O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 13

"Meier," shouted a man. "Meier--she'll have to go back, Meier; she's stopped the show."

Quiet and very still, Cake drew away.

It seemed to her only a moment later that Leafy touched her arm.

"Mr. Meier has taken a suite for you here in this hotel," she said.

"Can't you eat a little, Miss?"

Eat? She had never had enough to eat in her life. Her life? She had spent her life securing food for the lodger that he might teach her to be famous. Leafy lifted the spoon of hot soup to her lips and immediately she drank--she who had never had enough to eat in her life. Morsel by morsel from the bountifully filled table the kindly dresser fed her. Obediently she ate, and the hot, rich food stimulated her to swifter, more agonizing thought.

Then, for the first time, she saw Arthur Noyes standing with his back against a closed door. She read pity in his eyes, comprehension, great wonder, and what she did not know then was the love that came to a rare perfection between them and has never faded--and has no place in this story.

"Will you tell me," he said, "what your name is, where your home is, and who are those that love you there?"

Then he broke off and shrank a little against the door. "Oh, don't,"

he protested.

Yet she had only looked at him and smiled. But it came to her keenly in her new awareness that his questions covered the whole of a woman's life: Her name, her home, and the ones that loved her there. While she--she had no name, she did not even know the lodger's name. She looked down with strange astonishment at her grown-up figure, her woman's hands. She saw herself a ragged, gaunt, bushy-headed child moving on a tight rope above a dark abyss, intent only upon a luminous globe floating just out of reach ahead of her, that she stretched out for eagerly with both her hands. Suddenly the lovely bubble burst and the child was a woman, falling and falling among rows of convulsed, s.h.i.+ning white faces to the sound of gargantuan laughter.

"You tell me," Arthur Noyes pleaded gently.

And she did so very simply and beautifully. She did know Shakespeare; it was the only English that she had ever been taught. So Noyes heard how she became an instrument in the hands of the man who hated him mortally, and owed her debut and her terrible awakening to what he considered the only sporting answer to that insult. While he listened he pondered, awestruck, upon the fact that out of all this muck and blackness, the degradation of hate by the lodger, the refinement of hate by himself, had flowered that rarest of all human creatures--one that could make the whole world laugh.

"He always hated me," he said. "I told him he had traded his genius for drink, and he never forgave me. Where is he now?"

"Now?" Cake looked up at him in startled wonder. It came over her suddenly that he counted upon the lodger's being in the Imperial Theatre that night.

"Now?" she repeated. "Why, he is dead."

It took Noyes a minute to recover. "What will you do?" he asked her.

"Will you go on from this start, continue this--this sort of success?"

He felt it the basest cruelty, in the face of her story, to say it was the only kind she was ever destined to make. He waited for her answer, wondering, and a little awestruck. It seemed to him they had come to the supreme test of her genius.

And she looked up at him with such sadness and such mirth--such tragic, humorous appreciation of the darkness in which she had been born, the toilsome way she had travelled to the Great Light and what it actually revealed when she arrived.

"I will go on from this success," she said. Involuntarily she raised her hand to her breast. "I must, since it is the only way for me. You see," with a humour far more touching than the saddest tears, "I must be famous."

And she smiled that smile that hurt him, the smile the world loves and will give anything to see.

The most famous funmaker of her time looked away from the bright river fleeting beyond the trees to her giggling, half-terrified visitors.

"Fame," she said, "is a secret that cannot be told. It must be discovered by the seeker. Let me offer you tea as a subst.i.tute."

MUMMERY

By THOMAS BEER

From _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_

On Monday Mrs. Egg put her husband on the east-bound express with many orders. He was not to annoy Adam by kissing him when they met, if they met in public. He was to let Adam alone in the choice of civil dress, if Adam wanted to change his naval costume in New York. He was not to get lost in Brooklyn, as he had done before. He was to visit the largest moving-picture theatres and report the best films on his return. She made sure that Egg had her written list of lesser commands safe in his wallet, then folded him to her bosom, sniffed, and patted him up the steps of the coach.

A red-haired youth leaned through an open window and inquired, "Say, lady, would you mind tellin' me just what you weigh?"

"I ain't been on the scales in years, bub," said Mrs. Egg equably; "not since about when you was born. Does your mamma ever wash out your mouth with soap?"

An immediate chorus of laughter broke from the platform loungers. The train jerked forward. The youth pulled in his head. Mrs. Egg stood puffing triumphantly with her hands on her hips.

"It's a shame," the baggage-master told her, "that a lady can't be kind of--kind of----"

"Fat," said Mrs. Egg; "and bein' tall makes it worse. All the Packers 've always been tall. When we get fat we're holy shows. But if that kid's mother's done her duty by him he'd keep his mouth shut."

The dean of the loungers put in, "Your papa was always skinny, Myrtle."

"I can't remember him much," Mrs. Egg panted, "but he looks skinny in his pictures. Well, I got to get home. There's a gentleman coming over from Ashland to look at a bull."

She trod the platform toward the motor at the hitching rails and several loungers came along gallantly. Mrs. Egg cordially thanked them as she sank into the driving seat, settled her black straw hat, and drove off.

Beholding two of her married daughters on the steps of the drug store, she stopped the car and shouted: "Hey, girls, the fleet's gettin' in to-morrow. Your papa's gone to meet Dammy. I just shoved him on the train. By gee! I forgot to tell him he was to fetch home--no, I wrote that down--well, you come out to supper Wednesday night."

"But can Dammy get discharged all in one day?" a daughter asked.

Mrs. Egg had no patience with such imbecility. She snapped, "Did you think they'd discharge him a foot at a time, Susie?" and drove on up the street, where horsechestnuts were ready to bloom, appropriately, since Adam was fond of the blossoms. She stopped the car five times to tell the boys that Adam would be discharged tomorrow, and made a sixth stop at the candy shop, where a clerk brought out a chocolate ice cream with walnut sauce. He did this mechanically. Mrs. Egg beamed at him, although the fellow was a newcomer and didn't know Adam.

"My boy'll be home Wednesday," she said, giving the dish back.

"Been in the Navy three-four years, ain't he?"

Mrs. Egg sighed. "April 14, 1917. He was twenty-one las' week, so he gets discharged soon as the fleet hits New York. My gee, think of Dammy being twenty-one!"

She drove on, marvelling at time, and made her seventh stop at the moving-picture theatre. The posters of the new feature film looked dull. The heavily typed list of the current-events weekly took her sharp eye. She read, "Rome Celebrates Anniversary--Fleet Sails from Guantanamo," and chuckled. She must drive in to see the picture of the fleet. She hadn't time to stop now, as lunch would be ready.

Anyhow, night was the time for movies. She drove on, and the brick business buildings gave out into a dribble of small frame cottages, mostly shabby. Edith Webb was coming out of her father's gate.

Mrs. Egg made an eighth halt and yelled, "Hey, Edie, Dammy'll be home Wednesday night," for the pleasure of seeing the pretty girl flush.

Adam had taken Edith to several dances at Christmas. Mrs. Egg chuckled as the favoured virgin went red, fingering the top of the gatepost.

Edith would do. In fact, Edith was suitable, entirely.

"Well, I'm glad," the girl said. "Oh, say, was it our house or the next one you used to live in? Papa was wondering last night."

"It was yours," Mrs. Egg declared; "and thank your stars you've got a better father than I had, Edie. Yes, right here's where I lived when I was your age and helped Mamma do sewin', and sometimes didn't get enough to eat. I wonder if that's why--well, anyhow, it's a solid-built house. I expect Dammy'll call you up Wednesday night." She chuckled immensely and drove on again.

From the edge of town she pa.s.sed steadily a quarter of a mile between her husband's fields. His cows were grazing in the pastures. His apple trees were looking well. The red paint of his monstrous water tanks soothed her by their brilliance. A farmhand helped her out of the car and she took the shallow veranda steps one at a time, a little moody, wis.h.i.+ng that her mother was still alive to see Adam's glory. However, there were six photographs of Adam about the green sitting room in various uniforms, and these cheered her moment of sorrow. They weren't altogether satisfactory. His hard size didn't show in single poses. He looked merely beautiful. Mrs. Egg sniffled happily, patting the view of Adam in white duck. The enlarged snapshot portrayed him sitting astride a turret gun. It was the best of the lot, although he looked taller in wrestling tights, but that picture worried her. She had always been afraid that he might kill someone in a wrestling match.

She took the white-duck photograph to lunch and propped it against the pitcher of iced milk.

"It'll be awful gettin' him clothes," she told the cook; "except shoes. Thank G.o.d, his feet ain't as big as the rest of him! Say, remind me to make a coconut cake in the morning in the big pan. He likes 'em better when they're two three days old so the icin's kind of spread into the cake. I'd of sent a cake on with his papa, but Mr. Egg always drops things so much. It does seem----" The doorbell rang. Mrs.

Egg wiped her mouth and complained, "Prob'ly that gentleman from Ashland to look at that bull calf. It does seem a shame folks drop in at mealtimes. Well, go let him in Sadie."