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    7 best short stories by Ethel Watts Mumford
    7 best short stories by Ethel Watts Mumford
    7 best short stories by Ethel Watts Mumford
    Ebook115 pages1 hour

    7 best short stories by Ethel Watts Mumford

    By Ethel Watts Mumford and August Nemo

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    About this ebook

    Ethel Watts Mumford was an American author from New York City. After her first husband grew intolerant of her prolific writing and art career, she fled to San Francisco in 1899 with their only child, a son.
    This book contains:

    - The Arabian Days of Jimmy Jennette.
    - The Bells of Cullam .
    - The Cordon Bleu of the Sierra.
    - The Eyes of the Heart.
    - The Fear Motif.
    - Her Groove.
    - How Beelzebub Came to the Convent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTacet Books
    Release dateMay 16, 2020
    ISBN9783968585307
    7 best short stories by Ethel Watts Mumford

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      7 best short stories by Ethel Watts Mumford - Ethel Watts Mumford

      Publisher

      The Author

      Ethel Watts Mumford (1876/1878 – 1940) was an American author from New York City. The surname Mumford came from her first husband, George D. Mumford, a lawyer (married 1894–1901).

      After her first husband grew intolerant of her prolific writing and art career, she fled to San Francisco in 1899 with their only child, a son. She sued for divorce on grounds of desertion. After the divorce was granted in 1901, she returned to New York, vowing never to remarry unless her husband accepted her career. On June 4, 1906 she married Peter Geddes Grant of Grantown, Morayshire, Scotland.

      The daughter of a wealthy businessman, she was given a fine education, topped by her study of painting at the Julian Academy of Paris. She traveled extensively in Europe, the Far East, and North America, experience that is well-reflected in her work.

      Most of her early published works were written in San Francisco including her first novel, Dupes. She was a heavy producer of plays, vaudeville sketches, novels, short stories, joke collections, songs, poems, and articles. She also painted and illustrated books.

      In her teen years, after studying dramatic technique by reading 2,000 manuscripts, she turned to playwriting. Her farces were produced on New York and London stages. After her 1906 marriage she wrote for a time under the name Ethel Watts Mumford Grant, adding her second husband's name, but eventually reverted to Ethel Watts Mumford as a byline.

      The Arabian Days of Jimmy Jennette 

      THE trained nurse in charge of the hospital, The Lost and Found Child Department, and lady high custodian of the Infant Incubator Exhibit, raised her well-arched brows.

      You don't mean to tell me, Mr. Jennette, that you turn that boy loose here! Why, it 'll kill the child.

      Jimmy, with ecstatic eyes fixed on the distant lemon-yellow shape of the high-wire artist, nibbled his seventh ice-cream cone and sighed happily. Jimmy's father wrinkled his nose and blinked his pale-blue, humorous eyes.

      I must confess, Miss Alehan, we don't interfere with him much. We found, his mother and I, that he fretted himself sick when he was n't allowed the run of the place, and we 've got a notion it's healthier to let him get plain tired out, and bursting full of pop-corn and ice-cream and soda and 'dogs,' and then have the doctor for a week. He gets over it in great shape, and after that he's in training for the rest of the season. When all's said and done, why spoil it all? He's only eight; all the tinsel is real. It's all gold and diamonds and fairy-land,—fairy-land you don't wake up from,—and lasts every day and all day.

      Miss Mehan looked scientific disapproval, and, to do her justice, what she had seen of Jimmy's activities and appetite was enough to horrify her accurate sense of healthy equilibrium.

      Mark my words, she said sorrowfully; something is going to happen to that boy. Monsieur Daniel took him into the lions' den, and I saw him following around after that dreadful dancer in the Midway. Those Orientals are always fighting, and Jimmy's sure to get in it.

      I don't doubt it, said Jimmy's father, resignedly; "but he 'll subdue them all,—he always does,—and, besides, he's just as dangerous when he's home. Last week I caught him setting off fire-crackers under a contractor's dynamite wagon. Honestly, I feel lot safer when he's here, and it takes a crowd of about two hundred thousand to take care of him."

      Of course, Miss Melian admitted, "you 're his father, Mr. Jennette; but I must say, I do not consider an amusement ark the proper place in which to bring up a child. She turned away as the deputy nurse appeared at the side entrance of Concession B" and indicated in pantomime that the crowd was awaiting the lecture in the incubator-room.

      Mr. Chester Jennette, general manager of The World's Greatest Spectacular Playground, scratched his red head contemplatively and stared at his son. Perhaps Miss Mehan was right, but he and Edna somehow could n't deny the youngster the glamour and glory of these, his Arabian, days. Perhaps Jimmy's manners were an unpolished reflection of the cosmopolitan, heterogeneous throng of the employees of the big show, perhaps his language did need pruning; but what was lost in these branches of education was doubly gained in his ability to take care of himself, to make friends, to adjust himself, chameleon-like, to all the diversified creeds, customs, and codes with which, as the boss's boy, he came in daily contact.

      Shucks! said Jennette, "I only wish I could have had his chance. It must be perpetual heaven." He turned away with a whimsical sigh as Hamil, the Greco-Jewish camel-driver from Cairo, approached with waving hands.

      Boss, he wailed, that Jimmee he wan' ride Menelik, the black camel, all time. He no pay—

      "Oh, well, let him. The blue Irish eyes looked into the excited brown ones. Let him, for heaven's sake! He 'll be tired of camels by to-morrow. By all means, Hamil, get Menelik out of his system."

      Susteem? repeated Hamil.

      The manager came back to earth.

      Sure, Hamil; let Jimmy have the run of the whole Midway. Let him eat it up. And, he unwisely added, by way of further enforcing the freedom of the city which he accorded his small son, if he wants La belle Fatima to teach him the 'coochy-cooch,' tell her to go to it.

      The camel-driver retired in confusion to tell his tale in the bazaar. It lost nothing in the telling.

      Fatima received her orders to impart her art to the infant man-child with wide-eyed horror. Kula, the Bride of the Desert, and Zabelle, the Armenian Captive, were equally nonplussed. Yusuf, the magician, Haji, the brass-worker, Ibrahim, virtuoso of the peacock-zither, and Abdul, the owner of the four gorgeously bedecked camels, received the story of Hamil with amazed incredulity. Were they all to be under the heel of this infant? It was most strange. They would await the coming of Ben Ali Hassan, hereditary saint and general manager of all good Mohammedans in this land of sun-struck infidels. Hassan would explain the mystery.

      At this juncture Kiera, astrologer, fortune-teller, and general mystic-of-all-work, came slowly forward, swathed in her veils of black and purple. She heard the story with interest dawning in her pale-irised eyes.

      So—a man-child to whom is given command. That is not of every day; that is even as the babe of Hassan, who, by virtue of the blood of the prophet, inherits the green turban, though he have not been to holy Mecca. But what manner of infidel is this to whose suckling is given such power?

      Perhaps he is born under Amerikine planets, suggested Kula, hitching her spangled hip scarf. Kiera,—she raised her heavy eyebrows, which met above her small nose with true Oriental perfection,—"if Allah grants thee knowledge of the heavens, read thou his horoscope, if thou canst." She turned away sneering, and, swaying with self-conscious grace, crossed the tessellated square, surrounded by cardboard houses and papier-mâché mosques, to the performance tent.

      Kiera scowled.

      Did ye hear her? she snarled. "She would mock me, and pretend that I cannot read the stars! Wait, I will read the future of the man-child, though the heavens fall. Alas! that Achmet Ben Ahr is outside with the ballyhoo. He knows her for what she is, and he shall tell her."

      Quarrel thy quarrels, woman, with thine own kind, and seek not to embroil others, said Ibrahim. Leave Ben Ahr to his ballyhoo. He is no man of thine.

      Nor of hers, raged Kiera.

      Therefore cease thy talk, admonished Ibrahim. It is enough. He walked away with stately tread, and took his stand behind the foolish gray-suited American who presumed to engage Riza the crafty in a game of chess at twenty-five cents per game.

      But Kiera's hot Southern soul was boiling, and she sought her tent, curtly refusing to read the palms of two white-clad, highly perfumed ladies who dug into silver-mesh bags for a piece of change.

      For months now Kula had badgered and insulted the Greatest Seeress in the Western Hemisphere, and the G. S. of the W. H.'s small stock of patience was exhausted. Here they were starting in a new season with the big park, and Kula was already beginning her belittling insinuations and sneers. Kiera snorted like a blooded war-horse. She would steal Achmet's knife, and then!

      She was deflected from her thoughts of gory reprisal by the appearance of a small boy in a white suit, nibbling an ice-cream cone. The boy had an alert, serious face; a pair of pale-blue, imaginative, wide-set eyes; a shingling of freckles on his peeling, sunburned nose; a capacious mouth; and outstanding ears that upheld a white duck crew cap. He advanced to Menelik, the black camel, and with a proprietary air tweaked the colored wool tassels and shell ornaments of the big beast's halter. Then he looked about for Hamil, now absorbed in the game of chess proceeding on the big Kurdish carpet by the mosque entrance, changed his mind, peeled a strip of skin from his nose, gazed at it meditatively, then, catching the inquiring, pale-irised eyes gazing at him above the black and purple veils, he advanced, and laid two little monkey hands on the table before Kiera.

      "You 're the psy-cho-log-i-cal wonder and mind-reader, are n't you? he inquired. Gee! that must be great!"

      Twenty-fi' cents, please,

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