The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 56

Then he turned away again and bowed his head in his arms on the wall.

I don't remember anything clearly till a long time afterward, when I found myself walking with Mr. G.M. in the wet night on a deserted road on the outskirts of the town. We were carrying some inflammable things, flax, tar, matches, etc., which we must have purchased.

Mr. G.M. stopped and looked at me. It was exactly like coming out of a fainting fit.

"What are we doing with this gear?" he said in a low voice.

"I don't know."

"Better chuck it over a hedge.--"

We made our way to the station in silence. I was thinking of that desolate figure up there on the hill, leaning over the wall in the dark and the rain.

We caught the last train to London. In the carriage Mr. G.M. began to s.h.i.+ver as though he were cold.

"Brrr! that fellow got on my nerves," he said; and we made no further allusion to the matter.

But as the train, moving slowly, pa.s.sed a gap which brought us again in sight of the town, we saw a tongue of flame stream into the sky.

THE SHAME DANCE[18]

By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

(From _Harper's Magazine_)

"Stories of New York life preferable."

Well, then, here is a story of New York. A tale of the night heart of the city, where the vein of Forty-Second touches the artery of Broadway; where, amid the constellations of chewing-gum ads and tooth paste and memory methods, rise the incandescent facades of "dancing academies"

with their "sixty instructresses," their beat of bra.s.s and strings, their whisper of feet, their clink of dimes.--Let a man not work away his strength and his youth. Let him breathe a new melody, let him draw out of imagination a novel step, a more fantastic tilt of the pelvis, a wilder gesticulation of the deltoid. Let him put out his hand to the Touch of Gold.--

It is a tale of this New York. That it didn't chance to happen in New York is beside the point. Where? It wouldn't help you much if I told you. Taai. That island. Take an imaginary ramrod into Times Square, push it straight down through the center of the earth; where it comes out on the other side will not be very many thousand miles wide of that earth speck in the South Seas. Some thousands, yes; but out here a few thousand miles and a month or so by schooner make less difference than they do where the trains run under the ground.--

"Glauber's Academy"--"Einstein's Restaurant"--"Herald Square"--

I can't tell you how bizarrely those half-fabulous names fell from Signet's lips in the turquoise and gold of the afternoon. It was like the babble of some monstrous and harmless mythology. And all the while, as he kicked his bare heels on the deckhouse and hara.s.sed me with his somnolent greed for "talk," one could see him wondering, wondering, in the back of his mind. So he would have been wondering through all the hours of weeks, months--it had come to the dignity of years, on the beach, in the bush--wondering more than ever under the red iron roof of the Dutchman: "What in h.e.l.l am I doing here? What in h.e.l.l?"

A guttersnipe, pure and simple. That's to say, impure and unpleasantly complex. It was extraordinary how it stuck. Even with nothing on but a pair of cotton pants swimming out to me among the flas.h.i.+ng bodies of the islanders, men, women, girls, youths, who clung to the anchor cable and showed their white teeth for pilot biscuit, condensed milk, and gin--especially gin--even there you could see Signet, in imagination, dodging through the traffic on Seventh Avenue to pick the _Telegraph Racing Chart_ out of the rubbish can under the Elevated.--

I hadn't an idea who the fellow was. He burst upon me unheralded. I sail out of west-coast ports, but once I had been in New York. That was enough for him. He was "pals" in ten minutes; in fifteen, from his eminence on the deckhouse, with a biscuit in one hand and a tumbler of much-diluted Hollands in the other, he gazed down at his erstwhile beach fellows with almost the disdainful wonder of a tourist from a white s.h.i.+p's rail.--

"Gi' me an article you can retail at a nickel--any little thing everybody needs--or gi' me a song with a catchy chorus--something you can turn out on them ten-cent records.--That makes _me_. Don't want any Wall Street stuff. That's for Rockefeller and the b.o.o.bs. But just one time le' me catch on with one little old hunch that'll go in vaudeville or the pi'tures--get Smith and Jones diggin' for the old nickel.--That makes _me_. Then the line can move up one. That's the thing about New York. Say, man, len' me a cigarette.--But that's the thing about Broadway. When you make, you make _big_. I know a guy turned out a powder-puff looked like a lor'nette--a quarter of a dollar. You know how the Janes'll fall for a thing like that--"

It was completely preposterous, almost uncomfortable. It made a man look around him. On the schooner's port side spread the empty blue of the South Pacific; the tenuous snowdrift of the reef, far out, and the horizon. On the starboard hand, beyond the little s.p.a.ce of the anchorage, curved the beach, a pink-white scimitar laid flat. Then the scattering of thatched and stilted huts, the red, corrugated-iron store, residence and G.o.downs of the Dutch trader, the endless Indian-file of coco palms, the abrupt green wall of the mountain.--A twelve-year-old girl, naked as Eve and, I've no doubt, thrice as handsome, stood watching us from the mid-decks in a perfection of immobility, an empty milk tin propped between her brown palms resting on her breast. Twenty fathoms off a shark fin, blue as lapis in the shadow, cut the water soundlessly. The hush of ten thousand miles was disturbed by nothing but that grotesque, microscopic babbling:

"Say you play in bad luck. Well, you can't play in bad luck _f'rever_.

Not if you're wise. One time I get five good wheezes. Good ones! Sure fire! One of 'em was the old one about the mother-'n-law and the doctor, only it had a perfectly novel turn to it. Did I make? I did not. Why?

Well, a good friend o' mine lifts them five wheezes, writes a vaudeville turn around 'em, and makes big. Big! What does that learn me? Learns me to go bear on friends.h.i.+p. So next time I get an idea--"

The girl had put the milk tin down between her toes on deck and turned her head.

"Digger!" I called to the mate. "Clear the vessel! Shove them all overboard! Here comes the Dutchman!"

Before the advance of the trader's canoe, painted vermillion like his establishment and flying over the water under the paddle strokes of his six men, Signet took himself hastily overboard with the rest. There was no question of protest or false pride. Over he went. Rising and treading water under the taffrail, and seeing the trader still some fathoms off, he shook the wet from the rag of a beard with which long want of a razor had blurred his peaked chin and gathered up the ends of the conversation:

"No, Dole, you can't play in bad luck _f'rever_. One sure-fire hunch, that's all. That makes _me_. When I get back to Broadway--"

A paddle blade narrowly missed his head. He dived.

The Dutchman told me more about him that evening. I dined at the trader's house. He was a big-bodied tow-haired man who spoke English with the accent of a east-coast Scot, drank like a Swede, and viewed life through the eyes of a Spaniard--that is, he could be diabolical without getting red in the face.

"No, my dear sir, that Signet shall not 'get back to Broadway.' Too many have I seen. He is too tired. Quite too tired."

"But how in the world did he ever come here, Mynheer?"

"That is simple. This Signet got drunk in Papeete. He was on his way to Australia with a pugilist. How should he be in a pugilist's company, this crab? Because he plays a good game of pinochle--to keep the pugilist's mind bright. At any event, the steams.h.i.+p stops at Tahiti.

This Signet gets drunk. 'Soused!' And the steams.h.i.+p is gone without him.

No more pinochle for the pugilist, what?--From then, my dear sir, it is what it shall always be; one island throws him to another island. Here he shall stay for a while--"

"Till you decide to 'throw' him to another island, eh, Mynheer?"

"No, but I am alone. Sometimes to amuse myself I will invite him to dine with me. I put on him a suit of the evening clothes which belong to my nephew who is dead. But I will not allow him the razor, since his absurd beard is amusing to me. Afterward, however, I take away the evening clothes and I will kick him out. But he is talking continuously."

"I believe you, Mynheer."

"But at last I will say: 'My dear sir, suppose that you should have the most brilliant idea; that "hunch" of yours. "Sure-fire." What advantage will it do you here in the island of Taai? You are not here on Broadway.

You are too many thousand miles. You cannot come here. You are too tired. It takes money. Now, my dear sir, I am putting a trench about the G.o.downs. If you wish, I will let you work for me.'"

"What does he say to that, Mynheer?"

"He says, 'Do you take me for an _I_talian?'

"Then I will say: 'No; you see you are too tired. Also you are too soft.

You are a criminal. That's natural to you. But you think of police. You have a wish, say. Well my dear sir, but would you kill a man--three--ten men--to have that wish? No, you are too tired, and you must have the police. But here there are no police. _I_ am the police. Why do you not kill _me_? Ha-ha-ha! Then you could take my property. Then you would "make big," as you say. My dear sir, that is a "hunch!" That is "sure fire!" Ha-ha-ha!'--Then I will kick him out in his coolie cotton pants."

After coffee the trader said: "One gallon of the Hollands which you sent me ash.o.r.e has disappeared. The kitchen boys are 'careless.' Also I wink one eye when a schooner arrives. Of course they will dance tonight, however. You would care to go up, my dear sir?"

Of course we went. There's no other amus.e.m.e.nt in an islet like Taai but the interminable native dance. The Dutchman led the way up a narrow, bushy ravine, guiding me by sound rather than by sight.

"Up this same very path," I heard him, "has gone one uncle of mine. They pulled him to the advance with one rope around his arms. Then they cut him up and ate him. But that was many years ago, my dear sir. Now I am the law. Maybe there shall come, now and then, a Dutch gunboat to have a look-in. I raise up that flag. The captain shall dine with me. All is good. But, my dear sir, I am the law."

The "music" began to be heard, a measured monotone of drums, a breath of voices in a recitative chant, slightly impa.s.sioned by that vanished gallon. The same old thing, indeed; one of the more than fifty-seven varieties of the island _hula_. Then that had died away.

The light from the "place" grew among the higher leaves. And the trader, becoming visible, halted. I saw him standing, listening.