O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 58

"Worse than a car or a gun," he agreed.

As he strolled homeward along a stately avenue, wondering what he could do to avert the retribution that moved toward the Downeys, and finding that his a.s.sistant city-editor's resourcefulness availed him naught, he heard the scamper of feet behind him and whirled about with cane upraised in time to bring a snarling chow dog to a stand.

"Beat it, you brute!" he growled.

"Yeowp!" responded the chow dog, and leaped in air.

"Don't be alarmed," spoke a voice out of the gloom of the nearest lawn. "When he sees a man with a stick, he wants to play."

Sloan peered at the speaker's face. "Isn't this Mr. Wilbram? You were at the _Bee_ office to-day, sir. May I have a word with you about the Willie Downey matter?"

"Come in," said Mr. Wilbram.

VIII

On the first pay-day in May the impending sword cut its thread. Said a messenger to Jacob Downey: "They want you on the eighth floor." Downey set his jaws and followed.

In the mahogany-panelled room A. Lincoln Wilbram turned from the window and transfixed his servitor with eyes that bored like steel bits.

"Downey, I understand you have a literary son."

Jacob held his breath, eyed his accuser steadily, and a.s.sured himself that it would soon be over now.

"How about it, Downey?"

"I know what you mean, sir."

"Did you say the things printed there?"

The little man wasted no time in examining the newspaper clipping.

"Yes, sir, I did. If it has come to your lady's ears what I called her, I beg her pardon. But what I said I'll stick to. If I stand fifteen minutes in line in a meat store or any other kind of store, I've got a right to be waited on ahead of anybody that rings up, I don't give a ding who she is."

"Good for you, Downey. Let me see, how long have you worked for us?"

"Twenty-three years next January, sir."

"Floor salesman all the while?"

"Since 1900. Before that I was a wrapper."

"How many men have been promoted over your head?"

"Three."

"Four," Wilbram corrected. "First was Miggins."

"I don't count him, sir. Him and I started together."

"Miggins was a failure. Then Farisell; now in prison. Next, McCardy; he ran off to Simonds & Co. the minute they crooked a finger at him.

Last, young Prescott, who is now to come up here with his father.

Could you run the department if you had it?"

"Between you and I," replied Jacob Downey, sick, dizzy, trembling, "I been running the department these fifteen years."

"How'd you like to run it from now as manager? When I find a man with convictions and courage I advance him. The man who stands up is the man to sit down. That's evolution. If you could stand up to a big butcher like Myers and talk Dutch to him the way you did, I guess we need you at a desk. What do you say?"

A desk! A chance to rest his feet! Jacob Downey stiffened.

"Mr. Wilbram, I--I got to tell the truth. I never said those things to Myers. I just walked out."

"But you said them. You acknowledge it."

"I said 'em, yes--after I got home. To the family I said 'em. When I was in the meat shop I only thought 'em."

"So Myers has told me," said Jove, smiling. "Downey, my man, you've got more than moral courage. You've got common sense to go with it.

Tell young Prescott to give you his keys."

THE MARRIAGE IN KAIRWAN

By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From _Harper's_

Kairwan the Holy lay asleep, pent in its thick walls. The moon had sunk at midnight, but the chill light seemed scarcely to have diminished; only the limewashed city had become a marble city, and all the towers turned fabulous in the fierce, dry, needle rain of the stars that burn over the desert of mid-Tunisia.

In the street Bab Djedid the nailed boots of the watch pa.s.sed from west to east. When their thin racket had turned out and died in the dust of the market, Habib ben Habib emerged from the shadow of a door arch and, putting a foot on the tiled ledge of Bou-Kedj's fry shop, swung up by cranny and gutter till he stood on the plain of the housetops.

Now he looked about him, for on this dim tableland he walked with his life in his hands. He looked to the west, toward the gate, to the south, to the northeast through the ghostly wood of minarets. Then, perceiving nothing that stirred, he went on moving without sound in the camel-skin slippers he had taken from his father's court.

In the uncertain light, but for those slippers and the long-ta.s.selled _chechia_ on his head, one would not have taken him for anything but a European and a stranger. And one would have been right, almost. In the city of his birth and rearing, and of the birth and rearing of his Arab fathers generations dead, Habib ben Habib bel-Kalfate looked upon himself in the rebellious, romantic light of a prisoner in exile--exile from the streets of Paris where, in his four years, he had tasted the strange delights of the Christian--exile from the university where he had dabbled with his keen, light-ballasted mind in the learning of the conqueror.

Sometimes, in the month since he had come home, he had shaken himself and wondered aloud, "Where am I?" with the least little hint, perhaps, of melodrama. Sometimes in the French cafe outside the walls, among the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened mockery, he would break off suddenly, "_Voila, Messieurs!_ you will see that I am the best of Mussulmans!" He would laugh then in a key so high and restless that the commandant, shaking his head, would murmur to the lieutenant beside him, "One day, Genet, we must be on the alert for a dagger in that quarter there, eh?"

And Genet, who knew almost as much of the character of the university Arab as the commandant himself, would nod his head.

When Habib had laughed for a moment he would grow silent. Presently he would go out into the ugly dark of the foreign quarter, followed very often by Raoul Genet. He had known Raoul most casually in Paris. Here in the Tunisian _bled_, when Raoul held out his hand to say good-night under the gate lamp at the Bab Djelladin, the troubled fellow clung to it. The smell of the African city, coming under the great brick arch, reached out and closed around him like a hand--a hand bigger than Raoul's.

"You are my brother: not they. I am not of these people, Raoul!"

But then he would go in, under the black arch and the black shade of the false-pepper trees. In the darkness he felt the trees, centuries old, and all the blank houses watching him....

To-night, stealing across the sleeping roofs, he felt the star-lit mosque towers watching him in secret, the pale, silent espionage of them who could wait. The hush of the desert troubled him. Youth troubled him. His lips were dry.

He had come to an arbour covered with a vine. Whose it was, on what house-holder's roof it was reared, he had never known. He entered.