Short Fiction

Running footsteps⁠—light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches, following a stone’s throw behind.

Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle ahead somewhere in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with short swords lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse God and the black lanes of London.

Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow. Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow⁠—and there, startlingly, is the watch ahead⁠—two murderous pikemen of ferocious cast of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.

But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the feet of the watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a hue and cry. Soft Shoes goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch curse and hesitate, glance after the fugitive, and then spread their pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots. Darkness, like a great hand, cuts off the even flow the moon.

In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to Princeton University and received the Grade A⁠—excellent⁠—in Caesar, Cicero, Virgil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.

Two years later while George M. Cohan was composing “Over There,” Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on “The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form,” and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on “The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists.”

After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of “Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding.” Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on “German Idealism.”

The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.

He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with nearsighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.

“I never feel as though I’m talking to him,” expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. “He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say: ‘Well, I’ll ask myself and find out.’ ”

The Baltimore Station was hot and crowded, so Lois was forced to stand by the telegraph desk for interminable, sticky seconds while a clerk with big front teeth counted and recounted a large lady’s day message, to determine whether it contained the innocuous forty-nine words or the fatal fifty-one.

Lois, waiting, decided she wasn’t quite sure of the address, so she took the letter out of her bag and ran over it again.

“Darling,” it began⁠—“I understand and I’m happier than life ever meant me to be. If I could give you the things you’ve always been in tune with⁠—but I can’t, Lois; we can’t marry and we can’t lose each other and let all this glorious love end in nothing.

“Until your letter came, dear, I’d been sitting here in the half dark and thinking where I could go and ever forget you; abroad, perhaps, to drift through Italy or Spain and dream away the pain of having lost you where the crumbling ruins of older, mellower civilizations would mirror only the desolation of my heart⁠—and then your letter came.

“Sweetest, bravest girl, if you’ll wire me I’ll meet you in Wilmington⁠—till then I’ll be here just waiting and hoping for every long dream of you to come true.

“Howard.”

She had read the letter so many times that she knew it word by word, yet it still startled her.

“It’s all over,” he muttered brokenly as he tried to jam his car into first. “It’s all over⁠—if I have to choke you for an hour, damn you!” The last to the car, which had been standing some time and was quite cold.

He drove downtown⁠—that is, he got into a snow rut that led him downtown. He sat slouched down very low in his seat, much too dispirited to care where he went.

In front of the Clarendon Hotel he was hailed from the sidewalk by a bad man named Baily, who had big teeth and lived at the hotel and had never been in love.

“Perry,” said the bad man softly when the roadster drew up beside him at the curb, “I’ve got six quarts of the doggonedest still champagne you ever tasted. A third of it’s yours, Perry, if you’ll come upstairs and help Martin Macy and me drink it.”

“Baily,” said Perry tensely, “I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.”

“Shut up, you nut!” said the bad man gently. “They don’t put wood alcohol in champagne. This is the stuff that proves the world is more than six thousand years old. It’s so ancient that the cork is petrified. You have to pull it with a stone drill.”

“Take me upstairs,” said Perry moodily. “If that cork sees my heart it’ll fall out from pure mortification.”

By this time the boat was scraping the side of the yacht and a great bulking negro in the bow turned round and grasped the ladder. Thereupon the leader left his position in the stern and before Ardita had realized his intention he ran up the ladder and stood breathless before her on the deck.

“The women and children will be spared!” he said briskly. “All crying babies will be immediately drowned and all males put in double irons!” Digging her hands excitedly down into the pockets of her dress Ardita stared at him, speechless with astonishment. He was a young man with a scornful mouth and the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby set in a dark sensitive face. His hair was pitch black, damp and curly⁠—the hair of a Grecian statue gone brunette. He was trimly built, trimly dressed, and graceful as an agile quarterback.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!” she said dazedly.

They eyed each other coolly.

“Do you surrender the ship?”

“Is this an outburst of wit?” demanded Ardita. “Are you an idiot⁠—or just being initiated to some fraternity?”

“I asked you if you surrendered the ship.”

“I thought the country was dry,” said Ardita disdainfully. “Have you been drinking fingernail enamel? You better get off this yacht!”

“What?” the young man’s voice expressed incredulity.

“Get off the yacht! You heard me!”

He looked at her for a moment as if considering what she had said.

“No,” said his scornful mouth slowly; “No, I won’t get off the yacht. You can get off if you wish.”