O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 54

The blue shadows lengthened. The gang knocked off work. The last log was rushed down the satin ice of the chute to leap over its fellows at the foot. The smell of bacon sifted through the odours of evergreen branches and new-cut wood. Crossman declined a cordial invitation to join the gang at chuck. He must be getting back, he explained, "for chow at the Boss's."

Whistling, he entered the office, stirred up the fire, and crossed to the cook-house. It was empty. The charcoal fire was out. Shivering, he rebuilt it, looked through the larder, and hacked off a ragged slice of jerked venison. A film of fear rose in his soul. What if they were _really_ gone? What if Antoine _had_ taken her? It looked like it. His heart sank. Not to see her again! Not to feel her strange, thrilling presence! Not to sense that indomitable, insolent soul, throwing its challenge before it as it walked through the world!

Crossman came out, returned to the office, busied himself in tidying the living room and solving the disorder of his desk. The twilight sifted over wood and hill, crept from under the forest arches, and spread across the snow of the open. He lit the lamps and waited. The silence was complete. It seemed as if the night had come and closed the world, locking it away out of the reach even of G.o.d.

The meal Crossman had bunglingly prepared lay untouched on the table.

Now and then the crash of an avalanche of snow from the overburdened branches emphasized the stillness. Dreading he knew not what, Crossman waited--and loneliness is not good for a sick soul.

Thoughts began crowding, nudging one another; happenings that he had dismissed as casual took on new and sinister meanings. "Two and two together" became at once a huge sum, leaping to terrifying conclusions. Then with the silence and the tense nerve-draw of waiting came the sense of things finished--done forever. A vast, all-embracing finality--"_Neant_"--the habitant expression for the uttermost nothing, the word seemed to push at his lips. He wanted to say it, but a premonition warned him that to utter it was to make it real.

Should he call upon the name of the Void, the Void would answer. He feared it--it meant that She would be swallowed also in the great gaping hollow of nothingness. He strained his ears for sounds of the living world--the spit of the fire, the fall of clinkers in the grate, the whisper of the wind stirring at the door. He tried to a.n.a.lyse his growing uneasiness. He was sure now that she had followed Antoine's bidding--forgetting him, if, indeed, her desires had ever reached toward him.

Now she seemed the only thing that mattered. He must find her; he must follow. Wherever she was, there only was the world of reality. Where she was, was life. And to find her, he must find Antoine--and then, without warning, the door gaped--and Antoine stood before him, like a coloured figure pasted on the black ground of the night. Then he entered, quiet and matter-of-fact. He nodded, closed the door against the biting cold, pulled off his cap, and stood respectfully.

"It is no use to wait for the Boss; he will not come," said the log-brander. "I came to tell Monsieur, before I go on, that le Cure is safe at Chaumiere Noire. Yes, he is safe, and Monsieur Jakapa have turn back, when I catch up with him and tell him----"

"What?" gasped Crossman.

"It was to do," the giant twisted his cap slowly, "but it was harder than I think. It was not for jealousy, I beg you to know. That she would go if she want--to who she want, she can. I have no right to stop her. But she would have had the Cure knifed to death. She made the wish, and she put her wish in the heart of a man. If it had not been this time--then surely some other time. She always find a hand to do her will--even this of mine--once. I heard her tell to Jakapa.

Therefore, Jakapa he has gone back to watch with her body. I told him where. Me I go. There are for me no more dawns. You love her, too, Monsieur, therefore, I come to tell you the end. _Bon soir, Monsieur_."

He was gone. Again there was silence. Crossman sat rigid. What had happened? His mind refused to understand. Then he visioned her, lying on the white snow, scarlet under her breast, redder than her mackinaw, redder than her woollen mittens, redder than the cardinal-flower of her mouth--cardinal no more! "No, no!" he shrieked, springing to his feet. His words echoed in the empty room. "No--no!--He couldn't kill her!" He clung to the table. "No--no! No!" he screamed. Then he saw her eyes; she was looking in through the window--yes, they were her eyes--changing and glowing, eyes of mystery, of magic, eyes that made the silence, eyes that called and shifted and glowed. He laughed.

Fools, fools! to think her dead! He staggered to the door and threw it wide. Hatless, coatless, he plunged headlong into the dark--the Dark?

No! for she was there--on high, wide-flung, the banners of the Aurora Borealis blazed and swung, banners that rippled and ran, banners of rainbows, the souls of amethysts and emeralds, they fluttered in the heavens, they swayed across the world, streamed like amber wine poured from an unseen chalice, dropped fold on fold, like the fluttering raiment of the G.o.ds.

In the north a great sapphire curtain trembled as if about to part and reveal the unknown Beyond; it grew brighter, dazzling, radiant.

"Aurore!" he called. "Aurore!" The grip of ice clutched his heart.

Cold seized on him with unseen numbing hands. He was struggling, struggling with his body of lead--for one step--just a step nearer the great curtain, that now glowed warm--red--red as the ghost of her cardinal-flower lips--pillars of light, as of the halls of heaven.

"Aurore!--Aurore!"

MR. DOWNEY SITS DOWN

By L.H. ROBBINS

From _Everybody's_

I

Jacob Downey waited in line at the meat shop. A footsore little man was he. All day long, six days a week for twenty-two years, he had stood on his feet, trotted on them, climbed on them, in the hardware department of Wilbram, Prescot & Co., and still they would not toughen; still they would hurt; still to sustain his spirit after three o'clock he had to invoke a vision of slippers, a warm radiator, the _Evening Bee_, and the sympathy of Mrs. Downey and the youngsters.

To the picture this evening he had added pork chops.

The woman next in line ahead of him named her meat. Said the butcher, with a side glance at the clock, "A crown roast takes quite a while, lady. Could I send it in the morning?"

No, the lady wished to see it prepared. Expressly for that purpose had she come out in the rain. To-morrow she gave a luncheon.

"First come first served," thought Jacob Downey, and bode his time in patience, feeling less pity for his aching feet than for Butcher Myers. Where was the charity in asking a hurried man at five minutes to six o'clock to frill up a roast that would not see the inside of the oven before noon next day?

Now, crown roasts are one thing to him who waits on fallen arches, and telephone calls are another. Scarcely had Downey's opening come to speak for pork chops cut medium when off went the bell and off rushed Butcher Myers.

Sharply he warned the unknown that this was Myers's Meat Shop. Blandly he smiled into the transmitter upon learning that his caller was Mrs.

A. Lincoln Wilbram.

By the audience in front of the counter the following social intelligence was presently inferred:

That Mr. and Mrs. Wilbram had just returned from Florida; that they had enjoyed themselves ever so much; that they hoped Mr. Myers's little girl was better; that they were taking their meals at the Clarendon pending the mobilization of their house-servants; that they expected to dine with the Mortimer Trevelyans this evening; that food for the dog may with propriety be brought home from a hotel, but not from the Mortimer Trevelyans; that there was utterly nothing in the icebox for poor Mudge's supper; that Mudge was a chow dog purchased by a friend of Mr. Wilbram's in Hongkong at so much a pound, just as Mr.

Myers purchased live fowls; that Mudge now existed not to become chow, but to consume chow, and would feel grateful in his dog heart if Mr.

Myers would, at this admittedly late hour, send him two pounds of bologna and a good bone; and that Mrs. Wilbram would consider herself under deep and lasting obligation to Mr. Myers for this act of kindness.

Mr. Myers a.s.sured Mrs. Wilbram that it would mean no trouble at all; he would send up the order as soon as his boy came back from delivering a beefsteak to the Mortimer Trevelyans.

He filled out a slip and stuck it on the hook.

"Now, Mr. Downey," he said briskly.

But Jacob Downey gave him one tremendous look and limped out of the shop.

II

It was evening in the home of Miss Angelina Lance. Twenty-seven hours had pa.s.sed since Jacob Downey's exasperated exit from Myers's Meat Shop. The eyes of Miss Angelina were bright behind her not-unbecoming spectacles as she watched the face of the solemn young man in the Morris chair near the reading lamp.

In his hand the solemn young man held three sheets of school composition paper. As he read the pencil writing on page one he lost his gravity. Over page two he smiled broadly. At the end of the last page he said:

"D.K.T. couldn't have done better. May I show it to him?"

In the office of the Ashland (N.J.) _Bee_ the solemn young man was known as Mr. Sloan. At Miss Lance's he was Sam. The mentioned D.K.T.

conducted the celebrated "Bee-Stings" column on the editorial page of Mr. Sloan's journal, his levity being offset by the sobriety of Mr.

Sloan, who was a.s.sistant city-editor.

On two evenings a week Mr. Sloan fled the cares of the Fourth Estate and became Sam in the soul-refreshing presence of Miss Angelina. He was by no means her only male admirer. In the Sixth Grade at the Hilldale Public School she had thirty others; among these Willie Downey, whose name appeared on every page of the composition Mr. Sloan had read.

With a host of other sixth-graders throughout the city Willie had striven that day for a prize of ten dollars in gold offered by the public-spirited A. Lincoln Wilbram, of Wilbram, Prescott & Co., for the best schoolboy essay on Moral Principles.

"Moral principles, gentlemen; that is what we need in Ashland. How many men do you know who stand up for their convictions--or have any to stand up for?"

If the head of a department store is a bit thunderous at times, think what a Jovian position he occupies. In his cloud-girt, mahogany-panelled throne-room on the eighth floor he rules over a thousand mortals, down to the little Jacob Downeys in the bas.e.m.e.nt, who, if they do not quite weep with delight when he gives them a smile, tremble, at least, at his frown. When a large body of popular opinion accords him greatness, were he not undemocratic to affect humility and speak small?

"I speak of common men," said Mr. Wilbram (this was at a Chamber of Commerce banquet); "of men whose living depends upon the pleasure of their superiors. How few there are with fearless eye!"

He scarcely heard the laughter from a group of building contractors at a side table, who had not seen a servile eye among their workmen in many moons; for a worthy project had popped into his mind at that instant. How was the moral backbone of our yeomanry to be stiffened save through education? Why not a prize contest to stimulate the interest of the rising generation in this obsolete subject?

In many an Ashland home where bicycles, roller-skates, wireless outfits, and other such extravagances were strongly desired, the question had since been asked: "Pa, what are Moral Principles?" While some of the resulting essays indicated a haziness in paternal minds, not so the production that Mr. Sloan read in Miss Lance's parlour.

"But I couldn't let you print it," said Miss Angelina. "I wouldn't have Willie shamed for anything. He may be weak in grammar, but he is captain of every athletic team in the school. He has told me in confidence that he means to spend the prize money for a genuine horse-hide catching-mitt."