The Best Short Stories of 1917, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story

She seemed to remember that downstairs in the dark shop the dealer with the waxen face detained her to shew some old silver and jewellery and such like. But she did not come to herself, she had no precise recollection of anything, till she found herself entering a church near Portland Place. It was an unlikely act in her normal moments. Why did she go in there? She acted like one walking in her sleep.

The church was old and dim, with high black pews. There was nobody there. Mrs. Wilton sat down in one of the pews and bent forward with her face in her hands.

After a few minutes she saw that a soldier had come in noiselessly and placed himself about half-a-dozen rows ahead of her. He never turned round; but presently she was struck by something familiar in the figure. First she thought vaguely that the soldier looked like her Hugh. Then, when he put up his hand, she saw who it was.

She hurried out of the pew and ran towards him. "Oh, Hugh, Hugh, have you come back?"

He looked round with a smile. He had not been killed. It was all a mistake. He was going to speak....

Footsteps sounded hollow in the empty church. She turned and glanced down the dim aisle.

It was an old sexton or verger who approached. "I thought I heard you call," he said.

"I was speaking to my husband." But Hugh was nowhere to be seen.

"He was here a moment ago." She looked about in anguish. "He must have gone to the door."

"There's nobody here," said the old man gently. "Only you and me. Ladies are often taken funny since the war. There was one in here yesterday afternoon said she was married in this church and her husband had promised to meet her here. Perhaps you were married here?"

"No," said Mrs. Wilton, desolately. "I was married in India."

It might have been two or three days after that, when she went into a small Italian restaurant in the Bayswater district. She often went out for her meals now: she had developed an exhausting cough, and she found that it somehow became less troublesome when she was in a public place looking at strange faces. In her flat there were all the things that Hugh had used; the trunks and bags still had his name on them with the labels of places where they had been together. They were like stabs. In the restaurant, people came and went, many soldiers too among them, just glancing at her in her corner.

This day, as it chanced, she was rather late and there was nobody there. She was very tired. She nibbled at the food they brought her. She could almost have cried from tiredness and loneliness and the ache in her heart.

Then suddenly he was before her, sitting there opposite at the table. It was as it was in the days of their engagement, when they used sometimes to lunch at restaurants. He was not in uniform. He smiled at her and urged her to eat, just as he used in those days....

I met her that afternoon as she was crossing Kensington Gardens, and she told me about it.

"I have been with Hugh." She seemed most happy.

"Did he say anything?"

"N-no. Yes. I think he did, but I could not quite hear. My head was so very tired. The next time–"

I did not see her for some time after that. She found, I think, that by going to places where she had once seen him—the old church, the little restaurant—she was more certain to see him again. She never saw him at home. But in the street or the park he would often walk along beside her. Once he saved her from being run over. She said she actually felt his hand grabbing her arm, suddenly, when the car was nearly upon her.

She had given me the address of the clairvoyant; and it is through that strange woman that I know—or seem to know—what followed.

Mrs. Wilton was not exactly ill last winter, not so ill, at least, as to keep to her bedroom. But she was very thin, and her great handsome eyes always seemed to be staring at some point beyond, searching. There was a look in them that seamen's eyes sometimes have when they are drawing on a coast of which they are not very certain. She lived almost in solitude: she hardly ever saw anybody except when they sought her out. To those who were anxious about her she laughed and said she was very well.

One sunny morning she was lying awake, waiting for the maid to bring her tea. The shy London sunlight peeped through the blinds. The room had a fresh and happy look.

When she heard the door open she thought that the maid had come in. Then she saw that Hugh was standing at the foot of the bed. He was in uniform this time, and looked as he had looked the day he went away.

"Oh, Hugh, speak to me! Will you not say just one word?"

He smiled and threw back his head, just as he used to in the old days at her mother's house when he wanted to call her out of the room without attracting the attention of the others. He moved towards the door, still signing to her to follow him. He picked up her slippers on his way and held them out to her as if he wanted her to put them on. She slipped out of bed hastily....

It is strange that when they came to look through her things after her death the slippers could never be found.

"A CERTAIN RICH MAN–" 17

By LAWRENCE PERRYFrom Scribner's Magazine

Evelyn Colcord glanced up the table with the appraising eye of a young hostess who had already established a reputation for her dinners. The room had been decorated with a happy effect of national colors, merged with those of the allied nations, and neither in the table nor its appointments was a flaw revealed—while the low, contented murmur of conversation and light laughter attending completion of the first course afforded assurance that the company was well chosen and the atmosphere assertive in qualities that made for equanimity and good cheer.

She smiled slightly, nodding at the butler, who had been watching her anxiously, and then glanced out the corner of her eye at Professor Simec, seated at her right. She had entertained doubts concerning him, had, in fact, resented the business necessity which had brought him thither as guest of honor, not through any emotion approximating inhospitality but wholly because of her mistrust as to the effect of this alien note upon her dinner, which was quite impromptu, having been arranged at the eleventh hour in deference to the wishes of Jerry Dane, a partner of Colcord's, who was handling the firm's foreign war patents.

She had done the best she could as to guests, had done exceedingly well, as it chanced, fortune having favored her especially in the cases of several of those who sat about the table. And now Simec was fully involved in conversation with Bessie Dane, who seemed deeply interested. As for the man, weazened and attenuate, she could catch only his profile—the bulging, hairless brow, and beard curling outward from the tip, forming sort of a crescent, which she found hardly less sinister than the cynical twist where grizzled whiskers and mustaches conjoined and the cold, level white eyes that she had noted as dominant characteristics when he was presented.

Simec was a laboratory recluse who had found his métier in the war. Rumor credited to him at least one of the deadliest chemical combinations employed by the allied armies. But it was merely rumor; nothing definite was known. These are things of which little is hinted and less said. None the less, intangible as were his practical achievements—whatever they might be—his reputation was substantial, enhanced, small doubt, by the very vagueness of his endeavors. The element of mystery, which his physical appearance tended not to allay, invested him, as it were, with a thaumaturgic veil through which was dimly revealed the man. It was as though his personality was merely a nexus to the things he stood for and had done, so that he appeared to Evelyn less a human entity than a symbol. But at least Bessie Dane was interested and the fine atmosphere of the table was without a taint.

Shrugging almost imperceptibly, she withdrew her eyes and looked across the table with an expression which Nicholas Colcord could have interpreted had he not been engrossed with Sybil Latham. Evelyn studied him with admiring tenderness as he lounged in his chair, toying idly with a fork, smiling at something his partner was saying, while her mind ran lovingly over the dominant traits of a personality which was so strong, so keenly alive, so sensitive to decent, manly things, so perfectly balanced.

Failing to catch his eye, Evelyn turned to her plate filled with a subtle melancholy. When would there be another dinner like this? Not, at all events, until the war was over. Nick had spoken about this—very definitely; there would be no more entertaining. She had agreed with him, of course, not, however, escaping the conviction that her husband's viewpoint was more or less in keeping with a certain unusual sombreness which she had caught creeping into his mood in the past year or so.

Still, everybody who amounted to anything was pulling up on the bit and doing something or talking of doing something or other for the country. It was already assured that the season would be insufferably dull—from a social standpoint at least. Evelyn could not suppress a certain resentment. She was not one of those who had found an element of thrill in the suddenly altered perspectives. Her plans for the spring season had been laid; engagements had been accepted or declined, as functions promised to be worth while or uninteresting; all the delicate interlocking machinery of the life in which Evelyn Colcord moved, somewhat prominently, was in motion—then the sudden checking of the wheels: war.

Now there were memories of her husband's sober words; now there was young Jeffery Latham at her elbow—he had been almost shot to pieces in France—now there was Simec, the genius of diabolical achievement.... What were things coming to? Even the weather had gone wrong. Outside, an unseasonable cold rain, lashed by a northeast gale, was driving against the panes of the French windows, and the sizzling effulgence of an arc-lamp revealed pools of water lying on the asphalt of the avenue....

The dry, softly modulated voice of Captain Latham at her left lifted Evelyn from her trend of sombre revery.

"Nick is looking uncommonly fit—he'll go in for the cavalry, I suppose."

The young British officer spoke more with a half-humorous effort at conversation than any other motive, but she turned to him with a gesture of appeal.

"Jeffery," she said, "you make me shiver!"

The man stared at her curiously.

"Why, I—I'm sorry. I'm sure I didn't—"

"Oh, of course," she interrupted, "I know you didn't. Don't be silly. As for me, I'm perfectly foolish, don't you know. Only"—she paused—"I detest war talk. It's so fearfully upsetting. It seems only yesterday that it was a subject to drag in when conversation lagged. But now—"

Latham's quizzical reply was almost upon his lips, when, evidently changing his mind, he spoke dryly.

"No doubt you'll become used to it in time.... By the by, I was in fun about old Nick. His objection to grouse coverts and deer-stalking—I can't fancy him in war."

As she didn't reply he picked up his fork, adding: "Yet he's a tremendous athlete—polo and all that sort of thing. Do you know, I suspect that when the real pull comes he won't object to potting at Germans.... Did you do these menu cards, Evelyn? They're awfully well done."

She nodded, eying him eagerly.

"Yes, I painted them this afternoon. You see, it was a rush order.... As to Nick, I don't think it will come to his enlisting. I've never considered it, really. He's awfully mixed up in government finances, don't you know. We all tell him he's more valuable where he is."

Latham smiled faintly.

"What does Nick say to that?"

"Oh, I don't know." She shrugged. "Nothing very definite. War has been a taboo subject with him—I mean from the first when you all went in. I know he has strong feelings about it, terribly strong. But he never talks about them."

"He went in strong on the financial end, didn't he?" asked the Englishman. "Some one in London told me he'd made a lot of oof."

She nodded, coloring.

"Yes, oceans of money.... Not that we needed it," Evelyn added, a trifle defensively.

"I know; it just came," was Latham's comment. "Well, it all helped us out of a nasty mess."

Evelyn was thinking and did not reply immediately. When she did speak it was apparent that in changing the subject she had followed a natural impulse without intention or design.

"Jeffery," she said, "do you know I haven't been able to make you out since you arrived here—nor Sybil either," she added, nodding toward Latham's wife, whose classic, flaxen-haired profile was turned toward them.

The man was smiling curiously.

"I didn't realize we had changed so."

"Well, you have, both of you. You talk the same and act the same—except a—a sort of reserve; something; I don't know just what.... Somehow, you, and Sybil, too, seem as though you felt strange, aloof, out of place. You used to be so absolutely—well, natural and at home with us all—"

"My word!" Latham laughed but made no further comment.

"Of course," Evelyn went on, "you've been through a lot, I can appreciate that. When I got Sybil's letter I simply wept: twenty-four hours in a muddy shell-hole; invalided for good, with an arm you can't raise above your shoulder; a horrid scar down your face...."

"It does make rather a poor face to look at, doesn't it?" Latham flushed and hurried on. "Well, I've no complaint."

She glanced at the cross on his olive-drab coat.

"Of course not! How absurd, Jeffery! But how did Sybil ever stand it? How did she live through it? I mean the parting, the months of suspense, word that you were missing, then mortally wounded?… Her brother killed by gas?"

Latham glanced at his wife, a soft light in his eyes.

"Poor Sybil," he replied. "She was a brick, Evelyn—a perfect brick. I don't know how she got through it. But one does, you know."

"Yes, one does, I suppose." Evelyn sighed. "But how? I couldn't; I simply couldn't. Why, Jeffery, I can't bear even to think of it."

Latham shook his head negatively at the footman, who stood at his side, and then turned smiling to Evelyn. "Oh, come! Of course you could. You don't understand now, but you will. There's a sort of grace given, I fancy."

"Jeffery, I don't want to understand, and I don't want any grace, and I think you're horrid and unsympathetic." She tapped him admonishingly on the arm, laughing lightly. But the gloom was still in her dark-gray eyes. "But, after all, you are right. We are in for it, just as you have been.... God grant there are women more Spartan than I."

Latham grimaced and was raising a deprecating hand when she caught it impulsively.

"Please let's talk about something else."

"Very well." He smiled mockingly and lowered his voice. "Your friend at your right there—curious beggar, don't you think?"

Evelyn glanced at Simec, turning again to Latham.

"He gives me the creeps," she confessed. "It seems absurd, but he does."

"Really!" The Englishman stared at the man a moment. "Do you know," he resumed, "he does seem a bit uncanny. Where'd Nick pick him up?"

"It was Jerry Dane," she replied. "He's done some tremendous things on the other side. Jerry met him in Washington the other day and seems to regard him as a find. He has no business sense and has given away practically everything. Now we are going to capitalize him; I believe that's the word. I never saw him before tonight"—her voice sank to a whisper—"and, do you know, I hope I never shall again." She shrugged. "Listen to him."

Several of the guests were already doing that. His toneless voice rose and fell monotonously, and he appeared so detached from what he was saying that as Evelyn gazed at him she seemed to find difficulty in relating words that were said to the speaker; only the slight movement of the lips and an occasional formless gesture made the association definite.

"Doctor Allison," he was saying, "has missed the distinction between hostia honoraria and hostia piacularis. In the former case the deity accepts the gift of a life; in the latter he demands it."

"What in the world are you all talking about now?" asked Evelyn plaintively. "Not war—?"

"Sacrifice, Mrs. Colcord." Simec inclined his head slightly in her direction.

"I was saying," explained Doctor Allison, "that we do well if we send our young men to battle in the spirit of privileged sacrifice, as—as something that is our—our—yes—our proud privilege, as I say, to do."

Simec shook his head in thoughtful negation.

"That is sentiment, excellent sentiment; unfortunately, it doesn't stand assay. Reaction comes. We do better if we make our gift of blood as a matter of unalterable necessity. We make too much of it all, in any event. The vast evil of extended peace is the attachment of too great value to luxuries and to human life—trite, but true. We know, of course, that the world has progressed chiefly over the dead bodies of men and, yes, women and children."

Some new element had entered into the voice. Whether it was herself or whether it was Simec, Evelyn was in no mood to determine.... She was aware only of a certain metallic cadence which beat cruelly upon her nerves. Silence had followed, but not of the same sort as before. As though seeking complete withdrawal, Evelyn turned her eyes out of the window. A wayfarer, head down, was struggling through the nimbus of watery electric light; a horse-drawn vehicle was plodding by. Colcord's voice brought her back; it was strained.

"I don't feel as Allison does," he said. "And I certainly have no sympathy with Simec." He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. "You see," he went on, "I—I—well, maybe, I'm a product of extended peace, as Simec puts it. No doubt I'm soft. But this war—I've never talked nor let myself think much about the war—but this whole thing of sacrifice got under me from the very first.... Young men, thousands, hundreds of thousands of them, yes, millions, torn from their homes, from their mothers, their fathers—their wives, for what? To be blown into shapeless, unrecognizable clay, to be maimed, made useless for life. My God! It has kept me awake nights!"

"Colcord"—Simec's white eyes rested professionally upon the host—"let us get to the root of your state of mind; your brief is for the individual as against the common good, is it not?"

Colcord frowned.

"Oh, I haven't any brief, Simec; I've never reasoned about the thing, that is, in a cold, scientific way. It's a matter of heart, I suppose—of instinct. I just can't seem to stand the calculating, sordid wastage of young life and all that it involves. Now, of course, it has come closer home. And it's terrible."

"You never would shoot anything for sport, would you, old fellow?" said Latham, sympathetically, "not even pheasants."

Colcord tossed his beautifully modelled head.

"Latham, I tell you, I'm soft; I'm the ultimate product of peace and civilization."

"Yes, you're soft, terribly so," smiled Dane. "I ought to know; I played opposite you at tackle for two years."

"Stuff! You understand what I mean, Jerry; I guess you all do. I've never talked this way before; as I say, I've always kept the war in the background, tried to gloss it over, forget it. But I couldn't; I've done a heap of thinking." He sat bolt upright, his clinched fist upon the table. "All these young chaps herded together and suddenly turned loose from all they've known and done and thought—I tell you I can't duck it any more."

"I know, old chap." Arnold Bates, who wrote light society novels, spoke soothingly. "It is—rotten. But what are you going to do about it?"

Colcord's fine brow was wrinkled painfully.

"Nothing, Arnold, nothing. That's the trouble; you have to sit still and watch this wrecking of civilization or else get out and take a hack at the thing yourself. I can't do that; not unless I have to." He paused. "I've had a good time in this life; things have always come easily—"

Sybil Latham was regarding him contemplatively.

"Yes," she murmured, "I don't know a man who has impressed me as so thoroughly enjoying life as you, Nick—"

Colcord stared at her a moment.

"Well, I do," he replied at length. "But I want to say this right here: if some person or presence, some supernatural being, say, should come here to-night, at this table, and tell me that by giving up my life right now I would, through that act, bring an end to—"

"Nick!" Evelyn Colcord's voice was poignantly sharp.

"If through that little sacrifice the blood glut in Europe would end, I'd do it cheerfully, joyfully, in a minute."

Simec was gazing at the speaker with half-closed eyes; the others, in thrall of his words, were staring at the table or at one another.

"What a thought!" Mrs. Allison glanced at him curiously. "Coming from you, of all men, Nick!"

"I wonder if I could say that?" Jerry Dane sank down in his chair, put his hands in his pockets, and gazed sombrely up at the ceiling. "By George! I wish I could—but I can't."

Bates shifted uneasily. He shrugged.

"It's too hypothetical. And yet—of course it's absurd—yet if the thing could happen, I think I'd stick with Colcord."

"In other words"—Simec's voice now had a sibilant hiss—"if you could end war through your death you'd be willing to die—now, or at any specified time?"

"If you're talking to me," said Colcord, "I'm on record. Those who know me well know I don't have to say a thing twice."

"I was talking to Mr. Bates," replied the inventor. "He seemed doubtful."

"Well, I'm not now," retorted the writer sharply. "I'm with Nick absolutely."

Doctor Allison was shaking his head.

"Theoretically, I would make the same assertion," he confessed, "but I wish to be honest; I don't know whether I could do it or not."

"Neither do I," said Dane. "A certainty like that and taking a chance on the battlefield are two different things. What do you say, Latham; you've been through the mill?"

"Well, you know," shrugged the soldier, "I fancy I'm a bit hardened. I'd like to see the thing through now. We've gone so far, don't you know."

There was a momentary silence broken only by the soft movements of the butler and footman. One of the windows rattled in a gust of wind and rain. Under the flickering candle-lights the company seemed to draw to-gether in a fellowship that was not the bond of gustatory cheer—which Evelyn could so infallibly establish at her table—but a communion of sympathetic feeling as of one drawing to another in the common thrall of subdued emotion. The prevailing mood impressed Evelyn Colcord strongly, and, glancing down the table, she started at her accuracy in divining the cause. Simec's place was vacant. She recalled now that but a moment before he had been summoned to the telephone. She had noted his temporary departure only as one notices the lifting of a saffron mist.

Unquestionably, the absorbing topic had gripped the imagination of all. It was sufficiently theoretical, so absolutely hypothetical, in fact, so utterly impossible, that Evelyn's alert intellect found pleasure in grappling with it.

"I wonder—!" Her elbows were on the table, her chin upon her hands. "Of course, it's awfully easy to say; but I wonder how it would be if we really faced such a question. Just consider, Arnold,"—she was smiling at Bates—"the superhuman firing squad is outside the door; the superhuman agent stands at your side ready to push the button and end the war as the shots ring out. You picture it, of course, with your imagination. Well, sir, what do you say?"

Bates grimaced, twisting the stem of his wine-glass in his fingers.

"Well, one can say only what he thinks he would do. It's so absurd that I can't visualize your picture—not even with my imagination. But it seems to me—it seems that I would gladly make the sacrifice."

Doctor Allison, who had been scowling at the ceiling, passing his fingers thoughtfully through his sparse gray hair, sighed deeply.

"That's just it; how could one possibly tell? The mind adapts itself to situations, I suppose; in fact, of course it does. It's altogether difficult, sitting at this table with its food and color and light and excellent company, to place yourself in the position Nicholas has devised. It's simply flying from the very comfortable and congenial and normal present into a dark limbo that is deucedly uncomfortable, uncongenial, and abnormal. I can't go beyond what I've already said; I don't know whether I'd do it or not."