The best short stories of 1916, and the yearbook of the American short story
Author: Unknown
Date: 2026-09-25T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Short stories; American; American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories -- 20th century -- Bibliography; Short stories -- 20th century -- Indexes

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The best short stories of 1916, and the yearbook of the American short story

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The best short stories of 1916, and the yearbook of the American short story

Editor: Edward J. O'Brien

Release date: September 25, 2026 [eBook #79656]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Small, Maynard & Company, 1916

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79656

Credits: Chuck Greif and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916, AND THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY ***

CONTENTS
NECROLOGY
MAGAZINE AVERAGES FOR 1916
INDEX OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1916

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916

THE
BEST SHORT STORIES
OF 1916

AND THE

YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN
SHORT STORY

EDITED BY
EDWARD J. O’BRIEN

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1917, by The Boston Transcript Co.

Copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner’s Sons, Harper and Brothers, The Century Company, P. F. Collier & Son, Inc., Mitchell Kennerley, Every Week Corporation, The Bellman Company, The Curtis Publishing Company, George H. Doran Company, The Seven Arts Publishing Company, Inc., The Boston Transcript Co., R. M. McBride & Company, The Pictorial Review Company, The Atlantic Monthly Company, The Shortstory Publishing Company, and The Metropolitan Magazine Company.

Copyright, 1917, by Gertrude Atherton, Barry Benefield, Frederick Booth, Dana Burnet, Francis Buzzell, Theodore Dreiser, Armistead C. Gordon, Frederick Stuart Greene, Richard Matthews Hallet, Fannie Hurst, Mary Lerner, Jeannette Marks, Walter J. Muilenburg, Albert Du Verney Pentz, Benjamin Rosenblatt, Elsie Singmaster Lewars, Gordon Arthur Smith, and Wilbur Daniel Steele.

Copyright, 1917, by Edward J. O’Brien.

Copyright, 1917, by Small, Maynard and Company, Inc.

TO
RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET

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 copyright holders:

To Harper and Brothers and Mrs. Gertrude Atherton for permission to reprint “The Sacrificial Altar,” first published in Harper’s Magazine; to The Century Company and Mr. Barry Benefield for permission to reprint “Miss Willett,” first published in The Century Magazine; to The Seven Arts Publishing Company, Inc., and Mr. Frederick Booth for permission to reprint “Supers,” first published in The Seven Arts Magazine; to R. M. McBride & Company and Mr. Dana Burnet for permission to reprint “Fog,” first published in McBride’s Magazine; to The Pictorial Review Company and Mr. Francis Buzzell for permission to reprint “Ma’s Pretties,” first published in The Pictorial Review; to The Curtis Publishing Company, The George H. Doran Company, and Mr. Irvin S. Cobb for permission to reprint “The Great Auk,” first published in The Saturday Evening Post, and included in “Local Color and Other Stories,” by Irvin S. Cobb, published by The George H. Doran Company, New York, 1916; to The Century Company and Mr. Theodore Dreiser for permission to reprint “The Lost Phoebe,” first published in The Century Magazine; to Charles Scribner’s Sons and Mr. Armistead C. Gordon for permission to reprint “The Silent Infare,” first published in Scribner’s Magazine; to The Metropolitan Magazine Company and Mr. Frederick Stuart Greene for permission to reprint “The Cat of the Cane-Brake,” first published in The Metropolitan Magazine; to The Every Week Corporation and Mr. Richard Matthews Hallet for permission to reprint “Making Port,” first published in Every Week and The Associated Sunday Magazines; to P. F. Collier & Son, Inc., and Miss Fannie Hurst for permission to reprint “‘Ice Water, Pl—!’” first published in Collier’s Weekly; to The Atlantic Monthly Company and Miss Mary Lerner for permission to reprint “Little Selves,” first published in The Atlantic Monthly; to The Pictorial Review Company and Miss Jeannette Marks for permission to reprint “The Sun Chaser,” first published in The Pictorial Review; to Mr. Mitchell Kennerley, Mr. Walter J. Muilenburg, and The Forum Publishing Company for permission to reprint “At the End of the Road,” first published in The Forum; to The Boston Transcript and Mr. Albert Du Verney Pentz for permission to reprint “The Big Stranger of Dorchester Heights,” first published in The Boston Evening Transcript; to The Bellman Company and Mr. Benjamin Rosenblatt for permission to reprint “The Menorah,” first published in The Bellman; to The Pictorial Review Company and Mrs. Elsie Singmaster Lewars for permission to reprint “Penance,” first published in The Pictorial Review; to Charles Scribner’s Sons and Mr. Gordon Arthur Smith for permission to reprint “Feet of Gold,” first published in Scribner’s Magazine; to Harper and Brothers and Mr. Wilbur Daniel Steele for permission to reprint “Down on Their Knees,” first published in Harper’s Magazine, and to The Shortstory Publishing Company and Miss Alice L. Tildesley for permission to reprint “Half-Past Ten,” first published in The Black Cat.

Acknowledgments are specially due to The Boston Evening Transcript for permission to reprint the large body of material previously published in the columns of that paper.

I wish specially to express my gratitude to the following who have materially assisted by their efforts in making this yearbook of American fiction possible and more complete:

Mr. A. A. Boyden, Mr. Bruce Barton, Mr. Henry A. Bellows, Mr. Barry Benefield, Mr. Frederick Lewis Allen, Mr. Karl Edwin Harriman, Mr. Edward Frank Allen, Mr. Robert M. McBride, Mr. George H. Doran, Mr. Carl Hovey, Miss Sonya Levien, Mr. William Griffith, Mr. Arthur T. Vance, Mr. Mitchell Kennerley, Mr. Bernard Dailey, Miss Sarah Field Splint, Mr. Hiram M. Greene, Mr. Robert Bridges, Mr. Hayden Carruth, Mr. Thomas B. Wells, Mr. Henry J. Forman, Mr. Mark Sullivan, Mr. Charles Hanson Towne, Miss Margaret Anderson, Mr. William Marion Reedy, Mr. John T. Frederick, Mr. Ival McPeak, Mr. Burton Kline, Miss Dorothea Lawrance Mann, Mr. Thomas H. Uzzell, Miss Hilda Baker, Mr. William Stanley Braithwaite, Mr. Leo Pasvolsky, Mr. Frank Owen, Mr. Lewis Allen Browne, Mr. Alexander Harvey, Miss Louise Collier Wilcox, Mr. Don C. D. Moore, Mrs. Anne Shannon Monroe, Mr. T. D. Pendleton Cummins, Miss Margaret Prescott Montague, Mr. Frederick Stuart Greene, Mr. Llewellyn Jones, Mr. Edward Lyell Fox, Mr. H. M. Guilbert, Mrs. Mary Woodson Shippey, Mr. Harry V. Lawrence, Miss Catherine Lecky, Miss Josephine Conger-Kaneko, Colonel T. D. Landon, Miss Anne Rankin, Mr. Seumas O’Brien, Mrs. Edward Pearce Nagel, Dr. W. H. Starratt, Mr. John J. Phillips, Mr. W. A. Dwiggins, Mr. Lawrance B. Siegfried, Mr. Francis Buzzell, Mr. Lucian Cary, Mr. M. M. Stearns, Mr. Reginald Wright Kauffman, Mr. Horatio Winslow, Mrs. John R. Fisher, Miss Helen Christine Bennett, Mr. Herman E. Cassino, Mr. Sewell Haggard, Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, Mr. William Rose Benét, Mr. Edmond McKenna, Mr. Dana Burnet, Miss Agnes C. Laut, Mr. William Frederick Bigelow, Mr. Samuel W. Hippler, Mr. Joseph Bernard Rethy, Mr. Robert W. Sneddon, Miss Myra G. Reed, Mr. Robert H. Davis, Mr. Harold T. Pulsifer, Mr. Ray Long, Mr. Waldo Frank, Mr. H. E. Maule, Mr. Henry L. Mencken, Mr. Henry T. Schnittkind, Mr. Charles K. Field, Mr. Martyn Johnson, Mr. Padraic Colum, and Mr. Francis J. Hannigan.

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 and publishers of stories published during 1917 which have qualities of distinction, and yet are not printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice. These communications may be addressed to me at South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. For such assistance, I shall make due and grateful acknowledgment in next year’s annual.

If I have been guilty of any omissions in these acknowledgments, it is quite unintentional, and I trust that I shall be absolved for my good intentions.

E. J. O.

CONTENTS

| Page
Introduction. By the Editor | 1
The Sacrificial Altar. By Gertrude Atherton | 7
(From Harper’s Magazine)
Miss Willett. By Barry Benefield | 37
(From The Century Magazine)
Supers. By Frederick Booth | 52
(From The Seven Arts Magazine)
Fog. By Dana Burnet | 58
(From McBride’s Magazine)
Ma’s Pretties. By Francis Buzzell | 75
(From The Pictorial Review)
The Great Auk. By Irvin S. Cobb | 85
(From The Saturday Evening Post)
The Lost Phoebe. By Theodore Dreiser | 115
(From The Century Magazine)
The Silent Infare. By Armistead C. Gordon | 133
(From Scribner’s Magazine)
The Cat of the Cane-Brake. By Frederick Stuart Greene | 149
(From The Metropolitan Magazine)
Making Port. By Richard Matthews Hallet | 162
(From Every Week)
“Ice Water, Pl—!” By Fannie Hurst | 181
(From Collier’s Weekly)
Little Selves. By Mary Lerner | 212
(From The Atlantic Monthly)
The Sun Chaser. By Jeannette Marks | 226
(From The Pictorial Review)
At the End of the Road. By Walter J. Muilenburg | 262
(From The Forum)
The Big Stranger on Dorchester Heights. By Albert Du Verney Pentz | 272
(From The Boston Evening Transcript)
The Menorah. By Benjamin Rosenblatt | 275
(From The Bellman)
Penance. By Elsie Singmaster | 282
(From The Pictorial Review)
Feet of Gold. By Gordon Arthur Smith | 294
(From Scribner’s Magazine)
Down on Their Knees. By Wilbur Daniel Steele | 322
(From Harper’s Magazine)
Half-Past Ten. By Alice L. Tildesley | 349
(From The Black Cat)
The Yearbook of the American Short Story for 1916 | 357
The Roll of Honor for 1916 | 359
Volumes of Short Stories Published During 1916 | 365
Fifty American Short Stories of 1916: A Critical Summary | 374
Necrology for 1916 | 388
Magazine Averages for 1916 | 389
Index of Short Stories for 1916 | 394

INTRODUCTION

IN reviewing once more the short stories published in American periodicals during a year, it has been my pleasant task to study the imaginative interpretation of the period of which these short stories are the chief documentary expression. Last year I was moved to compare the American short story with that of other countries, and was driven to the conclusion that we were developing a new literary form, organically different from everything that preceded it, and still in the interesting process of developing its own technique.

The truth is that the American short story cannot be reduced to a literary formula, and if we are to measure its progress at all, it must be, as Mr. Chesterton once happily phrased it, with a growing reed. In the past it has been a frequent comment on our literature and our life to find that its interpretation in the hands of our writers was less individual and more standardized than in other countries. There is still much truth in this observation, and were the fact which it chronicles a completely true generalization, I should have little hope for any future literature of permanent importance in this country.

But during the past few years, slowly and naturally as the budding and growth of a plant, a new spirit in fiction has been making itself felt and spreading itself in many directions throughout the country. It had been felt in poetry much earlier, and the full fruition of its art in our poetry has almost come, but in fiction it is still young and requires much fostering in the hands of our native writers.

Our artists are beginning to think of life wholly in terms of the individual, and to substitute the warmth of the individual in place of the generalised and sentimentalised types to which our American public has been so whole-heartedly accustomed.

In these annual studies of the American short story, 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 of life which flows through the best of our work, and the psychological and imaginative reality that our writers have conferred upon the substance of it.

No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and we are still surrounded by it in almost all of our magazines. The new impulse must find its own substance freshly, and interpret it naturally in new forms, rather than in the stereotyped utterances to which we have been so long accustomed.

During the past year I have read about twenty-five hundred stories, and from this number I have sought to select those which have rendered life imaginatively in organic substance and artistic form. As the most adequate means to this end, to reaffirm my explanations of previous years, I have taken each short story by itself, and examined it impartially. I have done my best to surrender myself to the writer’s point of view, and granting his choice of material and personal interpretation of its value, have sought to test it by the double standard of substance and 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 obtain substantial embodiment when the artist’s power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth. I assume that such a living truth is the artist’s essential object. 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 known as the test of substance.

But a second test is necessary in this qualitative analysis if a story is to take high rank above other stories. The test of organic substance is the most vital test, to be sure, and if a story survives it, it has imaginative life. The true artist, however, 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 year-book without comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of those stories which may fairly claim to 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 year-book 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 year-book 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 a spiritual sincerity so earnest, and a creative belief so strong, that each of these stories may fairly claim, in my opinion, a position of some permanence in our literature as a criticism of life. Stories of such quality are indicated in the year-book index by three asterisks prefixed to the title, and, if by American writers, are also listed in a special “Roll of Honor.” In compiling this list, I must repeat that 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 this list, an asterisk is prefixed, and this asterisk, I must confess, reveals in some measure a personal preference. Stories indicated by this asterisk seem to me not only distinctive, but so highly distinguished as to necessitate their ultimate preservation between book covers. 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 or, as a general rule, a short story whose publication in book form seems likely. 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. It only remains now to point out certain passing characteristics of the year for the sake of chronological completeness.

The short stories published by Wilbur Daniel Steele during the past year have placed him with Katharine Fullerton Gerould at the head of his fellow-artists. It has been a rare pleasure to perceive his deepening substance and the gradual perfecting of his art. Irvin S. Cobb, whose great gifts are indubitable, has published more than one short story this year of permanent literary importance. Were his production less, and his standards more rigidly artistic, he would soon share with Fannie Hurst the distinction of interpreting with fine democratic heart the heart of the American people as adequately as Mark Twain and O. Henry. Vincent O’Sullivan, an American who has returned home after many years in English and French environments, has brought back to our fiction a subtle humor and finesse of execution which promises work as fine as that of the best Continental masters. Of the younger men and women who begin to define their place in our literature, I have found the work of Frederick Stuart Greene, Richard Matthews Hallet, Jeannette Marks, Gordon Arthur Smith, and Robert W. Sneddon the most uniformly satisfying. The two most distinctive new writers who have published short stories this year are Francis Buzzell and Sherwood Anderson. It is no mere coincidence that the finest expression of our national life among the younger men is coming out of the Middle West. The Midland has been a fruitful influence, and out of Chicago have come a band of writers including Anderson, Buzzell, Hecht, Lindsay, Masters, and Sandburg with an altogether new substance, saturated with the truth of the life they have experienced. I prophesy that the novels which Sherwood Anderson, Francis Buzzell, and Ben Hecht will publish during the next two or three years will mark a new era in the history of American fiction.

Of the new periodicals which have made their appearance during the past year, The Seven Arts Magazine is easily the most promising. In its pages, one finds already the most representative work of the best among our Eastern interpreters. It should serve the same torch-bearing function in the East as The Midland continues to serve in the Middle West, and with no less distinction, though with more sophistication.

Three new periodicals are introducing foreign masterpieces of the contemporary short story to us in adequate translations: The Russian Review, The Stratford Journal, and The Pagan.

As it was my pleasure and honor last year to associate this annual volume with the name of Benjamin Rosenblatt, whose story “Zelig” seemed to me the finest flowering of the literary year, it is my happiness this year to dedicate the best that I have found in the American magazines during the past year as the fruit of my labors to Richard Matthews Hallet, who has contributed to American literature in “Making Port” a story of noble imaginative substance and consummate literary art.

Edward J. O’Brien.

South Yarmouth, Massachusetts
December 5, 1916.

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916

THE SACRIFICIAL ALTAR [1]

By GERTRUDE ATHERTON

From Harper’s Magazine

LOUIS BAC drifted like a gray shadow through the gray streets of San Francisco. Even the French colony, one of the most homogeneous units of the city, knew little more of him than the community at large. He was the son of one famous restaurateur and the grandson of another; he had been sent to a Lycée in Paris at the age of twelve, graduated from the University of Paris at twenty-two, and returned to San Francisco upon the death of his father a year later. The French colony were surprised that he did not go back to Paris after selling the restaurant—his energetic mother had pre-deceased her husband—but buried himself in the old Bac home behind the eucalyptus-trees on the steepest hillside of the city; otherwise his return and himself attracted no attention whatever until he flung his hat into the spaces of the international arena.

Both his father, Henri Bac II, and his shrewd mother, Antoinette, had been agreed upon giving their studious ascetic little son a true American’s chance to rise in the world, and, acting on the advice of their chief patron and the leader of the French colony, M. César Dupont, who offered his escort, had sent the boy to the Collège Louis le Grand. They never saw their only child again; but although Louis had been reticent of speech, he proved a very prodigal with his pen. As the years passed, it became evident—the entire French colony read these letters—that his goal was belles lettres and that he was practising on his family. Finally, after many mutations his style became so formal and precise that M. Dupont became alarmed and, during his next visit to Paris, invited the young man to breakfast.

Louis by this time was eighteen, of medium height, as thin as all overworked, underfed, underoxygenated Lycée boys, with large gray eyes that were rarely raised, a long pale face, a long thin nose, a small thin-lipped mouth. The brow was abnormally large, the rest of the head rather small. It was not an attractive personality, M. Dupont reflected—he had not seen Louis for several years—but the boy carried something uncommon in his head-piece, or he, César Dupont, fashionable merchant and bon viveur, had studied the craniums of a thousand San Francisco geniuses in vain.

He had taken his guest to the Restaurant de la Tour d’Argent, and while the duck’s frame was being crushed he asked, abruptly:

“Have you given a thought to your future career, Louis? Of course you know you will not be obliged to drudge, but to be a professor of French literature is not without its éclat, and, I fancy, more in your line than commerce.”

Louis’s lip curled. “I have no more intention of being a professor than of being a merchant,” he said in his cold precise voice. “I shall write.”

“Ah!” M. Dupont drew a sigh of relief. He had feared the boy would be forbiddingly reticent. “I hoped as much from your letters. Your refinement of mind and style are remarkable for a man of your years. Shall you write plays?”

A faint color had invaded the youth’s cheeks under this considered flattery, and when he lifted his deeply set gray eyes to M. Dupont’s it was almost with the frankness of man to man. But he was intensely shy, and although more at his ease with this handsome genial patron of his family, he made his confidences without warmth.

“No. I shall write the novel. The dramatic form does not appeal to me.”

“Ah! Yes. I am not surprised. Your style is certainly more narrative—descriptive. But to be a novelist, my son, you must have seen a good deal of life. You must know the great world—unless—perhaps—you contemplate writing romance?”

Again the delicate lip opposite curled, and Louis almost choked over his morsel of duck. “Romance? No, Monsieur. I am a realist by temperament and mental habit. Nor do I need the great world. Only one thing interests me—crime.”

“Crime? Mon Dieu!” The amiable merchant almost choked in his turn, although he savored his duck more slowly than his Lycée guest. “Crime! But you are too young, my son, to be interested in anything so grim. Life is to enjoy. And how can you enjoy with your mind like a morgue?”

“We are not all made to enjoy in the same fashion. I enjoy intensely reading through old volumes of criminal records and trials—my master in psychology has kindly arranged that I shall have access to them. And I read with the greatest interest the details of current criminology. I shall never care for society, for I am too timid and dislike women. But I love the lonely grandeur of nature, and music, and great books and pictures. Have no fear, Monsieur, my mind is not polluted. It is purely scientific, this interest; the psychology of crime happens to appeal to my peculiar gifts.”

“But—that is it—your gifts are literary—but yes! I do not like the idea of wasting them on that lamentable subdivision of human society which one ignores save when held up by a footpad. With but few exceptions it has appealed only to the inferior order of writing talent. Even in France the masters do not condescend. With them crime is an incident, not a motif.”

“Has it occurred to you, Monsieur, that without the pioneers—”

“Oh, yes, perhaps—but you—”

“I am young and unknown? Of what author has that not at least once been said? I purpose to write novels—not mere stories—in which character and life shall be revealed in the light of the boldest and the subtlest crimes—murder preferably—and executed in a form and style above cavil—I hope! Oh, I hope! Moreover, I shall write my books in two languages—I have taken special courses in English. In that, too, I shall be unique.”

“Be careful of that style of yours, my son. It is growing a little too academic, and I, a Frenchman, say that! It would do for the essay, and win the praise of the expiring generation of critics, and the younger but non-creative formalists, but I infer you wish to be read by the public. You would also make money as well as achieve fame. Is it not?”

“Quite so. My father wishes that I live until I am thirty in California and vote—I, mon Dieu! But I shall follow his wishes. Then I shall buy a château here in France, for our châteaux are incomparable in beauty. Fame, but yes. It would make my nostrils quiver. But all that is as nothing to the joy of writing. Then my soul almost sings. I am almost happy, but not quite.”

He paused and his brow darkened. He raised his eyes and stared past his anxious host, far into some invisible plane of tormentingly elusive dreams. M. Dupont wisely remained silent, and Louis resumed, abruptly: “When I shall write as spontaneously as the spring bubbles or the ice melts, when my brain hardly knows what my pen is doing, when I experience that terrific uprush that would drown the more conscious parts of the intellect were it not for the perfect mastery of technique—that is it, monsieur! I am still an infant with my tools. Do not permit my style to cause you anxiety. It is merely in one stage of experiment. I shall not write a line for publication until I am four-and-twenty. I shall send forth my first professional novel on the third of October—my birthday—1900. Meanwhile, I enter the university this year, and take the course in literature. At twenty-two I shall graduate and take my Ph.D. Then I shall serve for a year as a reporter on a London newspaper. So shall I obtain perfect freedom with the English language and that first-hand contact with life which I realize is of a certain necessity. But after that no more of the world. I hate it—realities. I wish to live in my mind, my imagination; to spend every hour when I do not exercise for my nerves or sleep to refresh my faculty, in writing, writing—that one day shall be creating.”

Louis carried out his programme to the letter, and published, in 1900—some five years before the terrific episode which it is my melancholy privilege to chronicle—the first of those novels of crime that commanded the sedate attention of the intellectual world. Entombed as it were in the old house under the creaking eucalyptus-trees, with a padlock on his gate, he had rewritten it six times from the original draft—which, according to his method, contained nothing but the stark outline of the plot, every detail of which was thought out during long hours of exterior immobility. Three successive sets of servants, mistaking this accomplishment in petrifaction for a form of insanity which might at any moment express itself in violence, left abruptly. Finally, old Madame Dupont established in the kitchen wing an elderly Frenchman and his wife who had once presided over a hotel for artists, and thereafter Louis had peace and enforced nutrition.

It was during the long months of rewriting, of developing his characters by a subtle secondary method of his own, of profound analysis, and a phrasing which drew heavily on the adjectival vocabulary of the critics later on, that he really enjoyed himself. The last revision was devoted exclusively to the study and improvement of every sentence in the long book; and indeed there is no doubt that these months, from skeleton to trousseau, were, with one tremendous exception, the happiest period of this unhappy creator’s life.

This book in its cold intellectual remoteness appealed as little to Louis when he read it in print as it did to the public, and he set himself grimly to work to pour red blood into the veins of his characters and give his next book the rhythm of life as well as of style. Once more he was hailed by the intellectuals, but fell short of popular recognition, which, belonging himself to the intellectual democracy, he estimated far above the few who win their little fame by writing about the creators in art, or even above the artist himself. He was determined to enthrall, to create the perfect illusion. He scorned to be a cult, and when he saw himself alluded to as a “high-brow-lit” he wept. But above all he passionately wished for that intoxication in creation in which consciousness of self was obliterated, the power, as he expressed it, to write one book charged with the magnetism of a burning soul. He always felt, despite his love of his work, as cold and deliberate as a mathematician. And yet he spun his complicated plots with the utmost facility. There was no more doubt of his talent, in the minds of those who wrote essays of him in the reviews, than of his psychological insight and his impeccable style.

Poor Louis! Spurred on by his anxious and experienced friend, M. César Dupont, he made a meticulous attempt to adore a little French milliner; but the young artist, who would have been a monk in the Middle Ages and left to his monastery a precious heritage of illuminated manuscripts, returned within the month to his art (with abject apologies), set his teeth, and dissected the whole affair for his next book; presenting Céleste, the pivot of a demoniacal crime, in all the phases, common or uncommon, to a woman of her type. This novel, which he estimated as his worst, achieved to his disgust a certain measure of popularity, and the reporters hammered at his gate. San Francisco, which after its first mild interest, had forgotten him, awoke to a sense of its own importance, and besieged M. Dupont, whose acquaintance extended far beyond the French colony, for introductions. But Louis would have none of them. He went on writing his novels, taking his walks at midnight, never leaving the house otherwise unless to visit a bookstore or sit in the back of a box at the play, and literally knew no one in the city of his birth but old Madame Dupont, her son, and his two old servants, Philippe and Seraphine. It was after his seventh novel, when he felt himself growing stale, taking less pleasure in the mere act of writing, and losing his hold on his good friends, the intellectuals, that he took his trouble, as was his habit, to M. César.

They dined in the old Dupont mansion on Nob Hill, built, like the humbler home of the Bacs, in the city’s youth, and alone, as Madame was in bed with an influenza. M. César as a rule entertained at his club, and had a luxurious suite for bachelor purposes in a select apartment-house kept by a compatriot, but, like a dutiful son, he made a pretense of sharing his mother’s evening meal at six o’clock, no matter where he might be dining at eight.

For an hour after dinner Louis paced up and down the library and unburdened himself while M. César smoked in the depths of a chair. This confidence, which included rage at his own limitations, disgust with the critics who encouraged such miserable failures as he, and invective against fate for planting the fiction imp in what should have been a purely scientific mind and then withholding the power to electrify his talent with genius, was made about every seven months, and M. César always listened with deep concern and sympathy. He loved Louis, who was sweet of nature and the most inoffensive of egoists, but was beginning to regard him as hopeless. To-night, however, he was admitting a ray of hope.

“Céleste was a failure,” he said, abruptly. “It is no use for you to try that sort of thing again. But live you must. I have given up a dinner at the club to a distinguished guest from abroad to tell you that I insist you give yourself one more chance.”

“What is that?” Louis was alert and suspicious at once.

“Do you remember Berthe?”

“Berthe—your niece at Neuilly?”

“Ah—you do, although you would go to my brother’s house so seldom.”

“He had grown daughters of whom I was afraid, for their cruel instincts were excited by my shyness. But Berthe was a little thing then, very pretty, very sympathetic. I romped with her in the garden sometimes.”

“Just so. Berthe is now twenty, very handsome, very vivacious—a great admirer of M. Louis Bac, celebrated novelist.”

The young Frenchman stared at the elderly Frenchman. “Do you wish that I should marry her?”

“For your sake. For hers—to marry a genius whose vampire mistress is his art—ah, well, it is the fate of woman to be sacrificed when they do not sacrifice us. And Berthe’s would be no mean destiny. I feel convinced that she alone could make you fall madly in love—”

“I shall never see her again. I have lost my old longing for Paris. What difference where a failure exists and plods? Besides, I dreamed once of returning to Paris a master, not a mere formalist who had won the approval of antiquarians.”

“You shall meet her here.”

“Here?”

“She arrives to-morrow.”

“You have planned this, then, deliberately?”

“It is only a dream promising to come true. Not until now has my brother relented and given his consent to Berthe’s taking the long journey. But friends were coming.—It is fate, my son. Try to fall in love with her—but madly! I, who have loved many times, assure you that the intoxication which tempts lesser men to rhyme should stimulate your great gift to its final expression.”

“But marry!” Louis was quite cold. “A wife in my house! Oh no, M. César; I should hate it and her.”

“Not if you loved her. And Berthe has subtlety and variety.”

“And is far too good for me. I should make a detestable husband.”

“Let her make the husband.”

Once more Louis turned cold. “You desire that I shall meet her, talk to her, cultivate her? Oh, God!”

“I mean that you shall go to my tailor to-morrow. My mother will introduce Berthe to the Colony on Friday night. Its most distinguished members will be present—bankers, journalists, merchants, professional men of all sorts; young people will come in for a dance after the dinner of twenty-four. You may run away from the dance, but at the dinner you will sit beside Berthe.”

This time Louis was petrified. “But no! No!”

M. César rose and laid his hand solemnly on his young friend’s shoulder. “For your art, my son, for your divine gift. For both you would lay down your life. Is it not? Another year of this unnatural existence and you will go sterile. And what substitute for you in the long years ahead? Your mind needs a powerful stimulant and at once. The cup approaches your lip. Will you drink or will you turn it upside down?”

“I’ll drink if I can,” said Louis, through his set teeth, “for what you say is true. But I’d rather drink hemlock.”

Louis sat at his bedroom window, for the moon was high and the night was clear. The city that so often was shrouded to its cobblestones in fog, its muffled ghostly silences broken only by his creaking eucalyptus-trees, lay below him in all its bleak gray outlines. But he was not looking at the city, although sensible for the first time of the vast composite presence under the ugly roofs; nor even at the high-flung beauty of Twin Peaks; he stared instead at the cross on Calvary, that gaunt hill that rises above the cemeteries of Lone Mountain. The cross stood out black and austere save when a fog wraith from the sea drifted across it. The emblem of the cross was in tune with his mood to-night, for he felt neither romantic nor imaginative, but pervaded with fear and melancholy. The faith in which he had been bred as a child had long since passed, and to him the cross was merely the symbol of crucifixion.

His eye dropped from the cross to the dark mass of the Catholic cemetery where his parents slept. If his writing faculty should desert him, as M. César had ruthlessly predicted, no power in either world should condemn him to life. He would go out to Lone Mountain, shut himself in the family vault, lie down on the stones, and either drink poison or cut his wrists. This morbid vision had appealed to him before, but never so insidiously as to-night; never before had his spirits remained so persistently at zero as during the past week; never before had their melancholy been darkened by fear, rent by panic.

In spite of his shyness and dislike of women, not only had he nerved himself to the ordeal of meeting Berthe Dupont, but worked himself up to a real desire to fall in love with her, to experience that tremendous emotion from inception to crescendo and liberate the deep creative torrents of his genius. Not for a moment did he hope that she would marry him. On the contrary, what he particularly desired was that she should play with him, enthrall him, transform him into a sentimental ass and a caldron of passion, then flout him, condemn him to the fiendish tortures of the unsatisfied lover.

Six months at his desk of carefully conserved passion and torments, and then, immortal fame!

Louis, who was very honest and as little conceited as an author may be, had for some time believed, with his critics and M. César, that he would come into the full fruition of his gifts only after some great, possibly terrific, adventure of the soul had banished forever that curious lethargy that possessed the unexplored tracts of his genius.

Therefore had poor Louis gone to the tailor of his inexorable mentor, and crawled up the hill on Friday night, his heart hammering, his knees trembling, but his teeth set and his whole being a desperate hope. He was willing to go to the stake. Through his consciousness the outlines of another plot, subtle, intricate, vital, hinting at characters that were personalities, but uncommonly misty and slow to cohere, were wandering. Ordinarily his plots were as sharply outlined as a winter tree against a frosty sky. But now! He must tear up his soul by the roots and fill his veins with fire or this new conception would dribble forth in an image so commonplace that he would take it out to Lone Mountain and immure it with himself.

The Dupont house was perched high above the cut that had made a rough hillside into a bland street for the wealthy. The last automobile was rolling away as Louis reached the long flight of covered outer stairs that led up from the street to the house. He walked even more slowly up that tunnel on end, hoping the company would be in the dining-room when he arrived and he could slink into his seat unnoticed.

The old butler, Jean-Marie, almost shoved him into the drawing-room, and for a moment his terrors retreated before a wave of artistic pleasure never before experienced in the house of Dupont. The heavy old mahogany furniture, the bow-windows, even the clumsy candelabra were completely obliterated by a thousand American Beauty roses. It was a bower of surpassing richness and distinction for a group of women as handsome and exquisitely dressed as Louis had ever seen in the foyer of the opera-house in Paris.

The moment old Madame Dupont, magnificent in brocade and a new wig, espied him, she led the way to the dining-room, before M. César could introduce him to the eager Colony. This relieved Louis almost to the pitch of elation, and he even exchanged a few words with his partner after they were seated at the long table—covered with Madame’s historic silver and crystal—the while he covertly examined the young lady on his left. Mademoiselle Berthe had been taken in by the host and was chatting animatedly with M. Jules Constant, a young banker, who sat opposite.

Louis observed with delight that she was more than pretty, and realized that M. César had with purpose restrained his enthusiasm. Certainly it gave Louis a distinct throb of satisfaction to discover for himself that the young girl was beautiful and of no common type. She might be as practical as most Frenchwomen, but she looked romantic, passionate, mysterious. The heavy lids of her large brown eyes gave them depths and smoldering fires. Her soft brown hair, dark but full of light, was dressed close to her small proud head. She had a haughty little nose and a red babyish mouth filled with bright even teeth. Her complexion was olive and claret; her tall form round, flexible, carried with pride and grace. The contrasts in that seductive face were affecting her inflammable vis-à-vis profoundly.

It was only when dinner was half over that Louis realized with a shock which turned him as pale as his rival, M. Constant, that he felt neither jealousy nor any other of the master passions. He had talked alternately with Mademoiselle Berthe and the shy damsel on his right, and he found the one as interesting as the other. He appreciated that the young lady destined for him was intelligent, and emanated a warm magnetism; moreover, she had both coquetry and indubitable sincerity. Every man at the table was craning his neck, and M. Constant looked ready to fight twelve duels.

And he, Louis Bac, felt nothing!...

Staring at Calvary, his mind drifted over the events of the past week. He had seen Mademoiselle Berthe every day. On two separate occasions he had talked with her alone in the Dupont library. He had liked and admired her increasingly. He found her full of surprises, subtleties; it seemed to him that just such a young woman had been roaming the dim corridors of his brain, impatiently awaiting his call; and as a wife she would be incomparable.

But he did not want a wife. He wanted a grande passion. And he developed not a symptom. He felt not the least desire to impropriate her. Of course there was but one explanation. He was incapable of those profound and racking passions experienced once at least by ordinary men. He was nothing but an intellect with a rotten spot where fiction generated instead of those abnormal impulses that made of men so inflicted social outlaws. Otherwise, he should be quite mad over Berthe Dupont. Her beauty and charm were attracting attention far beyond the French colony. It was Berthe for him or no one. And alas! it was to be neither Berthe nor any one....

The moon flooded the sleeping city as the clocks struck one. Out of that vast composite below, its imagination liberated in dreams, a daring idea sprang, flew upward, darted into Louis’s relaxed brain. Its point wedged, quivered like an arrow. Louis himself quivered, but with fright. Of love and woman he had no personal knowledge save for his brief and shallow episode with Céleste, but of both he had the accumulated knowledge of the masters and the insight of genius.

It was night—a beautiful romantic night. Berthe was beautiful, seductive, at all times; what must she not be in the abandon of sleep? If he could steal to her chamber, gaze upon her unconscious loveliness, was it not categorical that he should be overwhelmed like any ordinary male? To defy her scorn for a few poignant moments, then rush forth repulsed and quite mad, to weep upon his floor until dawn! He stared at the boards of his ascetic chamber with fascinated eyes; ... to writhe there, to beat the floor with his fists, to weep like a good Frenchman.... And he knew that she had gone to bed early to-night, worn out with much gaiety.

He ran lightly down the stairs and let himself out of the house as silently, although his servants slept far in the rear. Even at the top of the hill not a policeman nor a chance pedestrian was in sight. San Francisco, he knew, had a roaring night life, but at this hour the domestic quarters were as silent as a necropolis.

Nor did he meet any one as he walked rapidly along Taylor Street past the dwellings of the rich to the old-fashioned row of houses perched high above the “cut.” As he was within a foot of the Dupont mansion he heard a taxicab in his wake, and darted within the sheltering walls of the covered stair. The cab came to a halt before the house opposite; a man with a black bag jumped out, and was immediately admitted.

A doctor, of course; but Louis, to his surprise, discovered that he was experiencing something like a thrill. If seen, he certainly would be handed over to the police. It was, therefore, a moment of real danger, and he almost laughed aloud as he discovered himself enjoying it. Many times he had described, with the most searching analysis, that sensation of fear during moments of imminent detection—even that subtle thrill along the nerves—but he was in search of an emotion that should shake his passions loose, and he ran lightly up the stairs, dismissing even the agreeable idea that he was also to experience the sensation of being his own housebreaker, so to speak. When he reached the upper terrace he took off his shoes and carried them to a little pagoda behind the house; it was possible that he would have to make a hasty exit by way of Jones Street. Before leaving his shelter he looked out warily; but the neighboring houses were black, and behind the windows of the Dupont library was a row of tall eucalyptus-trees planted as a wind-break. It was by one of the library windows that Louis purposed to enter, for he knew that its catch was broken; Jean-Marie’s memory was old and intermittent.

He raised the window without difficulty and stepped into the room. It was impenetrably dark and full of furniture. On a pedestal was a vase that had belonged to Napoleon, wired and fastened down as an assurance against earthquake. But Louis knew every detail of that room; he crept down its length without encountering a chair, and opened the door.

In the hall a dim light burned. He listened intently, still with a humorous sense that he felt as like a burglar as any he had ever created. But he experienced no impulse to steal and complete the chain of his sensations. His brain, which registered impressions automatically, was quite normal.

He stole up the stair. Not a step creaked. The upper hall also was dimly lit. He knew that Madame had given the jeune fille the room next to hers, but the connecting door was sure to be closed, for the old lady was a light sleeper and minimized disturbance.

There lay the danger. If Madame heard the slightest sound she would ring the bell connecting with the servants’ rooms in the mansard. He tiptoed to her door. She was snoring gently. He walked as softly to a door some ten feet down the hall and turned the knob. It yielded, and he entered the room where Berthe Dupont slept. The young lady was friendly to modern hygiene and the window stood wide open. The radiant moonlight streamed in. Louis, his heart thumping, but his head cool and his hands quiet, walked over to the bed. Berthe lay with her arms tossed outward, her head thrown back, as if consciously drawing attention to the classic outlines under the firm flesh. Her magnificent dark hair streamed over the pillow.

It should have been an entrancing picture, but for some reason it was not. In a moment Louis, with his inexorable eye for detail, realized the peccancy. The young lady’s classic face was slightly swollen from sleep, and pallid; her lips were puffed, and blew out, albeit noiselessly, as the regular breath exhaled.

Nevertheless, it was Berthe, and she slept. This was her bedroom, her maiden bower, inviolate by man. She was at his mercy. Why, then, did he not feel that intoxication of the senses, that unreckoning fury of the male, that would have favored any young blood of the French colony? He did not. He merely gazed resentfully at that diminished beauty. His artistic soul curled up. Far from feeling the sensations of the inexorable lover, his mind turned black with anger both at her and at himself. He hated her unreasonably for disappointing him, for failing to melt the ice in his blood. Well, he had seen the last of her. To-morrow he would shut himself up once more and by a supreme effort of will compel his brain to yield up its skulking treasures.

He turned to leave the room, then shrugged his shoulders and approached the bed, this time more stealthily. Why not give her a fright? That would be something to the credit side of this fiasco, which, he reflected with disgust, involved an insult to the best of his friends. He would make her believe she was being murdered, then get out while she was still too terrified and breathless to cry for help.

His first idea was to press his hands about her throat and choke her gently, not even enough to leave a mark, but quite sufficient to make her kick and writhe with terror. But in that case she would see him—he had not even worn his hat. He picked up a pillow she had tossed to the floor and pressed it against her face. She made a sudden downward movement, gurgling. He pressed more firmly, his eye measuring the distance to the door. But the gurgle affected him oddly. He desired to stop it.

Suddenly he knew that she was awake. She not only attempted to leap upward, but her strong hands clutched the pillow frantically. He had not thought of her arms, of those strong shapely hands he had admired. With a quick catlike leap he was on her chest, his knees hard against her lungs; he caught her hands in one of his, pressing his other arm along that portion of the pillow that covered her nose and mouth. The blood was running swiftly through his veins. His head was light and full of pleasant noises. Suddenly he realized that the tense strong young body of the girl was relaxing, and he felt a joy so fierce, so profound, so complete, that he could have shouted aloud a welcome to his liberated soul and passions as they tore through those ice barriers at last and found their transports in this sublime act of taking life.

For Louis had forgotten his original intention merely to terrify. The literary cultures in his brain had suddenly become personal and imperative. He was as ruthless as man ever is when supreme desire and opportunity coincide, whether the lust be for woman or the enemy on the battle-field. He meant to kill Berthe Dupont and gratify the clamoring male within him to the full. This was his moment. He was no assassin by natural inclination, and but for this providential set of conditions would have gone to his grave a little bourgeois, a literary machine with as frail a hold on his talents as a singer on a voice that had never been placed.

The body lay limp and flabby at last. He was about to remove the pillow, but his artistic soul uncurled itself and made indignant protest. He lifted the clammy hand and felt the pulse. It was still. So was the heart to which he laid his ear briefly.

Although there was still that ecstatic riot in his veins, his brain was by no means confused, and prompted his subsequent acts as coherently as if he were at his desk, pen in hand. He listened at Madame’s door. She still slept rhythmically. He opened the drawers of the bureau and chiffonnier and strewed the contents about the room. In a compartment of the desk he found a loose pile of gold and notes. He pocketed the gold, leaving the drawer open. He found Berthe’s jewel-box in another drawer, wrenched a few diamonds from their setting and threw a brooch out of the window.

As he was about to leave the room he felt a sudden and different impulse toward Madame’s door. But he was above all things an artist. Why repeat a great experience with possibly failing ardors? And in satiety lay the terrible danger of finding himself at his desk driving a pen heavy with reaction that should be tipped with fire.

He returned through the silent house and out of it as noiselessly as he had come. In the pagoda he tied his shoes properly lest the dragging laces impede his progress or attract attention.

And then he heard some one coming stealthily up the stairs from the street. A policeman, of course! In an instant he had darted through the tradesman’s entrance in the back fence, down a narrow alley, and was peering out into Jones Street. It was deserted.

The fog had rushed in from the Pacific. He encountered no one on his return home. The windows of his own house were still black. He stealthily replaced the chain insisted upon by his servants, then lit the gas in his library and almost flew to his desk. Eight hours later he was still there, and his old servants, weeping and shaking, gave up trying to make him listen. During the next three months, indeed, he might have been isolated on the highest peak of the Sierras.

Louis, after the twenty-four hours of deep recuperative sleep that always followed the finish of a book, awoke to a familiar chorus: the creaking of his eucalyptus-trees, the fog-horn of Sausalito, the measured drip of the fog on his old-fashioned window-panes. But he returned to his personal life with something more than the usual reaction after a long period in the world of imagination; his depression was so great that the divine happiness of the past three months was blotted from his memory.

Then, not slowly, but with frightful abruptness, he understood. It was not that he had forgotten the act of smothering Berthe Dupont while writing under its inspiration, but that realities, himself, were for the time non-existent. Now, in the deep depression of his nerve centers following that long orgy of creation, he felt as if he were falling down through an abyss of horror without hope and without end. And while he experienced no regret for his act, since it had given the world a masterpiece, nor any that he never should see the beautiful girl again, he was filled with an emotional pity for her that surprised himself. But then he was an artist, and he owed her so much!

A moment later and he nearly shrieked aloud. There was a heavy tread on the stair. It was portentously slow and deliberate.... Why had he not been suspected before this?... Had M. César used his influence?... He, too, was an artist in his way.... He cowered under the bedclothes.... The door opened. He heard the rattle of dishes. Seraphine never allowed him to sleep more than twenty-four hours without nourishment.

As he sat up in bed he smiled wanly upon his devoted servitor and smoothed his hair. “Good morning, ma vieille. Or is it afternoon? It is good to return to that rational condition which enables me to appreciate your excellent cooking.”

Seraphine’s gnarled old face grinned. “Ah, Monsieur, it is good to see you no worse. But you are very pale and thin, alas! Although how, then, in the name of all the saints, should you not be?”

Louis poured out the coffee with a steady hand. “Don’t run away,” he commanded. “Tell me the news. How is M. César? And Madame Dupont? And the charming Mademoiselle Berthe? Name of a name! but I have not remembered their existence since the day I began my book.”

“Oh, Monsieur! But O God!” She was about to squeeze a tear from her aged ducts and rock her body, when the gossip in her lively old mind gave a sniff of disdain and quenched the attempt at retrospective grief. “I—I—stupid old woman that I am—I had forgotten that you knew nothing—”

“Knew nothing?” Louis set down his cup. “Nothing has happened to M. César? Tell me at once!”

“Oh, not M. César, grâce à Dieu! But Mademoiselle! Oh, Monsieur! Quelle horreur!”

“Did she die, that charming young lady? She seemed a marvel of health.” Louis loosened the soft collar of his night-gown, but his tones merely betrayed a proper concern.

“Dieu! Dieu! If that were all! She was assassinated, that beautiful young girl, just from Paris, and of an innocence, an excellence, a respectability! And by a miserable villain who had seen her take money from the bank that day and got in by the window that old fool of a Jean-Marie had dared to neglect. And with a pillow!” The voluble details convinced Louis that suspicion had not brushed him in passing.

“And the assassin?” he demanded when Seraphine paused for breath. “Whom do they suspect?”

“Suspect? But they caught him red-handed, the foul fiend. For that we thank the good God.”

“Caught him! Do you mean as he was in the act of smothering poor Mademoiselle Berthe?”

“But no, Monsieur. He already had made his way down the stairs and out of the house, enfin! But a policeman was in the garden waiting for him. He had been told by some one who had seen the wretch sneak up the covered way. But not too soon, alas! The assassin denied all, of a certainty. He vowed he had been so terrified at the sight of the young lady murdered in her bed that he ran away at once. But, oh! of a greater certainty, no one believed him. No, not one!”

“But it well could have been. Remember that I have written stories to prove the criminal folly of condemning on circumstantial evidence alone.”

“Ah, yes, Monsieur, that is all very well in stories. But you see this was life, and the man was caught by a real policeman.”

“When is the man to be tried?”

“Tried? The man has been tried and hanged, Monsieur.”

“What!”

“But yes, Monsieur. Sometimes a murderer is hanged in San Francisco, and this was a misérable, a tramp, with no money or friends to make delay—grâce à Dieu! But you are white as death, Monsieur. Who am I to tell you this horrible story when you have just come back from the dead, as it were—”

“It is true that I am overcome. But arrange my bath. I will dress and go to M. César. Oh, my God!”

“But yes, Monsieur.”

For a few moments Louis hoped he was dead, that his ice-cold body was yielding up his agonized spirit. He made a desperate effort to rouse the sleeping artist and summon him to the rescue, but without avail; the man was left alone to face the fact that he was a murderer who had taken not one life, but two. And of the two he regretted the friendless burglar the more poignantly.

The fundamental moral questions had never held debate in his highly specialized brain. He had been brought up respectably and had led so impersonal a life that he had obeyed the laws of society automatically. But in this hour of awful revelation, while the artist in him slept the sleep of the dead, he was merely the son of a long line of excellent bourgeois ancestors and could have spat upon himself as a pariah dog.

But in time he got up, bathed, dressed. He even paid his customary visit to the barber. Then he turned his steps toward M. César.

Madame Dupont had gone to Santa Barbara to recuperate after the severe shock to her nerves. M. César, unless dining out, would be at his club. It was eight o’clock.

“Mr. Dupont,” he was told, was in the dining-room. Louis gave orders not to disturb him, and was shown into the library. A bright fire burned. He was very cold. He sank limply into a deep chair beside it and dropped his chin on his chest. His mind was too dull for thought, but fully made up.

He was roused by a firm grip on his shoulder, and started up to meet his old friend’s tired but kindly eyes.

“But how is this?” cried M. Dupont, in genuine surprise. “It cannot be that you have finished the great work in three months? I did not expect to see you for another two. But of a certainty you write with more and more facility—”

“I wish to see you alone. I have something horrible to say.”

“Come up-stairs. My chambers are being done over and I am staying here.” M. Dupont, who had given the young author a keen, appraising glance, spoke soothingly and drew a trembling arm through his own. “Mon Dieu, Louis, but you are thin! How long do you fancy you can keep this up? I feared for your gifts. Now I fear for something more precious still. You look on the verge of collapse.”

“It does not matter. Take me quickly to your room.”

M. Dupont, who never hurried, and always carried his portly form with a certain stateliness, led Louis out of the library and up one flight of the broad staircase to his temporary quarters. Already, Louis automatically noted, his club bedroom had the intimate and sybaritic look of his famous apartment. He had brought to it silver and crystal for his bureau and little buffet, framed photographs of beautiful women, a Meissonier, and several easy-chairs.

He pushed Louis into the deepest of the chairs, poured out a stiff whisky-and-soda, and stood over his guest until the glass was empty. Then he lighted his second after-dinner cigar and settled himself with the first sensation of anticipatory humor he had felt for many weeks. Louis always interested him and not infrequently amused him, with no effort on the part of that most unhumorous mind.

Louis lay back in his chair for a moment, responding to the glow of the spirits. He was still very cold.

“Now, my son, what is it? You may or may not have heard of the terrible tragedy that has devastated my home, but that can wait—”

“Oh no, Monsieur, it is not to wait! It is of that I have come to speak.”

“But, of course, old Seraphine would have told you the moment you would listen. It is like you to come at once, although God knows I should have been grateful for your sympathy during that terrible time—”

“Oh, Monsieur! I cannot stand it!” Louis sprang to his feet and strode about the room. “It is something more awful still that I have come to tell you. How am I to do it? You, who have always been so kind! My only friend! My God, what a return! But of that I never thought. I was obsessed. It was an inhibition.”

“Dear Louis! Come to the point. Are you quoting from your new book—”

“M. César, you do not know what you are dodging! I will try to put my confession into a few words. It was I—I—Louis Bac, who—who—killed Mademoiselle Berthe. There! It is said!”

“My poor boy!” M. Dupont rose and poured out another whiskey-and-soda. “Drink this and I will put you to bed in a room close by—drunk, hein! for the first time in your life.”

But Louis shook his head. Then he turned upon his friend eyes so beseeching and so abject that the ready tears rose to the eyes of the elderly Frenchman.

“When did Seraphine tell you this dreadful thing?”

“An hour or two ago.”

“Just after you had awakened from your long sleep?”

Louis nodded.

“No wonder your insatiable faculty immediately began on another! God knows it is not a subject for jest, but I cannot lose you, too. You will go to bed now—”

“Oh, Monsieur, you must believe me! I tell you I smothered Mademoiselle Berthe with a pillow—”

“Tut! tut! That was all in the papers. I can see old Seraphine’s ghoulish delight in recreating that grisly scene. And she told you, of course, that the drawers were open, the contents strewn about—”

“No; or if she did I have forgotten. God! how the moonlight streamed in!”

He flung off M. César’s hand, and almost ran about the room while his uneasy host felt of his biceps.

“Will you not believe me?” shrieked Louis.

“Perhaps, dear boy, when you have slept on it—”

“Oh, don’t talk as if you thought me insane. If you refuse to believe me I shall go from here and give myself up. I intend to do that anyhow, but I wished to confess to you first. That was your right.”

“Do you know what would happen if you went to a police station and denounced yourself? You would first be laughed at and then, if you persisted, sent to a lunatic asylum. It is well you came to me first. Why, the murderer has been hanged. The state would refuse to reopen the case—”

“Surely not!”

“Surely yes.”

“Then it is between you and me?”

“And a doctor if you do not go to bed at once.”

“Oh, but you must believe in me!” Another memory flashed into his stimulated mind, and he confronted M. César with an air of triumph. “The man denied it, did he not? He said he went into the house to steal and found Berthe murdered, and fled. Is it not so?”

“Naturally.”

“Now attend. How do you account for the fact that they found nothing on him—neither the missing gold nor the diamonds wrenched from the bracelet?”

“He had an accomplice, of course. He stood under the window while the man, after he murdered Berthe, dropped the loot out of the window. A brooch was found on the grass. The rear gate was open.”

“Ah no, Monsieur. I flung that brooch out of the window. I have that gold, those diamonds in my desk at home. Come with me.”

For a moment M. César turned gray and the shoulders that had supported a musket so gallantly in 1870 sagged as if old age had suddenly made them its perch. But he shook himself angrily erect. Did he not know Louis and his delusions? Was the poor boy ever actually on the mortal plane? Had not he himself, twice summoned by Seraphine, poured scalding coffee down his throat? Undoubtedly he had loved Berthe and been inspired at last, for during the first hours of his own grief and horror he had dared to intrude upon the high priest at his altar, and met the unseeing eyes of a genius in ecstasy. No wonder he was nearly mad with grief now.

There was nothing but to humor him. Once more he took his arm, and led him out into the street. Slowly the two men climbed the hills through the fog; for one, though gallant, was no longer young, and the other, although tragically young, was very weak. When they reached the foot of the steep incline which led up to the old Bac mansion, M. Dupont cunningly would have passed on, but Louis swung about peremptorily, and the philosophical old boulevardier, who cared for no further argument or confiscation of his precious evening hours, shrugged his shoulders and followed his erratic young friend up and into the house.

The economical Seraphine never left a light burning in the hall. Louis struck a match and led the way into the old double parlors he used as his study, and lit a gas-jet. M. César sat down on one of the horsehair chairs and opened his cigar-case.

“Mon Dieu!” he cried. “What a way to live in this amiable world. Fireless; dank; chairs stuffed with rocks. No wonder you look as if you had been in cold storage.”

“Oh, do not trouble yourself to light a cigar, Monsieur. It will go out, I assure you.”

He pulled open a drawer of his desk and pointed to a pile of loose gold and half a dozen diamonds of fair size.

“My God!”

M. César experienced an awful feeling of disintegration. The cigar fell from his relaxed hand and he sagged as far back in the chair as its uncompromising back would permit. He stared at the contents of the drawer throughout a long moment while he shivered with the impression that the waters of death were rising in that bleak and horribly silent room. But at the end of those sixty indelible seconds he sat very erect and the angry color rushed to his face.

“No!” he exclaimed. “That is not evidence. I am quite unconvinced. I have not the least idea how much gold Berthe had in her desk, and one gold piece is like another. I am a judge of diamonds, for I, alas! have bought many; but diamonds of the same size and water are as hard to identify. Those, no doubt, were your mother’s.”

“My mother had no diamonds. And what do you suppose I do with diamonds in my desk?”

“Properties, no doubt. How do I know that you have not in another drawer burglars’ kits and tools, and all the other instruments of destruction with which your characters celebrate themselves? Those diamonds were larger than any poor Berthe possessed.”

“They may have looked small in the heavy art nouveau setting. I noticed the bracelet the night of the dinner.”

“I never saw it until I saw it in ruins. Let me see those stones.”

Louis gathered them up and poured them into M. César’s steady hand. The old Frenchman felt of them, held them up to the light, flung them back contemptuously into the drawer. “Paste! I thought as much. For why should you buy real diamonds? As for Berthe—what few stones the poor child had were genuine. She could neither afford stones of that size nor would she condescend to wear paste.”

“Do you mean to say you will not believe me?” Louis looked sharply at M. César.

It was quite natural that this amiable gentleman should not choose to believe he had blindly nourished a viper. And not, perhaps, motived by pride and affection alone. He was kind and charitable and a keen man of business, but pleasure was his god. No man had extracted more juice from the sweet apple of life than he, tasted less of its ashes. It was quite in keeping that he should refuse to have his pleasant pastures sown with horrors a second time.

M. Dupont rose. “I shall send you a sleeping-powder from the chemist’s. You will wake without delusions. To-morrow you will take the eleven-thirty train for Santa Barbara, spend a month in my mother’s charming home at Montecito, and forget that you are a poor genius subject to plots at the wrong time. That, or a sanatorium. Do you comprehend, my friend?”

Louis turned away with a hopeless gesture. “Oh, very well. Have your own way.”

“And you will be ready when I call for you at ten minutes past eleven?”

“If I am awake.”

“I shall go out the back way and tell Seraphine to awaken you. Now I must leave you, as I have kept a very charming person waiting too long already.”

“Good night, Monsieur. I can tell Seraphine myself.”

“Very well. I trust you to do so.” Louis accompanied his guest with extreme courtesy to the door. On the threshold M. César paused and looked back into the dark house with a shudder. “Ciel, but it is a tomb! I cannot take you with me this evening, but you can go to the club and sleep there.”

“Many thanks, Monsieur, but this house is not a tomb to me. It is my home.”

“True. A thousand pardons. Au revoir, mon fils.”

It was two o’clock in the morning when Louis laid down his pen. He had confessed in minute detail to the killing of Berthe Dupont, entering into an elaborate and brilliant analysis of the primary causes, the successive phases of a more extended psychological process than he had realized at the time, the final impulse, and, as far as possible, the pathological condition of his brain during the act and the minor acts that followed. He added that while he found it impossible to feel remorse in the common sense, as through this abominable crime he had achieved the passionate ambition and desire of his life and a period of indescribable joy, he felt that as a member of society, however indifferent, it was now his duty to make atonement. As M. Dupont had convinced him that his story would not be believed, that, in fact, the authorities would incarcerate him in a lunatic asylum if he persisted in declaring his guilt, he had determined to act for himself.

He made his confession, he further added, not to clear the name of the poor derelict who had paid the penalty for a crime of which he was innocent, but in the interest of science, which would welcome this voluntary revelation of creative psychology. He believed that other serious writers of fiction, those illustrious men who had written to him with a spontaneous sense of brotherhood, would understand and exonerate. He had cast his soul and his body on the altar of art, and no man had ever done more.

He had written the confession in French and English. He addressed one manuscript to the leading morning newspaper of San Francisco, the other to the literary critic of a great journal in Paris. Then he took a large key from a drawer of his desk and left the house. He dropped the two packages in a mail-box at the foot of the hill, and waited long and wearily for a car. They were infrequent at this hour, but he felt too tired to walk to the outskirts of the city. The night was chill and the fog was dense, but when the car finally came along he took a seat on the front of the dummy, for he dreaded the lights within, or meeting some one, perhaps, who would recognize and speak to him.

When he reached the end of the line he was shivering, and involuntarily he pulled his coat-collar about his ears and thrust his hands into his pockets as he walked rapidly up the hill to the Catholic cemetery.

He knew all the cemeteries on Lone Mountain well, for he often walked there, reading the names on the shafts and mausoleums and reconstructing the history of early San Francisco, of which the dust below had been so fiery an impulse. Henri Bac I. had built a mausoleum here, too, for he felt that as a pioneer he should have a permanent resting-place among the dead who had made history. He had, indeed, been a member of the two great Vigilance Committees, had played his part on more than one occasion as an active citizen who could do somewhat more for the swaddling city than teach its adventurous spirits how to distinguish between appetite and relish.

Louis, who had always been a dutiful son, had come out here every Sunday in all weathers and placed a wreath on the little altar in the dim interior of the vault, knelt automatically for a moment beneath the shelves behind which his parents were sealed.

He unlocked the heavy door; then, as it swung slowly inward, he turned and glanced down over the sleeping city he had loved in his own impersonal fashion. The fog moved like the tides of the sea whose boom came faintly to him. Here and there a shaft from an arc-light shone faintly through, but for the most part San Francisco was the black depths of a ghostly inland sea.

Above him the night was clear. The cross on Calvary stood out like ebony against the glittering sky, a gay and spangled sky as if all the great planets and all the little courtesan stars up there were ready for a night of carnival and laughing at gloomy old Earth.

For a moment Louis hesitated. He was a Catholic by training, and to certain crimes the Church is merciless. But he reasoned that he no more had the right to call himself a Catholic than to persist as a mortal. He went into the vault and swung the heavy door behind him. It clanged faintly, but there was no one to hear.

MISS WILLETT [2]

By BARRY BENEFIELD

From The Century Magazine

TUESDAY morning Miss Willett’s intermittent little alarm-clock did its third violent song and dance by the side of her bed before she mustered enough energy to reach down and switch the silencing lever. Turning her feet out on the floor, she sat drooping on the side of the bed, holding her face in her hands. After a while, standing up, she yawned and stretched with large listlessness, and walked to the one window in her second-floor rear room.

It looked out on a double row of dingy back yards belonging to the old-style, brown-stone houses that had fallen from the high estate of private residences to the low estate of converted “light-housekeeping” apartments. Directly opposite her window, in the back yard of the house fronting northward on East Thirty-sixth Street, was a small brick building. Originally, she judged, it had been used as a stable. She wondered what it was used for now; herself a “light housekeeper,” she knew that they did not often keep carriages and automobiles in their back yards.

It occurred to her that she was still in her nightgown, and that her pale-yellow hair, which she had unpinned and shaken out, was falling about her shoulders and that people might see her. What if they did? Who cared?

All at once there leaped upon the threshold of her consciousness the suspicion that some one was peering at her from behind the one small window in the south end of the old stable, hardly twenty feet away. The window was partly hidden by a green blind now closed but the slats were tilted open, and there was a dimly silhouetting light behind the peering figure, probably from a window or door on one of the unseen sides of the building. Miss Willett could not discern the eyes clearly, but she knew now that they were there. Well, let him rubber. She did not trouble to ask why she had said to herself “him.” Shifting her eyes from the stable window, she began smoothing, as if absent-mindedly, at the wrinkles in the gown about her neck.

Miss Willett was waiting anxiously and planning. Down on Third Avenue a house was being torn down to make room for a taller building. Through the irregular gap the summer sun was raking the double line of grimy back yards with a shallow, narrow shaft of warm white light rising higher every minute. Already it rested on the east side and rear of the old stable, its upper edge cutting just under the window-sill.

“If the blackguard waits, I’ll catch him with the sun,” Miss Willett said savagely, straining to keep her eyes away from the window until the light should rise and enter the slats of the blind.

Over in the east a cloud slid darkly across the accomplice sun. Miss Willett shook her hair forward and began running her hands back through it, to hold the leering peeper until the revelation and the punishment. A little gray kitten came around the far corner of the stable, stepping with great daintiness through the tin cans and glass and broken furniture in the dirty yard. The big woman welcomed the little kitten; he would be a useful object upon which to attach her eyes until the proper time, and while she gathered her utmost resources to curdle her plump, kindly face in the disgusted grimace she used upon this kind of man. She had not been in department-store toilet articles ten years for nothing. And this morning she felt that it would ease her powerfully to squelch a man.

There was no need of gaps in the serried old buildings for the young summer season to get down into these back yards. It came in through the open window, touching Miss Willett. The wind was soft, like silk, and fiery sweet, like an alcoholic toilet water. There was in it the faint fragrance of millions of flowers, like the perfume she used to sell at Pfefferbaum’s for five dollars an ounce.

“I’ve got him!” she almost shouted to herself as the cloud slipped suddenly from across the sun. But the corners of her mouth did not draw down, and her upper lip and snub nose did not lift as if she were making desperate, but futile, efforts to avoid smelling something unspeakably evil. The brown-bearded face behind the blind, lit up for a moment, was—not what she had expected. No man’s eyes had ever before looked like that at her. They were not staring; they did not leer. They had in them something akin to timidity, a fearful wistfulness, a yearning tenderness; and Miss Willett was sorry that the sun’s shaft had now been blotted out by a cloud and no longer disclosed the face.

Sighing, she turned away. Pulling aside a huge-figured dust-curtain hanging across a corner of the room, she surveyed her wardrobe.

“An’ not a decent dress in the lot,” she summarized gloomily. “Gee! an’ I ain’t got no job, neither, to buy another one with.”

Miss Willett had received notice the day before. For five weeks she had been earning the highest salary that had come to her in her life—twenty dollars a week as a demonstrator of Bimber’s Patent Baby Bed. For five weeks, clothed in the handsome costume of a nurse (supplied by Mr. Bimber), she had stood in a show-window at Broadway and Twenty-third Street illustrating the marvelous and manifold uses of the patent baby bed, the other actor in the pantomime being a dummy baby with a celluloid head whom she called the Princess Bimberino.

According to her employer, she had not fulfilled his expectations; having learned the mechanism of the bed, she had not acted with any “ginger,” she had not exhibited the hoped-for “pep.” In her hands, Mr. Bimber had said the day before, when giving her notice, the Princess Bimberino was only a dummy and the patent bed only a wearisome piece of machinery out of which she had been making twenty dollars a week and through which the company had been losing two hundred dollars.

When Miss Willett reported for work at 8:45 o’clock a mob of twenty or thirty prospective demonstrators who had answered Mr. Bimber’s advertisement in the morning papers were waiting out in the hall in front of the office.

“Get on your nurse’s rig, Miss Willett,” he said briskly, “an’ do the job while I weed out that bunch. I guess you’ll be free by noon all right—to look around for another job. But I’m payin’ you for this week, an’ your time is mine if I want it.”

At nine o’clock Miss Willett stepped up on the show-window stage, ran up the curtains hiding Twenty-third Street on the one side and Madison Square Park on the other, and set herself to do the last sad lap of her twenty-dollar job. Lifting the Princess Bimberino in her arms, she noticed that the long white dress of the royal infant had lost its freshness and that some of the lace at the bottom was torn and hanging. She had not noticed the princess’s dress before.

“Bless her heart!” the big woman whispered contritely, squeezing the princess hard against her breast. “Bless her heart! nobody looks after her. Your muzzer’s goin’ to make you a brand-new dress even if she is losin’ her job. God knows, honey, I reckon I’ll have plenty of spare time in the next few days. It’s toilet articles again for mine, I reckon, at ten per; an’, stars above! how I hate the things now!”

In the shifting hundreds that stopped and gazed in at Bimber’s Patent Baby Bed exhibit during the morning there were more than the usual number of women. At almost any moment an Italian or Jewish mother with a baby in her arms joined the inlooking crowd. At the conclusion of every part of the didactic pantomime, and while she was putting on the stand the black-lettered card telling the use she had just demonstrated, Miss Willett’s round, gray eyes were searching hungrily through the spectators until she found one of these mothers, and then they smiled across the silent chasm of the plate-glass window in the eager, instant intimacy of common motherhood.

During a five-minute rest in the middle of the morning, holding the royal infant close up in her arms, Miss Willett turned her chair to face the Broadway side, and sat staring out at the park, just across the street. The old trees waved their young green branches at her, beckoning her to look. The multitude of flowers, banked row on row around the leaping fountain, lifted their hot faces to the kisses of the sun. The big woman leaned over suddenly and kissed the Princess Bimberino.

At 12:30 o’clock Mr. Bimber stepped up on the stage. His large, fat-padded, black eyes were shining. His stubby hands rubbed themselves together as if they were feeling already luxury within them. His little legs were strutting.

“Do you know it’s a half an hour past your lunch-time, Miss Willett?” he asked, looking closely at her.

“No, sir; I never paid no ’tention to the clock to-day.”

“Well, it is, Miss Willett. I’ll do this here three-ring circus while you’re gone.”

“Must I come back?” she asked, moving slowly toward the steps. “I guess you got somebody outa that bunch, didn’t you?”

“What’s happened to you, Miss Willett, that’s what I want to know?”

“Nothin’ ’s happened to me; only I’ve lost my job.”

“Lost nothing! I sent that bunch away after fifteen minutes. I got so busy writin’ orders I couldn’t talk to ’em. I ain’t even had time to go outside there to see what you been doin’ up here. What’s happened, that’s what I want to know? What you been doin’ up here while my back was turned, hey, Miss Willett? You got ’em comin’ in droves. Where’d you get all this here new ginger at, Miss Willett? Yesterday you had nothin’; to-day you got everything. I ain’t had time to see it, but you must have it. What’s happened to you overnight?”

“Stop your kiddin’, Mr. Bimber. I ain’t up to it to-day. I reckon I got to go back to toilet articles, an’ I hate them things now. I done ’em ten years. An’ it ain’t no cinch that I can get even that job again, for it’s the good old summer-time now. I’ll go back to Pfefferbaum’s and make a try, anyhow. I reckon you won’t need me no more this afternoon?”

“Need you? You make me laugh, Miss Willett. I tell you, you’ve got ’em comin’ in droves. I took more orders this mornin’ than I’ve took ever since I’ve been here. If this here keeps up, I’ll have to hire a secretary to write ’em down.”

“Need you, Miss Willett! Miss Willett, your salary is raised—a dollar and a quarter a week. You see that there place acrost the street over yonder? They say it’s a swell restaurant. Myself, I ain’t been in it; presidents of baby-bed companies eats in dairy lunches. But you—you take this here an’ have lunch on me to-day, Miss Willett.”

“O Mr. Bimber!”

“Gimme the princess an’ get out!”

As the big, bewildered, tremulous woman started out of the door, Mr. Bimber committed the terrible dramatic solecism of halting the pantomime in the middle of an act.

“Miss Willett!” he called.

“Yes, sir?”

“You take plenty of time to eat, Miss Willett. An hour for yours to-day. I guess you ain’t kind o’ tired, hey? Take an hour, anyhow, Miss Willett, an’ if it runs over, who cares? Not me. I’ll do this here three-ring circus in some kind o’ way while you’re gone. Don’t you come back before one-thirty, Miss Willett. Y’ un’erstan’ me, Miss Willett—one-thirty?”

“Yes, sir; thank you.”

She ate in a dairy lunch, bought a pair of clocked silk stockings with the rest of the two-dollar bill, and sat out the last three fourths of the hour in Madison Square Park.

Quitting work at six o’clock, Miss Willett took off the Princess Bimberino’s long white outer dress and tucked her carefully in the bed for the static, electrically lighted night exhibition, and came down the steps of the show-window stage holding the soiled, frazzled garment in her hands.

“What you gonna do with that thing, Miss Willett?” asked Mr. Bimber, looking up from the order-book.

“I ’m goin’ to patch it up some an’ wash it to-night. The pore little thing looks like a tramp in this. Ain’t you got but one dress for the princess, Mr. Bimber? She ought to have a clean dress every day, bless her heart! An’ she will have, too, if I have to do this one up every night.”

“Dozen new dresses for the Princess Bimberino to-morrow, Miss Willett. You buy ’em; I ’ll give you the money at lunch-time. Anything you say about the princess goes, Miss Willett; y’ un’erstan’ me—anything! Will you buy ’em for me, Miss Willett?”

“Sure; I’d like to.”

“Good night, Miss Willett. Pleasant dreams.”

Then Mr. Bimber went back inside to gloat over the day’s orders.

Arrived at home, Miss Willett rushed up the one flight of stairs and burst into her room. She took off her hat, dabbed a powder rag about her nose, slicked her eyebrows straight with a moistened finger, “duded up” her hair a bit, and then straining to hold herself to casual leisurely gestures, walked to the rear window and slid up the shade slowly. She looked out, not at the stable first; and when at last she did permit her eyes to rest hungrily on the little window, it was blinded on the inside with a dingy, blue shade.

“Gee! I knew it,” sighed Miss Willett, and went back to the bed and sank down. “Nobody lives or works in that little old thing, anyhow. He just happened to be in there this mawnin’ for a minute or two. I reckon it’s just a lumber-room, or somethin’, now. But maybe again sometime—.” The big woman stirred herself energetically, and stood up, to hurry her delicatessen and gas-stove dinner. “Because I got to do the princess’s dress to-night,” she said to herself, as if in explanation of her haste.

Miss Willett was awake Wednesday morning before the alarm-clock on the floor by her bed had done even one violent thing. She heard it give the premonitory click to signal all its forces to make ready for the first fiendish charge upon the quiet peace and comfort of the occupant of the bed. Reaching down, she turned the lever back to the word “Silent.”

“Don’t, dear,” she said, patting it tenderly. “It ain’t needed this mawnin’.”

Getting quickly out on the floor, Miss Willett stood up without stretching or yawning. Having attended carefully to her face and hair, she raised her arms above her head to make sure that the sleeves of her nightgown would slip down over them; she knew that her arms were good to look at. Maybe they were a shade too plump, but they were straight, without a loose-jointed bend-in at the elbow, and they were round and smooth and firm and long and white.

Assured that the sleeves were in perfect working order, she walked to the window, ran up the shade, and looked straight at the green blind on the rear of the old stable. The morning was gray with clouds, but she easily made out, behind the open slats, the brown-bearded face of the day before.

“Again—all right!” she said to herself, triumphantly.

Shifting her eyes from the window, she slowly raised her arms above her head as if in a waking yawn, and shook the loosened sleeves down to her shoulders. With tremendous effort she kept her eyes drifting about the back yards in the pretense of lazy, early morning indifference. When she looked back, a hand was shoving out on the window-sill a tin can containing a geranium with one red flower open. Miss Willett smiled vaguely in the direction of the window, shifted her eyes once more, and pulled down the shade.

“I wonder what them things cost?” she said to herself. “Anyhow, I got to have one.”

On the way down to Twenty-third Street it occurred to Miss Willett that he might be following her. She rather wished he would trail her to the baby-bed window; Mr. Bimber’s nurse’s white outfit was the handsomest costume she wore. She dawdled in front of several windows, looking furtively, anxiously, back.

“Shuckin’s!” she said after the third attempt, “he wouldn’t do a thing like that—follow a lady.” And she hurried on to work.

That night, though the stable window was once more dark and dead with the drawn shade, Miss Willett placed on her window-sill a small potted geranium with two open red flowers, flushing as red as they because she felt that already she was whispering to him in tones that no one else could hear. Well, anyhow, he had spoken first.

The week wore on. Mr. Bimber’s enthusiasm increased as the orders kept coming in. The forelady of Pfefferbaum’s “Ladies’ and Misses’ Dresses,” an old friend of Miss Willett’s, was personally supervising the alterations of “somethin’ swell,” for her whom the Pfefferbaum girls called “Old Toilet Articles.” Every day, across the dingy back yards, the two geraniums sent secret messages to each other; and though not again that week did the sun come out from behind the clouds in time to light the little window in the stable, yet every morning the big, blushing woman kept her tryst there with the brown beard and the tender wistful eyes. Only once, and then for but a few seconds, had the sun lighted the gloom behind the open-slatted blind; yet her imagination, given merely a glimpse of the now familiar head, always supplied the appealing attributes that had impressed her that first morning of acquaintance.

Rising as early as usual Sunday morning, Miss Willett hurried to the window. She did not know if he would be there on Sundays. Still, if he wasn’t a twenty-carat simp, he should have gathered that she, too, was a worker, and that therefore she would probably be free all day Sunday. And even if he wasn’t of the masher kind, surely he would have “pep” enough to seize her first free day. Miss Willett did not raise the shade; she merely peeped around the side of it. He was there all right, all right.

During the week, in the early morning pantomimes, Miss Willett had featured first her vague sweet smile, then her pale-yellow hair, her splendid arms, and her white neck with the dimpled depression at the base of it; and yet all so diplomatically that if for any reason she should want to draw back, she felt she could say severely and convincingly: “Who are you? I never seen you before. I don’t know you. On your way; don’t get fresh with me!”

This morning she would feature the new dress; hence the window-shade would not be raised until late, maybe nine o’clock, when she would be all ready. But she desired him to know that she was up and alert. Sticking her head around the side of the shade, she smiled across the two tiny yards, and shook her hand gaily.

At 9:15 Miss Willett still stood before the dresser-glass. The shade being down, the gas was turned on. She got out in the middle of the room, making large contortions in the endeavor to see herself from all sides. Front, back, and sides, she was the best that she could achieve. The big, gracefully drooping hat was of a tint which would, in the open, she knew, emphasize the color of her wholesome complexion. The filmy sleeves revealed her opulent arms alluringly, and the dark-blue taffeta skirt rustled richly at her slightest movement. The low shoes, though topped with buckles set with brilliants, did not dim, but enhanced, the glory of the clocked silk stockings.

Taking a final supercritical view of her face within three inches of the mirror, Miss Willett turned off the gas, drew a chair against the window, ran the shade up briskly, and sat down, holding in her hand a book that seemed, from the manner in which she handled it, already to bore her considerably. Miss Willett’s date was with Circumstance. She was ready; she was waiting.

From time to time she smiled incitingly across at the wistful, yearning, tender eyes she knew were behind the blind. Down on Third Avenue the elevated trains thundered, and in her mind she traced, a little regretfully, the glad course of the four old Pfefferbaum girls who had invited her to a Sunday in Bronx Park. If he made a move, she would suggest the park, provided he wasn’t dressed altogether like a rube. She was instantly ashamed of thinking of that proviso; somehow she knew he would not be tacky, no matter what he wore.

It was a swell day. Though the elevated trains roared on north and south as usual, though the trolley-cars rattled their loose and loosening steel bones along the steel tracks, yet the harsh, clattering, shrieking week-day noises of innumerable trucks and machines and whistles were withdrawn from the general volume of sound, and the city’s mighty voice was lowered and softened to its gentler Sabbath key. The west wind, coming from across how many millions of passionate fields and forests, shook out over New York the whispering ghosts of their soft summer sighs. Up in the park Minnie and the others were already rioting with the city and June and the sun. Miss Willett, gorgeous, eager, tremulous in the strain of suspense, sat by the window, holding a book, waiting.

At noon she dropped the book on the floor peevishly. “Gee! I wisht the simp would make some kind of a move. I cain’t set here all day. My God! on week-days I’m fed up good an’ plenty on show-window exhibitions.”

As usual on Sundays, Miss Willett went down to a restaurant on Third Avenue for dinner. Coming out, she stopped to consider. What next? She thought she might be able to find Minnie and the others in the park, and it would be fun trying, anyhow. But already she was arguing for him.

“Yes, you knock the mashers,” she said accusingly to herself, “an’ then you throw a fit because he don’t rush things like they do. Give him a little time, won’t you? He’p him out. Them’s the best kind—the kind you have to he’p some. It’s a sign they ain’t fresh.”

So she went back to her room, sat by the window, and took up her book and waited, while the marvelous June day marched on without her.

At two o’clock Miss Willett’s eyes were lounging about over the dirty back yards, as if to rest themselves after the fatigue of reading. They fell upon the little gray kitten. He came stealing around the far corner of the old stable, searching for whatever dainty adventures might come his way.

Determined to fight something and at once, he humped his back at a poor, defenseless tin can lying prostrate on the ground, sidled over to it, lashing his triple-sized tail ferociously, struck one mighty blow at the can, and ran to the fence separating the two back yards. He hesitated a moment in indecision whether to come over into foreign and fascinating, but possibly dangerous, territory; then he jumped, and so did Miss Willett. She was standing up when he reached the fence. Her plan was made.

Rushing down-stairs and through the basement apartment of the janitress, she got out in the yard. Five minutes later she was back in her room with the captive kitten. Setting him in the middle of her bed, she threw herself feverishly into the completion of her preparations for her tremendous adventure. It seemed to her that the kitten was a miraculous gift dropped straight down from heaven for a special purpose.

Tucking the strategic kitten under her left arm, Miss Willett walked out of the room, tiptoeing for some vague reason, locked the door, and went noiselessly down the stairs.

Every piece of jewelry that she owned was stuck on her somewhere. The fingers of her left hand were gnarled with rings. She loathed toilet articles, having had too much to do with selling them; but now she called herself a fool for not possessing any more complicated cosmetic aids than talcum powder. Still, the touch of the rings and the other jewelry, the swish of the taffeta skirt, the soft, snug feel of the silk stockings, the clinging caress of the filmy sleeves,—all these somewhat reassured her.

At 3:30 o’clock Miss Willett was around in East Thirty-sixth Street, standing fearfully in front of the leaning, dilapidated wooden gate that must open upon the passage leading back to the primitive little stable. She didn’t want to ring up the janitress of his house unless she had to. She pushed the gate, and it creaked open. Slipping inside, she closed it, and walked back along the rough, irregularly paved roadway, at the end of which she saw the dull red stable, its sliding-door slightly ajar.

It was not easy to walk down the old roadway now. She wanted to drop the kitten and flee. After a moment she did stop and drop him. But he did not run away and thus deprive her of her innocent excuse for entering the stable of the red geranium. He humped his back and snuggled purring about her ankles. So she picked him up again.

And now she had either to go on or run back at once. She could not stand there in the yard. The houses on both sides of her were filled with windows—monstrous eyes that leered and grinned at her, eyes that seemed to know every secret thought that had passed through her mind in the last five days about this man she had come to see—thoughts some of which even she herself was not definitely aware of until now. But they did not seem new; she was certain she had had them before. The door ahead of her was ajar. She went on slowly.

At the door the big, gorgeous, tremulous, flaming woman halted again, panting, crying “Shame” at herself within her heart. And yet she knew, knew absolutely, that he would not even think “Shame” about her. She recollected his eyes; no eyes had ever looked like that at her before. He would understand at the very first. Nothing else mattered.

High up in the house to her left a yearning beginner on the violin struggled in ecstatic pain with some vast, ancient, overpowering love-song. The softly moving wind from the west, slipping through the crevices of the crowding city, came stealing along the passage and waved the pale-yellow hair about her hot temples. Apparently unrelated thoughts, dimly noted, went swirling through her head: that the shouting of the children back there in Thirty-sixth Street sounded sweet in her ears; that she was thirty years old already; that the kitten lay warmly curled under her heart; that somehow the Princess Bimberino was very far away from her now.

Then she knocked, and, without waiting for an answer, stepped inside the door. Her eyes leaped to the little rear window that looked up at hers. But she was acutely aware of other things in the small house. There was a pungent odor of lime in the air. An old gray-bearded Italian lay asleep, snoring, on a bench against the wall. On shelves, on benches, on boxes, sitting around everywhere, were plaster figures of all sizes and shapes and colors. On the sill of the rear window sat the can with the one red geranium bloom. In front of it stood the plaster figure whose face the young summer sun had lifted up to hers. Some queer feminine impulse, in the midst of her catastrophe, demanded that she notice how he was dressed—in a sheet-like garment, with a blue border, and wearing sandals. She broke into a hysterical giggle, instantly smothered with a sob.

Miss Willett’s left arm relaxed, and the kitten slipped down upon the hard floor, scratching ragged furrows in her new dress as he went. The big woman, whimpering as if she were being beaten, leaned back against the door, patting at her mouth with her ring-gnarled fingers.

“O Jesus!” she whispered, pleading, holding out her arms to the plaster figure by the window—“Jesus! I didn’t know! I didn’t—”

And she backed out of the door, and closed it softly, and went home.

But somehow after that, Miss Willett’s love for the Princess Bimberino seemed even to deepen and intensify, and there was in her handling of the veteran infant an immaculate, an almost agonized wistful tenderness which, as Mr. Bimber said, “kept ’em comin’ in droves, an’ with their eyes shinin’.”

SUPERS[3]

By FREDERICK BOOTH

From The Seven Arts Magazine

Wanted: Tall, good-looking men for the stage. Must be well dressed. Apply at stage door of —— Theater at ten A.M.

THERE is a certain amount of irony in the above, such as for instance, “Tall, good-looking”; “must be well dressed”; and the man who appears in the side street in the vicinity of the stage door at about half-past nine in the morning knows this, for he wrote the advertisement himself.

He is a thick man, with a red beard trimmed in the form of a blunt wedge, and cut away from around his mouth as a hedge is cut from a gate. He is a man with a cool green eye, immobile face, and distant manner. A man who walks slowly, is introspective, gloomy; who carries a big stick like Javert’s cudgel and studies the pavement like a man of large affairs. He has the manner of a general waiting to review his army, which he expects to find decimated and run down at the heel. He wears a derby hat slightly broken at the crown, a little shiny on the edges; an overcoat with a collar somewhat frayed; boots that are rather square-toed and vulgar.

This combination of shabbiness and thoughtfulness lends him an appearance of sorrow—simple and primitive in the light of his red beard—as if he were telling himself and would like to tell the world: Here is a man of immense capabilities, fated to deal in small and absolutely rotten potatoes.

In twos and threes some men begin to come in sight from the direction of Sixth and Seventh Avenues. They sidle into the street that runs by the stage door; some of them cast at Red Beard a look of recognition and a half-nod, to which he is profoundly indifferent. Others fix their gaze upon the legend over the door as children stare at the entrance of a circus tent.

Little by little the straggling and deliberate comers make a scattered crowd. The catchings of the advertisement agglomerate and blacken the middle of the street.

They stand stock still. As a concourse of men they are, all in all, voiceless and apathetic; before the momentary flurry of some traffic in the street they are brushed aside as dry leaves. There is a shuffling of feet on the asphalt as of dry leaves hurried along by the wind.

There seems to be an understanding among these men, as if this were not their first venture in such an enterprise. And there seems to be an understanding between them and the man with the cane: he appears, by the casual oblique glance, by the turned shoulder, to know them, where they came from, what he can do with them; and to feel the indifference of the dealer for his stock-in-trade. He wrote the ad. Here are the men. It is the same as ordering coal and seeing it dumped upon the sidewalk.

The scattered crowd had become a mob, a quiet mob that pushes gently, elbows itself without offence, waits.

Tall? Well-dressed? There are tall men, but their heads move in a sea of men that are short, men that are stooped. There may be well-dressed men, but they are hidden among men with shabby clothes. They are of all ages, but of the same condition. There may be seen gray heads, like patches of white wool in a flock of black sheep.

From a distance this small mass of humanity, held in abeyance by a single purpose, appears to be wholly silent, its attention, if not its glance, controlled by the simple potency of the stage door; but coming closer one may hear sounds that are words gutturally spoken, and a desultory murmur that resolves itself into a dialogue of many parts. Is there any stratum of society that does not have its shop talk? In every one, its atoms, akin, are stretching back and forth those little tentacles of question and answer, of seeking to know, of seeking to tell, that hold them together.

“Wher’ wus you last week?”

“T’ Newark wit’ Mantell.”

“Any good?”

“Nix. Rotten. One night y’ play an’ th’ next y’ don’t an’ y’ gotta....”

“How many do they want here?”

“I dunno, it’s a rotten bizness; not’ing in this bizness no more. I’m goin’ t’....”

“Hey, y’ rummy, git offa my foot. Whaddaya t’ink I yam?”

A sinister sort of meekness controls these men; holds men patient who are hard of face; docile who seem to be cut for any sort of business; pathetically anxious who seem to be cast for any rough hazard.

These are the men who may be seen on park benches; at saloon corners; who accost passers in the name of charity; who carry restaurant signs; who may be seen every morning at newspaper offices eagerly scanning the want columns; who carry a newspaper as if it were something precious; who hurry along with a sidelong gait; whose shoes make a sliding noise on the pavement.

These are men unshaven of face, pallid of complexion. Some of them wear overcoats turned up at the collar, sagging at the skirt with a rag-tag of frayed lining showing; bulging at the pocket with some unimaginable personal freight. Some of them wear no overcoats, some no vests, others no collars. Some, with short, shrunken trousers, show bare red ankles. There are trousers that have settled into fixed folds about the shoes as if they had not been doffed or pulled up for some nights. The feet point out at a loutish angle, or point in pigeonwise. There are flat feet, feet broken at the instep, spread out like a duck’s—oozing damp, hideous and evidently filthy, stub-ended, low in the instep, too large. They shift, shuffle, and twist about like wounded and helpless members. The hands that go with them are red and dirty; they are rubbed against trousers impotently, for want of something better to do. These men stand with their necks habitually drawn into their collars, their shoulders hunched. They have an unhealthy color and they speak in voices coarsened by whiskey and by the weather. They crane at the door like beggars waiting for a handout.

It is ten o’clock. Red Beard has forsaken the sidewalk and is standing on a box or something at the stage door, looking at the findings of his advertisement. He scowls heavily and appears to be disgusted with what he sees.

The crowd edges closer. Those on the outside push those within. The crowd becomes a pack. Necks crane upward. A hoarse voice meant to be jocular wheezes:

“Hey, bo, y’ want me, don’t y’s? Ain’t I t’ cheese?”

A laugh swells up, but dies instantly before the sardonic sneer under Red Beard’s hedge. Someone says: “Huh, wot ’d’yu’s t’ink you are, a primy donny star?”

Red Beard’s jaw moves and he is heard to mutter:

“Gawd, what a rotten bunch!”

A uniform pushing and shoving begins. A clownish, uncouth eagerness manifests itself and animates the crowd. It is as if they were scrambling for apples. The scuffling of feet sounds like an unrhythmic dance. On the outside gaunt, bent legs push to get in. On the inside, in the middle of the jam, scrawny necks stretch up, heads stare.

A hoarse clacking murmur, resembling more than anything else the quacking of geese going to water, is evidence of a certain sort of talk going on within the confines of the crowd. It runs in a monotone and reveals no anger, no impatience, none of the mob frenzy that might be expected here. A futile eagerness!

Already the man on the box has begun to exercise his authority. He holds in his hand a card which he consults with knitted brows, and from which his glance shoots quickly, like an accusation, at the men. He points at one man in the thick of the press.

“You there,” he says, “you wop wit’ t’ dent in your nose, I want youse.”

As the lucky one shoves forward the crowd is forced apart as logs are pried apart by a canthook.

“Youse guys stand back,” bawls Red Beard. The stage door is opened by someone whose face shows through the dirty glass and the first super fights his way within.

Red Beard’s club-like finger is periodically brandished at the pack; his voice of brass names some candidate by any ill-favored mark he can see, and that one is cut out as a steer is cut out of the herd.

It seems that some definite program is being followed: some planned chiaroscuro of the stage is being sketched in: broad shoulders and tall frames are at a premium, but shrunk figures, hairy faces and loutish manners are nailed by the Captain of this peculiar industry; old men with long beards have their innings.

The crowd imperceptibly draws together at the edges as the middle is gutted and the ill-hued flowers of the flock are plucked.

At last some at the outside begin to straggle from the press. They light cigarettes which hang like appendages from their lips; some of them whistle; some dance a tentative hop. Thus they make light of their bootless quest “for a job.”

Suddenly the man on the box waves his hand and says: “That’s all; youse guys come back here tomorry morning,” hops from his perch and disappears within the theater.

The largest number of those who came are still on the street. Collectively they present the appearance of a dog licking his chops after some morsel snatched away. They gape at the door closed in their faces as if someone had gone inside with something that belonged to them.

There is some hesitation, some loafing about, then a policeman bears down and waves his club. The black knot untangles itself, tailing out into a long string that drags its length in two directions, towards the two avenues, thins more, parts in the middle and disappears. No face shows more than passing disappointment—little has been lost. Some whistle, others call to each other, empty phrases are bandied about by tongues that have lost the gift of tongues.

The scuffling of their feet more or less in unison sounds like a rope dragging.

FOG[4]

By DANA BURNET

From McBride’s Magazine

I HAD come out of the city, where story-telling is a manufactured science, to the country where story-telling is a by-product of life. Mr. Siles had arrived to paint my piazza, as per a roundabout agreement between my cook, my cook’s cousin, my cook’s cousin’s wife, who had been a Miss Siles, and finally—Mr. Siles himself. If that sentence is somewhat involved, so was my contract with Mr. Siles. In the country, a semicircle is the shortest line between two points.

I came at the strange story of Wessel’s Andy in something of the same circuitous manner. Mr. Siles, as I have said, had arrived to paint my piazza; but after a long look at the heavens and the heaving sea, he opined that it would be a wet day and that the painting had best be left till to-morrow. I demurred. I was acquainted with the to-morrows of this drowsy Maine village. But while we were arguing the point, a white ghost began to roll in from the deep.

“Fog,” said Mr. Siles.

“Yes,” I admitted grudgingly.

He stared into the thickening mists with an expression that puzzled me. I have seen the same look upon the face of a child compelled to face the dark alone.

“I mistrust it,” said Mr. Siles, simply.

“Mistrust the fog?”

He nodded, his iron-gray beard quivering with the intensity of the assent.

“Take it in a gale of wind,” he said, “that’s honest weather, though it blows a man’s soul to Kingdom Come. But fog—”

“I suppose strange things do happen in it,” I replied. It was a chance shot, but it struck home.

“Strange!” cried Mr. Siles. “You may well say strange! There was somethin’ happened right here in this village—”

I settled myself comfortably against the naked piazza railing, and Mr. Siles told me this story.

He was born a thousand miles from deep water. His folks were small farmers in a middle western grain state, and he was due to inherit the farm. But almost before he could talk they knew he was a queer one. They knew he was no more farmer than he was college professor. He was a land hater from the beginnin’. He hated the look and the feel and the smell of it. He told me afterward that turnin’ a furrow with a plow set his teeth on edge like when you scrape your finger nail along a piece of silk. His name was Andy.

When he was about thirteen year’ old he found a picture of a ship in a newspaper. It was like a glimpse of another world. He cut it out and pasted it on the attic wall over his bed. He used to look at it a hundred times a day. He used to get up in the middle of the night, and light a match and look at it. Got so, Andy’s father came up early one mornin’ with a can o’ whitewash and blotted the whole thing out against the wall. The boy didn’t say a word until the ship was gone. Then he laughed, a crazy sort o’ laugh.

“That’s the way they go,” he says, “right into the fog,” he says, “and never come out again!”

He was sick after that. Some sort of a fever. I guess it made him a little delirious. He told me he was afraid they were goin’ to blot him out, same as the picture. Used to dream he was smotherin’ to death, and pleasant things like that. Queer, too....

When the fever finally burned out of him, he was nothin’ but skin and bones. His people saw he was too sickly to work, so they let him mope around by himself. He used to spend most of his time in the woodshed, whittlin’ pine models o’ that whitewashed schooner. He was known all through those parts as Wessel’s Andy, Wessel bein’ his fam’ly name. See for yourself what Wessel’s Andy meant. It didn’t mean Andrew Wessel, by the grace o’ God free, white and twenty-one. It meant “that good-for-nothin’, brain-cracked boy over to Wessel’s.” That’s what it amounted to in plain words.

But the strange thing about that name was how it followed him. It came east a thousand miles, and there wasn’t a town but it crawled into, on its belly, like a snake into long grass. And it poisoned each place for him, so that he kept movin’ on, movin’ on, always toward deep water. It used to puzzle him how strangers knew to call his name hindside foremost. ’T wan’t any puzzle to me. He hadn’t been in my place two minutes askin’ for a job, but I say “What’s your name?” And he says, starin’ hard at the model of the Lucky Star schooner that hung over my counter, “I’m Wessel’s Andy,” he says, never takin’ his eyes off the schooner. Likely he’d done the same absent-minded trick all along the road, though not for just that reason.

I rec’llect the evenin’ he came into my place. I was keepin’ a ship’s supply store in those days—fittin’s and supplies, down by the Old Wharf. He shuffled in toward sundown, his belongin’s done up in a handkerchief, his clothes covered half an inch thick with dust.

“I want a job,” says he.

“What kind of a job?” says I.

“Oh, anything,” says he.

“All right,” I told him, “you can start in here to-morrow. I been lookin’ for somebody to help around the store.” Then I asked him his name and he answered “Wessel’s Andy.” Some of the boys was standin’ ’round and heard him say it. He was never called anything but Wessel’s Andy from that time on.

Quietest young fellow ever I saw—plenty willin’ to work, but not very strong. I paid him four dollars a week and let him bunk in with me at the back o’ the store. He could have made more money some’ers else, but he wouldn’t go. Naturally there were a good many seafarin’ men in and out o’ the shop, and some evenin’s they used to sit around yarnin’ to one another. Often I’ve seen Wessel’s Andy hunched up on a soap box behind the counter, his eyes burnin’ and blinkin’ at the model of the Lucky Star on the opposite wall, his head bent to catch the boys’ stories. Seemed as if he couldn’t get enough o’ ships and the sea.

And yet he was afraid to go, himself. I found that out one night when we were lockin’ up after the boys had gone.

“Have you ever felt yourself to be a coward, Mr. Siles?” he says, in one of his queer fits o’ talkin’.

“Why as for that,” I says, “I guess I been pretty good and scared, a time or two.”

“Oh, I don’t mean that,” he says. “I don’t mean scared. I mean afraid—day and night, sleepin’ and wakin’.”

“No,” I says, “and nobody else with good sense would be. Ain’t nothin’ in this world to frighten a man steady like that, unless it’s his own sin.”

Wessel’s Andy shook his head, smilin’ a little.

“Maybe not in this world,” says he, white and quiet, “but how about—other worlds?”

“What you drivin’ at?” says I. “You mean ghosts?”

“Not ghosts,” he says, lowerin’ his voice and lookin’ out the side window to where the surf was pawin’ the sand. “Just the feelin’ o’ ghosts.”

“Come to bed,” I says. “You’ve worked too hard to-day.”

“No. Please let me tell you. Please sit up awhile. This is one of the times when I can talk.”

He grabbed my hand and pulled me down to a chair. His fingers were as cold as ice. Then he dragged his soap box out from the counter and sat opposite me, a few feet away.

“I’ll tell you how I know I’m a coward,” he says. And he told me everything up to the time of his leavin’ home.

“You see,” he says, “I had to come. It was in me to come East. I’ve been four years workin’ my way to open water, and I’ve had a hell of a time ... a hell of a time. But it was in me to come. There has been a ship behind my eyes ever since I can remember. Wakin’ or sleepin’ I see that ship. It’s a schooner, like the Lucky Star there, with all her tops’ls set and she’s disappearin’ in a fog. I know,” he says, lookin’ at me so strange and sad it sent the shivers down my back, “I know I belong aboard o’ that ship.”

“All right,” I says, as though I didn’t think anything of his queer talk, “all right, then go aboard of her. You’ll find a hundred vessels up and down the coast that look like the Lucky Star. Not to a seafarin’ man, maybe. But you’re a farmer. You couldn’t tell one from t’other. Take your pick o’ the lot,” I says, “and go aboard of her like a man.”

But he just smiled at me, a sickly sort o’ smile.

“There’s only one,” he says, “there’s only one, Mr. Siles. When she comes I’ll go aboard of her, but I—won’t—go—like—a—man!”

Then all at once he jumped up with a kind o’ moanin’ noise and stood shakin’ like a leaf, starin’ out the window to the sea.

“There,” he says, kind o’ chokin’. “There, I saw it then! Oh, God, I saw it then!”

I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him.

“You saw what?” I says. “Tell me!”

His fingers dug into my arm like so many steel hooks.

“At the end of the Old Wharf. A sail! Look, don’t you see it?”

I forced him down onto the soap box.

“Sit there,” I says, “and don’t be a fool. It’s low tide,” I says, “and there ain’t enough water off the Old Wharf to float a dory.”

“I saw it,” he says, draggin’ the words out slow as death, “I saw it, just as I always knew I would. That’s what I came East for ... a thousand miles. And I’m afraid to go aboard of her. I’m afraid, because I don’t know what it’s for.”

He was rockin’ himself back and forth like a crazy man, so I ran and got a drop o’ whiskey from the back room.

“Here,” I says. “Drink this.”

He swallowed it straight, like so much water. In a few minutes he quieted. “Now then,” I says, “you come to bed. This night’s entertainment is over.”

But it wasn’t. About midnight I woke up with the feelin’ that somethin’ was wrong. First thing I saw was the lamp burnin’ high and bright. Next thing was Wessel’s Andy, sittin’ in his underclothes on the edge o’ the bunk, my whiskey flask in his hands.

“Mr. Siles,” says he, as straight and polite as a dancin’ master, though his eyes burned, “I have made free with your whiskey. I have drunk it all, I think.”

“Great Jehosophat,” I says, “there was pretty nigh a quart in that flask!”

“I hope you don’t begrudge it,” says he, still smooth as wax, “because it has made me feel like a man, Mr. Siles, like a man. I could talk—and even laugh a little, I think. Usually I can only feel. Usually I am afraid. Afraid of what, Mr. Siles? Afraid of goin’ aboard without knowin’ what for. That’s the fear to eat your heart out, Mr. Siles. That’s the fear to freeze your blood. The not knowin’ what for!”

I was wide awake by this time and wonderin’ how I could get him back to bed. I didn’t want to lay hands on him any more than you’d want to lay hands on a person with nightmare. So I started to argy with him, like one friend to another. We were a queer lookin’ pair, I’ll warrant, sittin’ there in our underclothes, facin’ each other.

“Look here,” I says, calm as a judge, “if it’s your fate to ship aboard of a vessel, why don’t you go peaceable and leave the reasons for it to God Almighty? Ain’t anything holdin’ you, is there?”

“There is somethin’ holdin’ me,” he says; and then, very low: “What is it, Mr. Siles, that holds a man back from the sea?”

“Saints and skittles!” I says, jolted out o’ my play-actin’, “you ain’t gone and fallen in love, have you?”

He didn’t answer. Just sat there starin’ at me, his face whiter than I ever saw a livin’ man’s face. Then all at once he turned his head, exactly as he would have done if a third person had walked into the room. He was gazin’ straight at the lamp now. His eyes had a sort o’ dazzled look.

“No,” he says. “No, I won’t tell that. It’s—too—beautiful.”

And before I could jump to catch him he pitched in a dead faint onto the floor.

It was two or three days before he was well enough to go to work again. Durin’ that time he hardly spoke a word. But one afternoon he came to me.

“Mr. Siles,” he said. “I’m queer, but I’m not crazy. You’ve been kind to me, and I wanted you to know it wasn’t that. There are people in this world,” he said, “whose lives aren’t laid down accordin’ to the general rule. I’m one o’ them.”

And that’s all he ever said about his actions the night he drank the whiskey.

It was a week or so later that Wessel’s Andy heard the story o’ Cap’n Salsbury and the Lucky Star. I suppose he was bound to hear it sooner or later, it bein’ a fav’rite yarn with the boys. But the way of his hearin’ it was an accident, at that.

One afternoon, late, a fisherman from Gloucester put into the harbor. He had carried away some runnin’ gear on his way to the Newf’n’land Banks and was stoppin’ in port to refit. After supper the skipper came into the shop, where the boys was sittin’ round as usual. First thing he saw was that model o’ the Lucky Star on the wall.

“What has become o’ Dan Salsbury?” says he, squintin’ aloft. “What has become o’ Dan Salsbury that used to go mackrelin’ with the fleet?”

So they told him what had become o’ Dan Salsbury, three or four o’ them pitchin’ in together. But finally it was left to old Jem Haskins to tell the story. In the first place, Jem had the longest wind and in the second place his cousin Allie used to keep house for Cap’n Dan. So Jem knew the ins and outs o’ the story better than any o’ the rest. As he began to talk, I saw Wessel’s Andy pick up his soap box and creep closer.... And this is the story that he heard:

Cap’n Dan Salsbury was a deep-sea fisherman, owner and master o’ the schooner Lucky Star. He had been born and raised in the village and was one of its fav’rite citizens. He was a fine, big man to look at, quiet and unassumin’ in his ways and fair in his dealin’, aship and ashore. If ever a man deserved to be happy, Dan Salsbury deserved it. But somehow happiness didn’t come to him.

First his wife died. He laid her in a little plot o’ ground on the hill back of his house, took his year-old girl baby aboard the Lucky Star and sailed for God knows where. He was gone ten months. Then he came back, opened his cottage on Salsbury Hill and set out to make little Hope Salsbury the richest girl in the village. He pretty nigh did it, too. His luck was supernat’ral. His catches were talked about up and down the coast. He became a rich man, accordin’ to village standards.

Hope Salsbury grew up to be the prettiest girl in town. She was never very strong, takin’ after her mother that way, and there was an air about her that kept folks at a distance. It wasn’t uppish or mean. She was as kind as an angel, and just about as far-away as one. There wasn’t a youngster in the village but would have died to have her, but she scared ’em speechless with her strange, quiet talk and her big misty eyes. Folks said Hope Salsbury wouldn’t look at a man, and they were right. She looked straight through him.

It worried Cap’n Dan. He didn’t want to get rid of Hope, by a long shot, but he knew he was failin’ and he wanted to see her settled with a nice, dependable boy who could take care of her after he had gone. There was a man for every woman, said Cap’n Dan. But Hope didn’t seem to find her man. She got quieter and quieter, and lonelier and lonelier, till the Cap’n decided somethin’ was wrong somewhere. So he asked her straight out if there was anyone she wanted, anyone she cared enough about to marry. She said no, there wasn’t. But she said it so queer that the Cap’n began to suspect it was a case of the poor child lovin’ somebody who didn’t love her. It took him a long time to find the courage to ask that question. But when he did, she only smiled and shook her head.

“Hope,” says the Cap’n, “there’s only one thing in the world that makes a young girl wilt like you’re wiltin’, and that’s love. Tell me what it is you want, and we’ll go searchin’ the seven seas till we find it.”

“I don’t know what it is myself,” the girl answered. “It’s as though I was in love with someone I had met long ago, and then lost.”

“Lost can be found,” says the Cap’n. “We’ll go ’round the world in the Lucky Star.”

Within a month’s time the old schooner was overhauled and refitted and made ready for sea. It was June when she sailed out o’ the harbor, but she hadn’t gone far enough to clear the Cape when a fog shut down and hid her from sight. Most of the village was standin’ on the wharf to wave good-bye. But they never saw the Lucky Star again. The fog lasted all day and all night and by mornin’ o’ the second day Cap’n Dan Salsbury and his daughter were a part o’ the blue myst’ry across the horizon. They never came back. The Lucky Star was lost with all hands in the big blow off Hatteras two years ago this summer.... So little Hope Salsbury never found her man, and that branch o’ the Salsbury family died, root, stock and branch.

As old Jem broke off, I glanced at Wessel’s Andy. The boy was crouched forward on his soap box, his eyes burnin’ like two coals in the shadow. When he saw me lookin’ at him, he shrank back like a clam into its shell. That night, as we were undressin’ in the back room, he turned to me all of a sudden.

“Mr. Siles,” says he, “is there a picture o’ Miss Hope Salsbury in this village?”

“Why,” I answered, “I don’t know as there is—and I don’t know as there isn’t. Come to think, I guess Cap’n Dan’s cousin Ed Salsbury might have a likeness. He inherited most of the Cap’n’s prop’ty. Probably find one in the fam’bly album.”

“Which house is Ed Salsbury’s?”

“Third to the right after you climb the Hill. You aren’t thinkin’ o’ goin’ up there to-night, are you?”

Wessel’s Andy was kind o’ smilin’ to himself. He didn’t answer my question. But he got into bed all right and proper, turned his face to the wall and was soon breathin’ quiet and regular. I never suspected for a minute that he was shammin’.

It was just four o’clock in the mornin’ when the telephone in the store began to ring—I looked at the clock as I jumped up to answer the call. I was on a party wire and my call was 13—one long and three shorts. I had never thought about it bein’ unlucky till that minute. But it struck me cold to hear that old bell borin’ through the early mornin’ silence....

“Hello,” I says, takin’ down the receiver.

“This is Ed Salsbury,” says the other party. “Come up to my house right away and take your crazy clerk off my hands. I found him sittin’ in the parlor when I came down to start the fires. Asked him what he was doin’ and he said he had come to steal things. If you ain’t up here in fifteen minutes I’ll call the deputy sheriff.”

I was up there in less than fifteen minutes. I cursed that fool boy every step of the way, but I went. I don’t know why I took such trouble about him. Maybe I was a part o’ that fate o’ his.

Ed met me at the door of his cottage.

“Siles,” says he, “there’s somethin’ queer about this. It’s against nature. That boy—I’ve been talkin’ to him—swears he came up here last night to steal. He pried open one o’ the front windows and got into the parlor. That’s enough to send him to jail for a good long bit, but I’m blessed if I want to send him. I’ve got a suspicion that the lad is lyin’, though why any human should lie himself into the penitentiary instead of out of it, blamed if I know. You got any ideas on the subject?”

“What was he doin’ when you found him?” says I.

“That was funny, too. He was sittin’ at the table, with the lamp lit, as home-like as you please. And—”

“And what?”

“Lookin’ at that old fam’ly album of ours.”

“Ed,” I says, “I’ll go bond for that boy. Don’t say anything about this down at the village. Some day I’ll tell you why he came up here at dead o’ night to peek into that old album of yours. It ain’t quite clear in my own mind yet, but it’s gettin’ clearer.”

“Queer how he looked at me when I came in the door,” says Ed. “Just as though he was the one belonged here and I was the trespasser. His eyes—”

“I know,” I said. “Where is the boy, Ed? I’ll take him home now.”

“He’s in the kitchen,” Ed answered, kind o’ sheepish, “eatin’ breakfast.”

The Salsburys always were the biggest-hearted folk in the village.

So I took Wessel’s Andy back to the store, but instead o’ talkin’ to him like I meant to, I never so much as opened my mouth the whole way home. I couldn’t. He looked too happy. It was the first time I’d seen him look anything but glum and peaked. Now, he was a changed man. There was a light on his face, and when I say light I mean light. Once he burst out laughin’—and it wasn’t the sort o’ laugh that comes from thinkin’ o’ somethin’ funny. It was just as though he’d seen some great trouble turned inside out and found it lined with joy. He made me think of a bridegroom, somehow, stridin’ along there in the early dawn....

I believe he would have gone straight on past the store, but for my hand on his arm. He followed me into the back room like a blind man, and there for the first time he spoke.

“I shan’t work to-day,” he says, drawin’ a deep breath. Again I thought of a bridegroom.

“No,” I says, “you’ll go to bed and get some sleep.”

“Yes,” he says, “I must sleep.” He began to peel off his clothes, and when I came back an hour later he was sleepin’ like a baby, and smilin’....

He slept well into the afternoon. Then he got up, shaved, washed and put on the best clothes he owned. He didn’t have only the one suit, but he brushed it till it looked like new. Instead o’ the blue shirt that he wore around the shop he had on a white one with a standin’ collar and a white tie. I found him standin’ by the window in the back room, lookin’ out to sea.

“Mr. Siles,” he says, not turnin’ round, “I am goin’ to leave you.”

“Leave?” I says.

“Yes.”

“When you goin’?”

“Soon,” he says. And then he faced me.

“That ship,” he says, “that ship I told you about”—he was speakin’ slow and quiet—“it’s comin’ for me very soon. I shan’t have to wait much longer now. I feel that it is near. And I am glad.”

“I thought you didn’t want to go?” I says, tryin’ to get at the real meanin’ of his words. I felt like a man in a dark room that’s reachin’ for somethin’ he knows is there but can’t quite locate.

“That was yesterday,” he says, smilin’ like he had smiled in his sleep. “To-day I’m glad. To-day I want to go. It’s the natural thing to do, now. It’s so natural—and good—that I don’t mind talkin’ about it any more. Sit down,” he says, “and I’ll tell you. You’ve been my friend, and you ought to know.”

I sat down, feelin’ kind o’ weak in the knees. By this time it was beginning to grow dark. A slight mist was formin’ on the water.

“I’ve already told you,” he says, “about the ship that was always behind my eyes. There was somethin’ else, Mr. Siles, somethin’ I’ve never told a livin’ soul. Ever since I was a little boy I’ve been seein’ a face. It was a child’s face to begin with, but it grew as I grew. It was like a beautiful flower, that changes but is always the same. At first I only dreamed it, but as I grew older I used to see it quite clearly, both day and night. I saw it more and more frequently, until lately”—he put his hand to his eyes—“it has become a livin’ part o’ me. It is a woman’s face, Mr. Siles, and it calls me.

“Until last night I had never connected this face in any way with the ship in the fog. You see, one was the most beautiful thing in the world—the only beautiful thing in my world—and the other was horrible. But it called me, too, and I was afraid; afraid that I would have to go before I found her.”

He leaned forward and put his hand on my knee.

“Mr. Siles,” says he, in the voice of a man speakin’ of his Bride, “I saw that face last night in Mr. Salsbury’s old album. It was the face of Hope Salsbury.”

I jumped up and away from him. My brain had been warnin’ me all along that something like this was comin’, but it was a shock, just the same.

“She’s dead,” I says. “She’s dead!”

It was the only thing I could think to say. My mouth was dry as a bone. Words wouldn’t come to me.

“Oh, no,” he cried, and his voice rang. “Oh, no, Mr. Siles. There’s no such thing as bein’ dead. There are more worlds than one,” he says. “As many more as a man needs,” he says. “This is only a poor breath of a world. There are others, others! I know,” he says—and laughed—“I know how it is with men. They think because their eyes close and their mouths are still and their hearts stop beatin’ that it’s the end o’ happiness. And maybe it is with some. I can’t say. Maybe if folks are entirely happy in this world they don’t need the others. But it’s every man’s right to be happy, Mr. Siles, and the Lord God knows His business. Trust Him, Mr. Siles, trust Him. Don’t I know? I used to be afraid, but now I see how it is.”

“Lord help me,” I says. “What am I to do?”

“Why, nothin’,” he says, pattin’ my knee. “It’s all right, Mr. Siles. You go ahead with your life,” he says, “the same as though I had never come into it. Take all the happiness you can get, Mr. Siles, for that’s as God intended. But never think it ends here.”

I couldn’t look at him. There was a blur before my eyes. I got up and went out o’ the store, headin’ down the beach. I wanted to be alone, to sit down quietly and think. My brain was spinnin’ like a weathercock in a gale.

I must have blundered up the beach a good two miles before I noticed that the mist was thickenin’. I stopped dead still and watched it creep in, blottin’ the blue water as it came. It was like the white sheet that a stage magician drops between him and the audience just before he does his great trick. I wondered what was goin’ on behind it.

The sun was settin’ behind Salsbury Hill. There was a sort o’ glow to the fog. It began to shine like a piece of old silver that has been rubbed with a rag. All at once I heard Wessel’s Andy say, clear as a bell: “Mr. Siles, I am goin’ to leave you!”

I turned toward home, walkin’ fast. But somethin’ kept pesterin’ me to hurry, hurry! I began to run, but I couldn’t get ahead of the black fear that was drivin’ me. I saw Wessel’s Andy standin’ at the window and lookin’ out to sea. I heard him say: “It’s comin’ for me very soon.” I ran till my heart pounded in my side....

The beach curved before me like the blade of a scythe, with the Old Wharf for the handle. The edge of it was glistenin’ in the afterglow and the surf broke against it like grain against the knife. I was still half a mile from home when I saw a single figure walk out on that shinin’ blade and stand with his arms folded, starin’ into the fog. It was Wessel’s Andy.

I tried to run faster, but the sand caught my feet. It was like tryin’ to run in a dream. I called and shouted to him, but he didn’t hear. All the shoutin’ in the world wouldn’t have stopped him then. Suddenly he threw out his arms and walked down into the water. I was so near by that time that I could see his face. It was like a lamp in the mist.

I called again, but he was in the surf now, and there were other voices in his ears. A wave broke over his shoulders. He struggled on, his hands kind o’ gropin’ ahead of him. I caught another glimpse of his face. He was smilin’....

I gathered myself to jump. I remember the foam on the sand and the water swirlin’ underfoot and the new wave makin’ and the fog over all. I remember thinkin’ o’ the strong tide, and how little a man looked in the sea....

And then I saw the Lucky Star.

I would have known her anywhere. She was just haulin’ out o’ the mist, on the starboard tack, with all her canvas set. As I looked she melted in the fog—she that should have been lyin’ fathoms deep—and after that I only saw her by glances. But I saw her plain. She was no color at all, and there wasn’t the sign of a light to mark her, but she came bow on through water that wouldn’t have floated a dory, closer and closer until I could make out the people on her decks. They were like statues carved out o’ haze. There was a great figure at the wheel, and others up for’ard, in smoky oilskins. And at the lee rail I saw a young girl leanin’ against the shrouds, one hand to her heart, the other held out as though to tear aside the mist....

I was in the water then, and it was cold. A wave picked me up and carried me forward. I saw Wessel’s Andy flounderin’ in the trough ahead o’ me. I swam for him. My hand touched his shoulder. He twisted half about and looked at me. His hair was like matted seaweed over his eyes and his face was as pale as the dead. But again, in all that wildness, I thought of a bridegroom....

A great wave, with a cruel curved edge, lifted above us. I made ready to dive, but he flung his arms out and waited.... I saw white bows ridin’ on the crest of it, and the silver belly of a drawin’ jib, and it seemed to me I heard a laugh! Then the wave hit me....

When I came to, I was lyin’ on the beach with some o’ the boys bendin’ over me. They had heard me shoutin’ and arrived just in time to pull me away from the tide. They never found him. They said it was because of the strong undertow. But I knew better. I knew that Wessel’s Andy had gone aboard of his vessel at last, and that all was well with him.

* * * * * * * * *

Mr. Siles stopped abruptly and drew his hand across his eyes. I found myself staring at the gray wall of fog as though it had been the final curtain of a play. I longed for it to lift—if only for an instant—that I might see the actors out of their parts. But the veil was not drawn aside.

Then I heard some one speaking monotonously of a piazza that would be painted on the morrow, and turning a moment later saw Mr. Siles just vanishing in the mist, a smoky figure solely inhabiting an intangible world.

I went into my house and closed the door.

MA’S PRETTIES[5]

By FRANCIS BUZZELL

From The Pictorial Review

BEN BROOKS filled his mouth with mashed potatoes, pushed the emptied plate to the center of the table, and kicked his chair back. It was Saturday night and he made ready to go to Almont. He ran his fingers through his mat of yellowish-gray hair, dirt-seamed fingers of a farm-laborer, as he went for his coat and hat on the nail behind the door. He had no team of horses to harness, not even a worked-out mare and paint-bare buggy, such as the “renters” went to town in. That had all gone long ago when the land went. He was no longer even a steady farm-hand. All that was left him was the old house with its garden patch, and the barn, which now housed a few chickens.

His daughters, Aggie and Josie, clearing away the supper dishes, looked at each other.

“Pa, you ain’t goin’ without seein’ Ma!”

Ben grunted, and started up the stairs. His wife sat propped up in bed, muttering to herself. On the little table beside the bed, he saw the pie-tin on which Ma burned mullein-leaves, and the old tin funnel through which she inhaled the fumes when she felt an attack of asthma coming on. Ben shuffled in the doorway and rubbed the back of his hand against his unshaven face. It might go hard with Ma if she started to wheeze, now that she was so bad with her side.

“Is that you there, Ben?—— Get me the little jug—— over the door—— You be careful, now—— It’s cracked.”

She tilted the jug upon the patch-quilt, a brown jug, with cat-tails painted on it. She had won it in a race at the Fair, when she was Sadie Chambers and “keeping company” with Ben Brooks. Her bony hands moved; her fingers felt about. She picked up a twenty-five cent piece and three nickels. The effort tired her.

“Put the jug back—— Careful, now—— You take them forty cents an’ get them earrings—They must be fixed by now—— Ma died in ’em. I want to die in ’em.”

“Don’t be a fool, Ma! You ain’t goin’ to die. Did n’t Doctor John say you was goin’ to last longer ’n me?”

“I’m a-breathin’ awful heavy.”

“Don’t talk like that, Ma. We got to have you.” Ben put his hand on his wife’s thin shoulder. “You wait till I bring back them earrings of your ’n, anyhow.”

“Don’t let that Sam talk you into spendin’ any of them forty cents, now.”

“Don’t begin a-wheezin’ while I’m gone.”

His daughters followed him out onto the porch.

“Now, Pa. You come home early. You know Ma’s sick.”

Ben hurried down the path. It was a habit formed on the many Saturday nights when, because he took a glass, or at most two glasses, of beer, his wife’s shrill, “Don’t you be a-gettin’ drunk, now!” pursued him far down the road. But he did not turn around, when out of sight, to shake his fist in the direction of the house and exclaim, “You old fool!” Nor did he mutter, as he plodded on, “The old miser. Don’t I know? Ain’t I seen her a-hangin’ of them old dresses of her’n out on the line so’s the farmers’ wives ’ud think she’d lots of things? She’s cracked about her pretties!” He did not even whistle to himself.

He found Old Sam leaning against the watering-trough at Predmore’s Corners, waiting for him. Like two old horses meeting in a strange pasture, they rubbed up against each other. This was their way of greeting every Saturday night. On the mile and a half to town they did not exchange a word.

On the hotel corner, Ben turned to Sam. “Got a dime?”

“No. Have you?”

“No.”

“We’ll get a dime or two,” said Sam.

“Editor Tinsman might have a job he wants done,” Ben suggested.

“Or Ed Snover, or Doc Greenshields,” added Sam. “Marb Brab might have something.”

“I got forty cents Ma gave me to get her earrings,” Ben confided.

“Have ye? We’ll get a dime or two, somehow.”

The two old men waited on Newberry’s Corner. Marb Brab came along.

“Good evening, boys.”

“Howdy, Mr. Brab.”

Marb Brab went on, without offering them a job. Editor Tinsman said “Hello!” to them as he crossed the street to his office. Al Jersey came along. They stepped out in the middle of the sidewalk, scuffled a bit, and laughed loudly. But he had nothing for them.

“I’d better get Ma’s earrings, ’fore it’s too late.”

“Better wait a bit.”

“No, I’d better go.”

“If you work it right, mebbe Tibbits will take just thirty cents.”

“Catch Roy Tibbits a-doin’ anything like that!”

“Mebbe I’ll get something while you’re gone,” Sam concluded.

Ben started up the street.

Charlie Wade, the photographer, passed Newberry’s Corner, and Lawyer Moreland, and Ed Snover.

“Got anything?” Ben asked, when he returned.

“Let’s go an’ look in the drugstore window,” Sam suggested. “Mebbe Hepplethwaite ’ll want us to turn the ice-cream freezer.”

They walked up and down in front of the plate-glass window. Hepplethwaite didn’t beckon to them. They heard the town clock strike ten—there was little chance of their earning anything.

Sam went through his pockets. “We ain’t got nothin’ we can borrow a dime or two on, have we?”

“Ma’s sick. She thinks a wonderful lot of them earrings. If it was next week, when Ma’d be better—”

“You might say you just forgot,” Sam interrupted. “Next Saturday night we’d sure make some money an’ get ’em back.”

“Ma’s sick. It’s one of her pretties.”

“Let’s go home, then,” Sam grumbled. “I’m tired of a-hangin’ around here.”

They started for home. Farmers drove past them. A wagon loaded with three generations of Jeddo’s, good-natured, noisy, the laughter of the women and young girls sounding shrilly above the gruff voices of the men, clattered up from behind. “Hello, Ben! Hello, Sam! Want a ride? Tumble in, boys! Tumble in! Lots of room!”

The two old men shook their heads and tramped on. Ben did not brag of the exploits that ended when he married Sadie Chambers; nor did Old Sam talk of the Saturday nights when he, and not his red-headed son, was hired man of the Predmore Farm. They reached Predmore’s Corners. “Good-night, Sam!”

“’Night!”

“I got them earrings, anyhow,” Ben prided himself, as he went along the stretch of road. “An’ I ain’t had a drink. Won’t Ma be surprised!”

Aggie and Josie came to the door when they heard Ben’s step. “Pa! Oh, Pa!” they called to him. “Ma’s dead!”

“Now, now, Josie! Don’t say that! She ain’t, Aggie! She ain’t, Josie! Say she ain’t dead!”

Mrs. Lowell was the first of the neighbors to come in the next day. She brewed strong tea for Ben and looked after the girls:

“Now you run up-stairs, Josie, an’ you, Aggie, an’ get fixed. People will begin a-comin’ soon. An’ you, Ben, go put on that black coat of your’n.”

Ben wandered from room to room. His daughters watched him. He wiped the face of the Swiss clock with his sleeve. He found the World’s Fair souvenir spoon in the china-closet, picked it up and put it down again. He took the silver-handled cane that Uncle George had brought with him from the city, and carried it about.

Aggie turned to Josie. “See, he’s already a-takin’ of Ma’s pretties.”

“He ’ll sell ’em all for drink, now Ma’s gone.”

“Ma loved Grandma Chambers’s earrings, didn’t she, Aggie?”

“Yes, Josie. An’ the jet beads with the locket on ’em. An’ the Swiss clock.”

“An’ the silver pitcher-frame.”

“An’ Uncle George’s cane with the silver end.”

“Ma loved her pretties.”

“Pa ’ll sell ’em all for drink, now Ma’s gone.”

They began to cry.

“We don’t care for ourselves,” Aggie appealed to Mrs. Lowell. “It’s you ought to get something nice. You ’ve always been so good to Ma.”

“Yes, one of the nicest,” said Josie. “It ’d be such a comfort to Ma to know you got the best. Pa ’ll sell ’em all for drink, now Ma’s gone.”

Ben took Grandma Chambers’s earrings into the parlor where Ma was lying in her coffin. “She didn’t know, she didn’t know I brought ’em home. Here they be, Ma! Here they be. See, on the coffin!”

Ben was moved by the appearance of the parlor, by the silence, by the heavy odor, that oppressive odor present at funerals, in rooms where windows and shutters are seldom opened. Mrs. Lowell had made everything beautiful for Ma’s last day at home. She had brought all the best flowers from her garden and disposed of them about the room. Ben saw the white asters which Mrs. Lowell had piled upon Ma’s rocker and set at the head of the coffin; the “store flowers” brought by Undertaker Hopkins that she had placed upon the coffin-lid; the pitcher of cosmos beside the family Bible on the little stand in the window; the zinnias on the marble-topped table in the corner; the dahlias on the window-sills; the stray asters and corn-flowers pinned to the curtains; the sweet alyssum twined around the picture-wire of Ma’s daguerreotype—Mrs. Lowell had always been good to Ma.

Mrs. Lowell had brought chicken-broth and tidied up Ma’s room whenever Ma was sick. She had been a great help to Ma when Uncle George came home to die. Now Ma lay in her coffin, white, with her hands folded over her breast. Ma would have a fine funeral. Mrs. Lowell had seen to everything.

His daughters were not like Mrs. Lowell. They didn’t know how to make a room look pretty. Ben had hoped that Aggie and Josie would turn out differently, when they had been too young instead of too old to be married, and Ma had gone about the house singing. Now Ma was gone, and left all her pretties behind.

“Aggie! Josie!” Ben called to his daughters. “Ma loved her pretties. You can have ’em all. You divide ’em, I can’t.”

Aggie and Josie looked at each other. The pretties were theirs! What had got into Pa?

“Mis’ Lowell ought to get one,” added Ben. “She’s always been so good to Ma. The beads an’ locket, she might like that?”

“Now, Pa, you better go into the dinin’-room an’ lay down. You’re so tired.”

“Mis’ Lowell’s always been good to Ma,” Ben repeated.

“You’re so tired, Pa. Go lay down on the lounge.”

They watched him shuffle out of the room, and waited until they heard the springs of the lounge creak under his weight. They knew there were pretties in Ma’s bureau that Pa had forgotten about. They started up the stairs, treading carefully, and keeping close together. They reached Ma’s door. Aggie turned the door-knob with both hands and stepped softly into the room, with Josie close behind her. They left the door open so that they might hear Pa better. They opened the closet door, hesitated, looked in. There was Ma’s bureau. They tried the two top drawers. They were locked.

“The keys, Josie! Where be the keys?”

“Ma kept ’em rolled up in a stockin’.”

“We’ll find ’em.”

They opened the next drawer, filled with Ma’s “best” clothes—the Paisley shawl, Ma’s “best” silk dress, the dress of Henrietta cloth, the cashmere dress, Ma’s “best” muslin dress, and the red flannel skirt edged with lace knit out of red yarn.

Both pulled at the third drawer. It flew open. Balls of yarn—pink, green, red, yellow, blue, of various sizes, left over from many quiltings, rolled out upon the floor. They felt about for rolled-up stockings, in the cotton-batting, under the piles of aprons, between the folds of babies’ clothing.

“Them be ours, Aggie.”

“Where be them stockin’s?”

They opened the fourth drawer. Their hands threshed about, ran into each other, tumbled the contents. They straightened up and looked at the shelves.

“They wouldn’t be in them boxes, would they, Josie?”

“The basket! Let’s try that.”

They took down the large, clean, basswood market-basket. Josie lifted the hinged cover. They found Ma’s white wool “fascinator” hood, a pair of woolen leggings, Ma’s “best” knit slippers, a thick brown veil, and a pair of black woolen mittens.

“Here be the stockin’s.”

They upset the basket. In a rolled up pair of gray woolen stockings Josie found the keys.

“Give ’em to me. Go an’ look, Josie. Pa may be a-comin’.”

“No, we’d hear ’im. Open the drawer, Aggie, the right-hand one.”

They saw the lacquer box and the red leather purse that Uncle George had brought Ma from the city. Aggie took the purse. Ma used to keep her money in it. But it was empty. The lacquer box held Grandma Chambers’s things. They lifted out carefully the shawl of Spanish lace, a small Bible with a gold clasp, six worn silver spoons, a coral cameo breast-pin, a piece of thin gold chain, and Grandma Chambers’s jet beads with the locket.

“The idea of Pa’s wantin’ to give away Grandma Chambers’s beads an’ locket,” said Aggie. “The idea!”

“It’s just like Pa. He ain’t to be trusted.”

“Now that locket, that locket ’ud look right smart on you, Josie. Ma’d be glad you had it, I know. An’ Ma’d like me to have Grandma Chambers’s earrings.”

“You’ll own three spoons, Aggie, an’ I’ll own the other three. Mebbe the lace shawl ’ud look best on me?”

“I’ll have the Bible, an’ you can have the cameo pin. We’ll find something for Mis’ Lowell.”

The upper left-hand drawer was filled with many small pasteboard boxes, one on top of the other. One of them held Ma’s “best” switch—gray, like her own hair—with the side-comb and bone hairpins in place. They took out the comb and pins. In a little box within a box they found an old needle-book that had belonged to Ma’s grandmother. From another box they took a black switch, worn before Ma’s hair turned. Josie thought it might come in handy. In other boxes were several pairs of Ma’s “specs,” which she had put away as she needed stronger ones; Ma’s under plate of false teeth, which she had never used; a lock of some one’s hair; several gold-plated breast-pins in the form of flowers; and a round locket that looked like a watch, with pictures of Pa and of Ma, taken on their wedding-day.

“You take the breast-pins, an’ I’ll have the round locket. We’ll find something for Mis’ Lowell.”

They looked around Ma’s room. Pa’s bureau did not interest them. They took down the jug from the shelf over the door. Its contents rattled. They upset the jug upon the patch-quilt, and divided fifty cents between them. Then they went down-stairs.

“The cane, Josie, you take that, an’ I’ll have the spoon from the World’s Fair. Ma was proud of Uncle George, wasn’t she, Josie? She’d want us to keep the cane, an’ the silk hat in the grand leather case, an’ the white gloves, an’ the box with the cigars in it.”

They went into the parlor, where Ma lay in her coffin.

“Them earrings are mine, now, ain’t they, Josie? You got the beads an’ locket. We’ll find something for Mis’ Lowell.”

Ben heard them. “Hadn’t I better take the pretty over to Mis’ Lowell? She’s always been so good to Ma.”

Aggie and Josie looked at their father and at each other.

“Yes, Pa. We’ll get it.”

They went back into Ma’s room. They looked around, at the top of the bureau, at the shelf over the door. They opened the door of Ma’s closet, and closed it again. They saw the jug where they had left it on the patch-quilt.

“Ma wouldn’t want us to give away that patch-quilt of her’n, would she, Josie?”

“No, Aggie. That’ll be good on our bed, cold nights. We’ll give Pa the brown one. It’ll be warmer.”

Aggie took a ball of string, wound smooth and hard—pink and green string from the drugstore—tied end to end, and Ma’s jack-knife from the pocket hanging on the closet door.

“You get a sheet of paper, Josie, from the bottom of one of them drawers.”

They wrapped up the jug carefully, and went downstairs.

“Here it is, Pa. We did it up nice. Be careful now, an’ don’t you undo it.”

Ben was pleased. It looked like a Christmas present. Mrs. Lowell had always been good to Ma. He took the South road to the Lowell farm. He saw a woman near the red barn. He felt of the parcel, turned it about. His fingers followed the outlines. He wanted to undo it, but he was afraid he would not be able to do it up so nice. The woman in the barnyard was Mrs. Lowell, feeding her chickens.

Ben worked open a corner of the paper, and inserted his finger, without disturbing the string.

“Mis’ Lowell should ’a’ had something nicer. It ain’t good enough to be given for Ma.”

He started back for home. “I ain’t goin’ to take that jug to her.”

He took a few steps, then straightened up and turned about. His heart beat fast; there was a light in his eyes. He was young again, one of a big crowd, watching the girls’ race at the Fair. His Sadie was leading them all. Everybody cheered for her. She ran right into his arms, and they gave her the first prize—the very jug he had in his hands.

He took the jug out of its wrappings, and hurried across the farmyard to Mrs. Lowell.

“I’m a-bringin’ you one of Ma’s pretties—— this here little jug with the cat-tail paintin’ on it—— she won it at the Fair. She was Sadie Chambers then, an’ she beat all the other girls, an’—Oh, you ought ’er seen how she ran!”

THE GREAT AUK[6]

By IRVIN S. COBB

From The Saturday Evening Post

AS REGARDS the body of the house it lay mostly in shadows—the man-made, daytime shadows which somehow always seem denser and blacker than those that come in the night. The little jogs in the wall behind the boxes were just the same as coalholes. The pitched front of the balcony suggested a deformed upper jaw, biting down on darkness. Its stucco facings, shining dimly, like a row of teeth, added to the illusion. At the bottom of the pit, or the family circle, or whatever it was they called it at the Cosmos Theater, where the light was somewhat better, the backs of the seats showed bumpily beneath the white cloths that covered them, like lines of graves in a pauper burying ground after a snowstorm.

A third of the way back, in this potter’s field of dead-and-gone laughter, a man was hunched in a despondent posture. His attitude would make you think of a lone ghost that had answered the resurrection trump too soon and now was overcome with embarrassment at having been deceived by a false alarm. The brim of his hat rested on the bridge of his nose. Belonging, as he did, to a race that is esteemed to be essentially commercial, he had the artistic face and the imaginative eyes which, as often as not, are found in those of his breed.

His name was Sam Verba. He was general director for Cohalan & Hymen, producing managers. He was watching a rehearsal of a new play, though he did not appear to be. Seemingly, if he was interested in anything at all it was in the movements of two elderly chore-women, who dawdled about the place deliberatively, with dust rags and brooms. Occasionally, as one of the women raised her voice shrilly to address her distant sister, he went “Sh-h! Sh-h!”—like a defective steam pipe. Following this the offender would lower her voice for a space measurable by seconds.

Border lights, burning within the proscenium arch, made the stage brightly visible, revealing it as a thing homely and nude. Stage properties were piled indiscriminately at either side. Against the bare brick wall at the back, segments of scenes were stacked any-which-way, so that a strip of a drawing-room set was superimposed on a strip of a kitchen and that in turn overlapped part of a wainscoted library, the result being as though an earthquake had come along and shaken one room of somebody’s house into another room and that into another, and then had left them so. In sight were four women and nine men, who perched on chairs or tables or roosted, crow-fashion, upon the iron steps of a narrow staircase which ascended to the top tier of dressing rooms, extending along a narrow balcony above. The hour was eleven o’clock in the morning. Therefore these persons wore the injured look which people of their nocturnal profession customarily wear upon being summoned out of their beds before midday.

At a little table, teetering on rickety legs almost in the trough of the footlights, sat a man hostilely considering a typewritten script, which was so interlined, so marked and disfigured with crosses, stars, and erasures that only one person—the author of these ciphers—might read his own code and sometimes even he couldn’t. The man at the table was the director, especially engaged to put on this particular piece, which was a comedy drama. He raised his head.

“All right, children,” he said, “take the second act—from the beginning. Miss Cherry, Mrs. Morehead—come along. Stand by, everybody else, and, please, in Heaven’s name, remember your cues—for once.”

A young woman and a middle-aged woman detached themselves from one of the waiting groups and came downstage. The young woman moved eagerly to obey; she was an exceedingly pretty young woman. The other woman, having passed her youth, strove now to re-create it in her costume. She wore a floppy hat and a rather skimpy frock, which buttoned down her back, school-girl fashion, and ended several inches above her ankles. Under the light her dyed hair shone with the brilliancy of a new copper saucepan. There were fine, puckery lines at her eyes. Her skin, though, had the smooth texture which comes, some say, from the grease paint, and others say from plenty of sleep.

She held in one hand a flimsy, blue-backed sheaf; it was her part in this play. Having that wisdom in her calling which comes of long experience, she would read from it until automatically she had acquired it without prolonged mental effort; would let her trained and docile memory sop up the speeches by processes of absorption. Miss Cherry carried no manuscript; she didn’t need it. She had been sitting up nights, studying her lines. For she, the poor thing, was newly escaped from a dramatic school. Mrs. Morehead wanted to make a living. Miss Cherry wanted to make a hit.

These two began the opening scene of the act and, between them, carried it forward. Miss Cherry as the daughter, was playing it in rehearsal, exactly as she expected to play it before an audience, putting in gestures, inflections, short catches of the breath, emotional gasps—all the illusions, all the business of the part. On the other hand, Mrs. Morehead appeared to have but one ambition in her present employment and that was to get it over with as speedily as possible. After this contrasted fashion, then, they progressed to a certain dramatic juncture:

“But, mother,” said Miss Cherry, her arms extended in a carefully-thought-out attitude of girlish bewilderment, “what am I to do?”

Mrs. Morehead glanced down, refreshing her memory by a glance into the blue booklet.

“My child,” she said, “leave it to destiny.”

She said this in the tone of a person of rather indifferent appetite, ordering toast and tea for breakfast.

A pause ensued here.

“My child,” repeated Mrs. Morehead, glancing over her shoulder impatiently, but speaking still in the same voice, “leave it to destiny.”

“Well, well—” snapped the man at the little table, “that’s the cue, ‘leave it to destiny.’ Come on, McVey? Come a-w-n, McVey? Where’s McVey?” He raised his voice fretfully.

A nervous, thin man hurried down the stage.

“Oh, there you are. Go ahead, McVey. You’re keeping everybody waiting. Didn’t I tell you you’d have to read the grandfather’s part to-day?”

“No, sir, you didn’t,” said McVey, aggrieved.

“Well, anyhow, I meant to,” said his superior.

“But I’m reading Miss Gifford’s part this morning,” said McVey, who was the assistant stage manager. “She had to go to see about her costumes.”

“You’ll have to read ’em both, then,” ordered the special director. “Anyhow, the parts don’t conflict—they’re not on the stage together during this act. Do the best you can. Now let’s go back and take those last two sides over again.”

Vibrantly and with the proper gesture in the proper place, Miss Cherry repeated her speech. Wearily and without gestures, Mrs. Morehead repeated hers. The flustered McVey, holding the absentee Miss Gifford’s part in one hand and the mythical grandfather’s in the other, circled upstage and, coming hurriedly down, stepped in between them.

“No, no, no,” barked the director, “don’t come on that way—you’ll throw both these ladies out. Come on at the upper side of that blue chair, Mac; that’s the door. This is supposed to be a house. You can’t walk right through the side of a house without upsetting things. You realize that, don’t you? Once more—back again to ‘leave it to destiny.’”

The rehearsal went on by the customary process of advancing a foot and a half, then retreating a foot, then re-advancing two feet. The novices in the cast were prodigal of their energy, but the veterans saved themselves against what they knew was coming later, when they would need all they had of strength and more, besides.

A young man let himself in through the box-office door and stood in that drafty, inky-black space which theatrical folks call the front of the house and the public call the back of the house. Coming out of the sunlight into this cave of the winds, he was blinded at first. He blinked until he peered out the shape of Verba, slumped down midway of a sheeted stretch of orchestra chairs, and he felt his way down the center aisle and slipped into a place alongside the silent, broody figure. The newcomer was the author of the play, named Offutt; his age was less than thirty; and his manner was cheerful, as befitting an author who is less than thirty and has placed a play with an established firm.

“Well,” he said, “how’s everything going?”

“Rotten, thank you!” said Verba, continuing to stare straight ahead. “We’re still shy one grandfather, if that should be of any interest to you.”

“But you had Grainger engaged—I thought that was all settled last night,” said the playwright.

“That tired business man? Huh!” said Verba expressively. “By the time he’d got through fussing over the style of contract he wanted, in case he liked the part and we liked him in it, and then quarrelling about the salary he was to get, and then arguing out how high up the list his name was to appear in the billing, your friend Grainger was completely exhausted.

“And then, on top of that, he discovered we were going to Chicago after the opening in Rochester, and he balked. Said his following was here in New York. Said he’d supposed we were coming right in here after the opening instead of fussing round on the road. Said he couldn’t think of being kept out of New York at the beginning of the season unless he got at least seventy-five more a week. Said he’d go back to vaudeville first. Said he had a swell offer from the two-a-day shops anyhow.

“Then I said a few things to Grainger and he walked out on me. His following!—do you get that? Grainger could carry all the following he’s got in the top of his hat and still have plenty of room left for his head. So there you are, my son—within ten days of the tryout and nobody on hand to play dear old grandfather for you! And nobody in sight either—in case anybody should happen to ask you.”

“Oh we’ll find somebody,” said Offutt optimistically. The young of the playwrighting species are constitutionally optimistic.

“Oh, we will, will we? Well, for example, who?—since you’re so confident about it.”

“That’s up to you,” countered Offutt, “I should worry!”

“Take it from me, young man, you’d better worry,” growled Verba morosely.

“But, Verba,” contended young Offutt, “there must be somebody loose who’ll fit the part. What with thousands of actors looking for engagements—”

“Say, Offutt, what’s the use of going over that again?” broke in Verba in a tone which indicated he was prepared to go over it again. “To begin with, there aren’t thousands of actors looking for jobs. There are a few actors looking for jobs—and a few thousand others looking for jobs who only think they can act. Off hand, I can list you just three men fit to play this grandfather part—or four, if you stick in Grainger as an added starter.”

He held up a long, slender hand, ticking off the names on his fingers.

“There’s Warburton, and there’s Pell, and there’s old Gabe Clayton. Warburton’s tied up in the pictures. Damn the movies! They’re stealing everybody worth a hang. I got a swell offer myself yesterday from the Ziegler crowd to direct features for ’em. The letter’s on my desk now. Old Gabe is in a sanitarium taking the rest cure—which means for the time being he’s practically sober, but not available for us or anybody else. And Guy Pell’s under contract to Fructer Brothers, and you know what a swell chance there is of their loaning him to our shop.

“That doesn’t leave anybody but Grainger, who’s so swelled up with conceit that he’s impossible. And, anyhow he’s too young. Just as I told you yesterday, I only figured him in as a last chance. I don’t want a young fellow playing this part—with his face all messed up with false whiskers and an artificial squeak in his voice. I want an old man—one that looks old and talks old and can play old.

“He’s got to be right or nothing’s right. You may have written this piece, boy; but, by gum, I’m responsible for the way it’s cast, and I want a regular, honest-to-God grandfather. Only,” he added, quoting the tag of a current Broadway story, “only there ain’t no such animal.”

“I still insist, Verba,” put in Offutt, “that you overestimate the importance of the grandfather—he’s only a character bit.”

“Son,” said Verba, “you talk like an author! Maybe you thought he was a bit when you wrote him in; but he’s not. He’s going to carry this play. He’s the axle that the whole action turns on and if he’s wrong the whole thing’s wrong. If he falls down your play falls down.”

“Well, suppose he is,” said Offutt plaintively. The bruised worm was beginning to turn. “Am I to blame because I write a part so human and so lifelike that nobody’s competent to do it?”

Verba gave him a sidelong glance and grinned sardonically. “Don’t ask me whose fault it is,” he said. “I know this: In the old days actors were actors.” Verba, who was perhaps forty-four, spoke with the air of having known Edmund Kean intimately. “They bred real artists then—people who had versatility and a range. You got hold of a play and you went out and hired a bunch of troupers, and they played it for you. Now we don’t have actors any more—we only have types.

“Everybody’s a type. A man or a woman starts out being one kind of type, and sticks right there. Dramatists write parts for types, and managers go out and hire types for the parts. Sometimes they can’t find the right type and then there’s another expensive production taking a trip to its eternal rest in the storehouse. I don’t know whose fault it is—I only know it’s not mine. It’s hell—that’s what it is—simply hell!”

Gloom choked Verba. He stared moodily ahead of him, where the broad of a wide, blue-ginghamed back showed above the draped tops of the next row of seats but one. Suddenly he smote his hands together.

“Bateman!” he exclaimed. “Old Bird Bateman!”

Up from behind the next row of seats but one rose a chorelady with her nose in the air and her clenched fists on the places where her hips should have been—if she had any hips.

“I beg your par-r-don?” she inquired, quivering with a grand, indignant politeness; “was you referrin’ to me as an ould boid?”

“Madam,” said Verba, “resume your pleasures. I wasn’t thinking of you.”

“Thin why was you lookin’ at me whin you said it? You may be the owner of this bum dump, f’r all I care, but job or no job, let me tell you this, young man—there’s no black Prowtestant Jew alive kin call me out of me own name an’——”

“Oh, shut up,” said Verba, without heat. He got on his feet. “Come on, Offutt, the lady thinks I’m trying to flirt with her and between the three of us, we’re breaking up rehearsals. Let’s get out—I’ve got an idea.” In the half light his eyes shone like a cat’s.

Outside, on the hot pavement, he took Offutt by the lapels of his coat. “Boy,” he said, “did you ever hear of Burton Bateman—better known as Old Bird Bateman?”

Offutt shook his head.

“Never did,” he confessed.

“You’re too young at this game to remember, I guess,” said Verba. “Well, then, did you ever hear of the Scudder Stock Company?”

“Of course I’ve heard of that,” said Offutt. “It was long before my time though.”

“It was long before everybody’s time,” assented Verba. “Ten years is the same as a century on this street. But twenty-five years ago Burt Bateman played leads with the Scudder Stock Company—yes; and played juveniles and walking gentlemen and friends of the family and long-lost heirs and Dutchmen and Irishmen and niggers—played high-comedy parts and low-comedy parts—played anything there was to play.

“He wasn’t one of your single-barrelled modern types and none of your old-time ranting scenery-biters either; he was an actor. If he’d come along a little later they’d have made a star out of him and probably ruined him. You’d have remembered him then. But he never was a star. He never was featured even. He just kept right on being an actor. And gee, how he could eat up an old man’s part!”

“You speak of him as though he were dead,” said Offutt.

“He might as well be—he’s forgotten,” said Verba, unconsciously coining all Broadway’s epitaph for all Broadway’s tribe. “I haven’t seen him for fifteen years, but I understand he’s still alive—that is, he hasn’t quit breathing. Somebody was telling me not long ago they’d crossed his trail ’way downtown.

“You see, Burt Bateman was a character in his way, just as old Nate Scudder was one in his way. I guess that’s why they hung together so long. When the theatrical district started to move uptown Nate wouldn’t move with it. It moved from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-third, and from there to Thirty-fourth, and from there to Forty-second—and it’s still headed north. But Scudder stayed where he was. And it broke him—broke his heart, too, I guess. Anyhow, he died and his organisation scattered—all but Bateman. He wouldn’t scatter. The heirs fell out and the estate—what was left of it—got tied up in litigation; and it’s been tied up ever since.”

He turned and waved a long arm at a passing taxi. The driver curved his machine up to the curb.

“Come on!” said Verba, making to cross the sidewalk.

“Come on where?” asked Offutt.

“We’re going to University Place—you and me,” said Verba, quickened and alive all over with his inspiration. “We’re going down to Scudder’s Theater. Didn’t know there was such a theater as Scudder’s, did you? Well, there is—what’s left of it. We’re going down there to find Old Bird Bateman. That’s where he was, last accounts. And if the booze hasn’t got him he’s going to play that damn grandfather in this show of yours.”

“Can he do it?”

Verba halted with one foot in the taxi.

“Can he do it? Watch him, boy—that’s all! Just watch him. Say, it’s a notion—digging that old boy out of the graveyard.

“You never heard of him and I’d forgotten him; but you take a lot of these old-timers who don’t think there’ve been any actors since Fanny Davenport and Billy Florence—they’ll remember him. And you bet they’ll come to see him. We’ll give this town a sensation—and that’s what it loves, this town—sensations.”

Once upon a time—that was when he was a green reporter newly come to town—Offutt had known, more or less minutely, almost every prowlable inch of the tip of the long seamy tongue of rock that is called Manhattan Island. Now, as a story-writer and a play-writer, he only went down there when he sought for local colour in Greenwich Village, or around Washington Square or on the lower East Side. As for Verba, he found his local colour, ready-mixed, in scene-painters’ pots and make-up boxes. Being a typical New Yorker—if there is such a thing—he was as insular, as provincial, as closely bound to his own briefened ranging ground as none but a typical New Yorker can be. To him this wasn’t a metropolis of five boroughs, many bridges and five-and-a-half millions. To him this was a strip of street, something less than two miles long, with shorter stretches of street meeting it at right angles, east and west, as ribs meet a spine. His map of New York would have resembled a codfish’s skeleton, its head aiming toward far-away Harlem, the fork in its tail pointing to the distant Battery. To him therefore Twenty-third Street was Farthest South. What might lie below was in the Antarctic Circle of community life.

They crossed Twenty-third Street and invaded a district grown strange to his eyes—a district where tall loft buildings, the successors to the sweatshops of an earlier, but not very much earlier, day, mounted, floor by floor, above the humbler roofs of older houses. They crossed Fourteenth, the taxi weaving a way through dense masses of men who gabbled in strange tongues among themselves, for lunch-time had come and the garment workers, the feather-workers and the fur-workers, deserting their work benches for an hour, had flocked into the open, packing the sidewalks and overflowing upon the asphalt, to chaffer and gossip and take the air. Just below Fourteenth Street they swung eastward and turned into University Place, which is a street of past memories and present acute activities, and, in a minute, obeying Verba’s instructions, their driver brought them to a standstill before a certain number.

“Give it the once-over,” advised Verba as he climbed out and felt in his pocket for the fare. “You can figure for yourself how far out of the world it is—nobody’s had the nerve to try to open it up as a moving-picture palace. And that’s the tip-off on any shack in this burg that’ll hold a crowd, a screen and a projecting machine all at the same time.”

Offutt looked, and marvelled that he had never noticed this place before since surely, covering assignments or on exploration jaunts, he must have passed it by a score of times. It stood midway of the block. On one side of it was a little pawnshop, its single grimy window filled with the strange objects which persons acquire, seemingly, for pawning purposes exclusively—sword-canes and mandolins with mother-of-pearl insets in them, and moss-agate cuff buttons. On the other side was a trunk store with half of its wares cluttering the narrow-door passage and signs everywhere displayed to inform the public that the proprietor was going out of business and must sell his stock at an enormous sacrifice, wherefore until further notice, perfectly ruinous prices would prevail. It appears to be a characteristic of all trunk-stores that their proprietors are constantly going out of business and that their contents, invariably, are to be had below cost.

Between these two establishments gaped a recessed and cavernous entryway flanked by two big stone pillars of a dropsical contour and spanned over at the top by a top-heavy cornice ponderously and painfully Corinthian in aspect. The outjutting eaves rested flat on the coping stones and from there the roof gabled up sharply. Old gates, heavily chained and slanting inward, warded the opening between the pair of pillars, so that the mouth of the place was muzzled with iron, like an Elizabethan shrew’s.

Above, the building was beetle-browed; below, it was dish-faced. A student of architectural criminology would pause before this façade and take notes.

The space inclosed within the skewed and bent gate pickets was a snug harbor for the dust of many a gritty day. There were little grey drifts of it at the foot of each of the five steps that led up to the flagged floor level; secretions of grime covered the barred double doors on beyond the steps, until the original colour was only to be guessed at; scraps of dodgers, pieces of newspaper and tattered handbills adhered to every carved projection at the feet of the columns, like dead leaves about tree boles in the woods.

On the frieze overhead might be made out, in lettering that once had been gold-leafed, the line: Scudder’s Family Theatre. The words were scarcely decipherable now. Bill-posters had coated every available inch of space with snipes and sheets.

Verba shook the gates until the hasps gritted and the chains clanged.

“Nobody at home,” he said. “I guess the sheriff locked her up when the lawsuits started and then threw away the key. Well, let’s scout round. Somebody’s sure to know our man; they told me Bateman was a neighborhood character down here. A cop ought to be able to help us—only I don’t see one. Maybe they don’t have cops in this street.”

Speculatively his eyes ranged the vista up and down the block and opposite. He pointed to a saloon diagonally across the way, next door to the first corner south.

“When in doubt,” he said, “ask everybody’s friend. Come on; we’ll go over and brace the barkeep.”

A young man, with a humorous slant to his eyebrows and dark hair combed back from the forehead in neatly ornate scallops, pulled down the front of a reasonably clean white jacket and spread both hands on the bar, awaiting their pleasure.

“Mister Wine Clerk,” said Verba, using the ceremonial title of his Tenderloin range, “we’re trying to find an old boy named Bateman—Burton Bateman, retired actor by profession. Ever hear of him?”

“Sure!” assented the barkeeper. “He’s part of the fixtures—Old Bird is; but he ain’t about now. To ketch him, you’ve come an hour late.”

“Lives round here somewhere, doesn’t he?”

“Search me,” said the young man succinctly. “I guess he don’t exactly live anywhere—not in a regular lodging house or anything like that. See? I never asked him—him being sort of touchy about his private affairs—but I guess he sleeps in some hole somewhere. He mostly does his scoffin’ here though—as a guest of the house.”

“Does his what here?” asked Verba.

“His scoffin’—his feedin’. See?” The young man flirted a thumb in the direction of the free-lunch counter.

“Oh! He eats here?”

“You said it! The boss—man that owns this liquor store—is a kind of an old-timer round here himself. I’ve heard him say he knowed The Bird away back yonder when the old theatre ’crost the street was runnin’ and things was breakin’ better for the old boy than what they do now. So he stakes him to a drink every now and then—Old Bird won’t take a piece of change, but he will take a drink—and he lets him browse off the free lunch all he’s a mind to.

“He comes driftin’ in here twicet a day regular and fills up on chow for nothin’! But he’s been here already and left to-day—’bout an hour ago. I figure he won’t be back now till ’long about four or five o’clock.”

Verba became cognisant of a tugging at his coat. An incredibly small, incredibly ragged boy, with some draggled first editions under his arm, had wormed silently in between his legs and was looking up at him with one eye. The boy had only one eye to look with. The other eye was a flattened slit over a sunken socket.

“Mister! Say, Mister!” beseeched the gamin earnestly. “Gimme fi’ cent and I’ll—”

“Hey, you, Blinky!” interposed the barkeeper, bending over the bar to see the small intruder. “Beat it!”

There was a scurrying thud of bare feet on the tiled floor and the wizened intruder magically had vanished between the swinging doors.

“You gents can sit down and wait if you want to,” said the barkeeper. “It’s liable to be a long time though. Or I can tell Old Bird, when he comes in, somebody’s askin’ for him and try to hold him for you. I could ’phone you even, if it’s important—if you’ll gimme your number.”

“It is important—in a way,” said Verba. “Suppose we do that, Offutt—give the wine clerk our telephone number.”

He laid a coin and a card on the bar. The young man regarded the name and the address on the card briefly.

“All right!” he said, depositing the coin in his pocket and the card against the mirror at his back. “I won’t forget. The old boy don’t have many people lookin’ for him. Fact is, I don’t remember he ever had anybody lookin’ for him before. Are you gents friends of his?... No? Well, anyhow, I’ll fix it.”

“Funny old sneezer!” he continued. “Dippy a little up here, I guess.”

He tapped himself on the forehead.

“If he had a habit I’d say sometimes he was hopped. F’r instance, he’ll come in here and spiel off something to me ’bout havin’ been in his Louie Kahn’s drawin’-room—anyhow, that’s what it sounds like. The only Louie Kahn round here that I know of runs a junk shop over in Ninth Street. And it’s a cinch that Louie Kahn ain’t got no drawin’-room. Or he’ll tell me he’s been spendin’ the day on the seabeach. Only yes’day he was handin’ me that junk.”

“Mightn’t he have taken a little run down to Coney?” suggested Verba hopefully.

“Go to Coney—him!” scoffed the barkeeper. “Where’d he raise the coin for carfare down to Coney? You can take it from me, gents, Old Bird forgot what the sad sea waves sound like, long time ago. I’ll lay you a little eight-to-five he ain’t been a quarter of a mile away from this liquor store in ten years.... Well, good day, gents.”

“It strikes me, Verba,” began Offutt as they passed out, “that possibly we’re only wasting our time. If what that gabby young drink wrestler just said is right we’re—”

Something wriggled at his knees and caromed off against Verba. A single bright, greedy eye appraised them both with an upward flash.

“Mister! Mister, listen!” pleaded a voice, the owner of which managed somehow to be in the path of both of them at once. “I heard yous spielin’ in there. I know where Old Boid is. I kin show yous where he is.”

“Where is he?” demanded Verba.

“Gimme fi’ cent—gimme ten cent—first. It’s a secrut. It’s worth ten cent.”

“It is,” agreed Verba gravely. “It’s worth all of ten cents now and it’ll be worth a quarter more to you, sonny, if you deliver the goods.”

He tendered the advance instalment of the fee, and a hand, all claws like a bird’s foot, snatched it away from him.

Blinky carefully pouched the dime in some unfathomable inner recess of his rags. Having provided against any attempt to separate him from the retainer in the event of the negotiations falling through, his code of honour asserted itself.

“It’s a secrut. See? They ain’t nobody but me and two-t’ree udder kids wise to it. Yous gotta swear yous won’t tell ’im nor nobody ’twas me tipped yous off. If yous did it’d spoil me graft—he’d be sore. See? Cold nights he lets us kids bunk in there wit’ ’im. And daytimes we plays audiunce for ’im. See?”

“You play what for him?” asked Offutt.

“C’mon, an’ I’ll show yous,” bade Blinky. “Only yous is gotta lay dead w’ile it’s comin’ off. See?”

“We’ll lay dead,” pledged Verba.

Satisfied, Blinky led the way. Mystified, they followed. He led them back across University Place again; and on past Scudder’s Family Theatre, with the lowering stone frontal bone above and, below, the wide maw, bitted and gagged by its scold’s bridle of snaffled iron; and on round the corner below into a fouled, dingy cross street.

Beyond the canvas marquee of a small walled-in beer garden the child went nimbly through a broken panel in a short stretch of aged and tottery wooden fencing. Wriggling through the gap behind him they found themselves in a small inclosure paved with cracked flagging. Confronting them was a short flight of iron steps, leading up to a wide, venerable-appearing doorway, which once, as the visible proof showed, had been sealed up with plank shorings, nailed on in vertical strips.

“One of the old side entrances to Scudder’s,” said Verba. “Where the carriages used to wait, I guess. The plot thickens—eh, Offutt?”

Offutt nodded, his eyes being on their small guide. A little sense of adventure possessed them both. They had the feeling of being co-conspirators in a little intrigue.

“Wotcher waitin’ fur?” demanded Blinky. “Stick wit’ me and don’t make no noise.” He climbed the iron steps and shoved the nail-pocked door ajar. “Watch yer step!” he counselled as he vanished within. “It’s kind o’ dark in yere.”

Kind o’ dark was right. Straining their eyes they stumbled along a black passage, with Blinky going on ahead silently. They turned once to the left and once to the right and emerged, where the light was somewhat clearer, into the shelter of a recess just behind the lower boxes of the abandoned playhouse.

“Wow!” said Verba in a sort of reverential undertone, as though he stood in the presence of death. “I haven’t been here in twenty-odd years. Why, the last time I was here I was a kid!”

Veritably he did stand in the presence of death. The place looked dead and smelled dead and was dead. The air was heavy-laden with bone-yard scents—rot and corrosion and rust and dust. With the taints of moulded leather and gangrened metal, of worm-gnawed woodwork and moth-eaten fabrics, arose also from beneath their feet that other stench which inevitably is begotten of neglect and lonesomeness within any spot inclosed by walls and a roof, provided sun and wind and human usage are excluded from it long enough. Offutt sniffed and, over Verba’s shoulder, looked about him.

He could make out his immediate surroundings fairly well, for the curtains that had guarded the windows in the hip roof and round one upper side of the building were turned by decay into squares of lace-work, patterned with rents and with cracks; and in some instances they had fetched away from their fastenings altogether.

Through the glass panes, and through the grime that bleared the glass, a measure of daylight filtered, slanting in pale bluish streaks, like spilt skim milk, on vistas of the faded red-plush chairs; on the scrolled and burdened decorations of the proscenium arch; on the seamy, stained curtain; on the torn and musty hangings of the boxes; on an enormous gas chandelier which, swinging low over the pit from the domed ceiling above, was so clumped with swathings of cobweb that it had become a great, dangling grey cocoon.

Curving in wide swings from above their heads to the opposite side ran three balconies, rising one above the other, and each supported by many fat pillars. The spaces beneath these galleries were shadowy and dark, seeming to stretch away endlessly. So, too, was the perspective of the lower floor, at the back, elaborated by the gloom into a vast, yawning mouth which fairly ached with its own emptiness. But at the front the screened angles of sunlight, stippled as they were with billions of dancing motes, brought out clearly enough the stage of the old theatre and, down under the lip of the stage, the railed inclosure of the orchestra and, at either side, the scarred bulkheads and fouled drapings of the stage boxes, upper tier and lower tier.

Close at hand Offutt was aware of crawling things which might be spiders, and a long grey rat which scuffled across the floor almost beneath his feet, dragging its scaled tail over the boards with a nasty rasping sound. He heard other rats squealing and gnawing in the wainscoting behind him. He was aware, also, of the dirt, which scabbed and crusted everything. And he felt as though he had invaded the vault of an ancient tomb. Sure enough, in a manner of speaking, he had done just that.

“Some place—huh, mister?” said the small gutter-sparrow proudly, and, though he spoke in a whisper, Offutt jumped. “Stick yere, yous two,” ordered the child. “Somethin’ll be comin’ off in a minute.”

Seemingly he had caught a signal or a warning not visible to the older intruders. Leaving them, he ran briskly down a side aisle, and apparently did not care now how much noise he might make, for he whooped as he ran. He flung his papers aside and perched himself in a chair at the very front of the pit. He briskly rattled the loose back of the chair in front of him, and, inserting two dirty fingers at the corners of his mouth, emitted the shrill whistle by which a gallery god, since first gallery gods were created into an echoing world, has testified to his impatient longings that amusement be vouchsafed him.

As though the whistle had been a command, the daubed old curtain shivered and swayed. A dead thing was coming to life. Creaking dolefully, it rolled up and up until it had rolled up entirely out of sight.

A back drop, lowered at a point well down front, made the stage shallow. Once upon a time this back drop had been intended to represent a stretch of beach with blue rollers breaking on beyond. Faded as it was, and stained and cracked and scaly as it was now, the design of the artist who painted it was yet discernible; for he plainly had been one who held by the pigmented principle that all sea sands be very yellow and all sea waves be very blue.

Out of the far wings came a figure of a man, crossing the narrowed space to halt midway of the stage, close up to the tin gutter where the tipless prongs of many gas-jet footlights stood up like the tines in a garden rake. Verba’s hand tightened on Offutt’s arm, dragging him farther back into the shadows, and Verba’s voice spoke, with a soft, tense caution, in Offutt’s ear: “Lord! Lord!” Verba almost breathed the words out. “‘Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your—’ Look yonder, Offutt! It’s him!”

He might have spared the urging. Offutt was looking and, without being told, knew the man at whom he looked was the man the two of them had come here to find. The lone gamin in the pit clapped his talons of hands together, making a feeble, thin sound. To this applause, as to a rousing greeting, the figure behind the footlights bowed low, then straightened. And Offutt could see, by one of the slanting bars of tarnished daylight, which stabbed downward through the dusk of the place, that the man up there on the stage was a very old man, with a heavy, leonine face and heavy brows and deep-set, big grey eyes, and a splendid massive head mopped with long, coarse white hair; and he was dressed as a fop of sixty years ago and he carried himself so.

The slash of indifferent sunshine, slicing into the gloom like a dulled sword blade, rested its lowermost tip full upon him. It brought out the bleached pallor of his skin, for his face was free from any suggestion of make-up, and it showed the tears and frays in his costume, and the misshapen shoes that were on his feet, and the high-shouldered, long-tailed coat, and the soiled, collarless shirt which he wore beneath the once gorgeous velvet waistcoat.

In one hand he held, by a dainty grip on the brim, a flat-crowned derby hat, and between the fingers of the other hand twirled a slender black walking stick, with the shreds of a silken tassel adhering to it. And everything about him, barring only the shoes and the shirt, which plainly belonged to his everyday apparel, seemed fit to fall apart with age and with shabbiness.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said—and his voice filled all the empty house by reason of its strength and its toned richness—“with your kind indulgence I shall begin this entertainment with an attempt at an imitation of the elder Sothern in his famous rôle of Lord Dundreary, depicting him as he appeared in one of the scenes from that sterling and popular comedy, Our American Cousin, by Tom Taylor, Esquire.”

With that, instantly stepping into character, he took a mincing, jaunty pace or two sideways. Half turning toward an imaginary confrère and addressing that mythical listener, he began a speech which, being pieced together with other speeches, at once lengthened into a kind of monologue. But he knew the lines—that was plain; and he knew the part, too, and for the moment lived and breathed it, and in all regards veritably was it. That, likewise, the watching pair of eavesdroppers could realise, though neither of them was of sufficient age to remember, even had he seen, the great craftsman whose work old Bateman now was counterfeiting.

The interlopers looked on and, under the spell of a wizardry, forgot indeed they were interlopers. For before their eyes they saw, wonderfully re-created, a most notable conception, and afterward would have sworn, both of them, that all of it—the drawl and the lisp, the exaggerated walk, the gestures, the play of leg and arm, the swing of body, the skew of head, the lift of eyebrow even—was as true and as faithful to the original as any mirrored image might be to the image itself.

How long they stood and watched neither Verba nor Offutt was subsequently able to say with any reasonable exactitude. It might have been four minutes; it might have been six, or even eight. When later, taking counsel together, they sought to reckon up the time, the estimates varied so widely they gave up trying to reconcile them.

This much, though, they were sure of—that, in his mumming, old Bateman rose magically triumphant above the abundant handicaps of his own years and his own physique, his garb and his environment. Doing the undoable, he for the moment threw aside his years as one might throw aside the weight of a worn-out garment, and for that moment, to suit his own designs of mimicry, made floods of strength and youthfulness course through those withered arteries.

The old man finished with a whimsical turn of his voice and a flirt of his cane to match it. He bowed himself off with the hand which held the hat at his breast, and promptly on the second he disappeared the ancient curtain began to descend, Blinky meanwhile clapping with all his puny might.

Offutt turned to his companion. Behind the shelter of the box Verba’s lean, dark face was twitching.

“Is he there? Can he act? Was I right?” Verba asked himself each question, and himself answered each with a little earnest nod. “Gee, what a find!”

“Not a find, Verba,” whispered Offutt—“a resurrection—maybe. We’ve seen a genius in his grave.”

“And we’re going to dig him up.” In his intentness Verba almost panted it. “Wait! Wait!” he added warningly then, though Offutt had not offered to stir. “This is going to be a Protean stunt, I take it. Let’s let him show some more of his goods; for, by everything that’s holy, he’s got ’em!”

Up once more the curtain lifted, seemingly by its own motive power; and now the seaside drop was raised, and they beheld that, behind it, the stage had been dressed for another scene—a room in a French house. A secrétaire, sadly battered and marred, stood at one side; a bookcase with broken doors and gaping, empty shelves stood at the other, balancing it off. Down stage was an armchair. Its tapestry upholstering was rotted through and a freed spiral of springs upcoiled like a slender snake from its cushioned seat. All three pieces were of a pattern—“Louie-the-Something stuff,” Verba would have called them.

A table, placed fronting the chair but much nearer the right lower entrance than the chair was, and covered with a faded cloth that depended almost to the floor, belonged evidently to the same set. The scenery at the back showed a balcony, with a wide French window, open, in the middle. Beyond the window dangled a drop, dingy and discoloured as all the rest was, but displaying dimly a jumble of painted housetops and, far away in the simulated distance, the Arc de Triomphe. The colours were almost obliterated, but the suggestion of perspective remained, testifying still to the skill of the creator.

From the wings where they had seen him vanish Bateman reappeared. The trousers and the shoes were those he had worn before; but now, thrown on over his shirt, was the melancholy wreck of what once had been a blue uniform coat, with huge epaulets upon the shoulders and gold braid upon the collar and the cuffs, and brass buttons to fasten it in double-breasted fashion down the front. Now, though, it hung open. Some of the buttons were missing, and the gold lacings were mere blackened wisps of rags.

Bateman came on slowly, with dragging feet, his arms and legs and head quivering in a violent palsy. He stared out of the window as he let himself down carefully into the ruined armchair. His first movement proved that he played a venerable, very decrepit man—a man near death from age and ailments; yet by his art he managed to project, through the fleshly and physical weaknesses of the character, a power of dignity, of dominance, and of mental authority. He rolled his head back weakly.

“‘My child,’” he said, addressing a make-believe shape before him, “‘I must help to receive our brave, victorious troops. See! I am fittingly dressed to do them honour.’”

His tones were pitched in the cracked cackle of senility. He paused, as though for an answer out of space. His inflection told as he, in turn, replied that this answer had been a remonstrance:

“‘No, no, no!’” he said almost fiercely. “‘You must not seek to dissuade me.’”

The words stung Verba’s memory, raising a welt of recollection there.

“I’ve got it!” he said exultantly, not forgetting, though, to keep his voice down. “Siege of Berlin, by that French fellow—what’s his name?—Daudet!”

“I remember the story,” answered Offutt.

“I remember the play,” said Verba. “Somebody dramatized it—Lord knows who—and Scudder put it on here as a curtain raiser. I saw it myself, Offutt—think of that! Sitting up yonder in the old peanut roost—a kid no bigger than that kid down there—I saw it. And now I’m seeing it again; seeing Burt Bateman play the part of the old paralytic—you know, the old French officer who was fooled by his doctor and his granddaughter into believing the French had licked the Germans, when all the time ’twas the other way and—”

“Sh-h!” counseled Offutt.

After another little wait Bateman was going on with his scene:

“‘Listen! Listen!’” he cried, cupping a tremulous palm behind his ear. “‘Do you not hear them far away?—the trumpets—the trumpets of victorious France! Our forces have entered Berlin! Thank God! Thank God! All Paris will celebrate. I must greet them from the balcony.’”

With a mighty effort he reared himself to his feet, straightening his slanted shoulders, erecting his lolled head. His fingers fumbled at button and buttonhole, fastening his coat at the throat. He swung one arm imperiously, warding off imaginary hands.

“‘The trumpets! The trumpets! Hark! They come nearer and nearer! They sound for the victory of France—for a heroic army. I will go! Doctor or no doctor, I this day pay my homage to our glorious army. Stand back, ma chérie!’”

Offutt, fifty feet away, caught himself straining his ears to hear those trumpets too. A rat ran across his foot and Offutt never knew it.

“‘They come! They come!’” chuckled Bateman.

He dragged himself up stage, mounted the two stairs to the balcony, and stood in the window, at attention, to salute the tri-coloured flag. Nor did he forget to keep his face half turned to the body of the house.

He smiled; and the two unseen spies, staring at that profiled head, saw the joy that was in the smile. Then, in the same moment, the expression changed. Dumb astonishment came first—an unbelieving astonishment; then blank stupefaction; then the shock of horrified understanding; then unutterable rage.

Offutt recalled the tale from which the playlet had been evolved, and Verba, for his part, recalled the playlet; but, had neither known what they knew, the both of them, guided and informed only by the quality of Bateman’s acting, still could have anticipated the climax now impending; and, lacking all prior acquaintance with the plot of it, yet would have read that the cripple, expecting to cheer his beloved French, saw advancing beneath the Arc de Triomphe the heads of the conquering Germans, and heard, above the calling bugles, not the Marseillaise, but the strains of a Teuton marching song. His back literally bristled with his hate. He spun about full face, a mortally stricken man. His clenched fists rose above his head in a command.

“‘To arms! To arms!’” he screamed impotently, with the rattle already in his throat. “‘The Prussians! The Prus—’”

He choked, tottered down the steps, reeled forward and fell headlong out into the room, rolling in the death spasm behind the draped table; and as, ten seconds later, the curtain began to unroll from above and lengthen down, Offutt found himself saying over and over again, mechanically:

“Why, he’s gone, isn’t he?”

“He kept the table between him and the house and crawled out behind it—trust him not to spoil his picture!” explained Verba. “And trust him to know the tricks of his trade.” He tugged at Offutt’s elbow. “Come on, boy; I’ve seen enough and so have you, I guess. Let’s go sign him.”

He fumbled at the wall.

“Side passageway back to the stage ought to be round here somewhere. Here it is—that’s lucky!”

Guiding himself by the touching of his outstretched hands upon the walls of the opening, Verba felt his way behind the box, with Offutt stumbling along in his rear. So progressing, they came to an iron-sheathed door. Verba lifted its latch and they were in a place of rancid smells and cluttering stage duffel. Roaches fled in front of them. On their left a small wooden door stood partly ajar, and through the cranny they looked, as they passed, into a dressing room, where a pallet of old hangings covered half the floor space, and all manner of dingy stock costumings and stage trappings hung upon hooks.

“Here’s where he must sleep,” said Verba. “What a place for a white man to be living in!”

He felt for his handkerchief to wipe his soiled hands, and then together they saw Bateman advancing toward them from out of the extreme rear of the stage. Over his shoulders was thrown a robe of heavy ragged sacking and upon his face he had hung a long, false beard of white hair. He glared at them angrily. And then Offutt, in instantaneous appraisal, interpreted most surely the look out of those staring big grey eyes.

Verba extended his hand and opened his mouth to speak; but Bateman was already speaking.

“What business have you here?” he demanded. “Strangers are not permitted here during performances. How came the stage doorkeeper to admit you? He has been here too long, that doorkeeper, and he grows careless. I shall have him discharged.”

“But, Mr. Bateman,” began Verba, half puzzled, half insistent, “I’m in the business myself. I want to—”

“Stand aside!” ordered the old man almost violently. “You cannot have been long in the business, young sir, else you would be more mannerly than to interrupt an artist when his public calls for him. Out of my way, please!”

He strutted by them in stilted vanity and gripped the lifting ropes of the old curtain where they swung in the near angle of the wings, and pulled downward on them with an unexpected display of muscular force. The curtain rose; and as Blinky, still at his place, uplifted a little yell of approbation the old man, bending his shoulders, passed out into the centre of the French drawing-room set and, extending a quivering hand, uttered sonorously the command:

“‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’”

“The mad scene from King Lear,” said Offutt.

“Sure—Shakspere!” agreed Verba. “Old Scudder was a bug on that Bard stuff. So was Bateman. He used to know it from cover to cover—Othello, Hamlet, Lear—the whole string.... Anyhow, Offutt, I’ve found the only man to do the grandfather’s part in that show of yours, haven’t I?”

“I’m sorry to say it, Verba, but you’re wrong,” stated Offutt.

“How do you mean—I’m wrong?” demanded Verba irritably. Out of the corner of his mouth he aimed the protest at his companion; but his eyes, through the gap of the first entrance, were fixed on Bateman as he strode back and forth, and his ears drank in the splendid full-lunged volume and thrill of Bateman’s voice as the player spoke snatches from the play. “He’s not too old—if that’s what you mean; he’s just about old enough. And he’s all there, even if he is old. Didn’t you see the strength he had when he hoisted up that heavy curtain?”

“I think I know where that strength came from,” said Offutt. “Just a minute, Verba—did you ever hear of the Great Auk?”

“He was in vaudeville, wasn’t he?” asked Verba, still staring at Bateman. “A trick juggler or something?”

Offutt forgot to smile.

“The Great Auk was a bird,” he said.

“Oh, I see; and I’ve been calling Bateman Old Bird,” said Verba. “I get you.”

“No, you don’t get me,” went on Offutt. “The Great Auk was a rare creature. It got rarer and rarer until they thought it had vanished. They sent an expedition to the Arctic Circle, or wherever it was the thing bred, to get one specimen for the museums; but they came back without it. And now the Great Auk is an extinct species.”

“What the devil are you driving at?” snapped Verba, swinging on him.

“Listen yonder!” bade the dramatist. “That old man out yonder is telling you, himself, in better words than I could tell you.”

He pointed a finger through the wings. Craning their necks, they heard the deep voice speak the lines:

“‘Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,
Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;
And, to deal plainly,
I fear I am not in my perfect mind.’”

Verba hearkened and he understood. After a little he nodded in gloomy affirmation of the younger man’s belief.

“I guess you’re right, Offutt,” he said disappointedly. “I guess I’d have seen it, too, only I was so sort of carried away. Real acting does me that way—when I see it, which ain’t often.”

He paused a minute in uncertainty. Then resolution came to him.

“Well,” he said, “come on; there’s no use of our hanging round here any longer. I’ll give Blinky his quarter—he certainly earned it ten times over—and then we’ll go back uptown, and I’ll telephone Grainger he can have his seventy-five more a week.”

“But what are we going to do about—him?” Offutt indicated whom he meant with a wave of his arm toward the stage.

It was Verba’s turn. Verba knew the stage and its people and its ways as Offutt would never know them. He had been an actor, Verba had, before he turned managing director for Cohalan & Hymen.

“What are we going to do about him?” he repeated; and then, as though surprised that the other should be asking the question: “Why, nothing! Offutt, every haunted house is entitled to its ghost. This is a haunted house if ever there was one; and there’s its ghost, standing out there. You mentioned an extinct species, didn’t you? Well, you were dead right, son. So take your good-by look now, before we go, at the last of a great breed. There’ll be no more like him, I’m thinking.”

“But you can’t leave him here like this!” said Offutt. “His mind is gone—you admit it yourself. They’ve got hospitals and asylums in this state—and homes too. It would be a mercy to take him with us.”

“Mercy? It would be the dam’dest cruelty on earth!” snapped Verba. “How long do you suppose he’d live in an asylum if we tore him up by the roots and dragged him away from this place? A week? I tell you, a week would be a blamed long time. No, sir; we leave him right here. And we’ll keep our mouths shut about this too. Come on!”

He tiptoed to the iron door and opened it softly. Then, with his hand on the latch, he halted.

Bateman was just finishing. He spoke the mad king’s mad tag-line and got himself off the stage. He unreeled the stay rope from its chock. The curtain rumbled down. Through it the insistent clapping of Blinky’s skinny paws could be heard.

Smiling proudly the old man listened to the sound. He forgot their presence behind him. He stood waiting. Blinky kept on applauding—Blinky was wise in his part, too. Then, still smiling, Bateman stripped off his beard, and, putting forth a bony white hand, he plucked aside the flapping curtain and stepped forth once more.

Scrouging up behind him and holding the curtain agape, they saw him bow low to the pit where Blinky was, and to the empty boxes, and to the yawning emptiness of each balcony; and they knew that to him this was not a mangy cavern of dead memories and dead traditions and dead days, peopled only by gnawing rats and crawling vermin and one lone little one-eyed street boy, but a place of living grandeurs and living triumphs. And when he spoke, then they knew he spoke, not to one but to a worshipping, clamorous host.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, with a bearing of splendid conceit, “I thank you for the ovation you have given me. To an artist—to an artist who values his art—such moments as this are most precious—”

“Come on, Offutt!” whispered Verba huskily. “Leave him taking his call.”

THE LOST PHOEBE[7]

By THEODORE DREISER

From The Century Magazine

THEY lived together in a part of the country which was not so prosperous as it had once been, about three miles from one of those small towns that, instead of increasing in population, is steadily decreasing. The territory was not very thickly settled; perhaps a house every other mile or so, with large areas of corn-and wheat-land and fallow fields that at odd seasons had been sown to timothy and clover. Their particular house was part log and part frame, the log portion being the old original home of Henry’s grandfather. The new portion, of now rain-beaten, time-worn slabs, through which the wind squeaked in the chinks at times, and which several overshadowing elms and a butternut-tree made picturesque and reminiscently pathetic, but a little damp, was erected by Henry when he was twenty-one and just married.

That was forty-eight years before. The furniture inside, like the house outside, was old and mildewy and reminiscent of an earlier day. You have seen the what-not of cherry wood, perhaps, with spiral legs and fluted top. It was there. The old-fashioned heavy-posted bed, with ball-like protuberances and deep curving incisions, was there also, a sadly alienated descendant of an early Jacobean ancestor. The bureau was of cherry also, high and wide and solidly built, but faded-looking, and with a musty odor. The rag carpet that underlay all these sturdy examples of enduring furniture was a weak, faded, lead-and-pink-colored affair woven by Phœbe Ann’s own hands when she was fifteen years younger than she was when she died. The creaky wooden loom on which it had been done now stood like a dusty, bony skeleton, along with a broken rocking-chair, a worm-eaten clothes-press,—Heaven knows how old,—a lime-stained bench that had once been used to keep flowers on outside the door, and other decrepit factors of household utility, in an east room that was a lean-to against this so-called main portion. All sorts of broken-down furniture were about this place: an antiquated clothes-horse, cracked in two of its ribs; a broken mirror in an old cherry frame, which had fallen from a nail and cracked itself three days before their youngest son, Jerry, died; an extension hat-rack, which once had had porcelain knobs on the ends of its pegs; and a sewing-machine, long since outdone in its clumsy mechanism by rivals of a newer generation.

The orchard to the east of the house was full of gnarled old apple-trees, worm-eaten as to trunks and branches, and fully ornamented with green and white lichens, so that it had a sad, greenish-white, silvery effect in moonlight. The low outhouses, which had once housed chickens, a horse or two, a cow, and several pigs, were covered with patches of moss as to their roof, and the sides had been free of paint for so long that they were blackish gray as to color, and a little spongy. The picket-fence in front, with its gate squeaky and askew, and the side fences of the stake-and-rider type were in an equally run-down condition. As a matter of fact, they had aged synchronously with the persons who lived here, old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phœbe Ann.

They had lived here, these two, ever since their marriage, forty-eight years before, and Henry had lived here before that from his childhood up. His father and mother, well along in years when he was a boy, had invited him to bring his wife here when he had first fallen in love and decided to marry; and he had done so. His father and mother were the companions of him and his wife for ten years after they were married, when both died; and then Henry and Phœbe were left with their five children growing lustily apace. But all sorts of things had happened since then. Of the seven children, all told, that had been born to them, three had died; one girl had gone to Kansas; one boy had gone to Sioux Falls, and never been heard of after; another boy had gone to Washington; and the last girl lived five counties away in the same State, but was so burdened with cares of her own that she rarely gave them a thought. Time and a commonplace home life that had never been attractive had weened them thoroughly, so that, wherever they were, they gave little thought as to how it might be with their father and mother.

Old Henry Reifsneider and his wife Phœbe were a loving couple. You perhaps know how it is with simple natures that fasten themselves like lichens on the stones of circumstance and weather their days to a crumbling conclusion. The great world sounds widely, but it has no call for them. They have no soaring intellect. The orchard, the meadow, the corn-field, the pig-pen, and the chicken-lot measure the range of their human activities. When the wheat is headed it is reaped and threshed; when the corn is browned and frosted it is cut and shocked; when the timothy is in full head it is cut, and the hay-cock erected. After that comes winter, with the hauling of grain to market, the sawing and splitting of wood, the simple chores of fire-building, meal-getting, occasional repairing, and visiting. Beyond these and the changes of weather—the snows, the rains, and the fair days—there are no immediate, significant things. All the rest of life is a far-off, clamorous phantasmagoria, flickering like Northern lights in the night, and sounding as faintly as cow-bells tinkling in the distance.

Old Henry and his wife Phœbe were as fond of each other as it is possible for old people to be who have nothing else in this life to be fond of. He was a thin old man, seventy when she died, a queer, crotchety person with coarse gray-black hair and beard, quite straggly and unkempt. He looked at you out of dull, fishy, watery eyes that had deep-brown crow’s-feet at the sides. His clothes, like the clothes of many farmers, were aged and angular and baggy, standing out at the pockets, not fitting about the neck, protuberant and worn at elbow and knee. Phœbe Ann was thin and shapeless, a very umbrella of a woman, clad in shabby black, and with a black bonnet for her best wear. As time had passed, and they had only themselves to look after, their movements had become slower and slower, their activities fewer and fewer. The annual keep of pigs had been reduced from five to one grunting porker, and the single horse which Henry now retained was a sleepy animal, not over-nourished and not very clean. The chickens, of which formerly there was a large flock, had almost disappeared, owing to ferrets, foxes, and the lack of proper care, which produces disease. The former healthy garden was now a straggling memory of itself, and the vines and flowerbeds that formerly ornamented the windows and dooryard had now become choking thickets. Yet these two lived together in peace and sympathy, only that now and then old Henry would become unduly cranky, complaining almost invariably that something had been neglected or mislaid which was of no importance at all.

“Phœbe, where’s my corn-knife? You ain’t never minded to let my things alone no more.”

“Now you hush, Henry,” his wife would caution him in a cracked and squeaky voice. “If you don’t, I’ll leave yuh. I’ll git up and walk out of here some day, and then where would y’ be? Y’ ain’t got anybody but me to look after yuh, so yuh just behave yourself.”

Old Henry, who knew that his wife would never leave him in any circumstances, used to speculate at times as to what he would do if she were to die. That was the one leaving that he really feared. As he climbed on the chair at night to wind the old, long-pendulumed, double-weighted clock, or went finally to the front and the back door to see that they were safely shut in, it was a comfort to know that Phœbe was properly ensconced on her side of the bed, and that if he stirred restlessly in the night, she would be there to ask what he wanted.

“Now, Henry, do lie still! You’re as restless as a chicken.”

“Well, I can’t sleep, Phœbe.”

“Well, yuh needn’t roll so, anyhow. You can let me sleep.”

This usually reduced him to a state of somnolent ease. If she wanted a pail of water, it was a grumbling pleasure for him to get it; and if she did rise first to build the fires, he saw that the wood was cut and placed within easy reach. They divided this simple world nicely between them.

As the years had gone on, fewer and fewer people had called. They were well known for a distance of as much as ten square miles as old Mr. and Mrs. Reifsneider, honest, moderately Christian, but too old to be really interesting any longer. Now and then some old friend stopped with a pie or cake or a roasted chicken or duck, or merely to see that they were well; even these kindly minded visits were no longer frequent.

One day in the early spring of her sixty-fourth year Mrs. Reifsneider took sick, and from a low fever passed into some indefinable ailment which, because of her age, was no longer curable. Old Henry drove to Swinnerton, the neighboring town, and procured a doctor. Some friends called, and the immediate care of her was taken off his hands. Then one chill spring night she died, and old Henry, in a fog of sorrow and uncertainty, followed her body to the nearest graveyard, an unattractive space, with a few pines growing in it. It was suggested to him at once by one friend and another that he come to stay with them awhile, or that he seek his daughter in Pemberton County. She had been notified. He was so old, and so fixed in his notions, however, and so accustomed to the exact surroundings he had known all his days, that he could not think of leaving. He wanted to remain near where they had put his Phœbe; and the fact that he would have to live alone did not trouble him in the least.

“I kin make a shift for myself,” he continually announced to old Dr. Morrow, who had attended his wife in this case. “I kin cook a little, and, besides, I don’t take much more ’n coffee an’ bread in the mornin’s. I’ll get along now well enough. You just let me be.” And after many pleadings and proffers of advice, with supplies of coffee and bacon and baked bread duly offered and accepted, he was left to himself. For a while he sat idly outside his door brooding in the spring sun. He tried to revive his interest in farming, and to keep himself busy and free from thought by looking after the fields, which of late had been much neglected. It was a gloomy thing to come in of an evening or in the afternoon and find no shadow of Phœbe where everything suggested her. By degrees he put a few of her things away. He sat beside his lamp and read in the papers that were left him occasionally or in a Bible that he had neglected for years, but he could get little solace from these things. Mostly he held his hand over his mouth and looked at the floor as he sat and thought of what had become of her, and how soon he himself would die. He made a great business of making his coffee in the morning and frying himself a little bacon at night; but his appetite was gone. This shell in which he had been housed so long seemed vacant, and its shadows were suggestive of immedicable griefs. So he lived quite dolefully for five long weeks, and then a change began.

It was one night, after he had looked after the front and the back door, wound the clock, blown out the lamp, and gone through all the selfsame motions that he had indulged in for years, that he went to bed not so much to sleep as to think. It was a moonlight night. The green-lichen-covered orchard was a silvery affair, sweetly spectral. The moon shone through the east windows, throwing the pattern of the panes on the wooden floor, and making the old furniture, to which he was accustomed, stand out dimly in the gloom. As usual he had been thinking of Phœbe and the years when they had been young together, and of the children who had gone, and the poor shift he was making of his present days. The house was coming to be in a very bad state indeed. The bed-clothes were in disorder and not clean, for he made a wretched shift of washing. It was a terror to him. He was getting into that brooding state when he would accept anything rather than exert himself. He preferred to pace slowly to and fro or to sit and think.

By twelve o’clock he was asleep, however, and by two o’clock he had waked again. The moon by this time had shifted to a position on the western side of the house, and it now shone in through the windows of the living-room and those of the kitchen beyond. A certain combination of furniture—a chair near a table, with his coat on it, the half-open kitchen door casting a shadow, and the position of a lamp near a paper—gave him an exact representation of Phœbe leaning over the table as he had often seen her do in life. He looked at her fixedly in the feeble half-light, his old hair tingling oddly at the roots, and then he sat up. The figure did not move. He put his thin legs out of the bed and sat looking at her, wondering if this could really be Phœbe. They had talked of ghosts often in their lifetime, of apparitions and omens; but they had never agreed that such things could be. It had never been a part of his wife’s creed that she could have a spirit that could return to walk the earth. Her after-world was quite a different affair, a vague heaven, no less, from which the righteous did not trouble to return. Yet here she was now, bending over the table in her black skirt and gray shawl, her pale profile outlined against the moonlight.

“Phœbe,” called old Henry, thrilling from head to toe and putting out one bony hand, “have you come back?”

The figure did not stir, and he arose and walked uncertainly to the door, looking at it fixedly the while. As he drew near, however, the apparition resolved itself into its primal content—his old coat over the high-backed chair, the lamp by the paper, the half-open door.

“Well,” he said to himself, his mouth open, “I thought shore I saw her.” And he ran his hand strangely and vaguely through his hair, the while his nervous tension relaxed.

Another night, because of this first illusion, and because his mind was now constantly on her and he was old, he looked out of the window that was nearest his bed and commanded hen-coop and pig-pen and a part of the wagon-shed, and there, a faint mist exuding from the damp of the ground, he thought he saw her again. It was a little wisp of mist, one of those faint exhalations of the earth that rise in a cool night after a warm day, and flicker like small white cypresses of fog before they disappear. It had been a custom of hers to cross the lot from her kitchen door to the pig-pen to throw in any scrap that was left from her cooking, and here she was again. He sat up and watched it strangely, doubtfully, because of his previous experience, but inclined, because of the nervous titillation that passed over his body, to believe that spirits really were, and that Phœbe, who would be concerned because of his lonely state, must be thinking about him, and hence returning. It would be within the province of her charity so to do, and like her loving interest in him. He quivered and watched it eagerly; but, a faint breath of air stirring, it wound away toward the fence and disappeared.

A third night, as he was actually dreaming, some ten days later, she came to his bedside and put her hand on his head.

“Poor Henry!” she said. “It’s too bad.”

He roused out of his sleep, actually to see her, he thought, moving from his bed-room into the one living-room, her figure a shadowy mass of black. The weak straining of his eyes caused little points of light to flicker about the outlines of her form. He arose, greatly astonished, walked the floor in the cool room, convinced that Phœbe was coming back to him. If he only thought sufficiently, if he made it perfectly clear by his feeling that he needed her greatly, she would come back, this kindly wife, and tell him what to do. She would perhaps be with him much of the time, in the night, anyhow; and that would make this lonely state endurable.

In age and with the feeble it is not such a far cry from the subtleties of illusion to actual hallucination, and in due time this transition was made for Henry. Night after night he waited, expecting her return. Once in his weird mood he thought he saw a pale light moving about the room, and another time he thought he saw her walking in the orchard after dark. It was one morning when the details of his lonely state were virtually unendurable that he woke with the thought that she was not dead. How he had arrived at this conclusion it is hard to say. His mind had gone. In its place was a fixed illusion. He and Phœbe had had a senseless quarrel. He had reproached her for not leaving his pipe where he was accustomed to find it, and she had left. It was an aberrated fulfilment of her old jesting threat that if he did not behave himself she would leave him.

“I guess I could find yuh ag’in,” he had always said. But her cackling threat had always been:

“Yuh’ll not find me if I ever leave yuh. I guess I kin git some place where yuh can’t find me.”

This morning when he arose he did not think to build the fire in the customary way or to grind his coffee and cut his bread, as was his wont, but solely to meditate as to where he should search for her and how he should induce her to come back. Recently the one horse had been dispensed with because he found it cumbersome and beyond his needs. He took down his soft crush hat after he had dressed himself, a new glint of interest and determination in his eye, and taking his black crook cane from behind the door, where he had always placed it, started out briskly to look for her among the distant neighbors that he knew. His old shoes clumped briskly in the dust as he walked, and his gray-black locks, now grown rather long, straggled out in a dramatic fringe or halo from under his hat. His short coat stirred busily as he walked, and his hands and face were peaked and pale.

“Why, hello, Henry! Where’re yuh goin’ this mornin’?” inquired Farmer Dodge, who, hauling a load of wheat to market, encountered him on the public road. He had not seen the aged farmer in weeks, not since his wife’s death, and he wondered now, seeing him looking so spry.

“Yuh ain’t seen Phœbe, have yuh?” inquired the old man, looking up quizzically.

“Phœbe who?” inquired Farmer Dodge, not for the moment connecting the name with Henry’s dead wife.

“Why, my wife Phœbe, o’ course. Who do yuh s’pose I mean?” He stared up with a pathetic sharpness of glance from under his shaggy, gray eyebrows.

“Wall, I’ll swan, Henry, yuh ain’t jokin’, are yuh?” said the solid Dodge, a pursy man, with a smooth, hard, red face. “It can’t be your wife you’re talkin’ about. She’s dead.”

“Dead! Shucks!” retorted the demented Reifsneider. “She left me early this mornin’, while I was sleepin’. She allus got up to build the fire, but she’s gone now. We had a little spat last night, an’ I guess that’s the reason. But I guess I kin find her. She’s gone over to Matilda Race’s; that’s where she’s gone.”

He started briskly up the road, leaving the amazed Dodge to stare in wonder after him.

“Well, I’ll be switched!” he said aloud to himself. “He’s clean out ’n his head. That poor old feller’s been livin’ down there till he’s gone mad. I’ll have to notify the authorities.” And he flicked his whip with great enthusiasm. “Geddap!” he said, and was off.

Reifsneider met no one else in this poorly populated region until he reached the whitewashed fence of Matilda Race and her husband three miles away. He had passed several other houses en route, but these not being within the range of his illusion were not considered. His wife, who had known Matilda well, must be here. He opened the picket-gate which guarded the walk, and stamped briskly up to the door.

“Why, Mr. Reifsneider,” exclaimed old Matilda herself, a stout woman, looking out of the door in answer to his knock, “what brings yuh here this mornin’?”

“Is Phœbe here?” he demanded eagerly.

“Phœbe who? What Phœbe?” replied Mrs. Race, curious as to this sudden development of energy on his part.

“Why, my Phœbe, o’ course. My wife Phœbe. Who do yuh s’pose? Ain’t she here now?”

“Lawsy me!” exclaimed Mrs. Race, opening her mouth. “Yuh pore man! So you’re clean out’n your mind. Now yuh come right in and sit down. I’ll git yuh a cup o’ coffee. O’ course your wife ain’t here; but yuh come in an’ sit down. I’ll find her fer yuh after a while. I know where she is.”

The old farmer’s eyes softened, and he entered. He was a thin, pantalooned, patriarchal specimen, and he took off his hat and laid it on his knees quite softly and mildly.

“We had a quarrel last night, and she left me,” he volunteered.

“Laws! laws!” sighed Mrs. Race, there being no one present with whom to share her astonishment as she went to her kitchen. “The pore man! Now somebody’s got to look after him. He can’t be allowed to run around the country this way lookin’ for his dead wife. It’s turrible.”

She boiled him a pot of coffee and brought in some of her new-baked bread and fresh butter. She set out some of her best jam and put a couple of eggs to boil, lying whole-heartedly the while.

“Now yuh stay right here, Uncle Henry, until Jake comes in, and I’ll send him to look for Phœbe. I think it’s more than likely she’s over to Swinnerton with some o’ her friends. Anyhow, we’ll find out. Now yuh just drink this coffee an’ eat this bread. Yuh must be tired. Yuh’ve had a long walk this mornin’.” Her idea was to take counsel with Jake, “her man,” and perhaps have him notify the authorities.

She bustled about, meditating on the uncertainties of life, while old Reifsneider thrummed on the rim of his hat with his pale fingers and later ate abstractedly of what she offered. His mind was on his wife, however, and since she was not here, it wandered vaguely away to a family by the name of Murray, miles away in another direction. He decided after a time that he would not wait for Jake Race to hunt his wife. He could not. He must be on, and urge her to come back.

“Well, I’ll be goin’,” he said, getting up and looking strangely about him. “I guess she didn’t come here. She went over to the Murrays’. I’ll not wait any longer, Mrs. Race. There’s a lot to do over to the house to-day.” And out he marched, while Mrs. Race pleaded with him to stay. He took to the dusty road again in the warm spring sun, his cane striking the earth as he went.

It was two hours later that this pale figure of a man appeared in the Murrays’ doorway, dusty, perspiring, eager. He had tramped all of five miles, and it was noon. An amazed husband and wife of sixty heard his strange query, and realized also that he was mad. They begged him to stay to dinner, intending to notify the authorities later and see what could be done; but though he stayed to partake of a little something, he did not stay long, and was off again, to another distant farmhouse, his idea of many things to do and his need of Phœbe impelling him.

The process by which a character assumes the significance of being peculiar, weird, harmless, in such a community is often involute and pathetic. This day saw Reifsneider at other doors, eagerly asking his unnatural question, and leaving a trail of amazement, sympathy, and pity in his wake. Although the authorities were informed,—the county sheriff, no less,—it was not deemed advisable to take him into custody; for when those who knew old Henry, had known him for so long, reflected on the condition of the county insane asylum, a place, because of the poverty of the district, of staggering aberration and sickening environment, it was decided to let him remain at large; for, strange to relate, it was found on investigation that at night he returned to his lonesome domicile to find whether his wife had returned, and to brood there in loneliness until the morning. Who would lock up a thin, eager old man with long iron-gray hair and an attitude of kindly, innocent inquiry, particularly when he was well known for a past of only kindly servitude and reliability? Those who had known him best rather agreed that he should be allowed to roam at large. He could do no harm. There were many who were willing to help him as to food, old clothes, the odds and ends of his daily life—at least at first. His figure after a time became not so much a commonplace as an accepted curiosity, and the replies, “Why, no, Henry; I ain’t seen her,” or “No, Henry; she ain’t been here to-day,” more customary.

He was an odd figure in the sun and rain, on dusty roads and muddy ones, encountered occasionally in strange and unexpected places, pursuing his endless search. Under-nourishment, after a time, although the neighbors and those who knew his history gladly contributed from their store, affected his body; for he walked much and ate little. The longer he roamed the public highway in this manner, the deeper became his strange hallucination; and finding it harder and harder to return from his more and more distant pilgrimages, he finally took a few utensils from his home store and, making a small package of them, carried them with him in order that he might not be compelled to return. In an old tin coffee-pot of large size he placed a small tin cup, a knife, fork, and spoon, some salt and pepper, and to the outside of it, by a string forced through a pierced hole, he fastened a plate, which could be released, and which was his woodland table. It was no trouble for him to secure the little food that he needed, and with a strange, almost religious dignity he had no hesitation in asking for that much. By degrees his hair became longer and longer, his once black hat became an earthen brown, and his clothes threadbare and dusty.

For all of a year he walked, and none knew how wide were his perambulations, nor how he survived the storms and cold. They could not see him, with homely rural understanding and forethought, sheltering himself in hay-cocks, or by the sides of cattle, whose warm bodies protected him from the cold and whose dull understandings were not opposed to his harmless presence. Overhanging rocks and trees kept him at times from the rain, and a friendly hay-loft or corn-crib was not above his humble consideration.

The involute progression of hallucination is strange. From asking at doors and being constantly rebuffed or denied, he finally came to the conclusion that although his Phœbe might not be in any of the houses at the doors of which he inquired, she might nevertheless be within the sound of his voice. And so, from patient inquiry, he began to call sad, occasional cries, that ever and anon waked the quiet landscapes and ragged hill regions, and set to echoing his thin “O-o-o Phœbe! O-o-o Phœbe!” It had a pathetic, albeit insane, ring, and many a farmer or plowboy or country housewife came to know it even from afar and to say, “There goes old Reifsneider.”

Another thing that puzzled him greatly after a time and after many hundreds of inquiries was, when he no longer had any particular dooryard in view and no special inquiry to make, which way to go. These cross-roads, which occasionally led in four or even six directions, came after a time to puzzle him. But to solve this knotty problem, which became more and more of a puzzle, there came to his aid another hallucination. Phœbe’s spirit or some power of the air or wind or nature would tell him. If he stood at the center of the parting of the ways, closed his eyes, turned thrice about, and called, “O-o-o Phœbe!” twice, and then threw his cane straight before him, that would surely indicate which way to go for Phœbe, or one of these mystic powers would govern its direction and fall! In whichever direction it went, even though, as was not infrequently the case, it took him back along the path he had already come, he was not so far gone in his mind but that he gave himself ample time to search before calling again,—— but that he had the strange feeling that sometime he would find her. There were hours when his feet were sore, and his limbs weary, when he would stop in the heat to wipe his faded brow, or in the cold to beat his arms. Sometimes, after throwing his cane, and finding it indicating the direction from which he had just come, he would shake his head wearily, and philosophically, as if contemplating the unbelievable or an untoward fate, and then start briskly off. His strange figure came finally to be known in the farthest reaches of three or four counties. Old Reifsneider was a pathetic character. His fame was wide.

Near a little town called Watersville, in Green County, perhaps four miles from that minor center of human activity, there was a place or precipice locally known as the Red Cliff, a sheer wall of red sandstone, perhaps a hundred feet high, which raised its sharp wall for half a mile or more above the fruitful corn-fields and orchards that lay beneath, and which was surmounted by a thick grove of trees. The slope that slowly led up to it from the opposite side was covered by a rank growth of beech, hickory, and ash, through which threaded a number of wagon-tracks crossing at various angles. In fair weather it had become old Reifsneider’s habit, so inured was he by now to the open, to make his bed in some patch of trees of this character, to fry his bacon or boil his eggs at the foot of some tree, before laying himself down for the night. His was a light and inconsequential sleep. More often the moonlight, some sudden wind stirring in the trees, or a reconnoitering animal, would arouse him, and he would sit up and think, or pursue his quest in the moonlight or the dark, a strange, unnatural, half wild, half savage-looking, but utterly harmless, creature, calling at lonely road crossings, staring at dark and shuttered houses, and wondering where, where, Phœbe could really be.

That particular lull that comes in the systole-diastole of this earthly ball at two o’clock in the morning invariably aroused him, and though he might not go any farther, he would sit up and contemplate the dark or the stars, wondering. Sometimes in the strange processes of his mind he would fancy that he saw moving among the trees the figure of his lost wife, and then he would get up to follow, taking his utensils, always on a string, and his cane.

It was in the seventh year of these hopeless peregrinations, in the dawn of a similar springtime to that in which his wife had died, that he came at last one night to the vicinity of this little patch of woods that crowned the rise to the Red Cliff. His far-flung cane, used as a divining-rod at the last cross-roads, had brought him hither. He had walked many, many miles. It was after ten o’clock at night, and he was very weary. Long wandering and little eating had left him only a shadow of his former self. It was a question now not so much of physical strength, but of spiritual endurance that kept him up. He had scarcely eaten this day, and, now exhausted, set himself down in the dark to rest and possibly to sleep. Curiously, a strange suggestion of the presence of his wife surrounded him. It would not be long now, he counseled himself, although the long months had brought him nothing. He fell asleep after a time, his head on his knees. At midnight the moon began to rise, and at two in the morning, his wakeful hour, was a large silver disk shining through the trees to the east. He opened his eyes when the radiance became strong, making a silver pattern at his feet, and lighting the woods with strange lusters and silvery, shadowy forms. His old notion that his wife must be near to him occurred to him as it usually did on occasions of this kind, and he looked about him with a strange, speculative, anticipatory eye. What was it that moved in the distant shadows along the path by which he had entered, a pale, flickering will-o’-the-wisp that bobbed gracefully among the trees, and riveted his expectant gaze? Moonlight and shadows combined to give it a strange form and a strange reality, this fluttering of bog-fire or dancing of wandering fire-flies. Was it truly his lost Phœbe? By a circuitous route it passed about him, and in his fevered state he fancied that he could see the very eyes of her, not as she was when he last saw her in the black dress and shawl, but a strangely younger Phœbe now, the one whom he had known years before as a girl. Old Reifsneider got up. He had been expecting and dreaming of this expected hour all these days, and now, as he saw the feeble light dancing, he peered at it questioningly, one thin hand in his gray hair.

There came to him now for the first time in many years the full charm of her girlish figure as he had first known it in boyhood, the pleasing, sympathetic smile, the brown hair, the blue sash she had once worn about her waist, her gay, graceful movements. He walked around the base of the tree, straining with his eyes, forgetting for once his cane and his utensils, and following eagerly after. On she moved before him, a will-o’-the-wisp, a little flame above her head; and it seemed as though among the small saplings of ash and beech and the thick trunks of hickory and elm that she signaled with a young, lightsome hand.

“O Phœbe! Phœbe!” he called. “Have yuh really come?” And hurrying faster, he fell once, scrambling lamely to his feet, only to see the light in the distance dancing illusively on. On and on he hurried faster and faster, until he was fairly running, brushing his ragged arms against the trees, striking his hands and face against impeding twigs. His hat was gone, his lungs were breathless, when coming to the edge of the cliff, he saw her below, among a silvery wonder of apple-trees now blooming in the spring.

“O Phœbe,” he called. “Oh, no; don’t leave me!” And feeling the lure of a world where love was young and Phœbe was as this vision presented her, he gave a gay cry of “Oh, wait, Phœbe!” and leaped.

Some farmer-boys, reconnoitering this region of bounty and prospect, found first the tin utensils tied together under the tree where he had left them. Months after his body was found, his old hat was discovered lying under some low-growing saplings the twigs of which had held it back. At the foot of the cliff they found him, pale, broken, elate, a molded smile of peace and delight upon his lips. No one of all the simple population knew how eagerly and joyously he had found his lost mate.

THE SILENT INFARE[8]

By ARMISTEAD C. GORDON

From Scribner’s Magazine

THE trees had never seemed greener or the grass more luxuriant to the denizens of Kingsmill than on the September morning when Mis’ Nancy, with a light shawl thrown about her shoulders, and the patient, half-pained smile on her face, sat in the rocking-chair on the porch and deprecated the expense that the recently much-discussed visit to her old schoolmate and friend would involve.

The waters of the river, visible in its broad expanse for a sweep of many miles, gleamed amethystine-blue under the brilliant early autumn sun; and the low-lying bank of its farther shore, set with faintly visible buildings that seemed white in the sunshine, encompassed a panorama of quiet and peaceful beauty.

“Hold de hank straight, boy,” growled Ommirandy to Tibe.

She occupied a low chair some distance from Mis’ Nancy, and addressed herself to the juvenile darky, son of Janey and grandson of Uncle Jonas, known to young Mars’ Jeems as Tiberius the Great.

Tibe had been caught by the old woman while meandering around the Kingsmill yard in search of guinea eggs, and incontinently hauled up on the porch to hold Ommirandy’s hank while she wound the cotton yarn into a nimble ball with her ancient but still agile fingers.

“Dat what I doin’, marm,” responded Tibe, lifting one end of the hank about a foot higher than the other.

“You sutny orter make her go, young Mars’ Jeems,” said the old woman to the owner of Kingsmill, who sat by his wife with an ante-bellum copy of “The Bride of Lammermoor” open face downward on his knee.

“I think it would do her good, Mirandy,” acquiesced young Mars’ Jeems. “She stays here, and thinks about everything on the plantation, and never gets outside of the yard. I am sure it would do her good to get up into the mountain country.”

“Dey was sebenty-two guinny aigs in dat one nes’ out dar in de clover-patch over by de fur cornder o’ de yard,” interjected Tibe. “I jes’ been done count ’em when you come dar an’ cotch me.”

Ommirandy stopped winding.

“You put dem han’s o’ yourn on a level, anyhow,” she said. “You ain’t got no sense ’bout holdin’ a hank. I dunno what gwi’ ’come o’ you little new-issue free-school niggers. Did you tetch dem eggs?”

“Yas ’m,” responded Tiberius. “I tetched ’em. I was ’bleedged fur ter turn some uv ’em ter count ’em. Dey was sebenty-two in one nes’.”

“Well, if dat don’t beat all!” exclaimed the old woman, dropping her unwound ball on the floor and leaning back in her low chair in supreme disgust. “You done ruint de whole business!”

Tiberius the Great seemed more interested than daunted by Ommirandy’s rebuke. Young Mars’ Jeems laughed aloud, and the pained smile on Mis’ Nancy’s face was accentuated.

“Ain’t you got no sense, nigger?” demanded the old woman. “I know yo’ gran’daddy ain’t got much; but you mought ’a’ enherited some gumption f’om Janey. She been takin’ keer o’ Jonas an’ you an’ de t’others sence yo’ pa died—’scusin’ what young Mars’ Jeems an’ Mis’ Nancy is done fur you-all. Name o’ Gord, what you put yo’ han’ in dat guinny nes’ fur?”

“Fur ter count de aigs, marm,” replied Tibe, with an inevitable logic derived from his public-school training.

“Is you distracted, Tiberius?” queried Ommirandy. “Don’t you know dem guinnys ain’t nuver gwi’ lay in dat place no mo’? Ain’t nobody uver tell you, ef you put yo’ han’ in a guinny nes’, dey nuver comes back dar? When you git de eggs out o’ whar de guinny-fowls all lays, you got ter do it wid a silver spoon, an’ leave three eggs. Dem birds kin not only smell, but dey kin count, too.”

Tiberius grinned at her vacuously, and was silent.

“Is dat what dey teach you at de free school? ’Fo’ Gord, I c’n take a hick’ry-switch an’ fling mo’ sho’ ’nuf eddication inter you little free niggers in ten minutes dan dat bow-legged, horn-specticle cullud school-teacher down dar by de church gwi’ git inter you-all in ten years. Young Mars’ Jeems, you cudden do more fur Mis’ Nancy dan ter sen’ her ter de mount’ns. She needs it. You kin remembrance how Ole Mars’ useter always take Mis’ ter de White Suffrer in de late summer? Many’s de time I been dar wid ’em.”

The conversation was desultory, and eventuated in the disclosure by Ommirandy that she had been watching the universal guinea nest that Tibe had invaded, in the hope of contributing by the sale of its eggs a substantial sum toward the expense that would be incidental to Mis’ Nancy’s trip to the mountains.

“I done been see de man at Yellowley’s Sto’ an’ he promis’ ter take all uv ’em at de market price. Hole de hank straight, Tiberius! Ef you don’t, I gwi’ hit you wid dis here broom! It look like you gotter have sump’n ter make yo’ han’s still all de time, fur ter keep ’em out o’ trouble. Drap dat en’ o’ de hank ter a level, I tell ye.”

“Yas ’m,” responded the boy, becoming loquacious with the imaginative mendacity of untrained childhood. “Dat what mammy, she all de time sayin’. I remembrance when I was a teenchy-weenchy baby in de cradle, mammy she use ter put a tetch o’ merlasses on my fingers, an’ den stick some pillow-feathers onter de merlasses. It use’ ter keep me workin’, a-pickin’ de feathers fust off’n one han’ an’ den off’n de t’other han’. Fast as dey git on one han’ I remembrance I gits ’em onter de t’other han’. It use ter make me quiet all day.”

He related the experience with an assurance calculated to disarm all criticism.

“You remembrance it, duz you?” queried Ommirandy, scornfully. “You remembrance what happen when you was a baby in de cradle! Young Mars’ Jeems, is you hear dat? I been sayin’ fur a long time, dat dis here boy is gwi’ come ter a bad en’. He de spit ’n’ image o’ Jonas. He ack like he warn’t no kin ter Janey.”

Tibe’s vacuous grin grew in dimensions, and he held one end of the hank higher than ever.

“I done been watchin’ dat guinny nes’ fur mo’n a week,” she continued, “an’ here come along dis little eddicated free-school nigger, an’ stick his rusty fis’ in de nes’. Hole yo’ right han’ down, boy!” she concluded viciously, giving the cotton yarn a jerk that snapped the thread. Tibe picked up the ends and tied them with apparent humility, in contemplation of the old woman’s short-handled broom that lay by her chair.

When Tiberius was finally dismissed, and Ommirandy and young Mars’ Jeems had helped her mistress into the house, it had been settled that Mis’ Nancy was to accept her old friend’s invitation and pay her a visit in the town beyond the mountains, and that Ommirandy was to accompany her.

“She ’bleedge ter have somebody ter tote water fur her, an’ make her comf’table an’ wait on her,” said Ommirandy.

“She is entitled to have a servant with her, Mirandy,” said young Mars’ Jeems. “All of the Kingsmill women have had ’em.”

“For hunnerds an’ hunnerds o’ years,” responded the old woman loyally. “An’ dey gwi’ keep on havin’ uv ’em ’twel dey die. Don’t you werry yo’se’f ’bout dat, honey. De Lord, he gwineter purvide ’em, ’scusin’ de Yankees an’ de freedom. Ain’t Mis’ done, many’s de time, read it ter us out’n de book in de loom-room: ‘Mine elec’ an’ my servants shall dwell dar’? Dat means you-all an’ we-all gwi’ always dwell at Kingsmill. It come out o’ Isaiah. I remembrance it a heap better dan Tibe remembrance dem feathers.”

Ommirandy accepted with a ready and unquestioning acquiescence Mis’ Nancy’s tacit estimate of the social importance of the family of her hostess in the little town beyond the Blue Ridge; but the old woman’s suspicion of the colored population of the place was aroused from the moment when Imogen, the spry young maid servant, came into Mis’ Nancy’s room on the evening of their arrival to tender her services to her mistress’s guest. The tender was coldly but civilly declined by the old woman.

“I gwi’ look arfter Mis’ Nancy while she here,” said Ommirandy to Imogen. “I gwi’ fetch her water, an’ make her bed, an’ wait on her. She ain’t use ter no other servant but me doin’ fur her.”

“You don’t have ter fetch no water,” responded Imogen with asperity. “De water is in de pipes. See here!”

She went to the stationary basin and turned the faucet.

“Well, I gwi’ do fur her, anyhow,” responded the old woman, regarding the flowing water with a questioning look.

Imogen withdrew after Mis’ Nancy had thanked her.

“I been hear dat dey ain’t so many niggers over here in dis country as dey is in Tidewater,” said the old woman. “I reck’n dat’s howcome they don’t tote de water over here, like we all duz at Kingsmill.”

She went over to the basin and turned the stream on and off curiously.

“’Fo’ de Lord, dey think dey know mo’ ’bout whar water ought ter go dan de Almighty,” she grumbled. “Dey makin’ it run up-hill.”

Her visit to the kitchen after supper accentuated her critical attitude toward the servants on the place.

“Dese here culluds ain’t like dem in Tidewater,” she said to Mis’ Nancy. “Dat cook-’oman down dar in de cellar, she tell me her name is Miz’ Nellins—yas ’m Miz’ Nellins—an’ she ax me what was my entitle. I answer her, I ain’t got no entitle ’scusin’ Ommirandy. I give her ter know dat quality niggers on de t’other side o’ de mount’in don’t go by no name o’ Miz’ ur Mister, like de white folks. She primp herse’f, an’ she say: ‘My! Is dat possible?’ An’ I say: ‘It ain’t only possible, but it’s so, an’ also.’ I say: ‘Ef you was ter tell young Mars’ Jeems yo’ name was Miz’ Nellins, he’d think you was givin’ him some o’ yo’ instance.’ Den she say: ‘’Scuse me!’ An’ I done so. I ax her what her sho-nuf name is, an’ she say: ‘Patsey.’ I say: ‘Patsey, you kin gimme my supper.’ She ’pear ter me younger’n Philadelphy, so I say ter her: ‘You kin call me Ommirandy, an’ dat’s enough.’ She dat Immygen gal’s mother.”

In a day or two after their arrival Ommirandy informed Mis’ Nancy that there were frequent colored visitors to the kitchen, and that among them was a young negro man who was evidently a suitor of Imogen’s.

“I ain’t nuver gwine ter git used ter no kitchen in de cellar, no mo’n I is ter dis here water runnin’ in dis wash-basin. I ain’t excusin’ dese here white folks o’ nothin’, Mis’ Nancy; but whar I been use ter all my life, dey had de kitchen out in de yard. An’ dis here house is got too many long sta’r steps in it fur a duck-legged ole nigger like me. But I boun’ ter go down dar ter git my meals’ vittles ur starve; an’ when I duz go, I sees dem Mister an’ Miz’ an’ Miss darkies in all dey glory; an’ it’s wuth de trip. Dey ack like dey was all carriage-comp’ny. It’s ‘Mister Paul,’ an’ ‘Miss Immygen,’ an’ ‘Miz’ Nellins.’ Dat young nigger boy, he look at me, kinder curisome, an’ he ain’t call me nothin’ yit. He ’pear ter seem like he was skeered dat I was gwi’ jump on him, all spraddled-out. ’Fo’ Gord, Mis’ Nancy, I ain’t got nothin’ ’gin him, nur any o’ dese town folks, ’scusin’ dey ain’t like my folks.”

Mis’ Nancy’s color was not long in coming back to her cheeks in the bracing mountain atmosphere, and she soon felt better. She listened with undisguised amusement to Ommirandy’s comments on the new acquaintances of her race, and wished that young Mars’ Jeems might be there to hear them.

Each new day brought forth from the old woman the narrative of some incident that to her mind illustrated the inferiority of the local black people to her familiars at Kingsmill.

“Town niggers! town niggers!” she would ejaculate, as she went about her duties in Mis’ Nancy’s room.

“De parson was here ter dinner,” Ommirandy said on the last evening of Mis’ Nancy’s visit. “I wish you mought ’a’ seed him. Long-tail black coat like dat one Mr. Sinjinn give Jonas, beaver hat, white shirt, an’ white things hangin’ down over his shiny shoes like he gwi’ lose some o’ his underclo’es. Our rev’un’ at home, he couldn’ tetch him wid a forty-foot pole. He eat a fine dinner, an’ two o’ de deacons, dey eat wid him. When dey was gone, I sez ter Patsey: ‘Looky here, Patsey, it ’pears ter me like you was feedin’ seb’ral famblies out o’ dis here kitchen.’ ‘No, marm,’ she sez, ‘de minister he say we don’t have ter feed mo’n two outside famblies f’om no one kitchen.’ Is you uver heerd de beat o’ dat, Mis’ Nancy?”

Mis’ Nancy smiled, and the old woman continued:

“Dey’s sump’n gwine on in dis here house dat dese white folks here don’t know nothin’ ’bout. ’Tain’t none o’ my bizness, an’ I ain’t gwi’ give ’em away. I makes it a rule not to give no cullud pussons away, ’scusin’ ter you an’ ter young Mars’ Jeems. But dey actin’ mighty cur’ous, Patsey an’ Immygen an’ dat young Paul, an’ all uv ’em.”

She paused in her narrative, while Mis’ Nancy listened.

“I reck’n you ain’t nuver notice dat alley what runs down de side o’ de house f’om de street, is you, Mis’ Nancy?”

Mis’ Nancy had not observed the particular alley in question, but she informed Ommirandy that many city and town houses had such alleys or areaways, in order to connect the back premises with the street.

“I dunno nothin’ ’bout dat,” said the old woman. “But ’fo’ Gord, dat alley been swarmin’ wid niggers all day. I been watchin’ out o’ de winder while you was drivin’, an’ dey been comin’ an’ goin’ in all shapes an’ sizes, men, wimmen, an’ chillun. Dey wusser’n dese here little ants when you step on dey house. Most uv ’em is been fetchin’ in all sorts o’ bundles, wropt up in paper, ur hid in things so ’s you can’t see what dey got. An’ dat parson an’ de deacons, dey’s been perambulatin’ an’ p’radin’ an’ prancin’ back’ards an’ forruds; an’ mo’ cullud wimmen, whisp’rin’ an’ gigglin’, dan uver I see git inter one small lane befo’. Dey’s sump’n gwi’ happen roun’ here ’fo’ long; but de white folks down-sta’rs, dey don’t ’pear ter notice it, an’ ’t ain’t none o’ my bizness.”

When Ommirandy came up to Mis’ Nancy’s room from her supper she was out of breath.

“Dem dar steps ter de cellar is killin’ me,” she said. “I thank Gord we’s gwine hom ter-morrer.”

Then she continued:

“It’s like a graveyard down dar in dat kitchen ter-night. Dar warn’t none o’ de outsiders in ter supper. Eben dat young Paul, he done made hisse’f skase. Patsey she nuver say two words endurin’ o’ de supper, an’ Immygen she look glum as a wet hen wid draggled tail-feathers. I ain’t nuver see no darkies vanish like dat swarm o’ culluds dat was here ter-day is done vanish dis here night. Gord knows what’s done become uv ’em.”

“Maybe it’s the calm before the storm,” said Mis’ Nancy, falling in with the old woman’s mood. “Possibly they are going to give their minister a pound-party.”

The night came on apace; and after helping to prepare her mistress for bed Ommirandy lay down on the low couch at the far end of the room with her clothes on. The busy hum of the streets subsided; and the noise of a cricket outside the window made the old woman almost fancy that she was once more at home at Kingsmill. She fell asleep, and dreamed of pleasant things at the old place in Tidewater.

Her placid slumber, after a period of indefinite and tranquil repose, was broken at length by a most unusual and startling occurrence.

She roused herself on her elbow and looked out through the open window into a cloudless and star-strewn sky.

“Name o’ Gord!” she muttered under her breath. “What dat?”

She could feel the house shaking, with a faint and swaying motion that to the inhabitants of a seismic country would have seemed unmistakable. The movement lasted for a few minutes, and then ceased. Again it began and again was as perceptible and as distinct as before. A death-like silence lay over everything; and the oscillation was as regular and as rhythmic as the strophe and antistrophe of a Greek chorus.

“It’s a yearthquake, sho’!” she ejaculated, rising from her couch.

She sat on the side of her low bed for a moment and listened intently.

Then she laughed softly.

“Ah-yi!” she said aloud.

The cricket outside had long since ceased his jocund chirping, and the silence was so dense that Ommirandy felt that it was like a big black cake, and that she could cut it with a kitchen knife.

Then faint, far away, elusive as elfin harping, she caught the almost inaudible tones of a fiddle.

“Um-huh!” she said. “Dey ain’t no doubtin’ it. Dat’s what ’tis!”

She felt in the dark for her carpet slippers and, thrusting her feet into them, moved cautiously and carefully toward the fireplace, on the mantel of which she kept the candle and box of matches which Mis’ Nancy had brought with her from Kingsmill. Securing these, she opened the door, and when she was outside in the passage-way she struck a light.

The swaying motion and the elfin music had ceased together. She stood there, wondering if she might be dreaming. After a little while the notes of the violin came up to her once more from the lower regions, faint, far-away, hushed. She crept stealthily down the stairs to the street floor, and noticed that by the grandfather’s clock in the hall it was ten minutes of three o’clock.

“I ain’t nuver understand howcome folks in dis country has winders over de do’s, inside de house. Dey ain’t nuver had ’em at Kingsmill,” she said to herself, as with lit candle in hand she started to descend the stairway that led down into the kitchen basement. “But, ’fo’ Gord, I sees de good uv ’em, in places whar’s dey’s folks dat acks like dese here town niggers acks.”

She blew out the candle and paused on one of the upper steps of the basement staircase. The swaying movement of the house was now more perceptible to her than ever; and the music, though on the faintest minor key, as if muffled and disguised, was more distinctly audible than it had been when she was up-stairs.

She leaned over the balustrade and looked through the big transom over the kitchen door, through which the light shone with a radiance that made her fear that she might be seen from the room on her perch upon the steps.

“‘Ha! ha!’ said de fox, wid his pocket full o’ rocks,” she quoted to herself. “‘I done kotch you!’”

The kitchen was a large room, extending the full length of the house, and from her coign of vantage Ommirandy had a good view of a large part of it.

The scene that met her gaze was an odd one; and the old woman chuckled with repressed merriment as she regarded it.

“Mis’ Nancy, she done tell de trufe,” she commented, “when she talk about de calm an’ de storm. De storm, it done hit here in full blars’; but, ’fo’ Gord, it’s de silentes’ storm dat uver I looked at! Dey ain’t no poun’-party ’bout dat!”

After watching the unconscious occupants of the kitchen for some minutes, she retraced her steps, holding on tightly to the unlit candle and the box of matches, and feeling her way back as cautiously as she had come. The strains of the fiddle were now in a diminuendo; and the old woman gave a jump, with her heart in her mouth, when the big hall clock banged the hour of three in her ear as she passed it in the black silence.

“Dis here devilish house is beyont me!” she muttered as she continued on her way up the stairs to Mis’ Nancy’s room. “Gord knows what’s de nex’ thing gwi’ happen. I’se pintedly glad we-all’s gwine home in de mornin’.”

She slipped quietly into Mis’ Nancy’s room and, undressing in the dark, was soon asleep, with her last consciousness that of the faint and elusive music below and the almost imperceptible movement of the building. She dreamed that she was a child again, being gently rocked asleep in the cradle of her childhood to the crooning notes of her mother’s voice, lost in the long-ended years.

In the morning she followed Mis’ Nancy down to the breakfast-room, where they found the mistress of the mansion interrogating, with an appearance of considerable surprise, an unknown, neatly dressed young colored girl, who had just brought the breakfast up from the kitchen.

“Yas ’m,” said Amanda, the newcomer, “Imogen, she got married las’ night at de Ebenezer Church ter Mr. Paul; an’ Miz’ Nellins, she got me ter come here ter take Imogen’s place, an’ wait on de table ’twel she git home f’om her weddin’-tower nex’ week.”

“Imogen married?” queried Mis’ Nancy’s hostess of Amanda. “Why didn’t her mother tell me about it?”

“I dunno’m,” responded Amanda. “All Miz’ Nellins say was fur me ter come an’ take her place.”

When they were seated at the table the head of the house was interested to ask Mis’ Nancy if she had been disturbed in the night by any peculiar noise or movement.

“The mountain air makes me sleep very soundly,” she replied. She had noticed nothing unusual.

His attention was attracted by a smothered chuckle from Ommirandy, who lingered in the room, with the double purpose of seeing if she might serve her mistress in any way, and of ascertaining who besides herself was cognizant of the nocturnal disturbance which had aroused her from her slumbers.

“Did you hear anything, Mirandy?” he asked. “I dreamed there was an earthquake.”

“Lord, Mars’ Henry, you needn’ ax me nothin’ ’bout no yearthquakes. I ain’t nuver seed ur heerd no yearthquakes. I dunno nothin’ ’bout dem things. Dey’s strangers o’ mine.”

“Did you feel the house rocking?” he persisted.

The unrepressed grin on the old woman’s usually sombre countenance, and the agitated dangling of her ear-hoops, attracted Mis’ Nancy’s attention and aroused her suspicion that Ommirandy knew more than she was willing to admit. The suspicion grew into certainty at the old woman’s answer.

“’Fo’ Gord, marster, I ain’t got no bizness noticin’ nothin’ out o’ de way in a gennulmun’s house whar my mistis is visitin’. Ef dis here house was ter git up on its behime-legs, an’ rock an’ r’ar all over de street out dar, ’twudden be becomin’ in Mirandy fur ter notice it. Nor, sir.”

She held her peace until she and Mis’ Nancy had returned to Kingsmill. Then when her mistress and young Mars’ Jeems were together again, in the library at home, she told them, with hilarious freedom, the story of her midnight adventure.

“I been bustin’ ter tell Mis’ Nancy ’bout it, but I holt it in ontwel I got back here, so you mought hear ’bout it, likewise, young marster. It beat anything dat uver I see in my trabels, an’ I’m gwine on some years.

“Young Mars’ Jeems, you knows I ain’t mix much wid no outside folks, ’scusin’ dese here on dis plantation sence de s’rrender; an’ when I went over yondah wid Mis’ Nancy I warn’t adzackly sho’ how dem new-issue town niggers was gwineter git along wid me. I warn’t dar mo’n a day ’fo’ I diskiver dat dey done size me up fo’ what dey call ‘a white folks’ nigger.’ Dey was pow’ful perlite, an’ dey ax me ter church, which I didn’ go; but dey kinder friz’ me. Dey nuver ’sociated wid me like I was one uv ’em. But what beat dat was dey didn’ appear ter ’sociate wid dey white folks none, nuther; an’ I sez ter myse’f, when niggers stop ’sociatin’ wid dey white ladies an’ gennulmens it’s good-by, niggers. I et wid ’em an’ talk ter ’em; an’ it ’peared ter me like harf de cullud folks in dat town come ter dat kitchen endurin’ o’ de time we was dar. Den ter clap de climax, I see ’em swarmin’ in by de side lane ter de back o’ de house, whar de kitchen was, de day befo’ we come away, fetchin’ bun’les an’ barskets an’ buckets; but I cudden fine out what it was dey was fetchin’ in ’em. ’Way late in de night de house begin ter rock an’ swing an’ sway, like ’twas gwine ter wake up ev’vybody in it; an’ I heerd a fiddle dat soun’ ter me like it was ’bout a mile down in de groun’. I crope down de sta’rs, an’ look thoo de winder dey got over de kitchen do’, an’ den I seed what was gwine on. Dat dine’-room gal, Immygen, dat was de cook’s daughter, she had done got married early in de night, an’ de whole cong’egation—preacher, elders, deacons, an’ all uv ’em—had come ter de infare. Thoo de winder I could see a table in de fur cornder o’ de room, wid hams an’ turkeys an’ cakes an’ pies piled up on it a foot high; an’ out in front o’ de table sot a little darky on a stool wid a fiddle. He was a’ orful little-bitty nigger wid a’ orful little-bitty fiddle, playin’ a’ orful little-bitty chune; but, bless Gord, young Mars’ Jeems, he was sho’ nuf a-playin’ dat chune. It was ‘Git yo’ pardners, fus’ kwattilion,’ but ef he called any figgers while he was a-fiddlin’ I cudden hear him call ’em. Dem culluds was so full o’ de music o’ dat little fiddle dey didn’ ’pear ter need ter have no figgers called fur ’em. Dey look’ like dey jes’ knowed ’em all anyhow. Dar dey was, de whole kit’n’bile uv ’em, out in de middle o’ de flo’, sasshayin’ back’ards an’ forruds, an’ crossin’ over an’ swingin’ pardners, an’ evvy nigger man an’ ’oman in de comp’ny darncin’ in dey sock-feets. Dat’s de Gord’s trufe, young Mars’ Jeems. I lay, dey ain’t nothin’ like it uver been seed dis side o’ dem mountains. I been ter many a infare an’ darnce in my day at Ole Town, an’ roun’ about dis here countryside; an’ I been hear ’em ‘ha-ha!’ an’ larf an’ raise a racket ter ’sturb de neighborhood fur a mile. But ’fo’ Gord, sir, it was de fus’ time dat uver I see sich a party, down in a cellar-kitchen, wid evvy black nigger dar a-darncin’ like he was gwi’ break his neck in his sock-feets, an’ n’ary one uv ’em makin’ a soun’. But dey was havin’ fun all de same. De parson, he had on white yarn socks, an’ a long-tail coat, an’ de coat-tails an’ de socks was a-keepin’ time ter de teeny little-bitty chune on de teeny little-bitty fiddle. He holt one big han’, wid a brass ring on it, over his mouf, ter keep f’om larfin’ out loud, an’ he swing de young wimmen wid de t’other han’. De bride, she had on red stockin’-feets an’ a short white skirt; an’ when de parson hit de cornders wid her dar was sich a flyin’ o’ skirts an’ coat-tails as showed up mo’ red legs dan we sees down here, ur de law allows. An’ all de time de darncin’ was gwine on, wid de men an’ de gells a-stuffin’ dey pocket-hanchkers in dey moufs an’ holdin’ dey han’s up ter dey faces fer ter keep quiet, dat house was a-rockin’ an’ a-swayin’ an’ a-rampagin’ in a way ter wake de dead. Den dey stop de kwattilion, and de teeny-bitty nigger tetched up de Ole Ferginyeh Reel on his teeny-bitty fiddle. He made dat fiddle talk, mun, eben ef it was a-whisperin’ ter itse’f; an’ I got ter kind o’ thinkin’ ’bout de times I useter have at dem darnces, mighty nigh a hunnerd years ago, when Mis’ fus’ tuk me f’om Ole Town, ’twell it seem ter me like I wanted ter git in dat room, wid dem niggers, an’ go down de middle wid de black parson in de white yarn sock-feets myse’f. I ain’t nuver seed so many diffunt cullud socks ez I seed at dat infare. Gord knows what dey all done wid dey shoes; but dey warn’t a livin’ sinner in de gang dat had on eben so much as a slipper, ’scusin’ one o’ de young deacons dat had tuk supper dar a few nights befo’. I reck’n he must ’a’ been skeered dat de white folks mought come down f’om up-sta’rs an’ raid ’em; an’ dat’s howcome he had his p’yar o’ number ’leben brogans tied together an’ hung roun’ his neck, like a string o’ beads. An’ it ’peared ter me like dat deacon wid de big brogans was shovin’ de hefties’ foot in de whole cong’egation. Lord, he could darnce!

“I watched ’em dar fur a little while, an’ den I crope back up-sta’rs ter bed. I didn’ wait ter see ’em git onter dat table o’ perwisions; but dey must ’a’ done dat as silent as dey done de darncin’. When I went down ter bre’kfus de nex’ mornin’ dey wa’n’t no sign o’ used plate ur dish in de room. Ev’vything was jes’ ez spick an’ span as it was de mornin’ befo’, an’ Patsey dat dey call Miz’ Nellins, she sot dar an’ po’ed out my coffee jes’ as calm as ef she nuver had heerd ur drempt o’ no infare.

“‘Was anything importan’ gwine on lars’ night?’ sez I ter Patsey.

“She holp herse’f ter a big plate o’ baddy-bread an’ harf uv a fried roe-herrin’, an’ she looks me in de face as cool as de middle inside seed uv any cowcumber you uver see.

“‘Nor’m,’ she sez, ’nuthin’ ’t’all, ’scusin’ my daughter Immygen, she got married ter Mr. Paul at de Ebenezer Baptis’ at nine P.M. lars’ night,’ she sez.

“‘Oh, did she?’ I sez. ‘I think I heerd sump’n’ ’bout it up-sta’rs, f’om dis young gell here dat’s a stranger o’ mine,’ I sez, lookin’ at ‘Mandy dat waited on de breakfas’ in de dine’-room. ‘I b’lieve she did menshun it.’

“‘Yas ’m,’ sez Miz’ Nellins, a-chawin’ away on de baddy-bread an’ de roe-herrin’, ’dey all sez it was a reel swell weddin’.’

“‘An’ did de bride an’ groom leave on de night train?’ sez I perlitely.

“‘Dey lef’ on a’ early train,’ sez Miz’ Nellins, de ole hippycrit.

“Young Mars’ Jeems, I done had enough o’ dem town niggers. Dey ain’t like we-all is.”

“I think the trip helped you as well as your Mis’ Nancy, Mirandy,” said young Mars’ Jeems, fingering his thin imperial. “Kind o’ cheered you up, didn’t it?”

“It sho’ holp Mis’ Nancy,” replied Ommirandy, chuckling and regarding her mistress with an affectionate expression on her rugged face. “Yas, sir. De mount’in air sho’ holp her.”

Then she said:

“Young Mars’ Jeems, is you been notice whether dem guinny-hens is done been back ter dat nes’ an’ laid any mo’ eggs dar since dat little fool Tibe meddle wid ’em?”

THE CAT OF THE CANE-BRAKE[9]

By FREDERICK STUART GREENE

From The Metropolitan Magazine

“SALLY! O-oh, Sally! I’m a-goin’ now.” Jim Gantt pushed back the limp brim of his rusty felt hat and turned colorless eyes toward the cabin.

A young woman came from around the corner of the house. From each hand dangled a bunch of squawking chickens. She did not speak until she had reached the wagon.

“Now, Jim, you ain’t a-goin’ to let them fellers down in Andalushy git you inter no blind tiger, air you?” The question came in a hopeless drawl; hopeless, too, her look into the man’s sallow face.

“I ain’t tetched a drop in more’n three months, has I?” Jim’s answer was in a sullen key.

“No, Jim, you bin doin’ right well lately.” She tossed the chickens into the wagon, thoughtless of the hurt to their tied and twisted legs. “They’re worth two bits apiece. That comes to two dollars, Jim. Don’t you take a nickel less ’n that.”

Jim gave a listless pull at the cotton rope that served as reins.

“Git up thar, mule!” he called, and the wagon creaked off on wobbling wheels down the hot, dusty road.

The woman looked scornfully at the man’s humpedover back for a full minute, turned and walked to the house, a hard smile at her mouth.

Sally Gantt gave no heed to her drab surroundings as she crossed the short stretch from road to cabin. All her twenty-two years had been spent in this far end of Alabama, where one dreary, unkempt clearing in the pine-woods is as dismal as the next. Comparisons which might add their fuel to her smouldering discontent were spared her. Yet, unconsciously, this bare, grassless country, with its flat miles of monotonous pine forests, its flatter miles of rank cane-brake, served to distil a bitter gall, poisoning all her thoughts.

The double cabin of Jim Gantt, its two rooms separated by a “dog-trot”—an open porch cut through the center of the structure—was counted a thing of luxury by his scattered neighbors. Gantt had built it four years before, when he took up the land as his homestead, and Sally for his wife. The labor of building this cabin had apparently drained his stock of energy to the dregs. Beyond the necessary toil of planting a small patch of corn, a smaller one of sweet potatoes and fishing in the sluggish waters of Pigeon Creek, he now did nothing. Sally tended the chickens, their one source of money, and gave intermittent attention to the half-dozen razor-back hogs, which, with the scrubby mule, comprised their toll of live-stock.

As the woman mounted the hewn log that answered as a step to the dog-trot, she stopped to listen. From the kitchen came a faint noise; a sound of crunching. Sally went on silent feet to the door. On the table, littered with unwashed dishes, a cat was gnawing at a fish head;—a gaunt beast, its lean flanks covered with wiry fur except where ragged scars left exposed the bare hide. Its strong jaws crushed through the thick skull-bone of the fish as if it were an empty bird’s egg.

Sally sprang to the stove and seized a pine knot.

“Dog-gone your yaller hide!” she screamed. “Git out of hyar!”

The cat wheeled with a start and faced the woman, its evil eyes glittering.

“Git, you yaller devil!” the woman screamed again.

The cat sprang sidewise to the floor. Sally sent the jagged piece of wood spinning through the air. It crashed against the far wall, missing the beast by an inch. The animal arched its huge body and held its ground.

“You varmint, I’ll git you this time!” Sally stooped for another piece of wood. The cat darted through the door ahead of the flying missile.

“I ’ll kill you yit!” Sally shouted after it. “An’ he kain’t hinder me neither!”

She sat down heavily and wiped the sweat from her forehead.

It was several minutes before the woman rose from the chair and crossed the dog-trot to the sleeping-room. Throwing her faded sunbonnet into a corner, she loosened her hair and began to brush it.

Sally Gantt was neither pretty nor handsome. But in a country peopled solely by pine-woods crackers, her black hair and eyes, clear skin and white teeth, made her stand out. She was a woman, and young. To a man, also young, who for two years had seen no face unpainted with the sallow hue of chills and fever, no eyes except faded blue ones framed by white, straggling lashes, no sound teeth, and the unsound ones stained always by the snuff stick, she might easily appear alluring.

With feminine deftness Sally re-coiled her hair. She took from a wooden peg a blue calico dress, its printed pattern as yet unbleached by the fierce suns. It gave to her slender figure some touch of grace. From beneath the bed she drew a pair of heavy brogans; a shoe fashioned, doubtless, to match the listless nature of the people who most use them, slipping on or off without hindrance from lace or buckle. As a final touch, she fastened about her head a piece of blue ribbon, the band of cheap silk making the flash in her black eyes the brighter.

Sally left the house and started across the rubbish-littered yard. A short distance from the cabin she stopped to look about her.

“I’m dog-tired of it all,” she said fiercely. “I hates the house. I hates the whole place, an’ more ’n all I hates Jim.”

She turned, scowling, and walked between the rows of growing corn that reached to the edge of the clearing. Here began the pine woods, the one saving touch nature has given to this land. Beneath the grateful shade she hastened her steps. The trees stood in endless disordered ranks, rising straight and bare of branch until high aloft their spreading tops caught the sunlight.

A quarter of a mile brought her to the lowland. She went down the slight decline and stepped within the cane-brake. Here gloom closed about her. The thickly growing cane reached to twice her height. Above the cane the cypress spread its branches, draped with the sad, gray moss of the South. No sun’s ray struggled through the rank foliage to lighten the sodden earth beneath. Sally picked her way slowly through the swamp, peering cautiously beyond each fallen log before venturing a further step. Crawfish scuttled backward from her path to slip down the mud chimneys of their homes. The black earth and decaying plants filled the hot, still air with noisome odors. Thousands of hidden insects sounded through the dank stretches their grating calls. Slimy water oozed from beneath the heavy soles of her brogans, green and purple bubbles were left in each footprint, bubbles with iridescent oily skins.

As she went around a sharp turn she was caught up and lifted clear from the ground in the arms of a young man—a boy of twenty or thereabout.

“Oh, Bob, you scairt me—you certainly air rough!”

Without words he kissed her again and again.

“Now, Bob, you quit! Ain’t you had enough?”

“Could I ever have enough? Oh, Sally, I love you so!” The words trembled from the boy.

“You certainly ain’t like none of ’em ’round hyar, Bob.” There was some pride in Sally’s drawling voice. “I never seed none of the men folks act with gals like you does.”

“There’s no other girl like you to make them.” Then, holding her from him, he went on fiercely: “You don’t let any of them try it, do you?”

Sally smiled up into his glowing eyes.

“You knows I don’t. They ’d be afeard of Jim.”

The blood rushed to the boy’s cheeks, his arms dropped to his side; he stood sobered.

“Sally, we can’t go on this way any longer. That’s why I asked you to come to the river to-day.”

“What’s a-goin’ to stop us?” A frightened look crossed the woman’s face.

“I’m going away.”

She made a quick step toward him.

“You ain’t lost your job on the new railroad?”

“No. Come down to the boat where we can talk this over.”

He helped her down the bank of the creek to a flat-bottomed skiff, and seated her in the stern with a touch of courtesy before taking the cross seat facing her.

“No, I have n’t lost my job,” he began earnestly, “but my section of the road is about finished. They’ll move me to another residency farther up the line in about a week.”

She sat silent a moment, her black eyes wide with question. He searched them for some sign of sorrow.

“What kin I do after you air gone?”

There was a hopeless note in her voice; it pleased the boy.

“That ’s the point: instead of letting them move me, I ’m going to move myself.” He paused that she might get the full meaning of his coming words.

“I ’m going away from here to-night, and I ’m going to take you with me.”

“No, no! I das n’t!” She shrank before his steady gaze.

He moved swiftly across to her. Throwing his arms around her, he poured out his words.

“Yes! You will! You must! You love me, don’t you?”

Sally nodded in helpless assent.

“Better than anything in this world?”

Again Sally nodded.

“Then listen. To-night at twelve you come to the river. I’ll be waiting for you at the edge of the swamp. We’ll row down to Brewton. We can easily catch the six-twenty to Mobile, and, once there, we’ll begin to live,” he finished grandly.

“But I can’t! Air you crazy? How kin I git away an’ Jim right in the house?”

“I’ve thought of all that; you just let him see this.” He drew a bottle from beneath the seat. “You know what he’ll do to this; it’s the strongest corn whisky I could find.”

“Oh, Bob! I’m a-scairt to.”

“Don’t you love me?” His young eyes looked reproach.

Sally threw both arms about the boy’s neck and drew his head down to her lips. Then she pushed him from her.

“Bob, is it so what the men-folks all say, that the railroad gives you a hundred dollars every month?”

He laughed. “Yes, you dear girl, and more. I get a hundred and a quarter, and I’ve been getting it for two years in this God-forsaken country, and nothing to spend it on. I’ve got over a thousand dollars saved up.”

The woman’s eyes widened. She kissed the boy on the mouth.

“They ’lows as how you’re the smartest engineer on the road.”

The boy’s head was held high.

Sally made some mental calculations before she spoke again.

“Oh, Bob, I jes’ can’t. I’m a-scairt to.”

He caught her to him. A man of longer experience might have noted the sham in her reluctance.

“My darling, what are you afraid of?” he cried.

“What air we a-goin’ to do after we gits to Mobile?”

“Oh, I’ve thought of everything. They’re building a new line down in Texas. We’ll go there. I’ll get another job as resident engineer. I have my profession,” he ended proudly.

“You might git tired, and want to git shed of me, Bob.”

He smothered her words under fierce kisses. His young heart beat at bursting pressure. In bright colors he pictured the glory of Mobile, New Orleans, and all the world that lay before them to love each other in.

When Sally left the boat she had promised to come. Where the pine-trees meet the cane-brake he would be waiting for her, at midnight.

At the top of the bank she turned to wave.

“Wait! Wait!” called the boy. He rushed up the slope.

“Quit, Bob, you’re hurtin’ me.” She tore herself from his arms and hastened back along the slimy path. When she reached the pine-wood she paused.

“More ’n a thousand dollars!” she murmured, and a slow, satisfied smile crossed her shrewd face.

The sun, now directly over the tops of the trees, shot its scorching rays through the foliage. They struck the earth in vertical shafts, heating it to the burning point. Not a breath stirred the glistening pine-needles on the towering branches. It was one of those noontimes which, in the moisture-charged air of southern Alabama, makes life a steaming hell to all living things save reptiles and lovers.

Reaching the cabin, Sally went first to the kitchen room. She opened a cupboard and, taking the cork from the bottle, placed the whisky on the top shelf and closed the wooden door.

She crossed the dog-trot to the sleeping-room; a spitting snarl greeted her entrance. In the center of the bed crouched the yellow cat, its eyes gleaming, every muscle over its bony frame drawn taut, ready for the spring. The woman, startled, drew back. The cat moved on stiff legs nearer. Unflinchingly they glared into each other’s eyes.

“Git out of hyar afore I kill yer! You yaller devil!” Sally’s voice rang hard as steel.

The cat stood poised at the edge of the bed, its glistening teeth showing in its wide mouth. Without an instant’s shift of her defiant stare, Sally wrenched a shoe from her foot. The animal with spread claws sprang straight for the woman’s throat. The cat and the heavy brogan crashed together in mid-air. Together they fell to the floor; the cat landed lightly, silently, and bounded through the open door.

Sally fell back against the log wall of the cabin, feeling the skin at her throat with trembling fingers....

“Jim! Oh-h, Jim!” Sally called from the cabin. “Come on in, yer supper’s ready.”

“He ain’t took nothin’ to drink to-day,” she thought. “It’s nigh three months now, he’ll be ’most crazy.”

The man took a few sticks of wood from the ground, and came on dragging feet through the gloom. As Sally watched his listless approach, she felt in full force the oppressive melancholy of her dismal surroundings. Awakened by the boy’s enthusiastic plans, imagination stirred within her. In the distance a girdled pine stood clear-cut against the horizon. Its bark peeled and fallen, left the dead, naked trunk the color of dried bones. Near the stunted top one bare limb stretched out. Unnoticed a thousand times before, to the woman it looked to-night a ghostly gibbet against the black sky.

Sally shuddered and went into the lighted kitchen.

“I jes’ kilt a rattler down by the woodpile.” Jim threw down his load and drew a splint-bottomed chair to the table.

“Ground-rattler, Jim?”

“Naw, sir-ee! A hell-bendin’ big diamond-back.”

“Did you hurt the skin?” Sally asked quickly.

“Naw. I chopped his neck clean, short to the haid. An’ I done it so durn quick his fangs is a-stickin’ out yit, I reckon.”

“Did he strike at you?”

“Yes, sir-ee, an’ the pizen came out of his mouth jes’ like a fog.”

“Ah, you’re foolin’ me!”

“No, I ain’t neither. I’ve heard tell of it, but I never seed it afore. The ground was kinda black whar he lit, an’ jes’ as I brought the axe down on him, thar I seed a little puff like, same as white steam, in front of his mouth.”

“How big was he, Jim?”

“’Leven rattles an’ a button.”

“Did you skin him?”

“Naw, it was too durn dark, but I hung him high up, so’s the hawgs won’t git at him. His skin’ll fotch fo’ bits down at Andalushy.”

“Ax ’em six, Jim, them big ones gittin’ kinda skeerce.”

Jim finished his supper in silence; the killing of the snake had provided more conversation than was usual during three meals among pine-woods people.

As Sally was clearing away the dishes, the yellow cat came through the door. Slinking close to the wall, it avoided the woman, and sprang upon the knees of its master. Jim grinned into the eyes of the beast and began stroking its coarse hair. The cat set up a grating purr.

Sally looked at the two for a moment in silence.

“Jim, you gotta kill that cat.”

Jim’s grin widened, showing his tobacco-stained teeth.

“Jim, I’m a-tellin’ you, you gotta kill that cat.”

“An’ I’m a-tellin’ you I won’t.”

“Jim, it sprung at me to-day, an’ would have hurt me somethin’ turrible if I hadn’t hit it over the haid with my shoe.”

“Well, you must ’a’ done somethin’ to make him. You leave him alone an’ he won’t pester you.”

The woman hesitated; she looked at the man as yet undecided; after a moment she spoke again.

“Jim Gantt, I’m axin’ you for the las’ time, which does you think more ’n of, me or that snarlin’ varmint?”

“He don’t snarl at me so much as you does,” the man answered doggedly. “Anyway, I ain’t a-goin’ to kill him; an’ you gotta leave him alone, too. You jes’ min’ yer own business an’ go tote the mattress out on the trot. It’s too durn hot to sleep in the house.”

The woman passed behind him to the cupboard, reached up, opened wide the wooden door and went out of the room.

Jim stroked the cat, its grating purr growing louder in the stillness.

A minute passed.

Into the dull eyes of the man a glitter came, and grew. Slowly he lifted his head. Farther and farther his chin drew up until the cords beneath the red skin of his neck stood out in ridges. The nostrils of his bony nose quivered, he sniffed the hot air like a dog straining to catch a distant scent. His tongue protruded and moved from side to side across his lips.

Standing in the darkness without, the woman smiled grimly.

Abruptly the man rose. The forgotten cat fell, twisted in the air and lighted on its feet. Jim wheeled and strode to the cupboard. As his hand closed about the bottle, the gleam in his eyes became burning flames. He jerked the bottle from the shelf, threw his head far back. The fiery liquor ran down his throat. He returned to his seat; the cat rubbed its ribbed flank against his leg, he stooped and lifted it to the table. Waving the bottle in front of the yellow beast, he laughed:

“Here’s to yer—an’ to’ad yer!” and swallowed half a tumblerful of the colorless liquid.

Sally dragged the shuck mattress to the dog-trot. Fully dressed, she lay waiting for midnight.

An hour went by before Jim shivered the empty bottle against the log wall of the kitchen. Pressing both hands hard upon the table, he heaved himself to his feet, upsetting the candle in the effort. He leered at the flame and slapped his bare palm down on it. The hot, melted wax oozed up, unheeded, between his fingers. Clinging to the table top, he turned himself toward the open door, steadied his swaying body for an instant, then lurched forward. His shoulder crashed against the door-post, his body spun half-way round. The man fell flat upon his back, missing the mattress by a yard. The back of his head struck hard on the rough boards of the porch floor. He lay motionless, his feet sticking straight up on the doorsill.

The yellow cat sprang lightly over the fallen body and went out into the night....

Wide-eyed, the woman lay, watching. After moments of tense listening the sound of faint breathing came to her from the prone figure. Sally frowned. “He’s too no ’count to git kilt,” she said aloud, and turned on her side. She judged, from the stars, it was not yet eleven. Drowsiness came; she fell into uneasy slumber.

Out in the night the yellow cat was prowling. It stopped near the wood-pile. With extended paw, it touched lightly something that lay on the ground. Its long teeth fastened upon it. The cat slunk off toward the house. Without sound it sprang to the floor of the dog-trot. Stealthily, its body crouched low, it started to cross through the open way. As it passed the woman she muttered and struck out in her sleep. The cat flattened to the floor. Near the moving arm, the thing it carried fell from its teeth. The beast scurried out across the opening.

The night marched on to the sound of a million voices calling shrilly through the gloom.

The woman awoke. The stars glowed pale from a cloudy midnight sky. She reached out her right hand, palm down, to raise herself from the bed, throwing her full weight upon it. Two needle points pierced her wrist. A smothered cry was wrung from her lips. She reached with her left hand to pluck at the hurt place. It touched something cold, something hard and clammy, some dead thing. She jerked back the hand. A scream shivered through the still air. Pains, becoming instantly acute, unbearable, darted through her arm. Again she tried to pull away the torturing needle points. Her quivering hand groped aimlessly in the darkness. She could not force herself, a second time, to touch the dead, clinging thing at her wrist. Screaming, she dragged herself to the man.

“Jim, I’m hurt, help me! Help me!”

The man did not move.

“Jim, wake up! Help me!” she wailed uselessly to the inert man.

The terrifying pain spurted from wrist to shoulder. With her clenched left hand she beat against the man’s upturned face.

“You drunken fool, help me! Take this thing away!”

The man lay torpid beneath her pounding fist....

Along the path to Pigeon Creek, where the pine-woods run into the cane-brake, a boy waited; waited until the eastern sky grew from black to gray. Then with cautious tread he began to move, his face turned toward the cabin. As he neared the clearing the gray in the east changed to red. He left the woods and entered the field of corn. His footfalls made no sound on the earth between the furrows.

At the cabin he drew close against the wall and listened. A man’s heavy breathing reached his straining ears. Slowly he moved toward the opening in the middle of the house. Above the breathing he heard a grating noise; between the deep-drawn breaths and the grating, another sound came to him; a harsh, rhythmic scratching.

The edge of the sun rose abruptly above the flat earth, sending light within the opening.

The boy thrust his head around the angle. A yellow cat was sitting at the foot of the mattress. From its throat grating purrs came in regular measure; between each purr the beast’s spread claws clutched and released the stiff ticking.

Beyond lay the man.

Between the cat and the man, stretched across the shuck bed, was the woman; her glassy eyes staring up into the grinning face of the cat. From her shoulder, reaching out toward the boy, was a vivid, turgid thing; a hand and arm, puffed beyond all human shape. From the swollen wrist, its poisoned fangs sunk deep into an artery, hung the mangled head of a snake.

The swaying corn blades whipped against the boy’s white face as he fled between the rows.

MAKING PORT[10]

By RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET

From Every Week

AS soon as old Tom was hoisted aboard the bark Forensic, he sat down on a hatch and inquired, “Whar to?” in an awed voice.

The new crew of that old hooker was lying about in the scuppers, after the manner of new crews: but one among us, Spike Moran by name, sat up and answered him:

“Where to? Why, you was there when the articles were signed, old feller. Sydney, New South Wales. Where was you hoping to go?”

“Liverpool,” said that strange old man.

“Oho, I remember,” said Spike. “You are the old one I was talking to on the tug, ain’t you?”

“Ay.”

With grave despondency he confessed to us that he had been trying to ship for Liverpool any time the last twelve years. Is there anything more uncertain than a seafaring life? As we looked closely at him, the old fellow turned his bleached eyes toward the Battery, and scratched his hide of a rhinoceros through the old yellow unwashed singlet he wore—scratched his ribs with a slow motion, as if numbed by the contrarieties of fate.

“What part of Liverpool?”

“Christian Street,” said old Tom.

Christian Street—of all streets in the world of sailormen, the most unchristian and the most unholy!

“You keep away from Christian Street,” said Spike, “if you want to keep your claws on a pay-day.”

Then old Tom, without moving his head, said, in a voice of feigned contempt, that he had a wife in Christian Street.

“Three years older than what I am,” he said sorrowfully.

“How old are you, Tom?”

“Sixty-four,” answered that melancholy old man.

Spike laughed.

“You would have more cause to complain if you was young, old feller,” he said. “It don’t make no real difference to you now, having a wife, unless you need nursing. But supposing you was young, and a girl was waiting for you in Sydney, New South Wales, and then you was shipped on the wrong ship, you’d have a right to complain, hey?”

Old Tom’s eyes flashed with a light of scorn for youth, and he inquired:

“What girl is this?”

“The mission girl,” said Spike proudly, gladly; “the one that comes out to the ship with the organ.”

“Ay,” said old Tom.

“You know her?”

“Ay,” said old Tom.

Closing his eyes, he affected to remember that girl. No sailor can afford to be ignorant of any port or any ship or any woman mentioned in the narrative of a shipmate.

“She wears rough pearls,” said Spike, “in a chain round her neck. She is the daughter of a pearl-diver.”

“Looking out for her beauty,” said old Tom. “I know her. Yes, I have seen her. Black hair.”

“No. Brown,” said Spike.

“Oh, ay,” said old Tom. “Yes; I remember her.”

He was an old man going the wrong way again, and he looked at Spike with a kind of hatred.

It appeared that Spike’s prospect of happiness, whispered about the ship, had set the whole crew against him—all save little Jewdler, the apprentice, and me. You do not know how strong can be the attack on a man’s soul by a combined ship’s crew. He could do nothing to please them. He shaved them, he cooked special dishes for that watch, he lanced wire-poisoned fingers which the Old Man wouldn’t touch, he stood for hours as policeman to the watch, in the tropics. You have heard of these nights wherein deep skies and soft trades induce the watch on deck to sleep in odd corners, out of the light of the moon? He was unwearied in serving those men. In vain. His good nature was like oil on this fiery resentment. It blazed up against him everywhere, until at last the starboard bo’sun, a battered, rough-handed sea-devil, found courage to strike him to the deck.

Later, still smiling, with his head bound in a bloody rag, he talked to old Tom.

“You are an old man, Tom,” he said; “you had ought to know. Ain’t a girl worth being kicked about a little to get? Ain’t there some consolation to a beaten man in the thought that she is there?”

With the red rag fluttering at his brows, he pointed east, whispering: “There is a woman for you.”

All this was lost on old Tom, and shattered against his stony ill will. What he knew he would not impart. Well, why should he? This world of water was just the dazzling blue ruin of his hopes.

“Whar to?” he had said feebly; and the mocking fates would only echo him. His voice came up to us as hollow as the echo in a tomb.

Twelve years already of plowing the seas, in an effort to set foot again on the stones of Christian Street. In vain. The malign fates had conspired with the gray gods of the deep to overset the plans of that unlucky old Ulysses. Ships had floundered under him. He had crawled up out of the sea to wander on inhospitable coasts. He had drunk fatal beers, and had waked in the fo’c’sles of ill-starred packets—forsaken old sea-wagons that had borne him protesting to Calcutta or Bangkok or the mythical island of Yap, when he wanted to get to Liverpool.

Now, after these mighty agonies, he sat, bound for New South Wales, on that glittering sea-track that led fourteen thousand miles away from Christian Street. Poor old Tom!

Old Tom never softened his animosity toward Spike. He seemed to know from the first that his destiny would link with that big sailor’s. It was in vain that we reminded him that he was the oldest man on the ship, and would be made night watchman in Sydney and have it soft; and that possibly this very ship would go to Liverpool.

“I’m done,” said old Tom. “This is my last ship.”

In a ghastly whisper he told us he could no longer swarm up a rope. Had tried and failed. The sap was out of him. This was his last ship.

Moving heavily in his oilskins, he whispered to us:

“We will all have to leave this ship, too, I am thinking. I saw a blue light off the foreyard-arm the other night.”

“When was that, Tom?” asked little Jewdler. “What wheel was that?”

“The gravy-eyed wheel,” said old Tom sadly.

“Must’ve been a star,” said little Jewdler, mystified.

“No, it wasn’t no star,” said old Tom, in the unruffled tones of a man sure of his ground. “Ain’t you never heard of death lights? There’s going to be death on this ship.”

“How is that, Tom?” we whispered, terrified.

But old Tom was careful not to let fall too much wisdom. He wouldn’t tell us how it came that a blue light meant death.

But he was right—old Tom was right.

The starboard bo’sun was a hound—a military hound: one of these ill-conditioned rats who had come out of the Boer War with a scar or two and a yearning to demonstrate authority. He hounded Spike, on account of that girl in Sydney, until Spike knocked him down with his bare fist. Then the bo’sun came with his knife,—two men saw it in his hand,—and Spike knocked him down again, with a belaying-pin. And this time the bo’sun did not get up.

He had sea burial, and Spike they chained in the sail-locker. The Old Man was tearing mad, too, because the death of that man had made the ship shorthanded—as if there were not already enough farmers in the crew. It was like spearing him to make his ship shorthanded, and he told the mate he intended to see justice done. We knew what that meant; and we looked upon our shipmate thenceforth as a dead man.

The Old Man, as it happened, hadn’t the least confidence in his two mates, and he had had a row with the port bo’sun over the proper way of sending down a yard. Therefore he intrusted the keys of that locker to old Tom—who venerated the skipper, and also cursed him through the seven cycles of time.

Strange to think of Spike, the gentle-hearted, tied to a ring in an iron wall. We were afraid to creep there by night and speak to him through the port. Was he to die? A man who was in love to die? To exchange the torment of the seas for the black void of death? It was hard: but very likely. The word of the skipper would be law in that foreign court.

My heart filled with hatred of that old man who held the keys of Spike’s prison. He was sitting on the after-hatch forcing the strands of a great yellow hawser with his teakwood fid. He was making ready the bowline. His big, crusty fingers moved with care. Many voyages he had terminated thus, not counting them in his life, since they did not lead to Liverpool.

In the hands of that old man the suggestion of this huge rope was hideous. My eye fell on him again and again as I played the ship through those giant seas. That yellow shard of a man held the keys, held the destiny of Spike in the hollow of his hand.

Ordinarily it’s a calm and holy business, furling the wings of the ship as she is going into harbor. There is a touch of awe in what you do to her then; as if you were stroking your good angel. There’s the exhilaration of relief, and certain wild anticipations too, awakened by land odors. It is a lazy moment of hush and speculation, and of unconscious religion; and the ship bears you away into the dark heart of the unknown.

But this time we were struck with horror to see that dark coast rising before us. The ship was a funeral ship, straddled by death and the black vengeance that old Tom bore in his heart for Spike, our shipmate. Even now we could hardly credit the gloomy significance of this incarceration.

Little Jewdler and I, as we lay on the upper topsail-yard, gazed hard at that beacon throbbing through the dark gloom of the night—this night so still, so vast, so full of space. Once we had felt like storm-ridden vikings: now we quailed—the black water swarmed and seethed in coils and flickerings of phosphorescence; a silver band of light streamed by unendingly at the waterline, throwing up a light of magic on the ship’s gray hull, making her under-body soft and unsubstantial.

All the while we heard the quiet voices of the watch aft floating up to us, we saw the coals in their pipes gleam and fade, like tiny beacons. We knew that they were leaning about, asking one another in throaty whispers who would stick to a ship where murder had been done.

Then we saw old Tom, sitting apart, in his yellow singlet, nursing memories of Liverpool in his heart of leather! We heard him say to the mate, in calm tones:

“There’s a heavy dew falling. That means a shift of wind in this latitude.”

We were filled with hate of his calm voice. Lying with our chins on the round of that wide hanging yard, we recreated that starboard bo’sun only to do him to death again.

And high over the Southern Cross we saw swinging the red star that Spike had given that mission girl for her own. As if it had been a spark from the fire in his heart, it glowed deep.

“Must be eight bells,” said the apprentice.

He clamored down and struck it. As we met again on the deck, the bo’sun said, “Watch is aft, sir,” in the chastened voice of a man without enmities.

The voice of the mate came down in a tolerant undertone:

“Relieve the wheel and look-out.”

The watch dissolved. Rolling men in shore-going shirts brushed past us. We heard a terrifying whisper from a big Yank:

“I tell you, I’m not going to see an American citizen done to death.”

At once that black ship seemed to be alive with the mutterings of conspiracy. Our hearts thumped. Would they attempt a rescue at the eleventh hour? We crept after the Yank, and heard him say to a silent Dane:

“Sharks are nothing. He could splash when he got away from the ship. Better than swinging.”

“Swinging!” We writhed on the latch, little Jewdler and I. That word hissed like a snake; it whistled through the air like a bullet.

Suddenly we saw the Yank padding after Tom in his bare feet, and we rolled into the shadow of the hatch. They stopped within five feet of us. We saw the teeth of that Yank shining against his terrifying beard. He had a deep, abrupt voice; his bold nose seemed to forge at you like a ram. But old Tom was turned half away from him.

“Are you going to see a man done to death? You give us the key, and we will see the man over the side all right, all right.”

Old Tom hung his two fists at his side, and looked round him.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself—tempting an old man to desert his duty.”

“Duty!” cried the Yank bitterly. “Why, darn it, there isn’t no such word. I would shed my blood to save that boy from the rope.”

“No,” said old Tom.

He sat down on the hatch, weighty and incorruptible, puffing out a cloud of smoke. He seemed to be possessed by some rigorous ideal of conduct, and to peer down on us from some impregnable rampart.

The Yank raised his shadowy white arms and cursed. We saw his face glisten with sweat as he lashed past us. Then Jewdler rose up from the deck in front of old Tom, and whispered to him:

“Don’t you want to save a man’s life? What difference does it make whether you stay by this hooker or not? You could pretend you lost the key.”

Old Tom leaned forward and said huskily: “I’m watchman of the ship.”

“Well, what of it if you are? Ain’t there no other ships?”

“She’s going to Liverpool,” said old Tom. “Ain’t you heard the news? This ship goes to Liverpool, and where she goes I goes.”

Liverpool! What hope was there of shaking the resolution of that old man whose withered heart was set on Liverpool? He sat mooning at us, very stiff, as if swathed in bandages—the old mummy! What earthly difference did it make where he was? His wife in Liverpool had probably deserted him. We thought there was something exasperating and inopportune in that old man’s yearning to see his wife again. Was it likely that he had anything in common with that ardent lover in the sail-locker?

“Tom, have you fed him to-night?” whispered Jewdler.

“Ay,” said Tom.

There he was close up in the dark; he went through the motion of scratching his ribs.

“How is he?”

“Why, comfortable,” said Tom; “comfortable as an old shoe.”

It was too much to believe.

A puff of wind came in our faces with that piercing land odor on it, and a spice, as it seemed, of sandalwood and sunbaked earth. Little Jewdler sighed desperately.

“He was going to get married, Tom,” he said regretfully.

“Ay, that’s right,” said old Tom densely. “Let him marry.”

“He can’t now,” wailed Jewdler. “They’ll string him up.”

“Well, that’s certain, too,” said old Tom.

He had the habit, exasperating to youth, of accepting all statements without amendment and without rebellion. He never reconciled conflicts. Experience had shown him they were irreconcilable. He had learned to submit himself austerely to the fates, and bow his head beneath the yoke of time the oppressor.

Still, he was one of the finest sailormen under the canopy of heaven. He was watchman of the ship. He knew his duty.

“What are we going to say to this mission girl, when she comes aboard?” asked little Jewdler.

“She will have to sorrow,” said old Tom harshly. “This will be her cross. We all have our cross, and this will be hers.”

Was he bent on making all destinies as cruel as his own?

“He did kill the bo’sun, sure enough,” said old Tom. “And there ain’t enough of us is positive the bo’sun had a knife in his hand at the time.”

“The Dane saw it,” said Jewdler eagerly.

Old Tom gloomed at us reproachfully. We wanted to cast him into the sea, but we remembered in time that he was one of the finest sailormen under the canopy of heaven.

“Weren’t you ever in love?” we whispered to him mournfully.

“Love—ha!” said old Tom. He squirmed in his singlet. The vast blue night grew deeper over us, bearing musky smells.

“Love—ha!”

We should loathe the memory of this which should have been a magic time for sailors—to be under tow in such a night of stars. But this time the savor of coming to land was lost. The yellow lights were like eyes—the eyes of those hounds of the law that were so soon to be set on the great body of Spike and bring it down.

The ship was like a dream ship stealing into an enchanted harbor, betraying life only in the watchful coals of those pipes along the topgallant rail.

And now all was over. The town lay fully revealed, shimmering, striking animated golden points into the surface of the harbor. We heard the roar of the anchor-chain tumbling up out of its iron locker—a voice from the tug:

“Let go. Give her forty fathom.”

The immense black masts of the ship moved slowly against the stars as she swayed back on her chain.

There we were at last—quieted, after four months. The very deck under us seemed to have lost its spring. It was ponderous, like a rock-ledge to the soles of our feet. Had those hatches ever resounded to the thump of weather seas? Had Spike killed the bo’sun? Had we actually seen that ill-omened man tilted overside with the shackles at his ankles?

Driven to it by sheer disbelief, we approached the sail-locker. That ghastly white iron wall intimidated us. The wraith of Spike seemed to extend itself out of that port with its poison-green brass rim. We laid our cheeks against the iron, whispering: “Spike, Spike.”

Then we heard the noise of his chains. He was manacled at the wrists—tied to a ring in the wall.

Suddenly his face filled the port. We were shocked to see it. His eyes burned on us, luminous, like an animal’s in the dark. We shrank back, as if the chains had sunk through to the soul and made a strange creature of him—less than man. We were desperately ashamed of this feeling, which in no way shook our loyalty.

“We’ve dropped anchor, Spike,” said Jewdler.

“Ay,” said Spike.

His voice was as still as the ship. Had he actually spoken? We could hear water dripping somewhere, and a link or two falling in Spike’s chain.

Suddenly he murmured:

“I have filed this chain. Can you get the key to the locker? In God’s name—”

We had to confess that we had failed. Staring in, we heard him fall back and say, in profound melancholy:

“I am a dead man.”

It was actually like a voice from the tomb. We crowded up close to the port, looking into the glazed eyes of that doomed man whose soul was sinking in him like a fire dying down.

“I had rather be et by a shark,” he whispered. “I would rather have my heart snapped out by a gray-nurse than swing.”

“Swing!” He had spoken the word aloud. With his own lips that intrepid sailorman had framed the abhorrent syllable that spelled the end.

We found no words deep enough to be a consolation to a man so far removed from the good offices of mere benevolence.

Then, in turning away to get a full breath, we saw that old Tom was coming off the section-head—coming down slowly and weightily, with the deliberation of an incorruptible man whom nothing can hasten and nothing can retard. Yes, we had a mournful conviction that nothing was to be hoped from that detestable old fellow with his mind bent on Liverpool. His heart had withered with his body. He was as far from the tremors of youth as if he had been born old.

What did he portend? Of course, if he allowed the prisoner to escape, he must escape with him, since there would be no more peace on that ship. Well, what of it? Couldn’t the queer old codger get another ship bound for Liverpool? Well, could he? For twelve years he had been trying to do just that. Now, at last, the way was plain. But if he let the prisoner escape—

No, he would never do it. We felt that he was as obdurate as the iron wall we were leaning against.

We were interrupted by the voice of Spike floating through the port:

“Listen. That’s the oars of the mission boat!”

We heard the sound of oars approaching the ship.

“It may be the harbor-master,” mumbled Jewdler.

“No,” said Spike. “She is coming.”

His voice died.

At this moment across the quiet decks we heard the amused voice of the Old Man calling over to the mate:

“It’s the mission boat. Lower away the accommodation steps.”

Affrighted, we fled away from that port. The weight of tragedy was too heavy for us. Yet nothing could prevent us from pausing at the accommodation steps as the mission folk came over with their portable organ.

We saw the girl spring to the deck, laughing, without assistance, and look round her quickly. She knew the ship. We shrank behind the rack of capstan bars to avoid her questioning eye.

At this moment a slight wind sprang across the harbor, lifting the gray awning on the poop, and bringing a land fragrance with it, which forever fixed the scene in memory: the girl looking for her lover, in vain.

It was terrible to see her standing expectant in the waist of that great ship, which seemed to be running over with four whispers of crime.

She sighed, twisted her hands together, and followed the organ.

Jewdler and I muttered together, seeing that they had set down the organ within a dozen feet of Spike’s port. We crept over the hatch, wriggling on our bellies, and were in time to see her hang her hat on an iron belaying-pin—the second from the brace-pins.

The hair crawled on our necks. This was the pin Spike had used to crush in the skull of that bo’sun! We thought we heard his chains clank again. Certainly he must now be staring at her. The girl stood with her hands folded, while the organist offered prayer. Bitterly that ship stood in need of prayer.

It was quiet. The crew of that old Forensic were looming out of shadow. Their heavy arms hung down, they twisted spun yarn in their fists. Then she sang.

All was calm; you could fancy you were dreaming. The brine crystals were still sparkling in ridges on the deck, where the seas had been falling down into that corner not twenty hours back. Yes, at that very spot we had struggled on the braces with foam at our necks, and that dead bo’sun bellowing in our ears. How could we believe in the actuality of that slim girl singing there beside an organ? Yet she was there. The pure line of her cheek was sweetly drawn against the great crooked rail of the starboard fence, which gleamed red with blistered paint. Had we, in truth, ever seen that huge iron bulwark sinking in foam?

She ended her song.

Then, as the organist stood up to speak, she descried Jewdler and me lying on the hatch, and came toward us with a look of smiling indifference. But the moment she had glided into the shadow of the bridge, she whispered:

“Where is Jake Moran?”

She caught her breath with eagerness.

“He’s on board, isn’t he?”

We nodded and swallowed hard.

“Where is he?”

I felt her moist hand about my wrist. I was choking. I had never had anything soft like that wrap itself about me before.

“Where is he?” she said again.

We stared at her like two little penguins that have just swallowed something. You have seen them hump their shoulders and look baffled and secret, haven’t you?

“He’s in the sail-locker,” said Jewdler. He pointed at that black port, which looked so grim against the white wall of the section-head.

“Why—why isn’t he—on deck?”

“Chains,” said Jewdler, gulping. “Locked in.”

Suddenly we both blurted out in agonized tones:

“He killed the starboard bo’sun.”

She seemed to slack and riffle like a sail when you luff ship.

“All fair and square,” we whispered. “He had to. The bo’sun was coming at him with a knife.”

She was stunned. Something she had held shut in her hand dropped to the deck. We never knew what it was.

Still, we felt a strange solace in the sorrow of that woman. To linger near her, even as bearers of tragedy, was to experience something of the stimulation of romance. We saw in her eyes the light of some desperate protective instinct.

“Take me to him,” she whispered.

Could we?

Glaring down the deck, we saw the sallow missioner talking to the crew in kindly tones. Those gentle precepts of his, falling on the ears of shaggy men, seemed to be numbered among the things that are drowned in storm, and overmatched by the sea’s wickedness. The men were looking at him with rapt attention, with strange amusement, knowing that Spike the murderer was just behind him.

Old Tom was on the outermost edge of the circle. When we touched him, he turned slowly, with his head solid on his huge shrunken shoulders. As soon as he spied the girl, he knew what was wanted of him.

“Come on, Tom,” we urged him; “let her see him. You can come yourself.”

The girl came toward us, trying to appear calm. A damp strand of bronze hair clung to her cheek; and the eye glittered woefully in the shadow of this. In another second she had stumbled over a ring-bolt, and this flung her suddenly against him. Old Tom, taking her by the shoulders, put her away from him slowly.

As if he knew his danger, his smoky eyes rested forbiddingly a moment on the desperate face of that girl. He swallowed, scratched his ribs, shook his head stiffly, as if bewildered by the nature of this attack.

Suddenly the mission girl made a swift gesture, laying one hand on her bosom, as if abandoning her heart to that old man without words. Her other hand touched my arm. She was trembling from head to foot.

“Come,” said old Tom harshly.

We glared at him. Was it possible? He was actually shuffling toward the alleyway on which the iron door of the locker opened. We floated after him, rustling against pegged oilskins.

We heard the girl’s quivering breath drawn as the key turned in the lock. The iron door swung open, and we were in a position to see Spike leaning out from the wall where he was chained.

Suddenly I recollected that he had filed his chain. Would he try to escape? No; he made no movement, save to move a little way behind a heap of musty canvas.

The girl uttered a faint cry, as if her heart were broken. Stumbling past us, she fell at his feet, putting her arms about him with that protective gesture which seemed to assert that he might rest content, for she would never let him go. Had she a power to reverse the malign decrees of men simply by fierce rebellion in the heart?

“You are not afraid of me?” said Spike in harsh tones. “You are not afraid of me?”

He looked down at her fiercely, strangely, as if at something lost to him, whose mist-like soft shadow still clung, deceiving him.

She shook her head, trembling against him. Lowering his arms about her, he let the chains slip, and stood up unshackled, holding her where the light, streaming through the port, fell on her face.

“You came too late,” he said.

“No—no!” she cried. “Not too late. If you could not help it, you will not be punished.”

Spike fixed her mournfully with a look of his old gentleness.

“I must die,” he said distinctly. “Make up your mind to this.”

For an instant he laid his cheek against hers. Then his eye fell on the figure of Tom, lingering in the door with distaste expressed in every line of his decrepit old body.

“They will take the skipper’s word for it,” he said. “The word of an able seaman is nothing.”

Lying in his arms, she reached up her hands to his face and suddenly whispered:

“If you could come away now—in the mission boat—while he is talking. There is a freighter about to weigh anchor. You could escape, and come to me again.”

Spike’s eye gleamed; but he looked at old Tom almost with amusement.

“No chance,” he said. “You can’t bribe the jailer.”

“Yes, come,” she whispered, with the same strange insistence. She drew him unresisting over the heap of canvas; and, turning on old Tom, cried in a moment of concentrated passion:

“Who are you, to part us? I love him. Do you understand, old man? Let him go with me.”

“Hah,” said that old man surrounded by mysteries. “And what becomes of me?”

“Let him go,” she said again, with hypnotic force. “He shall not die!”

“Hah,” said old Tom.

He opened his mouth, as if to hurl at her one of those contemptuous phrases of an old-fashioned sailor holding on to his duty like grim death. Perhaps in that moment the vision of Christian Street was strongly present to him. He had only to hold the key firm, turn it in the lock again, to attain Liverpool at last. The satisfaction of his twelve years’ quest was near.

But the irony of the sea is eternal. It is said that the sea is salt with the tears of women who have sorrowed over its disasters. And yet, none but able seamen can know properly the atrocities of which it is guilty in its devilish unrest.

Old Tom suddenly uttered the amazing syllables:

“Take him.”

He had betrayed himself in two words.

Without more, we crept aft in the shadow of the hatches. Would he repent and cry out, after all? Would the lure of Christian Street defeat him in the midst of his intended sacrifice?

We trembled and swallowed our hearts, seeing those red stars stream across the sky again. Looking back at the crew still clustered about the organ, we fixed our eyes on the little red hat hanging on the belaying-pin that had done the mischief.

“Good-bye, Forensic,” murmured Spike Moran.

One by one, we dropped into that mission boat.

When old Tom came last of all with his concertina, he sat on it, and squeezed out a little sound, a little sob. Horror-struck, we leaned against the gray side of the ship, waiting. The black water came up to those scored and dented iron plates without a ripple.

What hugeness, what torment, what impregnability expressed in a ship’s side! And what uncertainty. There was no movement over our heads, and we drifted away.

Spike rowed. The girl, taking the tiller ropes, leaned forward with a dawn of hope on her face, which we saw glimmering through darkness like a shell sinking in clear water.

Not a word was spoken. Holding our breath, we approached the red side of a tramp.

“Take in your oars,” said the girl.

Drifting against that ship, we heard the ring of feet running on her iron decks and the sound of the chain going through the hawse-pipe. She was already weighing anchor.

At this moment old Tom’s hand rasped on the plates and caught a trailing end of rope. He pulled: it came taut.

Staring aloft with wrinkled brow, he muttered, “There’s a coal port just overhead.”

Spike had already seen it. He rose from his oars, taking the girl in his arms and murmuring to her, “I will come again.”

But at these words it seemed to me that old Tom shook his head, slowly, sadly. What was the promise of an able seaman to come again? The winds blow where they list.

The two who were young stood up together, silent, desperate: and, as her hands met behind his neck, she cried earnestly:

“You will come again? Jake, you will come?”

He kissed her. This was what pay he had for six months of soaking in the misery of five oceans. He went away in his skin, it may be said. And some phantom of promise seemed to whisper along the black side of the ship, as he ascended the rope. She was still standing, her arms lifted, even after he had left them. He slipped through the port.

And there was old Tom, looking around for a place to sit down. You see how age had betrayed him. He could no longer swarm up a rope.

Yes, he had lost his chance. Wasn’t it bitterness to have been betrayed by some memory, some softening recollection of the wild justice of early love? I affirm to you that this was heroism. It’s unlikely he ever got to Liverpool, you know. Too old. And he couldn’t go back to the Forensic. This last memory of his life was a memory of dereliction.

With a shamed face, he mumbled: “Another dollar for Gertie,” sitting back in the stern-sheets, bewildered, scratching his ribs, with that slow motion of his, through the yellow singlet that had no buttons on the chest.

Just then the great tramp began to move. We heard the jar of the engines, and the clang of an iron lever, dropping from the winch, I suppose.

The woman was still staring at that black opening in the unknown ship that had swallowed up her lover; but old Tom, with mystery on every hand, stood up, bracing himself against the thwarts of the mission boat. Turning up his old face, full of grave despondency and puzzlement, he cried out in a rusty voice:

“Whar to?”

And, seeming to come out of the very skies, a harsh voice, rolling along the iron decks:

“Liverpool.”

“ICE WATER, PL——!”[11]

By FANNIE HURST

From Collier’s Weekly

WHEN the two sides of every story are told Henry VIII may establish an alibi or two, Shylock and the public-school system meet over and melt that too, too solid pound of flesh, and Xantippe, herself the sturdier man than Socrates, give ready lie to what is called the shrew in her. Landladies, whole black bombazine generations of them—oh, so long unheard—may rise in one Indictment of the Boarder: the scarred bureau front and match-scratched wall paper; the empty trunk nailed to the floor in security for the unpaid bill; cigarette-burnt sheets and the terror of sudden fire; the silent newcomer in the third floor back hustled out one night in handcuffs; the day-long sobs of the blond girl so suddenly terrified of life-about-to-be and wringing her ringless hands in the fourth-floor hallroom; the smell of escaping gas and the tightly packed keyhole; the unsuspected flutes that lurk in boarders’ trunks; towels, that querulous and endless pæan of the lodger; the high cost of liver and dried peaches, of canned corn and round steak!

Tired bombazine procession, wrapped in the greasy odors of years of carpet sweeping and emptying slops, airing the gassy slit of room after the coroner and padding from floor to floor on a mission of towels and towels and towels!

Sometimes climbing from floor to floor, a still warm supply of them looped over one arm, Mrs. Kaufman, who wore bombazine, but unspotted and with crisp net frills at the throat, and upon whose soft-looking face the years had written their chirography in invisible ink, would sit suddenly, there in the narrow gloom of her halls, head against the balustrade. Oftener than not the Katz boy from the third floor front would come lickety-clapping down the stairs and past her, jumping the last four steps of each flight.

“Irving, quit your noise in the hall.”

“Aw!”

“Ain’t you ashamed, a big boy like you, and Mrs. Suss with her neuralgia?”

“Aw!”—the slam of a door clipping off this insolence.

After a while she would resume her climb.

And yet in Mrs. Kaufman’s private boarding house in West Eighty-ninth Street, one of a breastwork of brown-stone fronts, lined up stoop for stoop, story for story, and ash can for ash can, there were few enough greasy odors except upon the weekly occasion of Monday’s boiled dinner; and, whatever the status of liver and dried peaches, canned corn and round steak, her menus remained static—so static that in the gas-lighted basement dining room and at a remote end of the long, well-surrounded table Mrs. Katz, with her napkin tucked well under her third chin, turned sotto from the protruding husband at her right to her left neighbor, shielding her remark with her hand. “Am I right, Mrs. Finshriber? I just said to my husband in the five years we been here she should just give us once a change from Friday night lamb and noodles.”

“Say, you should complain yet! With me it’s six and a half years day after to-morrow, Easter Day, since I asked myself that question first.”

“Even my Irving says to me to-night up in the room, jumping up and down on the hearth like he had four legs—”

“I heard him, Mrs. Katz, on my ceiling like he had eight legs.”

“‘Mamma,’ he says, ‘guess why I feel like saying “Baa.”’”

“Saying what?”

“Sheep talk, Mrs. Finshriber. B-a-a, like a sheep goes.”

“Oh!”

“’Cause I got so many Friday nights’ lamb in me, mamma,’ he said. Quick like a flash that child is.”

Mrs. Finshriber dipped her head and her glance, all her drooping features pulled even further down at their corners. “I ain’t the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, and I always say when you come right down to it, maybe Mrs. Kaufman’s house is as good as the next one, but—”

“I wish, though, Mrs. Finshriber, you would hear what Mrs. Spritz says at her boarding house they get for breakfast: fried—”

“You can imagine, Mrs. Katz, since my poor husband’s death, how much appetite I got left; but I say, Mrs. Katz, just for the principle of the thing, it would not hurt once Mrs. Kaufman should give somebody else besides her own daughter and Vetsburg always the white meat from everything, ain’t it?”

“It’s a shame before the boarders! She knows, Mrs. Finshriber, how my husband likes breast from the chicken. You think once he gets it? No. I always tell him, not till chickens come double-breasted like overcoats can he get it in this house, with Vetsburg such a star boarder.”

“Last night’s chicken, let me tell you, I don’t wish it to a dog! Such a piece of dark meat with gizzard I had to swallow.”

Mrs. Katz adjusted with greater security the expanse of white napkin across her ample bosom. Gold rings and a quarter-inch marriage band flashed in and out among the litter of small tub-shaped dishes surrounding her, and a pouncing fork of a short, sure stab. “Right away my husband gets mad when I say the same thing. ‘When we don’t like it we should move,’ he says.”

“Like moving is so easy, if you got two chairs and a hair mattress to take with you. But I always say, Mrs. Katz, I don’t blame Mrs. Kaufman herself for what goes on; there’s one good woman if there ever was one!”

“They don’t come no better or no better-looking, my husband always says. ‘S-ay,’ I tell him, ‘she can stand her good looks.’”

“It’s that big-ideaed daughter is more to blame. Did you see yet her new white spats to-night? Right away the minute they come out she has to have ’em. I’m only surprised she ain’t got one of them red hats from Gimp’s what is all the fad. Oser, if not such ideas, her mother could afford something better as succotash for us for supper.”

“It’s a shame, let me tell you, that a woman like Mrs. Kaufman can’t see for herself such things. God forbid I should ever be so blind to my Irving. I tell you that Ruby has got it more like a queen than a boarding-house keeper’s daughter. Spats, yet!”

“Rich girls could be glad to have it always so good.”

“I don’t say nothing how her mother treats Vetsburg, her oldest boarder, and for what he pays for that second floor front and no lunches she can afford to cater a little; but that such a girl shouldn’t be made to take up a little stenography or help with the housework!”

“S-ay, when that girl even turns a hand, pale like a ghost her mother gets.”

“How girls are raised nowadays, even the poor ones!”

“I ain’t the one to complain, Mrs. Katz, but just look down there, that red stuff.”

“Where?”

“Ain’t it cranberry between Ruby and Vetsburg?”

“Yes, yes, and look such a dish of it!”

“Is it right extras should be allowed to be brought on a table like this where fourteen other boarders got to let their mouths water and look at it?”

“You think it don’t hurt like a knife! For myself I don’t mind, but my Irving! How that child loves ’em, and he should got to sit at the same table without cranberries.”

From the head of the table the flashing implements of carving held in askance for stroke, her lips lifted to a smile and a simulation of interest for display of further carnivorous appetites, Mrs. Kaufman passed her nod from one to the other.

“Miss Arndt, little more? No? Mr. Krakower? Gravy? Mrs. Suss? Mr. Suss? So! Simon? Mr. Schloss? Miss Horowitz? Mr. Vetsburg, let me give you this little tender—No? Then, Ruby, here let mamma give you just a little more—”

“No, no, mamma, please!” She caught at the hovering wrist to spare the descent of the knife.

By one of those rare atavisms by which a poet can be bred of a peasant or peasant be begot of poet, Miss Ruby Kaufman, who was born in Newark, posthumous, to a terrified little parent with a black ribbon at the throat of her gown, had brought with her from no telling where the sultry eyes and tropical-turned skin of spice-kissed winds. The corpuscles of a shah might have been running in the blood of her, yet Simon Kaufman and Simon Kaufman’s father before him had sold wool remnants to cap factories on commission.

“Ruby, you don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive. Ain’t it a shame, Mr. Vetsburg, a girl should be so dainty?”

Mr. Meyer Vetsburg cast a beetling glance down upon Miss Kaufman, there so small beside him, and tinked peremptorily against her plate three times with his fork. “Eat, young lady, like your mamma wants you should, or, by golly, I’ll string you up for my watch fob, not, Mrs. Kaufman?”

A smile lay under Mr. Vetsburg’s gray-and-black mustache. Gray were his eyes too, and his suit, a comfortable baggy suit with the slouch of the wearer impressed into it, the coat hiking center back, the pocket flaps half in, half out, and the knees sagging out of press.

“That’s right, Mr. Vetsburg, you should scold her when she don’t eat.”

Above the black bombazine basque, so pleasantly relieved at the throat by a V of fresh white net, a wave of color moved up Mrs. Kaufman’s face into her architectural coiffure, the very black and very coarse skein of her hair wound into a large loose mound directly atop her head and pierced there with a ball-topped comb of another decade.

“I always say, Mr. Vetsburg, she minds you before she minds anybody else in the world.”

“Ma,” said Miss Kaufman, close upon that remark, “some succotash, please.”

From her vantage down table, Mrs. Katz leaned a bit forward from the line.

“Look, Mrs. Finshriber, how for a woman her age she snaps her black eyes at him. It ain’t hard to guess when a woman’s got a marriageable daughter, not?”

“You can take it from me she’ll get him for her Ruby yet! And take it from me, too, almost any girl I know, much less Ruby Kaufman, could do worse as get Meyer Vetsburg.”

“S-say, I wish it to her to get him. For why once in a while shouldn’t a poor girl get a rich man except in books and choruses?”

“Believe me, a girl like Ruby can manage what she wants. Take it from me, she’s got it behind her ears.”

“I should say so.”

“Oser without it she could get in with such a crowd of rich girls like she does. I got it from Mrs. Abrams in the Arline Apartments how every week she plays five hundred with Nathan Shapiro’s daughter.”

“No! Shapiro and Stein?”

“And yesterday at matinée in she comes with a box of candy and laughing with that Rifkin girl! How she gets in with such swell girls, I don’t know, but there ain’t a nice Saturday afternoon I don’t see that girl walking on Fifth Avenue with just such a crowd of fine-dressed girls, all with their noses powdered so white and their hats so little and stylish.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if her mother don’t send her down to Atlantic City over Easter again if Vetsburg goes. Every holiday she has to go lately like it was coming to her.”

“Say, between you and me, I don’t put it past her it’s that Markovitch boy down there she’s after. Ray Klein saw ’em on the Boardwalk once together, and she says it’s a shame for the people how they sat so close in a rolling chair.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised she’s fresh with the boys, but, believe me, if she gets the uncle she don’t take the nephew!”

“Say, a clerk in his own father’s hotel like the Markovitches got in Atlantic City ain’t no crime.”

“Her mother has got bigger thoughts for her than that. For why I guess she thinks her daughter should take the nephew when maybe she can get the uncle herself. Nowadays it ain’t nothing no more that girls marry twice their own age.”

“I always say I can tell when Leo Markovitch comes down by the way her mother’s face gets long and the daughter’s gets short.”

“Can you blame her? Leo Markovitch, with all his monograms on his shirt sleeves and such black rims on his glasses, ain’t the Rosenthal Vetsburg Hosiery Company, not by a long shot! There ain’t a store in this town you ask for the No Hole guaranteed stocking, right away they don’t show it to you. Just for fun always I ask.”

“Cornstarch pudding! Irving, stop making that noise at Mrs. Kaufman! Little boys should be seen and not heard even at cornstarch pudding.”

“Gott! Wouldn’t you think, Mrs. Katz, how Mrs. Kaufman knows how I hate desserts that wobble, a little something extra she could give me.”

“Oser how she plays favorite, it’s a shame. I wish you look, too, Mrs. Finshriber, how Flora Proskauer carries away from the table her glass milk with slice bread on top. I tell you it don’t give tune to a house the boarders should carry away from the table like that. Irving, come and take with you that extra piece cake. Just so much board we pay as Flora Proskauer.”

The line about the table broke suddenly, attended with a scraping of chairs and after-dinner chirrupings attended with toothpicks. A blowsy maid strained herself immediately across the strewn table and cloying lamb platter, and turned off two of the three gas jets.

In the yellow gloom, the odors of food permeating it, they filed out and up the dim-lit stairs into dim-lit halls, the line of conversation and short laughter drifting after.

A door slammed. Another. Irving Katz leaped from his third-floor threshold to the front hearth, quaking three layers of chandeliers. From Morris Krakower’s fourth floor back the tune of a flute began to wind down the stairs. Out of her just-closed door, Mrs. Finshriber poked a frizzled gray head.

“Ice water, ple-ase, Mrs. Kauf-man.”

At the door of the first floor back Mrs. Kaufman paused with her hand on the knob.

“Mamma, let me run and do it.”

“Don’t you move, Ruby. When Annie goes up to bed is time enough. Won’t you come in for a while, Mr. Vetsburg?”

“Don’t care if I do.”

She opened the door, entering cautiously. “Let me light up, Mrs. Kaufman.” He struck a phosphorescent line on the sole of his shoe, turning up three jets.

“You must excuse, Mr. Vetsburg, how this room looks; all day we been sewing for Ruby her new dress.”

She caught up a litter of dainty pink frills in the making, clearing a chair for him.

“Sit down, Mr. Vetsburg.”

They adjusted themselves around the shower of gaslight, Miss Kaufman fumbling in her flowered workbag, finally curling her foot up under her, her needle flashing and shirring through one of the pink flounces.

“Ruby, in such a light you shouldn’t strain your eyes.”

“All right, ma,” stitching placidly on.

“What’ll you give me, Ruby, if I tell you whose favorite color is pink?”

“Aw, Vetsy!” she cried, her face like a rose, “your color’s pink!”

From the depths of an inverted sewing-machine top Mrs. Kaufman fished out another bit of the pink, ruffling it with deft needle.

The flute lifted its plaintive voice, feeling for high C.

Mr. Vetsburg lighted a loosely wrapped cigar and slumped in his chair.

“If anybody,” he observed, “should ask right this minute where I’m at, tell ’em for me, Mrs. Kaufman, I’m in the most comfortable chair in the house.”

“You should keep it, then, up in your room, Mr. Vetsburg, and not always bring it down again when I get Annie to carry it up to you.”

“Say, I don’t give up so easy my excuse for dropping in evenings.”

“Honest, you—you two children, you ought to have a fence built around you the way you like always to be together.”

He sat regarding her, puffing and chewing his live cigar. Suddenly he leaped forward, his hand closing rigidly over hers.

“Mrs. Kaufman!”

“What?”

“Quick, there’s a hole in your chin.”

“Gott, a—a—what?”

At that he relaxed at his own pleasantry, laughing and shrugging. With small white teeth Miss Kaufman bit off an end of thread.

“Don’t let him tease you, ma; he’s after your dimple again.”

“Ach, du—tease, you! Shame! Hole in my chin he scares me with!”

She resumed her work with a smile and a twitching at her lips that she was unable to control. A warm flow of air came in, puffing the lace curtains. A faint odor of departed splendor lay in that room, its high calcimined ceiling with the floral rosette in the center, the tarnished pier glass tilted to reflect a great pair of walnut folding doors which cut off the room where once it had flowed on to join the great length of salon parlor. A folding bed with an inlay of mirror and a collapsible desk arrangement backed up against those folding doors. A divan with a winding back and sleek with horsehair was drawn across a corner, a marble-topped bureau alongside. A bronze clock ticked roundly from the mantel, balanced at either side by a pair of blue glass cornucopias with warts blown into them.

Mrs. Kaufman let her hands drop idly in her lap and her head fall back against the chair. In repose the lines of her mouth turned up, and her throat, where so often the years eat in first, was smooth and even slender above the rather round swell of bosom.

“Tired, mommy?”

“Always around Easter spring fever right away gets hold of me!”

Mr. Vetsburg bit his cigar, slumped deeper, and inserted a thumb in the arm of his waistcoat.

“Why, Mrs. Kaufman, don’t you and Ruby come down by Atlantic City with me to-morrow over Easter? Huh? A few more or less don’t make no difference to my sister the way they get ready for crowds.”

Miss Kaufman shot forward, her face vivid.

“Oh, Vetsy,” she cried, and a flush rushed up, completely dyeing her face. His face lit with hers, a sunburst of fine lines radiating from his eyes.

“Eh?”

“Why—why, we—we’d just love it, wouldn’t we, ma? Atlantic City, Easter Day! Ma!”

Mrs. Kaufman sat upright with a whole procession of quick emotions flashing their expressions across her face. They ended in a smile that trembled as she sat regarding the two of them.

“I should say so, yes! I—you and Ruby go, Mr. Vetsburg. Atlantic City, Easter Day, I bet is worth the trip. I—you two go, I should say so, but you don’t want an old woman to drag along with you.”

“Ma! Just listen to her, Vetsy, ain’t she—ain’t she just the limit! Half the time when we go in stores together they take us for sisters, and then she—she begins to talk like that to get out of going!”

“Ruby don’t understand; but it ain’t right, Mr. Vetsburg, I should be away over Saturday and Sunday. On Easter always they expect a little extra, and with Annie’s sore ankle, I—I—”

“Oh, mommy, can’t you leave this old shebang for only two days just for an Easter Sunday down at Atlantic, where—where everybody goes?”

“You know yourself, Ruby, how always on Annie’s Sunday out—”

“Well, what of it? It won’t hurt all them old things upstairs that let you wait on them hand and foot all year to go without a few frills for their Easter dinner.”

“Ruby!”

“I mean it. The old gossip pots! I just sat and looked at them there at supper just now, and I said to myself, I said, to think they drown kittens and let those poor lumps live!”

“Ruby, ain’t you ashamed to talk like that?”

“Sat there and looked at poor old man Katz with his ear all ragged like it had been chewed off, and wondered why he didn’t just go down to Brooklyn Bridge for a high jump.”

“Ruby, I—”

“If all those big, strapping women, Suss and Finshriber and the whole gang of them, were anything but vegetables, they’d get out and hustle with keeping house, to work some of their flabbiness off and give us a chance to get somebody in besides a chocolate-eating, novel-reading crowd of useless women who think, mommy, you’re a dumbwaiter, chambermaid, lady’s maid, and French chef rolled in one! Honest, ma, if you carry that ice water up to Katz to-night on the sly, with that big son of hers to come down and get it, I—I’ll go right up and tell her what I think of her if she leaves to-morrow.”

“Mr. Vetsburg, you—you mustn’t listen to her.”

“Can’t take a day off for a rest at Atlantic City because their old Easter dinner might go down the wrong side. Honest, mamma, to—to think how you’re letting a crowd of old, flabby women that ain’t fit even to wipe your shoes make a regular servant out of you! Mommy!”

There were tears in Miss Kaufman’s voice and actual tears, big and bright, in her eyes, and two spots of color had popped out in her cheeks.

“Ruby, when—when a woman like me makes her living off her boarders, she can’t afford to be so particular. You think it’s a pleasure I can’t slam the door right in Mrs. Katz’s face when six times a day now she orders towels and ice water. You think it’s a pleasure I got to take sass from such a bad boy like Irving. I tell you, Ruby, it’s easy talk from a girl what don’t understand. Ach, you—you make me ashamed before Mr. Vetsburg you should run down so the people we make our living off of.”

Miss Kaufman flashed her vivid face toward Mr. Vetsburg, still low there in his chair. She was trembling. “Vetsy knows! He’s the only one in this house does know! He ain’t been here with us ten years, ever since we started in this big house, not—not to know he’s the only one thinks you’re here for anything except impudence and running stairs and standing sass from the bad boys of lazy mothers. You know, don’t you, Vetsy?”

“Ruby! Mr. Vetsburg, you—you must excuse—”

From the depths of his chair Mr. Vetsburg’s voice came slow and carefully weighed. “My only complaint, Mrs. Kaufman, with what Ruby has got to say is it ain’t strong enough. It maybe ain’t none of my business, but always I have told you that for your own good you’re too gemütlich. No wonder every boarder what you get stays year in and year out till even the biggest kickers pay more board sooner as go. In my business, Mrs. Kaufman, it’s the same way right away if I get too easy with—”

“But, Mr. Vetsburg, a poor woman can’t afford to be so independent. I got big expenses and big rent; I got a daughter to raise—”

“Mamma, haven’t I begged you a hundred times to let me take up stenography and get out and hustle so you can take it easy, haven’t I?”

A thick coating of tears sprang to Mrs. Kaufman’s eyes and muddled the gaze she turned toward Mr. Vetsburg. “Is it natural, Mr. Vetsburg, a mother should want her only child should have always the best and do always the things she never herself could afford to do? All my life, Mr. Vetsburg, I had always to work. Even when I was five months married to a man what it looked like would some day do big things in the wool business, I was left all of a sudden with nothing but debts and my baby.”

“But, mamma—”

“Is it natural, Mr. Vetsburg, I should want to work off my hands my daughter should escape that? Nothing, Mr. Vetsburg, gives me so much pleasure she should go with all those rich girls who like her well enough poor to be friends with her. Always when you take her down to Atlantic City on holidays, where she can meet ’em, it—it—”

“But, mommy, is it any fun for a girl to keep taking trips like that with—with her mother always at home like a servant? What do people think? Every holiday that Vetsy asks me, you—you back out. I—I won’t go without you, mommy, and—and I want to go, ma, I—I want to!”

“My Easter dinner and—”

“You, Mrs. Kaufman, with your Easter dinner! Ruby’s right. When your mamma don’t go this time, not one step we go by ourselves, ain’t it?”

“Not a step.”

“But—”

“To-morrow, Mrs. Kaufman, we catch that one-ten train. Twelve o’clock I call in for you. Put ginger in your mamma, Ruby, and we’ll open her eyes on the Boardwalk, not?”

“Oh, Vetsy!”

He smiled regarding her.

Tears had fallen and dried on Mrs. Kaufman’s cheeks; she wavered between a hysteria of tears and laughter.

“I—children—” She succumbed to tears, daubing her eyes shamefacedly.

He rose kindly. “Say, when such a little thing can upset her it’s high time she took for herself a little rest. If she backs out, we string her up by the thumbs, not, Ruby?”

“We’re going, ma. Going! You’ll love the Markovitches’ hotel, ma dearie, right near the Boardwalk, and the grandest glassed-in porch and—and chairs, and—and nooks and things. Ain’t they, Vetsy?”

“Yes, you little Ruby, you,” he said, regarding her with warm, insinuating eyes, even crinkling an eyelid in a wink.

She did not return the glance, but caught her cheeks in the vise of her hands as if to stem the too-quick flush. “Now you—you quit!” she cried, flashing her back upon him in quick pink confusion.

“She gets mad yet,” he said, his shoulders rising and falling in silent laughter.

“Don’t!”

“Well,” he said, clicking the door softly after him, “good night and sleep tight.”

“’Night, Vetsy.”

Upon the click of that door Mrs. Kaufman leaned softly forward in her chair, speaking through a scratch in her throat. “Ruby!”

With her flush still high, Miss Kaufman danced over toward her parent, then as suddenly ebbed in spirit, the color going. “Why, mommy, what—what you crying for, dearie? Why, there’s nothing to cry for, dearie, that we’re going off on a toot to-morrow. Honest, dearie, like Vetsy says, you’re all nerves. I bet from the way Suss hollered at you to-day about her extra milk you’re upset yet. Wouldn’t I give her a piece of my mind, though! Here, move your chair, mommy, and let me pull down the bed.”

“I—I’m all right, baby. Only I just tell you it’s enough to make anybody cry we should have a friend like we got in Vetsburg. I—I tell you, baby, they just don’t come no better than him. Not, baby? Don’t be ashamed to say so to mamma.”

“I ain’t, mamma! And, honest, his—his whole family is just that way. Sweetlike and generous. Wait till you see the way his sister and brother-in-law will treat us at the hotel to-morrow. And—and Leo too.”

“I always say the day what Meyer Vetsburg, when he was only a clerk in the firm, answered my furnished-room advertisement was the luckiest day in my life.”

“You ought to heard, ma; I was teasing him the other day, telling him that he ought to live at the Savoy now that he’s a two-thirds member of the firm.”

“Ruby!”

“I was only teasing, ma. You just ought to seen his face. Any day he’d leave us!”

Mrs. Kaufman placed a warm, insinuating arm around her daughter’s slim waist, drawing her around the chair side and to her. “There’s only one way, baby, Meyer Vetsburg can ever leave me and make me happy when he leaves.”

“Ma, what you mean?”

“You know, baby, without mamma coming right out in words.”

“Ma, honest I don’t. What?”

“You see it coming just like I do. Don’t fool mamma, baby.”

The slender lines of Miss Kaufman’s waist stiffened, and she half slipped from the embrace.

“Now, now, baby, is it wrong a mother should talk to her own baby about what is closest in both their hearts?”

“I—I, mamma, I—I don’t know!”

“How he’s here in this room every night lately, Ruby, since you—you’re a young lady. How right away he follows us upstairs. How lately he invited you every month down at Atlantic City. Baby, you ain’t blind, are you?”

“Why, mamma—why, mamma, what is Meyer Vetsburg to—to me? Why, he—he’s got gray hair, ma; he—he’s getting bald. Why, he—he don’t know I’m on earth. He—he’s—”

“You mean, baby, he don’t know anybody else is on earth. What’s, nowadays, baby, a man forty? Why—why, ain’t mamma forty-one, baby, and didn’t you just say yourself for sisters they take us?”

“I know, ma, but he—he—Why, he’s got an accent, ma, just like old man Katz and—and all of ’em. He says ‘too-sand’ for thousand. He—”

“Baby, ain’t you ashamed like it makes any difference how a good man talks?” She reached out, drawing her daughter by the wrists down into her lap. “You’re a bad little flirt, baby you, what pretends she don’t know what a blind man can see.”

Miss Kaufman’s eyes widened, darkened, and she tugged for the freedom of her wrists. “Ma, quit scaring me!”

“Scaring you! That such a rising man like Vetsburg, with a business he worked himself into president from clerk looks every day more like he’s falling in love with you, should scare you!”

“Ma, not—not him!”

In reply she fell to stroking the smooth black plaits wound coronet fashion about Miss Kaufman’s small head. Large, hot tears sprang to her eyes, “Baby, when you talk like that it’s you that scares mamma!”

“He—he—”

“Why, you think, Ruby, I been making out of myself a servant like you call it all these years except for your future? For myself a smaller house without such a show and maybe five or six roomers without meals, you think ain’t easier as this big barn? For what, baby, you think I always want you should have extravagances maybe I can’t afford and should keep up with the fine girls what you meet down by Atlantic City if it ain’t that a man like Meyer Vetsburg can be proud to choose you from the best?”

“Mamma, mamma!”

“Don’t think, Ruby, when the day comes what I can give up this white-elephant house it won’t be a happy one for me. Every night when I hear from upstairs how Mrs. Katz and all of them hollers down ‘towels’ and ‘ice water’ to me like I—I was their slave, you don’t think, baby, I will be happiest woman in this world the day what I can slam the door, bang, right on the words.”

“Mamma, mamma, and you pretending all these years you didn’t mind!”

“I don’t, baby. Not one minute while I got a future to look forward to with you. For myself, baby, you think I ask anything except my little girl’s happiness? Anyways, when happiness come to you with a man like Meyer Vetsburg, don’t—don’t it come to me, too, baby?”

“Please, I—”

“That’s what my little girl can do for mamma, better as stenography. Set herself down well. That’s why, since we got on the subject, baby, I—I hold off signing up the new lease with every day Shulif fussing so. Maybe, baby, I—well, just maybe, eh, baby?”

For answer a torrent of tears so sudden that they came in an avalanche burst from Miss Kaufman, and she crumpled forward face in hands and red rushing up the back of her neck and over her ears.

“Ruby!”

“No, no, ma! No, no!”

“Baby, the dream what I’ve dreamed five years for you!”

“No, no, no!”

She fell back regarding her.

“Why, Ruby. Why, Ruby, girl!”

“It ain’t fair. You mustn’t!”

“Mustn’t?”

“Mustn’t! Mustn’t!” Her voice had slipped up now and away from her.

“Why, baby, it’s natural at first maybe a girl should be so scared. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked so soon except how it’s getting every day plainer, these trips to Atlantic City and—”

“Mamma, mamma, you’re killing me.” She fell back against her parent’s shoulder, her face frankly distorted.

A second, staring there into space, Mrs. Kaufman sat with her arm still entwining the slender but lax form. “Ruby, is—is it something you ain’t telling mamma?”

“Oh, mommy, mommy!”

“Is there?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Ruby, should you be afraid to talk to mamma, who don’t want nothing but her child’s happiness?”

“You know, mommy. You know!”

“Know what, baby?”

“I—er—”

“Is there somebody else you got on your mind, baby?”

“You know, mommy.”

“Tell mamma, baby. It ain’t a—a crime if you got maybe somebody else on your mind.”

“I can’t say it, mommy. It—it wouldn’t be—be nice.”

“Nice?”

“He—he—We ain’t even sure yet.”

“He?”

“Not—yet.”

“Who?”

“You know.”

“So help me, I don’t.”

“Mommy, don’t make me say it. Maybe if—when his uncle Meyer takes him in the business, we—”

“Baby, not Leo?”

“Oh, mommy, mommy.” And she buried her hot, revealing face into the fresh net V.

“Why—why, baby, a—a boy like that!”

“Twenty-three, mamma, ain’t a boy!”

“But, Ruby, just a clerk in his father’s hotel, and two older brothers already in it. A—a boy that ain’t got a start yet.”

“That’s just it, ma. We—we’re waiting! Waiting before we talk even—even much to each other yet. Maybe—maybe his uncle Meyer is going to take him in the business, but it ain’t sure yet. We—”

“A little yellow-haired boy like him that—that can’t support you, baby, unless you live right there in his mother’s and father’s hotel away—away from me!”

“Ma!”

“Ruby, a smart girl like you. A little snip what don’t make salt yet when you can have the uncle hisself!”

“I can’t help it, ma! If—if—the first time Vetsy took me down to—to the shore, if—if Leo had been a king or a—or just what he is, it wouldn’t make no difference. I—I can’t help my—my feelings, ma. I can’t!”

A large furrow formed between Mrs. Kaufman’s eyes, darkening her brow.

“You wouldn’t, Ruby,” she said, clutching her.

“Oh, mommy, mommy, when a—a girl can’t help a thing!”

“He ain’t good enough for you, baby.”

“He’s ten times too good that—that’s all you know about it. Mommy, please! I—I just can’t help it, dearie. It’s just like when I—I saw him a—a clock began to tick inside of me. I—”

“Oh, my God,” said Mrs. Kaufman, drawing her hand across her brow.

“His uncle Meyer, ma’s been hinting all along he—he’s going to give Leo his start and take him in the business. That’s why we—we’re waiting without saying much, till it looks more like—like we can all be together, ma.”

“All my dreams! My dreams I could give up the house! My baby with a well-to-do husband maybe on Riverside Drive. A servant for herself, so I could pass maybe Mrs. Suss and Mrs. Katz by on the street. Ruby, you—you wouldn’t, Ruby. After how I’ve built for you!”

“Oh, mamma, mamma, mamma!”

“If you ain’t got ambitions for yourself, Ruby, think once of me and this long dream I been dreaming for—us.”

“Yes, ma. Yes.”

“Gott im Himmel, Ruby, I always thought, and how he must have thought it, too, when you was so glad for Atlantic City, it—it was for Vetsburg you liked his folks. How could I know it was—”

“I never thought, mommy. Why—why Vetsy, he’s just like a relation or something.”

“I tell you, baby, it’s just an idea you got in your head.”

“No, no, mamma. No. No.”

Suddenly Mrs. Kaufman threw up her hands, clasping them tight against her eyes, pressing them in frenzy. “Oh, my God,” she cried, “all for nothing!” and fell to moaning through her laced fingers. “All for nothing! Years. Years. Years.”

“Mommy, darling!”

“Oh—don’t, don’t! Just let me be. Let me be. Oh, my God! My God!”

“Mommy, please, mommy! I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean it, mommy, darling.”

“I can’t go on all the years, Ruby. I’m tired. Tired, girl.”

“Of course you can’t, darling. We—I don’t want you to. Shh-h-h!”

“It’s only you and my hopes in you that kept me going all these years. The hope that with some day a good man to provide for you, I could find a rest maybe.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Every time what I think of that long envelope laying there on that desk with its lease waiting to be signed to-morrow, I—I could squeeze my eyes shut so tight, and wish I didn’t never have to open them again on this—this house and this drudgery. If you marry wrong, baby, I’m caught. Caught in this house like a rat in a trap.”

“No, no, mommy. Leo, he—his uncle—”

“Don’t make me sign that new lease, Ruby. Shulif hounds me every day now. Any day I expect he says is my last. Don’t make me saddle another five years with the house. He’s only a boy, baby, and years it will take, and—I’m tired, baby. Tired! Tired!” She lay back with her face suddenly held in rigid lines and her neck ribbed with cords.

At sight of her so prostrate there, Ruby Kaufman grasped the cold face in her ardent young hands, pressing her lips to the streaming eyes.

“Mommy, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t! I—we’re just kids, flirting a little, Leo and me. I didn’t mean it, mommy!”

“You didn’t mean it, Ruby, did you? Tell mamma you didn’t.”

“I didn’t, ma. Cross my heart. It’s only I—I kinda had him in my head. That’s all, dearie. That’s all!”

“He can’t provide, baby.”

“Ehh-h-h, ma. Try to get calm, and maybe then—then things can come like you want ’em. Shh-h-h, dearie. I didn’t mean it. ’Course Leo’s only a kid. I—we—Mommy dear, don’t. You’re killing me. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t.”

“Sure, baby! Sure?”

“Sure.”

“Mamma’s girl,” sobbed Mrs. Kaufman, scooping the small form to her bosom and relaxing. “Mamma’s own girl that minds.”

They fell quiet, cheek to cheek, staring ahead into the gaslit quiet, the clock ticking into it.

The tears had dried on Mrs. Kaufman’s cheeks, only her throat continuing to throb and her hand at regular intervals patting the young shoulder pressed to her. It was as if her heart lay suddenly very still in her breast.

“Mamma’s own girl that minds.”

“It—it’s late, ma. Let me pull down the bed.”

“You ain’t mad at mamma, baby? It’s for your own good as much as mine. It is unnatural a mother should want to see her—”

“No, no, mamma. Move, dearie; let me pull down the bed. There you are. Now!”

With a wrench Mrs. Kaufman threw off her recurring inclination to tears, moving casually through the processes of their retirement.

“To-morrow, baby, I tighten the buttons on them new spats. How pretty they look.”

“Yes, dearie.”

“I told Mrs. Katz to-day right out her Irving can’t bring any more his bicycle through my front hall. Wasn’t I right?”

“Of course you were, ma.”

“Miss Flora looked right nice in that pink waist to-night, not? Four-eighty-nine only, at Gimp’s sale.”

“She’s too fat for pink.”

“You get in bed first, baby, and let mamma turn out the lights.”

“No, no, mamma; you.”

In her white slip of a nightdress, her coronet braids unwound and falling down each shoulder, even her slightness had waned. She was like Juliet who at fourteen had eyes of maid and martyr.

They crept into bed, grateful for darkness.

The flute had died out, leaving a silence that was plaintive.

“You all right, baby?”

“Yes, ma.” And she snuggled down into the curve of her mother’s arm.

“Are you, mommy?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Go to sleep then.”

“Good night, baby.”

“Good night, mommy.”

Silence.

Lying there with her face upturned and her eyes closed, a stream of quiet tears found their way from under Miss Kaufman’s closed lids, running down and toward her ears like spectacle frames.

An hour ticked past, and two damp pools had formed on her pillow.

“Asleep yet, baby?”

“Almost, ma.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“You—you ain’t mad at mamma?”

“’Course not, dearie.”

“I—thought it sounded like you was crying.”

“Why, mommy, ’course not! Turn over now and go to sleep.”

Another hour, and suddenly Mrs. Kaufman shot out her arm from the coverlet, jerking back the sheet and feeling for her daughter’s dewy, upturned face where the tears were slashing down it.

“Baby!”

“Mommy, you—you mustn’t!”

“Oh, my darling, like I didn’t suspicion it!”

“It’s only—”

“You got, Ruby, the meanest mamma in the world. But you think, darling, I got one minute’s happiness like this?”

“I’m all right, mommy, only—”

“I been laying here half the night, Ruby, thinking how I’m a bad mother what thinks only of her own—”

“No, no, mommy. Turn over and go to sl—”

“My daughter falls in love with a fine, upright young man like Leo Markovitch, and I ain’t satisfied yet! Suppose maybe for two or three years you ain’t so much on your feet. Suppose even his uncle Meyer don’t take him in. Don’t any young man got to get his start slow?”

“Mommy!”

“Because I got for her my own ideas, my daughter shouldn’t have in life the man she wants!”

“But, mommy, if—”

“You think for one minute, Ruby, after all these years without this house on my hands and my boarders and their kicks, a woman like me would be satisfied! Why, the more, baby, I think of such a thing, the more I see it for myself. What you think, Ruby, I do all day without steps to run and my gedinks with housekeeping and marketing after eighteen years of it? At first, Ruby, ain’t it natural it should come like a shock that you and that rascal Leo got all of a sudden so—so thick? I—it ain’t no more, baby, I—I feel fine about it.”

“Oh, mommy, if—if I thought you did!”

“I do. Why not? A fine young man what my girl is in love with. Every mother should have it so.”

“Mommy, you mean it?”

“I tell you I feel fine. You don’t need to feel bad or cry another minute. I can tell you I feel happy. To-morrow at Atlantic City such a rascal don’t tell me for himself. I—I ask him right out!”

“Ma.”

“For why yet he should wait till he’s got better prospects, so his mother-in-law can hang on? I guess not!”

“Mommy, darling. If you only truly feel like that about it. Why, you can keep putting off the lease, ma, if it’s only for six months and then we—we’ll all be to—”

“Of course, baby. Mamma knows. Of course!”

“He—I just can’t begin to tell you, ma, the kind of a fellow Leo is till you know him better, mommy dear.”

“Always Vetsburg says he’s a wideawake one!”

“That’s just what he is, ma. He’s just a prince if—if there ever was one. One little prince of a fellow.” She fell to crying softly, easy tears that flowed freely.

“I—I can tell you, baby, I’m happy as you.”

“Mommy, dear, kiss me.”

They talked, huddled arm in arm, until dawn flowed in at the window and dirty roofs began to show against a clean sky. Footsteps began to clatter through the asphalt court and there came the rattle of milk cans.

“I wonder if Annie left out the note for Mrs. Suss’s extra milk!”

“Don’t get up, dearie; it’s only five.”

“Right away, baby, with extra towels I must run up to Miss Flora’s room. That six o’clock train for Trenton she gets.”

“Ma, dear, let me go.”

“Lay right where you are! I guess you want you should look all worn out when a young man what I know walks down to meet our train at Atlantic City this afternoon, eh?”

“Oh, mommy, mommy.” And Ruby lay back against the luxury of pillows.

At eleven the morning rose to its climax—the butcher, the baker, and every sort of maker hustling in and out the basement way; the sweeping of upstairs halls; windows flung open and lace curtains looped high; the smell of spring pouring in even from asphalt; sounds of scrubbing from various stoops; shouts of drivers from a narrow street wedged with its Saturday morning blockade of delivery wagons, and a crosstown line of motor cars, tops back, and nosing for the speedway of upper Broadway. A homely bouquet of odors rose from the basement kitchen, drifting up through the halls, the smell of mutton bubbling as it stewed.

After a morning of upstairs and downstairs and in and out of chambers, Mrs. Kaufman, enveloped in a long-sleeved apron still angular with starch, hung up the telephone receiver in the hall just beneath the staircase and entered her bedroom, sitting down rather heavily beside the open shelf of her desk. A long envelope lay uppermost on that desk, and she took it up slowly, blinking her eyes shut and holding them squeezed tight as if she would press back a vision, even then a tear oozing through. She blinked it back, but her mouth was wry with the taste of tears.

A slatternly maid poked her head in through the open door. “Mrs. Katz broke ’er mug!”

“Take the one off Mr. Krakow’s washstand and give it to her, Tillie.”

She was crying now frankly, and when the door swung closed, even though it swung back again on its insufficient hinge, she let her head fall forward into the pillow of her arms, the curve of her back rising and falling.

But after a while the greengrocer came on his monthly mission, in his white apron and shirt sleeves, and she compared stubs with him from a file on her desk and balanced her account with careful squinted glance and a keen eye for an overcharge on a cut of breakfast bacon.

On the very heels of him, so that they met and danced to pass one another in the doorway, Mr. Vetsburg entered with an overcoat flung across his right arm and his left sagging to a small black traveling bag.

“Well,” he said, standing in the frame of the open door, his derby well back on his head and regarding her there beside the small desk, “is this what you call ready at twelve?”

She rose and moved forward in her crackly starched apron. “I—please, Mr. Vetsburg, it ain’t right I know—”

“You don’t mean you’re not going!” he exclaimed, the lifted quality immediately dropping from his voice.

“You—you got to excuse me again, Mr. Vetsburg. It ain’t no use I should try to get away on Saturdays, much less Easter Saturday.”

“Well, of all things!”

“Right away the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, right one things after another!”

He let his bag slip to the floor.

“Maybe, Mrs. Kaufman,” he said, “it ain’t none of my business, but ain’t it a shame a good business woman like you should let herself always be tied down to such a house like she was married to it? Ain’t it?”

“But—”

“Can’t get away on Saturdays, just like it ain’t the same any other day in the week, I ask you! Saturday you blame it on yet!”

She lifted the apron from her hem, her voice hurrying. “You can see for yourself, Mr. Vetsburg, how in my brown silk all ready I was. Even—even Ruby don’t know yet I don’t go. Down by Gimp’s I sent her she should buy herself one of them red straw hats is the fad with the girls now. She meets us down by the station.”

“That’s a fine come-off, ain’t it, to disappoint—”

“At the last minute, Mr. Vetsburg, how things can happen. Out of a clear sky Mrs. Finshriber has to-morrow for Easter dinner that skin doctor, Abrams, and his wife she’s so particular about. And Annie with her sore ankle and—”

“A little shyster doctor like Abrams with his advertisements all over the newspapers should sponge off you and your holiday. By golly, Mrs. Kaufman, just like Ruby says, how you let a whole household of old hens rule this roost it’s a shame!”

“When you go down to the station, Mr. Vetsburg, so right away she ain’t so disappointed I don’t come, tell her maybe to-morrow I—”

“I don’t tell her nothing!” broke in Mr. Vetsburg and moved toward her with considerable strengthening of tone. “Mrs. Kaufman, I ask you, you think it right you should go back like this on Ruby and me, just when we want most you should—”

At that she quickened and fluttered. “Ruby and you! Ach, it’s a old saying, Mr. Vetsburg, like the twig is bent so the tree grows. That child won’t be so surprised her mother changes her mind. Just so changeable as her mother, and more, is Ruby herself. With that girl, Mr. Vetsburg, it’s—it’s hard to know what she does one minute from the next. I always say no man—nobody can ever count on a little harum-scarum like—like she is.”

He took up her hat, a small turban of breast feathers, laid out on the table beside him, and advanced with it clumsily enough. “Come,” he said, “please now, Mrs. Kaufman. Please.”

“I—”

“I—I got plans made for us to-morrow down by the shore that’s—that’s just fine! Come now, Mrs. Kaufman.”

“Please, Mr. Vetsburg, don’t force. I—I can’t! I always say nobody can count on such a little harum-scarum as—”

“You mean to tell me, Mrs. Kaufman, that just because a little shyster doctor—”

Her hand closed over the long envelope again, crunching it. “No, no, that—that ain’t all, Mr. Vetsburg. Only I don’t want you should tell Ruby, you promise me? How that child worries over little things. Shulif from the agency called up just now. He don’t give me one more minute as two this afternoon I—I should sign. How I been putting them off so many weeks with this lease, it’s a shame. Always you know how in the back of my head I’ve had it to take maybe a smaller place when this lease was done, but, like I say, talk is cheap and moving ain’t so easy done, ain’t it? If he puts in new plumbing in pantry and new hinges on the doors and papers my second floor and Mrs. Suss’s alcove, like I said last night, after all I could do worse as stay here another five year, ain’t it, Mr. Vetsburg?”

“I—”

“A house what keeps filled so easy and such a location with the subway less as two blocks. I—So you see, Mr. Vetsburg, if I don’t want I come back and find my house on the market, maybe rented over my head, I got to stay home for Shulif when he comes to-day.”

A rush of dark blood had surged up into Mr. Vetsburg’s face, and he twiddled his hat, his dry fingers moving around inside the brim.

“Mrs. Kaufman,” he cried, “Mrs. Kaufman, sometimes when for years a man don’t speak out his mind, sometimes he busts all of a sudden right out. I—oh—e-e-e!” And, immediately and thickly inarticulate, he made a tremendous feint at clearing his throat, tossed up his hat and caught it, and rolled his eyes.

“Mr. Vetsburg?”

“A man, Mrs. Kaufman, can bust!”

“Bust?”

He was still violently dark but swallowing with less labor. “Yes, from holding in. Mrs. Kaufman, should a woman like you—the finest woman in the world, and I can prove it—a woman, Mrs. Kaufman, who in her heart and my heart and—Should such a woman not come to Atlantic City when I got everything fixed like a stage set!”

She threw out an arm that was visibly trembling. “Mr. Vetsburg, for God’s sake, ain’t I just told you how that she—harum-scarum—she—”

“Will you, Mrs. Kaufman, come or won’t you? Will you, I ask you, or won’t you?” He threw a gesture now with mastery, one arm before and one behind.

“I—I can’t, Mr.—”

“All right, then, I—I bust out now. To-day can be as good as to-morrow! Not with my say in a tousand years, Mrs. Kaufman, you sign that lease! I ain’t a young man any more with fine speeches, Mrs. Kaufman, but not in a tousand years you sign that lease.”

“Mr. Vetsburg, Ruby, I—”

“If anybody’s got a lease on you, Mrs. Kaufman, I—I want it! I want it! That’s the kind of a lease would suit me. To be leased to you for always, the rest of your life!”

She could not follow him down the vista of fancy, but stood interrogating him with her heartbeats at her throat. “Mr. Vetsburg, if he puts on the doors and hinges and new plumbing in—”

“I’m a plain man, Mrs. Kaufman, without much to offer a woman what can give out her heart’s blood like it was so much water. But all these years I been waiting, Mrs. Kaufman, to bust out, until—till things got riper. I know with a woman like you, whose own happiness always is last, that first your girl must be fixed—”

“She’s a young girl, Mr. Vetsburg, you—you mustn’t depend—If I had my say—”

“He’s a fine fellow, Mrs. Kaufman. With his uncle to help ’em, they got, let me tell you, a better start as most young ones!”

She rose, holding on to the desk.

“I—I—” she said. “What?”

“Lena,” he uttered very softly.

“Lena, Mr. Vetsburg?”

“It ain’t been easy, Lenie, these years while she was only growing up, to keep off my lips that name. A name just like a leaf off a rose. Lena!” he reiterated and advanced.

Comprehension came quietly and dawning like a morning.

“I—I, Mr. Vetsburg, you must excuse me,” she said and sat down suddenly.

He crossed to the little desk and bent low over the back of her chair with his hand, not on her shoulder, but at the knob of her chair. His voice had a swift rehearsed quality.

“Maybe to-morrow, if you didn’t back out, it would sound finer by the ocean, Lenie, but it don’t need the ocean a man should tell a woman when she’s the first and the finest woman in the world. Does it, Lenie?”

“I—I thought Ruby. She—”

“He’s a good boy, Leo is, Lenie. A good boy what can be good to a woman like his father before him. Good enough even for a fine girl like our Ruby, Lenie—our Ruby!”

“Gott im Himmel, then you—”

“Wide-awake, too. With a start like I can give him in my business, you ain’t got to worry Ruby ain’t fixed herself with the man what she chooses. To-morrow at Atlantic City all fixed I had it I should tell—”

“You!” she said, turning around in her chair to face him, “you—all along you been fixing—”

He turned sheepish. “Ain’t it fair, Lenie, in love and war and business a man has got to scheme for what he wants out of life? Long enough it took she should grow up. I knew all along once those two, each so full of life and gedinks, got together it was natural what should happen. Mrs. Kaufman! Lenie! Lenie!”

From two flights up, in through the open door and well above the harsh sound of scrubbing, a voice curled down through the hallways and in. “Mrs. Kaufman, ice water—ple-ase!”

“Lenie,” he said, his singing, tingling fingers closing over her wrist.

“Mrs. Kauf-man, ice water, pl——!”

With her free arm she reached and slammed the door, let her cheek lie to the back of his hand, and closed her eyes.

LITTLE SELVES[12]

By MARY LERNER

From The Atlantic Monthly

MARGARET O’BRIEN, a great-aunt and seventy-five, knew she was near the end. She did not repine, for she had had a long, hard life and she was tired. The young priest who brought her communion had administered the last rites—holy oils on her eyelids (Lord, forgive her the sins of seeing!); holy oils on her lips (Lord, forgive her the sins of speaking!), on her ears, on her knotted hands, on her weary feet. Now she was ready, though she knew the approach of the dread presence would mean greater suffering. So she folded quiet hands beneath her heart, there where no child had ever lain, yet where now something grew and fattened on her strength. And she seemed given over to pleasant revery.

Neighbors came in to see her, and she roused herself and received them graciously, with a personal touch for each.—“And has your Julia gone to New York, Mrs. Carty? Nothing would do her but she must be going, I suppose. ’Twas the selfsame way with me, when I was coming out here from the old country. Full of money the streets were, I used to be thinking. Well, well; the hills far away are green.”

Or to Mrs. Devlin: “Terence is at it again, I see by the look of you. Poor man! There’s no holding him? Eh, woman dear! Thirst is the end of drinking and sorrow is the end of love.”

If her visitors stayed longer than a few minutes, however, her attention wandered; her replies became cryptic. She would murmur something about “all the seven parishes,” or the Wicklow hills, or “the fair cove of Cork tippytoe into the ocean;” then fall into silence, smiling, eyes closed, yet with a singular look of attention. At such times her callers would whisper: “Glory b’t’ God! she’s so near it there’s no fun in it,” and slip out soberly into the kitchen.

Her niece, Anna Lennan, mother of a fine brood of children, would stop work for the space of a breath and enjoy a bit of conversation.

“Ain’t she failing, though, the poor afflicted creature?” Mrs. Hanley cried one day. “Her mind is going back on her already.”

“Are you of that opinion? I’m thinking she’s mind enough yet, when she wants to attend; but mostly she’s just drawn into herself, as busy as a bee about something, whatever it is that she’s turning over in her head day-in, day-out. She sleeps scarce a wink for all she lies there so quiet, and, in the night, my man and I hear her talking to herself. ‘No, no,’ she’ll say. ‘I’ve gone past. I must be getting back to the start.’ Or, another time, ‘This is it, now. If I could be stopping!’”

“And what do you think she is colloguing about?”

“There’s no telling. Himself does be saying it’s in an elevator she is, but that’s because he puts in the day churning up and down in one of the same. What else can you expect? ’Tis nothing but ‘Going up! going down!’ with him all night as it is. Betune the two of them they have me fair destroyed with their traveling. ‘Are you lacking anything, Aunt Margaret?’ I call out to her. ‘I am not,’ she answers, impatient-like. ‘Don’t be ever fussing and too-ing, will you?’”

“Tch! tch!”

“And do you suppose the children are a comfort to her? Sorra bit. Just a look at them and she wants to be alone. ‘Take them away, let you,’ says she, shutting her eyes. ‘The others is realer.’”

“And you think she’s in her right mind all the same?”

“I do. ’Tis just something she likes to be thinking over,—something she’s fair dotty about. Why, it’s the same when Father Flint is here. Polite and riverintial at the first, then impatient, and, if the poor man doesn’t be taking the hint, she just closes up shop and off again into her whimsies. You’d swear she was in fear of missing something.”

The visitor, being a young wife, had an explanation to hazard. “If she was a widow woman, now, or married—perhaps she had a liking for somebody once. Perhaps she might be trying to imagine them young days over again. Do you think could it be that?”

Anna shook her head. “My mother used to say she was a born old maid. All she wanted was work and saving her bit of money, and to church every minute she could be sparing.”

“Still, you can’t be telling. ’Tis often that kind weeps sorest when ’tis too late. My own old aunt used to cry, ‘If I could be twenty-five again, wouldn’t I do different!’”

“Maybe, maybe, though I doubt could it be so.”

Nor was it so. The old woman, lying back so quietly among her pillows with closed eyes, yet with that look of singular intentness and concentration, was seeking no lover of her youth; though, indeed, she had had one once, and from time to time he did enter her revery, try as she would to prevent him. At that point, she always made the singular comment, “Gone past! I must be getting back to the beginning,” and, pressing back into her earliest consciousness, she would remount the flooding current of the years. Each time, she hoped to get further,—though remoter shapes were illusive, and, if approached too closely, vanished,—for, once embarked on her river of memories, the descent was relentlessly swift. How tantalizing that swiftness! However she yearned to linger, she was rushed along till, all too soon, she sailed into the common light of day. At that point, she always put about, and laboriously recommenced the ascent.

To-day, something her niece had said about Donnybrook Fair—for Anna, too, was a child of the old sod—seemed to swell out with a fair wind the sails of her visionary bark. She closed her mind to all familiar shapes and strained back—way, way back, concentrating all her powers in an effort of will. For a bit she seemed to hover in populous space. This did not disturb her; she had experienced the same thing before. It simply meant she had mounted pretty well up to the fountainhead. The figures, when they did come, would be the ones she most desired.

At last, they began to take shape, tenuously at first, then of fuller body, each bringing its own setting, its own atmospheric suggestion—whether of dove-feathered Irish cloud and fresh greensward, of sudden downpour, or equally sudden clearing, with continual leafy drip, drip, drip, in the midst of brilliant sunshine.

For Margaret O’Brien, ardent summer sunlight seemed suddenly to pervade the cool, orderly little bedchamber. Then, “Here she is!” and a wee girl of four danced into view, wearing a dress of pink print, very tight at the top and very full at the bottom. She led the way to a tiny new house whence issued the cheery voice of hammers. Lumber and tools were lying round; from within came men’s voices. The small girl stamped up the steps and looked in. Then she made for the narrow stair.

“Where’s Margaret gone to?” said one of the men. “The upper floor’s not finished. It’s falling through the young one will be.”

“Peggy!” called the older man. “Come down here with you.”

There was a delighted squeal. The pink dress appeared at the head of the stairs. “Oh, the funny little man, daddy! Such a funny little old man with a high hat! Come quick, let you, and see him.”

The two men ran to the stairs.

“Where is he?”

She turned back and pointed. Then her face fell. “Gone! the little man is gone!”

Her father laughed and picked her up in his arms. “How big was he, Peg? As big as yourself, I wonder?”

“No, no! Small.”

“As big as the baby?”

She considered a moment. “Yes, just as big as that. But a man, da.”

“Well, why aren’t you after catching him and holding him for ransom? ’Tis pots and pots o’ gold they’ve hidden away, the little people, and will be paying a body what he asks to let them go.”

She pouted, on the verge of tears. “I want him to come back.”

“I mistrust he won’t be doing that, the leprechaun. Once you take your eye away, it’s off with him for good and all.”

Margaret O’Brien hugged herself with delight. That was a new one; she had never got back that far before. Yet how well she remembered it all! She seemed to smell the woody pungency of the lumber, the limy odor of whitewash from the field-stone cellar.

The old woman’s dream went on. Out of the inexhaustible storehouse of the past, she summoned, one by one, her much-loved memories. There was a pigtailed Margaret in bonnet and shawl, trudging to school one wintry day. She had seen many wintry school-days, but this one stood out by reason of the tears she had shed by the way. She saw the long benches, the slates, the charts, the tall teacher at his desk. With a swelling of the throat, she saw the little girl sob out her declaration: “I’m not for coming no more, Mr. Wilde.”

“What’s that, Margaret? And why not? Haven’t I been good to you?”

Tears choked the child. “Oh, Mr. Wilde, it’s just because you’re so terrible good to me. They say you are trying to make a Protestant out of me. So I’ll not be coming no more.”

The tall man drew the little girl to his knee and reassured her. Margaret O’Brien could review that scene with tender delight now. She had not been forced to give up her beloved school. Mr. Wilde had explained to her that her brothers were merely teasing her because she was so quick and such a favorite.

A little Margaret knelt on the cold stone floor at church and stared at the pictured saints or heard the budding branches rustle in the orchard outside. Another Margaret, a little taller, begged for a new sheet of ballads every time her father went to the fair.—There were the long flimsy sheets, with closely printed verses. These you must adapt to familiar tunes. This Margaret, then, swept the hearth and stacked the turf and sang from her bench in the chimney-corner. Sometimes it was something about “the little old red coat me father wore,” which was “All buttons, buttons, buttons, buttons; all buttons down before”; or another beginning “Oh, dear, what can the matter be? Johnny’s so long at the fair! He promised to buy me a knot of blue ribbon to tie up my bonnie brown hair.”

Then there was a picture of the time the fairies actually bewitched the churn, and, labor as you might, no butter would form, not the least tiny speck. Margaret and her mother took the churn apart and examined every part of it. Nothing out of the way. “’Tis the fairies is in it,” her mother said. “All Souls’ Day a-Friday. Put out a saucer of cream the night for the little people, let you.” A well-grown girl in a blue cotton frock, the long braids of her black hair whipping about her in the windy evening, set out the cream on the stone flags before the low doorway, wasting no time in getting in again. The next day, how the butter “came!” Hardly started they were, when they could feel it forming. When Margaret washed the dasher, she “kept an eye out” for the dark corners of the room, for the air seemed thronged and murmurous.

After this picture, came always the same tall girl still in the same blue frock, this time with a shawl on her head. She brought in potatoes from the sheltered heaps that wintered out in the open. From one pailful she picked out a little flat stone, rectangular and smoother and more evenly proportioned than any stone she had ever seen.

“What a funny stone!” she said to her mother.

Her mother left carding her wool to look. “You may well say so. ’Tis one of the fairies’ tables. Look close and you’ll be turning up their little chairs as well.”

It was as her mother said. Margaret found four smaller stones of like appearance, which one might well imagine to be stools for tiny dolls.

“Shall I be giving them to little Bee for playthings?”

“You will not. You’ll be putting them outside. In the morning, though you may be searching the countryside, no trace of them will you find, for the fairies will be taking them again.”

So Margaret stacked the fairy table and chairs outside. Next morning, she ran out half reluctantly, for she was afraid she would find them and that would spoil the story. But, no! they were gone. She never saw them again, though she searched in all imaginable places. Nor was that the last potato heap to yield these mysterious stones.

Margaret, growing from scene to scene, appeared again in a group of laughing boys and girls.

“What’ll we play now?”

“Let’s write the ivy test.”

“Here’s leaves.”

Each wrote a name on a leaf and dropped it into a jar of water. Next morning, Margaret, who had misgivings, stole down early and searched for her leaf. Yes, the die was cast! At the sight of its bruised surface, ready tears flooded her eyes. She had written the name of her little grandmother, and the condition of the leaf foretold death within the year. The other leaves were unmarred. She quickly destroyed the ill-omened bit of ivy and said nothing about it, though the children clamored. “There’s one leaf short. Whose is gone?” “Mine is there!” “Is it yours, John?” “Is it yours, Esther?” But Margaret kept her counsel, and, within the year, the little grandmother was dead. Of course, she was old, though vigorous; yet Margaret would never play that game again. It was like gambling with fate.

And still the girls kept swinging past. Steadily, all too swiftly, Margaret shot up to a woman’s stature; her skirts crept down, her braids ought to have been bobbed up behind. She let them hang, however, and still ran with the boys, questing the bogs, climbing the apple trees, storming the wind-swept hills. Her mother would point to her sister Mary, who, though younger, sat now by the fire with her “spriggin’” [embroidery] for “the quality.” Mary could crochet, too, and had a fine range of “shamrogue” patterns. So the mother would chide Margaret.

“What kind of a girl are you, at all, to be ever lepping and tearing like a redshanks [deer]? ’Tis high time for you to be getting sensible and learning something. Whistles and scouting-guns is all you’re good for, and there’s no silver in them things as far as I can see.”

What fine whistles she contrived out of the pithy willow shoots in the spring! And the scouting-guns hollowed out of elder-stalks, which they charged with water from the brook by means of wadded sticks, working piston-wise! They would hide behind a hedge and bespatter enemies and friends alike. Many’s the time they got their ears warmed in consequence or went supperless to bed, pretending not to see the table spread with baked potatoes,—“laughing potatoes,” they called them, because they were ever splitting their sides,—besides delicious buttermilk, new-laid eggs, oat-cakes and fresh butter. “A child without supper is two to breakfast,” their mother would say, smiling, when she saw them “tackle” their stirabout the next day.

How full of verve and life were all these figures! That glancing creature grow old? How could such things be! The sober pace of maturity even seemed out of her star. Yet here she was, growing up, for all her reluctance. An awkward gossoon leaned over the gate in the moonlight, though she was indoors, ready to hide. But nobody noticed her alarm.

“There’s that long-legged McMurray lad again; scouting after Mary, I’ll be bound,” said her mother, all unawares.

But it was not Mary that he came for, though she married him just the same, and came out to America with their children some years after her sister’s lone pilgrimage.

The intrusion of Jerry McMurray signaled the grounding of her dream bark on the shoals of reality. Who cared about the cut-and-dried life of a grown woman? Enchantment now lay behind her, and, if the intervals between periods of pain permitted, she again turned an expectant face toward the old childish visions. Sometimes she could make the trip twice over without being overtaken by suffering. But her intervals of comfort grew steadily shorter; frequently she was interrupted before she could get rightly launched on her delight. And always there seemed to be one vision more illusive than the rest which she particularly longed to recapture. At last, chance words of Anna’s put her on its trail in this wise.

When she was not, as her niece said, “in her trance, wool-gathering,” Anna did her best to distract her, sending the children in to ask “would she have a sup of tea now,” or a taste of wine jelly. One day, after the invalid had spent a bad night, she brought in her new long silk coat for her aunt’s inspection, for the old woman had always been “tasty” and “dressy,” and had made many a fine gown in her day. The sharp old eyes lingered on the rich and truly striking braid ornament that secured the loose front of the garment.

“What’s that plaster?” she demanded, disparagingly.

Anna, inclined to be wroth, retorted: “I suppose you’d be preferring one o’ them tight ganzy [sweater] things that fit the figger like a jersey, all buttoned down before.”

A sudden light flamed in the old face. “I have it!” she cried. “’Tis what I’ve been seeking this good while. ’Twill come now—the red coat! I must be getting back to the beginning.”

With that, she was off, relaxing and composing herself, as if surrendering to the spell of a hypnotist.

To reach any desired picture in her gallery, she must start at the outset. Then they followed on, in due order—all that procession of little girls: pink clad, blue-print clad, bare-legged or brogan-shod; flirting their short skirts, plaiting their heavy braids. About half way along, a new figure asserted itself—a girl of nine or ten, who twisted this way and that before a blurred bit of mirror and frowned at the red coat that flapped about her heels,—bought oversize, you may be sure, so that she shouldn’t grow out of it too soon. The sleeves swallowed her little brown hands, the shoulders and back were grotesquely sack-like, the front had a puss [pout] on it.

“’Tis the very fetch of Paddy the gander I am in it. I’ll not be wearing it so.” She frowned with sudden intentness. “Could I be fitting it a bit, I wonder, the way mother does cut down John’s coats for Martin?”

With needle, scissors and thread, she crept up to her little chamber under the eaves. It was early in the fore-noon when she set to work ripping. The morning passed, and the dinner hour.

“Peggy! Where’s the girl gone to, I wonder?”

“To Aunt Theresa’s, I’m thinking.”

“Well, it’s glad I am she’s out o’ my sight, for my hands itched to be shaking her. Stand and twist herself inside out she did, fussing over the fit of the good coat I’m after buying her. The little fustherer!”

For the small tailoress under the roof, the afternoon sped on winged feet: pinning, basting, and stitching; trying on, ripping out again, and re-fitting. “I’ll be taking it in a wee bit more.” She had to crowd up to the window to catch the last of the daylight. At dusk, she swept her dark hair from her flushed cheeks and forced her sturdy body into the red coat. It was a “fit,” believe you me! Modeled on the lines of the riding-habit of a full-figured lady she had seen hunting about the countryside, it buttoned up tight over her flat, boyish chest and bottled up her squarish little waist. About her narrow hips, it rippled out in a short “frisk.” Beneath, her calico skirt, and bramble-scratched brown legs.

Warmed with triumph, she flew downstairs. Her mother and a neighbor were sitting in the glow of the peat fire. She tried to meet them with assurance, but, at sight of their amazed faces, misgiving clutched her. She pivoted before the mirror.

“Holy hour!” cried her mother. “What sausage-skin is that you’ve got into?” Then, as comprehension grew: “Glory b’ t’ God, Ellen! ’tis the remains of the fine new coat I’m after buying her, large enough to last her the next five years!”

“’Twas too large!” the child whimpered. “A gander I looked in it!” Then, cajolingly, “I’m but after taking it in a bit, ma. ’Twill do grand now, and maybe I’ll not be getting much fatter. Look at the fit of it, just!”

“Fit! God save the mark!” cried her mother.

“Is the child after making that jacket herself?” asked the neighbor.

“I am,” Margaret spoke up, defiantly. “I cut it and shaped it and put it together. It has even a frisk to the tail.”

“Maggie,” said the neighbor to Margaret’s mother. “’Tis as good a piece o’ work for a child of her years as ever I see. You ought not to be faulting her, she’s done that well. And,” bursting into irrepressible laughter, “it’s herself will have to be wearing it, woman dear! All she needs now is a horse and a side-saddle to be an equeestrieen!”

So the wanton destruction of the good red coat—in that house where good coats were sadly infrequent—ended with a laugh after all. How long she wore that tight jacket, and how grand she felt in it, let the other children laugh as they would!

What joy the old woman took in this incident! With its fullness of detail, it achieved a delicious suggestion of permanence, in contrast to the illusiveness of other isolated moments. Margaret O’Brien saw all these other figures, but she really was the child with the red coat. In the long years between, she had fashioned many fine dresses—gowned gay girls for their conquests and robed fair brides for the altar. Of all these, nothing now remained; but she could feel the good stuff of the red kersey under her little needle-scratched fingers, and see the glow of its rich color against her wind-kissed brown cheek.

“To the life!” she exclaimed aloud, exultantly. “To the very life!”

“What life, Aunt Margaret?” asked Anna, with gentle solicitude. “Is it afraid of the end you are, darling?”

“No, no, asthore. I’ve resigned myself long since, though ’twas bitter knowledge at the outset. Well, well, God is good and we can’t live forever.”

Her eyes, opening to the two flaring patent gas-burners, winked as if she had dwelt long in a milder light. “What’s all this glare about?” she asked playfully. “I guess the chandler’s wife is dead. Snuff out the whole of them staring candles, let you. ’Tis daylight yet; just the time o’ day I always did like the best.”

Anna obeyed and sat down beside the bed in the soft spring dusk. A little wind crept in under the floating white curtains, bringing with it the sweetness of new grass and pear-blossoms from the trim yard. It seemed an interval set apart from the hurrying hours of the busy day for rest and thought and confidences—an open moment. The old woman must have felt its invitation, for she turned her head and held out a shy hand to her niece.

“Anna, my girl, you imagine ’tis the full o’ the moon with me, I’m thinking. But, no, never woman was more in her right mind than I. Do you want I should be telling you what I’ve been hatching these many long days and nights? ’Twill be a good laugh for you, I’ll go bail.”

And, as best she could, she gave the trend of her imaginings. Anna did not laugh, however. Instead, with the ever-ready sympathy and comprehension of the Celt, she showed brimming eyes. “’Tis a thought I’ve often myself, let me tell you,” she admitted. “Of all the little girls that were me, and now can be living no longer.”

“You’ve said it!” cried the old woman, delighted at her unexpected responsiveness. “Only with me, ’tis fair pit’yus. There’s all those poor dear lasses there’s nobody but me left to remember, and soon there’ll not be even that. Sometimes they seem to be pleading just not to be forgotten, so I have to be keeping them alive in my head. I’m succeeding, too, and, if you’ll believe me, ’tis them little whips seem to be the real ones, and the live children here the shadders.” Her voice choked with sudden tears. “They’re all the children ever I had. My grief! that I’ll have to be leaving them! They’ll die now, for no man lives who can remember them any more.”

Anna’s beauty, already fading with the cares of house and children, seemed to put on all its former fresh charm. She leaned forward with girlish eagerness. “Auntie Margaret,” she breathed, with new tenderness, “there’s many a day left you yet. I’ll be sitting here aside of you every evening at twilight just, and you can be showing me the lasses you have in mind. Many’s the time my mother told me of the old place, and I can remember it well enough myself, though I was the youngest of the lot. So you can be filling it with all of our people,—Mary and Margaret, John, Martin and Esther, Uncle Sheamus and the rest. I’ll see them just as clear as yourself, for I’ve a place in my head where pictures come as thick and sharp as stars on a frosty night, when I get thinking. Then, with me ever calling them up, they’ll be dancing and stravaging about till doomsday.”

So the old woman had her heart’s desire. She recreated her earlier selves and passed them on, happy in the thought that she was saving them from oblivion. “Do you mind that bold lass clouting her pet bull, now?” she would ask, with delight, speaking more and more as if of a third person. “And that other hussy that’s after making a ganzy out of her good coat? I’d admire to have the leathering of that one.”

Still the old woman lingered, a good month beyond her allotted time. As spring ripened, the days grew long. In the slow-fading twilights, the two women set their stage, gave cues for entrances and exits. Over the white counterpane danced the joyous figures, so radiant, so incredibly young, the whole cycle of a woman’s girlhood. Grown familiar now, they came of their own accord, soothing her hours of pain with their laughing beauty, or, suddenly contemplative, assisting with seemly decorum at her devotional ecstasies.

“A saintly woman,” the young priest told Anna on one of the last days. “She will make a holy end. Her meditations must be beautiful, for she has the true light of Heaven on her face. She looks as if she heard already the choiring of the angels.”

And Anna, respectfully agreeing, kept her counsel. He was a good and sympathetic man and a priest of God, but, American-born, he was, like her stolid, kindly husband, outside the magic circle of comprehension. “He sees nothing, poor man,” she thought, indulgently. “But he does mean well.” So she set her husband to “mind” the young ones, and, easily doffing the sordid preoccupations of every day, slipped back into the enchanted ring.

THE SUN CHASER[13]

By JEANNETTE MARKS

From The Pictorial Review.

I

“No,” he said, looking down upon a lamp which was being lit, “it is just that Ambrose Clark wants to be happy. That’s why I got him the chance to light lamps. I thought it might help to make him happy.”

“Happy!” scoffed one. “He’s drunk—perpetually drunk!”

“Nevertheless,” objected the Doctor, “he is looking for happiness.”

“Why doesn’t Ambrose get it then and stop—” began a young married woman, the Doctor’s daughter-in-law.

“And stop sun-chasing?” completed the Doctor. “Because so often happiness is hard to find and still harder to keep.”

Outside a child stumbled along as fast as she could, clinging to her father’s hand and stubbing now here and now there, in the rough places of the road, the ragged toe of one little boot. They traveled rapidly from street lamp to street lamp and left behind them scores of flames pale in the yellow evening sunlight which streamed over the village.

But when Pearl reached the outskirts of the town she held back, crying out, “Father, this is most as far as I can go with you, for mother doesn’t know.”

“Yes, yes,” mumbled the Sun Chaser, “very far, very far.”

“Father, what makes you shake that way now? Father, can’t you stop here a minute before you chase the sun?”

“I’m eager to get on—to get on—to get on.”

“But the sun’s right up there, Father.”

“Going after it—going after it—sun travels very fash—nobody knows how fash—fasher than I can get the lamps lighted—a hot race—all day—all night—forever! Going after it, Pearl—that’s your name, Pearl?”

“Yes, Father.”

The child looked up at him wonderingly: there could be only one explanation of so many strange phenomena and that was sun-chasing.

“Does your foot pain you very much again?” she asked.

“Bad pain,” he mumbled.

“Then, Father, what does make you go after the sun?”

He shot a suspicious glance at Pearl clinging with both little hands to one of his. “I—I am hungry,” he stuttered.

Embarrassed, the child flushed. She ground the toe of the right boot around and around in the dirt. On the right boot the brass tip was gone but on the left it was still bright and shining,—the one bit of solidarity in what otherwise was about to go the way of all shoe leather.

Ambrose pointed to it. “Give it to me, Pearl,” he said.

It shone like a coin, looked like a coin, maybe it could be passed as a coin.

“No, no, Father,” she replied, “don’t be silly!”

Hunger and pain, hunger and pain and failure, she thought, these were the lot of her father. Then one hand dropped from her father’s and slipped to her pocket. Slowly she drew her hand out, in it a coin.

“Father,” she said, holding it up to him, “I guess you won’t be hungry any more, will you?”

The Sun Chaser snatched the coin greedily. This was what put wings even to a wooden-shod lame foot and double wings to a leather-shod.

“I must be going—going—going!” he cried.

And was gone.

Pearl watched him fleeing, at times almost flying,—hippity—hippity—hop after the sun, his long tawny hair blown out by the wind, his wild laughter echoed and re-echoed from the mountains towards which he fled. He was calling, calling, calling, and she watched until she could no longer see the burnished light on her father’s hair or the distortion of the fleeing back.

Then the child turned towards the pale lighted lamps and went homewards in the dusk. Somehow she had gathered the impression that sun-chasing was inseparably part of a man’s work and that it made men suffer, and the impression was terrible to her.

II

The sun, bringer of joy, of warmth, healer, comforter,—the sun, glorious and glowing, was up there. Ambrose did not want to go back, for all the misery he had known in the world—and that was a great deal—had come from going back. Clinging by his fingers and the toe of leather-shod, he dragged wooden-shod and leather-shod with him up the cliff. But he had made scarcely more than a beginning before it seemed to him that the sun was gaining on him,—that he was losing the sun. Dismayed, he gaped upward, his cheek as close as lichen to the cliff. Soaring at the very peak of the great rock, the sun swam slowly, slowly out of sight: one fourth, two fourths, three fourths gone and there was nothing but the great burning eyelash, and then all gone.

To Ambrose, child of the light, it had become suddenly dark—the sun was gone. With a sob he let go his hold, slipped and tumbled down what he had scaled, and while his cry was still flapping like a dark wing among the rocks, lay still.

On the other side, the sun, which was this time surely to have been his, was sinking down, down, down, in its diurnal course over other cliffs and rocky hills and above stony fields, meadows and shining streams.

The Sun Chaser’s cry had flapped about on the rocks, and sunk into the forgotten place of cries, when Ambrose opened his eyes again and gazed into the darkness above him. He knew what this meant. The sun was gone, he had lost the sun again. With a cry he staggered to his feet, stumbled, and then, finding his way out, he plunged down over the stony fields and through the wet meadows. Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clippity, clippity-clop, all could hear him come running, and stumbling along the lamp-lighted streets.

“See his copper hair shine!” said a wife to her husband.

“He runs like something mad,” answered her husband.

“When he came by last night,” said a little girl, fear in her voice, “he looked in at this window, Mother.”

“He’s looking for something now,” said the mother, “and I suppose that’s why he lights lamps and chases the sun, although I’m sure nobody knows what ails Ambrose Clark except that he’s drunk all the time.”

“What do you suppose he is after?” asked a bride who stood by a darkened window, her lover’s arm about her.

“The Doctor says happiness,” answered the lover.

III

When the Sun Chaser had reached the levels of the dark fields and then the dark and damp meadows, his first thought was that now, having lost it on its orbit, if he would find the sun again, he must go back. Yet all the misery he had ever known had come from going back.

Ambrose knew the place of the sun’s rising,—to the east, on beyond Northerly, past the lamps, past the place he called home, out by the old mill where the stream rushed, the wheels had clacked once upon a time, the hills rose, and the sun morn after morn came up in the midst of lake and stream.

So he stumbled along feeling his way by fence post and stone wall until he came to four corners and from thence to the village. The Sun Chaser had a purpose and he had never faltered in that purpose: to overtake the sun and go on—never go back again—go on with it forever.

Ambrose Clark found his way wearily, unsteadily, past the single light of a cottage, past stones luminous grey in the star-light, past lighted windows, past the dark, straight boles of trees, through the lamp-lit street of Northerly, by the Doctor’s windows, past a big shop, past the lock-up, past the minister’s, past the undertaker’s,—clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop.

The Doctor’s grandchild was wakeful, and raised herself from her little white bed: “W’at zat,” she called, “Sun Chaser comin’ back again?”

“Yes, coming back again, my darling,” answered her mother.

“Must he always come back?”

“Always,” was the reply, “for there is no going forward that way.”

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, step after lame step Ambrose went stumbling on through the night.

From the big shop a son of the storekeeper’s looked out the window to see him go limping by.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, on stumbled the leather-shod foot dragging the wooden-shod behind it, past the lock-up, through whose heavy iron grating Stephen Short, the town sheriff, was pushing bread and water to a thief. Thieves at large may buy bread a-plenty, or steal it, butter it with sunshine and freedom and, unwilling or wanton, be sufficed. Thieves caught must starve.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, feet fumbling their way, head swimming until lamps and stars swung about like torches. Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, on past the parsonage, where the Good Man at evening prayers was reading of sin and redemption, of love and eternal life. Clip-clop!

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, the Sun Chaser was going swiftly now, not because he was nearing home but because he was passing the undertaker’s. Clippity-clop, clippity-clop, leather-shod wildly dragging wooden-shod. And he was gone beyond the place he had wept because he must pass.

Before him, through the night, shone two lighted windows. Surely, pondered Ambrose Clark, the sun had left somewhat of itself shining there—yes, yes, this was the way, this was the way of the rising sun. All out there was his—pass the undertaker’s and all was his, his cottage, his wife, his little Pearl, the bit of sun there chipped off and upright on the white deal table. All but the mill,—the mill was not his, and he sighed and put his fingers in his pocket. However, if no one stand in his way, a fragment of sun was better than none. He would get that and scatter its joy for all.

IV

“Mother,” said Pearl, “is sun-chasing hard work?”

“It depends on what you mean by that,” replied the mother. The iron hissed over the wet linen.

For an instant the child studied her mother’s face. Then she lifted a ragged apron—once it had been sprigged with bright forget-me-nots, but that was before Ambrose Clark had a sunstroke,—and fumbled around in her dress pocket.

“It’s here!” Her pale baby face lighted up. “See, Mother, Doctor gave me two of these.”

She drew out a silver coin like the one she had given her father and held it under the lamplight.

The mother did not look. She turned over a flat and tested it with a moistened forefinger. Like an angry cat the iron spat back. Then she glanced at the child and down the child’s thin legs to the boots from which parts of vamp and sole were gone. Not for an instant did she cease her ironing, for that was the work which bought all their bread.

“If only,” she sighed, “you could have a pair of shoes! Where’s the other?”

“You mean the other quarter, Mother?”

Pearl looked frightened.

“Yes, tell me,” commanded the mother. “No, you needn’t,” she added bitterly. “You’ve given it to your father.”

“But, Mother!” cried the child, “his foot hurt so—he said it did—and he said he hadn’t had any success in sun-chasing and—”

“There, there, that’ll do! I know every one of those explanations backwards and forwards by this time. Anyway, don’t give him that. You must have a pair of mittens. Thanksgiving’s only a day off.”

Pearl crowded closer to her mother’s left side. About her mother’s waist she clasped one arm, sighing, for it felt good to be so close to her. There were so many questions to try to understand. Mother’s love seemed the only thing that was plain.

She stood some time so, undisturbed by the jerk and jar of her mother’s ceaselessly active arm and the thumping on the ironing board.

“Mother,” said Pearl, “if it weren’t for Father feeling he must chase the sun, wouldn’t we be just the happiest family in the whole world?”

“That’s as might be, child, but perhaps so,” replied Sybil.

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, soft as rain-fall on a moss-covered roof; fragment of sun, shining, upright, and nearer; golden and shining in the sun, gleam of waxed iron, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, softer than rain-fall on a moss-covered roof—here was an end of defeat, this and then more. This and then more!

“Mother, what was that passed the window?” asked Pearl.

“Nothing, I guess. I heard nothing.”

“But, Mother, I saw something.”

“Did you? Well the nights are growing cold now—maybe a falling star.”

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, around the house, to the door, to the latch. He who had never overtaken the whole must be wary in overtaking even a fragment of that sun whose possession spelled an end of defeat and misery. Clip-clop, clip—the door—clop—the latch—a rush, and it was his, his, his, swaying and gleaming, flaring and shining, dipping and flickering—his, his, his, in his hand, his own, part and parcel of the Great One. Toss it, catch it, brandish it! His, his, his, forever!

“Ambrose!” came Sybil’s cry, “for God’s sake set that lamp down—set it down!”

Fools, fools, fools, they had it and did not even know that it was beside them. His child, his child should have it all—never go out into the night and the dark—never chase the sun and never find—his child!

“Father!” came another cry, “it burns so! The lamp’s burning me!”

Nearer again swung the lamp, torch of flame and blackened stream of smoke. Scatter it like this—joy and joy and joy!

Smell of smoke, screams of a child, the tigerish leap of a woman upon a man, a crashing lamp, a black room and the dull thud and thrashing of struggle upon the floor; then moans and silence.

Up out of the blackness and silence, the Sun Chaser raised himself on knee and leather-shod foot, setting wooden-shod beside it. The windows were pale and silvery with the night light; in the room was the smell of lamp soot and burned hair; behind him the grate of the kitchen stove gleamed like an evil eye.

See what they had done! Happiness and to spare for all, and they had defeated him. Sybil had always been against him. Anyhow he had done his best to find and scatter joy over them all. Clip-clop—something soft, hop around it dragging wooden-shod; clip-clop, clip-clop, something again; around it, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip-clop; the latch; out, clip-clop, clip-clop; to the mill; the dawn again; the mill had always brought dawn back to him again; but at the mill one had to pay—thumb and forefinger into pocket,—yes, the silver piece Pearl had given him lay there—clippity-clop, clippity-clop, clippity-clop, not so fast as past the undertaker’s but fast as he could go, now, with a clippity-clippity, clippity-clop, stars and moon and trees swinging around his head.

V

The Miller had been sitting in the dark to save oil. He had ceased to grind wheat since he had discovered that there was more gold which came by means of no grinding. Nevertheless he was called the Miller,—old Harding, the Miller.

He rose and stood behind the closed shutters to look out between their wooden slats upon the road down which Ambrose Clark was limping. Above the Miller’s head there was the shuffling noise of slippered feet.

“She’s getting ready,” he muttered.

But he stood by the shutters watching Ambrose Clark and rubbing his hands. Then he laughed and rubbed his hands and rubbed his hands and rubbed them, and drew in his breath until it clicked. No one knew better than he did that the Sun Chaser was a fool.

He pushed the slats down so that not even a cat’s eye of light could be revealed and set a match to a candle. He lifted the lighted candle and let Ambrose in. The candle-light flickered on the Sun Chaser’s copper-colored hair and burning face. In the blood-shot, chameleon-like eyes the Miller read all he needed to know.

“What you got?” demanded the Miller.

Ambrose fumbled in his pocket and produced the silver piece Pearl had given him.

This silver had been warmed by her little hands and made bright, too, by rubbing so that a pretty picture of Liberty would show and a child’s eyes could read the words, “In God we trust.”

The Miller held the coin under the candle-flame, bit it with his teeth and then put it in his pocket.

He blew out the candle and left Ambrose in the dark. He went out into the yard to the pile of logs. The Miller brought a jug in and poured from it something yellow and murky and from which fumes rose. Ambrose watched the Miller pour, wildly, eagerly watched him. Even before the glass brimmed, he snatched it. The Sun Chaser tossed off the first glass. It stung and smarted, it thrilled and stabbed, it gripped like a hot metal hand at his quivering nerves and seemed to steady them; it sent the tears of relief gushing to his eyes; it swam and swarmed, out, out, out to the furthermost surfaces of his being; it tingled and bit at his fingers and ears; it seethed in his belly like summer heat; and it seared all misery from his mind. The Miller was watching the face that paled and flamed and then glazed into a semblance of steadiness.

“What luck?” he asked, rubbing his hands.

“None, none to-day,” answered the Sun Chaser, holding out his glass for another drink, “but to-morrow I shall overtake the sun.”

Harding lifted the jug, held it above the glass and poured.

The Sun Chaser took the glass in one hand and with the other seized the Miller by the front of his coat, drew him closer and whispered in his ear, “I tell you how I know this. I found—a piece—on the table—for the first time.”

“A piece of what?” asked the Miller, thinking of money.

“The sun, of course,” and Ambrose nodded, “but my wife’s against me—damn the women!”

A man came up the walk, entered and sat down on the bench from which he demanded a drink. As he was lifting his glass to his lips another entered, sat down on the bench too, and called for liquor. They came quickly now until the bench was full and men were standing about in the corridor—all waiting.

The Sun Chaser had laughed until he cried. Then he began to curse, and in the sitting room into which the Miller had shut him he cursed on and on, repeating now with a cry, now with a laugh, “Damn the women! Damn the women! All against us! All against us!”

Finally he sank down on an ancient, gutted-out, horsehair sofa, and screamed and cried and laughed and cursed, and struck at the floor with his wooden-shod foot and struck at the floor with his leather-shod foot. Then he wept alone. Alone, too, he murmured over and over, “As for me, give me the sun—the sun for me!” Finally he sank back on the sofa, crumpled up, and lay senseless upon it.

VI

There was much coming and going that night. When, just before dawn, the last man was going, the Sun Chaser still lay upon the black sofa, his breath loud and hoarse, his face livid, and his wooden-shod foot hanging over the edge of the sofa.

Outside, were gray stones luminous at dawn. Outside, as birds left their perches, was the stir of branches. Outside, even the spiral roots of bush and flower and the stiffened tendrils of vines knew what the Sun Chaser no longer knew: that dawn was coming and the sun would rise over the eastern hills and take its stately, beneficent way westward. Outside, a little pool which had always lain on the margin of the Miller’s stream, caught the coming dawn as good eyes take the light, and, like faith, reflected the color of heaven and was tremulous with the virgin white of birches.

“Get up!” shouted Harding.

Ambrose Clark did not answer. The Miller fetched a glass of cold water and flung it in the Sun Chaser’s face. With a cry Ambrose jerked upright and put out his hands to shield himself.

“Get out of here now, you fool!” commanded the Miller, pushing him towards the door.

This to the Sun Chaser,—he who could and would overtake the sun one day and be lord of all its domain of joy and warmth.

The Miller’s left hand was already on the bolt that would bar the Sun Chaser outside. And Ambrose stumbled forward over the sill into a world of dawn.

Clip-clop and stop, clip-clop and on, clip-clop and stop, clip-clop and on. As wooden-shod struck the ground the frozen earth sounded like vast, dry, shackling ribs of frost. Clip-clop and on, clip-clop and stop, and on and stop and on and stop.

By the road were bare, swinging, bead-budded larches waiting for the kindling of another spring, and up on the hillsides the wave-lines of wind-swept, pain-tossed trees. Again, dawn was coming and coming quickly. Above the deep blue hills was a horizon of clear amber and above this, flocking a million-fold, were rosy, winged clouds. Clip-clop and on, clip-clop and stop, on, clip-clip-clip-clip and fall.

There were no leaves anywhere on the trees except the withered, still grayish-green leaves of the poplar. Everywhere in the dark, leafless woods were seen the fine, white lines of birch saplings etching the sombreness.

Not much more than a tree’s length from his own door the Sun Chaser fell. The door, still ajar, was moving to and fro in the cool, playful gusts of the dawn wind. The sun was coming—undoubtedly the sun was coming, heralded by light and song, wind and color. But the Sun Chaser saw none of it, for he was lying face down in the ditch by the roadside. The sun was coming; already the little, white, spiral roots felt it, the mice in the fields knew it, the squirrels in their holes, wing of bird and tip of tree knew it, but the Sun Chaser, face down in the ditch, knew nothing.

At no point of the Sun Chaser’s consciousness did the sun touch him. He had passed the Border Land and entered a land where, for the time being, there was nothing, neither cry of the heart nor stirring of the soul. The lamp-lighter, who should be putting out his lights now, lay face down in the ditch.

As the night wore on Sybil Clark toiled heavily back to consciousness, aware of a weight on breast and heart. But when she opened her eyes slowly there shaped itself before her only the outlines of the kitchen stove.

“Oh,” she sighed, “the fire’s gone out!”

Consciousness widened and grew warmer. Against her bosom lay something lighter than the heavy breath she drew,—something soft and warm and comforting. She lifted her left hand and felt the child’s head over which she had closed with the Sun Chaser. With a cry she drew it closer. Blessed, blessed, blessed, blessed little one! She knew not whether this was sleep or what it was,—may be heaven itself.

Strength rushed back on her like a tidal wave. She struggled to her feet and gathered up the sleeping child and stumbled with her into the adjoining room. All the hard, all the bitter realities were gone, and there remained only the kindest and greatest of them all,—mother and child! She laid Pearl on the bed. She lighted a candle and gazed down on the little face, and upon the child’s temple with its long, red blister where the lamp chimney had scarred it.

“I’ll light the fire first,” she said. “I wonder where he is?”

The fire lighted, she went to the door and looked out, saw the changing night and the morning star in the east. She stood there for a few seconds. Color was brightening behind the dark hills and gray turning to blue and blue to rose and to gold. The morning star was waning and pearl-colored clouds, a million-fold, were flocking upwards.

With one look back into the kitchen where the fire was crackling, she drew the door to softly and went out.

As she started up towards the mill, she saw a figure coming towards her. It was Stephen Short, the sheriff. Her hand felt nervously at her torn collar and traveled up her chin to the gashed cheek and bruised temple.

“Good morning, ma’am,” said the young sheriff, looking past her.

Sybil followed his glance. Yes, there was what she had come to seek. It was lying face downward in the ditch.

Sybil Clark was the first to go forward.

“Ambrose,” she said quietly, turning him towards her, “wake up!”

The Sun, bringer of joy, of warmth, healer, comforter, had risen to the hill summit and shone down upon the ditch. The Sun Chaser was dreaming—dreaming that he did not want to go back, for all the misery he had ever known in this world had come from going back. He wanted to overtake the sun, and, then, Sybil and Pearl beside him, go on and on with it forever.

“Don’t stop me,” he moaned.

“Ambrose,” repeated the wife, “Ambrose, wake up!”

“There,” said the sheriff, “he isn’t fit to go with you. I’ll take him along with me.”

“No, no,” cried Sybil. “He’s mine and you can’t take him.”

“I’ll take him just the same. This has gone on long enough,” and Stephen Short looked significantly at the scarred cheek.

“He didn’t mean to—it was the lamp—he—”

“Well, he’ll come with me.”

“No, no,” came from Sybil, “you mustn’t! Everything would be different if you could only make men see things different. Ambrose isn’t bad. It’s just that Ambrose hasn’t ever settled down to what it means to be a—a husband.”

“Or a father.”

“Or a father, Stephen Short. But there are lots of children in the world who haven’t ever had more than one parent, Stephen Short. The birds could teach men lessons they haven’t ever learned. Men are that way, Stephen Short. They keep on traveling. Ambrose has that idea about the sun in his head.”

“Well,” said the young sheriff quietly, “I’ll take him along with me and give him a chance to think about the idea.”

VII

A stranger passing by the town lock-up would have seen that it had become the center of town interest. For the lover of the antique, its architecture might have had something to do with that. It was a square box, perhaps ten feet by ten, only a single storey high. On its roof the cedar shingles had turned to a heavy moss green with here and there ferns or the dried fronds of ferns, standing up. The clapboards with which the sides had been covered—perhaps the singing heart of the new wood was not yet dead and was letting in the cool, fresh air to still the cry of pain, “Aah-yaiah!” so often heard there. There was no paint to be seen. Years ago had that been washed away by drizzle and drip of rain and snow from the heavy, over-hanging trees. A long, broken narrow board walk led from the street to the steps of the lock-up. There was no stoop. There were no windows. In the heavy door was set an iron-barred grating, two feet high and a foot and a half wide. From the lock-up, an eighth of a mile westward, lay the children’s school. An eighth of a mile eastward the village paper-hanger had his shop.

The citizens of Northerly had not congregated about the lock-up, passed it and re-passed it and stared at it from every conceivable vantage point, because they loved the antique—unless by that antique injustice is meant. They had heard the age-old cry of pain, “Aah-yaiah!” and seen a hand cling like a bird claw to the bars, and heard repeated that wail, “Aah-yaiah!”

The Undertaker said, “We hear Stephen Short beat on the soles of the Sun Chaser’s feet till he woke up and cried.”

“Oh,” objected the paper hanger, “why did he beat on the soles of his feet—one foot lame, too?”

The first winked. “Well,” he said amiably, “it’s good treatment for sun-chasing—all they’re fit for anyway.”

“I can remember,” said the paper-hanger, “when Ambrose Clark was the best of fellows—before he was sunstruck, you know.”

“Go ’long,” laughed a third man coming up, “who ever heard of sunstroke making a man behave the way Ambrose Clark does?”

“One thing’s sure,” replied the little paper-hanger bitterly, “what most people don’t know anything about is what they won’t believe in.”

“Oh, come now,” objected the sheriff, “the Sun Chaser’s plain drunk and you know it.”

“Well, perhaps he is. I didn’t say he wasn’t. But he’s ill. You wouldn’t beat an insane man, would you? Yet they used to do that here, Stephen,—whip them till the welts stood out all over them, and starve them and put them out in the storm and cold to be cured. What’d happen to you, Stephen, if you did that?” asked the little paper-hanger wearily.

Their eyes met. To Stephen Short there came a vague apprehension,—almost fear. Afar off, down a very long, dark road shadowed at the end in blackness, light appeared, no bigger than the palm of a man’s hand. The light was wavering and casting strange shadows on the blackness and traveling feebly up, up, up the hill towards him.

It was five o’clock and school was letting out. The children began to pass that way. They went by in a whirl of dust, and, making the steps of the paper-hanger’s in safety, they cried and laughed with excitement.

“Oh, I thought the Sun Chaser’d catch me!” shouted one.

“No, you silly, he’s in the lock-up.”

“Why did you run, then?” asked a third.

“He’s a murderer,” came the reply, “for he tried to kill Pearl.”

“Oh!” chorused the children.

Giggling and squealing, they peeped around the edge of the paper-hanger’s porch towards the lock-up.

“It isn’t nithe to lath at the Sun Chaser,” lisped the Doctor’s little grandchild, “’cause he needs help.”

“Pooh!” came the pert reply from a rosy-cheeked little girl, “my mother said what the Sun Chaser needed wasn’t help but it was hanging.”

In the lock-up the Sun Chaser had fallen back from the bars, and leather-shod and wooden-shod beat heavily on the floor. In his delirium too much called for his attention to leave him any interest in what passed outside.

It was the old, old question of sun chasing,—to fight through all to the sun at last, and beleaguered and surrounded by camps of enemies, to find a way through.

In his weakness, because he needed it more, the more violently did he struggle towards the sun,—ever towards the sun, wooden-shod and leather-shod beating on the floor, his thoughts molten lava of desire, of defeat, of hope. Then, convulsed, he flung himself towards the bars, gripped them with his white fingers and shook them, crying out, “Aah-yaiah!” and laughed and shook his tawny hair only to fall back in defeat—the old defeat.

For a time back and forth between the bars and the floor he flung himself. Beyond the bars the westering sun had slipped behind gray, snow-laden clouds. Along the floor lay the path out, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clippity, clippity-clop to the west and the sun. Yet within him he felt hope burning to ashes and the sun gone from him never to return any more.

He lay there, where he had fallen back on the boards, and picked at the floor—picked incessantly. Faster and faster grew the beat of his westering running feet; clip-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip and stop, clip and hop, clip and stop.

Outside, the light had withdrawn quickly behind snow-laden clouds,—faster than the swiftest flight of any step.

Once in a while from behind the grating of the lock-up came the old reverberation of lame steps, fleeing home-ward after sunset, fainter and fainter: clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip-clop, wraith of sound vibrating from the prison floor where wooden-shod and leather-shod lay twitching in answer to the maddened brain. The sun, the sun, always the sun still seething in the fiery furnace of the Sun Chaser’s mind.

Outside, now here, now there, a window brightened with lighted candle or lighted lamp. Outside, a month ago, leaves had fallen, fallen, fallen all night long and all day long. Everywhere in the silence of night had been heard the mysterious creeping sound of their falling. By day when the Sun Chaser had sped westward, leaves had lain everywhere on the outstretched arms of spruces and like golden snow upon the roadways and little paths. Now there had begun a still more mysterious rustle, an infinite stirring upon the moss-covered roof,—the rustle of the first snow.

VIII

There was one child who did not pass either way that day to school. And there was one mother who hearing in her heart that age-old cry of pain, and seeing, graven there, those white, clutching fingers, ironed tears into the linen on her board,—those that she could not brush away with the back of her hand. She had no theories about Ambrose. She knew that he was good. There were those who were bad, but Ambrose was not among them. She knew, also, that this thought she could never prove to any one. It was true only in her own heart. Yet who should know better than she did?

The iron was hot and Sybil ironed, hissing over a tear dropped onto the white linen.

“Mother,” asked Pearl, “will Father be hungry?”

Sybil gathered her work together.

“I wish,” she said wistfully, “that this storm hadn’t set in. But you’ll be safe here, Pearl. With the money the Doctor’s wife will pay for this wash I can bring back enough food to see us through most of the week safely.” Her face brightened and she looked around the kitchen once more. “I’ve left a good fire for you.”

“Mother,” Pearl asked, one hand deep in her pocket as she turned a coin, “can I go with you?”

“Out in this?” said the mother, looking towards the darkening windows. “No, of course not.”

“Are you going to get Father something?”

“No, I am not,” came decisively.

“Oh-h,” murmured the child. Again she turned the coin in her pocket. “Mother, won’t Father be hungry?”

“They’ll look out for him, I guess, where he is now.”

Pearl’s hand clutched the bit of silver until its thin edge cut into her palm. She was seeing the dark, gruesome place where they had shut up her father.

“Mother,” she gasped, “couldn’t you take Father something to eat?”

“No,” said her mother, tying on her hat, “they wouldn’t allow that!”

“They!” The word clicked in the child’s ear like the mysterious key to the sorrows that were all about her, but into whose deepest dungeon she had never been allowed to enter. “They,” then, had put her father there and might or might not, as it happened, feed her father.

Without further questioning, Pearl let her mother go. Through the snow as far as the gate she could see the heavily laden form moving, and then the storm shut off further sight.

Her hand clutched the coin in terror. Hunger! Hunger! In her ears there rang, muffled, the clip-clop, clip-clop, of her father’s lame step. And he had said only the day before that he was hungry.

Nothing beyond the gate was to be seen but the falling snow drawn hither and yon, shroud-like, by the tempest shaking the trees. Pearl ran for her coat, and leaping after her mother, was off like a rabbit. In the white rush of snow and wind she sped on until she caught sight of her mother’s storm-beaten figure. After that, step for step, she followed on unseen behind her.

Three pheasants, frightened away from the dense undergrowth of a white cedar, where they were taking shelter, started up with a “cut-cut-cut” and a swish of long tail feathers as they disappeared into the whirling snow storm. The wave lines of the wind-beaten trees grew more distorted as the trees swayed and cracked in the blast. The long, bead-budded branches of the larches were whipped out like whitened hair. It was becoming rapidly darker. In the eerie light shadows were not, or seemed to merge, like thoughts of a disordered mind, into the whirling phantasmagoria of storm. Below, the lamps of Northerly, lighted this night by hands not the Sun Chaser’s, twinkled mistily.

Pearl’s fingers grew colder and colder as she followed the burden-bent figure of her mother, and the light, icy snow filled into the stubbed, open toes of her boots and chinked up the loose tops and melted down onto the feet. The lights of the town they were approaching obliged her to drop behind a little. Was it not something, she was thinking, that her father had lighted these lamps?

She watched her mother pass the big store and go on toward the Doctor’s house. She waited an instant, and then, hand clutching coin, she bounded into the store and came to a standstill trembling in the midst of its unaccustomed splendor of light and color.

The Doctor, on his way out, paused just inside the door. “Well, well, well,” he said, “so here we are again!”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Pearl, her eyes blinking, her cold, red nose quivering.

“Where’s your mother, child?”

“Please, sir, she’s gone to your house.”

“Oh, that’s it!” smiled the Doctor, “and you’re waiting here.”

He leaned over and looked at the scar which the snow had not hidden.

“Come closer,” he commanded.

He tilted Pearl’s snow-wet face back and studied the deep scar across the left temple.

“Too bad,” he muttered, thinking of the Sun Chaser, and not of the child, whose frightened eyes scanned his face.

“Yes, sir,” agreed Pearl, “it was the lamp did it.”

He who had seen so much of the tragedy of human life heard the blow of the mallet already driving a wedge down between this little thing and the world at large.

He tucked a coin into one of the empty, frost-bitten hands.

“Here, David,” he called, “give the child the best mittens you have—those like my granddaughter’s.”

And with a genial wink he was gone.

“So it’s mittens,” said David with assurance.

Pearl pressed up to the counter, lifted her thin little chin, looked out of her frightened, reddened eyes into the face of the lad above her, and whispered, “Please, sir, not mittens, but something to eat.”

David grasped the edge of the counter and stared. This little thing was hungry.

“You say you’re hungry?” he demanded angrily.

He had never known before that a little child could go hungry and not be fed.

Pearl shrank back. He was angry with her because he thought she couldn’t pay, she believed.

“Please,” she said, “something to eat with this.”

She held out her hand, her money in its tiny palm.

“Didn’t you have any dinner?” demanded the boy.

“Please, sir, no, but this is my money.”

The lad’s face had turned very red—even his neck was red. He was pulling out and setting down with hurried thumps various articles of food, bread, butter, cheese, cookies. They came from every direction storming down on the oaken counter.

“Eat,” commanded the boy savagely, “and take what you can’t eat.”

Growling he turned his back on Pearl.

“Please, sir,” came tremulously, “I haven’t time.”

“Haven’t time to eat?” David whisked about.

Pearl pointed at the bread and butter. “Please, sir, can I buy this with this money.”

She held up the coins and pointed to the loaves.

The boy’s eyes blazed. “Take it all, child, take it all.”

Quickly she set her money down on the counter; quietly she wrapped her little arms about the loaves of bread, and silently she was gone, even while David had turned to find the mittens.

When he came out he dangled the mittens to an empty counter. He looked over the counter to be sure the child had not fallen behind it, then he ran and jerked open the door.

“Little girl,” he called out into the storm, “you’ve forgotten your mittens!”

But there was no answer.

IX

With fear of neighbours, Pearl hurried on breathlessly—on towards the dark place, beyond the lights, where her father was. Mutely she knew that some penalty was attached to being the Sun Chaser’s child. She trembled a little at the thought of the bars. She struggled on through the tempest—that storm in which hundreds of lives were lost upon the great lakes and scores of ships went down and which smothered all the northland in many feet of snow, for this was that autumnal equinox when Saturn hung low in the east with its malefic influences of storm, sickness and suffering.

Deeper and deeper grew the way Pearl had to travel. She passed many places where the house lights shone in warm chinks through the drawn shades, or shades were snapped up for an instant so that the family might look out upon the storm. Each house that she passed was a mile-stone in the battle she fought without a fear except that of neighbors.

Her fingers were so cold that she could no longer move them easily about the bread. Her lips were blue and her teeth chattered.

But the paper-hanger’s was reached and passed, and the child, undaunted, struggled on. The snow fell thick and heavily, mounted in a drift here, was tunneled out by the raging wind there. It was not possible to see five feet ahead of her own two feet. The paper-hanger’s light, not more than twenty feet behind her, gleamed like a mist-shrouded lantern at sea.

Pearl felt for the walk that would lead in to the place where her father was. With one stubbed-out boot toe she scuffed along the edge, found the walk and turned in. The wind was at the child’s side, now, hurling itself against her, but she bent sideways and struggled on. In the white battle that raged all about her, she stubbed her boot against the first step, stumbled a little, righted herself, and climbed the five steps to the lock-up door.

She was glad now, and, clasping the loaves with one arm, she felt for the bars.

It was dark inside and Pearl called, “Father, Father, you in there?”

No answer came and she cried again.

This time it was, “Father, Father, I’m here!”

Still there was silence. She tried to see in, but her forehead only reached to the top of the grating and she could not. The wind whistled and cried about the bars and the snow lashed the old clapboards. Once she thought she heard her father moan and the beat of his feet on the floor: clip-clop, clip-clop. Then out of the darkness of the place into which she could not see, came the words, “The Sun—plenty of joy, plenty of joy for all!”

With one hand Pearl pounded on the door. “Father, Father,” she cried, her voice whipped off by the storm, “I’m here, I’ve brought you something to eat!”

There was no answer, only the audible mumble, turning over and over heavily, like a cartwheel of words, “Plenty of joy—plenty of joy for all—plenty of joy—plenty of joy for all!”

One of the loaves of bread was continually slipping from Pearl’s clasp, and she had to fumble around for it in the drifting snow. Once more she pounded on the door, then she took a loaf, set the other two down, divided the loaf up and pushed it through the bars in pieces, except the crust which would not go through.

Pearl began to feel numb. She reached up, clutched the bars with her stiffening fingers, drew herself up and clung there, like some storm-frightened bird, toes thrust between bars and hands clinging to the grating. She was terrified, and her words beat wing-like and frantic upon the lock-up.

She clung as long as she could, clung till the little fingers had shaped themselves about the bars. Then from the old ragged shoes that could not bear the strain, her feet slipped, jerked her frozen fingers loose, and she fell backwards, rolled off the edge of the steps and lay, whimpering a little, in the snow. One tiny boot had remained fast between the bars, but the other had tumbled in on the Sun Chaser.

But for the tigerish leaps of the storm, all within and without grew swiftly silent. Within, dreams came of realized fleet steps, like warm wind rushing over hill and mountain: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, faster and faster. Dreams came without, too, of a little hand laid in a warm big hand, of a swift step, clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clop, bearing her along the bright edges of sun-chased shadows, over ice-bound roads grown warm and smiling, of food a-plenty and lamps which shone gloriously, of a warm bosom which was not the snow’s, and a mother’s arms.

X

Sybil Clark came out into the storm, her basket refilled. In the whirling snow through which she plunged, now ankle deep, now knee deep, life seemed, like the rage of the tempest, a sort of madness. The storm roared, howled, shrieked its derision about her. The blackness had shut down on her in walls, with once in a while a ghostly white birch flung into relief by a dash of light cast from the hurtling flood of cloud overhead. The storm laughed—she heard Ambrose laughing. Bough struck on bough—she heard the wild clip-clop, clip-clop of his step. He was the storm and the storm was Ambrose and the storm was life.

It was all clear to her and all worthless now except to get to Pearl and care for her, feed her, warm her, protect her.

Suddenly she heard a summoning cry not unlike the cry of her heart. Once again it came almost from under her feet. She looked down into the gleaming, jewelled eyes of a sheep huddled against the stone wall of the home pasture. She was bleating for her lamb. Sybil fought her way back from the pasture onto the road. Only half a dozen rods more and she would be home.

When she was within a few feet of the house its windows became distinct to her. Alternately they flared and grew dim. She entered and beat the snow from her feet and dropped the basket from her stiff hand. She saw that the candle had burned down to the socket of the candlestick, and was sputtering in a pool of thin grease. The fire, too, was almost out.

After the blast of the storm the chilled room felt warm to her. She worked for a few seconds over the stove, pulling off her cotton, sleet-crusted gloves. Then she rubbed her hands dazedly over her face. The warmth of the stove glowed on her. Interest in life, that had ebbed so far away, trembled an instant, and ebbed back to her again. The storm was outside. Inside she had Pearl, she had food for the child, there was a fire, there was shelter. This was one of the times when she did not choose to think of Ambrose. She had learned long ago that there were times when she had no choice but to forget him. She lifted her hat from her head, set a new candle in the stick and went towards the bedroom door.

“Pearl,” she called lightly, “Mother’s come!”

There was no answer.

“Pearl,” she called again. “Mother’s here! I’ve something for you to eat.”

Over her came the emptiness of the room into which she spoke. She felt that there was nothing there. She took one quick step in, saw the vacant bed, turned and hurried into the kitchen. The child might have fallen asleep on a chair. She looked at the chairs, she looked at the floor, she called, she went upstairs, she went through the shed to the barn, she came hurrying and stumbling back.

Her call grew louder and louder, “Pearl! Pearl! Mother is here! Mother has come!”

She looked into closets, she pulled things hither and yon wildly and left them heaped and disordered in the rooms. The candle tilted and swayed in her trembling hand; the grease dripped on the floor.

Then came the moment when, with a cry, she stood stock still in the middle of the kitchen. Pearl was gone! With another cry, hatless, coatless, Sybil Clark turned, flung open the kitchen door, hurled herself into the tempest and, two rods from the house door, was engulfed in the storm.

Out upon the hillside, against the stone wall of the pasture was huddled the sheep still bleating for her lamb. She knew that it was there somewhere in the white, battle-filled vastness. And to the ewe, out of that vastness, had come one cry, one and then another and another, all growing fainter. Above the storm the bleating of the ewe rose and fell, calling, pleading with the furious elements to give her back her little one—that little one the impatient stirring of whose feet she had felt in her womb in the early spring, whose moist, cool mouth had tugged at her udder the summer long.

Frantic, the sheep ran forward a little into the drifts that heaped up before her, and then, chest-deep, backed up to the stone wall again, bleating incessantly. Even crowded against the sheltering wall, the snow almost covered her forequarters. She lurched forward, then back again and stood there quivering, her eyes big with fear. After that she began alternately backing and filling between the stone wall and the whirling snow drifts in front.

Suddenly she stood still and listened. On the white, furious wing of the tempest there came to her some intelligence of her lamb, and she answered with a maddened cry and a plunge out into the drifts. For a few seconds, now here, now there, beyond the stone wall, the whirling snow seemed to boil. There were muffled cries and then there was silence.

XI

The child’s boot had fallen upon the Sun Chaser where he had dropped in a last effort at shaking away out to further sun-chasing. The child’s boot had dropped with a thud on the side of his face and tumbled off onto the floor and then stood quite still and upright beside the Sun Chaser’s mouth. It was a most ragged little shoe. Long ago had its toe been stubbed through, then the buttons had fallen off one by one until only two were left. These had jerked off when Pearl fell and now lay on the floor as bright as a pair of rat’s eyes. There was not much of the boot left, but it still weighed something and was heavier because of the snow, which had drifted through the bars and was settling down into its open top.

When the shoe struck the Sun Chaser it roused him from one stupefied state and precipitated him into one less stupefied. His hands twitched. His feet moved convulsively as he drew leather-shod up under him and sat leaning forward with his hand on wooden-shod. According to expectation and dreams, the work of years, what had fallen upon him being heavy, and striking strange wavering lights from his eyes, might be an analogue to the sun, corresponding to it in all things except warmth. In that mercurial, snow-reflected light, his hand fumbled beside him and his fingers spread out, net-like, for the catch. He felt and caught what was there and drew it towards him and held it up in the quicksilver of snow-light and discovered the shoe.

“Oho!” laughed Ambrose Clark, hope having returned, “little Sun Chasers at work!”

For a few seconds he sat still, playing like a child with the shoe and repeating, “Little Sun Chasers at work!”

Then he stared up at the bars, each bar straight and black in the silver light. Nodules now were on those bars and Ambrose Clark, wooden-shod gathered on the knee of leather-shod, the little shoe in his hand, his eyes large and amazed, stared on.

“Something there and there and there,” he laughed, pointing with the little boot. “Something sun-sent!”

He clutched the shoe and rose swayingly on leather-shod and swung wooden-shod to its mate in a circle like the leg of a compass. There was always wooden-shod to be dragged after him.

“Lots of little Sun Chasers!” he laughed triumphantly, as he drew himself up towards the bars.

Something there—rows of something all snow-flecked and white in the quicksilvern storm-light. With the shoe he touched the pieces of bread.

“You and you and you,” he said. “Change! Sun-rays, wings, birds! Change quick! Change now! Fly in! Fly in!”

Then he touched a piece of the snow-covered bread and said, “Ouch!” in the voice of a child and laughed helplessly.

“Little shoe flew in to me!” he chanted. “Fly in, wings! See, little shoe! See wings! sun wings, storm wings, bird wings, all wings, all white and light. See!”

Gravely then did he match the shoe with each piece of snow-covered bread, laughing wildly like a child delighted with a new game. He dug the pieces of bread from between the bars with the toe of the shoe he held in his hand, repeating, “Fly in, wings!” as each one fell to the floor.

He came to the other shoe and paused, shaking his tawny hair. Two, where there should be only one! This had happened to him before.

“Go ’way, go ’way!” he begged. “Can’t fool me. I’m Sun-Chaser!”

But the other shoe wedged in between the bars remained with the obstinacy of inanimate objects.

“Why don’t you go ’way?” asked Ambrose.

The sturdy shoe remained where it was, the snow flakes on its copper toe melting under the hot breath of the Sun Chaser who was leaning nearer and nearer.

“Are you,” he muttered, “are you, little shoe,—are you there?”

With the shoe in his hand he made a few passes around his head and laughed loudly, and shook his tawny hair in delight over the comicality of the scene. In those orbits common in sun-chasing—in dreams, too, for that matter—the shoe in his hand glided past the side of his head and struck the other shoe, knocking the snow from it and laying bare the copper toe which shone like an eye in the snow light.

“Oho!” laughed the Sun Chaser. “Give it to me, Pearl.”

Then the little channel of recollection which had cleared a bit of the confusion of the Sun Chaser’s thoughts away, even as the rill bears along the skeleton leaf, became clogged, and the Sun Chaser stopped and stared stupidly. He put out a hand and touched the copper tip. He exclaimed and looked down at the shoe in his hand, then out through the bars. He pressed up closer to the bars, his feet crunching on the bread, and on the snow which was drifting in, and long and curiously he looked out into the quicksilver light of the whirling, howling storm. Again he touched the copper tip and said, “Pearl!” He looked about the dark, unlighted room and out into the storm. He dropped the shoe that was in his hand and took hold of the bars and pressed his face against them just above where the copper toe was wedged in fast.

For an instant again his mind, like a rift in tempestuous clouds, was very clear.

“Pearl,” he called, “Pearl, come in out of the storm!”

For the moment he knew where he was and what had happened. Some convergence of thoughts had bored through the wreckage of his mind, and he was himself and Pearl was—God only knew where!

“Pearl!” he shouted louder, grasping the bars and rattling them until the whole lock-up shook.

But he did not call again to her to come, for he knew that she could not. She was out there somewhere in that world of white rage and shrieking winds. The shoe in his hand he put between his teeth, and grasping the bars, shook them till the whole building cracked under the ice and snow. But the shoe wedged in between the bars remained where it was and the door continued fast. He shouted, he cried, he pleaded in tones that were whipped away on the gale. For answer came the wolfish howl of the tempest and the leap of the storm upon the lock-up. And with a yell he flung himself bodily against the door.

XII

They started out, scuffling knee-deep through the snow, holding the lantern up, now here, now there, to be sure that they were in the road, faintly descrying a house lamp set in some window and glowing feebly like the most nebulous of stars, turning their faces aside to draw breath and then facing the storm and pushing on.

“What’s that, Stephen?” asked the Doctor. “Don’t you hear something over there?”

“No, sir.”

“There it is again.”

The cry reached them again, a long, hungry, wild cry.

“That awful sound?” asked the Sheriff.

The scream came again, mad, terrible and muffled as if it were being choked under heavy blankets.

Both men came to a standstill.

“My God, Stephen, what has happened?”

“Do you think it’s one of those Canada lynxes lost in the storm?”

“Did you hear it then?” the Doctor asked.

“No, but—”

“There it is again!”

“It isn’t a lynx, Doctor, but I don’t know what it is. It’s out there in the direction we’re going. The walk’s beyond here some place.”

“Isn’t it over there?”

“Yes, there.”

The Doctor was fumbling with the toe of his heavy golosh for the little step up that would tell him where the path led in to the lock-up.

“I’ve found it,” he said. “Come, make haste!”

Even as they turned at right angles to the direction in which they had been walking, the scream came again and following it, distinct even in the tumult of the tempest were loud blows and a sound as of running feet clip-clop, clippity-clop, clippity-clippity-clop.

“He’s trying to get out.”

“Hurry!” shouted the Doctor. “Something’s gone wrong there.”

Weird, maddened, frantic, the cry rose again and with it the beat of the stamping feet: clip-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clippity-clop.

“Listen,” said the sheriff, “he’s calling for something!”

Out through the rage of wind and snow, out through the night, out of the darkness, the cry shaped itself into words: “Pearl! Aah-yaiah! Pearl! Pearl! Aah-yaiah!”

“It’s the little one,” came from the Sheriff.

“Something’s gone wrong,” muttered the Doctor.

“Aah-yaiah! Pearl! Pearl!” came the wail again. “Aah-yaiah, little shoe, bring her in! Bring her in! Aah-yaiah!”

“Something about a shoe,” replied the Doctor. “Here,” he shouted towards the lock-up, “be quiet there! We’re coming. Be quiet!”

“Pearl! Pearl! Pearl! Aah-yaiah!” rose wildly and was whirled off into the vastness of the storm.

“Can you see him anywhere?” asked the Doctor.

“Has he got out?” asked the Sheriff.

“No, see there! See his face, his eyes, he’s up on the door clinging to the bars.”

“He’s gone mad,” said the Sheriff.

“Something is wrong,” came the reply.

“Aah-yaiah, little shoe, bring her in—bring Pearl in!” rose in a wail. “Bring her in—can’t get out—bring her in. Aah-yaiah, Pearl, Pearl!”

The Doctor held the lantern high and close to the bars. Its light gleamed on tawny hair, the blood-shot eyes, the distorted face, the clinging hands of the Sun Chaser, and upon the heel of a little shoe stuck fast between the bars.

“There’s her shoe,” whispered the Doctor.

He held up the lantern looking into the cell.

“What’s this?”

The Sheriff stumbled, leaned over and took out of the snow a loaf of bread still in its paraffin paper wrapping.

“Bread,” said the Sheriff.

He held the lantern high and, his face close to the knotted, clinging fingers of the Sun Chaser, peered further into the lock-up.

“Aah-yaiah,” wailed the Sun Chaser.

There was froth about his lips and snow shining in his hair. And he chattered with his teeth and shook his hair, and, clinging to the bars, rattled them.

“He must have seen her,” muttered the Doctor, “she’s here somewhere.”

“Waiting for the Sun—the sun—the sun,” repeated the Sun Chaser. “Sun up and Pearl found—little Pearl!”

“Here,” said the Sheriff, and his voice was frightened, “here!”

The Sheriff was brushing the snow away from the child’s white face.

The Doctor turned on the Sheriff. “My God, see what you’ve done!”

The Sheriff stood looking down rigidly at the swift work of the Doctor in uncovering the child, the light of the lantern revealing the face and the white throat.

The Doctor dropped on his knees, thrust his arms deep into the snow, under the child, and, gathering her up gently, rose to his feet again.

In the light of the lantern which the Sheriff held, the child’s arms could be seen pointing stiff and unmoving upwards, the little fingers still crooked as they had been when they were wrenched from the bars. Her eyes were closed and the snowflakes on the little forehead made a twinkling halo about her hair.

“We’ll take her in there. Unlock the door!” commanded the Doctor.

The Sheriff’s key grated in the lock and, Pearl’s little arms rigid and upstretched, they stepped into the cell.

When he beheld Pearl and the Doctor the Sun Chaser smiled happily. He touched the lantern and laughed childlikely, gratefully.

“Sun found Pearl—little Pearl came in—little shoe brought Pearl in!”

“Shall I stand against the door?” asked the Sheriff.

“No,” growled the Doctor, “somebody’s always been standing against any door that might have let him out.”

The Sun Chaser touched his lips with the shoe he held in his hand, then he touched the child’s cheek. “Little shoe, wake Pearl! Little shoe, wake Pearl! More sun! More sun!”

Suddenly he leaped into the air and started running around the cell, laughing, shaking his hair and clattering with wooden-shod and leather-shod: clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, and humming over and over, “Going after it—going after it—going after more sun for little Pearl!”

“Light up whatever you have here,” said the Doctor.

“There is no lamp here,” came from the Sheriff.

The Doctor was chafing Pearl’s hands with snow. “I suppose you think when a man gets into a place like this he needs less light rather than more. Eh?”

“Keep that door open,” commanded the Doctor.

The Sheriff set his lantern down and turned to push the door open.

The Sun Chaser seized it, crying out, “Here’s sun. Doctor, here’s sun for little Pearl.”

“Set it down, Ambrose,” commanded the Doctor quietly, “I need it just there for the child.”

Ambrose set it down and then came and sat on the floor beside the Doctor.

“Pearl asleep?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied the Doctor.

“Oh!” said the Sun Chaser. “Sun coming to my Pearl!”

“Now,” said the Doctor, “start up the stove here!”

“There isn’t any,” admitted Stephen Short. And he dropped his head against the upright of the open door and began to sob. “Don’t blame me, for God’s sake,” he begged.

“I don’t,” growled the Doctor, tenderly stripping the white shoulders of the child. “It’s what you represent I blame.”

The Sun Chaser paused in the midst of tossing the child’s shoe up into the air and looked at the Sheriff.

“Don’t cry, boy,” he said, “sun’s coming!”

Then he continued his play. Wooden-shod on the knee of leather-shod, he kissed the little shoe and tossed it into the air.

From the doorway continued the heavy sobbing of the Sheriff, mingled with the long drawn-out howl of the wind.

Reassuringly the Sun Chaser looked up at the Sheriff and smiled. “Sun’s warm, never mind,” he said.

Again he leapt into the air, and started running about the cell, laughing, shaking his hair, and clattering with wooden-shod and leather-shod: clip-clop, clippity-clop, clip-clop, clippity-clop, and humming to himself, “Going after sun for Pearl, after sun for Pearl. Sun’s warm!”

“See the child’s hands,” muttered the Doctor, “just as they froze clinging about the bars.”

Whether the fine white lines of birch saplings etch the sombreness of bare woods or the golden leaves spread a glow through misty days, or spring flows again through every artery of the great world; whether the edges of the mist over the meadows about Northerly are smoke yellow with saffron from the autumn maple trees or silvery as the depths of a little pool where one might wash and become pure; whether the chaliced sunlight brim in the thick, translucent stems of plants or snow twinkle and melt on the globes of village lamps; whether gray stones be luminous at dawn or pale in the full light; whether Night lean down from the cliffs and draw dusk with him to passion and the stars; whether the shepherd’s purse be full or empty, wings flash or lightning glow, seed pods swell or rattle in the wind,—many a pilgrim passed through Northerly, there to lean hands on staff before a ruinous little building set somewhere between school house and paper-hanger’s, and there to gaze and gaze at a child’s shoe which no hands had ever withdrawn from between the bars whence a child’s foot had slipped from shoe to snow.

Many years have gone by, but neither in wind nor in rain, sunlight or darkness, at dawn or dusk, has any one ever been pushed over that threshold into the cell again. Those who believed that Christ was no longer in the world, those who believed that Christ was; those with broken lives and those whose lives were whole; they, who, spending themselves in good works, were yet hungry, and those who did less and yet were satisfied through faith; they who had found themselves and they who in dreams by night and work by day sought for themselves; they who were young and would learn; they who still chased the sun and they who had found it; and they who were old and had a brave farewell to make; yea, the running feet of children between schoolhouse and paper-hanger’s—all, all, passed that way, paused, gazed upon the little shoe, beaten upon by every wind of heaven, warmed by every ray of sun, thought of the price paid, some of the lesson learned, heard the ceaseless tapping of the branches on the roof of the old place like an echo of long forgotten steps; clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, felt a little unseen hand placed in their hand, and passed on,—comforted by a child’s love.

AT THE END OF THE ROAD[14]

By WALTER J. MUILENBURG

From The Forum

THE latter part of the summer found me tramping through the heavy, grey dust of a road in southern Iowa, so tired that I scarcely felt the hunger that had bitten me in the morning. Now, at noon, the hot, August sun sent its untempered rays down upon me as though it, too, united with all the world in fiery hatred for the wanderer upon the open road. Once I had seen romance in the long trail that always beckoned alluringly from the thin, indefinite distance where it touched the horizon but, though I had pursued with high hopes, the horizon ever lay beyond and left its promise unfulfilled. Now its mystery, the mystery of the unattainable, mocked me as I sweltered in the suffocating heat of a burning earth. The dim, green fields I had dreamed of, where Freedom reigned, were still far away. I was sick of it all. Life could not be solved so simply.

This unhappy trend of my thoughts was broken when I rounded a curve in the road and saw to the northwest a small, woody town lying somnolent under the hot, noon sun of August. From a grove on the outskirts of the village came the unmistakable tunes of a merry-go-round. Ah, here was a chance to pick up a little money to tide me on my way!

I quickly reached the edge of the grove, and ducked under a single strand of wire that doubtless marked the sacred precincts of celebration. Now the rising and falling hum of a large concourse of people struck me pleasantly, for I liked the impersonal companionship of crowds.

As I made my way through the trees, I saw that it was the typical country town celebration which had become familiar to me in my wanderings. The daughters dressed too gaudily and the mothers too sombrely. The men stood about in groups, smoking and discussing their crops. Everywhere, alone or in groups, swaggered small boys, exhibiting large satisfaction in unreproved stickiness and in the wide choice of indigestibles. Nevertheless, it struck me now, as it always did, that there was an undercurrent of weariness running through the whole crowd. Released for a day from the midsummer drudgery of the farm, their senses were too dull to appreciate such a change.

Finally, I reached the row of stands where all kinds of foods and drinks were dispensed to the hungry and thirsty swarm of people. My request for a job was repeatedly refused after a single glance at my disreputable attire. At last I reached a hamburger stand at the end of the line. The two proprietors were plainly having a hard time in handling the crowd. Here I was quickly hired for the day.

I threw off my coat and donned a greasy apron. It was fine to get back on the old job again, I thought, as I slapped sizzling hamburgers between unbuttered buns. The noise of the crowd, insistently surging about us, seemed comforting.

The balloon ascension in the early afternoon gave me leisure to study my employers. The one who had given me the job was short and fat, with tight-fitting trousers of greenish hue showing beneath the apron he wore. Of Teutonic origin, surely. His face reflected his nationality, a red nose issuing bluntly from heavy cheeks and light blue eyes, crowned by a bald head that gleamed palely out of a fringe of sandy hair. Seeing me observing him, he came up and announced that he was Dutch Frank. Then he turned to his partner, a tall, loose-limbed, grey-faced and grey-haired man who impressed me as prematurely old from dissipation. Out of the dark-rimmed hollows falling deeply from the high cheek-bones, his eyes, filled with a wide, hungry abstraction, stared out through the branches of the leaves about us.

“Let me,” said Dutch Frank, expansively, “give you a knock-down to my revered partner in this noble enterprise. His name is Bill and he’s got the tastes of a Kentucky colonel—he takes his whiskey raw.”

“Howdy!” Bill’s face remained expressionless as he extended a limp hand toward me. “Why don’t y’ ever forget that old spiel of yours, Frank?” he concluded in moody expostulation.

The conversation gradually dropped off. Bill again withdrew into himself and gazed with lack-lustre eyes into the air. Frank sat on a barrel of cider and smoked a pipe in stoical enjoyment.

The respite from labor soon ended and the hot, tired mob once more surrounded us. The air grew damp and fetid. Strong above the spiciness of hamburger came the sickening odor of peanuts in process of mastication. The noise of celebration rolled up and enveloped us. Next to our stand, a dark-skinned vendor of fruits and cold drinks bawled out incessantly to the restless throng and his words became wearyingly familiar to me through constant repetition. “Come on over, folks, come on over. We’ll treat yuh right. Don’t yuh ever git hongry? Don’t yuh ever git tired?” The bellow ended in a note of ineffable sorrow. Then, chancing to spy some attractive face in the crowd, he cried out in an insinuating tone, “Oh, you Lizzie, there ... you with the bright blue eyes. Won’t y’ come over and talk awhile? I’m the pride of the state o’ Bingville, America’s fav’rite son.” The girl giggled and tried to assume a demure expression but her embarrassment caused her face to draw up into rather terrifying contortions. “Why, you poor little son-of-a-gun!” exclaimed her admirer in a voice that mingled pity and contempt. “Say, ain’t these corn-feds a nice bunch?” he grinned at me as I came up to borrow a box.

Time passed swiftly. Though we could not see the sun, we knew that it was declining, for the oppressive, stale heat of the day was swept from under the trees by the cool, wet breeze of evening, which held the peculiar smell of dew fallen on dust. From the neighboring meadow, to the north, came the pungent smell of wild hay. Then the sun fell to the level of the horizon, threw a dim red curtain over the west, and faded away. After the work and grime of the day, twilight came restfully.

I heard a movement at my side and, turning, saw Bill leaning on the counter, chin resting in his palm, his wide grey eyes filled with the dreamy, troubled stare I had noticed in the early afternoon.

“Well, Bill, what do you think of it?” He remained silent, looking sombrely into the distance. Finally he said, irrelevantly, “See that yellow strip out there in the west? It’s so clear, almost wet—like whiskey.” He moved a little closer. His voice, though low, quivered tensely, almost out of control. “Oh, I wish this burg wasn’t dry—I got t’ have a drink!” I noticed that all the softness had fled from the eyes and a hard, desperate eagerness lay there instead. His hands grasped the edge of the counter so hard that the veins stood out blue and snakelike in the ghastly yellow skin. “I guess I’m all in, Bo,” he concluded, and as I saw again the grey face I believed him.

Lights began to appear. The merry-go-round blazed with color and its unending discord seemed to beat uselessly against the faint line of darkness that hurled the jarring tunes back upon us derisively. In the narrow belt of light the crowd moved restlessly, after its short rest at meal time. The older men and women had gone home with the children and only the young people remained. As evening grew, they threw off all restraint. Groups of heavy-faced farmer boys swaggered past and cried out familiarly to the young women they met. These answered back as roughly and usually occasioned a roar of laughter by their sharply personal replies. Then liquor began to flow from some unseen source. The crowd divided into groups, all anxious for a fight. Several times we narrowly avoided trouble by Frank’s seasoned diplomacy. Suddenly I noticed that Bill had disappeared.

After an hour the work became pressing. On all sides, the mob clamored. The cool night air became warm and stifling. The mixture of odors struck like a blow. Above the general smell of hamburger and fruit, rose the heavy fumes of whiskey and cheap perfume.

In a lull, when the capricious throng had ebbed away, I rested against the counter and looked up through the leaves into the night sky. How strange it seemed suddenly to feel the peaceful beauty of the night, with the twinkling stars shining so silently in their ebony setting, so indifferent and untouched by the brutishness raging about us. As the wind stirred the leaves, it brought the cool touch of fog, gathered, I fancied, from some grassy hollow where fireflies burned their tiny lanterns of green and yellow.

Immersed in pleasant revery, I did not at once notice Bill come in until he coughed. He leaned upon the counter beside me and looked into the darkness. His eyes shone with a warm light and a faint color touched his cheeks.

“Resting, are yuh?” he asked sociably, turning toward me.

His breath came to me heavy with the fumes of whiskey. We stood there for a long time. I was too tired to talk. Bill seemed to indulge in pleasant retrospection.

“Well, Bill,” I spoke lazily, “how do you like this kind of a life?”

His expression changed swiftly. “Rotten!” he exclaimed, so vehemently that I was startled.

“How did you get into such work, then?”

He settled himself more firmly against an empty barrel. “I started when I was a kid,” he began, in his low monotone. “My folks didn’t want me around so I got t’ work. Found a job with a guy that sold hot dogs on circuit fairs. Afterwards, I knocked about, but I liked the crowds so I went into cahoots with Dutch Frank. We tried skin games for awhile, but the law got pretty tight so we started a hamburger outfit.” He stopped. We were silent once more. The crowd had slowly deserted us until only a few stragglers walked uneasily. The night had crept in closer and now, as its silence came to us, the yellow tawdriness of the lights seemed incongruous beside the softer darkness of nature. I looked at my watch. Eleven o’clock. An hour more before the lights went out.

“Tell you what.” Bill had evidently been thinking back into his life. “I’m going to cut out all this pretty soon.” He came closer and spoke confidentially. “I got a girl up to Peoria, Illinois. When she was just a little runt, I found her on the streets, about half froze. Took her to where I stayed and fed her good. Then, when me ’n Frank went out on the circuits, she stayed with an old woman who took care of her. Gee, she got to be the purtiest little kid you ever seen. The boys laughed at me and says I was an old fool but I tell you they was pretty nice to her when she happened around.”

He fell into a fit of retrospection.

“What then?”

“When she was eighteen, she run away.” He commenced abruptly. “It just about busted me up, I guess. I started boozing pretty strong then and one night I got the D.T.’s bad. Then she come back. She felt so mean about it that I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t anyway—I was too glad. After that, she was as straight as a string. Went to church too. She always wanted me to quit work and let her take care o’ me but I wouldn’t do it. And then, I was tryin’ to cut the booze first. So I went ahead with Frank—but I guess I’ll go on the water-wagon soon.” “Say,” he lowered his voice slightly, “I got a letter from her a couple o’ days ago. She wrote that she was goin’ t’ be married to a fine young fellow and that they was goin’ t’ run a little truck farm just outside of Peoria. And she says, ‘Dad, we got it all fixed up. You got t’ throw up your work and come and live with us. You’re goin’ t’ get the warmest room in the house—on the south side. Besides, we need you to take care of the chickens.’ What do you know about that!” He laughed deep in his throat. “An old cuss like me feeding chickens. But see me beat it to that little farm as soon as the season’s over. Can’t jump my contract with my partner, y’ know.”

I was filled with a peculiar pity for the old man, a pity mixed with pleasure in his good-fortune. Surely, he needed the care of a kind daughter. Out there on the farm, wearing faded blue overalls, surrounded by grunting swine and bawling calves—I smiled—Bill would certainly look out of place there.

Slowly, as the place became deserted, the lights winked out, one by one, until our stand alone stood out in the gloom. Everything seemed asleep. I walked over to where Frank lay dozing in the grass. Happening to glance behind me, I caught Bill hastily removing a bottle from his lips. So he was drinking again! Oh, well, let him go to the devil in his own way.

I went to Frank and asked if I might retire for the night.

“Sure,” he grunted sleepily. “You’ll find a couple of blankets in that box yonder. You can lay right here if you ain’t afraid of sleepin’ on the ground.”

I unfolded the blankets and had hardly touched them before oblivion seized my senses. From this sleep I was wakened by a kick in the ribs. “Get up!” Frank was yelling at me, “and beat it to a doctor.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, drowsily.

“Bill’s run wild—half crazy with booze.”

Grabbing my coat, which I had been using as a pillow, I stumbled out into the darkness, but hesitated as an awful cry came from behind me. In it sounded such unutterable fear that I stopped, shivering.

“Float along!” Frank’s voice had a desperate note in it. “He’s workin’ into a fit again.”

It seemed a long way to the town and my shoes were soon soaked with dew which afterwards caked into mud as I struck the grey, dusty wraith of road. Even then, I felt the comfortable security of a dry road in the cold, wet darkness and appalling silence of late night. By rare luck, I met a belated traveller who directed me to the doctor’s residence.

After I had pounded on the door until my knuckles were raw, the doctor finally appeared. When I stated my case, he seemed pleased in a leisurely way, at the strangeness of it all.

“Hurry, please!” I urged, growing angry. He seized his case and I could hear the muffled thudding of his feet behind me in the dust of the road.

When we arrived at the stand, Frank came from behind a tree. He was mopping his face vigorously.

“The old cuss’s crazy!” he groaned. “Go in there once and see.”

Inside of the stand, Bill lay on the blanket that I had vacated. His eyes, red and blood-shot, glared wildly at us. Like a tired, beaten dog, he whined in his throat. Then he began to mumble in a rising voice until it came as a prolonged scream. “Look!” he cried, clutching at the darkness with his skinny talons. “See, it’s tryin’ to get me. You devil—!” He fought madly with some invisible horror. His face twisted into awful lines. Perspiration glistened on his forehead, but his face was ashen pale. He lay silent for a moment, sobbing. Then, without warning, his voice rose into a wild scream so full of unfathomed terror that the doctor looked fearfully about him into the darkness. I felt my finger nails cutting into my palms. But Bill was subsiding and, at last, lay in a stupor. The doctor bent over him for a few moments and then arose. “Delirium Tremens,” he announced, with a gesture of helplessness. Then he added, “A fool—such a fool.” Encouraged by seeing that we were listening respectfully to him, he swore with the careful pride of a man who knows how to swear virtuously.

“Pretty bad, Doc?” Frank asked mildly.

“He’s got a weak heart,” answered the doctor shortly, “probably he won’t recover from this.”

I suddenly thought of the pretty girl in Peoria who was going to repay Bill’s kindness at last—but too late. For her, too, life would resolve itself into darkness.

“Poor little kid,” I murmured, “—and poor old Bill.”

They looked at me questioningly, so I told them about the letter Bill had received from his adopted daughter. The doctor stalked about in great sympathy. Frank seemed unmoved. I felt a hot anger against him. He noted this and grinned.

“So he told you that story too, did he?” Frank spoke in a curious tone. “He always does that when he’s soused.”

“It wasn’t true?” I exclaimed.

“Oh, he picked up a fool kid from the streets once but she ran away with a travelling man. When Bill is tight with booze, he’s got it all fixed up. Poor old devil—she never come back.”

We were silent after that. The far, crystal-clear notes of the whip-poor-will came to us faintly like the impersonal, haunting presence of the night, which seemed passively to behold the tragedy of life, sorrowing at it, but unable to help. The gloom deepened about us and slowly the lifeless chill of grey dawn wound its tenuous fingers about us as we sat in the yellow flare of light, stupidly considering the futile struggles of the broken man lying in our midst.

I was sick with the heaviness of my senses. I remembered the Open Road; its promise of freedom had led to this—the painted lure of life and youth was but the mask of wanton death.

And in the east, dawn gathered in a cloudless sky that promised another hot day.

THE BIG STRANGER ON DORCHESTER HEIGHTS[15]

By ALBERT DU VERNEY PENTZ

From The Boston Transcript

PERHAPS it was Saturday, anyway, it was one of the first days of March, 1860. Paul Du Verney and Bowdoin Capen had been playing marbles on a bare spot of clay near the junction of Dorchester street and Broadway, South Boston. It was afternoon, and not late. At that period school hours were different; Wednesday had a half-holiday and Saturday but a half-holiday. Hence this was either Wednesday, Saturday, or truancy. Paul was capable of a companionable lapse of that character; Bowdy was a persuasive boy. When the sun comes beaming north it entices people out into its smiling warmth; often induces older persons than those just entering their teens to bathe in its glorious flood.

When the boys parted Bowdy took the marbles home with him; Paul’s pockets were as light as his spirits, as he went up Linden street toward where his father was at work on a row of houses then building on the Old Harbor side of the hill.

. . . . . . . . .

About half-way up this street Paul heard someone coming from behind with long, strong strides. Turning, the boy saw a gigantic man swinging up the narrow walk; soon the two came close together. “Say, Bub, is this the right road to Dorchester Heights?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pretty steep walking, isn’t it? Ain’t many hills where I live.”

Paul volunteered to guide the stranger, and the foot of the preserve was quickly reached.

Curiosity prompted the boy to climb the incline in company with the visitor. At the top they halted in the middle near the little reservoir which then occupied the present site of a schoolhouse.

“Of course you know the history of this place?” asked the stranger.

“Everybody knows that.”

They faced the harbor; the State House dome shone far away on the left.

“The fleet lay about there,” said the boy, glad to show his knowledge.

“Then Washington planted his guns where we stand.”

“So everybody says, sir.”

“And George Washington probably stood just where I now stand. Here he made history that counts for something.”

The great big man stooped over and scrabbled up a handful of pebbles which he put into his trousers pocket. He was dressed in black cloth; he wore a tall hat, as many men did at that time.

“Probably this gravel was brought here from somewhere else. Well! So was I; but both of us are better for having been here.”

This was not said to Paul but addressed to the surroundings.

. . . . . . . . .

Soon the stranger saw all that interested him and said, “Bub, I am glad to have been here. I may not have another opportunity, and am glad to have come.”

Paul accompanied the man down to Broadway and Dorchester street. He had never seen so big a man before, nor so gaunt a face, nor such sad eyes that could light up so finely. This face fixed itself in his memory.

After a long wait a horse-car came along and the big man thanked Paul for his kindness, wrapped the boy’s hand and wrist within his gigantic hand and went city-ward.

. . . . . . . . .

The summer came with intense interest. The crisis with slavery had come. Every one was excited. Conventions had nominated candidates and political clubs were formed. Wide-Awakes paraded every night with flaming lamps and oil-cloth capes. Paul was now fourteen and quite tall, so he enrolled.

He was one of the most enthusiastic members of the club, for there at the end of Waitts Hall on the high wall was a picture of the big stranger who had visited Washington Heights in his company. Beneath was

“ABRAHAM LINCOLN.”

THE MENORAH[16]

By BENJAMIN ROSENBLATT

From The Bellman

IT was a secluded little town in Russia, a town within the Pale—unpretentious, undignified. Very narrow and crooked were the streets; dingy and dilapidated, the low-thatched shanties; bare and bleak, the surrounding country. And the inhabitants partook of the pervading grime. They stooped in their walk, and stuttered in their speech—unerring tokens of the Jewish dwellers in the dominions of the White Tsar.

Yet the town did not lack its few aristocrats, its scanty patricians, before whom all the rest bent the crooked knee. But woe to the erstwhile Crœsus who lost his all, and joined the tatterdemalions. The victim and his progeny forever after stooped in their walk, faltered in their speech, and no wisdom or virtue could raise them from the dust.

The town had its prying eye on the evergrowing list of the once mighty who had slipped on the downhill road, soon to be cast into the trough of oblivion.

Among those who still received the homage of the populace, but whose star was on the wane, was Lea Reb Kalman’s. Her spouse, Reb Shloime, like Enoch, walked with God. His days were spent in the synagogue, enmeshed in a continuous maze of cabalistic hair-splitting. It was Lea who, living up to the lofty opinion of the Psalmist, toiled and spun for her household. The cares of the home, including the raising of funds, devolved on her shoulders. The town, therefore, brushed aside the master of the home, bearded Reb Shloime, who swallowed science and snuff to excess, and the family was universally known by the patronymic of Lea—the house of Lea Reb Kalman’s.

Long after the demise of the first Reb Kalman, the grandfather of Lea, the town shook with the rumors of his vast wealth, the numbers of holy scrolls he donated, the silver and gold utensils that lined the shelves of his home. But grandpa Reb Kalman could not forestall the pending ruin of the saintly Lea. The family pedigree was rated at a premium, but the wolf at Lea’s door grew more and more daring. Then, too, there was a marriageable daughter, but no dowry; a house filled with the furniture used by two generations, and no prospect of change. Lea’s patience and self-control and dissimulation were never found wanting. The true situation had to be hidden from public gaze.

The very closest neighbors were kept in the dark. Lea blinded them by the only link that still bound her impoverished family to its ancestral glory, a seven-branched antique candelabrum of massive gold and of excellent workmanship which Lea placed on a pedestal in the center of the best room, to spread its halo of aristocracy over the largest possible area. This Menorah enjoyed a local fame, and from near-by towns people would often come to view the treasure of Reb Kalman. They entered the house with reverence and awe, and were sure to overlook all that was dingy.

Poor Lea played the financier, and felt the ground under her giving way. The store of dry goods and miscellanies, which was left in the family in her charge, dwindled away by degrees. What the town really knew to be her journeys for the sake of business were frequently no more than visits to some well-to-do branch of the family in a remote town. There she would give vent to her pent-up tears and beg a loan to uphold the family dignity, so that Reb Shloime would not be forced to leave his spiritual heights and join the wicked ways of the pursuers of wealth.

“My enemies shall never live to see me go to work like Esau,” he would often exclaim amidst a spasm of coughing. He looked upon Lea as the guilty party, and she could not but agree with him. Never would she have had the glory of being led to the canopy by such a saint, if it had not been for the rating of her family. She could not now drag him into the mire. On her rested the burden of keeping untarnished the crest of Reb Kalman.

Slowly the plaster on the once stately mansion detached itself from the moldy wall, and hung as if in mockery; more than one of the massive oak chairs and tables became wabbly and was about to give way. Lea’s eyes followed the ruin to its minutest detail; but she clung desperately to the many-branched Menorah that cast its soft glamour over the sordid house.

The eyes of old Lea gradually took on a hungry, startled look. Her body was undersized. The face that looked out of the white kerchief was pinched and furrowed criss-cross. Still she felt a latent power that might turn her into a giant at the approach of danger to her only treasure.

For interwoven into her very fiber was the consciousness that the golden thread which bound her to her famed forefather was so feeble, that she, and what was hers, might be instantly swallowed up by the crooked streets, initiated into their ragged fraternity, engulfed in their mud, wiped out—forgotten, forgotten. A cry of anguish would escape her breast, and she would gaze at the golden relic as at a living thing, so endeared to her heart. None would dare to impeach her standing with that talisman before her. Her husband must respect her. The town must not forget her.

Often, when the strain of making both ends meet became unbearable, Lea prayed only for a husband for her daughter. After that, let the Most High send what He willed. The town called her the wide awake mother. All knew how she ran about, her kerchief halfway off her head, in search of a bridegroom for her only daughter. And she contrived to make appointments with the matchmaker for no other day but the Sabbath. Then the candelabrum appeared more prominent on the silvery tablecloth, and radiated such awe that the Shadchan could not have the audacity to propose aught but the very flower of Israel. He could not for a moment forget that he faced Lea Reb Kalman’s.

There had been times when it was not so difficult for Lea to keep the secret of her growing poverty from the world. Long after her marriage the house looked bright, and enjoyed many relics from the departed grandfather. There was a silver cup of rare design, the luster of which kept the neighbors for a long time from detecting that the home library of holy books was dwindling away. A string of pretty pearls hung from Lea’s neck, distracting attention from the threadbare dress of moire antique. A younger daughter was then alive, a slender, airy creature who added aristocratic grace to the bliss of the Sabbath, when the candles in the Menorah burned brightly, each little flame representing the soul of a departed kinsman. Old Shloime did not cough then, and he paced the room in his Sabbath caftan, his earlocks dangling, while he snapped his fingers and sang aloud his greetings to the angels that bring peace to the home.

Through the arts of Lea, the final disappearance of the pearls and books had little effect on the neighbors. She had let them go so gradually, with such finely shaded diminuendo, that her reputation had suffered but little.

When the town was in want of some one to go the rounds, and collect for the poor, it turned to Lea Reb Kalman’s. She walked from house to house, her ears tingling, her eyes aflame; and she collected groschens for the needy.

To the silver cup she clung tenaciously for a long time; and used it, together with the candelabrum, as a stalking horse. The value of the cup was slight, but she dreaded its loss; and she feared Reb Shloime, who kept the mug for his “wine of blessing.”

Once, however, when the younger child grew ill, Shloime noticed that Lea took the cup with her on one of her journeys. He fastened his eyes on her trembling hands, as she cast wild glances at the Menorah. For a moment he saw ruin before him, the devastation of everything. But she took only the cup, and with the little money tried to save the child, relying on the Almighty for the rest. When the girl died, and the mother threw her arms wildly in the air, and uttered her protest against the Lord, pious old Shloime shouted: “Silence, you have not sacrificed enough; you—” He was interrupted, for Lea was carried swooning into the open air.

Later, when the little corpse of their child lay on the ground, near its head two burning candles stuck into the lustrous candelabrum, and the assembled mourners, glancing at the celebrated relic, spoke in respectful whispers of the great Reb Kalman who died in the Lord, Reb Shloime felt a guilty shame, despite his habitual exaltation, toward his poor wife.

Lea would stay for hours near her golden gift, caressing it with her wrinkled hands, watching lest a speck of dust should dim its gloss. Every Friday, at sundown, as she stood with her face covered by her hands, murmuring her prayers over the lighted candles, she also prayed for the soul of the departed child. Then her husband’s harsh words would suddenly startle her, “You have not sacrificed enough,” and she would turn from the candelabrum, her face livid, her breast heaving.

One day, Lea returned from one of her journeys with a fire in her dimmed eyes that Shloime had never noticed before. In tones that sounded to him at first like an apology, and then like an atonement, she spoke of good news.

“A young man of birth, a family of means,” she related with scanty breath,—“an excellent match for our daughter. They wanted such high dowry. But thank God, as soon as you acquiesce we shall have her betrothed.”

Reb Shloime marveled at her abrupt speech. Even he noticed that Lea’s lips were parched, her eyes aflame, and that she spoke as if she had swallowed her sobs. But he ascribed it all to the excitement of leading a daughter to the canopy.

For the first time since her marriage, Lea had a secret which she kept from her husband. She was aware that she could not ward off the inevitable. Soon, not only her husband, the entire town, would learn of her fall. Her little body was shaken by a chill that ran from the roots of her hair to the tips of her fingers. Her teeth chattered in her mouth with the effort to keep from shouting the terrible secret at the top of her voice. But her trembling old lips moved in a whisper, in a continuous mumble: “O Lord of my fathers, O dear God, you know a mother’s heart—I had to sell grandpa’s Menorah, my magic Menorah.”

Shloime could not make out her incoherent cry at night, “I did not have enough for the dowry.”

It was one of her relatives on the paternal side who had bought Reb Kalman’s legacy, the candelabrum, yielding to the condition that Lea should keep the treasure till after her daughter’s betrothal.

In a frenzy, Lea had run to the tailor’s long before it was time. While her husband was away at the synagogue, celebrating with his cronies, she was afraid to stay alone at the house with the treasure that was no longer hers. She managed to spend the days before the ceremony amid the rustle of linens, the clicking of scissors, the flying of needles.

The night of the wedding, she frisked about and danced so wildly that the guests eyed one another in astonishment. Even at “the covering of the bride,” when the young girl sheds tears under her veil, while the bard, accompanied by the sighing violins and the wails of the women, speaks of happiness and misery, of life and death—even then Lea stood with eyes dry and staring.

Only for a moment her face contracted spasmodically, as she imagined that she was the cause of the wailing; even as the Talmud says: “Yea, the poor are likened unto the dead.” Better had she been now a corpse—she, the daughter of Israel who reduced her learned spouse to penury; she, who was no more the aristocratic Lea Reb Kalman’s. With an effort she straightened up, for fear that her husband might suspect something. She recalled a song she knew in her childhood, and, placing herself before the bride, she sang in a falsetto:

And when you depart hence,
And when you depart,—
Oh, think how lonely you leave me.

And Reb Shloime, with eyes somewhat the worse for the wine, looked shyly at her and laughed hoarsely, and nudged his neighbors, with the incessant remark: “Isn’t she as blooming as a bride? As I am a Jew, she looks as young as a bride!”

PENANCE[17]

By ELSIE SINGMASTER

From The Pictorial Review

FOR the young officer, the weeks dragged intolerably. He loathed war, its dusty marches, its rough camps, its horrible sights, its lacerating wounds. He was fond of study and travel, but for four years he had scarcely opened a book and he had traveled only in the saddle from battle-ground to battle-ground.

Though he loathed war, hated its waste, its cruelty, Buckingham was a brave soldier. His ancestors had been officers in the Revolutionary Army and there had been ever since military men in his family. He had enlisted with a light heart, certain that the struggle would be short, since the balance of courage and experience in arms was so heavily weighted on his side. Though he had been a student of law and not of tactics, he had risen rapidly to his important command. Gossip declared him the handsomest officer in the army; young women in cities were forever pouting because he was forever in distant camps. It was expected that at the end of the war he would be given his choice of important official positions.

But the war did not end: it dragged on and on. Buckingham grew frantic with impatience: he plunged at last into despair. His youth was going—a common conviction at twenty-six—he was accomplishing nothing. His cause, he saw more and more clearly each day, was destined to be a lost cause. He had laid out for himself an orderly life in which there should be ample leisure and opportunity for the cultivation of the mind and for the upbuilding of a home. Now he was to have nothing, nothing. With clear eyes he foresaw the long future of poverty and homelessness. All the possessions of the family, even the last of his mother’s trinkets, had gone into the bottomless treasury of the Great Cause and his house had been laid in ashes. He contrasted his present lot, commander of a division though he was, with the lot that would have been his in time of peace. He would have been prosperous and happy, he would have been married to some gentle and lovely creature, he might have had a son. Instead, he lived in a tent, his ears were filled with groans and screams and with hoarse shouts of command, his nostrils with the smell of powder and the smoke of reducing fires.

Steadily, all one midsummer day, Buckingham led his division in a march of dire necessity. Thirty miles ahead the army was even now engaged in battle, and the need of reinforcements was imperative, so imperative that Buckingham did not dare to lead his men too rapidly for fear that exhaustion would unfit them for duty when they arrived. The division was a heart-breaking sight; thin, ragged, shoeless, they went on grimly, even making light of their situation. A sense of humor and a measure of hope were still with them.

All day the sun beat upon them. Houses and wells were few, streams far apart; when they came to a creek, they drank greedily, without regard for possible infection. They said jokingly that those who had survived until now would survive forever. Frequently a soldier halted to toss away the last fragment of shoe sole which impeded his progress or to tighten the bandage which made walking possible.

In the late afternoon they halted for the rest which they should have had at noon. When the sound of the marching feet of men and horses and the rumble of wagons ceased, they heard a dim, ominous roar, and made comment.

“Hear that!”

“Cannonading!”

“Heavy, too!”

“We’re too late to help in the slaughter.”

A comrade turned a squinting eye upon the speaker.

“To be slaughtered, you mean! But there’s a to-morrow.”

Lying about the ground the men devoured the scanty rations in their knapsacks. Then in the hot sunshine they fell asleep in many ridiculous postures. They had learned to sleep sitting and standing and even on the march.

Presently with the padding of weary feet, which, multiplied a thousand times, acquired a strange, rustling quality, with hoarse commands, with rumble of wagon wheels, the division started its march once more toward those ominous sounds. Suddenly mounting an eminence, those in the front ranks beheld a low and distant ridge over which the smoke hung heavily. The cannonading had ceased, there was now only a faint crack, crack of musketry.

“They’re chasin’ ’em!” cried an exultant voice.

Presently came a galloping courier to the head of the long line. His dispatches announced that the fight was for the time over, the enemy routed. The Second Division was to go into camp, its leader was to report to his commanding officer.

Buckingham put spurs to his horse and went forward, followed by his aide, a slender, eager boy. All day, in a mood of great depression, Buckingham had ridden without a word for his young companion. He had spent a summer in Italy and his happiness there returned often to mock him. He remembered the softness of the sky, the grateful shade, the splendor and the mellowness of life. All this day Italy had possessed him. He chided himself sharply now for his preoccupation. In no smallest military duty had Buckingham ever failed.

It was dark when he reached the distant ridge and went into council of war with his peers. The enemy had been driven back but had not been defeated. Across on the other ridge the camp-fires gleamed; back of the ridge, it was known, the enemy was gathering in force, as singers gather behind a curtain which is to rise at an appointed time. On both sides, sinister preparations were in the making and in each camp was certainty that the morrow would find the enemy startled at the strength of his foe. In reality the odds were equal, the opposing armies could offer almost man for man, wooded vantage ground for wooded vantage ground, open field for open field.

The plans for the morning were made before young Buckingham arrived. To him, young, brave, hope inspiring, the most daring and brilliant duty was assigned, the making of the opening charge of battle. His exhausted troops were to lie where they had camped till morning, then, as soon as they had had the minimum of rest necessary to revive them, they were to advance, form under the protection of the cannon on the ridge and storm the opposite hill. The older officers had weighed young Buckingham before he arrived: they measured him now once more with keen, cold eyes. Some coveted his task. But he was the youngest, he had the freshest troops—a fact which no one who had not seen the troops of Dare and Lenken could have believed possible. The task required fire, dash, enthusiasm, all of which Buckingham possessed.

When the council closed, Buckingham rode back to the distant woodland. The night was still, there was not sufficient air to stir a blade of grass. The quiet breathed presage of unendurable heat for the morning. Young Buckingham saw to-morrow’s events as in a picture, himself leading the weary men, the weary men performing prodigies. His mind did not consider the result of the charge: it might succeed or it might fail, he would in two weeks or two months or two years he repeating the whole weary business. He never thought of death for himself. Death was an impossible and an indifferent contingency. He might as well die as live the life which promised.

Then, unexpectedly, as he rode along in the moonlight with young Arnold, Buckingham felt a breath of cool, damp, pleasant air upon his cheek. They were nearing the woodland, and were in a moment in camp. There the sentries paced about. Otherwise all was still. The thought of the slumber of so many weary men was pleasant to Buckingham; his dull patience changed to a more positive emotion, a longing for the feel of the ground under his body, the stretching of saddle-cramped limbs, a heart-breaking desire for sleep. Thank Heaven there was in war this respite!

The sentry directed him to a little side road upon which headquarters had been established. The road dropped suddenly; a loosened pebble seemed to bounce downward for a long space; there was the blessed sound of dripping water, the smell of fresh sawdust and wet earth. On one side of the road in an open space stood an old mill with sagging, picturesque roof; on the other a house in which there were dim lights. Nearby on a little plot of grass a sentry challenged. There was a bed in the house, he said, for Buckingham.

Dizzily Buckingham dismounted. The moon rose high above the open place: the heavenly odors seemed to thicken. A stout woman came to the door; to her skirt clung a little boy, sleepy, yet wide-eyed, as though he would not miss a moment of the strange, exciting experience in which Fate had involved the quiet mill. He impeded his mother’s progress, so frightened was he in spite of his curiosity to see the great enemy.

“I guess you’ll want to go right up-stairs.” The stout woman spoke without welcome; it had clearly been made plain to her that submission was imperative. “Minnie will show you to your room.”

Buckingham nodded. The place looked clean, and they would probably have good beds. He peered into the shadowy hall, eagerly expectant of Minnie, whoever she might be.

Then, hearing a little laugh, Buckingham lifted his head. Minnie stood on the stairway and looked down at him, the light from the candle in her hand flickering over her. She had dark eyes and a broad white forehead and a white neck: that much Buckingham saw at a glance before she led the way up the steps. Into his mind came a hundred flashing thoughts. He was aware once more of the soft, damp stillness of the place, of the silver moonlight, of the dense shadows, of the dripping water. Here, now, was a new element of enchantment, a beautiful girl, who with a candle, lit him at midnight to his room. Buckingham’s whole being seemed to leap. He had been a boy in school and then a soldier in the army; he felt suddenly an overmastering hunger for the soft and beautiful in life, hated more terribly than ever the arid desert which surrounded on all sides this rare moment.

When the girl looked back over her shoulder, Buckingham was following her. The shadow which had fallen on the face of the stout, middle-aged woman, as the candle was carried higher, hid a mocking expression.

The girl preceded Buckingham into the room which was to be his, and placed the candle on the high, old-fashioned bureau, and then turned to him with a smile, which, though it was innocent, revealed an appreciation of the hour, of their isolation, of their youth. For an instant they faced one another, two beautiful creatures, meeting thus strangely. Buckingham breathed deeply, his flesh tingling. The girl wished him good-night and went out the door. When she had gone Buckingham stood still, listening. He heard her take a few steps, open a door, close it, and then everything was still.

Buckingham undressed slowly and stretched himself out upon the bed. The mattress was filled with feathers which rose about him not uncomfortably in this cool, damp place. For four years he had slept on the ground or on a hard cot; this bed received him like a cradle.

But he could not sleep: his ear strained to catch every sound. Once, it seemed to him, he heard a light step as the girl went about her room. Afterward the silence was unbroken: the glade lay as though it had been put under a spell. But the young general did not sleep. With hands grasping the twisted rails which formed the head-board of his old-fashioned bed, he lay motionless, wide-eyed.

When daylight broke, Buckingham’s aide knocked at the door. Arnold was young: war had apparently not yet sickened him: he adored his master.

“It is five o’clock, sir. The woman is to give us chicken for breakfast. What can I do for you, sir?”

Again Buckingham felt his heart leap. It was morning: he would see the girl once more. He made his toilet with care and came down the steps, his spurs clanking, himself resplendent. His last thought before he fell asleep had been one of shame. What he had seen had been only the pretty face of a miller’s daughter who was not in the least akin to the mate whom he had dreamed of since his boyhood. But the full light of morning banished shame. He said to himself that he must see the girl again if only to satisfy himself that she was as beautiful as she had seemed.

The division made ready for the march and Buckingham waited in the parlor for his breakfast. Motionless, white-lipped, he watched for the opening of the door. Something within him had broken, some tight-drawn string had snapped. Theologians tell us that the Prince of Darkness waits outside each breast—how now must he have rejoiced to see entrance made so easy!

As Buckingham expected, Minnie brought him his breakfast. The longer she delayed the more certain was he that she would come. His mind dwelt upon her wide, dark gaze, upon her smile.

Finally the door opened and she entered and began to place breakfast before him. The window looked out into the green branches: the two were alone, secure. Buckingham looked at his companion from the crown of her head to the hem of her skirt to discover whether last night’s shadows had hidden any defects which this morning’s sunshine revealed. But her eyes were as dark as he remembered them, her mouth as curving, her neck as white. The small portion which she brought him did not satisfy his hunger, and she went for more. But when she returned, Buckingham did not eat. The two seemed to feast upon the sight of one another, as two who have been separated in long and sorrowful absence. The stir without grew louder, the sunlight broadened on the floor. At a sound of a loud colloquy outside the door, Buckingham frowned and started to rise, whereupon the girl put out her hand and touched his sword.

“Oh,” cried she, sharply, “What a cruel, cruel thing!”

Buckingham caught the hand and held it. Hitherto he had kissed no one but his mother; now he laid his cheek against the smooth neck of the miller’s daughter.

Still the path of sunlight broadened on the floor. Still the sounds from without grew more and more imperative. Still the young general and the girl sat side by side in the little parlor. On the window-pane a bee droned. The minutes passed and passed, seeming at once like seconds and like hours. A half hour passed and the door burst open.

“I have knocked, sir!” cried young Arnold, his face turned toward the hall. “It is late, sir!”

The young general rose heavily from the old settle. Without shame the girl held to his arm.

“Oh, do not go! Do not go!”

Buckingham made no answer. Desire had been whetted, not assuaged. He turned to her for an instant as though he would sit down once more. Then he saw, through the haze which surrounded him, young Arnold’s face, haggard and amazed, and went out to take command of his division.

The Second Division had made forced marches in its four years of service; it was famous, indeed, for moving from place to place with the speed and secrecy of Pallas Athena. It moved now with a speed which was madness for men who were shortly to charge a wooded hill. Young Buckingham galloped, drew in his horse, galloped again. With him his aide kept pace, the sudden changes of gait jolting him almost from his saddle. Once, Buckingham, turning to glance at him, saw that tears were running down his cheeks.

“My God, Arnold!” cried he. “Are you afraid?”

“No, sir,” answered young Arnold. “I am not afraid.”

The road was long which led from the mill to the ridge where the main army lay and where officers strained eager eyes through glasses forward toward the foe and backward toward Buckingham. Couriers had been dispatched; they rode furiously. One met the Second Division before it left the woodland, one met it midway, another near the ridge. The burden of all the messages was the dire necessity for haste. With a crazier gait, with a whiter face, the leader of the Second Division hastened. He was magnificent upon his tall horse.

Surmounting the ridge, the Second Division formed for the charge, plunged down into the valley and up toward the heights. But the foe had gained valuable time. Reinforcements had arrived,—were in place. As one wrestler deftly sends another hurtling backward, so those entrenched sent Buckingham’s division backward into the little valley which became for hundreds a valley of horrible death. Rout was absolute; it set the example for the day’s defeat; it marked the beginning of the end of war, the downfall of a kingdom, the final loss of the Great Cause.

Buckingham himself was not wounded, he seemed to live a charmed life. He plunged into danger, he stood defiantly before murderous shot, he carried to a place of safety the body of young Arnold, between whom and himself there was, as history records, a peculiar devotion. For the rest of the day he had only to await the outcome of other engagements on the field. He had free moments when he could think of the old mill and of his madness.

On the retreat that night, he dismounted and walked with bent head among his men who were too racked with weariness to know who walked with them. They did not know why they had been late in starting from the mill. They did not know that they were expected to be earlier. They knew only that once more they had been led to slaughter and that fewer than usual had escaped. If they thought of Buckingham, they pitied him and said to each other that luck was against him.

The night was dark and a fierce storm beat upon them. At daylight a courier summoned Buckingham to a council by the roadside, where his fellow officers looked at him in astonishment. Youth was gone; his face was contorted; pain had fixed her seat in his dark eyes.

If he expected reproof, he received none. He was not even asked for an explanation: it was assumed, then and later, that he had done the best that he could do. He heard in silence the directions for the march. Then he returned in silence to the fragment of his command. His hand rested on the handle of his pistol. When pain became intolerable, there was a gate open.

After the war was over, Buckingham settled near the ruins of the house where he had been born. His overseer’s cottage of ante-bellum days was still standing; in it he took refuge and set about earning his bread. His simple neighbors were glad to find work and a master once more. Gradually his hand loosened its clasp on his pistol. He came to look upon life as a penance; if he voluntarily yielded it up, he would be committing one more sin.

Gradually the old place took on something of the appearance of former days. The fields were brought back to cultivation; good crops were gathered; Buckingham prospered. What became of his earnings no one knew. He did not rebuild the old house, but lived in his cottage; he never gratified his desire for travel, but labored from sunrise to sunset. What he could do for the maimed and helpless of his men and for their widows and orphaned children he did, but these charities which absorbed his income remained a mystery even to the recipients.

There was another penance which Buckingham set himself. He never went back to find the old mill or the girl for whom he had sold himself. Nature which had then so cruelly betrayed him, played upon him another cruel trick; she kept before his eyes the girl’s eyes and her curving lips and her soft neck. When he saw candle-light playing on a white wall, he thought of her; when he heard a bee droning in the sunlight, he suffered almost unbearable heartache. Sometimes he thought of the girl’s suffering with pain which was harder to bear than his grief. Then, when still a young man, he shed tears. Sometimes he meditated upon the injustice of Fate which could in a half hour nullify the training of a man’s life and send him away undone.

After thirty years, Buckingham returned to the battlefield, requested by the national government to aid in establishing the exact line of his charge. It was a request which Buckingham could not well refuse. Having concluded his business with the gentlemen of the commission, he accepted the services of a guide and drove about the battlefield. He knew pretty well what he should hear. History had written an account of him of which the bravest men might be glad. That there lived in the world after young Arnold died another man who knew the truth, Buckingham did not surmise.

The guide was loquacious. General Buckingham, whom he did not know, was his only passenger; to him he related glibly his store of incidents. He had been, he said, a lad at his father’s mill, round which the Second Division had encamped.

“I remember well seeing the General come in,” said he. “It was at night, and he was very tall, as tall as you, sir, and the handsomest man I ever saw. I was told to go to bed but I stayed up to see him. When he came, I was frightened and hid behind my mother.”

“You hid behind your mother,” repeated General Buckingham in a toneless voice. He turned his head slowly to look toward the far West where lay the woodland and the mill. He had thought that he was old, cured of his madness, but though youth was gone, he was still possessed. If he could only have returned with honor!

“You hid behind your mother!” said he again.

“Yes,” chuckled the guide. “I was dreadfully afraid. And something very strange happened.” The guide turned in his seat so that he could address his passenger more comfortably. “History says nothing of it, but I know it. We all knew the battle was raging and the soldiers would have to leave early. There was a cousin staying with us and she and Mother made out they would delay the march by giving the general a good breakfast and giving it slowly. Minnie said she was going to keep him longer than that. Both of them were hot against the enemy. And Minnie did keep him. Mother knew when it was time for them to start, and it was long after when they did start. I always claim that if Buckingham had been earlier, the fight would have ended different. Mother could prove that he didn’t start on time if she was living, and so could Minnie. Minnie told Mother what the General had said and they laughed and laughed.”

When General Buckingham reached the site of his disastrous charge, he dismissed the guide and stood alone on the wooded crest which he had striven too late to reach. A great marker, describing the catastrophe in colorless military terms had been erected on the summit; he read it through bravely. He remembered the face of young Arnold who had so loved him, he saw horrible wounds, he contemplated finally with clear eyes the sordidness of the incident which had betrayed himself and his friends. Then suddenly he lifted his head and laid his hands across his breast.

“Now,” said he thickly. “I am free. I have done penance enough.”

FEET OF GOLD[18]

By GORDON ARTHUR SMITH

From Scribner’s Magazine

I

WHEN Ferdinand Taillandy, poet, pagan, and wanderer on the face of the earth, had completed his great epic he felt, surging high within him, the call of Paris. For eight years he had traversed on foot the untrammelled wilds, keeping his ear ever close to the breast of nature, that his soul might be in tune with her moods. For eight years he had worshipped nature, seeking no divinity save her, and finding in her one god made manifest in many forms. To his deep-seeing eyes there were dryads lurking in the trees and in the glades and in the groves; there were naiads in the springs and in the rivers and in the lakes; there were nereids in the seas, and always there was Pan, piping in the forests or on the hills. And so he bent the knee to all nature, and knew no other god but her.

But, his epic finished, he craved, like all poets, a publisher—he was not content to sing merely to himself. And, moreover, he knew that the epic was good. The need of a publisher, then, was his pretext for turning his face to the north and to Paris, but it was scarcely this need that so quickened his feet and his heart. It was more than that, certainly—it was rather the exhilaration that the exile feels when he is about to return home.

Said Taillandy to himself: “I left Paris of my own will; I despise Paris; Paris has caused me only great suffering; Paris is neither Christian nor pagan; if I go to Paris I am a retrograde—but, oh, ye gods, hasten my feet and strengthen my heart, that I may get to Paris the more quickly!”

This is comprehensible and excusable only because Paris was his first home. Granting that (and any one will vouch for it), the conclusion is as inevitable as that of a geometrical proposition, and we can wonder only that he resisted the homing instinct so long.

He went north by forced marches, following the Rhone through Avignon and Valence to Lyon, and the Saône to Chalon; thence, by Dijon, Tonnerre, Sens, and Melun, to Paris and the Porte de Charenton. The last twenty-five kilometres he made during the night, for something kept him at it, made him loath to stop and sleep with the goal so close.

It was a thick, heavy morning, then, in November when he passed through the octroi and said to himself: “I am home.” And it was a morning of mist that was almost rain. The stallions, harnessed in single file to the market-carts, were slipping on the treacherous cobblestones, straining with all their magnificent shoulders at the traces—supremely willing but not always successful. Taillandy, appreciative of the play of their muscles, stopped to admire them; and while he stopped he became aware of a woman standing at his elbow.

He did not trouble to look at her, for women, as individuals, were of little account in his life. He had loved one woman once and been sorry for it. That was enough. Perhaps she had been afraid of his intensity; perhaps he had given her too much of himself; perhaps he had endeavored to halo mortal clay—or perhaps she had been simply a timorous, flexible little thing with an empty blond head and a heart that he, at least, had been unable to quicken. At any rate, I know that she had told him that she loved him, and then the first breeze of parental opposition had blown her into another man’s arms. That is the story—we will not strive to place the blame.

To Taillandy, then, women were interesting only en masse: they stood for something, they must stand for something. After all, one half the population of the earth could not exist merely that children might be born. No, there was doubtless some mystery about them that accounted for their existence—above all, that accounted for their power. Why else should they (as they undoubtedly did) motivate men? Why should they have swayed nations and killed kings? He gave it up, but he continued, nevertheless, his ardent worship of Diana the Huntress and of Venus Genetrix.

The woman who stood at Taillandy’s elbow was, at first glance, in no way a remarkable person, and it was by sheer accident that they came to know each other. A slippery pavement, three stallions harnessed to an over-loaded cart, a quick-tempered driver—there was the accident, and there the beginning of Taillandy’s further education in women.

The cart had stopped in the middle of the road, just within the gates, and the three stallions seemed powerless to move it an inch forward. Obviously this delayed traffic, and of course the agent de police on duty became flushed and excited, imparting much of his mood to the driver of the cart. The driver unsheathed his whip, short of handle and long and cruel of lash, and sent it circling and shivering across the back of the leader. It was poor policy, for the animal had not been unwilling. At the stroke he started, slipped, and plunged in the traces; his hoofs struck sparks from the pavement as they slid and floundered, struggling in vain for a foothold, and finally, snorting and writhing, his legs went from under him and he fell over on his side.

The woman next to Taillandy gave a little cry, half fear and half pity, and clutched at his arm. When he turned he saw that she was very white—and not unbeautiful.

“Come,” he said, “let us get out of this. There is nothing one can do when beasts are whipping beasts.”

She tottered, clinging to his elbow.

“I think,” she said, “that I am going to faint.”

“I am sorry; try not to for a moment,” he recommended.

He almost carried her to the nearest sidewalk café, put her into an iron chair behind an iron table, and ordered a cognac.

She drank it and shivered at the heat of it.

“Thank you, monsieur,” she said. Then, slowly and for the first time, she raised her eyes to look at him.

Taillandy still clung to his thirties, and his eight years of nomadic life had kept him young and buoyant. He was not handsome—he was remarkable. Once you had seen him you would never forget him: those eyes with the sparkle of the poet burning in them; that thin, brown face with the crooked mouth and the hawk’s nose; those slim, capable hands; and that lean, restless body, jutting out angularly from his abominable clothes.

The woman looked at him, and her eyes widened in astonishment. Looking at her, he reflected that astonishment became her. She was at her best expressing astonishment.

“I am very hideous, am I not?” he remarked pleasantly—almost casually.

Recovering herself, she looked quickly away, and answered very demurely and properly.

“I beg your pardon, monsieur; of course you are not at all hideous. And I am very grateful to you. You were kind—and—and I am afraid that I detain you.”

He laughed a little—quietly, as men laugh who are accustomed to being alone.

“My dear,” said he, “from what do you detain me? Am I not in Paris where I wish to be? What more can I desire? Should I some day scale Olympus and be admitted through the gates, do you suppose that, once inside, I should object to being detained by—well, let us say by Diana?”

She did not follow this flight—naturally not—but she caught at the last word.

“Diane!” she exclaimed. “How strange that you should have guessed my name!”

“You are called Diane?” he inquired.

“But yes,” she affirmed.

“Et voilà,” said he, stretching out his hands as if he had won his case. “You see? Great is Diane!—Diane of what?—of the Ephesians?”

She shook her head, at a loss.

“No,” she said—“of Evremont-sur-Seine.”

The name must have awakened some memory for him, for he frowned and squinted up his eyes.

“No, no—don’t tell me,” he commanded, as she was about to speak. “Let me think. Evremont-sur-Seine ... Ah! I have it! A little village on the river with poplars patrolling the banks. A little iridescent village, all light and bright and clean—with a watering-trough in the square—and sparrows. Yes, hundreds of sparrows. And a lark or two for the morning. And a shop where, if one is a Christian, one should take off one’s hat and kneel. Ah, yes—now I remember, now I remember! She was called Madame Nicolas, she who kept the shop, and she was a saint. I am no Christian—I am a pagan—but Madame Nicolas.... Ah, well, one does not have to be a Christian to do homage to a Christian saint.”

He was carried out of himself; he was aglow with the enthusiasm of remembering; and he was disappointed to find that Diane remained quiet, unkindled.

“You don’t know, then,” he protested—“you don’t know Madame Nicolas?”

She shook her head, and he perceived, at length, that she was crying as quietly and secretly as possible.

“Ah,” said he softly, and then again, “Ah!” But for the present he said no more about Madame Nicolas. Rather he arose, called loudly for the check, paid it, put his hand on her shoulder, and, with great heartiness, exclaimed: “Now we shall go and breakfast. You are hungry and so am I. We shall traverse Paris and breakfast at the Closerie des Lilas, where, once upon a time, I was at home. Come—allons, mon enfant! En avant!”

She protested—not very vehemently. She claimed she was not a cheerful companion; he had better seek some one else; it was one of her sad days. Besides, she was not well dressed—her shoes and her blouse.... He laughed loudly, pointed to his own rags, and more especially to the hole in the top of his hat which revealed his straight, long black hair.

“What do we care for clothes!” he cried. “Are we not young and beautiful? Diana and—and Pan. Hand in hand they will now enter a fiacre!”

He was not to be thwarted in his holiday mood. Moreover, for some reason or other, the thought of quitting her displeased him. He wanted a companion to encourage him, to laugh at and with him, above all to listen to him. Perhaps he was beginning at last to realize in a small way why it is good that women exist.

Taillandy, at least, enjoyed that drive to the full. He was thrusting his head constantly from the windows to point out places that he remembered and places that he would never forget. At first they kept to the Seine—he couldn’t see enough of the Seine—and he prided himself on his ability to call each bridge by its name.

“Presently,” said he, “when we have passed the Halle aux Vins, we shall come to the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Then we shall leave the river.... There, what did I tell you? Au revoir, Seine! Hail, Musée de Cluny and École de Médecine! To the left, cocher! One must see the Odéon. Ah, the famous days—and the famous nights, parbleu!”

Always he grew more eager, more excited. By Zeus, was he not back again in his own Paris after eight years? Why, then, pretend to be calm? Diane, of course, had not attempted to suggest that he be calm. She liked him the way he was—tempestuous, vibrant, a boy.

They drew up with a flourish in front of the Closerie des Lilas on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was his favorite haunt in the old days, in the old days eight years ago when he damned women and strove to forget them all because one had forgotten him. There it was that men had first called him great; there it was that, when he was sober, much of his early poetry had been written; and there it was that they had crowned him king. He found that, as he paid the driver, his eyes were dim.

“My dear,” said he to Diane, “if you don’t make me laugh, I shall begin to cry.”

“What is it that troubles you?” she asked, a hand on his arm.

He smiled crookedly and answered: “Eight years of absence—that is all.”

“It is a great deal,” said she soberly. “I understand.”

He changed his mood with an effort, and became deliberately gay.

“Ah, well,” he cried, “we shall see what is altered. We shall see whether they still remember Ferdinand Taillandy.”

He was not kept long in doubt. A waiter in shirt-sleeves and apron who was brushing the floor, stood up from his task as they entered, and, seeing Taillandy, raised his hands heavenward in a delirium of joy and astonishment.

“But it is Monsieur Ferdinand!” he cried. “Or else perhaps his ghost!”

Taillandy, jubilant at the immediate recognition, extended two hands and said warmly: “My good Hippolyte—my good Hippolyte!”

A buxom lady in black came hurrying out from behind her high desk, her fingers busy at her hair (for she was not too young to be vain).

“Monsieur Ferdinand!” she exclaimed—“is it truly you returned to us? You will kill us with such sudden joy!” And she put a hand to her heart—or as close to her heart as her figure permitted.

“Dear Madame Maupin,” answered Ferdinand, embracing her frenziedly. “You grow younger and more beautiful each year. Of what marvellous waters do you drink?”

“Always the Vichy Celestins,” she answered; and then she slapped him coyly and said: “Vieux blagueur!”

For some minutes they stood off to appraise him, to take him all in, to see what changes eight years had wrought in him. Diane, temporarily neglected, hung in the background until Taillandy, feeling that she was ill at ease, led her forward by the arm and presented her to Madame Maupin as “his little friend Diane.”

“But I know Mademoiselle Diane,” said the caissière. “Were you not here two nights ago with Monsieur Bruno, the artist?”

Diane nodded and blushed, looking quickly at Taillandy and as quickly away.

“Yes, madame,” she said.

“Ah,” said Taillandy—“with old Bruno, hein? I am surprised that that one still lives. And how do you like old Bruno?”

“He was—kind,” answered Diane; “and I had had nothing to eat for two days. Yes, he was kind. He fed me.”

“It was the least he could do!” exclaimed Taillandy—“the old satyr!”

Then he turned on her so suddenly that she started back with a little cry, frightened.

“And now!” he cried—“and now! How long is it since you have eaten? Answer me that. Or does Bruno still feed you?”

“I have left Monsieur Bruno,” she replied after an interval. “I lost my position with the modiste on the Rue du Cherche-Midi. It was my own fault, because I did not apply myself to the work.”

“How long is it since you have eaten, I ask?” interrupted Taillandy fiercely.

“When I met you, monsieur,” she said bravely, “I was going to breakfast.”

He grunted his disbelief.

“Where were you going to breakfast? At the Porte de Charenton? Not likely.”

“I was going home to breakfast.”

“Ah, you were going home? To Evremont-sur-Seine? Twenty-six kilometres, hein?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

“And how were you going?”

“I was planning to walk, monsieur,” she said.

“Ah—voilà! Now at last we have it. You were going to walk twenty-six kilometres for your breakfast because you didn’t have a copper sou. That pig of a Bruno! Why do the gods allow such tragedies on earth! Here, Hippolyte—hasten thyself—covers for two, and all that is best in the house. The poor child starves while we air our vocabularies. It is criminal—it is unbelievable. Allez—heup!”

She permitted him to lead her to a seat—he did it in the grand manner, but cheerfully and with many lavish gestures, gallantly pretending that he did not see tears in her eyes. And while they ate he regaled her with a spirited monologue. He dwelt much on her name—that seemed to delight him—and he elaborated on it, calling her his Diana of the Moon, or his Goddess of the Chase. It amused him to pretend that they were feasting on Olympus. She, of course, was unable to follow his rhetoric, but so long as he enjoyed himself she was pleased; and she ate with a good appetite and no affectation.

When she had finished the omelette aux fines herbes the color came back into her cheeks and she was able to laugh with him. He bade Hippolyte, whom for the moment he had christened Bacchus, to fetch them some red wine from the cellar—“a good wine, Bacchus, not too heavy; a wine in which one can taste the grapes.”

It was forthcoming, and he drank her health very gravely—her health and her beaux yeux; for he now perceived for the first time that she had large, dark eyes.

At the coffee he stretched his long legs straight out under the table, lighted a cigarette, and sighed comfortably and profoundly.

“Now,” said he, with a smile at his mouth, “I will talk about myself. Shall you like that?”

“But yes,” she encouraged him naïvely; “you talk so well. You must have studied a great deal. I, as you see, am very ignorant. I know nothing.”

He laughed quietly.

“Come,” he said, “that is not so. You know a great deal. You knew enough to start for home when you were hungry. I, on the contrary, when I was hungry—I went away from home and lost myself for eight years. But it was not food-hunger that drove me away. Rather it was the hunger for consolation. That is why I went alone. One communes better with nature when one is alone. You see, the stars will not sing for an audience, and the trees will not whisper to a crowd. And the nymphs—ah, yes, my friend, the nymphs are shy.”

He paused, not to contemplate her, but, perhaps, to contemplate his thoughts.

“You are a poet,” said she, her eyes large with wonder and admiration.

“I hope so,” he answered—“I hope so.”

“You are a great poet,” she continued, with growing awe.

“I thank you,” said he. “At least I am not a prolific one.”

This brought him up to the remembrance of his epic and the reason for his being in Paris. I think that he had been in a fair way to forget both—he was so completely at home there at his favorite table, that the eight years of wandering and working seemed scarcely to have intervened.

“Ha!” he exclaimed—“that brings me to myself. I have work to do this morning. I must see my publisher. And you, my Diane, what do you intend to do?”

She shrugged her shoulders. What was there for her to do? He questioned her a little. Did she desire to return home to Evremont-sur-Seine? She did not dare. She was afraid they would not want her. But had she not thought to return there this morning when he had met her at the Porte de Charenton?

“Yes, monsieur,” she said in a very low voice. “I was very tired and I had not eaten, and—and I knew that I should not be able to walk that far. But I thought that it would be better to try.”

He looked at her searchingly. Then said he: “What you mean to say is that you thought it would be better to drop by the roadside than to fall into the river.”

She nodded. “Yes, monsieur. I was not happy.”

“Compassionate gods!” he cried, banging the table with his fist. “You were not happy! There speaks Mélisande. No, indeed, you were not happy! You were wretched, you were miserable, you were starving, and your poor little heart was dying within you—fluttering and trembling like a stricken bird. There, that is the city for you—that is the city’s work.”

Here, forgetting his recent enthusiasm for that selfsame city, he relapsed into the mood of bitterness and distrust that had driven him from Paris eight years ago. He condemned the city and everything connected with it—it was artificial, it was brutal, it was sordid, it was ugly, it was selfish, it was a tyrant. It stifled the heart and it murdered the soul.

His philippic ending as abruptly as it had begun, he reached across the table and took her hand.

“Listen, my little one,” he said, “listen to me. You are too young and too sweet to remain in this pest-hole. I am going to care for you from now on—you shall be my charge. I am going to snatch you from the maw of this monster of a city before it gets your heart and your soul as well as your body. It will be one good deed at least credited to the account of Ferdinand Taillandy before he dies. They can carve it on my tombstone if they wish: ‘He plucked a flower from the mire of a Christian city and planted it in the garden of the gods.’ Ha! That is something to have done, is it not? And I shall revel in it. To-morrow we shall start—you and I. To-morrow in the clean, white dawn. And I will lead you to the garden. I will take you by the hand and show you the wide spaces of the world; and you shall behold the sun with new eyes; and the breeze shall blow through your unbound hair; and you shall bathe in the streams and rest on the sweet earth and sleep dreamlessly under the singing stars!... Will you come with me?”

She hesitated. His eloquence had her bound hand and foot, and at his nod she would have followed him to the world’s end. She was commencing to worship him; but she was a woman and it was a woman’s reason that made her hesitate.

“I have nothing to wear, monsieur—” she began timidly.

He swept the objection aside with a grand gesture of his arm.

“So much the better!” he cried. “We shall travel the lighter. Will you come with me?”

She thrilled to his enthusiasm. She was proud to be his follower.

“I will go with you anywhere,” she said, “whenever you say you are ready.” And she gave him her two hands across the table as a pledge. He took them, sawed them violently up and down in the air, reached over and kissed her fraternally on the forehead.

“Good!” he said. “Meet me here for dinner at seven this evening. We will plan. Now I go to my publisher. Au revoir.”

Before she realized it he was out of the room; but, as suddenly, he was back again.

“Here,” he explained, “I had almost forgotten. One must pay to live and we shall be separated for ten hours. Take this and buy yourself some solid boots and some thick stockings. One should be well shod to climb Olympus.”

II

That was a memorable night at the Closerie des Lilas—and not only that night, but, I regret to say, several ensuing nights; for Taillandy, to Diane’s chagrin, could not bear to tear himself away from the city and his old disciples and comrades. Once more he forgot how intensely he hated Paris, remembering only how madly he loved it. The pagan child of nature reverted and became the boulevardier and the café prophet.

But that first night was responsible for the lapse. Taillandy enjoyed himself so hugely on that first night that it was only human of him to crave a second and a third. It was always: “To-morrow morning, my little Diane, we will leave all this behind us,” and always on the morrow there was some unreasonable reason why the departure should be postponed.

Diane, disappointed grievously at first, grew depressed and then worried. Had her great godlike poet, then, feet of clay? She thrust the suspicion resolutely from her as unworthy, and instead, womanlike, she endeavored to see what she could do to help him. She knew that he was too good to be wasting his days and his nights in the Closerie des Lilas. She knew, too, that champagne is no fitting diet for poets—especially for poets who are great enough to be inspired without it—and so she found herself mothering her hero. Worshipping him, of course—she would always do that—but mothering him at the same time. A curious state of affairs.

Taillandy’s publishers, it seemed, had been exuberantly glad to see him. His “Triomphe de l’Amour” and his “Tombeau de l’Amour” had made him famous, and his eight years of absence had given him a sort of posthumous halo. If he were not dead, why, so much the better. In brief, they gave him a thousand francs in advance for the epic and a generous royalty on its sale.

Of that thousand francs Taillandy spent seven hundred and ninety-six during the next four days—ninety-six, possibly, on himself, and the balance on his friends.

He had returned to the Closerie des Lilas that first afternoon and had instructed Hippolyte and Madame Maupin that he intended to entertain that evening from dinner-time to dawn. They were to invite any and all of his old associates whom they should see. Everything in the house was to be free, and he, by Bacchus, would foot the bills.

The result was that when Taillandy entered the Lilas at seven o’clock he was amazed to discover what an army of friends he could lay claim to. Never had the café been so crowded.

There was Bruno, the artist, who, he remembered with an inexplicable pang, was also Diane’s friend; there was Jacques Gaumont, a minor poet who was attempting to follow in the great Taillandy’s footsteps, and who succeeded merely in being very shabbily dressed and very enthusiastic; there was Baskoff, the Russian, a sculptor of the futurist school, half mad and wholly unprepossessing; there was le petit Martel, in velveteens, who cried loudly for a return to the good old days of Bohemia, but who sometimes dined surreptitiously at the Café de Paris in full-dress clothes with a chapeau à huit reflets; there were the two bearded, gray-headed veterans who remembered Delacroix and very little else; there was a young architect or two from the Beaux-Arts, and there were a score of others—nondescripts, driftwood, some of them mad but talented, others mediocre but sane. Also, there were a dozen girls—models, midinettes, dancers, and daughters of joy.

At Taillandy’s entrance they arose with a roar of delight. They embraced him, they kissed him on both cheeks, they pounded his back, they cheered him deafeningly. He was the only one of them worth while, and subconsciously they knew it and acknowledged it. Moreover, since he had once been one of them, they now felt a certain responsibility in his success. Had they not contributed to his greatness by their encouragement? Had he not perhaps imbibed some of his inspiration from their companionship? There was not a man there that did not envy his fame, but there was not a man there that begrudged it.

When the first commotion had somewhat subsided, Taillandy commanded Hippolyte to serve dinner. But first he inquired for Diane. Had any one seen Diane?

“Has any one seen whom?” asked Bruno, who was at his elbow.

“Diane—Diane,” answered Taillandy impatiently. And then, remembering, he added, with a frown: “You know her, Bruno, I believe. At least it was not your fault that she did not starve.”

“Ah, you wrong me,” said the artist. “I would have fed her for life, but she would not permit it. She left me—she disappeared.”

“She did well,” replied Taillandy gravely.

Bruno looked at him quizzically, shrugged his shoulders and went to take his place at a table.

“Our Ferdinand is in love,” he announced. “That will mean some very bad lyrics, I fear. It is regrettable.”

Taillandy remained at the door, smoking furiously, with an eye on the clock. He would not sit down, he said, until Diane arrived. No, nor would he drink. There would be plenty of time for that.

Presently the door opened and Diane stepped hesitatingly into the smoke-stained light of the restaurant. She was a little out of breath, for she had been walking fast, and there was color in her cheeks and a wet sparkle in her eye.

“Ah, my little one,” said Taillandy, “you are late.”

“I am sorry,” she answered. “I hurried as fast as I could. See, I have bought the stout boots and the thick stockings, as you desired me to do, so that we might climb—what was that mountain?”

“Olympus,” said he. “You were wise, for it is a hard climb. Come now and sit down. I have kept a place for you on my right. You will eat while I talk; and you need not listen, for I shall talk nonsense. I intend that this, my one night in Paris, shall be remembered. It is to be a very gay night.”

“But we start at dawn to-morrow, do we not?” she reminded him.

“Assuredly, assuredly. That is why we must make the most of these few hours.”

He installed her beside him with great ceremony, as if she were the queen of a carnival. Then he motioned to Hippolyte to open the champagne....

Toward midnight Taillandy, in response to repeated toasts to himself and his work, rose rather unsteadily to his feet and made a speech.

“Friends—comrades,” he began—“and fellow artists, no man is better than his neighbor: therefore there is no reason why I should be called upon to speak ahead of any other man present. All of us are alike in that all of us are seeking, each in his own way, the Truth. Naturally, since all of us are artists, we seek the Truth through Beauty; and when I say Beauty I spell it with a capital B, because Beauty, as I understand it, is more than a noun—it is religion. Now, to my eyes, Beauty exists wherever man does not intrude the ugly work of his hands. The world, if left to itself, would be universally beautiful, and in like manner a man’s soul, if isolated and uncontaminated by man-created ugliness, would of necessity be beautiful. A child’s soul, for example, is beautiful—how long? Why, until the child learns to talk and to hear and to understand the evil of men. In short, it is the herding of men together in cities and communities, it is the daily contact with artificiality, it is the galling yoke that we call modern civilization that has banished Beauty out of our lives and so has banished Truth.

“Granting (and I am sure you will grant it) that if a man have no responsibilities he will be happy, we may go on to say that if he be happy he will be in tune with the beautiful, and receptive to Beauty. What, then, is the lesson? Does it not cry aloud in your ears? Be free! Throw off the shackles of civilization that weigh you down, go forth into the world, keep close to the Beauty that the gods have revealed to you in nature and, casting down your false idols, bow the knee only to her. Cease to be slaves—be free!”

He sat down to great applause. Perhaps they were in a mood to applaud anything, for they were unaccustomed to champagne at sixteen francs the bottle. Taillandy drained his glass, refilled it, and drained it again. Then he turned to Diane: “Do not forget,” he said; “we leave at dawn to-morrow.”

“Do you think I could forget?” she reproached him.

But they did not leave at the dawn of the morrow; for at that hour Taillandy was sleeping most uncomfortably on Bruno’s sofa, whither he had been carried with difficulty by three well-meaning but unsteady friends. As for Diane, she had cried herself to sleep in a room over the café that Madame Maupin had placed at her disposal for the night. She was up and dressed, however, at daybreak, hoping against hope that her hero would not forget to come for her; and she waited, sad-eyed at the door, watching the stars pale in the face of the glow that came slowly out of the east, watching the roofs and the chimney-pots take form against a lightening sky, watching the shadows of the houses stretch their blue lengths along the street.

Madame Maupin, descending cheerfully from a dreamless sleep, found her at a table by the door, with her face in her hands. Madame Maupin, taking in the situation with the intuition of a true Frenchwoman, strove to console her, saying: “Come, my little cabbage, you must not cry. He will be back, and there are a great many more mornings ahead of you. He is doubtless a little tired, that is all, and if he is tired you surely do not begrudge him his sleep.”

Diane dried her eyes and tried to smile.

“Yes, yes,” she said. “I am very foolish. But I love him so much, Madame Maupin.”

“Of course you do. Every one does. He is a wonderful man, Monsieur Ferdinand is. And a great poet. You must remember that and make allowances; for all great poets get drunk. They tell me that Monsieur Paul Verlaine was—well, no matter. I do not remember him, and he is dead now. But he was a great poet and a wonderful drinker, too.”

Diane, never having heard of Monsieur Paul Verlaine, was of course not greatly interested. She felt that it was all the fault of Paris—that it was Paris that was reaching out hideous, soiled hands to drag her idol from his pedestal. And it was then that the high resolve came to her to save Ferdinand from this soul-devouring monster. I doubt if the irony of the situation entered her mind. I doubt if she remembered that originally it had been he who was to save her from the maw of Paris, who was to “pluck the flower from the mire of a Christian city and plant it in the garden of the gods.”

At eleven o’clock a perfectly cheerful Taillandy swung into the café, arm-in-arm with Bruno and le petit Martel, and found a Diane, serene and resolved, there to receive him.

He kissed her good morning on the forehead, inquired how she had slept, was glad that Madame Maupin had extended her hospitality, and, worst of all, asked Madame Maupin if she would be good enough to repeat the offer that night or any other night should it be necessary. He would gladly pay the bill.

“But,” ventured Diane, “do we not leave to-morrow surely?”

“Of course, my little one,” he answered—“of course. To-morrow at dawn. But it is well to be prepared in case something should intervene to delay us.”

Then, complaining of a headache, he ordered absinthe for three and a sirop de groseille for Diane. And he took occasion to warn her never to drink absinthe—it was very injurious and led to all sorts of follies. Diane assured him that she would always abstain from it. She was uncomfortable; her heart was heavy; she wished that Bruno were not present—she hated Bruno—and she believed that, if she were allowed an hour alone with Taillandy, she could persuade him to return to his gods. But Bruno and le petit Martel, anticipating perhaps another evening similar to the last, stuck close to Taillandy’s elbow, and saw to it that his glass (and their own glasses) remained full.

III

The first four days that Taillandy spent in Paris had a striking similarity. I have pictured one of them, endeavoring to deal with the poet’s temporary downfall as leniently and as delicately as possible. Even average men have their evil moments and are held excusable; how much more readily, then, must we condone the lapses of a genius! I do not pretend that he was blameless, but, remember, he had passed eight years alone, and the reaction was bound to be extreme.

On the evening of the fourth day, when Diane saw that all the signs and omens pointed to another festival night, she took matters into her own hands and made a decisive step. Strange as it may seem, it was Bruno who aided her in her scheme to get Taillandy out of the city. Perhaps Bruno, being more advanced in years, was tiring of dissipation; perhaps his heart was really excellent at bottom; perhaps he cared for Diane more unselfishly than he chose openly to admit. At any rate he rendered her invaluable assistance.

It was he who interviewed the owner and driver of the covered, two-wheeled market-cart, arranging with him that he should be at the Closerie des Lilas at two o’clock that morning.

“No vegetables, my friend,” said Bruno; “we want no vegetables, but we desire plenty of straw on the floor in order that a stuffed turkey may repose comfortably thereupon. And it will be a large turkey—a hundred and fifty pounds.”

The driver of the cart, disturbed at this, crossed himself violently.

“It is not a corpse that monsieur wishes me to drive in my wagon?”

Bruno laughed cheerfully.

“Not quite,” he answered. “It will be breathing—fire and alcohol; but it will be breathing. Beyond that I promise nothing.”

The driver was scarcely reassured. However, if it breathed, if monsieur guaranteed that it would breathe—well, for five francs more he would take the chance. So it was arranged.

“I have ordered Ferdinand’s hearse,” Bruno reported to Diane.

She cried out in horror. He must not say such things; and she, too, crossed herself precipitately.

At seven o’clock, the hour of dinner, when the fête usually commenced, the Closerie des Lilas was packed to the doors. All the guests were present, hungry, thirsty, licking their lips, but—there was no host.

“Where is he?” whispered Bruno to Diane.

“Where is he?” echoed le petit Martel.

“Where is he?” muttered the two veterans who remembered Delacroix.

“Where is he?” chorused the models and the midinettes and the daughters of joy.

Every one had the question, but no one the answer. Taillandy had not been seen by any one for over two hours. Each thought that he had been with one of the others. It was very strange.

At eight o’clock, with much grumbling, the guests were forced to order their own dinners, which, owing perhaps to the obnoxious prospect of paying the check out of their own pockets, they ate with little relish. Moreover, there was no sparkling wine of Champagne to flavor the meats, and no Taillandy to talk glorious nonsense.

Diane reluctantly, and for want of any plan of action, took her seat between Bruno and le petit Martel; but she kept her eyes steadfastly on the door and replied to all conversational efforts only in monosyllables. Nor did she eat.

As the hour advanced the gloom deepened. Bruno and le petit Martel, bored and fatigued, hazarded brutal guesses at the cause of Taillandy’s non-appearance.

Said Bruno: “He is doubtless drunk in some other café.”

Said le petit Martel: “It is probable that he has left Paris and gone back alone to converse with his gods.”

It was this latter conjecture that hurt Diane the more. She had planned to save him and he had forgotten her very existence. His promises to her had been empty words. Heart-searing thoughts, these.

“Have no fear,” she answered Bruno and le petit Martel bravely—“have no fear. He will come when he is ready.”

“And you,” insinuated Bruno, “will wait for him?”

“Yes,” she said, “and I will wait for him.”

“You are very faithful,” observed le petit Martel with a snicker.

She flushed a little but let the remark pass. She did not choose to explain to them that she was Taillandy’s disciple—not his mistress. Besides, something told her that they would not understand, that they would wink and nudge each other and snicker, even as le petit Martel had already snickered.

The clock struck twelve times—twelve weary, discouraged strokes. A few chairs were pushed back, a few checks (very modest ones) were paid, and a few of the guests yawned unaffectedly, said, “He will not come,” and departed. The two veterans who remembered Delacroix called for the backgammon-board, and immediately forgot the passage of time.

The clock struck the half-hour—timidly, unobtrusively, as if ashamed of itself. The Beaux-Arts students went gloomily home. Bruno lit his pipe and ordered a cognac and coffee. Le petit Martel, with a show of bravado, called for a bottle of champagne, then discreetly changed his mind and substituted a yellow chartreuse. They, at least, were determined to see it out if they were forced to remain there until dawn. Diane sat in silence, very tired, very miserable, ready to cry.

The clock struck one, surreptitiously, that the people might perhaps think it was merely the half-hour. Hippolyte began to clear the tables and to pile up the chairs for the night. Madame Maupin was stacking up the day’s receipts in little piles of copper, silver, and gold. The gold pile, she noted, was miserably small that evening.

And then, before the clock was forced to strike again, the door swung violently open and in came Taillandy, hatless, his hair on end, intoxicated, but not with wine. Intoxicated, rather, with the sense of great accomplishment.

He greeted no one, but cried loudly and exultantly: “I have done it! It is completed—and in six hours. Never have I worked so rapidly and so well. For it is good, my friends, it is good. Listen and judge for yourselves if it is not good. Oh, but I was in the vein to-night! I was tired—very tired—and I smoked fifty vile cigarettes and wrote fifty immortal lines. You see, I am not modest. That is because I know that it is good.”

He was tremendously excited. There was a flush on his cheek-bones as of fever, and a feverish light burned in his eyes. The two sheets of paper that he held trembled and rattled in his hands as he stood in the middle of the room and began to read.

What he read was his “Hymn to Diana Imprisoned.” We have all read it and recognized it as his greatest lyric; and we all remember, surely, the last quatrain, which some one has translated, poorly enough:

“Why dost thou tarry in the haunts of men?
Cast off the chains that bind thee, burst the bars!
The high gods call and, pleading, call again—
Come forth and live beneath the singing stars!”

Put that back into Taillandy’s French and let Taillandy stand up and declaim it to you, and I warrant you’ll feel a shiver of exhilaration run up your spine. For Taillandy knew how to read his verse—there is no gainsaying that.

When he finished he had them all fairly on their feet. The women, not understanding much of what he read them, nevertheless wept from sheer excitement, Madame Maupin the most conspicuously and copiously, Diane the most quietly. But there was a good bit of relief mingled with Diane’s tears. She had her hero back, more of a hero than ever. Her idol’s feet were not of clay but of gold. What woman could resist weeping with such excellent cause?

Vaguely she sensed that the invocation was addressed to her, that the poet had passed his evening in solitude, making her immortal in immortal verse, that, far from being forgotten by him, she had been ever before his inward eyes.

Triumphantly the clock struck two. Bruno was the only one to heed it; and he approached Diane and murmured, “It is two o’clock. The hearse should be at the door. Or shall we call it the triumphal chariot of fire that will bear him, like Elijah, up to heaven?”

Before Diane could reply the driver of the two-wheeled cart squeezed his broad bulk through the door. He stood there, whip in hand, searching the room for his clients.

“What do you want?” inquired Taillandy, who was nearest him.

“My passengers,” answered the driver.

“And who are they?” the poet persisted.

“God knows,” said the driver. “But one of them, they told me, would be very drunk.”

“I am very drunk,” said Taillandy. “Wine never made me more so. Moreover, I see no one else who is in that condition. Accordingly I retain you. Is your wagon comfortable?”

“There is plenty of straw,” answered the driver.

“Good. You are hired, then, until dawn; and we start at once.”

He went to Diane and took her by the hand.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“I am ready,” said she.

“Then come. Let us return to the true gods who are calling to us.”

He bowed very low, first to Madame Maupin, then to the room in general.

“Adieu,” said he. “I earnestly hope that come day you will open your eyes and see that you are slaves.”

With Diane on his arm he passed out of the door into the night. The cart stood at the curb, the huge percheron smoking in the chilly air. The driver climbed up into his seat, and Taillandy lifted Diane in his arms and placed her in the straw under the canvas cover. Then he himself took his seat beside the driver.

“You will be cold,” suggested the latter.

“You are wrong,” answered the poet; “I am on fire.”

“As you will, m’sieu’. Where shall I drive to?”

Taillandy bent toward him and whispered in his ear.

“B’en, m’sieu’,” said the driver. “I know the road well.”

IV

At dawn—a white, cold dawn that turned the frost to silver—a covered two-wheeled cart jolted and rumbled into the public square of the village of Evremont-sur-Seine. Taillandy sat upright on the driver’s seat, with the cold light on his gaunt face and a warmer light glowing in his eyes. Behind him, on the straw, lay Diane, sleeping like a child, with a child’s smile at her lips.

“To the right here,” said Taillandy softly, when they had crossed the square. “To the right, and then directly to the left. The shop next to the church.”

The driver, obeying directions, drew up in front of a small two-story plaster house, the ground floor of which was devoted to a shop. In the windows were crucifixes, artificial wreaths, embroidered altar-cloths, and little gilded and painted images of saints. It was the last place one would have expected a pagan to visit.

But Taillandy, with no hesitation, rapped gently on the door, casting a benevolent glance, meanwhile, on the emblems of Roman Catholicism.

“It is well,” he said to himself, “that there should be such people in the world. Does it matter, after all, what kindles the flame so long as it burns brightly?”

An elderly woman came to open the door—a woman with a face like one of her graven saints.

“Madame Nicolas,” said Taillandy bowing, “you are awake early. May I come in to warm myself?”

“Certainly,” she said. “Be good enough to enter. I am just now lighting the fire in the stove.”

He insisted on helping her with the coals. Then he said: “Madame Nicolas, you do not, of course, remember me. It is eighteen years since I used to come to this shop. I remember you, because you are the sort of woman one does not forget. I am called Ferdinand Taillandy.”

“I remember you now, Monsieur Ferdinand,” she answered. “You were an interesting boy.”

“I take no credit for that,” he disclaimed. “All boys are interesting. It is only men and women that are occasionally dull.”

He hesitated an instant. Then he said: “Madame Nicolas, are your two daughters well?”

“Véronique is very well,” she answered him quietly. “She is in the kitchen. Diane”—she faltered a little—“Diane has left us. She—she is working in Paris. We miss her a great deal.”

“Ah,” said Taillandy—“exactly.”

Madame Nicolas searched his eyes anxiously with hers.

“Madame Nicolas,” he continued abruptly after a silence—“Madame Nicolas, do you own a calf?”

“But no, Monsieur Ferdinand!” she exclaimed, surprised.

“That is a pity,” he mused. “I regret that you do not own a calf.”

“What should I do with a calf?”

“Kill it, of course,” he replied brightly—“kill it! In honor of your daughter who is returned to you.”

Madame Nicolas half-rose from her chair; then she fell back weakly, trembling.

“Diane,” she breathed, “you have news of my Diane?”

“I have more than news, Madame Nicolas, I have Diane herself. She is asleep out there in the covered cart.”

“God is merciful,” said Madame Nicolas. “He has, in his own good time, answered my prayers.”

“So be it,” murmured the pagan. “Be very kind to Diane, for she has suffered much.”

“Let me go to her,” said Madame Nicolas. “My arms ache to hold her.”

They went out into the chill morning. But Madame Nicolas did not know that it was cold. Taillandy raised the canvas flap at the back of the cart. Diane still slept on the straw, her head pillowed on her arm. As they watched her she stirred and sat upright, the smile still at her lips, for she had been happy in her sleep.

“Diane!” cried Madame Nicolas. “My blessed baby Diane—my blessed child!”

Taillandy turned away, pretending to shade his eyes from the sun.

“These Christians,” he muttered, “are over-demonstrative.” And he brushed a tear impatiently from his nose. When he had hardened himself sufficiently to look around without betraying his lamentable weakness, he saw that he was forgotten. Diane was gathered close to Madame Nicolas’s breast, and Madame Nicolas was crooning over her softly, as if, indeed, she were a child.

The poet and pagan shrugged his shoulders with a feeble imitation of his old bravado.

“I fear, Ferdinand,” he said to himself—“I fear that you have lost a disciple. Your creed does not seem to be popular. However, you have done to-day what I suppose they would call a ‘Christian deed.’ Ainsi soit.”

He climbed once more up into the driver’s seat.

“Where now, m’sieu’?” asked the driver stolidly.

“Where?” repeated the pagan. “Anywhere! Get me away from these Christians. They are weakening to a man’s resolution. They sap his manliness. They appeal insidiously to the maudlin, sentimental side of his nature. Bah! That sun is very glaring, driver. Do you see how it makes my eyes water? Turn around and face the south, and flog your horse a little. What was it that King Agrippa said in their Bible? Ah, I have it now: ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’ Flog your horse, driver—flog your horse! I must get out of here. It is dangerous, I tell you—dangerous. Flog your horse, driver, and drive me to the south—to the south where the nereids are laughing and leaping and calling to one another across the waves of the far-resounding sea. Farewell, Diane—adieu. I go back alone to the gods.”

Obediently the driver plied his whip, the horse broke into a heavy, swaying trot, the cart bounced and rattled over the cobblestones, and Ferdinand Taillandy, pagan and poet, became once more a wanderer on the face of the earth.

DOWN ON THEIR KNEES[19]

By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From Harper’s Magazine

SI NICKERSON’S Lane! Had the ghost of that Old Harbor whaler come back to his native street, amazement must have moved his phantom features. The little houses scrambling up its length, once so drab and austere, seemed to have gone mad with their pinks and yellows and emeralds. The babies under the grape-vines were brown as shoes, and so were the old women, bright-kerchiefed, gossiping across the fences in a tongue he had heard, perhaps, when he used to put in at the Azores for water and green stuff, but never here. Manta’s, Silva’s, Cabral’s, on the mail-boxes—and in the Nickerson house at the top, antique and white-pillared, lived now a Portuguese Peter—Peter Um Perna, as one would say—Peter One-leg. The ghostly visitant might have dropped a tear at all this, or, a philosopher, he might have turned his hollow eyes on Angel Avellar, making lace behind the pink palings of her grandmother’s yard, and, murmuring, “For of such is the kingdom of the future,” gone back to his grave.

Angel’s grandmother had to walk with a stick, she was so old; an absurd, dried-up person with a topknot the size of a thimble, bad knees, arms like broom-handles and a hundred times as tough and never thoroughly dry. At almost any time of the day, or of the year, they might have been seen in the yard or the shed, stabbing in and out of the wash-tub, furious, uncontrollable, thrashing the suds about at one end and the thin old woman at the other. One wondered if she never rebelled at them. Perhaps she did. They washed for a good many people, among them Peter Um Perna; and the One-leg, since he had become so rich, changed his shirt every other day when he was ashore from his vessel.

At any rate, other folks rebelled; it made them nervous to see her work so long and so hard. But when they demanded across their fences why she would put none of it on that “lazy piece of an Angelina,” she made no answer beyond tapping her nose reflectively with a dripping finger-bone. Or perhaps she might be hanging out one of Peter Um Perna’s shirts, and pause to stare at it with an odd, preoccupied attention. Or again, if the vessels chanced to be coming in that day, she might hobble into the house and, finding Angel reading on the sofa, pet her lustrous hair, mumble and smile, and say, “Y’r lace, Pretty, out ’n the garden,” or perhaps, “The flowe’s needs pickin’, Pretty.”

Peter Um Perna made his men carry him ashore on their shoulders when his vessel came back from the fishing-grounds. Had a drop of water touched his single russet shoe there is no saying what would have happened. They hated him as no other skipper was hated; yet he was a lucky man to go with, a “dog” for knowing the fish, and it was a sight to see them coming up Nickerson’s Lane after a “big trip,” in their boots and hard, round rubber hats, loitering and shuffling so as to let him keep his wooden-legged lead of them, and bellowing across the yards of how many fish they had taken and how many dollars they had shared.

Um Perna said nothing; there was no need. He stumped along in front with his hat pulled down to hide the scar on his forehead, one thumb tucked over the gold watch-chain, the other preening his black mustache. One would think he had forgotten there were other people in the world, for he turned his eyes neither to the right nor to the left, not even when he passed the pink-fenced yard where Angel Avellar always chanced to be, picking flowers, perhaps, or reaching up her brown, well-rounded arms to tuck a vine-tendril in place, or perhaps sitting with her head bent over her lace-hooks, the hair hiding her face except for an edge of cheek, deep-colored under the eyes of Um Perna’s men—especially of Man’el Costa. For saying his name over to herself, or even thinking of Man’el, made Angel’s cheeks hot this autumn of her seventeenth year.

Folks laughed at Angel for sitting out of doors when the flowers were all gone and the grass-plot dried up. But it was on one of these afternoons, with the sun as low as a man’s head and a cold wind spattering sand among the roofs, that Man’el Costa leaned his ditty-bag on the palings and asked Angel to go to the St. Michels’ dance with him.

“What y’ say?” he urged. His soft, dark cheeks grew darker still at the snickers of his mates behind him.

Angel wanted to laugh and to weep at the same time. She could not have lifted her eyes if a hundred red-hot needles had pricked her. Man’el Costa! Man’el Costa! If she could only so much as nod her head. Her heart jumped up and choked her; Man’el was turning away, not understanding. She must, somehow, get to her feet.

“M-m-man’el!” she stammered, her face stricken with fire.

It was not Man’el there facing her, but Peter Um Perna himself, who had waved Man’el away. He looked her over at his leisure.

“What’s y’r name?” he inquired, with a faint sneer. When he saw the girl trembling and quite unable to answer, the sneer broadened.

“I guess that’s one o’ my good shirts dryin’ on the line there. Better bring it to my house after supper, whatever y’r name is, because I’ll want to wear it to-morrow.”

Angel got into the house somehow. At first, on the front-room sofa, even the tears refused to come, she was so bruised and robbed. Man’el had not understood, and he would never ask her again, and there were so many girls. By and by the world grew warmer and blacker, and she could sob till she was worn out to her fingertips, and Avo Avellar’s hand on hers in the gloom was something holding her up from the deep. The Avo began to croon after a time, a curious mumbling overtone of exultation.

“I hear ’im. Pretty. I was behind the curtain. Y’ don’t know men yit, or y’ would n’t take on so. ’Ain’t he spoke to y’u, Pretty? He claims t’ hate women, an’ yit he’s spoke t’ my Pretty. Dry y’r tears, dearie. Did n’t y’ hear he wanted y’ should bring the wash t’night? This Peter wants t’ see my Pretty again, does he? Hee-hee-hee-hee!”

It was so hard for tired Angel to understand. What was the Avo talking about? Turning over, she stared at the shadowy ceiling, her eyes growing wider and wider, and her wrists cold, as if in an ice-pack.

“Who you mean?” she whispered. “Not—not the One-leg, Avo!”

“Yis, the One-leg, Pretty. The One-leg that lives in the big house up there and pays four dollars f’r a shirt, they tell, up to Boston. If more men was to git a leg catched into a jibin’ boom—what a world—what a world! Mebby they’d all git mad then, an’ proud, an’ mebby own their three good vessels same’s Peter. A touch o’ gold that was. Pretty. He’s the same’s the rest of ’em afore that—remember? And to-day—to-day, he’s spoke to Angel Avellar. Come, lay out y’r Sunday frock while I git the supper ready. Hee-hee—”

She hobbled off, bubbling over her stick, to rattle her supper pots in the kitchen. The illumination from the doorway lay across the carpet; Angel, turning on her side, watched the shadow crossing and re-crossing the bright patch, huge and misshapen and curiously agile.

“Was that the reason why she always sent me out into the yard then?” It was an astounding question, heavy and bitter and dark, made up, as it were, of all the questions of all the young girls standing on the thresholds of all the ages. It seemed impossible for her to go out into the light, but she had to when the Avo called.

“I don’t want t’—t’ take the wash,” she pleaded, bending her head lower over the cod-cheek chowder. Abashed by the unexpected silence, she hazarded a peep through her lashes. The old woman began to laugh with a shrill, angry sarcasm, throwing one skinny arm over her head like a dancing-girl.

“Oh yis, yis! I go! That’s what y’ want? I’m so strong an’ straight an’ pretty. I heave my stick in the pig-yard an’ skip like Tony Button’s goat—an’ who knows if Peter One-leg won’t ast me for his wife. Ahhh! Hee-hee-hee!” She dropped her irony in a wink for a kind of wrinkled tenderness. “Ah, my Pretty—I f’rgit my Pretty’s a little girl yit. But you won’t be nervous now, will you? I was same ’s that when I was young, too; I shivered and cried when I was lucky—same’s you, Pretty. It’ll be all right. You go ’long. Go ’long! Here, le’me fix y’r hair a second. Y’r dress is pretty. Pretty dress!”

When Angel went up the lane, carrying the bundle on her head, all the little houses with their bright eyes crowded close to watch her pass, and the moon sent a ramping, shameless shadow ahead to drag her slow feet along. The austere autumnal wind shamed her, making nothing of her Sunday frock and stinging her with its blast till she would have turned and run down again had it not been for a wisp of arm waving her on from the familiar shadows below.

Peter’s sister Philomena opened the back door slightly, almost before Angel could knock. Philomena was a narrow-chested, niggardly, black-clothed creature, standing forever on the brink of disaster. Her brother’s affluence, his three vessels, even this house, remained incredible to her, a golden spell to be shattered by a breath of skepticism. She never spent money without a haunting fear lest the shopman chance to bite the coin and find it dust. She gave Angel no time to speak.

“I know what y’r after,” she challenged, squeezing her tall, chalky face in the crack. “Na-na—we don’t want you snoopin’ round here. Go ’way!” But when Angel, unspeakably relieved, turned to go, the woman was out, plucking at her elbow with frightened fingers. “Na-na—come in! I s’pose you got to come in. Oh, dear me—my brother Peter—”

Peter Um Perna sat in front of a base-burner in the living-room, his wooden peg side by side with his russet shoe, and both of a color in the glow from the door, his hands folded across his white waistcoat, and his head sunken forward in a pose of meditation or perhaps fatigue.

“Oh, yes,” he murmured, hearing Angel behind him. He kept her standing in a torment of uncertainty, neither offering to rise himself nor asking her to sit. “What’s y’r name?” This was one of his finest thrusts, to seem not to know one’s name.

“Angeline,” the girl stammered, keeping her eyes on a dim Virgin and dimmer Child between the long windows, blue with the moon, so she would not have to look at him. “Angel—Angel Avellar, s-s-sir!”

“Angel, eh?” The scar on his forehead gathered up all the light and burned like a crooked beacon. “Not a bad name,” he mused. “You must’ve just come t’ Old Harbor; I never seen you before t’-day.”

His face did not change at this quite wanton lie, but the girl’s did in a curious way. Perhaps, after all, there is as true a travail when the child gives birth to the woman as is the woman’s giving birth to the child. Hitching his bad leg over the good, the man became engrossed in its shining metal tip.

“You’ll hear folks talkin’ about me before you been here long, Angel. That’s the name, ain’t it? All of ’em talks about me because I’s so good to ’em an’ because I’m so handsome. It’s my gold foot catches their eye. Look! Won’t see another foot in Old Harbor shines like that in the light. Brass, eh? Might’s well be gold. Then they like the rose-mark on my forehead. The saints ’ve got halos, remember.”

Half turning of a sudden, he clapped his hands together, crying, “Come, come! Stand over here where I can take a look at you. Mmm. That’s better.” He stared her over slowly from head to foot, one hand busy preening his mustache, the other slapping nervously on the chair-arm. “I’m thinkin’ o’ gittin’ married one o’ these days.” He paused to watch the color sweeping the girl’s face. There was a light in his eyes of an inexplicable glee. “Yes, I’m goin’ t’ git a woman when I can find the kind I want, or I won’t have ’er. Her hair won’t be black, either, but the color o’ gold, and curly, and her eyes the color o’ sky. She’ll be lighter color all told ’n you are, an’ not near so lean—and rich. She’ll keep a girl t’ do up her hair, and a man jus’ to black her shoes. An’ she’ll come crawlin’ on her knees for me t’ marry ’er, this woman!”

Angel could not understand. She had no way of defending herself against this singular and meaningless brutality. The man seemed amused at her horror and her pathetic, inarticulate passion. He carried on in a shrill mood.

“You ought n’t to have no trouble gettin’ a man, now. You’re good enough aplenty for some poor devil, like a young fellow in my vessel now; I forget his name—Man’el somethin’. Now why don’t y’ go to work an’ get out ’n the yard when the vessels comes in. Mebby this boy might happen t’ see you an’ take a fancy. Who knows? He may like ’em lean an’ black, an’ he poor, too.... That’s all! You c’n go now!” He shook his hands at her with an unaccountable ferocity. “D’ y’ hear? You c’n go! Mena! Mena! Where ’n the devil—Why don’t y’ let this girl out?”

Man’el Costa was waiting outside Peter Um Perna’s gate, rather heroic in the moonlight, leaning against a treebole and wondering how he should hail Angel Avellar, for he had seen her going in with the wash. Man’el was not used to girls quite so timid as Angel; he found it rather exciting, and the feeling deepened the natural fire of his eyes and whipped his fine dark cheeks with red.

“Oh, hello there!” he called, suddenly, catching sight of a figure at the gate. “What’s the hurry, Angel? What’s—what’s eatin’ you?” he finished, bewildered to find his hands imprisoned, and Angel’s eyes shining close with a light he could not fathom.

“Was you waitin’ for me, Man’el?”

“Yeh!” He had planned to lie about that.

“Come, let’s go. Quick, Man’el, let’s go!”

She tugged at his hand, and he followed a few steps down the hill, peering sidewise. It was like a dream, with the weird illumination and the wind and the naked vine-stems shivering among the yards. And this was Angel Avellar! He felt foolish, never to have seen through her before, and at the same time filled with a wild chill of discovery.

“Look here!” he cried, suddenly, tugging her to stop. “What you laughin’ for?” And then, still more uncertain, “What—what you cryin’ for, or are you laughin’, anyway?”

The girl’s hands, pressed against her bosom, rose and fell as though she had been running.

“Will you kill that one-leg pig, Man’el?”

“Sure!” He concluded that she was laughing, after all.

“Now?”

Man’el’s jaw gave way. It was more than ever like a dream; he began to wish he could wake up so as to be certain of it, and then go on dreaming again. The night below gave up a shape waving ecstatic arms and screeching: “Go way f’m here. Git away f’m my girl! Go way—go home!”

They paid her no more attention than they would have paid an unseasonable insect bumbling in the night or the faint surf on the beaches.

“Now? Will you now?” Angel’s eyes held him inexorably.

“W-e-l-l—ugh! Say, look here, what’s eatin’ you t’-night? What’s he done to you? Say, can’t y’ talk sensible?”

Angel’s fingers plucked at his coat lapels.

“Listen! Did I ever ask him to talk about me? Did I? Did I ask him to say if I was pretty or ugly? An’ if he likes yellow hair, what’s that to me? Oh! oh! If I was rich and had yellow hair, then I c’d come crawlin’ on my knees to ’im, could I? Oh! As if anybody ’d look at that cripple pig! Did I ask ’im if I was ugly? Oh! Oh! Oh!”

Man’el threw back his head to laugh at the stars, relieved.

“So you’re ugly, eh? Ugly?” He put something out of the way with his strong arm, crying: “Leave us be, old woman. Can’t y’ see we’re talkin’?... Ugly, eh? Well, I’m on’y a poor fellow, but if you’re ugly, then I want a ugly one. You’re good enough for me—plenty good enough for me! Well, I should guess!”

“Don’t say it that way!” she protested, fiercely. “Not that way!”

“Any way y’ like, then!” Man’el laughed triumphantly, taking her hands in his and swinging them back and forth.

Angel could not sleep that night. She lay wide-eyed awake and sometimes shivering in her bed under the windy shingles, wondering at the strange new face of the world. Her grandmother did not even go to bed, but sat in the kitchen, rocking very slowly back and forth, peering into the coals and sucking her gums. A little before dawn she killed and dressed a pair of pullets and carried them away with her down the lane, wrapped in an old shawl. She was back before Angel was up.

“Look ’t this bottle, Pretty,” she said. “I got it to the drug-store, an’ folks says it’ll make y’r hair yellah. See. Avo got it for Pretty.”

Sitting bolt up in bed, Angel stared at the bottle for a long time after the Avo had hobbled down-stairs again.

“Oh, yes. I remember now.”

Her anger with the Avo grew beyond bounds. She ran around the room in her bare feet, hunting for a place to break the bottle. In the end she let it drop down between the floor and the eaves, and then sat on the edge of the bed, staring at nothing.

Even the oldest crones in the neighborhood could see the difference in Angel after that, and wagged their heads and pursed their lips, for, though their eyes were dim, their wits were sharp for a thing of this kind.

What they saw in Angel was something hard, glittering, something purposeful. For a year she had been putting away nickels and pennies against the St. Michels’ excursion to New Bedford in the spring, and now everybody knew, from Evelina Silva, who worked in Matheson’s store, how she had spent it all in one morning for a piece of yellow silk and a pair of patent-leather pumps with French heels. She brushed her teeth, too, and the grocer-boy who caught her in the kitchen one morning rubbing her cheeks hard with a rough towel did not fail to tell of it.

She couldn’t fool the old women. Perhaps they were a little disappointed when she did not try. Any one with eyes was free to see her, when Peter Um Perna came up the lane, standing slim and brazen in the doorway, “showing off” the waist she had made from the yellow silk, and those patent-leather pumps with the French heels. A spot of color like a rose-petal burned in either cheek, and the lights in the hair framing the lovely oval of her face were like blue sabers in a mist. She stared at Peter as he passed, looked him over with the bland incuriosity of a stranger till her eyes came to that brass-shod peg, when she smiled a little to herself. One could see the cords in Peter’s cheeks tighten and stand out, that was all. He went on fingering his mustache and toying with the watch-chain as if he did not know she was there. How they hated each other, Angel Avellar and Peter Um Perna!

Man’el Costa wanted to laugh. He was delighted with Angel, and more and more with every passing week he wondered that he could have looked at any other girl. And yet, from time to time, a ripple of uneasiness passed across his simple soul. He spoke of it one evening in the Avo’s front room, where he came to see Angel quite often now and sit on the sofa with his arm around her, oblivious to the old woman’s vindictive screechings from the kitchen.

“You—you’re sure y’ like me, Angel? Y’ ain’t beginnin’ t’—to—”

There was no need to finish the question; the answer was in the dark, reproachful eyes which seemed to be looking through him and beyond. She spoke after a moment in a musing tone.

“He told me I was ugly. Did I ask him? Did I ask him? Say!” She jumped up to straighten a corner of carpet with a toe. “I tell you,” she cried, wheeling on Man’el. “You want t’ know what I wisht? I wisht that—that thing there—would come crawlin’ on his knees—to me—me, Man’el. Just once, Man’el!”

Man’el stared at his finger-nails and laughed uncertainly. “I’d like t’ see you then, Angel, old girl.”

The Avo, hobbling in, held up her two shaking hands. “Look at ’em,” she quavered. “All et up with the wash. An’ who did I wash f’r—t’ keep her soul ’n’ body togither? Eh? What does she care? Eeee! Eeee! She’d be glad if I was dead ’n’ gone! Wisht I was! I wisht I was.”

Angel was not the only one changed by that early winter. People said that Peter Um Perna was going crazy with his money. “’S if he didn’t have enough a’ready,” they said. “Don’ use his head no more at all, at all.”

It was quite true, he didn’t use his head. For after the weathers came on and other skippers hauled up or lay snug in their houses on the watch for fine days, Peter went out in everything. An abiding anger dwelt in him. Driving his dories overboard in a northeaster, he lost all his gear; and his crew, coming home empty-handed for their pains, refused to go again, even when he came stamping through the lanes calling them out, but had their women-folks pull down the front shades and sat in their kitchens, grinning and ill at ease. Man’el Costa stopped in at the Avo’s back shed with his bunk-tick over his shoulder.

“Ugh-ugh,” he sniggered. “Home ’n’ mother’s good enough f’r me.”

He had not counted on Angel, who met his announcement with blazing eyes.

“You’d let him scare y’ out, would you? You would, would you?”

Peter Um Perna grinned in an odd way when Man’el came to say he would go. They went out the day before Christmas with four Lisbon “ginnies” harried out of a back-street boarding-house, not in the big schooner, of course, but in Peter’s second craft, the Mena, which his uncle went dragging in through the summer. Angel went down to watch them go off from the beach in their dory. They looked tiny and shaky against the sky and water, both of a pitiless gray.

It began to snow about midnight—a soft, windless downfall, blinding at a dozen yards. The telephone-girl at the drug-store had the news before nine in the morning—the Mena on the bar at Plymouth, and breaking up fast with the flood tide. Yes, they had gotten the men ashore.

Word of shipwreck had run white-lipped through Old Harbor time out of number in the past. But this Christmas day there were no white lips or eyes aching for tears, unless they were up there at the top of Nickerson’s Lane, where sister Philomena stood behind the long windows and watched the people clear away their snow, limping grotesquely, putting fingers to noses, and hallooing down the dazzling passage. Philomena knew what it meant. Fate could not fool Philomena. Had she not been waiting for this? Had she not been fondling the darling fear of this disaster in the bottom of her heart? The golden spell was beginning to fade.

Angel Avellar sat in the front room at her house, chin in hand, brooding over the unseasonable flowers in the carpet.

“I’m glad,” she repeated over and over. “Glad! Glad! Glad!”

That night the festival of Menin’ Jesus brightened all the windows along the lane, making a joyful, steep corridor, walled in, for once, from the hungry ocean and the ruthless sky. There was music, too, of mandolins and island lutes, and men chanting the “Parcido im Belam!”

Avo Avellar had been hard at her housework all day, dusting and scrubbing, making her tiny altar of boards, getting out the new wheat carefully sprouted in saucers, and the candles, the bizarre little Virgin and Child, saints and cows and asses, brought with her from the islands. The wine also, in the huge black bottle, was island wine.

Not many came to the Avo’s—a few old gossips to mumble over the cake and wine, and three or four young fellows, shy of Angel at first till they found how the wind of her humor blew, when they all made fun of the One-leg louder and louder as the candle-fires danced in the girl’s eyes, strummed their mandolins, and drank of the old woman’s wine.

They fell silent of a sudden and wished they were somewhere else when Peter Um Perna stood in the doorway.

“Bóm noite!” he said to the company.

Convoyed by the ecstatic Avo, he entered and took a chair before the altar. He remained as the life-crew had taken him from his doomed vessel, one sleeve split, his collar gone, and his shirt laid open at the throat. They were astounded to see him so mild, as though his losing battle with the sea had somehow rested him. For a long time he sat staring into the candle-ranks. Once he murmured, “Good cake, Avo,” and again, “Good wine, old woman!” He drank the wine eagerly, but seemed to forget the cake. Once he started and looked about. “Where all the folks went to?” he wondered, vaguely.

The Avo got rid of the question with a wave of her skinny hands, and filled his glass again. One could not help wondering at the frail old woman all through that night. Now she was at Peter Um Perna’s elbow, a pervading minister; now she was in the kitchen, where the company had crowded to wait and watch and whisper, crossing her lips with a savage finger, grinning and chuckling through her gums, or shaking her fists at Angel, who remained in the front room, sitting in an angle between the altar and one of the front windows.

There was something luxurious about Angel’s attitude, leaning back at her ease, and something at the same time triumphant. One could think of her as having saved up precious moments against this night, moments of deep scorn or anger, and moments of especial beauty. Now and then her lips curled slightly with her contempt, but beyond this her face remained perfectly impassive, even when Peter Um Perna looked up at her once and down again quickly with a curious flush on his cheeks.

By and by, lulled by the wine and the candle-light, he seemed to forget where he was. His face grew oddly boyish, soft, and untired—he was remembering the red tiles and the rank, sweet gardens of Fayal.

Avo crooned a strange pæan over the kitchen fire! “Drunk in my house! Drunk in my house!” Some of the old women dozed; she hustled them awake. Others wanted to go home, it was so unearthly an hour, but she held them with incredible stratagems, even standing with her feeble back against the door. The cup was not to be snatched from her lips now.

Peter was looking at Angel as though he had never seen her before. “You’re pretty,” he mused. “My, my, but you’re pretty.”

She started ever so little in her chair, then lay back and covered a yawn. “Think so?” she murmured, gazing at the ceiling.

His face twitched and colored, as if for an instant he tried to pull himself together. He let himself go on again with a waving hand.

“I wished you liked me a—a little bit. If you—if you—”

“Who, me? Liked you?” The candle-light showed Angel’s smooth, round neck trembling with pent laughter. It seemed incredible that this was the Angel Avellar of half a year ago. “Me like you—you?”

“Yeah-yeah!” He strained toward her. “God, if you c’d on’y like me enough t’ get married with me! Could n’t you now—could n’t you?”

“Why don’t y’ get down onto your knees, then?”

“Yeah-yeah—wait a secon’. Yeah-yeah!”

He had forgotten that wooden peg of his; it caught between the chair-rungs and flung him down on one shoulder at Angel’s feet.

The devils were loose in Angel Avellar. Leaning over the prostrate man, she seemed to drink of the gray, twitching horror on his face.

“What ’d I say?” he whispered, not yet moving.

“You crawled on your knees for me t’ marry you, Peter Um Perna!”

She gazed into his eyes with a smile of sweet poison. But it was not enough; she was still thirsty. She had meant to spurn him now with a laugh, but the cornered look in his eyes gave her a far finer thrust. “And I will marry you, Peter One-leg. You hear? I will! I will!”

He scrambled up with his back to the wall. He seemed dazed to find curious, exultant faces packing the kitchen door, the Avo’s witnesses.

“I never!” he mumbled his denial. “I never, either!”

Angel turned and blew out the candles on the altar, showing the room cold with dawn. She shivered a little with her triumph. “Oh, well!” She shrugged her shoulders. “If you don’t—” She was making sport of him, Peter, before these people. Him! Peter Duarte! Devils were loose somewhere else now.

“All right!” he bawled. “Come on t’ the priest, damn you, right now!”

They studied each other’s eyes. The girl’s lips scarcely moved.

“You—you think I wouldn’t?”

“You think I wouldn’t?” Peter whispered, too. Then they both repeated it, wondering, almost appealing.

“You—think—I—wouldn’t?”

“You—think—I—wouldn’t?”

Old Harbor will forget many things before it forgets that morning of passion. Angela Avellar and Peter Um Perna were married in the yellow chapel up-street, as soon as things could be gotten ready, still scarcely knowing what they did, driven helpless on an obscure tempest, becoming one flesh in hate. When they walked home to the Nickerson house it was between two lines of people who shouted, “Kill the cripple, old boy!” at sight of Man’el Costa, sleep and rage in his eyes, barring their path half-way up the hill. When he could not stand up before those two intolerable masks, the crowd jeered and hooted to see him ducking away from the Avo’s triumphant stick.

It was after this that Man’el began to drift aimlessly from house to house, lowering and rumbling, stopping wherever they would give him the lees of last night’s wine and listen to his threats.

“Like t’ see ’im go fishin’ t’-day. Ain’t so anxious t’ go t’-day, is he?”

They spurred him on; he grew wilder as the wine moved him more and more. “Go fishin’! I’d go with the bastard. Tell ’im Man’el Costa ’ll go. Take the little Sea Bird now—jest the two of us—man an’ man. Go fishin’, eh? I’d go! Tell ’im Man’el Costa ’d go.”

A blind man would not have known there were people in the Nickerson living-room that morning, even though he had sat there an hour. Sister Philomena huddled down in a far corner, clutching an ancient shawl about her frame with both hands, as if to say, “They can’t take this away from me—leastways not this!”

Avo Avellar sat between the “children” with her chin propped on her stick. She was as motionless as the dead, except for her eyes, which went unceasingly from one to the other. She had spent herself in her one wild night, and now she was bankrupt, and content.

And all the while, for an hour, perhaps two hours, Peter and Angel stared at the same flower in the middle of the carpet.

Peter was the first to move. He got up to wander about the room at his halting gait, putting a hand on the wall here and there, standing for a long time in front of that dim Virgin between the windows.

“Make y’rself to home,” he said, suddenly, with his hand on the door-latch. Angel met his eyes with a regard as colorless as his own.

“I will,” she said.

Philomena’s fire had gone out and the room grew very cold. The Avo roused herself, mumbling, “Avo go git some o’ y’ things, Pretty,” and hobbled out by the back way. Presently Philomena vanished, too, noiseless as a scared mouse, leaving Angel alone with the flower in the carpet.

She was not to continue so long. The door swung open violently, discovering Philomena’s face chalkier than ever and her hands clawing appeal.

“Don’ let ’im go!” she screamed. “Aw, don’ let ’im go. Please, girl—good, pretty girl—don’ let ’im go in this! God sake!”

Angel found herself at a window with a giddy sense of having been wafted there by some mysterious violence.

“Wha-what you wa-wa-want?” she stammered.

“Don’ let ’im go! Don’—” The woman’s passionate drone filled her ears. She wondered with an odd detachment why the folks in the pallid sunshine outside were shrugging and grinning at the house.

“Don’t keep saying that!” she cried. “Now what’s the—O-oh!”

The world was leprous. Here and there on its gray skin a spot of pallor glowed and dimmed as the sun fought to keep it. A spot ran down to the Avo’s palings, and another far out there at the Point lent to the Light and its outbuildings a momentary and unnatural radiance. Still farther beyond, the mainsail of a sloop slanted across the fugitive glory and passed out, as if a gray hand had reached to take it.

“Him? Mena—is that him?”

So this was why the people grinned. As though her ears could hear through walls and spaces, Angel caught up the words from their lips: “Left ’er on his weddin’-day! Well, well, well, well, I never!” A spot of fire showed on her cheek, regular and clear-cut, like the mark of a slap.

For a time now she made no effort to control herself. Months of hate and wounds and bitterness had their hour of bloom. Once, in the half-gloom of the upper hall, she wheeled on Philomena, who followed her everywhere like a frightened dog. “Don’t let ’im go, you say? Ha-ha-ha! You make me laugh. Don’t let ’im come back—thatt’s what I pray on my knees to the sweet Virgin of Pity.”

Her sick fury drove her from room to room. She stood at an upper window and saw the storm getting itself together out of that vast gray yeast of the world. She saw the chimney-smudges topple for a moment and then lie down flat and thin, and she heard the first impact of the wind against the shingles overhead. And there came Avo Avellar, fighting with the wind for the bundle on her head, pathetic bits of finery done up in a pillowcase, Angel’s trousseau. For the first time, seemingly, she realized that the thing was done, completed; that she could not somehow wake up and find it a nightmare.

The house became quite dark. She wanted to lie down somewhere and cover her head with blankets to keep out the sound of the wind. In a bed-room where she came there was a photograph of Peter standing on the bureau. She took it in her hands, tore it once across, and, sinking down in a rocker by the window, remained there for a long time, holding the pieces in her hands. Her sense of helplessness deepened when she glanced down by and by and discovered the futility of her anger; the face in the picture was not touched.

It had been taken, evidently, before Peter was hurt. It carried her back to the front room at the Avo’s, and the altar and the candles and this face here in her hand dreaming into the light. For here was the same look of the boy in the man, the same air of an artless and delightful indecision, of expectancy, of human accessibility.

Angel lay down on the bed and began to cry. She was so utterly worn out that she wanted to die, or to sleep, but the wind would not let her die and it would not let her sleep. The house shivered with it; the bed shivered with it. She pulled a comfort over her head, but the wind came through that feeble barrier, carrying its voices, the singing sleet, the thunder of ocean flinging on its beaches; and other voices—voices insistent, remote, and ghostly. One crept into the room with her, wailing. “He’s dead ’n’ gone—dead ’n’ gone—dead ’n’ gone—”

It was so real that she flung off the comfort and stared about wildly. Philomena crouched in a corner, invisible save for the gray patch of her face. The burden of her wailing changed. “What’d you make ’im go f’r? What’d you make ’im go f’r?”

Angel lifted on her arms. “No, no, Mena! I never made him go. I never! Could I help it if he couldn’t stand the sight o’ me? Could I, Mena?”

“He went because you couldn’t stan’ the sight o’ him! An’ you know it, you—you terrible, wicked thing, you!”

The tempest seemed to withdraw for a moment and leave the bedroom with its two dim, gray faces hanging in a windless hush. Angel’s voice seemed far off, as though there were another person speaking.

“What—you—talkin’ about?”

“Dead ’n’ gone, dead ’n’ gone. Oh, dear, dear!” Philomena rocked from side to side. “You made ’im go in a gale o’ wind. You made ’im crazy so long, so long, an’ you wouldn’t look at ’im because he’s a cripple.”

“What you talkin’ about?”

“What a shame, a shame! If folks on’y knowed how good he was an’ how sweet-tempered when he’s alone an’ nobody watchin’ him. I’ve hear’ ’im talk s’ sweet it’s a’most poetry. But when folks ’s watchin’ him, it’s same ’s a crooked devil in Peter, an’ he had t’ make fun of ’em first before they made fun o’ him. An’ now he ’s dead ’n’ gone, dead ’n’ gone!”

Angel slid from the bed and shook the woman’s arm, as she might have aroused a sleeper. “But what about me?” she demanded.

“About you?” Philomena’s voice lifted wild and sore above the gale, like a prayer for vengeance. “Why’d you stan’ in your yard f’r two long year, then? Two year ago he come home one night an’ set in front o’ the fire, sayin’ to himself, ‘That little girl!’ over ’n’ over till you’d want t’ laugh. You wouldn’ think t’ see a growed-up man cry, would you? I’ve see my brother cry time aplenty, behind his four walls here. An’ other times he wouldn’ cry, but say: ‘Na-na. She likes this here Costa boy, an’ what is it t’ me? F’rgit it, Peter!’ An’ then he’d set f’rgittin’ it. What’d you do it f’r, girl?”

“Answer me a question. Why’d he call me ugly that night then?”

“Answer me a question. Why wouldn’ he eat no supper that night? An’ why’d he act the way he done after you’d went, carryin’ on same’s a drunk man, spittin’ onto his peg-leg, an’ tryin’ t’ bust it off in the door, an’ cursin’ God that’d struck ’im a cripple for pretty Angel t’ make sport of? Answer me that question, then!”

Angel cried for pity. “Mena, you’re lyin’ to me!”

“Ya-ya, an’ mebby it’s a lie he’s went out in a forty-foot sloop-boat an’ got drownded!” The finality of things seemed a tonic to the woman; disaster purged her of the old fear of disaster and gave her a shrewish malignance. “All right,” she screeched. “All right! He ain’t the on’y one, though. There’s two went if there’s one, and now where’s that pretty brown-face Man’el o’ yourn? Ha-ha-ha! Ow-w! Don’t do that!”

“Did Man’el go with him? Say! Quick!”

“He did. Ya-ya-ya! He did!”

Angel’s face grew grayer still with a horrible misgiving. “But why? What’s the reason he went?”

“Ya-ya, you can holler plenty now. There’s two of us now. Hark! What’s that—down-stairs, poundin’ on the door?” she whispered.

Angel whispered, too. “The door’s locked.” They had an absurd sense of being conspirators.

“It—it can’t be—”

“Oh, Mena, Meeena, it c-c-couldn’t be—”

They clung to each other, forgetting the past.

“Why don’t you go, Angel?”

“You go, Mena!”

“Na-na, please you go!”

Angel crept down the stairs and, while the summons still continued on the door-panels, brought the lamp out from the front room, set it on the marble-top table. Being distracted, she gave an illusion of almost grotesque self-control. She spoke to the door as if the boards had ears. “Wait! Wait! I hear you! Can’t you wait a second?”

She had trouble with the bolt, and even when it was undone she seemed not to know enough to pull the door, but stood in the middle of the hallway with her hands pressed against her cheeks. A hungry color swept her face when Man’el Costa came in. He laughed to see it.

“Waitin’, eh?” He took off his oilskin hat and shook it, spattering on the floor. “Scared I wouldn’t come back, eh, Angel, honey?”

“But—but where—is—he, Man’el?”

“Oh, that’s all right. Needn’t be a-scared o’ that now, Angel, old girl.” He ripped his jacket open, blowing and elated. “Needn’t be scared the One-leg’ll bother you no more, no more.”

“Man’el!”

Angel sat down suddenly on the bottom step of the stairs. Man’el confronted her, jubilant.

“Lucky girl—lucky, lucky girl! A swell house an’ a pot o’ money an’ no harm done. Who’d ’ve believed it, Angel? My, my! An’ t’ think I was sorer ’n hell this mornin’! But it’s all right now, ain’t it, old girl?”

“But, Man’el, where—is—he?”

“’Ain’t I told you it’s all right? How’d I know where he is now? Las’ I seen of ’im he’s ridin’ to an anchor between the Peaked Hill bars with the anchor draggin’ all the time an’ the inner bar dead astern. I come in on a freighter. They got a boat ’longside of us an’ took me off. God! how it was breezin’! Seas comin’ clean acrost us! No time to do no argyin’ with him—no time f’r beggin’ a man, I tell you that!”

“Argyin’? Beggin’?” Angel’s hand groped and found a spindle of the banister, whitening with the grip. “Man’el, but I don’t understand. Why didn’t he come in with you?”

“Why? Why? How d’ I know—’less it’s the reason he’s went off his head—crazy’s a bedbug. Settin’ there into the fo’c’s’le with his head in his hands, bawlin’ like a baby. Oh, that—that you, Mena?” A decent solemnity changed his voice at the sight of Philomena’s face hanging in the opening above, gray, quiet, and stricken. “It’s too bad, Mena, but, Mena—I—I’m a-scared your brother—” His floundering made him nervous. “Angel,” he protested, “you tell ’er!”

But Angel was gone.

From Si Nickerson’s Lane it is three miles across the cape to the Peaked Hill life-saving station.

They could hardly believe their eyes in the station-house—Angel seemed more a wind-driven ghost than any human wanderer, with her white lips and her vague, pleading eyes and her back against the booming panels of the door by which she had entered. For the third time now she repeated her words, very slowly and distinctly, and with a kind of desperate patience and a child-like faith that if she could just make these stubborn men understand what she wanted it would be all right.

“You see—we got to hurry—quick. Because the reason my husband’s on the bar out there. All alone in a sloop-boat, my husband is, and his anchor’s draggin’. Don’t you understand?”

The station captain, Ed Cook, banged his fists in growing exasperation. “You said that twict a’ready. I hear you. And I tell you your husband’s all safe ’n’ sound at home by this time. I tell you we got a telephone from a freighter, and he took ’im off a sloop-boat out here. Can’t you hear? You deef? Took ’im off—brought ’im in—safe ’n’ sound to home, now. Hear? Git me?”

“But you don’t understand,” she commenced all over again. “It’s the other man’s my husband. He’s all alone in a sloop-boat—”

“God sake, be sensible. You don’t think they’d go t’ work and take one man off a boat and leave the other!”

No. 2 man, beyond the table, lowered an eyelid and put his knuckles on his forehead. The captain, nodding understanding, got up from his chair by the stove and laid a hand on Angel’s arm. An odd, new kindness was in his voice.

“It’s all right, girl. We’ll go out in just a few minutes, but first you got to dry your clo’es and get rested up. Better lay down a spell, hadn’t you?”

“I can go along, too, though, can’t I?”

“Sure thing—surest thing you know! Only first, now—”

It was curious to see the rough, literal fellows grow artful in double-dealing. They got her into the captain’s office, and when she would not lie down on the sofa, but sat clinging to a seaward window-sill, they took turns sitting with her, coming out of the darkened room now and then like men relieved from a heavy wheel-watch to rub their hands over the stove and whisper about it.

“God alive!” muttered No. 5 once, “the way she talks in there you’d almost think ’twas so.”

“But it ain’t!” No. 3 shook the other fiercely by the wrist. “Good God! it ain’t, you know.”

It began to do queer things to them as the night wore on; that ceaseless, boring reiteration in the darkened room. The watches changed, the beach patrols came in blowing and flapping their “oilers,” heard the tale, and stared curiously at the tellers. The reliefs went out, north and south, and still the clock ticked the night away, and the yeast of a strange unrest worked on in them. It was Captain Cook himself, coming out of the office with sweat standing on his forehead, who struck his fist on the table and swore defensively: “Hell!—we couldn’t la’nch the boat in this—anyhow!”

He had failed to latch the door and it swung open behind him, giving up a voice, husky, quivering with an eagerness that would not dim: “Please—I’m dry now, ain’t I? I’m rested up! Can’t we go now? Because the reason we got to hurry—hurry! He’ll be onto the bar in—in half an hour, I think. Oh, please—”

“For God’s sake, shut that door!” The captain combed his beard violently. Somewhere in the back of the room one of the men hazarded:

“It’s moderatin’ a trifle, by the sound, ain’t it?”

The captain bawled at him, “Moderatin’ hell!” He was gone next minute, climbing the stairs to the lookout’s cupola. “Hey, Tom!” he shouted up the dark ascent, “what d’ y’ make?”

The steady tramping overhead ceased and a voice came down very thin against the background of the gale. “She’s haulin’ a bit now. Moderatin’ a bit, cap’n. She’ll come clear with the sun, I wouldn’t wonder.”

“Yeh, but that there craft offshore? Make ’er out any, Tom?”

“Mast’s away. Don’t make no life aboard. They took that fellow off, y’ know. She’ll hit the inner bar ’n half an hour, I should—”

“’Half-hour!’ What makes you say a half-hour?” The captain’s feet were dancing on the stair. “Gull-damn it! You heard her.”

They got out of the house on tiptoe, like a band of conspirators. They had to fight the surf-boat down the bluff against a wall of wind and spray, gray-pink with the coming dawn. They caught their breath, waiting for the break of the wave, yelled all together, ran the boat out through the white smother, up to their shoulders, scrambled aboard, hauling at one another, tugging—and one that they tugged at was Angel Avellar.

“I’m rested now,” she cried in triumph.

They thrust her down between two thwarts, bawling: “Shut up! shut up!” and, catching half the crest of the coming wave, slid strongly into the trough.

When they came up with the Sea Bird, beyond the lather of the inner bar, they found a dead thing, ready for her grave—a log, lifting and subsiding sluggishly with the swells, her decks swept clean of gear, her masts lying over the port board with the rigging swathed about it like a hank of seaweed. They rested on their oars a couple of fathoms from her side, just keeping their head up to the seas, and set up a desultory hailing. They began to feel more than ever idiotic; the inevitable revulsion set in. One shouted, “Hell’s fire! le’s get out o’ this!” and others, “That’s right! Damn fools, the lot of us!” The captain feathered the stern-sweep, waiting for the break to swing the boat inshore. He tried to avoid Angel’s eyes, two thwarts away, and when he failed he scowled glumly at her, grumbling:

“Look what y’ done!”

It made no impression on her. She turned her eyes across the little strip of water and back to him, smiling, half wistful, half joyous. “He’s waitin’ for us.”

Swinging the boat’s head in with an angry jerk, he cried: “God’s sake, climb aboard then, an’ get it off your mind and over with. Heave ’er aboard there, boys! God’s sake! the bother of ’er!”

Very cautiously she disappeared within the companionway of the tiny forecastle. They waited, holding on and fending off with their boat-hooks, afraid to meet one another’s eyes, grumbling, “’S too bad—too damn bad.”

The wrack over the water grew lighter and changed imperceptibly from pink to a pale lemon, and still they waited, not knowing what to do, till Ed Cook protested, “By Heaven! that’s about enough o’ this,” and got himself over the sloop’s taffrail. He teetered forward and bent down to peer into the black hole, and then, turning half around, he sat down in a heap on the house and took off his hat. “And jus’ to think!” he wondered, “jus’ to think!”

Angel’s voice came out to him, insistent and faintly querulous, as though she tried to wake a sleeper. “Peter, Peter—look at me, Peter! Didn’t you know I liked you always—ever since—ever since—Oh, Peter, Peter!—not to know that! Peter, look at me!”

Another voice was shallow and bewildered, like the sleeper awakened.

“Wh’—why—Angel! That little girl!” He must have been touching her with his incredulous hands down there in the gloomy place, for the next words were: “Why, you—you’re really! But—but what you doin’ down here, An-angel?”

“Can’t you see, Peter? Can’t you see?” There was an inexpressible triumph in the cry. “I’m down on my knees, Peter!”

The dawn came with a rush now, striking through the mists with its keen, level blades, cutting them away in vast, high-curling slices, letting in the blue sky.

HALF-PAST TEN[20]

By ALICE L. TILDESLEY

From The Black Cat

“THAT’S the child.”

They sighed and shook their heads. One of them wiped her eyes on her faded shawl; the other passed a needle-pricked finger over Rhoda’s short, brown locks. Apparently, it was very sad that she was “the” child. Rhoda backed away toward her grandmother’s knees.

Old Mrs. Varden did not even look up from the coat-seam she was basting with the furious haste of the piece-worker.

Rhoda slid to the floor and took up the bit of soiled rag that did duty as “Meely,” her beloved doll. She was accustomed to being left to her own devices.

“She doesn’t know?” speculated one of the callers.

“Ain’t it terrible?” countered the other, after a blank silence had convinced them that Mrs. Varden would not reply.

Rhoda took stock of them from beneath her straggling fringe of bangs. They were talking about her. What was it that she did not know?

Her grandmother bent over the endless seams, her lips drawn in until one could not see her mouth,—only a deep gash in the pallid face. The neighbors sighed again and murmured to each other. Curiously enough, it seemed that they were almost enjoying it—whatever it was. They had to sit on the little steamer trunk, because Mrs. Varden and the pile of finished coats occupied the two chairs. Why a steamer trunk? Rhoda had often wondered. There was never a reason for anything. The gas jet gave such a queer flaring flame because there was water in the gas. How did it get there? Another of those things you’ll never know. Rhoda stealthily took a pin out of the coat on her grandmother’s lap and began to dig the dirt out of the cracks in the floor, wiping them afterwards with the lower end of Meely. It was a fascinating occupation. Rhoda indulged in it whenever she was so fortunate as to have a pin.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and the two women on the trunk turned their eyes to the door. Rhoda scrambled to her feet, losing the priceless pin, and rushed to meet the woman who entered.

The younger Mrs. Varden was attired in a cheap, flashy, checked suit. There was a willow plume of a vile purple in her shabby hat. Long earrings—ten cent store variety—dangled almost to her shoulders. Her face was coated with a white and red liquid concoction that entirely obliterated expression. But her eyes had the red rims that betokened nights of weeping.

She greeted her child with an absent pat. It might have been a little dog that rubbed against her. Rhoda thought her mother surpassingly lovely.

“It ain’t a bit o’ use, Mom,” the younger Mrs. Varden was saying, “Al says y’ can’t see the Guv’nor fer love or money.”

Her mother-in-law did not pause in her work. Only a queer little shudder showed that she had heard.

“Ain’t there nothin’ we can do?” asked the woman in the shawl.

“Nope.”

Young Mrs. Varden crossed the room to the unmade bed and sat down on it with a little groan.

“What time will it be, Lu?” persevered the other.

“Ha’ past ten.” She swallowed, hastily. “It was ha’ past nine when me and Al came up the street. He’s waitin’ at the drug store for ’em to telephone him when it’s—all over.”

“Who’ll ’phone him?” The callers were deeply impressed.

“One o’ the reporters. They was hangin’ ’round already when me and Al was there. This one was real decent. They wouldn’t leave me see him, Mom!” She raised her voice plaintively, as she turned to her mother-in-law. “They wouldn’t leave me say anythin’ to him. There was a priest in with him then. This here fella says—this reporter fella—he says we didn’t go at it right or they’d ’a’ let me see him just once.”

There was a little pause. Rhoda sat at her mother’s feet and held Meely close to her bosom. The eyes of the visitors still held that odd, mournful joy. The elder Mrs. Varden threaded another needle.

“She don’t seem to miss her Pop, does she?” said one of the sympathizers, indicating the child. “Don’t she ever ask for him?”

Lu moved impatiently. “Sure, she misses him,” she contradicted; “she ain’t much of a kid for fussin’. There is somepin’ you might do, now I think of it, Mame. Y’ might rustle up a little gin fer me ’bout ha’-past ten. Now, Mom, y’ needn’t look like that! A little gin won’t hurt me. Y’d better have some yerself. You might watch fer Al, too, if y’ wanta, Mame. He’s goin’ to let me know if—if anything happens.”

The two women departed, whispering.

At once Lu started up and began to pace the floor, suddenly garrulous.

“Al says it ain’t a bit painful. He says it’s all over so soon he won’t hardly know what happened. We tried to get ’em to let me speak to him, but they wouldn’t. They say he don’t seem a bit sorry. He don’t talk none—not even to the priest. That’s like you, Mom. That’s where he gets that from. Al kinda hoped we’d get at the Guv’nor after we heard he’d come to town, and we tried. He’s stayin’ at the Westwick. My, but it’s grand in there! We waited fer a while in a room where the rugs was as thick as grass—an’ little gold chairs! He’s got an attack of grippe, they said,—the Guv’nor has,—but the man said it was too late fer him to act, anyway. That reporter fella was awful decent to us. He took my picture, and he says it’ll be on the front page.”

“Where’s my papa?” asked Rhoda, suddenly.

Her grandmother looked down at her, slackening her needle without stopping it.

“Do you want him, Baby?” she asked, huskily.

Rhoda frankly did not want him,—a dark, gloomy man, subject to fits of rage, as she remembered him. She shook her head. Her grandmother sucked in her lips again and bent over the sewing.

The younger woman laughed harshly. “You see!” she shrugged.

“Wonder if Al’s got any money,” continued Lu, presently. “I’d really ought to have black after—after—”

“Why should Al give you any money if he had it?” demanded her mother-in-law. “He’s done enough taking you all over town. What’s Al to you? And Jim—any minute now.”

“Al’s a friend o’ mine. He’s all right, Al is. Y’ needn’t go thinkin’ anything about us, neither. We’re straight. Jim! Huh! What did Jim ever do fer any of us?”

“You let up on Jim!” returned the elder woman, almost fiercely.

“Yes, and why should I—whadda I owe to Jim?” Lu’s voice rose shrilly. “Whadda any of us owe to Jim? Ain’t he took all your money and brung you down to sewin’ on them rags? Ain’t he drank up every cent y’ raised? Ain’t he kicked that kid about so’s she don’t care if she never sees him again—an’ the Lord knows after ha’-past ten she never will! Ain’t he made my life miserable? Ever see him spend a cent on me for ten years? No. He was too busy drinkin’ and hangin’ ’round them low saloons!”

“Hush! He ’s going to die.”

“Yes, an’ what fer? Fer shootin’ down a kid not much older ’n his own here. Just shootin’ him down fer pure devilment.”

“You don’t know. He always said he didn’t do it.” The older woman’s hands were shaking so that the needle traced a zigzag course along the seam.

“Oh, I’m tired o’ pretendin’ I think he ain’t guilty. Gawd knows I’ve gone snivelin’ to every Judge I could find, swearin’ I had the best husband a woman ever had, and that he couldn’t ’a’ done a dirty trick like that—an’ all along knowin’ it was just like him! Bah! Didn’t I cry like a baby to the Guv’nor’s man this very night—all so’s he could git out o’ bein’ punished for sompin’ we all know he done? But I’m through. Al says to me, he says, ‘You’re a fool to take on about a fella that’s been as low-down as Jim,’ he says.”

Rhoda began to whimper. She was not a child to cry noisily. Her mother reached under the bed for a battered tin box, took out a piece of cake, pale and soggy, and thrust it into the child’s hands. Rhoda seized it and, having rubbed it across Meely’s upper half, began to devour it.

“Jim was a dear little baby,” put in his mother. “He had a dimple in one cheek—”

“Jim’s used you mean, Mom. There goes quarter past ten. Wonder if that clock’s right? Jim ain’t been square with any of us.”

“Jim never lied to me.”

“No. But he didn’t need to lie to us. We was all weaker’n him. He did what he pleased and anybody that tried to stop him—huh!”

“Jim said he didn’t do it.” Jim’s mother drew in a sobbing breath. “Oh, it isn’t fair! Why can’t I do something? Why haven’t I enough money to make them listen? If Jim said he didn’t do it, I believe him. It isn’t right to kill him for something he never did! It isn’t right!”

“He had a fair trial, all right, all right, Mom. Don’t take on like that. Didn’t I set down in the front row and do a Evelyn Nesbit over him the whole time? Oh, it was fair enough, two witnesses. My Gawd, Mom, don’t take on like that! It ain’t painful. Al says it ain’t painful.”

There was a silence, broken only by the long-drawn-out sobs of the older woman. Rhoda, Meely, and the cake disappeared under the bed, fearfully. The young Mrs. Varden sat on the steamer trunk and gazed straight ahead of her, a hard little smile frozen on her face.

So the minutes dragged by.

At last the big clock on the square began to strike the half hour.

The grandmother threw up her head to listen.

“Oh, God, why don’t you do something? He was my little boy—my baby! And he didn’t do it, God! He didn’t do it. He says he didn’t do it.”

“Don’t, Mom, don’t! It won’t hurt him. Al says it’s all over in no time. It ain’t a bit painful.”

The last stroke echoed along the deserted street. The old woman dropped her work and threw herself forward on the shaky table, racked with sobs. Her daughter-in-law strained her ears for the sound of Al’s footsteps. It seemed a long time before she heard them—lagging along the pavement below, lagging up the broken stairway, stopping at the door.

“Fer Gawd’s sake, Al—”

Al leaned against the door jamb and removed an habitual cigarette.

“All over,” he announced, briefly.

“Did he ask—”

“Nope. Never a peep out o’ him. It was all over in no time. Didn’t have to give him extra juice, either—first volts done fer him.”

“Y’ hear that, Mom? It didn’t hurt him. Don’t take on so, Mom! It’s all over. See, Al says it didn’t take no time. Poor Mom, she’s all in! Did he say anything to that priest, Al?”

“Said he didn’t do it. Nothin’ else. He didn’t seem to be much interested, the guy said,” replied Al. “We kin take the body if we wanta, in a coupla hours.”

The woman with the shawl tore into the room.

“Some fella wants Al at the ’phone down to the drug store,” she panted. Lu followed the departing Al down the stairs.

The room was very still. The old woman lay across the table, motionless, one hand hanging over the edge, like a dead hand. Rhoda peered forth, stealthily; then, growing bolder, crept a trifle nearer the door.

A rush of feet on the stairs, and Lu darted into the room, with Al at her heels.

“Mom! Mom!” she cried wildly, “listen, Mom! He didn’t do it. You was right. Jim didn’t do it.”

The older woman raised her head. Her eyes looked dazed.

“One o’ them witnesses—Mom, you remember the fella with the limp?—it was him done it. He grabbed Jim’s gun and done it. They was all drinkin’. Jim was too drunk to remember anything.”

“He wrote to the Guv’nor, special d’livery,” broke in Al, “and then shot hisself. He was a dirty—”

“The Guv’nor never got the letter till ha’-past ten. And he tried to reach ’em, but it was—it was all over. Oh, Mom!” she sobbed hysterically.

The older woman slowly clasped and unclasped her hands. A world of mute agony was in her face. Rhoda pulled at her skirts and she suddenly seized the child and crushed her to her bosom, burying her face in the rough brown locks.

Al ran his eye over them, callously.

“So that’s the kid, hey?—and his Mom. Poor old gal, tough on her. But what you howlin’ fer, Lu? Wouldn’t it ’a’ been hell if the Guv’nor had got that note sooner?”

Lu continued to sob. The woman with the shawl brought in the gin. Lu and Al drank, she still sobbing fitfully. Then she turned to the others. Old Mrs. Varden had taken up another coat. Her needle flashed in and out at a furious pace.

Rhoda was on the floor again with Meely. She was absorbed in a most fascinating occupation. She had found another pin.

Lu turned again to Al.

“If that’s a extra them boys on the street are callin’, I wisht you’d git me one,” she said. “That fella said my picture’d be on the front page.”

THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FOR 1916

ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1916

NOTE. Only stories by American authors are listed. The best fifty-two stories are indicated by an asterisk before the title of the story. Authors included in previous Rolls of Honor are denoted by an asterisk before the name of the author.

Anderson, Sherwood.
*Hands.
*Queer.
Struggle, The.

Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman.
Colors, The.

Atherton, Gertrude.
*Sacrificial Altar, The.

Babcock, Edwina Stanton.
*Band, The.

Benefield, Barry.
*Miss Willett.
*Simply Sugar Pie.

Björkman, Edwin.
Man of Mystery, The.

Booth, Frederick.
*Supers.

Bottome, Phyllis.
*Awkward Turn, An.
“Mademoiselle l’Anglaise.”

Brooks, Alden.
*Belgian, The.
Parisian, The.

*Brown, Alice.
*Nicholas Woodman.
*Prince’s Ball, The.
Three Bachelor Birds.
Time.

*Brown, Katharine Holland.
Veil, The.

Burnet, Dana.
*Fog.

Burr, Amelia Josephine.
Lame Hands of Faith.

*Buzzell, Francis.
*Ma’s Pretties.

*Byrne, Donn.
Superdirigible “Gamma-I.”

*Canfield, Dorothy.
Conqueror, The.
Mess of Pottage, The.

Cather, Willa Sibert.
Diamond Mine, The.

*Child, Richard Washburn.
Young Woman in the Picture, The.

*Cobb, Irvin S.
*Great Auk, The.

Connolly, James B.
*Down River.

Cooke, Marjorie Benton.
Little Jesus.

De la Roche, Mazo.
Jilt, The.

Dreiser, Theodore.
*Lost Phoebe, The.

*Duncan, Norman.
*Doctor of Afternoon Arm, The.
*Last Lucifer, The.
*Last Shot in the Locker, The.
Two Men of Linger Tickle.
White Water.

*Dwight, H. G.
Like Michael.

Edgar, Randolph.
Moth, The.

*Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins.
*Retreat to the Goal, A.

Frost, Robert.
*In the Home Stretch.
*Snow.

*Gerould, Katharine Fullerton.
*Eighty-third, The.
Emma Blair.
*Louquier’s Third Act.

Glasgow, Ellen.
*Shadowy Third, The.

*Gordon, Armistead C.
*Silent Infare, The.

Graeve, Oscar.
Ticket-of-Leave Angel, The.

Greene, Frederick Stuart.
*Cat of the Cane-Brake, The.
Ticket to North Carolina, A.

Haines, Donal Hamilton.
“Infra Dig.”

Hallet, Richard Matthews.
*Making Port.
*Quest of London, The.

“Hatteras, Owen.”
Halls.

Hawes, Charles Boardman.
*The Port of a Vanishing Dream.

*Hopper, James.
Pursuit, The.
Spy, The.

Huneker, James.
Husband of Madame, The.

*Hurst, Fannie.
*“Ice Water, Pl—!”
*Sob Sister.

Hutchinson, Elizabeth Dewing.
Far Traveller, The.

Irwin, Inez Haynes.
*Sixth Canvasser, The.

Johnson, Fanny Kemble.
*They Both Needed It.

King, Basil.
Spreading Dawn, The.

Knight, Reynolds.
Inspiration, The.

Lerner, Mary.
*Little Selves.

Lighton, William R.
Judge Jerry and the Human Equation.

Lowell, Amy.
*Cross-Roads, The.
Malmaison.

Marks, Jeannette.
*Sun Chaser, The.

Marshall, Edison.
Missing Seventeen, The.

Matthews, Frances Aymar.
Marie Rose of Mustard Street.

Montague, Margaret Prescott.
Enchanted Princess, The.

Moroso, John A.
Heads or Tails?

*Muilenburg, Walter J.
*At the End of the Road.
*Brothers of the Road.

*Myers, Walter L.
In the Uplands.

Norris, Kathleen.
Brides of Wastewater, The.

O’Sullivan, Vincent.
*Olivia Mist.

Pentz, Albert DuVerney.
*Big Stranger on Dorchester Heights, The.

*Post, Melville Davisson.
Age of Miracles, The.
Baron Starkheim, The.
Hole in the Mahogany Panel, The.
Mystery at the Blue Villa, The.
Naboth’s Vineyard.
Sleuth of the Stars, The.

Quigley, Edward G.
“But the Earth Abideth Forever.”

Read, Marion Pugh.
Life for a Life, A.

*Rosenblatt, Benjamin.
Ecce Homo.
*Menorah, The.

Sedgwick, Anne Douglas.
*Pansies.
*Staking a Larkspur.

*Singmaster, Elsie.
*Penance.

*Smith, Gordon Arthur.
*Feet of Gold.

*Sneddon, Robert W.
Green Cigar-Band, The.
Out of Darkness.
“Petit Popo.”
Red-Haired Woman, The.

Springer, Fleta Campbell.
Superstructure.

*Steele, Wilbur Daniel.
*Down on Their Knees.
*Killer’s Son, The.
Last Fletcher, The.

*Synon, Mary.
But What Could I Do?

Tarkington, Booth.
Second Name for Vreedersburgh, The.

Tildesley, Alice L.
*Half-Past Ten.

Turner, George Kibbe.
*Smile Factory, The.

Vorse, Mary Heaton.
Mirror of Silence, The.

*Weston, George.
Man Who Was Cracked, The.

*Wharton, Edith.
*Kerfol.

Whitson, Beth Slater.
*Knitter of Liège, The.

VOLUMES OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1916

NOTE. An asterisk before a title indicates distinction.

I. AMERICAN AUTHORS.

Aldrich, Mildred.
*Told in a French Garden. Small, Maynard.

Allen, James Lane.
*A Cathedral Singer. Century.

Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman.
*Old Glory. Scribner.
*The Eternal Feminine. Scribner.

Beach, Rex.
The Crimson Gardenia. Harper.

Brady, Cyrus Townsend.
And Thus He Came. Putnam.

Browne, Porter Emerson.
Peace—At Any Price. Appleton.

Bunner, Henry Cuyler.
*Stories. 2 v. Scribner.

Burgess, Gelett.
*War the Creator. Huebsch.

Burnett, Frances Hodgson.
*The Little Hunchback Zia. Stokes.

Cabell, James Branch.
*The Certain Hour. McBride.

Canfield, Dorothy.
*The Real Motive. Holt.

Chambers, Robert W.
The Better Man. Appleton.

Child, Richard Washburn.
*Bodbank. Holt.

Cobb, Irvin S.
Fibble, D. D. Doran.
*Local Color. Doran.
Old Judge Priest. Doran.

Connolly, James Brendan.
*Head Winds. Scribner.

Dalrymple, Leona.
When the Yule Log Burns. McBride.

Dodge, Henry Irving.
Skinner’s Dress Suit. Houghton, Mifflin.

Drake, Alexander Wilson.
*Three Midnight Stories. Century.

Dwight, H. G.
*Stamboul Nights. Doubleday, Page.

Dyer, Walter A.
Gulliver the Great. Century.

Eaton, Walter Prichard.
The Bird House Man. Doubleday, Page.

Fillmore, Parker.
*A Little Question in Ladies’ Rights. Lane.

Fitch, George.
Petey Simmons at Siwash. Little, Brown.

Foote, John Taintor.
*The Look of Eagles. Appleton.

Frost, Robert.
*Mountain Interval. Holt.

Garland, Hamlin.
*They of the High Trails. Harper.

Grenfell, Wilfred T.
*Tales of the Labrador. Houghton, Mifflin.

Hall, Eliza Calvert.
*Clover and Blue Grass. Little, Brown.

Haynes, William.
Casco Bay Yarns. Haynes.
Sandhills Sketches. Haynes.

Herrick, Robert.
*The Conscript Mother. Scribner.

Howells, William Dean.
*The Daughter of the Storage. Harper.

Hurst, Fannie.
*Every Soul Hath Its Song. Harper.

Jordan, Elizabeth.
Lovers’ Knots. Harper.

Julius, Emanuel.
The Color of Life. Julius.

Kerr, Sophie.
Love at Large. Harper.

Kummer, Frederick Arnold.
The Second Coming. Dodd, Mead.

Kyne, Peter B.
Cappy Ricks. Fly.
The Three Godfathers. Doran.

Lait, Jack.
*Beef, Iron, and Wine. Doubleday, Page.

Lardner, Ring W.
You Know Me, Al. Doran.

Leacock, Stephen.
*Further Foolishness. Lane.

Lee, Jeannette.
*Unfinished Portraits. Scribner.

Lefèvre, Edwin.
Wall Street Stories. Harper.

London, Jack.
*The Turtles of Tasman. Macmillan.

Lowell, Amy.
*Men, Women, and Ghosts. Macmillan.

McNealus, Virginia Q.
The Lay of the Land. Neale.

Maxim, Hudson.
Dynamite Stories. Hearst.

Meacham, Allen.
Belle Jones. Dutton.

Merwin, Samuel.
The Trufflers. Bobbs-Merrill.

Montague, Margaret Prescott.
*Home To Him’s Muvver. Dutton.
*Of Water and the Spirit. Dutton.

Murphy, Rev. Joseph A.
The Unknown Master. Pilot Pub. Co.

O’Brien, Edward J., editor.
The Best Short Stories of 1915. Small, Maynard.

O’Brien, Seumas.
*The Whale and the Grasshopper. Little, Brown.

Owen, Frank.
The Actress. Broadway Pub. Co.

Page, Thomas Nelson.
*The Shepherd Who Watched By Night. Scribner.

Paine, Albert Bigelow.
*Hollow Tree Nights and Days. Harper.

Potter, Mary Knight.
Ten Beautiful Years. Lippincott.

Reeve, Arthur B.
The Social Gangster. Hearst.

Rhodes, Eugene Manlove.
The Desire of the Moth. Holt.

Rinehart, Mary Roberts.
Tish. Houghton, Mifflin.

Roberts, Charles G. D.
*The Secret Trails. Macmillan.

Romberg, Shalah S.
The Wanderer. Rand, McNally.

Ryan, Marah Ellis.
The Druid Path. McClurg.

Scott, Leroy.
Partners of the Night. Century.

Seton, Ernest Thompson.
*Monarch the Big Bear. Scribner.
*The Trail of the Sandhill Stag. Scribner.

Shawmeker, Harvey.
Tales from a Boy’s Fancy. Burton Pub. Co.

*Shortest Stories from “Life.”
Doubleday, Page.

Showerman, Grant.
*A Country Chronicle. Century.

Steele, Robert.
*The Russian Garland of Fairy Tales. McBride.

Stringer, Arthur.
The Door of Dread. Bobbs-Merrill.

Tarkington, Booth.
*Penrod and Sam. Doubleday, Page.
*Seventeen. Harper.

Warner, Anne.
Susan Clegg and Her Love Affairs. Little, Brown.

Warwick, Anne.
Unpretenders. Lane.

Webster, Henry Kitchell.
*The Painted Scene. Bobbs-Merrill.

Wharton, Edith.
*Xingu, and Other Tales. Scribner.

White, William Allen.
*God’s Puppets. Macmillan.

Wilson, Harry Leon.
Somewhere in Red Gap. Doubleday, Page.

II. FOREIGN AUTHORS.

Andreyev, Leonid S.
*The Crushed Flower. Knopf.

Artzibashev, Michael.
*Tales of the Revolution. Huebsch.

Barker, Granville.
*Souls on Fifth. Little, Brown.

“Bartimeus.”
*Naval Occasions. Houghton, Mifflin.
*Tall Ship On Other Naval Occasions. Putnam.

Bell, J. J.
*Wee Macgreegor Enlists. Revell.

Benecke, Else C. M., translator.
More Tales By Polish Authors. Longmans, Green.

Bowen, Marjorie.
*Shadows of Yesterday. Dutton.

Brebner, Percy.
The Master Detective. Dutton.

Clifford, Sir Hugh.
*The Further Side of Silence. Doubleday, Page.

Colum, Padraic.
*The King of Ireland’s Son. Holt.

Conrad, Joseph.
*Within the Tides. Doubleday, Page.

Dantchenko, Vladimir Ivanovitch Nemirovitch-.
*The Diploma. Luce.

“Dehan, Richard.” (See Graves, Clotilde.)

Dunsany, Lord.
*A Dreamer’s Tales. Luce.
*The Gods of Pegana. Luce.
*The Last Book of Wonder. Luce.
*The Sword of Welleran. Luce.

Fielding-Hall, H. (See Hall, H. Fielding-.)

Fleming, Guy.
Half Lights. Longmans, Green.

Gogol, Nikolas.
*The Mantle. Stokes.

Gordon, Samuel.
*God’s Remnants. Dutton.

Gorky, Maxim.
*Twenty-Six Men and a Girl. Stokes.

Graves, Clotilde. (“Richard Dehan.”)
Earth to Earth. Stokes.

Greene, H. Plunkett.
Pilot, and Other Stories. Macmillan.

Hall, H. Fielding-.
*For England. Houghton, Mifflin.
The Field of Honour. Houghton, Mifflin.

Hudson, W. H.
*Tales of the Pampas. Knopf.

Jacks, L. P.
*Philosophers in Trouble. Holt.

Jesse, F. Tennyson.
*Beggars on Horseback. Doran.

Joyce, James.
*Dubliners. Huebsch.

Korolenko, Vladimir.
*Makar’s Dream. Duffield.

Kuprin, Alexander I.
*A Slav Soul, and Other Tales. Putnam.
*The River of Life. Luce.

Lawrence, D. H.
*The Prussian Officer. Huebsch.

Lyons, A. Neil.
*Moby Lane and Thereabouts. Lane.

Magnus, Leonard A.
*Russian Folk Tales. Dutton.

Mille, Pierre.
*Louise and Barnavaux. Lane.

Oppenheim, E. Phillips.
An Amiable Charlatan. Little, Brown.

Pain, Barry.
*Collected Tales. Volume I. Stokes.

Phillpotts, Eden.
*The Human Boy and the War. Macmillan.

Ridge, W. Pett.
*On Toast. Doran.

Roche, Alexis.
Journeys with Jerry the Jarvey. Dutton.

“Rohmer, Sax.”
The Return of Fu Manchu. McBride.

“Sapper.”
*Men, Women, and Guns. Doran.
*Michael Cassidy, Sergeant. Doran.

“Sologub, Feodor.”
*The Old House. Knopf.

Tagore, Sir Rabindranath.
*The Hungry Stones. Macmillan.

Tchekhov, Anton.
*The Bet. Luce.
*The Darling. Macmillan.

Williamson, C. N. and A.M.
Angel Unawares. Harper.

Wood, Michael.
*The Willow Weaver. Dutton.

Wren, Percival C.
Drifting Spars. Longmans, Green.

Yeats, William Butler.
*The Table of the Law; and the Adoration of the Magi. Macmillan.

FIFTY AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF 1916

A CRITICAL SUMMARY

1. The Sacrificial Altar by Gertrude Atherton (Harper’s Magazine) portrays with fine psychological insight and reticence the spiritual reactions of a young French novelist to whom life is essentially a fascinating intellectual problem for analysis rather than a vital experience of the spirit. His longing for elemental emotions and their realization for the purposes of art lead him to commit murder, and the necessity for self-sacrifice after the first prolonged reaction brings to a close a story moved essentially by fate to an inevitable conclusion. With rigorous economy of means and suppression of detail, a noteworthy problem is solved in a superb work of art.

2. Miss Willett by Barry Benefield (Century) is noteworthy because of its compellingly warm human substance, and the fine tender art with which the author’s heroine is delineated. The temptation to sentimentalize a sentimental subject is tremendous, but Mr. Benefield has succeeded in clothing his story with sentiment, while completely avoiding sentimentality. The store-window demonstrator with her starved emotional life finds the fulfilment of her womanhood in a dream whose human disappointment is transformed by a mystical gentleness into a very real fulfilment of her desire.

3. Supers by Frederick Booth (Seven Arts) is a study in brief compass of human derelicts swept together by common need, of their hopes and disappointments, and of their dispersal. I find in it a sense of characterization altogether unusual, and believe that this new writer will win an important place for his work in the next few years. Although the story makes few demands in plot construction, it has a different sort of craftsmanship to commend it, which can best be described as a passion for etched background and salient human portrayal rather than for event or sustained situation. Circumstances would distract from the significance of these figures, and they have their eternal moment here before they separate and recombine in other entities.

4. Fog by Dana Burnet (McBride’s Magazine) is, I believe, as finely realized a story of the supernatural as the year can show. The passionate longing of an inland boy for the sea and a face glimpsed once in dreams creates its own subjective heaven of fulfilment, and the story is persuasively set forth with imaginative power and a fine atmospheric sense. It has the contagion of youth in it, and a sad undercurrent of knowledge which has a universal note. I think the opening is more or less of a cliché, but with this qualification I do not see how the story could have been more finely presented.

5. Ma’s Pretties by Francis Buzzell (Pictorial Review) which I regard as one of the three best American stories of the year, fulfils the promise of Mr. Buzzell’s story, Addie Erb and Her Girl Lottie, which I found to be one of the best two short stories of 1914. In Mr. Buzzell, America has found a new realist whose heart is touched by the poignancy of little things. He is a passionate observer of human nature, and has given realism a new method of characterization, whereby suggestion in dialogue is substituted for descriptive statement. In economy of material and richness of human values, Mr. Buzzell’s art is destined to be one of the most potent influences on American fiction during the next ten years. This story is assuredly a classic of our literature.

6. The Great Auk by Irvin S. Cobb (Saturday Evening Post) gives American literature a new legend adequately realized in dialogue and situation, and touched with a spirit of human sympathy never mawkish nor sentimental. It is altogether superior to Mr. Cobb’s other short stories of the past two years by reason of its imaginative characterization. The atmosphere of the story is as vividly conjured up by personification as that of Dickens, and the rich coloring of Mr. Cobb’s descriptive touches is memorable.

7. The Lost Phoebe by Theodore Dreiser (Century) is one of the three best short stories of the year, in my opinion, despite serious faults of style and a certain wilful verbosity. I find in the story much of Hawthorne’s plaintive singing quality, a dull richness of background, and a sharply delineated portraiture, which by a reiterative monotony conveys a poignant effect of tragic futility. It comes out of the folk spirit of the people, as do the stories of Francis Buzzell, and if an Englishman sought for what was most characteristically American in our fiction during the year, I should point to this story and Ma’s Pretties with considerable pride.

8. The Silent Infare by Armistead C. Gordon (Scribner’s Magazine) is also a transcript from the folk life of a people, touched with deft and insinuating humor, and a rich poetic sense of human values. It is told very quietly in an old-fashioned style, and, with much literary skill, chronicles for the first time the life of the house-negro of Virginia after the war. The atmosphere is softened by finely rendered shadows, and an instinctive sympathy with his subject has led Mr. Gordon safely to his goal.

9. The Cat of the Cane-Brake by Frederick Stuart Greene (Metropolitan) is a grim tragedy of horror, and with directness and power it is Greek in the relentless logic of its unfolding. It reveals striking originality in plot, adequate characterization, carefully handled suspense, and a natural though completely unforeseen dénouement. Its stark exposure of elemental forces is unforgettable, and its compactly wrought structure is a triumph of successful technique.

10. Making Port by Richard Matthews Hallet (Every Week) is, in my opinion, the best short story of 1916. It is elemental tragedy played out worthily against an eternal background, with an intimately human foreground of intensely realized personal experience. Mr. Hallet’s style, always mannered, is here at its simplest and best, and the subtlety of his substance is lucidly conveyed through deft characterization, clearly revealed atmosphere, and richly colored speech. This story ranks with the best of Conrad, with whom Mr. Hallet shares much in sympathy, although their literary methods are very different.

11. “Ice Water, Pl—!” by Fannie Hurst (Collier’s Weekly) is intimately woven of the very stuff of life. Dealing with sentimental types and yet avoiding sentimentality, the perfect fidelity of her dialogue and the subtle definition of her characters are fused into a vitally compelling substance. Miss Hurst’s stories, among which this deserves to rank among the very best, may prove to be the most essential literary documents of our city life to the inquiring literary historian of another century. Their defect is a lack of economy and selective power.

12. Little Selves by Mary Lerner (Atlantic Monthly) is little more than a succession of dream pictures portrayed as they cross the consciousness of an old woman who has lived well and is dying happily. But these pictures are so delicately woven, and so tenderly touched with beauty, that they will not easily be forgotten. I am tempted to say that a success such as this could not be repeated. It is a happy accident.

13. The Sun Chaser by Jeannette Marks (Pictorial Review) is another folk story of permanent literary value to be added to the store of American legends by reason of its imaginative persuasion of reality and its lucid insight into life. Its frankly mystical substance has a propagandist value, but this has not weakened its story interest. It is in the best tradition of Hawthorne, though with less deliberate spiritual repression. I found it elusive at a first reading, but this elusiveness is partly the secret of the story’s charm. The atmosphere is very completely realized, and the story has a rhythmical progression that fascinates me.

14. At the End of the Road by Walter J. Muilenburg (Forum) confirms the high hopes of this new author’s future which I was led to form from reading his two stories in “The Midland” during 1915. With a substance not unlike that of Francis Buzzell, he has a sense of nature brooding over human effort with impending portent, almost as vivid as the same sense in Thomas Hardy, and very completely realized in his work. Moreover, I find in these stories remarkable distinction and individuality in literary style. It seems incredible to me that his important gifts have not yet found recognition in the better national magazines.

15. The Big Stranger on Dorchester Heights by Albert Du Verney Pentz (Boston Evening Transcript) is a very brief recollection of an incident in the life of Lincoln, and true, I am informed, in all essential details. But it is told here with such lifelike imaginative truth and sharp characterization that it deserves a place of some permanence. Accepting the slightness of its texture, I prefer to judge it by the goal which the author set himself, and by this standard it does not fail.

16. The Menorah by Benjamin Rosenblatt (Bellman) is a compellingly realized tragedy told with the authority of the Russian masters in an alien speech. Mr. Rosenblatt has not yet attained ease in English idiom, but this is essentially irrelevant, and regarding it as we would a translation, I do not know what other American writer could have rendered his dream so poignantly and with such an economy of personal emotion. Mr. Rosenblatt has an instinct for avoiding accentuated climaxes of event. For this reason his spiritual climaxes are all the more overwhelmingly real. They leave us quiet with their “dying fall.” But this is something we have been wrongly taught to regard as a defect.

17. Penance by Elsie Singmaster (Pictorial Review) is as finely wrought a story as The Survivors, which I included in last year’s Roll of Honor. Mrs. Lewars writes out of a passion for the spirit of the Civil War, and is the noblest chronicler of its spiritual triumphs and defeats. With severe regard for form, her imagination shapes a situation of extreme difficulty in handling into a masterpiece of dramatic fulfilment. Her story has the illusion of history as well as the truth of all imaginative art.

18. Feet of Gold by Gordon Arthur Smith (Scribner’s Magazine) is a delicate romantic study of Bohemian temperament, unfolded with much magic of touch and a kind of fine sentiment which is not too deliberate. To compare the art of Mr. Smith with that of Leonard Merrick would be slightly unfair to either artist. He lacks Leonard Merrick’s nonchalance in narration, but he handles character with a less ready acceptance, and with a more reticent feeling for sentimental values.

19. Down on Their Knees by Wilbur Daniel Steele (Harper’s Magazine) is in the most vivid contrast to the preceding story. It is freighted with the warm coloring of the Portuguese life the author knows so well, and instinct with sharply contrasted dramatic values. The fusion of plot and characterization in a fully realized picture cannot be studied to better advantage in any other American writer. Mr. Steele and Mrs. Gerould are the leaders of their craft among the younger generation of American story-tellers.

20. Half-Past Ten by Alice L. Tildesley (Black Cat) is a grim and mordant study etched almost too brutally, but with intense power and vigor of expression. The psychological reactions upon his nearest of kin of a wrongly convicted man, who is executed, are memorably portrayed. I suppose that this is the first story of a new writer. If this is so, here is an excellent chance for some one to make a discovery.

21. Hands (Masses) and 22. Queer (Seven Arts) by Sherwood Anderson are two studies by a new and original artist of power who belongs to an important literary group in Chicago which bids fair to dominate the course of our American letters during the next ten years. Both of these stories are abnormal and most unlikely to be popular, but they are realized with a fulness of vision which is unique, and inaugurate a new craftsmanship which has much to teach American writers. I confess frankly that I dislike both of these stories intensely, but they move me to unwilling admiration by their power and sincerity.

23. The Band by Edwina Stanton Babcock (Harper’s Magazine) is akin by certain qualities to the stories of Francis Buzzell. It seeks to render character by indirect suggestion rather than by direct statement and pores with a fondness of observation on the most minute and revelatory details of character in humble individuals. Here action is reduced to an essential minimum in order that passion may be revealed in an eternal instant arrested through half-realized aspirations and desires.

24. Simply Sugar Pie by Barry Benefield (Seven Arts) is a bitter study in realism which contrasts sharply with Miss Willett, of which I have spoken above. The same tenderness interprets human life in both cases, but in this story Mr. Benefield has seen life from an entirely new angle and set down what he found with quiet emotional integrity.

25. An Awkward Turn by Phyllis Bottome (Century) is a distinguished study in realism in which the power of contrast is permitted to reveal the finer grain in a woman’s character. It is skilfully composed and attuned with repressed art to the demands of its subject. It may possibly offend the susceptibilities of unimaginative readers, but I should consider the story to be an excellent test of its readers’ finer grain.

26. The Belgian by Alden Brooks (Collier’s Weekly) ranks with The Eighty-Third by Katherine Fullerton Gerould as one of the two distinguished short stories inspired during the past year by the terrible reality of the war. The vivid pictorial quality of Mr. Brooks’s narrative is appalling in its ruthless brutality, but its ruthlessness is that of the surgeon who would heal a wound, and the story rises to high moments of imaginative spiritual power. I think that the story lacks a certain economy of narrative force, but nevertheless the author’s passion has fused his substance into notable artistic form.

27. Nicholas Woodman by Alice Brown (Harper’s Magazine) reflects with quiet humor the perversities of New England character while at the same time rendering faithfully the warm human qualities of character which it instinctively prefers to conceal. Miss Brown’s gift of selection is admirable. The freshness of vision which she brings to familiar substance is only to be found in the work of a very fine artist.

28. The Prince’s Ball by Alice Brown (Harper’s Magazine) shares with A Retreat to the Goal the distinction of carrying on adequately the fine New England literary tradition. The story is told with a quiet human glow that is very charming and with a certain emotional relaxation. Miss Brown has the virtue of dignifying what would prove to be comparatively slight substance in the hands of another writer. This story does not exhaust by any means the emotional values of its substance. It deftly hints them and leaves the rest to the reader.

29. Down River by James B. Connolly (Scribner’s Magazine) is to my mind the most imaginative rendering of reality that Mr. Connolly has given us in several years. It lacks the mannered quality of his sea stories, and he has not sentimentalized his material at all. The relation between white and black furnishes a new psychological contrast in this story and Mr. Connolly has made the most of his advantage.

30. The Doctor of Afternoon Arm (Ladies’ Home Journal), 31. The Last Shot in the Locker (Saturday Evening Post), and 32. The Last Lucifer (Saturday Evening Post) are three stories of somewhat permanent literary value which we shall esteem the more because their author, Norman Duncan, will no longer add to their number. These three stories rank with the best that Norman Duncan gave us in his prime, when he was surpassed by none in the direct biblical quality of his narrative style, springing as it did from the background of experience entirely novel in substance and realized with complete fidelity and human sympathy. These tales of the Labrador have more of the sea’s stern reality in them than those of any other American writer, although Richard Matthews Hallet and Lincoln Colcord promise to carry on the tradition which Norman Duncan inaugurated with such sincerity and power.

33. A Retreat to the Goal by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (Harper’s Magazine) ranks with the finest stories that Mrs. Freeman has given us in the past. Her smouldering art has always been preoccupied with a certain austerity of substance. She is at her best when dealing with the psychology of suppressed emotion as in this story. Such a preoccupation affords her opportunities for irony that remind one of the Greek tragedians, yet she never sacrifices the slightest human value on this account. The passion for things difficult informs her work always. She has handed this passion down as a tradition to many writers who are inspired by her example.

34. In the Home Stretch by Robert Frost (Century) is surely a masterpiece of the short story regardless of the fact that it is also an admirable poem. It has passion, magic, and truth for its virtues as poetry: rich human characterization, finely conceived background, and quiet dramatic power for its virtues as a short story.

35. Snow by Robert Frost (Poetry) is to my mind a finer story than In the Home Stretch. As a fine poem I am not concerned with it here, but as a short story full of skilfully suggested mystery, bitingly etched psychology, and dramatic contrast, I believe it ranks with the finer short stories of the year.

36. The Eighty-Third by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (Harper’s Magazine) is probably the most completely realized study of horror that American literature has produced since The Fall of the House of Usher. Once read, it will never be forgotten by the most callous reader. You may question it, as I do, on the score of taste, but however you regard it you will be compelled to acknowledge the awful reality of its substance and the utter persuasiveness of Mrs. Gerould’s presentation of that substance. The story is irresistible in its movement and inconclusive, as life is, in its ending.

37. Louquier’s Third Act by Katharine Fullerton Gerould (Harper’s Magazine) is a subtly rendered psychological study of a fixed idea, rendered with all Mrs. Gerould’s usual faithfulness to the premises which you must grant her, and completely persuasive in its poignant sufficiency of background.

38. The Sixth Canvasser by Inez Haynes Gillmore (Century) is a gently related story of the supernatural which unfolds in an atmosphere of dream. The veil which is interposed between the action and the listener permits the author to weave into her fabric an illusive substance that is essentially romantic, and yet so near as to come home in its reality to us all. Nowhere is the outline too faint, nor any detail given undue emphasis of nearness. I think that the author has achieved with happy deliberation the end which she had in view.

39. The Quest of London by Richard Matthews Hallet (Everybody’s Magazine) is a mannered piece of work. I frankly confess it. But the mannerism of this story seems to me to mark a transition from euphuism to style, and in this story Mr. Hallet’s style is almost adequate to the richness of his substance. If it be true, as I have been told, that sailors read Masefield with avidity and reject Conrad with scorn, they will surely choose the former course with this story. It is told with all the prolixity of a sailor in the forecastle, but also with all the passionate sense of reality and hardship that the sea breeds in a man. The romance of reality is set forth here with eager faith against an eternal background.

40. Sob Sister by Fannie Hurst (Metropolitan) must be added to the gallery of permanent portraits which Miss Hurst has added to American literature. Handled by an artist of less imaginative power, this story might easily have taken on excessive sentimental values, which would have destroyed its truthfulness entirely. Handled by Miss Hurst, it gains tremendous emotional values without any sacrifice to sentimentality.

41. They Both Needed It by Fanny Kemble Johnson (Century) unfolds in a leisurely and old-fashioned way, but its substance is new and rather completely realized. The spiritual conflict between father and son is portrayed with reticence and skill, and with an undercurrent of humor whose roots lie in a tragic seriousness. Granted that the story is in a minor key, it is more than competently told and the portrait of the boy is an interesting piece of characterization.

42. The Cross-Roads by Amy Lowell (Poetry Review of America), although it is classified as a poem by some and as polyphonic prose by the author, may safely be left to others for classification. The important fact here is that it is a masterly short story, told with the utmost economy of form, and yet freighted with a rich and shadowy background of mysterious beauty. It seems to me memorable for its poignancy of realization, swift and flashing directness of statement, and freshness of imaginative truth.

43. Brothers of the Road by Walter J. Muilenburg (Midland), like its fellow story of which I have written above, vividly portrays the relations between nature and man with a certain tinge of delineative power that marks the author definitely as one who has come to stay. He takes his substance very quietly, but handles it with an imaginative earnestness which is exceedingly rare. If I can gain even a small sympathetic audience for the work of this man and that of Francis Buzzell, I shall regard the labor of reading twenty-seven hundred stories this year as fully justified.

44. Olivia Mist by Vincent O’Sullivan (Century) introduces to America once more the work of a native artist, whom Wilde and Mallarmé were glad to accept as a fellow artist, but whom America does not as yet appear to know at all. Until the republication of his novels during the coming year, this story with its quietly veiled satire and charming narrative style must serve as an introduction to Mr. O’Sullivan’s work. I believe that it has qualities of humor which entitle one to set it not far below Daisy Miller.

45. Pansies by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Atlantic Monthly) is a very quietly told study in contrasts which suggests a rich preoccupation with backgrounds and a sympathy for the less often expressed emotions of the heart. Now that Henry James is dead, Anne Douglas Sedgwick continues his tradition more competently than any other American artist, and with a subtle feeling for all the nuances of human relationship she composes admirably toned studies of adjustments within her experience.

46. Staking a Larkspur by Anne Douglas Sedgwick (Century) is very like Pansies in its portrayal of quiet human responsiveness to environment. The humor of the situation is less self-consciously concealed, and the story lacks entirely the reproach of oversophistication, to which much of Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s work must plead guilty.

47. The Killer’s Son by Wilbur Daniel Steele (Harper’s Magazine) is almost as vividly realized a work of art as Down on Their Knees. These two stories show a measurable advance over The Yellow Cat and Romance, which seemed to me among the most permanent contributions of the American short story to literature during 1915. I find more passion in the work of Mr. Steele than in that of most of his contemporaries, as well as a more flashing directness of vision.

48. The Smile Factory by George Kibbe Turner (McClure’s Magazine) accepts a tawdry substance and confers upon it rich human values through simplicity of approach and sympathetic reticence. I find in the story something of Fannie Hurst’s art, coupled with a detachment of viewpoint which is more European than American in its quality. The story is told with easy narrative power and though its course is leisurely, it is not loosely put together.

49. Kerfol by Edith Wharton (Scribner’s Magazine) is a ghost story of familiar substance treated with restrained art in a new and unfamiliar way. After one forgets its competence, which is a little bit too self-conscious, one begins to admire the soft tones of the story’s background and the suggestiveness of things unspoken that the environment reveals. The brooding strangeness of the landscape is in harmony with the brooding strangeness of the story, and the two are fused by the author with consummate art.

50. The Knitter of Liège by Beth Slater Whitson (Southern Woman’s Magazine) relates with grim passion and a certain unsophisticated art the tale of a Belgian woman to whom the war brought the predestined significance of fate. Despite a conscious echo of A Tale of Two Cities, the complete realization of her substance endows the author with adequate means of telling her tale. It will be interesting to see whether her later work will equal the promise of this story.

NECROLOGY

- Shohem Aleichem.
Richard Harding Davis.
Norman Duncan.
Mrs. Havelock Ellis.
Anna Fuller.
Henry James.
Jack London.
Harris Merton Lyon.
Molly Elliott Seawell.
Henryk Sienkiewicz.

MAGAZINE AVERAGES FOR 1916

The following table includes the averages of all American periodicals published during 1916 of which complete files for the period covered were placed at my disposal. One, two, and three asterisks are employed to indicate relative distinction. “Three-asterisk stories” are of somewhat permanent literary value. The list excludes reprints.

PERIODICALS

NO. OF
STORIES
PUBLISHED

NO. OF
DISTINCTIVE
STORIES
PUBLISHED

PERCENTAGE OF
DISTINCTIVE
STORIES
PUBLISHED

| | * | ** | *** | * | ** | ***
American Magazine | 64 | 31 | 13 | 1 | 48 | 20 | 2
American Sunday Magazine | 33 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 18 | 0 | 0
Atlantic Monthly | 17 | 13 | 9 | 2 | 76 | 53 | 12
Bellman | 35 | 24 | 11 | 7 | 69 | 31 | 20
Black Cat | 108 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1
Boston Evening Transcript | 6 | 6 | 5 | 2 | 100 | 83 | 33
Century Magazine | 59 | 45 | 32 | 16 | 76 | 55 | 27
Chimaera | 5 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 80 | 40 | 0
Collier’s Weekly | 131 | 45 | 18 | 8 | 34 | 14 | 6
Craftsman | 8 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 75 | 25 | 0
Delineator | 36 | 12 | 1 | 0 | 33 | 3 | 0
Everybody’s Magazine | 36 | 23 | 9 | 4 | 64 | 25 | 11
Every Week | 90 | 26 | 10 | 2 | 29 | 11 | 2
Forum | 9 | 9 | 5 | 3 | 100 | 56 | 33
Good Housekeeping | 40 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 15 | 8 | 8
Harper’s Bazar | 22 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 27 | 9 | 0
Harper’s Magazine | 95 | 65 | 28 | 13 | 68 | 29 | 14
Harper’s Weekly | 7 | 5 | 1 | 0 | 71 | 14 | 0
Hearst’s Magazine | 61 | 9 | 2 | 0 | 15 | 3 | 0
Illustrated Sunday Magazine | 49 | 11 | 3 | 2 | 22 | 6 | 4
International | 22 | 12 | 5 | 1 | 55 | 23 | 5
Ladies’ Home Journal | 51 | 17 | 5 | 4 | 33 | 10 | 8
Life | 26 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 34 | 0 | 0
Little Review | 6 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 83 | 50 | 33
McBride’s Magazine | 36 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 19 | 8 | 3
McClure’s Magazine | 59 | 12 | 8 | 2 | 20 | 14 | 3
Masses | 29 | 19 | 8 | 1 | 66 | 28 | 4
Metropolitan | 40 | 23 | 14 | 4 | 58 | 35 | 10
Midland | 16 | 16 | 9 | 4 | 100 | 56 | 25
Munsey’s Magazine | 65 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 0
National Sunday Magazine | 22 | 7 | 2 | 0 | 32 | 9 | 0
New Republic | 11 | 8 | 2 | 0 | 72 | 18 | 0
New York Tribune | 47 | 38 | 14 | 4 | 81 | 30 | 9
Outlook | 10 | 8 | 6 | 3 | 80 | 60 | 30
Pagan | 13 | 12 | 10 | 5 | 92 | 77 | 38
Pictorial Review | 57 | 22 | 15 | 3 | 39 | 26 | 23
Red Book Magazine | 138 | 11 | 5 | 1 | 8 | 4 | 1
Reedy’s Mirror | 24 | 9 | 1 | 0 | 37 | 4 | 0
Russian Review | 16 | 16 | 14 | 9 | 100 | 88 | 56
Saturday Evening Post | 203 | 48 | 20 | 7 | 24 | 10 | 3
Scribner’s Magazine | 55 | 44 | 27 | 9 | 80 | 49 | 16
Seven Arts | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 100 | 67 | 67
Smart Set | 170 | 24 | 11 | 4 | 14 | 6 | 2
Southern Woman’s Magazine | 30 | 10 | 6 | 2 | 33 | 20 | 7
Stratford Journal | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 100 | 100 | 100
Sunset Magazine | 27 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 26 | 0 | 0
Trimmed Lamp | 4 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 50 | 25 | 0
Woman’s Home Companion | 47 | 10 | 2 | 0 | 21 | 4 | 0
Youth’s Companion | 146 | 12 | 2 | 0 | 8 | 2 | 0

The following tables indicate the rank, during 1916, by number and percentage of distinctive stories published, of the twenty-two periodicals coming within the scope of my examination which have published during the past year over twenty-five stories and which have exceeded an average of 15% in stories of distinction. The lists exclude reprints.

BY PERCENTAGE OF DISTINCTIVE STORIES

1. | Scribner’s Magazine | 80%
2. | Century Magazine | 76%
3. | Bellman | 69%
4. | Harper’s Magazine | 68%
5. | Masses | 66%
6. | Everybody’s Magazine | 64%
7. | Metropolitan Magazine | 58%
8. | American Magazine | 48%
9. | Pictorial Review | 39%
10. | Collier’s Weekly | 34%
11. | Life | 34%
12. | Ladies’ Home Journal | 33%
13. | Delineator | 33%
14. | Southern Woman’s Magazine | 33%
15. | Sunset Magazine | 26%
16. | Every Week | 25%
17. | Saturday Evening Post | 24%
18. | Illustrated Sunday Magazine | 22%
19. | Woman’s Home Companion | 21%
20. | McClure’s Magazine | 20%
21. | McBride’s Magazine | 19%
22. | American Sunday Magazine | 18%

BY NUMBER OF DISTINCTIVE STORIES

1. | Harper’s Magazine | 65
2. | Saturday Evening Post | 48
3. | Century Magazine | 45
4. | Collier’s Weekly | 45
5. | Scribner’s Magazine | 44
6. | American Magazine | 31
7. | Every Week | 26
8. | Bellman | 24
9. | Everybody’s Magazine | 23
10. | Metropolitan Magazine | 23
11. | Pictorial Review | 22
12. | Masses | 19
13. | Ladies’ Home Journal | 17
14. | Delineator | 12
15. | McClure’s Magazine | 12
16. | Illustrated Sunday Magazine | 11
17. | Southern Woman’s Magazine | 10
18. | Woman’s Home Companion | 10
19. | Life | 9
20. | Sunset Magazine | 7
21. | McBride’s Magazine | 7
22. | American Sunday Magazine | 6

The following periodicals have published during 1916 ten or more “two-asterisk stories.” The list excludes reprints. Periodicals represented in this list during 1915 as well are indicated by an asterisk.

1. | *Century Magazine | 32
2. | *Harper’s Magazine | 28
3. | *Scribner’s Magazine | 27
4. | *Saturday Evening Post | 20
5. | *Collier’s Weekly | 18
6. | Pictorial Review | 15
7. | Russian Review | 14
8. | Metropolitan Magazine | 14
9. | New York Tribune | 14
10. | *American Magazine | 13
11. | *Bellman | 11
12. | *Smart Set | 11
13. | Pagan | 10
14. | Every Week | 10

The following periodicals have published during 1916 five or more “three-asterisk stories.” The list excludes reprints. Periodicals represented in this list during 1915 as well are indicated by an asterisk.

1. | *Century Magazine | 16
2. | *Harper’s Magazine | 13
3. | Pictorial Review | 13
4. | Russian Review | 9
5. | *Scribner’s Magazine | 9
6. | *Collier’s Weekly | 8
7. | *Bellman | 7
8. | *Saturday Evening Post | 7
9. | Pagan | 5

Ties in the above lists have been decided by taking relative rank in other lists into account.

INDEX OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1916

All short stories published in the following magazines and newspapers during 1916 are indexed.

American Magazine.
Atlantic Monthly.
Bellman.
Boston Evening Transcript.
Century Magazine.
Chimæra.
Collier’s Weekly.
Craftsman.
Current Opinion.
Delineator.
Everybody’s Magazine.
Every Week.
Fabulist.
Forum.
Harper’s Magazine.
Illustrated Sunday Magazine.
International.
Ladies’ Home Journal.
Little Review.
McBride’s Magazine.

Masses.
Metropolitan.
Midland.
National Sunday Magazine.
New Republic.
New York Tribune.
Outlook.
Pagan.
Pictorial Review.
Poetry.
Poetry Review of America.
Reedy’s Mirror
Russian Review.
Saturday Evening Post.
Scribner’s Magazine.
Seven Arts.
Southern Woman’s Magazine.
Stratford Journal.
Trimmed Lamp.

Short stories, of distinction only, published in the following magazines and newspapers during 1916 are indexed.

American Sunday Magazine.
Bang.
Black Cat.
Book News Monthly.
Colonnade.
Good Housekeeping.
Harper’s Bazar.
Harper’s Weekly.
Hearst’s Magazine.
Independent.
Ladies’ World.
Life.
McCall’s Magazine.
McClure’s Magazine.
Munsey’s Magazine.
New York Evening Post.
New York Evening Sun.
Red Book Magazine.

Romance.
Short Stories.
Smart Set.
Snappy Stories.
Springfield Republican.
Sunset Magazine.
Today’s Magazine.
Volta Review.
Woman’s Home Companion.
Woman’s World.
Young’s Magazine.
Youth’s Companion.

The Cosmopolitan Magazine is not represented in these lists, because the editor of the magazine felt that it would be illogical to place a file for the year at my disposal, and most of the issues for 1916 were out of print when the volume went to press.

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 a story, and, if it is the work of an American author, entitle it to a place on the annual “Roll of Honor.” An asterisk before the name of an author indicates that he is not an American.

The following abbreviations are used in the index:—

Am. | American Magazine
Am. S. M. | American Sunday Magazine
Atl. | Atlantic Monthly
B. C. | Black Cat
Bel. | Bellman
B. E. T. | Boston Evening Transcript
Bk. News | Books News Monthly
Cen. | Century
Chim. | Chimæra
C. O. | Current Opinion
Col. | Collier’s Weekly
Colon. | Colonnade
Crafts. | Craftsman
Del. | Delineator
Ev. | Everybody’s Magazine
E. W. | Every Week
Fab. | Fabulist
For. | Forum
G. H. | Good Housekeeping
Harp. B. | Harper’s Bazar
Harp. M. | Harper’s Magazine
Harp. W. | Harper’s Weekly
Hear. | Hearst’s Magazine
Ind. | Independent
Int. | International
I. S. M. | Illustrated Sunday Magazine
L. H. J. | Ladies’ Home Journal
Lit. R. | Little Review
L. W. | Ladies’ World
McB. | McBride’s Magazine
McC. | McClure’s Magazine
McCall | McCall’s Magazine
Met. | Metropolitan Magazine
Mid. | Midland
Mir. | Reedy’s Mirror
Mun. | Munsey’s Magazine
N. Rep. | New Republic
N. S. M. | National Sunday Magazine
N. Y. Eve. Post | New York Evening Post
N. Y. Eve. Sun | New York Evening Sun
N. Y. Trib. | New York Tribune
Outl. | Outlook
Pag. | Pagan
Pict. R. | Pictorial Review
Poet. R. | Poetry Review of America
(R.) | (Reprint)
Red Bk. | Red Book Magazine
Rom. | Romance
Rus. R. | Russian Review
Scr. | Scribner’s Magazine
S. E. P. | Saturday Evening Post
Sev. A. | Seven Arts
Sh. St. | Short Stories
Sn. St. | Snappy Stories
So. Wo. M. | Southern Woman’s Magazine
Spring. Rep. | Springfield Republican
S. S. | Smart Set
Strat. J. | Stratford Journal
Sun. | Sunset Magazine
Tod. | Today’s Magazine
Tr. La. | Trimmed Lamp
Volt. R. | Volta Review
W. H. C. | Woman’s Home Companion
Wom. W. | Woman’s World
Y. C. | Youth’s Companion
Young | Young’s Magazine
’15 | 1915
’16 | 1916

A

Abbott, Avery. (See 1915.)
*Little Anna from Poland, The. Mid. Nov.
Reg’lar and Parlor-Fashion. E. W. Oct. 30.

Abbott, Keene. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
**Wind Fighters, The. Outl. Jan. 12.

Abbott, Mabel. (See 1915.)
Weapon That Cut, The. Am. Aug.

Abdullah, Achmed. (See 1915.)
**Feud. Cen. Dec.
*Man Who Lost Caste, The. Harp. W. Feb. 12.

Abert, Hannah.
**Little Folding of the Hands, A. Cen. July.

Adams, Frank R. (See 1915.)
Golden Nuisance, The. Am. June.

Adams, Minnie Barbour.
*Chicken Fighter, The. Sun. Oct.

Adams, Samuel Hopkins. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
**Chair That Whispered, The. Col. Aug. 26.
*Great Peacemaker, The. Col. Sept. 30.
*MacLachan of Our Square. Col. Sept. 2.
**Orpheus. Col. Nov. 11.
Our Square. Ev. March.
**“Tazmun.” Col. Dec. 16.
Triumph. Col. July 29.

Adams, Will. (See 1915.)
Fowler’s Snare, The. Col. Jan. 8.

Addison, Thomas. (See 1915.)
Sacred Spark, The. McB. March.
Tower Man, The. McB. April.

Agee, Fannie Heaslip Lea. (See Lea, Fannie Heaslip.)

Alden, Mary Doty.
*Watchful Washing. Crafts. Oct.

Aldis, Mary.
*Ellie. (R.) C. O. Feb.

Aldrich, Darragh and Rosemary.
**Highest Room, The. Am. July.

Allen, Maryland. (See 1915.)
*Visitor, The. Sun. Sept.

Allenson, A. C. (See 1915.)
Dempsey. McB. March.
Pandora Intervenes. McB. Feb.
Year of the Big Wind, The. McB. Jan.

“Amid, John.” (M. M. Stearns.) (See 1915.)
*Admiral, The. Bel. Nov. 18.
**After Thirty Years. S. S. May.
*Alien Son, An. Young. Aug.
*Cup as Planned, The. Mid. Oct.
*Westover’s Luck. Bel. Feb. 19.

Anderson, Frederick Irving. (1877- .) (See 1915.)
*Flame in the Socket, The. S. E. P. Feb. 26.
Ivory Hunters, The. S. E. P. Oct. 28.
Worldling, The. Pict. R. Oct.

Anderson, Sherwood. (See 1915.)
*Blackfoot’s Masterpiece. For. June. Mir. June 16.
***Hands. Masses. March.
*Novelist, The. Lit. R. Jan.-Feb.
**Philosopher, The. Lit. R. June-July.
***“Queer.” Sev. A. Dec.
**Story Writers, The. S. S. Jan.
*Strength of God, The. Masses. Aug.
***Struggle, The. Lit. R. May.
Vibrant Life. Lit. R. March.

Anderson, William Ashley. (See 1915.)
Passing Princess, A. L. H. J. Aug.

Andrae, Elsbeth Hasse.
**Marya. Atl. Sept.

Andrews, Mary Raymond Shipman. (See 1915.)
***Colors, The. Scr. July.
Discovery of Pouce-Long, The. Scr. Aug.
*Stranger Within the Gates, The. L. H. J. July.

*Andreyev, Leonid Nikolaevitch. (1871- .)
***Angel, The. B. E. T. Jan. 24.
***Giant, The. Rus. R. May.
***Present, A. Rus. R. Feb.

Anonymous.
*Benefactor in Bohemia, A. Life. July 6.
Impromptu Hospitality. (R.) Mir. Aug. 11.
*Influence of the Movies. (R.) Mir. July 21.
*In the Limousine. Met. Jan.
*Meed of a Brute, The. N. Rep. Jan. 22.
**Men of 1916, The. For. Feb.
*Parting, The. Masses. Oct.
**Quarrel, A. Masses. Sept.
Sacrifice, The. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 20.
Tempting of Anthony, The. Masses. Oct.
**Vengeance of the She-Wolf, The. N. Y. Trib. June 18.

Asch, Scholem.
**Abandoned. Pag. Sept.

Ashmun, Margaret.
**Rooshian, The. Crafts. Aug.

*Assis, Machado de.
**O Enfermeiro. B. E. T. Nov. 4.

Atherton, Gertrude (Franklin). (1857- .)
***Sacrificial Altar, The. Harp. M. Aug.

*Aumonier, Stacy. (See 1915.)
***Burney’s Laugh. Cen. July.
***Friends, The. (R.) I. S. M. April 16.
***Triple Scarab, The. Pict. R. Sept.

*Averchenko, Arkadyi. (See 1915.)
Heroism Under a Bushel. Int. Dec.
*His Friend. Rus. R. July-Aug.
My Wife. Int. July.
Telephone, The. Int. Nov.
War. Int. Sept.

Aymar, Maud Christian.
**War Medal, The. Harp. W. Feb. 5.

B

Babcock, Edwina Stanton.
***Band, The. Harp. M. Nov.

Bacon, Josephine Daskam. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
Bachelor of Hearts, A. Col. Sept. 30.
*High Days and Holy Days. Del. Dec.
*One of Our Luncheons. Del. Feb.
Phyllis Fellowes, Feminist. Col. Nov. 18.
*Royal Road to Learning, The. Del. Sept.
*We Visit the Zoo. Del. March.

Baker, Katharine. (See 1915.)
Home for Tatiana, A. Scr. Dec.
*Son, The. Sev. A. Nov.

Baker, Ray Stannard. (1870- .) (See 1915.)
**Great American Conscription, The. Am. Jan.

Barbour, Ralph Henry. (1870- .) (See 1915.)
After Millet. Pict. R. Aug.
Mignonette and the Toreador. Pict. R. June.

Barbour, Ralph Henry, and Osborne, George Ralph.
*Thicker Than Water. (R.) Life. April 6.

*Barker, (Harley) Granville. (1877- .)
**Souls on Fifth. Cen. April.

Barlow, James.
From Him That Hath Not. Tr. La. Jan.

Barnard, Floy Tolbert.
Beloved Meddler, The. Harp. M. Dec.

*Barrès, Maurice. (1862- .)
**“Up, Dead!” N. Y. Trib. May 7.

Bartlett, Frederick Orin. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
Her Door. Del. April.
Passing It Along. N. S. M. Oct. 8.
Spender, The. S. E. P. Dec. 9.

Bascom, Louise Rand. (See 1915.)
*Better Man, The. Harp. M. Feb.

Bascom, Louise Rand, and West, Eva McKinley.
Carrilla’s Corn. McB. Feb.

Bates, Katharine Lee. (1859- .) (See 1915.)
*Father Hippo. Outl. Sept. 27.

Bates, Sylvia Chatfield. (See 1915.)
*Vintage, The. W. H. C. July.

*Bauer, Ludwig.
**White Silence, The. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 13.

Beasley, Norman B. (See 1915.)
*Holiday Spirit, The. I. S. M. Dec. 3.

*Beerbohm, Max. (1872- .) (See 1915.)
**A. V. Laider. Cen. June.
***Enoch Soames. Cen. May.

Bell, Archie. (1877- .)
*Love Fool, The. S. S. June.

*Bell, J(ohn) J(oy). (1871- .) (See 1915.)
Skipper of Mine-Sweeper 1113, The. Bel. Sept. 30.

*Belloc, Hilaire. (1870- .)
**Inventor, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.

Benefield, Barry. (See 1915.)
Calhoun’s Christmas Gift. L. H. J. Dec.
***Miss Willett. Cen. Sept.
***Simply Sugar Pie. Sev. A. Nov.

Benét, Stephen Vincent.
**Vision of Revolution, A. Chim. July.

*Benjamin, René.
**In a Roadstead of France. N. Y. Trib. Nov. 5.
*Poilu’s Banquet, The. N. Y. Trib. July 2.

Bennet-Thompson, Lillian. (See Thompson, Lillian Bennet-.)

*Beresford, John Davys. (1873- .)
***Empty Theater, The. Sev. A. Dec.
**Off Chance, The. Met. Dec.

*Bermudez de Castro, Don José. (See Castro, Don José Bermudez de.)

Berry, John. (“Arkady Rissakoff.”)
*“Belgium.” N. Y. Eve. Sun. Oct. 11.
**Two Men and a Dog. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Nov. 6, Dec. 22.

Betts, Thomas Jeffries.
**Golden Glow of Victory, The. Scr. Oct.

Biggers, Earl Derr. (1884- .)
Ebony Stick, The. Col. Sept. 9.
*Valor of Ignorance, The. E. W. Sept. 25.
Volcano-Mad. S. E. P. April 29.

Birchall, Sara Hamilton. (See 1915.)
Makin’s, The. I. S. M. May 14.

*Birnek, Karl.
*Luck and the Cavalryman. N. Y. Trib. March 26.

Björkman, Edwin (August). (1866- .)
*Leisure Class, The. Cen. Oct.
***Man of Mystery, The. For. Feb.

*Björnson, Björnstjerne. (1832-1910.)
***Satyr, The. Mir. (R.) March 3.

*Blackwood, Algernon. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
***Imagination Wakes. Outl. April 26.

Block, Rudolph. (See “Lessing, Bruno.”)

*Blundell, Peter.
*Her Seventh Husband. Bel. April 15.
*Princess and the Professor, The. McB. March.

Booth, Frederick.
***Supers. Sev. A. Dec.

Bostwick, Grace G.
*Divine Atrocity, The. So. Wo. M. Jan.

Bottome, Phyllis.
***Awkward Turn, An. Cen. Dec.
***“Mademoiselle L’Anglaise.” Cen. March.

Bovill, C. H. (See Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville, and Bovill, C. H.)

Boyce, Neith. (Mrs. Hutchins Hapgood.) (1872- .) (See 1915.)
*Chocolate Mouse, The. Harp. W. Jan. 15.

Brackett, Charles William.
*Irritation. Masses. Sept.

Brady, Cyrus Townsend. (1861- .) (See 1915.)
Smooth Course of Justice, The. Col. April 1.

Brady, Mariel.
Prize Winner, The. McB. Feb.

Bray, Chester Fairclo.
**Man Who Had Been Trained, The. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Dec. 16.

Brenner, Walter Dundore. (See 1915.)
Measured by the Golden Rule. Col. June 17.

Brentano, Joseph P.
Mystery of a Cork Leg, The. Bel. Aug. 19.

Briggs, George A.
Trade at Home. (R.) Mir. Dec. 15.

Bronson-Howard, George (Fitzalan). (See Howard, George Bronson-.)

Brooke, Louisa.
*Love Letters of Nancy, The. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Dec. 4.

Brooks, Alden.
***Belgian, The. Col. May 27.
***Parisian, The. Col. Jan. 22.
*Prussian, The. Col. Oct. 28.

“Broughton, Walter.” (See Crane, Leo.)

Brown, Alice. (1857- .) (See 1915.)
**Citizen and His Wife, A. Col. Nov. 4.
***Nicholas Woodman. Harp M. Oct.
***Prince’s Ball, The. Harp. M. Feb.
***Three Bachelor Birds. Col. July 15.
***Time. Pict. R. April.
**Up on the Mountain. Harp. M. Aug.

Brown, Demetra Kenneth. (See “Vaka, Demetra.”)

Brown, Katharine Holland. (See 1915.)
*Her Jail-Bird. E. W. June 12.
*Last Bulletin, The. E. W. March 27.
Pink-Silk Descendant, The. Col. May 6.
***Veil, The. Cen. Aug.
*When the Princess Wakens. Del. Sept.

Brown, Phyllis Wyatt.
Mandolin Lin. Ev. March.

Browne, Porter Emerson. (1879- .)
*Mary and Marie. McC. Sept.

Browne, Raymond.
*Until the End. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Oct. 21.

Brubaker, Howard. (See 1915.)
*Boy Finance. Harp. M. June.
Breaking Out of Society. Harp. M. July.
*Day of Wrath. Harp. M. Nov.
*Fugitive from Injustice, A. Harp. M. April.
*Party Lines. Harp. M. March.
*Tame Hero, A. Harp. M. Sept.
Thoughts on Pedestrians. Harp. M. Aug.

Bruckman, Clyde A.
Reverse English. S. E. P. Oct. 21.

Brunel, Remy.
Author of “Pillars,” The. (R.) Mir. Dec. 8.

Bryson, Lyman. (See 1915.)
**Alfalfa. McC. June.

Bulger, Bozeman.
*Bar and the Bard, The. McC. Dec.

*Bunin, Ivan Aleksieevitch. (1870- .)
**Elijah, the Prophet. Rus. R. April.
**Figures. Rus. R. June.

Burhans, Viola. (See 1915.)
Inner Claw, The. McB. Jan.

*Burke, Thomas.
***Night in Limehouse, A. (R.) Mir. June 2.

Burnet, Dana. (1888- .) (See 1915.)
Business is Business. McB. Jan.
Experiment in Gentility, An. S. E. P. Nov. 11.
***Fog. McB. Feb.

*Gifts of Three Wise Men, The. S. E. P. Dec. 9.
Human Equation, The. Pict. R. Dec.
$1,000 Check, The. Am. Feb.
*Price of Happiness, The. Am. Jan.

Burr, Amelia Josephine. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
***Lame Hands of Faith. Bel. May 20.

Burr, Jane.
Even in the Backwoods. Tr. La. May.

Burrows, Dudley. (See 1915.)
**“Mutiny!” Scr. May.

Burton, George Lee. (See 1915.)
Christmas in High Places. Bel. Dec. 23.

*Busson, Paul.
**Death of the Ensign, The. Int. Apr.

Butler, Ellis Parker. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
Dead Line, The. McB. Feb.
**Haunted House, The. Am. Sept.
*Mamie’s Father. Am. March.
Mrs. Callan’s Absolute Happiness. I. S. M. Jan. 16.
One Quiet Summer. Pict. R. Sept.
Quarrelsome Club, The. Harp. M. Nov.
**Slim Finnegan. S. E. P. July 8.
**When the Ice Goes Out. Am. April.

Butler, Ellis Parker, and Dare, James B.
Dominie Dean. L. H. J. April.
Dominie Dean. Although He Won Without Losing, Yet He Won by Losing. L. H. J. June.
*Dominie Dean. He Discovers That Life and Love Run None Too Smoothly in Riverbank. L. H. J. May.

Buzzell, Francis. (See 1915.)
***Ma’s Pretties. Pict. R. Aug.

“Byrne, Donn.” (Bryan Oswald Donn-Byrne.) (1888- .) (See 1915.)
Alley of Flashing Spears, An. S. E. P. Oct. 21.
**Barnacle Goose, The. S. E. P. Aug. 12.
*Cock and Bull Story of Captain Burgoyne, The. Am. S. M. Aug. 6 (13).
Graft. S. E. P. April 22.
Honorable of the Earth, The. S. E. P. Jan. 22.
*Mrs. Dutton Intervenes. Am. S. M. May 7 (14).
Ruby Rose, The. McB. March.
Sargasso Sea. S. E. P. Sept. 9.
***Superdirigible “Gamma-I.” Scr. Aug.
**Underseaboat F-33. Scr. Jan.

C

*Cable, Boyd.
**Hymn of Hate, The. (R.) C. O. May.

Cain, Cullen A.
*Crack Marksman, The. Am. Feb.

Caine, William.
Pepe. Cen. June.

Cameron, Margaret. (Margaret Cameron Lewis.) (1867- .) (See 1915.)
Pragmatic Patricia. Harp. M. April-May.

Cameron, Margaret, and Rector, Jessie Leach.
More Than Raiment. Harp. M. March.

Camp, (Charles) Wadsworth. (See 1915.)
House With the Hidden Door, The. Col. March 4.
Through the Dark. Col. Jan. 1.

Campen Helen van. (See Van Campen, Helen.)

Canfield, Dorothy. (Dorothea Frances Canfield Fisher.) (1879- .) (See 1915.)
***Conqueror, The. Am. March.
***Mess of Pottage, The. Pict. R. Sept.
*Psychological Moment, The. W. H. C. May.
*What Really Happened. G. H. Sept.

*Capes, Bernard. (See 1915.)
***“Little Child, A.” (R.) Mir. Jan. 7.
*“Vic.” (R.) Mir. July 28.

Carman, Miriam Crittenden.
Empty Vessel, The. Crafts. Aug.

Carver, Ada Jack.
**Story of Angéle Glynn, The. So. Wo. M. July.

*Castro, Don José Bermudez de.
**Secrets of the Writing of “Don Quixote.” B. E. T. June 7.

Cather, Willa Sibert. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
*Bookkeeper’s Wife, The. Cen. May.
***Diamond Mine, The. McC. Oct.

Chamberlain, George Agnew. (1879- .) (See 1915.)
Kiss, The. E. W. Nov. 13.
Messenger, The. E. W. May 15.
**Spotted Man, The. Pict. R. May.

Chambers, Robert William. (1865- .)
**Cuckoo. Hear. Jan.
**Fifty-fifty. Hear. Sept.
*In Finistère. Hear. March.
*L’Ombre. Hear. Jan.

Channing, Grace Ellery. (Grace Ellery Channing Stetson.) (1862- .) (See 1915.)
Favorite of the Gods, A. Harp. M. April.

Chapin, Anna Alice. (1880- .) (See 1915.)
Last Love. I. S. M. June 18.

Chapman, Arthur. (1873- .)
*Colyum Conductor, The. Scr. Aug.

Chapman, Frances Norville.
*Café la Joie. S. S. March.
*Heat-Lightning. S.S. Nov.

Chawner, Mary G.
**Teacher Sylvia. Mid. June.

*Chekhov, Anton. (See Tchekov, Anton.)

Chester, George Randolph. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
**Scropper Patcher, A. Ev. Oct.

Child, Richard Washburn. (1881- .) (See 1915.)
*After All. Col. June 17.
Dead Canary, The. Pict. R. Oct.
Eagle Shannon Creates a Belief. Col. Dec. 2.
Eagle Shannon Finishes. Col. Aug. 19.
Eagle Shannon Ropes One. Col. July 29.
Eagle Shannon, the Devil and the Hindmost. Col. Sept. 16.
Hat Girl at the Ambervelt, The. L. H. J. May.
One of the Chosen. S. E. P. March 18.
On the Other Hand. S. E. P. Feb. 26.
Pflumpadink, The. S. E. P. May 27.
**Some Good. E. W. Jan. 24.
***Young Woman in the Picture, The. L. H. J. July.

Chittenden, Gerald. (See 1915.)
Business Proposition, A. Scr. June.

*Cholmondeley, Mary.
***Ghost of a Chance, The. Met. Aug.

Clark, Imogen.
Michael Comes Into His Own. Harp. M. Jan.

Clarke, W. J.
*In the Sunny South. Life. March 16.

*Clifford, Sir Hugh. (1866- .)
*Lone Hand Raid, The. Sh. St. Aug.

Cobb, Irvin S(hrewsbury). (1876- .) (See 1915.)
According to the Code. S. E. P. Jan. 15.
**And There Was Light. S. E. P. Sept. 23.
*Chapter from the Life of an Ant, A.    S. E. P. March 11.
*Cure for Lonesomeness, The. S. E. P. Nov. 4.
*Double-Barreled Justice. S. E. P. April 8.
*Enter the Villain. S. E. P. July 1.
Eyes of the World, The. S. E. P. April 15.
Field of Honor. S. E. P. May 13.
First Corinthians: Chapter XIII, Verse 4. S. E. P. Aug. 12.
***Great Auk, The. S. E. P. April 29.
Lover’s Leap. S. E. P. Oct. 7.
**Mr. Felsburg Gets Even. S. E. P. Sept. 9.
*Persona au Gratin. S. E. P. July 22.

Cohen, Octavus Roy. (See 1915.)
Four Aces and the Joker. I. S. M. Sept. 24.
Kid, The. I. S. M. Aug. 27.
**Runt, The. Red Bk. Aug.
Siren, The. I. S. M. March 26.
Strictly Confidential. I. S. M. Feb. 13.
Thirty Thousand Dollar Beauty, The. I. S. M. April 9.
Two Fists and a Heart. E. W. Jan. 24.

Colby, Eleanor.
We Gregory Girls. Pict. R. Aug.

Collard, Arthur.
**Court of Last Appeal, The. Col. June 24.

Collier, Miriam de Ford. (See De Ford, Miriam Allen.)

Collier, Tarleton. (See 1915.)
Big Laugh, The. Masses. June.
**Innocence. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Nov. 13.

Colton, Arthur (Willis). (1868- .)
Strike on Jamaica Road, The. Harp. M. Dec.

*Colum, Padraic. (1881- .) (See 1915.)
***Giant and His Servants, The. N. Y. Trib. Nov. 28, Dec. 5, 12, 19, 26, ’15; Jan. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, ’16.
***Interior, An. Int. Aug.

Comfort, Will Levington. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
*Black Frock Coat, The. E. W. June 12.
***Chautonville. (R.) I. S. M. May 21.

Condon, Frank.
Hence These Tears. S. E. P. Sept. 30.
Lemon Blossoms. S. E. P. Oct. 14.

Connolly, Christopher P.
Man from Nevada, The. S. E. P. May 6.

Connolly, James Brendan. (1868- .) (See 1915.)
Camera Man, The. S. E. P. Jan. 1.
**Chavero. Scr. Aug.
Colors. Col. Jan. 15.
***Down River. Scr. Sept.
Peter Stops Ashore. S. E. P. Nov. 18.

Connor, Brevard Mays. (See 1915.)
*Resultant Tangent, The. So. Wo. M. June.

Connor, Buck. (See Bower, B. M., and Connor, Buck.)

*“Conrad, Joseph.” (Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski.) (1857- .) (See 1915.)
***Shadow Line, The. Met. Sept.-Oct.

Converse, Florence. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
Mrs. Maxwell and the Unemployed. Atl. May. Mir. May 12.

Cook, Mrs. George Cram. (See Glaspell, Susan.)

Cooke, Grace MacGowan. (1863- .) (See 1915.)
Her Trial Marriage. E. W. Jan. 10.

Cooke, Marjorie Benton. (See 1915.)
Bird-Cage, The. Am. Aug.
***Little Jesus. Pict. R. Dec.

Cornell, Hughes.
*Coming, The. Atl. Dec.

Corrie, Theodore.
*Mute Stradivarius, The. Cen. March.

Cox, Marian (Metcalf). (1882- .)
*Book of the Dead, The. For. Jan.

Crabbe, Bertha Helen.
**Abigail Stone’s Independence. Crafts. Nov.

Cram, Mildred R.
**Victory, The. Scr. Dec.

Crane, Clarkson.
**Snipe. Atl. Nov.

Crane, Leo. (1881- .) (See 1915.)
*Clown, The. (R.) I. S. M. March 12.
*Imperishable Will, The. (R.) I. S. M. Jan. 23.
Little Fear, The. (R.) I. S. M. Feb. 27.
Man Who Knew, The. (R.) I. S. M. Feb. 20.
*Ruse, The. (R.) I. S. M. Jan. 23.

Crane, Stephen. (1870-1900.)
***Episode of War, An. (R.) Y. C. March 16.

Crissey, Forrest. (See 1915.)
*In the Footsteps of Wugoof. Harp. M. Dec.

Crosby, Katharine Kingsley.
*Crowning, The. Mid. April.

Crowfoot, John.
Fall of Newport, The. S. E. P. Dec. 16.
Meal Ticket vs. Heavy Date. S. E. P. Dec. 2.
Miss Long Lands Three Jobs. S. E. P. Nov. 18.
Pedigree Plug, The. S. E. P. Nov. 4.
Suggested Simon. (A New York Evolution.) S. E. P. Oct. 21.

*Crowley, Aleister. (See 1915.)
**Stratagem, The. S. S. Sept.

Cummins, T. D. Pendleton. (See “Pendleton, T. D.”)

*Cunninghame Graham, R. B. (See Graham, R. B. Cunninghame.)

Curtiss, Philip Everett. (1885- .) (See 1915.)
Cather. E. W. March 6.

Cutting, Mary Stewart. (1851- .) (See 1915.)
When Mother Woke Up. L. H. J. Nov.

D

Dare, James B. (See Butler, Ellis Parker, and Dare, James B.)

Darling, Eric A.
Child in the Street, The. Del. Oct.

Daviess, Maria Thompson. (See 1915.)
Poor Dear, The. L. H. J. Aug.

Davis, Charles Belmont. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
Ethics. I. S. M. July 16.
God’s Material. Scr. Nov.
Patsy Durgan’s Love Affair. I. S. M. March 5.

Davis, Charles F.
**Nino Jesu. Mid. Dec.

Davis, Lillian Perrine.
**Soldier of a New Day, A. So. Wo. M. May.

Davis, Richard Harding. (1864-1916.) (See 1915.)
Boy Who Cried Wolf, The. Met. May.
**Deserter, The. Met. Sept.
***Other Woman, The. (R.) I. S. M. June 4.

*Dawson, Coningsby (William). (1883- .) (See 1915.)
Invasion of Eden, The. Pict. R. April.
***Seventh Christmas, The. G. H. Dec.

“Dawson, Granby.” (See Crane, Leo.)

Day, Jr., Clarence. (See 1915.)
Owls and the Gladiator, The. Harp. M. May.
Simply the Cooking. Harp. M. Jan.

Deakin, Lumley.
Red Debts. Pict. R. Jan.

De Ford, Miriam Allen. (Miriam De Ford Collier.)
Snapshot. Masses. Jan.

De Jagers, Dorothy.
Jitney Adjustment, A. Ev. Aug.
Pearls vs. Pearls. Ev. Feb.
Tommy and the Tight Place. Ev. April.

De la Roche, Mazo. (See 1915.)
***Jilt, The. Cen. Sept.

Derieux, Samuel A.
*Her Sammy. E. W. July 10.
Magnet, The. I. S. M. Aug. 27.

De Sélincourt, Mrs. Basil. (See Sedgwick, Anne Douglas.)

Deutsch, Hermann Bacher.
Via the Milky Way. E. W. Nov. 13.

Dickson, Harris. (1868- .) (See 1915.)
Concerning a Quart. S. E. P. April 22.
Dark Horse, The. S. E. P. April 15.
Man in the End Room, The. L. H. J. Aug.
*Sole President, The. S. E. P. March 18.
Truth and the Corpus Delicti, The. S. E. P. Dec. 30.

Dill, Mabel Martin.
Understandy Little Girl, The. Pict. R. Jan.

Dix, Beulah Marie. (Mrs. George H. Flebbe.) (1876- .) (See 1915.)
***Across the Border. (R.) I. S. M. July 16.
*Fool of Fate. Harp. B. June.
*Journey’s End. Harp. B. Jan.
*“Pussy-Cat! Pussy-Cat!” Harp. B. May.
**Where Thomas Bailey Aldrich Wrote “The Story of a Bad Boy.” Harp. B. Feb.

Dobie, Charles Caldwell.
*Failure, The. Atl. April.
**Figure of a Snake, The. S. S. May.
*Four Saturdays. Harp. M. Dec.
**Road from Potterville, The. Scr. May.

Dodge, Henry Irving.
Skinner’s Dress Suit. S. E. P. Sept. 23.

Dodge, Margaret. (See 1915.)
*Whispering Mary. Mun. Nov.

Donahey, Mary Dickerson.
*Collector of Cinderellas, The. S. S. Jan.

Donn-Byrne, Bryan Oswald. (See “Byrne, Donn.”)

Doty, Walter G.
*Father’s Peril. N. S. M. March 26.

*Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. (1859- .)
*Prisoner’s Defense, The. Col. Jan. 8.

Drayham, William. (See 1915.)
*Deathbed, The. S. S. May.

Dreiser, Theodore. (1871- .)
***Lost Phoebe, The. Cen. April.

Dudeney, Mrs. Henry. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
*Great-Grandfather’s Landscape. Harp. M. March.
*Plum-Pudding Dog, The. Harp. M. May.
*Worker in Fine Flax, A. Harp. M. June.

Duffy, Alice E. (See 1915.)
Dual Life of Ariana, The. Met. Oct.

Duncan, Norman. (1871-1916.) (See 1915.)
*Affair of Ha-Ha Shallow. Red Bk. Dec.
***Doctor of Afternoon Arm, The. L. H. J. April.
**Huskie Dog. S. E. P. July 1.
***Last Lucifer, The. S. E. P. July 8.
***Last Shot in the Locker, The. S. E. P. March 25.
**Law in His Own Hands, The. S. E. P. Sept. 2.
**Little Fiddler of Amen Island, The. E. W. April 24.
**Madman’s Luck. E. W. Oct. 16.
Red Koran, The. Del. Dec.
*Siren of Scalawag Run, The. Del. Nov.
**Snow-Blind. S. E. P. Sept. 16.
**Wreck of the Rough-an’-Tumble, The. Red Bk. July.
***Two Men of Linger Tickle. L. H. J. July.
***White Water. Red Bk. Aug.

*Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
***Coronation of Mr. Thomas Shap. (R.) Mir. March 10.
***East and West. Fab. Spring.
***How Plash-Goo Came to the Land of None’s Desire. S. S. Sept.
***Loot of Bombasharna, The. (R.) Mir. Feb. 18.
***Three Sailors’ Gambit, The. S. S. Aug.

Durand, Mrs. Albert C. (See Sawyer, Ruth.)

Dutton, Louise Elizabeth. (See 1915.)
When Silas Turned Wage-Earner. L. H. J. June.

Duvaine, Lawrence.
*Code of the Hills, The. Red Bk. Nov.

Dwight, H(arry) G(riswold). (1875- .) (See 1915.)
***Like Michael. Cen. Sept.

Dwight, Mabel.
**Joy of Living, The. Masses. May.

Dwyer, James Francis. (1874- .) (See 1915.)
**American, The. Col. April 1.
Big Adventure of Peter Mullins, The. N. S. M. June 25.

Dyar, Muriel Campbell.
*Ann Eliza Weatherby’s Trip to Town. Harp. M. March.

Dyer, Walter Alden. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
Return of the Champion, The. Del. Sept.
Strike at Tiverton Manor, The. Am. Sept.

*Dymow, Ossip.
**Hymn to War, The. Int. June.

E

Eastman, Max. (1883- .)
**Shy. Masses. March.

Eaton, Walter Prichard. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
*Bank Where the Wild Thyme Blows, A. W. H. C. May.
Goldfinch, The. Am. April.
Love’s Umpire. Am. Oct.
Man Broadway Forgot, The. E. W. June 26.
*Meadow Larks, The. Am. Feb.
Pampered Fledgling, The. Am. Sept.
Red Geranium, The. Col. March 4.

Edgar, Randolph.
**Country Beyond, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.
***Moth, The. Bel. Aug. 5.

Edgelow, Thomas.
They Also Serve. Harp. M. Nov.

Edmondson, Vera. (See 1915.)
*Mr. Schuyler’s School. E. W. Jan. 10.
Second Man, The. Col. May 20.

*Elpatievsky, S.
***Pity Me! Rus. R. July-Aug.

*Elsner, Richard.
Three Women. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 29.

England, George Allan. (1877- .)
*June 6, 2016. Col. April 22.

Ernest Joseph. (See 1915.)
Angel Fish, The. Col. Aug. 5.
Grabber of Goats, A. E. W. April 3.

Estabrook, William Chester.
*Night Call, A. W. H. C. May.

Evans, Frank E. (See 1915.)
Greater Enemy, The. Col. March 18.

Evans, Ida May. (See 1915.)
Contrary Daniel. Col. April 29.
Deborah: A Detective. Col. April 1.
For Love or Money. Col. July 1.
Oil of Life, The. Col. June 3.

Evison, Millicent.
*High Failure. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Nov. 9.

*Ewers, Hanns Heinz. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
*Fairyland. Int. July.

F

Fahnestock, Mrs. Wallace Weir. (See Humphrey, Zephine.)

Falernia, Josef.
*Stub Pen in the Tuscan Wine Jar, The. Tr. La. March.

Ferber, Edna. (1887- .) (See 1915.)
**Eldest, The. McC. June.

Ferris, Walter.
*Blizzard in Lone Valley, The. E. W. Nov. 6.

Fillmore, Parker. (1878- .)
*Stephen Craves the Universal. N. S. M. May 28.

Fisher, Dorothy (Dorothea) Frances Canfield. (See Canfield, Dorothy.)

Fitzpatrick, James William. (See 1915.)
Breakfast in Bed. Col. Dec. 23.
Cocoa and Zwieback. Col. May 6.
Dishwasher, The. Col. April 15.
*Empty Room, The. Col. Sept. 23.

Flandrau, Charles Macomb. (1871- .)
*Trawnbeighs, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.

Flebbe, Mrs. George H. (See Dix, Beulah Marie.)

Fletcher, A. Byers.
*Quest of the V. C, The. Life. Jan. 27.

Focht, Mildred.
*Mother-Love. S. S. April.

Folsom, Elizabeth Irons.
Her Right Hand. Bel. March 4.
*No Language. Bel. July 29.
*Spirit of Courage, The. Y. C. Nov. 2.

Foote, John Taintor. (See 1915.)
All Around the Hickory Tree. E. W. Dec. 11.
*Augusta’s Bridge. S. E. P. Feb. 19.
Dumb-Bell’s Guest. Am. Oct.
Old Pastures. S. E. P. Jan. 29.
**Ordered On. Am. Nov.
Reluctant Traveler, A.  Am. Jan.

Forbes, Helen.
*Hunky Woman, The. Masses. May.

Ford, Miriam Allen de. (See De Ford, Miriam Allen.)

Ford, Sewell. (1868- .) (See 1915.)
Auntie Takes a Night Off. E. W. Nov. 6.
*Balance for the Boss, A.  E. W. March 20.
Breaking Odd With Myra. E. W. July 3.
Checking Up on Larsen. E. W. Dec. 18.
Jolt from Old Hickory, A.  E. W. Sept. 18.
Letting Peabody In. E. W. April 3.
On the Side With Silas. E. W. June 19.
Passing the Joke Buck. E. W. Nov. 20.
*Pulling an Alibi for Mink. E. W. Jan. 3.
Reporting Blank on Rupert. E. W. July 17.
Ringer in the Gracchi, A.  E. W. July 31.
Thumb Test for Kirby, The. E. W. Jan. 31.
Torchy Follows a Hunch. E. W. May 29.
Torchy Hits the High Seas. E. W. Oct. 2.
Torchy Takes a Running Jump. E. W. Dec. 4.
What Milo Needed Most. E. W. March 6.
When Auntie Crashes In. E. W. Aug. 21.
When Stuff Put It Over. E. W. April 17.
When the Navy Horned In. E. W. Oct. 23.
With Elmer Left In. E. W. Feb. 14.

Fox, Edward Lyell. (1887- .) (See 1915.)
Bellows Routs the Demon Rum. McB. April.
**Beloved Boy, The. Tod. Dec.
*“Thou Shalt not Kill.” Wom. W. July.

Fox, Paul Hervey. (See 1915.)
*Bread Cast Upon the Waters. S. S. Feb.
Treasure Trail, The. Bel. Jan. 29.

Frank, Florence Kiper. (1886- .) (See 1915.)
*Furlough, The. Mid. Sept.

Frank, Waldo.
Distinctions. Chim. May.
*Fetiches. Chim. July.

*Frankau, Gilbert.
**Rag-Time Hero, A.  Cen. Dec.

Franklin, Edgar. (See 1915.)
Cashing In. S. E. P. Jan. 15.

Frazer, Elizabeth. (See 1915.)
Liar, The. Pict. R. April.
Out-Maneuvering Mamma. S. E. P. Jan. 1.
Ransom. Harp. M. Feb.

Frederick, Esther.
Uncle Al. Mid. Feb.

Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins-. (1862- .) (See 1915.)
*Honorable Tommy. W. H. C. Dec.
**Old Man of the Field, The. W. H. C. May.
***Retreat to the Goal, A.  Harp. M. Jan.
*Sarah Edgewater. W. H. C. Feb.
**Soldier Man, The. Harp. M. Sept.
*Voice of the Clock, The. W. H. C. Sept.
**Value Received. W. H. C. Nov.

French, Anne Warner. (See Warner, Anne.)

French, Lillie Hamilton. (1854- .)
*Monsieur—A Soldier of France. Harp. B. June.

*Friedlaender, V. H.
*Discoverer, The. Atl. Feb.
*Three’s Company. Atl. Aug.

Frost, Robert. (1875- .)
***In the Home Stretch. Cen. July.
***Snow. Poetry. Nov.

Frost, Walter Archer. (1876- .)
*Just Potatoes. N. S. M. Feb. 27.

Fuessle, Newton A. (See 1915.)
Chain of Events, The. McB. Jan.

Fuller, Henry Blake. (1857- .)
*Aridity. N. Rep. May 6. C. O. July.
*Postponement. Poetry. Feb. C. O. April.

Fullerton, Hugh Stewart.
Alaskan World Series, An.  Col. March 11.
Hen’s Friend the Bear. Am. July.
Nut from Pecan University, The. Am. Aug.

G

*Gade, Anna.
*Home Soil. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 24.
*Last Greeting, The. N. Y. Trib. June 25.

Gale, Oliver Marble. (1877- .)
Moralizing Burglar, The. Am. April.

Gale, Zona. (1874- .) (See 1915.)
Children, The. Pict. R. May.
Cottage Cheese. Pict. R. June.
Goddess of Reason, The. Del. June.
*Over There. Col. July 22.
*Recipe, The. Pict. R. Dec.
*White Bread. Harp. M. July.

*Galsworthy, John. (1867- .) (See 1915.)
***Cartoon. (R.) Mir. Oct. 13.
**Manna. Atl. June.
Mother Stone, The. (R.) Mir. Nov. 24.
***Neighbors, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.
***Recruit, The. Ev. Jan.
***Strange Thing, A.  Ev. June.

Gardner, Ella Waterbury.
*Ardena Prefers Sewing. Mid. July.

Garland, Robert.
Mary Waits By the Window. N. S. M. Aug. 20.

*Garshin, Wsewold Michailovitch. (1855-1888.)
*Frog Who Traveled, The. (R.) Mir. April 28.
*How the Lizard Lost Its Tail. (R.) C. O. Jan.
*“Make-Believe.” (R.) Mir. June 9.

Gasch, Mrs. Herman E. (See Manning, Marie.)

Gatlin, Dana. (See 1915.)
Left Out Girl, The. Met. Feb.
One Before the Last, The. Col. June 3.
Your True Friend, Melissa M. Am. Aug.

Gerould, Katharine Fullerton. (1879- .) (See 1915.)
***Eighty-Third, The. Harp. M. Feb.
***Emma Blair. Harp. M. Nov.
***Louquier’s Third Act. Harp. M. Oct.

Gerry, Margarita Spalding. (1870- .) (See 1915.)
*Assistant Secretary, The. Harp. M. June.
Foot on the Staircase, The. Col. June 10.
Uncle ’Bial’s Bonds. Harp. M. March.
*Youth. L. W. Sept.

*Gibbon, Perceval. (1879- .) (See 1915.)
Car, The. Pict. R. July.

Gilbert, George.
*Cupid’s Goose. B. C. July.

Gill, Austin.
Female Bandit of Burro Flats, The. E. W. Nov. 27.
Lion and the Countess, The. E. W. May 1.

Gillmore, Inez Haynes. (See Irwin, Inez Haynes.)

Girardet, Gustave S.
**Hand at the Window, The. Colon. June.

Glasgow, Ellen (Anderson Gholson). (1874- .)
***Shadowy Third, The. Scr. Dec.

Glaspell, Susan Keating. (Mrs. George Cram Cook.) (1882- .) (See 1915.)
*“Finality” in Freeport. Pict. R. July.
Unveiling Brenda. Harp. M. June.

Glass, Montague (Marsden). (1877- .) (See 1915.)
Under New Management. S. E. P. Sept. 30.

Gleason, Arthur Huntington. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
**Flies. Cen. May.
**Flyer, The: A Parable. Col. Jan. 22.

Goodchild, George.
**Zaraphy. McB. Feb.

Goodloe, Abbie Carter. (1867- .) (See 1915.)
Grandmother of Pearl. McB. March.

Gordon, Armistead Churchill. (1855- .) (See 1915.)
**Cockatrice Den, The. Scr. Dec.
**Mr. Bolster. Scr. Oct.
***Silent Infare, The. Scr. March.

Gordon, Jan.
**Honest Man, The. Mir. Aug. 4.

*Gorky, Maxim. (1868- .) (See 1915.)
***On an Autumn Night. Rus. R. Oct.

Graeve, Oscar. (1884- .) (See 1915.)
Cinderella Stuff, The. Am. July.
***Ticket-of-Leave Angel, The. Cen. Dec.

*Graham, R(obert) B(outine) Cunninghame. (1852- .) (See 1915.)
*Convert, A. (R.) Mir. Jan. 14.
Elysium. (R.) Mir. July 14.
***Gold Fish, The. (R.) Mir. Feb. 4.

Granich, Irwin.
*Treacherous Greaser, The. Masses. Aug.

Grant, Mrs. Ethel Watts-Mumford. (See Mumford, Ethel Watts.)

*Grazie, Mar. Eugenie delle. (1864- .)
**Pogrom. N. Y. Trib. April 23.

Greene, Frederick Stuart. (See 1915.)
***Cat of the Cane-Brake, The. Met. Aug. C. O. Sept.
***Ticket to North Carolina, A.  Cen. Jan.

Greer, Paul.
*Sight of Blood, The. Masses. May.

*Greinz, Herman. (1879- .)
***Mother’s Dream, The. N. Y. Trib. Dec. 31.

*Grimshaw, Beatrice. (See 1915.)
Death Island. Col. Feb. 12.
Golden Bean, The. Col. June 10.
Lodge in the Wilderness, The. Ev. April.

Gruening, Martha.
*With Malice Aforethought. For. Jan. Mir. Jan. 7.

*Gunnarsson, Gunnar.
*Red Fall, The. Int. Feb.
*Sisters, The. Int. Oct.

*Gusev-orenburgsky, S. (See Orenburgsky, S. Gusev-.)

H

Haines, Donal Hamilton. (1886- .) (See 1915.)
**Broken Tale, The. Outl. Jan. 26.
***“Infra Dig.” Outl. March 1.
Je Ne Sais Quoi! Outl. Aug. 23.

“Hall, Holworthy.” (Harold Everett Porter.) (1887- .) (See 1915.)
Alibi. Cen. Feb.
Bulwark, The. E. W. Aug. 28.
Cold Comfort. E. W. May 1.
First Hand. Ev. Sept.
Getting Even. E. W. March 13.
Jessie Willard. S. E. P. July 22.
*Just Thirty Days! McC. July.
Luck of the Devil, The. Cen. June.
Off Duty. Col. Feb. 12.
Simply a Streak of Luck. E. W. Jan. 17.
Speedy. Ev. July.
Tasters, The. E. W. July 3.

Hall, Joseph. (See 1915.)
In Cold Blood. (R.) Mir. Oct. 6.

Hall, Wilbur Jay. (See 1915.)
Benefactor—Net, A.  Col. Jan. 8.
Case of Daniel Case, The. S. E. P. Nov. 4.
*Foolish Pride. Col. April 22.

Hallet, Richard Matthews. (See 1915.)
*Archaeology for Amateurs. Atl. March.
**Bos’. Ev. Nov.
***Making Port. E. W. March 20.
***Quest of London, The. Ev. Dec.
**Sea Adventurer, The. E. W. Oct. 2.

Hamby, William Henry. (1875- .)
Digging Up the Future. S. E. P. Oct. 14.
If a Man Fails Seven Times. S. E. P. Dec. 16.
Palms and Parasols. S. E. P. Dec. 2.
Puss Wants a Corner. Pict. R. July.
Rekindling the Fires. S. E. P. April 8.

*Hamilton, Cosmo. (See 1915.)
Little Gleam of Light, A. Del. Nov.
Master of Death. The. I. S. M. Jan. 9.

Hamilton, Gertrude Brooke. (See 1915.)
April in the Skylight. E. W. April 24.
*Girl With the R. S. V. P. Eyes, The. Pict. R. April.
*Pet of the Public, The. Pict. R. Feb.

*“Hamsun, Knut.” (Knut Pedersen.)
***Arch-Rogue, The. Pag. Oct.
**Conqueror, The. Pag. July.
***Man With the Lantern, The. Strat. J. Autumn.
***Minute. Strat. J. Autumn.
***Opium Fantasy, An. Strat. J. Autumn.

Hanley, Elizabeth Hines.
Chivalry. Masses. June.

Hansen, Curt.
**Délieur, Le. S. S. Dec.

Hapgood, Mrs. Hutchins. (See Boyce, Neith.)

Hard, Anne. (See 1915.)
Changeling, The. McB. Jan.

Hardy, Arthur Sherburne. (1847- .)
*Incident in the Prefecture of Police, An. Harp. M. July.

Harger, Charles Moreau. (1863- .)
Shanghaied. Scr. Sept.

Haring, Ethel Chapman.
Spade, The. I. S. M. April 16.

*Harker, L(izzie) Allen. (1863- .) (See 1915.)
*Paul and the Playwright. Del. May.

*Harker, L(izzie) Allen, and Pryor, F. R.
*His Mither’s Hairt. Scr. Feb.

Harland, Henry. (1861-1905.)
*Broken Looking-Glass, A. (R.) Mir. Oct. 20.

Harmon, Mark.
My Lady Crusoe. McB. March.

Harris, Corra (May White.) (Mrs. L. H. Harris.) (1869- .) (See 1915.)
Enoch’s Great Temptation. Pict. R. May.
Epsie of Blue Sky. Pict. R. April.
Serena’s “Mary and Martha” Hands. Pict. R. June.
Superparents. S. E. P. Nov. 11.

Harris, Kennett. (See 1915.)
*Glamor of the Granite, The. Pict. R. Nov.
In That Bony Light. S. E. P. March 25.
Rosy-Light-of-Dawn. S. E. P. Jan. 29.
*Tumblings and Raisings of Rudy. S. E. P. July 29.
*Very Smart Young Man, A. Red. Bk. July.

*Hartenau, Gert.
Chateau d’Ausperge, The. N. Y. Trib. May 21.

Harvey, Alexander. (1868- .) (See 1915.)
Demonstration, The. Int. May.
*Lady’s Lost Lover, The. Bang. Nov. 27.
**Sprite, The. Int. Sept.
**Thankless Child, A. Bang. Oct. 30.

Hastings, Milo (Milton). (1884- .)
New Chivalry, The. Met. Dec.

“Hatteras, Owen.” (See Mencken, Henry Louis.)

*Hauptmann, Hans.
*Hero Derelict, The. N. Y. Trib. April 30.

Hawes, Charles Boardman.
Last Hunt, The. Y. C. Nov. 30. Mir. Dec. 8.
***Port of a Vanishing Dream, The. Bel. Dec. 30.

Hawkes, Clarence. (1869- .)
*Angela. Bk. News. Nov.

Hawthorne, Hildegarde.
Evangeline. Del. May.
Hugh Wynne. Del. June.
Sappho. Del. July.
Summer Day With Ramona, A. Del. March.

Hendrick, Roe L.
*“Riming Jimmie.” Y. C. April 6.

Henrikson, Carl I. (See 1915.)
Loving in Boytime. Ev. July.
*Working in Boytime. Ev. March.

Hepburn, Elizabeth Newport.
Window, The. Del. Feb.

Hergesheimer, Joseph. (1880- .) (See 1915.)
Flower of Spain, The. S. E. P. Aug. 5.
Joy Riders. S. E. P. Dec. 16.
Pool of Clear Water, A.  S. E. P. April 15.
*Rosemary Roselle. S. E. P. Sept. 30.
**Thrush In the Hedge, The. S. E. P. June 10.

Herold, Don.
Bon Voyaging the Burglar. Harp. M. May.

Herrick, Robert. (1868- .)
**Conscript Mother, The. Scr. May.

Herron, Stella Wynne.
*Shoes. Col. Jan. 1.

Hibbard, Addison.
Maker of Nothings, The. Bel. Nov. 11.

*Hichens, Robert (Smythe). (1864- .)
*Two Fears, The. McC. July.

Higgins, Aileen Cleveland. (Mrs. John Archibald Sinclair.) (1882- .)
May-Day Magic. Harp. M. Aug.

Hill, Katharine.
Thrashing He Deserved, The. McB. March.

*Hilton-Turvey, C. (See 1915.)
*Song, The. Life. March 30.

*Hippius, Z.
***Heart, Oh, Rest in Peace! Rus. R. Oct.

Hodges, G. Charles.
**Anonymous. Chim. May. Mir. July 21. C. O. Aug.
Fool’s Gold. Int. Dec.
*Rising of the Moon, The. Chim. July.

Hofflund, Raymond Ward. (See 1915.)
When a Man’s Scared. Am. Oct.

Hoke, Travis.
**Voices. Bel. June 3.

Holley, Horace. (1887- .)
**Cross Patch. Poetry. April.

Hollingsworth, Ceylon. (See 1915.)
Punderson Waite. Col. Jan. 1.

Holloway, William. (See 1915.)
**War Beast, The. Bel. July 22.

Hope, S. J.
Temptation. Pag. Aug.

Hopkins, William John. (1863- .) (See 1915.)
*Ellen Forth and the Painter Boy. Atl. July.

Hopper, James Marie. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
*Long Try, The. S. E. P. Oct. 7.
***Pursuit, The. Col. July 1.
***Spy, The. Col. April 8.
*Strolling of Little Willie Little, The. Col. July 22.

Hough, Emerson. (1857- .) (See 1915.)
*Claxton, D. D. Sun. April.

Houghland, Mason.
Question of Breeding, A.  S. E. P. March 25.

Howard, George Bronson-. (1884- .) (See 1915.)
Stronger Than the Law. E. W. May 29.

Howe, Herbert Riley. (See 1915.)
*What the Vandals Leave. (R.) Mir. Sept. 29.

Howells, William Dean. (1837- .) (See 1915.)
*Boarders, The. Harp. M. March.
**Pearl, The. Harp. M. Aug.
*Return to Favor, The. (R.) C. O. July.
**Rotational Tenants, The. Harp. M. Oct.

Huard, Frances Wilson.
**Guests from the Desert. Scr. Oct.

Huestis, Annie Campbell. (1885- .)
**Flannigan. Harp. M. July.

Hughes, Rupert. (1872- .) (See 1915.)
**Long Ever Ago. Met. Aug.

Hull, Helen R. (See 1915.)
*Unclaimed. Masses. May.
Usury. Masses. Sept.
**Yellow Hair. Masses. Feb.

Humphrey, (Harriette) Zephine. (Mrs. Wallace Weir Fahnestock.) (1874- .) (See 1915.)
**Literary Accident, A. Atl. July.

Huneker, James Gibbons. (1860- .) (See 1915.)
**Cardinal’s Fiddle, The. Harp. M. Jan.
***Husband of Madame, The. Scr. Nov.
*Supreme Sin, The. For. March.

Hunt, Edward Eyre.
**Atrocities. N. Rep. Sept. 2.

Hunt, Frazier.
*Little Prince. Tod. Nov.

Hurst, Fannie. (1889- .) (See 1915.)
Birdie in the House, A. Met. March.
**Brunt. Met. June.
***“Ice Water, Pl—!” Col. Oct. 21.
**In Memoriam. S. E. P. March 18.
***Sob Sister. Met. Feb.
Thine Is Not Mine. Met. May.
**Through a Glass Darkly. Met. Jan.

Husband, Joseph. (1885- .)
***Helmet Men, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.

Hutchinson, Elizabeth (Bartol) Dewing.
***Far Traveller, The. Harp. M. June.

Hydeman, Sidney L.
*Prose Libre. S. S. June.

I

Irish, Marshall Hugh.
*Girl and the Giant, The. S. S. Jan.

Irwin, Inez Haynes (Gillmore). (1873- .) (See 1915, under Gillmore, Inez Haynes.)
Bundles, The. Col. May 27.
Crater, The. E. W. Oct. 9.
Ladies. Cen. March.
Night Before, The. Cen. April.
President’s Nephew, The. L. H. J. May.
***Sixth Canvasser, The. Cen. Jan.
Woman Across the Street, The. L. H. J. Sept.
When Mrs. Warburton Met Mrs. Connors. L. H. J. April.

Irwin, Wallace. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
*Act Three. Met. Nov.
Faith. Pict. R. March.
Goat, The. S. E. P. May 13.

Irwin, Will(iam Henry). (1873- .) (See 1915.)
Practical Joker, The. S. E. P. Jan. 8.

*“Isolani, Eugen.” (Eugen Isaacsohn.) (1860- .)
*Judgment of Heaven, The. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 22.

J

Jackson, Charles Tenney. (1874- .)
*Big Rich Feller, The. Am. S. M. Jan. 2 (9).

*Jacobs, W(illaim) W(ymark). (1863- .) (See 1915.)
*Family Cares. Met. Dec.
**Sam’s Ghost. Met. June.

Jakobi, Paula.
*Lecture, The. Crafts. Dec.

*Jameson, Elaine Mary. (See 1915.)
Their Way to Friendship. Del. Oct.-Nov.

*Janoske, Felix.
* Buried Saviour, The. N. Y. Trib. Nov. 12.

Jenkins, Herbert. (See 1915.)
Hypnotized Burglar, The. McB. April.

Jenks, Tudor. (1857- .)
What the Baroness Forgot. N. S. M. Oct. 8.

*Jepson, Edgar. (1864- .) (See 1915.)
Man Who Came Back, The. I. S. M. July 30.

*Jesse, F(ryniwyd) Tennyson.
**Why Senath Married. Met. May.

Johnson, A. P.
Swedish Reporter’s Encounter with Sarah Bernhardt, The. Am. Aug.

Johnson, Alvin Saunders. (1874- .)
Lot of the Inventor, The. N. Rep. Aug. 12.
*Sympathetic Strike, A. N. Rep. Feb. 26.

Johnson, Arthur. (See 1915.)
**Andy of the Timothy Quartet. Scr. Jan.
*Devil’s Joke-Box, The. Met. Dec.
How the Ship Came In. Harp. M. Aug.

Johnson, Burges. (1877- .)
Sincere Salad-Dresser, The. Harp. M. Sept.

Johnson, Ernestine.
“Consider the Lilies.” Masses. Jan.

Johnson, Fanny Kemble.
*Master of His Fate, The. Cen. Oct.
*Persistent Little Fool, The. Cen. Nov.
***They Both Needed It. Cen. July.

Johnson, Hugh. (See 1915.)
*Dove, the Undesired. Sun. Sept.
Furbished Gentleman, A. S. E. P. April 8.
*Manhandler, The. Scr. April.
Playing Both Ends. S. E. P. April 1.
Troop Horse Number One. Scr. Dec.

Johnson, Owen (McMahon). (1878- .) (See 1915.)
*Mystery of Women, The. Red Bk. Feb.

Jones, Ellis O.
Question of Time, A. I. S. M. May 7.

Jones, Frank Goewey. (See 1915.)
Great American Game, The. S. E. P. Oct. 14.
Jane Jests. E. W. Sept. 11.
Tall Hustling. S. E. P. Jan. 29-Feb. 5.

Jordan, Elizabeth (Garver). (1867- .) (See 1915.)
*Philip’s “Furnis Man.” Harp. M. Aug.

K

K., Q.
*Headmasterly. N. Rep. Nov. 18.
Henry and Edna. N. Rep. April 29.

*Kalkschmidt, Eugen.
*Two Fathers. N. Y. Trib. May 28.

Kauffman, Reginald Wright. (1877- .)
By Post, Registered. S. E. P. July 29.
*First Shot, The. Sn. St. Sept. 1.

Keith, Katherine.
*Carpet of Omar Nizam. (R.) Mir. Sept. 8.

Kelland, Clarence Budington. (1881- .) (See 1915.)
*Edwy Peddie—Scientific Humanitarian. Harp. M. Oct.
Efficiency Edgar and the Second Generation. S. E. P. July 1.
Efficiency Edgar’s Courtship. S. E. P. April 29.
Efficiency Edgar and the Home Circle. S. E. P. June 10.
Man Who Was Bitter, The. McB. April.
Match for Myrtie, A. E. W. Dec. 18.
*“Runnin’ Down” Billings. Y. C. March 2.
Scientific Social Service of Mr. Small. Harp. M. April.
Simeon Small, Compromise Candidate. Harp. M. Feb.
*Simeon Small—Dress Reformer. Harp. M. June.
*Simeon Small’s Business Career. Harp. M. Sept.

Kelley, Ethel May. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
Playing the Game. Cen. March.

Kennon, Harry B. (See 1915.)
Cashmere Shawl, The. Mir. May 26.
Christopher’s Cure. Mir. Sept. 22.
Concerning a Legacy. Mir. Feb. 11.
Heavenly House-Maid, The. Mir. April 14.
Her Jewels. Mir. Nov. 17.
Her Next Friend. Mir. Aug. 25.
Horse-Radish Joe. Mir. May 5.
Laugh, The. Mir. April 7.
*Mama Rosengarten’s Birthday. Mir. March 24.
My Son. Mir. March 17.
Sword of France, A. Mir. Feb. 4.
Texas Awake. Mir. Sept. 29.
Vacancy at Todds, A. Mir. Feb. 25.
Weeping Chamber, The. Mir. June 30.

Kerr, Sophie. (1880- .) (See 1915.)
Crossed Wires. Am. June.
*Little Hacks of Kindness. Am. July.
“Poor Laura Mather!” Am. March.
**Reason, The. Harp. M. July.
*Victor, the Victor. Am. Jan.
Zose Bluff! Am. Aug.

*Keyserling, Count Eduard. (1855- .)
*Simone. N. Y. Trib. June 11.

Kidwell, Grover.
*Hated “Revenuer,” The. Bel. April 1.
**Sort of Vendetta, A. Bel. Jan. 1.
Tragedy of Time, The. Bel. Nov. 4.

King, Basil.
***The Spreading Dawn. S. E. P. Dec. 30.

*Kinross, Albert. (1870- .) (See 1915.)
Collaborators, The. Cen. Feb.

Kiper, Florence. (See Frank, Florence Kiper.)

Kline, Burton. (1877- .) (See 1915.)
*As Usual. Ind. Jan. 17.
**Uplifted Latch, The. Mid. May.

Knight, Leavitt Ashley. (See 1915.)
*Gay Deceiver, The. Mun. July.
*Little Cards, The. Ev. Feb.
New Freedom, The. Col. May 13.
Thief in the Night, The. Col. Dec. 16.

Knight, Reynolds. (See 1915.)
***Inspiration, The. Mid. Oct.

*Korolenko, Vladimir G. (1853- .)
***Last Ray, The. Rus. R. Nov.
***Old Bell-Ringer, The. Rus. R. June.

*Korzeniowski, Joseph Conrad. (See “Conrad, Joseph.”)

*Krafft, Else. (Else Krafft Stramm.) (1877- .)
*One Touch of Nature. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 8.
Whither Thou Goest. N. Y. Trib. Nov. 19.

*Kuechler, Kurt. (1883- ).
**Cart of Death, The. N. Y. Trib. July 23.
***Funeral Pyre, The. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 10.

Kummer, Frederic Arnold. (See 1915.)
Quadrangular Love Affair, A. I. S. M. Dec. 3.

*Kuprin, Alexander I.
*Al-Issa—(A Legend). Int. Sept.
***Allez. Pag. Nov.-Dec.
***Anathema. Rus. R. April.
*Caprice. Pag. Sept.

*Garden of the Holy Virgin, The. Rus. R. Feb.
**Legend, A. Rus. R. July-Aug.

Kurtz, Frederick.
Touching the Elephant. (R.) C. O. April.

Kyne, Peter Bernard. (1880- .) (See 1915.)
Day of the Dog, The. S. E. P. Feb. 5.
Full and Bye. Col. Sept. 16.
Halcyon Comes Back, The. Col. Sept. 2.
Irish Dividend, The. S. E. P. Dec. 16.
Last Survivor, The. Col. March 11.
Light in Darkness. Col. Jan. 29.
Monsieur le Capitaine Ricks. S. E. P. Oct. 21.
*Reynard of the Sea. Col. Oct. 7.
*Salvage. Col. Dec. 9.

L

Lait, Jack. (Jacquin L.) (1882- .)
*Annye’s Ma. Am. July.
*As a Boy Thinks. Am. Aug.
Fat Chance, A.  Am. Nov.
Iliad of an Ad, The. Am. Dec.
One Touch of Art. Am. May.
Pics. Am. Sept.
*Saturday at Six. Am. Oct.
Second from the End. Am. June.
*Septagon, The. Am. April.

Lancaster, G. B. (See 1915.)
*North’s Bargain. Harp. M. May.

Lardner, Ring W. (See 1915.)
Carmen. S. E. P. Feb. 19.
*Champion. Met. Oct.
Good for the Soul. S. E. P. March 25.
Gullible’s Travels. S. E. P. Aug. 19.
Three Kings and a Pair. S. E. P. March 11.
Water Cure, The. S. E. P. Oct. 14.

Larson, Emma Mauritz. (See 1915.)
*Play Leader, The. Crafts. Sept.

Laughlin, Clara Elizabeth. (1873- .)
Love Maternal, The. Met. Nov.

Lea, Fannie Heaslip. (Mrs. H. P. Agee.) (1884- .) (See 1915.)
**Come and Be Saved. Pict. R. Nov.
Girl in the Vine-Covered Cottage, The. Col. March 18.
Green Fields. Harp. M. Sept.
Miss Juliet. Col. Oct. 14.
Miss Smithy and the Prodigal Son. Ev. April.
Voice That Breathed O’er Eden, The. Harp. M. Aug.

Lee, Jennette (Barbour Perry). (1860- .) (See 1915.)
Another Woman. L. H. J. Feb.
*Billy Boy. Harp. M. March.

Lefévre, Edwin. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
Greatest Speech in History, The. S. E. P. May 27.

*Le Gallienne, Richard. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
*Yellow Butterfly of Chiddingfold Manor, The. Del. Dec.

Leonard, Oscar.
Job at Any Price, A.  Mir. May 26.

Lerner, Mary. (See 1915.)
*Business of Youth, The. McCall. Oct.
***Little Selves. Atl. Sept.

“Lessing, Bruno.” (Rudolph Block.) (1870- .)
*Buried Gold. Hear. Jan.
*Hot Tamale. Am. S. M. Aug. 6 (13).

Levor, Simpson.
Trap, The. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Nov. 22.

Lewars, Elsie Singmaster. (See Singmaster, Elsie.)

Lewis, Austin.
Way of the Worker, The. Masses. Oct.

Lewis, Margaret Cameron. (See Cameron, Margaret.)

Lewis, Oscar.
*Vigil of Little Antone, The. McB. April.

Lewis, Sinclair. (1885- .) (See 1915.)
*He Loved His Country. Ev. Oct.
Honestly If Possible. S. E. P. Oct. 14.
If I Were Boss. S. E. P. Jan. 1-8.

*Lezeau, Robert de.
*Order, The. N. Y. Trib. March 19.

Lieberman, Elias.
*Real Feeling. Harp. W. Feb. 19.

Light, Annie.
*Handsome Is. Tod. Sept.

Lighton, Louis Duryea. (See Lighton, William Rheem, and Lighton, Louis Duryea.)

Lighton, William Rheem. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
Billy Fortune and the Way Things Happen. Pict. R. March.
***Judge Jerry and the Human Equation. Pict. R. Jan.
On the Knees of the Gods. Pict. R. May.

Lighton, William Rheem (1866- ), and Lighton, Louis Duryea.
Billy Fortune’s Christmas. Pict. R. Dec.
*Man Who Stopped Growing, The. E. W. Sept. 4.

Lindas, B. F.
**Tenant, The. Mir. Aug. 11.

Lipsett, Edward Raphael. (1868- .) (See 1915.)
**Emissary of Satan, An. Cen. June.

“Little, Frances.” (Fannie Caldwell Macaulay.) (1863- .)
New York’s Girl. Pict. R. April.

Loan, Charles E. Van. (See Van Loan, Charles E.)

*Locha, Emil.
**Transfiguration. N. Y. Trib. April 9.

Lockhart, Caroline.
*Eunice May and the New Thought. Pict. R. March.

Lockwood, Scammon.
*De-Luxe Annie. S. E. P. March 11.

Loizeaux, Jeanne Olive.
Love-Lady, The. McB. Feb.
Second Wife, The. I. S. M. April 2.

London, Jack. (1876-1916.) (See 1915.)
Too Much Gold. (R.) I. S. M. March 12.

Long, John Luther. (1861- .) (See 1915.)
***Sandwich-Man, The. (R.) I. S. M. Jan. 9.

Lowell, Amy. (1874- .) (See 1915.)
***Cross-Roads, The. Poet. R. Sept.
***Malmaison. Lit. R. June-July.
*Number 3 On the Docket. Poet. R. May.
*Off the Turnpike. Lit. R. May.

Lyle, Jr., Eugene P. (1873- .) (See 1915.)
Third Old Man, The. McB. April.

Lynde, Francis. (1856- .)
*Million Too Much, A.  Scr. Jan.
Minshew Makes Good. Scr. July.

Lyon, Harris Merton. (1881-1916.) (See 1915.)
Drop and the Stone, The. I. S. M. Feb. 27.
*Healer, The. Mir. April 14.

*Lyons, A(lbert Michael) Neil. (1880- .)
*Compleat Waggoner, The. (R.) Mir. July 7.
*Mobies, The. (R.) Mir. June 30.

M

M., G. C.
Jones. Masses. April.
Shelley. Masses. July.

Mabie, E. Graves.
Woman He Forgot, The. I. S. M. Nov. 19.

Macaulay, Fannie Caldwell. (See “Little, Frances.”)

McCallum, Mella Russell.
**White Stars, The. Mid. Aug.

McClure, John.
*Way of Peace, The. Bel. June 10.

McCreagh, Gordon. (See 1915.)
Hookey’s Handicap. I. S. M. May 21.

McCulloch-Williams, Martha. (See Williams, Martha McCulloch-.)

McEachern, Arthur Felix.
*Solitaire Bill. Life. Feb. 24.

MacGowan, Alice. (1858- .)
Girl Who Didn’t Know, The. E. W. April 10.

MacHarg, William. (See 1915.)
*Ghost in the Galley, The. Am. July.

McIntyre, John Thomas. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
Five-Mile Stretch, The. McB. April.

Mackall, Lawton. (See 1915.)
Black Jitney. Cen. March.
Light Breakfast. Cen. April.

McKenna, Edmond. (See 1915.)
**Green Silk Stockings. N. Y. Eve. Post. Sept. 9. C. O. Nov.

Mackenzie, Cameron. (1882- .)
Girl Who Married New York, The. S. E. P. May 27.
Man in the Gilded Cage, The. S. E. P. Nov. 4.
One Hundred Per Cent Efficient. S. E. P. Feb. 19.
Story of a Cold-Blooded Business Man, The. S. E. P. April 15.
Woman and Her War Babies, A.  S. E. P. Jan. 8.

McLaurin, Kate L.
*“Sleep of the Spinning Top, The.” Mid. Nov.

*MacManus, Seumas. (1870- .) (See 1915.)
Dick Decker’s Most Glorious Christmas Party. L. H. J. Dec.
*Mr. Devereux’s Twist. L. H. J. Aug.
*Tune That Came Out of the Fiddle, The. L. H. J. Sept.

Macvane, Edith. (1880- .)
Lonely Light, The. E. W. Aug. 14.

Magruder, Mary Lanier. (See 1915.)
Quitter, The. E. W. April 17.

Manning, Marie. (Mrs. Herman E. Gasch.) (See 1915.)
*Her Tribal Enemy. Harp. M. Feb.

*Manns, M. Alfred.
Abandoned Telephone, The. N. Y. Trib. Dec. 10.

Marks, Jeannette. (1875- .)
***Sun Chaser, The. Pict. R. Nov.

*Marnt, Ret.
**Flyer Without a Heart, The. N. Y. Trib. Dec. 3.

Marquis, Don (Robert Perry.) (1878- .) (See 1915.)
Iliad of the Oyster, The. N. S. M. Aug. 20.
*Mulatto, The. Harp. M. April.

Marriott, Crittenden. (1867- .) (See 1915.)
*Mary Carr’s Son. Tod. Oct.
Once To Every Woman. E. W. Feb. 28.

Marsh, George T. (See 1915.)
**Quest of Narcisse Lablanche, The. Scr. May.

Marshall, Edison.
***Missing Seventeen, The. S. E. P. May 20.

Martin, Margaret Burrows. (See 1915.)
*“Something Like Us.” Ev. July.

Martyn, Wyndham. (See 1915.)
**Old Marquis, The. S. S. Nov.

*Mason, Alfred Edward Woodley. (1865- .) (See 1915.)
One of Them. Met. March.

Mason, Grace Sartwell. (1877- .) (See 1915.)
**Lady With the Comic Sense, The. Ev. May.
Night Run, The. E. W. Feb. 28.
Pep. E. W. Nov. 20.

Masson, Thomas L(ansing). (1866- .)
Easy Solution, An.  N. Rep. May 6.

Matthews, Frances Aymar.
***Marie Rose of Mustard Street. So. Wo. M. Dec.

Melbourne, Harold.
Dora Was Different. (R.) Mir. May 19.

Mellett, Berthe Knatvold. (See 1915.)
*Free Woman, The. Col. Aug. 12.
Those Things Which Are Mine. Col. Oct. 7.

Mena, María Cristina. (See 1915.)
*Marriage by Miracle. Cen. March.

Mencken, Henry Louis. (“Owen Hatteras.”) (1880- .)
***Halls. S. S. April.

*Michaelis, Karin. (See Stangeland, Karin Michaelis.)

Middleton, J. E.
*Tillson (Dorothy)—Reference Section. S. S. July.

Miller, Alice Duer. (1874- .) (See 1915.)
*Home Influence. Harp. M. Jan.
*What Every Man Should Know. Cen. Feb.

Miller, Helen Topping. (See 1915.)
Butterfly, The. Del. Sept.
**Look Away. So. Wo. M. May.
Oldest Nurse, The. Del. March.

Miller, Hugh S.
*Storm Song, The. Harp. M. Dec.

Miller, Laura.
Story of the K’ang-hsi Vase, The. Outl. July 26.

Miner, Jessie S.
Little Flier in Culture, A. Scr. March.

Minnigerode, Meade.
*Some Men and a Lady. S. E. P. Dec. 30.

Mitchell, Mary Esther. (See 1915.)
**Asher Pride, The. Harp. M. Sept.
*Dumb Peterses, The. Harp. M. May.

Mitchell, Ruth Comfort.
Jane Proposes. Cen. Jan.

*Molnar, Franz.
*Magyar Paladin, A. N. Y. Trib. April 2.

Molt, H. F.
*Shawl of Kassim, The.  N. Y. Eve. Sun. Oct. 26.

Montague, Margaret Prescott. (1878- .) (See 1915.)
***Enchanted Princess, The. Volt. R. July.
*Marked for the Unexpected. Del. June.
**Of Water and the Spirit. Atl. May.

*Morgan, Gerald.
*Middle Ear, The. B. C. Sept.

Moroso, John Antonio. (1874- .) (See 1915.)
Bells, The. Col. Oct. 14.
Brown and Son. I. S. M. April 23.
Foppishness of Armistead, The. I. S. M. July 2.
Four Little Soldiers. I. S. M. Dec. 17.
***Heads or Tails? I. S. M. Jan. 2.
**Miracle of Poverty Hollow, The. Am. May.
Nan of Number Nineteen. Am. Jan.
*Papa Popineau. Del. Aug.
*Tryst in Heaven, A. So. Wo. M. Feb.

Morris, Charlotte Fitzhugh.
Uplift. Atl. Oct.

Morris, Gouverneur. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
***When the Devil Was Better. (R.) I. S. M. Jan. 16.

Morten, Marjory. (See 1915.)
**Krujer Hobbs. Cen. Aug.
**Transit of Venus, A. Cen. Nov.
**Veiled Island. Cen. July.

Muilenburg, Walter J. (See 1915.)
***At the End of the Road. For. May.
***Brothers of the Road. Mid. Sept.

Mumford, Ethel Watts. (Mrs. Ethel Watts-Mumford Grant.) (1878- .) (See 1915.)
Arabian Days of Jimmy Jennette, The. Cen. June.
*Bells of Cullam, The. Scr. Nov.
Embarrassment of Riches, An. N. S. M. May 14.
Girl and the Governor, The. N. S. M. June 25.
Squaw. Col. July 15.

Mundy, Talbot. (1879- .)
Sam Bagg of the Gabriel Group. S. E. P. March 11.

Murray, Roy Irving. (See 1915.)
Rudolph in Repertoire. Scr. April.

Muth, Edna Tucker. (See 1915.)
Junior, of the Bathtub. L. H. J. Oct.

Myers, Ruth Herrick.
Storm, The. Pict. R. July.

Myers, Walter L. (See 1915.)
***In the Uplands. Mid. March.

N

Nathan, George Jean. (1882- .) (See Burns, William J., and Nathan, George Jean.)

Neely, Sarah C.
**While the Surgeon Waited. Am. Nov.

Neidig, William Jonathan. (1870- .)
**Flight, The. S. E. P. March 4.
Mrs. Nemesis. S. E. P. Dec. 23.
Slipper Tongue, The. S. E. P. June 3.
*Touch of Sun, A. Cen. Feb.

*Neurath, Karl. (1883- .)
*Little Engelbert. N. Y. Trib. Nov. 26.

Newell, Maude Woodruff.
Her “Cut-Out.” L. H. J. Jan.

Newton, Peter.
*Talisman, The. (R.) Mir. Sept. 8.

Nicholson, Meredith. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
Hopper, The. Col. Dec. 30.
Landon’s Legacy. Col. Jan. 8.
Man With the Lantern, The. Col. Feb. 19.
Mr. Richard’s Fiancée. E. W. May 8-15.
Third Man, The. Col. May 13.

Norris, Kathleen. (1880- .) (See 1915.)
Bohemians, The. L. H. J. July.
***Brides of Wastewater, The. S. E. P. May 6.
In Tiffany’s. L. H. J. Aug.
Measles. L. H. J. May.

Norton, Guy W.
Crisscross, The. Col. Nov. 18.

Norton, Roy. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
Captain Bill. Col. Feb. 19.
*Captain Bill, Rebel. Col. April 22.
*Glory Across the Years, The. L. H. J. July.
*Matter of Friendship, A. Col. March 25.
Nell Hogue. L. H. J. June.
*Truthful Liar, The. L. H. J. May.
Vindication of Tom McPhail, The. E. W. Jan. 31.

*Noyes, Alfred. (1880- .)
***“Lusitania Waits, Sir!, The.” N. Y. Trib. Dec. 31.

O

O’Brien, Edward J(oseph Harrington.) (1890- .)
Fool, The. For. Jan.

O’Brien, Joseph. (See 1915.)
Montessori Christmas, A.  Pict. R. Jan.

O’Brien, Mary Heaton Vorse. (See Vorse, Mary Heaton.)

O’Brien, Seumas. (See 1915.)
**Land of Peace and Plenty, The. I. S. M. Jan. 2.
*Man With the Wooden Leg, The. I. S. M. Sept. 10.

*O’Byrne, Dermot.
***Through the Rain. (R.) Mir. Dec. 15.

Oemler, Marie Conway. (See 1915.)
*“Where the Young Child Was.” L. H. J. Dec.

O’Hara, Frank Hurburt. (See 1915.)
Glory Grows Up. Am. Dec.
Last Dime, The. Am. April.

*Ollivant, Alfred. (1874- .)
*Victoria Cross for Horses, A?  B. E. T. Aug. 30.

Onstott, Anna Brown.
**Miss Juliet of Kentucky. So. Wo. M. Jan.

*Opotawshu, J. K.
***Condemned. Pag. May.
***Winter-wolves. Pag. Aug.

*Oppenheim, Edward Phillips. (1866- .)
Ebony Dispatch Box, The. I. S. M. Nov. 19.

Oppenheim, James. (1882- .) (See 1915.)
**Dovecote, The. Del. July.
**Faith of a Woman, The. L. H. J. Aug.
Her Blue-Eyed Way. L. H. J. Feb.
Playboy, The. L. H. J. March.

Orchelle, R. L.
Sir Edward’s Dream. Int. Dec.

O’Reilly, Edward S.
Hanging à la Mode. Pict. R. Sept.

*Orenburgsky, S. Gusev-.
***Difficult Travel. Rus. R. March.

Orr, Edith. (See 1915.)
Emerald Snake, The. S. E. P. Sept. 16.
Mrs. Desmond. Bel. Oct. 21.

*Ortmann, Reinhold. (1859- .)
Face of the Medusa, The. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 17.

Osborne, George Ralph. (See Barbour, Ralph Henry, and Osborne, George Ralph.)

Osborne, William Hamilton. (1873- .) (See 1915.)
Rifles and Pearls. E. W. Dec. 4.
*Sole Survivor, The. Col. May 27.

Oskison, John Milton. (1874- .) (See 1915.)
Grady’s Squad. N. Y. Trib. Aug. 13.

Ostrander, Isabel. (See 1915.)
Changeling Pearls, The. I. S. M. June 18.

O’Sullivan, Vincent. (1872- .)
*Burned House, The. Cen. Oct.
***Olivia Mist. Cen. Nov.

Owen, Frank.
*Sixth Notch, The.  N. Y. Eve. Sun. Oct. 20.

*Ozaki, Madame Yukio.
Tsubosaka. Outl. Oct. 25.

P

Paez, Catalina V.
Their Child. I. S. M. Dec. 17.

Paine, Albert Bigelow. (1861- .) (See 1915.)
*How Mr. Possum’s Tail Became Bare. Harp. M. March.
*Kingship of Melt Cheney, The. Col. Oct. 14.
**Mr. Possum’s Motor-Car. Harp. M. April.
Mrs. Tumulty’s Hat. Harp. M. July.

Paine, Ralph D(elahaye). (1871- .) (See 1915.)
*His Code of Honor. Scr. June.

Paley, Bemis J.
*When the Augurs Yawned. N. Rep. Aug. 19.

Palmer, Vance. (See 1915.)
*Girl and the Gunboat, The. I. S. M. Feb. 20.
Girl at Van Goyt’s, The. N. S. M. Sept. 24.
*Homecoming, The. Bel. Oct. 14.
Marooning of Marryat, The. I. S. M. Sept 24.
*Renunciation. Bel. Dec. 9.

Pangborn, Georgia Wood. (1872- .) (See 1915.)
*Return, The. Harp. M. Dec.

Pape, Lee. (See 1915.)
*Night Flower. Harp. M. Jan.

*Papini, Giovanni. (1881- .) (See 1915.)
Substitute Suicide, The. Int. May.

Pardy, George T.
*Ghost of O’Toole, The. I. S. M. Aug. 13.

Parker, Helen Baker. (See 1915.)
Her Autumn Clothes. L. H. J. Oct.
Lady Behind the Iron Fence, The.  L. H. J. Aug.

Partridge, Edward Bellamy.
Fate and Fifteen Hundred Dollars. Harp. M. Dec.

Patrick, John.
*King of Kanabaloo, The. Scr. Jan.

Patterson, Mary.
Bear and the Honey, The. Harp. M. Jan.

Patton, Bess Hafer.
*Unalterable, The. Sun. July.

Pattullo, George. (1879- .) (See 1915.)
*Cuckoo, The. S. E. P. April 29.
*Good Rooster Crows Everywhere, A. S. E. P. Dec. 2.
Henree Demands His Rights. S. E. P. March 18.
Henree Tried. S. E. P. Jan. 22.
Leezie, The City Slicker. S. E. P. Nov. 25.
Lucky 7. S. E. P. Feb. 12.
Naming the Noble Boys. S. E. P. May 13.
Two Sinners, The. Col. April 8.
You Know What I Mean. E. W. July 10.

Paul, Dorothy.
From the Bottom of the Pack. Col. Feb. 5.

Payne, Will. (1865- .) (See 1915.)
Business Man, A. S. E. P. Sept. 30.
**Daguerreotype, A. E. W. Jan. 3.
*Druggist at Bocatown, The. S. E. P. July 1.
*Engineer’s Report, An. E. W. Aug. 7.
*Fat Stranger, The. S. E. P. Aug. 19.
Financier, The. S. E. P. Oct. 28.
In Strict Confidence. S. E. P. Jan. 15.
**Narrow House, The. E. W. June 5.
Nick of Time, The. S. E. P. Jan. 22.
**Quail Call, The. E. W. Feb. 14.
Settled Out of Court. E. W. July 17.
*Stubborn Man. The. S. E. P. Sept. 9.

Peake, Elmore Elliott. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
Equine Equation, An. E. W. July 31.
Still Waters. E. W. Nov. 6.

Pedersen, Knut. (See “Hamsun, Knut.”)

Peeler, Clare P.
Maggie. E. W. Dec. 18.
*Ninth Circle, The. E. W. Feb. 7.

Pelley, William Dudley.
Little Son of a Gun. S. E. P. Nov. 4.

Pendexter, Hugh. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
In the Shadow of the Big Misery. I. S. M. March 19.
Miss McCann, Heart Mender. I. S. M. Sept. 10.
Spurs of the Lark, The. I. S. M. Aug. 13.
*Trailing of M’sieur, The. I. S. M. May 7.

“Pendleton, T. D.” (T. D. Pendleton Cummins.) (See 1915.)
*Easter Hat, An. Y. C. April 6.
*Locket, The. Mir. July 28.
*Stacher, The. Mir. April 14.

Penney, Ray D.
*In the Lions’ Den. Scr. April.

Pentz, Albert DuVerney.
***Big Stranger on Dorchester Heights, The. B. E. T. Nov. 7.

Pepi, Eug. S.
*Night in June, A. Pag. June.

Perry, Lawrence. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
*Human Equation, The. Scr. Feb.
*Julius, Seizer of Opportunities. McB. Jan.
*Landlubbers, The. Scr. Sept.
**Through Fire. Cen. May.

*Pertwee, Roland.
Cellini Saltcellar, The. S. E. P. June 10.
Eggshell. S. E. P. March 4.
*Gautama Buddha, The. S. E. P. July 22.
Little Pressure, A. S. E. P. April 1.
Reynolds Group, The. S. E. P. April 15.
Seven Kang-He Vases. S. E. P. Oct. 21.

*Perzynski, W.
**Murder, The. Pag. Oct.

Phillips, Henry Wallace. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
*Flight of Mr. Perkins and the Jagwar, The. Am. May.
**Judgment Reversed. Am. Nov.
Wooing of Shah-Layah, The. McB. Feb.

*Phillpotts, Eden. (1862- .) (See 1915.)
*Farmer Sleep’s Savings. Cen. Oct.
*Pilkington. (R.) Mir. March 31.

Pickthall, Marjorie (Lowry Christie). (See 1915.)
***Stories. (R.) I. S. M. May 28.

Pitney, Albert De Ford. (See 1915.)
Knights of Hooptown. Col. Oct. 28.
Roughneck Percy. E. W. Aug. 7.

Porter, Harold Everett. (1887- .) (See “Hall, Holworthy.”)

Portor, Laura Spencer. (See 1915.)
**Mixed Marriage. Harp. M. Aug.

Post, Melville Davisson. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
**Adopted Daughter, The. Red Bk. June.
American Horses. S. E. P. Dec. 23.
***Age of Miracles, The. Pict. R. Feb.
***Baron Starkheim, The. Col. Aug. 12.
**Great Legend, The. S. E. P. June 10.
*Hidden Law, The. (R.) I. S. M. Oct. 8.
***Hole in the Mahogany Panel, The. L. H. J. April.
Man from America, The. L. H. J. Nov.
***Mystery at the Blue Villa, The. Pict. R. Oct.
***Naboth’s Vineyard. I. S. M. June 4.
*Pumpkin Coach, The. Hear. Oct.
***Sleuth of the Stars, The. S. E. P. March 4.
“Some Girl.” L. H. J. May.
*Spread Rails, The. Hear. Jan.
***Twilight Adventure, A. (R.) I. S. M. Jan. 2.
*Witness of the Earth, The. Hear. April.

Powell, Francis.
*Well, What Do You Think You Will Die For? N. Y. Eve. Sun. Nov. 28.

Powers, Barnard.
Débutanting. Pict. R. Jan.

Pratt, Lucy. (1874- .)
**Children Wanted. Atl. Nov.

Prouty, Olive Higgins.
*Broken Ribs. Am. Nov.

*Pryor, F. R. (See Harker, Lizzie Allen, and Pryor, F. R.)

Pulver, Mary Brecht. (See 1915.)
*Cass, the Red-Cheeked. L. H. J. June.
**Grand Little Fellow, The. Ev. Jan.
New Face On It, A. Ev. Nov.
Vampire, The. S. E. P. Nov. 18.

Purdy, Nina Sutherland.
**Safety-Pin, The. Bel. Oct. 7.

Putnam, Nina Wilcox. (1888- .) (See 1915.)
*H. R. H. Libby-Ann. Ev. Jan.

*Puttkamer, Hedwig von.
*Stronger Soul, The. N. Y. Trib. Sept. 3.
*Where the Roses Bloom. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 1.

*Puttkamer, Thea von.
*Last Bullet, The. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 15.

Q

Quick, (John) Herbert. (1861- .)
Boys’ Revolt in Fairview, The. S. E. P. Nov. 18.

Quigley, Edward G.
***“But the Earth Abideth Forever.” Mid. Jan.

R

Raine, William MacLeod. (1871- .) (See 1915.)
With the Help of the Tiger. McB. March.

Raisin, Ovro-om.
***Bullets. (R.) Mir. July 7.
**Silent Footsteps. Pag. Oct.

Ranck, Edwin Carty.
*His Wife. Am. June.

Raphael, John N.
*Thibault’s Luck. Ev. Nov.

Read, Marion Pugh. (See 1915.)
***Life for a Life, A. E. W. June 19.

Read, Susan N.
*Neeth and the House of a Thousand Gods. Colon. Sept.

Rector, Jessie Leach. (See Cameron, Margaret, and Rector, Jessie Leach.)

Reed, John (S.). (1887- .) (See 1915.)
**Broadway Night. Masses. May.
**Capitalist, The. Masses. April.
*Endymion, or On the Border. Masses. Dec.
**Head of the Family, The. Met. May.
**Last Clinch, The. Met. Nov.

Reese, Lowell Otus.
*Little Injun, The. Col. Nov. 4.

*Regis, Roger.
**Crowning Joy in the Life of Theodore Floque, The. (R.) C. O. Aug.

*Reinke, Siegfried.
*Last Flight, The. N. Y. Trib. May 14.

*Rejmont, Wladyslaw.
***Twilight. Pag. Aug.

*Reuter, Gabriele. (1859- .)
*Soldier’s Son, The.  N. Y. Trib. Aug. 6.

Reyher, Ferdinand M. (1891- .)
**Uninteresting Case, An. N. Rep. May 27.

Reynolds, Katharine.
*In the Desert Kiln. I. S. M. April 30.

Rhodes, Eugene Manlove. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
Desire of the Moth, The. S. E. P. Feb. 26-March 4.

Rhodes, Eugene Manlove (1869- ), and Yates, Laurence.
*Miracle, The. Red Bk. July.

Rich, Bertha A.
Her House In Order. Am. Feb.

Richter, Conrad. (See 1915.)
**Laughter of Leen, The. Outl. Feb. 23.

Rideout, Henry Milner. (1877- .) (See 1915.)
*Parimban’s Daughter. S. E. P. Aug. 12.

Riley, James Whitcomb. (1853-1916.)
***Grandfather. Scr. Dec.

Rinehart, Mary Roberts. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
“Are We Downhearted? No!” S. E. P. Jan. 8.
Empire Builders, The. S. E. P. May 20.
My Country Tish of Thee—. S. E. P. April 1-8.
Strange Cases at Summerlea, The. I. S. M. Oct. 22.
Sub-Deb, The. S. E. P. March 4.
Theme: The Celebrity. S. E. P. Nov. 25.

Rion, Hanna.
**Man from Flanders, The. McB. March.

“Rissakoff, Arkady.” (See Berry, John.)

Ritchie, Robert Welles. (See 1915.)
“Fem-in-in-ist” of Jumbo Mills, The. L. H. J. Nov.
High as Haman. E. W. Aug. 21.
*Original Bill. Harp. M. June.
*Pilgrim of Jackass Bar, The.  Sun. Feb.
Troubadour of Little Poison, The. Harp. M. July.

Roberts, John W.
*Fate’s Decree. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Nov. 21.

Roberts, Theodore. (1861- .)
Indian Giver, The. I. S. M. May 14.

Robinson, Eloise.
Barbara Buys a Bonnet. Harp. M. Nov.
*“Who Will Be Sue?” Harp. M. Oct.

Robinson, Philip.
**Man-Eating Tree, The. (R.) Mir. Sept. 8.

Roche, Mazo de la. (See 1915.) (See De la Roche, Mazo.)

*Roda-Roda, Alexander. (1872- .)
*Russian Sun, The. N. Y. Trib. April 16.

Roe, Vingie E. (See 1915.)
Blue Lock, the Queen. Col. Oct. 21.
First Law, The. Col. April 29.
King’s Blood. Col. Feb. 26.
Red Flag of Papoose Peak. Col. Jan. 8.
Stakes, The. Col. Dec. 2.

*“Rohmer, Sax.” (Arthur Sarsfield Ward.) (1883- .) (See 1915.)
Flower of Silence. Col. April 8.
Golden Pomegranates, The. Col. June 24.
*In the Valley of the Sorceress. Pict. R. Dec.
Queen of Hearts. Col. Nov. 25.
Zarmi of the Joy Shop. Col. May 13.

Rood, Henry. (1867- .) (See 1915.)
*Pirates. McB. April.

Rosenblatt, Benjamin. (See 1915.)
***Ecce Homo. For. April. Mir. April 21.
***Menorah, The. Bel. May 6.
***Zelig. (R.) Bel. July 1. C. O. March. I. S. M. April 9. Mir. March 31. Charleston Sunday News. Jan. 16.

Rothery, Julian.
**Belated Christmas Gift, A. Am. Dec.
Pride. Cen. Aug.
*Winning Hand, The. Am. Sept.

Rouse, William Merriam. (See 1915.)
As a Man To His Friend. N. S. M. March 26.
*Boot-Straps of His Soul, The. N. S. M. Sept. 24.
*Cage of Iron, The. N. S. M. April 23.
Dilettante, Dip, and Mary Jane. Bel. Feb. 12.
*Little Bronze Shoes, The. Col. Feb. 26.
**Mince-pie. Cen. Dec.
*Purged. S. S. July.
**Strings of Earth, The. Mid. Dec.

Rowland, Henry C(ottrell). (1874- .)
Mon Filleul. S. E. P. June 3.
Wrath. S. E. P. Sept. 23.

Rucker, Henry.
Blue Monday. S. E. P. May 13.
By Request. S. E. P. July 8.
Somewhere in Arizona. S. E. P. June 3.

Rugg, George Bigelow Cheever. (See 1915.)
*After Well of “Thirty-One,” The. Y. C. Aug. 31.

Rumbold, Charlotte.
*Holy Estate, The. N. Rep. Aug. 5.

Russell, John.
Badge, The. S. E. P. June 10.
Bird of Paradise, The. Col. Aug. 19.
*Price of the Head, The. Col. May 20.
Way of the Heathen, The. Col. July 1.

Ryder, Charles T. (See 1915.)
*Slate Blossom Soirée, A. Bel. March 18.

S

S., C.
**Rosey. Masses. Feb.

Saanen, Marie Louise Van. (See Van Saanen, Marie Louise.)

Sabin, Edwin L(egrand). (1870- .) (See 1915.)
Better See the Doctor. Am. Sept.
Sleeping Out. Am. June.

Sangster, Jr., Margaret E. (See 1915.)
Fairfield’s Criminal. McB. Feb.

Sapinsky, Ruth. (See 1915.)
Kid, The. E. W. Dec. 25.
*Star Light, Star Bright. Met. July.
Water-Wings. Met. Sept.
Yetta Flumbum, Amichure. Met. Nov.

Savage, Percy Godfrey.
*Somewhere in Belgium. Life. Jan. 13.

Sawyer, Ruth. (Mrs. Albert C. Durand.) (1880- .) (See 1915.)
*Pipes of Pan, The. G. H. Sept.
*Road Menders. Outl. March 22.
**Ye Can Never Be Tellin’. Harp. B. April.

Saxby, Charles.
*Captive Woman, The. E. W. Sept. 11.
**Sole Survivor, The. E. W. Feb. 21.

Scarlet, Patrick.
**Silver and Gold. Tr. La. Feb.

Schayer, E. Richard. (See 1915.)
*Good Loser, The. Am. June.
**Man Who Would Not Kill, The. (R.) C. O. Feb.

*Schmidt, Poldi.
Idea of Balint, the Gypsy, The.  N. Y. Trib. March 5.

*Schnitzler, Arthur. (1862- .)
**Dead Men Tell No Tales. Met. July.
*Threefold Admonishment, The.  Colon. Feb.

Schrader, Frederick Franklin. (1857- .)
Diary, The. Int. Jan.

*Schroeder, Heide.
Discovery. N. Y. Trib. Dec. 24.

Scott, Kit C.
*Hahwilget Julie. Sun. Oct.

Scott, Leroy. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
Apples of Oregon. Met. Aug.
Gordon Masterpieces, The. Met. July.
Little Matter of Discipline, A. Met. June.
Partners of the Night. Met. Oct.
Pride of Mary Regan, The. Met. Sept.

Scott, Margretta. (See 1915.)
*Mary Tompkins. Mir. June 16.
*Mr. Sprinkel. Mir. May 19.
*Mrs. Miller’s Canary. Mir. Dec. 15.

Scott, Rosa Naomi.
*Rachel. Col. Dec. 9.

Seawell, Molly Elliot. (1860-1916.) (See 1915.)
Mary Ann and the Grand Duke. Pict. R. Aug.

Sedgwick, Anne Douglas. (Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt.) (1873- .) (See 1915.)
**Carnations. Atl. Jan.
***Pansies. Atl. Aug.
***Staking a Larkspur. Cen. Feb.

Sélincourt, Mrs. Basil de. (See Sedgwick, Anne Douglas.)

Seton, Ernest Thompson. (1860- .)
Making of Silly Billy, The. N. S. M. Jan. 23.
**Story of Atalapha, The. Scr. April.
*Story of Coaly-Bay, The. Col. Jan. 22.

*Sexau, Richard. (1882- .)
*Judith. N. Y. Trib. July 16.

*Shaw, George Bernard. (1856- .)
Emperor and the Little Girl, The. N. Y. Trib. Oct. 22.

Shelton, Richard Barker.
Ally, The. Del. Aug.
*Quest and the Question, The. Mun. Aug.

Sherrard, Marion. (See 1915.)
Kidnapping a Cook. Am. Feb.

Shippey, Mary Woodson.
*His Rival. So. Wo. M. June.

Sholl, Anna McClure.
Only Seven Days Until Christmas. L. H. J. Dec.

Showerman, Grant. (1870- .)
**Dance, The. Cen. Sept.
**Runaways, The. Cen. Oct.
**Wheat Harvest, The. Cen. Aug.

*Sienkiewicz, Henryk. (1846-1916.)
***Peter and Paul on Olympus. (R.) Mir. Dec. 15.

Simmons, Laura.
Miss Alicia. Crafts. Dec.

Simpich, Frederick. (See 1915.)
Gall of Gopher Jones, The. McB. March.

Sinclair, Mrs. John Archibald. (See Higgins, Aileen Cleveland.)

Singmaster, Elsie. (Elsie Singmaster Lewars.) (1879- .) (See 1915.)
*Cure of Mr. Boyer, The. Y. C. May 4.
**Late Transplanting, A. Y. C. May 25.
*No Friend to Santa Claus. W. H. C. Dec.
***Penance. Pict. R. Oct.
*Stutterer, The. Bel. July 8.
***Survivors, The. (R.) I. S. M. April 30.

Slyke, Lucille van. (See Van Slyke, Lucille.)

Smale, Fred C.
*Afterwards. Scr. June.

Smith, Eugene.
*Sophistry of Art, A. Life. Jan. 6.

Smith, Gordon Arthur. (See 1915.)
***Feet of Gold. Scr. Aug.
*Tropic Madness. Scr. Dec.

Sneddon, Robert W. (1880- .) (See 1915.)
*Dead Yesterday. Bel. Jan. 22.
*Genius, The. Mun. Jan.
**Gray Cat, The. Sn. St. Dec. 1.
*Greater Sin, The. Sn. St. Jan. 7.
***Green Cigar-Band, The. Sn. St. May 5.
*Joke They Played on Curwen, The. S. S. May.
*Legacy of Monsieur Poivrot, The. Sn. St. Feb. 18.
*“Miracle of Noel, The.” Rom. Jan.
*Miracle of Spring, The. L. W. May.
**Old Man Without a Son, An. Scr. Nov.
***One Mother. (R.) Bel. July 1.
***Out of Darkness. Bel. July 15.
***“Petit Popo.” Bel. March 11.
***Red-Haired Woman, The. Bel. Jan. 8.
*“Somewhere in Paradise.” Sn. St. July 7.
*Song of Charlot, The. Sn. St. July 21.
*Violet, The. Bel. May 27.
*“Two Children.” Sn. St. Nov. 3.

*“Sologub, Feodor.” (Feodor Kuzmitch Teternikov.) (1863- .)
**White Dog, The. Pag. June.

*Soutar, Andrew. (See 1915.)
***Pruning Knife, The. Pict. R. March.

Spadoni, Adriana. (See 1915.)
*Hall Bedroom Nun, A. Masses. June.

Spofford, Harriet Prescott. (1835- .) (See 1915.)
**Mad Lady, The. Scr. Feb.
Miss Diantha’s Divorce Case. L. H. J. Sept.

Springer, Fleta Campbell. (See 1915.)
*“Bonjour, Monsieur!” Harp. M. Sept.
***Superstructure. Harp. M. Feb.
**Things That Are Cæsar’s, The. Harp. M. Nov.
**Trio, The. Harp. M. April.
**Wishing House, The. Harp. M. Dec.

*Squire, J(ack) C(ollings).
**March of Progress, The. Cen. Sept.

*Stacpoole, Henry de Vere Stacpoole-. (1865- ).
Cormorant, The. N. S. M. Oct. 22.
Girl in Brown, The. Met. Nov.

*Stangeland, Karin Michaelis. (1877- .)
*Sister Agnes. N. Y. Trib. March 12.

Stearnes, M. M. (See “Amid, John.”)

Steele, Alice Garland. (See 1915.)
Brother Babbitt. Del. May.
*“Captain, My Captain!” Ev. June.
Fustian Coat, The. Del. Jan.
Immediate Jewel, The. Ev. Dec.
*Melting Pot, The. Am. March.
Singing Angel, The. Col. Dec. 23.
Voice That Breathed O’er Eden, The. Del. April.

Steele, Wilbur Daniel. (1886- .) (See 1915.)
**Before the Mast. Harp. M. March.
***Down on their Knees. Harp. M. July.
*Escape from Freedom, An. Harp. M. Oct.
***Killer’s Son, The. Harp. M. Jan.
**Land’s End. Col. March 25.
***Last Fletcher, The. G. H. Sept.

Steffens, (Joseph) Lincoln. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
**Boss Who Was Bossed, The. McC. Jan.
*Po-lice-man, A. Life. Jan. 13.
*Strictly Business. Life. Jan. 27.
*“Thirty-Threed.” Ev. July.

Stetson, Grace Ellery Channing-. (See Channing, Grace Ellery.)

Stevens, Margaret Dean.
Cat Is On the Mat, The. Del. Oct.
Mother o’ Earth. Del. July.

Stillman, Henry E.
*Deathless Orchid, The. N. Y. Eve. Sun. Oct. 27.

Stockard, Willett.
Texas Marathon, A. N. S. M. Sept. 10.

*Stramm, Else Krafft. (See Krafft, Else.)

Stuart, Ralph.
**Bart Brown. Am. Oct.
**Dick. Am. Nov.
**My Friend Father John. Am. Dec.

Sullivan, John W. N.
*Temperament. (R.) Mir. April 14.

Synon, Mary. (See 1915.)
***But What Could I Do? Pict. R. June.
**My Grandmother and Myself. Scr. Aug.
*Red Poppies. Ev. May.
*Reservist, The. Scr. Oct.
**Sandals of His Youth, The. Scr. May.
*Time—and the Wind-Up. E. W. Nov. 27.
* Written on the Sand. Harp. M. Sept.

T

*Tagore, Sir Rabindranath. (1861- .) (Ravindranatha Thakura.)
*Raicharan: the Munsiff’s Servant. Int. Sept.
Revenge. Int. Nov.
Suspicious Husband, The. Int. Oct.
*Vacation, The. Int. July.

Tarkington, (Newton) Booth. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
*Bride-To-Be, The. Met. March.
*Brudie’s Pickle. Ev. Sept.
*Clothes Make the Man. Met. Jan.
*Farewell Party, The. Met. Feb.
**Maud and Bill. Ev. Dec.
*Maytime in Marlow. Ev. Nov.
***Second Name for Vreedersburgh, The. Ev. Aug.
*Spring Concert, The. Ev. Oct.

Tarpley, Ford. (See 1915.)
Laughter. Int. June.

Taylor, Deems.
**Brothers All. N. Y. Trib. June 11.

Taylor, Earl H.
Friend of Napoleon, A. I. S. M. Feb. 6.

*Tchekov, Anton Pavlovitch. (1860-1904.) (See 1915.)
**Gentleman Friend, A. (R.) Mir. April 21.
***Thickest Hide, The. B. E. T. April 26.
**Trouble. Rus. R. May.

Terry, Katharine. (See 1915.)
*Passing of the Grouch, The. I. S. M. April 23.

*Teternikov, Feodor Kuzmitch. (See “Sologub, Feodor.”)

Tharp, Vesta.
*Proper Spirit of Regret, A. Scr. Sept.
*Social Secretary, The. Scr. Dec.

Thompson, Ernest Seton-. (See Seton, Ernest Thompson.)

Thompson, Lillian Bennett-.
**Boomerang, The. N. S. M. Jan. 9.
**Tardy Rebellion, A. N. S. M. Sept. 10.

*Thurston, Ernest Temple. (1879- .) (See 1915.)
*Lark With a Broken Wing, A. Harp. W. Feb. 19.

Thurston, Mabel Nelson.
Crostlethwait. Col. Sept. 9.
*Order of the Day, The. E. W. May 22.
*When Maisie Passed Your House. L. H. J. June.

Tildesley, Alice L.
***Half-Past Ten. B. C. Aug.

Titus, Harold.
Listmann’s Jess and the Gentle Hand. Ev. May.

Tolman, Albert W.
*“Buckaroo,” The. Y. C. Aug. 17. Mir. Sept. 29.
*Gray Snow. Y. C. Aug. 24. Mir. Sept. 15.
**Greasing the Tram. Y. C. Nov. 30.

*Tolstoi, Count Alexis N.
***Blot of Ink, The. S. S. Dec.

Tompkins, Juliet Wilbor. (Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins Pottle.) (1871- .) (See 1915.)
Cotton-Wool. Harp. M. Feb.
Missionary Blood. Harp. M. May.
*Penny Wise. Cen. Jan.

Tooker, Lewis Frank. (1855- .) (See 1915.)
Romance. Cen. April.

Tracy, Virginia. (See 1915.)
Challenge, The. Col. Feb. 26.

Train, Arthur (Cheney). (1875- .) (See 1915.)
Purple Monkey, The. S. E. P. Feb. 26.
*Truth—For Once, The. Am. Dec.

Train, Ethel. (Mrs. Arthur Train.)
Paragon, The. Del. Dec.

Trethewey, Charles. (See 1915.)
*Confidence Game, The. Col. July 22.

Trites, William Budd. (1872- .) (See 1915.)
*Mr. Jackson. Del. March.
Plunge, The. S. E. P. Feb. 26.

Troubetzkoy, Princess Amélie. (See Rives, Amélie.)

Tupper, Edith Sessions.
Back Home. I. S. M. July 2.
Match Breakers, The. I. S. M. Nov. 5.

Turner, George Kibbe. (1869- .) (See 1915.)
**Diamond Ring, The. McC. Aug.
***Smile Factory, The. McC. Dec.

Turvey, C. Hilton-. (See Hilton-Turvey, C.)

U

*Ulmann, Henrik.
*Ford, The. N. Y. Trib. July 9.

Underwood, Sophie Kerr. (See Kerr, Sophie.)

*Upward, Allen. (1863- .)
*Saints of San Atoll, The. Sev. A. Nov.

Uzzell, Thomas H. (See 1915.)
Anton the Terrible. S. E. P. Jan. 8.
Ivan Revolts. S. E. P. June 3.
*Sombrero, The. Masses. May.

V

Vail, Laurence.
**Untrammelled. For. Sept.

Vaka, Demetra. (Demetra Kenneth Brown.) (1877- .) (See 1915.)
*By a Golden Thread. Hear. Nov.

Van Campen, Helen (Green). (1883- .) (See 1915.)
Betsy’s Holiday Mush. S. E. P. July 22.
Plugger Who Lost His Pep, The. S. E. P. Nov. 25.

Van de Water, Virginia (Belle) Terhune. (1865- .)
*Mirage. Am. S. M. July 2 (9).
*Twentieth Century Lear, A. Am. S. M. April 2 (9).

Van Loan, Charles Emmett. (1876- .) (See 1915.)
Adolphus and the Rough Diamond. Col. Sept. 23.
Badge Horse, The. S. E. P. April 22.
Buck and the Biscuit Shooter. S. E. P. May 27.
*Crusader, The. S. E. P. Aug. 19.
Desk Job, The. S. E. P. May 6.
Egyptian Corn. Col. May 20.
Elephant Never Forgets, The. S. E. P. Feb. 12.
Fire or Water? S. E. P. Oct. 28.
His Folks. S. E. P. March 11.
I O U. S. E. P. Nov. 11.
*Long Live the King! S. E. P. Aug. 5.
Modern Judgment of Solomon, The. Col. Sept. 9.
Morning Workout, A. Col. April 15.
No Business. S. E. P. Jan. 15.
Rank Quitter, A. S. E. P. April 1.
Redemption Handicap, The. Col. Feb. 5.
Whip Horse, The. Col. Nov. 25.

Van Saanen, Marie Louise. (See 1915.)
*Blood of the Fathers, The. Crafts. Jan.
*Game, The. Masses. May.

Van Slyke, Lucille Baldwin. (1880- .)
General Merry Sunshine. Col. Jan. 29.

Venable, Edward Carrington. (See 1915.)
*Lasca. Scr. Aug.
*Wife of the Junior Partner, The. Scr. Feb.

Victor, P. S.
Buck and the Bank. N. S. M. Oct. 22.

*Von Puttkamer, Hedwig. (See Puttkamer, Hedwig von.)

*Von Puttkamer, Thea. (See Puttkamer, Thea von.)

Vorse, Mary (Marvin) Heaton. (Mary Heaton Vorse O’Brien.) (See 1915.)
**Ancient Courage, The. Harp. M. May.
**Cage Door, The. McC. July.
Get-away, The. Cen. Feb.
**Great Understanding, The. McC. Feb.
**Judgment of the Thorntons, The. Cen. May.
***Mirror of Silence, The. Harp. M. Nov.
*New Dormer Window, The. L. H. J. July.

W

Wagnalls, Mabel.
**Rose-Bush of a Thousand Years, The. Sn. St. Oct. 18. C. O. Dec.

Wakeman, Mary Adams.
*Her Day of Days. S. S. June.

*Wallace, Edgar. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
Bones and the Wireless. Col. July 8.
Bones Changes His Religion. Col. June 3.
Bones: Kingmaker. Col. Sept. 23.
Bones, Sanders, and Another. Col. May 6.
Code No. 2. E. W. July 24.
Northern Men, The. Col. Dec. 2.

*Ward, Arthur Sarsfield. (See “Rohmer, Sax.”)

Ward, Herbert Dickinson. (1861- .)
**Lion’s Eyes, The. S. E. P. Dec. 9.

Warner, Anne. (Anne Warner French.) (1869-1913.) (See 1915.)
Amazing Event That Caused Miss Clegg to Disappear for Good, The. L. H. J. April.
Such a Little House. S. E. P. Aug. 19-26.
*Susan Develops New Troubles: Her Imagination Begins to Work. L. H. J. Feb.
Susan Has Her Troubles With the New House, and Jathrop Coming Home. L. H. J. March.
*Susan Moves and Finds Even Worse Troubles than Before. L. H. J. Jan.

Warren, Elizabeth.
Sub-Marine, A Peaceful Tale. McB. Jan.

Warren, Maude Radford. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
Alimony. Pict. R. Feb.
Life Job. A. S. E. P. May 20.
*Man’s Profit, A. Col. Aug. 5.
*Their Children. G. H. Dec.
You Can Always Bluff ’Em. S. E. P. Feb. 5.

Washburn, Elizabeth. (Elizabeth Washburn Wright.) (See 1915.)
***Storm in the Night, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.

Wasson, David A. (See 1915.)
*Biggs’s Bread and Butter. Y. C. Dec. 21.
Fall of Enderson, The. Bel. April 22.
King of Sports, The. Bel. Nov. 25.

Water, Virginia Terhune Van de. (See Van de Water, Virginia Terhune.)

Waterman, Charles E.
*Return of Bolduc, The. Spring. Rep. Dec. 10.

Webster, Henry Kitchell. (1875- .) (See 1915.)
Second Rescue, The. Met. Dec.

Weil, Dorothy.
New Woman, A? Masses. Jan.

*Wells, Herbert George. (1866- .) (See 1915.)
*Birds of a Feather. (R.) I. S. M. Nov. 5.

Wells, Leila Burton. (See 1915.)
*Naked Truth, The. Harp. M. April.
*Right of Selection, The. Harp. M. Oct.
So Very Congenial. Am. May.

West, Eva McKinley. (See Bascom, Louise Rand, and West, Eva McKinley.)

Weston, George. (See 1915.)
*Alicia and Little Moses. Ev. Aug.
*Believe It or Not. S. E. P. Feb. 19.
*Boys They Left Behind Them, The. S. E. P. Sept. 9.
Breaking Loose. E. W. Sept. 18.
Fire of Youth, The. E. W. Oct. 23.
Girl Behind Him, The. E. W. Jan. 31.
Girl Who Didn’t Care, The. L. H. J. March.
*Girl Who Was a Christmas Tree, The. E. W. Dec. 25.
Major Pom-Pom. N. S. M. July 16.
**Man Who Tried, The. S. E. P. July 15.
***Man Who Was Cracked, The. Pict. R. Oct.
Old Dominie, The. S. E. P. March 25.
*Ruling Passion, The. S. E. P. April 1.

Wharton, Edith (Newbold Jones). (1862- .) (See 1915.)
***Kerfol. Scr. March.

Wharton, Elna Harwood.
Fitting the Punishment to the Offence. Del. Nov.
Pleasure Exertions. Del. Oct.
Real Victory, The. Del. Sept.

White, Samuel Alexander. (1885- .) (See 1915.)
*Couriers of Chance. Col. Feb. 5.
Teeth of Famine, The. Col. Jan. 22.

Whitehead, Celia Baldwin.
Green Hat, The. Mir. March 10.

Whitson, Beth Slater.
***Knitter of Liège, The. So. Wo. M. April.

Wickham, Harvey.
**Crotty. Col. July 8.
*Epidemic of Philanthropy, An. I. S. M. Feb. 6.

Wilkins, Mary E. (See Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins-.)

Williams, Martha McCulloch-.
Story of Elspeth Cameron, The. McB. Jan.

Williams, Mary Brush.
Mrs. Murphy Breaks In. S. E. P. Feb. 12-19.

*Williamson, Charles Norris (1859- ), and Williamson, Alice Muriel.
Message, The. I. S. M. April 2.

Wilson, Harry Leon. (1867- .) (See 1915.)
Kate: or, Up from the Depths. S. E. P. July 15.
Little Old New York. S. E. P. Aug. 26.
Love Story, A. S. E. P. Sept. 2.
Non Plush Ultra. S. E. P. Feb. 12.
Once a Scotchman, Always. S. E. P. Jan. 22.
Pete’s Bother-in-Law. S. E. P. Aug. 5.

Wilson, John Fleming. (1877- .) (See 1915.)
Active Director, The. S. E. P. May 20.
**Admiral of the Ooze, The. Col, Aug. 26.
**San Bernardino Meridian, The. Red Bk. April.
Saving Sense, The. S. E. P. April 15-22.
Unearned Increment, The. S. E. P. Aug. 26.
What Have You Got? E. W. Oct. 30.

Wilson, Margaret Adelaide.
**Child Who Died on Eysos, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.
*Garden of Bee-Man John, The. Scr. Dec.
*Hyacinthine Macaw, The. Scr. Oct.
**Son of Patrick O’Moira, The. Scr. July.
*William Lee. Bel. Sept. 23.

Winslow, Horatio. (See 1915.)
***Wonderful City, The. (R.) Bel. July 1.

*Witte, Gustave Helene.
**Bronze Angel, The. N. Y. Trib. Dec. 17.

*Wittman, Hugo.
*Conversion of Lysistrate, The. N. Y. Trib. July 30.

Witwer, H. C.
East Lynch. S. E. P. Oct. 28.
It’s a Gift. S. E. P. Oct. 7.
Lay Off, Macduff. S. E. P. Sept. 16.
One At a Time. S. E. P. Sept. 9.

*Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville. (1881- .) (See 1915.)
Aunt and the Sluggard, The. S. E. P. April 22.
Fatal Kink in Algernon, The. L. H. J. Jan.
Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest. S. E. P. Dec. 9.
Jeeves Takes Charge. S. E. P. Nov. 18.
Leave It to Jeeves. S. E. P. Feb. 5.
Man With Two Left Feet, The. S. E. P. March 18.
Prisoner of War, A. I. S. M. Feb. 13.
*Romance of “Mac’s,” The. Red Bk. May.
Wilton’s Vacation. I. S. M. March 19.

*Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville (1881- ), and Boville, C. H.
Diverting Episode of the Exiled Monarch, The. Pict. R. Sept.
Episode of the Financial Napoleon, The. Pict. R. June.
Episode of the Hired Past, The. Pict. R. Oct.
Episode of the Landlady’s Daughter, The. Pict. R. May.
Episode of the Live Weekly, The. Pict. R. Aug.
Episode of the Theatrical Venture, The. Pict. R. July.

Wolf, Rennold.
Fortunes of Lucky Lounsberry, The. N. S. M. May 28.

Wolfe, Louise. (See 1915.)
Russian Wolf-Hound, The. E. W. June 26.

Wolff, William Almon.
Clutch of Circumstance, The. Col. Jan. 15.
Denatured Christmas, A. Col. Dec. 30.
*“Next Year!” Ev. June.
Point of Etiquette, A. Col. June 24.
Rub of the Green, A. Col. June 10.
Touch of Pan, The. S. E. P. May 20.
Victory Retrieved, A. Col. Nov. 11.

Wonderly, W. Carey. (See 1915.)
Small-Time Soul, The. I. S. M. July 30.

Wood, Cyrus.
**Paternité Oblige. S. S. Jan.

Wood, Sabine W.
*Milk or Ankles. Mun. May.

Woods, Alice. (See 1915.)
Bomb, The. Cen. Aug.

*Woodseer, John.
***Rest of the Story, The. G. H. Sept.

“Worth, Patience.” (See 1915.)
**Dance Before Augustus, The. Mir. Dec. 15.

Wright, Elizabeth Washburn. (See Washburn, Elizabeth.)

*Wylie, I. A. R.
Great Man’s Wife, The. L. H. J. Aug.
***In the Track of the Storm. Col. July 15.

Y

Yates, L. B. (See 1915.)
Reformation of Major Miles, The. S. E. P. Sept. 16.

Yates, Laurence. (See Rhodes, Eugene Manlove, and Yates, Laurence.)

Z

*Zarechnaya, L.
**Ave Maria. Rus. R. Sept.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Copyright, 1916, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1917, Gertrude Atherton.

[2] Copyright, 1916, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1917, by Barry Benefield.

[3] Copyright, 1916, by The Seven Arts Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright, 1917, by Frederick Booth.

[4] Copyright, 1916, by Robert M. McBride & Co. Copyright, 1917, by Dana Burnet.

[5] Copyright, 1916, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1917, by Francis Buzzell.

[6] Copyright, 1916, by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright, 1916, by George H. Doran Company. From “Local Color and Other Stories,” by Irvin S. Cobb, by permission of George H. Doran Company, Publishers, New York.

[7] Copyright, 1916, by The Century Company. Copyright, 1917, by Theodore Dreiser.

[8] Copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1917, by Armistead C. Gordon.

[9] Copyright, 1916, by The Metropolitan Magazine Company. Copyright, 1917, by Frederick Stuart Greene.

[10] Copyright, 1916, by Every Week Corporation. Copyright, 1917, by Richard Matthews Hallet.

[11] Copyright, 1916, by P. F. Collier and Son. Copyright, 1917, by Fannie Hurst.

[12] Copyright, 1916, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. Copyright, 1917, by Mary Lerner.

[13] Copyright, 1916, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1917, by Jeannette Marks.

[14] Copyright, 1916, by Mitchell Kennerley. Copyright, 1917, by Walter J. Muilenburg.

[15] Copyright, 1916, by The Boston Transcript. Copyright, 1917, by Albert Du Verney Pentz.

[16] Copyright, 1916, by The Bellman Company. Copyright, 1917, by Benjamin Rosenblatt.

[17] Copyright, 1916, by The Pictorial Review Company. Copyright, 1917, by Elsie Singmaster Lewars.

[18] Copyright, 1916, by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Copyright, 1917, by Gordon Arthur Smith.

[19] Copyright, 1916, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1917, by Wilbur Daniel Steele.

[20] Copyright, 1916, by The Short Story Publishing Company.

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

faded blue overralls=> faded blue over ralls {pg 268}

occupied the pressent=> occupied the present {pg 273}

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916, AND THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™ concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research. Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project Gutenberg License available with this file or online at www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg electronic works

1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property (trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg electronic works in your possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project Gutenberg electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg electronic works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project Gutenberg electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation” or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an individual work is unprotected by copyright law in the United States and you are located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project Gutenberg mission of promoting free access to electronic works by freely sharing Project Gutenberg works in compliance with the terms of this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg name associated with the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project Gutenberg License when you share it without charge with others.

1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project Gutenberg work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country other than the United States.

1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:

1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate access to, the full Project Gutenberg License must appear prominently whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg work (any work on which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, copied or distributed:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg™ License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is derived from texts not protected by U.S. copyright law (does not contain a notice indicating that it is posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the Project Gutenberg trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg electronic work is posted with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked to the Project Gutenberg License for all works posted with the permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.

1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg.

1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project Gutenberg License.

1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg work in a format other than “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version posted on the official Project Gutenberg website (www.gutenberg.org), you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.

1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg works unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.

1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing access to or distributing Project Gutenberg electronic works provided that:

- • You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg trademark, but he has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”

- • You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg™ License. You must require such a user to return or destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of Project Gutenberg™ works.

- • You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days of receipt of the work.

- • You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free distribution of Project Gutenberg™ works.

1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the manager of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark. Contact the Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.

1.F.

1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread works not protected by U.S. copyright law in creating the Project Gutenberg™ collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain “Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project Gutenberg™ trademark, and any other party distributing a Project Gutenberg™ electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further opportunities to fix the problem.

1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you ‘AS-IS’, WITH NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.

1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.

1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone providing copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in accordance with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works, harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any Project Gutenberg work, and (c) any Defect you cause.

Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is synonymous with the free distribution of electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life.

Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg’s goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg collection will remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure and permanent future for Project Gutenberg and future generations. To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org.

Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal Revenue Service. The Foundation’s EIN or federal tax identification number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state’s laws.

The Foundation’s business office is located at 41 Watchung Plaza #516, Montclair NJ 07042, USA, +1 (862) 621-9288. Email contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the Foundation’s website and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact

Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

Project Gutenberg™ depends upon and cannot survive without widespread public support and donations to carry out its mission of increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed in machine-readable form accessible by the widest array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations ($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt status with the IRS.

The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate.

While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who approach us with offers to donate.

International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.

Please check the Project Gutenberg web pages for current donation methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations. To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate.

Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg electronic works

Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project Gutenberg eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed editions, all of which are confirmed as not protected by copyright in the U.S. unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

Most people start at our website which has the main PG search facility: www.gutenberg.org.

This website includes information about Project Gutenberg, including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.

back

Table of Contents

- THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916
- CONTENTS
- INTRODUCTION

- THE SACRIFICIAL ALTAR [1] By GERTRUDE ATHERTON From Harper’s Magazine

- MISS WILLETT [2] By BARRY BENEFIELD From The Century Magazine

- SUPERS[3] By FREDERICK BOOTH From The Seven Arts Magazine

- FOG[4] By DANA BURNET From McBride’s Magazine

- MA’S PRETTIES[5] By FRANCIS BUZZELL From The Pictorial Review

- THE GREAT AUK[6] By IRVIN S. COBB From The Saturday Evening Post

- THE LOST PHOEBE[7] By THEODORE DREISER From The Century Magazine

- THE SILENT INFARE[8] By ARMISTEAD C. GORDON From Scribner’s Magazine

- THE CAT OF THE CANE-BRAKE[9] By FREDERICK STUART GREENE From The Metropolitan Magazine

- MAKING PORT[10] By RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET From Every Week

- “ICE WATER, PL——!”[11] By FANNIE HURST From Collier’s Weekly

- LITTLE SELVES[12] By MARY LERNER From The Atlantic Monthly

- THE SUN CHASER[13] By JEANNETTE MARKS From The Pictorial Review.

- I
- II
- III
- IV
- V
- VI
- VII
- VIII
- IX
- X
- XI
- XII

- AT THE END OF THE ROAD[14] By WALTER J. MUILENBURG From The Forum

- THE BIG STRANGER ON DORCHESTER HEIGHTS[15] By ALBERT DU VERNEY PENTZ From The Boston Transcript

- THE MENORAH[16] By BENJAMIN ROSENBLATT From The Bellman

- PENANCE[17] By ELSIE SINGMASTER From The Pictorial Review

- FEET OF GOLD[18] By GORDON ARTHUR SMITH From Scribner’s Magazine

- I
- II
- III
- IV

- DOWN ON THEIR KNEES[19] By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE From Harper’s Magazine

- HALF-PAST TEN[20] By ALICE L. TILDESLEY From The Black Cat

- THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FOR 1916 ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1916

- VOLUMES OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1916

- FIFTY AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OF 1916

- A CRITICAL SUMMARY

- NECROLOGY

- MAGAZINE AVERAGES FOR 1916

- INDEX OF SHORT STORIES FOR 1916

- FOOTNOTES:

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE