Short Stories and Essays | Page 7

The fact must be told in
brief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality. The last touch
must be Jan's cart turning the street corner with Jan's figure sharply
silhouetted against the clear, cold morning light. Nothing more.
But it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic,
so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world
which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his
suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing
from the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the
reader will have rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at
the head of it, quite well again, and going to be married to the little
brown youth with ear-rings who had long had her heart.
With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong this might be made, at
the fond reader's expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic, in
such a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be. I
should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame, and
that the whole affair had been so tacit on Jan's part that Nina might very
well have known nothing of his feeling for her. Perhaps at the very end
I might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had no such
feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine.

III.
The question as to which ending I ought to have given my romance is
what has ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has
prevented my ever writing it. Here is material of the best sort lying
useless on my hands, which, if I could only make up my mind, might
be wrought into a short story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in
fiction; and I think I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the
broken English of Jan and Nina's grandmother, and certainly something
novel. All that I can do now, however, is to put the case before the

reader, and let him decide for himself how it should end.
The mere humanist, I suppose, might say, that I am rightly served for
having regarded the fact I had witnessed as material for fiction at all;
that I had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I ought
to have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and tried
to learn something of their lives from them, that I might offer my
knowledge again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and
happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us. I own there is
something in this, but then, on the other hand, I have heard it urged by
nice people that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, that
it is offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and that
we ought to be writing about good society, and especially creating
grandes dames for their amusement. This sort of people could say to
the humanist that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to fall
off from for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment;
for if one is to be interested in such things at all, it must be aesthetically,
though even this is deplorable in the presence of fiction already
overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours.

SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN
It may be all an illusion of the map, where the Summer Islands glimmer
a small and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote from
continental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly
upon them, to show how sharp and swift the ship's course is, but they
seem so far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid
down a steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids
nebulous somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still
vibrant from the rush of the meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts
and incidents contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New
York in the raw March morning, and lurching and twisting through two
days of diagonal seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and
talking and smoking and cocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing;
but when the ship came in sight of the islands, and they began to lift
their cedared slopes from the turquoise waters, and to explain their
drifted snows as the white walls and white roofs of houses, then the
waking sense became the dreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility
of that drop through air became the