The Best Short Stories of 1915

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She had gone. The room was in darkness.

Hastings felt for the door. It yielded. He opened another door, and
stepped through it.

His head swam in the midst of the lights outside. He slunk back like one
who hesitates to confront the unknown. The stairs were there before him;
he began to descend, his right hand held forth, his eyes fastened in
horror upon it. Then, as he heard the distant hum of voices below, once
more pompous and erect he swung down the last broad treads between the
landing and the floor.

A servant who passed uttered a cry and vanished; but that did not deter
him. With long strides he boldly rounded the familiar corner to the
dining-room door and entered.

He flourished his right hand wildly in the air. He saw that it was
bleeding.

"See, see!" he called to them. "At last he is dead. I have killed him! I
have killed him!"

The room seemed to recede in the distance. Something snapped inside his
brain. Everything was different. Mr. and Mrs. Elliott, with shrieks of
terror, were moving to the pantry-door far at the other end. Confusedly
he saw Julia try to force herself toward him; saw her half come, heard
his name on her lips. He wanted to smile, he wanted to bend down over
her affectionately; but when he sought to reach her with his bloody
hand, she shrank back, turned, and fled with the others. He shouted to
them; but he stumbled, and thought he might fall. He caught hold of the
table. After that all was blackness.

* * * * *

He awoke amid the appointments of the chamber which Julia had called
his room. A quick flood of memories, some clear and accurate, others
vague and troublesome, inundated his tired consciousness. Gradually he
became aware of a thick, muddy pain rolling in dreadful rhythmic waves
through his head. He looked toward the clock on the mantelpiece to see
if it wasn't time to get up. He met the eyes of Mrs. Elliott. He lifted
himself, falling back on the pillow. The pillow was as cold as ice. She
came over to him.

"Dear boy--you feel better?"

"Better? Better?" he echoed. "Why are you here?"

"Your head is cooler. You've been--you--my dear child, you may as well
know it--you fainted last night--yesterday. You were worn out; you
caught cold, and had--a chill. You hadn't eaten anything since--not
since--" She fondled the bed-clothes. "You'll be all right now. Your
head--struck something. The doctor said you weren't to talk--"

It hurt him to move his eyes. The sockets ached. He tried hard to
realize what she had told him, repeating snatches of it feverishly over
to himself.

"Is it dangerous?" he finally got to the point of asking.

"No; a slight--just a very slight concussion."

"Concussion?" He floundered in the ominous meaning of it until Julia
came in. Every time he spoke they begged him not to. She looked so real
to him, so natural, so tangibly alive! When she put her face down by his
he trembled, and burst out crying like a child. He was afraid she would
go away. She sat on the edge of the bed, her hands about one of his. The
other hand lay bandaged on the counterpane.

The next day he was better, but he wasn't allowed to get up; and he
was secretly not sorry not to have to try. The weakness which followed
the first shock had made him submissive to the situation; he began to
be used to the fact that he was ill; even the nurse's presence he
philosophically accepted, so resigned was he to the necessity. He
asked questions concerning his pulse and temperature, wanted to know
if the bags of ice could be dispensed with soon. Julia read aloud to
him for an hour every morning.

But, having a half-attentive interest in what she read, he would look
fixedly at her and try to piece together his jumbled recollections.
Partly from lack of strength, mostly because he was loath to admit to
anybody that his brain wasn't normally clear, he let the questions which
rose to his lips pass unuttered. Once he exclaimed irrelevantly:

"Where, Julia, did that portrait come from?" And when he caught
the intensity of her stare, he looked around the walls, and, smiling
bashfully, concealed his embarrassment by saying, "I'm really listening,
but I must have dozed for a second." At times he would gaze wonderingly
at the ceiling, lose himself following the lines of the panels, or
counting the little square panes in the window-sashes. He sometimes
slept, but not quite soundly; half his somnolence was busy with
irrational calculations beyond his control.

A musty smell elusively kept fading as soon as he was aware of
breathing it; a dim room, in which the windows were shut close and
the shades pulled down, drifted through his quick fancy into darkness;
he would find himself deliriously sorting many strange garments into
piles, counting them, opening drawers to take others out, until the
accumulations drove him to despair. His right hand throbbed under the
tight bandage; he kept fingering the bandage and pressing on the sore
spots. Everything about him would seem suddenly definite and real as
compared with the dismal bewilderment of his dreamings. Perhaps the
doctor would enter, with professional cheerfulness. But then, right
in the middle of answering some question, Hastings would be blinded
by a great rush of bright light through the opened door.

A day came when all this phantasmagoria ceased to bother him; with
returning vigor he had to make less and less effort to forget it,
until at last it altogether went. The joy of new health swept over
him, filling the gaps and low, miasmic areas of his mentality, as
the rising tide fills the empty pools of the shore.

III

It was a month after the day of John Hastings's arrival at Rockface.
Unlike that day, the weather was sunny and mild; big cumulus clouds
moved languidly through the sky, as if it were midsummer instead of
late October. Julia was crocheting, and he was watching her. They
were sitting in front of the house on a leaf-strewn grass-plot near
the avenue between the lines of larches that, now calm in the windless
forenoon, stretched diagonally from the street to the corners of the
bland old facade.

"But if you knew all along," he, with his habitual freshness of wonder,
put to her, "that it was, that it _is_, really Mr. Eberdeen's house, why
in the name of things didn't you tell me _then_?"

She became irritatingly absorbed in her work.

"I thought," she at length said, "that you were pretending not to know,
and I wanted, in that case, to discover what other--what else you might
be holding back from me."

"Holding back from you? What _else_?" he echoed. "What else was there?"

"I wasn't sure, you see. Nothing that I knew," she affirmed frankly,
laughing away the sudden rigor of sadness on his face. "There was
another reason, though. There was something which I had been saving
for the very last moment to show you. But I was rather ashamed of
wanting to so much, and, after the way you had taken the rest of
the house, I hesitated. Just as I finally was going to, lunch was
ready--remember?"

Hastings awkwardly withdrew his right hand, which had been resting palm
downward on his knee, and thrust it into his pocket.

"Julia," he cried out, in characteristic disregard of all context,
"suppose Mr. Eberdeen should turn out to have been--well--a relative,
or something? It might account, you know, for my asking that question,
and--and for how everything here"--he looked inclusively round him--"for
how this all impressed me so."

She waited, hopeful of the time having at last come when he might
wish to confide in her whatever it was--if, indeed, he knew--that
had happened; but he only ingenuously continued to hold out to her
the possibility of his new idea.

"No," she told him, with a disappointment which she couldn't conceal,
"he wasn't. I've looked up his entire history. He died right here, and
he had no children. _Your_ pedigree I know by heart."

Hastings smiled at her thoroughness.

"What," he exclaimed, "if some unrecorded forebear of mine has eluded
you? Somebody," he dreamily improvised, "who knew this house, who was
familiar with every turn of the road, every habit of the mist. It's just
such a smug little, old, weather-worn town like Rockface, where any New
Englander is likely to find traces of forgotten ancestors."

The sound of footsteps made them both look toward the gate.

"Who is it? Why is he coming here?" Julia demanded half-indignantly
under her breath.

"The same old man I met, but so much older!" whispered Hastings,
unexpectedly puzzled whether to welcome or dread this intrusion.

"I have searched the streets through for him ever since," she
remonstrated; "I have asked everybody I saw, and no one in the whole
place could tell me of any old man answering his description."

They watched his slow, difficult approach over the gravel. He came
forward without making the slightest recognition of their presence.
Stopping full in front of them, he took off his hat, applied a
straggling red handkerchief uncertainly to his face, and stared
up at the house-front.

"They tell me," he muttered, not once looking at either of his
interlocutors, "that yer've been and sold it. So yer couldn't stand
it, eh, after all? It's what Al Makepeace said 'u'd be the case. Looks
innocent, though, as herself did, now, don't it?"

"We've sold it," Julia protested, "only because--because we can't stay
here. Jack--Mr. Hastings--and I are going to be married. We are going
to live in Europe. My father and mother didn't want--"

"Yer can't make a new dog out of an old dog, ner learn an old dog new
tricks," he went on disregardingly; "and I guess it's the same fur's
houses be concerned."

"Who are you, anyway?" Hastings asked, getting up to offer the old man a
chair.

"Who am I?" the old man echoed, suddenly attentive. "Dear me, dear me!
Whose father was it as planted--and I had his own word fer it--all these
'ere tam'rack trees, and dug the well by the south door? And seen the
lady of the house herself, mind yer, go out 'tween them stone posts fer
the last time--and darker than pitch it was, too--on her way that night
she went to meet Henry--"

At this point the old man was seized by a fit of coughing. When he
recovered from it, he just stood there, gazing ahead of him, shaken with
the palsy of years, so that he failed to heed the questions they thrice
repeated to him.

"No wonder yer couldn't sleep in it, with her curse on the big empty
halls! When the crops themselves died the night afterward, without a
sign of a frost comin' down to touch them! It was the devil's own
guilt in her that did it, Al says. Poor man! poor man! And yer tried
ter dress it all up like a corpse, as if yer thought it was dead; but
it came to life on yer, did it?" he mumbled, laughing incomprehensibly
to himself. "When yer leavin'? To-morrer? Sooner the better fer yer, I
guess. Good-day." With which imprecation the old man turned, feebly put
on his hat, and dragged himself back down the avenue whence he had come.

They saw the last vestige of him disappear forever.

"He's like a broken spirit brooding over the neighborhood," Hastings
said, shivering despite himself.

Julia began to crochet again, nervously absorbed in what she was doing.

"His scattered, crazy words are like the last gasp of the little
village. How he epitomizes all the cramped, pent-up emotions of the
starved inhabitants who have gone--all the passions that must have
so drearily burnt themselves out here, with nothing to note but the
shifting of the winds or the digging of some well! They who were
obliged, from sheer ennui, to create dramas out of their Puritan
prejudices. Can't you breathe contagion in the very atmosphere?
Julia, I've had enough of it; I'm glad we're going. If I stayed
here a month longer, I should get to feel as indigenous as that
gnarled old apple-tree; the ghosts of the soil would claim me."

She stood up and walked away from him across the gravel avenue, as
if doing so might help her to seize this occasion for what she had
decided at last to tell him. She realized that she must be quick,
that in another hour her parents' return might end this one good
opportunity for which she had longed and waited.

"Jack dear," she said, moving back toward him, seeing how her own
excitement was reflected in the way he, too, had arisen and taken
a few steps towards her, "to-morrow is our last day, and there's
something that we must talk about before we go."

His head was bowed, his eyes focused tensely up at hers, his arms
hanging beside him; the sensitive smile hovered more and more dimly
on his lips; his whole body swayed imperceptibly, like the beating
of a pulse.

"Jack," she got out, going still closer to him, "I want to show
you--Mrs. Eberdeen's room."

He would never quite realize the fullness of the shock it gave him;
no deliberate attack could have been so vulnerably aimed, and the
completeness of the blow was the greater for being one which he had
been unwittingly preparing all along to receive. The house looked
miles away; far over it three ducks flew southward.

On the landing above the broad part of the staircase they paused
a moment. Instead of going up the left branch, which led to Jack's
door, she took him to the right, where, at the head of the stairs,
there was another door directly opposite his. As soon as he saw it
he went forward quickly and turned the knob. It stuck; it was locked;
and rather timorously he stepped back to meet Julia's searching look
as she handed him a rusty old key.

The musty smell poured out on them like the damp from an opened vault.

She took his hand. They stepped across the threshold.

He saw the lithograph of the two kittens, age-worn and time-blurred,
still crooked on the wall beside the bureau; there was the sand-shaker
on the maple desk; there hung the yellowed print of the "Last Supper"
above the fireplace--all stark and ghostly in that uncannily late
afternoon light, which not even the morning sun could dispel.

He clutched her hand. He looked at the bed, which hadn't been smoothed
or touched since he had lain in it a month ago. He remembered it
as uncomprehendingly as one remembers mislaying a lost object in a
forgotten place. He remembered waking. But the rest he had done was
lost in the shadows.

"So this is where it happened--_here!_ How have I ever been in this room
before?"

"_What_ happened?" she asked him eagerly, firmly.

"I fainted--before I was sick. But why--why here?" he begged.

She had prepared her answer; she had many times rehearsed it; but the
words now served inadequately.

"You hadn't eaten anything," she stated softly. "You hadn't slept. You
had a fever, and your brain was so tired from--from everything that when
you started for _your_ room,--the one opposite, which I had shown to
you,--you carelessly turned to the right, and came into this room
instead, which I hadn't had a chance yet to tell you about. Haven't
you ever known, _since_, that you did it?"

He shook his head.

"This was Mrs. Eberdeen's room," she went on. "It has always been
just like this,--at least I think it has,--always, since the house was
built. I kept it as a curiosity. I called it Mrs. Eberdeen's room
because the natives said she was wicked and had brought ruin to the
house. I reasoned that this was why nobody had taken these things away
or changed them--the wall-paper, I mean, the bed, the carpet, the
pictures. And there's precisely one thing," she impetuously concluded,
as if she couldn't postpone longer telling him, "that I myself have
added."

Hastings smiled wanly at her. She guided him round to the wall at the
side of the door in front of which they had been standing; she started
to speak again before she saw what it was to which she had referred; and
so her own words prevented her from hearing the smothered sound of his
recognition.

"I found this," she said, trying to speak carelessly and forcing herself
steadfastly to regard it, "in an old shop twelve miles down the Poochuck
Road. Isn't it quaint? I got it--because, Jack, it looked like you,
and--and because it exactly fitted this panel!"

But her attempted gaiety sank dismally in the silence which followed.
They just stood there. The minutes thudded by; the mustiness enwrapped
them. Outside the window a dead piece of branch fell crackling to the
ground. Gradually he grew to be unaware of her presence, so sharp and
rapid were the currents which successively swept him; and her petty
curiosity, all her poor need for speculation, was lost in the depth of
the spell cast over him now. She dared not look at him, she dared not
take her eyes off the object before them.

It was crudely painted. It was the portrait of a young man dressed a
hundred or more years ago. He seemed to be walking forward out of the
picture. In many places the pigment was so nearly gone that the brown
fuzz of canvas showed through. The colors clung as delicate as cobwebs
to the stern face and erect stalwart figure.

"Who is it?" Hastings articulated, scarce audibly. But though he had
to ask, if only to save himself from going mad, his words were no more
than frail signals of his distress, for he knew that he alone knew the
answer. Electrically, crashingly, it had been borne in upon him at
almost the first instant of his beholding them where it was that he had
seen before those tightly compressed lips, with the mole still visible
near the corner; he knew those calm, cruel eyes, still averted from his
own; in a flash he had identified the purple satin waistcoat.

"You, Jack,"--she faced him determinedly--"you looked like _him_; you
were like him, absolutely, in every detail, when you came into the
dining-room!"

"When I came--" he repeated at a loss.

"Yes. It wasn't here, in this room, that you fainted. You went outside,
down the stairs. Elizabeth saw you. You pushed open the dining-room
door. Mother, father, I--we all saw you come in, wearing clothes like
_these_," she pointed.

"Yes, yes, yes. I remember; I did put them on."

"But you didn't, you couldn't have! O Jack, don't you understand me? You
weren't _really_ wearing them!"

All at once he felt something crunch beneath his feet, and he looked
down, then back up at the portrait. The large square of glass which
apparently once covered it had been shattered; there were a few
triangles still sticking in the edge of the frame; the rest was in
smaller bits on the floor. Instinctively he brought his right hand
to a level with his face, and saw the scar upon it.

"It's a mystery, Jack dear. Can't you see it is? And it is so much more
interesting never to explain it," she essayed fearfully, feigning a
laugh of regained naturalness. "We shall never, never find out who he
was, by whom it was painted, or what made you break it, or why--"

"Ah," he shouted eagerly, defying, as the memories came crowding into
his brain, the doubts which had freshly assailed him. "I told you it
might be possible! And he did have, after all--for that man was the
father of her child!"

"Whose child?" Julia gasped.

But love and pity for her whom he could not name kept him from
answering. And in the drift of his silence the vision capriciously
failed him. He looked at Julia. He looked back at the wall. It was
nothing but a funny old picture which hung there confronting them.
The commonplaceness, beside it, of Julia's long-drawn expression made
him snicker, until, as a result of this accidental reaction, they were
both actually giggling aloud.

He turned away from her. She watched him cross to the bureau. He pulled
out each one of the drawers in turn. He peered blankly into them, where
there was only the smell of mold and whirring dust to greet his pains.

He persistently scanned the room again. What had become of the hat-tub?
Why had the Chinese water-jug gone from the squalid little wash-stand?
Baffled and solemn, he went back over to her.

"Haven't you taken some things away?"

"Nothing. Not even so much as a splinter. What are you trying to find?"

Timidly catching her hand he cried:

"Come with me, please." And he drew her to the closet door. But when he
opened it, he let go her hand in his amazement.

A slit of window at the far end let in a ray of sun. There were rows and
rows of wooden hooks, but there seemed nothing on them. Steeling himself
boldly to view it, he turned to where there might have dangled that
calico bag stuffed with pieces against which the stranger had leaned. He
went forward and felt over the empty spaces to satisfy himself.

"Yes, Julia," he slowly brought out, "you are right; it was a dream--a
mystery." And he nodded vacantly to her.

"If only, Jack, you could remember it all!"

She stretched out her arms to him. But just as she was coming nearer, he
caught sight of something lying between them on the floor. He darted for
it, picked it up, and ran with it out of the shadow. Then, in terror, he
saw that it was a piece of crumpled gray chiffon, and that there were
the stains of blood upon it.

VENGEANCE IS MINE[10]

BY VIRGIL JORDAN

From _Everybody's Magazine_

[10] Copyright, 1915, by The Ridgway Company. Copyright, 1916, by Virgil
Jordan.

A psychologist has said that most dreams indicate some deep fear or some
deep wish that lies dormant in the dreamer. One curious thing about this
is that the psychologist was a German. Another is that none of my
companions in the dugout at Le Pretre seemed to find in my experience
anything entirely new to them. I leave you to judge which it was--fear
or desire--that came to light in me in the trenches of Pont-a-Mousson.

Foot by foot we had driven the Germans out of the forest of Le Pretre;
and when the winter came down on us we had brought up behind the ridge
overlooking the Moselle, with the enemy on the other side, fifteen miles
away from Metz.

They managed to keep the river open, but otherwise let us alone. There
was nothing to do for weeks but to sit tight. With cement, moss, burlap,
and a few rugs and a boiler and some steam-pipe we stole at
Pont-a-Mousson, we made our dugouts pretty comfortable.

Excepting myself and the rest of the aeroplane corps, our work had been
each day to do so and so much digging, hauling, figuring, firing into
the air, mechanically protecting ourselves from shells that we took as
a matter of course, like wind and rain. We did not even know when we had
won a point against the unseen enemy. We did not feel their resistance
as one feels a push. Some one who had charge of those matters figured it
out on paper, and we moved forward or back as their calculations said.
Outside our company we knew nothing of the general state of affairs.

Once in a while, especially about Christmas, one of us would get
a bundle of books, papers and magazines from a friend. Then we
talked--talked; we discussed again and again the reasons for the war,
the object of it, what we were going to do to Germany when it was over.
Every evening we tried Germany over again, put her culture, commerce,
social system on the rack, found her guilty and had her hanged, drawn,
and quartered.

Christmas Eve, 1914, I had turned in warm and excited and confused
with the whirl of ideas we had been discussing, gathered around our
steam-pipe. I had a restless night in the stuffy dugout. About midnight
the German firing commenced in the direction of Metz. Toward morning,
Christmas Day, they stopped, and I fell into a long, dreamy sleep.

* * * * *

It was Christmas Eve, 1916. Two long, haggard years of the war had
dragged by, to a wailing crescendo of misery, famine, disease, and
madness. We had been hurled up and down an invisible line of death,
bending and pressing it back and forth like a horde of ants at a thread.

Every human thought and fact had by now changed in us. As we formerly
recognized our friends, we seemed to know each other now as the citizens
of a new state on earth, in which the people did not live by productive
labor, nor in houses, nor in families, but like strange bees in an
unknown place, sexless, unconscious of our activity, destroying instead
of building. It was as if we had been born that way. All memory of
another life was sunk deep into the subconscious. We had become highly
specialized things, yet knew not in what or for what. Birth and death
had lost their meaning.

Tens of thousands of us had disappeared. Thousands took their places
nonchalantly. As the opening of the third year approached, there was
in the air the wild and brooding sense of the millions of German and
Austrian lives and as many of the Allies that had gone out before their
time.

Earth seemed to stir into consciousness of it.

The carnival of Chaos had spread like a wanton dementia. Italy had
long since flung aside her sane reserve and plunged into the carnage
for the shreds of Austria she desired--Tyrol, Dalmatia, Istria, and
Albania. Rumania and Greece had joined with Servia and bound the Balkans
into a temporary brotherhood. Together with Russia and Italy at Haskoi
they had scattered the crazy Turkish army like chaff and swarmed on to
the Bosphorus. The allied fleet drove a withering wedge of steel and
fire through the Dardanelles. Constantinople fell.

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