The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 29

"How's that?" one of the men still girded at Gordon. "Guess he's learned to respect his wife's throwing arm. He pipes up now from a more respectful distance."

"That's easy," Gordon let the caviller down gently. "He's set her up in a little house farther along the line. Naturally that's where he would whistle now."

For three weeks more we heard the faithful signal, at its new place. A little more faintly, but always punctual, always the same. And again the men began to whistle at their work.

By then the job was nearly finished. In two or three weeks more we should be leaving, and the whole crowd began to allege a touch of regret. They protested it was because the old place was so beautiful, but privately I think George Roberts and his tooting had something to do with the homesickness. To whatever new place we might go, however pleasant it might be, there was going to be a trifle that was lacking.

Then again a strange thing happened. Again the whistle stopped. For four days it was silent.

"Family jar already!" came the usual good-natured jeer.

"She's flung a plate and crippled his whistle arm."

"Guess you'd better find out what's the matter, Gordon," a third man recommended.

"I will," said Gordon.

That evening he returned from the village without the smile.

Nevertheless, as he was still plodding up the long driveway, his head down, his step slow, we actually heard the whistle as we sat waiting for Gordon under the portico. There was no mistaking it. And yet its note seemed different; there was a new tone to it, something like Gordon's air. And it seemed to come from still farther away.

Gordon paused as he heard it, and stood still, with his hat in his hand, till it died away. Then he came up the steps and sat down. We all leaned toward him.

"She fell ill," he said. "They left her in the little cemetery down the line. She'd always been delicate. And I suppose that's where he's whistling now. To-to let her know he's safe."

THE WILLOW WALK

_By_ SINCLAIR LEWIS From _The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ _Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publis.h.i.+ng Company._ _Copyright, 1919, by Sinclair Lewis._

I

From the drawer of his table desk Jasper Holt took a pane of window gla.s.s. He laid a sheet of paper on the gla.s.s and wrote, "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party." He studied his round business-college script, and rewrote the sentence in a small finicky hand, that of a studious old man. Ten times he copied the words in that false pinched writing. He tore up the paper, burned the fragments in his large ash tray and washed the delicate ashes down his stationary washbowl. He replaced the pane of gla.s.s in the drawer, tapping it with satisfaction. A gla.s.s underlay does not retain an impression.

Jasper Holt was as nearly respectable as his room, which, with its frilled chairs and pansy-painted pincus.h.i.+on, was the best in the aristocratic boarding house of Mrs. Lyons. He was a wiry, slightly bald, black-haired man of thirty-eight, wearing an easy gray flannel suit and a white carnation. His hands were peculiarly compact and nimble. He gave the appearance of being a youngish lawyer or bond salesman. Actually he was senior paying teller in the Lumber National Bank in the city of Vernon.

He looked at a thin expensive gold watch. It was six-thirty, on Wednesday-toward dusk of a tranquil spring day. He picked up his hooked walking stick and his gray silk gloves and trudged downstairs. He met his landlady in the lower hall and inclined his head. She effusively commented on the weather.

"I shall not be here for dinner," he said amiably.

"Very well, Mr. Holt. My, but aren't you always going out with your swell friends, though! I read in the _Herald_ that you were going to be star in another of those society plays at the Community Theater. I guess you'd be an actor if you wasn't a banker, Mr. Holt."

"No, I'm afraid I haven't much temperament." His voice was cordial, but his smile was a mere mechanical sidewise twist of the lip muscles.

"You're the one that's got the stage presence. Bet you'd be a regular Ethel Barrymore if you didn't have to look out for us."

"My, but you're such a flatterer!"

He bowed his way out and walked sedately down the street to a public garage. Nodding to the night attendant, but saying nothing, he started his roadster and drove out of the garage, away from the center of Vernon, toward the suburb of Rosebank. He did not go directly to Rosebank. He went seven blocks out of his way, and halted on Fandall Avenue-one of those petty main thoroughfares which, with their motion-picture palaces, their groceries, laundries, undertakers'

establishments and lunch rooms, serve as local centers for districts of mean residences. He got out of the car and pretended to look at the tires, kicking them to see how much air they had. While he did so he covertly looked up and down the street. He saw no one whom he knew. He went into the Parthenon Confectionery Store.

The Parthenon Store makes a specialty of those ingenious candy boxes that resemble bound books. The back of the box is of imitation leather, with a stamping simulating the t.i.tle of a novel. The edges are apparently the edges of a number of pages of paper. But these pages are hollowed out, and the inside is to be filled with candy.

Jasper gazed at the collection of book boxes and chose the two whose t.i.tles had the nearest approach to dignity-Sweets to the Sweet and The Ladies' Delight. He asked the Greek clerk to fill these with the less expensive grade of mixed chocolates, and to wrap them.

From the candy shop he went to a drug store that carried an a.s.sortment of reprinted novels, and from these picked out two of the same sentimental type as the t.i.tles on the booklike boxes. These also he had wrapped. He strolled out of the drug store, slipped into a lunch room, got a lettuce sandwich, doughnuts and a cup of coffee at the greasy marble counter, took them to a chair with a tablet arm in the dim rear of the lunch room and hastily devoured them. As he came out and returned to his car he again glanced along the street.

He fancied that he knew a man who was approaching. He could not be sure.

From the breast up the man seemed familiar, as did the customers of the bank whom he viewed through the wicket of the teller's window. When he saw them in the street he could never be sure about them. It seemed extraordinary to find that these persons, who to him were nothing but faces with attached arms that held out checks and received money, could walk about, had legs and a gait and a manner of their own.

He walked to the curb and stared up at the cornice of one of the stores, puckering his lips, giving an impersonation of a man inspecting a building. With the corner of an eye he followed the approaching man. The man ducked his head as he neared, and greeted him, "h.e.l.lo, Brother Teller." Jasper seemed startled; gave the "Oh! Oh, how are you!" of sudden recognition; and mumbled, "Looking after a little bank property."

"Always on the job, eh!"

The man pa.s.sed on.

Jasper got into his car and drove back to the street that would take him out to the suburb of Rosebank. As he left Fandall Avenue he peered at his watch. It was five minutes of seven.

At a quarter past seven he pa.s.sed through the main street of Rosebank, and turned into a lane that was but little changed since the time when it had been a country road. A few jerry-built villas of freckled paint did shoulder upon it, but for the most part it ran through swamps spotted with willow groves, the spongy ground covered with scatterings of dry leaves and bark. Opening on this lane was a dim-rutted gra.s.sy private road, which disappeared into one of the willow groves.

Jasper sharply swung his car between the crumbly gate posts and along the b.u.mpy private road. He made an abrupt turn, came into sight of an unpainted shed and shot the car into it without cutting down his speed, so that he almost hit the back of the shed with his front fenders. He shut off the engine, climbed out quickly and ran back toward the gate.

From the s.h.i.+eld of a bank of alder bushes he peered out. Two chattering women were going down the public road. They stared in through the gate and half halted.

"That's where that hermit lives," said one of them.

"Oh, you mean the one that's writing a religious book, and never comes out till evening? Some kind of a preacher?"

"Yes, that's the one. John Holt, I think his name is. I guess he's kind of crazy. He lives in the old Beaudette house. But you can't see it from here-it's clear through the block, on the next street."

"I heard he was crazy. But I just saw an automobile go in here."

"Oh, that's his cousin or brother or something-lives in the city. They say he's rich, and such a nice fellow."

The two women ambled on, their chatter blurring with distance. Standing behind the alders Jasper rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other. The palm was dry with nervousness. But he grinned.

He returned to the shed and entered a brick-paved walk almost a block long, walled and sheltered by overhanging willows. Once it had been a pleasant path; carved wooden benches were placed along it, and it widened to a court with a rock garden, a fountain and a stone bench. The rock garden had degenerated into a riot of creepers sprawling over the sharp stones; the paint had peeled from the fountain, leaving its iron cupids and naiads eaten with rust. The bricks of the wall were smeared with lichens and moss and were untidy with windrows of dry leaves and cakes of earth. Many of the bricks were broken; the walk was hilly in its unevenness. From willows and bricks and scuffled earth rose a damp chill.

But Jasper did not seem to note the dampness. He hastened along the walk to the house-a structure of heavy stone which, for this newish Midwestern land, was very ancient. It had been built by a French fur trader in 1839. The Chippewas had scalped a man in its very dooryard.

The heavy back door was guarded by an unexpectedly expensive modern lock. Jasper opened it with a flat key and closed it behind him. It locked on a spring. He was in a crude kitchen, the shades of which were drawn. He pa.s.sed through the kitchen and dining room into the living room. Dodging chairs and tables in the darkness as though he was used to them he went to each of the three windows of the living room and made sure that all the shades were down before he lighted the student's lamp on the game-legged table. As the glow crept over the drab walls Jasper bobbed his head with satisfaction. Nothing had been touched since his last visit.

The room was musty with the smell of old green rep upholstery and leather books. It had not been dusted for months. Dust sheeted the stiff red velvet chairs, the uncomfortable settee, the chill white marble fireplace, the immense gla.s.s-fronted bookcase that filled one side of the room.

The atmosphere was unnatural to this capable business man, this Jasper Holt. But Jasper did not seem oppressed. He briskly removed the wrappers from the genuine books and from the candy-box imitations of books. One of the two wrappers he laid on the table and smoothed out. Upon this he poured the candy from the two boxes. The other wrapper and the strings he stuffed into the fireplace and immediately burned. Crossing to the bookcase he unlocked one section and placed both the real books and the imitation books on the bottom shelf. There was a row of rather cheap-looking novels on this shelf, and of these at least six were actually such candy boxes as he had purchased that evening.

Only one shelf of the bookcase was given over to anything so frivolous as novels. The others were filled with black-covered, speckle-leaved, dismal books of history, theology, biography-the shabby-genteel sort of books you find on the fifteen-cent shelf at a secondhand bookshop. Over these Jasper pored for a moment as though he was memorizing their t.i.tles.