O. HENRY MEMORIAL
AWARD
PRIZE STORIES
of 1923

O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARD
PRIZE STORIES
of 1923

CHOSEN BY THE SOCIETY OF
ARTS AND SCIENCES
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
BLANCHE COLTON WILLIAMS
Author of “A Handbook on Story Writing,”
“Our Short Story Writers,” Etc.
Associate Professor of English, Hunter College of the City of New York
Instructor in Story Writing, Columbia University (Extension Teaching and
Summer Session)

GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1924

Copyright, 1923, by Harper & Brothers, The Curtis Publishing Company in the United States and Great Britain, McClure Publishing Company, New York; The Century Co., Pearson’s Magazine (The New Pearson’s), The Frank A. Munsey Company, P. F. Collier and Son Company in the United States and Great Britain, International Magazine Company, Consolidated Magazines Corporation (The Red Book Magazine.)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
AT
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y.

	PAGE
[Prelude.] By Edgar Valentine Smith	[1]
[A Friend of Napoleon.] By Richard Connell	[19]
[Towers of Fame.] By Elizabeth Irons Folsom	[38]
[Phantom Adventure.] By Floyd Dell	[46]
[The Distant Street.] By Francis Edwards Faragoh	[59]
[The Wager.] By Isa Urquhart Glenn	[75]
[Célestine.] By James Hopper	[92]
[Witch Mary.] By Genevieve Larsson	[104]
[The Bamboo Trap.] By Robert S. Lemmon	[120]
[The Hat of Eight Reflections.] By James Mahoney	[134]
[Home-Brew.] By Grace Sartwell Mason	[159]
[Derrick’s Return.] By Gouverneur Morris	[182]
[Shadowed.] By Mary Synon	[193]
[The One Hundred Dollar Bill.] By Booth Tarkington	[211]
[Nice Neighbours.] By Mary S. Watts	[229]
[Not Wanted.] By Jesse Lynch Williams	[247]

INTRODUCTION

This collection is that of no single person, whose prejudices conceivably might emphasize one type or another; but of editors, critics, and writers of fiction, whose combined opinion insures catholicity of taste and freedom from bias.

The fifth annual volume presented by the Committee from the Society of Arts and Sciences, it contains in the judgment of the Committee twenty-five or thirty per cent. of the best stories published in 1923.[A]

In previous volumes the Committee have stated the requisites of a good story. Hag-ridden by no formulæ, the Committee believe that every worthy narrative—whether Hebraic tale, Greek myth, or American short story—must yet meet specific tests. For example, characters engage in a struggle or become involved in difficulties out of which they emerge successfully or unsuccessfully. Apply this limitation to the David-Goliath fight, Phaëton’s sun chariot drive, or to Papa Chibou’s rape of Napoleon; it generously includes all.

The Committee apprehend, a posteriori, the writer’s problems of structure, characterization, colour, rhythm; they recognize the skill indispensable to concealing technique; they feel the beauty of the finished work, whose joinings are not discernible but whose exquisite art and pulsing nature—if they may paraphrase O. Henry—take them by the throat like the quinsy. Every short story may appear, and should appear, a mature Pallas, though the sympathetic analyst may deduce, as the author will recall, the slow processes of birth and growth.

Over the value of this year’s fiction compared with that of recent years, the Committee disagree. The pessimist says the level is lower; the optimist declares it higher. “A fair plateau marked by a few peaks,” says another. They agree on the following list as ranking first:

Babcock, Edwina Stanton, Mr. Cardeezer (Harper’s, May).

Beer, Thomas, Dolceda (Saturday Evening Post, November 3).

Benet, Stephen Vincent, The Golden Bessie (Everybody’s, June).

Buckley, F. R., Habit (Adventure, April 30).

Byrne, Donn, A Story Against Women (Collier’s, December 8).

Cobb, Irvin S., Red-Handed (Cosmopolitan, June); The Unbroken Chain (Cosmopolitan, September).

Connell, Richard, A New York Knight (Saturday Evening Post, April 21); A Friend of Napoleon (Saturday Evening Post, June 30); The Unfamiliar (Century, September).

Dell, Floyd, Phantom Adventure (Century, December).

Edholm, Charles Lawrence, The Rotten Board (Century, November).

Edwards, Harry Stilwell, The Blue Hen’s Chicken (Scribner’s October).

Faragoh, Francis Edwards, The Distant Street (The New Pearson’s, March).

Folsom, Elizabeth Irons, Towers of Fame (McClure’s, August).

Glenn, Isa Urquhart, The Wager (Argosy-All Story, September 18).

Hart, Frances Noyes, Long Distance (Pictorial Review, March); His Majesty’s Adviser (McCall’s, June).

Hopper, James, Célestine (Collier’s, June 2).

Hurst, Fannie, 7 Candles (Cosmopolitan, September).

Jackson, Charles Tenney, Water and Fire (Short Stories, April 10).

Johnson, Nunnally, I Owe It All to My Wife (Smart Set, July).

Johnston, Calvin, Clay of Ca’lina (Saturday Evening Post, April 7).

Kahler, Hugh MacNair, Power (Ladies’ Home Journal, January).

Larsson, Genevieve, Witch Mary (Pictorial Review, January).

Lemmon, Robert S., The Bamboo Trap (Short Stories, April 25).

Lincoln, Joseph, The Realist (Ladies’ Home Journal, July).

Mahoney, James, The Hat of Eight Reflections (Century, April).

Mason, Grace Sartwell, Home Brew (Saturday Evening Post, August 18).

Miller, Alice Duer, The Widow’s Might (Saturday Evening Post, July 14).

Montague, Margaret Prescott, The To-day, To-morrow (Atlantic Monthly, August).

Morris, Gouverneur, Derrick’s Return (Cosmopolitan, August).

Rice, Alice Hegan, Phoebe (Atlantic Monthly, April).

Russell, John, The Digger (Everybody’s, February); Gun Metal (Saturday Evening Post, June 30).

Saxby, Charles, The Song in the Desert (McCall’s, September).

Scoville, Samuel, The Sea King (Ladies’ Home Journal, January).

Singmaster, Elsie, The Truth (Saturday Evening Post, March 24).

Smith, Edgar Valentine, Prelude (Harper’s, May); Substance of Things Hoped For (Harper’s, August).

Steele, Wilbur Daniel, Towers of Sand (Pictorial Review, June); Ginger Beer (Pictorial Review, November).

Synon, Mary, Shadowed (Red Book, May); An Unfinished Story (Good Housekeeping, November).

Tarkington, Booth, The One Hundred Dollar Bill (McCall’s, January); The Coincidence (McCall’s, September).

Train, Arthur, Her Crowded Hour (Saturday Evening Post, May 19).

Vorse, Mary Heaton, The Promise (Harper’s, July); The Single Man (Century, July).

Watts, Mary S., Nice Neighbours (Harper’s, December).

Wharton, Edith, False Dawn (Ladies’ Home Journal, November).

Whitehead, Henry S., The Intarsia Box (Adventure, November 10).

Williams, Ben Ames, The Piano (Saturday Evening Post, March 10); A Threefold Cord (Saturday Evening Post, May 19).

Williams, Jesse Lynch, Not Wanted (Saturday Evening Post, November 17).

Wood, Frances Gilchrist, The Courage of a Quitter (Delineator, August); Four o’Clocks (Delineator, February); Shoes (Harper’s, December).

The stories in the following list rank high with a majority of the Committee.

Aldrich, Bess Streeter, Meadows Entertains a Celebrity (American, August).

Arbuckle, Mary, Half a Loaf (Argosy-All Story, May 19).

Bechdolt, Frederick R., The Sureness of MacKenzie (Sea-Stories, January).

Bennett, James W., The Singing Skipper (Short Stories, February 25).

Burt, Struthers, Pan of the Pastures (Saturday Evening Post, April 7).

Clausen, Carl, A Year Longer to Live (Metropolitan, June).

Cohen, Octavus Roy, Swampshade (Good Housekeeping, May).

Condon, Frank, A Wolf is a Wolf (Saturday Evening Post, December 1).

Connell, Richard, Fists (Saturday Evening Post, March 10).

Cooper, Courtney Ryley, The Son of Beauty (Elks Magazine, December).

Cross, Ruth, Mary ’Lizabeth’s Folks (Saturday Evening Post, December 22).

Dean, William Harper, Under Battened Hatches (McClure’s, July).

De Bra, Lemuel L., The Strategy of Chun Moy (Short Stories, March 10).

Derfelden, Margharita, The Buddha (Scribner’s, August).

Dodge, Louis, The Breaking Point (Scribner’s, July).

Dreiser, Theodore, Ida Hauchawout (Century, July).

Flanner, Janet, Papa Cæsar’s Wild Oats (Live Stories, December 14).

Frost, Meigs O., Lilies of the Lord (Blue Book, October).

Gilbert, Kenneth, The Last White-Water Birler (Short Stories, September 25).

Greene, Frederick Stuart, Coming Back (Saturday Evening Post, October 20).

Hall, Wilbur, The Screws (Red Book, January).

Hellman, Sam, A Date with Hannibal (McClure’s, February).

Hopper, James, A Fiery Revelation (Collier’s, January 27).

Irwin, Wallace, A Touch of Eternity (Red Book, April).

Jackson, Charles Tenney, Corn (Our World, October).

Johnston, Julia Winifred, The Blue in the Labradorite (Scribner’s, October).

Johnston, Mary, Nemesis (Century, May).

Josselyn, Talbert, Mocking Bird (Short Stories, October 25).

Kahler, Hugh MacNair, The Pinhooker (Saturday Evening Post, July 23).

Kerr, Sophie, Chin-Chin (Saturday Evening Post, May 12); Cherry Blossoms (McCall’s, October).

Larsson, Genevieve, Black Eric’s Son (Pictorial Review, September).

Lindsey, Myra Mason, Miss Tilly’s Yellow Streak (Scribner’s, December).

Marshall, Edison, The Savage Breast (Everybody’s, May).

Morris, Gouverneur, The Knife (Cosmopolitan, September).

Mumford, Ethel Watts, Ether (Munsey’s, September).

Nathan, Robert, The Marriage of the Puppets (Atlantic Monthly, October).

Norris, Kathleen, Christmas Bread (Good Housekeeping, December).

Nygren, Richard, Dead Man’s Hand (Scribner’s, October).

Pulver, Mary Brecht, The Black Pigeon (Saturday Evening Post, November 17).

Rhodes, Harrison, Thomas Robinson, Matrimonial Agent (Saturday Evening Post, April 28).

Sanborn, Ruth Burr, A Born Teacher (Bookman, April).

Sappington, T. L., Spring Tonic (Everybody’s, June).

Shannon, Robert Terry, The Scourge (Short Stories, November 25).

Singmaster, Elsie, The Messenger (Saturday Evening Post, June 2); Brother (Outlook, March 7).

Smith, Gordon Arthur, Triumph (Saturday Evening Post, January 20); Beata (Harper’s, October).

Springer, Fleta Campbell, The Scar (Century, January).

Steele, Wilbur Daniel, Arab Stuff (Harper’s, January).

Stone, Elinore Cowan, The Mama of Manuelito (Century, April).

Synon, Mary, Yucca Bloom (McCall’s, October).

Welles, Harriet, Old Ships (Scribner’s, August).

Wetjen, Albert Richard, The Iron Sea (Collier’s, March 31); Minute Immensities (Holland’s, April).

Willoughby, Barrett, The Law of the Trap Line (American, November).

Wood, Frances Gilchrist, The Pick-Up Job (Pictorial Review, May); “And Hear—the Angels—Sing” (Delineator, December).

From the first list were selected the stories here offered. Again, out of this smaller number three were voted the annual prizes. To “Prelude,” by Edgar Valentine Smith, goes the first award of $500; to “A Friend of Napoleon,” by Richard Connell, the second, of $250; to “Towers of Fame,” by Elizabeth Irons Folsom, the special prize of $100 for the best brief story under 3,000 words. One member wished to record a preference for “The Distant Street” as first winner, and also urged Richard Connell’s “A New York Knight” for second winner. With one exception, and with the result stated, every story on the first list was considered in making the awards. The exception is the work of Frances Gilchrist Wood. The Committee having indicated their appreciation of its high merit, Mrs. Wood, herself a member of the Committee, consented to a place on the lists; but, as a matter of course, she refused to enter any one of her stories as a candidate for the awards.

As magazines increase in number, good stories increase but not in equal ratio. The reason, which will commend itself to all readers, is apparent to any reader who has served a term in the editorial office. A story is rejected on one of several counts: it falls below the standard of the magazine; it is not of the type suited to the purpose and the audience of the magazine; it comes at a time when the vaults are overstocked. If superlatively excellent, it may overthrow both the second and third barriers. But, let us say, it is rejected because it departs from type. It may develop a psychological struggle, an adventure of the soul, whereas the periodical to which it is offered prefers stories of physical adventure. Sent back, the script may be bought subsequently by a magazine of repute superior to the first. But make no mistake: the editor paying most to-day has the pick of the market. He has first chance, though he may not pick the best. He may leave ungathered a peach of a story, because he believes his readers like apples or plums. Editor Number Two may observe the fine fibre, the rare bloom, of the rejected fruit and serve it up to the gustatorially discerning. So the good story is salvaged. Stories below standard fall to publications implicitly serving readers of lighter, cheaper fiction. The inferior story, then, also ultimately finds an audience.[B] To read, to estimate, and to extract the superior stories from the inferior combine in a threefold task of increasing difficulty.

Seventy-five years ago the stream of literature flowed from England and the European continent to America. Examine the first issue of Harper’s Magazine.[C] You will find with few exceptions a collection of reprints. Dickens’s Household Words, the Dublin University Magazine, Bentley’s Miscellany, the Ladies’ Companion and the London Athenæum provide two serials, a long story complete, a brief tale or two, memoirs, comments on authors of the day—Jeffrey, Bowles, Wordsworth, George Sand—and translations from the German, besides other matter of irrelevance to this summary.

Lay aside Volume I of Harper’s, after observing that the volume continues the practice of the first number, and take down Volume I of Scribner’s. Appearing thirty-seven years later [D] and thirty-six years before 1923, it marks the apex of this three-quarter century period. The Table of Contents is practically all-American. There are Brander Matthews, Joel Chandler Harris, Dean N. S. Shaler, Octave Thanet, Margaret Crosby, Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Nelson Page, Harold Frederic, H. C. Bunner, Duncan Campbell Scott, “J. S.” of Dale, Professor Adams Sherman Hill, Arlo Bates. There are “Glimpses at the Diary of Gouverneur Morris,” rather than “Memoirs of the Duchess of Orleans” (in the Harper’s of 1850). American periodical literature is established.

Consider, further, the situation to-day. In England you will find leading American periodicals in the English edition; you will find in Hutchinson’s, The Strand, Nash’s (published, all, in London) for instance, reprints of fiction first published in America by American authors, as well as stories by English authors published simultaneously, a little earlier, or a trifle later, in America.

“But,” asks one, “why state the obvious?” Because certain critics refuse to recognize the obvious, insisting on the sciolism, provincialism, poverty, and inadequacy of fiction in America. It is one thing to insist out of deference to dreams of greater achievement; it is quite another thing to insist out of subservience to the fashion which prompts negation and destruction, out of an inherent inability to acknowledge good in anything. The tentative data suggested above at least indicate the cosmopolitan appeal of American fiction.

Turn again to the first volume of Harper’s Magazine. You will find one page bearing the classic, “A Child’s Dream of a Star” (page 73); you will find “My Novel,” by Bulwer Lytton; and “Maurice Tiernay,” by Charles Lever. Will any magazine of June-November, 1923, carry similar survivals to 2000 A.D.? The answer is on the knees of the gods. But against the instances of novels of 1850, known at least to the specialist and perhaps to others, there are anecdotes and tales of matter and manner inferior to stories in the same magazine to-day.

Read the beginning of “Lettice Arnold” (page 13):

“Nay, my child,” said the pale, delicate, nervous woman, thus addressed by a blooming girl whose face beamed with every promise for future happiness, which health and cheerfulness, and eyes filled with warm affection could give, “Nay, my child, don’t talk so. You must not talk so. It is not to be thought of.”

Or read “Andrew Carson’s Money: A Story of Gold,” and mark the following passage:

Mother, I have taken poison. I have sold my body to a doctor for dissection; the money I give you is part of the price. You have upbraided me for never making money; I have sold all I possess—my body—and given you my money. You have told me of the stain on my birth; I can not live and write after that; all the poetical fame in the world would not wash away such a stain. Your bitter words, my bitter fate, I can bear no longer; I go to the other world; God will pardon me. Yes, yes. From the bright moon and stars this night, there came down a voice, saying, God would take me up to happiness amid his own bright worlds. Give my body to the men who are waiting for it, and so let every trace of Andrew Carson vanish from the earth.

Now read any passage in the stories here included from the same magazine. The point to be emphasized is the generally higher standard of present-day fiction, as the high standard of the magazine has been uniform.

Again, the charge finds entertainment that American fiction lacks depth; yet it flows full and deep from the head sources of all the races that make America. Granted that within a thousand years, from some white heat of common interest, fusion may effect a greater national literature. It will be different from this of to-day, but it will look back—if it looks, at all—on the Twentieth Century not as one of childish beginnings. American writers have their origins among Anglo-Saxon scops, Celtic bards, French trouvères, Hebrew psalmists and historians. A patent fact, yes; but too frequently ignored by those who like to regard American literature as infant literatures of old races are regarded. Nationally, America may lack depth of common interest; the soil may be “insufficiently fertilized,” as one critic says; but, racially, America has all that her several races have ever possessed. The short story is the exact vessel for catching and holding the various racial characteristics.

“And because we like to be loved,” says another,[E] “we dare not touch upon the wounds of life—the hunger, the passions, the buffets, the defeats that purge its sordidness, gild its drabness, and actuate us to nobler aspirations.”

By way of reply to this challenge Francis Edwards Faragoh might have written “The Distant Street” had he not already published it. Emanuel’s desire for undiscovered mysteries back of the yellow pools, for life behind the flowers, by him prefigured as unattainable, symbol of the ideal; his buffets at home, his climactic defeat through human passion—these are of the essence of life. Emanuel’s worldly success, built on the supremacy of the practical pull, poignantly concedes to life the insignificance of a single unit amid an infinity of units. His desire, which leads him—in his “unaccountable fits”—to the distant street, maintains his ego triumphant, ultimately inviolate. The lyric strain in this young doctor has the potency of passages in the Song of Solomon; his ideal of duty has the greater potency of the Mosaic tablets.

Growing out of the Swedish settlements in Wisconsin, from another tributary race flowers “Witch Mary.” The men and women of this story, blue-eyed and blond, among whom Black Eric represents the darker strength of Satan, retain the fancy, the poetry, of early Scandinavian peoples. Those peoples, more than a thousand years ago, saw etins and elves and nickers on the sea; their terror was of those monsters, the nipping night, and the northern wind. Of the inland country, in Miss Larsson’s narrative, the river is still the source of fear, as was the sea while Beowulf was growing slowly to epic size. Those children who saw Witch Mary fly, like the wind, from the river, are descended in the fortieth generation or so from those children who followed the flight of Grendel’s mother to her lair under the waters of the haunted mere.

“Prelude” pictures without ruth the dominant Anglo-Saxon in decay. But in Selina Jo, the humble fighter whose perseverance and patience land her in the reformatory of her desire, it hints at resurrection out of dust. Stock of the past, impoverished, dry as Phœnix ashes, yet may renew itself, like the fabled bird, for another thousand years. Heritage of the South, the poor white has been loosely accepted as drift left by flood and ebb of a splendid civilization. Only in recent years have writers come out of the South who treat him in the individual manner he deserves. Mr. Smith has done so with originality, true democracy, and thorough understanding. Selina Jo he has made a living girl, typical of her social stratum, seemingly typical in her departure from it. Hope lies in just this seeming divergence, which is in reality the survival of warrior blood second to none the earth has ever produced.

Though perhaps not apparent to the reader, “The Wager” represents in its authorship one who carries on the traditions of the feudal South. Those who have been longest in these states are first to scatter to other corners of the world in foreign service, in far-flung naval exploits, and in military outposts. If a considerable percentage of American fiction uses foreign settings, the conclusion must not be falsely drawn, “We have nothing at home to write about, it would appear,” but rather “Most at home in America, most at home abroad.” Isa Urquhart Glenn, in employing the scenes she knew while her husband saw service in the Philippines, only makes use of what for her was immediately at hand. Surely there lie in this tale feeling for race and compassion for the weak—hallmarks of noblesse oblige.

“Shadowed,” by Mary Synon, climactically presents the few hours which mark the climax of a political career. At the moment Stroude is about to be nominated for the presidency of the United States, he receives a letter from a dying woman. The significance of this letter lies in the facts that he loved her, that she had released him to climb a mountain higher than Pisgah, and that he had promised to return to her if she ever needed him. His struggle must be brief, since he must either accept the nomination without seeing the woman or must see her at the cost of losing the highest honour in the land. His code of honour has never faltered in the years he has smiled at the devious ways of politicians and kept his integrity, nor does it falter now. He goes back to Pisgah. If this eventuality is criticized as the one less likely to occur in real life, yet it has the merit of seeming true in the life of fiction. And every reader will admit the essential truth of the ideal. The author, herself of the Middle West, has paid tribute to the Southern mountaineer.

“The Bamboo Trap” illustrates the struggle of the American scientist far afield. John Mather’s adventure in the Andes, wherein his problem is to escape from a hole in the mountain side is enlivened by spiders. He escapes through a gallant physical fight. It is impossible to resist reference to a suggestion made by a reader of this story, a reader who is avowedly of the camp preferring Russian to American fiction. This tale would be more life-like, he said, if it ended on the unfinished struggle. “Why have that flood tear down the remaining barrier? Accident, wasn’t it?” But if Mather had not very nearly destroyed the barrier, accident would have availed him nothing. An Oriental in that trap doubtless would have concluded, “If I am fated to die I shall die.” Therein is exemplified the difference between the philosophy in literature of the negative and philosophy in literature of the positive. Life in America is not torpid, sick, neurasthenic, if one agrees with Theodore Dreiser, as he expressed himself in a recent interview.[F] “What I am driving at is the fact that the portrayal of American life does not lend itself to Russian atmosphere, to a Dostoyefsky plot, to Gorki treatment.” Mather’s escape is not so much the ingenious end to a clever plot as it is the logical end of just such a situation in real life, provided the chief actor be American and not Russian. The fighter may escape, the weakling dies. If the ideal of a people be annihilation, death the easy surrender either to indifference or to a divine nostalgia, just so surely literature will reflect that ideal. Not before America as a nation embraces pessimism will its literature be affected seriously by the literature of pessimism. And, incidentally, it will be worth while watching the literature of New Russia for a change of ideals.

According to recent statistics, Paris has replaced Chicago as literary centre of the United States, perhaps the first important result, to letters, of the World War. Richard Connell humorously records an instance of the days when “Ichabod” appeared on the lintel of waxworks palaces. Where is now the Eden Musée? Who goes to Madame Tussaud’s? They had their day, those creations of horror; melodramatically, they held their puppet moments on the stage. But those moments are fled, and what is out of date serves the humourist. Papa Chibou’s affection for the cauliflower-eared dummy and his ignorance of the real Napoleon combine incongruously enough, and with the love theme, to a high hilarity. Yet the story is beyond farce. More than one will feel his eyes moist at the end, and nobody drops a tear over farce unless from extravagance of laughter. Mr. Connell’s ability in creating characters over whom and with whom one laughs happily associates itself with acumen in searching out ridiculous situations. His humour recommends itself further as of that highly human order bordering pathos. Read, for example, “The Unfamiliar,” listed above, and receive proof of this statement.

The author of “Célestine,” born in France, has balanced Mr. Connell’s study of Papa Chibou by his interpretation of the peasant girl. Like Bertha, of Fannie Hurst’s “Lummox,” Célestine feels beauty but remains inexpressive; she is dull and speechless. Like Bertha, she is vaguely aware of harmonies; the majesty of war shakes her soul. Inarticulate love merges into dumb renunciation; the mute expression of her adoration lies in cleaning boots; of her sorrow, in unspoken prayer by the semblance of a tomb.

Around Paris of the Boul’ Miche’ many stories have centred. In a bubble of mirth James Mahoney adds another to the list: “The Hat of Eight Reflections.” The reflections are no less the highlights of the story than of the hat. Max Beerbohm once concluded, after ample proof by illustration, that the public finds humour either in delight over suffering or in contempt of the unfamiliar.[G] Such a public would hardly find humour in “The Hat,” which the Committee recommend for laughter prompted by the high-handed proceedings of Ventrillon, his wit, his ability to paint like the Devil, his catastrophic destruction of Hat Number Two. If he seems funny in walking hungry from his lunch, yet we well know he has been stuffing himself on Belletaille’s little cakes. And if Belletaille is subject for laughter, well, her personality stands the strain and exonerates the reader from the charge of cruelty in enjoyment at her expense. That enjoyment is modified by admiration.

Typical of the American scene and of American life are “Nice Neighbours,” “The One Hundred Dollar Bill,” “Towers of Fame,” “Not Wanted.” To these should be added Mrs. Wharton’s “False Dawn,” of the first list. Though in length outside the short story limit, nevertheless, it should receive mention as a notable piece of brief fiction. Failure to record appreciation of its exquisite charm would argue the Committee dull to beauty of theme and workmanship.

“Nice Neighbours,” a vigorous story dramatically presented, conveys a pleasantly satiric theme which every reader may state for himself. Mary S. Watts has accomplished her satire the more admirably in that she does so without the aid of caricature. Her characters, from the imps of Satan who killed their pets for the gruesome pleasure of it, to the nice old maid who rented her house—all walk out of life, distorted by not even so much as the temperament of the author which, justifiably, might have exaggerated lines and heightened colour.

Mr. Tarkington’s “The One Hundred Dollar Bill” so skilfully conceals its idea as to betray the unwary into seeing merely a light story, whereas it epitomizes the American character. Behold the American: Caution and thrift refuse the purchase of a toy yet retreat before the gambler’s spirit. Loss at the gaming table retrieves itself through that adaptability which leads on alike to failure or fortune. In the opinion of many readers who have enjoyed all this author’s stories, from “In the Arena” to the present, nothing he has written is stronger and at once more subtle than “The One Hundred Dollar Bill.” If there is such a thing as a composite American, he is represented by Collinson.

Eric Hall, of Mrs. Folsom’s “Towers of Fame,” is the counterpart of Emanuel in “The Distant Street.” Eric meets the one woman, who might have remained lost. So great is this possibility as to form the basis for surprise. We finish the story: Eric left the girl. Add a final hundred words or so and demolish the first dénouement. The new ending is as just as the old. The adherent of the negative and the incomplete says, “Eric went away, of course. And he never came back.” Quite right, if Eric was that sort of man. But the partisan of the positive may reply, “Why didn’t he go back? It was just that return which reveals his character.” He is the older American; Emanuel is the newcomer.

“Not Wanted” exemplifies the age-old struggle of the generations to understand each other. Of all the fathers who have enjoyed it, either in the Post or in the little volume published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, not one but has admired Mr. Williams’s skill in erecting barriers between father and son, then with equal skill removing them. Over this story perhaps more enthusiasm has been expressed to the Committee than over any other selected. If critics who see in it only another instance of the machine-made story will take a hint from general approval they will conclude that emotion, though intolerant of formula, yet makes universal appeal through perfection of form. “Not Wanted” will live in younger companionship with this author’s famous “The Stolen Story.”

At once a criticism and a half dozen stories rolled up in one parcel, “Home Brew” doubly succeeds and gives double measure. Grandmother’s selfishness, Father and Walter’s extraordinary friendship, Mother’s home-making gift, Aunt Jude’s quiet struggle—quiet as volcanic fires beneath the crust—Eddie’s love for the sea, and Mildred’s fluttering toward the flame: in all these lies potential drama. Three themes actually achieve the outline of drama and reach climax on the evening Alyse spends with her mother. Alyse, blind to all these potentialities, becomes the target for Miss Mason’s arrow-thrusts which, in piercing her, pierce the average would-be writer. The dilettante sees neither the humour nor the tragedy of real life, whose repressions mean to her only absence of thought and emotion. No other country owns to so many thousands of those who, mistaking desire for ability, and possessing the minimum requirements of the fictionist, waste themselves in “trying to write.” Miss Mason’s Alyse should be set before these thousands, and the Committee are grateful for the opportunity of passing her along.

If “Home Brew” is a criticism, no less is “Phantom Adventure” a revelation. Like Kipling’s “The Brushwood Boy” and “They,” it evokes from the realm of fancy a beautiful dream. Floyd Dell has educed an ectopolasm which, emerging from the material banker, magically forms an exquisite spirit picture. Plangently sombre the rhythmic cadences of this verbal harmony fall on the ear, drowning alien sounds, luring into unexplored recesses of the mystic and the subconscious. Restraint and reserve potently influence the reader to guess at tracts of the spirit still to be explored. The art of suggestion is here at its height; for though the expressed story is clear and whole, that which is unexpressed permits individual interpretation and so intensifies the clarity and unity for different minds in different ways.

“Derrick’s Return,” an adventure of the spirit unhampered by the body, illustrates in rollicking yet serious vein a philosophy of heaven and hell. The author’s concept of dimensions in time and place after death should be compared with that of May Sinclair in the final one of her “Uncanny Stories.” It was to be expected that Einstein’s theories of relativity would find ultimate translation into fiction, but hardly that resultant or similar theories would so instantly express themselves. Mr. Morris, as is true of Miss Sinclair, has so long since become master of telling a story in the large as to insure free play for finer thought processes, processes which distinguish the result as that of a unique personality. So in “Derrick’s Return” these thought radiations penetrate the confines of infinity and, charged with messages of the absolute, return to electrify and to entertain.

In this Introduction, the Chairman has indicated, without attempt at discussion, the wide range of present-day American short stories and the consequent labour in reading them all; their cosmopolitan characteristics, and their superiority in the average over stories of a generation ago. Further, the current of American fiction bears on its bosom the heritage of all the racial streams which have united to form it. Again, the American concept of life demands a completeness of struggle and sense of form associated with an underlying philosophy, not negative and pessimistic, but positive and optimistic.

To you who read, aware of the significant contribution American brief fiction adds to world entertainment and world literature, yet have not time to acquaint yourselves with the yearly thousands of short stories: gathering these covers full of the representative best is one reward of the Committee. Another reward is that of insuring comparatively permanent form to the group. Still a third reward lies in the bestowal of the annual prizes. These awards, the Treasurer of the Society, Mr. Melvin C. Hascall, states in a letter to the Chairman of this Committee, the Society expects to increase for the year 1924.

For 1923, the Committee of Award consisted of:

Blanche Colton Williams, Chairman
Ethel Watts Mumford
Frances Gilchrist Wood, Litt. D.
Grove Wilson
William Griffith

The Committee of Administration:

Melvin C. Hascall, Treasurer Society Arts and Sciences
George C. Howard, Attorney
Glenn Frank, Editor of the Century.

As before, the Committee are grateful to editors, readers and authors without whose coöperation this annual volume would be impossible.

Blanche Colton Williams.

New York City,
January, 1924.

O. HENRY MEMORIAL
AWARD
PRIZE STORIES
of 1923

PRELUDE
By EDGAR VALENTINE SMITH
From Harper’s

WHEN she was fifteen years old Selina Jo was doing a man’s work in Pruitt’s turpentine orchard; properly, though, her story begins earlier than this.

It was shortly before his daughter was born that Shug Hudsill brought his young wife, Marthy, to a sandy land homestead—twenty-five miles from the nearest railroad—in that section of the country which borders the Gulf of Mexico. There followed shortly the inevitable log-rolling, at which the neighbours—mostly Hudsills themselves—contributed their labour. Shug furnished refreshments in the form of “shinny,” an unpalatable, but unusually potent, native rum. Otherwise, his part in the erection of his future home was largely advisory. Despite this, though, the house, a two-room cabin of the “saddle-bag” type, was soon erected. Hand-split pine boards covered the roof and gave fair promise of keeping out the rain. An unglazed window and a door in each room, which would be closed with rough wooden shutters during inclement weather, served for ventilation and lighting. A stick-and-clay chimney at one end of the cabin gave outlet to the single fireplace which was to answer the dual purpose of cooking and heating.

By devious methods Shug accumulated two or three runty, tick-infested cows and a few razorback hogs. These were left, in the main, to shift for themselves. There were tough native grasses available and the canebrakes in Shoalwater River were close by. During severe weather such of the cows as chanced to be giving a few pints of thin, watery milk daily were fed a little home-grown fodder and corn on the ear. With proboscides inordinately sharpened for the purpose, the hogs probed for succulent roots in the rank undergrowth of the nearby swamp. When hog-killing season arrived Shug would shoulder his gun and slouch away for his winter’s supply of meat. Neighbours charged it against him that he was not always careful to see to it that they were his own shotes which he killed. Since it was a simple matter, though, to snip off the telltale ear markings of a dead pig, his pilferings, if a fact, were never proved.

Corn sprouted slowly in the thin soil; it grew up dispiritedly and came to maturity stunted as to blade, stalk, and ear. Sweet potatoes yielded generously in new ground; each year a fresh plot was cleared, broken, and planted to these. A patch of sugar cane was always grown for molasses; a portion of this, it was generally conceded, was finally made into “shinny,” since Shug was known to be an adept at its manufacture. Certain it is that he made frequent extended trips away from home with his wagon and yoke of oxen, never troubling to explain the reason for his absence.

It was amid these surroundings, sufficient in themselves, one would have said, to hinder physical, mental, and moral growth, that the girl Selina Jo was born. The occasion was in no sense of the word an event with Shug and Marthy. Since all married people of their acquaintance had children, the baby simply represented, to them, the inevitable. With the birth of the child, though, Marthy became barren.

For the first eighteen months of her existence the baby crawled about the cabin unnamed. Then it occurred to Marthy that their offspring ought to be christened.

“Shug,” she suggested casually, “seems to me we ort to be namin’ that air young ’un.”

Shug, lolling in the shade of a water oak, shifted his quid and spat disinterestedly. “I ain’t objectin’ none,” he replied.

“How ’bout callin’ her ‘S’liny Jo’?” Marthy asked.

“Fittin’ enough name fer her, I reckin,” Shug yawned.

As the child grew up she came to accept her parents as they had long since accepted her—merely as a bald fact. There was never the slightest evidence of parental affection upon the one side or of filial attachment upon the other.

Once Marthy came upon Shug whipping the girl with a switch.

“What you whippin’ her fer?” she asked. Her tone was one of simple curiosity, nothing else.

“All young ’uns needs it,” Shug replied virtuously, as he tossed the switch aside. “Hadn’t been my daddy usetah whale me powerful, I wouldn’t a been nigh the man I am now; not nigh.”

It was a matter for remark between the parents that, even at a tender age, Selina Jo rarely emitted any outcry under punishment. There burned in her sloe-black eyes, though, the flame of an emotion which she checked upon the surface.

One would have expected the girl to respond to the influence of heredity. Her parents, the cattle, the hogs, even the crops about her were stunted, half-starved in appearance. By contrast, Selina Jo, upon a daily ration made up almost exclusively of corn pone, molasses, and home-cured pork as salt as ocean brine, defied all known dietary laws, and flourished amazingly. She was precocious, too. When she was only seven years old she could swear just as well—rather, just as wickedly—as could Shug himself. She learned early, though, that, as a source of information, her parents were practically nil. Thenceforth, the questions that had rushed to her lips were succeeded by a look of eternal interrogation in her sombre eyes.

It was shortly after her twelfth birthday that a young school-teacher—the only one the community ever knew—came into the Hudsill settlement. Selina Jo was grudgingly allowed to attend the school. For six months the young man’s enthusiasm held out. Then it waned and died. Few of the older people could either read or write, and the opinion among them seemed to be universal that what was good enough for them was good enough for their offspring. But before the school closed Selina Jo had learned the alphabet and a portion of the old-fashioned first reader.

She missed the school, and she always kept, close at hand, her thumbed and dog-eared book, the only one that she possessed. The school-teacher had lighted the fires of ambition within her. She came to be troubled by the realization that her mental development was lagging behind her physical growth.

“S’liny Jo,” she informed herself one day in a fit of musing, “you air as p’izen strong as a gallon o’ green shinny, but you don’t know skercely nothin’.” A moment later she added dejectedly: “Ner ain’t got no chanchet o’ learnin’, neether; not nary par-tick-le of a chancet!”

Shoalwater River afforded her chief means of diversion. She never remembered when or how she learned to swim. Every day that the weather permitted she enjoyed a plunge in the river. Soon she noticed that no less pleasant than the contact of the water with her naked body was the comfortable after-feeling of cleanliness. Following this, came a feeling of repugnance toward her shiftless and slovenly parents.

She had long since begun to assist with the crops. With the manure scraped from the cow lot she made the beds for the potatoes. At planting time she pulled the slips and set them out. She hoed the sugar cane and thinned the corn. During harvest she did almost as much work as Shug and Marthy combined.

Before she was fourteen she had broken a pair of young steers to the yoke. She split the rails and laid the fence for a new potato patch. Using for the purpose the young oxen which she had broken, she prepared the ground for planting. She was as tall as her father now, a slender, wiry creature, her symmetrical young body as free from blemish as the trunk of a healthy pine tree.

A vague unrest troubled her at times, though. Something occurred one day which intensified this. In a corner of the cabin she found a dust-covered photograph. Brushing it off, she gazed upon a face that was unfamiliar. She took the picture to Marthy.

“Maw,” she asked, “who is this?”

Her mother glanced at it indifferently. “Me,” she answered listlessly.

“You?” Selina Jo gasped.

“Yeah. Ruther, it usetah be. Tuck when I married yore paw.”

Selina Jo scanned the comely pictured face for some likeness to the slatternly creature who had given her birth. Wild resentment against something—she scarcely knew what—flamed in her heart. Suddenly she dashed the photograph to the floor and hurried from the cabin. As one reads the chronicle of her words, it must be remembered that her vocabulary was patterned after that of her father.

“Oh, Goddlemighty!” she burst out tempestuously, “I don’t want to be like her! I ain’t goin’ to, neither!”

Her acquaintances were limited to the score of families, most of them relatives, and all of them mental and moral replicas of her own, who lived near by. There was an almost abandoned church in the neighbourhood where, at rare intervals, some itinerant preacher held services. Upon one occasion, though, Shug took the family to preaching in what was known as the Briggs settlement which was ten miles nearer the railroad. It was here that Selina Jo had it impressed upon her young mind just how people of her stripe were looked upon by those cast in another mould.

Shortly after they had seated themselves in the church, Shug, uncouth and unshaven on the men’s side, and she and her mother on that reserved for her sex, Selina Jo heard one of the women whisper to her neighbour:

“Some o’ that Hudsill tribe!”

As the girl caught the slur in the words her face flushed darkly. She began to notice the unfavourable looks with which the men of the congregation were regarding her father. Even the children stared superciliously toward her mother and herself. Puzzled, vaguely hurt, at first she wondered why.

Lingering just outside the church at the close of services, she waited, shyly hopeful that some one would speak to her. No one paid her the slightest heed. In a land where a lack of hospitality was the one unpardonable sin, this alone was enough to convince her that something was terribly wrong somewhere. But she held her peace until they had completed the tedious homeward journey.

“Maw,” she demanded abruptly, as soon as they were alone, “how come we ain’t like other folks?”

“What air you talkin’ about?” Marthy intoned querulously.

“Them folks in that air Briggs settlement.”

“Wa’l?”

“They looked slanchwise at Paw when we went in an’ set down.” Selina Jo waited a moment, her face clouding at the thought. “An’ them li’l’ old gals looked slanchwise at me, too. Durn ’em!”

“How kin I he’p the way they looked at us?” Marthy whined. “Treatin’ us thatta way just ’cause we air pore.”

“’Tweren’t that, neither,” the girl insisted stubbornly. “Them men—most of ’em—was wearin’ overhalls. The school-teacher said rich folks don’t wear them kind o’ clo’es to meetin’.”

“Tryin’ to git better ’n yore raisin’, air you?” Marthy suddenly showed unwonted spirit. “Wa’l, gal, you kin just make up yore mind to be like yore pore maw an’——”

“I ain’t goin’ to be like you!” The words shot out with sudden passion. “I ain’t!”

“God ha’ mercy!” Marthy’s usually expressionless face showed a trace of surprise at this outburst. “But I’ve allus said seein’ lots o’ things gits notions inta young ’uns’ heads what ain’t good fer ’em.”

“Ner that ain’t all I seed, neither,” Selina Jo retorted. “They didn’t none o’ them folks—not nary one o’ ’em—ast us home to eat a Sunday dinner with ’em.”

At the conclusion of the church service she had seen invitations to the noonday meal being extended and accepted right and left by the Briggs settlement householders. Since it was the custom to include the veriest stranger in these, the fact that none had been offered her people left room for only one conclusion: the Hudsills were looked upon by their neighbours as being unworthy to receive one. Slowly the impression fastened itself upon her brain that her family was hopelessly low in the social scale—“poison low-down,” she would have phrased it. This conviction gripped her. It stung—and it stayed with her.

Fortunately, something occurred about this time to divert her thoughts temporarily. Three miles from Shug’s home, Pruitt Brothers, turpentine operators, established a woods commissary. Selina Jo’s first visit to the store left her gasping with pleasure. Filled with the usual gaudy assortment carried in stock by the general country store, to the half-starved eyes and soul of the woods-bred girl, the place was a wonderland. Dress goods in loud patterns dazzled her sight; vari-colored ribbons flaunted themselves tantalizingly before her gaze. But the one thing that charmed her, that held her spellbound, was a cheap, ready-made gingham dress. She made frequent unnecessary trips to the store merely to feast her eyes upon it. She would look from it to the faded homespun that she wore and sigh enviously. Once she even mustered the courage to ask the price. It was an insignificant sum, but the thought struck her with sickening force that it might just as well have been a thousand dollars. She had never owned a piece of money.

Slowly, as her yearning for the dress became almost unbearable, a plan formed in her mind. Coming in from her tasks one day, she found Shug, just returned from one of his mysterious periodical trips.

“Paw,” she began timidly, “I—I got a hankerin’.”

“S’pose you have?” Shug’s manner was more surly than usual. “A hankerin’ never hurt nobody, yet.”

“But, but I shore ’nough want sump’m.”

“Wantin’ an’ gitten’ is diffe’ent things. What is it?”

“They’s the purtiest dress over to Pruitt’s store,” Selina Jo began eagerly, “an’ it’s made outen real gingham.”

“Gingham?” Shug whirled about with a snarl. “What air you talkin’ about, gal?”

Selina Jo’s heart sank. “I ain’t never had nary one,” she offered placatingly. “An’——”

“Ner ain’t never li’ble to, neether. Homespun’s good enough fer yore pore maw an’ it’ll hatter be good enough fer you. I ain’t goin’ to be workin’ myse’f to skin an’ bone to be fittin’ out no young ’un in fancy riggin’s.”

“But, Paw, it don’t cost much.”

“It costes just that much more ’n you’re goin’ to git. Shet up!”

It was then that Selina Jo unfolded her plan. “I’m goin’ to git me that air dress,” she announced dispassionately. “I’m aimin’ to pay fer it myse’f, too.”

“How?”

“Yearnin’ the money at public work.”

“You?” Shug snorted derisively. “Whare’ll you git any public work?”

“In Pruitt’s turkentime orchard. They’s a heap o’ the work I kin do. I could do scrapin’ er dippin’; reckin I could even do hackin’.”

Shug had slumped into the one comfortable chair in the room. Turning his head, he glared at his daughter.

“You air not goin’ to work in no turkentime orchard,” he rasped. “You air goin’ to stay right here an’ he’p yore pore maw an’ me. I told you oncet to shet up!”

It struck Selina Jo suddenly that life was, somehow, terribly one-sided and unfair. Other girls in the community, who didn’t work as hard as she did, were beginning to wear gingham dresses for Sunday. She thought bitterly that in return for her slaving she had received bed and board—nothing more. By everything that was right, she reasoned, she had earned at least one store-bought dress. Yet it was roughly denied her. Some of the thoughts which had been haunting her for months struggled for expression. Her soul cried out against what was a patent injustice. But she managed to speak calmly.

“Fer as I kin figger it out, Paw,” she said, “I been doin’ my sheer o’ keepin’ this here fambly up. I broke them last yoke o’ steers, an’ one of ’em you was afeared to tech. I’ve split rails an’ laid fences; I’ve broke new ground. An’ the fu’st time I ast fer anything you say I cain’t have it.”

She ceased speaking for a moment, but her steady gaze never left Shug’s face.

“Now, I’m goin’ to work fer Pruitt,” she continued slowly, “till I git me the money I need.”

Something must have occurred during Shug’s recent trip—probably a hurried flight from officers—to increase his normal perverseness. He had risen from his chair. Taking a heavy leather strap from the wall, he started toward Selina Jo.

“You air, huh?” Advancing, he fondled the strap suggestively. “You’ll git a larrupin’, that’s what!”

With the first evidence of her father’s intention, Selina Jo’s face had flushed a brick-red. Now it paled suddenly. She had not even been threatened with corporal punishment for years. Wild rebellion surged within her. A carving knife lay upon the rude deal table beside which she was standing. One slim, brown hand dropped down beside the knife. Her emotion visible only in the tumultuous heaving of her breast and the white, set expression of her face, she waited, motionless, her dark, sombre eyes gazing unwaveringly into Shug’s face.

“Paw,” she said evenly, “just you tech me oncet with that strop an’, as shore as God gives me stren’th, I’ll cut yore heart out.”

An innate coward, Shug recognized a danger sign when he saw it. The hand which held the strap dropped to his side. He backed slowly away.

“You ... you ...” he sputtered and stopped.

“You an’ Maw been sayin’,” Selina Jo continued, “that I’m tryin’ to be better ’n my raisin.’ But I ain’t forgot how them Briggs settlement folks looked at us slanchwise. ’Tweren’t ’cause we was p’izen pore, neither. They knowed, somehow, we was plumb low-down an’ ornery. That’s why they didn’t none of ’em ast us to a Sunday dinner. They seed we was trash. Course I’m honin’ to be better ’n that kind o’ raisin’—an’ I’m goin’ to, too!”

Shug had retreated to the doorway, where he stood watching this new daughter of his with furtive, fearful eyes. The meanest of petty tyrants, when he held the whip hand, doubtless he expected that Selina Jo would exhibit the same trait. There was nothing of the bully in the girl, though. Threatened with what she considered to be undeserved punishment, she had simply acted upon the dictates of her immature mind and had seized upon the only means at hand to escape it.

It was several moments before Shug mustered courage to speak. “Sence you air goin’ to do public work,” he whined presently, “’tain’t nothin’ but right you ort to pay fer yore bed an’ board.”

Selina Jo was glad to agree to this arrangement. When informed of it later, Marthy sullenly acquiesced. She would have to do the housework now, which was no more to her liking than the realization that Shug would permanently pocket the money for their daughter’s board.

It was the next day that Selina Jo sought out Lige Tuttle, woods foreman for Pruitt Brothers.

“I’m lookin’ fer a job,” she announced bluntly.

“Sorry,” Tuttle answered brusquely, “but all our cooks are niggers.”

“Cook?” was the scornful answer. “I ain’t astin’ to be no cook. I want shore ’nough work.”

Tuttle smiled patronizingly. “What can you do?’

“Scrapin’, dippin’, er hackin’,” was the confident answer.

“You?” Tuttle laughed softly. “Why, that’s a man’s work. It’s hard.”

“Any harder ’n breakin’ bull yearlin’s to the yoke? Er splittin’ rails an’ breakin’ new ground?”

“Mean to say you’ve done all that?”

“I most bardaceously have!”

Labour was scarce at the time. Tuttle considered the girl’s request carefully, asked a few more questions, and decided to take a chance.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“S’liny Jo.”

“What else?”

It was the first time Selina Jo had ever been asked her surname; she felt the blood rush to her face.

“What’s your last name?” Tuttle repeated.

The answer came almost inaudibly: “Hudsill.”

“Shug Hudsill’s young ’un?”

“How kin I he’p it?” the girl burst out passionately. “If you’d a been borned a Hudsill, you’d hatter be one, too!”

“Don’t get mad, child.” There was something in the spirit of this strange creature that Tuttle could not understand; but he respected it. “I wasn’t aimin’ to low-rate you none just because of your daddy. Come here to-morrow mornin’, an’ I’ll try you out.”

Selina Jo found that the work was hard. The dry, slippery pine needles underfoot made walking itself a task. She carried a heavy bucket into which she dipped the raw gum, emptying the bucket, when filled, into barrels scattered about the orchard. From sun-up till sunset, and later, she toiled; not once, though, did she grumble. She was too foolishly happy. What she was undergoing was the prelude to real existence, as she saw it. What better, she asked herself, could any strong, healthy girl desire than a steady job dipping turpentine for which she was paid real money?

Occasional passersby, strangers to the vicinity, amazed at seeing a girl engaged in such unusual work, would pause to ask friendly questions. The first flush of pleasure that this gave Selina Jo was quickly erased by the bitter after-tang of reflection: these people were kind because they did not know she was a Hudsill.

While with practice she developed skill, it was three months before she had saved the money she needed. The gingham dress had been laid aside for her. But her ambition had soared. A beautiful dress above a pair of bare legs and feet would never do. Then, too, since her only item of headgear was the sunbonnet which she wore every day, she would need, besides shoes and stockings, a hat.

The day came at last, though, when she could make her purchases. With her arms filled with bundles, she started out joyously on her three-mile walk home.

A half mile from the commissary she paused indecisively at a crossroads. The right-hand road, leading to Shoalwater River, meant the lengthening of her journey a full mile; but the river, with its promise of a cooling plunge, enticed her. As she stood hesitant, trying to decide, she observed a stranger approaching on horseback. She drew aside to let him pass, but he reined in his horse and hailed her.

“Evenin’, little sister! Live hereabouts?”

“Down the left-hand fork a piece.” Selina Jo bent her steady glance upon the stranger. “Who air you?”

“I’m Holmes—sheriff of the county.”

Instinctively the girl drew back. “What air you wantin’ o’ me? I ain’t done nothin’.”

“Lord bless you, little sister,” the sheriff laughed, “I’m not after you. Thought maybe as you live round here you might tell me something I want to know.”

It seemed that a murder had recently been committed in the bay-shore country ten miles distant. Circumstances pointed to the guilt of two men who had been arrested. Assuming that the murderers had passed through the Hudsill section en route to or from the scene of the crime, the sheriff was seeking evidence to prove this.

Strangers were enough of a rarity in the neighbourhood to be remembered easily. Selina Jo recalled two men who had passed that way whose description fitted those charged with the murder.

Sheriff Holmes was elated. “Would you like a trip to Eastview?” he asked.

“Eastview?” Selina Jo’s heart skipped a beat. “That’s town, ain’t it—whare the railroad trains is at?”

“Yes. We’ll want you there a week from to-day.” The sheriff filled in a blank subpœna and extended it to the girl. “Look me up in the courthouse soon as you get to town.”

Selina Jo’s breathless announcement that she was going to court created a flurry at home until Shug learned why she had been summoned. Then he breathed easily.

It was decided that she could use the oxen and wagon for the trip, as Eastview was twenty-five miles distant. This method of travel, being slow, would necessitate an early start on the day before the trial. When that day dawned, though, one of the oxen was found to be indisposed. Selina Jo assembled a lunch of corn pone and side meat, filled a small bottle with molasses, and, dressed in her new finery, set out on foot.

Within an hour the new shoes began to pinch. She took them off, tied them together by their strings and slung them over her shoulder. The stockings were rolled into balls and stuffed into her pockets.

Late in the afternoon she bathed her feet and legs in a brook just outside Eastview and donned shoes and stockings again.

It was dusk when she arrived at the sheriff’s office. An overflow crowd at the single hotel necessitated her staying with Sheriff Holmes’s family that night.

With the inborn timidity of the woods-bred girl, she remained there until summoned to court in the late forenoon of the following day. By the time her evidence was concluded, though, she had partially overcome her shyness, and was ready for sightseeing.

Wandering about the interior of the courthouse, she marvelled at the white plaster walls. Then she watched several people using the sanitary drinking fountain. Presently she found courage to try it herself. The technic she found to be rather difficult, but after she had mastered it she became a frequent patron.

Later, she ventured outside the courthouse.

Sheriff Holmes found her during the noon recess. She had commandeered a small goods box which she was using as a seat. Her enraptured gaze was fastened upon a scene across the street. Three large, two-story frame buildings, painted a dazzling white, stood upon a lot which occupied an entire block. Beneath the branches of huge water oaks, were scores of girls, dressed in white blouses and dark-blue skirts.

Sheriff Holmes smiled understandingly. “Like it?”

Selina Jo did not even turn her head. “Whose is them air li’l gals?” she asked breathlessly.

“The state’s—for the present,” was the answer.

“Who?”

“The state. That’s the reformatory for girls.”

It was plain that the remark conveyed no information to Selina Jo. “Do which?” she asked.

“When girls—young ones, like you—break the law,” the sheriff explained, “they bring them here to be reformed.”

“What’s re-formed?”

“Well ... it’s like this: before they let a girl go again, she has to prove that she’s been changed for the better.”

“Changed?” Selina Jo looked up with a quick indrawn breath. “They make ’em diffe’ent f’um what they was?”

“Ye-e-es ... that’s about it, I guess.”

“Do they learn ’em outen books in there?”

“Oh, yes; they have regular hours for study.”

“An’ could—could a gal git in there what didn’t know nothin’ but a part o’ the fu’st reader?”

“You don’t understand, yet, child. It’s only for girls who do wrong. Now, a girl like you never would go there.”

Selina Jo sighed dejectedly. Her eyes caressed the buildings with their spotless white walls and wide-flung shutters, and the groups of girls scattered about the lawn.

Presently she pointed to a high iron picket fence which enclosed the lot. “What’s the fence fer?” she asked.

“Why, if that fence wasn’t there, little sister, half the girls there would light out before midnight,” the sheriff answered.

“They’d run away?” Selina Jo shook her head incredulously. “F’um them purty houses?”

Since it would be impossible for her to reach home that day, she spent another night with the sheriff’s family. In her dreams she saw white-painted buildings fashioned of real lumber. There was real glass in the windows, too; they weren’t just yawning black holes in the walls. And the chimneys were of brick; so different from the flimsy stick-and-clay affair that leaned drunkenly against one end of the cabin at home. Home! She seemed to sicken at the thought.

Her dreams were peopled with girls in white blouses and blue skirts, thousands of them, it seemed to her. They were all within an iron-fenced inclosure, beckoning to her to enter; and she was always just on the outside.

With morning came thoughts of her work in the turpentine orchard. Inexplicably, a vague dissatisfaction awoke within her. The idea began to burn itself into her consciousness that, though she might spend a lifetime in honest toil there, she would always be referred to as “one of that Hudsill tribe.” Apparently there was no escape from that.

During breakfast she was unusually quiet and thoughtful. With a shy acknowledgment of thanks, she accepted the liberal lunch provided by the sheriff’s wife and made her adieus. Two miles outside the town she left the highway. A hundred yards from the road she seated herself upon a log and grimly prepared to wait.

Darkness had fallen when she again entered Eastview and cautiously approached the reformatory from the rear. She scaled the iron fence with comparative ease. Crouching low, she crept toward a lighted window on the ground floor. Two girls of about her own age sat at a study table. Standing before the window, Selina Jo spoke.

“Kin I come in?” she asked softly.

One of the girls screamed slightly; the other, after her first involuntary start of amazement, seemed wonderfully selfpossessed.

“Sure, Rube!” she invited cordially. “Step right in!”

Selina Jo climbed over the low window sill into the room.

“What you doin’ here?” one of the girls asked.

“I’m j’inin’ o’ this here re-formin’ place,” was the unruffled answer.

“You’re wha-a-at?”

Very simply Selina Jo made known her intentions.

“But you’ll be caught, sure as shootin’,” one of the girls objected. “In the first place you’ve got no uniform.”

Naturally, Selina Jo expected to be discovered sooner or later; but she had prepared for this eventuality—as she thought.

“Maybe we can fix that,” the other girl broke in eagerly. “There’s that old blouse of mine and your extra skirt. Gee! I wish we could put it over! Wouldn’t old Iron Jaw be wild?”

Between them they rigged a uniform for Selina Jo. At the nightly inspection she crept under the bed. Later, she slept on a pallet.

The fortunate indisposition of a girl across the hall solved the breakfast problem. Selina Jo, taking the vacant place in the formation, passed undiscovered for the moment.

Among the many contingencies which she could not have provided against, though, were the sharp eyes and keen memory for faces possessed by Mary Shane, the matron in charge. As the girls were forming for certain duties shortly after breakfast, Selina Jo felt a heavy hand upon her shoulder. She looked up into the stern face of the matron.

“What are you doing here?” was the curt inquiry.

“Me?” Selina Jo’s attempt at surprise was ludicrous. “I—I b’long here, ma’am.”

“You do? You ought to know me then. What is my name?”

Instinct told the girl that this must be the matron. “Old Iron Jaw,” she answered unabashed.

Mary Shane smiled grimly. “Come with me,” she ordered.

She led the way, Selina Jo following meekly, to her little cubby-hole of an office.

“Now, then,” the matron commanded sternly, “tell me the truth. How did you get in here?”

“I—I clumb that fence.”

“Why?”

“Just ’cause, ma’am, I nacherly got to git re-formed,” was the perfectly serious answer. “I ralely b’long here. I’m so p’izen mean they ain’t no other place fitten fer me.”

“What’s your name?”

Now it came, not hesitantly, but proudly—even defiantly: “S’liny Jo Hudsill!”

Mary Shane knitted her brows thoughtfully: “Hudsill?”

“Yes’m. Them low-down, sneakin’, ornery Shoalwater River Hudsills, ma’am. Ever’body in the country knows ’bout ’em. They air the shif’lesses’ fambly that ever was borned. An’ what’s furdermore, I’m the hellraisin’es’ one o’ the intire gin’ration!”

“What are you trying to tell me, child?”

“Just how tarnation mean I am, ma’am.”

In her plans for forcibly entering the reformatory, Selina Jo had hit upon the idea of charging herself, when her presence should be discovered, with an assortment of crimes sufficient to insure her incarceration for an indefinite period. It seemed to her now that the moment for her confession had arrived.

“Last mont’, ma’am,” she continued earnestly. “I burned down three cow stalls. Right atter that I went inta my own blood uncle’s cornfiel’ an’ pulled up ever’ smidgin’s bit o’ his young corn—pulled it smack up by the roots, ma’am. Ner that ain’t all, not nigh all. I almost hate to tell you this’n, ma’am. But last week I stobbed a li’l nigger baby to death. Killed him dead. Dead as——”

“Hush, child, hush!” the matron ordered. “You did none of those things. Now then: Tell me—the truth!”

It came then—the truth—a story haltingly told of a child’s scarcely understood heartache for self-betterment. Selina Jo didn’t want to stay in the reformatory long, she said; only long enough to learn all there was in the books. Then she would be willing to leave. She would change her name and go away off somewhere. Maybe the folks there, not knowing that she was a Hudsill, would invite her to a Sunday dinner when she went to meeting.

People, some of them, rather, said of Mary Shane that her long association with the so-called criminally inclined young had rendered her immune to every human emotion. But as the recital progressed, the matron turned her back suddenly and strode over to a window.

Presently the story was finished.

“An’ please, ma’am,” a voice was asking hopefully, “I kin stay now, cain’t I?”

Mary Shane did not reply, for a moment. “I’m afraid not, child,” she said presently. Few who thought they knew her would have recognized the matron’s voice. “You—you’ve done nothing to be kept here for. You’ll have to go home.”

Then it was that Selina Jo’s heart broke. She flung herself upon the matron.

“Oh, God, ma’am,” she sobbed, “please don’t make me go back! I ain’t goin’ back! I don’t want to be one o’ them low-down Hudsills all o’ my endurin’ days. I want to be somebody, like other folks is. I don’t want to have a passel o’ dang li’l’ old gals lookin’ at me slanchwise when I go to meetin’. You don’t know what it is, ma’am, to have a hankerin’. I want to be changed! I want to be made diffe’ent! Ma’am, I just got to git re-formed!”

Mary Shane had opened her mouth to speak, to check this outburst; suddenly her iron jaws closed with a snap.

“Come with me, child,” she said. “We’ll see the superintendent.” A moment later she added: “Jim Wellborn generally runs this reformatory to suit himself, anyway!”

The matron was the one person connected with the institution who took whatever liberties she chose. When she wished to be particularly impressive, she addressed people by their full names.

“Jim Wellborn,” she said brusquely, as she and Selina Jo entered the superintendent’s office, “this girl wants to tell you something. You listen closely.”

Wellborn, big and broad-shouldered, had glanced up as they entered. His quizzical glance had rested first upon the girl; now he looked at Mary Shane.

“When you’ve heard her story,” the matron continued, “if you can’t find some way to keep her here so she can learn to live the life that Almighty God has shown her that she’s fitted for, why I’ll undertake the job of looking after her myself and the reformatory can get another matron.”

“Hm-m-m!” Superintendent Wellborn’s gray eyes twinkled; but he did not smile outright. “Well ... the reformatory is fairly well satisfied with its present matron. Good-day, Mary Shane! Sit down, little girl.”

The matron closed the door and returned to her office. For nearly an hour she sat, idle, at her desk. It was the first of the month; there were statements to be prepared, reports to be rendered, bills to be checked. But it was patent that her mind was upon none of these things. From time to time she glanced up impatiently at some noise in the hallway. Presently there came the sound of hurrying footsteps. She whirled her chair about.

Selina Jo stood in the doorway. Questions, answers, were unnecessary. The flush in her cheeks, the flame in her sloe-black eyes, blazoned her happiness to the world. As she realized what the superintendent’s decision had been, an answering light gleamed, momentarily, in Mary Shane’s face. Characteristically, though, it was quenched upon the instant, as she slipped once more, automatically, into her habitual mask of granite.

But even a granite mask—since it is only a mask—cannot stifle a heart song; at best, it can only muffle it. For as she went about the prosaic business of acquainting Selina Jo with her duties, Mary Shane was well aware that, somewhere, deep within herself, a small voice was chanting, chanting over and over:

“For this one—just this one, Lord—who comes of her own accord to be changed, for this single one who wants to be made different, I thank Thee!”

A FRIEND OF NAPOLEON
By RICHARD CONNELL
From Saturday Evening Post

ALL Paris held no happier man than Papa Chibou. He loved his work—that was why. Other men might say—did say, in fact—that for no amount of money would they take his job; no, not for ten thousand francs for a single night. It would turn their hair white and give them permanent goose flesh, they averred. On such men Papa Chibou smiled with pity. What stomach had such zestless ones for adventure? What did they know of romance? Every night of his life Papa Chibou walked with adventure and held the hand of romance.

Every night he conversed intimately with Napoleon; with Marat and his fellow revolutionists; with Carpentier and Cæsar; with Victor Hugo and Lloyd George; with Foch and with Bigarre, the Apache murderer whose unfortunate penchant for making ladies into curry led him to the guillotine; with Louis XVI and with Madame Lablanche, who poisoned eleven husbands and was working to make it an even dozen when the police deterred her; with Marie Antoinette and with sundry early Christian martyrs who lived in sweet resignation in electric-lighted catacombs under the sidewalk of the Boulevard des Capucines in the very heart of Paris. They were all his friends and he had a word and a joke for each of them, as on his nightly rounds he washed their faces and dusted out their ears, for Papa Chibou was night watchman at the Musée Pratoucy—“The World in Wax. Admission, one franc. Children and soldiers, half price. Nervous ladies enter the Chamber of Horrors at their own risk. One is prayed not to touch the wax figures or to permit dogs to circulate in the establishment.”

He had been at the Musée Pratoucy so long that he looked like a wax figure himself. Visitors not infrequently mistook him for one and poked him with inquisitive fingers or canes. He did not undeceive them; he did not budge; Spartanlike he stood stiff under the pokes; he was rather proud of being taken for a citizen of the world of wax, which was, indeed, a much more real world to him than the world of flesh and blood. He had cheeks like the small red wax pippins used in table decorations, round eyes, slightly poppy, and smooth white hair, like a wig. He was a diminutive man and, with his horseshoe moustache of surprising luxuriance, looked like a gnome going to a fancy-dress ball as a small walrus. Children who saw him flitting about the dim passages that led to the catacombs were sure he was a brownie.

His title “Papa” was a purely honorary one, given him because he had worked some twenty-five years at the museum. He was unwed, and slept at the museum in a niche of a room just off the Roman arena where papier-mâché lions and tigers breakfasted on assorted martyrs. At night, as he dusted off the lions and tigers, he rebuked them sternly for their lack of delicacy.

“Ah,” he would say, cuffing the ear of the largest lion, which was earnestly trying to devour a grandfather and an infant simultaneously, “sort of a pig that you are! I am ashamed of you, eater of babies. You will go to hell for this, Monsieur Lion, you may depend upon it. Monsieur Satan will poach you like an egg, I promise you. Ah, you bad one, you species of a camel, you Apache, you profiteer——”

Then Papa Chibou would bend over and very tenderly address the elderly martyr who was lying beneath the lion’s paws and exhibiting signs of distress and, say, “Patience, my brave one. It does not take long to be eaten, and then, consider: The good Lord will take you up to heaven, and there, if you wish, you yourself can eat a lion every day. You are a man of holiness, Phillibert. You will be Saint Phillibert, beyond doubt, and then won’t you laugh at lions!”

Phillibert was the name Papa Chibou had given to the venerable martyr; he had bestowed names on all of them. Having consoled Phillibert, he would softly dust the fat wax infant whom the lion was in the act of bolting.

“Courage, my poor little Jacob,” Papa Chibou would say. “It is not every baby that can be eaten by a lion; and in such a good cause too. Don’t cry, little Jacob. And remember: When you get inside Monsieur Lion, kick and kick and kick! That will give him a great sickness of the stomach. Won’t that be fun, little Jacob?”

So he went about his work, chatting with them all, for he was fond of them all, even of Bigarre the Apache and the other grisly inmates of the Chamber of Horrors. He did chide the criminals for their regrettable proclivities in the past and warn them that he would tolerate no such conduct in his museum. It was not his museum of course. Its owner was Monsieur Pratoucy, a long-necked, melancholy marabou of a man who sat at the ticket window and took in the francs. But, though the legal title to the place might be vested in Monsieur Pratoucy, at night Papa Chibou was the undisputed monarch of his little wax kingdom. When the last patron had left and the doors were closed Papa Chibou began to pay calls on his subjects; across the silent halls he called greetings to them:

“Ah, Bigarre, you old rascal, how goes the world? And you, Madame Marie Antoinette; did you enjoy a good day? Good evening, Monsieur Cæsar; aren’t you chilly in that costume of yours? Ah, Monsieur Charlemagne, I trust your health continues to be of the best.”

His closest friend of them all was Napoleon. The others he liked; to Napoleon he was devoted. It was a friendship cemented by the years, for Napoleon had been in the museum as long as Papa Chibou. Other figures might come and go at the behest of a fickle public, but Napoleon held his place, albeit he had been relegated to a dim corner.

He was not much of a Napoleon. He was smaller even than the original Napoleon, and one of his ears had come in contact with a steam radiator and as a result it was gnarled into a lump the size of a hickory nut; it was a perfect example of that phenomenon of the prize ring, the cauliflower ear. He was supposed to be at St. Helena and he stood on a papier-mâché rock, gazing out wistfully over a nonexistent sea. One hand was thrust into the bosom of his long-tailed coat, the other hung at his side. Skintight breeches, once white but white no longer, fitted snugly over his plump bump of waxen abdomen. A Napoleonic hat, frayed by years of conscientious brushing by Papa Chibou, was perched above a pensive waxen brow.

Papa Chibou had been attracted to Napoleon from the first. There was something so forlorn about him. Papa Chibou had been forlorn, too, in his first days at the museum. He had come from Bouloire, in the south of France, to seek his fortune as a grower of asparagus in Paris. He was a simple man of scant schooling and he had fancied that there were asparagus beds along the Paris boulevards. There were none. So necessity and chance brought him to the Museum Pratoucy to earn his bread and wine, and romance and his friendship for Napoleon kept him there.

The first day Papa Chibou worked at the museum Monsieur Pratoucy took him round to tell him about the figures.

“This,” said the proprietor, “is Toulon, the strangler. This is Mademoiselle Merle, who shot the Russian duke. This is Charlotte Corday, who stabbed Marat in the bathtub; that gory gentleman is Marat.” Then they had come to Napoleon. Monsieur Pratoucy was passing him by.

“And who is this sad-looking gentleman?” asked Papa Chibou.

“Name of a name! Do you not know?”

“But no, monsieur.”

“But that is Napoleon himself.”

That night, his first in the museum, Papa Chibou went round and said to Napoleon, “Monsieur, I do not know with what crimes you are charged, but I, for one, refuse to think you are guilty of them.”

So began their friendship. Thereafter he dusted Napoleon with especial care and made him his confidant. One night in his twenty-fifth year at the museum Papa Chibou said to Napoleon, “You observed those two lovers who were in here to-night, did you not, my good Napoleon? They thought it was too dark in this corner for us to see, didn’t they? But we saw him take her hand and whisper to her. Did she blush? You were near enough to see. She is pretty, isn’t she, with her bright dark eyes? She is not a French girl; she is an American; one can tell that by the way she doesn’t roll her r’s. The young man, he is French; and a fine young fellow he is, or I’m no judge. He is so slender and erect, and he has courage, for he wears the war cross; you noticed that, didn’t you? He is very much in love, that is sure. This is not the first time I have seen them. They have met here before, and they are wise, for is this not a spot most romantic for the meetings of lovers?”

Papa Chibou flicked a speck of dust from Napoleon’s good ear.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “it must be a thing most delicious to be young and in love! Were you ever in love, Napoleon? No? Ah, what a pity! I know, for I, too, have had no luck in love. Ladies prefer the big, strong men, don’t they? Well, we must help these two young people, Napoleon. We must see that they have the joy we missed. So do not let them know you are watching them if they come here to-morrow night. I will pretend I do not see.”

Each night after the museum had closed, Papa Chibou gossiped with Napoleon about the progress of the love affair between the American girl with the bright dark eyes and the slender, erect young Frenchman.

“All is not going well,” Papa Chibou reported one night, shaking his head. “There are obstacles to their happiness. He has little money, for he is just beginning his career. I heard him tell her so to-night. And she has an aunt who has other plans for her. What a pity if fate should part them! But you know how unfair fate can be, don’t you, Napoleon? If only we had some money we might be able to help him, but I, myself, have no money, and I suppose you, too, were poor, since you look so sad. But attend; to-morrow is a day most important for them. He has asked her if she will marry him, and she has said that she will tell him to-morrow night at nine in this very place. I heard them arrange it all. If she does not come it will mean no. I think we shall see two very happy ones here to-morrow night, eh, Napoleon?”

The next night, when the last patron had gone and Papa Chibou had locked the outer door, he came to Napoleon, and tears were in his eyes.

“You saw, my friend?” broke out Papa Chibou. “You observed? You saw his face and how pale it grew? You saw his eyes and how they held a thousand agonies? He waited until I had to tell him three times that the museum was closing. I felt like an executioner, I assure you; and he looked up at me as only a man condemned can look. He went out with heavy feet; he was no longer erect. For she did not come, Napoleon; that girl with the bright dark eyes did not come. Our little comedy of love has become a tragedy, monsieur. She has refused him, that poor, that unhappy young man.”

On the following night at closing time Papa Chibou came hurrying to Napoleon; he was a-quiver with excitement.

“She was here!” he cried. “Did you see her? She was here and she kept watching and watching; but, of course, he did not come. I could tell from his stricken face last night that he had no hope. At last I dared to speak to her. I said to her, ‘Mademoiselle, a thousand pardons for the very great liberty I am taking, but it is my duty to tell you—he was here last night and he waited till closing time. He was all of a paleness, mademoiselle, and he chewed his fingers in his despair. He loves you, mademoiselle; a cow could see that. He is devoted to you; and he is a fine young fellow, you can take an old man’s word for it. Do not break his heart, mademoiselle.’ She grasped my sleeve. ‘You know him, then?’ she asked. ‘You know where I can find him?’ ‘Alas, no,’ I said. ‘I have only seen him here with you.’ ‘Poor boy!’ she kept saying. ‘Poor boy! Oh, what shall I do? I am in dire trouble. I love him, monsieur.’ ‘But you did not come,’ I said. ‘I could not,’ she replied, and she was weeping. ‘I live with an aunt; a rich tiger she is, monsieur, and she wants me to marry a count, a fat leering fellow who smells of attar of roses and garlic. My aunt locked me in my room. And now I have lost the one I love, for he will think I have refused him, and he is so proud he will never ask me again.’ ‘But surely you could let him know?’ I suggested. ‘But I do not know where he lives,’ she said. ‘And in a few days my aunt is taking me off to Rome, where the count is, and oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear——’ And she wept on my shoulder, Napoleon, that poor little American girl with the bright dark eyes.”

Papa Chibou began to brush the Napoleonic hat.

“I tried to comfort her,” he said. “I told her that the young man would surely find her, that he would come back and haunt the spot where they had been happy, but I was telling her what I did not believe. ‘He may come to-night,’ I said, ‘or to-morrow.’ She waited until it was time to close the museum. You saw her face as she left; did it not touch you in the heart?”

Papa Chibou was downcast when he approached Napoleon the next night.

“She waited again till closing time,” he said, “but he did not come. It made me suffer to see her as the hours went by and her hope ebbed away. At last she had to leave, and at the door she said to me, ‘If you see him here again, please give him this.’ She handed me this card, Napoleon. See, it says, ‘I am at the Villa Rosina, Rome. I love you. Nina.’ Ah, the poor, poor young man. We must keep a sharp watch for him, you and I.”

Papa Chibou and Napoleon did watch at the Musée Pratoucy night after night. One, two, three, four, five nights they watched for him. A week, a month, more months passed, and he did not come. There came instead one day news of so terrible a nature that it left Papa Chibou ill and trembling. The Musée Pratoucy was going to have to close its doors.

“It is no use,” said Monsieur Pratoucy, when he dealt this blow to Papa Chibou. “I cannot go on. Already I owe much, and my creditors are clamouring. People will no longer pay a franc to see a few old dummies when they can see an army of red Indians, Arabs, brigands and dukes in the moving pictures. Monday the Musée Pratoucy closes its doors for ever.”

“But, Monsieur Pratoucy,” exclaimed Papa Chibou, aghast, “what about the people here? What will become of Marie Antoinette, and the martyrs, and Napoleon?”

“Oh,” said the proprietor, “I’ll be able to realize a little on them, perhaps. On Tuesday they will be sold at auction. Someone may buy them to melt up.”

“To melt up, monsieur?” Papa Chibou faltered.

“But certainly. What else are they good for?”

“But surely monsieur will want to keep them; a few of them anyhow?”

“Keep them? Aunt of the devil, but that is a droll idea! Why should any one want to keep shabby old wax dummies?”

“I thought,” murmured Papa Chibou, “that you might keep just one—Napoleon, for example—as a remembrance——”

“Uncle of Satan, but you have odd notions! To keep a souvenir of one’s bankruptcy!”

Papa Chibou went away to his little hole in the wall. He sat on his cot and fingered his moustache for an hour; the news had left him dizzy, had made a cold vacuum under his belt buckle. From under his cot, at last, he took a wooden box, unlocked three separate locks, and extracted a sock. From the sock he took his fortune, his hoard of big copper ten-centime pieces, tips he had saved for years. He counted them over five times most carefully; but no matter how he counted them he could not make the total come to more than two hundred and twenty-one francs.

That night he did not tell Napoleon the news. He did not tell any of them. Indeed he acted even more cheerful than usual as he went from one figure to another. He complimented Madame Lablanche, the lady of the poisoned spouses, on how well she was looking. He even had a kindly word to say to the lion that was eating the two martyrs.

“After all, Monsieur Lion,” he said, “I suppose it is as proper for you to eat martyrs as it is for me to eat bananas. Probably bananas do not enjoy being eaten any more than martyrs do. In the past I have said harsh things to you, Monsieur Lion; I am sorry I said them, now. After all, it is hardly your fault that you eat people. You were born with an appetite for martyrs, just as I was born poor.” And he gently tweaked the lion’s papier-mâché ear.

When he came to Napoleon, Papa Chibou brushed him with unusual care and thoroughness. With a moistened cloth he polished the imperial nose, and he took pains to be gentle with the cauliflower ear. He told Napoleon the latest joke he had heard at the cabmen’s café where he ate his breakfast of onion soup, and, as the joke was mildly improper, nudged Napoleon in the ribs, and winked at him.

“We are men of the world, eh, old friend?” said Papa Chibou. “We are philosophers, is that not so?” Then he added, “We take what life sends us, and sometimes it sends hardnesses.”

He wanted to talk more with Napoleon, but somehow he couldn’t; abruptly, in the midst of a joke, Papa Chibou broke off and hurried down into the depths of the Chamber of Horrors and stood there for a very long time staring at an unfortunate native of Siam being trodden on by an elephant.

It was not until the morning of the auction sale that Papa Chibou told Napoleon. Then, while the crowd was gathering, he slipped up to Napoleon in his corner and laid his hand on Napoleon’s arm.

“One of the hardnesses of life has come to us, old friend,” he said. “They are going to try to take you away. But, courage! Papa Chibou does not desert his friends. Listen!” And Papa Chibou patted his pocket, which gave forth a jingling sound.

The bidding began. Close to the auctioneer’s desk stood a man, a wizened, rodent-eyed man with a diamond ring and dirty fingers. Papa Chibou’s heart went down like an express elevator when he saw him, for he knew that the rodent-eyed man was Mogen, the junk king of Paris. The auctioneer in a voice slightly encumbered by adenoids, began to sell the various items in a hurried, perfunctory manner.

“Item 3 is Julius Cæsar, toga and sandals thrown in. How much am I offered? One hundred and fifty francs? Dirt cheap for a Roman emperor, that is. Who’ll make it two hundred? Thank you, Monsieur Mogen. The noblest Roman of them all is going at two hundred francs. Are you all through at two hundred? Going, going, gone! Julius Cæsar is sold to Monsieur Mogen.”

Papa Chibou patted Cæsar’s back sympathetically.

“You are worth more, my good Julius,” he said in a whisper. “Good-bye.”

He was encouraged. If a comparatively new Cæsar brought only two hundred, surely an old Napoleon would bring no more.

The sale progressed rapidly. Monsieur Mogen bought the entire Chamber of Horrors. He bought Marie Antoinette, and the martyrs and lions. Papa Chibou, standing near Napoleon, withstood the strain of waiting by chewing his moustache.

The sale was very nearly over and Monsieur Mogen had bought every item, when, with a yawn, the auctioneer droned: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, we come to Item 573, a collection of odds and ends, mostly damaged goods, to be sold in one lot. The lot includes one stuffed owl that seems to have moulted a bit; one Spanish shawl, torn; the head of an Apache who has been guillotined, body missing; a small wax camel, no humps; and an old wax figure of Napoleon, with one ear damaged. What am I offered for the lot?”

Papa Chibou’s heart stood still. He laid a reassuring hand on Napoleon’s shoulder.

“The fool,” he whispered in Napoleon’s good ear, “to put you in the same class as a camel, no humps, and an owl. But never mind. It is lucky for us, perhaps.”

“How much for this assortment?” asked the auctioneer.

“One hundred francs,” said Mogen, the junk king.

“One hundred and fifty,” said Papa Chibou, trying to be calm. He had never spent so vast a sum all at once in his life.

Mogen fingered the material in Napoleon’s coat.

“Two hundred,” said the junk king.

“Are you all through at two hundred?” queried the auctioneer.

“Two hundred and twenty-one,” called Papa Chibou. His voice was a husky squeak.

Mogen from his rodent eyes glared at Papa Chibou with annoyance and contempt. He raised his dirtiest finger—the one with the diamond ring on it—toward the auctioneer.

“Monsieur Mogen bids two hundred and twenty-five,” droned the auctioneer. “Do I hear two hundred and fifty?”

Papa Chibou hated the world. The auctioneer cast a look in his direction.

“Two hundred and twenty-five is bid,” he repeated. “Are you all through at two hundred and twenty-five? Going, going—sold to Monsieur Mogen for two hundred and twenty-five francs.”

Stunned, Papa Chibou heard Mogen say casually, “I’ll send round my carts for this stuff in the morning.”

This stuff!

Dully and with an aching breast Papa Chibou went to his room down by the Roman arena. He packed his few clothes into a box. Last of all he slowly took from his cap the brass badge he had worn for so many years; it bore the words “Chief Watchman.” He had been proud of that title, even if it was slightly inaccurate; he had been not only the chief but the only watchman. Now he was nothing. It was hours before he summoned up the energy to take his box round to the room he had rented high up under the roof of a tenement in a near-by alley. He knew he should start to look for another job at once, but he could not force himself to do so that day. Instead, he stole back to the deserted museum and sat down on a bench by the side of Napoleon. Silently he sat there all night; but he did not sleep; he was thinking, and the thought that kept pecking at his brain was to him a shocking one. At last, as day began to edge its pale way through the dusty windows of the museum, Papa Chibou stood up with the air of a man who has been through a mental struggle and has made up his mind.

“Napoleon,” he said, “we have been friends for a quarter of a century and now we are to be separated because a stranger had four francs more than I had. That may be lawful, my old friend, but it is not justice. You and I, we are not going to be parted.”

Paris was not yet awake when Papa Chibou stole with infinite caution into the narrow street beside the museum. Along this street toward the tenement where he had taken a room crept Papa Chibou. Sometimes he had to pause for breath, for in his arms he was carrying Napoleon.

Two policemen came to arrest Papa Chibou that very afternoon. Mogen had missed Napoleon, and he was a shrewd man. There was not the slightest doubt of Papa Chibou’s guilt. There stood Napoleon in the corner of his room, gazing pensively out over the housetops. The police bundled the overwhelmed and confused Papa Chibou into the police patrol, and with him, as damning evidence, Napoleon.

In his cell in the city prison Papa Chibou sat with his spirit caved in. To him jails and judges and justice were terrible and mysterious affairs. He wondered if he would be guillotined; perhaps not, since his long life had been one of blameless conduct; but the least he could expect, he reasoned, was a long sentence to hard labour on Devil’s Island, and guillotining had certain advantages over that. Perhaps it would be better to be guillotined, he told himself, now that Napoleon was sure to be melted up.

The keeper who brought him his meal of stew was a pessimist of jocular tendencies.

“A pretty pickle,” said the keeper; “and at your age too. You must be a very wicked old man to go about stealing dummies. What will be safe now? One may expect to find the Eiffel Tower missing any morning. Dummy stealing! What a career! We have had a man in here who stole a trolley car, and one who made off with the anchor of a steamship, and even one who pilfered a hippopotamus from a zoo, but never one who stole a dummy—and an old one-eared dummy, at that! It is an affair extraordinary!”

“And what did they do to the gentleman who stole the hippopotamus?” inquired Papa Chibou tremulously.

The keeper scratched his head to indicate thought.

“I think,” he said, “that they boiled him alive. Either that or they transported him for life to Morocco; I don’t recall exactly.”

Papa Chibou’s brow grew damp.

“It was a trial most comical, I can assure you,” went on the keeper. “The judges were Messieurs Bertouf, Goblin, and Perouse—very amusing fellows, all three of them. They had fun with the prisoner; how I laughed. Judge Bertouf said, in sentencing him, ‘We must be severe with you, pilferer of hippopotamuses. We must make of you an example. This business of hippopotamus pilfering is getting all too common in Paris.’ They are witty fellows, those judges.”

Papa Chibou grew a shade paler.

“The Terrible Trio?” he asked.

“The Terrible Trio,” replied the keeper cheerfully.

“Will they be my judges?” asked Papa Chibou.

“Most assuredly,” promised the keeper, and strolled away humming happily and rattling his big keys.

Papa Chibou knew then that there was no hope for him. Even into the Musée Pratoucy the reputation of those three judges had penetrated, and it was a sinister reputation indeed. They were three ancient, grim men who had fairly earned their title, The Terrible Trio, by the severity of their sentences; evildoers blanched at their names, and this was a matter of pride to them.

Shortly the keeper came back; he was grinning.

“You have the devil’s own luck, old-timer,” he said to Papa Chibou. “First you have to be tried by The Terrible Trio, and then you get assigned to you as lawyer none other than Monsieur Georges Dufayel.”

“And this Monsieur Dufayel, is he then not a good lawyer?” questioned Papa Chibou miserably.

The keeper snickered.

“He has not won a case for months,” he answered, as if it were the most amusing thing imaginable. “It is really better than a circus to hear him muddling up his clients’ affairs in court. His mind is not on the case at all. Heaven knows where it is. When he rises to plead before the judges he has no fire, no passion. He mumbles and stutters. It is a saying about the courts that one is as good as convicted who has the ill luck to draw Monsieur Georges Dufayel as his advocate. Still, if one is too poor to pay for a lawyer, one must take what he can get. That’s philosophy, eh, old-timer?”

Papa Chibou groaned.

“Oh, wait till to-morrow,” said the keeper gayly. “Then you’ll have a real reason to groan.”

“But surely I can see this Monsieur Dufayel.”

“Oh, what’s the use? You stole the dummy, didn’t you? It will be there in court to appear against you. How entertaining! Witness for the prosecution: Monsieur Napoleon. You are plainly as guilty as Cain, old-timer, and the judges will boil your cabbage for you very quickly and neatly, I can promise you that. Well, see you to-morrow. Sleep well.”

Papa Chibou did not sleep well. He did not sleep at all, in fact, and when they marched him into the inclosure where sat the other nondescript offenders against the law he was shaken and utterly wretched. He was overawed by the great court room and the thick atmosphere of seriousness that hung over it.

He did pluck up enough courage to ask a guard, “Where is my lawyer, Monsieur Dufayel?”

“Oh, he’s late, as usual,” replied the guard. And then, for he was a waggish fellow, he added, “If you’re lucky he won’t come at all.”

Papa Chibou sank down on the prisoners’ bench and raised his eyes to the tribunal opposite. His very marrow was chilled by the sight of The Terrible Trio. The chief judge, Bertouf, was a vast puff of a man, who swelled out of his judicial chair like a poisonous fungus. His black robe was familiar with spilled brandy, and his dirty judicial bib was askew. His face was bibulous and brutal, and he had the wattles of a turkey gobbler. Judge Goblin, on his right, looked to have mummified; he was at least a hundred years old and had wrinkled parchment skin and red-rimmed eyes that glittered like the eyes of a cobra. Judge Perouse was one vast jungle of tangled grizzled whisker, from the midst of which projected a cockatoo’s beak of a nose; he looked at Papa Chibou and licked his lips with a long pink tongue. Papa Chibou all but fainted; he felt no bigger than a pea, and less important; as for his judges, they seemed enormous monsters.

The first case was called, a young swaggering fellow who had stolen an orange from a pushcart.

“Ah, Monsieur Thief,” rumbled Judge Bertouf with a scowl, “you are jaunty now. Will you be so jaunty a year from to-day when you are released from prison? I rather think not. Next case.”

Papa Chibou’s heart pumped with difficulty. A year for an orange—and he had stolen a man! His eyes roved round the room and he saw two guards carrying in something which they stood before the judges. It was Napoleon.

A guard tapped Papa Chibou on the shoulder. “You’re next,” he said.

“But my lawyer, Monsieur Dufayel——” began Papa Chibou.

“You’re in hard luck,” said the guard, “for here he comes.”

Papa Chibou in a daze found himself in the prisoner’s dock. He saw coming toward him a pale young man. Papa Chibou recognized him at once. It was the slender, erect young man of the museum. He was not very erect now; he was listless. He did not recognize Papa Chibou; he barely glanced at him.

“You stole something,” said the young lawyer, and his voice was toneless. “The stolen goods were found in your room. I think we might better plead guilty and get it over with.”

“Yes, monsieur,” said Papa Chibou, for he had let go all his hold on hope. “But attend a moment. I have something—a message for you.”

Papa Chibou fumbled through his pockets and at last found the card of the American girl with the bright dark eyes. He handed it to Georges Dufayel.

“She left it with me to give to you,” said Papa Chibou. “I was chief watchman at the Musée Pratoucy, you know. She came there night after night, to wait for you.”

The young man gripped the sides of the card with both hands; his face, his eyes, everything about him seemed suddenly charged with new life.

“Ten thousand million devils!” he cried. “And I doubted her! I owe you much, monsieur. I owe you everything.” He wrung Papa Chibou’s hand.

Judge Bertouf gave an impatient judicial grunt.

“We are ready to hear your case, Advocate Dufayel,” said the judge, “if you have one.”

The court attendants sniggered.

“A little moment, monsieur the judge,” said the lawyer. He turned to Papa Chibou. “Quick,” he shot out, “tell me about the crime you are charged with. What did you steal?”

“Him,” replied Papa Chibou, pointing.

“That dummy of Napoleon?”

Papa Chibou nodded.

“But why?”

Papa Chibou shrugged his shoulders.

“Monsieur could not understand.”

“But you must tell me!” said the lawyer urgently. “I must make a plea for you. These savages will be severe enough, in any event; but I may be able to do something. Quick; why did you steal this Napoleon?”

“I was his friend,” said Papa Chibou. “The museum failed. They were going to sell Napoleon for junk, Monsieur Dufayel. He was my friend. I could not desert him.”

The eyes of the young advocate had caught fire; they were lit with a flash. He brought his fist down on the table.

“Enough!” he cried.

Then he rose in his place and addressed the court. His voice was low, vibrant and passionate; the judges, in spite of themselves, leaned forward to listen to him.

“May it please the honourable judges of this court of France,” he began, “my client is guilty. Yes, I repeat in a voice of thunder, for all France to hear, for the enemies of France to hear, for the whole wide world to hear, he is guilty. He did steal this figure of Napoleon, the lawful property of another. I do not deny it. This old man, Jerome Chibou, is guilty, and I for one am proud of his guilt.”

Judge Bertouf grunted.

“If your client is guilty, Advocate Dufayel,” he said, “that settles it. Despite your pride in his guilt, which is a peculiar notion, I confess, I am going to sentence him to——”

“But wait, your honour!” Dufayel’s voice was compelling. “You must, you shall hear me! Before you pass sentence on this old man, let me ask you a question.”

“Well?”

“Are you a Frenchman, Judge Bertouf?”

“But certainly.”

“And you love France?”

“Monsieur has not the effrontery to suggest otherwise?”

“No. I was sure of it. That is why you will listen to me.”

“I listen.”

“I repeat then: Jerome Chibou is guilty. In the law’s eyes he is a criminal. But in the eyes of France and those who love her his guilt is a glorious guilt; his guilt is more honourable than innocence itself.”

The three judges looked at one another blankly; Papa Chibou regarded his lawyer with wide eyes; Georges Dufayel spoke on.

“These are times of turmoil and change in our country, messieurs the judges. Proud traditions which were once the birthright of every Frenchman have been allowed to decay. Enemies beset us within and without. Youth grows careless of that honour which is the soul of a nation. Youth forgets the priceless heritages of the ages, the great names that once brought glory to France in the past, when Frenchmen were Frenchmen. There are some in France who may have forgotten the respect due a nation’s great”—here Advocate Dufayel looked very hard at the judges—“but there are a few patriots left who have not forgotten. And there sits one of them.

“This poor old man has deep within him a glowing devotion to France. You may say that he is a simple, unlettered peasant. You may say that he is a thief. But I say, and true Frenchmen will say with me, that he is a patriot, messieurs the judges. He loves Napoleon. He loves him for what he did for France. He loves him because in Napoleon burned that spirit which has made France great. There was a time, messieurs the judges, when your fathers and mine dared share that love for a great leader. Need I remind you of the career of Napoleon? I know I need not. Need I tell you of his victories? I know I need not.”

Nevertheless, Advocate Dufayel did tell them of the career of Napoleon. With a wealth of detail and many gestures he traced the rise of Napoleon; he lingered over his battles; for an hour and ten minutes he spoke eloquently of Napoleon and his part in the history of France.

“You may have forgotten,” he concluded, “and others may have forgotten, but this old man sitting here a prisoner—he did not forget. When mercenary scoundrels wanted to throw on the junk heap this effigy of one of France’s greatest sons, who was it that saved him? Was it you, messieurs the judges? Was it I? Alas, no. It was a poor old man who loved Napoleon more than he loved himself. Consider, messieurs the judges; they were going to throw on the junk heap Napoleon—France’s Napoleon—our Napoleon. Who would save him? Then up rose this man, this Jerome Chibou, whom you would brand as a thief, and he cried aloud for France and for the whole world to hear, ‘Stop! Desecraters of Napoleon, stop! There still lives one Frenchman who loves the memories of his native land; there is still one patriot left. I, I, Jerome Chibou, will save Napoleon!’ And he did save him, messieurs the judges.”

Advocate Dufayel mopped his brow, and levelling an accusing finger at The Terrible Trio he said, “You may send Jerome Chibou to jail. But when you do, remember this: You are sending to jail the spirit of France. You may find Jerome Chibou guilty. But when you do, remember this: You are condemning a man for love of country, for love of France. Wherever true hearts beat in French bosoms, messieurs the judges, there will the crime of Jerome Chibou be understood, and there will the name of Jerome Chibou be honoured. Put him in prison, messieurs the judges. Load his poor feeble old body with chains. And a nation will tear down the prison walls, break his chains, and pay homage to the man who loved Napoleon and France so much that he was willing to sacrifice himself on the altar of patriotism.”

Advocate Dufayel sat down; Papa Chibou raised his eyes to the judges’ bench. Judge Perouse was ostentatiously blowing his beak of a nose. Judge Goblin, who wore a Sedan ribbon in his buttonhole, was sniffling into his inkwell. And Chief Judge Bertouf was openly blubbering.

“Jerome Chibou, stand up.” It was Chief Judge Bertouf who spoke, and his voice was thick with emotion.

Papa Chibou, quaking, stood up. A hand like a hand of pink bananas was thrust down at him.

“Jerome Chibou,” said Chief Judge Bertouf, “I find you guilty. Your crime is patriotism in the first degree. I sentence you to freedom. Let me have the honour of shaking the hand of a true Frenchman.”

“And I,” said Judge Goblin, thrusting out a hand as dry as autumn leaves.

“And I also,” said Judge Perouse, reaching out a hairy hand.

“And, furthermore,” said Chief Judge Bertouf, “you shall continue to protect the Napoleon you saved. I subscribe a hundred francs to buy him for you.”

“And I,” said Judge Goblin.

“And I also,” said Judge Perouse.

As they left the court room, Advocate Dufayel, Papa Chibou and Napoleon, Papa Chibou turned to his lawyer.

“I can never repay monsieur,” he began.

“Nonsense!” said the lawyer.

“And would Monsieur Dufayel mind telling me again the last name of Napoleon?”

“Why, Bonaparte, of course. Surely you knew——”

“Alas, no, Monsieur Dufayel. I am a man the most ignorant. I did not know that my friend had done such great things.”

“You didn’t? Then what in the name of heaven did you think Napoleon was?”

“A sort of murderer,” said Papa Chibou humbly.

Out beyond the walls of Paris in a garden stands the villa of Georges Dufayel, who has become, everyone says, the most eloquent and successful young lawyer in the Paris courts. He lives there with his wife, who has bright dark eyes. To get to his house one must pass a tiny gatehouse, where lives a small old man with a prodigious walrus moustache. Visitors who peer into the gatehouse as they pass sometimes get a shock, for standing in one corner of its only room they see another small man, in uniform and a big hat. He never moves, but stands there by the window all day, one hand in the bosom of his coat, the other at his side, while his eyes look out over the garden. He is waiting for Papa Chibou to come home after his work among the asparagus beds to tell him the jokes and the news of the day.

TOWERS OF FAME
By ELIZABETH IRONS FOLSOM
From McClure’s

HE raised his voice to bar interruption.

“You cannot tell anything about any one. Romance survives where you least expect it. Would you look for it in Eric Hall, for instance? Would you suspect him of Romance?”

“Well, hardly,” said one of the listeners. “Not that calculating, cold man—all indifference. Just to make your point, don’t try to prove that he has known sentiment.”

“More than most men,” replied Kent. “I have a notion to tell you about him. I will tell you. Come closer, Janet—all of you—to hear the unbelievable.”

“About Judge Eric Hall who knows only power—fame!” They laughed.

“Yes, about him.”

“How do you happen to know?”

“He told me.”

“Did he expect you to tell?”

“Heaven knows what a man expects when he babbles.”

Dinner was over; coffee was being served in the big, candlelit drawing room. The guests had made little intimate groups; some one at the piano at the far end of the room touched half strains between talk and laughter. The group in the deep window drew closer to Kent, and made themselves comfortable.

“‘Babbles’ is what I said,” went on the speaker, rolling a cigarette with deliberation, “but that is the wrong word. We were old friends: in fact, I was responsible for the whole thing, for I had talked about the queer town in one of the Middle Western states. Eric is the kind who always wants to know, so when he happened to be in that part of the state, he hired a car and drove out to see for himself.”

“I’ve heard of that town,” declared Janet eagerly. “There is no other like it, is there?”

Kent passed over the question.

“I’ll tell it exactly as he told me. I’m sure I can. I could not forget it. He had driven ten miles through dust and wind with a thunderstorm rolling up ahead of him—purple storm with green fringe on it—the kind they have out there. He was whacking along when he caught sight of a sign by the roadside. He stopped and backed his car to read it. It said—I remember it exactly—it said:

SMOKING, DRINKING, PROFANITY, FORBIDDEN AS YOU PASS THROUGH THIS TOWN.

YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO POLLUTE THE AIR.

MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD. MOST PEOPLE LIE, STEAL, AND DRINK.”

“Oh! Truly!” gasped Janet.

“It was what Eric was looking for—the entrance to the town of fanatics. There was a blank-looking group of houses marked at intervals by tall, white board signs—black letters on a white ground. He drove slowly. It was Sunday and the stillness was absolute. There was a building that might be a hotel—on the veranda were vacant chairs tilted against the rail; a few shops, gray with closed doors; houses gray, too, all with doors shut tight, curtains made to screen. The main street, three or four blocks long, was deserted. At a far corner a man appeared, took a look at the coming car, and stepped out of sight. A woman who came out on her porch, slipped back, and shut the door sharply. She was gray, too—clothes and hair; the distant man had seemed gray—a brown-gray, like the dust that whirled.

“He stopped the car again to read another sign, this one as large as a house front, full of preachments, repeating the words that he had first read:

MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD. THEY LIE, STEAL, AND DRINK.

NO OUTSIDE PEOPLE OR INSTITUTIONS WANTED HERE.

THE DANCE IS OF THE DEVIL, THE THEATRES ARE DEVIL-BEGOTTEN.

“And again:

MOST PEOPLE ARE BAD. THEY LIE, STEAL, AND DRINK.

“As he stood reading, he was conscious that men had appeared in the streets ahead and behind him. They fitted the houses—brown-gray, closed, shut tight. They walked slowly, eyes on the ground, but, as they passed him, he had a look from each. The looks were alike: ominous—hate snapped out at him from under briefly raised lids. Each face had a set mouth, with slashes down from its corners. Each head that turned slightly had—menace—hostile promises.

“The storm was breaking: a flash of lightning swept down the street; thunder crashed; for a moment the wind ceased—it hung aloof and the calm was thick with the brown-gray of the town—with deep silence. A desert plain, a skiff alone on the ocean, would have been more friendly, he said.”

“Where is the Romance?” some one asked, as Kent stopped.

“It’s at hand. It crossed the street in front of his car just as the wind came tearing like a railroad train. He saw her face for an instant before it caught her. Well, folks—I can’t tell you how Eric spoke of her face. He forgot that he had ever seen a court room or a law office, or had known indifference or ambition. He said to me—I can see him as he rapped the table and forgot he was speaking—‘The face of that girl, Kent!’ And—can you believe it of Eric?—he went on: ‘Do you remember Raphael’s peasant girl? The one with parted lips and queer, asking eyes? She was exactly like her. The wind took her sunbonnet away. She had two long braids of hair. She stopped and stared at me, her long, brown-gray skirt twisting about her little flat shoes. Then she ran on, clutching her braids, and a near door slammed after her.’

“The wind was on then; the few trees bent before it.

“The rain was close. There was no protection and, acting on impulse, he drove the car back of the huge sign. It was a shield from the wind and a slight protection against the slanting rain.

“Eric said it had been years since he had seen a Western storm, where it lets loose and whoops ’er up. He was half blinded with the lightning; he could hear the smash of small buildings; the rattling scurry of débris blown by the wind. His own shelter shivered, creaked. It was braced strongly from the back, but he thought it more than likely that it would go. Across the street he heard one go down with a splitting thud.

“But as he waited, he was conscious, he said, only of the girl who was somewhere in that strange town. I’d like to have had you—you people who think you know Eric—watch him as he told me this. There was not a drop of blood in his body, to judge from the colour of his face; his fingers twitched. He talked because he had to talk to some one, I guess. He was not self-sufficient just then.”

“Hm-m,” said some one. “I don’t get him in that rôle, and still I do, too, in a way: the force in him could be applied as well to an—er—infatuation as to anything else. I suppose it was an infatuation, eh, Kent? They are strange things, but they wear off.”

“Go on,” said Janet.

“He said that he sat there in the car while the wind bent his board protection and the rain came in sheets. He was wet through from the spray where it struck the outer edge of the car. He sat and watched pictures of that girl’s face: they came through the rain; came into the lightning; came everywhere. He was half conscious, he said, absorbed in the new thing.

“Out of that state of mind—he told a lot about that; it seemed to puzzle him as it does us now—he was startled by a new gale of wind, a close splitting of boards, the shriek of wood parting from wood at his elbow; and then the whole great shield tottered, swayed, resisted, swayed again, and came down over him. He ducked his head. A moment later he discovered that, in falling, the sign had gone into some trees standing close and was held there, in half-tent fashion, so that it protected him from the rain. Then he saw, too, some one clinging to the slanting edge of the shield. He leaped from the car and caught her as she fell.

“Her clothes were dripping with water; there was a trickle of blood down one cheek. But she was not unconscious and she struggled in his arms. He made her sit down on the running board of the car. Then he asked if she was hurt and she shook her head. He asked her how she happened to be there back of the sign and she shook her head again. He sat down beside her and watched her. He spoke to me about ‘filling his eyes with her for the rest of his life’—and other things that Eric would not have said normally—or if he had not been—er—infatuated. That was the word, wasn’t it?

“They sat there a long time without speaking, and she kept her eyes closed. The wind died away, but the rain persisted—a steady downpour; the green-gray of the storm daylight changed into the black-gray of steady rain. He waited.

“When she opened her eyes, he asked again how she happened to be there. After much urging she answered him.

“‘They turned me out of the house,’ she said.

“‘Turned you out!’ he repeated, incredulously. ‘In this storm! From your home! Why? What had you done?’

“‘I had stopped and looked at you,’ she answered simply.

“‘What?’ Eric put force into the word when he spoke it.

“‘I had looked at you. Stopped and looked. It was a sin. After that, I could not be allowed to live with those who were not sinners,’ she explained.

“‘I never heard of such a thing!’ he told her. ‘Are they crazy?’

“‘The signs tell you. It is their belief. It was a sin to have looked at you—and remembered.’

“Eric’s blood was racing; she had remembered! Looked at him, and remembered.

“‘Don’t worry. Just tell me,’ he urged.

“She told him. He did not tell me just what she said, but I could guess as I watched the light back in his eyes. Her father had opened the door and put her out in the rain as a wanton. He was very strict—father. As soon as the rain was over she would go to the other end of town where she had a friend who would take her in. No, she did not believe as her father and the people of the town believed; her mother had taken her away and she had been brought up differently, but when the mother had died, he had brought her back.

“‘My mother could not bear it here,’ she said. ‘I am not so brave as she, or I would go.’”

“Go on,” said Janet again.

“It’s a good story, isn’t it? Especially since we have our own opinions concerning him. No king of lovers, no Romeo, no schoolboy, could have told such a tale of first love as Eric told me. Spilled it out. Words tumbling over each other.

“In one look, in one half hour, it seemed, he had turned over all the principles upon which we live here in New York. The primal had taken him—and her, too. She was not afraid; not frightened at what she must have seen in him.

“‘And why, when he turned you out, did you come in here?’ he asked finally.

“He had never before listened for an answer as he listened for that one.

“‘I came because you were here,’ she said.

“Well, people—I began to see then what he was up against in the way of intoxication. He had not touched her; it had been all very aloof, but when she told him why she had come, he said he would have been wooden if he had not gathered her close and held her tight.

“Then, through the slackening rainfall, he heard footsteps outside their shelter, heard them on the soft ground close by, saw a stooped figure straighten under their tipped roof. It was one of the all-alike, brown-gray men with jammed-shut mouth and slashes down from it; with hate-filled eyes.

“This man levelled his finger at Eric. ‘Now ye kin have her,’ he said harshly. ‘Ye kin take her along o’ ye. There’s no door open in this town for such as her. They’re shut against her for ever. This is no place for her ever again. We’re done. All o’ us.’

“She sprang forward. ‘Father!’ she cried.

“He struck her with his open hand straight across the mouth.

“‘Harlot! Plaything o’ strange men!’ he accused, scornfully.

“Eric said that he reached for the man, but that she spread her arms between them.

“‘No!’ she exclaimed. ‘He believes it! He cannot help it. No, no!’

“The man did not speak again. He stooped under the slanting boards and went away.

“And now comes what Eric says was the strangest part of it—the way he took it. Back of the glamour of the girl’s lovely face; back of the pull of her, standing there in the slackening rain holding her wet skirts about her, her neck bare; back of the wonder of her, there rose a bank of his sane self—that self indifferent to all else. There towered a steeple of his future as he had planned it; of his ambitions; of his wealth and fame which were just beginning and for which he had worked hard. They grew—these steeples—and pushed closer. The girl watched him.

“She had not spoken to him since her father had gone away; she had stood aside while Eric got the car out upon the road; she had followed him to it and stood there clasping her bare elbows—lips parted like the Raphael girl-child, he said. She was oblivious to watchers behind drawn curtains.

“‘Now what shall you do?’ he asked her. ‘Does he mean it?”

“‘Yes, he means it. I shall walk to the next town. There will be something for me to do there.’

“‘I’m sorry——’ he began, all the steeples crowding around him.

“‘Don’t be. I’m glad. It gives me a chance to be brave as she was.’

“She put up one hand to her mouth and pressed her lips tight with it.

“‘It’s odd, isn’t it?’ she asked.

“He says he did not need to ask what was odd. He knew. It was the sudden new thing which was his—and hers. But the steeples were nearer. And a free life was what he had planned; it alone could bring him what he wanted. But he asked:

“‘Will you come with me, as he said?’

“She shook her head.

“‘Oh, no. I am not your kind.’

“‘But I love you,’ he told her then. You should have heard him speak those three words, the day he told me the story. Another man surely—not the Eric we know. He said it twice: ‘I love you.’

“‘And I you,’ the girl replied.

“‘Then come with me,’ he pleaded.

“‘No. It will pass. It cannot be the real thing. It was too quick for that.’

“She smiled, and he tried to laugh and say, without too much earnestness:

“‘Shall I come back some day?’

“She shook her head again.

“‘Please don’t.’

“He climbed slowly into the car, legs weighted, he said. He looked back as he gathered speed on the hard road. She was walking too slowly it seemed to him—her head too low——

“But everywhere were the steeples of fame and fortune to come if he were unhampered; if he could be always indifferent. The west had red streaks—— He drove away.”

“Oh, I hate the man!” cried Janet, indignantly. “It’s just like him! What became of her?”

“There she is now, at the end of the room,” said Kent, smiling at the evident astonishment of the group around him.

Eric Hall’s wife was lifting her coffee cup and laughing. Her filmy sleeves fell away from perfect arms; a jewel flashed from a tiny silver band in her hair. She was clearly the loveliest, the most distinguished woman there.

They stared at her.

“But you just said that he drove away!” some one exclaimed in amazement. “That was the drama of your story!”

“He drove back and got her,” finished Kent sententiously.

PHANTOM ADVENTURE
By FLOYD DELL
From Century

I. A Secret. He was not a banker by temperament. But nobody in New York, nobody east of the Rockies, knew that. It was his secret.

When he graduated from college, instead of preparing himself seriously for life by cleaning the inkwells in some Wall Street institution, as an ambitious young man should, he got a job on a Western ranch. He did this for no better reason than that he had been fond of reading about cowboys. He learned many things about horses and cattle, and made friends with every cowboy within a hundred miles. Nevertheless, he was not satisfied; for cowboy life, while interesting enough in fact, is less romantically adventurous than in fiction. Yet he stayed there for five years, dreaming now of the sea and reading stories of sailor adventures.

Then an uncle died, leaving him a legacy of a little more than five thousand dollars. With five thousand dollars a young man could get started in business, and it was high time for him to do so. He went to San Francisco and looked about for an opening.

In a café he met a man who had just come back from incredible adventures in the South Seas. To this man’s tales he listened all evening, and then went back to his lodging, where he could not sleep, but walked back and forth for hours in a little garden, dreaming, awake, of strange birds and strange trees and slim, brown, laughing girls with flowers in their hair.

Next morning he went down to the waterfront, and looked out thoughtfully in the direction of the South Seas. With his five thousand dollars he could buy or build a little boat and, with some congenial companion, set sail for those islands of incredible adventure. But he knew that this was mere romantic folly, more worthy of a boy than of a man. He must begin to take life seriously. He shook his head and frowned, and went on to the café.

Every morning—sometimes it was noon—for a whole year he went down to the waterfront and looked out over the bay. And every afternoon and evening he sat in some café. At the end of the year he had made many friends and heard many curious tales, and his money was all gone.

He began to look for a job. He had an extensive convivial acquaintance among the business men of the town; but they did not seem to have any job for him, though they were willing to lend him a few dollars.

So he borrowed a little money and came to New York, where no one knew, as he expressed it, what a damn fool he was.

He took care that no one should know. He got a job in a Fifth Avenue bank, and when he was barely forty he was one of its vice-presidents. He had an apartment in town and a house in the country and a car and a wife and four lovely children, and he was proud of them all.

He was proud of being a sober and responsible citizen—proud of having conquered his romantic propensities. Perhaps his children knew, from the wild, half-true and half-imagined tales he told them at their bedtime hours, that he was still at heart a romantic adventurer. But nobody else, and least of all his sweet and sensible wife, suspected his secret.

II. A Conversation. In the summer of his fortieth year the town apartment had been closed, and his wife and children were in the country. He himself was going to the country in a day or two, as soon as he had cleared up those matters, whatever they are, that keep bankers in town in August. He stayed at his club until one evening on an impulse he went down to an out-of-the-way little street near Washington Square, in the hope of hearing some talk from a man who lived there, and whom he had been thinking of at intervals all day.

He was thinking of this man because he had read the night before, at the club, a story of his in a magazine. This man was a writer of stories and lived in what was called Greenwich Village; and this particular story was one of romantic adventure in the South Seas. The story-writer’s wife and the banker’s wife had been friends from girlhood, and the story-writer and the banker were acquaintances of a sort. The banker was always a little aware in the other’s presence of his own secret and foolish past. He was embarrassed when he talked of financial conditions by a fear and perhaps also a hope that the other would somehow see through him. Also he kept wondering if a writer imagined all his romantic adventures or if some of them had really happened. He particularly wondered this about the story he had read the night before at the club, for it gave such a vivid description of a South Sea island that it seemed as though it could only have been written by one who had lived there.

The story-writer was at home. His wife, he explained, was at the seashore with the children, and he was staying in town to do a story or two to pay their summer bills. He sat down again in his study, cocking up his feet on the typewriter desk and lighting a fresh cigarette.

“No, you’re not interrupting me,” he said. “Don’t worry about that. I never get started to work till after midnight, and I want somebody to talk to while this new South Sea yarn ferments in my head. Have a cigarette.” He started to talk. Again the banker had the feeling of guarding a secret.

It was nearly midnight when the conversation took a turn that promised to satisfy the banker’s curiosities.

“It’s odd,” said the story-writer, and paused. “It’s very odd. I’m supposed to be a respectable citizen. But consider these stories of mine. The hero, who is me, meets a beautiful girl and falls in love with her. Sometimes she is a princess, sometimes a chorus girl; just now she is usually a dusky maiden with flowers in her hair. I suppose I’ve met and made love to more than a hundred girls in the course of my literary career. To be sure, I always ask them to marry me; but I never tell them of all the other beautiful heroines I have loved and left behind me. And yet nobody thinks I’m a scoundrel. Not even my wife!”

“Of course not,” said the banker. “That would be absurd.”

“Yes, it would be unthinkable,” said the story-writer. “For when I have finished one of my adventures, I mail it to an editor and get a check for it. And that’s exactly why my wife doesn’t object. It pays the rent; and so it’s perfectly all right for me to spend my life in extra-matrimonial love scenes. But why do I get paid for these adventures?” he went on meditatively. “Because people want adventures. When a man reads one of my romantic yarns, he becomes the hero, he makes love to beautiful, strange girls. And yet no one has thought of proposing laws to forbid married men to read love stories.”

“After all,” said the banker, ironically, “there is a slight difference between reading a love adventure and going out and having one.”

“No,” said the story-writer; “the difference is not slight; it is considerable. But just what is that difference? A love adventure in story form is guaranteed to be complete in itself, to be over when it is finished, and to leave behind it nothing but a pleasant memory in the reader’s mind. In all these ways it differs from a love adventure in reality concerning which no such safe guarantees can be offered. We try to live orderly lives, and while the love adventures of reality may upset the well considered plans of a lifetime, the other kind leave everything exactly as it was. The heroine may swoon with ecstasy in your arms to-night; but she will not call you up on the telephone in the morning or write you passionate and compromising letters.”

“Poor girl—she can’t!” said the banker.

“She doesn’t want to. It is only women of the real world who want love to be a part of life. She belongs to the world of romance, which has laws of its own.”

“The world of fancy,” said the banker.

“Don’t pretend to despise the world of fancy,” said the story-writer. “Fond as we are of the real world, it is far from satisfying all our demands. It is too inexorable. The phantom world of fancy is in many respects a more agreeable place. And everybody goes to it for solace. The sober triumphs of reality are never able for long to satisfy us; always we turn from those four-square actualities to live for a delightful hour in that extravagant land where our most impossible wishes can come true. It is a need of our human nature.”

“Oh, no doubt,” said the banker. “But nevertheless——”

The story-teller interrupted him.

“Have you thought of this? That the self which goes out adventuring in the land of fancy is not a part of this real life of ours, at all? It is a kind of phantom, existing joyously and irresponsibly in a phantom world.”

“I hadn’t thought of it just like that,” said the banker, reflectively.

“But here is the real question. These adventurers in the phantom realm of fancy, why do they never meet?”

The banker stared.

“I’m not sure that I understand you.”

“Suppose a man and a girl, unknown to each other, reading the same story at the same time; their phantom selves are sharing the same adventure, one that some writer has created for them. But suppose they dispense with the writer’s assistance. Suppose these phantom selves should meet and create their own adventure. Why not?”

The banker stirred uneasily in his chair.

The story-writer laughed.

“It might happen.”

“It might,” said the banker.

“I wonder,” said the story-writer, “what my wife would say if I told her of such an adventure. It would be like all my other adventures, more beautiful, perhaps, than any of the others. And yet——”

“I hope,” said the banker, frowning, “that you——”

“Go to bed,” said the story-writer, suddenly. “You’ll find the guest room on the top floor. I’m going to get to work on my South Sea story. I’ll call you up for coffee in the morning.”

He took his feet down from the typewriter desk and threw away his cigarette. His hands hovered over the keyboard and already he had forgotten the outer world, including his guest, who rose and wandered uncertainly from the room.

III. The Ivory Gate. He found the guest room upstairs. But whether it was the faint clicking of the typewriter below that disturbed him, or his own thoughts, he was disinclined to sleep.

There was a pile of magazines on the table, and he began to read a story. It was the kind of story he had been fond of all his life, an adventure and a strange meeting with a beautiful girl.

But he let the magazine slip to the floor. He was thinking of old times in San Francisco. He remembered that he had wanted to build a boat and sail to the South Seas.

“But I didn’t!” he said to himself triumphantly.

No—a mocking thought came to remind him—he had stayed on shore and listened to café yarns.

But since then he had been sensible. He had been sensible for twelve years. Twelve years! In a sudden panic he wondered if his youth had slipped by and vanished with those years. He went over and gazed at himself in the mirror. He saw a man in the prime of life, strong and clear-eyed.

He did not want to go to bed; but perhaps a walk to the club would make him sleepy. He debated whether to disturb the man at work below to tell him, and decided he would not. He went downstairs quietly.

On the second floor he looked out to reassure himself as to the weather. The sky was a little cloudy, that was all. And then, as he stood there looking out of the hall window, he saw below him a little garden in the moonlight. He looked away quickly, but not in time, for he remembered a moonlit garden perched on one of the hills of San Francisco, where as a young man he had walked night after night dreaming impossible things. That memory was painful, and he hurried downstairs and took his hat to leave the house. But the pain of that memory was strangely sweet and afflicted him with a kind of nostalgia. He wanted to go out into this garden and be again the young fool he had been. He walked up and down the hall with his hat in his hand, wanting to go away and wanting to stay and dream in this garden. It was a queer thing. He had stopped drinking, and he had stopped dreaming, years ago; the desire for drink had never come back, but the desire for dreaming was upon him again. He felt that his whole life of triumphant common sense was at stake. But no, it couldn’t be. An hour in a moonlit garden could not undo the solid achievement of twelve years. He put his hat back on the stand. With a guilty feeling of having yielded to a weakness, he went quietly out, past the door from behind which came the inspired click of typewriter keys fashioning some strange adventure.

In the garden he stood and looked about. There was a full moon above, dimmed with clouds and casting that half-light which transforms the accustomed world into the realm of fancy. On such a night as this—Odd bits of poetry, remembered from his youth, came into his mind.

Across from where he stood was a high board fence, and in it a gate, painted ivory-white. He had an impulse to go over and open it. But instead he stood still, mockingly analysing that impulse. “In a story,” he said to himself, “there would be an adventure waiting in the next garden. But in real life, as I well know, there is only another garden, like this, with no one there. People do not moon about in gardens.”

But then he reflected, “I am mooning about in a garden.” Realizing that bankers do not do such things, it seemed to him that he was not a banker, but, as his friend had said, a phantom in a phantom world where impossible things come true.

He surrendered himself for a moment to this feeling, and began to think foolish thoughts, such as he had not thought for twelve years.

“What if there should be an adventure waiting for me on the other side of that gate? What if there were a girl in that garden, waiting?” These thoughts were frightening, and nevertheless they made him happy.

Then his common sense reasserted itself. There was nothing in that other garden, and he was being a damn fool. He reflected gratefully that no one would ever know what a damn fool he was. The depositors at the bank could never guess, nor could his wife. And since there was nothing on the other side of the gate, he might as well go and open it and look into the garden, and then go back to bed.

He walked over to the gate, and there he paused. Why trouble himself to prove what he already knew? Why not keep intact the memory of this absurd fancy and have the pleasure of thinking that perhaps, after all, there had been an adventure waiting beyond that gate?

He realized that if he opened the gate and nothing happened, it would hurt. He put his hand on the latch in a mood curiously like the mood of prayer. If he had had a God to whom such a prayer could be addressed, he might have prayed, that just this once—— But his was no pagan deity, and so he did not pray. Lacking the courage that prayer sometimes gives, he took his hand from the latch.

Then he remembered how he had gone down to the waterfront every morning and looked out over the bay and never set sail for the islands of romance; and he felt that this was a test. It didn’t make any difference what happened: he couldn’t turn back.

He pushed open the gate softly.

Seated on a little wooden bench was a girl; her face was turned away from him, but he could see the languid sweep of a slender arm, bare and beautiful.

One last reminder of his ordinary self intruded into his mind, the façade of the bank on Fifth Avenue, symbol of twelve years of sturdy effort in the realm of common sense. But it seemed to have no relation whatever to this moment, and it faded and was gone.

He stood looking at the girl for the space of a breath; then he walked over to her through a tangle of moonlight that broke through the branches of an elm.

IV. Afterward. The milk wagons were rattling over the streets when he went back through the ivory gate, and he could hear the typewriter still clattering within the house. He went silently to the guest room. The adventure was over, and now he had to think about its relation to actuality. But he did not think; he fell asleep.

At the bank there were other matters to occupy his mind. On the train to the country that afternoon there was a neighbour who talked about financial conditions. At the end of the ride there was his wife’s welcome and the children climbing into his arms. It wasn’t until after dinner that he had any time to think.

He was rather surprised at his thoughts. They were, first of all, thoughts of relief at being back at home. It was as if he had strayed for a few hours out of time and space, and was happy to find himself again safely within the cosy contours of the familiar. He was glad to be back in a world that had a meaning beyond the moment, a world that reached back in memory and forward in hope, the world of reality.

As a happy citizen of this comfortable world, he was naturally concerned with the inquiry whether his position in it had been endangered by last night’s adventure. And it seemed to him that he need have no fear. That adventure was a thing utterly apart from all the rest of his life—a thing complete and perfect in itself, with no sequel to be feared or hoped for; they did not even know each other’s names. She herself had preferred that it should be so.

“And,” she had said, “you needn’t fear that it will ever be made commonplace by our meeting at a tea somewhere; you will never see me again.” And he had said, laughing:

“You speak as though you were going to die or going on a very long journey!”

“Yes,” she said; “something like that. You mustn’t ask me about it, only take my word for it.”

And he believed her. Why, he did not know. But to-day he was glad to be so sure that their adventure was ended and that no one but themselves could ever know about it.... He had asked his friend the story-writer over their morning coffee:

“Who lives in that little white house next door, a writer?” and was told, “A school-teacher, I believe.” Evidently his friend did not know of the school-teacher’s guest. No; so far as all the world was concerned, there had been no midnight adventure. It was as detached from reality, as immaterial from any common-sense point of view, as if it had been merely a story he had read in a magazine that night. He might, if he wished, think of it as that.

He was a little startled, as by an odd coincidence, when his wife asked: “Shall I read you a story? The new magazines have come.” But really it was no coincidence at all, for she knew that he liked magazine stories and enjoyed being read to in the evenings. The thing had happened many times before; nevertheless, it was a little strange to be listening to such a story, while in and out of his mind there flashed bright memories of another story.

“Why always the South Seas, I wonder?” his wife paused to remark, looking up from the big chair where she sat with the magazine in her lap. “I suppose it is a more romantic place.”

“Yes, perhaps,” he said.

He had talked to that girl last night about the South Seas; he had said he would like to take her there to see the strange birds and flowers. And she had told him about Venice. And while they talked of sailboats and gondolas, they were sitting on a garden bench.

“He gets the romantic atmosphere rather well, doesn’t he?” said his wife. “I think I can guess which one of the girls he is going to fall in love with, the one with the red hibiscus flower in her hair. What do you think?”

“Very likely,” he agreed.

Who was she, the girl of last night’s story? He couldn’t guess. She wasn’t young, as girls in stories are; there were even tragic lines marring the beauty of what had been a lovely face. But her eyes were incredibly young—the eyes of a child, full of wild dreams. Perhaps, in her ordinary life, she was some one quite different from what she had been that night—as different as he had been from his ordinary self. None of his friends would have recognized him as the romantic wanderer whom she had held for a moment in her arms. He had even quoted poetry to her. On such a night as this—Well, he didn’t care; it had not been sham. It was another part of himself. And she? It did not matter what she was to her friends. Last night she had been his strange and lovely playmate.

His wife looked up from the magazine.

“A little improbable, don’t you think?”

Many things were improbable, he reflected. That room last night, with its flowers and tall candles.

“This isn’t my place, you know,” she had said. “Shall I tell you the story? It belongs to a school-teacher, a queer little old-maidish person one would have thought if one had seen her in her schoolroom, no doubt. She invested all her savings in oil stock; and contrary to what you might expect, she made a fortune,—oh, just a little fortune, but enough to last her for the rest of her life. And she bought this house in Greenwich Village, and fitted up this room as a place for romantic things to happen in. But nothing romantic happened. So yesterday, when we met—she was going away on a visit, and I was in town for a day and a night, on my way somewhere else—well, we became very quickly acquainted, and she wanted me to stay here. I was thinking of her when you walked into her garden to-night. Shall I tell you? I think that she believed I was the sort of person to whom romantic things do happen, and that if I were here this room of hers would fulfil its destiny. Is it shameless of me to tell you that?”

“It’s beautiful of you to tell me that,” and he took her in his arms, no longer wondering how this adventure would end.

“I don’t like her.” It was his wife, speaking of the heroine of the story she was reading.

“Why not?”

“She isn’t real.”

He looked at his wife. She was real. And that was better than being the phantom creature of a lovely moment. Why should she begrudge the other kind of girl her moment?

It was odd; he wasn’t in the least ashamed. Men, he remembered, sometimes had bad consciences over things like this, they were driven to confession by remorse. But he had nothing to be sorry for. Why should he confess?

His wife laid the magazine aside a little petulantly.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s just a story.”

“Yes,” he said absently, “just a story.”

V. The Face. It was a fortnight before he went back to town. That evening he invited his friend the story-writer to dinner, and they talked. And, as it seemed, by accident, their talk touched upon the subject of neighbours.

“Is Greenwich Village any different in that way from uptown? Do you know your school-teacher neighbour in the little white house next door, for instance?” Surely, he thought, it could not be rash to ask that. Certainly his friend would not suspect him of a personal interest in an old-maid school-teacher. So he was thinking when he heard, “She died there to-day.”

Afterward he could hardly believe what had happened except that a wild conviction came into his mind, whirling him out of his chair, out of the restaurant. He wandered somewhere, with one thought in his mind:

He must see that dead face.

Then he found himself in a house, in that house, among a fluttered group of school-teachers, who talked to him about the woman who had died. They took him for one of her family. He did not talk to them. He went up a stairway and into a room with faded flowers and tall candles ranged about a high bed like an altar. A dead woman lay there, with a sheet drawn over her face. He lifted the cloth and looked at her face and went away silently.

VI. The Confession. It was queer, he knew, this impulse to confess that haunted him day and night. When she had been alive he had never wished to speak the words that might set him free to seek again the strange solace of her lips and arms. But now that she was for ever out of reach, he felt this mad compulsion to make known their shadowy love.

To speak now would be to risk losing all the happiness he had built up for himself in the real world, out of an inexplicable loyalty to the memory of his dead playmate. But he could not think of such things now. He could think only of the dreamer who had decked a room for a beautiful adventure that did not come, and who sat in a garden waiting, wondering whether death would come before the adventure; and of a gate that swung open one moonlit night to make her dream come true, and of two adventurers happy for an uncalendared hour in the phantom world of fancy. The time would come, his reason urged, when this memory would be a thing remote and forgotten, when it would no longer hold for him even the ache of regret, when its pathos even would be faded, as its bright joys were already fading in his thoughts. He would be sorry to have spoken. He would know that he had been a fool to speak. But now, though he lost everything that would one day be dear to him again, he did not care.

He fought against that mad impulse while he could. Then, lest he blurt the thing out suddenly, he began to plan the manner of his confession.

He remembered a fantastic idea uttered that night by the story-writer and he thought, “It will be easier to tell it to her first as a story.”

And one evening he told her the story.

He began haltingly enough, constrained as he was to present to her imagination these two nameless figures of a man and a woman who had wished rashly for a happiness not to be had within the solid confines of reality; but as he talked, he forgot all else, and his confession became a passionate vindication of the rights of that phantom self for which the workaday world has so little use, and which can achieve only a pitiful and momentary freedom in what the world calls folly. Then, for he had come to the end of his tale, in that picture of a room with its faded flowers and spent candles and a face whose eyes were no longer bright with wild dreams, abruptly he ceased speaking. And it seemed to him that even without as yet naming himself, he had confessed his crime of secret rebellion against the wisdom of the world.

He looked up and saw that there were tears in his wife’s eyes.

“It’s true,” she said. “Women do feel like that.”

He was bewildered.

“All women,” she went on. “But I didn’t think men knew. How did you know?”

He was about to tell her how he knew, when she spoke again, softly.

“I’m glad she found so beautiful a lover.”

Then he was ashamed, of what, he hardly knew, unless it was of what he seemed to his wife. He realized that he was to her merely what he had laboured for twelve years to seem to all the world. Not the foolish adventurer of his tale; no, she could never believe that. He imagined how it would sound to her if he pretended to be that man in the story. It would be the strangest argument in the annals of marriage. He could prove nothing; his secret was fatally secure. She would say, “You have dreamed it, dear.”

And seeing himself with her eyes, he was shaken by a doubt. Perhaps it had been just a dream.

VII. Catharsis. But presently a thought of bitter comfort came; he would tell his friend the story-writer, who would do what was after all the only sensible thing to do with a dream in this world, sell it to other dreamers.

And after a time that was what happened.

THE DISTANT STREET
By FRANCIS EDWARDS FARAGOH
From The New Pearson’s
(Pearson’s Magazine, 157 E. Ohio St., Chicago, Ill.)

ON the sidewalk pools of yellow light. Stretches of evening-tinted pavement between them, around them. Gray pavement, with touches of black. To Emmanuel, as he stood in the uncertainly lighted doorway of the college building, the street called out. The yellow pools leaped out of their own flatness; they sang and touched his hands.

Still, he dared not leave the doorway. Every evening it was the same. The street was not for him. The yellow bits of sidewalk, stealing their gold from the lights of the soft-curtained doors, low windows along the street, were not his. He was an outsider. For three years, ever since he had started going to the college, he had known that. And now, again, he felt that he would always remain an outsider.

Sometimes, during the day, Emmanuel would look out of the window of one of the classrooms and try to understand the street. But while daylight was on the pavements, the street was very much like other streets. It was only in the evening that it became alluring, that it became forbidding, throwing light-kisses that were not for him.

No, it would not be wise to go into the street, thought Emmanuel. But he knew that, although impotent rage was causing his legs to tremble, he loved all the hasty-gabled houses and arched doorways, the lawns with their now dusky smiles. This street had a song about it. His own street—that other one, downtown, under the humpbacked shadow of the Williamsburg bridge—had no song. It had only butcher shops and fruit stands and grimy children and smells. Garbage cans and stoops that were unswept and slouching houses which pushed their bellies out into the evening and grinned.

Emmanuel waited in the doorway. Someone would come out. Someone always did. Then, together, it would be easier to face the street, talking in fast, loud sentences to shut out the song. He peered into the building. Yes, someone was approaching. Luck! He knew the man, one of his classmates. He knew, also, that he would not be considered welcome by the other. But that didn’t matter. Anything rather than walk alone....

“Are you going to the Subway?” He tried to conceal his anxiety, desperately forcing the question to be casual.

“Why ... yes!” Not cordial, just as Emmanuel had expected. They thought him queer.... Well.... The main thing was that he’d not have to walk to the subway alone. Blocks and blocks.

“Anything happen in the psychiatry class? I cut it, you know.” Had to make conversation! Oh, anything.... The street....

“No. Nothing much. Old man Hedley gassed some more about maniac-depressives. Usual stuff.”

Hedley ... that was the professor ... maniac-depressives ... oh, yes, maniac-depressives.... (Was that somebody laughing up in that window, behind those flowers? A girl) ... maniac....

“He ... he didn’t.... (A girl! Her body can’t be seen, but she must have white shoulders, smiling through the transparent crimson shawl!) ... let me see ... oh, yes ... he didn’t say when those paranoia reports are due?”

“No.”

“He didn’t! That’s funny!” Emmanuel began to laugh softly. He could feel, without actually seeing it, that the other threw him a questioning troubled glance from the corner of his eye. That made him laugh more. The fool! He didn’t know that the laughter belonged to the girl behind the flowers, to the girl who must have silken eyes and a soft throat. “Well, I guess I’ll cut to-morrow again.”

“Yes?” Without interest.

“Yes!” A warmth came over Emmanuel. He felt himself getting angry, at what he didn’t know. “Yes! I’ll cut it as many times as I damn feel like it. See?” He realized that this required an explanation. “I’m no good at the stuff. I don’t want to be good at it. I’ll never be a doctor. I hate the thought of ever being a doctor.”

“Then why did you come to the school?” In spite of himself the man was compelled to ask. He was amazed at the fury in Emmanuel’s words. “Why did you take up medicine?”

“Why? What the hell do you ask me that for? Don’t you know?” Emmanuel wasn’t listening to himself. The questions had come out of his mouth almost automatically. This was not his only conversation of the kind. Just now he was paying attention to the piano that was being played in a house up the street. “No, I guess you can’t know,” his mouth continued. “You’re not a Jew.”

“What has that to do with it?”

A wailing chord ... was there some regret in that music? Who played it? Another girl? One with seeking eyes?

“Everything! When you’re a Jew your family works for you ... your father, your mother, sisters even ... and you study. And all the time they look at you so hungry, so impatient, demanding that you hurry, hurry, through college, through all your years. That you make money. That’s what they want. And then they’ve got their damned pride, too. You must become a professional man. A lawyer, a doctor.... God, their rotten selfishness! Always driving you, hungry, exacting....”

The other was frightened. Emmanuel knew that and he grinned with pleasure. He was flattered. Frightened—of him. That was good! He heard the uncertain tone:

“Well, what would you like to do instead?”

Ah.... It had come! Emmanuel stopped. Under his feet a yellow patch of light, on his hair, uncovered now as he snatched off his hat, the notes of the piano rested for a moment before rushing along the street. Emmanuel could see the chords in the air, he told himself. They glowed. There were flames in them. He threw out his arms, indicating the street:

“This! This is what I’d like to do!”

His companion also had to stop. Out of bewildered gray eyes he looked at Emmanuel. He didn’t understand, of course.

“This?”

“This! You hear that music ...?” He stepped closer to the man, grabbed his lapels. “You hear it? I could do that!”

“Do it?” Absolutely terrified! Emmanuel grinned with satisfaction. He released him. “Why, do you play an instrument?”

“No ... no....” What a fool! But why should he understand?

“Oh, you compose....”

Idiot!

“I don’t have to compose! I don’t have to play!” Snarling: “I said I could do it. You don’t have to know a note to do it.... It’s just got to be in you....” His hands dropped. A silly smile came into his face. What’s the use? “I guess I can’t explain. I don’t know myself exactly what I mean. Take the sky, for instance. It’s like a banner. That’s it, a torn banner. Well, I could do that, too! Not paint it, or write about it, though. Something else....”

The other had left him. Emmanuel looked after the hurrying man and he knew that an empty papier-mâché figure was going there, a papier-mâché figure made of flesh, curiously, and that terror was dogging the steps of that figure. Let him run! Let him think that he, Emmanuel Wolkowitz, is a lunatic! Let him run. Now, now he was not afraid of the street. He turned and shouted into it:

“I won’t be a doctor!”

He shook his fist into the face of the houses:

“I won’t be a doctor!”

Blood rushed to his face. He coughed. Perspiration stood on his forehead. He felt tired, spent. How would he ever get home? The Subway.... He turned into the station. But the music, although that had been blocks beyond, kept on following him. He muttered.

“That’s Rachmaninoff.... No, it isn’t.... I don’t know what it is.... I don’t know one piece from another.... Why don’t I?”

O. HENRY MEMORIAL AWARDPRIZE STORIESof 1923

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PRELUDEBy EDGAR VALENTINE SMITHFrom Harper’s

A FRIEND OF NAPOLEONBy RICHARD CONNELLFrom Saturday Evening Post

TOWERS OF FAMEBy ELIZABETH IRONS FOLSOMFrom McClure’s