Short stories from 100 Selected Stories By O Henry

→ The Gift of the Magi

→ A Cosmopolite in a Café
→ The Skylight Room
→ A Service of Love
→ The Coming Out of Maggie
→ The Cop and the Anthem
→ Memoirs of a Yellow Dog
→ The Love-philtre of Ikey Shoenstein
→ The Furnished Room
→ The Last Leaf
→ The Poet and the Peasant
→ A Ramble in Aphasia
→ A Municipal Report
→ Proof of the Pudding
I
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. 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
2 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
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.
4 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
6 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 7

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 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.
8 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 9

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 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
10 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 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. 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’hôte. Let cheap
Bohemians consider coffee the end, if they would. Let them make
12 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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, turned over a page
to follow up the article about the carpenters’ strike. Mrs. Murphy
shrieked to the moon: ‘Oh, ar-r-Mike, fr 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 leaning out of
14 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
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 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.
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
16 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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?’
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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 17

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
18 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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, 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 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.’
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 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
20 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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

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 left-hand
end of the keyboard. And they were happy; for they had their Art and
they had each other. And my advice to 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
22 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 Seventy-first
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,
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 23

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 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
24 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 25

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.’
‘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
26 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 muscle-
making 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 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,
28 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
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 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.’
30 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

‘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? 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?’
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. 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.
‘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.
32 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

‘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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 33

In Soapy’s opinion the Law was more benign than Philanthropy. There
was an endless round of institutions, municipal and eleemosynary, on
which he might set out and receive lodging and food accordant with the
simple life. But to one of Soapy’s proud spirit the gifts of charity are
encumbered. If not in coin you must pay in humiliation of spirit for
every benefit received at the hands of philanthropy. As Cæsar 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.
34 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 35

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.
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.’
36 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 37

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,
38 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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-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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 39

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 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 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-and-
tan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every evening,
40 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 41

‘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 two streets
is the shortest. The Blue Light does not consider that pharmacy is a
thing
42 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 43

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.’
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.’
44 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

‘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 up-town
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 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
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 45

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 many-hours’
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 I 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.’
‘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?’
74 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 75

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 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
76 O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
'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 gleains 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,
O HENRY – 100 SELECTED STORIES 77

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 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