O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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"Go on," said his listener. Her grey eyes plumbed his with a child's
directness. He was conscious of his will playing on her. He was keeping
his part of the contract, but he was also breaking the way for hers. He
must not let them go for a moment, those grey eyes like a girl's that
grew absent-minded so easily. Only a little more and his mood would
curve around both them, a glamorous mist of feeling.

"You go on," he murmured. "Can't you see how much I want you to? Can't
you feel how much I'm the right person to know?"

"I could never tell any one. You want--"

"Anything, everything. You must have known him better than anybody in
he world did."

"I think so," she said, slowly "And I saw him alone only twice in my
life."

For some time he had sat with his long fingers over his mouth, afraid of
checking her by an untimely word.

"Of course I was in his classes. You know he had an extraordinary
success; he struck twelve at once, as they say there. The French really
discovered him as a poet, just as Mallarme discovered Poe; some of them
used that parallel. And the girls--he was a matinee idol and a
cult--even the French girls. We went into that classroom thrilling as we
never went to any ball. I worked that winter for him harder than I had
ever worked in my life, and about Easter he began to single me out for
the most merciless fault-finding. That was his way of showing that he
considered you worth while. He had a habit of standing over you in
class, holding your paper like a knout. And once or twice--I called
myself a conceited little idiot--but once or twice--"

Hugh nodded. His pulses were singing like morning stars at the spectacle
of a new world.

"He used to say of a certain excited, happy feeling, a sort of fey
feeling, that you seemed to have swallowed a heavenly pigeon. And--well,
he looked like that. But I knocked my vanity on the head and told it,
'Down to the other dogs.' I was used to young men; I knew how little
such manifestations could mean. But after that I used to set little
lines in the things I wrote for him, very delicately, and sometimes I
fancied I had caught a fish. It was most exciting."

Hugh again impersonated a Chinese mandarin.

"You see, he allowed so few people to know him, he moved with such
difficulty in that formally laid-out small, professional world, with its
endless leaving of cards and showing yourself on the proper days. I
think they considered him a sort of Huron afflicted with genius, and
forgave him. He ran away from them, he fought them off. And to feel that
there was a magic spiderweb between this creature and me, new every day
and invisible to everybody else and dripping with poetry like dewdrops!
Can't you fancy the intoxication? I was nineteen.... I had engaged
myself to be married to Beverly Shirley. I had known him all my
life--before I left home--but I had absolutely no conviction of
disloyalty. This was different; this was another life."

"Another you," agreed Hugh, as one who took exotic states of mind for
granted.

"Well, yes.... It was one of the awful at-homes of Madame Normand's. She
took American girls _en pension_, and she was supposed to look after us
severely; but as she was an American herself, of course she gave us a
great deal of liberty. She was the wife of a _professeur_, and she had
rather an imposing _salon_, so she received just so often, and you had
to go or she never stopped asking you why. You have been to those French
receptions?"

"Where they serve music and syrup and little hard cakes, and you carry
away the impression of a lordly function because of the scenery and the
manners? Indeed yes!"

"I slid away after a while, out upon the iron balcony, filled with new
lilacs, that overhung the garden. Something had hurt my little feelings;
a letter hadn't come, perhaps. I remember how dark and warm the night
was, like a gulf under me, and the stars and the lights of Paris seemed
very much alike and rather disappointing. Then I heard his voice behind
me, and I was as overwhelmed as--as Daphne or Danae or one of those
pagan ladies might have been when the god came.

"He said, 'What are you doing, hanging over this dark, romantic chasm?'
And I just had presence of mind enough to play up.

"'Naturally, I'm waiting for a phantom lover.' Then the answer to that
flashed on me and I said in a hurry, 'I thought you never came to these
things.'

"'I came to see you'--he really said it--and then, 'And--am I
sufficiently demoniacal?' And he _had_ swallowed a pigeon.

"'Oh dear, no!' said I. 'You are much too respectable. You are from
Boston.'

"'And you from Virginia,' said he. 'I hear that a certain Stewart once
unjustifiably claimed kinship with your branch of the family and has
since been known as the Pretender.'

"'That is quite true,' said I. 'And I hear that once when the Ark ran
aground a little voice was heard piping: 'Save me! save me! I am a
Fowler of Boston!'

"That was the silly way we began. Isn't it incredible?"

"He could be silly--that was one of the lovable things," Hugh mused.
"And he could say the most nakedly natural things. But he generally used
the mandarin dialect. He thought in it, I suppose."

"No," the stranger corrected him. "He thought in thoughts. Brilliant
people always do. The words just wait like a--a--"

"Layette," said Hugh. "What else did he say?"

"The next I remember we were leaning together, all but touching. And he
was telling me about the little green gate."

Hugh's hand shut. "He always called it that. Was he thinking of it even
then?"

"Oh yes!"

"He never was like a person of this world," said Hugh, under his breath.

"The loneliest creature I ever knew."

They fell silent, like two old friends whose sorrow is the same.

"He believed," Hugh went on, after a moment, "that when life became
intolerable you had a perfect right to take the shortest way out. And he
thought of it as a little green gate, swinging with its shadow in the
twilight so that a touch would let you into the sweetest, dimmest old
garden."

"But he loved life."

"Sometimes. The colour of it and the unexpectedness. He believed the
word didn't have any definite plan, but just wandered along the road and
picked up adventures. And he loved that. He said God made a new earth
every day and he rather fancied a new heaven oftener. But he got so
dead tired at the end, homesick for the underground.... I wonder ..."

The little woman was looking past him, straight into an evocation of a
vanished presence that was so real, so nearly tangible, that Hugh was
forced to lay violent hands upon his absurd impulse to glance over his
shoulder "I wouldn't let him," she said, in a tone the young man had
never heard before.

"You mean ..."

"I couldn't bear it. I made him promise me that he wouldn't. I can't
tell you that. We talked for a long time and the night was full of doom.
He was tired then, but that wasn't all. He felt what was coming--the
Shadow ... and he was in terror. What he dreaded most was that it might
change him in some way, make him something beastly and devilish--he who
had always loved whatever was lovely and merciful and of good report."

Hugh got up with a shudder. "Hush!" he said, sharply. "It's too ghastly.
Don't tell me any more about it." He wandered across the room, pulling a
leaf from the azaleas, stopping at the window for a long look out. The
wind was blowing some riotous young clouds over the sky like
inarticulate shouts. There was an arrogant bird in the elm; there were
pert crocus-buds in the window-boxes. The place was full of foolhardy
little dare-devils who trusted their fate and might never find it out.
After all, that was the way to live--as long as one was allowed. He
turned suddenly with his whimsical smile. "I look out o' window quite a
bit," he explained, "well, because of my aunt Maria." When he sat down
again in the Sheraton chair Mrs. Shirley shifted her story to the plane
of the smile.

"I don't know how late it was when Madame Normand popped her head out of
the balcony door."

"'Who was then surprised? It was the lady,' as dear old Brantome says?"

"It was everybody. The company had gone and Melanie the _bonne_ was
putting out the candles.

"'Miss Stewart and I have just discovered that we are very nearly
related,' said he.

"'But how delightful,' said Madame, thoroughly annoyed."

"And the other time," Hugh hinted. What he wanted to say was, "So you
prevented it, you kept him here, God bless you!" His natural resilience
had asserted itself. Vistas were opening. The Hugh who accepted life for
what it was worth was again in the ascendant, but he found a second to
call up the other Hugh, whose legal residence was somewhere near the
threshold of consciousness, to take notice. He had always known that
there must have been something in Uncle Hugh's girl.

"That was a few days later, the afternoon before I left Paris. I went
quite suddenly. Somebody was sick at home, and I had the chance to
travel with some friends who were going. He had sent me flowers--no, not
roses."

"Narcissus?"

"Yes. Old Monsieur Normand was scandalized; it seems one doesn't send
yellow flowers to a _jeune fille_. To me it was the most incredibly
thoughtful and original thing. All the other girls had gone with Madame
to a very special piano recital, in spite of a drizzling rain. It had
turned cool, too, I remember, because there was a wood fire in the
little sitting-room--not the _salon_, but the girls' room. Being an
American, Madame was almost lavish about fires. And it was a most
un-French room, the most careless little place, where the second-best
piano lived, and the lilacs, when they were taken in out of the cold.
There were sweet old curtains, and a long sofa in front of the fireplace
instead of the traditional armchairs. Anybody's books and bibelots lay
about. I was playing."

"What?" This was important.

"What would a girl play, over twenty years ago, in Paris? In the
_crepuscule_, with the lilacs that _embaument_, as they say there, and
with a sort of panic in her mind? Because, after all, the man to whom
one is engaged is a man whom one knows very slightly."

"Absolutely," said Hugh.

"And I didn't want to leave Paris.... Of course I was playing Chopin
bits, with an ache in my heart to match, that I couldn't bear and was
enjoying to the utmost. What do girls play now? Then all of us had
attacks of Chopin. Madame used to laugh and say, 'I hear the harbour bar
still moaning,' and order that particular girl's favourite dessert. She
spoiled us. And Monsieur would say something about _si jeunesse savait_.
He was a nice old man, not very successful; his colleagues patronized
him. Oh yes he was obvious!

"And then Melanie opened the door and announced, '_Monsieur, le cousin
de Mademoiselle_.' I don't know what made her do it except a general
wish to be kind. She remembered from the other night, and, besides, she
hated to attempt English names; she made salmi of them."

Hugh had ceased to hold her eyes long ago. They looked into the window's
square of light. He had no wish to intrude his presence. She was finding
it natural to tell him, just as he had acknowledged her right to explore
the intimate places of his soul. Things simply happened that way
sometimes, and one was humbly thankful.

"'Go on,' he said. 'Don't stop.' He sat in a corner of the sofa, and for
a while the impetus of my start carried me on. Then the bottom dropped
out of Chopin. I went over and sat in the other corner. It was a long
sofa; it felt as long as the world.

"Do you remember that heart-breakingly beautiful voice of his that could
make you feel anything he was feeling? It was like magic. He said at
last:

"'So you are going home to be married?'

"I nodded.

"'Betty,' he said, 'are you happy, quite happy, about--everything?'

"'Oh yes!' I said. 'Oh yes, Professor Fowler!' The curious thing about
it was that I spoke the truth when I considered it seriously.

"He said, 'Then that's all right.' Then he laughed a little and said,
'Do you always call me Professor Fowler, even when you shut your door on
the world at night and are all alone with God and the silence?'

"'And Claudia Jones,' I added, stupidly.

"He considered that seriously and said, 'I didn't know about Claudia
Jones; she may inhibit even the silence and the other ingredient. I
suppose you call me Teacher.'

"I cried out at that. 'I might call you _cher maitre_, as they do her.'

"He said, 'That may do for the present.'

"'We looked into the fire and the lilacs filled the pause as adequately
as Chopin could have done. All at once he got up and came over to me--it
seemed the most natural thing in the world--across that wilderness of
sofa.

"'I suppose,' he said, 'that you won't let me off that promise.'

"'No, no!' I cried, all my old panic flooding over me again. I threw my
hands out, and suddenly he had caught them in his and was holding me
half away from him, and he was saying, in that tragic voice of his:

"'No, no! But give me something to make it bearable.'"

"Allah, the compassionate!" sighed Hugh, in ecstasy. He had never dared
hope for all this. His very being went on tiptoe for fear of breathing
too loud.

"We sat there for ages and ages, gazing into the fire, not saying a
word. Then he spoke ... every now and then. He said:

"'The horrible thing would have been never to have known you. Now that
I've touched you I'm magnetized for life. I can't lose you again.'

"'It isn't I,' I told him. 'It's only what you think me.'

"'You are the only creature outside of myself that I ever found myself
in,' he said. 'And I could look into you like Narcissus until I died.
You are home and Nirvana. That's what you are. When I look at you I
believe in God. You gallantest, most foolhardy, little, fragile thing,
you, you're not afraid of anything. You trust this rotten life, don't
you? You expect to find lovely things everywhere, and you will, just
because they'll spring up around your feet. You'll save your world like
all redeemers simply by being in it.'

"No woman ever had such things said to her as he said to me. But most
of the time we said nothing. There wasn't any past or future; there was
only the touch of his shoulder and his hands all around mine. It was
like coming in out of the cold; it was like being on a hill above the
sea, and listening to the wind in the pines until you don't know which
is the wind and which is you....

"It couldn't last forever. After a while something like a little point
of pain began worrying my mind.

"'But there won't be.... This is good-bye,' I cried.

"'Don't you believe it,' he said. 'God Himself couldn't make us say
good-bye again.' He got up and drew me with him. It was quite dark now
except for the fire, and his eyes ... they were like those of the Djinns
who were made out of elemental fire instead of earth. 'You'll come to me
in the blessed sunshine,' he said, 'and in music, and in the best
impulses of my own soul. If I were an old-fashioned lover I should
promise to wait for you in heaven.... Betty, Betty, I have you in heaven
now and forever!' ... I felt his cheek on mine. Then he was gone. That
was all; that was every bit of all."

"And he had that to live on for the rest of his life." Hugh broke the
silence under his breath. "Well, thank God he had _something_!"

The little woman fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief and shamelessly
dried her eyes. As she moved, a brown object fell from the corner of the
couch across her lap. Hugh held his hand out for the morocco portfolio.

"It seems to have the homing instinct," he observed; then, abruptly,
"Wait a moment; I'm going to call them back." He paused, as usual,
before his favourite confidant, the window. "The larger consciousness,
the Universal Togetherness," he muttered. "I really believe he must have
touched it that once. O Lord! how--" His spacious vocabulary gave it up.

When he followed his uncle and aunt into the room Mrs. Shirley came
forward, her thin veil again covering her face.

"I must go," she said. "Thank you once more for letting me come."

With a curious young touch of solemnity Hugh laid the brown case in her
hands. "This belongs to you," he said, "and I wanted them to see you
receive it."

* * * * *

"And you intend to permit this, Winthrop?"

Miss Fowler turned on her brother. She had suppressed her emotions
before the intruder; she had even said some proper things without unduly
speeding the parting guest. But if you can't be hateful to your own
family, to whom, in the name of the domestic pieties, can you be
hateful?

Mr. Fowler swiveled on her the glassy eye of one who does not suffer
fools gladly. "I permit anything," he responded, icily, "that will keep
that boy ... sane." He retired anew behind the monastic newspaper and
rattled it.

Miss Maria received a sudden chill apprehension that Winthrop was
looking much older lately. "But--" she faltered. Then she resolutely
returned to the baiting. "I suppose you recall her saying that she has a
daughter. Probably," admitted Miss Maria, grudgingly, "an attractive
daughter."

"It might be a very good thing," said the world-weary voice, and left
her gasping. "Two excellent Virginia families." He faced his sister's
appalled expression. "He might do something much more impossible--marry
a cheap actress or go into a monastery. His behaviour to-day prepares me
for anything. And"--a note of difficulty came into what Hugh had once
called his uncle's chiselled voice--"you do not appear to realize,
Maria, that what Mrs. Shirley has done is rather a remarkable thing, a
thing that you and I, with our undoubted appreciation of the value of
money, should probably have felt that we could not afford to do."

Hugh came in blithely, bringing a spring-smelling whiff of outdoors with
him. "I got her a taxi," he announced, "and she asked me to come down to
their place for Easter. There's a hunting club. Oh cheer up, Aunt Maria!
At least she left the money behind."

"Look at my needle!" cried the long-suffering lady. "_You_ did that. I
must say, Hugh, I find your conduct most disrespectful."

"All right, I grovel," Hugh agreed, pleasantly. He picked up the cat and
rubbed her tenderly the wrong way.

"As for the money, I don't see how her conscience could have allowed her
to accept everything. And she married somebody else, too."

"So did Dante's girl. That doesn't seem to make all the difference.
Conscience?" Hugh went on, absently. "Conscience? Haven't I heard that
word somewhere before? You are the only person I know, Aunt Maria, who
has a really good, staunch, weather-proof one, because, like the laws of
the Medes and Persians, it altereth not."

"I should hope not, indeed," said Miss Fowler, half mollified.

Hugh smiled sleepily. The cat opened one yellow eye and moved mystified
whiskers. She profoundly distrusted this affectionate young admirer. Was
she being stroked the wrong way or ruffled the right way?

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright," murmured Hugh. "Puzzle, Kitty: find the
Adventuress."

THE KITCHEN GODS

BY G.F. ALSOP

From _Century Magazine_

The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard in their fantastic
green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened.
Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their
faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the
wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was
mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as
straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness;
but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved
among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house
where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the
wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the
devil-catches, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge
china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came
the sounds of early morning--the click of wooden sandals on cobbled
streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh
vegetables or carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city.
The gate-keeper was awake, brushing out his house with a broom of twigs.
He was quite bald, and the top of his head was as tanned and brown as
the legs of small summer children.

"Good morning, Honourable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The
lilies have opened."

An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-aproned, cluttered across
the courtyard with two pails of steaming water.

"Good morning, Honourable One. The water for the great wife is hot and
heavy." She dropped her buckets, the water splashing over in runnels
and puddles at her feet, and stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an
auspicious day."

From the casement-window in the right balcony a voice called:

"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"

It sounded elderly and querulous a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to
dominate. The great wife's face appeared a moment at the casement. Her
eyes swept over the courtyard scene--over the blooming lilies, and
Dong-Yung standing among them.

"Behold the small wife, cursed of the gods!" she cried in her high,
shrill voice. "Not even a girl can she bear her master. May she eat
bitterness all her days!"

The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare
boards of the ancestral hall beyond.

"The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honourable
One, shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids."

Dong-Yung nodded. The flower girl came slowly in under the guarded
gateway. She was a country child, with brown cheeks and merry eyes. Her
shallow basket was steadied by a ribbon over one shoulder, and caught
between an arm and a swaying hip. In the flat, round basket, on green
little leaves, lay the wired perfumed orchids.

"How many? It is an auspicious day. See, the lilies have bloomed. One
for the hair and two for the buttonholes. They smell sweet as the breath
of heaven itself."

Dong-Yung smiled as the flower-girl stuck one of the fragrant, fragile,
green-striped orchids in her hair, and hung two others, caught on
delicate loops of wire, on the jade studs of her jacket, buttoned on the
right shoulder.

"Ah, you are beautiful-come-death!" said the flower-girl. "Great
happiness be thine!"

"Even a small wife can be happy at times." Dong-Yung took out a little
woven purse and paid over two coppers apiece to the flower-girl.

At the gate the girl and the gate-keeper fell a-talking.

"Is the morning rice ready?" called a man's voice from the room behind.

Dong-Yung turned quickly. Her whole face changed. It had been smiling
and pleased before at the sight of the faint, white lily-petals and the
sunlight on her feet and the fragrance of the orchids in her hair; but
now it was lit with an inner radiance.

"My beloved Master!" Dong-Yung made a little instinctive gesture toward
the approaching man, which in a second was caught and curbed by Chinese
etiquette. Dressed, as she was, in pale-gray satin trousers, loose, and
banded at the knee with wide blue stripes, and with a soft jacket to
match, she was as beautiful in the eyes of the approaching man as the
newly opened lilies. What he was in her eyes it would be hard for any
modern woman to grasp: that rapture of adoration, that bliss of worship,
has lingered only in rare hearts and rarer spots on the earth's surface.

Foh-Kyung came out slowly through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged
it like a bright border. The floors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw
the decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically
along the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of
honour. Long crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from
ceiling to floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom,
imperial yellow, and turquoise blue, gleamed like a lighted lamp in the
shadowy morning light of the room.

Foh-Kyung stooped to smell the lilies.

"They perfume the very air we breathe. Little Jewel, I love our old
Chinese ways. I love the custom of the lily-planting and the day the
lilies bloom. I love to think the gods smell them in heaven, and are
gracious to mortals for their fragrance's sake."

"I am so happy!" Dong-Yung said, poking the toe of her slipper in and
out the sunlight. She looked up at the man before her, and saw he was
tall and slim and as subtle-featured as the cross-legged bronze Buddha
himself. His long thin hands were hid, crossed and slipped along the
wrists within the loose apricot satin sleeves of his brocaded garment.
His feet, in their black satin slippers and tight-fitting white muslin
socks, were austere and aristocratic. Dong-Yung, when he was absent,
loved best to think of him thus, with his hands hidden and his eyes
smiling.

"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her
shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree.

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