Part 8

Did princes say 'Hullo!'

The Princess had little time to wonder, for he was there before her. She could feel his presence in every fibre of her trembling little being, though she would not open her eyes for very fear that it might be somebody else. No, no, it was the Prince! It was his voice, clear and ringing, as she had known it would be. She put up her hands suddenly and covered her eyes with them to make surer. It was not fear now, but a device to put off a little longer the delight of seeing him.

'I say, hullo! Haven’t you got any tongue?'

'Oh, verily, verily,--I mean hear, O Prince, I beseech,' she panted.

The boy’s merry eyes regarded the shabby small person in puzzled astonishment. He felt an impulse to laugh and run away, but his royal blood forbade either. So he waited.

'You are the Prince,' the little Princess cried. 'I’ve been waiting the longest time,--but I knew you’d come,' she added simply. 'Have you got your velvet an’ gold buckles on? I’m goin' to look in a minute, but I’m waiting to make it spend.'

The Prince whistled softly. 'No,' he said then, 'I didn’t wear _them_ clo’es to-day. You see, my mother--'

'The Queen,' she interrupted; 'you mean the Queen?'

'You bet I do! She’s a reg’lar-builter! Well, she don’t like to have me wearin' out my best clo’es every day,' he said gravely.

'No,' eagerly, 'nor mine don’t. Queen, I mean,--but she isn’t a mother, mercy, no! I only wear silk dresses every day, not my velvet ones. This silk one is getting a little faded.'

She released one hand to smooth the dress wistfully. Then she remembered her painfully practiced little speech and launched into it hurriedly.

'Hear, O Prince. Verily, verily, I did not know which color you 'd like to find me dressed in--I mean _arrayed_. I beseech thee to excuse--oh, _pardon_, I mean--'

But she got no further. She could endure the delay no longer, and her eyes flew open.

She had known his step; she had known his voice. She knew his face. It was terribly freckled, and she had not expected freckles on the face of the Prince. But the merry, honest eyes were the Prince’s eyes. Her gaze wandered downward to the home-made clothes and bare, brown legs, but without uneasiness. The Prince had explained about his clothes. Suddenly, with a shy, glad little cry, the Princess held out her hands to him.

The royal blood flooded the face of the Prince and filled in all the spaces between its little gold-brown freckles. But the Prince held out his hand to her. His lips formed for words and she thought he was going to say, 'Verily, Princess, thou hast found favor--'

'Le’ ’s go fishin',' the Prince said.

THE TWO APPLES

JAMES EDMUND DUNNING

WHEN the morning of the sixteenth day broke out from the gray battlements to the east’ard, only two live men remained on the raft which more than two weeks before had left the splintered side of the barkentine; besides, there was one dead man, and his body counted three out of a dozen who had clung to the raft until ten starved to death because they could not live on red apples and brine.

Zadoc roused as much as a man can when every morning he wakens less and less until some day he does not waken at all. Jeems lay staring at the sun as at a stranger’s face.

'Turn out, Jeems,' said Zadoc, when he had worked some life back into his thickening tongue, 'till we put him over.'

They rolled the body into the sea with no words or ceremonials to mark the end, except that Jeems, when some part of the splash stung his face, struck off the drops with trembling, horrified hands.

'Two apples left,' said Zadoc, not in any tentative sounding of possibilities, but with finality forced home by a fact so plain and near as to render evasion needless.

'One for to-day,' said Jeems, 'the--the other one for to-morrow.'

'The _last_ one for to-morrow!' returned Zadoc, bold as ever. 'Let us wait as long as we can before breakfast!'

The raft drifted many hours, following the sun around the fatal, empty bowl. Jeems broke that vast silence.

'Zadoc, I must eat something. My head is--you know--my head!'

'So does mine,' said Zadoc. 'Cut the first apple in two.'

It takes so little to satisfy, when one is starving, and that little goes so very fast! When Zadoc put his furred teeth into half the first apple, it was as if he had not tasted such since he left Cape Cod a dozen years before. His mind, strained with a long, unrealized hope, forgot the timbers on which his bent muscles clung, and went back to an orchard he had known--where such apples always grew. The cool air from the shadows underneath the tree-rows seemed interlaid with waves of heat and the loved odors of the sunlit seaside farm,--that long slope from the meadow land up, up and up beneath the slant uncertain fence to where the white top-sides of the house were vividly set off in green,--till Zadoc came to himself and understood that the smell was only the damp breath of the Atlantic, and the heat the plunging agony which flowed from his own tense heart. The first apple was gone.

The two men’s eyes conversed in brief. Then Zadoc said,--

'I’m going to sleep again, if it _is_ sleep. Anyway, I’m tired. Can you stay up a while?'

'It’s my trick,' consented Jeems.

Neither spoke of the approaching end, but when they had sat staring at each other a time,--for mad men’s minds move with but a mock agility, Zadoc said,--

'Put the second apple under the tin cup in the middle of the raft, and keep it there.'

When the apple was safe, Zadoc held out his right hand.

'Until I wake, Jeems!' he said.

'It is safe there,' was the answer.

And Zadoc lay down on the soggy timbers, satisfied, with faith in the honor of his starving mate.

To Jeems, who watched, the sea looked as never in his life before. For years he had enslaved it. As a tough Mount Desert fisher-boy, he had bound it to his childish will; and in many later years afloat had thrown back its innumerable challenges with all contempt until the Last Time. In sailors' lives, birth and the marriage-day bow down to the Last Time. It always comes, when Fortune or the years have made them blindly bold.

His courage fled before the onslaught of these terrible seas which, high above the level of his blurring eyes, swept up in a torturous parade, as if Death maddened his victims by passing his grand divisions in review.

Besides, the pain of hunger so outgrew all reason! It cut through the man’s thin body like the blade of a great and sudden sorrow in one’s heart, through and through, ever returning, never going!

A greater sea than the others rolled underneath the raft, and shook the loose boards so that the tin dipper rolled on its inverted rim, and then fell tinkling back again. Jeems crawled to where he could lift the dipper and see beneath. The second apple lay secure, its plump sides a shocking contrast to the terrors of the raft. Jeems looked hard. A cruel pain shot from his throat to his heels in a tearing red-hot spiral. The first apple had so cooled his mouth! Water began running off Jeems’s chin. If he could only run his fingers down those rounding sides, maybe they would catch some of the orchard smell.

Jeems clapped the dipper down with a sudden muscular fury, and kicked Zadoc into sense with such vigor that he fell exhausted from the effort.

'I was so lonesome, I thought I might go off,' he explained, adding, 'Zadoc, what’s your family?'

'Five and the wife, God help 'em,' said Zadoc, not dramatically either, but just dully, as if it was what his mind had grown to know very much better than anything else. 'Have you?'

'No,' said Jeems. 'Years ago, I called on a pretty girl over to Somesville, but nothing came of it.'

'Just as well now,' said Zadoc coldly; adding, half in dream, 'I recollect _all_ them Somesville girls was pretty. 'Lizabeth come from there.'

'Who?' asked Jeems.

''Lizabeth,--the wife,--why, she was your sister, Jeems!'

'So she was! I forgot!'

Many madmen speak in the past tense at the stage where they seem to look back on their proper selves.

The sun neared the west.

'Lie down again,' said Jeems; 'I’ll watch.'

'Any sail--that time before?'

'No sail, Zadoc.'

The wind dropped near night, and Jeems lay on the raft with eyes that glowed back the red reflection of the setting sun. As it moved toward the liquid line of sea, its brilliance fell into the smother of a cloud through which its sides shone with the softened, satin polish of the second apple as Jeems last saw it. The thought struck him in the middle of his heart, which began leaping as when, at nineteen, a girl’s smooth fingers lingered on his own. He hungered for sight of the second apple as for nothing else in the whole of the world before. He wished the raft might roll so violently as to throw off the dipper, and then, before he realized, his own foot had kicked it into the ocean and the apple smiled before him, securely laid between two great planks at the bottom of the raft. Zadoc slept. Jeems was alone with the second apple!

He looked at it between caked lids and let his eyes rove over and over its rare beauties. For the first time since he was born, his whole being--the knotted body whose abundant energies had been quite absorbed by the arduous doings of his roving life, and the big heart of him where the rich red of the blood was pent and packed with never a bit of an outlet for relief--thrilled with the keen, delicious mystery of Desire. His meagre lips, crackling like snake-skin, repeated in monotone, as if to hold his conscience under some mesmeric charm, 'I must! I must!'

The mere thought of the cool heart of the fruit made his pulse spring as if whipped. To imagine the exquisite satisfaction which would follow his teeth as they sank slowly, slowly--sank farther and farther through those moistening walls until, at the very acme of delight, they met! Christ! He was on it in an instant, holding it with both hands and not lifting it, but just putting his face down and keeping it so in a passionate embrace. He _would_ eat, if he died for it. He _must_--

''Lizabeth!' It was Zadoc, dreaming.

''Lizabeth! Good old girl. Good girl. Bye-bye, home at sundown. Good old, good--ah-h-h-h!'

The voice fell away in an idiotic sigh. Jeems sprang to his feet and stood swaying with the raft, the image of his sister in his eyes. Off east, where the gray shades grew, he saw her walking on the sea, her long hair blown before, like a cloud of jet-black flame, and her face all lovely.

''Lizabeth!' Jeems spread his arms; but she did not see him, for she looked at Zadoc as he lay there at her brother’s feet, and her eyes rained love, which calmed the sea like oil.

And then Jeems saw himself as if from far. ''Lizabeth!' he cried; but she did not hear, so he held his two arms up toward the sky and whispered, 'God, God, _God_! Forgive Jeems Harbutt, a wicked sinner,--and take him,'--his voice sank to a low, unhuman key,--'and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever--O God!'

And with arms still raised in suppliance for his great unselfish soul, he sprang out backward to the darkening sea.

THE PURPLE STAR

BY REBECCA HOOPER EASTMAN

I

WHEN the Fifth Graders returned in the fall, they knew, to a boy and a girl, that they were to go to Room H, and they knew, too, that by passing over the threshold they would automatically become the elderly and dignified Sixth Grade. Proud and disdainful were Sixth Graders, in that they carried the largest geographies made; highly pedantic, too, were they, because they coped with mysterious institutions called fractions, which occupied the clean, unexplored back part of one’s arithmetic. Fearsomely learned were they in words of seven, eight, and nine syllables. To be one of such was to be indeed Grown Up. When the new class, half-timorous, and wholly suspicious, entered Room H, they were startled to find their thirty names already written in a neat column on the blackboard, with an imperative 'DO NOT ERASE' underneath. How on earth had Miss Prawl found out their names?

It was hard for Theodora Bowles to take her seat inconspicuously, as if she were no better than stupid Freddy Beal; as if, in fact, she had not been for five years the leader of the class. Theodora, however, was not nearly so obscure as she supposed; for Miss Prawl, in secret session with the Fifth-Grade teacher, had been informed that Theodora was so quick-witted that she usually called out the answer before the teacher had finished putting the question. Furthermore, whenever the class was asked to recite in concert, she invariably shouted the answer first, and then the rest of the class repeated what Theodora had said, and were therefore always right. The fact that she knew more than any one but the teacher had made Theodora’s life one delightful arrogance of intellectual supremacy. Pretending that she was royalty in disguise, Theodora gazed impatiently at Miss Prawl, and wondered how long it would be before the new teacher found out how bright she was.

After all the children were located at desks corresponding to the ones they had occupied in Grades Five, Four, Three, Two, and One, Miss Prawl opened a drawer of her shiny, spotless desk, and took out a box which proved to contain six new pieces of different-colored chalk, lying side by side. The combination of the bright colors was so alluring that every child immediately resolved to save up for just such an outfit, in order to play hopscotch in colors. With every eager eye riveted upon her, Miss Prawl took out the piece of pink chalk, and made a very beautiful pink star on the blackboard, directly after Stella Appleton’s name. Stella, it may be said, always had a good deal of undeserved prominence, because her name began with an A.

'If, at the end of the week, Stella or any one of the rest of you is perfect in spelling, that person will get a pink star after his name,' announced Miss Prawl. And she put away the pink chalk, and drew a blue-chalk star after Freddy Beal’s name. 'You will all receive blue stars if you are perfect in arithmetic,' she continued. 'And yellow--' she drew a yellow star--'yellow is for perfect geography. Green'--she made a green star--'green is for perfect reading; and red--'Miss Prawl paused impressively--'red is for perfect deportment.'

After this entrancing monologue, Miss Prawl rubbed out the explanatory stars, replaced the chalk carefully in the box, and waited. Theodora’s hand at once shot up into the air.

'Well?' asked Miss Prawl.

'My-name’s-Theodora-Bowles,' said Theodora. 'And there’s a piece of purple chalk in your box, Miss Prawl, that you didn’t say anything about. And so I wondered if you hadn’t forgotten to tell us about purple stars.'

The whole class leaned forward in breathless expectancy, proud of their discerning Theodora.

'I am very glad that you asked me this question, Theodora,' said Miss Prawl. 'I keep the purple chalk for a very special, wonderful reason.'Thirty pairs of glistening eyes grew rounder. 'The purple star,' said Miss Prawl, in a hushed voice, 'is the greatest reward that I can bestow on any girl or boy. It is given only for some very great deed: for some deed which shall show that the girl or boy is either very brave or very kind, or both. Although I have seen a great many fine girls and boys, it has never happened that I felt that the right time had come to give any one a purple star. But perhaps this will be purple-star year.'

Theodora listened with a great dawning worship in her eyes. How exciting it was of Miss Prawl to set up such an impossibly high standard! And how altogether interesting Miss Prawl was, too! Her eyes seemed much given to dancing and twinkling; her voice was sweet and pleasant, being especially persuasive when she said 'boy' or 'girl'; and her smile was a blended maternal-siren affair which nobody of either sex had ever been able to resist. Miss Prawl made one feel a little ashamed, as if one had never before appreciated what a privilege and a responsibility it was to be a boy or a girl. The new teacher’s dress was a soft, pretty brown, dainty and fresh. Yes, Theodora resolved that she must attain the purple star, and thus forever become famous.

Just as she had arrived at this engrossing decision, the hall door opened, and Mr. Wadsmore, the adored, portly principal, strode energetically in, leading a new boy. This person, this upstart, this unidentified stranger, this perfect nobody of a new boy faced the critical, penetrating eyes of the assembled class with an almost superhuman ease.

'Miss Prawl, this young man is Charley Starr,' said Mr. Wadsmore. 'Can you make a place for him?'

Beside Theodora there was an empty seat, the only one in the room. As it was on the 'girls' side,' the male aspirants for education with difficulty smothered their roars of laughter at the idea of a boy’s sitting, debased, among the girls. Observing this ill-concealed hilarity, Miss Prawl at once led Charley to the empty seat beside Theodora.

'If you’ll sit here to-day, Charley, I will rearrange the seating to-morrow,' she said.

As Charley sank into the place assigned, Theodora blushed painfully. Being nearest to the unwelcome masculine stranger embarrassed her frightfully. Her hand flew up into the air.

'MayIgwoutandgettadrink?' she asked.

'Yes, Theodora,' replied Miss Prawl evenly.

She had heard of Theodora’s continuous and unquenchable thirst, and had been advised by no less a person than Mr. Wadsmore that the best course was to allow Theodora to drink as much and as often as she wished.

After a copious raid on the water-cooler, Theodora returned, feeling a little bloated, but much more composed and natural.

'Five minutes for whispering,' announced Miss Prawl, at eleven o’clock.

A deafening hubbub immediately arose.

'Say,' began Charley Starr to Theodora, from behind his desk cover, 'how do you like _her_?' He nodded toward Miss Prawl, and winked.

Theodora was unwilling to indulge in the intimacies of gossip on so slight an acquaintance.

'Where’d you come from, anyway?' she icily inquired.

'Skipped up from the Fourth Grade.'

'You did!' Hauteur was drowned in awe.

'You bet. It’s the second time I’ve skipped in this school, too.'

Theodora studied Charley with detached, incipient dislike. Charley must be very bright indeed to have skipped two classes. She herself, with all her brains, had never arrived at the pinnacle of skipping. And she had so much wanted to feel the importance of marching into chapel with the class next higher up, and of smiling back at her old mates with condescending tolerance. Theodora did not know that she might have skipped several times, but for the fact that her parents, who believed in the slow unfolding of her almost too brilliant mind, had begged to have her kept back.

All unconscious of this parental duplicity, Theodora was having some very uncomfortable minutes. If Charley Starr had skipped two classes, it looked as if the impossible were true--that there actually existed on the earth a person who was brighter than she. It could not be, and yet, and yet--Charley looked disturbingly intelligent. But there, of course he had not studied last year’s subjects in detail, so he could not possibly compete with her. And when she received the purple star, she would be entirely safe. Star--why, the new boy’s name was Star.

'Is your name spelled plain _S-t-a-r_?' she asked.

'_S-t-a-double r_,' replied Charley. 'I’m Charles Augustus Starr, Junior,' he said, in a bragging tone.

Theodora gave a shriek of delight, and punched the girl in front of her.

'Say, Laura, the new boy’s father is Coal-Cart Starr!' she cried.

Laura immediately shrieked, too, and so did all the other girls when they heard the news. Bewildered at so much noise, Miss Prawl rang the bell, and asked Theodora, who seemed to be a sort of cheer-leader, to look up the word 'whisper' in the large dictionary, and write the definition on the blackboard.

The cause of all the undue commotion was the fact that Charles Augustus Starr, Senior, was in the coal business, and that daily, all day long, up and down the city went huge coal carts labeled 'C. A. Starr.' At Theodora’s instigation, the girls in her class had formed the 'C. A. Starr Club,' which was a very original organization. There were no dues, and the responsibilities were light. They consisted of merely looking upward into the sky, and of pointing upward simultaneously with the index finger of the right hand every time one met a coal cart. C. A. Starr was thus cunningly interpreted as 'See a star!' It rather spoiled things that there were no stars to be seen in the daytime, and that the club members never met any coal carts at night. Still, it was extremely good fun, when you caught sight of a coal cart, to point up and look up suddenly, and to have the vulgar, uninitiated outsider ask, 'What are you doing?' and then to explain that you belonged to a secret order, and that there were times when it was necessary to give the high sign.

As Theodora was president of the See-A-Star Club, she at once called a meeting, to be held at the noon hour, for the purpose of considering whether or not club members ought to give the high sign in the presence of C. A. Starr, Junior. It was at length decided by the president, who did all the talking, that they would point up and look up when they met C. A. Starr, Junior, outside the school grounds. Otherwise, with Charley Starr right there in the same room, they would have to be pointing up and looking up all the time, and Miss Prawl might with reason object.

'Say,' said Charley Starr to Theodora, in the afternoon whispering period, 'did you hear about the purple star?'

Theodora nodded. She was speechless, because she had just crammed an entire licorice 'shoe-string' into her mouth.

'Well, I’m laying all my plans to get that star,' proclaimed Charley.

'So’m I,' said Theodora, thickly, with black lips. 'So there’s no use in your trying. I’d give up the idea, if I was you.'

'Not much I won’t. I’d like to see a girl get ahead of _me_,' retorted Charles, witheringly.

Violent sex-antagonism sprang up full grown within the soul of Theodora. This insignificant upstart who casually skipped must be taught the lesson, once and for all, that school was one of the places where girls excelled.

'Let us refresh our memories by reviewing some of last year’s geography,' said Miss Prawl, ringing the dinner-bell which called the class to order.

'Aha!' thought Theodora, swallowing the last of the shoe-string whole,--clearing the decks for action, as it were,--'I guess I’ll surprise C. A. Starr, Junior, _now_!'

'Recite in concert. What is the capital of Maine?' asked Miss Prawl.

'Augusta-on-the-Kennebec!' shouted Theodora Bowles and Charley Starr, as in one voice. 'Ter-ron-the-Kennebec!' echoed the rest of the class.

'What is the capital of New Hampshire?'

Again the two brilliant ones roared the right answer, and the rest recited, 'Curd-on-the-Merrimac!'

'Vermont?' continued Miss Prawl.

'Montpelier-on-the-Winooski!' yelled the rivals.

'She’s going straight through the United States in order,' decided Theodora. 'I know 'em all, backwards and forwards, and I guess Charley Starr will get left long before we get to the Dakotas.'

'What is the capital of Rhode Island?' asked the wily Miss Prawl, who had noted the absent look on Theodora’s face, and purposely omitted Massachusetts. And she caught everybody in the class.

'Boston-on-Massachusetts-Bay!' the leaders cried. And the parrots mimicked them.

Miss Prawl paused so long that Theodora recalled her question.

'Providence-and-Newport-on-Narragansett-Bay!' howled Charles Starr, _ahead_ of Theodora, and in a voice that could be heard all over the building.