The Complete Short Stories and Sketches of Stephen Crane

by Stephen Crane

  When the old man reached the door of this paradise, he stopped for a moment with his finger on the latch. He sighed deeply; evidently he was undergoing some lachrymose reflection. For somewhere overhead in the inn he could hear the wild clamor of dining pig-buyers, men who were come for the pig fair to be held on the morrow. Evidently in the little parlor of the inn these men were dining amid an uproar of shouted jests and laughter. The revelry sounded like the fighting of two mobs amid a rain of missiles and the crash of shop windows. The old man raised his hand as if, unseen there in the darkness, he was going to solemnly damn the dinner of the pig-buyers.

  Within the kitchen Nora, tall, strong, intrepid, approached the fiery stove in the manner of a boxer. Her left arm was held high to guard her face, which was already crimson from the blaze. With a flourish of her apron she achieved a great brown humming joint from the oven, and, emerging a glowing and triumphant figure from the steam and smoke and rapid play of heat, she slid the pan upon the table, even as she saw the old man standing within the room and lugubriously cleaning the mud from his boots. “ ’Tis you, Mickey?” she said.

  He made no reply until he had found his way to the long bench. “It is,” he said then. It was clear that in the girl’s opinion he had gained some kind of strategic advantage. The sanctity of her kitchen was successfully violated, but the old man betrayed no elation. Lifting one knee and placing it over the other, he grunted in the blissful weariness of a venerable laborer returned to his own fireside. He coughed dismally. “Ah, ’tis no good a man gits from fishin’ these days. I moind the toimes whin they would be hoppin’ up clear o’ the wather, there was that little room fur thim. I would be likin’ a bottle o’ stout.”

  “Niver fear you, Mickey,” answered the girl. Swinging here and there in the glare of the fire, Nora, with her towering figure and bare brawny arms, was like a feminine blacksmith at a forge. The old man, pallid, emaciated, watched her from the shadows of the other side of the room. The lines from the sides of his nose to the corners of his mouth sank low to an expression of despair deeper than any moans. He should have been painted upon the door of a tomb with weeping willows arched above him and men in gray robes slowly booming the drums of death. Finally he spoke. “I would be likin’ a bottle o’ stout, Nora, me girrl,” he said.

  “Niver fear you, Mickey,” again she replied with cheerful obstinacy. She was admiring her famous roast, which now sat in its platter on the rack over the range. There was a lull in her tumultuous duties. The old man coughed and moved his foot with a scraping sound on the stones. The noise of dining pig-buyers, now heard through doors and winding corridors of the inn, was a roll of a faraway storm.

  A woman in a dark dress entered the kitchen and keenly examined the roast and Nora’s other feats. “Mickey here would be wantin’ a bottle o’ stout,” said the girl to her mistress. The woman turned toward the spectral figure in the gloom, and regarded it quietly with a clear eye. “Have yez the money, Mickey?” she said. This question seemed to strike the old man as the final point in human brutality. “A-ah,” he said, stricken to the heart. He rolled his eyes toward the throne of heaven.

  “Have yez the money, Mickey?” repeated the woman of the house.

  Profoundly embittered, he replied in short terms, “I have.”

  “There now,” cried Nora, in astonishment and admiration. Poising a large iron spoon, she was motionless, staring with open mouth at the old man. He searched his pockets slowly during a complete silence in the kitchen. He brought forth two coppers and laid them sadly, reproachfully, and yet defiantly on the table.

  “There now,” cried Nora, stupefied.

  They brought him a bottle of the black brew, and Nora poured it out for him with her own red hand, which looked to be as broad as his chest. A collar of brown foam curled at the top of the glass. With measured movements the old man filled a short pipe. There came a sudden howl from another part of the inn. One of the pig-buyers was at the head of the stairs bawling for the mistress. The two women hurriedly freighted themselves with the roast and the vegetables, and sprang with them to placate the pig-buyers. Alone, the old man studied the gleam of the fire on the floor. It faded and brightened in the way of lightning at the horizon’s edge.

  When Nora returned, the strapping grenadier of a girl was blushing and giggling. The pig-buyers had been humorous. “I moind the toime—” began the old man sorrowfully, “I moind the toime whin yez was a wee bit of a girrl, Nora, an’ wouldn’t be havin’ words wid min loike thim buyers.”

  “I moind the toime whin yez could attind to your own affairs, ye ould skileton,” said the girl promptly. He made a gesture which may have expressed his stirring grief at the levity of the new generation, and then lapsed into another stillness.

  The girl, a giantess, carrying, lifting, pushing, an incarnation of dauntless labor, changing the look of the whole kitchen with a moment’s manipulation of her great arms, did not heed the old man for a long time. When she finally glanced toward him, she saw that he was sunk forward with his gray face on his arms. A growl of heavy breathing ascended. He was asleep.

  She marched to him and put both hands to his collar. Despite his feeble and dreamy protestations, she dragged him out from behind the table and across the floor. She opened the door and thrust him out into the night.

  October 19, 1897

  [The Philistine, Vol. 9 (July, 1899), pp. 44–50.]

  A FISHING VILLAGE

  The brook curved down over the rocks, innocent and white, until it faced a little strand of smooth gravel and flat stones. It turned then to the left, and thereafter its guilty current was tinged with the pink of diluted blood. Boulders standing neck-deep in the water were rimmed with red; they wore bloody collars whose tops marked the supreme instant of some tragic movement of the stream. In the pale green shallows of the bay’s edge, the outward flow from the criminal little brook was as eloquently marked as if a long crimson carpet had been laid upon the waters. The scene of the carnage was the strand of smooth gravel and flat stones, and the fruit of the carnage was cleaned mackerel.

  Far to the south, where the slate of the sea and the gray of the sky wove together, could be seen Fastnet Rock, a mere button on the moving, shimmering cloth, while a liner, no larger than a needle, spun a thread of smoke aslant. The gulls swept screaming along the dull line of the other shore of Roaring Water Bay, and near the mouth of the brook circled among the fishing boats that lay at anchor, their brown, leathery sails idle and straight. The wheeling, shrieking, tumultuous birds stared with their hideous unblinking eyes at the Capers—men from Cape Clear—who prowled to and fro on the decks amid shouts and the creak of the tackle. Shoreward, a little shriveled man, overcome by a profound melancholy, fished hopelessly from the end of the pier. Behind him, on a hillside, sat a white village, nestled among more trees than is common in this part of Southern Ireland.

  A dinghy sculled by a youth in a blue jersey wobbled rapidly past the pier-head and stopped at the foot of the moss-green, dank, stone steps, where the waves were making slow but regular leaps to mount higher, and then falling back gurgling, choking, and waving the long, dark seaweeds. The melancholy fisherman walked over to the top of the steps. The young man was fastening the painter of his boat in an iron ring. In the dinghy were three round baskets heaped high with mackerel. They glittered like masses of new silver coin at times, and then other lights of faint carmine and peacock blue would chase across the sides of the fish in a radiance that was finer than silver.

  The melancholy fisherman looked at this wealth. He shook his head mournfully. “Ah, now, Denny. This would not be a very good kill.”

  The young man snorted indignantly at his fellow-townsman. “This will be th’ bist kill th’ year, Mickey. Go along now.”

  The melancholy old man became immersed in deeper gloom. “Shure I have been in th’ way of seein’ miny a grand day whin th’ fish was runnin’ sthrong in these wathers, but there will be no more big kills here. No more. No more.” At
the last his voice was only a dismal croak.

  “Come along outa that now, Mickey,” cried the youth impatiently. “Come away wid you.”

  “All gone now. A-ll go-o-ne now!” The old man wagged his gray head, and, standing over the baskets of fishes, groaned as Mordecai groaned for his people.

  “ ’Tis you would be cryin’ out, Mickey, whativer,” said the youth with scorn. He was giving his basket into the hands of five incompetent but jovial little boys to carry to a waiting donkey cart.

  “An’ why should I not?” said the old man sternly. “Me—in want—”

  As the youth swung his boat swiftly out toward an anchored smack, he made answer in a softer tone. “Shure, if yez got for th’ askin’, ’tis you, Mickey, that would niver be in want.” The melancholy old man returned to his line. And the only moral in this incident is that the young man is the type that America procures from Ireland, and the old man is one of the home types, bent, pallid, hungry, disheartened, with a vision that magnifies with a microscope glance any fly-wing of misfortune, and heroically and conscientiously invents disasters for the future. Usually the thing that remains to one of this type is a sympathy as quick and acute for others as is his pity for himself,

  The donkey with his cartload of gleaming fish, and escorted by the whooping and laughing boys, galloped along the quay and up a street of the village until he was turned off at the gravelly strand, at the point where the color of the brook was changing. Here twenty people of both sexes and all ages were preparing the fish for market. The mackerel, beautiful as fire-etched salvers, first were passed to a long table, around which worked as many women as could have elbow room. Each one could clean a fish with two motions of the knife. Then the washers, men who stood over the troughs filled with running water from the brook, soused the fish until the outlet became a sinister element that in an instant changed the brook from a happy thing of gorse and heather of the hills to an evil stream, sullen and reddened. After being washed, the fish were carried to a group of girls with knives, who made the cuts that enabled each fish to flatten out in the manner known of the breakfast table. And after the girls came the men and boys, who rubbed each fish thoroughly with great handfuls of coarse salt, which was whiter than snow, and shone in the daylight from a multitude of gleaming points, diamond-like. Last came the packers, drilled in the art of getting neither too few nor too many mackerel into a barrel, sprinkling constantly prodigal layers of brilliant salt. There were many intermediate corps of boys and girls carrying fish from point to point, and sometimes building them in stacks convenient to the hands of the more important laborers.

  A vast tree hung its branches over the place. The leaves made a shadow that was religious in its effect, as if the spot was a chapel consecrated to labor. There was a hush upon the devotees. The women at the large table worked intently, steadfastly, with bowed heads. Their old petticoats were tucked high, showing the coarse brogans which they wore—and the visible ankles were proportioned to the brogans as the diameter of a straw is to that of a half-crown. The national red under-petticoat was a fundamental part of the scene.

  Just over the wall, in the sloping street, could be seen the be-jerseyed Capers, brawny, and with shocks of yellow beard. They paced slowly to and fro amid the geese and children. They, too, spoke little, even to each other; they smoked short pipes in saturnine dignity and silence. It was the fish. They who go with nets upon the reeling sea grow still with the mystery and solemnity of the trade. It was Brittany; the first respectable catch of the year had changed this garrulous Irish hamlet into a hamlet of Brittany.

  The Capers were waiting for high tide. It had seemed for a long time that, for the south of Ireland, the mackerel had fled in company with potato; but here, at any rate, was a temporary success, and the occasion was momentous. A strolling Caper took his pipe and pointed with the stem out upon the bay. There was little wind, but an ambitious skipper had raised his anchor, and the craft, her strained brown sails idly swinging, was drifting away on the first oily turn of the tide.

  On the top of the pier the figure of the melancholy old man was portrayed upon the polished water. He was still dangling his line hopelessly. He gazed down into the misty water. Once he stirred and murmured: “Bad luck to thim.” Otherwise he seemed to remain motionless for hours. One by one the fishing boats floated away. The brook changed its color, and in the dusk showed a tumble of pearly white among the rocks.

  A cold night wind, sweeping transversely across the pier, awakened perhaps the rheumatism in the old man’s bones. He arose and, mumbling and grumbling, began to wind his line. The waves were lashing the stones. He moved off toward the intense darkness of the village streets.

  November 19, 1897

  [The Westminster Budget, Vol. 10, p. 13.]

  THE BRIDE COMES TO YELLOW SKY

  I

  The great Pullman was whirling onward with such dignity of motion that a glance from the window seemed simply to prove that the plains of Texas were pouring eastward. Vast flats of green grass, dull-hued spaces of mesquite and cactus, little groups of frame houses, woods of light and tender trees, all were sweeping into the east, sweeping over the horizon, a precipice.

  A newly married pair had boarded this coach at San Antonio. The man’s face was reddened from many days in the wind and sun, and a direct result of his new black clothes was that his brick-colored hands were constantly performing in a most conscious fashion. From time to time he looked down respectfully at his attire. He sat with a hand on each knee, like a man waiting in a barber’s shop. The glances he devoted to other passengers were furtive and shy.

  The bride was not pretty, nor was she very young. She wore a dress of blue cashmere, with small reservations of velvet here and there, and with steel buttons abounding. She continually twisted her head to regard her puff sleeves, very stiff, straight, and high. They embarrassed her. It was quite apparent that she had cooked, and that she expected to cook, dutifully. The blushes caused by the careless scrutiny of some passengers as she had entered the car were strange to see upon this plain, underclass countenance, which was drawn in placid, almost emotionless lines.

  They were evidently very happy. “Ever been in a parlor car before?” he asked, smiling with delight.

  “No,” she answered. “I never was. It’s fine, ain’t it?”

  “Great! And then after a while we’ll go forward to the diner, and get a big layout. Finest meal in the world. Charge a dollar.”

  “Oh, do they?” cried the bride. “Charge a dollar? Why, that’s too much—for us—ain’t it, Jack?”

  “Not this trip, anyhow,” he answered bravely. “We’re going to go the whole thing.”

  Later, he explained to her about the trains. “You see, it’s a thousand miles from one end of Texas to the other; and this train runs right across it, and never stops but four times.” He had the pride of an owner. He pointed out to her the dazzling fittings of the coach; and in truth her eyes opened wider as she contemplated the sea-green figured velvet, the shining brass, silver, and glass, the wood that gleamed as darkly brilliant as the surface of a pool of oil. At one end a bronze figure sturdily held a support for a separated chamber, and at convenient places on the ceiling were frescoes in olive and silver.

  To the minds of the pair, their surroundings reflected the glory of their marriage that morning in San Antonio. This was the environment of their new estate, and the man’s face in particular beamed with an elation that made him appear ridiculous to the negro porter. This individual at times surveyed them from afar with an amused and superior grin. On other occasions he bullied them with skill in ways that did not make it exactly plain to them that they were being bullied. He subtly used all the manners of the most unconquerable kind of snobbery. He oppressed them; but of this oppression they had small knowledge, and they speedily forgot that infrequently a number of travelers covered them with stares of derisive enjoyment. Historically there was supposed to be something infinitely humorous in their situation.
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  “We are due in Yellow Sky at 3:42,” he said, looking tenderly into her eyes.

  “Oh, are we?” she said, as if she had not been aware of it. To evince surprise at her husband’s statement was part of her wifely amiability. She took from a pocket a little silver watch; and as she held it before her, and stared at it with a frown of attention, the new husband’s face shone.

  “I bought it in San Anton’ from a friend of mine,” he told her gleefully.

  “It’s seventeen minutes past twelve,” she said, looking up at him with a kind of shy and clumsy coquetry. A passenger, noting this play, grew excessively sardonic, and winked at himself in one of the numerous mirrors.

  At last they went to the dining car. Two rows of negro waiters, in glowing white suits, surveyed their entrance with the interest, and also the equanimity, of men who had been forewarned. The pair fell to the lot of a waiter who happened to feel pleasure in steering them through their meal. He viewed them with the manner of a fatherly pilot, his countenance radiant with benevolence. The patronage, entwined with the ordinary deference, was not plain to them. And yet, as they returned to their coach, they showed in their faces a sense of escape.

  To the left, miles down a long purple slope, was a little ribbon of mist where moved the keening Rio Grande. The train was approaching it at an angle, and the apex was Yellow Sky. Presently it was apparent that, as the distance from Yellow Sky grew shorter, the husband became commensurately restless. His brick-red hands were more insistent in their prominence. Occasionally he was even rather absent-minded and faraway when the bride leaned forward and addressed him.