O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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"No-o, so they say," Hugh agreed. "One of our forebears did see ghosts,
but that was rather the fashion. And his father, that old Johnnie over
the fireplace--you take after him, Aunt Maria--he was the prize
witch-smeller of his generation, and he condemned all the young and
pretty ones. That hardly seems well-balanced."

"Collaterals on the distaff side," Mr. Fowler put in hastily. "If you
would read Mendel--"

"Mendel? I have read about him." He raised the forefinger of his right
hand. "Very suggestive. If your father was a black rabbit"--he raised
the forefinger of his left--"and your mother was a white rabbit, then
your male children would be"--he raised all the other fingers and paused
as though taken aback by the size of the family--"would be blue
guinea-pigs, with a tendency to club-foot and astigmatism, but your
female children might only be rather clumsy tangoists with a weakness
for cutting their poor relations. That's all I remember, but I _do_ know
that because I studied the charts."

"Very amusing," said Mr. Fowler, indulgently.

Hugh flushed.

"I am sure it can't be that way." Miss Maria flapped her knitting over.
"But everything has changed since my day, and _not_ for the better. The
curtain-cord."

"Beg pardon," muttered Hugh. His mind went on churning nonsense. "There
are two days it is useless to flee from--the day of your death and the
day when your family doesn't care for your jokes.

"For a joke is an intellectual thing,
And a _mot_ is the sword of an angel king.

"Good old Blake. Why do the best people always see jokes? Why does a
really good one make a whole frozen crowd feel jolly and united all of a
sudden?" He pondered on the beneficence of the comic spirit. Hugh was a
born Deist. It gave him no trouble at all to believe that since the
paintings of Velasquez and the great outdoors which he had seen, were
beautiful, so much the more beautiful must be that God whom he had not
seen. It seemed reasonable. As for the horrors like Uncle Hugh's
affair--well, they must be put in for chiaroscuro. A thing couldn't be
all white without being blank. The thought of the shadows, however,
always made him profoundly uncomfortable, and his instinct
right-about-faced to the lighter surface of life. "Anyhow," he broke
silence, "the daughter of Heth must be game. Three to one, and on our
native heath."

He looked appraisingly about the room, pausing at the stiff,
distinguished, grey-haired couple, one on either side of the fire. The
effect was of a highly finished genre picture: the rich wainscot between
low book-shelves, the brooding portraits, the black-blue rug bordered by
a veiled Oriental motive, the black-velvet cushions that brought out the
watery reflections of old Sheraton as even the ancient horsehair had not
done; the silver candlesticks, the miniatures, and on the mantel those
two royal flower-pots whose precarious existence was to his aunt a very
fearful joy. Even the tortoise-shell cat, sprawled between the two
figures like a tiny tiger-skin, was in the picture. It was a room that
gently put you into your place. Hugh recalled with a faint grin certain
meetings here of philanthropic ladies whose paths had seldom turned into
the interiors of older Beacon Street. The state of life to which it had
pleased their Maker to call them, he reflected, would express itself
preferably in gilding and vast pale-tinted upholstery and pink
bibelots--oh, quite a lot of pink. This place had worried them into a
condition of disconcerted awe.

He tried to fancy what it was going to do to the unbidden, resented
guest. A queer protest against its enmity, an impulse to give her a
square deal, surged up in him from nowhere. After all, whatever else she
might be, she was Uncle Hugh's girl. Like all the world, Hugh loved the
dispossessed lover. He knew what it felt like. One does not reach the
mature age of twenty-four without having at least begun the passionate
pilgrimage. His few tindery and tinselly affairs suspected of following
the obvious formula: three parts curiosity, three parts the literary
sense, three parts crude young impulse, one part distilled moonshine.
The real love of his life had been Uncle Hugh.

He sprang up with an abruptness to which his elders seemed to be used.
He stopped before a brass-trimmed desk and jerked at the second drawer.
"Where are those letters, sir?"

"You mean--"

"Yes, the one you wrote her about the money, and her answer. You put
them with his papers, didn't you? Where's the key?"

The older man drew from his waistcoat pocket a carved bit of brass.
"What do you want with them?" he asked, cautiously.

"I want to refresh my memory--and Aunt Maria's." He took out a neat
little pile of papers and began to sort them intently. "Here they are on
top." He laid out a docketed envelope on the desk. "And here are the
essays and poems that you wouldn't publish. I considered them the best
things he ever did."

"You were not his literary executor," said his uncle, coldly. Another
stifled glance passed between the seniors, but this time Miss Maria made
no effort to restore the gloss of the surface. She sat idle, staring at
the papers with a sort of horror.

"Put them back," she said. "Winthrop, I do think you might burn them. If
you keep things like that too long the wrong people are sure to get
them."

"Wait a bit. I haven't seen them for years, not since you published the
collected works--with Hamlet left out." The young man lifted a worn
brown-morocco portfolio tied with a frazzled red ribbon. "And here"--his
voice dropped--"here is It--the letters he wrote to her and never sent.
It was a sort of diary, wasn't it, going on for years? What a howling
pity we couldn't print that!"

"Hugh!"

"Don't faint, Aunt Maria. You wouldn't catch me doing anything so
indecent. But suppose Dante's dear family had suppressed the _Vita
Nuova_. And it ought to be one of the most extraordinary human documents
in the world, perfectly intimate, all the bars down, full of those
flashes of his. Just the man, _ipsissimus_, that never happened but that
once. Uncle Winthrop, don't you think that I might read it?"

"Do you think so? I never did."

"Oh, if you put it up to me like that! Of course I can't. But what luck
that he didn't ask you to send it to her--supposing she's the wrong
kind--wasn't it ..." His voice trailed off, leaving his lips foolishly
open. "You don't mean--he did?"

"Yes, at the end, after you had left the room," said Mr. Fowler, firmly.

"And you--didn't? Why not?"

"As you said, for fear she was the wrong kind"

"It was too much to hope that she would be anything else," his aunt
broke in, harshly. "Shut your mouth, Hugh; you look like a fool. Think
what she might have done with them--she and some of those unspeakable
papers."

"Oh, I see! I see!" groaned the young man. "But how awful not to do the
very last thing he wanted! Did you ever try to find out what kind of a
person she was?"

"She took the money. That was enough," cried Miss Fowler. "She got her
share, just as though she had been his legal wife."

Hugh gave her a dazed look. "You don't mean that she was his illegal
one? I never--"

"Oh no, no!" Mr. Fowler interposed. "We have no reason to think that she
was otherwise than respectable. Maria, you allow most unfortunate
implications to result from your choice of words. We know very little,
really."

"He met her in Paris when he gave that course of lectures over there. We
know that much. And she was an American student--from Virginia, wasn't
it? But that was over twenty years ago. Didn't he see her after that?"

"I am sure he did not."

"She wasn't with him when he was knocking about Europe?"

"Certainly not. She came home that very year and married. As her letter
states, she was a widow with three children at the time of his death."

"I have always considered it providential that he didn't know she was a
widow," observed Miss Maria, primly.

Her nephew shot her a look that admitted his intermittent amusement in
his aunt Maria, but definitely gave her up. He carefully leaned the
portfolio inside the arm of the sofa that neighboured the desk, and
picked up the long envelope.

"A copy of my letter," said Mr. Fowler.

To his sister, watching him as he watched Hugh, came the unaccountable
impression that his sure and chiselled surface covered a nervous
anxiety. Then Miss Maria, being a product of the same school, dismissed
the idea as absurd.

Hugh raised bewildered eyes from the letters. "I can't exactly
remember," he said. "I was so cut up at the time. Did I ever actually
read this before or was I merely told about it? I went back for
Midyear's, you know, almost at once. I know my consent was asked, but--"

"You--did not see it."

"And you, Aunt Maria, of course you knew about it!"

"Certainly," said Miss Fowler, on the defensive. "As usual in business
matters, your uncle decided for me. We have been accustomed to act as a
family always. To me the solidarity of the family it more than the
interest of any member of it."

"Oh, I know that the Fowler family is the noblest work of God." The
young man looked from one to the other as he might have regarded two
strangers whose motives it was his intention to find out. "I've been
brought up on that. But what I want to know now is the whyness of this
letter."

"What do you mean?" Mr. Fowler's voice cut the pause like a trowel
executing the middle justice on an earthworm.

"Why--why--" Hugh began, desperately. "I mean, why wasn't the money
turned over to her at once--all of it?"

"It is customary to notify legatees."

"And she wasn't even a legatee," added Miss Maria, grimly. He never made
a will."

"No," said Hugh, with an ugly laugh, "he merely trusted to our
promises."

There was a brief but violent silence.

"I think, Winthrop," Miss Maria broke it, "that instead of questioning
the propriety of my language, you might do well to consider your
nephew's."

Hugh half-tendered the letter. "You're so confoundedly clever. Uncle
Winthrop. You--you just put the whole thing up to the poor woman. I
can't pick out a word to show where you said it, but the tone of your
letter is exactly this, 'Here's the money for you, and if you take it
you're doing an unheard-of thing.' _She_ saw it right enough. Her answer
is just defence of why she has to take it--some of it. She's a mother
with three children, struggling to keep above water. She's a human
animal fighting for her young. So she takes, most apologetically, most
unhappily, a part of what he left her, and she hates to take that. It's
the most pitiful thing--"

"Piteous," corrected Miss Maria, in a tone like a bite.

Mr. Fowler laid the tips of his fingers very delicately on his nephew's
knee. "Will you show me the place or places where I make these very
damaging observations?"

"That's just it. I can't pick them out, but--"

"I am sure that you cannot, because they exist only in your
somewhat--shall we say, lyrical imagination? I laid the circumstances
before the woman and she acted as she saw fit to act. Hugh, my dear boy,
I wish that you would try to restrain your--your growing tendency to
excitability. I know that this is a trying day for all of us."

"O Lord, yes! It brings it all back," said Hugh, miserably. "I'm sorry
if I said anything offensive sir, but--" He gave it up. "You know I have
a devil, sometimes." He gave a half-embarrassed laugh.

"Offensive--if you have said anything offensive?" Miss Fowler boiled
over. "Is that all you are going to say, Winthrop? If so--"

Mr. Fowler lifted a warning hand. The house door was opening. Then the
discreet steps of Gannett came up the hall, followed by something
lighter and more resilient.

"At least don't give me away to the lady the very first thing," said
Hugh, lightly. He shoved the papers into the drawers and swung it shut.
His heart was beating quite ridiculously. He would know at last--What
wouldn't he know? "Uncle Hugh's girl, Uncle Hugh's girl," he told
himself, and his temperamental responsiveness to the interest and the
mystery of life expanded like a sea-anemone in the Gulf Stream.

Gannett opened the door, announced in his impeccable English, "Mrs.
Shirley," and was not.

* * * * *

A very small, very graceful woman hesitated in the doorway. Hugh's first
impression was surprise that there was so little of her. Then his always
alert subconsciousness registered:

"A lady, yes, but a country lady; not _de par le monde_. Pleasantly
rather than well dressed; those veils are out." He had met her at once
with outstretched hand and the most cordial, "I am glad to see you, Mrs.
Shirley." Then he mentioned the names of his aunt and uncle. He did not
dare to leave anything to Aunt Maria.

That lady made a movement that might or might not have been a gesture of
recognition. Mr. Fowler, who had risen, inclined his handsome head with
a polite murmur and indicated a chair which faced the light. Mrs.
Shirley sat, instead, upon the edge of the sofa, which happened to be
nearer. With her coming Hugh's expansiveness had suffered a sudden
rebuff. A feeling of dismal conventionality permeated the room like a
fog. He plumbed it in vain for the wonder and the magic that ought to
have been the inescapable aura of Uncle Hugh's girl. Was this the mighty
ocean, was this all? She was a little nervous, too. That was a pity.
Nervousness in social relations was one of the numerous things that Aunt
Maria never forgave.

Then the stranger spoke, and Hugh's friendliness went out to the sound
as to something familiar for which he had been waiting.

"It is very good of you to let me come," she said.

"But she must be over forty," Hugh told himself, "and her voice is
young. So was his always." It was also very natural and moving and not
untinged by what Miss Fowler called the Southern patois. "And her feet
are young."

Mr. Fowler uttered another polite murmur. There was no help from that
quarter. She made another start.

"It seemed to me--" she addressed Miss Fowler, who looked obdurate. She
cast a helpless glance at the cat, who opened surprising topaz eyes and
looked supercilious. Then she turned to Hugh. "It seemed to me," she
said, steadily, "that I could make you understand--I mean I could
express myself more clearly if I could see you, than I could by writing,
but--it is rather difficult."

The overheated, inclement room waited. Hugh restrained his foot from
twitching. Why didn't Aunt Maria say something? She was behaving
abominably. She was still seething with her suppressed outburst like a
tea-kettle under the cozy of civilization. And it was catching.

"I explained at the time, three years ago," Mrs. Shirley made the
plunge, "why I took the--money at all." The hard word was out, and Hugh
relaxed. "I don't know what you thought of me, but at the time it seemed
like the mercy of Heaven. I had to educate the children. We were
horribly poor. I was almost in despair. And I felt that if I could take
it from any one I could take it from him ..."

"Yes," said Hugh, unhappily. The depression that dropped on him at
intervals seemed waiting to pounce. He glanced at his uncle's judicial
mask, knowing utterly the distaste for sentimental encounters that it
covered. He detested his aunt's aloofness. He was almost angry with this
little woman's ingenuousness that put her so candidly at their cynical
mercy.

"But now," she went on, "some land we have that seemed worth nothing at
the time has become very valuable. The town grew out in that direction.
And my eldest boy is doing very well indeed, and my daughter is studying
for a library position."

"The short and simple annals of the poor," sighed Hugh to Hugh.

"And so," said little Mrs. Shirley, with astounding simplicity, "I came
to ask you please to take it back again." She gave an involuntary sigh
of relief, as though she had returned a rather valuable umbrella. Mr.
Fowl's eyeglasses dropped from his nose as his eyebrows shot up.

"Good Lord!" ejaculated Miss Maria with all the unexpectedness of
Galatea. "You don't really mean it?" Her bag slid to the floor and the
cat became thoroughly intrigued.

"Do I understand you to say"--Mr. Fowler's voice was almost
stirred--"that you wish to return my brother's legacy to the family?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Shirley, "only, it wasn't a legacy. It was merely
kindness that let me have it. You never can know how kind it was. But we
can get on without it now."

Mr. Fowler cleared his throat. To Hugh his manner faintly suggested the
cat busy with the yarn, full of a sort of devout curiosity. "Pardon me,"
he said, gently, "but are you sure--have you given this matter
sufficient thought? The sum is a considerable one. Your children--"

"I have talked it over with them. They feel just as I do."

"A very proper feeling," said Miss Fowler, approvingly. "I must say that
I never expected it. I shall add part of my share of it to the Marian
Fowler Ward in the Home for Deficient Children. A most worthy charity.
Perhaps I could interest you--"

"Oh, that would be lovely!" cried Mrs. Shirley. "Anything for
children.... I've already spoken to my cousin, who is a lawyer, about
transferring the securities back to you."

"I shall communicate with him at once," said Mr. Fowler. His court-room
manner had bourgeoned into his best drawing-room blend of faintly
implied gallantry and deep consideration. One almost caught Winter
getting out of the lap of Spring. Then the three heads which had
unconsciously leaned together suddenly straightened up and turned in the
same direction.

Hugh stood almost over them. In one hand he held his aunt's knitting,
which he had mechanically rescued from the cat. Now he drew out one of
the ivory needles and snapped it into accurate halves. "This is
atrocious!" he said, with care and precision. His voice shook. "I shall
not touch a cent of it and"--he embraced his uncle and aunt in the same
devastating look--"neither will you if you have any sense of decency."

"I think--"

"It doesn't matter remotely what you--we think sir. What matters is what
Uncle Hugh thought." He turned to Mrs. Shirley with an extraordinary
softening of tone. "Couldn't you keep it? When he died ... in the room
over this"--with a little gasp her glance flew to the ceiling as though
this topographical detail had brought her a sharp realization of that
long-past scene--"he made us promise that you should have it, all of it.
He felt that you needed it; he worried about it."

"Oh, how kind of him--how kind!" cried the little woman. The poignancy
of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light.
"Even then--to think of me. But don't you understand that he wouldn't
want me to--to take anything that I felt I ought not to take?"

"That's the way out," rippled across Mr. Fowler's face. He was
experiencing a variety of mental disturbances, but this came to the
surface just in time for Hugh to catch it.

"Oh well," he murmured, wearily. "Only, none for this deficient child,
thank you." He walked to the window and stood looking out into the blown
spring green of the elm opposite. His ebbed anger had left a residuum of
stubbornness. There was still an act of justice to be consummated and
the position of grand-justicer offered a certain righteous attraction.
As he reminded himself, if you put your will to work on a difficult
action you were fain to commit, after a while the will worked
automatically and your mind functioned without aid from you, and the
action bloomed of itself. This kinetic process was a constant device of
the freakish impulse that he called his devil. He deliberately laid the
train.

"There is one more thing," the alien was saying. Her voice had gained a
wonderful fluency amid the general thaw. "I didn't dare to ask before,
but if we thought of me then--I have always hoped he left some message
for me ... a letter, perhaps."

Hugh smiled agreeably. "In just a moment," he considered, "I am going to
do something so outrageous that I can't even imagine how my dear
families are going to take it." He was about to hurt them severely, but
that was all right. His uncle was a tempered weapon of war that despised
quarter; and as for Aunt Maria, he rather wanted to hurt Aunt Maria for
her own good.

Into the eloquent and mendacious silence that was a gift of their caste
the voice fell humbly: "So there wasn't? I suppose I oughtn't to have
expected it."

"Any time now, Gridley," Hugh signalled to his familiar. Like a
response, a thin breeze tickled the roots of his hair. He swung around
with the pivot of a definite purpose. With an economy of movement that
would have contented an efficiency expert he set a straight
fiddle-backed chair squarely in front of Uncle Hugh's girl and settled
himself in it with his back to his own people.

"Mrs. Shirley," he began, quietly, "will you talk to me, please? I hope
I shan't startle you, but there are things I absolutely have to know,
and this is my one chance. I am entirely determined not to let it slip.
Talk to me, please, not to them. As you have doubtless noticed, though
excellent people where the things not flatly of this world are
concerned, my uncle is a graven image and my aunt is a deaf mute. As for
me, I am just unbalanced enough to understand anything." He was aware of
the rustle of consternation behind him and hurried on, ignoring that and
whatever else might be happening there. "That's what I'm banking on now.
I intend to say my say and they are going to allow it, because it is
dangerous to thwart queer people--very dangerous indeed. You know, they
thwarted Uncle Hugh in every possible way. My grandfather was a
composite of those two, and all of them adored my uncle and contradicted
him and watched him until he went over the border. And they're so dead
scared that I'm going to follow him some day that they let me do quite
as I please." He passed his hand across his eyes as though brushing away
cobwebs. "Will you be so good as to put your veil up."

"Why--why, certainly!" Mrs. Shirley faltered. She uncovered her face and
Hugh nodded to the witness within.

"Yes, he'd have liked that," he told himself. "Lots of expression and
those beautiful haunted shadows about the eyes." He laughed gently.
"Don't look so frightened. I don't bite. Just humour me, as Uncle
Winthrop is signalling you to do. You understand, don't you, that Uncle
Hugh was the romance and the adventure of my life? I'm still saturated
with him, but there was lots of him that I could never get through to.
There never was a creature better worth knowing, and he couldn't show
me, or else I had blind spots. There were vast tracts of undiscovered
country in him, as far as I was concerned--lands of wonder, east of the
sun and west of the moon--that sort of thing. But I knew that there was
a certain woman who must have been there, who held the heart of the
mystery, and to-day, when this incredible chance came--when you came--I
made up my mind that I was not going to be restrained nor baffled by the
customs of my tribe. I want the truth and I'm prepared to give it. From
the shoulder. If you will tell me everything you know about him I
promise to tell you everything I know. You'll want to--" The sound of
the closing door made him turn. The room behind him was empty. His
manner quieted instantly. "That's uncommonly tactful of them.... You
won't think that they meant any discourtesy by leaving?" he added,
anxiously. "They wouldn't do that."

"Oh, I'm sure not! Your uncle made me understand," faltered Mrs.
Shirley. "They knew you could speak more freely without them."

"He's wonderful with the wireless," Hugh agreed. "But they were in
terror, anyway, as to how freely I was about to speak before them. They
can't stand this. Everything really human seems pretty well alien to
Uncle Winthrop. He's exhibit A of the people who consider civilization
a mistake. And my aunt Maria is a truly good woman--charities and all
that--but if you put a rabbit in her brain it would incontinently curl
up and die in convulsions."

She laughed helplessly, and Hugh reported an advance.

"Nevertheless," he added quaintly, "we don't really dislike each other."

"I'm the last of the family, you see; I'm the future.... Can't we skip
the preliminaries?" he broke out. "You don't feel that I am a stranger,
do you?" He halted on the verge of the confidence that he found no
barrier in her advanced age. He knew plenty of women of forty who had
never grown up much and who met him on perfectly equal terms. This,
however, was a case by itself. He plunged back into the memories of
Uncle Hugh. He spoke of his charm, his outlook on life, sometimes
curiously veiled, often uncannily clairvoyant; his periods of restless
suffering tending to queer, unsocial impulses; then the flowering of an
interval of hard work and its reward of almost supernatural joy.

"He used to go around in a rainbow," said Hugh, "a sort of holy soap
bubble. I hardly dared to speak to him for fear of breaking it. It came
with a new inspiration, and while it lasted nothing on earth was so
important. Then when it was finished he never wanted to see the thing
again."

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