The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 7

Mrs. Tyarck's head darted forward like a snake's. At last in the back of the store the girl's head fell forward, her weak shoulders were shaken by helpless sobs.

The hands of the old shopkeeper fumbling with the package trembled, but Miss Frenzy appeared outwardly calm. Before counting out change, however, she paused, regarding the shopper musingly.

"Pardon me. Did I rightly hear you use the word 'cruelties'?" she questioned. To an onlooker her manner might have seemed suspiciously tranquil.

"Yes-cruelties," repeated the other, patronizingly. "There's no use denying it, Frenzy-there's that fly-paper loomin' up before you! There's them cat-traps and killin' devices, and, as if it wasn't bad enough, what must you do but go and take up with a girl that the whole town says is-"

There was a sudden curious cessation of the speaker's words. This was caused by a very sudden action on the part of Miss Giddings. Desperately seizing on a pair of the hanging black stockings, she darted with incredible swiftness around the end of the counter. With a curious sweep of her long arms she pa.s.sed the black lengths around the shopper's mouth, effectively m.u.f.fling her.

"Cruelties!" gasped the old shopkeeper. "Cruelties indeed! You will [gasp] be so good [gasp] as to take the word cruelties and go home and reflect upon it."

"Hey?" gasped Mrs. Tyarck. "Hey? Now, now, now!" Over the black gag her eyes looked frightened and uncomprehending. She suddenly saw herself in the grasp of the heaver and squeezer, of the chewers and suckers, and was full of consternation. "You've no call to get excited, Frenzy," she mumbled through the cottony thicknesses of stocking; then, as she worked her mouth out of its leash, "I'll have the law on you, Frenzy Giddings!"

"Leave the store!" was Miss Frenzy's sole response. She said it between set jaws. She suddenly let go of the stockings and they dropped to the floor. She picked up the parcel of purple veiling and cast it through the door into the gutter. She stood, tall and withering, pointing with inexorable finger; then, as Mrs. Tyarck, the gag removed, began to chatter fierce intimations of reprisal the old shopkeeper's eyes again flashed.

"Cruelties!" repeated Miss Frenzy, dwelling scornfully upon the word-"cruelties! Yes, I understand your reference." She kept on pointing to the open door. "You refer to the worms, to those creatures that ate and defaced helpless roses; tender young things that couldn't help themselves.... Very well. I am still, as it were, inexorable toward worms! So," with a shrill, excited laugh, "I still heave them and squeeze them. Therefore depart-worm! Leave the store!"

"_Worm?_" questioned Mrs. Tyarck, faintly. This lady had suddenly lost all her a.s.surance, the very upstanding wing in her hat became spiritless. She looked aghast, puzzled. Her eyes, like those of a person in a trance, wandered to the package of purple veiling lying outside in the gutter, and she tried to rally. "Worm! Now look here, Frenzy Giddings, I don't know whether it's a.s.sault and battery to call a person such names, or whether it's slander, but I tell you the law has had people up for saying less than 'worm.'"

"But I said 'worm,'" repeated the old shopkeeper, firmly-"worms, contemptible and crawling, chewers and suckers of reputations; you and Mrs. Cap.r.o.n, the whole town (with lamentably few exceptions) are a nest of small, mean, crawling, contemptible worms.... Worms, I repeat, worms!"

"Frenzy Giddings!" whispered the shocked Mrs. Tyarck. She stood frozen in horror under the last hissing, unsparing indictment, then turned and fled. As she scuttled, almost whimpering, through the door she was followed by the ceaseless, unsparing epithet, "Worm!"

The shopkeeper's protegee found her stiff and still unyielding, bowed over the counter, her forehead reddened with shame, her hands twisted together in self-loathing.

"Get me some hot tea, my dear," gasped Miss Frenzy. She still shook and her voice was as the voice of a dying person. The fine raiment of courtesy and punctilious speech that she had all her life worn had been torn from her by her own fierce old hands; in her own gentle eyes she was hopelessly degraded. Yet she smiled triumphantly at the anxious young face of the girl as she proffered the steaming tea. "Young,"

muttered Miss Frenzy, her eyes following the movements of the other.

"Young."

At last she roused herself and went slowly toward the door of the little private room, the girl hurrying to a.s.sist her. She paused, took the dark young head between her wrinkled hands, and kissed it. "I called her a 'worm,' my dear," said Miss Frenzy. "It was a regrettable circ.u.mstance, but she accused me of cruelties-cruelties?... I called her a 'worm.'"

The old shopkeeper's eyes twinkled. "On the whole, I am glad I did so."

Later, when the roses came again and the two sat with their sewing in the little garden, Miss Frenzy cheerfully remarked upon the entire absence of rose-worms. "Without conceit," she remarked-"without conceit, I should be inclined to say that the Lord has endorsed my activities."

She looked affectionately at the slender figure sewing near the honeysuckle and called attention to the young cherry-tree shooting up in green a.s.surance.

"My mystery!" announced Miss Frenzy. "Not planted by human hands. The seed doubtless dropped by a bird in flight. Whether the fruit will be sweet or bitter is to me a matter of pleasing conjecture."

BUSTER

_By_ KATHARINE HOLLAND BROWN From _Scribner's Magazine_ _Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner's Sons._ _Copyright, 1919, by Katharine Holland Brown._

Lucien, Mrs. Bellamy's impeccable chauffeur, brought me home from Mrs.

Bellamy's bridge that green-gold summer afternoon of 1914. Looking down from the cliff road, all Gloucester Harbor was a floor of rippled amethyst. When we turned into the forest drive the air breathed deep of pine fragrance, heady as new wine.

"How few people are driving to-day, Lucien! Yet it's so perfect-"

"One driver approaches, mademoiselle." Lucien's solid gray shape bore hard on the wheel. The big car swerved, shot half-way up the bank. I screamed. Past us like a streak of white lightning tore a headlong white monster, m.u.f.fler cut out, siren whooping. Its huge wheels grazed our hubs; with a roar, it shot round the curve, plunged down the steep grade toward Gloucester, and vanished. Its shriek rang back to us like the shriek of a lost soul.

"Lucien! That car must have been making eighty miles an hour!"

"Mademoiselle speaks truth." Lucien, frankly shaken, took off his cap and wiped a very damp brow. "It is the car of the great Doctor Lake, he who is guest of Madame Hallowell, at Greenacres."

"Doctor Lake! That stodgy old specialist!" I was a bit shaken myself.

"Nonsense. He never ventures out of a crawl."

"Pardon, mademoiselle. It is the car of Doctor Lake. But at the wheel sat not monsieur the doctor. Instead, there sat, and drove"-here Lucien forgot himself completely-"that demon boy."

"Buster!" I groaned. For there was only one demon boy on all Cape Ann, and that was my second cousin Isabella O'Brien's only son, Richard Parke O'Brien, rechristened Buster since the days of his tempestuous infancy.

Isabella (born Sears and Brattle Street, but she ran away and married Octavius...o...b..ien, descendant of an unknown race, at eighteen, and has lived ever since in the wilds of Oklahoma)-Isabella, I say, had sent her child to visit Aunt Charlotte and myself, while she and her Octavius went camping in the Yosemite. From her letters we had inferred that she needed a vacation from her Civic League work. Later, we came to realize that her base secret aim had been to win a vacation from Buster. What we two sedate Back Bay spinsters had endured from that unspeakable child!

Octavius...o...b..ien is a large, emphatic man with large, emphatic ideas as to the rearing of children. Buster once summarized his father's method in a few simple words.

"Here in New England, when I want to learn how to do anything, you and Aunt Charlotte say: 'Dear me, Richard, wait till you grow up. Then you'll understand.' Down in Oklahoma, dad just gives me a check and says: 'Go to it.'"

Such eclecticism bears startling fruits. The maddening thing about Buster's activities was that his blackest crimes, once sifted down, proved not to be crimes at all. Merely the by-products of his inquiring disposition. Although, to quote Aunt Charlotte, if your house is burnt down over your head, it matters little to you whether it was fired for malice or from a scientific desire to see how long it would take to burn.

To-day, as we drove on, I looked back on the summer. As a rule, our months at the sh.o.r.e are compact of slow and tranquil days, but this season had fled past like a demented moving-picture film. Buster had arrived at 9 A. M. the 8th of June. By noon he had made his presence felt. During the next five days he took the gas-range apart, to see how it worked, and put it together again, but inaccurately, so that it blew up and all but annihilated a perfectly good cook. I had to raise Louisiana's wages three dollars a week. He drained all the water out of the fountain pool, to see how long it would take to refill it; then, at sight of a wayfaring organ-grinder he rushed away, to bribe the man to open up his instrument and let him see how its harmonious innards worked. Thus, he left nine fat, venerable goldfish to flop themselves to a miserable end. To be sure, he sniffled audibly at dinner that night and almost declined dessert; which didn't bring back aunt's beloved Chinese carp, alas! He tried to teach Gulliver, the Leonards' Great Dane, to do German police-dog stunts. Gulliver, who is young, obedient, and muddle-headed, took his training seriously to heart and made breath-taking leaps at the Leonards' gardener's throat, to the up-blown pride of both Buster and the gardener. Unhappily, he saw fit to show off his new accomplishment on an irascible New York banker, to whom Commodore Leonard was trying his best to sell his early Pullman place at Beverly Farms. As Buster hotly declared, if the banker hadn't squealed and acted such a sissy, Gulliver would have stopped with a mere snap at his lapel. But his cries so excited the poor pup that by the time the horrified commodore came to his aid most of the banker's raiment was in tatters, to say nothing of his dignity. Commodore Leonard lost his one chance of the year to unload that white elephant of a house. At that, he congratulated himself because the banker didn't sue him for damages.

Subdued and chastened, Buster took himself off to the harbor to seek diversion among the ancient mariners who had already found in him a stimulating audience. He spent, I judge, a pleasant afternoon. He rode back on the Magnolia 'bus just at dinner-time. He did not return alone.

Proudly he strode up the steps, one eye c.o.c.ked over his shoulder at the bland and tarry skipper who swaggered, all too jovially, behind. Eagerly he ran to the palsied Aunt Charlotte.

"Aunt Charlotte, this is my friend, Captain Harrigan, of the _Lottie Foster_. The captain has come to dinner and to spend the evening, and he's promised to tell us all his adventures and draw the plans for my racing yacht, when I get one, and teach me how to make her torpedo-proof and-and everything! Cap Harrigan, meet Aunt Charlotte!"

Well, as Aunt Charlotte and I agreed later, we were bound and helpless.

The child was so brimful of glad hospitality. You couldn't strike him in the face by rebuffing his friend. But oh, the hours that followed! As Louisiana put it later, the genman wasn't plumb drunk, but he cert'ny was happy drunk. The instant dinner was ended Aunt Charlotte fled up-stairs, locked her door, and pushed the bureau against it. I stayed on deck, a quaking Casabianca, till 11 P. M. Then, by way of a mild suggestion, I turned down the lights; and Captain Harrigan, now in mellow tears at the reminiscences of his own boyhood, kissed my hands and took a fervent leave.

"But Richard, child! The man was intoxicated! Disgustingly intoxicated!"

"Gosh, was he? Well, he was bully and interesting, anyhow. Look at all those sailors' knots he's taught me. And the story he told about crossing the equator the first time, and the one about the admiral who was always three sheets to the wind and wouldn't tie his shoe-strings-what does three sheets to the wind mean, anyhow? And he's showed me how to read a compa.s.s and all about s.e.xtants and transits, too. Gee, I bet I could steer a dreadnought, after what he's taught me to-night."

"He certainly was full of information. But don't invite any more drunken sailors to the house, dear. Bring your friends home whenever you wish, but make sure first that they're sober."

"Well, I will. Though I kind o' hate to ask 'em."

With that I let the matter drop. You could not blame the child. Back of every calamity that he brought upon us lay his ravenous curiosity, his frantic longing to know how the world was made and ruled. But to-day was different. No hunger for knowledge could warrant a boy of fifteen in seizing the sacrosanct car of the most famous of Boston specialists, and going joy-riding down the Gloucester hills. Buster should be seriously rebuked.

Incidentally, I'd been playing bridge all afternoon with two stern dowagers and one irritable maiden lady, all crack players, while I'm a hopeless amateur. I had on a tea-rose crepe de chine and the waitress had spilled coffee on it. Further, I was wearing brand-new patent-leather slippers. Yes, Buster would receive his full deserts.

Buster pranced home at dusk, afire with triumph from his crested red head to his comically ma.s.sive young feet. Pallid and grave, Aunt Charlotte and I confronted him on the piazza.

"H'lo, Cousin Edith. Say, is dinner ready? Cracky, I could eat a whole barbecue!"

"Richard! Where is Doctor Lake's car?"

Buster gasped slightly, but his jauntiness never flinched.