O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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

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Miss Gaylord rose. "There are Gerald and father looking for you," she
said, "and I must go now." She held out her hand. "Thank you for letting
me see her picture, and for everything you said about Captain
Sherwood--for _everything_, remember--I want you to remember."

With a light pressure of her fingers she was gone, slipping away
through the shrubbery, and he did not see her again.

IV

So he came to his last morning at Bishopsthorpe; and as he dressed, he
wished it could have been different; that he were not still conscious of
that baffling wall of reserve between himself and Chev's people, for
whom, despite all, he had come to have a real affection.

In the breakfast-room he found them all assembled, and his last meal
there seemed to him as constrained and difficult as any that had
preceded it. It was over finally, however, and in a few minutes he would
be leaving.

"I can never thank you enough for the splendid time I've had here," he
said as he rose. "I'll be seeing Chev to-morrow, and I'll tell him all
about everything."

Then he stopped dead. With a smothered exclamation, old Sir Charles had
stumbled to his feet, knocking over his chair, and hurried blindly out
of the room; and Gerald said, "_Mother_!" in a choked appeal.

As if it were a signal between them, Lady Sherwood pushed her chair back
a little from the table, her long delicate fingers dropped together
loosely in her lap; she gave a faint sigh as if a restraining mantle
slipped from her shoulders, and, looking up at the youth before her, her
fine pale face lighted with a kind of glory, she said, "No, dear lad,
no. You can never tell Chev, for he is gone."

"_Gone_!" he cried.

"Yes," she nodded back at him, just above a whisper; and now her face
quivered, and the tears began to rush down her cheeks.

"Not _dead_!" he cried. "Not Chev--not that! O my God, Gerald, not
_that_!"

"Yes," Gerald said. "They got him two days after you left."

It was so overwhelming, so unexpected and shocking, above all so
terrible, that the friend he had so greatly loved and admired was gone
out of his life forever, that young Cary stumbled back into his seat,
and, crumpling over, buried his face in his hands, making great uncouth
gasps as he strove to choke back his grief.

Gerald groped hastily around the table, and flung an arm about his
shoulders.

"Steady on, dear fellow, steady," he said, though his own voice broke.

"When did you hear?" Cary got out at last.

"We got the official notice just the day before you came--and Withers
has written us particulars since."

"And you _let_ me come in spite of it! And stay on, when every word I
said about him must have--have fairly _crucified_ each one of you! Oh,
forgive me! forgive me!" he cried distractedly. He saw it all now; he
understood at last. It was not on Gerald's account that they could not
talk of flying and of Chev, it was because--because their hearts were
broken over Chev himself. "Oh, forgive me!" he gasped again.

"Dear lad, there is nothing to forgive," Lady Sherwood returned. "How
could we help loving your generous praise of our poor darling? We loved
it, and you for it; we wanted to hear it, but we were afraid. We were
afraid we might break down, and that you would find out."

The tears were still running down her cheeks. She did not brush them
away now; she seemed glad to have them there at last.

Sinking down on his knees, he caught her hands. "Why did you _let_ me do
such a horrible thing?" he cried. "Couldn't you have trusted me to
understand? Couldn't you _see_ I loved him just as you did--No, no!" he
broke down humbly. "Of course I couldn't love him as his own people did.
But you must have seen how I felt about him--how I admired him, and
would have followed him anywhere--and _of course_ if I had known, I
should have gone away at once."

"Ah, but that was just what we were afraid of," she said quickly. "We
were afraid you would go away and have a lonely leave somewhere. And in
these days a boy's leave is so precious a thing that nothing must spoil
it--_nothing_," she reiterated; and her tears fell upon his hands like
a benediction. "But we didn't do it very well, I'm afraid," she went on
presently, with gentle contrition. "You were too quick and
understanding; you guessed there was something wrong. We were sorry not
to manage better," she apologized.

"Oh, you wonderful, wonderful people!" he gasped. "Doing everything for
my happiness, when all the time--all the time--"

His voice went out sharply, as his mind flashed back to scene after
scene: to Gerald's long body lying quivering on the grass; to Sybil
Gaylord wishing Sally Berkeley happiness out of her own tragedy; and to
the high look on Lady Sherwood's face. They seemed to him themselves,
and yet more than themselves--shining bits in the mosaic of a great
nation. Disjointedly there passed through his mind familiar
words--"these are they who have washed their garments--having come out
of great tribulation." No wonder they seemed older.

"We--we couldn't have done it in America," he said humbly.

He had a desperate desire to get away to himself; to hide his face in
his arms, and give vent to the tears that were stifling him; to weep for
his lost friend, and for this great heartbreaking heroism of theirs.

"But why did you do it?" he persisted. "Was it because I was his
friend?"

"Oh, it was much more than that," Gerald said quickly. "It was a matter
of the two countries. Of course, we jolly well knew you didn't belong to
us, and didn't want to, but for the life of us we couldn't help a sort
of feeling that you did. And when America was in at last, and you
fellows began to come, you seemed like our very own come back after many
years, and," he added a throb in his voice, "we were most awfully glad
to see you--we wanted a chance to show you how England felt."

Skipworth Cary rose to his feet. The tears for his friend were still wet
upon his lashes. Stooping, he took Lady Sherwood's hands in his and
raised them to his lips. "As long as I live, I shall never forget," he
said. "And others of us have seen it too in other ways--be sure America
will never forget, either."

She looked up at his untouched youth out of her beautiful sad eyes, the
exalted light still shining through her tears. "Yes," she said, "you see
it was--I don't know exactly how to put it--but it was England to
America."

"FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO"

BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From _Pictorial Review_

When Christopher Kain told me his story, sitting late in his
dressing-room at the Philharmonic I felt that I ought to say something,
but nothing in the world seemed adequate. It was one of those times when
words have no weight: mine sounded like a fly buzzing in the tomb of
kings. And after all, he did not hear me; I could tell that by the look
on his face as he sat there staring into the light, the lank, dark hair
framing his waxen brow, his shoulders hanging forward, his lean, strong,
sentient fingers wrapped around the brown neck of "Ugo," the 'cello,
tightly.

Agnes Kain was a lady, as a lady was before the light of that poor worn
word went out. Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing in face and
form the fragile beauty of a rose-petal come to its fading on a windless
ledge, she moved down the years with the stedfast sweetness of the
gentlewoman--gentle, and a woman.

They knew little about her in the city, where she had come with her son.
They did not need to. Looking into her eyes, into the transparent soul
behind them they could ask no other credential for the name she bore and
the lavender she wore for the husband of whom she never spoke.

She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and to her son. As
Christopher grew through boyhood, she watched him; in her enveloping
eagerness she forestalled the hour when he would have asked, and told
him about his father, Daniel Kain.

It gave them the added bond of secret-sharers. The tale grew as the boy
grew. Each night when Christopher crept into his mother's bed for the
quiet hour of her voice, it was as if he crept in to another world, the
wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains, Daniel, his father,
and Maynard, _his_ father, another Maynard before _him_, and all the
Kains--and the Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor Under the
Cloud, the Beach where the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the
Lilac hedge standing against the stars.

He knew he would have to be a man of men to measure up to that heritage,
a man strong, grave, thoughtful, kind with the kindness that never
falters, brave with the courage of that dark and massive folk whose
blood ran in his veins. Coming as it did, a world of legend growing up
side by side with the matter-of-fact world of Concord Street, it never
occurred to him to question. He, the boy, was _not_ massive, strong,
or brave; he saw things in the dark that frightened him, his thin
shoulders were bound to droop, the hours of practise on his violin left
him with no blood in his legs and a queer pallor on his brow.

Nor was he always grave, thoughtful, kind. He did not often lose his
temper, the river of his young life ran too smooth and deep. But there
were times when he did. Brief passions swept him, blinded him, twisted
his fingers, left him sobbing, retching, and weak as death itself. He
never seemed to wonder at the discrepancy in things, however, any more
than he wondered at the look in his mother's eyes, as she hung over him,
waiting, in those moments of nausea after rage. She had not the look of
the gentlewoman then; she had more the look, a thousand times, of the
prisoner led through the last gray corridor in the dawn.

He saw her like that once when he had not been angry. It was on a day
when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going
out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in
one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without
a ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an
average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high
forehead, narrow, sallow, and moist.

No, it was not the stranger that troubled Christopher. It was his
mother's look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was out
of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation.

"He came about some papers, you know."

"You mean our _Morning Post?_" Christopher asked her.

She let her breath out all at once and colour flooded her face.

"Yes," she told him. "Yes, yes."

Neither of them said anything more about it.

It was that same day, toward evening, that Christopher broke one of his
long silences, reverting to a subject always near to them both.

"Mother, you've never told me where it is--on the _map_, I mean."

She was looking the other way. She did not turn around.

"I--Chris--I--I haven't a map in the house."

He did not press the matter. He went out into the back yard presently,
under the grape-trellis, and there he stood still for a long time,
staring at nothing particular.

He was growing up.

He went away to boarding-school not long after this, taking with him the
picture of his adored mother, the treasured epic of his dark, strong
fathers, his narrow shoulders, his rare, blind bursts of passion, his
newborn wonder, and his violin. At school they thought him a queer one.

The destinies of men are unaccountable things. Five children in the
village of Deer Bay came down with diphtheria. That was why the academy
shut up for a week, and that was what started Christopher on his way
home for an unexpected holiday. And then it was only by one chance in a
thousand that he should glimpse his mother's face in the down-train
halted at the junction where he himself was changing.

She did not see till he came striding along the aisle of her coach, his
arms full of his things, face flushed, eyes brimming with the surprise
and pleasure of seeing her; his lips trembling questions.

"Why, Mother, what in earth? Where are you going? I'm to have a week at
least, Mother; and here you're going away, and you didn't tell me, and
what is it, and everything?"

His eager voice trailed off. The colour drained out of his face and
there was a shadow in his eyes. He drew back from her the least way.

"What is it, Mother? _Mother!_"

Somewhere on the platform outside the conductor's droning "--_board_"
ran along the coaches. Agnes Kain opened her white lips.

"Get off before it's too late, Christopher. I haven't time to explain
now. Go home, and Mary will see you have everything. I'll be back in a
day or so. Kiss me, and go quickly. Quickly!"

He did not kiss her. He would not have kissed her for worlds. He was to
bewildered, dazed, lost, too inexpressibly hurt. On the platform
outside, had she turned ever so little to look, she might have seen his
face again for an instant as the wheels ground on the rails. Colour was
coming back to it again, a murky colour like the shadow of a red cloud.

They must have wondered, in the coach with her, at the change in the
calm, unobtrusive, well-gowned gentlewoman, their fellow-passenger.
Those that were left after another two hours saw her get down at a
barren station where an old man waited in a carriage. The halt was
brief, and none of them caught sight of the boyish figure that slipped
down from the rearmost coach to take shelter for himself and his dark,
tempest-ridden face behind the shed at the end of the platform--

Christopher walked out across a broad, high, cloudy plain, following a
red road, led by the dust-feather hanging over the distant carriage.

He walked for miles, creeping ant-like between the immensities of the
brown plain and the tumbled sky. Had he been less implacable, less
intent, he might have noticed many things, the changing conformation of
the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture of the
wind that flowed over his hot temples. But as it was, the sea took him
by surprise. Coming over a little rise, his eyes focused for another
long, dun fold of the plain, it seemed for an instant as if he had lost
his balance over a void; for a wink he felt the passing of a strange
sickness. He went off a little way to the side of the road and sat down
on a flat stone.

The world had become of a sudden infinitely simple, as simple as the
inside of a cup. The land broke down under him, a long, naked slope
fringed at the foot of a ribbon of woods. Through the upper branches he
saw the shingles and chimneys of a pale grey village clinging to a white
beach, a beach which ran up to the left in a bolder flight of cliffs,
showing on their crest a cluster of roofs and dull-green gable-ends
against the sea that lifted vast, unbroken, to the rim of the cup.

Christopher was fifteen, and queer even for that queer age. He had a
streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat there in a
huddle, the wind coming out of this huge new gulf of life seemed to pass
through him, bone and tissue, and tears rolled down his face.

The carriage bearing his strange mother was gone, from sight and from
mind. His eyes came down from the lilac-crowned hill to the beach, where
it showed in white patches through the wood, and he saw that the wood
was of willows. And he remembered the plain behind him, the wide, brown
moor under the could. He got up on his wobbly legs. There were stones
all about him on the whispering wire-grass, and like them the one he had
been sitting on bore a blurred inscription. He read it aloud, for some
reason, his voice borne away faintly on the river of air:

Here Lie The Earthly Remains Of
MAYNARD KAIN, SECOND
Born 1835--Died 1862 For the Preservation of the Union

His gaze went on to another of those worn stones.

MAYNARD KAIN, ESQUIRE
1819-1849

This Monument Erected in His Memory By His Sorrowing
Widow, Harriet Burnam Kain

The windy Gales of the West Indias
Laid claim to His Noble Soul
And Took him on High to his Creator
Who made him Whole.

There was no moss or lichen on this wind-scoured slope. In the falling
dusk the old white stones stood up like the bones of the dead
themselves, and the only sound was the rustle of the wire-grass creeping
over them in a dry tide. The boy had taken off his cap; the sea-wind
moving under the mat of his damp hair gave it the look of some somber,
outlandish cowl. With the night coming on, his solemnity had an elfin
quality. He found what he was looking for at last, and his fingers had
to help his eyes.

DANIEL KAIN

Beloved Husband of Agnes Willoughby Kain

Born 1860--Died 1886

Forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Christopher Kain told me that he left the naked graveyard repeating it
to himself, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," conscious
less of the words than of the august rhythm falling in with the pulse of
his exaltation.

The velvet darkness that hangs under cloud had come down over the hill
and the great marsh stretching away to the south of it. Agnes Kain stood
in the open doorway, one hand on the brown wood, the other pressed to
her cheek.

"You heard it _that_ time, Nelson?"

"No, ma'am." The old man in the entrance-hall behind her shook his
head. In the thin, blown light of the candelabra which he held high, the
worry and doubt of her deepened on his singularly-unlined face.

"And you might well catch your death in that draft, ma'am."

But she only continued to stare out between the pillars where the
lilac-hedge made a wall of deeper blackness across the night.

"What am I thinking of?" she whispered, and then: _"There!"_

And this time the old man heard it, a nearer, wind-blown hail.

"Mother! Oh, Mother!"

The boy came striding through the gap of the gate in the hedge.

"It's I, Mother! Chris! Aren't you surprised?"

She had no answer. As he came she turned and moved away from the door,
and the old man, peering from under the flat candle flames, saw her face
like wax. And he saw the boy, Christopher, in the doorway, his hands
flung out, his face transfigured.

"Mother! I'm here! Don't you understand?"

He touched her shoulder. She turned to him, as it were, lazily.

"Yes," she breathed. "I see."

He threw his arms about her, and felt her shaking from head to foot. But
he was shaking, too.

"I knew the way!" he cried. "I knew it, Mother, I knew it! I came down
from the Moor and there was the Willow Wood, and I knew the way home.
And when I came, Mother, it was like the trees bowing down their
branches in the dark. And when I came by the Beach, Mother, it was like
a roll of drums beating for me, and when I came to the Hill I saw the
Hedge standing against the sky, and I came, and here I am!"

She expressed no wonder, asked no question.

"Yes," was all she said, and it was as if she spoke of a tree coming to
its leaf, the wind to its height, the tide to its flood.

Had he been less rapt and triumphant he must have wondered more at that
icy lassitude, and at the cloak of ceremony she wrapped about her to
hide a terror. It was queer to hear the chill urbanity of her: "This is
Christopher, Nelson; Christopher, this is your father's servant,
Nelson." It was queerer still to see the fastidious decorum with which
she led him over this, the familiar house of his fathers.

He might have been a stranger, come with a guide-book in his hand. When
he stood on his heels in the big drawing-room, staring up with all his
eyes at the likenesses of those men he had known so well, it was strange
to hear her going on with all the patter of the gallery attendant, names
of painters, prices, dates. He stood before the portrait of Daniel Kain,
his father, a dark-skinned, longish face with a slightly-protruding
nether lip, hollow temples, and a round chin, deeply cleft. As in all
the others, the eyes, even in the dead pigment, seemed to shine with an
odd, fixed luminosity of their own, and like the others from first to
last of the line, it bore upon it the stamp of an imperishable youth.
And all the while he stood there, drinking it in, detail by detail, his
mother spoke, not of the face, but of the frame, some obscure and
unsuspected excellence in the gold-leaf on the frame.

More than once in that stately tour of halls and chambers he found
himself protesting gaily, "I know, Mother! I know, I know!"

But the contagion of his glory did not seem to touch her. Nothing seemed
to touch her. Only once was the fragile, bright shell of her punctilio
penetrated for a moment, and that was when Christopher, lagging, turned
back to a door they were about to pass and threw it open with the happy
laugh of a discoverer. And then, even before she could have hushed him,
the laughter on his lips died of itself.

A man lay on a bed in the room, his face as colourless and still as the
pillow behind it. His eyes were open, but they did not move from the
three candles burning on the high bureau, and he seemed unconscious of
any intrusion.

"I didn't know!" Christopher whispered, shocked, and shamed.

When the door was closed again his mother explained. She explained at
length, concisely, standing quite still, with one frail, fine hand
worrying the locket she wore at her throat. Nelson stood quite still
too, his attention engrossed in his candle-wicks. And Christopher stood
quite still, and all their shadows--That man was the caretaker, the man,
Christopher was to understand, who had been looking after the place. His
name was Sanderson. He had fallen ill, very ill. In fact, he was dying.
And that was why his mother had had to come down, post-haste, without
warning. To see about some papers. Some papers. Christopher was to
understand--

Christopher understood. Indeed there was not much to understand. And
yet, when they had gone on, he was bothered by it. Already, so young he
was, so ruthless, and so romantic, he had begun to be a little ashamed
of that fading, matter-of-fact world of Concord Street. And it was with
just that world which he wished to forget, that the man lying ill in the
candle-lit chamber was linked in Christopher's memory. For it was the
same man he had seen in the doorway that morning months ago, with a
brown hat in one hand and a thorn stick in the other.

Even a thing like that may be half put aside, though--for a while. And
by the time Christopher went to his room for the night the thought of
the interloper had retired into the back of his mind, and they were all
Kains there on the Hill, inheritors of romance. He found himself bowing
to his mother with a courtliness he had never known, and an "I wish you
a good night," sounding a century old on his lips. He saw the remote,
patrician figure bow as gravely in return, a petal of colour as hard as
paint on the whiteness of either cheek. He did not see her afterward,
though, when the merciful door was closed.

Before he slept he explored the chamber, touching old objects with
reverent finger-tips. He came on a leather case like an absurdly
overgrown beetle, hidden in a corner, and a violoncello was in it. He
had seen such things before, but he had never touched one, and when he
lifted it from the case he had a moment of feeling very odd at the pit
of his stomach. Sitting in his underthings on the edge of the bed, he
held the wine-coloured creature in the crook of his arm for a long time,
the look in his round eyes, half eagerness, half pain, of one pursuing
the shadow of some ghostly and elusive memory.

He touched the C-string by and by with an adventuring thumb. I have
heard "Ugo" sing, myself, and I know what Christopher meant when he said
that the sound did not come out of the instrument, but that it came
_in_ to it, sweeping home from all the walls and corners of the
chamber, a slow, rich, concentric wind of tone. He felt it about him,
murmurous, pulsating, like the sound of surf borne from some far-off
coast.

And then it was like drums, still farther off. And then it was the feet
of marching men, massive, dark, grave men with luminous eyes, and the
stamp on their faces of an imperishable youth.

He sat there so lost and rapt that he heard nothing of his mother's
footsteps hurrying in the hall; knew nothing till he saw her face in the
open doorway. She had forgotten herself this time; that fragile defense
of gentility was down. For a moment they stared at each other across a
gulf of silence, and little by little the boy's cheeks grew as white as
hers, his hands as cold, his lungs as empty of breath.

"What is it, Mother?"

"Oh, Christopher, Christopher--Go to bed, dear."

He did not know why, but of a sudden he felt ashamed and a little
frightened, and, blowing out the candle, he crept under the covers.

The afternoon was bright with a rare sun and the world was quiet.
Christopher lay full-spread on the turf, listening idly to the
"clip-clip" of Nelson's shears as the old man trimmed the hedge.

"And was my father _very_ strong?" he asked with a drowsy pride.

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