The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 40

"The things in life are far stranger than the things in story books," he said. Then in the velvet dark he whispered: "Strange! Strange!"

Das.h.i.+ng Captain Jack Fuller, true to his blood and his birthright, went away on the following day at the head of his st.u.r.dy volunteers. They entrained at ten o'clock for Fort Ethan Allen.

Truly the boy did not remember the words of that toast which he gave that memorable evening. But one thing he does remember. He remembers the words of the girl he had married as he took her in his arms in those last few sweet moments following the final breakfast in the little home:

"It was the Nieson in me that didn't want you to go, Jack," she choked brokenly. "Up to last night I didn't want you to go. But when you wouldn't drink the wine-when you had the courage to do what you did in front of all those people-I was ashamed of my selfishness. Jackie dear-I'm the proudest, happiest, miserablest woman in all this town!"

He pressed her to him. He kissed her-an embrace that left her weak and limp.

"And you can count on me, Jack," she said, "I'll-do-my-duty-too! Even-if you should never come back; remember I said-I was sorry for the way I've acted; I'll-do-my-duty-too!"

"Good-by, Betty!" he choked.

"Good-by-my soldier!" she lisped-bravely-piteously.

But she sent him away-with a smile!

She's working now at her old place in Amos Wheeler's box-shop. She closed down the little home on Pleasant Street partly because she could not keep up the expense, partly because she could not endure-the memories. She's living out in her father's old place at the far end of Cedar Street.

Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!

We know from his letters to our local paper, that Jack Fuller has reached France. The girl is alone, earning five dollars a week in the box-factory to support herself. The lad is "Over There" in the Whirlpool and the Nightmare-and where the fighting is thickest, there we believe Jack Fuller will be found.

But somehow, we feel that Jack Fuller will not fall. We feel there is coming a great and a glorious day for our little town of Paris up here in these mountains. In fancy we can see a morning when a great crowd is going to mill around and through the platforms and the railroad yards of our station. The hour is coming when a train whistle will sound far down the Greene River valley. The minutes will pa.s.s. The whistle will sound nearer. Finally in the lower end of the yards we will see a great furl of seething smoke from an oncoming locomotive. Another and a third whistle will shriek as a great high-breasted mogul comes bearing down upon us, seeming to cry out to us from the decreasing distance: "I've got them! I've got them! I'm bringing them back! Every mother's son of them! They're in these coaches I'm pulling behind me now!" And the train will come to a grinding stop, and amid cheer after cheer and the gyrations of the Paris band seeking to blow itself inside out, down from that train will come the soldiers of Uncle Sam-the boys who never have been and never can be whipped-great bronzed men with lean jaws, faces the hue of copper and muscles as hard as billets of steel. Car after car will disgorge them-men who met the Great Problem, offered themselves, ran the risk, fought the fight, gave their last full measure of devotion, and have come back home to women who cannot trust themselves to speak-only hold out their arms mutely.

And we feel certain that in that great day, after the Nightmare is over and the world is a fairer, better world, that one of those great bronzed heroes will gather up in his war-hardened arms a slender little girl in the plainest of white s.h.i.+rt-waists and black skirts, with the paste dried on the poor little workaday clothes and the worn shoes turning her step over cruelly. He will gather her up while the tears fall clumsily, for men do not know how to weep. And there will be no more weariness in her homeward walk in that twilight. After all, not all the boys are going to die. Many are coming back, hundreds of thousands of them. There will be other toasts to Forty-five pledged by the living. It must be so, for G.o.d still rules in His heaven and will make all right with the world.

Yet just now-for Betty Fuller-the way is lonesome and her pillow is wet with her tears in the midnight. But-

She sent her man away with a smile.

Poor little, dear little, brave little woman!

All over America her name is legion!

EXTRA MEN

_By_ HARRISON RHODES From _Harper's Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Harper and Brothers._ _Copyright, 1919, by Harrison Rhodes._

The pretty, peaceful Jersey farm-land slopes gently up from the Delaware River to the little hill which Princeton crowns. It is uneventful country. The railway does not cross it, nor any of the great motor trunk roads. On the river itself there is no town of considerable size, though on the map you read the quaint name of Was.h.i.+ngton Crossing for a little hamlet of a few houses. This will remind you of the great days when on these sleepy fields great history was made. But the fields have lain quiet in the sun now for more than a century, and even the legends of Revolutionary days are for the most part forgotten along these country roads.

As for modern legends, the very phrase seems proof of their impossibility. And in spite of her s.p.a.cious and resounding past, New Jersey's name now seems to mean incorporations and mosquitoes and sea-bathing and popcorn-crisp rather than either legend or romance. But with the coming of the Great War strange things are stirring in the world, and in the farthest corners of the land the earth is shaken by the tramp of new armies. In the skies by day and night there is a sign.

And the things one does not believe can happen may be happening, even in New Jersey.

The small events on the Burridge Road which are here set down cannot even be authenticated. There are people down by the river who say they saw a single horseman go through the village at dusk, but not one seems to know which way he came. There is no ferry at Was.h.i.+ngton Crossing and the bridge at Lambertville had, since three that afternoon, been closed for repairs. What facts are set down here-and indeed they are scarcely facts-were acquired because a chauffeur missed the road and a motor then broke down. What story there is-and indeed there is perhaps not much story-has been pieced together from fragments collected that afternoon and evening. And if the chronicle as now written is vague, it can be urged that, though it all happened so recently as last year, it is already as indeterminate and misty as a legend.

We may, however, begin with undisputed facts. When her grandson enlisted for the war old Mrs. Buchan became very genuinely dependent on the little farm that surrounded the lovely old Colonial house on the Burridge Road. (Meadows, and horses, and hay and the quality and price of it, have much to do with our story-as, indeed, befits a rural chronicle.) The farm had been larger once, and the hospitality which the old house could dispense more lavish. Indeed, the chief anecdote in its history had been the stopping there once of Was.h.i.+ngton, to dine and rest on his way to join the army in New York. Old Mrs. Buchan, who, for all her gentleness, was incurably proud, laid special stress on the fact that on _that_ night the great man had not been at an inn-which was in the twentieth century to cheapen his memory by a sign-board appeal to automobile parties-but at a gentleman's house. A gentleman's house it still was; somehow the Buchans had always managed to live like gentlemen. But if George, the gay, agreeable last one of them, could also live that way, it was because his grandmother practised rigid heart-breaking economy. The stories of her s.h.i.+fts and expedients were almost fables of the countryside. When George came home-he had a small position in a New York broker's office-there was gaiety and plenty. He might well have been deceived into thinking that the little he sent home from New York was ample for her needs. But when he went back his grandmother lived on nothing, or less than that. She dressed for dinner, so they said, in black silk and old lace, had the table laid with Lowestoft china and the Buchan silver, and ate a dish of corn-meal mush, or something cheaper if that could be found!

George Buchan's enlistment-it was in the aviation service-had been early. And very early he was ordered to France to finish his training there. Two days before he expected his s.h.i.+p to sail the boy got a few hours' furlough and came to the Burridge Road to say good-by to his grandmother.

What was said we must imagine. He was all the old lady had left in the world. But no one ever doubted that she had kissed him and told him to go, and to hold his head high as suited an American and a Buchan.

Georgie would perhaps have had no very famous career in Wall Street, but no one doubted that he would make a good soldier. There had always been a Buchan in the armies of the Republic, his grandmother must have reminded him. And very likely Georgie, kissing her, had reminded her that there had always been a Buchan woman at home to wish the men G.o.d speed as they marched away, and told her too to hold her old head high.

There must have been some talk about the money that there wouldn't be now; without his little weekly check she was indeed almost penniless. It is quite likely that they spoke of selling the house and decided against it. Part of the boy's pay was of course to come to his grandmother, but, as she explained, there were so many war charities needing that, and then the wool for her knitting- She must manage mostly with the farm.

There was always the vegetable-garden, and a few chickens, and the green meadow, which might be expected to yield a record crop of hay.

We may imagine that the two-old lady and boy-stepped out for a moment into the moonlit night to look at the poor little domain of Buchan that was left. Under the little breeze that drifted up from the Delaware the gra.s.s bent in long waves like those of the summer seas that Georgie was to cross to France. As the Buchans looked at it they might have felt some wonder at the century-old fertility of the soil. Back in the days of the Revolution Was.h.i.+ngton's horse had pastured there one night. Then, and in 1812, and during the great battle of the States, the gra.s.s had grown green and the hay been fragrant, and the fat Jersey earth had out of its depths brought forth something to help the nation at war. Such a field as that by the old white house can scarcely be thought of as a wild, primeval thing; it has lived too long under the hand of man. This was a Buchan field, George's meadow, and by moonlight it seemed to wave good-by to him.

"You aren't dependent on me now, dear," he may have said, with his arm around his grandmother. "I just leave you to our little garden patch and our chickens and the green meadow."

"You mustn't worry, dear. They'll take care of me," she must have answered.

So George went away; and the night after, the night before he sailed, the horseman and his company came.

It was at dusk, and a gossamer silvery mist had drifted up from the Delaware. He had hitched his horse by the gate. He was in riding-breeches and gaiters and a rather old-fas.h.i.+oned riding-coat. And in the band of his hat he had stuck a small American flag which looked oddly enough almost like a c.o.c.kade. He knocked at the door, quite ignoring the new electric bell which George had installed one idle Sunday morning when his grandmother had felt he should have been at church. As it happened, old Mrs. Buchan had been standing by the window, watching the mist creep up and the twilight come, thinking of Georgie so soon to be upon the water. As the horseman knocked she, quite suddenly and quite contrary to her usual custom, went herself to the door.

His hat was immediately off, swept through a n.o.bler circle than the modern bow demands, and he spoke with the elaboration of courtesy which suited his age; for, though his stride was vigorous, he was no longer young. It was a severe, careworn face of a stern, almost hard, n.o.bility of expression. Yet the smile when it came was engaging, and old Mrs.

Buchan, as she smiled in return, found herself saying to herself that no Southerner, however stern, could fail to have this graceful lighter side. For his question had been put in the softer accents of Virginia and of the states farther south.

"I've lost my way," he began, with the very slightest, small, gay laugh.

But he was instantly serious. "It is so many, many years since I was here."

Mrs. Buchan pointed up the road.

"That is the way to Princeton."

"Princeton, of course. That's where we fought the British and beat them.

It seems strange, does it not, that we now fight with them?"

"We must forget the Revolution now, must we not?" This from Mrs. Buchan.

"Forget the Revolution!" he flashed back at her, almost angrily. Then more gently: "Perhaps. If we remember liberty!" He glanced an instant up the road to Princeton hill and then went on. "They fought well then, madam. As a soldier I am glad to have such good allies. But I was forgetting. Yonder lies Princeton, and from there there is the post-road to New York, is there not? I must be in New York by morning."

Mrs. Buchan was old-fas.h.i.+oned, but she found herself murmuring amazedly something about railroads and motor-cars. But he did not seem to hear her.

"Yes," he continued, "I must be in New York by morning. The first transport with our troops sails for France."

"I know," she said, proudly. "My grandson, George Buchan, sails for France."

"George Buchan? There was a George Buchan fought at Princeton, I remember."

"There was. And another George Buchan in the War of Eighteen-twelve. And a John in the Mexican War. And a William in eighteen sixty-three. There was no one in the Spanish War-my son was dead and my grandson was too young. But now he is ready."

"Every American is ready," her visitor answered. "I am ready."