O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 51

Dong-Yung, still arrayed for feasting, went to the pigskin trunk in the corner, fitted the key from her belt into the carven bra.s.s wings of the b.u.t.terfly, and lifted out the kitchen G.o.ds. One in each hand, she held them, green and gold. She put them back in their niche, and lifted up a bowl of rice to their feet, and beat her head on the ground before them.

"Forgive me, O my kitchen G.o.ds, forgive my injurious hands and heart; but the love of my master is even greater than my fear of thee. Thou and I, we bar the gates of heaven from him."

When she had finished, she tiptoed around the room, touching the chairs and tables with caressing fingers. She stole out into the courtyard, and bent to inhale the lily fragrance, sweeter by night than by day. "An auspicious day," the gate-keeper had said that morning. Foh-Kyung had stood beside her, with his feet in the sunshine; she remembered the light in his eyes. She bent her head till the fingers of the lily-petals touched her cheek. She crept back through the house, and looked at Foh-Kyung smoking. His eyes were dull, even as are the eyes of sightless bronze Buddhas. No, she would never risk going in to speak to him. If she heard the sound of his voice, if he called her "little Flower of the House," she would never have the strength to go. So she stood in the doorway and looked at him much as one looks at a sun, till wherever else one looks, one sees the same sun against the sky.

In the formless shadow she made a great obeisance, spreading out her arms and pressing the palms of her hands against the floor.

"O my Lord and Master," she said, with her lips against the boards of the floor, softly, so that none might hear her--"O my Lord and Master, I go. Even a small wife may unbar the gates of heaven."

First, before she went, she cast the two kitchen G.o.ds, green and gold, of ancient plaster, into the embers of the fire. There in the morning the cook-rice amahs found the onyx stones that had been their eyes. The house was still unlocked, the gate-keeper at the feast. Like a shadow she moved along the wall and through the gate. The smell of the lilies blew past her. Drums and chants echoed up the road, and the sounds of manifold feastings. She crept away down by the wall, where the moon laid a strip of blackness, crept away to unbar the gates of heaven for her lord and master.

APRIL 25TH, AS USUAL

By EDNA FERBER

From _Ladies Home Journal_

Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster always cleaned house in September and April. She started with the attic and worked her purifying path down to the cellar in strict accordance with Article I, Section I, Unwritten Rules for House Cleaning. For twenty-five years she had done it. For twenty-five years she had hated it--being an intelligent woman. For twenty-five years, towel swathed about her head, skirt pinned back, sleeves rolled up--the costume dedicated to house cleaning since the days of What's-Her-Name, mother of Lemuel (see Proverbs)--Mrs. Brewster had gone through the ceremony twice a year.

Furniture on the porch, woolens on the line, mattresses in the yard--everything that could be pounded, beaten, whisked, rubbed, flapped, shaken or aired was dragged out and subjected to one or all of these indignities. After which, completely cowed, they were dragged in again and set in their places. Year after year, in attic and in cellar, things had piled up higher and higher--useless things, sentimental things; things in trunks; things in chests; shelves full of things wrapped up in brown-paper parcels.

And boxes--oh, above all, boxes; pasteboard boxes, long and flat, square and oblong, each bearing weird and cryptic pencilings on one end; cryptic, that, is to anyone except Mrs. Brewster and you who have owned an attic. Thus "H's Fshg Tckl" jabberwocked one long slim box. Another stunned you with "Cur Ted Slpg Pch." A cabalistic third hid its contents under "Slp Cov Pinky Rm." To say nothing of such curt yet intriguing fragments as "Blk Nt Drs" and "Sun Par Val." Once you had the code key they translated themselves simply enough into such homely items as Hosey's fishing tackle, canvas curtains for Ted's sleeping porch, slip-covers for Pinky's room, black net dress, sun-parlour valence.

The contents of those boxes formed a commentary on normal American household life as lived by Mr. and Mrs. Hosea C. Brewster, of Winnebago, Wisconsin. Hosey's rheumatism had prohibited trout fishing these ten years; Ted wrote from Arizona that "the li'l' ol' sky" was his sleeping-porch roof and you didn't have to worry out there about the neighbours seeing you in your pyjamas; Pink's rose-cretonne room had lacked an occupant since Pinky left the Winnebago High School for the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute, thence to New York and those amazingly successful magazine covers that stare up at you from your table--young lady, hollow chested (she'd need to be with that decolletage), carrying feather fan.

You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves the black net dress and sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.

Now don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking, ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin, were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.

Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and Georgette and alligator pears; and Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster house was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises as well-to-do Middle Western home is likely to be.

That home had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically, that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--intolerance and understanding humanness--until now, as you talked with them, you felt that there was room and to spare of sun-filled mental chambers, and shelves well stored with experience, and pantries and bins and closets for all your worries and confidences.

But the attic! And the cellar! The attic was the kind of attic every woman longs for who hasn't one and every woman loathes who has. "If I only had some place to put things in!" wails the first. And, "If it weren't for the attic I'd have thrown this stuff away long ago,"

complains the second. Mrs. Brewster herself had helped plan it. Hardwood floored, s.p.a.cious light, the Brewster attic revealed to you the social, aesthetic, educational and spiritual progress of the entire family as clearly as if a sociologist had chartered it.

Take, for example (before we run down to the cellar for a minute), the crayon portraits of Gran'ma and Gran'pa Brewster. When Ted had been a junior and Pinky a freshman at the Winnebago High School the crayon portraits had beamed down upon them from the living-room wall. To each of these worthy old people the artist had given a pair of hectic pink cheeks. Gran'ma Brewster especially, simpering down at you from the labyrinthian scrolls of her s.e.xtuple gold frame, was rouged like a soubrette and further embellished with a pair of gentian-blue eyes behind steel-bowed specs. Pinky--and in fact the entire Brewster household--had thought these ma.s.sive atrocities the last word in artistic ornament. By the time she reached her soph.o.m.ore year, Pinky had prevailed upon her mother to banish them to the dining-room. Then two years later, when the Chicago decorator did over the living-room and the dining-room, the crayons were relegated to the upstairs hall.

Ted and Pinky, away at school, began to bring their friends back with them for the vacations Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the checks as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting-places in a nondescript back chamber known as the serving room. Then the new sleeping porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended their journeying in the attic.

One paragraph will cover the cellar. Stationary tubs, laundry stove.

Behind that, bin for potatoes, bin for carrots, bins for onions, apples, cabbages. Boxed shelves for preserves. And behind that Hosea C.

Brewster's _bete noir_ and plaything, tyrant and slave--the furnace.

"She's eating up coal this winter," Hosea Brewster would complain. Or: "Give her a little more draft, Fred." Fred, of the furnace and lawn mower, would shake a doleful head. "She ain't drawin' good. I do' know what's got into her."

By noon of this particular September day--a blue-and-gold Wisconsin September day--Mrs. Brewster had reached that stage in the cleaning of the attic when it looked as if it would never be clean and orderly again. Taking into consideration Miz' Merz (Mis' Merz by-the-day, you understand) and Gussie, the girl, and Fred, there was very little necessity for Mrs. Brewster's official house-cleaning uniform. She might have unpinned her skirt, unbound her head, rolled down her sleeves and left for the day, serene in the knowledge that no corner, no chandelier, no mirror, no curlicue so hidden, so high, so glittering, so ornate that it might hope to escape the rag or brush of one or the other of this relentless and expert crew.

Every year, twice a year, as this box, that trunk or chest was opened and its contents revealed, Mis' Merz would say "You keepin' this, Miz'

Brewster?"

"That? Oh, dear yes!" Or: "Well--I don't know. You can take that home with you if you want it. It might make over for Minnie."

Yet why, in the name of all that's ridiculous, did she treasure the funeral wheat wreath in the walnut frame? Nothing is more _pa.s.se_ than a last summer's hat, yet the leghorn and pink-cambric-rose thing in the tin trunk was the one Mrs. Brewster had worn when a bride. Then the plaid kilted dress with the black velvet monkey jacket that Pinky had worn when she spoke her first piece at the age of seven--well, these were things that even the rapacious eye of Miz' Merz (by-the-day) pa.s.sed by unbrightened by covetousness.

The smell of soap and water, and cedar, and moth b.a.l.l.s, and dust, and the ghost of a perfumery that Pinky used to use pervaded the hot attic.

Mrs. Brewster, head and shoulders in a trunk, was trying not to listen and not to seem not to listen to Miz' Merz' recital of her husband's relations' latest flagrancy.

"'Families is nix,' I says. 'I got my own family to look out fuh,' I says. Like that. 'Well,' s's he, 'w'en it comes to _that_,' s's he, 'I guess I got some--'" Punctuated by thumps, spatterings, swashings and much heavy breathing, so that the sound of light footsteps along the second-floor hallway, a young clear voice calling, then the same footsteps, fleeter now, on the attic stairway, were quite unheard.

Pinky's arm were around her mother's neck and for one awful moment it looked as if both were to be decapitated by the trunk lid, so violent had been Mrs. Brewster's start of surprise.

Incoherent little cries, and sentences unfinished.

"Pinky! Why--my baby! We didn't get your telegram. Did you--"

"No; I didn't. I just thought I--Don't look so dazed, mummy--You're all smudged too--what in the world!" Pinky straightened her hat and looked about the attic. "Why, mother! You're--you're house cleaning!" There was a stunned sort of look on her face. Pinky's last visit home had been in June, all hammocks, and roses, and especially baked things, and motor trips into the country.

"Of course. This is September. But if I'd known you were coming--Come here to the window. Let mother see you. Is that the kind of hat they're--why, its a winter one, isn't it? Already! Dear me, I've just got used to the angle of my summer one. You must telephone father."

Miz' Merz damply calicoed, rose from a corner and came forward, wiping a moist and parboiled hand on her skirt. "Ha' do, Pinky? Ain't forgot your old friends, have you?"

"It's Mrs. Merz!" Pinky put her cool, sweet fingers into the other woman's spongy clasp. "Why, h.e.l.lo, Mrs. Merz! Of course when there's house cleaning--I'd forgotten all about house cleaning--that there was such a thing, I mean."

"It's got to be done," replied Miz' Merz severely.

Pinky, suddenly looking like one of her own magazine covers (in tailor clothes), turned swiftly to her mother. "Nothing of the kind," she said crisply. She looked about the hot, dusty, littered room. She included and then banished it all with one sweeping gesture. "Nothing of the kind. This is--this is an anachronism."

"Mebbe so," retorted Miz' Merz with equal crispness. "But it's got to be cleaned just the same. Yessir; it's got to be cleaned."

They smiled at each other then, the mother and daughter. They descended the winding attic stairs happily, talking very fast and interrupting each other.

Mrs. Brewster's skirt was still pinned up. Her hair was bound in the protecting towel. "You must telephone father. No, let's surprise him.

You'll hate the dinner--built around Miz' Merz; you know--boiled. Well, you know what a despot she is."

It was hot for September, in Wisconsin. As they came out to the porch Pinky saw that there were tiny beads of moisture under her mother's eyes and about her chin. The sight infuriated her somehow. "Well, really, mother!"

Mrs. Brewster unpinned her skirt and smoothed it down and smiled at Pinky, all unconscious that she looked like a plump, pink Sister of Mercy with that towel bound tightly about her hair. With a swift movement Pinky unpinned the towel, unwound it, dabbed with it tenderly at her mother's chin and brow, rolled it into a vicious wad and hurled it through the open doorway.

"Now just what does that mean?" said Mrs. Brewster equably. "Take off your hat and coat, Pinky, but don't treat them that way--unless that's the way they're doing in New York. Everything is so informal since the war." She had a pretty wit of her own, Mrs. Brewster.

Of course Pinky laughed then, and kissed her mother and hugged her hard.

"It's just that it seems idiotic--your digging around in an attic in this day and age! Why it's--it's--" Pinky could express herself much more clearly in colours than in words. "There is no such thing as an attic. People don't clean them any more. I never realized before--this huge house. It has been wonderful to come back to, of course. But just you and dad." She stopped. She raised two young fists high in important anger. "Do you _like_ cleaning the attic?"

"Why, no. I hate it."

"Then why in the world--"