Chapters 16
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1 01 - "The Rose of Dixie" 26:07
Section One of Options Options by O'Henry The Rose of Dixie When The Rose of Dixie Magazine was started by a stock company in Toombs City, Georgia, there was never but one candidate for its chief editorial position in the minds of its owners. Colonel Aquila Telfair was the man for the place. By all the rights of learning, family, reputation, and Southern traditions, he was its foreordained fit and logical editor. So a committee of the patriotic Georgia citizens, who had subscribed the founding fund of one hundred thousand dollars, called upon Colonel Telfair at his residence, Cedar Heights, fearful lest the Enterprise and the South should suffer by his possible refusal. The Colonel received them in his great library, where he spent most of his days.
The library had descended to him from his father. It contained ten thousand volumes, some of which had been published as late as the year 1861. When the deputation arrived, Colonel Telfair was seated at his massive White Pine Center table, reading Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. He arose and shook hands punctiliously with each member of the committee. If you were familiar with The Rose of Dixie, you will remember the Colonel's portrait, which appeared in it from time to time. You could not forget the long, carefully brushed white hair, the hooked, high-bridged nose, slightly twisted to the left, the keen eyes under the still black eyebrows, the classic mouth beneath the drooping white mustache, slightly frazzled at the ends.
The committee solicitously offered him the position of managing editor, humbly presenting an outline of the field that the publication was designed to cover, and mentioning a comfortable salary. The colonel's lands were growing poorer each year, and were much cut up by red gullies. Besides, the honor was not one to be refused. In a forty-minute speech of acceptance, Colonel Telfair gave an outline of English literature from Chaucer to Macaulay, refought the Battle of Chancellorsville, and said that, God helping him, he would so conduct the Rose of Dixie that Its fragrance and beauty would permeate the entire world, hurling back into the teeth of the northern minions their belief that no genius or good could exist in the brains and hearts of the people whose property they had destroyed and whose rights they had curtailed.
Offices for the magazine were partitioned off and furnished in the second floor of the First National Bank building, and it was for the kernel to cause the rose of Dixie to blossom and flourish, or to wilt in the balmy air of the land of flowers. The staff of assistants and contributors that editor-colonel Telfair drew about him was a peach. It was a whole crate of Georgia peaches. The first assistant editor, Tolliver Lee Fairfax, had had a father killed during Pickett's Charge. The second assistant, Keats Unthank, was the nephew of one of Morgan's Raiders. The book-reviewer, Jackson Rockingham, had been the youngest soldier in the Confederate Army, having appeared on the field of battle with a sword in one hand and a milk bottle in the other.
The art editor, Ron Cessfilis Sykes, was a third cousin to a nephew of Jefferson Davis. Miss Lavinia Terhune, the Colonel's stenographer and typewriter, had an aunt who had once been kissed by Stonewall Jackson. Tommy Webster, the head office boy, got his job by having recited Father Ryan's poems, complete, at the commencement exercises of the Toombs City High School. The girls who rapped and addressed the magazines were members of old Southern families, in reduced circumstances. The cashier was a scrub named Hawkins, from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had recommendations and a bond from a guarantee company filed with the owners. Even Georgia stock companies sometimes realize that it takes live ones to bury the dead.
Well, sir, if you believe me, the Rose of Dixie blossomed five times before anybody heard of it, except the people who buy their hooks and eyes in Tomb City. Then Hawkins climbed off his stool and told on him to the stock company. Even in Ann Arbor, he had been used to having his business propositions heard of at least as far away as Detroit. So an advertising manager was engaged, Beauregard Fitzhugh Banks, a young man in the lavender necktie, whose grandfather had been the exalted high pillow slip of the Ku Klux Klan. In spite of which, the Rose of Dixie kept coming out every month. Although in every issue it ran photos of either the Taj Mahal or the Luxembourg Gardens or Carmencita of La Follette, a certain number of people bought it and subscribed for it.
As a boom for it, Editor Colonel Telfair ran three different views of Andrew Jackson's old home, the Hermitage, a full-page engraving of the Second Battle of Manassas, entitled, Lee to the Rear, and a 5,000-word biography of Belle Boyd in the same number. The subscription list that month advanced 118. Also, there were poems in the same issue by Leonina Vashtiharakat, Pen name, related to the Haricots of Charleston, South Carolina, and Bill Thompson, nephew of one of the stockholders, and an article from a Special Society correspondent describing a tea-party given by the Swell Boston and English set, where a lot of tea was spilled overboard by some of the guests masquerading as Indians. One day, a person whose breath would easily cloud a mirror, he was so much alive, entered the office of the Rose of Dixie.
He was a man about the size of a real-estate agent, with a self-tied tie and a manner that he must have borrowed conjointly from W.J. Bryan, Hackenschmidt, and Hetty Green. He was shown into the editor-colonel's ponce asenorum. Colonel Telfair rose and began a Prince Albert bow.
"'I'm Thacker,' said the intruder, taking the editor's chair. T.T. Thacker of New York.' He dribbled hastily upon the colonel's desk some cards, a bulky manila envelope, and a letter from the owners of the Rose of Dixie. This letter introduced Mr. Thacker, and politely requested Colonel Telfair to give him a conference, and whatever information about the magazine he might desire. I've been corresponding with the secretary of the magazine owners for some time," said Thacker briskly. I am a practical magazine man myself, and a circulation booster as good as any, if I do say it. I'll guarantee an increase of anywhere from ten thousand to a hundred thousand a year for any publication that isn't printed in a dead language.
I've had my eye on the Rose of Dixie ever since it started. I know every end of the business, from editing to setting up the classified ads. Now, I've come down here to put a good bunch of money in the magazine, if I can see my way clear. It ought to be made to pay. The secretary tells me it's losing money. I don't see why a magazine in the South, if it's properly handled, shouldn't get a good circulation in the North, too.
Colonel Telfair leaned back in his chair and polished his gold-rimmed glasses. Mr. Thacker, said he, courteously but firmly, The Rose of Dixie is a publication devoted to the fostering and the voicing of Southern genius. Its watchword, which you may have seen on the cover, is of, for, and by the South. But you wouldn't object to a Northern circulation, would you? asked Thacker. "'I suppose,' said the editor-colonel, "'that it is customary to open the circulation lists to all. I do not know. I have nothing to do with the business affairs of the magazine. I was called upon to assume editorial control of it, and I have devoted to its conduct such poor literary talents as I may possess, and whatever store of erudition I may have acquired.' "'Sure,' said Thacker, "'but a dollar is a dollar anywhere.' North, South, or West, whether you're buying codfish, goober peas, or Rocky Ford cantaloupes.
Now, I've been looking over your November number. I see one here on your desk. You don't mind running over it with me? Well, your leading article is all right. A good write-up of the cotton belt with plenty of photographs is a winner any time. New York is always interested in the cotton crop. And this sensational account of the Hatfield-McCoy feud by a schoolmate of a niece of the governor of Kentucky isn't such a bad idea. It happened so long ago that most people have forgotten it. Now, here's a poem, three pages long, called The Tyrant's Foot by Lorella Lascelles. I've pawed around a good deal over manuscripts, but I never saw her name on a rejection slip. Miss LaSalle's," said the editor, "'is one of our most widely recognized southern poetesses.
She is closely related to the Alabama LaSalle's family, and made with her own hands the silken confederate banner that was presented to the governor of that state at his inauguration. But why," persisted Thacker, "'is the poem illustrated with the view of the M&O Railroad Freight Depot at Tuscaloosa?' The illustration, said the Colonel with dignity, shows a corner of the fence surrounding the old homestead where Miss Marcellus was born.
All right, said Thacker. I read the poem, but I couldn't tell whether it was about the depot of the Battle of Bull Run. Now, here's a short story called Rosie's Temptation by Foss Dyke Pigott. It's rotten. What is a Pigott, anyway? Mr. Piggott, said the editor, is a brother of the principal stockholder of the magazine. All's right with the world. Piggott passes, said Thacker. Well, this article on Arctic exploration and the one on tarpon fishing might go. But how about this write-up of the Atlanta, New Orleans, Nashville and Savannah breweries? It seems to consist mainly of statistics about their output and the quality of their beer. What's the chip over the bug? "'If I understand your figurative language,' answered Colonel Telfair, "'it is this.
The article you refer to was handed to me by the owners of the magazine with instructions to publish it. The literary quality of it did not appeal to me, but in a measure I feel impelled to conform, in certain matters, to the wishes of the gentlemen who are interested in the financial side of the rose.' "'I see,' said Thacker. Next, we have two pages of selections from Lala Rook by Thomas More. Now, what federal prison did More escape from, or what's the name of the FFV family that he carries as a handicap?
More was an Irish poet who died in 1852, said Colonel Telfair, pityingly. He is a classic. I have been thinking of reprinting his translation of an Acreon serially in the magazine. Look out for the copyright laws, said Thacker flippantly. Who's Bessie Belleclare, who contributes the essay on the newly-completed waterworks plant in Milledgeville? The name, sir, said Colonel Telfair, is the nom de guerre of Miss Elvira Simkins. I have not the honor of knowing the lady, but her contribution was sent to us by Congressman Brower, of her native state. Congressman Brower's mother was related to the Polks, of Tennessee. "'Now, see here, Colonel,' said Thacker, throwing down the magazine. "'This won't do.
You can't successfully run a magazine for one particular section of the country. You've got to make a universal appeal.' Now, look how the Northern publications have catered to the South and encouraged Southern writers. And you've got to go far and wide for your contributors. You've got to buy stuff according to its quality without any regard to the pedigree of the author. Now, I'll bet a quart of ink that this Southern parlor organ you've been running has never played a note that originated above the Mason and Hamlin's line. Am I right?
"'I have carefully and conscientiously rejected all contributions from that section of the country, if I understand your figurative language aright,' replied the Colonel. "'All right. Now I'll show you something.' Thacker reached for his thick manila envelope, and dumped a mass of typewritten manuscript on the editor's desk. "'Here's some truck,' said he, "'that I paid cash for and brought along with me.' One by one, he folded back the manuscripts and showed the first pages to the colonel. Here are four stories by four of the highest-priced authors in the United States, three of them living in New York and one commuting. There's a special article on Vienna-bred society by Tom Vampson. Here's an Italian serial by Captain Jack.
No, it's the other Crawford. Here are three separate exposés of city governments by sniffings, and here's a dandy entitled What Women Carry in Dress Suit Cases. A Chicago newspaper woman hired herself out for five years as a lady's maid to get that information. And here's a synopsis of preceding chapters of Hall Cain's new serial to appear next June. And here's a couple of pounds of Vers de Societe, that I got at a rate from the Clever magazines. That's the stuff that people everywhere want. And now here's a write-up with photographs at the ages of four, twelve, twenty-two, and thirty of George B. McClellan. It's a prognostication. He's bound to be elected mayor of New York. It'll make a big hit all over the country.
He—'I beg your pardon,' said Colonel Telfair, stiffening in his chair. "'What was the name?' Oh, I see," said Thacker, with a half grin. Yes, he's the son of the general. We'll pass that manuscript up. But if you'll excuse me, Colonel, it's a magazine we're trying to make go of, not the first gun at Fort Sumter. Now, here's a thing that's bound to get next to you. It's an original poem by James Whitcomb Riley, J.W. himself. You know what that means to a magazine? I won't tell you what I had to pay for that poem, but I'll tell you this. Riley can make more money writing with a fountain pen than you or I with one that lets the ink run. I'll read you the last two stanzas.
Pa lays around and loafs all day and reads and makes us leave him be. He lets me do just like I please, and when I'm bad he laughs at me. And when I holler loud and say bad words and then begin to tease the cat, and Pa just smiles, Ma's mad and gives me Jesse crossed her knees. I always wondered why that was. I guess it's cause Pa never does. And after all the lights are out, I'm sorry about it. So I creep out of my trundle-bed to Ma's, and say I love her a whole heap, and kiss her, and I hug her tight, and it's too dark to see her eyes, but every time I do I know she cries and cries and cries and cries. I always wondered why that was. I guess it's cause Pa never does." That's the stuff," continued Ducker.
What do you think of that?"
I am not unfamiliar with the works of Mr. Riley. said the colonel deliberately. I believe he lives in Indiana. For the last ten years I have been somewhat of a literary recluse, and am familiar with nearly all the books in the Cedar Heights Library. I am also of the opinion that a magazine should contain a certain amount of poetry. Many of the sweetest singers of the South have already contributed to the pages of The Rose of Dixie. I myself have thought of translating from the original, for publication in its pages, the works of the great Italian poet Tasso. Have you ever drunk from the fountain of this immortal poet's lines, Mr. Thacker?
Not even a demitasso, said Thacker. Now, let's come to the point, Colonel Telfair. I've already invested some money in this as a flyer. That bunch of manuscripts cost me four thousand dollars. My object was to try a number of them in the next issue. I believe you make up less than a month ahead, and see what effect it has on the circulation. I believe that by printing the best stuff we can get in the North, South, East, or West, we can make the magazine go. You have there the letter from the Owning Company asking you to cooperate with me in this plan. Let's chuck out some of this slush that you've been publishing, just because the writers are related to the Scoop Doodles of Scoop Doodle County.
Are you with me?"
As long as I continue to be the editor of The Rose," said Colonel Telfair with dignity, I shall be its editor. But I desire also to conform to the wishes of its owners, if I can do so conscientiously." That's the talk," said Thacker briskly. Now, how much of this stuff I've brought can we get into the January number? We want to begin right away.
There is yet space in the January number," said the editor, for about eight thousand words, roughly estimated. Great," said Thacker. It isn't much, but it'll give the readers some change from Goobers, Governors, and Gettysburg. I'll leave the selection of the stuff I brought to fill the space to you, as it's all good. I've got to run back to New York, and I'll be down again in a couple of weeks." Colonel Telfair slowly swung his eyeglasses by their broad black ribbon. The space in the January number that I referred to, said he, measuredly, has been held open purposely. Pending a decision that I have not yet made. A short time ago, a contribution was submitted to The Rose of Dixie that is one of the most remarkable literary efforts that has ever come under my observation.
None but a mastermind and talent could have produced it. It would just fill the space that I have reserved for its possible use. Thacker looked anxious. What kind of stuff is it? He asked. Eight thousand words sound suspicious. The oldest families must have been collaborating. Is there going to be another secession?
The author of the article, continued the Colonel, ignoring Thacker's allusions, is a writer of some reputation. He has also distinguished himself in other ways. I do not feel at liberty to reveal to you his name, at least not until I have decided whether or not to accept his contribution. Well," said Thacker nervously, is it a continued story, or an account of the unveiling of the new town pump in Whitmore, South Carolina, or a revised list of General Lee's body-servants, or what?
You are disposed to be facetious, said Colonel Telfair calmly. The article is from the pen of a thinker, a philosopher, a lover of mankind, a student, and a rhetorician of high degree. It must have been written by a syndicate, said Thacker. But honestly, Colonel, you want to go slow. I don't know of any eight-thousand-word single doses of written matter that are read by anybody these days, except Supreme Court briefs and the reports of murder trials. You haven't by any accident gotten hold of a copy of one of Daniel Webster's speeches, have you? Colonel Telfair swung a little in his chair and looked steadily from under his bushy eyebrows at the magazine promoter. Mr. Thacker, he said gravely, I am willing to segregate that somewhat crude expression of your sense of humor from the solicitude that your business investments undoubtedly have conferred upon you.
But I must ask you to cease your jibes and derogatory comments upon the South and the Southern people. They, sir, will not be tolerated in the office of the Rose of Dixie for one moment. And before you proceed with more of your covert insinuations that I, the editor of this magazine, am not a competent judge of the merits of the matter submitted to its consideration, I beg that you will first present some evidence or proof that you are my superior in any way, shape, or form relative to the question in hand. Oh, come, Colonel," said Thacker, good-naturedly. I didn't do anything like that to you. It sounds like an indictment by the Fourth Assistant Attorney General. Let's get back to business. What's this eight-thousand-to-one shot about?
The article," said Colonel Telfair, acknowledging the apology by a slight bow, "'covers a wide area of knowledge. It takes up theories and questions that have puzzled the world for centuries, and disposes of them logically and concisely. One by one, it holds up to view the evils of the world, points out the way of eradicating them, and then conscientiously and in detail commends the good. There is hardly a phase of human life that it does not discuss wisely, calmly, and equitably. The great policies of governments, the duties of private citizens, the obligations of home life, law, ethics, morality, all these important subjects are handled with the calm wisdom and confidence that, I must confess, has captured my admiration."
"'It must be a Cracker Jack,' said Thacker, impressed. "'It is a great contribution to the world's wisdom,' said the Colonel." The only doubt remaining in my mind as to the tremendous advantage it would be to us to give it publication in The Rose of Dixie is that I have not yet sufficient information about the author to give his work publicity in our magazine. "'I thought you said he is a distinguished man,' said Thacker. He is, replied the colonel, both in literary and in other more diversified and extraneous fields. But I am extremely careful about the matter that I accept for publication. My contributors are people of unquestionable repute and connections, which fact can be verified at any time.
As I said, I am holding this article until I can acquire more information about its author. I do not know whether I will publish it or not. If I decide against it, I shall be much pleased, Mr. Thacker, to substitute the matter that you are leaving with me in its place." Thacker was somewhat at sea. "'I don't seem to gather,' said he, "'much about the gist of this inspired piece of literature. It sounds more like a dark horse than Pegasus to me.'" It is a human document," said the Colonel Editor confidently, from a man of great accomplishments, who, in my opinion, has obtained a stronger grasp on the world and its outcomes than that of any man living to-day. Thacker rose to his feet excitedly.
"'Say,' he said, "'it isn't possible that you've cornered John D. Rockefeller's memoirs, is it? Don't tell me that all at once.' "'No, sir,' said Colonel Telfair. "'I am speaking of mentality and literature, not of less worthy intricacies of trade.' "'Well, what's the trouble about running the article?' asked Thacker, a little impatiently. "'If the man's well known and has got the stuff—' Colonel Telfair sighed. "'Mr. Thacker,' said he, "'for once I have been tempted.' Nothing has yet appeared in The Rose of Dixie that has not been from the pen of one of its sons or daughters. I know little about the author of this article, except that he has acquired prominence in a section of the country that has always been inimical to my heart and mind.
But I recognize his genius, and as I have told you, I have instituted an investigation of his personality. Perhaps it will be futile, but I shall pursue the inquiry. Until that is finished, I must leave open the question of filling the vacant space in our January number. Thacker arose to leave. "'All right, Colonel,' he said, as cordially as he could. "'You use your own judgment. If you've really got a scoop or something that will make them sit up, run it instead of my stuff. I'll drop in again in about two weeks. Good luck.' Colonel Telfair and the magazine promoters shook hands. Returning a fortnight later, Thacker dropped off a very rocky pullman at Toombs City. He found the January number of the magazine made up, and the forms closed.
The vacant space that had been yawning for type was filled by an article that was headed thus. Second Message to Congress Written for the Rose of Dixie by a member of the well-known Bullock family of Georgia, T. Roosevelt.
End of The Rose of Dixie.
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2 02 - The Third Ingredient 28:11
The Third Ingredient The so-called Vallambrosia apartment house is not an apartment house. It is composed of two old-fashioned brownstone front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and headgear of a modiste. The other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week, or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallembrosia's roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, Wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister rail when the doorbell rings. This treatise shall have to do with but two of the Vallombrosians, though meaning no disrespect to the others.
At six o'clock one afternoon, Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor rear $3.50 room in the Vallombrosia, where her nose and chin were sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where you have been working for four years, and with only fifteen cents in your purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely chiselled. And now for Hetty's thumbnail biography while she climbs the two flights of stairs. She walked into the biggest store one morning, four years before, with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waste department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blond hair sufficient to have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.
The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man, whose task it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of suffocation, as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipani, while white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small, contemptuous green eyes and chocolate-colored hair, dressed in a suit of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight. "'You're on!' shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved. And that is how Hetty came to be employed in the biggest store. The story of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little Red Riding Hood.
You shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner. There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no millionaire shop proprietors climbing the fire escape of my tenement house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir. The story of Hetty's discharge from the biggest store is so nearly a repetition of her engagement. as to be monotonous. In each department of the store, there is an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnivorous person carrying a mileage book and a red necktie, and referred to as a buyer. The destinies of the girls in his department who live on, see Bureau of Victual Statistics, so much per week are in his hands. This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man.
As he walked along the aisles of his department, he seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipani, while white clouds, machine-embroidered, floated above him. Too many sweets bring surfeit. He looked upon Hetty Pepper's homely countenance, emerald eyes, and chocolate-covered hair as a welcome oasis of green in a desert of cloying beauty. In a quiet angle of a counter, he pinched her arm, kindly, three inches above the elbow. She slapped him three feet away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially lily-white right. So now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the biggest store at thirty minutes' notice with one dime and a nickel in her purse. This morning's quotations list the price of ribbed beef at six cents per butcher's pound.
But on the day that Hetty was released by the B.S., the price was seven and one-half cents. That fact is what makes this story possible. Otherwise, the extra four cents would have... But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned with shorts, who were unable to cover. So you can find no fault with this one. Hetty mounted with her ribbed beef to her $3.50 third floor back. One hot, savory beef stew for supper, a good night's sleep, And she would be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little Red Riding Hood. In her room she got the granite ware stew pan out of the two-by-four china er, I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a rat's nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions.
She came out with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed. There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of beef stew can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster soup without oysters, turtle soup without turtles, coffee cake without coffee, but you can't make beef stew without potatoes and onions. But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door look like a wrought iron gambling house portal to the wolf. With salt and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour, first well stirred in a little cold water, twill serve. "'Tis not so deep as a lobster a la Newburgh, nor so wide as a church-festival doughnut, but "'Twill serve." Hetty took her stewpan to the rear of the third-floor hall.
According to the advertisements of the Valambrosia, there was running water to be found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled or walked through the faucets, but technicalities have no place here. There was also a sink, where housekeeping rumors often met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another's kimonos. At this sink, Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown artistic hair and plaintive eyes, washing two large Irish potatoes. Hetty knew the valambrosia as well as anyone not owning double-hextra-magnifying eyes could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopedia, her whose what? her clearing-house of news of goers and comers. From a rose-pink kimono edged with nile green, she had learned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature painter, living in a kind of attic, or studio as they prefer to call it, on a top floor.
Hetty was not certain in her mind what a miniature was. But it certainly wasn't a house, because house painters, although they wear splashy overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home. The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a dull shoemaker's knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel one of the potatoes with it. Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round. "'Beg pardon,' she said, "'for butting into what's not my business. But if you peel them potatoes, you lose out.
They're new Bermudas. You want to scrape em. Lemme show you.' She took a potato and the knife, and began to demonstrate. "'Oh, thank you,' breathed the artist. "'I didn't know.' And I did hate to see the thick peeling go. It seemed like such a waste. But I thought they always had to be peeled. When you've got only potatoes to eat, the peelings count, you know. Say, kid," said Hetty, staying her knife, "'you ain't up against it, too, are you?' The miniature artist smiled starvedly. "'I suppose I am. Art—' Or, at least, the way I interpret it, doesn't seem to be much in demand. I have only these potatoes for my dinner, but they aren't so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt. Child," said Hetty, letting her brief smile soften her rigid features, fate has sent me and you together.
I've had it handed to me in the neck, too. But I've got a chunk of meat in my room as big as a lapdog. And I've done everything to get potatoes except pray for them. Let's me and you bunch our commissary departments and make a stew of them. We'll cook it in my room. If we only had an onion to go with it. Say, kid, you haven't got a couple of pennies that have slipped down into the lining of your last winter's sealskin, have you? I could step down to the corner and get one at Old Giuseppe's stand. A stew without an onion is worse than a matinee without candy. You may call me Cecilia, said the artist. No. I spent my last penny three days ago. Then we'll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in," said Hetty.
I'd ask the janitors for one, but I don't want him hepp yet to the fact that I'm pounding the asphalt for another job. But I wish we did have an onion. In the shopgirl's room, the two began to prepare their supper. Cecilia's part was to sit on the couch helplessly, and begged to be allowed to do something in the voice of a cooing-ring dove. Hetty prepared the ribbed beef, putting it in cold, salted water in the stewpan and setting it on the one-burner gas stove. "'I wish—' we had an onion,' said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes. On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous advertising picture of one of the new ferry-boats of the P.U. F.F. Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los Angeles and New York City one-eighth of a minute.
Hetty, turning her head during her continuous monologue, saw tears running from her guest's eyes as she gazed on the idealized presentiment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport. "'Why say, Cecilia, kid,' said Hetty, poising her knife, "'is that as bad art as that? I ain't a critic, but I thought it kind of brightened up the room. Of course, a manicure painter could tell it was a bum picture in a minute. I'll take it down if you say so.' I wish to the holy saint potluck we had an onion. But the miniature, miniature painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch. Something was here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude lithography.
Hetty knew. She had accepted her role long ago. How scant the words with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being. When we reach the abstract We are lost. The nearer to nature that the babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively, let us say, some people are bosoms, some are hands, some are heads, some are muscles, some are feet, some are backs for burdens. Hetty was a shoulder. Hers was a sharp sinewy shoulder. But all her life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually, and had left there all or half their troubles. Looking at life anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was preordained to be a shoulder. There were few truer collar-bones anywhere than hers.
Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned upon her for consolation. But one glance in her mirror always served as an instantaneous pain-killer. So she gave one pale look into the crinkly, old-looking glass on the wall above the gas stove, turned down the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia's head to its confessional. "'Go and tell me, honey,' she said. "'I know now that it ain't art that's worrying you. You met him on a ferry-boat, didn't you?' Go on, Cecilia Kidd, and tell your—your Aunt Hetty all about it. But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and tears that waft and float the bark of romance to its harbor in the delectable isles.
Presently, through the stringy tendons that form the bars of the confessional, the penitent—or was it the glorified communicant—of the sacred flame—told her story without art or illumination. It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from Jersey City. Old Mr. Shrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would be fifty dollars, he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars. I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I felt as if I didn't want to live another day.
I must have looked as I felt, for I saw him on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as if he understood. He was a nice-looking, but, oh, above everything else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, Kindness counts more than anything else. When I got so miserable that I couldn't fight against it any longer, I got up and walked slowly out the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin. No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail and dropped into the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold. For just one moment, I wished I was back in the old Vallombrosia, starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn't care. And then I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me.
He had followed me, and jumped in to save me. Somebody threw a thing like a big white doughnut at us, and he made me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferry-boat backed, and they pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness, and trying to drown myself, and besides, my hair had all tumbled down, and was sobbing wet, and I was such a sight. And then some men in blue clothes came round, and he gave them his card. And I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse by the edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who try to kill other people, and I was afraid.
But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace room and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, he came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn't tell him my name, nor where I lived. I was so ashamed. You were a fool, child, said Hetty, kindly. Wait till I turn up the light a bit. I wish to heaven we had an onion. Then he raised his hat, went on Cecilia, and said, Very well. But I'll find you somehow. I'm going to claim my rights of salvage. And then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I wanted to go and walked away. What is salvage, Hetty? The edge of a piece of goods that ain't hemmed, said the shop girl.
You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero boy. It's been three days, moaned the miniature painter, and he hasn't found me yet. Extend the time, said Hetty. This is a big town. Think of how many girls you might have to see soaked in water with their hair down before he would recognize you. The stew's getting on fine, but, oh, for an onion! I'd even use a piece of garlic if I had it. The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savor that yet lacked something, leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting, wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient. "'I came near to drowning in that awful river,' said Cecilia, shuddering. "'It ought to have more water in it,' said Hetty.
"'The stew, I mean. I'll go and get some at the sink.' "'It smells good,' said the artist. "'That nasty old North River,' objected Hetty. "'It smells to me like soap factories and wet setter dogs. Oh, you mean the stew. Well, I wish we had an onion for it. Did he look like he had money?' "'First.' He looked kind," said Cecilia. I'm sure he was rich, but that matters so little. When he drew out his billfolder to pay the cabman, you couldn't help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in it. And I looked over the cab doors, and saw him leave the ferry station in a motor car, and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put on, for he was sopping wet, and it was only three days ago. "'What a fool!' said Hetty shortly.
Oh, the chauffeur wasn't wet, breathed Cecilia, and he drove the car away very nicely. I mean you, said Hetty, for not giving him your address. I never give my address to chauffeurs, said Cecilia haughtily. I wish we had one, said Hetty, disconsolately. What for? For the stew, of course. Oh, I mean an onion. Hetty took a picture. and started to the sink at the end of the hall. A young man came down the stairs from above, just as she was opposite the lower step. He was decently dressed, but pale and haggard. His eyes were dull with the stress of some burden of physical or mental woe. In his hand, he bore an onion. A pink, smooth, solid, shining onion, as large around as a ninety-eight-cent alarm clock.
Hetty stopped. So did the young man. There was something Joan of Arcish, Herculean, and Unaish in the look and pose of the shoplady. She had cast off the rolls of Job in Little Red Riding Hood. The young man stopped at the foot of the stairs and coughed distractedly. He felt marooned, held up, attacked, assailed, levied upon, sacked, assessed, panhandled, browbeaten, though he knew not why. It was the look. In Hetty's eyes that did it. In them he saw the jolly roger fly to the mast-head, and an able seaman with a dirk between his teeth scurry up the rat-lines and nail it there. But as yet he did not know that the cargo he carried was the thing that had caused him to be so nearly blown out of the water without even a parley.
Beg your pardon, said Hetty, as sweetly as her dilute acidic tones permitted. But did you find that onion on the stairs? There was a hole in the paper bag, and I've just come out to look for it. The young man coughed for half a minute. The interval may have given him the courage to defend his own property. Also he clutched the pungent prize greedily, and with a show of spirit faced his grim waylayer. "'No,' he said huskily. "'I didn't find it on the stairs. It was given to me by Jack Bevins on the top floor. If you don't believe it, ask him, and I'll wait until you do.' "'I know, Bevins,' said Hetty, sourly. "'He writes books and things up there for the paper and rags man. We can hear the postman guy him all over the house when he brings them thick envelopes back.
Say, do you live in the Valambrosia?' "'I do not,' said the young man." I come to see Bevan sometimes. He's my friend. I live two blocks west. What are you going to do with the onion? Begging your pardon, said Hetty. I'm going to eat it. Raw? Yes, as soon as I get home. Haven't you got anything else to eat with it? The young man considered briefly. No, he confessed. There's not another scrap of anything in my diggings to eat. I think old Jack is pretty hard up for grubbing his shack, too. He hated to give up the onion, but I worried him into parting with it. Man," said Hetty, fixing him with her world-sapient eyes and laying a bony but impressive finger on his sleeve, you've known trouble, too, haven't you?
Lots," said the onion owner promptly. But this onion is my own property. Honestly, come by. If you will excuse me, I must be going. Listen," said Hetty, paling a little with anxiety, raw onion is a mighty poor diet, and so is a beef stew without one. Now, if you're Jack Bevan's friend, I guess you're nearly right. And there's a little lady, a friend of mine, in my room there at the end of the hall. Both of us are out of luck, and we just had potatoes and meat between us. They're stewing now. But it ain't got any soul. There's something lacking in it. There's certain things in life are naturally intended to fit and belong together. One is pink cheesecloth and green roses, and one is ham and eggs, and one is Irish in trouble, and the other is beef and potatoes with onions.
Still another is people who are up against it, and other people in the same fix. The young man went into a protracted paroxysm of coughing. With one hand he hugged his onion to his bosom. "'No doubt, no doubt,' said he at length. "'But as I said, I must be going, because—' Hetty clutched his sleeve firmly. Don't be a dig, oh little brother. Don't eat raw onions. Chip it in toward the dinner, and line yourself inside with the best stew you ever licked a spoon over. Must two ladies knock a young gentleman down, and drag him inside for the honor of dining with him? No harm shall befall you, little brother. Loosen up, and fall into line. The young man's pale face relaxed into a grin.
"'I believe I'll go,' he said, brightening. "'If my onion is good as a credential, I'll accept the invitation gladly.' "'It's good as that, but better as seasoning,' said Hetty. "'You come and stand outside the door till I ask my lady friend if she has any objections. And don't run away with that letter of recommendation before I come out.' Hetty went into her room and closed the door. The young man waited outside. "'Cecilia, kid,' said the shop girl. Oiling the sharp saw of her voice as well as she could. There's an onion outside, with a young man attached. I've asked him in to dinner. You ain't gonna kick, are you?" "'Oh, dear,' said Cecilia, sitting up and patting her artistic hair. She cast a mournful glance at the ferryboat poster on the wall.
"'Knit,' said Hetty. "'It ain't him. You're up against real life now. I believe you said your hero friend had money in automobiles.' This is a poor skeezix that's got nothing to eat but an onion. But he's easy-spoken and not a freshen. I imagine he's been a gentleman he's so low down now. And we need the onion. Shall I bring him in? I'll guarantee his behavior." Hetty, dear," sighed Cecilia, I'm so hungry. What difference does it make whether he's a prince or a burglar? I don't care. Bring him in, if he's got anything to eat with him. Hetty went back into the hall. The Onion Man was gone. Her heart missed a beat, and a gray look settled over her face except on her nose and cheekbones. Then the tides of life flowed in again, for she saw him leaning out the front window at the other end of the hall.
She hurried there. He was shouting to someone below. The noise of the street overpowered the sound of her footsteps. She looked down over his shoulder, saw whom he was speaking to, and heard his words. He pulled himself in from the window sill and saw her standing over him. Hetty's eyes bored into him like two steel gimlets. Don't lie to me, she said calmly. What were you going to do with that onion? The young man suppressed a cough and faced her resolutely. His manner was of one who had been bearded sufficiently. I was going to eat it, said he. with emphatic slowness. Just as I told you before. And you have nothing else to eat at home? Not a thing. What kind of work do you do? I'm not working at anything just now.
Then why, said Hetty, with her voice set on its sharpest edge, do you lean out of windows and give orders to chauffeurs in green automobiles in the street below? The young man flushed, and his dull eyes began to sparkle. "'Because, madame,' said he, in accelerando tones, "'I pay the chauffeur's wages, and I own the automobile, and also this onion—this onion, madame!' He flourished the onion within an inch of Hetty's nose. The shoplady did not retreat a hair's-breadth. "'Then why do you eat onions?' she said, with biting contempt. "'And nothing else!' "'I never said I did,' retorted the young man heatedly. "'I said I had nothing else to eat where I live. I am not a delicatessen storekeeper.' "'Then why,' pursued Hetty inflexibly, "'were you going to eat a raw onion?' "'My mother,' said the young man, "'always made me eat one for a cold.' Pardon my referring to a physical infirmity, but you may have noticed that I have a very, very severe cold.
I was going to eat the onion and go to bed. I wonder why I am standing here and apologizing to you for it." How did you catch this cold? went on Hetty suspiciously. The young man seemed to have arrived at some extreme height of feeling. There were two modes of descent open to him, a burst of rage or a surrender to the ridiculous. He chose wisely. And the empty hall echoed his hoarse laughter. "'You're a dandy,' said he, "'and I don't blame you for being careful. I don't mind telling you I got wet. I was on a North River ferry a few days ago when a girl jumped overboard. Of course I—' Hetty extended her hand, interrupting his story. "'Give me the onion,' she said. The young man set his jaw a trifle harder.
"'Give me the onion,' she repeated. He grinned, and laid it in her hand. Then Hetty's infrequent, grim, melancholy smile showed itself. She took the young man's arm and pointed with her other hand to the door of her room. "'Little brother,' she said, "'go in there. The little fool you fished out of the river is there waiting for you. Go on in. I'll give you three minutes before I come. Potatoes is in there, waiting. Go on in, onions.' After he had tapped at the door and entered, Hetty began to peel and wash the onion at the sink. She gave a grey look at the grey roofs outside, and the smile on her face vanished by little jerks and twitches. "'But it's us,' she said grimly to herself. "'It's us that furnished the beef.'" End of The Third Ingredient by O'Henry
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3 03 - The Hiding of Black Bill 35:20
Options by O. Henry. The Hiding of Black Bell. A lank, strong, red-faced man with a wellington beak and small, fiery eyes, tempered by flags and lashes, sat on the station platform at Los Pinos, swinging his legs to and fro. At his side sat another man, fat, melancholy, and seedy, who seemed to be his friend. They had the appearance of men to whom life Had appeared as a reversible coat. See me on both sides.
Ain't seen you in about four years, Ham, said the seedy man. Which way you been traveling? Texas, said the red-faced man. It was too cold in Alaska for me, and I found it warm in Texas. I'll tell you about one hot spell I went through there. One morning, I steps off the International at a water tank and lets it go on without me. T'was a ranch country, not fuller of spied houses than New York City. Only out there, they build them 20 miles away so that you can't smell what we've got for dinner, instead of running them up two inches from their neighbor's windows. There wasn't any roads inside. So I folded it cross-country. The grass was shoot-up deep, and the mesquite timber looked just like a peach orchid.
It was so much like a gentleman's private estate that every minute you expected a cannon full of bulldogs to run out at bite you. But I must have walked twenty miles before I came in sight of a ranch house. It was a little one. about as big as an elevated railroad station. There was a little man in a white shirt and brown overalls and a pink handkerchief around his neck, rolling cigarettes under a tree in front of the door. "'Greetings,' says I. Any refreshment, welcome, a monument, or even work for a comparative stranger?' "'Oh, come in,' says he. In a refined tone, sit down at that stool, please. I didn't hear your horse coming. He isn't near enough yet, says I. I walked. I don't want to be a burden, but I wonder if you have three or four gallons of water handy.
You do look pretty dusty, says he, but our bathing arrangements. It's a drink I want, says I. Never mind the dust that's on the outside. He gets me a dip of water out of a red jar hanging up, and then goes on. Do you want work? For time, says I. This is a rather quiet section of the country, isn't it? It is, says he. Sometimes so, I have been told. One sees no human being pass for weeks at a time. I've been here only a month. I bought a ranch from an old settler who wanted to move farther west. It suits me, says I. Quiet and retirement are good for a man sometimes. And I need a job. I can turn the bar, salt mines, lecture, float the stock, do a little middleweight slugging, and play the piano.
Can you herd sheep? asked. The little ranchman. Do you mean, have I heard sheep, says I? Can you herd them? Take charge of a flock of them, says he. Oh, says I, now I understand. You mean chase them around and bark at them like coddy dogs. Well, I might, says I. I've never exactly done any sheep herding, but... I've often seen them from car windows, masquilidating daisies, and they don't look dangerous. I'm shorter herder, says the ranchman. You never can depend on the Mexicans. I've only got two flocks. You may take out my bunch of muttons. There are only eight hundred of them, in the morning, if you like. The pay is $12 a month, and generations furnished. You camp in a tent on the prairie with your sheep.
You do your own cooking, but wood and water are brought to your camp. It's an easy job.
I'm on, says I. I'll take the job even if I have to garland my brow, and hold on to a crook, and wear a lucifect, and play on a pipe like the shepherds do in pictures. So, the next morning, The little ranchman helps me drive the flock of muttons from the corral to about two miles out, and let them graze on a little hillside on the prairie. He gives me a lot of instructions about not letting bunches of them stray off from the herd, and driving them down to a waterhole to drink at noon. "'I'll bring out your tent and camping staff, and brations in the backboard before night,' says he. "'Fine,' says I. Don't forget the rations, nor the camping outfit, and be sure to bring the tent. Your name's Zollicofer, ain't it?
My name, says he, is Henry Ogden. All right, Mr. Ogden, says I. Mine is Mr. Percival St. Clair. I herded sheep for five days on the rancho Chiquito, and then the wolf entered my soul. That getting to nature, Certainly got next to me. I was lonesomer than Crusoe's goat. I've seen a lot of persons more entertaining as companions than those sheep were. I drive them to the corral and pen them every evening. I then cook my cornbread and mutton and coffee. I lie down in a tent the size of a tablecloth. I listen to the coyotes and whippoorwills. singing around the camp. The fifth evening, after I had corralled my costly but uncongenial matters, I walked over to the ranch house and stepped in the door.
Mr. Ogden, says I, you and me have got to get sociable. Sheep are all very well to dot the landscape and furnish $8 cotton suitings for men. But for table talk and fireside companions, they rank along with five o'clock teasers. If you've got a deck of cards, or a Parcheesi outfit, or a game of authors, get them out, and let's get on a mental basis. I've got to do something in an intellectual line. If it's only to knock somebody's brains out.
This Henri Ogden was a peculiar kind of Frenchman. He wore finger rings and a big gold watch and careful neckties, and his face was calm, and his nose spectacles was kept very shiny. I saw once, in Muscogee, an outlaw hung for murdering six men who was a dead ringer for him, but I knew a preacher in Arkansas that you would have taken to be his brother. I didn't care much for him either way. What I wanted was some fellowship, and communion with holy saints or lost sinners. Anything sheepless will do.
Well, St. Clair, says he, laying down the book he was reading, I guess it must be pretty lonesome for you at first. I don't deny that it's monotonous for me. Are you sure you'd currage your sheep so they won't stray out? They're shot up as tight as the jury of a millionaire murderer, says I, and I'll be back with them long before they'll need their trained nurse. So Ogden digs up a deck of cards, and we play casino. After five days and nights of my sheep camp, it was like a toot on Broadway. When I caught Big Casino, I felt as excited as if I had made a million in Trinity. And when H. O. loosened up a little, I told a story about a lady in the pool-man car, and left for five minutes. That showed what a comparative thing life is.
A man may see so much that he'd be bored to turn his head to look at a three million dollar fire, or Joe Weber, or the Adriatic Sea. But let him hurt sheep for a spell, and Joe see him splitting his ribs, laughing at Curfew shall not rain tonight, or really enjoying himself playing cards with ladies. By and by, Ogden gets out a decanter of bourbon, and then there is a total eclipse of sheep. Do you remember reading in the papers about a month ago, says he, about a train holdup on the MKT? The express agent was shot through the shoulder and about $15,000 in currency taken, and it's said that only one man did the job. Seems to me I do, says I. But such things happen so often, they don't linger long in the human tax's mind.
Did they overtake of a hole, seize, or lay hands upon the despoiler? He escaped, says Ogden. And I was just reading in a paper today that the officers have tracked him down into this part of the country. It seems the bills the rubber got were all the first issue of the currency to the Second National Bank of Espinosa City. And so they follow the trail where they've been spent, and it leads this way. Ogden pours out some more bourbon. and shoves me the bottle. I imagine, says I, after ingurgitating another modicum of the royal booze, that it wouldn't be at all a disingenuous idea for a train robber to run down into this part of the country to hide for a spell. A sheep ranch, now, says I, would be the finest kind of a place.
Who'd ever expect to find such A desperate character among these sombers and muttons and wildflowers. And by the way, says I, kind of looking H Ogden over, was there any description mentioned of this single-handed terror? Was his lineaments, or height and thickness, or teeth-feelings, or a style of habiliments set forth in print? Why, no, says Ogden. They say nobody got a good sight of him because he wore a mask, but they know it was a train robber called Black Bell, because he always works alone, and because he dropped a handkerchief in the express car that had his name on it.
All right, says I. I approve of Black Bell's retreat to the ship ranges. I guess they won't find them. There is $1,000 reward for his capture, says Ogden. I don't need that kind of money, says I, looking Mr. Shipman, straight in the eye. The $12 a month you pay me is enough. I need a rest, and I can save up until I get enough to pay my fare to Texarkana, where my wedded mother lives. If Black Bell, I goes on, looking. Significantly at Ogden. Was to have come down this way, say a month ago, and bought a little sheep ranch and... Stop, says Ogden, getting out of his chair and looking pretty vicious. Do you mean to insinuate? Nothing, says I, no insinuations. I'm stating a hypodermical case. I say, if Black Bill...
had come down here and bought a sheep ranch and hired me to, little boy Blueham, and treated me square and friendly, as you've done. He'd never have anything to fear from me. A man is a man, regardless of any complications he may have with sheep or railroad trains. Now you know where I stand." Ogden looks. Black as camp coffee for nine seconds, and then he laughs, amused. You'll do St. Clair, says he. If I was Black Bell, I wouldn't be afraid to trust you. Let's have a game or two of 7-Up tonight. That is, if you don't mind playing with a train robber. I've told you, says I, my oral sentiments, and there's no strength to them. While I was shuffling after the first hand, I asked Ogden, as if the idea was a kind of a casualty, where he was from.
Oh, says he, from the Mississippi Valley. That's a nice little place, says I. I've often stopped over there. But didn't you find the sheets a little damp and the food poor? No. "'A hell,' says I, "'from the Pacific Slope. Ever pot up there?' "'Too droughty,' says Ogden. "'But if you're ever in the Middle West, "'just mention my name "'and she'll get foot warmers and dripped coffee.'" "'Well,' says I, "'I wasn't exactly fishing for your private telephone number "'and the middle name of your aunt "'that carried off the Cumberland.'" Presbyterian minister. It don't matter. I just want you to know you are safe in the hands of your shepherd. Now don't play hearts on spades. Don't get nervous.
Still harping, says Ogden, laughing again. Don't you suppose that if I was Black Bell, I thought you suspected me. I'd put a Winchester bullet into you. I'd stop my nervousness, if I had any.
Not any, says I. A man who's got the nerve to hold up a train single-handed wouldn't do a trick like that. I've knocked about enough to know that them are the kind of men who put a value on a friend. Not that I can claim being a friend of yours, Mr. Ogden, says I, being only your sheep-herder. But under more expeditious circumstances, we might have been. Forget a sheep temporarily, I beg, says Ogden, a cut for deal.
About four days afterward, while my muttons were looning on the water-hole and I deep in the interstices of making a pot of coffee, up right softly on the grass, A mysterious person in the garb of the being he wished to represent. He was dressed somewhere between a Kansas City detective, Buffalo Bill, and the town dogcatcher of Beton Rouge. His chin and eye wasn't molded on fighting lines, so I knew he was only a scout. "'Herden sheep?' he asked me. "'Well,' says I, To a man of your evident, gumptional endowments, I wouldn't have the nerve to say that I am engaged in decorating old bronzes or oiling bicycle sprockets. You don't talk or look like a sheepherder to me," says he. But you talk like what you look like to me," says I.
And then he asks me who I was low-working for, and I shows him Rancho Chiquito. Two miles away, in the shadow of a low hill, and it tells me he's a deputy sheriff. "'There's a train robber called Black Bell. Supposed to be somewhere in these parts,' says the scout. "'He's been traced as far as San Antonio, and maybe farther. Have you seen or heard of any strangers round here during the past month?' "'I have not,' says I. except a report of one over at the Mexican quarters of Lumis' ranch on the frill. "'What do you know about him?' asks the deputy. "'He's three days old,' says I. "'What kind of a looking man is the man you'd work for?' he asks. "'Does old George Ramey own this place yet? "'He's run sheep here for the last ten years, but never had no success.' The old man has sold out and gone west, I tells him.
Another sheep fancier bought him out about a month ago. What kind of a looking man is he? asks the deputy again. Oh, says I, a big fat kind of a Dutchman with long whiskers and blue specks. I don't think he knows a sheep from a grunt squirrel. I guess old George stalked him pretty well on the deal, says I. After indulging himself in a lot more non-communicative information than two-thirds of my dinner, the deputy rides away. That night I mentions the matter to Ogden. They are drawing the tendrils of the octopus around Blackbill, says I. And then I told him about the The deputy sheriff, and how I described him to the deputy, and what the deputy said about the matter. Oh, well, says Ogden, let's don't bring any of Black Bell's troubles.
We will feel overrun. Get the bourbon out of the cupboard, and we'll drink to his health. Unless, says he, with his little cackling laugh, you're prejudiced against trainwriters. "'I'll drink,' says I, "'to any man who's a friend to a friend. "'And I believe that Black Bill,' I goes on, "'would be that. "'So here's to Black Bill, "'and may he have good luck.' "'And both of us drank. "'About two weeks later "'comes shearing time. "'The sheep had to be driven up the ranch, "'and a lot of frowzy-headed Mexicans "'would snip the fur off of them. with back-action scissors. So, the afternoon before the barbers were to come, I hustled my undertone muttons over the hill, across the dell, down by the winding brook, and up to the ranch-house.
I append them in a corral, and bade them my nightly adjus. I went from there to the ranch-house. I find H. Ogden, Esquire, lying asleep, on his little cot-bed. I guess we had been overcome by anti-insomnia, or diswakefulness, or some of the disease peculiar to the sheep business. His mouth and vest were open, and he breathed like a second-hand bicycle pump. I looked at him and gave then to just a few musings. "'Imperial Caesar,' says I, Asleep in such a way, might shut his mouth and keep the wind away. A man asleep is certainly a sight to make angels weep. What good is all his brain, muscle, backing, nerve, influence, and family connections? He is at the mercy of his enemies, and more so of his friends, and is about as beautiful as a cab horse leaning against the Metropolitan Opera House at twelve-thirty a.m.
dreaming of the plains of Arabia. Now, a woman asleep you regard as different. No matter how she looks, you know it's better for all hands for her to be that way.
Well, I took a drink of bourbon and one for Ogden. and started to become comfortable while he was taking his nap. He had some books on his table on indigenous subjects, such as Japan and drainage and physical culture, and some tobacco, which seemed more to the point. After I'd smoked a few, and listened to the sartorial breathing of H.O., I happened to look out the window toward the shearing-pens, where there was a kind of a road coming up from a kind of a road across a kind of a creek farther away. I saw five men running up to the house. All of them carried guns across their saddles, and among them was the deputy that had talked to me at my camp. They rode up careful, in open formation, with their guns ready.
I set apart with my eye the one I opinionated to be the boss muckraker of this law and order cavalry. "'Good evening, gents,' says I. "'Want you light and tie your horses?' The boss rides up close and swings his gun over till the opening in it. seems to cover my whole front elevation. Don't you move your hands, none," says he, till you and me indulge in an adequate amount of necessary conversation. I will not, says I. I am no deaf-mute, and therefore will not have to disobey your injunctions in replying. We are on the lookout, says he, for Black Bell, the man that held up the Katy for $15,000 in May. We are searching the ranches, and everybody on them. What is your name, and what do you do on this ranch?
Captain, says I. Percival St. Clair is my occupation, and my name is Sheep Herder. I've got my flock of veals, no, muttons, pond here tonight. The shearers are coming tomorrow to give them a haircut with Baroom, I suppose.
Where's the boss of this ranch? The captain of the gang asks me. Wait just a minute, Cap'n, says I. Wasn't there a kind of a reward offered for the capture of this desperate character you have referred to? in your preamble. There is a thousand dollars reward offered, says the captain, but it's for his capture and conviction. There don't seem to be no provision made for an informer. It looks like it might rain in a day or so, says I, in a tired way, looking up at the cerubian blue sky.
If you know anything about the locality, disposition, or secretiveness of this here black bill, says he, in a severe dialect, you are amiable to the law in not reporting it. I heard a fence-rider say, says I, in a desultory kind of voice, that a Mexican told a cowboy named Jake over a pigeon store on the nooses that he heard that Black Bell had been sending Matamoros by a Shipman's cousin two weeks ago. "'Tell you what I'll do, tight mouth,' says the captain, after looking me over for bargains. "'If you put us on so we can scoop Black Bell, I'll pay you a hundred dollars out of my own—out of our own pockets.' "'That's liberal,' says he." You ain't entitled to anything. No. What do you say? Cash down now?
He asks. The captain has a sort of discussion with his helpmates. They all produce the contents of their pockets for analysis. Out of the general results, they figured up $102.30 in cash. and thirty-one dollars'worth of pluck tobacco. Come nearer, Captain Mio, says I, and listen. He's so dead. I am mighty poor and low down in this world, says I. I am working for the twelve dollars a month trying to keep a lot of animals together, whose only thought seems to be to get asunder. Although, says I, I regard myself as some better than the state of South Dakota. It's a comedown to a man who has heretofore regarded sheep only in the form of chops. I'm pretty far reduced in the world on account of all the ambitions and brum and the kind of cocktail they make along the P.R.R.
all the way from Scranton to Cincinnati, Dredging, French One squeeze of a lime, and a good dash of orange bitters. If you're ever up that way, don't fail to let one try you. And again, says I, I have never yet went back on a friend. I've stayed by em, when they had plenty, and when adversities overtaken me, I've never forsook em. But, I goes on, this is not exactly the case of a friend. Twelve dollars a month is only buying acquaintance money, and I do not consider brown beans and cornbread the food of friendship. I am a poor man, says I, and I have a wedded mother in Texarkana. You will find Black Bell, says I, lying asleep in this house on the cot in the room to your right. He is the man you want.
As I know from his words and conversation, he was, in a way, a friend, R explains. And if I was the man I once was, the entire product of the mines of Gondola would not have tempted me to betray him. But, says I, every week, half of the beans was wormy, and not nigh enough wood in camp. Better go in careful, gentlemen, says I. He seems impatient at times, and when you think of his late professional pursuits, one would look for abrupt actions if he was come upon sudden. So the whole paws ammounts and ties their horses and delimbers their ammunition and equipments and taptals into the house, and as follows, like Delilah, when she set a Philip Staines unto Samson. The leader of the posh shakes Ogden and wakes him up, and then he jumps up, and two more of the reward hunters grab him.
Ogden was mighty tough with all his slimness, and gives him as neat a single-footed tussle against odds as I ever see. "'What does this mean?' he says, after they had him down. "'You're scooped in, Mr. Blackbell.' Says the captain. That's all. It's an outrage, says H. Ogden. Matter yet? It was, says the peace and goodwill man. The Katie wasn't bothering you, and there's a law against monking with express packages. And he sits on H. Ogden's stomach and goes through his pockets symptomatically and careful. I'll make you perspire for this. says Ogden, perspiring himself. I can prove who I am. So can I, says the captain, as he draws from H. Ogden's inside cold pocket, a handful of new bells of the Second National Bank of Espinosa City.
Your regular, engraved Tuesdays and Fridays visiting card wouldn't have a louder voice in proclaiming your indemnity. The this here currency, you can get up now and prepare to go with us and expatriate your sins.
H. Ogden gets up and fixes his necktie, he says no more after they have taken the money off of him. A well-greased idea, says the Sheriff Captain, admiring, to slip off down here and buy a little sheep ranch. where the hand of man is seldom heard. "'Twas the slickest head-out I ever see,' says the captain." So one of the men goes to the shearing-pan and haunts up the other herder, a Mexican they call John Sallies, and he saddles up Ogden's horse and the sheriffs all ride up close around him with their guns in hand, ready to take their prisoner to town. Before starting, Ogden puts the ranch in John Sally's hands, and gives him orders about the shearing and where to graze the sheep, as if she intended to be back in a few days.
At a couple of hours afterward, one Percival Sinclair, an ex-sheep-herder of the rancho Chiquito, might have been seen, with a hundred and nine dollars Wages and blood money in his pocket, riding south on another horse belonging to said ranch. The red-faced man paused and listened.
The whistle of a coming freight train sounded far away among the low hills. The fat, seedy man at his side sniffed and shook his frowzy head slowly and disparagingly. What is it, Snipey? asked the other. Got the blues again? No, I ain't, said the seedy one, sniffing again. But I don't like your talk. You and me have been friends, off and on, for fifteen years, and I never yet knew or heard of you giving anybody up to the law. Not no one, and here was a man whose cellaritas you had at and at whose table you had played games of cards, if casino can be so called. And yet you inform them to the law and take money for it. It never was like you, I say. Thus H. Ogden, resumed the red-faced man, through a lawyer, proved himself free by alibis and other legal terminalities.
As I so heard afterward, He never suffered no harm. He did me favors, and I hated to hand him over. How about the bells they found in his pocket? asked the city man.
I put him there, said the red-faced man while he was asleep when I saw the post riding up. I was Black Bell. Look out, Snipey. Here she comes. We'll board her on the bumpers when she takes water at the tank. End of the heading of Black Bell.
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4 04 - Schools and Schools 26:04
Options by O. Henry. Schools and schools. One. Alderam Warren. Lived in the $100,000 house at 35 East 50th Sofort Street. He was a downtown broker so rich that he could afford to walk, for his health, a few blocks in the direction of his office every morning, and then call a cab. He had an adopted son, the son of an old friend named Gilbert. Sarah Scott could play him nicely. who was becoming a successful painter as fast as he could squeeze the paint out of his tubes. Another member of the household was Barbara Ross, a step-niece. Man is born to trouble. So, as old Jerome had no family of his own, he took up the burdens of others. Gilbert and Barbara got along swimmingly. There was a tacit and tactical understanding all round.
The two would stand up under a floral bell some high noon, and promise the minister to keep O'Jerome's money in a state of high commotion. But at this point, complications must be introduced. Thirty years before, when O'Jerome was young, there was a brother of his named Dick. Dick went west to seek his or somebody else's fortune. Nothing was heard of him until one day O'Jerome had a letter from his brother. It was badly written on rude paper that smelled of salt bacon and coffee grounds. The writing was athmatic, and the spelling seemed fatussy. It appeared that instead of Deg having forced fortune to stand and deliver, he had been held up himself and made to give hostages to the enemy, that is, As his letter disclosed, he was on the point of pegging out with the complication of disorders that even whiskey had failed to check.
All that his thirty years of prospecting had netted him was one daughter, ninety years old, as per invoice whom he was shipping east, charges prepaid for Jerome to clothe, feed, educate, comfort, and cherish for the rest of her natural life. Until matrimony should them part. Old Jerome was a boardwalk. Everybody knows that the world is supported by the shoulders of Atlas, and that Atlas stands on a rail fence, and that the rail fence is built on a turtle's back. Now, the turtle has to stand on something, and that is a boardwalk made of men like old Jerome. I do not know whether immortality shall accrue to men, but if not so, I would like to know when men like old Jerome get what is due them. They met Nevada Warren at the station.
She was a little girl, deeply sunburnt and wholesomely good-looking, with a manner that was frankly unsophisticated, yet one that not even a cigar drummer would intrude upon without thinking twice. Looking at her, somehow you would expect to see her in a short skirt and leather leggings, shooting glass balls, or a taming mustangs. But in her plain white waist and black skirt, she sent you guessing again. With an easy exhalation of strength, she swung along a heavy valise, which the uniformed porters tried in vain to wrest from her. "'I am sure we shall be the best of friends,' said Barbara. pecking at the firm, sunburned cheek. "'I hope so,' said Nevada. "'Dear little niece,' said old Jerome, "'you are as welcome to my home as if it were your father's own.' "'Thanks,' said Nevada.
"'And I am going to call you cousin,' said Gilbert, with his charming smile. "'Take the valise, please,' said Nevada. It weighs a million pounds. It's got samples from six of Dad's old mines in it, she explained to Barbara. I calculate, they'd say, about nine cents to the thousand tons, but I promised him to bring them along.
Two. It is a common custom to refer to the usual complication between one man and two ladies, or one lady and two men, or a lady and a man and a nobleman, or... Any of those problems ends the triangle. But they are never unqualified triangles. They are always isosceles, never equilateral. So, upon the coming of Nevada Warren, she and Gilbert and Barbara Ross lined up into such a figurative triangle. And of that triangle, Barbara formed the hypotenuse. One morning, old Jerome was lingering long after breakfast over the Dallas Morning Paper in the city. Before setting forth to his downtown flytrap, he had become quite fond of Nevada, finding in her much of his dead brother's quiet independence and unsuspicious frankness.
A maid brought in a note for Miss Nevada Warren. A messenger boy delivered it at the door, please, she said. He's waiting for an answer. Nevada, who was whistling a Spanish watsp between her teeth, And watching the carriages and autos were by in the street, took the envelope. She knew it was from Gilbert before she opened it, but a little gold pallet in the upper left-hand corner. Upon tearing it open, she pored over the contents for a while, absorbedly. Then, with a serious face, she went and stood at her uncle's elbow. Uncle Jerome, Gilbert is a nice boy, isn't he? Why, bless the child, said old Jerome, crackling his paper loudly. Of course he is. I raised him myself. He wouldn't write anything to anybody that wasn't exactly, I mean that everybody could know and read, would he?
I'd just like to see him try it, said Uncle, tearing a handful from his newspaper. Why, what? Read this note he just sent me, Uncle, and see if you think it's all right and proper. You see, I don't know much about city people and their ways. Old Jerome threw his paper down and set both his feet upon it. He took Gilbert's note and fiercely perused it twice, and then a third time. Why, child, said he, you had me almost excited, although I was sure of that boy. He's a duplicate of his father, and he was a gilt-edged diamond. He only asks if you and Barbara will be ready at four o'clock this afternoon for an automobile drive over to Long Island. I don't see anything to criticize in it, except the stationery.
I always did hate that shade of blue. Would it be all right to go? asked Nevada, eagerly. Yes, yes, yes, child, of course. Why not? Still, it pleases me to see you so careful and candid. Go, by all means. "'I didn't know,' said Nevada demurely. "'I thought I'd ask you. Couldn't you go with us, Uncle?' "'I?' "'No, no, no, no. I've ridden once in a car that boy was driving. Never again. But it's entirely proper for you and Barbara to go. Yes, yes. But I will not. No, no, no, no.' Nevada flew to the door and said to the maid, "'You bet we'll go.' I'll answer for Miss Barbara. Tell the boy to say to Mr. Warren. You bet we'll go." Nevada, called old Jerome. Pardon me, my dear, but wouldn't he be as well to send the monoton reply?
Just a line would do. No, I won't bother about that, said Nevada, gaily. Gilbert will understand. He always does. I've never rode in an automobile in my life, but I've paddled the canoe down Little Devil River. Barbara sat in the study of the $100,000 house. It was a good place for her. Many places are provided in the world where men and women may prepare for the purpose of extricating themselves from diverse difficulties. There are cloisters, wailing places, watering places, confessionals, hermitages, lawyers' offices, beauty parlors, airships, and studies. And the greatest of these are studies. It usually takes a hypotenuse, a long time to discover that it is the longest side of a triangle.
But it's a long line that has no turning. Barbara was alone. Uncle Jerome and Nevada had gone to the theater. Barbara had not cared to go. She wanted to stay at home and study in the study. A few myths were a stunning newer girl, and saw every other day that a brown, ingenuous, western witch was getting hobbles on the lasso, and the young man you wanted for yourself, you too would lose taste for the oxidized silver setting of a musical comedy. Barbara sat by the quarter-dog library table. Her right arm rested upon the table. And her dextral fingers nervously manipulated the sealed letter. The letter was addressed to Nevada Warren, and in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope was Gilbert's little gold pallet.
It had been delivered on an o'clock after Nevada had left. Barbara would have given her pearl necklace to know what the letter contained, but she could not open and read it by the aid of steam or a pen handle. Her hairpin, or any of the generally approved methods, because her position in society forbade such an act. She had tried to read some of the lines of the letter by holding the envelope up to a strong light and pressing it hard against the paper, but Gilbert had too good a taste in stationery to make that possible. At 11.30, the theatre-goers returned. It was a delicious winter night, even so far as from the cab to the door, they were powdered thickly, with the big flakes downpouring diagonally from the east.
Old Jerome growled good-naturedly about the fitness cab service and blockaded streets. Nevada, colored like a rose, with sapphire eyes, babbled over the stormy nights in the mountains around Dad's cabin. During all these winter apostrophes, Barbara Cold at heart, sawed wood, the only appropriate thing she could think of to do. Aljoram went immediately upstairs to hot water bottles and quinine. Nevada fluttered into the study. The only cheerfully lighted room subsided into an armchair, and, while at the interminable task of unbuttoning her elbow gloves, gave oral testimony as to the demerits of the show. Yes. I think Mr. Fields is really amusing sometimes, said Barbara. Here is a letter for you, dear, that came by the special delivery just after you had gone.
Who is it from? asked Nevada, tugging at a button. Well, really, said Barbara with a smile. I can only guess. The envelope has a clear little thing in one corner that Gilbert calls a pallet, but which looks to me rather like a gilt heart. The schoolgirls Valentin. I wonder what it's writing to me about, remarked Nevada, listlessly. We're all alike, said Barbara. All women were trying to find out what is in the letter by studying the postmark. As a last resort, I'll use scissors and read it from the bottom upward. Here it is. She made a motion as if to toss the letter across the table to Nevada. Great catamounts, exclaimed Nevada. These centerfire buttons are a nuisance. I'd rather wear bug skins.
Oh, Barbara, please shock the height of that letter and read it. It'll be midnight before I get these gloves off. Why, dear? You don't want me to open Gilbert's letter to you? It's for you, and you wouldn't wish anyone else to read it, of course. Nevada raised her steady, calm sapphire eyes from her gloves. Nobody writes me anything that everybody mightn't read, she said. Go on, Barbara. Maybe Gilbert wants us to go out in his car again tomorrow. Curiosity can do more things than kill a cat, and if emotions, well recognized as feminine, are inimical to feline life, then jealousy, when Sue leaves the world catless, Barbara opened the letter, with an indulgent, slightly bored air. "'Well, dear,' said she, "'I'll read it if you want me to.' She slicked the envelope and read the missive with swift-travelling eyes, read it again, and cast a quick, shrewd glance at Nevada, who, for the first time, seemed to consider gloves as the word of her interest, and letters from rising artists as no more than messages from Mars.
For a quarter of a minute, Barbara looked at Nevada, With a strange steadfastness. And then a smile so small that it widened her mouth only the sixteenth part of an inch, and narrowed her eyes no more than the twentieth, flashed like an inspired thought across her face. Since the beginning, no woman has been a mystery to another woman. Swift as light travels, each penetrates the heart and mind of another, sift her sister's words of their cunningest disguises. Reads her most hidden desires, and plucks the sophistry from her wiliest talk like ears from a comb, twiddling them sardonically between her thumb and fingers before letting them float away on the breezes of fundamental doubt. Long ago, Eve's son ran the doorbell of the family residence in Paradise Park, bearing a strange lady on his arm whom he introduced.
Eve took her daughter-in-law aside and lifted a classic eyebrow. The land of naught, said the bride, languidly flirting the leaf of a palm. I suppose you've been there, of course. Not lately, said Eve, absolutely unstaggered. Don't you think the applesauce they serve over there is execrable? I rather like that mulberry leaf tunic effect, dear, but of course... The real fake goods are not to be had over there. Come over behind this lilac bush while the gentleman split celery tonic. I think the caterpillar horse have made your dress open a little in the back. So, then and there, according to the records, was the alliance formed by the only two who's-who ladies in the world. Then it was agreed The woman should forever remain as clear as a pane of glass, though glass was yet to be discovered to other women, and that she should palm herself off a man as a mystery.
Barbara seemed to hesitate. Really, Nevada, she said, with a little show of embarrassment. You shouldn't have insisted on me opening this. I'm sure it wasn't meant for anyone else to know. Nevada forgot her gloves for a moment. Then read it aloud, she said. Since you've already read it, what's the difference? If Mr. Warren has written to me something that anyone else oughtn't to know, that is all the more reason why everybody should know it.
Well, said Barbara, this is what it says. Dearest Nevada, come to my studio at twelve o'clock tonight. Do not fail. Barbara Rose, I dropped the note in a vada slab. I'm awfully sorry, she said. That I knew. It isn't like Gilbert. There must be some mistake. Just consider that I am ignorant of it, will you, dear? I must go upstairs now. I have such a headache. I'm sure I don't understand the note. Perhaps Gilbert has been dining too well. I will explain. Good night. Four. Nevada tiptoed to the hall and heard Barbara Storr close upstairs. The bronze clock in the study told the hour of twelve was fifteen minutes away. She ran swiftly to the front door and let herself out into the snowstorm. Gilbert Warren's studio was six squares away.
By aerial ferry, the white, silent forces of the storm attacked the city from beyond the sullen East River. Already, the snow lay a foot deep. on the pavements, the drifts heaping themselves like scaling ladders against the walls of the besieged town. The avenue was as quiet as the street in Pompeii. Caps now and then skimmed paths like white-winged gaols over a moonlit ocean, and less frequent motor-cars sustaining the comparison haste through the foaming waves like submarine boats on their jocund, perilous journeys. Nevada plunged like a wind-driven storm patrol on her way. She looked up at the ragged sierras of cloud-capped buildings that rose above the streets, shaded by the night lights and the congealed vapours to grey drab-ashen, lavender, dun, and cerulean tints.
They were so like the wintry mountains of her western home that she felt a satisfaction such as The hundred-thousand-dollar house had seldom brought her. A policeman caused her to waver on a corner, just by his eye and wait. "'Hello, Mabel,' said he. Can't wait for you to be out, ain't it?' "'I—I am just going to the drugstore,' said Nevada, hurrying past him. The excuse served as a passport for the most sophisticated, thus it proved that women never progresses, or that she sprang from Adam's rib. Full-fledged in intellect and wiles. Turning eastward, the erect blast caught on a weather speed one half. She made zigzag tracks in the snow, but she was as tough as a pinion sapling, and bowed to it as gracefully.
Suddenly, the studio building loomed before her, a familiar landmark, like a cliff above some well-remembered canyon. The haunt of business This Harsdale neighbor, Art, was darkened and silent. The elevator stopped at ten. Up eight flights of Stichon stairs, Nevada climbed, and rapped firmly at the door numbered eighty-nine. She had been there many times before, with Barbara and Uncle Jerome. Gilbert opened the door. He had a crayon pencil in one hand, a green shade over his eyes, and a pipe in his mouth. the pipe dropped to the floor. Am I late? asked Nevada. I came as quick as I could. Ankur and me were at the theater this evening. Here I am, Gilbert. Gilbert did a Pygmalion and Galatea act.
He changed from a statue of stupefaction to a young man with a problem to tackle. He admitted Nevada, got a whisk broom, and began to brush the snow from her clothes. A great lamp with a green shade hung over an easel, where the artist had been sketching in crayon. "'You wanted me,' said Nevada simply, "'and I came. You said so in your letter. What did you send me for?' "'You read my letter?' inquired Gilbert, sparring for wind. Barbara read it to me, and I saw it afterward. It said, "'Come to my studio at twelve to-night, and do not fail.' I thought you were sick, of course, but you don't seem to be. Aha! said Gilbert, irrelevantly. I'll tell you why I asked you to come, Nevada. I want you to marry me immediately tonight.
What's a little snowstorm? Will you do it? You might have noticed that I would long ago, said Nevada, and I'm rather stuck on the snowstorm idea myself. I surely would hate one of these flowery church new weddings, Gilbert. I didn't know you had great enough to propose it this way. Let's shock him. It's our funeral, ain't it? You bet, said Gilbert. Where did I hear that expression? He added to himself, Wait a minute, Nevada. I want to do a little phoning. He shut himself in a little dressing room and called upon the lightnings of the heavens. condensed into unromantic numbers and districts. "'That you, Jack?' You confounded sleepyhead. "'Yes, wake up. This is me. Or I. Or bother the difference in grammar.
I'm going to be married right away.' "'Yes. Wake up your sister. Don't answer me back. Bring her along, too. You must.' Remind Agnes of the time I saved her from drowning in Lake Ronkonkoma. I know it's Caddash to refer to it, but she must come with you. Yes, Nevada is here, waiting. We've been engaged quite a while. Some opposition among the relatives, you know, and we have to pull it off this way. We're waiting here for you. Don't let Agnes out-talk you. Bring her. You will? Good old boy. I'll order a carriage to call for you. Double quick time. Confound you, Jack. You're right." Gilbert returned to the room, where Nevada waited. My old friend Jack Payton and his sister were to have been here at a quarter to twelve, he explained.
But Jack is so confoundedly slow. I have just phoned them to hurry. They will be here in a few minutes. I am the happiest man in the world, Nevada. What did you do with the letter I sent you today? I've got it singed here," said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath her opera cloak. Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over carefully. Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully. "'Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to my studio at midnight?' he asked. "'Why no?' said Nevada, round in her eyes. "'Not if you need me. Out west, when the power sends you, I hear a call. Ain't that what you say here? We get there first, and talk about it after the war is over.' And it's usually snowy there, too, when things happen.
So I didn't mind. Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with overcoats, warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow. Put this ring-coat on, he said, holding it for her. We have a quarter of a mile to go. Old Jack, and his sister, will be here in a few minutes. He began to struggle into a ring-coat. Oh, Nevada, he said, Just look at the headlines on the front page of that evening paper on the table, will you? It's about your section of the West, and I know it will interest you." He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on of his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was looking at him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had a flush on them.
beyond the colour that had been contributed by the wind and snow, but her eyes were steady. "'I was going to tell you,' she said, anyhow before you, before we, before a while, before anything. That never gave me a day of schooling. I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now if—' Pounding their uncertain way upstairs, the feet of Jack, the Somnolent, and Agnes the Grateful were hurt.
While Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Warren were spinning softly Homer in a closed carriage after the ceremony, Gilbert said, Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter that you received tonight? Fire away, said this bride. Word for word, said Gilbert, it was this. My dear Miss Warren, you were right about the flower. It was a hydrangea and not a lilac. All right. But let's forget it. The joke's on Barbara anyway.
End of Schools and Schools.
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5 05 - Thimble, Thimble 35:58
Options by O. Henry, Thimble, Thimble.
These are the directions for finding the office of Carteret and Carteret, mail supplies and leather belting. You follow the Broadway Trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line, the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the big canyons of the Money Grubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a pushcart at the town of a two-ton four-horse stray, And hop, skip, and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story synthetic mountain of stone and iron.
In the twelfth story is the office of Carteret and Carteret. The factory where they make the mail supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities, to say nothing of Brooklyn, not being of interest to you. Let us hold the incidents within the confines of a one-act once in play, thereby lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher. So, if you have the courage to face down four pages of type and Cartwright and Cartwright's office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in the inner office and peep. Add the little comedy of the old nigger man, the hunting case watch, and the open-faced question, mostly borrowed from the late Mr. Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.
First, biography, but pair to the quick, must intervene. I am, for the inverted sugar-coated quinine pail, the bitter on the outside. The Carterets were... Or was, Columbia College professors please rule, an old Virginia family. Long time ago, the gentlemen of the family had worn lace ruffles and carried tinless foils and owned plantations and had slaves to burn. But the war had greatly reduced their holdings. Of course, you can perceive at once that this flavor has been shoplifted from Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith, in spite of the act after Carter. Well, anyhow, in digging up the Carteret history, I shall not take you farther back than the year 1620. The two original American Carterets came over in that year, but by different means of transportation.
One brother named John came in the Mayflower. and became a pilgrim father. You've seen his pictures on the covers of the Thanksgiving magazines, hunting turkeys in the deep snow with a blunderbuss.
Blantford Cartwright, the other brother, crossed the pond in his own brigantine, landed on the Virginia coast, and became an FFV. John became distinguished for piety and shudeness in business. Blantford, for his pride, juleps, marksmanship, and vast slave-cultivated plantations. Then came the Civil War. I must condense this historical interpolation. Stonewall Jackson was shot. Lee surrendered. Grant toured the world. Cotton went to nine cents. Old Crow Whiskey and Jim Crow cars were invented. The Seventy-Ninth Massachusetts Mount Volunteers returned to the Ninety-Seventh Alabama Zewa's, the battle flag of Lundis Lane, which they bought at a second-hand store in Chelsea, kept by a man named Shkoskinski.
Georgia sent the president A sixty-pound watermelon, and that brings us up to the time when the story begins. My! But that was barring for an opening. I really must brush up on my Aristotle.
The Yankee Carterets went into business in New York long before the war. Their house, as far as leather belting and mail supplies was concerned, was as musty and arrogant and solid as one of those old East India tea-importing concerns that you read about in Dickens. There were some rumors of a war behind its counters, but not enough to affect the business. During and after the war, Blountford Carteret, F. F. V., lost his plantations, juleps, marksmanship, And life, he bequeathed little more than his pride to his surviving family. So it came to pass that Blantford Carteret, the fifth, aged fifteen, was invited by the leather and mail supplies branch of their name to come north and learn business instead of hunting foxes and boasting of the glory of his fathers and the reduced acres of his impoverished family.
The boy jumped at a chance, and, at the age of twenty-five, sat in the office of the firm, equal partner with John, the fifth, of the Blunderbuss and Turkey branch. Here the story begins again. The young men were about the same age, smooth of face, alert, easy of manner, and with air, that promised mental and physical quickness. They were razored, blue-serged, straw-headed, and prostag-pinned like other young New Yorkers who might be millionaires or Bill Clarks. One afternoon at four o'clock in the private office of the firm, Blantford Cartwright opened a letter that Clark had just brought to his desk. After reading it, He chuckled audibly for nearly a minute. John looked around from his desk inquiringly.
It's from Mother, said Blantford. I read you the funny part of it. She tells me all the neighborhood news first, of course, and then consulates me against getting my feet wet at musical comedies. After that, Come vital statistics about calves and pigs, and estimate of the wheat crop. And now, I'll quote some. And what do you think, old Uncle Jake, who was 76 last Wednesday, must go traveling? Nothing would do, but he must go to New York and see his young master Blantford. Old as he is, he has a deal of common sense. So, I've let him go. I couldn't refuse him. He seemed to have concentrated all his hopes and desires into this one adventure into the wide world. You know he was born on the plantation.
It has never been ten miles away from it in his life. And he was your father's body servant during the war, and has always been a faithful vassal and servant of the family. He has often seen the Gold Watch. The watch that was your father's and your father's father's. I told him it was to be yours, and he begged me to allow him to take it to you and to put it into your hands himself. So he has it, carefully enclosed in the buckskin case, and is bringing it to you with all the pride and importance of a king's messenger. I gave him money for the roundtrip and for a two-week stay in the city. I wish you would see to it that he gets comfortable quarters. Jake will need much looking after. He's able to take care of himself.
But I have read in the papers that African bishops and colored potentates generally have much trouble in obtaining food and lodging in the Yankee metropolis. That may be all right, but I don't see why the best hotel there shouldn't take Jake in. Still, I suppose it's a rule. I gave him full directions about finding you. I'd packed his valise myself. You won't have to bother with him, but I do hope you will see that he is made comfortable. Take the watch that he brings to you. It's almost a decoration. It has been worn by two cartelettes. There isn't a stain upon it, nor a false movement of the wheels. Bringing it to you is the crony joy of old Jake's life. I'd wanted him to have that little outing and that happiness before it is too late.
You have often heard us talk about how Jake, pretty badly wounded himself, crawled through the reddened grass at Chancellor's Field to where your father lay, with the bullet in his dear heart, and took the watch from his pocket to keep it from the Yanks. So my son, when the old man comes, consider him as a frail but worthy messenger from the old-time life and home. You have been so long away from home, and so long among the people, that we have always regarded as aliens, that I am not sure that Jake will know you. When he sees you, but Jake has a keen perception, and I rather believe that he will know of Virginia Cartwright at sight. I can't conceive that even ten years in Yankee land could change a boy of mine.
Anyhow, I'm sure you will know Jake. I put 18 colors in his fleece. If he should have to buy others, he wears a number 15 and a half. Please see that he gets right once. He will be of no trouble to you at all. If you are not too busy, I'd like for you to find him a place to board where they have white meal cornbread and try to keep him from taking his shoes off in your office or on the street. His white foot swells a little, and he likes to be comfortable. If you can spare the time, count his handkerchiefs when they come back from the wash. I bought him a dozen new ones before he left. He should be there about the time this letter reaches you. I told him to go straight to your office when he arrives.
As soon as Blantford had finished the reading of this, something happened, as there should happen in stories that must happen on the stage. Percival, the office boy, with his air of despising the world's output of mail supplies and leather belting, came in to announce that a colored gentleman was outside to see Mr. Blantford Cartwright.
Bring him in, said Blantford, rising. John Cartwright swung around in his chair and said to Percival, ask him to wait a few minutes outside. We'll let you know when to bring him in. Then he turned to his cousin with one of those broad, slow smiles that was an inheritance of all the carterets, and said, Bland, I've always had a consuming curiosity to understand the differences that you haughty sozeners believe to exist between you and the people of the North. Of course, I know that you consider yourself made out of finer clay and look upon Adam as only a collateral branch of your ancestry. But I don't know why I never could understand the differences between us. Well, John, said Blountford, laughing.
What you don't understand about it is just the difference. Of course, I suppose it was the feudal way in which we lived that gave us our lordly baronial airs and feeling of superiority. But you are not feudal now, Wonton John, since we liked you and stole your cotton and mules. You've had to go to work just as we, them Yankees, as you call us, have always been doing. And you're just as proud and exclusive and upper classy As you were before the war, so it wasn't your money that caused it. Maybe it was the climate, said Blantford lightly. Or maybe our negros borrowed us. I'll call old Jakey now. I'll be glad to see the old villain again. Wait just a moment, said John. I've got a little theory I want to test.
You and I... are pretty much alike in our general appearance. Old Jake hasn't seen you since you were fifteen. Let's have him in and play fair and see which one of us gets the watch. The old darky surely ought to be able to pick out his young master without any trouble. The alleged aristocratic superiority of a rabbe ought to be visible to him at once. He couldn't make the mistake of handing over the timepiece to a Yankee, of course. The loser buys the dinner this evening, and two dozen fifteen-and-a-half callers for Jake. Is it a go?
Glanford agreed heartily. Percival was summoned and told to usher the colored gentleman in. Uncle Jake stepped inside the private office cautiously. He was a little old man, as black as suit, wrinkled and bald, except for a fringe of white wool, caught decorously short, that ran over his ears and around his head. There was nothing of the stage uncle about him. His black suit nearly fitted him, his shoes shone, and his short hat was banded with a goldy ribbon. In his right hand, He carried something carefully concealed by his close fingers. Uncle Jake stopped a few steps from the door. Two young men sat in their revolving desk chairs, ten feet apart, and looked at him in friendly silence. His gaze slowly shifted many times from one to the other.
He felt sure that he was in the presence of one, at least. of the revered family, among whose forties his life had begun and was to end. One had a pleasing but haughty cartelette air. The other had the unmistakable straight, long, family nose. Both had the keen black eyes, horizontal brows, and thin, smiling lips that distinguished both the cartelette of the Mayflower and him of the brigantine. With Jake, I thought that he could have packed out his young master instantly from a thousand northerners, but he found himself in difficulties. The best he could do was to use strategy. Howdy, Mars Blantford. Howdy, sir, he said, looking midway between the two young men. Howdy, Uncle Jake. They both answered pleasantly and in unison.
Sit down. Have you brought a watch? Uncle Jake chose a hard-bottomed chair at a respectful distance, sat on the edge of it, and laid his hat carefully on the floor. The watch, in its buckskin case, he gripped tightly. He had now risked his life on the battlefield to rescue the watch from his old master's foes, to hand it over again to the enemy without a struggle. "'Yes, sir. I've got it in my hand, sir. I'm going to give it to you right away in just a minute.' Old Mrs. told me to put it in young Mars Bluntford's hand and tell him to wear it for the family pride and honour. It was a mighty lonesome trip for an old negro man to make. Ten thousand miles, it must be. Back to old Virginia, sir. You've growled mightily, young master.
I wouldn't have recognized you, but for your powerful resemblance to old master. With admirable diplomacy, the old man kept his eyes roaming in the space between the two men. His words might have been addressed to either. Though neither wicked nor perverse, he was seeking for a sign. Blantford and Zhang exchanged winks. I reckon you don't got your ma's letter, wont on Uncle Jake. She said she was going to write to you about my coming along this way. Yes, yes, Uncle Jake, said Zhang briskly. "'My cousin and I have just been notified to expect you. We are both carterets, you know.' "'Although one of us,' said Blantford, "'was born and raised in the North.' "'So if you will hand over the watch,' said John.
"'My cousin and I,' said Blantford. "'We'll then see to it,' said John. "'That comfortable quarters are found for you,' said Blantford.' With credible ingenuity, old Jake set up a cackling, high-pitched, protracted laugh. He beat his knee, picked up his hat, and bent the brim in an apparent paroxysm of humorous appreciation. The seizure afforded him a mask behind which he could blow his eyes impartially between above and beyond his two tormentors. "'I see what?' he chuckled after a while. "'You gentleman is trying to have fun with the poor old nigger.' "'But you can't fool out Jake. I knowed you, Mars Blantford. The minute I sought eyes on you, you was a poor, skimpy little boy, no more than the boat for tin when you left home to come north.' But I knowed you the minute I sought eyes on you.
You is the mortal image of the old master. The other gentleman resembles you mightily, sir. But you can't fool old Jake on a member of the old Virginia family. No, sir.
At exactly the same time, both Carterets smiled and extended a hand for the watch. Uncle Jake's wrinkled black face lost the expression of amusement to which he had faintly twisted it. He knew that he was being teased, and that it made a little real difference as far as its safety went, into which of those ostrached hands he placed the family rich treasure. But it seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty, but much of the Virginia Carterets was at stake. He had heard down south during the war about that other branch of the family that lived in the north and fought on the Uther side, and it had always grieved him. He had followed his old master's fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost poverty, and now with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by old Mrs.
and entrusted implicitly to his care. He had come ten thousand miles to deliver it into the hands of the one who was to wear it, and wind it, and cherish it, and listen to it, take off the unsullied hours that mark the lives of the Carterets of Virginia. His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of tyrants. Lowdown, common trash, in blue, laying waste with fire and sword. He had seen the smoke of many burning homesteads, almost as grand as Cartwright Hall, ascending to the drowsy, southern skies. And now he was face to face with one of them. But he could not distinguish him from his young master, whom he had come to find and bestow upon him the emblem of his kingship, even as the arm clothed in white Samite mystic wonderful, laid Excalibur in the right hand of Arthur.
He saw before him two young men, easy, kind, courteous, welcoming, Either of whom might have been the one he sought. Troubled, bewildered, sorely grieved at his weakness of judgment, old Jake abandoned his loyal subterfuges. His right hand sweated against the bucket-skin cover of the watch. He was deeply humiliated and chastened. Seriously now, his prominent yellow-white eyes closely scanned the two young men. At the end of his scrutiny, he was conscious of but one difference between them. He wore a narrow black tie with a white pearl stick-pin. The other's four in hand was a narrow blue one pinned with a black pearl. And then, to old Jake's relief, there came a sudden distraction. Drama knocked at the door with imperious knuckles and forced comedy to the wings, and Drama peeped with a smiling but set face over the footlights.
Percival, the hater of male supplies, brought in a card, which he handed with the manner of one bearing a cartel to Blutey, Olivia de Ormond, read Blue Tie from the card. He looked inquiringly at his cousin. We'll not have her in, said Black Tie, and bring matters to a conclusion. Uncle Jake, said one of the young men, would you mind taking that chair over there in the corner for a while? A lady is coming in on some business. We'll take up your case afterward. The lady whom Percival archered in, was young, unpatulently, decidedly, freshly, consciously, and intentionally pretty. She was dressed with such expensive plainness that she made you consider lace and ruffles as mere tatters and rags. But one great ostrich plume that she wore would have marked her anywhere in the Army of Beauty as the wearer of the Merry Helmet of Navarre.
Mr. Ormond accepted a swivel chair at Blutey's desk. Then the gentleman drew leather upholstered seats conveniently near and spoke of the weather. "'Yes,' said she, I noticed the water was warmer. "'I mustn't take up too much of your time during business hours,' that is," she continued, "'unless we talk business.'" She addressed her words to Blue Tie with a charming smile. "'Very well,' said he. "'You don't mind my cousin being present, do you? We are generally rather confidential with each other, especially in business matters.'" "'Oh, no!' Corrode Mr. Ormond. It's rather he did hear. He knows all about it anyhow. In fact, he's quite a material witness, because he was present when you... when it happened.
I thought you might want to talk things over before... well, any action is taken, as I believe the lawyers say.
"'Have you anything in the way of a proposition to make?' asked Black Tie.
Mr. Ormond looked reflectively at the neat toe of one of her dull catpumps. "'I had a proposal made to me,' she said. "'If the proposal sticks, it cuts all the proposition. Let's have that settled first.' "'Well, as far as—' began a blue tie. "'Excuse me, cousin,' interrupted Black Tie. "'If you don't mind me cutting in.' And then she turned, with a good-natured air, toward the lady. "'Now let's recapitulate a bit,' he said cheerfully. "'All three of us, besides other mutual acquaintances, have been out on a good many larks together.' "'I'm afraid I'll have to call the birds by another name,' said Mr. Ormond. "'All right,' responded Black Tie, with an impaired cheerfulness. "'S'pose we say squabs when we talk about the proposal, and larks when we discuss the proposition.
"'You have a quick mind, Mr. Ormond. Two months ago, some half-dozen of us went in a motor-car For a day's run into the country, we stopped at a roadhouse for dinner. My cousin proposed my marriage to you then and there. He was influenced to do so, of course, by the beauty and charm which no one could deny that you possess.
Wish I had you for a press agent, Mr. Cartwright," said the beauty, with a dazzling smile. "'You are on the stage, Mr. Ormond,' went on Blacktie. "'You have had doubtless many admirers, and perhaps other proposals. You must remember, too, that we were a party of merry-makers on that occasion. There were a good many corks pulled. That the proposal of marriage was made to you by my cousin we cannot deny.' But hasn't it been your experience that, by common consent, such things lose their seriousness when viewed in the next day's sunlight? Isn't there something of a cold among good sports, I use the word in its best sense, that wipes out each day the follies of the evening previous?
I did very well, and I've always played up to it. But as you seem to be concluding the case with the silent consent of the defendant, I'll tell you something more. I've got letters from him repeating the proposal as they assigned to you. I understand," said Black Tie gravely. What's your price for the letters?
I'm not a cheap one. said Mr. Ormond, but I had decided to make you a rate. You both belong to a swell family. Well, if I am on the stage, nobody can say a word against me truthfully, and the money is only a secondary consideration.
It isn't the money I was after. I... I believed them, and... and I liked them. She cast a soft, entrancing glance at Blue Tie from under her long eyelashes. And the price? Want on Black Tie inexorably. Ten thousand dollars, said the lady sweetly. Or? Or the fulfillment of the engagement to Mary. I think it is time, interrupted Blue Tie, for me to be allowed to say a word or two. You and I, cousin, belong to a family that has held its head pretty high. You have been brought up in a section of the country very different from the one where a branch of the family lived. Yet both of us are Carterets, even if some of our ways and theories differ. You remember it is a tradition of the family that no Carteret ever failed in chivalry to a lady.
Or, failed to keep his word when it was given. Then Blue Tie, with frank decision showing on his countenance, turned to Mr. Ormond. Olivia, said he, on what date will you marry me? Before she could answer, Blue Tie again interposed. It is a long journey, said he, from Plymouth Rock. To Norfolk Bay. Between the two points, we find the changes that nearly three centuries have brought. In that time, the old order has changed. We no longer burn witches or torture slaves. And today, we neither spread our cloaks on the mud for ladies to walk over, nor treat them to the ducking stool. It is the age of common sense. Adjustment and proportion. All of us—ladies, gentlemen, women, men, northerners, souteners, lords, caters, actors, hot redramas, senators, hot carriers, and politicians—are coming to a better understanding.
Chivalry is one of our words that changes its meaning every day. Family pride is a thing of many constructions. It might show itself by maintaining a mouth-eaten arrogance in a cobwebbed colonial mansion, or by the prompt paying of one's debts. Now, I suppose you've had enough of my monologue. I've learned something of business, and a little of life. I did somehow believe, cousin, that our great-great-grandfathers, the original Carterets, would endorse my view of this matter.
Black Tie wheeled around to his desk, wrote in the checkbook, and tore out the check, the sharp rasp of the perforated leaf making the only sound in the room. He laid the check within easy reach of Mr. Ormond's hand.
Business is business, said he. We live in a business age. There is my personal check for $10,000. What do you say, Mr. Ormond? Will it be orange blossoms or cash?
Mr. Ormond picked up the check carefully, folded it indifferently, and stuffed it into her glove. Oh, that's how I do, she said calmly. I just thought I'd call and put it up to you. I guess you people are all right, but the girl has feelings, you know. I've heard one of you was a sostener. I wonder which one of you it is.
She arose, smiled sweetly, and walked to the door. There, with a flash of white teeth and the depth of the heavy plume, she disappeared. Both of the cousins had forgotten Uncle Jake for the time, but now they heard the shuffling of his shoes as he came across the rock toward him from his seat in the corner. Young master, he said, take your watch. And without hesitation, he laid the ancient timepiece in the hand of his rightful owner.
End. of Thimble Thimble.
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6 06 - Supply and Demand 28:12
Henry Supply and Demand Finch keeps a hat's cleaned by electricity while you wait. Establishment, nine feet by twelve in Third Avenue. Once a customer, you are always his. I do not know his secret process, but every four days your hat needs to be cleaned again. Finch is a leathern, sallow, slow-footed man, between 20 and 40. You would say he had been brought up a bushelman in Essex Street. When business is slack, he likes to talk. So I had my hat cleaned even oftener than it deserved, hoping Finch might let me into some of the secrets of the sweatshops. One afternoon I dropped in and found Finch alone. He began to anoint my headpiece de panama with his mysterious fluid that attracted dust and dirt like a magnet.
"'They say the Indians weave him underwater,' said I for a liter. "'Don't you believe it,' said Finch. "'No Indian or white man could stay underwater that long. "'Say, do you pay much attention to politics?' I see in the paper something about a law they've passed called the law of supply and demand. I explained to him as well as I could that the reference was to a politico-economical law and not to a legal statute. I didn't know, said Finch. I heard a good deal about it a year or so ago, but in a one-sided way. Yes. said I. Political orators use it a great deal. In fact, they never give it a rest. I suppose you heard some of those cartel fellows pouting on the subject over here on the east side.
I heard it from a king, said Finch, the white king of a tribe of Indians in South America. I was interested, but not surprised. The big city is like a mother's knee to many who have strayed far and found the roads rough beneath their uncertain feet. At dusk they come home and sit upon the doorstep. I know a piano player in a cheap café who has shot lions in Africa. A bellboy who fought in the British army against the Zulus. An express driver whose left arm had been cracked like a lobster's claw for a stew-pot of Patagonian cannibals when the boat of his rescuers hove in sight. So a hat cleaner who had been a friend of a king did not oppress me. A new band? asked Finch with his dry-bearing smile.
Yes, said I, and half an inch wider. I had had a new band five days before. I meet a man one night," said Finch, beginning his story, a man brown as snuff, with money in every pocket, eating Schweinerknückel in Schlagels. That was two years ago, when I was a host car driver for number 98. His discourse runs to the subject of gold. He says that certain mountains in a country down south that he calls Gaudimala He's full of it. He says the Indians wash it out of the streams in plural quantities. Oh, Geronimo, says I, Indians. There's no Indians in the South, I tell him, except Elks, Maccabees and the buyers for the fall dry goods trade. The Indians are all on the reservations, says I. I'm telling you this with reservations, says he.
They ain't Buffalo Bill Indians. They're squattier and more pedigreed. They call em' Incars and Aspics. And they was old inhabitants when Mazuma was king of Mexico. They wash the gold out of the mountain streams, says the brown man, and fill quills with it. And then they empty them into red jars till they are full, and then they pack it in buckskin sacks of one Arroba each and store it in a stone house with an engraving of a idol with marcelled hair playing a flute over the door. How do they work off this unearthed increment, I asks. They don't, says the man. It's a case of ill-fares the land with a great deal of velocity, where wealth accumulates and there ain't any reciprocity. After this man and me got through our conversation, which left him dry of information, I shook hands with him and told him I was sorry I couldn't believe him.
And a month afterward, I landed on the coast of this Gaidimala, With $1,300 that I had been saving up for five years. I thought I knew what Indians liked, and I fixed myself accordingly. I loaded down four pack mules with red woolen blankets, wrought iron pails, jeweled side combs for the ladies, glass necklaces and safety razors. I hired a black mozo. Who was supposed to be a mule driver and an interpreter too. It turned out that he could interpret mules alright, but he drove the English language March too hard. His name sounded like a Yale key when you push it in wrong side up, but I called him McClintock, which was close to the noise. Well, this gold village was 40 miles up in the mountains, and it took us nine days to find it.
But one afternoon McClintock led the other mules and myself over a rawhide bridge stretched across a precipice 5,000 feet deep, it seemed to me. The hoofs of the beasts drummed on it just like before George M. Cohen makes his first entrance on the stage. This village was built of mud and stone and had no streets. Some few yellow and brown persons popped their heads out of doors, looking about like Welsh rabbits with Worcestershire sauce on them. Out of the biggest house that had a kind of a porch around it, steps a big white man, red as a beet in color. Dressed in fine-tanned deerskin clothes, with a gold chain around his neck, smoking a cigar. I've seen United States senators of his style of features and build, also head-waiters and cops.
He walks up and takes a look at us, while McClintock disembarks and begins to interpret to the lead mule while he smokes a cigarette. Hello, Buttinsky! Says the fine man to me. How did you get in the game? I didn't see you buy any chips. Who gave you the keys of the city? I'm a poor traveler, says I, especially Muleback. You'll excuse me. Do you run a hack line or only a bluff? Segregate yourself from your pseudo-equine quadruped, says he, and come inside. He raises a finger, and the villager runs up. This man will take care of your outfit, says he, and I'll take care of you. He leads me into the biggest house and sets out the chairs and a kind of a drink, the color of milk. It was the finest room I ever saw.
The stone walls was hung all over with silk shawls, and there was red and yellow rugs on the floor, and jars of red pottery and angora goat skins, and enough bamboo furniture to misfurnish half a dozen seaside cottages. In the first place, says the man, you want to know who I am. I am sole, lessee, and proprietor of this tribe of Indians. They call me the Grand Yakuma, which is to say, king or main finger of the bunch. I've got more power here than a charge d'affaires, a charge of dynamite, and a charge account at Tiffany's combined. In fact, I'm the big stick, with as many extra knots on it as there is on the record run of the Lusitania. Oh, I read the papers now and then, says he. Now let's hear your entitlements, he goes on, and the meeting will be open.
Well, says I, I am known as one W. D. Finch, Occupation Capitalist. Address 541 East 32nd, New York. Chips in the Noble Grand. I know, says he, grinning. It ain't the first time you've seen it go down on the blotter. I can tell by the way you hand it out. Well, explain, capitalist. I tell this boss plain what I come for and how I come to came. Gold dust, says he, looking as puzzled as a baby that's got a feather stuck on its molasses finger. That's funny. This ain't a gold-mining country. And you invested all your capital on a stranger's story? Well, well, these Indians of mine, they are the last of the tribe of Peshers, are simple as children. They know nothing of the purchasing power of gold.
I'm afraid you've been imposed on," says he. Maybe so, says I, but it sounded pretty straight to me. WD. Says the king all of a sudden, I'll give you a square deal. It ain't often I get to talk to a white man, and I'll give you a show for your money. It may be these constituents of mine have a few grains of gold dust hid away in their clothes. Tomorrow you may get out these goods you've brought up and see if you can make any sales. Now I am going to introduce myself unofficially. My name is Shane. Patrick Shane. I own this tribe of Peche Indians by right of conquest, single-handed and unafraid. I drifted up here four years ago and worn them by my size and complexion and nerve. I learned their language in six weeks.
It's easy. You simply emit a string of consonants as long as your breath holds out and then point at what you're asking for. I conquered them spectacularly, goes on King Shane, and then I went at them with economical politics, law, sleight of hand, and a kind of New England ethics and parsimony. Every Sunday, or as near as I can guess at it, I... I preach to him in the council house on the law of supply and demand. I praise supply and knock demand. I use the same text every time. You wouldn't think, WD, says Shane, that I had poetry in me, would you? Well, says I, I wouldn't know whether to call it poetry or not. Tennyson. says Shane, furnishes the poetic gospel I preach. I always considered him the boss poet.
Here is the way the text goes. For not to admire if a man could learn it were more than to walk all day like a sultan of old in a garden of spice. You see, I teach him to cut out demand that supplies the main thing. I teach them not to desire anything beyond their simplest needs. A little mutton, a little cocoa, and a little fruit brought up from the coast. That's all they want to make them happy. I've got them well trained. They make their own clothes and hats out of vegetable fiber and straw, and they're a contempted lot. It's a great thing, winds up Shane. To have made a people happy by the incultivation of such simple institutions. Well, the next day, with the king's permission, I asked the McClintock open up a couple of sacks of my goods in the little plaza of the village.
The Indians swarmed around by the hundred and looked the bargain counter over. I shook red blankets at them, flashed fingerings and ear bobs, tried pearl necklaces and side combs on the women, and a line of red hosiery on men. It was no use. They looked on like hungry graven images, but I never made a sale. I asked McClintock what was the trouble. Mac yawned three or four times, rolled a cigarette, made one or two confidential side remarks to a mule, and then condescended to inform me that the people had no money. Just then straws up King Patrick, big and red and royal as usual, with a gold chain over his chest and his cigar in front of him. How's business, Double D, he asks. Fine, says I. It's a bargain-de-rush.
I've got one more line of goods to offer before I shut up shop. I'll try them with safety razors. I've got two gross that I bought at a fire sale. Shane laughs till some kind of marmalade of private secretary he carries with him has to hold him up. Oh, my sainted Aunt Jerusha, says he. Ain't you one of the babes in the goods, WD? Don't you know that no Indians ever shave? They pull out their whiskers instead. Well, says I, that's just what these razors would do for them. They wouldn't have any kick coming if they used them once. Shane went away, and I could hear him laughing a block if there had been any block. Tell him. Says I to McClintock, it ain't money I want. Tell him I'll take gold dust.
Tell him I'll allow him sixteen dollars an ounce for it in trade. That's what I'm out for, the dust. Mac interprets, and you'd have thought a squadron of cops had charged the crowd to disperse it. Every uncle's nephew and aunt's niece of them faded away inside of two minutes. At the royal palace that night, me and the king talked it over. They've got the dust hid out somewhere, says I, or they wouldn't have been so sensitive about it. They haven't, says Shane. What's this gag you've got about gold? You've been reading Edward Allan Poe? They ain't got any gold. They put it in quills, says I. And then they emptied in jars. And then into sacks of 25 pounds each. I got it straight. W.D., says Shane laughing and chewing his cigar, I don't often see a white man, and I feel like putting you on.
I don't think you'll get away from here alive anyhow, so I'm going to tell you. Come over here. He draws aside a silk fiber curtain in a corner of the room and shows me a pile of buckskin sacks. Forty of them, says Shane. One Aroba in each one. In round numbers, two hundred twenty thousand dollars worth of gold dust you see there. It's all mine. It belongs to the Grand Yakuma. They bring it all to me. $220,000. Think of that, you glass bead peddler, says Shane, and all mine. Little good it does you, says I contemptuously and hatefully. And so you are the government depositor of this gang of moneyless moneymakers? Don't you pay enough interest on it to enable one of your depositors to buy an Augusta Maine Pullman carbon diamond worth $200 for $4.85?
Listen, says Patrick Shane with the sweat coming out on his brow, I am confident with you, as you have somehow enlisted my regards. Did you ever, he says, feel the Avoir Dupois, power of gold. Not the troy weight of it, but the sixteen ounces to the pound force of it. Never, says I. I never take in any bad money. Shane drops down on the floor and throws his arms over the sacks of gold dust. I love it, says he. I want to feel the touch of it day and night. It's my pleasure in life. I come in this room, and I'm a king and a rich man. I'll be a millionaire in another year. The pile's getting bigger every month. I've got the whole tribe washing out the sands in the creeks. I'm the happiest man in the world, WD.
I just want to be near this gold, and know it's mine, and it's increasing every day. Now you know. Says he, why my Indians wouldn't buy your goods. They can't. They bring all the dust to me. I'm their king. I've taught them not to desire or admire. You might as well shut up shop. I'll tell you what you are, says I. You are a plain contemptible miser. You preach supply and you forget demand. Now supply, I goes on, is never anything but supply. On the contrary, says I, demand is a much broader syllogism, an assertion. Demand includes the rights of our women and children and charity and friendship and even a little banging on the street corners. They've both got to harmonize equally, and I've got a few things up my commercial sleeve yet, says I, that may jostle your preconceived ideas of politics and economy.
The next morning I had McClintock bring up another mule load of goods to the plaza and open it up. The people gathered around the same as before. I got out the finest line of necklaces, bracelets, haircombs, and earrings that I carried, and had the women put them on. And then I played trumps. Out of my last In the pack, I opened up a half-gross of hand mirrors with solid tinfoil backs and passed them round among the ladies. That was the first introduction of looking-glasses among the Pecha Indians. Shane walks by with his big laugh. Business looking up, Annie? he asks. It's looking at itself right now, says I. By and by, a kind of a murmur goes through the crowd. The women had looked into the magic crystal and seen that they were beautiful, and was confiding the secret to the men.
The men seemed to be urging the lack of money in the hard times just before the election, but their excuses didn't go. Then was my time. I called McClintock away from an animated conversation with his mules and told him to do some reinterpreting. Tell him, says I, that Gold Dust will buy for them these befitting ornaments for kings and queens of the earth. Tell him The yellow sand they wash out of the waters of the high sanctified Ayakame and Chopsui of the tribe will buy the precious jewels and charms that will make them beautiful and preserve and pickle them from evil spirits. Tell them the Pittsburgh banks are paying 4% interest on deposits by mail While this get-rich-frequently-custodian of the public funds ain't even paying attention.
Keep telling him, Mac, says I, to let the Goldust family do their work. Talk to him like a born anti-Bryanite, says I. Remind him that Tom Watson's gone back to Georgia, says I. McClintock waves his hand affectionately at one of his mules and then hurls a few stickfuls of minion type at the mob of shoppers. A Gatapercha Indian man, with a lady hanging on his arm with three st... The strings of my fish-scale jewelry and imitation marble beads around her neck stands up on a block of stone and makes a talk that sounds like a man shaking Dyson.
He says, says McLeanTech, that the people not know that Gold Dust will buy their things. The women very mad. The Grand Yakuma tell him it no good but for keep to make bad spirits keep away. You can't keep bad spirits away from money, says I. They say, goes on McClintock, the Yakuma fool them. They raise plenty row. Going, going, says I. Gold dust or cash takes the entire stock. That dust weighed before you and taking at $16 the ounce the highest price on the Gaudimala coast. Then the crowd disperses all of a sudden, and I don't know what's up. Mac and me packs away the hand mirrors and jewelry they had handed back to us, and we had the mules back on the corral they had set apart for our garage.
While we was there, we hear great noises of shouting, and down across the plaza runs Patrick Shane, hot foot with his clothes ripped half off, and scratches on his face like a cat had fought him hard for every one of its lives. They're looting the treasury, W.D., he sings out. They're going to kill me and you too. Unlimber a couple of mules at once. We'll have to make a getaway in a couple of minutes. They've found out, says I, the truth about the law of supply and demand. It's the women mostly, says the king, and they used to admire me so. They hadn't seen looking glasses then, says I. They've got knives and hatchets, says Shane. Hurry! Take that Roan, mule, says I. You and your law of supply.
I'll ride the Dunn, for he is two knots per hour faster. The Roan has a stiff knee, but he may make it, says I. If you'd included reciprocity in your political platform, I might have given you the Dunn, says I. Shane, Anne, McClintag and me mounted our mules and rode across the Rawhide Bridge just as the Peches reached the other side and began firing stones and long knives at us. We cut the thongs that held up our end of the bridge and headed for the coast. A tall, bulky policeman came into Finch's shop at that moment and leaned an elbow on the showcase. Finch nodded at him friendly. I heard down at Casey's, said the cop in rumbling husky tones, that there was going to be a picnic at the Hat Cleaners Union over at Bergen Beach Sunday, is that right?
Sure, said Finch. There'll be a dandy time. Gimme five tickets, said the cop, throwing a five-dollar bill on the showcase. Why? Said Finch. Ain't you going it a little too... Go to... said the cop. You've got them to sell, ain't you? Somebody's got to buy them. Wish I could go along. I was glad to see Finch so well thought of in his neighborhood. And then in came a wee girl of seven, with dirty face and pure blue eyes and a smudged and insufficient dress. Mama says, she recited shrilly, that you must give me eighty cents for the grocer and nineteen for the milkman and five cents for me to buy hokey pokey with, but she didn't say that," the elf concluded with a hopeful but honest grin. Finch shelled out the money, counting it twice, but I noticed that the total sum that the small girl received was one dollar and four cents.
That's the right kind of law. remarked Finch as he carefully broke some of the stitches of my hat-bend so that it would assuredly come off within a few days. The law of supply and demand. But they've both got to work together. I'll bet, he went on with his dry smile, she'll get jelly beans with that nickel. She likes them. What's supply if there's no demand for it? Whatever became of the king, I asked curiously. Oh, I might have told you," said Finch. That was Shane came in and bought the tickets. He came back with me, and he's on the force now.
End of supply and demand.
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7 07 - Buried Treasure 26:18
Options by O. Henry. Varied Treasure. There are many kinds of fools. Now, will everybody please sit still until they are called upon specifically to rise? I had been every kind of fool except one. I had expended my patrimony, pretended my matrimony, played poker, long tennis, and bucket jobs, parted soon with my money in many ways. But there remained one rule of the wearer of capables that I had not played. That was the Seeker after buried treasure. To few does the delectable viewer come. But of all the would-be followers in the Wolf-Prince of King Midas, none has found the pursuit so rich in pleasurable promise.
But, going back from Athenmawile, as Lampens must do, I was a fool of the sentimental sort. I saw Maymartha Mangum, and was hers. She was eighteen, the color of the white ivory keys of a new piano, beautiful and possessed by the exquisite solemnity and pathetic witchery of an unsophisticated angel doomed to live in a small, dull Texas prairie town. She had a spirit and charm that could have enabled her to pluck rubies like raspberries from the crown of Belgium or any other sporty kingdom. But she did not know it, and did not paint the picture for her. You see, I wanted May Martha Mangum for to have and to hold. I wanted her to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be fond of evenings.
May Martha's father was a man hidden behind whiskers and spectacles. He lived for bugs and butterflies, and all insects that fly or crawl or buzz or get on your back or in the butter. He was an etymologist, or was to that effect. He spent his life singing the air for flying fish of the Junbug order and then sticking pants through him and calling him names.
He and Maymartha were the whole family. He prized her highly as a fine specimen of the receivus humanus. Because she saw that he had food at times, and put his clothes on the right side before, and kept his alcohol bottles filled. Scientists, they say, are apt to be absent-minded. There was another besides myself who thought May Martha Mangum want to be desired. That was Goodloe Banks, a young man just off from college. He had all the attainments to be found in books, Latin, Greek philosophy. And especially the higher branches of mathematics and logic. If he hadn't been for his habit of pouring out this information and learning on everyone that he addressed, I'd have liked him pretty well. But even as it was, he and I were, you would have thought, great pals.
We got together every time we could because each of us wanted to pump the other for whatever straws we could find which way the wind blew. From the heart of May Martha Mangum, rather a mixed metaphor. Goodloe Banks would never have been guilty of that. That is the way of rivals. You might say that Goodloe ran to books, manners, culture, growing intellect, and clothes. I would have put you in mind more of baseball and Friday night debating societies by way of culture. and maybe of a good horseback rider. But in our talks together, and in our visits and conversation with my Martha, neither Goodloe Banks nor I could find out which one of us she preferred. My Martha was a natural more noncommittal, that knew in her cradle how to keep people guessing.
As I said, Oldman Mangum was absent-minded. After a long time, he found out one day one little butterfly must have told him that two young men were trying to throw a net over the head of the young person, a daughter or some such technical appendage, who looked after his comforts. I never knew scientists could rise to such occasions. Old Mangum Orally labeled and classified Goodloe and myself easily among the lowest orders of the vertebrates. And in English too, without going any further into Latin, than the simple reference to Augustorex Rex Helvetii, which is as far as I ever went, myself. And he told us that if he ever caught us around this house again, he would add us to his collection. Goodloe Banks and I remained away five days.
Expecting the storm to subside. When we dared to call at the house again, May Martha Mangum and her father were gone. Gone! The house they had rented was closed. Their little store of goods at chattels was gone also. And not a word of farewell to either of us from May Martha. Not a white fluttering note pinned to the hornthorn bush. Not a chalk mark on the gatepost. Nor a postcard in the post office to give us a clue. For two months, Goodloe Banks and I separately tried every scheme we could think of to track the runaways. We used our friendship and influence with the ticket agent, with liberal stablemen, railroad conductors, and our lone, lone constable, but without results. Then, we became better friends and worse enemies than ever.
We were gathered in the back room of Snyder's saloon every afternoon after work, and played the dominoes, and laid conversational traps to find out from each other if anything had been discovered. That is the way of rivals. Now, Goodloe Banks had a sarcastic way of displaying his own learning and porting me in the class I was reading, purging Ray. Her bird is dead. She cannot play. Well, I rather liked Goodloe. I had a contempt for his college learning, and I was always regarded as good-natured, so I kept my temper. And I was trying to find out if he knew anything about my mother, so I endured his anxiety. In talking things over one afternoon, he said to me, Suppose you do find her, Ed. Goodbye, would you profit?
Miss Mangum has a mind. Perhaps it is yet uncultured. But she is destined for higher things than she could give her. I have talked with no one who seemed to appreciate more the enchantment of the ancient poets and writers, and the modern cults that have assimilated and expanded their philosophy of life. Don't you think you are wasting your time looking for her? My idea, said I, of a happy home is that eight-room house in a grove of live oaks by the side of a charcoal on a Texas prairie. A piano, I went on, with an automatic prayer in the sitting-room, three thousand head of cattle under a fence for a starter, a bug-board, and ponies always hitched at a post for the missus, and may Martha Mangum to spend the profits of the ranch as she pleases, and to abide with me, and put my slippers and pipe away every day in places where they cannot be found of evenings.
That, said I, She is meant for higher things," repeated Goodloe Banks. Whatever she is meant for, I answered. Just now she is out of pocket, and I shall find her as soon as I can without the aid of colleges. The game is blocked, said Goodloe. Putting down a domino, and we had a beer.
Shortly after that, a young farmer, whom I knew, came into town and brought me a folded blue paper. He said his grandfather had just died. I concealed a tear, and he went on to say that the old man had jealously guarded this paper for twenty years. He left it to his family as part of his estate, the rest of which consisted of two meals, The sheet of paper was of the old blue kind, used during the rebellion of the abortionists against the secessionists. It was dated June 14, 1863, and it described the hiding place of ten barrels of gold and silver coin, valued at $300,000. Old Randall, grandfather of his grandson Sam, was given the information by a Spanish priest Who was in on the treasure-bearing, and who died many years before.
No, afterward, in old Randall's house. Old Randall wrote it down from dictation. Why didn't your father look this up? I asked young Randall. He went blind before he could do so, he replied. Why didn't you hunt for it yourself? I asked. Well, said he, I've only known about the paper for ten years. First, there was the spring plowing to do. And then chopping the weeds out of the corn, and then come taking fodder. And mighty soon, winter was on us. It seemed to run along that way, year after year. That sounded perfectly reasonable to me, so I took it up with young Lee Rondo at once. The directions on the paper were simple. The whole borough cavalcade, laden with the treasure, started from an old Spanish mission in Dolores County.
They traveled due south by the compass until they reached the Alimento River. They frauded this and buried the treasure on the top of a little mountain, shaped like a pack-saddle, standing in a row between two higher ones. A heap of stones marked the place of the buried treasure. All the party, except the Spanish priests, were killed by Indians a few days later. The secret was a monopoly. It looked good to me.
Lee Rondo suggested that we rig out a camping outfit, hire a surveyor to run out the line from the Spanish mission, and then spend $300,000 seeing the sights in Fort Worth. But without being highly educated, I knew a way to save time and expense. When we went to the state land office, I had a practical, what they call a working sketch, Made of all the surveys of land from the old mission to the Alimito River. On this map, as you aligned the southward to the river, the length of lines of each survey and section of land was accurately given on the sketch. By this, we found the point on the river and had a connection made with it, and an important, well-identified corner of the Los Animos Five Leagues Survey, a grant made by King Philip of Spain.
By doing this, we did not need to have the line run out by a surveyor. It was a great saving of expense and time. So, Lee Rondo and I fitted out a two-horse wagon team with all the accessories and drove 149 miles to Chico, the nearest town to the point we wished to reach.
There, we picked up a deputy county surveyor. He found the corner of the Los Animos survey for us, ran out the 5720 varas west that our sketch called for, laid a stone on the spot, had coffee and bacon, and called the mail stage back to Chico. I was pretty sure that we would get that $300,000. Lee Randall's was to be only one third, because I was paying all the expenses. With that two hundred thousand dollars, I knew I could find my Martha Mangum if she was on Earth. And with it, I could flutter the butterflies in Old Man Mangum's dovecot, too, if I could find that treasure. But Lee and I established camp. Across the river were a dozen little mountains densely covered by cedar bricks, but not one shaped like a pack saddle.
That did not deter us. Appearances are deceptive. A pack-saddle, like beauty, may exist only in the eye of the beholder. I, and the grandson of the treasure, examined those cedar-covered hills with the care of a lady hunting for the wicked flea. We explored every side, top, circumference, mean elevation, angle, slope, and concavity of every one for two miles up and down the river. We spent four days doing so. Then, we hedged up the room and the den, and hauled the remains of the coffee and bacon the one hundred and forty-nine miles back to Concho City. Lee Rondo chewed too much tobacco on the return trip. I was busy driving because I was in a hurry. As shortly as could be after our empty return, Goodloe Banks and I forgathered in the back room of Snyder's Saloon, to play dominoes and fish for the information.
I told Goodloe about my expedition after the baby treasure. If I could have found the three hundred thousand dollars, I said to him, I could have scurred and sifted the surface of the earth to find my Martha Mangum. She is meant for higher things, said Goodloe. I shall find her myself. But, Tell me how you went about discovering the spot where this unearthed increment was imprudently buried. I told him in the smallest detail. I showed him the draftsman's sketch with the distances marked plainly upon it. After glancing over it in a masterly way, he leaned back in his chair and bestowed upon me an explosion of sardonic, superior, and collegiate humor. Well, You are a fool, Jim, he said when he could speak.
It's your play, said I, patiently fingering my double six. Twenty, said Goodloe, making two crosses on the table with his chalk. Why am I a fool? I asked. Buried treasure has been found before in many places. Because, said he, in calculating the point on the river, Where your line would strike, you neglected to allow for the variation. The variation there would be nine degrees west. Let me have your pencil." Goodloe Banks figured rapidly on the back of an envelope. The distance from north to south of the line run from the Spanish mission, said he, is exactly twenty-two miles. It was run by a pocket compass, according to your story. Allowing for the variation, The point on the Alimento River, where you should have searched for your treasure, is exactly six miles and nine hundred and forty-five ferrars farther west than the place you head upon.
Oh, what a fool you are, Jim. What is this variation that you speak of? I asked. I thought figures never lied. The variation of the magnetic compass, said Goodloe, from the true meridian. He smiled in his superior way. And then I saw come out in his face the singular, eager, consuming cupidity of the seeker after buried treasure. Sometimes, he said with the air of the Oracle, these old traditions of hidden money are not without foundation. Suppose you let me look over that paper describing the location. Perhaps together we might. The result was that Goodloe Banks and I, rivals in love, Became companions in adventure. We went to Chico by stage from Huntersburg, the nearest railroad town. In Chico, we hired a team, drawing a curved spring wagon and camping periphylania.
We had the same surveyor run at our distance, as revised by Goodloe and his variations, and then dismissed him and sent him on his homeward road. It was night when we arrived. I fed the horses and made a fire near the bank of the river, and cooked supper. Goodloe would have helped, but his education had not fitted him for practical things. But while I worked, he cheered me with expression of some great thoughts, handed down from the dead ones of old. He quoted some translations from the Greek at much length. As I recited it, she is meant for higher things, said I, repeating his phrase. Can there be anything higher, asked Goodlaw, than to dwell in the society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning and culture?
You have often decried education. What of your wasted efforts through your ignorance of simple mathematics? How soon would you have found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown you your error? We'll take a look at those hills across the river first, said I, and see what we find. I am still doubtful about variations. I have been brought up to believe that the needle is true to the pole. The next morning was a bright June one. We were up early and had breakfast. Goodloe was charmed. He recited. Keats, I think it was, and Kelly or Shelly, while I broiled the bacon. We were getting ready to cross the river, which was little more than a shallow creek there, and explore the many sharp-peaked, cedar-covered hills on the other side.
My good Ulysses, said Goodloe, slapping me on the shoulder while I was washing the ten breakfast plates. Let me see the enchanted document once more. I believe it gives directions for climbing the hill shaped like a pack-saddle. I never saw a pack-saddle. What is it like, Jim? Score one against culture, said I. I'll know it when I see it. Goodloe was looking at Old Brando's document when he ripped out the most uncleagiate swear word. Come here, he said, holding the paper up against the sunlight. Look at that, he said, laying his finger against it. On the blue paper, a thing I had never noticed before, I saw stand out in white letters, the word and figures. Malvern, 1898. What about it, I asked.
It's the watermark, said Goodloe. The paper was manufactured in 1898. The writing on the paper is dated 1863. This is a palpable fraud. Oh, I don't know, said I. The Rundles are pretty reliable, plain, uneducated country people. Maybe the paper manufacturers tried to perpetuate this window? And then Goodloe Banks went as wild as his education permitted. He dropped the glasses off his nose and glared at me. I have often told you you were a fool, he said. You have let yourself be imposed upon by a clodhopper, and you have imposed upon me. How? you asked. Have I imposed upon you? By your ignorance, said he. Twice I have discovered serious flaws in your plans that a common school education should have enabled you to avoid.
And, he continued, I have been poor to expense That I could ill afford in pursuing this swindling quest. I am done with it. I rose and pointed a large pewter spoon at him, fresh from the dishwater. Good Lord Banks, I said. I cannot one parboiled navy bean for education. I always barely tolerated it in anyone, and I despised it in you. What has your learning done for you? It is a curse to yourself and a bore to your friends. Away, I said. Away with your watermarks and variations. They are nothing to me. They shall not deflect me from the quest. I pointed with my spoon across the river to a small mountain shaped like a pack saddle. I am going to search that mountain, I went on, for the treasure.
Decide now whether you are in it or not. If you wish to let a watermark or variation shake your soul, you are no true adventurer. Decide. A white cloud of dust began to rise far down the river road. It was the mail wagon from Hesperus to Chico. Goodloe flagged it. "'I am done with this window,' said he, thoroughly. "'No one but a fool would pay any attention to that paper now.' "'Well, you always were a fool, Jim. I leave you to your fate.' He gathered his personal traps, climbed into the mail wagon. I adjusted his glasses nervously, and flew away in a cloud of dust.
After I had washed the dishes and staked the horses on new grass, I crossed the shallow river and made my way slowly through the cedar bricks up to the top of the hill, shaped like a pack saddle. It was a wonderful June day. Never in my life had I seen so many birds, so many butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers. and such waned and stained beasts of the air and fields. I investigated a hill shaped like a pack saddle from base to summit. I found an absolute absence of signs relating to buried treasure. There was no pile of stones, no ancient blazes on the trees, none of the evidences of the three hundred thousand dollars, as set forth in the document of Old Man Rundle. I came down the hill in the cool of the afternoon.
Suddenly, out of the cedar break, I stepped into a beautiful green valley, where a tributary small stream ran into the Alamito River.
And there I was startled to see what it took to be a wild man with an unkempt beard and ragged hair pursuing a giant butterfly with brilliant wings.
Perhaps He is an escaped madman. I thought, I wondered how he has strayed so far from seeds of education and learning. And then, I took a few more steps and saw a vine-covered cottage near the small stream. And in the little grassy glade, I saw May Martha Mangum plucking wildflowers. She straightened up and looked at me. For the first time since I knew her, I saw her face, which was the color of the white keys of a new piano, turn pink. I walked toward her without a word. She let the gathered flowers trickle slowly from her hand to the grass. I knew you would come, Jim, she said clearly. Father wouldn't let me write, but I knew you would come. What followed, you may guess. There was my wagon and team.
Just across the river.
I've often wondered what good too much education is to a man if he can't use it for himself. If all the benefits of it are to go to others, where does he come in? From May, Martha Mangum abides with me. There is an eight-room house in a live oak grove, and a piano with an automatic player, and a good start to order three thousand head of cattle is under a fence. And when I ride home at night, my pipe and slippers are put away in places where they cannot be found. But who cares for that? Who cares? Who cares?
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8 08 - To Him Who Waits 21:11
O'Henry To Him Who Waits The hermit of the hudson was hustling about his cave with unusual animation. The cave was on or in the top of a little spur of the Catskills. That had strayed down to the river's edge and, not having a ferry ticket, had to stop there. The Bijou Mountains were densely wooded and were infested by ferocious squirrels and woodpeckers that forever menaced the summer transients. Like a badly sewn strip of white braid, a macadamized road ran between the green skirt of the hills and the foamy lace of the river's edge. A dim path wound from the comfortable road up a rocky height to the hermit's cave. One mile upstream was the viewpoint inn to which summer folk from the city came, leaving cool electric-fanned apartments that they might be driven about in burning sunshine, shrieking in gasoline launches by spindle-legged modrids bearing the blankest of shields.
Train your lorgnette upon the hermit. Let your eye receive the personal touch that shall endear you to the hero. A man of forty. Judging him fairly, with long hair curling at the ends, dramatic eyes, and a forked brown beard like those that were imposed upon the West some years ago by self-appointed divine healers who succeeded the grasshopper crop. His outward vesture appeared to be kind of gunny-sacking, cut, and made into a garment that would have made the fortune of a London tailor. His long, well-shaped fingers, delicate nose, and a poise of manner raised him high above the class of hermits who fear water. and bury money in oyster cans in their caves and spots indicated by rude crosses chipped in the stone wall above.
The hermit's home was not altogether a cave. The cave was an addition to the hermitage, which was a rude hut made of poles daubed with clay and covered with the best quality of rust-proof sink roofing. In the house proper there were stone slabs for seats, a rustic bookcase made of unplanned poplar planks. and a table formed of a wooden slab laid across two upright pieces of granite, something between the furniture of a Druid temple and that of a Broadway beefsteak dungeon. Hung against the walls were skins of wild animals purchased in the vicinity of 8th Street in University Place, New York. The rear of the cabin merged into the cave. There the hermit cooked his meals on a rude stone hearth. With infinite patience and an old axe, he had chopped natural shelves in the rocky walls.
On them stood his stores of flour, bacon, lard, talcum powder, kerosene, baking powder, sodament tablets, pepper, salt, and olivio-crimo emulsion for chaps in roughness of the hands and face. The hermit had hermited there for ten years. He was an asset to the viewpoint inn. To its guests, he was second in interest only to the mysterious echo in the haunted glen, and the lover's leap beat him only a few inches flat-footed. He was known far, but not very wide on account of the topography. As a scholar of brilliant intellect who had foresworn the world because he had been jilted in a love affair. Every Saturday night, the Viewpoint Inn sent to him surreptitiously a basket of provisions. He never left the immediate outskirts of his hermitage.
Guests of the inn who visited him said his store of knowledge, wit, and scintillating philosophy were simply wonderful, you know. That summer, the Viewpoint Inn was crowded with guests, so on Saturday nights there were extra cans of tomatoes, and sirloin steak instead of rounds in the hermit's basket. Now you have the material allegations in the case, so make way for romance. Evidently, the hermit expected a visitor. He carefully combed his long hair and parted his apostolic beard. When the ninety-eight-cent alarm clock on a stone shelf announced the hour of five, he picked up his gunny-sacking skirts, brushed them carefully, gathered an oaken staff, and strolled slowly into the thick woods that surrounded the hermitage.
He had not long to wait. Up the faint pathway, slippery with his carpet of pine needles, toiled Beatrix, youngest and fairest of the famous Trenholm sisters. She was all in blue from hat to canvas pumps, bearing intent from the shade of the tinkle of a bluebell at daybreak on a spring Saturday, to the deep hue of a Monday morning at nine when the washerwoman has failed to show up. Beatrix dug her cerulean parasol deep into the pine needles inside. The hermit, on the QT, removed a grass burr from the ankle of one sandaled foot with the big toe of his other one. She blued, and almost starched and ironed him, with her cobalt eyes. It must be so nice, she said in little tremulous gasps, to be a hermit and have ladies climb mountains to talk to you.
The hermit folded his arms and leaned against a tree. Beatrix, with a sigh, settled down upon the mat of pine needles like a bluebird upon her nest. The hermit followed suit. Drawing his feet rather awkwardly under his gunny-sacking. It must be nice to be a mountain, said he, with ponderous lightness, and have angels in blue climb up you instead of flying over you. Mama had neuralgia, said Beatrix, and went to bed, or I couldn't have come. It's dreadfully hot at that horrid old inn. We hadn't the money to go anywhere else this summer. Last night, said the hermit, I climbed to the top of that big rock above us. I could see the lights of the inn and hear a strain or two of the music when the wind was right.
I imagined you moving gracefully in the arms of others, to the dreary music of the waltz amid the fragrance of flowers. Think how lonely I must have been. The youngest, handsomest, and poorest of the famous Trenholm sisters sighed. You haven't quite hit it, she said plaintively. I was moving gracefully at the arms of another. Mama had one of her periodical attacks of rheumatism in both elbows and shoulders, and I had to rub them for an hour with that horrid old liniment. I hope you didn't think that smelled like flowers. You know, there were some West Point boys and a yacht load of young men from the city at last evening's weekly dance. I've known Mama to sit by an open window for three hours with one half of her registering eighty-five degrees and the other half frost-bitten and never sneeze once.
But just let a bunch of ineligibles come around where I am and she'll begin to swell at the knuckles and shriek with pain, and I have to take her to her room and rub her arms. To see Mama dressed, you'd be surprised to know the number of square inches of surface there are to her arms. I think it must be delightful to be a hermit. That cassock or gabardine, isn't it, that you wear is so becoming? Do you make it? Or them? Of course you must have changes, yourself. But what a blessed relief it must be to wear sandals instead of shoes. Think how we must suffer. No matter how small I buy my shoes, they always pinch my toes. Oh, why can't there be lady hermits too? The beautifulest and most adolescent Trenholm sister extended two slender blue ankles that ended in two enormous blue silk bows that almost concealed two fairy oxfords, also of one of the forty-seven shades of blue.
The hermit, as if impelled by a kind of reflex telepathic action, drew his bare toes farther beneath his gunny-sacking. "'I have heard about the romance of your life,' said Miss Trenholm softly. They have it printed on the back of the menu card at the inn. Was she very beautiful and charming? On the bills of fare, muttered the hermit. But what do I care for the world's babble? Yes, she was of the highest and grandest type. Then, he continued, then I thought the world could never contain another equal to her. So I forsook it and repaired to this mountain fastness to spend the remainder of my life alone, to devote and dedicate my remaining years to her memory. It's grand, said Miss Trenholm, absolutely grand.
I think a hermit's life is the ideal one. No bill collectors calling, no dressing for dinner. How I'd like to be one. But there's no such luck for me. If I don't marry this season, I honestly believe Mama will force me into settlement work or trimming hats. It isn't because I'm getting old or ugly, but we haven't enough money left to butt in at any of the swell places any more. And I don't want to marry, unless it's somebody I like. That's why I'd like to be a hermit. Hermits don't ever marry, do they? Hundreds of them, said the hermit, when they've found the right one. But they're hermits, said the youngest and beautifulest, because they've lost the right one, aren't they? Because they think they have, answered the recluse, fatuously.
Wisdom comes to one in a mountain cave as well as to one in the world of swells, as I believe they are called in the Argot. When one of the swells brings it to them, says Miss Trenholm, and my folks are swells, that's the trouble. But there are so many swells at the seashore in the summertime that we hardly amount to more than ripples. So we've had to put our money into river and harbor appropriations. We were all girls, you know. There were four of us. I'm the only surviving one. The others have been married off, all to money. Mama's so proud of my sisters. They send her the loveliest pinwipers in our calendars every Christmas. I'm the only one on the market now. I'm forbidden to look at anyone who hasn't money.
But," began the hermit, But, oh, said the beautifulest, of course hermits have great pots of gold in doubloons buried somewhere near three great oak trees. They all have. I have not, said the hermit regretfully. I'm so sorry, said Miss Trenholm. I always thought they had. I think I must go now. Oh, beyond question she was the beautifulest. Fair lady, began the hermit. I am Beatrix Trenholm. Some call me Trix, she said. You must come to the inn to see me. I haven't been a stone's throw from my cave in ten years, said the hermit. You must come to see me there, she repeated, any evening except Thursday. The hermit smiled weakly. Goodbye, she said, gathering the folds of her pale blue skirt. I shall expect you, but not on Thursday evening, remember.
What an interest it would give to the future menu cards of the Viewpoint Inn to have these printed lines added to them. Only once, during the more than ten years of his lonely existence, did the mountain hermit leave his famous cave. That was when he was irresistibly drawn to the end by the fascinations of Miss Beatrix Trenholm, youngest and most beautiful of the celebrated Trenholm sisters, whose brilliant marriage to—ay, to whom? The hermit walked back to the hermitage. At the door stood Bob Binkley, his old friend and companion of the old days before he had renounced the world. Bob himself arrayed like the orchids of the greenhouse in the summer man's polychromatic garb. Bob, the millionaire, with his fat, firm, smooth, shrewd face, his diamond rings, sparkling fob-chain, and pleated bosom.
He was two years older than the hermit, and looked five years younger. "'You're Hamp Ellison, in spite of those whiskers and that going-away bathrobe,' he shouted. "'I read about you on the bill of fare at the inn. They've run your biography in between the cheese and not responsible for coats and umbrellas. What'd you do it for, Hamp? And ten years, too, gee-willikins.' "'You're just the same,' said the hermit. "'Come in and sit down. Sit on that limestone rock over there. It's softer than the granite.' "'I can't understand it, old man,' said Binkley. "'I can see how you could give up a woman for ten years. But not ten years for a woman. "'Of course I know why you did it. Everybody does. Edith Carr.
She jilted four or five besides you, but you were the only one who took to a hole in the ground. The others had recourse to whiskey, the Klondike, politics—' And that similia similibus cure. But say Hamp. Edith Carr was just about the finest woman in the world, high-toned and proud and noble, and playing her ideals to win at all kinds of odds. She certainly was a crackerjack. After I renounced the world, said the hermit, I never heard of her again. She married me, said Binkley. The hermit leaned against the wooden walls of his ante-cave and wriggled his toes. I know how you feel about it, said Binkley. What else could she do? There were her four sisters and her mother, an old man car. You remember how he put all the money he had into dirigible balloons?
Well, everything was coming down and nothing going up with them, as you might say. Well, I know Edith as well as you do. Although I married her, I was worth a million then, but I've run it up since to between five and six. It wasn't me she wanted as much as... well, it was about like this. She had that bunch on her hands, and they had to be taken care of. Edith married me two months after you did the ground squirrel act. I thought she liked me, too, at the time. And now? inquired the recluse. We're better friends than ever now. She got a divorce from me two years ago. Just incompatibility. I didn't put in any defense. Well, well, well, Hamp, this is certainly a funny dugout you built here. But you always were a hero of fiction.
Seems like you'd have been the very one to strike Edith's fancy. Maybe you did. But it's the bankroll that catches him, my boy. Your caves and whiskers won't do it. Honestly, Hamp, don't you think you've been a darn fool? The hermit smiled behind his tangled beard. He was, and always had been, so superior to the crude and mercenary Binkley that even his vulgarities could not anger him. Moreover, his studies and meditations in his retreat had raised him far above the little vanities of the world. His little mountainside had been almost an Olympus, over the edge of which he saw, smiling, The bolts hurled in the valleys of man below. Had his ten years of renunciation, of thought, of devotion to an ideal, of living scorn of a sordid world been in vain, up from the world had come to him the youngest and beautifulest, fairer than Edith, one and three-seventh times lovelier than these seven years served Rachel.
So the hermit smiled in his beard. When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence, And the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can of baking powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard. There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years had brought her. She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large, thinking, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of things caused him to turn the baking powder can slowly in his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.
"'I am stopping at the end,' said Edith, in low but clear tones. "'I heard of you there. I told myself that I must see you. I want to ask your forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be provided for, but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you and ask your forgiveness.' You have lived here ten years, they tell me, cherishing my memory. I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful heart. If—but it is too late now, of course. Her assertion was a question, clothed, as best it could be, in a loving woman's pride. But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily that his lady had come back to him, if he chose.
He had won a golden crown, if it pleased him to take it. The reward of his decade of faithfulness was ready for his hand, if he desired to stretch it forth. For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with a refined radiance, and then by turns he felt the manly sensations of indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having been, as it were, sought again. And last of all, how strange that it should have come at last. The pale blue vision of the beautifulest of the Trenholm sisters illuminated his mind's eye and left him without a waver. It is too late, he said in deep tones, pressing his baking powder can against his heart. Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path.
The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes shining sadly through the twilight. But he stood inflexible in the doorway of his shack and made no sign. Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening, the hermit was seized by world madness. Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of Elfland, came now and then a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was broadened by the night into an illimitable sea. Those lights, dimly seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away. The waters in front of the inn were gay with fireflies, or were they motorboats smelling of gasoline and oil?
Once the hermit had known these things and had sported with amaryllis in the shade of the red-and-white striped awnings. But for ten years he had turned a heedless ear to these far-off echoes of a frivolous world. But to-night there was something wrong. The casino band was playing a waltz. A waltz! What a fool he had been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that wealth. Tum-ti, tum-ti, tum-ti. How did that waltz go? But those years had not been sacrificed. Had they not brought him the star and pearl of all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of... But do not come on Thursday evening, she had insisted. Perhaps by now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that waltz.
Held closely by West Pointers or city commuters, while he, who had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den. Why should—damn it, said the hermit suddenly. I'll do it. He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga. He dragged a dust-covered trunk from the corner of the cave and with difficulty wrenched open its lid. Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow. Clothes, ten years old and cut, scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory rest and strewn about in painful disorder. A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled razors to perform approximately their office.
Cutting his own hair was beyond the hermit's skill, so he only combed and brushed it backward as smoothly as he could. Charity forbids us to consider the heart-burnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery and society. At the last, the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave, and began to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon. Out of the cavity he thus made, he drew a tin can, and out of the can, three thousand dollars in bills, tightly rolled, and wrapped in oiled silk. He was a real hermit, as this may assure you. You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little mountainside. A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his calves, white duck trousers unacquainted with the tailor's goose, a pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie, and buttoned Congress gaiters.
But think, sir and madam, ten years. From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his hair. Seeing him, With all your shrewdness, you could not have guessed him. You would have said that he played Hamlet, or the tuba, or Pinochle. You would never have laid your hand on your heart and said, He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady, to win another. The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river. Gay lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it. A hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted in and about it. To the left of the dusty roadway, down which the hermit had tramped, were the inn and grill-room.
Something seemed to be on there, too. The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was playing, music different from the two steps and waltzes of the casino band. A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate with its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders. "'What is going on here tonight?' asked the hermit. Well, suh, said the servitor, dey is havin de regular Thursday evening dance at de casino, and in de grill room dey has a beefsteak dinner, suh. The hermit glanced up at the inn. On the hillside, Wentz burst suddenly a triumphant strain of splendid harmony. "'And up there,' said he, they are playing Mendelssohn. What is going on up there?' "'Up in de inn,' said the dusky one.
Dey is a wedding going on. Mr. Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marrying Miss Trinholm, suh.' The young lady, who am quite the belle of the place.
End of To Him Who Waits.
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9 09 - He Also Serves 28:12
Omaha, Nebraska. Options by O'Henry. He also serves.
If I could have a thousand years, just one little thousand years, more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true romance to touch the hem of her robe. Up from ships men come, and from waste places on forests on road and garret and cellar to monder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread, deafness and brighter scramp. The hand is yet steady. Did the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp follower of fortune.
Biography shall claim you But an instant I first knew Honky when he was head waiter at Chop's Little Beef Steak Restaurant and Cafe on Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides. Then, successfully, I caromed against him in the little streets of the big city after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl fisher in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land of adventure, he usually came back to Chubbs for a while. Chubbs was a port for him when Gale was blew too high. But when you dine there, and Hanky went for your steak, you never knew whether he would come to anchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan archipelago.
You wouldn't care for his description. He was soft a voice and hard a face. I rarely had to use more than one eye to quail any approach to a disturbance among Chops customers. One night, I found Hunky standing at the corner of 23rd Street and 3rd Avenue after an absence of several months. In 10 minutes, we had a little wrong table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears began to get busy. I leave out my slight ruses and fins to draw Hunky's word of mouth blows. It all came to something like this. Speaking of the next election, said Honky, did you ever know much about Indians? No. I don't mean the Cooper, Beedle, cigar store, or laughing water kind. I mean the modern Indian, the kind that takes Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the halfback and the other side in football games.
The kind that eats macarons and tea in the afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the ancestral wiki-up. Well, they ain't so bad. I like them better than most foreigners that have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the Indian is this. When he mixes with the white race, he swaps all his own vices for them. of the pale faces, and he retains all his own virtues. Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets them loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep their own vices. And it's going to take a whole standing army someday to place that gang.
But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with Hijack Snake Feeder. A Cherokee, twice removed. A graduate of a Pennsylvania college, and the latest in a pointy-toed, rubber-heeled, paten-cate moccasins, and Madras hunting shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during the land boom. And way got thick. He had got all there, was out of colleges, and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a man of first-class style and brought essays. I'd have been invited to visit rich guys' houses in Boston and such places. There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish about. He took me to see her a few times.
Her name was Florence Bluefeather. Would you want to clear your mind? Of all ideas of schools with nose rings and army blankets, this young lady was whiter than you are and better educated than I ever was. You couldn't have told her from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then one hijack wasn't along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She was educated at the Muscogee College and was making a specialty of, let's see, eth. Yes, ethnology. That's the art that goes back and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from jellyfish, through monkeys, and to the O'Brien's. High Jack had took up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of rioters' assemblies.
Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder parties and such. Having a mutual taste for most information like that was what made them like each other, I suppose. But I don't know. What they call congeniality of tastes ain't always it. Now, when Miss Bluefeather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins German. Well, if the Germans don't Nod, who does? To the Mount Builders of Ohio, with incomprehension and respect. And to then tell her about the Bowery and Coney Island. and sing her a few songs that had heard the Jamaican niggers sing at their church lawn parties. She didn't look much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived here on stilts after a ferry tatanaphyay, New Jersey.
But I was going to tell you more about High Jack. About six months ago, I got a letter from him saying, I'd been commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the meaning of some short-hand notes on some runes, or something of that sort. And if I'd go along, I could squeeze the price into the expense account. Well, I'd been holding a napkin over my arm and chops about long enough then. So, I'd wear a hijack, yes, and send me a ticket. I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me. First of all, was that Florence Bluefeather had suddenly disappeared from her home and environments. Run away, I asked.
Vanished, says High Jack, disappeared like your shadow when the sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then she turned the corner, and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole community turned out to look for her. But we never found a clue. That's bad. That's bad, says I. She was a mighty nice girl, and as smart as you find them. Hijack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss Bluefeather quite highly. I could see that he referred the matter to the whiskey jug. That was his weak point, and many another man's. I've noticed that when a man loses a girl, It generally takes to drink either just before or just after it happens. From Washington, we railroaded to New Orleans, and there took a trampled streamer bound for Belize.
And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yakutan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Bocca de Coyacuyla. Suppose the ship ran against the name in the dark. Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay, says High Jack Snake Feeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory when the squall seem to cease from squalling. We will find bruns here or make them, says High. The government doesn't care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation. Boka de Koyakoyula was a dead town. The biblical towns were read about, tired and siphoned, after they were destroyed. It must have looked like 42nd Street and Broadway compared to this bulk of place.
It still claimed 1,300 inhabitants as estimated, and engraved on a stone courthouse by the census taker in 1597. The citizens were a mixture of Indians and other Indians, but some of them were light-colored. which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that the subpoena server couldn't have reached the monkey ten yards away with the papers. We wondered what kept it from Bean on next to Kansas, but we soon found out that it was Major Bean. Major Bean was the ointment around the fly. He had a cochineal, sarsaparilla, logwood, a nettle, hemp, And all other diewards and pure further alteration concessions cornered. He had five sets of the Boca Dantingama jiggers working for him on shares.
It was a beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E.H., and others of our wisest, when I was in the provinces. But now no more. That peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without even the observation tower showing. Major Bean's idea was this. He had the population go forth into the forest and gather these products. When they brought him in, he gave them one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes, they'd strike and demand a sixth. The Major always gave in to them. The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him hijacked snake-feeder, sat on the porch. And drank rum from noon till midnight.
He said they had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and High Ami could stay with them forever if we would. But High Jack happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology. Runes, says Major Bain. The woods are full of them. I don't know how far they did back, but they was here before I came, High Jack asked. What form of worship the citizens of that locality are addicted to? Why, says the Major, rubbing his nose, I can't hardly say. I imagine it's infidel or Aztec or nonconformist or something like that. There's a church here, a Methodist or some other kind, with a person named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don't assimilate, except on state occasions.
I imagine they worship some kind of gods or idols yet, but Skidder says he has him in a fold. A few days later, Hijack and me, prouling around, strikes a plain path into the forest and follows it a good four miles. Then a branch turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe. Down that, and run up against the finest rune you ever saw. Solid stone with trees and vines and underbrush, all growing up against it, and through it. All over it was chiseled carvings of funny beasts and people that would have been arrested if they'd ever come out in vaudeville that way. We approached it from the rear. Hijack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in Boca. You know how an Indian is? The pale faces fixed its clock.
When they introduced him to fire water, it brought a croat along with him. Han Ki, says he, will explore the ancient temple. It may be that the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology, says he, may yet profit by the vagaries of wind and tide. We went in the rear door of the bomb edifice, which struck a kind of alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport and a stone washstand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood pegs drove into holes in the wall. And that was all. To go out of that furnished apartment into a Harlem Hall bedroom would make you feel like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an east side settlement house.
While I was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall, That the stonemasons must have made when their tools slipped. I stepped into the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet stone floor, six little windows like square potholes. That didn't let much light in.
I looked back over my shoulder and sees Hijack's face three feet away. Hi, says I, of order. And then I noticed he looked funny. I turned around. He'd taken off his clothes to the waist, and he didn't seem to hear me. I touched him and came near beating it. Hijack turned to stone. I had been drinking some rum myself. I said to him loudly, I knew what would happen if you kept it up. Then Hijack comes in from the alcove when he hears me conversing with nobody. And we have a look at Mr. Snakefeeder No. 2. It's a stone idol, or a god, or revised statute, or something. It looks as much like hijack as one green pea looks like itself. It's got exactly his face and size and all color, but steadier on its panes.
It stands on a kind of rostrum or pedestal, and you can see it's been there 10 million years. He's a cousin of mine, sings high, and then he turns solemn. Honky, he says, putting one hand on my shoulder and one on the statues. I'm in the holy temple of my ancestors. Well, if looks goes for anything, says I, you've struck a twin. Stunt side by side with body. Let's see if there's any difference. There wasn't. You know an Indian can keep his face as steel as an iron dog when he wants to, so when Hijack throws his features, you couldn't have told him from the other one. There are some letters, says I, on his knob's pedestal, but I can't make them out. The alphabet of this country seems to be composed of sometimes A, E, I, O, U, but generally Zs, Ls, and Ts.
High Jack's ethnology gets the upper hand of his room for a minute, and he investigates the inscription. Hunky, says he. This is a statue of Tlodopaxo, one of the most powerful gods of the ancient Astex. Glad to know him, says I. Pointing his present condition, he reminds me of the joke Shakespeare got off on Julius Caesar. Who am I saying about your friend? Imperius was his name, dead and turned to stone. No use to write or call him on the phone. Hunky, says Hijack Snakefeeder, looking at me funny. Do you believe in reincarnation? It sounds to me, says I, like either a clean-up of the slaughterhouses or a new kind of Boston Pink. I don't know. I believe, says he. That I am the reincarnation of Telotopexo.
Mine researchers have convinced me that the Cherokees, of all the North American tribes, can boast of the straightest descent from the proud Aztec race. That, says he, was a favorite theory of mine at Florence Bluefeathers. And she, what if she— High Jack grabs my arm and wards his eyes at me. Just then, he looked more like his eminent co-Indian murderer, crazy horse. Well, says I, what if she, what if she, what if she, you're drunk, says I, impersonating idols and believing in, what was it, reincarnation? Let's have a drink, says I. It's as spooky here as the Brooklyn artificial land factory at midnight, with the gas turned down. Just then, I heard somebody coming, and I dragged High Jack into the bedless bedchamber.
There was peepholes brought through the wall, so I could see the whole front part of the temple. Major Bing told me afterward that the ancient priests in charge used to rub through them at the congregation. In a few minutes, an old Indian woman came in with a big oval earthen dish full of grub. She set it on a square block of stone in front of the graven image, and lay down and walloped her face on the floor a few times, and then took a walk for herself. High Jack and me was hungry, so we came out and looked it over. There was goat steaks and fried rice cakes and plantains and cassava, and broiled land crabs and mangoes. Nothing like what you get in chops. We ate hearty. and had another round of rum.
It must be Othacompsus, or whatever you call him, birthday, says I, or do they feed him every day? I thought gods only drank vanilla among catwampus.
Then some more native parties in short kimonos that show their aborigines punctured a near horizon, and me and Hai had to skip back into Father Axelchwe's private boudoir. They came by ones, twos, and threes, and left all sorts of offerings. There was enough grub for Bingham's Nine Gods of War. There was plenty left over for the peace conference at The Hague. They brought jars of honey, and bunches of bananas and bottles of wine, and stacks of tortillas and beautiful shawls, worth one hundred dollars apiece. That the Indian women weave of a kind of vegetable fiber like silk. All of them got down and wriggled on the floor in front of their hard-finished guard, and then sneaked off to the woods again.
I wonder who gets this rake off, remarks High Jack. Oh, says I, there's priests or deputy idols or a committee of disarrangements somewhere in the woods on the job. Wherever you find a god, you'll find somebody waiting to take charge of the burnt offerings. And then we took another swig of rum and walked out to the parlour front door to cool off, for it was as hot inside as the summer camp on the palisades. While we stood there in the breeze, we looked down the path and see the young lady approaching the blessed room. She was barefooted. And tied on a white rope, and carried a wreath of white flowers in her hand. When she got nearer, we saw she had a long blue feather stuck through her black hair.
And when she got nearer still, me and Highjack Snake Feeder grabbed each other to keep from tumbling down on the floor. For the girl's face was as much like Florence Bluefeather's, as it was like Old King Toxicology's. And then... Wilson Hijack's booze drunk this system of ethnology. He drags me inside the back of the statue and says, Lay hold of it, hunky. Put your packet into the other room. I've felt it all the time, says he. I am the reconsideration of the god Locomotor Ataxia, and Florence Bluefeather was my bride a thousand years ago. She has come to seek me in the temple where I used to reign. All right," says I. There's no use arguing against the rum or question. You take his feet. We lifted a three-hundred-pound stone guard and carried him into the back room of the café, the temple I mean, and leaned him against the wall.
It was more work than bouncing three live ones from an all-night Broadway joint on New Year's Eve. Then, High Jack ran out and brought in a couple of them, Indian silk shawls, and began to undress himself. Oh, Figs, says I. Is it thus, a strong drink is an adder and subtractor too? Is it the heat, or the call of the wild that's got you? But High Jack is too full of exaltation and King Juice to reply. He stops the disorbing business, just short of the Manhattan Beach Rules, and then winds them Red and white shawls around him. I then go out and stand on the pedestal as steady as any platinum deity you ever saw, and I look through a peek hole to see what he's up to. In a few minutes, in comes the girl with a flower wreath.
Dand if I wasn't knocked a little silly when she got close. She looked so exactly much like Florence Bluefeather. I wonder, says that to myself. If she has been re-incarcerated, too. If I could see, says I to myself, whether she has a mole on her left. But the next minute, I thought she looked one-eighth of a shade darker than Florence. But she looked good at that. And hijacked and drank all the rum that had been drank. The girl went up within ten feet of the bum idol, and I got down and massaged her nose with the floor, like the rest did. Then, she went nearer, and laid a flower wreath on the block of stone at High Jack's feet. Rummy, as I was, I thought it was kind of nice of her to think of offering flowers instead of household and kitchen provisions.
Even a stone guard ought to appreciate a little sentiment like that on top of the fancy groceries they had piled up in front of him. Then High Jack steps down from his pedestal, quiet, and mentions a few words. That sounded just like the hieroglyphics carved on the walls of the room. The girl gives a little jump backward, and her eyes fly open as big as doughnuts. But she don't beat it. Why didn't she? I'll tell you why. I think why. It don't seem to a girl so supernatural, unlikely, strange and startling, that a stone god should come to life for her. If he was to do it for one of them snub-nosed brown girls on the other side of the woods, now you will be different. But her? I'll bet she said to herself, Well, goodness me, you've been a long time getting on your job.
I've had a minor to speak to you.
But she and High Jack hold hands, and walks away out of the temple together. By the time I'd had time to take another drink, and entered upon the scene. They was twenty yards away, going up the path in the woods that the girl had come down, with the natural scenery already in place. It was just like a play to watch him. She, looking up at him, and him giving back the best that an Indian can hand out in the way of a goo-goo-eye. But there wasn't anything in that reconification and revulsion to think up for me. Hey! "'Engine,' I yelled out to Hijack, "'I forgot a board bill during town, and you're leaving me without a scent. Brace up and cut out a Neapolitan fisherman, and let's go back home.' But on the two goes, without looking once back, until, as you must say, the forest swallowed them up, and I never saw or heard of Hijack's snake feeder from that day to death.
I don't know if the Cherokees came from the Aspics, but if they did, one of them went back. All I could do was to hustle back to that balka place and panhandle Major Bain. He detached himself from enough of his winnings to buy me a ticket home. And I'm back again on the job at Chops, sir, and I'm going to hold it steady. Come around, and you'll find the stakes. As good as ever. I wondered what Hunky McGee thought about his own story. So, I asked him if he had any theories about reincarnation and transmogrification and such mysteries as he had touched upon. Nothing like that, said Hunky positively. What I'll hijack was too much boost and education. They'll do an Indian up every time. But what about Miss Bluefeather?
I persisted. Say, said Hunky, with a grin, that little lady that stole High Jack certainly did give me a jar when I first took a look at her. But it was only for a minute. You remember I told you High Jack said that Miss Florence Bluefeather disappeared from home about a year ago? Well, where she landed four days later, was in as neat of a five-room flat on East 23rd Street as you'd ever walked sideways through, and she's been Mrs. McGee ever since.
End of He Also Serves.
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10 10 - The Moment of Victory 27:29
OPTIONS by O.
HENRY. The Moment of Victory. Ben Granger is a war veteran, aged twenty-nine, which should enable you to guess the war. He is also principal merchant and postmaster of Cadiz. A little town over which the breezes from the Gulf of Mexico perpetually blow. Ben helped to hurl the Don from his stronghold in the Greater Antilles, and then, hiking across half the world, he marched as a corporal usher up and down the blazing tropic aisles of the open-air college in which the Filipino was schooled. Now, with his bayonet beaten into a cheese slicer, he rallies his corporal's guard of cronies in the shade of his well-whittled porch, instead of in the matted jungles of Mindanao. Always have his interest and choice been for deeds rather than for words, but the consideration and digestion of motives is not beyond him, as this story, which is his, will attest.
What is it, he asked me one moonlit eve as we sat among his boxes and barrels, that generally makes men go through dangers and fire and trouble and starvation and battle and such recourses? What does a man do for? Why does he try to outdo his fellow humans and be braver and stronger and more daring and showy than even his best friends are? What's his game? What does he expect to get out of it? He don't do it just for the fresh air and exercise. What would you say now, Bill, that an ordinary man expects, generally speaking, for his efforts along the lines of ambition and extraordinary hustling in the marketplaces? Forums, shooting-galleries, lyceums, battlefields, links, cinder-paths, and arenas of the civilized and versa versa places of the world."
Well, Ben," said I with judicial seriousness, I think we might safely limit the number of motives of a man who seeks fame to three. Two, ambition, which is a desire for popular applause. Two, avarice, which looks to the material side of success. And to love of some woman whom he either possesses or desires to possess. Ben pondered over my words while a mockingbird on the top of a mesquite by the porch trilled a dozen bars. "'I reckon,' said he, "'that your diagnosis about covers a case according to the rules laid down in the copybooks and historical readers. But what I had in my mind was the case of Willie Robbins, a person I used to know.' I'll tell you about them before I close up the store, if you don't mind listening.
Willie was one of our social set up in San Augustine. I was clerking there for Brady and Murchison, wholesale dry goods and ranch supplies. Willie and I belonged to the same German club and athletic association and military company. He played the triangle in our serenading and quartet crowd that used to ring the Welkin three nights a week somewhere in town.
Willie jibed with his name considerable. He weighed about as much as a hundred pounds of veal in his summer suitings, and he had a where-is-Mary expression on his features so plain you could almost see the wool growing on him. And yet you couldn't fence him away from the girls with barbed wire. You know that kind of young fellas, a kind of mixture of fools and angels. They rush in and fear to tread at the same time, but they never fail to tread when they get a chance. He was always on hand when a joyful occasion was had, as the morning paper would say, looking as happy as a king full, and at the same time as uncomfortable as a raw oyster served with sweet pickles. He danced like he had his hind hobbles on, and he had a vocabulary of about 350 words that he made stretch over four Germans a week, and plagiarized for them to get them through two ice cream suppers and a Sunday night call.
He seemed to me to be a sort of mixture of Maltese kitten, sensitive plant, and a member of a stranded two orphans company. I'll give you an estimate of his physiological and pictorial makeup, and then I'll stick Spurs into the side of my narrative. Willie inclined to the Caucasian in his color and manner of style. His hair was opalescent, and his conversation fragmentary. His eyes were the same blue shade as the china dogs on the right-hand corner of your Aunt Ellen's mantelpiece. He took things as they came, and I never felt any hostility against him. I let him live, and so did others. But what does this willy do but coax his heart out of his boots and lose it to Myra Allison, the liveliest, brightest, keenest, smartest, and prettiest girl in San Augustine?
I tell ya, she had the blackest eyes, the shiniest curls, and the most tantalizing- Oh no, you're off. I wasn't a victim. I might have been, but I knew better. I kept out. Joel Granberry was it from the start. He had everybody else beat a couple of leagues and then ceased to a stake in mound. But anyhow, Myra was a nine-pound full merino fall-clip fleece, sacked and loaded on a four-horse team for San Antone. One night, there was an ice cream sociable at Mrs. Colonel Spragans in St. Augustine. We fellas had a big room upstairs open for us to put our hats and things in, and to comb our hair and put on the clean collars we brought along inside the sweatbands of our hats. In short, a room to fix up in, just like they have everywhere at Hot Tone Doin's.
A little farther down the hall was the girls' room, which they used to powder up in and so forth. Downstairs we That is, the St. Augustine Social Cotillion and Merrymakers Club had a stretcher put down in the parlor where our dance was going on. Willie Robbins and me happened to be up in our cloakroom, I believe we called it, when Myra Allison skipped through the hall on her way downstairs from the girls' room. Willie was standing before the mirror, deeply interested in smoothing down the blonde grass pot on his head, which seemed to give him lots of trouble. Myra was always full of life and devilment. She stopped and stuck her head in at her door. She certainly was good-looking. But I knew how Joe Granberry stood with her.
So did Willie, but he kept on baaing after her and following her around. He had a system of persistence that didn't coincide with pale hair and light eyes. "'Hello, Willie,' says Myra. "'What are you doing to yourself in the glass?' "'I'm trying to look fly,' says Willie." "'Well, you could never be fly,' says Myra, with a special laugh, which was the provokingest sound I ever heard except the rattle of an empty canteen against my saddle horn." I looked around at Willie after Myra had gone. He had a kind of lily-white look on him, which seemed to show that her remark had, as you might say, disrupted his soul. I never noticed anything in what she said that sounded particularly destructive to a man's ideas of self-consciousness, but he was set back to an extent you could scarcely imagine.
After we went downstairs with our clean collars on, Willie never went near Myra again that night. After all, he seemed to be a deluded kind of skim milk sort of a chap, and I never wondered that Joe Granberry beat him out. The next day, the battleship Maine was blown up. And then pretty soon somebody—I reckon it was Joe Bailey or Ben Tillman or maybe the government—declared war against Spain. Well, everybody south of Mason and Hamlin's line knew the North by itself couldn't whip a whole country the size of Spain. So the Yankees commenced to holler for help, and the Johnny Rebs answered the call. We're coming, Father William. A hundred thousand strong and then some, was the way they sung it. And the old party lines drawn by Sherman's March and the Ku Klux and nine-cent cotton and the Jim Crow streetcar ordinances faded away.
We became one undivided country, with no north, very little east, a good-sized chunk of west, and a south that loomed up as big as the first foreign label on a new eight-dollar suitcase. Of course. The dogs of war weren't a complete pack without a yelp from the San Augustine Rifles Company D of the 14th Texas Regiment. Our company was among the first to land in Cuba and strike terror into the hearts of the foe. I'm not gonna give you a history of the war. I'm just dragging it in to fill out my story about Willa Robbins, just as the Republican Party dragged it in to help out the election in 1898. If anybody ever had heroitis, it was that Willie Robbins. From the minute he set foot on the soil of the tyrants of Castile, he seemed to engulf danger as a catlapse of cream.
He certainly astonished every man in our company from the Captain Up. You'd have expected him to gravitate naturally to the job of an orderly to the Colonel, or typewriter in the Commissary, but not any. He created the part of the flaxen-haired boy hero who lives and gets back home with the goods, instead of dying with an important dispatch in his hands at the colonel's feet. Our company got into a section of Cuban scenery where one of the messiest and most unsung portions of the campaign occurred. We were out every day capering around in the bushes and having little skirmishes with the Spanish troops that looked more like kinda tired-out feuds than anything else. The war was a joke to us, and of no interest to them.
We never could see it any other way than as a howling farce comedy that the San Augustine rifles were actually fighting to uphold the Stars and Stripes. And the blamed little senors didn't get enough pay to make them care whether they were patriots or traitors. Now and then, somebody would get killed. Seemed like a waste of life to me. I was at Coney Island when I went to New York once, and one of them downhill skidding apparatuses they call roller coasters flew the track and killed a man in a brown sack suit. Whenever the Spaniards shot one of our men, it struck me as just about as unnecessary and regrettable as that was. But I'm dropping Willie Robbins out of the conversation. He was out for bloodshed, laurels, ambition, medals.
He didn't seem to be afraid of any other recognized forms of military danger, such as Spaniards, cannonballs, canned beef, gunpowder, or nepotism. He went forth with his pallid hair and shiny blue eyes and ate up Spaniards like you would sardines out of canopy. Wars and rumbles of wars never flustered him. He would stand guard duty, mosquitoes, hardtack, treat, and fire with equally perfect unanimity. No blondes in history ever come in comparison distance of them, except the Jack of Diamonds and Queen Catherine of Russia.
I remember one time a little caballard of Spanish men saundered out from behind a patch of sugar cane and shot Bob Turner, the first sergeant of our company, while we were eating dinner. As required by the Army regulations, we fellows went through the usual tactics of falling into line, saluting the enemy, and loading and firing, kneeling. That wasn't the Texas way of scrapping, but... Being a very important addendum and annex to the regular army, the San Agustin rifles had to conform to the red tape system of getting even. By the time we had got out of Upton's Tactics, turned to page 57, said, one, two, three, one, two, three, a couple of times, and got blank cartridges into our spring fields, the Spanish outfit had smiled repeatedly, rolled and lit cigarettes by squads, and walked away contemptuously.
I went straight to Captain Floyd and says to him, Sam, I don't think this war is a straight game. You know as well as I do that Bob Turner was one of the whitest fellows that ever threw a leg over a saddle. And now, these wire pollers in Washington have fixed his clock. He is politically and ostensibly dead. That ain't fair. Why should they keep this thing up? If they want Spain licked, Why don't they turn the San Augustine Rifles and Joe Sealy's Ranger Company and a carload of West Texas Deputy Sheriffs onto these Spaniards and let us exonerate them from the face of the earth? I never did, says I, care much about fighting by the Lord Chesterfield Ring rules. I'm gonna hand in my resignation and go home if anybody else I am personally acquainted with gets hurt in this wall.
If you can get somebody in my place, Sam, says I. I'll quit first next week. I don't want to work in an army that don't give its help a chance. Never mind my wages, says I. Let the Secretary of the Treasury keep them.
Well, then, says the Captain to me, your allegations and estimations of the tactics of war, government, patriotism, guard mounting, and democracy are all right. But I've looked into the system of international arbitration. And the ethics of justifiable slaughter a little closer, maybe, than you have. Now, you can hand in your resignation the first of next week if you are so minded. But if you do, says Sam, I'll order a corporal's guard to take you over by that limestone bluff on the creek and shoot enough lead into you to ballast a submarine airship. I'm captain of this company, and I've swore allegiance to the amalgamated states, regardless of sectional... "...successional and congressional differences."
Now, have you got any smoking tobacco?" winds up Sam. Mine got wet when I swum the creek this morning. The reason I drag all this non-ex parte evidence in is because Willie Robbins was standing there listening to us. I was a second sergeant, and he was a private then. But among us Texans and Westerners, there never was as much tactics and subordination as there was in the regular army. We never called our captain anything but Sam. Except when there was a lot of major generals and admirals around so as to preserve the discipline. And says Willie Robbins to me, in a sharp construction of voice much unbecoming to his light hair and previous record, You ought to be shot, Ben, for omitting any such sentiments.
A man that won't fight for his country is worse than a horse thief. If I was the Cap, I'd put you in the guardhouse for thirty days on round steak and tamales. "'War,' says Willie, "'is great and glorious. I didn't know you were a coward.' "'I'm not,' says I. "'If I was, I'd knock some of the pallidness off your marble brow. "'I'm lenient with you,' I says, "'just as I am with the Spaniards.' Because you have always reminded me of something with mushrooms on the side. Why, you little lady of shalott, says I. You underdone leader of cotillions. You glassy fashion in molded form. You white pine soldier made in the Cisalpine Alps in Germany for the late New Year trade. Do you know of whom you are talking to?
"'We've been in the same social circle,' says I, "'and I've put up with you because you seem so meek and self-unsatisfying. I don't understand why you have so sudden taken a personal interest in chivalrousness and murder. Your nature's undergone a complete revelation. Now, how is it?' "'Well, you wouldn't understand, Ben,' says Willie, giving one of his refined smiles and turning away. "'Come back here,' says I, catching him by the tail of his khaki coat. "'You made me kind of mad, in spite of the aloofness in which I have heretofore held you. You are out for making a success in this hero business, and I believe I know what for. You are doing it either because you are crazy, or because you expect to catch some girl by it.
Now, if it's a girl, I got something here to show you.' I wouldn't have done it, but I was plum mad." And I pulled a San Augustine paper out of my hip pocket and showed him an item. It was half a column about the marriage of Mara Allison and Joe Granberry. Willie laughed, and I saw I hadn't touched him. Oh, says he, everybody knew that was gonna happen. I heard about that a week ago. And then he gave me the laugh again. "'All right,' says I. "'Then why do you so recklessly chase the bright rainbow of fame? Do you expect to be elected president, or do you belong to a suicide club?' And then Captain Sam interferes. "'You gentlemen, quit John and go back to your quarters,' says he, "'or I'll have you escorted to the guardhouse.
Now, scat, both of you. Before you go, which one of you has got any chewing tobacco?' "'We're off, Sam,' says I. It's supper time anyhow. But what do you think of what we was talking about? I've noticed you throwing out a good many grappling hooks for this here balloon called fame. What's ambition anyhow? What does a man risk his life day after day for? Do you know of anything he gets in the end that can pay him for trouble? I want to go back home, says I. I don't care whether Cuba sinks or swims, and I don't give a pipe full of rabbit tobacco whether Queen Sophia Christina or Charlie Culberson rules these fairy isles, and I don't want my name on any list except the list of survivors. But I notice you, Sam, says I, seeking the bubble notoriety and the cannon's larynx a number of times.
Now, what do you do it for? Is it ambition? Business? Or some freckle-faced Phoebe at home that you're heroing for. Well, Ben, says Sam, kinda hefting his sword out from between his knees, as your superior officer, I could court-martial you for attempted cowardice and desertion. But I won't. And I'll tell you why I'm trying for promotion and the usual honors of war and conquest. A major gets more pay than a captain, and I need the money. Correct for you, says I. I can understand that. Your system of fame-seeking is rooted in the deepest soil of patriotism. But I can't comprehend, says I, why Willie Robbins, whose folks at home are well off, and who used to be as meek and undesirous of notice as a cat with cream on his whiskers, should all at once develop into a warrior, bold with the most fire-eating kind of proclivities.
And the girl in his case seems to have been eliminated by marriage to another fellow. I reckon, says I, it's a plain case of just common ambition. He wants his name, maybe, to go thundering down the coroners of time. It must be that. Well, without itemizing his deeds, Willie sure made good as a hero. He simply spent most of his time on his knees begging our captain to send him on forlorn hopes and dangerous scouting expeditions. In every fight, he was the first man to mix it at close quarters with the Don Alfonso's. He got three or four bullets planted in various parts of his autonomy. Once he went off with a detail of eight men and captured a whole company of Spanish. He kept Captain Floyd busy writing out recommendations of his bravery to send into headquarters.
And he began to accumulate medals for all kinds of things—heroism and target shooting and valor and tactics and uninsubordination—and all the little accomplishments that looked good to the third assistant secretaries of the War Department. Finally, Cap Floyd got promoted to be a Major General, or a Knight Commander of the Maine Herd or something like that. He pounded around on a white horse, all desecrated up with gold leaf and hen feathers and a good Templar's hat, and wasn't allowed by the regulations to speak to us. And Willa Robbins was made captain of our company. And maybe he didn't go after the wreath of fame then. As far as I could see, it was him that ended the war. He got 18 of us boys.
Friends of his, too, killed in battles that he stirred up himself, and that didn't seem to mean necessary at all. One night, he took twelve of us, and waded through a little rill about a hundred and ninety yards wide, and climbed a couple of mountains, and sneaked through a mile of neglected shrubbery, and a couple of rock coys, and into a rye straw village, and captured a Spanish general named, as they said, Benevitas. Benny seemed to me hardly worth the trouble, being a blackish man without shoes or cuffs, and anxious to surrender and throw himself on the commissary of his foe. But that job gave Willie the big boost he wanted. The St. Augustine News and the Galveston, St. Louis, New York, and Kansas City papers printed his picture and columns of stuff about him.
Old St. Augustine simply went crazy over its gallant son. The news had an editorial tearfully begging the government to call off the regular army and the National Guard and let Willett carry on the rest of the war single-handed. It's said that a refusal to do so would be regarded as proof that the northern jealousy of the south was still as rampant as ever. If the war hadn't ended pretty soon, I don't know to what heights of gold braid and encomiums Willett would have climbed, but it did. There was a succession of hostilities just three days after he was appointed a colonel, and got in three more medals by registered mail, and shot two Spaniards while they were drinking lemonade in an ambuscade.
Our company went back to San Augustine when the war was over. There wasn't anywhere else for it to go. And what do you think? The old town notified us in print, by wire cable, special delivery, and a nigger named Saul sent on a gray mule to San Antone that they was gonna give us the biggest blowout. Complimentary, elementary, and elementary that ever disturbed the Kildees on the sand flats outside of the immediate contiguity of the city. I say oui, but it was all meant for ex-private Captain DeFacto and Colonel-elect Willie Robbins. The town was crazy about them. They notified us that the reception they were going to put up would make the Mardi Gras in New Orleans look like an afternoon tea in Barry St.
Edmunds with a curate's aunt. Well... The San Augustine Rifles got back home on schedule time. Everybody was at the depot giving forth Roosevelt Democrat, they used to be called Rebel, yells. There was two brass bands, and the mayor, and schoolgirls in white frightening the streetcar horses by throwing Cherokee roses in the streets, and, well, maybe you've seen a celebration by a town that was inland and out of water. They wanted Brevet Colonel Willie to get into a carriage and be drawn by prominent citizens and some of the city old men to the armory. But he stuck to his company and marched at the head of it up Sam Houston Avenue. The buildings on both sides was covered with flags and audiences, and everybody hollered, Robins or Hello Willie, as we marched up in files of fours.
I never saw an illustriouser looking human in my life than Willie was. He had at least seven or eight medals and diplomas and decorations on the breast of his khaki coat. He was sunburnt the color of a saddle, and he certainly done himself proud. They told us at the depot that the courthouse was to be illuminated at half past seven, and there would be speeches and chili con carne at the Palace Hotel. Miss Delphine Thompson was to read an original poem by James Whitcomb Ryan, and Constable Hooker had promised us a salute of nine guns from Chicago that he had arrested that day. After we had disbanded in the armory, Willie says to me, "'Wanna walk out of peace with me?' "'Why, yes,' says I, if it ain't so far that we can't hear the tumult and the shouting die away.
"'I'm hungry myself,' says I, and I'm pining for some home grub.'" But I'll go with you. Willie steered me down some side streets till we came to a little white cottage in a new lot, with a twenty-by-thirty-foot lawn decorated with brickbats and old barrel staves. Halton, give the counter sign, says I to Willie. Don't you know this dugout? It's the bird's nest that Joe Granberry built before he married Myra Allison. What are you going there for? But Willie already had the gate open. He walked up the brick wall to the steps, and I went with him. Myra was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, sewing. Her hair was smoothed back, kinda hasty, and tied in a knot. I never noticed till then that she had freckles.
Joe was at one side of the porch in his shirt sleeves, with no collar on and no signs of a shave, trying to scrape out a hole among the brickbats and tin cans to plant a little fruit tree in. He looked up, but never said a word, and neither did Myra. Willie was sure dandy-looking in his uniform, with medals strung on his breast and his new gold-handled sword. You'd never have taken him for the little white-headed snipe that the girls used to order about and make fun of. He just stood there for a minute, looking at Myra with a peculiar little smile on his face, and then he says to her, slow and kinda holding onto his words with his teeth, Oh, I don't know. Maybe I could if I tried. That was all that was said.
Willie raised his hat, and we walked away. And somehow, when he said that, I remembered, all of a sudden, the night of that dance and Willie brushing his hair before the looking glass, and Myra sticking her head in the door to Guyum. When we got back to Sam Houston Avenue, Willie says, Well, so long, Ben. I'm going down home and get off my shoes and take a rest. You, says I, what's the matter with you? Ain't the courthouse jammed with everybody in town waiting to honor the hero? And two brass bands? And recitations and flags and jags and grub to follow waiting for you? Willie sighs. All right, Ben, says he darned if I didn't forget all about that. And that's why I say, concluded Ben Granger, That you can't tell where ambition begins any more than you can where it is going to wind up.
End of the moment of victory.
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11 11 - The Head-Hunter 27:20
The Headhunter. When the war between Spain and George Dewey was over, I went to the Philippine Islands. There, I remained as bushwhacker correspondent for my paper, until its managing editor notified me that an 800-word cablegram describing the grief of a pet carabao over the death of an infant moro was not considered by the office to be war news. So I resigned, and came home. On board the trading vessel that brought me back, I pondered much upon the strange things I had sensed in the weird archipelago of the yellow-brown people. The maneuvers and skirmishings of the petty war interested me not. I was spellbound by the outlandish and unreadable countenance of that race that had turned its expressionless gaze upon us out of an unguessable past.
Particularly during my stay in Mindanao, had I been fascinated and attracted by that delightfully original tribe of heathen known as the Headhunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men, never seen but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence, paralleling the trail of their prey through unmapped forests, across perilous mountaintops, adown bottomless chasms, into uninhabitable jungles, always near with the invisible hand of death uplifted, betraying their pursuit only by such signs as a beast or a bird or a gliding serpent might make. A twig crackling in the awful, sweat-soaked night. A drench of dew showering from the screening foliage of a giant tree.
A whisper at even from the rushes of a water level. A hint of death for every mile and every hour. They amuse me greatly, those little fellows of one idea. When you think of it, their method is beautifully and almost hilariously effective and simple. You have your hut, in which you live, and carry out the destiny that was decreed for you. Spiked to the jam of your bamboo doorway is a basket made of green wides, plated. From time to time, as vanity or anui or love or jealousy or ambition may move you, you creep forth with your snickersnee and take up the silent trail. Back from it you come, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of your victim, which you deposit with pardonable pride in the basket at the side of your door.
It may be the head of your enemy, your friend, or a stranger. According as competition, jealousy, or simple sportiveness has been your incentive to labor. In any case, your reward is certain. The village men, in passing, stop to congratulate you, as your neighbor on weaker planes of life stops to admire and praise the begonias in your front yard. Your particular brown maid lingers with fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of your love for her. You chew betel nut and listen, content, to the intermittent soft drip from the ends of the severed neck arteries, and you show your teeth and grunt like a water buffalo, which is as near as you can come to laughing, at the thought that the cold, acephalous body of your door ornament is being spotted by wheeling vultures in the Mindanaan wilds.
Truly, the life of the merry headhunter captivated me. He had reduced art and philosophy to a simple code. To take your adversary's head, To basket it at the portal of your castle, to see it lying there, a dead thing, with its cunning and stratagems and power gone. Is there a better way to foil his plots? To refute his arguments? To establish your superiority over his skill and wisdom? The ship that brought me home was captained by an erratic Swede, who changed his course and deposited me, with genuine compassion, in a small town on the Pacific coast of one of the Central American republics, a few hundred miles south of the port to which he had engaged to convey me. But I was wearied of movement and exotic fancies, so I leaped contentedly upon the firm sands of the village of Mahata, telling myself I should be sure to find there the rest that I craved.
After all, Far better to linger there, I thought, lulled by the sedative plash of the waves and the rustling of palm fronds, than to sit upon the horsehair sofa of my parental home in the east, and there, cast down by currant wine and cake, and scourged by fatuous relatives, drivel into the ears of gaping neighbors sad stories of the death of colonial governors.
When I first saw Chloe Green, she was standing, all in white, In the doorway of her father's tile-roofed Dobie house, she was polishing a silver cup with a cloth, and she looked like a pearl laid against black velvet. She turned on me a flatteringly protracted but a wiltingly disapproving gaze, and then went inside, humming a light song to indicate the value she placed upon my existence. Small wonder, for Dr. Stamford... The most disreputable professional man between Juno and Valparaiso, and I were zig-zanging along the turfy street, tunelessly singing the words of Auld Lang Syne to the air of Muzzer's Little Coal Black Coon. We had come from the Ice Factory, which was Mohata's Palace of Wickedness, where we had been playing billiards and opening black bottles, white with frost, that we dragged with strings out of old Sandoval's ice-cold vats.
I turned in sudden rage to Dr. Stamford, as sober as the verger of a cathedral. In a moment, I had become aware that we were swine cast before a pearl. "'You beast,' I said. "'This is half your doing, and the other half is the fault of this cursed country. I'd better have gone back to Sleepytown and died in a wild orgy of currant wine and buns than to have had this happen.' Stamford filled the empty street with his roaring laughter. "'You, too,' he cried. And all is quick as the popping of a cork. Well, she does seem to strike agreeably upon the retina. But don't burn your fingers. All Mojada will tell you that Louis Deveaux is the man. We will see about that, said I, and perhaps whether he is a man as well as the man.
I lost no time in meeting Louis Deveaux. That was easily accomplished, for the foreign colony in Mojada numbered scarce a dozen. And they gathered daily at a half-decent hotel kept by a Turk, where they managed to patch together the fluttering rags of country and civilization that were left them. I sought Deveaux before I did my pearl of the doorway, because I had learned a little of the game of war, and knew better than to strike for a prize before testing the strength of the enemy. A sort of cold dismay, something akin to fear, filled me when I had estimated him. I found a man, so perfectly poised, So charming, so deeply learned in the world's rituals, so full of tact, courtesy, and hospitality, so endowed with grace and ease and a kind of careless, haughty power, that I almost overstepped the bounds in probing him, in turning him on the spit to find the weak point that I so craved for him to have.
But I left him whole. I had to make bitter acknowledgment to myself that Louis Deveaux was a gentleman worthy of my best blows, and I swore to give him them. He was a great merchant of the country, a wealthy importer and exporter. All day he sat in a fastidiously appointed office, surrounded by works of art and evidences of his high culture, directing through glass doors and windows the affairs of his house. In person he was slender and hardly tall. His small, well-shaped head was covered with thick brown hair, trimmed short, and he wore a thick brown beard also cut close and to a fine point. His manners were a pattern. Before long, I had become a regular and a welcome visitor at the Green Home.
I shook my wild habits from me like a worn-out cloak. I trained for the conflict with the care of a prizefighter and the self-denial of a Brahmin. As for Chloe Green, I shall weary you with no sonnets to her eyebrow. She was a splendidly feminine girl, as wholesome as a November Pippin, and no more mysterious than a windowpane. She had whimsical little theories that she had deduced from life. And that fitted the maxims of Epictetus-like princess gowns. I wonder, after all, if that old duffer wasn't rather wise. Chloe had a father, the Reverend Homer Green, and an intermittent mother who sometimes palely presided over a twilight teapot. The Reverend Homer was a burr-like man with a life work. He was writing a concordance to the scriptures and had arrived as far as kings.
Being, presumably, a suitor for his daughter's hand, I was timber for his literary outpourings. I had the family tree of Israel drilled into my head until I used to cry aloud in my sleep, and Amenadah begat J.I.C., and so forth, until he had tackled another book. I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer's concordance would be worked up as far as the seven vials mentioned in Revelations about the third day after they were opened. Louis Deveaux, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the Greens. It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life. Luckily, or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a boy. My appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and the cursed theories and hobbies of paterfamilias.
Chloe called me Tommy, and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo her. With DeVoe, she was vastly more reserved. He was the man of romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her fancy leaned toward him. I was closer to her, but standing in no glamour. I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me the American way of fighting, with cleanness and pluck and everyday devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles. Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of us. But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred in a man.
It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating as to its application. I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her. "'Tommy,' said she, "'I don't want a man to show his love for me by leading an army against another country and blowing people off the earth with cannons.' "'If you mean that the opposite way,' I answered, "'as they say women do, I'll see what I can do. The papers are full of this diplomatic row in Russia.' My people know some big people in Washington who are right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission and— I'm not that way, interrupted Chloe. I mean what I say. It isn't the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a woman.
When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show his love in little ways. He must never forget, after hearing at once, that I do not like to have anyone walk at my left side, that I detest bright-colored neckties, that I prefer to sit with my back to alight, that I like candied violets, that I must not be talked to when I am looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often long for dates stuffed with English walnuts. "'Frivolity,' I said with a frown. Any well-trained servant would be equal to such details.
"'And he must remember,' went on Chloe, "'to remind me of what I want when I do not know myself what I want.' "'You're rising in the scale,' I said. "'What you seem to need is a first-class clairvoyant.' "'And if I say that I'm dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, "'and stamp my foot when I say it,' He must know by that that what my soul craves is salted almonds, and he will have them ready in his pocket. Now, said I, I'm at a loss. I do not know whether your soul's affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer. Chloe turned her pearly smile upon me. Take less than half of what I said as a jest, she went on, and don't think too lightly of the little things, boy. Be a paladin if you must, but don't let it show on you.
Most women are only very big children, and most men are only very little ones. Please us. Don't try to overpower us. When we want a hero, we can make one, out of even a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it falls to the ground.
That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever. That is a kind of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments. Your temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there, laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the coal-tar derivatives. Pernicious fever is a case for a simple mathematician instead of a doctor. It is merely this formula. Vitality plus the desire to live minus the duration of the fever equals the result. I took to my bed in the two-room thatched hut where I had been comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum. That was not for myself. Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes and the Pacific. He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into condition.
My boy, said he, my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will do you no good. But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter, will arouse in you hatred and anger. Two stimulants that will add ten percent to your chances. You're as strong as a caribou calf, and you'll get well, if the fever doesn't get in a knockout blow when you're off your guard. For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindu widow on a burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the door like a petrified statue of what's-the-use, attending to her duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at worst times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in Sleepytown.
One afternoon I ordered a tasca de Vamos, and got up and dressed carefully. I took my temperature, which I was pleased to find 104. I paid almost dainty attention to my dress, choosing solicitously a necktie of a dull and subdued hue. The mirror showed I was looking little the worse from my illness. The fever gave brightness to my eyes and color to my face. And while I looked at my reflection, my color went and came again, as I thought of Chloe Green and the millions of eons that had passed since I'd seen her, and of Louis Deveaux and the time he had gained on me. I went straight to her house. I seemed to float rather than walk. I hardly felt the ground under my feet. I thought, pernicious fever must be a great boon to make one feel so strong.
I found Chloe and Louis DeVoe sitting under the awning in front of the house. She jumped up and met me with a double handshake. "'I'm glad, glad, glad to see you out again,' she cried, every word a pearl strung on the string of her sentence. "'You're well, Tommy. Or better, of course. I wanted to come see you, but they wouldn't let me.' "'Oh, yes,' said I carelessly. It was nothing. Merely a little fever. I'm out again, as you see.' We three sat there and talked for half an hour or so. Then Chloe looked out yearningly and almost piteously across the ocean. I could see in her sea-blue eyes some deep and intense desire. DeVoe, curse him, saw it too. What is it? we asked in unison. Coconut pudding, said Chloe pathetically.
I've wanted some, oh, so badly, for two days. It's got beyond a wish. It's an obsession. The coconut season is over. Said Deveaux in that voice of his that gave thrilling interest to his most commonplace words. I hardly think one could be found in Moada. The natives never use them except when they are green and the milk is fresh. They sell all the ripe ones to the fruiterers. Wouldn't a broiled lobster or a Welsh rabbit do as well? I remarked, with the engaging idiocy of a pernicious fever convalescent. Chloe came as near to pouting as a sweet disposition and a perfect profile would allow her to come. The Reverend Homer poked his ermine-lined face through the doorway and added a concordance to the conversation.
"'Sometimes,' said he, "'Old Campos keeps the dried nuts in his little store on the hill.'" But it would be far better, my daughter, to restrain unusual desires and partake thankfully of the daily dishes that the Lord has set before us." Stuff," said I. How was that?" asked the Reverend Homer sharply. I say it's tough, said I, to drop into the vernacular that Miss Green should be deprived of the food she desires, a simple thing like calcimine pudding. Perhaps, I continued solicitously, some pickled walnuts or a fricassee of Hungarian butternuts would do as well. Everyone looked at me with a slight exhibition of curiosity. Louis de Voix arose and made his adieus. I watched him until he had sauntered slowly and grandiosely to the corner, around which he turned to reach his great warehouse and store.
Chloe made her excuses, and went inside for a few minutes to attend to some detail affecting the seven o'clock dinner. She was a past mistress in housekeeping. I had tasted her puddings and bread with beatitude. When all had gone, I turned casually and saw a basket made of plated green wides hanging by a nail outside the doorjamb. With a rush that made my hot temples throb, there came vividly to my mind recollections of the headhunters. Those grim, flinty, relentless little men. Never seen but chilling the warmest noonday by the subtle terror of their concealed presence. From time to time, as vanity or ennui, or love or jealousy or ambition may move him, one creeps forth with his snickersnee and takes up the silent trail.
Back he comes, triumphant, bearing the severed, gory head of his victim, his particular brown Or white maid lingers with fluttering bosom, casting soft tiger's eyes at the evidence of his love for her.
I stole softly from the house and returned to my hut. From its supporting nails in the wall I took a machete, as heavy as a butcher's cleaver and sharper than a safety razor, and then I chuckled softly to myself and set out to the fastidiously appointed private office Of Monsieur Louis Deveaux, usurper to the hand of the Pearl of the Pacific. He was never slow at thinking. He gave one look at my face and another at the weapon in my hand as I entered his door, and then he seemed to fade from my sight. I ran to the back door, kicked it open, and saw him running like a deer up the road toward the wood that began two hundred yards away. I was after him, with a shout. I remember hearing children and women screaming and seeing them flying from the road.
He was fleet, but I was stronger. A mile, and I had almost come up with him. He doubled cunningly and dashed into a break that extended into a small canyon. I crashed through this after him, and in five minutes had him cornered in an angle of insurmountable cliffs. There his instinct of self-preservation studied him, as it will study even animals at bay. He turned to me, quite calm, with a ghastly smile. Oh, Rayburn. He said, with such an awful effort at ease that I was impolite enough to laugh rudely in his face. Oh, Rayburn, said he. Come, let's have done with this nonsense. Of course, I know it's the fever, and you're not yourself. But collect yourself, man. Give me that ridiculous weapon now, and let's go back and talk it over.
I will go back, said I, carrying your head with me. We will see how charmingly it can discourse when it lies in the basket at her door. Come, said he persuasively, I think better of you than to suppose that you tried this sort of thing as a joke. But even the vagaries of a fever-crazed lunatic come sometime to a limit. What is this talk about heads and baskets? Get yourself together and throw away that absurd cane-chopper. "'What would Miss Goyne think of you?' he ended, with the silky cajolery that one would use toward a fretful child. "'Listen,' said I, "'at last you have struck upon the right note. What would she think of me?' "'Listen,' I repeated. "'There are women—' I said, who look upon horsehair sofas and current wine as dross.
To them, even the calculated modulation of your well-trimmed talk sounds like the dropping of rotten plums from a tree in the night. They are the maidens who walk back and forth in the villages, scorning the emptiness of the baskets at the doors of the young men who would win them. One such as they, I said, is waiting. Only a fool would try to win a woman by drooling like a braggart in her doorway, or by waiting upon her whims like a footman. They are all daughters of Herodias, and to gain their hearts one must lay the heads of his enemies before them with his own hands. Now, bend your neck, Louis Deveaux. Do not be a coward. As well as a chatterer at a ladies' tea table. There, there, said DeVoe falteringly.
You know me, don't you, Rayburn? Oh, yes, I said. I know you. I know you. I know you. But the basket is empty. The old men of the village and the young men, and both the dark maidens and the ones who are as fair as pearls, walk back and forth and see its emptiness. Will you kneel now, or must we have a scuffle? It is not like you to make things go roughly and with bad form, but the basket is waiting for your head. With that, he went to pieces. I had to catch him as he tried to scamper past me like a scared rabbit. I stretched him out and got a foot on his chest, but he squirmed like a worm, although I appealed repeatedly to his sense of propriety and the duty he owed to himself as a gentleman not to make a row.
But at last he gave me the chance, and I swung the machete. It was not hard work. He flopped like a chicken during the six or seven blows that it took to sever his head, but finally he lay still, and I tied his head in my handkerchief. The eyes opened and shut thrice while I walked a hundred yards. I was red to my feet with the drip, but what did that matter? With delight, I felt under my hands the crisp touch of his short, thick brown hair and close-trimmed beard. I reached the House of the Greens and dumped the head of Louis DeVoe into the basket that still hung by the nail in the doorjamb. I sat in the chair under the awning and waited. The sun was within two hours of setting. Chloe came out and looked surprised.
"'Where have you been, Tommy?' she asked. "'You were gone when I came out.' "'Look in the basket,' I said, rising to my feet. She looked, and gave a little scream. Of delight, I was pleased to note. "'Oh, Tommy,' she said. "'It was just what I wanted you to do. "'It's leaking a little, but that doesn't matter. "'Wasn't I telling you? "'It's the little things that count, and you remembered.' "'Little things?' She held the unsanguined head of Louis DeVoe in her white apron. Tiny streams of red widened on her apron and dripped upon the floor. Her face was bright and tender. Little things indeed, I thought again. The headhunters are right. These are the things that women like you to do for them. Chloe came close to me.
There was no one in sight. She looked up at me with sea-blue eyes that said things they had never said before. You think of me, she said. You are the man I was describing. You think of the little things, and they are what make the world worth living in. The man for me must consider my little wishes, and make me happy in small ways. He must bring me little red peaches in December if I wish for them, and then I will love him till June. I will have no knight in armor slaying his rival or killing dragons for me. You please me very well, Tommy." I stooped and kissed her. Then a moisture broke out on my forehead, and I began to feel weak. I saw the red stains vanish from Chloe's apron, and the head of Louis DeVoe turned to a brown, dried coconut.
There will be coconut pudding for dinner, Tommy Boy, said Chloe gaily, and you must come. I must go in for a little while. She vanished in a delightful flutter. Dr. Stamford tramped up hurriedly. He seized my pulse as though it were his own property that I had escaped with. "'You are the biggest fool outside of any asylum,' he said angrily. "'Why did you leave your bed? And the idiotic things you've been doing! And no wonder with your pulse going like a sledgehammer!' "'Name some of them,' said I. "'Devaux sent for me,' said Stanford. He saw you from his window go to old Campos' store, chase him up the hill with his own yardstick, and then come back and make off with his biggest coconut. It's the little things that count after all, said I.
It's your little bed that counts with you just now, said the doctor. You come with me at once, or I'll throw up the case. You're as loony as a loon. So I got no coconut pudding that evening, but I conceived a distrust as to the value of the method of the headhunters. Perhaps for many centuries, the maidens of the village may have been looking wistfully at the heads in the baskets at the doorways, longing for other and lesser trophies. End of The Headhunter
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12 12 - No Story 27:45
Henry No story To avoid having this book hurled into a corner of the room by the suspicious reader, I will assert in time that this is not a newspaper story. You will encounter no shirt-sleeved, omniscient city editor, no prodigy cub reporter just off the farm, no scoop, no story, no anything. But if you will concede me the setting of the first scene in the reporter's room of the morning beacon, I will repay the favor by keeping strictly my promises set forth above. I was doing space work on the beacon, hoping to be put on a salary. Someone had cleared with a rake or a shovel a small space for me at the end of a long table, piled high with exchanges. Congressional records and old files. There I did my work.
I wrote whatever the city whispered or roared or chuckled to me on my diligent wanderings about its streets. My income was not regular. One day Trip came in and leaned on my table. Trip was something in the mechanical department. I think he had something to do with the pictures, for he smelled of autographer's supplies, and his hands were always stained and cut up with acids. He was about 25 and looked 40. Half of his face was covered with short curly red whiskers that looked like a doormat with a welcome left off. He was pale and unhealthy and miserable and phoning and an insidious borrower of sums ranging from 25 cents to a dollar. One dollar was his limit. He knew the extent of his credit as well as the Chemical National Bank knows the amount of H2O that collateral will show on analysis.
When he sat on my table, he held one hand with the other to keep both from shaking. Whiskey. He had a spurious air of lightness and bravado about him that deceived no one, but was useful in his borrowing because it was so pitifully and perceptibly assumed. This day I had coaxed from the cashier five shining silver dollars as a grumbling advance on a story that the Sunday editor had reluctantly accepted, so if I was not feeling at peace with the world, at least an armistice had been declared, and I was beginning with ardour to write a description of the Brooklyn Bridge by moonlight. Well, trip. Said I, looking up at him rather impatiently. How goes it? He was looking today more miserable, more cringing and haggard and downtrodden than I had ever seen him.
He was at that stage of misery where he drew your pity so fully that you longed to kick him. Have you got a dollar? asked I have, said I. And again I said, I have, more loudly and inhospitably. And for besides, and I had hard work corks carrying them out of old Atkinson, I can tell you. And I drew them, I continued, to meet a want, a hiatus, a demand, a need, an exigency, a requirement of exactly five dollars.
I was driven to emphasis by the premonition that I was to lose one of the dollars on the spot.
I don't want to borrow any, said Tripp, and I breathed again. I thought you'd like to get put onto a good story, he went on. I've got a rattling fine one for you. You ought to make it run a column at least. It'll make it dandy if you work it upright. It'll probably cost you a dollar or two to get the stuff. I don't want anything out of it myself. I became placated. The proposition showed that Tripp appreciated past favors, although he did not return them. If he had been wise enough to strike me for a quarter, then he would have got it. What is the story? I asked, poising my pencil with a finely calculated editorial air. I'll tell you, said Tripp. It's a girl, a beauty. One of the howlingest Amsdons dunes you ever saw.
Rosebuds covered with dew, violets in their mossy bed, and truck like that. She's lived on Long Island twenty years and never saw New York City before. I ran against her on 34th Street. She'd just got in on the East River Ferry. I tell you, she is a beauty that would take the hydrogen out of all the peroxides in the world. She stopped me on the street and asked me where she could find George Brown. Asked me where she could find George Brown in New York City. What do you think of that? I talked to her and found that she was going to marry a young farmer named Dodd. Hiram died next week, but it seems that George Brown still holds the championship in her youthful fancy. George had greased his cowhide boots some years ago and came to the city to make his fortune, but he forgot to remember to show up again at Greenberg.
And Hiram got in as second best choice. But when it comes to the scratch, Ada, her name is Ada Lowry. Saddles a nag and rides eight miles to the railroad station and catches the 6.45 a.m. train for the city. Looking for George, you know, you understand about women, George wasn't there, so she wanted him. Well, you know, I couldn't leave her loose in Wolftown on the Hudson. I suppose she thought the first person she inquired of would say... George Brown, why, yes, let me see. He's a short man with light blue eyes, ain't he? Oh, yes, you'll find George in 125th Street, right next to the grocery. He's Bill Clerk in a saddle and harness store. That's about how innocent and beautiful she is. You know those little Long Island waterfront villages like Greenberg?
A couple of duck farms for sport and clams and about nine summer visitors for industries. That's the kind of a place she comes from. But say, you ought to see her. What could I do? I don't know what money looks like in the morning. And she'd paid her last cent of pocket money for her railroad ticket except a quarter, which she had squandered on gumdrops. She was eating them out of a paper bag. I took her to a boarding house on 32nd Street, where I used to live, and hocked her. She is in soak for a dollar. That's old Mother McGuinness price per day. I'll show you the house. What? Words are these, Trip, said I. I thought you said you had a story. Every ferryboat that crosses the East River brings or takes away girls from Long Island.
The premature lines on Trip's face grew deeper. He frowned seriously from his tangle of hair. He separated his hands and emphasized his answer with one shaking forefinger. Can't you see? He said. What a rattling fine story it would make. You could do it fine. All about the romance, you know, and describe the girl, and put a lot of stuff in it about true love, and sling in a few stickfuls of funny business, joshing the Long Islanders about being green, and, well, you know how to do it. You ought to get fifteen dollars out of it anyhow, and it'll cost you only about four dollars. You'll make a clear profit of eleven. How will it cost me four dollars? I asked suspiciously. One dollar to Mrs. McGuinness, Tripp asked promptly, and two dollars to pay the girls' fare back home.
And the fourth dimension? I inquired, making a rabid mental calculation. One dollar to me, said Trip, for whiskey. Are you on? I smiled enigmatically and spread my elbows as if to begin writing again. But this grim, abject, spacious, subservient, burl-like wreck of a man would not be shaken off. His forehead suddenly became shiningly moist. Don't you see, he said with a sort of desperate calmness, that this girl has got to be sent home today, not tonight nor tomorrow, but today. I can't do anything for her. You know, I'm the janitor and corresponding secretary of the Down-and-Out Club. I thought you could make a newspaper story out of it and win out a piece of money on general results. But anyhow, don't you see that she's got to get back home before tonight?
And then I began to feel that dull, leaden, soul-depressing sensation known as the sense of duty. Why should that sense fall upon one as a weight and a burden? I knew that I was doomed that day to give up the bulk of my store of hard-wrung coin to the relief of this Edel Lowry. But I swore to myself that Trip's whiskey dollar would not be forthcoming. He might play knight-errant at my expense, but he would indulge in no wassail afterward, commemorating my weakness and gullibility. In a kind of chilly anger, I put on my coat and hat. Trip, submissive, cringing, vainly endeavoring to please, conducted me via the streetcars to the human porn shop of Mother McGuinness. I paid the fares. It seems that the collodion-scented Don Quixote and the smallest minted coin were strangers.
Trip pulled the bell at the door of the moldy red brick boarding house. At its faint tinkle, he paled and crouched as a rabbit makes ready to spring away at the sound of a hunting dog. I guessed what a life he had led, terror-haunted by the coming footsteps of landladies. Give me one of the doors. Quick, he said. The door opened six inches. Mother McGuinness stood there with white eyes. They were white, I say. And a yellow face holding together at her throat with one hand a gingy pink flannel dressing sack. Trip thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it brought us entry. She's in the parlor, said the McGuinness, turning the back of her sack upon us. In the dim parlor a girl sat at the crackled marble center table, weeping comfortably and eating gumdrops.
She was a flawless beauty. Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched a gumdrop, you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied this senseless confection. Eve, at the age of five minutes, must have been a ringer for Miss Ada Lowry at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced, and the gumdrop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naive interest, such as a puppy dog a prize-winner would bestow upon a crawling beetle or a frog. Tripp took his stand by the table with the fingers of one hand spread upon it, as an attorney or a master of ceremonies might have stood, but he looked the master of nothing. His faded coat was buttoned high, as if it sought to be charitable to deficiencies of tie and linen.
I thought of a Scotch terrier at the sight of his shifty eyes in the glade between his tangled hair and beard. For one ignoble moment I felt ashamed of having been introduced as his friend in the presence of so much beauty in distress, but evidently Tripp meant to conduct the ceremonies, whatever they might be. I thought I detected in his actions and pose an intention of foisting the situation upon me as material for a newspaper story, in a lingering hope of extracting from me his whiskey dollar. "'My friend,' I shuddered, "'Mr. Chalmers,' said Tripp, "'will tell you, Miss Lowry, the same that I did. He's a reporter, and he can hand out the talk better than I can. That's why I brought him with me.' "'Oh, Tripp, wasn't it the silver-tongue-orator you wanted?' "'He's wise to a lot of things, and he'll tell you now what's best to do.' I stood on one foot, as it were, as I sat in my rickety chair.
Why, er, Miss Lowery, I began secretly enraged at Tripp's awkward opening. I am at your service, of course, but, er, as I haven't been apprised of the circumstances of the case, I, er... Oh, said Miss Lowery, beaming for a moment, it ain't as bad as that. There ain't any circumstances. It's the first time I've ever been in New York, except once when I was five years old, and I had no idea it was such a big town. And I met Mr. Snipp on the street and asked him about a friend of mine, and he brought me here and asked me to wait. "'I advise you, Miss Lowry,' said Tripp, "'to tell Mr. Chalmers all. He's a friend of mine. I was getting used to it by this time. And he'll give you the right tip.' "'Why, certainly,' said Miss Ada, chewing a gumdrop toward me.
"'There ain't anything to tell except that... well, everything's fixed for me to marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening. I has... Caught two hundred acres of land with a lot of shorefront and one of the best truck farms on the island. But this morning I had my horse saddled up and I rode over to the station. I told him at home I was going to spend the day with Susie Adams. It was a story, I guess, but I don't care. And I came to New York on the train, and I met Mr. Mr. Flip on the street and asked him if he knew where I could find J... J... Now, Miss Laurie, broke in Trip loudly and with much bad taste, I thought as she hesitated with her word. You like this young man, Hiram Dodd, don't you? He is all right and good to you, ain't he?
Of course I like him. Said Miss Lowry emphatically. He's all right, and of course he's good to me. So is everybody. I could have sworn it myself. Throughout Miss Ada Lowry's life, all men would be too good to her. They would strive, contrive, struggle, and compete to hold umbrellas over her hat, check her trunk, pick up her handkerchief, and buy for her soda at the fountain. But, went on Miss Lowry, last night I got to thinking about George and I... Down went the bright gold, head upon dimpled clasped, hands on the table, such a beautiful April storm. Unrestrainedly she sobbed. I wished I could have comforted her, but I was not George, and I was glad I was not Hiram. And yet I was sorry, too.
By and by the shower passed. She straightened up, brave and halfway smiling. She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made her eyes more bright and tender. She took a gumdrop and began her story. "'I guess I'm a terrible hayseed,' she said between her little gulps and sighs. "'But I can't help it.' George Brown and I were sweethearts since he was eight and I was five. When he was nineteen, that was four years ago, he left Greenberg and went to the city. He said he was going to be a policeman or a railroad president or something, and then he was coming back for me. But I never heard from him anymore, and I... I... liked him. Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Trip hurled himself into the crevasse and damned it.
Confound him! I could see his game. He was trying to make a story of it for his sordid ends and profit. Go on, Mr. Chalmers, said he, and tell the lady what's the proper caper. That's what I told her. You'd hand it to her straight. Spiel up. I coughed and tried to feel less wrathful toward Trip. I saw my duty. Cunningly, I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped. Trip's first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady must be sent back to Greenberg that day. She must be argued with, convinced, assured, instructed, ticketed, and returned without delay. I hated Hiram and despised George, but duty must be done. Noblesse oblige, and only five silver dollars are not strictly romantic compatibles, but sometimes they can be made to jibe.
It was mine to be Sir Oracle, and then pay the freight. So I assumed an air that mingled Solomon's with that of the general passenger agent of the Long Island Railroad. Miss Lowery, said I as impressively as I could. Life is rather a queer proposition after all. There was a familiar sound to these words after I had spoken them, and I hope Miss Lowery had never heard Mr. Cohen's song. Those whom we first love we seldom wed. Our earlier romances, tinged with the magic radiance of youth, often fail to materialize. The last three words sounded somewhat trite when they struck the air. But those fondly cherished dreams... I went on, may cast a pleasant afterglow on our future lives, however impracticable and vague they may have been.
But life is full of realities, as well as visions and dreams. One cannot live on memories. May I ask, Miss Lowry, if you think you could pass a happy, that is, a contented and harmonious life with Mr. Dodd? If in other ways than romantic recollections he seems to, er, fill the bill, as I might say. Oh, I's all right," answered Miss Lowry. Yes, I could get along with him fine. He's promised me an automobile and a motorboat, but somehow, when it got so close to the time I was to marry him, I couldn't help wishing, well, just thinking about George. Something must have happened to him, or he'd have written. On the day he left, he and me got a hammer and a chisel and cut a diamond to two pieces. I took one piece, and he took the other, and we promised to be true to each other and always keep the pieces till we saw each other again.
I've got mine at home now, in a ring-box, in the top drawer of my dresser. I guess I was silly to come up here looking for him. I never realized what a big place it is. And then Tripp joined in with a little grating laugh that he had still trying to drag in a little story or drama to earn the miserable dollar that he craved. Oh, the boys from the country forget a lot when they come to the city and learn something. I guess George maybe is on the bum or got... Roped in by some other girl, or maybe gone to the dogs on account of Whiskey or the races. You listen to Mr. Chalmers and go back home, and you'll be all right. But now the time was come for action, for the hands of the clock were moving close to noon.
Frowning upon Trip, I argued gently and philosophically with Miss Lowry, delicately convincing her of the importance of returning home at once, and I impressed upon her the truth that it would not be absolutely necessary to her future happiness that she mentioned to high the wonders of the fact of her visit to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George. She said she had left her horse, unfortunate Rossinant, tied to a tree near the railroad station. Tripp and I gave her instructions to mount the patient steed as soon as she arrived and ride home as fast as possible. There she was to recount the exciting adventure of a day spent with Susie Adams. She could fix Susie, I was sure of that, and all would be well.
And then, being susceptible to the barbed arrows of beauty, I warmed to the adventure. The three of us hurried to the ferry, and there I found the price of a ticket to Greenberg to be but a dollar and eighty cents. I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty cents for Miss Lowry. We saw her aboard her ferryboat. And stood watching her wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch imaginable. And then Trip and I faced each other, brought back to earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the somber verities of life. The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling. I looked at Trip and almost sneered. He looked more careworn, contemptible, and disreputable than ever.
I fingered the two silver dollars remaining in my pocket and looked at him with the half-closed eyelids of contempt. He mustered up an imitation of resistance. Can't you get a story out of it? He asked huskily. Some sort of a story, even if you have to fake part of it? Not a line. Said I. I can fancy the look on Grimes' face if I should try to put over any slush like this, but we've helped the little lady out, and that'll have to be our only reward. I'm sorry, said Tripp almost inaudibly. I'm sorry you're out your money. Now it seemed to me like a find of a big story, you know, that is a sort of thing that would write up pretty well. Let's try to forget it, said I with a praiseworthy attempt at gaiety, and take the next car across town.
I steeled myself against his unexpressed by palpable desire. He should not coax, cajole or wring from me the dollar he craved. I had had enough of this wild goose chase. Trip feebly unbuttoned his coat of the faded pattern and glossy seams to reach for something that had once been a handkerchief deep down in some obscure and cavernous pocket. As he did so, I caught the shine of a cheap silver-plated watch chain across his vest, and something dangling from it caused me to stretch forth my hand and seize it curiously. It was the half of a silver dime that had been cut in halves with a chisel. What? I said, looking at him keenly. Oh, yes, he responded dully. George Brown, alias Tripp. What's the use?
Barring the WCTU, I'd like to know if anybody disapproves of my having produced promptly from my pocket Tripp's whiskey dollar. and unhesitatingly laying it in his hand.
End of no story.
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13 13 - The Higher Pragmatism 21:11
One.
Where to go for wisdom has become a question of serious import. The ancients are discredited. Plato is boilerplate. Aristotle is tottering. Marcus Aurelius is reading. Aesop has been copyrighted by Indiana. Solomon is still solemn. You couldn't get anything out of Epictetus with a pick. The ant, which for many years served as a model of intelligence and industry in the school readers, has been proven to be a doddering idiot and a waster of time and effort. The owl today is hooted at. Chautauqua conventions have abandoned culture and adopted Diabolo. Greybeards give glowing testimonials to the vendors of patent hair restorers. There are typographical errors in the almanacs published by the daily newspapers.
College professors have become, but there shall be no personalities. To sit in classes, to delve into the encyclopedia or the past performances page will not make us wise. As the poet says, knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. Wisdom is dew which, while we know it not, soaks into us, refreshes us, and makes us grow. Knowledge is a strong stream of water turned on us through a hose. It disturbs our roots. Then let us rather gather wisdom. But how to do so requires knowledge. If we know a thing, we know it. But very often we are not wise to it that we are wise and... But let's go on with the story. Two. Once upon a time I found a ten-cent magazine lying on a bench in Little City Park. Anyhow, that was the amount he asked me for when I sat on the bench next to him.
He was a musty, dingy, and tattered magazine, with some queer stories bound in him, I was sure. He turned out to be a scrapbook. I am a newspaper reporter, I said to him to try him. I have been detailed to write up some of the experiences of the unfortunate ones who spend their evenings in this park. May I ask you to what you attribute your downfall in... I was interrupted by a laugh from my purchase, a laugh so rusty and unpracticed that I was sure it had been his first for many a day. Oh, no, no, said he. You ain't a reporter. Reporters don't talk that way. They pretend to be one of us and say they've just got in on the blind baggage from St. Louis. I can tell a reporter on site. Park bums get to be fine judges of human nature.
We sit here all day and watch the people go by. I can size up anybody who walks past my bench in a way that would surprise you." "'Well,' I said, "'go on and tell me. How do you size me up?' "'I should say,' said the student of human nature with unpardonable hesitation, That you was, say, in the contracting business, or maybe worked in a store, was a sign painter, you stopped in the park to finish your cigar, and thought you'd get a little free monologue out of me. Still, you might be a plasterer or a lawyer, it's getting kind of dark, you see, and your wife won't let you smoke at home. I frowned gloomily. But judging again, went on the reader of men, I'd say you ain't got a wife. No, said I, rising restlessly, no, no, no, I ain't.
But I will have by the arrows of Cupid, that is, if—my voice must have trailed away and muffled itself in uncertainty and despair. I see you have a story yourself, said the dusty vagrant, impudently it seemed to me. Suppose you take your dime back and spin your yarn for me. I am interested myself in the ups and downs of unfortunate ones who spend their evenings in the park. Somehow that amused me. I looked at the frowsy derelict with more interest. I did have a story. Why not tell it to him? I had told none of my friends. I had always been a reserved and bottled-up man. It was physical timidity or sensitiveness, perhaps both, and I smiled to myself in wonder when I felt an impulse to confide in this stranger and vagabond.
Jack, said I. Mac, said he. Mac, said I, I'll tell you. Do you want the dime back in advance, said he. I handed him a dollar. The dime, said I, was the price of listening to your story. Right on the point of the jaw, said he. Go on. And then, incredible as it may seem to the lovers of the world who confide their sorrows only to the night wind and the gibbous moon, I laid bare my secret to that wreck of all things that you would have supposed to be in sympathy with love. I told him of the days and weeks and months that I had spent in adoring Mildred Telfair. I spoke of my despair, my grievous days and wakeful nights, my dwindling hopes and distress of mind. I even pictured to this night prowler her beauty and dignity, the great sway she had in society, and the magnificence of her life as the elder daughter of an ancient race whose pride overbalanced the dollars of the city's millionaires.
Why don't you cop the lady out? asked Mac, bringing me down to earth in dialect again. I explained to him that my worth was so small, my income so minute, and my fears so large that I hadn't the courage to speak to her of my worship. I told him that in her presence I could only blush and stammer, and that she looked upon me with a wonderful, maddening smile of amusement. She kind of moves in the professional class, don't she? asked Mac. The Telfair family, I began haughtily. I mean professional beauty, said my hearer. She is greatly and widely admired, I answered cautiously. Any sisters? One. You know any more girls? Why, several, I answered, and a few others? Say, said Mac, tell me one thing, can you hand out the dope to other girls?
Can you chin em and make matinee eyes at em and squeeze em, you know what I mean? You're just shy when it comes to this particular dame, the professional beauty, ain't that right? In a way, you have outlined the situation with approximate truth. I admitted. I thought so, said Mac grimly. Now, that reminds me of my own case. I'll tell you about it. I was indignant, but concealed it. What was this loafer's case, or anybody's case compared with mine? Besides, I had given him a dollar and ten cents. Feel my muscle. Said my companion, suddenly flexing his biceps. I did so mechanically. The fellows in gyms are always asking you to do that. His arm was as hard as cast iron.
Four years ago, said Mac, I could lick any man in New York outside of the professional ring. Your case and mine is just the same. I come from the west side. Between 30th and 14th, I won't give a number on the door. I was a scrapper when I was 10, and when I was 20, now amateur in the city could stand up for rounds with me. It's a fact. You know Bill McCarty? No? He managed the smokers, for some of them swell clubs. Well, I knocked out everything Bill brought up before me. I was a middleweight, but could train down to a welfare when necessary. I boxed all over the Westside, all bouts and benefits and private entertainments, and was never put out once. But, say the first time I put my foot in the ring with a professional, I was no more than a canned lobster.
I don't know how it was. I seemed to lose heart. I guess I got too much imagination. There was a formality and publicness about it that kind of weakened my nerve. I never won a fight in the ring. Lightweights and all kinds of scrubs used to sign up with my manager and then walk up and tap me on the wrist and see me fall. The minute I seen the crowd and a lot of gents in evening clothes down in front and seen a professional come inside the ropes, I got as weak as ginger ale. Of course, it wasn't long till I couldn't get no backers, and I didn't have any more chances to fight a professional or many amateurs either. But let me tell you. I was as good as most men inside the ring or out. It was just that dumb dead feeling I had when I was up against the regular that always done me up.
Well, sir, after I had got out of the business, I got a mighty grouch on. I used to go around town licking private citizens and all kinds of unprofessionals just to please myself. I'd lick cops in dark streets and car conductors and cab drivers and dream in whenever I could start a row with them. It didn't make any difference how big they were or how much signs they had. I got away with them. If I'd only just have had the confidence in the ring that I had beating up the best man outside of it, I'd be wearing black pearls and heliotrope silk socks today. One evening I was walking along near the Bowery, thinking about things, when along comes a slumming party. About six or seven there was, all in swallowtails and these silk hats that don't shine.
One of the gang kinda shoves me off the sidewalk. I hadn't had a scrap in three days, and I just says, delighted, and hits him back of the air. Well, we had it. That Johnny put up as decent a little fight as you'd want to see in the moving pictures. It was on a side street and no cops around. The other guy had a lot of science, but it only took me about six minutes to lay him out. Some of the Swallowtails dragged him up against some steps and began to fan him. Another one of them comes over to me and says, Young man? Do you know what you've done? Oh, beat it, says I. I've done nothing but a little punching bag work. Take Freddy back to Yale and tell him to quit studying sociology on the wrong side of the sidewalk.
My good fellow, says he, I don't know who you are, but I'd like to. You've knocked out Rady Burns, the champion middleweight of the world. He came to New York yesterday to try to get a match on with Jim Jeffries. If you... But when I come out of my faint, I was laying on the floor in a drugstore saturated with aromatic spirits of ammonia. If I'd known that was Reddy Burns, I'd have got down in the gutter and crawled past him instead of handing him one like I did. Why, if I'd ever been in a ring and seen him climbing over the ropes, I'd have been all to the cell volatile. So that's what imagination does, concluded Mac. And as I said, your case and mine is simultaneous. You'll never win out. You can't go up against professionals.
I tell you, it's a park bench for yours in this romance business. Mack the pessimist laughed harshly. I am afraid I don't see the parallel, I said coldly. I have only a very slight acquaintance with the prize ring. The derelict touched my sleeve with his forefinger for emphasis as he explained his parable. Every man, said he with some dignity, has got his lamps on something that looks good to him. With you it's this dame that you're afraid to say your say to. With me it was to win out in the ring. Well, you'll lose just like I did. Why do you think I shall lose, I asked warmly. Cause, says he, you're afraid to go in the ring. You doesn't stand up before a professional. Your case and mine is just the same.
You're an amateur, and that means that you'd better keep outside of the ropes. Well, I must be going. I said, rising and looking with elaborate care at my watch. When I was twenty feet away, the park bencher called to me. Much obliged for the dollar, he said, and for the dime. But you'll never get her. You're in the amateur class. Serves you right, I said to myself for hobnobbing with the tramp. He's impudence. But as I walked... His words seemed to repeat themselves over and over again in my brain. I think I even grew angry at the man. I'll show him, I finally said aloud, I'll show him that I can fight ready burns too, even knowing who he is. I hurried to a telephone booth and rang up the Telfair residence.
A soft sweet voice answered. Didn't I know that voice? My hand holding the receiver shook. Is that you? said I, employing the foolish words that formed the vocabulary of every talker through the telephone. Yes, this is I? came back the answer in the low, clear-cut tones that are an inheritance of the tailfares. Who is it, please? It's me, said I, less ungrammatically than egotistically. It's me, and I've got a few things that I want to say to you right now and immediately and straight to the point. Dear me," said the voice, oh, it's you, Mr. Arden? I wondered if any accent on the first word was intended. Mildred was fine at saying things that you had to study out afterward. Yes," said I, I hope so.
And now, to come down to brass tacks, I thought that rather vernacularism, if there is such a word, as soon as I had said it, but I didn't stop to apologize. You know, of course, that I love you and that I have been in that idiotic state for a long time. I don't want any more foolishness about it. That is, I mean, I want an answer from you right now. Will you marry me or not? Hold the wire, please. Keep out, Central. Hello? Hello? Will you or will you not? That was just the uppercut for Eddie Byrne's chin. The answer came back. Why, Phil, dear, of course I will. I didn't know that you... that is, you never said... Oh, come up to the house, please. I can't say what I want to over the phone. You are so importunate, but please come up to the house, won't you?
Would I? I rang the bell of the Telfair house violently. Some sort of a human came to the door and shooed me into the drawing room. Oh well, said I to myself, looking at the ceiling. Anyone can learn from anyone. That was a pretty good philosophy of Max, anyhow. He didn't take advantage of his experience, but I get the benefit of it. If you want to get into the professional class, you've got to... I stopped thinking then. Someone was coming down the stairs. My knees began to shake. I knew then how Mac had felt when a professional began to climb over the ropes. I looked around foolishly for a door or a window by which I might escape. If it had been any other girl approaching, I mightn't have...
But just then the door opened, and this, Mildred's younger sister, came in. I'd never seen her look so much like a glorified angel. She walked straight up to me, and... and... I'd never noticed before what perfectly wonderful eyes and hair Elizabeth Telfair had. Feel? She said in the telfer's sweet thrilling tones, why didn't you tell me about it before? I thought it was sister you wanted all the time until you telephoned to me a few minutes ago. I suppose Mac and I always will be hopeless amateurs. But as the thing has turned out in my case, I'm mighty glad of it.
End of the Higher Pragmatism
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14 14 - Best-Seller 25:17
R-O-X-A-N-N-E-W-E-B-E-R.com. Options by O. Henry. Bestseller. One. One day last summer, I went to Pittsburgh. Well, I had to go there on business. My chair car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one usually sees on chair cars. Most of them were ladies in brown silk dresses, cut with square yokes, with lace insertion and dotted veils, who refused to have the windows raised. Then there was the usual number of men, who looked as if they might be in almost any business and going almost anywhere. Some students of human nature can look at a man in a Pullman I could tell you where he is from, his occupation and his stations in life, both flag and social, but I never could. The only way I can correctly judge a fellow traveler is when the train is held up by robbers or when he reaches at the same time I do for the last towel in the dressing room of the sleeper.
The porter came and brushed the collection of suit on the windowsill off to the left knee of my trousers. I removed it with an air of apology. The temperature was eighty-eight. One of the dotted-veiled ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators and spoke loudly of Interlaken. I leaned back idly in chair number seven and looked with the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just visible above the back of number nine. Suddenly, number nine hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the window, and looking, I saw that it was the Rose Lady in Trevelyon. One of the best-selling novels of the present day. And then the critic, or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the window, and I knew him at once, for John A.
Peskud of Pittsburgh, traveling salesman for a plate glass company, an old acquaintance whom I had not seen in two years. In two minutes we were faced handshaking hands and had finished with such topics as rain, prosperity, health. Residence and destination. Politics might have followed next, but I was not so ill-fated. I wish you might know John A. Peskid. He is of the stuff that heroes are not often lucky enough to be made of. He is a small man with a wide smile and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red spot on the end of your nose. I never saw him wear but one kind of necktie, and he believes in cuff holders and button shoes. He is as hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria steelworks, and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke consumers compulsory, St.
Peter will come down and sit at the foot of Smithfield Street and let somebody else attend to the gate up in the branch heaven. He believes that our plate glass is the most important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his hometown, he ought to be decent and law-abiding. During my acquaintance with him in the city of Diurnal Night, I had never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics. We had browsed during our meetings on local topics and then parted after Chateau Maga, Irish stew, flannel cakes, cotton pudding, and coffee. Hey there, with milk separate. Now I was to get more of his ideas. By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up since the party conventions.
And that he was going to get off at Coketown. Hey, said Peskud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his right shoe. Did you ever read one of these bestsellers? I mean, the kind where the hero is an American swell, sometimes even from Chicago, who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is traveling under an alias and follows her to her father's kingdom or principality? I guess you have. They're all alike. Sometimes this going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent. And sometimes he is a van something from New York, or a Chicago wheat broker worthy fifty millions. But he's always ready to break into the king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four, or the B and O.
There doesn't seem to be any reason in the book for their being there. Well, this fellow chases the royal chairwarmer home, as I said, and finds out who she is. He meets her on the Corso or the Strauss one evening and gives us ten pages of conversation. She reminds him of the difference in their stations, and then gives him a chance to ring in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns. If you'd take his remarks and set them to music, and then take the music away from them, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohen's songs. Well, you know what it runs on. If you've read any of them, he slaps the king's Swiss bodyguards around like everything whenever they get in his way. He's a great fencer, too.
Now, I've known of some Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any fencers coming from there. He stands on the first landing of the royal staircase and castle, shoots in Festenstein with a gleaming rapier in his hand, and makes a Baltimore royal of six platoons of traitors who come to massacre the said king. And then he has to fight duels with a couple of chancellors and foil a plot by four Austrian archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline station. But the great scene is when his rival for the Princess's hand, Count Fedor, attacks him between the porticles and the ruined chapel armed with a Mitriolus, a Yedigan, and a couple of Siberian bloodhounds. This scene is what runs the bestseller into the 29th edition before the publishers had time to draw a check for the advance royalties.
The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the bloodhounds, gives the Mitrioloos a slap with his mitt, says, yeah, to the Yadigan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the Count's left eye. Of course, we have a neat little prize fighter right then and there. The Count, in order to make the go possible, seems to be an expert at the art of self-defense himself. And here we have the Corbett Sullivan fight done over into literature. The book ends with the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the linden trees on the Gorgonzola Walk. That winds up the love story plenty good enough, but I noticed that the book dodges the final issue. Even a bestseller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobster Pots Dam or bringing over a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on Michigan Avenue.
What do you think about them? Why, I said, I hardly know, John. There's a saying, love levels all ranks, you know? Yes, said Peskid, but these kind of love stories are rank on the level. I know something about literature, even if I am in plate glass. These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train but what they pile them up on me. No good can come out of an international clinch between the old world aristocracy and one of us fresh Americans. When people in real life marry, they generally hunt up somebody in their own station. A fellow usually picks out a girl that went to the same high school and belonged to the same singing society that he did. When young millionaires fall in love, they always select the chorus girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the lobster that he does.
Washington newspaper correspondents. Always many window ladies ten years older than themselves who keep boarding houses. No, sir, you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of C.D. Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside down just because he's a Taft American and took a course at a gymnasium. And listen how they talk, too. Peskid picked up the bestseller and hunted his page. Listen at this, he says. Trevilon is shinning with the Prince Alwanna at the back end of the Tulip Garden. This is how it goes. Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers. What I aspire, you are a star set high above me in a royal heaven. I am only myself, yet I am a man, and I have a heart to do and dare.
I have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign, but I have an arm and a sword that yet might free Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of traitors. Think of a Chicago man packing a sword and talking about freeing anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that. He'd be much more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it. I think I understand you, John, I said. You want fiction writers to be consistent with their scenes and characters. They shouldn't mix Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers or English dukes with Long Island clam diggers. Or Italian countesses with Montana Cowboys, or Cincinnati Brewery agents with the Rajahs of India. Or plain businessmen with aristocracy high above them, added Peskud.
It don't jive. People are divided into classes, whether we admit it or not. And it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class. They do it, too. I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds of thousands of books like that. You don't see or hear of any such diddyos and capers in real life. Three. Well, John, I said, I haven't read a bestseller in a long time. Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours. But tell me more about yourself getting along all right with the company. Bully, said Peskid, brightening at once. I've had my salary raised twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too. I've bought a neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a house on it.
Next year, the firm is going to sell me some shares of stock. Oh, I'm in on the line of general prosperity, no matter who's elected. Met your affinity yet, John? I asked. Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I? said Peskid with a broader grin. Oh, ho, I said. So you've taken time enough off from your plate glass to have a romance? No, no," said John. No romance, nothing like that. But I'll tell you about it. I was on the South Bend, going to Cincinnati about eighteen months ago, when I saw across the aisle the finest-looking girl I'd ever laid eyes on. Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you want for keeps. Well, I never was up to the flirtation business, either handkerchief, automobile, postage stamp, or doorstep, and she wasn't the kind to start anything.
She read a book and minded her business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by residing on it. I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes, and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch. I never thought of speaking to her, but I let the plate-glass business go to smash for a while. She changed cars at Cincinnati and took a sleeper to Louisville over the L&N. There she bought another ticket and went on through Shelbyville, Frankfurt, and Lexington. Along there I began to have a hard time keeping up with her. The trains came along when they pleased and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, except to keep an eye on the track and the right-of-way as much as possible.
Then they began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and at last they stopped altogether. I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the plate glass people for my services any time if they knew how I managed to shadow that young lady. I contrived to keep out of her sight as much as I could, but I never lost track of her. The last station she got off at was way down in Virginia, about six in the afternoon. There were about fifty houses and four hundred niggers in sight. The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds. A tall old man with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud as Julius Caesar and Roscoe Conkling on the same postcard, was there to meet her. His clothes were frazzled, but I didn't notice that till later.
He took her little satchel, and they started over the plank walks and went up a road along the hill. I kept along a piece behind him, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in the sand that my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday. They went in a gate on top of the hill. It nearly took my breath away when I looked up. Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was a tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet high, and the yard was so full of rose bushes and box bushes and lilacs that you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as big as the capital of Washington. Here's where I have to trail, says I to myself. I thought before that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances at least.
This must be the governor's mansion or the agricultural building of a new World's Fair anyhow. I'd better go back to the village and get posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information. In the village, I find a pine hotel called the Bayview House. The only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard. I set my sample case down and tried to be ostensible. I told the landlord I was taking orders for plate glass. I don't want no plates, says he, but I do need another glass molasses pitcher. By and by, I got him down to local gossip and answering questions. Why, he says, I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big white house on the hill. It's Colonel Allen, the biggest man and the finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else.
They're the oldest family in the state. That was his daughter that got off the train. She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick. I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence. I stopped and raised my hat. There wasn't any other way. Excuse me, says I. Can you tell me where Mr. Hinkle lives? She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight... Quinkle of fun in her eyes. No one of that name lives in Birchton, says she. That is, she goes on, as far as I know. Is the gentleman you are seeking white? Well, that tickled me. No kidding, says I.
I'm not looking for smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh. You are quite a distance from home, she says. I'd have gone a thousand miles farther, says I. Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville, says she, and then she turned almost as red as one of those roses on the bushes in the yard. I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she took, and only just managed to wake up in time. And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I could. And I told her everything about myself and what I was making and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her and try to get her to like me. She smiles a little and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed up.
They look straight at whatever she's talking to. I never had anyone talk like this to me before, Mr. Peskud, she says. What did you say your name is, John? John A., says I. And you came mighty near missing the train at Poetan Junction, too," she says with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage book to me. How did you know? I asked. Men are very clumsy, said she. I knew you were on every train. I thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't. Then we had more talk. And at last, a kind of proud, serious look came upon her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big house. The Allens, says she, have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years. We are a proud family. Look at that mansion.
It has 50 rooms. See the pillars and porches and balconies? The ceilings in the reception rooms and the ballroom are 28 feet high. My father is a lineal descendant of belted earls. I belted one of them once in the Dukesny Hotel in Pittsburgh, says I, and he didn't offer to resent it. He was there dividing his attentions between Monongalia whiskey and heiresses, and he got fresh. Of course, she goes on. My father wouldn't allow a drummer to set his foot in Elmcroft. If he knew that I was talking to one over the fence, he would lock me in my room. Would you let me come there? Says I. Would you talk to me if I was to call? For, I goes on, if you said I might come and see you, the Earls might be belted or suspended or pinned up with safety pins as far as I'm concerned.
I must not talk to you, she says, because we have not been introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say goodbye, Mr. Say the name, says I. You haven't forgotten it. Peskid, she says, a little mad. The rest of the name, I demand, cool as could be. John, she says. John what, I says. John A., says she, with her head high. Are you through now? I'm coming to see the belted earl tomorrow, I says. He'll feed you to his foxhounds, she says, laughing. If he does, it'll improve their running, says I. I'm something of a hunter myself. I must be going in now, she says. I oughtn't to have spoken to you at all. I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis, or Pittsburgh, was it? Goodbye. "'Goodnight,' says I, and it wasn't Minneapolis.
"'What's your name first, please?' She hesitated, then she pulled a leaf off a bush and said, "'My name is Jessie,' she says. "'Goodnight, Miss Allen,' says I." The next morning at 11 sharp, I rang the doorbell of that World's Fair main building. After about three quarters of an hour, an old nigger man, about 80, showed up and asked what I wanted. I gave him my business card and said I wanted to see the Colonel. He showed me in. Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut? That's what that house was like. There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an eight-dollar flat. Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye.
But when Colonel Allen comes in, the place seems to light up. You could almost hear a band playing and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs and white stockings dancing a quadro. It was the style of him, although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the station. For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near to getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate glass. But I got my nerve back pretty quick. He asked me to sit down, and I told him everything. I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and explained to him my little code of living, to be always decent and right in your hometown, and when you're on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day, or play higher than a 25-cent limit.
At first, I thought he was going to throw me out of the window, but I kept on talking. Pretty soon I had a chance to tell him that story about the western congressman who had lost his pocketbook and the grass widow. You remember that story. Well, that got him to laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and horsehair sofas had heard in many a day. We talked two hours. I told him everything I knew, and then he began to ask questions, and I told him the rest. All I asked of him was to give me a chance. If I couldn't make a hit with the little lady, I'd clear out and not bother anymore. At last, he said, there was a Sir Courtney Peskett in the time of Charles I, if I remember rightly.
If there was, says I, he can't claim kin with our bunch. We've always lived in and around Pittsburgh. I've got an uncle in the real estate business and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas. You can inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in Old Smokytown and get satisfactory replies. Did you ever run across that story about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a sailor say his prayers? Says I. It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate, says the Colonel. So I told it to him. Laugh. I was wishing to myself that he was a customer. What a bill of glass I'd sell him. And then he says, The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed to me, Mr. Peskid, to be of a particularly agreeable way of promoting and perpetuating amenities between friends.
With your permission, I will relate to you a fox hunting story with which I was personally connected, and which may furnish you some amusement. So he tells it. It takes 40 minutes by the watch. Did I laugh? Well, say when I got my face straight, he calls in Old Pete, the super-knotted darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my valise. It was Elmcroft for me while I was in town. Two evenings later, I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie, alone on the porch, while the Colonel was thinking up another story. It's going to be a fine evening, says I. He's coming, says she. He's going to tell you, this time. The story about the old Negro and the green watermelons. It always comes after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster.
There was another time, she goes on, that you nearly got left. It was at Pulaski City. Yes, says I. I remember. My foot slipped as I was jumping on the step, and I nearly tumbled off. I know, she says. And I was afraid you had, John A. I was afraid you had. And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows. Four. Coke down, drummed the porter, making his way through the slowing car. Peskid gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of an old traveler. I married her a year ago, says John. I told you I built a house in the East End. The belted, I mean the Colonel, is there too. I find him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any new story I might have picked up on the road.
I glanced out of the window. Coketown was nothing more than a ragged hillside dotted with a score of black, dismal huts, propped up against dreary mounds of slag and clinkers. It rained in slanting torrents, too, and the reels foamed and splashed down through the black mud to the railroad tracks. You won't sell much plate glass here, John, said I. Why do you get off at this end of the world? Why, said Peskid. The other day I took Jessie for a little trip to Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias in a pot in one of those windows over there, just like some she used to raise down in the old Virginia home. So I thought I'd drop off here for the night and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings or blossoms for her.
Here we are. Good night, old man. I gave you the address. Come out and see us when you have time. The train moved forward. One of the dotted brown ladies insisted on having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them. The porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the car. I glanced downward and saw the bestseller. I picked it up and set it carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the raindrops would not fall upon it. And then, suddenly... I smiled and seemed to see that life has no geographical metts and bounds. Good luck to you, Travelian, I said, and may you get the patoot. End of Best Seller.
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15 15 - Rus in Urbe 18:57
Options by O.
Henry. Section 15. Ruse in Urbe. Considering men in relation to money, There are three kinds whom I dislike. Men who have more money than they can spend. Men who have more money than they do spend. And men who spend more money than they have. Of the three varieties, I believe I have the least liking for the first. But, as a man, I liked Spencer Grenville North pretty well, although he had something like two or ten or thirty millions. I've forgotten exactly how many. I did not leave town that summer. I usually went down to a village on the south shore of Long Island. The place was surrounded by duck farms, and the ducks and dogs and whippoorwills and rusty windmills made so much noise that I could sleep as peacefully as if I were in my own flat, six doors from the elevated railroad in New York.
But that summer I did not go. Remember that. One of my friends asked me why I did not. I replied, Because, old man, New York is the finest summer resort in the world. You've heard that phrase before. But that is what I told him. I was press agent that year for Binkley and Bing, the theatrical managers and producers. Of course you know what a press agent is. Well, he is not. That is the secret of being one. Binkley was touring France in his new CNN Williamson car, and Bing had gone to Scotland to learn curling, Which he seemed to associate in his mind with hot tongs rather than with ice. Before they left, they gave me June and July on salary for my vacation, which act was in accord with their large spirit of liberality.
But I remained in New York, which I had decided was the finest summer resort in... but I said that before. On July 10th, North came to town from his camp in the Adirondacks. Try to imagine a camp with sixteen rooms. Plumbing, eider-down quilts, a butler, a garage, solid silver plate, and a long-distance telephone. Of course, it was in the woods. If Mr. Pinchot wants to preserve the forests, let him give every citizen two or ten or thirty million dollars, and the trees will all gather around the summer camps, as the Burnham Woods came to Dunsinane, and be preserved. North came to see me in my three rooms and bath. Extra charge for light when used extravagantly or all night. He slapped me in the back—I'd rather have my shins kicked any day—and greeted me with outdoor obstreperousness and revolting good spirits.
He was insolently brown and healthy-looking, and offensively well-dressed. "'Just ran down for a few days,' said he, "'to sign some papers and stuff like that. My lawyer wired me to come.' "'Well, you indolent cockney, what are you doing in town?' I took a chance and telephoned, and they said you were here. What's the matter with that utopia on Long Island, where you used to take your typewriter and your villainous temper every summer? Anything wrong with your swans, weren't they, that used to sing on the farms at night? Ducks, said I. The songs of swans are for luckier ears. They swim and curve their necks in artificial lakes on the estates of the wealthy, to delight the eyes of the favorites of fortune.
Also in Central Park, said North. To delight the eyes of immigrants and bummers. I've seen them there lots of times. But why are you in the city so late in the summer?"
New York City, I began to recite, is the finest summer. No, you don't, said North emphatically. You don't spring that old one on me. I know you better. Man, you ought to have gone up with us this summer. The Prestons are there, and Tom Volney, and the Monroes, and Lulu Stanford, and the Miss Kennedy and her aunt that you liked so well. I never liked Miss Kennedy's aunt, I said. Didn't say you did, said North. We are having the greatest time we've ever had. The Pickerel and Trout are so ravenous that I believe they would swallow your hook with a Montana copper mine prospectus fastened on it. And we have a couple of electric launches, and I'll tell you what we do every night or two. We tow a rowboat behind each one with a big phonograph and a buoy to change the discs in them.
On the water and twenty yards behind you, they're not so bad. And there are passably good roads through the woods when we go motoring. I ship two cars up there, and the Pine Cliff Inn is only three miles away. You know the Pine Cliff. Some good people are there this season, and we run over to the dances twice a week. Can't you go back with me for a week, old man?" I laughed. "'Northy,' said I, "'if I may be so familiar with a millionaire,' because I hate both the names Spencer and Grenville, "'your invitation is meant kindly, but the city in the summertime for me.'" Here, while the bourgeoisie is away, I can live as Nero lived, barring, thank heaven, the fiddling. While the city burns at night, he in the shade.
The tropics and the zones wait upon me like handmaidens. I sit under Florida palms and eat pomegranates, while Boreas himself, electrically conjured up, blows upon me his arctic breath. As for trout, you know yourself that Jean, at Maurice's, cooks them better than anyone else in the world. Be advised! said North. My chef has pinched the blue ribbon from the lot. He lays some slices of bacon inside the trout, wraps it all in corn husks—the husks are green corn, you know—burries them in hot ashes, and covers them with live coals. We build fires on the bank of the lake, and have fish suppers. I know, said I, and the servants bring down tables and chairs and damask cloths, and you eat with silver forks.
I know the kinds of camps that you millionaires have. And their champagne pail set about, disgracing the wildflowers, and no doubt Madame Tetrazzini to sing in the boat pavilion after the trout. Oh, no, said North, concernedly. We were never as bad as that. We did have a variety trip up from the city three or four nights, but they weren't stars by as far as light can travel in the same length of time. I always like a few home comforts, even when I'm roughing it. But don't tell me you prefer to stay in the city during summer. I don't believe it. If you do, why did you spend your summers there for the last four years, even sneaking away from town on a night train, and refusing to tell your friends where this Arcadian village was?
Because, said I, they might have followed me and discovered it. But since then I have learned that Amaryllis has come to town. The coolest things, the freshest, the brightest, the choicest are to be found in the city. If you have nothing on hand this evening, I will show you." I'm free, said North. And I have my light car outside. I suppose, since you've been converted to the town, that your idea of rural sport is to have a little whirl between bicycle cops in Central Park, and then a mug of sticky ale in some stuffy rotskeller, under a fan that can't stir up as many revolutions in a week as Nicaragua can in a day. We'll begin with a spin through the park, anyhow, I said. I was choking with the hot, stale air of my little apartment.
And I wanted that breath of the cool to brace me for the task of proving to my friend that New York was the greatest, and so forth. Where can you find any fresher or purer air than this, I asked as we sped into Central Park's Bosquius Dell. Air, said North, contemptuously. Do you call this air, this muggy vapor, smelling of garbage and gasoline smoke? Man, I wish you could get one sniff of the real Adirondack article in the pine woods at daylight. I have heard of it, said I, but for fragrance and tang and a joy in the nostrils, I would not give one puff of sea breeze across the bay, down on my little boat dock on Long Island, for ten of your turpentine-scented tornadoes. Then why, asked North, a little curiously, don't you go there instead of staying cooped up in this greater bakery?
Because, said I doggedly, I have discovered that New York is the greatest summer— Don't say that again, interrupted North. Unless you've actually got a job as general passenger agent of the subway. You can't really believe it. I went to some trouble to try to prove my theory to my friend. The Weather Bureau and the season had conspired to make the argument worthy of an able advocate. The city seemed stretched on a broiler, directly above the furnaces of a furnace. There was a kind of tepid gaiety afoot, and a wheel in the boulevards, mainly evinced by languid men strolling about in straw hats and evening clothes, and rows of idle taxicabs with their flags up, looking like a blockaded Fourth of July procession.
The hotels kept up a specious brilliancy and hospitable outlook, but inside one saw vast empty caverns, and the foot-rails at the bars gleamed brightly from long disacquaintance with the sole leather of customers. In the crosstown streets, the steps of the old brownstone houses were swarming with stupors, that motley race hailing from skylight room and basement, bringing out their straw doorstep mats to sit on and fill the air with strange noises and opinions. North and I dined on top of a hotel, and here for a few minutes I thought I'd made a score. An east wind, almost cool, blew across the roofless roof. A capable orchestra, concealed in a bower of wisteria, played with sufficient judgment to make the art of music probable and the art of conversation possible.
Some ladies in reproachless summer gowns at other tables gave animation and color to the scene, and an excellent dinner, mainly from the refrigerator, seemed to successfully back my judgment as to summer resorts. But North grumbled all during the meal, and cursed his lawyers, and prated so of his confounded camp in the woods, that I began to wish he would go back there, and leave me in my peaceful city retreat. After dining, we went to a roof-garden vaudeville that was being much praised. There we found a good bill, an artificially cooled atmosphere, cold drinks, prompt service, and a gay, well-dressed audience. North was bored. If this isn't comfortable enough for you on the hottest August night of for five years, I said, a little sarcastically, you might think about the kids in Delancey and Hester streets, lying out on the fire escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a breath of air that hasn't been fried on both sides.
The contrast might increase your enjoyment. Don't talk socialism, said North. I gave $500 to the Free Ice Fund on the 1st of May. I'm contrasting these stale, artificial, hollow, wearisome amusements with the enjoyment a man can get in the woods. You should see the firs and pines do skirt dances during a storm, and lie down flat and drink out of mountain branch at the end of a day's tramp after the deer. That's the only way to spend a summer. Get out and live with nature." I agree with you absolutely, said I, with emphasis. For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance and had spoken my true sentiments. North looked at me long and curiously. Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo, he asked, have you been singing this deceitful peen to summer in town?
I suppose I looked my guilt. Ha! said North. I see. May I ask her name? Annie Ashton, said I, simply. She played Nanette in Binkley & Bing's production of The Silver Chord. She is to have a better part next season. Take me to see her, said North. Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel. They were out of the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons. As press agent of Binkley & Bing, I had tried to keep her before the public. As Robert James Vandiver, I had hoped to withdraw her, For if ever one was made to keep company with said Vandiver, and smell the salt breeze on the south shore of Long Island, and listen to the ducks quack in the watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth above.
But she had a soul above ducks, above nightingales, aye, even above birds of paradise. She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and seemed genuine. She had both taste and talent for the stage. And she liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother. She was unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley and Bing's press agent. Since the theater had closed, she had allowed Mr. Vandiver to call in an unofficial role. I had often spoken to her of my friend Spencer Grenville North, and so, as it was early, the first turn of the vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone. Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr. Vandiver and Mr. North. We found her fitting a new cap on her mother.
I never saw her look more charming. North made himself disagreeably entertaining. He was a good talker, and had a way with him. Besides, he had two or ten or thirty millions. I've forgotten which. I uncautiously admired the mother's cap, whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two. And I took a course in edging and frills. Even though Annie's fingers had pinked or ruched or hemmed or whatever you'd do to them, They palled upon me, and I could hear North dribbling to Annie about his odious Adirondack camp. Two days after that, I saw North in his motor car with Miss Ashton and her mother. On the next afternoon, he dropped in on me. "'Bobby,' said he, "'this old burg isn't such a bad proposition in the summertime, after all.
Since I've been knocking around, it looks better to me. There are some first-rate musical comedies and light operas on the roofs and the outdoor gardens.' And if you hunt up the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as cool here as you can in the country. Hang it! When you come to think of it, there's nothing much to the country anyhow. You get tired and sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that the cook dishes up to you. It makes a difference, doesn't it? said I. It certainly does. Now, I found some whitebait yesterday at Maurice's with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line that I ever tasted. It makes a difference, doesn't it? I said. Immense!
The sauce is the main thing with whitebait. It makes a difference, doesn't it? I asked, looking him straight in the eye. He understood. Look here, Bob, he said. I was going to tell you I couldn't help it. I'll play fair with you, but I'm going to win. She is the one particular for me. All right, said I. It's a fair field. There are no rights for you to encroach upon. On Thursday afternoon, Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have tea in her apartment. He was devoted, and she was more charming than usual. By avoiding the subject of caps, I managed to get a word or two into and out of the talk. Miss Ashton asked me in a make-conversational tone something about next season's tour. "'Oh,' said I, "'I don't know about that.
I'm not going to be with Binkley and Bing next season.' "'Why, I thought,' said she, that they were going to put the No. One Road Company under your charge. I thought you told me so. They were, said I, but they won't. I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small cottage I know there on the edge of the bay. And I'll buy a cat-boat and a row-boat and a shotgun and a yellow dog. I've got money enough to do it. And I'll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the sea, and the pine odor when it blows from the land. And of course I'll write plays until I have a trunk full of them on hand. And the next and the biggest thing I'll do will be to buy that duck farm next door.
Few people understand ducks. I can watch them for hours. They can march better than any company in the National Guard, and they can play Follow My Leader better than the entire Democratic Party. Their voices don't amount to much, but I like to hear them. They'll wake you up a dozen times a night. But there's a homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the cry of, FRESH STROBERRIES! under your window in the morning when you want to sleep. And, I went on enthusiastically, do you know the value of ducks besides their beauty and intelligence and order of sweetness of voice? Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never-ceasing income. On a farm that I know, the feathers were sold for $400 in one year.
Think of that. And the ones shipped to the market will bring in more money than that. Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt breeze coming over the bay. I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and with him and the dog and the sun sets for company, I shall do well. No more of this dull, baking, scentless, roaring city for me." Miss Ashton looked surprised. North laughed. I'm going to begin one of my plays tonight, I said. So I must be going. And with that I took my departure.
A few days later, Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at four in the afternoon. I did.
You have been very good to me, she said, hesitatingly. And I thought I would tell you. I'm going to leave the stage. Yes, said I. I suppose you will. They usually do when there's so much money. There is no money, she said, or very little. Our money's almost gone. But I'm told, said I, that he has something like two or ten or thirty millions. I've forgotten which. I know what you mean, she said. I will not pretend that I do not. I am not going to marry Mr. North.
Then why are you leaving the stage, I asked severely. What else can you do to earn a living? She came closer to me. And I can see the look in her eyes yet, as she spoke. I can pick ducks, she said. We sold the first year's feathers for three hundred and fifty dollars.
End of Roos in Urbe.
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16 16 - A Poor Rule 30:38
A Poor Rule. I have always maintained and asserted time to time That woman is no mystery. That man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong, we shall see. As Harper's drawer used to say in bygone years, the following good story is told of Miss blank, Mr. blank, Mr. blank, and Mr. blank. We shall have to omit Bishop X and the Reverend Blank, for they do not belong. In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific. A reporter would have called it a mushroom town, but it was not. Paloma was first and last of the toadstool variety. The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine.
There was a new Yellow Pine Hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, black waxy mud, and mesquite trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-be city. The houses represented faith, the tents hope, the twice-a-day train by which you might leave The Parisian restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and perpetuated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and sorghum. There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house In which the family lived. From the kitchen extended a shelter made of poles covered with chaparral brush.
Under this was a table and two benches, each 20 feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here were set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda biscuits, mudden orpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu. Ma Hinkle was a subordinate known to the ears as Betty, but denied to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours, a Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I placed the sweets at the end of my wordy menu. Eileen Hinkle. The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she had been named by ear, but she so splendidly bore the orthography that Tom Moore himself, had he seen her, would have endorsed the phonography.
Eileen was the daughter of the house and the first lady cashier to invade the territory south of an east-west line drawn through Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grandstand, or was it a temple, under the shelter at the door of the kitchen. There was a barbed wire protection in front of her, with a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the barbed wire, for every man who dined Parisianally there would have died in her service. Her duties were light. Each meal was a dollar. You put it under the arch, and she took it. I set out with the intent to describe Eileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty. Roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm. As for smoothness, the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes. Eileen was strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm of Gilead Act of the Year of the Fall of Adam. She was a fruit-stand blonde. Strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her eyes were wide apart, and she possessed a calm that precedes a storm that never comes. But it seems to me that words, at any rate purr, are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, it is engendered in the eyes.
There are three kinds of beauties. I was foreordained to be homiletic. I can never stick to a story. The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The second is Maude Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies of Borough Rose paintings. Eileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as Helen of the Troy Laundries. The Parisian restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its circumference, men rode into Paloma to win her smiles. They got them. One meal, one smile, one dollar. But with all her impartiality, Eileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.
The first was an artificial product known as Brian Jack's. A name that had obviously met with reverses. Jack's was the outcome of paved cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting house. His eyes were twin cranberries. His mouth was like the aperture under a drop letters here sign. He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to Portland, Thence South 45 East to a given point in Florida. He had mastered every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in the world. Had been present at or hurrying on his way to every headline event that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five years old.
You might open the Atlas, place your finger at random upon the name of a town, And Jacks would tell you the front names of three prominent citizens before you could close it again. He spoke patronizingly, and even disrespectfully, of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth Avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts. Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit. He had learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you about it. I hate to be reminded of Pollock's course of time, and so do you, but every time I saw Jack's, I would think of the poet's description of another poet by the name of G. G. Byron, who drank early, deeply drank, drank draughts that common millions might have quenched, then died of thirst because there was no more to drink.
That fitted Jack's, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma, which was about the same thing. He was a telegrapher and station and express agent at $75 a month. Why, a young man who knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out a hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and stockholders of the S.P. Railway Company. One more line of description, and I turn Jax over to you. He wore bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same cloth as his shirt. My rival number two was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by a ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep within the bounds of decorum and order.
Bud was the only cowboy off the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it. He wore the sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his neck. Twice a week Bud rode in from Valverde Ranch to sup at the Parisian restaurant. He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a tremendously fast lope Which animal he would rain up so suddenly under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his hoofs would plow canals yards long in the loam. Jax and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course. The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as there was in the black waxy country. It was all willow rocking chairs, and home knit tidies, and albums and conch shells in a row.
And a little upright piano in one corner. Here Jax and Bud and I, or sometimes one or two of us, according to our good luck, used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was over and visit Miss Hinkle. Eileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things, if there can be anything higher, than taking in dollars all day through a barbed wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl, but rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of a salon, the only one in Paloma. Don't you think that Shakespeare was a great writer? she would ask, with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows, that the late Ignatius Donnelly himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved his bacon.
Eileen was of the opinion also That Boston is more cultured than Chicago. That Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painters. That Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners. That London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other opinions indicating a keeping up with the world's best thought. These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence. Eileen had theories of her own. One in particular she disseminated to us untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and woman. If ever she could like anyone, it would be for those qualities.
I am awfully weary. She said one evening, when we three musketeers of the mesquite were in the little parlor, of having compliments on my looks paid to me. I know I'm not beautiful. Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep from calling her a liar when she said that. I'm only a little Middle-Western girl, went on Eileen, who just wants to be simple and neat and tries to help her father make a humble living. Old Man Heekle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear profit, to a bank in San Antonio. Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from which he could never be persuaded to separate. He did not know whether she wanted what she said she wanted, or what she knew she deserved.
Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding. Bud decided. Why, ah, Miss Eileen! "'Beauty, as you might say, ain't everything. Not saying that you haven't your share of good looks. I always admired, more than anything else about you, the nice, kind way you treat your ma and pa. But anyone what's good to their parents and is kind of homebody don't specially need to be too pretty.' Eileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. "'Thank you, Mr. Cunningham,' she said. I consider that one of the finest compliments I've had in a long time. I'd so much rather hear you say that than to hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I'm glad you believe me when I say I don't like flattery." Our cue was there for us.
Bud had made a good guess. You couldn't lose Jax. He chimed in next. "'Sure thing, Miss Eileen,' he said. The good lookers don't always win out. Now, you ain't bad looking, of course, but that's Nick's come ruse. I knew a girl once in Dubuque with a face like a coconut, who could skin the cat twice on a horizontal bar without changing hands. Now, a girl might have the California peach crop mashed to marmalade and not be able to do that. I've seen, uh, well, worse lookers than you, Miss Eileen. But what I like about you is the business way you've got of doing things. Cool and wise. That's the winning way for a girl. Mr. Hinkle told me the other day you'd never taken in a lead silver dollar or a plugged one since you've been on the job.
Now that's the stuff for a girl. That's what catches me. Jax got his smile, too. Thank you, Mr. Jax, said Eileen. If you only knew how I appreciate anyone's being candid and not a flatterer. I get so tired of people telling me I'm pretty. I think it is the loveliest thing to have friends who tell you the truth. Then I thought I saw an expectant look on Eileen's face as she glanced toward me. I had a wild, sudden impulse to dare fate. And tell her of all the beautiful handiwork of the great artificer. She was the most exquisite. That she was a flawless pearl, gleaming pure and serene in a setting of black mud and emerald prairies. That she was a corker. And as for mine, I cared not if she were as cruel as a serpent's tooth to her fond parents, or if she couldn't tell a plucked dollar from a bridal buckle.
If I might sing, chant, praise, Glorify and worship her peerless and wonderful beauty. But I refrained. I feared the fate of a flatterer. I had witnessed her delight at the crafty and discreet words of Bud and Jack's. No, Miss Hinkle was not one to be beguiled by the plaited silver tongue of a flatterer. So I joined the ranks of the candid and honest. At once I became mendacious. And didactic. In all ages, Miss Hinkle, said I, in spite of the poetry and romance of each, intellect in woman has been admired more than beauty. Even in Cleopatra herself, men found more charm in her queenly mind than in her looks. Well, I should think so, said Eileen. I've seen pictures of her that weren't so much.
She had an awfully long nose. If I may say so, I went on, you remind me of Cleopatra, Miss Eileen. Why, my nose isn't so long, she said, opening her eyes wide and touching that comely feature with a dimpled forefinger. Why, I mean, said I, I mean as to mental endowments. Oh, she said. And then I got my smile, just as Bud and Jax had got theirs. "'Thank every one of you,' she said very, very sweetly, "'for being so frank and honest with me. That's the way I want you to be always. Just tell me plainly and truthfully what you think, and we'll all be the best friends in the world.' And now, because you've been so good to me and understand so well how I dislike people who do nothing but pay me exaggerated compliments, I'll sing and play a little for you.
Of course, we expressed our thanks in joy, but we would have been better pleased if Eileen had remained in her low rocking chair, face to face with us, and let us gaze upon her, for she was no Adelina Patty. Not even on the farewellest of the divas' farewell tours. She had a cooing little voice like that of a turtle dove that could almost fill the parlor when the windows and doors were closed, and Betty was not rattling the lids of the stove in the kitchen. She had a gamut that I estimate about eight inches on the piano, and her runs and trills sounded like the clothes bubbling in your grandmother's iron washpot. Believe that she must have been beautiful when I tell you that it sounded like music to us.
Eileen's musical taste was Catholic. She would sing through a pile of sheet music on the left-hand top of the piano, laying each slaughtered composition on the right-hand top. The next evening, she would sing from the right to left. Her favorites were Mendelssohn and Moody and Sankey. By request, she always wound up with Sweet Violets, And when the leaves began to turn. When we left at ten o'clock, the three of us would go down to Jack's little wooden station and sit on the platform swinging our feet and trying to pump one another for clues as to which way Miss Eileen's inclinations seemed to lean. That is the way of rivals. They do not avoid and glower at one another. They convene and converse and construe, striving by the art politic to estimate the strength of the enemy.
One day there came a dark horse to Paloma, a young lawyer who at once flaunted his shingle and was himself spectacularly upon the town. His name was C. Vincent Vesey. You could see at a glance that he was a recent graduate of a southwestern law school. His Prince Albert coat, light striped trousers, broad-brimmed soft black hat, and narrow white muslin bow tie proclaimed that more loudly than any diploma could. Vesey was a compound of Daniel Webster, Lord Chesterfield, Beau Brummel, and Little Jack Horner. His coming boomed Paloma. The next day after he arrived, an addition to the town was surveyed and laid off in lots. Of course, Vesey, to further his professional fortunes, must mingle with the citizenry and outliers of Paloma.
But, as well as with our soldier men, he was bound to seek popularity with the gay dogs of the place. So Jax and Bud Cunningham and I came to be honored by his acquaintance. The doctrine of predestination would have been discredited had not Vesey seen Eileen Hinkle and become fourth in the tourney. Magnificently, he boarded at the Yellow Pine Hotel instead of at the Parisian restaurant. But he came to be a formidable visitor in the Hinkle Parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of profanity, drove Jax to an outburst of slang so weird that it sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations, and made me dumb with gloom. For Vessie had the rhetoric. Words flowed from him like oil from a gusher.
Hyperbole, compliment, praise, appreciation, honeyed gallantry, golden opinions, eulogy, and unveiled panegyric vied with one another for preeminence in his speech. We had small hopes that Eileen could resist his oratory and Prince Albert. But a day came that gave us courage. About dusk one evening, I was sitting on the little gallery in front of the Hinkle Parlor, waiting for Eileen to come. When I heard voices inside, she had come into the room with her father, and old man Hinkle began to talk to her. I had observed before that he was a shrewd man, and not unphilosophic. "'Eyly,' he said. "'I notice there's three or four young fellers that have been calling to see you regular for a while. Is there any one of them you like better than another?' "'Why, Pa,' she answered.
I like all of them very well. I think Mr. Cunningham and Mr. Jax and Mr. Harris are very nice young men. They are so frank and honest in everything they say to me. I haven't known Mr. Vesey very long, but I think he's a very nice young man. He's so frank and honest in everything he says to me." Now, that's what I'm getting at," says Old Hinkle. "'You've always been sayin'. "'You like people what tell the truth and don't go humbuggin' you with compliments and bogus talk. "'Now suppose you make a test of these fellers and see which one of them will talk the straightest to you.' "'But how'll I do it, Pa?' "'I'll tell you how. "'You know you sing a little bit. "'Eilie, you took music lessons nearly two years in Logansport.' It wasn't long, but it was all we could afford then.
And your teacher said you didn't have any voice, and it was a waste of money to keep on. Now suppose you ask the fellers what they think of your singing, and see what each of them tells you. The man that'll tell you the truth about it will have a mighty lot of nerve, and'll do to tie to. What do you think of the plan? All right, Pa. Said Eileen. I think it's a good idea. I'll try it. Eileen and Mr. Hinkle went out of the room through the inside doors. Unobserved, I hurried down to the station. Jax was at his telegraph table waiting for eight o'clock to come. It was Bud's night in town, and when he rode in, I repeated the conversation to them both. I was loyal to my rivals, as all true admirers of all Eileen's should be.
Simultaneously, the three of us were smitten by an uplifting thought. Surely this test would eliminate Vesey from the contest. He, with his unctuous flattery, would be driven from the lists. Well, we remembered Eileen's love of frankness and honesty, how she treasured truth and candor above vain compliment and blandishment. Leaking arms, we did a grotesque dance of joy up and down the platform, singing, Muldoon was a solid man. At the top of our voices. That evening, four of the willow rocking-chairs were filled besides the lucky one that sustained the trim figure of Miss Hinkle. Three of us awaited with suppressed excitement the application of the test. It was tried on Bud first. Mr. Cunningham, said Eileen with her dazzling smile after she had sung When the leaves began to turn.
What do you think of my voice? "'Frankly and honestly now, as you know I want you always to be toward me.' Bud squirmed in his chair, at his chance to show the sincerity that he knew was required of him. "'I tell you the truth, Miss Eileen,' he said earnestly, "'you ain't got much more voice than a weasel. Just a little squeak, you know. Of course, we all like to hear you sing, for it's kind of sweet and soothing, after all.' And you look most as mighty well sittin' on the piano stool as you do faced around. But as for real singin', I reckon you couldn't call it that. I looked closely at Eileen to see if Bud had overdone his frankness. But her pleased smile and sweetly spoken thanks assured me that we were on the right track.
And what do you think, Mr. Jax? she asked next. Take it from me, said Jax. You ain't the prima donna class. I've heard him warble in every city in the United States, and I tell you, your vocal output don't go. Otherwise, you've got the Grand Opera Bunch sent to the soap factory. In looks, I mean. For the high screechers generally look like Mary Ann on her Thursday out. But nix for the gargle work. Your epiglottis ain't a real sidestepper. Its footwork ain't good. With a merry laugh at Jack's criticism, Eileen looked inquiringly at me. I admit that I faltered a little. Was there not such a thing as being too frank? Perhaps I even hedged a little in my verdict, but I stayed with the critics. I am not skilled in scientific music, Miss Eileen, I said.
But frankly, I cannot praise very highly the singing voice that nature has given you. It has long been a favorite comparison that a great singer sings like a bird. Well, there are birds and birds. I would say that your voice reminds me of a thrush's throaty, not strong, nor much compass or variety, but still sweet, well, in its way, and... Thank you, Mr. Harris, interrupted Miss Hinkle. I knew I could depend upon your frankness. and honesty. And then C. Vincent Vesey drew back one sleeve from his snowy cuff, and the water came down at Lodore. My memory cannot do justice to his masterly tribute to that priceless, God-given treasure, Miss Hinckley's voice. He raved over it in terms that, if they had been addressed to the morning stars when they sang together, would have made their stellar choir explode in a meteoric shower of flaming self-satisfaction.
He marshalled on his little white fingertips the grand opera stars of all the continents, from Jenny Lind to Emma Abbott, only to depreciate their endowments. He spoke of larynxes, of chest notes, of phrasing, arpeggios, and other strange paraphernalia of the throaty art. He admitted, as though driven to a corner, that Jenny Lynn had a note or two in the high register that Miss Hinkle had not yet acquired, but that was a mere matter of practice and training. As a peroration, he predicted, solemnly predicted, a career in vocal art for the coming star of the Southwest, and one of which Grand Ole Texas may well be proud. Hitherto unsurpassed in the annals of musical history. When we left at ten, Eileen gave each of us her usual warm, cordial handshake, entrancing smile, and invitation to call again.
I could not see that one was favored above or below another, but three of us knew. We knew. We knew that frankness and honesty had won, and that the rivals now numbered three instead of four. Down at the station, Jax brought out a pint bottle of the proper stuff, and we celebrated the downfall of a blatant interloper. Four days went by without anything happening worthy of recount. On the fifth, Jax and I, entering the brush arbor for our supper, saw the Mexican youth instead of a divinity in a spotless waist and navy blue skirt, taking in dollars through the barbed wire wicket. We rushed into the kitchen, meeting Paul Hinkle coming out with two cups of hot coffee in his hands. "'Where's Eileen?' we asked in recitative.
Paul Hinkle was a kindly man. "'Well, gents,' said he, "'it was a sudden notion she took. But I've got the money, and I let her have her way. She's gone to a conservatory in Boston for four years.' For to have her voice cultivated. Now excuse me to pass, Jets, for this coffee's hot and my thumbs is tender.
That night, there were four instead of three of us sitting on the station platform and swinging our feet. See, Vincent Vesey was one of us. We discussed things while dogs barked at the moon that rose as big as a five-cent piece or a flour barrel. And what we discussed was whether it is better to lie to a woman or to tell her the truth. And as all of us were young then, we did not come to a decision. End of a Poor Rule End of Options by O. Henry