five since he had gone away after his
tiff with Savelle. He did not come directly into the back room, as he
had been used to do, but dined by himself at a small table in front. He
sat there a long time after dinner over his coffee, with his back turned
to his old place. Every one of them had seen him and recognized him, and
talk that night was slow. Though he had spoken to none of them and
turned his back to them, each knew somehow that he would speak and that
he had come there especially to speak, and that he would say something
important, and they sat nervously waiting.

At last he did come, pushing back his chair and walking slowly up the
room. They noticed then how he had changed. He had grown very much
older. He had been scarcely fifty when he had left, and now he looked
and walked like an old man, and his dress, which had always been very
neat and careful, showed an old man’s carelessness. They all got up when
he came and greeted him by name and with genuine cordiality. The little
stings of five years since had vanished long ago. Savelle got up last
and a little doubtfully, but it was Savelle he especially picked out.

“Ah, Savelle,” and he put out his hand.

Then he sat down in his old place and ordered more coffee and talked for
a while quietly to his right-hand neighbor, who was little Norvel. He
said nothing of himself and very little of any subject, seeming distrait
and very depressed. After a little, abruptly he took the conversation in
his own hands.

“Gentlemen,” he said, leaning forward with his hands folded on the cloth
in front of him, “since I was here last I have had a very great sorrow.
I have lost my son.”

Then he fell silent again, and apparently not hearing any of the things
that were said to him.

“He was killed,” he began a second time, just as he had begun the first,
“in Flanders, six weeks ago. He was twenty-two years and four months
old. Before he died they pinned this on him.” He fumbled in his
waistcoat, and picking out something threw it across the cloth over in
front of Savelle. It was a little bronze cross known the world over,
with two words on it, “For valor”. “I sent them my son and they sent me
back that,” said Philbin.

It was the old Philbin voice—the same that had in turn galled each one
of them.

“He went out in the night,” he went on, “and pulled back to life two
London fishmongers. Then he died—going back for a third fishmonger.
There is some six inches in a London newspaper telling about it. That
same paper gave a column and a half last week to a story I wrote. And
they gave six inches to my son. That’s queer, too, isn’t it?”

Nobody answered him. They were all afraid to—his tone was too bitter. No
one was quite sure what he would say.

“We used to talk here years ago,” he went on presently, “about curious
things. I think this curious enough to talk about. They gave a ‘stick’
to the death of my son and a column to the birth of my book. Savelle,
you are a newspaper man, tell us about it?”

Savelle was looking at him with his eyes blazing, and he answered not a
word.

“I suppose it’s logical,” said Philbin. “Any man may have a son. But I
have written twenty books and had only one son.”

The only answer came from quite an unexpected quarter. It was little
Norvel, who was sitting at Philbin’s elbow.

“Did you say, sir,” he asked, “that he went back three times?”

“Yes, Mr. Norvel, three times—three fishmongers.”

The man’s sneers would have been disgusting if they had not been so
plainly aimed at himself first. As it was, they were almost terrible.

“Whether the three fishmongers lived or died,” he went on, “I don’t
know. The six inches neglected to state. Want of space, possibly. You
are a newspaper man, Savelle, perhaps you can explain.”

“I wish you would explain this, Mr. Savelle,” said little Norvel.

“What?” said Savelle.

“What part of nature Mr. Philbin was imitating when he went back?”

All the pent-up intensity of Savelle’s being rushed out in his answer:
“I am maliciously misrepresented. There is no human element in such
action. It is the divine phenomenon of Calvary.”

“Savelle,” put in Philbin, “when my son was alive he was a man. I
believe, too, he died like a man. I prefer that to an imitation of
anything—even God.”

The width of the table was between the two men, and the whole meaning of
the universe. Their antagonism was irreconcilable. In that instant it
had recovered all its bitterness of five years before. Time could do
nothing. Not even chance could. It was literally immutable, the only
thing in the world neither of those great forces can effect.

But the only pitiful part of it was, Sampson sitting between them,
turning now to one, now to the other, with dim sight and faulty hearing,
and wanting of either merely something human.



                           DE VILMARTE’S LUCK


_By_ MARY HEATON VORSE
From _Harper’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._
_Copyright, 1919, by Mary Heaton O’Brien._

What Hazelton’s friends called his second manner had for a mother
despair, and for a father irony, and for a godmother necessity. It
leaped into his mind full-grown, charged with the vitality of his
bitterness.

Success had always been scratching at Hazelton’s door, and then hurrying
past. The world had always been saying to him, “Very well, very well
indeed; just a little bit better and you shall have the recognition that
should be yours.” Patrons came and almost bought pictures. He was
accepted only to be hung so badly that his singing color was lost on the
sky-line. Critics would infuriate him by telling him that he had
almost—_almost_, mind you—painted the impossible; that his painting was
what they called “a little too blond.”

How Hazelton hated that insincere phrase which meant nothing, for, as he
explained to Dumont the critic, as they sat outside the Café de la
Rotonde after their return from the _Salon_, Nature was blond—what else?
He, Dumont, came from the Midi, didn’t he? Well, then, he knew what
sunshine was! How could paint equal the color of a summer’s day, the sun
shining on the flesh of a blond woman, a white dress against a white
wall? Blond? Because he loved the vitality of light they wanted him to
dip his brush in an ink-pot—_hein_? Dumont would be pleased if he harked
back to the gloom of the old Dutch school, or if he imitated the massed
insincerities of Boecklen, Hazelton opined from the depths of his scorn.

Dumont poised himself for flight on the edge of his hard metal chair. He
was bored, but he had to admit that if ever Hazelton was justified in
bitterness it was to-day when, after a long search through the miles of
canvases, he had finally discovered his two pictures hung in such a
position as to be as effective as two white spots. He escaped, leaving
Hazelton hunched over the table, his forceful, pugnacious, red
countenance contrasting oddly with the subtle anemia of his absinthe. He
was followed by Hazelton’s choleric shouts, which informed him that he,
Hazelton, could paint with mud for a medium if he chose.

His profession of art critic had accustomed Dumont to the difficulties
of the artistic temperament, and he thought no more of Hazelton until he
ran into him some ten days later. There was malice in Hazelton’s small,
brilliant eyes, and an air of suppressed triumph in his muscular
deep-chested figure. His face was red, partly from living out of doors
and partly from drink. He rolled as he walked, not quite like a bear and
not quite like a seafaring man—a vigorous, pugnacious person whose
vehement greeting made Dumont apprehensive until he glanced at
Hazelton’s hands, which were reassuringly small.

“Well,” he said, “you remember our conversation? It was the parent, my
dear Dumont, of dead-sea fruit of the most mature variety.” Hazelton
considered this a joke, and laughed at it with satisfaction. He was very
much pleased with himself.

Dumont went with Hazelton to his studio. On Hazelton’s easel was a
picture of dark, wind-swept trees beaten by a storm. They silhouetted
themselves against a sinister and menacing sky. The thing was full of
violence and fury, it was drenched with wet and blown with wind.

“Who did this?” asked Dumont. “It is magnificent!”

“You _like_ it?” asked Hazelton, incredulously. And then he repeated
himself, changing his accent, “_You_ like it, Dumont?”

“Certainly I like it,” Dumont answered, a trifle stiffly. “There is
vitality, form, color! Because you are not happy unless you are in the
midst of a sunbath, at least permit others to vary their moods.”

At this Hazelton burst into loud laughter.

“You amuse yourself,” Dumont observed, but Hazelton continued to laugh
uproariously, shaking his wide shoulders.

“Do you know the name of that picture? The name of that picture is ‘_La
Guigne Noire_’—I painted it from the depths of my bad luck.”

“_Hein?_” said Dumont. “_You_ painted that picture?”

“This picture—if you call it that—I painted.”

“I call it a picture,” Dumont asserted, dryly.

“I call it a practical joke,” said Hazelton. “One does not paint
pictures with the tongue in one’s cheek. I know how one paints
pictures.”

“How one paints pictures makes no difference,” Dumont replied,
impatiently. “Who cares if you had your tongue in your cheek? You had
your brush in your hand. The result is that which matters. This work has
completeness.”

Hazelton slapped his thigh with a mighty blow. “Mon Dieu!” he cried. “If
this fools you, there are others it will fool as well—and I need the
money! And from that bubbling artesian well from which this sprang I can
see a million others like it—like it, but not like it. _Hein, mon
vieux?_ Come, come, my child, to Mercier’s, who will sell it for me. The
day of glory has arrived!”

A sardonic malice sparkled on Hazelton’s ugly face, and his nose, which
jutted out with a sudden truculency, was redder than ever. He took the
picture up and danced solemnly around the studio.

It was in this indecorous fashion, to the echo of Hazelton’s bitter
laughter, that his second manner was born, and that he achieved his
first success, for his second manner was approved by the public.

Three years went past. Hazelton was medaled. He was well hung now, he
sold moderately, but he never sold the work which he respected. At last
his constant failure with what he called “his own pictures” had made him
so sensitive that he no longer exposed them.

Hazelton’s position was that of the parent in the old-fashioned fairy
tale who had two children, one beautiful and dark-haired, whom he
despised and ill-treated and made work that the child of light might
thrive. That, in his good-tempered moments, was how he explained the
matter to his friends.

Dumont explained to Hazelton that he had two personalities and that he
had no cause to be ashamed of this second and subjective one, even
though he had discovered it by chance and in a moment of mockery.

“You have an artistic integrity that is proof even against yourself,”
was his analysis.

The insistence of the public and of Dumont, in whose critical judgment
he had believed, gave him something like respect for his foster-child.
His belief in his judgment was subtly undermined.

“I shall leave you,” he told Dumont. “I shall secrete myself in the
country undefiled by the artist’s paintbrush and there I will paint a
_chef d’œuvre_ entitled ‘Le Mal du Ventre.’ On its proceeds I will
return to my blond.”

While engaged on this work, which later became Hazelton’s most
successful picture, Hazelton met Raoul de Vilmarte. This young man was a
poor painter, but a delightful companion, and he endeared himself to
Hazelton at once by his naïve enthusiasm for Hazelton’s former pictures.

“What grace they had—what beauty—what light! What an extraordinary irony
that you should throw away a gift that I should so have cherished!” he
exclaimed.

His words were to Hazelton like rain to a dying plant. He stopped work
on “Le Mal du Ventre,” and began to paint to “suit himself” again. He
had a childish delight in surprising De Vilmarte with his new picture.

“Why, why,” cried his new friend, “do you permit yourself to bury this
supreme talent? No one has painted sunlight as well! Compared with this,
darkness enshrouds the canvases of all other masters! Why do you not
claim your position as the apostle of light?”

Hazelton explained that critics and the public had forced these canvases
into obscurity.

“Another name signed to them—a Frenchman preferably—and we might hear a
different story,” he added.

A sudden idea came to De Vilmarte. “Listen!” he said. “I have exposed
nothing for two years. Indeed, I have been doubtful as to whether I
should expose again. I know well enough that were my family unknown and
were not certain members of the jury my masters, and others friends of
my family, I might never have been accepted at all—it has been a
sensitive point with me. Unfortunately, my mother and my friends believe
me to be a genius—”

“Well?” said Hazelton, seeing some plan moving darkly through De
Vilmarte’s talk.

“Well,” said De Vilmarte, slowly, “we might play a joke upon the critics
of France. There is a gap between this and my work—immeasurable—one I
could never bridge—and yet it is plausible—” He glanced from a sketch of
his he was carrying to Hazelton’s picture.

Hazelton looked from one to the other. Compared, a gulf was there,
fixed, unbridgable, and yet— He twisted his small, nervous hands
together. Malice sparkled from his eyes.

“It _is_ plausible!” he agreed. He held out his hand. A sparkle of his
malice gleamed in De Vilmarte’s pale eyes. They said no more. They shook
hands. Later it seemed to Hazelton the ultimate irony that they should
have entered into their sinister alliance with levity.

The second phase of the joke seemed as little menacing. You can imagine
the three of them outside the Rotonde, Hazelton and De Vilmarte
listening to Dumont’s praise of De Vilmarte’s picture. You can enter
into the feelings of cynicism, of disillusion, that filled the hearts of
the two _farceurs_. De Vilmarte’s picture had been accepted, hung well,
then medaled. The critics had acclaimed him!

They sat there delicately baiting Dumont, bound together by the
knowledge that they had against the world—for they, and they alone, knew
the stuff of which fame is made. They were in the position of the
pessimist who has proof of his pessimism. No one really believes the
world as bad as he pretends, and here De Vilmarte and Hazelton had proof
of their most ignoble suspicions; here was the corroding knowledge that
Raoul’s position and popularity could achieve the recognition denied to
an unknown man. He was French, and on the inside, and Hazelton was a
foreigner and on the outside.

“Well,” said Raoul, when Dumont had left them, “we have a fine _gaffe_
to spring on them, _hein_? It’s going to cost me something. My mother is
charmed—she will take it rather badly, I am afraid.”

“Well, why should she take it?” asked Hazelton, after a pause. “Why
should we share our joke with all the world?”

“You mean?” asked Raoul.

It was then that the voice of fate spoke through Hazelton.

“You can have the picture,” he said, jerking his big head impatiently.

“Do you mean that I can have it—to keep?”

“Have it if you like. Money and what money buys is all I want from now
on,” said Hazelton, and he shook his shoulders grossly and sensually
while his nervous hands, the hands whose work the picture was, twisted
themselves as though in agonized protest.

Hazelton went back to his studio and stood before his blond pictures,
the children of his heart. It was already evening, but they shone out in
the dim light. He was a little tipsy.

“So,” he said to them—“so all these years you have deceived me, as many
a man has been deceived before by his beloved. Your flaunting smiles
made me think you were what you are not. Dumont was right—my
foster-child is better than you, for she made her way alone and without
favor. I tried to think I had painted the impossible. Light is beyond
me. Why should I think I could paint light? I am a child of darkness and
misfortune. I know who my beloved is. You shall no longer work to
support your sister!”

“What are you doing?” came his wife’s querulous voice. “Talking and
mumbling to yourself before your pictures in the dark? Are you drunk
again?”

                                  ――――

Some months passed before De Vilmarte and Hazelton met again. They ran
into each other on the corner of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard
du Montparnasse.

“Hey! What are you doing so far from home?” cried Hazelton.

“Looking for you.”

“I was going to you,” Hazelton acknowledged.

They stared at each other scrutinizingly, each measuring the other with
dawning distrust. Each waited.

“Let us go to the Rotonde,” Hazelton suggested.

They talked of other things, each waiting for the other to begin.
Hazelton had the most resistance; he had flipped a penny as to whether
he should go to seek De Vilmarte, but De Vilmarte had made his decision
with anguish. It was he who finally said:

“You know—about the matter of the picture—my mother is quite frantic
about my success. She is failing—”

“_Toc!_” cried Hazelton. “My poor wife has to go to the hospital.”

“Nothing to do, I know,” said De Vilmarte, looking away diffidently,
“but for one’s mother—”

“But for one’s wife,” Hazelton capped him, genially. “An aged mother and
a sick wife, and a joke on the world shared between two friends— What
will a man not do for his sick wife and for his aged mother!”

A little shiver of cold disgust ran over Raoul. For the first time he
felt a vague antipathy for Hazelton, his neck was so short and he rolled
his big head in such a preposterous fashion.

They said good-by, Hazelton’s swagger, De Vilmarte’s averted eyes
betraying their guilty knowledge that they had bought and sold things
that should not be for sale.

Just how it came to be a settled affair neither De Vilmarte nor Hazelton
could have told. Now an exhibition occurred for which De Vilmarte needed
a picture; now Hazelton dogged by his need of money would come to him.
Hazelton’s wife was always ailing. Her beauty and her disposition had
been undermined by ill-health and self-indulgence, and he was one of
those men temperamentally in debt and always on the edge of being sued
or dispossessed.

But in Hazelton’s brain a fantastic and mad sense of rivalry grew. He
had transferred his affection to his darker mood. Every notice of De
Vilmarte’s name rankled in his mind. De Vilmarte’s growing vogue
infuriated him. He felt that he must wring from the critics and the
public the recognition that was his due so that this child of his, born
of his irony and his despair, and that had been so faithful to him in
spite of abuse, might be crowned. Just what had happened to both of them
they realized after the opening of the _Salon_ next year.

“Take care,” Hazelton had warned De Vilmarte, “that they do not hang you
better than they do me. That I will not have.” He had said it jokingly;
but while De Vilmarte’s exhibit was massed, and he had won the second
medal, Hazelton’s was scattered, and he had but one picture on the line;
worse still, the critics gave Hazelton formal praise while they
acclaimed De Vilmarte as the most promising of the younger school of
landscape-painters.

De Vilmarte sought out Hazelton, full of a sense of apology. He found
him gazing morosely into his glass of absinthe like one seeing
unpleasant visions.

“It is really too strong,” Raoul said. “I am sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Hazelton replied, listlessly. “It’s got to stop,
though!” He did not look up, but he felt the shock that traveled through
De Vilmarte’s well-knit body. “It’s got to stop!” he repeated. “It’s too
strong, as you say.”

There was a long silence, a silence full of gravity, full of despair,
the silence of a man who has suddenly and unexpectedly heard his death
sentence, a silence in whose duration De Vilmarte saw his life as it
was. He had begun this as a joke, after his first agonized indecision,
and now suddenly he saw not only his mother but himself involved, and
the honor of his name. He waited for Hazelton to say something—anything,
but Hazelton was chasing chimeras in the depths of his pale drink. As
usual, his resistance was the greater. He sat hunched and red, his black
hair framing his truculent face, unmindful of Raoul.

“It has gone beyond a joke,” was what Raoul finally said.

“That’s just it,” Hazelton agreed. “My God! Think how they have hung
you—think how they have hung me. Where do I get off? Have I got to work
for nothing all my life?”

“The recognition—you know what that means—it means nothing!” cried
Raoul.

Hazelton did not answer.

“But I can’t—confess now!” Raoul’s anguish dragged it out of him. “I
could afford to be a _farceur_—I cannot afford to be a cheat.”

Hazelton looked at him suddenly. Then he laughed. “Ha! ha! The little
birds!” he said. “They stepped in the lime and they gummed up their
little feet, didn’t they?” He lifted up his own small foot, which was
well shod in American shoes. “Poor little bird! Poor little gummed
feet!” He laughed immoderately.

Disgust and shame had their will with Raoul.

Hazelton was enchanted with his own similes, and, unmindful of his
friend’s mood, he placed his small hand next Raoul’s, which was nervous
and brown, the hand of a horseman.

“Can you see the handcuffs linking us?” he chuckled. “‘Linked for Life’
or ‘The Critics’ Revenge.’” He laughed again, but there was bitterness
in his mirth. “We should have told before,” he muttered. “I suppose it
is too late now. I cannot blame you or myself, but, by God! I’m not
going to paint for you all my days. Why should I? We had better stop it,
you know.” He drank deeply. “Courage, my boy!” he cried, setting down
his glass. “I will have the courage to starve my wife if you will have
the courage to disappoint your mother.”

They left it this way.

                                  ――――

When De Vilmarte again entered Hazelton’s studio, Hazelton barked at him
ungraciously: “Ho! So you are back!”

“Yes,” said Raoul, “I am back.” He stood leaning upon his cane, very
elegant, very correct, a hint of austerity about him that vanished
charmingly under the sunshine of his smile.

Hazelton continued painting. “Well,” he said, without turning around,
“you have not come, I suppose, for the pleasure of my company; but let
me tell you in advance that I have no time to do any painting for you. I
am not your _bonne à tout faire_.”

By Hazelton’s tone De Vilmarte realized that he was ready to capitulate;
he wanted to be urged, and he desired to make it as disagreeable as he
could because he was not in a position to send De Vilmarte to the devil
any more than De Vilmarte could follow his instinct and leave Hazelton
to come crawling to him—for there was always the chance that Hazelton
might be lucky and would not come crawling.

“It’s your mother again, I suppose,” said Hazelton, ungraciously.

De Vilmarte grew white around his mouth; he grasped his cane until his
hand was bloodless. “Some one unfortunately told her that they were
urging me to have a private exhibition, and her heart is set upon it.”

“There are a number of things upon which my wife’s heart is set,”
Hazelton admitted after a pause, during which he painted with delicate
deliberation and exquisite surety while, fascinated and full of envy, De
Vilmarte watched the delicate hand that seemed to have an independent
existence of its own that seemed to be the utterance of some other and
different personality than that which was expressed in Hazelton’s body.
He turned around suddenly, grinning at De Vilmarte.

“How much are you going to pay for my soul this time?” he asked.

They had never bargained before. In the midst of it Hazelton stopped and
looked De Vilmarte over from top to toe. No detail of his charm and of
his correctness escaped him.

“How are you able to stand it?” he asked. “It must be hard on you, too.”
The thought came to him as something new.

“Oh,” said Raoul, with awful sarcasm, “you think it is hard on me?”

“You must be fond of your mother,” said Hazelton. This time he had not
meant to be brutal, and he was sorry to see De Vilmarte wince, but he
did not know how to mend matters. “How are we going to break through?”
he said. “What end is there for us? I do it for my wife, whom I don’t
love, poor wretch, but for whom I feel damned responsible; and you sell
your soul to please your mother. And do you get nothing for yourself, I
wonder—” He half closed his little eyes, which glinted like jewels
between his black lashes. “Appreciation and applause must be pleasant.
One can buy as much with stolen money as one can with money earned....
There is only one way out—it is for one of us to die, or for one of
_them_. There is death in our little drama, _hein, mon vieux_?”

                                  ――――

It was the private exhibition that fixed De Vilmarte’s reputation as an
artist. It also marked in his own mind the precariousness of his
position. And now the matter was complicated for him because he fell in
love with a young girl who cared for his talent as did his mother. She
was one of those proud young daughters of France who had no interest in
rich and idle young men. Each word of her praise was anguish to him. The
praise of the _feuilletons_ he could stand better, because some way they
seemed to have nothing to do with him. It was the price which he paid
willingly for his mother’s happiness.

He cared so much that he had tried not to care for her, and again his
mother intervened. It was in every way a suitable match, and his mother
told him that she did not wish to die without a grandchild. “You have
obligations to your art,” she said, “but your obligations to your race
are above those.”

She was now very feeble. His wedding and his next _Salon_ picture filled
her mind. She was haunted by the presentiment that she would not see the
summer come to its close.

So Raoul would hurry from her room to Hazelton to see how the picture
was coming on. Hazelton was painting as he had never painted before. It
seemed, indeed, as if he had a double personality, and as if each one of
these personalities was trying to outstrip the other. As happens
sometimes to an artist, he had made a sudden leap ahead. No picture that
he had painted had the depth or the beauty or the clear, flowing color
of this one. But he lagged along. It was as though the beauty of the
picture which De Vilmarte was to sign tortured him, and he did not wish
to finish it. He would stand before it, lost in the contemplation of its
excellences like a devotee, refusing to paint.

The picture Hazelton was painting for his own signature was dark and
magnificent, but the picture which he was painting for De Vilmarte had a
singular radiance. It was as though at last Hazelton had painted the
impossible; light shone from that picture. Yet it was not finished. Days
passed, and Hazelton had not brought the picture further toward
completion.

One day when De Vilmarte came in he found Hazelton brooding before it.
He had been drinking. Tears were in his eyes. “It is too beautiful—too
beautiful! Light is more beautiful than darkness. The taste for the
black, the menacing, is the decadent appreciation of a too sheltered
world. I cannot finish this picture for another to sign.”

“No,” De Vilmarte soothed him, “of course not.”

“Oh, my beautiful!” cried Hazelton, addressing his picture. “I cannot
finish you! Come, De Vilmarte, we will drink.”

De Vilmarte went with Hazelton. He watched over him as a mother over her
child. He talked; he reasoned; he sat quiet, white-lipped, while
Hazelton would speculate as to what De Vilmarte got out of it.

“You are, I think, like the victim of a drug,” he said, jeering at De
Vilmarte, his brilliant eyes agleam. That was truer than Hazelton knew.
He could not stop. His mother, his fiancée, his friends, the critics,
his world, expected a picture from him. He visualized them sometimes
pushing him on to some doom of whose exact nature he was ignorant. Again
it was to him as though they dug a dark channel in which his life had to
flow.

Meantime he had to nurse Hazelton’s sick spirit along. He would go with
him as he drank, stand by him in his studio, urging him to paint. In
this way they spent hideous days together.

Hazelton developed a passion for torture. He was tortured himself.
Alcohol tortured him, his embittered nature tortured him. He loved to
see De Vilmarte writhe. He was torn between his desire to finish the
picture and the anguish which he felt at seeing it about to pass into
another’s hands. There were days when its existence hung in the balance.

“You see this palette-knife,” he would tell De Vilmarte, “and this
palette of dark paint? A twist, my friend, a little twist of the knife
and a little splash, and where is this luminous radiance? Gone!” And he
would watch De Vilmarte as he let his brush hover over the brilliant
surface.

How it hurt Raoul he knew, because when he thought of destroying the
picture it was as though a knife were twisted in his own heart.

One afternoon De Vilmarte nursed Hazelton from café to café, listening
to his noble braggadocio.

“Remember,” Hazelton urged Raoul, “the wonderful Mongolian legend of the
father and son who loved the same woman, and whom for their honor they
threw over a cliff! That’s the idea—the cliff! You shall throw our love
over the cliff—you shall destroy the picture yourself. Come back with
me!” He was as though possessed. Full of apprehension, De Vilmarte
followed him.

They stood before the picture. It shone out as though indeed light came
from it. Hazelton put the palette into De Vilmarte’s hand.

“Now, my friend, go to it!” he cried. “Paint, De Vilmarte—paint in your
own natural manner! A few strokes of the brush of the great master De
Vilmarte, and color and light will vanish from it. Why not—why not? You
suffer, too—your face is drawn. You think I do not know how you hate me.
I don’t need to look at you to know that. We always hate those who have
power over us. Paint—paint! If I can bear it, surely you can. _Paint
naturally_, De Vilmarte! Paint into it your own meagerness and banality!
Paint into my masterpiece the signature of your own defeat.”

The afternoon was ebbing. It seemed as though the room were full of
silent people, all holding Raoul back—his world, the critics, his
fiancée, his mother. Besides, he had no right to destroy this beautiful
thing to save his honor.

“You are not yourself,” he said.

“Aha! I know what you think of me. Ha! De Vilmarte, but I am a master, a
great painter. Paint, and betray yourself. Ha! _sale voyou_, you will
not? You are waiting to steal from me my final beautiful expression. You
stand there— How is it that you permit me to call the Vicomte de la Tour
de Vilmarte names? Why do you not strike me?”

“Oh, call me what you like,” Raoul cried. “Only finish the picture.
There is very little more to do.”

“I tell you what I shall call you,” Hazelton jeered at him. “I will call
you nothing worse than Raoul—Ra-oul—Ra—o—u—l!” He meowed it like a
tom-cat. “How can I be so vile when I paint like an angel, Ra—o—u—l ...
Ra—o—u—l!”

Sweat stood on Raoul’s forehead. He stood quiet. The picture was
finished.

“Sign, my little Raoul, sign!” cried Hazelton. And with murder in his
heart, a bitter tide of dark and sluggish blood mounting, ever mounting,
Raoul signed and then fled into the lovely spring evening.

“This is the end,” he thought. “There shall be no more of this. Not for
any one—not for any one, can I be so defiled!” For he felt the mystic
identity between himself and his mother—that he was flesh of her flesh,
and that in some vicarious way she was being insulted through him.

But it was not the end. It was with horror that Raoul learned that the
picture had been bought by the state, that he was to receive the Legion
of Honor. His mother was wild with joy.

“Now,” she cried, embracing him—“now I can depart in peace.” She looked
so fragile that it seemed as if indeed her spirit had lingered only for
this joy. She looked at him narrowly. “But you have been working too
hard—you look ill. A long rest is what you need.”

“A very long rest,” Raoul agreed. He left the house, and, as if it was a
magnet, the great exhibition drew him to it, and in front of his picture
stood the thick, familiar figure of Hazelton, his nose jutting out
truculently from his face, which was red and black like a poster. He
broke through his attitude of devoted contemplation to turn upon Raoul.

“Bought by the state!” he cried. “To be hung in the Luxembourg!” He
pointed menacingly with his cane at De Vilmarte’s neat little signature.
“Why, I ask, should I go to my grave unknown, poor, a pensioner of your
bounty? Why should you be happy—fêted?”

The irony of being accused of happiness was too much for De Vilmarte. He
laughed aloud.

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to be an honest man?” croaked Hazelton.

“Only death can make an honest man of me,” answered De Vilmarte.

“_My_ death could make an honest man of you,” Hazelton said slowly. It
was as if he had read the dark and nameless secret that was lurking in
the bottom of De Vilmarte’s heart.

For a moment they two seemed alone in all the earth, the only living
beings. They stood alone, their secret in their hands.

Then Hazelton’s lips began to move. “My God!” he said. “Bought by the
state and hung in the Luxembourg! Bought by the state and hung in the
Luxembourg!” He repeated it as if trying to familiarize himself with
some inexplicable fact. “I will not have it!” he went on. “I will not
have it! If I’m not bought by the state I shall not go on!”

Raoul looked at him with entreaty. Hazelton came up to the surface of
consciousness and his eyes followed Raoul’s. A very frail little old
lady was being pushed in a wheel-chair near them.

“My mother,” Raoul whispered.

“I wish to meet her,” said Hazelton.

She bowed graciously and then sat in her chair gazing at the picture
bought by the state. Pride was in every line of her old face. She seemed
returned from the shadows only to gaze at this picture. Then, in a voice
which was cracked with age, she said, turning to Hazelton:

“I know your work, too. Monsieur—the opposite of my son’s. It is as
though between you you encompassed all of nature’s moods. To me there
has always been—you will laugh I know—a strange similarity, as though
you were two halves of a whole, as day and night.”

A cold wave flowed over Hazelton, a feeling as though his hair were
lifting on the back of his head. It was as though this frail old lady
was linking him irrevocably to Raoul. He was powerless now to take his
own.

“Madame,” he said, “I feel as if no one had understood my work before.”

But she had turned to gaze upon her son’s painting. A sort of senility
enveloped her, and his drunkenness reached out to it. His gaze had in it
respect and tenderness and abnegation. His manner, more eloquent than
words, said: “I give up; I resign. Take it.”

He went to the end of the gallery, and Raoul saw him sit down in the
attitude of one who waits. When Mme. de Vilmarte left, Raoul joined him.

Hazelton’s head sank deeply between his shoulders; his pugnacity had
oozed away. After a time he spoke with an effort. “I understand,” he
said. “I understand—”

A curious sense of liberation seized De Vilmarte. His old liking for
Hazelton returned. “I am sorry for all of us,” he said.

“My poor friend, there is no way out,” said Hazelton. “I am vile—a
beast. But trust me—believe in me.”

“I will,” cried De Vilmarte, deeply touched.

Hazelton’s little jewel-like eyes were blurred with unwonted sentiment.
“I am a king in exile,” he muttered over and over. “A king in exile,” he
repeated. This sentimental simile seemed to be a well of bitter comfort
for him.

This story should end here, for stories should end like this, on the
high note; but life is different. Hazelton was a man with a bad liver,
and he got no joy from his sacrifice. Moreover, in real life one seldom
fights a decisive battle with one’s lower nature. One goes on fighting;
it dies hard when it dies at all. There are the high moments when one
thinks the battle won, and the next day the enemy attacks again, with
the battle to be fought over.

Hazelton had formed the habit of cursing fate and De Vilmarte, and, to
revenge himself, of threatening De Vilmarte’s exposure, and he continued
to do these things. And De Vilmarte let his mind stray far in
contemplating Hazelton’s possible vileness, and in doing this he himself
became vile. What he could not recognize was the definite place where
Hazelton’s vileness stopped. His life was like a fair fruit rotten
within.

It was the summer of 1914, and Hazelton, whose drunkenness before had
been occasional, now drank always, and forever in the background of De
Vilmarte’s mind was this powerful figure with its red face and black
hair and truculent bearing, drunken and obscene, who carried in his
careless hand the honor of the De Vilmartes. At any moment Hazelton
could rob Raoul of his pride, embitter his mother’s last hours, and make
him the laughing stock of his world. Raoul became like an entrapped
animal running around and around the implacable barriers of a cage. It
is a terrible thing to have one’s honor in the hands of another.

He thought of everything that might end this torment, and he found no
answer. Madness grew in him. Wherever Raoul de la Tour de Vilmarte went,
there followed him unseen a shadow, swart, dark, and red-faced. It
followed him, mouthing, “Ra-o-u-l—Ra-o-u-l!” like a cat. “Ra-o-u-l!
Ra-o-u-l!” from morning till night. When De Vilmarte was at a table in a
café a huge and mocking shadow sat beside him, and it said, wagging its
head in a horrid fashion, “There’s death in our little drama, _hein, mon
vieux_?”

The fate that had made their interests one, bound them together. They
sought each other out to spend strange and tortured hours in each
other’s company, while in the depths of Raoul’s heart a plan to end the
torture was coming to its own slow maturity, and grew large and dark
during the hot days of July. He could not continue to live. The burden
of his secret weighed him down. Nor could he leave Hazelton behind him,
the honor of the De Vilmartes in his hands.

The bloody answer to the riddle leaped out at him. Hazelton’s death—that
was the answer. Then De Vilmarte could depart in peace. For two mad,
happy days he saw life simply. First Hazelton, then himself.

One day he stopped short, for he realized he could not go until his
mother—went. He must stay a while—until she died.

He had to wait until she died. He watched her, wondering if his
endurance would outlast her life. He tried not to let her see him
watching—for he knew there was madness in his eyes—and he would go out
to find his dark shadow, for often it was less painful to be with him
than away from him—he knew then what Hazelton was up to. He spent days
in retracing the steps which had brought him to this desperate
_impasse_. They had been easy, but he knew that weakness was at the
bottom of it—perhaps, unless he did it now, he would never do it—perhaps
an unworthy desire for life—and love—might hold back his hand.

So De Vilmarte lived his days and nights bound on the torturing pendulum
of conflict.

                                  ――――

Suddenly Europe was aflame. France stood still and waited. And as he
waited, with Europe, Raoul for a moment forgot his torment. War is a
great destroyer, but among other things it destroys the smaller
emotions. Its licking flame shrivels up personal loves and hates. When
war was declared, old hates were blotted out, and hopeless lovers
trembling on the brink of suicide were cured overnight. Small human
atoms were drowned in the larger hate and the larger love. Men ceased to
have power over their own lives since their lives belonged to France.

So when war was declared, choice was taken from Raoul’s hands. A high
feeling of liberation possessed him. He walked along the street, and
suddenly he realized that instead of going toward his home he was
seeking his other half, the dark shadow to whom he had been so bound.

On Hazelton’s door a note was pinned, addressed to him.

“My friend,” it said, “you have luck! You will have your regiment, while
nothing better than the ambulance, like a _sale embusque_, for me. If
harm comes to you, don’t fear for your mother.”

This letter made him feel as though Hazelton had clasped his hand. He no
longer felt toward Hazelton as an enemy, since France had also claimed
him.

Madness had brushed him with its dark wings. By so slender a thread his
life and Hazelton’s had hung! Yes—and his honor!

“Thank God!” he said, “for an honorable death!” It was the last personal
thought that was his for a long time. War engulfed him. Instead of an
individual he was a soldier of France, and his life was broken away from
the old life which now seemed illusion, the days which streamed past him
like pennants torn in the wind.

Later, in the monotony of trench warfare, he had time to think of
Hazelton. He desired two things—to serve France, and to see Hazelton.
Raoul wanted a word of friendship to pass between them, and especially
he wanted to tell Hazelton that he need not worry about his wife. He
wrote to him, but got no answer. Life went on; war had become the normal
thing. The complexities of his former life receded further and further
from him, and became more phantasmal, but the desire to see Hazelton
before either of them should die remained with Raoul.

When he was wounded it was his last conscious thought before oblivion
engulfed him. There followed a half-waking—pain—a penumbral land through
which shapes moved vaguely; the smell of an anesthetic, an awakening,
and again sleep. When he wakened fully he was in a white hospital ward
with a sister bending over him.

“In the next bed,” she said, “there is a _grand blessé_.” She looked at
him significantly. “He wishes to speak to you—he is a friend of yours.”

In the next bed lay Hazelton, the startling black of his shaggy hair
framing the pallor of his face.

With difficulty Raoul raised his head. They smiled at each other. From
the communion of their silence came Hazelton’s deep voice.

“Why the devil,” he said, “did we ever hate each other?”

Raoul shook his head. He didn’t know. He, too, had wanted to ask
Hazelton this.

“It has bothered me,” said Hazelton. “I wanted to see you—” His voice
trailed off. “I’ve wanted to ask you why we have needed this
war—death—to make us know we don’t hate each other.”

“I don’t know,” said De Vilmarte. It was an effort for him to speak; his
voice sounded frail and broken.

“Raoul,” Hazelton asked, tenderly, “where are you wounded? Is it bad?”

“I don’t know,” Raoul answered again.

“It’s his head,” the sister answered for him, “and his right hand.”

Hazelton raised his great head; a red mounted to his face; his old
sardonic laughter boomed out through the ward. With a sharply indrawn
breath of pain: “Oh, la—la!” he shouted. “_’Cré nom! ’Cré nom!_ What
luck—imperishable! I’m dying—your right hand—your _right_ hand!” He sank
back, his ironic laughter drowned in a swift crimson tide.

The nurse beckoned to an orderly to bring a screen....

Tears of grief and weakness streamed down Raoul’s face. To the last his
ill luck had held. He hadn’t been able to make his friend understand, or
to make amends. His right hand was wounded, and he could no longer serve
France.

The sister looked at him with pity. She tried to console him.

“Death is not always so mercifully quick with these strong men,” she
said.



                          THE WHITE BATTALION


_By_ FRANCES GILCHRIST WOOD
From _The Bookman_
_Copyright, 1918, by Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc._
_Copyright, 1919, by Frances Gilchrist Wood._

An orderly ushered two officers of the Foreign Legion, young men in
mud-stained khaki, through the door of a dugout back of the fighting
line in France. As they entered the hut a French officer in horizon
blue, equally muddy, rose and returned the American’s salute.

“You will be seated?” He pushed camp chairs toward them.

A guttering candle, stuck in a bottle neck, veiled rather than revealed
the sordid interior. The light flickered across the young Frenchman’s
face, threw gaunt shadows under his eyes emphasized the look of utter
weariness and—there was something more.

The senior officer of the Legion, Captain Hailes, looked at him keenly.

“Major Fouquet, we report at headquarters in an hour, sir. Lieutenant
Agor, commanding platoon at extreme right—contact platoon with your
battalion, sir, reports we lost touch with the French forces between the
advance and the first trench. Thought it might have been his watch, but
the timepiece checks up to a second.”

The captain hesitated uneasily, “We are not presuming to question, sir,
but Lieutenant Agor says he saw—we felt there might have been some
cause, some reason that did not appear, so we came—”

The Frenchman lifted his head in a stupid way altogether foreign to his
usual manner.

“Merci, Captain Hailes. We were—forty seconds slow in attacking the
first trench, sir.” He went on mechanically as if delivering a rehearsed
report. “Caught up and reached the second trench on time. Few prisoners
besides the children. Enemy practically wiped out.”

He concluded heavily, a dazed look blotting all expression.

“There was a cause for the forty seconds delay, Major?”

Fouquet struggled up out of the curious apathy. He cleared his throat,
made several attempts to speak and finally blurted out.

“You won’t believe it—I saw it and I cannot! But there are the
children—and a first-line trench full of dead Huns—without a mark on
them! Barres was flying over us—he saw the Battalion—knew them for old
comrades. The women—all of them saw the faces of their dead! I don’t
believe it, sir,—but how did we do it? The women never thrust once in
the first trench—the children haven’t a wound—that’s got to prove it!”

He stopped abruptly—looking from one to the other with a gesture of
hopeless protest. The Americans regarded him with puzzled eyes.

“Was it some new trick of the Huns? God knows they’ve given them to us
in plenty! Can you tell us—it might—?”

Fouquet pulled himself forward, his knuckles whitening with his grip of
the table edge.

“You know the history of the section of the Front the Avengers retook
to-day?”

“No, Major Fouquet. We came in later, with the Canadians.”

“It began with the great retreat of 1914, sir, when the Germans were
driving us back toward Paris. They had crowded our army against the
river. Between the slow crossing and their terrible artillery fire, new
to us then, we faced annihilation!”

There was a rustle at the door of the dugout and a whispered password.
Fouquet did not pause.

“To the —nth Battalion was given the honor of acting as rear guard. Ah,
sir,—” his voice steadied—guttural with pride and emotion, “our men
stood like a barricade of rock against which the waves of German
infantry dashed themselves, only to break and be withdrawn for
re-formation. Each receding wave showed where it had bit into the red
and blue barrier, for we were wearing the old uniform then, but the bits
slid together, closing up the gaps to stand against the next flood. When
the eroded wall went down, undermined and over-whelmed at last, the main
army of France was across the river and safe.

“Only two of us lived to rejoin our army, Lieutenant Barres and myself.
Barres’s leg was shattered, hopelessly crippling him for the infantry,
but when the wounds healed—France could not spare so brave a man, so
they strapped him to the seat of a plane in the winged section of the
army, where he is still fighting!”

The sharp click, click of crutches tapped across the floor as Barres of
the Aviation Squad came into the fringe of light. He saluted, then broke
in upon Fouquet’s story.

“But you do not tell them, mon camarade, but for you I would have died
with the rest! He does not tell you, sir, that he put his own chance of
escape into peril by dragging me—a helpless burden—with him!”

He looked at Fouquet with an anxious frown, “I thought there might be
enquiry about to-day. You are—?”

A look flashed between them, the love of men who have faced death
together.

“Yes, Barres, I shall need you. It is the history of the Avengers I am
telling—to explain—”

He turned to the Americans.

“In the years of struggle that came after the retreat, our women of
France have taken the places of men behind the lines, while our soldiers
held the Front. But when Russia freed herself the news filtered through
the provinces that the women of Russia when the revolution needed them
formed themselves into the Battalion of Death. We also heard that German
women were in the army.

“Then the flame of a common inspiration touched the widows of the —nth.
They sought and found each other and petitioned as their right that they
be entered and drilled as the —nth Battalion of Avengers.

“Military objections refused them again and again, but the women stood
as firm in their purpose as their men who had held the post of rear
guard. Always they asked, Why should France be left a nation of
sorrowful women only? Let the widowed women of the —nth take the place
of men in the chance of death—they would welcome it—and so save men to
France.

“At last they were accepted and trained. Each added to her equipment a
small packet of cyanide of potassium as her Russian sisters had taught
her. One further request they made, that the position assigned to them
might be in the course of the advance to retake the ground held to the
death by their men. To me was given the great honor to be their
commander.”

He drew himself up with pride. “They have justified their petition for
enlistment, sir, they wear the strap of a battalion commended for
bravery. We have been fully trusted to hold our share of the Front in
safety.”

As if at the significance of his own words his head dropped, then lifted
again grimly.

“It was for to-day’s work that this battalion was assembled and trained
to invincibility. We need no one to interpret the meaning of the Front
to us, but to the women—to retake this strip of ground sodden with the
blood of the rear guard barricade built of their men, meant being given
the denied rite of closing glazed eyes, the crossing of arms on rigid
breasts, the lighting of candles at head and feet and the last kiss on
frozen lips. They were mad for it—not in revenge but to right a wrong.”

Fouquet’s voice thrilled, “That is the history, sir, and the temper of
the Battalion of Avengers who held the trench at your right!

“When the order came for attack to-day, they waited, taut as arrows in
held bowstrings, at the foot of the ladders for the signal to go over
the top. Like shafts released they sprang up the sides of the ditch.
There was sure death to the Hun in every gripped bayonet as they bent to
follow the barrage of fire across the craters and snarled wire of No
Man’s Land.

“No human sound comes through the hell of battle artillery and yet we
knew the strangling gasp that ran the length of the line as the
protective barrage made its final jump, lifted and showed us the trench
we were to take. The women stood as motionless as the corpses of the old
—nth!

“Thrust shield-wise above the heads of the Huns, crowning the ditch as
with protective spikes, frightened and sobbing, cowering before us were
hundreds of little children!”

Fouquet’s chair went spinning back as he leaned across the table.

“God! men—they knew! The devil tells them! They knew this section was
held by women! For us to hold the Front—our share of the Front—these
mothers must bayonet their way through crying, helpless babies!”

His groan found gasping echo.

“They were children of the French villages held by the Germans—we could
tell! Some of them had been shot by the last of our barrage fire after
the Huns had shoved them over the top. It was hell to see the children’s
torn bodies writhing—we’re used to it with men! The smallest—babies—were
clinging to the older ones—children of five or six—trying to
hide—between the Huns and—us!

“If we went on—took the ditch—these mothers must cut through a barricade
of children! If we did not go on, we betrayed our trust, lost our share
of the Front—let the Huns behind the lines through a gap made by the
failure of the women of the —nth!

“We seemed to stand there for hours, but it was only a second. The Huns
had thrust their guns between the children, and were holding their
fire—the devilish cat and mouse game!

“Then one of the women captains stumbled forward and made the sign of
the cross. It is the voiceless battle cry of the Avengers and signs
supreme sacrifice for all the Front means. She lifted her right hand in
the sweep of victory—on her wrist was bound the packet of death they
carry in case of capture by the kultur beasts—and fell, for the Huns
opened fire the instant they saw her gesture.

“But the message had gotten over! They could charge—they must—and the
cyanide would erase the intolerable memory forever! I looked at those
nearest and saw they would go through with it, but men—their faces were
set with the look of the face of Christ on the cross!”

He stopped, breathing heavily, and looked from one American to the
other.

“You won’t believe it—I saw it and I cannot—but the proof is there! As
the women gripped to thrust, leaning forward as if to force rebellious
bodies toward that barricade, there swept down upon us from the rear or
above, a sudden striding mist—a battalion of marching shadows in a blur
of the old red and blue that outstripped the Avengers’ advance. There
was a flash of charging steel and the waving colors of the old —nth as
they swept over the untouched children into the trench.

“It’s all a blur, sir, I can’t tell you clearly, but they turned their
faces as they passed and—we knew our dead. You could see the women cry
out and lift their arms, each to her own man as he halted an instant
beside her.

“Madame Arouet was sobbing as if caught by a bullet, ‘Jean—Jean!—to have
seen you again! Ah, my God!’ The tall corporal, just beyond, threw
herself with high piercing scream—arms outstretched—toward the smiling
shadow that was passing.

“The bravest man in the old —nth, where all were brave, dropped behind
as he bent over the fallen captain. There was a quivering smile of
recognition just as the jerking heap settled into quiet; then, as if he
waited for it, a slender blur in horizon blue sprang to his side and
swept forward with the Battalion—though the captain still lay where she
had fallen!”

Fouquet gripped his comrade, arm and crutch together, with a cry.

“Did you see our brave captain salute as he passed? Joyously I shouted
as I fell into step beside him, but—I dropped back—I could not keep that
pace! Barres—Barres—you saw them? You must have seen them? It was the
old —nth come back to save their women from the last hellish trap set by
fiends! We know they had the right. This was their battleground where
once before they had saved an army of France!”

Lieutenant Agor was leaning across the table with staring eyes:
“Then—that was what I—saw, sir?” He turned to his commander, “I told you
it was like the fog blowing in off Frisco bay, and—”

Captain Hailes half rose, “My lieutenant said he lost you when a mist
obscured the contact platoon. He said he saw—I—thought it was shell
shock—I meant to send him behind the lines—”

Barres shook his head slowly as he caught Fouquet about the shoulder.

“_Mon ami_—I saw—I know! Very low I flew over the gap to-day when it
broke and widened. I felt the White Battalion first, rushing through the
planes—then I saw them—a mist of the old red and blue with wondrous
swords!” His voice sank low, “From above I saw one who led them—a
shining one who, even as we have read, smote the camp of the Assyrians”.

“It was the old —nth that followed. I knew them!” His voice caught. “Did
you see the rascals in the third squad goose-stepping as they closed in
on the Hun?” With a break of unsteady laughter, “It was always their
final joke with the German, sir, before they got him. No one could break
them of it! Fouquet—we know! It was the old —nth, our White Battalion!”

“A White Battalion!” Agor repeated the words slowly, still staring.

The aviator shifted his crutch and drew himself erect. “_Mes amis_, the
Huns fling the taunt that France has been bled white! To us it means a
White Army—a crowding host killed in battle—the red life of gallant
youth given so gloriously that it cannot die!

“And France bled white!... We know,” the words halted, “the country for
which we went to war is maimed—scarred—she can never again be the same
France, but—” his lifted face gleamed through the dim light, “our battle
cry has changed! We no longer fight ‘_Pour la Patrie!_’ but ‘_Pour le
Droit!_’—the right that is greater than country!”

With a sharp intake of breath he turned to his comrade. Fouquet’s
protesting look was gone. With the sure touch of reality he picked up
the story.

“It was all over in a breath, sir—like a mist swirling along the
trenches shot through with phantom steel, and we knew our work was being
done. When it lifted—the ditch lay motionless!

“The women had dropped on their knees with their arms about the
children. We passed the poor little ones through to the rear in charge
of the wounded.

“The first trench was piled with dead—unmarked dead! The communicating
tunnels were cleared or quiet; that was how we made up the forty seconds
and followed the barrage on time to the second ditch.

“I looked down the line as we made ready for the second charge. Not a
Hun cried ‘Kamarad!’ or tried to surrender when they saw the faces of
the Avengers. The second ditch was piled with nearly as many dead as the
first—marked dead! The Avengers and the White Battalion had retaken the
ground for which the —nth had given their lives.

“That is all, sir,” the gaunt figure in mud-stained blue straightened,
“excepting that the fouling Beast is going in the end—we know! He cannot
stand against the unconquerable dead. And when we march through Berlin,
the White Armies will march at the head of the column—” he lifted his
hand in salute, “_Pour le Droit!_”

The crippled aviator balanced on crutches as he brought up his hand.

“_Pour le Droit!_”

Noiselessly the men of the Foreign Legion pushed back their chairs and
stood at salute. Silently they faced each other in a long moment of
understanding. The major in blue dropped his arm and with smiling eyes
gripped the hand of the man in khaki.

He flung open the door of the dugout, humming the Song of France in
marching time. The young officers, French and American, fell into step
together.

“Gentlemen—to Headquarters!”

The lilting voices filled the low room to the accent of marching feet.

    “_Allons, enfants de la patrie,_
    _Le jour de gloire est arrivé!_”




   THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918



        ADDRESSES OF AMERICAN MAGAZINES PUBLISHING SHORT STORIES


_Note._ _This address list does not aim to be complete, but is based
simply on the magazines which I have considered for this volume._

    Adventure, Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.
    Ainslee’s Magazine, 79 Seventh Avenue, New York City.
    All−Story Weekly, 280 Broadway, New York City.
    American Magazine, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Argosy, 280 Broadway, New York City.
    Atlantic Monthly, 41 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston, Mass.
    Bellman, 118 South 6th Street, Minneapolis, Minn.
    Black Cat, Salem, Mass.
    Boston Evening Transcript, 324 Washington Street, Boston, Mass.
    Catholic World, 120 West 60th Street, New York City.
    Century Magazine, 353 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Collier’s Weekly, 416 West 13th Street, New York City.
    Cosmopolitan Magazine, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.
    Country Gentleman, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.
    Delineator, Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.
    Detective Story Magazine, 79 Seventh Avenue, New York City.
    Everybody’s Magazine, Spring and Macdougal Streets, New York City.
    Forum, 118 East 28th Street, New York City.
    Good Housekeeping, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.
    Harper’s Bazar, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.
    Harper’s Magazine, Franklin Square, New York City.
    Hearst’s Magazine, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.
    Illustrated Sunday Magazine, 193 Main Street, Buffalo, N. Y.
    Independent, 119 West 40th Street, New York City.
    Ladies’ Home Journal, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.
    Liberator, 34 Union Square, East, New York City.
    Little Review, 24 West 16th Street, New York City.
    Live Stories, 35 West 39th Street, New York City.
    McCall’s Magazine 236 West 37th Street, New York City.
    McClure’s Magazine, 251 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Magnificat, Manchester, N. H.
    Metropolitan Magazine, 432 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Midland, Moorhead, Minn.
    Modern School, Stelton, N. J.
    Munsey’s Magazine, 280 Broadway, New York City.
    Outlook, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Pagan, 7 East 15th Street, New York City.
    Parisienne, Printing Crafts Building, 461 Eighth Avenue, New York City.
    Pictorial Review, 216 West 39th Street, New York City.
    Popular Magazine, 79th Seventh Avenue, New York City.
    Queen’s Work, 3200 Russell Avenue, St. Louis, Mo.
    Reedy’s Mirror, Syndicate Trust Building, St. Louis, Mo.
    Saturday Evening Post, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.
    Scribner’s Magazine, 597 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
    Short Stories, Garden City, Long Island, N. Y.
    Smart Set, Printing Crafts Building, New York City.
    Snappy Stories, 35 West 39th Street, New York City.
    Southern Woman’s Magazine, American Building, Nashville, Tenn.
    Stratford Journal, 32 Oliver Street, Boston, Mass.
    Sunset Magazine, 460 Fourth Street, San Francisco, Cal.
    Today’s Housewife, 461 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Touchstone, 118 East 30th Street, New York City.
    University Magazine, Montreal, P. Q., Canada.
    Woman’s Home Companion, 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
    Woman’s World, 107 So. Clinton Street, Chicago, Ill.
    Youth’s Companion, 881 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Mass.



        THE BIOGRAPHICAL ROLL OF HONOR OF AMERICAN SHORT STORIES


                        JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918


_Note._ _Only stories by American authors are listed. The best sixty
stories are indicated by an asterisk before the title of the story. The
index figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 prefixed to the name of the author indicate
that his work has been included in the Rolls of Honor for 1914, 1915,
1916, and 1917 respectively. The list excludes reprints._

*ABDULLAH, ACHMED.* Born at Kabul, Afghanistan, May 12, 1881, of Arab
and Tartar stock. Educated in India, England, France, and Germany.
Bachelor of Letters, Sorbonne, Paris. Served in British-Indian and
Ottoman armies. Writer of short stories, novels, and plays. Expert
linguist. Chief interests, outside his profession, music, international
politics, society. First story published, “The Strength of the Little
Thin Thread,” Collier’s Weekly, Oct. 5, 1912. Author of “The Red Stain,”
1915; “Bucking the Tiger,” 1917; “The Blue-Eyed Manchu,” 1917; “The Last
Manchu,” 1918; “The Trail of the Beast,” 1918; “The Web,” 1919. Lives in
New York City.

    Cobbler’s Wax.
    Light.
    *Simple Act of Piety.
    Two-Handed Sword.

(34) *ANDERSON, SHERWOOD* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Man of Ideas.
    Senility.

(34) *ANDREWS, MARY RAYMOND SHIPMAN* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Ditch.

(34) *BABCOCK, EDWINA STANTON* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Cruelties.
    *“Goddess Size.”

*BEEDE, RALPH G.* Born in Redfield, S. D., June 3, 1895. Educated in
public schools, Rolla, N. D., and Shattuck Military School, Faribault,
Minn. Three years at University of North Dakota. Managed newspapers in
Winnebago, Neb., and Makoti, N. D. Has taught school and was
superintendent of schools at Goodrich, N. D., for two years. Chief
interests, writing and music. First story published, “Cera,” Harper’s
Magazine, May, 1918.

    Cera

(4) *BEER, THOMAS* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Beneficiary.

“*BRANGWYN, JOHN.*” First story published, “Bell-Tower of P’an-Ku.” His
first book will be published soon. He lives in Washington, D. C.

    *Bell-Tower of P’an-Ku.

*BROWN, HEARTY EARL.* Born 1886, Schoolcraft, Mich. Degrees A.B. and
M.A. from University of Michigan. Member of the English Faculty,
University of Kansas. First published story, “The Marrying Time,”
Atlantic Monthly, October, 1918. Lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

    Marrying Time.

(23) *BROWN, KATHARINE HOLLAND.* Born in Alton, Ill. Educated in
Washington, D. C., and at University of Michigan. Profession, writer of
fiction. Chief interest, writing. First published stories: “2620 Oxford
Place,” Lippincott’s Magazine, August, 1900, “The Mathematics Man,”
Woman’s Home Companion, August, 1900. Books published: “Diane,” 1904;
“Dawn,” 1907; “The Messenger,” 1910; “White Roses,” 1910; “Philippa at
Halcyon,” 1910; “Uncertain Irene,” 1911; “The Hallowell Partnership,”
1912; “Wages of Honor,” 1917. Lives at Long Beach, Cal.

    *Buster.

*BROWNELL, AGNES MARY.* Born at Concordia, Kans. Educated in Concordia
public and high schools, supplemented by four years in a western school
of music. Music teacher. Chief interests, music, an ineradicable habit
of prowling around libraries, and out-of-door jaunts. First published
story, “The Fifer,” Youth’s Companion, June 28, 1917. Lives at
Concordia, Kans.

    Sanctuary.

(14) *BURT, MAXWELL STRUTHERS.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Wings of the Morning.

*BUTLER, ELLIS PARKER.* Born at Muscatine, Iowa, Dec. 5, 1869. One year
in Muscatine high school. Bill clerk, bookkeeper, salesman, editor, and
now acting Cashier of Flushing National Bank, of which he is
Vice-President. Chief interest, letting himself know he is alive. First
published story, “Shorty and Frank’s Adventure,” in a deceased
publication whose name is forgotten. Author of “Pigs is Pigs,” 1906;
“French Decorative Styles,” 1906; “The Incubator Baby,” 1906; “Mr.
Perkins of Portland,” 1906; “The Great American Pie Co.,” 1907;
“Confessions of a Daddy,” 1907; “Kilo,” 1907; “The Cheerful Smugglers,”
1908; “That Pup,” 1908; “The Thin Santa Claus,” 1909; “Mike Flannery on
Duty and Off,” 1909; “Water Goats and Other Troubles,” 1910; “Adventures
of a Suburbanite,” 1911; “The Jack Knife Man,” 1913; “Red Head and
Whistle Breeches,” 1916; “Dominie Dean,” 1917; and “Philo Gubb,” 1918.
Lives in Flushing, N. Y.

    *Sorry Tale of Hennery K. Lunk.

(2) *BUTLER, KATHARINE.* Born in Baltimore, Md., Oct 2, 1890, of New
England parentage. Has lived in Salem, Mass., and the nearby inland
countryside of Essex County since 1896. Education desultory. First
published story, “In No Strange Land,” Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915.
Lives in Danvers, Mass.

    *Black Pearl.

*CABELL, JAMES BRANCH.* Born in Richmond, Va., April 14, 1879. Educated
at McGuire’s School in Richmond, and graduated from College of William
and Mary, 1898. Professions in order: school teacher, proof reader,
newspaper reporter, and coal miner: at present, genealogist and writer.
First published stories: “Love Letters of Falstaff,” Harper’s Monthly,
March, 1902; and “As Played Before His Highness” (republished as “The
Ducal Audience”), Smart Set, 1902. Author of the following volumes:
(novels) “The Eagle’s Shadow,” 1904; “The Cords of Vanity,” 1909; “The
Soul of Melicent,” 1913; “The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck,” 1915; “The
Cream of the Jest,” 1917; (tales) “The Line of Love,” 1905; “Gallantry,”
1907; “Chivalry,” 1909; “The Certain Hour,” 1916; (essays) “Beyond
Life,” 1918; (verse) “From the Hidden Way,” 1916; (genealogy)
“Branchiana,” 1906; “Branch of Abingdon,” 1911; “The Majors and Their
Marriages,” 1915. Lives at Dumbarton Grange, Dumbarton, Va.

    *Some Ladies and Jurgen.

(23) *CANFIELD, DOROTHY (MRS. JOHN R. FISHER).* Born at Lawrence, Kans.,
Feb. 17, 1879. Graduate of Ohio State University and Columbia
University. Secretary Horace Mann School, 1902-05. Married, 1907. Has
traveled widely in Europe. Now assisting Miss Winifred Holt in War
Relief Work at Paris. Author of “Corneille and Racine in England,” 1904;
(with G. R. Carpenter) “English Rhetoric and Composition,” 1906; “What
Shall We Do Now?” 1906; “Gunhild,” 1907; “The Squirrel-Cage,” 1912; “The
Montessori Mother,” 1913; “Mothers and Children,” 1914; “Hillsboro
People,” 1915; “The Bent Twig,” 1915; “The Real Motive,” 1916; (with
Sarah Cleghorn) “Fellow Captains,” 1916; “Understood Betsy,” 1917; “Home
Fires In France,” 1918. Lives at Arlington, Vt.

    Little Kansas Leaven.
    On the Edge.
    Pharmacienne.

*CARVER, GEORGE.*

    In a Moment of Time.

(234) *COBB, IRVIN S.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Gallowsmith.

(4) *CRABBE, BERTHA HELEN* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Wild-Wing.

*DICKINSON, ROY.* Born at Newark, N. J., March 14, 1888. Educated at
Newark Academy and Princeton University, graduating in 1909. Profession,
advertising and manufacturing. Five years with Cosmopolitan Magazine.
Chief interests, labor psychology and the other fellow’s viewpoint.
First story published, “Playing Hookey,” Delineator, November, 1916. Now
Captain in the Ordnance Department at Washington. Engaged in work for
stimulating industry in ordnance plants.

    Some of Our Folks, and War.

(4) *DOBIE, CHARLES CALDWELL.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Open Window.

(134) *DWIGHT, H. G.* (_for biography, see 1917_) _and_ *TAYLOR, JOHN.*

    *Emerald of Tamerlane.

*“ELDERLY SPINSTER” (MARGARET WILSON).* Born in Iowa, Jan. 16, 1882.
Graduated from University of Chicago, 1904. Lived in India for the most
part, 1904 to 1916. Since then she has been resting, gardening, and
farming. Chief interest, the Americanization of American children
through the school in which she is teaching. First published story,
“Taffeta Trousers,” Atlantic Monthly, December, 1917.

    God’s Little Joke.

*ELLERBE, ALMA ESTABROOK,* and *ELLERBE, PAUL LEE.* Mrs. Ellerbe was
born in Greenfield, Ind., and educated at Oxford College, Ohio. Chief
interests, people, writing, and automobiling. First published magazine
story, “The Requital,” Harper’s Magazine, September, 1903. Author of
“The Rule of Three.” Mr. Ellerbe was born in Montgomery, Ala. Had one
year in which he scrupulously refrained from study at the University of
the South, Sewanee, Tenn. Now Assistant Chief, Americanization section,
Council of National Defense. Chief interests: English poetry, music,
writing, automobiling. First published story, “The Vacant Forty,”
Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1913. Has been chief naturalization
examiner for the U. S. Department of Labor at Denver. Chautauqua
lecturer. Mr. and Mrs. Ellerbe plan to do all their writing in
collaboration, preferably in a cabin in the Colorado Rockies.

    Citizen Paper.

*FISHER, DOROTHY CANFIELD.*

    _See_ *CANFIELD, DOROTHY.*

*FREEDLEY, MARY MITCHELL.* Born in Philadelphia, Feb. 14, 1894.
Granddaughter of S. Weir Mitchell. Previous to her marriage she was much
interested in the betterment of economic conditions relating to woman’s
labor, and at one time organized and managed The Philadelphia Trades
School for Girls. She is the wife of an actor, Vinton Freedley, and her
interests are mainly of the stage and things theatrical. She has never
done any previous writing and is at present chiefly concerned with the
business of “being a woman” and the wife of a soldier.

    *Blind Vision.

(1234) *FREEMAN, MARY E. WILKINS.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Jade Bracelet

(4) *GEER, CORNELIA THROOP.* Born in New York City, Feb. 15, 1894.
Educated at Brearley School, New York. Graduated from Barnard College,
Columbia University, 1917. Instructor in English, Bryn Mawr College,
1918. Interested in Woman’s Land Army of America, and worked as farm
hand at its Bedford Unit in summers of 1917 and 1918. First published
story, “Pearls Before Swine,” Atlantic Monthly, October, 1917. Lives in
New York City.

    *Irish of It.

*GEROULD, GORDON HALL.* Born at Goffstown, N. H., Oct. 4, 1877. Graduate
of Dartmouth College and Oxford University. Studied also in Paris. On
Faculty of Bryn Mawr College, 1901 to 1905, and since that time
successively Assistant Professor and Professor of English at Princeton
University. Captain Ordnance Department, U. S. A., 1918. Married
Katharine Fullerton, 1910. First story published, “Justification,”
Scribner’s Magazine, October, 1911. Publications largely the result of
studies in mediæval literature, folk lore, and hagiography, appearing in
learned journals here and abroad. Books: “Sir Guy of Warwick,” 1905,
“Selected Essays of Henry Fielding,” 1905; “The Grateful Dead,” 1908;
“Saints’ Lives,” 1916; “Peter Sanders, Retired,” 1917. Lives in
Princeton, N. J.

    *Imagination.

(1234) *GEROULD, KATHARINE FULLERTON.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Marchpane.

*GILBERT, GEORGE.* Born in Binghamton, N. Y., Sept. 27, 1874. Educated
in public schools. Became newsboy, messenger, “rambler,” telegrapher,
lineman, and press operator before reaching eighteen. Served as
editor-in-chief of several important inland newspapers. Confidential
clerk to Republican whip, J. W. Dwight, in Congressional sessions
1909-10. An editor again in Binghamton. First published story, “The
Encouragement of Reuben,” Pets and Animals, July and August, 1900. Chief
interests: Mrs. Gilbert, their son, flower garden, fishing, playing
typewriter sonatas. Lives in Binghamton, N. Y.

    Ashes of Roses.
    *In Maulmain Fever-Ward.

(4) *GLASPELL, SUSAN.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *“Beloved Husband.”
    *“Poor Ed.”

*GOODMAN, HENRY.* Born in Roumania of Jewish parents, May 30, 1893. Came
to the United States in 1900. Graduated from the Columbia School of
Journalism in 1915. Subsequently journalist on the New York Tribune and
New York World. First story published, “Billy’s Mother,” Pearson’s
Magazine, June, 1917. Chief interest, writing poetry and short stories.
Lives in New York City.

    Conquered.

(134) *GORDON, ARMISTEAD C.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Sinjinn, Surviving.

*HALDEMAN-JULIUS, EMANUEL.* _See_ _Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-_.

*HALL, MAY EMERY.* Born in Providence, R. I., Sept. 16, 1874. Educated
at high and normal schools in Providence, supplemented by special
University courses. Taught for five years in Providence public schools.
Chief interests, the World War, study and travel. Author of “Dutch
Days,” 1914, “Roger Williams,” 1917. Writer of magazine articles. Lives
at Douglaston, L. I., N. Y.

    Whiteford’s Masterpiece.

(3) *HAWES, CHARLES BOARDMAN.*

    *Even So.

(2) *HECHT, BEN.* Born in New York City, Feb. 28, 1896. But left for the
Middle West as soon as he learned to walk. Educated in public schools,
Racine, Wis. Has always wanted to be an anthropologist. First published
story, “Life,” Little Review, November, 1915. Lives in Chicago.

    *Decay.

(4) *HEMENWAY, HETTY.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Their War.

*“HENRY, ETTA.”* Pseudonym of a woman student at Columbia University,
who has published several excellent short stories. Lives in St. Paul,
Minnesota.

    Kaddish.

*HERGESHEIMER, JOSEPH.* Born in Philadelphia, Feb. 15, 1880. Educated at
a Quaker school in Philadelphia and at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine
Arts. His first magazine contribution was a set of prose impressions of
Atlantic City in The Forum, September, 1913. Author of “The Lay
Anthony,” 1914; “Mountain Blood,” 1915; “The Three Black Pennys,” 1917;
“Gold and Iron,” 1918; “Java Head,” 1919. Lives in West Chester, Pa.

    Black Key.

*HOUGH, EMERSON.* Born at Newton, Ia., June 28, 1857. High school
education at Newton, and graduated from State University of Iowa, 1880.
Practised law in New Mexico in 1882. Came to Chicago in 1889 and had
charge of the Western office of Forest and Stream, 1889 to 1902. Fond of
amateur sport. “I have never seen a game of professional baseball and
don’t intend to. I care little for the movies, and detest the comic
supplements of the Sunday newspapers. I read moderately and like
historical fiction of the old type. I don’t care so much for jig-time
and jazz-time.” First published story, “Far from the Crowd,” Forest and
Stream, about 1881. “My father was a great sportsman, a great
mathematician, a great Christian. I myself have always been a sportsman,
but as to mathematics and Christianity I do not say so much.” Author of
“The Singing Mouse Stories,” 1895; “The Story of the Cowboy,” 1897; “The
Girl at the Half-way House,” 1900; “The Mississippi Bubble,” 1902; “The
Way to the West,” 1903; “The Law of the Land,” 1904; “Heart’s Desire,”
1905; “The King of Gee Whiz,” 1906; “The Story of the Outlaw,” 1906;
“The Way of a Man,” 1907; “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” 1909; “The
Sowing,” 1909; “The Young Alaskans,” 1910; “The Purchase Price,” 1911;
“Young Alaskans on the Trail,” 1911; “John Rawn,” 1912; “The Lady and
the Pirate,” 1913; “Young Alaskans in the Rockies,” 1913; “The
Magnificent Adventure,” 1915; “The Man Next Door,” 1916; “The Broken
Gate,” 1917; “Young Alaskans in the Far North,” 1918; “The Way Out,”
1918. President of the Society of Midland Authors. Lives in Chicago.

    Clan Gordon.

(2) *HUGHES, RUPERT.* Born in Lancaster, Mo., Jan. 31, 1872. Educated at
public schools, Lancaster, Mo., and Keokuk, Ia. Graduate of Western
Reserve University, 1892, M.A. (Yale), 1899. Chief interests:
literature, military work, music, and history. Married, 1908. Assistant
editor Godey’s Magazine, Current Literature, and The Criterion before
1901. With Encyclopedia Britannica, 1902 to 1905. Captain U. S. A. on
Mexican border service, 1916. Assistant to Adjutant-General, New York,
1917. Now Major in the U. S. A., stationed at Washington, D. C. First
short story published, probably “The Man Who Could Stop His Heart,” The
Adelbert, 1889. Books: “The Lake Rim Athletic Club,” 1898; “The Dozen
from Lake Rim,” 1899; “American Composers,” 1900; “Gyges’ Ring,” 1901;
“The Whirlwind,” 1902; “The Musical Guide,” 1903; “Love Affairs of Great
Musicians,” 1903; “Songs by Thirty Americans,” 1904; “Zal,” 1905;
“Colonel Crockett’s Coöperative Christmas,” 1906; “The Lake Rim Cruise,”
1910; “The Gift-Wife,” 1910; “Excuse Me,” 1911; “Miss 318,” 1911; “The
Old Nest,” 1912; “The Amiable Crimes of Dirk Memling,” 1913; “The Lady
Who Smoked Cigars,” 1913; “What Will People Say?” 1914; “The Music
Lovers’ Cyclopedia,” 1914; “The Last Rose of Summer,” 1914; “Empty
Pockets,” 1915; “Clipped Wings,” 1916; “The Thirteenth Commandment,”
1916; “In a Little Town,” 1917; “We Can’t Have Everything,” 1917; “Long
Ever Ago,” 1918; “The Unpardonable Sin,” 1918; and many successful
plays. Lives at Bedford Hills, N. Y.

    *At the Back of God Speed.

*HUMPHREY, GEORGE.* Born at Boughton, Eng., July 17, 1889. Educated at
Faversham School, England; Oxford and Leipsig Universities. Professor of
ancient history at Saint Francis Xavier’s University, Antigonish, Nova
Scotia. Now at Harvard University.

    *Father’s Hand.

(234) *HURST, FANNIE.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Hers _Not_ to Reason Why.

(2) *JOHNSON, ARTHUR.* Born in Boston, 1881. Graduate of Harvard
University. Practised law since 1905. Chief interests: his profession,
poetry, human nature, literature, art. Cares more for poetry than
anything else. First story published, “Frankie and Jenny,” American
Magazine, December, 1913. Now engaged in war work at Washington. Home,
Cambridge, Mass.

    His New Mortal Coil.
    *Little Family.
    *Visit of the Master.

(4) *JONES, (E.) CLEMENT.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Mongrel.

*JULIUS, EMANUEL HALDEMAN-.* Born in Philadelphia, July 30, 1888. Self
educated. “I left home as a kid and meandered around doing odd jobs—from
being a bell boy in a school for polite young ladies to holding copy in
a newspaper proof room. At twenty I became a reporter in New York. Later
I did newspaper work in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles. I have
edited and contributed to many labor and radical periodicals. I am
managing editor of The New Appeal, which is the largest Socialist paper
in the world. I am also director of a thoroughly capitalistic bank.
Married in 1916. My chief interest right now is in getting the baby
weaned.” Books: “The Color of Life,” 1916; “Somewhere in Europe,” 1917;
“The Pest,” 1916. Lives in Girard, Kans.

    Ring.

(3) *KING, BASIL.* Born in Charlottetown, P. E. I., Canada, Feb. 26,
1859. Educated at St. Peter’s School, Charlottetown, and King’s College,
Windsor, N. S. Married, 1893. First story published, “The Eleventh
Hour,” Atlantic Monthly, February, 1901. Books: “Griselda,” 1901; “Let
Not Man Put Asunder,” 1902; “In the Garden of Charity,” 1903; “Steps of
Honor,” 1905; “The Giant’s Strength,” 1906; “The Inner Shrine,” 1909;
“The Wild Olive,” 1910; “The Street Called Straight,” 1912; “The Way
Home,” 1913; “The Letter of the Contract,” 1914; “The Side of the
Angels,” 1915; “The Lifted Veil,” 1917; “The High Heart,” 1917;
“Abraham’s Bosom,” 1918. Lives in Boston.

    Going West.

(4) *KLINE, BURTON* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *In the Open Code.
    Singular Smile.

(4) *KRYSTO, CHRISTINA* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Mother of Stasya.

*LEWIS, SINCLAIR.* Born at Sauk Centre, Minn., Feb. 7, 1885. Educated at
local schools, and graduate of Yale University. Newspaper reporter,
assistant editor of Adventure and of Transatlantic Tales, editor of the
Publishers’ Newspaper Syndicate, editor for George H. Doran Company and
Frederick A. Stokes Company. First published story appeared in Pacific
Monthly about 1905. Books: “Our Mr. Wrenn,” 1914; “The Trail of the
Hawk,” 1915; “Job,” 1917; “The Innocents,” 1917. Lives at Port
Washington, L. I., N. Y.

    *Willow Walk.

*LIEBERMAN, ELIAS.* Born in Petrograd, Russia, Oct. 30, 1883. His
parents emigrated with him to New York in 1891. Graduate of the College
of the City of New York and New York University. Head of the English
Department, Bushwick High School, Brooklyn, N. Y. Aside from life
itself, magazine and newspaper work has always been his chief interest.
First published story, “The Open Door,” Lippincott’s Magazine,
September, 1913. Books: “The American Short Story,” 1912; “Paved
Streets,” 1918. Lives in Brooklyn, N. Y.

    Tower of Confusion.

(3) *MARKS, JEANNETTE.* Born in Chattanooga, Tenn., 1875. Educated in
Philadelphia, Dresden, and Wellesley College. Has travelled much in
England and Wales. Fond of outdoor sports. Lecturer in English
literature at Mt. Holyoke College. Member of the Committee on Habit
Forming Drugs, American Public Health Association. First story
published, “Mors Triumphans,” Outlook, May 20, 1905. Books: “The
Cheerful Cricket,” 1907; “The English Pastoral Drama,” 1908; “Through
Welsh Doorways,” 1909; “The End of a Song,” 1911; “A Girl’s School Days
and After,” 1911; “Gallant Little Wales,” 1912; “Vacation Camping for
Girls,” 1913; “Leviathan,” 1913; “Early English Hero Tales,” 1915;
“Three Welsh Plays,” 1917. Winner of the Welsh National Theatre Prize,
1911. Lives at South Hadley, Mass.

    *Haymakers.
    *Old Lady Hudson.

(1) *MORRIS, GOUVERNEUR.* Born in New York City, Feb. 7, 1876. Graduated
from Yale University, 1898. Books: “A Bunch of Grapes,” 1897; “Tom
Beauling,” 1901; “Aladdin O’Brien,” 1902; “The Pagan’s Progress,” 1904;
“Ellen and Mr. Man,” 1904; “The Footprint,” 1908; “Putting on the
Screws,” 1909; “Spread Eagle,” 1910; “The Voice in the Rice,” 1910;
“It,” 1912; “If You Touch Them They Vanish,” 1913; “The Penalty,” 1915;
“When My Ship Comes In,” 1915; “The Goddess,” 1915; “The Seven
Darlings,” 1915; “We Three,” 1916. Lives in New York City.

    Unsent Letter.

*MORTEN, MARJORY.* Born in New York City. Educated in boarding schools,
studied art in Paris and New York. Married Alexander Morten, 1909. First
story published, “Sophy So-and-So,” Harper’s Magazine, August, 1915.
Lives in New York City.

    *Nettle and Foxglove.

*MOSELEY, KATHARINE PRESCOTT.* Born in Newburyport, Mass. Niece of Mrs.
Harriet Prescott Spofford. Privately educated in Washington, D. C. Her
father, a secretary of the I. C. Commission, spent over twenty years in
his well-known work for the amelioration of railroad employees. His life
was written by James Morgan. Miss Moseley’s life has been spent between
Newburyport, Washington, and Boston, with trips abroad. Her chief
interests are in music and gardening. Her home is at Deer Island,
Newburyport, Mass.

    *Story Vinton Heard at Mallorie.

(23) *MYERS, WALTER L.* Born in Lawrence, Kans., 1886, and reared in
Iowa. Educated in Iowa public schools, State University of Iowa and
Harvard University. In civil life Assistant Professor of English,
University of Iowa. Now Second Lieutenant, Machine-Gun Training Centre,
Camp Hancock, Ga. Chief interest, literature. First published story, “At
the Crossing of the Trails,” Outing, 1909.

    *Clouds.

(4) *O’HIGGINS, HARVEY J.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Owen Carey.

*OPPENHEIM, JAMES.* Born at St. Paul, Minn., May 24, 1882. Educated at
Columbia University. Engaged in Social Settlement Work in New York, 1901
to 1903. Married, 1905. Teacher and Acting Superintendent, Hebrew
Technical School for Girls, New York, 1905 to 1907. Editor, the Seven
Arts Magazine, 1916-17. First story published in a school paper at age
of thirteen. Books: “Doctor Rast,” 1909; “Monday Morning,” 1909; “Wild
Oats,” 1910; “The Pioneers,” 1910; “Pay-Envelopes,” 1911; “The
Nine-Tenths,” 1911; “The Olympian,” 1912; “Idle Wives,” 1914; “Songs for
the New Age,” 1914; “The Beloved,” 1915; “War and Laughter,” 1916; “The
Book of Self,” 1917; “Night,” 1918. Chief interests: running a Ford in
the Litchfield Hills, taking care of chickens and gas engines, analytic
psychology, talking with a friend, and writing poetry. Lives in New York
City.

    * Second-Rater.

(34) *O’SULLIVAN, VINCENT.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Exhibit C-470.

*PATTERSON, ELIZABETH.* Born in Old Fort Seward, Jamestown, Dakota
Territory, and spent her childhood in the picturesque life of isolated
army posts. Daughter of Brigadier-General John S. Patterson, U. S. A.
Educated at Cooperstown, N. Y., High School. Chief interests, traveling
and out-of-door things. Expects to spend the coming winter in France in
Red Cross service. First story published, “Sir Galahad,” All-Story
Weekly, May 18, 1918. Lives in Cooperstown, N. Y.

    Sir Galahad.

*PATTERSON, NORMA.* Born at Jasper, Texas, July 6, 1891. Educated at
Beaumont High School and University of Nashville. Chief interest at
present, turning out khaki-colored sweaters. Is an earnest student of
places, words, people, and national issues. First published story, “The
Roll of Honor,” Holland’s Magazine, 1915. Lives in San Antonio, Tex.

    *Unto Each His Crown.

*PAYNE, WILL.* Born on a farm in Whiteside County, Ill., Jan. 9, 1855.
Public-school education. Chief interests: writing and three
grandchildren. “My first magazine story was published in the Century
about 1891, but while I have a clear recollection of the indignation of
the gentleman who unconsciously sat as a model for the leading
character, I can’t, to save me, recover the title.” Member of National
Institute of Arts and Letters. Engaged in journalism, 1890 to 1904.
Books: “Jerry the Dreamer,” 1896; “The Money Captain,” 1898; “The Story
of Eva,” 1901; “On Fortune’s Road,” 1902; “Mr. Salt,” 1903; “When Love
Speaks,” 1906; “The Automatic Capitalist,” 1909; “The Losing-Game,”
1909. Lives in Paw Paw, Mich.

    *His Escape.

*PELLEY, WILLIAM DUDLEY.* An accomplished writer of Vermont stories,
proprietor of the St. Johnsbury Caledonian, and editorial free lance. Is
now traveling in Siberia. Lives at Bennington, Vt.

    *Toast to Forty-Five.

(4) *PERRY, LAWRENCE.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Poet.

*PRATT, LUCY.* Born at Deerfield, Mass., July 29, 1874. Educated at
Deerfield Academy, private school at Nyack, N. Y., Boston Normal School
of Gymnastics, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Teacher at
Hampton Institute, 1897 to 1904. First story published, “The Entrance of
Ezekiel.” Books: “Ezekiel,” 1909; “Ezekiel Expands,” 1914; “Felix Tells
It,” 1915. Chief interests: human beings, music, literature, and
changing seasons. Lives at Cambridge, Mass.

    *Green Umbrellas.

(4) *PULVER, MARY BRECHT.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *David and Jonathan.

*PUTNAM, GEORGE PALMER.* Born at Rye, N. Y., Sept. 7, 1887. Educated in
public schools and King’s School, Stamford, Conn., Gunnery School,
Washington, D. C., Harvard University, and University of California.
Journalist, newspaper owner, author, Mayor of Bend, Ore., and Secretary
to the Governor of Oregon. Enlisted in the army and went to the Mexican
border. Has been in Department of Justice for eight months and is now in
the Officers’ Training Camp, Louisville, Ky. Chief interests: outdoor
world, travel, politics, and people. First published story, “The Sixth
Man,” Ladies’ Home Journal, February, 1918. Books: “The Southland of
North America,” 1913; “Outings in Oregon,” 1915; “The Smiting of the
Rock,” 1917. Home: Bend, Ore.

    *Sixth Man.

*RANCK, EDWIN CARTY.* Born in Lexington, Ky., 1879. Educated in private
schools and Harvard. Newspaper man since 1898. On staffs of newspapers
in Lexington and Covington, Ky. Dramatic editor, Cincinnati Post, 1906;
St. Louis Star, 1907 and 1908; Brooklyn Eagle, 1916 to 1918. Has been in
France as war correspondent. Now press representative and play reader
for the Greenwich Village Theatre, New York City. First published story,
“The Chosen People,” Lippincott’s Magazine, September, 1906. Books:
“History of Covington,” 1903; “Poems for Pale People,” 1906; “The Night
Riders,” 1912; “The Doughboys’ Book,” 1919. Lives in New York City.

    Out o’ Luck.

*RHODES, HARRISON (GARFIELD).* Born at Cleveland, Ohio, June 2, 1871.
Educated at public schools, Cleveland, Adelbert College of Western
Reserve University, and Harvard University. Chief interests, the war,
travel, human society, and writing. First published story, “The
Impertinence of Charles Edward,” McClure’s Magazine, January, 1903.
Books: “The Lady and the Ladder,” 1906; “Charles Edward,” 1907; “The
Flight to Eden,” 1907; “Guide Book to Florida,” 1912; “In Vacation
America,” 1915. Lives in New York City.

    *Extra Men.

*RIVERS, STUART.*

    Leading Lady of the Discards.

*RUSSELL, JOHN.* Born at Davenport, Ia., April 22, 1885. Son of Charles
Edward Russell, publicist. Educated in Brooklyn, Chicago, and
Northwestern University. Left college to make a tour of the world. Spent
some time in the South Seas. Reporter and special writer New York
Herald, 1907. Special correspondent to Panama and Peru, 1908. Staff
interviewer, teacher, and fiction writer, New York Herald Sunday
Magazine, 1908 to 1911. Free lance magazine contributor under seven
pseudonyms until 1916. On volunteer mission for U. S. Public
Information, England and Ireland, 1918. First published story, “First
Assistant to the Substitute,” Circle Magazine, July, 1907. Chief
interests, fiction and travel. Married Grace Nye Bolster of Chicago;
daughter, Lydia. No acknowledged books.

    Adversary.

(3) *SEDGWICK, ANNE DOUGLAS. (MRS. BASIL DE SÉLINCOURT).* Born at
Englewood, N. J., March 28, 1873. Educated by governess at home. Left
America when nine years of age, and has since lived abroad, chiefly in
Paris and London. Has studied painting and exhibited at Paris. Married,
1908. Books: “The Dull Miss Archinard,” 1898; “The Confounding of
Camelia,” 1899; “The Rescue,” 1902; “Paths of Judgment,” 1904; “The
Shadow of Life,” 1906; “A Fountain Sealed,” 1907; “Amabel Channice,”
1908; “Franklin Winslow Kane,” 1910; “Tante,” 1911; “The Nest,” 1912;
“The Encounter,” 1914. Lives near Oxford, England.

    *Daffodils.

(1234) *SINGMASTER, ELSIE.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Release.

(234) *SMITH, GORDON ARTHUR.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Return.

(34) *SPRINGER, FLETA CAMPBELL.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *Solitaire.

(234) *STEELE, WILBUR DANIEL.* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    Always Summer.
    *Dark Hour.
    Eternal Youth.
    Man’s a Fool.
    Perfect Face.
    *Taste of the Old Boy.
    *Wages of Sin.
    White Man.

*STREET, JULIAN.* Born in Chicago, April 12, 1879. Educated in Chicago
public schools and Ridley College, St. Catharines, Ontario, Can. His
first writing was done when he helped to revive the school paper there.
At nineteen became a reporter on New York Mail and Express. “Became
dramatic editor of that paper at twenty-one—just about the kind of
dramatic editor you might expect a twenty-one-year old to be.” Then in
the advertising business for awhile and abroad for a year. First
published story, “My Enemy—the Motor,” McClure’s Magazine, July, 1906.
“I was fortunate in having such friends as Booth Tarkington and Harry
Leon Wilson, with whom I went abroad, and who encouraged my early
efforts to write. The greatest honor I have ever had in my work was an
invitation from Booth Tarkington to collaborate with him upon a play,
‘The Country Cousin,’ which is still running. I work slowly and
laboriously, and my production is small, because, though I love writing,
it is very difficult for me. I dislike exercise but am fond of poker,
which I play badly. My chief interests, aside from my wife and two
children, are in what Mark Twain called ‘the damned human race,’ and in
Havana cigars.” Books: “My Enemy—the Motor,” 1908; “The Need of Change,”
1909; “Paris à la Carte,” 1911; “Ship-Bored,” 1911; “The Goldfish,”
1912; “Welcome to our City,” 1913; “Abroad at Home,” 1914; “The Most
Interesting American,” 1915; “American Adventures,” 1917. Lives in New
York City.

    *Bird of Serbia.

(3) *TARKINGTON, BOOTH.* Born in Indianapolis, July 29, 1869. Educated
at Exeter Academy, Purdue University, and Princeton University. Member
of National Institute of Arts and Letters. Books: “The Gentleman from
Indiana,” 1899; “Monsieur Beaucaire,” 1900; “The Two Vanrevels,” 1902;
“Cherry,” 1903; “In the Arena,” 1905; “The Conquest of Canaan,” 1905;
“The Beautiful Lady,” 1905; “His Own People,” 1907; “The Guest of
Quesnay,” 1908; “Beasley’s Christmas Party,” 1909; “Beauty and the
Jacobin,” 1911; “The Flirt,” 1913; “Penrod,” 1914; “The Turmoil,” 1915;
“Penrod and Sam,” 1916; “Seventeen,” 1916; “The Magnificent Ambersons,”
1918. Plays: “Monsieur Beaucaire” (with E. G. Sutherland), 1901; “The
Man from Home” (with Harry Leon Wilson), 1906; “Cameo Kirby,” 1907;
“Your Humble Servant,” 1908; “Springtime,” 1908; “Getting a Polish,”
1909; “The Country Cousin” (with Julian Street), 1917. Lives in
Indianapolis.

    *Three Zoölogical Wishes.

*TOLMAN, ALBERT W.* Born at Rockport, Me., Nov. 29, 1866. Brought up in
Portland, Me. Educated in Portland public and high schools, graduate of
Bowdoin College and Harvard University. Tutor in Greek and rhetoric,
Bowdoin College, 1889 to 1890. Instructor in elocution and rhetoric,
1890 to 1893. Elected Assistant Professor of English, 1893, but resigned
on account of poor health. Practised law, 1898 to 1913, at the same time
writing adventure stories, principally for the Youth’s Companion. For
last few years has devoted himself almost wholly to writing. First
published story probably “On the Monument,” Golden Days, about 1886.
Book, “Jim Spurling, Fisherman,” 1918. Lives in Portland, Me.

    *Five Rungs Gone.

*VENABLE, EDWARD C.*

    “Ali Babette.”
    *At Isham’s.

(34) *VORSE, MARY HEATON* (_for biography, see 1917_).

    *De Vilmarte’s Luck.
    *Huntington’s Credit.
    River Road.

*WILLIAMS, BEN AMES.* Born in Macon, Miss., March 7, 1889. Brought up in
Jackson, Ohio. Educated at West Newton, Mass., and Cardiff, Wales.
Graduated from Dartmouth College, 1910. Newspaper man in Jackson, Ohio,
Oklahoma City, and Boston until 1916, now devotes himself entirely to
fiction. “I married a Wellesley girl, who insists that she and our two
boys are properly my chief interest. Fiction writing comes next; and
after that tennis, golf, fishing, swimming, gunning, and the general run
of outdoor stuff, with chess for rainy-day wear. My first published
story—my eighty-fourth in the order of writing—was ‘The Wings of Lias,’
Smith’s Magazine, July, 1915. Like a good many others, I owe a debt to
Robert H. Davis of Munsey’s for the encouragement that kept me going.”
Lives in Newton Centre, Mass.

    Right Whale’s Flukes.

*WILSON, MARGARET.* _See_ *“Elderly Spinster.”*

*WINSLOW, THYRA SAMTER.* Born in Fort Smith, Ark., 1889. Ancestors on
both sides included writers. Attended public and private schools,
Cincinnati Art Academy, and University of Missouri. Feature writer on
the Fort Smith Southwest American and the Chicago Tribune. Experimental
work included principalship of an Oklahoma school and theatrical
experience from the chorus to ingénue. In 1912 married John Seymour
Winslow, son of Chief Justice John Bradley Winslow of the Wisconsin
Supreme Court. Interests: all printed matter, people, the theatre,
interior decoration, and psychology. First story, “Little Emma,” The
Smart Set, December, 1915. Her subsequent stories are appearing mainly
in the same publication. Lives in New York City.

    Eva Duveen.

*WOOD, FRANCES GILCHRIST.* Born half a century ago, near the small
prairie town of Carthage, Ill. Graduate of Carthage College, and has
done much postgraduate work, credit due to student ancestry. In earlier
years worked as reporter and editor on western newspapers, city and
small town, and in railway administration with her father, a combination
that carried her well over the States and Mexico. Present interests
centre, by turn, in the game of writing; children, including her own;
community festivals; gardening and all out of doors; as well as a
passion for pursuing the historic ghost through haunt of house and
highway. First published story, “The White Battalion,” The Bookman, May,
1918. Books: “The Children’s Pageant,” 1913; “Pageant of Ridgewood,”
1915; “Cartoons of Dress,” 1917. Lives in New York City.

    As Between Mothers.
    *White Battalion.

*WOOD, JOHN SEYMOUR.* Born at Utica, N. Y., Oct. 1, 1853. Graduate of
Yale University and Columbia Law School. Married, 1880. Has practised
law in New York City since 1876. Books: “Gramercy Park,” 1892; “A
Daughter of Venice,” 1892; “College Days,” 1895; “A Coign of Vantage,”
1896; “Yale Yarns,” 1897. Editor of Bachelor of Arts, 1896 to 1898.
Lives in New York City.

    *In the House of Morphy.



    THE ROLL OF HONOR OF FOREIGN SHORT STORIES IN AMERICAN MAGAZINES


                        JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918


_Note._ _Stories of special excellence are indicated by an asterisk. The
index figures 1, 2, 3, and 4 prefixed to the name of the author indicate
that his work has been included in the Rolls of Honor for 1914, 1915,
1916, and 1917 respectively. The list excludes reprints._


                     I. _English and Irish Authors_


    (234) _Aumonier, Stacy._ *Bitter End.
      *Source of Irritation.

    (23) _Blackwood, Algernon._ *S. O. S.

    (2) _Colum, Padraic._ *Sea Maiden Who Became a Sea-Swan.

    (134) “_Conrad, Joseph._” *Commanding Officer.

    _Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-._ _See_ Quiller-Couch, Sir
            Arthur Thomas.

    (4) _Dudeney, Mrs. Henry._ “Willow Walk.”

    _Friedlaender, V. H._ Last Day.
      Miracle.

    (1234) _Galsworthy, John._ “Cafard!”
      *Gray Angel.
      *Indian Summer of a Forsyte.

    _Hinkson, Katharine Tynan._ Boys of the House.

    (4) _Mordaunt, Elinor._ *High Seas.

    _Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas._ Old Æson.

    _Stephens, James._ Crêpe de Chine.
      Darling.
      *Desire.
      Sawdust.
      School-fellows.
      Wolf.

    _Tynan, Katharine._ _See_ Hinkson, Katharine Tynan.

    _Watson, E. L. Grant._ *Cobwebs and Starshine.
      *Man and Brute.

    _Windeler, B._ *Elimus.


                           II. _Translations_


    _Alaihem, Sholom._ (_Yiddish._) *Great Prize.

    _Anonymous._ *Bistoquet’s Triumph. (_French._)
      Oratorio. (_French._)

    _Becquer, Gustav A._ (_Spanish._) *Our Lady’s Bracelet.

    _Bertheroy, Jean._ (_French._) Cathedral.

    (4) _Boutet, Frédéric._ (_French._) Rift.

    (34) _Chekhov, Anton._ (_Russian._) *Overspiced.
      *Scandal Monger.
      *Vengeance.
      *Who Was She?
      *Work of Art

    _Crussol, M._ (_French._) Love in War Time.

    _Daudet, Alphonse._ (_French._) *Last Lesson.

    _Efimovich, L._ (_Russian._) *Early Spring.

    (3) “_Gorki, Maxim._” (_Russian._) *Makar Chudra.
      *Man Who Could Not Die.

    _Jaloux, Edmond._ (_French._) *Vagabond.

    _Mauclair, Camille._ (_French._) Inner Man.

    _Stronny, Vladimir._ (_Russian._) *Father and Son.

    _Villiers de l’Isle-Adam._ (_French._) *Heroism of Doctor
            Halidonhill.



      THE BEST BOOKS OF SHORT STORIES OF 1918: A CRITICAL SUMMARY


_The Ten Best American Books._

   1. Bierce. Can Such Things Be? Boni & Liveright.
   2. Bierce. In the Midst of Life. Boni & Liveright.
   3. Brown. The Flying Teuton. Macmillan.
   4. Burt. John O’May. Scribner.
   5. Hergesheimer. Gold and Iron. Knopf.
   6. Hughes. Long Ever Ago. Harper.
   7. Hurst. Gaslight Sonatas. Harper.
   8. Steele. Land’s End. Harper.
   9. Wolcott. A Gray Dream. Yale.
  10. Wormser. The Scarecrow. Dutton.

_The Ten Best English Books._

   1. Blackwood. The Empty House. Dutton.
   2. Blackwood. John Silence. Dutton.
   3. Blackwood. The Listener. Dutton.
   4. Blackwood. The Lost Valley. Dutton.
   5. Buchan. The Watcher by the Threshold. Doran.
   6. Galsworthy. Five Tales. Scribner.
   7. Harker. Children of the Dear Cotswolds. Scribner.
   8. Jacks. The Country Air. Holt.
   9. Phillpotts. Chronicles of Saint Tid. Macmillan.
  10. Sélincourt. Nine Tales. Dodd, Mead.

_The Ten Best Translations._

   1. Andreyev. The Seven That Were Hanged. Boni & Liveright.

   2. Barbusse. We Others. Dutton.

   3. Chekhov. The Wife. Macmillan.

   4. Chekhov. The Witch. Macmillan.

   5. Dantchenko. Peasant Tales of Russia. McBride.

   6. Dostoevsky. White Nights. Macmillan.

   7. Gogol. Taras Bulba. Dutton.

   8. Gorky. Creatures That Once Were Men. Boni & Liveright.

   9. Gorky. Stories of the Steppe. Stratford.

  10. Tagore. Mashi. Macmillan.

          _Below follows a record of eighty-seven distinctive
          volumes published during 1918, before November first._



                         I. _American Authors_


_Her Country_, by _Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews_ (Charles Scribner’s
Sons). In this short story by Mrs. Andrews there is a fine emotional
quality, and the spiritual values, though nowhere overstressed, will
remind the reader of “The Perfect Tribute,” which still remains Mrs.
Andrews’ best story. Written to assist the last Liberty Bond campaign,
its significant interest is independent of its timeliness.

_In the Midst of Life_ and _Can Such Things Be?_ by _Ambrose Bierce_
(Boni & Liveright). To an Englishman, the lack of familiarity we show
with Ambrose Bierce’s stories is a mystery. If he were asked to mention
our foremost short story writers, he would think of Poe, Hawthorne,
Harte, O. Henry, and Bierce. Yet the name of Ambrose Bierce is almost
unknown in this country. His publishers are to be congratulated on the
critical acumen that prompted them to reissue Bierce’s stories in a new
popular edition. No writer, with the possible exceptions of Stephen
Crane and Henri Barbusse, has written of war with more passionate
vividness. Such stories as “The Horseman in the Sky,” “An Occurrence at
Owl Creek Bridge,” and “Chickamauga” are among the best stories ever
written by an American, and in the field of the macabre Bierce at his
best is very nearly the equal of Poe. I suppose that “In the Midst of
Life” is the better volume, but “Can Such Things Be?” almost rivals it
in interest.

_Helen of Troy_, and _Rose_, by _Phyllis Bottome_ (The Century Company).
These two novelettes are studies in national and temperamental
contrasts. Their deft characterization, subtle humor, and sense of place
entitle them to a place beside the best novels of Ethel Sidgwick. They
reveal a disciplined sense of poetry and a tolerance of outlook which
spring from an older background than most American work.

_The Flying Teuton and Other Stories_, by _Alice Brown_ (The Macmillan
Company). Last year I had occasion to express my belief that “The Flying
Teuton” was the best short story that had been inspired by the war up to
that time. It comes to us now in book form with a collection of Miss
Brown’s other stories of war and peace, revealing the old qualities of
courage, imagination, poetry, and dramatic irony which we have come to
associate with the name of Miss Brown. I regard the book as her most
satisfying contribution to the short story since “Meadow Sweet.”

_John O’May_, by _Maxwell Struthers Burt_ (Charles Scribner’s Sons). The
wish which I expressed last year that Mr. Burt’s stories should be
collected in book form is now gratified by the appearance of this
volume. It is one of the few indispensable collections of the year by an
American author, and gives Mr. Burt a place among American short story
writers beside that of Mrs. Gerould, Wilbur Daniel Steele, H. G. Dwight,
and Charles Caldwell Dobie. Few writers have a more thoughtful technique
or a more unerring sense of dramatic values.

_Home Fires in France_, by _Dorothy Canfield_ (Henry Holt & Company).
Here is a homely record of the new spirit that the war has developed in
the homes of France, and of the human intercourse so rapidly cemented
between the French people and ourselves. There is a quiet glow in these
stories which idealizes the sufferings of France, and brings home to us
poignantly the present realities of her sufferings. If the volume lacks
the conscious art of “Hillsboro People,” its substance has been shaped
by a personal experience so intense that the book should live as a
memorial long after the incidents which it records have passed.

_Rush-Light Stories_, by _Maud Chapin_ (Duffield & Company). These
poetic studies in place, though reminiscent of Gautier, are freshly told
in a style that adequately mirrors the backgrounds of which they treat.
I find them to be delicately wrought, with a prismatic beauty of
phrasing, which errs slightly on the side of preciosity.

_The Thunders of Silence_, by _Irvin S. Cobb_ (George H. Doran Company).
When this short story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post this year,
it was discussed widely as a polemic. It is not literature, but it is
journalism at its very best, and has fine story values.

_Free and Other Stories_, by _Theodore Dreiser_ (Boni & Liveright). This
collection of stories is uneven, but the best of it is the best of Mr.
Dreiser. In “The Lost Phœbe,” which I reprinted as one of the best short
stories of 1917, a new legend was added to American letters which had
much of the glamor of leisureliness of Hawthorne. Such a story as
“McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers” is a fine imaginative projection
into a new world, mirroring ironically our human passions in the warfare
of two tribes of ants under the blades of a grass forest. Of the social
studies in this volume, all show the exact observation and conscientious
accumulation of detail for which Mr. Dreiser is noted, and the absence
of selective power in many cases which often weakens his best work.

_Battles Royal Down North_ and _Harbor Tales Down North_, by _Norman
Duncan_ (Fleming H. Revell Company). These two collections contain the
last stories which we shall have from the pen of Norman Duncan.
Reverting as they do to the Labrador shores of which he is the chief
interpreter, they show no flagging in Mr. Duncan’s power. No other
writer has portrayed so vividly the wet gray shores of the Labrador, nor
interpreted so sympathetically the character of the Labrador “Liveyere.”
Such a story as “The Little Nipper o’ Hide-an’-Seek Harbor” has not been
surpassed by Mr. Duncan in his earlier books, and as one who knows the
Labrador personally, I can testify to the reality and imaginative truth
of Mr. Duncan’s epic chronicles.

_Tales of Giants from Brazil_, by _Elsie Spicer Eells_ (Dodd, Mead &
Company). These adaptations from the collections of Romero and others
are an excellent introduction to the Portuguese folk lore of Brazil.
They are told by Mrs. Eells in a simple style which preserves their folk
quality without any attempt to refine upon it.

_Cheerful—By Request_, by _Edna Ferber_ (Doubleday, Page & Co.). Miss
Ferber is at her best in such a story as “The Tough Old Dog.” In this
story she has not sentimentalized her substance, but has accepted the
sentimental values inherent in the theme and chronicled them faithfully.
Such a story as this is the product of regionalism in its best sense. In
other stories in this volume Miss Ferber’s characterization is of
varying degrees of success. In the best of these stories her characters
are individualized; in those which are less successful they remain
types. But the volume is an important addition to the year’s books by
virtue of three or four stories included in it.

_Edgewater People_, by _Mary E. Wilkins Freeman_ (Harper & Brothers).
While this volume does not as a whole represent Mrs. Freeman’s art at
its best, it contains two fine stories in “The Ring With the Green
Stone” and “A Retreat to the Goal,” while “The Old Man of the Field” has
much of Mrs. Freeman’s familiar charm. These stories have the unity of
New England village life.

_Great Ghost Stories_, edited by _Joseph Lewis French_ (Dodd, Mead &
Company). This collection is fairly representative of the best ghost
stories that can be gathered, though one misses “The Canterville Ghost”
and “The Apparition of Mrs. Veal,” as well as any representation of Poe,
de Maupassant, or Bierce. But it does contain twelve stories which may
fairly be regarded as classics in their field, and there is not one of
them which is not of absorbing interest.

_Mimi_, by _J. U. Giesy_ (Harper & Brothers). This novelette is an idyl
of the Latin quarter of Paris during the first year of the Great War.
Written in the tradition of Murger, it has his qualities and defects. It
is slightly overstressed and somewhat carelessly written, but it has the
human touch and good characterization. I commend it to the reader for
its quiet emotional appeal.

_Hindu Fairy Tales_, by _Florence Griswold_ (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard
Co.). These fairy tales retold for children from the “Jataka” are
narrated in a simple style which is unpretentious but effective. The
legends upon which they are based are among the oldest of the human
race, but they retain much of their freshness in this version.

_Uncle Remus Returns_, by _Joel Chandler Harris_ (Houghton, Mifflin
Co.). This volume falls into two parts. It includes six new folk stories
by Uncle Remus as told to the son of the little boy who was the eager
listener in the earlier volumes. These stories rank with the best of
their predecessors. To these have been added five sketches from
newspaper files, which are purely ephemeral.

_The Ransom of Red Chief and Other Stories_, by _O. Henry_, as chosen
for boys by _Franklin K. Mathiews_ (Doubleday, Page & Co.). It was a
happy thought which inspired Mr. Mathiews to make his selection. In it
the reader will find many old favorites well balanced by less familiar
stories. Mr. Mathiews knew well that no coaxing was necessary to
introduce these stories to boys, and has wisely dispensed with any
educational apparatus.

_Gold and Iron_, by _Joseph Hergesheimer_ (Alfred A. Knopf). In these
three careful studies in time and place Mr. Hergesheimer has sought to
reproduce certain aspects of our American tradition. With a meticulous
attention to detail, and a keen eye for salient incident, he has slowly
built up three portraits which rank with the best that American fiction
has given us in the past few years. The comparison with Mr. Galsworthy
is an obvious one, but emphasizes a difference rather than a
resemblance. There is a certain asceticism of color and emotion in these
novelettes alien to Mr. Galsworthy’s romantic temperament.

_Long Ever Ago_, by _Rupert Hughes_ (Harper & Brothers). During the past
few years I have had frequent occasion to comment upon these admirable
studies of Irish American life as they first appeared in the magazines.
I regard them as the definitive chronicle of the first Irish American
generation in its process of assimilation by New York. But it is more
than this, for it is a series of richly humorous little dramas, with an
inimitable flavor of their own.

_Tales From a Famished Land_, by _Edward Eyre Hunt_ (Doubleday, Page &
Co.). Mr. Hunt has been a prominent official of the American Relief
Commission in Belgium, and these poignant stories, continuing as they do
the record of Mr. Hunt’s earlier book, “War Bread,” are largely based on
actual happenings. But the author has looked upon events with the
imaginative eye of a born story writer, and it is hard to forget such
finely wrought pictures as “Ghosts” and “Saint Dympna’s Miracle.”

_Gaslight Sonatas_, by _Fannie Hurst_ (Harper & Brothers). I have
expressed my opinion so frequently as to the permanent human values of
Miss Hurst’s work that I can only remark here that “Gaslight Sonatas” is
one of the very few permanent short story books. Of the seven stories in
the volume two have been previously published in volumes of this annual.

_Abraham’s Bosom_, by _Basil King_ (Harper & Brothers). This short
story, now republished in book form from the Saturday Evening Post, is
an imaginative rendering of spiritual experience independent of sensory
phenomena. Its effectiveness is due to its direct sense of reality and
incisive characterization.

_Modern Short Stories_: _A Book for High Schools_, Edited with
Introduction and Notes by _Frederick Houk Law_ (Century Company). This
collection of twenty-two stories drawn entirely from contemporary work
is a most persuasive introduction of the short story to young readers.
The selection is catholic, and should make the student familiar with
many types of plot, characterization and style. The selection ranges
from Lafcadio Hearn to Tolstoy, and from Richard Harding Davis to Fiona
Macleod. Such notable stories of the past year or two as Phyllis
Bottome’s “Brother Leo” and Stacy Aumonier’s “A Source of Irritation”
afford a refreshing change from the conventional routine. Mr. Law has
succeeded almost admirably in coating the educational pill.

_The Land Where the Sunsets Go_, by _Orville H. Leonard_ (Sherman,
French & Company). This volume was published in 1917 somewhat obscurely,
but it has certain remarkable qualities which would make me sorry to
neglect it. These sketches of the American desert are divided somewhat
evenly between verse and prose. The verse is very bad, and the prose is
very good. While the prose sketches are not short stories in the strict
sense of the word, they contain much fine characterization and a
pictorial value which place them easily first among all imaginative
records of the American desert.

_The Red One_, by _Jack London_ (The Macmillan Company). These four
short stories include the best of the work upon which Mr. London was
engaged at the time of his death. “Like Argus of the Ancient Times” is a
true saga full of the open spaces and the zest of youth lingering on
into old age. “The Hussy” also takes its place among the best of Mr.
London’s later stories. While the other stories are distinctive I cannot
report upon them so favorably.

_Canadian Wonder Tales_, by _Cyrus Macmillan_ (John Lane Company). These
stories are drawn from all parts of Canada and include both Indian and
French Canadian legends. While they lack the naïve reality of the folk
storyteller’s method, the selection is excellent, and should prove a
revelation to the American reader of the rich, though neglected,
treasures which lie at our back door. Until Mr. C. M. Barbeau of Ottawa
renders his invaluable collections accessible in more popular form, this
collection will be practically the only introduction of these treasures
to the general reader.

_Famous Ghost Stories_, edited by _J. Walker McSpadden_ (The Thomas Y.
Crowell Company). This selection follows more conventional lines than
that of Mr. French, which I spoke of above, but it contains Defoe’s
“True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal,” which is perhaps the
best ghost story ever written, and which has the advantage of relative
unfamiliarity. The other thirteen stories are by Sir Walter Scott, Mrs.
Gaskell, Bulwer-Lytton, H. B. Marryat, Fitz-James O’Brien, Hawthorne,
Irving, Poe, Kipling, and Dickens. The publisher should be congratulated
on the best piece of bookmaking of the year.

_E. K. Means_ (G. P. Putnam’s Sons). This book is so good that it needs
no title, but raises the question as to what its successor will be
called. It is a series of negro farces in narrative form chronicling the
joys and tribulations of Vinegar Atts, Figger Bush, Pap Curtain, Hitch
Diamond and other Louisiana negroes. The town of Tickfall will have its
pilgrims some day if this book finds the audience it so richly deserves.

_Shandygaff_, by _Christopher Morley_ (Doubleday, Page & Co.). Mr.
Morley says that this book contains short stories and I will leave to
the reader the delightful task of hunting them. Meanwhile I beg the
question and step aside after introducing the reader to good discourse
on many subjects by a man who knows how to talk.

_Uncle Abner_, by _Melville Davisson Post_ (D. Appleton and Company).
Few writers have so conscientious a technique as Mr. Post, or such a
fine sense of plot. This collection of mystery stories is woven around
the personality of Uncle Abner, whose Greek sense of justice is
inflexible. All of these stories are masterly examples of the
justifiable surprise ending, yet have the logic and dramatic power which
we have come to associate with Athenian tragedy. Their effectiveness is
largely due to the value of under statement.

_Sketches in Duneland_, by _Earl H. Reed_ (John Lane Company). These
studies of the dune country of Lake Michigan fall into two groups. The
second and larger group consists of character studies drawn from the
quaint denizens of this district with skilful humor and fine
characterization. “Holy Zeke,” “The Love Affair of Happy Cal,” and “The
Resurrection of Bill Saunders” are the best stories in this collection,
though the whole is very good indeed.

_Miss Mink’s Soldier_, by _Alice Hegan Rice_ (Century Company). This is
a pleasant collection of Mrs. Rice’s better short stories. They will
give quiet pleasure to the reader who is not too exacting and show a
wide range of human interest.

_The Key of the Fields_ and _Boldero_, by _Henry Milner Rideout_
(Duffield & Company). These two picaresque novelettes have the magical
glamor of fairy tales set in Maxfield Parrish landscapes. They have
given me great pleasure by reason of their prismatic quality and their
whimsical humor. Mr. Rideout is a conscious stylist who never falls into
preciosity, but we must accept his world without qualification if we are
to enter properly into the spirit of his work.

_The Best College Short Stories_, edited by _Henry T. Schnittkind_ (The
Stratford Company). Mr. Schnittkind aims to consider annually the best
short stories in college magazines, following the same principles which
I have adopted in the present series of volumes. The idea is excellent,
and the results are surprisingly good. I find in this collection three
stories which would have won a place on my annual Roll of Honor: “The
Tomte Gubbe” by Alma P. Abrahamson, “The Dead City” by Isidor Schneider,
and “Angèle” by John Jones Sharon. The volume includes a large amount of
valuable illustrative material, including contributions by many magazine
editors and successful writers.

_The Scar that Tripled_, by _William G. Shepherd_ (Harper & Brothers).
In this short story Mr. Shepherd relates with vivid detail the true
story of the lad whose meeting with Richard Harding Davis at Salonica
suggested to the latter the story of “The Deserter.” To my mind it is a
better story than “The Deserter,” and one which will have a quiet life
of its own for some time.

_Land’s End and Other Stories_, by _Wilbur Daniel Steele_ (Harper &
Brothers). I consider this the best volume of short stories by an
American author published this year. It rightly claims a place in our
literature by virtue of Mr. Steele’s sensitive fidelity to the more
abiding romance of ordinary life. These stories have a quality of
romantic escape which is rare. Behind the complications which his men
and women weave for one another looms the eternal but ever-changing
pattern of the sea. Few writers show such economy in the use of their
material. These stories will last because of their imaginative reality,
their warm color, and their finality of artistic execution.

_Mr. Squem and Some Male Triangles_, by _Arthur Russell Taylor_ (George
H. Doran Company). These sketches have an American philosophy with more
background than the casual reader may at first realize. They help to
interpret much that would bewilder the foreigner, and their unassuming
excellence is noteworthy.

_Atlantic Narratives_ (First and second series), edited with an
Introduction by _Charles Swain Thomas_ (The Atlantic Monthly Press).
These two volumes are a well chosen selection from the rich store of
short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly during the past few
years. Edited for college and high school use, the second series is
specially adapted to younger readers. Speaking generally, I should say
that these collections would be of more use in classes in English
narrative than in short story classes, but my personal emphasis would be
on the special pleasure they will give the general reader, who will find
such old favorites as “Little Selves” by Mary Lerner, “In No Strange
Land” by Katharine Butler, “The Garden of Memories” by C. A. Mercer, and
“Babanchik” by Christina Krysto reprinted in a format which is a delight
to the eye. It would be pleasant if these collections should prove to be
the forerunners of an annual series of Atlantic stories.

_The Rose-Bush of a Thousand Years_, by _Mabel Wagnalls_ (Funk &
Wagnalls Company). When the first part of this book was published in a
magazine during 1916 its story value instantly attracted my attention,
and later it became familiar to a wider public through the screen
version in which Madame Nazimova took the principal part. The present
reprint has been long called for, and would have gained if the crude and
inartistic second part had been omitted. It forms no essential part of
the story and is clearly an addition dictated by supposed moving picture
demands.

_A Book of Short Stories_, edited by _Blanche Colton Williams_ (D.
Appleton and Company). This collection of thirteen stories for high
schools is an admirable collection along well-trodden paths, and to it
is added a wealth of biographical and critical material, well-ordered
and clearly exposed. The general reader will wish to have the volume on
his shelves, because it renders accessible for the first time in book
form Major Frederick Stuart Greene’s remarkable story, “Molly McGuire,
Fourteen.” It is the finest testimony I know of the quality of Dr.
Williams’ teaching that a pupil of hers should have produced so notable
a story in her classrooms.

_A Gray Dream_, by _Laura Wolcott_ (Yale University Press). This
collection of short stories and reminiscences has all the quiet glow of
Indian summer, dreaming over the past with serene conviction and an
unconquerable youth of the spirit. The best that New England Puritanism
had to reveal is chronicled in these stories, which will remind more
than one reader of Emily Dickinson. They have a finished style which
achieves its end without undue pomp and circumstance.

_The Scarecrow and Other Stories_, by _G. Ranger Wormser_ (E. P. Dutton
& Company). These stories by Miss Wormser are the most interesting short
story discovery of the year. They are subtle studies in unfamiliar
regions of the spirit, and their vivid imaginative quality is not unlike
that of Algernon Blackwood, though Miss Wormser’s style is somewhat more
self-conscious. I believe that this volume heralds a remarkable future.


                    II. _English and Irish Authors_


_The Tideway_, by “_John Ayscough_” (Benziger Brothers). This collection
of stories has much of Henry Harland’s charm, with a more complete
mastery of plot. These stories are, many of them, studies in social
atmosphere, and if their substance is tenuous, Monsignor
Bickerstaffe-Drew has made the most of it.

_Johnny Pryde_, by _J. J. Bell_ (Fleming H. Revell Company). The dry
merriment of this little book is infectious, and makes it a worthy
successor to the best of Wee Macgreegor’s earlier adventures.

_The Empty House_, _John Silence_, _The Listener_, and _The Lost
Valley_, by _Algernon Blackwood_ (E. P. Dutton & Company). The present
reprint of four of Algernon Blackwood’s earlier collections of short
stories gives me the opportunity to call attention to four books for
which I care more personally than for the short stories of any other
English writer. No contemporary has continued the magic tradition of
Keats and Coleridge more successfully than Mr. Blackwood, particularly
in “The Listener” and “The Lost Valley.” These two books at least will
last longer than any other volume of short stories by an English or
American writer published this year.

_The Watcher by the Threshold_, by _John Buchan_ (George H. Doran
Company). Seven or eight years ago a remarkable book of animistic
stories by a writer then unknown to me was issued in this country. It at
once awakened my enthusiasm for the writer’s work, and I felt that an
important new figure had come into view. But “The Moon Endureth”
attracted almost no attention and has since been forgotten. Mr. Buchan
has published other pleasant books since then but the present collection
is the first to recapture something of the same beauty, and in
recommending it cordially to the public I earnestly hope that Mr.
Buchan’s publishers will find it possible to reissue “The Moon
Endureth.”

_Nights in London_, by _Thomas Burke_ (Henry Holt & Company). Strictly
speaking, this is not a volume of short stories, but to those who
greatly admired “Limehouse Nights” last year this volume will be found
to hold the same fascination of style and to make clearer the human
background out of which that book flowered.

_Gentlemen at Arms_, by “_Centurion_” (Doubleday, Page & Co.). This
volume stands out as a distinguished record from the host of personal
experiences which the war has produced. I think it quite the best of the
English collection, and a volume which the earlier Kipling might have
been proud to sign. There is a poignancy about these studies which is
relieved by a well-considered art.

_Under the Hermes_, by “_Richard Dehan_” (Dodd, Mead & Company). This
book is written solely with the worthy object of entertaining the
reader. Five or six years ago, I remember steaming down the Labrador in
a decrepit little boat called, rather magnificently, the _Stella Maris_
(and fisherman’s rumor had it that Lady Morris was so honored by the
christening), and my only companion for a week in the stuffy cabin was
an independent fur trader on his way to his winter post near Nain. His
baggage consisted of two crates of jam and two volumes by “Richard
Dehan,” and I remember how we banished sleep for several nights and days
by reading them to each other, and then beginning all over again. If I
knew where Richard White was now, I would send him a copy of “Under the
Hermes” to see if the old magic still lingered. It is a collection of
good stories imaginatively told.

_Tales of War_, by _Lord Dunsany_ (Little, Brown & Company). This volume
is a series of sketches and essays dealing with Lord Dunsany’s
experiences in the Great War, but it contains one of his best short
stories,—“The Prayer of the Men of Daleswood,”—and several fine
imaginative fables.

_Five Tales_, by _John Galsworthy_ (Charles Scribner’s Sons). This
collection of short stories and novelettes should be set on the book
shelf beside “The Dark Flower” as one of Galsworthy’s two most signal
contributions to the poetic interpretation of life. It is not too much
to say that this volume takes its place in the great English line.

_The Quest of the Face_, by _Stephen Graham_ (The Macmillan Company).
This volume does not represent the author at his best, but the
passionate mysticism which Mr. Graham has voiced so nobly in his Russian
books still flames through these pages, and there are several sketches
in the volume which I should have felt sorry to have missed.

_Children of the Dear Cotswolds_, by _L. Allen Harker_ (Charles
Scribner’s Sons). These quiet pastoral studies, to be fully enjoyed,
should be read aloud slowly by the winter fire, and I think the reader
will agree with me that they are a very delicate series of studies in
place. Mrs. Harker’s readers have a freemasonry of their own to which
the password is a love for England and its forgotten Cotswold places.

_The Country Air_, by _L. P. Jacks_ (Henry Holt & Company). It is my
particular pride that I was one of the first to hail the remarkable
qualities of Mr. Jacks’ “Wild Shepherds.” I suppose that the present
volume will never be widely popular, but to those who enjoy clean human
observation, a broad philosophical outlook, and an imaginative
transmutation of facts, this volume will be always welcome.

_Waysiders_, by _Seumas O’Kelly_ (Frederick A. Stokes Company). As
Daniel Corkery was the Irish discovery of last year, so Seumas O’Kelly
is the most remarkable Irish find of the present season. These studies
lack the disciplined art of Mr. Corkery, but they have the same rich
imagination, deep folk spirit, and close observation which distinguished
“A Munster Twilight.”

_Chronicles of Saint Tid_, by _Eden Phillpotts_ (The Macmillan Company).
Mr. Phillpotts has done well to collect his magazine stories of the past
ten years. As a novelist he seems to me inferior to “John Trevena,” who
also deals with Dartmoor characters, but the short story with its narrow
confines affords him an excellent opportunity to chronicle the whims of
human nature which he has observed, and to set down simple chronicles of
the countryside which have a romantic atmosphere of their own.

_Nine Tales_, by _Hugh de Sélincourt_ (Dodd, Mead & Company). To those
of us who found in “A Soldier of Life” last year a novel which revealed
far more of the spiritual realities of this war than “Mr. Britling Sees
it Through,” these stories have been awaited with eagerness. In “The
Sacrifice,” Mr. de Sélincourt has surpassed this novel for human
revelation of war’s spiritual effect on England, and “Sense of Sin” is
as fine a story in a different manner. The whole book is an eloquent
plea for spiritual freedom based on physical health and imaginative
life. An art so delicate as this is rare.

_Some Happenings_, by _Horace Annesley Vachell_ (George H. Doran
Company). This is an entertaining collection of stories, by an English
writer in the American manner, and ranges in breadth of interest from
stories of the American West to English mystery stories and French
pastorals.


                          III. _Translations_


_The Seven That Were Hanged_, by _Leonid Andreyev_ (Boni & Liveright).
These two sombre studies in death rank among the masterpieces of modern
Russian literature. “The Seven That Were Hanged” is a study in the human
reactions of seven different men between their condemnation and
execution. Andreyev is a master of character, relentless in his probing,
inevitable in his conclusions. “The Red Laugh,” which is also included
in this volume, is an unforgettable study of the horrors of warfare.

_Lazarus_, by _Leonid Andreyev_, and _The Gentleman from San Francisco_,
by _Ivan Bunin_, translated by _Abraham Yarmolinsky_ (The Stratford
Company). These stories, published together in one volume, are in vivid
contrast. In “Lazarus” Andreyev has written one of his two great prose
poems, relating how Lazarus revealed the mystery of the grave. “The
Gentleman from San Francisco” has poetry too, but it is essentially an
ironic study of the artificial values of commercial prosperity.

_We Others: Stories of Fate, Love, and Pity_, by _Henri Barbusse_,
translated by _Fitzwater Wray_ (E. P. Dutton & Company). This collection
of early stories by Monsieur Barbusse would have been important even if
the author was not already known to us by “Under Fire” and “The
Inferno.” It includes forty-five short stories of remarkable technique
in small compass, sounding almost every note of the human comedy and
tragedy with the utmost economy of means and finish of construction. It
is perhaps not an accident that the first two stories are the best, but
the collection is unusually even and seems sure of reasonable
permanence.

_Czech Folk Tales_, selected and translated by _Josef Baudis_ (The
Macmillan Company). This is probably the best volume of fairy stories
published this year and should interest students of folk lore and the
general reader as well as children. There is a wild poetry in these
brief tales, which is well rendered in Dr. Baudis’s translation.

_Tales from Boccaccio_ (The Stratford Company). It was a happy thought
of the publishers to select these seven stories at which the most
puritan cannot carp, and to present them to us in such an attractive
form. An old translation is used whose style faithfully mirrors that of
Boccaccio.

_The Wife_ (The Macmillan Company), _The Witch_ (The Macmillan Company),
and _Nine Humorous Tales_ (The Stratford Company), by _Anton Chekhov_.
Two new volumes have been added this year to Mrs. Garnett’s admirable
edition of Chekhov. It is now universally admitted that Chekhov ranks
with Poe and de Maupassant as one of the three supreme masters of the
short story. “The Wife” contains at least two of Chekhov’s masterpieces:
“A Dreary Story” and “Gooseberries.” With these two stories I should
rank “Gusev” and “In the Ravine.” The little book issued by the
Stratford Company reprints nine of Chekhov’s less familiar stories, some
of which cannot yet be obtained in English elsewhere.

_Peasant Tales of Russia_, by _V. I. Nemirovitch-Dantchenko_, translated
by _Claud Field_ (Robert M. McBride & Company). These four poetic
stories by one of the less known Russian masters are tragic studies of
human conflict, softened by pity and a deep-rooted religious belief.
They are admirably translated in a style which reflects much of the
poetry of the original. “The Deserted Mine” is one of the great short
stories of the world.

_White Nights, and Other Stories_, by _Fyodor Dostoevsky_, translated by
_Constance Garnett_ (The Macmillan Company). These seven short stories
and novelettes range over a period of more than twenty years in
Dostoevsky’s career. “White Nights,” which is one of his earliest works,
is a poem of young love and its effect on solitude and spiritual
isolation. “A Faint Heart,” which was written seven or eight years
afterwards, is a study of the will and morbid melancholy. It anticipates
many of the findings of modern psychiatry. “A Little Hero,” written
immediately afterwards, is a kind of autobiography, and sheds much light
on Dostoevsky’s early life. But “Notes from Underground” is the
masterpiece of the book, and is one of the chief clues to Dostoevsky’s
own philosophy.

_Jewish Fairy Tales_, translated by _Gerald Friedlander_ (Bloch
Publishing Company). This collection of eight stories, translated from
the Talmud, Yalkut, and other sources, has been wisely selected to
cultivate the imagination of Jewish children, but should prove of much
interest to the general reader who is likely to be unfamiliar with most
of these legends.

_Taras Bulba, and Other Tales_, by _Nikolai V. Gogol_ (E. P. Dutton &
Company). “Taras Bulba” and five of Gogol’s best short stories are now
added to Everyman’s Library. The title story is the national epic of
Little Russia, and has a Homeric quality of spaciousness, dignity, and
imagination which places it among the world’s great masterpieces. The
other stories show Gogol in many moods, but chiefly as Russia’s greatest
humorous writer.

_Creatures That Once Were Men_ (Boni & Liveright) and _Stories of the
Steppe_ (The Stratford Company), by “_Maxim Gorky_.” These two volumes
are in sufficient contrast to one another. The former contains five
stories of life among the submerged classes of Russia, which are nobly
told with simplicity, imaginative power, and sceptical philosophy.
“Stories of the Steppe” contains three prose poems full of a wild gypsy
poetry.

_Men in War_, by _Andreas Latsko_ (Boni & Liveright). These six
realistic studies of warfare by an Austrian whose book has been
suppressed in his own country are a terrific indictment of the
militaristic spirit which has brought on the great conflict and
continued it relentlessly for four years. It shares with Barbusse’s
“Under Fire” the distinction of being one of the two masterpieces
written by combatants during the last four years, and the spirit of the
two books will be found to be essentially the same.

_Tales of Wartime France_, by Contemporary French Writers. Translated by
_William L. McPherson_ (Dodd, Mead & Company). This anthology of thirty
war stories is well selected, and shows that the war has produced many
excellent French stories. One and all, they illustrate the spirit of the
nation, and show an artistic reticence which contrasts favorably with
the work of English and American writers.

_French Short Stories_, Edited for School Use, by _Harry C. Schweikert_
(Scott, Foresman and Company). This collection of eighteen stories for
the most part follows conventional lines, but the choice is excellent
and introduces the reader to several unfamiliar stories by Coppée,
Bazin, Claretie, and Lemaître. The critical apparatus is competent, and
the biographical notes should prove useful.

_The Spanish Fairy Book_, by _Gertrudis Segovia_, translated by
_Elisabeth Vernon Quinn_ (Frederick A. Stokes Company). These eight
fairy stories show much imagination, a pleasant unpretentious style, and
a fine sense of form. While written for quite young children, they also
possess much folk lore value.

_Serbian Fairy Tales_, translated by _Elodie L. Mijatovich_ (Robert M.
McBride & Co.). I would rank this with Dr. Baudis’s “Czech Folk Tales”
as one of the two best books of fairy tales published this year. Like
Ispirescu’s collection of Roumanian stories it seems to bear traces of a
secret animistic doctrine disclosing the mystery of change, and to have
crystallized in literary form through centuries of traditional
storytelling.

_Mashi, and Other Stories_, by _Sir Rabindranath Tagore_ (The Macmillan
Company). Of these stories it is difficult to speak without undue
enthusiasm. With admirable economy of means, Tagore has succeeded in
conveying the utmost subtlety of nostalgic remembrance, and the sensuous
beauty of shrouded landscape in which he projects his figures sustains
profound emotional revelation without undue tightening of the literary
fabric. His literary method is a strange one to us, but it might well be
the beginning of a new short story tradition in which an American writer
could find inspiration as fresh as the new impulse that the discovery of
Japanese prints brought to Whistler and others that followed him.

_Paulownia_: Seven Stories from Contemporary Japanese Writers,
translated by _Torao Taketomo_ (Duffield & Company). These stories
reveal a new world to us, as significant in its way as the world of
Tagore’s stories. Some of these Japanese writers have been influenced by
European models, but their spirit is essentially national, and springs
from an imaginative quality which it is hard for us at first to
recapture. All the stories have a finished art, and so has Mr. Torao
Taketomo’s translation.

_What Men Live By, and Other Stories_, by _Leo Tolstoi_, translated by
_L. and A. Maude_ (The Stratford Company). This collection includes four
familiar stories by Tolstoi chosen for their social doctrine. The format
of the book is pleasant, and the choice of stories excellent.



 VOLUMES OF SHORT STORIES PUBLISHED, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918: AN INDEX


_NOTE._ _An asterisk before a title indicates distinction. This list
includes single short stories, collections of short stories, textbooks,
and a few continuous narratives based on short stories previously
published in magazines._


                         I. _American Authors_


_Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman._
       *Her Country. Scribner.

_Anonymous._
       Thompson. Houghton-Mifflin.

_Antin, Mary._
       *Lie, The. Atlantic Monthly Press.

_Bacheller, Irving A._
       Story of a Passion. Roycrofters.

_Bacon, Josephine Daskam._
       On Our Hill. Scribner.

_Bagnold, Enid._
       Diary Without Dates. Luce.

_Barton, George._
       Strange Adventures of Bromley Barnes. Page.

_Bell, Robert B. H._
       Laughing Bear. Shores.

_Bellegarde, Sophie de._
       Russian Soldier-Peasant. Young Churchman.

_Bierce, Ambrose._
       *Can Such Things Be? Boni and Liveright.
       *In the Midst of Life. Boni and Liveright.

_Bottome, Phyllis._
       *Helen of Troy, and Rose. Century.

_Brown, Alice._
       *Flying Teuton. Macmillan.

_Buffum, G. Tower._
       On Two Frontiers. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard.

_Burt, Maxwell Struthers._
       *John O’May, and Other Stories. Scribner.

_Butler, Ellis Parker._
       Philo Gubb. Houghton-Mifflin.

_Canfield, Dorothy._
       *Home Fires in France. Holt

_Chapin, Maud._
       Rush-light Stories. Duffield.

_Cobb, Irvin S._
       *Thunders of Silence. Doran.

_Davis, J. Frank._
       Almanzar. Holt.

_Dodge, Henry Irving._
       Skinner’s Big Idea. Harper.
       Yellow Dog. Harper.

_Dougherty, Harry Vincent._
       Way of the Transgressor. Roycrofters.

_Douglas, A. Donald._
       From their Galleries. Four Seas.

_Dreiser, Theodore._
       *Free, and Other Stories. Boni and Liveright.

_Driggs, Laurence la Tourette._
       Adventures of Arnold Adair, American Ace. Little, Brown.

_Duncan, Norman._
       *Battles Royal Down North. Revell.
       *Harbor Tales Down North. Revell.

_Eells, Elsie Spicer._
       *Tales of Giants from Brazil. Dodd, Mead.

_Ferber, Edna._
       *Cheerful—By Request. Doubleday, Page.

_Foote, John Taintor._
       Lucky Seven. Appleton.

_Ford, Sewell._
       House of Torchy. Clode.
       Shorty McCabe Looks ’Em Over. Clode.

_Fox, Frances Margaret._
       Seven Little Wise Men. Page.

_Frazer, Elizabeth._
       Old Glory and Verdun. Duffield.

_Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins._
       *Edgewater People. Harper.

_French, Joseph Lewis_, _editor_.
       *Great Ghost Stories. Dodd, Mead.

_Ganoe, William Addleman._
       *Ruggs—R. O. T. C. Atlantic Monthly Press.

_Gatlin, Dana._
       Full Measure of Devotion. Doubleday, Page.

_Giesy, J. U._
       *Mimi. Harper.

_Glass, Montague._
       Worrying Won’t Win. Harper.

_Goldsberry, Louise Dunham._
       Ted. Badger.

_Greene, Frances Nimmo._
       America First. Scribner.

_Griswold, Florence._
       *Hindu Fairy Tales. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard.

_Hamby, William H._
       Way of Success. Laird and Lee.

_Hardy, Thomas._
       *Two Wessex Tales. Four Seas.

_Harris, Joel Chandler._
       *Uncle Remus Returns. Houghton-Mifflin.

“_Hay, Timothy._”
       _See_ Rollins, Montgomery.

_Hearn, Lafcadio._
       *Japanese Fairy Tales. Boni and Liveright.
       *Karma. Boni and Liveright.

“_Henry, O._” (_Sidney Porter._)
       *Ransom of Red Chief and Other O. Henry Stories for Boys, As
               Chosen by Franklin K. Mathiews. Doubleday, Page.

_Hergesheimer, Joseph._
       *Gold and Iron. Knopf.

_Herring, J. L._
       Saturday Night Sketches. Badger.

_Hughes, Rupert._
       *Long Ever Ago. Harper.

_Hunt, Edward Eyre._
       *Tales from a Famished Land. Doubleday, Page.

_Hurst, Fannie._
       *Gaslight Sonatas. Harper.

_James, Henry._
       *Gabrielle de Bergerac. Boni and Liveright.

_King, Basil._
       *Abraham’s Bosom. Harper.

_Law, Frederick Houk_, _editor_.
       *Modern Short Stories. Century.

_Leonard, Orville H._
       *Land Where the Sunsets Go. Sherman, French.

_Levinger, Elma Ehrlich._
       Jewish Holyday Stories. Bloch. Pub. Co.

_London, Jack._
       *Red One. Macmillan.

_McKenna_, “_Jawn._”
       Stories. Published by the Author.

_MacLean, Annie Marion._
       “Cheero!” Woman’s Press.

_McSpadden, J. W._, _editor_.
       *Famous Ghost Stories. Crowell.

_Mahon, Shiela._
       Irish Joy Stories. Mahon Press.

_Marcy, Mary Edna Tobias._
       Stories of the Cave People. Kerr.

_Masson, Thomas L._, _editor_.
       Best Short Stories. Doubleday, Page.

_Masters, Edgar Lee._
       *Toward the Gulf. Macmillan.

_Mayo, Katharine._
       Standard Bearers. Houghton-Mifflin.

*_Means, E. K._
       Putnam.

_Merwin, Samuel._
       Henry is Twenty. Bobbs-Merrill.

_Morley, Christopher._
       *Shandygaff. Doubleday, Page.

_Morse, Richard._
       Fear God in Your Own Village. Holt

_Murphy, Marguerite._
       Necklace of Jewels. Page.

_Neal, Robert W._, _editor_.
       To-day’s Short Stories Analyzed. Oxford University Press.

_O’Brien, Edward J._, _editor_.
       Best Short Stories of 1917. Small, Maynard.

_Orcutt, William Dana._
       White Road of Mystery. Lane.

_Poe, Edgar Allan._
       *Gold-Bug and Other Tales. Four Seas.

_Porter, Sidney._
       _See_ “Henry, O.”

_Post, Melville Davisson._
       *Uncle Abner—Master of Mysteries. Appleton.

_Pratt, A. H._
       My Tussle with the Devil. I. M. Y. Co.

_Reed, Earl H._
       *Sketches in Duneland. Lane.

_Reeve, Arthur B._
       Panama Plot. Harper.
       Soul Scar. Harper.

_Rice, Alice Hegan._
       *Miss Mink’s Soldier. Century.

_Richmond, Grace S._
       Enlisting Wife. Doubleday, Page.

_Rideout, Henry Milner._
       *Key of the Fields, and Boldero. Duffield.

_Robbins, Leo._
       Mary the Merry. Stratford Co.

_Roberts, Elizabeth Judson._
       Indian Stories of the Southwest. Wagner.

_Rollins, Montgomery._ (“_Timothy Hay._”)
       Over Here Stories. Marshall Jones Co.

_Rutledge, Archibald Hamilton._
       Tom and I On the Old Plantation. Stokes.

_Sanborn, Gertrude._
       Blithesome Jottings. Four Seas.

_Schnittkind, Henry T._, _editor_.
       *Best College Short Stories. Stratford Co.

_Shepherd, William Gunn._
       *Scar That Tripled. Harper.

_Skinner, Ada M._, _and_ _Eleanor L._
       Pearl Story Book. Duffield.
       Turquoise Story Book. Duffield.

_Slaughter, Gertrude._
       Two Children in Old Paris. Macmillan.

_Smith, Charlotte Curtis._
       Old Cobblestone House. Rochester, N. Y. Craftsman Press.

_Steele, Wilbur Daniel._
       *Land’s End and Other Stories. Harper.

_Steinberg, Judah._
       *Breakfast of the Birds. Jewish Publication Soc. of Am.

_Taylor, Arthur Russell._
       *Mr. Squem and Some Male Triangles. Doran.

_Thomas, Charles Swain_, _editor_.
       *Atlantic Narratives, First Series. Atlantic Monthly Co.
       *Atlantic Narratives, Second Series. Atlantic Monthly Co.

_Train, Arthur._
       Mortmain. Scribner.

_Tweedy, Frank._
       Discarded Confidante. Neale.

_Van Loan, Charles E._
       Fore! Doran.

_Wagnalls, Mabel._
       *Rose-Bush of a Thousand Years. Funk and Wagnalls.

_Wagner, Rob._
       Film Folk. Century.

_Waldo, Nigel._
       Wallflowers. Hannis Jordan Co.

_Wharton, Edith._
       Marne. Appleton.

_White, Stewart Edward._
       Simba. Doubleday, Page.

_Widdemer, Margaret._
       You’re Only Young Once. Holt.

_Williams, Blanche Colton_, _editor_.
       *Book of Short Stories. Appleton.

_Wolcott, Laura._
       *Gray Dream. Yale Univ. Press.

_Wormser, C. Ranger._
       *Scarecrows. Dutton.


                    II. _English and Irish Authors_


“_Ayscough, John._”
       *Tideway. Benziger.

“_Bartimeus._”
       *Long Trick. Doran.

_Bell, John Joy._
       *Johnny Pryde. Revell.

_Blackwood, Algernon._
       *Empty House. Dutton.
       *John Silence. Dutton.
       *Listener. Dutton.
       *Lost Valley. Dutton.

_Brebner, Percy James._
       Christopher Quarles. Dutton.

*_Buchan, John._
       *Watcher by the Threshold. Doran.

_Burke, Thomas._
       *Nights in London. Holt.

_Cable, Boyd._
       Front Lines. Dutton.

“_Centurion._”
       _See_ Morgan, Captain J. H.

_Copplestone, Bennet._
       Lost Naval Papers. Dutton.

“_Dehan, Richard._”
       *Under the Hermes. Dodd, Mead.

_Doyle, A. Conan._
       *Danger. Doran.

_Dunsany, Lord._
       *Book of Wonder. (Modern Library.) Boni and Liveright.
       *Tales of War. Little, Brown.

_Empey, Arthur Guy._
       Tales from a Dugout. Century.

_Evans, Caradoc._
       *Capel Sion. Boni and Liveright.
       *My Own People. Boni and Liveright.

_Galsworthy, John._
       *Five Tales. Scribner.

_Graham, Stephen._
       *Quest of the Face. Macmillan.

_Graves, Clotilde._
       _See_ “Dehan, Richard.”

“_Hanshew, T. W._” (_Charlotte May Kingsley._)
       Cleek, the Master Detective. Doubleday, Page.

_Harker, L. Allen._
       *Children of the Dear Cotswolds. Scribner.

_Hodgson, William Hope._
       Captain Gault. McBride.

_Jacks, L. P._
       *Country Air. Holt.

_Kipling, Rudyard._
       *Tales. Four Seas.

_Moore, George._
       *Story-Teller’s Holiday. Boni and Liveright.

_Morgan, Captain J. H._ (“Centurion.”)
       *Gentlemen at Arms. Doubleday, Page.

_Morrison, Arthur._
       *Tales of Mean Streets. Goodman.

_Noyes, Alfred._
       *Walking Shadows. Stokes.

_O’Kelly, Seumas._
       *Waysiders. Stokes.

_Pearse, Padraic._
       *Collected Works. Stokes.

_Pertwee, Roland._
       Transactions of Lord Louis Lewis. Dodd, Mead.

_Phillpotts, Eden._
       *Chronicles of St. Tid. Macmillan.

_Sabatini, Rafael._
       *Historical Nights’ Entertainment. Lippincott.

“_Sapper._”
       Human Touch. Doran.

_Sélincourt, Hugh de._
       *Nine Tales. Dodd, Mead.

_Stockley, Cynthia._
       *Blue Aloes. Putnam.

“_Trevena, John._”
       *By Violence. Four Seas.

_Vachel, Horace Annesley._
       *Some Happenings. Doran.

_Walker, Dugald Stewart._
       Dream Boats. Doubleday, Page.

_Wilde, Oscar._
       *Fairy Tales and Poems in Prose. Boni and Liveright.
       *House of Pomegranates. Moffat, Yard.

_Yeats, W. B._, _editor_.
       *Irish Fairy and Folk Tales. (Modern Library.) Boni and
               Liveright.

“_Yeo._”
       Soldier Men. Lane.


                          III. _Translations_


_Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevich._ (_Russian._)
       (_See also_ Modern Russian Classics.)
       *Seven That Were Hanged, and The Red Laugh. (Modern Library.)
               Boni and Liveright.

_Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevich_, and _Bunin, Ivan Alexeivich_.
(_Russian._)
       *Lazarus (by Andreieff) and The Gentleman from San Francisco (by
               Bunin). Stratford Co.

_Artzibashev, Michael._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ Modern Russian Classics.

_Balzac, Honoré de._ (_French._)
       *Short Stories. (Modern Library.) Boni and Liveright.

_Barbusse, Henri._ (_French._)
       *We Others. Dutton.

_Baŭdes, Joseph_, _editor_. (_Czech._)
       *Czech Folk Tales. Macmillan.

_Boccaccio de Certaldo, Giovanni._ (_Italian._)
       Tales from Boccaccio. Stratford.

_Bosschère, Jean de._ (_French._)
       *Folk Tales of Flanders. Dodd, Mead.

_Bunin, Ivan Alexeivich._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevich, _and_ Bunin, Ivan Alexeivich.

_Chekhov, Anton._ (_Russian._)
       (_See also_ Modern Russian Classics.)
       *Nine Humorous Tales. Stratford.
       *Wife. Macmillan.
       *Witch. Macmillan.

_Dantchenko, V. I. Nemirovitch-._ (_Russian._)
       *Peasant Tales of Russia. McBride.

_Dostoevskii, Fyodor Mikhailovich._ (_Russian._)
       *White Nights. Macmillan.

_Friedlander, Gerald_, _translator_. (_Yiddish._)
       Jewish Fairy Stories. Bloch.

_Gogol, Nikolai Vassilyevitch._ (_Russian._)
       *Taras Bulba. Dutton.

_Goldberg, Isaac_, _editor_. (_Portuguese._)
       *Brazilian Tales. Four Seas.

_Gorky, Maxim._ (_Russian._)
       (_See also_ Modern Russian Classics.)
       *Creatures That Once Were Men. Boni and Liveright.
       *Stories of the Steppe. Stratford.

_Latzko, Andreas._ (_German._)
       *Men in War. Boni and Liveright.

_McPherson, William_, _editor_. (_French._)
       *Tales of Wartime France. Dodd, Mead.

_Maupassant, Guy de._ (_French._)
       *Mademoiselle Fifi. Four Seas.
       *Selected Short Stories. Current Literature Pub. Co.

_Mendés, Catulle._ (_French._)
       *Fairy Spinning Wheel. Four Seas.

_Mijatovich, Elodie L._, _translator_. (_Serbian._)
       *Serbian Fairy Tales. McBride.

*_Modern Russian Classics._ (_Russian._) (Stories by Andreyev, Sologub,
Gorky, Chekhov, and Artzibashev.)
       Four Seas.

_Nemirovitch-dantchenko, V. I._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ _Dantchenko, V. I. Nemirovitch-._

_Schweikert, Harry C._, _editor_. (_French._)
       *French Short Stories. Scott, Foresman.

_Segovia, Gertrudis._ (_Spanish._)
       *Spanish Fairy Book. Stokes.

“_Sologub, Feodor._” (_Feodor Kuzmitch Teternikov._) (_Russian._)
       _See_ Modern Russian Classics.

_Tagore, Sir Rabindranath._ (_Bengali._)
       *Mashi, and Other Stories. Macmillan.

_Taketomo, Torao_, _editor_. (_Japanese._)
       *Paulownia. Duffield.

_Tchekhov, Anton._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ Chekhov, Anton.

_Tolstoy, Lyof._ (_Russian._)
       *Death of Ivan Ilyitch, and Other Stories. Boni and Liveright.
       *What Men Live By. Stratford.

_Underwood, Edna Worthley._
       *Famous Stories from Foreign Countries. Four Seas.



                 THE BEST SIXTY AMERICAN SHORT STORIES


              JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918: A CRITICAL SUMMARY


_The sixty short stories published in the American magazines between
January and October, 1918, which I shall discuss in this article are
chosen from a larger group of about one hundred and twenty stories,
whose literary excellence justifies me in including them in my annual
“Roll of Honor.” The stories which are included in this Roll of Honor
have been chosen from the stories published in seventy-four American
periodicals during the first ten months of 1918. In selecting them I
have sought to accept the author’s point of view and manner of
treatment, and to measure simply his degree of success in accomplishing
what he set out to achieve. I have permitted no personal preference or
prejudice to influence my mind consciously for or against a story. But I
must confess that it has been difficult to eliminate personal admiration
completely in the further winnowing which has resulted in this selection
of sixty stories. Below are set forth the particular qualities which
have seemed to me to justify in each case the inclusion of a story in
this list._

1. _A Simple Act of Piety_, by _Achmed Abdullah_ (The All-Story Weekly).
To those who enjoyed last year Thomas Burke’s “Limehouse Nights,” the
series of Pell Street stories which Captain Abdullah is publishing in
the Century Magazine, Collier’s Weekly, and the All-Story Weekly will be
welcome. To a vivid sense of color and an economy of dramatic situation,
“A Simple Act of Piety,” which is the best of these stories, adds a fine
appreciation of the Oriental point of view. The characterization is
almost subjective it is so real, and the story is a fine crystallization
of the poetry inherent in New York Chinatown life.

2. _The Man of Ideas_, by _Sherwood Anderson_ (Little Review), points
the way to a new American realism. Those who have read Mr. Anderson’s
other Winesburg stories in the Seven Arts and the Little Review will
remember that he has set himself the task of portraying the spiritual
values of a small Ohio community without sentimentality. These stories
suggest the Spoon River Anthology, and indeed the tradition inaugurated
by Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and other realists of the new
Chicago School seems likely to carry on the vision of Walt Whitman to
new goals of achievement.

3. _Cruelties_ (Harper’s Magazine) and 4. “_Goddess Size_” (Harper’s
Magazine), by _Edwina Stanton Babcock_. When Miss Babcock published “The
Excursion” last year in the Pictorial Review, I expressed my belief that
it was one of the best five American short stories of the year. I regard
these two stories as marking a significant advance in Miss Babcock’s
art. Her characterization of these Nantucket folks has a subtle humor
and poetry linked to a faithful realism. Miss Babcock continues to prove
herself a leader in short-story regionalism. “Cruelties” is very quietly
done and no point is over-stressed. In fact I find a greater reticence
in these stories than in Miss Babcock’s earlier work, and this is all to
the good.

5. _The Bell-Tower of P’An-Ku_, by “_John Brangwyn_” (Century Magazine).
This story by an American novelist, whose name is not to be revealed,
comes with a definite message to Americans from China. It is an allegory
quietly setting forth the essence of the imaginative attitude toward
life. Like a shifting tapestry, pictures weave to and fro, and the way
is opened to us to see the vision that the unknown Chinese master saw.

6. _Buster_, by _Katharine Holland Brown_ (Scribner’s Magazine). Here in
clear swift portraiture Miss Brown has caught the spirit of America,
youthful and eager, living dangerously and happily, and prepared to face
danger, and, if necessary, seek it. “Buster” is a study of the typical
young American who finds himself at last as an aviator in France. No
story could better interpret our spirit to the English and French
imagination.

7. _The Sorry Tale of Hennery K. Lunk_, by _Ellis Parker Butler_
(Harper’s Magazine). This tale of a mournful mariner ashore on the banks
of the Mississippi would have delighted Mark Twain. I hope Mr. Butler
will forgive me if I state that it contains more poetry than prose. But
after all, mournful mariners come and go, while their stories go on
forever.

8. _The Black Pearl_, by _Katharine Butler_ (Atlantic Monthly). This
story, redolent of the East, is an admirable study in atmosphere. It has
all the nostalgia of a half-forgotten dream, and yet it is so
confidently set forth that we may enter its background without
difficulty. Style is not a common quality, I regret to say, in American
short stories, but the picture portrayed in “The Black Pearl” is well
nigh flawless.

9. _Some Ladies and Jurgen_, by _James Branch Cabell_ (Smart Set), is a
wilful apologue of poets and their wives which will delight the
thoughtful while disappointing the serious. It is really a prose poem
without any moral whatever, unless perhaps the moral Miss Guiney once
pointed out when she said that tall talk always reminded her of the
Himalayas. I commend the fable to all would-be poets.

10. _The Gallowsmith_, by _Irvin S. Cobb_ (All-Story Weekly). This
story, which marks a great departure from Mr. Cobb’s usual vein, is one
of the most grim stories an American magazine has ever published, but it
is a masterly portrait of a professional hangman which the reader cannot
easily forget. With vivid completeness of detail, and characterization
which is admirably suggestive, Mr. Cobb manages the situation in such a
way that its conclusion is inevitable, yet unexpected.

11. _The Open Window_, by _Charles Caldwell Dobie_ (Harper’s Magazine),
is a sequel to “Laughter,” which I published last year as one of the
best short stories of 1917. Unlike most sequels, it is perhaps better
than its predecessor, and the mastery of his art which Mr. Dobie shows
only serves to confirm my prediction of two years ago, that in Mr. Dobie
America would find before long one of its four or five best short-story
writers. An adventurous publisher, anxious to issue the best that is
being written in American fiction, cannot afford to neglect Mr. Dobie.

12. _The Emerald of Tamerlane_, by _H. G. Dwight and John Taylor_
(Century Magazine). Every discriminating reader knows H. G. Dwight’s
book of short stories entitled “Stamboul Nights,” and admires its
quality of romantic mystery and poetic description. “The Emerald of
Tamerlane” admirably sustains Mr. Dwight’s reputation for vivid
realization of Persian life.

13. _Blind Vision_, by _Mary Mitchell Freedley_ (Century Magazine). This
story, by S. Weir Mitchell’s granddaughter, marks not only Mrs.
Freedley’s first appearance in print, but the arrival of a remarkable
new talent. It is a study of an American aviator and a spiritual problem
that he had to decide, and is set down with exceptional artistic
economy.

14. _The Irish of It_, by _Cornelia Throop Geer_ (Atlantic Monthly).
This little study, which is hardly more than a dialogue, is inimitable
in its deft humorous characterization. It is good news to be able to
report that Miss Geer is planning a volume of stories about these Irish
boys and girls whose poetry of thought and action is so coaxing.

15. _Imagination_, by _Gordon Hall Gerould_ (Scribner’s Magazine).
Captain Gerould has taken his subject quietly and handled it with a
thoughtful sense of its possibilities. This study of a successful writer
of best sellers, with his egregious solemnity and lack of imagination,
is delightfully rendered. The subtlety of the author’s psychology will
not blind the reader to its essential truth.

16. _Marchpane_, by _Katharine Fullerton Gerould_ (Harper’s Magazine).
Mrs. Gerould has only published one short story this year, but
fortunately it ranks among her best. It is written with all her usual
close observation of abnormal psychological situations. The art of few
stories is concealed so successfully, and the story is one of which
Henry James would have been proud.

17. _In Maulmain Fever-Ward_, by _George Gilbert_. This story, which
appeared in a Chicago magazine, is the first of an unusual series of
stories dealing with East Indian life. It is full of a wild poetry of
speech and action, set against a background of almost oppressive natural
beauty. I think that the story would have gained by a little more
reticence, but the groundwork is firm and the detail admirably rendered.

18. “_Beloved Husband_” (Harper’s Magazine) and 19. “_Poor Ed_” (The
Liberator), by _Susan Glaspell_. Susan Glaspell has already won a high
reputation in three equally difficult fields, those of the novel, the
drama, and the short story. Considering her as a short-story writer
only, we may say that these two stories reflect the best that she has
done, with the possible exception of the story entitled “A Jury of Her
Peers,” which I reprinted in “The Best Short Stories of 1917.” Both are
studies in suppressed ambition, set forth with a gentle humor which does
not fail by virtue of overstress. Susan Glaspell is at her best in “Poor
Ed,” a study in the triumph of failure.

20. _Sinjinn Surviving_, by _Armistead C. Gordon_ (Harper’s Magazine).
This story is one more addition to Mr. Gordon’s studies of Virginia
negro plantation life. It introduces us once more to Ommirandy and Uncle
Jonas, and is a quiet idyl of the life that survived in Virginia after
the fall of the Confederacy.

21. _Even So_, by _Charles Boardman Hawes_ (The Bellman). The art of Mr.
Hawes has developed so quietly during the past few years that it has not
attracted the attention it richly deserves. This study of life and death
many years ago in the Southern Seas recaptures much of the magic of the
old sailing-ship days when the _Helen of Troy_ and other American
clippers came bravely into port. The story has a fine legendary quality.

22. _Decay_, by _Ben Hecht_ (Little Review). When Mr. Hecht published
“Life” in the Little Review some few years ago I predicted that the
future would reveal the fulfilment of his remarkable promise, although I
was not quite sure whether Mr. Hecht would find himself most fully in
the short story or in the novel. During these years his output has been
small but distinguished, and the present study of Chicago life shows a
marked advance in technique. Nevertheless I now think that the novel is
Mr. Hecht’s natural vehicle, and that when his first novel appears it
will create a profound literary impression.

23. _Their War_, by _Hetty Hemenway_ (Atlantic Monthly). When Miss
Hemenway published “Four Days” in the Atlantic Monthly last year, it
created more discussion than any other war story of the year. Her new
story, which is in as quiet a key, represents an advance in her art, and
the two stories taken together represent one of the few important
contributions America has made to the imaginative literature of the war.
The war has taught us that youth is old enough, under the stress of
events, to speak for itself, and there is a brave frankness about Mrs.
Richard’s exposition of this truth which brings it home to all.

24. _At the Back of God Speed_, by _Rupert Hughes_ (Hearst’s Magazine).
Three years ago Mr. Hughes published in the Metropolitan Magazine two
stories which were as fine in their way as the best of Irvin Cobb’s
humorous stories. In “Michaeleen! Michaelawn!” and “Sent for Out” Mr.
Hughes depicted with his wonted kindliness and pathos the first
generation of successful Irish immigrants. “At the Back of God Speed”
now completes the series, which form as a whole the most faithful
portrait yet drawn of the Americanized Irishman.

25. _The Father’s Hand_, by _George Humphrey_ (The Bookman). Although
Mr. Humphrey was born in England he has now definitely adopted us and I
suppose we may claim him as an American writer. This brief and touching
study of one minor incident in the Great War shows a fine sense of human
values, whose artistic effect is enhanced by deliberate understatement.

26. _Her’s_ _NOT_ _to Reason Why_, by _Fannie Hurst_ (Cosmopolitan).
This story was published in 1917, when it unaccountably failed to
attract my attention, and as an act of prosaic justice I now chronicle
it, because I believe it to be the best story Miss Hurst has yet
published. The temptation to oversentimentalize the theme must have been
almost irresistible, but the author has not failed in reticence and this
study of a certain aspect of New York life will not be soon forgotten.

27. _The Little Family_ (Harper’s Magazine) and 28. _The Visit of the
Master_ (Harper’s Magazine), by _Arthur Johnson_. These stories have
nothing in common except the fact that they reinforce Mr. Johnson’s
claim this year to rank with Mrs. Gerould, Wilbur Daniel Steele, H. G.
Dwight, and Charles Caldwell Dobie as one of the most finished artists
in America to-day. “The Visit of the Master” is an altogether delightful
social comedy, not without a moral. “The Little Family,” on the other
hand, is a poignant study of the effect of war on the gentle
imaginations of two lonely men. Its quality makes us think of the
relation between Stevenson and his old nurse, and stylistically it is
admirable. I suggest with all diffidence, and from a point of view of
frank personal preference that it is very possibly the best short story
of the year.

29. _In the Open Code_, by _Burton Kline_ (The Stratford Journal). This
brief tale in sharp outline recounts a single human incident. Romantic
in treatment, it is told with the eye on the object. It is a finished
piece of workmanship.

30. _The Willow Walk_, by _Sinclair Lewis_ (Saturday Evening Post). It
was an interesting problem which presented itself to Mr. Lewis when he
thought of writing this story. Could a criminal of marked intellectual
ability create a dual personality for himself by inventing an imaginary
brother, give up his own personality after his crime, and live on
undetected in the continuous imaginative realization of his new
personality? Mr. Lewis has studied the psychological effects of such a
successful impersonation and shown the destructive force of mental
suggestion on the soul, in a manner which is in interesting contrast to
that employed by Charles Caldwell Dobie in the story which I have
mentioned above.

31. _The Haymakers_ (Stratford Journal) and 32. _Old Lady Hudson_ (The
Midland), by _Jeannette Marks_. These two allegorical stories are
written in what is usually a most hazardous literary form. I think that
Miss Marks has steered clear of Scylla and Charybdis successfully, and
pointed out to a somewhat deaf world the imaginative realities which
underlie the commercial crust of our American civilization. These
stories, and others of similar tenor, are to be published shortly in a
volume entitled “Forgotten Sins.”

33. _Nettle and Foxglove_, by _Marjory Morten_ (Century Magazine). This
is a study in conflicting temperaments which is very gently rendered
with an art that recalls in its subtlety that of Miss Ethel Sidgwick’s
novels. A collection of Mrs. Morten’s studies, reprinted from the files
of the Century Magazine, would make an interesting volume.

34. _The Story Vinton Heard at Mallorie_, by _Katharine Prescott
Moseley_ (Scribner’s Magazine). Miss Moseley, who is a niece of Mrs.
Harriet Prescott Spofford, shares with Mrs. Frances G. Wood the
distinction of having contributed one of the two most enduring legends
this year to the supernatural literature of the war. One of the most
significant aspects of the American short story during the past two
years has been its increasing preoccupation with supernatural beliefs,
especially as they have a bearing on the fortunes of the war. Arthur
Machen perhaps inaugurated this movement with his remarkable story about
the angels of Mons, but the spirit was implicit before that in much
American work. In editing a series of War Echoes for The Bookman last
year, I had occasion to read the manuscripts of several hundred war
stories, and it was a gratifying surprise to find that fully sixty per
cent of these stories dealt with some supernatural aspect of the war.

35. _Clouds_, by _Walter L. Myers_ (The Midland). This remarkable study
of place is one of the best stories so far produced in the literary
revival throughout the Middle West which centres around the nucleus of
The Midland. I wish that The Midland would publish a volume of stories
selected from its columns during the last three years. Such a book would
quickly earn a permanent place on our shelves.

36. _Owen Carey_, by _Harvey J. O’Higgins_ (The Century Magazine). I
believe this story to be the most distinguished in the series of
imaginary American portraits that Mr. O’Higgins has been publishing
during the past two years. These studies aim to take as a starting point
the lives of men and women successful in many different fields, and to
depict in each case the thing which may have seemed perfectly trivial at
the time, but which actually proved to be the turning point in their
careers. It is such an incident in the life of a successful romantic
novelist which Mr. O’Higgins portrays in this story.

37. _The Second-Rater_, by _James Oppenheim_ (Century Magazine). In this
brilliant study of artistic temperament, Mr. Oppenheim portrays the
spiritual struggle of an artist in such a way as to reveal the finer
grain. The author has been clearly influenced by Henry James, but the
texture of his story is a little loosely woven.

38. _Unto Each His Crown_, by _Norma Patterson_ (The Bookman). This
nervously written study of death in battle and the discovery it awakened
is the work of a new writer who should have a brilliant future if my
judgment does not betray me. Like Miss Moseley’s story, it is a study in
the supernatural implications of the war. There is a proud joy in it
which the reader will find infectious.

39. _His Escape_, by _Will Payne_ (Saturday Evening Post). I regard this
as the best newspaper story published in America since “The Stolen
Story.” It has quick dramatic action, well stressed conflict, clean-cut
characterization, and a thoroughly adequate conclusion. If the style is
somewhat staccato, this is perhaps in harmony with the character of the
story.

40. _The Toast to Forty-Five_, by _William Dudley Pelley_ (Pictorial
Review). Mr. Pelley has “the human touch.” His stories of Paris,
Vermont, have a homely quality which never over-stresses the emotional
values, even when it almost seems as if the author were going to
sentimentalize them. No work could be more indigenous to the soil. Its
very roughnesses are a product of environment. Though Mr. Pelley as yet
entirely lacks style, there is a driving force within him which should
finally shape a personal style in much the same manner as may be
observed in the evolution of Irvin S. Cobb’s best work.

41. _The Poet_, by _Lawrence Perry_ (Harper’s Magazine). This story is a
study in courage similar in quality to “A Certain Rich Man,” which I
published last year in “The Best Short Stories of 1917.” It is very
deliberately built up as a literary problem, but with unquestionable
artistic sincerity. It would have been easy to key this story too
tightly from an emotional point of view, but Mr. Perry’s feeling in the
matter has been sure.

42. _Green Umbrellas_, by _Lucy Pratt_ (Pictorial Review). Symbolism is
woven into this story as modestly as in “The Sun Chaser” by Jeannette
Marks, which appeared in the same magazine during 1916. Miss Pratt has
abandoned her negro character stories for the time being, and written
about a little boy who brings his parents together. It is slightly
sentimentalized, but this is a weakness which the other excellent
qualities of the story largely neutralize.

43. _David and Jonathan_, by _Mary Brecht Pulver_ (Mother’s Magazine).
This idyl of boyhood friendship, which may not have come to the
attention of many readers, has interested me as much as Roland Pertwee’s
notable study of adolescence, entitled “Red and White.” It is a study in
loyalties seen from a boy’s point of view, mirroring as it does later,
if no firmer, loyalties of men and women.

44. _The Sixth Man_, by _George Palmer Putnam_ (Ladies’ Home Journal).
It is claimed by the author of this story that it is based on fact.
Whether this is so or not, it is an interesting study of a possible
historical situation woven around the death of Edith Cavell. It seems to
me a made story rather than a told story, but granting this weakness
which has not been sufficiently covered, it is noteworthy in its way.

45. _Extra Men_, by _Harrison Rhodes_ (Harper’s Magazine). This story is
an instance of atmosphere perfectly realized in brief compass. But it is
more than that. It is a new legend for American literature fairly
comparable to Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Hawthorne’s “The Gray
Champion,” in its portraiture of Washington and all the armies of the
American dead sailing for France with the American troopships in the
morning.

46. _Daffodils_, by _Anne Douglas Sedgwick_ (Atlantic Monthly). Of the
series of stories based on the symbolism of flowers which Mrs. de
Sélincourt has contributed during the past few years to American
magazines, “Daffodils” is probably the best. Full of the spirit of young
England and the many thousand youths mown in Flanders like a field of
daffodils in glad surrender, this story reflects the spiritual analogies
of the flower in the human heart. It is the same spirit of eternal
English youth which is reflected in Rupert Brooke’s last sonnets.

47. _Release_, by _Elsie Singmaster_ (Pictorial Review). One more memory
of Lincoln, uniting the tradition of the Civil War with the tradition of
the present war, is evoked by Elsie Singmaster in this story. There is
very little action in “Release” of a physical kind, but the spiritual
values are dynamic, and the story is told with a processional dignity
attained in other stories only by this author.

48. _The Return_, by _Gordon Arthur Smith_ (Scribner’s Magazine). From
the romantic fortunes of Ferdinand Taillandy, Mr. Smith has turned to a
poignant study of French war life. With great reticence and gentleness
he has idealized the return of a soldier home to his greatest desire,
and so added one more to the notable chronicles of supernatural life
which the war has evoked from American artists.

49. _Solitaire_, by _Fleta Campbell Springer_ (Harper’s Magazine). I
regard this as one of the two best short stories of the year, though in
saying so I wish to put forward no more than a personal judgment. The
character whom Mrs. Springer has created is unlike any other in American
fiction, and yet, in his modesty, efficiency, and sensitiveness, a most
natural American individual. There are many different passions for
perfection among men, most of them secret, and of these I think that the
passion of Corey is not the least noble.

50. _The Dark Hour_ (Atlantic Monthly), 51. _A Taste of the Old Boy_
(Collier’s Weekly), and 52. _The Wages of Sin_ (Pictorial Review), by
_Wilbur Daniel Steele_. Once more it is necessary to affirm that Wilbur
Daniel Steele shares with Mrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould the
distinction of first place among contemporary American short-story
artists. I still think that “Ching, Ching, Chinaman” is the best short
story that Mr. Steele has yet written, and that its only close rival is
“A White Horse Winter,” but “The Dark Hour” I should place third in an
anthology of Mr. Steele’s stories, and first in an anthology of American
war stories. In its message to the American people it yields in
significance only to the best of President Wilson’s state papers, and
serves to crystallize the issue before the country in this war as
unforgetably as William Vaughn Moody crystallized the war issue less
than twenty years ago in his “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” also published
in the Atlantic Monthly. In the light of present events, Mr. Steele’s
message has only increased in significance. Of the two other stories,
“The Wages of Sin” takes its rightful place with the other Urkey Island
stories which I have discussed in the past. “A Taste of the Old Boy” is
one more war legend for our anthology.

53. _The Bird of Serbia_, by _Julian Street_ (Collier’s Weekly).
Repeatedly in the course of this article I have had occasion to point
out that the best of the year’s war stories are creating new legends.
How a bird in a cage in a little Serbian village may have been the cause
of the Great War is persuasively set forth by Mr. Street in this story.
The conclusion is one of the best examples of a justifiable surprise
ending that I know of, and the human quality of Mr. Street’s
characterization renders its inherent improbability psychologically
convincing.

54. _The Three Zoölogical Wishes_, by _Booth Tarkington_ (Collier’s
Weekly). This is the most amusing study of adolescence that Mr.
Tarkington has given us. It has countless subtle touches of observation
which quietly build up two remarkably accurate portraits. I regard it as
the best of the new series which Mr. Tarkington has been publishing in
Collier’s Weekly.

55. _Five Rungs Gone_, by _Albert W. Tolman_ (Youth’s Companion). For
many years the most interesting weekly feature of the Youth’s Companion
has been the danger story in which the youthful hero escapes from
extraordinary peril by virtue of courage and great intellectual
ingenuity. Most of these stories are built on a regular formula and
cannot claim much literary value. But now and then a situation is so
vividly realized, and the situation so logically deduced, that the story
has literary justification. And “Five Rungs Gone” is altogether
exceptional in this respect.

56. _At Isham’s_, by _Edward C. Venable_ (Scribner’s Magazine). The zest
of this story consists in the intellectual subtlety of mental conflict.
It contrasts the characters of several _habitués_ of a New York café who
form a little group each night for endless discussion. The value of the
story rests in the manner in which events bring out variations in
character, and the solution of the story is as absorbing as a chess
problem.

57. _De Vilmarte’s Luck_ (Harper’s Magazine) and 58. _Huntington’s
Credit_ (Harper’s Magazine), by _Mary Heaton Vorse_. In these two
stories there is a marked contrast of subject matter. “De Vilmarte’s
Luck” is a study of the artistic temperament, with fine ironies keenly
portrayed. The war provides the story with a solution which reveals the
finer grain. In “Huntington’s Credit” we have a study in suppressed
desires, very quietly told, with a poignancy softened somehow by the
quality of character. In these two stories Mary Heaton Vorse has given
us the best work written by her in the last four years.

59. _The White Battalion_, by _Frances Gilchrist Wood_ (The Bookman).
Here is the last of the fine supernatural legends inspired during the
past year by the Great War. The White Battalion of the dead which fights
on the side of the Allies is comparable to the marching host seen by
Harrison Rhodes in “Extra Men,” but there is an _élan_ in this story
which suggests a deeper spiritual background.

60. _In the House of Morphy_, by _John Seymour Wood_ (Scribner’s
Magazine). This legend of old New Orleans has the romantic glow of Mr.
Cable’s best novels linked to a well-developed plot with a fine quality
of logical surprise. It is one of the best stories written by a
fastidious artist of the old school who appears seldom in our magazines,
and always with the finest substance that he can give.



         ARTICLES ON THE SHORT STORY, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918


_The following abbreviations are used in this index:—_

    _Atl._ .....................Atlantic Monthly
    _Bel._ .....................Bellman
    _B. E. T._ ................Boston Evening Transcript
    _Bk. News Mo._ ........Book News Monthly
    _Book._ ...............Bookman
    _Cen._ ................Century Magazine
    _C. O._ ...............Current Opinion
    _Cos._ ................Cosmopolitan
    _F. A. Suppl._ ........Fine Arts Supplement
    _For._ ................Forum
    _Lit. R._ .............Little Review
    _Liv. Age_ ............Living Age
    _Mir._ ................Reedy’s Mirror
    _N. A. Rev._ ..........North American Review
    _N. Rep._ .............New Republic
    _Outl. (London)_ ......London Outlook
    _So. Atl. Quart._ .....South Atlantic Quarterly
    _Strat. J._ ...........Stratford Journal
    _Yale R._ .............Yale Review
    _(161)_ ...............Page 161
    _(11:161)_ ............Volume 11, page 161

American Short Stories of 1917, The Best Sixty-Three.
       By Edward J. O’Brien. Book. Feb. (46:696.)

American Short Story.
       By William Stanley Braithwaite. B. E. T. May 15. (pt. 2. p. 6.)

_Anonymous._
       Short Story Art and the Magazines. Strat. J. July-Aug. (78.)

Artzibashev, Michael.
       _See_ Russian Revolutions and Literature.

Asch, Sholom.
       _See_ Yiddish Writers.

_Ashmun, Margaret._
       Ivan Turgenev. B. E. T. Oct. 19. (pt. 3. p. 4.)

_Beaucrispin, Raoul de._
       Edgar Allan Poe. Bk. News Mo. April. (36:281.)

_Belshaw, Alexander._
       Review of Moore’s “A Story Teller’s Holiday.” Chicago Daily News.
               Aug. 21.

Bennett’s Books, Arnold.
       By Randolph Edgar. Bel. July 13. (25:48.)

_Bergengren, Ralph._
       Review of Morley’s “Shandygaff.” B. E. T. June 12. (pt. 2. p. 6.)

Best Short Stories of 1917.
       By Edward J. O’Brien. B. E. T. Jan. 19. (pt 3. p. 5.)

Best Sixty-Three American Short Stories of 1917.
       By Edward J. O’Brien. Book. Feb. (46:696.)

Bierce, Ambrose.
       C. O. Sept. (65:184.)

Bierce, Ambrose: America’s Neglected Satirist.
       By Wilson Follett. Dial. July 18. (65:49.)

Bierce, Ambrose: A Rejected Guest.
       By Louise Gebhard Cann. Strat. J. June. (38.)

_Bourne, Randolph._
       Review of Latzko’s “Men in War.” Dial. May 23. (64:486.)

_Boynton, H. W._
       Told and Made. (Reviews of Short-Story Collections.) Nation.
               April 4. (106:394.)

_Bradley, William Aspenwall._
       “A Queer Fellow.” (Booth Tarkington.) Dial. March 28. (64:297.)

_Braithwaite, William Stanley._
       American Short Story. B. E. T. May 15. (pt. 2. p. 6.)

_Brégy, Katherine._
       Lord Dunsany. America. June 15. (19:241.)

_Brooks, Van Wyck._
       On Creating a Usable Past. Dial. April 11. (64:337.)

Brown, Alice.
       Reviews of “The Flying Teuton.” Nation. May 11. (106:575.) By
               Dorothea Lawrance Mann. B. E. T. July 10. (pt. 2. p. 6.)

Burgess, Gelett (The Irritating Mr. Burgess.)
       By Vincent Starrett. Mir. Oct. 11. (27:511.)

Burt, Maxwell Struthers.
       _See_ Tricks and Inventions.

_Burton, Richard._
       A Debauch of O. Henry. Bel. Jan. 26. (24:93.)

Cabell, James Branch.
       By Wilson Follett. Dial. April 25. (64:392.)
       By Ben Hecht. Chicago Daily News. April 10.
       By Vincent Starrett. Chicago Herald and Examiner. F. A. Suppl.
               May 11. (I.)

_Canby, Henry Seidel._
       On a Certain Condescension Toward Fiction. Cen. Feb. (95:549.)
       Sentimental America. Atl. April. (121:500.)

_Cann, Louise Gebhard._
       Ambrose Bierce: A Rejected Guest. Strat. J. June. (38.)

Chambers, Art of Robert W.
       By Rupert Hughes. Cos. June. (80.)

Chekhov, Anton.
       By Louis S. Friedland. Dial. Jan. 3. (64:27.)
       By George Rapall Noyes. Nation. Oct 12. (107:406.)
       _See also_ Russian Revolutions and Literature.

_Colum, Padraic._
       Conquistadore. (R. B. Cunninghame-Graham.) N. Rep. July 6.
               (15:296.)
       Irishry. (With review of Pearse’s “Collected Works.”) Nation.
               Sept. 21. (107:317.)

Conrad, Joseph.
       By J. M. Robertson. N. A. Rev. Sept (208:439.)
       By Arthur L. Salmon. Bk. News Mo. Aug. (36:442.)

Cunninghame-Graham, R. B.
       By Padraic Colum. N. Rep. July 6. (15:296.)
       By Amy Wellington. Book. April. (47:155.)

Davis, Richard Harding.
       By Francis Hackett. N. Rep. March 2. (14:149.)

Dostoevsky, Fedor.
       _See_ Russian Revolutions and Literature.

Doyle, A. Conan.
       _See_ Starrett, Vincent.

Dreiser, Theodore.
       Review of “Free.” By Edwin F. Edgett. B. E. T. Aug. 28. (pt. 2.
               p. 6.)

Dunsany, Lord.
       By Katherine Brégy. America. June 15. (19:241.)

_Eaton, Walter Prichard._
       Diogenes in Search of a “Hero.” B. E. T. Oct. 16. (pt 2. p. 4.)

_Edgar, Randolph._
       Arnold Bennett’s Books. Bel. July 13. (25:48.)

_Edgett, Edwin F._
       Review of Dreiser’s “Free.” B. E. T. Aug. 28. (pt 2. p. 6.)
       Review of Ferber’s “Cheerful—By Request.” B. E. T. Sept 14. (pt
               3. p. 6.)
       Review of Galsworthy’s “Five Tales.” B. E. T. April 10. (pt. 2.
               p. 8.)
       Review of Harris’s “Life of Joel Chandler Harris.” B. E. T. Sept
               18. (pt. 2. p. 6.)
       Review of Harris’s “Uncle Remus Returns.” B. E. T. Aug. 21. (pt
               2. p. 6.)
       Review of Hergesheimer’s “Gold and Iron.” B. E. T. May 15. (pt 2.
               p. 6.)

Editor’s Way, In the.
       By Isaac Goldberg. B. E. T. Feb. 16. (pt 3. p. 5.)

Farrère, Claude.
       _See_ French Literature During the War and After.

Ferber, Edna.
       Review of “Cheerful—By Request,” by Edwin F. Edgett. B. E. T.
               Sept. 14. (pt 3. p. 6.)

_Follett, Wilson._
       America’s Neglected Satirist. (Ambrose Bierce.) Dial. July 18.
               (65:49.)
       Gossip on James Branch Cabell. Dial. April 25. (64:392.) Humanism
               and Fiction. Atl. Oct. (122:503.)

French Literature During the War and After (with Notices of Farrère and
Mille).
       By Theodore Stanton. Strat. J. (2:40.)

_Friedland, Louis S._
       Anton Chekhov. Dial. Jan. 3. (64:27.)

Galsworthy, John.
       Reviews of “Five Tales.” London Nation. Sept 28. (23:692.)
       By A. C. N. N. Rep. Aug. 10. (16:53.)
       By E. F. Edgett. B. E. T. April 10. (pt 2. p. 8.)
       By Frank Swinnerton. Outl. (London.) Aug. 10. (42:131.)

_Garnett, Edward._
       Edward Thomas. Dial. Feb. 14. (64:135.)

_Gerould, Katharine Fullerton._
       War Novels [and Short Stories]. Yale R. Oct. (8:159.)

_Goldberg, Isaac._
       East Side Unearths a Dickens. (H. Gutman.) B. E. T. Sept 11. (pt.
               2. p. 5.)
       In the Editor’s Way. B. E. T. Feb. 16. (pt. 3. p. 5.)
       New York’s Yiddish Writers. (Pinski, Asch, Raisin, Libin,
               Kobrin.) Book. Feb. (46:684.)
       Pinski, Maeterlinck of America. B. E. T. July 17. (pt. 2. p. 4.)
       Tales from the Yiddish. (Leon Kobrin.) B. E. T. Aug. 14. (pt. 2.
               p. 6.)
       Touching on the Impersonal. B. E. T. Aug. 21. (pt 2. p. 4.)

Grim Thirteen, The. (_Review._)
       By Louis Untermeyer. Dial. Jan. 17. (64:70.)

Gutman, H. (East Side Unearths a Dickens.)
       By Isaac Goldberg. B. E. T. Sept 11. (pt. 2. p. 5.)

_Hackett, Francis._
       Richard Harding Davis. N. Rep. March 2. (14:149.)

_Harman, H. E._
       Joel Chandler Harris: The Prose Poet of the South. So. Atl.
               Quart. July. (17:243.)

Harris, Joel Chandler.
       Joel Chandler Harris. By H. E. Harman. So. Atl. Quart. July.
               (17:243.)
       Review of His “Life and Letters.” By E. F. Edgett. B. E. T. Sept.
               18. (pt. 2. p. 6.)
       Review of “Uncle Remus Returns.” By E. F. Edgett. B. E. T. Aug.
               21. (pt. 2. p. 6.)

_Hecht, Ben._
       Concerning James Branch Cabell. Chicago Daily News. April 10.

“Henry, O.”
       By C. Alphonso Smith. Nation. May 11. (106:567.)
       By Richard Burton. Bel. Jan. 26. (24:93.)
       Letters of “O. Henry.” By G. H. Sargent B. E. T. April 27. (pt.
               3. p. 4.)

_Hergesheimer, Joseph._
       Some Veracious Paragraphs. Book. Sept. (48:8.)

Hergesheimer, Joseph. Review of “Gold and Iron.”
       By Edwin F. Edgett B. E. T. May 15. (pt. 2. p. 6.)

_Hughes, Rupert._
       Art of Robert W. Chambers. Cos. June. (80.)

Hughes, Interview with Rupert.
       By “Pendennis.” For. Jan. (59:77.)

Humanism and Fiction.
       By Wilson Follett Atl. Oct. (122:503.)

Hurst, Fannie: Genius of the Short Story.
       By Kathleen Norris. Cos. Sept (93.)

_Hutchings, Emily Grant._
       Review of Tagore’s “Mashi.” Mir. Oct 4. (27:500.)

Irishry. (With review of Pearse’s “Collected Works.”)
       By Padraic Colum. Nation. Sept. 21. (107:317.)

Is American Life Divorced from American Literature?
       C. O. March. (64:206.)

James, Henry.
       Articles by. Ethel Colburn Mayne, Ezra Pound, A. R. Orage, T. S.
               Eliot, John Rodker, and Theodora Bosanquet. Lit. R. Aug.
               (pp. 1-64.) Sept. (pp. 50-53.)
       By Francis X. Talbot, S. J. America. Oct 12. (20:19.)

Joyce, James.
       By Scofield Thayer. Dial. Sept. 19. (65:201.)

_Kadison, Alexander._
       Ovid as a Short-Story Writer in the Light of Modern Technique.
               Poet-Lore. March-April. (29:206.)

Kipling Anatomized. (Review of Hart’s “Kipling the Story Writer.”)
Nation. Sept. 28. (107:350.)

Kobrin, Leon. (Tales from the Yiddish.)
       By Isaac Goldberg. B. E. T. Aug. 14. (pt. 2. p. 6.)
       _See also_ Yiddish Writers.

_Lansing, Ruth._
       Robert Louis Stevenson’s French Reading As Shown in His
               Correspondence. Poet-Lore. March-April (29:218.)

Latzko, Andreas. “Men in War.”
       Review by Randolph Bourne. Dial. May 23. (64:486.)

Lemaitre, Jules.
       By Desmond MacCarthy. New Statesman. April 27. (11:71.)

Libin, Zalmon.
       _See_ Yiddish Writers.

_Lighton, William R._
       Something Rotten in the State of Fiction. B. E. T. Aug. 14. (pt.
               2. p. 5.)

Lincoln, Joseph C.
       By Reed, Charles Francis. For. Feb. (59:219.)

Lyons, A. Neil.
       By Constance Mayfield Rourke. N. Rep. June 8. (15:180.)

_MacCarthy, Desmond._
       Jules Lemaitre. New Statesman. April 27. (11:71.)

_McIntire, Ruth._
       Imperturbable Artist. (Leonard Merrick.) Dial. June 6. (64:527.)

_Mann, Dorothea Lawrance._
       Review of Brown’s “The Flying Teuton.” B. E. T. July 10. (pt. 2.
               p. 6.)
       Review of Train’s “Mortmain.” B. E. T. Sept. 21. (pt. 3. p. 6.)

Merrick, Leonard.
       By Ruth McIntire. Dial. June 6. (64:527.)
       By R. Ellis Roberts. Liv. Age. Sept. 28. (298:775.)
       Review of “While Paris Laughed.” By Rebecca West Outl. (London.)
               Aug. 17. (42:159.)

Mille, Pierre.
       _See_ French Literature During the War and After.

Moore, George. “A Story Teller’s Holiday.”
       Review by Alexander Belshaw. Chicago Daily News. Aug. 21.

Morley, Christopher. “Shandygaff.”
       Review by Ralph Bergengren. B. E. T. June 12. (pt 2. p. 6.)

N., A. C.
       Interior Fiction. (Galsworthy’s “Five Tales.”) N. Rep. Aug. 10.
               (16:53.)

_Norris, Kathleen._
       Genius of the Short Story. (Fannie Hurst.) Cos. Sept. (93.)

_Noyes, George Rapall._
       Chekhov. Nation. Oct 12. (107:406.)

_O’Brien, Edward J._
       Best Short Stories of 1917. B. E. T. Jan. 19. (pt 3. p. 5.)
       Best Sixty-Three American Short Stories of 1917. Book. Feb.
               (46:696.)
       Review of Williams’s “Handbook of Story-Writing.” Book. Jan.
               (46:612.)
       Some Books of Short Stories. Book. May. (47:299.)

_Olgin, Moissaye J._
       Survey of Russian Literature. (I.) Book. Oct. (48:191.)

Ovid as a Short-Story Writer.
       By Alexander Kadison. Poet-Lore. March-April. (29:206.)

Pearse, Padraic.
       _See_ Irishry.

“_Pendennis._”
       “My Types”—Rupert Hughes. For. Jan. (59:77.)

_Phelps, William Lyon._
       Russian Revolutions and Literature. (With reviews of Dostoevsky,
               Chekhov, and Artzibashev.) Yale R. Oct. (8:191.)

Pinski, David, Maeterlinck of America.
       By Isaac Goldberg. B. E. T. July 17. (pt 2. p. 4.)
       _See also_ Yiddish Writers.

Poe, Edgar Allan.
       By Raoul de Beaucrispin. Bk. News Mo. April. (36:281.)
       By Francis X. Talbot, S. J. America. June 1. (19:193.)

Post, Melville Davisson.
       _See_ Tricks and Inventions.

Raisin, Abraham.
       _See_ Yiddish Writers.

_Reed, Charles Francis._
       Joseph C. Lincoln. For. Feb. (59:219.)

“Renaissance in the Eighties.”
       Nation. Oct. 12. (107:404.)

_Roberts, R. Ellis._
       Leonard Merrick. Liv. Age. Sept 28. (298:775.)

_Robertson, J. M._
       Art of Joseph Conrad. N. A. Rev. Sept (208:439.)

_Rourke, Constance Mayfield._
       English Raconteur. (A. Neil Lyons.) N. Rep. June 8. (15:180.)

Russian Literature, Survey of. (I.)
       By Moissaye J. Olgin. Book. Oct. (48:191.)

Russian Revolutions and Literature. (With reviews of Dostoevsky,
Chekhov, and Artzibashev.) By William Lyon Phelps. Yale R. Oct. (8:191.)

Sabatini, Rafael. “Historical Nights’ Entertainment.” (Review.) Nation
(London.) Feb. 2. (22:577.)

_Salmon, Arthur L._
       Joseph Conrad. Bk. News Mo. Aug. (36:442.)

Saltus, Edgar. C. O. Oct. (65:254.)

_Sargent, George H._
       Letters of “O. Henry.” B. E. T. April 27. (pt. 3. p. 4.)

_Scarborough, Dorothy._
       Review of Steele’s “Land’s End.” N. Y. Sun. Books and Book World.
               Sept. 29. (10.)

Sélincourt, Hugh de.
       Review of “Nine Tales.” By Myron R. Williams. Dial. March 14.
               (64:241.)

Sherlock Holmes, In Praise of.
       By Vincent Starrett. Mir. Feb. 22. (27:106.)

Short-Story Art and the Magazines.
       By a Magazine Editor. Strat. J. July-Aug. (78.)

Smith, Arthur Cosslett.
       By Vincent Starrett. Mir. Oct. 18. (27:522.)

_Smith, C. Alphonso._
       “O. Henry.” Nation. May 11. (106:567.)

_Stanton, Theodore._
       French Literature During the War and After. (With Notices of
               Farrère and Mille.) Strat. J. (2:40.)

_Starrett, Vincent._
       Arthur Cosslett Smith. Mir. Oct. 18. (27:522.)
       In Praise of Sherlock Holmes. Mir. Feb. 22. (27:106.)
       Irritating Mr. Burgess. Mir. Oct. 11. (27:511.)
       James Branch Cabell. Chicago Herald and Examiner. F. A. Suppl.
               May 11. (1.)

Steele, Wilbur Daniel.
       Review of “Land’s End.” By Dorothy Scarborough. N. Y. Sun. Books
               and Book World. Sept. 29. (10.)

Stevenson’s French Reading As Shown in His Correspondence.
       By Ruth Lansing. Poet-Lore. March-April. (29:218.)

_Swinnerton, Frank._
       Review of Galsworthy’s “Five Tales.” Outl. (London.) Aug. 10.
               (42:131.)

Tagore, Rabindranath.
       Review of “Mashi.” By Emily Grant Hutchings. Mir. Oct. 4.
               (27:500.)

_Talbot, S. J., Francis X._
       Edgar Allan Poe. America. June 1. (19:193.)
       Henry James. America. Oct 12. (20:19.)

Tarkington, Booth. (“A Queer Fellow.”)
       By William Aspenwall Bradley. Dial. March 28. (64:297.)

_Thayer, Scofield._
       James Joyce. Dial. Sept. 19. (65:201.)

Thomas, Edward.
       By Edward Garnett. Dial. Feb. 14. (64:135.)

Train, Arthur.
       Review of “Mortmain,” by Dorothea Lawrance Mann. B. E. T. Sept.
               21. (pt. 3. p. 6.)

Tricks and Inventions.
       (Including reviews of Post’s “Uncle Abner” and Burt’s “John
               O’May.”) Nation. Oct 19. (107:453.)

Turgenev, Ivan.
       By Margaret Ashmun. B. E. T. Oct. 19. (pt. 3. p. 4.)

_Untermeyer Louis._
       Review of “The Grim Thirteen.” Dial. Jan. 17. (64:70.)

War Novels [and Short Stories].
       By Katharine Fullerton Gerould. Yale R. Oct. (8:159.)

_Wellington, Amy._
       Artist-Fighter in English Prose: Cunninghame Graham. Book. April.
               (47:155.)

_West, Rebecca._
       Review of Merrick’s “While Paris Laughed.” Outl. (London.) Aug.
               17. (42:159.)

Williams, Blanche Cotton. Review of “A Handbook on Story-Writing.”
       By Edward J. O’Brien. Book. Jan. (46:612.)

_Williams, Myron R._
       Review of Sélincourt’s “Nine Tales.” Dial. March 14. (64:241.)

Yiddish Writers, New York’s. (Pinski, Asch, Raisin, Libin, Kobrin.)
       By Isaac Goldberg. Book. Feb. (46:684.)



              MAGAZINE AVERAGES, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918


_The following table includes the averages of American periodicals
published during the ten-month period before November 1, 1918. One, two,
and three a’s are employed to indicate relative distinction. “Three-a
stories” are of somewhat permanent literary value. The table excludes
reprints, but not translations._


  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
                              NO. OF DISTINCTIVE   PERCENTAGE OF
  PERIODICALS     NO. OF      STORIES PUBLISHED    DISTINCTIVE
  (Jan.-Oct.)     STORIES                          STORIES PUBLISHED
                  PUBLSHED  ──────────────────────────────────────────
                               a      aa    aaa     a      aa    aaa
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Adventure          177       16     3      0      9      2      0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Ainslee’s          75        9      1      0      12     1      0
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  American           40        17     4      0      43     10     0
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Atlantic           17        16     13     9      94     76     53
  Monthly
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Bellman            24        21     5      3      88     20     13
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Black Cat          77        9      2      0      12     3      0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Bookman             6        6      6      3     100    100     50
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Boston             14        13     7      2      93     50     14
  Evening
  Transcript
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Catholic            7        6      4      1      86     57     14
  World
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Century            41        34     27     16     83     66     39
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Collier’s          79        36     18     6      46     23     8
  Weekly
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Cosmopolitan       54        18     7      2      33     13     4
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Delineator         24        10     5      0      42     21     0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Everybody’s        33        9      2      0      27     6      0
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Every Week         53        17     4      0      32     8      0
  (Jan. 5-June
  22)
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Good               27        6      1      0      22     4      0
  Housekeeping
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Harper’s           29        7      0      0      24     0      0
  Bazar
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Harper’s           61        47     26     20     77     43     33
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Hearst’s           47        6      2      1      13     4      2
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Ladies’ Home       39        14     3      1      36     8      3
  Journal
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Liberator           8        8      5      1     100     63     13
  (Mar.-Oct.)
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Little Review       6        5      5      4      83     83     67
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  McClure’s          42        3      0      0      7      0      0
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Magnificat         63        4      0      0      6      0      0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Metropolitan       34        16     7      2      48     21     6
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Midland            11        9      7      3      81     63     27
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Munsey’s           40        2      1      0      5      3      0
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  New York           43        37     18     7      86     42     16
  Tribune
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Outlook            16        8      2      0      50     13     0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Pagan              20        15     7      2      75     35     10
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Pictorial          31        16     9      8      52     29     26
  Review
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Queen’s Work        9        2      0      0      22     0      0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Reedy’s            14        11     2      0      79     14     0
  Mirror
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Saturday           162       44     9      2      27     6      1
  Evening Post
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Scribner’s         44        33     22     14     75     50     32
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Short Stories      80        4      1      0      5      1      0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Stratford          28        27     18     14     96     64     50
  Journal
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Sunset             26        6      1      0      23     4      0
  Magazine
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Touchstone          9        8      4      0      88     44     0
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Woman’s Home       38        4      2      0      11     5      0
  Companion
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Youth’s            121       9      9      1      7      7      1
  Companion
  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────


_The following tables indicate the rank, during the period between
January and October, 1918, inclusive, by number and percentage of
distinctive stories published, of the nineteen periodicals coming within
the scope of my examination which have published during that period over
twenty-one stories and which have exceeded an average of 15 per cent in
stories of distinction. The lists exclude reprints, but not
translations._


                  BY PERCENTAGE OF DISTINCTIVE STORIES


       1. Stratford Journal (including translations) .....96%
       2. Bellman .....88%
       3. New York Tribune (translations only) .....86%
       4. Century .....83%
       5. Harper’s Magazine ..... 77%
       6. Scribner’s Magazine .....75%
       7. Pictorial Review .....52%
       8. Metropolitan Magazine .....48%
       9. Collier’s Weekly .....46%
      10. American Magazine .....43%
      11. Delineator .....42%
      12. Ladies’ Home Journal .....36%
      13. Cosmopolitan .....33%
      14. Every Week .....32%
      15. Saturday Evening Post .....27%
      16. Everybody’s Magazine .....27%
      17. Harper’s Bazar .....24%
      18. Sunset Magazine .....23%
      19. Good Housekeeping ..... 22%


                    BY NUMBER OF DISTINCTIVE STORIES


       1. Harper’s Magazine .....47
       2. Saturday Evening Post .....44
       3. New York Tribune (translations only) .....37
       4. Collier’s Weekly .....36
       5. Century Magazine .....34
       6. Scribner’s Magazine .....33
       7. Stratford Journal (including translations) .....27
       8. Bellman .....21
       9. Cosmopolitan .....18
      10. American Magazine .....17
      11. Every Week .....17
      12. Metropolitan .....16
      13. Pictorial Review .....16
      14. Ladies’ Home Journal .....14
      15. Delineator .....10
      16. Everybody’s Magazine .....9
      17. Harper’s Bazar .....7
      18. Sunset Magazine .....6
      19. Good Housekeeping .....6

_The following periodicals have published during the same period eight
or more “two-asterisk stories” The list excludes reprints, but not
translations. Periodicals represented in this list during 1915 as well
are indicated by an asterisk. Periodicals represented in this list
during 1916 are indicated by a dagger, and during 1917 by the sign §._

       1. *†§ Century Magazine .....27
       2. *†§ Harper’s Magazine .....26
       3. *†§ Scribner’s Magazine .....22
       4. Stratford Journal (including translations) .....18
       5. † New York Tribune (translations only) .....18
       6. *†§ Collier’s Weekly .....18
       7. § Atlantic Monthly .....13
       8. All-Story Weekly .....10
       9. †§ Pictorial Review ..... 9
      10. *†§ Smart Set .....9
      11. *†§ Saturday Evening Post .....9
      12. Youth’s Companion ..... 9

_The following periodicals have published during the same period four or
more “three-asterisk stories.” The list excludes reprints, but not
translations. Periodicals represented in this list during 1915 as well
are indicated by an asterisk. Periodicals represented in this list
during 1916 are indicated by a dagger, and during 1917 by the sign §._

       1. *†§ Harper’s Magazine .....20
       2. *†§ Century Magazine .....16
       3. *†§ Scribner’s Magazine .....14
       4. § Stratford Journal (including translations).....14
       5. § Atlantic Monthly .....9
       6. †§ Pictorial Review ..... 8
       7. New York Tribune (translations only) .....7
       8. Smart Set .....7
       9. *† Collier’s Weekly .....6
      10. All-Story Weekly .....5
      11. Little Review .....4

_Ties in the above lists have been decided by taking relative rank in
other lists into account._ The New York Tribune _and_ The Stratford
Journal _gain their high place chiefly through translations of foreign
stories, and allowance should be made for this in any qualitative
estimate._

_Looking back over a period of four years it is interesting to see what
magazines have maintained a steady lead during this period. Of the eight
magazines whose percentage of distinctive stories has led,_ Scribner’s
Magazine _has maintained the highest average of distinction. Below
follow the percentages of these eight magazines:_

      1. Scribner’s Magazine .....76.5%
      2. Century Magazine .....74.8
      3. Harper’s Magazine .....70.3
      4. Bellman .....70.0
      5. Metropolitan Magazine .....48.5
      6. American Magazine .....45.0
      7. Everybody’s Magazine .....44.3
      8. Pictorial Review .....43.8

_Five magazines during this four-year period far surpass all others in
the number of distinctive stories published during that time, and_
Harper’s Magazine _leads its nearest competitor by forty-nine stories.
The list follows:_

      1. Harper’s Magazine .....232
      2. Saturday Evening Post .....183
      3. Collier’s Weekly .....178
      4. Scribner’s Magazine .....166
      5. Century Magazine .....151

_Reprints have not been taken into account in the last two lists._



       INDEX OF SHORT STORIES IN BOOKS, JANUARY TO OCTOBER, 1918


ABBREVIATIONS

    _Andrews A_ ........Andrews. Her Country
    _Andreyev A_ .......Andreyev. Seven That Were Hanged
    _Andreyev B_ .......Andreyev and Bunin. Lazarus, and Gentleman
      from San Francisco.
    _Atlantic A_ .......Thomas. Atlantic Narratives: First Series
    _Atlantic B_ .......Thomas. Atlantic Narratives: Second Series
    _Bierce A_ .........Bierce. In the Midst of Life
    _Bierce B_ .........Bierce. Can Such Things Be?
    _Boccaccio_ ........Boccaccio. Tales
    _Brown_ ............Brown. Flying Teuton
    _Buchan_ ...........Buchan. The Watcher by the Threshold
    _Burt_ .............Burt. John O’May, and Other Stories
    _Canfield A_ .......Canfield. Home Fires In France
    _Chekhov A_ ........Chekhov. Nine Humorous Tales
    _Chekhov B_ ........Chekhov. The Wife
    _Chekhov C_ ........Chekhov. The Witch
    _Cobb A_ ...........Cobb. The Thunders of Silence
    _Dantchenko_ .......Dantchenko. Peasant Tales of Russia
    _Dostoevsky A_ .....Dostoevsky. White Nights, and Other Stories
    _Dreiser_ ..........Dreiser. Free, and Other Stories
    _Duncan A_ .........Duncan. Battles Royal Down North
    _Duncan B_ .........Duncan. Harbor Tales Down North
    _Dunsany A_ ........Dunsany. Tales of War
    _Ferber_ ...........Ferber. Cheerful—By Request
    _Freeman_ ..........Freeman. Edgewater People
    _French_ ...........French. Great Ghost Stories
    _Galsworthy A_ .....Galsworthy. Five Tales
    _Gogol_ ............Gogol. Taras Bulba
    _Gorky A_ ..........Gorky. Creatures That Once Were Men
    _Gorky B_ ..........Gorky. Stories of the Steppe
    _Harris_ ...........Harris. Uncle Remus Returns
    _Henry_ ............“O. Henry.” Ransom of Red Chief
    _Hergesheimer_ .....Hergesheimer. Gold and Iron
    _Hughes_ ...........Hughes. Long Ever Ago
    _Hurst_ ............Hurst. Gaslight Sonatas
    _Jacks A_ ..........Jacks. The Country Air
    _Law_ ..............Law. Modern Short Stories
    _London_ ...........London. The Red One
    _McPherson_ ........McPherson. Tales of Wartime France
    _McSpadden_ ........McSpadden. Famous Ghost Stories
    _O’Kelly_ ..........O’Kelly. Waysiders
    _Phillpotts_ .......Phillpotts. Chronicles of Saint Tid
    _Post_ .............Post. Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries
    _Schweikert_ .......Schweikert. French Short Stories
    _Steele_ ...........Steele. Land’s End, and Other Stories
    _Tagore_ ...........Tagore. Mashi, and Other Stories
    _Taketomo_ .........Taketomo. Paulownia
    _Tolstoi_ ..........Tolstoi. What Men Live By
    _Williams_ .........Williams. A Book of Short Stories
    _Wormser_ ..........Wormser. The Scarecrow, and Other Stories


                         I. _American Authors_


_Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman._
       Her Country. Andrews A. 1.

_Antin, Mary._ (_Mrs. Amadeus William Grabau._) (1881- .)
       Lie. Atlantic B. 1.

“_Ashe, Elizabeth._” (_Georgiana Pentlarge._)
       Blue Reefers. Atlantic B. 29.
       Glory-Box. Atlantic A. 68.

_Bierce, Ambrose_ (1842-?)
       Adventure at Brownville. Bierce A. 247.
       Affair at Coulter’s Notch. Bierce A. 105.
       Affair of Outposts. Bierce A. 146.
       Applicant. Bierce A. 281.
       Arrest. Bierce B. 340.
       At Old Man Eckert’s. Bierce B. 389.
       Baby Tramp. Bierce B. 185.
       Baffled Ambuscade. Bierce B. 356.
       Beyond the Wall. Bierce B. 210.
       Boarded Window. Bierce A. 364.
       Charles Ashmore’s Nail. Bierce B. 421.
       Chickamauga. Bierce A. 46.
       Cold Greeting. Bierce B. 331.
       Coup de Grâce. Bierce A. 122.
       Damned Thing. Bierce B. 280.
       Death of Halpin Frayser. Bierce B. 13.
       Diagnosis of Death. Bierce B. 81.
       Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Bierce B. 415.
       Eyes of the Panther. Bierce A. 385.
       Famous Gilson Bequest. Bierce A. 266.
       Fruitless Assignment. Bierce B. 377.
       George Thurston. Bierce A. 209.
       Haïti the Shepherd. Bierce B. 297.
       Haunted Valley. Bierce B. 134.
       Holy Terror. Bierce A. 324.
       Horseman in the Sky. Bierce A. 15.
       Inhabitant of Carcosa. Bierce B. 308.
       John Bartine’s Watch. Bierce B. 268.
       John Mortonson’s Funeral. Bierce B. 252.
       Jug of Sirup. Bierce B. 155.
       Killed at Resaca. Bierce A. 93.
       Lady from Red Horse. Bierce A. 373.
       Man and the Snake. Bierce A. 311.
       Man Out of the Nose. Bierce A. 233.
       Man with Two Lives. Bierce B. 345.
       Middle Toe of the Right Foot. Bierce B. 235.
       Mocking-Bird. Bierce A. 218.
       Moonlit Road. Bierce B. 62.
       Moxon’s Master. Bierce B. 88.
       Night-Doings at “Deadman’s.” Bierce B. 194.
       Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. Bierce A. 27.
       One Kind of Officer. Bierce A. 178.
       One of the Missing. Bierce A. 71.
       One of Twins. Bierce B. 112.
       One Officer, One Man. Bierce A. 197.
       One Summer Night. Bierce B. 58.
       Other Lodgers. Bierce B. 400.
       Parker Adderson, Philosopher. Bierce A. 133.
       Present at a Hanging. Bierce B. 327.
       Psychological Shipwreck. Bierce B. 227.
       Realm of the Unreal. Bierce B. 255.
       Resumed Identity. Bierce B. 174.
       Secret of Macarger’s Gulch. Bierce B. 44.
       Son of the Gods. Bierce A. 58.
       Spook House. Bierce B. 393.
       Staley Fleming’s Hallucination. Bierce B. 169.
       Story of a Conscience. Bierce A. 165.
       Stranger. Bierce B. 315.
       Suitable Surroundings. Bierce A. 350.
       Thing at Nolan. Bierce B. 405.
       Three and One are One. Bierce B. 350.
       Tough Tussle. Bierce B. 106.
       Two Military Executions. Bierce B. 361.
       Unfinished Race. Bierce B. 419.
       Vine on a House. Bierce B. 383.
       Watcher by the Dead. Bierce A. 290.
       Wireless Message. Bierce B. 335.

_Bottome, Phyllis._
       Brother Leo. Law. 221.

_Brown, Alice._ (1857- .)
       Citizen and His Wife. Brown. 97
       Empire of Death. Brown. 48.
       Father. Brown. 265.
       Flags on the Tower. Brown. 178.
       Flying Teuton. Brown. 1.
       Island. Brown. 24.
       Man and the Militant. Brown. 69.
       Mid-Victorian. Brown. 231.
       Nemesis. Brown. 299.
       Torch of Life. Brown. 122.
       Trial at Ravello. Brown. 200.
       Tryst. Brown. 140.
       Waves. Brown. 160.

_Burt, Maxwell Struthers._ (1882- .)
       Closed Doors. Burt. 117.
       Cup of Tea. Burt. 75.
       Glory of the Wild Green Earth. Burt. 217.
       John O’May. Burt. 1.
       Panache. Burt. 183.
       Water-Hole. Burt. 149.
       Wings of the Morning. Burt. 37.

_Butler, Katharine._ (1890- .)
       In No Strange Land. Atlantic A. 201.

_Canby, Henry Seidel._ (1878- .)
       Business is Business. Atlantic A. 152.

_Canfield, Dorothy._ (_Dorothy Canfield Fisher._) (1879- .)
       Eyes for the Blind. Canfield A. 173.
       Fair Exchange. Canfield A. 84.
       First Time After. Canfield A. 194.
       Hats. Canfield A. 204.
       Honeymoon ... Vive l’Amérique. Canfield A. 227.
       Little Kansas Leaven. Canfield A. 132.
       Permissionaire. Canfield A. 27.
       Pharmacienne. Canfield A. 259.
       Refugee. Canfield A. 111.

_Carman, Kathleen._
       Debt. Atlantic B. 40.

_Cobb, Irvin Shrewsbury._ (1876- .)
       Thunders of Silence. Cobb A. 9.

_Comer, Cornelia Atwood_ (_Pratt_).
       Preliminaries. Atlantic A. 1.
       Seth Miles and the Sacred Fire. Atlantic B. 50.

_Davis, Richard Harding._ (1864-1916.)
       On the Fever Ship. Law. 53.

_De la Roche, Mazo._
       Buried Treasure. Atlantic B. 69.

_Dobie, Charles Caldwell._ (1881- .)
       Failure. Atlantic A. 136.

_Dodge, Mary Mapes._ (1838-1905.)
       Crow-Child. Law. 9.

_Donnell, Annie Hamilton._ (1862- .)
       Princess of Make-Believe. Atlantic B. 94.

_Doty, Madeleine Zabriskie._ (1878- .)
       Little Brother. Atlantic A. 208.

_Dreiser, Theodore._ (1871- .)
       Cruise of the “Idlewild.” Dreiser. 300.
       Free. Dreiser. 9.
       Lost Phœbe. Dreiser. 112.
       McEwen of the Shining Slave Makers. Dreiser. 54.
       Married. Dreiser. 323.
       Nigger Jeff. Dreiser. 76.
       Old Rogaum and His Theresa. Dreiser. 201.
       Second Choice. Dreiser. 135.
       Story of Stories. Dreiser. 163.
       When the Old Century Was New. Dreiser. 351.
       Will You Walk Into My Parlor? Dreiser. 229.

_Duncan, Norman._ (1871-1916.)
       Art of Terry Lute. Duncan B. 91.
       Crœsus of Gingerbread Cove. Duncan B. 141.
       Doctor of Afternoon Arm. Duncan B. 115.
       Idyl of Rickety Tickle. Duncan B. 255.
       Last Lucifer. Duncan A. 169.
       Little Nipper o’ Hide-an’-Seek Harbor. Duncan B. 189.
       Long Arm. Duncan A. 67.
       Madman’s Luck. Duncan B. 17.
       Madonna of Tinkle Tickle. Duncan B. 165.
       Rose of Great Price. Duncan A. 17.
       Siren of Scalawag Run. Duncan B. 59.
       Small Sam Small. Duncan B. 223.
       White Water. Duncan A. 225.
       Wreck of the Rough-an’-Tumble. Duncan A. 251.

_Dunning, James Edmund._ (1873- .)
       Two Apples. Atlantic B. 100.

_Dwight, Harry Griswold._ (1875- .)
       In the Pasha’s Garden. Atlantic A. 98.

_Dyer, Walter Alden._ (1878- .)
       Gulliver the Great. Law. 2.

_Eastman, Rebecca (Lane) Hooper._
       Purple Star. Atlantic B. 105.

_Fahnestock, Zephine Humphrey._
       _See_ Humphrey, Zephine.

_Ferber, Edna._ (1887- .)
       Cheerful—By Request. Ferber. 3.
       Eldest. Ferber. 113.
       Gay Old Dog. Ferber. 38.
       Girl Who Went Right. Ferber. 200.
       Guiding Miss Gowd. Ferber. 250.
       Hooker-Up-the-Back. Ferber. 224.
       Shore Leave. Ferber. 329.
       Sophy-As-She-Might-Have-Been. Ferber. 278.
       That’s Marriage. Ferber. 143.
       Three of Them. Ferber. 305.
       Tough Guy. Ferber. 73.
       Woman Who Tried to Be Good. Ferber. 181.

_Fisher, Dorothy Canfield._
       _See_ _Canfield, Dorothy_.

_Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins._ (1862- .)
       Both Cheeks. Freeman. 215.
       Flowering Bush. Freeman. 101.
       Gala Dress. Williams. 117.
       Liar. Freeman. 153.
       Old Man of the Field. Freeman. 26.
       Outside of the House. Freeman. 128.
       “Retreat to the Goal.” Freeman. 285.
       Sarah Edgewater. Freeman. 3.
       Soldier Man. Freeman. 232.
       Sour Sweetings. Freeman. 186.
       Value Received. Freeman. 74.
       Voice of the Clock. Freeman. 51.

_Ganoe, William Addleman._
       Ruggs—R. O. T. C. Atlantic B. 125.

_Garland, Hamlin._ (1860- .)
       Under the Lion’s Paw. Williams. 133.

_Gerould, Katharine Fullerton._ (1879- .)
       Moth of Peace. Atlantic A. 180.

_Gray, David._ (1870- .)
       Her First Horse Show. Law. 117.

_Green, Captain and Mrs. F. J._
       _See_ “_Louriet, F. J._”

_Greene, Frederick Stuart._ (1870- .)
       “Molly McGuire, Fourteen.” Williams. 223.

_Harris, Joel Chandler._ (1848-1908.)
       Adventures of Simon and Susanna. Law. 3.
       Brother Rabbit, Brother Fox, and Two Fat Pullets. Harris. 79.
       Brother Rabbit’s Bear Hunt. Harris. 1.
       How Brother Rabbit Brought Family Trouble on Brother Fox. Harris.
               103.
       Impty-Umpty and the Blacksmith. Harris. 26.
       Most Beautiful Bird in the World. Harris. 127.
       Taily-po. Harris. 52.

_Harte, Francis Bret._ (1839-1902.)
       Tennessee’s Partner. Williams. 48.

_Hawthorne, Nathaniel._ (1804-1864.)
       Gray Champion. McSpadden. 157.

_Hearn, Lafcadio._ (1850-1904.)
       Soul of the Great Bell. Law. 17.

“_Henry, O._” (_William Sydney Porter._) (1867-1910.)
       Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes. Henry. 119.
       After Twenty Years. Henry. 212.
       Blackjack Bargainer. Henry. 301. Williams. 163.
       Chaparral Christmas Gift. Henry. 92.
       Clarion Call. Henry. 230.
       Cop and the Anthem. Henry. 143.
       Double-Dyed Receiver. Henry. 259.
       Foreign Policy of Co. 99. Henry. 156.
       Girl and the Habit. Henry. 201.
       Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet. Henry. 65.
       Jimmie Hayes and Muriel. Henry. 24.
       Lost on Dress Parade. Henry. 178.
       Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein. Henry. 191.
       Memoirs of a Yellow Dog. Henry. 168.
       New York by Camp Fire Light. Henry. 111.
       One Dollar’s Worth. Henry. 78.
       Ransom of Red Chief. Henry. 3.
       Reformation of Calliope. Henry. 48.
       Retrieved Reformation. Henry. 244. Law. 212.
       Roads We Take. Henry. 102.
       Sleuths. Henry. 131.
       Technical Error. Henry. 35.
       Theory and the Hound. Henry. 281.
       “What You Want.” Henry. 219.

_Hergesheimer, Joseph._ (1880- .)
       Dark Fleece. Hergesheimer. 227.
       Tubal Cain. Hergesheimer. 111.
       Wild Oranges. Hergesheimer. 11.

_Huffaker, Lucy._
       Way of Life. Atlantic B. 145.

_Hughes, Rupert._ (1872- .)
       After-Honor. Hughes. 221.
       At the Back of Godspeed. Hughes. 146.
       Bitterness of Sweets. Hughes. 250.
       Canavan, the Man Who Had His Way. Hughes. 189.
       Except He Were a Bird. Hughes. 86.
       Immortal Youth. Hughes. 281.
       Long Ever Ago. Hughes. 116.
       Michaeleen! Michaelawn! Hughes. 21.
       Murphy That Made America. Hughes. 1.
       Sent For Out. Hughes. 45.

_Humphrey (Harriette) Zephine._ (_Mrs. Wallace Weir Fahnestock._) (1874-
.)     Nothing. Atlantic A. 167.

_Hurst, Fannie._ (1889- .)
       Bitter-Sweet. Hurst. 1.
       Get Ready the Wreaths. Hurst. 229.
       Golden Fleece. Hurst. 149.
       Her’s _Not_ to Reason Why. Hurst. 116.
       Ice-Water, Pl—! Hurst. 78.
       Nightshade. Hurst. 187.
       Sieve of Fulfilment. Hurst. 40.

_Irving, Washington._ (1783-1859.)
       Lady With the Velvet Collar. McSpadden. 179.
       Legend of the Moor’s Legacy. Williams. 13.
       Storm-Ship. McSpadden. 169.

_Johnson, Owen._ (1878- .)
       One Hundred in the Dark. Law. 192.

_Jordan, Elizabeth._ (1867- .)
       Comforter. Williams. 205.

_Kemper, S. H._
       Woman’s Sphere. Atlantic B. 181.

_Krysto, Christina._
       Babanchik. Atlantic B. 190.

_Lerner, Mary._
       Little Selves. Atlantic A. 121.

_London, Jack._ (1876-1916.)
       Hussy. London. 51.
       Like Argus of the Ancient Times. London. 89.
       Princess. London. 142.
       Red One. London. 1.
       War. Law. 141.

“_Louriet, F. J._” (_Captain_ and _Mrs. F. J. Green._)
       What Road Goeth He? Atlantic A. 217.

_Lynn, Margaret._
       Legacy of Richard Hughes. Atlantic A. 290.

_Mackubin, Ellen._
       Rosita. Atlantic B. 207.

_Mercer, C. A._
       Garden of Memories. Atlantic A. 252.

_Mirrielees, Edith Ronald._
       Perjured. Atlantic B. 222.

_Mitchell, Silas Weir._ (1829-1914.)
       Dilemma. Law. 160.

_Montague, Margaret Prescott._ (1878- .)
       Of Water and the Spirit. Atlantic A. 310.
       What Mr. Grey Said. Atlantic B. 237.

_Nicholson, Meredith._ (1866- .)
       Boulevard of Rogues. Atlantic B. 274.

_Norris, Kathleen (Thompson.)_ (1880- .)
       What Happened to Alanna. Atlantic B. 282.

“_O. Henry._”
       _See_ “Henry, O.”

_O’Brien, Fitz-James._
       What Was It? French. 346. McSpadden. 135.

_Pentlarge, Georgiana._
       _See_ “Ashe, Elizabeth.”

_Poe, Edgar Allan._ (1809-1849.)
       Cask of Amontillado. Williams. 36.
       Ligeia. Cross. 109. McSpadden. 189.
       MS. Found in a Bottle. McSpadden. 213.

_Porter, William Sydney._
       _See_ “Henry, O.”

_Portor, Laura Spencer._ (_Mrs. Francis Pope._)
       Spendthrifts. Atlantic B. 298.

_Post, Melville Davisson._ (1871- .)
       Act of God. Post. 64.
       Adopted Daughter. Post. 303.
       Age of Miracles. Post. 136.
       Angel of the Lord. Post. 41.
       Concealed Path. Post. 266.
       Devil’s Tools. Post. 171.
       Doomdorf Mystery. Post. 1.
       Edge of the Shadow. Post. 286.
       Hidden Law. Post. 191.
       House of the Dead Man. Post. 101.
       Mystery of Chance. Post. 249.
       Naboth’s Vineyard. Post. 323.
       Riddle. Post. 208.
       Straw Man. Post. 227.
       Tenth Commandment. Post. 153.
       Treasure Hunter. Post. 82.
       Twilight Adventure. Post. 118.
       Wrong Hand. Post. 21.

_Pratt, Lucy._
       Children Wanted. Atlantic B. 323.

_Robertson, Morgan._ (1861-1915.)
       Battle of the Monsters. Law. 147.

_Roche, Mazo de la._
       _See_ De la Roche, Mazo.

_Sedgwick, Anne Douglas._ (_Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt._) (1873- .)
       Hepaticas. Atlantic A. 30.

_Sélincourt, Mrs. Basil de._
       _See_ Sedgwick, Anne Douglas.

_Seton, Ernest Thompson._ (1860- .)
       Ten Trails. Law. 22.

_Sherwood, Margaret Pollock._ (1864- .)
       Clearest Voice. Atlantic A. 259.

_Singmaster, Elsie._ (_Elsie Singmaster Lewars._) (1879- .)
       Squire. Atlantic B. 339.

_Starr, Ernest._
       Clearer Sight. Atlantic A. 227.

_Steele, Wilbur Daniel._ (1886- .)
       Devil of a Fellow. Steele. 154.
       Down on Their Knees. Steele. 84.
       Ked’s Hand. Steele. 249.
       Killer’s Son. Steele. 121.
       Land’s End. Steele. 1.
       Man’s a Fool. Steele. 210.
       Romance. Steele. 275.
       White Horse Winter. Steele. 60.
       Woman at Seven Brothers. Steele. 29.

_Stone, Amy Wentworth._
       Possessing Prudence. Atlantic A. 56.

_Stuart, Ruth McEnery._ (1856-1917.)
       Sonny’s Schoolin’. Law. 105.

_Taylor, Arthur Russell._ (  -1918.)
       Mr. Squem. Atlantic A. 326

_Townsend, Charles Haskins._
       Gregory and the Scuttle. Atlantic B. 350.

_Wilkins, Mary E._
       _See_ Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins.

_Wormser, G. Ranger._
       Before the Dawn. Wormser. 211.
       China-Ching. Wormser. 163.
       Effigy. Wormser. 105.
       Faith. Wormser. 125.
       Flowers. Wormser. 61.
       Haunted. Wormser. 37.
       Mutter Schwegel. Wormser. 21.
       Scarecrow. Wormser. 1.
       Shadow. Wormser. 81.
       Stillness. Wormser. 229.
       Wood of Living Trees. Wormser. 187.
       Yellow. Wormser. 147.

_Wyatt, Edith Franklin._ (1873- .)
       In November. Atlantic B. 357.


                    II. _English and Irish Authors_


_Aumonier, Stacy._
       Source of Irritation. Law. 69.

_Barrie, Sir James Matthew._ (1860- .)
       My Husband’s Book. Law. 135.

_Bland, Edith Nesbit._
       _See_ “Nesbit, E.”

_Buchan, John._ (1875- .)
       Basilissa. Buchan. 255.
       Divus Johnston. Buchan. 286.
       Far Islands. Buchan. 100.
       King of Ypres. Buchan. 301.
       No-Man’s Land. Buchan. 13.
       Outgoing of the Tide. Buchan. 204.
       Rime of True Thomas. Buchan. 238.
       Watcher by the Threshold. Buchan. 137.

_Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Edward George._ (1803-1873.)
       Haunted and the Haunters. _See_ House and the Brain.
       House and the Brain. French. 1. McSpadden. 73.

_Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-._
       _See_ Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas.

_Defoe, Daniel._ (1659?-1731.)
       Apparition of Mrs. Veal. McSpadden. 1.

_Dickens, Charles._ (1812-1870.)
       Bagman’s Story. McSpadden. 281.
       To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt. McSpadden. 263.

*_Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan._ (1859- .)
       Red-Headed League. Law. 166.

_Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron._ (1878-
.)     Prayer of the Men of Daleswood. Dunsany A. 1.

_Edwards, Amelia Ann Blandford._ (1831-1892.)
       Four-Fifteen Express. French. 187.

_Galsworthy, John._ (1867- .)
       Apple Tree. Galsworthy A. 199.
       Buttercup-Night. Atlantic A. 22.
       First and the Last. Galsworthy A. 1.
       Indian Summer of a Forsyte. Galsworthy A. 309.
       Juryman. Galsworthy A. 279.
       Stoic. Galsworthy A. 77.

_Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn._ (1810-1865.)
       Old Nurse’s Story. McSpadden. 39.

_Gibbon, Perceval._ (1879- .)
       Wood Ladies. Law. 38.

_Hardy, Thomas._ (1840- .)
       Withered Arm. French. 246.

_Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall._ (1860- .)
       Farmer Jeremy and His Ways. Jacks A. 1.
       Farmer Perryman’s Tall Hat. Jacks A. 59.
       Gravedigger Scene. Jacks A. 83.
       “Macbeth” and “Banquo” on the Blasted Heath. Jacks A. 94.
       Mary. Jacks A. 113.
       “That Sort of Thing.” Jacks A. 175.

_Jacobs, William Wymark._ (1863- .)
       Well. Williams. 186.

_James, Montague Rhodes._
       Stalls of Barchester Cathedral. French. 324.

_Kipling, Rudyard._ (1865- .)
       Moti-Guj—Mutineer. Law. 84.
       Phantom R’ickshaw. McSpadden. 229.

_Lucas, Edward Verrall._ (1868- .)
       One Left. Atlantic A. 283.

_Lytton, Lord Edward George Bulwer-._
       _See_ Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Edward George.

“_Maclaren, Ian._” (_John Watson._) (1850-1907.)
       Fight with Death. Law. 238.

“_Macleod, Fiona._” (_William Sharp._) (1856-1905.)
       Dan-nan-ron. Law. 248.
       Green Branches. French. 166.

_Marryatt, H. B._
       Were-Wolf. French. 221. McSpadden. 109.

_Morrison, Arthur._ (1863- .)
       On the Stairs. Williams. 155.

“_Nesbit, E._” (_Edith Nesbit Bland._) (1858- .)
       Marble Child. Atlantic A. 270.

_O’Kelly, Seumas._
       Both Sides of the Pond. O’Kelly. 36.
       Building. O’Kelly. 173.
       Can With the Diamond Notch. O’Kelly. 1.
       Gray Lake. O’Kelly. 140.
       Home-Coming. O’Kelly. 113.
       Rector. O’Kelly. 104.
       Shoemaker. O’Kelly. 85.
       Sick Call. O’Kelly. 69.
       Wayside Burial. O’Kelly. 128.
       White Goat. O’Kelly. 54.

_Oliphant, Margaret._ (1828-1897.)
       Open Door. French. 62.

_Phillpotts, Eden._ (1862- .)
       Better Man. Phillpotts. 217.
       Church Grim. Phillpotts. 1.
       Dream. Phillpotts. 52.
       Farmer Sleep’s Savings. Phillpotts. 251.
       “Green Man” and “The Tiger.” Phillpotts. 157.
       House in Two Parishes. Phillpotts. 65.
       Jenifer and the Twain. Phillpotts. 271.
       Legacy. Phillpotts. 179.
       Lie to the Dead. Phillpotts. 233.
       Panting after Christopher. Phillpotts. 292.
       Rare Poppy. Phillpotts. 109.
       Reed Pond. Phillpotts. 83.
       Revolver. Phillpotts. 128.
       Saint and the Lovers. Phillpotts. 196.
       Silver Thimble Farm. Phillpotts. 31.
       Touch of “Fearfulness.” Phillpotts. 306.

“Q.”   _See_ Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas.

_Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas._ (“Q.”) (1863-  ).
       Roll-Call of the Reef. French. 38.

_Scott, Sir Walter._ (1771-1832.)
       Tapestried Chamber. McSpadden. 15.

_Sharp, William._
       _See_ “Macleod, Fiona.”

_Stevenson, Robert Louis._ (1850-1894.)
       Sire de Malétroit’s Door. Williams. 74.

_Watson, John._
       _See_ “Maclaren, Ian.”


                          III. _Translations_


_Aicard, Jean._ (1848- .) (_French._)
       Mariette’s Gift. McPherson. 142.

_Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevich._ (1871- .) (_Russian._)
       Lazarus. Andreyev B. 9.
       Red Laugh. Andreyev A. 103.
       Seven That Were Hanged. Andreyev A. 1.

_Anonymous._ (_French._)
       Evocation. McPherson. 195.
       Pipe. McPherson. 160.
       Rendezvous. McPherson. 167.
       Sacrifice. McPherson. 180.
       Slacker with a Soul. McPherson. 188.
       Sonata to the Star. McPherson. 153.
       Voice of the Church Bell. McPherson. 173.

_Arnaud, Arsène._ (_French._)
       _See_ “Claretie, Jules.”

_Balzac, Honoré de._ (1799-1850.) (_French._)
       Atheist’s Mass. Schweikert. 45.
       Colonel Chabert. Schweikert. 67.
       Episode of the Reign of Terror. Schweikert. 21.

_Bazin, René._ (1853- .) (_French._)
       Birds in the Letter-Box. Schweikert. 292.

_Benjamin, René._ (_French._)
       Hindoo Commissariat. McPherson. 134.
       In a Roadstead of France. McPherson. 121.
       Simplicity of Heroism. McPherson. 128.

_Boccaccio de Certaldo, Giovanni._ (1313-1375.) (_Italian._)
       Befriending His Enemy. Boccaccio. 47.
       Calandrino’s Story. Boccaccio. 38.
       Iphigenia, Mistress of Cimon. Boccaccio. 26.
       Scoundrel Becomes a Saint. Boccaccio. 5.
       Story of Griselda. Boccaccio. 54.
       Story of the Three Rings. Boccaccio. 18.
       Tragedy of Illicit Love. Boccaccio. 22.

_Boutet, Frédéric._ (_French._)
       Convalescent’s Return. McPherson. 54.
       Medallion. McPherson. 59.
       Messenger. McPherson. 48.
       Promise. McPherson. 65.

_Bunin, Ivan._ (_Russian._)
       Gentleman from San Francisco. Andreyev B. 32.

“_Chatrian, Erckmann-._” (_French._)
       _See_ “Erckmann-Chatrian.”

_Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich._ (1860-1904.) (_Russian._)
       About Love. Chekhov B. 287.
       Agafya. Chekhov C. 117.
       At Christmas Time. Chekhov C. 135.
       Carelessness. Chekhov A. 38.
       Difficult People. Chekhov B. 73.
       Dreams. Chekhov C. 85.
       Gooseberries. Chekhov B. 269.
       Grasshopper. Chekhov B. 89.
       Gusev. Chekhov C. 145.
       Happiness. Chekhov C. 251.
       Her Gentleman Friend. Chekhov A. 22.
       Huntsman. Chekhov C. 241.
       In the Ravine. Chekhov C. 177.
       Lottery Ticket. Chekhov B. 303.
       Malefactor. Chekhov C. 269.
       Man in a Case. Chekhov B. 247.
       New Villa. Chekhov C. 61.
       Overspiced. Chekhov A. 55.
       Peasant Wives. Chekhov C. 25.
       Peasants. Chekhov C. 279.
       Pipe. Chekhov C. 101.
       Post. Chekhov C. 49.
       Privy Councillor. Chekhov B. 219.
       Scandal Monger. Chekhov A. 33.
       Student. Chekhov C. 169.
       Such Is Fame! Chekhov A. 46.
       That “Fresh Kid.” Chekhov A. 43.
       Vengeance. Chekhov A. 16.
       Who Was She? Chekhov A. 27.
       Wife. Chekhov B. 3.
       Witch. Chekhov C. 3.
       Work of Art. Chekhov A. 11.

“_Claretie, Jules._” (_Arsène Arnaud._) (1840- .) (_French._)
       Boum-Boum. Schweikert. 301.

_Coppee, François-Edouard-Joachim._ (1842-1908.) (_French._)
       Piece of Bread. Schweikert. 274.

_Dantchenko, V. I. Nemirovitch-._ (_Russian._)
       Deserted Mine. Dantchenko. 3.
       Luck of Ivan the Forgetful. Dantchenko. 129.
       Mahoud’s Family. Dantchenko. 61.
       Misunderstanding. Dantchenko. 91.

_Daudet, Alphonse._ (1840-1897.) (_French._)
       Last Lesson. Schweikert. 247. Williams. 65.
       Pope’s Mule. Schweikert. 251.
       Reverend Father Gaucher’s Elixir. Schweikert. 262.

_Delarue-Madrus, Lucie._ (_French._)
       Godmother. McPherson. 97.
       Godmother II. McPherson. 103.
       Red Rose. McPherson. 109.
       Rivals. McPherson. 115.

_Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich._ (1822-1881.) (_Russian._)
       Christmas Tree and a Wedding. Dostoevsky A. 200.
       Faint Heart. Dostoevsky A. 156.
       Little Hero. Dostoevsky A. 223.
       Mr. Prohartchin. Dostoevsky A. 258.
       Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky A. 50.
       Polunkov. Dostoevsky A. 208.
       White Nights. Dostoevsky A. 1.

“_Erckmann-Chatrian._” (_French._) [Emile Erckmann (1822-1899) and Louis
Gratien Charles Alexandre Chatrian. (1826-1890.)]
       Mysterious Sketch. French. 143.

“_France, Anatole._” (_Jacques-Anatole Thibault._) (1844- .) (_French._)
       Juggler of Notre Dame. Schweikert. 284.

_Gautier, Theophile._ (1811-1872.) (_French._)
       Clarimonde. French. 281.

_Gogol, Nikolai Vassilievich._ (1809-1852.) (_Russian._)
       Calash. Gogol. 299.
       Cloak. Gogol. 155.
       How the Two Ivans Quarrelled. Gogol. 189.
       Mysterious Portrait. Gogol. 243.
       St. John’s Eve. Gogol. 137.
       Taras Bulba. Gogol. 1.

“_Gorky, Maxim._” (_Alexei Maximovich Pyeshkov._) (1868- .) (_Russian._)
       Because of Monotony. Gorky B. 27.
       Chelkash. Gorky A. 125.
       Creatures That Once Were Men. Gorky A. 13.
       Makar Chudra. Gorky B. 9.
       Man Who Could Not Die. Gorky B. 49.
       My Fellow-Traveller. Gorky A. 178.
       On a Raft. Gorky A. 229.
       Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. Gorky A. 104.

_Hoffmann, Ernest Theodor Wilhelm_ (_Amadeus_). (1776-1822.) (_German._)
       Deserted House. French. 115.

_Kafu, Nagai._ (_Japanese._)
       Bill-Collecting. Taketomo. 71.
       Ukiyoe. Taketomo. 105.

_Lemaître, (François Elie) Jules._ (1853-1914.) (_French._)
       Siren. Schweikert. 310.

_Level, Maurice._ (_French._)
       After the War. McPherson. 42.
       At the Movies. McPherson. 24.
       Great Scene. McPherson. 36.
       Little Soldier. McPherson. 30.
       Spirit of Alsace. McPherson. 13.
       Under Ether. McPherson. 7.

_Machard, Alfred._ (_French._)
       Repatriation. McPherson. 1.

_Madrus, Lucie Delarue-._ (_French._)
       _See_ Delarue-Madrus, Lucie.

_Maupassant, Henri René Albert Guy de._ (1850-1893.) (_French._)
       Fright. Schweikert. 219.
       Hand. Schweikert. 235.
       Necklace. Schweikert. 194. Williams. 102.
       Two Friends. Schweikert. 227.
       Wreck. Schweikert. 205.

_Mérimée, Prosper._ (1803-1870.) (_French._)
       Mateo Falcone. Schweikert. 144.

_Mille, Pierre._ (1864- .) (_French._)
       Apologue of Kadir Bakch. McPherson. 78.
       How They Do It. McPherson. 70.
       Man Who Was Afraid. McPherson. 83.
       Soldier Who Conquered Sleep. McPherson. 90.

_Musset, Alfred de._ (1810-1857.) (_French._)
       Croisilles. Schweikert. 160.

_Nemirovitch-Dantchenko, V. I._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ Dantchenko, V. I. Nemirovitch-.

_Ogwali, Mori._ (_Japanese._)
       Hanako. Taketomo. 35.
       Pier. Taketomo. 55.
       Takase Bune. Taketomo. 3.

_Pyeshkov, Alexei Maximovich._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ “Gorky, Maxim.”

_Tagore, Sir Rabindranath._ (1861- .) (_Bengali._)
       Auspicious Vision. Tagore. 49.
       Castaway. Tagore. 185.
       Elder Sister. Tagore. 123.
       Mashi. Tagore. 3.
       My Fair Neighbour. Tagore. 215.
       Postmaster. Tagore. 159.
       Raja and Rani. Tagore. 77.
       Riddle Solved. Tagore. 107.
       River Stairs. Tagore. 173.
       Saved. Tagore. 207.
       Skeleton. Tagore. 31.
       Subha. Tagore. 145.
       Supreme Night. Tagore. 61.
       Trust Property. Tagore. 87.

_Tchekhov, Anton._ (_Russian._)
       _See_ Chekhov, Anton.

_Thibault, Jacques-Anatole._ (_French._)
       _See_ “France, Anatole.”

_Tolstoi, Lyof Nikolaievitch, Count._ (1828-1910.) (_Russian._)
       Coffee-House of Surat. Tolstoi. 39.
       How Much Land Does a Man Need? Tolstoi. 48.
       Three Questions. Tolstoi. 34.
       What Men Live By. Tolstoi. 9.
       Where Love Is, There God is Also. Law. 23.

_Toson, Shimazaki._ (_Japanese._)
       Domestic Animal. Taketomo. 117.
       Tsugaru Strait. Taketomo. 135.



   INDEX OF SHORT STORIES PUBLISHED IN AMERICAN MAGAZINES, JANUARY TO
                             OCTOBER, 1918


_All short stories published in the following magazines and newspapers,
January to October, inclusive, 1918, are indexed._

    American Magazine
    Atlantic Monthly
    Bellman
    Bookman
    Boston Evening Transcript
    Catholic World
    Century
    Collier’s Weekly
    Current Opinion
    Delineator
    Everybody’s Magazine
    Every Week
    Forum
    Good Housekeeping
    Harper’s Magazine
    Independent
    Ladies’ Home Journal
    Liberator
    Little Review
    McClure’s Magazine
    Metropolitan
    Midland
    Modern School
    New Republic
    New York Tribune
    Outlook
    Pagan
    Pictorial Review
    Poetry
    Reedy’s Mirror
    Russian Review
    Saturday Evening Post
    Scribner’s Magazine
    Stratford Journal
    Sunset Magazine
    Touchstone

_Short stories, of distinction only, published in the following
magazines and newspapers during the same period are indexed._

    Adventure
    Ainslee’s Magazine
    All-Story Weekly
    Black Cat
    Cosmopolitan
    Country Gentleman
    Harper’s Bazar
    Hearst’s Magazine
    Illustrated Sunday Magazine
    Live Stories
    McCall’s Magazine
    Magnificat
    Milestones
    Munsey’s Magazine
    Parisienne
    Queen’s Work
    Saucy Stories
    Short Stories
    Smart Set
    Snappy Stories
    Southern Woman’s Magazine
    Today’s Housewife
    Woman’s Home Companion
    Woman’s World
    Youth’s Companion

_Certain stories of distinction published in the following magazines
during this period are indexed, because they have been specially called
to my attention._

    American Hebrew
    American Weekly Jewish News
    Argosy
    California Writers’ Club Monthly Bulletin
    Canadian Courier
    Christian Herald
    Mother’s Magazine
    People’s Favorite Magazine
    Popular Magazine
    University Magazine
    Visitor
    Waste Basket

_One, two, or three asterisks are prefixed to the titles of stories to
indicate distinction. Three asterisks prefixed to a title indicate the
more or less permanent literary value of the story, and entitle it to a
place on the annual “Rolls of Honor.” A asterisk before the name of an
author indicates that he is not an American. Cross references after an
author’s name refer to previous volumes of this series._ (H) _after the
name of an author indicates that other stories by this author, published
in American magazines between 1900 and 1914 are to be found indexed in
*“The Standard Index of Short Stories,” *by Francis J. Hannigan,
published by Small, Maynard & Company, 1918. The figures in parenthesis
after the title of a story refer to the volume and page number of the
magazine. In cases where successive numbers of a magazine are not paged
consecutively, the page number only is given in this index._

_The following abbreviations are used in the index:—_

_Adv._ ..........Adventure
_Ain._ ..........Ainslee’s Magazine
_All._ ..........All-Story Weekly
_Am._ ...........American Magazine
_Am. Heb._ ......American Hebrew
_Am. W. J. N._ ..American Weekly Jewish News
_Arg._ ..........Argosy
_Atl._ ..........Atlantic Monthly
_B. C._ .........Black Cat
_Bel._ ..........Bellman
_B. E. T._ ......Boston Evening Transcript
_Book._ .........Bookman
_Cal._ ..........California Writers’ Club Monthly Bulletin
_Can. Courier_ ..Canadian Courier
_Cath. W._ ......Catholic World
_Cen._ ..........Century Magazine
_C. G._ .........Country Gentleman
_Christ. H._ ....Christian Herald
_C. O._ .........Current Opinion
_Col._ ..........Collier’s Weekly
_Cos._ ..........Cosmopolitan
_Del._ ..........Delineator
_Ev._ ...........Everybody’s Magazine
_E. W._ .........Every Week
_For._ ..........Forum
_G. H._ .........Good Housekeeping
_(H)_ ...........*See* Hannigan’s “Standard Index of Short Stories”
_Harp. B._ ......Harper’s Bazar
_Harp. M._ ......Harper’s Magazine
_Hear._ .........Hearst’s Magazine
_Ind._ ..........Independent
_I. S. M._ ......Illustrated Sunday Magazine
_L. H. J._ ......Ladies’ Home Journal
_Lib._ ..........Liberator
_Lit. R._ .......Little Review
_L. St._ ........Live Stories
_Mag._ ..........Magnificat
_McC._ ..........McClure’s Magazine
_McCall_ ........McCall’s Magazine
_Met._ ..........Metropolitan
_Mid._ ..........Midland
_Mile_ ..........Milestones
_Mir._ ..........Reedy’s Mirror
_Mod. S._ .......Modern School
_Moth._ .........Mother’s Magazine
_Mun._ ..........Munsey’s Magazine
_N. Rep._ .......New Republic
_N. Y. Trib._ ...N. Y. Tribune Sunday Magazine
_Outl._ .........Outlook
_Pag._ ..........Pagan
_Par._ ..........Parisienne
_Peop._ .........People’s Favorite Magazine
_Pict. R._ ......Pictorial Review
_Poetry_ ........Poetry: A Magazine of Verse
_Pop._ ..........Popular Magazine
_Q. W._ .........Queen’s Work
_(R)_ ...........Reprint
_Rus. R._ .......Russian Review
_Sau. St._ ......Saucy Stories
_Scr._ ..........Scribner’s Magazine
_S. E. P._ ......Saturday Evening Post
_Sh. St._ .......Short Stories
_Sn. St._ .......Snappy Stories
_So. Wo. M._ ....Southern Woman’s Magazine
_S. S._ .........Smart Set
_Strat. J._ .....Stratford Journal
_Sun._ ..........Sunset Magazine
_Tod._ ..........Today’s Housewife
_Touch._ ........Touchstone
_Univ._ .........University Magazine
_Vis._ ..........Visitor
_Waste_ .........Waste Basket
_W. H. C._ ......Woman’s Home Companion
_Wom. W._ .......Woman’s World
_Y. C._ .........Youth’s Companion
(_161_) .........Page 161
(_11:161_) ......Volume 11, page 161
(_See 1915_) ....See “Best Short Stories of 1915.”

_Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell._ (_Mrs. Fordyce Coburn._) (1872- .) (_See
1915._) (_H._)
       Man from Down the Gulf. L. H. J. June. (19.)

_Abbott, Frances._ (_See 1917._)
       Elsie—Heels, Hair, Nails, and Heart of Gold. Del. April. (16.)

_Abbott, Helen Raymond._
       **Eternal Balance. Cen. Oct. (96:813.)

_Abdullah, Achmed._ (_Achmed Abdullah Nadir Khan el-Durani
el-Idrissyeh._) (“_A. A. Nadir._”) (1881- .) (_See 1915, 1916 and
1917._) (_H._)
       *After Youth. For. March. (59:334.)
       ***Cobbler’s Wax. Cen. July (96:319.)
       ***Light. All. May 18. (84:211.)
       *Pell Street Spring Song. Arg. Sept. 28. (99:606.)
       **Reprisal. Col. Jan. 26. (20.)
       **River of Hate. Tod. Oct. (8.)
       ***Simple Act of Piety. All. April 20. (83:216.)
       *Taint. L. St. July. (29.)
       Thingumajee Thingumabob Jones. McC. July. (10.)
       ***Two-Handed Sword. Col. May 11. (18.)
       ***Wings. All. Aug. 10. (87:219.)

_Adams, Morris._
       *Planned in Berlin. All. April 27. (83:562.)

_Adams, Russell._
       Adopting Bobby. E. W. Feb. 2. (9.)

_Adams, Samuel Hopkins._ (1871- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Beggar’s Purse. S. E. P. March 23. (3.)
       **Bribe. Col. July 27. (8.)
       Common Cause. S. E. P. July 27. (5.)
       “Excess Baggage.” Col. Jan. 5. (18.)-Jan. 12. (16.)
       Front-Page Frankie. Ev. April. (35.)
       *Little Privacy. Col. March 9. (18.)
       *Orator of the Day. Col. May 25. (8.)
       Three Days’ Leave. Met. July. (15.)

_Addis, H. A. Noureddin._
       *Sword of Kara Mahmoud. Adv. March 18. (38.)

_Addison, Thomas._ (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       Chicken Logan and the Flag. Ev. Sept. (33.)

_Agee, Fannie Heaslip Lea._
       _See_ _Lea, Fannie Heaslip_.

_Aldrich, Darragh._ (_See 1916._)
       Mothers of Men. Harp. M. June. (137:114.)

_Aleihem, Sholom._
       ***Great Prize. Pag. March. (4.)

“_Alexander, Mary._”
       _See_ _Kilbourne, Fannie_.

“_Amid, John._” (_M. M. Stearns._) (1884- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and
1917._) (_H._)
       Kale in Season. Col. Oct. 5. (13.)
       *Pepper Tree. Bel. April 6. (24:382.)
       *Prem Singh. (_R._) C. O. March. (64:214.)

_Andell, Frances M._
       *Bobbed Hair. Pag. July. (58.)

_Anderson, Edna._
       Her Own People. Sun. Jan. (42.)
       *Lamps of Midsummer. Sun. Aug. (38.)

_Anderson, Frederick Irving._ (1877- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       Dummkopf! McC. Oct. (22.)
       Golden Fleece. S. E. P. May 4. (20.)
       Mad Hour. McC. June. (13.)
       Touch on His Shoulder. McC. March. (20.)

_Anderson, Sherwood._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Man of Ideas. Lit. R. June. (22.)
       ***Senility. Lit. R. Sept. (37.)
       **White Streak. S. S. July. (27.)

_Andrews, Grayman._
       *At Twelve Twenty-Five. Y. C. April 25. (92:209.)
       *Awakening of “Sam-nambulist.” Y. C. March 21. (92:145.)

_Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Diamonds in the Apple Tree. (L. H. J.) Jan. (19.)
       ***Ditch. Scr. April. (63:405.)
       **Her Country. Del. May. (9.)

_Anonymous._ (_See also_ “Elderly Spinster.”)
       **Adieu. N. Y. Trib. July. (28.)
       *Alibi. N. Y. Trib. June 9.
       ***Bistoquet’s Triumph. N. Y. Trib. May 5.
       Chrysalis and Butterfly. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 11.
       Confession of a Lawyer’s Wife. Del. Sept. (6.)
       Educating Robert S. E. P. May 4. (26.)
       *His Brother. Y. C. April 4. (III.)
       **Home Again. (_R._) Mir. June 28. (27:393.)
       *Martyrs. B. E. T. June 15. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)
       ***Oratorio. N. Y. Trib. June 2.
       *Poilu’s Romance. N. Y. Trib. Jan. 13.
       Rival. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 8.
       *Robelot’s Reasons. N. Y. Trib. April 28.
       **Terrorist. Lib. April. (14.)

_Armstrong, William._ (_See 1917._)
       Freedom’s Sunrise. Del. Aug. (5.)

*_Asch, Sholom._ (_See 1916._)
       **Daughter of Gentlefolk. Pag. Feb. (4.)

_Ashmun, Margaret Eliza._ (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       Culture. Cen. Oct. (96:785.)

_Aspinwall, Marguerite._
       Red Cross Plot in Arden. L. H. J. Sept. (12.)

*_Aumonier, Stacy._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       ***Bitter End. Pict. R. Oct. (22.)
       **Return. Cen. April. (95:780.)
       ***Source of Irritation. Cen. Jan. (95:321.)

_Austin, F. Britten._ (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *“And the Earth Opened Her Mouth.” S. E. P. Feb. 16. (14.)
       *Iron Cross. S. E. P. May 18. (9.)
       *Magic of Mohammed Din. Red Bk. Aug. (37.)
       *Other Side. Red Bk. Oct. (23.)
       **Peace. S. E. P. April 27. (3.)
       *Plateau of Thirst. Red Bk. May. (45.)
       *Prisoner in the Château. Red Bk. July. (35.)
       *Spy. S. E. P. Jan. 19. (14.)
       There! S. E. P. Oct. 19. (8.)

_Austin, Mary (Hunter)._ (1868- .) (_H._)
       Divorcing of Sina. Sun. June. (26.)

_Babcock, Edwina Stanton._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Cruelties. Harp. M. May. (136:852.)
       ***“Goddess-Size.” Harp. M. Jan. (136:176.)

_Bacheller, Irving._ (1859- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *Kind o’ Hankerin’ For Your Folks. Ind. May 11. (94:250.)

_Bacon, Josephine Daskam._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._ )
(_H._) Alice of the Red Tape. S. E. P. March 30. (13.)
       Fruits of the Earth. S. E. P. May 25. (5.)
       *Our Best Friends. Del. Sept. (14.)
       *Presto! Change! Del. Jan. (13.)

_Baker, Virginia._ (1859- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *Subjugation of William the Kaiser. Atl. Aug. (122:206.)

_Balmer, Edwin._ (1883- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Error in Chaos. Col. Jan. 5. (20.)
       Forced Landing. Col. Feb. 9. (16.)
       Helpmates. E. W. Feb. 2. (6.)
       Out of the Deep. Ev. Aug. (13.)

_Banks, Helen Ward._ (_See 1917._)
       *Highbrow Courtship. Tod. Feb. (5.)
       Jim and the Giant. Scr. Feb. (63:219.)

_Barcỳnska, Countess._ (_See 1915._)
       *City of Her Soul. Sun. Sept. (12.)

_Barnard, Floy Tolbert._ (1879- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *Ginger of the Amb’lance. Harp. M. Sept. (137:480.)

_Barnes, Djuna._
       *Renunciation. S. S. Oct. (65.)

_Barratt, Louise Rand Bascom._
       _See_ _Bascom, Louise Rand_.

_Barrows, Albert W._
       Pro Patria. Sun. Aug. (29.)

_Bartlett, Frederick Orin._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Davenports. L. H. J. Sept. (23.)

_Bartley, Nalbro._ (1888- .) (_See 1917._)
       Bargain True. S. E. P. May 11. (24.)
       *Cudgel and the Creel. Del. Jan. (6.)

_Bascom, Louise Rand_ (_Mrs. G. W. Barratt_). (_See 1915 and 1916._)
(_H._) *Two Dog-Collars. G. H. Oct. (19.)

_Beadle, Charles._
       *Autocrat. Ev. June. (41.)
       *Idol of “It.” Adv. July 3. (106.)

_Beale, Will C._
       “I’m the Only Mother This Child’s Ever Had.” Am. Aug. (30.)

_Beatty, Jerome._ (_See 1917._)
       “There’s Hits in Every Bat.” Col. Aug. 17. (11.)

*_Becquer, Gustav A._
       ***Our Lady’s Bracelet. Strat. J. April. (3.)

_Beede, Ralph G._ (1895- .)
       ***Cera. Harp. M. May. (136:869.)

_Beer, Richard Cameron._
       One Large Night! S. E. P. April 20. (41.)

_Beer, Thomas._ (1889- .) (_See 1917._)
       *Absent Without Leave. S. E. P. July 20. (37.)
       ***Beneficiary. Cen. Aug. (96:453.)

_Behrman, S. N._ (_See 1917._)
       *Surrender. Lib. May. (16.)

*_Bell, J(ohn) J(oy)._ (1871- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Life Belt. Bel. Jan. 26. (24:99.)

*_Benjamin, René._ (_See 1916._)
       *His Furlough—At the Front. N. Y. Trib. Mar. 17.

*_Bertheroy, Jean._
       ***Cathedral. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 25.

_Beston, Henry B._
       On Night Patrol. Outl. Oct. 2. (119:172.)

_Betts, Thomas Jeffries._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *Unfit. Scr. May. (63:564.)

*_Bezançon, H._
       Romance of Louise Rosier. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 15.

*_Binet-Valmer._
       *Pacifist. N. Y. Trib. June 30.

*“_Birmingham, George A._” (_Canon James O. Hannay._) (1865- .) (_See
1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Upright Judge. E. W. April 13. (10.)

*_Blackwood, Algernon._ (1869- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       ***S. O. S. Cen. March. (95:653.)

_Bloch, Bertram._
       **Boy Who Was Ten. Sn. St. May 4. (47.)

_Boggs, Russell A._ (_See 1917._)
       Landing Venus. S. E. P. Jan. 5. (30.)

_Bottome, Phyllis._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Great Exception. I. S. M. Early Summer No. (3.)

*_Bourget, Paul._ (1852- .) (_H._)
       **Captain V——s’ Narrative. B. E. T. June 15. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)

*_Boutet, Frédéric._ (_See 1917._)
       *Cousin of Madame Moreau. N. Y. Trib. Mar. 10.
       **Her Turn. N. Y. Trib. April 14.
       **On the Night Express. N. Y. Trib. Jan. 27.
       ***Rift. N. Y. Trib. June 16.

*“_Bowen, Marjorie._” (_Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell Costanzo._)
(_H._) *Gilt Sedan Chair. All. May 18. (84:328.)
       *Heartsease. All. June 29. (85:724.)
       *Scoured Silk. All. June 8. (85:136.)

*_Bracco, Roberto._
       *Hunchback. Strat. J. Oct. (3:151.) B. E. T. Mar. 2. (Pt. 3. p.
               4.)

_Braley, Berton._ (1882- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Hot Off the Griddle. Ev. Jan. (34.)

_Brand, Max._
       *John Ovington Returns. All. June 8. (85:25.)

“_Brangwyn, John._”
       ***Bell-Tower of P’an-ku. Cen. April. (95:865.)

“_Brassill, Winifred._”
       *Poor Donkey! Q. W. April. (8:93.)

“_Breck, John._” (_Elizabeth C. A. Smith._) (_See 1917._)
       *Yellow-Footed Bird Col. April 20. (23.)

*_Bréville, A. de._
       Their Boy. N. Y. Trib. July 7.

*_Brighouse, Harold._
       *Happy Hangman. S. S. June. (45.)

_Brooks, Alden._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Out of the Sky. Cos. May. (36.)

_Brown, Alice._ (1857- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Gifts. W. H. C. May. (13.)

_Brown, Bernice._ (_See 1917._)
       *In April. E. W. May 11. (15)

_Brown, Hearty Earl._ (1886- .)
       ***Marrying Time. Atl. Oct. (122:493.)

_Brown, Katharine Holland._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Actor and His Part. Col. May 18. (9.)
       ***Buster. Scr. Aug. (64:153.)
       *Pretender. G. H. Aug. (27.)

_Brown, Royal._ (_See 1917._)
       Hash and Moth Balls. L. H. J. Jan. (11.)
       His First Stenographer. L. H. J. April. (14.)
       Not a Chinaman’s Chance. Am. July. (39.)

_Browne, Porter Emerson._ (1879- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       “All In.” McC. Jan. (18.)
       Higher the Fewer. Col. Jan. 19. (20.)

_Brownell, Agnes Mary._ (_See 1917._)
       Sanctuary. Mid. Sept.-Oct. (4:254.)

_Brubaker, Howard._ (1882- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Cruise of the “Fearless Four.” Harp. M. June. (137:40.)
       *Journey into Journalism. Harp. M. March. (136:532.)
       *Round Trip to Crime. Harp. M. Jan. (136:276.)
       Ruby Crosses the Rubicon. Col. March 30. (20.)
       *Uncivil Government. Harp. M. Oct. (137:698.)

_Bryson, Lyman Lloyd._ (1888- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       **Man’s Word. Mid. Jan.-Feb. (4:27.)

_Buch, Vera._
       **Spring Comes Again. Lib. July. (10.)

_Buell, Katharine._
       Man with the Hands. Met. Sept. (36.)

_Bunker, William Mitchell._
       “Good Luck, Jim!” Sun. Feb. (43.)

_Burleson, Adèle Steiner._
       *Acid Test. Wom. W. April. (7.)

_Burnet, Dana._ (1888- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *Private Pettigrew’s Girl. S. E. P. Sept. 14. (5.)
       *“Red, White, and Blue. McC. Aug. (19.)
       String of Beads. S. E. P. April 20. (10.)

_Burt, Maxwell Struthers._ (1882- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._)
       ***Wings of the Morning. Scr. July. (64:35.)

_Burton, Agnes Boulton._
       *Letter. Sn. St. Oct. 3. (27.)

_Butler, Ellis Parker._ (1869- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Big Money Billings. S. E. P. April 3. (19.)
       Billy Brad, Convict. S. E. P. Oct. 12. (32.)
       Matey. S. E. P. Sept. 14. (45.)
       Mrs. Dugan’s Discovery. G. H. June. (44.)
       ***Sorry Tale of Hennery K. Lunk. Harp. M. May. (136:913.)
       *“Thief! Thief!” Am. Aug. (53.)

_Butler, Katharine._ (1890- .) (_See 1915._)
       ***Black Pearl. Atl. June, (121:767.)

“_Byrne, Donn._” (_Bryan Oswald Donn-Byrne._) (1888- .) (_See 1915,
1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Case of Blackmail. Am. Oct. (22.)
       Clay Feet. Col. July 6. (8).
       *Fiddler’s Green. S. E. P. Feb. 23. (9.)
       *Patrick Leary’s Son. Ev. Aug. (51.)
       *Sister of Shining Swords. Col. May 25. (12.)
       Sweet Honey in All Mouths. S. E. P. April 13. (14.)
       *Wife of the Red-Haired Man. Red Bk. June. (23).
       *Woman of the Shee. S. E. P. July 6. (54.)

_Byrne, Lawrence._
       **Diplomatic Messenger. S. E. P. April 27. (14.)

_Cabell, James Branch._ (1879- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       ***Some Ladies and Jurgen. S. S. July. (93.)

*_Cable, Boyd._ (_See 1916._)
       *Bring Home the B’us. Sh. St. June. (85.)
       *Nightmare. Sh. St. July. (105.)

*_Caine, William._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *Chance, the Juggler. Cen. Jan. (95:366.)

_Camp, (Charles) Wadsworth._ (1879- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Secret of the Frame House. Col. May 4. (20.)

*_Campbell, Gabrielle Margaret Vere._
       _See_ “_Bowen, Marjorie._”

_Canfield, Dorothy._ (_Dorothea Frances Canfield Fisher._) (1879- .)
(_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       **Eyes for the Blind. Del. Oct. (10.)
       **Fair Exchange. Ev. Sept. (18.)
       **First Time After. Ev. July. (30.)
       **Honeymoon à l’Amércaine. Pict. R. Oct. (12.)
       *Institution. Pict. R. June. (14.)
       ***Little Kansas Leaven. Pict. R. Aug. (14.)
       ***On the Edge. Col. Aug. 24. (8.)
       **Permissionnaire. Col. June 8. (6.)
       ***Pharmacienne. Pict. R. Sept. (14.)

_Carver, George._
       ***In a Moment of Time. Strat. J. Sept. (3:134).

_Cary, Lucian._
       Facing the Facts. S. E. P. July 20. (10.)
       Putting It Over on the Old Home Town. Col. Sept. 28. (8.)
       Right Sort of Man. Col. June 15. (11.)
       Supper for Two. Col. Jan. 26. (15.)

_Castle, Everett Rhodes._ (_See 1917._)
       Business Will Be Business. S. E. P. April 20. (73.)
       Georgette Methods. S. E. P. April 6. (37.)
       Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl. S. E. P. June 1. (14.)
       Job VII, Ten. S. E. P. March 23. (63.)
       Old Dog Tray. S. E. P. July 27. (9.)
       Tinge. S. E. P. Feb. 16. (8.)
       Uplift and Peach Melbas. S. E. P. March 2. (55.)

_Cather, Willa Sibert._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Ardessa. Cen. May. (96:105.)

_Catton, George L._
       *Some Joke. B. C. April. (38.)

_Chalmers, Stephen._
       _See_ _Keefer, Ralph D._, _and_ _Chalmers, Stephen_.

_Channing, Grace Ellery._ (_Grace Ellery Channing Stetson._) (1862- .)
(_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Years of a Man. S. E. P. Aug. 31. (9.)

*_Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich._ (1860-1904.) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917
under_ _Tchekov_.) (_H._)
       *Carelessness. Strat. J. Feb. (3.)
       *Her Gentleman Friend. Strat. J. May. (11.)
       ***Overspiced. Strat. J. Feb. (8.)
       ***Scandal Monger. Strat. J. Jan. (18.)
       *Such is Fame. Strat. J. May. (3.)
       *That “Fresh Kid.” Strat. J. May. (15.)
       ***Vengeance. Strat. J. Jan. (13.)
       ***Who Was She? Strat. J. Jan. (8.)
       ***Work of Art. Strat. J. Jan. (3.)

_Chenault, Fletcher._ (_See 1917._)
       *Camel Flaggers. Col. March 30. (24.)

_Chester, George Randolph_ (1869- .) _and_ _Chester, Lillian_. (_See
1915, 1916, 1917, and “H” under_ _Chester, George Randolph_.)
       Has-Been. S. E. P. Sept. 14. (12.)

_Child, Richard Washburn._ (1881- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *Face at the Window. Red Bk. July. (99.)
       Fixer. Pict. R. Sept. (10.)
       Glove. S. E. P. Oct. 12. (6.)
       Her Ghastly Smile. Pict. R. Feb. (22.)
       *On Her Back. Pict. R. March. (14.)
       *Smothered. Pict. R. Aug. (22.)

_Christmas, Grace V._
       *In the Medici Gardens. Cath. W. Aug. (107:661.)

_Cleveland, H. I._
       *On the Turn of the Wheel. Y. C. Feb. 28. (92:106.)

_Cloud, Virginia Woodward._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       *Laughing Duchess. Bel. March 23. (24:323.)
       *Sword of Solomon. Bel. May 25. (24:575.)

_Clover, Nathan._
       **Promise. B. C. March. (24.)

_Cobb, Irvin S(hrewsbury)._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) ***Gallowsmith. All. Feb. 9. (80:529.)
       **Luck Piece. S. E. P. Feb. 2. (3.)
       *Thunders of Silence. S. E. P. Feb. 9. (3.)

_Cochran, Jean Carter._
       Brass Incense-Burner. Outl. Feb. 27. (118:328.)

_Cohen, Inez Lopez._
       _See_ “_Lopez, Inez._”

_Cohen, Octavus Roy._ (1891- .) (_See 1915, 1916 and 1917. See also_
_Cohen, Octavus Roy_, _and_ _Levison, Eric_, _and 1917 under this
head_.)
       Long Lane. Del. Feb. (15.)
       *Master of the Gray House. So. Wo. M. Feb. (20.)
       Missing Clink. S. E. P. Oct. 19. (33.)
       **Road to the Front. Sn. St. Sept. 18. (75.)

_Cohen, Octavus Roy_, (1891- .), _and_ _Levison, Eric_. (_See 1917._)
       Between Decks. E. W. June 15. (9.)
       Destroyer. Peop. March 10. (184).

_Collier, Tarleton._ (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Penalty. Pag. Oct. (27.)

_Colton, John._ (_See 1917._)
       *Great. E. W. June 22. (15.)
       **Lusitania Night. E. W. May 18. (15.)
       Oh, This War! S. E. P. Aug. 10. (16.)

*_Colum, Padraic._ (1881- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       **Ass and the Seal. Mod. S. April. (5:114.)
       ***Sea Maiden Who Became a Sea-Swan. Mod. S. Aug. (5:243.)
       **Young Cuckoo. Mod. S. April. (5:112.)

_Comfort, Will Levington._ (1878- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) **“Cameo” Corrigan. Touch. Jan. (2:362.)
       *Gift of the Sands. Red Bk. March. (63.)
       *Leave No Wounded Behind. Ev. Jan. (19.)

_Condon, Frank._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Fair Enough. S. E. P. Sept. 21. (28.)

_Coney, Rosamond._
       *Taking a Chance. Outl. June 26. (119:346.)

_Connolly, James Brendan._ (1868- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) **Bill Green Puts Out to Sea. Scr. Oct. (64:474.)

*“_Conrad, Joseph._” (_Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski._) (1857- .) (_See
1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Commanding Officer. Met. Feb. (24.)

_Cook, Mrs. George Cram._
       _See_ _Glaspell, Susan_.

_Cooke, Marjorie Benton._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *“They also Serve.” Met. Sept. (9.)

_Cooper, Frederic Taber._ (1864- .) (_H._)
       *My Friend the Enemy. Sn. St. Sept. 3. (59.)

*_Corelli, Marie._ (1864- .) (_H._)
       Left on Fifth Avenue. L. H. J. Oct. (11.)

_Costello, Fanny Kemble._
       _See_ _Johnson, Fanny Kemble_.

*_Couch, Sir Arthur T. Quiller-._
       _See_ _Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur T._

_Cox, Eleanor Rogers._
       **Finover of the Fair Eyelids. Del. Feb. (10.)

_Crabb, Arthur._ (_See 1917._)
       In Connection with the Old Murray Place. Col. June 29. (12.)
       Master. S. E. P. March 2. (38.)
       Par One Hundred. G. H. Sept. (33.)

_Crabbe, Bertha Helen._ (1887- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       **Day Follows Day. Touch. July. (3:331.)
       *Mother of the World. Bel. Aug. 31. (25:241.)
       **Red Sunset Bel. April 27. (24:459.) Mir. May 17. (27:294.)
       ***Wild-Wing. Bel. June 22. (24:690.)

_Cranston, Claudia._
       **Thin Day. Atl. July. (122:54.)

_Crenshaw, Hansell._
       *Money Magic. Scr. July. (64:97.)
       Ravenwood—913. Scr. May. (63:579.)
       *Tune in the Dark. Scr. June. (63:733.)

_Cross, Ruth._
       *Toll. Touch. July. (3:309.)

*_Crussol, M._
       ***Love in War Time. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 1.

_Curtiss, Philip (Everett)._ (1885- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Prince Charming, Ph.D. S. E. P. June 8. (14.)
       Son of One-Horse Jack. E. W. April 27. (7.)

_Curwood, James Oliver._ (1878- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Jacqueline. G. H. Aug. (39.)
       **Nomads of the North, Red Bk. May. (23.)

_Cutting, Mary Stewart (Doubleday)._ (1851- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._)
(_H._) Bridge. Del. Aug. (18.)

_Dalrymple, C. Leona._ (1885- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       **Peter’s Client. Met. April. (26.)

_Daniel, Hawthorne._
       **American. Outl. April 17. (118:632.)

*_Daudet, Alphonse._ (1840-1897.) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       ***Last Lesson. (_R._) Strat. J. July-Aug. (3:3.)
       ***M. Seguin’s Goat. (_R._) Mir. May 31. (27:327.)

_Davies, Oma Almona._ (_See 1915._)
       *Pa and Ol’ Cass’. All. Feb. 23. (81:332.)

_Davis, J. Frank._ (_See 1917._)
       “All Right, Mother!” E. W. May 11. (8.)
       Luck of Cingalo. E. W. Jan. 26. (7.)

_Davis, Richard Harding._ (1864-1916.) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       ***My Disreputable Friend Mr. Raegan (_R._) I. S. M. 17th No.
               (3.)

_Day, Holman Francis._ (1865- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Stars and Wagons. S. E. P. Feb. 16. (10.)

_Delano, Edith Barnard._ (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Great Big Five Dollar Bill. Wom. W. Jan.

*_Delarue-Madrus, Lucie._ (_See 1917._)
       Red Rose. (_R._) C. O. Jan. (64:59).
       **Repatriated. N. Y. Trib. May 26.
       **Two Deaths of Little Pierre. N. Y. Trib. Feb. 17.

_Derby, Jeannette._
       *Blue. Pag. April-May. (4.)

_Derieux, Samuel A._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *Crisis in Room 25. Am. Feb. (42.)

_Detlefs, Louise._
       *At the Pike. Sn. St. April 4. (39.)
       *Exceptional Case. Sn. St. Feb. 4. (32:285.)

*_Dickens, Charles._ (1812-1870). (_H._)
       ***Cheeryble Brothers’ Banquet. (_R._) Ind. Mar. 9. (93:418.)

_Dickenson, Edwin C._
       She-Quitter. Scr. Oct. (64:421.)

_Dickinson, Roy._ (1888- .)
       ***Some of Our Folks, and War. Ind. March 9. (93:412.)

_Dickson, Harris._ (1868- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Devilment on Middling-Fair. Col. Feb. 9. (18.)
       Little Mother of Rivergift. McC. Jan. (5.)

*_Dimov, Ossip._ (_See 1916 under_ _Dymow, Ossip_.)
       **Come With Me. Strat. J. April. (11.)

_Dingle, A. E._
       *Steward. All. Oct. 12. (89:491.)

_Dobie, Charles Caldwell._ (1881- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       ***Open Window. Harp. M. Aug. (137:319.)

_Dodge, Henry Irving._ (1861- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Yellow Dog. S. E. P. May 4. (6.)

_Dodge, Louis._ (1870- .) (_See 1917._)
       *Troop Dog. Y. C. Feb. 28. (92:98.)

_Donworth, Grace._ (_H._)
       *Mary Emeline’s Idea. Wom. W. May. (9.)

_Dowlin, Mary._
       “A-Swinging in the Lane.” Scr. Aug. (64:197.)

*_Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan._ (1859- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Three of Them. Ev. Sept. (42.)

_Drake, Jeanie._ (_H._)
       **Major Münchausen of the Gap. Cath. W. April.

_Drayham, William._ (_See 1915-1916._)
       *Man of God. S. S. Oct. (95.)

_Dreiser, Theodore._ (1871- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Free. S. E. P. March 16. (13.)

_Dresbach, Glenn Ward._
       **Murderer God Sentenced. Mid. March-April. (4:49.)

_Dresser, Jasmine Stone van._
       _See_ _Van Dresser, Jasmine Stone._

*_Dreveton, Eugéne._
       *How General Melsau Put His Foot In It. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 4.

_Driggs, Laurence la Tourette._ (_See 1917._)
       Arnold’s Escape to America. Outl. Feb. 20. (118:288.)
       **Her First Flight. Outl. Aug. 14. (119:588.)
       Reunion in the Sky. Outl. Feb. 13. (118:248.)
       Swiss Spy Found, and Arnold Lost. Outl. Feb. 6. (118:213.)

_Ducros, Leslie-Leigh._
       *Rose from the Governor’s Wife. So. Wo. M. Jan. (12.)

*_Dudeney, Mrs. Henry E._ (1866- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Journey. Harp. M. Aug. (137:435.)
       ***“Willow Walk.” Harp. M. Sept. (137:467.)

_Dunn, Henry Steele._
       Alice-Blue Elephant. Sun. April. (17.)

_Dunn, Violette Kimball._
       *George Napoleon Washington and Jean Jacques. Met. Aug. (26.)

_Durand, Ruth Sawyer._
       _See_ _Sawyer, Ruth_.

_Duranty, Walter._
       **In the Cage. Col. Mar. 23. (22.)

_Dutton, Louise Elizabeth._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Strange Story of Mr. Smith. S. E. P. March 30. (5.)

_Dwelle, Helen._
       *Modern Arthur Comes to the Round Table. Waste. April-May. (11.)

_Dwight, Harry Griswold_ (1875- .), _and_ _Taylor, John_. (_See 1915,
1916, 1917, and “H” under_ _Dwight, H. G._, _and 1917 under_ _Taylor,
John_.)
       ***Emerald of Tamerlane. Cen. June. (96:147.)

_Dwyer, James Francis._ (1874- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Camera Joe. E. W. March 9. (9.)
       *Come Back of Old Dad Lane. L. H. J. March. (27.)
       *Friendly Sandbar. Tod. March. (4.)
       *Little Man in the Smoker. L. H. J. April. (18.)
       **Polished Nail. Sun. Sept. (17.)

_Dyer, Walter Alden._ (1878- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Home. B. C. March. (27.)

*_Dymow, Ossip._
       _See_ _Dimov, Ossip_.

_Eaton, Walter Prichard._ (1878- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **He Understood Women. Cen. March. (95:673.)
       *Man Who Cost $50,000. Col. May 4. (12.)
       Surinam Forest. E. W. Feb. 16. (6.)

_Edginton, May._ (_H._)
       Feast of Epicurus. Col. July 6. (20.)
       Girl Who Would. S. E. P. Aug. 31. (14.)

*_Efimovich, L._
       ***Early Spring. Rus. R. April. (4:112.)

“_Elderly Spinster._” (_Margaret Wilson._) (1882- .)
       ***God’s Little Joke. Atl. May. (121:601.)
       **Story of Sapphire. Atl. Oct. (122:467.)

_Eldridge, Paul._
       Golden Wedding. Pag. Oct. (5.)

*“_Eliot, George._” (_Marian Evans._) (1819-1880.)
       ***Party at the Red House. (_R._) Ind. March 16. (93:460.)

_Ellerbe, Alma Martin Estabrook._ (1871- .) (_See 1915 under_
_Estabrook, Alma Martin_, _and 1917 under_ _Ellerbe, Alma Estabrook_.)
       *Long Trail. Wom. W. Aug. (5.)

_Ellerbe, Alma Martin Estabrook_ (1871- .) _and_ _Ellerbe, Paul Lee_.
(_See 1915 under_ _Estabrrok, Alma Martin_, _and 1917 under_ _Ellerbe,
Alma Estabrook_.) (_See “H” under_ _Ellerbe, Paul Lee_.)
       ***Citizen Paper. Cen. Feb. (95:605.)
       *Little Bigger. Wom. W. Sept. (11.)

_Emery, Gilbert._
       “Squads Right.” Ev. May. (31.)

_English, Victoria._
       Mr. Billings Gets His Chance. Cath. W. June. (107:373.)

*_Erlande, Albert._
       *Frisquet’s Gratitude. N. Y. Trib. July 21.

_Ernest, Joseph._ (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       **Sky Witch. E. W. June 22. (8.)

_Evans, Ida May._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Contributions of Bascom Smith. S. E. P. Oct. 5. (66.)
       Omelets for Violets—A Fair Trade. Am. Jan. (13.)
       On the Banks of Wabash Avenue. G. H. June. (38.)
       Way of a Maid with a Man. S. E. P. Jan. 26. (13.)

_Exton, Thayer._
       Our Tetrarchal Precieuse. Lit. R. July. (3.)

_Ferber, Edna._ (1887- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       One Hundred Per Cent. Met. Oct. (11.)
       *Shore Leave. Col. July 20. (6.)
       That’s Marriage. Met. May. (13.)
       **Three of Them. Col. Aug. 17. (5.)
       *Tough Guy. Met. April. (11.)

_Ferris, Elmer Ellsworth._ (1861- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Billy Crowther Enlists. Outl. June 19. (119:313.)

_Feuerlicht, Ethel._
       *When the Heart Listeneth All. June 8. (85:166.)

_Field, Flora._
       **Lavinia. Del. Oct. (9.)

“_Fisguill, Richard._” (_Wilson, Richard Henry._) (1870- .) (_H._)
       Ned’s Pancake Gal. Col. April 6. (16.)

_Fisher, Dorothy Canfield._
       _See_ _Canfield, Dorothy_.

_Fisher. Jr., Philip M._
       *Queer. All. Aug. 3. (87:24.)

_Flandrau, Grace Hodgson._
       Stranger in His House. McC. Sept. (13.)

_Fletcher, A. Byers._ (_See 1916._)
       *Chips. Met. Aug. (9.)

_Flower, Elliott._ (1863- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Road to High Finance. Harp. M. Feb. (136:457.)

_Folsom, Elizabeth Irons._ (1876- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       **Gethsemane. Pag. July. (6.)
       **Revolt of the Flesh. Lib. March.

_Foote, John Taintor._ (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       **Otto. Am. April. (9.)

_Ford, Sewell._ (1868- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       And Then, There Was Todd. E. W. Feb. 16. (10.)
       Forsythe at the Finish. E. W. March 2. (10.)
       House of Torchy. E. W. March 16. (15.)
       Late Returns on Rupert. E. W. Jan. 5. (10.)
       Low Tackle by Torchy. E. W. June 8. (18.)
       Side Bet on Bart. E. W. May 4. (10.)
       Slant at the Corners. E. W. April 6. (15.)
       Speed Work for Pipkin. E. W. Jan. 26. (10.)
       Tag Day at Torchy’s. E. W. May 25. (18.)
       Torchy Gets the Thumb Grip. E. W. April 20. (10.)
       What Aunt Abbie Has Coming. E. W. Jan. 12. (19.)

_Forman, Henry James._ (1879- .) (_See 1915._)
       Doctor of Cheerfulness. Col. May 18. (16.)

_Forrester, Izola L._, _and_ _Page, Mann_. (_See “H” under_ _Forrester,
Izola L._)
       **Skeepie’s Agent. Cen. Aug. (96:502.)

_Forsyth, Louise._
       Mother. E. W. June 1. (10.)

_Foster, Maximilian._ (1872- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Sure Thing. S. E. P. April 27. (5.)

_Fox, Paul Hervey._ (_See 1917._)
       *Barred Room. L. St. Aug. (67.)
       Till the Clouds Roll By. E. W. Feb. 2. (9.)

_Fox, Stephen._
       *Woman of France. E. W. Feb. 23. (8.)

_Frank, Nanna E._
       *Story He Dared Not Tell. All. April 6. (82:737.)

_Freedley, Mary Mitchell._ (1894- .)
       ***Blind Vision. Cen. Jan. (95:346)

_Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins._ (1862- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) **Flowering Bush. W. H. C. April. (18.)
       ***Jade Bracelet. For. April. (59:429.)
       *Prop. S. E. P. Jan. 5. (12.)

*_Friedlaender, V. H._ (_See 1916._)
       ***Last Day. S. S. Sept. (53.)
       ***Miracle. Atl. Sept. (122:309.)

_Froome, Jr., John Redhead._ _See_ _Robinson, Eloise_, _and_ _Froome,
Jr., John Redhead_.
_Fuessle, Newton A._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Million Heir. Mir. March 22. (27:167.)

_Fullerton, Hugh Stewart._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Insignificant “Dub.” Am. Oct. (28.)
       Li’l’ Ol’ Dove of Peace. Am. April. (38.)

_Gale, Zona._ (1874- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Arpeggio and Patriotism. Harp. M. April. (136:633.)
       Back-Door Cupid. L. H. J. Sept. (22.)
       New Day. L. H. J. April. (15.)
       When Nick Nordman Came Back Home. L. H. J. June. (18.)

_Gallishaw, John._
       **Jake Bolton, 551. Cen. March. (95:625.)

*_Galsworthy, John._ (1867- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***“Cafard!” Scr. Jan. (63:18.)
       ***Gray Angel. Scr. March. (63:301.)
       ***Indian Summer of a Forsyte. Cos. Feb.-March.

_Ganoe, William Addleman._ (_See 1917._)
       Mushrooms. Scr. Oct. (64:482.)

_Gasch, Marie Manning._
       _See_ _Manning, Marie_.

_Gatlin, Dana._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Flame Divine. Hear. Sept. (34:183.)
       God Gave Them Youth. Col. March 16. (18.)
       Like a Singing Bird. Col. April 13. (14.)
       New York Stuff. McC. March. (13.)
       Star in the Window. McC. Aug. (24.)

_Geddes, O’Brien._
       *Cold Blooded Crime. Lib. July. (16.)

_Geer, Cornelia Throop._ (1894- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Irish of It. Atl. March. (121:334.)

_Gerould, Gordon Hall._ (1877- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       ***Imagination. Scr. Aug. (64:144.)

_Gerould, Katharine Fullerton._ (1879- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) ***Marchpane. Harp. M. May. (136:781.)

*_Gibbon, Perceval._ (1879- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Miss Pilgrim’s Progress. Cos. May. (53.)

_Gilbert, George._ (1874- .) (_See 1916._)
       ***Ashes of Roses. All. Oct. 19. (89:691.)
       *Cupid’s Gosling. B. C. April. (10.)
       ***In Maulmain Fever-Ward. Green Bk. Oct. (759.)
       **King of the Shillibers. Christ. H. Aug. 28-Sept. 4. (41:979
               _and_ 1001.)
       *Tiger! Tiger! B. C. Oct. (3.)

_Gillmore, Inez Haynes._
       (_See_ _Irwin, Inez Haynes_.)

_Gilmore, Florence._ (_See 1915._ ) (_H._)
       **Golden Years. Cath. W. Oct. (108:64.)

_Glaspell, Susan (Keating)._ (_Mrs. George Cram Cook._) (1882- .) (_See
1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***“Beloved Husband.” Harp. M. April. (136:675.)
       *Good Luck. G. H. Sept. (44.)
       ***“Poor Ed.” Lib. March.

_Glass, Jennie._
       In Japan. E. W. March 30. (15.)

_Going, (Ellen) Maud._
       *Sermon on the Wrath of God. Univ. Feb. (17:70.)

_Goldberg, Isaac._
       *“East is East, ——.” Strat. J. May. (30.)
       Ingratitude. Strat. J. Sept. (3:138.)

_Goldman, Raymond Leslie._ (_See 1917._)
       *For Molly. E. W. May 4. (8.)

_Goodloe, Abbie Carter._ (1867- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Cry-Baby. Scr. Aug. (64:188.)
       John Smith. Scr. Jan. (63: 100.)
       Letter in the Shirt. L. H. J. March. (20.)

_Goodman, Henry._ (1893- .)
       ***Conquered. Am. W. J. N. April 26. (5.)

_Goodwin, E._
       *Devil Among The Skins. Ain. April (71.)

_Gordon, Armistead Churchill._ (1855- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) ***Sinjinn, Surviving. Harp. M. Jan. (136:220.)

_Gordon, Tziril._
       **Kosher Stuff. L. St. Sept. (57.)

*“_Gorky, Maxim._” (_Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov._) (1868- .) (_See 1915
and 1916._) (_H._)
       **Because of Monotony. Strat. J. July-Aug. (3:53.)
       ***Makar Chudra. Strat. J. March. (3.)
       ***Man Who Could Not Die. Strat. J. June. (3.)

_Graeve, Oscar._ (1884- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Fine and Dandy. Col. Oct. 19. (13.)
       *Four Tickets to Paradise. Col. Aug. 31. (7.)
       Peter the Penniless. Col. April 27. (22.)
       You Can’t Just Wait. Col. June 22. (16.)

_Greene, Harry Irving._ (1868- .) (_H._)
       *Lady of Lions. All. May 11. (84:20.)

*“_Greene, Lewis Patrick._” (_Louis Montague Greene._) (1891- .)
       *Bound Twigs. Adv. June 18. (170.)
       *Snakes of Zari. Feb. 3. (165.)
       *White Kaffir. Adv. Feb. 18. (137.)

_Greenman, Frances._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Impossible Angela. L. H. J. Feb. (10.)

_Gurlitz, Amy Landon._ (_See 1917._)
       *Changeling of the Gods. Met. Aug. (23.)
       Dog of War. Met. April. (16.)

_Haines, Donal Hamilton._ (1886- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Bill. Outl. Jan. 16. (118:100).
       **Something ——! Col. July 13. (17.)
       *“Three Musketeers.” Col. Oct. 19. (15.)

_Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel._
       _See_ _Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-_.

_Hale, Louise Closser._ (1872- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Benefits Forgot. McC. July. (24.)
       High Cost of Living. McC. Jan. (11.)

“_Hall, Holworthy._” (_Harold Everett Porter._) (1887- .) (_See 1915,
1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       “Boys—My Sister from the East!” Am. April. (21.)
       Getting After Mr. Lockett. McC. June. (16.)
       Hateful Person. McC. Oct. (7.)
       New York and Return. Am. Feb. (13.)
       Peter Breaks Through His Shell. Am. March. (19.)
       Swashbuckler. Pict. R. Aug. (24.)
       Through Clearing. Am. Jan. (21.)

_Hall, Joseph._ (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       *Passed by the Censor. Col. Jan. 19. (42.)

_Hall, May Emery._ (1874- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Whiteford’s Masterpiece. B. E. T. April 13. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)

_Hall, Wilbur Jay._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *Goda’mighty’s Pardner. Adv. April. 18. (80.)
       *Snob. E. W. Jan. 5. (7.)
       “Some Game Guy.” E. W. June 8. (7.)
       Text. Sun. Feb. (37.)
       Thief at Heart. Sun. Aug. (17.)

_Hamby, William Henry._ (1875- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       From Him Who Waits. S. E. P. Oct. 19. (41.)
       They That Toil Not. S. E. P. Sept. 7. (65.)

_Hamilton, Gertrude Brooke._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Boy Wanted. E. W. March 23. (8.)
       *Ever Heard of the Pan Club? Pict. R. March. (6.)
       *High Monkey-Monk. Pict. R. April. (17.)
       *Pantaloons. G. H. April. (41.)

*“_Hamsun, Knut._” (_Knut Pedersen._) (_See 1916._)
       *Call of Life. Strat. J. July-Aug. (3:13.)

_Hankins, Arthur Preston._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Kind of a Dog-Gone Christian. Am. Feb. (31.)

_Hanna, Paul._
       **Caught with the Goods. All. May 11. (84:173.)

*_Hannay, James O._
       _See_ “_Birmingham, George A._”

*_Haraucourt, Edmond._
       **Boche. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 13.
       *Man Who Murdered Sleep. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 27.

_Harding, Meredith._
       “To the Beginning of This Day.” Scr. June. (63:704.)

*_Harker, Lizzie Allen._ (1863- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Mrs. Cushion’s Children. Scr. May. (63:608.)

*_Harlor, Th._
       *Retaliation. Tod. July. (9.)

_Harris, Corra (May White)._ (_Mrs. L. H. Harris._) (1869- .) (_See
1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Miss Apsylla’s Furlough. G. H. Oct. (33.)
       Will Maker. S. E. P. March 9. (26.)

_Harris, Kennett._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Brachycephalic Bohunkus. S. E. P. Jan. 5. (5.)
       Corresponding Secretary. S. E. P. May 4. (10.)
       Doing It By Deputy. S. E. P. May 11. (16.)
       Tobermory. S. E. P. May 18. (14.)

_Harris, Raymond S._
       Deer Hunt. Cen. March. (95:765.)
       *Little Annie. Cen. Feb. (95:619.)

_Hartman, Lee Foster._ (1879- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Earthen Vessels. Harp. M. March. (136:478.)
       **Last of the Argonauts. Harp. M. Sept. (137:540.)
       **Young Allyn’s Sixth Sense. Scr. Jan. (63:112.)

_Harvey, Alexander._ (1868- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       *Elopement. Mir. Feb. 15. (27:92.)

_Hawes, Charles Boardman._ (1889- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       ***Even So. Bel. March 16. (24:296.)
       *Million Years. Bel. April 20. (24:434.)

*_Hawxhurst, E._
       *Letter from No Man’s Land. Harp. B. Jan. (40.)

_Hecht, Ben._ (1896- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._)
       **Broken Necks. Lit. R. July. (12.)
       ***Decay. Lit. R. Sept. (39.)

_Hegan, Alice Caldwell._
       _See_ _Rice, Alice Hegan_.

_Hemenway, Hetty Lawrence._ (_Mrs. Auguste Richard._) (_See 1917._)
       ***Their War. Atl. April. (121:444.)

“_Henry, Etta._”
       *Report to His Kaiser. Touch. Oct. (4:28.)
       ***Sophie and the Lieutenant. Touch. May. (3:137.)

_Hergesheimer, Joseph._ (1880- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Banked Fires. S. E. P. May 4. (14.)
       ***Black Key. Cen. May. (96:33.)
       *Egyptian Chariot. S. E. P. Sept. 14. (9.)
       Wars and Rumors. S. E. P. March 2. (5.)

_Hervey, John L._
       *Old Men’s Tragedy. Mir. Jan. 18. (27:35.)

_Heyliger, William._ (1884- .) (_H._)
       Little Fingers. Pict. R. Feb. (16.)

_Hibbard, George._ (1858- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Somewhere in New York. Scr. Aug. (64:213.)

_Hillis, Richard Dwight._
       Night of the Hotel Bedroom. Met. Sept. (32.)

_Hilty, Bernadine._
       *In San Francisco. E. W. March 9. (18.)

_Hinds, Roy W._
       *Dead Man Tells a Tale. Pop. Jan. 20. (126.)

*_Hinkson, Katharine Tynan._
       ***Boys of the House. Cath. W. Sept. (107:792.)
       **Connla and the Swineherd. Cath. W. May. (107:223.)

*_Hirsch, Charles Henry._
       **Dalilah. N. Y. Trib. Jan. 20.

_Hogle, Imogene M._
       **By the Way. B. E. T. Jan. 26. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)

_Hoke, Howard Markle._ (_H._)
       Julie—the Unconquerable. Am. March. (31.)

*_Holt, H. P._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Red’s Last Throw. Sun. April. (32.)

_Hopper, James Marie._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Extra Fare Ticket. Met. July. (31.)
       *Kettle of House Joyful. Col. Feb. 2. (17.)
       Old Wars and New. Col. Sept. 21. (7.)

_Horton, Kate E._
       **Pink Crane. Cen. June. (96:241.)

_Hough, Emerson._ (1857- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Clan Gordon. So. Wo. M. Jan. (7.)
       Claxton, C. C. Sun. Feb. (17.)
       Claxton, M. P. Sun. May. (17.)

_Houston, Margaret Belle._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       **Evening Before. L. H. J. May. (13.)

_Hughes, Rupert._ (1872- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***At the Back of God Speed. Hear. April. (33:264.)
       *Kaiser’s Apotheosis. Hear. March. (33:184.)
       **Murphy That Saved America. Met. Feb. (7.)

_Hull, Alexander._ (_See 1917._)
       Matter of Temperament. E. W. Jan. 19. (9.)
       *Quest of Gloria Harney. Am. Jan. (29.)

_Hull, Helen R._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Alley Ways. Cen. Feb. (95:561.)
       Discovery. Touch. Aug. (3:401.)
       *Reluctant Hero. Harp. M. Jan. (136:257.)

_Humphrey, George._ (1889- .)
       ***Father’s Hand. Book. June. (47:401.)

_Hunt, Edward Eyre._ (1885- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       ***Odyssey of Mr. Solslog. (_R._) C. O. June. (64:428.)

_Hurst, Fannie._ (1889- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Bittersweet. Cos. March. (14.)
       **Boob Spelled Backward. Cos. April (28.)
       ***Hers _Not_ to Reason Why. Cos. Jan., 1917.
       **Nightshade. Cos. Jan. (20.)
       **Petal on the Current. Cos. June. (42.)
       *She also Serves. Cos. Oct. (61.)

_Hurst, S. B. H._
       **Maze of Memory. Adv. Aug. 3. (59.)
       **On the Far Edge. Adv. Oct. 3. (126.)

_Hurst, Veta._
       *Case of Uncle Marcel. Col. Jan. 5. (24.)

_Ingersoll, Will E._ (_H._)
       **Man Who Slept Till Noon. Harp. M. June. (137:76.)

_Ingram, Eleanor Marie._ (1886- .) (_H._)
       *King’s Noon. Mun. Sept. (64:733.)

_Irving, Washington._ (1783-1859.)
       ***Old Fashioned Christmas Dinner. (_R._) Ind. April 13. (94:88.)

_Irwin, Inez Haynes._ (_Inez Haynes Gillmore._) (1873- .) (_See 1915
under_ _Gillmore, Inez Haynes_, _and 1916 and 1917 under_ _Irwin, Inez
Haynes_.) (_See “H” under_ _Gillmore, Inez Haynes_.)
       My Crescent Moon. Met. Jan. (24.)
       **Passed Word. E. W. March 2. (8.)
       Sylvia’s Sissies. L. H. J. Oct. (22.)

_Irwin, Wallace._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Country Mouse. S. E. P. March 9. (9.)
       Light That Paled. S. E. P. April 6. (19.)
       When the House Is on Fire. S. E. P. Jan. 19. (6.)

_Jackson, Charles Tenney._ (1874- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       **Little Jigger This Mornin’. Adv. Oct. 18. (69.)

*_Jacobs, W(illiam) W(ymark)._ (1863- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *Shareholders. Hear. Oct. (34:261.)
       *Striking Home. Hear. June. (33:429.)

_Jacobsen, Norman._
       _See_ _Putnam, Nina Wilcox_, _and_ _Jacobsen, Norman_.

*_Jaloux, Edmond._
       Bachelor. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 29.
       ***Vagabond. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 20.

_Jameson, Fred W._
       *Martin Yordi’s “Book.” All. July 6. (86:93.)

_Jay, Mae Foster._
       Swings and Things. Sun. May. (33.)

_Jefferson, Charlotte._
       *Little Belgian Boy and His Dog. L. H. J. Feb. (12.)

_Jenkins, Charles Christopher._
       **On the Wire. B. E. T. July 10. (Pt. 2. p. 4.)
       *Skipper’s Black Valise. Can. Courier. (5.)
       *Trail to the Skies. Can. Courier. March 2. (8.)

*_Jesse, F(ryniwyd) Tennyson._ (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       *Mademoiselle Lamotte of the Mantles. Met. Aug. (16.)

_Johnson, Alvin Saunders._ (1874- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *On Land and Sea. N. Rep. Feb. 16. (14:79.)
       **Short Change. N. Rep. April 27. (14:381.)

_Johnson, Arthur._ (1881- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       ***His New Mortal Coil. Cen. Aug. (96:475.)
       ***Little Family. Harp. M. Oct. (137:725.)
       ***Visit of the Master. Harp. M. Feb. (136:389.)

_Johnson, Burges._ (1877- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Iron Heroines. Cen. June. (96:285.)

_Johnson, Fanny Kemble._ (_Fanny Kemble Costello._) (_See 1916 and
1917._) (_H._)
       *Butterfly Dust. Cen. April. (95:827.)

_Johnston, Charles._ (1867- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Morris Coulston. Col. Feb. 16. (24.)

_Johnston, Erle._ (_See 1917._)
       Timber-Wolf. Cen. Feb. (95:529.)

_Johnston, William (Andrew)._ (1871- .) (_U._)
       “File Ninety-Nine—P. H.” Pict. R. Sept. (28.)
       Man Who Never Was. G. H. July. (34.)
       Pay-Day. Del. Sept. (11.)
       Promoted. Del. Oct. (18.)

_Jones, E. Clement._ (1890- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Mongrel. N. Rep. May 18. (15:75.)

_Jones, Frank Goewey._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       By Blistering Brindle Blazes! S. E. P. March 16. (29.)
       Doormat and the Bulldog. McC. Aug. (14.)

_Jones, Ruth Lambert._
       They’re With Us Still—the Spies. B. E. T. July 13. (Pt. 3. p. 4.)

_Julius, Emanuel Haldeman-._ (1888- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Ring. Strat. J. April. (36.)

_Keefer, Ralph D._, _and_ _Chalmers, Stephen_. (1880- .)
       Winged Lizard. Bel. June 1. (24:602.)

_Kelland, Clarence Budington._ (1881- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Bait. Pict. R. June. (20.)
       Error of Choice. Pict. R. May. (8.)
       *It Can’t Be Done. S. E. P. July 20. (58.)
       Pewter Porringer Tract. G. H. March. (12.)
       Renovation of Professor Bitter. Pict. R. July. (22.)
       Scattergood Makes It Round Numbers. S. E. P. Feb. 16. (28.)
       *Simeon Small, Militarist. Harp. M. May. (136:800.)

_Kelley, Leon._ (_See 1917._)
       Odds on the Boy. McC. Feb. (24.)
       Tenants and Tears. McC. Jan. (20.)

_Kennon, Harry B._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Carrying on. Mir. May 3. (27:264.)
       *Cash and Carry. Mir. July 19. (27:440.)

_Kenyon, Camilla E. L._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Nanny and His Lordship. Sun. Sept. (30) and Oct. (34.)

_Kerr, Sophie._ (1880- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_See “H” under_
_Underwood, Sophie Kerr_.)
       **His Mark. S. E. P. Aug. 3. (14.)
       Leaks and Letters. McC. Feb. (7.)
       One of the By-Products. McC. Sept. (9.)
       Ties of Blood. Harp. M. June. (137:14.)
       Values. S. E. P. July 6. (8.)
       Without the Last Act. McC. April. (17.)

_Kilbourne, Fannie._ (“_Mary Alexander._”) (_See 1915 and 1917 under_
_Kilbourne, Fannie_, _and 1917 under_ _Alexander, Mary_.)
       Girl Who Is Not Popular. Del. March. (13.)

_Kilpatrick, Lewis H._
       *When Breathitt Went to Battle. Bel. Aug. 10. (25:154.)

_Kimball, Alice Mary._
       Adventures of a Perfectly Nice Girl. Scr. Sept. (64:305.)

_King, (William Benjamin) Basil._ (1859- .) (_See 1916._ ) (_H._ )
       *Abraham’s Bosom. S. E. P. March 30. (10.)
       ***Going West. Pict. R. Sept. (5.)

*_Kipling, Rudyard._ (1865- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Flight of Fact. Met. June. (16.)

_Kline, Burton._ (1877- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       ***In the Open Code. Strat. J. Feb. (21.)
       **Lost Lenore. Strat. J. July-Aug. (3:36.)
       *Mrs. Carnes Adjusts Herself to the Universe. S. S. Jan. (109.)
       *Pillars of Society. S. S. June. (59.)
       ***Singular Smile. Strat. J. May. (25.)

_Kling, Joseph._
       Greenwich Village Idyll. Pag. Feb. (33.)

_Knight, Reynolds._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *Spartan. Pop. Jan. 7. (159.)

_Kollock, Adéle Force._
       Excursion into Feminism. Cen. Aug. (96:570.)

*_Korzeniowski, Joseph Conrad._
       _See_ “_Conrad, Joseph._”

_Kral, Carlos A. V._
       **Resurrection. Pag. June. (31.)

_Krysto, Christina._ (1887- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Mother of Stasya. Atl. June. (121:742.)

_Kummer, Frederic Arnold._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Toymaker. Harp. B. July. (26.)

_Lait, Jack._ (_Jacquin L._) (1882- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       **“Gentlemen of the Jury—.” Am. Aug. (27.)
       *Heart of a Bum. Sh. St. July. (135.)
       *“I Wisht I Was a Wave.” Am. July. (46.)
       **Piker’s Baby. Sh. St. Jan. (94.)

_Lamb, H. A._
       *Wolf’s War. Adv. Jan. 3. (166.)

*“_Lancaster, G. B._” (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Man Primeval. Scr. March. (63:336.)

_Lardner, Ring W._ (1885- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Call for Mr. Keefe! S. E. P. March 9. (3.)

_Lawson, W. P._ (_See 1915._)
       Seeing Alma First. Col. May 11. (26.)

_Lea, Fannie Heaslip._ (_Mrs. H. P. Agee._) (1884- .) (_See 1915, 1916,
and 1917._) (_H._)
       Half-Past the Eleventh Hour. G. H. July. (29.)

_Lee, Jennette_ (_Barbour Perry._) (1860- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and
1917._) (_H._)
       *Future of Edward. L. H. J. July. (26.)
       Jim Eagan’s Draft. E. W. April 6. (8.)
       Man in the Toy House. G. H. Feb. (30.)
       **Miss Cynthia’s Rosebush. Harp. M. July. (137:229.)
       Their Mother. L. H. J. May. (19.)

_Leinster, Murray._
       *Atmosphere. Arg. Jan. 26. (104.)
       *Cabin in the Wilderness. All. April 6. (82:647.)

_Lerner, Mary._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Blue Eyes. Met. Feb. (14.)
       *House on the Knoll. Sun. Jan. (17.)
       *Splendid Legend. Harp. B. Oct. (42.)
       *Torches of Freedom. Tod. June. (4.)

*_Level, Maurice._ (_See 1917._)
       Amateur. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 18.
       **His Village. N. Y. Trib. April 7.
       *Little Soldier. N. Y. Trib. Jan. 6.
       *Officer. N. Y. Trib. March 3.
       *Under Ether. N. Y. Trib. Feb. 3.
       **Wotan. N. Y. Trib. May 12.

_Leverage, Henry._ (_See 1917._)
       *Captain Percival. S. E. P. June 1. (10.)
       **Daybreak—Over There. All. April 6. (82:707.)
       *Harpooned. S. E. P. June 22. (10.)
       High Tension. S. E. P. Oct. 19. (24.)
       *Kelly. S. E. P. April 6. (16.)
       *Silver Greyhound. S. E. P. April 13. (5.)
       *Tagore’s Trigonometry. All. July 13. (86:262.)
       Whispering Wires. S. E. P. May 25. (9.)

_Levison, Eric._
       _See_ _Cohen, Octavus Roy_, _and_ _Levison, Eric_.

_Lewars, Elsie Singmaster._
       _See_ _Singmaster, Elsie_.

_Lewis, Addison._ (1889- .) (_See 1917._)
       “Elevator Stops at All Floors.” (_R._) C. O. July. (65:57.)
       ***When Did You Write Your Mother Last? (_R._) C. O. May.
               (64:357.)

_Lewis, O. F._
       Fathers’ and Sons’ Tournament. S. E. P. May 4. (18.)
       Miss Lucretia Bets a Church. L. H. J. July. (23.)

_Lewis, Sinclair._ (1885- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Afterglow. Col. Jan. 19. (14.)
       Detour—Roads Rough. E. W. March 30. (7.)
       Getting His Bit. Met. Sept. (12.)
       Invitation to Tea. E. W. June 1. (6.)
       Jazz. Met. Oct. (23.)
       Rose for Little Eva. McC. Feb. (13.)
       Shadowy Glass. S. E. P. June 22. (5.)
       Slip It to ’Em. Met. March. (26.)
       Swept Hearth. S. E. P. Sept. 21. (5.)
       Widower for a While. L. H. J. July. (13.)
       ***Willow Walk. S. E. P. Aug. 10. (8.)

_Liebe, Hapsburg._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *Blood of the Allisons. Adv. Aug. 18. (87.)

_Lieberman, Elias._ (1883- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       ***Tower of Confusion. Am. Heb. May 31. (76.)
       **Voice of Angels. Am. Heb. Oct. 4. (551.)

_Lighton, William Rheem_ (1866- .), _and_ _Lighton, Louis Duryea_. (_See
1916 and 1917; and 1915, 1916, and 1917, and “H” under_ _Lighton,
William Rheem_.)
       Billy Fortune and the Prune Fighter. Pict. R. April. (14.)

_Livingston, Armstrong._
       *Things That Are Caesar’s. All. March 30. (82:412.)

_Livingston, Ruby Erwin._
       *Luck of Forty-Four. Adv. June 18. (160.)

_London, Jack._ (1876-1916.) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *At the Rainbow’s End. (_R._) I. S. M. 2nd. Jan. No. (3.)
       *Princess. Cos. June. (20.)
       *Red One. Cos. Oct. (34.)
       *Tears of Ah Kim. Cos. July. (32.)
       *Water-Baby. Cos. Sept. (80.)
       *When Alice Told Her Soul. Cos. March. (28.)
       *Where the Trail Forks. (_R._) I. S. M. 1st Spring No. (5.)

_Long, Lily Augusta._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Anne. McC. July. (29.)

_Loos, Anita._
       Heart That Truly Loved. Pict. R. Aug. (26.)

“_Lopez, Inez._” (_Mrs. Octavus Roy Cohen._) (_See 1917._)
       *Another Viewpoint. All. Oct. 26. (90:64.)

_Lorente, Mariano Joaquin._
       **Funeral. Mir. June 14. (27:357.)

_Lowell, Amy._ (1874- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       *Business As Usual. B. E. T. Feb. 16. (Pt. 3. p. 4.)
       *Landlady of the Whinton Inn Tells a Story. Poetry. Jan.
               (11:171.)

_Ludwig, Frances A._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       *Roaring Chief Engineer of the Ætna. Am. Aug. (21.)

_Lyman, Chester L._
       Mark of the Beast. Col. Aug. 10. (17.)

_McCormack, Katherine._
       *’Arf and ’Arf. Sn. St. May 18. (55.)

_McCoy, William M._ (_See 1917._)
       *Five Furlongs for Salvation. Col. Feb. 2. (20.)
       “Useless.” Am. Sept. (46.)

_McCrea, Marion._
       Funny-Looking Man. Pag. Aug.-Sept. (50.)

_McCutcheon, George Barr._ (1866- .) (_H._)
       Best Man Wins! McC. Sept. (23.)
       Perfect End of a Day. McC. July. (15.)
       “You Are Invited to Be Present.” McC. May. (9.)

_Macfarlane, Peter Clark._ (1871- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Bilge and the “Q” Boat. S. E. P. Oct. 5. (76.)
       Greatest Game. S. E. P. July 27. (12.)
       Kidnapping Cupid. S. E. P. Oct. 12. (17.)
       Mistakes of Bilge. S. E. P. Aug. 24. (9.)

_McGill, Anna Blanche._
       *One of Our Patriots. Mag. Oct. (22:338.)
       *Terence and the Fairies. Mag. May. (22:28.)

_MacGrath, Harold._ (1871- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Kidnapped! McC. June. (27.)
       One Chance in a Thousand. G. H. May. (33.)
       Playing the Game. L. H. J. Aug. (23.)
       “Poor Black Sheep!” McC. Sept. (19.)

*_Machard, Alfred._ (_See 1917._)
       **His Last Night on Leave, N. Y. Trib. Feb. 24.

_MacHarg, William Briggs._ (1872- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Boy of Jim’s. L. H. J. Oct. (25.)
       *Thing That Sets Men Free. Harp. B. Oct. (28.)

_McIntire, Ruth._
       *How the War Came to Big Laurel. Mid. Jan.-Feb. (4:2.)

_Mackall, (Alexander) Lawton_. (1888- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       “Sans Camouflage.” Cen. Sept. (96:717.)

_Mackay, Helen._ (1876- .)
       **Their Places. Harp. M. Feb. (136:410.)

_McKenna, Edmond._ (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Life-Line. E. W. March 30. (15.)

_McKinney, Jean Webster._
       _See_ _Webster, Jean_.

_McMorrow, Thomas._ (_See 1915._)
       *Campaign of Aristide Cartouche. Ev. April. (47.)

_McPartlin, Ellen E._
       *Sentinel Pine. Mag. Oct. (22:321.)

*_Madrus, Lucie Delarue-._
       _See_ _Delarue-Madrus, Lucie_.

_Mahoney, George Gordon._
       “An’ a Man Must Go With a Woman.” Pag. Jan. (27.)

_Manning, Marie._ (_Mrs. Herman E. Gasch._) (_See 1915, 1916, and
1917._) (_H._)
       *Crucible of Time. Harp. M. March. (136:591.)
       Third Generation. McC. May. (15.)

*_Marguier, Leo._
       *Horrible Slip of Monsieur Peinart. B. E. T. June 5. (Pt. 2. p.
               4.)

_Marks, Jeannette A._ (1875- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Haymakers. Strat. J. March. (35.)
       ***Old Lady Hudson. Mid. July-Aug. (4:181.)

_Marquis, Don (Robert Perry)._ (1878- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *McDermott and the War. Ev. Oct. (20.)

_Marshall, Edison._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       Pike of the O. I. & E. Sun. Jan. (26.)

_Martyn, Wyndham._ (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       Vulture Woman, The. For. Jan. (59:69.)

*_Mason, Alfred Edward Woodley._ (1865- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *Crystal Trench. Met. May. (26.)
       *Peiffer. Met. Jan.

_Mason, Grace Sartwell._ (1877- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       April Fools. Met. May. (16.)
       Lotus Eater. G. H. Jan. (33.)

_Masters, Edgar Lee._ (1868- .) (_See 1917._)
       *Clay Bailey at the Side Show. Mir. March 22. (27:164.)

_Matteson, Herman Howard._
       *Mowitch for Men. All. April 6. (82:600.)

_Matthews, Frances Aymar._ (_See 1916._)
       *Cherry Colored Dress. I. S. M. 1st. Feb. No. (6.)

*_Mauclair, Camille._
       **Counsel of the Sea. Tod. Aug. (6.)
       ***Inner Man. N. Y. Trib. March 31.

*_Maupassant, Henri René Albert Guy de_. (1850-1893.) (_H._)
       ***Two Friends. B. E. T. Oct. 5. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)

“_Maxwell, Helena._”
       *Case No. 16. Q. W. Aug. (9:40.)

_Mayo, Katherine._ (_H._)
       Get Your Man. Outl. April 3. (118:537.)
       *Hot Weather. Outl. March 27. (118:486.)
       John G. Outl. March 20. (118:447.)
       *One Little Word from Home. Outl. Oct. 2. (119:168.)

_Means, E. K._ (_H._)
       *Best Policy. All. July 13. (86:214.)
       *Stunt Dancers. All. May 4. (83:600.)
       *Tar and Feathers. All. March 23. (82: 214.)
       **Tombstone Test. All. June 22. (85:437.)
       **“Vally Sham.” All. May 18. (84:265.)

_Medbery, Helen Dearborn._
       **Warburton’s Daughter. L. H. J. Feb. (11.)

_Merriam, Sidney A._
       **Bill. Atl. May. (121:649.)

_Merritt, A._
       *People of the Pit. All. Jan. 5. (79:376.)

_Merwin, Martha P._ (_H._)
       **Somewhere In ——. Book. June. (47:404.)

_Michel, D. L._
       *Medusa. Pag. March. (31.)

*_Mille, Pierre._ (1864- .) (_See 1917._)
       *His Grievance. N. Y. Trib. April 21.
       *Misadventure of Lieutenant Ward. N. Y. Trib. Feb. 10.
       *Monkey and the Scotchmen. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 6.
       *Spy. N. Y. Trib. July 14.
       *Wager. N. Y. Trib. March 24.

_Mills, Dorothy Culver._
       Wristers. E. W. June 15. (18.)

_Mitchell, Mary Esther._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Fire Unquenchable. Harp. M. Oct. (137:684.)
       *Gifts on the Altar. Harp. M. Sept. (137:572.)
       *“On Pinions Free.” Harp. M. May. (136:888.)

_Mitchell, Ruth Comfort._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *Episode of the Enemy Alien. Mir. March 29. (27:194.)

_Moore, Frederick Ferdinand._ (_H._)
       Book Soldier. Ev. March. (25.)

_Moore, John Trotwood._ (1858- .)
       **Tom’s Last “Furage.” (_R._) So. Wo. M. Feb. (15.)

*_Mordaunt, Elinor._ (_See 1915 and 1917._)
       ***High Seas. Cen. Oct. (96:733.)
       **His White Stocking. Met. July. (24.)

_Morgan, Byron._
       Junkpile Sweepstakes. S. E. P. Sept. 28. (9.)
       Roaring Road. S. E. P. Oct. 12. (8.)
       Undertaker’s Handicap. S. E. P. Oct. 5. (14.)

_Moriarty, Helen._
       *Curé and Little Jean. Mag. Jan. (21:145.)

_Morley, Christopher (Darlington)._ (1890- .) (_See 1917._)
       *Eleven Hours of Moonlight. L. H. J. June. (16.)
       Prize Package. Col. March 23. (14.)
       *Urn Burial. E. W. April 27. (10.)
       *Woman Who Polished the Apples. L. H. J. April. (20.)

_Moroso, John Antonio._ (1874- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Boy Wanted. Harp. B. March. (31.)
       In the Spring. Col. Jan. 12. (21.)
       **Non Nobis. Del. June. (16.)

_Morris, Gouverneur._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Behind the Door. McC. July. (7.)
       *Sure-Thing Man. Cos. Oct. (44.)
       ***Unsent Letter. Cos. April. (16.)

_Morse, Richard._
       Putting the Fear of God in Our Church. L. H. J. March. (21.)
       Putting the Fear of God in Our Village. L. H. J. April. (21.)

_Morten, Marjory._ (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       ***Nettle and Foxglove. Cen. June. (96:197.)
       **Under the Owl. Cen. Sept. (96:591.)

_Moseley, Katharine Prescott._
       ***Story Vinton Heard At Mallorie. Scr. Sept. (64:358.)

_Mott, Frank Luther._
       **Eyes. Strat. J. July-Aug. (3:86.)

_Muilenburg, Walter J._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       **Last Spring. Mid. May-June. (4:129.)

_Muller, Julius Washington._ (1868- .) (_H._)
       *Morgan’s Loyalty. E. W. May 25. (6.)

_Mullett, Mary B._ (_H._)
       Singer at the Window. Am. June. (29.)

_Myers, Walter L._ (1886- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       ***Clouds. Mid. March-April. (4:80.)

_Neely, Henry M._
       “Mr. Hoover.” Col. Sept. 21. (12.)

_Neidig, William Jonathan._ (1870- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Snob. S. E. P. Sept. 28. (14.)

*“_Nesbit, E._” (_Edith Nesbit Bland._) (1856- .) (_H._)
       **Ruddick’s Yarn. All. Oct. 12. (89:403.)

_Newell, Maude Woodruff._ (_See 1916._)
       Girl with the Leopard-skin Coat. Am. Oct. (11.)

_Nichols, Robert W._
       *“Order of the Red Ravelings.” C. G. April 27. (12.)

_Nichols, T._
       *Captain Findlay’s Last Voyage. Adv. April 3. (141.)

_Nicholson, Meredith._ (1866- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Hot Biscuits and Honey. L. H. J. April. (24.)

*_Noyes, Alfred._ (1880- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       Creative Impulse. S. E. P. April 20. (16.)
       Man from Buffalo. S. E. P. Feb. 23. (47.)
       Mystery of the Evening Star. L. H. J. June. (11.)
       Uncle Hyacinth. S. E. P. Feb. 2 (10.)

_Oemler, Marie Conway._ (1879- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *To Be a Woman. Ain. April. (47.)

_O’Hagan, Anne._ (_Anne O’Hagan Shinn._)
       *Irrevocable. Harp. M. Feb. (136:441.)

_O’Hara, Frank Hurburt._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Although Very Young. Am. Sept. (40.)
       Davida’s Uncle. Ev. March. (48.)

_O’Higgins, Harvey Jerrold._ (1876- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Conrad Norman. Cen. Sept. (96:644.)
       ***Owen Carey. Cen. Jan. (95:436.)

*_Oppenheim, Edward Phillips._ (1866- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Poetry by Compulsion. Harp. B. Jan. (36.)

_Oppenheim, James._ (1882- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Gardener. Touch. Aug. (3:420.)
       ***Second-Rater. Cen. May. (96:124.)

_O’Reilly, Edward S._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       What’s One Man’s Meat Pict. R. Oct. (24.)

_Orth, Jr., Charles D._
       Peace Nature of Eb Hawkins. L. H. J. Aug. (10.)
       Two Bets and Betty. L. H. J. April. (10.)

_Osborn, Louie H._
       *Her Service Flag. E. W. April 13. (15.)

_Osborne, William Hamilton._ (1873- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Infamous Inoculation. S. E. P. March 9. (13.)
       *Peter Grimwood Goes to War. B. C. April. (3.)
       Troop Train. S. E. P. May 11. (11.)

_O’Sullivan, Vincent._ (1872- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       ***Exhibit C-470. Scr. Feb. (63:198.)

*_Oswald, Jean-françois._
       *Everlasting Private. B. E. T. Aug. 31. (Pt. 3. p. 4.)

_Owen, Frank._ (_See 1916._)
       *Gentleman of the Desert. Vis. Jan. 27. (5.)

_Oyen, (Olaf) Henry._ (1883- .) (_H._)
       Love Winds of Port o’ Flowers. Ev. Feb. (53.)

_Pabke, William Hugh._
       *Troops. All. Feb. 2. (80:380.)

_Page, Mann._
       _See_ _Forrester, Izola_, _and_ _Page, Mann_.

_Paine, Albert Bigelow._ (1861- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Adventure in Decoration. Harp. M. Oct. (137:737.)
       Meanness of Pinchett. Harp. M. April. (136:761.)
       Northwest by North. Harp. M. July. (137:297.)
       Reforming Verny. Harp. M. Sept. (137:593.)
       Thwarted Pygmalion. Harp. M. March. (136:609.)
       Toy of Fate. Harp. M. Aug. (137:449.)

_Paine, Ralph D(elahaye.)_ (1871- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       Bold Marine. Scr. Jan. (63:22.)
       *Recalled. Scr. Aug. (64:173.)

_Palmer, Vance._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *Shanghaiing of Shard. Mile. June. (2.)

_Parmenter, Christine Whiting._
       Supreme Moment. Del. April. (19.)

_Patterson, Elizabeth._
       ***Sir Galahad. All. May 18. (84:300.)

_Patterson, Norma._ (1891- .)
       ***Unto Each His Crown. Book. May. (47:278.)

_Pattullo, George._ (1879- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Boy Howdy! S. E. P. Aug. 3. (5.)
       Hidden Shame. Pict. R. Feb. (14.)
       Madame Patsy and Those Kilts. June 15. (13.)

_Payne, Will._ (1865- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Benway’s Luck. Oct. 26. (32.)
       ***His Escape. S. E. P. July 20. (14.)
       Iron Butcher. S. E .P. March 2. (14.)
       **Lumberman’s Story. S. E. P. Sept. 7. (28.)
       Old Thrifty. S. E. P. Oct. 19. (14.)
       Revival. S. E. P. Aug. 24. (14.)
       Samuel Crews’ Dilemma, S. E. P. Feb. 23. (14.)
       Without Prejudice. S. E. P. April (20. 12.)

_Pearce, Ella Randall._
       Trifle. E. W. June 15. (18.)

*_Pedersen, Knut._
       _See_ “_Hamsun, Knut._”

_Pelley, William Dudley._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       **Aunt Julia. Am. Jan. (7.)
       *Bud Jones—Small Advertiser. Am. Feb. (21.)
       **One White Sheep in a Family of Black Ones. Am. June. (46.)
       *Paisley Shawl. McCall. Aug. (6)-Sept. (9.)
       *Through Thick and Thin. Am. May. (41.)
       ***Toast to Forty-Five. Pict. R. May. (5.)
       *Wanted—A Younger and More Practical Man. Am. March. (11.)
       *What Put “Pep” into John Stevens. Am. July. (20.)
       *Why the Judge Felt Safe. Am. Oct. (40.)

_Pendexter, Hugh._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Salvage. E. W. March 9. (18.)

*_Perez, Isaac Loeb._ (1851- .) (_H._)
       *Reincarnated Melody. Pag. Oct. (14.)

_Perry, Lawrence._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917_) (_H._)
       Migratory Moncktons. Harp. M. Oct. (137:632.)
       ***Poet. Harp. M. May. (136:830.)
       Tragressor. Harp. M. Feb.-March.
       **Trouble-Maker. Scr. Aug. (64:224.)

*_Pertwee, Roland._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       Her Eyes. L. H. J. May. (14.)
       *Little Landscape. Ev. Feb. (35.)
       Mary Eldon’s Aunt S. E. P. June 29. (9.)

*_Phillpotts, Eden._ (1862- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Mystery of the Sailor Men. Bel. Feb. 16. (24:184.)
       *Peter Paul. Del. July. (6.)

_Pickthall, Marjorie_ (_Lowry Christie_.) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       **Forgiver. Bel. Jan. 5. (24:17.)

_Pitt, Chart._ (_See 1917._)
       *Watchers of the Wild. B. C. May. (3.)

_Pope, Laura Spencer Portor._
       _See_ _Portor, Laura Spencer_.

_Porter, Harold Everett._
       _See_ “_Hall, Holworthy._”

_Portor, Laura Spencer._ (_Laura Spencer Portor Pope._) (_See 1915,
1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *For Love of Snow White. McCall. June. (6.)
       *Hearts Triumphant. Harp. M. Aug. (137:387.)

_Post, Melville Davisson._ (1871- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *Against the Sky of the Theater. L. H. J. Aug. (11.)
       **Fortune Teller. Red Bk. Aug. (75.)
       *Girl with the Ruby. L. H. J. March. (17.)
       **Satire of the Sea. Hear. Feb. (33:114.)

_Postelle, Catherine._
       *At La Croix Rouge. Mir. May 17. (27:293.)

_Potter, Elizabeth Gray._
       Inside the Wire. Sun. May. (37.)

_Pottle, Juliet Wilbor Tompkins._
       _See_ _Tompkins, Juliet Wilbor_.

_Powers, Barnard._ (_See 1916._)
       Dip in Diplomacy. Pict. R. Feb. (17.)

_Pratt, Lucy._ (1874- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Green Umbrellas. Pict. R. Oct. (18.)

_Price, Edith Ballinger._
       *Sister Heloise. Cen. July. (96:385)

_Pulver, Mary Brecht._ (1883- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       All Under the Flag. Ev. Jan. (53.)
       *Apple Tree. S. E. P. Sept. 14. (28.)
       ***David and Jonathan. Moth. June. (13:511.)
       Enter the Villain. S. E. P. July 13. (13.)
       *Fuller Brothers. S. E. P. June 29. (13.)
       Good Old Shoe. S. E. P. Oct. 12. (10.)
       Old Stuff. S. E. P. April 6. (8.)

_Putnam, George Palmer._ (1887- .)
       ***Sixth Man. L. H. J. Feb. (9.)

_Putnam, Nina Wilcox._ (1888- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Ladies Enlist. S. E. P. June 1. (5.)
       *Lamb of God. Ain. Jan. (65.)
       Pro Bonehead Publico. S. E. P. Sept. 28. (5.)

_Putnam, Nina Wilcox_ (1888- .), _and_ _Jacobsen, Norman_.
       Every Little Bit Helps. S. E. P. Feb. 16. (5.)-Feb. 23. (17.)
       Vulgar Dollar. S. E. P. Aug. 17. (5.)

*_Pyeshkov, Alexei Maximovich._
       _See_ “_Gorky, Maxim._”

*_Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur Thomas._ (1863- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       *Cask Ashore. Bel. May 11. (24:522.)
       *Clock and the Pillar-Box. Bel. Jan. 12. (24:44.)
       ***Old Aeson. (_R._) All. April 27. (83:409).

*_Raisin, Ovro’om._
       *Dog. Pag. June. (4.)

*_Ramsey, Alicia._ (_H._)
       *Cloven Hoof. L. St. Jan. (13:245.)
       *Rendezvous. Ain. Feb. (68.)

*_Ramuz, C. F._
       **Benoit. Pag. Aug.-Sept. (5.)

_Ranck, Edwin Carty._ (1879- .) (_See 1916._)
       ***Out o’ Luck. B. E. T. Oct. 19. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)

_Ranck, Reita Lambert._
       *Knight in Goloshes. Bel. June 8. (24:634.)
       Old Alpaca. Bel. Sept. 28. (25:253.)
       *Sunday. Bel. Feb. 23. (24:210.) Mir. June 21. (27:378.)

_Reely, Mary Katharine._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       *Ernestine at Forty. Pag. Oct. (37.)

_Reese, Lowell Otus._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       Poor Little Freshmen. S. E. P. Sept. 28. (45.)
       Saved by Fire. Am. July. (51.)
       Who’s Who. S. E. P. May 4. (73.)

_Reynolds, Katharine._ (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       *Bit of Home. Wom. W. Aug. (13.)
       *Soldiers Two. Wom. W. March. (10.)

_Rhodes, Harrison (Garfield)._ (1871- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       ***Extra Men. Harp. M. July. (137:164.)
       *Substitute. W. H. C. Oct. (13.)

_Rice, Alice (Caldwell) Hegan._ (1870- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *Miss Mink’s Soldier. Cen. Aug. (96:433.)
       **Mrs. Wiggs’s Benefit Dance. (_R._) Ind. May 25. (94:330.)

_Rice, Louise._ (_H._)
       Old “Norwhal” Goes to Sea. Ev. July. (49.)

_Rich, Bertha A._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       Man She Loved. Am. April. (29.)
       Williams Sees Herself as Others Saw Her. Am. March. (44.)

_Richard, Hetty Hemenway._
       _See_ _Hemenway, Hetty Lawrence_.

_Richardson, Anna Steese._ (1865- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       How the Great War Came To Me. McC. April. (15.)

*_Richepin, Jean._ (1849- .) (_H._)
       **Constant Guinard. Pag. April-May. (36.)

_Richmond, Grace (Louise) S(mith)._ (1866- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Enlisted Wife. L. H. J. March. (29.)

_Richter, Conrad._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Nothing Else Matters. E. W. Jan. 12. (8.)
       Pippin of Pike County. E. W. March 16. (8.)

_Rideout, Henry Milner._ (1877- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *After Dark. S. E. P. March 23. (5.)
       *Goliah. S. E. P. Sept. 7. (12.)
       Saxby Gale. S. E. P. Feb. 9. (14.)

_Riley, Ellen Webb._
       John Augustus Viliken. Harp. M. Aug. (137:410.)

_Rinehart, Mary Roberts._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *His Letters. McC. Sept. (7.)
       Twenty-Three and a Half Hours’ Leave. S. E. P. Aug. 24. (3.)

_Ritchie, Robert Welles._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *Big Day in Bugle. Sun. July. (17.)

_Rivers, Stuart._
       ***Leading Lady of the Discards. Scr. April. (63:448.)

_Rives, Amélie_ (_Princess Troubetzkoy_.) (1863- .) (_H._)
       *Gioia. Cos. Aug. (36.)

_Rix, Alice._
       C. O. D. Sun. Oct. (27.)

_Robbins, Tod._
       *Silent, White, and Beautiful. S. S. April. (69.)

_Roberts, Charles George Douglas._ (1860- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._)
(_H._) *Lake of Long Sleep. Cos. June. (69.)

_Roberts, Kenneth L._ (_See 1917._)
       With Neatness and Dispatch. S. E. P. Feb. 2. (12.)

_Robinson, Eloise._ (1889- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *White Elephants. Harp. M. July. (137:178.)

_Robinson, Eloise_ (1889- .), _and_ _Froome, Jr., John Redhead_.
       Dead Dog. Harp. M. Sept. (137:513.)

_Roche, Arthur Somers._ (1883- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Empty Sleeve. Col. March 30. (15.)
       Gun-Metal Case. Col. March 2. (8.)
       “Higher Up.” McC. May. (11.)
       Interrupted Tea. Col. March 16. (16.)
       Ivory Billiard Ball. Col. March 9. (14.)
       Last Bullet. Col. April 6. (14.)
       Second Cup. Col. March 23. (16.)

_Roe, Vingie E._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Alchemy of Love. Met. Oct. (15.)
       Clêche of Sunrise Basin. S. E. P. July 27. (28.)
       Face in the Loophole. Col. June 29. (18.)
       Girl at Enright’s. Sun. July. (27.)
       In Round Stone Valley. Col. Feb. 23. (18.)
       Strong Ones. McC. Feb. (10.)
       Surrender. Sun. March. (17.)-April. (27.)
       Wild Honey. Pict. R. July. (13.)

*_Roland, Marcel._
       *Their Son. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 22.

_Roof, Katharine Metcalf._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *Sentenced. All. Sept. 21. (88:597.)

_Rothery, Julian._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *“There’s Life in the Old Dog Yet.” Am. June. (11.)

_Rouse, William Merriam._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Old Man Wamsley’s Ghost. Mid. July-Aug. (4:148.)

_Rowland, Henry C(ottrell)._ (1874- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       **Merle. Harp. M. June. (137:94.)

_Rubinstein, Z. H._
       *Pity. Pag. Jan. (39.)

_Russell, John._ (1885- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       ***Adversary. Col. June 22. (8.)
       *Boston Limited. Col. Sept. 7. (10.)
       Foul Deeds. Harp. M. Jan. (136:239.)
       *Man Who Was Dead. Col. March 2. (16.)
       Slaver. Col. Feb. 16. (14.)

_Russell, Phillips._
       **Diurne—The Story of a Day’s Work. Lib. Aug. (24.)

“_Rutledge, Marice._”
       _See_ _Van Saanen, Marie Louise_.

_Ryerson, Florence._ (_See 1915 and 1917._)
       Codfish and the Cattle Princess. Sun. Sept. (41.)
       *Simple Home Body. Sn. St. Jan. 18. (32:169.)

_Saanen, Marie Louise van._
       _See_ _Van Saanen, Marie Louise_.

_Sangster, Jr., Margaret E._ (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       *“From the Burning.” Sn. St. May 18. (29.)

_Sawyer, Ruth._ (_Mrs. Albert C. Durand._) (1880- .) (_See 1915, 1916,
and 1917._) (_H._)
       Changeling. G. H. July. (49.)
       For the Honor of the San. G. H. Aug. (35.)
       *Leprechaun of Tin Can Alley. Col. June 8. (17.)
       *Man Who Feared Sleep. G. H. May. (18.)
       **Old King Cole. G. H. June. (30.)
       Psalm of David. Del. Feb. (8.)

_Saxby, Charles._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Mademoiselle Rahab. Ain. June. (22.)
       *Shoes. Ain. May. (50.)

_Scarborough, Dorothy._
       *Engagement-Ring. Harp. M. June. (137:57.)

_Schneider, Herman._ (1872- .) (_See 1917._)
       *From Every Stormy Wind That Blows. Outl. July 10. (119:420.)

_Schnittkind, Henry Thomas._
       *Three Trials. Strat. J. Oct. (3:185.)

_Scott, Emily W._
       *Archbishop of Rheims. Bel. Jan. 19. (24:72.)

_Scott, Margretta._ (_See 1915 and 1916._)
       **Certain Old Woman. B. E. T. Sept. 21. (Pt. 3. p. 5.)
       **Cousin Mary. B. E. T. July 31. (Pt. 2. p. 12.)
       *Invincible Youth. B. E. T. Oct. 16. (Pt. 2. p. 5.)
       *Neither Did Lettie. Mir. July 5. (27:411.)
       Reminder. Mir. May 24. (27:307.)
       *Yellow Jonquils. Mir. Oct. 18. (27:524.)

_Seawell, Molly Eliot._ (1860-1916.) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       Lance Corporal. Del. March. (14.)

_Sedgwick, Anne Douglas._ (_Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt._) (1873- .) (_See
1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       ***Daffodils. Atl. Aug. (122:165.)

_Seiffert, Marjorie Allen._ (1885- .)
       **Neighbor. Mir. Oct. 25. (27:539.)

_Sélincourt, Mrs. Basil de._
       _See_ _Sedgwick, Anne Douglas_.

_Shaw, M. A._
       *Father Hugh. Mid. Jan.-Feb. (4:11.)

_Shearon, Lillian Nicholson._
       Little Mixer. G. H. Jan. (25.)

_Sheehan, Perley Poore._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *On Board the “City of Arverne.” Scr. Sept. (64:335.)

_Shelton, Richard Barker._ (_See 1916; and 1917 under_ “_Oxford, John
Barton._”) (_H._)
       Blind God’s Altar. Del. Jan. (19.)

_Sheridan, A. G._
       *In Sanctuary. Cath. W. July. (107:511.)

_Shields, Gertrude M._
       *Steam Heat. Cen. July. (96:353.)

_Shinn, Anne O’Hagan._
       _See_ _O’Hagan, Anne_.

_Sholl, Anna Mcclure._ (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       *Balsam of Mecca. Del. June. (12.)
       Red Flannel. E. W. April 13. (6.)

_Singmaster, Elsie._ (_Elsie Singmaster Lewars._) (1879- .) (_See 1915,
1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Adrian. Bel. May 4. (24:489.)
       **Grandmother’s Bread. C. G. April 20.
       *Jan. S. E. P. July 27. (73.)
       *Miss Pomfret. S. E. P. June 22. (14.)
       *Mrs. Pillow. S. E. P. Oct. 5. (16.)
       *Music Lesson. Y. C. Feb. 28. (92:97.)
       ***Release. Pict. R. June. (16.)
       *Spirit of ’63. Outl. July 3. (119:383.)
       *When a Man Has a Son. W. H. C. June. (15.)
       **Zion Hill. C. G. Dec. 22, 1917.

_Skinner, Constance (Lindsay.)_ (_See 1915 and 1917._)
       Consider This Woman. Del. May. (6.)

_Slater, Mary White._ (1870- .) (_H._)
       *Jenkins. Harp. M. April. (136:735.)

_Slocombe, Herbert._
       *Wild Ride of Thornton Upton. Adv. May 3. (79.)

_Slyke, Lucille Van._
       _See_ _Van Slyke, Lucille_.

_Smith, Elizabeth C. A._
       _See_ “_Breck, John._”

_Smith, Francis Hopkinson._ (1838-1915.) (_H._)
       ***Colonel Carter Welcomes a Friend. (_R._) Ind. April 27.
               (94:172.)

_Smith, Gordon Arthur._ (1886- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Return. Scr. Feb. (63:163.)

_Sneddon, Robert W._ (1880- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917_) (_H._)
       *Candid Critic. Par. Aug. (113.)
       *Fighting Proud. Bel. Feb. 9. (24:156.)
       *Fleur de Paris. Par. Jan. (105.)
       **Girl in the Red Hat. Par. June. (47.)
       *Last Rendezvous. Sau. St. Feb. (97.)
       *Richard of the Lion’s Heart. Par. Sept. (91.)
       *Son of Belgium. Ain. Aug. (125.)
       **Street of Lost Memories. Ain. Sept. (124.)
       *Tapping Hand. Par. Aug. (29.)
       *To the Immortal Memory of Hyacinthe Perronet. Par. April. (95.)

_Sonnichsen, Albert._ (1878- .)
       Thirteenth Victim. L. H. J. Oct. (12.)

_Sothern, Edward Hugh._ (1859- .) (_See 1917._)
       *Raynor, J. P. Scr. Sept. (64:279.)

*_Soutar, Andrew._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       *“Entered in the Log.” L. St. Jan. (13:285.)
       Hostage. McC. Oct. (11.)
       Power Behind. Met. Jan.

_Spadoni, Adriana._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Red Brothers. L. St. Aug. (51.)

_Spears, Raymond Smiley._ (1876- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       *Hoarded Assets. Scr. June. (63:741.)
       Jim Tilou, Wastrel. Col. Jan. 19. (16.)

“_Spinster, Elderly._
       “_See_ ”:small-caps:_Elderly Spinster._”

_Springer, Fleta Campbell._ (1886- .) (_See 1915 and 1916, and also 1917
under_ _Campbell, Fleta_.) (_H._)
       ***Solitaire. Harp. M. Jan. (136:195.)

_Springer, Norman._ (_See 1915 and 1917._)
       Bag of Makings. S. E. P. March 23. (14.)

*_Stacpoole, Henry de Vere._ (1865- .) (_See 1916._) (_H._)
       *White Eye. Pop. Jan. 20. (79.)

_Starrett, Vincent._
       *Head of Cromwell. B. C. Feb. (16.)
       *Miraculous Image. S. S. April. (101.)

_Stearns. M. M._
       _See_ “_Amid, John._”

_Steele, Alice Garland._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       “We Go Together—You and I.” Am. May. (21.)

_Steele, Wilbur Daniel._ (1886- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       ***Always Summer. Harp. M. April. (136:692.)
       ***Dark Hour. Atl. May. (121:677.)
       ***Eternal Youth. Scr. April. (63:473.)
       ***Man’s a Fool. Met. June. (25.)
       *Mr. Scattergood and the Other World. Harp. M. July. (137:258.)
       ***Perfect Face. Harp. M. Aug. (137:362.)
       ***Taste of the Old Boy. Col. Sept. 28. (11.)
       ***Wages of Sin. Pict. R. March. (8.)
       ***White Man. Harp. M. Feb. (136:423.)
       **“You’re Right, At That.” Col. Feb. 23. (16.)

_Steffens, (Joseph) Lincoln._ (1866- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *Midnight in Russia. McC. May. (22.)

_Stephens, C. A._
       *Guest Who Had Been in Jail. Y. C. April 11. (92:178.)

*_Stephens, James._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       ***Crêpe de Chine. S. S. July. (23.)
       ***Darling. S. S. June. (41.)
       ***Desire. (_R._) Mir. March 1. (27:120.)
       ***Sawdust. Cen. Sept. (96:668.)
       ***School-fellows. Cen. Sept. (96:674.)
       ***Wolf. Cen. Sept. (96:671.)

_Stetson, Grace Ellery Channing._
       _See_ _Channing, Grace Ellery_.

_Stewart, Charles David._ (1868- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Canary Bird. Cen. April. (95:905.)

_Stock, Ralph._ (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       *Dan of the Beach. Sun. June. (17.)

_Stolper, B. J._
       *Andy Jackson Helps Business. All. July 13. (86:363.)

*_Storonny, Vladimir._
       ***Father and Son. Rus. R. April. (4:118.)

_Stratton, Clarence._
       *Jeremiah in the Desert. Strat. J. June. (29.)

_Street, Julian (Leonard)._ (1879- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       ***Bird of Serbia. Col. Aug. 31. (5.)
       *Eye of the Beholder. S. E. P. Oct. 26. (12.)

_Sullivan, Alan._ (1868- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Crawshay Method. Mun. June. (64:180.)

_Swain, John D._ (_H._)
       *Cipher. All. May 18. (84:355.)

*_Swinnerton, Frank._
       *Silver Ring. Bel. Aug. 17. (25:184.)

_Swinney, Mary B._
       Conquerable Soul. Mid. May-June. (4:110.)

_Synon, Mary._ (1881- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Coonskin Caps. Scr. June (63:713.)
       *Not in the Theory. Pict. R. Jan. (14.)
       *Promised Land. Red Book. Aug. (99.)
       *Through His Wife. L. H. J. Aug. (20.)

*_Tagore, Sir Rabindranath._ (_Ravindranatha Thakura._) (1861- .) (_See
1916._) (_H._)
       ***Skeleton. C. O. Aug. (65:125.)

_Tarkington, (Newton) Booth._ (1869- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) *Captain Schlotterwerz. S. E. P. Jan. 26. (3.)
       **Feef and Meemuh. Col. June 1. (10.)
       **“First, Last, and Supper.” Col. Oct. 26. (5.)
       **Little Cousin Sarah. Col. Aug 3. (8.)
       Loneliness. McC. Aug. (13.)
       ***Three Zoölogical Wishes. Col. Sept. 14. (5.)
       **Too Gentle Julia. Col. April 20. (6.)

_Taylor, Anne Ueland._ (_H._)
       New Hat. E. W. June 1. (10.)

_Taylor, Arthur Russell._ (-1918.) (_See 1917._)
       **Return of Mr. Squem. Atl. Feb. (121:239.)
       *“Up to the Good Man.” Atl. Sept. (122:363.)

_Taylor, John._
       _See_ _Dwight, H. G._, _and_ _Taylor, John_.

_Taylor, Katharine Haviland._
       **Fanchon, the Gay. Book. May. (47:275.)

*_Tchekov, Anton._
       _See_ _Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich_.

_Terhune, Albert Payson._ (1872- .) (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Cashing In. E. W. April 20. (6.)
       Dubbess. S. E. P. Aug. 17. (9.)
       Hunger Juggler. S. E. P. July 27. (14.)
       Wildcat. S. E. P. Oct. 19. (10.)

*_Thackeray, William Makepeace._ (1811-1863.)
       ***Colonel Newcome’s Return. (_R._) Ind. March 23. (93:496.)

_Tharp, Vesta._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       *Drafted. Am. June. (50.)

_Thompson, James Henry._
       *Nicholas Drakos Goes Home. B. C. April. (22.)

_Tiffany, J. A._
       *Short Circuit. I. S. M. 2nd Feb. No. (8.)

_Titus, Harold._ (1888- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Dear Little Four-Flusher. Ev. May. (24.)

_Tolman, Albert W._ (1866- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Fifteen By Eleven. Y. C. Aug. 8. (93:999.)
       ***Five Rungs Gone. Y. C. June 27. (93:329.)

_Tompkins, Juliet Wilbor._ (_Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins Pottle._)
(1871- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       Road to Health. S. E. P. Sept. 7. (8.)

_Tooker, Lewis Frank._ (1855- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       **Man Who Was Made in His Own Image. Cen. Aug. (96:533.)

*_Townend, W._ (_H._)
       *Mr. Harrington’s Wife. Adv. Feb. 18. (68.)

_Train, Arthur (Cheney)._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._ )
(_H._) *All the Comrades Were There. Red Book. Feb. (23.)
       Flag of His Country. McC. Aug. (9.)
       Spider of Warsaw. McC. June. (19.)

_Trites, William Budd._ (1872- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       Triumph. McC. March. (6.)

_Troubetzkoy, Princess._
       _See_ _Rives, Amélie_.

_Turner, George Kibbe._ (1869- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Box of Candy. S. E. P. April 13. (16.)
       Decoy. S. E. P. March 2. (10.)
       Dreamwood. S. E. P. Aug. 3. (10.)
       Killing. S. E. P. July 13. (18.)
       Miser. S. E. P. Sept. 7. (37.)

_Turner, Maude Sperry._ (_See 1917._)
       House That Lived. Del. March. (10.)

*_Tynan, Katharine._
       _See_ _Hinkson, Katharine Tynan_.

_Underhill, Ruth Murray._ (_See 1917._)
       *Cheeses from Torre. Sn. St. May 4. (81.)
       Real Eyetalian Vendetta. E. W. Feb. 9. (9.)

_Underwood, Sophie Kerr._
       _See_ _Kerr, Sophie_.

_Unger, Edith._
       *“Back Stairs.” Touch. Oct. (4:46.)

_Unterman, Elsa._
       *Less Than Equal. Lib. Oct. (13.)

_Updegraff, Robert R._
       Bedford Loses His Business Leg. S. E. P. Oct. 26. (8.)

*_Valdagne, Pierre._
       **Sister of Charity. N. Y. Trib. May 19.

_Van Dresser, Jasmine Stone._
       Gordon Hamilton—Sixteen. Met. Sept. (15.)

_Van Dyke, Henry._ (1852- .) (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Primitive and His Sandals. Scr. Aug. (64:142.)

_Van Loan, Charles Emmett._ (1876- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Billy the Kid. S. E. P. June 29. (5.)
       For the Pictures. S. E. P. Oct. 19. (5.)
       Great and Only Lesley. S. E. P. April 27. (9.)
       Mixed Foursome. S. E. P. Jan. 12. (11.)
       Scrap Iron. S. E. P. May 18. (10.)
       “Similia Similibus Curantur.” S. E. P. March 23. (20.)

_Van Saanen, Marie Louise._ (“_Marice Rutledge._”) (_See 1915, 1916, and
1917._) (_See “H” under_ _Goetchius, Marie Louise_.)
       *Cerise. Cos. Sept. (36.)

_Van Slyke, Lucille Baldwin._ (1880- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Blow Your Own Horn. Harp. B. Sept. (56.)

“_Vardon, Claire._”
       **Retreat. Book. June. (47:409.)

_Vaughn, David._
       *Heart of Antoinette. Sn. St. Feb. 4. (32:257.)

_Veiller, Deems._
       *Voice of God. S. S. May. (117.)

_Venable, Edward Carrington._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
       ***“Ali Babette.” Scr. May. (63:537.)
       ***At Isham’s. Scr. July. (64:51.)
       **Getting Out of Mufti. Scr. March. (63:329.)

*_Villiers de l’Isle-Adam._
       ***Heroism of Doctor Halidonhill. Pag. Jan. (18.)

_Von Wien, Florence E._
       Lynoff. Pag. Aug.-Sept. (34.)

_Vorse, Mary (Marvin) Heaton._ (_Mary Heaton Vorse O’Brien._) (_See
1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Case of Carolinda. Harp. M. Aug. (137:342.)
       ***De Vilmarte’s Luck. Harp. M. March. (136:571.)
       ***Huntington’s Credit. Harp. M. Feb. (136:327.)
       *Laugh. Harp. M. July. (137:203.)
       ***River Road. Harp. M. Oct. (137:608.)
       Strayed House. G. H. Sept. (39.)
       *Temperamental Husband. Touch. Jan. (2:391.)

_Wade, Robert._
       *Cap’n Tristram’s Shipbuilding. Atl. July. (122:76.)

_Wadsworth, Eulita._
       **Message. Mid. July-Aug. (4:172.)

_Wall, R. N._ (_See 1917._ ) (_H._)
       Buffer. Ev. May. (42.)
       Outcast. E. W. May 18. (7.)

*_Wallace, Edgar._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Annie—the Gun. Ev. Feb. (25.)
       Duke’s Museum. Ev. Sept. (54.)
       Enter the Americans! Ev. Aug. (58.)
       Last Load. Ev. July. (54.)
       *Law-Breaker and Frightfulness. Ev. March. (52.)
       Madness of Valentine. Col. Feb. 9. (22.)
       Man Behind the Circus. Ev. April. (25.)
       Man Called McGinnice. Ev. Oct. (47.)
       Question of Rank. Ev. May. (54.)
       Reprisal Raid. Ev. June. (47.)
       *Sleuth. Adv. Feb. 3. (101.)

_Warren, Maude (Lavinia) Radford._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and
1917._) (_H._)
       *Garden of the Unwithered Hearts. McCall. Sept. (7.)
       Road Through the Dark. Met. March. (12.)

*_Watson, E. L. Grant._
       ***Cobwebs and Starshine. S. S. June. (93.)
       ***Man and Brute. S. S. July. (57.)

_Watson, Jean._
       Care. Mir. April 5. (27:208.)

_Webster, Henry Kitchell._ (1875- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Harbor. Met. Jan. (11.)

_Webster, (Alice) Jean._ (_Mrs. G. F. Mckinney._) (1876-1916.) (_H._)
       What Happened at School (_R._) Ind. May 11. (94:255.)

_Welles, Harriet._ (_See 1917._)
       **Duty First. Scr. June. (63:689.)
       *In the Day’s Work. Scr. Oct. (64:450.)
       **Wall. Scr. March. (63:369.)

_Wells, Leila Burton._ (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Invisible Divorce. Am. Sept. (29.)
       Jade Lady. S. E. P. April 20. (61.)

_Weston, George (T.)._ (1880- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       Bloom of the Peach. S. E. P. Sept. 21. (12.)
       **Feminine Touch. S. E. P. Sept. 7. (14.)
       For the Love of Lulu. S. E. P. Feb. 2. (15.)
       Gem of the Old Rock. S. E. P. Oct. 5. (9.)
       **Girl Who Wasn’t Refined. S. E. P. Jan. 26. (9.)
       Grand Romantic Manner. S. E. P. Feb. 9. (8.)
       *Inspiration of M’sieur. S. E. P. March 16. (10.)
       Old Maids Have Warm Hearts. S. E. P. April 20. (5.)
       *Uncle Heiney and the Major. Ain. Feb. (92.)
       *Village Cut-Up. Pict. R. Oct. (20.)

_Wharton, Edith_ (_Newbold Jones_.) (1862- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._)
(_H._) *Marne. S. E. P. Oct. 26. (3.)

_Wharton, Mabel H._
       *Refuge. Cal. Jan. (22.)

_Whitaker, Herman._ (1867- .) (_See 1915._) (_H._)
       Sheep. Sun. March. (35.)

_Widdemer, Margaret._ (_See 1915 and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Convent at Thomé. Sn. St. April 18. (63.)

_Wien, Florence E. von._
       _See_ _Von Wien, Florence E._

_Wilcoxson, Elizabeth Gaines._ (_See 1917._) (_H._)
       Dream. Pict. R. May. (10.)
       **Morning. E. W. Jan. 19. (7.)

_Wiley, Hugh._ (_See 1917._)
       **Melting Point. Scr. Jan. (63:84.)

_Williams, Ben Ames._ (1889- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Right Whale’s Flukes. Bel. June 29. (24:713.)

_Williams, Jesse Lynch._ (1871- .) (_H._)
       Professor and the Painted Lady. Met. Feb. (9.)

_Willson, Dixie._
       *Imogene Novré. All. March 16. (82:102.)
       *Little John. All. July 27. (86:666.)

_Wilson, Harry Leon._ (1867- .) (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       *Ma Pettengill and the Animal Kingdom. S. E. P. May 11. (5.)
       *One Arrowhead Day. S. E. P. July 13. (8.)
       *Porch Wren. S. E. P. July 20. (5.)
       *Red Gap and the Big League Stuff. S. E. P. June 15. (9.)
       *Vendetta. S. E. P. July 6. (12.)

_Wilson, John Fleming._ (1877- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._) (_H._)
       *Commodore Erroll’s Subscription. S. E. P. Jan. 12. (16.)
       *Resurrection of Slack-Lime Jones. Red Bk. Sept. (39.)
       Sailorman Born. Col. April 27. (15.)

_Wilson, Kathryne._
       *In the Making. Sn. St. Oct. 3. (89.)

_Wilson, Margaret._
       _See_ “_Elderly Spinster._”

_Wilson, Margaret Adelaide._ (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Bee-Loud Glade. Bel. Feb. 2. (24:121.)

_Wilson, Richard Henry._
       _See_ “_Fisguill, Richard._”

_Wimsatt, Genevieve._
       *Alibis. Sn. St. May 18. (35.)

*_Windeler, B._
       ***Elimus. Lit. R. April. (13.)

_Winslow, Thyra Samter._ (1889- .) (_See 1917._)
       ***Eva Duveen. S. S. June. (99.)

_Witwer, H. C._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       Don’t Give Up the Tip. Am. Sept. (21.)
       Licking the Huns. McC. May. (5.)
       “Life Is Reel.” Am. June. (38.)
       Play Your Ace! Am. May. (26.)

*_Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville._ (1881- .) (_See 1915, 1916, and 1917._)
(_H._) Jeeves and the Chump Cyril. S. E. P. June 8. (10.)

_Wolff, William Almon, Jr._ (1885- .) (_See 1916 and 1917._) (_H._)
       Loan of a Lady. Col. Sept. 7. (15.)
       Point—Set—March. Ev. Aug. (40.)
       Ruling Love. Ev. June. (35.)
       Situations Wanted—Male. Ev. Oct. (41.)

_Wood, Eugene._ (1860- .) (_H._)
       *Mystery of the Six Dessert-Plates. Red Book. May. (99.)

_Wood, Frances Gilchrist._
       ***As Between Mothers. Tod. Sept. (3.)
       ***White Battalion. Book. May. (47:270.)

_Wood, John Seymour._ (1853- .) (_See 1915._)
       ***In the House of Morphy. Scr. Feb. (63:231.)

_Wood, Julia Francis._ (_H._)
       Parable for Fathers. Atl. Jan. (121:77.)

_Worts, George F._
       Small-Town Stuff. Col. Aug. 10. (9.)
       Sparks Goes to War. Col. Oct. 26. (10.)

_Wright, Richardson (Little)._ (1886- .) (_See 1915._)
       **Thug. S. S. June. (111.)

*_Wylie, I. A. R._ (_See 1916 and 1917._)
       Gift of Prophecy. G. H. Feb. (25.)
       Last Cure. G. H. May. (29.)
       Richard Enters the Lists. G. H. March. (28.)
       Two of a Trade. G. H. April (20.)
       Unmaking a Marquis. G. H. Jan. (21.)

_Yates, L. B._ (_See 1915 and 1916._) (_H._)
       Caveat Emptor. S. E. P. May 18. (53.)

_Yezierska, Anzia._ (_See 1915._)
       **Where Lovers Dream. Met. March. (17.)

_Young, James C._
       “Kamerad.” McC. April. (11.)
       Man Who Knew His Place. McC. March. (26.)

*_Yvignac, Henri d’._
       *End of a Friendship. N. Y. Trib. June 23.

_Zerr, Gertrude A._
       Way Down in Dixie. Sun. July. (37.)

                                  ――――




                           Transcriber’s Note


Spelling and obvious punctuation inaccuracies were corrected.

Given multiple authors and the use of dialect in some stories:

    Archaic and variable spelling is preserved;

    Hyphenation and accented word variations are preserved;

    The authors’ punctuation styles are preserved.