The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 28

"There he found out that the report had been right; beyond a few cracked wire-gla.s.s windows--for which, as one last painful detail, he had to pay--and a blackened side wall, the Elephant was unharmed. The men putting the finishing touches to the inside had not lost an hour's work.

All that dreadful journey up from New York had been merely one last turn of the screw.

"Two weeks later he turned the Elephant over to the owners, finished, a good, workmanlike job from roof to foundation-piers. He had lost money on it; for months he had worked overtime his courage, his ingenuity, his nerve, and his strength. But that did not matter. He had delivered the goods. I believe he treated himself to an afternoon off and went to a ball-game; but that was all, for by this time other jobs were under way, a whole batch of new problems were waiting to be solved; in a week the Elephant was forgotten."

Mrs. Trask pushed back her chair and walked to the west window. A strange quiet had fallen upon the sky-sc.r.a.per now; the workmen had gone down the ladders, the steam-riveters had ceased their tapping. Mrs.

Trask opened the window and leaned out a little.

Behind her the three women at the tea-table gathered up their furs in silence. Cornelia Blair looked relieved and prepared to go on to dinner at another club, Mrs. Bullen avoided Mrs. Van Vechten's eye. In her rosy face faint lines had traced themselves, as if vaguely some new perceptiveness troubled her. She looked at her wrist.w.a.tch and rose from the table hastily.

"I must run along," she said. "I like to get home before John does. You going my way, Sally?"

Mrs. Van Vechten shook her head absently. There was a frown between her dark brows; but as she stood fastening her furs her eyes went to the west window, with an expression in them that was almost wistful. For an instant she looked as if she were going over to the window beside Mary Trask; then she gathered up her gloves and m.u.f.f and went out without a word.

Mary Trask was unaware of her going. She had forgotten the room behind her and her friends at the tea-table, as well as the other women drifting in from the adjoining room. She was contemplating, with her little, absent-minded smile, her husband's name on the builder's sign halfway up the unfinished sky-sc.r.a.per opposite.

"Good work, old Rob," she murmured. Then her hand went up in a quaint gesture that was like a salute. "To all good jobs and the men behind them!" she added.

FOOTNOTE:

[11] Copyright, 1920, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1921, by Grace Sartwell Mason.

THE RENDING[12]

#By# JAMES OPPENHEIM

From _The Dial_

There is a bitter moment in youth, and this moment had come to Paul. He had pa.s.sed his mother's door without entering or even calling out to her, and had climbed on doggedly to the top floor. Now he was shut in his sanctuary, his room, sitting at his table. His head rested on a hand, his dark eyes had an expression of confused anguish, a look of guilt and sternness mingled.... He could no more have visited his mother, he told himself, than he could voluntarily have chopped off his hand. And yet he was amazed at the cruelty in himself, a hard cold cruelty which prompted the thought: "Even if this means her death or my death, I shall go through with this."

It was because of such a feeling that he couldn't talk to his mother.

Paul was one of those sensitive youths who are delivered over to their emotions--swept now and then by exaltation, now by despair, now by anguish or rage, always excessive, never fully under control. He was moody, and always seemed unable to say the right thing or do the right thing. Suddenly the emotion used him as a mere instrument and came forth in a shameful nakedness. But the present situation was by all odds the most terrible he had faced: for against the cold cruelty, there throbbed, warm and unutterably sweet, like a bird in a nest of iron, an intense childish longing and love....

You see, Paul was nineteen, the eldest son in a family of four, and his mother was a widow. She was not poor; they lived in this large comfortable house on a side street east of Central Park. But neither was she well off, and Paul was very magnanimous; he had given up college and gone to work as a clerk. Perhaps it wasn't only magnanimity, but also pride. He was proud to be the oldest son, to play father, to advise with his mother about the children, to be the man of the house. Yet he was always a mere child, living, as his two sisters and his brother lived, in delicate response to his mother's feelings and wishes. And he wanted to be a good son: he thought nothing was more wonderful than a child who was good to his mother. She had given all for her children, they in return must give all to her. But against this spirit of sacrifice there arose a crude, ugly, healthy, monstrous force, a terrible thing that kept whispering to him: "You can't live your mother's life: you must live your own life."

Once, when he had said something conceited, his mother had flashed out at him: "You're utterly selfish." This stung and humiliated him. Yet this terrible monster in himself seemed concerned about nothing but self. It seemed a sort of devil always tempting him to eat of forbidden fruit. Lovely fruit, too. There was Agnes, for instance: Agnes, a mere girl, with a pigtail down her back, daughter of the fishman on Third Avenue.

His mother held Agnes in horror. That her son should be in love with a fishman's daughter! And all the child in Paul, responding so sensitively to his mother's feelings, agreed to this. He had contempt for himself, he struggled against the romantic Thousand and One Nights glamour, which turned Third Avenue into a Lovers' Lane of sparkling lights. He struggled, vainly. Poetry was his pa.s.sion: and he steeped himself in Romeo and Juliet, and in Keats's St. Agnes' Eve and The Pot of Basil....

It was then the great struggle with his mother began, and the large house became a gloomy vault, something dank, damp, sombre, something out of Poe, where a secret duel to the death was being fought, mostly in undertones and sometimes with sharp cries and stabbing words.

Now, this evening, with his head in his hand, he knew that the end had already been reached. To pa.s.s his mother's door without a greeting, especially since he was well aware that she was ill, was so unprecedented, so violent an act, that it seemed to have the finality of something criminal. His mother had said two days ago: "This can't go on.

It is killing me."

"All right," he flashed. "It sha'n't. I'll get out."

"I suppose you'll marry," she said, "on fifteen a week."

He spoke bitterly:

"I'll get out of New York altogether. I'll work my way through college...."

She almost sneered at the suggestion. And this sneer rankled. He telegraphed his friend, at a little freshwater college, and Samuel telegraphed back: "Come." That day he drew his money from the bank, and got his tickets for the midnight sleeper. And he did all this with perfect cruelty....

But now the time had come to go, and things were different. An autumn wind was blowing out of the park, doubtless carrying seeds and dead leaves, and gusting down the street, blowing about the sparkling lamps, eddying in the area-ways, rapping in pa.s.sing on the loose windows....

The lights in the houses were all warm, because you saw only the glowing yellow shades: Third Avenue was lit up and down with shop-windows, and people were doing late marketing. It was a night when nothing seemed so sweet, or sane, or comfortable, as a soft-lighted room, and a family sitting together. Soft voices, familiarity, warm intimacy, the feeling of security and ease, the unspoken welling of love and understanding: these belonged to such a night, when the whole world seemed dying and there was only man to keep the fires burning against death.

And so, out of its tomb, the little child in Paul stepped out again, beautiful and sweet with love and longing. And this little child said to him: "Sacrifice--surrender--let the hard heart melt with pity.... There is no freedom except in love, which gives all." For a moment Paul's vivid imagination, which presented everything to him like works of dramatic art, pictured himself going down the steps, as once he had done, creeping to his mother's bed, flinging himself down, sobbing and moaning, "Forgive me. Forgive me."

But just then he heard the stairs creak and thought that his eldest sister was coming up to question him. His heart began a frightened throbbing: he shook with a guilty fear, and at once he saved himself with a bitter resurgence of cruel anger. He hated his sister, he told himself, with a livid hatred. She always sided with his mother. She was bossy and smart and high and mighty. He knew what he would do. He jumped up, went to the door, and locked it. So--she could beat her head on the door, for all he cared!

He packed. He got out his valise, and filled it with his necessaries. He would let the rest go: the books, the old clothes. He was going to start life all over again He was going to wipe out the past....

When he was finished, he anxiously opened his pocket-book to see if the tickets were safe. He looked at them. It was now ten o'clock. Two hours--and then the long train would pull out, and he would be gone....

To-morrow morning they'd come downstairs. His sister probably would sit at the foot of the table, instead of himself. The table would seem small with himself gone. Perhaps the house would seem a little empty.

Automatically they would wait for the click of his key in the front door lock at seven in the evening. He would not come home at all....

His mother might die. She had told him this was killing her.... It was so easy for him to go, so hard for her to stay.... She had invested most of her capital of hopes and dreams and love in him: he was the son; he was the first man. And now he was shattering the very structure of her life....

Easy for him to go! He slumped into the chair again, at the table....

The wind blew strongly, and he knew just how the grey street looked with its spots of yellow sparkling lamplight; its shadows, its glowing windows.... He knew the smell of the fish-shop, the strange raw sea-smell, the sight of glittering iridescent scales, the beauty of lean curved fishes, the red of broiled lobsters, the pink-cheeked swarthy fishman, the dark loveliness of Agnes.... He had written to Agnes. His mother didn't know of it, but he was done with Agnes. Agnes meant nothing to him. She had only been a way out, something to cling to, something to fight for in this fight for his life....

Fight for his life! Had he not read of this in books, how the young must slay the old in order that life might go on, just as the earth must die in autumn so that the seeds of spring may be planted? Had he not read Ibsen's Master Builder, where the aging hero hears the dread doom which youth brings, "the younger generation knocking at the door"? He was the younger generation, he was the young hero. And now, at once, a vivid dramatization took place in his brain: it unwound clear as hallucination. He forgot everything else, he sat there as a writer sits, living his fiction, making strange gestures with face and hands, muttering words under his breath....

In this phantasy, he saw himself rising, appearing a little older, a little stronger, and on his face a look of divine compa.s.sion and understanding, yet a firmness inexorable as fate. He repeated Hamlet's words: "For I am cruel only to be kind." Blame life, fate, the G.o.ds who decree that a man must live his own life: don't blame me.

He unlocked the door, crossed the big hall, stepped down the stairs. His mother's door was shut. The younger generation must knock at it. He knocked. A low, sad voice said: "Come." He opened the door.

This was the way it always was: a pin-point of light by the western window, a newspaper pinned to the gla.s.s globe of the gas-jet to shield his mother's eyes, the wide range of warm shadow, and in the shadow the two beds. But his sister was not in one of them. His mother was alone....

He went to the bedside....

"Mother!"

"Paul!"

He took her hand.

"Are you feeling better?" he asked.

"A little more quiet, Paul...."

"I am very glad...."

Now there was silence.... Then he spoke quietly, honestly, candidly. It was the only way. Why can't human beings be simple with one another, be sweetly reasonable? Isn't a little understanding worth more than pride and anger? To understand is to forgive. Surely any one must know that.

Starting to speak, he sat down on the chair beside the bed, still holding her hand....