O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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A number of 1921 stories centre about a historic character. F. Scott
Fitzgerald's "Tarquin of Cheapside" (_Smart Set_, February) offers in
episode form the motivation of Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece"; Mary
Raymond Shipman Andrews parallels her "The Perfect Tribute" and eulogy
of Lincoln with "His Soul Goes Marching On" and warm reminiscence of
Roosevelt; Fleta Campbell Springer's "The Role of Madame Ravelles" is
apparently a tapestry in weaving the stately figure of Georgette
LeBlanc. Ranking highest among these personal narratives, however, is
Mildred Cram's "Stranger Things--" Besides calling up, under the name
of Cecil Grimshaw, the irresistible figure of Oscar Wilde, the author
has created a supernatural tale of challenging intricacy and
imaginative genius. The only other stories of the supernatural to find
place in the Committee's first list are Maxwell Struthers Burt's
"Buchanan Hears the Wind" and Mary Heaton Vorse's "The Halfway House."
In all of these, suggestion, delicately managed, is the potent element
of success.

Animals figure in vaster numbers and under intensive psychological
study. That a race-horse owner goes nowadays to the astrologer for a
horoscope of his racer is a fact that insinuatingly elevates the beast
to the plane of his master. In the short story of 1921, the monkey,
the tiger, the elephant, the dog and all their kind are treated from
an anthropomorphic point of view. Courtney Ryley Cooper's
titles--"Love" and "Vengeance," for example--covering stories
dominated by the animal character, betray the author's ascription of
human attributes to his hero or villain. "Reynardine," by Donn Byrne,
retails with haunting charm the friendship between the Fitzpauls and
the fox, in an instance that tests the friendship. Foxes, for Morgan
of the story, "took on for him now a strange, sinister entity.... They
had become to him a quasi-human, hypernormal race.... They had tabus
as strict as a Maori's. Strange, mystical laws."--"Corkran of the
Clamstretch" uniquely portrays the ugly and heroic "R.T.C." throughout
as a gentleman, "who met triumph with boredom," and "defeat, as a
great gentleman should, with quiet courtesy and good humour." Samuel
A. Derieux adds "Comet" to his list of superintelligent dogs in a
story the Committee regard as one of his best. It should be compared
with R.G. Kirk's "Gun-Shy" (_Saturday Evening Post_, October 22).
Similar in theme, in sympathy and in the struggle--that of a trainer
to overcome a noble dog's fear of the powder roar--the stories diverge
in the matter of workmanship. Yet "Gun-Shy" is based on a plot
superior to that of "Comet." Oddly enough, the Committee preferred not
one of the humanized-beast stories, but Edison Marshall's "The Heart
of Little Shikara." The preference was because of a number of counts,
however; moreover, the man eater takes second place beside Little
Shikara, whose bravery and loyalty motivate the thrilling climax of
the narrative. And it is just this: a superb story, with underscoring
for "story."

Anthropomorphism is found at its height in "A Life," by Wilbur Daniel
Steele. Dr. Edward J. Wheeler places this story first of the year's
brief fiction, on the score of originality, power, and satisfactory
evolution of the struggle, with its triumphant dramatic reverse. Other
members of the Committee, though sensible of its claim to high
distinction, believe it is a novelette, not to be classed as a short
story, and therefore barred from consideration. Its spirit, one
affirms, lacks something of the vigour which made of "Guiablesse"
(_Harper's_, 1919) so convincing a work of art. Another member finds
its value somewhat decreased in that its theme had been used similarly
in John Masefield's "The Wanderer."

The child's place in the democracy of the short story was assured
years ago. No remarkably outstanding examples have come from the pen
of Booth Tarkington, amusing as are his adolescents and children of
the _Red Book_ tales. The best combinations of humour and childhood
appeared to the Committee to be "Wilfrid Reginald and the Dark Horse,"
by James Mahoney, and "Mr. Downey Sits Down," by L.H. Robbins. For
laughter the reader is recommended to each of these, the latter of
which is reprinted in this volume. For humour plus a trifle more of
excitement, "Mummery," by Thomas Beer, is included. Mr. Beer has
succeeded in handling Mrs. Egg as Miss Addington manages Miss
Titwiler, the "Cactus"; that is, as the equal of author and reader,
but also--and still without condescension--as reason for twinkles and
smiles.

Apart from consideration of impulses dominating the short story of
1921, impulses here summarized under the general idea of democracy,
the story is different in several particulars. First, its method of
referring to drink, strong drink, marks it of the present year. The
setting is frequently that of a foreign country, where prohibition is
not yet known; the date of the action may be prior to 1919; or the
apology for presence of intoxicating liquors is forthcoming in such
statement as "My cellar is not yet exhausted, you see."

Second, the war is no longer tabu; witness "The Tribute," and "His
Soul Goes Marching On." Touched by the patina of time and mellowed
through the mellifluence of age, the war now makes an appeal
dissimilar to that which caused readers two or three years ago to
declare they were "fed up."

Third, Freudian theories have found organic place in the substance of
the story. They have not yet found incorporation in many narratives
that preserve short story structure, however--although it is within
conceivability that the influence may finally burst the mould and
create a new--and the Committee agree in demanding both substance and
structure as short story essentials.

Finally, the story reflects the changing ideals of a constantly
changing age. Not only are these ideals changing because of
cross-currents that have their many sources in racial springs far
asunder, not only because of contact or conflict between the ideals
and cosmic forces dimly apprehended; also they are changing because of
the undeniable influence of what Emerson called the Oversoul. The
youth of the time is different, as youth is always different. But now
and then a sharp cleavage separates the succeeding generations and it
separates them now. The youth of England has found interpretation in
Clemence Dane's play, "A Bill of Divorcement." In America, the
interpretation is only half articulate; but when the incoherent sounds
are wholly intelligible, the literature of the short story will have
entered, in definite respects, upon a new era.

The Committee of Award wish once again to thank the authors, editors,
and publishers whose cooperation makes possible this annual volume and
the O. Henry Memorial Prizes.

Blanche Colton Williams.

New York City
January 10, 1922

_O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARD PRIZE STORIES of 1921_

THE HEART OF LITTLE SHIKARA

By EDISON MARSHALL

From _Everybody's_

I

If it hadn't been for a purple moon that came peering up above the
dark jungle just at nightfall, it would have been impossible to tell
that Little Shikara was at his watch. He was really just the colour of
the shadows--a rather pleasant brown--he was very little indeed, and
besides, he was standing very, very still. If he was trembling at all,
from anticipation and excitement, it was no more than Nahar the tiger
trembles as he crouches in ambush. But the moon did show him--peering
down through the leaf-clusters of the heavy vines--and shone very
softly in his wide-open dark eyes.

And it was a purple moon--no other colour that man could name. It
looked almost unreal, like a paper moon painted very badly by a clumsy
stage-hand. The jungle-moon quite often has that peculiar purplish
tint, most travellers know, but few of them indeed ever try to tell
what causes it. This particular moon probed down here and there
between the tall bamboos, transformed the jungle--just now
waking--into a mystery and a fairyland, glinted on a hard-packed
elephant trail that wound away into the thickets, and always came back
to shine on the coal-black Oriental eyes of the little boy beside the
village gate. It showed him standing very straight and just as tall as
his small stature would permit, and looked oddly silvery and strange
on his long, dark hair. Little Shikara, son of Khoda Dunnoo, was
waiting for the return of a certain idol and demigod who was even now
riding home in his _howdah_ from the tiger hunt.

Other of the villagers would be down to meet Warwick Sahib as soon as
they heard the shouts of his beaters--but Little Shikara had been
waiting almost an hour. Likely, if they had known about it, they would
have commented on his badness, because he was notoriously bad, if
indeed--as the villagers told each other--he was not actually cursed
with evil spirits.

In the first place, he was almost valueless as a herder of buffalo.
Three times, when he had been sent with the other boys to watch the
herds in their wallows, he had left his post and crept away into the
fringe of jungle on what was unquestionably some mission of
witchcraft. For small naked brown boys, as a rule, do not go alone and
unarmed into the thick bamboos. Too many things can happen to prevent
them ever coming out again; too many brown silent ribbons crawl in the
grass, or too many yellow, striped creatures, no less lithe, lurk in
the thickets. But the strangest thing of all--and the surest sign of
witchcraft--was that he had always come safely out again, yet with
never any satisfactory explanations as to why he had gone. He had
always looked some way very joyful and tremulous--and perhaps even
pale if from the nature of things a brown boy ever can look pale. But
it was the kind of paleness that one has after a particularly
exquisite experience. It was not the dumb, teeth-chattering paleness
of fear.

"I saw the sergeant of the jungle," Little Shikara said after one of
these excursions. And this made no sense at all.

"There are none of the King's soldiers here," the brown village folk
replied to him. "Either thou liest to us, or thine eyes lied to thee.
And didst thou also see the chevron that told his rank?"

"That was the way I knew him. It was the black bear, and he wore the
pale chevron low on his throat."

This was Little Shikara all over. Of course he referred to the black
Himalayan bear which all men know wears a yellowish patch, of chevron
shape, just in front of his fore legs; but why he should call him a
jungle-sergeant was quite beyond the wit of the village folk to say.
Their imagination did not run in that direction. It never even
occurred to them that Little Shikara might be a born jungle creature,
expatriated by the accident of birth--one of that free, strange breed
that can never find peace in the villages of men.

"But remember the name we gave him," his mother would say. "Perhaps he
is only living up to his name."

For there are certain native hunters in India that are known, far and
wide, as the Shikaris; and possibly she meant in her tolerance that
her little son was merely a born huntsman. But in reality Little
Shikara was not named for these men at all. Rather it was for a
certain fleet-winged little hawk, a hunter of sparrows, that is one of
the most free spirits in all the jungle.

And it was almost like taking part in some great hunt himself--to be
waiting at the gate for the return of Warwick Sahib. Even now, the
elephant came striding out of the shadows; and Little Shikara could
see the trophy. The hunt had indeed been successful, and the boy's
glowing eyes beheld--even in the shadows--the largest, most beautiful
tiger-skin he had ever seen. It was the great Nahar, the royal tiger,
who had killed one hundred cattle from near-by fields.

Warwick Sahib rode in his _howdah_, and he did not seem to see the
village people that came out to meet him. In truth, he seemed half
asleep, his muscles limp, his gray eyes full of thoughts. He made no
answer to the triumphant shouts of the village folk. Little Shikara
glanced once at the lean, bronzed face, the limp, white, thin hands,
and something like a shiver of ecstasy went clear to his ten toes. For
like many other small boys, all over the broad world, he was a
hero-worshipper to the last hair of his head; and this quiet man on
the elephant was to him beyond all measure the most wonderful living
creature on the earth.

He didn't cry out, as the others did. He simply stood in mute worship,
his little body tingling with glory. Warwick Sahib had looked up now,
and his slow eyes were sweeping the line of brown faces. But still he
did not seem to see them. And then--wonder of wonders--his eyes rested
full on the eyes of his little worshipper beside the gate.

But it was quite the way of Warwick Sahib to sweep his gray, tired-out
eyes over a scene and seemingly perceive nothing; yet in reality
absorbing every detail with the accuracy of a photographic plate. And
his seeming indifference was not a pose with him, either. He was just
a great sportsman who was also an English gentleman, and he had
learned certain lessons of impassiveness from the wild. Only one of
the brown faces he beheld was worth a lingering glance. And when he
met that one his eyes halted in their sweeping survey--and Warwick
Sahib smiled.

That face was the brown, eager visage of Little Shikara. And the blood
of the boy flowed to the skin, and he glowed red all over through the
brown.

It was only the faintest of quiet, tolerant smiles; but it meant more
to him than almost any kind of an honour could have meant to the
prematurely gray man in the _howdah_. The latter passed on to his
estate, and some of the villagers went back to their women and their
thatch huts. But still Little Shikara stood motionless--and it wasn't
until the thought suddenly came to him that possibly the beaters had
already gathered and were telling the story of the kill that with
startling suddenness he raced back through the gates to the village.

Yes, the beaters had assembled in a circle under a tree, and most of
the villagers had gathered to hear the story. He slipped in among
them, and listened with both outstanding little ears. Warwick Sahib
had dismounted from his elephant as usual, the beaters said, and with
but one attendant had advanced up the bed of a dry creek. This was
quite like Warwick Sahib, and Little Shikara felt himself tingling
again. Other hunters, particularly many of the rich sahibs from across
the sea, shot their tigers from the security of the _howdah_; but this
wasn't Warwick's way of doing. The male tiger had risen snarling from
his lair, and had been felled at the first shot.

Most of the villagers had supposed that the story would end at this
point. Warwick Sahib's tiger hunts were usually just such simple and
expeditious affairs. The gun would lift to his shoulder, the quiet
eyes would glance along the barrel--and the tiger, whether charging or
standing still--would speedily die. But to-day there had been a
curious epilogue. Just as the beaters had started toward the fallen
animal, and the white Heaven-born's cigarette-case was open in his
hand, Nahara, Nahar's great, tawny mate, had suddenly sprung forth
from the bamboo thickets.

She drove straight to the nearest of the beaters. There was no time
whatever for Warwick to take aim. His rifle leaped, like a live thing,
in his arms, but not one of the horrified beaters had seen his eyes
lower to the sights. Yet the bullet went home--they could tell by the
way the tiger flashed to her breast in the grass.

Yet she was only wounded. One of the beaters, starting, had permitted
a bough of a tree to whip Warwick in the face, and the blow had
disturbed what little aim he had. It was almost a miracle that he had
hit the great cat at all. At once the thickets had closed around her,
and the beaters had been unable to drive her forth again.

The circle was silent thereafter. They seemed to be waiting for
Khusru, one of the head men of the village, to give his opinion. He
knew more about the wild animals than any mature native in the
assembly, and his comments on the hunting stories were usually worth
hearing.

"We will not be in the honoured service of the Protector of the Poor
at this time a year from now," he said.

They all waited tensely. Shikara shivered. "Speak, Khusru," they urged
him.

"Warwick Sahib will go again to the jungles--and Nahara will be
waiting. She owes two debts. One is the killing of her mate--and ye
know that these two tigers have been long and faithful mates. Do ye
think she will let that debt go unpaid? She will also avenge her own
wound."

"Perhaps she will die of bleeding," one of the others suggested.

"Nay, or ye would have found her this afternoon. Ye know that it is
the wounded tiger that is most to be feared. One day, and he will go
forth in pursuit of her again; and then ye will not see him riding
back so grandly on his elephant. Perhaps she will come here, to carry
away _our_ children."

Again Shikara tingled--hoping that Nahara would at least come close
enough to cause excitement. And that night, too happy to keep silent,
he told his mother of Warwick Sahib's smile. "And some time I--I,
thine own son," he said as sleepiness came upon him, "will be a killer
of tigers, even as Warwick Sahib."

"Little sparrow-hawk," his mother laughed at him. "Little one of
mighty words, only the great sahibs that come from afar, and Warwick
Sahib himself, may hunt the tiger, so how canst thou, little
worthless?"

"I will soon be grown," he persisted, "and I--I, too--will some time
return with such a tiger-skin as the great Heaven-born brought this
afternoon." Little Shikara was very sleepy, and he was telling his
dreams much more frankly than was his wont. "And the village folk will
come out to meet me with shoutings, and I will tell them of the
shot--in the circle under the tree."

"And where, little hawk, wilt thou procure thine elephants, and such
rupees as are needed?"

"Warwick Sahib shoots from the ground--and so will I. And sometimes he
goes forth with only one attendant--and I will not need even one. And
who can say--perhaps he will find me even a bolder man than Gunga
Singhai; and he will take me in his place on the hunts in the
jungles."

For Gunga Singhai was Warwick Sahib's own personal attendant and
gun-carrier--the native that the Protector of the Poor could trust in
the tightest places. So it was only to be expected that Little
Shikara's mother should laugh at him. The idea of her son being an
attendant of Warwick Sahib, not to mention a hunter of tigers, was
only a tale to tell her husband when the boy's bright eyes were closed
in sleep.

"Nay, little man," she told him. "Would I want thee torn to pieces in
Nahara's claws? Would I want thee smelling of the jungle again, as
thou didst after chasing the water-buck through the bamboos? Nay--thou
wilt be a herdsman, like thy father--and perhaps gather many rupees."

But Little Shikara did not want to think of rupees. Even now, as sleep
came to him, his childish spirit had left the circle of thatch roofs,
and had gone on tremulous expeditions into the jungle. Far away, the
trumpet-call of a wild tusker trembled through the moist, hot night;
and great bell-shaped flowers made the air pungent and heavy with
perfume. A tigress skulked somewhere in a thicket licking an injured
leg with her rough tongue, pausing to listen to every sound the night
gave forth. Little Shikara whispered in his sleep.

A half mile distant, in his richly furnished bungalow, Warwick Sahib
dozed over his after-dinner cigar. He was in evening clothes, and
crystal and silver glittered on his board. But his gray eyes were half
closed; and the gleam from his plate could not pass the long, dark
lashes. For his spirit was far distant, too--on the jungle trails with
that of Little Shikara.

II

One sunlit morning, perhaps a month after the skin of Nahar was
brought in from the jungle, Warwick Sahib's mail was late. It was an
unheard-of thing. Always before, just as the clock struck eight, he
would hear the cheerful tinkle of the postman's bells. At first he
considered complaining; but as morning drew to early afternoon he
began to believe that investigation would be the wiser course.

The postman's route carried him along an old elephant trail through a
patch of thick jungle beside one of the tributaries of the Manipur.
When natives went out to look, he was neither on the path nor drowned
in the creek, nor yet in his thatched hut at the other end of his
route. The truth was that this particular postman's bells would never
be heard by human ears again. And there was enough evidence in the wet
mould of the trail to know what had occurred.

That night the circle under the tree was silent and shivering. "Who is
next?" they asked of one another. The jungle night came down,
breathless and mysterious, and now and then a twig was cracked by a
heavy foot at the edge of the thickets. In Warwick's house, the great
Protector of the Poor took his rifles from their cases and fitted them
together.

"To-morrow," he told Gunga Singhai, "we will settle for that postman's
death." Singhai breathed deeply, but said nothing. Perhaps his dark
eyes brightened. The tiger-hunts were nearly as great a delight to him
as they were to Warwick himself.

But while Nahara, lame from Warwick's bullet, could no longer overtake
cattle, she did with great skilfulness avoid the onrush of the
beaters. Again Little Shikara waited at the village gate for his hero
to return; but the beaters walked silently to-night. Nor were there
any tales to be told under the tree.

Nahara, a fairly respectable cattle-killer before, had become in a
single night one of the worst terrors of India. Of course she was
still a coward, but she had learned, by virtue of a chance meeting
with a postman on a trail after a week of heart-devouring starvation,
two or three extremely portentous lessons. One of them was that not
even the little deer, drinking beside the Manipur, died half so easily
as these tall, forked forms of which she had previously been so
afraid. She found out also that they could neither run swiftly nor
walk silently, and they could be approached easily even by a tiger
that cracked a twig with every step. It simplified the problem of
living immensely; and just as any other feline would have done, she
took the line of least resistance. If there had been plenty of carrion
in the jungle, Nahara might never have hunted men. But the kites and
the jackals looked after the carrion; and they were much swifter and
keener-eyed than a lame tiger.

She knew enough not to confine herself to one village; and it is
rather hard to explain how any lower creature, that obviously cannot
reason, could have possessed this knowledge. Perhaps it was because
she had learned that a determined hunt, with many beaters and men on
elephants, invariably followed her killings. It was always well to
travel just as far as possible from the scene. She found out also
that, just as a doe is easier felled than a horned buck, certain of
this new kind of game were more easily taken than the others.
Sometimes children played at the door of their huts, and sometimes old
men were afflicted with such maladies that they could not flee at all.
All these things Nahara learned; and in learning them she caused a
certain civil office of the British Empire to put an exceedingly large
price on her head.

Gradually the fact dawned on her that unlike the deer and the buffalo,
this new game was more easily hunted in the daylight--particularly in
that tired-out, careless twilight hour when the herders and the
plantation hands came in from their work. At night the village folk
kept in their huts, and such wood-cutters and gipsies as slept without
wakened every hour to tend their fires. Nahara was deathly afraid of
fire. Night after night she would creep round and round a gipsy camp,
her eyes like two pale blue moons in the darkness, and would never
dare attack.

And because she was taking her living in a manner forbidden by the
laws of the jungle, the glory and beauty of her youth quickly departed
from her. There are no prisons for those that break the jungle laws,
no courts and no appointed officers, but because these are laws that
go down to the roots of life, punishment is always swift and
inevitable. "Thou shall not kill men," is the first law of the wild
creatures; and everyone knows that any animal or breed of animals that
breaks this law has sooner or later been hunted down and slain--just
like any other murderer. The mange came upon her, and she lost flesh,
and certain of her teeth began to come out. She was no longer the
beautiful female of her species, to be sung to by the weaver-birds as
she passed beneath. She was a hag and a vampire, hatred of whom lay
deep in every human heart in her hunting range.

Often the hunting was poor, and sometimes she went many days in a
stretch without making a single kill. And in all beasts, high and low,
this is the last step to the worst degeneracy of all. It instils a
curious, terrible kind of blood-lust--to kill, not once, but as many
times as possible in the same hunt; to be content not with one death,
but to slay and slay until the whole herd is destroyed. It is the
instinct that makes a little weasel kill all the chickens in a coop,
when one was all it could possibly carry away, and that will cause a
wolf to leap from sheep to sheep in a fold until every one is dead.
Nahara didn't get a chance to kill every day; so when the opportunity
did come, like a certain pitiable kind of human hunter who comes from
afar to hunt small game, she killed as many times as she could in
quick succession. And the British Empire raised the price on her head.

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