Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  In his studio Hawker smoked a pipe, clasping his knee with thoughtful, interlocked fingers. He was gazing sourly at his finished picture. Once he started to his feet with a cry of vexation. Looking back over his shoulder, he swore an insult into the face of the picture. He paced to and fro, smoking belligerently and from time to time eying it. The helpless thing remained upon the easel, facing him.

  Hollanden entered and stopped abruptly at sight of the great scowl. “What’s wrong now?” he said.

  Hawker gestured at the picture. “That dunce of a thing. It makes me tired. It isn’t worth a hang. Blame it!”

  “What?” Hollanden strode forward and stood before the painting with legs apart, in a properly critical manner. “What? Why, you said it was your best thing.”

  “Aw!” said Hawker, waving his arms, “it’s no good! I abominate it! I didn’t get what I wanted, I tell you. I didn’t get what I wanted. That?” he shouted, pointing thrust-way at it—”that? It’s vile! Aw! it makes me weary.”

  “You’re in a nice state,” said Hollanden, turning to take a critical view of the painter. “What has got into you now? I swear, you are more kinds of a chump!”

  Hawker crooned dismally: “I can’t paint! I can’t paint for a damn! I’m no good. What in thunder was I invented for, anyhow, Hollie?”

  “You’re a fool,” said Hollanden. “I hope to die if I ever saw such a complete idiot! You give me a pain. Just because she don’t — —”

  “It isn’t that. She has nothing to do with it, although I know well enough — I know well enough — —”

  “What?”

  “I know well enough she doesn’t care a hang for me. It isn’t that. It is because — it is because I can’t paint. Look at that thing over there! Remember the thought and energy I —— Damn the thing!”

  “Why, did you have a row with her?” asked Hollanden, perplexed. “I didn’t know — —”

  “No, of course you didn’t know,” cried Hawker, sneering; “because I had no row. It isn’t that, I tell you. But I know well enough” — he shook his fist vaguely—”that she don’t care an old tomato can for me. Why should she?” he demanded with a curious defiance. “In the name of Heaven, why should she?”

  “I don’t know,” said Hollanden; “I don’t know, I’m sure. But, then, women have no social logic. This is the great blessing of the world. There is only one thing which is superior to the multiplicity of social forms, and that is a woman’s mind — a young woman’s mind. Oh, of course, sometimes they are logical, but let a woman be so once, and she will repent of it to the end of her days. The safety of the world’s balance lies in woman’s illogical mind. I think — —”

  “Go to blazes!” said Hawker. “I don’t care what you think. I am sure of one thing, and that is that she doesn’t care a hang for me!”

  “I think,” Hollanden continued, “that society is doing very well in its work of bravely lawing away at Nature; but there is one immovable thing — a woman’s illogical mind. That is our safety. Thank Heaven, it — —”

  “Go to blazes!” said Hawker again.

  CHAPTER XXXIII.

  As Hawker again entered the room of the great windows he glanced in sidelong bitterness at the chandelier. When he was seated he looked at it in open defiance and hatred.

  Men in the street were shovelling at the snow. The noise of their instruments scraping on the stones came plainly to Hawker’s ears in a harsh chorus, and this sound at this time was perhaps to him a miserere.

  “I came to tell you,” he began, “I came to tell you that perhaps I am going away.”

  “Going away!” she cried. “Where?”

  “Well, I don’t know — quite. You see, I am rather indefinite as yet. I thought of going for the winter somewhere in the Southern States. I am decided merely this much, you know — I am going somewhere. But I don’t know where. ‘Way off, anyhow.”

  “We shall be very sorry to lose you,” she remarked. “We — —”

  “And I thought,” he continued, “that I would come and say ‘adios’ now for fear that I might leave very suddenly. I do that sometimes. I’m afraid you will forget me very soon, but I want to tell you that — —”

  “Why,” said the girl in some surprise, “you speak as if you were going away for all time. You surely do not mean to utterly desert New York?”

  “I think you misunderstand me,” he said. “I give this important air to my farewell to you because to me it is a very important event. Perhaps you recollect that once I told you that I cared for you. Well, I still care for you, and so I can only go away somewhere — some place ‘way off — where — where —— See?”

  “New York is a very large place,” she observed.

  “Yes, New York is a very large —— How good of you to remind me! But then you don’t understand. You can’t understand. I know I can find no place where I will cease to remember you, but then I can find some place where I can cease to remember in a way that I am myself. I shall never try to forget you. Those two violets, you know — one I found near the tennis court and the other you gave me, you remember — I shall take them with me.”

  “Here,” said the girl, tugging at her gown for a moment—”Here! Here’s a third one.” She thrust a violet toward him.

  “If you were not so serenely insolent,” said Hawker, “I would think that you felt sorry for me. I don’t wish you to feel sorry for me. And I don’t wish to be melodramatic. I know it is all commonplace enough, and I didn’t mean to act like a tenor. Please don’t pity me.”

  “I don’t,” she replied. She gave the violet a little fling.

  Hawker lifted his head suddenly and glowered at her. “No, you don’t,” he at last said slowly, “you don’t. Moreover, there is no reason why you should take the trouble. But — —”

  He paused when the girl leaned and peered over the arm of her chair precisely in the manner of a child at the brink of a fountain. “There’s my violet on the floor,” she said. “You treated it quite contemptuously, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Together they stared at the violet. Finally he stooped and took it in his fingers. “I feel as if this third one was pelted at me, but I shall keep it. You are rather a cruel person, but, Heaven guard us! that only fastens a man’s love the more upon a woman.”

  She laughed. “That is not a very good thing to tell a woman.”

  “No,” he said gravely, “it is not, but then I fancy that somebody may have told you previously.”

  She stared at him, and then said, “I think you are revenged for my serene insolence.”

  “Great heavens, what an armour!” he cried. “I suppose, after all, I did feel a trifle like a tenor when I first came here, but you have chilled it all out of me. Let’s talk upon indifferent topics.” But he started abruptly to his feet. “No,” he said, “let us not talk upon indifferent topics. I am not brave, I assure you, and it — it might be too much for me.” He held out his hand. “Good-bye.”

  “You are going?”

  “Yes, I am going. Really I didn’t think how it would bore you for me to come around here and croak in this fashion.”

  “And you are not coming back for a long, long time?”

  “Not for a long, long time.” He mimicked her tone. “I have the three violets now, you know, and you must remember that I took the third one even when you flung it at my head. That will remind you how submissive I was in my devotion. When you recall the two others it will remind you of what a fool I was. Dare say you won’t miss three violets.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Particularly the one you flung at my head. That violet was certainly freely — given.”

  “I didn’t fling it at your head.” She pondered for a time with her eyes upon the floor. Then she murmured, “No more freely — given than the one I gave you that night — that night at the inn.”

  “So very good of you to tell me so!”

  Her eyes were still upon the floor.

&n
bsp; “Do you know,” said Hawker, “it is very hard to go away and leave an impression in your mind that I am a fool? That is very hard. Now, you do think I am a fool, don’t you?”

  She remained silent. Once she lifted her eyes and gave him a swift look with much indignation in it.

  “Now you are enraged. Well, what have I done?”

  It seemed that some tumult was in her mind, for she cried out to him at last in sudden tearfulness: “Oh, do go! Go! Please! I want you to go!”

  Under this swift change Hawker appeared as a man struck from the sky. He sprang to his feet, took two steps forward, and spoke a word which was an explosion of delight and amazement. He said, “What?”

  With heroic effort she slowly raised her eyes until, alight with anger, defiance, unhappiness, they met his eyes.

  Later, she told him that he was perfectly ridiculous.

  ACTIVE SERVICE

  Frederick A. Stokes of New York and Heinemann of London published Active Service in 1899. Crane’s last novel published during his lifetime, Active Service tells the story of a young American journalist living in Greece during the time of the Greco-Turkish war. The novel’s plot revolves around both the journalist’s search for an American professor and his archaeological students lost in Greece and with his courtship of a young woman traveling with them, the professor’s daughter. Complications arise in the form of another woman, who lays a claim upon him.

  An unsigned review in Literary News noted that “the story is worth the telling” and claimed that Crane “has reached maturity at a bound in his new novel.” However, The Dial damned with faint praise: “Recollections of that study in chromatic emotion, The Red Badge of Courage, and of the ineffectual pieces of realism by which it was followed, have not led us to expect work of any sort of real interest and value from Mr. Stephen Crane. His reputation seems to have risen like a rocket amid the glare of colored fires, and come down to earth like the proverbial stick. It is, then, with considerable surprise that we find in ‘Active Service’ a novel which, while not exactly meritorious according to a serious standard, is at least readable and entertaining, by virtue of having a story to tell, and of telling it with much effectiveness.” The Graphic praised Crane’s uncanny ability to describe war conditions: “Mr. Crane can make his readers feel the whiz of a bullet, and that is well for non-combatants to realise in these days.” Crane had, in fact, spent time as a journlist, reporting on the Greco-Turkish war close up.

  A first edition copy of Active Service, published by Frederick A. Stokes

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXII.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVIL

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX

  Stephen Crane in 1899, photograph by Elliott and Fry

  Stephen Crane with his friend, C.K. Linson, possibly in New York

  TO E. A.

  CHAPTER I.

  MARJORY walked pensively along the hall. In the cool shadows made by the palms on the window ledge, her face wore the expression of thoughtful melancholy expected on the faces of the devotees who pace in cloistered gloom. She halted before a door at the end of the hall and laid her hand on the knob. She stood hesitating, her head bowed. It was evident that this mission was to require great fortitude.

  At last she opened the door. “Father,” she began at once. There was disclosed an elderly, narrow-faced man seated at a large table and surrounded by manuscripts and books. The sunlight flowing through curtains of Turkey red fell sanguinely upon the bust of dead-eyed Pericles on the mantle. A little clock was ticking, hidden somewhere among the countless leaves of writing, the maps and broad heavy tomes that swarmed upon the table.

  Her father looked up quickly with an ogreish scowl. “Go away!” he cried in a rage. “Go away. Go away. Get out!” He seemed on the point of arising to eject the visitor. It was plain to her that he had been interrupted in the writing of one of his sentences, ponderous, solemn and endless, in which wandered multitudes of homeless and friendless prepositions, adjectives looking for a parent, and quarrelling nouns, sentences which no longer symbolised the language-form of thought but which had about them a quaint aroma from the dens of long-dead scholars. “Get out,” snarled the professor.

  “Father,” faltered the girl. Either because his formulated thought was now completely knocked out of his mind by his own emphasis in defending it, or because he detected something of portent in her expression, his manner suddenly changed, and with a petulant glance at his writing he laid down his pen and sank back in his chair to listen. “Well, what is it, my child?”

  The girl took a chair near the window and gazed out upon the snow-stricken campus, where at the moment a group of students returning from a class room were festively hurling snow-balls. “I’ve got something important to tell you, father,” said she, “but I don’t quite know how to say it.”

  “Something important?” repeated the professor. He was not habitually interested in the affairs of his family, but this proclamation that something important could be connected with them, filled his mind with a capricious interest. “Well, what is it, Marjory?”

  She replied calmly: “Rufus Coleman wants to marry me.”

  “What?” demanded the professor loudly. “Rufus Coleman. What do you mean?”

  The girl glanced furtively at him. She did not seem to be able to frame a suitable sentence.

  As for the professor, he had, like all men both thoughtless and thoughtful, told himself that one day his daughter would come to him with a tale of this kind. He had never forgotten that the little girl was to be a woman, and he had never forgotten that this tall, lithe creature, the present Marjory, was a woman. He had been entranced and confident or entranced and apprehensive according to the time. A man focussed upon astronomy, the pig market or social progression, may nevertheless have a secondary mind which hovers like a spirit over his dahlia tubers and dreams upon the mystery of their slow and tender revelations. The professor’s secondary mind had dwelt always with his daughter and watched with a faith and delight the changing to a woman of a certain fat and mumbling babe. However, he now saw this machine, this self-sustaining, self-operative love, which had run with the ease of a clock, suddenly crumble to ashes and leave the mind of a great scholar staring at a calamity. “Rufus Coleman,” he repeated, stunned. Here was his daughter, very obviously desirous of marrying Rufus Coleman. “Marjory,” he cried in amazement and fear, “what possesses you? Marry Rufus Coleman?”

  The girl seemed to feel a strong sense of relief at his prompt recognition of a fact. Being freed from the necessity of making a flat declaration, she simply hung her head and blushed impressively. A hush fell upon them. The professor stared long at his daughter. The shadow of unhappiness deepened upon his face. “Marjory, Marjory,” he murmured at last. He had tramped heroically upon his panic and devoted his strength to bringing thought into some kind of attitude toward this terrible fact. “I am — I am surprised,” he began. Fixing her then with a stern eye, he asked: “Why do you wish to marry this man? You, with your opportunities of meeting persons of intelligence. And you want to marry—” His voice grew tragic. “You want to marry the Sunday editor of the New York Eclipse.”

  “It is not so very terrible, is it?” said Marjory sullenly.

&n
bsp; “Wait a moment; don’t talk,” cried the professor. He arose and walked nervously to and fro, his hands flying in the air. He was very red behind the ears as when in the class-room some student offended him. “A gambler, a sporter of fine clothes, an expert on champagne, a polite loafer, a witness knave who edits the Sunday edition of a great outrage upon our sensibilities. You want to marry him, this man? Marjory, you are insane. This fraud who asserts that his work is intelligent, this fool comes here to my house and—”

  He became aware that his daughter was regarding him coldly. “I thought we had best have all this part of it over at once,” she remarked.

  He confronted her in a new kind of surprise. The little keen-eyed professor was at this time imperial, on the verge of a majestic outburst. “Be still,” he said. “Don’t be clever with your father. Don’t be a dodger. Or, if you are, don’t speak of it to me. I suppose this fine young man expects to see me personally?”

  “He was coming to-morrow,” replied Marjory. She began to weep. “He was coming to-morrow.”

  “Um,” said the professor. He continued his pacing while Marjory wept with her head bowed to the arm of the chair. His brow made the three dark vertical crevices well known to his students. Sometimes he glowered murderously at the photographs of ancient temples which adorned the walls. “My poor child,” he said once, as he paused near her, “to think I never knew you were a fool. I have been deluding myself. It has been my fault as much as it has been yours. I will not readily forgive myself.”

  The girl raised her face and looked at him. Finally, resolved to disregard the dishevelment wrought by tears, she presented a desperate front with her wet eyes and flushed cheeks. Her hair was disarrayed. “I don’t see why you can call me a fool,” she said. The pause before this sentence had been so portentous of a wild and rebellious speech that the professor almost laughed now. But still the father for the first time knew that he was being undauntedly faced by his child in his own library, in the presence of 372 pages of the book that was to be his masterpiece. At the back of his mind he felt a great awe as if his own youthful spirit had come from the past and challenged him with a glance. For a moment he was almost a defeated man. He dropped into a chair. “Does your mother know of this?” he asked mournfully.