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Emily Dickinson - "Poems: Third Series"

Richard Newton - "The Life of Jesus Christ for the Young"

Hugh McHugh - "Back to the Woods"

George Gissing - "The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories"

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O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 by Various

V >> Various >> O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920




As has been said, Boaz found himself listening, scrutinizing with an
extraordinary attention, this immense background of sound. He heard
footfalls. The story of that night was written, for him, in footfalls.

He heard them moving about the house, the lower floor, prowling here,
there, halting for long spaces, advancing, retreating softly on the
planks. About this aimless, interminable perambulation there was
something to twist the nerves, something led and at the same time
driven like a succession of frail and indecisive charges.

Boaz lifted himself from his chair. All his impulse called him to
make a stir, join battle, cast in the breach the re-enforcement of
his presence, authority, good will. He sank back again; his hands
fell down. The curious impotence of the spectator held him.

He heard footfalls, too, on the upper floor, a little fainter, borne
to the inner rather than the outer ear, along the solid causeway of
partitions and floor, the legs of his chair, the bony framework of
his body. Very faint indeed. Sinking back easily into the background
of the wind. They, too, came and went, this room, that, to the
passage, the stair-head, and away. About them too there was the same
quality of being led and at the same time of being driven.

Time went by. In his darkness it seemed to Boaz that hours must have
passed. He heard voices. Together with the footfalls, that abrupt,
brief, and (in view of Wood's position) astounding interchange of
sentences made up his history of the night. Wood must have opened the
door at the head of the stair; by the sound of his voice he would be
standing there, peering below perhaps; perhaps listening.

"What's wrong down there?" he called. "Why don't you go to bed?"

After a moment, came Manual's voice, "Ain't sleepy."

"Neither am I. Look here, do you like to play cards?"

"What kind? Euchre! I like euchre all right. Or pitch."

"Well, what would you say to coming up and having a game of euchre
then, Manuel? If you can't sleep?"

"That'd be all right."

The lower footfalls ascended to join the footfalls on the upper floor.
There was the sound of a door closing.

Boaz sat still. In the gloom he might have been taken for a piece of
furniture, of machinery, an extraordinary lay figure, perhaps, for
the trying on of the boots he made. He seemed scarcely to breathe,
only the sweat starting from his brow giving him an aspect of life.

He ought to have run, and leaped up that inner stair and pounded
with his fists on that door. He seemed unable to move. At rare
intervals feet passed on the sidewalk outside, just at his elbow, so
to say, and yet somehow, to-night, immeasurably far away. Beyond the
orbit of the moon. He heard Rugg, the policeman, noting the silence
of the shop, muttering, "Boaz is to bed to-night," as he passed.

The wind increased. It poured against the shop with its deep,
continuous sound of a river. Submerged in its body, Boaz caught the
note of the town bell striking midnight.

Once more, after a long time, he heard footfalls. He heard them
coming around the corner of the shop from the house, footfalls half
swallowed by the wind, passing discreetly, without haste, retreating,
merging step by step with the huge, incessant background of the wind.

Boaz's muscles tightened all over him. He had the impulse to start up,
to fling open the door, shout into the night, "What are you doing?
Stop there! Say! What are you doing and where are you going?"

And as before, the curious impotence of the spectator held him
motionless. He had not stirred in his chair. And those footfalls,
upon which hinged, as it were, that momentous decade of his life,
were gone.

There was nothing to listen for now. Yet he continued to listen.
Once or twice, half arousing himself, he drew toward him his
unfinished work. And then relapsed into immobility.

As has been said, the wind, making little difference to the ears,
made all the difference in the world with the sense of feeling and
the sense of smell. From the one important direction of the house.
That is how it could come about that Boaz Negro could sit, waiting
and listening to nothing in the shop and remain ignorant of disaster
until the alarm had gone away and come back again, pounding, shouting,
clanging.

"_Fire_!" he heard them bawling in the street. "_Fire! Fire_!"

Only slowly did he understand that the fire was in his own house.

There is nothing stiller in the world than the skeleton of a house
in the dawn after a fire. It is as if everything living, positive,
violent, had been completely drained in the one flaming act of
violence, leaving nothing but negation till the end of time. It is
worse than a tomb. A monstrous stillness! Even the footfalls of the
searchers can not disturb it, for they are separate and superficial.
In its presence they are almost frivolous.

Half an hour after dawn the searchers found the body, if what was
left from that consuming ordeal might be called a body. The
discovery came as a shock. It seemed incredible that the occupant of
that house, no cripple or invalid but an able man in the prime of
youth, should not have awakened and made good his escape. It was the
upper floor which had caught; the stairs had stood to the last. It
was beyond calculation. Even if he had been asleep!

And he had not been asleep. This second and infinitely more
appalling discovery began to be known. Slowly. By a hint, a breath
of rumour here; there an allusion, half taken back. The man, whose
incinerated body still lay curled in its bed of cinders, had been
dressed at the moment of disaster; even to the watch, the
cuff-buttons, the studs, the very scarf-pin. Fully clothed to the
last detail, precisely as those who had dealings at the bank might
have seen Campbell Wood any week-day morning for the past eight
months. A man does not sleep with his clothes on. The skull of the
man had been broken, as if with a blunt instrument of iron. On the
charred lacework of the floor lay the leg of an old andiron with
which Boaz Negro and his Angelina had set up housekeeping in that
new house.

It needed only Mr. Asa Whitelaw, coming up the street from that
gaping "Noah's Ark" at the bank, to round out the scandalous circle
of circumstance.

"Where is Manuel?"

Boaz Negro still sat in his shop, impassive, monumental, his thick,
hairy arms resting on the arms of his chair. The tools and materials
of his work remained scattered about him, as his irresolute
gathering of the night before had left them. Into his eyes no change
could come. He had lost his house, the visible monument of all those
years of "skinning his fingers." It would seem that he had lost his
son. And he had lost something incalculably precious--that hitherto
unquenchable exuberance of the man.

"Where is Manuel?"

When he spoke his voice was unaccented and stale, like the voice of
a man already dead.

"Yes, where is Manuel?"

He had answered them with their own question.

"When did you last see him?"

Neither he nor they seemed to take note of that profound irony.

"At supper."

"Tell us, Boaz; you knew about this money?"

The cobbler nodded his head.

"And did Manuel?"

He might have taken sanctuary in a legal doubt. How did he know what
Manuel knew? Precisely! As before, he nodded his head.

"After supper, Boaz, you were in the shop? But you heard something?"

He went on to tell them what he had heard: the footfalls, below and
above, the extraordinary conversation which had broken for a moment
the silence of the inner hall. The account was bare, the phrases
monosyllabic. He reported only what had been registered on the
sensitive tympanums of his ears, to the last whisper of footfalls
stealing past the dark wall of the shop. Of all the formless tangle
of thoughts, suspicions, interpretations, and the special and
personal knowledge given to the blind which moved in his brain, he
said nothing.

He shut his lips there. He felt himself on the defensive. Just as he
distrusted the higher ramifications of finance (his house had gone
down uninsured), so before the rites and processes of that
inscrutable creature, the Law, he felt himself menaced by the
invisible and the unknown, helpless, oppressed; in an abject sense,
skeptical.

"Keep clear of the Law!" they had told him in his youth. The monster
his imagination had summoned up then still stood beside him in his
age.

Having exhausted his monosyllabic and superficial evidence, they
could move him no farther. He became deaf and dumb. He sat before
them, an image cast in some immensely heavy stuff, inanimate. His
lack of visible emotion impressed them. Remembering his exuberance,
it was only the stranger to see him unmoving and unmoved. Only once
did they catch sight of something beyond. As they were preparing to
leave he opened his mouth. What he said was like a swan-song to the
years of his exuberant happiness. Even now there was no colour of
expression in his words, which sounded mechanical.

"Now I have lost everything. My house. My last son. Even my honour.
You would not think I would like to live. But I go to live. I go to
work. That _cachorra_, one day he shall come back again, in the dark
night, to have a look. I shall go to show you all. That _cachorra_!"

(And from that time on, it was noted, he never referred to the
fugitive by any other name than _cachorra_, which is a kind of dog.
"That _cachorra_!" As if he had forfeited the relationship not only
of the family, but of the very genus, the very race! "That _cachorra_!")

He pronounced this resolution without passion. When they assured him
that the culprit would come back again indeed, much sooner than he
expected, "with a rope around his neck," he shook his head slowly.

"No, you shall not catch that _cachorra_ now. But one day--"

There was something about its very colourlessness which made it
sound oracular. It was at least prophetic. They searched, laid their
traps, proceeded with all their placards, descriptions, rewards,
clues, trails. But on Manuel Negro they never laid their hands.

Months passed and became years. Boaz Negro did not rebuild his house.
He might have done so, out of his earnings, for upon himself he
spent scarcely anything, reverting to his old habit of an almost
miserly economy. Yet perhaps it would have been harder after all.
For his earnings were less and less. In that town a cobbler who sits
in an empty shop is apt to want for trade. Folk take their boots to
mend where they take their bodies to rest and their minds to be
edified.

No longer did the walls of Boaz's shop resound to the boastful
recollections of young men. Boaz had changed. He had become not only
different, but opposite. A metaphor will do best. The spirit of Boaz
Negro had been a meadowed hillside giving upon the open sea, the sun,
the warm, wild winds from beyond the blue horizon. And covered with
flowers, always hungry and thirsty for the sun and the fabulous wind
and bright showers of rain. It had become an entrenched camp, lying
silent, sullen, verdureless, under a gray sky. He stood solitary
against the world. His approaches were closed. He was blind, and he
was also deaf and dumb.

Against that what can young fellows do who wish for nothing but to
rest themselves and talk about their friends and enemies? They had
come and they had tried. They had raised their voices even higher
than before. Their boasts had grown louder, more presumptuous, more
preposterous, until, before the cold separation of that unmoving and
as if contemptuous presence in the cobbler's chair, they burst of
their own air, like toy balloons. And they went and left Boaz alone.

There was another thing which served, if not to keep them away, at
least not to entice them back. That was the aspect of the place. It
was not cheerful. It invited no one. In its way that fire-bitten
ruin grew to be almost as great a scandal as the act itself had been.
It was plainly an eyesore. A valuable property, on the town's main
thoroughfare--and an eyesore! The neighbouring owners protested.

Their protestations might as well have gone against a stone wall.
That man was deaf and dumb. He had become, in a way, a kind of
vegetable, for the quality of a vegetable is that, while it is
endowed with life, it remains fixed in one spot. For years Boaz was
scarcely seen to move foot out of that shop that was left him, a
small square, blistered promontory on the shores of ruin.

He must indeed have carried out some rudimentary sort of domestic
programme under the debris at the rear (he certainly did not sleep
or eat in the shop). One or two lower rooms were left fairly intact.
The outward aspect of the place was formless; it grew to be no more
than a mound in time; the charred timbers, one or two still standing,
lean and naked against the sky, lost their blackness and faded to a
silvery gray. It would have seemed strange, had they not grown
accustomed to the thought, to imagine that blind man, like a mole,
or some slow slug, turning himself mysteriously in the bowels of
that gray mound--that time-silvered "eye-sore."

When they saw him, however, he was in the shop. They opened the door
to take in their work (when other cobblers turned them off), and
they saw him seated in his chair in the half darkness, his whole
person, legs, torso, neck, head, as motionless as the vegetable of
which we have spoken--only his hands and his bare arms endowed with
visible life. The gloom had bleached the skin to the colour of damp
ivory, and against the background of his immobility they moved with
a certain amazing monstrousness, interminably. No, they were never
still. One wondered what they could be at. Surely he could not have
had enough work now to keep those insatiable hands so monstrously in
motion. Even far into the night. Tap-tap-tap! Blows continuous and
powerful. On what? On nothing? On the bare iron last? And for what
purpose? To what conceivable end?

Well, one could imagine those arms, growing paler, also growing
thicker and more formidable with that unceasing labour; the muscles
feeding themselves omnivorously on their own waste, the cords
toughening, the bone-tissues revitalizing themselves without end.
One could imagine the whole aspiration of that mute and motionless
man pouring itself out into those pallid arms, and the arms taking it
up with a kind of blind greed. Storing it up. Against a day!

"That _cachorra_! One day--"

What were the thoughts of the man? What moved within that motionless
cranium covered with long hair? Who can say? Behind everything, of
course, stood that bitterness against the world--the blind
world--blinder than he would ever be. And against "that _cachorra_."
But this was no longer a thought; it was the man.

Just as all muscular aspiration flowed into his arms, so all the
energies of his senses turned to his ears. The man had become, you
might say, two arms and two ears. Can you imagine a man listening,
intently, through the waking hours of nine years?

Listening to footfalls. Marking with a special emphasis of
concentration the beginning, rise, full passage, falling away, and
dying of all the footfalls. By day, by night, winter and summer and
winter again. Unravelling the skein of footfalls passing up and down
the street!

For three years he wondered when they would come. For the next three
years he wondered if they would ever come. It was during the last
three that a doubt began to trouble him. It gnawed at his huge moral
strength. Like a hidden seepage of water, it undermined (in
anticipation) his terrible resolution. It was a sign perhaps of age,
a slipping away of the reckless infallibility of youth.

Supposing, after all, that his ears should fail him. Supposing they
were capable of being tricked, without his being able to know it.
Supposing that that _cachorra_ should come and go, and he, Boaz,
living in some vast delusion, some unrealized distortion of memory,
should let him pass unknown. Supposing precisely this thing had
already happened!

Or the other way around. What if he should hear the footfalls coming,
even into the very shop itself? What if he should be as sure of them
as of his own soul? What, then, if he should strike? And what then,
if it were not that _cachorra_ after all? How many tens and hundreds
of millions of people were there in the world? Was it possible for
them all to have footfalls distinct and different?

Then they would take him and hang him. And that _cachorra_ might
then come and go at his own will, undisturbed.

As he sat there sometimes the sweat rolled down his nose, cold as
rain.

Supposing!

Sometimes, quite suddenly, in broad day, in the booming silence of
the night, he would start. Not outwardly. But beneath the pale
integument of his skin all his muscles tightened and his nerves sang.
His breathing stopped. It seemed almost as if his heart stopped.

Was that it? Were those the feet, there, emerging faintly from the
distance? Yes, there was something about them. Yes! Memory was in
travail. Yes, yes, yes! No! How could he be sure? Ice ran down into
his empty eyes. The footfalls were already passing. They were gone,
swallowed up already by time and space. Had that been that _cachorra_?

Nothing in his life had been so hard to meet as this insidious drain
of distrust in his own powers; this sense of a traitor within the
walls. His iron-gray hair had turned white. It was always this now,
from the beginning of the day to the end of the night: how was he to
know? How was he to be inevitably, unshakably, sure?

Curiously, after all this purgatory of doubts, he did know them. For
a moment at least, when he had heard them, he was unshakably sure.

It was on an evening of the winter holidays, the Portuguese festival
of _Menin' Jesus_. Christ was born again in a hundred mangers on a
hundred tiny altars; there was cake and wine; songs went shouting by
to the accompaniment of mandolins and tramping feet. The wind blew
cold under a clear sky. In all the houses there were lights; even in
Boaz Negro's shop a lamp was lit just now, for a man had been in for
a pair of boots which Boaz had patched. The man had gone out again.
Boaz was thinking of blowing out the light. It meant nothing to him.

He leaned forward, judging the position of the lamp-chimney by the
heat on his face, and puffed out his cheeks to blow. Then his cheeks
collapsed suddenly, and he sat back again.

It was not odd that he had failed to hear the footfalls until they
were actually within the door. A crowd of merry-makers was passing
just then; their songs and tramping almost shook the shop.

Boaz sat back. Beneath his passive exterior his nerves thrummed; his
muscles had grown as hard as wood. Yes! Yes! But no! He had heard
nothing; no more than a single step, a single foot-pressure on the
planks within the door. Dear God! He could not tell!

Going through the pain of an enormous effort, he opened his lips.

"What can I do for you?"

"Well, I--I don't know. To tell the truth--"

The voice was unfamiliar, but it might be assumed. Boaz held himself.
His face remained blank, interrogating, slightly helpless. "I am a
little deaf," he said. "Come nearer."

The footfalls came half way across the intervening floor, and there
appeared to hesitate. The voice, too, had a note of uncertainty.

"I was just looking around. I have a pair of--well, you mend shoes?"

Boaz nodded his head. It was not in response to the words, for they
meant nothing. What he had heard was the footfalls on the floor.

Now he was sure. As has been said, for a moment at least after he
had heard them he was unshakably sure. The congestion of his muscles
had passed. He was at peace.

The voice became audible once more. Before the massive preoccupation
of the blind man it became still less certain of itself.

"Well, I haven't got the shoes with me. I was--just looking around."

It was amazing to Boaz, this miraculous sensation of peace.

"Wait!" Then, bending his head as if listening to the winter wind,
"It's cold to-night. You've left the door open. But wait!" Leaning
down, his hand fell on a rope's end hanging by the chair. The
gesture was one continuous, undeviating movement of the hand. No
hesitation. No groping. How many hundreds, how many thousands of
times, had his hand schooled itself in that gesture!

A single strong pull. With a little _bang_ the front door had swung
to and latched itself. Not only the front door. The other door,
leading to the rear, had closed too and latched itself with a little
_bang_. And leaning forward from his chair, Boaz blew out the light.

There was not a sound in the shop. Outside, feet continued to go by,
ringing on the frozen road; voices were lifted; the wind hustled
about the corners of the wooden shell with a continuous, shrill note
of whistling. All of this outside, as on another planet. Within the
blackness of the shop the complete silence persisted,

Boaz listened. Sitting on the edge of his chair, half-crouching, his
head, with its long, unkempt, white hair, bent slightly to one side,
he concentrated upon this chambered silence the full powers of his
senses. He hardly breathed.

The other person in that room could not be breathing at all, it
seemed.

No, there was not a breath, not the stirring of a sole on wood, not
the infinitesimal rustle of any fabric. It was as if in this utter
stoppage of sound, even the blood had ceased to flow in the veins
and arteries of that man, who was like a rat caught in a trap.

It was appalling even to Boaz; even to the cat. Listening became
more than a labour. He began to have to fight against a growing
impulse to shout out loud, to leap, sprawl forward without aim in
that unstirred darkness--do something. Sweat rolled down from behind
his ears, into his shirt-collar. He gripped the chair-arms. To keep
quiet he sank his teeth into his lower lip. He would not! He would
not!

And of a sudden he heard before him, in the centre of the room, an
outburst of breath, an outrush from lungs in the extremity of pain,
thick, laborious, fearful. A coughing up of dammed air.

Pushing himself from the arms of the chair, Boaz leaped.

His fingers, passing swiftly through the air, closed on something.
It was a sheaf of hair, bristly and thick. It was a man's beard.

On the road outside, up and down the street for a hundred yards,
merry-making people turned to look at one another. With an abrupt
cessation of laughter, of speech. Inquiringly. Even with an
unconscious dilation of the pupils of their eyes.

"What was that?"

There had been a scream. There could be no doubt of that. A single,
long-drawn note. Immensely high-pitched. Not as if it were human.

"God's sake! What was that? Where'd it come from?"

Those nearest said it came from the cobbler-shop of Boaz Negro.

They went and tried the door. It was closed; even locked, as if for
the night. There was no light behind the window-shade. But Boaz
would not have a light. They beat on the door. No answer.

But from where, then, had that prolonged, as if animal, note come?

They ran about, penetrating into the side lanes, interrogating,
prying. Coming back at last, inevitably, to the neighbourhood of
Boaz Negro's shop.

The body lay on the floor at Boaz's feet, where it had tumbled down
slowly after a moment from the spasmodic embrace of his arms; those
ivory-coloured arms which had beaten so long upon the bare iron
surface of a last. Blows continuous and powerful. It seemed
incredible. They were so weak now. They could not have lifted the
hammer now.

But that beard! That bristly, thick, square beard of a stranger!

His hands remembered it. Standing with his shoulders fallen forward
and his weak arms hanging down, Boaz began to shiver. The whole
thing was incredible. What was on the floor there, upheld in the
vast gulf of darkness, he could not see. Neither could he hear it;
smell it. Nor (if he did not move his foot) could he feel it. What
he did not hear, smell, or touch did not exist. It was not there.
Incredible!

But that beard! All the accumulated doubtings of those years fell
down upon him. After all, the thing he had been so fearful of in his
weak imaginings had happened. He had killed a stranger. He, Boaz
Negro, had murdered an innocent man!

And all on account of that beard. His deep panic made him
light-headed. He began to confuse cause and effect. If it were not
for that beard, it would have been that _cachorra_.

On this basis he began to reason with a crazy directness. And to act.
He went and pried open the door into the entry. From a shelf he took
down his razor. A big, heavy-heeled strop. His hands began to hurry.
And the mug, half full of soap. And water. It would have to be cold
water. But after all, he thought (light-headedly), at this time of
night----

Outside, they were at the shop again. The crowd's habit is to forget
a thing quickly, once it is out of sight and hearing. But there had
been something about that solitary cry which continued to bother them,
even in memory. Where had it been? Where had it come from? And those
who had stood nearest the cobbler-shop were heard again. They were
certain now, dead certain. They could swear!