Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The table was no longer between them. He caught her in his arms and
kissed her face and her uncovered head again and again. From outside
the rain beat drearily and the fog rolled through the street, but inside
before the fire the two young people sat close together, asking eager
questions or sitting in silence, staring at the flames with wondering,
happy eyes.
The Lion and the Unicorn saw them only once again. It was a month later
when they stopped in front of the shop in a four-wheeler, with their
baggage mixed on top of it, and steamer-labels pasted over every trunk.
“And, oh, Prentiss!” Carroll called from the cab-window. “I came near
forgetting. I promised to gild the Lion and the Unicorn if I won out in
London. So have it done, please, and send the bill to me. For I’ve won
out all right.” And then he shut the door of the cab, and they drove
away forever.
“Nice gal, that,” growled the Lion. “I always liked her. I am glad
they’ve settled it at last.”
The Unicorn sighed, sentimentally. “The other one’s worth two of her,”
he said.
ON THE FEVER SHIP
There were four rails around the ship’s sides, the three lower ones of
iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them from
the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held him in.
Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water which ended in a
line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged palms. Beyond that again
rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck upon the loftiest peak of
all, a tiny block-house. It rested on the brow of the mountain against
the naked sky as impudently as a cracker-box set upon the dome of a
great cathedral.
As the transport rode on her anchor-chains, the iron bars around her
sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines. From
his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe, painstaking
interest. Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very block-house
itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight. And again it
sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped them out of the
picture as though they were a line of chalk.
The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the sea
would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the palm-trees
or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when it failed to
reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of ill use, of having
been wronged by some one. There was no other reason for submitting to
this existence, save these tricks upon the wearisome, glaring landscape;
and, now, whoever it was who was working them did not seem to be making
this effort to entertain him with any heartiness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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