CHAPTER XII

_Stories_

Stories are sometimes called _Artistic Narrative_ in contrast to the

other and various kinds illustrated in the preceding chapters, all

of which are known as _Informational Narrative_. The reason for this

distinction in terms is readily seen by one who has examined the

form and the subject matter of the story. Reminiscent, biographical,

expository narrative, the sketch, the account of travel present alike

incidents, situations, circumstances, persons, objects, landscapes,

reflections--all in an orderly and a pleasing manner, to be sure,

but without giving any especial heightening or stress to what might

well have been an exceptional situation with significant causes and

most interesting consequences. This singling out a situation, this

simplifying of a mass of unrelated material to a few weighty details

all bearing upon one another, this presentation of causes with their

inevitable results, this selection of a few outstanding characters

whose lives and fortunes have been for a short time in conflict over

a great matter or in collision over a small one--these are within

the province of the story-teller; and because such work demands a

sense of form in the arrangement of material to the best advantage,

a sympathetic understanding of character, and a perception of what

certain surroundings and circumstances may mean to persons in a given

situation, the story-teller is called upon to exhibit a kind of art

which is not demanded of the writer of informational narrative.

Mr. Bliss Perry in _A Study of Prose Fiction_ defines a story-teller

as one who “shows how certain persons do certain things under certain

circumstances.” In this definition there are clearly suggested three

possible and entirely distinct sources of interest in a story:

the author may be concerned most of all in the behavior of his

characters, in the series of actions and events which make up the

plot; or, instead, he may wish above everything else to depict some

one character who seems to him outstanding and unusual enough to

command the attention of any reader; or, again, he may be one who

sees behavior or character entirely in the light of environment, to

whom setting is a great, even an overwhelming force in a person’s

life.

If the first of these sources of interest is of paramount importance

to him, then he will write a story in which plot is uppermost, in

which the action is more significant than the portrayal of character

or than setting, a story in which “things happen.” This Mr. H. C.

Bunner has done in “A Sisterly Scheme.” Here, although the setting

of the story is well and clearly given, although the two sisters and

Mr. Morpeth are capitally portrayed, it is the _action_ of the story

which holds our attention and our curiosity to the end. Indeed, the

reader will easily see that no setting is given except that which

is absolutely necessary and that the characters are almost entirely

depicted by what they do or by what happens to them.

In the story called “Two Friends” by M. Guy de Maupassant, however,

character portrayal is uppermost. The plot action is relegated to

little more than an incident; and yet M. Morissot and M. Sauvage,

in their quiet dependence upon each other, in their common love of

fishing, which makes them forget “the rest of the world,” and finally

in their splendid and pathetic heroism are imperishable. Here, too,

at the close is illustrated a device valuable to the writer of the

character story in the contrast which is afforded by the picture of

the Prussian officer, and which serves to accentuate the simplicity,

the kindness, and the valor of the two little Frenchmen.

And Mr. Francis Buzzell in “Lonely Places” has given us a story of

almost pure setting. To be sure, there is action in plenty; to be

sure, the characters of Abbie Snover and of Old Chris are clearly and

beautifully portrayed; and yet the reader is every moment conscious

that the action rises out of and because of the setting, that the

environment has been and still is responsible for the careless

cruelty of the children, for the attitude of their parents, and for

the pathetic consequences which Old Chris and Abbie must undergo.

These three stories, however, distinct as they are in their

respective and single impressions and effects, all contain plot _in

some measure_, even though the action may seem subordinate to the

portrayal of character in one of them and to the depiction of the

setting in another. Most stories, in fact, contain more or less

of the plot element. Yet there are those narratives which possess

too many of the features of a story to be called an incident or

a sketch, and too little of the form which we have come to think

necessary to the well-constructed short-story. Sometimes they are

called stories without plot. Such a story is Miss Willa Cather’s “The

Sculptor’s Funeral.” It is, in form, little more than an incident and

the circumstances attendant upon it; and yet there are few stories

anywhere that surpass it in brilliancy of characterization, in

strength and vividness of setting, and in the consistent art of its

atmosphere.

A study of the four stories which follow will illustrate better than

any precept can do the impressions which the story writer must seek

to attain after he has made his choice of a subject and after he has

decided upon his way of approach and of treatment.

M. E. C.

A SISTERLY SCHEME

H. C. BUNNER

Away up in the very heart of Maine there is a mighty lake among the

mountains. It is reached after a journey of many hours from the place

where you “go in.” That is the phrase of the country, and when you

have once “gone in,” you know why it is not correct to say that you

have gone _through_ the woods, or, simply, _to_ your destination.

You find that you have plunged into a new world--a world that has

nothing in common with the world that you live in; a world of wild,

solemn, desolate grandeur, a world of space and silence; a world that

oppresses your soul--and charms you irresistibly. And after you have

once “come out” of that world, there will be times, to the day of

your death, when you will be homesick for it, and will long with a

childlike longing to go back to it.

Up in this wild region you will find a fashionable summer hotel, with

electric bells and seven-course dinners, and “guests” who dress three

times a day. It is perched on a little flat point, shut off from the

rest of the mainland by a huge rocky cliff. It is an impertinence in

that majestic wilderness, and Leather-Stocking would doubtless have

had a hankering to burn such an affront to Nature; but it is a good

hotel, and people go to it and breathe the generous air of the great

woods.

On the beach near this hotel, where the canoes were drawn up in

line, there stood one summer morning a curly-haired, fair young

man--not so very young, either--whose cheeks were uncomfortably red

as he looked first at his own canoe, high and dry, loaded with rods

and landing net and luncheon basket, and then at another canoe, fast

disappearing down the lake wherein sat a young man and a young woman.

“Dropped again, Mr. Morpeth?”

The young man looked up and saw a saucy face laughing at him. A girl

was sitting on the stringpiece of the dock. It was the face of a girl

between childhood and womanhood. By the face and the figure, it was a

woman grown. By the dress, you would have judged it a girl.

And you would have been confirmed in the latter opinion by the fact

that the young person was doing something unpardonable for a young

lady, but not inexcusable in the case of a youthful tomboy. She had

taken off her canvas shoe, and was shaking some small stones out of

it. There was a tiny hole in her black stocking, and a glimpse of her

pink toe was visible. The girl was sunburnt, but the toe was prettily

pink.

“Your sister,” replied the young man with dignity, “was to have gone

fishing with me; but she remembered at the last moment that she had a

prior engagement with Mr. Brown.”

“She hadn’t,” said the girl. “I heard them make it up last evening,

after you went upstairs.”

The young man clean forgot himself.

“She’s the most heartless coquette in the world,” he cried, and

clinched his hands.

“She is all that,” said the young person on the stringpiece of the

dock, “and more too. And yet, I suppose, you want her all the same?”

“I’m afraid I do,” said the young man miserably.

“Well,” said the girl, putting her shoe on again, and beginning

to tie it up, “I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Morpeth. You’ve been

hanging around Pauline for a year, and you are the only one of the

men she keeps on a string who hasn’t snubbed me. Now, if you want me

to, I’ll give you a lift.”

“A--a--_what_?”

“A lift. You’re wasting your time. Pauline has no use for devotion.

It’s a drug in the market with her--has been for five seasons.

There’s only one way to get her worked up. Two fellows tried it, and

they nearly got there; but they weren’t game enough to stay to the

bitter end. I think you’re game, and I’ll tell you. You’ve got to

make her jealous.”

“Make her jealous of me?”

“No,” said his friend, with infinite scorn; “make her jealous of the

other girl. _Oh!_ but you men are stupid!”

The young man pondered a moment.

“Well, Flossy,” he began, and then he became conscious of a sudden

change in the atmosphere, and perceived that the young lady was

regarding him with a look that might have chilled his soul.

“Miss Flossy--Miss Belton--” he hastily corrected himself. Winter

promptly changed to summer in Miss Flossy Belton’s expressive face.

“Your scheme,” he went on, “is a good one. Only--it involves the

discovery of another girl.”

“Yes,” assented Miss Flossy cheerfully.

“Well,” said the young man, “doesn’t it strike you that if I were to

develop a sudden admiration for any one of these other young ladies

whose charms I have hitherto neglected, it would come tardy off--lack

artistic verisimilitude, so to speak?”

“Rather,” was Miss Flossy’s prompt and frank response; “especially as

there isn’t one of them fit to flirt with.”

“Well, then, where am I to discover the girl?”

Miss Flossy untied and retied her shoe. Then she said, calmly:----

“What’s the matter with--” a hardly perceptible hesitation--“_me_?”

“With _you_?” Mr. Morpeth was startled out of his manners.

“Yes!”

Mr. Morpeth simply stared.

“Perhaps,” suggested Miss Flossy, “I’m not good-looking enough?”

“You are good-looking enough,” replied Mr. Morpeth, recovering

himself, “for _anything_--” and he threw a convincing emphasis into

the last word as he took what was probably his first real inspection

of his adored one’s junior--“but--aren’t you a trifle--young?”

“How old do you suppose I am?”

“I know. Your sister told me. You are sixteen.”

“Sixteen!” repeated Miss Flossy, with an infinite and uncontrollable

scorn, “yes, and I’m the kind of sixteen that stays sixteen till your

elder sister’s married. I was eighteen years old on the 3d of last

December--unless they began to double on me before I was old enough

to know the difference--it would be just like mamma to play it on me

in some such way,” she concluded, reflectively.

“Eighteen years old!” said the young man. “The deuce!” Do not think

that he was an ill-bred young man. He was merely astonished, and he

had much more astonishment ahead of him. He mused for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “what’s your plan of campaign? I am to--to discover

you.”

“Yes,” said Miss Flossy calmly, “and to flirt with me like fun.”

“And may I ask what attitude you are to take when you

are--discovered?”

“Certainly,” replied the imperturbable Flossy. “I am going to dangle

you.”

“To--to dangle me?”

“As a conquest, don’t you know? Let you hang around and laugh at you.”

“Oh, indeed?”

“There, don’t be wounded in your masculine pride. You might as well

face the situation. You don’t think that Pauline’s in love with you,

do you?”

“No!” groaned the young man.

“But you’ve got lots of money. Mr. Brown has got lots more. You’re

eager. Brown is coy. That’s the reason that Brown is in the boat and

you are on the cold, cold shore, talking to Little Sister. Now if

Little Sister jumps at you, why, she’s simply taking Big Sister’s

leavings; it’s all in the family, anyway, and there’s no jealousy,

and Pauline can devote her whole mind to Brown. There, _don’t_ look

so limp. You men are simply childish. Now, after you’ve asked me to

marry you----”

“Oh, I’m to ask you to marry me?”

“Certainly. You needn’t look frightened, now. I won’t accept you. But

then you are to go around like a wet cat, and mope, and hang on worse

than ever. Then Big Sister will see that she can’t afford to take

that sort of thing from Little Sister, and then--there’s your chance.”

“Oh, there’s my chance, is it?” said Mr. Morpeth. He seemed to have

fallen into the habit of repetition.

“There’s your _only chance_,” said Miss Flossy, with decision.

Mr. Morpeth meditated. He looked at the lake, where there was no

longer sign or sound of the canoe, and he looked at Miss Flossy, who

sat calm, self-confident, and careless on the springpiece of the dock.

“I don’t know how feasible--” he began.

“It’s feasible,” said Miss Flossy, with decision. “Of course Pauline

will write to mamma, and of course mamma will write and scold me. But

she’s got to stay in New York and nurse papa’s gout; and the Miss

Redingtons are all the chaperons we’ve got up here, and they don’t

amount to anything--so I don’t care.”

“But why,” inquired the young man, and his tone suggested a complete

abandonment to Miss Flossy’s idea, “why should you take so much

trouble for _me_?”

“Mr. Morpeth,” said Miss Flossy solemnly, “I’m two years behind

the time-table, and I’ve got to make a strike for liberty, or die.

And besides,” she added, “if you are _nice_, it needn’t be such an

_awful_ trouble.”

Mr. Morpeth laughed.

“I’ll try to make it as little of a bore as possible,” he said,

extending his hand. The girl did not take it.

“Don’t make any mistake,” she cautioned him, searching his face with

her eyes; “this isn’t to be any little-girl affair. Little Sister

doesn’t want any kind, elegant, supercilious encouragement from Big

Sister’s young man. It’s got to be a _real_ flirtation--devotion no

end, and ten times as much as ever Pauline could get out of you--and

you’ve got to keep your end ’way--’way--’way up!”

The young man smiled.

“I’ll keep my end up,” he said; “but are you certain that you can

keep yours up?”

“Well, I think so,” replied Miss Flossy. “Pauline will raise an awful

row; but if she goes too far, I’ll tell my age, _and hers, too_.”

Mr. Morpeth looked in Miss Flossy’s calm face. Then he extended his

hand once more.

“It’s a bargain, so far as I’m concerned,” he said.

This time a soft and small hand met his with a firm, friendly, honest

pressure.

“And I’ll refuse you,” said Miss Flossy.

* * * * *

Within two weeks, Mr. Morpeth found himself entangled in a flirtation

such as he had never dreamed of. Miss Flossy’s scheme had succeeded

only too brilliantly. The whole hotel was talking about the

outrageous behavior of “that little Belton girl” and Mr. Morpeth, who

certainly ought to know better.

Mr. Morpeth had carried out his instructions. Before the week was

out, he found himself giving the most lifelike imitation of an

infatuated lover that ever delighted the old gossips of a summer

resort. And yet he had only done what Flossy told him to do.

He got his first lesson just about the time that Flossy, in the

privacy of their apartments, informed her elder sister that if she,

Flossy, found Mr. Morpeth’s society agreeable, it was nobody’s

concern but her own, and that she was prepared to make some

interesting additions to the census statistics if any one thought

differently.

The lesson opened his eyes.

“Do you know,” she said, “that it wouldn’t be a bit of a bad idea to

telegraph to New York for some real nice candy and humbly present it

for my acceptance? I _might_ take it--if the bonbonnière was pretty

enough.”

He telegraphed to New York, and received, in the course of four or

five days, certain marvels of sweets in a miracle of an upholstered

box. The next day he found her on the veranda, flinging the bonbons

on the lawn for the children to scramble for.

“Awfully nice of you to send me these things,” she said languidly,

but loud enough for the men around her to hear,--she had men around

her already: she had been discovered,--“but I never eat sweets, you

know. Here, you little mite in the blue sash, don’t you want this

pretty box to put your doll’s clothes in?”

And Maillard’s finest bonbonnière went to a yellow-haired brat of

three.

But this was the slightest and lightest of her caprices. She made

him send for his dogcart and his horses, all the way from New York,

only that he might drive her over the ridiculous little mile and a

half of road that bounded the tiny peninsula. And she christened him

“Muffets,” a nickname presumably suggested by “Morpeth”; and she

called him “Muffets” in the hearing of all the hotel people.

And did such conduct pass unchallenged? No. Pauline scolded, raged,

raved. She wrote to mamma. Mamma wrote back and reproved Flossy. But

mamma could not leave papa. His gout was worse. The Miss Redingtons

must act. The Miss Redingtons merely wept, and nothing more. Pauline

scolded; the flirtation went on; and the people at the big hotel

enjoyed it immensely.

And there was more to come. Four weeks had passed. Mr. Morpeth

was hardly on speaking terms with the elder Miss Belton; and with

the younger Miss Belton he was on terms which the hotel gossips

characterized as “simply scandalous.” Brown glared at him when they

met, and he glared at Brown. Brown was having a hard time. Miss

Belton the elder was not pleasant of temper in those trying days.

“And now,” said Miss Flossy to Mr. Morpeth, “it’s time you proposed

to me, Muffets.”

They were sitting on the hotel veranda, in the evening darkness. No

one was near them, except an old lady in a Shaker chair.

“There’s Mrs. Melby. She’s pretending to be asleep, but she isn’t.

She’s just waiting for us. Now walk me up and down and ask me to

marry you so that she can hear it. It’ll be all over the hotel inside

of half an hour. Pauline will just _rage_.”

With this pleasant prospect before him, Mr. Morpeth marched Miss

Flossy Belton up and down the long veranda. He had passed Mrs. Melby

three times before he was able to say, in a choking, husky, uncertain

voice:----

“Flossy--I--I--I _love_ you!”

Flossy’s voice was not choking nor uncertain. It rang out clear and

silvery in a peal of laughter.

“Why, of course you do, Muffets, and I wish you didn’t. That’s what

makes you so stupid half the time.”

“But--” said Mr. Morpeth vaguely; “but I----”

“But you’re a silly boy,” returned Miss Flossy; and she added in a

swift aside: “_You haven’t asked me to marry you!_”

“W-W-W-Will you be my wife?” stammered Mr. Morpeth.

“No!” said Miss Flossy, emphatically, “I will not. You are too

utterly ridiculous. The idea of it! No, Muffets, you are charming in

your present capacity; but you aren’t to be considered seriously.”

They strolled on into the gloom at the end of the great veranda.

“That’s the first time,” he said, with a feeling of having only the

ghost of a breath left in his lungs, “that I ever asked a woman to

marry me.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Flossy, “from the way you did it. And

you were beautifully rejected, weren’t you? Now--look at Mrs. Melby,

will you? She’s scudding off to spread the news.”

And before Mr. Morpeth went to bed, he was aware of the fact that

every man and woman in the hotel knew that he had “proposed” to

Flossy Belton, and had been “beautifully rejected.”

* * * * *

Two sulky men, one sulky woman, and one girl radiant with triumphant

happiness started out in two canoes, reached certain fishing grounds

known only to the elect, and began to cast for trout. They had

indifferent luck. Miss Belton and Mr. Brown caught a dozen trout;

Miss Flossy Belton and Mr. Morpeth caught eighteen or nineteen, and

the day was wearing to a close. Miss Flossy made the last cast of the

day, just as her escort had taken the paddle. A big trout rose--just

touched the fly--and disappeared.

“It’s this wretched rod!” cried Miss Flossy; and she rapped it on

the gunwale of the canoe so sharply that the beautiful split bamboo

broke sharp off in the middle of the second joint. Then she tumbled

it overboard, reel and all.

“I was tired of that rod, anyway, Muffets,” she said; “row me home,

now; I’ve got to dress for dinner.”

Miss Flossy’s elder sister, in the other boat, saw and heard this

exhibition of tyranny; and she was so much moved that she stamped her

small foot, and endangered the bottom of the canoe. She resolved that

mamma should come back, whether papa had the gout or not.

Mr. Morpeth, wearing a grave expression, was paddling Miss Flossy

toward the hotel. He had said nothing whatever, and it was a

noticeable silence that Miss Flossy finally broke.

“You’ve done pretty much everything that I wanted you to do,

Muffets,” she said; “but you haven’t saved my life yet, and I’m going

to give you a chance.”

It is not difficult to overturn a canoe. One twist of Flossie’s

supple body did it, and before he knew just what had happened,

Morpeth was swimming toward the shore, holding up Flossy Belton with

one arm, and fighting for life in the icy water of a Maine lake.

The people were running down, bearing blankets and brandy, as he

touched bottom in his last desperate struggle to keep the two of them

above water. One yard further, and there would have been no strength

left in him.

He struggled up on shore with her, and when he got breath enough, he

burst out:----

“Why did you do it? It was wicked! It was cruel!”

“There!” she said, as she reclined composedly in his arms, “that will

do, Muffets. I don’t want to be scolded.”

A delegation came along, bringing blankets and brandy, and took her

from him.

* * * * *

At five o’clock of that afternoon, Mr. Morpeth presented himself

at the door of the parlor attached to the apartments of the Belton

sisters. Miss Belton, senior, was just coming out of the room. She

received his inquiry after her sister’s health with a white face and

a quivering lip.

“I should think, Mr. Morpeth,” she began, “that you had gone far

enough in playing with the feelings of a m-m-mere child, and

that--oh! I have no words to express my _contempt_ for you!”

And in a most unladylike rage Miss Pauline Belton swept down the

hotel corridor.

She had left the door open behind her. Morpeth heard a voice, weak,

but cheery, addressing him from the far end of the parlor.

“You’ve got her!” it said. “She’s crazy mad. She’ll make up to you

to-night--see if she don’t.”

Mr. Morpeth looked up and down the long corridor. It was empty. He

pushed the door open, and entered. Flossy was lying on the sofa,

pale, but bright-eyed.

“You can get her,” she whispered, as he knelt down beside her.

“Flossy,” he said, “don’t you know that that is all ended? Don’t you

know that I love you and you only? Don’t you know that I haven’t

thought about any one else since--since--oh, Flossy, don’t you--is it

possible that you don’t understand?”

Flossy stretched out two weak arms, and put them around Mr. Morpeth’s

neck.

“Why have I had you in training all summer?” said she. “Did you think

it was for Pauline?”

Henry C. Bunner, _Short Sixes_. By permission

of Charles Scribner’s Sons, the authorized

publishers.

LONELY PLACES

FRANCIS BUZZELL

She was not quite forty years old, but so aged was she in appearance

that another twenty-five years would not find her perceptibly

older. And to the people of Almont she was still Abbie Snover, or

“that Snover girl.” Age in Almont is not reckoned in years, but by

marriage, and by children, and grandchildren.

Nearly all the young men of Abbie’s generation had gone to the City,

returning only in after years, with the intention of staying a week

or two weeks, and leaving at the end of a day, or two days. So Abbie

never married.

It had never occurred to Abbie to leave Almont because all the young

men had gone away. She had been born in the big house at the foot

of Tillson Street; she had never lived anywhere else; she had never

slept anywhere but in the black walnut bed in the South bedroom.

At the age of twenty-five, Abbie inherited the big house, and with it

hired-man Chris. He was part of her inheritance. Her memory of him,

like her memory of the big house, went back as far as her memory of

herself.

Every Winter evening, between seven and eight o’clock, Abbie lighted

the glass-handled lamp, placed it on the marble-topped table in

the parlor window, and sat down beside it. The faint light of this

lamp, gleaming through the snow-hung, shelving evergreens, was the

only sign that the big house was there, and occupied. When the wind

blew from the West she could occasionally hear a burst of laughter

from the boys and girls sliding down Gidding’s Hill; the song of

some young farmer driving home. She thought of the Spring, when the

snow would disappear, and the honeysuckle would flower, and the

wrens would again occupy the old tea-pots hung in the vines of the

dining-room porch.

The things that made the people of Almont interesting to each other

and drew them together meant nothing to Abbie Snover. When she had

become too old to be asked in marriage by any one, she had stopped

going to dances and to sleigh-rides, and no one had asked her why.

Then she had left the choir.

Except when she went to do her marketing, Abbie was never seen on the

streets.

For fifteen years after Amos Snover died, Abbie and Old Chris lived

alone in the big house. Every Saturday morning, as her mother had

done before her, Abbie went to the grocery store, to the butcher

shop, and to “Newberry’s.” She always walked along the East side of

Main Street, Old Chris, with the market-basket, following about three

feet behind her. And every Saturday night Old Chris went down-town to

sit in the back of Pot Lippincott’s store and visit with Owen Frazer,

who drove in from the sixty acres he farmed as a “renter” at Mile

Corners. Once every week Abbie made a batch of cookies, cutting the

thin-rolled dough into the shape of leaves with an old tin cutter

that had been her mother’s. She stored the cookies in the shiny tin

pail that stood on the shelf in the clothes-press of the down-stairs

bedroom, because that was where her mother had always kept them, to

be handy and yet out of reach of the hired help. And when Jennie

Sanders’s children came to her door on their way home from school she

gave them two cookies each, because her mother had always given her

two.

Once every three months “the Jersey girls,” dressed in black

broadcloth, with black, fluted ruffles around their necks, and

black-flowered bonnets covering their scanty hair, turned the corner

at Chase’s Lane, walked three blocks to the foot of Tillson Street,

and rang Abbie Snover’s door-bell.

As Old Chris grew older and less able, Abbie was compelled to close

off first one room and then another; but Old Chris still occupied the

back chamber near the upstairs woodroom, and Abbie still slept in

the South bedroom.

Early one October afternoon, Jim East, Almont’s express agent and

keeper of the general store, drove his hooded delivery cart up to

the front steps of the big house. He trembled with excitement as he

climbed down from the seat.

“Abbie Snover! Ab--bie!” he called. “I got somethin’ for you! A

package all the way from China! Just you come an’ look!”

Jim East lifted the package out of the delivery cart, carried it up

the steps, and set it down at Abbie’s feet.

“Just you look, Abbie! That there crate’s made of little fishin’

poles, an’ what’s inside’s all wrapped up in Chinee mats!”

Old Chris came around from the back of the house. Jim East grabbed

his arm and pointed at the bamboo crate.

“Just you put your nose down, Chris, an’ smell. Ain’t that foreign?”

Abbie brought her scissors. Carefully she removed the red and yellow

labels.

“There’s American writin’ on ’em, too,” Jim East hastened to explain,

“cause otherwise how’d I know who it was for, hey?”

Abbie carried the labels into the parlor and looked for a safe place

for them. She saw the picture-album and put them in it. Then she

hurried back to the porch. Old Chris opened one end of the crate.

“It’s a plant,” Jim East whispered; “a Chinee plant.”

“It’s a dwarf orange-tree,” Old Chris announced. “See, it says so on

that there card.”

Abbie carried the little orange-tree into the parlor. Who could have

sent it to her? There was no one she knew, away off there in China!

“You be careful of that bamboo and the wrappings,” she warned Old

Chris. “I’ll make something decorative-like out of them.”

Abbie waited until Jim East drove away in his delivery cart. Then

she sat down at the table in the parlor and opened the album. She

found her name on one of the labels--ABBIE SNOVER, ALMONT, MICHIGAN,

U. S. A. It seemed queer to her that her name had come all the

way from China. On the card that said that the plant was a dwarf

orange-tree she found the name--Thomas J. Thorington. Thomas? Tom?

Tom Thorington! Why, the last she had heard of Tom had been fifteen

years back. He had gone out West. She had received a picture of him

in a uniform, with a gun on his shoulder. She dimly recollected that

he had been a guard at some penitentiary. How long ago it seemed!

He must have become a missionary or something, to be away off in

China. And he had remembered her! She sat for a long time looking at

the labels. She wondered if the queer Chinese letters spelled ABBIE

SNOVER, ALMONT, MICHIGAN. She opened the album again and hunted until

she found the picture of Tom Thorington in his guard’s uniform. Then

she placed the labels next to the picture, closed the album, and

carefully fastened the adjustable clasp.

Under Abbie’s constant attention, the little orange-tree thrived. A

tiny green orange appeared. Day by day she watched it grow, looking

forward to the time when it would become large and yellow. The days

grew shorter and colder, but she did not mind; every week the orange

grew larger. After the first snow, she moved the tree into the

down-stairs bedroom. She placed it on a little stand in the South

window. The inside blinds, which she had always kept as her mother

liked them best--the lower blinds closed, the top blinds opened a

little to let in the morning light--she now threw wide open so that

the tree would get all of the sun. And she kept a fire in the small

sheet-iron stove, for fear that the old, drafty wood furnace might

not send up a steady enough heat through the register. When the

nights became severe, she crept down the narrow, winding stairs, and

through the cold, bare halls, to put an extra chunk of hardwood into

the stove. Every morning she swept and dusted the room; the ashes and

wood dirt around the stove gave her something extra to do near the

orange-tree. She removed the red and white coverlet from the bed,

and put in its place the fancy patch-quilt with the green birds and

yellow flowers, to make the room look brighter.

“Abbie Snover loves that orange-tree more’n anything in the world,”

Old Chris cautioned the children when they came after cookies, “an’

don’t you dare touch it, even with your little finger.”

The growing orange was as wonderful to the children as it was to

Abbie. Instead of taking the cookies and hurrying home, they stood

in front of the tree, their eyes round and big. And one day, when

Abbie went to the clothes-press to get the cookie-pail, Bruce Sanders

snipped the orange from the tree.

The children were unnaturally still when Abbie came out of the

clothes-press. They did not rush forward to get the cookies. Abbie

looked quickly at the tree; the pail of cookies dropped from her

hands. She grabbed the two children nearest and shook them until

their heads bumped together. Then she drove them all in front of her

to the door and down the path to the gate, which she slammed shut

behind them.

Once outside the gate the children ran, yelling: “Ab-bie Sno-ver,

na--aa--ah! Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah!”

Abbie, her hands trembling, her eyes hot, went back into the house.

That was what came of letting them take fruit from the trees and

vines in the yard; of giving them cookies every time they rang her

door-bell. Well, there would be no more cookies, and Old Chris should

be told never to let them come into the yard again.

That evening, when the metallic hiccough of the well pump on the

kitchen porch told her that Old Chris was drawing up fresh water

for the night, Abbie went out into the kitchen to make sure that he

placed one end of the prop under the knob of the kitchen door and the

other end against the leg of the kitchen table.

“It’ll freeze afore mornin’,” said Old Chris.

“Yes,” Abbie answered.

But she did not get up in the night to put an extra chunk of wood in

the stove of the down-stairs bedroom.

“Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah! Ab-bie Sno-ver, na--aa--ah!”

Old Chris stopped shoveling snow to shake his fist at the yelling

children.

“Your Mas’ll fix you, if you don’t stop that screechin’!”

And they answered: “Ab-bie Sno-ver, an’ old Chris! Ab-bie Sno-ver,

an’ old Chris!”

Every day they yelled the two names as they passed the big house.

They yelled them on their way to and from school, and on their way to

Giddings’s Hill to slide. The older boys took it up, and yelled it

when they saw Abbie and Old Chris on Main Street Saturday mornings.

And finally they rimed it into a couplet,

“Ab-bie Sno-ver, an’ Old Chris--

We saw Chris an’ Ab-bie kiss!”

It was too much. Abbie went to Hugh Perry’s mother.

Mrs. Perry defended her young son. “He couldn’t have done it,” she

told Abbie. “He ain’t that kind of a boy, and you can just tell that

Old Chris I said so. I guess it must be true, the way you’re fussin’

round!”

Mrs. Perry slammed the door in Abbie’s face. Then she whipped

her young son, and hated Abbie and Old Chris because they were

responsible for it.

“That Abbie Snover came to my house,” Mrs. Perry told Mrs. Rowles,

“an’ said my Hugh had been a-couplin’ her name with Old Chris’s in a

nasty way. An’ I told her----”

“The idea! the idea!” Mrs. Rowles interrupted.

“An’ I told her it must be so, an’ I guess it is,” Mrs. Perry

concluded.

Mrs. Rowles called upon Pastor Lucus’s wife.

“Abbie Snover an’ Old Chris was seen kissin’.”

“It’s scandalous,” Mrs. Lucas told the pastor. “The town shouldn’t

put up with it a minute longer. That’s what comes of Abbie Snover not

coming to church since her Ma died.”

On Saturday mornings when Abbie went down-town followed by Old

Chris, the women eyed her coldly, and the faces of the men took on

quizzical, humorous expressions. Abbie could not help but notice

it; she was disturbed. The time for “the Jersey girls” to call came

around. Every afternoon Abbie sat in the window and watched for them

to turn the corner at Chase’s Lane. She brought out the polished

apples which she kept in the clothes-press all ready for some one,

but “the Jersey girls” did not come.

“You haven’t heard of anybody being sick at the Jersey house, have

you, Chris?”

“Um? Nope!”

“Haven’t seen Josie or Em Jersey anywhere lately?”

“Seen ’em at the post-office night afore last.”

“H’mp!”

Abbie pushed the kettle to the front of the kitchen stove, poked up

the fire, and put in fresh sticks of wood. When the water boiled she

poured it into a blue-lacquered pail with yellow bands around the

rim, carried it up the steep stairs, and got out fresh stockings.

An hour later Old Chris saw her climbing up Tillson Street. He

scratched his head and frowned.

Abbie turned the corner at Chase’s Lane. The snow, driven by the

wind, blinded her. She almost bumped into Viny Freeman.

“My, Viny! What you doing out on such a day?”

“Seems she didn’t see me,” Abbie muttered. “What can she be doing

away down here on such a day? Must be something special to bring her

out of her lonely old house with her lame side. My! I almost bumped

that hand she’s always holding up her pain with. My!”

Abbie turned into the Jersey gate and climbed the icy steps, hanging

onto the railing with both hands. She saw Em Jersey rise from her

chair in the parlor and go into the back sitting-room. Abbie pulled

the bell-knob and waited. No one answered. She pulled it again. No

answer. She rapped on the door with her knuckles. Big Mary, the

Jersey hired girl, opened the door part way.

“They ain’t to home.”

“Ain’t to home?” exclaimed Abbie. “My land! Didn’t I just see Em

Jersey through the parlor window?”

“No’m, you never did. They ain’t to home.”

“Well, I never! And their Ma and mine was cousins! They ain’t sick or

nothing? Well!”

The snow melted; the streets ran with water and then froze. Old Chris

no longer came into the parlor in the evening to sit, his hands

clasped over his thin stomach, his bald head bent until his chin

rested upon the starched neckband of his shirt.

They ate in silence the meals which Abbie prepared: Old Chris at one

end of the long table, and Abbie at the other end.

In silence they went about their accustomed tasks.

Abbie, tired with a new weariness, sat in her chair beside the

marble-topped table. The village was talking about her; she knew it;

she felt it all around her. Well, let them talk!

But one day Almont sent a committee to her. It was composed of one

man and three women. Abbie saw them when they turned in at her

gate--Pastor Lucus, Lorina Inman, Antha Ewell, and Aunt Alphie

Newberry.

Abbie walked to the center of the parlor and stood there, her hands

clenched, her face set. The door-bell rang; for a moment her body

swayed. Then she went into the bay window and drew the blinds aside.

Antha Ewell saw her and jerked Pastor Lucus’s arm. Pastor Lucus

turned and caught sight of Abbie; he thought that she had not heard

the bell, so he tapped the door panel with his fingers and nodded his

head at her invitingly, as if to say:

“See, we’re waiting for you to let us in.” Abbie’s expression did not

change. Pastor Lucus tapped at the door again, this time hesitantly,

and still she looked at them with unseeing eyes. He tapped a third

time, then turned and looked at the three women. Aunt Alphie Newberry

tugged at his arm, and the committee of four turned about without

looking at Abbie, and walked down the steps.

A few minutes later Abbie heard the door between the parlor and

dining-room open. Old Chris came in. For a moment or two neither

spoke. Old Chris fingered his cap.

“Abbie, I lived here forty-two years. I was here when you was born.

I carried you around in my arms a little bit of thing an’ made you

laugh.”

Abbie did not turn away from the window.

“I know what they came for,” Old Chris continued. “Your Ma--your Ma,

she’d never thought I’d have to go away from here.”

Abbie could not answer him.

“I don’t know who’ll keep the furnace a-goin’ when I’m gone, nor fill

the up-stairs woodroom.”

Still no answer.

“I’m old now--I’ll go to Owen Frazer’s farm--down to Miles Corners.

He’ll have some work I can do.”

Old Chris stroked his baggy cheeks with trembling hands. Abbie still

looked out of the window.

“I’m a-goin’ down to the post-office now,” said Old Chris, as he

turned and went to the door. “Be there anything you want?”

Abbie shook her head; she could not find words. As Old Chris went

down the hall she heard him mumble, “I don’t know what she’ll do when

I’m gone.”

That night Abbie sat in the parlor window longer than usual. It was

a white night; wet snow had been falling heavily all day. Some time

between eight and nine o’clock she arose from her chair and went

into the long, narrow dining-room. The pat-pat of her slippered feet

aroused Old Chris from his nodding over the _Farm Herald_. Finding

that the hot air was not coming up strong through the register over

which he sat, the old man slowly pushed his wool-socked feet into

felt-lined overshoes and tramped down into the cellar, picking up the

kitchen lamp as he went. Abbie followed as far as the kitchen. The

pungent dry-wood smell that came up the stairs when Old Chris swung

open the door of the wood cellar made her sniff. She heard the sounds

as he loaded the wheelbarrow with the sticks of quartered hardwood;

the noise of the wheel bumping over the loose boards as he pushed his

load into the furnace-room. She went back into the parlor and stood

over the register. Hollow sounds came up through the pipe as Old

Chris leveled the ashes in the fire-box and threw in the fresh sticks.

When Old Chris came up from the cellar and went out onto the porch to

draw up fresh water for the night, Abbie went back into the kitchen.

“It’s snowin’ hard out,” said Old Chris.

“Yes,” Abbie answered.

She led the way back into the dining room. Old Chris placed the

kitchen lamp on the stand under the fruit picture and waited. For

a few moments they stood in the blast of hot air rising from the

register. Then Abbie took up the larger of the two lamps. Through the

bare, high-ceilinged rooms she went, opening and closing the heavy

doors; on through the cold, empty hall, up the stairs, into the South

bedroom. While she was closing the blinds she heard Old Chris stumble

up the back stairs and into the chamber he had occupied ever since

she could remember.

The night after Old Chris had gone, Abbie took the brass dinner-bell

from the pantry shelf and set it on the chair beside her bed. Over

the back of the chair she placed her heavy, rabbit-lined coat; it

would be handy if any one disturbed her. Once or twice when she

heard sounds, she put out her hand and touched the bell; but the

sounds did not recur. The next night she tried sleeping in the

down-stairs bedroom. The blue-and-gray carpet, the blue fixings on

the bureau and commode, the blue bands around the wash-bowl and

pitcher--all faded and old-looking--reminded her of her mother and

father, and would not let her sleep. On the wall in front of her was

a picture in a black frame of a rowboat filled with people. It was

called “From Shore to Shore.” Trying not to see it, her eyes were

caught by a black and white print in a gilt frame, called “The First

Steps.” How she had loved the picture when she was a little girl;

her mother had explained it to her many times--the bird teaching its

little ones to fly; the big, shaggy dog encouraging its waddling

puppies; the mother coaxing her baby to walk alone.

At midnight Abbie got out of bed, picked up the dinner-bell by the

clapper, and went back up-stairs to the South bedroom.

The tall, bare walls of the big house, the high ceilings with their

centerpieces of plaster fruits and flowers, the cold whiteness,

closed her in. Having no one to talk to, she talked to herself: “It’s

snowin’ hard out--why! that was what Old Chris said the night before

he went away.” She began to be troubled by a queer, detached feeling;

she knew that she had mislaid something, but just what she could not

remember. Forebodings came to her, distressing, disquieting. There

would never be any one for her to speak to--never! The big house grew

terrible; the rooms echoed her steps. She would have given everything

for a little house of two or three small low-ceilinged rooms close to

the side-walk on a street where people passed up and down.

A night came when Abbie forgot that Old Chris had gone away. She had

been sitting in her chair beside the marble-topped table, staring

out into the night. All day the wind had blown; snow had piled high

around the porch. Her thoughts had got back to her childhood. Somehow

they had centered around the old grandfather who, years before, had

sat in the same window. She saw him in his chair; heard his raspy

old voice, “I married Jane sixty-eight an’ a half years ago, an’ a

half year in a man’s life is something, I’ll bet you. An’ I buried

her thirty years ago, an’ that’s a long time, too. We never tore each

other’s shirts. Jane wanted to live a quiet life. She wanted one

child, an’ she was tenacious ’bout that. She never wanted any more,

an’ she had three, an’ one of ’em was your Ma. She never wanted to be

seen out with a baby in her arms, Jane didn’t. I made her get bundled

up once or twice, an’ I hitched up the horse an’ took her ridin’ in

my phaeton that cost two hundred dollars.--You’ll be in your dotage

some day, Abbie. I’ve been in my dotage for years now.--Oh, I altered

my life to fit Jane’s. I expected I had a wife to go out and see the

neighbors with. By gosh! we never went across the street--I’ll take

on goodness some day, Abbie. By goll! that’s all I’m good for to

take on now.--Oh, it beat all what a boy I was. I and Mother broke

our first team of oxen. When you get children, Abbie, let them raise

themselves up. They’ll do better at it than a poor father or mother

can. I had the finest horses and the best phaeton for miles around,

but you never saw a girl a-ridin’ by the side of me.--Some men can’t

work alone, Abbie. They got to have the women around or they quit.

Don’t you get that kind of a man, Abbie.--Oh, she was renowned was

my old mare, Kit. You never got to the end of her. She lived to be

more’n thirty year, an’ she raised fourteen colts. She was a darned

good little thing she was. I got her for a big black mare that

weighed fourteen hundred pound, an’ I made ’em give me ten dollars,

too, an’ I got her colt with her----”

Abbie suddenly realized that she was shivering; that her feet were

cold; that it was long after nine o’clock. Old Chris must have fallen

asleep in his chair. She went to the dining-room door and opened it;

the dining-room was dark. Why?--why, of course! Old Chris had been

gone for more than three weeks. She took hold of the door to steady

herself; her hands shook. How could she have forgotten? Was she going

crazy? Would the loneliness come to that?

Abbie went to bed. All night she lay awake, thinking. The thoughts

came of themselves. What the town had to say didn’t matter after all;

the town had paid her no attention for years; it was paying her no

attention now. Why, then, should she live without any one to speak

to? “I’ll go and get Old Chris, that’s what I’ll do. I won’t live

here alone any longer.” And with this decision she went to sleep.

In the morning when Abbie opened the kitchen door and stepped out

onto the porch, frost lay thick upon the well pump.

She drew her shawl close around her and took hold of the pump-handle

with her mittened hands. When she had filled the pail she went back

into the kitchen. The sound of the wind made her shiver. To walk all

the way to Mile Corners on such a day required green tea, so Abbie

drank three cupfuls. Then, as on the day when she went out to call

upon “the Jersey girls,” she carried hot water up-stairs and got out

fresh stockings.

About nine o’clock three women of Pastor Lucus’s church, standing

on the front steps of Aunt Alphie Newberry’s house, saw Abbie

struggling through a drift.

“Why, there’s Abbie Snover,” said Jennie Chipman.

“She’s turnin’ down the road to Mile Corners,” added Judie Wing.

Aunt Alphie Newberry opened the door to the three women:

“Whatever’s the matter to be bringin’ you callin’ so early?”

“Ain’t you heard yet?”

“We come to tell you.”

“My! my! my! What can have happened?” Aunt Alphie exclaimed.

“Old Chris died last night----”

“Just after bein’ middlin’ sick for a day an’----”

“An’ they say,” Judie Wing interrupted, “that it was ’cause Abbie

Snover turned him out.”

Abbie reached the end of the town sidewalk. Lifting her skirts high,

she waded through the deep snow to the rough-rutted track left by the

farmer’s sleighs. Every little while she had to step off the road

into the deep snow to let a bob-sled loaded high with hay or straw

pass on its way into town. Some of the farmers recognized her; they

spoke to her with kindly voices, but she made no answer. Walking was

hard; Owen Frazer’s farm was over the hill; there was a steep climb

ahead of her. And besides, Owen Frazer’s house was no place for Old

Chris. No one knew anything about Owen Frazer and that woman of his;

they hadn’t been born in Almont. How could she have let Old Chris go

down there, anyway?

“Whoa up! Hey! Better climb in, Abbie, an’ ride with me. This ain’t

no day for walkin’. Get up here on the seat. I’ll come down an’ help

you.”

Abbie looked up at Undertaker Hopkins. In the box of his funeral

wagon was a black coffin with a sprinkling of snow on its top. Abbie

shook her head, but did not speak.

“Guess I shouldn’t have asked you,” Undertaker Hopkins apologized.

“Sorry! Get along as fast as you can, Abbie. It’s gettin’ mighty,

all-fired cold. It’ll be a little sheltered when you get over the

hill.”

Undertaker Hopkins drove on. Abbie tried to keep her feet in the

fresh track made by the runners. She reached the top of the hill.

Owen Frazer’s red barn stood up above the snow. Undertaker Hopkins

and his funeral wagon had disappeared.

“He must have turned down the Mill Road,” Abbie muttered.

She reached the gate in front of the low, one-story farmhouse. A

shepherd dog barked as she went up the path. She rapped at the front

door. A woman appeared at the window and pointed to the side of the

house. Abbie’s face expressed surprise and resentment. She backed

down the steps and made her way to the back door. The woman, Owen

Frazer’s wife, let her into the kitchen.

“Owen! Here be Abbie Snover!”

Owen Frazer came in from the front of the house.

“Good day! Didn’t expect you here. Pretty cold out, ain’t it? Have a

chair.”

Abbie did not realize how numb the cold had made her body until she

tried to sit down.

“Maggie, give her a cup of that hot tea,” Owen Frazer continued.

“She’s been almost froze, an’ I guess she’ll have a cup of tea. Hey!

Miss Snover?”

“I want to talk to Old Chris.”

“Talk to Old Chris! Talk to Old Chris, you want to?”

Owen Frazer looked at his wife. Abbie Snover didn’t know, yet she

had walked all the way to Mile Corners in the cold. He couldn’t

understand it.

“What’d you come for, anyhow, Abbie Snover?”

“Now, Owen, you wait!” Owen Frazer’s wife turned to Abbie:

“Got lonesome, did you, all by yourself in that big barn of a house?”

“I want to talk to Old Chris,” Abbie repeated.

“Was you so fond of him, then?”

Abbie made no answer. Owen Frazer went over to the sink and looked

out of the window at the bed-tick smoldering on the rubbish heap.

Owen Frazer’s wife pushed open the door of the sitting-room, then

stood back and turned to Abbie:

“You may be fine old family, Abbie Snover, but we’re better. You

turned Old Chris out, an’ now you want to talk to him. All right,

talk to him if you want to. He’s in the parlor. Go on in now. Talk to

him if you want to--go on in!”

The animosity in Mrs. Frazer’s voice shook Abbie; she was disturbed;

doubt came to her for the first time. As she went through the

sitting-room, fear slowed her steps. Perhaps they had turned Old

Chris away from her and she would have to go back alone, to live

alone, for all the remaining years of her life, in that big house.

Francis Buzzell. Reprinted from _Pictorial

Review_ by the kind permission of the author.

TWO FRIENDS[2]

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

Paris was besieged, starving, exhausted. The sparrows were growing

scarce on the roofs and the rats in the sewers. People ate whatever

they could get.

As he walked listlessly along the outer boulevard on a clear January

morning, his hands in the pockets of his uniform, and his stomach

empty, Monsieur Morissot, a watchmaker by trade and a militiaman

by necessity, stopped short in front of a colleague in whom he

recognized a friend. It was Monsieur Sauvage, an acquaintance made at

the waterside.

Before the war, Morissot used to start every Sunday at daybreak, a

bamboo fishing rod in his hand, a tin box on his back. He took the

Argenteuil train, stopped at Colombes, then walked to Marante Island.

No sooner had he reached this ideal spot than he began to fish, and

he went on fishing till nightfall.

Every Sunday, he found there a plump and jolly little man, Monsieur

Sauvage, a haberdasher in Notre-Dame de Lorette Street, also a born

fisherman. They would often spend hours, side by side, their rods

in their hands, their feet hanging over the running water; and a

friendship had sprung up between them.

Sometimes they remained silent. Sometimes, they talked. But they

understood each other perfectly, without saying a word, having

identical tastes and feelings.

On spring mornings, about ten o’clock, when the sun would draw from

the still river a thin mist which ran along the water and poured upon

the backs of the obstinate fishermen the welcome warmth of the new

season, Morissot would say to his neighbor: “Isn’t it mild though?”

and Monsieur Sauvage would reply: “There isn’t anything like it!” And

they needed nothing more for perfect understanding and mutual esteem.

In the autumn, towards nightfall, when the sky, blood red from the

setting sun, reflected the shapes of the scarlet clouds in the

water, tinted the whole river, set the horizon ablaze, made even

the two friends as red as the flames, and turned to gold the brown

trees, shivering with a wintry chill, Monsieur Sauvage would smile

at Morissot, and say: “How wonderful!” And Morissot, with deep

admiration, would reply, without lifting his eyes from his cork:

“It’s better than the city, isn’t it?”

* * * * *

As soon as they recognized each other, they shook hands heartily,

much excited at meeting again under such altered circumstances.

Monsieur Sauvage sighed and murmured: “What strange happenings!”

Morissot, much depressed, groaned: “And such weather! This is the

first fine day this year.”

In fact, the sky was quite blue and full of light.

They walked on, side by side, thoughtful and gloomy. Morissot

continued: “And our fishing, eh? What a pleasant memory!”

Monsieur Sauvage asked: “When shall we ever do it again?”

They went into a little cafe and drank an absinthe, then resumed

their walk on the boulevard.

Morissot stopped suddenly: “Let’s have another ‘verte’, eh?” Monsieur

Sauvage agreed: “Just as you say.” And they went into another

restaurant.

When they came out they were quite dazed, and ill at ease as people

are who take alcohol on an empty stomach. It was very mild. A soft

breeze brushed their faces.

Monsieur Sauvage, whom the balmy air intoxicated still more, stopped:

“Let’s go!”

“Where?”

“Fishing, of course.”

“But where?”

“To our island. The French outposts are near Colombes. I know

Colonel Dumoulin; he will let us through.”

Morissot was thrilled: “All right, that’s settled.” And they

separated to get their fishing tackle.

An hour later, they were walking along the highway. When they reached

the villa where the colonel was quartered, he smiled at their request

and granted it. They departed, with a pass.

They were soon beyond the outposts, then they walked through deserted

Colombes, and reached the small vineyards which slope toward the

Seine. It was about eleven o’clock.

On the opposite bank, Argenteuil seemed abandoned. The heights of

Orgemont and Sannois towered above the whole countryside. The long

plain which extends as far as Nanterre was empty, quite empty, with

its leafless cherry trees and grayish soil.

Monsieur Sauvage, pointing to the hills, murmured: “The Prussians are

up there!” And a sudden dismay chilled the two friends at sight of

this lonely place.

The Prussians! They had never seen any, but they had felt their

presence for months, around Paris, pillaging, massacring, starving

France, invisible and all powerful. And a sort of superstitious

terror added to their hatred of these unknown and victorious enemies.

Morissot mumbled: “Say!... Suppose we should meet some of them?”

Monsieur Sauvage replied, with the irrepressible drollery of the

Parisian:

“We might offer them a fish fry.”

Still they hesitated to venture out into the open country, awed by

the all-pervading silence.

Finally, Monsieur Sauvage made up his mind: “Come, let’s go on,

but cautiously.” They crept down through a vineyard, bending low,

crawling, keeping under cover of some bushes, their eyes watchful,

their ears alert.

There remained a strip of bare ground between them and the river.

They ran, and as soon as they reached the bank, they crouched among

the dry reeds.

Morissot put his ear to the ground to listen for footsteps. He heard

nothing. They were alone, all alone.

They took heart and began to fish.

In front of them, Marante Island, also deserted, hid them from the

other bank. The little restaurant was closed and looked as if it had

been abandoned for years.

Monsieur Sauvage took the first gudgeon. Morissot caught the next

one, and every little while they would lift their rods with a small

silvery object squirming at the end of the line; it was a miraculous

catch.

They placed the fish carefully in a fine-meshed bag which lay at

their feet in the water, and they were filled with a peculiar joy

which comes on finding again some long lost pleasure.

The warm sun shone on their shoulders; they were no longer listening

or thinking, they ignored the rest of the world, they were fishing.

Suddenly a dull sound which seemed to come from underground shook the

earth. The cannon was thundering again.

Morissot turned, and over the edge of the bank, he saw yonder, on the

left, the great profile of Mont-Valerien, with a white plume on its

brow, the haze of gunpowder which it had just belched forth.

And instantly a second puff of smoke arose from the crest of the

fortress; and a few minutes later another shot roared.

Then more followed, and from time to time there gushed from the

mountain a death laden breath, milky vapors which rose slowly and

formed a cloud above it under the calm sky.

Monsieur Sauvage shrugged his shoulders: “They are at it again,” said

he.

Morissot, who was intently watching the bobbing of his float, was

suddenly seized with a peaceful man’s fury against those madmen who

were fighting thus, and he growled: “How stupid to kill one another

like that.”

Monsieur Sauvage replied: “They are worse than animals!”

And Morissot who had just caught a bleak, exclaimed: “And to think it

will always be the same as long as there are governments....”

Monsieur Sauvage stopped him: “The Republic would not have declared

war....”

Morissot interrupted him: “With a king there is war abroad; with a

republic, there is war at home.”

And tranquilly, they began to discuss, solving deep political

problems with the sane reason of gentle and limited minds, agreeing

on this one point: one would never be free. And Mont-Valerien

thundered ceaselessly, its shells tearing down French homes, pounding

out lives, crushing human beings, putting an end to many dreams, many

expected joys, much longed for happiness, creating in the hearts of

wives, in the hearts of daughters, in the hearts of mothers, over

there, and in other countries, a grief that would never end.

“That’s life,” declared Monsieur Sauvage.

“It’s death, you mean,” retorted Morissot, laughing.

They started with fear, suddenly aware that someone had just walked

behind them; looking back, they saw, standing quite close to them

four men, four big fellows, armed and bearded, dressed like servants

in livery and wearing flat caps, who were pointing their guns at

them.

The fishing rods dropped from their hands and drifted down the river.

In a few seconds they were seized, carried off, thrown into a boat

and brought to the island.

And behind the house which they had thought deserted, they saw a

score of German soldiers.

A kind of hairy giant, who sat, astride a chair, smoking a long

porcelain pipe, asked them in excellent French: “Well, gentlemen, how

was the fishing?”

Then a soldier laid at the feet of the officer the net full of fish

which he had been thoughtful enough to bring along. The Prussian

smiled: “Ha! ha! I see you did pretty well. But that is not the

point. Listen carefully and don’t get excited.

“In my opinion you are spies sent to watch me. I’ve got you and you

are to be shot. You were pretending to fish in order to hide your

plans more thoroughly. You have fallen into my hands; so much the

worse for you; c’est le guerre.”

“But as you came through the outposts you must certainly have the

password for your return. Give me this password and I shall pardon

you.”

The two friends, pallid, side by side, their hands shaking with a

slight nervous twitching, remained silent.

The officer continued: “No one will ever know. You shall return in

peace. The secret will disappear with you. If you refuse, it means

death, immediate death. Choose.”

They stood motionless, not saying a word.

The Prussian, as cool as ever, pointing to the river, went on:

“Remember that in five minutes you will be at the bottom of this

stream. In five minutes! You must have some relatives?”

Mont-Valerien was still thundering.

The two fishermen stood silent.

The German gave orders in his own tongue. Then he moved his chair

so as not to be too close to the prisoners; and twelve men came and

stood twenty feet away, their guns at rest.

The officer continued: “I give you one minute, not a second more.”

Then he got up suddenly, came to the two men, took Morissot by the

arm, drew him away and said to him in a low voice: “Hurry, give me

the password. Your companion won’t know. I’ll pretend I am relenting.”

Morissot did not reply.

Then the Prussian took aside Monsieur Sauvage and asked him the same

question.

Monsieur Sauvage said nothing.

They were again side by side.

And the officer began to give orders. The soldiers leveled their guns.

Then Morissot happened to glance at the net full of gudgeons, lying

in the grass, a few feet.

A sunbeam was shining on the mass of quivering fish. A feeling of

faintness came over him. In spite of his efforts his eyes filled with

tears.

He stammered: “Good-bye, Monsieur Sauvage.”

Monsieur Sauvage replied: “Good-bye, Monsieur Morissot.”

They shook hands, trembling from head to foot, uncontrollably.

The officer shouted: “Fire!”

The twelve shots sounded like one.

Monsieur Sauvage fell flat on his nose. Morissot, taller, tottered,

pivoted, and dropped sidewise across the body of his companion, his

face turned to the sky, while streams of blood gushed over the front

of his uniform.

The German gave more orders.

His men scattered, then returned with ropes and some stones which

they fastened to the feet of the bodies; then they carried them to

the bank.

Mont-Valerien did not stop roaring; it was now capped with a mountain

of smoke.

Two soldiers took Morissot by the head and the feet; two others

seized Monsieur Sauvage in the same way. The bodies, being violently

swung for an instant, described a curve, then plunged upright into

the river, the stones pulling the feet down.

The water splashed, bubbled, shivered, then grew still, while tiny

wavelets spread slowly to the shore.

A little blood floated.

The officer, still serene, said calmly: “Let the fish have their turn

now.”

Then he started towards the house.

And suddenly he saw the fishnet in the grass. He picked it up,

examined it, and called: “Wilhelm!”

A white-aproned soldier ran to him. And the Prussian, throwing him

the murdered men’s catch, said: “Fry these little things right away,

while they are still alive. They will be delicious.”

And he resumed his pipe.

THE SCULPTOR’S FUNERAL

WILLA CATHER

A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little

Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was

already twenty minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over

everything; in the pale starlight the line of bluffs across the wide,

white meadows south of the town made soft, smoke-coloured curves

against the clear sky. The men on the siding stood first on one foot

and then on the other, their hands thrust deep into their trousers

pockets, their overcoats open, their shoulders screwed up with the

cold; and they glanced from time to time toward the southeast, where

the railroad track wound along the river shore. They conversed in low

tones and moved about restlessly, seeming uncertain as to what was

expected of them. There was but one of the company who looked as if

he knew exactly why he was there, and he kept conspicuously apart;

walking to the far end of the platform, returning to the station

door, then pacing up the track again, his chin sunk in the high

collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping forward, his

gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a tall, spare,

grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled out from

the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his neck

forward until his back made the angle of a jack-knife three-quarters

open.

“I reckon she’s a-goin’ to be pretty late agin tonight, Jim,” he

remarked in a squeaky falsetto. “S’pose it’s the snow?”

“I don’t know,” responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,

speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew

fiercely and thickly in all directions.

The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other

side of his mouth. “It ain’t likely that anybody from the East will

come with the corpse, I s’pose,” he went on reflectively.

“I don’t know,” responded the other, more curtly than before.

“It’s too bad he didn’t belong to some lodge or other. I like an

order funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some

repytation,” the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession

in his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest

pocket. He always carried the flag at the G. A. R. funerals in the

town.

The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the

siding. The spare man rejoined the uneasy group. “Jim’s ez full ez a

tick, ez ushel,” he commented commiseratingly.

Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of

feet on the platform. A number of lanky boys, of all ages, appeared

as suddenly and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some

came from the waiting-room, where they had been warming themselves by

the red stove, or half asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled

themselves from baggage trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two

clambered down from the driver’s seat of a hearse that stood backed

up against the siding. They straightened their stooping shoulders

and lifted their heads, and a flash of momentary animation kindled

their dull eyes at that cold, vibrant scream, the world-wide call for

men. It stirred them like the note of a trumpet; just as it had often

stirred the man who was coming home tonight, in his boyhood.

The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward

marsh lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of

shivering poplars that sentinelled the meadows, the escaping steam

hanging in grey masses against the pale sky and blotting out the

Milky Way. In a moment the red glare from the headlight streamed up

the snow-covered track before the siding and glittered on the wet,

black rails. The burly man with the dishevelled red beard walked

swiftly up the platform toward the approaching train, uncovering his

head as he went. The group of men behind him hesitated, glanced

questioningly at one another, and awkwardly followed his example. The

train stopped, and the crowd shuffled up to the express car just as

the door was thrown open, the man in the G. A. R. suit thrusting his

head forward with curiosity. The express messenger appeared in the

doorway, accompanied by a young man in a long ulster and travelling

cap.

“Are Mr. Merrick’s friends here?” inquired the young man.

The group on the platform swayed uneasily. Philip Phelps, the banker,

responded with dignity: “We have come to take charge of the body. Mr.

Merrick’s father is very feeble and can’t be about.”

“Send the agent out here,” growled the express messenger, “and tell

the operator to lend a hand.”

The coffin was got out of its rough-box and down on the snowy

platform. The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and

then formed a close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the

palm leaf which lay across the black cover. No one said anything. The

baggage man stood by his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The

engine panted heavily, and the fireman dodged in and out among the

wheels with his yellow torch and long oil-can, snapping the spindle

boxes. The young Bostonian, one of the dead sculptor’s pupils who had

come with the body, looked about him helplessly. He turned to the

banker, the only one of that black uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who

seemed enough of an individual to be addressed.

“None of Mr. Merrick’s brothers are here?” he asked uncertainly.

The man with the red beard for the first time stepped up and joined

the others. “No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered.

The body will be taken directly to the house.” He stooped and took

hold of one of the handles of the coffin.

“Take the long hill road up, Thompson, it will be easier on the

horses,” called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of

the hearse and prepared to mount to the driver’s seat.

Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: “We

didn’t know whether there would be any one with him or not,” he

explained. “It’s a long walk, so you’d better go up in the hack.” He

pointed to a single battered conveyance, but the young man replied

stiffly: “Thank you, but I think I will go up with the hearse. If you

don’t object,” turning to the undertaker, “I’ll ride with you.”

They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight up

the long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village

were shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on

every side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide

as the soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.

When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,

weather-beaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group

that had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate.

The front yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks,

extending from the sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety

foot-bridge. The gate hung on one hinge, and was opened wide with

difficulty. Steavens, the young stranger, noticed that something

black was tied to the knob of the front door.

The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the

hearse, was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was

wrenched open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into

the snow and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: “My boy, my

boy! And this is how you’ve come home to me!”

As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of

unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and

angular, dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and

caught Mrs. Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: “Come, come,

mother; you mustn’t go on like this!” Her tone changed to one of

obsequious solemnity as she turned to the banker: “The parlour is

ready, Mr. Phelps.”

The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the

undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into

a large, unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and

furniture polish, and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented

with jingling glass prisms and before a “Rogers group” of John Alden

and Priscilla, wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about

him with the sickening conviction that there had been a mistake,

and that he had somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked

at the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the

hand-painted china plaques and panels and vases, for some mark of

identification,--for something that might once conceivably have

belonged to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend

in the crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls, hanging

above the piano, that he felt willing to let any of these people

approach the coffin.

“Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy’s face,” wailed

the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked

fearfully, almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under

its masses of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his

eyes, and then, almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind

of power about her face--a kind of brutal handsomeness, even; but it

was scarred and furrowed by violence, and so coloured and coarsened

by fiercer passions that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle

finger there. The long nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and

there were deep lines on either side of it; her heavy, black brows

almost met across her forehead, her teeth were large and square, and

set far apart--teeth that could tear. She filled the room; the men

were obliterated, seemed tossed about like twigs in an angry water,

and even Steavens felt himself being drawn into the whirlpool.

The daughter--the tall, raw-boned woman in crepe, with a mourning

comb in her hair which curiously lengthened her long face--sat

stiffly upon the sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large

knuckles, folded in her lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly

awaiting the opening of the coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto

woman, evidently a servant in the house, with a timid bearing and an

emaciated face pitifully sad and gentle. She was weeping silently,

the corner of her calico apron lifted to her eyes, occasionally

suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens walked over and stood

beside her.

Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and

frail, odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept grey hair and a

dingy beard, tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly.

He went slowly up to the coffin and stood rolling a blue cotton

handkerchief between his hands, seemingly so pained and embarrassed

by his wife’s orgy of grief that he had no consciousness of anything

else.

“There, there, Annie, dear, don’t take on so,” he quavered timidly,

putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She

turned and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he tottered

a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but continued

to look at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression, as a

spaniel looks at the whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and

burned with miserable shame. When his wife rushed from the room, her

daughter strode after her with set lips. The servant stole up to

the coffin, bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the

kitchen, leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves.

The old man stood looking down at his dead son’s face. The sculptor’s

splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid stillness than in

life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide forehead; the face

seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that repose we expect

to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were so drawn that there

were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the chin was thrust

forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life had been so

sharp and bitter that death could not at once relax the tension and

smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he were still

guarding something precious, which might even yet be wrested from him.

The old man’s lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to

the lawyer with timid deference: “Phelps and the rest are comin’ back

to set up with Harve, ain’t they?” he asked. “Thank ’ee, Jim, thank

’ee.” He brushed the hair back gently from his son’s forehead. “He

was a good boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child

and the kindest of ’em all--only we didn’t none of us ever onderstand

him.” The tears trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the

sculptor’s coat.

“Martin, Martin! Oh, Martin! come here,” his wife wailed from the

top of the stairs. The old man started timorously: “Yes, Annie, I’m

coming.” He turned away, hesitated, stood for a moment in miserable

indecision; then reached back and patted the dead man’s hair softly,

and stumbled from the room.

“Poor old man, I didn’t think he had any tears left. Seems as if

his eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very

deep,” remarked the lawyer.

Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had

been in the room, the young man had scarcely seen any one else; but

now, from the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird’s florid face

and blood-shot eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been

heartsick at not finding before--the feeling, the understanding, that

must exist in some one, even here.

The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by

dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that

of a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept

plucking at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens,

sitting by the window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still

its jangling pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with

his hands locked behind him, staring down into the master’s face.

He could not help wondering what link there had been between the

porcelain vessel and so sooty a lump of potter’s clay.

From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door

opened, the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid

for having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which

had been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything

in the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse,

unique and masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and

unrestrained as had been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a

shudder of disgust the lawyer went into the dining-room and closed

the door into the kitchen.

“Poor Roxy’s getting it now,” he remarked when he came back. “The

Merricks took her out of the poor-house years ago; and if her loyalty

would let her, I guess the poor old thing would tell tales that would

curdle your blood. She’s the mulatto woman who was standing in here a

while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there

never was anybody like her. She made Harvey’s life a hell for him

when he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could

see how he kept himself sweet.”

“He was wonderful,” said Steavens slowly, “wonderful; but until

tonight I have never known how wonderful.”

“That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from

such a dung heap as this,” the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture

which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which

they stood.

“I think I’ll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so

close I am beginning to feel rather faint,” murmured Steavens,

struggling with one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and

would not yield, so he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his

collar. The lawyer came over, loosened the sash with one blow of his

red fist and sent the window up a few inches. Steavens thanked him,

but the nausea which had been gradually climbing into his throat for

the last half hour left him with but one desire--a desperate feeling

that he must get away from this place with what was left of Harvey

Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enough now the quiet bitterness of

the smile that he had seen so often on his master’s lips!

Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a

singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old

woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a

full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a

single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to

call her attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed

by the tender and delicate modelling of the thin, tired face, had

asked him if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that

had burned up in the sculptor’s face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head

thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,

puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should

conceal a feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of

beard. Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor’s keen glance,

Jim Laird opened his eyes.

“Was he always a good deal of an oyster?” he asked abruptly. “He was

terribly shy as a boy.”

“Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so,” rejoined Steavens.

“Although he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the

impression of being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was

reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as

regarded his work. He was sure enough there. He distrusted men pretty

thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill of

them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best; but he seemed

afraid to investigate.”

“A burnt dog dreads the fire,” said the lawyer grimly, and closed his

eyes.

Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable

boyhood. All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the

man whose mind was to become an exhaustless gallery of beautiful

impressions--so sensitive that the mere shadow of a poplar leaf

flickering against a sunny wall would be etched and held there for

ever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic word in his finger tips,

it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed its holiest secret;

liberated it from enchantment and restored it to its pristine

loveliness. Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left a

beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal signature; a

scent, a sound, a colour that was his own.

Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master’s life;

neither love nor wine, as many had conjectured; but a blow which

had fallen earlier and cut deeper than anything else could have

done--a shame not his, and yet so unescapably his, to hide in his

heart from his very boyhood. And without--the frontier warfare; the

yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a desert of newness and ugliness

and sordidness, for all that is chastened and old, and noble with

traditions.

At eleven o’clock the tall, flat woman in black announced that

the watchers were arriving, and asked them to “step into the

dining-room.” As Steavens rose the lawyer said dryly: “You go

on--it’ll be a good experience for you. I’m not equal to that crowd

tonight; I’ve had twenty years of them.”

As Steavens closed the door after him he glanced back at the lawyer,

sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his

hand.

The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express

car shuffled into the dining-room. In the light of the kerosene

lamp they separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale,

feeble-looking man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took

his seat beside a small side table and placed his Bible upon it.

The Grand Army man sat down behind the stove and tilted his chair

back comfortably against the wall, fishing his quill toothpick from

his waistcoat pocket. The two bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off

in a corner behind the dinner-table, where they could finish their

discussion of the new usury law and its effect on chattel security

loans. The real estate agent, an old man with a smiling hypocritical

face, soon joined them. The coal and lumber dealer and the cattle

shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard coal-burner, their feet

on the nickel-work. Steavens took a book from his pocket and began

to read. The talk around him ranged through various topics of local

interest while the house was quieting down. When it was clear that

the members of the family were in bed, the Grand Army man hitched

his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on the

rounds of his chair.

“S’pose there’ll be a will, Phelps?” he queried in his weak falsetto.

The banker laughed disagreeably, and began trimming his nails with a

pearl-handled pocket-knife.

“There’ll scarcely be any need for one, will there?” he queried in

his turn.

The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his

knees still nearer his chin. “Why, the ole man says Harve’s done

right well lately,” he chirped.

The other banker spoke up. “I reckon he means by that Harve ain’t

asked him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on

with his education.”

“Seems like my mind don’t reach back to a time when Harve wasn’t

bein’ edycated,” tittered the Grand Army man.

There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief

and blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with

a snap. “It’s too bad the old man’s sons didn’t turn out better,”

he remarked with reflective authority. “They never hung together.

He spent money enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattlefarms, and he

might as well have poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at

home and helped nurse what little they had, and gone into stock on

the old man’s bottom farm, they might all have been well fixed. But

the old man had to trust everything to tenants and was cheated right

and left.”

“Harve never could have handled stock none,” interposed the

cattleman. “He hadn’t it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he

bought Sander’s mules for eight-year olds, when everybody in town

knew that Sander’s father-in-law give ’em to his wife for a wedding

present eighteen years before, an’ they was full-grown mules then?”

The company laughed discreetly, and the Grand Army man rubbed his

knees with a spasm of childish delight.

“Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore

was never fond of work,” began the coal and lumber dealer. “I mind the

last time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to

the barn helpin’ his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and

Cal Moots was patchin’ up the fence; Harve, he come out on the step

and sings out, in his lady-like voice: ‘Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please

come cord my trunk.’”

“That’s Harve for you,” approved the Grand Army man. “I kin hear him

howlin’ yet, when he was a big feller in long pants and his mother

used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin’ the cows git

foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin’ ’em home from pasture.

He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onct--a pure Jersey and the best

milker I had, an’ the old man had to put up for her. Harve, he was

watchin’ the sun set acrost the marshes when the anamile got away.”

“Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East

to school,” said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a

deliberate, judicial tone. “There was where he got his head full of

nonsense. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course in some

first-class Kansas City business college.”

The letters were swimming before Steaven’s eyes. Was it possible

that these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant

nothing to them? The very name of their town would have remained

for ever buried in the postal guide had it not been now and again

mentioned in the world in connection with Harvey Merrick’s. He

remembered what his master had said to him on the day of his death,

after the congestion of both lungs had shut off any probability of

recovery, and the sculptor had asked his pupil to send his body home.

“It’s not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and

doing and bettering,” he had said with a feeble smile, “but it rather

seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from, in the

end. The townspeople will come in for a look at me; and after they

have had their say, I shan’t have much to fear from the judgment of

God!”

The cattleman took up the comment. “Forty’s young for a Merrick to

cash in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it

along with whiskey.”

“His mother’s people were not long lived, and Harvey never had a

robust constitution,” said the minister mildly. He would have liked

to say more. He had been the boy’s Sunday-school teacher, and had

been fond of him; but he felt that he was not in a position to speak.

His own sons had turned out badly, and it was not a year since one

of them had made his last trip home in the express car, shot in a

gambling-house in the Black Hills.

“Nevertheless, there is no disputin’ that Harve frequently looked

upon the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an

oncommon fool of him,” moralized the cattleman.

Just then the door leading into the parlour rattled loudly and every

one started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came

out. The Grand Army man ducked his head when he saw the spark in his

blue, blood-shot eye. They were all afraid of Him; he was a drunkard,

but he could twist the law to suit his client’s needs as no other man

in all western Kansas could do, and there were many who tried. The

lawyer closed the door behind him, leaned back against it and folded

his arms, cocking his head a little to one side. When he assumed

this attitude in the court-room, ears were always pricked up, as it

usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.

“I’ve been with you gentlemen before,” he began in a dry, even tone,

“when you’ve sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;

and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied

when you checked them up. What’s the matter, anyhow? Why is it that

reputable young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It

might almost seem to a stranger that there was some way something

the matter with your progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the

brightest young lawyer you ever turned out, after he had come home

from the university as straight as a die, take to drinking and forge

a check and shoot himself? Why did Bill Merrit’s son die of the

shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why was Mr. Thomas’s son, here, shot

in a gambling-house? Why did young Adams burn his mill to beat the

insurance companies and go to the pen?”

The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist

quietly on the table. “I’ll tell you why. Because you drummed

nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they

wore knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you’ve been

carping here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them

for their models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and

John Adams. But the boys were young, and raw at the business you put

them to, and how could they match coppers with such artists as Phelps

and Elder? You wanted them to be successful rascals; they were only

unsuccessful ones--that’s all the difference. There was only one boy

ever raised in this borderland between ruffianism and civilization

who didn’t come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for

winning out than you hated all the other boys who got under the

wheels. Lord, Lord, how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of

saying that he could buy and sell us all out any time he’s a mind to;

but he knew Harve wouldn’t have given a tinker’s damn for his bank

and all his cattlefarms put together; and a lack of appreciation,

that way, goes hard with Phelps.

“Old Nimrod thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as Nimrod

and me!

“Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man’s money--fell

short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the

very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in

the county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that

partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I’m

getting personal, and I’d better be driving ahead at what I want to

say.”

The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:

“Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were

dead in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We

meant to be great men. Even I, and I haven’t lost my sense of humour,

gentlemen, I meant to be a great man. I came back here to practise,

and I found you didn’t in the least want me to be a great man. You

wanted me to be a shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me

to get him an increase of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps

wanted a new county survey that would put the widow Wilson’s little

bottom farm inside his south line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5

per cent a month, and get it collected; and Stark here wanted to

wheedle old women up in Vermont into investing their annuities in

real estate mortgages that are not worth the paper they are written

on. Oh, you needed me hard enough, and you’ll go on needing me!

“Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted

me to be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and

yet you’ll stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul

you couldn’t dirty and whose hands you couldn’t tie. Oh, you’re a

discriminating lot of Christians! There have been times when the

sight of Harvey’s name in some Eastern paper has made me hang my head

like a whipped dog; and, again, times when I liked to think of him

off there in the world, away from all this hog-wallow, climbing the

big, clean up-grade he’d set for himself.

“And we? Now that we’ve fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and

hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little

Western town know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey

Merrick wouldn’t have given one sunset over your marshes for all

you’ve got put together, and you know it. It’s not for me to say why,

in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been

called from this place of hatred and bitter waters, but I want this

Boston man to know that the drivel he’s been hearing here tonight is

the only tribute any truly great man could have from such a lot of

sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present

financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!”

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught

up his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand

Army man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck

about at his fellows.

Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral

services. Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled

to start East without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he

would hear from him again, and left his address on the lawyer’s

table; but if Laird found it, he never acknowledged it. The thing

in him that Harvey Merrick had loved must have gone under ground

with Harvey Merrick’s coffin; for it never spoke again, and Jim got

the cold he died of driving across the Colorado mountains to defend

one of Phelps’s sons who had got into trouble out there by cutting

government timber.

From _Youth and the Bright Medusa_ by Willa

Cather. By permission of and special arrangement

with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., the authorized

publishers.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SHORT STORIES

The editors have found the following collections of Short Stories the

best for use in class:

_Modern Short Stories_, edited by Margaret Ashmun. The Macmillan

Company.

_The Best Short Stories of 1917_, edited by Edward J. O’Brien.

Small, Maynard & Company.

_Atlantic Narratives_, First and Second Series, edited by Charles

Swain Thomas. The Atlantic Monthly Press.

_The Harper Prize Short Stories_, edited by Bliss Perry. Harper &

Brothers.

_The O. Henry Memorial Award Stories_, edited by Blanche Colton

Williams and published yearly by Doubleday, Page & Company.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Abu-Lubabah,--It is remarkable that the name should have suffered

no corruption in the chronicles.

[2] Translation by Marguerite Guinotte.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been

corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within

the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added,

when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,

and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

p19: ‘they are expectd’ changed to ‘they are expected’

p59: ‘this lad who coud’ changed to ‘this lad who could’

p284: ‘tallish fellow with’ changed to ‘tallish fellow with a’

p480: ‘china placques’ changed to ‘china plaques’