O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

The place was very quiet and peaceful, mottled with the gorgeous,
flowerlike splashes of colour. The waiting candles, the echoes of many
prayers, the blossom of worship filled the tiny chapel. Dong-Yung liked
it, despite herself, despite the strangeness of the imageless altar,
despite the clothes of the priest. She stood quite still behind the
bench flooded and filled with an all-pervading sense of happiness.

Foh-Kyung and the black-robed priest walked past her, down the little
aisle, to a shiny brass railing that went like a fence round before the
altar. The foreign-born priest laid one hand on the railing as if to
kneel down, but Foh-Kyung turned and beckoned with his chin to Dong-Yung
to come. She obeyed at once. She was surprisingly unafraid. Her feet
walked through the patterns of colour, which slid over her head and
hands, gold from the gold of a cross and purple from the robe of a king.
As if stepping through a rainbow, she came slowly down the aisle to the
waiting men, and in her heart and in her eyes lay the light of all love
and trust.

Foh-Kyung caught her hand.

"See, I take her hand," he said to the priest, "even as you would take
the hand of your wife, proud and unashamed in the presence of your God.
Even as your love is, so shall ours be. Where the thoughts of my heart
lead, the heart of my small wife follows. Give us your blessing."

Foh-Kyung drew Dong-Yung to her knees beside him. His face was hidden,
after the manner of the foreign worshipers; but hers was uplifted, her
eyes gazing at the glass with the colours of many flowers and the shapes
of men and angels. She was happier than she had ever been--happier even
than when she had first worshiped the ancestral tablets with her lord
and master, happier even than at the feast of the dead, when they laid
their food offerings on the shaven grave-mounds. She felt closer to
Foh-Kyung than in all her life before.

She waited. The silence grew and grew till in the heart of it something
ominous took the place of its all-pervading peace. Foh-Kyung lifted his
face from his hands and rose to his feet. Dong-Yung turned, still
kneeling, to scan his eyes. The black-robed priest stood off and looked
at them with horror. Surely it was horror! Never had Dong-Yung really
liked him. Slowly she rose, and stood beside and a little behind
Foh-Kyung. He had not blessed them. Faintly, from beyond the walls of
the Christian chapel came the beating of drums. Devil-drums they were.
Dong-Yung half smiled at the long-known familiar sound.

"Your small wife?" said the priest. "Have you another wife?"

"Assuredly," Foh-Kyung answered. "All men have a great wife first; but
this, my small wife, is the wife of my heart. Together we have come to
seek and find the Jesus way."

The priest wiped his hand across his face. Dong-Yung saw that it was wet
with tiny round balls of sweat. His mouth had suddenly become one thin
red line, but in his eyes lay pain.

"Impossible," he said. His voice was quite different now, and sounded
like bits of metal falling on stone. "No man can enter the church while
living in sin with a woman other than his lawful wife. If your desire is
real, put her away."

With instant response, Foh-Kyung made a stately bow. "Alas! I have made
a grievous mistake. The responsibility will be on my body. I thought all
were welcome. We go. Later on, perhaps, we may meet again."

The priest spoke hurriedly.

"I do not understand your meaning. Is this belief of such light weight
that you will toss it away for a sinful woman? Put her away, and come
and believe." But Foh-Kyung did not hear his words. As he turned away,
Dong-Yung followed close behind her lord and master, only half
comprehending, yet filled with a great fear. They went out again into
the sunshine, out across the flat green grass, under the iron gateway,
back into the Land of the Flowery Kingdom. Foh-Kyung did not speak until
he put Dong-Yung in the rickshaw.

"Little Wife of my Heart," he said, "stop at the jeweller's and buy thee
new ear-rings, these ear-rings of the sky-blue stone and sea-tears, and
have thy hair dressed and thy gowns perfumed, and place the two red
circles on the smile of thy cheeks. To-night we will feast. Hast thou
forgotten that to-night is the Feast of the Lanterns, when all good
Buddhists rejoice?"

He stood beside her rickshaw, in his imperial yellow garment hemmed with
the rainbow waves of the sea, and smiled down into her eyes.

"But the spirit God of love, the foreign-born spirit God?" said
Dong-Yung. "Shall we feast to him too?"

"Nay, it is not fitting to feast to two gods at once," said Foh-Kyung.
"Do as I have said."

He left her. Dong-Yung, riding through the sun-splashed afternoon,
buying coloured jewels and flowery perfume and making herself beautiful,
yet felt uneasy. She had not quite understood. A dim knowledge advanced
toward her like a wall of fog. She pressed her two hands against it and
held it off--held it off by sheer mental refusal to understand. In the
courtyard at home the children were playing with their lighted animals,
drawing their gaudy paper ducks, luminous with candle-light, to and fro
on little standards set on four wheels. At the gate hung a tall
red-and-white lantern, and over the roof floated a string of candle-lit
balloons. In the ancestral hall the great wife had lit the red candles,
speared on their slender spikes, before the tablets. In the kitchen the
cooks and amahs were busy with the feast-cooking. Candles were stuck
everywhere on the tables and benches. They threw little pools of light
on the floor before the stove and looked at the empty niche. In the
night it was merely a black hole in the stove filled with formless
shadow. She wished--

"Dong-Yung, Flower in the House, where hast thou hidden the kitchen
gods? Put them in their place." Foh-Kyung, still in imperial yellow,
stood like a sun in the doorway.

Dong-Yung turned.

"But--"

"Put them back, little Jewel in the Hair. It is not permitted to worship
the spirit God. There are bars and gates. The spirit of man must turn
back in the searching, turn back to the images of plaster and paint."

Dong-Yung let the wall of fog slide over her. She dropped her
resistance. She knew.

"Nay, not the spirit of man. It is but natural that the great God does
not wish the importunings of a small wife. Worship thou alone the great
God, and the shadow of that worship will fall on my heart."

"Nay, I cannot worship alone. My worship is not acceptable in the sight
of the foreign God. My ways are not his ways."

Foh-Kyung's face was unlined and calm, yet Dong-Yung felt the hidden
agony of his soul, flung back from its quest upon gods of plaster and
paint.

"But I know the thoughts of thy heart, O Lord and Master, white and
fragrant as the lily-buds that opened to-day. Has thy wish changed?"

"Nay, my wish is even the same, but it is not permitted to a man of two
wives to be a follower of the spirit God."

Dong-Yung had known it all along. This knowledge came with no surprise.
It was she who kept him from the path of his desire!

"Put back the kitchen gods," said Foh-Kyung. "We will live and believe
and die even as our fathers have done. The gate to the God of love is
closed."

The feast was served. In the sky one moon blotted out a world of stars.
Foh-Kyung sat alone, smoking. Laughter and talk filled the women's wing.
The amahs and coolies were resting outside. A thin reed of music crept
in and out among the laughter and talk, from the reed flute of the cook.
The kitchen was quite empty. One candle on the table sent up a long
smoky tongue of flame. The fire still smouldered in the corner. A little
wind shook the cypress-branches without, and carried the scent of the
opened lilies into the room.

Dong-Yung, still arrayed for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the
corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven brass wings of the
butterfly, and lifted out the kitchen gods. One in each hand, she held
them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a
bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground before them.

"Forgive me, O my kitchen gods, forgive my injurious hands and heart;
but the love of my master is even greater than my fear of thee. Thou and
I, we bar the gates of heaven from him."

When she had finished, she tiptoed around the room, touching the chairs
and tables with caressing fingers. She stole out into the courtyard, and
bent to inhale the lily fragrance, sweeter by night than by day. "An
auspicious day," the gate-keeper had said that morning. Foh-Kyung had
stood beside her, with his feet in the sunshine; she remembered the
light in his eyes. She bent her head till the fingers of the lily-petals
touched her cheek. She crept back through the house, and looked at
Foh-Kyung smoking. His eyes were dull, even as are the eyes of sightless
bronze Buddhas. No, she would never risk going in to speak to him. If
she heard the sound of his voice, if he called her "little Flower of the
House," she would never have the strength to go. So she stood in the
doorway and looked at him much as one looks at a sun, till wherever else
one looks, one sees the same sun against the sky.

In the formless shadow she made a great obeisance, spreading out her
arms and pressing the palms of her hands against the floor.

"O my Lord and Master," she said, with her lips against the boards of
the floor, softly, so that none might hear her--"O my Lord and Master, I
go. Even a small wife may unbar the gates of heaven."

First, before she went, she cast the two kitchen gods, green and gold,
of ancient plaster, into the embers of the fire. There in the morning
the cook-rice amahs found the onyx stones that had been their eyes. The
house was still unlocked, the gate-keeper at the feast. Like a shadow
she moved along the wall and through the gate. The smell of the lilies
blew past her. Drums and chants echoed up the road, and the sounds of
manifold feastings. She crept away down by the wall, where the moon laid
a strip of blackness, crept away to unbar the gates of heaven for her
lord and master.

APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL

By EDNA FERBER

From _Ladies Home Journal_

Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She
started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar
in strict accordance with Article I, Section I, Unwritten Rules for
House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five
years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five
years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled
up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of
What's-Her-Name, mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone
through the ceremony twice a year.

Furniture on the porch, woolens on the line, mattresses in the
yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed,
flapped, shaken or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of
these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in
again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar,
things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental
things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things
wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.

And boxes--oh, above all, boxes; pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square
and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencilings on one end;
cryptic, that, is to anyone except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned
an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long slim box. Another
stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents
under "Slp Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing
fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key
they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as
Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch,
slip-covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valence.

The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American
household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago,
Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten
years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his
sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the
neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pink's rose-cretonne room had
lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the
Chicago Art Institute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful
magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow
chested (she'd need to be with that decolletage), carrying feather fan.
You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves
the black net dress and sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too
tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.

Now don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking,
ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a
palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and
slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin,
were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at
Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless
heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of
citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and
to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.

Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and Georgette and alligator pears; and
Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up
above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the
afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster
house was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen
closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises
as well-to-do Middle Western home is likely to be.

That home had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically,
that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had
they--intolerance and understanding humanness--until now, as you talked
with them, you felt that there was room and to spare of sun-filled
mental chambers, and shelves well stored with experience, and pantries
and bins and closets for all your worries and confidences.

But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every
woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I
only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it
weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago,"
complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood
floored, spacious light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social,
aesthetic, educational and spiritual progress of the entire family as
clearly as if a sociologist had chartered it.

Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the
crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a
junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon
portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each
of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink
cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the
labyrinthian scrolls of her sextuple gold frame, was rouged like a
soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes
behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster
household--had thought these massive atrocities the last word in
artistic ornament. By the time she reached her sophomore year, Pinky had
prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining-room. Then two
years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living-room and the
dining-room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.

Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with
them for the vacations Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel
and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the
entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the checks
as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting-places in a
nondescript back chamber known as the serving room. Then the new
sleeping porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their
journeying in the attic.

One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove.
Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples,
cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C.
Brewster's _bete noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace.
"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or:
"Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn
mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know
what's got into her."

By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin
September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of
the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly
again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Mis' Merz by-the-day, you
understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little
necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might
have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves and
left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier,
no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that
it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this
relentless and expert crew.

Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened
and its contents revealed, Mis' Merz would say "You keepin' this, Miz'
Brewster?"

"That? Oh, dear yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home
with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie."

Yet why, in the name of all that's ridiculous, did she treasure the
funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _passe_ than
a last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the
tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the
plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had
worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these
were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) passed
by unbrightened by covetousness.

The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth balls, and dust, and
the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic.
Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen
and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz' recital of her husband's
relations' latest flagrancy.

"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own family to look out fuh,' I
says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I
guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings and
much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the
second-floor hallway, a young clear voice calling, then the same
footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard.

Pinky's arm were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it
looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent
had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise.

Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished.

"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--"

"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all
smudged too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked
about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was
a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in
June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor
trips into the country.

"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come
here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat
they're--why, its a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just
got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father."

Miz' Merz damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping a
moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky? Ain't forgot your
old friends, have you?"

"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other
woman's spongy clasp. "Why, hello, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's
house cleaning--I'd forgotten all about house cleaning--that there was
such a thing, I mean."

"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz severely.

Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor
clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said
crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included
and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the
kind. This is--this is an anachronism."

"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be
cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned."

They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended
the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting
each other.

Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the
protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him.
You'll hate the dinner--built around Miz' Merz; you know--boiled. Well,
you know what a despot she is."

It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch
Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes
and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really,
mother!"

Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down and smiled at
Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of
Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift
movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly
at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad and hurled
it through the open doorway.

"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster equably. "Take off
your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way--unless that's
the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the
war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster.

Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard.
"It's just that it seems idiotic--your digging around in an attic in
this day and age! Why it's--it's--" Pinky could express herself much
more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an
attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before--this
huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just
you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in important
anger. "Do you _like_ cleaning the attic?"

"Why, no. I hate it."

"Then why in the world--"

"I've always done it, Pinky. And while they may not be wearing attics in
New York, we haven't taken them off in Winnebago. Come on up to your
room, dear. It looks bare. If I'd known you were coming--the slip
covers--"

"Are they in the box in the attic labeled 'Slp Cov Pinky Rum'?" She
succeeded in slurring it ludicrously.

It brought an appreciative giggle from Mrs. Brewster. A giggle need not
be inconsistent with fifty years, especially if one's nose wrinkles up
delightfully in the act. But no smile curved the daughter's stern young
lips. Together they went up to Pinky's old room (the older woman stopped
to pick up the crumpled towel on the hall floor). On the way they paused
at the door of Mrs. Brewster's bedroom, so cool, so spacious, all soft
greys and blues.

Suddenly Pinky's eyes widened with horror. She pointed an accusing
forefinger at a large dark object in a corner near a window. "That's the
old walnut desk! she exclaimed.

"I know it."

The girl turned, half amused, half annoyed. "Oh, mother dear! That's
the situation in a nutshell. Without a shadow of doubt, there's an
eradicable streak of black walnut in your grey-enamel make-up."

"Eradicable! That's a grand word, Pinky. Stylish! I never expected to
meet it out of a book. And fu'thermore, as Miz' Merz would say, I didn't
know there was any situation."

"I meant the attic. And it's more than a situation. It's a state of
mind."

Mrs. Brewster had disappeared into the depths of her clothes closet. Her
voice sounded muffled. "Pinky, you're talking the way they did at that
tea you gave for father and me when we visited New York last winter."
She emerged with a cool-looking blue kimono. "Here. Put this on.
Father'll be home at twelve-thirty, for dinner, you know. You'll want a
bath, won't you, dear?"

"Yes. Mummy, is it boiled--honestly?--on a day like this?"

"With onions," said Mrs. Brewster firmly.

Fifteen minutes later Pinky, splashing in a cool tub, heard the voice of
Miz' Merz, high-pitched with excitement and a certain awful joy: "Miz'
Brewster! Oh, Miz' Brewster! I found a moth in Mr. Brewster's winter
flannels!"

"Oh!" in choked accents of fury from Pinky; and she brought a hard young
fist down in the water--spat!--so that it splashed ceiling, hair and
floor impartially.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24