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    Friend Island
    Friend Island
    Friend Island
    Ebook39 pages27 minutes

    Friend Island

    By Francis Stevens

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 27, 2013
    Friend Island
    Author

    Francis Stevens

    Francis Stevens was the pseudonym of Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948), an American writer of science fiction and fantasy novels. Born in Minneapolis, Stevens wrote her first story at 17, finding publication in popular pulp magazine Argosy. Believed to be one of the first American women to publish a work of science fiction, Bennett gained a nationwide reputation as a leading short story writer with such tales as “The Nightmare” (1917), “Friend Island” (1918), and “Serapion” (1920). Additionally, Bennett published several novels throughout her career, including The Citadel of Fear (1918), The Heads of Cerberus (1919), and Claimed! (1920). To supplement her writing, Stevens—who was widowed in 1910 when her husband Stewart Bennett died at sea—worked as a stenographer to support herself, her daughter, and her invalid mother. Credited with influencing H. P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt, Bennett is recognized as a pioneering figure in the history of science fiction.

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      Book preview

      Friend Island - Francis Stevens

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of Friend Island, by Francis Stevens

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Friend Island

      Author: Francis Stevens

      Release Date: February 26, 2011 [EBook #35401]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIEND ISLAND ***

      Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online

      Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

      All-Story Weekly

      September 7, 1918

      FRIEND ISLAND

      by Francis Stevens

      It was upon the waterfront that I first met her, in one of the shabby little tea shops frequented by able sailoresses of the poorer type. The uptown, glittering resorts of the Lady Aviators' Union were not for such as she.

      Stern of feature, bronzed by wind and sun, her age could only be guessed, but I surmised at once that in her I beheld a survivor of the age of turbines and oil engines—a true sea-woman of that elder time when woman's superiority to man had not been so long recognized. When, to emphasize their victory, women in all ranks were sterner than today's need demands.

      The spruce, smiling young maidens—engine-women and stokers of the great aluminum rollers, but despite their profession, very neat in gold-braided blue knickers and boleros—these looked askance at the hard-faced relic of a harsher day, as they passed in and out of the shop.

      I, however, brazenly ignoring similar glances at myself, a mere male intruding on the haunts of the world's ruling sex, drew a chair up beside the veteran. I ordered a full pot of tea, two cups and a plate of macaroons, and put on my most ingratiating air. Possibly my unconcealed admiration and interest were wiles not exercised in vain. Or the macaroons and tea, both excellent, may have loosened the old sea-woman's tongue. At any rate, under cautious questioning, she had soon launched upon a series of reminiscences well beyond my hopes for color and variety.

      When I was a lass, quoth the sea-woman, after a time, "there was none of this high-flying, gilt-edged, leather-stocking luxury about the sea. We sailed by the power of our oil and gasoline. If

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