Shinn / Nemo 7 best short stories by Anne O'Hagan Shinn

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-96858-439-3
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 142, 50 Seiten

Reihe: 7 best short stories

Anne O'Hagan Shinn was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, and writer of short stories, regularly contributing to publications such as Vanity Fair, and Harper's. In particular, she is known for her writings detailing the exploitation of young women working as shop clerks in early 20th Century America. This book contains: - Bread Eaten in Secret. - The Courtship of the Boss. - Emeline Hardacre's Revenge. - Fate and the Pocketbook. - Margaret McDonough's Restaurant. - The Romance at Hollywood College - Phbe in Politics

Anne O'Hagan Shinn (August 8, 1869 June 24, 1933) was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, and writer of short stories, regularly contributing to publications such as Vanity Fair, and Harper's. In particular, she is known for her writings detailing the exploitation of young women working as shop clerks in early 20th Century America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shinn, Anne O'Hagan

Nemo, August

Leseproben

IT was not surprising that Daniel Hennessey and his fellow townsmen sometimes forgot that the mayoralty was not a hereditary office in Crowley. For so many undisputed terms had he been chief magistrate that at last the very town seemed to him his heritage.

The people of the larger city that lay across the state line from Crowley—in this case the state line was a river—were given to much abuse of that begrimed center of mills, railroads, gas-works, and oil-tanks. When they spoke of Crowley's mayor and his administrations, it was with the triumphant vindictiveness of those who maintain their own virtuous standing chiefly by the shortcomings of others.

But all the periodic outcries of its great neighbor left Crowley placidly unmoved. Mr. Hennessey and the town agreed admirably with each other. Its population was a poor one; it was the shabby sleeping-place of a horde of petty clerks and workmen, who were ferried over to the big city in the morning twilight and back at evening dusk; it was the abode of its own soiled mill-hands and railroad laborers, of the employees on the trolley lines, its rotund saloon-keepers, and of their graduates in the staring, new, rectangular City Hall that was its boast.

Habited to makeshifts and blunders, they accepted without resentment the caving-in of badly-laid pavements, the bursting of shell-like sewer-pipes, and the spluttering and flickering illuminating gas that did not illuminate.

Daniel Hennessey suited them. If he did not give them good streets, he made ample amends in the way of picnics, free to all corners; if he amassed property at a rate unpleasantly suggestive, wealth did not render him proud. Moreover he spent his income in a way that made Crowley as indifferent to taxation as a loyal Briton on Coronation Day. No mayor within a hundred miles had more diamonds, raced better horses, or kept a more expensive or more easy "open house" at New Year's and other times when he bade his constituents hearty welcome.

Even his political associates were not jealous of Hennessey. He was a "fair man," they said wagging their chins judicially; by which they meant that if Daniel held stock in each new trolley that won a franchise from the town, they too held stock in their degree; and that if the company which mysteriously, in spite of a high bid, received the contract for opening up a new street, balanced things by restoring a small proportion of its fee to the city officials, they, as well as Daniel, profited.

And they continued to let Daniel rule them and rule Crowley, while the opposition languished into a negligible quantity, prating of assessments, civic honor and the hygienic disposal of refuse, but never organizing a barge party in the summer or distributing coals in the winter.

If Crowley's center was the disgrace to civilization which its neighbors named it, the outskirts were indescribable. The streets went unpaved, the roads ungraded, the infrequent street lamps were erected apparently as targets for stray missiles. Along the riverside toward the north was the road which the big city was constantly urging the little one to turn into a boulevard or a speedway, so great were its natural beauties. On one side lay the winding, isleted stream and on the other sloping, wooded stretches. But Crowley had small use for speedways; so the river-bank north of the town's center went quickly to ruin. Here a flood had encroached upon the road and left a great gap of jagged rock and water; and there a quarrying company, empowered by the city to blast rock, had left holes and pitfalls. The rains came and washed down the earth, uncovering the old corduroy foundations, until even the sure-footed horses from outlying truck farms were forced to seek a new road to town.

In the tangled growth of grass and weeds and trees that sloped up from the river's bank, were five or six old houses. They had been country seats when Crowley was merely a ferry-slip. They had been built with that ancient solidity which defies time and even vandalism. The owners had long since ceased to occupy them, and for the most part they were untenanted. The shingles had fallen from their roofs, the glass was gone from their windows, the doors were fallen from their hinges, the columns of their high piazzas were scarred and chipped by the hands of many picnickers. In the coarse grass that covered their old carriage-ways the wheel tracks of the past were dim, and ragged weeds choked out the fine grass where lawns had stretched.

It was one morning in September that Mayor Hennessey was tempted to try this ramshackle road. He had intended to take a spin out of the town and try his new horse on the good roads south of his jurisdiction, but when he came down the steps of the City Hall, he found he was too late for the run. Yet there was an unwonted freshness in the air—the wind blowing the many smokes of Crowley away from him—and he wished to try the horse. He bent to lift Lady Hamilton's hoofs with practised hand, then rising, flushed with the exertion, he climbed into the light rig and took the reins from the slouching hostler.

In the Crowley language he was "a fine figure of a man," broad and well padded by nature across the shoulders and ample of chest. Crowley liked the ruddy, jovial face, the fine, fierce iron-gray mustache at which his honor was wont to pull while his little blue eyes twinkled down upon a voter's baby.

They started delicately. Lady Hamilton and her owner. His big hands in their orange driving gloves grasped the reins lightly. On the River Way Daniel had purposed to give the horse her head, but the twisting road did not look promising for speeding. Although along the winding way he kept a tight rein, at a sharp turn he came upon calamity.

An adventurous furniture van—what idiot could be carting furniture along the River Way?—blocked travel. Its rear wheel hung over a minor precipice washed out of the road. Some of its contents had escaped their rope moorings and lay below, a damaged pile with the ripples washing it. The driver stood scratching his head futilely, and a woman was surveying the scene.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am," said his honor, elaborately. "Excuse me for not dismountin' to help you, ma'am, but this mare, ma'am, is a bit skittish this morn'. Can I do anything for you?"

"Yes, if you please," said the lady with unfeminine promptness. "I think this driver 's drunk. I thought so when he came this morning, and that's why I came along with the load. I don't care to have him finish dumping my furniture into the river. If there is such a thing in that town back there"—she nodded contemptuously in the direction of Crowley's center, and the Mayor felt a thrill of wounded pride such as he had not known in thirty years—"as a decent furniture wagon and a man sober enough to unload this on it, please send them to me."

"I will, ma'am, with pleasure, ma'am," answered the Mayor, resentful of Lady Hamilton's determined pulls to be gone.

"I will be much obliged," announced the lady in a tone that implied no consciousness of overwhelming obligation.

"Not at all, ma'am, not at all," the Mayor managed to jerk out, as the horse, safely turned, began to make good her late owner's claims in regard to her speed.

To insure it that the calm woman of the gray eyes was properly served, Daniel sent to her aid a city dray driven by a man so sober as to be absolutely taciturn. This being never mentioned to her that the infamously famous Mayor of Crowley had befriended her.

The Mayor was no "lady's man." Fifteen years before he had, as he put it, "buried his wife." Since then he had been too busy to think much about women. Indeed he had been so before poor Mrs. Hennessey had made her final pathetic appeal for thought. But since then he had been the despair of the ladies of Crowley's political circle who were well aware of his eligibility.

To-day, however, there was a gentle tumult beneath his striped shirt and his checked waistcoat. The direct gaze from a pair of fine, unexcited gray eyes kept intruding between him and his official business. And at night he went laggingly to the brick structure of which he had always thought proudly as the finest house in Crowley, being seized with an inexplicable distaste for its solitary splendors.

He stood at the door of the parlor, hoping by a contemplation of it to restore the brilliancy of his conception of his home. The ormolu clock ticked loudly on the black marble mantel. Daniel scowled at it and at the tall Chinese vases at either end, and even at the silver loving-cup inscribed with divers names and with high-sounding sentiments.

The lace curtains hung in spotless evenness clear to the floor, and swept the rose-strewn carpet a few inches. The chairs, upholstered in plush of the softest texture and the most glowing hue, stood evenly against the flowered wall. The marble table supported a gorgeously-bound Bible, an empty card receiver of jade and silver, and a plush photograph album. A long gilt-framed mirror doubled the room, chair for chair and ornament for ornament—even the great, dead, upright piano over against the folding doors, where the red portières were pulled back by heavy gold cord like the fringe on a general's epaulets.

"An' no one to play it," grumbled the Mayor.

By morning, however, his honor was better. At fifty, the successful politician seldom perishes of love at first sight. He made up his mind to visit the farm-house where some of his horses were pasturing, to buy a library—the Mayor did things on a grand scale—and to start the campaign. Not that there was much arduous campaigning in Crowley. "It's a walk-over for us, all right," said the Mayor,...