Short Stories of Various Types

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Harrison opened his dark eyes wide and looked at her in surprise. "You
don't understand--we're not flirting with each other, Maggie and
I--we're engaged." He added with an air of proffering a self-evident
explanation, "As good as married, you know."

Miss Midland seemed to find in the statement a great deal of material
for meditation, for after an "Ah!" which might mean anything, she sat
down on the other side of the tree, leaning her blonde head against its
trunk and staring up into the thick green branches. Somewhere near them
in an early-flowering yellow shrub a bee droned softly. After a time
she remarked as if to herself, "They must take marriage very seriously
in Iowa."

The young man aroused himself, to answer sleepily: "It's Illinois where
I live now--Iowa was where I grew up--but it's all the same. Yes, we
do."

After that there was another long, fragrant silence which lasted until
Harrison roused himself with a sigh, exclaiming that although he would
like nothing better than to sit right there till he took root, they had
yet to "do" the two Trianons and to see the state carriages. During
this sightseeing tour he repeated his performance of the morning in the
chateau, pouring out a flood of familiar, quaintly expressed historical
lore of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which made his
astonished listener declare he must have lived at that time.

"Nope!" he answered her. "Got it all out of Illinois libraries. Books
are great things if you're only willing to treat them right. And
history--by gracious! history is a study fit for the gods! All about
folks, and they are all that are worth while in the world!"

They were standing before the Grand Trianon as he said this, waiting
for the tram car, and as it came into sight he cried out artlessly, his
dark, aquiline face glowing with fervor, "I--I just _love_ folks!"

She looked at him curiously. "In all my life I never knew any one
before to say or think that." Some of his enthusiasm was reflected upon
her own fine, thoughtful face as a sort of wistfulness when she added,
"It must make you very happy. I wish I could feel so."

"You don't look at them right," he protested.

She shook her head. "No, we haven't known the same kind. I had never
even heard of the sort of people you seem to have known."

The tram car came noisily up to them, and no more was said.

V

A notice posted the following day to the effect that for some time the
reading-room would be closed one day in the week for repairs, gave
Harrison an excuse for insisting on weekly repetitions of what he
called their historical picnics.

Miss Midland let herself be urged into these with a half-fearful
pleasure which struck the young American as pathetic. "Anybody can see
she's had mighty few good times in _her_ life," he told himself. They
"did" Fontainebleau,[129-1] Pierrefonds,[129-2] Vincennes,[129-3] and
Chantilly[129-4]--this last expedition coming in the first week of May,
ten days before Miss Midland was to leave Paris. They were again
favored by wonderfully fine spring weather, so warm that the girl
appeared in a light-colored cotton gown and a straw hat which, as her
friend told her, with the familiarity born of a month of almost
uninterrupted common life, made her look "for all the world like a
picture."

After their usual conscientious and minute examination of the objects
of historical interest, they betook themselves with their lunch-basket
to a quiet corner of the park, by a clear little stream, on the other
side of which a pair of white swans were building a nest. It was very
still, and what faint breeze there was barely stirred the trees. The
English girl took off her hat, and the sunlight on her blonde hair
added another glory to the spring day.

They ate their lunch with few words, and afterward sat in what seemed
to the American the most comfortable and companionable of silences,
idly watching a peacock unfold the flashing splendor of his plumage
before the old gray fountain. "My! My! My!" he murmured finally. "Isn't
the world about the best place!"

The girl did not answer, and, glancing at her, he was startled to see
that her lips were quivering. "Why, Miss Midland!" he cried anxiously.
"Have you had bad news?"

She shook her head. "Nothing new."

"What's the matter?" he asked, coming around in front of her. "Perhaps
I can help you even if it's only to give some good advice."

She looked up at him with a sudden flash. "I suppose that, since you
are so much engaged, you think you would make a good father-confessor!"

"I don't see that that has anything to do with it," he said, sitting
down beside her, "but you can bank on me for doing anything I can."

"You don't see that that has anything to do with it," she broke in
sharply, with the evident intention of wounding him, "because you are
very unworldly, what is usually called very unsophisticated."

If she had thought to pique him with this adjective, she was disarmed
by the heartiness of his admission, "As green as grass! But I'd like to
help you all the same, if I can."

"You don't care if you are?" she asked curiously.

"Lord no! What does it matter?"

"You may care then to know," she went on, still probing at him, "that
your not caring is the principal reason for my--finding you
interesting--for my liking you--as I do."

"Well, I'm interested to know that," he said reasonably, "but blessed
if I can see why. What difference does it make to _you_?"

"It's a great surprise to me," she said clearly. "I never met anybody
before who didn't care more about being sophisticated than about
anything else. To have you not even think of that--to have you think of
nothing but your work and how to 'mean well' as you say----" she
stopped, flushing deeply.

"Yes, it must be quite a change," he admitted sobered by her tone, but
evidently vague as to her meaning. "Well, I'm very glad you don't mind
my being as green as grass and as dense as a hitching-block. It's very
lucky for me."

A quick bitterness sprang into her voice. "I don't see," she echoed his
phrase, "what difference it makes to _you_!"

"Don't you?" he said, lighting a cigarette and not troubling himself to
discuss the question with her. She was evidently all on edge with
nerves, he thought, and needed to be calmed down. He pitied women for
their nerves, and was always kindly tolerant of the resultant
petulances.

She frowned and said with a tremulous resentment, as if gathering
herself together for a long-premediated attempt at self-defense.
"You're not only as green as grass, but you perceive nothing,--any
European, even the stupidest, would perceive what you--but you are as
primitive as a Sioux Indian, you have the silly morals of a
non-conformist preacher,--you're as brutal as----"

He opposed to this outburst the impregnable wall of a calm and
meditative silence. She looked angrily into his quiet eyes, which met
hers with unflinching kindness. The contrast between their faces was
striking--was painful.

She said furiously, "There is nothing to you except that you are
stronger than I, and you know it--and that _is_ brutal!" She paused a
long moment, quivering, and then relapsed into spent, defeated
lassitude,--"and I like it," she added under her breath, looking down
at her hands miserably.

"I don't mean to be brutal," he said peaceably. "I'm sorry if I am."

"Oh, it's no matter!" she said impatiently.

"All right, have it your own way," he agreed, good-naturedly, shifting
into a more comfortable position, and resuming his patient silence. He
might have been a slightly pre-occupied but indulgent parent, waiting
for a naughty child to emerge from a tantrum.

After a while, "Well, then," she began as though nothing had passed
between them since his offer to give her advice, "well then, if you
want to be father-confessor, tell me what you'd do in my place, if your
family expected you as a matter of course to--to----"

"What do they want you to do?" he asked as she hesitated.

"Oh, nothing that they consider at all formidable! Only what every girl
should do--make a good and suitable marriage, and bring up children to
go on doing what she had found no joy in."

"Don't you do it!" he said quietly. "Nobody believes more than I do in
marrying the right person. But just marrying so's to _be_ married--that's
Tophet! Red-hot Tophet!"[133-1]

"But what else is there for me to do?" she said, turning her eyes to
him with a desperate hope in his answer. "Tell me! My parents have
brought me up so that there is nothing I can fill my life with, if--I
think, on the whole, I will be more miserable if I don't than if I----"

"Why, look-y-here!" he said earnestly. "You're not a child, you're a
grown woman. You have your music. You could earn your living by that.
Great Scott! Earn your living scrubbing floors before you----"

She put her handkerchief to her eyes. "Ah, but I am so alone against
all my world! Now, here, with you, it seems easy but--without any one
to sustain me, to----"

Harrison went on: "Now let me give you a rule I believe in as I do in
the sun's rising. Never marry a man just because you think you could
manage to live with him. Don't do it unless you are dead sure you
couldn't live without him!"

She took down her handkerchief, showing a white face, whose expression
matched the quaver in her voice, as she said breathlessly: "But how if
I meet a man and feel I cannot live without him, and he is already--"
she brought it out squarely in the sunny peace,--"if he is already as
good as married!"

He took it with the most single-hearted simplicity. "Now it's you who
are unsophisticated and getting your ideas from fool novels. Things
don't happen that way in real life. Either the man keeps his marriage a
secret, in which case he is a sneak and not worth a second thought from
any decent woman, or else, if she had known all along that he was
married, she doesn't get to liking him that way. Don't you see?"

She looked away, down the stream for a moment with inscrutable eyes,
and then broke into an unexpected laugh, rising at the same time and
putting on her hat. "I see, yes, I see," she said. "It is as you say,
quite simple. And now let us go to visit the rest of the park."

VI

The next excursion was to be their last, and Miss Midland had suggested
a return to Versailles to see the park in its spring glory. They
lunched in a little inclosure, rosy with the pink and white magnolia
blossoms, where the uncut grass was already ankle-deep and the
rose-bushes almost hid the gray stone wall with the feathery abundance
of their first pale green leaves. From a remark of the girl's that
perhaps this was the very spot where Marie Antoinette had once gathered
about her gay court of pseudo-milkmaids, they fell into a discussion of
that queen's pretty pastoral fancy. Harrison showed an unexpected
sympathy with the futile, tragic little merrymaker.

"I expect she got sick and tired of being treated like a rich, great
lady, and wanted to see what it would feel like to be a human being.
The king is always disguising himself as a goat-herd to make sure he
can be loved for his own sake."

"But those stories are all so monotonous!" she said impatiently. "The
king always is made to find out that the shepherdess does love him for
his own sake. What would happen if she wouldn't look at him?"

Harrison laughed, "Well, by George, I never thought of that. I should
say if he cared enough about her to want his own way, he'd better get
off his high-horse and say, 'Look-y-here, I'm not the common ordinary
mutt I look. I'm the king in disguise. _Now_ will you have me?"

Miss Midland looked at him hard. "Do you think it likely the girl would
have him then?"

"Don't you?" he said, still laughing, and tucking away the last of a
foie-gras sandwich.

She turned away, frowning, "I don't see how you can call _me_ cynical!"

He raised his eyebrows, "That's not cynical," he protested. "You have
to take folks the way they are, and not the way you think it would be
pretty to have them. It mightn't be the most dignified position for the
king, but I never did see the use of dignity that got in the way of
your having what you wanted."

She looked at him with so long and steady a gaze that only her patent
absence of mind kept it from being a stare. Then, "I think I will go
for a walk by myself," she said.

"Sure, if you want to," he assented, "and I'll take a nap under this
magnolia tree. I've been working late nights, lately."

When she came back after an hour, the little inclosure was quite still,
and, walking over to the magnolia, she saw that the young man had
indeed fallen soundly asleep, one arm under his head, the other flung
wide, half buried in the grass. For a long time she looked down gravely
at the powerful body, at the large, sinewy hand, relaxed like a
sleeping child's, at the eagle-like face, touchingly softened by its
profound unconsciousness.

Suddenly the dark eyes opened wide into hers. The young man gave an
exclamation and sat up, startled. At this movement she looked away,
smoothing a fold of her skirt. He stared about him, still half-asleep.
"Did I hear somebody call?" he asked. "I must have had a very vivid
dream of some sort--I thought somebody was calling desperately to me.
You didn't speak, did you?"

"No," she answered softly, "I said nothing."

"Well, I hope you'll excuse me for being such poor company. I only
meant to take a cat-nap. I hope we won't be too late for the train."

He scrambled to his feet, his eyes still heavy with sleep, and pulled
out his watch. As he did this, Miss Midland began to speak very
rapidly. What she said was so astonishing to him that he forgot to put
back his watch, forgot even to look at it, and stood with it in his
hand, staring at her, with an expression as near to stupefaction as his
keen and powerful face could show.

When she finally stopped to draw breath, the painful breath of a person
who has been under water too long, he broke into baroque ejaculations,
"Well, wouldn't that _get_ you! Wouldn't that absolutely freeze you to
a pillar of salt! Well, of all the darndest idiots, I've been the----"
With Miss Midland's eyes fixed on him, he broke into peal after peal
of his new-world laughter, his fresh, crude, raw, inimitably vital
laughter, "I'm thinking of the time I loaned you the franc and a half
for your lunch, and hated to take it back because I thought you needed
it--and you rich enough to buy ten libraries to Andy's[137-1] one! Say,
how did you keep your face straight!"

Miss Midland apparently found no more difficulty in keeping a straight
face now than then. She did not at all share his mirth. She was still
looking at him with a strained gaze as though she saw him with
difficulty, through a mist increasingly smothering. Finally, as though
the fog had grown quite too thick, she dropped her eyes, and very
passive, waited for his laughter to stop.

When it did, and the trees which had looked down on Marie Antoinette
had ceased echoing to the loud, metallic, and vigorous sound, he
noticed his watch still in his hand. He glanced at it automatically,
thrust it back into his pocket and exclaimed, quite serious again,
"Look-y-here. We'll have to step lively if we are going to catch that
train back to Paris, Miss Midland--Lady Midland, I mean,--Your
highness--what _do_ they call the daughter of an Earl? I never met
a real live member of the aristocracy before."

She moved beside him as he strode off towards the gate. "I am usually
called Lady Agatha," she answered, in a flat tone.

"How pretty that sounds!" he said heartily, "Lady Agatha! Lady Agatha!
Why don't we have some such custom in America?" He tried it
tentatively. "Lady Marietta--that's my mother's name--don't seem to fit
altogether does it? Lady Maggie--Oh, Lord! awful! No, I guess we'd
better stick to Miss and Mrs. But it _does_ fit Agatha fine!"

She made no rejoinder. She looked very tired and rather stern.

After they were on the train, she said she had a headache and preferred
not to talk and, ensconcing herself in a corner of the compartment,
closed her eyes. Harrison, refreshed by the outdoor air and his nap,
opened his notebook and began puzzling over a knotty point in one of
the French Royal Grants to LaSalle[138-1] which he was engaged at the
time in deciphering. Once he glanced up to find his companion's eyes
open and fixed on him. He thought to himself that her headache must be
pretty bad, and stirred himself to say with his warm, friendly accent,
"It's a perfect shame you feel so miserable! Don't you want me to open
the window? Wouldn't you like my coat rolled up for a pillow? Isn't
there something I can do for you?"

She looked at him, and closing her lips, shook her head.

Later, in the midst of a struggle over an archaic law-form, the
recollection of his loan to his fellow-student darted into his head. He
laid down his notebook to laugh again. She turned her head and looked a
silent question. "Oh, it's just that franc and a half!" he explained.
"I'll never get over that as long as I live!"

She pulled down her veil and turned away from him again.

When they reached Paris, he insisted that she take a carriage and go
home directly. "I'll go on to the reading-room and explain to your
hired girl that you were sick and couldn't wait for her." Before he
closed her into the cab he added, "But, look here! I won't see you
again, will I? I forgot you are going back to England to-morrow. Well,
to think of this being good-bye! I declare, I hate to say it!" He held
out his hand and took her cold fingers in his. "Well, Miss Midland, I
tell _you_ there's not a person in the world who can wish you better
luck than I do. You've been awfully good to me, and I appreciate it,
and I do hope that if there's ever any little thing I can do for you,
you'll let me know. I surely am yours to command."

The girl's capacity for emotion seemed to be quite exhausted, for she
answered nothing to this quaint valedictory beyond a faint, "Good-by,
Mr. Harrison, I hope you----" but she did not finish the sentence.

FRANCIS BRET HARTE

Chu Chu

I do not believe that the most enthusiastic lover of that "useful and
noble animal," the horse, will claim for him the charm of geniality,
humor, or expansive confidence. Any creature who will not look you
squarely in the eye--whose only oblique glances are inspired by fear,
distrust, or a view to attack, who has no way of returning caresses,
and whose favorite expression is one of head-lifting disdain, may be
"noble" or "useful," but can be hardly said to add to the gayety of
nations. Indeed it may be broadly stated that, with the single
exception of gold-fish, of all animals kept for the recreation of
mankind the horse is alone capable of exciting a passion that shall be
absolutely hopeless. I deem these general remarks necessary to prove
that my unreciprocated affection for Chu Chu was not purely individual
or singular. And I may add that to these general characteristics she
brought the waywardness of her capricious sex.

She came to me out of the rolling dust of an emigrant wagon, behind
whose tailboard she was gravely trotting. She was a half-broken
colt--in which character she had at different times unseated everybody
in the train--and, although covered with dust, she had a beautiful coat
and the most lambent gazelle-like eyes I had ever seen. I think she
kept these latter organs purely for ornament--apparently looking at
things with her nose, her sensitive ears, and sometimes even a slight
lifting of her slim near foreleg. On our first interview I thought she
favored me with a coy glance, but as it was accompanied by an
irrelevant "Look out!" from her owner, the teamster, I was not certain.
I only know that after some conversation, a good deal of mental
reservation, and the disbursement of considerable coin, I found myself
standing in the dust of the departing emigrant wagon with one end of a
forty-foot _riata_ in my hand and Chu Chu at the other.

I pulled invitingly at my own end and even advanced a step or two
towards her. She then broke into a long disdainful pace and began to
circle round me at the extreme limit of her tether. I stood admiring
her free action for some moments--not always turning with her, which
was tiring--until I found that she was gradually winding herself up _on
me_! Her frantic astonishment when she suddenly found herself thus
brought up against me was one of the most remarkable things I ever saw
and nearly took me off my legs. Then when she had pulled against the
_riata_ until her narrow head and prettily arched neck were on a
perfectly straight line with it, she as suddenly slackened the tension
and condescended to follow me, at an angle of her own choosing.
Sometimes it was on one side of me, sometimes on the other. Even then
the sense of my dreadful contiguity apparently would come upon her like
a fresh discovery, and she would become hysterical. But I do not think
that she really _saw_ me. She looked at the _riata_ and sniffed it
disparagingly; she pawed some pebbles that were near me tentatively
with her small hoof; she started back with a Robinson-Crusoe-like
horror of my footprints in the wet gully, but my actual personal
presence she ignored. She would sometimes pause, with her head
thoughtfully between her forelegs, and apparently say, "There is some
extraordinary presence here: animal, vegetable, or mineral--I can't
make out which--but it's not good to eat, and I loathe and detest it."

When I reached my house in the suburbs, before entering the "fifty
vara" lot inclosure, I deemed it prudent to leave her outside while I
informed the household of my purchase; and with this object I tethered
her by the long _riata_ to a solitary sycamore which stood in the
centre of the road, the crossing of two frequented thoroughfares. It
was not long, however, before I was interrupted by shouts and screams
from that vicinity and on returning thither I found that Chu Chu, with
the assistance of her _riata_, had securely wound up two of my
neighbors to the tree, where they presented the appearance of early
Christian martyrs. When I released them, it appeared that they had been
attracted by Chu Chu's graces, and had offered her overtures of
affection, to which she had characteristically rotated with this
miserable result.

I led her, with some difficulty, warily keeping clear of the _riata_,
to the inclosure, from whose fence I had previously removed several
bars. Although the space was wide enough to have admitted a troop of
cavalry, she affected not to notice it and managed to kick away part of
another section on entering. She resisted the stable for some time, but
after carefully examining it with her hoofs and an affectedly meek
outstretching of her nose, she consented to recognize some oats in the
feed-box--without looking at them--and was formally installed. All this
while she had resolutely ignored my presence. As I stood watching her,
she suddenly stopped eating; the same reflective look came over her.
"Surely I am not mistaken, but that same obnoxious creature is
somewhere about here!" she seemed to say, and shivered at the
possibility.

It was probably this which made me confide my unreciprocated affection
to one of my neighbors--a man supposed to be an authority on horses,
and particularly of that wild species to which Chu Chu belonged. It was
he who, leaning over the edge of the stall where she was complacently
and, as usual, obliviously munching, absolutely dared to toy with a pet
lock of hair which she wore over the pretty star on her forehead. "Ye
see, captain," he said with jaunty easiness, "hosses is like wimmen; ye
don't want ter use any standoffishness or shyness with _them_; a stiddy
but keerless sort o' familiarity, a kind o' free but firm handlin',
jess like this, to let her see who's master----"

We never clearly knew _how_ it happened; but when I picked up my
neighbor from the doorway, amid the broken splinters of the stall rail
and a quantity of oats that mysteriously filled his hair and pockets,
Chu Chu was found to have faced around the other way and was
contemplating her forelegs, with her hind ones in the other stall. My
neighbor spoke of damages while he was in the stall, and of physical
coercion when he was out of it again. But here Chu Chu, in some
marvelous way, righted herself, and my neighbor departed hurriedly with
a brimless hat and an unfinished sentence.

My next intermediary was Enriquez Saltello--a youth of my age, and the
brother of Consuelo Saltello, whom I adored. As a Spanish Californian
he was presumed, on account of Chu Chu's half-Spanish origin, to have
superior knowledge of her character, and I even vaguely believed that
his language and accent would fall familiarly on her ear. There was the
drawback, however, that he always preferred to talk in a marvelous
English, combining Castilian[145-1] precision with what he fondly
believed to be Californian slang.

"To confer then as to thees horse, which is not--observe me--a Mexican
plug![145-2] Ah, no! you can your boots bet on that. She is of
Castilian stock--believe me and strike me dead! I will myself at
different times overlook and affront her in the stable, examine her as
to the assault, and why she should do thees thing. When she is of the
exercise, I will also accost and restrain her. Remain tranquil, my
friend! When a few days shall pass, much shall be changed, and she will
be as another. Trust your oncle do thees thing! Comprehend me!
Everything shall be lovely, and the goose hang high!"

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