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1、【英文文学】Short Stories of the New AmericaPREFACEThe purpose of this book of short stories of modern American life is twofold.First, these narratives give an interpretation of certain great forces and movements in the life of this age. All the authors represented are especially qualified to describe wit
2、h force and feeling some phase of contemporary life.Thinking people everywhere realize that it is not enough to place before the pupils in the schools the bare facts in regard to community and national life. The heart must be warmed, the feelings must be stirred, before the will can be aroused to no
3、ble action in any great movement.President Wilson has urged school officers to increase materially the time and attention devoted to instruction bearing directly upon the problems of community and national life. This was not a plea for the temporary enlargement of the school programme, appropriate m
4、erely to the period of the war, but a plea for the realization in public education of the new emphasis which the war has given to the ideals of democracy.The first aim of this book, then, is to help to place clearly before young people the ideals of America through the medium of literature that will
5、 grip the attention and quicken the will to action.Second, librarians have stated that there are very few compilations of modern short stories of interest and significance with which to meet the needs of young people who turn to the libraries for help in reading.It is hoped that this book may be of
6、real value in the schools, by clothing the dry bones of civics with significant and interesting material, and that it may also supply a need of the libraries and the homes for a book of live and valuable short stories.IA LITTLE KANSAS LEAVENBetween 1620 and 1630 Giles Boardman, an honest, sober, wel
7、l-to-do English master-builder found himself hindered in the exercise of his religion. He prayed a great deal and groaned a great deal more (which was perhaps the Puritan equivalent of swearing), but in the end he left his old home and his prosperous business and took his wife and young children the
8、 long, difficult, dangerous ocean voyage to the New World. There, to the end of his homesick days, he fought a hand-to-hand battle with wild nature to wring a living from the soil. He died at fifty-four, an exhausted old man, but his last words were, “Praise God that I was allowed to escape out of t
9、he pit digged for me.”His family and descendants, condemned irrevocably to an obscure struggle for existence, did little more than keep themselves alive for about a hundred and thirty years, during which time Giles spirit slept.In 1775 one of his great-great-grandsons, Elmer Boardman by name, learne
10、d that the British soldiers were coming to take by force a stock of gunpowder concealed 4 in a barn for the use of the barely beginning American army. He went very white, but he kissed his wife and little boy good-bye, took down from its pegs his musket, and went out to join his neighbors in repelli
11、ng the well-disciplined English forces. He lost a leg that day and clumped about on a wooden substitute all his hard-working life; but, although he was never anything more than a poor farmer, he always stood very straight with a smile on his plain face whenever the new flag of the new country was ca
12、rried past him on the Fourth of July. He died, and his spirit slept.In 1854 one of his grandsons, Peter Boardman, had managed to pull himself up from the family tradition of hard-working poverty, and was a prosperous grocer in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The struggle for the possession of Kansas betwee
13、n the Slave States and the North announced itself. It became known in Massachusetts that sufficiently numerous settlements of Northerners voting for a Free State would carry the day against slavery in the new Territory. For about a month Peter Boardman looked very sick and yellow, had repeated viole
14、nt attacks of indigestion, and lost more than fifteen pounds. At the end of that time he sold out his grocery (at the usual loss when a business is sold out) and took his family by the slow, laborious caravan route out to the little new, raw settlement on the banks of the Kaw, which was called Lawre
15、nce for the city in the East which so many of its inhabitants had left. Here he recovered his health rapidly, and the look of distress left his face; indeed, he had a singular expression of secret happiness. He was caught by the Quantrell raid and 5 was one of those hiding in the cornfield when Quan
16、trells men rode in and cut them down like rabbits. He died there of his wounds. And his spirit slept.His granddaughter, Ellen, plain, rather sallow, very serious, was a sort of office manager in the firm of Walker and Pennypacker, the big wholesale hardware merchants of Marshallton, Kansas. She had
17、passed through the public schools, had graduated from the High School, and had planned to go to the State University; but the death of the uncle who had brought her up after the death of her parents made that plan impossible. She learned as quickly as possible the trade which would bring in the most
18、 money immediately, became a good stenographer, though never a rapid one, and at eighteen entered the employ of the hardware firm.She was still there at twenty-seven, on the day in August, 1914, when she opened the paper and saw that Belgium had been invaded by the Germans. She read with attention w
19、hat was printed about the treaty obligation involved, although she found it hard to understand. At noon she stopped before the desk of Mr. Pennypacker, the senior member of the firm, for whom she had a great respect, and asked him if she had made out correctly the import of the editorial. “Had the G
20、ermans promised they wouldnt ever go into Belgium in war?”“Looks that way,” said Mr. Pennypacker, nodding, and searching for a lost paper. The moment after, he had forgotten the question and the questioner.Ellen had always rather regretted not having been 6 able to “go on with her education,” and th
21、is gave her certain little habits of mind which differentiated her somewhat from the other stenographers and typewriters in the office with her, and from her cousin, with whom she shared the small bedroom in Mrs. Wilsons boarding-house. For instance, she looked up words in the dictionary when she di
22、d not understand them, and she had kept all her old schoolbooks on the shelf of the boarding-house bedroom. Finding that she had only a dim recollection of where Belgium was, she took down her old geography and located it. This was in the wait for lunch, which meal was always late at Mrs. Wilsons. T
23、he relation between the size of the little country and the bulk of Germany made an impression on her. “My! it looks as though they could just make one mouthful of it,” she remarked. “Its awfully little.”“Who?” asked Maggie. “What?”“Belgium and Germany.”Maggie was blank for a moment. Then she remembe
24、red. “Oh, the war. Yes, I know. Mr. Wentworths fine sermon was about it yesterday. War is the wickedest thing in the world. Anything is better than to go killing each other. They ought to settle it by arbitration. Mr. Wentworth said so.”“They oughtnt to have done it if theyd promised not to,” said E
25、llen. The bell rang for the belated lunch and she went down to the dining-room even more serious than was her habit.She read the paper very closely for the next few days, and one morning surprised Maggie by the loudness of her exclamation as she glanced at the headlines. 7“Whats the matter?” asked h
26、er cousin. “Have they found the man who killed that old woman?” She herself was deeply interested in a murder case in Chicago.Ellen did not hear her. “Well, thank goodness!” she exclaimed. “England is going to help France and Belgium!”Maggie looked over her shoulder disapprovingly. “Oh, I think its
27、awful! Another country going to war! England a Christian nation, too! I dont see how Christians can go to war. And I dont see what call the Belgians had, anyhow, to fight Germany. They might have known they couldnt stand up against such a big country. All the Germans wanted to do was just to walk al
28、ong the roads. They wouldnt have done any harm. Mr. Schnitzler was explaining it to me down at the office.“Theyd promised they wouldnt,” repeated Ellen. “And the Belgians had promised everybody that they wouldnt let anybody go across their land to pick on France that way. They kept their promise and
29、 the Germans didnt. It makes me mad! I wish to goodness our country would help them!”Maggie was horrified. “Ellen Boardman, would you want Americans to commit murder? Youd better go to church with me next Sunday and hear Mr. Wentworth preach one of his fine sermons.”Ellen did this, and heard a sermo
30、n on passive resistance as the best answer to violence. She was accustomed to accepting without question any statement she found in a printed book, or what any speaker said in any lecture. Also her mind, having been uniquely devoted 8 for many years to the problems of office administration, moved wi
31、th more readiness among letter-files and card-catalogues of customers than among the abstract ideas where now, rather to her dismay, she began to find her thoughts centering. More than a week passed after hearing that sermon before she said, one night as she was brushing her hair: “About the Belgian
32、sif a robber wanted us to let him go through this room so he could get into Mrs. Wilsons room and take all her money and maybe kill her, would you feel all right just to snuggle down in bed and let him? Especially if you had told Mrs. Wilson that she neednt ever lock the door that leads into our roo
33、m, because youd see to it that nobody came through?”“Oh, but,” said Maggie, “Mr. Wentworth says it is only the German Government that wanted to invade Belgium, that the German soldiers just hated to do it. If you could fight the German Kaiser, itd be all right.”Ellen jumped at this admission. “Oh, M
34、r. Wentworth does think there are some cases where it isnt enough just to stand by, and say you dont like it?”Maggie ignored this. “He says the people who really get killed are only the poor soldiers that arent to blame.”Ellen stood for a moment by the gas, her hair up in curl-papers, the light full
35、 on her plain, serious face, sallow above the crude white of her straight, unornamented nightgown. She said, and to her own surprise her voice shook as she spoke: “Well, suppose the real robber stayed down in the street and only sent up here 9 to rob and kill Mrs. Wilson some men who just hated to d
36、o it, but were too afraid of him not to. Would you think it was all right for us to open our door and let them go through without trying to stop them?”Maggie did not follow this reasoning, but she received a disagreeable, rather daunting impression from the eyes which looked at her so hard, from the
37、 stern, quivering voice. She flounced back on her pillow, saying impatiently: “I dont know whats got into you, Ellen Boardman. You look actually queer, these days! What do you care so much about the Belgians for? You never heard of them before all this began! And everybody knows how immoral French p
38、eople are.”Ellen turned out the gas and got into bed silently.Maggie felt uncomfortable and aggrieved. The next time she saw Mr. Wentworth she repeated the conversation to him. She hoped and expected that the young minister would immediately furnish her with a crushing argument to lay Ellen low, but
39、 instead he was silent for a moment, and then said: “Thats rather an interesting illustration, about the burglars going through your room. Where does she get such ideas?”Maggie disavowed with some heat any knowledge of the source of her cousins eccentricities. “I dont know where! Shes a stenographer
40、 downtown.”Mr. Wentworth looked thoughtful and walked away, evidently having forgotten Maggie.In the days which followed, the office-manager of the wholesale hardware house more and more justified the accusation of looking “queer.” It came to be so noticeable that one day her employer, Mr. Pennypack
41、er, asked 10 her if she didnt feel well. “Youve been looking sort of under the weather,” he said.She answered, “Im just sick because the United States wont do anything to help Belgium and France.”Mr. Pennypacker had never received a more violent shock of pure astonishment. “Great Scotland!” he ejacu
42、lated, “whats that to you?”“Well, I live in the United States,” she advanced, as though it were an argument.Mr. Pennypacker looked at her hard. It was the same plain, serious, rather sallow face he had seen for years bent over his typewriter and his letter-files. But the eyes were differentanxious,
43、troubled.“It makes me sick,” she repeated, “to see a great big nation picking on a little one that was only keeping its promise.”Her employer cast about for a conceivable reason for the aberration. “Any of your folks come here from there?” he ventured.“Gracious, no!” cried Ellen, almost as much shoc
44、ked as Maggie would have been at the idea that there might be “foreigners” in her family. She added: “But you dont have to be related to a little boy, do you, to get mad at a man thats beating him up, especially if the boy hasnt done anything he oughtnt to?”Mr. Pennypacker stared. “I dont know that
45、I ever looked at it that way.” He added: “Ive been so taken up with that lost shipment of nails, to tell the truth, that I havent read much about the war. Theres always some sort of a war going on over there in Europe, seems 11 to me.” He stared for a moment into space, and came back with a jerk to
46、the letter he was dictating.That evening, over the supper-table, he repeated to his wife what his stenographer had said. His wife asked, “That little sallow Miss Boardman that never has a word to say for herself?” and upon being told that it was the same, said wonderingly, “Well, what ever started h
47、er up, I wonder?” After a time she said: “Is Germany so much bigger than Belgium as all that? Pete, go get your geography.” She and her husband and their High School son gazed at the map. “It looks that way,” said the father. “Gee! They must have had their nerve with them! Gimme the paper.” He read
48、with care the war-news and the editorial which he had skipped in the morning, and as he read he looked very grave, and rather cross. When he laid the paper down he said, impatiently: “Oh, damn the war! Damn Europe, anyhow!” His wife took the paper out of his hand and read in her turn the news of the
49、 advance into Northern France.Just before they fell asleep his wife remarked out of the darkness, “Mr. Scheidemann, down at the grocery, said to-day the war was because the other nations were jealous of Germany.”“Well, I dont know,” said Mr. Pennypacker heavily, “that Id have any call to take an ax to a man because I thought he was jealous of me.”“T