Complete Works of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  The veteran looked down and grinned. Observing his manner, the entire group tittered. “Well, I guess I was,” he answered finally. “Pretty well scared, sometimes. Why, in my first battle I thought the sky was falling down. I thought the world was coming to an end. You bet I was scared.”

  Every one laughed. Perhaps it seemed strange and rather wonderful to them that a man should admit the thing, and in the tone of their laughter there was probably more admiration than if old Fleming had declared that he had always been a lion. Moreover, they knew that he had ranked as an orderly sergeant, and so their opinion of his heroism was fixed. None, to be sure, knew how an orderly sergeant ranked, but then it was understood to be somewhere just shy of a major general’s stars. So, when old Henry admitted that he had been frightened, there was a laugh.

  “The trouble was,” said the old man, “I thought they were all shooting at me. Yes, sir, I thought every man in the other army was aiming at me in particular, and only me. And it seemed so darned unreasonable, you know. I wanted to explain to ’em what an almighty good fellow I was, because I thought then they might quit all trying to hit me. But I couldn’t explain, and they kept on being unreasonable — blim! — blam! — bang! So I run!”

  Two little triangles of wrinkles appeared at the corners of his eyes. Evidently he appreciated some comedy in this recital. Down near his feet, however, little Jim, his grandson, was visibly horror-stricken. His hands were clasped nervously, and his eyes were wide with astonishment at this terrible scandal, his most magnificent grandfather telling such a thing.

  “That was at Chancellorsville. Of course, afterward I got kind of used to it. A man does. Lots of men, though, seem to feel all right from the start. I did, as soon as I ‘got on to it,’ as they say now; but at first I was pretty well flustered. Now, there was young Jim Conklin, old Si Conklin’s son — that used to keep the tannery — you none of you recollect him — well, he went into it from the start just as if he was born to it. But with me it was different. I had to get used to it.”

  When little Jim walked with his grandfather he was in the habit of skipping along on the stone pavement in front of the three stores and the hotel of the town and betting that he could avoid the cracks. But upon this day he walked soberly, with his hand gripping two of his grandfather’s fingers. Sometimes he kicked abstractedly at dandelions that curved over the walk. Any one could see that he was much troubled.

  “There’s Sickles’s colt over in the medder, Jimmie,” said the old man. “Don’t you wish you owned one like him?”

  “Um,” said the boy, with a strange lack of interest. He continued his reflections. Then finally he ventured, “Grandpa — now — was that true what you was telling those men?”

  “What?” asked the grandfather. “What was I telling them?”

  “Oh, about your running.”

  “Why, yes, that was true enough, Jimmie. It was my first fight, and there was an awful lot of noise, you know.”

  Jimmie seemed dazed that this idol, of its own will, should so totter. His stout boyish idealism was injured.

  Presently the grandfather said: “Sickles’s colt is going for a drink. Don’t you wish you owned Sickles’s colt, Jimmie?”

  The boy merely answered, “He ain’t as nice as our’n.” He lapsed then into another moody silence.

  One of the hired men, a Swede, desired to drive to the county seat for purposes of his own. The old man loaned a horse and an unwashed buggy. It appeared later that one of the purposes of the Swede was to get drunk.

  After quelling some boisterous frolic of the farm hands and boys in the garret, the old man had that night gone peacefully to sleep, when he was aroused by clamouring at the kitchen door. He grabbed his trousers, and they waved out behind as he dashed forward. He could hear the voice of the Swede, screaming and blubbering. He pushed the wooden button, and, as the door flew open, the Swede, a maniac, stumbled inward, chattering, weeping, still screaming: “De barn fire! Fire! Fire! De barn fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  There was a swift and indescribable change in the old man. His face ceased instantly to be a face; it became a mask, a gray thing, with horror written about the mouth and eyes. He hoarsely shouted at the foot of the little rickety stairs, and immediately, it seemed, there came down an avalanche of men. No one knew that during this time the old lady had been standing in her night clothes at the bedroom door, yelling: “What’s th’ matter? What’s th’ matter? What’s th’ matter?”

  When they dashed toward the barn it presented to their eyes its usual appearance, solemn, rather mystic in the black night. The Swede’s lantern was overturned at a point some yards in front of the barn doors. It contained a wild little conflagration of its own, and even in their excitement some of those who ran felt a gentle secondary vibration of the thrifty part of their minds at sight of this overturned lantern. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been a calamity.

  But the cattle in the barn were trampling, trampling, trampling, and above this noise could be heard a humming like the song of innumerable bees. The old man hurled aside the great doors, and a yellow flame leaped out at one corner and sped and wavered frantically up the old gray wall. It was glad, terrible, this single flame, like the wild banner of deadly and triumphant foes.

  The motley crowd from the garret had come with all the pails of the farm. They flung themselves upon the well. It was a leisurely old machine, long dwelling in indolence. It was in the habit of giving out water with a sort of reluctance. The men stormed at it, cursed it; but it continued to allow the buckets to be filled only after the wheezy windlass had howled many protests at the mad-handed men.

  With his opened knife in his hand old Fleming himself had gone headlong into the barn, where the stifling smoke swirled with the air currents, and where could be heard in its fulness the terrible chorus of the flames, laden with tones of hate and death, a hymn of wonderful ferocity.

  He flung a blanket over an old mare’s head, cut the halter close to the manger, led the mare to the door, and fairly kicked her out to safety. He returned with the same blanket, and rescued one of the work horses. He took five horses out, and then came out himself, with his clothes bravely on fire. He had no whiskers, and very little hair on his head. They soused five pailfuls of water on him. His eldest son made a clean miss with the sixth pailful, because the old man had turned and was running down the decline and around to the basement of the barn, where were the stanchions of the cows. Some one noticed at the time that he ran very lamely, as if one of the frenzied horses had smashed his hip.

  The cows, with their heads held in the heavy stanchions, had thrown themselves, strangled themselves, tangled themselves: done everything which the ingenuity of their exuberant fear could suggest to them.

  Here, as at the well, the same thing happened to every man save one. Their hands went mad. They became incapable of everything save the power to rush into dangerous situations.

  The old man released the cow nearest the door, and she, blind drunk with terror, crashed into the Swede. The Swede had been running to and fro babbling. He carried an empty milk pail, to which he clung with an unconscious, fierce enthusiasm. He shrieked like one lost as he went under the cow’s hoofs, and the milk pail, rolling across the floor, made a flash of silver in the gloom.

  Old Fleming took a fork, beat off the cow, and dragged the paralyzed Swede to the open air. When they had rescued all the cows save one, which had so fastened herself that she could not be moved an inch, they returned to the front of the barn and stood sadly, breathing like men who had reached the final point of human effort.

  Many people had come running. Some one had even gone to the church, and now, from the distance, rang the tocsin note of the old bell. There was a long flare of crimson on the sky, which made remote people speculate as to the whereabouts of the fire.

  The long flames sang their drumming chorus in voices of the heaviest bass. The wind whirled clouds of smoke and cinders into the faces of the spectators. The for
m of the old barn was outlined in black amid these masses of orange-hued flames.

  And then came this Swede again, crying as one who is the weapon of the sinister fates. “De colts! De colts! You have forgot de colts!”

  Old Fleming staggered. It was true; they had forgotten the two colts in the box stalls at the back of the barn. “Boys,” he said, “I must try to get ’em out.” They clamoured about him then, afraid for him, afraid of what they should see. Then they talked wildly each to each. “Why, it’s sure death!” “He would never get out!” “Why, it’s suicide for a man to go in there!” Old Fleming stared absent-mindedly at the open doors. “The poor little things!” he said. He rushed into the barn.

  When the roof fell in, a great funnel of smoke swarmed toward the sky, as if the old man’s mighty spirit, released from its body — a little bottle — had swelled like the genie of fable. The smoke was tinted rose-hue from the flames, and perhaps the unutterable midnights of the universe will have no power to daunt the colour of this soul.

  THE END

  THE OPEN BOAT AND OTHER TALES OF ADVENTURE

  The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure, published by Doubleday & McClure in 1898, was Stephen Crane’s second collection of short fiction. Two of Crane’s finest, best-loved and most anthologised tales appear among its pages, “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.”

  “The Open Boat,” originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, features one of the most famous first lines in American literature: “None of them knew the color of the sky.” Although written as fiction, Crane based the tale on personal experience. Shipwrecked near Florida while on his way to Cuba in 1897, Crane had spent 30 hours at sea in an open boat with three other men. Many critics consider “The Open Boat” an outstanding and seminal work of literary naturalism. Crane based “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” on his extended trip in 1895 through the western United States and into Mexico. Although the story features elements later popular in conventional pulp western fiction, such as gunfighters versus the law and the civilizing influence of settlers, Crane’s sharp writing and humor lend it a fresh, timeless quality.

  A Book Notes reviewer praised the collection as “quite unique and more satisfying than any of his earlier work notwithstanding its great promise,” adding, “the whole book, the contents of which follow, shows the hand of a new and powerful observer.” A reviewer in Literature, commenting on the English edition published by Heinemann, remarked, “He has in a very unusual degree the power of bringing a scene, no matter what, before our eyes by a few graphic phrases.” One of the most measured reviews appeared in The Book Buyer, whose critic wrote: “It would be very easy to call him to account for slovenliness of composition, for excess of luridness, for being attracted to themes inherently coarse, and to enumerate the slang which narrator and cowboys use. But for every wrong word I find a right word or phrase, for every far-fetched simile one that rivets itself in mind, and granting the author’s right to choose his own themes, few there are who can handle such as Mr. Crane has chosen, especially in the Mexican sketches, with equally good taste.”

  A first edition published in 1898 by Doubleday & McClure

  CONTENTS

  The Open Boat

  A Man and Some Others.

  One Dash — Horses

  Flanagan and His Short Filibustering Adventure

  The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky

  The Wise Men: A Detail of American Life in Mexico

  Death and the Child

  The Five White Mice

  Stephen Crane with his common-law wife, Cora Taylor Crane

  TO

  THE LATE WILLIAM HIGGINS

  AND TO CAPTAIN EDWARD MURPHY AND

  STEWARD C. B. MONTGOMERY

  OF THE SUNK STEAMER COMMODORE

  The Open Boat

  A Tale intended to be after the Fact. Being the Experience of Four Men from the Stunk Steamer

  Commodore

  I

  None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept towards them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

  Many a man ought to have a bath-tub larger than the boat which here rode upon the sea. These waves were most wrongfully and barbarously abrupt and tall, and each froth-top was a problem in small boat navigation.

  The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. Often he said: ‘Gawd! That was a narrow clip.’ As he remarked it he invariably gazed eastward over the broken sea.

  The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.

  The correspondent, pulling at the other oar, watched the waves and wondered why he was there.

  The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down. The mind of the master of a vessel is rooted deep in the timbers of her, though he commanded for a day or a decade, and this captain had on him the stern impression of a scene in the greys of dawn of seven turned faces, and later a stump of a topmast with a white ball on it that slashed to and fro at the waves, went low and lower, and down. Thereafter there was something strange in his voice. Although steady, it was deep with mourning, and of a quality beyond oration or tears.

  ‘Keep ‘er a little more south, Billie,’ said he.

  ‘ “A little more south,” sir,’ said the oiler in the stern.

  A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and, by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and, moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.

  A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dinghy one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves that is not probable to the average experience which is never at sea in a dinghy. As each slaty wall of water approached, it shut all else from the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last effort of the grim water. There was a terrible grace in the move of the waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.

  In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been grey. Their eyes must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds. The sun swung steadily up the sky, and they knew it was broad day because the colour of the sea changed from slate to emerald-green, streaked with amber lights, and the foam was like tumbling snow. The process of the breaking day was unknown to them. They were aware only of this effect upon the colour of the waves that rolled toward them.

  In disjointed sentences t
he cook and the correspondent argued as to the difference between a life-saving station and a house of refuge. The cook had said: ‘There’s a house of refuge just north of the Mosquito Inlet Light, and as soon as they see us, they’ll come off in their boat and pick us up.’

  ‘As soon as who see us?’ said the correspondent.

  ‘The crew,’ said the cook.

  ‘Houses of refuge don’t have crews,’ said the correspondent. ‘As I understand them, they are only places where clothes and grub are stored for the benefit of shipwrecked people. They don’t carry crews.’

  ‘Oh, yes, they do,’ said the cook.

  ‘No, they don’t,’ said the correspondent.

  ‘Well, we’re not there yet, anyhow,’ said the oiler, in the stern.

  ‘Well,’ said the cook, ‘perhaps it’s not a house of refuge that I’m thinking of as being near Mosquito Inlet Light. Perhaps it’s a life-saving station.’

  ‘We’re not there yet,’ said the oiler, in the stern.

  II

  As the boat bounced from the top of each wave, the wind tore through the hair of the hatless men, and as the craft plopped her stern down again the spray slashed past them. The crest of each of these waves was a hill, from the top of which the men surveyed, for a moment, a broad tumultuous expanse, shining and wind-riven. It was probably splendid. It was probably glorious, this play of the free sea, wild with lights of emerald and white and amber.

  ‘Bully good thing it’s an on-shore wind,’ said the cook. ‘If not, where would we be? Wouldn’t have a show.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the correspondent.

  The busy oiler nodded his assent.

  Then the captain, in the bow, chuckled in a way that expressed humour, contempt, tragedy, all in one. ‘Do you think we’ve got much of a show now, boys?’ said he.