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O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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




"He'd ought to go to jail, Dammy," said Mrs. Egg. "It's just awful! I
bet the police are lookin' for him right now."

"Mamma, if we put him in jail this'll be all over the county and
you'll never hear the end of it."

She stared at the ape with loathing. There was a star tattooed on one
of his naked insteps. He looked no longer frail, but wiry and
snakelike. The pallor behind his dark tan showed the triangles of
black stain in his cheeks and eye sockets.

"He's too smart to leave loose, Dammy."

"It'll be an awful joke on you, Mamma."

"I can't help it, Dammy. He----"

The prisoner figure toppled back against Adam's breast and the mouth
opened hideously. The lean legs bent.

"You squeezed him too tight, Dammy. He's fainted. Lay him down."

Adam let the figure slide to the floor. It rose in a whirl of blue
linen. Mrs. Egg rocked on the chest.

The man thrust something at Adam's middle and said in a rasp, "Get
your arms up!"

Adam's face turned purple beyond the gleaming skull. His hands rose a
little and his fingers crisped. He drawled,

"Fact. I ought have looked under your duds, you----"

"Stick 'em up!" said the man.

Mrs. Egg saw Adam's arms tremble. His lower lip drew down. He wasn't
going to put his arms up. The man would kill him. She could not
breathe. She fell forward from the ice chest and knew nothing.

She roused with a sense of great cold and was sitting against the
shelves. Adam stopped rubbing her face with a lump of ice and grinned
at her.

He cried, "By gee, you did that quick, Mamma! Knocked the wind clear
out of him."

"Where is he, Dammy?"

"Dunno. Took his gun and let him get dressed. He's gone. Say, that was
slick!"

Mrs. Egg blushed and asked for a drink. Adam dropped the ice into a
mug of pear cider and squatted beside her with a shabby notebook.

"Here's somethin' for October 10, 1919." He read: "'Talked to a man
from Ilium to-day in Palace Bar. Myrtle married to John Egg. Four
children. Egg worth a wad. Dairy and cider business. Going to build
new Presbyterian church.' That's it, Mamma. He doped it all out from
the diary."

"The dirty dog!" said Mrs. Egg. She ached terribly and put her head on
Adam's shoulder.

"I'll put all the diaries up in the attic. Kind of good readin.' Say,
it's after two. You better go to bed."

In her dreams Mrs. Egg beheld a bronze menacing skeleton beside her
pillow. It whispered and rattled. She woke, gulping, in bright
sunlight, and the rattle changed to the noise of a motor halting on
the drive. She gave yesterday a fleet review, rubbing her blackened
elbows, but felt charitable toward Frisco Cooley by connotation; she
had once sat down on a collie pup. But her bedroom clock struck ten
times. Mrs. Egg groaned and rolled out of bed, reaching for a wrapper.
What had the cook given Adam for breakfast? She charged along the
upper hall into a smell of coffee, and heard Adam speaking below. His
sisters made some feeble united interjection.

The hero said sharply: "Of course he was a fake! Mamma knew he was,
all along, but she didn't want to let on she did in front of folks.
That ain't dignified. She just flattened him out and he went away
quiet. You girls always talk like Mamma hadn't as much sense as you.
She's kind of used up this morning. Wait till I give her her
breakfast, and I'll come talk to you."

A tray jingled.

Mrs. Egg retreated into her bedroom, awed. Adam carried in her
breakfast and shut the door with a foot.

He complained: "Went in to breakfast at Edie's. Of course she's only
sixteen, but I could make better biscuits myself. Lay down, Mamma."

He began to butter slices of toast, in silence, expertly. Mrs. Egg
drank her coffee in rapture that rose toward ecstasy as Adam made
himself a sandwich of toast and marmalade and sat down at her feet to
consume it.



THE VICTIM OF HIS VISION

By GERALD CHITTENDEN

From _Scribner's_


I

"There's no doubt about it," said the hardware drummer with the
pock-pitted cheeks. He seemed glad that there was no doubt--smacked
his lips over it and went on. "Obeah--that's black magic; and
voodoo--that's snake-worship. The island is rotten with 'em--rotten
with 'em."

He looked sidelong over his empty glass at the Reverend Arthur
Simpson. Many human things were foreign to the clergyman: he was
uneasy about being in the _Arequipa's_ smoke-room at all, for
instance, and especially uneasy about sitting there with the drummer.

"But--human sacrifice!" he protested. "You spoke of human sacrifice."

"And cannibalism. _La chevre sans cornes_--the goat without
horns--that means an unblemished child less than three years old. It's
frequently done. They string it up by its heels, cut its throat, and
drink the blood. Then they eat it. Regular ceremony--the _mamaloi_
officiates."

"Who officiates?"

"The _mamaloi_--the priestess."

Simpson jerked himself out of his chair and went on deck. Occasionally
his imagination worked loose from control and tormented him as it was
doing now. There was a grizzly vividness in the drummer's description.
It was well toward morning before Simpson grasped again his usual
certainty of purpose and grew able to thank God that he had been born
into a very wicked world. There was much for a missionary to do in
Hayti--he saw that before the night grew thin, and was glad.

Between dawn and daylight the land leaped out of the sea, all clear
blues and purples, incomparably fresh and incomparably 111 wistful in
that one golden hour of the tropic day before the sun has risen very
high--the disembodied spirit of an island. It lay, vague as hope at
first, in a jewel-tinted sea; the ship steamed toward it as through
the mists of creation's third morning, and all good things seemed
possible. Thus had Simpson, reared in an unfriendly land, imagined it,
for beneath the dour Puritanism that had lapped him in its armour
there still stirred the power of wonder and surprise that has so often
through the ages changed Puritans to poets. That glimpse of Hayti
would remain with him, he thought, yet within the hour he was striving
desperately to hold it. For soon the ruffle of the breeze died from
off the sea, and it became gray glass through which the anchor sank
almost without a sound and was lost.

"Sweet place, isn't it, Mr. Simpson?" said Bunsen, the purser, pausing
on his way to the gangway.

"So that," Simpson rejoined slowly--and because it was a port of his
desire his voice shook on the words--"is Port au Prince!"

"That," Bunsen spat into the sea, "is Port au Prince."

He moved away. A dirty little launch full of uniforms was coming
alongside. Until the yellow flag--a polite symbol in that port--should
be hauled down Simpson would be left alone. The uniforms had climbed
to the deck and were chattering in a bastard patois behind him; now
and then the smell of the town struck across the smells of the sea and
the bush like the flick of a snake's tail. Simpson covered his eyes
for a moment, and immediately the vision of the island as he had seen
it at dawn swam in his mind. But he could not keep his eyes forever
shut--there was the necessity of living and of doing his work in the
world to be remembered always. He removed his hand. A bumboat was made
fast below the well of the deck, and a boy with an obscenely twisted
body and a twisted black face was selling pineapples to the sailors.
Simpson watched him for a while, and because his education had been
far too closely specialized he quoted the inevitable:

"Where every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile"

The verse uplifted him unreasonably. He went below to pack his
baggage. He said good-bye to the officers, painfully conscious that
they were grinning behind his back, and was rowed ashore by the
deformed boy.

The boy said something in abominable French. He repeated it--Simpson
guessed at its meaning.

"I shall stay a long time," he answered in the same language. "I am a
minister of the gospel--a missionary."

The cripple, bent revoltingly over his oar, suddenly broke out into
laughter, soulless, without meaning. Simpson, stung sharply in his
stiff-necked pride, sprang up and took one step forward, his fist
raised. The boy dropped the oars and writhed to starboard, his neck
askew at an eldritch angle, his eyes glaring upward. But he did not
raise a hand to ward off the blow that he feared, and that was more
uncanny still.

The blow never fell. Simpson's hand unclinched and shame reddened in
his face.

"Give me the oars," he said. "_Pauvre garcon_--did you think that I
would strike you?"

The boy surrendered the oars and sidled aft like a crab, his eyes
still rolling at his passenger.

"Why should the maimed row the sound?" said Simpson.

He rowed awkwardly. The boy watched him for a moment, then grinned
uncertainly; presently he lolled back in the stern-sheets, personating
dignity. A white man was doing his work--it was splendid, as it should
be, and comic in the extreme. He threw back his head and cackled at
the hot sky.

"Stop that!" Simpson, his nerves raw, spoke in English, but the
laughter jarred to a blunt end. The boy huddled farther away from him,
watching him with unwinking eyes which showed white all around the
pupil. Simpson, labouring with the clumsy oars, tried to forget him.
It was hot--hotter than it had seemed at first; sweat ran into his
eyes and he grew a little dizzy. The quarantine launch with its load
of uniforms, among which the purser's white was conspicuous, passed,
giving them its wake; there was no sound from it, only a blaze of
teeth and eyeballs. Simpson glanced over his shoulder at it. The
purser was standing in the stern, clear of the awning, his head
quizzically on one side and a cigarette in his fingers.

The rowboat came abreast of a worm-eaten jetty.

"_Ici_," said the cripple.

Simpson, inexpert, bumped into it bow on, and sculled the stern
around. The cripple, hideously agile, scrambled out and held the boat;
Simpson gathered up his bag and followed.

A Roman priest, black as the top of a stove, strode down the jetty
toward them.

"You--you!" he shouted to the cripple when he was yet ten strides
away. His voice rose as he approached. "You let the m'sieu' row you
ashore! You----" A square, heavy boot shot out from beneath his
cassock into the boy's stomach. "_Cochon_!" said the priest, turning
to Simpson. His manner became suddenly suave, grandiose. "These
swine!" he said. "One keeps them in their place. I am Father Antoine.
And you?"

"Simpson--Arthur Simpson." He said his own name slowly as thought
there was magic in it, magic that would keep him in touch with his
beginnings.

"Simpson?" The priest gave it the French sound; suspicion struggled
for expression on his black mask; his eyes took in the high-cut
waistcoat, the unmistakable clerical look. "You were sent?"

"By the board of foreign missions."

"I do not know it. Not by the archbishop?"

"There is no archbishop in my Church."

"In your Church?" Father Antoine's eyes sprang wide--wide as they had
been when he kicked the boatman. "In your Church? You are not of the
true faith, then?"

Pride of race, unchastened because he had not till that moment been
conscious that it existed in him, swelled in Simpson.

"Are you?" he asked.

Father Antoine stared at him, not as an angry white man stares, but
with head thrown back and mouth partly open, in the manner of his
race. Then, with the unreasoned impetuousness of a charging bull, he
turned and flung shoreward down the pier. The cripple, groaning still,
crawled to Simpson's feet and sat there.

"_Pauvre garcon_!" repeated Simpson dully. "_Pauvre garcon_!"

Suddenly the boy stopped groaning, swung Simpson's kit-bag on his
shoulder, and sidled up the pier. His right leg bent outward at the
knee, and his left inward; his head, inclined away from his burden,
seemed curiously detached from his body; his gait was a halting sort
of shuffle; yet he got along with unexpected speed. Simpson, still
dazed, followed him into the Grand Rue--a street of smells and piled
filth, where gorged buzzards, reeking of the tomb, flapped upward
under his nose from the garbage and offal of their feast. Simpson
paused for a moment at the market-stalls, where negroes of all shades
looked out at him in a silence that seemed devoid of curiosity. The
cripple beckoned him and he hurried on. On the steps of the cathedral
he saw Father Antoine, but, although the priest must have seen him, he
gave no sign as he passed. He kept to what shade there was. Presently
his guide turned down a narrow alley, opened a dilapidated picket
gate, and stood waiting.

"_Maman_!" he called. "_Oh! Maman_!"

Simpson, his curiosity faintly stirring, accepted the invitation of
the open gate, and stepped into an untidy yard, where three or four
pigs and a dozen chickens rooted and scratched among the bayonets of
yucca that clustered without regularity on both sides of the path. The
house had some pretensions; there were two stories, and, although the
blue and red paint had mostly flaked away, the boarding looked sound.
In the yard there was less fetor than there had been outside.

"_Maman_!" called the boy again.

A pot-lid clashed inside the house, and a tall negress, dressed in a
blue-striped Mother Hubbard, came to the door. She stared at Simpson
and at the boy.

"_Qui_?" was all she said.

The boy sidled nearer her and dropped the bag on the threshold.

"_Qui_?" she said again.

Simpson waited in silence. His affairs had got beyond him somehow, and
he seemed to himself but the tool of circumstance. It did occur to
him, though dimly, that he was being introduced to native life rather
quickly.

The cripple, squatting with his back against the bag, launched into a
stream of patois, of which Simpson could not understand a word.
Gestures explained somewhat; he was reenacting the scenes of the last
half hour. When he had finished, the negress, not so hostile as she
had been but by no means friendly, turned to Simpson and looked at him
a long time without speaking. He had all he could do not to fidget
under her gaze; finally, she stood aside from the door and said,
without enthusiasm:

"_B'en venu. C'est vo' masson_."

Simpson entered automatically. The kitchen, with its hard earth floor
and the sunlight drifting in through the bamboo sides, was not
unclean, and a savoury smell came from the stew-pot on the ramshackle
stove. In one of the bars of sunlight a mango-coloured child of two
years or so was playing with his toes--he was surprisingly clean and
perfectly formed.

"_Aha, mon petit_!" exclaimed Simpson. He loved children. "He is
handsome," he added, addressing the woman.

"Mine!" She turned the baby gently with her foot; he caught at the hem
of her dress, laughing. But she did not laugh. "Neither spot nor
blemish," she said, and then: "He is not yet three years old."

Simpson shuddered, recalling the pock-marked drummer on the
_Arequipa_. That was momentary--a coincidence, he told himself. The
woman was looking down at the child, her eyes softer than they had
been, and the child was lying on its back and playing with her Mother
Hubbard.

The woman lifted the lid from the pot and peered into it through the
sun-shot steam.

"It is ready," she said. She lifted it from the stove and set it on
the earthen floor. The cripple placed a handful of knives and spoons
on the table and three tin plates; he thrust a long fork and a long
spoon into the pot and stood aside.

"Seat yourself," said the woman, without looking at Simpson, "and
eat."

She explored the pot with the fork, and stabbed it firmly--there was a
suggestion of ruthlessness about her action that made Simpson shudder
again--into a slab of meat, which she dropped on a plate, using a
callous thumb to disengage it from the tines. She covered it with
gravy and began to eat without further ceremony. The cripple followed
her example, slobbering the gravy noisily; some of it ran down his
chin. Neither of them paid any attention to Simpson.

He took the remaining plate from the table and stood irresolute with
it in his hand. He was hungry, but his essential Puritan
fastidiousness, combined with that pride of race which he knew to be
un-Christian, rendered him reluctant to dip into the common pot or to
eat on equal terms with these people. Besides, the sun and his amazing
introduction to the island had given him a raging headache: he could
not think clearly nor rid himself of the sinister suggestion of the
town, of the house, of its three occupants in particular.

The child touched a ringer to the hot lip of the pot, burned itself,
and began to cry.

"_Taise_," said the woman. Her voice was low but curt, and she did not
raise her eyes from her plate. The child, its finger in its mouth,
stopped crying at once.

Simpson shook himself; his normal point of view was beginning to
assert itself. He must not--must not hold himself superior to the
people he expected to convert; nothing, he insisted to himself, was to
be gained, and much might be lost by a refusal to meet the people "on
their own ground." Chance--he did not call it chance--had favoured him
incredibly thus far, and if he failed to follow the guidance that had
been vouchsafed him he would prove himself but an unworthy vessel. He
took up the long fork--it chattered against the pot as he seized
it--and, overcoming a momentary and inexplicable nausea, impaled the
first piece of meat that rolled to the surface. There were yams also
and a sort of dumpling made of manioc. When he had filled his plate he
rose and turned suddenly; the woman and the cripple had stopped eating
and were watching him. They did not take their eyes away at once but
gave him stare for stare. He sat down; without a word they began to
eat once again.

The stew was good, and once he had begun Simpson ate heartily of it.
The tacit devilry fell away from his surroundings as his hunger grew
less, and his companions became no more than a middle-aged negress in
a turban, a black boy pitifully deformed, and a beautiful child. He
looked at his watch--he had not thought of the time for hours--and
found that it was a little after noon. It was time that he bestirred
himself and found lodgings.

"Is there a hotel?" he asked cheerfully. He had noticed that the
islanders understood legitimate French, though they could not speak
it.

"There is one," said the woman. She pushed away her plate and became
suddenly dourly communicative. "But I doubt if the _proprietaire_
would find room for m'sieu'."

"Has he so many guests, then?"

"But no. M'sieu' has forgotten the priest."

"The priest? What has he to do with it?"

"My son tells me that m'sieu' offended him, and the _proprietaire_ is
a good Catholic. He will close his house to you."

She shaved a splinter to a point with a table knife and picked her
teeth with it, both elbows on the table and her eyes on Simpson.
"There is nowhere else to stay," she said. "Unless--here."

"I should prefer that," said Simpson--quickly, for reluctance and
distrust were rising in him again. "But have you a room?"

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at a door behind her.

"There," she said. Simpson waited for her to move, saw that she had no
intention of doing so, and opened the door himself.

The room was fairly large, with two windows screened but unglazed; a
canvas cot stood in one corner, a packing-box table and a decrepit
chair in another. Like the kitchen it was surprisingly clean. He
returned to his hostess, who showed no anxiety about his intentions.

"How much by the week?" he asked.

"Eight _gourdes_."

"And you will feed me for how much?"

"Fifteen _gourdes_."

"I will take it." He forced himself to decision again; had he
hesitated he knew he would have gone elsewhere. The price also--less
than four dollars gold--attracted him, and he could doubtless buy some
furniture in the town. Moreover, experienced missionaries who had
talked before the board had always emphasized the value of living
among the natives.

"_B'en_," said the negress. She rose and emptied the remains from her
plate into a tin pail, sponging the plate with a piece of bread.

"I have a trunk on the steamer," said Simpson. "The boy--can he----"

"He will go with you," the negress interrupted.

The cripple slid from his chair, scraped his plate and Simpson's, put
on his battered straw hat, and shambled into the yard. Simpson
followed.

He turned at the gate and looked back. The child had toddled to the
door and was standing there, holding on to the door-post. Inside, the
shadow of the woman flickered across the close bars of bamboo.


II

Bunsen was standing on the jetty when they reached it talking
excitedly with a tall bowed man of fifty or so whose complexion showed
the stippled pallor of long residence in the tropics.

"Here he is now!" Bunsen exclaimed as Simpson approached. "I was just
getting anxious about you. Stopped at the hotel--you hadn't been
there, they said. Port au Prince is a bad place to get lost in.
Oh--this gentleman is our consul. Mr. Witherbee--Mr. Simpson."

Simpson shook hands. Witherbee's face was just a pair of dull eyes
behind a ragged moustache, but there was unusual vigour in his grip.

"I'll see a lot of you, if you stay long," he said. He looked at
Simpson more closely. "At least, I hope so. But where have you been? I
was getting as anxious as Mr. Bunsen--afraid you'd been sacrificed to
the snake or something."

Simpson raised a clerical hand, protesting. His amazing morning swept
before his mind like a moving-picture film; there were so many things
he could not explain even to himself, much less to these two Gentiles.

"I found lodgings," he said.

"Lodgings?" Witherbee and Bunsen chorused the word. "Where, for
heaven's sake?"

"I don't know the name of the street," Simpson admitted. "I don't even
know the name of my hostess. That"--indicating the cripple--"is her
son."

"Good God!" Witherbee exclaimed. "Madame Picard! The _mamaloi_!"

"The--the what?" But Simpson had heard well enough.

"The _mamaloi_--the _mamaloi_--high priestess of voodoo."

"Her house is fairly clean," Simpson said. He was hardly aware of his
own inconsequence. It was his instinct to defend any one who was
attacked on moral grounds, whether they deserved the attack or not.

"Ye-es," Witherbee drawled. "I dare say it is. It's her company that's
unsavoury. Especially for a parson. Eh? What's the matter now?"

Simpson had flared up at his last words. His mouth set and his eyes
burned suddenly. Bunsen, watching him coolly, wondered that he could
kindle so; until that moment he had seemed but half alive. When he
spoke his words came hurriedly--were almost unintelligible; yet there
was some quality in his voice that compelled attention, affecting the
senses more than the mind.

"Unsavoury company? That's best for a parson. 'I come not to bring the
righteous but sinners to repentance.' And who are you to brand the
woman as common or unclean? If she is a heathen priestess, yet she
worships a god of some sort. Do you?" He stopped suddenly; the
humility which men hated in him again blanketed his fanaticism. "It is
my task to give her a better god--the only true God--Christ."

Bunsen, his legs wide apart, kept his eyes on the sea, for he did not
want to let Simpson see him smiling, and he was smiling. Witherbee,
who had no emotions of any sort, pulled his moustache farther down and
looked at the clergyman as though he were under glass--a curiosity.

"So you're going to convert the whole island?" he said.

"I hope to make a beginning in the Lord's vineyard."

"Humph! The devil's game-preserve, you mean," Bunsen suddenly broke
in.

"The devil's game-preserve, then!" Simpson was defiant.

"The ship calls here every other Saturday," was all Bunsen said to
that. "You may need to know. I'll send your trunk ashore."

He stepped into the cripple's boat and started for the ship. Witherbee
did not speak; Simpson, still raging, left him, strode to the end of
the pier, and stood there, leaning on a pile.

His gust of emotion had left him; a not unfamiliar feeling of
exaltation had taken its place. It is often so with the extreme
Puritan type; control relaxed for however brief a moment sends their
slow blood whirling, and leaves them light-headed as those who breathe
thin air. From boyhood Simpson had been practised in control, until
repression had become a prime tenet of his faith. The cheerful and
generally innocent excursions of other men assumed in his mind the
proportions of crime, of sin against the stern disciplining of the
soul which he conceived to be the goal of life. Probably he had never
in all his days been so shocked as once when a young pagan had scorned
certain views of his, saying; "There's more education--soul education,
if you will have it--in five minutes of sheer joy than in a century of
sorrow." It was an appalling statement, that--more appalling because
he had tried to contradict it and had been unable to do so. He himself
had been too eager to find his work in life--his pre-ordained
work--ever to discover the deep truths that light-heartedness only can
reveal; even when he heard his call to foreign missions--to Hayti, in
particular--he felt no such felicity as a man should feel who has
climbed to his place in the scheme of things. His was rather the
sombre fury of the Covenanters--an intense conviction that his way was
the only way of grace--a conviction that transcended reason and took
flight into the realm of overmastering emotion--the only overmastering
emotion, by the way, that he had ever experienced.