O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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

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"How do they dare! You must see Worthington Oakes about this, Abe."

"I certainly will," he vowed.

VI

He certainly did, as Mr. Worthington Oakes, the publisher of the
_Bee_, will testify. In the front office on the editorial floor he saw
Mr. Oakes for a bad half-hour, and demanded a public retraction of the
insult.

At about the same time a dapper stranger who had come up in the
elevator with Mr. Wilbram held speech with Assistant City-Editor Sloan
in the local room at the other end of the hall.

"Yonder's your bird," said Mr. Sloan, pointing to a poetic-looking
young man at a desk in a corner.

Crossing to the poet, who was absorbed in his day' poesy and talking
to himself as he versified, the stranger smiled and spoke.

"Am I addressing the celebrated D.K.T.?"

"Am, cam, dam, damn, ham, jam, lamb----"

The far-away look of genius faded out of the poet's eyes.

"Not buying," said he. "My pay-envelope is mortgaged to you
book-agents for ten years to come. Ma'am, ram, Sam, cram, clam, gram,
slam----"

"Books are not my line," said the dapper one briskly. "I represent the
Jones-Nonpareil Newspaper Syndicate. In fact, I am Jones. I have a
proposition to make to you, Mr. D.K.T., that may enable you to buy
more books than you can ever read. You know, of course, what the
Jones-Nonpareil service is. We reach the leading dailies of the United
States and Canada----"

"Have a chair, Mr. Jones."

"Thank you. We handle some very successful writers. Malcomb Hardy, you
may have heard, takes his little five hundred a week out of us; and
poor Larry Bonner pulled down eleven hundred as long as he had health.
His Chinese-laundryman sketches might be selling yet."

"Suspense is cruel," spoke D.K.T. eagerly. "Let the glad news come."

"Some time ago," said the syndicate man, "you printed in your column
an essay in imitation of a schoolboy's. You called it 'Moral
Principles'."

D.K.T. sank back with a low moan.

"If you can write six of those a week for a year," continued the
visitor, "you won't ever need to slave any more. You can burn your pen
and devote the rest of your life to golf and good works."

The poet closed his eyes. "Sham, swam, diagram," he murmured.

"Does a minimum guarantee of fifteen thousand a year look like
anything to you? There will, of course, be the book rights and the
movie rights in addition."

"Anagram, epigram, telegram, flimflam--aha!" cried D.K.T. "Siam!" He
wrote it down.

"That little skit of yours," pursued the caller, "has swept the
country. You have created a nation-wide demand. My ringer is on the
journalistic pulse, and I know. Can you repeat?"

He drew a paper from his pocketbook.

"Here is a list of subjects your imaginary Willie Downey might start
with: The Monetary System; the Cost of Living; the League of Nations;
Capital and Labour----"

Over the stranger's head an office-boy whispered significantly: "Front
office."

"Excuse me," said the poet, and hurried away.

With the publisher, in the front office, sat A. Lincoln Wilbram, quite
purple in the cheeks. They had a file of the _Bee_ before them.

"Diedrick," said Mr. Oakes, "on March eighteenth you printed this
thing"--his finger on Willie's essay--"why did you do it?"

"What's the matter with it?" replied D.K.T.

"The matter with it," spoke Mr. Wilbram terribly, "is that it slanders
my wife. It makes her out to eat dog bones. Friends of ours as far
away as California have seen it and recognized her portrait, drawn by
your scurrilous pen. The worst of it is, the slander is founded on
fact. By what right do you air my domestic affairs before the public
in this outrageous fashion?"

With agonized eyes the funny-man read the essay as far as the fateful
line, "It was Mrs. Will Brum."

"My gosh!" he cried.

"How did you come to write such a thing?" Mr. Oakes demanded.

"Me write that thing? If I only had!"

The facts were recalled; the sending of Mr. Sloan and many reporters
to Rutland; the need of extra hands at the copy-table that day.

"I found this contribution on my desk. It looked safe. In the rush of
the morning I sent it up and never gave it another thought."

"So it is really a boy's essay, and not some of your own fooling?"
asked Oakes.

"A boy's essay, yes; entered in Mr. Wilbram's prize contest,
eliminated by the boy's teacher and shown by her to Mr. Sloan, who
brought it to the shop. I know now that Sloan meant me to change the
author's name to save the kid from ridicule. If there were actual
persons in it, I'm as amazed as Mrs. Wilbram."

"I wonder, Oakes," said Wilbram, "that a dignified newspaper like
yours would print such trash, in the first place."

Worthington Oakes looked down his nose. D.K.T. took up the challenge.

"Trash, sir? If it's trash, why has the Ashland Telephone asked
permission to reprint it on the front cover of their next directory?"

"Have they asked that?"

"They have; they say they will put a little moral principle into the
telephone hogs in this town. And didn't a Fifth Avenue minister preach
a sermon on it last Sunday? Doesn't the _Literary Review_ give it half
a page this week? Hasn't it been scissored by almost every exchange
editor in the land? Isn't there a man in the city-room now offering me
fifteen thousand a year to write a daily screed like it?"

"You can see, Wilbram," said Mr. Oakes, "that there was no intention
to injure or annoy. We are very sorry; but how can we print an apology
to Mrs. Wilbram without making the matter worse?"

"Who is this Willie Downey?" demanded Wilbram. "And who is the school
teacher?"

"I don't believe my moral principles will let me tell you," replied
D.K.T. "I'm positive Mr. Sloan's won't let him. We received the essay
in confidence."

"Enough said," Mr. Wilbram exclaimed, rising. "Good day to you. I
don't need your help, anyway. I'll find out from the butcher."

VII

It seemed necessary that Mr. Sloan should call at the Lance home that
evening. Whatever Miss Angelina might think of him, it was his duty to
take counsel with her for the welfare of Willie.

He began with the least important of the grave matters upon his mind.

"Do you suppose your _protege_ could write some essays like the one we
printed?"

"Why, Mr. Sloan?"

If Miss Angelina had responded, "Why, you hyena?" she would not have
cut him more deeply than with her simple, "Why, Mr. Sloan?"

"A newspaper syndicate," he explained, "has offered D.K.T. a fortune
for a series of them."

"Poor Willie!" she sighed. "He flunked his English exam, to-day. I'm
afraid I shall have him another year."

"He is a lucky boy," said Sloan.

"Do you think so?"

Clearly her meaning was, "Do you think he is lucky when a powerful
newspaper goes out of its way to crush him?"

"There is no use approaching him with a literary contract?"

"Not with the baseball season just opening. His team beat the
Watersides yesterday, sixteen nothing. He has more important business
on hand than writing for newspapers."

Since Sloan wrote for a newspaper, this was rather a dig.
Nevertheless, he persevered.

"A. Lincoln Wilbram is on his trail. Do you know that Willie libelled
Mrs. Wilbram?"

"Oh! Sam. Surely I know about the libel. But is--is Mr. Wilbram
really----Has he discovered?"

"He came to the office to-day. We gave him no information; but he has
other sources. He is bound to identify his enemy before he quits."

"I didn't know about the so-called slander at first," said she, "when
I--when you----"

"When I promised to change Willie's name?"

"I found out when I went to them, on the night it came out in the
paper. They were woefully frightened. They are frightened still. Mr.
Downey has worked for Mr. Wilbram since he was a boy. They think of
Mr. Wilbram almost as a god. It's--it's a tragedy, Sam, to them."

"Would it do any good to warn them?"

"They need no warning," said Miss Angelina. "Don't add to their
terrors."

"I am more sorry than I can say. May I hope to be forgiven some day?"

"There's nothing to forgive, Sam. It was an accident. But don't you
see what a dangerous weapon a newspaper is?'

"Worse than a car or a gun," he agreed.

As he strolled homeward along a stately avenue, wondering what he
could do to avert the retribution that moved toward the Downeys, and
finding that his assistant city-editor's resourcefulness availed him
naught, he heard the scamper of feet behind him and whirled about with
cane upraised in time to bring a snarling chow dog to a stand.

"Beat it, you brute!" he growled.

"Yeowp!" responded the chow dog, and leaped in air.

"Don't be alarmed," spoke a voice out of the gloom of the nearest
lawn. "When he sees a man with a stick, he wants to play."

Sloan peered at the speaker's face. "Isn't this Mr. Wilbram? You were
at the _Bee_ office to-day, sir. May I have a word with you about the
Willie Downey matter?"

"Come in," said Mr. Wilbram.

VIII

On the first pay-day in May the impending sword cut its thread. Said a
messenger to Jacob Downey: "They want you on the eighth floor." Downey
set his jaws and followed.

In the mahogany-panelled room A. Lincoln Wilbram turned from the
window and transfixed his servitor with eyes that bored like steel
bits.

"Downey, I understand you have a literary son."

Jacob held his breath, eyed his accuser steadily, and assured himself
that it would soon be over now.

"How about it, Downey?"

"I know what you mean, sir."

"Did you say the things printed there?"

The little man wasted no time in examining the newspaper clipping.

"Yes, sir, I did. If it has come to your lady's ears what I called
her, I beg her pardon. But what I said I'll stick to. If I stand
fifteen minutes in line in a meat store or any other kind of store,
I've got a right to be waited on ahead of anybody that rings up, I
don't give a ding who she is."

"Good for you, Downey. Let me see, how long have you worked for us?"

"Twenty-three years next January, sir."

"Floor salesman all the while?"

"Since 1900. Before that I was a wrapper."

"How many men have been promoted over your head?"

"Three."

"Four," Wilbram corrected. "First was Miggins."

"I don't count him, sir. Him and I started together."

"Miggins was a failure. Then Farisell; now in prison. Next, McCardy;
he ran off to Simonds & Co. the minute they crooked a finger at him.
Last, young Prescott, who is now to come up here with his father.
Could you run the department if you had it?"

"Between you and I," replied Jacob Downey, sick, dizzy, trembling, "I
been running the department these fifteen years."

"How'd you like to run it from now as manager? When I find a man with
convictions and courage I advance him. The man who stands up is the
man to sit down. That's evolution. If you could stand up to a big
butcher like Myers and talk Dutch to him the way you did, I guess we
need you at a desk. What do you say?"

A desk! A chance to rest his feet! Jacob Downey stiffened.

"Mr. Wilbram, I--I got to tell the truth. I never said those things to
Myers. I just walked out."

"But you said them. You acknowledge it."

"I said 'em, yes--after I got home. To the family I said 'em. When I
was in the meat shop I only thought 'em."

"So Myers has told me," said Jove, smiling. "Downey, my man, you've
got more than moral courage. You've got common sense to go with it.
Tell young Prescott to give you his keys."

THE MARRIAGE IN KAIRWAN

By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From _Harper's_

Kairwan the Holy lay asleep, pent in its thick walls. The moon had
sunk at midnight, but the chill light seemed scarcely to have
diminished; only the limewashed city had become a marble city, and all
the towers turned fabulous in the fierce, dry, needle rain of the
stars that burn over the desert of mid-Tunisia.

In the street Bab Djedid the nailed boots of the watch passed from
west to east. When their thin racket had turned out and died in the
dust of the market, Habib ben Habib emerged from the shadow of a door
arch and, putting a foot on the tiled ledge of Bou-Kedj's fry shop,
swung up by cranny and gutter till he stood on the plain of the
housetops.

Now he looked about him, for on this dim tableland he walked with his
life in his hands. He looked to the west, toward the gate, to the
south, to the northeast through the ghostly wood of minarets. Then,
perceiving nothing that stirred, he went on moving without sound in
the camel-skin slippers he had taken from his father's court.

In the uncertain light, but for those slippers and the long-tasselled
_chechia_ on his head, one would not have taken him for anything but a
European and a stranger. And one would have been right, almost. In the
city of his birth and rearing, and of the birth and rearing of his
Arab fathers generations dead, Habib ben Habib bel-Kalfate looked upon
himself in the rebellious, romantic light of a prisoner in
exile--exile from the streets of Paris where, in his four years, he
had tasted the strange delights of the Christian--exile from the
university where he had dabbled with his keen, light-ballasted mind in
the learning of the conqueror.

Sometimes, in the month since he had come home, he had shaken himself
and wondered aloud, "Where am I?" with the least little hint, perhaps,
of melodrama. Sometimes in the French cafe outside the walls, among
the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to
chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the
bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face
pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened
mockery, he would break off suddenly, "_Voila, Messieurs!_ you will
see that I am the best of Mussulmans!" He would laugh then in a key so
high and restless that the commandant, shaking his head, would murmur
to the lieutenant beside him, "One day, Genet, we must be on the alert
for a dagger in that quarter there, eh?"

And Genet, who knew almost as much of the character of the university
Arab as the commandant himself, would nod his head.

When Habib had laughed for a moment he would grow silent. Presently he
would go out into the ugly dark of the foreign quarter, followed very
often by Raoul Genet. He had known Raoul most casually in Paris. Here
in the Tunisian _bled_, when Raoul held out his hand to say good-night
under the gate lamp at the Bab Djelladin, the troubled fellow clung to
it. The smell of the African city, coming under the great brick arch,
reached out and closed around him like a hand--a hand bigger than
Raoul's.

"You are my brother: not they. I am not of these people, Raoul!"

But then he would go in, under the black arch and the black shade of
the false-pepper trees. In the darkness he felt the trees, centuries
old, and all the blank houses watching him....

To-night, stealing across the sleeping roofs, he felt the star-lit
mosque towers watching him in secret, the pale, silent espionage of
them who could wait. The hush of the desert troubled him. Youth
troubled him. His lips were dry.

He had come to an arbour covered with a vine. Whose it was, on what
house-holder's roof it was reared, he had never known. He entered.

"She is not here." He moistened his lips with his tongue.

He sat down on the stone divan to wait, watching toward the west
through the doorway across which hung a loop of vine, like a snake.

He saw her a long way off, approaching by swift darts and intervals of
immobility, when her whiteness grew a part of the whiteness of the
terrace. It was so he had seen her moving on that first night when,
half tipsy with wine and strangeness, he had pursued, caught her, and
uncovered her face.

To-night she uncovered it herself. She put back the hooded fold of her
_haik_, showing him her face, her scarlet mouth, her wide eyes, long
at the outer corners, her hair aflame with henna.

The hush of a thousand empty miles lay over the city. For an hour
nothing lived but the universe, the bright dust in the sky....

That hush was disrupted. The single long crash of a human throat!
Rolling down over the plain of the housetops!

"_La illah il Allah, Mohammed rassoul'lah! Allah Akbar!_ God is
great!"

One by one the dim towers took it up. The call to prayer rolled
between the stars and the town. It searched the white runways. It
penetrated the vine-bowered arbour. Little by little, tower by tower,
it died. In a _fondouk_ outside the gate a waking camel lifted a
gargling wail. A jackal dog barked in the Oued Zaroud two miles away.
And again the silence of the desert came up over the city walls.

Under the vine Habib whispered: "No, I don't care anything about thy
name. A name is such a little thing. I'll call thee 'Nedjma,' because
we are under the stars."

"_Ai, Nedjmetek_--'Thy Star'!" The girl's lips moved drowsily. In the
dark her eyes shone with a dull, steady lustre, unblinking,
unquestioning, always unquestioning.

That slumberous acquiescence, taken from all her Arab mothers, began
to touch his nerves with the old uneasiness. He took her shoulders
between his hands and shook her roughly, crying in a whisper:

"Why dost thou do nothing but repeat my words? Talk! Say things to me!
Thou art like the rest; thou wouldst try to make me seem like these
Arab men, who wish for nothing in a woman but the shadow of
themselves. And I am not like that!"

"No, _sidi_, no."

"But talk! Tell me things about thyself, thy life, thy world. Talk! In
Paris, now, a man and a woman can talk together--yes--as if they were
two friends met in a coffeehouse. And those women can talk! Ah! in
Paris I have known women--"

The girl stirred now. Her eyes narrowed; the dark line of her lips
thinned. At last something comprehensible had touched her mind.

"Thou hast known many women, then, _sidi_! Thou hast come here but to
tell me that? Me, who am of little beauty in a man's eyes!"

Habib laughed under his breath. He shook her again. He kissed her and
kissed her again on her red lips.

"Thou art jealous, then! But thou canst not comprehend. Canst thou
comprehend this, that thou art more beautiful by many times than any
other woman I have ever seen? Thou art a heaven of loveliness, and I
cannot live without thee. That is true ... Nedjma. I am going to take
thee for my wife, because I cannot live without thine eyes, thy lips,
the fragrance of thy hair.... Yes, I am going to marry thee, my star.
It is written! It is written!"

For the first time he could not see her eyes. She had turned them
away. Once again something had come in contact with the smooth, heavy
substance of her mind. He pulled at her.

"Say! Say, Nedjma!... It is written!"

"It is not written, _sidi_." The same ungroping acquiescence was in
her whisper. "I have been promised, _sidi_, to another than thee."

Habib's arms let go; her weight sank away in the dark under the vine.
The silence of the dead night crept in and lay between them.

"And in the night of thy marriage, then, thy husband--or thy father,
if thou hast a father--will kill thee."

"_In-cha-'llah_. If it be the will of God."

Again the silence came and lay heavy between them. A minute and
another minute went away. Habib's wrists were shaking. His breast
began to heave. With a sudden roughness he took her back, to devour
her lips and eyes and hair with the violence of his kisses.

"No, no! I'll not have it! No! Thou art too beautiful for any other
man than I even to look upon! No, no, no!"

* * * * *

Habib ben Habib walked out of the gate Djelladin. The day had come;
the dawn made a crimson flame in the false-pepper trees. The life of
the gate was already at full tide of sound and colour, braying,
gargling, quarrelling--nomads wading in their flocks, Djlass
countrymen, Singalese soldiers, Jewish pack-peddlers, Bedouin women
bent double under their stacks of desert fire-grass streaming inward,
dust white, dust yellow, and all red in the dawn under the red wall.

The flood ran against him. It tried to suck him back into the maw of
the city. He fought against it with his shoulders and his knees. He
tried now to run. It sucked him back. A wandering _Aissaoua_ plucked
at his sleeve and held under his nose a desert viper that gave off
metallic rose glints in its slow, pained constrictions.

"To the glory of Sidna Aissa, master, two sous."

He kept tugging at Habib's sleeve, holding him back, sucking him back
with his twisting reptile into the city of the faithful.

"In the name of Jesus, master, two copper sous!"

Habib's nerves snapped. He struck off the holy mendicant with his
fist. "That the devil grill thee!" he chattered. He ran. He bumped
into beasts. He bumped into a blue tunic. He halted, blinked, and
passed a hand over his hot-lidded eyes. He stammered:

"My friend! I have been looking for you! _Hamdou lillah! El
hamdou'llah_!"

Raoul Genet, studying the flushed, bright-eyed, unsteady youth, put up
a hand to cover a little smile, half ironic, half pitying.

"So, Habib ben Habib, you revert! Camel-driver's talk in your mouth
and camel's-hide slippers on your feet. Already you revert! Eh?"

"No, that is not the truth. But I am in need of a friend."

"You look like a ghost, Habib." The faint smile still twisted Raoul's
lips. "Or a drunken angel. You have not slept."

"That's of no importance. I tell you I am in need--"

"You've not had coffee, Habib. When you've had coffee--"

"Coffee! My God! Raoul, that you go on talking of coffee when life and
death are in the balance! For I can't live without--Listen, now!
Strictly! I have need to-night--to-morrow night--one night when it is
dark--I have need of the garrison car."

The other made a blowing sound. "I'm the commandant, am I, overnight?
_Zut_! The garrison car!" Habib took hold of his arm and held it
tight. "If not the car, two horses, then. And I call you my friend."

"_Two_ horses! Ah! So! I begin to perceive. Youth! Youth!"

"Don't jibe, Raoul! I have need of two horses--two horses that are
fast and strong."

"Are the horses in thy father's stable, then, of no swiftness and of
no strength?"

It was said in the _patois_, the bastard Arabic of the Tunisian
_bled_. A shadow had fallen across them; the voice came from above.
From the height of his crimson saddle Si Habib bel-Kalfate awaited the
answer of his son. His brown, unlined, black-bearded face, shadowed in
the hood of his creamy burnoose, remained serene, benign, urbanely
attendant. But if an Arab knows when to wait, he knows also when not
to wait. And now it was as if nothing had been said before.

"Greeting, my son. I have been seeking thee. Thy couch was not slept
upon last night."

Habib's face was sullen to stupidity. "Last night, sire, I slept at
the _caserne_, at the invitation of my friend, Lieutenant Genet, whom
you see beside me."

The Arab, turning in his saddle, appeared to notice the Christian for
the first time. His lids drooped; his head inclined an inch.

"Greeting to thee, oh, master!"

"To thee, greeting!"

"Thou art in well-being?"

"There is no ill. And thou?"

"There is no ill. That the praise be to God, and the prayer!"

Bel-Kalfate cleared his throat and lifted the reins from the neck of
his mare.

"Rest in well-being!" he pronounced.

Raoul shrugged his shoulders a little and murmured: "May God multiply
thy days!... And yours, too," he added to Habib in French. He bowed
and took his leave.

Bel-Kalfate watched him away through the thinning crowd, sitting his
saddle stolidly, in an attitude of rumination. When the blue cap had
vanished behind the blazing corner of the wool dyers, he threw the
reins to his Sudanese stirrup boy and got down to the ground. He took
his son's hand. So, palm in palm, at a grave pace, they walked back
under the arch into the city. The market-going stream was nearly done.
The tide, against which at its flood Habib had fought and won ground,
carried him down again with its last shallow wash--so easily!

His nerves had gone slack. He walked in a heavy white dream. The city
drew him deeper into its murmurous heart. The walls pressed closer and
hid him away. The _souks_ swallowed him under their shadowy arcades.
The breath of the bazaar, fetor of offal, stench of raw leather, and
all the creeping perfumes of Barbary, attar of roses, chypre and amber
and musk, clogged his senses like the drug of some abominable
seduction. He was weary, weary, weary. And in a strange, troubling way
he was at rest.

"_Mektoub_! It is written! It is written in the book of the destiny of
man!"

With a kind of hypnotic fascination, out of the corners of his eyes,
he took stock of the face beside him, the face of the strange being
that was his father--the broad, moist, unmarked brow; the large eyes,
heavy-lidded, serene; the full-fleshed cheeks from which the beard
sprang soft and rank, and against which a hyacinth, pendent over the
ear, showed with a startling purity of pallor; and the mobile,
deep-coloured, humid lips--the lips of the voluptuary, the eyes of the
dreamer, the brow of the man of never-troubled faith.

"Am I like that?" And then, "What can that one be to me?"

As if in answer, bel-Kalfate's gaze came to his son.

"I love thee," he said, and he kissed Habib's temple with his lips.
"Thou art my son," he went on, "and my eyes were thirsty to drink of
the sight of thee. It is _el jammaa_." [Friday, the Mohammedan
Sabbath.] "It is time we should go to the prayer. We shall go with
Hadji Daoud to-day, for afterward, there at the mosque, I have
rendezvous with his friends, in the matter of the dowry. It is the
day, thou rememberest, that he appointed."

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