FIRST TALE
AN INDIAN JATAKA 17
_By Achmed Abdullah_
SECOND TALE
OUT OF THE DARK 45
_By Max Brand_
THIRD TALE
PLUMB NAUSEATED 81
_By E. K. Means_
FOURTH TALE
PRINCESS OR PERCHERON 127
_By Perley P. Sheehan_
_INTRODUCTION_
Some time ago I was dining with four distinguished writers. Needless to
say where two or three authors are gathered together with a sympathetic
editor in their midst, the flood-gates of fancy are opened wide.
In an inspired moment, Dr. Means tossed this "tremendous trifle" into
the center of the table: "What mental and emotional reaction would a man
and a woman undergo, linked together by a ten-foot chain, for three days
and nights?" The query precipitated an uproar.
Captain Abdullah stepped into the arena at once, and with that elan of
the heart, which is bred only in the Orient, declared if the man and the
woman really loved one another, no chain could be riveted too close or
too enduring to render onerous its existence. For through this world and
the next, love would hold these twain in ever deeper and tenderer
embrace.
Then the doctor, who claims he cuts nearer to the realities, insisted no
emotion could bear such a physical impact. The reaction from such an
imposed contact would leave love bereft of life, strangled in its own
golden mesh. Max Brand begged to differ with both of his fellow
craftsmen. With the cold detachment of a mind prepared to see all four
sides of an object and with no personal animus of either prejudice or
prepossession, Mr. Brand averred no blanker conclusion covered the case
in question but in any given instance, the multiple factors of heredity,
environment, habit, and temperament, would largely determine the final
state of both the man and the woman.
Hereupon, Perley Poore Sheehan, the fourth member of the writing
fraternity present, insisted on a hearing. Mr. Sheehan, nothing daunted
by the naturally polygamous instincts of the male heart, insisted a good
man, once in love, would and could discount the handicap of a ten-foot
chain, since love was after all, as others have contended, not the whole
of a man's life. To be sure it was an integral need, a recurrent
appetite; the glamour and the glory, if you like, enfolding with its
overshadowing wings his house of happiness. As for the woman--well, we
will let Mr. Sheehan report, in person, his conviction as to the
stability of her attachment.
The editor, whose business it is to keep an open mind, scarcely felt
equal to the responsibility of passing judgment, where experts differed.
But the discussion presented an opportunity which he felt called upon to
develop. Therefore, each of the four authors was invited to present his
conclusions in fiction form, the four stories to be published under the
general caption "The Ten-Foot Chain." Herewith we are printing this
unique symposium, one of the most original series ever presented.
Naturally, the stories are bound to provoke opinion and raise
discussion. The thesis in the form presented by Dr. Means is quite
novel, but the underlying problem of the stability of human affections,
is as old as the heart of man. Wasn't it that prosaic but wise old poet,
Alexander Pope, who compared our minds to our watches? "No two go just
alike, yet each believes his own."