1

The Gift of the Magi

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 cheek burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three
times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And
the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the
shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates
the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and
smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from
the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A
furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar
description, but it certainly had that word on the look-out 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 unassuming
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, already introduced to you as
Della. 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
grey cat walking a grey fence in a grey 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 honour 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
rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate
conception of his looks. Della, 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 colour 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 grandfather's. The
other was Della's hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat
2 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the
window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty's
jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all
his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled
out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his
beard from envy.
So now Della's beautiful hair fell about her, rippling and
shining like a cascade of brown 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 of 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 Della ran, and collected
herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly
looked the 'Sofronie.' 'Will you buy my hair?' asked Della.
'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.
'Give it to me quick,' said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings.
Forget 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 ornamentation - as all
good things should do. 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.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a
little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and
lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by
generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task,
dear friends - a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny,
closelying 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 with a dollar
and eighty-seven cents?'
At seven 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. Della 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
3 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a
habit of saying little 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 very 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 stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the
scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, 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 prepared for. He
simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his
face.
Della 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 labour.
'Cut it off and sold it,' said Della. 'Don't you like me just
as well, anyhow? I'm me without my hair, ain't I?'
Jim looked about the room curiously.
'You say your hair is gone?' he said with an air almost of
idiocy.
'You needn't look for it,' said Della. '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 count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on,
Jim?'
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded
his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny
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 wrong answer. 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
unwrap that package you may see why you had me going
awhile at first.'
White 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 Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window.
Beautiful combs, pure tortoiseshell, with jewelled rims - just
the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were
4 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 bosom, 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 Della 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.
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 privilege 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 give gifts these two
were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they
are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

II
A Cosmopolite in a Café
AT MIDNIGHT THE CAFÉ was crowded. By some chance
the little table at which I sat had escaped the eye of incomers,
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 travellers 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 sedulous and largess-loving garçons, the music wisely
catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the mélange
of talk and laughter - and, if you will, the Würzburger 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
5 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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'hôte 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 Lapland.
Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at
Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas
postoak 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 the letter to 'E. Rushmore Coglan,
Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,' and have mailed
it, feeling confident that it would be delivered to him.
I was sure that I had at last found 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 himself 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
traffic 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
Siberian Railway the orchestra glided into a medley. The
concluding air was 'Dixie,' and as the exhilarating notes
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 cafés in the City
of New York. Tons of brew have been consumed over theories
to account for it. Some have conjectured hastily that all
Southerners in town hie themselves to cafés 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 water-melon 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
6 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 Würzburgers 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? Why, I've seen
Kentuckians who hated whisky, Virginians who weren't
descended from Pocahontas, Indianians who hadn't written a
novel, Mexicans who didn't wear velvet trousers 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 altogether 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 ostensible sectional
loyalty is invariably a native of either Secaucus, 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 Upernavik who sends to Cincinnati for his
neckties, and I saw a goat-herder 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 Yokohama all the
year round. 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 de 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
7 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.'
'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 Venice 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
grandaunt on his mother's side was related by marriage to the
Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was
kidnapped for ransom by some Afghanistan 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 that he saw someone through the chatter and smoke
whom he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle,
who was reduced to Würzburger without further ability to
voice his aspirations to perch, melodious, upon the summit of a
valley.
I sat reflecting upon my evident cosmopolite and
wondering how the poet had managed to miss him. He was my
discovery and I believed in him. How was it? 'The men that
breed from them they traffic up and down, but cling 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 café. I saw above the heads of
the seated patrons E. Rushmore Coglan and a stranger to me
engaged in terrific battle. They fought between 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 outside,
still resisting.
8 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

I called McCarthy, one of the French garçons, 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 - '
'Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,'
continued McCarthy, 'and he wouldn't stand for no knockin' the
place.'

III

Between Rounds

THE MAY MOON SHONE BRIGHT upon the private

boarding-house of Mrs. Murphy. By reference to the almanac a
large amount of territory will be discovered upon which its
rays also fell. Spring was in its heyday, with hay fever soon to
follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for
the Western and Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort
agents were blowing; the air and answers to Lawson were
growing milder; hand-organs, fountains and pinochle were
playing everywhere.
The windows of Mrs. Murphy's boarding-house were
open. A group of boarders were seated on the high stoop upon
round, flat mats like German pancakes.
In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey
11 awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its
heat went into Mrs. McCaskey.
At nine Mr. McCaskey came. He carried his coat on his
arm and his pipe in his teeth; and he apologized for disturbing
the boarders on the steps as he selected spots of stone between
them on which to set his size 9, width Ds.
As he opened the door of his room he received a surprise.
Instead of the usual stove-lid or potato-masher for him to
dodge, came only words.
Mr. McCaskey reckoned that the benign May moon had
softened the breast of his spouse.
'I heard ye,' came the oral substitutes for kitchenware. 'Ye
can apollygize to riff-raff of the streets for settin' yer unhandy
feet on the tails of their frocks, but ye'd walk on the neck of yer
wife the length of a clothes-line without so much as a "Kiss me
fut," and I'm sure, it's that long from rubberin' out the windy
for ye and the victuals cold such as there's money to buy after
drinkin' up yer wages at Gallegher's every Saturday evenin',
and the gas man here twice to-day for his.'
'Woman!' said Mr. McCaskey, dashing his coat and hat
upon a chair, 'the noise of ye is an insult to me appetite. When
ye run down politeness ye take the mortar from between the
bricks of the foundations of society. 'Tis no more than
exercisin' the acrimony of a gentleman when ye ask the dissent
of ladies blockin' the way for steppin' between them. Will ye
bring the pig's face of ye out of the windy and see to the food?'
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily and went to the stove. There
was something in her manner that warned Mr. McCaskey.
9 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

When the corners of her mouth went down suddenly like a

barometer it usually foretold a fall of crockery and tinware.
'Pig's face, is it?' said Mrs. McCaskey, and hurled a
stewpan full of bacon and turnips at her lord.
Mr. McCaskey was no novice at repartee. He knew what
should follow the entree. On the table was a roast sirloin of
pork, garnished with shamrocks. He retorted with this, and
drew the appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen
dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her
husband struck Mrs. McCaskey below one eye. When she
replied with a well-aimed coffee-pot full of a hot, black, semi-
fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should have
ended.
But Mr. McCaskey was no 50 cent table d'hôter. Let cheap
Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them
make that faux pas. He was foxier still. Finger-bowls were not
beyond the compass of his experience. They were not to be had
in the Pension Murphy; but their equivalent was at hand.
Triumphantly he sent the granite-ware wash-basin at the head
of his matrimonial adversary. Mrs. McCaskey dodged in time.
She reached for a flat-iron, with which, as a sort of cordial, she
hoped to bring the gastronomical duel to a close. But a loud,
wailing scream downstairs caused both her and Mr. McCaskey
to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.
On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman
Cleary was standing with one ear upturned, listening to the
crash of household utensils.
' 'Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missus at it again,' meditated
the policeman. 'I wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will
not. Married folks they are; and few pleasures they have. 'Twill
not last long. Sure, they'll have to borrow more dishes to keep
it up with.' And just then came the loud scream below-stairs,
betokening fear or dire extremity. ' 'Tis probably the cat,' said
Policeman Cleary, and walked hastily in the other direction.
The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an
insurance solicitor by birth and an investigator by profession,
went inside to analyse the scream. He returned with the news
that Mrs. Murphy's little boy Mike was lost. Following the
messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy - two hundred pounds in
tears and hysterics, clutching the air and howling to the sky for
the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and mischief. Bathos,
truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy,
milliner, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two
old maids, Misses Walsh, who complained every day about the
noise in the halls, inquired immediately if anybody had looked
behind the clock.
Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose
and buttoned his coat. 'The little one lost?' he exclaimed. 'I will
scour the city.' His wife never allowed him out after dark. But
now she said: 'Go, Ludovic!' in a baritone voice. 'Whoever can
look upon that mother's grief without springing to her relief
has a heart of stone.' 'Give me some thirty or - sixty cents, my
love,' said the Major. 'Lost children sometimes stray far. I may
need car-fares.'
Old man Denny, hall-room, fourth floor back, who sat on
the lowest step, trying to read a paper by the street lamp,
10 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

turned over a page to follow up the article about the carpenters'

strike. Mrs. Murphy shrieked to the moon: 'Oh, ar-r-Mike, f'r
Gawd's sake, where is me little bit av a boy?'
'When'd ye see him last?' asked old man Denny, with one
eye on the report of the Building Trades League.
'Oh,' wailed Mrs. Murphy,.' 'twas yisterday, or maybe four
hours ago! I dunno. But it's lost he is, me little boy Mike. He
was playin' on the sidewalk only this mornin' - or was it
Wednesday? I'm that busy with work 'tis hard to keep up with
dates. But I've looked the house over from top to cellar, and it's
gone he is. Oh, for the love av Hiven - '
Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its
revilers. They call it hard as iron; they say that no pulse of pity
beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests
and deserts of lava. But beneath the hard crust of the lobster is
found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile
would have been wiser. Still, nobody should take offence. We
would call no one a lobster without good and sufficient claws.
No calamity so touches the common heart of humanity as
does the straying of a little child. Their feet are so uncertain
and feeble; the ways are so steep and strange.
Major Griggs hurried down to the corner, and up the
avenue into Billy's place. 'Gimme a rye-high,' he said to the
servitor. 'Haven't seen a bow-legged, dirty-faced little devil of
a six-yearold lost kid around here anywhere, have you?'
Mr. Toomey retained Miss Purdy's hand on the steps.
'Think of that dear little babe,' said Miss Purdy, 'lost from his
mother's side - perhaps already fallen beneath the iron hoofs of
galloping steeds - oh, isn't it dreadful?
'Ain't that right?' agreed Mr. Toomey, squeezing her hand.
'Say I start out and help look for um!'
'Perhaps,' said Miss Purdy, 'you should. But oh, Mr.
Toomey, you are so dashing - so reckless - suppose in your
enthusiasm some accident should befall you, then what - '
Old man Denny read on about the arbitration agreement,
with one finger on the lines.
In the second floor front Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey came to
the window to recover their second wind. Mr. McCaskey was
scooping turnips out of his vest with a crooked forefinger, and
his lady was wiping an eye that the salt of the roast pork had
not benefited. They heard the outcry below, and thrust their
heads out of the window.
' 'Tis little Mike is lost,' said Mrs. McCaskey in a hushed
voice, 'the beautiful, little, trouble-making angel of a gossoon!'
'The bit of a boy mislaid?' said Mr. McCaskey leaning out
of the window. 'Why, now, that's bad enough, entirely. The
childer, they be different. If 'twas a woman I'd be willin', for
they leave peace behind 'em when they go.'
Disregarding the thrust, Mrs. McCaskey caught her
husband's arm.
'Jawn,' she said sentimentally, 'Missis Murphy's little bye is
lost. 'Tis a great city for losing little boys. Six years old he was.
Jawn, 'tis the same age our little bye would have been if we
had had one six years ago.'
'We never did,' said Mr. McCaskey, lingering with the fact.
11 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'But if we had, Jawn, think what sorrow would be in our

hearts this night, with our little Phelan run away and stolen in
the city nowheres at all.'
'Ye talk foolishness,' said Mr. McCaskey. ' 'Tis Pat he
would be named, after me old father in Cantrim.'
'Ye lie!' said Mrs. McCaskey, without anger. 'Me brother
was worth tin dozen bog-trotting McCaskeys. After him would
the bye be named.' She leaned over the window-sill and looked
down at the hurrying and bustle below.
'Jawn,' said Mrs. McCaskey softly, 'I'm sorry I was hasty
wid ye.'
' 'Twas hasty puddin', as ye say,' said her husband, 'and
hurryup turnips and get-a-move-on-ye coffee. 'Twas what ye
could call a quick lunch, all right, and tell no lie.'
Mrs. McCaskey slipped her arm inside her husband's and
took his rough hand in hers.
'Listen at the cryin' of poor Mrs. Murphy,' she said. ' 'Tis an
awful thing for a bit of a bye to be lost in this great big city. If
'twas our little Phelan, Jawn, I'd be breakin' me heart.'
Awkwardly Mr. McCaskey withdrew his hand. But he laid
it around the nearing shoulders of his wife.
' 'Tis foolishness, of course,' said he, roughly, 'but I'd be cut
up some meself, if our little - Pat was kidnapped or anything.
But there never was any childer for us. Sometimes I've been
ugly and hard with ye, Judy. Forget it.'
They leaned together, and looked down at the heart-drama
being acted below.
Long they sat thus. People surged along the sidewalk,
crowding, questioning, filling the air with rumours and
inconsequent surmises. Mrs. Murphy ploughed back and forth
in their midst, like a soft mountain down which plunged an
audible cataract of tears. Couriers came and went.
Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of
the boarding-house.
'What's up now, Judy?' asked Mr. McCaskey.
' 'Tis Missis Murphy's voice,' said Mrs. McCaskey,
harking. 'She says she's after finding little Mike asleep behind
the roll of old linoleum under the bed in her room.'
Mr. McCaskey laughed loudly.
'That's yer Phelan,' he shouted sardonically 'Divil a bit
would a Pat have done that trick if the bye we never had is
strayed and stole, by the powers, call him Phelan, and see him
hide out under the bed like a mangy pup.'
Mrs. McCaskey arose heavily, and went toward the dish
closet, with the corners of her mouth drawn down.
Policeman Cleary came back around the corner as the
crowd dispersed. Surprised, he upturned an ear toward the
McCaskey apartment where the crash of irons and chinaware
and the ring of hurled kitchen utensils seemed as loud as
before. Policeman Cleary took out his timepiece.
'By the deported snakes!' he exclaimed, 'Jawn McCaskey
and his lady have been fightin' for an hour and a quarter by the
watch. The missis could give him forty pounds weight.
Strength to his arm.'
Policeman Cleary strolled back around the corner.
12 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Old man Denny folded his paper and hurried up the steps
just as Mrs. Murphy was about to lock the door for the night.

IV

The Skylight Room

FIRST MRS. PARKER would show you the double parlours.

You would not dare to interrupt her description of their
advantages and of the merits of the gentleman who had
occupied them for eight years. Then you would manage to
stammer forth the confession that you were neither a doctor
nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner of receiving the admission
was such that you could never afterward entertain the same
feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you up
in one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlours.
Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the
second floor back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor
manner that it was worth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always
paid for it until he left to take charge of his brother's orange
plantation in Florida near Palm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre
always spent the winters that had the double front room with
private bath, you managed to babble that you wanted
something still cheaper.
If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to
look at Mr. Skidder's large hall-room on the third floor. Mr.
Skidder's room was not vacant. He wrote plays and smoked
cigarettes in it all day long. But every room-hunter was made
to visit his room to admire the lambrequins. After each visit,
Mr. Skidder, from the fright caused by possible eviction, would
pay something on his rent.
Then - oh, then - if you still stood on one foot with your
hot hand clutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and
hoarsely proclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty,
nevermore would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would
honk loudly the word 'Clara,' she would show you her back,
and march downstairs. Then Clara, the coloured maid, would
escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth
flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied 7 by 8
feet of floorspace at the middle of the hall. On each side of it
was a dark lumber closet or store-room.
In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was
the dresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like
the sides of a coin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped,
you looked up as from a well - and breathed once more.
Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of
blue infinity.
'Two dollars, suh,' Clara would say in her half-
contemptuous, half-Tuskegeenial tones.
One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She
carried a typewriter made to be lugged around by a much
larger lady. She was a very little girl, with eyes and hair that
kept on growing after she had stopped and that always looked
as if they were saying: 'Goodness me. Why didn't you keep up
with us?'
13 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. 'In this

closet,' she said, 'one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or
coal - '
'But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist,' said Miss Leeson
with a shiver.
Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering,
icy stare that she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors
or dentists, and led the way to the second floor back.
'Eight dollars?' said Miss Leeson. 'Dear me! I'm not Hetty
if I do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me
something higher and lower.'
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette
stubs at the rap on his door.
'Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,' said Mrs. Parker, with her
demon's smile at his pale looks. 'I didn't know you were in. I
asked the lady to have a look at your lambrequins.'
'They're too lovely for anything,' said Miss Leeson,
smiling in exactly the way the angels do.
After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the
tall, black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and
inserting a small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and
vivacious features.
'Anna Held'll jump at it,' said Mr. Skidder to himself,
putting his feet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in
a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.
Presently the tocsin call of 'Clara!' sounded to the world
the state of Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her,
mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her into a vault with a
glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and
cabalistic words 'Two dollars!'
'I'll take it!' sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the
squeaky iron bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she
brought home papers with handwriting on them and made
copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had no work at
night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop
with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a
skylight room when the plans were drawn for her creation. She
was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies. Once
she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great
(unpublished) comedy, 'It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the
Subway.'
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers
whenever Miss Leeson had time to sit on the steps for an hour
or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a
public school and said 'Well, really!' to everything you said, sat
on the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the
moving ducks at Coney every Sunday and worked in a
department store, sat on the bottom step and sniffed. Miss
Leeson sat on the middle step, and the men would quickly
group around her.
Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for
the star part in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real
life. And especially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat,
flushed and foolish. And especially very young Mr. Evans,
who set up a hollow cough to induce her to ask him to leave
14 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

off cigarettes. The men voted her 'the funniest and jolliest ever,'
but the sniffs on the top step and the lower step were
implacable.

• • • • •

I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the
footlights and drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr.
Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of
bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have
rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's
rickety ribs to the ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not
puff. To the train of Momus are the fat men remanded. In vain
beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt,
Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off
Helen herself; Hoover, fortyfive, flush, foolish and fat, is meat
for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.
As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening,
Miss Leeson looked up into the firmament and cried with her
little gay laugh:
'Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down
here, too.'
All looked up - some at the windows of skyscrapers, some
casting about for an airship, Jackson-guided.
'It's that star,' explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny
finger. 'Not the big one that twinkles - the steady blue one near
it. I can see it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy
Jackson.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'I didn't know you
were an astronomer, Miss Leeson.'
'Oh, yes,' said the small star-gazer, 'I know as much as any
of them about the style of sleeves they're going to wear next
fall in Mars.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker. 'The star you refer to
is Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the
second magnitude, and its meridian passage is - '
'Oh,' said the very young Mr. Evans, 'I think Billy Jackson
is a much better name for it.
'Same here,' said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to
Miss Longnecker. 'I think Miss Leeson has just as much right
to name stars as any of those old astrologers had.'
'Well, really!' said Miss Longnecker.
'I wonder whether it's a shooting star,' remarked Miss
Dorn. 'I hit nine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at
Coney Sunday.'
'He doesn't show up very well from down here,' said Miss
Leeson. 'You ought to see him from my room. You know you
can see stars even in the daytime from the bottom of a well. At
night my room is like the shaft of a coal-mine, and it makes
Billy Jackson look like the big diamond pin that Night fastens
her kimono with.'
There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought
no formidable papers home to copy. And when she went in the
morning, instead of working, she went from office to office
and let her heart melt away in the drip of cold refusals
transmitted through insolent office boys. This went on.
15 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs.

Parker's stoop at the hour when she always returned from her
dinner at the restaurant. But she had had no dinner.
As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and
seized his chance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness
hovered above her like an avalanche. She dodged, and caught
the balustrade. He tried for her hand, and she raised it and
smote him weakly in the face. Step by step she went up,
dragging herself by the railing. She passed Mr. Skidder's door
as he was red-inking a stage direction for Myrtle Delorme
(Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to 'pirouette across
stage from L to the side of the Count.' Up the carpeted ladder
she crawled at last and opened the door of the skylight room.
She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell
upon the iron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn
springs. And in that Erebus of a room she slowly raised her
heavy eyelids, and smiled.
For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and
bright and constant through the skylight. There was no world
about her. She was sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that
small square of pallid light framing the star that she had so
whimsically, and oh, so ineffectually, named. Miss Longnecker
must be right; it was Gamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia,
and not Billy Jackson. And yet she could not let it be Gamma.
As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm.
The third time she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a
kiss out of the black pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back
limply.
'Good-bye, Billy,' she murmured faintly. 'You're millions
of miles away and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept
where I could see you most of the time up there when there
wasn't anything else but darkness to look at, didn't you? . . .
Millions of miles.... Good-bye, Billy Jackson.'
Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at ten the
next day, and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of
wrists and even burnt feathers, proving of no avail, someone
ran to 'phone for an ambulance.
In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-
clanging, and the capable young medico, in his white linen
coat, ready, active, confident, with his smooth face half
debonair, half grim, danced up the steps.
'Ambulance call to 49,' he said briefly. 'What's the
trouble?'
'Oh yes, doctor,' sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble
that there should be trouble in the house was the greater. 'I can't
think what can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do
would bring her to. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsie - yes, a
Miss Elsie Leeson. Never before in my house - '
'What room?' cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which
Mrs. Parker was a stranger.
'The skylight room. It - '
Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the
location of skylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a
time. Mrs. Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.
On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the
astronomer in his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised
16 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

scalpel of his tongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker

crumpled as a stiff garment that slips down from a nail. Ever
afterwards there remained crumples in her mind and body.
Sometimes her curious roomers would ask her what the doctor
said to her.
'Let that be,' she would answer. 'If I can get forgiveness
for having heard it I will be satisfied.'
The ambulance physician strode with his burden through
the pack of hounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even
they fell back along the sidewalk abashed, for his face was that
of one who bears his own dead.
They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed
prepared for it in the ambulance the form that he carried, and
all that he said was: 'Drive like h - l, Wilson,' to the driver.
That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw
a little news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as
it helped me) to weld the incidents together.
It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a
young woman who had been removed from No. 49 East -
Street, suffering from debility induced by starvation. It
concluded with these words:
'Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who
attended the case, says the patient will recover.'

A Service of Love

WHEN ONE LOVES ONES ART no service seems too hard.

That is our premise. This story shall draw a conclusion
from it, and show at the same time that the premise is
incorrect. That will be a new thing in logic, and a feat in story-
telling somewhat older than the Great Wall of China.
Joe Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats of the Middle
West pulsing with a genius for pictorial art. At six he drew a
picture of the town pump with a prominent citizen passing it
hastily. This effort was framed and hung in the drug store
window by the side of the ear of corn with an uneven number
of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a flowing necktie
and a capital tied up somewhat closer.
Delia Caruthers did things in six octaves so promisingly in
a pine-tree village in the South that her relatives chipped in
enough in her chip hat for her to go 'North' and 'finish.' They
could not see her f -, but that is our story
Joe and Delia met in an atelier where a number of art and
music students had gathered to discuss chiaroscuro, Wagner,
music, Rembrandt's works pictures, Waldteufel, wall-paper,
Chopin, and Oolong.
Joe and Delia became enamoured one of the other or each
of the other, as you please, and in a short time were married -
for (see above), when one loves one's Art no service seem too
hard.
Mr. and Mrs. Larrabee began housekeeping in a flat. It
was a lonesome flat - something like the A sharp way down at
the lefthand end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for
they had their Art and they had each other. And my advice to
17 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

the rich young man would be - sell all thou hast, and give it to
the poor - janitor for the privilege of living in a flat with your
Art and your Delia.
Flat-dwellers shall endorse my dictum that theirs is the
only true happiness. If a home is happy it cannot fit too close -
let the dresser collapse and become a billiard table; let the
mantel turn to a rowing machine, the escritoire to a spare
bedchamber, the washstand to an upright piano; let the four
walls come together, if they will, so you and your Delia are
between. But if home be the other kind, let it be wide and long
- enter you at the Golden Gate, hang your hat on Hatteras, your
cape on Cape Horn, and go out by Labrador.
Joe was painting in the class of the great Magister - you
know his fame. His fees are high; his lessons are light - his
high-lights have brought him renown. Delia was studying
under Rosenstock you know his repute as a disturber of the
piano keys.
They were mighty happy as long as their money lasted. So
is every - but I will not be cynical. Their aims were very clear
and defined. Joe was to become capable very soon of turning
out pictures that old gentlemen with thin side-whiskers and
thick pocketbooks would sandbag one another in his studio for
the privilege of buying. Delia was to become familiar and then
contemptuous with Music, so that when she saw the orchestra
seats and boxes unsold she could have sore throat and lobster
in a private dining-room and refuse to go on the stage.
But the best, in my opinion, was the home life in the little
flat the ardent, voluble chats after the day's study; the cosy
dinners and fresh, light breakfasts; the interchange of
ambitions - ambitions interwoven each with the other's or else
inconsiderable - the mutual help and inspiration; and -
overlook my artlessness stuffed olives and cheese sandwiches
at 11p.m.
But after awhile Art flagged. It sometimes does, even if
some switchman doesn't flag it. Everything going out and
nothing coming in, as the vulgarians say. Money was lacking
to pay Mr. Magister and Herr Rosenstock their prices. When
one loves one's Art no service seems too hard. So, Delia said
she must give music lessons to keep the chafing dish bubbling.
For two or three days she went out canvassing for pupils.
One evening she came home elated.
'Joe, dear,' she said gleefully, 'I've a pupil. And, oh, the
loveliest people! General - General A. B. Pinkney's daughter -
on Seventyfirst Street. Such a splendid house, Joe - you ought
to see the front door! Byzantine I think you would call it. And
inside! Oh, Joe, I never saw anything like it before.
'My pupil is his daughter Clementina. I dearly love her
already. She's a delicate thing - dresses always in white; and
the sweetest simplest manners! Only eighteen years old. I'm to
give three lessons a week; and, just think, Joe! $5 a lesson. I
don't mind it a bit; for when I get two or three more pupils I
can resume my lessons with Herr Rosenstock. Now, smooth
out that wrinkle between your brows, dear, and let's have a nice
supper.'
'That's all right for you, Dele,' said Joe, attacking a can of
peas with a carving knife and a hatchet, 'but how about me? Do
18 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

you think I'm going to let you hustle for wages while I
philander in the regions of high art? Not by the bones of
Benvenuto Cellini! I guess I can sell papers or lay
cobblestones, and bring in a dollar or two.'
Delia came and hung about his neck.
'Joe, dear, you are silly. You must keep on at your studies.
It is not as if I had quit my music and gone to work at
something else. While I teach I learn. I am always with my
music. And we can live as happily as millionaires on $15 a
week. You mustn't think of leaving Mr. Magister.'
'All right,' said Joe, reaching for the blue scalloped
vegetable dish. 'But I hate for you to be giving lessons. It isn't
Art. But you're a trump and a dear to do it.'
'When one loves one's Art no service seems too hard,' said
Delia.
'Magister praised the sky in that sketch I made in the
park,' said Joe. 'And Tinkle gave me permission to hang two of
them in his window. I may sell one if the right kind of a
moneyed idiot sees them.'
'I'm sure you will,' said Delia sweetly. 'And now let's be
thankful for General Pinkney and this veal roast.'
During all of the next week the Larrabees had an early
breakfast. Joe was enthusiastic about some morning-effect
sketches he was doing in Central Park, and Delia packed him
off breakfasted, coddled, praised, and kissed at seven o'clock.
Art is an engaging mistress. It was most times seven o'clock
when he returned in the evening.
At the end of the week Delia, sweetly proud but languid,
triumphantly tossed three five-dollar bills on the 8 by 10
(inches) centre table of the 8 by 10 (feet) flat parlour.
'Sometimes,' she said, a little wearily, 'Clementina tries
me. I'm afraid she doesn't practise enough, and I have to tell
her the same things so often. And then she always dresses
entirely in white, and that does get monotonous. But General
Pinkney is the dearest old man! I wish you could know him,
Joe. He comes in sometimes when I am with Clementina at the
piano - he is a widower, you know - and stands there pulling
his white goatee. "And how are the semiquavers and the demi-
semiquavers progressing?" he always asks.
'I wish you could see the wainscoting in that drawing-
room, Joe! And those Astrakhan rug portières. And Clementina
has such a funny little cough. I hope she is stronger than she
looks. Oh, I really am getting attached to her, she is so gentle
and high bred. General Pinkney's brother was once Minister to
Bolivia.'
And then Joe, with the air of a Monte Cristo, drew forth a
ten, a five, a two and a one - all legal tender notes - and laid
them beside Delia's earnings.
'Sold that water-colour of the obelisk to a man from
Peoria,' he announced overwhelmingly.
'Don't joke with me,' said Delia - 'not from Peoria!'
'All the way. I wish you could see him, Dele. Fat man with
a woollen muffler and a quill toothpick. He saw the sketch in
Tinkle's window and thought it was a windmill at first. He was
game, though, and bought it anyhow. He ordered another - an
19 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

oil sketch of the Lackawanna freight depot - to take back with

him. Music lessons! Oh, I guess Art is still in it.'
'I'm so glad you've kept on,' said Delia heartily. 'You're
bound to win, dear. Thirty-three dollars! We never had so much
to spend before. We'll have oysters to-night.'
'And filet mignon with champignons,' said Joe. 'Where is
the olive fork?'
On the next Saturday evening Joe reached home first. He
spread his $18 on the parlour table and washed what seemed to
be a great deal of dark paint from his hands.
Half an hour later Delia arrived, her right hand tied up in a
shapeless bundle of wraps and bandages.
'How is this?' asked Joe after the usual greetings.
Delia laughed, but not very joyously.
'Clementina,' she explained, 'insisted upon a Welsh rabbit
after her lesson. She is such a queer girl. Welsh rabbits at five
in the afternoon. The General was there. You should have seen
him run for the chafing dish, Joe, just as if there wasn't a
servant in the house. I know Clementina isn't in good health;
she is so nervous. In serving the rabbit she spilled a great lot of
it, boiling hot, over my hand and wrist. It hurt awfully, Joe.
And the dear girl was so sorry! But General Pinkney! - Joe,
that old man nearly went distracted. He rushed downstairs and
sent somebody - they said the furnace man or somebody in the
basement - out to a drug store for some oil and things to bind it
up with. It doesn't hurt so much now.'
What's this?' asked Joe, taking the hand tenderly and
pulling at some white strands beneath the bandages.
'It's something soft,' said Delia, 'that had oil on it. Oh, Joe,
did you sell another sketch?' She had seen the money on the
table.
'Did I?' said Joe. 'Just ask the man from Peoria. He got his
depot to-day, and he isn't sure but he thinks he wants another
parkscape and a view on the Hudson. What time this afternoon
did you burn your hand, Dele?'
'Five o'clock, I think,' said Dele plaintively. 'The iron - I
mean the rabbit came off the fire about that time. You ought to
have seen General Pinkney, Joe, when - '
'Sit down here a moment, Dele,' said Joe. He drew her to
the couch, sat down beside her and put his arm across her
shoulders.
'What have you been doing for the last two weeks, Dele?'
he asked.
She braved it for a moment or two with an eye full of love
and stubbornness, and murmured a phrase or two vaguely of
General Pinkney; but at length down went her head and out
came the truth and tears.
'I couldn't get any pupils,' she confessed. 'And I couldn't
bear to have you give up your lessons; and I got a place ironing
shirts in that big Twenty-fourth Street laundry. And I think I
did very well to make up both General Pinkney and
Clementina, don't you, Joe? And when a girl in the laundry set
down a hot iron on my hand this afternoon I was all the way
home making up that story about the Welsh rabbit. You're not
angry are you, Joe? And if I hadn't got the work you mightn't
have sold your sketches to that man from Peoria.'
20 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'He wasn't from Peoria,' said Joe slowly.

'Well, it doesn't matter where he was from. How clever
you are, Joe - and - kiss me, Joe - and what made you ever
suspect that I wasn't giving music lessons to Clementina?'
'I didn't,' said Joe, 'until to-night. And I wouldn't have
then, only I sent up this cotton waste and oil from the engine-
room this afternoon for a girl upstairs who had her hand
burned with a smoothing-iron. I've been firing the engine in
that laundry for the last two weeks.'
'And then you didn't –
' 'My purchaser from Peoria,' said Joe, 'and General
Pinkney are both creations of the same art - but you wouldn't
call it either painting or music.
And then they both laughed, and Joe began:
'When one loves one's Art no service seems –
' But Delia stopped him with her hand on his lips. 'No,'
she said 'just "When one loves." '

VI

The Coming-out of Maggie

EVERY SATURDAY NIGHT the Clover Leaf Social Club

gave a hop in the hall of the Give and Take Athletic
Association on the East Side. In order to attend one of these
dances you must be a member of the Give and Take - or, if you
belong to the division that starts off with the right foot in
waltzing, you must work in Rhinegold's paper-box factory.
Still, any Clover Leaf was privileged to escort or be escorted
by an outsider to a single dance. But mostly each Give and
Take brought the paper-box girl that he affected; and few
strangers could boast of having shaken a foot at the regular
hops.
Maggie Toole, on account of her dull eyes, broad mouth
and left-handed style of footwork in the two-step, went to the
dances with Anna McCarty and her 'fellow.' Anna and Maggie
worked side by side in the factory, and were the greatest chums
ever. So Anna always made Jimmy Burns take her by Maggie's
house every Saturday night so that her friend could go to the
dance with them.
The Give and Take Athletic Association lived up to its
name. The hall of the association in Orchard Street was fitted
out with musclemaking inventions. With the fibres thus
builded up the members were wont to engage the police and
rival social and athletic organizations in joyous combat.
Between these more serious occupations the Saturday night
hops with the paper-box factory girls came as a refining
influence and as an efficient screen. For sometimes the tip
went 'round, and if you were among the elect that tiptoed up
the dark back stairway you might see as neat and satisfying a
little welter-weight affair to a finish as ever happened inside
the ropes.
On Saturdays Rhinegold's paper-box factory closed at 3
p.m. On one such afternoon Anna and Maggie walked
homeward together. At Maggie's door Anna said, as usual: 'Be
21 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

ready at seven, sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and me'll come by for
you.'
But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and
grateful thanks from the non-escorted one there was to be
perceived a high-poised head, a prideful dimpling at the
corners of a broad mouth, and almost a sparkle in a dull brown
eye.
'Thanks, Anna,' said Maggie; 'but you and Jimmy needn't
bother to-night. I've a gentleman friend that's coming 'round to
escort me to the hop.'
The comely Anna pounced upon her friend, shook her,
chided and beseeched her. Maggie Toole catch a fellow! Plain,
dear, loyal, unattractive Maggie, so sweet as a chum, so
unsought for a two-step or a moonlit bench in the little park.
How was it? When did it happen? Who was it?
'You'll see to-night,' said Maggie, flushed with the wine of
the first grapes she had gathered in Cupid's vineyard. 'He's
swell all right. He's two inches taller than Jimmy, and an up-to-
date dresser. I'll introduce him, Anna, just as soon as we get to
the hall.'
Anna and Jimmy were among the first Clover Leafs to
arrive that evening. Anna's eyes were brightly fixed upon the
door of the hall to catch the first glimpse of her friend's 'catch.'
At 8.30 Miss Toole swept into the hall with her escort.
Quickly her triumphant eye discovered her chum under the
wing of her faithful Jimmy.
'Oh, gee!' cried Anna, 'Mag ain't made a hit - oh, no! Swell
fellow? Well, I guess! Style? Look at 'um.'
'Go as far as you like,' said Jimmy, with sandpaper in his
voice. 'Cop him out if you want him. These new guys always
win out with the push. Don't mind me. He don't squeeze all the
limes, I guess. Huh!'
'Shut up, Jimmy. You know what I mean. I'm glad for
Mag. First fellow she ever had. Oh, here they come.'
Across the floor Maggie sailed like a coquettish yacht
convoyed by a stately cruiser. And truly, her companion
justified the encomiums of the faithful chum. He stood two
inches taller than the average Give and Take athlete; his dark
hair curled; his eyes and his teeth flashed whenever he
bestowed his frequent smiles. The young men of the Clover
Leaf Club pinned not their faith to the graces of person as
much as they did to its prowess, its achievements in hand-to-
hand conflicts, and its preservation from the legal duress that
constantly menaced it. The member of the association who
would bind a paper-box maiden to his conquering chariot
scorned to employ Beau Brummel airs. They were not
considered honourable methods of warfare. The swelling
biceps, the coat straining at its buttons over the chest, the air of
conscious conviction of the super-eminence of the male in the
cosmogony of creation, even a calm display of bow legs as
subduing and enchanting agents in the gentle tourneys of
Cupid - these were the approved arms and ammunition of the
Clover Leaf gallants. They viewed, then, the genuflexions and
alluring poses of this visitor with their chins at a new angle.
'A friend of mine, Mr. Terry O'Sullivan,' was Maggie's
formula of introduction. She led him around the room,
22 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

presenting him to each new-arriving Clover Leaf. Almost was

she pretty now, with the unique luminosity in her eyes that
comes to a girl with her first suitor and a kitten with its first
mouse.
'Maggie Toole's got a fellow at last,' was the word that
went round among the paper-box girls. 'Pipe Mag's floor-
walker' - thus the Give and Takes expressed their indifferent
contempt.
Usually at the weekly hops Maggie kept a spot on the wall
warm with her back. She felt and showed so much gratitude
whenever a self-sacrificing partner invited her to dance that his
pleasure was cheapened and diminished. She had even grown
used to noticing Anna joggle the reluctant Jimmy with her
elbow as a signal for him to invite her chum to walk over his
feet through a two-step.
But to-night the pumpkin had turned to a coach and six.
Terry O'Sullivan was a victorious Prince Charming, and
Maggie Toole winged her first butterfly flight. And though our
tropes of fairyland be mixed with those of entomology they
shall not spill one drop of ambrosia from the rose-crowned
melody of Maggie's one perfect night.
The girls besieged her for introductions to her 'fellow.'
The Clover Leaf young men, after two years of blindness,
suddenly perceived charms in Miss Toole. They flexed their
compelling muscles before her and bespoke her for the dance.
Thus she scored; but to Terry O'Sullivan the honours of
the evening fell thick and fast. He shook his curls; he smiled
and went easily through the seven motions for acquiring grace
in your own room before an open window ten minutes each
day. He danced like a faun; he introduced manner and style and
atmosphere; his words came trippingly upon his tongue, and -
he waltzed twice in succession with the paper-box girl that
Dempsey Donovan brought.
Dempsey was the leader of the association. He wore a
dress suit, and could chin the bar twice with one hand. He was
one of 'Big Mike' O'Sullivan's lieutenants, and was never
troubled by trouble. No cop dared to arrest him. Whenever he
broke a push-cart man's head or shot a member of the Heinrick
B. Sweeney Outing and Literary Association in the kneecap, an
officer would drop around and say:
'The Cap'n'd like to see ye a few minutes round to the
office whin ye have time, Dempsey, me boy.'
But there would be sundry gentlemen there with large
gold fob chains and black cigars; and somebody would tell a
funny story, and then Dempsey would go back and work half
an hour with the six-pound dumb-bells. So, doing a tight-rope
act on a wire stretched across Niagara was a safe terpsichorean
performance compared with waltzing twice with Dempsey
Donovan's paperbox girl. At ten o'clock the jolly round face of
'Big Mike' O'Sullivan shone at the door for five minutes upon
the scene. He always looked in for five minutes, smiled at the
girls and handed out real perfectos to the delighted boys.
Dempsey Donovan was at his elbow instantly, talking
rapidly. 'Big Mike' looked carefully at the dancers, smiled,
shook his head and departed.
23 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

The music stopped. The dancers scattered to the chairs

along the walls. Terry O'Sullivan, with his entrancing bow,
relinquished a pretty girl in blue to her partner and started back
to find Maggie. Dempsey intercepted him in the middle of the
floor.
Some fine instinct that Rome must have bequeathed to us
caused nearly every one to turn and look at them - there was a
subtle feeling that two gladiators had met in the arena. Two or
three Give and Takes with tight coat-sleeves drew nearer.
'One moment, Mr. O'Sullivan,' said Dempsey. 'I hope
you're enjoying yourself. Where did you say you lived?
The two gladiators were well matched. Dempsey had,
perhaps, ten pounds of weight to give away. The O'Sullivan
had breadth with quickness. Dempsey had a glacial eye, a
dominating slit of a mouth, an indestructible jaw, a complexion
like a belle's and the coolness of a champion. The visitor
showed more fire in his contempt and less control over his
conspicuous sneer. They were enemies by the law written
when the rocks were molten. They were each too splendid, too
mighty, too incomparable to divide preeminence. One only
must survive.
'I live on Grand,' said O'Sullivan insolently; 'and no
trouble to find me at home. Where do you live?'
Dempsey ignored the question.
'You say your name's O'Sullivan,' he went on. 'Well, "Big
Mike" says he never saw you before.'
'Lots of things he never saw,' said the favourite of the hop.
'As a rule,' went on Dempsey, huskily sweet, 'O'Sullivans
in this district know one another. You escorted one of our lady
members here, and we want a chance to make good. If you've
got a family tree let's see a few historical O'Sullivan buds come
out on it. Or do you want us to dig it out of you by the roots?'
'Suppose you mind your own business,' suggested
O'Sullivan blandly.
Dempsey's eyes brightened. He held up an inspired
forefinger as though a brilliant idea had struck him.
'I've got it now,' he said cordially. 'It was just a little
mistake.
You ain't no O'Sullivan. You are a ring-tailed monkey.
Excuse us for not recognizing you at first.'
O'Sullivan's eye flashed. He made a quick movement, but
Andy Geoghan was ready and caught his arm.
Dempsey nodded at Andy and William McMahan, the
secretary of the club, and walked rapidly toward a door at the
rear of the hall. Two other members of the Give and Take
Association swiftly joined the little group. Terry O'Sullivan
was now in the hands of the Board of Rules and Social
Referees. They spoke to him briefly and softly, and conducted
him out through the same door at the rear.
This movement on the part of the Clover Leaf members
requires a word of elucidation. Back of the association hall was
a smaller room rented by the club. In this room personal
difficulties that arose on the ballroom floor were settled, man
to man, with the weapons of nature, under the supervision of
the Board. No lady could say that she had witnessed a fight at a
24 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Clover Leaf hop in several years. Its gentlemen members

guaranteed that.
So easily and smoothly had Dempsey and the Board done
their preliminary work that many in the hall had not noticed
the checking of the fascinating O'Sullivan's social triumph.
Among these was Maggie. She looked about for her escort.
'Smoke up!' said Rose Cassidy. 'Wasn't you on? Demps
Donovan picked a scrap with your Lizzie-boy, and they've
waltzed out to the slaughter-room with him. How's my hair
look done up this way, Mag?'
Maggie laid a hand on the bosom of her cheesecloth waist.
'Gone to fight with Dempsey!' she said breathlessly.
'They've got to be stopped. Dempsey Donovan can't fight him.
Why, he'll he'll kill him!'
'Ah, what do you care?' said Rosa. 'Don't some of 'em
fight every hop?'
But Maggie was off, darting her zigzag way through the
maze of dancers. She burst through the rear door into the dark
hall and then threw her solid shoulder against the door of the
room of single combat. It gave way, and in the instant that she
entered her eye caught the scene - the Board standing about
with open watches; Dempsey Donovan in his shirt-sleeves
dancing, lightfooted, with the wary grace of the modern
pugilist, within easy reach of his adversary; Terry O'Sullivan
standing with arm folded and a murderous look in his dark
eyes. And without slacking the speed of her entrance she
leaped forward with a scream - leaped in time to catch and
hang upon the arm of O'Sullivan that was suddenly uplifted,
and to whisk from it the long, bright stiletto that he had drawn
from his bosom.
The knife fell and rang upon the floor. Cold steel drawn in
the rooms of the Give and Take Association! Such a thing had
never happened before. Every one stood motionless for a
minute. Andy Geoghan kicked the stiletto with the toe of his
shoe curiously, like an antiquarian who has come upon some
ancient weapon unknown to his learning.
And then O'Sullivan hissed something unintelligible
between his teeth. Dempsey and the Board exchanged looks.
And then Dempsey looked at O'Sullivan without anger as one
looks at a stray dog, and nodded his head in the direction of the
door.
'The back stairs, Giuseppi,' he said briefly. 'Somebody'll
pitch your hat down after you.'
Maggie walked up to Dempsey Donovan. There was a
brilliant spot of red in her cheeks, down which slow tears were
running. But she looked him bravely in the eye.
'I knew it, Dempsey,' she said, as her eyes grew dull even
in their tears. 'I knew he was a Guinea. His name's Tony
Spinelli. I hurried in when they told me you and him was
scrappin'. Them Guineas always carries knives. But you don't
understand, Dempsey. I never had a fellow in my life. I got
tired of comin' with Anna and Jimmy every night, so I fixed it
with him to call himself O'Sullivan, and brought him along. I
knew there'd be nothin' doin' for him if he came as a Dago. I
guess I'll resign from the club now.'
Dempsey turned to Andy Geoghan.
25 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Chuck that cheese slicer out of the window,' he said, 'and

tell 'em inside that Mr. O'Sullivan has had a telephone message
to go down to Tammany Hall.'
And then he turned back to Maggie.
Say, Mag,' he said, 'I'll see you home. And how about next
Saturday night? Will you come to the hop with me if I call
around for you?'
It was remarkable how quickly Maggie's eyes could
change from dull to a shining brown.
'With you, Dempsey?' she stammered. 'Say - will a duck
swim?'

VII

The Cop and the Anthem

ON HIS BENCH IN MADISON SQUARE Soapy moved

uneasily. When wild goose honk high of nights, and when
women without sealskin coats grow kind to their husbands, and
when 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 warning 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 inhabitants 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 Committee of
Ways and Means to provide against the coming rigour. And
therefore he moved uneasily on his bench.
The hibernatorial ambitions of Soapy were not of the
highest. In them were no considerations of Mediterranean
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 newspapers, 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 large 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
26 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

humiliation of spirit for every benefit received at the hands of

philanthropy. As Caesar 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 café, where are gathered together nightly the choicest
products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm.
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 presented to
him by a lady missionary on Thanksgiving Day. If he could
reach a table in the restaurant unsuspected success 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 café management; 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 the
coveted Island was not to be an epicurean one. Some other way
of entering limbo must be thought of.
At a corner of Sixth Avenue electric lights and cunningly
displayed wares behind plate-glass made a shop window
conspicuous. Soapy took a cobblestone and dashed it through
the glass. People came running round the corner, a policeman
in the lead. Soapy stood still, with his hands in his pockets, and
smiled at the sight of brass buttons.
'Where'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 halfway 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 unsuccessful.
27 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

On the opposite side of the street was a restaurant of no

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
tell-tale 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 carpenter's
rule opens, and beat the dust from his clothes. Arrest seemed
but a rosy dream. The Island seemed very far away. A
policeman who stood before a drug store two doors away
laughed and walked down the street.
Five blocks Soapy travelled before his courage permitted
him to woo capture again. This time the opportunity presented
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 demeanour leaned against a water-plug.
It was Soapy's design to assume the role of the despicable
and execrated 'masher.' The refined and elegant appearance 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 ensure 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 bestowed 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
practically en route for his insular haven. Already he imagined
he could feel the cosy 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 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.
28 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

At the next corner he shook off his companion and ran. He

halted in the district where by night are found the lightest
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 rendered 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 at the
corner.'
The umbrella owner slowed his steps. Soapy did likewise,
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
improvements. 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 standstill.
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
29 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
The conjunction of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the
influences about the old church wrought a sudden and
wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the
pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy
desires, dead hopes, wrecked 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 himself 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 down-town 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 officer.
'Nothin',' said Soapy.
'Then come along,' said the policeman. 'Three months on
the Island,' said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next
morning.

VIII

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

I DON'T SUPPOSE it will knock any of you people off your

perch to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a
good many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can
express themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine
goes to press nowadays without an animal story in it, except
the old-style monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan
and the Mont Pelée horror.
But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my
piece, such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and
Tammanoo, the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog
that's spent most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping
in a corner on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port
wine on at the Lady Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be
expected to perform any tricks with the art of speech.
30 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight

unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me
in a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a
fat lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the
band as a genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-
Cochin-ChinaStoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V
around among the samples of gros grain flannelette in her
shopping-bag till she cornered it, and gave up. From that
moment I was a pet - a mamma's own wootsey squidlums. Say,
gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound woman breathing
a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne pick you
up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the time in
an Emma Eames tone of voice: 'Oh, oo's um oodlum, doodlum,
woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?'
From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an
anonymous yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora
cat and a box of lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She
thought that the two primeval pups that Noah chased into the
ark were but a collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two
policemen to keep her from entering me at the Madison Square
Garden for the Siberian bloodhound prize.
I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary thing
in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall
and cobblestones above the first floor. Our flat was three fl -
well, not flights - climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished,
and put in the regular things - 1903 antique upholstered parlour
set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea-house, rubber plant
and husband.
By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little
man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Hen-
pecked? - well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had
their bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my
mistress tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the
squirrel-skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to
dry. And every evening while she was getting supper she made
him take me out on the end of a string for a walk.
If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone
they'd never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little
almond cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an
hour's talk with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a
couple of pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour
peeking through a hole in the window shade into the flat across
the airshaft - that's about all there is to it. Twenty minutes
before time for him to come home from work she straightens
up the house, fixes her rat so it won't show, and gets out a lot
of sewing for a ten-minute bluff.
I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in my
corner watching the fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and
had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements
and growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was
intended to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of
that drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose - but
what could I do? A dog can't chew cloves.
I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We
looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out;
so we shook the streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and
31 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

took to climbing the piles of last December's snow on the

streets where cheap people live.
One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was
trying to look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was
trying to look like he wouldn't have murdered the. first organ-
grinder he heard play Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I looked
up at him and said, in my way:
'What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed
lobster? She don't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and
listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy
sound like the maxims of Epictetus. You ought to be thankful
you're not a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues
begone.'
The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost
canine intelligence in his face.
'Why, doggie,' says he, 'good doggie. You almost look like
you could speak. What is it, doggie - Cats?'
Cats! Could speak!
But, of course, he couldn't understand. Humans were
denied the speech of animals. The only common ground of
communication upon which dogs and men can get together is
in fiction.
In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-
andtan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every
evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One
day I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I
struck him for an elucidation.
'See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,' I says, 'you know that it ain't
the nature of a real man to play dry-nurse to a dog in public. I
never saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn't look like
he'd like to lick every other man that looked at him. But your
boss comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur
prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Don't
tell me he likes it.'
'Him?' says the black-and-tan. 'Why, he uses Nature's Own
Remedy. He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as
shy as the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro
when they make 'em all jackpots. By the time we've been in
eight saloons he don't care whether the thing on the end of his
line is a dog or a catfish. I've lost two inches of my tail trying
to sidestep those swinging doors.'
The pointer I got from that terrier - vaudeville please copy -
set me to thinking.
One evening about six o'clock my mistress ordered him to
get busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it
until now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan
was called 'Tweetness.' I consider that I have the bulge on him
as far as you could chase a rabbit. Still 'Lovey' is something of
a nomenclatural tin-can on the tail of one's self-respect.
At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my
custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a
dead-ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the
press despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is
bogged while gathering lilies in the brook.
'Why, darn my eyes,' says the old man, with a grin; 'darn
my eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't
32 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

asking me in to take a drink. Lemme see - how long's it been

since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the footrest?
I believe I'll - '
I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table.
For an hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side
rapping for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such
as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck
bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes
home.
When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except
the rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and
played me outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there
he took off my collar and threw it into the street.
'Poor doggie,' says he; 'good doggie. She shan't kiss you
any more. 'S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get
run over by a street car and be happy.'
I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's
legs happy as a pug on a rug.
'You old flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,' I said to him -
'you moon-baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle,
can't you see that I don't want to leave you? Can't you see that
we're both Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle
after you with the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and
a pink bow to tie on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be
pards for evermore?' Maybe you'll say he didn't understand -
maybe he didn't. But he kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches,
and stood still for a minute, thinking.
'Doggie,' says he finally, 'we don't live more than a dozen
lives on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300.
If I ever see that flat any more I'm a flat, and if you do you're
flatter; and that's no flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that Westward
Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund.'
There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master
to the Twenty-third Street ferry. And the cats on the route saw
reason to give thanks that prehensile claws had been given
them.
On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood
eating a currant bun:
'Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky
Mountains.'
But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled
both of my ears until I howled, and said:
'You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured
son of a door-mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?'
I thought of 'Lovey,' and I whined dolefully
'I'm going to call you "Pete," ' says my master; and if I'd
had five tails I couldn't have done enough wagging to do
justice to the occasion.

IX

The Love-philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

THE BLUE LIGHT DRUG STORE is down-town, between

the Bowery and First Avenue, where the distance between the
33 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

two streets is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider
that pharmacy is a thing of bric-a-brac, scent and ice-cream
soda. If you ask it for a pain-killer it will not give you a
bonbon.
The Blue Light scorns the labour-saving arts of modern
pharmacy. It macerates its opium and percolates its own
laudanum and paregoric. To this day pills are made behind its
tall prescription desk - pills rolled out on its own pill-tile,
divided with a spatula, rolled with the finger and thumb, dusted
with calcined magnesia and delivered in little round,
pasteboard pill-boxes. The store is on a corner about which
coveys of ragged-plumed, hilarious children play and become
candidates for the cough-drops and soothing syrups that wait
for them inside.
Ikey Schoenstein was the night clerk of the Blue Light and
the friend of his customers. Thus it is on the East Side, where
the heart of pharmacy is not glacé. There, as it should be, the
druggist is a counsellor, a confessor, an adviser, an able and
willing missionary and mentor whose learning is respected,
whose occult wisdom is venerated and whose medicine is often
poured, untasted, into the gutter. Therefore Ikey's corniform,
bespectacled nose and narrow, knowledge-bowed figure was
well known in the vicinity of the Blue Light, and his advice
and notice were much desired.
Ikey roomed and breakfasted at Mrs. Riddle's, two squares
away. Mrs. Riddle had a daughter named Rosy. The
circumlocution has been in vain - you must have guessed it -
Ikey adored Rosy. She tinctured all his thoughts; she was the
compound extract of all that was chemically pure and officinal
- the dispensatory contained nothing equal to her. But Ikey was
timid, and his hopes remained insoluble in the menstruum of
his backwardness and fears. Behind his counter he was a
superior being, calmly conscious of special knowledge and
worth; outside, he was a weak-kneed, purblind, motorman-
cursed rambler, with ill-fitting clothes stained with chemicals
and smelling of socotrine aloes and valerianate of ammonia.
The fly in Ikey's ointment (thrice welcome, pat trope!) was
Chunk McGowan.
Mr. McGowan was also striving to catch the bright smiles
tossed about by Rosy. But he was no out-fielder as Ikey was;
he picked them off the bat. At the same time he was Ikey's
friend and customer, and often dropped in at the Blue Light
Drug Store to have a bruise painted with iodine or get a cut
rubber-plastered after a pleasant evening spent along the
Bowery.
One afternoon McGowan drifted in in his silent, easy way,
and sat, comely, smoothed-faced, hard, indomitable, good-
natured, upon a stool.
'Ikey,' said he, when his friend had fetched his mortar and
sat opposite, grinding gum benzoin to a powder, 'get busy with
your ear. It's drugs for me if you've got the line I need.'
Ikey scanned the countenance of Mr. McGowan for the
usual evidences of conflict, but found none.
'Take your coat off,' he ordered. 'I guess already that you
have been stuck in the ribs with a knife. I have many times told
you those Dagoes would do you up.'
34 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Mr. McGowan smiled. 'Not them,' he said. 'Not any

Dagoes. But you've located the diagnosis all right enough - it's
under my coat, near the ribs. Say! Ikey - Rosy and me are goin'
to run away and get married to-night.'
Ikey's left forefinger was doubled over the edge of the
mortar, holding it steady. He gave it a wild rap with the pestle,
but felt it not. Meanwhile Mr. McGowan's smile faded to a
look of perplexed gloom.
'That is,' he continued, 'if she keeps in the notion until the
time comes. We've been layin' pipes for the gateway for two
weeks. One day she says she will; the same evenin' she says
nixy. We've agreed on to-night, and Rosy's stuck to the
affirmative this time for two whole days. But it's five hours yet
till the time, and I'm afraid she'll stand me up when it comes to
the scratch.'
'You said you wanted drugs,' remarked Ikey.
Mr. McGowan looked ill at ease and harassed - a condition
opposed to his usual line of demeanour. He made a patent-
medicine almanac into a roll and fitted it with unprofitable
carefulness about his finger.
'I wouldn't have this double handicap make a false start to-
night for a million,' he said. 'I've got a little flat up in Harlem
all ready, with chrysanthemums on the table and a kettle ready
to boil. And I've engaged a pulpit pounder to be ready at his
house for us at 9.30. It's got to come off. And if Rosy don't
change her mind again!' - Mr. McGowan ceased, a prey to his
doubts.
'I don't see then yet,' said Ikey shortly, 'what makes it that
you talk of drugs, or what I can be doing about it.'
'Old man Riddle don't like me a little bit,' went on the
uneasy suitor, bent upon marshalling his arguments. 'For a
week he hasn't let Rosy step outside the door with me. If it
wasn't for losin' a boarder they'd have bounced me long ago.
I'm makin' $20 a week and she'll never regret flyin' the coop
with Chunk McGowan.'
'You will excuse me, Chunk,' said Ikey. 'I must make a
prescription that is to be called for soon.'
'Say,' said McGowan, looking up suddenly, 'say, Ikey, ain't
there a drug of some kind - some kind of powders that'll make
a girl like you better if you give 'em to her?'
Ikey's lip beneath his nose curled with the scorn of superior
enlightenment; but before he could answer, McGowan
continued:
'Tim Lacy told me once that he got some from a croaker
uptown and fed 'em to his girl in soda water. From the very
first dose he was ace-high and everybody else looked like
thirty cents to her. They was married in less than two weeks.'
Strong and simple was Chunk McGowan. A better reader
of men than Ikey was could have seen that his tough frame was
strung upon fine wires. Like a good general who was about to
invade the enemy's territory he was seeking to guard every
point against possible failure.
'I thought,' went on Chunk hopefully, 'that if I had one of
them powders to give Rosy when I see her at supper to-night it
might brace her up and keep her from reneging on the
proposition to skip. I guess she don't need a mule team to drag
35 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

her away, but women are better at coaching than they are at
running bases. If the stuff'll work just for a couple of hours it'll
do the trick.'
'When is this foolishness of running away to be
happening?' asked Ikey.
'Nine o'clock,' said Mr. McGowan. 'Supper's at seven. At
eight Rosy goes to bed with a headache. At nine old
Parvenzano lets me through to his backyard, where there's a
board off Riddle's fence, next door. I go under her window and
help her down the fireescape. We've got to make it early on the
preacher's account. It's all dead easy if Rosy don't balk when
the flag drops. Can you fix me one of them powders, Ikey?'
Ikey Schoenstein rubbed his nose slowly.
'Chunk,' said he, 'it is of drugs of that nature that
pharmaceutists must have much carefulness. To you alone of
my acquaintance would I entrust a powder like that. But for
you I shall make it, and you shall see how it makes Rosy to
think of you.'
Ikey went behind the prescription desk. There he crushed
to a powder two soluble tablets, each containing a quarter of a
grain of morphia. To them he added a little sugar of milk to
increase the bulk, and folded the mixture neatly in a white
paper. Taken by an adult this powder would ensure several
hours of heavy slumber without danger to the sleeper. This he
handed to Chunk McGowan, telling him to administer it in a
liquid, if possible, and received the hearty thanks of the
backyard Lochinvar.
The subtlety of Ikey's action becomes apparent upon recital
of his subsequent move. He sent a messenger for Mr. Riddle
and disclosed the plans of McGowan for eloping with Rosy.
Mr. Riddle was a stout man, brick-dusty of complexion and
sudden in action.
'Much obliged,' he said briefly to Ikey. 'The lazy Irish
loafer! My own room's just above Rosy's, I'll just go up there
myself after supper and load the shot-gun and wait. If he
comes in my backyard he'll go away in an ambulance instead
of a bridal chaise.'
With Rosy held in the clutches of Morpheus for a
manyhours' deep slumber, and the bloodthirsty parent waiting,
armed and forewarned, Ikey felt that his rival was close,
indeed, upon discomfiture.
All night in the Blue Light Store he waited at his duties for
chance news of the tragedy, but none came.
At eight o'clock in the morning the day clerk arrived and
Ikey started hurriedly for Mrs. Riddle's to learn the outcome.
And, lo! as he stepped out of the store who but Chunk
McGowan sprang from a passing street-car and grasped his
hand - Chunk McGowan with a victor's smile and flushed with
joy.
'Pulled it off,' said Chunk with Elysium in his grin. 'Rosy
hit the fire-escape on time to a second and we was under the
wire at the Reverend's at 9.30 1/4. She's up at the flat - she
cooked eggs this mornin' in a blue kimono - Lord! how lucky I
am! You must pace up some day, Ikey, and feed with us. I've
got a job down near the bridge, and that's where I'm heading
for now.'
36 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'The - the powder?' stammered Ikey.

'Oh, that stuff you gave me!' said Chunk broadening his
grin; 'well, it was this way. I sat down at the supper table last
night at Riddle's, and I looked at Rosy, and I says to myself,
"Chunk, if you get the girl get her on the square - don't try any
hocus-pocus with a thoroughbred like her." And I keeps the
paper you give me in my pocket. And then my lamps falls on
another party present, who, I says to myself, is failin' in a
proper affection toward his comin' son-in-law, so I watches my
chance and dumps that powder in old man Riddle's coffee -
see?' moment immovable. For this odour belonged to Miss
Leslie; it was her own, and hers only.
The odour brought her vividly, almost tangibly before him.
The world of finance dwindled suddenly to a speck. And she
was in the next room - twenty steps away.
'By George, I'll do it now,' said Maxwell, half aloud. 'I'll ask
her now. I wonder I didn't do it long ago.'
He dashed into the inner office with the haste of a short
trying to cover. He charged upon the desk of the stenographer.
She looked up at him with a smile. A soft pink crept over
her cheek, and her eyes were kind and frank. Maxwell leaned
one elbow on her desk. He still clutched fluttering papers with
both hands and the pen was above his ear.
'Miss Leslie,' he began hurriedly, 'I have but a moment to
spare. I want to say something in that moment. Will you be my
wife? I haven't had time to make love to you in the ordinary
way, but I really do love you. Talk quick, please - those fellows
are clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific'
'Oh, what are you talking about?' exclaimed the young
lady. She rose to her feet and gazed upon him, round-eyed.
'Don't you understand?' said Maxwell restively. 'I want you
to marry me. I love you, Miss Leslie. I wanted to tell you, and I
snatched a minute when things had slackened up a bit. They're
calling me for the 'phone now. Tell 'em to wait a minute,
Pitcher. Won't you, Miss Leslie?'
The stenographer acted very queerly. At first she seemed
overcome with amazement; then tears flowed from her
wondering eyes; and then she smiled sunnily through them,
and one of her arms slid tenderly about the broker's neck.
'I know now,' she said softly. 'It's this old business that has
driven everything else out of your head for the time. I was
frightened at first. Don't you remember, Harvey? We were
married last evening at eight o'clock in the Little Church
Around the Corner.'

XVI

The Furnished Room

RESTLESS, SHIFTING, FUGACIOUS as time itself, is a

certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of
the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes.
They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients for
ever - transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They
37 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

sing 'Home Sweet Home' in ragtime; they carry their lares et

penates 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 ghosts.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these
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
unwholesome, 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 staircase 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 water'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.'
'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 housekeeper moved
away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he
carried at the end of his tongue.
38 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 hair 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 their 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 inevitable 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 sophistical
comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture,
the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a
footwide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from 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,
rectangular, 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 Breakfast,
Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline
was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn
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 little 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. 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 beyond forbearance 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
39 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that
all this 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
resentful 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
crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors
banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a
cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the
breath of the house - a dank savour 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 odour 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 odour clung to him and wrapped him
about. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time
confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily
called by an odour? 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
enveloping scent of mignonette, the odour 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 womankind, feminine of
gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of 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 buttons, 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 ornament, 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,
40 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 colour and
love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh,
God! whence that odour, and since when have odours 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 tenant; 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 door that
showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He
smothered his excitement as best he could.
'Will you tell me, madam,' he besought her, 'who occupied
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?'
'Why, 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 perfume
of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale
odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
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
subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the
worm dieth seldom.
41 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'I rented out my third floor back, this evening,' said Mrs.
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 concluded 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.'

XVII

The Brief Debut of Tildy

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 castor-stand, containing cruets of condiments
and seasons. From the pepper cruet you may shake a cloud of
something tasteless and melancholy, like volcanic dust. From
the salt cruet you may 'A very sad one,' says he, laying the
points of his manicured fingers together. 'An utterly
incorrigible girl. I am Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend
Jones. The case was assigned to me. The girl murdered her
fiancéa nd committed suicide. She had no defence. My report
to the court relates the facts in detail, all of which are
substantiated by reliable witnesses. The wages of sin is death.
Praise the Lord. '
The court officer opened the door and stepped out.
'Poor girl,' said Special Terrestrial Officer the Reverend
Jones, with a tear in his eye. 'It was one of the saddest cases
that I ever met with. Of course she was - '
42 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Discharged,' said the court officer. 'Come here, Jonesy.

First thing you know you'll be switched to the pot-pie squad.
How would you like to be on the missionary force in the South
Sea Islands - hey? Now, you quit making these false arrests, or
you'll be transferred - see? The guilty party you've got to look
for in this case is a red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by
the window reading, in his stocking feet, while his children
play in the streets. Get a move on you.'
Now, wasn't that a silly dream?

XXXIII

The Last Leaf

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 himself 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 Maine, the other from California. They had met at the
table d'hôte 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 finger. 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 would call a chivalric old
gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by
Californian 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 doctor invited Sue into the hallway
with a shaggy, grey eyebrow.
'She has one chance in - let us 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 of
lining-up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire
pharmacopœia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind
that she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?'
43 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 jews'-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,
with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling,
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 horseshow 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 little later, 'eleven'; and then 'ten,'
and 'nine'; and then 'eight' and 'seven,' almost together.
Sue looked solicitously out 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.
'What 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. When 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, with
magnificent scorn. 'What have old ivy leaves to do with your
getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty
girl. Don't be a goosey. Why, 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!
Why, 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
44 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port
wine for her sick child, and porkchops 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 promise
me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out of the window
until I am done working? I must hand those drawings 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, closing
her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, 'because 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 everything, 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 never yet begun it. For several years he
had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of
commerce or advertising. 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 anyone, 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 canvas
on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to
receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told 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.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted
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 vill not
bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you
allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot
poor little Miss Yohnsy.'
'She is very ill arid 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 flibberti-gibbet.'
45 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'You are just like a woman!' yelled Behrman. 'Who 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. Gott! 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 all go avay. 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.
'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 mysterious,
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,
commanded 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.
46 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Even chances,' said the doctor, talking 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 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 woollen
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 today in hospital. He was ill only
two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day
in his room downstairs 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 scattered brushes, and a
palette with green and yellow colours 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 fell.'
Presently Thomas moved tentatively in his seat, and
thoughtfully felt an abrasion or two on his knees and elbows.
'Say, Annie,' said he confidentially, 'maybe it's one of the
last dreams of the booze, but I've a kind of a recollection of
riding in an automobile with a swell guy that took me to a
house full of eagles and arc lights. He fed me on biscuits and
hot air, and then kicked me down the front steps. If it was the d
t's, why am I so sore?'
'Shut up, you fool,' said Annie.
'If I could find that funny guy's house,' said Thomas, in
conclusion, 'I'd go up there some day and punch his nose for
him.'

XLVII

The Poet and the Peasant

THE OTHER DAY a poet friend of mine, who has lived in

close communication with nature all his life, wrote a poem and
took it to an editor.
It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the
fields, the song of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling
streams. When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes
of a beefsteak dinner in his heart, it was handed back to him
with the comment:
'Too artificial.'
Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County
chianti, and swallowed indignation with the slippery forkfuls.
And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, a
well-arrived writer of fiction - a man who had trod on asphalt
all his life, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes
47 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

except with sensations of disgust from the windows of express

trains.
Conant wrote a poem and called it 'The Doe and the Brook.'
It was a fine specimen of the kind of work you would expect
from a poet who had strayed with Amaryllis only as far as the
florist's windows, and whose sole ornithological discussion
had been carried on with a waiter. Conant signed this poem,
and we sent it to the same editor.
But this has very little to do with the story.
Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on
the next morning, a being stumbled off the West Shore
ferryboat, and loped slowly up Forty-second Street.
The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a
hanging lip, and hair the exact colour of the little orphan's
(afterward discovered to be the earl's daughter) in one of Mr.
Blaney's plays. His trousers were corduroy, his coat short-
sleeved, with buttons in the middle of his back. One bootleg
was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly, though in
vain, at his straw hat for ear-holes, its shape inaugurating the
suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine
possessor. In his hand was a valise - description of it is an
impossible task; a Boston man would not have carried his
lunch and law books to his office in it. And above one ear, in
his hair, was a wisp of hay - the rustic's letter of credit, his
badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of the Garden of
Eden lingering to shame the goldbrick men.
Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They
saw the raw stranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at
the tall buildings. At this they ceased to smile, and even to look
at him. It had been done so often. A few glanced at the antique
valise to see what Coney 'attraction' or brand of chewing-gum
he might be thus dinning into his memory. But for the most
part he was ignored. Even the newsboys looked bored when he
scampered like a circus clown out of the way of cabs and
street-cars.
At Eighth Avenue stood 'Bunco Harry,' with his dyed
moustache and shiny, good-natured eyes. Harry was too good
an artist not to be pained at the sight of an actor overdoing his
part. He edged up to the countryman, who had stopped to open
his mouth at a jewellery store window, and shook his head.
'Too thick, pal,' he said critically - 'too thick by a couple of
inches. I don't know what your lay is; but you've got the
properties on too thick. That hay, now - why, they don't even
allow that on Proctor's circuit any more.'
'I don't understand you, mister,' said the green one. 'I'm not
lookin' for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to
look at the town, bein' that the hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's
a whopper. I thought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this
here town is five times as big.'
'Oh, well,' said 'Bunco Harry,' raising his eyebrows, 'I didn't
mean to butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to
tone down a little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success
at your graft, whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow.'
'I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer,'
acknowledged the other. They went to a caféf requented by
men with smooth faces and shifty eyes, and sat at their drinks.
48 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'I'm glad I come across you, mister,' said Haylocks. 'How'd

you like to play a game or two of seven-up? I've got the
keerds.'
He fished them out of Noah's valise - a rare, inimitable
deck, greasy with bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of
cornfields.
'Bunco Harry' laughed loud and briefly.
'Not for me, sport,' he said firmly. 'I don't go against that
make-up of yours for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it.
The Reubs haven't dressed like that since '79. I doubt if you
could work Brooklyn for a key-winding watch with that lay-
out.'
'Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money,' boasted
Haylocks. He drew forth a tightly rolled mass or bills as large
as a teacup, and laid it on the table.
'Got that for my share of grandmother's farm,' he
announced. 'There's $950 in that roll. Thought I'd come into
the city and look around for a likely business to go into.'
'Bunco Harry' took up the roll of money and looked at it
with almost respect in his smiling eyes.
'I've seen worse,' he said critically. 'But you'll never do it in
them clothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit
and a straw hat with a coloured band, and talk a good deal
about Pittsburg and freight differentials, and drink sherry for
breakfast in order to work off phony stuff like that.'
'What's his line?' asked two or three shifty-eyed men of
'Bunco Harry' after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned
money and departed.
'The queer, I guess,' said Harry. 'Or else he's one of Jerome's
men. Or some guy with a new graft. He's too much hayseed.
Maybe that his - I wonder now - oh no, it couldn't have been
real money.'
Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again,
for he dived into a dark groggery on a side-street and bought
beer. Several sinister fellows hung upon one end of the bar. At
first sight of him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent
and exaggerated rusticity became apparent their expressions
changed to wary suspicion.
Haylocks swung his valise across the bar.
'Keep that awhile for me, mister,' he said, chewing at the
end of a virulent claybank cigar. 'I'll be back after I knock
around a spell. And keep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside
of it, though maybe you wouldn't think so to look at me.'
Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece,
and Haylocks was off for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in
the middle of his back.
'Divvy? Mike,' said the men hanging upon the bar, winking
openly at one another.
'Honest, now,' said the bartender, kicking the valise to one
side. 'You don't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see
he ain't no jay. One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's
a shine if he made himself up. There ain't no parts of the
country now where they dress like that since they run rural free
delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he's got nine-fifty in
that valise it's a ninety-eight-cent Waterbury that's stopped at
ten minutes to ten.'
49 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison

to amuse he returned for his valise. And then down Broadway
he gallivanted, culling the sights with his eager blue eyes. But
still and evermore Broadway rejected him with curt glances
and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest of the 'gags' that the
city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible, so ultra-
rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of the
barnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited
only weariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair
was so genuine, so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so
clamorously rural, that even a shellgame man would have put
up his peas and folded his table at the sight of it.
Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and
once more exhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise.
The outer one, a twenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a
newsboy.
'Son,' said he, 'run somewhere and get this changed for me.
I'm mighty nigh out of chicken feed; I guess you'll get a nickel
if you'll hurry up.'
A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face.
'Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed
yerself. Dey ain't no farm clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer
stage money.'
On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a
gamblinghouse. He saw Haylocks, and his expression suddenly
grew cold and virtuous.
'Mister,' said the rural one. 'I've heard of places in this here
town where a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or
peg a card at keno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down
from old Ulster to see the sights. Know where a fellow could
get action on about $9 or $10? I'm goin' to have some sport,
and then maybe I'll buy out a business of some kind.'
The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck
on his left forefinger nail.
'Cheese it, old man,' he murmured reproachfully. 'The
Central Office must be bughouse to send you out looking like
such a gillie. You couldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk
crap game in them Tony Pastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty
from Death Valley has got you beat a crosstown block in the
way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanical accessories. Let it
be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded halls where one
may bet a patrol wagon on the ace.'
Rebuffed again by the great city that is so swift to detect
artificialities, Haylocks sat upon the kerb and presented his
thoughts to hold a conference.
'It's my clothes,' said he; 'durned if it ain't. They think I'm a
hayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never
made fun of this hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks
to notice you in New York you must dress up like they do.'
So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men
spake through their noses and rubbed their hands and ran the
tape line ecstatically over the bulge in his inside pocket where
reposed a red nubbin of corn with an even number of rows.
And messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamed to his
hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre.
50 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

At nine o'clock in the evening one descended to the

sidewalk whom Ulster County would have forsworn. Bright
tan were his shoes; his hat the latest block. His light grey
trousers were deeply creased; a gay blue silk handkerchief
flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant English walking-
coat. His collar might have graced a laundry window; his
blond hair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone.
For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air
of a boulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his
evening pleasures. And then he turned down the gay, bright
street with the easy and graceful tread of a millionaire.
But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest
eyes in the city had enveloped him in their field of vision. A
stout man with grey eyes picked two of his friends with a lift
of his eyebrows from the row of loungers in front of the hotel.
'The juiciest jay I've seen in six months,' said the man with
grey eyes. 'Come along.' It was half-past eleven when a man
galloped into the West Forty-seventh Street police-station with
the story of his wrongs.
'Nine hundred and fifty dollars,' he gasped, 'all my share of
grandmother's farm.'
The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez
Bulltongue, of Locust Valley Farm, Ulster County, and then
began to take descriptions of the strong-arm gentlemen.
When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his
poem, he was received over the head of the office boy into the
inner office that is decorated with the statuettes by Rodin and
J. G. Brown.
'When I read the first line of "The Doe and the Brook," '
said the editor, 'I knew it to be the work of one whose life has
been heart to heart with nature. The finished art of the line did
not blind me to that fact. To use a somewhat homely
comparison, it was as if a wild, free child of the woods and
fields were to don the garb of fashion and walk down
Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would show.'
'Thanks,' said Conant. 'I suppose the cheque will be round
on Thursday, as usual.'
The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You
can take your choice of 'Stay on the Farm' or 'Don't write
Poetry.'

XLVIII

The Thing's the Play

BEING ACQUAINTED WITH a newspaper reporter who had

a couple of free passes, I got to see the performance a few
nights ago at one of the popular vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a violin solo by a striking-looking
man not much past forty, but with very grey, thick hair. Not
being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the system of noises
drift past my ears while I regarded the man.
'There was a story about that chap a month or two ago,' said
the reporter. 'They gave me the assignment. It was to run a
column and was to be on the extremely light and joking order.
The old man seems to like the funny touch I give to local
51 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

happenings. Oh yes, I'm working on a farce comedy now. Well,

I went down to the house and got all the details; but I certainly
fell down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-
up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't seem to
get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you
could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll
give you the details.'
After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me
the facts over the Würzburger. racking, petitionary music of a
violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the noblest. The
daws may peck upon one's sleeve without in injury, but
whoever wears his heart upon his tympanum gets it not far
from the neck.
This music and the musician called her, and at her side
honour and the old love held her back.
'Forgive me,' he pleaded
'Twenty years is a long time to remain away from the one
you say you love,' she declared, with a purgatorial touch.
'How could I tell?' he begged. 'I will conceal nothing from
you. That night when he left I followed him. I was mad with
jealousy. On a dark street I struck him down. He did not rise. I
examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not intend to
kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and
saw an ambulance take him away. Although you married him,
Helen - '
'Who are you?' cried the woman, with wide-open eyes,
snatching her hand away.
'Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always
loved you the best? I am John Delaney. If you can forgive - '
But she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up
the stairs toward the music and him who had forgotten, but
who had known her for his in each of his two existences, and
as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang: 'Frank! Frank!
Frank!'
Three mortals thus juggling with years as though they were
billiard balls, and my friend, the reporter, couldn't see anything
funny in it!

XLIX

A Ramble in Aphasia

MY WIFE AND I PARTED on that morning in precisely our

usual manner. She left her second cup of tea to follow me to
the front door. There she plucked from my lapel the invisible
strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim
ownership) and bade me take care of my cold. I had no cold.
Next came her kiss of parting - the level kiss of domesticity
flavoured with Young Hyson. There was no fear of the
extemporaneous, of variety spicing her infinite custom. With
the deft touch of long malpractice, she dabbed awry my well-
set scarf-pin; and then, as I closed the door, I heard her
morning slippers pattering back to her cooling tea.
When I set out I had no thought or premonition of what was
to occur. The attack came suddenly.
52 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

For many weeks I had been toiling, almost night and day,
at a famous railroad law case that I won triumphantly but a few
days previously. In fact, I had been digging away at the law
almost without cessation for many years. Once or twice good
Doctor Volney, my friend and physician, had warned me.
'If you don't slacken up, Bellford,' he said, 'you'll go
suddenly to pieces. Either your nerves or your brain will give
way. Tell me, does a week pass in which you do not read in the
papers of a case of aphasia - of some man lost, wandering
nameless, with his past and his identity blotted out - and all
from that little brain-clot made by overwork or worry?'
'I always thought,' said I, 'that the clot in those instances
was really to be found on the brains of the newspaper
reporters.'
Dr. Volney shook his head.
'The disease exists,' he said. 'You need a change or a rest.
Court-room, office and home - there is the only route you
travel. For recreation you - read law books. Better take
warning in time.'
'On Thursday nights,' I said defensively, 'my wife and I
play cribbage. On Sundays she reads to me the weekly letter
from her mother. That law books are not a recreation remains
yet to be established.'
That morning as I walked I was thinking of Doctor Volney's
words. I was feeling as well as I usually did - possibly in better
spirits than usual.

I awoke with stiff and cramped muscles from having slept

long on the incommodious seat of a day coach. I leaned my
head against the seat and tried to think. After a long time I said
to myself: 'I must have a name of some sort.' I searched my
pockets. Not a card; not a letter; not a paper or monogram
could I find. But I found in my coat pocket nearly $3,000 in
bills of large denomination. 'I must be someone, of course,' I
repeated to myself, and began again to consider.
The car was well crowded with men, among whom I told
myself, there must have been some common interest, for they
intermingled freely, and seemed in the best good-humour and
spirits. One of them - a stout, spectacled gentleman enveloped
in a decided odour of cinnamon and aloes - took the vacant
half of my seat with a friendly nod, and unfolded a newspaper.
In the intervals between his periods of reading, we conversed,
as travellers will, on current affairs. I found myself able to
sustain the conversation on such subjects with credit, at least to
my memory. By and by my companion said:
'You are one of us, of course. Fine lot of men the West
sends in this time. I'm glad they held the convention in New
York; I've never been East before. My name's R. P. Bolder -
Bolder & Son, of Hickory Grove, Missouri.'
Though unprepared, I rose to the emergency, as men will
when put to it. Now must I hold a christening, and be at once
babe, parson and parent. My senses came to the rescue of my
slower brain. The insistent odour of drugs from my companion
supplied one idea; a glance at his newspaper, where my eye
met a conspicuous advertisement, assisted me further.
53 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'My name,' said I glibly, 'is Edward Pinkhammer. I am a

druggist, and my home is in Cornopolis, Kansas.'
'I knew you were a druggist,' said my fellow-traveller
affably. 'I saw the callous spot on your right forefinger where
the handle of the pestle rubs. Of course, you are a delegate to
our National Convention.'
'Are all these men druggists?' I asked wonderingly. '
They are. This car came through from the West. And they're
your old-time druggists, too - none of your patent tablet-and-
granule pharmashootists that use slot machines instead of a
prescription desk. We percolate our own paregoric and roll our
own pills, and we ain't above handling a few garden seeds in
the spring, and carrying a sideline of confectionery and shoes. I
tell you, Hampinker, I've got an idea to spring on this
convention - new ideas is what they want. Now, you know the
shelf bottles of tartar emetic and Rochelle salt Ant. et Pot. Tart.
and Sod. et Pot. Tart. - one's poison, you know, and the other's
harmless. It's easy to mistake one label for the other. Where do
druggists mostly keep 'em? Why, as far apart as possible, on
different shelves. That's wrong. I say keep 'em side by side so
when you want one you can always compare it with the other
and avoid mistakes. Do you catch the idea?'
'It seems to me a very good one,' I said.
'All right! When I spring it on the convention you back it
up. We'll make some of these Eastern orange-phosphate-and-
massage-cream professors that think they're the only lozenges
in the market look like hypodermic tablets.'
'If I can be of any aid,' I said, warming, 'the two bottles of -
er- '
'Tartrate of antimony and potash, and tartrate of soda and
potash.'
'Shall henceforth sit side by side,' I concluded firmly.
'Now, there's another thing,' said Mr. Bolder. 'For an
excipient in manipulating a pill mass which do you prefer - the
magnesia carbonate or the pulverized glycerrhiza radix?'
'The - er - magnesia,' I said. It was easier to say than the
other word.
Mr. Bolder glanced at me distrustfully through his
spectacles.
'Give me the glycerrhiza,' said he. 'Magnesia cakes.'
'Here's another one of these fake aphasia cases,' he said,
presently, handing me his newspaper, and laying his finger
upon an article. 'I don't believe in 'em. I put nine out of ten of
'em down as frauds. A man gets sick of his business and his
folks and wants to have a good time. He skips out somewhere,
and when they find him he pretends to have lost his memory -
don't know his own name, and won't even recognize the
strawberry mark on his wife's left shoulder. Aphasia! Tut! Why
can't they stay at home and forget?'
I took the paper and read, after the pungent headlines, the
following:

'DENVER, June 12. - Elwyn C. Bellford, a prominent lawyer, is mysteriously

missing from his home since three days ago, and all efforts to locate him have been
in vain. Mr. Bellford is a well-known citizen of the highest standing, and has
enjoyed a large and lucrative law practice. He is married and owns a fine home and
54 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

the most extensive private library in the State. On the day of his disappearance, he
drew quite a large sum of money from his bank.
No one can be found who saw him after he left the bank. Mr. Bellford was a
man of singularly quiet and domestic tastes, and seemed to find his happiness in his
home and profession. If any clue at all exists to his strange disappearance, it may be
found in the fact that for some months he had been deeply absorbed in an important
law case in connection with the Q. Y. and Z. Railroad Company. It is feared that
overwork may have affected his mind. Every effort is being made to discover the
whereabouts of the missing man.'

'It seems to me you are not altogether uncynical Mr.

Bolder,' I said, after I had read the despatch. 'This has the
sound, to me, of a genuine case. Why should this man,
prosperous, happily married and respected, choose suddenly to
abandon everything? I know that these lapses of memory do
occur, and that men do find themselves adrift without a name,
a history or a home.'
'Oh, gammon and jalap!' said Mr. Bolder. 'It's larks they're
after. There's too much education nowadays. Men know about
aphasia, and they use it for an excuse. The women are wise,
too.
When it's all over they look you in the eye, as scientific as
you please, and say: "He hypnotized me."
Thus Mr. Bolder diverted, but did not aid me with his
comments and philosophy.
We arrived in New York about ten at night. I rode in a cab
to an hotel, and I wrote my name 'Edward Pinkhammer' in the
register. As I did so I felt pervade me a splendid, wild,
intoxicating buoyancy - a sense of unlimited freedom, of newly
attained possibilities. I was just born into the world. The old
fetters - whatever they had been - were stricken from my hands
and feet. The future lay before me a clear road such as an
infant enters, and I could set out upon it equipped with a man's
learning and experience.
I thought the hotel clerk looked at me five seconds too long.
I had no baggage.
'The Druggists' Convention,' I said. 'My trunk has somehow
failed to arrive.' I drew out a roll of money.
'Ah!' said he, showing an auriferous tooth, 'we have quite a
number of the Western delegates stopping here.' He struck a
bell for the boy.
I endeavoured to give colour to my rôle
'There is an important movement on foot among us
Westerners,' I said, 'in regard to a recommendation to the
convention that the bottles containing the tartrate of antimony
and potash, and the tartrate of sodium and potash, be kept in a
contiguous position on the shelf.'
'Gentleman to three-fourteen,' said the clerk hastily. I was
whisked away to my room.
The next day I bought a trunk and clothing, and began to
live the life of Edward Pinkhammer. I did not tax my brain
with endeavours to solve problems of the past.
It was a piquant and sparkling cup that the great island city
held up to my lips. I drank of it gratefully. The keys of
Manhattan belong to him who is able to bear them. You must
be either the city's guest or its victim.
The following few days were as gold and silver. Edward
Pinkhammer, yet counting back to his birth by hours only,
55 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

knew the rare joy of having come upon so diverting a world

full-fledged and unrestrained. I sat entranced on the magic
carpets provided in theatres and roof-gardens, that transported
one into strange and delightful lands full of frolicsome music,
pretty girls and grotesque, drolly extravagant parodies upon
humankind. I went here and there at my own dear will, bound
by no limits of space, time or comportment. I dined in weird
cabarets, at weirder tables d'hôte to the sound of Hungarian
music and the wild shouts of mercurial artists and sculptors.
Or, again, where the night life quivers in the electric glare like
a kinetoscopic picture, and the millinery of the world, and its
jewels, and the ones whom they adorn, and the men who make
all three possible are met for good cheer and the spectacular
effect. And among all these scenes that I have mentioned I
learned one thing that I never knew before. And that is that the
key to liberty is not in the hands of Licence, but Convention
holds it. Comity has a toll-gate at which you must pay, or you
may not enter the land of Freedom. In all the glitter, the
seeming disorder, the parade, the abandon, I saw this law,
unobtrusive, yet like iron, prevail. Therefore, in Manhattan you
must obey these unwritten laws, and then you will be freest of
the free. If you decline to be bound by them, you put on
shackles.
Sometimes, as my mood urged me, I would seek the stately,
softly murmuring palm-rooms, redolent with high-born life and
delicate restraint, in which to dine. Again I would go down to
the waterways in steamers packed with vociferous, bedecked,
unchecked, love-making clerks and shop-girls to their crude
pleasures on the island shores. And there was always
Broadway - glistening, opulent, wily, varying, desirable
Broadway - growing upon one like an opium habit.
One afternoon as I entered my hotel a stout man with a big
nose and a black moustache blocked my way in the corridor.
When I would have passed around him, he greeted me with
offensive familiarity.
'Hallo, Bellford!' he cried loudly. 'What the deuce are you
doing in New York? Didn't know anything could drag you
away from that old book den of yours. Is Mrs. B. along or is
this a little business run alone, eh?'
'You have made a mistake, sir,' I said coldly, releasing my
hand from his grasp. 'My name is Pinkhammer. You will
excuse me.'
The man dropped to one side, apparently astonished. As I
walked to the clerk's desk I heard him call to a bell-boy and
say something about telegraph blanks.
'You will give me my bill,' I said to the clerk, 'and have my
baggage brought down in half an hour. I do not care to remain
where I am annoyed by confidence men.'
I moved that afternoon to another hotel, a sedate, old-
fashioned one on lower Fifth Avenue.
There was a restaurant a little way off Broadway where one
could be served almost alfresco in a tropic array of screening
flora. Quiet and luxury and a perfect service made it an ideal
place in which to take luncheon or refreshment. One afternoon
I was there picking my way to a table among the ferns when I
felt my sleeve caught.
56 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Mr. Bellford!' exclaimed an amazingly sweet voice.

I turned quickly to see a lady seated alone - a lady of about
thirty, with exceedingly handsome eyes, who looked at me as
though I had been her very dear friend.
'You were about to pass me,' she said accusingly. 'Don't tell
me you did not know me. Why should we not shake hands - at
least once in fifteen years?'
I shook hands with her at once. I took a chair opposite her
at the table. I summoned with my eyebrows a hovering waiter.
The lady was philandering with an orange ice. I ordered a
crème de menthe. Her hair was reddish bronze. You could not
look at it, because you could not look away from her eyes. But
you were conscious of it as you are conscious of sunset while
you look into the profundities of a wood at twilight.
'Are you sure you know me?' I asked
'No,' she said, smiling, 'I was never sure of that.'
'What would you think,' I said, a little anxiously, 'if I were
to tell you that my name is Edward Pinkhammer, from
Cornopolis, Kansas.'
'What would I think?' she repeated, with a merry glance.
'Why, that you had not brought Mrs. Bellford to New York
with you, of course. I do wish you had. I would have liked to
see Marian.' Her voice lowered slightly - 'You haven't changed
much, Elwyn.'
I felt her wonderful eyes searching mine and my face more
closely.
'Yes, you have,' she amended, and there was a soft, exultant
note in her latest tones; 'I see it now. You haven't forgotten.
You haven't forgotten for a year or a day or an hour. I told you
you never could.'
I poked my straw anxiously in the crème de menthe.
'I'm sure I beg your pardon,' I said, a little uneasy at her
gaze. 'But that is just the trouble. I have forgotten. I've
forgotten everything.'
She flouted my denial. She laughed deliciously at
something she seemed to see in my face
'I've heard of you at times,' she went on. 'You're quite a big
lawyer out West - Denver, isn't it, or Los Angeles? Marian
must be very proud of you. You knew, I suppose, that I married
six months after you did. You may have seen it in the papers.
The flowers alone cost two thousand dollars.
She had mentioned fifteen years. Fifteen years is a long
time.
'Would it be too late,' I asked somewhat timorously, 'to offer
you congratulations?'
'Not if you dare do it,' she answered, with such fine
intrepidity that I was silent, and began to crease patterns on the
cloth with my thumb-nail.
'Tell me one thing,' she said, leaning toward me rather
eagerly 'a thing I have wanted to know for many years - just
from a woman's curiosity, of course - have you ever dared
since that night to touch, smell or look at white roses - at white
roses wet with rain and dew?'
I took a sip of crème de menthe
It would be useless, I suppose,' I said, with a sigh, 'for me to
repeat that I have no recollection at all about these things. My
57 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

memory is completely at fault. I need not say how much I

regret it.'
The lady rested her arms upon the table, and again her eyes
disdained my words and went travelling by their own route
direct to my soul. She laughed softly, with a strange quality in
the sound it was a laugh of happiness yes, and of content - and
of misery. I tried to look away from her.
'You lie, Elwyn Bellford,' she breathed blissfully. 'Oh, I
know you lie!
I gazed dully into the ferns
'My name is Edward Pinkhammer,' I said. 'I came with the
delegates to the Druggists' National Convention. There is a
movement on foot for arranging a new position for the bottles
of tartrate of antimony and tartrate of potash, in which, very
likely, you would take little interest.'
A shining landau stopped before the entrance. The lady
rose. I took her hand, and bowed.
'I am deeply sorry,' I said to her, 'that I cannot remember. I
could explain, but fear you would not understand. You will not
concede Pinkhammer; and I really cannot at all conceive of the
the roses and other things.'
'Good-bye, Mr. Bellford,' she said, with her happy,
sorrowful smile, as she stepped into her carriage.
I attended the theatre that night. When I returned to my
hotel, a quiet man in dark clothes, who seemed interested in
rubbing his finger-nails with a silk handkerchief, appeared,
magically, at my side.
'Mr. Pinkhammer,' he said casually, giving the bulk of his
attention to his forefinger, 'may I request you to step aside with
me for a little conversation? There is a room here.'
'Certainly,' I answered.
He conducted me into a small, private parlour. A lady and a
gentleman were there. The lady, I surmised, would have been
unusually good-looking had her features not been clouded by
an expression of keen worry and fatigue. She was of a style of
figure and possessed colouring and features that were
agreeable to my fancy. She was in a travelling-dress; she fixed
upon me an earnest look of extreme anxiety, and pressed an
unsteady hand to her bosom. I think she would have started
forward, but the gentleman arrested her movement with an
authoritative motion of his hand. He then came, himself, to
meet me. He was a man of forty, a little grey about the temples,
and with a strong, thoughtful face.
'Bellford, old man,' he said cordially, 'I'm glad to see you
again. Of course we know everything is all right. I warned you,
you know, that you were overdoing it. Now, you'll go back
with us, and be yourself again in no time.'
I smiled ironically.
'I have been "Bellforded" so often,' I said, 'that it has lost its
edge. Still, in the end, it may grow wearisome. Would you be
willing at all to entertain the hypothesis that my name is
Edward Pinkhammer, and that I never saw you before in my
life?'
Before the man could reply a wailing cry came from the
woman. She sprang past his detaining arm. 'Elwyn!' she
sobbed, and cast herself upon me, and clung tight. 'Elwyn,' she
58 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

cried again, 'don't break my heart. I am your wife - call my

name once - just once! I could see you dead rather than this
way.'
I unwound her arms respectfully, but firmly.
'Madam,' I said severely, 'pardon me if I suggest that you
accept a resemblance too precipitately. It is a pity,' I went on,
with an amused laugh, as the thought occurred to me, 'that this
Bellford and I could not be kept side by side upon the same
shelf like tartrates of sodium and antimony for purposes of
identification. In order to understand the allusion,' I concluded
airily, 'it may be necessary for you to keep an eye on the
proceedings of the Druggists' National Convention.'
The lady turned to her companion, and grasped his arm.
'What is it, Doctor Volney? Oh, what is it?' she moaned.
He led her to the door.
'Go to your room for awhile,' I heard him say. 'I will remain
and talk with him. His mind? No, I think not - only a portion of
the brain. Yes, I am sure he will recover. Go to your room and
leave me with him.'
The lady disappeared. The man in dark clothes also went
outside, still manicuring himself in a thoughtful way. I think he
waited in the hall.
'I would like to talk with you a while, Mr. Pinkhammer, if I
may,' said the gentleman who remained.
'Very well, if you care to,' I replied, 'and will excuse me if I
take it comfortably; I am rather tired.' I stretched myself upon
a couch by a window and lit a cigar. He drew a chair near by.
'Let us speak to the point,' he said soothingly. 'Your name
is not Pinkhammer.'
'I know that as well as you do,' I said coolly. 'But a man
must have a name of some sort. I can assure you that I do not
extravagantly admire the name of Pinkhammer. But when one
christens one's self, suddenly the fine names do not seem to
suggest themselves. But suppose it had been Scheringhausen
or Scroggins! I think I did very well with Pinkhammer.'
'Your name,' said the other man seriously, 'is Elwyn C.
Bellford. You are one of the first lawyers in Denver. You are
suffering from an attack of aphasia, which has caused you to
forget your identity. The cause of it was over-application to
your profession, and, perhaps, a life too bare of natural
recreation and pleasures. The lady who has just left the room is
your wife.'
'She is what I would call a fine-looking woman,' I said,
after a judicial pause. 'I particularly admire the shade of brown
in her hair.'
'She is a wife to be proud of. Since your disappearance,
nearly two weeks ago, she has scarcely closed her eyes. We
learned that you were in New York through a telegram sent by
Isidore Newman, a travelling man from Denver. He said that
he had met you in an hotel here, and that you did not recognize
him.'
'I think I remember the occasion,' I said. 'The fellow called
me "Bellford," if I am not mistaken. But don't you think it
about time, now, for you to introduce yourself?'
'I am Robert Volney - Doctor Volney. I have been your
close friend for twenty years, and your physician for fifteen. I
59 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

came with Mrs. Bellford to trace you as soon as we got the

telegram. Try, Elwyn, old man - try to remember!'
'What's the use to try!' I asked, with a little frown. 'You say
you are a physician. Is aphasia curable? When a man loses his
memory, does it return slowly, or suddenly?'
'Sometimes gradually and imperfectly; sometimes as
suddenly as it went.'
'Will you undertake the treatment of my case, Doctor
Volney?' I asked.
'Old friend,' said he, 'I'll do everything in my power, and
will have done everything that science can do to cure you.'
'Very well,' said I. 'Then you will consider that I am your
patient. Everything is in confidence now - professional
confidence.'
'Of course,' said Doctor Volney.
I got up from the couch. Someone had set a vase of white
roses on the centre table - a cluster of white roses freshly
sprinkled and fragrant. I threw them far out of the window, and
then I laid myself upon the couch again.
'It will be best, Bobby,' I said, 'to have this cure happen
suddenly. I'm rather tired of it all, anyway. You may go now
and bring Marian in. But, oh, Doc,' I said, with a sigh, as I
kicked him on the shin - 'good old Doc - it was glorious!'

A Municipal Report
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

Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not
merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners 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 Californians 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 mistake
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 refutation 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.
60 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

railroads. This city is regarded as the most important 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.
Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20
parts; dewdrops, gathered in a brickyard at sunrise, 25 parts;
odour 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 an 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 drawn
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 hurriedly
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 wah.'
The hotel was one of the kind described as 'renovated.'
That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, tiling,
electric 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 without
reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the
service as slow as the progress of a snail and as good-
humoured as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth travelling 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 accomplished; 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.

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 wondered
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
61 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

laughter issuing from a soda-water and ice-cream parlour. The

streets other than 'main' seemed to have enticed upon their
borders houses consecrated 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 confederates in a terrible conflict.

All my life I have heard of, admired, and witnessed the fine
markmanship of the South in its peaceful conflicts in the
tobaccochewing regions. But in my hotel a surprise awaited
me. There were twelve bright, new, imposing, capacious brass
cuspidors in the great lobby, tall enough to be called urns and
so widemouthed 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, 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 markmanship.
Here I first saw Major (by misplaced courtesy) Wentworth
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 was 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 would have
repulsed his advances, and the criminal calendar of the world
would have been spared the addition of one murder.
I happened to be standing within five feet of a cuspidor
when Major Caswell opened fire upon it. I had been observant
enough to perceive that the attacking force was using Gatlings
instead of squirrel rifles; so I side-stepped so promptly that the
major seized the opportunity to apologize to a non-combatant.
He had the blabbing lip. In four 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 on the leather-
62 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

cornered seat and, well, order another Würzburger and wish

that Longstreet had but what's the use?
Major Caswell 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 family
trees, and demonstrated that Adam was only a third cousin 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 rumour that she may have had
relations in the land of Nod.
By this time I began to suspect that he was trying to
obscure 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 obligatory. 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
courteously: '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 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 company. 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 of the window. 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 colour and variety to the cities in the
East and West. Just a good, ordinary, humdrum business town.'

Nashville occupies af oremostp lace among the manufacturing centres 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 dry
goods, grocery and drug business.

I must tell you how I came to be in Nashville, and assure

you the digression brings as much tedium to me as it does to
you. I was travelling 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.
63 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Adair (there was no clue to the personality except the

handwriting) 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 Cæsar. He was a stalwart negro,
older than the pyramids, with grey wool and a face that
reminded me of Brutus, and a second afterwards of the late
King Cetewayo. 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 grey in colours. But rain and sun and age
had so variegated it that Joseph's coat, 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 adown its front it had been
frogged and tasselled 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 dishevelled. It must have been added to the coat as
a substitute for vanished splendours, with tasteless but
painstaking 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 leather 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' 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
perceived that there was little choice among the vehicles for
hire that lined the kerb. 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 old negro barred me. On his massive and
saturnine face a look of sudden suspicion and enmity flashed
for a moment. Then, with quickly returning conviction, he
asked blandishingly: 'What are you gwine there for, boss?
'What is that to you?' I asked a little sharply.
64 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 flavoured 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, of which 137
miles are paved; a system of waterworks 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, outmerged 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 generosity 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."
' '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 Cetewayo softened. 'Is you from the
South, suh? I reckon it was them shoes of yourn fooled me.
There is somethin' sharp in the toes for a Southern gen'l'man to
wear.'
'Then the charge is fifty cents, I suppose?' said I
inexorably.
His former expression, a mingling of cupidity and hostility,
returned, remained ten minutes, and vanished.
'Boss,' he said, 'fifty cents is right; but I needs two dollars,
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' sayin' 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 into my
pocket, 'you ought to be turned over to the police.'
65 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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. 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 protecting 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 horsehair sofa and two or three chairs. Yes, there was
a picture on the wall, a coloured 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 somewhat 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 essayists made. While she
talked to me, I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously,
to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs
of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, 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
house 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. 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 commercialism.
But I spoke of my mission, and three o'clock of the next
afternoon was set for the discussion of the business
proposition.
'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.'
66 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
still, 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 windows and heard the drop 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 Review.'
'Of course,' said I platitudinously, 'human nature is the same
everywhere; but there is more colour - er - more drama and
movement and - er - romance in some cities than in others.'
'On the surface,' said Azalea Adair. 'I have travelled 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 bow-string 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 because his wife
was going out with her face covered - with 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 Nashville the other night I saw Kitty
Morgan cut dead by seven of her schoolmates and lifelong
friends because she had married 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 humdrum town. Just a few miles of redbrick houses
and mud and stores and lumber yards.'
Someone knocked hollowly at the back of the house.
Azalea Adair 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, bare-foot, 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 tissuepaper. 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
67 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

was sure it was hers - filled the hollow house. Then the deep,
gruff tones of an angry man's voice mingled with the girl's
further squeals and unintelligible words.
Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and
disappeared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the
man's voice; then something like an oath and a light 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
uneventful 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
coachman 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. ' 'Scuse me,
boss; you is de gen'l'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 dollar 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 Cetewayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate
old negro hack-driver.
'She a'n'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 when 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 was one of those despicable, roaring,
advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks
attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.
68 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 was 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 town had made me tired and listless.
I remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed
of the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clue
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 Cetewayo 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.
Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she
had looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract
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 horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk
and yelled to the coffee-coloured 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 minutes he returned with a grave, grey-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 Cæsar,' 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 some time this week.'
It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to
the speeding powers of the landpirate's steeds. After Uncle
Cæsar 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 Cæsar, 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
revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of
the autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of
colour. She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the
outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as
69 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere, 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 Cæsar's grandfather
was a king in Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you
may have observed.'
As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar's voice
inside: 'Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis'
Zalea?'
'Yes, Cæsar,' I heard Azalea Adair 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 Cæsar drove me back to the hotel.
Here ends all 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 Cæsar
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
puffickly clean, suh - jus' got back from a funeral-
' And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was
getting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of
colour, 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 edged my way inside. On an extemporized
couch of empty boxes and chairs was stretched the 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
clenched 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
70 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 gentlemen 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 waters
below.
I wonder what's doing in Buffalo!

LI

Compliments of the Seas

THERE ARE NO MORE Christmas stories to write. Fiction is

exhausted; and newspaper items the next best, are
manufactured by clever young Journalists who have married
early and have an engagingly pessimistic view of life.
Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we are reduced to two
very questionable sources - facts and philosophy. We will
begin with - whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have
to cope under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially
when childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits'
end. We exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat
them, sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million
years, and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for
the children, no one understands them except old maids,
hunchbacks, and shepherd dogs.
Now come the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the
Tatterdemalion, and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost
her rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's
palace on the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and
grounds, but without finding the lost treasure. The Child was a
girl of five, and one of those perverse little beasts that often
wound the sensibilities of wealthy parents by fixing their
affections upon some vulgar,
'P-pardon, lady,' he said, 'but couldn't leave without
exchangin' comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. ' 'Gainst
princ'ples gen'leman do sho.'
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a
tradition in the House when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
'The blessings of another year –
' Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
'- Be upon this hearth.'
'- The guest - ' stammered Fuzzy. '-
And upon her who - ' continued the Lady, with a leading
smile.
'Oh, cut it out,' said Fuzzy ill-manneredly. 'I can't
remember. Drink hearty.'
71 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled
again the smile of her caste. James enveloped Fuzzy and re-
conducted him toward the front door. The harp music still
softly drifted through the house.
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and
hugged the gate.
'I wonder,' said the Lady to herself, musing 'who - but there
were so many who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse
or a blessing to them after they have fallen so low.'
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady
called: 'James!'
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting
unsteadily, with his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer
grip on his section of gas-pipe.
'You will conduct this gentleman,' said the Lady,
'downstairs. Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take
him to whatever place he wishes to go.

LII

Proof of the Pudding

SPRING WINKED a vitreous optic at Editor Westbrook, of the

Minerva Magazine, and deflected him from his course. He had
lunched in his favourite corner of a Broadway hotel, and was
returning to his office when his feet became entangled in the
lure of the vernal coquette. Which is by way of saying that he
turned eastward in Twenty-sixth Street, safely forded the
spring freshet of vehicles in Fifth Avenue, and meandered
along the walks of budding Madison Square.
The lenient air and the settings of the little park almost
formed a pastoral; the colour motif was green - the presiding
shade at the creation of man and vegetation.
The callow grass between the walks was the colour of
verdigris, a poisonous green, reminiscent of the horde of
derelict humans that had breathed upon the soil during the
summer and autumn. The bursting tree-buds looked strangely
familiar to those who had botanized among the garnishings of
the fish course of a forty-cent dinner. The sky above was of
that pale aquamarine tint that hallroom poets rhyme with 'true'
and 'Sue' and 'coo.' The one natural and frank colour visible
was the ostensible green of the newly painted benches - a
shade between the colour of a pickled cucumber and that of a
last year's fast-back cravenette raincoat. But, to the city-bred
eye of Editor Westbrook, the landscape appeared a
masterpiece.
And now, whether you are of those who rush in, or of the
gentle concourse that fears to tread, you must follow in a brief
invasion of the editor's mind.
Editor Westbrook's spirit was contented and serene. The
April number of the Minerva had sold its entire edition before
the tenth day of the month - a newsdealer in Keokuk had
written that he could have sold fifty copies more if he had had
'em. The owners of the magazine had raised his (the editor's)
72 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

salary; he had just installed in his home a jewel of a recently

imported cook who was afraid of policemen; and the morning
papers had published in full a speech he had made at a
publishers' banquet. Also there were echoing in his mind the
jubilant notes of a splendid song that his charming young wife
had sung to him before he left his uptown apartment that
morning. She was taking enthusiastic interest in her music of
late, practising early and diligently. When he had
complimented her on the improvement in her voice she had
fairly hugged him for joy at his praise. He felt, too, the benign,
tonic medicament of the trained nurse, Spring, tripping softly
adown the wards of the convalescent city.
While Editor Westbrook was sauntering between rows of
park benches (already filling with vagrants and the guardians
of lawless childhood) he felt his sleeve grasped and held.
Suspecting that he was about to be panhandled, he turned a
cold and unprofitable face, and saw that his captor was - Dawe
- Shackleford Dawe, dingy, almost ragged, the genteel scarcely
visible in him through the deeper lines of the shabby.
While the editor is pulling himself out of his surprise, a
flashlight biography of Dawe is offered.
He was a fiction writer, and one of Westbrook's old
acquaintances. At one time they might have called each other
old friends. Dawe had some money in those days, and lived in
a decent apartment-house near Westbrook's. The two families
often went to theatres and dinners together. Mrs. Dawe and
Mrs. Westbrook became 'dearest' friends. Then one day a little
tentacle of the octopus, just to amuse itself, ingurgitated
Dawe's capital, and he moved to the Gramercy Park
neighbourhood, where one, for a few groats per week, may sit
upon one's trunk under eightbranched chandeliers and opposite
Carrara marble mantels and watch the mice play upon the
floor. Dawe thought to live by writing fiction. Now and then he
sold a story. He submitted many to Westbrook. The Minerva
printed one or two of them; the rest were returned. Westbrook
sent a careful and conscientious personal letter with each
rejected manuscript, pointing out in detail his reasons for
considering it unavailable. Editor Westbrook had his own clear
conception of what constituted good fiction. So had Dawe.
Mrs. Dawe was mainly concerned about the constituents of the
scanty dishes of food that she managed to scrape together. One
day Dawe had been spouting to her about the excellences of
certain French writers. At dinner they sat down to a dish that a
hungry schoolboy could have encompassed at a gulp. Dawe
commented.
'It's Maupassant hash,' said Mrs. Dawe. 'It may not be art,
but I do wish you would do a five course Marion Crawford
serial with an Ella Wheeler Wilcox sonnet for dessert. I'm
hungry.'
As far as this from success was Shackleford Dawe when he
plucked Editor Westbrook's sleeve in Madison Square. That
was the first time the editor had seen Dawe in several months.
'Why, Shack, is this you?' said Westbrook somewhat
awkwardly, for the form of this phrase seemed to touch upon
the other's changed appearance.
73 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'Sit down for a minute,' said Dawe, tugging at his sleeve.

'This is my office. I can't come to yours, looking as I do. Oh,
sit down you won't be disgraced. Those half-plucked birds on
the other benches will take you for a swell porch-climber. They
won't know you are only an editor.'
'Smoke, Shack?' said Editor Westbrook, sinking cautiously
upon the virulent green bench. He always yielded gracefully
when he did yield.
Dawe snapped at the cigar as a kingfisher darts at a
sunperch, or a girl pecks at a chocolate cream.
'I have just- ' began the editor.
'Oh, I know; don't finish,' said Dawe. 'Give me a match.
You have just ten minutes to spare. How did you manage to get
past my office-boy and invade my sanctum? There he goes
now, throwing his club at a dog that couldn't read the "Keep off
the Grass" signs.'
'How goes the writing?' asked the editor.
'Look at me,' said Dawe, 'for your answer. Now don't put
on that embarrassed, friendly-but-honest look and ask me why
I don't get a job as a wine agent or a cab-driver. I'm in the fight
to a finish. I know I can write good fiction and I'll force you
fellows to admit it yet. I'll make you change the spelling of
"regrets" to "c-h-e-q-u-e" before I'm done with you.'
Editor Westbrook gazed through his nose-glasses with a
sweetly sorrowful, omniscient, sympathetic, sceptical
expression - the copyrighted expression of the editor
beleaguered by the unavailable contributor.
'Have you read the last story I sent you - "The Alarum of
the Soul"?' asked Dawe.
'Carefully. I hesitated over that story, Shack, really I did. It
had some good points. I was writing you a letter to send with it
when it goes back to you. I regret- '
'Never mind the regrets,' said Dawe grimly. 'There's neither
salve nor sting in 'em any more. What I want to know is why.
Come, now; out with the good points first.'
'The story,' said Westbrook deliberately, after a suppressed
sigh, 'is written around an almost original plot.
Characterization the best you have done. Construction - almost
as good, except for a few weak joints which might be
strengthened by a few changes and touches. It was a good
story, except-
' 'I can write English, can't I?' interrupted Dawe.
'I have always told you,' said the editor, 'that you had a
style.'
'Then the trouble is the- '
'Same old thing,' said Editor Westbrook. 'You work up to
your climax like an artist. And then you turn yourself into a
photographer. I don't know what form of obstinate madness
possesses you, Shack, but that is what you do with everything
that you write. No, I will retract the comparison with the
photographer. Now and then photography, in spite of its
impossible perspective, manages to record a fleeting glimpse
of truth. But you spoil every denouement by those flat, drab,
obliterating strokes of your brush that I have so often
complained of. If you would rise to the literary pinnacle of
your dramatic scenes, and paint them in the high colours that
74 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

art requires, the postman would leave fewer bulky, self-

addressed envelopes at your door.'
'Oh, fiddles and footlights!' cried Dawe derisively. 'You've
got that old sawmill drama kink in your brain yet. When the
man with the black moustache kidnaps golden-haired Bessie
you are bound to have the mother kneel and raise her hands in
the spotlight and say: "May high heaven witness that I will rest
neither night nor day till the heartless villain that has stolen me
child feels the weight of a mother's vengeance!"
Editor Westbrook conceded a smile of impervious
complacency. 'I think,' said he, 'that in real life the woman
would express herself in those words or in very similar ones.'
'Not in a six hundred nights' run anywhere but on the
stage,' said Dawe hotly. 'I'll tell you what she'd say in real life.
She'd say: "What! Bessie led away by a strange man? Good
Lord! It's one trouble after another! Get my other hat, I must
hurry around to the police-station. Why wasn't somebody
looking after her, I'd like to know? For God's sake, get out of
my way or I'll never get ready. Not that hat - the brown one
with the velvet bows. Bessie must have been crazy; she's
usually shy of strangers. Is that too much powder? Lordy! How
I'm upset!"
'That's the way she'd talk,' continued Dawe. 'People in real
life don't fly into heroics and blank verse at emotional crises.
They simply can't do it. If they talk at all on such occasions
they draw from the same vocabulary that they use every day,
and muddle up their words and ideas a little more, that's all.'
'Shack,' said Editor Westbrook impressively, 'did you ever
pick up the mangled and lifeless form of a child from under the
fender of a street-car, and carry it in your arms and lay it down
before the distracted mother? Did you ever do that and listen to
the words of grief and despair as they flowed spontaneously
from her lips?'
'I never did,' said Dawe. 'Did you?'
'Well, no,' said Editor Westbrook, with a slight frown. 'But I
can well imagine what she would say.'
'So can I,' said Dawe. And now the fitting time had come
for Editor Westbrook to play the oracle and silence his
opinionated contributor. It was not for an unarrived fictionist to
dictate words to be uttered by the heroes and heroines of the
Minerva Magazine, contrary to the theories of the editor
thereof.
'My dear Shack,' said he, 'if I know anything of life I know
that every sudden, deep and tragic emotion in the human heart
calls forth an apposite, concordant, conformable, and
proportionate expression of feeling? How much of this
inevitable accord between expression and feeling should be
attributed to nature, and how much to the influence of art, it
would be difficult to say. The sublimely terrible roar of the
lioness that has been deprived of her cubs is dramatically as far
above her customary whine and purr as the kingly and
transcendent utterances of Lear are above the level of his senile
vapourings. But it is also true that all men and women have
what may be called a subconscious dramatic sense that is
awakened by a sufficiently deep and powerful emotion - a
sense unconsciously acquired from literature and the stage that
75 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

prompts them to express those emotions in language befitting

their importance and histrionic value.
'And in the name of seven sacred saddle-blankets of
Sagittarius, where did the stage and literature get the stunt?'
asked Dawe.
'From life,' answered the editor triumphantly.
The story-writer rose from the bench and gesticulated
eloquently but dumbly. He was beggared for words with which
to formulate adequately his dissent.
On a bench near by a frowsy loafer opened his red eyes and
perceived that his moral support was due to a down-trodden
brother.
'Punch him one, Jack,' he called hoarsely to Dawe. 'Wat's he
come makin' a noise like a penny arcade for amongst
gen'lemen that comes in the Square to set and think?'
Editor Westbrook looked at his watch with an affected
show of leisure.
'Tell me,' asked Dawe, with truculent anxiety, 'what especial
faults in "The Alarum of the Soul" caused you to throw it
down.' 'When Gabriel Murray,' said Westbrook, 'goes to his
telephone and is told that his fiancée has been shot by a
burglar, he says - I do not recall the exact words, but- '
'I do,' said Dawe. 'He says: "Damn Central; she always cuts
me off." (And then to his friend): "Say, Tommy, does a thirty-
two bullet make a big hole? It's kind of hard luck, ain't it?
Could you get me a drink from the sideboard, Tommy? No;
straight; nothing on the side." '
'And again,' continued the editor, without pausing for
argument, 'when Berenice opens the letter from her husband
informing her that he has fled with the manicure girl, her
words are - let me see- '
'She says,' interposed the author: ' "Well, what do you think
of that!" '
'Absurdly inappropriate words,' said Westbrook,
'presenting an anti-climax - plunging the story into hopeless
bathos. Worse yet; they mirror life falsely. No human being
ever uttered banal colloquialisms when confronted by sudden
tragedy.'
'Wrong,' said Dawe, closing his unshaven jaws doggedly. 'I
say no man or woman ever spouts highfalutin talk when they
go up against a real climax. They talk naturally, and a little
worse.'
The editor rose from the bench with his air of indulgence
and inside information.
'Say, Westbrook,' said Dawe, pinning him by the lapel,
'would you have accepted "The Alarum of the Soul" if you had
believed that the actions and words of the characters were true
to life in the parts of the story that we discussed?'
'It is very likely that I would, if I believed that way,' said
the editor. 'But I have explained to you that I do not.'
'If I could prove to you that I am right?'
'I'm sorry, Shack, but I'm afraid I haven't time to argue any
further just now.'
'I don't want to argue,' said Dawe. 'I want to demonstrate to
you from life itself that my view is the correct one.'
76 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'How could you do that?' asked Westbrook in a surprised

tone.
'Listen,' said the writer seriously. 'I have thought of a way.
It is important to me that my theory of true-to-life fiction be
recognized as correct by the magazines. I've fought for it for
three years, and I'm down to my last dollar, with two months'
rent due.'
'I have applied the opposite of your theory,' said the editor,
'in selecting the fiction for the Minerva Magazine. The
circulation has gone up from ninety thousand to- '
'Four hundred thousand,' said Dawe. 'Whereas it should
have been boosted to a million.'
'You said something to me just now about demonstrating
your pet theory.'
'I will. If you'll give me about half an hour of your time I'll
prove to you that I am right. I'll prove it by Louise.'
'Your wife!' exclaimed Westbrook. 'How?' 'Well, not exactly
by her, but with her,' said Dawe. 'Now, you know how devoted
and loving Louise has always been. She thinks I'm the only
genuine preparation on the market that bears the old doctor's
signature. She's been fonder and more faithful than ever, since
I've been cast for the neglected genius part.'
'Indeed, she is a charming and admirable life companion,'
agreed the editor. 'I remember what inseparable friends she and
Mrs. Westbrook once were. We are both lucky chaps, Shack, to
have such wives. You must bring Mrs. Dawe up some evening
soon, and we'll have one of those informal chafing-dish
suppers that we used to enjoy so much.'
'Later,' said Dawe. 'When I get another shirt. And now I'll
tell you my scheme. When I was about to leave home after
breakfast if you can call tea and oatmeal breakfast - Louise
told me she was going to visit her aunt in Eighty-ninth Street.
She said she would return home at three o'clock. She is always
on time to a minute. It is now-
' Dawe glanced toward the editor's watch pocket.
'Twenty-seven minutes to three,' said Westbrook, scanning
his timepiece.
'We have just enough time,' said Dawe. 'We will go to my
flat at once. I will write a note, address it to her and leave it on
the table where she will see it as she enters the door. You and I
will be in the dining-room concealed by the portieres. In that
note I'll say that I have fled from her for ever with an affinity
who understands the needs of my artistic soul as she never did.
When she reads it we will observe her actions and hear her
words. Then we will know which theory is the correct one -
yours or mine.'
'Oh, never!' exclaimed the editor, shaking his head. 'That
would be inexcusably cruel. I could not consent to have Mrs.
Dawe's feelings played upon in such a manner.'
'Brace up,' said the writer. 'I guess I think as much of her as
you do. It's for her benefit as well as mine. I've got to get a
market for my stories in some way. It won't hurt Louise. She's
healthy and sound. Her heart goes as strong as a ninety-eight-
cent watch. It'll last for only a minute, and then I'll step out and
explain to her. You really owe it to me to give me the chance,
Westbrook.'
77 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

Editor Westbrook at length yielded, though but half

willingly. And in the half of him that consented lurked the
vivisectionist that is in all of us.
Let him who has not used the scalpel rise and stand in his
place. Pity 'tis that there are not enough rabbits and guinea-pigs
to go around.
The two experimenters in Art left the Square and hurried
eastward and then to the south until they arrived in the
Gramercy neighbourhood. Within its high iron railings the
little park had put on its smart coat of vernal green, and was
admiring itself in its fountain minor. Outside the railings the
hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a bygone gentry,
leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings of the
vanished quality. Sic transit gloria urbis.
A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor
again eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a
lofty but narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-
decorated façade. To the fifth story they toiled, and Dawe,
panting, pushed his latch-key into the door of one of the front
flats.
When the door opened Editor Westbrook saw, with feelings
of pity, how meanly and meagrely the rooms were furnished.
'Get a chair, if you can find one,' said Dawe, 'while I hunt
up pen and ink. Hallo, what's this? Here's a note from Louise.
She must have left it there when she went out this morning.'
He picked up an envelope that lay on the centre-table and
tore it open. He began to read the letter that he drew out of it;
and once having begun it aloud he so read it through to the
end. These are the words that Editor Westbrook heard:

DEAR SHACKLEFORD,-
'By the time you get this I will be about a hundred miles
away and still a-going. I've got a place in the chorus of the
Occidental Opera Co., and we start on the road to-day at
twelve o'clock. I didn't want to starve to death, and so I
decided to make my own living. I'm not coming back. Mrs.
Westbrook is going with me. She said she was tired of living
with a combination phonograph, iceberg and dictionary, and
she's not coming back, either. We've been practising the songs
and dances for two months on the quiet. I hope you will be
successful, and get along all right. Good-bye.
'LOUISE.'
Dawe dropped the letter, covered his face with his
trembling hands, and cried out in a deep vibrating voice:
'My God, why hast Thou given me this cup to drink? Since she is false,
then let Thy Heaven's fairest gifts, faith and love, become the jesting
bywords of traitors and friends!'
Editor Westbrook's glasses fell to the floor. The fingers of
one hand fumbled with a button on his coat as he blurted
between his pale lips:
'Say, Shack, ain't that a hell of a note? Wouldn't that knock you off your
perch, Shack? Ain't it hell, now, Shack - ain't it?'

LIII

Past One at Rooney's

78 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

ONLY ON THE LOWER East Side of New York do the

Houses of Capulet and Montague survive. There they do not
fight by the book of arithmetic. If you but bite your thumb at
an upholder of your opposing house you have work cut out for
your steel. On Broadway you may drag your man along a
dozen blocks by his nose, and he will only bawl for the watch;
but in the domain of the East Side Tybalts and Mercutios you
must observe the niceties of deportment to the wink of an
eyelash and to an inch of elbowroom at the bar when its
patrons include foes of your house and kin.
So, when Eddie McManus, known to the Capulets as Cork
McManus, drifted into Dutch Mike's for a stein of beer, and
came upon a bunch of Montagues making merry with the suds,
he began to observe the strictest parliamentary rules. Courtesy
forbade his leaving the saloon with his thirst unslaked; caution
steered him to a place at the bar where the mirror supplied the
cognizance of the enemy's movements that his indifferent gaze
seemed to disdain; experience whispered to him that the finger
of trouble would be busy among the chattering steins at Dutch
Mike's that night. Close by his side drew Brick Cleary, his
Mercutio, companion of his perambulations. Thus they stood,
four of the Mulberry Hill Gang and two of the Dry Dock Gang
minding their P's and Q's so solicitously that Dutch Mike kept
one eye on his customers and the other on an open space
beneath his bar in which it was his custom to seek safety
whenever the ominous politeness of the rival associations
congealed into the shapes of bullets and cold steel.
But we have not to do with the wars of the Mulberry Hills
and the Dry Docks. We must to Rooney's, where, on the most
blighted dead branch of the tree of life, a little pale orchid shall
bloom.
Overstrained etiquette at last gave way. It is not known who
first overstepped the bounds of punctilio; but the consequences
were immediate. Buck Malone, of the Mulberry Hills, with a
Dewey-like swiftness, got an eight-inch gun swung round from
his