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

"You'd like to, of course," suggested Mrs. Dane.

"Oh, of course I'd like to," was the reply. "The point I make is whether I could or not; I don't know."

"Well"—the young woman paused—"I'm not going to put the question to my husband because I wouldn't let Jerry do it, even if he were willing."

"Oh, come now, Bess!" grinned Dane.

"Well, I wouldn't, and I imagine I'd have some rights in the matter."

"Now we're getting back to Simec's hostia honoraria and hostia piacularis," laughed Bates.

"It is a new viewpoint," sighed Evelyn. "Curiously, I hadn't thought of that."

She smiled across the table at her husband, but he was slouched in his chair, his eyes staring vacantly over her head.

"Of course you'd all do it, every one," he said presently. "The trouble now is that you are attempting to visualize the tragic part of it and not considering the humanitarian side—the great good that would come of the sacrifice. When you look at it that way you would be willing to do it—and think it a mighty darn cheap exchange."

"Well, perhaps so," grumbled Allison. "But I can't help thinking I'm glad I don't have to face the alternative."

Evelyn turned swiftly toward Sybil Latham, under the impression that she had made some little exclamation or that she had checked one. But her face was hard and inscrutable.

"Let's change the subject." Evelyn laughed self-consciously. "It's so far-fetched; it's getting a bit on my nerves."

Even as she spoke she knew that Simec had resumed his seat, although he had made no sound and her eyes were upon her husband. She was thus not surprised to hear his voice.

"I gather, then," he said, as though picking up a conversational thread, "that there are two of you who would be willing to make the gift of sacrifice—Colcord and Bates."

His manner was such as to draw them all from their mood of idle, comfortable speculation to rigidity. Turning to him, searching him, they saw, as it seemed to them, a new being divested of vagueness—dominant, commanding, remorseless. Sitting rigid, his thin, hairy neck stretched outward, he suggested some sinister bird of prey. Thus poised for an instant he regarded the two men whom he had named.

"Suppose," he proceeded, "that I could make this absurd condition—as Bates terms it—exist. Would you gentlemen still hold your position? Believe me, I ask this in the utmost good faith—"

Evelyn Colcord spoke before either man could make reply.

"Nick, this is getting a bit unpleasant, really." She laughed nervously. "Don't you think we could turn to something more cheerful? I adore a joke—"

"But this is not a joke, Mrs. Colcord," rejoined Simec gravely.

"Well, in any event—" began Evelyn, but her husband interrupted.

"I told you I was on record, Simec," he said. "You show me a way to end this carnival of murder—and I'm your man."

"I, too." Bates chuckled. "Perhaps, after all, we've been dining closer to the supernatural than we realized. Well, I'm game. Life, after all, is only a few more summers and a few more winters, even if we live it out. Go to it, Simec." There was sort of a reckless ring in the writer's voice which was taken as a sign that he was seriously impressed. But Bates would be; he had imagination and was temperamental.

"I wish you all would stop." Bessie Dane's voice was childishly plaintive.

"Nick, please!" cried Evelyn. "This is not at all funny."

"I don't see the joke, I must confess," grumbled Allison.

Evelyn wished that Latham or his wife would add weight to the protest, but they remained silent, staring curiously at the inventor, as, indeed, they had throughout. Now she thought of it, she realized that the two had remained practically aloof from the discussion that had preceded Simec's dénouement.

"I'm afraid, Simec," said Colcord crisply, "that we're getting a bit unpopular. We'd better drop the subject. It was rather a cheap play, I'll admit, stacking myself up as a martyr in a wholly impossible situation. You called me—and Bates there—rather cleverly.... The drinks are on us.... At the same time I meant what I said, even if it was far-fetched; I mean I was sincere."

Simec threw out his arm in a long, bony gesture.

"I am perfectly convinced of that. That is why I am going to ask you to make your offer good."

Had it come from any one else there would have been derisive laughter. But Simec, a man to whom had been credited so much of mystery and achievement, was speaking. In the soft crimson glow of the table he stood, reducing to practical application the very situation which they had found so attractive, only because of its utter grotesque impossibility. It was startling, grimly thrilling. There was the sense among some about the table of struggling mentally to break the spell which this coldly unemotional creature of science had cast. At length Dane spoke as though by sheer physical effort.

"Simec—we—we all know you're a genius. But just now you don't quite get over."

The inventor turned his head slowly toward the speaker.

"I don't think I quite understand."

"Rats," said Dane roughly. "Here Nick says he'd give up his life if the war could be stopped and you bob up and tell him to make good, throwing sort of a Faust effect over the whole dinner. All right for Nick and Arnold Bates—but how about you, Simec? How will you stop the war if they shuffle off? I'll bite once on anything; how will you do it?" There was a general movement of the diners. Dane's wife laughed a trifle hysterically.

Simec arose and stood leaning forward, his hands upon the table.

"The situation which Colcord devised, as it happens, is not so impossible as you think. In fact, it may prove to be quite feasible—" He paused, but no voice rose to break the silence. The candle-lights were flickering softly in an entering breath of wind. Evelyn looked appealingly at her husband, who grimaced and shrugged slightly.

"I imagine I have some sort of a reputation in the way of physical formula as applied to war," Simec went on presently. "Dane is about to handle a rather extraordinary gun of mine in the foreign market. But one gun differs from another only inasmuch as it is somewhat more deadly—its destructiveness is not total." He raised a thin forefinger and levelled it along the table.

"Let us assume," he said, "that there has been devised and perfected an apparatus which will release a destructive energy through the medium of ether waves. If you understand anything about the wireless telegraph you will grasp what I mean; in itself the wireless, of course, involves transmitted power. Let us transform and amplify that power and we encompass—destruction. The air is filled with energy. A sun-ray is energy; you will recall that Archimedes concentrated it through immense burning-glasses which set fire to Roman ships."

His voice had grown clear and strong, as though he was lecturing to a class of students.

"Now, then, assume an instrument such as I have roughly described be placed in the hands of our allied nations, an instrument which releases and propels against the enemy energy so incomprehensibly enormous that it destroys matter instantaneously, whether organic or inorganic; assume that in a few hours it could lay the greatest host the world ever saw in death, whether they were concealed in the earth or were in the air, or wherever they were; assume it could level a great city. Assuming all this, can you conceive that the nations holding this mighty force in their hands could bring about peace which would not only be instant but would be permanent?"

There was silence for a moment. The footman, obeying a significant glance from the butler, withdrew; the butler himself went softly out of the room. Latham looked up with the expression of a man emerging from a trance.

"I don't fancy any one could doubt that," he said.

"No, indeed. Certainly not." Allison gestured in playful salute. "Let me congratulate you upon a fine flight of imagination, Professor Simec."

"Thank you—but it isn't imagination, Doctor Allison." The man's voice had again become flat and unemotional, with the effect of withdrawal of personality. "I have reason to think I have perfected some such device.... At least I believe I now possess the means of destroying human life on a wholesale scale. There is yet more to do before we may successfully assail inorganic matter. The waves penetrate but do not as yet destroy, so that while we should easily bring dissolution to human beings we cannot yet disintegrate the walls behind which they lurk. That, however, is a detail—"

"Just like that, eh?" No one smiled at Jerry Dane's comment. Bates leaned forward.

"Where do Colcord and I come in?"

Simec, who had resumed his seat, turned to him.

"Of course—I beg your pardon. I should have explained at the outset that the discovery has never had adequate practical test. One of my assistants lost his life a month or so ago, to be sure; an extremely promising man. The incident was of value in demonstrating practically a theoretical deadliness; unfortunately, it proved also that the power energized ether waves in all directions, whereas obviously it should be within the power of the operator to send it only in a given direction."

"Otherwise," remarked Latham, "it would be as fatal to the side using it as to the army against whom it was directed."

"Precisely." Simec lifted his wine-glass and sipped slowly. "For a time," he went on, "this drawback seemed insuperable, just as it has been in wireless telegraphy. Within the past week, however, I am convinced that a solution of that difficulty has been reached. In theory and in tests on a minor scale it certainly has. My assistants, however, refuse to serve in the demonstrations at full power—which, of course, are vitally necessary—even though I engage to share a part, but not, of course, the major part, of the risk. I have been equally unfortunate in enlisting others, to whom, naturally, I was in duty bound to designate possible—in fact, extremely probable—dangers."

"In more precise words," snapped Bates, "if your invention is what you think it is your assistants are bound to die."

Simec hesitated a moment, his gleaming brow wrinkled thoughtfully.

"Well, not precisely," he said at length. "That is, not necessarily. There is, of course, as I have said, that possi—that probability. I cannot be certain. Assuming the more serious outcome materializes, there will be no further danger for those who operate; I shall have learned all that it is necessary to know." He paused. "Then war will cease; either before or immediately after the initial field application."

"But this is absurd." Allison smote the table in agitation. "Why don't you secure condemned convicts?"

"Even were that possible, I should not care to proceed in that way. Again, I must have one or more men of keen intelligence."

"But neither Colcord nor Bates is a scientist!"

"That is not at all necessary," was the composed reply. "I am the scientist."

"And Nick the victim," flashed Evelyn Colcord. "Well, I most decidedly and unalterably object, Professor Simec."

"Your husband and Mr. Bates, inspired by humanitarian motives, named a condition under which they would give—not risk—their lives. I meet their condition, at least so far as it lies within human agency to do.... Of course they can withdraw their offer—"

Bates, who had left his seat and was walking up and down the room, turned suddenly, standing over the scientist with upraised hand.

"Simec, I withdraw right here. I'm no fool. The whole spirit of this—this situation is not in keeping with the original idea. Not at all. Whether you are joking, serious, or simply insane, I'm out. Try it on yourself."

"I have already assumed great risks. In furtherance of my device—which, as you may imagine, will have far-reaching effects—I must survive, if I can."

Evelyn, who had suppressed an exclamation of approval of Arnold Bates's stanch words, turned to her husband. His jaws were bulging at the corners, his eyes alight. In a species of panic she tried to speak but could not.

"And you, Colcord?" Simec's colorless delivered question came as from afar.

Colcord had arisen and was staring at the inventor with the face of one exalted.

"If you have what you say you have, Simec, you meet my condition to the letter. At the very least, it will be a most important asset to the cause of my country. In either case the least I can give to help it along is my life—if that proves necessary.... When do you want me?"

In the silence that followed Evelyn Colcord, sitting like a statue, unable to move nor to speak, passed through a limbo of nameless emotion. Through her mind swept a flashing filament of despair, hope, craven fear, and sturdy resolution. Tortured in the human alembic, she was at length resolved, seeing with a vision that pierced all her horizons. And then, trembling, tense, there came—a thought? A vision? She knew not what it was, nor was she conscious of attempting to ascertain. She knew only that for a fleeting instant the veil had been lifted and that she had gazed upon serenity and that all was well. Further, she had no inclination to know. Not that she feared complete revelation; for that matter, some subconscious conviction that all would be well illumined her senses. This she spurned, or rather ignored, in a greater if nameless exaltation. Stern with the real fibre of her womanhood, she lifted her head in pride.

Then, moved by initiative not her own, her face turned, not to her husband, but to her guests, each in turn. Arnold Bates was crushing a napkin in his sensitive fingers, flushed, angry, rebellious, perhaps a trifle discomfited. Dane was smiling foolishly; Bessie was leaning forward on the table, dead white, inert. Doctor Allison's head was shaking; he was clicking his tongue and his wife was twisting her stout fingers one around another. So her gaze wandered, and then, as though emerging from a dream, revivified, calm, she studied each intently. She knew not why, but something akin to contempt crept into her mind.

It was as though seeking relief that her eyes rested upon Sybil Latham. The Englishwoman's face was turned to Colcord; her color was heightened only slightly, but in her blue eyes was the light of serene stars, and about her lips those new lines of self-sacrifice, anxiety, sorrow, which Evelyn had resented as marring the woman's delicate beauty, now imparted to her face vast strength, ineffable dignity, nobility.

Evelyn Colcord's throat clicked; for a moment she did not breathe, while a vivid flash of jealous emotion departed, leaving in its place a great peace, an exaltation born of sudden knowing. Instinctively seeking further confirmation, her eyes, now wide and big and flaming, swept to Latham. His face, too, was turned toward her husband. It was the grimly triumphant visage of the fighter who knows his own kind, of the friend and believer whose faith, suddenly justified, has made him proud.

Evelyn rose and stood erect, staring into vacancy. Here were two who knew, who understood—who had been through hell and found it worth while.

Voices, expostulatory voices, roused her. Allison was at her side and Dane, whose wife, weeping, was pulling at her bare arm. Colcord and Simec stood to one side, aloof, as though already detached from the world.

"Evelyn!" Allison's voice was peremptory. "I command you! You're the only one who has the right to check this damn foolishness. I command you to speak."

"Evelyn—" Dane's voice trailed into nothingness.

Again her eyes turned to Sybil Latham, and then, rigidly as an automaton, she walked swiftly to her husband's side. For a moment the two stood facing each other, eye riveted to eye. Her beautiful bare arms flew out swiftly, resting upon his shoulders, not encircling his neck.

"Nick—" Her voice was low, guttural. "I—I didn't help you much, did I, dear heart? I didn't understand. They've been saying it would all come home to us. But I didn't think so quickly—nor to us. I—I wasn't ready. I am now. I want to help; I—I—" Her fingers clutched his shoulders convulsively. "When—when do you go?"

Colcord stood a moment, his eyes smouldering upon her.

"To-morrow morning at seven," he replied. "That was the hour, Professor Simec?" he added with a side-wise inclination of his head.

"Yes." The scientist looked away, hesitated, and then joined in the little procession to the dimly lighted hall. Evelyn started as she felt her fingers locked together in a firm hand.

"You know, dear girl, don't you?" There was a mist in Latham's eyes.

But Evelyn's face was light.

"Yes, Jeffery," she said proudly, "I know now."

THE PATH OF GLORY 18

By MARY BRECHT PULVERFrom The Saturday Evening Post

It was so poor a place—a bitten-off morsel "at the beyond end of nowhere"—that when a February gale came driving down out of a steel sky and shut up the little lane road and covered the house with snow a passer-by might have mistaken it all, peeping through its icy fleece, for just a huddle of the brown bowlders so common to the country thereabouts.

And even when there was no snow it was as bad—worse, almost, Luke thought. When everything else went brave and young with new greenery; when the alders were laced with the yellow haze of leaf bud, and the brooks got out of prison again, and arbutus and violet and buttercup went through their rotation of bloom up in the rock pastures and maple bush—the farm buildings seemed only the bleaker and barer.

That forlorn unpainted little house, with its sagging blinds! It squatted there through the year like a one-eyed beggar without a friend—lost in its venerable white-beard winters, or contemplating an untidy welter of rusty farm machinery through the summers.

When Luke brought his one scraggy little cow up the lane he always turned away his head. The place made him think of the old man who let the birds build nests in his whiskers. He preferred, instead, to look at the glories of Bald Mountain or one of the other hills. There was nothing wrong with the back drop in the home stage-set; it was only home itself that hurt one's feelings.

There was no cheer inside, either. The sagging old floors, though scrubbed and spotless, were uncarpeted; the furniture meager. A pine table, a few old chairs, a shabby scratched settle covered by a thin horse blanket as innocent of nap as a Mexican hairless—these for essentials; and for embellishment a shadeless glass lamp on the table, about six-candle power, where you might make shift to read the Biweekly—times when there was enough money to have a Biweekly—if you were so minded; and window shelves full of corn and tomato cans, still wearing their horticultural labels, where scrawny one-legged geraniums and yellowing coleus and begonia contrived an existence of sorts.

And then, of course, the mantelpiece with the black-edged funeral notice and shiny coffin plate, relics of Grampaw Peel's taking-off; and the pink mug with the purple pansy and "Woodstock, N.Y.," on it; the photograph of a forgotten cousin in Iowa, with long antennæ-shaped mustaches; the Bible with the little china knobs on the corners; and the pile of medicine testimonials and seed catalogues—all these contributed something.

If it was not a beautiful place within, it was, also, not even a pleasant place spiritually. What with the open door into his father's room, whence you could hear the thin frettings made by the man who had lain these ten years with chronic rheumatism, and the untuneful whistlings of whittling Tom, the big brother, the shapely supple giant whose mind had never grown since the fall from the barn room when he was eight years old, and the acrid complaints of the tall gaunt mother, stepping about getting their inadequate supper, in her gray wrapper, with the ugly little blue shawl pinned round her shoulders, it was as bad a place as you might find in a year's journeying for anyone to keep bright and "chirk up" in.

Not that anyone in particular expected "them poor Hayneses" to keep bright or "chirk up." As far back as he could remember, Luke had realized that the hand of God was laid on his family. Dragging his bad leg up the hill pastures after the cow, day in and day out, he had evolved a sort of patient philosophy about it. It was just inevitable, like a lot of things known in that rock-ribbed and fatalistic region—as immutably decreed by heaven as foreordination and the damnation of unbaptized babes. The Hayneses had just "got it hard."

Yet there were times, now he was come to a gangling fourteen, when Luke's philosophy threatened to fail him. It wasn't fair—so it wasn't! They weren't bad folks; they'd done nothing wicked. His mother worked like a dog—"no fair for her," any way you looked at it. There were times when the boy drank in bitterly every detail of the miserable place he called home and knew the depths of an utter despair.

If there was only some way to better it all! But there was no chance. His father had been a failure at everything he touched in early life, and now he was a hopeless invalid. Tom was an idiot—or almost—and himself a cripple. And Nat! Well, Nat "wa'n't willin'"—not that one should blame him. Times like these, a lump like a roc's egg would rise in the boy's throat. He had to spit—and spit hard—to conquer it.

"If we hain't the gosh-awfulest lot!" he would gulp.

To-day, as he came up the lane, June was in the land. She'd done her best to be kind to the farm. All the old heterogeneous rosebushes in the wood-yard and front "lawn" were pied with fragrant bloom. Usually Luke would have lingered to sniff it all, but he saw only one thing now with a sudden skipping at his heart—an automobile standing beside the front porch.

It was not the type of car to cause cardiac disturbance in a connoisseur. It was, in fact, of an early vintage, high-set, chunky, brassily æsthetic, and given to asthmatic choking on occasion; but Luke did not know this. He knew only that it spelled luxury beyond all dreams. It belonged, in short, to his Uncle Clem Cheesman, the rich butcher who lived in the village twelve miles away; and its presence here signaled the fact that Uncle Clem and Aunt Mollie had come to pay one of their detestable quarterly visits to their poor relations. They had come while he was out, and Maw was in there now, bearing it all alone.

Luke limped into the house hastily. He was not mistaken. There was a company air in the room, a stiff hostile-polite taint in the atmosphere. Three visitors sat in the kitchen, and a large hamper, its contents partly disgorged, stood on the table. Luke knew that it contained gifts—the hateful, merciful, nauseating charity of the better-off.

Aunt Mollie was speaking as he entered—a large, high-colored, pouter-pigeon-chested woman, with a great many rings with bright stones, and a nodding pink plume in her hat. She was holding up a bifurcated crimson garment, and greeted Luke absently.

"Three pair o' them underdrawers, Delia—an' not a break in one of 'em! I sez, as soon as I see Clem layin' 'em aside this spring, 'Them things'll be jest right fur Delia's Jere, layin' there with the rheumatiz.' They may come a little loose; but, of course, you can't be choicey. I've b'en at Clem fur five years to buy him union suits; but he's always b'en so stuck on red flannen. But now he's got two aut'mobiles, countin' the new delivery, I guess he's gotta be more tony; so he made out to spare 'em. And now that hat, Delia—it ain't a mite wore out, an' fur all you'll need one it's plenty good enough. I only had it two years and I guess folks won't remember; an' what if they do—they all know you get my things. Same way with that collarette. It's a little moth-eaten, but it won't matter fur you.... The gray suit you can easy cut down fur Luke, there—"

She droned on, the other woman making dry automatic sounds of assent. She looked cool—Maw—Luke thought; but she wasn't. Not by a darn sight! There was a spot of pink in each cheek and she stared hard every little bit at Grampaw Peel's funeral plate on the mantel. Luke knew what she was thinking of—poor Maw! She was burning in a fire of her own lighting. She had brought it all on herself—on the whole of them.

Years ago she had been just like Aunt Mollie. The daughters of a prosperous village carpenter, they had shared beads, beaux and bangles until Maw, in a moment's madness, had chucked it all away to marry poor Paw. Now she had made her bed, she must lie in it. Must sit and say "Thank you!" for Aunt Mollie's leavings, precious scraps she dared not refuse—Maw, who had a pride as fierce and keen as any! It was devilish! Oh, it was kind of Aunt Mollie to give; it was the taking that came so bitter hard. And then they weren't genteel about their giving. There was always that air of superiority, that conscious patronage, as now, when Uncle Clem, breaking off his conversation with the invalid in the next room about the price of mutton on the hoof and the chances of the Democrats' getting in again, stopped fiddling with his thick plated watch chain and grinned across at big Tom to fling his undeviating flower of wit: