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The Stories. Wm. Leeds, the peddler in Last Night, is not merely a man whom life has defeated: he is a generalization, a symbol, an inclusion of defeat. After a day of selling his pencils to the faces behind back doors, he crawls into a cattle shed near a railroad station, to sleep there tasting the dark murmur and damp smell of cows. "First he had been a bound boy, then a hired man. He had had a room over kitchens. For a summer or two he had tramped it, and slept in groves or in straw piles or on the hay in barns. But this place here, with no one about, was the same as his own." One night even the little scale room where he slept was crowded with cattle. When the men came to take them out, Wm. Leeds said to the men: "'Look here, ship me on with the critters. Weigh me and ship me on.'" Said one of them: " 'Like to be butchered, eh?' 'Something,' said Wm. Leeds." Wm. Leeds waits. "Toward night . . . there he was, grim and ugly to look at, heavy and dead. . . . He was buried by the town the next morning, not far from the time of the arrival of the cattle train at the Chicago stockyards. And the beef quotations were showing an active market."
Bellard, in The Woman, meant to be a financier. One day "he was torn by the look of a house on whose mean little porch near the street sat a shabby old man of 60, without a coat and reading a newspaper. The man's fate seemed terrible. . . . But the man looked up, and smiled at Bellard as brightly as if he himself had been young." Bellard, the ambitious Bellard, never becomes a financier but he finds happiness because he loves a woman. So when his children rail at his failure, he goes out on the porch of his scrubby little house to read his paper. "A youth . . . looked up at him with an excess ot visible compassion. On this youth Bellard looked down and smiled, a luminous smile, a smile as bright as if he himself had been young."
The Significance of these and the other nineteen pieces that the small book encloses are in some way explained by the quotations that furnish its title: from Noah Webster, " '. . .the yellow gentian which has a very bitter taste' " and from The New Botany, "'... flowers, pushing through from some inner plane of being, and with such energy that they are visible to man. Especially the blue gentian.' " Even in the bitterest of Author Gale's stories there is a vein of iron sentimentality; even in her bravest, there is a grimly sentimental irony. Yet sentimentality is only the approximate, not the exact word to describe a humanity that prevents each of Author Gale's terse episodes from being merely a brilliant chart of the disasters and deep triumphs of people in life.