The Best Short Stories of 1920 Part 4

"A winy-looking thing, isn't it? See those red fibers? Why shouldn't such roots, and nuts like those great, burnished horse-chestnuts there--yes, and cattails, and poke-berries, and skunk cabbages, give forth an entirely new outfit of fruits and vegetables?" Berber smiled his young ruminating smile; then, with inevitable courtesy, he seemed to remember that he had not answered her question. "I am not surprised that you and Mr. Strang thought such things about me. I wonder that you have not questioned me before--only you see _now_--I can't answer!" The boy gave her his slow, serious smile, reminding her.

"You must remember that I am like a foreigner--only worse off, for foreigners pick up a few words for their most vital needs, and I have no words at all--for what--for what vital things I used to know--so that perhaps in time I shall come to forget that I ever knew anything different from--other persons' knowledge." Berber paused, regarding his mistress intently, as if wistfully trying to see what she made of all this. Then he continued:

"One of our professors at college died, and the men of his cla.s.s were gloomy; some even cried, others could not trust themselves to speak of him.... I noticed that they all called him 'poor' Landworth.... I could see that they felt something the way I do when I miss out on a chemical experiment, or spoil a valuable specimen--only more so--a great deal more." The boy knit his brows, puzzling it all out. "Well, it's queer. I liked that professor, too; he was very kind to me--but when I saw him dead I felt glad--glad! Why"--Berber looked at her searchingly--"I grew to be afraid some one would find out _how_ glad!"

The young fellow, still anxiously searching her face, dropped his voice.

"You are the only person I dare tell this to--for I understand the world--" She noted that he spoke as if "the world" were a kind of plant whose needs he had fathomed. "But after that," concluded Berber, speaking as if quite to himself--"after that I somehow came to see that I had been--well, educated _backward_."

She moved impatiently; the youth, seeing the question in her face, answered the demand of its trembling eagerness, explaining:

"Do you not see--I have--sometimes _known_, not 'guessed' nor 'believed,' but _known_ that death was a wonderful, happy thing--a fulfilment, a satisfaction to him who dies--but I have been educated backward into a life where people cannot seem to help regarding it as a sad thing. And----"

"Yes?--Yes?" breathed the eager woman. "Tell me--tell me----"

But he had come suddenly to a full stop. As if appalled to find only empty words, or no words at all, for some astounding knowledge he would communicate to her, he stammered painfully; then, as if he saw himself caught in guilt, colored furiously. Evelyn Strang could see the inevitable limitations of his world training creep slowly over him like cement hardening around the searching roots of his mind. She marveled.

She remembered Strang's pet phrase, "the plaster of Paris of so-called 'normal thinking.'" Then the youth's helpless appeal came to her:

"Do you not think that I am doing wrong to speak of these things?"

Berber asked, with dignity.

The mistress of Heartholm was silent. Recklessly she put by all Doctor Mach's prophecies. She could not stop here; her whole soul demanded that she go further. There were old intuitions--the belief that she and Strang had shared together, that, under rationalized schemes of thought, knowledge of inestimable hope was being hidden from the world. Here was this boy of the infinite vision, of the "_backward educated_" mind, ready to tell miraculous things of a hidden universe. Could she strike him dumb? It would be as if Lazarus had come forth from the open grave and men were to bandage again his ecstatic lips!

Suddenly, as if in answer to her struggle, Berber spoke. She was aware that he looked at her curiously with a sort of patient disdain.

"The world is so sure, so contented, isn't it?" the youth demanded of her, whether in innocence or irony she could not tell. "People are trained, or they train themselves, by the millions, to think of things in exactly one way." He who had once been "Gargoyle" looked piercingly into the eyes of this one being to whom at least he was not afraid to speak.

"Anything you or I might guess outside of what other people might accept," the boy reminded her, austerely, "could be called by just one unpleasant name." He regarded the face turned to his, recognizing the hunger in it, with a mature and pitying candor, concluding: "After to-day we must never speak of these things. I shall never dare, you must never dare--and so--" He who had once been "Gargoyle" suddenly dropped his head forward on his breast, muttering--"and so, that is all."

Evelyn Strang rose. She stood tall and imperious in the waning afternoon light. She was bereaved mother, anguished wife; she was a dreamer driven out of the temple of the dream, and what she had to do was desperate.

Her voice came hard and resolute.

"It is _not_ all," the woman doggedly insisted. The voiceless woe of one who had lost a comrade by death was on her. In her eyes was fever let loose, a sob, like one of a flock of imprisoned wild birds fluttered out from the cage of years. "Oh no--no!" the woman pleaded, more as if to some hidden power of negation than to the boy before her--"Oh no--no, this _cannot_ be all, not for me! The world must never be told--it could not understand; but _I_ must know, I _must_ know." She took desperate steps back and forth.

"John Berber, if there is anything in your memory, your knowledge; even if it is only that you have _imagined_ things--if they are so beautiful or so terrible that you can never speak of them--for fear--for fear no one would understand, you might, you might, even then, tell me--Do you not hear? You might tell _me_. I authorize it, I command it."

The woman standing in the autumn gardens clenched her hands. She looked round her into the clear air at the dense green and gold sunshine filtering through the colored trees, the softly spread patens of the cosmos, the vivid oriflammes of the chrysanthemums. Her voice was anguished, as if they two stood at a secret door of which Berber alone had the key, which for some reason he refused to use.

"I--of all the world," her whisper insisted. "If you might never speak again--I should understand."

Berber, his face grown now quite ashen, looked at her. Something in her expression seemed to transfix and bind him. Suddenly shutting his teeth together, he stood up, his arms folded on his broad chest. The afternoon shadows spread pools of darkness around their feet, the flowers seemed frozen in shapes of colored ice, as his dark, controlled eyes fixed hers.

"You--you dare?" the youth breathed, thickly.

She faced him in her silent daring. Then it seemed to her as if the sky must roll up like a scroll and the earth collapse into a handful of dust falling through s.p.a.ce, for she knew that little Gargoyle of the "undressed mind"--little Gargoyle, looking out of John Berber's trained eyes as out of windows of ground gla.s.s, was flitting like a shadow across her own intelligence, trying to tell her what things he had always known about life and death, and the myriads of worlds spinning back in their great circles to the Power which had set them spinning.

Not until after the first halting, insufficient words, in which the boy sought to give his secret to the woman standing there, did she comprehend anything of the struggle that went on within him. But when suddenly Berber's arms dropped to his sides and she saw how he shivered, as if at some unearthly touch on his temples, she was alert. Color was surging into his face; his features, large, irregular, took on for the instant a look of speechless, almost demoniac power; he seemed to be swimming some mental tide before his foot touched the sands of language and he could helplessly stammer:

"I cannot--It--it will not come--It is as I told you--I have been taught no _words_--I _cannot_ say _what I know_."

His powerful frame stood placed among the garden surroundings like that of a breathing statue, and his amazed companion witnessed this miracle of physical being chained by the limitations of one environment, while the soul of that being, clairaudient, clairvoyant, held correspondence with another environment. She saw Berber smile as if with some exquisite sense of beauty and rapture that he understood, but could not communicate, then helplessly motion with his hands. But even while she held her breath, gazing at him, a change came over the radiant features.

He looked at her again, his face worked; at last John Berber with a m.u.f.fled groan burst into terrible human tears.

She stood there helpless, dumfounded at his agony.

"You--you cannot speak?" she faltered.

For answer he dropped his face into his strong hands. He stood there, his tall body quivering. And she knew that her dream was over.

She was forced to understand. John Berber's long and perfect world training held him in a vise. His lips were closed upon his secret, and she knew that they would be closed for evermore.

They remained, silently questioning each other, reading at last in each other's speechlessness some comfort in this strange common knowledge, for which, indeed, there were no human words, which must be forever borne dumbly between them. Then slowly, with solemn tenderness, the obligation of that unspoken knowledge came into Evelyn Strang's face.

She saw the youth standing there with grief older than the grief of the world stabbing his heart, drowning his eyes. She laid a quiet hand on his shoulder.

"I understand." With all the mother, all the woman in her, she tried to say it clearly and calmly. "I understand; you need never fear me--and we have the whole world of flowers to speak for us." She gazed pitifully into the dark, storming eyes where for that one fleeting instant the old look of "Gargoyle" had risen, regarding her, until forced back by the trained intelligence Of "John Berber," which had always dominated, and at last, she knew, had killed it. "We will make the flowers speak--for us." Again she tried to speak lightly, comfortingly, but something within the woman snapped shut like a door. Slowly she returned to the garden seat. For a moment she faltered, holding convulsively to it, then her eyes, blinded from within, closed.

Yet, later, when the mistress of Heartholm went back through the autumnal garden to the room where were the books and treasures of John Strang, she carried something in her hand. It was a lily bulb from which she and Berber hoped to bring into being a new and lovely flower. She took it into that room where for so many years the pictured eyes of her husband had met hers in mute questioning, and stood there for a moment, looking wistfully about her. Outside a light breeze sprang up, a single dried leaf rustled against the window-pane. Smiling wistfully upon the little flower-pot, Mrs. Strang set it carefully away in the dark.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers. Copyright, 1921, by Edwina Stanton Babc.o.c.k.

GHITZA[4]

#By# KONRAD BERCOVICI

From _The Dial_

That winter had been a very severe one in Roumania. The Danube froze solid a week before Christmas and remained tight for five months. It was as if the blue waters were suddenly turned into steel. From across the river, from the Dobrudja, on sleds pulled by long-horned oxen, the Tartars brought barrels of frozen honey, quarters of killed lambs, poultry and game, and returned heavily laden with bags of flour and rolls of sole leather. The whole day long the crack of whips and the curses of the drivers rent the icy atmosphere. Whatever their destination, the carters were in a hurry to reach human habitation before nightfall--before the dreaded time when packs of wolves came out to prey for food.

In cold, clear nights, when even the wind was frozen still, the lugubrious howling of the wolf permitted no sleep. The indoor people spent the night praying for the lives and souls of the travellers.

All through the winter there was not one morning but some man or animal was found torn or eaten in our neighbourhood. The people of the village at first built fires on the sh.o.r.es to scare the beasts away, but they had to give it up because the thatched roofs of the huts in the village were set on fire in windy nights by flying sparks. The cold cowed the fiercest dogs. The wolves, crazed by hunger, grew more daring from day to day. They showed their heads even in daylight. When Baba Hana, the old gypsy fortune-teller, ran into the school-house one morning and cried, "Wolf, wolf in the yard," the teacher was inclined to attribute her scare to a long drink the night before. But that very night, Stan, the horsesh.o.e.r, who had returned late from the inn and had evidently not closed the door as he entered the smithy, was eaten up by the beasts.

And the smithy stood in the centre of the village! A stone's throw from the inn, and the thatch-roofed school, and the red painted church! He must have put up a hard fight, Stan. Three huge dark brown beasts, as big as cows' yearlings, were found brained. The body of big Stan had disappeared in the stomachs of the rest of the pack. The high leather boots and the hand that still gripped the handle of the sledgehammer were the only remains of the man. There was no blood, either. It had been lapped dry. That stirred the village. Not even enough to bury him--and he had been a good Christian! But the priest ordered that the slight remains of Stan be buried, Christian-like. The empty coffin was brought to the church and all the rites were carried out as if the body of Stan were there rather than in the stomachs of wild beasts.

But after Stan's death the weather began to clear as if it had been G.o.d's will that such a price be paid for His clemency. The cold diminished daily and in a few days reports were brought from everywhere on the sh.o.r.e that the bridge of ice was giving way. Two weeks before Easter Sunday it was warm enough to give the cows an airing. The air cleared and the rays of the sun warmed man and beast. Traffic on the frozen river had ceased. Suddenly one morning a whip cracked, and from the bushes on the opposite sh.o.r.e of the Danube there appeared following one another six tent wagons, such as used by travelling gypsies, each wagon drawn by four horses harnessed side by side.

The people on our side of the Danube called to warn the travellers that the ice was not thick enough to hold them. In a few minutes the whole village was near the river, yelling and cursing like mad. But after they realized that the intention was to cross the Danube at any cost, the people settled down to watch what was going to happen. In front of the first wagon walked a tall, grey-bearded man trying the solidity of the ice with a heavy stick. Flanking the last wagon, in open lines, walked the male population of the tribe. Behind them came the women and children. No one said a word. The eyes of the whole village were on the travellers, for every one felt that they were tempting Providence. Yet each one knew that Murdo, the chief of the tribe, who was well known to all, in fact to the whole Dobrudja, would not take such risks with his people without good reason.

They had crossed to the middle of the frozen river in steady fashion, when Murdo shouted one word and the feet of every man and beast stopped short. The crossing of the river had been planned to the slightest detail. The people on the sh.o.r.e were excited. The women began to cry and the children to yell. They were driven inland by the men, who remained to watch what was going on. No a.s.sistance was possible.

The tall chief of the gypsies walked to the left and chose another path on the ice. The movement continued. Slowly, slowly, in silence the gypsies approached the sh.o.r.e. Again they halted. Murdo was probing the ice with his stick. We could see that the feet of the horses were wrapped in bags, and instead of being shod each hoof was in a cushion made of straw. As Murdo felt his way, a noise at first as of the tearing of paper, but more distinct with every moment, came from somewhere in the distance.

"Whoa, whoa, Murdo, the ice is breaking!" every one began to shout excitedly. The noise grew louder and louder as it approached. One could hear it coming steadily and gauge how much nearer it was. The ice was splitting lengthwise in numberless sheets which broke up in smaller parts and submerged gaily in the water, rising afterwards and climbing one on top of the other, as in a merry embrace.