O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

V >> Various >> O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921

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"It's a--a room!" he whispered.

"A--a room?" repeated Old Man Anderson dully.

"Come! After me! Up! I'll pull you up!"

Detroit Jim, being wiry, swung himself up, and then bent down, groping
for the old man's hands. Winded, panting, exhausted, the two men stood
at last in this new blackness, clutching each other, their ears
strained to catch the slightest sound.

"For God's sake, don't fall down that hole now!" hissed Detroit Jim.
"Listen. We'll both crawl together till we get to a wall. Then you
feel along one way, and whisper to me what you find, and I'll crawl
the other. Look for a window or a door--some way out! We'll come
together finally. Are you ready?"

"I'm--I'm afraid," whined the old man.

Detroit Jim's fingers dug into the other's arm, and he pulled the
latter along. Their groping hands touched a wall--a wall of wood.
Detroit Jim stood up and pulled Anderson beside him. He felt the old
man shiver. He shoved him gently in to the left and himself moved
cautiously to the right, slowly, catlike.

Finally, Jim came to a door. He could perceive no light through the
chinks in the door. Sensing the increasing uncanniness of a room
without windows, without furniture, with flagging for a floor, he
turned the knob of the door gently, and it gave under his touch.

Just then there came to him a hoarse whisper from across the room. It
made him jump. "I've--I've found some wires," the old man was saying,
"in a cable running along the floor----"

"See where they lead!" Detroit Jim was breathless, in anticipation.

And then, shattering the overwhelming tension of the moment, shrilled,
suddenly, a horrible, prolonged, piercing shriek ending in a gasp and
the sound of a heavy body falling to the floor! What, in God's name,
had happened to the old man? And that yell was enough to awaken the
entire world!

Detroit Jim groped his way across the room. He could hear now no
further sound from the old man.... Steps outside! He sank upon his
knees, his hands outstretched. He heard a lock turn; then following
upon a click the whole universe went white, and dazzling and
scorching!

He raised one arm to his blinking, throbbing eyes. A rough voice
shouted: "Hands up!"

There was a rush of feet, the rough clutch of hands at his
shoulders.... Presently he found himself blinking down upon the
fear-contorted face of Old Man Anderson dirt-streaked, bearded, gaunt,
dead!

Slowly his eyes crawled beyond the body on the floor.... Before him,
its empty arms stretched toward him, its straps and wires twisting
snakily in front of him, was The Chair!

"AURORE"

By ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD

From _Pictorial Review_

"Your name!--_Votre nom_?" Crossman added, for in the North Country
not many of the habitants are bilingual.

She looked at him and smiled slowly, her teeth white against
cardinal-flower lips.

"Ma name? Aurore," she answered in a voice as mystically slow as her
smile, while the mystery of her eyes changed and deepened.

Crossman watched her, fascinated. She was like no woman he had ever
seen, radiating a personality individual and strange. "Aurore," he
repeated. "You're not the dawn, you know; not a bit like it." He did
not expect her to own to any knowledge of the legend of her name, but
she nodded her head understandingly.

"It was the Cure name' me so," she explained. "But the Cure and me,"
she shrugged, "never could--how you say?--see--hear--one the
other--so, I would not be a blonde just for spite to him--I am a very
black dawn, _n'est-ce pas_?"

"A black dawn," he repeated. Her words unleashed his fancy--her heavy
brows and lashes, her satiny raven hair, her slow voice that seemed
made of silence, her eyes that changed in expression so rapidly that
they dizzied one with a sense of space. "Black Dawn!" He stared at her
long, which in no wise disconcerted her.

"Will you want, then, Antoine and me?" she asked at length.

He woke from his dream with a savage realization that, most surely, he
wanted her. "Yes. Of course--you--and Antoine. Wait, _attendez_, don't
go yet."

"_Why_ not?" she smiled. "I have what I came for."

Her hand was on the door-latch. The radiance from the opened door of
the square, old-fashioned stove shimmered over her fur cap and
intensified the broad scarlet stripes of her mackinaw. In black
corduroy trousers, full and bagging as a moujik's, she stood at ease,
her feet small and dainty even in the heavy caribou-hide boots.

"_Bon soir, monsieur_," she said. "In two days we go with you to
camp--me--_and_ Antoine."

"Wait!" he cried, but she had opened the door. He rose with a start,
and, ignoring the intense cold, followed her till the stinging breath
of the North stabbed him with the recollection of its immutable power.
All about him the night was radiant. Of a sudden the sky was hung with
banners--banners that rippled and folded and unfolded, banners of
rainbows, long, shaking loops of red and silver, ghosts of lost
emeralds and sapphires, oriflammes that fluttered in the heavens,
swaying across the world in mysterious majesty. Immensity, Silence,
Mystery--The Northern Lights! "Aurora!" he called into the night,
"Aurora--Borealis!"

The Cure of Portage Dernier drove up to the log-cabin office and shook
himself from his blankets; his _soutane_ was rolled up around his
waist and secured with safety-pins; his solid legs were encased in the
heaviest of woollen trousers and innumerable long stockings. His
appearance was singularly divided--clerical above, under the long
wool-lined cape, and "lay" below. Though the thermometer showed a
shockingly depressed figure, the stillness and the warmth of the sun,
busy at diamond-making in the snow, gave the feeling of spring.

The sky was inconceivably blue. The hard-frozen world was one
immaculate glitter, the giant evergreens standing black against its
brightness. The sonorous ring of axes on wood, the gnawing of saws,
the crunching of runners, the crackling crash of distant trees falling
to the woodsmen's onslaughts--Bijou Falls logging-camp was a vital
centre of joyous activity.

The Cure grinned and rubbed his mittened hands. "H--Hola!" he called.

At his desk in the north window Crossman heard the hail, and went to
the door. At sight of the singular padded figure his face lifted in a
grin. "Come in, Father," he exclaimed; "be welcome."

"Ah," said the Priest, his pink face shining with benevolence, "I
thank you. Where is my friend, that good Jakapa? I am on my monthly
circuit, and I thought to see what happens at the Falls of the Bijou."
He stepped inside the cabin and advanced to the stove with
outstretched hands. "I have not the pleasure," he said tentatively.

"My name is Crossman," the other answered. "I am new to the North."

"Ah, so? I am the Cure of Portage Dernier, but, as you see, I must
wander after my lambs--very great goats are they, many of them, and
the winter brings the logging. So I, too, take to the timber. My
team," he waved an introducing hand at the two great cross-bred
sled-dogs that unhooked from their traces had followed him in and now
sat gravely on their haunches, staring at the fire. "You are an
overseer for the company?" suggested the Cure, politely curious--"or
perhaps you cruise?"

Crossman shook his head. "No, _mon pere_. I came up here to get well."

"Ah," said the Cure, sympathetically tapping his lung. "In this air of
the evergreens and the new wood, in the clean cold--it is the world's
sanatorium--you will soon be yourself again."

Crossman smiled painfully. "Perhaps _here_"--he laid a long, slender
finger on his broad chest--"but I heal not easily of the great world
sickness--the War. It has left its mark! The War, the great malady of
the world."

"You are right." Meditatively the Priest threw aside his cape and
began unfastening the safety-pins that held up his cassock. "You say
well. It strikes at the _heart_."

Crossman nodded.

"Yet it passes, my son, and Nature heals; as long as the hurt be in
Nature, Nature will take care. And you have come where Nature and God
work together. In this great living North Country, for sick bodies and
sick souls, the good God has His good sun and His clean winds." He
nodded reassurance, and Crossman's dark face cleared of its brooding.

"Sit down, Father." He advanced a chair.

"So," murmured the Cure, continuing his thought as he sank into the
embrace of thong and withe. "So you were in the War, and did you take
hurt there, my son?"

Crossman nodded. "Trench pneumonia, and then the rat at the lung; but
of shock, something also. But I think it was not concussion, as the
doctors said, but _soul_-shock. It has left me, Father, like
Mohammed's coffin, suspended. I think I have lost my grip on the
world--and not found my hold on another."

"Shock of the soul," the Priest ruminated. "Your soul is bruised, my
son. We must take care of it." His voice trailed off. There was
silence in the little office broken only by the yawn and snuffle of
the sled-dogs.

Suddenly the door swung open. In the embrasure stood Aurore in her red
mackinaw and corduroy trousers. A pair of snowshoes hung over her
back, and her hand gripped a short-handled broad axe. Her great eyes
turned from Crossman to the Cure, and across her crimson mouth crept
her slow smile. The Cure sprang to his feet at sight of her, his face
went white, and the lines from nose to lips seemed to draw in.

"Aurore!" he exclaimed; "Aurore!"

"_Oui, mon pere_," she drawled. "It is Aurore." She struck a
provocative pose, her hand on her hip, her head thrown back, while her
eyes changed colour as alexandrite in the sun.

The Cure turned on Crossman. "What is this woman to you?"

Her eyes defied him. "Tell him," she jeered. "What _am_ I to you?"

"She is here with Antoine Marceau, the log-brander," Crossman answered
unsteadily. "She takes care of our cabin, Jakapa's and mine."

"Is that _all_?" the Priest demanded.

Her eyes challenged him. What, indeed, was she to him?
What _was_ she? From the moment he had followed her into the boreal
night, with its streaming lights of mystery and promise, she had held
his imagination and his thoughts.

"Is that _all_?" the Priest insisted.

"You insult both this girl and me," Crossman retorted, stung to sudden
anger.

"_Dieu merci_!" the Cure made the sign of the cross as he spoke. "As
for this woman, send her away. She is _not_ the wife of Antoine
Marceau; she is not married--she _will_ not be."

In spite of himself a savage joy burned in Crossman's veins. She was
the wife of no man; she was a free being, whatever else she was.

"I do not have to marry," she jeered. "That is for the women that only
one man desires--or perhaps two--like some in your parish, _mon
pere_."

"She is evil," the Priest continued, paying no attention to her
sneering comment. "I know not what she is, nor who. One night, in
autumn, in the dark of the hour before morning, she was brought to me
by some Indians. They had found her, a baby, wrapped in furs, in an
empty canoe, rocking almost under the Grande Falls. But I tell you,
and to my sorrow, I _know_, she is evil. She knows not God, nor God
her. You, whose soul is sick, flee her as you would the devil! Aurore,
the Dawn! I named her, because she came so near the morning. Aurore!
Ah, God! She should be named after the blackest hour of a witch's
Sabbath!"

She laughed. It was the first time Crossman had heard her laugh--a
deep, slow, far-away sound, more like an eerie echo.

"_He_ has a better name for me," she said, casting Crossman a look
whose intimacy made his blood run hot within him. "'The Black
Dawn'--_n'est-ce-pas?_ Though I _have_ heard him call me in the
night--by another name," with which equivocal statement she swung the
axe into the curve of her arm, turned on her heel, and softly closed
the door between them.

The Priest turned on him. "My son," his eyes searched Crossman's, "you
have not lied to me?"

"No," he answered steadily. "Once I called her the Aurora
Borealis--that is all. To me she seems mysterious and changing, and
coloured, like the Northern Lights."

"She is mysterious and changing and beautiful, but it is not the
lights of the North and of Heaven. She is the _feu follet_, the
will-o'-the-wisp that hovers over what is rotten, and dead. Send her
away, my son; send her away. Oh, she has left her trail of blood and
hatred and malice in my parish, I know. She has bred feuds; she has
sent strong men to the devil, and broken the hearts of good women. But
_you_ will not believe me. It is to Jakapa I must talk. _Mon Dieu_!
how is it that he let her come! You are a stranger, but he----"

"Jakapa wished for Antoine, and she was with him," explained Crossman
uneasily, yet resentful of the Priest's vehemence.

"I can not wait." The Cure rose and began repinning his clerical
garments. "Where is Jakapa? Have you a pair of snowshoes to lend me?
You must forgive my agitation, Monsieur, but you do not
understand--I--which way?"

"He should be at Mile End, just above the Bijou. Sit still, Father; I
will send for him. The wind sets right. I'll call him in." Slipping on
his beaver jacket, he stepped outside and struck two blows on the
great iron ring, a bent rail, that swung from its gibbet like a
Chinese gong. A singing roar, like a metal bellow, sprang into the
clear, unresisting air, leaped and echoed, kissed the crags of the
Bijou and recoiled again, sending a shiver of sound and vibration
through snow-laden trees, on, till the echoes sighed into silence.
Crossman's over-sensitive ear clung to the last burring whisper as it
answered, going north, north, to the House of Silence, drawn there by
the magnet of Silence, as water seeks the sea. For a moment he had
almost forgotten the reason for the smitten clamour, hypnotized by the
mystery of sound. Then he turned, to see Aurore, a distant figure of
scarlet and black at the edge of the wood road, shuffling northward on
her long snowshoes, northward, as if in pursuit of the sound that had
gone before. She raised a mittened hand to him in ironic salutation.
She seemed to beckon, north--north--into the Silence. Crossman shook
himself. What was this miasma in his heart? He inhaled the vital air
and felt the rush of his blood in answer, realizing the splendour of
this beautiful, intensely living world of white and green, of sparkle
and prismatic brilliance. Its elemental power like the urge of the
world's youth.

But Aurore? His brain still heard the echo of her laugh. He cursed
savagely under his breath, and turned his back upon the Cure, unable
to face the scrutiny of those kind, troubled eyes.

"Jakapa will be here presently," he said over his shoulder. "That gong
carries ten miles if there's no wind. One ring, that's for the Boss;
two, call in for the whole gang; three, alarm--good as a telegraph or
the telephone as far as it goes. Meanwhile, if you'll excuse me, I'll
have a look at the larder."

Without a doubt, he reasoned, Aurore would have left their mid-day
meal ready. She would not return, he knew, until the guest had gone.
In the little overheated cook-house he found the meal set out. All was
in order. Then his eye caught a singular decoration fastened to the
door, a paper silhouette, blackened with charcoal, the shape of a
cassocked priest. The little cut-out paper doll figure was pinned to
the wood by a short, sharp kitchen knife driven viciously deep, and
the handle, quivering with the closing of the door, gave the illusion
that the hand that had delivered the blow must have only at that
instant been withdrawn.

Crossman shivered. He knew that world-old formula of hate; he knew of
its almost innocent use in many a white caban, but its older, deeper
meaning of demoniacal incantation rushed to his mind, somehow blending
with the wizardry with which he surrounded his thoughts of the strange
woman.

A step outside crunching in the snow. The door opened, revealing
Antoine Marceau. The huge form of the log-brander towered above him.
He could not read the expression of the eyes behind the square-cupped
snow spectacles.

"She tell me, Aurore," he rumbled, "that I am to come. We have the
company."

"Yes, the Cure of Portage Dernier." Crossman watched him narrowly.

Antoine took off the protecting wooden blinders and thrust them in his
pocket.

Crossman stood aside, hesitating. Antoine drew off his mittens with
businesslike precision, and placed a huge, capable hand on a pot-lid,
lifted it, and eyed the contents of the saucepan.

"The Cure, he like ptarmigan," he observed, "but," he added in a
matter-of-fact voice, "the Cure like not Aurore--he have tell you,
_hein_? Ah, well, why not? For him such as Aurore _are_ not--_voila_."

"The Cure says she is a devil." Crossman marvelled at his temerity,
yet he hung on the answer.

"Why not? For him, as I have say, she _is_ not--for _me_, for _you_,
ma frien', _that_ is different." Antoine turned on him eyes as
impersonal as those of Fate; where Crossman had expected to see
animosity there was none, only a strange brotherhood of pitying
understanding.

"For who shall forbid that the dawn she shall break--_hein_?" he
continued. "The Cure? Not mooch. When the Dawn she come, she come; not
with his hand can he hold her back. For me, now comes perhaps the
sunset; perhaps the dawn for you. But what would you? Who can put the
dog-harness on the wind, or put the bit in the teeth of the waterfall
to hold him up?"

"Or who with his hand can draw the Borealis from heaven?" Crossman cut
in. He spoke unconsciously. He had not wished to say that, he had not
wanted to speak at all, but his subconscious mind had welded the
thought of her so fast to the great mystery of the Northern Lights
that without volition he had voiced it.

Antoine Marceau nodded quietly. The strangely aloof acknowledgment of
Crossman's possible relation to this woman, _his_ woman, who yet was
not his or any man's, somehow shocked Crossman. His blood flamed at
the thought, and yet he felt her intangible, unreal. He had but to
look into her shifting, glittering eyes, and there were silence and
playing lights. Suddenly his vision of her changed, became human and
vital. He saw before him the sinuous movement of her strong young
body. He realized the living perfume of her, clean and fresh, faintly
aromatic as of pine in the sunlight, and violets in the shadow.

Antoine Marceau busied himself about the cook-house. He did not speak
of Aurore again, not even when his eye rested on the paper doll
skewered to the door by the deep-driven knife. He frowned, made the
sign of the cross, jerked out the knife, and thrust its point in the
purifying blaze of the charcoal fire. But he made no comment.

Crossman turned on his heel and entered the office-building. Through
the south window he saw Jakapa snowshoeing swiftly up the short
incline to the door; beside him walked the Cure, pleading and anxious.
He could follow the words as his lips framed them. In the present mood
Crossman did not wish to hear the Cure's denunciation. It was
sufficient to see that the Foreman had, evidently, no intention of
acting on the advice proffered.

As he softly closed the door between the main office and the living
room at the rear, he heard the men enter on a quick word of reproof in
the Cure's rich bass.

"She does her work sufficiently well, and I shall not order her from
the camp," Jakapa snapped in reply. "She is with Marceau; if he keeps
her in hand, what do I care? She leave him, that _his_ affair, _mon
Dieu, mon pere_."

"She has bewitched you, too, Jakapa. She has bewitched that other, the
young man who is here for the healing of his soul. What an irony, to
heal his soul, and she comes to poison it!"

"Heal his soul?" Jakapa laughed harshly. "He's had the weak lung,
shell-shock, and he's a friend of the owner. _Mon pere_, if he is here
for the good of his soul, that is _your_ province--but me?--I am here
to boss one job, and I boss him, that's all. I hope only you have not
driven the cook away, or the _pot-au-feu_, she will be thin." He tried
to speak the latter part of his sentence lightly, but his voice
betrayed his irritation.

Crossman opened the door and entered. "Antoine will be here in a
minute," he announced. "Aurore sent him back to feed the animals." He
took down the enamelled tin dishes and cups and set their places.
Jakapa eyed him covertly, with a half-sneering venom he had never
before shown.

It was a silent meal. The Cure sighed and shook his head at intervals,
and the Boss grumbled a few comments in answer to an occasional
question concerning his lumberjacks. Crossman sat in a dream. Could he
have understood aright when Antoine had spoken of the dawn?

Jakapa dropped a plate with a curse and a clatter. The sudden sound
ripped the sick man's nerves like an exploding bomb. White to the
lips, he jumped from his chair to meet the Boss's sneering eyes. The
Cure laid a gentle hand on his arm, and he settled back shamefacedly.

"Your pardon, _mon pere_--my nerves are on edge--excuse me--an
inheritance of the trenches."

"Emotion is bad for you, my son, and you should not emotion yourself,"
said the Priest gently.

"Do you travel far when you leave us now?" Crossman asked
self-consciously, anxious to change the subject.

"To the camp at the Chaumiere Noire, a matter of ten kilometres. It is
no hardship, my rounds, not at all, with the ground like a white
tablecloth, and this good sun, to me like to my dogs, it is but play."
He rose from the table, glad of the excuse to hasten his going, and
with scant courtesy Jakapa sped his guest's departure.

As the sled disappeared among the trees, bearing the queerly bundled
figure of the Priest, the Boss unhooked his snowshoes from the wall.
He seemed to have forgotten Crossman's presence, but as he turned, his
smouldering eyes lighted on him. He straightened with a jerk. "What
did he mean when he say, _she_ have bewitch _you_?" As always, when
excited, his somewhat precise English slipped back into the idiom of
the habitant. "By Gar! Boss or no Boss, I pack you out if I catch you.
We make no jealousies for any one, not where I am. You come here for
your health--_hein?_ Well, better you keep this place healthy for
you."

As if further to complicate the situation, the door opened to admit
the woman herself. She closed it, leaned against the wall, looking
from one to the other with mocking eyes.

"Well, do I leave? Am I to pack? Have you wash the hand of me to
please the Cure, yes?"

Jakapa turned on her brutally. "Get to the cook-house! Wash your dish!
Did I give orders to Antoine to leave hees work? By Gar! I feel like I
take you and break you in two!" He moved his knotted hands with a
gesture of destruction. There was something so sinister in the action
that, involuntarily, Crossman cried out a startled warning. Her laugh
tinkled across it.

"Bah!" she shrugged. "If you wish to kill, why do you not kill those
who make the interferre? Are you a man? What is it, a cassock, that it
so protect a man? But me, because I do not wear a woman's skirt, you
will break me, hey? _Me!_ Nevair mind, I prefer this man. He at least
make no big talk." She slipped her arm through Crossman's, letting her
fingers play down from his wrist to his finger-tips--and the thrill of
it left him tongue-tied and helpless.

Jakapa cursed and crouched low. He seemed about to hurl himself upon
the pair before him. Again she laughed, and her tingling, searching
fingers stole slowly over his throbbing pulses.

She released Crossman's arm with a jerk, and snapped the fingers that
had just caressed him in the face of the furious lumberman. "_Allons!_
Must I forever have no better revenge but to knife one paper doll? Am
I to be hounded like a beast, and threatened wherever I go? I am tired
of this dead camp. I think I go me down the river." She paused a
moment in her vehemence. Her next words came almost in a whisper:
"_Unless you can cross the trail to Chaumiere Noire--then_, maybe, I
stay with you--I say--maybe." With a single swooping movement of her
strong young arm she swept the door open, and came face to face with
Antoine Marceau. "What, thou?" she said airily.

He nodded. "Shall I go back, or do you want that I go to the other
side?" he asked the Foreman.

"Go to the devil!" growled Jakapa, and slinging his snowshoes over his
arm, he stamped out.

"_Tiens_!" said Antoine. "He is mad, the Boss."

"I think we are all mad," said Crossman.

"Maybe," said Antoine. Quietly he gathered together his axe, mittens,
and cap, and shrugging his huge shoulders into his mackinaw, looked
out at the glorious brightness of the stainless world and frowned.
"Come, Aurore," he said quietly.

A little later, as Crossman rose to replenish the dwindling fire, he
saw him, followed by Aurore, enter the northern end of the timber
limit. Were they leaving, Crossman wondered. Had the silent woodsman
asserted his power over the woman? Crossman took down the
field-glasses from the nail on the wall. They were the sole reminder,
here in the North Country, of his years of war service. He followed
the two figures until the thickening timber hid them. Idly he swept
the horizon of black-green trees, blue shadows, and sparkling snow. A
speck moved--a mackinaw-clad figure passed swiftly across the clearing
above the Little Bijou--only a glimpse--the man took to cover in the
burned timber, where the head-high brush made a tangle of brown above
which the gaunt, white, black-smeared arms of dead trees flung
agonized branches to the sky.--"The short-cut trail to Chaumiere
Noire"--"Shall I forever have no better revenge but to stab one paper
doll?" Her words echoed in his ears.

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