O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 by Various

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"No, not so very." Nelson stopped clipping and was immediately lost in
the past.

"Only when he was _that_ way five strong men couldn't turn him. I'll
say that. No, if they had to get him with a shotgun that day, 'twas
nobody's fault nor sin. If Guy Bullard seen Daniel there on the sand
with an ax in his hand and foam-like on his lips, and the little ones
cornered where he caught them between cliff and water--Guy's own baby
amongst them--and knowing the sickness of the Kains as he and everybody
else did--why, I'm free and willing to say 'twas his bounden duty to
hold a true aim and pull a steady trigger on Daniel, man of his though I
was, and man of his poor father before him--

"No, I can't make it right to lay blame on any man for it, no more than
I can on them, his brother officers, that broke Maynard's neck with
their tent-pegs the night after Gettysburg. No, no--"

It was evidently a time-worn theme, an argument, an _apologia_, accepted
after years of bitterness and self-searching. He went on with the remote
serenity of age, that has escaped the toils of passion, pursuing the
old, worn path of his mind, his eyes buried in vacancy.

"No, 'twas a mercy to the both of them, father and son, and a man must
see it so. 'Twould be better of course if they could have gone easier,
same as the _old_ Maynard went, thinking himself the Lord our God to
walk on water and calm the West Indy gale. That's better, better for all
hands round. But if it had to come so, in violence and fear, then nobody
need feel the sin of it on his soul--nobody excepting the old man
Bickers, him that told Daniel. For 'twas from that day he began to take
it on.

"I saw it myself. There was Daniel come home from other parts where his
mother had kept him, out of gossip's way, bright as you please and
knowing nothing wrong with the blood of the Kains. And so I say the sin
lays on the loose-wagging tongue of Bickers, for from the day he let it
out to Daniel, Daniel changed. 'Twas like he'd heard his doom, and went
to it. Bickers is dead a long time now, but may the Lord God lay eternal
damnation on his soul!"

Even then there was no heat; the curse had grown a formula. Having come
to the end, the old man's eyes tumbled down painlessly out of the void
and discovered the shears in his hand.

"Dear me, that's so," he said to himself. One thought was enough at a
time. He fell to work again. The steady "clip-clip-clip" moved off
slowly along the hedge. Not once did he remember; not once as the
indefatigable worker shuffled himself out of sight around the house did
he look back with any stirring of recollection at the boyish figure
lying there as still as a shadow cast in the deep grass.

A faintly lop-sided moon swam in the zenith. For three days now that
rare clarity had hung in the sky, and for three nights the moon had
grown. Its benign, poisonous illumination flowed down steeply through
the windows of the dark chamber where Christopher huddled on the bed's
edge, three pale, chill islands spread on the polished floor.

Once again the boy brought the bow home across the shivering strings,
and, as if ears could be thirsty as a drunkard's throat, he drank his
fill of the 'cello's deep, full-membered chord. The air was heavy with
the resonance of marching feet, ghostly feet marching and marching down
upon him in slow, inexorable crescendo as the tides ebbed later among
the sedges on the marsh and the moon grew big. And above the pulse of
the march he seemed to hear another cadence, a thin laughter.

He laughed too, giving himself up to that spectral contagion. He saw the
fat, iridescent bubble with the Hill in it, the House of dreams, the
Beach and the Moor and Willow Wood of fancy, and all the grave, strong,
gentle line of Kains to whom he had been made bow down in worship. He
saw himself taken in, soul and body, by a thin-plated fraud, a cheap
trick of mother's words, as before him, his father had been. And the
faint exhalations from the moon-patches on the floor showed his face
contorted with a still, set grimace of mirth.

Anger came over him in a white veil, twitching his lips and his toes and
bending his fingers in knots. Through the veil a sound crept, a sound he
knew well by this time, secret footfalls in the hall, faltering,
retreating, loitering returning to lag near the door.

How he hated her! It is curious that not once did his passion turn
against his blighted fathers; it was against the woman who had borne
him, the babe, and lied to him, the boy--against her, and against that
man, that interloper, dying in a room below.

The thought that had been willing to creep out of sight into the
back-country of his mind on that first night came out now like a red,
devouring cloud. Who was that man?

What was he dying of--or _supposed_ to be dying of? What had he been
doing that morning in Concord Street? What was he doing here, in the
house of the men who had never grown old and of the boy who would never
grow old? Why had his mother come down here, where he was, so queerly,
so secretly, so frightened?

Christopher would have liked to kill that man. He shivered and licked
his lips. He would have liked to do something bloody and abominable to
that face with the hollow cheeks, the sunken grey eyes, and the
forehead, high, sallow, and moist. He would have liked to take an ax in
his hand and run along the thundering beach and catch that face in a
corner somewhere between cliff and water. The desire to do this thing
possessed him and blinded him like the kiss of lightning.

He found himself on the floor at the edge of the moonlight, full of
weakness and nausea. He felt himself weeping as he crawled back to the
bed, his cheeks and neck bathed in a flood of painless tears. He threw
himself down, dazed with exhaustion.

It seemed to him that his mother had been calling a long while.
"Christopher! What is it? What is it, boy?"

He had heard no footsteps, going or coming; she must have been there all
the time, waiting, listening, her ear pressed to the thick, old paneling
of the door. The thought was like wine; the torment of her whispering
was sweet in his ears.

"Oh, Chris, Chris! You're making yourself sick!"

"Yes," he said. He lifted on an elbow and repeated in a voice which
must have sounded strange enough to the listener beyond the door. "Yes!"
he said. "Yes!"

"Go away!" he cried of a sudden, making a wide, dim, imperious gesture
in the dark.

"No, no," the imploring whisper crept in. "You're making yourself
sick--Christopher--all over nothing--nothing in the world. It's so
foolish--so foolish--foolish! Oh, if I could only tell you,
Christopher--if I could tell you--"

"Tell me _what_?" He shuddered with the ecstasy of his own irony. "Who
that man is? That 'caretaker'? What he's doing here? What _you're_ doing
here?--" He began to scream in a high, brittle voice: "_Go away from
that door! Go away!_"

This time she obeyed. He heard her retreating, soft-footed and
frightened, along the hall. She was abandoning him--without so much as
trying the door, just once again, to see if it were still bolted against
her.

She did not care. She was sneaking off--down the stairs--Oh, yes, he
knew where.

His lips began to twitch again and his finger nails scratched on the
bedclothes. If only he had something, some weapon, an axe, a broad,
keen, glittering axe! He would show them! He was strong, incredibly
strong! Five men could not have turned him back from what he was going
to do--if only he had something.

His hand, creeping, groping, closed on the neck of the 'cello leaning by
the bed. He laughed.

Oh, yes, he would stop her from going down there; he would hold her,
just where she was on the dark stair nerveless, breathless, as long as
he liked, if he liked he would bring her back, cringing, begging.

He drew the bow, and laughed higher and louder yet to hear the booming
discord rocking in upon him from the shadows. Swaying from side to side,
he lashed the hollow creature to madness. They came in the press of the
gale, marching, marching, the wild, dark pageant of his fathers, nearer
and nearer through the moon-struck night.

"Tell me _what_?" he laughed. "_What_?"

And abruptly he slept, sprawled crosswise on the covers, half-clothed,
dishevelled, triumphant.

* * * * *

It was not the same night, but another; whether the next or the next but
one, or two, Christopher can not say. But he was out of doors.

He had escaped from the house at dusk; he knew that.

He had run away, through the hedge and down the back side of the hill,
torn between the two, the death, warm and red like life, and the birth,
pale, chill, and inexorable as death.

Most of that daft night-running will always be blank in Christopher's
mind; moments and moments, like islands of clarity, remain. He brings
back one vivid interval when he found himself seated on his father's
gravestone among the whispering grasses, staring down into the pallid
bowl of the world. And in that moment he knew what Daniel Kain had felt,
and Maynard Kain before him; a passionate and contemptuous hatred for
all the dullards in the world who never dreamed dreams or saw visions or
sang wordless songs or ran naked-hearted in the flood of the full-blown
moon. He hated them because they could not by any possibility comprehend
his magnificent separation, his starry sanity, his kinship with the
gods. And he had a new thirst to obliterate the whole creeping race of
dust-dwellers with one wide, incomparably bloody gesture.

It was late when he found himself back again before the house, and an
ink-black cloud touched the moon's edge. After the airless evening a
wind had sprang up in the east; it thrashed among the lilac-stems as he
came through them and across the turf, silent-footed as an Indian. In
his right hand he had a bread-knife, held butt to thumb, dagger-wise.
Where he had come by the rust-bitten thing no one knows, least of all
himself. In the broken light his eyes shone with a curious luminosity of
their own, absorbed, introspective.

All the windows were dark, and the entrance-hall, when he slipped in
between the pillars, but across its floor he saw light thrown in a
yellow ribbon from the half-closed door of the drawing-room.

It took his attention, laid hands on his imagination. He began to
struggle against it.

He would _not_ go into that room. He was going to another room. To stay
him, he made a picture of the other room in his tumbled mind--the high,
bleak walls, the bureau with the three candles burning wanly, the bed,
the face of the man on the bed. And when his rebellious feet,
surrendering him up to the lure of that beckoning ribbon, had edged as
far as the door, and he had pushed it a little further ajar to get his
head in, he saw that the face itself was there in the drawing-room.

He stood there for some time, his shoulder pressed against the
door-jamb, his eyes blinking.

His slow attention moved from the face to the satin pillows that wedged
it in, and then to the woman that must have been his mother, kneeling
beside the casket with her arms crooked on the shining cover and her
head down between them. And across from her leaned "Ugo," the 'cello,
come down from his chamber to stand vigil at the other shoulder of the
dead.

The first thing that came into his groping mind was a bitter sense of
abandonment. The little core of candle-light hanging in the gloom left
him out. Its unstirring occupants, the woman, the 'cello, and the clay,
seemed sufficient to themselves. His mother had forgotten him. Even
"Ugo," that had grown part and parcel of his madness, had forgotten him.

Bruised, sullen, moved by some deep-lying instinct of the clan, his eyes
left them and sought the wall beyond, where there were those who would
not forget him, come what might, blood of his blood and mind of his own
queer mind. And there among the shadowed faces he searched for one in
vain. As if that candle-lit tableau, somehow holy and somehow
abominable, were not for the eyes of one of them, the face of Daniel,
the wedded husband, had been turned to the wall.

Here was something definite, something Christopher could take hold of,
and something that he would not have.

His mother seemed not to have known he was near till he flung the door
back and came stalking into the light with the rusty bread-knife in his
hand. One would not have imagined there were blood enough left in her
wasted heart, but her face went crimson when she lifted it and saw him.

It brought him up short--the blush, where he had looked for fright. It
shocked him, and, shocking him more than by a thousand laboured words of
explanation, it opened a window in his disordered brain. He stood
gawking with the effort of thought, hardly conscious of his mother's
cry:

"Christopher, I never meant you to know!"

He kept on staring at the ashen face between the pillows, long (as his
own was long), sensitive, worn; and at the 'cello keeping incorruptible
vigil over its dead. And then slowly his eyes went down to his own left
hand, to which that same old wine-brown creature had come home from the
first with a curious sense of fitness and authority and right.

"Who is this man?"

"Don't look at me so! Don't, Chris!"

But he did look at her. Preoccupied as he was, he was appalled at sight
of the damage the half-dozen of days had done. She had been so much the
lady, so perfectly the gentlewoman. To no one had the outward gesture
and symbol of purity been more precious. No whisper had ever breathed
against her. If there had been secrets behind her, they had been dead;
if a skeleton, the closet had been closed. And now, looking down on her,
he was not only appalled, he was a little sickened, as one might be to
find squalor and decay creeping into a familiar and once immaculate
room.

"Who is this man?" he repeated.

"He grew up with me." She half raised herself on her knees in the
eagerness of her appeal. "We were boy and girl together at home in
Maryland. We were meant for each other, Chris. We were always to
marry--always, Chris. And when I went away, and when I married
your--when I married Daniel Kain, _he_ hunted and he searched and he
found me here. He was with me, he stood by me through that awful
year--and--that was how it happened. I tell you, Christopher, darling,
we were meant for each other, John Sanderson and I. He loved me more
than poor Daniel ever did or could, loved me enough to throw away a life
of promise, just to hang on here after every one else was gone, alone
with his 'cello and is one little memory. And I loved him enough
to--to--_Christopher, don't look at me so!"_

His eyes did not waver. You must remember his age, the immaculate,
ruthless, mid-Victorian 'teens; and you must remember his bringing-up.

"And so this was my father," he said. And then he went on without
waiting, his voice breaking into falsetto with the fierceness of his
charge. "And you would have kept on lying to me! If I hadn't happened,
just happened, to find you here, now, you would have gone on keeping me
in the dark! You would have stood by and seen me--well--_go crazy!_ Yes,
go crazy, thinking I was--well, thinking I was meant for it! And all to
save your precious--"

She was down on the floor again, what was left of the gentlewoman,
wailing.

"But you don't know what it means to a woman, Chris! You don't know what
it means to a woman!"

A wave of rebellion brought her up and she strained toward him across
the coffin.

"Isn't it something, then, that I gave you a father with a _mind_? And
if you think you've been sinned against, think of _me_! Sin! You call it
_sin_! Well, isn't it _anything at all_ that by my 'sin' my son's blood
came down to him _clean_? Tell me that!"

He shook himself, and his flame turned to sullenness.

"It's not so," he glowered.

All the girl in him, the poet, the hero-worshipping boy, rebelled. His
harassed eyes went to the wall beyond and the faces there, the ghosts of
the doomed, glorious, youth-ridden line, priceless possessions of his
dreams. He would not lose them: he refused to be robbed of a tragic
birthright. He wanted some gesture puissant enough to turn back and
blot out all that had been told him.

"It's not his!" he cried. And reaching out fiercely he dragged the
'cello away from the coffin's side. He stood for an instant at bay,
bitter, defiant.

"It's not his! It's mine! It's--it's--_ours!_"

And then he fled out into the dark of the entrance-hall and up the black
stairs. In his room there was no moonlight now, for the cloud ran over
the sky and the rain had come.

"It isn't so, it isn't so!" It was like a sob in his throat.

He struck on the full strings. And listening breathless through the
dying discord he heard the liquid whispers of the rain, nothing more. He
lashed with a wild bow, time and again. But something was broken,
something was lost: out of the surf of sound he could no longer fashion
the measure of marching feet. The mad Kains had found him out, and cast
him out. No longer could he dream them in dreams or run naked-hearted
with them in the flood of the moon, for he was no blood of theirs, and
they were gone. And huddling down on the edge of the bed, he wept.

The tears washed his eyes and falling down bathed his strengthless
hands. And beyond the phantom windows, over the marsh and the moor and
the hill that were not his, the graves of strangers and the lost Willow
Wood, lay the healing rain. He heard it in gurgling rivulets along the
gutters overhead. He heard the soft impact, like a kiss, brushing the
reedy cheeks of the marsh, the showery shouldering of branches, the
aspiration of myriad drinking grasses, the far whisper of waters coming
home to the waters of the sea--the long, low melody of the rain.

And by and by he found it was "Ugo," the 'cello, and he was playing.

They went home the following afternoon, he and his mother. Or rather,
she went home, and he with her as far as the Junction, where he changed
for school.

They had not much to say to each other through the journey. The boy had
to be given time. Five years younger, or fifteen years older, it would
have been easier for him to look at his mother. You must remember what
his mother had meant to him, and what, bound up still in the fierce and
sombre battle of adolescence, she must mean to him now.

As for Agnes Kain, she did not look at him, either. Through the changing
hours her eyes rested on the transparent hands lying crossed in her lap.
She seemed very tired and very white. Her hair was not done as tidily,
her lace cuffs were less fresh than they had used to be. About her whole
presence there was a troubling hint of let-down, something obscurely
slovenly, a kind of awkward and unlovely nakedness.

She really spoke to him for the first time at the Junction, when he
stood before her, slim and uncouth under the huge burden of "Ugo,"
fumbling through his leave-taking.

"Christopher," she said, "try not to think of me--always--as--as--well,
when you're older, Christopher, you'll know what I mean."

That was the last time he ever heard her speak. He saw her once again,
but the telegram was delayed and his train was late, and when he came
beside her bed she said nothing. She looked into his eyes searchingly,
for a long while, and died.

* * * * *

That space stands for the interval of silence that fell after
Christopher had told me the story. I thought he had quite finished. He
sat motionless, his shoulders fallen forward, his eyes fixed in the
heart of the incandescent globe over the dressing-table, his long
fingers wrapped around the neck of the 'cello.

"And so she got me through those years," he said. "Those nip-and-tuck
years that followed. By her lie.

"Insanity is a queer thing," he went on, still brooding into the light.
"There's more of it about than we're apt to think. It works in so many
ways. In hobbies, arts, philosophies. Music is a kind of insanity. I
know. I've got mine penned up in the music now, and I think I can keep
it there now, and save my soul."

"Yours?"

"Yes, mine. I know now--now that it's safe for me to know. I was down
at that village by the beach a year or so ago. I'm a Kain, of course,
one of the crazy Kains, after all. John Sanderson was born in the
village and lived there till his death. Only once that folks could
remember had he been away, and that was when he took some papers to the
city for Mrs. Kain to sign. He was caretaker at the old 'Kain place' the
last ten years of his life, and deaf, they said, since his tenth
year--'deaf as a post.' And they told me something else. They said there
was a story that before my father, Daniel, married her, my mother had
been an actress. An actress! You'll understand that I needed no one to
tell me _that_!

"They told me that they had heard a story that she was a _great_
actress. Dear God, if they could only know! When I think of that night
and that setting, that scene! It killed her, and it got me over the
wall--"

THEY GRIND EXCEEDING SMALL

By BEN AMES WILLIAMS

From _Saturday Evening Post_

I telephoned down the hill to Hazen Kinch. "Hazen," I asked, "are you
going to town to-day?"

"Yes, yes," he said abruptly in his quick, harsh fashion. "Of course I'm
going to town."

"I've a matter of business," I suggested.

"Come along," he invited brusquely. "Come along."

There was not another man within forty miles to whom he would have given
that invitation.

"I'll be down in ten minutes," I promised him; and I went to pull on my
Pontiacs and heavy half boots over them and started downhill through the
sandy snow. It was bitterly cold; it had been a cold winter. The bay--I
could see it from my window--was frozen over for a dozen miles east and
west and thirty north and south; and that had not happened in close to a
score of years. Men were freighting across to the islands with heavy
teams. Automobiles had beaten a rough road along the course the steamers
took in summer. A man who had ventured to stock one of the lower islands
with foxes for the sake of their fur, counting on the water to hold them
prisoners, had gone bankrupt when his stock in trade escaped across the
ice. Bitterly cold and steadily cold, and deep snow lay upon the hills,
blue-white in the distance. The evergreens were blue-black blotches on
this whiteness. The birches, almost indistinguishable, were like trees
in camouflage. To me the hills are never so grand as in this winter coat
they wear. It is easy to believe that a brooding God dwells upon them. I
wondered as I ploughed my way down to Hazen Kinch's farm whether God did
indeed dwell among these hills; and I wondered what He thought of Hazen
Kinch.

This was no new matter of thought with me. I had given some thought to
Hazen in the past. I was interested in the man and in that which should
come to him. He was, it seemed to me, a problem in fundamental ethics;
he was, as matters stood, a demonstration of the essential uprightness
of things as they are. The biologist would have called him a sport, a
deviation from type, a violation of all the proper laws of life. That
such a man should live and grow great and prosper was not fitting; in a
well-regulated world it could not be. Yet Hazen Kinch did live; he had
grown--in his small way--great; and by our lights he had prospered.
Therefore I watched him. There was about the man the fascination which
clothes a tight-rope walker above Niagara; an aeronaut in the midst of
the nose dive. The spectator stares with half-caught breath, afraid to
see and afraid to miss seeing the ultimate catastrophe. Sometimes I
wondered whether Hazen Kinch suspected this attitude on my part. It was
not impossible. There was a cynical courage in the man; it might have
amused him. Certainly I was the only man who had in any degree his
confidence.

I have said there was not another within forty miles whom he would have
given a lift to town; I doubt if there was another man anywhere for whom
he would have done this small favour.

He seemed to find a mocking sort of pleasure in my company.

When I came to his house he was in the barn harnessing his mare to the
sleigh. The mare was a good animal, fast and strong. She feared and she
hated Hazen. I could see her roll her eyes backward at him as he
adjusted the traces. He called to me without turning:

"Shut the door! Shut the door! Damn the cold!"

I slid the door shut behind me. There was within the barn the curious
chill warmth which housed animals generate to protect themselves against
our winters.

"It will snow," I told Hazen. "I was not sure you would go."

He laughed crookedly, jerking at the trace.

"Snow!" he exclaimed. "A man would think you were the personal manager
of the weather. Why do you say it will snow?"

"The drift of the clouds--and it's warmer," I told him.

"I'll not have it snowing," he said, and looked at me and cackled. He
was a little, thin, old man with meager whiskers and a curious precision
of speech; and I think he got some enjoyment out of watching my
expression at such remarks as this. He elaborated his assumption that
the universe was conducted for his benefit, in order to see my silent
revolt at the suggestion. "I'll not have it snowing." he said. "Open the
door."

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