The Gift of The Magi
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.
Della 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. Tomorrow 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 2
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. Some- thing 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. Per- haps you have
seen a pier-glass in an 58 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 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 shin- ing 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, pant- ing. 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 3
‘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, close- lying curls that
made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection
in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
'If Jim doesn't kill me,' she said to herself, 'before he takes a second look at
me, he'll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do – oh!
what could I do 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 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 4
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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 5
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 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 unevent- ful 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 6
II
A Cosmopolitan in a Café
AT MIDNIGHT THE CAFE 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 rables, the range
of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay com- pany, 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 kingly diversion. And then his conversation rang along
parallels of latitude and lon- gitude. 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 dis- respectfully of
the equator, he skipped from continent to conti nent, he derided the zones, he
mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would
speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in
Lap- land. Zip! Now you rode the breakers with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki.
Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas post- oak swamp, let you dry for a
moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch, then whirled you into the
society of Viennese arch- dukes. 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 7
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 carth, 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 Oricans race-track, and the brilliant banquets
given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who compose the North Carolina
Society, have made the South rather a 'fad' in Manhattan. Your manicure will
lisp softly that your left forefinger reminds her so much of a gentleman's in
Richmond, Va. Oh, certainly, but many a lady has to work now – the war, you
know.
When 'Dixie' was being played a dark-haired young man sprang up from
somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved frantically his soft-brimmed
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 8
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 Pocahon- tas, 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 me 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, NJ., 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 9
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 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. "Bot 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 terres- trial, 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 intro- duced 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 pot 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.’
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 10
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.
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, foun- tains
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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 11
awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its hear 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 something in her
manner that warned Mr. McCaskey. 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. MeCaskey 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 12
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 down- stairs 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 car 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 scout 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, turned over a page to follow up the
article about the carpenters' strike. Mrs. Murphy shrieked to the moon: 'Oh, ar-r-
Mike, for Gawd's sake, where is me little bit av a boy?!
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 13
'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-year- old 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 learning out
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 14
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.
‘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 hurry- up 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 sur- mises. 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 15
Loud voices and a renewed uproar were raised in front of the boarding-house.
'What's up now, Judy?" asked Mr. McCaskey.’
‘’Tis Mrs. 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 hit 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 MeCaskey 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.
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
FIRST MRS. PARKER would show you the double pariours. 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 confes- sion 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 16
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, never- more 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?’
Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. In this closet,' she said, 'one
could keep a skeleton or anæsthetic 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 17
do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me some- thing 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 Concy 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 18
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 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 foot- lights 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, forty- five, 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 cast- ing 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 Jack- son.’
'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."
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 19
‘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.
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 Myrtie 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 20
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 colored maid, found the door locked at ten the next day, and they
forced it open. Vinegar, 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 practiced 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 21
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
VI
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 muscle-making inventions.
With the fibers 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 welterweight 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 ready at seven, sharp, Mag; and Jimmy and me'll come
by for you.'
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 27
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,
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 28
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, 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 sun; 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 29
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 paper-box
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.
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
everyone 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.'
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 30
'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 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? Dempsey 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?'
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 31
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, light-footed, 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. Everyone
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 Guines. 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.
'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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 32
‘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
VIII
'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,
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 38
such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tamananoo, 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.
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-
China-Stoke-Poges 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 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 floors up, not flights or climbs. 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 husband 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 39
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 air-
shaft—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 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 cakun-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-and-tan 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 40
'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
buige 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 dispatches 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; 'dare my eyes if the
saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't 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 boughs 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.'
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 41
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 BLUE LIGHT DRUG STORE is down-town, between the Bowery and
First Avenue, where the distance between the 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 42
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 were 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
'You will excuse me, Chunk,' said Ikey. 'I must make a prescription that is to
be called for soon.'
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 44
'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
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 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 fire escape. 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.
moment immovable. For this odour belonged to Miss Leslie; it was her own,
and hers only.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 47
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, 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, Pitchers. 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
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to
furnished room, transients for ever, transients in abode, transients in heart and
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 48
mind. They sing 'Home Sweet Home' in ragtime; they carry their lares et
penates in a bandbox, their vine 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 on 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 49
‘Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?’ asked the young man.
‘They come and go. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the
theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stay long
anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they come and they go.’
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.
‘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 have names they change
as often as their rooms. They come and they go. 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 today hurried 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 foot-wide
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 diverse
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,
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 50
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 a lovely woman
had marched in the throng. Tiny fingerprints 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 hurried 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 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 cranes 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