Miss Laura Spencer Portor, poet and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 1875. She lived at Covington until ten years old, when she was taken to Paris, France, where she attended private schools for two years. She returned to Kentucky, and attended school at Cincinnati, but she afterwards entered the old Norwood Institute, Washington. Her education being finished, Miss Portor again made her home at Covington, where she resided until a few years ago, when she went to New York, her home at the present time. She has worked in many literary fields. Children's work; essays; short-stories; feature and editorial work of all kinds; and verse for children and "grown-ups." Miss Portor is now children's editor of The Woman's Home Companion. She has been so very busy with her magazine work that she has found time to publish but one book, Theodora (Boston, 1907), a little tale for children, done in collaboration with Miss Katharine Pyle, sister of the famous American artist, the late Howard Pyle, and herself an artist and author of ability and reputation. The next few years will certainly see several of Miss Portor's manuscripts published in book form. Among her magazine stories and verse that have attracted attention may be mentioned her purely Kentucky tales, such as "A Gentleman of the Blue Grass," published in The Ladies' Home Journal; "The Judge," which appeared in The Woman's Home Companion; "Sally," a Southern story, printed in The Atlantic Monthly; and "My French School Days," an essay, also printed in The Atlantic, are thought to be the best things in prose Miss Portor has written so far. Her poems, "The Little Christ" (Atlantic Monthly), and "But One Leads South" (McClure's Magazine), are her most characteristic work in verse. She has written much for children in both prose and poetry. Miss Portor is one of Kentucky's proudest hopes in fiction or verse, and the books that are to be published from her pen will bring together her work in a manner that will be highly pleasing to her admirers.
Bibliography. Harper's Magazine (August, 1900); St. Nicholas Magazine (October, 1912).
THE LITTLE CHRIST[79]
[From The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1905]
BUT ONE LEADS SOUTH[80]
[From McClure's Magazine, December, 1909]
Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, poet and short-story writer, was born at Eminence, Kentucky, in 1875. She is the daughter of the Rev. W. S. Giltner, who was for many years president of Eminence College, from which the future writer was graduated. She later pursued a course in English at the University of Chicago, and studied Shakespeare and dramatic art with Hart Conway of the Chicago School of Acting. Miss Giltner's book of lyrics, The Path of Dreams (Chicago, 1900), brought her many kind words from the reviewers. This little book contained some very excellent verse, but, shortly after its appearance, the author abandoned poesy for the short-story. Her stories and sketches have appeared in the New England Magazine, The Century, Munsey's Overland Monthly, The Reader, The Era, and several other periodicals. Within the last year or so she has had quite a number of short-stories in Young's Magazine "of breezy stories." At the present time Miss Giltner has a Kentucky novel and a comedy in preparation, both of which should appear shortly. She is one of the most beautiful of Kentucky's writers: her frontispiece portrait in The Path of Dreams is said to have disarmed many carping critics who untied the little volume with malice aforethought. But back of her personal loveliness, is a mind of much power, cleverness, and originality.
Bibliography. The Nation (September 6, 1900); Munsey's Magazine (October, 1902); The Overland (October, 1910).
THE JESTING GODS[81]
[From Munsey's Magazine (July, 1904)].
From the first it had been, in the nature of things, perfectly patent to every member of the party gathered at Grantleigh for the shooting that Tompkins' bride cared not a whit for Tompkins—which, if one happened to know the man, was scarcely a matter for surprise.
Tompkins, though a good fellow on the whole, was an unmitigated idiot. Not a mere insignificant unit in the world's noble army of fools, but a fool so conspicuous and of so infinite a variety as to be at all times the cynosure of the general gaze.
When a man is a fool and knows it, his folly not infrequently attains the measure of wisdom. Let him but conceal his motley beneath a cloak of weighty silence and he will presently acquire a reputation for solid intelligence and a wise conservatism. But Tompkins was not one of these. He joyously jangled his bells and flourished his bauble, wholly unaware the while of the spectacle he was making of himself. If he could have been persuaded to take on a neutral tint and keep himself well in the background, inanity might, in time, have assumed the dignity of intellectuality: but he lacked the sense of proportion, of values. He was always in the foreground and always a more or less inharmonious element in the ensemble.
Tompkins had published an impossible volume of prose, followed by a yet more impossible volume of verse: his crudely impressionistic essays at art made the judicious grieve: he dabbled in music and posed as a lyric tenor, though he had neither voice nor ear. A temperament essentially histrionic kept him constantly in the centre of the stage. With no remote realization of his limitations, he aspired to play leads and heavies, when Fate had inexorably cast him for a line of low comedy. He contrived to make divers and sundry kinds and degrees of an idiot of himself on all possible occasions—and even when there was no possible occasion therefor. He had a faculty for doing the wrong thing which amounted to inspiration.
We had been wont to speculate at the Club as to whether Tompkins would ever find a woman the measure of whose folly should so far exceed his own as to impel her to marry him. We wondered much when we heard that he had at last achieved this feat. We wondered more when we saw the woman who had made it a possibility.
"Titania and Bottom, by Jove!" whispered Ronalds to me as Tompkins followed his wife into the drawing-room on the evening of their arrival at Grantleigh Manor. (Tompkins is asked everywhere on account of his relationship to old Lord Wrexford.) My fancy, which I had allowed to play freely about the lady of Tompkins' choice since I had heard of his marriage, had wavered between a spinster of uncertain age who had accepted him as a dernier resort and a simpering school girl too young to know her own mind. I now glanced at the bride—and gasped.
She was one of those women whose beauty is so absolute, so compelling, as to admit of neither question nor criticism. It quite took away one's breath. Every man in the room was gaping at her, but she bore the ordeal with all grace and calm, though she was the daughter of a struggling curate in some obscure locality remote from social advantages. She was of a singularly striking type: the beauty of her face was almost tragic in its intensity: the ghost of some immemorial sorrow seemed to lurk in the depths of her dark eyes: but when her too sombre expression was irradiated by the transient gleam of her rare smile, she was positively dazzling. (I am aware that I shall seem to "promulgate rhapsodies for dogmas" so to speak, but my proverbial indifference to feminine charm should endorse me.)
As the days passed—we were at Grantleigh for a fortnight—I found myself watching for some flaw in her conception, some inaccuracy in her interpretation of her role. But I watched in vain. There was always a perfect appreciation of the requirements of the situation, always the perfection of taste in its treatment. Evidently she had thrown herself into the part and was playing it—would play it, perhaps, to the end—with artistic abandon, tempered by a fine discretion and discrimination. If her yoke galled, this proud woman made no sign. But even the subtlest artiste has her unguarded moment, and it was in such a moment that I chanced to see her the night before the last of our stay.
The men had come in late from a day's shooting over the moors and were on their way to their rooms to dress for dinner. Tompkins had gone up stairs just ahead of me (his apartments were next mine) and had carelessly left a door opening on the corridor slightly ajar. In passing I unconsciously glanced that way and my eyes fell full upon the mirrored face of Elinor Tompkins as her husband crossed toward where she sat at her dressing table. The flash of feeling that crossed her countenance held me for a moment transfixed. Such a look, such an unbelievable complex of shrinking, repugnance, utter loathing and self-contempt I had never seen or imagined.... Like a flash it came and went. The next instant she had forced herself to smile and was lifting her face for her husband's caress, while Tompkins, physically and mentally short-sighted, bent and inclined his lips to hers. I caught my breath sharply. A choking sensation in my throat paid tribute to her art. Not even Duse was more a mistress of emotional control, expression, and repression. But this was something more than the perfection of acting: it was courage, the courage of endurance long drawn out—a greater than that which impels men to the cannon's mouth and a swift and sure surcease from suffering.
That evening at dinner, Villars, who had run up to town for the day, and found time for a gossip at the Club, proceeded to open his budget. He had had the satisfaction of surprising us with the rumored engagement of Lady Agatha Trelor to the scapegrace son of an impoverished peer: he had hinted delicately at a scandal in high official life: and had made his climax with the announcement of the sudden demise of old Lord Ilverton and the consequent succession of Delmar to his title and estates—when I glanced, by purest chance, at Mrs. Tompkins. (I had fallen into a way of looking at her often—she was certainly an interesting study.) Her face was white, even to the lips. Chancing to turn, she found my eyes upon her. In an instant she had somehow compelled the color to her cheeks and recovered her wonted perfect poise and calm.
That night in the smoking room, Villars shed light upon the subject. Tompkins was presumably haunting his wife's footsteps at the moment. In his unconscious egotism he never spared her: there was seldom a moment when she might drop her smiling mask: the essence of his personality pervaded her whole atmosphere.
"I met old Waxby at the Club to-day," Villars was saying, "and—apropos of Delmar's succession to the title—he mentioned that there had been a serious affair of the heart between him and our fellow-guest, Mrs. Tompkins, then Elinor Barton. It seems one of Ilverton's innumerable country places was near the village where the Bartons lived and Delmar met the girl there last Autumn. The affair soon assumed serious proportions: Ilverton heard of the engagement: cut up an awful shindy: had a scene with Del, and finally bundled him off to India post haste. The girl had grit, though. She sent her compliments to Lord Ilverton with the assurance that he need have given himself no uneasiness, as she had already twice refused his son and heir, and was prepared to repeat the refusal should occasion arise. They say his Lordship, who had cooled down a bit, chuckled mightily over the message and vowed that had it only been one of his younger sons, she should have had him, by Jupiter!... But things weren't easy for the girl at home. She had an invalid mother, a nervous, nagging creature, who dinned it into her ears that she'd lost the chance of a lifetime: that she was standing in the light of three marriageable younger sisters: that with her limited social advantages few matrimonial opportunities might be expected to come her way—and more to the same effect till the poor girl was nearly driven frantic."
"Why not have tried the stage—with her voice and presence any manager would have been glad to take her on," Landis suggested.
"She considered it, they say, but her reverend father turned a fit at the bare suggestion. At this juncture, Tompkins presented himself as a suitor: it was duly pointed out to Miss Barton by her loving parents that he was rather an eligible parti: rich, not bad looking, and a nephew of Wrexford's, and that she would better take the goods the gods provided, which, in sheer desperation, she ultimately did. You can see she loathes him, but she's evidently made up her mind to be decent to him—and by Jove, she doesn't do it by halves! She's got sand, all right, and I honor her for the way she makes the best of a bad bargain—though it's not a pleasant thing to see."
"It's a beastly pity!" broke in Ronalds warmly. "It makes me ill to see her wasting herself and her subtleties on a dolt like Algy. What a splendid pair she and Del would have made, and what a shame his Lordship didn't obligingly die a few months sooner—since it had to be!"
At this precise moment I caught sight of Tompkins standing just without the parted portierres. How long he had been there I could not guess, but doubtless quite long enough. He looked like a man who had had a facer and was a bit dazed in consequence. I think I gasped, for on the instant he looked my way with a glance that held an appeal, which I must somehow have answered. In an instant he was gone and the other men, all unaware of his proximity, pursued their theme.
I did not see Tompkins at our hurried buffet breakfast next morning, and I began to hope he would not go out with the guns that day, thus sparing me the awkward necessity of meeting him again. But he presently appeared on the terrace in his shooting togs, and I knew I was in for it. His manner, however, which was entirely as usual, reassured me. Either he had heard less than I had feared or the callousness of stupidity protected him. He chatted with his wonted gayety with the men: he made the ladies at hand to see us off a labored compliment or two, and met my eye without consciousness or embarassment. I wondered if it were stolidity or stoicism? All day he was in the best of spirits: he was positively hilarious when we gathered at the gamekeeper's cottage for luncheon—and I decided upon the former with a sense of relief, for the thing had somehow got on my nerves.
But later, as we returned to the field, he so palpably waited for me to come up with him (we always put Tompkins in the van for safety's sake—he did such fearful and wonderful things with his gun) that I was forced to join him. After a moment he said, with an effort:
"Sibley, I want to ask, as a very great personal favor, that you will never, under any circumstances, mention to anyone—to any one," he repeated, with a curious effect of earnestness, "about—last night."
I hastened to give him my assurance. It was the least I could do.
"Thank you," he said simply. "I felt I might depend upon you." Then, because we were men—and Englishmen—we spoke of other things.
Late that afternoon, as we bent our steps homeward, Tompkins and I found ourselves again together. We had somehow strayed from the rest, and under the guidance of a keeper, striding ahead, laden with trappings of the hunt, were making our way toward Grantleigh. Tompkins' manner was entirely simple and unconstrained. A respect I had not previously accorded him was growing upon me. We were both dead tired, and when we spoke at all it was of the day's sport.
As we neared the Manor, the keeper, far in the lead, vaulted lightly over a stile in a hedgerow. I followed less lightly (my enemies aver that I am growing stout) with Tompkins in the rear.... Suddenly a shot, abnormally loud and harsh in the twilight hush, rang out at my back. Blind and deaf—fatally blind and deaf as I had been—I realized its import on the instant. Even before I turned I knew what I should see.
Tompkins was lying in a huddled heap at the foot of the stile, and as I bent over him I saw that it was a matter of moments. He had bungled things all his life, poor fellow, but he had not bungled this.
"An accident, Sibley," he gasped, as I knelt beside him. "I was—always—awkward—with a gun, you know. An accident—you'll remember, old man? Elinor must not—"
Speech failed him for an instant. An awful agony was upon him, but no moan escaped his lips. His life had been a farce, a failure, but if he had not known how to live, assuredly he knew how to die.... The shadows were closing round him. He put out a groping hand for mine.
"I think I'm—going, Sibley," he whispered. "Tell Elinor—" And with her name upon his lips, he went out into the dark.
Miss Margaret Steele Anderson, poet and critic, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, in 1875. She was educated in the public schools, with a short special course at Wellesley College. Since 1901 Miss Anderson has been literary editor of The Evening Post, of Louisville, having a half-page of book reviews and literary notes in the Saturday edition. From 1903 to 1908 she was "outside reader" for McClure's Magazine; and since quitting McClure's, she has been a public lecturer upon literature and art in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Memphis, and Lake Chautauqua. Miss Anderson's fine poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Century, McClure's, but the greater number of them have been published in The American Magazine. She has also contributed considerable verse to the minor magazines. The next year will witness Miss Anderson's poems brought together in a charming volume, entitled The Flame in the Wind, which form they very certainly merit. No Kentucky woman of the present time has done better work in verse than has she.
Bibliography. McClure's Magazine (August, 1902); The Century (September, 1904).
THE PRAYER OF THE WEAK[82]
[From McClure's Magazine (September, 1909)]
NOT THIS WORLD[83]
[From McClure's Magazine (November, 1909)]
WHISTLER (AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM)[84]
[From The Atlantic Monthly (August, 1910)]
Mrs. Abby Meguire Roach, "the very cleverest of the Louisville school of women novelists," was born at Philadelphia in 1876. She was educated in the schools of her native city, finishing her training with a year at Wellesley College. In 1899 she was married to Mr. Neill Roach, of Louisville, Kentucky, and that city has been her home since. Mrs. Roach wrote many stories of married life for the New York magazines, which were afterwards collected and published as Some Successful Marriages (New York, 1906). These have been singled out by the reviewers as "charming" and "most beautiful"; and her work has been compared to Miss May Sinclair's, the famous English novelist. One of Mrs. Roach's most recent stories was published in The Century Magazine for July, 1907, entitled "Manifest Destiny," but this has not been followed by any others in the last year or so. "Unremembering June," one of the best of the tales in Some Successful Marriages, relates the love of Molly-Moll for her invalid husband, after whose death she falls in love with Reno, the father of Lola, "who had been his salvage from the wreck of his marriage."
Bibliography. Harper's Magazine (May, 1907); Library of Southern Literature (Atlanta, 1909, v. xv), contains Miss Marilla Waite Freeman's excellent study of Mrs. Roach.
UNREMEMBERING JUNE[85]
[From Some Successful Marriages (New York, 1906)]
"And you will let me have word of you? Surely? And give me a chance to be of use? Won't you?" he persisted, taking leave. She swept his face swiftly with a glance of inquiry, intelligence. "Won't you?"
"O-h—perhaps," with just the faintest puckering of the mouth.
But spring passed without word from her, until there were times when Reno's impatience seethed like a colony of bees at hiving-time.
At last he wrote.
With unpardonable deliberation a brief answer came: Molly's son was a couple months old, but not yet finished enough to be much to look at.
He wrote again: Lola was pale from the city, and bored with herself and her maid; a farm with other children on it sounded like fairyland to her. Could some arrangement be made...?
Lola had been there a month before he had any word but her own hard-written and naturally not very voluminous love-letters, letters in which the homesickness was an ever fainter and fainter echo of the first wild cry, and in which the references to "Dandie" made it plain that she had adopted the other children's auntie into a peculiar relationship with herself. At last a postscript from Mrs. Loring herself:
"Wouldn't you like to come to see her? It's worth a longer trip."
"Of course I would. You're uncommon slow asking me. What kind of father, and man, do you think me?"
Molly was standing with the baby in her arms, chewing its chub of fist. In the warm wind soft wisps of blown brown hair curled all around forehead and neck. Her flesh was firm, transparent, aglow; her skin as clear, satiny, pink as the baby's. And what generous, sweet plumpness! She was at perhaps the most beautiful time of a woman's life—in the glamour of first young motherhood, with the beauty of perfect health and uncoarsened maturity.
And in the black-and-white of her shirt-waist suit there was no more suggestion of mourning than there is thought of winter in full June—rich, warm, full of promise, "unremembering June," the present and future tenses of the year's declension.
As she stood biting the baby, Reno understood why. His look devoured her.
Seeing him, her eyes only gave greeting, and, smiling, directed his to the group of animated children's overalls in a sand-pile in front of her. One particular occupant of one particular pair of overalls spied him. Lola flew. He held her off, brown, round, rosy. "Why, who is this? Whose little girl—or boy—are you?"
Her head dropped; she dropped from his hand like a nipped flower.
"Whose little girl are you?" coached a rich voice with an undercurrent of laughter.
Like a flower again, the child swayed at the breath of that elemental nature. "Dandie's little girl," ventured a small voice. At sight of the father's face, Molly laughed, a laugh of many significances. And with a flood of recollected loyalty, "Papa's!" gasped the child, and smothered him with remorse.
"Wouldn't you like to be Dandie's and papa's little girl all at once?"
("Well! I like that!")
"Why, yes. Ain't I? Can't I?"
"I think you can."
("Oh, you do?")
"No?" His grip on her wrist hurt, and forced her to look up. ("Is it only a mother you want for Lola—and yourself?"); and, looking, she was satisfied; and, looking, she flushed slowly from head to foot, answering him.
"The most loyal, affectionate woman in the world!" he added, after a little.
"Oh, never mind the fairy tales!" she scoffed, pleased, waiting.
He spoke none of the time-honored commonplaces that belittle or dignify or mask the real individual feeling under the stereotype of what it is assumed love ought to be. He could foresee her amusement. Besides, it would have been about as appropriate as trying to capture a bird with a smile.
"But I would never marry any woman that I wasn't sure would be kind to Lola and fond of her."
"Oh, Lola!" Her whole look was soft and sweet. "I am fond of her now." Then a mischievous laugh bubbled in her throat. "And could be of you, too, if you insist." Even with the laugh her eyes were deeper than words, grave and tender.
"As to that, also, Molly-Moll, what you will be to me I am quite satisfied, quite."
Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb, humorist and short-story writer, was born at Paducah, Kentucky, June 23, 1876. He was educated in public and private schools, but the newspaper field loomed large before him, and at the age of nineteen he became editor of the Paducah Daily News. For three years he conducted the "Sour Mash" column in the Louisville Evening Post, when he returned to Paducah to become managing editor of the News-Democrat, which position he held from 1901 to 1904. Late in the year of 1904 Mr. Cobb went to New York, and for a year he was editor of the humorous section and special writer for The Evening Sun. In 1905 he became staff humorist for The World, and for the following six years he remained with that paper. Mr. Cobb has written several plays, none of which have been published in book form, but they have been produced upon the stage. They include: The Campaigner, Funabashi, Mr. Busybody, The Gallery God, The Yeggman, and Daffy-Down-Dilly. He has written many humorous stories, among which may be mentioned: New York Through Funny Glasses, The Hotel Clerk, Live Talks with Dead Ones, Making Peace at Portsmouth, The Gotham Geography, and The Diary of Noah.
Then, one day, the daily grind racked his nerves, he rebelled and bethought himself of the good old days in Kentucky years agone. Ah, what a fine chapter was added to the history of our native letters when Cobb looked backward! Now, when he was but twenty-four years of age, he had written a story, a horror tale of Reelfoot Lake, which he named "Fishhead" and immediately forgot, but which he had brought on East with him. On this he made some minor revisions and started it on its round of the magazine editors. But Cobb didn't wait for the fate of "Fishhead"; and it's a good thing that he didn't! He wrote what he now regards as his first fiction story, The Escape of Mr. Trimm; and The Saturday Evening Post accepted it so quickly, printing it in the issue for November 27, 1909, that Cobb gleefully cashed the cheque and sent them another shortly thereafter. The editor of The Post, George Horace Lorimer, whom many competent judges considered the greatest editor in the United States, realized that a new literary planet had swam into his ken; and in 1911 he asked Cobb to become a staff contributor, which the Kentuckian was delighted to do. All of his stories have appeared in that publication, all save Fishhead, which Mr. Lorimer regarded as a bit too strong medicine for his subscribers. Mr. Cobb's next big story in The Post was one that he has come to regard as the best thing he has done hitherto, "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," which appeared in the issue for January 21, 1911. This was a real horror tale, a "thriller," making one couple the name of Cobb with Poe, a comparison which has gathered strength with the passing of the months. For The Post Mr. Cobb created Judge Priest, a character that has made him famous. He did a group of tales about and around this leading citizen of a certain Southern town—which town was none other than his own Paducah; and which character was none other than old Judge Bishop, whom many Kentuckians recall with pleasure. Cobb is a great realist and he has never had any patience with the romanticists. He painted the old town and the old judge and the judge's friends and enemies—if he had any—just as he remembered them. The best of these yarns, perhaps, was "Words and Music," printed in the issue for October 28, 1911; and when they were collected the other day and published under the title of Back Home (New York, 1912), that story, in which the old judge "rambles," was the first of the ten tales the book contained. Some reviewers of this work have rather loosely characterized it as a novel, and in a certain big sense it is; but the sub-title is a better description: "the narrative of Judge Priest and his people." The book is really a series of pictures; and what Francis H. Underwood did so well in his Kentucky novel, Lord of Himself, and what William C. Watts did much better in his Chronicles of a Kentucky Settlement, Irvin S. Cobb has done in a manner superior to either of them in his Back Home. Judge Priest is a worthy and welcome addition to the gallery of American heroes of prose fiction, hung next to Bret Harte's highest heroes. Cohan and Harris have acquired the dramatic rights of his book, and it is to be made into play-form by Bayard Veiller, author of Within the Law, the great "hit" of the 1912 New York season, in collaboration with the Kentuckian, who once wrote of his original plays, which have already been listed: "One was accidentally destroyed, one was lost, and one was loaned out and never returned." Let us hope that none of these things may overtake the present work; and that, when Thomas Wise struts across the boards in the autumn of 1913 as Judge Priest he may receive a bigger "hand" than he ever drew in The Gentleman from Mississippi.
Besides these tales of Judge Priest, Cobb wrote several detached short-stories, and many humorous articles for The Post during 1912. The best of this humor appeared simultaneously with Back Home, in a delightful little book, called Cobb's Anatomy (New York, 1912). This contained four essays on the following subjects: "Tummies," perhaps the funniest thing he has done so far; "Teeth;" "Hair;" "Hands and Feet." The only adverse criticism to make of the work was its length: it was too short. Its sequel will appear in 1913 under the title of Cobb's Bill of Fare, containing four humorous skits. Aside from his Judge Priest yarns, which began in The Post in the autumn of 1911 and ran throughout the year of 1912, and his humorous papers which also appeared from time to time, Cobb wrote the greatest short-story ever written by a Kentuckian (save that first book of stories by James Lane Allen), entitled "The Belled Buzzard" (The Post, September 28, 1912). This, with "An Occurrence Up a Side Street," and "Fishhead," which is to be published in The Cavalier for January 11, 1913, after having been rejected by almost every reputable magazine in America, form a trio of horror tales of such power as to compel comparison with the best work of Edgar Poe, with the "shade" going to the Kentuckian in many minds. All three of them, together with "The Escape of Mr. Trimm"; "The Exit of Anse Dugmore," a Kentucky mountain yarn; and four unpublished stories, called "Another of Those Cub Reporter Stories"; "Smoke of Battle"; "To the Editor of the Sun;" and "Guilty as Charged," will appear in book form in the autumn of 1913, entitled The Escape of Mr. Trimm.
In summing up Cobb's work for the New York Sun, Robert H. Davis, editor of the Munsey magazines, wrote: "Gelett Burgess, in a lecture at Columbia College, said that Cobb was one of the ten great American humorists. Cobb ought to demand a recount. There are not ten humorists in the world, although Cobb is one of them.... Thus in Irvin Cobb we find Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Edgar Allan Poe at their best.... If he uses his pen for an Alpine stock, the Matterhorn is his." And George Horace Lorimer holds that Cobb is "the biggest writing-man ever born in Kentucky; and he's going to get better all the time." This is certainly high praise, but that it voices the opinions of many people is beyond all question. "The great 'find' of 1912" may be the trade-mark of his future.
Bibliography. Everybody's Magazine (April, 1911); Hampton's Magazine (October, 1911); The American Magazine (November, 1912); Who's Cobb and Why, by R. H. Davis (New York, 1912, a brochure).
THE BELLED BUZZARD[86]
[From The Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia, September 28, 1912)]
There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big Niggerwool, which lay nearer the river. It was traversable only by those who knew it well—an oblong stretch of yellow mud and yellower water, measuring, maybe four miles its longest way and two miles roughly at its widest; and it was full of cypress and stunted swamp oak, with edgings of cane-break and rank weeds; and in one place, where a ridge crossed it from side to side, it was snaggled like an old jaw with dead tree-trunks, rising close-ranked and thick as teeth. It was untenanted of living things—except, down below, there were snakes and mosquitoes, and a few wading and swimming fowl; and up above, those big woodpeckers that the country people called logcocks—larger than pigeons, with flaming crests and spiky tails—swooping in their long, loping flight from snag to snag, always just out of gunshot of the chance invader, and uttering a strident cry which matched those surroundings so fitly that it might well have been the voice of the swamp itself.
On one side Little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road, and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier. At the time I am speaking of it was midsummer, and from these canes and weeds and waterplants there came a smell so rank as almost to be overpowering. They grew thick as a curtain, making a blank green wall taller than a man's head.
Along the dusty stretch of road fronting the swamp nothing living had stirred for half an hour or more. And so at length the weedstems rustled and parted, and out from among them a man came forth silently and cautiously. He was an old man—an old man who had once been fat, but with age had grown lean again, so that now his skin was by odds too large for him. It lay on the back of his neck in folds. Under the chin he was pouched like a pelican and about the jowls was wattled like a turkey-gobbler.
He came out upon the road slowly and stopped there, switching his legs absently with the stalk of a horseweed. He was in his shirtsleeves—a respectable, snuffy old figure; evidently a man deliberate in words and thoughts and actions. There was something about him suggestive of an old staid sheep that had been engaged in a clandestine transaction and was afraid of being found out.
He had made amply sure no one was in sight before he came out of the swamp, but now, to be doubly certain, he watched the empty road—first up, then down—for a long half minute, and fetched a sighing breath of satisfaction. His eyes fell upon his feet and, taken with an idea, he stepped back to the edge of the road and with a wisp of crabgrass wiped his shoes clean of the swamp mud, which was of a different color and texture from the soil of the upland. All his life Squire H. B. Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of the little hill.
He felt perfectly natural—not like a man who had just taken a fellowman's life—but natural and safe, and well satisfied with himself and his morning's work. And he was safe—that was the main thing—absolutely safe. Without hitch or hindrance he had done the thing for which he had been planning and waiting and longing all these months. There had been no slip or mischance; the whole thing had worked out as plainly and simply as two and two make four. No living creature except himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden. No one had seen the two of them enter the swamp; no one had seen the squire emerge, three hours later, alone. The gun, having served its purpose, was hidden again, in a place no mortal eye would ever discover. Face downward, with a hole between his shoulderblades, the dead man was lying where he might lie undiscovered for months or for years, or forever. His pedler's pack was buried in the mud so deep that not even the probing crawfishes could find it. He would never be missed probably. There was but the slightest likelihood that inquiry would ever be made for him—let alone a search. He was a stranger and a foreigner, the dead man was, whose comings and goings made no great stir in the neighborhood, and whose failure to come again would be taken as a matter of course—just one of those shiftless, wandering dagoes, here to-day and gone to-morrow. That was one of the best things about it—these dagoes never had any people in this country to worry about them or look for them when they disappeared. And so it was all over and done with, and nobody the wiser. The squire clapped his hands together briskly with the air of a man dismissing a subject from his mind for good, and mended his gait.
He felt no stabbings of conscience. On the contrary, a glow of gratification filled him. His house was saved from scandal; his present wife would philander no more—before his very eyes—with these young dagoes, who came from nobody knew where, with packs on their backs and persuasive, wheedling tongues in their heads. At this thought the squire raised his head and considered his homestead. It looked pretty good to him—the small white cottage among the honey locusts, with beehives and flowerbeds about it; the tidy whitewashed fence; the sound outbuildings at the back, and the well-tilled acres roundabout.
At the fence he halted and turned about, carelessly and casually, and looked back along the way he had come. Everything was as it should be—the weedfield steaming in the heat; the empty road stretching along the crooked ridge like a long gray snake sunning itself; and beyond it, massing up, the dark, cloaking stretch of swamp. Everything was all right, but——. The squire's eyes, in their loose sacs of skin, narrowed and squinted. Out of the blue arch away over yonder a small black dot had resolved itself and was swinging to and fro, like a mote. A buzzard—hey? Well, there were always buzzards about on a clear day like this. Buzzards were nothing to worry about—almost any time you could see one buzzard, or a dozen buzzards if you were a mind to look for them.
But this particular buzzard now—wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool? The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the buzzards until this minute. Sometimes when cattle strayed the owners had been known to follow the buzzards, knowing mighty well that if the buzzards led the way to where the stray was, the stray would be past the small salvage of hide and hoofs—but the owner's doubts would be set at rest for good and all.
There was a grain of disquiet in this. The squire shook his head to drive the thought away—yet it persisted, coming back like a midge dancing before his face. Once at home, however, Squire Gathers deported himself in a perfectly normal manner. With the satisfied proprietorial eye of an elderly husband who has no rivals, he considered his young wife, busied about her household duties. He sat in an easy-chair upon his front gallery and read his yesterday's Courier-Journal which the rural carrier had brought him; but he kept stepping out into the yard to peer up into the sky and all about him. To the second Mrs. Gathers he explained that he was looking for weather signs. A day as hot and still as this one was a regular weather-breeder; there ought to be rain before night.
"Maybe so," she said; "but looking's not going to bring rain."
Nevertheless the squire continued to look. There was really nothing to worry about; still at midday he did not eat much dinner, and before his wife was half through with hers he was back on the gallery. His paper was cast aside and he was watching. The original buzzard—or, anyhow, he judged it was the first one he had seen—was swinging back and forth in great pendulum swings, but closer down toward the swamp—closer and closer—until it looked from that distance as though the buzzard flew almost at the level of the tallest snags there. And on beyond this first buzzard, coursing above him, were other buzzards. Were there four of them? No; there were five—five in all.
Such is the way of the buzzard—that shifting black question-mark which punctuates a Southern sky. In the woods a shoat or a sheep or a horse lies down to die. At once, coming seemingly out of nowhere, appears a black spot, up five hundred feet or a thousand in the air. In broad loops and swirls this dot swings round and round and round, coming a little closer to earth at every turn and always with one particular spot upon the earth for the axis of its wheel. Out of space also other moving spots emerge and grow larger as they tack and jibe and drop nearer, coming in their leisurely buzzard way to the feast. There is no haste—the feast will wait. If it is a dumb creature that has fallen stricken the grim coursers will sooner or later be assembled about it and alongside it, scrouging ever closer and closer to the dying thing, with awkward outthrustings of their naked necks and great dust-raising flaps of the huge, unkempt wings; lifting their feathered shanks high and stiffly like old crippled grave-diggers in overalls too tight—but silent and patient all, offering no attack until the last tremor runs through the stiffening carcass and the eyes glaze over. To humans the buzzard pays a deeper meed of respect—he hangs aloft longer; but in the end he comes. No scavenger shark, no carrion crab, has chambered more grisly secrets in his digestive processes than this big charnel bird. Such is the way of the buzzard.
The squire missed his afternoon nap, a thing that had not happened in years. He stayed on the front gallery and kept count. Those moving distant black specks typified uneasiness for the squire—not fear exactly, or panic or anything akin to it, but a nibbling, nagging kind of uneasiness. Time and again he said to himself that he would not think about them any more; but he did—unceasingly.
By supper-time there were seven of them.
He slept light and slept badly. It was not the thought of that dead man lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether. Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked drowsily what ailed him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything?
Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering him, he told her. It was a hot-enough night—wasn't it? And when a man got a little along in life he was apt to be a light sleeper—wasn't that so? Well, then? She turned upon her side and slept again with her light, purring snore. The squire lay awake, thinking hard and waiting for day to come.
At the first faint pink-and-gray glow he was up and out upon the gallery. He cut a comic figure standing there, in his shirt in the half light, with the dewlap at his throat dangling grotesquely in the neck-opening of the unbuttoned garment, and his bare bowed legs showing, splotched and varicose. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline below, to the south. Buzzards are early risers too. Presently, as the heavens shimmered with the miracle of sunrise, he could make them out—six or seven, or maybe eight.
An hour after breakfast the squire was on his way down through the weed field to the country road. He went half eagerly, half unwillingly. He wanted to make sure about those buzzards. It might be that they were aiming for the old pasture at the head of the swamp. There were sheep grazing there—and it might be that a sheep had died. Buzzards were notoriously fond of sheep, when dead. Or, if they were pointed for the swamp he must satisfy himself exactly what part of the swamp it was. He was at the stake-and-rider fence when a mare came jogging down the road, drawing a rig with a man in it. At sight of the squire in the field the man pulled up.
"Hi, squire!" he began. "Goin' somewheres?"
"No; jest knockin' about," the squire said—"jest sorter lookin' the place over."
"Hot agin—ain't it?" said the other.
The squire allowed that it was, for a fact, mighty hot. Commonplaces of gossip followed this—county politics, and a neighbor's wife sick of breakbone fever down the road a piece. The subject of crops succeeded inevitably. The squire spoke of the need of rain. Instantly he regretted it, for the other man, who was by way of being a weather wiseacre, cocked his head aloft to study the sky for any signs of clouds.
"Wonder whut all them buzzards are doin' yonder, squire," he said, pointing upward with his whipstock.
"Whut buzzards—where?" asked the squire with an elaborate note of carelessness in his voice.
"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool—see 'em there?"
"Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin' nothin, I reckin—jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear weather."
"Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy.
"A hawg probably," said the squire promptly—almost too promptly. "There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool. Bristow, over the other side from here—he's got a big drove of hawgs."
"Well, mebbe so," said the man; "but hawgs is a heap more apt to be feedin' on high ground, seems like to me. Well, I'll be gittin' along towards town. G'day, squire." And he slapped the lines down on the mare's flank and jogged off through the dust.
He could not have suspected anything—that man couldn't. As the squire turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made people curious—made them ask questions.
He was halfway across the weedfield when, above the hum of insect life, above the inward clamor of his own busy speculations, there came to his ear dimly and distantly a sound that made him halt and cant his head to one side the better to hear it. Somewhere, a good way off, there was a thin, thready, broken strain of metallic clinking and clanking—an eery ghost-chime ringing. It came nearer and became plainer—tonk-tonk-tonk; then the tonks all running together briskly.
A cowbell—that was it; but why did it seem to come from overhead, from up in the sky, like? And why did it shift so abruptly from one quarter to another—from left to right and back again to left? And how was it that the clapper seemed to strike so fast? Not even the breachiest of breachy young heifers could be expected to tinkle a cowbell with such briskness. The squire's eye searched the earth and the sky, his troubled mind giving to his eye a quick and flashing scrutiny. He had it. It was not a cow at all. It was not anything that went on four legs.
One of the loathly flock had left the others. The orbit of his swing had carried him across the road and over Squire Gathers' land. He was sailing right toward and over the squire now. Craning his flabby neck the squire could make out the unwholesome contour of the huge bird. He could see the ragged black wings—a buzzard's wings are so often ragged and uneven—and the naked throat; the slim, naked head; the big feet folded up against the dingy belly. And he could see a bell too—an ordinary cowbell—that dangled at the creature's breast and jangled incessantly. All his life nearly Squire Gathers had been hearing about the Belled Buzzard. Now with his own eye he was seeing him.
Once, years and years and years ago, some one trapped a buzzard, and before freeing it clamped about its skinny neck a copper band with a cowbell pendent from it. Since then the bird so ornamented has been seen a hundred times—and heard oftener—over an area as wide as half the continent. It has been reported, now in Kentucky, now in Florida, now in North Carolina—now anywhere between the Ohio River and the Gulf. Crossroads correspondents take their pens in hand to write to the country papers that on such and such a date, at such a place, So-and-So saw the Belled Buzzard. Always it is the Belled Buzzard, never a belled buzzard. The Belled Buzzard is an institution.
There must be more than one of them. It seems hard to believe that one bird, even a buzzard in his prime, and protected by law in every Southern state and known to be a bird of great age, could live so long and range so far, and wear a clinking cowbell all the time! Probably other jokers have emulated the original joker; probably if the truth were known there have been a dozen such; but the country people will have it that there is only one Belled Buzzard—a bird that bears a charmed life and on his neck a never-silent bell.
Squire Gathers regarded it a most untoward thing that the Belled Buzzard should have come just at this time. The movements of ordinary, unmarked buzzards mainly concerned only those whose stock had strayed; but almost anybody with time to spare might follow this rare and famous visitor, this belled and feathered junkman of the sky. Supposing now that some one followed it to-day—maybe followed it even to a certain thick clump of cypress in the middle of Little Niggerwool!
But at this particular moment the Belled Buzzard was heading directly away from that quarter. Could it be following him? Of course not! It was just by chance that it flew along the course the squire was taking. But, to make sure, he veered off sharply, away from the footpath into the high weeds. He was right; it was only a chance. The Belled Buzzard swung off, too, but in the opposite direction, with a sharp tonking of its bell, and, flapping hard, was in a minute or two out of hearing and sight, past the trees to the westward.
Again the squire skimped his dinner, and again he spent the long, drowsy afternoon upon his front gallery. In all the sky there were now no buzzards visible, belled or unbelled—they had settled to earth somewhere; and it served somewhat to soothe the squire's pestered mind. This does not mean, though, that he was by any means easy in his thoughts. Outwardly he was calm enough, with the ruminative judicial air befitting the oldest justice of the peace in the county; but, within him, a little something gnawed unceasingly at his nerves like one of those small white worms that are to be found in seemingly sound nuts. About once in so long a tiny spasm of the muscles would contract the dewlap under his chin. The squire had never heard of that play, made famous by a famous player, wherein the murdered victim was a pedler, too, and a clamoring bell the voice of unappeasable remorse in the murderer's ear. As a strict church goer the squire had no use for players or for play-actors, and so was spared that added canker to his conscience. It was bad enough as it was.
That night, as on the night before, the old man's sleep was broken and fitful, and disturbed by dreaming, in which he heard a metal clapper striking against a brazen surface. This was one dream that came true. Just after daybreak he heaved himself out of bed, with a flop of his broad bare feet upon the floor, and stepped to the window and peered out. Half seen in the pinkish light, the Belled Buzzard flapped directly over his roof and flew due south, right toward the swamp—drawing a direct line through the air between the slayer and the victim—or, anyway, so it seemed to the watcher, grown suddenly tremulous.
Kneedeep in yellow swamp water the squire squatted, with his shotgun cocked and loaded and ready, waiting to kill the bird that now typified for him guilt and danger and an abiding great fear. Gnats plagued him and about him frogs croaked. Almost overhead a logcock clung lengthwise to a snag, watching him. Snake-doctors, insects with bronze bodies and filmy wings, went back and forth like small living shuttles. Other buzzards passed and repassed, but the squire waited, forgetting the cramps in his elderly limbs and the discomfort of the water in his shoes.
At length he heard the bell. It came nearer and nearer, and the Belled Buzzard swung overhead not sixty feet up, its black bulk a fair target against the blue. He aimed and fired, both barrels bellowing at once and a fog of thick powder smoke enveloping him. Through the smoke he saw the bird careen, and its bell jangled furiously; then the buzzard righted itself and was gone, fleeing so fast that the sound of its bell was hushed almost instantly. Two long wing feathers drifted slowly down; torn disks of gunwadding and shredded green scraps of leaves descended about the squire in a little shower.
He cast his empty gun from him, so that it fell in the water and disappeared; and he hurried out of the swamp as fast as his shaky legs would take him, splashing himself with mire and water to his eyebrows. Mucked with mud, breathing in great gulps, trembling, a suspicious figure to any eye, he burst through the weed curtain and staggered into the open, his caution all gone and a vast desperation fairly choking him—but the gray road was empty and the field beyond the road was empty; and, except for him, the whole world seemed empty and silent.
As he crossed the field Squire Gathers composed himself. With plucked handfuls of grass he cleaned himself of much of the swamp mire that coated him over; but the little white worm that gnawed at his nerves had become a cold snake that was coiled about his heart, squeezing it tighter and tighter!
This episode of the attempt to kill the Belled Buzzard occurred in the afternoon of the third day. In the forenoon of the fourth, the weather being still hot, with cloudless skies and no air stirring, there was a rattle of warped wheels in the squire's lane and a hail at his yard fence. Coming out upon his gallery from the innermost darkened room of his house, where he had been stretched upon a bed, the squire shaded his eyes from the glare and saw the constable of his own magisterial district sitting in a buggy at the gate waiting for some one.
The old man came down the dirtpath slowly, almost reluctantly, with his head twisted up sidewise, listening, watching; but the constable sensed nothing strange about the other's gait and posture; the constable was full of the news he brought. He began to unload the burden of it without preamble.
"Mornin', Squire Gathers. There's been a dead man found in Little Niggerwool—and you're wanted."
He did not notice that the squire was holding on with both hands to the gate; but he did notice that the squire had a sick look out of his eyes and a dead, pasty color in his face; and he noticed—but attached no meaning to it—that when the Squire spoke his voice seemed flat and hollow.
"Wanted—fur—whut?" The squire forced the words out of his throat.
"Why, to hold the inquest," explained the constable. "The coroner's sick abed, and he said you bein' the nearest jestice of the peace should serve."
"Oh," said the squire with more ease. "Well, where is it—the body?"
"They taken it to Bristow's place and put it in his stable for the present. They brought it out over on that side and his place was the nearest. If you'll hop in here with me, squire, I'll ride you right over there now. There's enough men already gathered to make up a jury, I reckin."
"I—I ain't well," demurred the squire. "I've been sleepin' porely these last few nights. It's the heat," he added quickly.
"Well, such, you don't look very brash, and that's a fact," said the constable; "but this here job ain't goin' to keep you long. You see it's in such shape—the body is—that there ain't no way of makin' out who the feller was, nor whut killed him. There ain't nobody reported missin' in this county as we know of, either; so I jedge a verdict of a unknown person dead from unknown causes would be about the correct thing. And we kin git it all over mighty quick and put him underground right away, suh—if you'll go along now."
"I'll go," agreed the squire, almost quivering in his newborn eagerness. "I'll go right now." He did not wait to get his coat or to notify his wife of the errand that was taking him. In his shirtsleeves he climbed into the buggy, and the constable turned his horse and clucked him into a trot. And now the squire asked the question that knocked at his lips demanding to be asked—the question the answer to which he yearned for and yet dreaded.
"How did they come to find—it?"
"Well, suh, that's a funny thing," said the constable. "Early this mornin' Bristow's oldest boy—that one they call Buddy—he heared a cowbell over in the swamp and so he went to look; Bristow's got cows, as you know, and one or two of 'em is belled. And he kept on followin' after the sound of it till he got way down into the thickest part of them cypress slashes that's near the middle there; and right there he run acrost it—this body.
"But, suh, squire, it wasn't no cow at all. No, suh; it was a buzzard with a cowbell on his neck—that's whut it was. Yes, suh; that there same old Belled Buzzard he's come back agin and is hangin' round. They tell me he ain't been seen round here sence the year of the yellow fever—I don't remember myself, but that's whut they tell me. The niggers over on the other side are right smartly worked up over it. They say—the niggers do—that when the Belled Buzzard comes it's a sign of bad luck for somebody, shore!"
The constable drove on, talking on, garrulous as a guinea-hen. The squire didn't heed him. Hunched back in the buggy he harkened only to those busy inner voices filling his mind with thundering portents. Even so, his ear was first to catch above the rattle of the buggy wheels the faraway, faint tonk-tonk! They were about halfway to Bristow's place then. He gave no sign, and it was perhaps half a minute before the constable heard it too.
The constable jerked the horse to a standstill and craned his neck over his shoulder.
"Well, by doctors!" he cried, "if there ain't the old scoundrel now, right here behind us! I kin see him plain as day—he's got an old cowbell hitched to his neck; and he's shy a couple of feathers out of one wing. By doctors, that's somethin' you won't see every day! In all my born days I ain't never seen the beat of that!"
Squire Gathers did not look; he only cowered back farther under the buggy-top. In the pleasing excitement of the moment his companion took no heed, though, of anything except the Belled Buzzard.
"Is he followin' us?" asked the squire in a curiously flat voice.
"Which—him?" answered the constable, still stretching his neck. "No, he's gone now—gone off to the left—jest a-zoonin', like he'd forgot somethin'."
And Bristow's place was to the left! But there might still be time. To get the inquest over and the body underground—those were the main things. Ordinarily humane in his treatment of stock, Squire Gathers urged the constable to greater speed. The horse was lathered and his sides heaved wearily as they pounded across the bridge over the creek which was the outlet to the swamp and emerged from a patch of woods in sight of Bristow's farm buildings.
The house was set on a little hill among cleared fields, and was in other respects much like the squire's own house, except that it was smaller and not so well painted. There was a wide yard in front with shade trees and a lye-hopper and a well-box, and a paling fence with a stile in it instead of a gate. At the rear, behind a clutter of outbuildings—a barn, a smokehouse and a corncrib—was a little peach orchard; and flanking the house on the right there was a good-sized cowyard, empty of stock at this hour, with feeding racks ranged in a row against the fence. A two-year-old negro child, bareheaded and barefooted, and wearing but a single garment, was grubbing busily in the dirt under one of these feedracks.
To the front fence a dozen or more riding horses were hitched, flicking their tails at the flies; and on the gallery men in their shirtsleeves were grouped. An old negro woman, with her head tied in a bandanna and a man's old slouch hat perched upon the bandanna, peeped out from behind a corner. There were hound dogs wandering about, sniffing uneasily.
Before the constable had the horse hitched the squire was out of the buggy and on his way up the footpath, going at a brisker step than the squire usually traveled. The men on the porch hailed him gravely and ceremoniously, as befitting an occasion of solemnity. Afterward some of them recalled the look in his eye; but at the moment they noted it—if they noted it at all—subconsciously.