Chapter VI · THE ARTISTIC GROUP: THE REAL SHORT-STORY

The short-story as a production of an artist conscious of rules and striving for definite effects within limitations is a thing of the nineteenth century. Only gradually have writers come to the feeling for singleness and unity. It would appear that before the days of Poe and Maupassant brief narratives were brief because of their source or their type, or because the author did not happen to have a rich vein of digression and incident. They were then rather what we think of as tales than what we have come to regard as the real short-story.

We have hitherto in our study been making little or no distinction in our use of the terms narrative, story, and tale, nor have we understood the adjective short with any but its usual significance. We shall from now on, however, understand the term short-story technically, and employ the hyphen, as Matthews has employed it, to suggest the significance.

A short-story is very perceptibly shorter than a romance or a novel. It is indeed about like a chapter of one of these. In no case must the reading require more than one sitting, says Poe. On the other hand, it may not be so short as an ordinary incident or anecdote, but far longer. It is more complex, more dignified, and has distinguishing essential elements.

It is not possible, of course, to make a hard and fast definition, but there are certain qualities we pretty generally expect to find. A short-story may be of any type from a myth to a realistic sketch; it may emphasize environment, plot, or character; but it must have unity, it must have directness, it must have climax, however slight. The effect should be single, not multiple. Hence anything like digression or episode is entirely out of place. The end should not be delayed, nor yet should it be precipitated. It should come just at the right time, and be as proper as the catastrophe of a tragedy. It should be but the beginning made special and concrete, the middle continued in harmony, the conclusion come upon both inevitably. "Make another end to it?" says Stevenson[7] in answering an objection to one of his stories. "Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write; the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect when I can help it unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make another end; that is to make the beginning all wrong. The dénouement of a long story is nothing, it is just 'a full close,' which you may approach and accompany as you please—it is a coda, not an essential number in the rhythm; but the body and end of a short-story is bone-of-the-bone and blood-of-the-blood of the beginning."

Students of this type of narrative find Poe the first man to reveal a consciousness of any strictly limiting tenets. Poe worked to definite rules which he himself made. He saw intrinsic reasons why a short-story should be short. His predecessors, Irving and others, had not seen them. Even Hawthorne, who fulfilled them many times, said nothing about them. But Poe both formulated and preached them. He exemplified them, too, and other men followed.

The list of good short-story writers is so great that particular mention of any seems invidious. Some of our less known men have done as good work as our best. For names by countries, you may notice the bibliography at the end of this book. Kipling's stories for a large part emphasize place; Poe's, very often plot; and Hawthorne's and Stevenson's, mostly psychological phenomena—character and whimsical expressions of it; Miss Wilkins's altogether reveal temperament and characteristics; while Maupassant's generally record events which include a stab of fate.

On the basis of artistic purpose, the short-story divides itself into three types: the weird tale, stories that emphasize environment and typical personality, stories that emphasize events and character.

Every narrator whenever he sets his pen to paper must deal with place, plot, and people; but the artistic short-story writer, because of the limitation of his form, is forced to a selection of emphasis. He can not at will, as the biographer can, dilate upon the ancestry of his hero if he means to present the personage in action; if he wants to indulge in an environment analysis, the short-story writer has not time to wind up and unwind a mystery; if he has decided to give us the crisis event of a character, he must perforce touch but lightly on place. We shall find, then, that while each good short-story has the three elements present and skilfully managed, it has also one or the other more strongly emphasized—or at most two, in practical neglect of the third.

I. The Psychological Weird Tale

Origin

Our idea of the required form of the weird tale has come to be that of the modern artistic short-story; but all the elements of the type save form were present in England in the middle of the eighteenth century in the terror school started by Walpole's "Castle of Otranto." The author declared his work to be an attempt to blend the ancient romance and the modern novel. By modern novel he meant the stories of Richardson, Fielding, Smollet, and their less worthy contemporaries; by ancient romance he must have meant the Oriental wonder tale; for he has sliding panels, trap doors, subterranean passages, and a general extravagance in an attempt at magnificence. Indeed, in regard to the multiplicity of detail, this school is often called the Gothic. The difference between the narratives of the school of terror and the Oriental wonder tale is the difference of atmosphere. While the ancient tale is mysterious, it is seldom if ever morbid. Especially is the cheerfulness true of the stories of mediæval chivalry that later embodied the wonder tale. Enchantment there is, but it is airy; if there be any vaults, they are not damp. The school of terror But the "Castle of Otranto" by Walpole, the "Old English Baron" by Clara Reeve, the "Romance of the Forest," the "Mysteries of Udolpho," and the "Italian" by Mrs. Radcliffe, and "The Monk" by Matthew Lewis,—the six chief romances of the school of terror,—are all damp, dark, ghostly, and morbid. Mrs. Radcliffe, however, added an element of eighteenth-century rationalism in her attempt at explanation; inasmuch as she always refers her constant suggestions of the supernatural to ordinary causes. Moreover, she interspersed her work with excellent landscape description in harmony or contrast with her theme. The contributions, then, of the romances of the school of terror are (1) frightful mechanism, (2) a general tone of Gothic fantasticalness, (3) weird place-impressions that can be explained by natural causes, and (4) terror of physical or supernatural punishment and death.

Edgar Allen Poe

To point out how much Edgar Allan Poe on the mere material side is indebted to this set of writers, possibly through Charles Brockden Brown and the American school of terror, we need only to name over to ourselves two of his famous weird tales together with their grosser elements. "The Fall of the House of Usher" has general arabesqueness plus hollow groans, echoing footsteps, high pointed windows excluding light, a person imprisoned in a metal vault (the hero in the "Castle of Otranto" is imprisoned in a gigantic metal helmet), terror of death, consonant landscape description, natural causes for weird sounds. The "Pit and the Pendulum" has a dungeon of the Inquisition, horrible instrument of torture, brink over which to fall, bodily and mental fear of death (Lewis's monk is snatched by demons from the Inquisition and carried to a cliff of the Sierra Morena off which he is commanded to fling himself).

But Poe is as far away from the crude and bungling methods of the earlier writers as he is near their materials. How cracking doors and opening vaults, quaking houses, and walking dead, outer terrific elements and inner terrific sensation and morbid imaginative perception reaching madness, can be fused into one harmonized, unified, piercing, intense prose poem he has shown us in this same "Fall of the House of Usher." Nothing of the kind could be better. His own cruder attempt is set forth in the fore-study, "Berenice," which might be considered good if the other story were not immeasurably better. A side sketch of quite a different tone, yet almost as weird, is his beautiful color symphony of the "Masque of the Red Death." All are exquisite artistic creations.

Stevenson

Poe's "William Wilson," an imaginative psychological horror study of conscience, has been paralleled if not surpassed by Stevenson's "Markheim." "Markheim" is more concrete, especially at the beginning; there is more of story and less of symbolism about it; but the climax is the same, or rather the reverse; for in Poe's story William Wilson's worse self murders his better, while in Stevenson's story Markheim's better self, the murderer, who really hates his deed, triumphs over his worse self, the coward and liar.

In Poe's story the weirdness results from the fact that Wilson's conscience, which he kills, is a concrete double with the same name and appearance. Stevenson has united this device of a double with weird place-description and weird deed-narrative. He has kept the thing more psychological and less symbolic by making the second presence explainable as an hallucination, more shadowy than Poe's.

Maupassant and others

"What is It? a Mystery" by Fitz James O'Brien shows how very, very material the horror story may be; and yet O'Brien's is not an uninteresting narrative; for it is full of vigor and truth-likeness in the beginning; the end only is bad art; where the frightened people take a plaster cast of the mysterious being they have captured and can not see. "The Hand" by Maupassant is another such touch horror tale, but of course better told. His "Apparition" is almost pure narrative and builds to a fine realistic climax, despite the ghostliness of the visitant. Matthew's "Venetian Glass" is also weird plot rather than weird place, while "The Wind in the Rose Bush" is emphatically character study, and the "Phantom Rickshaw" is a good old-fashioned, if Oriental, ghost story.

Suggestions on writing a weird tale

For your first attempt at this type of narrative, you might try the modern ghost story, and later, when more practised, the delicate psychological analysis of states of conscience. The modern ghost stories differ from folk-tales concerning weird beings in this respect particularly: the modern ghost is usually explainable, a fact you would expect because of our inheritance from the terror school. He is a logical ghost—a creature of one's own making, an hallucination at best or a white cow at worst. The author sets out to depict not so much the ghost, as the ghost's effect upon the hero. In a number of instances the modern narrative of this kind rises to the plane of the true short-story, complying with all the canons of art. Read for example one of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's six "Stories of the Supernatural," of which the "Wind in the Rose Bush" is one.

Material and method

The material is comparatively simple. Get eerie circumstances, a credulous or boastfully incredulous mind, a probable incident, an explainable apparition, and any modern setting that will hold the course of events together. See to it that the construction is unified and coherent. Build to a climax, and stop quickly afterwards. Make the apparition a logical outgrowth of the environment and the state of mind of the victim. The ghost of the folk-tale usually appears to the half-witted, the foolish, the credulous; but the ghost of the modern story, to prove his existence, perhaps, is far bolder; he speaks out to the skeptic, the person who calls a shadow a shadow. That the unearthly spirit must catch the strong man at his weak moment is obvious—otherwise there would be no story. But when the events are given, stop. Do not explain too much.

Form

It is well to notice the different methods of getting the facts before the reader. Sometimes everything is set forth by the author, and the characters speak but little or not at all. Sometimes one character speaks in a continued monologue. Sometimes the events come out in conversation or dialogue, the dramatic method, and the author appears but little. When he appears not at all we have true drama instead of narrative. The larger number of stories, doubtless, are a mixture of author and character talk.

The Signal-Man

"Halloa! Below there!"

When he heard a voice thus calling to him he was standing at the door of his box with a flag in his hand, furled around its short pole. One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but, instead of looking up to where I stood oh the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset that I had shadowed my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

"Halloa! Below!"

From looking down the line he turned himself about again and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him.

"Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?"

He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapor as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by.

I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called down to him, "All right!" and made for that point. There, by dint of looking closely about me, I found a rough zigzag descending path notched out, which I followed.

The cutting was extremely deep and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons I found the way long enough to recall a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out the path.

When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent to see him again, I saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear. He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right hand, crossed over his breast. His attitude was one of such expectant watchfulness that I stopped a moment, wondering at it.

I resumed my downward way and, stepping out upon the level of the railroad and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark, sallow man with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

Before he stirred I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step and lifted his hand.

This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped! In me he merely saw a man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who, being at last set free, had a newly awakened interest in these great works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the terms I used, for besides that I am not happy in opening any conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me.

He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel's mouth and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and then looked at me.

That light was part of his charge—was it not?

He answered in a low voice, "Don't you know it is?"

The monstrous thought came into my mind as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since whether there may have been infection in his mind.

In my turn I stepped back. But in making the action I detected in his eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to flight.

"You look at me," I said, forcing a smile, "as if you had a dread of me."

"I was doubtful," he returned, "whether I had seen you before."

"Where?"

He pointed to the red light he had looked at.

"There?" I said.

Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), "Yes."

"My good fellow, what should I do there? However, be that as it may, I never was there, you may swear."

"I think I may," he rejoined. "Yes. I am sure I may."

His manner cleared, like my own. He replied to my remarks with readiness and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes, that was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work—manual labor—he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim those lights and to turn this iron handle now and then was all he had to do under that head. Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much he could only say that the routine of his life had shaped itself into that form and he had grown used to it. He had taught himself a language down here—if only to know it by sight and to have formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation could be called learning it. He had also worked at fractions and decimals, and tried a little algebra; but he was, and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures. Was it necessary for him when on duty always to remain in that channel of damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those high stone walls? Why, depended upon times and circumstances. Under some conditions there would be less upon the line than under others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night. In bright weather he did choose occasions for getting a little above these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his electric bell and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety, the relief was less than I would suppose.

He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an official book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument with its dial, face and needle, and the little bell of which he had spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been well educated and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that he had heard it was so in work-houses, in the police force, even in that last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could believe it, sitting in that hut—he scarcely could), a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to offer about that. He had made his bed and he lay upon it. It was far too late to make another.

All that I have here condensed he said in a quiet manner, with his grave dark regards divided between me and the fire. He threw in the word "Sir" from time to time, and especially when he referred, to his youth—as though to request me to understand that he claimed to be nothing but what I found him. He was several times interrupted by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once he had to stand without the door and display a flag as a train passed and make some verbal communication to the driver. In the discharge of his duties I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable and remaining silent until what he had to do was done.

In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen color, turned his face towards the little bell when it did not ring, opened the door of the hut (which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel. On both of those occasions he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him which I had remarked, without being able to define when we were so far asunder.

Said I, when I rose to leave him, "You almost make me think that I have met with a contented man."

(I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.)

"I believe I used to be so," he rejoined in the low voice in which he had first spoken; "but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled."

He would have recalled the words if he could. He had said them, however, and I took them up quickly.

"With what? What is your trouble?"

"It is very difficult to impart, sir. It is very, very difficult to speak of. If ever you make me another visit I will try to tell you."

"But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall it be?"

"I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-morrow night, sir."

"I will come at eleven."

He thanked me and went to the door with me. "I'll show my white light, sir," he said in his peculiar low voice, "till you have found the way up. When you have found it, don't call out! And when you are at the top, don't call out!"

His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said no more than "Very well."

"And when you come down to-morrow night, don't call out! Let me ask you a parting question. What made you cry 'Halloa! Below there!' to-night?"

"Heaven knows," said I. "I cried something to that effect—"

"Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them well."

"Admit those were the very words. I said them, no doubt because I saw you below."

"For no other reason?"

"What other reason could I possibly have?"

"You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural way?"

"No."

He wished me good-night and held up his light. I walked by the side of the down line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation of a train coming behind me) until I found the path. It was easier to mount than to descend, and I got back to my inn without any adventure.

Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of the zigzag next night as the distant clocks were striking eleven. He was waiting for me at the bottom with his white light on. "I have not called out," I said when we came close together; "may I speak now?" "By all means, sir." "Good-night, then, and here's my hand." "Good-night, sir, and here's mine." With that we walked side by side to his box, entered it, closed the door and sat down by the fire.

"I have made up my mind, sir," he began, bending forward as soon as we were seated, and speaking in a tone but a little above a whisper, "that you shall not have to ask me twice what troubles me. I took you for some one else yesterday evening. That troubles me."

"That mistake?"

"No. That some one else."

"Who is it?"

"I don't know."

"Like me?"

"I don't know. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face and the right arm is waved—violently waved. This way."

I followed his action with my eyes and it was the action of an arm gesticulating with the utmost passion and vehemence, "For God's sake clear the way!"

"One moonlight night," said the man, "I was sitting here when I heard a voice cry 'Halloa! Below there!' I started up, looked from that door, and saw this some one else standing by the red light near the tunnel waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting and it cried, 'Look out! Look out!' And then again, 'Halloa! Below there! Look out!' I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, 'What's wrong? What has happened? Where?' It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away, when it was gone."

"Into the tunnel," said I.

"No. I ran on into the tunnel five hundred yards. I stopped and held up my lamp above my head and saw the figures of the measured distance and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light, with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways, 'An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?' The answer came back, both ways, 'All well.'"

Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight, and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature of their affliction and had even proved it by experiments upon themselves. "As to an imaginary cry," said I, "do but listen for a moment to the wind in this unnatural valley, while we speak so slow and to the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires!"

That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a while, and he ought to know something of the wind and wires—he who so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching. But he would beg to remark that he had not finished.

I asked his pardon and he slowly added these words, touching my arm:

"Within six hours after the appearance the memorable accident on this line happened, and within ten hours the dead and the wounded were brought along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood."

A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it. It was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable coincidence, calculated deeply to impress his mind. But it was unquestionable that remarkable coincidences did continually occur and they must be taken into account in dealing with such a subject. Though to be sure I must admit, I added (for I thought I saw that he was going to bring the objection to bear upon me), men of common sense did not allow much for coincidence making the ordinary calculations of life.

He again begged to remark that he had not finished.

I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions.

"This," he said, again laying his hand upon my arm and glancing over his shoulder with hollow eyes, "was just a year ago. Six or seven months passed and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at the door, looked towards the red light and saw the spectre again." He stopped with a fixed look at me.

"Did it cry out?"

"No. It was silent."

"Did it wave its arm?"

"No. It leaned against the shaft of the light with both hands before the face. Like this."

Once more I followed his action with my eyes. It was an action of mourning. I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs.

"Did you go up to it?"

"I came in and sat down, partly to collect my thoughts, partly because it had turned me faint. When I went to the door again, daylight was above me and the ghost was gone."

"But nothing followed? Nothing came of this?"

He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice, giving a ghastly nod each time.

"That very day, as the train came out of the tunnel, I noticed at a carriage window on my side what looked like a confusion of hands and heads and something waved. I saw it just in time to signal the driver, stop! He shut off and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it and as I went along heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died instantaneously in one of the compartments and was brought in here and laid down on this floor between us."

Involuntarily I pushed my chair back suddenly, as I looked from the boards, at which he pointed, to himself.

"True, sir. True. Precisely as it happened, so I tell it you."

I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was very dry. The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail.

He resumed. "Now, sir, mark this and judge how my mind is troubled. The spectre came back a week ago. Ever since it has been there, now and again, by fits and starts."

"At the light?"

"At the danger-light."

"What does it seem to do?"

He repeated, if possible, with increased passion and vehemence, that former gesticulation of, "For God's sake, clear the way!"

Then he went on. "I have no peace or rest for it. It calls to me, for many minutes together, in an agonized manner, 'Below there! Look out! Look out!' It stands waving to me. It rings my little bell—"

I caught at that. "Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I was here and you went to the door?"

"Twice."

"Why, see," said I, "how your imagination misleads you. My eyes were on the bell and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a living man it did not ring at those times. No, nor at any other time, except when it was rung in the natural course of physical things by the station communication with you."

He shook his head. "I have never made a mistake as to that yet, sir. I have never confused the spectre's ring with the man's. The ghost's ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don't wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it."

"And did the spectre seem to be there when you looked out?"

"It was there."

"Both times?"

He repeated firmly: "Both times."

"Will you come to the door with me and look for it now?"

He bit his under lip as though he were somewhat unwilling, but arose. I opened the door and stood on the step while he stood in the doorway. There was the danger-light. There was the dismal mouth of the tunnel. There were the high, wet stone wells of the cutting. There were the stars above them.

"Do you see it?" I asked him, taking particular note of his face. His eyes were prominent and strained, but not very much more so, perhaps, than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly towards the same spot.

"No," he answered. "It is not there."

"Agreed," said I.

We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he took up the conversation in such a matter-of-course way, so assuming that there could be no serious question of fact between us, that I felt myself placed in the weakest of positions.

"By this time you will fully understand, sir," he said, "that what troubles me so dreadfully is the question, What does the spectre mean?"

I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.

"What is its warning against?" he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the fire and only by times turning them on me. "What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging somewhere on the line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do?"

He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped the drops from his heated forehead.

"If I telegraph danger on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for it," he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. "I should get into trouble and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the way it would work—Message: 'Danger! Take care!' Answered: 'What danger? Where?' Message: 'Don't know. But for God's sake, take care!' They would discharge me. What else could they do?"

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.

"When it first stood under the danger-light," he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, "why not tell me where that accident was to happen, if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted, if it could have been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, 'She is going to die. Let them keep her at home?' If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signal man in this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed and power to act?"

When I saw him in this state I saw that for the poor man's sake, as well as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations incidental to his post as the night advanced began to make larger demands on his attention; and I left him at two in the morning. I had offered to stay through the night, but he would not hear of it.

That I more than once looked back at the red light as I ascended the pathway, that I did not like the red light, and that I should have slept but poorly if my bed had been under it, I see no reason to conceal. Nor did I like the two sequences of the accident and the dead girl. I see no reason to conceal that, either.

But what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration, how ought I to act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had proved the man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking and exact; but how long might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a subordinate position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to execute it with precision?

Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in my communicating what he had told me to his superiors in the company, without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion. A change in his time of duty would come round next night, he had apprised me, and he would be off an hour or two after sunrise, and on again soon after sunset. I had appointed to return accordingly.

Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy it. The sun was not yet quite down when I traversed the field-path near the top of the deep cutting. I would extend my walk for an hour, I said to myself, half an hour on and half an hour back, and it would then be time to go to my signal-man's box.

Before pursuing my stroll I stepped to the brink and mechanically looked down from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the tunnel I saw the appearance of a man with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.

The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was a little group of other men standing at a short distance to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft a little low hut, entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed.

With an irresistible sense that something was wrong—with a flashing self-reproachful fear that fatal mischief had come of my leaving the man here and causing no one to be sent to overlook or correct what he did—I descended the notched path with all the speed I could make.

"What is the matter?" I asked the men.

"Signal-man killed this morning, sir."

"Not the man belonging to that box?"

"Yes, sir."

"Not the man I know?"

"You will recognize him, sir, if you knew him," said the man who spoke for the others, solemnly uncovering his own head and raising an end of the tarpaulin, "for his face is quite composed."

"O, how did this happen, how did this happen?" I asked, turning from one to another as the hut closed in again.

"He was cut down by an engine, sir. No man in England knew his work better, but somehow he was not clear of the outer rail. It was just at broad day. He had struck the light and had the lamp in his hand. As the engine came out of the tunnel his back was towards her and she cut him down. That man drove her and was showing how it happened. Show the gentleman, Tom."

The man, who wore a rough dark dress, stepped back to his former place at the mouth of the tunnel:

"Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir," he said, "I saw him at the end, like as if I saw him down a perspective glass. There was no time to check speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he didn't seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon him and called to him as loud as I could call."

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake, clear the way!"

I started.

"Ah! it was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use."

Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious circumstances more than any other, I may, in closing it, point out the coincidence that the warning of the engine driver included not only the words which the unfortunate signal-man had repeated to me as haunting him, but also the words which I myself—not he—had attached, and that only in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated.

—Charles Dickens.

"Like a Thief in the Night"

"How many more days of this miserable tramping have we before us, Ivan?" It was a rough voice that spoke—a voice hardened with bitterness and hatred.

"But four days more, Peter, and then the railroad. There lies Mansk below us, and it is not far from Mansk to Vilna, not even by such a detour as we must make."

Peter paused again in his eating and looking out from their woodland hiding-place toward the scraggly village, asked doubtingly, "You are sure they will not fail us? For I swear, Ivan, I'll walk no further than Vilna."

Ivan twisted his scarred lips into a semblance of a smile. "The brotherhood never fail," he said. "And now that we have finished our supper, we may rest for the night, eh, Lev?" The speaker, who showed evidences of association with the upper classes, turned to the young Jewish lad sprawled beside him on the mouldy ground. The boy was laboriously spelling out words in a greasy, dog-eared tract which he tried to conceal when he saw Ivan's eyes upon him.

"Hello," exclaimed the nihilist fanatic, "what have we here?" He took the grimy pamphlet from the likewise grimy hands of the youth. "Ho-ho," he laughed boisterously, for once forgetting that sometimes even trees have ears. "Ho-ho! a merry jest, indeed! Lev reading up on transmigration! Did you think to become learned, you pitiable young dog? Have you not had meted out to you the full amount of education allowed you miserable Jews? What can you understand of such things as these? Ho-ho! yes, a joke indeed!"

The boy gulped. His narrow nostrils widened, and the corners of his sensitive mouth twitched. "I know I don't know much, Ivan. I found it on the way and kept it, for it helps sometimes, wh-when I wish I hadn't come."

"Ho-ho," laughed Ivan again. "When he wishes he hadn't come! As if he could have helped coming! Where, indeed, could the brotherhood have found a more innocent-looking hiding-place for their papers? But there, Lev, you shall have your thesis, since you feel the need of amusement, you precious infant. And, Peter, perhaps you will rest more peacefully when I tell you that Loris Pleschivna, that government spy-cat—" here Ivan paused to observe the interest which he knew that this name would create, while Lev, frightened, glanced backward—"was shot two weeks ago," finished the narrator, impressively.

Peter's yellow face showed great relief, but the boy whitened. "Well, Lev, are you not glad! Or perhaps, mighty philosopher, you think that his soul will come and steal the papers while you keep watch to-night, eh?" And Ivan grinned—a hideous, tooth-displaying grin. But Lev only shivered and looked around at the darkness.

The night, one of those dear nights whose very paleness intensifies the shadows and pictures the ghosts of the past to the guilty mind, had fallen. The two older men rolled themselves in blankets and went to sleep without delay.

The young Jew sat alone, waiting for morning. For hours he remained in the same position, his hands over his eyes that he might not see; but his ears were alert to the slightest suggestion of sound. In those weary minutes he lived over the scanty pleasures and the great tribulations of his life, the joyless life of the persecuted Polish Jew. The crackling of a dry leaf nearby aroused him. He looked up quickly, apprehensively. A long wailing howl came from somewhere in the darkness. Lev stiffened, staring into the shadows before him. From a clump of bushes directly opposite peered two weird green eyes. The lad's lower lip sagged loosely. As the strange eyes approached he unconsciously moaned. Ivan and Peter stirred. Suddenly Ivan jumped up. "Lev, Lev, what is it?" But the boy sat rigid. Ivan also looked at the green eyes in the underbrush. Then he laughed, laughed long and heartily. "Did you think it was a soul, Lev? A dog, and you afraid! Perhaps it is a soulful dog." Ivan had sufficient culture not to laugh at his own joke, but he waited for Peter's appreciation and Peter gave it. Lev's only reply was to draw his hand across his brow. The palm came down damp and clammy. "But it is just as well," went on Ivan, "that we are awake, for it will soon be daylight, and we had best be moving."

In five minutes the trio were on their watchful way to skirt the little village of Mansk. The trio, did I say? No, the quartet, I meant, for two men, one with misshapen lips, the other with decided Jewish features, went ahead; and close behind them walked a leathery visaged man, who had for a companion a scraggly half-starved cur, with ghastly green eyes. Occasionally the Jew turned, and, looking into those green eyes, shivered. "Well," said Ivan, "perhaps it is the soul of Pleschivna, eh?" In answer the dog whimpered. "It may be," said the Jew, stupidly, "it may be," and he shivered again.

The cold was of the damp clinging sort, against which no amount of clothing can protect one. The three men on the tree-covered hill overlooking the thatched brown cottages of Mansk, drew up their coat collars and shivered. They had turned back and were seeking for something. The scrawny green-eyed dog with them whined a low whine like a human moan.

"Curse the dog!" exclaimed one vagabond in a rasping voice. "I'll have him following us no longer with his ghostly howls. And I tell you, Ivan, it is useless to go back further, for Lev had the papers when we were here before."

"Yes, curse the dog," returned the man with the ever-grinning mouth. "Curse him, of course; and since you feel such deep affection for him, why not present him with one of those tablets meant for Pleschivna's palate? Perhaps they would even so fulfill their intended purpose. What say you, Lev?"

The dull-eyed Jewish lad stared at the dog as if fascinated. "It may be," he said and shivered again. It was, indeed, a very cold night.

"Well, and the papers?" Peter impatiently queried.

"I say, then, it is useless to go forward to Vilna without them. We must search about here. Perhaps Lev has an opinion." But Lev was thinking only of a much-thumbed philosophical tract in his pocket. "Or, perhaps, learned theosophist, you believe that the dog has taken them. You could not tell us somewhat of them yourself, could you, Lev?"

"Lev! Why, he's afraid of his own shadow! He would not dare to tell a lie, not even to himself," Peter scoffed.

Again the dog whimpered. He went up to Lev and licked the boy's hand. Ivan watched the performance interestedly. "None the less," he said, "the dog shall have his dose; and that right now. He follows us about like an evil spirit." The men disposed themselves as on the evening before.

How Lev had prayed for the night! And now that his prayer was answered, how he stared into the thick, solid blackness and longed for the grey light of morning! With straining ears he listened to the midnight stillness. He had not even thought of sleep. If only he could rid himself of that dullness or could concentrate his thoughts!

A figure broke through the bushes. "Ivan, Ivan!" came Peter's voice. "Ivan, wake up!" Ivan roused himself. "Well, Peter, why do you create such a disturbance?" Ivan's speech was pettish, though still husky from interrupted sleep. "Ivan, I got up and gave the dog the dose, as you said. He slunk off into the woods. I followed. I don't know why. It was almost midnight when he gave a sharp cry and dropped. I swear I had never lost sight of him for an instant. I went up to look. He was dead. And, Ivan, from his very mouth I took—the papers!" Peter waxed triumphantly dramatic, his every low-spoken word sounding in Lev's ears with the loudness of a tribal war-whoop. After much fumbling in the darkness he placed in Ivan's hands a slightly torn packet.

"A light!" Ivan spoke tersely.

Peter struck a light. Trembling, Ivan spread out the documents. A gruesome, unearthly howl, like the triumphant screech of a resentful soul came to them through the blackness. With an awful oath Ivan turned to Peter. "The signatures, you ignoramus, you imbecile!" he cried, pointing to the ragged holes in the papers. "They are gone!"

And Lev shivered, for the night was very cold.

—Dorothea Knobloch.

II. The Story That Emphasizes Character and Environment.

Rudyard Kipling

The large number of Kipling's stories could not have been written outside India, or at least the Orient. They are of the East eastern. "Without Benefit of Clergy," "Muhammad Din," "The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows," "The Man Who Would Be King"—the very names conjure up the environment. They do more than that; they almost tell the story. Before he began to write, Kipling knew thoroughly his adopted literary land; in the same way all successful writers must know theirs if they mean to reveal the influence of surroundings on character, if they mean to give, as many writers do, a miniature of the locality in each sketch. To read one of Mary E. Wilkins's stories is to catch the flavor of all New England. Her nun is indeed a New England nun. Nowhere else do people keep house quite so; but in scores of Massachusetts and Connecticut homes the women, married and single, are 'that partic'lar'—or nearly as particular as Louisa Ellis. But wait a minute!Mary E. Wilkins Freeman If there are tens of women like Louisa Ellis, wherein comes the story? Why, do you not see?—just in the plus, the superfluity of New Englandishness that there is in Louisa. It is the breadth of that more-so that gave Miss Wilkins her twenty-four stories in the same book, and others outside it. And here is the point: in this kind of story, your writer must know his locality so well that the sameness of the people has a difference in each family and in each member of that family. In other words, his characters must be persons, not figureheads; they may be types, it is true, but they must have the soul of individuality breathed into them. For instance, in this one collection of stories Miss Wilkins has two Louisas, and they both are typically of New England, they both have suitors, and they both are averse to marriage; moreover, each slight course of events is built on the impulse of the woman to avoid matrimony. But here the likeness ends; for the women are individuals, and the lovers are different from each other. The character-drawing of these two stories is a daring attempt on the part of the author, but it is a remarkably successful one.

Hamlin Garland

Hamlin Garland has been almost as successful with his middle Northwest as Miss Wilkins has with her New England. His stories can not be called quaint, as hers can, nor sweet exactly; but they can be said to be as graphic, faithful, straightforward, homely, and to have been compiled with as patient and sympathetic an observation—not so minute, but as unerring. They are freer, bolder, more like the country he portrays. With Mr. Garland perhaps we have more of the out-of-doors, literal country, the black soil into which the people's lives are ploughed and from which they come out again sometimes at the top of the corn tassel. With Miss Wilkins the country is more that country not built with hands, eternal in characteristics. Of both writers the work is great work, and you can not go astray in taking either for your model. "Up the Coolly" is a remarkable tragedy—for tragedy it is. "The Return of the Private" is all too pathetically true. "Among the Corn Rows" is startlingly realistic, and "A Branch Road"—well, doubtless people have varying opinions about the usefulness of such pictures, but nobody can gainsay the excellence of the craftsmanship.

Bret Harte

In a somewhat different way, with just as much realism maybe, but surely with a large dash of romance, Bret Harte pre-empted California as a literary land two decades before these younger writers staked out their claims. "Tennessee's Partner" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" are perfect in their way, and their way is this way: the place-character narrative.

Suggestions and precautions

To write such a narrative, you must have vividly and accurately in mind your selected environment. It is to form the color of your picture. If you do not think you know thus intimately any locality, open your eyes. The beautiful fact about living is, that we all always live somewhere, and that same somewhere is full of a number of things, and of nothing more surely than of local color. It is your business as a writer to add this color constantly to your stories; but the best way to proceed is not to attempt to spread it on from the outside, but to let it shine through from within. To be sure, it must be on the valleys and hills, the streets and the houses and the window curtains; but it must also be in the speech of your peoples, in their notions, their attitude toward each other and toward the great and little questions of human relationship. Besides knowing the environment, you must know indisputably some individuals of the place. You can not draw a life-like sketch from an abstraction. The canvas painters have taught us that truth, and so have the sculptors. For every figure they have a living model. They must know where the bones and sinews are, even if they mean to etherealize. So must you, and you have a harder problem; your figure must speak. One false tone, and you mar the impression. Mary E. Wilkins, excellent artist that she is, has impaired one of her strongest stories, "The Revolt of Mother," by a lapse of art in respect to two of her characters. The girl and boy are not old enough for the age the author intimates; or what she says that they are is too old for what they prove that they are when they speak and when they keep silent even,—especially the girl. Moreover, we feel that the mother is ten or fifteen years younger, than the age given her. These are minor points, one admits, and, as we say, the story is excellent; but in so far as it fails in little ways it is not superfine, though one of the most lovable and dramatic, of Miss Wilkins's productions. In art you must not make this mistake; it is no answer to assert that in life the woman was sixty and the boy and girl fourteen and twenty. On the basis of the character-drawing the woman is forty-five or fifty and the children are twins, less than sixteen years old. In other words, a realist that is an artist as well selects not only what is true but also what will immediately without argument seem true. Miss Wilkins usually is convincing.

In addition to an unmistakably clear knowledge of place and personality, you must know both local dialect and family vernacular. The various individuals of your sketch, if they happen to belong to the same household, must speak as if they so belonged. In actual life when you converse with a company of persons, you can pick out two members of the same family as readily as you can pick out two members of the same community. Your character-narrative must reveal this likeness, not by declaration especially, but by a subtle unity of vocabulary that does not at the same time preclude individuality.

The character Overbury and Hall

The writers of this kind of short-story owe much to the past. We are inclined to think of quiet and truthful character sketchers, who reveal an appreciative knowledge of the influence of environment, as distinctly a late nineteenth century brotherhood; but the fact is that while moderate realism is undoubtedly the last artistic word on the subject of effective character-revelation, it is also the first. The modern novel of manners (and the artistic short-story of the same class as an offshoot of it) drew from a full stream of realism. As far back as the age of Overbury and Bishop Hall the public was interested in prose character-sketches. The fact that essays could have such names as "The Tinker" and "The Milkmaid" was a promise of the light of common day. Then the gentle de Coverley papers came on with their slight narrative and continued portrait, their delightful skits on class environment and tradition;The novel of manners then, Tristram Shandy's frank shamelessness about familiar things; then the Vicar of Wakefield's struggling poverty; and finally the women entered—Evelina, Belinda, Emma, Mary Barton, and the gentle ladies of Cranford, bringing with them the tea-table and the trials of the parlor and of factory life. The only thing that was needed to make the archetype complete by the middle of the nineteenth century was for some one to take persistently the same large yet specific environment. Trollope's Cathedral Town Studies Anthony Trollope did so in his Cathedral Town Studies. What ran parallel for a time with the novel of manners, but had a later and fuller development, is the psychological problem novel, begun by Richardson and Fielding and handed over to the late nineteenth century writers by Charlotte Brontë. This psychological problem novel bears the same relation to the novel of manners as the character-events short-story bears to the character-environment one.

You doubtless realize, as every one realizes, that a good short-story is hard to write, but in the hardness comes the inspiration. If you succeed, you have scored a triumph. But for your comfort, be assured that the possibility is not beyond even a high-school student. The attempt in very instructive at least.

Remember that you are not writing a biography, but a place-character narrative in the short-story form. You are not called on to record every incident in the life of your subject or even every important incident. The happenings may all be minor, in fact. The only essential thing is that you reveal the indissoluble connection between environment and characteristics. The person is what he is because he has lived at that place with those habitual surroundings.

There is this precaution, however, that you must take; you must not let your narrative degenerate into a mere analysis and enumeration of qualities. You are to write a story. And to write a story you must have a happening or a series of happenings, however mild. Usually one of these should be of more importance than the others, and the others should be related to it as subordinates, in order that the effect may be single. Any part of the life of your people that lies behind the day of your revelation, if mentioned at all, should be told in retrospect; whatever lies ahead, if mentioned at all, can be only prophecy. And, finally, here is a little secret, an open one among artists, but one shut away from the herd of common scribblers; what you do not tell but only skilfully suggest is what makes for excellence and immortality.

The Story of Muhammad Din

"Who is the happy man? He that sees in his own house at home, little children crowned with dust, leaping and falling and crying."—Munichandra, translated by Professor Peterson.

The polo ball was an old one, scarred, chipped and dinted. It stood on the mantelpiece among the pipe-stems which Iman Din, khitmatgar, was cleaning for me.

"Does the heaven-born want this ball?" said Imam Din, deferentially.

The heaven-born set no particular store by it; but of what use was a polo ball to a khitmatgar?

"By your honour's favour, I have a little son. He has seen this ball and desires it to play with. I do not want it for myself."

No one would for an instant accuse portly old Imam Din of wanting to play with polo balls. He carried out the battered thing into the veranda, and there followed a hurricane of joyful squeaks, a patter of small feet, and the thud-thud-thud of the ball rolling along the ground. Evidently the little son had been waiting outside the door to secure his treasure. But how had he managed to see that polo ball?

Next day, coming back from office half an hour earlier than usual, I was aware of a small figure in the dining-room—a tiny, plump figure in a ridiculously inadequate shirt, which came, perhaps, half way down the tubby stomach. It wandered round the room, thumb in mouth, crooning to itself as it took stock of the pictures. Undoubtedly this was the "little son."

He had-no business in my room, of course; but was so deeply absorbed in his discoveries that he never noticed me in the doorway. I stepped into the room and startled him nearly into a fit. He sat down on the ground with a gasp. His eyes opened and his mouth followed suit. I knew what was coming and fled, followed by a long, dry howl which reached the servants' quarters far more quickly than any command of mine had ever done. In ten seconds Imam Din was in the dining-room. Then despairing sobs arose, and I returned to find Imam Din admonishing the small sinner, who was using most of his shirt as a handkerchief.

"This boy," said Imam Din, judiciously, "is a budmash—a big budmash. He will, without doubt, go to the jail-khana for his behaviour." Renewed yells from the penitent, and an elaborate apology to myself from Imam Din.

"Tell the baby," I said, "that the Sahib is not angry and take him away." Imam Din conveyed my forgiveness to the offender, who had now gathered all his shirt round his neck, stringwise, and the yell subsided into a sob. The two set off for the door. "His name," said Imam Din, as though the name were part of the crime, "is Muhammad Din, and he is a budmash." Freed from present danger, Muhammad Din turned round in his father's arms and said gravely, "It is true that my name is Muhammad Din, Tahib, but I am not a budmash. I am a man!"

From that day dated my acquaintance with Muhammad Din. Never again did he come into my dining-room; but on the neutral ground of the garden we greeted each other with much state, though our conversation was confined to "Talaam, Tahib" from his side, and "Salaam, Muhammad Din" from mine. Daily on my return from office the little white shirt and the fat little body used to rise, from the shade of the creeper-covered trellis where they had been hid, and daily I checked my horse there that my salutation might not be slurred over or given unseemly.

Muhammad Din never had any companions. He used to trot about the compound, in and out of the castor-oil bushes, on mysterious errands of his own. One day I stumbled upon some of his handiwork far down the grounds. He had half buried the polo-ball in dust, and stuck six shriveled old marigold flowers in a circle round it. Outside that circle again was a rude square, traced out in its bits of red brick alternating with fragments of broken china; the whole bounded by a little bank of dust. The water-man from the well-curb put in a plea for the small architect, saying that it was only the play of a baby and did not much disfigure my garden.

Heaven knows that I had no intention of touching the child's work then or later; but that evening a stroll through the garden brought me unawares full on it, so that I trampled, before I knew, marigold heads, dust bank and fragments of broken soap-dish into confusion past all hope of mending. Next morning I came upon Muhammad Din crying softly to himself over the ruin I had wrought. Some one had cruelly told him that the Sahib was very angry with him for spoiling the garden, and he had scattered his rubbish, using bad language the while. Muhammad Din laboured for an hour at effacing every trace of the dust-bank and pottery fragments, and it was with a tearful and apologetic fact that he said, "Talaam, Tahib," when I came home from office. A hasty inquiry resulted in Imam Din informing Muhammad Din that, by my singular favour, he was permitted to disport himself as he pleased. Whereat the child took heart and fell to tracing the ground-plan of an edifice which was to eclipse the marigold-polo-ball creation.

For some months the chubby little eccentricity revolved in his humble orbit among the castor-oil bushes and in the dust; always fashioning magnificent palaces from stale flowers thrown away by the bearer, smooth water-worn pebbles, bits of broken glass, and feathers pulled, I fancy, from my fowls—always alone, and always crooning to himself

A gaily spotted sea-shell was dropped one day close to the last of his little buildings, and I looked that Muhammad Din should build something more than ordinarily splendid on the strength of it. Nor was I disappointed. He meditated for the better part of an hour, and his crooning rose to a jubilant song. Then he began tracing in the dust. It would certainly be a wondrous palace, this one, for it was two yards long and a yard broad in ground-plan. But the palace was never completed.

Next day there was no Muhammad Din at the head of the carriage-drive, and no "Talaam, Tahib" to welcome my return. I had grown accustomed to the greeting, and its omission troubled me. Next day Imam Din told me that the child was suffering slightly from fever and needed quinine. He got the medicine, and an English doctor.

"They have no stamina, these brats," said the doctor, as he left Imam Din's quarters.

A week later, though I would have given much to have avoided it, I met on the road to the Mussulman burying-ground Imam Din, accompanied by one other friend, carrying in his arms, wrapped in a white cloth, all that was left of little Muhammad Din.

—Rudyard Kipling.

"Plain Tales from the Hills." (Doubleday, Page & Co., 1907.)

The Fetters

The cool maples rustled temptingly before the open kitchen window, and seemed to mock the busy worker within. Flies buzzed at the screen, door, and at intervals found entrance through sundry gaps in the rusty screening. Inside there was the endless clatter of dishes, the hissing sound of frying meat, and occasionally a sharp exclamation in a nervous, high-pitched voice. The owner of the voice, a woman of about thirty-five, was walking busily around the kitchen. A soiled gingham apron nearly covered a worn gray skirt, and several large safety-pins held her waist together over her flat chest. Premature wrinkles hardened her eyes and mouth. Her hair drawn back over a high, bony forehead, was twisted into an untidy little knot at the back of her head. On each of her cheeks, just below the bone, came and went bright spots of color—the only color about her, for her hair had no glints of light and her apathetic blue eyes seemed absolutely devoid of luster.

As she hastened back and forth, opening the oven door, setting the table, inspecting the contents of various kettles steaming on the big stove, she still found time to throw a glance, now and then, out to the rickety porch, where a pale-faced little girl sat in an old red porch-chair. The child's big eyes, startlingly prominent in her wan face, followed the woman, and, when the latter looked at her, a sudden smile would curve the straight little lips. But at times she would look away from the kitchen out beyond to the wheat-fields, gleaming yellow in the August sun—and still farther to the cool green woods, with the hard blue sky above them. Then the child would sigh, and her face would grow wondering and anxious, as she turned back again and smiled at the woman in the kitchen—a curious, wistful, unchildlike smile. On the step beside her lay a worn little home-made crutch.

"Here come the men-folks, mother," the child exclaimed suddenly. Her mother came to the door, and shading her eyes with her apron, peered up the dusty lane. Then she went back to the house and hurriedly finished setting the table. The heavy plates and cups were hardly in place on the red-checked cloth before the men came clattering up the walk and up the porch. Most of them had a smile for the pale little girl in the chair, and one had brought her a bunch of red field-poppies, already half withered, in his big hand. The child took them eagerly, laying their vivid petals lovingly against her pale cheek. The rest of the men filed past with a grin or a roughly tender, word—all but the last. He came up the steps, his forehead wrinkled in a scowl evidently habitual, his mouth hard, his eyes deep-set and forbidding. He did not even notice the child, and she shrank back in her chair, her lip trembling, her eyes wide with fear.

"Dinner near ready, Jane?" he demanded in a gruff tone. Jane gave a brief little nod and hurried on with the rest of the preparations. Rough laughter, scraping of boots, loud clattering of knives on plates, and a continual demand for replenishment, followed the course of the dinner. Jane sat wearily, but her plateful of cabbage and pork lay untasted before her. Out on the porch the little girl sipped a glass of milk and watched the cool dimness of the distant woods.

The men pushed back their chairs, wiped their mouths with the backs of their brown hands, and hurried away to the fields. Jane's husband stopped for a moment to mend a rip in his boot. It was a difficult rip to mend and his temper was soon exhausted.

"Why don't ye learn that white-faced brat out there to work!" he stormed, "us short o' hands an' her less good than none at all—an' a nuisance to boot." Jane suddenly turned and let a saucer fall. Her lips were compressed for a moment, then she went down on one knee and carefully picked up the fragments of china.

"What a snap ye've got, next to what brother Dan's wife had," Jim went surlily on. "Dan made her go out an' tend his grapes, while all ye've got to do is cook a little and wash up—an' ye act as if ye was worked hard. Dan's wife never kicked—she'd be'n sorry if she had," and he gave a hard dry laugh in appreciation of his own humor.

But Jane did not hear this last remark; she was thinking of her brother-in-law's wife, a frail little woman whose life had been made up of pruning grapevines or cutting grapes, working side by side with the Italian women whom her husband hired, working harder than any of them did, too, and for far less recompense. She remembered how angry Dan had been because his wife had appeared one afternoon in a shirt-waist, instead of the usual wrapper. It was a clumsy, cheap, ill-made thing, but Margaret's eyes had danced when Jane came to see her that day. And she remembered how Dan had come in and declared he wanted no high-falutin' things around his house; that he had married to get some one to work for him, not for a parlor ornament. Poor little Margaret! How her thin cheeks had flushed and her timid eyes filled with tears! But she died not long after—Jane gave a half-envious sigh.

"Goin' to stand there all day lookin' at nothin'?" a gruff voice asked suddenly, and she started. The knife with which she had been peeling potatoes to fry for supper, slipped and cut her finger. She went over to the sink and wiped away the red streak, while her husband shufflingly made his exit, grumbling to himself over the foolishness of ever bothering with such a useless baggage as a woman. On the porch he stumbled over the little crutch and kicked it aside with an oath.

The afternoon wore away slowly. Little Meg slept on her cot upstairs, her cheeks hot and damp, her arms flung wide in the weariness of childhood. Jane sewed steadily at a heap of burlap grain bags, until the sun went down in a riot of yellow and crimson behind the trees. Jane put away her sewing, gently woke Meg, and prepared to go downstairs to get supper ready. She stopped to look at the sunset before she went down. Along the road beyond came the rattle of wheels; a buggy passed in which sat a woman in solitary state. A striped silk dress enveloped her ample person, a hat with nodding red roses and a broad white brim shaded a pair of stupid, comfortable eyes, and cast its shadow over a mouth that fairly sagged with good humor and good living. Her fat hands, lying idly in her lap and holding the reins loosely, were pulled back and forth by the jogging brown horse. Jane recognized in the woman Mrs. Petersen, her nearest neighbor, and half hungrily surmised that she was returning home from a meeting of the "Tuesday Social Club." The buggy leisurely passed the house and disappeared along the dusty lane.

Suddenly, in one rush of emotion, the whole barrenness of Jane's lot came over her. She thought of the long days filled with unceasing labor—the dull, gray days that stretched endlessly behind her and yet more endlessly before her. Her life seemed one wearying round of dish-washing and cooking, of going to bed utterly worn out and of rising next morning just as tired as she had been the night before. She felt a terrible grudge rise in her against her husband—and she allowed this grudge now to fill her soul completely, instead of crushing out such feelings as she had hitherto done. Why had he never helped her to have a good time as other women had? Why had he forgotten that she was a woman and fond of dainty things? She thought of the stern young fellow who had courted her when she was a girl—so very long ago that was. And how she had married him, and how proud she had been of him, and how she had boasted of his thrift to all her neighbors. And then she remembered how sternness which she admired in the youth had changed into surliness in the man; how gradually—little by little—she had lost hope—she who had hoped for so much and had had to little given her. On her, and on her alone, the brunt of all his displeasure and of all his wrath had fallen.

Then suddenly her face cleared; as she heard a sleepy yawn from the bed; little Meg lay watching her, her sleep-filled eyes smiling their same brave smile. At least, Jane thought, she had Meg—and Dan's wife had not even had a Meg. Dan's wife had never known the sweetness of clinging hands and the comfort of damp baby kisses. So even for her, life still held compensation. She looked out at the west where the riotous reds had now faded to soft rose and gray. The outlines of the woods were softened and the nodding tree-tops seemed beckoning her to come away with them. Almost involuntarily the woman stretched out her hands towards the trees, and her hungry eyes filled with tears. Perhaps some day, when little Meg became stronger—perhaps some day they two—just they—might go away somewhere, together—somewhere where the world was all soft rose and gray, where there were no endless days of toil, no angry voice, nothing but peace. Then perhaps Meg would—

"Jane," a rough voice broke in on her musings, "fer God's sake, woman, what ails ye? Seven o'clock an' no bite to eat ready!"

Jane hurriedly rose from the window. For the first time in her life she had let her day-dreams really make her forget her dull, common-place world. She stopped to smooth Meg's moist curls, and ran downstairs. There at the foot stood her husband, a whole day's displeasure frowning forth in his face, an angry light in his eyes.

"I know it's late, Jim—it's too bad," Jane faltered, "but you never had to wait before. I was busy—I was thinking—I—"

"Busy!" he sneered. "Busy! Settin' down doin' nothin' but hushin' that blamed brat. Let her alone. She ain't only a nuisance anyhow—spend yer time on something worth while."

Half unconsciously Jane looked at her hands; the forefinger of the right was rough and needle-pricked, and her hands were red and raw from much dish-washing and cleaning. She thought to herself how often she longed to caress little Meg, to hug her and rock her for a whole afternoon, to love, love, love her to her heart's content—but she had never found time. Then her husband's last cutting words came back to her. She took a step forward, the suffering of years in her face. The red spots on her cheeks were very red now. "Can I help it," she gasped, "that my baby is a puny little thing? Is it my fault? What care has she ever had, excepting what I have been able to steal for her? If you were a man like other men—not a brute—then perhaps you would understand!" She clinched her hand and looked defiantly up into his face.

Jim stood still for a moment, astonished at the outburst from his meek wife. Then his quick anger blazed up, and, lifting his big hand, he struck Jane full in the face. She fell back against the stairway, her face white, save for the red spots which were livid now. Her eyes, were full of tears from the force of the blow. She heard Jim's voice from a distance.

"No use waitin' here forever," he grumbled. "I'll go to Reynold's an' get a bite; his wife'll probably have it waitin'." And she saw him turn to the door along which Meg just came tapping. The child hurried to get out of his way. Jim slouched heavily through the room, and out of the house, his big boots creaking as he went.

Jane sat down on the step. Her head ached from the force of the blow. She felt dazed with the suddenness of everything. Little Meg came and sat down beside her, patting Jane's rough hand with her soft palm to attract her attention; then she settled down quietly beside her, her bright head leaning on her mother's apron. Darkness came, but Jane did not stir. Meg had gone to sleep.

Suddenly the crutch beside them slipped and rattled against the wall. Meg woke and cried out with fright. Jane absently took the child in her arms and tried to soothe her, but Meg was thoroughly frightened and refused to be comforted. At length she was quiet and Jane carried her to bed. In a few moments, her baby-fear forgotten, she was again fast asleep. Jane went over to the window and crouched there, bitterness in her heart. Over in the west the shadowy outlines of the trees looked mysterious, aloof, unsympathetic; so did the cold white stars over them. Sympathy seemed to have gone out of everything in the whole world. And Jane leaned heavily on the sill and thought.

For a long time she sat there, until she heard Meg stir restlessly on the bed. Then she rose and looked mechanically towards the Reynolds house. A bright light burned in a lower room, so she knew that her husband was still there, talking over the day's affairs with Farmer Reynolds. Her husband! She felt a sudden shrinking at the mere word. She decided that she hated him, she knew that she hated him, with the pent-up hatred of years. And she shuddered when she thought of to-morrow and the next to-morrow, and all the dull to-morrows that would have to come—and he must be in them all; that was the thought which made her sick and faint. She lay down on the bed beside Meg, merely loosening her waist and uncoiling her hair. Physical weariness brought a dreamless sleep. She woke with a start, after a sleep that seemed to have lasted for centuries. There was strange noises downstairs—gruff, muffled voices, queer shuffling as of heavy boots, and then a sudden scraping against the outer door. With a quick unreasoning fear at her heart, Jane flew down the stairs and out into the kitchen. Some one had lighted the oil lamp there. Her eyes saw at first only a blurred group before her. Her vision cleared gradually, until the blur resolved itself into four men, with alarmed, puzzled faces, who were carrying several boards on which lay something covered with a big coat. Jane held her breath, while the men looked sheepishly at one another. Then she ran to the heap, lifted the coat, and looked down at her husband. His face was hard and set, the jaw projecting; but the usual sneer was gone from his mouth, and his closed eyes gave him an expression of peace. Jane dropped the coat as if dazed and turned helplessly to the men. They, equally helpless, nudged Farmer Reynolds forward to act as spokesman. His big, kindly face was abashed and solemn, his fingers nervously twirled his rough cap.

"It was a stroke, mum," he managed to jerk out at last, "some kind of a fit, Doc says. It carried him right, off, too, quicker'n a wink, an' not a mite o' pain. There he was a-sittin' an' scrappin' like a good feller one minute—an' then his face kind o' went pale, an' over he keeled. First we knew it was him on the floor, clean knocked out." Reynolds was becoming garrulous in his efforts to relieve the embarrassment of the situation, but Jane had already forgotten him. They had laid Jim on the floor and Jane sat down beside him, carefully adjusting his tumbled coat and smoothing the rough hair off his low forehead. She did it all in a calm and matter-of-fact way. The men looked helplessly at one another, while Jane, utterly unconscious of them, continued her ministrations to the dead. Was it a few hours ago or was it many years ago that she had vowed never to call him husband again? She had forgotten—after all, it didn't matter. Nothing really mattered now.

Suddenly there came a tapping down the steps. The stair door was pushed open, and a towsled, barefooted, night-gowned little figure appeared on the threshold. "Mother," Meg quivered, "where are you?" When she saw her mother, she made straight for her, almost tumbling over the crutch in her haste. She threw her arms, lovingly around her mother's neck. Jane started—the queer, dazed look left her eyes, though her cheeks were still pale, save for one long red mark. With a little sob she turned, crushed the child to her, and began to cry.

"Oh, but we did love him, Meg, didn't we?" she sobbed. "And he was good to us, just as good as he knew how to be. Oh, Meg, Meg, if I had only been a better wife to him!"

—Katherine Kurz.

When Terry "Quit"

"Gad! and to think, Jim, that I ever lived on Front street!" The frock-coated, silk-hatted stage manager removed the big black cigar from his mouth, and with a pudgy little finger, on which sparkled a blue diamond of unusual size, he flicked away the ashes. "Though it really was a rather decent sort of a place then, you know." He addressed his companion, a press-agent, first, however, carefully readjusting the cigar so that it should be at such an angle to his lips as to suggest sportiness.

Now, the south side of the thoroughfare just mentioned consists chiefly of warehouses and saloons, the north side chiefly of saloons and pawnshops. On summer days the street squirms with chickens, bulldogs and babies; but on the warm evenings, when the pawnshops and the warehouses are closed, when the saloons are doing a lucrative business, then the chickens roost on the back fences, the bulldogs doze lazily on the stone flaggings, and in the stuffy little sleeping apartments above the saloons the children of the saloon-keepers dream of the envy which, by means of delicious chili-sauce sandwiches, they will create the next day among the children of the pawnbrokers.

The two men were now approaching the most prosperous saloon in the street. Streams of light, coming from both above and below the little green baize door, shone on a swinging signboard. "Tim Dugan's Café," the gilt letters informed any who were unacquainted with the neighborhood. Boorish men could be heard calling jocularly for more beer, and the constant slamming of the cash drawer mingled with the clinking of heavy glasses.

"A song! It's time fer a chune!" called a raucous voice.

"Aha, yer right there, it's Terry fer us," acquiesced one of the crowd.

"Terry! Terry! it's oop on the table fer ye, Terry." The cry was accompanied by much loud laughter and the shuffling of heavy boots. Labor-hardened hands clapped approval, and then for a moment there was silence.

"'A sailor's wife a sailor's star shall be.'"

The sweet, though untrained tenor voice, rang high and clear.

"'Yo-ho-oh, boyoys, ho—'"

The two fashionably dressed men stopped in front of the short door.

"Jove! what a voice!" the manager breathed.

"'A long, long life to my sweet wife!'"

No sound interrupted the ringing sailor ballad.

"Let's go in and have a drink," suggested the press-agent, when the song was finished.

As unobtrusively as possible the two men entered.

"More! more!" the appreciative, if unschooled, audience was demanding, and in the clatter of applause the strangers were unnoticed.

"'I have come to say good-bye, Dolly Grey.'"

The then new popular song thrilled the listeners with its martial rhythm, as the plaintive cadences of the beautiful voice rang in their ears.

"'Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you.'"

The singer's glance fell on the new listeners. His merry eyes wavered and his face flushed until it became as red as his curly hair. He stopped short in the chorus.

"I guess it's me that's been yowling anough fer tunight, byes," he mumbled, as he climbed down from the table and, sliding behind the counter, donned the white apron which proclaimed him a bartender.

"Wy, Terry, wat's the matter wit ye? We got a have one more afore ye quit."

But Terry shook his head vigorously in an emphatic "no," as he rapidly cleaned the thick glasses.

The two men from the world of dazzling footlights ordered drinks, paid doubly for them, made a bluff at enjoying the poor liquor, and then quietly left the café, and continued their walk past the warehouses, pawnshops and saloons of Front street.

The next morning, when the heavy wagons were rattling over the cobble-stones of the narrow, dirty thoroughfare, and the children of the pawnbrokers were engaged in throwing "spit-balls" at the children of the saloon-keepers, "Tim Dugan's Café" was for the second time honored with the entrance of the stage-manager of the minstrel show which was to be in town the next week. This potentate had come on ahead of his company to adjust some little difficulty with the play-house owners, and now that that business had been settled, another matter of importance presented itself: the tenor soloist, no longer in his prime, had left.

The manager sauntered up to the bar, rested his right elbow on the marble slab, settled his "silk" hat more comfortably on his head, shoved his left hand deep into his trousers' pocket—whereupon an attractive chinking sound could be heard—and crossed his gaitered feet.

"One," he announced, and the ruddy-haired Irish lad, who had been busy washing glasses, quickly, deftly, filled a mug with frothy beer.

"Ahem!" The manager puffed up his heavy chest and leaned both elbows on the bar.

Then, ensued a whispered dialogue, during which Terry Flynn's laughing eyes alternately grew round with wonder and twinkled with pleasure.

"Sorry!" gasped the bartender at last, "not a bit of it. Ye cin bet yer shiny, boots, an' it's me as 'll do it!"

The manager, smiling with the satisfaction of having clinched an excellent bargain, made his way among the chickens, bulldogs and babies of Front street and soon left the beery atmosphere far behind him.

Terry, however, kept his own council. Not until the following Monday did he give any information concerning the identity of the "swell gent" who had so strangely visited him.

Then how the inhabitants of Front street rejoiced! Terry Flynn—often called "Irish" for short—redheaded Terry Flynn, who had many a time caused a quarrel to be forgotten by breaking into a song as he rattled the mugs on the bar—Terry—their Terry—was going on the stage! He would own a silk tile, and wear diamond studs—but he would sing no more for Front street.

How the bony-fisted, generous men, in spite of their keen regret at losing him, rejoiced in Terry's good fortune!

"Ha'n't I said, ag'in an' ag'in, as Terry could sing twicet as fine as the feller 'at sang 'atween the acks o' 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' one time w'en I went an' seen it? Ha'n't I now?" queried a delighted teamster.

"Aye, that ye 'ave, Jawn, that ye 'ave," replied a pensioned sailor, also jubilant over the fame in store for Terry.

As for Terry himself, he had not yet recovered from his surprise, and so had little room for other emotions. He was too ignorant, too fresh from his peat-carrying labors in the shamrock country, to have any fear of stage fright. Indeed, that word was not in his stunted vocabulary.

He went that afternoon to rehearse "Nancy Lee," with the rest of the company, newly arrived, who were to join him in the "yo-ho's." How well the song sounded when supplemented by such a chorus! Terry's blood quickened! He did not observe the coldness of the other singers towards him. He would have cared little if he had felt the lack of friendliness, for so sunny was his Irish temperament, so strong his Irish independence and congeniality, that he would not easily have lost hope of winning the good will of his associates. Moreover Terry was so humble that he would rather have expected them to stand a little aloof at first; but when, black-faced and white-gloved, he stood upon the great stage of the Opera House, and filled the domed auditorium with his strong, beautiful tenor notes, he knew nothing save that he was one of "them actor fellows" now; that the men and women from the world of wealth were listening to him. His eyes sparkled with excitement.

"A long, long life to my sweet wife," he sang.

In the silence of the people Terry instinctively recognized their appreciation.

"Nancy Lee—"

The vaulted ceiling sent the round, high notes back to the eager ears of the audience.

"Yo-ho-boyoys, ho—"

The "yo-ho" didn't sound with the proper vigor. It was flat. A frown appeared between Terry's arched eyebrows. He was singing his "Yo-ho's" alone! Slowly he turned, still singing, to face the other minstrels. Some one snickered, "Do you see us singing with a bar-tender?"

"Nance—"

Terry stopped. A calloused fist, with strong muscle and Irish temper to speed it, shot out.

"Curtain!" called the manager, wildly. The audience, though somewhat surprised, accepted this performance as a ridiculous climatic ending to one of the "stunts," and gave a vigorous applause. But Terry heeded neither applause nor curtain. He was demonstrating to these unmannerly show men, that though they might refuse to sing with a bar-tender, they could not refuse to accept from one a lesson in pugilism.

Terry paused to take a long breath. He glared at the men, one of whom was holding a handkerchief to a rapidly swelling eye, another of whom was hugging an aching side. Terry had done his work quickly. The manager hastened up to interfere.

"They might a' told me so afore. It isn't me as they need be makin' a fool of. I'm made as good as them, even if it do be a truth that I sell the beer they drink," Terry said, dazed. He picked up the battered opera hat which had been part of his costume and started towards the door.

"My dear Mr. Flynn, I will adjust this little misunderstanding. I assure you, it shall not occur again."

Terry turned. "Why," he laughed strangely, as he picked a bit of lint from his sleeve. "Aren't ye knowin'? I'd be ashamed t' sing, with such dum poor excuses fer men," he replied, and made his way down the rickety stairway, to the street, not stopping even to remove the grease-paint.