The Best Short Stories of 1915

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"Fortunately," the older man said, "there is no title accompanying the
office."

"Well, I should think not," the boy exclaimed. "Oh, dad, isn't it the
greatest thing in the world that you're to represent the United States
of America?"

James Thorold smiled. "No doubt," he said dryly. His gaze passed his
son to glimpse the crowd at the gate, frantic now with excitement, all
looking forward toward some point on the platform just beyond where the
man and boy were standing. "These United States of America have grown
past my thought of them," he added. The boy caught up the idea eagerly.
"Haven't they, though?" he demanded. "And isn't it wonderful to think
that it's all the same old America, 'the land of the free and the home
of the brave?' Gee, but it's good to be back in it again. I came up
into New York alongside the battleship that brought our boys home from
Mexico," he went on, "and, oh, say, dad, you should have seen that
harbor! I've seen a lot of things for a fellow," he pursued with a touch
of boyish boastfulness, "but I never saw anything in all my life like
that port yesterday. People, and people, and people, waiting, and flags
at half-mast, and a band off somewhere playing a funeral march, and that
battleship with the dead sailors--the fellows who died for our country
at Vera Cruz, you know--creeping up to the dock. Oh, it was--well, I
cried!" He made confession proudly, then hastened into less personal
narrative.

"One of them came from Chicago here," he said. "He was only nineteen
years old, and he was one of the first on the beach after the order to
cross to the customhouse. He lived over on Forquier Street, one of the
men was telling me--there are six of them, the guard of honor for him,
on the train--and his name was Isador Framberg. He was born in Russia,
too, in Kiev, the place of the massacres, you remember. See, dad, here
comes the guard!"

Peter Thorold swung his father around until he faced six uniformed
men who fell into step as they went forward toward the baggage-car.
"It's too bad, isn't it," the boy continued, "that any of the boys had
to die down in that greaser town? But, if they did, I'm proud that we
proved up that Chicago had a hero to send. Aren't you, dad?" James
Thorold did not answer. Peter's hands closed over his arm. "It reminds
me," he said, lowering his voice as they came closer to the place where
the marines stood beside the iron carrier that awaited the casket of
Isador Framberg's body, "of something the tutor at Westbury taught us
in Greek last year, something in a funeral oration that a fellow in
Athens made on the men who died in the Peloponnesian War. 'Such was
the end of these men,'" he quoted slowly, pausing now and then for a
word while his father looked wonderingly upon his rapt fervor, "'and
they were worthy of Athens. The living need not desire to have a more
heroic spirit. I would have you fix your eyes upon the greatness of
Athens, until you become filled with the love of her; and, when you
are impressed by the spectacle of her glory, reflect that this empire
has been acquired by men who knew their duty and who had the courage
to do it, who in the hour of conflict had the fear of dishonor always
present to them.'" With the solemnity of the chant the young voice
went on while the flag-covered casket was lifted from car to bier.
"'For the whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; not only are
they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country,
but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them,
graven not in stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples,
and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do
not weigh too nicely the perils of war.'"

He pulled off his cap, tucking it under his arm and dragging his
father with him to follow the men who had fallen in behind the marines
as they moved forward toward the gates and the silent crowd beyond.
Almost unwillingly James Thorold doffed his hat. The words of Peter's
unexpected declamation of Pericles's oration resounded in his ears.
"Once before," he said to the boy, "I heard that speech. Judge Adams
said it one night to Abraham Lincoln."

"Father!" Peter's eyes flashed back from the cortege to meet James
Thorold's. "I never knew that you knew Abraham Lincoln." His tone
betokened an impression of having been cheated of some joy the older
man had been hoarding. But James Thorold's voice held no joy. "Yes,"
he said. "I knew him."

The gates, sliding back, opened the way for the officers who led the
procession with which Isador Framberg came back to the city of his
adoption. The crowd yawned to give space to the guard of honor, walking
erectly beside the flag-draped coffin, to the mourners, men and women
alien as if they had come from Kiev but yesterday, to the little group
of men, public officials and rabbis, who trailed in their wake, and to
James Thorold and Peter, reverently following. Then it closed in upon
the cortege, urging it silently down the broad stairways and out into
the street where other crowds fell in with the strange procession.
Surging away after the shabby hearse, drawn by its listless horses and
attended by the marines, the crowd left the Thorolds, father and son,
on the pavement beside the station. "Don't you want to go?" There was
a wistfulness in Peter's voice that told his father that the boy had
sensed some lack of responsiveness in him. "He's going to lie in state
to-day at the city hall. Don't you think we should go, dad?" Not Peter's
query but Peter's eyes won his father's answer. "After a while," he
promised. "Then let's find a breakfast," the boy laughed. "I spent my
last dollar sending you that telegram."

All the way over to his father's club on Michigan Avenue, and all
through the breakfast that he ordered with lusty young appetite, Peter
kept up a running fire of reminiscence of his European adventures. That
the fire held grapeshot for his father when he talked of the latter's
worthiness for the ambassadorship to Forsland he could not guess; but
he found that he was pouring salt in a wound when he went back to
comment upon Isador Framberg's death. "Why make so much of a boy who
happened to be at Vera Cruz?" the older man said at last, nettled that
even his son found greater occasion for commendation in the circumstance
of the Forquier Street hero than in his father's selection to the most
important diplomatic post in the gift of the government. Peter's brows
rose swiftly at his father's annoyance. He opened his lips for argument,
then swiftly changed his intention. "Tell me about Judge Adams, dad," he
said, bungling over his desire to change the topic, "the fellow who knew
his Pericles."

"It's too long a story," James Thorold said. He watched Peter closely
in the fashion of an advocate studying the characteristics of a judge.
The boy's idealism, his vivid young patriotism, his eager championship
of those elements of the new America that his father contemned, had
fired his personality with a glaze that left James Thorold's smoothly
diplomatic fingers wandering over its surface, unable to hold it within
his grasp. He had a story to tell Peter--some time--a story of Judge
Adams, of the house among the lilacs, of days of war, of Abraham
Lincoln; but the time for its telling must wait upon circumstance that
would make Peter Thorold more ready to understand weakness and failure
than he now seemed. Consciously James Thorold took a change of venue
from Peter Thorold of the visions to Peter Thorold of the inevitable
disillusions. But to the former he made concession. "Shall we go to the
city hall now?" he asked as they rose from the table.

The city hall, a massive white granite pile covering half of the square
east of La Salle Street and north of Washington and meeting its twin
of the county building to form a solid mass of masonry, flaunted black
drapings over the doorways through which James Thorold and his son
entered. Through a wide corridor of bronze and marble they found their
way, passing a few stragglers from the great crowd that had filled the
lower floors of the huge structures when Isador Framberg's body had
been brought from its hearse and carried to the centre of the aisles,
the place where the intersecting thoroughfares met. Under a great bronze
lamp stood the catafalque, covered with the Stars and Stripes and
guarded by the men of the fleet.

Peter Thorold, pressing forward, took his place, his cap thrust under
his arm, at the foot of the bier, giving his tribute of silence to the
boy who had died for his country. But James Thorold went aside to stand
beside an elevator-shaft. Had his son watched him as he was watching
Peter, he would have seen the swift emotions that took their way across
his father's face. He would have seen the older man's look dilate with
the strained horror of one who gazed back through the dimming years to
see a ghost. He would have seen sorrow, and grief, and a great remorse
rising to James Thorold's eyes. He might even have seen the shadow of
another bier cast upon the retina of his father's sight. He might have
seen through his father's watching the memory of another man who had
once lain on the very spot where Isador Framberg was lying, a man who
had died for his country after he had lived to set his country among the
free nations of the earth. But Peter Thorold saw only the boy who had
gone from a Forquier Street tenement to the Mexican sands that he might
prove by his dying that, with Irish, and Germans, and French, he too,
the lad who had been born in Kiev of the massacres, was an American.

With the surge of strange emotions flooding his heart, Peter Thorold
crossed to where his father stood apart. The tide of his thought
overflowed the shore of prose and landed his expression high on a
cliff of poetry. No chance, but the urging of his own exalted mood,
brought him the last lines of Moody's "Ode in Time of Hesitation":

"Then on your guiltier head
Shall our intolerable self-disdain
Wreak suddenly its anger and its pain;
For manifest in that disastrous light
We shall discern the right
And do it, tardily.--O ye who lead,
Take heed!
Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite."

But to the older man, seeing as he stood the picture of that other
catafalque to which he had crept one night in the lilac time of a year
nearly a half century agone, the words flung anathema. He leaned back
against the bronze grating of the shaft with a sudden look of age that
brought Peter's protective arm to his shoulder. Then, with Peter
following, he went out to the sun-bright street.

Like a man in a daze he dismissed his car, crossing pavements under
Peter's guiding until he came to the building where the fortunes of
the great Thorold mercantile business were administered. Through the
outer room, where clerks looked up in surprise at the appearance which
their chief presented on the morning when they had learned of the
Forsland embassy, he led Peter until they came to the room where he
had reigned for twenty years. It was a room that had always mirrored
James Thorold to his son. Tall bookcases, stiff, old-fashioned, held
long rows of legal works, books on history, essays on ethical topics,
and bound volumes of periodicals. Except for its maps, it was a lawyer's
room, although James Thorold never claimed either legal ability or legal
standing. Peter seldom entered it without interest in its possibilities
of entertainment, but to-day his father's strange and sudden
preoccupation of manner ingulfed all the boy's thought. "What is it,
dad?" he asked, a tightening fear screwing down upon his brain as he
noted the change that had come over the mask that James Thorold's
face held to the world.

James Thorold made him no answer. He was standing at the wide walnut
table, turning over and over in his hands the letters which his
secretary had left for his perusal. Finally, he opened one of them,
the bulkiest. He scanned it for a moment, then flung it upon the floor.
Then he began to pace the room till in his striding he struck his foot
against the paper he had cast aside. He picked it up, tossing it toward
Peter. The boy turned from his strained watching of his father's face
to read the letter. It was the official notification of the Senate's
confirmation of the President's appointment of James Thorold as
ambassador to the Court of St. Jerome.

"Why, father!" Incredulity heightened the boyishness in Peter's tone.
James Thorold wheeled around until he faced him. "Peter," he said
huskily, "there's something you'll have to know before I go to
Forsland--if ever I go to Forsland. You'll have to decide." The boy
shrank from the ominous cadence of the words. "Why, I can't judge for
you, dad," he said awkwardly. "Our children are always our ultimate
judges," James Thorold said.

"I have sometimes wondered," he went on, speaking to himself rather than
to the puzzled boy, "how the disciples who met Christ but who did not go
his way with him to the end felt when they heard he had died. I knew a
great man once, Peter. I went his way for a little while, then I took my
own. I saw them bring him, dead, over the way they have brought that boy
to-day. I came down to the court-house that night, and there, just where
that boy lies, Peter, I made a promise that I have not kept."

Again he resumed his pacing, speaking as he went, sometimes in low
tones, sometimes with tensity of voice, always as if urged by some force
that was driving him from silence. The boy, leaning forward at the edge
of the chair, watched his father through the first part of the story.
Before the end came he turned away.

"You remember," James Thorold began, his voice pleading patience,
"that I've told you I came to Chicago from Ohio before the war? I was
older than you then, Peter, but I was something of a hero-worshipper,
too. Judge Adams was my hero in those troublous times of the fifties.
I knew him only by sight for a long time, watching him go in and out of
the big white house where he lived. After a time I came to know him. I
was clerking in a coffee-importing house during the day and studying law
at night. Judge Adams took me into his office. He took me among his
friends. Abraham Lincoln was one of them.

"I remember the night I met Lincoln. Judge Adams had talked of him
often. He had been talking of him that day. 'Greatness,' he had said,
'is the holding of a great dream, not for yourself, but for others.
Abraham Lincoln has the dream. He has heard the voice, and seen the
vision, and he is climbing up to Sinai. You must meet him, James.'
That night I met him in the old white house.

"We were in the front parlor of the old house," James Thorold continued,
resetting the scene until his only listener knew that it was more real
to him than the room through which he paced, "when some one said, 'Mr.
Lincoln.' I looked up to see a tall, awkward man standing in the arched
doorway. Other men have said that they had to know Lincoln a long time
to feel his greatness. My shame is the greater that I felt his greatness
on the instant when I met his eyes.

"There was talk of war that night. Lincoln did not join in it, I
remember, although I do not recall what he said. But when he rose to go
I went with him. We walked down the street past dooryards where lilacs
were blooming, keeping together till we crossed the river. There our
ways parted. I told him a little of what Judge Adams had said of him.
He laughed at the praise, waving it away from himself. 'It's a good
thought, though,' he said, 'a great dream for others. But we need more
than the dreaming, my friend. When the time comes, will you be ready?'

"I held out my hand to him in pledge.

"My way home that night took me past the armory where the Zouaves, the
boys whom Ellsworth trained, were drilling. You remember Ellsworth's
story, Peter? He was the first officer to die in the war." The boy
nodded solemnly, and the man went on. "With Abraham Lincoln's voice
ringing in my ears I enlisted.

"Years afterward, when Abraham Lincoln was President, war came. I'd seen
Lincoln often in the years between." James Thorold stopped his restless
pacing and stood at the end of the table away from Peter, leaning over
it slightly, as he seemed to keep up his story with difficulty. "He came
often to Judge Adams's house. There were evenings when the three of us
sat in the parlor with the dusk drifting in from the lake, and spoke of
the future of the nation. Judge Adams thought war inevitable. Abraham
Lincoln thought it could be averted. They both dreaded it. I was young,
and I hoped for it. 'What'll you do, Jim, if war should come?' they
asked me once. 'I'd go as a private,' I told them.

"If the war had come then I should have gone with the first regiment
out. But when the call sounded Ellsworth had gone to New York and the
Zouaves had merged with another regiment. I didn't go with them in the
beginning because I told myself that I wanted to be with the first troop
that went from Illinois to the front. I didn't join until after Lincoln
had sent out his call for volunteers.

"You see," he explained to the silent boy, "I had left Judge Adams's
office and struck out for myself. Chicago was showing me golden
opportunities. Before me, if I stayed, stretched a wide road of
success."

"And you didn't go?" Peter interrupted his father for the first time.
"I thought--" His voice broke.

"I went," James Thorold said. "The regiment, the Nineteenth, was at the
border when Lincoln gave the call. There was a bounty being offered to
join it. I would have gone anyhow, but I thought that I might just as
well take the money. I was giving up so much to go, I reasoned. And so
I took the bounty. The provost marshal gave me the money in the office
right across the square from the old court-house. I put it in the bank
before I started south.

"I left Chicago that night with a great thrill. I was going to fight
for a great cause, for Abraham Lincoln's great dream, for the country
my father had died for in Mexico, that my grandfather had fought for at
Lundy's Lane. I think," he said, "that if I might have gone right down
to the fighting, I'd have stood the test. But when I came to Tennessee
the regiment had gone stale. We waited, and waited. Every day I lost a
little interest. Every day the routine dragged a little harder. I had
time to see what opportunities I had left back here in Chicago. I wasn't
afraid of the fighting. But the sheer hatred of what I came to call the
uselessness of war gnawed at my soul. I kept thinking of the ways in
which I might shape my destiny if only I were free. I kept thinking of
the thousand roads to wealth, to personal success, that Chicago held
for me. One night I took my chance. I slipped past the lines."

"Father!" The boy's voice throbbed with pain. His eyes, dilated with
horror at the realization of the older man's admission, fixed their gaze
accusingly on James Thorold. "You weren't a--a deserter?" He breathed
the word fearfully.

"I was a bounty-jumper."

"Oh!" Peter Thorold's shoulders drooped as if under the force of a vital
blow. Vaguely as he knew the term, the boy knew only too well the burden
of disgrace that it carried. Once, in school, he had heard an old tutor
apply it to some character of history whom he had especially despised.
Again, in a home where he had visited, he had heard another old man use
the phrase in contempt for some local personage who had attempted to
seek public office. Bounty-jumper! Its province expressed to the lad's
mind a layer of the inferno beneath the one reserved for the Benedict
Arnolds and the Aaron Burrs. Vainly he bugled to his own troops of
self-control; but they, too, were deserters in the calamity. He flung
his arms across the table, surrendering to his sobs.

Almost impassively James Thorold watched him, as if he himself had gone
so far back into his thought of the past that he could not bridge the
gap to Peter now. With some thought of crossing the chasm he took up his
tale of dishonor. Punctuated by the boy's sobs it went on.

"I came back to Chicago and drew the money from the bank. I knew I
couldn't go back to the practise of law. I changed my name to Thorold
and started in business as an army contractor. I made money. The money
that's made us rich, the money that's sending me to Forsland"--a
bitterness not in his voice before edged his mention of the
embassy--"came from that bounty that the provost marshal gave me."

He turned his back upon the sobbing boy, walking over to the window
and staring outward upon the April brightness of the noonday ere he
spoke again. "You know of the Nineteenth's record? They were at
Nashville, and they were at Chattanooga after my colonel came back,
dead. I went out of Chicago when his body was brought in. Then Turchin
took command of the brigade. The Nineteenth went into the big fights.
They were at Chickamauga. Benton fell there. He'd been in Judge Adams's
office with me. After I'd come back he'd joined the regiment. The day
the news of Chickamauga came I met Judge Adams on Washington Street.
He knew me. He looked at me as Peter might have looked at Judas."

Slowly Peter Thorold raised his head from his arms, staring at the
man beside the window. James Thorold met his look with sombre sorrow.
"Don't think I've had no punishment," he said. "Remember that I loved
Judge Adams. And I loved Abraham Lincoln."

"Oh, no, no!" The boy's choked utterance came in protest. "If you'd
really cared for them you wouldn't have failed them."

"I have prayed," his father said, "that you may never know the grief of
having failed the men you have loved. There's no heavier woe, Peter."
Again his gaze went from the boy, from the room, from the present. "I
did not see Abraham Lincoln again until he was dead," he said. "They
brought him back and set his bier in the old court-house. The night he
lay there I went in past the guards and looked long upon the face of him
who had been my friend. I saw the sadness and the sorrow, the greatness
and the glory, that life and death had sculptured there. He had dreamed
and he had done. When the time had come he had been ready. I knelt
beside his coffin; and I promised God and Abraham Lincoln that I would,
before I died, make atonement for the faith I had broken."

Peter's sobbing had died down to husky flutterings of breath, but he
kept his face averted from the man at the other side of the table.
"I meant to make some sort of reparation," James Thorold explained,
listlessness falling like twilight on his mood as if the sun had gone
down on his power, "but I was always so busy, so busy. And there seemed
no real occasion for sacrifice. I never sought public office or public
honors till I thought you wanted me to have them, Peter." He turned
directly to the boy, but the boy did not move. "I was so glad of
Forsland--yesterday. Through all these years I have told myself that,
after all, I had done no great wrong. But sometimes, when the bands were
playing and the flags were flying, I knew that I had turned away from
the Grail after I had looked upon it. I knew it to-day when I stood
beside that boy's coffin. I had said that times change. I know now that
only the time changes. The spirit does not die, but it's a stream that
goes underground to come up, a clear spring, in unexpected places. My
father died in Mexico. I failed my country. And Isador Framberg dies
at Vera Cruz."

"For our country," the boy said bitterly.

"And his own," his father added. "For him, for his people, for all these
who walk in darkness Abraham Lincoln died. The gleam of his torch shone
far down their lands. His message brought them here. They have known him
even as I, who walked with him in life, did not know him until to-day.
And they are paying him. That dead boy is their offering to him, their
message that they are the Americans."

Into Peter Thorold's eyes, as he looked upon his father, leaped a flash
of blue fire. Searchingly he stared into the face of the older man as
Galahad might have gazed upon a sorrowing Percival. "You're going to
give up Forsland?" he breathed, touching the paper on the table. "I gave
up Forsland," James Thorold said, "when I saw you at Isador Framberg's
side. I knew that I was not worthy to represent your America--and his."
He held out his hands to Peter longingly. The boy's strong one closed
over them. Peter Thorold, sighting the mansion of his father's soul, saw
that the other man had passed the portals of confession into an empire
of expiation mightier than the Court of St. Jerome.

THE YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY FOR 1914 AND 1915

THE ROLL OF HONOR FOR 1914

BUZZELL, FRANCIS.
Addie Erb and Her Girl Lottie.

CONRAD, JOSEPH.
Laughing Anne.
The Planter of Malata.

DWIGHT, H.G.
The Leopard of the Sea.

FREEMAN, MARY E. WILKINS-.
Daniel and Little Dan'l.

GALSWORTHY, JOHN.
A Simple Tale.

GEROULD, KATHARINE FULLERTON.
The Dominant Strain.
The Toad and the Jewel.
The Tortoise.
The Triple Mirror.

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