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Charles de Coster - "De legende en de heldhaftige, vroolijke en roemrijke daden"

Various - "Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885"

James Oliver Curwood - "The Courage of Captain Plum"

ith The Author's Journals of his Two Voyages - "Travels in the United States of America"

Schuster song pokes fun at 'Puke Watson'
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Random House Digitising 8000 Books
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Wiley Inks Deal with Meredith
Extract not available.

O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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




She let her hand linger in his.

"Leon--you--really going--how--terrible--how--how--wonderful!"

"How wonderful--your coming!"

"I--you think it was not nice of me--to come?"

"I think it was the nicest thing that ever happened in the world."

"All the way here in the train, I kept saying--crazy--crazy--running to
tell Leon--Lieutenant--Kantor good-bye--when you haven't even seen him
three times in three years--"

"But each--each of those three times we--we've remembered, Gina."

"But that's how I feel toward all the boys, Leon--our fighting
boys--just like flying to them to kiss them each one good-bye."

"Come over, Gina. You'll be a treat to our mother. I--well, I'm
hanged--all the way from Philadelphia!"

There was even a sparkle to talk then, and a let-up of pressure. After
a while, Sarah Kantor looked up at her son, tremulous but smiling.

"Well, son, you going to play--for your old mother before--you go? It'll
be many a month--spring--maybe longer before I hear my boy again except
on the discaphone."

He shot a quick glance to his sister.

"Why, I--I don't know. I--I'd love it, ma if--if you think, Esther, I'd
better."

"You don't need to be afraid of me, darlink. There's nothing can give me
strength to bear--what's before me like--like my boy's music. That's my
life, his music."

"Why, yes; if mamma is sure she feels that way, play for us, Leon."

He was already at the instrument, where it lay swathed, atop the grand
piano.

"What'll it be, folks?"

"Something to make ma laugh, Leon--something light, something funny."

"'Humoresque'?" he said, with a quick glance for Miss Berg.

"'Humoresque,'" she said, smiling back at him.

He capered through, cutting and playful of bow, the melody of Dvorak's,
which is as ironic as a grinning mask.

Finished, he smiled at his parent, her face still untearful.

"How's that?"

"It's like life, son, that piece. Laughing and making fun of--the way
just as we think we got--we ain't got."

"Play that new piece, Leon, the one you set to music. You know. The
words by that young boy in the war who wrote such grand poetry before he
was killed. The one that always makes poor Mannie laugh. Play it for
him, Leon."

Her plump little unlined face innocent of fault, Mrs. Isadore Kantor
ventured her request, her smile tired with tears."

"No, no--Rosa--not now--ma wouldn't want that."

"I do, son; I do! Even Mannie should have his share of good-bye."

To Gina Berg: "They want me to play that little setting of mine of
Allan Seeger's poem, 'I have a rendezvous.'"

"It--it's beautiful, Leon! I was to have sung it on my program
to-night--only, I'm afraid you had better not--"

"Please, Leon! Nothing you play can ever make me as sad as it makes me
glad. Mannie should have too his good-bye."

"All right then, ma, if--if you're sure you want it. Will you sing it,
Gina?"

She had risen.

"Why, yes, Leon."

She sang it then, quite purely, her hands clasped simply together and
her glance mistily off, the beautiful, the heroic, the lyrical prophecy
of a soldier-poet and a poet-soldier.

But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

In the silence that followed, a sob burst out stifled from Esther
Kantor, this time her mother holding her in arms that were strong.

"That, Leon, is the most beautiful of all your compositions. What does
it mean, son, that word, 'rondy-voo'?"

"Why, I--I don't exactly know. A rendezvous--it's a sort of meeting, an
engagement, isn't it, Miss Gina? Gina?"

"That's it, Leon--an engagement."

"Have I an engagement with you, Gina?"

"Oh, how--how I hope you have, Leon!"

"When?"

"In the spring?"

"That's it--in the spring."

Then they smiled, these two, who had never felt more than the merest
butterfly wings of love brushing them, light as lashes. No word between
them, only an unfinished sweetness, waiting to be linked up.

Suddenly there burst in Abrahm Kantor.

"Quick, Leon! I got the car downstairs. Just fifteen minutes to make the
ferry. Quick! The sooner we get him over there the sooner we get him
back! I'm right, mamma? Now--now--no water-works! Get your brother's
suitcase, Isadore. Now--now--no nonsense--quick!"

With a deftly manoeuvred round of good-byes, a grip-laden dash for door,
a throbbing moment of turning back when it seemed as though Sarah
Kantor's arms could not unlock their deadlock of him, Leon Kantor was
out and gone, the group of faces point-etched into the silence behind
him. The poor mute face of Mannie, laughing softly. Rosa Kantor crying
into her hands. Esther, grief-crumpled, but rich in the enormous hope of
youth. The sweet Gina, to whom the waiting months had already begun
their reality.

Not so, Sarah Kantor. In a bedroom adjoining, its high-ceilinged
vastness as cold as a cathedral to her lowness of stature, sobs dry and
terrible were rumbling up from her, only to dash against lips tightly
restraining them.

On her knees beside a chest of drawers, and unwrapping it from
swaddling-clothes, she withdrew what at best had been a sorry sort of
fiddle. Cracked of back and solitary of string it was as if her
trembling arms, raising it above her head, would make of themselves and
her swaying body the tripod of an altar. The old twisting and prophetic
pain was behind her heart. Like the painted billows of music that the
old Italian masters loved to do, there wound and wreathed about her
clouds of song.

But I've a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.




THE LUBBENY KISS


BY LOUISE RICE

From _Ainslee's Magazine_

For many hours the hot July sun had beaten down upon the upland meadows
and the pine woods of the lower New Jersey hills. So, when the dew began
to fall, there arose from them a heady brew, distilled from blossoming
milkweed and fruiting wild raspberry canes and mountain laurel and dried
pine needles.

The Princess Dora Parse took this perfume into her lusty young lungs and
blew it out again in a long sigh, after which she bent her first finger
over her thumb as one must when one returns what all Romanys know to be
"the breath of God." She did this almost unconsciously, for all her
faculties were busied in another matter.

The eyes of a gorgio, weakened by an indoor life, would never have been
able to distinguish the small object for which the princess looked, for
she was perched up on the high seat of the red Romany _wardo_, and she
drove her two strong, shaggy horses with a free and careless hand. But
to Dora Parse the blur of vague shadows gliding by each wheel was not
vague at all. Suddenly she checked her horses and sprang down.

The patteran for which she was looking was laid beneath a clump of the
flowering weed which the Romanys call "stars in the sky." The gorgios
know it as Queen Ann's lace, and the farmers curse it by the name of the
wild carrot. The patteran was like a miniature log cabin without a roof,
and across the top one large stick was laid, pointing upward along the
mountain road.

Two brown and slender fingers on the big braid which dropped over her
shoulder, the princess meditated, a shiver of fear running through her.
What, she asked herself, could this mean? Why, for the first time in
years, were the wagons to go to the farm of Jan Jacobus? Even if it were
only a chance happening, it was a most unfortunate one, for young Jan,
the fair-haired, giant son of old Jacobus, with his light blue eyes and
his drawling, insolent speech, was the last person in the world that she
wanted to see, especially with her man near.

For she had meant no harm. Many and many a time she had smiled into the
eyes of men and felt pride in her power over them. Still--and yet--The
princess scattered the patteran with her foot, for she knew that all the
wagons must be ahead of her, since she had lagged so, and she leaped to
her seat with one easy, lithe swing and drove on up the darkening road.

Jan Jacobus, like several other descendants of the Dutch settlers of New
Jersey, held his upland farm on shares with John Lane's tribe of
gypsies. Jacobuses and Bantas and Koppfs, they made no bones about
having business dealings with the tribe of English Romanys which had
followed a regular route, twice a year, from Maryland to the upper part
of New Jersey, since before the beginning of the Revolutionary days. The
descendants of the English settlers, the Hardys, the Lesters, the
Vincents, and the Farrands, looked with still persisting English reserve
upon the roamers of the woods and would have no traffic with them,
though a good many of their sons and daughters had to know the few
Romany young people who were left, by twos and threes in the towns for
occasional years of schooling.

The tribe, trading in land in the two States which they frequented, and
breeding horses, was very rich, but not very many people knew that.
However, they were conceded to be shrewd bargainers, and when old John
bought Martin Debbins' upland and rocky farm one year, with the money
that he had made by a lucky purchase of a gangling colt whose owner had
failed rightly to appraise its possibilities as a racer, Boonton and
Dover and Morristown laughed.

"_Sal_ away," old John retorted pleasantly to the cashier of the bank in
Boonton, where the tube had deposited its surplus funds for many years,
"but you won't _sal_ so much when you _dik_ what I will make out of
that joke."

The cashier thereupon looked thoughtful. It might well be that he and
others would not laugh when they saw good fortune which might have been
theirs following this genial old outlaw.

That summer the wagons camped on the Debbins place, and old John stocked
it with a lot of fine hogs, for which the land was especially adapted.
They fattened on the many acres, wooded with wild nut trees, and
Jacobus--as keen a bargainer as any Romany, upon whom John Lane had had
his eye all the time--took the farm on shares, and every year thereafter
the cashier at the bank added a neat little total to the big balance
which the tribe was rolling up.

And every year, as the wagons beat up toward Dover in July, old John
would drive on ahead and spend a night of mingled business and pleasure
with old Jan, reckoning up the profits on the Berkshires for which the
farm was now famous, and putting down big mugs of the "black drink" for
which Aunty Alice Lee, John Lane's ancient cousin, was equally famous.
The amount of this fiery and head-splitting liquor which the two old men
thus got away with was afterward gleefully recounted in the wagons and
fearfully whispered of in the little Dutch church at Horse's Neck which
the Jacobuses had attended for over a hundred years.

But never, as wagon after wagon had gone up the turning that led to the
upward farm, had there been a patteran pointing that way. Always, it had
shown the way onward and downward, to the little hamlet of Rockaway,
where there was an old and friendly camping place, back of the
blacksmith shop beyond the church. Old John never encouraged the wagons
to visit any of the properties held by the tribe.

"Silver blackens the salt of friendship," he would say.

Dora Parse was driving her own _wardo_, a very fine one which had
belonged to her mother. Lester Montague, of Sea Tack, Maryland, who
makes the wagons of Romanys for all the Atlantic coast tribes, like his
father before him, had done an especially good job of it. The princess
had been certified, by the Romany rites, to old John's eldest son,
George, for she had flatly refused to be married according to the gorgio
ways. Not having been married a full year, he was not yet entitled to
carry the heavy, silver-topped stick which is the badge of the married
man, nor could he demand a place in his wife's tent or wagon unless she
expressly invited him. Dora Parse and George Lane were passionately in
love with each other, and their meeting and mating had been the
flowering romance of the tribe, the previous summer.

The princess, being descended from a very old Romany family, as her name
showed, was far higher in rank than any one in the Lane tribe. Her
aristocratic lineage showed in the set of her magnificent head, in the
small, delicate fingers of her hand, and in the fire and richness of her
eyes. Also, her skin was of the colour of old ivory upon which is cast a
distant, faint reflection of the sunset, and her mouth, thinner than
those of most Romanys, was of the colour of a ripe pomegranate.

"A _rauni, a puro rauni_," all the tribes of the eastern coast murmured
respectfully, when Dora Parse's name was mentioned.

She was, indeed, a very great lady, but she was a flirtatious and
headstrong girl. She was one of the few modern gypsies who still hold to
the unadulterated worship of "those." All the members of John Lane's
tribe were Methodists--had been since before they had migrated from
England. In every wagon, save Dora's, a large illustrated Bible lay on a
little table, and those who could, read them aloud to the rest of a
Sunday afternoon. This did not mean, however, that the Romanys had
descended to gorgio ways, or that they had wholly left off their
attentions to "those". They combined the two. Old John was known as a
fervent and eloquent leader in prayer at the Wednesday-night prayer
meetings in the Maryland town where his church membership was held, but
he had not ceased to carry the "box of meanings," as befitted the chief
of the tribe.

This was a very beautifully worked box of pure gold, made by the great
Nikola of Budapest, whose boxes can be found inside the shirt of every
gypsy chief, where they are always carried. In them are some grains of
wheat, garnered by moonlight, a peacock's feather, and a small silver
bell with a coiled snake for a handle. When anything is to be decided, a
few of the grains are taken out and counted. If they are even, the omen
is bad, but if they are odd, all is well. Old John had an elastic and
accommodating mind, like all Romanys, so he never thought it strange
that he should ask the "box of meanings" whether or not it was going to
storm on prayer-meeting nights.

Dora Parse thought of the box now, and wished that she might have the
peacock's feather for a minute, so that her uneasy sense of impending
bad luck would leave her. Then she stopped beside a cross-barred gate
where an old man was evidently waiting for her.

"Lane was gettin' troubled about yuh," he said, as he turned the horses
and peered curiously up at her. He knew who she was, not only because
John Lane had said who it was who was late, but because Dora Parse's
appearance was well known to the whole countryside. She was the only
member of the tribe who kept to the full Romany dress. There were big
gold loops in her small ears, and on her arms, many gold bracelets,
whose lightness testified to their freedom from alloy. Her skirt was of
red, heavily embroidered in blue, and her waist, with short sleeves, was
of sheer white cloth, with an embroidered bolero. Her hair she wore in
the ancient fashion, in two braids on either side of her face. She could
well afford to, the chis muttered among themselves. Any girl with hair
like that--

There was a long lane leading to the barns and to the meadow back of
them, and there, said Jan, the tribe was to camp. As the princess drove
along the short distance, she swiftly snatched off her little bolero,
put it on wrong side out, and then snatched it off and righted it. That
much, at least, she could do to avert ill luck. And her heart bounded as
she drove in among the other wagons, for her husband came running to
meet her and held out his arms.

She dropped into them and laid each finger tip, delicately, in
succession, upon his eyes and his ears and his mouth, the seal of a
betrothal and the sign whereby a Romany chal may know that a chi intends
to accept him when he speaks for her before the tribe; a sign that
lovers repeat as a sacred and intimate caress. She leaned, hard, into
his arms, and he held her, pressing the tender, confidential kiss that
is given to children behind her little ear.

Dora Parse suddenly ran both hands through his thick hair and gave it a
little pull. She always did that when her spirits rose. Then she turned
and looked at the scene, and at once she knew that there was to be some
special occasion. Aunty Alice Lee was seated by a cooking fire, on which
stood the enormous iron pot in which the "big meals" were prepared, when
the tribe was to eat together and not in separate groups, as it usually
did. There were some boards laid on wooden horses, and Pyramus Lee,
aunty's grandson, was bringing blocks of wood from the woodshed for
seats. Dora Parse clapped her hands with delight and looked at her man.

"_Tetcho_!" she exclaimed, approvingly, using the word that spells all
degrees of satisfaction. "And what is it for, stickless one? Is it a
talk over silver?"

"Yes, it is some business," George Lane replied, "but first there will
be a _gillie shoon_."

A _gillie shoon_ has its counterpart in the English word "singsong," as
it is beginning to be used now, with this exception: Romanys have few
"fixed" songs. They have strains which are set, which every one knows,
but a _gillie shoon_ means that the performers improvise coninually; and
in this sense it is a mystic ceremony, never held at an appointed time,
except a "time of Mul-cerus," which really means a sort of religious
wave of feeling, which strikes tribe after tribe, usually in the spring.

"Marda has come back," Aunty Lee called out to Dora Parse. No one ever
called her by her full name of Marda Lee, because she was a Lee only by
courtesy, having been adopted from a distant wagon when both her parents
were killed in a thunderstorm. Marda, wearing the trim tailored skirt
and waist that were her usual costume, was putting the big red
tablecloth of the "big meals" on the boards. Dora went quickly toward
the young girl and embraced her.

"How is our little scholar?" she asked affectionately.

"I am very well, Dora Parse, but a little tired," Marda answered.

"And did you receive another paper?"

"Yes. I passed my exams. It will save me half a year in Dover."

"That is good," Dora Parse replied, although she had only the dimmest
idea of what Marda meant. The young girl knew that. She had just come
from taking a special course in Columbia, and she was feeling the breach
between herself and her people to be especially wide. Because of that,
perhaps, she also felt more loving toward all of them than she ever had,
and especially toward Dora about whom she knew something that was most
alarming. Dora Parse noted the pale, grave face of her favourite friend
with concern.

"Smile, bird of my heart," she entreated, "for we are to have a _gillie
shoon_. Sit near me, that I may follow your heaven voice."

There was no flattery meant. The Romanys call the soprano "the heaven
voice," the tenor "the sky voice," the contralto "the earth voice," and
the basso "the sea voice." Dora had a really wonderful earth voice,
almost as wonderful as Marda's heaven voice, which would have been
remarkable even among opera singers, and the two were known everywhere
for their improvisations. In answer to the remark of the princess, Marda
gave her a strange look and said:

"I shall be near you, Dora Parse. Do not forget."

Her manner was certainly peculiar, the princess thought, as she walked
away. But then one never knew what Marda was thinking about. Her great
education set her apart from others. Any chi who habitually read herself
to sleep over those most _puro libros_, "The Works of William
Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, Complete, with Glossary and Appendix,"
must not be judged by ordinary standards. The princess knew the full
title of those _puro libros_, having painfully spelled it out, all one
rainy afternoon, in Marda's mother's wagon, with repeated assitance and
explanations from Marda, which had left the princess with a headache.

Now Aunty Lee took off the heavy iron cover of the pot and the odour of
Romany duck stew, than which there is nothing in the world more
appetizing, mingled with the sweet fragrance of the drying hay. Aunty
thrust a fork as long as a poker into the bubbling mass and then gave
the call that brings the tribe in a hurry.

"Empo!" she said in her shrill, cracked voice. "Empo! Empo!"

Laughing, teasing, jostling, talking, they all came, spilling out from
the wagons, running from the barn, sauntering in, the lovers, by twos,
and sat down before the plates heaped high with the duck and the
vegetables with which it was cooked and the big loaves of Italian bread
which the Romanys like and always buy as they pass through towns where
there are Italian bakeries.

But they sat quiet then, and each one looked toward the princess, as
politeness demanded, since she was the highest in rank among them.

She drew a sliver of meat from her plate and tossed it over her
shoulder.

"To the great _re_" she said.

"To the _shule_," each one murmured. Then, having paid their compliments
to the sun and the moon, as all good Romanys must before eating, they
fell to with heartiness.

When they were through, the mothers and the old men cleared away the
tables and put the younger children to bed in the wagons, and the
princess and George Lane and Marda and young Adam Lane, George's
youngest brother, walked up and down, outside the glow from the cooking
fire, taking the deep, full breaths which cleanse the mouth and prepare
the soul for the ecstasy of song.

The men took away the table and the lanterns which had been standing
about, and put out the cooking fire, for the big moon was rolling up
over the treetops, and Romanys sing by her light alone, if they can.
Frogs were calling in the shallow stretches of the Upper Rockaway.
People began to sit down in a big circle.

Then Marda started the _gillie shoon_. At first you could not have been
sure whether the sound was far or near, for she "covered" her tones, in
a way that many a gorgio gives years and much silver to learn. Then the
wonderful tone swelled out, as if an organ stop were being pulled open,
and one by one, the four leaders cast in the dropping notes which
followed and sustained the theme that Marda was weaving:

"Lal--la--ai--lala--lalu! Ai--l-a-a-a--lalu!"

Old John, who had not appeared before, slid into the circle, holding by
the sleeve a giant of a man who seemed to come half unwillingly. Dora
Parse saw him, and she could not repress the shiver that ran through her
at the sight of young Jan Jacobus, yet she sang on. The deep, majestic
basses throbbed out the foundation of the great fuguelike chorus, and
the sopranos soared and soared until they were singing falsetto,
according to gorgio standards, only it sounded like the sweetly piercing
high notes of violins, and the tenors and contraltos wove a garland of
glancing melody between the two. They were all singing now. Rocking back
and forth a little, swaying gently from side to side, lovers clasped
together, mothers in their young sons' arms, and fathers clasping their
daughters, they sent out to the velvet arch above them the heart cry of
a race, proud and humble, cleanly voluptuous, strong and cruel,
passionate and loving, elemental like the north wind and subtle as the
fragrance of the poppy.

"Ai--lallu! Ai--lala--lala! Ai--lallu!"

Jan Jacobus sat with his big jaw dropping. Stupid boor that he was, he
could not have explained the terrifying effect which this wild music and
those tense, uplifting faces had upon him, but he would have given
anything to be back in his mother's kitchen, with the lamp lit and the
dark, unfamiliar night shut out.

As suddenly as the singing had begun, it stopped. People coughed, moved
a little, whispered to one another. Then George Lane stood upon his
feet, pulling Dora Parse with him.

"You see her?" he asked them all, holding out his wife in his arms.

Dora Parse knew then, for he was beginning the ritual of the man or
woman who accuses a partner, before the tribe, of unfaithfulness. He was
using the most _puro_ Romany _jib_, for only so can the serious affairs
of the tribe tribunal be conducted. Dora Parse struggled in the strong
hands of her man.

"No! No!" she cried. "No--no!"

"You see her?" George Lane repeated to the circle.

"We see her," they answered in a murmur that ran around from end to end.

"She is mine?"

"She is yours."

"What shall be done to her if she has lost the spirit of our love?"

Again Dora Parse furiously struggled, but George Lane held her.

"What shall be done with her? If that is so?"

Aunty Lee, as the oldest woman present, now took up the replies, as was
her right and duty:

"Let her go to that other, if she wishes, and do you close your tent and
your wagon against her."

"And if she does not wish?"

"Then punish her."

"What shall be done to the man?"

"Is he a Romany?"

"No."

Jan Jacobus half started up, but strong hands instantly jerked him down.