The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 26

Wixon, seated in the boat on Avon and lost in such dusk that he could hardly see his hand upon the idle oar, recited the poem softly to himself, intoning it in the deep voice one saves for poetry. It sounded wonderful to him in the luxury of hearing his own voice upon the water and indulging his own memory. The somber mood was perfect, in accord with the realm of shadow and silence where everything beautiful and living was cloaked in the general blur.

After he had heard his voice chanting the last long oh's of the final verse, he was ashamed of his solemnity, and terrified lest some one might have heard him and accounted him insane. He laughed at himself for a sentimental fool.

He laughed too as he remembered what a letter of praise he had dictated to his astonished stenographer and fired off at Luke Mellows; and at the flippant letter he had in return.

Lay readers who send incandescent epistles to poets are apt to receive answers in sardonic prose. The poet lies a little, perhaps, in a very sane suspicion of his own transcendencies.

Luke Mellows had written:

"#Dear Old Joel#:

"I sure am much obliged for your mighty handsome letter. Coming to one of the least successful wool-gatherers in the world from one of the most successful wool distributors, it deserves to be highly prized. And is. I will have it framed and handed down to my heirs, of which there are more than there will ever be looms.

"You ask me to tell you all about myself. It won't take long. When the b.u.t.terly Bottlery went bust, I had no job at all for six months, so I got married to spite my father. And to please Kit, whose poor mother ceased to suffer about the same time.

"The poor girl was so used to taking care of a poor old woman who couldn't be left alone that I became her patient just to keep all her talents from going to waste.

"The steady flow of children seems to upset the law of supply and demand, for there is certainly no demand for more of my progeny and there is no supply for them. But somehow they thrive.

"I am now running my father's store, as the old gentleman had a stroke and then another. The business is going to pot as rapidly as you would expect, but I haven't been able to kill it off quite yet.

"Thanks for advising me to go on writing immortal poetry. If I were immortal, I might, but that fool thing was the result of about ten years' hard labor. I tried to make a sonnet of it, but I gave up at the end of the decade and called it whatever it is.

"Your father's paper published it free of charge, and so my income from my poetry has been one-tenth of nothing per annum. Please don't urge me to do any more. I really can't afford it.

"The poem was suggested to me by an ancient fit of blues over the fact that Kit's once-so-beautiful voice would never be heard in song, and by the fact that her infinite goodnesses will never meet any recompense or even acknowledgment.

"I was bitter the first five years, but the last five years I began to feel how rich this dark old world is in good, brave, sweet, lovable, heartbreakingly beautiful deeds that simply cast a little fragrance on the dark and are gone. They perfume the night and the busy daylight dispels them like the morning mists that we used to watch steaming and vanishing above the old river. The Mississippi is still here, still rolling along its eternal mult.i.tudes of snows and flowers and fruits and fish and snakes and dead men and boats and trees.

"They go where they came from, I guess--in and out of nothing and back again.

"It is a matter of glory to all of us that you are doing so n.o.bly.

Keep it up and give us something to brag about in our obscurity.

Don't worry. We are happy enough in the dark. We have our batlike sports and our owllike prides, and the full sun would blind us and lose us our way.

"Kit sends you her love--and blushes as she says it. That is a very daring word for such shy moles as we are, but I will echo it.

"Yours for old sake's sake. #Luke.#"

Vaguely remembering this letter now Joel inhaled a bit of the merciful chloroform that deadens the pain of thwarted ambition.

The world was full of men and women like Luke and Kit. Some had given up great hopes because they were too good to tread others down in their quest. Some had quenched great talents because they were too fearsome or too weak or too lazy to feed their lamps with oil and keep them trimmed and alight. Some had stumbled through life darkly with no gifts of talent, without even appreciation of the talents of others or of the flowerlike beauties that star the meadows.

Those were the people he had known. And then there were the people he had not known, the innumerable caravan that had pa.s.sed across the earth while he lived, the inconceivable hosts that had gone before, tribe after tribe, generation upon generation, nation at the heels of nation, cycle on era on age, and the backward perpetuity from everlasting unto everlasting. People, people, peoples--poor souls, until the thronged stars that make a dust of the Milky Way were a lesser mob.

Here in this graveyard at Stratford lay men who might have overtopped Shakespeare's glory if they had but "had a mind to." Some of them had been held in higher esteem in their town. But they were forgotten, their names leveled with the surface of their fallen tombstones.

Had he not cried out in his own Hamlet: "O G.o.d, I could be bounded in a nutsh.e.l.l and count myself a king of infinite s.p.a.ce, were it not that I have bad dreams--which dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream--and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow."

After all, the greatest of men were granted but a lesser oblivion than the least. And in that overpowering thought there was a strange comfort, the comfort of misery finding itself in an infinite company.

The night was thick upon Avon. The swans had gone somewhere. The lights in the houses had a sleepy look. It was time to go to bed.

Joel yawned with the luxury of having wearied his heart with emotion. He had thought himself out for once. It was good to be tired. He put his oars into the stream and, dipping up reflected stars, sent them swirling in a doomsday chaos after him with the defiant revenge of a proud soul who scorns the universe that grinds him to dust.

The old boatman was surly with waiting. He did not thank the foreigner for his liberal largeness, and did not answer his good night.

As Wixon left the river and took the road for his hotel, the nightingale (that forever anonymous nightingale, only one among the millions of forgotten or throttled songsters) revolted for a moment or two against the stifling doom and shattered it with a wordless sonnet of fierce and beautiful protest--"The tawny-throated! What triumph! hark!--what pain!"

It was as if Luke Mellows had suddenly found expression in something better than words, something that any ear could understand, an ache that rang.

Wixon stopped, transfixed as by flaming arrows. He could not understand what the bird meant or what he meant, nor could the bird. But as there is no laughter that eases the heart like unpacking it of its woes in something beyond wording, so there is nothing that brightens the eyes like tears gushing without shame or restraint.

Joel Wixon felt that it was a good, sad, mad world, and that he had been very close to Shakespeare--so close that he heard things n.o.body had ever found the phrases for--things that cannot be said but only felt, and transmitted rather by experience than by expression from one proud worm in the mud to another.

FOOTNOTE:

[10] Copyright, 1920, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc. Copyright, 1921, by Rupert Hughes.

HIS JOB[11]

#By# GRACE SARTWELL MASON

From _Scribner's Magazine_

Against an autumn sunset the steel skeleton of a twenty-story office building in process of construction stood out black and bizarre. It flung up its beams and girders like stern and yet airy music, orderly, miraculously strong, and delicately powerful. From the lower stories, where masons made their music of trowel and hammer, to the top, where steam-riveters rapped out their chorus like giant locusts in a summer field, the great building lived and breathed as if all those human energies that went to its making flowed warm through its steel veins.

In the west window of a womans' club next door one of the members stood looking out at this building. Behind her at a tea-table three other women sat talking. For some moments their conversation had had a plaintive if not an actually rebellious tone. They were discussing the relative advantages of a man's work and a woman's, and they had arrived at the conclusion that a man has much the best of it when it comes to a matter of the day's work.

"Take a man's work," said Mrs. Van Vechten, pouring herself a second cup of tea. "He chooses it; then he is allowed to go at it with absolute freedom. He isn't hampered by the dull, petty details of life that hamper us. He----"

"Details! My dear, there you are right," broke in Mrs. Bullen. Two men, first Mrs. Bullen's father and then her husband, had seen to it that neither the biting wind of adversity nor the bracing air of experience should ever touch her. "Details! Sometimes I feel as if I were smothered by them. Servants, and the house, and now these relief societies----"

She was in her turn interrupted by Cornelia Blair. Cornelia was a spinster with more freedom than most human beings ever attain, her father having worked himself to death to leave her well provided for.

"The whole fault is the social system," she declared. "Because of it men have been able to take the really interesting work of the world for themselves. They've pushed the dull jobs off onto us."

"You're right, Cornelia," cried Mrs. Bullen. She really had nothing to say, but she hated not saying it. "I've always thought," she went on pensively, "that it would be so much easier just to go to an office in the morning and have nothing but business to think of. Don't you feel that way sometimes, Mrs. Trask?"

The woman in the west window turned. There was a quizzical gleam in her eyes as she looked at the other three. "The trouble with us women is we're blind and deaf," she said slowly. "We talk a lot about men's work and how they have the best of things in power and freedom, but does it occur to one of us that a man _pays_ for power and freedom? Sometimes I think that not one of the women of our comfortable cla.s.s would be willing to pay what our men pay for the power and freedom they get."

"What do they pay?" asked Mrs. Van Vechten, her lip curling.

Mrs. Trask turned back to the window. "There's something rather wonderful going on out here," she called. "I wish you'd all come and look."

Just outside the club window the steel-workers pursued their dangerous task with leisurely and indifferent competence, while over their head a great derrick served their needs with uncanny intelligence. It dropped its chain and picked a girder from the floor. As it rose into s.p.a.ce two figures sprang astride either end of it. The long arm swung up and out; the two "bronco-busters of the sky" were black against the flame of the sunset. Some one shouted; the signalman pulled at his rope; the derrick-arm swung in a little with the girder teetering at the end of the chain. The most interesting moment of the steel-man's job had come, when a girder was to be jockeyed into place. The iron arm swung the girder above two upright columns, lowered it, and the girder began to groove into place. It wedged a little. One of the men inched along, leaned against s.p.a.ce, and wielded his bar. The women stared, for the moment taken out of themselves. Then, as the girder settled into place and the two men slid down the column to the floor, the spectators turned back to their tea-table.