The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 19

I felt aggrieved. Had Orrington been working on our feelings for his private amus.e.m.e.nt merely? "You said there wasn't any conclusion," I growled.

"Don't get huffy," Orrington returned imperturbably. "The story hasn't any ending, as I warned you. Only my part in it turned out rather amusingly. I hope I shouldn't be fatuous a.s.s enough to brag about the incident if there were anything in it that demanded bouquets. I suspect the bubble of n.o.ble actions often bursts just as mine did."

"What do you mean?" asked Reynolds-reasonably enough, I thought.

"Only this," Orrington went on. "It turned out that the people who had offered to let me do the articles were tremendously impressed by my turning them down. The letter I wrote them must have been a corker.

Somehow or other they got the notion that I was a very busy man and a person of importance. They ought to have known better, of course, but they evidently adopted that silly idea. They talked about me to their friends and cracked me up as a coming man. The upshot of it was that I began to be tempted with most flattering offers of one sort and another-before long I had my choice of several things. My self-const.i.tuted backers were rather powerful in those days, so it was useful to be in their good books. I left my moribund magazine and got so prosperous that I began to grow fat at once. Serene obscurity has been my lot ever since; and I've never got rid of the fat."

"That's a happy ending," I remarked lazily. "It's very like a real conclusion. What more do you want?"

"Oh, for the sake of argument, I'd like to prove that I was right and that Reynolds's theory is all wrong."

"I'm exceedingly glad that it turned out so well for you," said Reynolds unctuously. "Then the young man whom you a.s.sisted didn't need to feel quite so much under obligation to you as we've been thinking?"

I was outraged. Reynolds was a great gun in literature, at least in the opinion of himself and a huge circle of readers. He was also a dozen years older than I. At the same time, I couldn't allow him to disparage what Orrington had done, merely because Orrington made light of it.

"You will observe," I said with some heat, "that the effect on Orrington was purely secondary and fortuitous. Orrington didn't know he could possibly gain by it when he took the bread out of his own mouth to feed the young cur. I hope, for my part, that the fellow eventually starved to death or took to digging ditches."

Reynolds sat up very straight. His black eyes snapped with anger. "He didn't," he burst out. "I happen to know him."

"You know him!" I exclaimed, while Orrington goggled.

"Yes." Reynolds had grown very red, but he looked defiant. "Since I've been attacked like this, I may as well tell you. Not that I think it's anybody's business but my own. Orrington didn't suffer by what he did."

"You don't mean-" I began.

"I mean just what I say-no less and no more. I was the man in question, and I admit that I ought to have thanked Orrington for his kindness. I meant to, of course; but I set to work at once on those articles that have a.s.sumed such importance in our discussion, and I was very busy. I had to make them as good as I knew how. I a.s.sumed, naturally, that I had merely received a useful tip from a man who didn't care for the job.

I've always a.s.sumed that till this afternoon. I wanted the job badly, myself."

"Oh, well!" Orrington put in soothingly. "It doesn't matter, does it?

I've explained that the incident really set me on my feet. You don't owe me anything, Reynolds. If I'd been a complete pig and kept the chance for myself, I'd probably have been much worse off for it. You needed it much more than I did, evidently."

To my surprise, Reynolds was not quieted by Orrington's magnanimous speech. Instead, he jumped up in a pa.s.sion and stood before us, clinching and unclinching his fists like a small boy before his first fight.

"That isn't the point," he said in a voice so loud that various groups of men scattered about the room looked toward us with amus.e.m.e.nt. "I admit that I was glad of the opportunity to do the articles, but I was by no means in such straits as you suppose. So much for the critical sense for which you have such a reputation!" He turned on Orrington with a sneer.

Orrington remained very calm. He seemed in no wise disturbed by the fury of Reynolds's tirade, nor by his insufferable rudeness, but puffed at a cigarette two or three times before he replied. "It's a poor thing, critical sense," he murmured. "I've never been proud of what mine has done for me. But you must admit that I paid you a pretty compliment, Reynolds, in believing that your story was founded on real experience. I don't see why you need mind my saying that it wasn't much of a yarn.

n.o.body need be sensitive about something he did twenty years back."

"I don't care a hang what you thought about the story then, or what you think of it now," Reynolds snapped. "You might, however, grant the existence of imagination. You needn't attribute everything anybody writes to actual experience. I never went hungry."

So that was where the shoe pinched! Reynolds insisted on being proud of his prosperity at all stages. I laughed. "You've missed something, then," I put in. "The sensation, if not agreeable, is unique. Every man should feel it once, in a way. A couple of times I've run short of provisions, and I a.s.sure you the experience is like nothing else."

"That's different," said Reynolds a little more quietly. "I'm not saying that I owe nothing to Orrington. I acknowledge that I do, and I admit that I ought to have acknowledged it twenty years ago. I was anxious at the time to get a start in the world of letters, and I was looking for an opening. Orrington's suggestion gave me my first little opportunity; but it certainly didn't save my life."

"Then it was all imagination, after all," Orrington said gently. "What a mistake I made!"

"Of course it was all imagined!" Reynolds protested, and he added navely: "I was living at home at the time, and I had a sufficient allowance from my father."

A twinkle crept into Orrington's usually expressionless eyes. "I must apologize to you, Reynolds, or perhaps to your father, for so mistaking the circ.u.mstances of your youth. You have, at all events, lived down the opprobrium of inherited wealth. You've supported yourself quite nicely ever since I've known you."

"As I remarked earlier," Reynolds went on pompously, but in better humor, "I have never thought it wise for young men to embark on the literary life without sufficient means to live in comfort until they can establish their reputations. In my own case I should never have undertaken to do so."

His declaration of principle seemed to restore him to complete self-satisfaction, and it must have seemed to him the proper cue for exit. As he was already standing, he was in a position to shake hands with Orrington and me rather condescendingly; and he took himself off with the swagger of conscious invincibility. I think he bore us no malice.

Orrington looked at me and raised his eyebrows. "I told you I needed you to save my life," he said. "I hadn't any notion, though, that this kind of thing would happen. I'm sorry to have let you in for such a scene."

"Oh, I don't mind," I answered. "It has been rather amusing and-well-illuminating."

Orrington chuckled. "The devil tempted me, and I didn't resist him unduly. As a matter of fact, it has been quite as illuminating to me as to you. I've been wis.h.i.+ng for a dozen or fifteen years to try out the experiment."

"What experiment?" I was puzzled.

"Oh, putting it up to Reynolds, of course. I've wondered why he did it and why he didn't do it and, moreover, how he did it."

"If you got light on a complication like that, you did better than I did. Do you mind explaining?"

"Reynolds has explained sufficiently, hasn't he? Of course I knew long ago that he faked his story, but-"

"Then you knew it was Reynolds?" I interrupted.

"Knew? Of course I knew. Later, of course, much later. I never inquired, as I told you, but I spotted him after he made his first big hit. The man who had hired him to do those articles bragged about it to me-said he'd given him his start, but allowed me some credit for establis.h.i.+ng the connection. I blinked, but didn't let on I hadn't known that Reynolds and my supposedly starving young author were one and the same person. By that time, of course, everybody was fully aware that Reynolds had emerged from heavily gilded circles of dulness. I don't know why I've never had it out with him before. I suppose I shouldn't have sailed in to-day if he hadn't been so snippy about the boy of whom I was telling you. I couldn't stand that."

"I'm afraid," I ventured to say, "that it won't do Reynolds any special good."

Orrington rose ponderously from his chair and spread his hands in a fantastic gesture of disclaim. "Who am I," he asked, "to teach ethics to a genius who is also a moralist-'with perhaps a cosmic significance'?

The devil tempted me, I tell you, and I fell, for the sake of a little fun and a little information. I've never known Reynolds's side of the story. Lord, no, it won't do him any good. All the same, it will take him a week to explain to himself all over again just why he acted with perfect propriety in not acknowledging my little boost. I dare say his book may be a few days later on account of it, and I shall have to nurse Speedwell through an attack of the fidgets. A dreadful life, mine! No wonder the business man is tired. You ought to thank G.o.d on your knees every night that you haven't been sitting all day in a publisher's office."

He held out his hand very solemnly, and very solemnly waddled across the big room, nodding every now and then to acquaintances who smiled up at him as he pa.s.sed.

IN MAULMAIN FEVER-WARD

_By_ GEORGE GILBERT _Copyright, 1918, by The Story-Press Corporation._

Flood-time on Salwin River, Burma! _Pouk_ trees and _stic-lac_ in flower. By day the rush, the roar of water fretting at the knees of Kalgai Gorge, above which the Thoungyeen enters the main current. And the music of the elephants' bells as they come along the track bound down or mayhap up to work in the teak forests. By night the languorous scent of the _serai_ vines luring the myriad moths, the wail of the gibbons, the rustle of the bamboos chafing their feathery leaves together in the winds that just falter between rest and motion.

At Kalgai the traders pause in going up or down, over or across. From everywhere they come, and coming, stay to chaffer, to chat, cheat, scheme, love-aye and even slay! Why not? It's life-raw life!

Take away the medicine. Give me rice curry and chicken and fish cooked with green bamboo tips and sourish-sweet _pilou_ of river mussels. And then a whiff of _bhang_ or black Malay tobacco that the gypsies of the sea smuggle in....

My name? Paul Brandon will do. My father was a Stepney coster. Mother?

Oh, a half-caste Mandalay woman. Yes, they were married at the mission.

He took her home. I was born in London. But I ran away; came East....

Don't mind if I babble, ma'am. And forgive me if I pull at the sheets.