7 best short stories by Elizabeth Garver Jordan E-Book

Elizabeth Garver Jordan

• Herausgeber: Tacet Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: 7 best short stories
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 193

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Elizabeth Garver Jordan was an American journalist, author, editor, and suffragist, now remembered primarily for having edited the first two novels of Sinclair Lewis, and for her relationship with Henry James, especially for recruiting him to participate in the round-robin novel The Whole Family. This book contains: - Bart Harrington, Genius. - The Community's Sunbeam. - Mrs. Mccafferty Explains. - Motion Study at St. Katharine's. - Philip's "Furnis Man". - The Surrender of Professor Seymour. - Young Love.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Author

Bart Harrington, Genius

The Community's Sunbeam

Mrs. Mccafferty Explains

Motion Study at St. Katharine's

Philip's "Furnis Man"

The Surrender of Professor Seymour

Young Love

About the Publisher

The Author

Elizabeth Garver Jordan was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to William Frank Jordan and Margaretta Garver, and was the first of their two daughters. She graduated from high school in 1884. After learning shorthand at business school, she began her journalistic career as women's page editor at Peck's Sun. She then worked as a secretary to the Milwaukee superintendent of schools while contributing to the St. Paul Globe and Chicago Tribune.

In 1890, Jordan moved to New York City and began working at Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World. Her first big break was an interview with the normally reticent First Lady Caroline Scott Harrison, wife of President Benjamin Harrison. At the World she became known for her regular Sunday human interest feature "True Stories of the News". Major stories she covered included the trial of Carlyle Harris for the murder of his wife Helen Potts and the trial of accused ax murderer Lizzie Borden. She also wrote a series of articles about conditions in New York City tenements that was later published as the book The Submerged Tenth. In 1895, she published a collection of short stories, many of them inspired by her work, called Tales of the City Room. In 1897 she was appointed assistant Sunday editor of the World.

From 1901 to 1913, she was editor of the magazine Harper's Bazaar. During those years she published a number of novels and short story collections. These included a popular series of novels featuring the heroine May Iverson. Her play The Lady of Oklahoma premiered on Broadway at the 48th Street Theatre in April 1913. During this period, she is perhaps best remembered for organizing a collaborative novel called The Whole Family, about the middle class Talbert family from New England. Each of her co-authors, some of them novelists of some renown like Henry James and William Dean Howells, penned one of the twelve chapters. The novel was serialized in Harper's from 1907 to 1908.

After the sale of Harper's to William Randolph Hearst, she remained at Harper and Brothers as literary advisor until 1918. In that capacity, she edited the first novel by Sinclair Lewis, Our Mr. Wrenn (1914). While his first novel required extensive revision with her assistance, his second, The Trail of the Hawk (1915), required no editorial intervention. She also helped publish novels by a number of female authors, including Zona Gale, Eleanor H. Porter, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Jordan was an active suffragette and in 1917 organized another collaborative novel, The Sturdy Oak, with fourteen authors supporting the cause, including Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Heaton Vorse, Alice Duer Miller, Ethel Watts Mumford, Henry Kitchell Webster and William Allen White. The novel was serialized in Collier's Weekly. She also collaborated with minister and suffragette Anna Howard Shaw on Shaw's autobiography, The Story of a Pioneer (1915).

In 1918, she was briefly editorial director for Goldwyn Pictures. She spent the rest of her career writing. Two of her novels were adapted for film: Daddy and I (1934) as Make Way for a Lady (1936) and The Girl in the Mirror (1919) as The Girl in Number 29 (1920). She published a memoir, Three Rousing Cheers, in 1938. She died at her home in New York City and was buried in Florence, Massachusetts.

Bart Harrington, Genius

THE assistant Sunday editor of the New York Searchlight was busy. This was not an unusual condition, but it frequently included unusually irritating features. His superior, Wilson, the Sunday editor, was a gentleman with a high brow and a large salary, who, having won a reputation as "a Napoleon of Journalism," had successfully cultivated a distaste for what he called "details." His specialty was the making of suggestions in editorial council, in cheery expectation that they would be carried out by his associates—an expectation so rarely realized that Mr. Wilson's visage had almost a habit of hurt wonder. "Details" continued to absorb the activity of The Sunday Searchlight office, and Maxwell, the assistant editor, attended to them all, murmuring bitterly against his chief as he labored.

On this special morning, moreover, he was receiving telephoned bulletins of the gradual disintegration of his biggest "special," scheduled for the coming Sunday edition, which was to tell with sympathetic amplitude of a beautiful French maiden who had drowned herself because some young man no longer loved her. The active reporter assigned to the case had telephoned first his discovery that the girl never had a lover, but cheerily suggested that this explained her suicide as well as the earlier theory, and wasn't so hackneyed, sagely adding that he would get the story, anyhow. Subsequently, he had rung up the office to report, with no slight disgust, that there was no suicide to explain as the girl was not dead. She had merely gone to visit friends in the country, and the people in the house, missing her, had decided that the peaceful waters of the Hudson——

Maxwell hung up the receiver with a few crisp remarks addressed to space, and absorbed in awestruck silence by a young woman at the other end of the room, who eased her typewriting labor by pausing to hear them fully. It was at this inauspicious moment that the card of Mr. Bart Harrington was brought in by an office boy. Maxwell surveyed it with strong disfavor.

"Who is he?" he asked, regarding the office boy severely.

The office boy avowed deprecatingly that he didn't know.

"He ain't never been here before," he submitted in extenuation. "He says he's got a Sunday story."

Maxwell resigned himself to the waste of five minutes of precious time.

"Show 'm in," he commanded testily. He sat down at his desk and turned toward the door an expression that reminded callers of the value of time and the brevity of life. Mr. Harrington, who had followed the boy through the door with conviction of these two things, dropped into a chair beside the editor's desk and surveyed Maxwell with a smile so young, so trustful, and withal so engaging, that unconsciously the stern features of that functionary relaxed. Nevertheless, he was not jarred out of his routine.

"Got your story with you, Mr. Harrington?" he asked briskly, holding out his hand for the manuscript. "If you'll leave it, I'll read——"

Harrington interrupted him with an impressive shake of his head. Then he settled back in his chair, crossed one leg comfortably over the other, plunged his hands deep in the pockets of his very shabby overcoat, and continued to regard the editor with his singularly boyish, dimpling smile. With one swift glance Maxwell took him in, from the broken boot on the foot he was gently swinging to and fro, to the thick, curly locks on his handsome head. He had a complexion like a girl's, a dimple in each cheek, and a jaw like a bulldog's. He was all of six feet tall, and his badly made clothes could not wholly conceal the perfect lines of his figure. He was about twenty-two years old. Maxwell decided, and, notwithstanding his dimples, his complexion, his youth, and his smile, he conveyed a vivid impression of masculinity and strength. He was wholly self-possessed, and his manner suggested that the business which had brought him where he was was of such urgent value and importance that the busy world itself might well hush its noisy activities long enough to hear of it. To his own great surprise, Maxwell waited until his caller was prepared to speak.

Harrington shook his head again, slowly. Then he tapped his forehead with the second finger of his right hand.

"I have it heah," he said slowly, referring evidently to the brow he had indicated, and speaking with a slight drawl and the strongly marked accent of the southern mountaineer. "I 'lowed I wouldn't write it till I knew you-all wanted it. I'd like to tell it. Then if——"

Maxwell nodded, and glanced at his watch.

"Fire away," he said, elegantly. "But be as quick as you can, please. This is closing day and every minute counts."

Harrington smiled his ingenuous smile. It was a wistful smile—not a happy one—but it seemed, somehow, to illumine the office. Maxwell reflected irritably that there was something unusually likable about the fellow, but he wished he'd hurry up and get out. From force of habit his fingers grasped a blue pencil on his desk, and he began to fumble nervously among the manuscripts that lay before him. Harrington settled back more firmly in his chair, and the swinging of his torn boot was accelerated a trifle, but his voice when he spoke was full of quiet confidence.

"It's a good thing, suh," he said, "and I can tell you-all about it in a sentence. I'm goin' to commit suicide to-day, an' I agree to write the experience foh you, up to the last minute, if you-all will have me buried decently. I don't cayah to be shoveled into the Pottah's Field."

Maxwell dropped the blue pencil and wheeled to look at him. Then his face hardened.

"It's a pretty bad joke," he said, "or a bum sort of bid for charity. In either case you can't waste any more of my——"

But Harrington had sprung to his feet, his blonde young face black with passion.

"Damn you!" he hissed, thrusting his head down close to the other's and clenching his fists. "How dahe you-all say I lie o' ask charity? I'd see you-all in hell befoah I'd take a cent of youah damned money. Ain't you got brains enough in youah haid to see that I've got to the end of mah rope?"

Maxwell was a clever man, educated in the world's university. He knew truth when he met it, and he knew human nature.

"Sit down," he said quietly, "and tell me about it. I'm sorry I spoke as I did, but you must admit that your proposition was rather startling."

Harrington sat down, still breathing hard in his excitement, but evidently making a resolute effort to control himself.

"That's why I brought it heah," he said, answering the other's last words. "You-all like stahtlin' things, don't you? That's what you print. I'm offerin' you a straight bahgain, suh—a business proposition. If you-all don't want it, say so."

Maxwell smiled in his turn, but there was nothing ironic in the smile, nor in the look he turned on his fellow-man.

"It's not quite as simple as you seem to think," he explained gently. "But tell me more about it. What led to this decision? What makes you think suicide is the only way out of your troubles? That's a part of the story, you know. Let me have that first, in a few words.

"It can be told, suh, in three," said the southerner. His smile had returned. His voice was the cool voice of one who discusses abstract things. "I'm a failyuh. This wo'ld ain't no use foh failyuhs. I've given myself all the time and chances I dese'ved, but I cayn't win out, so I've got to git out. The's no one to ca'e. I've no kin, no one dependin' on me in any way. As foh me, I'm ti'ed; life ain't wuth the effo't."

Maxwell regarded him.

"You don't look like a quitter," he said thoughtfully.

The boy's face blazed again, but he kept his temper.

"To quit means to give somethin' up," he said doggedly. "I ain't givin' anythin' up. I ain't got anythin' to give up. Life without wo'k, o' interest, o' fren's, o' ambition, o' love—that ain't livin'! If you-all evah tried it, you'd know. I ain't been so chee'ful in yeahs as I've been sence I made up my mind to 'quit,' as you-all call it."

"You've got health, haven't you?" demanded Maxwell.

"Yes."

Maxwell brought his hand down on the desk with an air of finality.

"Then you've got everything. Do you mean to tell me that a fellow like you can't earn enough to support himself? If you do, you're talking rot."

Harrington took this with his wide, guileless grin. He was not offended now, for he felt the friendly interest and sympathy under the other's words. His voice when he replied was gentler.

"I ain't sayin' I can't keep body an' soul together, foh maybe I can," he conceded. "But I'm sayin' that ain't life. I'm sayin' I ain't been fitted fo' wo'k. I ain't been educated. I've lived in a log cabin down in the Virginia mountains all mah life. I left thah six weeks ago, after mah mother died. She was the last of ouah family but me. I ain't never been to school. She taught me to read in the Bible, an' to write. I ain't nevah read anotheh book except the Bible and Mistah Shakespeah's poems, an' Mistah Pluta'ch's Lives of Great Men. I know them b' hea't. I don't know whe' she got them o' whe' she came from. She was different from othah mountain women. I've been No'th six weeks, and I've tried ha'd to find a place whah I could fit in, but th' ain't none. Men must be trained fuh wo'k; I ain't trained. I cyan't go back, foh the's no one thah, an' I hate the mountains."

Maxwell's reply was brief and to the point.

"Think you could learn to run our elevator without killing us all?" he inquired. "Well, you've got to. You've been talking awful guff, you know Now you're going to work, right here. We need a new man. The one we have has been drunk three days. You're going to run the elevator and get fifteen dollars a week to begin with. Here's your first week's salary in advance. I'll arrange about the job with the Superintendent. I'll give you some books, and you can educate yourself. When you're above elevator work we'll give you something better. You'll probably have my job inside of a year," he ended, jocosely.

The hand the mountaineer stretched out to him trembled as Maxwell grasped it.

"You ah the only white man I've found in the No'th," said the southerner breathlessly. "I'll make good, as they say up heah. But I don't know how I can thank you."

"Don't try," said Maxwell, brusquely. "Be here at eight in the morning. By nine there will be a few callers I may want you to throw down the shaft."

Thus began the connection between the Searchlight and Bart Harrington, subsequently its most popular employé. Before the week was over all the reporters and most of the editors had casually sought from Maxwell some details concerning his protégé, but had received few. Harrington was a new man and he came from the Virginia mountains, and was most obliging and altogether engaging. This was all the information acquired even by the indefatigable Miss Mollie Merk, whose success in extracting from individuals information it was their dearest desire to conceal had made her a star member of the Searchlight's staff. It was to Miss Merk, however, that Harrington announced his first important discovery. Leaning across her desk one evening after his successor had taken the "car," the new elevator man touched a subject much upon his mind.

"I got wet the othah day," he began conversationally, "an' mah landlady let me go to the kitchen to dry mah clothes. I obse'ved as I sat by huh stove that the lid of the wash boilah kept liftin' up, all by itself, an' then I saw 't'was raised by the steam of the hot watah inside. I kep' thinkin' 'bout it, an' it seems to me that's an idea thah, a soht of ene'gy, you know, that might be used in big ways. I mus' think it out."

Mollie Merk looked at him, vague memories of one James Watts stirring uneasily in her brain.

"There's a good deal written about steam," she said sympathetically. "I'll bring you a book on it."

She did, for Harrington was already high in her regard; and quite possibly the volume killed in that youth's aspiring soul the germ of a beautiful hope. But he was to the fore very soon with a discovery of equal weight. This time his confidant was Maxwell.

"Why is it," he asked that busy citizen one evening, "that when I get in the bath-tub the water rises highah? Ain't the' some principal the' that is impo'tant? As I think it ovah——"

Maxwell hurriedly assured him that there was, and the volume on steam was followed by a treatise on specific gravity, which gave Mr. Harrington food for reflection for several days. Nevertheless the discovery that others had been before him did not depress him in the least. He gave the Sunday editor an insight into his views on one occasion when that gentleman was able to convince him that Isaac Newton and not Bart Harrington had discovered the law of gravitation while watching an apple fall from a tree.

"I obse'ved it, too, suh," argued Harrington sturdily, defending his position as a scientific discoverer. "Of co'se I see the fo'ce of you'h rema'k that the othah man was first. That is unfo'tunate foh me. But does it affect the value of my discovery? It does not, suh."

"There's a good deal in it," Wilson conceded to Maxwell after he had delightedly repeated this conversation. "Of course, the fellow has an unusual mind. It's a pity he's always a few hundred years behind the time, but, as he hints, that needn't dim our admiration for the quality of his brain fibre."

Maxwell laughed uneasily.

"I can't make up my mind," he admitted in his turn, "whether he's a genius or a plain fool. He lost his dinner last night explaining to me how the power of Niagara could be applied to practical uses. He was horribly depressed when I told him it not only could be, but was. I let him talk, though, to see what his ideas were, and they were very practical."

"I call that mighty encouraging," said the chief, optimistically. "He's getting down to modern times. After he has discovered the telephone and telegraph and cable and wireless telegraphy he may tackle telepathy and give us something new."

But Harrington indulged in an unexplained digression at this point. He discovered literature and became acquainted with the works of one Charles Dickens, of whose genius he made himself the sounding trumpet-call for the ears of an indifferent world.

"The's a book called 'David Coppe'field,'" he confided to Maxwell one night when he had lingered for a chat with his benefactor. "It's great, suh. You should read it sometime, Mistah Maxwell; you would appreciate its wo'th." He outlined the plot then and there, and Maxwell good-naturedly listened, finding his compensation in the enthusiast's original comments on character and situation. This, however, established a bad precedent, and Maxwell was subsequently obliged to hear a careful synopsis of "Little Dorrit," "Old Curiosity Shop" and "Oliver Twist," in quick succession, followed by the somewhat painful recitation of most of Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"—for Harrington was now entering the daisied field of poetry.

It was at this point that Maxwell felt himself constrained to give his protégé a few words of advice, the city editor having objected to an enforced hearing of the plot of "Ivanhoe," and Mollie Merk having admitted that she had climbed six flights of stairs twice a day for a week in preference to hearing the final eighteen stanzas of "Paradise Lost."

Maxwell explained the situation to his friend as gently as he could one morning when Harrington had interrupted a talk between himself and a distinguished western editor who was spending a few days in New York.

"You see, old man," he ended kindly, "this is a big, new world to you, but the rest of us have been living in it all our lives. We've taken in these things you're discovering—or we've had them driven into us at school. So—er—they're not new, and while we appreciate them we haven't got time to go over them all again. When you get up to modern fiction—the things people are reading to-day——"

With one expressive gesture of the hand Mr. Harrington demolished modern fiction.

"I ain't got time foh that, Mistah Maxwell," he said, respectfully. "I read one, an I regret to say, suh, that it was too much. I have looked into othe's, but I go no fu'thah. I have tried to open to you gentlemen the great wo'ks I have disco ve'ed, an' youah reply is that you-all have read them, suh. I am surprised. Do you give one glance at a picture an' nevah look again? Do you listen once to music, o' must it be something new and mode'n ev'ry time? Last night I heard the composition of a musician named Beethoven, who, I have learned, has been dead foh yeahs. Yet people still listen to his notes. Why don't they read these books, of Mistah Dickens and Mistah Scott and Mistah Shakespeah?"

Maxwell murmured feebly that a few did. A fitting response to Harrington's arraignment somehow eluded him, and before he had found the words he wanted an unexpected interruption came from the western editor, who had been listening to the conversation with almost painful interest.

"Mr. Harrington," he asked abruptly, "can you write?"

Harrington looked surprised and boyishly injured.

"Yes, suh," he replied stiffly. I can read and write."

"Oh, of course, of course," explained the other hastily. "I don't mean that. Can you write for the press? Have you tried to write anything for other people to read?"

Harrington's characteristic smile flashed forth.

"I have submitted sev'al ahticles to Mistah Maxwell," he said with some dignity, "but thus far I have not been fo'tunate enough——"

Maxwell drew a little package of manuscripts from a pigeon-hole in his desk and handed them to the visitor without a word. They spoke for themselves. The latter glanced through them, frowning. Maxwell returned to his work. Harrington waited. At last the westerner handed the papers back to his eastern colleague, shaking his head as he did so.

"These won't do at all," he said decidedly, "but they confirm my impression that this man can write something worth while." He addressed himself to Maxwell now, discussing Harrington as impersonally as if he were absent, but from time to time his keen eyes returned to the southerner's face.

"Here's a man," he began didactically, "who is hundreds of years behind the times. But please to remember that he would have been Watts, Newton, and several other discoverers if he had existed before them. He's as much of a pilgrim on this earth to-day as if he were a visitor from another planet. But he has an extraordinary type of mind and very good taste—a strong, ignorant, instinctive feeling for the best. If he would write a series of short articles giving his point of view to the busy men and women of to-day, they should be 'good stuff'—a sort of artistic voice crying in the commercial wilderness, don't you see. You or some one else may have to put them into shape, until he catches the idea, but he will catch it all right. He's clever enough. If you want to try him, and it turns out as I think it will, I'll buy the material for simultaneous publication in Chicago. What do you say?"