The Best Short Stories of 1915 Part 40

Round the next corner Adam Foust waited. He was clad in his gray uniform--those who looked at him closely saw with astonishment that it was a new uniform; his brows met in a frown, his gray moustache seemed to bristle.

"How he hates them!" said one citizen of Fosterville to another. "Just look at poor Adam!"

"Used to bait his hook for him," Adam was saying. "Used to carry him pick-a-back! Used to go halves with him on everything. Now he walks with Ed Green!"

Adam pressed forward to the curb. The band was playing "Marching Through Georgia," which he hated; everybody was cheering. The volume of sound was deafening.

"Cheering Ed Green!" said Adam. "Fat! Lazy! Didn't have a wound. Dare say he hid behind a tree! Dare say--"

The band was in sight now, the back of the drum-major appeared, then all the musicians swung round the corner. After them came the little children with their flowers and their s.h.i.+ning faces.

"Him and Ed Green next," said old Adam.

But Henry walked alone. Adam's whole body jerked in his astonishment.

He heard some one say that Edward Green was sick, that the doctor had forbidden him to march, or even to ride. As he pressed nearer the curb he heard the admiring comments of the crowd.

"Isn't he magnificent!"

"See his beautiful flowers! His grandchildren always send him his flowers."

"He's our first citizen."

"He's mine!" Adam wanted to cry out. "He's mine!"

Never had Adam felt so miserable, so jealous, so heartsick. His eyes were filled with the great figure. Henry was, in truth, magnificent, not only in himself, but in what he represented. He seemed symbolic of a great era of the past, and at the same time of a new age which was advancing. Old Adam understood all his glory.

"He's mine!" said old Adam again, foolishly.

Then Adam leaned forward with startled, staring eyes. Henry had bowed and smiled in answer to the cheers. Across the street his own house was a ma.s.s of color--red, white, and blue over windows and doors, gay dresses on the porch. On each side the pavement was crowded with a shouting mult.i.tude. Surely no hero had ever had a more glorious pa.s.sage through the streets of his birthplace!

But old Adam saw that Henry's face blanched, that there appeared suddenly upon it an expression of intolerable pain. For an instant Henry's step faltered and grew uncertain.

Then old Adam began to behave like a wild man. He pushed himself through the crowd, he flung himself upon the rope as though to tear it down, he called out, "Wait! wait!" Frightened women, fearful of some sinister purpose, tried to grasp and hold him. No man was immediately at hand, or Adam would have been seized and taken away. As for the feeble women--Adam shook them off and laughed at them.

"Let me go, you geese!" said he.

A mounted marshal saw him and rode down upon him; men started from under the ropes to pursue him. But Adam eluded them or outdistanced them. He strode across an open s.p.a.ce with a surety which gave no hint of the terrible beating of his heart, until he reached the side of Henry. Him he greeted, breathlessly and with terrible eagerness.

"Henry," said he, gasping, "Henry, do you want me to walk along?"

Henry saw the alarmed crowds, he saw the marshal's hand stretched to seize Adam, he saw most clearly of all the tearful eyes under the beetling brows. Henry's voice shook, but he made himself clear.

"It's all right," said he to the marshal. "Let him be."

"I saw you were alone," said Adam. "I said, 'Henry needs me.' I know what it is to be alone. I--"

But Adam did not finish his sentence. He found a hand on his, a blue arm linked tightly in his gray arm, he felt himself moved along amid thunderous roars of sound.

"Of course I need you!" said Henry. "I've needed you all along."

Then, old but young, their lives almost ended, but themselves immortal, united, to be divided no more, amid an ever-thickening sound of cheers, the two marched down the street.

THE YELLOW CAT[19]

BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From _Harper's Magazine_

[19] Copyright 1915, by Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1916, by Wilbur Daniel Steele.

At least once in my life I have had the good fortune to board a deserted vessel at sea. I say "good fortune" because it has left me the memory of a singular impression. I have felt a ghost of the same thing two or three times since then, when peeping through the doorway of an abandoned house.

Now that vessel was not dead. She was a good vessel, a sound vessel, even a handsome vessel, in her blunt-bowed, coastwise way. She sailed under four lowers across as blue and glittering a sea as I have ever known, and there was not a point in her sailing that one could lay a finger upon as wrong. And yet, pa.s.sing that schooner at two miles, one knew, somehow, that no hand was on her wheel. Sometimes I can imagine a vessel, stricken like that, moving over the empty s.p.a.ces of the sea, carrying it off quite well were it not for that indefinable suggestion of a stagger; and I can think of all those ocean G.o.ds, in whom no landsman will ever believe, looking at one another and tapping their foreheads with just the shadow of a smile.

I wonder if they all scream--these s.h.i.+ps that have lost their souls?

Mine screamed. We heard her voice, like nothing I have ever heard before, when we rowed under her counter to read her name--the _Marionnette_ it was, of Halifax. I remember how it made me s.h.i.+ver, there in the full blaze of the sun, to hear her going on so, railing and screaming in that stark fas.h.i.+on. And I remember, too, how our footsteps, pattering through the vacant internals in search of that haggard utterance, made me think of the footsteps of hurrying warders roused in the night.

And we found a parrot in a cage; that was all. It wanted water. We gave it water and went away to look things over, keeping pretty close together, all of us. In the quarters the table was set for four. Two men had begun to eat, by the evidence of the plates. Nowhere in the vessel was there any sign of disorder, except one sea-chest broken out, evidently in haste. Her papers were gone and the stern davits were empty. That is how the case stood that day, and that is how it has stood to this. I saw this same _Marionnette_ a week later, tied up to a Hoboken dock, where she awaited news from her owners; but even there, in the midst of all the water-front bustle, I could not get rid of the feeling that she was still very far away--in a sort of s.h.i.+ppish other-world.

The thing happens now and then. Sometimes half a dozen years will go by without a solitary wanderer of this sort crossing the ocean paths, and then in a single season perhaps several of them will turn up: vacant waifs, impa.s.sive and mysterious--a quarter-column of tidings tucked away on the second page of the evening paper.

That is where I read the story about the _Abbie Rose_. I recollect how painfully awkward and out-of-place it looked there, cramped between ruled black edges and smelling of landsman's ink--this thing that had to do essentially with air and vast colored s.p.a.ces. I forget the exact words of the heading--something like "Abandoned Craft Picked Up At Sea"--but I still have the clipping itself, couched in the formal patter of the marine-news writer:

"The first hint of another mystery of the sea came in to-day when the schooner _Abbie Rose_ dropped anchor in the upper river, manned only by a crew of one. It appears that the out-bound freighter _Mercury_ sighted the _Abbie Rose_ off Block Island on Thursday last, acting in a suspicious manner. A boat-party sent aboard found the schooner in perfect order and condition, sailing under four lower sails, the topsails being pursed up to the mastheads but not stowed. With the exception of a yellow cat, the vessel was found to be utterly deserted, though her small boat still hung in the davits. No evidences of disorder were visible in any part of the craft. The dishes were washed up, the stove in the galley was still slightly warm to the touch, everything in its proper place with the exception of the vessel's papers, which were not to be found.

"All indications being for fair weather, Captain Rohmer of the _Mercury_ detailed two of his company to bring the find back to this port, a distance of one hundred and fifteen miles. The only man available with a knowledge of the fore-and-aft rig was Stewart McCord, the second engineer. A seaman by the name of Bjornsen was sent with him. McCord arrived this noon, after a very heavy voyage of five days, reporting that Bjornsen had fallen overboard while shaking out the foretopsail.

McCord himself showed evidences of the hards.h.i.+ps he has pa.s.sed through, being almost a nervous wreck."

Stewart McCord! Yes, Stewart McCord would have a knowledge of the fore-and-aft rig, or of almost anything else connected with the affairs of the sea. It happened that I used to know this fellow. I had even been quite chummy with him in the old days--that is, to the extent of drinking too many beers with him in certain hot-country ports. I remembered him as a stolid and deliberate sort of a person, with an amazing hodge-podge of learning, a stamp collection, and a theory about the effects of tropical suns.h.i.+ne on the Caucasian race, to which I have listened half of more than one night, stretched out naked on a freighter's deck. He had not impressed me as a fellow who would be bothered by his nerves.

And there was another thing about the story which struck me as rather queer. Perhaps it is a relic of my seafaring days, but I have always been a conscientious reader of the weather reports; and I could remember no weather in the past week sufficient to shake a man out of a top, especially a man by the name of Bjornsen--a thorough-going seafaring name.

I was destined to hear more of this in the evening from the ancient boatman who rowed me out on the upper river. He had been to sea in his day. He knew enough to wonder about this thing, even to indulge in a little superst.i.tious awe about it.

"No sir-ee. Something _happened_ to them four chaps. And another thing--"

I fancied I heard a sea-bird whining in the darkness overhead. A shape moved out of the gloom ahead, pa.s.sed to the left, lofty and silent, and merged once more with the gloom behind--a barge at anchor, with the sea-gra.s.s clinging around her water-line.

"Funny about that other chap," the old fellow speculated. "Bjornsen--I b'lieve he called 'im. Now that story sounds to me kind of--" He feathered his oars with a suspicious jerk and peered at me. "This McCord a friend of yourn?" he inquired.

"In a way," I said.

"Hm-m--well--" He turned on his thwart to squint ahead. "There she is,"

he announced, with something of relief, I thought.