5 of the Shortest Stories from Life Magazine

This episode includes a few stories from “Short Stories From Life" a collection of short stories of under 1,500 words were compiled from “Life” magazine’s Shortest Story Contest published in 1916. The contest received over 30,000 entries from all around the world from which 81 of the best stories were published in a collection. 

• Arletta by Margaret Ade
• The Cat Came Back by Virginia West
• Hope by Edward Thomas Noonan
• North of Fifty-three by Mary Woodbury Caswell
• Thicker Than Water by Ralph Henry Barbour and George Randolph Osborne

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Narrated Archives. I'm your host, Sally Barron. Each week we delve in the past to find engaging stories from the public domain. This episode includes a few selections from “Short Stories From Life" a collection of short stories under 1,500 words compiled from “Life” magazine’s Shortest Story Contest published in 1916. The contest received over 30,000 entries, from which 81 of the best stories under 1,500 words were chosen.

The introduction of the collection explains the definition of a short story for the contest’s purposes:

A short story must contain at least two characters, for otherwise there would be no contrast or struggle. A situation must be depicted in which there are two opposing forces.

A short story must be a picture out of real life which gives the reader a definite sensation, such as he gets upon looking at a masterpiece of painting. While it must be complete in itself, the art of it lies in what it suggests to the reader beyond its own limits. That is to say, it must convey an idea much larger than itself.

Our first story, “Arletta”, addresses ancestral class structure and its holes.  As with most of the other of this episode's authors,  I wasn’t able to find biographical information about the author, Margaret Ade. 

Arletta

It was on a Monday morning in August that Miss Backbay climbed the brownstone steps to the rooming-house conducted by Mrs. Edward Southend in Massachusetts Avenue, Boston. Miss Backbay was short, stout, and sixty, and her face was flushed and scowling.

“I wish to speak with Mrs. Southend,” she snapped at the woman who opened the door. The woman, a middle-aged, quiet-looking little woman, glanced at the card and said: “I am Mrs. Southend, Miss Backbay; come this way please.”

In the parlour Miss Backbay and Mrs. Southend looked into each other’s eyes for a few moments and exchanged a silent challenge; then Miss Backbay leaned forward in her chair and said: “I have come, Mrs. Southend, to talk with you concerning this—this affair between your son and my niece. Miss Arletta Backbay. I have, as you know, brought her up, and I love her as if she were my own daughter. She is the last of the Backbays—the Backbays of Backbay. Our family lived on Beacon Hill when Boston Common was a farming district. The Backbays are direct—direct descendants of William I, King of England—William the Conqueror.”

Miss Backbay drew a long, deep breath.

Mrs. Southend was silent.

“I have devoted years of my life,” Miss Backbay continued, “to the education of my niece. Nothing has been spared to prepare her for the high social position to which, by her ancestry alone, she is entitled. I am going into this bit of family history so you will understand—so you will see this affair from my viewpoint. I have been exceedingly careful in the selection of her teachers, her associates, and her servants. Your son came to us well recommended by his pastor and by his former employer. I have no fault to find with him as—as a chauffeur, but as a suitor for the hand of my niece he—he is impossible. Absolutely! The thing is absurd. I—I have done what I could to break up this affair. I have discharged him. But my niece has defied me. She assures me that she loves him and—and will marry him in spite of everything. She is headstrong, self-willed, and—and completely bewitched. She has lost all pride—pride in her ancient lineage. Now I have come to you to beseech you to use your influence with your son. Induce him to leave the city—he must leave the city, if only for a year. I—I shall pay——”

“Pardon me, just a moment, Miss Backbay.” Mrs. Southend left the room, and in a few minutes she returned carrying a large volume, her fingers between the pages.

“As I listened to you, Miss Backbay, the thought came to me very forcibly that it is a pity—a great pity—that you could not have selected your ancestors as you do your servants—from the better class of respectable working people. But, of course, you could not. You could, however, try to live them down—forget them—some of them, anyway. Listen to this biographical sketch of your most famous ancestor. It is from page 659 of the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’: ‘William I, King of England—William the Conqueror, born 1027 or 1028. He was the bastard son of Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy, by Arletta, the daughter of a tanner.’”

Mrs. Southend closed the book with a bang.

“Not much to boast about, is it? We all have ancestors, Miss Backbay, but the less said about some of them the better. And now, if my son wants to go out of his class and mix it up with Robert the Devil and Arletta—why, that’s his—his funeral. You’ll excuse me now, Miss Backbay. I have my husband’s dinner to prepare.”

The next story “The Cat Came Back" is by Virginia West. The mischievous cat in this story may just be a match maker.

The Cat Came Back

Leonard Raymond was temperamentally a naturalist. Had circumstances not compelled him to make a living he would no doubt have been an Audubon, or a Gray. He spent his spare moments studying the habits of the living things about town, English sparrows, pigeons, stray cats, homeless dogs, and so forth. Old man Peterkin, whose wife kept the boarding-house at which Raymond was getting his meals, who did nothing but collect the board bills, grow fat, and hold the position of church deacon, had told him that the crows in the cupola of the Eutaw Place synagogue had been nesting there for eleven years. Raymond did not know whether to regard that as an interesting item about crows, or evidence against Mr. Peterkin’s veracity. However, Mr. Peterkin and the crows have nothing to do with this story.

In the backyard of the Linden Avenue house in which he lived with his married sister, Raymond raised flowers, and on Sundays and holidays he would often go to the country to study the wild flowers and the birds.

One summer evening he sat in the backyard among the flowers. He was hot and lonesome, the thermometer being close to ninety, the family being out of town, and no vacation for himself in sight. Tomorrow, he reflected, he would return to his post of teller in the bank, and hand out more money than he would ever own in a lifetime; the day after he would do the same thing——

His melancholy reflections were broken in upon by what seemed to be a ball of fire on top of the tall board fence. In an instant it disappeared, and he saw the long black form of a cat slide down the fence, and light in the yard. The beast went to a garbage can in the corner of the yard, sniffed about it, observed that the lid was on, and then, turning the gleaming ball upon Raymond, sprang up the fence and disappeared.

The same thing happened the next evening. On the third evening when the cat appeared Raymond advanced cautiously, and tried to be friendly. The cat hesitated, but when the man’s hand was almost on him he streaked up, and over the fence.

The following evening when Raymond walked uptown from the bank, as he approached Richmond market he thought of the cat, and stopping at a stall bought a small portion of meat.

The meat was put on the ground near the fence on which at the regular time the cat appeared. The eye gleamed. Raymond was wondering why both eyes did not gleam when the cat seemed to fall straight down upon the meat. Raymond sat as still as a stone, and heard the meat crunching between the cat’s jaws. The animal was licking its chops when he advanced—it met him halfway, and while Raymond rubbed his fur, the cat purred. Sitting down upon a bench, the cat leaped into his lap, curled up, and settled down for a nap. Then it was that he found about the cat’s neck a small chain with a tag on it.

When he went into the house the cat followed him, and by the gas light he read on the tag a Madison Avenue address. Also he observed that the cat had but one eye, and forthwith he christened him Cyclops. He wondered why a person who thought enough of the cat to provide him with a chain and tag should have left him to search for his victuals in alleys and backyards like an ordinary stray.

Cyclops stuck by Raymond like a twin brother. And every evening when Raymond came from business he stopped in Richmond market and bought meat for Cyclops. One day the man in the stall asked him if he were a family man.

One Sunday morning Raymond strolled across Eutaw Place and up to the Madison Avenue address. The house was closed for the summer, but the policeman on the post told him who lived there.

Summer was nearly at an end when Raymond happened to see in the paper that the people at the Madison Avenue house had returned to town. Now, Raymond was an honest man—had he been anything else he would not have been allowed to handle the bank’s money, so on Saturday evening with Cyclops under his arm, he sadly went up Madison Avenue to return the cat to his lawful owner. Boys on the street made personal remarks about the man and the cat, and Cyclops’ great eye turned green with wrath as he glared at them.

A woman answered his ring. She looked and gasped. Before Raymond could explain she thrust her head into the hall and shouted in strident tones:

“Come here, Miss ’Liza! If it ain’t your cat, this man has your cat.”

In a moment appeared the prettiest girl that Raymond’s eyes had ever rested upon. She had blue eyes and a mass of golden hair. Though comparatively young, and quite in the eligible class, Raymond was not a lady’s man. With much embarrassment he told the history of the cat.

While she held Cyclops to her bosom, the girl explained that she had left him with a friend to keep for her during the summer, and he had run away. She had given him up for lost.

Raymond went off catless. All the way home he was thinking of a way by which he might call on the beautiful Miss ’Liza. Sunday afternoon he went out to the country, to the woods, the flowers, the birds, and his soul was full of poetry and his mind of thoughts of the girl.

That evening old Cyclops was back on the fence! His great eye had a gleam of mischievousness. Down the fence he slid, and straight to Raymond, who decided that he must take the cat back to his owner immediately.

While Cyclops prowled about the parlour with tail erect, rubbing against every article of furniture, Raymond talked to Miss ’Liza.

Every evening Cyclops returned to Raymond, and every evening he as promptly took him home. Thus time passed from autumn into early winter.

One evening sitting before the little wood fire in her parlour, Raymond said to Miss ’Liza: “I don’t see but one way to keep our cat in one place!”

Then Miss ’Liza blushed, and said she didn’t see but one way either!

Then he kissed her!

And old Cyclops rubbed against both of them and purred to beat the band.

In “Hope”, our next story, author Edward Thomas Noonan has us questioning whether love and loss combined results in tragedy or hope or both. 

Hope

“Here’s a pathetic case of chronic melancholia,” the doctor continued, as we walked among the inmates. “That white-haired woman has been here twenty-six years. She is entirely tractable with one obsession. Every Sunday she writes this letter:

“Sunday.

Dear John:

I am sorry we quarreled when you were going away out West. It was all my fault. I hope you will forgive and write.

Your loving,

Esther."

"Every Monday she asks for a letter, and, though receiving none, becomes radiant with hope and says: ‘It will come to-morrow.’ The last of the week she is depressed. Sunday she again writes her letter. That has been her life for twenty-six years. Her youthful face is due to her mental inactivity. Aimlessly she does whatever is suggested.  The years roll on and her emotions alternate between silent grief and fervid hope.

“This is the male ward. That tall  man has been here twenty years. His history sheet says from alcoholism. He went to Alaska, struck gold, and returned home to marry the girl he left behind. He found her insane and began drinking, lost his fortune and then his reason, and became a ward of the State, always talking about his girl and events that happened long ago.

“He is the ‘John’ to whom ‘Esther’ writes her letter.

“They meet every day.

“They will never know each other.”

Our fourth story “North of Fifty-three” by Mary Woodbury Caswell is set in the Alaskan wilderness and yet even in the early 1900’s the world seemed to be small.  I’ve located a Mary Woodbury Caswell who lived in Anoka, Minnesota between 1884 and 1936, but I’m not able to confirm if she is our author. 

North of Fifty-three

The short winter day of Alaska was brightening as Gertrude pushed her chair back from the breakfast table and announced that she proposed to go at once for her constitutional. Her brother placidly assented, but Keith interposed with a worried look.

“Hadn’t you better go with her, Bob? I suppose I’ve grown to be an old granny, but since Jacques told us of that outlaw who threatened to kidnap a white girl for his wife, I don’t like to have Gertrude get out of sight.”

The girl bent over him caressingly.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she said. “Jacques had been drinking hard when he told you of this mythical exile. Besides, I am no Helen of Troy to be abducted for my beauty. I’d really much rather have Bob stay with you.”

And she kissed him, put on warm wraps, took her snowshoes and started for the daily tramp that had kept her fit ever since she had come up on the last boat, hastily summoned by a cable from Bob when her fiancé had his shoulder crushed, and it would be impossible for the young men to return to the States with their stake. She and Bob had nursed him into convalescence, but it had been a hard winter for him, and she did not wonder that he h ad developed some nervousness, though she considered his fear for her wholly unnecessary, as, indeed, did Bob.

When she was a half-mile from the cabin and a slight rise of ground hid it from her, she saw a dog team approaching, and smiled, thinking that Keith would surely consider that danger was near. As it met her the driver touched his cap, and she had a swift impression of a very different type than she had recently met, and one that made Jacques’s fantastic tale seem less absurd. As she involuntarily glanced back she saw, and now with alarm, that the stranger had turned and was coming toward her. He stopped the dogs close to her and inquired courteously with a foreign accent:

“Can you tell me, mademoiselle, how near I am to some residence?”

“Our cabin is over the hill,” she replied quietly, though with growing terror, which was justified, as he sprang toward her, swathing her in a blanket, so that she could neither speak nor struggle, and placing her on the sled.

She could not have told whether it was hours or minutes before she was lifted, carried into a cabin, and the blanket unfolded from her, while a savage-looking husky dog growled a greeting. Her captor shook off his heavy outer coat, removed his cap, and with exaggerated deference said:

“Mademoiselle, pray remove your parka and permit that I relieve you of your snowshoes. I do myself the honour, mademoiselle, to offer you marriage.”

Resolutely conquering her fear, Gertrude looked steadily at him. The man evidently was, or had been, a gentleman; but what must his life have been to bring him to this! As composedly as she could she answered:

“I must decline your offer. Pray permit me to return home.”

“Ah, no, mademoiselle. I fear I cannot allow that. As for marriage—as you please, but in any case you must remain here.”

“Not alive,” she said.

“Ah, but, mademoiselle, how not?” he asked, in mockery of courtesy more pronounced. “It is not so easy to die”—with a sudden bitter sadness.

“There are many ways,” she replied. “Here is one.”

And, seizing a dog whip lying near, she struck the husky a sharp blow and, as he furiously leaped to his feet, flung herself upon the floor before him. He fastened his teeth in her arm as his master grasped his throat, and the struggle shook the cabin. At last the man broke the dog’s hold and dragged him to the door. Gertrude’s heavy clothing had saved her arm from anything but a superficial wound, but as he bound it up she said:

“The dog will not forget, and if he fails me I can find another way.”

His face, which had paled, flushed a dark red as he hastily spoke.

“For God’s sake do not think—but why should you not? You are free, mademoiselle. Such courage shows me I am not quite the brute I fancied I had become, and also that there is one woman in the world whose ‘no’ assuredly does not mean ‘yes.’ I will take you home at once, on the faith of a Marovitch.”

She stared at him incredulously and said slowly:

“Is it possible—are you Count Boris Marovitch?”

“Yes”—in deep wonder—“that is my name, but how could you know?”

“This letter should interest you,” she said. “It is from Varinka. I was at a convent school in Paris with her.” And she watched him excitedly as he read aloud the passage she indicated.

“Do you remember my telling you of my cousin Boris, who was sent to Siberia for killing Prince —— in a duel? It was supposed that he was shot while trying to escape, but the guard has confessed that he was bribed to assist him, and he may be living. The Czar would gladly pardon him if he would return, his homicidal tendencies being valuable in the present war crisis. And Olga has steadfastly refused to marry any one else, so——”

A sharply drawn breath interrupted the reading, and the letter fell to the floor from his shaking hands as he looked at her, his face white and drawn.

“Mademoiselle, it is too much,” he gasped. “Your courage—your generosity—I insult you unforgivably and you give me back honour, love, life—I cannot say——” And he sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands.

She went over to him and laid her hand gently on his shoulder.

“I am glad you are happy, Count,” she said, “and I am sure we shall be very good friends. Please take me home now.”

They met Bob halfway, striding along with an anxious face, his rifle over his shoulder. “This is my brother, Mr. Stacey,” said Gertrude. “Bob, this is Count Marovitch, of whom Varinka wrote. He starts tomorrow by dog train to the States on his way to Russia.”

Our final story this week is the first prize winner of the contest.  “Thicker Than Water” by Ralph Henry Barbour and George Randolph Osborne shows not only the dangers of the early 1900’s sweat shops but unwavering family devotion.  Ralph Henry Barbour was an American novelist who primarily wrote popular works of sports fiction for boys. In collaboration with L. H. Bickford, he also wrote as Richard Stillman Powell, notably Phyllis in Bohemia. Other works included light romances and adventure.

Thicker Than Water

Doctor Burroughs, summoned from the operating room, greeted his friend from the doorway: “Sorry, Harry, but you’ll have to go on without me. I’ve got a case on the table that I can’t leave. Make my excuses, will you?”

“There’s still an hour,” replied the visitor. “I’m early and can wait.”

“Then come in with me.” Markham followed to the operating room, white-walled, immaculate, odorous of stale ether and antiseptics. On the table lay the sheeted form of a young girl. Only the upper portion of the body was visible, and about the neck wet, red-stained bandages were bound. “A bizarre case,” said the surgeon. “Brought here from a sweat-shop two hours ago. A stove-pipe fell and gashed an artery in her neck. She’s bleeding to death. Blood’s supposed to be thicker than water, but hers isn’t, poor girl. If it would clot she might pull through. Or I could save her by transfusion, but we can’t find any relatives, and there’s mighty little time.”

The attending nurse entered. “The patient’s brother is here,” she announced, “and is asking to see her.”

“Her brother!” The surgeon’s face lighted. “What’s he like?”

“About twenty, Doctor; looks strong and healthy.”

“See him, Nurse. Tell him the facts. Say his sister will die unless he’ll give some blood to her. Or wait!” He turned to Markham. “Harry, you do it! Persuasion’s your line. Make believe he’s a jury. But put it strong, old man! And hurry! Every minute counts!”

The boy was standing stolidly in the waiting-room, only the pallor of his healthy skin and the anxiety of his clear eyes hinting the strain. Markham explained swiftly, concisely.

“Doctor Burroughs says it’s her one chance,” he ended.

The boy drew in his breath and paled visibly.

“You mean Nell’ll die if someone don’t swap his blood for hers?”

“Unless the blood she has lost is replaced——”

“Well, quit beefin’,” interrupted the other roughly. “I’m here, ain’t I?”

When he entered the operating room the boy gave a low cry of pain, bent over the form on the table, and pressed his lips to the white forehead. When he looked up his eyes were filled with tears. He nodded to the surgeon.

Doggedly, almost defiantly, he submitted himself, but when the artery had been severed and the blood was pulsing from his veins to the inanimate form beside him his expression changed to that of abject resignation. Several times he sighed audibly, but as if from mental rather than bodily anguish. The silence became oppressive. To Markham it seemed hours before the surgeon looked up from his vigil and nodded to the nurse. Then:

“You’re a brave lad,” he said cheerfully to the boy. “Your sacrifice has won!”

The boy, pale and weak, tried to smile. “Thank God!” he muttered. Then, with twitching mouth: “Say, Doc, how soon do I croak?”

“Why, not for a good many years, I hope.” The surgeon turned frowningly to Markham. “Didn’t you explain that there was no danger to him?”

“God! I’m afraid I didn’t!” stammered Markham. “I was so keen to get his consent. Do you mean that he thought——”

The surgeon nodded pityingly and turned to the lad. “You’re not going to die,” he said gently. “You’ll be all right tomorrow. But I’m deeply sorry you’ve suffered as you must have suffered the past hour. You were braver than any of us suspected!”

“Aw, that’s all right,” muttered the boy. “She’s my sister, ain’t she?”

I enjoyed choosing from “Stories From Life: The 81 Prize Stories in “Life’s” Shortest Story Contest.  How to choose just a few for a Narrated Archives episode is surely less daunting than judging the contest, yet I struggled to narrow down my choices. so look forward to more stories from this collection in the future. 

If you know of or have information on any authors I wasn’t able to locate biographical information, please email me at sbnarration@sallybarronvoiceovers.com so I can share with listeners in future episodes.

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