The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story by Various

284 Pages·1921·1.75 MB·English

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Title: The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

Author: Various

Editor: Edward J. O'Brien

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Language: English

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THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1921

AND THE

YEARBOOK OF THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

EDITED BY

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN

EDITOR OF "THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1915"

"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1916"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1917"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1918"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1919"
"THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1920"

"THE GREAT MODERN ENGLISH STORIES," ETC

BOSTON

SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1920, by John T. Frederick, Charles J. Finger, The Dial Publishing Company, Inc., Charles Scribner's Sons,
The International Magazine Company, Harper & Brothers, and Smart Set Company, Inc.

Copyright, 1921, by The Boston Transcript Company.

Copyright, 1921, by B.W. Huebsch, The Century Company, John T. Frederick, George H. Doran Company, The Dial
Publishing Company, Inc., The Pictorial Review Company, The Curtis Publishing Company, The Crowell Publishing
Company, Harper & Brothers, Charles Scribner's Sons, The International Magazine Company, and Smart Set
Company, Inc.

Copyright, 1921, by Boni & Liveright, Inc.

Copyright, 1922, by Maxwell Struthers Burt, George H. Doran Co., Lincoln Colcord, Waldo Frank, Katharine
Fullerton Gerould, Doubleday, Page & Co., Glasgow, Susan Glaspell Cook, Richard Matthews Hallet, Frances Noyes
Hart, Fannie Hurst, Manuel Komroff, Frank Luther Mott, Vincent O'Sullivan, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Harriet Maxon
Thayer, Charles Hanson Towne, and Mary Heaton Minor.

Copyright, 1922, by Small, Maynard & Company, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PRESS OF THE MURRAY PRINTING COMPANY

KENDALL SQUARE, CAMBRIDGE

TO A.E. COPPARD

BY WAY OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Grateful acknowledgment for permission to include the stories and other material in this volume is made to the following
authors, editors and publishers:

To the Editor of The Century Magazine, the Editor of The Bookman, the Editor of The Dial, the Editor of The
Pictorial Review, the Editor of The Saturday Evening Post, the Editor of The American Magazine, the Editor of
Scribner's Magazine, the Editor of Good Housekeeping, the Editor of Harper's Magazine, the Editor of The
Cosmopolitan, the Editors of The Smart Set, The Editor of The Midland, Boni & Liveright, Inc., George H. Doran
Co., B.W. Huebsch, Doubleday, Page & Co., Sherwood Anderson, Konrad Bercovici, Maxwell Struthers Burt, Irvin
S. Cobb, Lincoln Colcord, Charles J. Finger, Waldo Frank, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Ellen Glasgow, Susan
Glaspell, Richard Matthews Hallet, Frances Noyes Hart, Fannie Hurst, Manuel Komroff, Frank Luther Mott, Vincent
O'Sullivan, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Harriet Maxon Thayer, Charles Hanson Towne, and Mary Heaton Vorse.

Acknowledgments are specially due to The Boston Evening Transcript for permission to reprint the large body of
material previously published in its pages.

I shall be grateful to my readers for corrections, and particularly for suggestions leading to the wider usefulness of this
annual volume. In particular, I shall welcome the receipt, from authors, editors, and publishers, of stories printed during
the period between October, 1921 and September, 1922 inclusive, which have qualities of distinction and yet are not
printed in periodicals falling under my regular notice. Such communications may be addressed to me at Forest Hill,
Oxfordshire, England.

E.J.O.

CONTENTS[1]

PAGE

Introduction.
By the Editor
xii

Brothers.
By Sherwood Anderson
3

(From The Bookman)

Fanutza.
By Konrad Bercovici
13

(From The Dial)

Experiment.
By Maxwell Struthers Burt
28

(From The Pictorial Review)

Darkness.
By Irvin S. Cobb
52

(From The Saturday Evening Post)

An Instrument of The Gods.
By Lincoln Colcord
82

(From The American Magazine)

The Lizard God.
By Charles J. Finger
109

(From All's Well)

Under The Dome.
By Waldo Frank
130

(From The Dial)

French Eva.
By Katharine Fullerton Gerould
142

(From Scribner's Magazine)

The Past.
By Ellen Glasgow
168

(From Good Housekeeping)

His Smile.
By Susan Glaspell
194

(From The Pictorial Review)

The Harbor Master.
By Richard Matthews Hallet
207

(From Harper's Magazine)

Green Gardens.
By Frances Noyes Hart
240

(From Scribner's Magazine)

She Walks in Beauty.
By Fannie Hurst
253

(From The Cosmopolitan)

The Little Master of the Sky.
By Manuel Komroff
288

(From The Dial)

The Man with the Good Face.
By Frank Luther Mott
300

(From The Midland)

Master of Fallen Years.
By Vincent O'Sullivan
321

(From The Smart Set)

The Shame Dance.
By Wilbur Daniel Steele
337

(From Harper's Magazine)

Kindred.
By Harriet Maxon Thayer
362

(From The Midland)

Shelby.
By Charles Hanson Towne
386

(From The Smart Set)

The Wallow of the Sea.
By Mary Heaton Vorse
401

(From Harper's Magazine)

The Yearbook of the American Short Story, October, 1920, to September, 1921 419

Addresses of American and English Magazines Publishing Short Stories
421

The Biographical Roll of Honor of American Short Stories
424

The Roll of Honor of Foreign Short Stories in American Magazines
428

The Best Books of Short Stories: A Critical Summary
430

Volumes of Short Stories Published in the United States: An Index
437

Volumes of Short Stories Published in England and Ireland Only
440

Volumes of Short Stories Published in France
442

Articles on the Short Story: An Index
443

Index of Short Stories in Books
457

I. American Authors
458

II. English and Irish Authors
461

III. Translations
463

Magazine Averages
466

Index of Short Stories Published in American Magazines
469

I. American Authors
471

II. English and Irish Authors
500

III. Translations
505

INTRODUCTION

I was talking the other day to Alfred Coppard, who has steered more successfully than most English story writers away
from the Scylla and Charybdis of the modern artist. He told me that he had been reading several new novels and
volumes of short stories by contemporary American writers with that awakened interest in the civilization we are framing
which is so noticeable among English writers during the past three years. He asked me a remarkable question, and the
answer which I gave him suggested certain contrasts which seemed to me of basic importance for us all. He said: "I
have been reading books by Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank and Ben Hecht and Konrad Bercovici and Joseph
Hergesheimer, and I can see that they are important books, but I feel that the essential point to which all this newly
awakened literary consciousness is tending has somehow subtly eluded me. American and English writers both use the
same language, and so do Scotch and Irish writers, but I am not puzzled when I read Scotch and Irish books as I am
when I read these new American books. Why is it?"

I had to think for a moment, and then the obvious answer occurred to me. I told him that I thought the reason for his
moderate bewilderment was due to the fact that the Englishman or the Scotchman or the Irishman living at home was
writing out of a background of racial memory and established tradition which was very much all of one piece, and that
all such an artist's unspoken implications and subtleties could be easily taken for granted by his readers, and more or
less thoroughly understood, because they were elements in harmony with a tolerably fixed and ordered world.

I added that this was more or less true of the American writer up to a date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago
World's Fair in 1892. During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date, there has been an ever
widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the
contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and
spiritual, of many races.

My suggestion to Mr. Coppard was that gradually the Anglo-Saxon, to take the most readily understandable instance,
was beginning to absorb large tracts of many other racial fields of memory, and to share the experience of Scandinavian
and Russian and German and Italian, of Polish and Irish and African and Asian members of the body politic, and that all
these widening tracts of remembered racial experience interacting upon one another under the tremendous pressure of
our nervous, keen, and eager industrial civilization had set up a new chaos in many creative minds. I said that Mr.
Anderson and the others, half consciously and half unconsciously, were trying to create worlds out of each separate
chaos, living dangerously, as Nietzsche advised, and fusing their conceptions at a certain calculated temperature in
artistic crucibles of their own devising.

Mr. Coppard said that he quite saw that, but added that the particular meaning in each case more or less escaped him.
And then I ventured to suggest that these meanings were more important for Americans at the present stage than for
Europeans, because American minds would grasp readily at suggestions that harmonized with their own spiritual pasts,
and seize instinctive relations and congruities which had previously escaped them in their experience, and so begin to
formulate from these books new intuitive laws. I suggested, moreover, that from the point of view of the great artist
these books were all more or less magnificent failures which were creating, little by little, out of the shock of conflict an
ultimate harmony, out of which the great book for which we are all waiting in America might come ten years from now,
or five years, or even tomorrow.

To this he replied that he felt I had supplied the clue which had baffled him, and asked me if I did not discover a chaos
of a different sort in English life and literature since the armistice. I agreed that I did discover such a chaos, but that it
seemed to me a chaos which was an end rather than a beginning, a chaos in which the Tower of Babel had fallen, and
men had come to babble with more and more complete dissociation of ideas, or else, on the other hand, were clinging
desperately to such literary and social traditions as had been left, while their work froze into a new Augustanism
comparable to that of the early years of the eighteenth century.

Next year, in conjunction with John Cournos, I shall begin in a parallel series of volumes with the present series, to

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present my annual study of the English case. Meanwhile, for the present, I deal once more with that American chaos in
which I have unbounded and ultimate faith. From now on I should like to take as my motto almost the last paragraph
written by Walt Whitman before he died: "The Highest said: Don't let us begin so low—isn't our range too coarse—too
gross?—The Soul answer'd: No, not when we consider what it is all for—the end involved in Time and Space." Or, as
the old Dutch flour-miller put it more briefly: "I never bother myself what road the folks come—I only want good wheat
and rye."

To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my
standards and principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential human
qualities in our contemporary fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists, may fairly be called a
criticism of life. I am not at all interested in formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead
criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead. What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is
the fresh, living current which flows through the best American work, and the psychological and imaginative reality
which American writers have conferred upon it.

No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life
is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater
artistic discrimination than we display at present.

The present record covers the period from October 1920, to September 1921, inclusive. During this period, I have
sought to select from the stories published in American magazines those which have rendered life imaginatively in
organic substance and artistic form. Substance is something achieved by the artist in every act of creation, rather than
something already present, and accordingly a fact or group of facts in a story only attain substantial embodiment when
the artist's power of compelling imaginative persuasion transforms them into a living truth. The first test of a short story,
therefore, in any qualitative analysis is to report upon how vitally compelling the writer makes his selected facts or
incidents. This test may be conveniently called the test of substance.

But a second test is necessary if the story is to take rank above other stories. The true artist will seek to shape this living
substance into the most beautiful and satisfying form, by skilful selection and arrangement of his materials, and by the
most direct and appealing presentation of it in portrayal and characterization.

The short stories which I have examined in this study, as in previous years, have fallen naturally into four groups. The
first consists of those stories which fail, in my opinion, to survive either the test of substance or the test of form. These
stories are listed in the year book without comment or a qualifying asterisk. The second group consists of those stories
which may fairly claim that they survive either the test of substance or the test of form. Each of these stories may claim
to possess either distinction of technique alone, or more frequently, I am glad to say, a persuasive sense of life in them
to which a reader responds with some part of his own experience. Stories included in this group are indicated in the
yearbook index by a single asterisk prefixed to the title.

The third group, which is composed of stories of still greater distinction, includes such narratives as may lay convincing
claim to a second reading, because each of them has survived both tests, the test of substance and the test of form.
Stories included in this group are indicated in the yearbook index by two asterisks prefixed to the title.

Finally, I have recorded the names of a small group of stories which possess, I believe, the even finer distinction of
uniting genuine substance and artistic form in a closely woven pattern with such sincerity that these stories may fairly
claim a position in American literature. If all of these stories by American authors were republished, they would not
occupy more space than five novels of average length. My selection of them does not imply the critical belief that they
are great stories. A year which produced one great story would be an exceptional one. It is simply to be taken as
meaning that I have found the equivalent of five volumes worthy of republication among all the stories published during
the period under consideration. These stories are indicated in the yearbook index by three asterisks prefixed to the title,
and are listed in the special "Roll of Honor." In compiling these lists I have permitted no personal preference or
prejudice to consciously influence my judgment. To the titles of certain stories, however, in the "Rolls of Honor," an
asterisk is prefixed, and this asterisk, I must confess, reveals in some measure a personal preference, for which,
perhaps, I may be indulged. It is from this final short list that the stories reprinted in this volume have been selected.

It has been a point of honor with me not to republish a story by an English author or by any foreign author. I have also
made it a rule not to include more than one story by an individual author in the volume. The general and particular results
of my study will be found explained and carefully detailed in the supplementary part of the volume.

In past years it has been my pleasure and honor to dedicate the best that I have found in the American magazines as the
fruit of my labors to the American artist who, in my opinion, has made the finest imaginative contribution to the short
story during the period considered. I take pleasure in recalling the names of Benjamin Rosenblatt, Richard Matthews
Hallet, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Arthur Johnson, Anzia Yezierska, and Sherwood Anderson. In my opinion Sherwood
Anderson has made this year once more the most permanent contribution to the American short story, but as last year's
book is associated with his name, I am happy to dedicate this year's offering to a new and distinguished English artist,
A.E. Coppard, to whom the future offers in my opinion a rich harvest of achievement.

EDWARD J. O'BRIEN.

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Forest Hill, Oxon, England,
November 23, 1921

THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1921

Note.—The order in which the stories in this volume are printed is not intended as an indication of their comparative
excellence; the arrangement is alphabetical by authors.

BROTHERS[2]

By SHERWOOD ANDERSON

(From The Bookman)

I am at my house in the country and it is late October. It rains. Back of my house is a forest and in front there is a road
and beyond that open fields. The country is one of low hills, flattening suddenly into plains. Some twenty miles away,
across the flat country, lies the huge city, Chicago.

On this rainy day the leaves of the trees that line the road before my window are falling like rain, the yellow, red, and
golden leaves fall straight down heavily. The rain beats them brutally down. They are denied a last golden flash across
the sky. In October leaves should be carried away, out over the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.

Yesterday morning I arose at daybreak and went for a walk. There was a heavy fog and I lost myself in it. I went down
into the plains and returned to the hills and everywhere the fog was as a wall before me. Out of it trees sprang suddenly,
grotesquely, as in a city street late at night people come suddenly out of the darkness into the circle of light under a
street lamp. Above there was the light of day forcing itself slowly into the fog. The fog moved slowly. The tops of trees
moved slowly. Under the trees the fog was dense, purple. It was like smoke lying in the streets of a factory town.

An old man came up to me in the fog. I know him well. The people here call him insane. "He is a little cracked," they
say. He lives alone in a little house buried deep in the forest and has a small dog he carries always in his arms. On many
mornings I have met him walking on the road and he has told me of men and women who were his brothers and sisters,
his cousins, aunts, uncles, brothers-in-law. The notion has possession of him. He cannot draw close to people near at
hand so he gets hold of a name out of a newspaper and his mind plays with it. One morning he told me he was a cousin
to the man named Cox who at the time when I write is a candidate for the presidency. On another morning he told me
that Caruso the singer had married a woman who was his sister-in-law. "She is my wife's sister," he said, holding the
little dog closely. His gray watery eyes looked appealingly up to me. He wanted me to believe. "My wife was a sweet
slim girl," he declared. "We lived together in a big house and in the morning walked about arm in arm. Now her sister
has married Caruso the singer. He is of my family now." As some one had told me the old man had never been married
I went away wondering.

One morning in early September I came upon him sitting under a tree beside a path near his house. The dog barked at
me and then ran and crept into his arms. At that time the Chicago newspapers were filled with the story of a millionaire
who had got into trouble with his wife because of an intimacy with an actress. The old man told me the actress was his
sister. He is sixty years old and the actress whose story appeared in the newspapers is twenty, but he spoke of their
childhood together. "You would not realize it to see us now but we were poor then," he said. "It's true. We lived in a
little house on the side of a hill. Once when there was a storm the wind nearly swept our house away. How the wind
blew. Our father was a carpenter and he built strong houses for other people but our own house he did not build very
strongly." He shook his head sorrowfully. "My sister the actress has got into trouble. Our house is not built very
strongly," he said as I went away along the path.

For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered every morning in our village, have been filled with
the story of a murder. A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for the deed. The tale runs
something like this—

The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged, worked in a bicycle factory where he was a
foreman, and lived with his wife and his wife's mother in an apartment in Thirty-Second Street. He loved a girl who
worked in the office of the factory where he was employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to
the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy stolid-looking man with gray eyes, she seemed
the most beautiful woman in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the

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building, and the foreman, down in the shop, had a desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets
containing the record of the work done by each man in his department. When he looked up he could see the girl sitting
at work at her desk. The notion got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely. He did not think of trying to draw close
to her or of winning her love. He looked at her as one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October
when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold. "She is a pure, virginal thing," he thought vaguely. "What can
she be thinking about as she sits there by the window at work?"

In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his apartment in Thirty-Second Street and into the
presence of his wife and his mother-in-law. All day in the shop and during the evening at home he carried her figure
about with him in his mind. As he stood by a window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central
railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there beside him. Down below women walked in the
street and in every woman he saw there was something of the Iowa girl. One woman walked as she did, another made
a gesture with her hand that reminded of her. All the women he saw except only his wife and his mother-in-law were
like the girl he had taken inside himself.

The two women in his own house puzzled and confused him. They became suddenly unlovely and commonplace. His
wife in particular was like some strange unlovely growth that had attached itself to his body.

In the evening after the day at the factory he went home to his own place and had dinner. He had always been a silent
man and when he did not talk no one minded. After dinner he, with his wife, went to a picture show. When they came
home his wife's mother sat under an electric light reading. There were two children and his wife expected another. They
came into the apartment and sat down. The climb up two flights of stairs had wearied his wife. She sat in a chair beside
her mother groaning with weariness.

The mother-in-law was the soul of goodness. She took the place of a servant in the home and got no pay. When her
daughter wanted to go to a picture show she waved her hand and smiled. "Go on," she said. "I don't want to go. I'd
rather sit here." She got a book and sat reading. The little boy of nine awoke and cried. He wanted to sit on the po-po.
The mother-in-law attended to that.

After the man and his wife came home the three people sat in silence for an hour or two before bedtime. The man
pretended to read a newspaper. He looked at his hands. Although he had washed them carefully grease from the
bicycle frames left dark stains under the nails. He thought of the Iowa girl and of her white quick hands playing over the
keys of a typewriter. He felt dirty and uncomfortable.

The girl at the factory knew the foreman had fallen in love with her and the thought excited her a little. Since her aunt's
death she had gone to live in a rooming house and had nothing to do in the evening. Although the foreman meant nothing
to her she could in a way use him. To her he became a symbol. Sometimes he came into the office and stood for a
moment by the door. His large hands were covered with black grease. She looked at him without seeing. In his place in
her imagination stood a tall slender young man. Of the foreman she saw only the gray eyes that began to burn with a
strange fire. The eyes expressed eagerness, a humble and devout eagerness. In the presence of a man with such eyes
she felt she need not be afraid.

She wanted a lover who would come to her with such a look in his eyes. Occasionally, perhaps once in two weeks, she
stayed a little late at the office, pretending to have work that must be finished. Through the window she could see the
foreman, waiting. When every one had gone she closed her desk and went into the street. At the same moment the
foreman came out at the factory door.

They walked together along the street, a half-dozen blocks, to where she got aboard her car. The factory was in a
place called South Chicago and as they went along evening was coming on. The streets were lined with small unpainted
frame houses and dirty-faced children ran screaming in the dusty roadway. They crossed over a bridge. Two
abandoned coal barges lay rotting in the stream.

He went along by her side walking heavily, striving to conceal his hands. He had scrubbed them carefully before leaving
the factory but they seemed to him like heavy dirty pieces of waste matter hanging at his side. Their walking together
happened but a few times and during one summer. "It's hot," he said. He never spoke to her of anything but the
weather. "It's hot," he said; "I think it may rain."

She dreamed of the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young man, a rich man owning houses and lands. The
workingman who walked beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked with him, stayed at the
office until the others had gone to walk unobserved with him, because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in his eyes
that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to her. In his presence there was no danger, could be no danger.
He would never attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was safe with him.

In his apartment in the evening the man sat under the electric light with his wife and his mother-in-law. In the next room
his two children were asleep. In a short time his wife would have another child. He had been with her to a picture show
and presently they would get into bed together.

He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of a bed from where, in another room, his mother-
in-law was crawling under the sheets. Life was too intimate. He would lie awake eager, expectant—expecting what?

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Nothing. Presently one of the children would cry. It wanted to get out of bed and sit on the po-po. Nothing strange or
unusual or lovely would or could happen. Life was too close, intimate. Nothing that could happen in the apartment
could in any way stir him. The things his wife might say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the goodness
of his stout mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without pay—

He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a newspaper—thinking. He looked at his hands. They
were large, shapeless, a workingman's hands.

The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he went out of the apartment and walked in silence
through miles of streets. It was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a sea, along the crest of a mountain.
The night was clear and silent and the stars shone. She also was a star. It was not necessary to say words.

Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out of dim, star-lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off
like the stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she
has being."

One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now
in the courts being tried for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the evening of the murder he
had taken his wife as usual to a picture show and they started home at nine. In Thirty-Second Street, at a corner near
their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out of an alleyway and then darted back again. That
incident may have put the idea of killing his wife into the man's head.

They got to the entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a dark hallway. Then quite suddenly and apparently
without thought the man took a knife out of his pocket. "Suppose that man who darted into the alleyway had intended
to kill us," he thought. Opening the knife he whirled about and struck his wife. He struck twice, a dozen times—madly.
There was a scream and his wife's body fell.

The janitor had neglected to light the gas in the lower hallway. Afterward, the foreman decided that was the reason he
did it, that and the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an alleyway and then darted back again.
"Surely," he told himself, "I could never have done it had the gas been lighted."

He stood in the hallway thinking. His wife was dead and with her had died her unborn child. There was a sound of
doors opening in the apartments above. For several minutes nothing happened. His wife and her unborn child were
dead—that was all.

He ran upstairs thinking quickly. In the darkness on the lower stairway he had put the knife back into his pocket and, as
it turned out later, there was no blood on his hands or on his clothes. The knife he later washed carefully in the
bathroom, when the excitement had died down a little. He told everyone the same story. "There has been a holdup," he
explained. "A man came slinking out of an alleyway and followed me and my wife home. He followed us into the
hallway of the building and there was no light." The janitor had neglected to light the gas. Well there had been a struggle
and in the darkness his wife had been killed. He could not tell how it had happened. "There was no light. The janitor
had neglected to light the gas," he kept saying.

For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to get rid of the knife. He took a long walk and
threw it away into the river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting under the bridge, the
bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings he walked to the street car with the girl who was virginal and pure,
who was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.

And then he was arrested and right away he confessed—told everything. He said he did not know why he had killed his
wife and was careful to say nothing of the girl at the office. The newspapers tried to discover the motive for the crime.
They are still trying. Some one had seen him on the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged into
the affair and had her picture printed in the paper. That has been annoying for her, as of course she has been able to
prove she had nothing to do with the man.

Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of the city and I went for a long walk in the early
morning. As I returned out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose family has so many and such
strange ramifications. For a time he walked beside me holding the little dog in his arms. It was cold and the dog whined
and shivered. In the fog the old man's face was indistinct. It moved slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the
upper air and with the tops of trees. He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and whose name is being shouted in
the pages of the city newspapers that come to our village each morning. As he walked beside me he launched into a
long tale concerning a life he and his brother, who had now become a murderer, had once lived together. "He is my
brother," he said over and over, shaking his head. He seemed afraid I would not believe. There was a fact that must be
established. "We were boys together, that man and I," he began again. "You see we played together in a barn back of
our father's house. Our father went away to sea in a ship. That is the way our names became confused. You understand
that. We have different names but we are brothers. We had the same father. We played together in a barn back of our
father's house. All day we lay together in the hay in the barn and it was warm there."

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In the fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree. Then it became a thing suspended in air. It
swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows. The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were
trying to tell. In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, a muddle. The
spirit of the man who had killed his wife came into the body of the little old man there by the roadside. It was striving to
tell me the story it would never be able to tell in the courtroom in the city, in the presence of the judge. The whole story
of mankind's loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty tried to get itself expressed from the lips of a
mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness, who stood by the side of a country road on a foggy morning holding a little
dog in his arms.

The arms of the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine with pain. A sort of convulsion shook his body.
The soul seemed striving to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog down across the plain to the city,
to the singer, the politician, the millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in the city. The intensity
of the old man's desire was terrible and in sympathy my body began to tremble. His arms tightened about the body of
the little dog so that it screamed with pain. I stepped forward and tore the arms away and the dog fell to the ground and
lay whining. No doubt it had been injured. Perhaps ribs had been crushed. The old man stared at the dog lying at his
feet as in the hallway of the apartment building the worker from the bicycle factory had stared at his dead wife. "We are
brothers," he said again. "We have different names but we are brothers. Our father you understand went off to sea."

I am sitting in my house in the country and it rains. Before my eyes the hills fall suddenly away and there are the flat
plains and beyond the plains the city. An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest went past my door and the little
dog was not with him. It may be that as we talked in the fog he crushed the life out of his companion. It may be that the
dog like the workman's wife and her unborn child is now dead. The leaves of the trees that line the road before my
window are falling like rain—the yellow, red, and golden leaves fall straight down, heavily. The rain beats them brutally
down. They are denied a last golden flash across the sky. In October leaves should be carried away, out over the
plains, in a wind. They should go dancing away.

FANUTZA[3]

By KONRAD BERCOVICI

(From The Dial)

Light and soft, as though the wind were blowing the dust off the silver clouds that floated overhead, the first snow was
falling over the barren lands stretching between the Danube and the Black Sea. A lowland wind, which had already
hardened and tightened the marshes, was blowing the snow skywards. The fine silvery dust, caught between the two air
currents, danced lustily, blown hither and thither until it took hold of folds and rifts in the frozen land and began to form
rugged white ridges that stretched in soft silvery curves to meet other growing mountains of snow. The lowland wind, at
first a mere breeze playfully teasing the north wind, like a child that kicks the bed-sheets before falling asleep, increased
its force and swiftness, and scattered huge mountains of snow, but the steadily rising drone of the north wind soon
mastered the situation. Like silver grain strewn by an unseen hand the snow fell obliquely in steady streams over the
land. A great calm followed. The long Dobrudgean winter had started. In the dim steady light, in the wake of the great
calm, travelling towards the Danube from the Black Sea, the "marea Neagra," four gipsy wagons, each drawn by four
small horses, appeared on the frozen plains. The caravan was brought to a standstill within sight of the slowly moving
river. The canvas-covered wagons ranged themselves, broadwise, in a straight line with the wind. Between the wagons
enough space was allowed to stable the horses. Then, when that part of the business had been done, a dozen men, in
furs from head to toe, quickly threw a canvas that roofed the temporary quarters of the animals and gave an additional
overhead protection from the snow and wind to the dwellers of the wheeled homes.

While the unharnessing and quartering of the horses and the stretching of the canvas roof proceeded, a number of
youngsters jumped down from the wagons, yelling and screaming with all the power of their lusty lungs. They threw
snowballs at one another as they ran, some in search of firewood and others, with wooden pails dangling from ends of
curved sticks over the left shoulder, in search of water for the horses and for the cooking pots of their mothers.

Soon afterwards, from little crooked black chimneys that pointed downwards over the roofs of the wagons, thick black
smoke told that the fires were already started. The youngsters came back; those with the full water pails marching
erectly with legs well apart; the ones with bundles of firewood strapped to their shoulders leaning forward on knotted
sticks so as not to fall under the heavy burden.

When everything had been done, Marcu, the tall gray-bearded chief, inspected the work. A few of the ropes needed
tightening. He did it himself, shaking his head in disapproval of the way in which it had been done. Then he listened
carefully to the blowing of the wind and measured its velocity and intensity. He called to his men. When they had

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surrounded him, he spoke a few words. With shovels and axes they set energetically to work at his direction, packing a
wall of snow and wood from the ground up over the axles of the wheels all around the wagons so as to give greater
solidity to the whole and to prevent the cold wind from blowing underneath.

By the time the early night settled over the marshes, the camp was quiet and dark. Even the dogs had curled up near the
tired horses and had gone to sleep.

Early the following morning the whole thing could not be distinguished from one of the hundreds of mountains of snow
that had formed over night. After the horses had been fed and watered, Marcu, accompanied by his daughter, Fanutza,
left the camp and went riverward, in search of the hut of the Tartar whose flat-bottomed boat was moored on the
shore. Marcu knew every inch of the ground. He had camped there with his tribe twenty winters in succession. He
sometimes arrived before, and at other times after, the first snow of the year. But every time he had gone to Mehmet
Ali's hut and asked the Tartar to row him across the Danube, on the old Roumanian side, to buy there fodder for the
horses and the men; enough to last until after the river was frozen tight and could be crossed securely with horses and
wagon. He had always come alone to Mehmet's hut, therefore, the Tartar, after greeting Marcu and offering to do what
his friend desired, inquired why the girl was beside the old chief.

"But this is my daughter, Fanutza, Mehmet Ali," Marcu informed.

"Who, Fanutza? She who was born here fourteen winters ago on the plains here?"

"The same, the same, my friend," Marcu answered as he smilingly appraised his daughter.

Mehmet Ali looked at the girl in frank astonishment at her size and full development; then he said as he took the oars
from the corner of the hut: "And I, who thought that my friend had taken a new wife to himself! Allah, Allah! How fast
these youngsters grow! And why do you take her along to the Giaour side, to the heathen side, of the river, friend?" he
continued talking as he put heavy boots on his feet and measured Fanutza with his eyes as he spoke.

"For everything there is only one right time, say I, Marcu," the chief explained, in measured solemn voice. "And so now
is the time for my daughter to get married. I have chosen her a husband from amongst the sons of my men, a husband
who will become the chief when I am no longer here to come to your hut at the beginning of every winter. She shall
marry him in the spring. I now go with her to the bazaars to buy silks and linens which the women of my tribe will
fashion into new clothes for both. And may Allah be good to them."

"Allah il Allah," Mehmet assured Marcu. "And who is he whom you have chosen from amongst your men?"

"I am old, Mehmet, I would otherwise have chosen a younger man for my daughter; but because I fear that this or the
following winter will be the last one, I have chosen Stan, whose orphaned daughter is Fanutza's own age. He is good
and true and strong. Young men never make careful chiefs."

"That be right and wise," remarked Mehmet, who was by that time ready for the trip. During the whole conversation the
young gipsy girl had been looking to her father when he spoke and sidewise when Mehmet answered.

At fourteen Fanutza was a full-grown woman. Her hair, braided in tresses, was hanging from underneath a black fur cap
she wore well over her forehead. Her eyes were large and brown, the long eyebrows were coal black. Her nose was
straight and thin and the mouth full and red. Withal she was of a somewhat lighter hue than her father or the rest of the
gipsy tribe. Yet there was something of a darker grain than the grain in her people that lurked beneath her skin. And she
was light on her feet. Even trudging in the deep snow, she seemed more to float, to skim on top, than to walk.

Unconcerned she had listened to the conversation that had gone on between her father and the Tartar in the hut of the
boatman. She had hardly been interested in the whole affair, yet, when Mehmet Ali mentioned casually as soon as he
was outdoors that he knew a man who would pay twenty pieces of gold for such a wife as Fanutza was, she became
interested in the conversation.

"I sell horses only," Marcu answered quietly.

"Yet my friend and others from his tribe have bought wives. Remember that beautiful Circassian girl?" the Tartar
continued without raising or lowering his voice.

"Yes, Mehmet, we buy wives but we don't sell them."

"Which is not fair," Mehmet reflected aloud still in the same voice.

By that time they had reached the river shore. Mehmet, after rolling together the oil cloth that had covered the boat,
helped the gipsy chief and his daughter to the stern. With one strong push of the oar on the shore rock, the Tartar slid
his boat a hundred feet towards the middle of the stream. Then he seated himself, face towards his passengers, and
rowed steadily without saying a single word. The gipsy chief lit his short pipe and looked over his friend's head, trying to
distinguish the other shore from behind the curtain of falling snow. The boat glided slowly over the thickening waters of
the Danube. A heavy snowstorm, the heaviest of the year, lashed the river. When Mehmet had finally moored his boat
to the Roumanian side of the Danube, he turned around to the gipsy chief and said:

"Be back before sundown. It shall be my last crossing of the year. For when the sun rises the waters will be frozen still.

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The gale blows from the land of the Russians."

"As you tell me, friend," answered Marcu while helping his daughter out of the boat.

When the two had gone a short distance Fanutza turned her head. Mehmet Ali was leaning on an oar and looking after
them. A little later, a hundred paces further, she caught fragments of a Tartar song that reached her ears in spite of the
shrill noises of the wind.

Marcu and his daughter entered the inn that stood a few hundred feet from the shore. The innkeeper, an old fat greasy
Greek, Chiria Anastasidis, welcomed the gipsy chief. Not knowing the relationship between the old man and the girl, he
feared to antagonize his customer by talking to the young woman. He pushed a white pine table near the big stove in the
middle of the room and after putting two empty glasses on the table he inquired "White or red?"

"Red wine, Chiria. It warms quicker. I am getting old."

"Old!" exclaimed the Greek as he brought a small pitcher of wine. "Old! Why, Marcu, you are as young as you were
twenty years ago."

"This is my daughter, Fanutza, Chiria, and not my wife."

"A fine daughter you have. Your daughter, eh?"

"Yes, and she is about to marry, too."

After they had clinked glasses and wished one another health and long years the innkeeper inquired:

"All your men healthy?"

"All. Only one-eyed Jancu died. You remember him. He was well along in years."

"Bogdaproste. Let not a younger man than he was die," answered Anastasidis as he crossed himself.

After Marcu had declared himself warmed back to life by the fine wine he inquired of Anastasidis the price of oats and
straw and hay. The innkeeper's store and his warehouse contained everything from a needle to an oxcart. The shelves
were full of dry goods, socks, shirts, silks, belts, fur caps, coats, and trousers. Overhead, hanging from the ceiling, were
heavy leather boots, shoes, saddles, harness of all kinds, fishers' nets, and even a red painted sleigh that swung on
heavy chains. In one corner of the store blankets were piled high, while all over the floor were bags of dry beans and
peas and corn and oats. At the door were bales of straw and hay, and outside, already half covered with snow, iron
ploughs hobnobbed with small anchors, harrows, and bundles of scythes that leaned on the wall.

"Oats you wanted? Oats are very high this year, Marcu."

And the bargaining began. Fanutza sat listlessly on her chair and looked through the window. A few minutes later, the
two men called one another thief and swindler and a hundred other names. Yet each time the bargain was concluded on
a certain article they shook hands and repeated that they were the best friends on earth.

"Now that we have finished with the oats, Chiria, let's hear your price for corn? What? Three francs a hundred kilo?
No. I call off the bargain on the oats. You are the biggest thief this side of the Danube."

"And you, you lowborn Tzigane, are the cheapest swindler on earth."

Quarrelling and shaking hands alternately and drinking wine Marcu and the Greek went on for hours. The gipsy chief
had already bought all the food for his men and horses and a few extra blankets and had ordered it all carted to the
moored boat where Mehmet Ali was waiting, when Fanutza reminded her father of the silks and linen he wanted to buy.

"I have not forgotten, daughter, I have not forgotten." Fanutza approached the counter behind which the Greek stood
ready to serve his customers.

"Show us some silks," she asked.

He emptied a whole shelf on the counter.

The old gipsy stood aside watching his daughter as she fingered the different pieces of coloured silk, which the
shopkeeper praised as he himself touched the goods with thumb and forefinger in keen appreciation of the quality he
offered. After she had selected all the colours she wanted and picked out the linen and neckerchiefs and ear-rings and
tried on a pair of beautiful patent leather boots that reached over the knees and had stripes of red leather sewed on with
yellow silk on the soft vamps, Fanutza declared that she had chosen everything she wanted. The bargaining between the
Greek and the gipsy was about to start anew when Marcu looked outdoors thoughtfully, stroked his beard and said to
the innkeeper:

"Put away the things my daughter has selected. I shall come again, alone, to bargain for them."

"If my friend fears he has not enough money—" suavely intervened Anastasidis, as he placed a friendly hand on the
gipsy's arm.

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"When Marcu has no money he does not ask his women to select silk," haughtily interrupted the gipsy. "It will be as I
said it will be. I come alone in a day if the river has frozen. In a day or a week. I come alone."

"Shall I, then, not take all these beautiful things along with me, now?" asked Fanutza in a plaintive yet reproachful tone.
"There is Marcia who waits to see them. I have...