The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story Part 20

Esther and Meyer walk the grey street. In the arms of the man sleeps Flora. His arm aches. He dares not change her to his other arm. Lest she wake.

He has undressed her. Gentle hands of a man. He holds her little body, naked, near his eyes. Her face and her hands, her feet and her knees are soiled. The rest of her body is white--very white--no bloom upon her body. He kisses her black hair.

He lays her away beneath her coverlet.

There is his wife before him. She is straight. Her naked body rises, column of white flame, from her dun skirt. Esther--his love--she is in a case of fire. Within her b.r.e.a.s.t.s as within hard jewels move the liquids of love. Within her body, as within a case, lies her soul, pent, which should pour forth its warmth upon them.

He embraces her.

"Esther.--Esther--" He can say no more.

His lips are at her throat. Can he not break her open?

She sways back, yielding. Her eyes swerve up. They catch the cradle of her child.

--Another child--another agony of glory--another misery to the world?

She is stiff in the unbroken case of a vast wound all about her.

So they lie down in bed. So they sleep.

She has cooked their breakfast.

They walk, a man and a woman, down the steep street to work. A child between them, holding the hand of a man.

They are grey, they are sullen. They are caught up in the sullen strife of their relentless life. There is no let to them. Time is a barren field with no horizon.

FRENCH EVA[9]

By KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

(From _Scribner's Magazine_)

The real _dramatis personae_ are three (for Schneider was only a sign-post pointing): Follet, the remittance-man, Stires, and French Eva.

Perhaps I should include Ching Po--but I hate to. I was the man with his hands in his pockets who saw the thing steadily and saw it whole--to filch a windy phrase. I liked Stires, who had no social standing, even on Naapu, and disliked Follet, who had all the standing there was.

Follet dined with magnates; and, believe me, the magnates of Naapu were a multicolored lot. A man might have been made by copra or by pearls--or by blackbirding. We were a plutocracy; which means that so long as a man had the house and the drinks, you asked no questions. The same rule holds--allowing for their dizzier sense of figures--in New York and Chicago. On the whole, I think we were more sensible. There is certainly more difference between good food and bad than between five millions and fifty (which, I take it, is a figure that buys immunity over here). I don't think any man's hospitality would have ranked him permanently on Naapu if his dinners had been uneatable. Though perhaps--to be frank--drinks counted more than food as a measuring-rod of aristocracy.

Well, Follet trained with the people who received consignments of champagne and good whiskey. And Stires did not. Anyhow, Stires was a temperance man: he took only one or two drinks a day, and seldom went beyond a modest gin-fizz. With the remarkable native punch, compounded secretly and by unknown ways, but purchasable, and much esteemed by the knowing, he never would have anything to do. Stires looked like a cowboy and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a s.h.i.+p-chandler in a small--a very small--way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was a middleman between fishermen and householders. As she owned a gramophone and one silk dress, it was clear that her business prospered.

Even Ching Po bought eggs of her, though there was a nameless, uninterpreted hostility between them.

Let me give you, at once, the few facts I could gather about French Eva.

There were rumors a-plenty, but most of them sifted down to a little residual malice. I confined my questionings to the respectable inhabitants of Naapu; they were a very small circle. At last, I got some sort of "line" on French Eva.

None within our ken fathered or mothered her. Old Dubois knew most about her, but old Dubois, a semi-paralyzed colossus, "doped" most of the time, kept his thick lips closed. "An excellent girl" was all that any one could wring from him. As she had begun life on Naapu by being _dame de comptoir_ for him, he had some right to his judgment. She had eventually preferred independence, and had forsaken him; and if he still had no quarrel with her, that speaks loudly for her many virtues.

Whether Dubois had sent for her originally, no one knew. His memory was clouded by opium, and you could get little out of him. Besides, by the time I arrived on Naapu, French Eva belonged to the landscape and to history. She was generally supposed to be pure French, and her accent supported the theory, though she was in a small way a linguist. Her English was as good as any one's--on Naapu, where we were by no means academic. She could speak the native tongue after a fas.h.i.+on, and her beche-de-mer was at least fluent.

I had heard of the lady before I ever saw her, and had wondered why Naapu chose to distinguish a female fish-vender--even if she had begun with old Dubois. As soon as I clapped eyes on her, I perceived her distinction, her "difference"--the reason for the frequent "Mam'selle."

She was, at first glimpse, unusual. To begin with, never was so white a face matched with hair and brows and eyes so black. In the ordinary pursuit of her business she wore her hair half loose, half braided, down her back; and it fell to her knees like a heavy c.r.a.pe veil. A bad simile, you will say; but there are no words to express the unrelieved blackness of her hair. There were no lights in it; no "reflets," to use the French phrase. It might have been "treated" with ink. When, on rare occasions--not often, for the weight of it, as she freely explained, made her head ache--she put it up in coils, it was like a great mourning bonnet under which her white face seemed to shrink away. Her eyes were nearly as black as her hair. Her figure was very lovely, whether in forming the loose native garment or laced into her silk dress.

You will say that I have painted for you a person who could not, by any possibility, be beautiful; and yet French Eva was beautiful. You got used to that dull curtain of her hair; it made Madame Maur's l.u.s.trous raven locks look oily. It came to seem, after a time, all that hair should be. Her features were nearly perfect from our finicking European point of view, and she grew in grace even while I, a newcomer, watched; for the effect of the tropic sun upon her skin was curious and lovely: it neither blotched nor reddened nor tanned her, but rather gilded her pallor, touching it with the faintest brown in the world. I must, in the interests of truth, mention one more fact. Mam'selle Eva was the sort of woman who has a direct effect on the opposite s.e.x. Charm hardly expresses it; magnetism, rather, though that is a poor word. A man simply wanted to be near her. She intrigued you, she drew you on, she a.s.sailed your consciousness in indefinable ways--all without the sweep of an eyelash or the pout of a lip. French Eva was a good girl, and went her devious ways with reticent feet. But she was not in "society," for she lived alone in a thatched hut, and attended native festivals, and swore--when necessary--at the crews of trading barques. I am not sure that she did not, of all tongues possible to her, prefer beche-de-mer; which is not, at its most innocent, an elegant language. She had no enemies except Ching Po--for reasons unknown; and she paid her occasional respects to any and all religions that Naapu boasted. When there was a row, she was always, of course, on the European side; though she would stretch a point now and then in favor of the native constabulary.

So much for French Eva--who was by no means so important in the Naapu scheme of things as my long description may imply. She had her eminently respectable, her perfectly recognized niche, and we all bought eggs and fish of her when we could. She was a curious figure, to be sure; but you must remember that on Naapu every one, nearly, was unaverage, if not abnormal. Even the agents and officials were apt to be the least promising of their kind--or they would have been somewhere else. It was a beautiful refuge for utter bounders and men who, though not bounders, had a very low limit of achievement. The jetsam of officialdom was washed up on that lonely, lovely sh.o.r.e. The magnates of Naapu were not to be trusted. Naapu was a rich island, the richest of its group; and, being off the main lines of traffic, was an excellent field for the unscrupulous. Tourists did not bother us, for tourists do not like eighty-ton schooners; maps did not particularly insist upon us; we were well known in places where it was profitable to know us, and not much talked about anywhere. Our copra was of the best; there were pearls to be had in certain waters if you could bribe or fight your way to them; and large groups of natives occasionally disappeared over night from one of the surrounding islands. Naapu was, you might say, the clasp of a necklace. How could we be expected to know what went on in the rest of the string--with one leaky patrol-boat to ride those seas? Sometimes there were fights down by the docks; strangers got arrested and were mysteriously pardoned out; there were always a good many people in the landscape who had had too much square-face. We were very far away from everything, and in spite of all these drawbacks we were happy, because the climate was, most of the year, unexceptionable. When you recall what most civilized climates are like, "unexceptionable," that cold and formal word, may well take your breath away. Lest any one should suspect me of blackbirding or gin-selling, I will say at once that I had come to Naapu by accident and that I stayed because, for reasons that I will not go into here, I liked it. I lived in a tiny bungalow with an ex-s.h.i.+p's cook whom I called Joe, and several thousand c.o.c.kroaches. I had hired Joe to cook for me, but his chief duty soon became to keep the c.o.c.kroaches out of my bedroom. As a matter of fact, I usually dined at Dubois's hotel or at some private house.

Why so idle a person as I should have looked down--as I did, from the first--on Follet, I cannot explain. The money I lived on was certainly not of my own making. But, strictly speaking, I could have gone home if I had chosen, and I more than suspected that Follet could not have.

Follet was not enamoured of Naapu, and talked grandiloquently of Melbourne and Batavia and Hong-Kong. He continued, however, to be a resident of the island, and none of his projects of removal to a better place ever went beyond mere frothy talk. He lived at Dubois's, but spent much of his time with the aforesaid magnates. He had an incorruptible manner; some grace that had been bred in him early never forsook him, and the ladies of Naapu liked him. Even good Madame Maur, who squinted, squinted more painfully at Follet than at any one else. But his idleness was beginning to tell on him; occasionally he had moody fits, and there were times when he broke out and ran amuck among beach-combers and tipsy natives along the water-front. More than once, Ching Po sought him out and fetched him home.

My first intimation of trouble came from Stires. I had nothing to do with this particular Yankee in the way of business, but I lingered occasionally by his door in the cool of the afternoon, just to feed my eyes on his brawn and my ears on his homely and pleasant nasality.

Stires's eyes were that disconcerting gray-blue which seems to prevail among men who have lived much in the desert or on the open sea. You find it in Arizona; and in the navies of all the northern countries. It added to his cowboy look. I knew nothing about Stires--remember that on Naapu we never asked a man questions about himself--but I liked him. He sat about on heaps of indescribable junk--things that go into the bowels of s.h.i.+ps--and talked freely. And because Follet and I were both in what Naapu would have called its best circles, I never talked about Follet, though I liked him no better than Stires did. I say it began with Stires; but it began really with Schneider, introduced by Stires into our leisurely conversation. This is Schneider's only importance: namely, that, mixing himself up in French Eva's context, he made other men speak of her.

The less said about Schneider, the better; which means always that there is a great deal to say. In this case, there was perhaps less to say than to surmise. He did not give himself away--to us. Schneider had turned up on a trading schooner from Melbourne, was stopping at the hotel in one of the best rooms, and had a general interest in the potentialities of Naapu. I say potentialities advisedly, for he was not directly concerned, so far as I know, with any existing business there. He frequented everybody, and asked questions in the meticulous German way.

He wandered all over the island--islands, I should say, for once or twice I saw him banging off in a creaky motor-boat to the other jewels of the necklace. Guesses as to his real business were free and frequent.

He was a pearl-smuggler; the agent of a Queensland planter; a fugitive from justice; a mad scientist; a servant of the Imperial German Government. No one presumed to cert.i.tude--which was in itself a tribute to German efficiency. Schneider was blond and brush-haired and thick-lipped; he was unpleasant from the crown of his ill-shaped head to the soles of his ill-shaped shoes; but, though lacking in every charm, he was not sinister. He had seen curious places and amusing things, and could cap most adventures with something relevant; but his type and temperament prevented him from being a "good mixer," and he was not popular.

Stires, however, had his own grievance, and his judgment of Schneider went deep. He did not mind the shape of Schneider's skull, or the hint of goose-step in Schneider's gait; but he minded, very much, the kind of interest that Schneider took in French Eva. He told me that, straight, emphasizing his statements with a rusty spanner, which he wielded in a curious, cla.s.sical way, like a trident. According to him, Schneider was bothering the life out of the girl. "Always asking her to dress up and come over to chow with him at the hotel." And the spanner went down as if Neptune were rebuking the seas.

"Does she go?"

"No."

"Well, then--can't you leave the lady to discourage him in her own way?"

"She won't go to the ho-tel, because she hates Ching Po. But she walks out with him Sunday afternoons. He gives her gimcracks."

"Then she likes him?"

"There's no telling. She's a real lady." And the discouraged Stires beat, with his spanner, a refrain to his involuntary epigram.

"She can take care of herself, can't she?" I had watched her deal with a drunken Solomon Islander, and did not see how Schneider could be a match for her.

"I don't know." Stires's lazy drawl challenged the sunset.

"Anything I can do?" I asked as I rose.

"Unless you go in and cut him out," he meditated with a grin.

"But I'm not in love with her," I protested.

"You might take her to church."

But I refused. Philandering was not my forte, and church, in any case, was the last thing I should venture to propose.

"Why don't you go in yourself?"