Polytechnic High School - Polytechnic Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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THE JOURNAL 26 SHADOWS Shadows are phantoms: Weird wisps that float gently Through silent spaces of the air. Gilding the universe with glamour, While beckoning and calling to mortals. Shadows are mockery: Remaining a moment. They vanish to nothingness. Touching some chord of infinite peace In gliding o'er the harpstrings of hearts. Shadows are images: Vague shapes that form Undreamed-of thoughts, unspoken words, Unlonged-for hopes, unprayed-for faiths, And things yet unknown: Shadows are Life. —Edith Trickler, '25 TWILIGHT Silence is all around us; it is twilight; The willow trees are drooping to the ground; The day is done, now comes the dreary night. And with it, far away, I hear the sound Of falling leaves upon their silent bed: It is the cold, cold twilight of the dead. But by the brook a million fireflies play; Merrily do they mingle with the leaves; And round and round they wheel and whirl away; When twilight comes, their happy life they live. And gaily thru the night their vigil keep: The happy souls of little unborn flowers that lie asleep. -—Frieda Kuhl, '25

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28 THE ELF JOURNAL PRIZE STORY Robert McClelland THE JOURNAL IT WAS closing time. True, the great wheels still showed no signs of diminishing their speed, nor did the huge hammers slacken in their pounding, hut the long line of workers kept glancing at the burly foreman, whose pudgy fingers would soon ring the bell that marked the end of the long day. For this was a paper mill, the largest in Moscow. Daily, enormous piles of rags entered the gloomy building and there, by the magic of machinery and the toil of many hands, they were transformed into paper. At the end of a long corridor, sorting rags as they came down an endless chain, was a boy. And such a boy! Two brown eyes set in a face remarkable for the perfection of its oval form, and almost hidden by a great mass of brown hair that fell about his shoulders. The workers called him The Elf. An indefinable sense of deformity hovered about him, but it was not until he moved that one noticed that he was a hunchback. Daily, for three years he had sat there, his tiny hands sorting the rags as they came, noticing no one, seemingly as devoid of feeling as his partner in labor, the chain. Today, had one listened, a remarkable change would have been apparent. The hunchback was humming, a tuneless hum that kept time with the rhythm of the chain. His eyes, usually dull, were dancing with pure happiness, and the little hands were trembling with excitement. He was very happy, for he had a brother, and the brother, after six years’ absence, was coming back to him. Thoughts of the past came pulsing through his brain. He could just remember the brother, a big blond fellow, who used to toss him in the air and catch him. Then there had been a father, a silent, brooding father, who held secret meetings in their home with other wilddooking fellows. How his mother had hated these meetings! The Elf, sensing this, had feared these men, especially when they drank and, becoming careless, raved of aristocracy and tyranny and revolution. The meetings had continued for a long time. Then like a flash of lightning came the dreadful night when the door had been smashed open and uniformed soldiers of the Tsar had rushed in. The mother had screamed; so had the dark, wild men. There had been oaths and dull thuds and shots. Some one had thrown a club, and the Elf’s back had received it. Then there was a lapse of time during which his only remembrances had been those of pain and fever and calling for a mother who never came. Weeks later he had awakened on a neighbor's cot, a hunchback. His mother had been killed outright; his father, less fortunate, had lived long enough to feel the vengeance of the Tsar's officers. The brother, because of his youth, had been sent to Siberia for six years. That was now six years ago. Only the Elf knew the sorrows of those years. But why think of that? The time was up, and, if the bulletin outside the courthouse was correct, his brother was coming home tonight. The Elf's reveries ceased abruptly. Would the bell never ring? The minutes seemed weighted with lead; the foreman seemed oblivious of time. Then, when further waiting seemed unendurable, the bell rang.