The Best Short Stories of 1915
V >>
Various >> The Best Short Stories of 1915
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25
"''Tis me that's here, then,' said the grasshopper. 'Me grandmother died
last night an' she wasn't insured either.'
"'The practice of negligence is the curse of mankind and the root of
sorrow,' ses the whale. 'I suppose the poor old soul had her fill of
days, an' sure we all must die, an' 'tis cheaper to be dead than alive
at any time. A man never knows that he's dead when he's dead an' he
never knows he's alive until he's married.'
"'You're a great one to expatiate on things you know nothing about, like
the barbers and the cobblers,' said the grasshopper. 'I only want to
know if you're coming to the funeral to-morrow?'
"'I'm sorry I can't,' ses the whale. 'Me grandfather is getting married,
for the tenth time, an' as I was in China on the last few occasions I
must pay me respects by being present at to-morrow's festivities,' ses
he.
"'I'm sorry you can't come,' ses the grasshopper, 'because you are
heartily welcome an' you'd add prestige to the ceremony besides.'
"'I know that,' ses the whale, 'but America doesn't care much about
ceremony.'
"'Who told you that?' ses the grasshopper.
"'Haven't I me eyesight, an' don't I read the newspapers,' ses the
whale.
"'You mustn't read the society columns, then,' ses the grasshopper.
"'Wisha, for the love of St. Crispin,' ses the whale 'have they society
columns in the American newspapers?'
"'Indeed they have,' ses the grasshopper, 'and they oftentimes devote a
few columns to other matters when the dressmakers don't be busy.'
"'America is a strange country surely, a wonderful country, not to say
a word about the length and breadth of it. I swam around it twice last
week without stoppin,' to try an' reduce me weight, an' would you
believe me that I was tired after the journey, but the change of air
only added to me proportions.'
"'That's too bad,' said the grasshopper.
"'Are you an American?' said the whale.
"'Of course I am,' ses the grasshopper. 'You don't think 'tis the way
I'd be born at sea an' no nationality at all like yourself. I'm proud
of me country.'
"'And why, might I ask?'
"'Well don't we produce distinguished Irishmen? Don't we make Americans
of the Europeans and Europeans of the Americans? Think of all the
connoisseurs who wouldn't buy a work of art in their own country when
they could go to Europe and pay ten times its value for the pot-boilers
that does be turned out in the studios of Paris and London.'
"'There's nothin' like home industry,' ses the whale, 'in a foreign
country, I mean.'
"'After all, who knows anything about a work of art but the artist? and
very little he knows about it, either. A work of art is like a flower,
it grows, it happens. That's all. An' unless you charge the devil's own
price for it, people will think you are cheating them.'
"'Wisha, I suppose the best anyone can do is to take all you can get an'
if you want to be a philanthropist, give away what you don't want,' ses
the grasshopper.
"'All worth missing I catches,' ses the whale, 'an' all worth catchin'
I misses, like the fisherwoman who missed the fish and caught a crab.
How's things in Europe? I didn't see the papers this morning.'
"'Europe is in a bad way,' ses the grasshopper. 'She was preaching
civilization for centuries so that she might be prepared when war came
to annihilate herself.'
"'It looks that way to me,' ses the whale. 'Is there anything else worth
while going on in the world?'
"'There's the Irish question,' ses the grasshopper.
"'Where's that, Ireland is?' ses the whale. 'Isn't that an island to the
west of England?'
"'No,' ses the grasshopper, 'but England is an island to the east of
Ireland.'
"'Wisha,' ses the whale, 'it gives me indigestion to hear people talking
about Ireland. Sure, I nearly swallowed it up be mistake while I was on
a holiday in the Atlantic last year, an' I'm sorry now that I didn't.'
"'An' I'm sorry that you didn't try,' ses the grasshopper. 'Then you'd
know something about indigestion. The less you have to say about Ireland
the less you'll have to be sorry for. Remember that me father came from
Cork.'
"'Can't I say what I like?' ses the whale.
"'You can think what you like,' ses the grasshopper, 'but say what other
people like if you want to be a good politician.'
"'There's nothin' so much abused as politics,' ses the whale.
"'Except politicians,' ses the grasshopper. 'Only for the Irish they'd
be no one bothering about poetry and the drama to-day. Only for fools
they'd be no wise people an' only for sprats, hake, and mackerel there
'ud be no whales an' a good job that would be, too.'
"'What's that you're saying?' ses the whale very sharply.
"'Don't have me to lose me temper with you,' ses the grasshopper.
"'Wisha, bad luck to your impudence an' bad manners, you insignificant
little spalpeen. How dare you insult your superiors?' ses the whale.
"'Who's me superior?' ses the grasshopper. 'You, is it?'
"'Yes, me then,' ses the whale.
"'Another word from you,' ses the whale, 'an' I'll put you where
Napoleon put the oysters.'
"'Well,' ses the grasshopper, 'there's no doubt but vanity, ignorance
and ambition are three wonderful things an' you have them all.'
"'Neither you nor Napoleon, nor the Kaiser himself an' his hundred
million men could do hurt or harm to me. You could have every soldier
in the German Army, the French Army, an' the Salvation Army lookin'
for me an' I'd put the comether on them all.'
"'I can't stand this any longer,' ses the whale, an' then and there
he hits the rock a whack of his tail an' when I went to look for the
grasshopper, there he was sitting on the whale's nose as happy an'
contented as if nothing happened. An' when he jumped back to the rock
again he says: 'A little exercise when 'tis tempered with discretion,
never does any harm, but violent exertion is a very foolish thing if
you value your health. But it is only people who have no sinse but
think they have it all who make such errors.'
"'If I could get a hold of you,' ses the whale, 'I'd knock some of the
pride out of you.'
"'That would be an ungentlemanly way of displaying your displeasure,'
ses the grasshopper.
"'I'd scorn,' ses he, 'to use violent means with you, or do you physical
injury of any kind. All you want is self-control and a little education.
You should know that quantity without quality isn't as good as quality
without quantity.'
"'Sure 'tis I'm the fool to be wasting me time listening to the likes of
you,' ses the whale. 'If any of me family saw me now, I'd never hear the
end of it.'
"'Indeed,' ses the grasshopper, 'no one belonging to me would ever
recognize me ever again if they thought I was trying to make a whale
behave himself. There would be some excuse for one of my attainments
feeling proud. But as for you!--'
"'An' what in the name of nonsense can you do except give old guff out
of you?'
"'I haven't time to tell you all,' ses the grasshopper. 'But to
commence with, I can travel all over the world an' have the use of
trains, steamers, sailing ships and automobiles and will never be asked
to pay a cent, an' I can live on dry land all me life if I choose, while
you can't live under water, or over water, on land or on sea, and while
all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't catch me if they
were trying till the crack of doom, you could be caught be a few poor,
harmless sailors, who wouldn't know a crow from a cormorant, and who'd
sell your carcass to make oil for foolish wives to burn an' write
letters to other people's husbands an' fill the world with trouble.'
An' what about all the whalebone we supplies for ladies' corsets an'
paper knives, and what about all the stories we make for the novelists
an' the moving pictures an'--'"
"We're at the Sprig of Holly now," said Felix. "Is it a pint of porter
or a bottle you'll have?"
"I'll have a pint, I think," said Standish.
IN BERLIN[15]
BY MARY BOYLE O'REILLY
From _The Boston Daily Advertiser_
[15] Copyright, 1915, by The Boston Daily Advertiser.
The train crawling out of Berlin was filled with women and children,
hardly an able-bodied man. In one compartment a gray-haired Landsturm
soldier sat beside an elderly woman who seemed weak and ill. Above
the click-clack of the car wheels passengers could hear her counting:
"One, two, three," evidently absorbed in her own thoughts. Sometimes she
repeated the words at short intervals. Two girls tittered, thoughtlessly
exchanging vapid remarks about such extraordinary behavior. An elderly
man scowled reproval. Silence fell.
"One, two, three," repeated the obviously unconscious woman. Again the
girls giggled stupidly. The gray Landsturm leaned forward.
"Fraeulein," he said gravely, "you will perhaps cease laughing when I
tell you that this poor lady is my wife. We have just lost our three
sons in battle. Before leaving for the front myself I must take their
mother to an insane asylum."
It became terribly quiet in the carriage.
THE WAITING YEARS[16]
BY KATHARINE METCALF ROOF
From _The Century Magazine_
[16] Copyright 1915, by The Century Co. Copyright, 1916, by Katharine
Metcalf Roof.
The shadow on the sun-dial, blue upon its white-marble surface, marked
four o'clock, but its edge was broken by the irregular silhouette of
an encroaching rose-bush. The sun-dial in the midst of the wide, sunny
garden, the old red-brick house among the elms--these were the most
sharply defined elements of Mark Faraday's picture of home. Born in
Italy, for most of his young life a sojourner in foreign lands, he yet
remembered being utterly happy at "Aunt Lucretia's" when at seven he
had made his first visit to his mother's country. That memory had never
faded. He had recalled and reclaimed each detail of its serene charm at
his second visit ten years later, after his mother's death. And now in
America again, he had naturally gravitated toward the old place.
The young man gave a careless friendliness to his faded little aunt,
and spent long hours with his dreams, creative and subjective, in her
garden. For the most part they were dreams of unheard melodies, for Mark
Faraday was a composer. So little of his life had been spent in his own
country that outside the garden he felt less at home in America than in
Florence or Vienna. Yet place mattered little to him. An artist and a
creator, his kingdom was within. Of his environment he demanded only
harmony and space.
A bee buzzed into the open heart of a rose, bending it with his weight.
A little breeze wafted its perfume toward him. His eyes wandered over
the delicate, riotous color of the sweet-pea hedge and rested in content
upon the mignonette border. A circular path of white gravel surrounded
the grass plot about the dial. From it as a center curved paths wandered
outward dividing the flower-beds. The flowers were planted without much
regularity except for the borders of four o'clock and mignonette. It was
this spot that had inspired Mark's song cycle, "The Sun-dial." A certain
quality of youth and freshness as natural as a spring in the woods had
won for it quick recognition. Mark's artistic tendency was not exotic.
Although not retrogressive, he had drunk deep at the springs of Bach,
Schubert, and Mozart, and the basis of his work was sound.
Alone in the fragrant silence, he began dreaming sounds. The notes
of the bee's drone, one high, one low, combining in uneven rhythm,
had given him a suggestion for an accompaniment. His mind was far
away, working out his pattern of harmony, when another sound, actual,
familiar, broke into his reverie--the preliminary chords of one of
the songs of his "Sun-dial" cycle, "Youth and Crabbed Age." Then a
woman began to sing. It was Stella's voice; he recognized it at once,
pleasant, sufficiently trained. Stella was a fair musician and was
fond of trying over new music, but to-day she was playing in a more
musicianly manner than he had believed her capable of playing. He
had expected that his aunt would ask her over for tea. He enjoyed
the girl's companionship. He had not known many of his own countrywomen.
Their naturalness and freedom from the personal attitude of the
Continental woman interested him. It was perhaps this quality in
Stella that most appealed to him. He was aware that his Aunt Lucretia
hoped for a romantic conclusion to the friendship. He himself had given
the matter an occasional thought. Yet somehow Stella's definiteness
left no room for the imaginative element to become active. It was
difficult for him to visualize her as an established factor in his
life, either as the restful center of a home or the adaptable companion
of his nomadic wanderings. The precise nature of her lack he had not
felt the necessity to characterize.
The concluding chords of his song vibrated into silence. With the
ceasing of the actual sounds, his imagined music began to move again
along its interrupted course; then a crash of Brahms broke into his
creative weavings, and he frowned, not only for the interruption:
Stella should not attempt Brahms. The hazardous attempt broke off
as abruptly as it had begun. There was something fragmentary, or
perhaps more correctly, something unfinished about Stella. She never
had just fulfilled the promise of their first meeting. The bee theme
drifted into his mind again, and had progressed a few measures, when
the evolving harmonic pattern was again invaded by an alien presence,
a soft one of dim outline and faded voice, his Aunt Lucretia.
"You are coming in for tea, Mark." She paused, characteristically
tentative, wavering, fearful of intruding, a gentle, kindly, ineffectual
presence. "And Stella is here," she added.
"I heard her." Mark rose to his excellent height and stood an instant
looking down at the little old lady shading her eyes from the sunlight.
They had been large and dark once; now the filmy rim of age was visible
about the iris. Her white hair lay in neat ringlets upon her brow, which
was wrinkled like a fine parchment. Her skin, bleached to a bloodless
whiteness, retained still some of the soft texture of youth.
"And Allison Clyde," she finished her announcement: "but you won't mind
her," she added, recalling the restiveness of the present generation
under boredom.
"Allison Clyde?" he repeated. He remembered the name vaguely as one of
some old friend of the family. "An old lady." He had not reckoned his
indifferent label a question, but his aunt took it up.
"We never think of her as that. She is younger," Lucretia Hall conceded,
"than I am. Allison is universally admired. Mrs. Herrick"--she quoted
the oracle of her circle in that last-generation manner that proclaims
the accepted--"says that Allison is a personage."
Miss Lucretia turned toward the house; her nephew followed her.
"Any relation to the historian, bane of my youth?" he asked.
"His daughter," Lucretia gladly expounded; "and her brother, the poet,
died young. Allison herself--very gifted musically." The fragments
came back to him as his aunt preceded him with her small, hesitating
steps up the narrow path. The picture of an old lady playing the "Songs
without Words" passed through Mark's mind, and he began to plan flight.
"But she was obliged to give up her music to care for her invalid
father."
"I heard Stella playing," Mark commented.
His aunt rejoined after a moment:
"She doesn't seem at all nervous. Young people aren't in these days. At
her age, if any one asked me to play, I was terrified."
Her nephew smiled down at her, hooking her with an affectionate arm.
"What used you to play, _Tante_? The 'Blue Alsatian Mountains' and the
'Stephanie Gavotte'?"
Her faded smile held a faint surprise.
"How did you know?"
"I am a clairvoyant, and did you sing, 'Then You'll Remember Me?'"
"No, I never sang; but Mary--your mother--did."
They reached the back porch and passed through the wide hall into
the shaded spaciousness of the drawing-room. In that quiet interior
light that rested softly upon the decorous portraits of his forebears,
the mahogany, and the accumulated bric-a-brac of three generations,
he became aware of the incongruous presence of Stella. He realized
again her clean-cut, finished daintiness, the incisiveness of voice
and feature. As he released her hand, still aware of its hard, boyish
grip, he heard his aunt's voice, light, wandering, non-arresting, as if
continuing some conversational thread, "And Miss Allison Clyde, Mark--my
old friend." He had been vaguely aware of some one else in the room, but
when he met the smile of the older woman who held out her hand to him,
he wondered that he had not realized it more promptly; for Miss Allison
Clyde, although far removed from the youth of years, had about her
something immediately and quietly charming--something, it occurred to
him, that suggested autumnal perfumes and the warmth of late sunlight.
It was a face with a certain fine austerity belonging to a generation
at once more natural and more reserved than ours.
"So this is Mary's boy," she said. "You have her eyes." He looked at her
and unconsciously glanced at Stella. The older woman belonged to the
quiet old room. Stella, despite the same inheritance, did not.
Tea was brought in by a maid grown gray in his aunt's service, and Miss
Lucretia presided. Mark's eyes again wandered from Miss Allison Clyde to
Stella with involuntary comparison.
No one would have accused Stella of not being a well-bred young
woman, yet she sat, Mark noted, carelessly and not quite gracefully.
Miss Allison Clyde was taller than Stella, yet she was adjusted to her
chair with a disciplined grace and dignity far removed from stiffness.
"Stella has promised to sing 'Crabbed Age' for me again," she announced
when tea was finished.
"Shall I sing it now?" Stella rose with her promptness, and, going to
the piano, plunged at once into the opening bars. Although the composer
was not an egoist, he shuddered.
"I am making frightful hash of it, I know," Stella confessed, unabashed,
as her fingers stumbled. "I think Miss Allison had better play it." Mark
glanced quickly at the older woman.
"Then it was _you_ I heard a moment ago."
"I tried it," she admitted, with a smile. "The title had a melancholy
attraction for me. I had no idea the composer was overhearing, or I
should have had stage-fright dreadfully."
"Play something else," Mark suggested. "It would give me so much
pleasure. Something _not_ Mark Faraday."
Miss Allison rose decisively.
"No, I will play 'Crabbed Age,'" she decided, "and youth shall sing
it." And then they ran through it together, the older woman playing it
with a musician's sense of its qualities, and Stella singing it through
passably in her firm young voice.
In answer to Mark's sincere, "Play more," as she started to rise from
the piano stool, Miss Allison let her fingers wander through passages
of "Meistersinger" in a way that showed a musician's knowledge of the
score.
"How wonderful that you can play like that still!" exclaimed Stella.
The gaucherie of that "still" struck upon Mark's artistic sensibilities,
trained in Italian habits of speech. "What a resource it must be!"
"For crabbed age," Miss Allison finished. Her smile held a faint
amusement. Stella, momentarily silenced, if not abashed, by this
explicit voicing of her thought, did not contradict, and Miss Allison
continued, "The technic of a Paderewski would be small compensation
for lost youth, I fear." She said it without sentimentality, but, as
she spoke, lightly touched the delicate theme of the "Golden Apples"
that brought eternal youth to the gods, passing into the sublimity of
the Valhalla motive. Looking up, she met Mark's comprehension and
smiled, then, bringing her chord to a resolution, rose from the piano
stool. Mark watched her as she paused to turn over the pages of his
"Sun-dial," noting the titles--Sunrise, Morning, High Noon, Afternoon,
Evening, Night. "'Youth and Crabbed Age' is Evening, I see," she
commented. "Then what is this?" She held up a separate sheet loosely
set in the book, reading the title, "Too Late for Love and Loving."
"That was an attempt with words of my own before I resigned in favor
of Shakespeare," Mark explained. "I am not a poet. They are just words
for music."
She read them over:
"Sweet love, too late!
Life is Time's prisoner,
Love's hour has fled,
The flowers are dead,
Love has passed by.
Sweet love, too late!
Death stands at the gate."
She sat down again without comment, and ran it through softly, then
again more assuredly, with appreciation. The warm afternoon light from
the open window fell upon her, revealing what the years had worn, what
they had been powerless to touch. Her hair was half gray; but her eyes
were as dark, vivid, and expectant as the eyes of youth--autumn pools
shot through with the sun. The mouth was a generous one, finely molded
by the experience of the years. He remembered that she was a spinster,
yet there was about her none of the emptiness, the starved quality, of
the woman with her destiny unfulfilled; nothing of the futility, the
incompletion, of the celibate that causes the imagination to turn with
relief to contemplation of the most bovine mother of a family. It must
have been an impervious boor indeed who would venture to jest upon Miss
Allison's single state. It spoke of naught but dignity. Life, it would
seem, had not deprived her.
It was that warm, alive, expectant quality, Mark reflected, that
revealed that Allison Clyde was neither wife nor mother. She had
turned, no doubt, to other interests with her unquenchable vividness,
and so could still look out upon the world with young, hopeful eyes.
Yet what, at her age, could the years still bring her? It had been
surely a vain waiting; yet, viewed as a picture, it had, he felt, an
autumnal beauty of its own.
That night Miss Allison Clyde wrote a long letter to her lifelong
friend, Miss Augusta Penfield:
I met Lucretia's nephew, Mary's boy, to-day. He is you know, a
composer already on the road to fame. You remember that he was born
abroad. There is for all his undiluted American ancestry a foreign
touch about him, a something warm and ardent caught under the Italian
skies that even our children seem to take on when born there. He is
indeed a beautiful boy, a dreamer, yet manly. A boy I call him, yet
he is twenty-nine. My dear father had four sons and a daughter at
his age. Still he is a boy. It is strange in this generation, Augusta,
that though in many ways they seem so advanced, so beyond us, in others
they are further away from life's responsibilities than we were at their
age. There is a suggestion of his Uncle William about Mark, but he is
somehow stronger, more imperative. I was drawn to him at once because
of his music. And he has the charming manner, the almost excessive
chivalry, toward our sex that we see so little of any more, or at least
seldom encounter at our age. Lucretia had asked Stella in for tea. She
is a dear child and quite alarmingly composed, but not altogether
musical, despite her excellent musical opportunities. She played one
of the boy's songs, a delicious thing, rather dreadfully. I felt sorry
for him. Lucretia insisted upon my playing his "Youth and Crabbed Age,"
which every one has been singing, although he seems delightfully unaware
of that fact. He was so courteous about insisting that I should play
more, I ran through a bit of "Meistersinger,"--he seemed so truly a
young _Walther_,--and then discovered another little song that he has
not published, "Too Late for Love and Loving," full of a kind of pathos
that it seems impossible youth could understand. But I suppose that is
where genius comes in.
The rest of the letter was made of messages and the mild, small daily
occurrences that are of moment to such as Miss Augusta Penfield.
That night, searching in an old secretary in his room for some missing
notes, Mark came upon a little daguerreotype in a drawer. It was of a
young girl, taken apparently in the late sixties or early seventies.
Something in the face, clear-eyed, warm-lipped, trusting, caught and
held his attention. He turned it over to see if the girl's name was on
the back, but the only inscription was a date in his Uncle William's
writing, June, 1863. Poor Uncle William, who had been so full of
promise, they said, but who had died from a bullet wound, a sacrifice to
his country two years after the war!
Some girl that his uncle had loved, perhaps. The young man's face,
dark-eyed, romantic, familiar to him through the old picture in
uniform always on his mother's dressing-table, rose before his mind's
eye. Perhaps Uncle William had taken the little picture away with him
to the war. The date must have been just about the time that he had
enlisted and marched away. He had gone without telling her perhaps;
she could have been little more than a child. Perhaps he had never told.
Or they might have had their brief tragic happiness upon the edge of
death, they two "embracing under death's spread hand."
He stared at the picture. It would have been easy to love a girl with
those eyes, that mouth. A fancy came upon him to put Uncle William's
picture beside the girl's, and impulsively he went back to the darkened
drawing-room, groped for the framed picture that stood upon the mantel,
found it, and carried it up to his room. Then side by side he studied
the two faces.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25