SHORT SHORT-STORIES BY ZONA GALE
Follette, Belle Case La
SHORT SHORT-STORIES BY ZONA GALE By Belle Case La Follette YELLOW Gentians and Blue," by Zona Gale, adds another distinctive feature to her unique place in literature. These "short short-stories"...
...WHY TELEGRAPH WIRES SING ALL of us have heard the weird "singing" of telegraph or telephone wires and probably wondered just what caused the music...
...His wife had a brother in the city, but he was a man of many words...
...Surveys are made at milk plants during their operation...
...The crisis may turn on an incident as of Nellie in "Cherries...
...BILL was thirty when his wife died, and little Minna was four...
...Millions of stars are constantly dying, as others form to take their place...
...He held her at arm's length, looked in her eyes, said: "Minna's a big girl now...
...He met me at the boat, and I was alone, and then I had to tell him...
...He did not get rid of them until be had to, and they have no rancor toward the man...
...The little volume is in the nature of a series of snapshots revealing the inner lives of the people all about us, whom we have hitherto hardly noticed...
...a shabby man of sixty, without his coat, sits on the porch reading a newspaper...
...When the little business he had built up failed, he heard the exasperated daughter ask her mother, 'What are you going to live on?' And he heard the mother say, 'Your father was responsible for three of us for a quarter of a century, you know, dear.' And that gave him the strength and courage to breast the future...
...f His brother kept writing to him that America was the place to be and to make money...
...The fifth day out she sickened...
...This evidence of cheerfulness in the midst of such unattractive surroundings surprises the college youth who expects to be a great financier and otherwise lead a radiant life of prosperity and success...
...BLUE GENTIANS may taste less bitter than yellow, but the stories inspired by a characteristic described in a "new botany" are far from joyful...
...This parasol Minna held bobbing above her head, and she was so absorbed in looking up at the blue silk that she did not remember to turn and wave her hand...
...Then the woman next door told him bluntly that he ought not to have the child there, and him coughing as he was...
...He washed and patched Minna's little garments and mended her doll...
...the inevitable push of youth crowds out old age, as in "The Fourth Generation...
...THE CUNNING OF THE FOX THE fox's cunning often puzzles the old hunter who thinks he has learned all of Reynard's tricks...
...And of her in the little sealed box with the sail...
...She doesn't want papa to kiss her...
...COOLIDGE—THE MAX OF INACTION IT IS only men of action who make enemies...
...When they asked: "How long before we can have her...
...C. G. Abbott on the evolution of stars...
...All day while he worked at his bench, she played in the yard, and when he was obliged to be absent for hours, the woman next door looked after her...
...Coolidge—rather the reverse...
...K. B., in New Republic...
...The trail presently led along the banks of a creek...
...They had brought her a little blue parasol in case the parting should be hard...
...Bill could cook a little coffee and bacon and fried potatoes and flapjacks, and he found bananas and sardines and crackers useful...
...He could hear Minna singing to her doll...
...Minna's never been for a visit...
...Can nothing be done to help the repressed and inarticulate...
...Intense cold may also be responsible for the phenomenon of singing wires...
...Sometimes sitting here in the Home where my four children pay out money to keep me comfortable, I think about them in their homes, where of 'course they can't bother with me...
...In time, the star dies, again red in color, and far smaller than it was at birth...
...Dasher's hands wore all the expression that she had" is a portrait in one line...
...Minna was six when Bill fell ill...
...He stopped work for a.day and took her to the Sunday school picnic...
...References required...
...There isn't room or reason for any...
...When he came home he sat in his shop for a long time and did nothing...
...She does not...
...It is presumed to be due to barometric depression, which is carried through the wires, in some strange fashion...
...Then the intense heat at the center lessens toward the outer edge and the surface cools and hardens...
...We never should have left the old country for we had it fine there...
...LIFE IS LIKE THAT FOR SOME OF US—AND YET WE WANT TO LIVE JUST LIKE OTHER FOLKS...
...These studies show not only the point at which the greatest breakage occurs but the character and cause of the breakage...
...For the land sakes...
...I says to him 'You go then, and if you like it, I'll follow.' * * * We had one little girl...
...and of my father and mother that I never saw again...
...The sun was beaming through the window in bright squares...
...Coolidge has been wholly free of these handicaps...
...So fast it went off over the water, so fast and, so gay in the slanting sunlight...
...When she came to kiss him that night, he made an excuse, for he must never kiss her now...
...Once he said to her, 'You'll never have anything more than you have now, do you realize that?' And she replied, 'I don't want anything more to dust and take care of!' Again he asked her, 'What do you want most of anything in this world...
...Investigations in milk-plant management include a study of this problem...
...They didn't even hesitate at the spot where the old fellow had leaped into the water...
...Otherwise we could not sympathize, as we do, with Zona Gale's interpretation of the hidden Buffering of the average human being...
...He said: 'God forgive me for bringing you over, but I cou'dn't face it any longer alone.' * * * I says, 'Where do we live, my dear?' He took me to two high rooms with no light...
...So Bill looked at this woman and said steadily that he had now other plans for his little girl...
...On this youth he looked down and smiled, a luminous smile, a smile as bright as if he himself had been young...
...They went on like this for years...
...he looks up and smiles brightly at the young man, as though he himself were young and happy...
...He stood and watched the man and woman walking down the street with Minna between them...
...Bill's carpenter shop was in the yard of his house, so he thought that he could keep up his home for Minna and himself...
...When telephone wires sing, you may expect a storm, within a day or so, or within, a few hours...
...He had a sister in Nebraska, but she was a tired woman...
...I watched it till the sun went, till the dark came and the little dot went out...
...He was not going to get well...
...Coolidge, "we love him for the enemies he has made...
...Abbott states that the formless nebula which characterize the first step in the formation of stars have their origin in some manner which we do not understand...
...Nor have the Democrats...
...They moved to a suburb, rented a little house and he went into a real estate office...
...he told her buoyantly...
...No one will ever say of Mr...
...The annual cost of replacing bottles that are lost or broken amounts to about $30,000,000...
...As a matter of fact, scientists are not absolutely certain just what does make the wires "sing...
...You hadn't the right—a man in your health...
...And when she ran toward him, "A big girl, a big girl," he reminded her...
...At night he heard her say her prayer, kneeling in the middle of the floor with her hands folded, and speaking like lightning...
...Bill said: "One day more," That day he spent in the shop...
...Their clothes were as he had hoped...
...we think there must be some relief for all this dumb misery and social cruelty...
...And he had only six months...
...He wished that he could hear of somebody who would understand her...
...Not even the unsavory fellows of the Daugherty stripe dislike him personally...
...They came in a limousine, as he had hoped that they would come...
...The man and woman who walked into Bill's shop one morning were still mourning their own little girl...
...Then he advertised in a city paper: A man with a few months' more to live would like nice people to adopt his little girl, six, blue eyes, curls...
...Gradually the color changes from red to yellow, and white, and blue and the diameter decreases constantly...
...Spotting the old fox, he'd put the dogs on the trail, and when the quarry was finally run down it would turn out to be some other fox...
...The woman was not sad—only sorrowful, and the man, who was tender of her, was a carpenter...
...Glass hroken at various points in the plant is collected and weighed at the end of each day's run, and notes are taken on the types and arrangement of machinery, distances that bottles are moved, and means of conveying bottles from one place to another within the plant...
...Mrs...
...Suddenly the old fox jumped sideways into the water, waded down a hundred yards, climbed the other bank and disappeared...
...he is obliged to leave college and to accept uncongenial employment...
...We lived with my father and mother in the house where I was born...
...The heart aches, the conscience hurts...
...It was summer and Minna was playing in the yard...
...Her mother would of," he told the teacher, diffidently...
...and he complained that after he had cleaned the windows he could not see as well as he could before...
...He could hear the words of her songs...
...And little Minna . . . there were things known to her which he himself did not know—matters of fairies and the words of songs...
...But who, at times, is not repressed and inarticulate—more often than not...
...On Sundays, he took her to church and sat listening with his head on one side, trying to understand, and giving Minna peppermints when she rustled...
...They had with them a little girl who cried: "Is this my little sister...
...viewing the situation with obvious compassion...
...Of this amount, over $12,000,000 results from breakage in the milk plants where milk is bottled...
...When they came for hor the next morning, be had her ready and her little garments were ready, washed and mended, and he had mended her doll...
...You done her out of a fortune...
...But this girl 'was silent and fragrant, and hopeful like a flower.' » * * When he asked her wistfully what kept her so happy she replied with an air of wonder: 'You!' And he thought to himself...
...On which the woman in the smart frock said sharply;"Now then, you do as mama tells you and keep out of this or we'll leave you here and take this darling little girl away with us...
...Here's.one: An Ohio hunter chased an old fox repeatedly and always failed to get him...
...On a May afternoon he went to a doctor...
...He watched the great blue car roll away...
...surely Zona, before she stops, will offer a workable solution...
...He himself used to try to pray: "Lord, make me do right by her if you see me doing wrong...
...Coolidge is pre-eminently a man of inaction...
...We are disconcerted and startled, suddenly, to be made conscious of the thoughts, aspirations, romances, sacrifices, heroisms, struggles, frustrations, sorrows, of these commonplace folk in their commonplace surroundings...
...Most people attribute it to the wind, which really has little or nothing to do with the humming sound...
...The Woman" comes nearest to conceding a degree of happiness and perhaps in defining what constitutes happiness: "We see a young college student, dressed in the best tailor made clothes, passing by an ugly, unpainted house, whose mean little porch faces the street...
...Then came a man of the ship * * * and made a boatlike box...
...But he could make little of the colored paper and the designs and the games, and he did not go again...
...Even the anti-administration Senators like Noris, Borah and La Follette, and anti-administration leaders like Lowden and Dawes, have no feeling against Mr...
...A strange fascination pervades the stories, though like the yellow gentian they have "a very bitter taste...
...The youth's father becomes bankrupt...
...And when other cars came, and he let them go, this woman told her husband that Bill ought to be reported to the authorities...
...A big girl, a big girl," he told her...
...Recently, some Parisian scientists have made astudy of singing wires ami have come to the conclusion that atmospheric condition, rather than wind, causes the vibration which produces sound...
...The holding of strong, clear views on mooted public questions, the harboring of genuine "convictions about controversial matters, the taking of definite stands one way or another—these are things which, while they may serve a fine public purpose, inevitably create a hostile political feeling...
...Here is a man who, for nearly six years, has held more power than any other in the world, and has done so little with it that at the end of five years he has not collected at home or abroad a single genuine antagonism...
...She considered and answered, T want you to be as happy as I am.' Then, after reflecting on his early dreams of success, he said to her out of a deep sense of conviction, 'I'm the happy one, you know.' "One day when he was sixty, sitting on the mean little porch of his small house, near the street, he glanced up from the newspaper he was reading and saw, walking by, a young man in clothes of latest cut...
...By gravitation and radiation red giant stars are formed and grow hotter and denser...
...In the fifty years I have been in this country they've grown to be men and women with homes to look after...
...I'm a little girl tonight—kiss me," she had said, but he shook his head...
...THE EVOLUTION OF STARS THE annual report of the Smithsonian Institution—the 81st, by the way—contains several very interesting articles of considerable scientific importance...
...said the woman next door when she heard...
...Coolidge personally...
...The hunter watched the fox one day from concealment...
...The dogs came along and naturally followed the fresh scent of the other fox...
...Among them is one by Dr...
...In the fifteen years the four children came...
...When the woman next door said this was not the diet for four-year-olds, he asked her to teach him to cook oatmeal and vegetables, and though he always burned the dishes in which he cooked these things, he cooked them every day...
...I had a little schooling, not much, and then I worked in the mills and waited for the time to marry...
...When he tucked her in her bed, he stood in the dlark hearing her breathing...
...BILL Zona Gale_ gladly responded to my request of the privilege to reprint in full in our December number the beautiful story, "Bill...
...It might be that he had sir months...
...But, the 6trange thing about these studies is the discovery that singing wires presage bad weather...
...very small, and in that he laid my little one * * * and he made a sail of the sailcloth and fastened on that strange boat...
...There's some things I can't be any help to her with," he thought...
...He falls in lore, with a pretty girl and they are married and live in a little flat...
...Autobiography" comes near answering the recurrent question, why they bear it: * * * ti\ SWING under a fruit -tree that /\ seemed always in bloom, some dishes of pottery and a wooden doll —these gave me a happy childhood, at the hands of mv parents, who were anxious but kind...
...and he knew that his decision was already upon him...
...He swept, all but the corners, and he dusted, dabbing at every object...
...He found a kitten for her so that she wouldn't be lonely...
...I think of him, that worked himself to death long ago...
...Why, scientists cannot tell, as yet...
...For the most part it seems that about all there is to be said of an individual life can be told in the space of three or four or, at most, five, or six pages...
...the children grew up, married, came home and patronized them...
...BOTTLE BREAKAGE IN MILK PLANTS ONE of the problems confronting dairymen and milk dealers is how to reduce the loss of milk bottles...
...The other doctor made him sure.._ He tried to think what to do...
...These "short short-stories" as she calls them are an inherent part of the art which has won her world fame as a writer of fiction, poetry and drama...
...But her lip curled and she turned away sorrowful, so the next day Bill went to another doctor to make sure...
...The stories are not related, and yet we read the first, and the next, and the next, and so on to the finish, just as we read the chapters of an irresistible novel of whose conclusion we are in doubt, but are eager to know...
...In a blooming of his hope and his dread, Bill said to them: "You're the ones...
...And, while we ask for forgiveness for our want of understanding of the people "next door," we realize how closely akin our own emotional states and experiences are to theirs...
...He cooked their supper and while she ate, he watched...
...One whole night he thought...
...Lest I be misunderstood, I hasten to add that I do not consider this a compliment to Mr...
...But while I told him I saw there was something he had to tell me...
...narrow bounds and limited endowment do not exclude the search for life's meaning, as in "The Question...
...If fie forgot the prayer, he either woke her up, or else he made her say it the first thing next morning...
...The old one was running along behind a young fox with the dogs some distance behind...
...The seventh day . she died...
...I am not good enough for her,' and he tried his best to prove that he was...
Vol. 19 • December 1927 • No. 12
