The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 47

"It will be something to do, doctor, that will. Like taking hold of lightning. It will rack us body and soul; belief will strip us naked for a moment, leave us new-born and shaken and weak-as weak as Christ in the manger. And that day nothing can stand before us. Because, you see, we'll know what we want."

The doctor stood for a moment as he had been, a large, dark troubled body rocking slowly to the heave of the deck beneath him. He rubbed a hand over his face.

"Utopian!" he said.

"Utopian!" Hallett repeated after him. "To-day we are children of Utopia-or we are nothing. I tell you, doctor, to-day it has come down to this-Hamburg to Bagdad-or-Utopia!"

The other lifted his big arms and his face was red.

"You're playing with words, Hallett. You do nothing but twist my words.

When I say Utopian, I mean, precisely, impossible. Absolutely impossible. See here! You tell me this empire of theirs is a dream. I give you that. How long has it taken them to dream it? Forty years.

_Forty years!_ And this wild, transcendental empire of the spirit you talk about,-so much harder,-so many hundreds of times more incredible,-will you have us do that sort of a thing in a _day_? We're a dozen races, a score of nations. I tell you it's-it's impossible!"

"Yes. Impossible."

The silence came down between them, heavy with all the dark, impersonal sounds of pa.s.sage, the rhythmical explosions of the waves, the breathing of engines, the m.u.f.fled staccato of the spark in the wireless room, the note of the s.h.i.+p's bell forward striking the hour and after it a hail, running thin in the wind: "Six bells, sir, and-_all's well_!"

"_All's well!_"

The irony of it! The infernal patness of it, falling so in the black interlude, like stage business long rehea.r.s.ed.

"_All's well!_" the doctor echoed with the mirthless laughter of the d.a.m.ned.

Hallett raised himself very slowly on an elbow and stared at the star beyond the rail.

"Yes, I shouldn't wonder. Just now-to-night-somehow-I've got a queer feeling that maybe it is. Maybe it's going to be.-Maybe it's going to be; who knows? The darkest hour of our lives, of history, perhaps, has been on us. And maybe it's almost over. Maybe we're going to do the impossible, after all, doctor. And maybe we're going to get it done in time. I've got a queer sense of something happening-something getting ready."

When he spoke again, his voice had changed a little.

"I wish my father could have lived to see this day. He's in New York now, and I should like-"

The doctor moved forward suddenly and quietly, saying: "Lie down, Hallett. You'd better lie down now."

But the other protested with a gray hand.

"No, no, you don't understand. When I say-well-it's just the sh.e.l.l of my father walking around and talking around, these ten years past. Prison killed his heart. He doesn't even know it, that the immortal soul of him has gone out. You know him, doctor. Ben Hallett; the Radical-'the Destroyer,' they used to call him in the old days. He was a brave man, doctor; you've got to give him that; as brave as John the Baptist, and as mad. I can see him now,-to-night,-sitting in the back room in Eighth Street, he and old Radinov and Hirsch and O'Reilly and the rest, with all the doors shut and the windows shut and their eyes and ears and minds shut up tight, trying to keep the war out. They're old men, doctor, and they must cling to yesterday, and to to-morrow. They mustn't see to-day. They must ignore to-day. To-day is the tragic interruption.

They too ask nothing but to wake up and find it isn't so. All their lives they've been straining forward to see the ineffable dawn of the Day of Man, calling for the Commune and the red barricades of revolution. The barricades! Yesterday, it seems to them now, they were almost in sight of the splendid dawn-the dawn of the Day of Barricades.

And then this war, this thing they call a 'rich man's plot' to confound them, hold them up, turn to ashes all the fire of their lives. All they can do is sit in a closed room with their eyes shut and wait till this meaningless brawl is done. And then, to-morrow-to-morrow-some safely distant to-morrow (for they're old men),-to-morrow, the barricades! And that's queer. That's queer."

"Queer?"

"It seems to me that for days now, for weeks and months now, there's been no sound to be heard in all the length and breadth of the world but the sound of barricades."

The voice trailed off into nothing.

To the doctor, charging slowly back and forth along the near deck, his hands locked behind him and his face bent slightly over his breast, there came a queer sense of separation, from Hallett, from himself, his own everyday acts, his own familiar aspirations, from the s.h.i.+p which held him up in the dark void between two continents.

What was it all about, he asked himself over and over. Each time he pa.s.sed the shadow in the companionway he turned his head, painfully, and as if against his will. Once he stopped squarely at the foot of the cot and stood staring down at the figure there, faintly outlined, motionless and mute. Sweat stood for a moment on his brow, and was gone in the steady onrush of the wind. And he was used to death.

But Hallett had fooled him. He heard Hallett's whisper creeping to him out of the shadow:

"That's a bright star, doctor."

THE BIRD OF SERBIA

_By_ JULIAN STREET From _Collier's Weekly_ _Copyright, 1918, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc._ _Copyright, 1919, by Julian Street._

"Here's a queer item," remarked the man at the window end of the long leather-covered seat, looking up from his newspaper and apparently speaking in general to the other occupants of the Pullman smoking compartment. "There's a dispatch here announcing the death from tuberculosis of that Serbian who shot the Archduke of Austria at Sarajevo. It seems he has been in prison ever since. I thought he had been executed long ago."

Four of us, strangers to one another, had settled in the smoking compartment at the beginning of the journey from Chicago to New York, and as we had been on our way nearly an hour it seemed time for conversation.

"They didn't execute him," replied a man who sat in one of the chairs, "because he was under age. It's against the law, over there, to execute a person under twenty-one. This boy was only nineteen."

"The law wouldn't have cut much figure over here in a case like that,"

replied the first speaker.

"Perhaps not," returned the man in the chair, "but respect for law is one of the few benefits that seem to go with autocratic government. I don't find that dispatch in my paper. May I borrow yours?"

The other handed over the journal, indicating the item with his finger.

"I had almost forgotten that fellow," spoke up a third traveler. "The rush and magnitude of the war have carried our thoughts-and for the matter of that, our soldiers too-a pretty long way since the a.s.sa.s.sination occurred. Yet I suppose historians, digging back into the minute beginnings of the war, will all trace down to the shot fired by that Serbian."

"That's what the paper says," returned the one who had begun to talk.

"It speaks of 'the historic shot fired in Serbia' as the thing that fired the world."

"And in doing so," declared the man who had borrowed the paper, "it falls into a popular error. The shot was _not_ fired in Serbia, but in Austria-Hungary, and the boy who did the shooting was an Austro-Hungarian subject."

"But that doesn't seem possible," interposed the man who had spoken of the historical aspect of the case. "If he was an Austrian subject and did the shooting in Austria, how could Austria make that an excuse for attacking Serbia?"

The other looked from the window for a moment before replying.

"It was one of the poorest excuses imaginable," he returned.

"Autocracies can do those things; that's why they must be stamped out.

As you said, historians will trace back to the a.s.sa.s.sination. It so happened that I was over there at the time and got a glimpse of what lay back of the a.s.sa.s.sination-microscopic, unclean forces of which historians will never hear, yet which seem peculiarly suitable in connection with Austria's crime. But I had better not get to talking about all that."

As though in indication of his intention to be silent, he closed his mouth firmly. It was a strong mouth and could shut with finality.

Everything about him expressed strength and determination mixed, as these qualities often are in the highest type of American business man, with gentleness, good nature, and modesty. I liked his looks. He was the kind of man you would pick out to take care of your watch and pocketbook-or your wife-in case of emergency. I wanted him to go on talking, and said so, and when both the other men backed up my request, he began in a spirit evidently reluctant but obliging:

"For some years before the outbreak of this war," he said, "I represented a large American oil company in southeastern Europe, where we had a considerable market. My headquarters were at Vienna, but my travels took me through various countries inhabited by people of the Serb race, and I found it advantageous to learn to speak the Serbian tongue, both for business reasons and because I enjoyed making friends among the people. In order to practice the language and form some knowledge of the people, I made it a custom, when traveling, to stop at small hotels used by the Serbs themselves, in preference to the more cosmopolitan establishments; or, where the small hotels were not clean, I would sometimes take a room with some Serbian family.

"In Bosnia there was one very attractive little city to which I was always particularly glad to go. It was a place of thirty or forty thousand inhabitants and lay in a lovely, fertile valley among the hills; and you may judge something of it by the fact that the Serbs coupled the adjective 'golden' with the town's name. Not one American in a thousand-probably not one in a hundred thousand-had ever heard of the place then, yet it was the capital of Bosnia. The Austrian governor of Bosnia had his palace there, and the life of the place was like that of some great capital in miniature. One thing about the town which interested me was the way in which its people and its architecture reflected Bosnian history. In the first place there were many Serbs there, the more prosperous of them dressing like conventional Europeans-except that the fez was worn by almost all of them-and living in low, picturesque Serbian houses, with roofs of tile or flat stone s.h.i.+ngle; the rest peasants in the Bosnian costume, who came in from the outlying agricultural regions. But also there were Mohammedans-leftovers from the days of Turkish dominion-and the town had minarets and other architectural signs of the Turk. And last there were the Austrians-the Austrian governor, Austrian soldiers in uniform about the streets, Austrian minor officials everywhere; and in new buildings, parks, and boulevards, Austrian taste. For, after taking Bosnia, under the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878, the Austrians, knowing well that their grabbing policy was criticized, went to some pains to beautify the Bosnian capital, with the object, it is commonly understood, of impressing visitors-and perhaps also the inhabitants themselves-with the 'benefits'

of Austrian rule-as though palaces, parks, pavements, and prost.i.tutes were sufficient compensation to the Serbs for the racial unity and freedom which have been denied them, first by one nation, then by another."

"But," some one broke in, "up to the time of the present war, didn't the Serbs have Serbia?"