O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 Part 47

"'I suppose,' he said, 'that you won't let me off that promise.'

"'No, no!' I cried, all my old panic flooding over me again. I threw my hands out, and suddenly he had caught them in his and was holding me half away from him, and he was saying, in that tragic voice of his:

"'No, no! But give me something to make it bearable.'"

"Allah, the compa.s.sionate!" sighed Hugh, in ecstasy. He had never dared hope for all this. His very being went on tiptoe for fear of breathing too loud.

"We sat there for ages and ages, gazing into the fire, not saying a word. Then he spoke ... every now and then. He said:

"'The horrible thing would have been never to have known you. Now that I've touched you I'm magnetized for life. I can't lose you again.'

"'It isn't I,' I told him. 'It's only what you think me.'

"'You are the only creature outside of myself that I ever found myself in,' he said. 'And I could look into you like Narcissus until I died.

You are home and Nirvana. That's what you are. When I look at you I believe in G.o.d. You gallantest, most foolhardy, little, fragile thing, you, you're not afraid of anything. You trust this rotten life, don't you? You expect to find lovely things everywhere, and you will, just because they'll spring up around your feet. You'll save your world like all redeemers simply by being in it.'

"No woman ever had such things said to her as he said to me. But most of the time we said nothing. There wasn't any past or future; there was only the touch of his shoulder and his hands all around mine. It was like coming in out of the cold; it was like being on a hill above the sea, and listening to the wind in the pines until you don't know which is the wind and which is you....

"It couldn't last forever. After a while something like a little point of pain began worrying my mind.

"'But there won't be.... This is good-bye,' I cried.

"'Don't you believe it,' he said. 'G.o.d Himself couldn't make us say good-bye again.' He got up and drew me with him. It was quite dark now except for the fire, and his eyes ... they were like those of the Djinns who were made out of elemental fire instead of earth. 'You'll come to me in the blessed suns.h.i.+ne,' he said, 'and in music, and in the best impulses of my own soul. If I were an old-fas.h.i.+oned lover I should promise to wait for you in heaven.... Betty, Betty, I have you in heaven now and forever!' ... I felt his cheek on mine. Then he was gone. That was all; that was every bit of all."

"And he had that to live on for the rest of his life." Hugh broke the silence under his breath. "Well, thank G.o.d he had _something_!"

The little woman fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief and shamelessly dried her eyes. As she moved, a brown object fell from the corner of the couch across her lap. Hugh held his hand out for the morocco portfolio.

"It seems to have the homing instinct," he observed; then, abruptly, "Wait a moment; I'm going to call them back." He paused, as usual, before his favourite confidant, the window. "The larger consciousness, the Universal Togetherness," he muttered. "I really believe he must have touched it that once. O Lord! how--" His s.p.a.cious vocabulary gave it up.

When he followed his uncle and aunt into the room Mrs. s.h.i.+rley came forward, her thin veil again covering her face.

"I must go," she said. "Thank you once more for letting me come."

With a curious young touch of solemnity Hugh laid the brown case in her hands. "This belongs to you," he said, "and I wanted them to see you receive it."

"And you intend to permit this, Winthrop?"

Miss Fowler turned on her brother. She had suppressed her emotions before the intruder; she had even said some proper things without unduly speeding the parting guest. But if you can't be hateful to your own family, to whom, in the name of the domestic pieties, can you be hateful?

Mr. Fowler swiveled on her the gla.s.sy eye of one who does not suffer fools gladly. "I permit anything," he responded, icily, "that will keep that boy ... sane." He retired anew behind the monastic newspaper and rattled it.

Miss Maria received a sudden chill apprehension that Winthrop was looking much older lately. "But--" she faltered. Then she resolutely returned to the baiting. "I suppose you recall her saying that she has a daughter. Probably," admitted Miss Maria, grudgingly, "an attractive daughter."

"It might be a very good thing," said the world-weary voice, and left her gasping. "Two excellent Virginia families." He faced his sister's appalled expression. "He might do something much more impossible--marry a cheap actress or go into a monastery. His behaviour to-day prepares me for anything. And"--a note of difficulty came into what Hugh had once called his uncle's chiselled voice--"you do not appear to realize, Maria, that what Mrs. s.h.i.+rley has done is rather a remarkable thing, a thing that you and I, with our undoubted appreciation of the value of money, should probably have felt that we could not afford to do."

Hugh came in blithely, bringing a spring-smelling whiff of outdoors with him. "I got her a taxi," he announced, "and she asked me to come down to their place for Easter. There's a hunting club. Oh cheer up, Aunt Maria!

At least she left the money behind."

"Look at my needle!" cried the long-suffering lady. "_You_ did that. I must say, Hugh, I find your conduct most disrespectful."

"All right, I grovel," Hugh agreed, pleasantly. He picked up the cat and rubbed her tenderly the wrong way.

"As for the money, I don't see how her conscience could have allowed her to accept everything. And she married somebody else, too."

"So did Dante's girl. That doesn't seem to make all the difference.

Conscience?" Hugh went on, absently. "Conscience? Haven't I heard that word somewhere before? You are the only person I know, Aunt Maria, who has a really good, staunch, weather-proof one, because, like the laws of the Medes and Persians, it altereth not."

"I should hope not, indeed," said Miss Fowler, half mollified.

Hugh smiled sleepily. The cat opened one yellow eye and moved mystified whiskers. She profoundly distrusted this affectionate young admirer. Was she being stroked the wrong way or ruffled the right way?

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright," murmured Hugh. "Puzzle, Kitty: find the Adventuress."

THE KITCHEN G.o.dS

BY G.F. ALSOP

From _Century Magazine_

The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard in their fantastic green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened.

Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness; but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the devil-catches, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came the sounds of early morning--the click of wooden sandals on cobbled streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh vegetables or carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city.

The gate-keeper was awake, brus.h.i.+ng out his house with a broom of twigs.

He was quite bald, and the top of his head was as tanned and brown as the legs of small summer children.

"Good morning, Honourable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The lilies have opened."

An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-ap.r.o.ned, cluttered across the courtyard with two pails of steaming water.

"Good morning, Honourable One. The water for the great wife is hot and heavy." She dropped her buckets, the water splas.h.i.+ng over in runnels and puddles at her feet, and stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an auspicious day."

From the cas.e.m.e.nt-window in the right balcony a voice called:

"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"

It sounded elderly and querulous a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to dominate. The great wife's face appeared a moment at the cas.e.m.e.nt. Her eyes swept over the courtyard scene--over the blooming lilies, and Dong-Yung standing among them.

"Behold the small wife, cursed of the G.o.ds!" she cried in her high, shrill voice. "Not even a girl can she bear her master. May she eat bitterness all her days!"

The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare boards of the ancestral hall beyond.

"The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honourable One, shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids."