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C. A. Kincaid - "Deccan Nursery Tales"

Compiled by James D. Richardson - "A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk"

H. G. Wells - "What is Coming?"

E. Arnold Bennett - "The Regent"

Schuster song pokes fun at 'Puke Watson'
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Wiley Inks Deal with Meredith
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O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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




_Jakapa was on the short cut to the Chaumiere Noire_! Only Crossman's
accidental use of the field-glasses had betrayed his going. For an
instant Crossman's impulse was to rush out and ring the alarm on the
shrieking steel gong, but the next instant he laughed at himself. Yes,
surely, he was a sick man of many imaginings. The gang boss was gone
about his business. The log-brander had called upon his woman to
accompany him. That was all. Her angry words were mere threats--best
forgotten.

With nervous haste he bundled into his heavy garments and ran from
himself and his imaginings into the dazzling embrace of the sun.

He tramped to the gang at work above the Little Bijou Chute, where
they raced the logs to the iron-hard ice of the river's surface far
below. He even took a hand with the axe, was laughed at, and watched
the precision and power of the Jacks as they clove, swung, and lopped.
From the cliff he looked down at the long bunk-house, saw the blue
smoke rising straight, curled at the top like the uncoiling frond of a
new fern-leaf. Saw the Chinese cook, in his wadded coat of blue,
disappear into the snow-covered mound that hid the provision shack,
and watched the bounding pups refusing to be broken into harness by
Siwash George. It was all very simple, very real, and the twists of
his tired mind relaxed; his nervous hands came to rest in the warm
depths of his mackinaw pockets. The peace of sunned spaces and
flowing, clean air soothed his mind and heart.

The blue shadows lengthened. The gang knocked off work. The last log
was rushed down the satin ice of the chute to leap over its fellows at
the foot. The smell of bacon sifted through the odours of evergreen
branches and new-cut wood. Crossman declined a cordial invitation to
join the gang at chuck. He must be getting back, he explained, "for
chow at the Boss's."

Whistling, he entered the office, stirred up the fire, and crossed to
the cook-house. It was empty. The charcoal fire was out. Shivering, he
rebuilt it, looked through the larder, and hacked off a ragged slice
of jerked venison. A film of fear rose in his soul. What if they were
_really_ gone? What if Antoine _had_ taken her? It looked like it. His
heart sank. Not to see her again! Not to feel her strange, thrilling
presence! Not to sense that indomitable, insolent soul, throwing its
challenge before it as it walked through the world!

Crossman came out, returned to the office, busied himself in tidying
the living room and solving the disorder of his desk. The twilight
sifted over wood and hill, crept from under the forest arches, and
spread across the snow of the open. He lit the lamps and waited. The
silence was complete. It seemed as if the night had come and closed
the world, locking it away out of the reach even of God.

The meal Crossman had bunglingly prepared lay untouched on the table.
Now and then the crash of an avalanche of snow from the overburdened
branches emphasized the stillness. Dreading he knew not what, Crossman
waited--and loneliness is not good for a sick soul.

Thoughts began crowding, nudging one another; happenings that he had
dismissed as casual took on new and sinister meanings. "Two and two
together" became at once a huge sum, leaping to terrifying
conclusions. Then with the silence and the tense nerve-draw of waiting
came the sense of things finished--done forever. A vast, all-embracing
finality--"_Neant_"--the habitant expression for the uttermost
nothing, the word seemed to push at his lips. He wanted to say it, but
a premonition warned him that to utter it was to make it real.

Should he call upon the name of the Void, the Void would answer. He
feared it--it meant that She would be swallowed also in the great
gaping hollow of nothingness. He strained his ears for sounds of the
living world--the spit of the fire, the fall of clinkers in the grate,
the whisper of the wind stirring at the door. He tried to analyse his
growing uneasiness. He was sure now that she had followed Antoine's
bidding--forgetting him, if, indeed, her desires had ever reached
toward him.

Now she seemed the only thing that mattered. He must find her; he must
follow. Wherever she was, there only was the world of reality. Where
she was, was life. And to find her, he must find Antoine--and then,
without warning, the door gaped--and Antoine stood before him, like a
coloured figure pasted on the black ground of the night. Then he
entered, quiet and matter-of-fact. He nodded, closed the door against
the biting cold, pulled off his cap, and stood respectfully.

"It is no use to wait for the Boss; he will not come," said the
log-brander. "I came to tell Monsieur, before I go on, that le Cure is
safe at Chaumiere Noire. Yes, he is safe, and Monsieur Jakapa have
turn back, when I catch up with him and tell him----"

"What?" gasped Crossman.

"It was to do," the giant twisted his cap slowly, "but it was harder
than I think. It was not for jealousy, I beg you to know. That she
would go if she want--to who she want, she can. I have no right to
stop her. But she would have had the Cure knifed to death. She made
the wish, and she put her wish in the heart of a man. If it had not
been this time--then surely some other time. She always find a hand to
do her will--even this of mine--once. I heard her tell to Jakapa.
Therefore, Jakapa he has gone back to watch with her body. I told him
where. Me I go. There are for me no more dawns. You love her, too,
Monsieur, therefore, I come to tell you the end. _Bon soir,
Monsieur_."

He was gone. Again there was silence. Crossman sat rigid. What had
happened? His mind refused to understand. Then he visioned her, lying
on the white snow, scarlet under her breast, redder than her mackinaw,
redder than her woollen mittens, redder than the cardinal-flower of
her mouth--cardinal no more! "No, no!" he shrieked, springing to his
feet. His words echoed in the empty room. "No--no!--He couldn't kill
her!" He clung to the table. "No--no! No!" he screamed. Then he saw
her eyes; she was looking in through the window--yes, they were her
eyes--changing and glowing, eyes of mystery, of magic, eyes that made
the silence, eyes that called and shifted and glowed. He laughed.
Fools, fools! to think her dead! He staggered to the door and threw it
wide. Hatless, coatless, he plunged headlong into the dark--the Dark?
No! for she was there--on high, wide-flung, the banners of the Aurora
Borealis blazed and swung, banners that rippled and ran, banners of
rainbows, the souls of amethysts and emeralds, they fluttered in the
heavens, they swayed across the world, streamed like amber wine poured
from an unseen chalice, dropped fold on fold, like the fluttering
raiment of the gods.

In the north a great sapphire curtain trembled as if about to part and
reveal the unknown Beyond; it grew brighter, dazzling, radiant.

"Aurore!" he called. "Aurore!" The grip of ice clutched his heart.
Cold seized on him with unseen numbing hands. He was struggling,
struggling with his body of lead--for one step--just a step nearer the
great curtain, that now glowed warm--red--red as the ghost of her
cardinal-flower lips--pillars of light, as of the halls of heaven.
"Aurore!--Aurore!"



MR. DOWNEY SITS DOWN

By L.H. ROBBINS

From _Everybody's_


I

Jacob Downey waited in line at the meat shop. A footsore little man
was he. All day long, six days a week for twenty-two years, he had
stood on his feet, trotted on them, climbed on them, in the hardware
department of Wilbram, Prescot & Co., and still they would not
toughen; still they would hurt; still to sustain his spirit after
three o'clock he had to invoke a vision of slippers, a warm radiator,
the _Evening Bee_, and the sympathy of Mrs. Downey and the youngsters.
To the picture this evening he had added pork chops.

The woman next in line ahead of him named her meat. Said the butcher,
with a side glance at the clock, "A crown roast takes quite a while,
lady. Could I send it in the morning?"

No, the lady wished to see it prepared. Expressly for that purpose had
she come out in the rain. To-morrow she gave a luncheon.

"First come first served," thought Jacob Downey, and bode his time in
patience, feeling less pity for his aching feet than for Butcher
Myers. Where was the charity in asking a hurried man at five minutes
to six o'clock to frill up a roast that would not see the inside of
the oven before noon next day?

Now, crown roasts are one thing to him who waits on fallen arches, and
telephone calls are another. Scarcely had Downey's opening come to
speak for pork chops cut medium when off went the bell and off rushed
Butcher Myers.

Sharply he warned the unknown that this was Myers's Meat Shop. Blandly
he smiled into the transmitter upon learning that his caller was Mrs.
A. Lincoln Wilbram.

By the audience in front of the counter the following social
intelligence was presently inferred:

That Mr. and Mrs. Wilbram had just returned from Florida; that they
had enjoyed themselves ever so much; that they hoped Mr. Myers's
little girl was better; that they were taking their meals at the
Clarendon pending the mobilization of their house-servants; that they
expected to dine with the Mortimer Trevelyans this evening; that food
for the dog may with propriety be brought home from a hotel, but not
from the Mortimer Trevelyans; that there was utterly nothing in the
icebox for poor Mudge's supper; that Mudge was a chow dog purchased by
a friend of Mr. Wilbram's in Hongkong at so much a pound, just as Mr.
Myers purchased live fowls; that Mudge now existed not to become chow,
but to consume chow, and would feel grateful in his dog heart if Mr.
Myers would, at this admittedly late hour, send him two pounds of
bologna and a good bone; and that Mrs. Wilbram would consider herself
under deep and lasting obligation to Mr. Myers for this act of
kindness.

Mr. Myers assured Mrs. Wilbram that it would mean no trouble at all;
he would send up the order as soon as his boy came back from
delivering a beefsteak to the Mortimer Trevelyans.

He filled out a slip and stuck it on the hook.

"Now, Mr. Downey," he said briskly.

But Jacob Downey gave him one tremendous look and limped out of the
shop.


II

It was evening in the home of Miss Angelina Lance. Twenty-seven hours
had passed since Jacob Downey's exasperated exit from Myers's Meat
Shop. The eyes of Miss Angelina were bright behind her not-unbecoming
spectacles as she watched the face of the solemn young man in the
Morris chair near the reading lamp.

In his hand the solemn young man held three sheets of school
composition paper. As he read the pencil writing on page one he lost
his gravity. Over page two he smiled broadly. At the end of the last
page he said:

"D.K.T. couldn't have done better. May I show it to him?"

In the office of the Ashland (N.J.) _Bee_ the solemn young man was
known as Mr. Sloan. At Miss Lance's he was Sam. The mentioned D.K.T.
conducted the celebrated "Bee-Stings" column on the editorial page of
Mr. Sloan's journal, his levity being offset by the sobriety of Mr.
Sloan, who was assistant city-editor.

On two evenings a week Mr. Sloan fled the cares of the Fourth Estate
and became Sam in the soul-refreshing presence of Miss Angelina. He
was by no means her only male admirer. In the Sixth Grade at the
Hilldale Public School she had thirty others; among these Willie
Downey, whose name appeared on every page of the composition Mr. Sloan
had read.

With a host of other sixth-graders throughout the city Willie had
striven that day for a prize of ten dollars in gold offered by the
public-spirited A. Lincoln Wilbram, of Wilbram, Prescott & Co., for
the best schoolboy essay on Moral Principles.

"Moral principles, gentlemen; that is what we need in Ashland. How
many men do you know who stand up for their convictions--or have any
to stand up for?"

If the head of a department store is a bit thunderous at times, think
what a Jovian position he occupies. In his cloud-girt,
mahogany-panelled throne-room on the eighth floor he rules over a
thousand mortals, down to the little Jacob Downeys in the basement,
who, if they do not quite weep with delight when he gives them a
smile, tremble, at least, at his frown. When a large body of popular
opinion accords him greatness, were he not undemocratic to affect
humility and speak small?

"I speak of common men," said Mr. Wilbram (this was at a Chamber of
Commerce banquet); "of men whose living depends upon the pleasure of
their superiors. How few there are with fearless eye!"

He scarcely heard the laughter from a group of building contractors at
a side table, who had not seen a servile eye among their workmen in
many moons; for a worthy project had popped into his mind at that
instant. How was the moral backbone of our yeomanry to be stiffened
save through education? Why not a prize contest to stimulate the
interest of the rising generation in this obsolete subject?

In many an Ashland home where bicycles, roller-skates, wireless
outfits, and other such extravagances were strongly desired, the
question had since been asked: "Pa, what are Moral Principles?" While
some of the resulting essays indicated a haziness in paternal minds,
not so the production that Mr. Sloan read in Miss Lance's parlour.

"But I couldn't let you print it," said Miss Angelina. "I wouldn't
have Willie shamed for anything. He may be weak in grammar, but he is
captain of every athletic team in the school. He has told me in
confidence that he means to spend the prize money for a genuine
horse-hide catching-mitt."

"If I cross out his name, or give him a _nom de plume_?"

On that condition Miss Lance consented.


III

At the office next morning Sloan found the essay in his pocket and
looked around the city-room for D.K.T. The staff poet-clown was no
daylight saver; professing to burn the midnight oil in the interest of
his employer, he seldom drifted in before half-past nine.

"See me. S.S." wrote Sloan, and dropped Willie's manuscript on
D.K.T.'s desk.

Then he jumped and gasped, and copy-readers and office-boys jumped and
gasped, and the religious editor dashed frantically for the stairs,
outrunning the entire staff down the hall, though he had farther to go
than any other man or woman there. A huge, heart-stopping shock had
rocked the building, set the windows to clattering and the lights to
swinging, and brought down in a cloud the accumulated dust of a
quarter-century.

Within two minutes by the clock Sloan and five reporters had started
for the scene of the Rutland disaster, fifteen miles away, where
enough giant powder had gone up in one terrific blast to raze
Gibraltar. A thriving town lay in ruins; hundreds of families were
homeless; a steamship was sunk at her dock; a passenger train blown
from the rails.

At eleven o'clock on the night following that pitiful day Sloan
journeyed homeward to Ashland in an inter-urban trolley-car in company
with a crowd of refugees. A copy of the last edition of the _Bee_
comforted his weary soul.

The first page was a triumph. Count on the office to back up its men
in the field! There was the whole story, the whole horror and
heartbreak, finely displayed. There were his photographs of the
wreckage; there, in a "box" was his interview with the superintendent
of the Rutland Company; there was a map of the devastated area.
Perhaps someone had found time even to do an editorial; in that case
the clean-up would be complete.

Opening the paper to the sixth page, he groaned; for the first thing
that caught his eye was Willie Downey's essay, at the top of D.K.T.'s
column, with Willie's name below the headline.

MOREL PRINSAPLES

BY WILLIE DOWNEY

AGE 12

Morel Prinsaples is when you have a nerve to stick up for some thing.

Like last night my Father went in Mires meet shop & stood in line 15
or twenty min. wateing his tirn & when his tirn come he says to mr.
Mires Ile have 6 porc chops.

at that inst. the telaphone wrang & mr. Mires slidd for it like it was
2nd base.

Hold on Mires says Pa, who got here 1st, me or that bell wringer.
Igscuse me just 1 min. says Mr. mires.

No I be ding if Ile igscuse you says Pa, 1st come 1st served is the
rool of bizness all over.

But Mr. mires wyped his hands on his apern & ansered the wring & it
was mrs. Will Brum, she was going to eat out at a frends so she wanted
2 lbs, bolony & a dog bone.

So then Pa give him hale columbus.

Here I bin wateing 1/2 an our he said, yet when some lazy lofer of a
woman who has been reading a novvle or a sleep all after noon pfhones
you to rush her up some dog meet in youre Autto with gass 36 cts. &
charge it to her acct. & may be you wont get youre munny for three 4
munths, wy you run to wate on her while I stand & shovle my feet in
youre saw dust like a ding mexican pea own or some thing.

What says Pa is there about a cusstamer who takes the trubble to come
for his meet & pay cash for it & deliwers it him self that maiks him
so Meen & Lo that he hass to be pushed one side for some body that has
not got Gumpshun enoughf to order her dog bones before the rush our?

Do you think that people with a telapfhone's munny is any better than
mine, do you think because I walk in here on my hine leggs that I am a
piker & a cheep skait, becuase if so I will bring along my telapfhone
contract nex time & show you & then may be you will reckonnize me as a
free born amerrican who dont haff to traid where I haff to play 2d
fiddle to a chow pupp. Its agenst my morel prinsaples says Pa.

With theas wirds he walks out in the rane althogh his feet hurt him
clear down to Washington St. to the nex meet store, but by that time
they were all cloased up so we had prinsaples for supper insted of
porc chops.

Pa says if he run a store & had a pfhone & no body to anser it & do
nothing else he would ring it's neck, becuase while the telaphone is
the gratest blesing of the aige, but a pfhone with out an opperater is
like a ham ommalet with the ham let out. He says the reazon the Chane
Stores have such a pull with the public is becuase the man behine the
counter is not all the time jilting you in the middle of your order &
chacing off to be sweet to some sosciety dame with a dog 4 miles away.

Ma says she dont kno why we have a pfhone any how becuase every time
she is youseing it a woman buts in & jiggles the hook & says will you
pleas hang up so I can call a Dr. & when Ma hangs up & then lissens in
to see who is sick, wy this woman calls up a lady f rend & they nock
Ma back & 4th over the wyre for ours & some times they say I bet she
is lisening in on us dont you.

So as I say let us all stick up for our Morel Prinsaples like my
Father come what may.


IV

Bright were Miss Angelina's eyes but not with mirth. It was
unspeakable, this thing that Mr. Sloan had done. Thrice before bedtime
she called his lodgings. Mr. Sloan was not in.

Before the last call, she donned her wraps and went out to Plume
Street. Courageously she pulled the bell at Number Nine. Willie's
mother opened the door and cried, surprised, "Why! Miss Lance."

"Is Willie here? Have you seen the paper? Will you let me tell him how
it happened, and how sorry I am?"

Willie was not receiving callers this evening. He had been sent to bed
without supper. The explosion at Rutland had been as nothing, it
seemed, to the outburst in the Downey home.

Slowly the extent of the harm dawned upon Miss Angelina.

"It was Mrs. A. Lincoln Wilbram wanted the dog bone," said Mrs. Downey
tearfully. "Everybody will recognize her; and what Mr. Wilbram will do
to us we don't need to be told. Poor Jake is so upset he has gone out
to roam in the dark. He couldn't stay in the house."

New jobs were scarce for men at his time of life, and with his feet.
Dora and Jennie might have to leave high school.

"I'm sure you meant us no wrong, Miss Lance; I'm sure there was a
mistake. But think how dreadful it is, after twenty-two years of
having Mr. Wilbram's pay, then to turn around and backbite his wife
like that, right out in print!"

Doubly troubled now, Miss Lance departed. Attracted by a quick
gathering of loiterers in the avenue, she witnessed a controversy that
might easily have become a police matter.

"You're a liar if you say you said all that to me!" shouted the burly
Butcher Myers. "You never opened your head, you shrimp! Bawling me out
in the papers and losing me my best customers! Whaddye mean?"

Back came the retort from Jacob Downey with the snarl of a little
creature at bay.

"If I didn't say it to you then, you big lobster, I say it to you now.
All that the paper says I said I say. What'll you do about it?"

"Hah! You!" Myers snapped his fingers in Downey's fiery face and
turned away.

Miss Lance's path to the Hilldale School next morning took her past
three post-boxes. Into the third she dropped a note that she had
carried from home. Mr. Sloan would find her message exceedingly brief,
although (or, perhaps, because) she had spent hours in composing it.

DEAR SIR:

I regret to discover that you lack moral principles.

ANGELINA LANCE.

Just before the last bell the janitor brought in a prisoner for her
custody. Willie Downey's head was bloody but unbowed; three
seventh-graders he had vanquished in one round. "They guyed me," said
he. "They called me a Nawthour."

Morning prayer and song waited while teacher and pupil spoke earnestly
of many things; while the teacher's eyes filled with tears, and the
pupil's heart filled with high resolve to bring home the baseball
championship of the Ashland Public School League and lay it at Miss
Angelina's feet, or perish in the attempt.


V

The A. Lincoln Wilbram prize went to a small boy named Aaron Levinsky
whose English was 99 per cent. pure. Little Aaron's essay was printed
as the centre-piece in Wilbram, Prescott & Co.'s page in the _Bee_;
little Aaron invested his gold in thrift-stamps, and the tumult and
the shouting died.

Miss Angelina Lance sat alone every evening of the week. True, Mr.
Sloan had tried to right the wrong; he had called Miss Angelina on the
telephone, which he should have known was an inadequate thing to do;
he had also sent a ten-dollar bank-note to Willie, in care of Miss
Lance at the Hilldale School, together with his warm felicitations
upon Willie's success as a _litterateur_. Did Willie know that his
fine first effort had been reprinted, with proper credit, in the great
New York _Planet_?

True, too, the illustrious D.K.T. had written Miss Angelina an abject
apology, most witty and poetic, taking all the blame to himself and
more than exonerating his high-principled friend Mr. Sloan.

But the bank-note went back to its donor without even a rejection
slip; and D.K.T.'s humour was fatal to his client's cause. Ghastly are
they who jest in the shadow of tragedy. Mr. Sloan and D.K.T. did not
know, of course--Miss Angelina had not thought it of any use to tell
them--of the sword which they had hung up by a thread above the heads
of the Downeys.

As for Jacob Downey, he limped about amid his hardware in the basement
at Wilbram, Prescott & Co.s, careworn, haunted of eye, expecting the
house to crash about his ears at any moment. One does not with
impunity publish the wife of one's employer as a lazy loafer.

The A. Lincoln Wilbrams had servants again, and dined at home. To Mr.
Wilbram said Mrs. Wilbram one evening:

"It is the strangest thing. In the last month I've met scarcely a soul
who hasn't asked me silly questions about Mudge and his diet. Mrs.
Trevelyan and everybody. And they always look so queer."

Mr. Wilbram was reminded that while coming home that evening with a
package in his hand he had met Trevelyan, and Trevelyan had inquired:
"What's that? A bone for the dog?"

"To-morrow," said A. Lincoln, "I'll ask him what he was driving at."

"What was the package?" queried his wife.

He fetched it from the hall. It had come to him at the store that day
by registered mail.

"From Hildegarde," said Mrs. Wilbram, noting the Los Angeles postmark.
Hildegarde was honeymooning among the orange groves. Wrote the happy
bride:

Dear Aunt and Uncle:

Charles and I see by the paper that Mudge is hungry, so we are sending
him a little present.

"What can the child mean, Abe?"

"Don't ask me," he answered. "Undo the present and see."

They loosened blue ribbons and wrappings of soft paper, and disclosed
a link of bologna sausage.

Maddening? It might have been, if Hildegarde had not thought to
inclose a page from the _Daily Southern Californian_, upon which,
ringed with pencil marks, was a bit of miscellany headed, "Morel
Prinsaples."

They read it through to the conclusion:

So as I say let us all stick up for our Morel Prinsaples like my
Father come what may.--Willie Downey in Ashland (N.J.) _Bee_.

"Why!--why!--it's--it's me!" cried Mrs. Wilbram. "I did telephone to
Mr. Myers for two pounds of bologna and a dog bone--on the night we
dined at the Trevelyans'!"

"It comes mighty close to libel," fumed Wilbram.