Short Fiction

that bounded the world and up the great sides and back to the centre where they hummed for a moment and died. Then the great walls began slowly to bear down upon her, growing smaller and smaller, coming closer and closer as if to crush her; and as she clinched her hands and waited for the swift bruise of the cold glass, the bowl gave a sudden wrench and turned over⁠—and lay there on the sideboard, shining and inscrutable, reflecting in a hundred prisms, myriad, many-colored glints and gleams and crossings and interlaces of light.

The cold wind blew in again through to front door, and with a desperate, frantic energy Evylyn stretched both her arms around the bowl. She must be quick⁠—she must be strong. She tightened her arms until they ached, tauted the thin strips of muscle under her soft flesh, and with a mighty effort raised it and held it. She felt the wind blow cold on her back where her dress had come apart from the strain of her effort, and as she felt it she turned toward it and staggered under the great weight out through the library and on toward the front door. She must be quick⁠—she must be strong. The blood in her arms throbbed dully and her knees kept giving way under her, but the feel of the cool glass was good.

Out the front door she tottered and over to the stone steps, and there, summoning every fibre of her soul and body for a last effort, swung herself half around⁠—for a second, as she tried to loose her hold, her numb fingers clung to the rough surface, and in that second she slipped and, losing balance, toppled forward with a despairing cry, her arms still around the bowl⁠ ⁠… down⁠ ⁠…

Over the way lights went on; far down the block the crash was heard, and pedestrians rushed up wonderingly; upstairs a tired man awoke from the edge of sleep and a little girl whimpered in a haunted doze. And all over the moonlit sidewalk around the still, black form, hundreds of prisms and cubes and splinters of glass reflected the light in little gleams of blue, and black edged with yellow, and yellow, and crimson edged with black.

The Four Fists

I

At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a girl’s lips.

I’m sure everyone has met a man like that, been casually introduced, even made a friend of him, yet felt he was the sort who aroused passionate dislike⁠—expressed by some in the involuntary clinching of fists, and in others by mutterings about “takin’ a poke” and “landin’ a swift smash in ee eye.” In the juxtaposition of Samuel Meredith’s features this quality was so strong that it influenced his entire life.

What was it? Not the shape, certainly, for he was a pleasant-looking man from earliest youth: broad-bowed with gray eyes that were frank and friendly. Yet I’ve heard him tell a room full of reporters angling for a “success” story that he’d be ashamed to tell them the truth that they wouldn’t believe it, that it wasn’t one story but four, that the public would not want to read about a man who had been walloped into prominence.

It all started at Phillips Andover Academy when he was fourteen. He had been brought up on a diet of caviar and bellboys’ legs in half the capitals of Europe, and it was pure luck that his mother had nervous prostration and had to delegate his education to less tender, less biased hands.

At Andover he was given a roommate named Gilly Hood. Gilly was thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the September day when Mr. Meredith’s valet stowed Samuel’s clothing in the best bureau and asked, on departing, “hif there was hanything helse, Master Samuel?” Gilly cried out that the faculty had played him false. He felt like an irate frog in whose bowl has been put goldfish.

“Good gosh!” he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries, “he’s a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, ‘Are the crowd here gentlemen?’ and I said, ‘No, they’re boys,’ and he said age didn’t matter, and I said, ‘Who said it did?’ Let him get fresh with me, the ole pieface!”

For three weeks Gilly endured in silence young Samuel’s comments on the clothes and habits of Gilly’s personal friends, endured French phrases in conversation, endured a hundred half-feminine meannesses that show what a nervous mother can do to a boy, if she keeps close enough to him⁠—then a storm broke in the aquarium.

Samuel was out. A crowd had gathered to hear Gilly be wrathful about his roommate’s latest sins.

“He said, ‘Oh, I don’t like the windows open at night,’ he said, ‘except only a little bit,’ ” complained Gilly.

“Don’t let him boss you.”

“Boss me? You bet he won’t. I open those windows, I guess, but the darn fool won’t take turns shuttin’ ’em in the morning.”

“Make him, Gilly, why don’t you?”

“I’m going to.” Gilly nodded his head in fierce agreement. “Don’t you worry. He needn’t think I’m any ole butler.”

“Le’s see you make him.”

At this point the darn fool entered in person and included the crowd in one of his irritating smiles. Two boys said, “ ’Lo, Mer’dith”; the others gave him a chilly glance and went on talking to Gilly. But Samuel seemed unsatisfied.

“Would you mind not sitting on my bed?” he suggested politely to two of Gilly’s particulars who were perched very much at ease.

“Huh?”

“My bed. Can’t you understand English?”

This was adding insult to injury. There were several comments on