O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

V >> Various >> O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919

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Kan Wong slid into its waterfront turmoil, an infinitesimal human atom
added to it. His tiny craft fixed itself upon the outer edge of the
wriggling river life like a coral cell attaching itself to a slow
growing atoll. From there he worked his way inshore, crawling over the
craft that stretched out from the low banks as a water beetle might move
over the flotsam and jetsam caught in the back-water of a sluggish
stream. Once in the narrow, crowded streets of the city itself, he
roamed aimlessly, open-eyed to its wonders, dreamily observant. Out of
the native quarter and into the foreign section he moved, accustoming
himself to these masters of mystery whom he was about to serve, calling
sluggish memory to his aid as his cars strove to reconstruct The meaning
of the barbarous jargon.

Into the quarter where the Foreign Devils and the native population came
together to barter and to trade, he strayed one day. A Foreign Devil in
a strangely unattractive uniform was addressing a crowd of coolies in
their own tongue. Kan Wong attached himself to the outer edge of the
impassively curious throng, his ears alert, his features, as ever, an
imperturbable mask. The foreign officer, for such he seemed to be, was
making an offer to the assemblage for contract labour: one dollar a day,
with rice, fish, and tea rations, for work in a foreign land. Kan Wong
translated the money quickly into _yens_. The sum seemed incredible to
him. What service would he not perform for such payment? Why, within a
year, or two at the very most, with careful frugality, he might return
and buy himself a junk worthy of his Dragon dreams of the river. And
then ...

The officer talked on, persuading, holding out the glittering lure of
profit and adventure. Kan Wong listened eagerly. He had thought there
was a ban on contract labour, but perhaps this new Republican
Government, so friendly to the Foreign Devil, had removed it. Surely one
who wore the uniform of a soldier and an officer could not thus publicly
solicit coolies without the sanction of the mandarins, or escape their
notice.

Kan Wong studied the crowd. It contained a few Chinese soldiers, who
were obviously keeping order. He was satisfied, and edged his way closer
to the speaker. There, already, ranged to one side was a line of his own
kind, jabbering to a Celestial who put down their names on slips of rice
paper and accepted their marks, which they made with a bamboo brush,
that they bonded themselves to the adventure. Kan Wong gained the
signing table. Picking up the brush, he set his name, the name of one
of the Dragon's blood, to the contract, accepted a duplicate, and
stepped back into the waiting line.

His pay and his rations, he was told, would begin two days hence, when
he was to report to the fire junk now lying at the dock, awaiting the
human cargo of which he was a part. Kan Wong memorized the directions as
he turned away from his instructing countryman. Of the Foreign Devil he
took no further notice. Time enough for that when he passed into
service. The God of Luck had smiled upon his boldness, and, reflecting
upon it Kan Wong turned back to the river and the sampan that had so
long been his floating home. No sentimental memories, however, clung
about it for him. Its freight of dreams he had landed here in Shanghai,
marketing them for a realization. The sampan now was but the empty shell
of a water beetle, that had crawled upon the bank into the sun of
Fortune to spill forth a dragon fly to try newly found wings of
adventure.

He found a customer, and, with much haggling after the manner of his
kind, disposed of his boat, the last tie, if tie there was, that bound
him to his present life. Waterman he had always been, and now had come
to him the call of the Father of All Waters. The tang of the salt in his
nostrils conjured up dreams as magical as those invoked by the wand of
the poppy god. Wrapped in their rosy mantle, he walked the streets for
the next two days, and on the third he took his way to the dock where
lay the fire junk that was to bear him forth into the wonders of the
Foreign Devils' land. Larger she loomed than any he had ever seen,
larger, oh, much larger, than those which had steamed up the Yangtze in
swanlike majesty. But this huge bulk was grey--grey and squat and
powerful. Once aboard, he found it crowded with an army of chattering
coolies. They swarmed in the hold like maggots. Every inch of space was
given over to them, an army, it seemed to Kan Wong, in which he was all
but lost.

Day after day across the waste of water the ship took its eastern way.
Never had Kan Wong dreamed there was so much water in the world. The
broad, long river that had been his life's path seemed but a narrow
trickle on the earth's face compared with this stretch of sea that never
ended, though the days ran into weeks. The land coolies chafed and found
much sickness in the swell but Kan Wong, used ever to a moving deck,
round the way none too long, and smiled softly to himself as he counted
up the dollars they were paying him for the keenest pleasure he had ever
known.

At last land appeared. The ship swung into the dock, disclosing to the
questioning eyes of Kan Won and his kind a new strange land. In orderly
discipline they were marched off the vessel and on to the dock. But rest
was not theirs as yet, nor was this their final destination. From the
fire junk they boarded the flying iron horse of the Foreign Devils;
again they were on the move. Swiftly across the land they went, over
high mountains crowded with eternal snow, thence down upon brown,
rolling plains as wide as the flat stretches of the broad Yangtze
Valley; eastward, ever eastward, through a land sparsely peopled for all
its virgin fertility. Behind their flying progress the days
dropped--one, two, three, four, at last five; and then they entered a
more populous region. Kan Wong, his nose flattened against the glass
that held the moving picture as in a frame, wondered much at the magic
that unrolled to his never-sated eyes. Yet the journey's end was beyond
his questioning.

Once more they came to a seaport. Marching from the carriages, once more
they beheld the sea. But this time it was different--more turbulent,
harsher, more sombre with the hint of waiting storms. Was there, then,
more than one ocean, Kan Wong asked himself? He found that it was indeed
so when once more a fire junk received them. This one was greyer than
the first that they had known. Upon her decks were guns and at her side
were other junks, low, menacing, with a demon flurry of vicious speed,
and short, squat funnels that belched dense smoke clouds. Within the
town were many Foreign Devils, all dressed alike in strange drab
uniforms; on the docks and here and there at other places they bore
arms and other unmistakable equipment of fighting men, which even Kan
Wong could not but notice.

The grey ship moved into a cold grey fog. With it other ships as grey
and as crowded, ships that crawled with men, strange Foreign Devils who
clanked with weapons as they walked aboard. Again a waste of water,
through which the ship seemed to crawl with a caution that Kan Wong
felt, but did not understand. With it on either side, moved those other
junks--squat, menacing, standing low on the horizon, but as haunting as
dark ghosts. Where were they bound, this strangely mixed fleet? Often
Kan Wong pondered this, but gave it no tongue to his fellow-passengers,
holding a bit aloof from them by virtue of his caste.

Again they neared the shore, where other boats, low-built and bristling
with guns, flew swiftly out to meet them like fierce ocean birds of
prey. Now they skirted high, bleak cliffs, their feet hid in a lather of
white foam; then they rounded the cliffs and passed into a storm-struck
stretch of sea through which they rolled to a more level land, off which
they cast anchor. The long ocean journey was finished at last.

There was a frantic bustle at this port, increasing a hundredfold when
once they set foot upon the land. Men--men were everywhere; men in
various uniforms, men who spoke various tongues in a confusing babel,
yet they all seemed intent upon one purpose, the import of which Kan
Wong could but vaguely guess. All about them was endless movement, but
no confusion, and once ashore their work commenced immediately.

From the fleet of fire junks various cargoes were to be unloaded with
all speed, and at this the coolies toiled. Numberless crates, boxes, and
bags came ashore to be stowed away in long, low buildings, or loaded
into long lines of rough, boxlike carriages that then went scurrying off
behind countless snorting and puffing fire-horses to the east, always to
the east and north. Strange engines, which the Foreign Devils saw to it
that they handled most tenderly, were also much in evidence, and always,
at all hours the uniformed men with their bristling arms and clanking
equipment crowded into the carriages and were whisked off to the east,
always to the east and north. They went with much strange shouting and,
to Kan Wong's ears, discordant sounds that they mistook for music. Yet
now and then other strings of carriages came back from the east and
north, with other men--men broken, bloody, lacking limbs, groping in
blindness, their faces twisted with pain as they were loaded into the
waiting fire-junks to recross the rough sea.

Then came the turn of the coolies to be crowded into the boxlike
carriages and to be whisked off to the east. With them went
tools--picks, shovels, and the like--for further work, upon the nature
of which Kan Wong, unquestioning, speculated. It was a slow, broken
journey that they made. Every now and then they stopped that other
traffic might pass them, going either way; mostly the strange men in
uniforms, bristling with guns, hurrying always to the east and north.

At last they too turned north, and as they did so the country, which had
been smiling, low, filled with soft fields and pretty, nestling houses,
little towns and quiet, orderly cities, changed to bleak fields, cut and
seared as by a simoom's angry breath. Still there were little towns--or
what had been little towns, now tumbled ruins--fire-smitten, gutted,
their windows gaping like blind eyes in the face of a twisted cripple.
Off to the east hung angry clouds from which the thunder echoed
distantly; a thunder low, grumbling, continual, menacing, and through
the clouds at night were lightning flashes of an angry red. Toward this
storm it seemed that all the men were hurrying, and so too were the
coolies of whom Kan Wong was one. Often they chattered speculatively of
the storm beyond. What did it mean? Why did the men hurry toward instead
of away from it? Truly the ways of the Foreign Devils were strange!

As they drew nearer to the storm, the river dreams of Kan Wong returned.
This was indeed the land of the Dragon's wrath. The torn and harrowed
fields, the empty, broken towns, the distant, grumbling storm, and the
armed men, hurrying, always hurrying toward the east and north where the
clouds darkened and spread--all this was in the tales that his father's
father had told him of those fifteen mad years when the Yangtze Valley
crouched trembling under the fiery breath of the Dragon's wrath. Here
once more he saw the crumbling towers and walls of Hang Gow in fresh
rain. Here was the ruthless wreck that even nature in her fiercest mood
could never make. Truly the lure of the Dragon's blood in him was
drawing him, magnet-like, to the glory of his ancestors.

The one who had them in charge and spoke their tongue gave them their
tools and bade them dig narrow ditches head deep. From them they ran
tunnels into deep caves hollowed out far under the ground. They burrowed
like moles, cutting galleries here and there, reinforcing them with
timbers, and lining them with a stone which they made out of dust and
water. Many they cut, stretching far back behind the ever present storm
in front of them, while from that storm cloud, in swift and unseen
lightning bolts that roared and burst and destroyed their work often as
fast as it was completed, fell death among them, who were only
labourers, not soldiers, as Kan Wong now knew those Foreign Devils in
the strange and dirty uniforms to be.

As the storm roared on, never ceasing, it stirred the Dragon's blood in
Kan Wong's veins. The pick and shovel irked his hands as he swung them;
his palms began to itch for the weapons that the soldiers bore. Now and
then he came upon a gun where it had dropped from its owner's useless
hands. He studied its mechanism, even asking the Foreign Devil overseer
how it was worked, and, being shown, he remembered and practised its use
whenever opportunity offered. He took to talking with his
fellow-workers, some of whom had themselves fought with the rebels of
New China, who, with just such Foreign Devils' tools, had clipped the
claws of the Manchu Dragon, freeing the Celestial Kingdom forever from
its crooked grip. He took much interest in these war implements. He
became more intimate and friendly with his fellows, feeling them now to
be brothers in a danger that had awakened the soldier soul beneath the
brown of his coolie skin.

Little could he make of all the strife about him. All of which he was
sure was that this was the Dragon's Field, and he, a Son of the Dragon,
had been guided to it to fulfil a destiny his forefathers had begun in
the Yangtze Valley when with the "Hairy Rebels" they had waged such war
as this. The flying death all about him that now and then claimed toll
of one of his own kind was but a part of it; but all the time he grew to
hate his humble work and long for a part, a real part, in the fighting
that raged ahead, where an unseen enemy, of whom he grew to think as his
own, hurled destruction among them. Often he spoke of this to the gang
under him, imbuing them with the spirit of the Dragon's blood that,
eager to fulfil its destiny, once more boiled within him.

Then one day the storm grew more furious. The thunder was a continual
roll, and both from the front and rear flew the whining lightning bolts,
spewing out death and destruction. Many a coolie fell, his dust buried
under the dust of this fierce foreign land, never to be returned and
mixed with that of his own Flowery Kingdom. Now and then came "stink
pots," filling the air with such foul vapours that men coughed out their
lives in the putrid fumes. The breath of the Dragon, fresh from his
awful mouth, was wrapped about them in hot wrath.

Past them the soldiers streamed, foul with fight, their hot guns
spitting viciously back into the rolling, pungent grey fog that followed
them malignantly. Confusion reigned, and in that confusion a perfect
riot of death. On all sides the soldiers fell, blighted by the Dragon's
breath. The coolies crouched in the heaped-up ruins of their newly dug
ditches, knowing not which way to turn, bereft of leadership since the
Foreign Devil who commanded them was gone, buried beneath a pile of
earth where a giant cracker had fallen.

Suddenly Kan Wong noticed that there were no more soldiers save only
those who lay writhing or in still, twisted heaps upon the harrowed
ground. The coolie crowd huddled here alone, clutching their futile
picks and shovels, grovelling in helpless panic. Disaster had overtaken
them. The Dragon was upon them, and they were unprotected. All about
them in scattered heaps lay discarded equipment, guns, even the
sharp-barking death-spitting, tiny instrument that the soldiers handled
so lovingly and so gently when it was not in action. But those who
manned the weapons had passed on, back through the thick curtain of
smoke that hung between them and the comparative safety of the rear.

Kan Wong's eyes were ahead, striving to pierce the pungent veil that hid
the enemy. Suddenly his keen eyes noted them--the strange uniforms and
stranger faces, ducking forward here and there through the hell of their
own making. The blood of the Dragon within him boiled up, now that the
enemy was really near enough to feel the teeth and claws of the Dragon's
whelps. This was the hour for which he had lived. This was the Tai-ping
glory come again for him to share. Reaching down, he picked up the rifle
of a fallen soldier, fondled its mechanism lovingly for a moment, and
then, cuddling it tenderly beneath his chin, his finger bade it spit
death at the misty grey figures crawling through the greyer fog in
front.

When the magazine was exhausted he filled it with fresh clips and turned
with the authority he had always wielded, and a new one that they
instantly recognized, upon his shivering countrymen.

"What are ye?" he yelled with withering scorn. "Sons of pigs who root in
the dung of this Foreign Devil's land, or men of the Dragon's blood? Are
ye the scum of the Yangtze River or honourable descendants of the Hairy
Rebels? Would ye avenge your brothers who have choked to death in the
breath of the stink-pots that have been flung among us? Will ye let
escape this horde of Foreign Devil enemies who have hurled at us giant
crackers that have spit death, now that they are near enough to feel how
the Dragon's blood can strike? Here are the Dragon's claws!" He waved
his bayoneted gun aloft. "Will ye die like men, or like slinking rats
stamped into the earth? All who are not cowards--come!" He waved the way
through the smoke to the grey figures emerging from it.

The Chinaman is no coward when once aroused. Death he faces as he faces
life, stoically, imperturbably. The coolies, reaching for the nearest
weapons, followed the man who showed the Dragon's blood. Many of them
understood the use of arms, having borne them for New China. Death was
upon them, and they went to meet it with death in their hands.

Kan Wong dragged up an uninjured machine gun the crew of which lay about
it. Fitting the bands of cartridges as he had seen the gunners do, he
turned the crank and swung it round on its revolving tripod. Before its
vicious rain he saw the grey figures fall, and a great joy welled up in
his breast. He signalled for other belts and worked the gun faster.
Round him the coolies rallied; others beyond the sound of his voice
joined in from pure instinct. The grey figures wavered, hesitated,
melted back into the smoke, and then strove to work around the fire of
the death-spitting group. But the Dragon's blood was up, the voice of
the Dragon's son cheered and directed the snarling, roused whelps to
whom war was an old, old trade, forgotten, and now remembered in this
strange, wild land. The joy of slaughter came savagely upon them. The
death that they had received they now gave back. In the place the white
men had fled, the yellow men now stood, descendants of the Tai-pings, as
fierce and wild as their once Hairy brothers.

Meanwhile, behind them the retreating line halted, stiffened by hurried
reinforcements. The officers rallied their men, paused and looked back
through the smoke. The line had given way and they must meet the
oncoming wave. Quickly reforming, they picked their ground for a stand
and waited. The moments passed, but no sign of the victors.

"What the hell is up?" snarled one of the reinforcing officers. "I
thought the line had given way."

"It has," replied the panting, battle-torn commander. "My men are all
back here; there's no one in front but the enemy!"

"What's that ahead, then?" The sharp bark of rifles, the _rat-a-tat_ of
machine guns, the boom of bursting grenades, and the yells, groans,
screams and shouts of the hand-to-hand conflict came through the
curtaining smoke in a mad jumble of savage sound.

"Damned if I know! We'd better find out!" They began moving their now
rallied men back into it.

Suddenly they came upon it--a writhing mass of jeans-clad coolies,
wild-eyed, their teeth bared in devilish, savage grins, their hands busy
with the implements of death, standing doggedly at bay before grey waves
that broke upon them as a sullen sea breaks and recedes before a jutting
point of land ...

With the reinforcements the tide turned, ebbing back in a struggling,
writhing fury, and soon the ground was clear again of all save the wreck
that such a wave leaves behind it. Once the line was re-established and
the soldiers holding it steadily, the coolies, once more the wielders of
pick and shovel, returned to the work of trench repairing, leaving the
fighting to those to whom it belonged.

The officers were puzzled. What had started them? What had injected that
mad fighting spirit into their yellow hides? What had caused them to
make that swift, wild, wonderful stand?

"Hey, you, John!" The commanding officer addressed one of them when a
lull came and they were busy again at the tumbled earth. "What you fight
for, hey?"

The coolie grinned foolishly.

"Him say fight. Him heap big man, alle same have Dlagon's blood. Him say
fight, we fight, _sabe_?" And he pointed to Kan Wong--Kan Wong, his head
bleeding from a wound, his eyes glowing with a green fury from between
their narrow lids, his long, strong hands, red with blood other than his
own, still clutching his rifle with a grip that had a tenderly savage
joy _in_ it.

The officer approached him.

"Are you the man who rallied the coolies and held the line?" he asked
shortly.

Kan Wong stiffened with a dignity to which he now felt he had a right.

"Me fight," he said quietly--"me fight, coolie fight, too. Me belong
Dlagon's blood. One time my people fighting men; long time I wait."

"You'll wait no longer," said the officer. He unpinned the cross from
his tunic and fastened it to the torn, bloody blouse of Kan Wong. "Off
to the east are men of your own race, fighting-men from China,
Cochin-China. That is the place for a man of the Dragon's blood--and
that is the tool that belongs in your hand till we're done with this
mess." He pointed to the rifle that Kan Wong still held with a stiff,
loving, lingering grip.

And so, on the other side of the world, the son of the Dragon came to
his own and realized the dreams of a glory he had missed.

"HUMORESQUE"

By FANNIE HURST

From _Cosmopolitan_

On either side of the Bowery, which cuts through like a drain to catch
its sewage, Every Man's Land, a reeking march of humanity and humidity,
steams with the excrement of seventeen languages, flung in _patois_ from
tenement windows, fire-escapes, curbs, stoops, and cellars whose walls
are terrible and spongy with fungi.

By that impregnable chemistry of race whereby the red blood of the
Mongolian and the red blood of the Caucasian become as oil and water in
the mingling, Mulberry Street, bounded by sixteen languages, runs its
intact Latin length of push-carts, clothes-lines, naked babies, drying
vermicelli; black-eyed women in rhinestone combs and perennially big
with child; whole families of button-hole makers, who first saw the
blue-and-gold light of Sorrento, bent at home work around a single gas
flare; pomaded barbers of a thousand Neapolitan amours. And then, just
as suddenly, almost without osmosis and by the mere stepping-down from
the curb, Mulberry becomes Mott Street, hung in grill-work balconies,
the mouldy smell of poverty touched up with incense. Orientals, whose
feet shuffle and whose faces are carved out of satinwood. Forbidden
women, their white, drugged faces behind upper windows. Yellow children,
incongruous enough in Western clothing. A drafty areaway with an oblique
of gaslight and a black well of descending staircase. Show-windows of
jade and tea and Chinese porcelains.

More streets emanating out from Mott like a handful of crooked,
rheumatic fingers, then suddenly the Bowery again, cowering beneath
elevated trains, where men, burned down to the butt end of soiled lives,
pass in and out and out and in of the knee-high swinging doors--a
veiny-nosed, acid-eaten race in themselves.

Allen Street, too, still more easterly and half as wide, is straddled
its entire width by the steely, long-legged skeleton of elevated
traffic, so that its third-floor windows no sooner shudder into silence
from the rushing shock of one train than they are shaken into chatter by
the passage of another. Indeed, third-floor dwellers of Allen Street,
reaching out, can almost touch the serrated edges of the elevated
structure, and in summer the smell of its hot rails becomes an actual
taste in the mouth. Passengers, in turn, look in upon this horizontal of
life as they whiz by. Once, in fact, the blurry figure of what might
have been a woman leaned out as she passed to toss into one Abrahm
Kantor's apartment a short-stemmed pink carnation. It hit softly on
little Leon Kantor's crib, brushing him fragrantly across the mouth and
causing him to pucker up.

Beneath, where, even in August noonday, the sun cannot find its way by a
chink, and babies lie stark naked in the cavernous shade, Allen Street
presents a sort of submarine and greenish gloom, as if its humanity were
actually moving through a sea of aqueous shadows, faces rather bleached
and shrunk from sunlessness as water can bleach and shrink. And then,
like a shimmering background of orange-finned and copper-flanked marine
life, the brass shops of Allen Street, whole rows of them, burn
flamelessly and without benefit of fuel.

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