Short stories from 100 Selected Stories, by O Henry

The Gift of the Magi

A Cosmopolite in a Café
Between Rounds
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
 1

The Gift of the Magi

ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-SEVEN CENTS. That was all. And sixty cents of it
was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and
the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheek burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted
it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing left to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and
howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of
sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the
second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly
beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the look-out for the mendicancy
squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an
electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining
thereunto was a card bearing the name 'Mr. James Dillingham Young.'
The 'Dillingham' had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity
when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was
shrunk to $20, the letters of 'Dillingham' looked blurred, as though they were
thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr.
James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called 'Jim'
and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as
Della. Which is all very good.
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. Some- thing fine and rare and sterling- something just a little bit near to being
worthy of the honour of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Per- haps you have
seen a pier-glass in an $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.
3 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 choras 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 band 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 -- seld 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 abic to look up with
dim eyes and a smile and say: 'My hair grows so fast, Jim!'
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, 'Oh, oh!'
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her
open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright
and ardent spirit.
Isn't it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You'll have to look at the '
time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on
it.'
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the
back of his head and smiled.
Dell,' said he, 'let's put our Christmas presents away and keep 'em awhile. '
They're too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your
combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.'
The magi, as you know, were wise men - wonderfully wise men - who brought
gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents.
Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of
exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the unevent-
ful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each
other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these
days, let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who
give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are
the magi.
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 lon- gitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly,
contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a
table-d'hôte grape fruit. He spoke dis- respectfully of the equator, he skipped from
continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his
napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad.
Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lap- land. Zip! Now you rode the breakers
with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He dragged you through an Arkansas
post- oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the alkali plains of his Idaho ranch,
then whirled you into the society of Viennese arch- dukes. Anon he would be telling
you of a cold he acquired in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in
Buenos Ayres with a hot infusion of the chuchula weed. You would have
7 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

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. Rush- more 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 over- powered
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 Rich- mond, Va. Oh, certainly; but many a
lady has to work now -- the war, you know.
8 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES8

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 Pocahon- tas, Indianians who hadn't written a novel, Mexicans who didn't
wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen,
spendthrift Yankees, cold-blooded Southern- ers, 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
9 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 terres- trial, globular,
planetary hunk of matter, slightly flattened at the poles, and known as the Earth, is
my abode. I've met a good many object-bound citizens of this country abroad. I've
seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag
about their drainage canal. I've seen a Southerner on being intro- duced to the King
of England hand that monarch, without batting his eyes, the information that his
grandaunt on his mother's side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of
Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was kidnapped for ransom by some
Afghanistan bandits. His people sent over the money and he came back to Kabul
with the agent. "Afghanistan?" the natives said to him through an interpreter. "Well,
not so slow, do you think?" "Oh, I don't know," says he, and he begins to tell them
about a cab-driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don't suit me. I'm
not tied down to anything that isn't 8,000 miles in diameter. Just 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 cailed McCarthy, one of the French garçons, and asked him the cause of the
conflict.
The man with the red tie' (that was my cosmopolite), said he, 'got hot on
account of things said about the bum sidewalks and water supply of the place he
come from by the other guy.'
'Why,' said I, bewildered, that man is a citizen of the world - a cosmopolite. He-'
'Originally from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,' continued McCarthy, 'and he
wouldn't stand for no knockin' the place.'

III
Between Rounds

THE MAY MOON SHONE BRIGHT upon the private boarding-house of Mrs.
Murphy. By reference to the almanac a large amount of territory will be discovered
upon which its rays also fell. Spring was in its heyday, with hay fever soon to
follow. The parks were green with new leaves and buyers for the Western and
Southern trade. Flowers and summer-resort agents were blowing, the air and
answers to Lawson were growing milder; hand-organs, foun- tains and pinochle
were playing everywhere.
The windows of Mrs. Murphy's boarding-house were open. A group of boarders
were seated on the high stoop upon round, flat mats like German pancakes.
In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey
11 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

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, gar- nished with shamrocks. He
retorted with this, and drew the appropriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen
dish. A hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown by her husband struck Mrs.
McCaskey below one eye. When she replied with a well-aimed coffee-pot full of a
hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the battle, according to courses, should have ended.
But Mr. McCaskey was no 50 cent table d'hôter. Let cheap Bohemians consider
coffee the end, if they would. Let them make
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 down- stairs caused both her and Mr. McCaskey
to pause in a sort of involuntary armistice.
On the sidewalk at the corner of the house Policeman Cleary was standing with
one car upturned, listening to the crash of household utensils.
' Tis Jawn McCaskey and his missus at it again,' meditated the policeman. 'I
wonder shall I go up and stop the row. I will not. Married folks they are; and few
pleasures they have. Twill not last long. Sure, they'll have to borrow more dishes to
keep it up with.'
And just then came the loud scream below-stairs, betokening fear or dire
extremity. 'Tis probably the cat,' said Policeman Cleary, and walked hastily in the
other direction.
The boarders on the steps were fluttered. Mr. Toomey, an insurance solicitor by
birth and an investigator by profession, went inside to analyse the scream. He
returned with the news that Mrs. Murphy's little boy Mike was lost. Following the
messenger, out bounced Mrs. Murphy - two hundred pounds in tears and hysterics,
clutching the air and howling to the sky for the loss of thirty pounds of freckles and
mischief. Bathos, truly; but Mr. Toomey sat down at the side of Miss Purdy,
milliner, and their hands came together in sympathy. The two old maids, Misses
Walsh, who complained every day about the noise in the halls, inquired
immediately if anybody had looked behind the clock.
Major Grigg, who sat by his fat wife on the top step, arose and buttoned his coat.
'The little one lost?' he exclaimed. 'I will 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?'
33 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 scoop- ing 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 sur- mises. Mrs. Murphy ploughed
back and forth in their midst, like a soft mountain down which plunged an audible
cataract of tears. Couriers came and went
15 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
31 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, never- more would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would
bonk 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 anesthetic 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
17 O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

do look green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me some- thing higher and
lower.'
Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at the rap on his
door.
'Excuse me, Mr. Skidder,' said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile at his pale
looks. 'I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady to have a look at your
lambrequins.'
'They're too lovely for anything,' said Miss Leeson, smiling in exactly the way the
angels do.
After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall, black-haired
heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and inserting a small, roguish one with
heavy, bright hair and vivacious features.
'Anna Held'll jump at it,' said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting his feet up against '
the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smoke like an aerial cuttlefish.
Presently the tocsin call of 'Clara!' sounded to the world the state of Miss
Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygian stairway, thrust her
into a vault with a glimmer of light in its top and muttered the menacing and
cabalistic words 'Two dollars!'
'I'll take it!' sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeaky iron bed.
Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought home papers with
handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter. Sometimes she had no
work at night, and then she would sit on the steps of the high stoop with the other
roomers. Miss Leeson was not intended for a skylight room when the plans were
drawn for her creation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies.
Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great (unpublished) comedy,
'It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway.'
There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leeson had
time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But Miss Longnecker, the tall blonde
who taught in a public school and said 'Well, really!' to everything you said, sat on
the top step and sniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at 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 foot- lights and drops an
epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune the pipes to the tragedy of
tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity of corpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have
rendered more romance to the ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the
ounce. A lover may sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fat
men remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inch belt. Avaunt,
Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, might carry off Helen herself,
Hoover, forty- five, flush, foolish and fat, is meat for perdition. There was never a
chance for you, Hoover.
As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leeson looked up
into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:
'Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too.' All looked up
some at the windows of skyscrapers, some cast- ing about for an airship, Jackson-
guided.
'It's that star,' explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger. 'Not the big one
that twinkles - the steady blue one near it. I can see it every night through my
skylight. I named it Billy 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.'
19 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 incf- fectually, named. Miss Longnecker must he 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 nuillions 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 any- thing 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 Elsic 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 hack 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 - 1,
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 belped me) to weld the incidents together.
21 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 wash- stand 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
pocket- books 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,
23 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 break- fast. 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 dis- tracted. He rushed downstairs and sent somebody - they said
the
25 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 scen 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.
Maggic 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 organiza- tions in joyous combat. Between these more serious
occupations the Saturday night hops with the paper-box factory girls came as a
refin- ing 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.'
27 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

But what was this? Instead of the customary humble and grate- ful 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 'un.'
'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 enchant- ing 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 fairy- land 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 succes- sion 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
29 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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.
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 con-
tempt and less control over his conspicuous sneer. They were ene- mies by the law
written when the rocks were melten. They were each too splendid, too mighty, too
incomparable to divide pre- eminence. 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 check- ing 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?'
31 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 Sat- urday 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.
33 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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
Caesar had his Brutus, every bed of charity must have its toll of a bath, every loaf of
bread its compensation of a private and personal inquisition. Wherefore it is better
to be a guest of the law, which, though conducted by rules, does not meddle unduly
with a gentleman's private affairs.
Soapy, having decided to go to the Island, at once set about accomplishing his
desire. There were many easy ways of doing this. The pleasantest was to dine
luxuriously at some expensive restaurant; and then, after declaring insolvency, be
handed over quietly and without uproar to a policeman. An accommodating
inagistrate 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 cov- eted 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 dis- played 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 half- way down the block running to catch a car. With
drawn club he joined in the pursuit. Soapy, with disgust in his heart, loafed along,
twice 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, flap-
jacks, 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
35 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 che 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 enter- ing. 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 mas- tery 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
37 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 them- selves 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 Tamaanoo, 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 cor- nered it, and gave up. From that moment
I was a pet - a manuma's own wootsey squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever
have a 200-pound woman breathing a fiavour 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.
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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 communica- tion 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,
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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 ali 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 custo- dian 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.
41 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

'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 cominon, 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
43 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

sat, comely, smoothed-faced, hard, indounicable, good-natured, upon a stool.

Tkey,' 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 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
45 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 dis- closed 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 back- yard he'll go away in at 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 14. 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 over- come 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.
75 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 hell 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 for- sworn. 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 some- where, 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 gleans 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, con- fused 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,
77 O HENRY - 100 SELECTED STORIES

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 for- bearance 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