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

McCord was really telling a story now. He paused for a long moment, one
hand shielding an ear and his eyeballs turned far up.

"That was the first time I really went over the hulk," he ran on. "I
got out a lantern and started at the forward end of the hold, and I
worked aft, and there was nothing there. Not a sign, or a stain,
or a scrap of clothing, or anything. You may believe that I began to
feel funny inside. I went over the decks and the rails and the house
itself--inch by inch. Not a trace. I went out aft again. The cat sat
on the wheel-box, washing her face. I hadn't noticed the scar on her
head before, running down between her ears--rather a new scar--three
or four days old, I should say. It looked ghastly and blue-white in
the flat moonlight. I ran over and grabbed her up to heave her over
the side--you understand how upset I was. Now you know a cat will
squirm around and grab something when you hold it like that, generally
speaking. This one didn't. She just drooped and began to purr and looked
up at me out of her moonlit eyes under that scar. I dropped her on the
deck and backed off. You remember Bjoernsen had _kicked_ her--and I
didn't want anything like that happening to--"

The narrator turned upon me with a sudden heat, leaned over and shook
his finger before my face.

"There you go!" he cried. "You, with your stout stone buildings and your
policemen and your neighborhood church--you're so damn sure. But I'd
just like to see you out there, alone, with the moon setting, and all
the lights gone tall and queer, and a shipmate--" He lifted his hand
overhead, the finger-tips pressed together and then suddenly separated
as though he had released an impalpable something into the air.

"Go on," I told him.

"I felt more like you do, when it got light again, and warm and
sunshiny. I said 'Bah!' to the whole business. I even fed the cat, and
I slept awhile on the roof of the house--I was so sure. We lay dead most
of the day, without a streak of air. But that night--! Well, that night
I hadn't got over being sure yet. It takes quite a jolt, you know, to
shake loose several dozen generations. A fair, steady breeze had come
along, the glass was high, she was staying herself like a doll, and so
I figured I could get a little rest lying below in the bunk, even if I
didn't sleep.

"I tried not to sleep, in case something should come up--a squall or the
like. But I think I must have dropped off once or twice. I remember I
heard something fiddling around in the galley, and I hollered 'Scat!'
and everything was quiet again. I rolled over and lay on my left side,
staring at that square of moonlight outside my door for a long time.
You'll think it was a dream--what I saw there."

"Go on," I said.

"Call this table-top the spot of light, roughly," he said. He placed a
finger-tip at about the middle of the forward edge and drew it slowly
toward the center. "Here, what would correspond with the upper side of
the companion-way, there came down very gradually the shadow of a tail.
I watched it streaking out there across the deck, wiggling the slightest
bit now and then. When it had come down about half-way across the light,
the solid part of the animal--its shadow, you understand--began to
appear, quite big and round. But how could she hang there, done up in a
ball, from the hatch?"

He shifted his finger back to the edge of the table and puddled it
around to signify the shadowed body.

"I fished my gun out from behind my back. You see I was feeling
funny again. Then I started to slide one foot over the edge of the bunk,
always with my eyes on that shadow. Now I swear I didn't make the sound
of a pin dropping, but I had no more than moved a muscle when that
shadowed thing twisted itself around in a flash--and there on the floor
before me was the profile of a man's head, upside down, listening--a
man's head with a tail of hair."

McCord got up hastily and stepped in front of the state-room door, where
he bent down and scratched a match.

"See," he said, holding the tiny flame above a splintered scar on the
boards. "You wouldn't think a man would be fool enough to shoot at a
shadow?"

He came back and sat down.

"It seemed to me all hell had shaken loose. You've no idea, Ridgeway,
the rumpus a gun raises in a box like this. I found out afterward the
slug ricochetted into the galley, bringing down a couple of pans--and
that helped. Oh yes, I got out of here quick enough. I stood there, half
out of the companion, with my hands on the hatch and the gun between
them, and my shadow running off across the top of the house shivering
before my eyes like a dry leaf. There wasn't a whisper of sound in the
world--just the pale water floating past and the sails towering up like
a pair of twittering ghosts. And everything that crazy color--

"Well, in a minute I saw it, just abreast of the mainmast, crouched down
in the shadow of the weather rail, sneaking off forward very slowly.
This time I took a good long sight before I let go. Did you ever happen
to see black-powder smoke in the moonlight? It puffed out perfectly
round, like a big, pale balloon, this did, and for a second something
was bounding through it--without a sound, you understand--something a
shade solider than the smoke and big as a cow, it looked to me. It
passed from the weather side to the lee and ducked behind the sweep of
the mainsail like _that_--" McCord snapped his thumb and forefinger
under the light.

"Go on," I said. "What did you do then?"

McCord regarded me for an instant from beneath his lids, uncertain. His
fist hung above the table. "You're--" He hesitated, his lips working
vacantly. A forefinger came out of the fist and gesticulated before my
face. "If you're laughing, why, damn me, I'll--"

"Go on," I repeated. "What did you do then?"

"I followed the thing." He was still watching me sullenly. "I got up
and went forward along the roof of the house, so as to have an eye on
either rail. You understand, this business had to be done with. I kept
straight along. Every shadow I wasn't absolutely sure of I _made_ sure
of--point-blank. And I rounded the thing up at the very stem--sitting
on the butt of the bowsprit, Ridgeway, washing her yellow face under
the moon. I didn't make any bones about it this time. I put the bad end
of that gun against the scar on her head and squeezed the trigger. It
snicked on an empty shell. I tell you a fact; I was almost deafened by
the report that didn't come.

"She followed me aft. I couldn't get away from her. I went and sat on
the wheel-box and she came and sat on the edge of the house, facing me.
And there we stayed for upwards of an hour, without moving. Finally she
went over and stuck her paw in the water-pan I'd set out for her; then
she raised her head and looked at me and yawled. At sun-down there'd
been two quarts of water in that pan. You wouldn't think a cat could
get away with two quarts of water in--"

He broke off again and considered me with a sort of weary defiance.

"What's the use?" He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.
"I knew you wouldn't believe it when I started. You _couldn't_. It would
be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of pavements.
You're too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can't shake you. You haven't sat two
days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer teeth-gritting,
until they got used to it and wouldn't shut any more. When I tell you
I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits, and three bights
of the boat-fall loosened out, plain on deck--you grin behind your
collar. When I tell you she padded off forward and evaporated--flickered
back to hell and hasn't been seen since, then--why, you explain to
yourself that I'm drunk. I tell you--" He jerked his head back abruptly
and turned to face the companionway, his lips still apart. He listened
so for a moment, then he shook himself out of it and went on:

"I tell you, Ridgeway, I've been over this hulk with a foot-rule.
There's not a cubic inch I haven't accounted for, not a plank I--"

This time he got up and moved a step toward the companion, where he
stood with his head bent forward and slightly to the side. After what
might have been twenty seconds of this he whispered, "Do you hear?"

Far and far away down the reach a ferry-boat lifted its infinitesimal
wail, and then the silence of the night river came down once more,
profound and inscrutable A corner of the wick above my head sputtered
a little--that was all.

"Hear what?" I whispered back. He lifted a cautious finger toward the
opening.

"Somebody. Listen."

The man's faculties must have been keyed up to the pitch of his nerves,
for to me the night remained as voiceless as a subterranean cavern. I
became intensely irritated with him; within my mind I cried out against
this infatuated pantomime of his. And then, of a sudden, there _was_ a
sound--the dying rumor of a ripple, somewhere in the outside darkness,
as though an object had been let into the water with extreme care.

"You heard?"

I nodded. The ticking of the watch in my vest pocket came to my ears,
shucking off the leisurely seconds, while McCord's fingernails gnawed
at the palms of his hands. The man was really sick. He wheeled on me
and cried out, "My God! Ridgeway--why don't we go out?"

I, for one, refused to be a fool. I passed him and climbed out of the
opening; he followed far enough to lean his elbows on the hatch, his
feet and legs still within the secure glow of the cabin.

"You see, there's nothing." My wave of assurance was possibly a little
over-done.

"Over there," he muttered, jerking his head toward the shore lights.
"Something swimming."

I moved to the corner of the house and listened.

"River thieves," I argued. "The place is full of--"

"_Ridgeway. Look behind you!_"

Perhaps it _is_ the pavements--but no matter; I am not ordinarily a
jumping sort. And yet there was something in the quality of that voice
beyond my shoulder that brought the sweat stinging through the pores
of my scalp even while I was in the act of turning.

A cat sat there on the hatch, expressionless and immobile in the gloom.

I did not say anything. I turned and went below. McCord was there
already, standing on the farther side of the table. After a moment or
so the cat followed and sat on her haunches at the foot of the ladder
and stared at us without winking.

"I think she wants something to eat," I said to McCord.

He lit a lantern and went into the galley. Returning with a chunk of
salt beef, he threw it into the farther corner. The cat went over and
began to tear at it, her muscles playing with convulsive shadow-lines
under the sagging yellow hide.

And now it was she who listened, to something beyond the reach of even
McCord's faculties, her neck stiff and her ears flattened. I looked at
McCord and found him brooding at the animal with a sort of listless
malevolence. "_Quick_! She has kittens somewhere about." I shook his
elbow sharply. "When she starts, now--"

"You don't seem to understand," he mumbled. "It wouldn't be any use."

She had turned now and was making for the ladder with the soundless
agility of her race. I grasped McCord's wrist and dragged him after
me, the lantern banging against his knees. When we came up the cat was
already amidships, a scarcely discernible shadow at the margin of our
lantern's ring. She stopped and looked back at us with her luminous
eyes, appeared to hesitate, uneasy at our pursuit of her, shifted here
and there with quick, soft bounds, and stopped to fawn with her back
arched at the foot of the mast. Then she was off with an amazing
suddenness into the shadows forward.

"Lively now!" I yelled at McCord. He came pounding along behind me,
still protesting that it was of no use. Abreast of the foremast I took
the lantern from him to hold above my head.

"You see," he complained, peering here and there over the illuminated
deck. "I tell you, Ridgeway, this thing--" But my eyes were in another
quarter, and I slapped him on the shoulder.

"An engineer--an engineer to the core," I cried at him. "Look aloft,
man."

Our quarry was almost to the cross-trees, clambering the shrouds with
a smartness no sailor has ever come to, her yellow body, cut by the
moving shadows of the ratlines, a queer sight against the mat of the
night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two words: "By
gracious!" The following instant he had the lantern and was after her.
I watched him go up above my head--a ponderous, swaying climber into
the sky--come to the cross-trees, and squat there with his knees clamped
around the mast. The clear star of the lantern shot this way and that
for a moment, then it disappeared and in its place there sprang out
a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens.
I could see the shadows of his head and hands moving monstrously over
the inner surface of the sail, and muffled exclamations without meaning
came down to me. After a moment he drew out his head and called: "All
right--they're here. Heads! there below!"

I ducked at his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard
from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked
up a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled
with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere
abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger
down the shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of
litter, a sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a
soiled apron.

"Well," he said when he had come to deck, "I feel like a man who has
gone to hell and come back again. You know I'd come to the place where I
really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By gracious!
we haven't come so far from the jungle, after all."

We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord
broke a prolonged silence.

"I'm sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He's probably climbing up
a wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the
gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the world's
turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week. Poor
cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--"

"Yes," I broke in. "I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when
he made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the
ship's papers with him He would have attached some profound importance
to them--remember, the 'barbarian,' eight thousand miles from home.
Probably couldn't read a word. I suppose the cat followed him--the
traditional source of food He must have wanted water badly."

"I should say! He wouldn't have taken the chances he did."

"Well," I announced, "at any rate, I can say it now--there's another
'mystery of the sea' gone to pot."

McCord lifted his heavy lids.

"No," he mumbled. "The mystery is that a man who has been to sea all
his life could sail around for three days with a man bundled up in his
top and not know it. When I think of him peeking down at me--and playing
off that damn cat--probably without realizing it--scared to death--by
gracious! Ridgeway, there was a pair of funks aboard this craft, eh?
Wow--yow--I could sleep--"

"I should think you could."

McCord did not answer.

"By the way," I speculated. "I guess you were right about Bjoernsen,
McCord--that is, his fooling with the foretop. He must have been caught
all of a bunch, eh?"

Again McCord failed to answer. I looked up, mildly surprised, and found
his head hanging back over his chair and his mouth opened wide. He was
asleep.

THE BOUNTY-JUMPER[20]

By MARY SYNON

From _Scribner's Magazine_

[20] Copyright, 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1916, by
Mary Synon.

"... While faith, that in the mire was fain to wallow,
Returns at last to find
The cold fanes desolate, the niches hollow,
The windows dim and blind,

"And strown with ruins around, the shattered relic
Of unregardful youth,
Where shapes of beauty once, with tongues angelic,
Whispered the runes of Truth."

--_From "The Burden of Lost Souls_."

On the day before Isador Framberg's body was brought back to Chicago
from Vera Cruz, James Thorold's appointment as ambassador to Forsland
was confirmed by the Senate of the United States. Living, Isador
Framberg might never have wedged into the affairs of nations and the
destinies of James Thorold. Marines in the navy do not intrigue with
chances of knee-breeches at the Court of St. Jerome. More than miles
lie between Forquier Street and the Lake Shore Drive. Dead, Isador
Framberg became, as dead men sometimes become, the archangel of a
nation, standing with flaming sword at the gateway to James Thorold's
paradise.

For ten years the Forsland embassy had been the goal of James Thorold's
ambition. A man past seventy, head of a great importing establishment,
he had shown interest in public affairs only within the decade, although
his very build, tall, erect, commanding, and his manner suavely
courteous and untouched by futile haste, seemed to have equipped him
with a natural bent for public life. Marrying late in life, he seemed
to have found his bent more tardily than did other men. But he had
invested wealth, influence, and wisdom in the future of men who, come
to power, were paying him with this grant of his desire. The news,
coming to him unofficially but authoritatively from Washington, set
him to cabling his wife and daughter in Paris and telegraphing his son
whose steamer was just docking in New York. The boy's answer, delayed
in transit and announcing that he was already on his way to Chicago,
came with the morning newspapers and hurried his father through their
contents in order that he might be on time to meet Peter at the station.

The newspapers, chronicling Thorold's appointment briefly, were heavy
with harbingering of the funeral procession of the boy who had fallen
a fortnight before in the American navy's attack upon Vera Cruz. The
relative values that editors placed upon the marine's death and his own
honoring nettled Thorold. Ambassadors to the Court of St. Jerome were
not chosen from Chicago every day, he reasoned, finding Isador Framberg
already the fly in the amber of his contentment. To change the current
of his thought he read over Peter's telegram, smiling at the exuberant
message of joy in which the boy had vaunted the family glory. The yellow
slip drove home to James Thorold the realization of how largely Peter's
young enthusiasm was responsible for the whetting of his father's desire
to take part in public affairs. For Peter's praise James Thorold would
have moved mountains; and Peter's praise had a way of following the man
on horseback. Thorold's eager anticipation of the boy's pride in him
sped his course through rosy mists of hope as his motor-car threaded
the bright drive and through the crowded Parkway toward the Rush Street
bridge.

A cloud drifted across the sky of his serenity, however, as a blockade
of traffic delayed his car in front of the old Adams homestead, rising
among lilacs that flooded half city square with fragrance. The old
house, famous beyond its own day for Judge Adams's friendship with
Abraham Lincoln and the history-making sessions that the little group
of Illinois idealists had held within its walls, loomed gray above the
flowering shrubs, a saddening reminder of days that James Thorold must
have known; but Thorold, glimpsing the place, turned away from it in a
movement so swift as to betoken some resentment and gave heed instead
to the long line of motors rolling smoothly toward the city's heart.

Over the bridge and through the packed streets of the down-town
district Thorold, shaken from his revery of power and Peter, watched
the film that Chicago unrolled for the boulevard pilgrims. The boats
in the river, the long switch-tracks of the railroads, the tall
grain-elevators, the low warehouses from which drifted alluring
odors of spices linked for James Thorold the older city of his youth
with the newer one of his age as the street linked one division of the
city's geography with another. They were the means by which Chicago had
risen from the sand-flats of the fifties to the Michigan Avenue of the
present, that wide street of the high skyline that fronted the world
as it faced the Great Lakes, squarely, solidly, openly. They were the
means, too, by which James Thorold had augmented his fortune until it
had acquired the power to send him to Forsland. To him, however, they
represented not ladders to prosperity but a social condition of a
passing generation, the Chicago of the seventies, a city distinctively
American in population and in ideals, a youthful city of a single
standard of endeavor, a pleasant place that had been swallowed by the
Chicago of the present, that many-tentacled monster of heterogeneous
races, that affected him as it did so many of the older residents,
with an overwhelming sensation of revolt against its sprawling lack
of cohesion. Even the material advantages that had accrued to him from
the growth of the city could not reconcile James Thorold to the fact
that the elements of the city's growth came from the races of men whom
he held in contempt. What mattered it, he reasoned, that Chicago waxed
huge when her grossness came from the unassimilated, indigestible mass
of Latins and Greeks, Poles and Russians, Czechs, Bulgars, Jews, who
filled the streets, the factories, and the schools?

The prejudice, always strong within him, rose higher as he found his
machine blocked again, this time by the crowd that stood across Jackson
Boulevard at La Salle Street. Even after the peremptory order of a
mounted police officer had cleared the way for him James Thorold frowned
on the lines of men and women pressed back against the curbstones. The
thought that they were waiting the coming of the body of that boy who
had died in Mexico added to his annoyance the realization that he would
have to fight his way through another crowd at the station if he wished
to reach the train-shed where Peter's train would come. The struggle was
spared him, however, by the recognition of a newspaper reporter who took
it for granted that the ambassador to Forsland had come to meet the
funeral cortege of the marine and who led him through a labyrinthine
passage that brought him past the gates and under the glass dome of the
train-shed.

Left alone, Thorold paced the platform a little apart from the group
of men who had evidently been delegated to represent the city. Some
of them he knew. Others of them, men of Isador Framberg's people and
of the ten tribes of Israel, he did not care to know. He turned away
from them to watch the people beyond the gates. Thousands of faces,
typical of every nation of Europe and some of the lands of Asia, fair
Norsemen and Teutons, olive-skinned Italians and men and women of the
swarthier peoples of Palestine, Poles, Finns, Lithuanians, Russians,
Bulgars, Bohemians, units of that mass which had welded in the city
of the Great Lakes of America, looked out from behind the iron fence.
The tensity written on their faces, eager yet awed, brought back to
James Thorold another time when men and women had stood within a
Chicago railway terminal waiting for a funeral cortege, the time when
Illinois waited in sorrow to take Abraham Lincoln, dead, to her heart.
The memory of that other day of dirges linked itself suddenly in the
mind of James Thorold with the picture of the lilacs blooming in the
yard of the Adams homestead on the parkway, that old house where Abraham
Lincoln had been wont to come; and the fusing recollections spun the
ambassador to Forsland upon his heel and sent him far down the platform,
where he stood, gloomily apart, until the limited, rolling in from the
end of the yards, brought him hastening to its side.

Peter Thorold was the first to alight.

A boy of sixteen, fair-haired, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, springing
from the platform of the Pullman into his father's arms, he brought
with him the atmosphere of high adventure. In height, in poise of
shoulders, in bearing, in a certain trick of lifting his chin, he
was a replica of the dignified man who welcomed him with deep emotion;
but a difference--of dream rather than of dogma--in the quality of their
temperaments accoladed the boy. It was not only that his voice thrilled
with the higher enthusiasms of youth. It held besides an inflexibility
of tone that James Thorold's lacked. Its timbre told that Peter
Thorold's spirit had been tempered in a furnace fierier than the one
which had given forth the older man's. The voice rang out now in excited
pleasure as the boy gripped his father's shoulders. "Oh, but it's good
to see you again, dad," he cried. "You're a great old boy, and I'm proud
of you, sir. Think of it!" he almost shouted. "Ambassador to Forsland!
Say, but that's bully!" He slipped his arm around his father's shoulder,
while James Thorold watched him with eyes that shone with joy. "What do
you call an ambassador?" he demanded laughingly.

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