ELECTED STORIES FROM O. HENRY of tl?? ImtiFrsttg 0f N nrtlj (Carnltna ainll^rttatt af NortI| (SarnUnlana nf tlyr (Elasa of lBfi9 CB UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL 00032193698 This book must not be taken from the Library building. SELECTED STORIES FROM O. HENRY OTHER BOOKS BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH Repetition and Parallelism est English Verse Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book Studies in English Syntax Die Amerikanische Literatur What Can Literature Do for Me ? O, Henry Biogil^phy Keynote Studies in Kjeynote Books of the Bible New Words Self-Defined Edgar Allan Poe : How to Know Him O. HFARY IN THP: WINTER OF 1909-10 SELECTED STORIES FROM O. HENRY EDITED BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH LATE HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH IN THE UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY THE ODYSSEY PRESS NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1922, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED COPTBIGHT, 1902, igo6, BT FRANK A. MT7NSET COMPAiqT COFTBIGHT, 1903, BT THE AINSLEE MAGAZINE COMPANY AND COSMOPOLITAJ? MAGAZINE COMPANY COPTBIGHT, 1904, 1905, BY THE PRESS PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYBIGHT, I9OS, 1906, BY THE 8. 8. MCCLURE COMPANY OOPTBIGHT, 1907, BY THE BIDGWAY COMPANY AND PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANT COPYBIGHT, 1908, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY BENJAMIN B. HAMPTON COPTBIGHT, I910, BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANT PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES FIFTEENTH PRINTING CONTENTS O. Henry Frontispiece PAGE Introduction v" The Duplicity of Hargraves 1 Roads of Destiny 16 A Retrieved Reformation 41 The Brief Debut of Tildy 50 A LicKPENNY Lover 57 The Pendulum ^"^ Transients in Arcadia '^0 The Roads We Take 77 The Furnished Room 83 Makes the Whole World Eon 91 Squaring the Circle 97 The Cop and the Anthem 103 The Making OF A New Yorker Ill A Cosmopolite in a Cafe 118 Mammon and the Archer 125 An Unfinished Story 133 The Last Leaf 141 The Gift of the Magi 149 The Handbook of Hymen 156 The Trimmed Lamp 169 The Caballero's Way 182 The World and the Door 196 '*The Rose OF Dixie" 211 A Municipal Report 224 Let Me Feel Your Pulse 242 INTRODUCTION A GOOD coign of vantage for the appraisal of O. Henry is found in the number and variety of authors with whom he has been compared. No other American writer of recent times has sent his critics on so many or so diverse quests for sug- gestive parallels or equally suggestive contrasts. He himself once wrote :^ "When we strove to set forth real life they reproached us for trying to imitate Henry George, George Washington, Washington Irving, and Irving Bacheller. We wrote of the West and the East, and they accused us of both Jesse and Henry James." He has not been, so far as my reading goes, "accused" of Henry James; but the vocabulary and plots of the two have been interestingly likened. "We reahze," says a writer in The Unpopular Review,^ "that we are dealing with no uncouth ranchman who has literary aspirations, who writes in slang for want of legitimate vocabu- lary. We are in the hands of one who has read widely and well one who has a vocabulary, not including his slang, which may be called unique, which may be compared indeed with that of a Pater or a James." And Miss Blanche Colton Winiams,^ after mentioning a group of O. Henry stories, among which are Transients in Arcadia, The Gift of the Magi, and The World and the Door, adds: "In connection with these plots, O. Henry must have observed that Henry James had employed the method he himself had used. It is a far call from one of these stylists to the other; yet the older writer's ^The Girl and the Habit 2April-June, 1917. ^Our ShoH Story Writers (1920), page 220. viii INTRODUCTION Broken Wings, The Real Thing, and The Madonna oj the Future have at their bases the very plot principle on which O. Henry rested the group just given." No one, however, has gone so far afield for an analogue as Nicholas Vachel Lindsay : ^ How coolly he misquoted. 'Twas his art — Slave-scholar, who misquoted — from the heart. So when we slapped his back with friendly roar Esop awaited him without the door, — Esop the Greek, who made dull masters laugh With little tales of fox and dog and calf. It is hardly adequate to say that O. Henry misquoted "coolly." He misquoted reconstructively. He made mis- quotation an art. Instead of merely mutilating, as Sheridan makes Mrs. Malaprop do, O. Henry impresses a new meaning and releases a new thought. Many of his misquotations de- serve to live as original creations. Two of his characters, for example, lose their booty by quarreling over it: "There was a rift within the loot, as Albert Tennyson says." A connois- seur in ordering fashionable dinners is described as "one tc the menu born." Spenser's famous warning in The Faerie Qiieene, "Be bolde, be bolde, and everywhere be bolde. Be not too bolde" is metamorphosed into "Be bold; everywhere be bold, but be not bowled over." "A straw vote," says O. Henry, "only shows which way the hot air blows." "Strong drink," we are assured, "is an adder, and subtracter, too." Tennyson's "Fierce light which beats upon a throne" is democratized into "The fierce light that beats upon the throwTi-down." At first Mark Twain and Kipling were the authors most often requisitioned for comparison. "O. Henry is a humorist," said The Nation," "in spite of his local color and his cheer- ful spirit, a humorist after Kipling rather than after Mark ^ The Knight in Disguise. *July 4, 1907. INTRODUCTION ix Twain. More than once in the present volume^ he pays a tribute, stated or impHed, to the author of the Plain Tales, and though his characteristic mood is more grim [less grim?], his style has much of Kiphng's terseness and saliency." There is no doubt that Kipling influenced O. Henry's style. He was deeply gratified by the message that Kipling was said to have sent him : " Do you know O. Henry ? Well, when you see him, tell him Hello for me." Mr. Oilman Hall relates also that O. Henry was most interested in Stevenson but that he had left his edition of Stevenson in Texas, and had in all only about twenty-seven books in his room in New York. Mr. O. W. Firkins, in one of the most discriminating critiques^ yet written of O. Henry, finds a contrasting point de repere in Shakespeare and Chaucer. "There is," he says, "one literary trait in which I am unable to name any writer of tales in any literature who surpasses O. Henry. It is not primary or even secondary among literary merits; it is less a value per se than the condition or foundation of values. But its utihty is manifest, and it is rare among men; Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of its absence in masters of that very branch of art in which its presence would seem to be imperative. I refer to the designing of stories— not to the primary intuition or to skill in development, in both of which finer phases of invention O. Henry has been largely and frequently surpassed, but to the disposition of masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a half-educated American provincial should have been original in a field in which orig- inal men have been copyists is enough of itself to make his personality observable." Mr. Firkins cites as illustrations AJter Twenty Years and The Furnished Room. An Enghsh critic, Mr. S. P. B. Mais,^ finds a bond between Shakespeare and O. Henry in the common compass of their sympathies. Citing the foreword to The Four Million Mr. 1 The Trimmed Lamp. 2 The Review. New York, September 13, 1919. ^In From Shakespeare to 0. Henry (1918). X INTRODUCTION Mais continues: "Here we get the clue to O. Henry's great ness, his kinship with Dickens and Shakespeare and all great writers. He was the born, large-hearted democrat who, with the utmost sincerity, can lay his hand upon his breast and say: Humani nihil a me alienum piito.'* The resemblance to Dickens seems to Mr. Stephen Lea- cock ^ more a matter of canvas than of common sympathies : "It is an error of the grossest kind to say that O. Henry's work is not sustained. In reality his canvas is vast. His New York stories, like those of Central America or of the West, form one great picture as gloriously comprehensive in its scope as the lengthiest novels of a Dickens or the canvas of a Da Vinci. It is only the method that is different, not the result." Another English critic^ discovers a likeness to O. Henry in the sketches of Phil May and the dramas of Eugene Scribe : "His work reminds us of Phil May's sketches in economy of material and ruthless elimination of the unessential. His action never lags unmeaningly. As the story approaches its close, the apparently irrelevant delays, the side-issues taken up and dropped ostensibly without purpose, suddenly assume a vital importance and reach their true proportion in the re- flected light of the finale. . . . Alike in his merits and defects, O. Henry had a strong affinity to Eugene Scribe, the master-carpenter of the French drama. Scribe had the same constructive ability, the same talent for finding neat and unexpected solutions to his imbroglios, the same gift of know- ing what the public wanted almost before it knew itself, the same disregard of all that did not make for the immediate appeal. He had sufficient wit and humor to keep his audi- ence amused, and sufficient skill in character-drawing to make his action seem plausible. More he hardly attempted." To Miss Williams^ O. Henry has proved both a summariz- ing and a projecting influence: "He sums up the development ^Essays and Literary Studies (1916). 2 Writing anonymously in The Spectator, London, April 7, 1917. ^Our Short Story Writers (1920). INTRODUCTION = ot the short story from Poe to the present. Stockton humor. Aldrich surprise, and Harte's exaltation of local color con- tributed to his flood tide. But they remam tributary ... It is quite likely that not one writer who learned the tools of his trade after 1900 has been able to avoid the influence o the most American of short-story writers of the tirst twentieth century decade." H C Bunner has also been mentioned many times among Henry's Uneal if not contributory predecessors. ihe resemblance." writes an unnamed reviewer, ^ is persistently felt before it can be named; recognized, unmistakably, betore it is analyzed. Because it is not a superficial likeness, but an essential similarity . They were one kin, Bunner and Porter in their stories. One spirit moved them. Both '^ere keen reporters. Neither missed the significance in the slightest clue to character. Each responded to the stimulus of sug- gestion m every odd 'situation,' every incident packed with humor or tragedy. And each had that rare power of putting too a few paragraphs the secret ot a life, the summary of a character." , , But Guy de Maupassant has been summoned to bear comparative testimony to O. Henry's merits or demerits more often than any other writer. "It •« a truism to ob- serve " says Miss WiUiams once more, that O. Henry learned from Aldrich and Maupassant how to construct sur- prise; but not to remark that he progressed beyond the French author in this particular phase of technique. And the English critic already cited^ finds the most salient differ- ential between the two men to consist in their attitude towa d women: "O. Henry's intense and chivalrous sympathy for the working girl and the woman of the underworld crucified or L sin! of men preserved his work from that cold cruelty which makes some of Maupassant's short atones an insult to our general humanity. When he wrote on their behalf he wrote keenly and bitterly, and his words were barbed with iln The Sun, New York, March 4, 1917. ^The Spectator, London, AprU 7, 1917. xii INTRODUCTION insight and conviction." To Mr. Henry James Forman^ the difference lies chiefly in Maupassant's defective humor: "No one, it is safe to say, has brought so much fun and humor to the Western story. Cattle-king, cowboy, miner, the plains and the chaparral — material of the 'dime novel' but all treated with the skill of a Maupassant, and a humor Mau- passant never dreamed of." IVIrs. Katharine Fullerton Gerould, who maintains that O. Henry is a "pernicious influence," that he did not write short stories but only expanded anecdotes, contrasts the two authors thus: *'In Maupassant's stories you know how the characters would act whatever extraneous conditions might enter; but in O. Henry's stories you know how the people acted in one set of circumstances, but you have no idea how they w^ould act at any other time." The remark is eminently just, but do the honors go to Maupassant? I do not know for the life of me how the characters in our selected stories "would act under other circumstances. Human nature is proverbially incalculable. Thackeray said that when writing Vanity Fair he not only did not know what Becky Sharp was going to do next but was equally ignorant of what she had already done. The short story is the simplification of a small section of life ; it is not the projection of a life curve. Charac- ter may be revealed or determined in it; but in either case it is not petrified or predestined. Maupassant's art of course needs no defence, but a wise insight into human nature was not among his virtues. His characters can hardly be said to act. They react, and react with such abnormal uniformity that the reader can conjecture not only their reaction to other happenings but their reaction in the story itself before the story has fairly begun. II But O. Henry's life furnishes a more intimate introduction to his stories than can be found in even the most elaborate The North American Review, May, 1908. INTRODUCTION xin array of comparative estimates. His reputation was made, it is true, before his life was known well enough to serve as runnmg comment on his work. But I can recall no author whose life parallels his writing more closely or more reveal- ingly than O. Henry's. William Sidney Porter, better known as O. Henry, was born on September 11, 1862 (not 1867), in Greensboro, Guil- ford County, North Carolina. Here he resided until 1882, and here the O. Henry Hotel with its memorial room attests the affectionate regard in which his boyhood friends still cherish his memory. He went to school to his aunt and for a few months to the graded school that had just been founded in Greensboro. He was original and painstaking in all of his school duties and before he reached his teens was reading widely and assimilatively. In these early years he would catch quickly the style of an author and reproduce it with humorous additions in stories told to his coterie. He made several attempts at this time to unravel and complete Dickens's unfinished story. The Mystery of Edwin Drood, but gave it up as beyond his powers. As he always said that he read more in Greensboro than at any other period of his life, it may be well to summarize here the books and authors re- ferred to by him in his stories. The Bible leads with sixty- three references; Shakespeare follows with thirty-four; Tennyson, always his favorite poet, with twenty-one; The Arabian Nights with fourteen, though the figures do not show the relative significance of the great classic in his work; Kipling with twelve; Byron and Dickens with seven each; Omar Khayyam with six; Conan Doyle with five; Csesar, Marcus Aurelius, Keats, and Henry James each with four. The total number of authors alluded to directly or indirectly is one hundred and thirty-six. From school he passed to his uncle's drug store where he remained until 1882. In both school and store he was known not only as a timid and reticent boy, living chiefly within himself, but as a rarely promising cartoonist. Individuals and groups were reproduced by him in pen or pencil sketch xiv INTRODUCTION with equal ease and fidelity. The drug store was the rendez« vous of all types of Greensboro characters as it was the clear- ing house of all local news; and Will Porter, who as O. Henry was later to become the interpreter of New York through his stories, became first the historian of Greensboro through his cartoons. At the age of twenty he went to Texas where he remained, with the exception of about six months, until 1898. He lived first on a ranch in La Salle County, then moved to Austin, then to Houston. In Austin he edited The Rolling Stone and was teller in the First National Bank; in Houston he was a reporter on The Daily Post. While in Houston he was summoned back to Austin to stand trial for the alleged misappropriation of $1153.68j Had he gone he would certainly have been acquitted. He protested his innocence to the last, and nobody in Austin, so far as I could learn, believed or believes him guilty. The indictment was contra- dictory in itself. One item of the charge was that on November 12, 1895, while acting as teller of the Austin bank, he had embezzled $299.60. But O. Henry had resigned his position in the wretchedly managed institution early in December, 1894, and had been living in Houston ever since. There is profound pathos in a note just received from Colonel Edward M. House. Colonel House was born in Houston but his home was then and still is in Austin: '*I have always thought O. Henry was innocent and I have no doubt that if he had remained in Austin and had stood his trial he would have been proved so. Judge E. P. Hill, then owner of the Houston Post for which O. Henry was writing, enhsted my sympathies in his behalf and I looked into the matter closely enough to feel convinced that he had done no wrong. I had in mind the year he died to invite him that autumn to Austin as my guest. It was my purpose to give him a dinner and to have present the Governor, the members of the Supreme Court, and other State officials in order that an expression of regard and affection might be offered him. Unhappily, he died before I could extend the invitation to INTRODUCTION xv bim. I wished also to show some appreciation of the many delightful hours he had given me through his stories. I con- sider him the greatest short story writer the world has pro- duced." ABut after taking the train for Austin O. Henry was moved by a whim of the moment to turn back at Hempstead. He passed through New Orleans, took a fruiter for Honduras, and remained in Central and South America until he learned that his wife was desperately ill. He returned at once to Austin after an absence of a half year, surrendered himself to the authorities, and was sentenced to the federal prison in Columbus, Ohio. He entered the prison on April 25, 1898, and was released on July 24, 1901. It was here that he wrote his first stories and assumed the now famous pen-name O. Henry. ~ ^ After a short stay in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his daughter and her grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. P. G. Roach, were then living, he moved to New, York City. His real flowering period began in December, 1903, when he signed a contract with The New York World for a story a week at the rate of $100 a story. j From March to November of this year he had dabbled in verse, publishing five second-rate poems in Ainslee's Magazine under the names of Howard Clark, T. B. Dowd, and S. H. Peters; the latter name together with that of James L. Bliss he also signed to several of the stories written in 1903. • But from now on the short story was his central concern, his output being sometimes seven stories a month. Only once was he deflected — ^for six months during 1909 he collaborated with Mr. Franklin P. Adams on a musical comedy of Indian life to which O. Henry gave the title La from Pope's couplet, Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind. Ill health set in early in 1907, though there was never any dechne in the quality of the stories. The end came on xvi INTRODUCTION June 5, 1910. He was buried in Asheville, North Carolina, near the home of his second wife, Miss Sara Coleman. Into his last story. Let Me Feel Your Pulse, he has woven the initial stages of his fatal illness and his brave but unavaihng fight for life among the highlands of his native State. His grave is visited annually by throngs of tourists and a nation- wide movement is already under way to erect a monument that shall testify fittingly if not adequately to the admiration and affection of his readers. The volumes of O. Henry's stories were issued in the following order: Cabbages and Kings, 1904; The Four Million, 1906; TJie Trimmed Lamp, 1907; Heart of the West, 1907; The Voice of the City, 1908; The Gentle Grafter, 1908; Roads of Destiny, 1909; Options, 1909; Strictly Business, 1910; Whirl- igigs, 1910; Sixes and Sevens, 1911; Rolling Stones, 1913; Waifs and Strays, 1919. These are all published by Double- day, Page and Company except Options which is published by Harper and Brothers. Ill The twenty-five stories that follow are arranged chrono- logically and represent O. Henry's chief regional interests, his favorite themes, his varying technique, his humor and pathos, and the four distinctive stages of his career. That they are the best twenty-five stories that he wrote no two readers would probably agree. AYith the exception of per- haps six of these stories substitutes equally good but hardly better could probably be found. ^Mien it is remembered that the ten lists of O. Henry's best ten stories (see page 133) resulted in a vote of sixty -two best, it can hardly be expected that my own choice of twenty -five will escape the dissent of the critic. If censure be mingled with dissent, no harm will be done; a closer study of O. Henry's work will be ample recompense for both censor and censured. SELECTED STORIES FROM O. HENRY THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES From Sij:es and Sevens. First published in Munsey's Magazine. February, 1902, but written in prison. The difference between the Northerner and the Southerner occupied much of O. Henry's thought. Regional differences, however, never became sectional differences with him, and characterization never passed into carica- ture. Six years later he writes Thimble, Thimble from this brief jotting in his notebook: "Old darkey — difference between Yankee and Southerner — ^N. Y." In the mediatorial character of Miss Lydia, as in the attitude of O. Henry himself, one sees a forecast of that larger and blended Americanism which combines the best in both Major Talbot and Hargraves but without the prejudice of the one or the blind spot of the other For a characteristic statement of O. Henry's Southernism see the paragraph (page 228) in A Municipal Report, beginning, "I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one by profession or trade." When Major Pendleton Talbot, of Mobile, sir, and his daughter, Miss Lydia Talbot, came to Washington to reside, they selected for a boarding place a house that stood fifty yards back from one of the quietest avenues. It was an old- fashioned brick building, with a portico upheld by tall white pillars. The yard was shaded by stately locusts and elms, and a catalpa tree in season rained its pink and white blos- soms upon the grass. Rows of high box bushes lined the fence and walks. It was the Southern style and aspect of the place that pleased the eyes of the Talbots. In this pleasant, private boarding house they engaged 2 STORIES FROM O. HENRY rooms, including a study for Major Talbot, who was adding the finishing chapters to his book, "Anecdotes and Remi- niscences of the Alabama Army, Bench, and Bar." Major Talbot was of the old, old South. The present day had little interest or excellence in his eyes. His mind lived in that period before the Civil War, when the Talbots o^oied thousands of acres of fine cotton land and the slaves to till them; when the family mansion was the scene of princely hospitality, and drew its guests from the aristocracy of the South. Out of that period he had brought all its old pride and scruples of honor, an antiquated and punctilious polite- ness, and (you would think) its wardrobe. Such clothes were surely never made w^ithin fifty years. The major was tall, but w^henever he made that wonderful, archaic genuflexion he called a bow, the corners of his frock coat swept the floor. That garment was a surprise even to Washington, which has long ago ceased to shy at the frocks and broad-brimmed hats of Southern congressmen. One of the boarders christened it a "Father Hubbard," and it certainly was high in the waist and full in the skirt. But the major, with all his queer clothes, his immense area of plaited, raveling shirt bosom, and the little black string tie with the bow always slipping on one side, both was smiled at and liked in Mrs. Vardeman's select boarding house. Some of the young department clerks would often "string him," as they called it, getting him started upon the subject dearest to him — the traditions and history of his beloved Southland. During his talks he would quote freely from the "Anecdotes and Reminiscences." But they were very care- ful not to let him see their designs, for in spite of his sixty- eight years, he could make the boldest of them uncomfortable under the steady regard of his piercing gray eyes. Miss Lydia was a plump, little old maid of thirty -five, with smoothly drawn, tightly twisted hair that made her look still older. Old fashioned, too, she was; but ante-bellum glory did not radiate from her as it did from the major. She possessed a thrifty common sense; and it was she who handled THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 3 the finances of the family, and met all comers when there were bills to pay. The major regarded board bills and wash bills as contemptible nuisances. They kept coming in so per- sistently and so often. Why, the major wanted to know, could they not be filed and paid in a lump sum at some con- venient period — say when the "Anecdotes and Reminis- cences " had been published and paid for? Miss Lydia would calmly go on with her sewing and say, "We'll pay as we go as long as the money lasts, and then perhaps they'll have to lump it." Most of Mrs. Vardeman's boarders were away during the day, being nearly all department clerks and business men; but there was one of them who was about the house a great deal from morning to night. This was a young man named Henry Hopkins Hargraves — every one in the house addressed him by his full name— who was engaged at one of the popular vaude- ville theatres. Vaudeville has risen to such a respectable plane in the last few years, and Mr. Hargraves was such a modest and well-mannered person, that Mrs. Vardeman could find no objection to enrolling him upon her list of boarders. At the theatre Hargraves was known as an all-round dialect comedian, having a large repertoire of German, Irish, Swede, and black-face specialties. But Mr. Hargraves was ambitious, and often spoke of his great desire to succeed in legitimate comedy. This young man appeared to conceive a strong fancy for Major Talbot. Whenever that gentleman would begin his Southern reminiscences, or repeat some of the liveUest of the anecdotes, Hargraves could always be found, the most at- tentive among his listeners. For a time the major showed an inchnation to discourage the advances of the "play actor," as he privately termed him; but soon the young man's agreeable manner and indubitable appreciation of the old gentleman's stories completely won him over. It was not long before the two were like old chums. The 4 STORIES FROM O. HENRY major set apart each afternoon to read to him the manuscript of his book. During the anecdotes Hargraves never failed to laugh at exactly the right point. The major was moved to declare to Miss Lydia one day that young Hargraves pos- sessed remarkable perception and a gratifying respect for the old regime. And when it came to talking of those old days — if Major Talbot liked to talk, INIr. Hargraves was entranced to listen. Like almost all old people who talk of the past, the major loved to linger over details. In describing the splendid, almost royal, days of the old planters, he would hesitate until he had recalled the name of the Negro who held his horse, or the exact date of certain minor happenings, or the number of bales of cotton raised in such a year; but Hargraves never grew impatient or lost interest. On the contrary, he would advance questions on a variety of subjects connected with the life of that time, and he never failed to extract ready replies. The fox hunts, the 'possum suppers, the hoe dowTis and jubilees in the Negro quarters, the banquets in the plantation- house hall, when invitations w^ent for fifty miles around; the occasional feuds with the neighboring gentry; the major's duel with Rathbone Culbertson about Ejtty Chalmers, who afterward married a Thwaite of South Carolina; and private yacht races for fabulous sums on Mobile Bay; the quaint beliefs, improvident habits, and loyal virtues of the old slaves — all these were subjects that held both the major and Har- graves absorbed for hours at a time. Sometimes, at night, when the young man would be coming upstairs to his room after his turn at the theatre was over, the major would appear at the door of his study and beckon archly to him. Going in, Hargraves would find a little table set with a decanter, sugar bowl, fruit, and a big bunch of fresh green mint. "It occurred to me," the major would begin — he was always ceremonious — "that perhaps you might have found your duties at the — at your place of occupation — sufiBciently arduous to enable you, Mr. Hargraves, to appreciate what the THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 5 poet might well have had in his mind when he wrote, 'tired Nature's sweet restorer,'— one of our Southern juleps." It was a fascination to Hargraves to watch him make it. He took rank among artists when he began, and he never varied the process. With what delicacy he bruised the mint; with what exquisite nicety he estimated the ingredients; with what solicitous care he capped the compound with the scarlet fruit glowing against the dark green fringe! And then the hospitality and grace with which he offered it, after the selected oat straws had been plunged into its tinkling depths! After about four months in Washington, Miss Lydia dis- covered one morning that they were almost without money. The "Anecdotes and Reminiscences" was completed, but pubhshers had not jumped at the collected gems of Alabama sense and wit. The rental of a small house which they still owned in Mobile was two months in arrears. Their board money for the month would be due in three days. Miss Lydia called her father to a consultation. "No money? " said he with a surprised look. "It is quite annoying to be called on so frequently for these petty sums. Really, I " , , The major searched his pockets. He found only a two- dollar bill, which he returned to his vest pocket. "I must attend to this at once, Lydia," he said. "Kindly get me my umbrella and I will go down town immediately. The congressman from our district, General Fulghum, assured me some days ago that he would use his influence to get my book published at an early date. I will go to his hotel at once and see what arrangement has been made." With a sad little smile Miss Lydia watched him button his "Father Hubbard" and depart, pausing at the door, as he always did, to bow profoundly. That evening, at dark, he returned. It seemed that Congressman Fulghum had seen the publisher who had the major's manuscript for reading. That person had said that if the anecdotes, etc., were carefully pruned down about one haK, in order to eliminate the sectional and class prejudice 6 STORIES FROM O. HENRY with which the book was dyed from end to end, he might, consider its pubhcation. The major was in a white heat of anger, but regained his equanimity, according to his code of manners, as soon as he was in Miss Lydia's presence. "We must have money," said Miss Lydia, with a httle wrinkle above her nose. "Give me the two dollars, and I will telegraph to Uncle Ralph for some to-night." The major drew a small envelope from his upper vest pocket and tossed it on the table. "Perhaps it was injudicious," he said mildly, "but the sum was so merely nominal that I bought tickets to the theatre to-night. It's a new war drama, Lydia. I thought you would be pleased to witness its first production in Washington. I am told that the South has very fair treatment in the play. I confess I should like to see the performance myself." Miss Lydia threw up her hands in silent despair. Still, as the tickets were bought, they might as well be used. So that evening, as they sat in the theatre listening to the lively overture, even Miss Lydia was minded to relegate their troubles, for the hour, to second place. The major, in spot- less linen, w^th his extraordinary coat showing only where it was closely buttoned, and his white hair smoothly reached, looked really fine and distinguished. The curtain went up on the first act of "A Magnolia Flower," revealing a typical Southern plantation scene. Major Talbot betrayed some interest. "Oh, see!" exclaimed Miss Lydia, nudging his arm, and pointing to her programme. The major put on his glasses and read the line in the cast of characters that her finger indicated. Col. Webster Calhoun. . . . H. Hopkins Hargraves. "It's our Mr. Hargraves," said Miss Lydia. "It must be his first appearance in what he calls *the legitimate.' I'm so glad for him." Not until the second act did Col. Webster Calhoun appear upon the stage. When he made his entry Major Talbot gave THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 7 an audible sniff, glared at him, and seemed to freeze solid. Miss Lydia uttered a little, ambiguous squeak and crumpled her programme in her hand. For Colonel Calhoun was made up as nearly resembling Major Talbot as one pea does another. The long, thin white hair, curly at the ends, the aristocratic beak of a nose, the crumpled, wide, raveling shirt front, the string tie, with the bow nearly under one ear, were almost exactly duplicated. And then, to clinch the imitation, he wore the twin to the major's supposed to be unparalleled coat. High-collared, baggy, empire-waisted, ample-skirted, hanging a foot lower in front than behind, the garment could have been designed from no other pattern. From then on, the major and Miss Lydia sat bewitched, and saw the counterfeit presentment of a haughty Talbot "dragged," as the major afterward expressed it, "through the slanderous mire of a corrupt stage." Mr. Hargraves had used his opportunities well. He had caught the major's little idiosyncrasies of speech, accent, and intonation and his pompous courtliness to perfection — ex- aggerating all to the purpose of the stage. When he per- formed that marvellous bow that the major fondly imagined to be the pink of all salutations, the audience sent forth a sudden round of hearty applause. Miss Lydia sat immovable, not daring to glance toward her father. Sometimes her hand next to him would be laid against her cheek, as if to conceal the smile which, in spite of her disapproval, she could not entirely suppress. The culmination of Hargraves's audacious imitation took place in the third act. The scene is where Colonel Calhoun entertains a few of the neighboring planters in his "den." Standing at a table in the centre of the stage, with his friends grouped about him, he delivers that inimitable, rambling, character monologue so famous in "A Magnolia Flower," at the same time that he deftly makes juleps for the party. Major Talbot, sitting quietly, but white with indignation, heard his best stories retold, his pet theories and hobbies ad- 8 STORIES FROM O. HENRY vanced and expanded, and the dream of the ** Anecdotes and Reminiscences" served, exaggerated and garbled. His favorite narrative — that of his duel with Rathbone Cul- bertson — was not omitted, and it was delivered with more fire, egotism, and gusto than the major himself put into it. The monologue concluded with a quaint, delicious, witty- little lecture on the art of concocting a julep, illustrated by the act. Here Major Talbot's delicate but sho\\y science was reproduced to a hair's breadth — from his dainty handling of the fragrant weed — "the one-thousandth part of a grain too much pressure, gentlemen, and you extract the bitterness, in- stead of the aroma, of this heaven-bestowed plant" — to his solicitous selection of the oaten straws. At the close of the scene the audience raised a tumultuous roar of appreciation. The portrayal of the type was so exact, so sure and thorough, that the leading characters in the play were forgotten. After repeated calls, Hargraves came before the curtain and bowed, his rather boyish face bright and flushed with the knowledge of success. At last Miss Lydia turned and looked at the major. His thin nostrils were working like the gills of a fish. He laid both shaking hands upon the arms of his chair to rise. '*We will go, Lydia," he said, chokingly. "This is an abominable — desecration." Before he could rise, she pulled him back into his seat. "We will stay it out," she declared. "Do you want to advertise the copy by exhibiting the original coat?" So they remained to the end. Hargraves's success must have kept him up late that night, for neither at the breakfast nor at the dinner table did he appear. About three in the afternoon he tapped at the door of Major Talbot's study. The major opened it, and Hargraves walked in with his hands full of the morning papers — too full of his triumph to notice anything unusual in the major's de- meanor. "I put it all over 'em last night, major," he began ex- THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 9 ultantly. "I had my inning, and, I think, scored. Here's what the Post says: His conception andportrayal of the old-tiroe Southern colonel, with his absurd grandiloquence, his eccentric garb, his quaint idioms and phrases, his moth-eaten pride of family, and his really kind heart, fastidious sense of honor, and lovable simplicity, is the best deline- ation of a character role on the boards to-day. The coat worn by Colonel Calhoun is itself nothing less than an evolution of genius. Mr. Hargraves has captured his public. "How does that sound, major, for a first nighter.^" "I had the honor" — the major's voice sounded ominously frigid — "of witnessing your very remarkable performance, sir, last night." Hargraves looked disconcerted. "You were there .^ I didn't know you ever — I didn't know you cared for the theatre. Oh, I say. Major Talbot," he exclaimed frankly, " don't you be offended. I admit I did get a lot of pointers from you that helped me out wonderfully in the part. But it's a type, you know — not individual. The way the audience caught on shows that. Half the patrons of that theatre are Southerners. They recognized it." "Mr. Hargraves," said the major, who had remained standing, "you have put upon me an unpardonable insult. You have burlesqued my person, grossly betrayed my confidence, and misused my hospitality. If I thought you possessed the faintest conception of what is the sign manual of a gentleman, or what is due one, I would call you out, sir, old as I am. I will ask you to leave the room, sir." The actor appeared to be slightly bewildered, and seemed hardly to take in the full meaning of the old gentleman's words. "I am truly sorry you took offence," he said regretfully. "Up here we don't look at things just as you people do. I know men who would buy out half the house to have 10 STORIES FROM O. HENRY their personality put on the stage so the public would recognize it." "They are not from Alabama, sir," said the major haughtily. "Perhaps not. I have a pretty good memory, major; let me quote a few lines from your book. In response to a toast at a banquet given in — Milledgeville, I believe — you uttered and intend to have printed, these words: The Northern man is utterly without sentiment or warmth except in so far as the feelings may be turned to his o-wti commercial profit. He will suffer without resentment any imputation cast upon the honor of himself or his loved ones that does not bear with it the consequence of pecuniary loss. In his charity, he gives with a liberal hand; but it must be heralded with the trumpet and chroni- cled in brass. "Do you think that picture is fairer than the one you saw of Colonel Calhoun last night?" "The description," said the major frowning, "is — not without grounds. Some exag — ^latitude must be allowed in public speaking." "And in public acting," replied Hargraves. "That is not the point," persisted the major, unrelenting. "It was a personal caricature. I positively decline to over- look it, sir." "Major Talbot," said Hargraves, with a winning smile, " I wish you would understand me. I want you to know that I never dreamed of insulting you. In my profession, all life belongs to me. I take what I want, and what I can, and return it over the footlights. Now, if you will, let's let it go at that. I came in to see you about something else. We've been pretty good friends for some months, and I'm going to take the risk of offending you again. I know you are hard up for money — never mind how I found out; a boarding house is no place to keep such matters secret — and I want you to let me help you out of the pinch. I've been there often enough myself. I've been getting a fair salary all the season, and THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 11 I've saved some money. You're welcome to a couple hun- dred — or even more — until you get " "Stop!" commanded the major, with his arm outstretched. " It seems that my book didn't lie, after all. You think your money salve will heal all the hurts of honor. Under no circumstances would I accept a loan from a casual acquaint- ance; and as to you, sir, I would starve before I would con- sider your insulting offer of a financial adjustment of the circumstances we have discussed. I beg to repeat my request relative to your quitting the apartment." Hargraves took his departure without another word. He also eft the house the same day, moving, as Mrs. Vardeman explained at the supper tab e, nearer the vicinity of the down- town theatre, where "A Magnolia Flower" was booked for a week's run. Critical was the situation with Major Talbot and Miss Lydia. There was no one in Washington to whom the major's scruples allowed him to apply for a loan. Miss Lydia wrote a letter to Uncle Ralph, but it was doubtful whether that relative's constricted affairs would permit him to furnish help. The major was forced to make an apologetic address to Mrs. Vardeman regarding the delayed payment for board, referring to "delinquent rentals" and "delayed remittances" in a rather confused strain. Deliverance came from an entirely unexpected source. Late one afternoon the door maid came up and announced an old colored man who wanted to see Major Talbot. The major asked that he be sent up to his study. ^ Soon an old darkey appeared in the doorway, with his hat in hand, bow- ing, and scraping with one clumsy foot. He was quite decently dressed in a baggy suit of black. His big, coarse shoes shone with a metallic lustre suggestive of stove polish. His bushy wool was gray— almost white. After middle life, it is difficult to estimate the age of a Negro. This one might have seen as many years as had Major Talbot. "I be bound you don't know me, Mars' Pendleton," were his first words. 12 STORIES FROM O. HENRY The major rose and came forward at the old, famiHar style of address. It was one of the old plantation darkeys without a doubt; but they had been widely scattered, and he could not recall the voice or face. "I don't believe I do," he said kindly — "unless you wdll assist my memory." "Don't you 'member Cindy's Mose, Mars' Pendleton, what 'migrated 'mediately after de war? " "Wait a moment," said the major, rubbing his forehead with the tips of his fingers. He loved to recall everything connected with those beloved days. "Cindy's Mose," he reflected. "You worked among the horses — breaking the colts. Yes, I remember now. After the surrender, you took the name of — don't prompt me — Mitchell, and went to the West — to Nebraska." "Yassir, yassir," — the old man's face stretched with a delighted grin — "dat's him, dat's it. Newbraska. Dat's me — Mose Mitchell. Old Uncle Mose Mitchell, dey calls me now. Old mars', your pa, gimme a pah of dem mule colts when I lef fur to staht me goin' with. You 'member dem colts. Mars' Pendleton?" "I don't seem to recall the colts," said the major. "You know I was married the first year of the war and living at the old Follinsbee place. But sit down, sit down. Uncle Mose. I'm glad to see you. I hope you have prospered." Uncle Mose took a chair and laid his hat carefully on the floor beside it. "Yassir; of late I done mouty famous. WTien I first got to Newbraska, dey folks come all roun' me to see dem mule colts. Dey ain't see no mules like dem in Newbraska. I sold dem mules for three hundred dollars. Yassir — three hundred. "Den I open a blacksmith shop, suh, and made some money and bought some Ian'. Me and my old 'oman done raised up seb'm chillun, and all doin' well 'cept two of 'em what died. Fo' year ago a railroad come along and staht a town slam ag'inst my Ian', and, suh. Mars' Pendleton, Uncle THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 13 Mose am worth leb*m thousand dollars in money, property, and Ian'." "I'm glad to hear it," said the major heartily. "Glad to hear it." "And dat little baby of yo'n, Mars' Pendleton — one what you name Miss Lyddy — I be bound dat little tad done growed up tell nobody wouldn't know her." The major stepped to the door and called: "Lydia, dear, will you come?" Miss Lydia, looking quite grown up and a little worried, came in from her room. "Dar, now! WTiat'd I tell you? I kno wed dat baby done be plum growed up. You don't 'member Uncle Mose, child?" "This is Aunt Cindy's Mose, Lydia," explained the major. "He left Sunny mead for the West when you were two years old." "Well," said Miss Lydia, "I can hardly be expected to remember you. Uncle Mose, at that age. And, as you say, I'm 'plum growed up, ' and was a blessed long time ago. But I'm glad to see you, even if I can't remember you." And she was. And so was the major. Something alive and tangible had come to link them with the happy past. The three sat and talked over the olden times, the major and Uncle Mose correcting or prompting each other as they re- viewed the plantation scenes and days. The major inquired what the old man was doing so far from his home. "Uncle Mose am a delicate," he explained, "to de grand Baptis' convention in dis city. I never preached none, but bein' a residin' elder in de church, and able fur to pay my own expenses, dey sent me along." "And how did you know we were in Washington?" in- quired Miss Lydia. "Dey's a cuUud man works in de hotel whar I stops, what comes from Mobile. He told me he seen Mars' Pendleton comin' outen dish here house one mawnin'. 14 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "What I come fur," continued Uncle Mose, reaching into his pocket — "besides de sight of home folks — was to pay Mars' Pendleton what I owes him." "0^'e me?" said the major, in surprise. "Yassir— three hundred dollars." He handed the major a roll of bills. "AMien I lef old mars' says: 'Take dem mule colts, Mose, and, if it be so you gits able, pay for 'em'. Yassir — dem was his words. De war had done lef old mars' po' hisself. Old mars' bein' 'long ago dead, de debt descends to Mars' Pendleton. Three hundred dollars. Uncle Mose is plenty able to pay now. When dat railroad buy my Ian' I laid off to pay fur dem mules. Count de money. Mars' Pendleton. Dat's what I sold dem mules fur. Yassir." Tears were in Major Talbot's eyes. He took Uncle Mose's hand and laid his other upon his shoulder. "Dear, faithful, old servitor," he said in an unsteady voice, "I don't mind saying to you that 'Mars' Pendleton' spent his last dollar in the world a week ago. We will accept this money. Uncle Mose, since, in a way, it is a sort of payment, as well as a token of the loyalty and devotion of the old regime. Lydia, my dear, take the money. You are better fitted than I to manage its expenditure." "Take it, honey," said Uncle Mose. "Hit belongs to you. Hit's Talbot money." After Uncle Mose had gone, Miss Lydia had a good cry — for joy; and the major turned his face to a corner, and smoked his clay pipe volcanically. The succeeding days saw the Talbots restored to peace and ease. Miss Lydia's face lost its worried look. The major appeared in a new frock coat, in which he looked like a wax figure personifying the memory of his golden age. Another publisher who read the manuscript of the "Anecdotes and Reminiscences" thought that, with a little retouching and toning down of the high lights, he could make a really bright and salable volume of it. Altogether, the situation was com- fortable, and not without the touch of hope that is often sweeter than arrived blessings. THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES 15 One day, about a week after their piece of good luck, a maid brought a letter for Miss Lydia to her room. The postmark showed that it was from New York. Not knowing any one there. Miss Lydia, in a mild flutter of wonder, sat down by her table and opened the letter with her scissors. This was what she read : Dear !Miss Talbot: I thought you might be glad to learn of my good fortune. I have received and accepted an offer of two hundred dollars per week by a New York stock company to play Colonel Calhoun in "A Magnolia Flower." There is something else I wanted you to know. I guess you'd better not tell Major Talbot. I was anxious to make him some amends for the great help he was to me in studying the part, and for the bad humor he was in about it. He refused to let me, so I did it anyhow. I could easily spare the three hundred. Sincerely yours, H. Hopkins Hargraves. P. S. How did I play Uncle Mose.? Major Talbot, passing through the hall, saw Miss Lydia's door open and stopped. "Any mail for us this morning, Lydia, dear?" he asked. Miss Lydia slid the letter beneath a fold of her dress. "The Morning Chronicle came," she said promptly. "It*S on the table in your study." ROADS OF DESTINY From Roads of Destiny. First published in Ainslee's Magazine, April, 1903. This story is unique among O. Henry's works. It returns a studied and philosophic "No" to the stanzaed question that introduces it. The first adventure, "The Left Branch," shows the influence, I think, of The Sire de Maletroit's Door, by Stevenson; but the story as a whole suggests Poe in its connective repetitions, Dumas in its swashbuckling, Maupassant in its detachment, and Omar Khay^^am in its fatalism. It is even more fatalistic than Omar; for not only is death preordained and inescapable, whichever road David takes, but death from the bullet of the same pistol. In sheer but impersonal technique O. Henry never surpassed this story. In The Enchanted Kiss (February, 1904), the same theme is put again upon the same triple framework; but Fate and Tansey pulled different ways. For O. Henry's final treatment of fatalism, see The Roads We Take (page 77). I go to seek on many roads \NTiat is to be. True heart and strong, with love to light- Will they not bear me in the fight To order, shun or wield or mould My Destiny? Unpublished Poems of David Mignot. The song was over. The words were David's; the air, one of the countryside. The company about the inn table ap- plauded heartily, for the young poet paid for the wine. Only the notary, M. Papineau, shook his head a little at the lines, for he was a man of books, and he had not drunk with the rest. David went out into the village street, where the night air drove the wine vapor from his head. And then he remem- 16 ROADS OF DESTINY 17 bt?red that he and Yvonne had quarreled that day, and that he had resolved to leave his home that night to seek fame and honor in the great world outside. "When my poems are on every man's tongue," he told him- self, in a fine exhilaration, "she will, perhaps, think of the hard words she spoke this day." Except the roysterers in the tavern, the village folk were abed. David crept softly into his room in the shed of his father's cottage and made a bundle of his small store of cloth- ing. With this upon a staff, he set his face outward upon the road that ran from Vernoy. He passed his father's herd of sheep huddled in their nightly pen — the sheep he herded daily, leaving them to scatter while he wrote verses on scraps of paper. He saw a light yet shining in Yvonne's window, and a weakness shook his purpose of a sudden. Perhaps that light meant that she rued, sleepless, her anger, and that morning might But, no! His decision was made. Vernoy was no place for him. Not one soul there could share his thoughts. Out along that road lay his fate and his future. Three leagues across the dim, moonlit champaign ran the road, straight as a ploughman's furrow. It was believed in the village that the road ran to Paris, at least; and this name the poet whispered often to himseK as he walked. Never so far from Vernoy had David traveled before. THE LEFT BRANCH Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles. David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then took the road to the left Upon this more important highway were, imprinted in the dust, wheel tracks left by the recent passage of some vehicle. Some half an hour later these traces were verified by the sight of a ponderous carriage mired in a little brook at the bottom of a steep hill. The driver and postilions were shouting and 18 STORIES FROM O. HENRY tugging at the horses' bridles. On the road at one side stood a huge, black-clothed man and a slender lady wrapped in a long, light cloak. David saw the lack of skill in the efforts of the servants. He quietly assumed control of the work. He directed the outriders to cease their clamor at the horses and to exercise their strength upon the wheels. The driver alone urged the animals with his familiar voice; David himself heaved a powerful shoulder at the rear of the carriage, and with one harmonious tug the great vehicle rolled up on solid ground. The outriders climbed to their places, David stood for a moment upon one foot. The huge gen- tleman waved a hand. *'You will enter the carriage," he said, in a voice large, like himself, but smoothed by art and habit. Obedience belonged in the path of such a voice. Brief as was the young poet's hesitation, it was cut shorter still by a renewal of the command. David's foot went to the step. In the darkness he perceived dimly the form of the lady upon the rear seat. He was about to seat himself op- posite, when the voice again swayed him to its will. "You will sit at the lady's side." The gentleman s^omg his great weight to the forward seat. The carriage proceeded up the hill. The lady was shrunk, silent, into her corner. David could not estimate whether she was old or young, but a delicate, mild perfume from her clothes stirred his poet's fancy to the belief that there was loveliness beneath the mystery. Here was an adventure such as he had often imagined. But as yet he held no key to it, for no word was spoken while he sat with his impenetrable companions. In an hour's time David perceived through the window that the vehicle traversed the street of some town. Then it stopped in front of a closed and darkened house, and a pos- tilion alighted to hammer impatiently upon the door. A latticed window above flew wide and a nightcapped head popped out. " Who are ye that disturb honest folk at this time of night? ROADS OF DESTINY 19 My house is closed. 'Tis too late for profitable travelers to be abroad. Cease knocking at my door, and be off." "Open!" spluttered the postilion, loudly; "open for Mon- seigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys." "Ah ! " cried the voice above. "Ten thousand pardons, my lord. I did not know — the hour is so late — at once shall the door be opened, and the house placed at my lord's disposal." Inside was heard the clink of chain and bar, and the door was flung open. Shivering with chill and apprehension, the landlord of the Silver Flagon stood, half clad, candle in hand, upon the threshold. David followed the marquis out of the carriage. "Assist the lady," he was ordered. The poet obeyed. He felt her small hand tremble as he guided her descent. "Into the house," was the next command. The room was the long dining-hall of the tavern. A great oak table ran down its length. The huge gentleman seated himself in a chair at the nearer end. The lady sank into another against the wall, with an air of great weariness. David stood, considering how best he might now take his leave and continue upon his way. "My lord," said the landlord, bowing to the floor, "h-had I ex-expected this honor, entertainment would have been ready. T-t-there is wine and cold fowl and m-m-may-be " "Candles," said the marquis, spreading the fingers of one plump white hand in a gesture he had. "Y-yes, my lord." He fetched half a dozen candles, lighted them, and set them upon the table. "If monsieur would, perhaps, deign to taste a certain Bur- gundy — there is a cask " "Candles," said monsieur, spreading his fingers. "Assuredly — quickly — I fly, my lord." A dozen more lighted candles shone in the hall. The great bulk of the marquis overflowed his chair. He was dressed in fine black from head to foot save for the snowy ruffles at his wrist and throat. Even the hilt and scabbard of his sword were black. His expression was one of sneering pride. 20 STORIES FROM O. HENRY The ends of an upturned moustache reached nearly to his mocking eyes. The lady sat motionless, and now David perceived that she was young, and possessed of pathetic and appealing beauty. He was startled from the contemplation of her for- lorn loveliness by the booming voice of the marquis. "What is your name and pursuit.^" "David Mignot. I am a poet." The moustache of the marquis curled nearer to his eyes. "How do you live.'^" "I am also a shepherd; I guarded my father's flock," David answered, with his head high, but a flush upon his cheek. "Then listen, master shepherd and poet, to the fortune you have blundered upon to-night. This lady is my niece, Mademoiselle Lucie de Varennes. She is of noble descent and is possessed of ten thousand francs a year in her own right. As to her charms, you have but to observe for your- self. If the inventory pleases your shepherd's heart, she becomes your wife at a word. Do not interrupt me. To- night I conveyed her to the chateau of the Comte de Ville- maur, to whom her hand had been promised. Guests were present; the priest was waiting; her marriage to one eligible in rank and fortune was ready to be accomplished. At the altar this demoiselle, so meek and dutiful, turned upon me like a leopardess, charged me with cruelty and crimes, and broke, before the gaping priest, the troth I had plighted for her. I swore there and then, by ten thousand devils, that she should marry the first man we met after leaving the chateau, be he prince, charcoal-burner, or thief. You, shepherd, are the first. Mademoiselle must be wed this night. If not you, then another. You have ten minutes in which to make your decision. Do not vex me with words or questions. Ten minutes, shepherd; and they are speeding." The marquis drummed loudly with his white fingers upon the table. He sank into a veiled attitude of waiting. It was as if some great house had shut its doors and windows against approach. David would have spoken, but the huge man's ROADS OF DESTINY 21 bearing stoppea his tongue. Instead, he stood by the lady's chair and bowed. *' Mademoiselle," he said, and he marveled to find his words flowing easily before so much elegance and beauty. *'You have heard me say I was a shepherd. I have also had the fancy, at times, that I am a poet. If it be the test of a poet to adore and cherish the beautiful, that fancy is now strengthened. Can I serve you in any way, mademoiselle?" The young woman looked up at him with eyes dry and mournful. His frank, glowing face, made serious by the gravity of the adventure, his strong, straight figure and the liquid sympathy in his blue eyes, perhaps, also, her imminent need of long-denied help and kindness, thawed her to sudden tears. "Monsieur," she said, in low tones, "you look to be true and kind. He is my uncle, the brother of my father, and my only relative. He loved my mother, and he hates me because I am like her. He has made my life one long ter- ror. I am afraid of his very looks, and never before dared to disobey him. But to-night he would have married me to a man three times my age. You will forgive me for bringing this vexation upon you, monsieur. You will, of course, de- cline this mad act he tries to force upon you. But let me thank you for your generous words, at least. I have had none spoken to me in so long." There was now something more than generosity in the poet's eyes. Poet he must have been, for Yvonne was for- gotten; this fine, new loveliness held him with its freshness and grace. The subtle perfume from her filled him with strange emotions. His tender look fell warmly upon her. She leaned to it, thirstily. "Ten minutes," said David, "is given me in which to do what I would devote years to achieve. I will not say I pity you, mademoiselle; it would not be true — I love you. I cannot ask love from you yet, but let me rescue you from this cruel man, and, in time, love may come. I think I have a future, I will not always be a shepherd. For the present I 22 STORIES FROM O. HENRY will cherish you with all my heart and make your life less sad Will you trust your fate to me, mademoiselle?'* '*Ah, you would sacrifice yourself from pity!" "From love. The time is almost up, mademoiselle." "You will regret it, and despise me." "I will live only to make you happy, and myself worthy of you." Her fine small hand crept into his from beneath her cloak. "I will trust you," she breathed, "with my life. And — and love — may not be so far off as you think. Tell him. Once away from the power of his eyes I may forget." David went and stood before the marquis. The black figure stirred, and the mocking eyes glanced at the great hall clock. "Two minutes to spare. A shepherd requires eight min- utes to decide whether he will accept a bride of beauty and income! Speak up, shepherd, do you consent to become mademoiselle's husband?" "Mademoiselle," said David, standing proudly, "has done me the honor to yield to my request that she become my wife." "Well said!" said the marquis. "You have yet the mak- ing of a courtier in you, master shepherd. Mademoiselle could have drawn a worse prize, after all. And now to be done with the affair as quick as the Church and the devil will allow!" He struck the table soundly with his sword hilt. The landlord came, knee-shaking, bringing more candles in the hope of anticipating the great lord's whims. "Fetch a priest," said the marquis, " a priest; do you understand? In ten minutes have a priest here, or " The landlord dropped his candles and flew. The priest came, heavy-eyed and ruffled. He made David Mignot and Lucie de Varennes man and wife, pocketed a gold piece that the marquis tossed him, and shuffled out again into the night. "Wine," ordered the marquis, spreading his ominous fingers at the host. ROADS OF DESTINY 23 "Fill glasses," he said, when it was brought. He stood up at the head of the table in the candlelight, a black mountain of venom and conceit, with something like the memory of an old love turned to poison in his eye, as it fell upon his niece. "Monsieur Mignot," he said, raising his wineglass, "drink after I say this to you : You have taken to be your wife one who will make your life a foul and wretched thing. The blood in her is an inheritance running black lies and red ruin. She will bring you shame and anxiety. The devil that de- scended to her is there in her eyes and skin and mouth that stoop even to beguile a peasant. There is your promise, mon- sieur poet, for a happy life. Drink your wine. At last, mademoiselle, I am rid of you." The marquis drank. A little grievous cry, as if from a sudden wound, came from the girl's lips. David, with his glass in his hand, stepped forward three paces and faced the marquis. There was little of a shepherd in his bearing. "Just now," he said, calmly, "you did me the honor to ^all me 'monsieur.' May I hope, therefore, that my marriage to mademoiselle has placed me somewhat nearer to you in — • let us say, reflected rank — ^has given me the right to stand more as an equal to monseigneur in a certain little piece o* business I have in my mind.f^" "You may hope, shepherd," sneered the marquis. "Then," said David, dashing his glass of wine into the contemptuous eyes that mocked him, "perhaps you will con- descend to fight me." The fury of the great lord outbroke in one sudden curse like a blast from a horn. He tore his sword from its black sheath; he called to the hovering landlord: "A sword there, for this lout!" He turned to the lady, with a laugh that chilled her heart, and said: "You put much labor upon me, madame. It seems I must find you a husband and make you a widow in the same night.'* "I know not sword-play," said David. He flushed to make the confession before his lady. " *I know not sword-play, ' " mimicked the marquis. "Shall 24 STORIES FROM O. HENRY we fight like peasants with oaken cudgels? Hola ! Frangoisj my pistols!" A postilion brought two shining great pistols ornamented with carven silver, from the carriage holsters. The marquis tossed one upon the table near David's hand. "To the other end of the table," he cried; "even a shepherd may pull a trigger. Few of them attain the honor to die by the weapon of a De Beaupertuys." The shepherd and the marquis faced each other from the ends of the long table. The landlord, in an ague of terror, clutched the air and stammered: "M-M-Monseigneur, for the love of Christ! not in my house! — do not spill blood — it will ruin my custom " The look of the marquis, threaten- ing him, paralyzed his tongue. "Coward," cried the lord of Beaupertuys, "cease chattering your teeth long enough to give the word for us, if you can." Mine host's knees smote the floor. He was without a vo- cabulary. Even sounds were beyond him. Still, by gestures he seemed to beseech peace in the name of his house and custom. " I will give the word," said the lady, in a clear voice. She went up to David and kissed him sweetly. Her eyes w^ere sparkling bright, and color had come to her cheek. She stood against the wall, and the two men leveled their pistols for her count. " Un — deux — trois .'" The tW'O reports came so nearly together that the candles ■flickered but once. The marquis stood, smiling, the fingers of his left hand resting, outspread, upon the end of the table. David remained erect, and turned his head very slowly, searching for his wife with his eyes. Then, as a garment falls from where it is hung, he sank, crumpled, upon the floor. With a little cry of terror and despair, the widowed maid ran and stooped above him. She found his wound, and then looked up with her old look of pale melancholy. "Through his heart," she whispered. "Oh, his heart!" "Come, " boomed the great voice of the marquis, "out with ROADS OF DESTINY 25 you to the carriage! Daybreak shall not find you on my hands. Wed you shall be again, and to a living husband, this night. The next we come upon, my lady, highwayman or peasant. If the road yields no other, then the churl that opens my gates. Out with you to the carriage!" The marquis, implacable and huge, the lady wrapped again in the mystery of her cloak, the postilion bearing the weapons — all moved out to the waiting carriage. The sound of its ponderous wheels rolling away echoed through the slumbering village. In the hall of the Silver Flagon the distracted land- lord wrung his hands above the slain poet's body, while the flames of the four and twenty candles danced and flickered on the table. THE RIGHT BRANCH Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles. David stood, uncertain, for a while, and then took the road to the right. Whither it led he knew not, but he was resolved to leave Vernoy far behind that night. He traveled a league and then passed a large chateau which showed testimony of recent entertainment. Lights shone from every window; from the great stone gateway ran a tracery of wheel tracks drawn in the dust by the vehicles of the guests. Three leagues farther and David was weary. He rested and slept for a while on a bed of pine boughs at the roadside. Then up and on again along the unknown way. Thus for five days he traveled the great road, sleeping upon Nature's balsamic beds or in peasants' ricks, eating of their black, hospitable bread, drinking from streams or the willing cup of the goatherd. At length he crossed a great bridge and set his foot within the smiling city that has crushed or crowned more poets than all the rest of the world. His breath came quickly as Paris sang to him in a little undertone her vital chant of greeting — ■ the hum of voice and foot and wheel. High up under the eaves of an old house in the Rue Conti. 26 STORIES FROM O. HENRY David paid for lodging, and set himself, in a wooden chairj to his poems. The street, once sheltering citizens of import and consequence, was now given over to those who ever follow in the wake of decline. The houses were tall and still possessed of a ruined dignity, but many of them were empty save for dust and the spider. By night there was the clash of steel and the cries of brawlers straying restlessly from inn to inn. Where once gentility abode was now but a rancid and rude incontinence. But here David found housing commensurate to his scant purse. Daylight and candlelight found him at pen and paper. One afternoon he was returning from a foraging trip to the lower world, with bread and curds and a bottle of thin wine. Halfway up his dark stairway he met — or rather came upon, for she rested on the stair — a young woman of a beauty that should balk even the justice of a poet's imagina- tion. A loose, dark cloak, flung open, showed a rich gown beneath. Her eyes changed swiftly with every little shade of thought. Within one moment they would be round and artless like a child's, and long and cozening like a gipsy's One hand raised her gown, undraping a little shoe, high-heeled with its ribbons dangling, untied. So heavenly she was, so unfitted to stoop, so qualified to charm and command ! Per' haps she had seen David coming, and had waited for his help there. Ah, would monsieur pardon that she occupied the stairway, but the shoe ! — the naughty shoe ! Alas ! it would not remain tied. Ah! if monsieur would be so gracious! The poet's fingers trembled as he tied the contrary ribbons. Then he would have fled from the danger of her presence, but the eyes grew long and cozening, like a gipsy's, and held him. He leaned against the balustrade, clutching his bottle of sour wine. "You have been so good," she said, smiling. "Does mon sieur, perhaps, five in the house.'*" *'Yes, madame. I — I think so, madame." ''Perhaps in the third story, then?'* ROADS OF DESTINY 27 "No, madame; higher up." The lady fluttered her fingers with the least possible ges« ture of impatience. "Pardon. Certainly I am not discreet in asking. Mon- sieur will forgive me ? It is surely not becoming that I should inquire where he lodges." "Madame, do not say so. I live in the " "No, no, no; do not tell me. Now I see that I erred. But I cannot lose the interest I feel in this house and all that is in it. Once it was my home. Often I come here but to dream of those happy days again. Will you let that be my -excuse: "Let me tell you, then, for you need no excuse, stam- mered the poet. "I live in the top floor — the small room where the stairs turn." "In the front room.^" asked the lady, turning her head sidewise. "The rear, madame." The lady sighed, as if with relief. "I will detain you no longer, then, monsieur," she said, employing the round and artless eye. "Take good care of my house. Alas! only the memories of it are mine now. Adieu, and accept my thanks for your courtesy." She was gone, leaving but a smile and a trace of sweet perfume. David climbed the stairs as one in slumber. But he awoke from it, and the smile and the perfume lingered with him and never afterward did either seem quite to leave him. This lady of whom he knew nothing drove him to lyrics of eyes, chansons of swiftly conceived love, odes to curling hair, and sonnets to shppers on slender feet. Poet he must have been, for Yvonne was forgotten; this fine, new loveliness held him with its freshness and grace. The subtle perfume about her filled him with strange emo- tions. On a certain night three persons were gathered about a table in a room on the third floor of the same house. Three 28 STORIES FROM O. HENRY chairs and the table and a Hghted candle upon it was all the furniture. One of the persons was a huge man, dressed in black. His expression was one of sneering pride. The ends of his upturned moustache reached nearly to his mocking eyes. Another was a lady, young and beautiful, with eyes that could be round and artless, like a child's, or long and cozening, like a gipsy's, but were now keen and ambitious, like any other conspirator's. The third was a man of action, a combatant, a bold and impatient executive, breathing fire and steel. He was addressed by the others as Captain Desrolles. This man struck the table with his fist, and said, with con- trolled violence: "To-night. To-night as he goes to midnight mass. I am tired of the plotting that gets nowhere. I am sick of signals and ciphers and secret meetings and such haragouin. Let us be honest traitors. If France is to be rid of him, let us kill in the open, and not hunt with snares and traps. To-night, I say. I back my words. My hand will do the deed. To- night, as he goes to mass." The lady turned upon him a cordial look. Woman, how- ever wedded to plots, must ever thus bow to rash courage. The big man stroked his upturned moustache. "Dear captain," he said, in a great voice, softened by habit, "this time I agree with you. Nothing is to be gained by waiting. Enough of the palace guards belong to us to make the endeavor a safe one." "To-night," repeated Captain Desrolles, again striking the table. "You have heard me, marquis; my hand will do the deed." "But now," said the huge man, softly, "comes a question. Word must be sent to our partisans in the palace, and a signal agreed upon. Our stanchest men must accompany the royal carriage. At this hour what messenger can penetrate so far as the south doorway.^ Ribout is stationed there; once a mes- sage is placed in his hands, all will go well/' "I will send the message," said the lady. ROADS OF DESTINY 29 "You, countess?" said the marquis, raising his eyebrows. "Your devotion is great, we know, but " "Listen!" exclaimed the lady, rising and resting her hands upon the table; "in a garret of this house lives a youth from the provinces as guileless and tender as the lambs he tended there. I have met him twice or thrice upon the stairs. I questioned him, fearing that he might dwell too near the room in which we are accustomed to meet. He is mine, if I will. He writes poems in his garret, and I think he dreams of me. He will do what I say. He shall take the message to the palace." The marquis rose from his chair and bowed. "You did not permit me to finish my sentence, countess," he said. "I would have said: 'Your devotion is great, but your wit and charm are infinitely greater. While the conspirators were thus engaged, David was pol- ishing some lines addressed to his amorette d'escalier. He heard a timorous knock at his door, and opened it, with a great throb, to behold her there, panting as one in straits, with eyes wide open and artless, like a child's. "Monsieur," she breathed, "I come to you in distress. I believe you to be good and true, and I know of no other help. How I flew through the streets among the swaggering men! Monsieur, my mother is dying. My uncle is a captain of guards in the palace of the king. Some one must fly to bring him. May I hope " "Mademoiselle," interrupted David, his eyes shining with the desire to do her service, "your hopes shall be my wings. Tell me how I may reach him." The lady thrust a sealed paper into his hand. "Go to the south gate — the south gate, mind — and say to the guards there, *The falcon has left his nest.' They will pass you, and you will go to the south entrance to the palace. Repeat the words, and give this letter to the man who will reply 'Let him strike when he will.' This is the password, monsieur, entrusted to me by my uncle, for now when the country is disturbed and men plot against the king's 30 STORIES FROM O. HENRY life, no one without it can gain entrance to the palace grounds after nightfall. If you will, monsieur, take him this letter so that my mother may see him before she closes her eyes." Give it me," said David, eagerly. "But shall I let you return home through the streets alone so late.^ I " "No, no — fly. Each moment is like a precious jewel. Some time," said the lady, with eyes long and cozening, like a gipsy's, "I will try to thank you for your goodness." The poet thrust the letter into his breast, and bounded doTVTi the stairway. The lady, when he was gone, returned to the room below. The eloquent eyebrows of the marquis interrogated her. "He is gone," she said, "as fleet and stupid as one of his own sheep, to deliver it." The table shook again from the batter of Captain Des- rolles's fist. "Sacred name!" he cried; "I have left my pistols behind! I can trust no others." "Take this," said the marquis, drawing from beneath his cloak a shining, great weapon, ornamented with carven silver. "There are none truer. But guard it closely, for it bears my arms and crest, and already I am suspected. Me, I must put many leagues between myself and Paris this night. To-morrow must find me in my chateau. After you, dear countess." The marquis puffed out the candle. The lady, well cloaked, and the two gentlemen softly descended the stairway and flowed into the crowd that roamed along the narrow pavements of the Rue Conti. David sped. At the south gate of the king's residence a halberd was laid to his breast, but he turned its point with the words: "The falcon has left his nest." "Pass, brother," said the guard, "and go quickly." On the south steps of the palace they moved to seize him, but again the mot de passe charmed the watchers. One smong them stepped forward and began: "Let him ROADS OF DESTINY 31 strike " but a flurry among the guards told of a surprise. A man of keen look and soldierly stride suddenly pressed through them and seized the letter which David held in his hand. *' Come with me," he said, and led him inside the great hall. Then he tore open the letter and read it. He beckoned to a man uniformed as an officer of musketeers, who was pass- ing. "Captain Tetreau, you will have the guards at the south entrance and the south gate arrested and confined. Place men known to be royal in their places." To David he said: "Come with me." He conducted him through a corridor and an anteroom into a spacious chamber, where a melancholy man, sombrely dressed, sat brooding in a great, leather-covered chair. To that man he said: " Sire, I have told you that the palace is as full of traitors and spies as a sewer is of rats. You have thought, sire, that it was my fancy. This man penetrated to your very door by their connivance. He bore a letter which I have inter- cepted. I have brought him here that your majesty may Qo longer think my zeal excessive." "I will question him," said the king, stirring in his chair. He looked at David with heavy eyes dulled by an opaque film. The poet bent his knee. "From where do you come.^^" asked the king. "From the village of Vernoy, in the province of Eure-et- Loir, sire." "What do you follow in Paris?" "I — I would be a poet, sire." "What did you in Vernoy?" "I minded my father's flock of sheep." The king stirred again, and the film lifted from his eyes. "Ah! in the fields!" "Yes, sire." "You lived in the fields; you went out in the cool of the morning and lay among the hedges in the grass. The flock distributed itself upon the hillside; you drank of the living stream; you ate your sweet, brown bread in the shade, and 32 STORIES FROM O. HENRY you listened, doubtless, to blackbirds piping in the grove. Is not that so, shepherd?" **It is, sire," answered David, with a sigh; "and to the bees at the flowers, and, maybe, to the grape gatherers sing- ing on the hill." *'Yes, yes," said the king, impatiently; "maybe to them; but surely to the blackbirds. They whistled often, in the grove, did they not?" "Nowhere, sire, so sweetly as in Eure-et-Loir. I have endeavored to express their song in some verses that I have written." "Can you repeat those verses?" asked the king, eagerly. "A long time ago I listened to the blackbirds. It would be something better than a kingdom if one could rightly con- strue their song. And at night you drove the sheep to the fold and then sat, in peace and tranquillity, to your pleasant bread. Can you repeat those verses, shepherd?" "They run this way, sire," said David, with respectful ardor : "'Lazy shepherd, see your lambkins Skip, ecstatic, on the mead; See the firs dance in the breezes. Hear Pan blowing at his reed. 'Hear us calling from the tree-tops. See us swoop upon your flock; Yield us wool to make our nests warm In the branches of the — ' ' "If it please your majesty," interrupted a harsh voice, "I will ask a question or two of this rhymester. There is little time to spare. I crave pardon, sire, if my anxiety for your safety offends." "The loyalty," said the king, "of the Duke d'Aumale is too well proven to give offence." He sank into his chair, and the film came again over his eyes. ROADS OF DESTINY 33 "First," said the duke, '*I will read you the letter he brought : " *To-night is the anniversary of the dauphin's death. If he goes, as is his custom, to midnight mass to pray for the soul of his son, the falcon will strike, at the corner of the Rue Esplanade. If this be his intention, set a red light in the upper room at the southwest corner of the palace, that the falcon may take heed.' "Peasant," said the duke, sternly, "you have heard these words. Who gave you this message to bring?" "My lord duke," said David, sincerely, "I will tell you. A lady gave it me. She said her mother was ill, and that this writing would fetch her uncle to her bedside. I do not know the meaning of the letter, but I will swear that she is beautiful and good." "Describe the woman," commanded the duke, "and how you came to be her dupe." "Describe her!" said David with a tender smile. "You would command words to perform miracles. Well, she is made of sunshine and deep shade. She is slender, like the alders, and moves with their grace. Her eyes change while you gaze into them; now round, and then half shut as the sun peeps between two clouds. When she comes, heaven is all about her; when she leaves, there is chaos and a scent of hawthorn blossoms. She came to me in the Rue Conti, number twenty -nine." "It is the house," said the duke, turning to the king, "that we have been watching. Thanks to the poet's tongue, we have a picture of the infamous Countess Quebedaux." "Sire and my lord duke," said David, earnestly, "I hope my poor words have done no injustice. I have looked into that lady's eyes. I will stake my life that she is an angel, letter or no letter." The duke looked at him steadily. "I will put you to the proof," he said, slowly. "Dressed as the king, you shall. 34 STORIES FROM O. HENRY yourself, attend mass in his carriage at midnight. Do you accept the test?'* David smiled. "I have looked into her eyes," he said. "I had my proof there. Take yours how you will." Half an hour before twelve the Duke d'Aumale, with his own hands, set a red lamp in a southwest window of the pal- ace. At ten minutes to the hour, David, leaning on his arm, dressed as the king, from top to toe, with his head bowed in his cloak, walked slowly from the royal apartments to the waiting carriage. The duke assisted him inside and closed the door. The carriage whirled away along its route to the cathedral. On the qui vive in a house at the corner of the Rue Espla- nade w^as Captain Tetreau with twenty men, ready to pounce upon the conspirators when they should appear. But it seemed that, for some reason, the plotters had slightly altered their plans. When the royal carriage had reached the Rue Christopher, one square nearer than the Rue Esplanade, forth from it burst Captain Desrolles, with his band of would-be regicides, and assailed the equipage. The guards upon the carriage, though surprised at the premature attack, descended and fought valiantly. The noise of con- flict attracted the force of Captain Tetreau, and they came pelting down the street to the rescue. But, in the meantime, the desperate Desrolles had torn open the door of the king's carriage, thrust his weapon against the body of the dark fig- ure inside, and fired. Now, with loyal reinforcements at hand, the street rang with cries and the rasp of steel, but the frightened horses had dashed away. Upon the cushions lay the dead body of the poor mock king and poet, slain by a ball from the pistol of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys. The Main Road Three leagues, then, the road ran, and turned into a puzzle. It joined with another and a larger road at right angles, David ROADS OF DESTINY 35 stood, uncertain, for a while, and then sat himself to rest upon its side. Whither those roads led he knew not. Either way there seemed to he a great world full of chance and peril. And then, sitting there, his eye fell upon a bright star, one that he and Yvonne had named for theirs. That set him think- ing of Yvonne, and he wondered if he had not been too hasty. Why should he leave her and his home because a few hot words had come between them.f^ Was love so brittle a thing that jealousy, the very proof of it, could break it.^ Mornings always brought a cure for the little heartaches of evening. There was yet time for him to return home without any one in the sweetly sleeping village of Vernoy being the wiser. His heart was Yvonne's; there where he had lived always he could write his poems and find his happiness. David rose, and shook off his unrest and the wild mood that had tempted him. He set his face steadfastly back along the road he had come. By the time he had retraveled the road to Vernoy, his desire to rove was gone. He passed the sheep- fold, and the sheep scurried, with a drumming flutter, at his late footsteps, warming his heart by the homely sound. He crept without noise into his little room and lay there, thankful that his feet had escaped the distress of new roads that night. How well he knew woman's heart! The next evening Yvonne was at the well in the road where the young con- gregated in order that the cure might have business. The corner of her eye was engaged in a search for David, albeit her set mouth seemed unrelenting. He saw the look; braved the mouth, drew from it a recantation and, later, a kiss as they walked homeward together. Three months afterward they were married. David's father was shrewd and prosperous. He gave them a wedding that was heard of three leagues away. Both the young people were favorites in the village. There was a procession in the streets, a dance on the green; they had the marionettes and a tumbler out from Dreux to delight the guests. Then a year, and David's father died. The sheep and the 36 STORIES FROM O. HENRY cottage descended to him. He already had the seemliest wife in the village. Yvonne's milk pails and her brass kettles were bright — ouf! they blinded you in the sun when you passed that way. But you must keep your eyes upon her 3-ard, for her flower beds were so neat and gay they restored to you your sight. Xnd you might hear her sing, aye, as far as the double chestnut tree above Pere Gruneau's blacksmith forge. But a day came when David drew out paper from a long- shut drawer, and began to bite the end of a pencil. Spring had come again and touched his heart. Poet he must have been, for now Yvonne was well-nigh forgotten. This fine new loveliness of earth held him with its witchery and grace» The perfume from her woods and meadows stirred him strangely. Daily had he gone forth with his flock, and brought it safe at night. But now he stretched himself under the hedge and pieced words together on his bits of paper. The sheep strayed, and the wolves, perceiving that difficult poems make easy mutton, ventured from the woods and stole his lambs. David's stock of poems grew larger and his flock smaller. Yvonne's nose and temper waxed sharp and her talk blunt. Her pans and kettles grew dufl, but her eyes had caught their flash. She pointed out to the poet that his neglect was re- ducing the flock and bringing woe upon the household. David hired a boy to guard the sheep, locked himself in the little room in the top of the cottage, and wrote more poems. The boy, being a poet by nature, but not furnished with an outlet in the way of writing, spent his time in slumber. The wolves lost no time in discovering that poetry and sleep are practically the same; so the flock steadily grew smaller. Yvonne's ill temper increased at an equal rate. Sometimes she would stand in the yard and rail at David through his high window. Then you could hear her as far as the double chestnut tree above Pere Gruneau's blacksmith forge. M. Papineau, the kind, wise, meddling old notary, saw this, as he saw everything at which his nose pointed. He ROADS OF DESTINY 37 went to David, fortified himself with a great pinch of snuff, and said: "Friend Mignot, I affixed the seal upon the marriage cer- tificate of your father. It would distress me to be obliged to attest a paper signifying the bankruptcy of his son. But that is what you are coming to. I speak as an old friend. Now% listen to what I have to say. You have your heart set, I perceive, upon poetry. At Dreux, I have a friend, one Monsieur Bril — Georges Bril. He fives in a fittle cleared space in a houseful of books. He is a learned man; he visits Paris each year; he himself has written books. He will tell you when the catacombs were made, how they found out the names of the stars, and why the plover has a long bill. The meaning and the form of poetry is to him as intelligent as the baa of a sheep is to you. I will give you a letter to him, and you shall take him your poems and let him read them. Then you will know if you shall write more, or give your attention to your wife and business." "Write the letter," said David, "I am sorry you did not speak of this sooner." At sunrise the next morning he was on the road to Dreux with the precious roll of poems under his arm. At noon he mped the dust from his feet at the door of Monsieur Bril. That learned man broke the seal of M. Papineau's letter, and sucked up its contents through his gleaming spectacles as the sun draws water. He took David inside to his study and sat him down upon a little island beat upon by a sea of books. Monsieur Bril had a conscience. He flinched not even at a mass of manuscript the thickness of a finger length and rolled to an incorrigible curve. He broke the back of the roll against his knee and began to read. He slighted nothing: he bored into the lump as a worm into a nut, seeking for a kernel. Meanwhile, David sat, marooned, trembling in the spray of so much literature. It roared in his ears. He held no chart or compass for voyaging in that sea. Half the world, he thought, must be writing books. 38 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Monsieur Bril bored to the last page of the poems. Then he took off his spectacles and wiped them with his handker- chief. "My old friend, Papineau, is well.'^" he asked. "In the best of health," said David. "How many sheep have you, Monsieur Mignot.'^" "Three hundred and nine, when I counted them yesterday. The flock has had ill fortune. To that number it has de- creased from eight hundred and fifty." "You have a wife and a home, and lived in comfort. The sheep brought you plenty. You went into the fields with them and lived in the keen air and ate the sweet bread of contentment. You had but to be vigilant and recline there upon nature's breast, listening to the whistle of the black- birds in the grove. Am I right thus far.?" "It was so," said David. "I have read all your verses," continued Monsieur Bril, his eyes wandering about his sea of books as if he conned the horizon for a sail. "Look yonder, through that window, Monsieur Mignot; tell me what you see in that tree." "I see a crow," said David, looking. "There is a bird," said Monsieur Bril, "that shall assist me where I am disposed to shirk a duty. You know that bird. Monsieur Mignot; he is the philosopher of the air. He is happy through submission to his lot. None so merry or full-crawed as he with his whimsical eye and rollicking step. The fields yield him what he desires. He never grieves that his plumage is not gay, like the oriole's. And you have heard. Monsieur Mignot, the notes that nature has given him.^ Is the nightingale any happier, do you think.?" David rose to his feet. The crow cawed harshly from his tree. "I thank you, Monsieur Bril," he said, slowly. "There was not, then, one nightingale note among all those croaks.?" "I could not have missed it," said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh. "I read every word. Live your poetry, man; do not try to write it any more." ROADS OF DESTINY 39 "I thank you," said David, again. "And now I will be going back to my sheep." *'If you would dine with me," said the man of books, "and overlook the smart of it, I will give you reasons at length." "No," said the poet, "I must be back in the fields cawing at my sheep." Back along the road to Vernoy he trudged with his poems under his arm. When he reached his village he turned into the shop of one Zeigler, a Jew out of Armenia, who sold any- thing that came to his hand. "Friend," said David, "wolves from the forest harass my sheep on the hills. I must purchase firearms to protect them. What have you.^" "A bad day, this, for me, friend Mignot," said Zeigler, spreading his hands, "for I perceive that I must sell you a weapon that will not fetch a tenth of its value. Only last week I bought from a peddler a wagon full of goods that he procured at a sale by a commissionaire of the crown. The sale was of the chateau and belongings of a great lord — I know not his title — who has been banished for conspiracy against the king. There are some choice firearms in the lot. This pistol — oh, a weapon fit for a prince! — it shall be only forty francs to you, friend Mignot — if I lost ten by the sale. But perhaps an arquebuse " "This will do," said David, throwing the money on the counter. "Is it charged.^" " I will charge it," said Zeigler. "And, for ten francs more, add a store of powder and ball." David laid his pistol under his coat and walked to his cot- tage. Yvonne was not there. Of late she had taken to gadding much among the neighbors. But a fire was glowing in the kitchen stove. David opened the door of it and thrust his poems in upon the coals. As they blazed up they made a singing, harsh sound in the flue. "The song of the crow!" said the poet. He went up to his attic room and closed the door. So quiet was the village that a score of people heard the roar 40 STORIES FROM O. HENRY of the great pistol. They flocked thither, and up the stairs where the smoke, issuing, drew their notice. The men laid the body of the poet upon his bed, awkwardly arranging it to conceal the torn plumage of the poor black crow. The women chattered in a luxury of zealous pity. Some of them ran to tell Yvonne. M. Papineau, whose nose had brought him there among the first, picked up the weapon and ran his eye over its silver mountings with a mingled air of connoisseurship and grief. "The arms," he explained, aside, to the cure, "and crest of Monseigneur, the Marquis de Beaupertuys." A RETRIEVED REFORMATION From Roads of Destiny. First published in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, April, 1903. For the singular history of this story, see the 0. Henry Biography pages 191-194. The popularity of the story as a motion picture added greatly to the author's vogue, though in the English, French, and Spanish versions O. Henry's name was not mentioned. The character of Jimmy Valentine is taken from life but there is a close parallel to the leading incident in chapter XLII of Hugo's Les Miserables. The chief criticism of the story has been that in spite of the hero's reformation he offers his kit of burglar's tools to a pal instead of destroying them. O. Henry's interpre- tation of the character, however, is thoroughly consistent. Jimmy's reformation, as the title of the story intimates, was as yet incom- plete. It concerned himself, not his pals. He had not reached that maturer stage where the exemplar of a virtue becomes also its propa- gandist. A GUARD came to the prison shoe-shop, where Jimmy Valentine was assiduously stitching uppers, and escorted him to the front office. There the w^arden handed Jimmy his par- don, which had been signed that morning by the governor. Jimmy took it in a tired kind of way. He had served nearly ten months of a four-year sentence. He had expected to stay only about three months, at the longest. When a man w4th as many friends on the outside as Jimmy Valentine had is received in the ''stir" it is hardly worth while to cut his hair. "Now, Valentine," said the warden, "you'll go out in the morning. Brace up, and make a man of yourself. You're not a bad fellow at heart. Stop cracking safes, and live straight." "Me.^" said Jimmy, in surprise. "Why, I never cracked a safe in my Hfe." 41 42 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "Oh, no," laughed the warden. "Of course not. Let's see, now. How was it you happened to get sent up on that Springfield job.^ Was it because you wouldn't prove an aUbi for fear of compromising somebody in extremely high- toned society? Or was it simply a case of a mean old jury that had it in for you.^ It's always one or the other with you innocent victims." "Me.f^" said Jimmy, still blankly virtuous. "Why, war- den, I never was in Springfield in my life ! " "Take him back, Cronin," smiled the warden, "and fix him up with outgoing clothes. Unlock him at seven in the morn- ing, and let him come to the bull-pen. Better think over my advice, Valentine." At a quarter past seven on the next morning Jimmy stood in the warden's outer office. He had on a suit of the villain- ously fitting, ready-made clothes and a pair of the stiff, squeaky shoes that the state furnishes to its discharged com- pulsory guests. The clerk handed him a railroad ticket and the five-dollar bill with which the law expected him to rehabilitate himseH into good citizenship and prosperity. The warden gave him a cigar, and shook hands. Valentine, 9762, was chronicled on the books "Pardoned by Governor," and Mr. James Val- entine walked out into the sunshine. Disregarding the song of the birds, the waving green trees, and the smell of the flowers, Jimmy headed straight for a restaurant. There he tasted the first sweet joys of liberty in the shape of a broiled chicken and a bottle of white wine — ^followed by a cigar a grade better than the one the war- den had given him. From there he proceeded leisurely to the depot. He tossed a quarter into the hat of a blind man sitting by the door, and boarded his train. Three hours set him down in a little town near the state line. He went to the cafe of one Mike Dolan and shook hands with Mike, who was alone behind the bar. "Sorry we couldn't make it sooner, Jimmy, me boy," said Mike. "But we had that protest from Springfield to A RETRIEVED REFORMATION 43 buck against, and the governor nearly balked. Feeling all right?" "Fine," said Jimmy. "Got my key.?" He got his key and went upstairs, unlocking the door of a room at the rear. Everything was just as he had left it. There on the floor was still Ben Price's collar-button that had been torn from that eminent detective's shirt-band when they had overpowered Jimmy to prrest him. Pulling out from the wall a folding-bed, Jimmy shd back a panel in the wall and dragged out a dust-covered suit-case. He opened this and gazed fondly at the finest set of burglar's tools in the East. It was a complete set, made of specially tempered steel, the latest designs in drills, punches, braces and bits, jimmies, clamps, and augers, with two or three novelties, invented by Jimmy himself, in which he took pride. Over nine hundred dollars they had cost him to have made at , a place where they make such things for the profession. In half an hour Jimmy went downstairs and through the cafe. He was now dressed in tasteful and well-fitting clothes, and carried his dusted and cleaned suit-case in his hand. "Got anything on?" asked Mike Dolan, genially. "Me?" said Jimmy, in a puzzled tone. "I don't under- stand. I'm representing the New York Amalgamated Short Snap Biscuit Cracker and Frazzled Wheat Company." This statement delighted Mike to such an extent that Jimmy had to take a seltzer-and-milk on the spot. He never touched "hard" drinks. A week after the release of Valentine, 9762, there was a neat job of safe-burglary done in Richmond, Indiana, with no clue to the author. A scant eight hundred dollars was all that was secured. Two weeks after that a patented, im- proved, burglar-proof safe in Logansport was opened like a cheese to the tune of fifteen hundred dollars, currency; securities and silver untouched. That began to interest the rogue-catchers. Then an old-fashioned bank-safe in Jeffer- son City became active and threw out of its crater an erup- tion of bank-notes amounting to five thousand dollars. The 44 STORIES FROM O. HENRY losses were now high enough to bring the matter up into Ben Price's class of work. By comparing notes, a remark- able similarity in the methods of the burglaries was noticed. Ben Price investigated the scenes of the robberies, and was heard to remark: *' That's Dandy Jim Valentine's autograph. He's resumed business. Look at that combination knob — jerked out as easy as pulling up a radish in wet weather. He's got the only clamps that can do it. And look how clean those tum- blers were punched out! Jimmy never has to drill but one hole. Yes, I guess I want Mr. Valentine. He'll do his bit next time without any short-time or clemency foolishness." Ben Price knew Jimmy's habits. He had learned them while working up the Springfield case. Long jumps, quick get-aways, no confederates, and a taste for good society — these ways had helped Mr. Valentine to become noted as a successful dodger of retribution. It was given out that Ben Price had taken up the trail of the elusive cracksman, and other people w^ith burglar-proof safes felt more at ease. One afternoon Jimmy Valentine and his suit-case climbed out of the mail-hack in Elmore, a little town five miles off the railroad down in the black-jack country of Arkansas. Jimmy, looking like an athletic young senior just home from college, went down the board side-walk toward the hotel. A young lady crossed the street, passed him at the corner, and entered a door over which was the sign "The Elmore Bank." Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgot what he was, and became another man. She lowered her eyes and colored slightly. Young men of Jimmy's style and looks were scarce in Elmore. Jimmy collared a boy that was loafing on the steps of the bank as if he w^ere one of the stockholders, and began to ask him questions about the town, feeding him dimes at intervals. By and by the young lady came out, looking royally uncon- scious of the young man with the suit-case, and went her way. ''Isn't that young lady Miss Polly Simpson.?" asked Jimmy, with specious guile. A RETRIEVED REFORMATION 45 "Naw," said the boy. "She's Annabel Adams. Her pa owns this bank. What'd you come to Elmore for? Is that a gold watch-chain .P I'm going to get a bulldog. Got any more dimes.'^" Jimmy went to the Planters' Hotel, registered as Ralph D. Spencer, and engaged a room. He leaned on the desk and declared his platform to the clerk. He said he had come to Elmore to look for a location to go into business. How was the shoe business, now, in the town? He had thought of the shoe business. Was there an opening? The clerk was impressed by the clothes and manner of Jimmy. He himself was something of a pattern of fashion to the thinly gilded youth of Elmore, but he now perceived his shortcomings. While trying to figure out Jimmy's manner of tying his four-in-hand he cordially gave informa- tion. Yes, there ought to be a good opening in the shoe line. There wasn't an exclusive shoe-store in the place. The dry- goods and general stores handled them. Business in all lines was fairly good. Hoped Mr. Spencer would decide to locate in Elmore. He would find it a pleasant town to live in, and the people very sociable. Mr. Spencer thought he would stop over in the town a few days and look over the situation. No, the clerk needn't call the boy. He would carry up his suit-case, himseK; it was rather heavy. Mr. Ralph Spencer, the phoenix that arose from Jimmy Valentine's ashes— ashes left by the flame of a sudden and alterative attack of love— remained in Elmore, and prospered. He opened a shoe-store and secured a good run of trade. Socially he was also a success, and made many friends. And he accomplished the wish of his heart. He met Miss Annabel Adams, and became more and more captivated by her charms. At the end of a year the situation of Mr. Ralph Spencer was this: he had won the respect of the community, his shoe-store was flourishing, and he and Annabel were engaged to be mar- 46 STORIES FROM O. HENRY ried in two weeks. Mr. Adams, the typical, plodding, country banker, approved of Spencer. Annabel's pride in him almost equaled her affection. He was as much at home in the family of IVIr. x^dams and that of Annabel's married sister as if he were already a member. One day Jimmy sat down in his room and wrote this letter, which he mailed to the safe address of one of his old friends in St. Louis: Dear Old Pal: I want you to be at Sullivan's place, in Little Rock, next Wednes- day night, at nine o'clock. I want you to wind up some little mat- ters for me. And, also, I want to make you a present of my kit of tools. I know you'll be glad to get them — you couldn't duplicate the lot for a thousand dollars. Say, Billj^ I've quit the old busi- ness — a year ago. I've got a nice store. I'm making an honest living, and I'm going to marry the finest girl on earth two weeks from now. It's the only life, Billy — the straight one. I wouldn't touch a dollar of another man's money now for a million. After I get married I'm going to sell out and go West, where there won't be so much danger of having old scores brought up against me. I tell you, Billy, she's an angel. She believes in me; and I wouldn't do another crooked thing for the whole world. Be sure to be at Sully's, for I must see you. I'll bring along the tools with me. Your old friend, JiM\rF. On the Monday night after Jimmy wrote this letter, Ben Price jogged unobtrusively into Elmore in a livery buggy. He lounged about town in his quiet way until he found out what he wanted to know. From the drug-store across the street from Spencer's shoe-store he got a good look at Ralph D. Spencer. "Going to marry the banker's daughter are you, Jimmy.?" said Ben to himself, softly. "Well, I don't know!" The next morning Jimmy took breakfast at the Adamses. He was going to Little Rock that day to order his wedding- suit and buy something nice for Annabel. That would be the first time he had left town since he came to Elmore. It A RETRIEVED REFORMATION 47 had been more than a year now since those last professional "jobs," and he thought he could safely venture out. After breakfast quite a family party went downtown to- gether — Mr. Adams, Annabel, Jimmy, and Annabel's mar- ried sister with her two little girls, aged five and nine. They came by the hotel where Jimmy still boarded, and he ran up to his room and brought along his suit-case. Then they went on to the bank. There stood Jimmy's horse and buggy and Dolph Gibson, who was going to drive him over to the rail- road station. All went inside the high, carved oak railings into the bank- ing-room — Jimmy included, for Mr. Adams's future son-in- law was welcome anywhere. The clerks were pleased to be greeted by the good-looking, agreeable young man who was going to marry Miss Annabel. Jimmy set his suit-case down. Annabel, whose heart was bubbling with happiness and lively youth, put on Jimmy's hat, and picked up the suit* case. "Wouldn't I make a nice drummer.?" said Annabel. "My! Ralph, how heavy it is.^^ Feels like it was full of gold bricks." "Lot of nickel-plated shoe-horns in there," said Jimmy, coolly, "that I'm going to return. Thought I'd save ex- press charges by taking them up. I'm getting awfully eco- nomical." The Elmore Bank had just put in a new safe and vault. Mr. Adams was very proud of it, and insisted on an inspec- tion by everyone. The vault was a small one, but it had a new, patented door. It fastened with three solid steel bolts thrown simultaneously with a single handle, and had a time- lock. Mr. Adams beamingly explained its workings to Mr. Spencer, who showed a courteous but not too intelligent in- terest. The two children. May and Agatha, were delighted by the shining metal and funny clock and knobs. While they were thus engaged Ben Price sauntered in and leaned on his elbow, looking casually inside between the rail- ings. He told the teller that he didn't want anything; he was just waiting for a man he knew. 48 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Suddenly there was a scream or two from the women, and a commotion. Unperceived by the elders. May, the nine- year-old girl, in a spirit of play, had shut Agatha in the vault. She had then shot the bolts and turned the knob of the com- bination as she had seen Mr. Adams do. The old banker sprang to the handle and tugged at it for a moment. "The door can't be opened," he groaned. "The clock hasn't been wound nor the combination set." Agatha's mother screamed again, hysterically. "Hush!" said Mr. Adams, raising his trembling hand. "All be quiet for a moment. Agatha! " he called as loudly as he could. "Listen to me." During the following silence they could just hear the faint sound of the child wildly shriek- ing in the dark vault in a panic of terror. "My precious darling!" wailed the mother. "She will die of fright! Open the door! Oh, break it open! Can't you men do something.?" "There isn't a man nearer than Little Rock who can open that door," said Mr. Adams, in a shaky voice. "My God. Spencer, what shall we do.^^ That child — she can't stand it long in there. There isn't enough air, and, besides, she'll go into convulsions from fright." Agatha's mother, frantic now, beat the door of the vault with her hands. Somebody wildly suggested dynamite. Annabel turned to Jimmy, her large eyes full of anguish, but not yet despairing. To a woman nothing seems quite im- possible to the powers of the man she worships. "Can't you do something, Ralph — try, won't you?" He looked at her with a queer, soft smile on his lips and in his keen eyes. "Annabel," he said, "give me that rose you are wearing, will you?" Hardly believing that she heard him aright, she unpinned the bud from the bosom of her dress, and placed it in his hand. Jimmy stuffed it into his vest-pocket, threw off his coat, and pulled up his shirt-sleeves. With that act Ralph D. Spencer passed away and Jimmy Valentine took his place. A RETRIEVED REFORMATION 49 "Get away from the door, all of you," he commanded, shortly. He set his suit-case on the table, and opened it out flat. From that time on he seemed to be unconscious of the pres- ence of any one else. He laid out the shining, queer imple- ments swiftly and orderly, whistling softly to himself as he always did when at work. In a deep silence and immovable, the others watched him as if under a spell. In a minute Jimmy's pet drill was biting smoothly into the steel door. In ten minutes — breaking his own burglarious record — ^he threw back the bolts and opened the door. Agatha, almost collapsed, but safe, was gathered into her mother's arms. Jimmy Valentine put on his coat, and walked outside the railings toward the front door. As he went he thought he heard a far-away voice that he once knew call "Ralph!" But he never hesitated. At the door a big man stood somewhat in his way. "Hello, Ben!" said Jimmy, still with his strange smile. "Got around at last, have you.? Well, let's go. I don't know that it makes much difference, now." And then Ben Price acted rather strangely. "Guess you're mistaken, Mr. Spencer," he said. "Don't believe I recognize you. Your buggy's waiting for you, ain't it?" And Ben Price turned and strolled down the street. THE BRIEF DEBUT OF TILDY From The Four Million. First published in The World, March 27, 1904. Stories are commonly thought of as compounded of back- ground or setting, character or characters, plot or plan, these con- stituting the short story "rule of three." But in many writers the background or setting is mentioned at the beginning and then dismissed. Not so with O. Henry. His settings are no more initial than terminal. They are continuous. They condition the talk: they flavor the adjectives, they nominate the nouns, they move with the verbs. Try to retell this story, and see what has gone out of it. You have omitted an essential, the restaurant atmosphere. When O. Henry's stories are called mere anecdotes, the critic is im- peaching nothing more than his own retold and impoverished product. To omit background or setting or atmosphere — call it what you will in O. Henry's work — is to omit the integration of both plot and character. Is it any more discreditable to a short story that it may be cut up and then summarized fragmentarily in terms of an anecdote than it is to a New Testament parable that it may be similarly mutilated and distilled into a proverb.'^ This story and A Lickpenny Lover have been dubbed not stories but anecdotes. If you do not know Bogle's Chop House and Family Restaurant it is your loss. For if you are one of the fortunate ones who dine expensively you should be interested to know how the other half consumes provisions. And if you belong to the half to whom waiters' checks are things of moment, you should know Bogle's, for there you get your money's worth — in quantity, at least. Bogle's is situated in that highway of bourgeoisie, that boulevard of Brown-Jones-and-Robinson, Eighth Avenue. There are two rows of tables in the room, six in each row. On each table is a caster-stand, containing cruets of condiments and seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud 50 THE BRIEF DfiBUT OF TILDY 51 of something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic dust. From the salt cruet you may expect nothing. Though a man should extract a sanguinary stream from the pallid turnip, yet will his prowess be balked when he comes to wrest salt from Bogle's cruets. Also upon each table stands the counter- feit of that benign sauce made "from the recipe of a nobleman in India." At the cashier's desk sits Bogle, cold, sordid, slow, smouldering, and takes your money. Behind a mountain of toothpicks he makes your change, files your check, and ejects at you, like a toad, a word about the weather. Beyond a corroboration of his meteorological statement you would better not venture. You are not Bogle's friend; you are a fed, transient customer, and you and he may not meet again until the blowing of Gabriel's dinner horn. So take your change and go— to the devil if you like. There you, have Bogle's sentiments. The needs of Bogle's customers were supplied by two waitresses and a Voice. One of the waitresses was named Aileen. She was tall, beautiful, lively, gracious, and learned in persiflage. Her other name? There was no more neces- sity for another name at Bogle's than there was for finger- bowls. The name of the other waitress was Tildy. Why do you suggest Matilda? Please listen this time— Tildy— Tildy. Tildy was dumpy, plain-faced, and too anxious to please to please. Repeat the last clause to yourself once or twice, and make the acquaintance of the duplicate infinite. The Voice at Bogle's was invisible. It came from the kitchen, and did not shine in the way of originality. It was a heathen Voice, and contented itself with vain repetitions of exclamations emitted by the waitresses concerning food. Will it tire you to be told again that Aileen was beautiful? Had she donned a few hundred dollars' worth of clothes and joined the Easter parade, and had you seen her, you would have hastened to say so yourself. The customers at Bogle's were her slaves. Six tables full 52 STORIES FROM O. HENRY she could wait upon at once. They who were in a hurry restrained their impatience for the joy of merely gazing upon her swiftly moving, graceful figure. They who had finished eating ate more that they might continue in the light of her smiles. Every man there — and they were mostly men — tried to make his impression upon her. Aileen could successfully exchange repartee against a dozen at once. And every smile that she sent forth lodged, like pellets from a scatter-gun, in as many hearts. And all this while she would be performing astounding feats with orders of pork and beans, pot roasts, ham-and, sausage-and- the-wheats, and any quantity of things on the iron and in the pan and straight up and on the side. With all this feasting and flirting and merry exchange of wit Bogle's came mighty near being a salon, with Aileen for its Madame Recamier. If the transients were entranced by the fascinating Aileen, the regulars were her adorers. There was much rivalry among many of the steady customers. Aileen could have had an engagement every evening. At least twice a week some one took her to a theatre or to a dance. One stout gentleman whom she and Tildy had privately christened "The Hog" presented her with a turquoise ring. Another one known as "Freshy," who rode on the Traction Company's repair wagon, was going to give her a poodle as soon as his brother got the hauling contract in the Ninth. And the man who always ate spareribs and spinach and said he was a stock broker asked her to go to "Parsifal" with him. "I don't know where this place is," said Aileen while talk- ing it over with Tildy, "but the wedding-ring's got to be on before I put a stitch into a traveling dress — ain't that right .^^ Well, I guess!" But, Tildy! In steaming, chattering, cabbage-scented Bogle's there was almost a heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay- colored hair, the freckled skin, the bag-o'-meal figure, had never had an admirer. Not a man followed her with his eyes when she went to and fro in the restaurant save now and THE BRIEF DEBUT OF TILDY 53 then when they glared with the beast-hunger for food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish interchanges of wit. None of them loudly "jollied" her of mornings as they did Aileen, accusing her, when the eggs were slow in coming, of late hours in the company of envied swains. No one had ever given her a turquoise ring or invited her upon a voyage to mysterious, distant "Parsifal." Tildy was a good waitress, and the men tolerated her. They who sat at her tables spoke to her briefly with quo- tations from the bill of fare; and then raised their voices in honeyed and otherwise-flavored accents, eloquently addressed to the fair Aileen. They writhed in their chairs to gaze around and over the impending form of Tildy, that Aileen's pulchritude might season and make ambrosia of their bacon and eggs. And Tildy was content to be the unwooed drudge if Aileen could receive the flattery and the homage. The blunt nose was loyal to the short Grecian. She was Aileen's friend; and she was glad to see her rule hearts and wean the attention of men from smoking pot-pie and lemon meringue. But deep below our freckles and hay-colored hair the unhandsomest of us dream of a prince or a princess, not vicarious, but coming to us alone. There was a morning when Aileen tripped in to work with a slightly bruised eye; and Tildy 's solicitude was almost enough to heal any optic. "Fresh guy," explained Aileen, "last night as I was going home at Twenty-third and Sixth. Sashayed up, so he did, and made a break. I turned him down, cold, and he made a sneak; but followed me down to Eighteenth, and tried his hot air again. Gee! but I slapped him a good one, side of the face. Then he give me that eye. Does it look real awful, Til.'^ I should hate that Mr. Nicholson should see it when he comes in for his tea and toast at ten." Tildy listened to the adventure with breathless admiration. No man had ever tried to follow her. She was safe abroad at any hour of the twenty-four. What bliss it must have 54 STORIES FROM O. HENRY been to have had a man follow one and black one's eye for love! Among the customers at Bogle's was a young man named Seeders, who worked in a laundry office. Mr. Seeders was thin and had hght hair, and appeared to have been recently rough-dried and starched. He was too diffident to aspire to Aileen's notice; so he usually sat at one of Tildy's tables, where he devoted himself to silence and boiled weakfish. One day when Mr. Seeders came in to dinner he had been drinking beer. There were only two or three customers in the restaurant. TMien Mr. Seeders had finished his weakfish he got up, put his arm around Tildy's waist, kissed her loudly and impudently, walked out upon the street, snapped his fingers in the direction of the laundry, and hied himself to play pennies in the slot machines at the Amusement Arcade. For a few moments Tildy stood petrified. Then she was aware of Aileen shaking at her an arch fore-finger, and saying : "Why, Til, you naughty girl! Ain't you getting to be a-^^ful, Miss Slyboots ! First thing I know you'll be stealing some of my fellows. I must keep an eye on you, my lady." Another thing dawned upon Tildy's recovering wits. In a moment she had advanced from a hopeless, lowly admirer to be an Eve-sister of the potent Aileen. She herself was now a man-charmer, a mark for Cupid, a Sabine who must be coy when the Romans were at their banquet boards. Man had found her waist achievable and her lips desirable. The sud- den and amatory Seeders had, as it were, performed for her a miraculous piece of one-day laundry vvork. He had taken the sackcloth of her uncomeliness, had washed, dried, starched and ironed it, and returned it to her sheer em- broidered lawn — the robe of Venus herself. The freckles in Tildy's cheeks merged into a rosy flush. Now both Circe and Psyche peeped from her brightened eyes. Not even Aileen herself had been publicly embraced and kissed in the restaurant. Tildy could not keep the delightful secret. When trade was slack she went and stood at Bogle's desk. Her eyes THE BRIEF DEBUT OF TILDY 55 were shining; she tried not to let her words sound proud and boastful. "A gentleman insulted me to-day," she said. "He hugged me around the waist and kissed me." "That so.?" said Bogle, cracking open his business armor. "After this week you get a dollar a week more." At the next regular meal when Tildy set food before customers with whom she had acquaintance she said to each of them modestly, as one whose merit needed no bol- stering: "A gentleman insulted me to-day in the restaurant. He put his arm around my waist and kissed me." The diners accepted the revelation in various ways — some incredulously, some with congratulations; others turned upon her the stream of badinage that had hitherto been directed at Aileen alone. And Tildy's heart swelled in her bosom, for she saw at last the towers of Romance rise above the horizon of the gray plain in which she had for so long traveled. For two days Mr. Seeders came not again. During that time Tildy established herself firmly as a woman to be wooed. She bought ribbons, and arranged her hair like Aileen's, and tightened her waist two inches. She had a thrilling but delightful fear that Mr. Seeders would rush in suddenly and shoot her with a pistol. He must have loved her desperately; and impulsive lovers are always blindly jealous. Even Aileen had not been shot at with a pistol. And then Tildy rather hoped that he would not shoot at her, for she was always loyal to Aileen; and she did not want to over- shadow her friend. At 4 o'clock on the afternoon of the third day Mr. Seeders came in. There were no customers at the tables. At the back end of the restaurant Tildy was refilling the mustard pots and Aileen was quartering pies. Mr. Seeders walked back to where they stood. Tildy looked up and saw him, gasped, and pressed the mustard spoon against her heart. A red hair bow was in her 56 STORIES FROM O. HENRY hair; she wore Venus's Eighth Avenue badge, the blue bead necklace with the swinging silver symbolic heart. Mr. Seeders was flushed and embarrassed. He plunged one hand into his hip pocket and the other into a fresh pumpkin pie. "Miss Tildy," said he, "I want to apologize for what I done the other evenin'. Tell you the truth, I was pretty well tanked up or I wouldn't of done it. I wouldn't do no lady that a-way when I was sober. So I hope, Miss Tildy, you'll accept my 'pology, and believe that I wouldn't of done it if I'd known what I was doin' and hadn't of been drunk." With this handsome plea Mr. Seeders backed away, and departed, feeling that reparation had been made. But behind the convenient screen Tildy had thrown herself flat upon a table among the butter chips and the coffee cups, and was sobbing her heart out — out and back again to the gray plain wherein travel they with blunt noses and hay- colored hair. From her knot she had torn the red hair bow and cast it upon the floor. Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must forevermore remain the Sleeping Beauty. Yet not all was lost. Aileen's arm was around her; and Tildy 's red hand groped among the butter chips till it found the warm clasp of her friend's. "Don't you fret. Til," said Aileen, who did not understand entirely. "That turnip-faced little clothespin of a Seeders ain't worth it. He ain't anything of a gentleman or he wouldn't ever of apologized." A LICKPENNY LOVER From The Voice of the City. First published in The World, May 29, 1904. Few reviews of O. Henry fail to acclaim him as "The little shop-girl's knight unto the end." "The reforms that I attempted m behalf of the shop-girls of New York," said Colonel Roosevelt, "were suggested by the stories of O. Henry." The more notable of these stories in the order of their publication are: A Lick- penny Lover, An Unfinished Story, Elsie in New York, Brickdust Row, and The Trimmed Lamp. There is less reform purpose, however, in A Lickpenny Lover than m any of the others, but the art is consum- mate. Coney Island may so dominate the working girl's imagi- nation as to make her mistake the sham for the real, the imitation for the original, the sjTnbol for the thing symbolized — m some such thought the germ of the story is probably to be found. Masie's vocabulary had become narrowed, not in the number of words but in their connotation. All of us are Masies more or less when we read Saint John, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Browning. We understand the words but the reach and altitude of the ideas are bounded by the reach and altitude of our own experience. There were 3,000 girls in the Biggest Store. Masie was one of them. She was eighteen and a saleslady in the gents' gloves. Here she became versed in two varieties of human beings — the kind of gents who buy their gloves in department stores and the kind of women who buy gloves for unfortunate gents. Besides this wide knowledge of the human species, Masie had acquired other information. She had listened to the proniulgated wisdom of the 2,999 other girls and had stored it in a brain that was as secretive and wary as that of a Maltese cat. Perhaps nature, foreseeing that she would lack wise counsellors, had mingled the saving ingredient of shrewd- ness along with her beauty, as she has endowed the silver fox of the priceless fur above the other animals with cunning. 57 58 STORIES FROM O. HENRY For Masie was beautiful. She was a deep-tinted blonde, with the calm poise of a lady who cooks butter cakes in a window. She stood behind her counter in the Biggest Store; and as you closed your hand over the tape-line for your glove measure you thought of Hebe; and as you looked again you wondered how she had come by Minerva's eyes. When the floorwalker was not looking Masie chewed tutti frutti; when he was looking she gazed up as if at the clouds and smiled wistfully. That is the shop-girl smile, and I enjoin you to shun it unless you are well fortified with callosity of the heart, caramels, and a congeniality for the capers of Cupid. This smile belonged to Masie's recreation hours and not to the store; but the floor- walker must have his own. He is the Shylock of the stores. WTien he comes nosing around, the bridge of his nose is a toll- bridge. It is goo-goo eyes or "git" when he looks toward a pretty girl. Of course not all floorwalkers are thus. Only a few days ago the papers printed news of one over eighty years of age. One day Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, traveler, poet, automobilist, happened to enter the Biggest Store. It is due to him to add that his visit was not voluntary. Filial duty took him by the collar and dragged him inside, while his mother philandered among the bronze and terra-cotta statuettes. Carter strolled across to the glove counter in order to shoot a few minutes on the wing. His need for gloves was genuine; he had forgotten to bring a pair with him. But his action hardly calls for apology, because he had never heard of glove- counter flirtations. As he neared the vicinity of his fate he hesitated, suddenly conscious of this unknown phase of Cupid's less worthy profession. Three or four cheap fellows, sonorously garbed, were lean- ing over the counters, wrestling with the mediatorial hand- coverings, while giggling girls played vivacious seconds to their lead upon the strident string of coquetry. Carter would A LICKPENNY LOVER 59 have retreated, but he had gone too far. Masie confronted him behind her counter with a questioning look in eyes as coldly, beautifully, warmly blue as the glint of summer sun- shine on an iceberg drifting in Southern seas. And then Irving Carter, painter, millionaire, etc., felt a warm flush rise to his aristocratically pale face. But not from diffidence. The blush was intellectual in origin. He knew in a moment that he stood in the ranks of the ready- made youths who wooed the giggling girls at other counters. Himself leaned against the oaken trysting place of a cockney Cupid with a desire in his heart for the favor of a glove sales- girl. He was no more than Bill and Jack and Mickey. And then he felt a sudden tolerance for them, and an elating, courageous contempt for the conventions upon which he had fed, and an unhesitating determination to have this perfect creature for his own. When the gloves were paid for and wrapped Carter lingered for a moment. The dimples at the corners of Masie's dam- ask mouth deepened. All gentlemen w^ho bought gloves lin- gered in just that way. She curved an arm, showing like Psyche's through her shirt-waist sleeve, and rested an elbow upon the show-case edge. Carter had never before encountered a situation of which he had not been perfect master. But now he stood far more awkward than Bill or Jack or Mickey. He had no chance of meeting this beautiful girl socially. His mind struggled to recall the nature and habits of shop-girls as he had read or heard of them. Somehow he had received the idea that they sometimes did not insist too strictly upon the regular channels of introduction. His heart beat loudly at the thought of proposing an unconventional meeting with this lovely and virginal being. But the tumult in his heart gave him cour- age. After a few friendly and well-received remarks on general subjects, he laid his card by her hand on the counter. "Will you please pardon me," he said, "if I seem too bold; but I earnestly hope you will allow me the pleasure of seeing 60 STORIES FROM O. HENRY you again. There is my name; I assure you that it is with the greatest respect that I ask the favor of becoming one of your fr acquaintances. May I not hope for the privi- lege?" Masie knew men — especially men who buy gloves. With- out hesitation she looked him frankly and smilingly in the eyes, and said: "Sure. I guess you're all right. I don't usually go out with strange gentlemen, though. It ain't quite ladylike. When should you want to see me again .^" "As soon as I may," said Carter. "If you would allow me to call at your home, I " Masie laughed musically. "Oh, gee, no!" she said, em- phatically. " If you could see our flat once ! There's five of us in three rooms. I'd just like to see ma's face if I w^as to bring a gentleman friend there!" "Anywhere, then," said the enamored Carter, "that will be convenient to you." "Say," suggested Masie, with a bright-idea look in her peach-blow face; "I guess Thursday night will about suit me. Suppose you come to the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty- eighth Street at 7 :30. I hve right near the corner. But I've got to be back home by eleven. Ma never lets me stay out after eleven." Carter promised gratefully to keep the tryst, and then hastened to his mother, who was looking about for him to ratify her purchase of a bronze Diana. A salesgirl, with small eyes and an obtuse nose, strolled near Masie, with a friendly leer. "Did you make a hit with his nobs, Masie.^" she asked, familiarly. "The gentleman asked permission to call," answered Masie, with the grand air, as she slipped Carter's card into the bosom of her waist. "Permission to call!" echoed small eyes, with a snigger. "Did he say anything about dinner in the Waldorf and a spin in his auto afterward .f*" A LICKPENNY LOVER 61 ''*0h, cheese it!" said Masie, wearily. "You've been used to swell things, I don't think. You've had a swelled head ever since that hose-cart driver took you out to a chop suey joint. No, he never mentioned the Waldorf; but there's a Fifth Avenue address on his card, and if he buys the supper you can bet your life there won't be no pigtail on the waiter what takes the order." As Carter glided away from the Biggest Store with his mother in his electric runabout, he bit his lip with a dull pain at his heart. He knew that love had come to him for the first time in all the twenty-nine years of his life. And that the object of it should make so readily an appointment with him at a street corner, though it was a step toward his desires, tortured him with misgivings. Carter did not know the shop-girl. He did not know that her home is often either a scarcely habitable tiny room or a domicile filled to overflowing with kith and kin. The street- corner is her parlor; the park is her drawing-room; the avenue is her garden walk; yet for the most part she is as inviolate mistress of herself in them as is my lady inside her tapestried chamber. One evening at dusk, two weeks after their first meeting. Carter and Masie strolled arm-in-arm into a little, dimly-lit park. They found a bench, tree-shadowed and secluded, and sat there. For the first time his arm stole gently around her. Her golden-bronze head slid restfully against his shoulder. "Gee!" sighed Masie, thankfully. "Why didn't you ever think of that before.^" "Masie," said Carter, earnestly, "yo^ surely know that I love you. I ask you sincerely to marry me. You know me well enough by this time to have no doubts of me. I want you, and I must have you. I care nothing for the difference in our stations." "What is the difference.'^" asked Masie, curiously. "Well, there isn't any," said Carter, quickly, "except in the minds of foolish people. It is in my power to give you a 62 STORIES FROM O. HENRY life of luxury. My social position is beyond dispute, and my means are ample." "They all say that," remarked Masie. "It's the kid they aU give you. I suppose you really work in a delicatessen or follow the races. I ain't as green as I look." "I can furnish you aU the proofs you want," said Carter, gently. "And I want you, Masie. I loved you the first day I saw you." "They all do," said Masie, with an amused laugh, "to hear 'em talk. If I could meet a man that got stuck on me the third time he'd seen me I think I'd get mashed on him." "Please don't say such things," pleaded Carter. "Listen to me, dear. Ever since I first looked into your eyes you have been the only woman in the world for me." "Oh, ain't you the kidder!" smiled Masie. "How many other girls did you ever teU that-f^" But Carter persisted. And at length he reached the flimsy, fluttering little soul of the shop-girl that existed some- where deep down in her lovely bosom. His words penetrated the heart whose very lightness was its safest armor. She looked up at him with eyes that saw. And a warm glow visited her cool cheeks. Tremblingly, a^-fully, her moth w^ngs closed, and she seemed about to settle upon the flower of love. Some faint glimmer of life and its possibilities on the other side of her glove counter dawned upon her. Carter felt the change and crowded the opportunity. "Marry me, Masie," he whispered softly, "and we will go away from this ugly city to beautiful ones. We will forget work and business, and life will be one long holiday. I know where I should take you — I have been there often. Just think of a shore where summer is eternal, where the waves are always rippling on the lovely beach and the people are happy and free as children. We will sail to those shores and remain there as long as you please. In one of those far-away cities there are grand and lovely palaces and towers full of beautiful pictures and statues. The streets of the city are water^ and one travels about in " A LICKPENNY LOVER 63 "I know," said Masie, sitting up suddenly. "Gondolas." "Yes," smiled Carter. "I thought so," said Masie. "And then," continued Carter, "we will travel on and see whatever we wish in the world. After the European cities we will visit India and the ancient cities there, and ride on elephants and see the wonderful temples of the Hindoos and Brahmins and the Japanese gardens and the camel trains and chariot races in Persia, and all the queer sights of foreign countries. Don't you think you would like it, Masie.^^" Masie rose to her feet. "I think we had better be going home," she said, coolly. "It's getting late." Carter humored her. He had come to know her varying, thistle-down moods, and that it was useless to combat them. But he felt a certain happy triumph. He had held for a moment, though but by a silken thread, the soul of his wild Psyche, and hope was stronger within him. Once she had folded her wings and her cool hand had closed about his o^\ti. At the Biggest Store the next day Masie's chum, Lulu, way- laid her in an angle of the counter. "How are you and your swell friend making it?" she asked. "Oh, him?" said Masie, patting her side curls. "He ain't in it any more. Say, Lu, what do you think that fellow wanted me to do?" "Go on the stage?" guessed Lulu, breathlessly. "Nit; he's too cheap a guy for that. He wanted me to marry him and go down to Coney Island for a wedding tour ! " THE PENDULUM From The Trimmed Lamp. First published in The World, June 12, 1904. Habit, especially the alternation of resolve and relapse, furnished O. Henry with rich story material. He first approached the theme in The Passing of Black Eagle (March, 1902), which was quickly followed by Round the Circle (see Waifs and Strays, pages 17-24), the latter being little more than a first draft of The Pendu- lum. Then followed A Comedy in Rubber, From the Cabby's Seat, The Girl and the Habit, and The Harbinger (March 18, 1906). His text in The Girl and the Habit is from the dictionary: "Habit — a tendency or aptitude acquired by custom or frequent repetition." In The Harbinger he hails habit as "the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces, though there is some silly theory of gravi- tation." "Habit," says William James in his great chapter on the subject, "is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance." Read also Maupassant's stoiy called An Artist and Armistead Churchill Gordon's Baytop (in Omviirandy, Scribners, 1917). The latter is a happy illustration of Professor James's re- mark about habit in animals: "Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a battle, have been seen to come together and go through their custom- ary evolutions at the sound of the bugle-call." "Eighty-First Street — let 'em out, please," yelled the shepherd in blue. A flock of citizen sheep scrambled out and another flock scrambled aboard. Ding-ding! The cattle cars of the Manhattan Elevated rattled away, and John Perkins drifted down the stairway of the station with the released flock. John walked slowly toward his flat. Slowly, because in the lexicon of his daily life there was no such word as "per- haps." There are no surprises awaiting a man who has been married two years and lives in a flat. As he walked John 64 THE PENDULUM 65 Per'kins prophesied to himself with gloomy and downtrodden cynicism the foregone conclusions of the monotonous day. Katy would meet him at the door with a kiss flavored with cold cream and butter-scotch. He would remove his coat, sit upon a macadamized lounge, and read, in the evening paper, of Russians and Japs slaughtered by the deadly lino- type. For dinner there would be pot roast, a salad flavored with a dressing warranted not to crack or injure the leather, stewed rhubarb, and the bottle of strawberry marmalade blushing at the certificate of chemical purity on its label. After dinner Katy would show him the new patch in her crazy quilt that the iceman had cut for her off the end of his four-in- hand. At half -past seven they would spread newspapers over the furniture to catch the pieces of plastering that fell when the fat man in the flat overhead began to take his physical culture exercises. Exactly at eight Hickey & Moo- ney, of the vaudeville team (unbooked) in the flat across the hall, would yield to the gentle influence of delirium tremens and begin to overturn chairs under the delusion that Hammerstein was pursuing them with a five-hundred-dollar- a-week contract. Then the gent at the window across the air-shaft would get out his flute; the nightly gas leak would steal forth to frolic in the highways; the dumbwaiter would slip off its trolley; the janitor would drive Mrs. Zanowitski's five children once more across the Yalu; the lady with the champagne shoes and the Skye terrier would trip downstairs and paste her Thursday name over her bell and letter-box — and the evening routme of the Frogmore flats would be under way. John Perkins knew these things would happen. And he knew that at a quarter past eight he would summon his nerve and reach for his hat, and that his wife would deliver this speech in a querulous tone: "Now, where are you going, I'd like to know, John Per- kins?" "Thought I'd drop up to McCloskey's," he would answer, "and play a game or two of pool with the fellows." 66 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Of late such had been John Perkins's habit. At ten or eleven he would return. Sometimes Katy would be asleep; sometimes waiting up, ready to melt in the crucible of her ire a little more gold plating from the \^Tought steel chains of matrimony. For these things Cupid will have to answer when he stands at the bar of justice with his victims from the Frogmore flats. To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door. No Katy was there with her affectionate, confectionate kiss. The three rooms seemed in portentous disorder. All about lay her things in confusion. Shoes in the middle of the floor, curling tongs, hair bows, kimonos, powder box, jumbled together on dresser and chairs — this was not Xaty's way. With a sinking heart John saw the comb with a curling cloud of her brown hair among its teeth. Some unusual hurry and perturbation must have possessed her, for she always care- fully placed these combings in the little blue vase on the mantel to be some day formed into the coveted feminine "rat." Hanging conspicuously to the gas jet by a string was a folded paper. John seized it. It was a note from his wife running thus: ''Dear John: I just had a telegram saying mother is very sick, I am going to take the 4-30 train. Brother Sam is going to meet me at the depot there. There is cold mutton in the ice box. I hope it isn't her quinzy again. Pay the milkman 50 cents. She had it bad last spring. DonH forget to write to the company about the gas meter, and your good socks are in the top drawer. I will write to-morrow. Hastily, katy:' Never during their two years of matrimony had he and Katy been separated for a night. John read the note over and over in a dumbfounded way. Here was a break in a routine that had never varied, and it left him dazed. THE PENDULUM 67 There on the back of a chair hung, pathetically empty and formless, the red wrapper with black dots that she always wore while getting the meals. Her week-day clothes had been tossed here and there in her haste. A little paper bag of her favorite butter-scotch lay with its string yet unwound. A daily paper sprawled on the floor, gaping rectangularly where a railroad time-table had been clipped from it. Every- thing in the room spoke of a loss, of an essence gone, of its soul and life departed. John Perkins stood among the dead re- mains with a queer feeling of desolation in his heart. He began to set the rooms tidy as well as he could. When he touched her clothes a thrill of something like terror went through him. He had never thought what existence would be without Katy. She had become so thoroughly annealed into his life that she was like the air he breathed — necessary but scarcely noticed. Now, without warning, she was gone, vanished, as completely absent as if she had never existed. Of course it would be only for a few days, or at most a week or two, but it seemed to him as if the very hand of death had pointed a finger at his secure and uneventful home. John dragged the cold mutton from the ice-box, made coffee, and sat down to a lonely meal face to face with the strawberry marmalade's shameless certificate of purity. Bright among withdrawn blessings now appeared to him the ghosts of pot roasts and the salad with tan polish dressing. His home was dismantled. A quinzied mother-in-law had knocked his lares and penates sky-high. After his solitary meal John sat at a front window. He did not care to smoke. Outside the city roared to him to come join in its dance of folly and pleasure. The night was his. He might go forth unquestioned and thrum the strings of jollity as free as any gay bachelor there. He might carouse and wander and have his fling until dawn if he liked; and there would be no wrathful Katy waiting for him, bearing the chalice that held the dregs of his joy. He might play pool at McCloskey's with his roistering friends until Aurora dimmed the electric bulbs if he chose. The hymeneal strings 68 STORIES FROM O. HENRY that had curbed him always when the Frogmore flats had palled upon him were loosened. Katy was gone. John Perkins was not accustomed to analyzing his emotions. But as he sat in his Katy-bereft 10x12 parlor he hit unerringly upon the keynote of his discomfort. He knew now that Katy was necessary to his happiness. His feeling for her, lulled into unconsciousness by the dull round of domesticity, had been sharply stirred by the loss of her presence. Has it not been dinned into us by proverb and sermon and fable that we never prize the music till the sweet- voiced bird has flown — or in other no less florid and true utterances? *'I'm a double-dyed dub," mused John Perkins, "the way I've been treating Katy. Off every night playing pool and bumming with the boys instead of staying home with her. The poor girl here all alone with nothing to amuse her, and me acting that way ! John Perkins, you're the worst kind of a shine. I'm going to make it up for the little girl. I'll take her out and let her see some amusement. And I'll cut out the McCloskey gang right from this minute." Yes, there was the city roaring outside for John Perkins to come dance in the train of Momus. And at McCloskey 's the boys were knocking the balls idly into the pockets against the hour for the nightly game. But no primrose w^ay nor clicking cue could woo the remorseful soul of Perkins the bereft. The thing that was his, lightly held and half scorned, had been taken away from him, and he wanted it. Backward to a certain man named Adam, whom the cherubim bounced from the orchard, could Perkins, the remors/eful, trace his descent. Near the right hand of John Perkins stood a chair. On the back of it stood Katy's blue shirtwaist. It still retained something of her contour. Midway of the sleeves were fine, individual wrinkles made by the movements of her arms in working for his comfort and pleasure. A delicate but im- pelling odor of blue-bells came from it. John took it and looked long and soberly at the unresponsive grenadine THE PENDULUM 69 Katy had never been unresponsive. Tears: — yes, tears — came into John Perkins's eyes. When she came back things would be different. He would make up for all his neglect. What was life without her? The door opened. Katy walked in carrying a little hand satchel. John stared at her stupidly. "My! I'm glad to get back," said Katy. "Ma wasn't sick to amount to anything. Sam was at the depot, and said she just had a little spell, and got all right soon after they telegraphed. So I took the next train back. I'm just dying for a cup of coffee." Nobody heard the click and rattle of the cog-wheels as the third-floor front of the Frogmore flats buzzed its machinery back into the Order of Things. A band slipped, a spring was touched, the gear was adjusted, and the wheels revolved in their old orbit. John Perkins looked at the clock. It was 8.15. He reached for his hat and walked to the door. "Now, where are you going, I'd like to know, John Per^ kins?" asked Katy, in a querulous tone. "Thought I'd drop up to McCloskey's," said John, "and play a game or two of pool with the fellows." TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA From The Voice of the City. First published in The World, July 17, 1904. "There was a certain Caliph of Bagdad," says O. Henry in The Caliph and the Cad, written a few months before Transients in Arcadia, "who was accustomed to go dowTi among the poor and lowly for the solace obtained from the relation of their tales and histories. Is it not strange that the humble and poverty-stricken have not availed themselves of the pleasure they might glean by donning diamonds and silks and playing Caliph among the haunts of the upper world ^ There was one who saw the possibilities of thus turning the tables on Haroun al Raschid. His name was Corny Brannigan. " No, his name was O. Henry. He not only turned the tables on Haroun al Raschid but illustrated a new phase of psy- chology and colonized a new area for the short story. There is a hotel on Broadway that has escaped discovery by the summer-resort promoters. It is deep and wide and cool. Its rooms are finished in dark oak of a low temperature. Home-made breezes and deep-green shrubbery give it the delights without the inconveniences of the Adirondacks. One can mount its broad staircases or glide dreamily upward in its aerial elevators, attended by guides in brass buttons, with a serene joy that Alpine climbers have never attained. T^ere is a chef in its kitchen who will prepare for you brook trout better than the White Mountains ever served, sea food that would turn Old Point Comfort— "by Gad, sah!"— green with envy, and Maine venison that would melt the oflScial heart of a game warden. A few have found out this oasis in the July desert of Manhattan. During that month you will see the hotel's reduced array of guests scattered luxuriously about in the cool twilight of its lofty dining-room, gazing at one another 70 TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA 71 across the snowy waste of unoccupied tables, silently con- gratulatory. Superfluous, watchful, pneumatically moving waiters hover near, supplying every want before it is expressed. The temperature is perpetual April. The ceiling is painted in water colors to counterfeit a summer sky across which delicate clouds drift and do not vanish as those of nature do to our regret. The pleasing, distant roar of Broadway is transformed in the imagination of the happy guests to the noise of a waterfall filhng the woods with its restful sound. At every strange footstep the guests turn an anxious car, fearful lest their retreat be discovered and invaded by the restless pleasure- seekers who are forever hounding nature to her deepest lairs. Thus in the depopulated caravansary the little band of connoisseurs jealously hide themselves during the heated season, enjoying to the uttermost the delights of mountain and seashore that art and skill have gathered and served to them. In this July came to the hotel one whose card that she sent to the clerk for her name to be registered read "Mme. Heloise D'Arcy Beaumont." Madame Beaumont was a guest such as the Hotel Lotus loved. She possessed the fine air of the elite, tempered and sweetened by a cordial graciousness that made the hotel employes her slaves. Bell-boys fought for the honor of answering her ring; the clerks, but for the question of owner- ship, would have deeded to her the hotel and its contents; the other guests regarded her as the final touch of feminine exclusiveness and beauty that rendered the entourage per- fect. This super-excellent guest rarely left the hotel. Her habits were consonant with the customs of the discriminating patrons of the Hotel Lotus. To enjoy that delectable hostelry one must forego the city as though it were leagues away. By night a brief excursion to the nearby roofs is in order; but during the torrid day one remains in the um- 72 STORIES FROM O. HENRY brageous fastnesses of the Lotus as a trout hangs poised in the pellucid sanctuaries of his favorite pool. Though alone in the Hotel Lotus, Madame Beaumont preserved the state of a queen whose loneliness was of position only. She breakfasted at ten, a cool, sweet, leisurely, deli- cate being who glowed softly in the dimness like a jasmine flower in the dusk. But at dinner was Madame 's glory at its height. She wore a gown as beautiful and immaterial as the mist from an un- seen cataract in a mountain gorge. The nomenclature of this gown is beyond the guess of the scribe. Always pale-red roses reposed against its lace-garnished front. It was a gown that the head-waiter viewed with respect and met at the door. You thought of Paris when you saw it, and maybe of mysterious countesses, and certainly of Versailles and rapiers and IMrs. Fiske and rouge-et-noir. There was an untraceable rumor in the Hotel Lotus that Madame was s cosmopolite, and that she was pulling with her slender white hands certain strings between the nations in the favor of Russia. Being a citizeness of the world's smoothest roads it was small wonder that she was quick to recognize in the refined purlieus of the Hotel Lotus the most desirable spot in America for a restful sojourn during the heat of mid-summer. On the third day of Madame Beaumont's residence in the hotel a young man entered and registered himself as a guest. His clothing — to speak of his points in approved order — was quietly in the mode; his features good and regular; his ex- pression that of a poised and sophisticated man of the world. He informed the clerk that he would remain three or four days, inquired concerning the sailing of European steamships, and sank into the blissful inanition of the nonpareil hotel with the contented air of a traveler in his favorite inn. The young man — not to question the veracity of the regis- ter — was Harold Farrington. He drifted into the exclusive and calm current of life in the Lotus so tactfully and silently that not a ripple alarmed his fellow-seekers after rest. He ate in the Lotus and of its patronym, and was lulled into bliss- TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA 73 ful peace with the other fortunate mariners. In one day he acquired his table and his waiter and the fear lest the panting chasers after repose that kept Broadway warm should pounce upon and destroy this contiguous but covert haven. After dinner on the next day after the arrival of Harold Farrington Madame Beaumont dropped her handkerchief in passing out. Mr. Farrington recovered and returned it with- out the effusiveness of a seeker after acquaintance. Perhaps there was a mystic freemasonry between the dis- criminating guests of the Lotus. Perhaps they were drawn one to another by the fact of their common good fortune in discovering the acme of summer resorts in a Broadway hotel. Words delicate in courtesy and tentative in departure from formality passed between the two. And, as if in the ex- pedient atmosphere of a real summer resort, an acquaintance grew, flowered, and fructified on the spot as does the mystic plant of the conjuror. For a few moments they stood on a balcony upon which the corridor ended, and tossed the feathery ball of conversation. "One tires of the old resorts," said Madame Beaumont, with a faint but sweet smile. "What is the use to fly to the mountains or the seashore to escape noise and dust when the very people that make both follow us there?" "Even on the ocean," remarked Farrington, sadly, "the Philistines be upon you. The most exclusive steamers are getting to be scarcely more than ferry boats. Heaven help us when the summer resorter discovers that the Lotus is further away from Broadway than Thousand Islands or Mackinac." "I hope our secret will be safe for a week, anyhow," said Madame, with a sigh and a smile. "I do not know where I would go if they should descend upon the dear Lotus. I know of but one place so delightful in summer, and that is the castle of Count Polinski, in the Ural Mountains." "I hear that Baden-Baden and Cannes are almost deserted this season," said Farrington. "Year by year the old resorts fall in disrepute. Perhaps many others, like ourselves, are 74 STORIES FROM O. HENRY seeking out the quiet nooks that are overlooked by the majority." "I promise myself three days more of this delicious rest," said Madame Beaumont. "On Monday the Cedric sails." Harold Farrington's eyes proclaimed his regret. "I too must leave on Monday," he said, *'but I do not go abroad." Madame Beaumont shrugged one round shoulder in a foreign gesture. ''One cannot hide here forever, charming though it may be. The chateau has been in preparation for me longer than a month. Those house parties that one must give — ^rv^hat a nuisance! But I shall never forget my week in the Hotel Lotus." "Nor shall I," said Farrington in a low voice, "and I shall neyer forgive the Cedric.'' On Sunday evening, three days afterward, the two sat at a little table on the same balcony. A discreet waiter brought ices and small glasses of claret cup. Madame Beaumont wore the same beautiful evening gown that she had worn each day at dinner. She seemed thought- ful. Near her hand on the table lay a small chatelaine purse. After she had eaten her ice she opened the purse and took out a one-dollar bill. "Mr. Farrington," she said, with the smile that had won the Hotel Lotus, "I want to tell you something. I'm going to leave before breakfast in the morning, because I've got to go back to my work. I'm behind the hosiery counter at Casey's Mammoth Store, and my vacation's up at eight ^'clock to-morrow. That paper dollar is the last cent I'll see till I draw my eight dollars salary next Saturday night. You're a real gentleman, and you've been good to me, and I wanted to tell you before I went. "I've been saving up out of my wages for a year just for this vacation. I wanted to spend one week like a lady if I never do another one. I wanted to get up when I please instead of having to crawl out at seven every morning; and TRANSIENTS IN ARCADIA 75 I wanted to live on the best and be waited on and ring beUs for things just hke rich folks do. Now I've done it, and I've had the happiest time I ever expect to have in my life. I'm going back to my work and my little hall bedroom satisfied for another year. I wanted to tell you about it, Mr. Farring- ton, because I — I thought you kind of liked me, and I — I liked you. But, oh, I couldn't help deceiving you up till now, for it was all just like a fairy tale to me. So I talked about Europe and the things I've read about in other coun- tries, and made you think I was a great lady. "This dress I've got on — it's the only one I have that's fit to wear — I bought from O'Dowd & Levinsky on the instal- ment plan. "Seventy-five dollars is the price, and it was made to measure. I paid $10 down, and they're to collect $1 a week till it's paid for. That'll be about all I have to say, Mr. Farrington, except that my name is Mamie Siviter instead of Madame Beaumont, and I thank you for your attentions. This dollar will pay the instalment due on the dress to- morrow. I guess I'll go up to my room now." Harold Farrington listened to the recital of the Lotus's loveliest guest with an impassive countenance. WTien she had concluded he drew a small book like a checkbook from his coat pocket. He wrote upon a blank form in this with a stub of pencil, tore out the leaf, tossed it over to his com- panion and took up the paper dollar. "I've got to go to work, too, in the morning," he said, "and I might as well begin now. There's a receipt for the dollar instalment. I've been a collector for O'Dowd & Levinsky for three years. Funny, ain't it, that you and me both had the same idea about spending our vacation? I've always wanted to put up at a swell hotel, and I saved up out of my twenty per, and did it. Say, Mame, how about a trip to Coney Saturday night on the boat — what?" The face of the pseudo Madame Heloise D'Arcy Beaumont beamed. "Oh, you bet I'll go, Mr. Farrington. The store closes at 76 STORIES FROM O. HENRY twelve on Saturdays. I guess Coney '11 be all right even if we did spend a week with the swells." Below the balcony the sweltering city growled and buzzed in the July night. Inside the Hotel Lotus the tempered, cool shadows reigned, and the solicitous waiter single-footed near the low windows, ready at a nod to serve Madame and her escort. At the door of the elevator Farrington took his leave, and Madame Beaumont made her last ascent. But before they reached the noiseless cage he said: "Just forget that 'Harold Farrington,* will you? — McManus is the name — James Mc- Manus. Some call me Jimmy." "Good-night, Jimmy," said Madame, THE ROADS WE TAKE From Whirligigs. First published in The Worlds August 7, 1904. Tidball's summary (page 80), a Western version of, *'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars. But in ourselves, that we are underlings," is a direct denial of the fatalism found in Roads of Destiny (page 16). When Channing Pollock's melodrama, called also Roads of Destiny and suggested by O. Henry's story, was put upon the stage in New York, November 27, 1918, it was explained that the original stark fatalism of O. Henry's story had been tempered with more modern and Western thought: *'Fate, inexorable as it is, is in some measure, at least, the result of character. The power which decrees our ends is within ourselves — the things we think and are." This is precisely O. Henry's doctrme in The Roads We Take. There is a striking adumbration of this story in a passage from Colonel Roosevelt's Winning of the West, volume I, chapter 5. He is speaking of the backwoodsmen of the AUeghanies: "All qualities, good and bad, are intensified and accentuated in the life of the wilderness. The man who in civilization is merely sullen and bad-tempered becomes a murderous, treacherous ruffian when transplanted to the wilds; while, on the other hand, his cheery, quiet neighbor develops into a hero, ready uncomplainingly to lay down his life for his friend. One who in an eastern city is merely a backbiter and slanderer, in the western woods lies in wait for his foe with a rifle; sharp practice in the East becomes highway robbery in the West." Note in the next to the last paragraph of the story the same illuminating use of repetition that formed a characteristic of Roads of Destiny. Twenty miles west of Tucson the "Sunset Express" stopped at a tank to take on water. Besides the aqueous addition the engine of that famous flyer acquired some other things that were not good for it. 77 78 STORIES FROM O. HENRY While the fireman was lowering the feeding hose, Bob Tidball, "Shark" Dodson, and a quarter-bred Creek Indian called John Big Dog climbed on the engine and showed the engineer three round orifices in pieces of ordnance that they carried. These orifices so impressed the engineer with their possibilities that he raised both hands in a gesture such as accompanies the ejaculation "Do tell!" At the crisp command of Shark Dodson, who was leader of the attacking force, the engineer descended to the ground and uncoupled the engine and tender. Then John Big Dog, perched upon the coal, sportively held two guns upon the engine driver and the fireman, and suggested that they run the engine fifty yards away and there await further orders. Shark Dodson and Bob Tidball, scorning to put such low- grade ore as the passengers through the mill, struck out for the rich pocket of the express car. They found the messenger serene in the belief that the "Sunset Express" was taking on nothing more stimulating and dangerous than aqua pura. While Bob was knocking this idea out of his head with the butt-end of his six-shooter Shark Dodson was already dosing the express-car safe with dynamite. The safe exploded to the tune of $30,000, all gold and currency. The passengers thrust their heads casually out of the windows to look for the thunder-cloud. The conductor jerked at the bell-rope, which sagged down loose and un- resisting, at his tug. Shark Dodson and Bob Tidball, with their booty in a stout canvas bag, tumbled out of the express car and ran awkwardly in their high-heeled boots to the engine. The engineer, sullenly angry but wise, ran the engine, according to orders, rapidly away from the inert train. But before this was accomplished the express messenger, re- covered from Bob Tidball's persuader to neutrality, jumped out of his car with a Winchester rifle and took a trick in the game. IVir. John Big Dog, sitting on the coal tender, un- wittingly made a wrong lead by giving an imitation of a tar- get, and the messenger trumped him. With a ball exactly THE ROADS WE TAKE 79 between his shoulder blades the Creek chevalier of industry- rolled off to the ground, thus increasing the share of his com- rades in the loot by one sixth each. Two miles from the tank the engineer was ordered to stop. The robbers waved a defiant adieu and plunged down the steep slope into the thick woods that lined the track. Five minutes of crashing through a thicket of chaparral brought them to open woods, where three horses were tied to low- hanging branches. One was waiting for John Big Dog, who would never ride by night or day again. This animal the robbers divested of saddle and bridle and set free. They mounted the other two with the bag across one pommel, and rode fast and with discretion through the forest and up a primeval, lonely gorge. Here the animal that bore Bob Tidball sUpped on a mossy boulder and broke a foreleg. They shot him through the head at once and sat down to hold a council of flight. Made secure for the present by the tortuous trail they had traveled, the question of time was no longer so big. Many miles and hours lay between them and the spryest posse that could follow. Shark Dodson's horse, with trailing rope and dropped bridle, panted and cropped thankfully of the grass along the stream in the gorge. Bob Tidball opened the sack, drew out double handfuls of the neat packages of currency and the one sack of gold, and chuclded with the glee of a child. "Say, you old double-decked pirate," he called joyfully to Dodson, "you said we could do it— you got a head for financing that knocks the horns off of anything in Arizona." "What are we going to do about a hoss for you, Bob? We ain't got long to wait here. They'll be on our trail before daylight in the mornin'." "Oh, I guess that cayuse of yourn'U carry double for a while," answered the sanguine Bob. "We'll annex the first animal we come across. By jingoes, we made a haul, didn't we? Accordin' to the marks on this money there's $30,000 — $15,000 apiece!" "It's short of what I expected," said Shark Dodson. kick- 80 STORIES FROM O. HENRY ing softly at the packages with the toe of his boot. And then he looked pensively at the wet sides of his tired horse. '*01d Bolivar's mighty nigh played out," he said, slowly. *'I wish that sorrel of yours hadn't got hurt." "So do I," said Bob, heartily, "but it can't be helped. Bolivar's got plenty of bottom — he'll get us both far enough to get fresh mounts. Dang it, Shark, I can't help thinkin' how funny it is that an Easterner like you can come out here and give us Western fellows cards and spades in the desperado business. What part of the East was you from, anyway.?" New York State," said Shark Dodson, sitting down on a boulder and chewing a twig. "I was born on a farm in Ulster County. I ran aw^ay from home when I was seven- teen. It was an accident my comin' West. I was walkin' along the road with my clothes in a bundle, makin' for New York City. I had an idea of goin' there and makin' lots of money. I always felt like I could do it. I came to a place one evenin' where the road forked and I didn't know which fork to take. I studied about it for half an hour, and then I took the left-hand. That night I run into the camp of a Wild West show that was travelin' among the little towns, and I went West with it. I've often wondered if I wouldn't have turned out different if I'd took the other road." "Oh, I reckon you'd have ended up about the same," said Bob Tidball, cheerfully philosophical. "It ain't the roads we take; it's what's inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do." Shark Dodson got up and leaned against a tree. "I'd a good deal rather that sorrel of yourn hadn't hurt himself, Bob," he said again, almost pathetically. "Same here," agreed Bob; "he was sure a first-rate kind of a crowbait. But Bolivar, he'll pull us through all right. Reckon we'd better be movin' on, hadn't we. Shark.? I'll bag this boodle ag'in and we'll hit the trail for higher timber." Bob Tidball replaced the spoil in the bag and tied the THE ROADS WE TAKE 81 mouth of it tightly with a cord. When he looked up the most prominent object that he saw was the muzzle of Shark Dodson's .45 held upon him without a waver. "Stop your funnin'," said Bob, with a grin. "We got to be hittin' the breeze." "Set still," said Shark. "You ain't goin' to hit no breeze, Bob. I hate to tell you, but there ain't any chance for but one of us. BoUvar, he's plenty tired, and he can't carry double." "We been pards, me and you. Shark Dodson, for three year," Bob said quietly. "We've risked our lives together time and again. I've always give you a square deal, and I thought you was a man, I've heard some queer stories about you shootin' one or two men in a peculiar way, but I never believed 'em. Now if you're just havin' a little fun with me, Shark, put your gun up, and we'll get on Bolivar and vamose. If you mean to shoot— shoot, you blackhearted son of a tarantula!" Shark Dodson's face bore a deeply sorrowful look. "You don't know how bad I feel," he sighed, "about that sorrel of yourn breakin' his leg, Bob." The expression on Dodson's face changed in an instant to one of cold ferocity mingled with inexorable cupidity. The soul of the man showed itself for a moment like an evil face in the window of a reputable house. Truly Bob Tidball was never to "hit the breeze" again. The deadly .45 of the false friend cracked and filled the gorge with a roar that the walls hurled back with indignant echoes. And Bolivar, unconscious accomplice, swiftly bore away the last of the holders-up of the "Sunset Express," not put to the stress of "carrying double." But as Shark Dodson galloped away the woods seemed to fade from his view; the revolver in his right hand turned to the curved arm of a mahogany chair; his saddle was strangely upholstered, and he opened his eyes and saw his feet, not in stirrups, but resting quietly on the edge of a quartered-oak desk. 82 STORIES FROM O. HENRY I am telling you that Dodson, of the firm of Dodson & Decker, Wall Street brokers, opened his eyes. Peabody, the confidential clerk, was standing by his chair, hesitating to speak. There was a confused hum of wheels below, and the sedative buzz of an electric fan. "Ahem! Peabody," said Dodson, blinking. "I must have fallen asleep. I had a most remarkable dream. What is it, Peabody?" "Mr. WilHams, sir, of Tracy & Williams, is outside. He has come to settle his deal in X. Y. Z. The market caught him short, sir, if you remember." "Yes, I remember. What is X. Y. Z. quoted at to-day, Peabody.?" "One eighty-five, sir." "Then that's his price." "Excuse me," said Peabody, rather nervously, "for speak- ing of it, but I've been talking to Williams. He's an old friend of yours, Mr. Dodson, and you practically have a corner in X. Y. Z. I thought you might — that is, I thought you might not remember that he sold you the stock at 98. If he settles at the market price it will take every cent he has in the world and his home too to deliver the shares." The expression on Dodson's face changed in an instant to one of cold ferocity mingled with inexorable cupidity. The soul of the man show^ed itself for a moment like an evil face in the window of a reputable house. "He will settle at one eighty-five," said Dodson. " Bolivaj cannot carry double." THE FURNISHED ROOM From The Four Million. First published in The World, August 14, 1904. To my mind this is O. Henry's greatest story, though, being without humor, it can hardly be called his most characteris- tic story. In unity, convergence of parts, purity of style, structural craftsmanship, saturation with the main idea, it stands alone. It is Poe in all his "totality of effect," Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables, Shakespeare when he set the weird sisters upon the heath to croak the curtained doom of Macbeth. Saintsbury in The English Novel, page 122, says of Smollett's Sir Launcelot Greaves; *T have always thought that the opening passage more than entitles the book to an honorable place in the history of English fiction. I do not know where to look, before it, for such an interior — such a com- plete Dutch picture of room and furniture and accessories gen- erally." Against Smollett's picture I should pit confidently O. Henry's paragraph beginning, "One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, " etc. Indeed this room, this inte- rior, is one of the characters in the story, as is Dulcie's room in An Unfinished Story. Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever — transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing "Home, Sweet Home" in ragtime; they carry their lares et senates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree. Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests. One evening after dark a young man prowled among these 83 84 STORIES FROM O. HENRY crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hat-band and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths. To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an un- wholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers. He asked if there was a room to let. "Come in," said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. "I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it.?^" The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the stair-case and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below. "This is the room," said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. "It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer — no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The w^ater's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls — you may have heard of her — Oh, that was just the stage names — right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long." THE FURNISHED ROOM 85 "Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?" asked the young man. "They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes." He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the house- keeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue. "A young girl — Miss Vashner — Miss Eloise Vashner — do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish, gold hau* and a dark mole near her left eyebrow." "No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as then- rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't call that one to mind." No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the mevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools, and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great, water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and slime. The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophisti- cal comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furni- ture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from 86 STORIES FROM O. HENRY one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner. The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry. A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered rectangu- lar, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house — The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Break- fast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery dra^Ti rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port — a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck. One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the httle signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. The tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name "Marie." It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury — perhaps tempted be- yond forebearance by its garish coldness — and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a sepa- rate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this THE FURNISHED ROOM 87 malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resent- ful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish. The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crymg dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared inter- mittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house— a dank savor rather than a smell— a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork. Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odor of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud: *'What, dear?" as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odor clung to him and wrapped him around. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odor? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him? "She has been in this room," he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This envelopmg scent of mignonette, the odor that she had loved and made her own — ^whence came it? The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins — those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankmd, feminine of gender, infinite of mood, and uncommunicative of 88 STORIES FROM O. HENRY tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd but- tons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman's black satin hair bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair bow also is femininity's demure, impersonal, common orna- ment and tells no tales. And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognizant of the call. Once again he answered loudly: "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and color and love and outstretched arms in the odor of mignonette. Oh, God, whence that odor, and since when have odors had a voice to call.^^ Thus he groped. He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half -smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic ten- ant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace. And then he thought of the housekeeper. He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a dooi that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could. THE FURNISHED ROOM 89 "Will you tell me, madam," he besought her, "who oc- cupied the room I have before I came?" "Yes, sir. I can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over " "What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls — in looks, I mean?" "WTiy, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday." "And before they occupied it?" "Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember." He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The per- fume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odor of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in stor- age. The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again, and laid himself gratefully upon the bed. It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those sub- terranean retreats where house-keepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom. "I rented out my third floor, back, this evening," said Mrs. 90 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. *'A young man took it He went up to bed two hours ago.'* *'Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am.^" said Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration. "You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then.?" she con- cluded in a husky whisper laden with mystery. "Rooms," said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, "are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool." " 'Tis right ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma'am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin' in the bed of it." "As you say, we has our living to be making," remarked Mrs. Purdy. "Yis, ma'am; 'tis true. 'Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin' herself wid the gas — a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am." "She'd a-been called handsome, as you say," said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, "but for that mole she had a- growin' by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool." MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN From Sixes and Sevens. First published in The World, September 25, 1904. Drugs and drug-store experiences enter into many of O. Henry's stories. As a boy he was a drug clerk in Greensboro, North Carolina, and later in Austin, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio. At a crisis in his career he owed freedom and probably life itself to his having been a registered pharmacist in his native town: see 0. Henry Biography, pages 147-148. It should be remembered, too, that O. Henry found his now famous pen-name in the United States Dispensatory, the daily companion of every American drug clerk. O. Henry is the abbreviated name, just as it appears in the Dis- pensatory, of the celebrated French pharmacist, Etienne-Ossian Henry: see The Nation, New York, May 11, 1918, and Nouvelles de France, Paris, July 25, 1918. But it is not so much a special knowl- edge of drugs that this story reflects as the special kind of conver- sation that is heard in the drug store of a typical small town. It is here that patients of all classes gather to report on common ailments and to compare common remedies. Latent friendships are de- veloped via patent medicines. Makes the Whole World Kin does more than furnish a title to a single O. Henry story: it sums the service of them all. The burglar stepped inside the window quickly, and then he took his time. A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else. The house was a private residence. By its boarded front door and untrimmed Boston ivy the burglar knew that the mistress of it was sitting on some oceanside piazza telling a sympathetic man in a yachting cap that no one had ever understood her sensitive, lonely heart. He knew by the light in the third-story front windows, and by the lateness of the season, that the master of the house had come home, and would soon extinguish his light and retire. For it was 91 92 STORIES FROM O. HENRY September of the year and of the soul, in which season the house's good man comes to consider roof gardens and sten- ographers as vanities, and to desire the return of his mate and the more durable blessings of decorum and the moral excellencies. The burglar lighted a cigarette. The guarded glow of the match illuminated his salient points for a moment. He belonged to the third type of burglars. This third type has not yet been recognized and accepted. The police have made us familiar with the first and second. Their classification is simple. The collar is the distinguish- ing mark. When a burglar is caught who does not wear a collar he is described as a degenerate of the lowest type, singularly vi- cious and depraved, and is suspected of being the desperate criminal who stole the handcuffs out of Patrolman Hennessy's pocket in 1878 and walked away to escape arrest. The other well-known type is the burglar who wears a collar. He is always referred to as a Raffles in real life. He is invariably a gentleman by daylight, breakfasting in a dress suit, and posing as a paper-hanger, while after dark he plies his nefarious occupation of burglary. His mother is an ex- tremely wealthy and respected resident of Ocean Grove, and when he is conducted to his cell he asks at once for a nail file and the Police Gazette. He always has a wife in every State in the Union and fiancees in all the Territories, and the newspapers print his matrimonial gallery out of their stock of cuts of the ladies who were cured by only one bottle after having been given up by five doctors, experiencing great re- lief after the first dose. The burglar wore a blue sweater. He was neither a Raffles nor one of the chefs from Hell's Kitchen. The police would have been baffled had they attempted to classify him. They have not yet heard of the respectable, unassuming burglar who is neither above nor below his station. This burglar of the third class began to prowl. He wore no masks, dark lanterns, or gum shoes. He carried a 38-calibre MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN 93 revolver in his pocket, and he chewed peppermint gum thoughtfully. The furniture of the house was swathed in its summer dust protectors. The silver was far away in safe-deposit vaults. The burglar expected no remarkable "haul.'* His objective point was that dimly lighted room where the master of the house should be sleeping heavily after whatever solace he had sought to lighten the burden of his loneliness. A *' touch" might be made there to the extent of legitimate, fair professional profits — loose money, a watch, a jewelled stick-pin — nothing exorbitant or beyond reason. He had seen the window left open and had taken the chance. The burglar softly opened the door of the lighted room. The gas was turned low. A man lay in the bed asleep. On the dresser lay many things in confusion — a crumpled roll of bills, a watch, keys, three poker chips, crushed cigars, a pink silk hair bow, and an unopened bottle of bromo- seltzer for a bulwark in the morning. The burglar took three steps toward the dresser. The man in the bed suddenly uttered a squeaky groan and opened his eyes. His right hand slid under his pillow, but remained there. "Lay still," said the burglar in conversational tone. Bur- glars of the third type do not hiss. The citizen in the bed looked at the round end of the burglar's pistol and lay still. "Now hold up both your hands," commanded the burglar. The citizen had a little, pointed, brown-and-gray beard, like that of a painless dentist. He looked solid, esteemed, irritable, and disgusted. He sat up in bed and raised his right hand above his head. "Up with the other one," ordered the burglar. "You might be amphibious and shoot with your left. You can count two, can't you? Hurry up, now." "Can't raise the other one," said the citizen with a contor- tion of his lineaments. "What's the matter with it.?" "Rheumatism in the shoulder." 94 STORIES FROM O. HENRY " Inflammatory? " "Was. The inflammation has gone down." The burglar stood for a moment or two, holding his gun on the afilicted one. He glanced at the plunder on the dresser and then, with a half -embarrassed air back at the man in the bed. Then he, too, made a sudden grimace. "Don't stand there making faces," snapped the citizen, bad-humoredly. "If you've come to burgle why don't yoii do it? There's some stuff lying around." "'Sense me," said the burglar, with a grin: "but it just socked me one, too. It's good for you that rheumatism and me happens to be old pals. I got it in my left arm, too. Most anybody but me would have popped you when you wouldn't hoist that left claw of yours." "How long have you had it?" inquired the citizen. "Four years. I guess that ain't all. Once you've got it, it's you for a rheumatic life — that's my judgment." "Ever try rattlesnake oil?" asked the citizen, interestedly. "Gallons," said the burglar. "If all the snakes I've used the oil of was strung out in a row they'd reach eight times as far as Saturn, and the rattles could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back." "Some use Chiselum's Pills," remarked the citizen. "Fudge!" said the burglar. "Took 'em five months. No good. I had some relief the year I tried Finkelham's Ex- tract, Balm of Gilead poultices, and Potts's Pain Pulverizer; but I think it was the buckeye I carried in my pocket what done the trick." "Is yours worse in the morning or at night?" asked the citizen. "Night," said the burglar; "just when I'm busiest. Say, take down that arm of yours — I guess you won't Say ! did you ever try Blickerstaff's Blood Builder?" "I never did. Does yours come in paroxysms or is it a steady pain?" The burglar sat down on the foot of the bed and rested his gun on his crossed knee. MAKES THE WHOLE WORLD KIN 95 "It jumps," said he. "It strikes me when I ain't looking for it. I had to give up second-story work because I got stuck sometimes half-way up. Tell you what— I don't be- lieve the bloomin' doctors know what is good for it." "Same here. I've spent a thousand dollars without get- ting any relief . Yours swell any?" *'0f mornings. And when it's goin' to rain— great Chris- topher!" .11. "Me, too," said the citizen. "I can tell when a streak of humidity the size of a tablecloth starts from Florida on its way to New York. And if I pass a theatre where there's an 'East Lynne' matinee going on, the moisture starts my left arm jumping Uke a toothache." "It's undiluted— hades!" said the burglar. "You're dead right," said the citizen. The burglar looked down at his pistol and thrust it into his pocket with an awkward attempt at ease. "Say, old man," he said, constramedly, "ever try opo- deldoc?" „ ^ "Slop!" said the citizen angrily. "Might as well rub on restaurant butter." "Sure," concurred the burglar. "It's a salve suitable for little Minnie when the kitty scratches her finger. I'll tell you what! We're up against it. I only find one thing that eases her up. Hey? Little old sanitary, ameliorating, lest- we-forget Booze. Say— this job's off— 'sense me— get on 70ur clothes and let's go out and have some. 'Sense the liberty, but — ouch! There she goes again!" "For a week," said the citizen, "I haven't been able to dress myself without help. I'm afraid Thomas is in bed, and " "Chmb out," said the burglar, "I'll help you get into your duds." The conventional returned as a tidal wave and flooded the citizen. He stroked his brown-and-gray beard. "It's very unusual " he began. "Here's your shirt," said the burglar, " fall out. I know a 96 STORIES FROM 0. HENRY man who said Omberry's Ointment fixed him in two weeks so he could use both hands in tying his four-in-hand." As they were going out the door the citizen turned and started back. " 'Liked to forgot my money," he explained; "laid it on the dresser last night." The burglar caught him by the right sleeve. "Come on," he said bluffly. "I ask you. Leave it alone. I've got the price. Ever try witch hazel and oil of winter- green?" SQUARING THE CIRCLE From The Voice of the City. First published in The World, No- vember 27, 1904. This is the first one of our twenty-five stories that begins with a philosophical overture, with what O. Henry has called a "recitative by the chorus." But he was fond of such be- ginnings: see Ulysses and the Dogman, Dougherty's Eye-Opener , A Comedy in Rubbery The Green Door, The Voice of the City, The Har- binger, The Venturers, and A Municipal Report (page 224). These openings do not enable the reader to anticipate the denouement but, with the denouement reached and reviewed, they almost compel him to believe that no other was possible. It was the expositor in O. Henry, rather than the pure narrator, that prefixed these over- tures. They strike the keynote and enable the reader to attach the plot or plan of the story to a central motif. In this opening O. Henry was on familiar ground. Two years before, in Round the Circle, he had written: *'The straight line is Art. Nature moves in circles. A straightforward man is a more artificial product than a diplomatist is. Men lost in the snow travel in exact circles until they sink, exhausted, as their footprints have attested. Also, travelers in philosophy and other mental processes frequently wind up at their starting-point." See also Introduction to The Making of a Netv Yorker, page 111. At the hazard of wearying you this tale of vehement emotions must be prefaced by a discourse on geometry. Nature moves in circles; Art in straight lines. The nat< ural is rounded; the artificial is made up of angles. A man lost in the snow wanders, in spite of himself, in perfect cir- cles; the city man's feet, denaturalized by rectangular streets and floors, carry him ever away from himself. The round eyes of childhood typify innocence; the nar- rowed line of the flirt's optic proves the invasion of art. The hori^pntal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has 87 98 STORIES FROM O. HENRY not read Nature's most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the candid kiss? Beauty is Nature in perfection; circularity is its chief at- tribute. Behold the full moon, the enchanting golf ball, the domes of splendid temples, the huckleberry pie, the wed- ding ring, the circus ring, the ring for the waiter, and the "round" of drinks. On the other hand, straight lines show that Nature has been deflected. Imagine Venus 's girdle transformed into a "straight front*'! When we begin to move in straight lines and turn sharp corners our natures begin to change. The consequence is that Nature, being more adaptive than Art, tries to conform to its sterner regulations. The result is often a rather curi- ous product — for instance: A prize chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri, cauliflower au gratiriy and a New Yorker. Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geomet- rical, not moral. The straight lines of its streets and archi- tecture, the rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, un- compromising rules of all its ways — even of its recreations and sports — coldly exhibit a sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature. Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demon- strated the problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of making its importations con- form to its angles. The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was a 'possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family evened up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land, SQUARING THE CIRCLE 99 where the 'possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax. The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at the plough, through their lamp-Kt cabin windows, coming from camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in family groups, prepared and unpre- pared. Folwells had the branches of their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of their country pre- scribed and authorized. By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the controversy would give a too de- cided personal flavor to the feud, suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell. A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary, unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he mixed with lard, and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and packed a carpet-sack with Spartan lingerie. He took his squirrel rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. How- ever ethical and plausible the habit might be in the Cumber- lands, perhaps New York would not swallow his pose of hunt- ing squirrels among the skyscrapers along Broadway. An ancient but reliable Colt's revolver that he resurrected from a bureau drawer seemed to proclaim itself the pink of weapons for metropolitan adventure and vengeance. This and a hunting-knife in a leather sheath, Sam packed in the carpet- sack. As he started, muleback, for the lowland railroad station the last Folwell turned in his saddle and looked grimly at the little cluster of white-pine slabs in the clump of cedars that marked the Folwell burying-ground. Sam Folwell arrived in New York in the night. Still moving and living in the free circles of nature, he did not perceive the formidable, pitiless, restless, fierce angles of the 100 STORIES FROM O. HENRY great city waiting in the dark to close about the rotundity of his heart and brain and mould him to the form of its mil- lions of reshaped victims. A cabby picked him out of the whirl, as Sam himself had often picked a nut from a bed of wind-tossed autumn leaves, and whisked him away to a hotel commensurate to his boots and carpet-sack. On the next morning the last of the Folwells made his sortie into the city that sheltered the last Harkness. The Colt was thrust beneath his coat and secured by a narrow leather belt; the hunting-knife hung between his shoulder- blades, with the haft an inch below his coat collar. He knew this much — that Cal Harkness drove an express wagon somewhere in that town, and that he, Sam Folwell, had come to kill him. And as he stepped upon the sidewalk the red came into his eye and the feud-hate into his heart. The clamor of the central avenues drew him thitherward. He had half expected to see Cal coming down the street in his shirt-sleeves, with a jug and a whip in his hand, just as he would have seen him in Frankfort or Laurel City. But an hour went by and Cal did not appear. Perhaps he was waiting in ambush, to shoot him from a door or a window. Sam kept a sharp eye on doors and windows for a while. About noon the city tired of playing with its mouse anr^. suddenly squeezed him with its straight lines. Sam Folwell stood where two great, rectangular arteries of the city cross. He looked four ways, and saw the world hurled from its orbit and reduced by spirit level and tape to an edged and cornered plane. All life moved on tracks, in grooves, according to system, within boundaries, by rote. The root of life was the cube root; the measure of existence was square measure. People streamed by in straight rows; the horrible din and crash stupefied him. Sam leaned against the sharp corner of a stone building. Those faces passed him by thousands, and none of them were turned toward him. A sudden foolish fear that he had died and was a spirit, and that they could not see him, seized him. And then the city smote him with loneliness. SQUARING THE CIRCLE 101 A fat man dropped out of the stream and stood a few feet distant, waiting for his car. Sam crept to his side and shouted above the tumult into his ear: "The Rankinses' hogs weighed more'n ourn a whole passel, but the mast in thar neighborhood was a fine chance better than what it was down " The fat man moved away unostentatiously, and bought roasted chestnuts to cover his alarm. Sam felt the need of a drop of mountain dew. Across the street men passed in and out through swinging doors. Brief glimpses could be had of a glistening bar and its bedeckings. The feudist crossed and essayed to enter. Again had Art eliminated the familiar circle. Sam's hand found no door- knob — it slid, in vain, over a rectangular brass plate and polished oak with nothing even so large as a pin's head upon which his fingers might close. Abashed, reddened, heartbroken, he walked away from the bootless door and sat upon a step. A locust club tickled him in the ribs. *'Take a walk for yourself," said the policeman. "You've been loafing around here long enough." At the next corner a shrill whistle sounded in Sam's ear. He wheeled around and saw a black-browed villain scowling at him over peanuts heaped on a steaming machine. He started across the street. An immense engine, running with- out mules, with the voice of a bull and the smell of a smoky lamp, whizzed past, grazing his knee. A cab-driver bumped him with a hub and explained to him that kind words were invented to be used on other occasions. A motorman clanged his bell wildly and, for once in his life, corroborated a cab-driver. A large lady in a changeable silk waist dug an elbow into his back, and a newsy pensively pelted him with banana rinds, murmuring, " I hates to do it — but if anybody seen me let it pass!" Cal Harkness, his day's work over and his express wagon stabled, turned the sharp edge of the building that, by the cheek of architects, is modeled upon a safety razor. Out 102 STORIES FROM O. HENRY of the mass of hurrying people his eye picked up, three yards away, the surviving bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin. He stopped short and wavered for a moment, being un- armed and sharply surprised. But the keen mountaineer's eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out. There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers- by, and the sound of Sam's voice crying: "Howdy, Cal! I'm durned glad to see ye." And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and Twenty third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands. THE COP AND THE ANTHEM From The Four Million. First published in The World, December 4,1904. "The irony of fate!" we say on reading this story, or, with Foe, "The imp of the perverse!" But Foe's unp operated from within, never from without. The story is a perfect illustration of O. Henry's genius in taking the merest whifif or whimsy of an idea» the merest wraith or gossamer of a thought, and making of it some- thing solid, durable, appeahng. " On the technical side of his craft," says a writer in The Spectator (London, April 7, 1917), "he has probably never been surpassed either in fertility or ingenuity. The original themes on which he wove his stories are often of the very slightest description; but give him a mannerism, a racial contrast, an inverted proverb, to start with, and his inventive opulence would soon clothe it in a wealth of appropriate incident." Was O. Hemy greater in designing stories or in clothing them with appropriate incident? Mr. Firkins (see Introduction, page ix) would say the former; our anonymous English critic, the latter. If the two re- quirements must be distinguished, I should give first place to O.Henry's resourcefulness in filling in. It is not difficult to think of a plan or plot or thesis for a short story; but to flesh the skeleton, to make the abstract concrete, to hold the interest increasingly from first detail to last — this is the most exigent requirement laid upon the narrative artist. When we call a short story original, we refer of course to the blend of theme and development but more distmctively to development than to theme. The irony of fate is not a novel or origmal idea; Anatole France's short story, Crainquehille, develops the same motif . But the incarnation of the theme in Soapy is novel and original. Is there any story in our twenty-five in which you thmk the complementary detail falls below the excellence of the design.? On his bench in Madison Square Soapy moved uneasily. When wild geese honk high of nights, and when women with- out sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and when A03 104 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Soapy moves uneasily on his bench in the park, you may know that winter is near at hand. A dead leaf fell in Soapy 's lap. That was Jack Frost's card. Jack is kind to the regular denizens of Madison Square and gives fair w^arning of his annual call. At the corners of four streets he hands his pasteboard to the North Wind, footman of the mansion of All Outdoors, so that the inhabit- ants thereof may make ready. Soapy 's mind became cognizant of the fact that the time had come for him to resolve himself into a singular Com- mittee of Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigor. And therefore he moved uneasily on his bench. The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the highest. In them there were no considerations of Mediter- ranean cruises, of soporific Southern skies, or drifting in the Vesuvian Bay. Three months on the Island was what his soul craved. Three months of assured board and bed and congenial company, safe from Boreas and bluecoats, seemed to Soapy the essence of things desirable. For years the hospitable Blackwell's had been his winter quarters. Just as his more fortunate fellow New Yorkers had bought their tickets to Palm Beach and the Riviera each winter, so Soapy had made his humble arrangements for his annual hegira to the Island. And now the time was come. On the previous night three Sabbath new^spapers, distributed beneath his coat, about his ankles, and over his lap, had failed to repulse the cold as he slept on his bench near the spurting fountain in the ancient square. So the Island loomed big and timely in Soapy 's mind. He scorned the provisions made in the name of charity for the city's dependents. In Soapy 's opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the simple life. But to one of Soapy 's proud spirit the gifts of charity are encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Csesar THE COP AND THE ANTHEM 105 had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better to be a guest of the law which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly with a gentleman's private affairs. Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating magistrate would do the rest. Soapy left his bench and strolled out of the square and across the level sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe, where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm, and the proto- plasm. Soapy had confidence in himself from the lowest button of his vest upward. He was shaven, and his coat was decent and his neat black, ready-tied four-in-hand had been pre- sented to him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected, suc- cess would be his. The portion of him that would show above the table would raise no doubt in the waiter's mind. A roasted mallard duck, thought Soapy, would be about the thing — ^with a bottle of Chablis, and then Camembert, a demi-tasse and a cigar. One dollar for the cigar would be enough. The total would not be so high as to call forth any supreme manifestation of revenge from the cafe manage- ment; and yet the meat would leave him filled and happy for the journey to his winter refuge. But as Soapy set foot inside the restaurant door the head waiter's eye fell upon his frayed trousers and decadent shoes. Strong and ready hands turned him about and conveyed him in silence and haste to the sidewalk and averted the ignoble fate of the menaced mallard. Soapy turned off Broadway. It seemed that his route to 106 STORIES FROM O. HENRY the coveted island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way of entering Hmbo must be thought of. At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly displayed wares behind plate-glass made a shop window con- spicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through the glass. People came running around the corner, a police- man in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, and smiled at the sight of brass buttons. "WTiere's the man that done that.^" inquired the officer excitedly. "Don't you figure out that I might have had something to do with it.^ " said Soapy, not without sarcasm, but friendly, as one greets good fortune. The policeman's mind refused to accept Soapy even as a clue. Men who smash windows do not remain to parley with the law's minions. They take to their heels. The policeman saw a man half way down the block running to catch a car. With drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along, twice un- successful. On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of nc great pretensions. It catered to large appetites and modest purses. Its crockery and atmosphere were thick; its soup and napery thin. Into this place Soapy took his accusive shoes and telltale trousers without challenge. At a table he sat and consumed beefsteak, flapjacks, doughnuts, and pie. And then to the waiter he betrayed the fact that the minutest coin and himself were strangers. "Now, get busy and call a cop," said Soapy. "And don't keep a gentleman waiting." "No cop for youse," said the waiter, with a voice like butter cakes and an eye like the cherry in a Manhattan cocktail. "Hey, Con!" Neatly upon his left ear on the callous pavement two waiters pitched Soapy. He arose, joint by joint, as a car- penter's rule opens, and beat the dust from his clothes. Ar- rest seemed but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far THE COP AND THE ANTHEM 107 away. A policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away laughed and walked down the street. Five blocks Soapy traveled before his courage permitted him to woo capture again. This time the opportunity pre- sented what he fatuously termed to himself a "cinch." A young woman of a modest and pleasing guise was standing before a show window gazing with sprightly interest at its display of shaving mugs and inkstands, and two yards from the window a large policeman of severe demeanor leaned against a water plug. It was Soapy 's design to assume the role of the despicable and execrated "masher." The refined and elegant appear- ance of his victim and the contiguity of the conscientious cop encouraged him to believe that he would soon feel the pleasant official clutch upon his arm that would insure his winter quarters on the right little, tight little isle. Soapy straightened the lady missionary's ready-made tie, dragged his shrinking cuffs into the open, set his hat at a killing cant, and sidled toward the young woman. He made eyes at her, was taken with sudden coughs and "hems," smiled, smirked, and went brazenly through the impudent and contemptible litany of the "masher." With half an eye Soapy saw that the policeman was watching him fixedly. The young woman moved away a few steps, and again be- stowed her absorbed attention upon the shaving mugs. Soapy followed, boldly stepping to her side, raised his hat and said: "Ah there, Bedelia! Don't you want to come and play in my yard?" The policeman was still looking. The persecuted young woman had but to beckon a finger and Soapy would be prac- tically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined he could feel the cozy warmth of the station-house. The young woman faced him and, stretching out a hand, caught Soapy 's coat sleeve. **Sure, Mike," she said joyfully, "if you'll blow me to a pail 108 STORIES FROM O. HENRY of suds I'd have spoke to you sooner, but the cop was watching.'* With the young woman playing the clinging ivy to his oak Soapy walked past the policeman overcome with gloom. He seemed doomed to liberty. At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He halted in the district where by night are found the light- est streets, hearts, vows, and librettos. Women in furs and men in greatcoats moved gaily in the wintry air. A sudden fear seized Soapy that some dreadful enchantment had ren- dered him immune to arrest. The thought brought a little of panic upon it, and when he came upon another policeman lounging grandly in front of a transplendent theatre he caught at the immediate straw of "disorderly conduct." On the sidewalk Soapy began to yell drunken gibberish at the top of his harsh voice. He danced, howled, raved, and otherwise disturbed the welkin. The policeman twirled his club, turned his back to Soapy and remarked to a citizen: *' 'Tis one of them Yale lads celebratin' the goose egg they give to the Hartford College. Noisy; but no harm. We've instructions to lave them be." Disconsolate, Soapy ceased his unavailing racket. Would never a policeman lay hands on him.'^ In his fancy the Island seemed an unattainable Arcadia. He buttoned his thin coat against the chilling wind. In a cigar store he saw a well-dressed man lighting a cigar at a swinging light. His silk umbrella he had set by the door on entering. Soapy stepped inside, secured the umbrella, and sauntered off with it slowly. The man at the cigar light followed hastily. "My umbrella," he said, sternly. "Oh, is it.^" sneered Soapy, adding insult to petit larceny. "Well, why don't you call a policeman? I took it. Your umbrella! Why don't you call a cop. ^ There stands one on the corner." The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise,! THE COP AND THE ANTHEM 109 with a presentiment that luck would again run against him. The policeman looked at the two curiously. "Of course," said the umbrella man — "that is — well, you know how these mistakes occur — I — if it's your umbrella I hope you'll excuse me — I picked it up this morning in a restaurant — if you recognize it as yours, why — I hope you'll " "Of course it's mine," said Soapy, viciously. The ex-umbrella man retreated. The policeman hurried to assist a tall blonde in an opera cloak across the street in front of a street car that was approaching two blocks away. Soapy walked eastward through a street damaged by im- provements. He hurled the umbrella wrathfully into an excavation. He muttered against the men who wear helmets and carry clubs. Because he wanted to fall into their clutches, they seemed to regard him as a king who could do no wrong. At length Soapy reached one of the avenues to the east where the glitter and turmoil was but faint. He set his face down this toward Madison Square, for the homing instinct survives even when the home is a park bench. But on an unusually quiet corner Soapy came to a stand- still. Here was an old church, quaint and rambling and gabled. Through one violet-stained window a soft light glowed, where, no doubt, the organist loitered over the keys, making sure of his mastery of the coming Sabbath anthem. For there drifted out to Soapy 's ears sweet music that caught and held him transfixed against the convolutions of the iron fence. The moon was above, lustrous and serene; vehicles and pedestrians were few; sparrows twittered sleepily in the eaves — for a little while the scene might have been a country churchyard. And the anthem that the organist played cemented Soapy to the iron fence, for he had known it well in the days when his life contained such things as mothers and roses and ambitions and friends and immaculate thoughts and collars. 110 STORIES FROM O. HENRY The conjunction of Soapy 's receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and won- derful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy desires, dead hopes, wTccked faculties, and base motives that made up his existence. And also in a moment his heart responded thrillingly to this novel mood. An instantaneous and strong impulse moved him to battle with his desperate fate. He would pull himself out of the mire; he would make a man of him- self again; he would conquer the evil that had taken possession of him. There was time; he was comparatively young yet; he would resurrect his old eager ambitions and pursue them without faltering. Those solemn but sweet organ notes had set up a revolution in him. To-morrow he would go into the roaring downtown district and find work. A fur importer had once offered him a place as driver. He would find him to-morrow and ask for the position. He would be somebody in the world. He would Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman. "What are you doin' here.'^" asked the oflBcer. "Nothin'," said Soapy. "Then come along," said the policeman. "Three months on the Island," said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning. THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER From The Trimmed Lamp. First published in The World, Janu- ary 1, 1905. The second paragraph is as autobiographical as any- thing that O. Henry ever wrote unless, perhaps, we except a paragraph from The Voice of the City: "I must go and find out," I said, "what is the Voice of this city. Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New York," I continued, in a rising tone, "had better not hand me a cigar and say: 'Old man, I can't talk for publication.' No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, imhesitatingly, 'I will'; Philadelphia says, 'I should'; New Orleans says, T used to'; Louisville says, 'Don't care if I do'; St. Louis says, 'Excuse me'; Pittsburgh says, 'Smoke up.' Now, New York " One hundred and thirty-eight of O. Henry's stories take place in New York, the great city being not merely the station- ary locale but a cooperative agent in developing the plot. What London was to Johnson, to Lamb, to Dickens, what Paris was to Victor Hugo, that was New York to O. Henry. But with a differ- 'ince. O. Henry persisted to the last m his endeavor to body forth \he spirit of New York, to find its central characteristics, to differ- entiate it from other cities, to appraise and phrase not only its more notable streets, parks, places, etc., but its distinctive service as w^U. It is not mere description in which he excels; it is description as an aid to characterization, and characterization as an ally of mterpre- tation. This is a city, so runs Raggles's experience, that is cold and indifferent on the surface but warm-hearted, sympathetic, helpful beneath the surface. It is a Levite till you are hurt ; then it is a good Samaritan. The very types that seemed to embody the aloofness of New York are the first to reach Raggles's side when he is down. From this mdividual solicitude shown for the fractured Haggles on the pavement, he passes to the organized and institutional charity of the hospital. Whoever defames New York now has Raggles to reckon with. Compare with this characteristic of New York the achievement of the same city recorded in Squaring the Circle. page 97. Ill 112 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Besides many other things, Raggles was a poet. He was called a tramp; but that was only an elliptical way of saying that he was a philosopher, an artist, a traveler, a naturalist, and a discoverer. But most of all he was a poet. In all his life he never wrote a line of verse; he lived his poetry. His Odyssey would have been a Limerick, had it been written. But, to Hnger with the primary proposition, Raggles was a poet. Raggles's specialty, had he been driven to ink and paper, would have been sonnets to the cities. He studied cities as women study their reflections in mirrors; as children study the glue and sawdust of a dislocated doll; as the men who write about wild animals study the cages in the zoo. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants; it was a thing with a soul characteristic and distinct; an individual conglom- eration of life, with its own peculiar essence, flavor, and feel- ing. Two thousand miles to the north and south, east and west, Raggles wandered in poetic fervor, taking the cities to his breast. He footed it on dusty roads, or sped magnifi- cently in freight cars, counting time as of no account. And when he had found the heart of a city and listened to its secret confession, he strayed on, restless, to another. Fickle Raggles! — but perhaps he had not met the civic corporation that could engage and hold his critical fancy. Through the ancient poets we have learned that the cities are feminine. So they were to poet Raggles; and his mind carried a concrete and clear conception of the figure that sym- bolized and typified each one that he had wooed. Chicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs. Partington, plumes and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would awake to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish. Thus Chicago affected him. Perhaps there is a vagueness and inaccuracy in the description; but that is Raggles's THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER 113 fault. He should have recorded his sensations in magazine poems. Pittsburgh impressed him as the play of "Othello" per- formed in the Russian language in a railroad station by Dock- stader's minstrels. A royal and generous lady this Pittsburgh, though — ^homely, hearty, with flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and drink champagne with his pigs' feet and fried potatoes. New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She laughed and hummed a chansonette and filled Raggles's shoes with ice-cold water. Allons ! Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed. Indefinite and unintelligible ideas, you will say; but your disapprobation should be tempered with gratitude, for these are poets' fancies — and suppose you had come upon them in verse! One day Raggles came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn her note in the scale ; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the secret of their individ- uality. And here we cease to be Raggles's translator and be- come his chronicler. Raggles landed from a ferry-boat one morning and walked into the core of the town with the blase air of a cosmopolite. He was dressed with care to play the role of an "unidentified 114 STORIES FROM O. HENRY man." No country, race, class, clique, union, party clan, or bowling association could have claimed him. His clothing, which had been donated to him piece-meal by citizens of different height, but same number of inches around the heart, was not yet as uncomfortable to his figure as those speci- mens of raiment, self-measured, that are railroaded to you by transcontinental tailors with a suit case, suspenders, silk handkerchief, and pearl studs as a bonus. Without money — as a poet should be — but with the ardor of an astronomer discovering a new star in the chorus of the milky way, or a man who has seen ink suddenly flow from his fountain pen, Raggles wandered into the great city. Late in the afternoon he drew out of the roar and commo- tion with a look of dumb terror on his countenance. He was defeated, puzzled, discomfited, frightened. Other cities had been to him as long primer to read; as country maidens quickly to fathom; as send-price-of-subscription-with-answer rebuses to solve; as oyster cocktails to swallow; but here was one as cold, glittering, serene, impossible as a four-carat diamond in a window to a lover outside fingering damply in his pocket his ribbon-counter salary. The greetings of the other cities he had known — their homespun kindliness, their human gamut of rough charity, friendly curses, garrulous curiosity, and easily estimated credulity or indifference. This city of Manhattan gave him no clue; it was walled against him. Like a river of adamant it flowed past him in the streets. Never an eye was turned upon him; no voice spoke to him. His heart yearned for the clap of Pittsburgh's sooty hand on his shoulder; for Chicago's menacing but social yawp in his ear; for the pale and eleemosynary stare through the Bostonian eyeglass — even for the precipitate but unmalicious boot-toe of Louisville ^r St. Louis. On Broadway Raggles, successful suitor of many cities, stood, bashful, like any country swain. For the first time he experienced the poignant humiliation of being ignored. And when he tried to reduce this brilliant, swiftly changing, THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER 115 ice-cold city to a formula he failed utterly. Poet though he was, it offered him no color similes, no points of comparison, no flaw in its polished facets, no handle by which he could hold it up and view its shape and structure, as he familiarly and often contemptuously had done with other towns. The houses were interminable ramparts loopholed for defense; the people were bright but bloodless spectres passing in sinister and selfish array. The thing that weighed heaviest on Raggles's soul and clogged his poet's fancy was the spirit of absolute egotism that seemed to saturate the people as toys are saturated with paint. Each one that he considered appeared a monster of abominable and insolent conceit. Humanity was gone from them; they were toddling idols of stone and varnish, worship- ping themselves and greedy for, though oblivious of, worship from their fellow graven images. Frozen, cruel, implacable, impervious, cut to an identical pattern, they hurried on their ways like statues brought by some miracles to motion, while soul and feeling lay unaroused in the reluctant marble. Gradually Raggles became conscious of certain types. One was an elderly gentleman with a snow-white, short beard, pink, unwrinkled face and stony, sharp blue eyes, attired in. the fashion of a gilded youth, who seemed to personify the city's wealth, ripeness, and frigid unconcern. Another type was a woman, tall, beautiful, clear as a steel engraving, god- dess-like, calm, clothed like the princesses of old, with eyes as coldly blue as the reflection of sunlight on a glacier. And another was a by-product of this town of marionettes — a broad, swaggering, grim, theateningly sedate fellow, with a jowl as large as a harvested wheat field, the complexion of a baptized infant, and the knuckles of a prize-fighter. This type leaned against cigar signs and viewed the world with f rapped contumely. A poet is a sensitive creature, and Raggles soon shriveled in the bleak embrace of the undecipherable. The chill, sphinx-like, ironical, illegible, unnatural, ruthless expression of the city left him downcast and bewildered. Had it no 116 STORIES FROM O. HENRY heart? Better the woodpile, the scolding of vinegar-faced housewives at back doors, the kindly spleen of bartenders behind provincial free-lunch counters, the amiable truculence of rural constables, the kicks, arrests, and happy-go-lucky chances of the other vulgar, loud, crude cities than this freez- ing heartlessness. Raggles summoned his courage and sought alms from the populace. Unheeding, regardless, they passed on without the wink of an eyelash to testify that they were conscious of his existence. And then he said to himself that this fair but pitiless city of Manhattan was without a soul; that its inhabitants were manikins moved by wires and springs, and that he was alone in a great wilderness. Raggles started to cross the street. There was a blast, a roar, a hissing and a crash as something struck him and hurled him over and over six yards from where he had been. As he was coming down like the stick of a rocket the earth and all the cities thereof turned to a fractured dream. Raggles opened his eyes. First an odor made itself known to him — an odor of the earliest spring flowers of Paradise. And then a hand soft as a falling petal touched his brow. Bending over him was the woman clothed like the princess of old, with blue eyes, now soft and humid with human sympathy. Under his head on the pavement were silks and furs. With Raggles's hat in his hand and with his face pinker than ever from a vehement burst of oratory against reckless driving, stood the elderly gentleman who personified the city's wealth and ripeness. From a nearby cafe hurried the by-product with the vast jowl and baby complexion, bearing a glass full of a crimson fluid that suggested delight- ful possibilities. "Drink dis, sport," said the by-product, holding the glass to Raggles's lips. Hundreds of people huddled around in a moment, their faces wearing the deepest concern. Two flattering and gorge- ous policemen got into the circle and pressed back the over- plus of Samaritans. An old lady in a black shawl spoke THE MAKING OF A NEW YORKER 117 loudly of camphor; a newsboy slipped one of his papers be- neath Raggles's elbow, where it lay on the muddy pave- ment. A brisk young man with a notebook was asking for names. A bell clanged importantly, and the ambulance cleaned a lane through the crowd. A cool surgeon slipped into the midst of affairs. "How do you feel, old man?" asked the surgeon, stooping easily to his task. The princess of silks and satins wiped a red drop or two from Raggles's brow with a fragrant cobweb. *'Me.^" said Raggles, wath a seraphic smile, *'I feel fine." He had found the heart of his new city. In three days they let him leave his cot for the convales- cent ward in the hospital. He had been in there an hour when the attendants heard sounds of conflict. Upon inves- tigation they found that Raggles had assaulted and damaged a brother convalescent — a glowering transient whom a freight train collision had sent in to be patched up. "What's all this about.^" inquired the head nurse. "He was runnin' down me town," said Raggles. "What town?" asked the nurse. "Noo York," said Raggles. A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFE From The Four Million. First published in The World, January 22, 1905. Does not the leading character here stand out with the utmost distinctness? You may forget that he was named E. Rush- more Coglan, but shall j'ou ever forget the kind of man that he was? He is not a hypocrite. He firmly believes, as does the hero in Best- Seller, that he is what he is proved at last not to be. He is an ex- emplar not only of Kipling's quoted lines To the City of Bombay but of his later lines on Sussex : God gave all men all earth to love, But since our hearts are small. Ordained for each one spot should prove Beloved over all. It is greatly to E. Rushmore Coglan's credit that he is self-deceived. Says Tennyson: That man's the best Cosmopohte Who loves his native country best. But O. Henry's purpose is so clear and the character plays his part so well that to read the story is to remember not so much the plan as the character that illustrates the plan. Yet E. Rushmore Coglan is no better portrayed than Hargraves or Jimmy Valentine or Tildy or Masie or John Perkins or Madame Beaumont or Shark Dodson or at least a half dozen of the characters yet to appear. Why, then, is the charge sometimes brought against O. Henry that he failed in the ability to portray unforgettable characters? Has he failed? Of course the comparison must be made with other short story writers, not with novelists. Can you mention any other writer, living or dead, who confined himself strictly to the short story and yet lodged more characters (not names of characters) in the memory of more readers than O. Henrys has done? The name of the charac- ter among O. Henry's more than a thousand may not be recalled. 118 A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFE 119 But if the character of the character, his reaction to his environment, what he or she did or said, the distinctive trait of human nature that each illustrated, the obscure motive that each illumined— if these come back, is not the author's art vmdicated? At midnight the cafe was crowded. By some chance the little table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incom- ers, and two vacant chairs at it extended their arms with venal hospitality to the influx of patrons. And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I held a theory that since Adam no true citizen of the world has existed. We hear of them, and we see foreign labels on much luggage, but we find travelers instead of cosmopolites. I invoke your consideration of the scene — the marble- topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulons and largess-loving gargons, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the com- posers; the melange of talk and laughter— and, if you will, the WUrzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly Parisian. My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and he will be heard from next summer at Coney Island. He is to establish a new "attraction" there, he informed me, offering kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along parallels of latitude and longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d'hote grape fruit. He spoke disrespectfully of the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff ! He would have you on skis in Lap- 120 STORIES FROM O. HENRY land. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post-oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the society of Viennese archdukes. Anon he would be telling you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have addressed a letter to '*E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe," and mailed it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him. I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and I listened to his world-wide discourse fearful lest I should discover in it the local note of the mere globe- trotter. But his opinions never fluttered or drooped; he was as impartial to cities, countries, and continents as the winds or gravitation. And as E. Rushmore Coglan prattled of this little planet I thought with glee of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himseK to Bombay. In a poem he has to say that there is pride and rivalry between the cities of the earth, and that "the men that breed from them, they traflSc up and down, but cling to their cities' hem as a child to the mother's gown." And whenever they walk *'by roaring streets unknown" they remember their native city "most faithful, foolish, fond; making her mere-breathed name their bond upon their bond." And my glee was roused because I had caught Mr. Kipling napping. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who had no narrow boasts of birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag of his whole round globe against the Martians and the inhabitants of the Moon. Expression on these subjects was precipitated from E. Rushmore Coglan by the third corner to our table. While Coglan was describing to me the topography along the Si- berian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The concluding air was "Dixie," and as the exliilarating notes A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFfi 121 tumbled forth they were almost overpowered by a great clapping of hands from almost every table. It is worth a paragraph to say that this remarkable scene can be witnessed every evening in numerous cafes in the City of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theor- ies to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all Southerners in town hie themselves to cafes at nightfall. This applause of the *' rebel" air in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it is not insolvable. The war with Spain, many years' generous mint and watermelon crops, a few long-shot winners at the New Orleans race track, and the brilliant banquets given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a *'fad" in Manhattan. Your manicure will lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a lady has to work now — the war, you know. When "Dixie" was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft-brimmed hat. Then he strayed through the smoke, dropped into the vacant chair at our table, and pulled out cigarettes. The evening was at the period when reserve is thawed. One of us mentioned three Wurzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man acknowledged his inclusion in the order by a smile and a nod. I hastened to ask him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I had. "Would you mind telling me," I began, "whether you are from " The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I was jarred into silence. "Excuse me," said he, "but that's a question I never like to hear asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his post-office address? WTiy, I've seen Kentuckians who hated whiskey, Virginians who weren't descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers 122 STORIES FROM O. HENRY with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southerners, narrow- minded Westerners, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocer's clerk do up cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don't handicap him with the label of any section." "Pardon me," I said, "but my curiosity was not alto- gether an idle one. I know the South, and when the band plays 'Dixie' I like to observe. I have formed the belief that the man who applauds that air with special violence and os- tensible sectional loyalty is invariably a native of either Se- caucus, N. J., or the district between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River, this city. I was about to put my opinion to the test by inquiring of this gentleman when you interrupted with your own — larger theory, I must confess." And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became evident that his mind also moved along its own set of grooves. "I should like to be a periwinkle," said he, mysteriously, "on the top of a valley, and sing too-ralloo-ralloo." This was clearly too obscure, so I turned again to Coglan. "I've been around the world twelve times," said he. "I know an Esquimau in IJpernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his neckties, and I saw a goatherder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle competition. I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yoko- hama all the year around. I've got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don't have to tell 'em how to cook my eggs in Rio Janeiro or Seattle. It's a mighty little old world. What's the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house in the dale, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike's Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan's Flats or any place? It'll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there." A COSMOPOLITE IN A CAFE 123 "You seem to be a genuine cosmopolite," I said admiringly. "But it also seems that you would decry patriotism." " A relic of the stone age," declared Coglan, warmly. " We are all brothers— Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians, and the people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one's city or State or section or country will be wiped out, and we'll all be citizens of the world, as we ought to be." " But while you are wandering in foreign lands," I persisted, "do not your thoughts revert to some spot — some dear and " *'Nary a spot," interrupted E. R. Coglan, flippantly. "The terrestrial, globular, planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth is my abode. I've met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. I've seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Ven- ice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. I've seen a Southerner on being introduced to the King of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his grand-aunt on his mother's side was re- lated by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some Afghan- istan bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul with the agent. 'Afghanistan?' the natives said to him through an interpreter. 'Well, not so slow, do you think?' 'Oh, I don't know,' says he, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don't suit me. I'm not tied down to anything that isn't 8,000 miles in diameter. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the terrestrial sphere." My cosmopolite made a large adieu and left me, for he thought he saw some one through the chatter and smoke whom he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who was reduced to Wurzburger without further ability to voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit of a valley. I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and wonder- 124 STORIES FROM O. HENRY ing how the poet had managed to miss him. He was my discovery and I beheved in him. How was it.^ "The men that breed from them they traffic up and down, but cHng to their cities* hem as a child to the mother's gown." Not so E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his My meditations were interrupted by a tremendous noise and conflict in another part of the cafe. I saw above the heads of the seated patrons E. Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me engaged in terrific battle. They fought be- tween the tables like Titans, and glasses crashed, and men caught their hats up and were knocked down, and a brunette screamed, and a blonde began to sing "Teasing." My cosmopolite was sustaining the pride and reputation of the Earth when the waiters closed in on both combatants with their famous flying wedge formation and bore them out- side, still resisting. I called McCarthy, one of the French gargons, and asked him the cause of the conflict. "The man with the red tie" (that was my cosmopolite), said he, "got hot on account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the place he come from by the other guy." "Why," said I, bewildered, "that man is a citizen of the world — a cosmopolite. He " "Orginally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said," con- tinued McCarthy, "and he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place." MAMMON AND THE ARCHER From The Four Million. First published in The Worlds March 19. 1905. This has been called "perhaps the O. Henriest of all O. Henry's stories. " Why? Following is a tentative but by no means complete summary: (1) The background or setting, "the vast space where Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Thirty-fourth Street cross one another," is preeminently O. Henry Land. It is not only the Where? of the main action of the story but the Why? and the How? "In one sense," says Francis Hackett, "Broadway is the spinal column of his art, and the nerve branches cover all Manhat- tan." (2) Anthony Rockwall and his sister. Aunt Ellen, are con- trasted in a manner and spirit peculiarly O. Henryesque. (3) The part of the story following "The story should end here. . . . But we must go to the bottom of the well for truth," gives what is popularly known as the O. Henry touch. It exhibits the blending of the unexpected but inevitable, the unlooked-for but not unprepared' for. (4) The humor is irresistible but kindly, elemental, con- tagious. You want to read the story aloud to others but you do not have to choose your audience for fear that feelings will be hurt. There is no class spirit in it. Aunt Ellen is sure that the ring won; Rockwall thinks mammon was the victor; we know at last that the happy result was brought about by the cooperation of the two. (5) The ring in this story, the mole by the left eyebrow in The Furnished Room, and the button in A Municipal Report illustrate a favorite technical device of the author. (6) Equally characteristic are the piquancy, originality, and picturesqueness of the style. "O. Henry can introduce a felicity," says a critic, "with a noiselessness that numbers him for a flying second among the sovereigns of English." Do you find examples in this story? You will find them m the story that follows. Old Anthony Rockwall, retired manufacturer and pro- prietor of Rockwall's Eureka Soap, looked out the library mndow of his Fifth Avenue mansion and grinned. His 125 126 STORIES FROM O. HENRY neighbor to the right — the aristocratic clubman, G. Van Schuylight Siiffolk-Jones — came out to his waiting motor* car, wrinkling a contumelious nostril, as usual, at the Italian renaissance sculpture of the soap palace's front elevation. "Stuck-up old statuette of nothing doing!" commented the ex-Soap King. "The Eden Musee'll get that old frozen Nesselrode yet if he don't w^atch out. I'll have this house painted red, white, and blue next summer and see if that'll make his Dutch nose turn up any higher." And then Anthony Rockw^all, who never cared for bells, went to the door of his library and shouted "Mike!" in the same voice that had once chipped off pieces of the welkin on the Kansas prairies. "Tell my son," said Anthony to the answering menial, **to come in here before he leaves the house." When young Rockwall entered the library the old man laid aside his newspaper, looked at him with a kindly grim- ness on his big, smooth, ruddy countenance, rumpled his mop of white hair with one hand, and rattled the keys in his pocket with the other. "Richard," said Anthony Rockwall, "what do you pay for the soap that you use?" Richard, only six months home from college, was startled a little. He had not yet taken the measure of this sire of his, who was as full of unexpectednesses as a girl at her first party. "Six dollars a dozen, I think, dad." "And your clothes?" "I suppose about sixty dollars, as a rule." "You're a gentleman," said Anthony, decidedly. "I've heard of these young bloods spending $24 a dozen for soap, and going over the hundred mark for clothes. You've got as much money to waste as any of 'em, and yet you stick to what's decent and moderate. Now I use the old Eureka — not only for sentiment, but it's the purest soap made. When- ever you pay more than 10 cents a cake for soap you buy bad perfumes and labels. But 50 cents is doing very w^ell for a young man in your generation, position, and condition. As MAMMON AND THE ARCHER 127 I said, you're a gentleman. They say it takes three genera- tions to make one. They're off. Money'll do it as sHck as soap grease. It's made you one. By hokey! it's almost made one of me. I'm nearly as impolite and disagreeable and ill-mannered as these two old Knickerbocker gents on each side of me that can't sleep of nights because I bought in between 'em." "There are some things that money can't accomplish," remarked young Rockwall, rather gloomily. "Now, don't say that," said old Anthony, shocked. "I bet my money on money every time. I've been through the encyclopaedia down to Y looking for something you can't buy with it; and I expect to have to take up the appendix next week. I'm for money against the field. Tell me something money won't buy." "For one thing," answered Richard, rankling a little, "it won't buy one into the exclusive circles of society." "Oho! won't it.''" thundered the champion of the root of evil. "You tell me where your exclusive circles would be if the first Astor hadn't had the money to pay for his steerage passage over?" Richard sighed. "And that's what I was coming to," said the old man, less boisterously. " That's why I asked you to come in. There's something going wrong with you, boy. I've been noticing it for two weeks. Out with it. I guess I could lay my hands on eleven millions within twenty-four hours, besides the real estate. If it's your liver, there's the Rambler down in the bay, coaled, and ready to steam down to the Bahamas in two days." "Not a bad guess, dad; you haven't missed it far." "Ah," said Anthony, keenly; "what's her name.^^" Richard began to walk up and down the library floor. There was enough comradeship and sympathy in this crude old father of his to draw his confidence. "Why don't you ask her.^ " demanded old Anthony. "She'll jump at you. You've got the money and the looks, and 128 STORIES FROM 0. HENRY you're a decent boy. Your hands are clean. You've got no Eureka soap on 'em. You've been to college, but she'll overlook that." **I haven't had a chance," said Richard. "Make one," said Anthony. "Take her for a walk in the park, or a straw ride, or walk home with her from church. Chance! Pshaw!" "You don't know the social mill, dad. She's part of the stream that turns it. Every hour and minute of her time is arranged for days in advance. I must have that girl, dad, or this town is a blackjack swamp forevermore. And I can't write it — I can't do that." "Tut!" said the old man. "Do you mean to tell me that with all the money I've got you can't get an hour or two of a girl's time for yourself.'^" "I've put it off too late. She's going to sail for Europe at noon day after to-morrow for a two years' stay. I'm to s€3 her alone to-morrow evening for a few minutes. She's at Larchmont now at her aunt's. I can't go there. But I'm allowed to meet her with a cab at the Grand Central Station to-morrow evening at the 8.30 train. We drive down Broadway to Wallack's at a gallop, where her mother and a box party will be w^aiting for us in the lobby. Do you think she would listen to a declaration from me during that six or eight minutes under those circumstances? No. And what chance would I have in the theatre or afterward? None. No, dad, this is one tangle that your money can't unravel. We can't buy one minute of time with cash; if we could, rich people would live longer. There's no hope of getting a talk with Miss Lantry before she sails." "All right, Richard, my boy," said old Anthony, cheerfully. "You may run along do\\Ti to your club now. I'm glad it ain't your liver. But don't forget to burn a few punk sticks in the joss house to the great god Mazuma from time to time. You say money won't buy time? Well, of course, you can't order eternity wrapped up and delivered at your residence for a price, but I've seen Father Time get pretty bad stone MAMMON AND THE ARCHER 1^9 bruises on his heels when he walked through the gold dig- gings." That night came Aunt Ellen, gentle, sentimental, wrinkled, sighing, oppressed by wealth, in to Brother Anthony at his evening paper, and began discourse on the subject of lovers' woes. "He told me all about it," said brother Anthony, yawning. **I told him my bank account was at his service. And then he began to knock money. Said money couldn't help. Said the rules of society couldn't be bucked for a yard by a team of ten-millionaires. ' ' "Oh, Anthony," sighed Aunt Ellen, "I wish you would not think so much of money. Wealth is nothing where a true affection is concerned. Love is all-powerful. If he only had spoken earlier! She could not have refused our Richard. But now I fear it is too late. He will have no opportunity to address her. All your gold cannot bring happiness to your son." At eight o'clock the next evening Aunt Ellen took a quaint old gold ring from a moth-eaten case and gave it to Richard. "Wear it to-night, nephew," she begged. "Your mother gave it to me. Good luck in love she said it brought. She asked me to give it to you when you had found the one you loved." Young Rockwall took the ring reverently and tried it on his smallest finger. It slipped as far as the second joint and stopped. He took it off and stuffed it into his vest pocket, after the manner of man. And then he 'phoned for his cab. At the station he captured Miss Lantry out of the gadding mob at eight thirty-two. "We mustn't keep mamma and the others waiting," said she. "To Wallack's Theatre as fast as you can drive!" said Richard loyally. They whirled up Forty-second to Broadway, and then down the white-starred lane that leads from the soft meadows of sunset to the rocky hills of morning. 130 STORIES FROM O. HENRY At Thirty-tourth Street young Richard quickly thrust up the trap and ordered the cabman to stop. "I've dropped a ring," he apologized, as he chmbed out. **It was my mother's, and I'd hate to lose it. I won't detain you a minute — I saw where it fell." In less than a minute he was back in the cab with the ring. But within that minute a crosstown car had stopped di- rectly in front of the cab. The cabman tried to pass to the left, but a hea\y express wagon cut him off. He tried the right, and had to back away from a furniture van that had no business to be there. He tried to back out, but dropped his reins and swore dutifully. He was blockaded in a tangled mess of vehicles and horses. One of those street blockades had occurred that sometimes tie up commerce and movement quite suddenly in the big city. "Why don't you drive on?" said Miss Lantry, impa- tiently. "We'll be late." Richard stood up in the cab and looked around. He saw a congested flood of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans, and street cars filling the vast space where Broadway, Sixth Avenue, and Thirty-fourth Street cross one another as a twenty-six inch maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the converging point at full speed, and hurling themselves into the struggling mass, locking wheels and adding their drivers' imprecations to the clamor. The entire traffic of Manhattan seemed to have jammed itself around them. The oldest New Yorker among the thousands of spectators that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a street blockade of the proportions of this one. "I'm very sorry," said Richard, as he resumed his seat, "but it looks as if we are stuck. They won't get this jumble loosened up in an hour. It was my fault. E I hadn't dropped the ring we " "Let me see the ring," said Miss Lantry. "Now that it can't be helped, I don't care. I think theatres are stupid, anyway. " MAMMON AND THE ARCHER 131 At 11 o'clock that night somebody tapped hghtly on An- thony Rockwall's door. "Come in," shouted Anthony, who was in a red dressing- gown, reading a book of piratical adventures. Somebody was Aunt Ellen, looking like a gray-haired angel that had been left on earth by mistake. *' They 're engaged, Anthony," she said, softly. "She has promised to marry our Richard. On their way to the theatre there was a street blockade, and it was two hours before their cab could get out of it. "And oh, brother Anthony, don't ever boast of the power of money again. A little emblem of true love— a little ring that symbolized unending and unmercenary affection — was the cause of our Richard finding his happiness. He dropped it in the street, and got out to recover it. And before they could continue the blockade occurred. He spoke to his love and won her there while the cab was hemmed in. Money is dross compared with true love, Anthony." "All right," said old Anthony. "I'm glad the boy has got what he wanted. I told him I wouldn't spare any ex- pense in the matter if " "But, brother Anthony, what good could your money have done.^" "Sister," said Anthony Rockwall. "I've got my pirate in a devil of a scrape. His ship has just been scuttled, and he's too good a judge of the value of money to let drown. I wish you would let me go on with this chapter." The story should end here. I wish it would as heartily as you who read it wish it did. But we must go to the bot- tom of the well for truth. The next day a person with red hands and a blue polka- dot necktie, who called himself Kelly, called at Anthony Rockwall's house, and was at once received in the library. "Well," said Anthony, reaching for his cheque-book, '*it was a good bihn' of soap. Let's see— you had $5,000 in cash." "I paid out $300 more of my own," said Kelly. "I had 132 STORIES FROM O. HENRY to go a little above the estimate. I got the express wagons and cabs mostly for $5; but the trucks and two-horse teams mostly raised me to $10. The motormen wanted $10, and some of the loaded teams $20. The cops struck me hardest — $50 I paid two, and the rest $20 and $25. But didn't it work beautiful, Mr. Rockwall.^ I'm glad William A. Brady wasn't onto that little outdoor vehicle mob scene. I wouldn't want Wilham to break his heart with jealousy, And never a rehearsal, either! The boys was on time to the fraction of a second. It was two hours before a snake could get below Greeley's statue. " "Thirteen hundred — there you are, Kelly," said Anthony, tearing off a check. "Your thousand, and the $300 you were out. You don't despise money, do you, Kelly?" "Me?" said Kelly. "I can lick the man that invented poverty." Anthony called Kelly when he was at the door. "You didn't notice," said he, "anywhere in the tie-up, a kind of a fat boy without any clothes on shooting arrows around with a bow, did you? " "Why, no," said Kelly, mystified. "I didn't. If he was like you say, maybe the cops pinched him before I got there." "I thought the little rascal wouldn't be on hand," chuckled Anthony. "Good-by, Kelly." AN UNFINISHED STORY From The Four Million. First published in McClure's Magazine, A.ugust, 1905. Two months later O. Henrj^ built another indictment. The Guilty Party, on the framework of An Unfinished Story; but the latter maintains its supremacy. In the plebiscite held by The Book- man, June, 1914, in which ten persons voted independently on the ten best stories by O. Henry, An Unfinished Story led with seven votes, A Municipal Report coming next with six votes. Then followed A Lickpenny Lover, The Furnished Room, and The Gift of the Magi, each with four votes; Mammon and the Archer and Let Me Feel Your Pulse, each with two votes. One of the finest touches in the story is the sudden and unexpected emergence of General Kitchener. O. Henry's tribute to his eyes was recalled by a London paper at the time of Lord Kitchener's death. "They strike you," says Harold Begbie in Kitchener: Organizer of Victory, "with a kind of clutching terror; you look at them, try to say something, look away, and then, trying to speak, find your eyes returning to that dreadful gaze, and once more choke with silence." Dulcie holds her own or is held to her own until General Kitchener " happens to be looking the other way." It is not often that O. Henry expresses loathing for anybody. It is worth noting, however, that the three most loathsome characters in our twenty-five stories are pilloried by O. Henry for the same offence, their treatment of women. Compare Mrs. Purdy in TJie Furnished Room, Piggy in this story, and Major Caswell in A Municipal Report. Piggy, the "connoisseur in star- vation," finds his prey only because there are men who hire working- girls for five or six dollars a week. It is for these employers that O. Henry reserves his terminal lightning. If satire is to humor as corporal punishment is to moral suasion, this story hints the gallows. We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or ether or some 133 134 STORIES FROM O. HENRY scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is a pleasing hypothesis; but there lingers yet some of the old, goodly terror of ortho- doxy. There are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You may talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. Both Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your listener dare not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a vision, then, shall furnish my theme — chosen with apologies and regrets instead of the more limited field of pretty Polly's small talk. I had a dream that was so far removed from the higher criticism that it had to do with the ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of- judgment theory. Gabriel had played his trump; and those of us who could not follow suit were arraigned for examination. I noticed at one side a gathering of professional bondsmen in solemn black and collars that buttoned behind; but it seemed there was some trouble about their real estate titles; and they did not appear to be getting any of us out. A fly cop — an angel policeman — flew over to me and took me by the left wing. Near at hand was a group of very pros- perous-looking spirits arraigned for judgment. "Do you belong with that bunch?" the policeman asked. "Who are they?" was my answer. "Why," said he, "they are " But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should occupy. Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or stuffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six dollars per week. The re- mainder was credited to her and debited to somebody else's account in the ledger kept by G Oh, primal energy, you say, Reverend Doctor Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy. AN UNFINISHED STORY 135 During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars per week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that amount. Don't care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger amounts. Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived on six dollars per week. One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat- pin within an eighth of an inch of her medulla oblongata, she said to her chum, Sadie — the girl that waits on you with her left side: "Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy." "You never did!" exclaimed Sadie admiringly. "Well, ain't you the lucky one.^^ Piggy's an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You'll have a swell time, Dulcie." Dulcie hurried homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks showed the delicate pink of life's — real life's — approaching dawn. It was Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week's wages. The streets were filled w^ith the rush-hour floods of people. The electric lights of Broadway were glowing — calling moths from miles, from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors' homes, turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. Man- hattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead-white, heavy-odored petals. Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have been spent otherwise — fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for breakfast, ten cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings; and five cents was to be squandered for licorice drops — the kind 136 STORIES FROM 0. HENRY that made your cheek look Hke the toothache, and last as long. The licorice was an extravagance — almost a carouse — but what is life without pleasures? Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other people do not know it when you go hungry. Dulcie went up to her room — the third floor back in a West Side broT\Tistone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance knowTi. Their mistake. Landladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the tips of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in vain until one's fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin w411 not remove it; therefore let us call it immovable. So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candle-power glow we will observe the room. Couch-bed, dressf^r, table, washstand, chair — of this mud^ the landlady was guilty. The rest was Dulcie's. On the dresser were her treasures — a gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar issued by a pickle works, a book on the divination of dreams, some rice powder in a glass dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied with a pink ribbon. Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O'Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-colored child as- saulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie's final judgment in art; but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his eyebrows at her infantile entomologist. Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, let us discreetly face the other way and gossip, For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On week-days her breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee AN UNFINISHED STORY 137 and cooked an egg over the gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at "Billy's" restaurant, at a cost of twenty- five cents — and tipped the waitress ten cents. New York presents so many temptations for one to run into ex- travagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening papers — show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper! — came to six cents; and two Sunday papers — one for the personal column and the other to read — were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one has to buy clothes, and I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie's life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. 'Tis a weary thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours. Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of-three-letters lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy's biography. He was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the magnanimity of a cat. ... He wore expensive clothes; and was a connoisseur in starvation. He could look at a shop-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He hung about the shopping districts, and prowled around in department stores with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell upon him no longer; my pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no carpenter. At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked 138 STORIES FROM O. HENRY at herseK in the wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satis* factory. The dark blue dress, fitting without a WTinkle, the hat with its jaunty black feather, the but-slightly-soiled gloves — all representing self-denial, even of food itself — were vastly becoming. Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentle^ man had ever asked her out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and exalted show. The girls said that Piggy was a "spender." There would be a grand dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and things to eat that strangely twisted the girl's jaws when they tried to tell about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew — by saving twenty cents a week instead of ten, in — let's see Oh, it would run into years! But there was a second- hand store in Seventh Avenue where Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood there with a spurious smile, sniflfing for cook ing by stolen gas. "A gentleman's do^Tistairs to see you," she said. "Name is Mr. Wiggins." By such epithet was Piggy knoTvm to unfortunate ones who had to take him seriously. Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then she stopped still, and bit her under-lip hard. While looking in her mirror she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, beautiful, stern eyes — the only one there was to approve or condemn what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful reproach on his handsome, melancholy face. General Kitchener fixed his wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser. Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady. AN UNFINISHED STORY 139 "Tell him I can't go," she said dully. "Tell him I'm sick, or something. Tell him I'm not going out." After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only friend. He was Dulcie 's ideal of a gallant knight. He looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful moustache was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet tender look in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would call at the house sometime, and ask for her, with his sword clanking against his high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain against a lamp-post she had opened the window and looked out. But there was no use. She knew that General Kitchener w^as away over in Japan, leading his army against the savage Turks; and he would never step out of his gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had vanquished Piggy that night. Yes, for that night. When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, and put on her old blue kimono. She wanted no din- ner. She sang two verses of "Sammy." Then she became intensely interested in a little red speck on the side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she drew up a chair to the rickety table, and told her fortune with an old deck of cards. "The horrid, impudent thing!" she said aloud. "And I never gave him a word or a look to make him think it!" At nine o'clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot of raspberry jam out of her trunk, and had a feast. She offered General Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the sphinx would have looked at a butterfly — if there are butterflies in the desert. "Don't eat it if you don't want to," said Dulcie. "And don't put on so many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you'd be so superior and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week." It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. And then she turned Benvenuto CelHni face 140 STORIES FROM O. HENRY downward with a severe gesture. But that was not inex- cusable; for she had always thought he was Henry VHI, and she did not approve of him. At half-past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It's an awful thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marl- borough, and Benvenuto Cellini. This story really doesn't get anj^here at all. The rest of it comes later — sometime when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way; and then As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them. "Who are they.^" I asked. "\Miy," said he, "they are the men who hired working- girls, and paid 'em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?" "Not on your immortality," said I. "I'm only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies." THE LAST LEAF From The Trimmed Lamp. First published in The World, October 15, 1905. In Bruno's Weeklij for December 11, 1915, "edited by Guido Bruno in his Garret on Washington Square," the editor says: "There is one man in American letters, the late O. Henry, who knew Greenwich Village, who knew it as it was and is, and who never hesitated to show m the most humorous way that it is not what newspapers and magazines and even some of the people down there themselves are trying to make you believe that it is. . . . And The Last Leaf is the very best story that he ever wrote and is the most characteristic of his personality and of his literary style." The story is at least a good illustration of the original way in which O. Henry used his sources. He is reported to have said, as he looked at a leaf -covered brick wall in Greenwich Village: "There is a story there, a story that suggests an episode in Murger's Vw de Boheme, where the grisette at night waters the flowers to keep them alive. The lifetime of the flowers, you remember, was to be the lifetime of that transient love." Murger narrates the incident in Chapter VI: *T will remam with you," Musette says to Marcel, "until the flowers that you have just given me shall fade." Unobserved by Marcel she slips out every night and waters the flowers so that the liaison is prolonged fifteen days instead of the expected two days. But in motif there is hardly more resemblance here than in the Slavic and Hungarian folk-songs in which the lover secretly feeds wheat to Chanticleer that he may delay his crowing, that being the signal for leave-taking. O. Henry, at any rate, has so improved the setting and so elevated the motif as to make the resemblance hardly recognizable. Is it not possible also that Oliver WendeU Hohnes's poem furnished more than the mere title of the story? "The fun in Hohnes," says F. H. Underwood (m Good Words, volume 28), "is always jostling the pathos. . . . The pathos of The Last Leaf is all the more surprising in connection with the queer humor in the description of the old man who is the subject of the poem." 141 142 STORIES FROM O. HENRY In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called "places." These *' places" make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper, and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himseK coming back, without a cent having been paid on account! So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth- century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a ''colony." At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. "Johnsy" was familiar for Joanna. One was from INIaine; the other from California. They had met at the table dliote of an Eighth Street "Delmonico's," and found their tastes in art, chicory salad, and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted. That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the East Side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown "places." Mr. Pneumonia was not what you w ould call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote ; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the next brick house. One morning the busy cioctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow. "She has one chance in — let as say, ten," he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. "And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have THE LAST LEAF 143 of lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?" "She — she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day," said Sue. "Paint? — bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice — a man, for instance? " "A man?" said Sue, with a jew's-harp twang in her voice. "Is a man worth — but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind." "Well, it is the weakness, then," said the doctor. "I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent, from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten." After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime. Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, dth her face toward the window. Sue stopped whisthng, thinking she was asleep. She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature. As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horse-show riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside. Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting — counting backward. "Twelve," she said, and a Httle later "eleven'*; and then 144 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "ten," and "nine"; and then "eight" and "seven," almost together. Sue looked solicitously out of the window. What was there to count .'^ There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks. "AVhat is it, dear?" asked Sue. "Six," said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. "They're falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now." "Five what, dear. Tell your Sudie." " Leaves. On the ivy vine. WTien the last one falls I must go, too. I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?" "Oh, I never heard of such nonsense," complained Sue, wdth magnificent scorn. "TVTiat have old i\'y leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a goosey. \Miy, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were — let's see exactly what he said — he said the chances were ten to one ! WTiy, that's almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self." "You needn't get any more wine," said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window. "There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go, too." "Johnsy, dear," said Sue, bending over her, "will you prom- ise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the win- dow until I am done working? I must hand those drawings THE LAST LEAF 145 in by to-morrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down.'* "Couldn't you draw in the other room?" asked Johnsy coldly. "I'd rather be here by you," said Sue. "Besides, I don't want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves." "Tell me as soon as you have finished," said Johnsy, clos- ing her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, "be- cause I want to see the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on every- thing, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves." "Try to sleep," said Sue. "I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to move till I come back." Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or ad- vertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff -in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above. Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank can- vas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She toxd him of Johnsy 's fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker. 146 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouteci his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings. "Vass!" he cried. "Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you al- low dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor lettle Miss Johnsy.'* "She is very ill and weak," said Sue, "and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn't. But I think you are a horrid old — old flibbertigibbet." "You are just like a woman!" yelled Behrman. "WTio said I vill not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gottl dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall al) go away. Gott! yes." Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock. When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade. " Pull it up; I want to see," she ordered, in a whisper. Wearily Sue obeyed. But, lo ! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground. THE LAST LEAF 147 "It is the last one," said Johnsy. "I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall die at the same time." "Dear, dear!" said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow, "think of me, if you won't think of yourself. What would I do.^" But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mys- terious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed. The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves. When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, com- manded that the shade be raised. The ivy leaf was still there. Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove. "I've been a bad girl, Sudie," said Johnsy. "Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and — no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook." An hour later she said. "Sudie, Some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples." The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left. "Even chances," said the doctor, taking Sue's thin, shaking hand in his. "With good nursing you'll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is — some kind of an artist, I believe Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no 148 STORIES FROM O. HENRY hope for him; but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable." The next day the doctor said to Sue : " She's out of danger. You've won. Nutrition and care now — that's all." And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all. *'I have something to tell you, white mouse," she said. *'Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room doTvTistairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold, They couldn't imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scat- tered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it, and — look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece — he painted it there the night that the last leaf feU." THE GIFT OF THE MAGI From The Four Million. First published in The World, December 10, 1905. "And when they [the magi] were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary, his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him; and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts: gold, and frankincense, and myrrh" {Matthew, 11, 11). These were the gifts of the magi but their gift was love; and love is the theme of this perfect little Christmas story. The infant Christ could make no use of gold or frankincense or myrrh, nor could Delia and Jim make use of the combs and the chain. But the love that prompted the giving shines all the brighter because the gifts were, in a utilitarian sense, egregious misfits. *'That the gold at least," says a learned commentator, "would be highly serviceable to the parents in their unexpected journey to Egypt and during their stay there — thus much at least admits of no dispute." Perhaps so. But read the famous passage once more and turn again to O. Henry's story. WTiich interpretation goes deeper into the heart of the incident? Which is more in accord with the spirit of the text? Which leaves you more in love with love? Notice that the real surprise in this story is not m what the lovers do. It is in what O. Henry says about what they do. He con- gratulates them. They acted wisely. But all this is told us at the end. The author has thus combined in a single paragraph his terminal surprise and the explanatory remarks that usually come first. See Sqimring the Circle, page 97. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent im- putation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Delia counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas. 149 150 STORIES FROM O. HENRY There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Delia did it. Wliich in- stigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, snifiles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. ^yhile the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A fur- nished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar de- scription, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad. In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name "Mr. James Dillingham Young." The "Dillingham" had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of "Dillingham" looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and un- assuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called "Jim" and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, al- ready introduced to you as Defla. Which is all very good. Delia finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. To- morrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn't go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling — something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim. There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a THE GIFT OF THE MAGI 151 rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Delia, being slender, had mastered the art. Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length. Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim's gold watch that had been his father's and his grand- father's. The other was Delia's hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Delia would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to de- preciate Her Majesty's jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the base- ment, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy. So now Delia's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and shining like a cascade of bro^Ti waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet. On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street. Where she stopped the sign read: "Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Delia ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too w^hite, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie." "Will you buy my hair?" asked Delia. "I buy hair," said Madame. "Take yer hat off and let's have a sight at the looks of it." Down rippled the brown cascade. "Twenty dollars," said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand. 152 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "Give it to me quick," said Delia. Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. For- get the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim's present. She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious orna- mentation — as all good things should be. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim's. It was like him. Quietness and value — the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain. WTien Delia reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curlmg irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. WTiich is always a tre- mendous task, dear friends — a mammoth task. Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close- lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically. "If Jim doesn't kill me," she said to herself, "before he takes a second look at me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do — oh! what could I do w^ith a dollar and eighty-seven cents .^" At 7 o'clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops. Jim was never late. Delia doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a mo- THE GIFT OF THE MAGI 153 ment. She had a habit of saying Uttle silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: "Please God, make him think I am still pretty." The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty- two — and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves. Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Delia, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been pre- pared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face. Delia wriggled off the table and went for him. "Jim, darling," she cried, "don't look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn't have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It'll grow out again — ^you won't mind, will you.^^ I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say * Merry Christmas!' Jim, and let's be happy. You don't know what a nice — what a beautiful, nice gift I've got for you." "You've cut off your hair.^^ " asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor. "Cut it off and sold it," said Delia. "Don't you like me just as well, anyhow .^^ I'm me without my hair, ain't I?" Jim looked about the room ciu*iously. "You say your hair is gone.^" he said, with an air almost of idiocy. "You needn't look for it," said Delia. "It's sold, I tell you — sold and gone, too. It's Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered," she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, "but nobody could ever coimt my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?" Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded 154 STORIES FROM O. HENRY his Delia. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrut* iny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year — what is the difference.? A mathematician or a wit would give you the 'WTong an- swer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on. Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table. "Don't make any mistake, Dell," he said, "about me. I don't think there's anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you'll un^^Tap that package you may see why you had me going awhile at first." AVhite fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat. For there lay The Combs — the set of combs, side and back, that Delia had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jeweled rims — just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. Thej" were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone. But she hugged them to her bossom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: "My hair grows so fast, Jim!" And then Delia leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, "Oh, oh!" Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit. "Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. THE GIFT OF THE MAGI 155 You'll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it." Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled. "Dell," said he, "let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em awhile. They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on." The magi, as you know, were wise men— wonderfully wise men— who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privi- lege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who gave gifts these two were the wisest . Of all who give and receive gifts such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. Thev are the magi. ^ THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN From Heart of the West. First published in Munsey's Magazine, July, 1906. Twice before this story was written O. Henry had staged a courtship in which the two rival suitors adopt opposed methods, and a year before his death he returned to the contest with four strategic suitors instead of two. But the contrast between the rivals is better based and better enacted in this roaring farce than in either Psyche and the Pskyscraper or Telemachus, Friend or A Poor Rule. The contrast here is between the ultra-matter-of-fact man and the ultra-imaginative man, between the statistical and the poetic mind. In its two leading characters the story is a sort of miniature Don Quixote: Sanderson Pratt, like Sancho Panza, is the f actualist; Idaho Green, like the Knight de la Mancha, is the ro- manticist. The factualist wins out, though O. Henry's heart was with Omar, not with Herkimer. Perhaps, however, he meant us to see in the character of Mrs. Sampson a victorious defeat for the up- holder of Omar. 'Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can't tell me why our college professors shouldn't be transferred to the meteorological de- partment. They have been learned to read; and they could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the main office what kind of weather to expect. But there's the other side of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an ele- gant education. We was up in Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla- Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grub- 156 THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN 157 staked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference. Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and stops to eat three cans of green-gages, and leave us a newspaper of modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom of the deck was "warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes." That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain, thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper. If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up in a eighteen by twenty -foot cabin for a month. Human nature won't stand it. When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other's jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet and called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a edict to me. Says he : "I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half -masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow's cud, only she's lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain't." "Mr. Green," says I, "you having been a friend of mine once, I have some hesitations in confessing to you that if I had my choice for society between you and a common yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of the inmates of this here cabin would be wagging a tail just at present." This way we goes on for two or three days, and then we 158 STORIES FROM O. HENRY quits speaking to one another. We divides up the cooking implements, and Idaho cooks his grub on one side of the fire- place, and me on the other. The snow is up to the windows, and we have to keep a fire all day. You see me and Idaho never had any education beyond reading and doing "if John had three apples and James five" on a slate. We never felt any special need for a university degree, though we had acquired a species of intrinsic intelli- gence in knocking around the world that we could use in emergencies. But snowbound in that cabin in the Bitter Roots, we felt for the first time that if we had studied Homer or Greek and fractions and the higher branches of informa- tion, we'd have had some resources in the line of meditation and private thought. I've seen them Eastern college fellows working in camps all through the West, and I never noticed but what education was less of a drawback to 'em than you w^ould think. WTiy, once over on Snake River, when Andrew Mc Williams' saddle horse got the botts, he sent a buckboard ten miles for one of these strangers that claimed to be a bota- nist. But that horse died. One morning Idaho was poking around with a stick on top of a little shelf that was too high to reach. Two books fell down to the floor. I started toward 'em, but caught Idaho's eye. He speaks for the first time in a week. "Don't burn your fingers," says he. "In spite of the fact that you're only fit to be the companion of a sleeping mud- turtle, I'll give you a square deal. And that's more than your parents did when they turned you loose in the world with the sociability of a rattlesnake and the bedside manner of a frozen turnip. I'll play you a game of seven-up, the winner to pick up his choice of the book, the loser to take the other." We played; and Idaho won. He picked up his book; and 1 took mine. Then each of us got on his side of the house and went to reading. I never was as glad to see a ten-ounce nugget as I was that book. And Idaho looked at his like a kid looks at a stick of candy. THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN 159 Mine was a little book about five by six inches called "Her- kimer's Handbook of Indispensable Information." I may be wrong, but I think that was the greatest book that ever was written. I've got it to-day; and I can stump you or any man fifty times in five minutes with the information in it. Talk about Solomon or the New York Tribune! Herkimer had cases on both of 'em. That man must have put in fifty years and traveled a million miles to find out all that stuff. There was the population of all cities in it, and the way to tell a girl's age, and the number of teeth a camel has. It told you the longest tunnel in the world, the number of the stars, how long it takes for chicken pox to break out, what a lady's neck ought to measure, the veto powers of Governors, the dates of the Roman aqueducts, how many pounds of rice going without three beers a day would buy, the average an- nual temperature of Augusta, Maine, the quantity of seed re- quired to plant an acre of carrots in drills, antidotes for poi- sons, the number of hairs on a blonde lady's head, how to pre- serve eggs, the height of all the mountains in the world, and the dates of all wars and battles, and how to restore drowned persons, and sunstroke, and the number of tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and what to do before the doctor comes — and a hundred times as many things besides. If there was anything Herkimer didn't know I didn't miss it out of the book. I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of education was compressed in it. I forgot the snow, and I forgot that me and old Idaho was on the outs. He was sit- ting still on a stool reading away with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look shining through his tan-bark whiskers. "Idaho," says I, "what kind of a book is yours?" Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any slander or malignity. "Why," says he, "this here seems to be a volume by Homer KM." "Homer K. M. what.?" I asked. 160 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "WTiy, just Homer K. M.," says he. "You're a liar," says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put me up a tree. "No man is going 'round signing books with his initials. If it's Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K. M. Jones, why don't you say so like a man instead of biting off the end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothes-line?" " I put it to you straight, Sandy," says Idaho, quiet. " It's a poem book," says he, "by Homer K. M. I couldn't get color out of it at first, but there's a vein if you follow it up. I wouldn't have missed this book for a pair of red blankets.'* "You're welcome to it," says I. "What I want is a disin- terested statement of facts for the mind to w;ork on, and that's what I seem to fiind in the book I've drawTi." "^Vhat you've got," says Idaho, "is statistics, the lowest grade of information that exists. They'll poison your mind. Give me old K. M.'s system of surmises. He seems to be a kind of a wine agent. His regular toast is 'nothing doing,' and he seems to have a grouch, but he keeps it so well lubri- cated with booze that his worst kicks sound like an invitation to split a quart. But it's poetry," says Idaho, "and I have sensations of scorn for that truck of yours that tries to con- vey sense in feet and inches. When it comes to explaining the instinct of philosophy through the art of nature, old K. M. has got your man beat by drills, rows, paragraphs, chest measurement, and average annual rainfall." So that's the way me and Idaho had it. Day and night all the excitement we got was studying our books. That snow- storm sure fixed us with a fine lot of attainments apiece. By the time the snow melted, if you had stepped up to me sud- denly and said: "Sanderson Pratt, what would it cost per square foot to lay a roof with twenty by twenty -eight tin at nine dollars and fifty cents per box?" I'd have told you as quick as light could travel the length of a spade handle at the rate of one hundred and ninety -two thousand miles per second. Howmany cando it? You wake up 'most any man you know in the middle of the night, and ask him quick to THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN 161 tell you the number of bones in the human skeleton exclusive of the teeth, or what percentage of the vote of the Nebraska Legislature overrules a veto. Will he tell you ? Try him and see. About what benefit Idaho got out of his poetry book I didn't exactly know. Idaho boosted the wine-agent every time he opened his mouth; but I wasn't so sure. This Homer K. M., from what leaked out of his libretto through Idaho, seemed to me to be a kind of a dog who looked at life like it was a tin can tied to his tail. After running himself half to death, he sits down, hangs his tongue out, and looks at the can and says: "Oh, well, since we can't shake the growler, let's get it filled at the corner, and all have a drink on me." Besides that, it seems he was a Persian; and I never hear of Persia producing anything worth mentioning unless it was Turkish rugs and Maltese cats. That spring me and Idaho struck pay ore. It was a habit of ours to sell out quick and keep moving. We unloaded on our grubstaker for eight thousand dollars apiece; and then we drifted down to this little town of Rosa, on the Salmon River, to rest up, and get some human grub, and have our whiskers harvested. Rosa was no mining-camp. It laid in the valley, and was as free of uproar and pestilence as one of them rural towns in the country. There was a three-mile trolley line champing its bit in the environs; and me and Idaho spent a week riding on one of the cars, dropping off of nights at the Sunset View Hotel. Being now well read as well as traveled, we was soon pro re nata with the best society in Rosa, and was in- vited out to the most dressed-up and high-toned entertain- ments. It was at a piano recital and quail-eating contest in the city hall, for the benefit of the fire company, that me and Idaho first met Mrs. De Ormond Sampson, the queen of Rosa society. Mrs. Sampson was a widow, and owned the only two-story house in town. It was painted yellow, and whichever way 162 STORIES FROM O. HENRY you looked from, you could see it as plain as egg on the chin of an O' Grady on a Friday. Twenty-two men in Rosa be- sides me and Idaho was trying to stake a claim on that yellow house. There was a dance after the song books and quail bones had been raked out of the Hall. Twenty-three of the bunch galloped over to Mrs. Sampson and asked for a dance. I side-stepped the two-step, and asked permission to escort her home. That's where I made a hit. On the way home says she: "Ain't the stars lovely and bright to-night, Mr. Pratt?" "For the chance they've got," says I, "they're humping themselves in a mighty creditable way. The big one you see is sixty-six billions of miles distant. It took thirty-six years for its light to reach us. With an eighteen-foot tele- scope you can see forty-three millions of 'em, including them of the thirteenth magnitude, which, if one was to go out now, you w^ould keep on seeing it for twenty-seven hundred years." "My!" says Mrs. Sampson. "I never knew that before. How warm it is ! I'm as damp as I can be from dancing so much." "That's easy to account for," says I, "when you happen to know that you've got two million sweat-glands working all at once. If every one of your perspiratory ducts, which are a quarter of an inch long, was placed end to end, they would reach a distance of seven miles." "Lawsy!" says Mrs. Sampson. "It sounds like an irriga- tion ditch you was describing, Mr. Pratt. How do you get all this knowledge of information.^" "From observation, Mrs. Sampson," I tells her. "I keep my eyes open when I go about the world." "Mr. Pratt," says she, "I always did admire a man of education. There are so few scholars among the sap-headed plug-uglies of this town that it is a real pleasure to converse with a gentleman of culture. I'd be gratified to have you call at my house whenever you feel so inclined." And that was the way I got the goodwill of the lady in the THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN 163 yellow house. Every Tuesday and Friday evenings I used to go there and tell her about the wonders of the universe as discovered, tabulated, and compiled from nature by Herki- mer. Idaho and the other gay Lutherans of the town got every minute of the rest of the week that they could. I never imagined that Idaho was trying to work on IVIrs. Sampson with old K. M.'s rules of courtship till one afternoon when I was on my way over to take her a basket of wild hog- plums. I met the lady coming down the lane that led to her house. Her eyes was snapping, and her hat made a danger- ous dip over one eye. "Mr. Pratt," she opens up, "this Mr. Green is a friend of yours, I believe." "For nine years," says I. "Cut him out," says she. "He's no gentleman!" "Why ma'am," says I, "he's a plain incumbent of the mountains, with asperities and the usual failings of a spend- thrift and a liar, but I never on the most momentous occasion had the heart to deny that he was a gentleman. It may be that in haberdashery and the sense of arrogance and display Idaho offends the eye, but inside, ma'am, I've found him impervious to the lower grades of crime and obesity. After nine years of Idaho's society, Mrs. Sampson," I winds up, "I should hate to impute him, and I should hate to see him imputed." "It's right plausible of you, Mr. Pratt," says Mrs. Samp- son, "to take up the curmudgeons in your friend's behalf; but it don't alter the fact that he has made proposals to me sufficiently obnoxious to ruffle the ignominy of any lady." "Why, now, now, now!" says I. "Old Idaho do that! I could believe it of myself sooner. I never knew but one thing to deride in him; and a blizzard was responsible for that. Once while we was snowbound in the mountains he became a prey to a kind of spurious and uneven poetry, which may have corrupted his demeanor." "It has," says Mrs. Sampson. "Ever since I knew him 164 STORIES FROM O. HENRY he has been reciting to me a lot of irreligious rhymes by some person he calls Ruby Ott, and who is no better than she should be, if you judge by her poetry." "Then Idaho has struck a new book," says I, "for the one he had was by a man who writes under the nom de phwie of K. M." "He'd better have stuck to it," says Mrs. Sampson, "what- ever it was. And to-day he caps the vortex. I get a bunch of flowers from him, and on 'em is pinned a note. Now, Mr. Pratt, you know a lady when you see her; and you know how I stand in Rosa society. Do you think for a moment that I'd skip out to the woods with a man along with a jug of wine and a loaf of bread, and go singing and cavorting up and down under the trees with him.'^ I take a little claret with my meals, but I'm not in the habit of packing a jug of it into the brush and raising Cain in any such style as that. And of course he'd bring his book of verses along, too. He said so. Let him go on his scandalous picnics alone! Or let him take his Ruby Ott with him. I reckon she wouldn't kick unless it was on account of there being too much bread along. And what do you think of your gentleman friend now, IVIr. Pratt?" "Well, 'm," says I, "it may be that Idaho's invitation was a kind of poetry, and meant no harm. May be it belonged to the class of rhymes they call figurative. They offend law and order, but they get sent through the mails on the grounds that they mean something that they don't say. I'd be glad on Idaho's account if you'd overlook it," says I, "and let us extricate our minds from the low regions of poetry to the higher planes of fact and fancy. On a beautiful afternoon like this, Mrs. Sampson," I goes on, "we should let our thoughts dwell accordingly. Though it is warm here, we should remember that at the equator the line of perpetual frost is at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Between the latitudes of forty degrees and forty-nine degrees it is from four thousand to nine thousand feet." "Oh, jVIt. Pratt," says Mrs. Sampson, "it's such a comfort THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN 165 to hear you say them beautiful facts after getting such a jar from that minx of a Ruby's poetry!" "Let us sit on this log at the roadside," says I, "and forget the inhumanity and ribaldry of the poets. It is in the glori- ous columns of ascertained facts and legalized measures that beauty is to be found. In this very log we sit upon, Mrs. Sampson," says I, "is statistics more wonderful than any poem. The rings show it was sixty years old. At the depth of two thousand feet it would become coal in three thousand years. The deepest coal mine in the world is at Killingworth, near Newcastle. A box four feet long, three feet w^de, and two feet eight inches deep will hold one ton of coal. If an artery is cut, compress it above the wound. A man's leg contains thirty bones. The Tower of London was burned in 1841." "Go on, Mr. Pratt," says Mrs. Sampson. "Them ideas is so original and soothing. I think statistics are just as lovely as they can be." But it wasn't till two weeks later that I got all that was coming to me out of Herkimer. One night I was waked up by folks hollering "Fire!" all around. I jumped up and dressed and went out of the hotel to enjoy the scene. When I seen it was Mrs. Sampson's house, I gave forth a kind of yell, and I was there in two minutes. The whole lower story of the yellow house was in flames, and every masculine, feminine, and canine in Rosa was there, screeching and barking and getting in the way of the firemen. I saw Idaho trying to get away from six firemen who were holding him. They was telling him the whole place was on fire downstairs, and no man could go in it and come out alive. "Where's Mrs. Sampson?" I asks. "She hasn't been seen," says one of the firemen. "She sleeps upstairs. We've tried to get in, but we can't, and our company hasn't got any ladders yet." I runs around to the light of the big blaze, and pulls the Handbook out of my inside pocket. I kind of laughed when 166 STORIES FROM O. HENRY I felt it in my hands — I reckon I was some daffy with the sen- sation of excitement. "Herky, old boy," I says to it, as I flipped over the pages, "you ain't ever lied to me yet, and you ain't ever thro wed me doTVTi at a scratch yet. Tell me what, old boy, tell me what!" says I. I turned to "\Miat to do in Case of Accidents," on page 117. I run my finger down the page, and struck it. Good old Herkimer, he never overlooked anything! It said: Suffocation from Inhaling Smoke or Gas. — There is nothing better than flaxseed. Place a few seed in the outer comer of the eye. I shoved the Handbook back in my pocket, and grabbed a boy that was running by. "Here," says I, giving him some money, "run to the drug store and bring a dollar's worth of flaxseed. Hurry, and you'll get another one for yourself. Now," I sings out to the crowd, "we'll have Mrs. Sampson!" And I throws away my coat and hat. Four of the firemen and citizens grabs hold of me. It's sure death, they say, to go in the house, for the floors was beginning to fall through. "How in blazes," I sings out, kind of laughing yet, but not feeling like it, "do you expect me to put flaxseed in a eye without the eye?" I jabbed each elbow in a fireman's face, kicked the bark off of one citizen's shin, and tripped the other one with a side hold. And then I busted into the house. If I die first I'll write you a letter and tell you if it's any worse down there than the inside of that yellow house was ; but don't believe it yet. I was a heap more cooked than the hurry-up orders of broiled chicken that you get in restaurants. The fire and smoke had me down on the floor twice, and was about to shame Herkimer, but the firemen helped me with their little stream of water, and I got to Mrs. Sampson's room. She'd lost conscientiousness from the smoke, so I wrapped her in THE HANDBOOK OF HYMEN 167 the bedclothes and got her on my shoulder. Well, the floors wasn't as bad as they said, or I never could have done it — not by no means. I carried her out fifty yards from the house and laid her on the grass. Then, of course, every one of them other twenty- two plaintiffs to the lady's hand crowded around with tin dippers of water ready to save her. And up runs the boy with the flaxseed. I unwrapped the covers from Mrs. Sampson's head. She opened her eyes and says: "Is that you, Mr. Pratt.?" "S-s-sh," says I. "Don't talk till you've had the remedy." I runs my arm around her neck and raises her head, gentle, and breaks the bag of flaxseed with the other hand; and as easy as I could I bends over and slips three or four of the seeds in the outer corner of her eye. Up gallops the village doc by this time, and snorts around, and grabs at Mrs. Sampson's pulse, and wants to know what I mean by any such sandblasted nonsense. "Well, old Jalap and Jerusalem oakseed," says I, "I'm no regular practitioner, but I'll show you my authority, anyway." They fetched my coat, and I gets out the Handbook. "Look on page 117," says I, "at the remedy for suffoca- tion by smoke or gas. Flaxseed in the outer corner of the eye, it says. I don't know whether it works as a smoke-con- sumer or whether it hikes the compound gastro-hippopotamus nerve into action, but Herkimer says it, and he was called to the case first. If you want to make it a consultation, there's no objection." Old doc takes the book and looks at it by means of his specs and a fireman's lantern. "Well, Mr. Pratt," says he, "you evidently got on the wrong line in reading your diagnosis. The recipe for suffoca- tion says : 'Get the patient into fresh air as quickly as possible, and place in a rechning position.' The flaxseed remedy is for *Dust and Cinders in the Eye,' on the line above. But, after all " 168 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "See here," interrupts Mrs. Sampson, "I reckon I've got something to say in this consultation. That flaxseed done me more good than anything I ever tried." And then she raises up her head and lays it back on my arm again, and says: "Put some in the other eye, Sandy dear." And so if you was to stop off at Rosa to-morrow, or any other day, you'd see a fine new yellow house with Mrs. Pratt, that was ^Irs. Sampson, embellishing and adorning it. And if you was to step inside you'd see on the marble-top centre table in the parlor "Herkimer's Handbook of Indispensable Information," all rebound in red morocco, and ready to be consulted on any subject pertaining to human happiness and wisdom. THE TRIMMED LAMP From The Trimmed Lamp. First published in McClure's Maga- s^ine, August, 1906. Unlike most of O. Henry's shop-girl stories The Trimmed Lamp does not concern itself with possible pitfalls but with means of self-improvement. It is a classic of self-culture through the vocation. Its text might well have been these words of the historian Froude: "Every occupation, even the meanest — I don't say the scavenger's or the chimney-sweep's — but every productive occupation which adds anything to the capital of man- kind, if followed assiduously with a desire to understand everything connected with it, is an ascending stair whose summit is nowhere, and from the successive steps of which the horizon of knowledge perpetually enlarges." Notice the three types of character sketched: Dan, like Kent in King Lear or Horatio in Hamlet, is the good, steady, stationary type; Nancy is the ascending type; Lou is the descending type. ''The Trimmed Lamp," said O. Henry, "is the other side of An Unfinished Story.''' It is the other side because Nancy, the leading character, moves or is seK-impelled upward, while Dulcie moved or was drawn downward. Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear "shop-girls" spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occu- pation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as "marriage-girls." Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active, country girls who had no ambition to go on the stage. The little cherub that sits up aloft guided them to a cheap 169 170 STORIES FROM O. HENRY and respectable boarding-house. Both found positions and became wage-earners. They remained chums. It is at the end of six months that I would beg you to step forward and be introduced to them. Meddlesome Reader: My Lady friends, Miss Nancy and Miss Lou. TMiile you are shaking hands please take notice — cautiously — of their attire. Yes, cautiously; for they are as quick to resent a stare as a lady in a box at the horse show is. Lou is a piece-work ironer in a hand laundry. She is clothed in a badly fitting purple dress, and her hat plume is four inches too long; but her ermine muff and scarf cost $25, and its fellow beasts will be ticketed in the windows at $7.98 before the season is over. Her cheeks are pink, and her light blue eyes bright. Contentment radiates from her. Nancy you would call a shop-girl — because you have the habit. There is no type ; but a perverse generation is always seeking a type; so this is what the type should be. She has the high-ratted pompadour, and the exaggerated straight- front. Her skirt is shoddy, but has the correct flare. No furs protect her against the bitter spring air, but she wears her short broadcloth jacket as jauntily as though it were Persian lamb ! On her face and in her eyes, remorseless type- seeker, is the typical shop-girl expression. It is a look of silent but contemptuous revolt against cheated womanhood; of sad prophecy of the vengeance to come. \^Tien she laughs her loudest the look is still there. The same look can be seen in the eyes of Russian peasants; and those of us left will see it some day on Gabriel's face when he comes to blow us up. It is a look that should wither and abash man; but he has been known to smirk at it and offer flowers — with a string tied to them. Now lift your hat and come away, while you receive Lou's cheery "See you again," and the sardonic, sweet smile of Nancy that seems, somehow, to miss you and go fluttering like a white moth up over the housetops to the stars. The two waited on the corner for Dan. Dan was Lou's steady company. Faithful.^ Well, he was on hand when THE TRIMMED LAMP 171 Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena servers to find her lamb. "Ain't you cold, Nance? " said Lou. "Say, what a chump you are for working in that old store for $8 a week! I made $18.50 last week. Of course ironing ain't as swell work as selling lace behind a counter, but it pays. None of us ironers make less than $10. And I don't know that it's any less respectful work, either." *'You can have it," said Nancy, w^th uplifted nose. "I'll take my eight a week and hall bedroom. I like to be among nice things and swell people. And look what a chance I've got ! Why, one of our glove girls married a Pittsburgh — steel maker, or blacksmith or something — the other day worth a million dollars. I'll catch a swell myself some time. I ain't bragging on my looks or anything; but I'll take my chances where there's big prizes offered. \^liat show would a girl have in a laundry .f^" "Why, that's where I met Dan," said Lou, triumphantly. "He came in for his Sunday shirt and collars and saw me at the first board, ironing. We all try to get to work at the first board. Ella Maginnis was sick that day, and I had her place. He said he noticed my arms first, how round and white they was. I had my sleeves rolled up. Some nice fellows come into laundries. You can tell 'em by their bring- ing their clothes in suit cases, and turning in the door sharp and sudden." "How can you wear a waist like that, Lou?" said Nancy, gazing down at the offending article with sweet scorn in her heavy-lidded eyes. "It shows fierce taste." "This waist?" cried Lou, w4th wide-eyed indignation. "Why, I paid $16 for this waist. It's worth twenty-five. A woman left it to be laundered, and never called for it. The boss sold it to me. It's got yards and yards of hand em- broidery on it. Better talk about that ugly, plain thing you've got on." "This ugly, plain thing," said Nancy, calmly, "was copied from one that Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher was wearing. The 172 STORIES FROM O. HENRY girls say her bill in the store last year was $12,000. I made mine, myself . It cost me $1.50. Ten feet away you couldn't tell it from hers." "Oh, well," said Lou, good-naturedly, "if you want to starve and put on airs, go ahead. But I'll take my job and good wages; and after hours give me something as fancy and attractive to w^ear as I am able to buy." But just then Dan came — a serious young man with a ready-made necktie, who had escaped the city's brand of frivolity — an electrician earning $30 per week who looked upon Lou with the sad eyes of Romeo, and thought her em- broidered waist a web in which any fly should delight to be caught. *'My friend, Mr. Owens — shake hands with Miss Dan- forth," said Lou. *' I'm mighty glad to know you. Miss Danforth," said Dan, with outstretched hand. "I've heard Lou speak of you so often." "Thanks," said Nancy, touching his fingers with the tips of her cool ones, "I've heard her mention you — a few times." Lou giggled. "Did you get that handshake from Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, Nance?" she asked. "If I did, you can feel safe in copying it," said Nancy. "Oh, I couldn't use it at all. It's too stylish for me. It's intended to set off diamond rings, that high shake is. Wait till I get a few and then I'll try it." "Learn it first," said Nancy wisely, "and you'll be more likely to get the rings." "Now, to settle this argument," said Dan, with his ready, cheerful smile, "let me make a proposition. As I can't take both of you up to Tiffany's and do the right thing, what do you say to a little vaudeville.'^ I've got the tickets. How about looking at stage diamonds since we can't shake hands with the real sparklers .f^" The faithful squire took his place close to the curb; Lou next, a little peacocky in her bright and pretty clothes; Nancy THE TRIMMED LAMP 173 on the inside, slender, and soberly clothed as the sparrow, but with the true Van Alstyne Fisher walk — thus they set out for their evening's moderate diversion. I do not suppose that many look upon a great department store as an educational institution. But the one in which Nancy worked was something like that to her. She was surrounded by beautiful things that breathed of taste and refinement. If you live in an atmosphere of luxury, luxury is yours whether your money pays for it, or another's. The people she served were mostly women whose dress, manners, and position in the social world were quoted as criterions. From them Nancy began to take toll — the best from each according to her view. From one she would copy and practice a gesture, from an- other an eloquent lifting of an eyebrow, from others, a man- ner of walking, of carrying a purse, of smiling, of greeting a friend, of addressing "inferiors in station." From her best beloved model, Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher, she made requi- sition for that excellent thing, a soft, low voice as clear as silver and as perfect in articulation as the notes of a thrush. Suffused in the aura of this high social refinement and good breeding, it was impossible for her to escape a deeper effect of it. As good habits are said to be better than good prin- ciples, so, perhaps, good manners are better than good habits. The teachings of your parents may not keep alive your New England conscience; but if you sit on a straight-back chair and repeat the words "prisms and pilgrims" forty times, the devil will flee from you. And when Nancy spoke in the Van Alstyne Fisher tones she felt the thrill of noblesse oblige to her very bones. There was another source of learning in the great depart- mental school. Whenever you see three or four shop-girls gather in a bunch and jingle their wire bracelets as an ac- companiment to apparently frivolous conversation, do not think that they are there for the purpose of criticizing the way Ethel does her back hair. The meeting may lack the dig- nity of the deliberative bodies of man; but it has all the in?- 174 STORIES FROM O. HENRY portance of the occasion on which Eve and her first daughter first put their heads together to make Adam understand his proper place in the household. It is Woman's Conference for Common Defense and Exchange of Strategical Theories of Attack and Repulse upon and against the World, which is a stage, and Man, its audience who Persists in Throwing Bouquets Thereupon. Woman, the most helpless of the young of any animal — with the fawn's grace but without its fleetness; with the bird's beauty but without its power of flight; with the honey-bee's burden of sweetness but without its Oh, let's drop that simile — some of us may have been stung. During this council of war they pass weapons one to an- other, and exchange stratagems that each has devised and formulated out of the tactics of life. *'I says to 'im," says Sadie, "ain't you the fresh thing! Who do you suppose I am, to be addressing such a remark to me? And what do you think he says back to me?" The heads, brown, black, flaxen, red, and yellow, bob together; the answer is given; and the parry to the thrust is decided upon, to be used by each thereafter in passages- at-arms with the common enemy, man. Thus Nancy learned the art of defense; and to woman suc- cessful defense means victory. The curriculum of a department store is a wide one. Perhaps no other college could have fitted her as well for her life's ambition — the drawing of a matrimonial prize. Her station in the store was a favored one. The music room was near enough for her to hear and become familiar with the works of the best composers — at least to acquire the familiarity that passed for appreciation in the social world in which she was vaguely trying to set a tentative and aspiring foot. She absorbed the educating influence of art wares, of costly and dainty fabrics, of adornments that are almost culture to women. The other girls soon became aware of Nancy's ambition. "Here comes your millionaire, Nancy," they would call to her THE TRIMMED LAMP 175 whenever any man who looked the role approached her coun- ter. It got to be a habit of men, who were hanging about while their women folk were shopping, to stroll over to the handkerchief counter and dawdle over the cambric squares. Nancy's imitation high-bred air and genuine dainty beauty was what attracted. Many men thus came to display their graces before her. Some of them may have been millionau-es ; others were certainly no more than their sedulous apes! Nancy learned to discriminate. There was a window at the end of the handkerchief counter; and she could see the rows of vehicles waiting for the shoppers in the street below. She looked and perceived that automobiles differ as well as do their owners. Once a fascinating gentleman bought four dozen hand- kerchiefs, and wooed her across the counter with a King Cophetua air. When he had gone one of the girls said: "What's wrong, Nance, that you didn't warm up to that !?^.^ He looks the swell article, all right, to me." "Him.?" said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; "not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought— silk! And he's got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please." Two of the most "refined" women in the store— a forelady and a cashier— had a few "swell gentlemen friends" with whom they now and then dined. Once they included Nancy m an invitation. The dinner took place in a spectacular cafe whose tables are engaged for New Year's Eve a year in advance. There were two "gentlemen friends"— one with- out any hair on his head— high living ungrew it; and we can prove It— the other young man whose worth and sophisti- cation he impressed upon you in two convincing ways- he swore that all the wme was corked; and he wore diamond cuff buttons. This young man perceived irresistible ex- ceUencies in Nancy. His taste ran to shop-girls; and here was one that added the voice and manners of his high social 176 STORIES FROM O. HENRY world to the franker charms of her own caste. So, on the following day, he appeared in the store and made her a serious proposal of marriage over a box of hemstitched., grass-bleached Irish linens. Nancy declined. A brown pompadour ten feet away had been using her eyes and ears. TVTien the rejected suitor had gone she heaped carboys of up- braidings and horror upon Nancy's head. *'^Miat a terrible little fool you are! That fellow's a millionaire — he's a nephew of old Van Skittles himself. And he was talking on the level, too. Have you gone crazy, Nance?" *'Have I?" said Nancy. "I didn't take him, did I? He isn't a millionaire so hard that you could notice it, anyhow. His family only allows him $20,000 a year to spend. The bald-headed fellow was guying him about it the other night at supper." The browTi pompadour came nearer and narrowed her eyes. "Say, what do you want?" she inquired, in a voice hoarse for lack of chewing-gum. "Ain't that enough for you? Do you want to be a Mormon, and marry Rockefeller and Glad- stone Dowie and the King of Spain and the whole bunch? Ain't $20,000 a year good enough for you? " Nancy flushed a little under the level gaze of the black, shallow eyes. "It wasn't altogether the money, Carrie," she explained. "His friend caught him in a rank lie the other night at dinner. It was about some girl he said he hadn't been to the theater with. Well, I can't stand a liar. Put everything together — I don't like him; and that settles it. When I sell out it's not going to be on any bargain day. I've got to have something that sits up in a chair like a man, anyhow. Yes, I'm looking out for a catch; but it's got to be able to do something more than make a noise like a toy bank." "The physiopathic ward for yours!" said the brown pom- padour, walking away. These high ideas, if not ideals — ^Nancy continued to cul- tivate on $8 per week. She bivouacked on the trail of the THE TRIMMED LAMP 177 great unknown "catch," eating her dry bread and tightening her belt day by day. On her face was the faint, soldierly, sweet, grim smile of the preordained man-hunter. The store was her forest; and many times she raised her rifle at game that seemed broad-antlered and big; but always some deep unerring instinct — perhaps of the huntress, perhaps of the woman — made her hold her fire and take the trail again. Lou flourished in the laundry. Out of her $18.50 per week she paid $6 for her room and board. The rest went mainly for clothes. Her opportunities for bettering her taste and manners were few compared with Nancy 's. In the steaming laundry there was nothing but work, work, and her thoughts of the evening pleasures to come. Many costly and showy fabrics passed under her iron; and it may be that her growing fondness for dress was thus transmitted to her through the conducting metal. When the day's work was over Dan awaited her outside, her faithful shadow in whatever light she stood. Sometimes he cast an honest and troubled glance at Lou's clothes that increased in conspicuity rather than in style; but this was no disloyalty; he deprecated the attention they called to her in the streets. And Lou was no less faithful to her chum. There was a law that Nancy should go with them on whatsoever outings they might take. Dan bore the extra burden heartily and in good cheer. It might be said that Lou furnished the color, Nancy the tone, and Dan the weight of the distraction-seek- ing trio. The escort, in his neat but obviously ready-made suit, his ready-made tie and unfailing, genial, ready-made wit, never startled or clashed. He was cf that good kind that you are likely to forget while they are present, but remember distinctly after they are gone. To Nancy's superior taste the flavor of these ready-made pleasures was sometimes a little bitter: but she was young.' and youth is a gourmand, when it cannot be a gourmet. "Dan is always wanting me to marry him right away," 178 STORIES FROM 0. HENRY Lou told her once. "But why should I? I'm independent I can do as I please with the money I earn; and he never would agree for me to keep on working afterward. And say, Nance, what do you want to stick to that old store for, and half starve and half dress yourself.'^ I could get you a place in the laundry right now if you'd come. It seems to me that you could afford to be a little less stuck-up if you could make a good deal more money." "I don't think I'm stuck-up, Lou," said Nancy, "but I'd rather live on half rations and stay where I am. I suppose I've got the habit. It's the chance that I want. I don't expect to be always behind a counter. I'm learning some- thing new every day. I'm right up against refined and rich people all the time — even if I do only wait on them; and I'm not missing any pointers that I see passing around." " Caught your millionaire yet.^ " asked Lou with her teasing Jaugh. "I haven't selected one yet," answered Nancy. "I've been looking them over." " Goodness ! the idea of picking over 'em ! Don't you ever let one get by you, Nance — even if he's a few dollars shy. But of course you're joking — millionaires don't think about working girls like us." "It might be better for them if they did," said Nancy, with cool wisdom. "Some of us could teach them how to take care of their money." "If one was to speak to me," laughed Lou, "I know I'd have a duck-fit." "That's because you don't know any. The only difference between swells and other people is you have to watch 'em closer. Don't you think that red silk lining is just a little bit too bright for that coat, Lou.^" Lou looked at the plain, dull olive jacket of her friend. "Well, no, I don't — but it may seem so beside that faded^ looking thing you've got on." "This jacket," said Nancy, complacently, "has exactly the cut and fit of one that Mrs. Van Alstyne Fisher was wear- THE TRIMMED LAMP 179 ing the other day. The material cost me $3.98. I suppose hers cost about $100 more." *'0h, well," said Lou lightly, "it don't strike me as million- aire bait. Shouldn't wonder if I catch one before you do, anyway." Truly it would have taken a philosopher to decide upon the values of the theories held by the two friends. Lou, lacking that certain pride and fastidiousness that keeps stores and desks filled with girls working for the barest living, thumped away gaily with her iron in the noisy and stifling laundry. Her wages supported her even beyond the point of comfort; so that her dress profited until sometimes she cast a sidelong glance of impatience at the neat but inelegant apparel of Dan — Dan the constant, the immutable, the undeviating. As for Nancy, her case was one of tens of thousands. Silk and jewels and laces and ornaments and the perfume and music of the fine world of good-breeding and taste — these were made for woman; they are her equitable portion. Let her keep near them if they are a part of life to her, and if she will. She is no traitor to herself, as Esau was; for she keeps her birthright and the pottage she earns is often very scant. In this atmosphere Nancy belonged; and she throve in it and ate her frugal meals and schemed over her cheap dresses with a determined and contented mind. She already knew woman; and she was studying man, the animal, both as to his habits and eligibility. Some day she would bring down the game that she wanted; but she promised herself it would be what seemed to her the biggest and the best, and nothing smaller. Thus she kept her lamp trimmed and burning to receive the bridegroom when he should come. But, another lesson she learned, perhaps unconsciously. Her standard of values began to shift and change. Some- times the dollar-mark grew blurred in her mind's eye, and shaped itself into letters that spelled such words as "truth" 180 STORIES FROM O. HENRY and "honor" and now and then just *'bHndness." Let us make a hkeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a Httle dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt. So, Nancy wondered sometimes if Persian lamb was always quoted at its market value by the hearts that it covered. One Thursday evening Nancy left the store and turned across Sixth Avenue westward to the laundry. She was ex- pected to go with Lou and Dan to a musical comedy. Dan was just coming out of the laundry when she arrived. There was a queer, strained look on his face. "I thought I would drop around to see if they had heard from her," he said. "Heard from who?" asked Nancy. "Isn't Lou there?" "I thought you knew," said Dan. "She hasn't been here or at the house where she lived since Monday. She moved all her things from there. She told one of the girls in the laundry she might be going to Europe." "Hasn't anybody seen her anyT\^here?" asked Nancy. Dan looked at her with his jaws set grimly, and a steely gleam in his steady gray eyes. "They told me in the laundry," he said, harshly, "that they saw her pass yesterday — in an automobile. With one of the millionaires, I suppose, that you and Lou were forever busying your brains about." For the first time Na\icy quailed before a man. She laid her hand that trembled slightly on Dan's sleeve. "You've no right to say such a thing to me, Dan — as if I had anything to do with it ! " "I didn't mean it that way," said Dan, softening. He fumbled in his vest pocket. "I've got the tickets for the show to-night," he said, with a gallant show of lightness. "If you " Nancy admired pluck whenever she saw it. "I'll go with you, Dan," she said. Three months went by before Nancy saw Lou again. THE TRIMMED LAMP 181 At twilight one evening the shop-girl was hurrying home along the border of a little quiet park. She heard her name called, and wheeled about in time to catch Lou rushing into her arms. After the first embrace they drew their heads back as serpents do, ready to attack or to charm, with a thousand questions trembling on their swift tongues. And then Nancy noticed that prosperity had descended upon Lou, manifesting itself in costly furs, flashing gems, and creations of the tailors' art. "You little fool!" cried Lou, loudly and affectionately. "I see you are still working in that store, and as shabby as ever. And how about that big catch you were going to make • — nothing doing yet, I suppose.?^" And then Lou looked, and saw that something better than prosperity had descended upon Nancy — something that shone brighter than gems in her eyes and redder than a rose in her cheeks, and that danced like electricity anxious to be loosed from the tip of her tongue. "Yes, I'm still in the store," said Nancy, "but I'm going to leave it next week. I've made my catch — the biggest catch in the world. You won't mind now, Lou, will you? — I'm going to be married to Dan — to Dan! — he's my Dan now — why, Lou!" Around the corner of the park strolled one of those new- crop, smooth-faced young policemen that are making the force more endurable — at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur coat and diamond-ringed hands crouch- ing down against the iron fence of the park sobbing tur- bulently, while a slender, plainly dressed working girl leaned close, trying to console her. But the Gibsonian cop, being of the new order, passed on, pretending not to notice, for he was w^ise enough to know that these matters are beyond help so far as the power he represents is concerned, though he rap the pavement with his night-stick till the sound goes up to the furthermost stars. THE CABALLERO'S WAY From Heart of the West. First published in Everybody's Magazine, July, 1907. For O. Henry's intimate knowledge of the life por- trayed in this dramatic story, see Chapter V of the 0. Henry Biog- raphy. The style alone, however, is proof that he does not write from hearsay or book sources. It is different from the New York style. Though equally direct and vivid, it is wider-spaced. It is conscious of a sky above it rather than a roof. Forty of O. Henry's stories take place in Texas. When he was a prisoner m Ohio, a guard asked him why he was sitting in a certain corner of the yard. "Are you seeking the shade.^" "No, Mr. Nolan," he replied, "I like to sit over here because I feel a little nearer Texas." This stor3% however. Jinks him interestingly to Greensboro, his birthplace. His school- mates remember how at the age of ten he used to sing or shout a Negro song running, *Tf you don't stop fooling with my Lula I tell you what I'll do ; I'll feel around your heart with a razor And I'll cut your liver out too." A slightly different version, from East Tennessee, may be found in The Journal of American Folk-Lore, April-June, 1915, page 184. Note how a fragment of this stanza with its ominous "and so on" is used to foreshadow without revealing the tragic ending of the story, and how at the close the same fragment recurs but without "and so on" — there was no need of it. The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him- 182 THE CABALLERO'S WAY 183 The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it — because he was quick-tempered — to avoid arrest — for his own amusement — any reason that came to his mind w^ould suflfice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras. Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest — oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more — the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed jacal near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a father oi grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a con- tinuous drunken dream from drinking mescal. Back of the jacal a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff's posse, denying knowledge of her man in soft melange of Spanish and English. One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, ex officio, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by mur- derers and desperadoes in the said captain's territory. The captain turned the color of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant 184 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order. Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful couleur de rose through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the end of his gamboge moustache. The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away. Six feet two, blond as a viking, quiet as a deacon, dan- gerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the jacales, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid. Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid's pastimes to shoot Mexicans "to see them kick": if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be enter- tained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged w^ith upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with "quien sabes" and denials of the Kid's acquaintance. But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing — a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking. "No use to ask them Mexicans," he said to Sandridge. "They're afraid to tell. This hombre they call the Kid — Goodall is his name, ain't it? — he's been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run across him at — but I guess I don't keer to say, myself. I'm two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about. But this kid's got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see. She lives in that jacal a hundred yards down the arroyo at the edge of the pear. Maybe she — no, I don't suppose she would, but that jacal would be a good place to watch, anyway." Sandridge rode down to the jacal of Perez. The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already THE CABALLERO'S WAY 185 covered the grass-thatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves. The old Mexi- can lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a stupor from his mescal^ and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes — so old his wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the jacal stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman. The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and suc- cessful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two per- sons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly/ abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him. Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this. He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. He seemed to illuminate the shadow of the pear when he smiled, as though the sun were rising again. The men she had known had been small and dark. Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday. As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the hum- ming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird. The newly lighted sun-god asked for a drink of water. Tonia brought it from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter. Sandridge considered it necessary to dismount so as to lessen the trouble of her ministrations. 186 STORIES FROM O. HENRY I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human heart; but I assert, by the chronicler's right, that before a quarter of an hour had sped, Sandridge was teaching her how to plait a six-strand rawhide stake-rope, and Tonia had explained to him that were it not for her little English book that the peripatetic padre had given her and the little crippled chivo, that she fed from a bottle, she would be very, very lonely indeed. Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid's fences needed re- pairing, and that the adjutant-general's sarcasm had faller* upon unproductive soil. In his camp by the water hole Lieutenant Sandridge an- nounced and reiterated his intention of either causing the Cisco Kid to nibble the black loam of the Frio country prair- ies or of haling him before a judge and jury. That sounded business-like. Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolt Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia's slim, slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly grow- ing lariata. A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach. The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the rear of the jacal. Thus he might bring down the kite and the humming-bird with one stone. While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties. He moodily shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town marshal (plugging him neatly in the center of his tin badge), and then rode away, morose and unsatisfied. No true artist is uplifted by shoot- ing an aged man carrying an old-style .38 bulldog. On his way the Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of de- light. He yearned for the woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty devotion. He THE CABALLERO'S WAY 187 wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jug under the brush shelter, and tell him how the chivo was thriving on the bottle. The Kid turned the speckled roan's head up the ten-mile pear flat that stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. The roan whickered; for he had a sense of locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse; and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the end of a forty -foot stake rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe's straw- roofed hut. More weird and lonesome than the journey of an Ama- zonian explorer is the ride of one through a Texas pear flat. With dismal monotony and startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way. The demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the parched traveler with its lush gray greenness. It warps itself a thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to lure the rider into blind and impassable spine- defended "bottoms of the bag," leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass whirling in his head. To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends hovering about. But it was not so with the Kid and his mount. Winding, twisting, circling, tracing the most fantastic and bewildering trail ever picked out, the good roan lessened the distance to the Lone Wolf Crossing with every coil and turn that he made. While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and he sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was a single-minded man of conven- tional ideas. He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it. It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its be- ginning as near as may be to these words: 188 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'll do and so on. The roan was inured to it, and did not mind But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own consent to refrain from contributing to the world's noises. So the Kid, by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia's jacal, had reluctantly allowed his song to die away — not because his vocal performance had become less charm- ing to his own ears, but because his laryngeal muscles were aweary. As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then, where the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the jacal, and the hackberry tree in the edge of the arroyo. A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan — and gazed intently through the prickly openings. Then he dismounted, dropped the roan's reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian. The roan, knowing his part, stood still, making no sound. The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitered between the leaves of a clump of cactus. Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the jacal, sat his Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble small fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six-strand plait. Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A gun-scabbard will make that sound when one THE CABALLERO'S WAY 189 grasps the handle of a six-shooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia's fingers needed close atten- tion. And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid. "Remember, then," said Tonia, "you must not come again until I send for you. Soon he will be here. A vaquero at the tienda said to-day he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago. When he is that near he always comes. If he comes and finds you here he will kill you. So, for my sake, you must come no more until I send you the word." "All right," said the ranger. "And then what.?" "And then," said the girl, "you must bring your men here and kill him. If not, he will kill you." "He ain't a man to surrender, that's sure," said Sandridge. "It's kill or be killed for the oflficer that goes up against Mr. Cisco Kid." "He must die," said the girl. "Otherwise there will not be any peace in the world for thee and me. He has killed many. Let him so die. Bring your men, and give him no chance to escape." "You used to think right much of him," said Sandridge^ Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon-tinted arm over the ranger's shoulder. "But then," she murmured in liquid Spanish, "I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man ! And thou art kind and good, as well as strong. Could one choose him, knowing thee ? Let him die ; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me." "How can I know when he comes? " asked Sandridge. "When he comes," said Tonia, "he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the lavandera, has a swift pony. I will write a letter to thee and send it by him, saying how it will be best to come upon him. By Gregorio will the letter come. And bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the 190 STORIES FROM O. HENRY rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is 'El Chivato,* as they call him, to send a ball from his pistola.'' "The Kid's handy with his gun, sure enough," admitted Sandridge, "but when I come for him I shall come alone I'll get him by myself or not at all. The Cap wrote one or two things to me that make me want to do the trick without any help. You let me know when Mr. Kid arrives, and I'll do the rest." "I will send you the message by the boy Gregorio," said the girl. "I knew you were braver than that small slayer of men who never smiles. How could I ever have thought I cared for him.f^" It was time for the ranger to ride back to his camp on the water hole. Before he mounted his horse he raised the slight form of Tonia with one arm high from the earth for a parting salute. The drowsy stillness of the torpid summer air still lay thick upon the dreaming afternoon. The smoke from the fire in the jacal, where the frijoles blubbered in the iron pot, rose straight as a plumb-line above the clay-daubed chimney. No sound or movement disturbed the serenity of the dense pear thicket ten yards away. When the form of Sandridge had disappeared, loping his big dun down the steep banks of the Frio crossing, the Kid crept back to his own horse, mounted him, and rode back along the tortuous trail he had come. But not far. He stopped and waited in the silent depths of the pear until half an hour had passed. And then Tonia heard the high, untrue notes of his unmusical singing coming nearer and nearer; and she ran to the edge of the pear to meet him. The Kid seldom smiled; but he smiled and waved his hat when he saw her. He dismounted, and his girl sprang into his arms. The Kid looked at her fondly. His thick, black hair clung to his head like a wrinkled mat. The meeting brought a slight ripple of some undercurrent of feeling to his smooth, dark face that was usually as motionless as a clay mask. THE CABALLERO'S WAY 191 **How's my girl?" he asked, holding her close. "Sick of waiting so long for you, dear one," she answered. "My eyes are dim with always gazing into that devil's pin- cushion through which you come. And I can see into it such a little way, too. But you are here, beloved one, and I will not scold. Que mal muchacho ! not to come to see your alma more often. Go in and rest, and let me water your horse and stake him with the long rope. There is cool water in the jar for you." The Kid kissed her affectionately. " Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me," said he. "But if you'll run in, chica, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the caballo, I'll be a good deal obliged." Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly. He was muy cahallero, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned. For them he had always gentle words and consideration. He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman. He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness de- clared their disbelief in the stories circulated about Mr, Kid. One shouldn't believe everything one heard, they said. When confronted by their indignant men folk with proof of the caballero's deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow. Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride that he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding-place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind. At the end of the short twilight they gathered around a sup- per offrijolesy goat steaks, canned peaches, and coffee, by the 192 STORIES FROM O. HENRY light of a lantern in the jacal. Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corraled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a gray blanket. Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid's last visit; it was as all his other home-comings had been. Then outside Tonia sw^ung in a grass hammock with her guitar and sang sad canciones de amor. *'Do you love me just the same, old girl.^^" asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers. "Always the same, little one,'* said Tonia, her dark eyes lingering upon him. "I must go over to Fink's," said the Kid, rising, "for some tobacco. I thought I had another sack in my coat. I'll be back in a quarter of an hour." "Hasten," said Tonia, "and tell me — how long shall I call you my own this time.^ Will you be gone again to-morrow, leaving me to grieve, or will you be longer with your Tonia .^ " "Oh, I might stay two or three days this trip," said the Kid, yawning. "I've been on the dodge for a month, and I'd like to rest up." He was gone half an hour for his tobacco. When he re- turned Tonia was still lying in the hammock. "It's funny," said the Kid, "how I feel. I feel like there was somebody lying behind every bush and tree waiting to shoot me. I never had mullygrubs like them before. May- be it's one of them presumptions. I've got half a notion to light out in the morning before day. The Guadalupe coun- try is burning up about that old Dutchman I plugged down there." "You are not afraid — no one could make my brave little one fear." "Well, I haven't been usually regarded as a jack-rabbit when it comes to scrapping; but I don't want a posse smoking me out when I'm in your jacal. Somebody might get hurt that oughtn't to." THE CABALLERO'S WAY 193 ''Remain with your Tonia; no one will find you here." The Kid looked keenly into the shadows up and down the arroyo and toward the dim lights of the Mexican village. "I'll see how it looks later on," was his decision. At midnight a horseman rode into the rangers' camp, blazing his way by noisy "halloes" to indicate a pacific mission. Sandridge and one or two others turned out to in- vestigate the row. The rider announced himself to be Do- mingo Sales, from the Lone Wolf Crossing. He bore a letter for Senor Sandridge. Old Luisa, the lavandera, had per- suaded him to bring it, he said, her son Gregorio being too ill of a fever to ride. Sandridge lighted the camp lantern and read the letter. These were its words : Dear One: He has come. Hardly had you ridden away when he came out of the pear. When he first talked he said he would stay three days or more. Then as it grew later he was like a wolf or a fox, and walked about without rest, looking and listening. Soon he said he must leave before daylight when it is dark and stillest. And then he seemed to suspect that I be not true to him. He looked at me so strange that I am frightened. I swear to him that I love him, his own Tonia. Last of all he said I must prove to him I am true. He thinks that even now men are waiting to kill him as he rides from my house. To escape he says he will dress in my clothes, my red skirt and the blue waist I wear and the brown mantilla over the head, and thus ride away. But before that he says that I must put on his clothes, his pantalones and camisa and hat, and ride away on his horse from the jacal as far as the big road beyond the crossing and back again. This before he goes, so he can tell if I am true and if men are hidden to shoot him. It is a terrible thing. An hour before daybreak this is to be. Come, my dear one, and kill this man and take me for your Tonia. Do not try to take hold of him alive, but kill him quickly. Knowing all, you should do that. You must come long before the time and hide yourself in the little shed near the jacal where the wagon and saddles are kept. It is dark in there. He will wear my red skirt and blue waist and brown mantilla. I send you a hundred kisses. Come surely and shoot quickly and ^*"^^g^t- Thine Own Tonia. 194 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Sandridge quickly explained to his men the official part of the missive. The rangers protested against his going alone. "I'll get him easy enough," said the lieutenant. "The girl's got him trapped. And don't even think he'll get the drop on me." Sandridge saddled his horse and rode to the Lone Wolf Crossing. He tied his big dun in a clump of brush on the arroyo, took his Winchester from its scabbard, and care- fully approached the Perez jacal. There was only the half of a high moon drifted over by ragged, milk-white gulf clouds. The wagon-shed was an excellent place for ambush; and the ranger got inside it safely. In the black shadow of the brush shelter in front of the jacal he could see a horse tied and hear him impatiently pawing the hard-trodden earth. He waited almost an hour before two figures came out of the jacal. One, in man's clothes, quickly mounted the horse and galloped past the wagon-shed toward the crossing and village. And then the other figure, in skirt, waist, and man- tilla over its head, stepped out into the faint moonlight, gaz- ing after the rider. Sandridge thought he would take his chance then before Tonia rode back. He fancied she might not care to see it. "Throw up your hands," he ordered loudly, stepping out of the wagon-shed with his Winchester at his shoulder. There was a quick turn of the figure, but no movement to obey, so the ranger pumped in the bullets — one — two — three — and then twice more; for you never could be too sure of bringing down the Cisco Kid. There was no danger of missing at ten paces, even in that half moonlight. The old ancestor, asleep on his blanket, was awakened by the shots. Listening further, he heard a great cry from some man in mortal distress or anguish, and rose up grumbling at the disturbing ways of moderns. The tall, red ghost of a man burst into the jacal, reaching one hand, shaking like a tule reed, for the lantern hanging on its nail. The other spread a letter on the table. THE CABALLERO'S WAY 195 "Look at this letter, Perez," cried the man. "Who wrote it?" "Ah, Dios! it is Senor Sandridge," mumbled the old man, approaching. '' Pues, senor, that letter was written by ^El ChivatOy' as he is called — by the man of Tonia. They say he is a bad man; I do not know. While Tonia slept he wrote the letter and sent it by this old hand of mine to Domingo Sales to be brought to you. Is there anything wrong in the letter? I am very old; and I did not know. Valgame Dios! it is a very foolish world; and there is nothing in the house to drink — nothing to drink." Just then all that Sandridge could think of to do was to go outside and throw himself face downward in the dust by the side of his humming-bird, of whom not a feather fluttered. He was not a caballero by instinct, and he could not under- stand the niceties of revenge. A mile away the rider who had ridden past the wagon- shed struck up a harsh, untuneful song, the words of which began: Don't you monkey with my Lulu girl Or I'll tell you what I'U do THE WORLD AND THE DOOR From Whirligigs. First published in The American Magazine, August, 1907. O. Henry never treated a bigger theme than the subject that gives unity to this story. On a first reading the gist of it would seem to be that while love may of course be based on community of taste, of feeling, of experience, it cannot be based on community of guilt; as soon as the engaged murderers find that they are not murderers, it's all off with them. But this theme, touched upon in the earlier Blind Man's Holiday, is not the theme of The World and the Door. This is proved by the title, by the develop- ment of the plot, and by what O. Henry himself said many times about the story. The real theme is that in the normal man and woman the desire for the larger fellowship of the world, for mixmg with folks, for having friends and neighbors, is innate and irre- sistible. Love itself when pitted against it — certainly a love like that of Merriam and Mrs. Conant — will be found the weaker passion. Community of supposed guilt, the dream of being a world to themselves, made the two lovers shut out the larger world and close the door — as they thought. But with the consciousness of innocence there came to both the inspiriting vision of a slowly open- ing door. "The whole out-of-doors is mine once more" is what throbbed through Merriam's pulses, and Mrs. Conant's thoughts reverted instantly and exultantly to the world that she thought she had shut out, to domestic and neighborly things, to the chit-chat of department stores, to an apron for the cook, patterns for sleeves, callers, tea. That italicized paragraph is one of O. Henry's triumphs, an illustration of how often his romanticism is only realism touched with understanding. This was the story that he wished to drama- tize so as to stage for all time the inextinguishable desire of those down and out to get back to civilization. "O. Henry talked for hours about this theme," says Mr. Oilman Hall. "He wrote me," says Mrs. Porter, "that two acts of the play. The World and the Door, were just about finished. As you say, it was to show that every human soul has this tendency toward respectability. It was greater, he insisted, than love." 196 THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 197 A FAVORITE dodge to get your story read by the public is to assert that it is true, and then add that Truth is stranger than Fiction. I do not know if the yarn I am anxious for you to read is true; but the Spanish purser of the fruit steamer El Carrero swore to me by the shrine of Santa Guadalupe that he had the facts from the U. S. vice-consul at La Paz — a person who could not possibly have been cognizant of half of them. As for the adage quoted above, I take pleasure in punctur- ing it by affirming that I read in a purely fictional story the other day the hne : ** 'Be it so,' said the policeman." Nothing so strange has yet cropped out in Truth. When H. Ferguson Hedges, millionaire promoter, investor, and man-about-New-York, turned his thoughts upon mat- ters convivial, and word of it went '*down the line," bouncers took a precautionary turn at the Indian clubs, waiters put ironstone china on his favorite tables, cab drivers crowded close to the curbstone in front of all-night cafes, and careful cashiers in his regular haunts charged up a few bottles to his account by way of preface and introduction. As a money power a one-millionaire is of small account in a city where the man who cuts your slice of beef behind the free-lunch counter rides to work in his own automobile. But Hedges spent his money as lavishly, loudly, and showily as though he were only a clerk squandering a week's wages. And, after all, the bartender takes no interest in your re- serve fund. He would rather look you up on his cash register, than in Bradstreet. On the evening that the material allegation of facts begins, Hedges was bidding dull care begone in the company of five or six good fellows — acquaintances and friends who had gathered in his wake. Among them were two younger men — Ralph Merriam, a broker, and Wade, his friend. Two deep-sea cabmen were chartered. At Columbus Circle they hove to long enough to revile the statue of the 198 STORIES FROM O. HENRY great navigator, unpatriotically rebuking him for having voyaged in search of land instead of Hquids. Midnight ov"er- took the party marooned in the rear of a cheap cafe far up- town. Hedges was arrogant, overriding, and quarrelsome. He was burly and tough, iron-gray but vigorous, "good" for the rest of the night. There was a dispute — about nothing that matters — and the five-fingered words were passed — the words that represent the glove cast into the lists. Merriam played the role of the verbal Hotspur. Hedges rose quickly, seized his chair, swung it once and smashed wildly down at Merriam's head. Merriam dodged, drew a small revolver and shot Hedges in the chest. The leading roysterer stumbled, fell in a wry heap, and lay still. Wade, a commuter, had formed that habit of promptness. He juggled Merriam out a side door, walked him to the corner, ran him a block, and caught a hansom. They rode five minutes and then got out on a dark corner and dismissed the cab. Across the street the lights of a small saloon be- trayed its hectic hospitality. *'Go in the back room of that saloon," said Wade, "and wait. I'll go find out what's doing and let you know. Yov may take two drinks while I am gone — no more." At ten minutes to one o'clock Wade returned. "Brace up, old chap," he said. "The ambulance got there just as I did. The doctor says he's dead. You may have one more drink. You let me run this thing for you. You've got to skip. I don't believe a chair is legally a deadly weapon. You've got to make tracks, that's all there is to it." Merriam complained of the cold querulously, and asked for another drink. "Did you notice what big veins he had on the back of his hands?" he asked. "I never could stand — I never could " "Take one more," said Wade, "and then come on. I'll see you through." Wade kept his promise so well that at eleven o'clock the next morning Merriam, with a new suit case full of new THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 199 clothes and hair-brushes, stepped quietly on board a Httle 500-ton fruit steamer at an East River pier. The vessel had brought the season's first cargo of limes from Port Limon, and was homeward bound. Merriam had his bank balance of $2,800 in his pocket in large bills, and brief in- structions to pile up as much water as he could between him- self and New York. There was no time for anything more. From Port Limon Merriam worked down the coast by schooner and sloop to Colon, thence across the isthmus to Panama, where he caught a tramp bound for Callao and such intermediate ports as might tempt the discursive skipper from his course. It was at La Paz that Merriam decided to land — La Paz the Beautiful, a little harborless town smothered in a living green ribbon that banded the foot of a cloud-piercing moun- tain. Here the little steamer stopped to tread water while the captain's dory took him ashore that he might feel the pulse of the cocoanut market. Merriam went too, with his suit case, and remained. Kalb, the vice-consul, a Grseco -Armenian citizen of the United States, born in Hessen-Darmstadt, and educated i» Cincinnati ward primaries, considered all Americans hi* brothers and bankers. He attached himself to Merriam 's elbow, introduced him to every one in La Paz who wore shoes, borrowed ten dollars, and went back to his hammock. There was a little wooden hotel in the edge of a banana grove, facing the sea, that catered to the tastes of the few foreigners that had dropped out of the world into the triste Peruvian town. At Kalb's introductory: "Shake hands with ," he had obediently exchanged manual salutations with a German doctor, one French and two Italian mer- chants, and three or four Americans who were spoken of as gold men, rubber men, mahogany men — anything but men of living tissue. After dinner Merriam sat in a corner of the broad front galeria with Bibb, a Vermonter interested in hydraulic min- ing, and smoked and drank Scotch *' smoke." The moonlit 200 STORIES FROM O. HENRY sea, spreading infinitely before him, seemed to separate him beyond all apprehension from his old life. The horrid tragedy in which he had played such a disastrous part now began, for the first time since he stole on board the fruiter, a wretched fugitive, to lose its sharper outlines. Distance lent assuagement to his view. Bibb had opened the flood-gates of a stream of long-dammed discourse, overjoyed to have captured an audience that had not suffered under a hundred repetitions of his views and theories. "One year more," said Bibb, "and I'll go back to God's country. Oh, I know it's pretty here, and you get dolce far niente handed to you in chunks, but this country wasn't made for a white man to live in. You've got to have to plug through snow now and then, and see a game of baseball and wear a stiff collar and have a policeman cuss you. Still, La Paz is a good sort of a pipe-dreamy old hole. And IVIrs. Conant is here. When any of us feels particularly like jump- ing into the sea we rush around to her house and propose. It's nicer to be rejected by IVIrs. Conant than it is to be drowned. And they say drowning is a delightful sensation." "Many like her here?" asked Merriam. "Not anywhere," said Bibb, with a comfortable sigh. "She's the only white woman in La Paz. The rest range from a dappled dun to the color of a b-flat piano key. She's been here a year. Comes from — well, you know how a woman can talk — ask 'em to say *string' and they'll say *crow's foot' or *cat's cradle.' Sometimes you'd think she was from Oshkosh, and again from Jacksonville, Florida, and the next day from Cape Cod." "Mystery.^" ventured Merriam. "M — well, she looks it; but her talk's translucent enough. But that's a woman. I suppose if the Sphinx were to begin talking she'd merely say: 'Goodness me! more visitors coming for dinner, and nothing to eat but the sand which is here.' But you won't think about that when you meet her, Merriam You'll propose to her, too." To make a hard story soft, Merriam did meet her and pro THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 201 pose to her. He found her to be a woman in black with hair the color of a bronze turkey's wings, and mysterious, remem- bering eyes that — well, that looked as if she might have been a trained nurse looking on when Eve was created. Her words and manner, though, were translucent, as Bibb had said. She spoke, vaguely, of friends in California and some of the lower parishes in Louisiana. The tropical climate and indolent life suited her; she had thought of buying an orange grove later on; La Paz, all in all, charmed her. Merriam's courtship of the Sphinx lasted three months, although he did not know that he was courting her. He was using her as an antidote for remorse, until he found, too late, that he had acquired the habit. During that time he had received no news from home. Wade did not know where he was; and he was not sure of Wade's exact address, and was afraid to write. He thought he had better let matters rest as they were for a while. One afternoon he and Mrs. Conant hired two ponies and rode out along the mountain trail as far as the little cold river that came tumbling down the foothills. There they stopped for a drink, and Merriam spoke his piece — ^he proposed, as Bibb had prophesied. Mrs. Conant gave him one glance of brilliant tenderness, and then her face took on such a strange, haggard look that Merriam was shaken out of his intoxication and back to his senses. "I beg your pardon, Florence," he said, releasing her hand; "but I'll have to hedge on part of what I said. I can't ask you to marry me, of course. I killed a man in New York — a man who was my friend — shot him down — in quite a cowardly manner, I understand. Of course, the drinking didn't excuse it. Well, I couldn't resist having my say; and I'll always mean it. I'm here as a fugitive from justice, and — I suppose that ends our acquaintance." Mrs. Conant plucked little leaves assiduously from the low- hanging branch of a lime tree. "I suppose so," she said, in low and oddly uneven tones, 202 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "but that depends upon you. I'll be as honest as you were. I poisoned my husband. I am a self-made widow. A man cannot love a murderess. So I suppose that ends our ac- quaintance." She looked up at him slow^ly. His face turned a little pale, and he stared at her blankly, like a deaf-and-dumb man who was wondering what it was all about. She took a swift step toward him, with stiffened arms and eyes blazing. *' Don't look at me like that!" she cried, as though she were in acute pain. "Curse me, or turn your back on me, but don't look that way. Am I a woman to be beaten .^^ If I could show you — here on my arms, and on my back are scars — and it has been more than a year — scars that he made in his brutal rages. A holy nun would have risen and struck the fiend down. Yes, I killed him. The foul and horrible words that he hurled at me that last day are repeated in my ears every night when I sleep. And then came his blows, and the end of my endurance. I got the poison that after- noon. It was his custom to drink every night in the library before going to bed a hot punch made of rum and wine. Only from my fair hands would he receive it — because h^ knew^ the fumes of spirits always sickened me. That night when the maid brought it to me I sent her dowmstairs on an errand. Before taking him his drink I went to my little private cabinet and poured into it more than a teaspoonful of tincture of aconite — enough to kill three men, so I had learned. I had drawn $6,000 that I had in bank, and with that and a few things in a satchel I left the house without any one seeing me. As I passed the library I heard him stagger up and fall heavily on a couch. I took a night train for New Orleans, and from there I sailed to the Bermudas. I finally cast anchor in La Paz. And now what have you to say? Can you open your mouth .f^" Merriam came back to life. "Florence," he said earnestly, "I want you. I don't care what youVe done. If the world " THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 203 "Ralph," she interrupted, almost with a scream, "be my world!" Her eyes melted; she relaxed magnificently and swayed toward Merriam so suddenly that he had to jump to catch her. Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. But it can't be helped. It's the subconscious smell of the footHghts' smoke that's in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook's soul sufficiently and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese. Merriam and Mrs. Conant were very happy. He an- nounced their engagement at the Hotel Orilla del Mar. Eight foreigners and four native Astors pounded his back and shouted insincere congratulations at him. Pedrito, the Castihan-mannered barkeep, was goaded to extra duty until his agility would have turned a Boston cherry-phosphate clerk a pale lilac with envy. They were both very happy. According to the strange mathematics of the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when united became only half as dense instead of darker. They shut the world out and bolted the doors. Each was the other's world. Mrs. Conant lived again. The remembering look left her eyes. Merriam was with her every moment that was possible. On a little plateau under a grove of palms and calabash trees they were going to build a fairy bungalow. They were to be married in two months. Many hours of the day they had their heads to- gether over the house plans. Their joint capital w^ould set up a business in fruit or woods that would yield a comfortable support. "Good night, my world," would say Mrs. Conant every evening when Merriam left her for his hotel. They were very happy. Their love had, circumstantially, that element of melancholy in it that it seems to require to attain its supremest elevation. And it seemed that their mutual great misfortune or sin was a bond that nothing could sever. One day a steamer hove in the offing. Bare-legged and bare-shouldered La Paz scampered down to the beach, for 204 STORIES FROM O. HENRY the arrival of a steamer was their loop-the-loop, circus, Emancipation Day, and four o'clock tea. When the steamer was near enough, wise ones proclaimed that she was the PajarOy bound up-coast from Callao to Panama. The Pajaro put on brakes a mile off shore. Soon a boat came bobbing shoreward. Merriam strolled down on the beach to look on. In the shallow water the Carib sailors sprang out and dragged the boat with a mighty rush to the firm shingle. Out climbed the purser, the captain, and two passengers ploughing their way through the deep sand toward the hotel. Merriam glanced toward them with the mild interest due to strangers. There was something famil- iar to him in the walk of one of the passengers. He looked again, and his blood seemed to turn to strawberry ice cream in his veins. Burly, arrogant, debonair as ever, H. Ferguson Hedges, the man he had killed, was coming toward him ten feet away. When Hedges saw Merriam his face flushed a dark red. Then he shouted in his old, bluff way: "Hello, Merriam. Glad to see you. Didn't expect to find you out here. Quinby, this is my old friend Merriam, of New York — Merriam, Mr. Quinby." Merriam gave Hedges and then Quinby an ice-cold hand. "Br-r-r-r ! " said Hedges. "But you've got a f rapped flip- per! Man, you're not well. You're as yellow as a China- man. Malarial here.^^ Steer us to a bar if there is such a thing, and let's take a prophylactic." Merriam, still half comatose, led them toward the Hotel Orilla del Mar. "Quinby and I," explained Hedges, puflSng through the slippery sand, "are looking out along the coast for some in- vestments. We've just come up from Concepcion and Val- paraiso and Lima. The captain of this subsidized ferry boat told us there was some good picking around here in silver mines. So we got off. Now, where is that cafe, Merriam? Oh, in this portable soda-water pavilion?" THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 205 Leaving Quinby at the bar, Hedges drew Merriam aside. "Now, what does this mean? " he said, with gruff kindness. *'Are you sulking about that fool row we had?" "I thought," stammered Merriam — "I heard — they told me you were — that I had " '*Well, you didn't, and I'm not," said Hedges. "That fool young ambulance surgeon told Wade I was a candidate for a coffin just because I'd got tired and quit breathing. I laid up in a private hospital for a month; but here I am, kicking as hard as ever. Wade and I tried to find you, but couldn't. Now, Merriam, shake hands and forget it all. I was as much to blame as you were; and the shot really did me good — I came out of the hospital as healthy and fit as a cab horse. Come on; that drink's waiting." "Old man," said Merriam, brokenly, "I don't know how to thank you — I — ^well, you know " "Oh, forget it," boomed Hedges. "Quinby '11 die of thirst if we don't join him." Bibb was sitting on the shady side of the gallery waiting for the eleven -o'clock breakfast. Presently Merriam came out and joined him. His eye was strangely bright. "Bibb, my boy," said he, slowly waving his hand, "do you see those mountains and that sea and sky and sunshine? — they're mine, Bibbsy — all mine." "You go in," said Bibb, "and take eight grains of quinine, right away. It won't do in this climate for a man to get to thinking he's Rockefeller, or James O'Neill either." Inside, the purser was untying a great roll of newspapers, many of them weeks old, gathered in the lower ports by the Pajaro to be distributed at casual stopping-places. Thus do the beneficent voyagers scatter news and entertainment among the prisoners of sea and mountains. Tio Pancho, the hotel proprietor, set his great silver- rimmed anteojos upon his nose and divided the papers into a number of smaller rolls. A barefooted muchacho dashed in, desiring the post of messenger. "'Bien venido,"' said Tio Pancho. "This to Senora Conant; 206 STORIES FROM O. HENRY that to el Doctor S-S-Schlegel — Dios! what a name to say !— that to Senor Davis — one for Don Alberto. These two for the Casa de Huespedes, Numero 6, en la calle de las Bnenas Gracias. And say to them all, Muchacho, that the Pajaro sails for Panama at three this afternoon. If any have letters to send by the post, let them come quickly, that they may first pass through the correo.'* IVIrs. Conant received her roll of newspapers at four o'clock. The boy was late in delivering them, because he had been de- flected from his duty by an iguana that crossed his path and to which he immediately gave chase. But it made no hard- ship, for she had no letters to send. She was idling in a hammock in the patio of the house that she occupied, half awake, half happily dreaming of the para- dise that she and Merriam had created out of the wrecks of their pasts. She was content now for the horizon of that shimmering sea to be the horizon of her life. They had shut out the w^orld and closed the door. Merriam was coming to her house at seven, after his dinner at the hotel. She would put on a white dress and an apricot- colored lace mantilla, and they would walk an hour under the cocoanut palms by the lagoon. She smiled contentedly, and chose a paper at random from the roll the boy had brought. At first the words of a certain headline of a Sunday news- paper meant nothing to her; they conveyed only a visualized sense of familiarity. The largest type ran thus: "Lloyd B. Conant secures divorce." And then the subheadings : "Well- known Saint Louis paint manufacturer wins suit, pleading one year's absence of wife." "Her mysterious disappearance recalled." "Nothing has been heard of her since." Twisting herself quickly out of the hammock, Mrs. Con- ant's eye soon traversed the half-column of the Recall. It ended thus: "It will be remembered that Mrs. Conant diappeared one evening in March of last year. It was freely rumored that her marriage with Lloyd B. Conant resulted in much unhappiness. Stories were not wanting to i^e effect^ THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 207 that his cruelty toward his wife had more than once taken the form of physical abuse. After her departure a full bottle of tincture of aconite, a deadly poison, was found in a small medicine cabinet in her bedroom. This might have been an indication that she meditated suicide. It is supposed that she abandoned such an intention if she possessed it, and left her home instead." Mrs. Conant slowly dropped the paper, and sat on a chair, clasping her hands tightly. "Let me think — O God! — let me think," she whispered. **I took the bottle with me ... I threw it out of the window of the train . . . I . . . there was an- other bottle in the cabinet . . . there were two, side by side — the aconite — and the valerian that I took when I could not sleep ... If they found the aconite bottle full, why — but, he is alive, of course — I gave him only a harmless dose of valerian ... I am not a murderess in fact . . . Ralph, I — O God, don't let this be a dream!" She went into the part of the house that she rented from the old Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and walked up and down her room swiftly and feverishly for half an hour. Merriam's photograph stood in a frame on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a smile of exquisite tenderness, and — dropped four tears on it. And Merriam only twenty rods away! Then she stood still for ten minutes, looking into space. She looked into space through a slowly opening door. On her side of the door was the building material for a castle of Romance — love, an Arcady of waving palms, a lullaby of waves on the shore of a haven of rest, respite, peace, a lotus land of dreamy ease and security — a life of poetry and heart's ease and refuge. Romanticist, will you tell me what Mrs. Conant saw on the other side of the door? You cannot .f^ — that is, you will not? Very well; then listen. She saw herself go into a department store and buy five spools of silk thread and three yards of gingham to make an apron for the cook. ''Shall I charge it, ma'am?'' asked the clerk. As 208 STORIES FROM O. HENRY she walked out a lady whom she met greeted her cordially. " OA, where did you get the pattern for those sleeves, dear Mrs. Con- ant?^' she said. At the corner a policeman helped her across the street and touched his helmet. ''Any callers?" she asked the maid when she reached home. ''Mrs. Waldron/' answered the maid, "and the two Misses Jenkinson." "Very welly'* she said. " You may bring me a cup of tea, Maggie.'' Mrs. Conant went to the door and called Angela, the old Peruvian woman. *'If Mateo is there send him to me.'* Mateo, a half-breed, shuffling and old but efficient, came. "Is there a steamer or a vessel of any kind leaving this coast to-night or to-morrow that I can get passage on?" she asked. Mateo considered. "At Punta Reina, thirty miles down the coast, senora," he answered, "there is a small steamer loading with cinchona and dyewoods. She sails for San Francisco to-morrow at sunrise. So says my brother, who arrived in his sloop to- day, passing by Punta Reina." "You must take me in that sloop to that steamer to-night Will you do that.^" "Perhaps " Mateo shrugged a suggestive shouldei. IVIrs. Conant took a handful of money from a draw^er and gave it to him. "Get the sloop ready behind the little point of land below the town," she ordered. "Get sailors, and be ready to sail at six o'clock. In half an hour bring a cart partly filled with straw into the patio here, and take my trunk to the sloop. There is more money yet. Now, hurry." For one time Mateo walked away without shuffling his feet. "Angela," cried Mrs. Conant, almost fiercely, "come and help me pack. I am going away. Out with this trunk. My clothes first. Stir yourself. Those dark dresses first. Hurry." From the first she did not waver from her decision. Her view was clear and final. Her door had opened and let the THE WORLD AND THE DOOR 209 world in. Her love for Merriam was not lessened; but it DOW appeared a hopeless and unrealizable thing. The visions of their future that had seemed so blissful and complete had vanished. She tried to assure herself that her renunciation was rather for his sake than for her own. Now that she was cleared of her burden — at least, technically — would not his own weigh too heavily upon him? If she should cling to him, would not the difference forever silently mar and corrode their happiness.? Thus she reasoned; but there were a thou- sand little voices calling to her that she could feel rather than hear, like the hum of distant, powerful machinery — the little voices of the world, that, when raised in unison, can send their insistent call through the thickest door. Once while packing, a brief shadow of the lotus dream came f)ack to her. She held Merriam 's picture to her heart with one hand, while she threw a pair of shoes into the trunk with her other. At six o'clock Mateo returned and reported the sloop ready. He and his brother lifted the trunk into the cart, covered it with straw, and conveyed it to the point of embarkation. From there they transferred it on board in the sloop's dory. Then Mateo returned for additional orders. Mrs. Conant was ready. She had settled all business matters with Angela, and was impatiently waiting. She wore a long, loose black-silk duster that she often walked about in when the evenings were chilly. On her head was a small round hat, and over it the apricot-colored lace mantilla. Dusk had quickly followed the short twilight. Mateo led her by dark and grass-grown streets toward the point behind which the sloop was anchored. On turning a corner they beheld the Hotel Orilla del Mar three streets away, nebulously aglow with its array of kerosene lamps. Mrs. Conant paused, with streaming eyes. "I must I must see him once before I go," she murmured in anguish. But even then she did not falter in her decision. Quickly she invented a plan by which she might speak to him, and 210 STORIES FROM O. HENRY yet make her departure without his knowing. She would walk past the hotel, ask some one to call him out and talk a few moments on some trival excuse, leaving him expecting to see her at her home at seven. She unpinned her hat and gave it to Mateo. "Keep this, and wait here till I come," she ordered. Then she draped the mantilla over her head as she usually did when walking after sunset, and went straight to the Orilla del Mar. She was glad to see the bulky, w^hite-clad figure of Tie Pancho standing alone on the gallery. "Tio Pancho," she said, with a charming smile, "may I trouble you to ask Mr. Merriam to come out for just a few moments that I may speak with him.'^" Tio Pancho bowed as an elephant bows. ''Buenas tardes, Sefiora Conant," he said, as a cavalier talks. And then he went on, less at his ease: "But does not the sefiora know that Senor Merriam sailed on the Pajaro for Panama at three o'clock of this afternoon? " "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" From Options. Copyright, Harper and Brothers, and used here by arrangement with the pubHshers. First pubhshed in Everybody's Magazine, June, 1908. In Art and the Bronco, pubhshed in 1903, O. Henry's theme was art by ancestry. His theme here is hterature by ancestry. The jotting in the notebook is: "Southern Maga- zine. All contributors relatives of Southern distinguished men." There w^as enough truth in the picture to drive the message home, and the South has joined whole-heartedly in the laughter raised at its own expense. Colonel Telfair rather than Mr. Thacker has thus unwittingly become the exponent of literature not only divorced from ancestral claims but liberalized and modernized in its appeal. The changed attitude was in evidence, however, at least four years before 1902, the year in which the story is supposed to take place. The ending is a triumph of unexpectedness and convincingness un- surpassed even by O. Henry. The reader w^ill not be surprised to learn that Colonel Roosevelt greatly enjoyed the humor of the story, so I am told by Mr. Kermit Roosevelt, and passed it around for other members of the family to read. If Colonel Telfair extended his "investigation" far enough, he doubtless learned not only that Colonel Roosevelt's mother, Martha Bulloch, was a native of Georgia but that she had two brothers in the Confederate Navy and that she herself was as loyal to the cause of the South as her husband was to the cause of the North. When The Rose of Dixie magazine was started by a stock company in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief editorial position in the minds of its owners. Col. Aquila Telfair was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family, reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained, fit, and logical editor. So, a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens who had subscribed the founding fund of $100,000 called upon Colonel 211 212 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the en- terprise and the South should suffer by his possible refusal. The colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of his days. The library had descended to him from his father. It contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair was seated at his massive white-pine center-table, reading Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy.'* He arose and shook hands punctiliously with each member of the committee. If you were familiar with The Rose of Dixie you will remember the colonel's por- trait, which appeared in it from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed white hair; the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the left; the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows; the classic mouth beneath the drooping white moustache, slightly frazzled at the ends. The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing editor, humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication was designed to cover and mentioning a comfortable salary. The colonel's lands were growing poorer each year and were much cut up by red gullies. Be- sides, the honor was not one to be refused. In a forty -minute speech of acceptance. Colonel Teffair gave an outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macau- lay, re-fought the battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would so conduct The Rose of Dixie that its fragrance and beauty would permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the Northern minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose rights they had curtailed. OflBces for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the second floor of the First National Bank building; and it was for the colonel to cause The Rose of Dixie to blossom and flourish or to wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers. The staff of assistants and contributors that Editor-Colonel Telfair drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" 213 of Georgia peaches. The first assistant editor, ToUiver Lee Fairfax, had had a father killed during Pickett's charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank, was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders. The book reviewer, Jackson Rocking- ham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate army, having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a milk-bottle in the other. The art editor, Ron- cesvalles Sykes, was a third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune, the colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once been kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office-boy, got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who wrapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern families in Reduced Cir- cumstances. The cashier was a scrub named Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations, and a bond from a guarantee company filed w4th the owners. Even Georgia stock companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead. Well, sir, if you believe me. The Rose of Dixie blossomed five times before anybody heard of it except the people who buy their hooks and eyes in Toombs City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on 'em to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor he had been used to having his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So an advertising manager was engaged — Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks — a young man in a lavender necktie, whose grand- father had been the Exalted High Pillow-slip of the Kuklux Klan. In spite of which The Rose of Dixie kept coming out every month. Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or the Luxembourg Gardens, or Carmencita or La Follette, a certain number of people bought it and sub- scribed for it. As a boom for it, Editor-Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's old home, "The Hermitage," a full-page engraving of the second battle of 214 STORIES FROM O. HENRY Manassas, entitled "Lee to the Rear!'* and a five-thousand- word biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription Hst that month advanced 118. Also there were poems in the same issue by Leonina Vashti Haricot (pen- name), related to the Haricots of Charleston, South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders, and an article from a special society correspondent describing a tea-party given by the swell Boston and English set, where a lot of tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests mas- querading as Indians. One day a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so much alive, entered the office of The Rose of Dixie. He was a man about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self -tied tie and a manner that he must have borrowed con- jointly from W. J. Bryan, Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel's pons asinorun. Colo- nel Telfair rose and began a Prince Albert bow\ "I'm Thacker," said the intruder, taking the editor's chair— "T. T. Thacker, of New York." He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulk manila envelope, and a letter from the owners of The Rose of Dixie. This letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and po- litely requested Colonel Telfair to give him a conference and whatever information about the magazine he might desire. "I've been corresponding with the secretary of the maga- zine owners for some time," said Thacker, briskly. "I'm a practical magazine man myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it. I'll guarantee an increase of any- where from ten thousand to a hundred thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead language. I've had my eye on The Rose of Dixie ever since it started. I know every end of the business from editing to setting up the clas- sified ads. Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of money in the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made to pay. The secretary tells me it's losing money. I don't see why a magazine in the South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a good circulation in the North, too." "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" 215 Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed glasses. "Mr. Thacker," said he, courteously but firmly, " The Rose of Dixie is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voic- ing of Southern genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is 'Of, For, and By the South."* "But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you.'^" asked Thacker. "I suppose," said the editor-colonel, "that it is customary to open the circulation lists to all. I do not know. I have nothing to do with the business affairs of the magazine. I was called upon to assume editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such poor literary talents as I may possess and whatever store of erudition I may have acquired." "Sure," said Thacker. "But a dollar is a dollar anywhere. North, South, or West — whether you're buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky Ford cantaloupes. Now, I've been iooking over your November number. I see one here on your desk. You don't mind running over it with me.^^ "Well, your leading article is all right. A good write-up of the cotton-belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time. New York is always interested in the cotton crop. And this sensational account of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, by a schoolmate of a niece of the Governor of Kentucky, isn't such a bad idea. It happened so long ago that most people have forgotten it. Now, here's a poem three pages long called 'The Tyrant's Foot,' by Lorella Lascelles. I've pawed around a good deal over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip." "Miss Lascelles," said the editor, "is one of our most widely recognized Southern poetesses. She is closely related to the Alabama Lascelles family, and made with her own hands the silken Confederate banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his inauguration." "But why," persisted Thacker, "is the poem illustrated with a view of the M. & O. Railroad freight depot at Tus- caloosa?" 216 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "The illustration," said the colonel, with dignity, "shows a corner of the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Lascelles was born." "All right," said Thacker. "I read the poem, but I couldn't tell whether it was about the depot or the battle of Bull Run. Now, here's a short story called 'Rosie's Temptation,' by Fosdyke Piggott. It's rotten. What is a Piggott, anyT\^ay.?" "Mr. Piggott," said the editor, "is a brother of the prin- cipal stockholder of the magazine." "All's right with the world — Piggott passes," said Thacker. "Well, this article on Arctic exploration and the one on tar- pon fishing might go. But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville, and Savannah breweries? It seems to consist mainly of statistics about their output and the quality of their beer. What's the chip over the bug? " "If I understand your figurative language," answered Colonel Telfair, "it is this : the article you refer to was handed to me by the owners of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality of it did not appeal to me. But, in a measure, I feel impelled to conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are interested in the financial side of The Rose.'' " I see," said Thacker. "Next we have two pages of selec- tions from 'Lalla Rookh,' by Thomas Moore. Now, what Federal prison did Moore escape from, or what's the name of the F. F. V. family that he carries as a handicap?" "Moore was an Irish poet who died in 1852," said Colonel Telfair, pityingly. "He is a classic. I have been thinking of reprinting his translation of Anacreon serially in the maga- zine." "Look out for the copyright laws," said Thacker, flip- pantly. " Who's Bessie Belleclair, who contributes the essay on the newly completed water- works plant in Millodgeville?" "The name, sir," said Colonel Telfair, "is the nom de guerre of Miss Elvira Simpkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady; but her contribution was sent us by Con- "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" 217 gressman Brower, of her native state. Congressman Brow- er's mother was related to the Polks of Tennessee." "Now, see here, Colonel," said Thacker, throwing down the magazine, "this won't do. You can't successfully run a magazine for one particular section of the country. You've got to make a universal appeal. Look how the Northern publications have catered to the South and encouraged the Southern writers. And you've got to go far and wide for your contributors. You've got to buy stuff according to its quality, without any regard to the pedigree of the author. Now, I'll bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running has never played a note that originated above Mason & Hamlin's line. Am I right.'^" "I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contri- butions from that section of the country — if I understand your figurative language aright," replied the colonel. "All right. Now, I'll show you something." Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope and dumped a mass of typewritten manuscript on the editor's desk. "Here's some truck," said he, "that I paid cash for, and brought along with me." One by one he folded back the manuscripts and showed their first pages to the colonel. "Here are four short stories by four of the highest priced authors in the United States — three of 'em living in New York, and one commuting. There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson. Here's an Italian serial by Captain Jack — ^no — it's the other Crawford. Here are three separate exposes of city governments by Sniffings, and here's a dandy entitled 'What Women Carry in Dress- Suit Cases' — a Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's maid to get that information. And here's a Synopsis of Preceding Chapters of Hall Caine's new serial to appear next June. And here's a couple of pounds of vers de societe that I got at a rate from the clever magazines. That's the stuff that people everywhere want. And now here's a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, 218 STORIES FROM O. HENRY twelve, twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It's a prognostication. He's bound to be elected Mayor of New York. It'll make a big hit all over the country. He " "I beg your pardon," said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair. "What was the name?" *'0h, I see," said Thacker, with half a grin. "Yes, he's a son of the General. We'll pass that manuscript up. But, if you'll excuse me. Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go off — not the first gun at Fort Sumter. Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to you. It's an original poem by James \ATiitcomb Riley, J. W. himself. You know what that means to a magazine. I won't tell you what I had to pay for that poem; but I'll tell you this — Riley can make more money \\Titing with a fountain-pen than you or I can vvith one that lets the ink run. I'll read you the last two stanzas " Ta lays around 'n' loafs all day, 'N' reads and makes us leave him be. He lets me do just like I please, 'N' when I'm bad he laughs at me, 'N' when I holler loud 'n' say Bad words 'n' then begin to tease The cat, 'n' pa just smiles, ma's mad 'N' gives me Jesse crost her knees. I always wondered why that wuz — I guess it's cause Pa never does. "**N' after all the lights are out I'm sorry 'bout it; so I creep Out of my trundle bed to ma's 'N' say I love her a whole heap, 'N' kiss her, 'n' I hug her tight. 'N' it's too dark to see her eyes. But every time I do I know She cries 'n' cries 'n' cries 'n' cries. I always wondered why that wuzr-^ 1 guess it's cause Pa never does.' "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" 219 "That's the stuff," contmued Thacker. "What do you think of that?" "I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr. Riley," said the colonel, deliberately. "I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years I have been somewhat of a literary re- cluse, and am familiar with nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights library. I am also of the opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry. Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to the pages of The Rose of Dixie. I, myself, have thought of trans- lating from the original for publication in its pages the works of the great Italian poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the fountain of this immortal poet's lines, Mr. Thacker?" "Not even a demi-Tasso," said Thacker. "Now, let's come to the point. Colonel Telfair. I've already invested some money in this as a flyer. That bunch of manuscripts cost me $4,000. My object was to try a number of them in the next issue — I believe you make up less than a month ahead — and see what effect it has on the circulation. I be- lieve that by printing the best stuff we can get in the North, South, East, or West we can make the magazine go. You have there the letter from the owning company asking you to co-operate with me in the plan. Let's chuck out some of this slush that you've been publishing just because the writers are related to the Skoopdoodles of Skoopdoodle County. Are you with me?" "As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose^' said Colonel Telfair, with dignity, "I shall be its editor. But I desire also to conform to the wishes of its owners if I can do so conscientiously." "That's the talk," said Thacker, briskly. "Now, how much of this stuff I've brought can we get into the January number? We want to begin right away." "There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, "for about eight thousand words, roughly estimated." "Great!" said Thacker. "It isn't much, but it'll give the readers some change from goobers, governors, and Gettys- 220 STORIES FROM O. HENRY burg. I'll leave the selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all good. I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a couple of weeks." Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eye-glasses by their broad, black ribbon. "The space in the January number that I referred to," said he, measuredly, "has been held open purposely, pending a decision that I have not yet made. A short time ago a con- tribution was submitted to The Rose of Dixie that is one of the most remarkable literary efforts that has ever come under my observation. None but a master mind and talent could have produced it. It would about fill the space that I have reserved for its possible use." Thacker looked anxious. "WTiat kind of stuff is it?" he asked. "Eight thousand words sounds suspicious. The oldest families must have been collaborating. Is there going to be another secession.? " "The author of the article," continued the colonel, ignoring Thacker's allusions, "is a writer of some reputation. He has also distinguished himself in other ways. I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his name — at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his contribution." "Well," said Thacker, nervously," is it a continued story, or an account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whit- mire, South Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body- servants, or what?" "You are disposed to be facetious,'' said Colonel Telfair, calmly. "The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philoso- pher, a lover of mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree." "It must have been written by a syndicate," said Thacker. "But, honestly. Colonel, you want to go slow. I don't know of any eight-thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by anybody these days, except Supreme Court briefs and reports of murder trials. You haven't by any ac- cident gotten hold of a copy of one of Daniel Webster's speeches, have you?" "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" 221 Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked stead- ily under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter. '*Mr. Thacker," he said, gravely, "I am willing to segre- gate the somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude that your business investments undoubt- edly have conferred upon you. But I must ask you to cease j'our jibes and derogatory comments upon the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated in the ojSSce of The Rose of Dixie for one moment. And before you proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form relative to the question in hand." "Oh, come. Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly. "I didn't do anything like that to you. It sounds like an m- dictment by the fourth assistant attorney-general. Let's get back to business. What's this 8,000 to 1 shot about.'^" "The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a slight bow, "covers a wide area of knowledge. It takes up theories and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes of them logically and concisely. One by one it holds up to view the evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them, and then conscientiously and in detail commends the good. There is hardly a phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and equitably. The great policies of governments, the duties of private citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality — all these important subjects are handled with a calm wisdom and confidence that I must confess has captured my admiration." "It must be a crackerjack," said Thacker, impressed. "It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom," said the colonel. "The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it would be to us to give it publica- tion in The Rose of Dixie is that I have not yet suiSficient in- 222 STORIES FROM O. HENRY formation about the author to give his work pubHcity in our magazine." "I thought you said he is a distinguished man," said Thacker. "He is," repHed the colonel, "both in literary and in other more diversified and extraneous fields. But I am extremely careful about the matter that I accept for pubhcation. My contributors are people of unquestionable repute and connec- tions, which fact can be verified at any time. As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire more information about its author. I do not know whether I will publish it or not. If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased, Mr Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in its place." Thacker was somewhat at sea. "I don't seem to gather," said he, "much about the gist of this inspired piece of literature. It sounds more like a dark horse than Pegasus to me." "It is a human document," said the colonel-editor, con- fidently, "from a man of great accomplishments who, in my opinion, has obtained a stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man living to-day." Thacker rose to his feet excitedly. "Say!" he said. "It isn't possible that youVe cornered John D. Rockefeller's memoirs, is it? Don't tell me that all at once." "No, sir," said Colonel Telfair. "I am speaking of men- tality and literature, not of the less worthy intricacies of trade." "Well, what's the trouble about running the article," asked Thacker, a little impatiently, "if the man's well known and has got the stuff?" Colonel Telfair sighed. "Mr. Thacker," said he, "for once I have been tempted. Nothing has yet appeared in The Rose of Dixie that has not been from the pen of one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this article except that he has ac- "THE ROSE OF DIXIE" 223 quired prominence in a section of the country that has al- ways been inimical to my heart and mind. But I recognize his genius; and, as I have told you, I have instituted an in- vestigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile. But I shall pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open the question of filling the vacant space in our January number.'* Thacker arose to leave. "All right. Colonel," he said, as cordially as he could. "You use your own judgment. If you've really got a scoop or something that will make 'em sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I'll drop in again in about two weeks. Good luck!" Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoter shook hands. Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very focky Pullman at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up and the forms closed. The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an article that was headed thus : SECOND MESSAGE TO CONGRESS Written for THE ROSE OF DIXIE BY A Member of the Well-known BULLOCH FAMILY, OF GEORGIA T. Roosevelt A MUNICIPAL REPORT From Strictly Business. First published in Hampton*s Magazine, November, 1909. This story, says a writer in the New York Times, April 28, 1918, "is coming to be regarded as O. Henry's greatest short story and one of the greatest in the language." Writing about the story to Mr. William Griffith, then editor of Hampton's,0. Henry says: "Title will follow with the remainder; have to take time on title. ... In the end there is a dramatic and mysterious murder, the victim being Major Caswell. The *snapper' comes in the last paragraph, revealing the slayer by a bare intimation. The whole scheme is to show that an absolutely prosaic and conventional town such as Nashville, can equal San Francisco, Bagdad, or Paris when it comes to a human story. The beginning of the story is not yet written — there will be two or three pages to follow, containing references to Frank Norris's lines, in which the words occur, * Think of anything happening in Nashville, Tennessee.'" It was knowTi before that O. Henry pondered long over his titles, that he blocked out his plots slowly, but that he wrote rapidly and with hardly an erasure after the plot had been thought through to its denouement. This letter indicates also that the expository openings (see page 97) were sometimes written after the purely narrative part had been completed. In the structure of the story, note especially the artistic use made of Rand and McNally's prosaic summary. The repetition of a quotation or parts of a quotation at intervals through a story for re-enforcement or continuousness is not an uncommon device. But the quotations from Rand and McNally are employed differently. They strike an opposing note; they take the side of Frank Norris; they build up the material Nashville by the side of O. Henry's romantic Nashville. The story becomes a sort of debate, with periodic rejoinders from the opposition. The initial quotation from Frank Norris is taken from The House with the Blindsy one of the stories in the volume called The Third Circle (1909). 224 A MUNICIPAL REPORT 225 The cities are full of pride. Challenging each to each — This from her mountainside. That from her burthened beach. R. Kipling. Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are "story cities" — New York, of course. New Orleans, and, best of the lot, San Francisco. — Frank Norris. East is East, and West is San Francisco, according to Calif ornians. Calif ornians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southern- ers of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Cali- fornians go into detail. Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to mis- take your silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion, no refuta- tion is necessary. But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: *'In this town there can be no romance — what could happen here?" Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally. Nashville. — A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N. C. & St. L. and the L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded as the most im portant educational centre in the South. I stepped off the train at 8 p. m. Having searched the thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe. STORIES FROM O. HENRY Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix. The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup; but 'tis enough — 'twill serve. I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong self- suppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawm by beasts of a bygone era and driven by something dark and emancipated. I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hur- riedly paid it the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old "marster" or anything that happened *'befo' de w^ah." The hotel was one of the kind described as "renovated." That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling, elec- tric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. &. N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The management was with- out reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern cour- tesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as good- humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth traveling a thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers en brochette. At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything doing in town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: "Well, boss, I don't really reckon there's anything at all doin' after sundown." Sundown had been accomphshed; it had been drowned in the drizzle long before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there. It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum. A MUNICIPAL REPORT 227 As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with — ! no, I saw with relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, "Kyar you anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents," I reasoned that I was merely a "fare" instead of a victim. I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I won- dered how those streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn't until they were "graded." On a few of the "main streets" I saw lights in stores here and there; saw street cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and yon; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation, and heard a burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda- water and ice-cream parlor. The streets other than " main" seemed to have enticed upon their borders houses con- secrated to peace and domesticity. In many of them lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in a few pianos tinkled orderly and irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little "doing." I wished I had come before sundown. So I returned to my hotel. In November, 1864, the Confederate General Hood advanced against Nashville, where he shut up a National force under General Thomas. The latter then sallied forth and defeated the Confeder- ates in a terrible conflict. All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine marksmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the tobacco-chewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited me. There were twelve bright, new, imposing, ca- pacious brass cuspidors in the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and so wide-mouthed that the crack pitcher of a lady baseball team should have been able to throw a ball into one of them at five paces distant. But, although a terrible battle had raged and was still raging, the enemy had not suffered. Bright, new, imposing, capacious, untouched. 228 STORIES FROM O. HENRY they stood. But, shades of Jefferson Brick! the tile floor — • the beautiful tile floor! I could not avoid thinking of the battle of Nashville, and trying to draw, as is my foolish habit, some deductions about hereditary marksmanship. Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Went- worth Caswell. I knew him for a type the moment my eyes suffered from the sight of him. A rat has no geographical habitat. My old friend, A. Tennyson, said, as he so well said almost everything: Prophet, curse me the blabbing lip. And curse me the British vermin, the rat. Let us regard the word "British" as interchangeable ad lib, A rat is a rat. This man w as hunting about the hotel lobby like a starved dog that had forgotten where he had buried a bone. He had a face of great acreage, red, pulpy, and with a kind of sleepy massiveness like that of Buddha. He possessed one single virtue — he was very smoothly shaven. The mark of the beast is not indelible upon a man until he goes about with a stubble. I think that if he had not used his razor that day I w^ould have repulsed his advances, and the crim- inal calendar of the world would have been spared the addi- tion of one murder. I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor when Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been ob- servant enough to perceive that the attacking force was using Gatlings instead of squirrel rifles ; so I side-stepped so prompt- ly that the major seized the opportunity to apologize to a non- combatant. He had the blabbing lip. In fcur minutes he had become my friend and had dragged me to the bar. I desire to interpolate here that I am a Southerner. But I am not one by profession or trade. I eschew the string tie, the slouch hat, the Prince Albert, the number of bales of cotton destroyed by Sherman, and plug chewing. When the orchestra plays Dixie I do not cheer. I slide a little lower A MUNICIPAL REPORT 229 on the leather-cornered seat and, well, order another Wiirz- burger and wish that Longstreet had But what's the use? Major CasweU banged the bar with his fist, and the first gun at Fort Sumter re-echoed. When he fired the last one at Appomattox I began to hope. But then he began on fam- ily trees, and demonstrated that Adam was only a third cou- sin of a collateral branch of the Caswell family. Genealogy disposed of, he took up, to my distaste, his private family matters. He spoke of his wife, traced her descent back to Eve, and profanely denied any possible rumor that she may have had relations in the land of Nod. By this time I began to suspect that he was trying to ob- scure by noise the fact that he had ordered the drinks, on the chance that I would be bewildered into paying for them. But when they were down he crashed a silver dollar loudly upon the bar. Then, of course, another serving was obliga- tory. And when I had paid for that I took leave of him brusquely; for I wanted no more of him. But before I had obtained my release he had prated loudly of an income that his wife, received, and showed a handful of silver money. When I got my key at the desk the clerk said to me cour- teously: "If that man Caswell has annoyed you, and if you would like to make a complaint, we will have him ejected. He is a nuisance, a loafer, and without any known means of support, although he seems to have some money most of the time. But we don't seem to be able to hit upon any means of throwing him out legally." "Why, no," said I, after some reflection; "I don't see my way clear to making a complaint. But I would like to place myself on record as asserting that I do not care for his com- pany. Your town," I continued, "seems to be a quiet one. What manner of entertainment, adventure, or excitement have you to offer to the stranger within your gates?" "Well, sir," said the clerk, "there will be a show here next Thursday. It is — I'll look it up and have the announcement sent up to your room with the ice water. Good night." After I went up to my room I looked out the window. 230 STORIES FROM O. HENRY It was only about ten o'clock, but I looked upon a silent town. The drizzle continued, spangled with dim lights, as far apart as currants in a cake sold at the Ladies' Exchange. *'A quiet place," I said to myself, as my first shoe struck the ceiling of the occupant of the room beneath mine. "Nothing of the life here that gives color and variety to the cities in the East and West. Just a good, ordinary, humdrum, business town.*' Nashville occupies a foremost place among the manufacturing centers of the country. It is the fifth boot and shoe market in the United States, the largest candy and cracker manufacturing city in the South, and does an enormous wholesale drygoods, grocery, and drug business. I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and I assure you the digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to you. I was traveling elsewhere on my own business, but I had a commission from a Northern literary magazine to stop over there and establish a personal connection between the publication and one of its contributors. Azalea Adair. Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the hand- writing) had sent in some essays (lost art:) and poems that had made the editors swear approvingly over their one o'clock luncheon. So they had commissioned me to round up said Adair and corner by contract his or her output at two cents a word before some other publisher offered her ten or twenty. At nine o'clock the next morning, after my chicken livers en brochette (try them if you can find that hotel), I strayed out into the drizzle, which was still on for an unlimited run. At the first corner I came upon Uncle Csesar. He was a stalwart Negro, older than the pyramids, with gray wool and a face that reminded me of Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late King Cettiwayo. He wore the most remarkable coat that I ever had seen or expect to see. It reached to his ankles and had once been a Confederate gray in co/ors. But rain and sun and age had so variegated it that Jo.«eph's coat A MUNICIPAL REPORT 231 beside it, would have faded to a pale monochrome. I must linger with that coat, for it has to do with the story — the story that is so long in coming, because you can hardly expect anything to happen in Nashville. Once it must have been the military coat of an officer. The cape of it had vanished, but all adoT\Ti its front it had been frogged and tasseled magnificently. But now the frogs and tassels were gone. In their stead had been patiently stitched (I surmised by some surviving "black mammy") new frogs made of cunningly twisted common hempen twine. This twine was frayed and disheveled. It must have been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished splendors, with taste- less but pains taking devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were gone save one. The second button from the top alone remained. The coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in the opposite side. There was never such a weird garment so fantastically bedecked and of so many mottled hues. The lone button was the size of a half-dollar, made of yellow horn and sewed on with coarse twine. This Negro stood by a carriage so old that Ham himself might have started a hack line with it after he left the ark with the two animals hitched to it. As I approached he threw open the door, drew out a feather duster, waved it without using it, and said in deep, rumbling tones : "Step right in, suh; ain't a speck of dust in it — ^jus' got back from a funeral, suh.'* I inferred that on such gala occasions carriages were given an extra cleaning. I looked up and down the street and per- ceived that there was little choice among the vehicles for hire that lined the curb. I looked in my memorandum book for the address of Azalea Adair. *'I want to go to 861 Jessamine Street," I said, and was about to step into the hack. But for an instant the thick, long, gorilla-like arm of the Negro barred me. On his mas- 232 STORIES FROM O. HENRY sive and saturnine face a look of sudden suspicion and enmity flashed for a moment. Then, with quickly returning con- viction, he asked blandishingly : "What are you gwine there for, boss?" '* What is that to you? " I asked, a little sharply. "Nothin', suh, jus' nothin'. Only it's a lonesome kind of part of town and few folks ever has business out there. Step right in. The seats is clean — jes' got back from a funeral, suh." A mile and a half it must have been to our journey's end. I could hear nothing but the fearful rattle of the ancient hack over the uneven brick paving; I could smell nothing but the drizzle, now further flavored with coal smoke and something like a mixture of tar and oleander blossoms. All I could see through the streaming windows were two rows of dim houses. The city has an area of 10 square miles; 181 miles of streets, et which 137 miles are paved; a system of water- works that cost $2,000,000, with 77 miles of mains. Eight-sixty-one Jessamine Street was a decayed mansion. Thirty yards back from the street it stood, out-merged in a splendid grove of trees and untrimmed shrubbery. A row of box bushes overflowed and almost hid the paling fence from sight; the gate was kept closed by a rope noose that encircled the gate post and the first paling of the gate. But when you got inside you saw that 861 was a shell, a shadow, a ghost of former grandeur and excellence. But in the story, I have not yet got inside. When the hack had ceased from rattling and the weary quadrupeds came to a rest I handed my jehu his fifty cents with an additional quarter, feeling a glow of conscious gen- erosity, as I did so. He refused it. "It's two dollars, suh," he said. "How's that?" I asked. "I plainly heard you call out at the hotel: 'Fifty cents to any part of the town.' '* A MUNICIPAL REPORT 233 "It's two dollars, suh," he repeated obstinately. "It's a long ways from the hotel." "It is within the city limits and well within them," I argued. "Don't think that you have picked up a greenhorn Yankee. Do you see those hills over there?" I went on, pointing toward the east (I could not see them, myself, for the drizzle) ; "well, I was born and raised on their other side. You old fool nigger, can't you tell people from other people when you see 'em?" The grim face of King Cettiwayo softened. "Is you from the South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me. They is somethin' sharp in the toes for a Southern gen '1 'man to wear." "Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?" said I in- exorably. His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hos- tility, returned, remained ten seconds, and vanished. "Boss," he said, "fifty cents is right; but I needs two dol- lars, suh; I'm obleeged to have two dollars. I ain't demandin* it now, suh; after I knows whar you's from; I'm jus' say in' that I has to have two dollars to-night, and business is mighty po'." Peace and confidence settled upon his heavy features. He had been luckier than he had hoped. Instead of having picked up a greenhorn, ignorant of rates, he had come upon an inheritance. "You confounded old rascal," I said, reaching down to my pocket, "you ought to be turned over to the police." For the first time I saw him smile. He knew; he knew; HE KNEW. I gave him two one-dollar bills. As I handed them over I noticed that one of them had seen parlous times. Its upper right-hand corner was missing, and it had been torn through in the middle, but joined again. A strip of blue tissue paper, pasted over the split, preserved its negotiability. Enough of the African bandit for the present: I left him happy, lifted the rope, and opened the creaky gate. 234 STORIES FROM O. HENRY The house, as I said, was a shell. A paint brush had not touched it in twenty years. I could not see why a strong wind should not have bowled it over like a house of cards until I looked again at the trees that hugged it close — the trees that saw the battle of Nashville and still drew their pro- tecting branches around it against storm and enemy and cold. Azalea Adair, fifty years old, white-haired, a descendant of the cavaliers, as thin and frail as the house she lived in, robed in the cheapest and cleanest dress I ever saw, with an air as simple as a queen's, received me. The reception room seemed a mile square, because there was nothing in it except some rows of books, on unpainted white-pine bookshelves, a cracked marble-top table, a rag rug, a hairless horse-hair sofa, and two or three chairs. Yes, there was a picture on the wall, a colored crayon drawing of a cluster of pansies. I looked around for the portrait of Andrew Jackson and the pine-cone hanging basket but they were not there. Azalea Adair and I had conversation, a little of which will be repeated to you. She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of splendid originality in its some- what narrow scope. She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived from inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of es- sayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the ab- sent dust from the half -calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Haziitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, and Hood. She was exquisite, she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much — oh, so much too much — of real life. I could perceive clearly that Azalea Adair was very poor. A horuse and a dress she had, not much else, I fancied. So, divided between my duty to the magazine and my loyalty to the poets and essayists who fought Thomas in the valley of the Cumberland, I listened to her voice, which was like a harpsichord's, and found that I could not speak of contracts. A MUNICIPAL REPORT 235 In the presence of the nine Muses and the three Graces one hesitated to lower the topic to two cents. There would have to be another colloquy after I had regained my commer- cialism. But I spoke of my mission, and three o'clock of the next afternoon was set for the discussion of the business prop- osition. "Your town," I said, as I began to make ready to depart (which is the time for smooth generalities), "seems to be a quiet, sedate place. A home town, I should say, where few things out of the ordinary ever happen." It carries on an extensive trade in stoves and hollow ware with the West and South, and its flouring mills have a daily capacity of more than 2,000 barrels. Azalea Adair seemed to reflect. "I have never thought of it that way," she said, with a kind of sincere intensity that seemed to belong to her. " Isn't it in the stiU, quiet places that things do happen.? I fancy that when God began to create the earth on the first Monday morning one could have leaned out one's window and heard the drops of mud splashing from His trowel as He built up the everlasting hills. What did the noisiest project in the world — I mean the building of the tower of Babel — result in finally? A page and a half of Esperanto in the North American Re- view.'' "Of course," said I platitudinously, "human nature is the same everywhere; but there is more color — er — more drama and movement and — er — romance in some cities than in others." "On the surface," said Azalea Adair. "I have traveled many times around the world in a golden airship wafted on two wings — print and dreams. I have seen (on one of my imaginary tours) the Sultan of Turkey bowstring with his own hands one of his wives who had uncovered her face in public. I have seen a man in Nashville tear up his theatre tickets be- cause his wife was going out with her face covered — with 236 STORIES FROM O. HENRY rice powder. In San Francisco's Chinatown I saw the slave girl Sing Yee dipped slowly, inch by inch, in boiling almond oil to make her swear she would never see her American lover again. She gave in when the boiling oil had reached three inches above her knee. At a euchre party in East Nash- ville the other night I saw Kitty Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong friends because she had mar- ried a house painter. The boiling oil was sizzling as high as her heart; but I wish you could have seen the fine little smile that she carried from table to table. Oh, yes, it is a hum- drum town. Just a few miles of red brick houses and mud and stores and lumber yards." Some one knocked hollowly at the back of the house. Azalea Adah* breathed a soft apology and went to investigate the sound. She came back in three minutes with brightened eyes, a faint flush on her cheeks, and ten years lifted from her shoulders. "You must have a cup of tea before you go," she said, "and a sugar cake." She reached and shook a little iron bell. In shuffled a small Negro girl about twelve, barefoot, not very tidy, glowering at me with thumb in mouth and bulging eyes. Azalea Adair opened a tiny, worn purse and drew out a dollar bill, a dollar bill with the upper right-hand corner missing, torn in two pieces and pasted together again with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was one of the bills I had given the piratical Negro — there was no doubt of it. "Go up to Mr. Baker's store on the corner, Impy," she said, handing the girl the dollar bill, "and get a quarter of a pound of tea — the kind he always sends me — and ten cents worth of sugar cakes. Now, hurry. The supply of tea in the house happens to be exhausted," she explained to me. Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had died away on the back porch, a wild shriek — I was sure it was hers — filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man's voice mingled with the givVs further squeals and unintelligible words. A MUNICIPAL REPORT 237 Azalea Adair rose witnout surprise or emotion and disap- peared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man's voice; then something like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair. "This is a roomy house," she said, "and I have a tenant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-morrow Mr. Baker will be able to supply me." I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired concerning street-car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair's name. But to-morrow would do. That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this eventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accomplice — after the fact, if that is the correct legal term — to a murder. As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coach- man of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster, and began his ritual: "Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean — jus' got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any " And then he knew me and grinned broadly. " 'Souse me, boss; you is de genl'man what rid out with me dis mawnin'. Thank you kindly, suh." "I am going out to 861 again to-morrow afternoon at three," said I, "and if you will be here, I'll let you drive me. So you know Miss Adair.^ " I concluded, thinking of my dol- lar bill. "I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh," he replied. "I judge that she is pretty poor," I said. "She hasn't much money to speak of, has she?" For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro hack driver. 238 STORIES FROM O. HENRY "She ain't gwine to starve, suh,'* he said slowly. "She has reso'ces, suh; she has reso'ces.'* "I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip," said I. "Dat is puffeckly correct, suh," he answered humbly. "I jus' had to have dat two dollars dis mawnin', boss." I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: "A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word." The answer that came back was: "Give it to her quick, you duffer." Just before dinner "Major" Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the greetings of a long-lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar w^hen he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the drinks, hoping, thereby, to escape another; but he w^as one of those despic- able, roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies. With an air of producing millions he drew two one-dollar bills from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once more at the dollar bill with the upper right- hand corner missing, torn through the middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue paper. It w^as my dollar bill again. It could have been no other. I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary, eventless Southern towTi had made me tired and listless. I remember that just before I went to bed I men- tally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily: "Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack-Driver's Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Wonder if " Then I fell asleep. King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I was ready. A MUNICIPAL REPORT 239 Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had ^oked on the day before. After she had signed the con- tract at eight cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horse-hair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-colored Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not suspected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten min- utes he returned with a grave, gray-haired, and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old Negro. "Uncle Caesar," he said calmly, "run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don't drive — run. I want you to get back sometime this week." It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding powers of the land-pirate's steeds. After Uncle Caesar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had decided that I might do. "It is only a case of insufficient nutrition," he said. "In other words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Caesar, who was once owned by her family." "Mrs. Caswell!" said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw that she had signed it "Azalea Adair Caswell." "I thought she was Miss Adair," I said. "Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir," said the doctor. "It is said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant contributes toward her support." When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon 240 STORIES FROM O. HENRY revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autunm leaves that were then in season, and their height of color. She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fan- ned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due else- where, and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased. "By the way," he said, "perhaps you would like to know that you have had royalty for a coachman. Old Csesar's grandfather was a king in Congo. Csesar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed." As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Caesar's voice inside: "Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis' Zalea.?^" "Yes, Csesar," I heard Azalea x\dair answer weakly. And then I went in and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Caesar drove me back to the hotel. Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The rest must be only bare statements of facts. At about six o'clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Caesar was at his corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster, and began his depressing formula: "Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to anywhere in the city — hack's puflBckly clean, suh — jus' got back from a funeral " And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was get- ting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button — the button of yellow horn — was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Caesar ! About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was manna; so I wedged my way inside. On an extem- porized couch of empty boxes and chairs was stretched the A MUNICIPAL REPORT 241 mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence. The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being had been engaged in terrific battle — the details showed that. Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him. One kind- looking man said, after much thought: "When *Cas' was about fo'teen he was one of the best spellers in school." While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of "the man that was," which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it in a death grip. At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners: "In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several gentle- men in the hotel. When he was found the money was not on his person." I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy ^yaters below. I wonder what's doing in Buffalo 1 LET* ME FEEL YOUR PULSE From Sixes and Sevens. First published in The Cosmopolitan Magazine, July, 1910. This last complete story that O. Henry wrote shows no diminution of humor or charm. An English critic, S. P. B. Mais, in From Shakespeare to 0. Henry (1918), says: "For pure humor I place Let Me Feel Your Pulse easily first. It has an appeal which none of the others has for the purely English reader. ... It obeys the laws laid down by Meredith for the Comic Spirit: it makes us laugh at human follies; it satirizes and ridicules and yet it does us quite active and appreciable good. It is an anodyne in itself for all bodily ailments, an infallible prescription from an unerring doctor." The story was first published as Ad- ventures in Neurasthenia and was heralded by the announcement: *'If you want to get well, read this story by O. Henry;" but the author was dead before it appeared. The latter half of the story takes place in or near Asheville (Pineville) , North Carolina, at Mrs. Porter's home, where O. Henry had sought and seemingly found restoration of health. "It was \\Titten," says Dr. William Pinkney Herbert, of Asheville, "with the aid of my medical books. Some- times he would take them to his office and again he would sit in my outer office." There is not the usual surprise at the end, for the story passes almost imperceptibly into an allegory of rest and heart's-ease with Amaryllis in the shade. But there is exquisite imagery, there is release at last from the spell of the unquiet Lady Neurasthenia, and there is a terminal beauty of thought and melody of phrase that in themselves are restful and remedial. So I went to a doctor. "How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?" he asked. Turning my head sidewise, I answered, "Oh, quite a while." He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and 242 LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 243 forty. He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I like him immensely. "Now," said he, "I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation." I think it was '* circulation " he said; though it may have been "advertising." He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like him better. Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb con- nected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a ther- mometer. The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number. "Now," said he, "you see what alcohol does to the blood- pressure." "It's marvelous," said I, "but do you think it a sufficient test.^ Have one on me, and let's try the other arm." But, no! Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips that he had fastened to a card. "It's the haemoglobin test," he explained. "The color of your blood is wrong." "Well," said I, "I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so " "I mean," said the doctor, "that the shade of red is too ligHt." ^^ ^ "Oh," said I, "it's a case of matching instead of matches." The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he did that I don't know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he 244 STORIES FROM O. HENRY looked grave and mentioned a string of grievances that the flesh is heir to — mostly ending in "itis." I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account. "Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?" I asked. I thought my connection with the matter justified toy manifesting a certain amount of interest. "All of them," he answered cheerfully. "But their prog- ress may be arrested. With care and proper continuous treat- ment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety." I began to think of the doctor's bilL "Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure," was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account. "The first thing to do," he said, with renewed animation, "is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your nerves to get into a better con- dition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one." So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, som^e patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant with- out applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: "It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation." My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phos- phoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pan- cakes, and nux vomica tea for my repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees. It was pro- duced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, "Neur- asthenia!" — except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, " Chronic alcoholism." I hope to meet him again. The physician in charge turned and walked away. LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 245 An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the work- shop — say fifty yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the physician in charge's understudy and sponge-holder — a man with feet and a blue sw^eater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face ; but the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands. "Here," said the physician in charge, "our guests find re- laxation from past mental worries by devoting themselves to physical labor — recreation, in reality." There were turning-lathes, carpenters' outfits, clay-model- ing tools, spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums, enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, black- smith forges, and everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of a first-rate sanitarium. "The lady making mud pies in the corner," whispered the physician in charge, "is no other than — Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel entitled 'Why Love Loves.' What she is doing now is simply to rest her mind after performing that piece of work." I had seen the book. "Why doesn't she do it by writing another one instead?" I asked. As you see, I wasn't as far gone as they thought I was. "The gentleman pouring water through the funnel," con- tinued the physician in charge, "is a Wall Street broker broken down from overwork." I buttoned my coat. Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah's arks, ministers reading Darwin's "Theory of Evolution," lawyers sawing wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room. "You look pretty strong," said the physician in charge to me. "I think the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders over the mountainside and then bringing them up again." I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me. 246 STORIES FROM 0. HENRY "What's the matter?" he asked. "The matter is," said I, "that there are no aeioplanes handy. So I am going to merrily and hastily jog the foot- pathway to yon station and catch the first milimited-soft- coal express back to town." "Well," said the doctor, "perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the suitable place for you. But what you need is rest — absolute rest and exercise." That night I went to a hotel in the city, and said to the clerk: "What I need is absolute rest and exercise. Can you give me a room with one of those tall folding beds in it, and a relay of bellboys to work it up and down while I rest.^" The clerk rubbed a speck off one of his finger nails and glanced sidewise at a tall man in a white hat sitting in the lobby. That man came over and asked me politely if I had seen the shrubbery at the west entrance. I had not, so he showed it to me and then looked me over. "I thought you had 'em," he said, not unkindly, "but I guess you're all right. You'd better go see a doctor, old man." A week afterward my doctor tested my blood pressure again without the preliminary stimulant. He looked to me a little less like Napoleon. And liis socks were of a shade of ^an that did not appeal to me. "What you need," he decided," is sea air and companion- ship." "Would a mermaid " I began; but he slipped on his professional manner. "I myself," he said, "will take you to the Hotel Bonair off the coast of Long Island and see that you get in good shape. It is a quiet, comfortable resort where you will soon recuperate." The Hotel Bonair proved to be a nine-hundred-room fash- ionable hostelry on an island off the main shore. Every- body who did not dress for dinner was shoved into a side dining-room and given only a terrapin and champagne table d'hote. The bay was a great stamping ground for LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 247 wealthy yachtsmen. The Corsair anchored there the day we arrived. I saw Mr. Morgan standing on deck eating a cheese sandwich and gazing longingly at the hotel. Still, It was a very inexpensive place. Nobody could afford to pay their prices. When you went away you simply left your baggage, stole a skiff, and beat it for the mainland in the night. When I had been there one day I got a pad of mono- grammed telegraph blanks at the clerk's desk and began to wire all my friends for get-away money. My doctor and I played one game of croquet on the golf links and went to sleep on the lawn. When we got back to town a thought seemed to occur to him suddenly. "By the way," he asked, "how do you feel.?" "ReHeved of very much," I replied. Now a consulting physician is different. He isn't exactly sure he is to be paid or not, and this uncertainty msures you either the most careful or the most careless at- tention. My doctor took me to see a consulting physician. He made a poor guess and gave me careful attention. I liked him immensely. He put me through some co-ordina- tion exercises. "Have you a pain in the back of your head.?" he asked. I told him I had not. "Shut your eyes," he ordered, "put your feet close to- gether, and jump backward as far as you can." I always was a good backward jumper with my eyes shut, so I obeyed. My head struck the edge of the bathroom door, which had been left open and was only three feet away. The doctor was very sorry. He had overlooked the fact that the door was open. He closed it. "Now touch your nose with your right forefinger," he d. "Where is it.?" I asked. "On your face," said he. "I mean my right forefinger," I explained. "Oh, excuse me," said he. He reopened the bathroom 248 STORIES FROM O. HENRY door, and I took my finger out of the crack of it. After I had performed the marvelous digito-nasal feat I said: "I do not wish to deceive you as to symptoms, Doctor; I really have something hke a pain in the back of my head." He ignored the symptom and examined my heart carefully with a latest-popular-air-penny-in-the-slot ear-trumpet. I felt like a ballad. "Now," he said, "gallop like a horse for about five minutes around the room." I gave the best imitation I could of a disqualified Percheron being led out of Madison Square Garden. Then, without dropping in a penny, he listened to my chest again. "No glanders in our family, Doc," I said. The consulting physician held up his forefinger within three inches of my nose. "Look at my finger," he commanded. "Did you ever try Pears' " I began; but he went on with his test rapidly. "Now look across the bay. At my fijiger. Across the bay. At my finger. At my finger. Across the bay. A- cross the bay. At my finger. Across the bay." This for about three minutes. He explained that this was a test of the action of the brain. It seemed easy to me. I never once mistook his finger for the bay. I'll bet that if he had used the phrases: "Gaze, as it were, unpreoccupied, outward — or rather laterally — in the direction of the horizon, underlaid, so to speak, with the adjacent fluid inlet," and "Now, returning — or rather, in a manner, withdrawing your attention, bestow it upon my up- raised digit" — I'll bet, I say, that Henry James himself could have passed the examination. After asking me if I had ever had a grand uncle with curva- ture of the spine or a cousin with swelled ankles, the two doc- tors retired to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath tub for their consultation. I ate an apple, and gazed first at my finger and then across the bay. The doctors came out looking grave. More: they looked tombstones and Tennessee-papers-please-copy. They wrote out a diet list to which I was to be restricted. It had every- LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 249 thing that I had ever heard of to eat on it, except snails. And I never eat a snail unless it overtakes me and bites me first. *'You must follow this diet strictly," said the doctors. "I'd follow it a mile if I could get one-tenth of what's on it," I answered. "Of next importance," they went on, "is outdoor air and exercise. And here is a prescription that will be of great benefit to you." Then all of us took something. They took their hats, and I took my departure. I went to a druggist and showed him the prescription. "It will be $2.87 for an ounce bottle," he said. "Will you give me a piece of your wrapping cord.^^" said I. I made a hole in the prescription, ran the cord through it, tied it around my neck, and tucked it inside. All of us have a little superstition, and mine runs to a confidence in amulets. Of course there was nothing the matter with me, but I was very ill. I couldn't work, sleep, eat, or bowl. The only way I could get any sympathy was to go without shaving for four days. Even then somebody would say : "Old man, you look as hardy as a pine knot. Been up for a jaunt in the Maine woods, eh?" Then, suddenly, I remembered that I must have outdoor air and exercise. So I went down South to John's. John is an approximate relative by verdict of a preacher standing with a little book in his hands in a bower of chrysanthemums while a hundred thousand people looked on. John has a country house seven miles from Pineville. It is at an altitude and on the Blue Ridge Mountains in a state too dignified to be dragged into this controversy. John is mica, which is more valuable and clearer than gold. He met me at Pineville, and we took the trolley car to his home. It is a big, neighborless cottage on a hill surrounded by a hundred mountains. We got off at his little private station, where John's family and Amaryllis met and greeted us. Amaryllis looked at me a trifle anxiously. A rabbit came bounding across the hill between us and the 250 STORIES FROM O. HENRY house. I threw down my suit-case and pursued it hotfoot. After I had run twenty yards and seen it disappear, I sat down on the grass and wept disconsolately. "I can't catch a rabbit any more," I sobbed. "I'm of no further use in the world. I may as well be dead." "Oh, what is it — what is it, Brother John.^" I heard Amaryllis say. "Nerves a little unstrung," said John, in his calm way. "Don't worry. Get up, you rabbit-chaser, and come on to the house before the biscuits get cold." It was about twi- light, and the mountains came up nobly to Miss Murfree's descriptions of them. Soon after dinner I announced that I believed I could sleep for a year or two, including legal holidays. So I was shown to a room as big and cool as a flower garden, where there was a bed as broad as a lawn. Soon afterward the remainder of the household retired, and then there fell upon the land a silence. I had not heard a silence before in years. It was absolute. I raised myself on my elbow and listened to it. Sleep! I thought that if I only could hear a star twinkle or a blade of grass sharpen itself I could compose myself to rest. I thought once that I heard a sound like the sail of a catboat flapping as it veered about in a breeze, but I decided that it was probably only a tack in the carpet. Still I listened. Suddenly some belated bird alighted upon the window-sill, and, in what he no doubt considered sleepy tones, enunciated the noise generally translated as "cheep!" I leaped into the air. *'Hey! what's the matter down there?" called John from his room above mine. "Oh, nothing," I answered, "except that I accidentally bumped my head against the ceiling." The next morning I went out on the porch and looked at the mountains. There were forty-seven of them in sight. I shuddered, went into the big hall sitting room of the house, selected "Pancoast's Family Practice of Medicine" from a LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 251 bookcase, and began to read. John came in, took the book away from me, and led me outside. He has a farm of three hundred acres furnished with the usual complement of barns, mules, peasantry, and harrows with three front teeth broken off. I had seen such things in my childhood, and my heart began to sink. Then John spoke of alfalfa, and I brightened at once. **0h, yes," said I, "wasn't she in the chorus of — let's see *' "Green, you know," said John, "and tender, and you plough it under after the first season." "I know," said I, "and the grass grows over her." "Eight," said John. "You know something about farm- ing, after all." "I know something of some farmers," said I, "and a sure scythe will mow them down some day." On the way back to the house a beautiful and inexplicable creature walked across our path. I stopped irresistibly fascinated, gazing at it. John waited patiently, smoking his cigarette. He is a modern farmer. After ten minutes he said : "Are you going to stand there looking at that chicken all day? Breakfast is nearly ready." "A chicken?" said I. "A White Orpington hen, if you want to particularize." "A White Orpington hen?" I repeated, with intense in- terest. The fowl walked slowly away with graceful dignity, and I followed like a child after the Pied Piper. Five minutes more were allowed me by John, and then he took me by the sleeve and conducted me to breakfast. After I had been there a week I began to grow alarmed. I was sleeping and eating well and actually beginning to enjoy life. For a man in my desperate condition that would never do. So I sneaked down to the trolley-car station, took the car for Pineville, and went to see one of the best physicians in town. By this time I knew exactly what to do when I needed medical treatment. I hung my hat on the back of a chair, and said rapidly: "Doctor, I have cirrhosis of the heart, indurated arteries. 252 STORIES FROM O. HENRY neurasthenia, neuritis, acute indigestion, and convalescence. I am going to live on a strict diet. I shall also take a tepid bath at night and a cold one in the morning. I shall en- deavor to be cheerful, and fix my mind on pleasant subjects. In the way of drugs I intend to take a phosphorous pill three times a day, preferably after meals, and a tonic composed of the tinctures of gentian, cinchona, calisaya, and cardamon compound. Into each teaspoonful of this I shall mix tincture of nux vomica, beginning with one drop and increasing it a drop each day until the maximum dose is reached. I shall drop this with a medicine-dropper, which can be procured at a trifling cost at any pharmacy. Good morning." I took my hat and walked out. After I had closed the door I remembered something that I had forgotten to say. I opened it again. The doctor had not moved from where he had been sitting, but he gave a slightly nervous start when he saw me again. "I forgot to mention," said I, "that I shall also take abso- lute rest and exercise." After this consultation I felt much better. The re-establish- ing in my mind of the fact that I was hopelessly ill gave me so much satisfaction that I almost became gloomy again. There is nothing more alarming to a neurasthenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful. John looked after me carefully. After I had evinced so much interest in his ^Vhite Orpington chicken he tried his best to divert my mind, and was particular to lock his hen house of nights. Gradually the tonic mountain air, the wholesome food, and the daily walks among the hills so alleviated my malady that I became utterly wretched and despondent. I heard of a country doctor who lived in the mountains near by. I went to see him and told him the whole story. He was a gray-bearded man with clear, blue, wrinkled eyes, in a home-made suit of gray jeans. In order to save time I diagnosed my case, touched my nose with my right forefinger, struck myself below the knee to make my foot kick, sounded my chest, stuck LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE 253 out my tongue, and asked him the price of cemetery lots in Pineville. He ht his pipe and looked at me for about three minutes. "Brother," he said, after a while, "you are in a mighty bad way. There's a chance for you to pull through, but it's a mighty slim one." "What can it be?" I asked eagerly. "I have taken arsenic and gold, phosphorus, exercise, nux vomica, hy- drotherapeutic baths, rest, excitement, codein, and aromatic spirits of ammonia. Is there anything left in the pharma- copoeia?" "Somewhere in these mountains," said the doctor, "there's a plant growing — a flowering plant that'll cure you, and it's about the only thing that will. It's of a kind that's as old as the world; but of late it's powerful scarce and hard to find. You and I will have to hunt it up. I'm not engaged in active practice now: I'm getting along in years; but I'll take your case. You'll have to come every day in the after^ noon and help me hunt for this plant till we fimd it. The city doctors may know a lot about new scientific things, but they don't know much about the cures that nature carries around in her saddle bags." So every day the old doctor and I hunted the cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. To- gether we toiled up steep heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like Indians through brakes of pine — road side, hill side, river side, mountain side we explored in our search for the miraculous plant. As the old doctor said, it must have grown scarce and hard to find. But we followed our quest. Day by day we plumbed the valleys, scaled the heights, and tramped the plateaus in search of the miraculous plant. Mountain-bred, he never seemed to tire. I often reached home too fatigued 254 STORIES FROM O. HENRY to do anything except fall into bed and sleep until morning. This we kept up for a month. One evening after I had returned from a six-mile tramp with the old doctor, Amaryllis and I took a Httle walk under the trees near the road. We looked at the mountains drawing their royal-purple robes around them for their night's repose. "I'm glad you're well again," she said. "When you first came you frightened me. I thought you were really ill." "Well again!" I almost shrieked. "Do you know that I have only one chance in a thousand to live.'^" AmaryUis looked at me in surprise. "WTiy," said she, "you are as strong as one of the plough-mules, you sleep ten or twelve hours every night, and you are eating us out of house and home. What more do you want.^ " "I tell you," said I, "that unless we find the magic — that is, the plant we are looking for — in time, nothing can save me. The doctor tells me so." "What doctor?" "Doctor Tatum — the old doctor who lives half way up Black Oak Mountain. Do you know him?" "I have known him since I was able to talk. And is that where you go every day — is it he who takes you on these long walks and climbs that have brought back your health and strength? God bless the old doctor." Just then the old doctor himself drove slowly down the road in his rickety old buggy. I waved my hand at him and shouted that I would be on hand the next day at the usual time. He stopped his horse and called to Amaryllis to come out to him. They talked for five minutes while I waited. Then the old doctor drove on. When we got to the house Amaryllis lugged out an en- cyclopaedia and sought a word in it. "The doctor said," she told me, "that you needn't call any more as a patient, but he'd be glad to see you any time as a friend. And then he told me to look up my name in the encyclopaedia and tell you what it means. It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering plants, and also the name of a country girl in LET ME FEEL YOUR PULSE ^5 Theocritus and Virgil. What do you suppose the doctor meant by that?" "I know what he meant," said I. " I know now." A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet Lady Neurasthenia. The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament. And so for the exercise one is referred to good Doctor Tatum on Black Oak Mountain — take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting house in the pine-grove. Absolute rest and exercise! What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with a sixth sense, read the wordless Theoc- ritan idyl of the gold-bannered blue mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night? THE END