Great Short Stories by American Women

by Candace Ward (Editor)

  “As you will,” replied Pavageau, and he flashed another look at Grabert. It was a look of insolent triumph and derision. His Honor’s eyes dropped beneath it.

  “What did that man mean, Father, by saying you should take me out of school?” asked Vannier on his way home.

  “He was provoked, my son, because he had lost his case, and when a man is provoked he is likely to say silly things. By the way, Vannier, I hope you won’t say anything to your mother about the incident. It would only annoy her.”

  For the public, the incident was forgotten as soon as it had closed, but for Grabert, it was indelibly stamped on his memory; a scene that shrieked in his mind and stood out before him at every footstep he took. Again and again as he tossed on a sleepless bed did he see the cold flash of Pavageau’s eyes, and hear his quiet accusation. How did he know? Where had he gotten his information? For he spoke, not as one who makes a random shot in anger, but as one who knows, who has known a long while, and who is betrayed by irritation into playing his trump card too early in the game.

  He passed a wretched week, wherein it seemed that his every footstep was dogged, his every gesture watched and recorded. He fancied that Elise, even, was suspecting him. When he took his judicial seat each morning, it seemed that every eye in the courtroom was fastened upon him in derision; everyone who spoke, it seemed, was but biding his time to shout the old village street refrain which had haunted him all his life, 0”Nigger! — Nigger! — White nigger!”

  Finally, he could stand it no longer; and with leaden feet and furtive glances to the right and left for fear he might be seen, he went up a flight of dusty stairs in an Exchange Alley building, which led to Pavageau’s office.

  The latter was frankly surprised to see him. He made a polite attempt to conceal it, however. It was the first time in his legal life that Grabert had ever sought out a Negro; the first time that he had ever voluntarily opened conversation with one.

  He mopped his forehead nervously as he took the chair Pavageau offered him; he stared about the room for an instant; then with a sudden, almost brutal directness, he turned on the lawyer.

  “See here, what did you mean by that remark you made in court the other day?”

  “I meant just what I said” was the cool reply.

  Grabert paused. “Why did you say it?” he asked slowly.

  “Because I was a fool. I should have kept my mouth shut until another time, should I not?”

  “Pavageau,” said Grabert softly, “let’s not fence. Where did you get your information?”

  Pavageau paused for an instant. He put his fingertips together and closed his eyes as one who meditates. Then he said with provoking calmness, “You seem anxious — well, I don’t mind letting you know. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “Yes, yes,” broke in Grabert impatiently.

  “Did you ever hear of a Mme. Guichard of Hospital Street?”

  The sweat broke out on the judge’s brow as he replied weakly, “Yes.”

  “Well, I am her nephew.”

  “And she?”

  “Is dead. She told me about you once — with pride, let me say. No one else knows.”

  Grabert sat dazed. He had forgotten about Mme. Guichard. She had never entered into his calculations at all. Pavageau turned to his desk with a sigh, as if he wished the interview were ended. Grabert rose.

  “If — if — this were known — to — to — my — my wife,” he said thickly, “it would hurt her very much.”

  His head was swimming. He had had to appeal to this man, and to appeal to his wife’s name. His wife, whose name he scarcely spoke to men whom he considered his social equals.

  Pavageau looked up quickly. “It happens that I often have cases in your court,” he spoke deliberately. “I am willing, if I lose fairly, to give up; but I do not like to have a decision made against me because my opponent is of a different complexion from mine, or because the decision against me would please a certain class of people. I only ask what I have never had from you — fair play.”

  “I understand,” said Grabert.

  He admired Pavageau more than ever as he went out of his office, yet this admiration was tempered by the knowledge that this man was the only person in the whole world who possessed positive knowledge of his secret. He groveled in a self-abasement at his position; and yet he could not but feel a certain relief that the vague, formless fear which had hitherto dogged his life and haunted it had taken on a definite shape. He knew where it was now; he could lay his hands on it, and fight it.

  But with what weapons? There were none offered him save a substantial backing down from his position on certain questions; the position that had been his for so long that he was almost known by it. For in the quiet deliberate sentence of Pavageau’s, he read that he must cease all the oppression, all the little injustices which he had offered Pavageau’s clientele. He must act now as his convictions and secret sympathies and affiliations had bidden him act, not as prudence and fear and cowardice had made him act.

  Then what would be the result? he asked himself. Would not the suspicions of the people be aroused by this sudden change in his manner? Would not they begin to question and to wonder? Would not someone remember Pavageau’s remark that morning and, putting two and two together, start some rumor flying? His heart sickened again at the thought.

  There was a banquet that night. It was in his honor, and he was to speak, and the thought was distasteful to him beyond measure. He knew how it all would be. He would be hailed with shouts and acclamations, as the finest flower of civilization. He would be listened to deferentially, and younger men would go away holding him in their hearts as a truly worthy model. When all the white —

  He threw back his head and laughed. Oh, what a glorious revenge he had on those little white village boys! How he had made a race atone for Wilson’s insult in the courtroom; for the man in the restaurant at whom Ward had laughed so uproariously; for all the affronts seen and unseen given these people of his own whom he had denied. He had taken a diploma from their most exclusive college; he had broken down the barriers of their social world; he had taken the highest possible position among them and, aping their own ways, had shown them that he, too, could despise this inferior race they despised. Nay, he had taken for his wife the best woman among them all, and she had borne him a son. Ha, ha! What a joke on them all!

  And he had not forgotten the black and yellow boys either. They had stoned him too, and he had lived to spurn them; to look down upon them, and to crush them at every possible turn from his seat on the bench. Truly, his life had not been wasted.

  He had lived forty-nine years now, and the zenith of his power was not yet reached. There was much more to do, much more, and he was going to do it. He owed it to Elise and the boy. For their sake he must go on and on and keep his tongue still, and truckle to Pavageau and suffer alone. Someday, perhaps, he would have a grandson, who would point with pride to “My grandfather, the famous Judge Grabert!” Ah, that in itself, was a reward. To have founded a dynasty; to bequeath to others that which he had never possessed himself, and the lack of which had made his life a misery.

  It was a banquet with a political significance; one that meant a virtual triumph for Judge Grabert in the next contest for the District Judge. He smiled around at the eager faces which were turned up to his as he arose to speak. The tumult of applause which had greeted his rising had died away, and an expectant hush fell on the room.

  “What a sensation I could make now,” he thought. He had but to open his mouth and cry out, “Fools! Fools! I whom you are honoring, I am one of the despised ones. Yes, I’m a nigger — do you hear, a nigger!” What a temptation it was to end the whole miserable farce. If he were alone in the world, if it were not for Elise and the boy, he would, just to see their horror and wonder. How they would shrink from him! But what could they do? They could take away his office; but his wealth, and his former successes, and his learning, they could not touch. Well, he must speak, and he m
ust remember Elise and the boy.

  Every eye was fastened on him in eager expectancy. Judge Grabert’s speech was expected to outline the policy of their faction in the coming campaign. He turned to the chairman at the head of the table.

  “Mr. Chairman,” he began, and paused again. How peculiar it was that in the place of the chairman there sat Grandmère Grabert, as she had been wont to sit on the steps of the tumbledown cottage in the village. She was looking at him sternly and bidding him give an account of his life since she had kissed him good-bye ere he had sailed down the river to New Orleans. He was surprised, and not a little annoyed. He had expected to address the chairman, not Grandmère Grabert. He cleared his throat and frowned.

  “Mr. Chairman,” he said again. Well, what was the use of addressing her that way? She would not understand him. He would call her Grandmère, of course. Were they not alone again on the cottage steps at twilight with the cries of the little brutish boys ringing derisively from the distant village square?

  “Grandmère,” he said softly, “you don’t understand — ” And then he was sitting down in his seat pointing one finger angrily at her because the other words would not come. They stuck in his throat, and he choked and beat the air with his hands. When the men crowded around him with water and hastily improvised fans, he fought them away wildly and desperately with furious curses that came from his blackened lips. For were they not all boys with stones to pelt him because he wanted to play with them? He would run away to Grandmère who would soothe him and comfort him. So he arose and, stumbling, shrieking and beating them back from him, ran the length of the hall, and fell across the threshold of the door.

  The secret died with him, for Pavageau’s lips were ever sealed.

  Susan Glaspell

  (1876-1948)

  SUSAN GLASPELL was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa. After graduating from Drake University in 1899, she began writing for the Des Moines Daily News. Her early short stories appeared in literary magazines such as Harper’s and the Ladies’ Home Journal.

  In 1911, Glaspell moved to New York City’s Greenwich Village and two years later she married George Cram Cook, another native of Davenport. Together the two founded the Provincetown Playhouse, an experimental theater that produced only original plays by American playwrights. The plays produced in Provincetown by Glaspell, Eugene O’Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Reed and Michael Gold represented the most progressive work in American drama at that time.

  “A Jury of Her Peers” was originally produced as a one-act play, Trifles, which premiered August 8, 1916 in Provincetown and which Glaspell rewrote in short-story form a year later. Set in her native Midwest, Glaspell’s story explores the effect of isolation — physical and mental — on the individual. The protagonist, Minnie Wright, never appears in the story, but for the two women who become the “jury of her peers” her presence is evidenced by the pieces of quilting she has left behind. For Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters, the quilted blocks become the text of Minnie Wright’s story, a text that remains closed to the male characters. Glaspell’s use of sewing imagery is ironic and self-conscious; whereas needlework — in fiction and in real life — represented the sublimation of female desires, in Glaspell’s story it quite literally liberates them.

  A Jury of Her Peers

  WHEN MARTHA HALE opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away — it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.

  She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too — adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was.

  “Martha!” now came her husband’s impatient voice. “Don’t keep folks waiting out here in the cold.”

  She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy.

  After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn’t seem like a sheriff’s wife. She was small and thin and didn’t have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, the sheriff’s wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn’t look like a sheriff’s wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff — a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale’s mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights’ now as a sheriff.

  “The country’s not very pleasant this time of year,” Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men.

  Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it.

  “I’m glad you came with me,” Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door.

  Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn’t cross it now was simply because she hadn’t crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, “I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster” — she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.

  The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said:

  “Come up to the fire, ladies.”

  Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. “I’m not — cold,” she said.

  The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. “Now, Mr. Hale,” he said in a sort of semi-official voice, “before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning.”

  The county attorney was looking around the kitchen.

  “By the way,” he said, “has anything been moved?” He turned to the sheriff. “Are things just as you left them yesterday?”

  Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table.

  “It’s just the same.”

  “Somebody should have been left here yesterday,” said the county attorney.

  “Oh — yesterday,” returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. “When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy — let me tell you, I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by today, George, and as long as I went over everyth
ing here myself — ”

  “Well, Mr. Hale,” said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, “tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning.”

  Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn’t begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer — as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick.

  “Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes,” Mrs. Hale’s husband began.

  Harry was Mrs. Hale’s oldest boy. He wasn’t with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn’t been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out.

  “We came along this road,” Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, “and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, ‘I’m goin’ to see if I can’t get John Wright to take a telephone.’ You see,” he explained to Henderson, “unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won’t come out this branch road except for a price I can’t pay. I’d spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet — guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing — well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say — though I said at the same time that I didn’t know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John — ”