Short Fiction

walls and niches; there were a few pieces of elegant furniture, and on one side, some five hundred books in a neat case.

The whole was pervaded with a scent of roses. “How beautiful!” I exclaimed involuntarily.

“Not at all,” he answered. “Only a makeshift. When I get my home in the woods it will be beautiful, but art is not possible in a city.”

“But what good will it do for you to go off alone?” I said; “You certainly have beautiful ideals, but if you isolate yourself, how will it help humanity?” He snapped his fingers. “Always that,” he answered; “I reform myself; that is the beginning of reform, self. When I have accomplished it perhaps I shall return and teach others.” He glided around the room and added, “Yes, anyway I shall come back some day. The Americans are a lot of cowards, but some day they will talk justice, too. When it begins⁠—perhaps here in New York, in Chicago, or Philadelphia⁠—no matter where, there will be work to do and I shall be there!”

His five white teeth jutted savagely over the lower lip.

“Well, do you wish any of my books?” I had chosen a few, and, finding no further excuse for remaining, reluctantly turned to go. As we were passing through the “laboratory,” my strange acquaintance asked, “Do you want to see water burn?” and taking some metallic substance from a jar he threw it into a small dish of water. A brilliant blaze shot up and burned for several minutes. In its glare the wizard face laughed silently; “See,” he said, “how I could burn the Pacific Ocean.”

“Wouldn’t that be a big contract?” I returned.

“There are other things I would prefer to burn. Well, goodbye. We shall not meet again.”

And we did not.

Mr. C. afterward told me he had left San Francisco, to no one knew where. He had, however, a different theory to explain his bandit’s misanthropy.

He was in love once, C. explained, and wanted the girl to go and live with him on uncooked food. She declined, and he has foresworn civilization ever since.

“Ah, the usual woman in the case.” And I went away musing on the freaks of passion, my thoughts returning often to the wizard face with its prophetic, silent laugh lit by the burning water.

Between the Living and the Dead

We were three⁠—a man, a child, and I who am a woman. It was in the winter, and the man sat always at the front window of the third story opposite me, and the child in the parlor two stories below; and I from my second story saw them both. If they saw me, or seeing noted me, I do not know, but I think they did: for we were kin, and the only kin in all that life that hurried round us, up and down, up and down. Ah, the long agony of those endless days, while we stayed watching the snow floating in the merciless atmosphere and the living people going up and down⁠—we the unburied dead who from our coffin windows looked out!

The man sat always propped among his pillows with his feet stretched out on the windowsill, looking down, wearily down. I, who could not sit nor lie, stood with my forehead upon the panes of glass, listening to the never ending roar of the machinery of my own body, the engine beat of a sick heart. And the child, ah well, the child with her ghastly face and sullen blue eyes, sat staring outward at the snow and the life that was all denied her;⁠—such a young child, with the glory of youth yet shining in her mass of pale hair. And we thought, we three, as we gazed at the others, busy, so busy with life, “Ah, they too must die soon. The woman who sweeps the pavement there, impatient of the falling snow, she too must suffer; yet a little while she too must suffer and die. One day she will go in and close the door behind her, and never come out again. Those men who tramp so lustily, forcing back the cold and the snow with their hot hearts and limbs, they are tramping straight towards it, that last door which will open to them the fore-halls of death, wherein they, too, must sit unburied⁠—long perhaps, like us. Ah, what is the use of it all? Why go up and down so? Why wait so long since the end is the same? Why not make an end? Why not make an end?”

But the will to make an end was dead also, so we stayed on, looking from our coffins at the world that did not interest us, to which we did not belong⁠—dead things with living eyes. But there came a day, a soft, stray day that had wandered among the winter rigors, a day with a blue sky and a flood of golden glamors, when Life, in mockery, called luringly from afar to her forsaken children. I leaned out over my casement, and looked at that swift runlet of being passing by, then up at the man and down at the child. The man was caressing a geranium with his long skeleton fingers, and looking down, down, down, as into a bottomless well. He was measuring: I felt it then, I knew it afterward. But the child⁠—ah, the meagre little creature with her blue-white visage and sunken nose! Around the decaying bones of it the lichenous fungus of a rotten birthright! She had crept out upon the doorstep; even to her, who had begun to die before she saw the light, to die long and in much pain and never know aught of life save fugitive yearnings, inexplicable, ending in nothing, buds that can never fruit nor bloom⁠—even to her the mocking sunlight called, and in the wasted little bosom the fading life swelled vaguely. Her crippled leg, shapeless and fleshless, just a covered bone, hung down