A Prairie Oyster

A Prairie Oyster by John Galsworthy

On a westbound train crossing the Canadian prairie, the narrator retreats to an empty smoking car and finds it occupied by Dick Denver, a laconic, cigar-smoking traveler with a face like carved mahogany. After warding off the tedium of "bummers" (commercial travelers) with shared cynicism, the two men bond over a round of "prairie oysters" — raw-egg, cayenne-laced pick-me-ups. Loosened by drink and the moonlit silence outside, Denver finally agrees to tell a story he rarely shares, about the tightest scrape of his life. Years earlier, Denver was a passenger on a rough tramp steamer bound near Madeira, alongside two other men: Kinjan, a garrulous, wine-trading Irishman, and the Hon. Christopher Torin, a tall, taciturn, recklessly brave Englishman nursing an unspoken heartbreak over a woman. Off the Moroccan coast near Mogador, the ship wrecks on a reef at night. Denver swims to shore and finds Torin already there, comically stripped of his trousers by the sea, calmly asking for a spare pair of breeches. At dawn the two discover Kinjan washed up alive and furious, wedged inside a floating butter barrel, cursing steadily until they free him. Stranded and starving on the empty coast, the trio spots a distant city glimpsed by climbing on each other's shoulders. Kinjan, fluent in the local tongue from his time at Gibraltar, warns the region is held by rebels and urges caution, then promptly falls back asleep. That night, while the three doze, a band of armed Moorish raiders captures and binds them. Eavesdropping on the captors' talk, Kinjan quietly works one hand free, cuts the others loose, and the three overpower the sentries in a sudden, violent scramble — Torin fighting with startling, almost suicidal ferocity, at one point using a fallen enemy's body as a weapon to scatter the raiders and scavenging horses and clothing from the dead. Dressed as Moors and mounted, with the raiders' elderly chief taken hostage, they ride for the city, Kinjan charming and manipulating the old chief along the way. At the gate, the chief attempts to betray them to a mounted guard, but the three bluff and fight their way through, Kinjan holding a pistol to the chief's head to force passage into the city itself. Amid the chaos, Torin — seemingly desiring death, indifferent to escape — tries to peel off and re-engage the pursuing guard alone; Kinjan shoots Torin's horse out from under him to stop him, and the two others physically drag him inside the gate against his will, an act Denver later says he's "often regretted," musing that a man who genuinely wants release should perhaps be allowed it. Inside, they bluff a terrified porter into leading them to the Sheikh's private quarters at gunpoint. The story is interrupted as dawn breaks over the prairie outside the train, and Denver, uncharacteristically moved, removes his hat and seems to murmur something like a prayer while watching the sunrise. When the narrator presses him to finish, Denver's mood has curdled into weary reluctance; he brushes off the climax in a few flat lines — the Sheikh turns out affable, declares the Englishmen his dear friends, and provides an escort safely to Mogador. Asked what became of Kinjan and Torin afterward, Denver answers that Kinjan is surely still alive somewhere, indestructible and larcenous as ever, but of Torin he says only, with impassive finality, "Gone out, I reckon" — implying Torin eventually got the death he seemed to have been courting all along. The curtness stings the narrator, though he can't quite say why. As full daylight fills the car, Denver returns to shuffling and dealing himself hands of solitary poker, humming softly, the emotional door of the "oyster" closed once more. The narrator retires to his berth, left not with any tidy moral but with the simple, homely thought: "Thank God for a good dinner" — a wry echo of Denver's own opening toast to life's raw, transient pleasures.

By John Galsworthy · First published 1897 · Genre: Adventure, Frame Narrative, Action · 7,544 words

First lines

‘I drink my love at the fall of night, / As the glow dies out of the Western sky; / I drink to the whirr of the widgeon's flight, / And the coyote's yowl, as we drundle by.

‘I drink my love in the prairie morn, / With a "Hey! farewell! " to the falling moon, / To the stars a-point at the flush of dawn, / And the waking cry of the watchful loon.

Genres

Tags

short story · British literature · Edwardian era · social realism · domestic life · marriage · class differences · family relationships · irony · moral conflict · psychological insight · social satire

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A Prairie Oyster is listed on Textopian as a short story by John Galsworthy, dated 1897 CE.

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