The Best Short Stories of 1915, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story. Various
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year is most impressive are Katharine Fullerton Gerould and Wilbur Daniel Steele. Lincoln Colcord’s two stories show qualities of artistic conscience reënforcing an imaginative substance so real that another year or two should suffice for him to take his place with the leaders of American fiction. I must affirm once more the genuine literary art of Fannie Hurst. The absolute fidelity of her dialogue to life and its revealing spirit, not despite, but rather because of the vulgarities she accepts, seem to me to assure her permanence in her best work.
A rare literary art, not dissimilar in fundamentals, and quite as marvellously documented, is revealed by Rupert Hughes in his series of stories in the Metropolitan Magazine this year. In “Michaeleen! Michaelawn!” he has succeeded greatly. It is a story which it will be difficult for Americans to forget.
What must have begun as a doubtful experiment and been continued only because it was a triumphantly demonstrated success has been the serial publication for the great average American public of my selection of the best twenty-one stories published in 1914. The Illustrated Sunday Magazine has evidently justified its daring, and the bold pioneering of its editor, Mr. Hiram M. Greene, to judge from the host of letters I have received from readers who have not read the best magazines in the past because, as many of them state, they feared that they were too “high-brow,” but who have been convinced, by the introduction to the best contemporary fiction afforded them weekly in the supplement to their Sunday newspaper, that such periodicals as Harper’s Magazine and Scribner’s Magazine have many qualities to commend them to the untrained reader. All this serves to illustrate my point that the commercial short story is not preferred by that imaginary norm of editors known as “the reading public.” If adequate means are employed to allay the average man’s suspicions of literature and to introduce him painlessly to the best that our writers are creating, my experience shows absolutely that he will respond heartily and make higher standards possible by his support. We have scarcely begun to build our democracy of letters.
Because an American publisher has been found who shares my faith in the democratic future of the American short story as something by no means ephemeral, this year-book of American fiction is assured of annual publication for several years. It is my wish annually to dedicate whatever there may be of faith and hope in each volume to the writer of short stories whose work during the year has brought to me the most definite message of idealism. It is accordingly my privilege this year to associate the present volume with the name of Benjamin Rosenblatt, who has contributed in “Zelig” a noble addition to American literature.
Edward J. O’Brien
South Yarmouth, Massachusetts
Twelfth Night, 1916
THE BEST SHORT STORIES OF 1915
THE WATER-HOLE[1]
By MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT
From Scribner’s Magazine
Some men are like the twang of a bow-string. Hardy was like that—short, lithe, sunburned, vivid. Into the lives of Jarrick, Hill, and myself, old classmates of his, he came and went in the fashion of one of those queer winds that on a sultry day in summer blow unexpectedly up a city street out of nowhere. His comings excited us; his goings left us refreshed and a little vaguely discontented. So many people are gray. Hardy gave one a shock of color, as do the deserts and the mountains he inhabited. It was not particularly what he said—he didn’t talk much—it was his appearance, his direct, a trifle fierce, gestures, the sense of mysterious lands that pervaded him. One never knew when he was coming to New York and one never knew how long he was going to stay; he just appeared, was very busy with mining companies for a while, sat about clubs in the late afternoon, and then, one day, he was gone.
Sometimes he came twice in a year; oftener, not for two or three years at a stretch. When he did come we gave him a dinner—that is, Jarrick, Hill, and myself. And it was rather an occasion. We would procure a table in the gayest restaurant we could find, near, but not too near, the music—Hill it was who first suggested this as a dramatic bit of incongruity between Hardy and the frequenters of Broadway—and the most exotic food obtainable, for a good part of his time Hardy, we knew, lived upon camp fare. Then we would try to make him tell about his experiences. Usually he wouldn’t. Impersonally, he was entertaining about South Africa, about the Caucasus, about Alaska, Mexico, anywhere you care to think; but concretely he might have been an illustrated lecture for all he mentioned himself. He was passionately fond of abstract argument. “Y’ see,” he would explain, “I don’t get half as much of this sort of thing as I want. Of course, one does run across remarkable people—now, I met a cow-puncher once who knew Keats by heart—but as a rule I deal only with material things, mines and prospects and assays and that sort of thing.” Poor chap! I wonder if he thought that we, with our brokering and our writing and our lawyering, dealt much with ideas! I remember one night when we sat up until three discussing the philosophy of prohibition over three bottles of port. I wonder how many other men have done the same thing!
But five years ago—no, it was six—Hardy really told us a real story about himself. Necessarily the occasion is memorable in our recollections. We had dined at Lamb’s, and the place was practically empty, for it was long after the theatre hour—only a drowsy waiter here and there, and away over in one corner a young couple who, I suppose, imagined themselves in love. Fancy being in love at Lamb’s! We had been discussing, of all things in the world, bravery and conscience and cowardice and original sin, and that sort of business, and there was no question about it that Hardy was enjoying himself hugely. He was leaning upon the table, a coffee-cup between his relaxed brown hands, listening with an eagerness highly complimentary to the banal remarks we had to make upon the subject. “This is talk!” he ejaculated once with a laugh.
Hill, against the combined attack of Jarrick and myself, was maintaining the argument. “There is no such thing as instinctive bravery,” he affirmed, for the fifth time at least, “amongst intelligent men. Every one of us is naturally a coward. Of course we are. The more imagination we’ve got the more we can realize how pleasant life is, after all, and how rotten the adjuncts of sudden death. It’s reason that does the trick—reason and tradition. Do you know of any one who is brave when he is alone—except, that is, when it is a case of self-preservation? No! Of course not. Did you ever hear of any one choosing to go along a dangerous road or to ford a dangerous river unless he had to—that is, any one of our class, any man of education or imagination? It’s the greater fear of being thought afraid that makes us brave. Take a lawyer in a shipwreck—take myself! Don’t you suppose he’s frightened? Naturally he is, horribly frightened. It’s his reason, his mind, that after a while gets the better of his poor pipe-stem legs and makes them keep pace with the sea-legs about them.”
“It’s condition,” said Jarrick doggedly—“condition entirely. All has to do with your liver and digestion. I know; I fox-hunt, and when I was younger—yes, leave my waist alone!—I rode jumping races. When you’re fit there isn’t a horse alive that bothers you, or a fence, for that matter, or a bit of water.”
“Ever try standing on a ship’s deck, in the dark, knowing you’re going to drown in about twenty minutes?” asked Hill.
Hardy leaned forward to strike a match for his cigarette. “I don’t agree with you,” he said.
“Well, but—” began Hill.
“Neither of you.”
“Oh, of course, you’re outside the argument. You lead an adventurous life. You keep in condition for danger. It isn’t fair.”
“No.” Hardy lit his cigarette and inhaled a puff thoughtfully. “You don’t understand. All you have to say does have some bearing upon things, but, when you get down to brass tacks, it’s instinct—at the last gasp, it’s instinct. You can’t get away from it. Look at the difference between a thoroughbred and a cold-blooded horse! There