O. Henry

by O. Henry

In Mezzotint

  * * *

  THE DOCTOR had long ago ceased his hospital practice, but whenever there was a case of special interest among the wards, his spirited team of bays was sure to be seen standing at the hospital gates. Young, handsome, at the head of his profession, possessing an ample income, and married but six months to a beautiful girl who adored him, his lot was certainly one to be envied.

  It must have been 9 o’clock when he reached home. The stableman took the team, and he ran up the steps lightly. The door opened, and Doris’ arms were flung tightly about his neck, and her wet cheek pressed to his.

  “Oh, Ralph,” she said, her voice quivering and plaintive; “you are so late. You can’t think how I miss you when you don’t come at the usual hour. I’ve kept supper warm for you. I’m so jealous of those patients of yours—they keep you from me so much.”

  “How fresh and sweet and wholesome you are, after the sights I have to see,” he said, smiling down at her girlish face with the airy confidence of a man who knows himself well beloved. “Now, pour my coffee, little one, while I go up and change clothes.”

  After supper he sat in the library in his favorite arm chair, and she sat in her especial place upon one arm of the chair and held a match for him to light his cigar. She seemed so glad to have him with her; every touch was a caress, and every word she spake had that lingering, loving drawl that a woman uses to but one man—at a time.

  “I lost my case of cerebro-­spinal meningitis tonight,” he said, gravely.

  “I have you, and I don’t have you,” she said. “Your thoughts are always with your profession, even when I think you are most mine. Ah, well,” with a sigh, “you help the suffering, and I would see all that suffer relieved or else like your cerebro—what is it? patient, at rest.”

  “A queer case, too,” said the doctor, patting his wife’s hand and gazing into the clouds of cigar smoke. “He should have recovered. I had him cured, and he died on my hands without any warning. Ungrateful, too, for I treated that case beautifully. Confound the fellow, I believe he wanted to die. Some nonsensical romance worried him into a fever.”

  “A romance? Oh, Ralph, tell it to me. Just think! A romance in a hospital.”

  “He tried to tell it to me this morning in snatches between paroxysms of pain. He was bending backward till his head almost touched his heels, and his ribs were nearly cracking, yet he managed to convey something of his life story.”

  “Oh, how horrible,” said the doctor’s wife, slipping her arm between his neck and the chair.

  “It seems,” went on the doctor, “as well as I could gather, that some girl had discarded him to marry a more well-­to-­do man, and he lost hope and interest in life, and went to the dogs. No, he refused to tell her name. There was a great pride in that meningitis case. He lied like an angel about his own name, and he gave his watch to the nurse and spoke to her as he would to a queen. I don’t believe I ever will forgive him for dying, for I worked the next thing to a miracle on him. Well, he died this morning, and—let me get a match—oh, yes, here’s a little thing in my pocket he gave me to have buried with him. He told me about starting to a concert with this girl one night, and they decided not to go in, but take a moonlight walk instead. She tore the ticket in two pieces, and gave him one-­half and kept the other. Here’s his half, this little red piece of pasteboard, with the word ‘Admit—’ printed on it. Look out, little one—that old chair arm is so slippery. Hurt you?”

  “No, Ralph. I’m not so easy hurt. What do you think love is, Ralph?”

  “Love? Little one! Oh, love is undoubtedly a species of mild insanity. An over-­balance of the brain that leads to an abnormal state. It is as much a disease as measles, but as yet, sentimentalists refuse to hand it over to us doctors of medicine for treatment.”

  His wife took the half of the little red ticket and held it up.

  “Admit—” she said, with a little laugh. “I suppose by this time he’s admitted somewhere, isn’t he, Ralph?”

  “Somewhere,” said the doctor, lighting his cigar afresh.

  “Finish your cigar, Ralph, and then come up,” she said. “I’m a little tired, and I’ll wait for you above.”

  “All right, little one,” said the doctor. “Pleasant dreams!”

  He smoked the cigar out, and then lit another.

  It was nearly eleven when he went up stairs.

  The light in his wife’s room was turned low, and she lay upon her bed undressed. As he stepped to her side and raised her hand, some steel instrument fell and jingled upon the floor, and he saw upon the white countenance a creeping red horror that froze his blood.

  He sprang to the lamp and turned up the blaze. As he parted his lips to send forth a shout, he paused for a moment, with his eyes upon his dead patient’s half ticket that lay upon the table. The other half had been neatly fitted to it, and it now read:

  The Barber Talks

  * * *

  THE POST man slid into the chair with an apologetic manner, for the barber’s gaze was superior and scornful. He was so devilish, cool and self-­possessed, and held the public in such infinite contempt.

  The Post man’s hair had been cut close with the clippers on the day before.

  “Haircut?” asked the barber in a quiet but thoroughly dangerous tone.

  “Shave,” said The Post man.

  The barber raised his eyebrows, gave his victim a look of deep disdain, and hurled the chair with a loud rattle and crash back to a reclining position.

  Then he seized a mug and brush and, after bestowing upon The Post man a look of undying contumely, turned with a sneer to the water faucet. Thence he returned, enveloped the passive victim in a voluminous cloth, and with a pitiless hand daubed a great brushful of sweetish tasting lather across his mouth.

  Then he began to talk.

  “Ever been in Seattle, Washington Territory?” he asked.

  “Blub-­a-­lub-­blub,” said The Post man, struggling against the soap, and then he shook his head feebly.

  “Neither have I,” said the barber, “but I have a brother named Bill who runs an orange orchard nine miles from St. John, Fla. That’s only a split hair on your neck; it’s growing the wrong way. They are caused by shaving the neck in the wrong direction. Sometimes whiskey will make them do that way. Whiskey is a terrible thing. Do you drink it?”

  The Post man only had one eye of all his features uncovered by lather and he tried to throw an appealing expression implying negation into this optic, but the barber was too quick for him and filled the eye with soap by a dextrous flap of his brush.

  “My brother Bill used to drink,” continued the barber. “He could drink more whiskey than any man in Houston, but he never got drunk. He had a chair in my shop, but I had to let him go. Bill had a wonderful constitution. When he got all he could hold he would quit drinking. The only way he showed it was in his eyes. They would get kind of glazed and fishy and wouldn’t turn in his head. When Bill wanted to look to one side he used to take his fingers and turn his eyeballs a little the way he wanted to see. His eyes looked exactly like those little round windows you see in the dome of the postoffice. You could hear Bill breathe across the street when he was full. He could shave people when he was drunk as well as he could sober.—Razor hurt you?”

  The Post man tried to wave one of his hands to disclaim any sense of pain, but the barber’s quick eye caught the motion and he leaned his weight against the hand, crushing it against the chair.

  “I kept noticing,” went on the barber, “that Bill was getting about four customers to my one, even if he did drink so much. People would come in three or four at a time and sit down and wait their turns with Bill when my chair was vacant. I didn’t know what to make of it. Bill had all he could do, and he was so crowded that he didn’t have time to go out to a saloon, but he kept a big jug in the back room, and every few minutes he would slip i
n there and take a drink.

  “One day I noticed a man that got out of Bill’s chair acting queer and he staggered as he went out. A day or two afterwards the shop was full of customers from morning till night, and one man came back and had a shave three different times in the forenoon. In a couple of days more there was a crowd of men in the shop, and they had a line formed outside two or three doors down the sidewalk. Bill made $9.00 that day. That evening a policeman came in and jerked me up for running a saloon without a license. It seems that Bill’s breath was so full of whiskey that every man he shaved went out feeling pretty hilarious and sent his friends there to be shaved. It cost me $300 to get out of it, and I shipped Bill to Florida pretty soon afterward.”

  “I was sent for once,” went on the barber, as he seized his victim by the ear and slammed his head over on the other side, “to go out on Piney street and shave a dead man. Barbers don’t much like a job of that kind, although they get from $5 to $10 for the work. It was 1908 Piney street. I started about 11 o’clock at night. I found the street all right and I counted from the corner until I found 1908. I had my razors, soap and mug in a little case I use for such purposes. I went in and knocked at the door. An old man opened it and his eye fell on my case.

  “ ‘You’ve come, have you?’ he asked. ‘Well, go up stairs; he’s in the front room to your right. There’s nobody with him. He hasn’t any friends or relatives in town; he’s only been boarding here about a week.’

  “ ‘How long since he—since it occurred?’ I asked.

  “ ‘About an hour, I guess,’ says the old man. I was glad of that because corpses always shave better before they get good and cold. I went in the room and turned up the lamp. The man was laid out on the bed. He was warm yet and he had about a week’s growth of beard on. I got to work and in half an hour I had given him a nice clean shave that would have done his heart good if he had been alive. Then I went down stairs and saw the old man.

  “ ‘What success?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Good,’ says I. ‘He’s fixed up all right. Who’s to pay?’

  “ ‘He gave me $30 to send his folks in Alabama yesterday,’ says the old man. ‘I guess your fee will have to come out of it.’

  “ ‘It’ll be five,’ I said.

  “The old man handed me a five dollar bill and I went home very well satisfied.”

  Here the barber seized the chair, hurled it upright, snatched off the cloth, buried his hands in The Post man’s hair and tore out a handful, bumped and thumped his head, shook it violently and hissed sarcastically:

  “Bay rum?”

  The Post man nodded stupidly, closed his eyes and tried unsuccessfully to recall a prayer.

  “Next day,” said the barber, “I heard some news. It seems that a man had died at 1908 Piney street and just a little while before a man in the next house had taken poison. The folks in one house sent for a doctor and the ones in the other sent for a barber. The funny part is the doctor and I both made a mistake and got into the wrong house. He went in to see the dead man and found the family doctor just getting ready to leave. The doctor didn’t waste any time asking questions, but got out his stomach pump, stuck it into the dead man and went to work pumping the poison out. All this time I was busy shaving the man who had taken poison. And the funniest part of it all is that after the doctor had pumped all the other doctor’s medicine out of the dead man, he opened his eyes, raised up in bed and asked for a steak and potatoes.

  “This made the family doctor mad, and he and the doctor with a stomach pump got into a fight and fell down the stairs and broke the hat rack all to pieces.”

  “And how about your man who had taken poison?” asked The Post man timidly.

  “Him?” said the barber, “why he died, of course, but he died with one of the beautifulest shaves that ever a man had.—Brush!”

  An African of terrible aspect bore down upon The Post man, struck him violently with the stub of a whisk broom, seized his coat at the back and ripped it loose from its collar.

  “Call again,” growled the barber in a voice of the deepest menace, as the scribe made a rush for the door and escaped.

  The Ghost That Came to Old Angles

  * * *

  DENNY TOOLE, who played the rôle of ghost is now leading man in a dramatic company of repute, “Raph,” short for Raphael, who “made up” Denny for the scene is a rising marine painter, “The Angel,” whose barbarous imagination conceived the infamous scheme, perforates our statesmen in Washington “specials,” while I, aider and abettor in the affair, I—well, you should drop up into my den sometime and look over my splendid collection of “Editors’ Regrets.”

  The long, two storied, moss grown brick college building in the lonely North Carolina woods, the cool, sandy roads flanked by sumac and blackberry bushes, through which ran, half hidden, the gray rail fences, the farm houses peering from shady groves across the fields of wheat and corn, the drone of the bees in the locust trees, the rattle of falling chestnuts upon the dry leaves at night, the dismal crying of the chicken hawks in the afternoons, the solemnity, the loneliness of the distant wooded hills, weltering in blue September haze and wooing us through the high, small windows;—all these things come back to me afresh as I recall the facts about the ghost that came to Old Angles.

  We four boys, students at Oak Hill college, by reason of concordant tastes in the direction of the fine arts, a more discriminating and delicate choice in deviltry, and a fancied superiority to other people in general, were sworn and congenial associates. Our higher strung natures demanded loftier diversion than that afforded by the looting of watermelon and potato patches to set forth nocturnal feasts, and devising new forms of torture for the principal’s cow. Wherefore, we sought out new, bizarre, and deeply pondered modes of rendering life a burden to our preceptors and the good folk unfortunate enough to dwell within the radius of the territory we covered.

  By far the choicest butt of our waggery at Oak Hall was Professor Haliburton Chester Strayhorn, instructor in mathematics. At him we launched our masterpieces of wit and satire,—shafts that I now can see were but poor pinfeather darts of impudence and conceit.

  Professor Strayhorn—or “Old Angles,” as we called him privately,—a weak fancy evolved from his occupation and his bony figure—was a gloomy, solemn man with a sparse, reddish beard, and eyes totally devoid of humour. Mathematics he undoubtedly knew, but the rest of his soul he kept closed. It was rumored that he had once had a romance of some sort, but we four, who knew the world, laughed the idea to scorn. Old Angles, in his black dyed clothes, his frayed, with-­collar-­attached shirt, and his rusty brown string tie was too sorry a bird to have ever perched upon the bright pinnacles of romance. He always went through his lessons with painstaking care, and was sharp and intolerant with inattention or shirking. At all times he seemed a prey to some inward care that revealed itself in his restless, sometimes absent-­minded, and always unhappy demeanour. After lessons he invariably retired to his room, a small log building upon the campus. To this room he seldom invited any one. Glimpses we caught of its interior in passing failed to reveal anything suggestive of romance or mystery. A table littered with books and papers, a frail bed in a corner, two or three chairs and a venerable hair trunk was about all it contained.

  From some inexplicable, and, to us, tantalizing reason Old Angles had taken an uncommon fancy toward Denny. To him he explained equations with partial minuteness, and from him he bore with abnormal endurance utterly idiotic demonstrations of problems that from any other member of the class would have drawn swift and pointed reproof. Even in addressing Denny, Old Angles’ voice would lose some of its harsh monotony, and I have seen him, during a lesson, watching the boy’s face with a most peculiar soft and puzzling expression upon his own. He even went so far one day as to invite Denny to his room, and there regaled him with a glass of elderberry wine, and a lecture on the hypothenuse. Goad
ed by our ingenious and derisive speculations as to the reason of Old Angles’ partiality, Denny received his favors with waxing hostility.

  One day when Old Angles was feeling pretty sharp he kept in two of the duller boys after lessons in order to drum into them the whys and wherefores of a certain geometric design. We inevitable four companions left the recitation hall, and with ennui upon us, walked across the campus. As we came to Old Angles’ cottage we observed that the door was open. Impelled by a common prompting to evil, we entered and looked about. The table in the center of the room alone offered matter worthy of inspection. It was piled high with books, mostly works on the higher mathematics, and scratch pads broken out all over with figures in pencil. There was his lamp with a spoonful of oil in it, and an old quill pen in an inkstand. Curiously enough, among the books lay an old volume of Tennyson’s poems, which, when I picked it up opened easily at “Maud.”

  “Boys,” I said, “Old Angles has deceived us. He reads poetry. Listen to this.” A passage was marked with a pencil:—

  . . . “ ‘Would die,

  For sullen seeming Death may give more

  life to Love than is, or ever was

  In our low world, where yet ’tis sweet to live’ ”

  “Hullo! what next?” said The Angel, snatching up a square of cardboard that fell from a treatise on the differential calculus that he was contemptuously handling; “Shades of Cupid! Old Angles’ Romance has turned up at last.”

  He held up a photograph of a woman, a young woman with a face such as an artist of real imagination pictures upon an angel; sweet, clear and tender, with eyes that accuse while they charm the beholder.

  And—the secret of Old Angles’ partiality to Denny was out—it was Denny’s face femininized; the same dreamy, holy expression that so belied Denny’s interior, the same unimpor­tant nose, the same curve to the mouth and same blonde curling hair. The Angel turned the card over. On the back was written in a sloping hand: “To Hal from Luella”; and underneath, in Old Angles’ scrawl: “Died June 18th, 1868.”