O. Henry

by O. Henry

  Impy left by the back way. Before the scrape of her hard, bare feet had died away on the back porch, a wild shriek—I was sure it was hers—filled the hollow house. Then the deep, gruff tones of an angry man’s voice mingled with the girl’s further squeals and unintelligible words.

  Azalea Adair rose without surprise or emotion and disappeared. For two minutes I heard the hoarse rumble of the man’s voice; then something like an oath and a slight scuffle, and she returned calmly to her chair.

  “This is a roomy house,” she said, “and I have a tenant for part of it. I am sorry to have to rescind my invitation to tea. It was impossible to get the kind I always use at the store. Perhaps to-­morrow Mr. Baker will be able to supply me.”

  I was sure that Impy had not had time to leave the house. I inquired concerning street-­car lines and took my leave. After I was well on my way I remembered that I had not learned Azalea Adair’s name. But to-­morrow would do.

  That same day I started in on the course of iniquity that this uneventful city forced upon me. I was in the town only two days, but in that time I managed to lie shamelessly by telegraph, and to be an accomplice—after the fact, if that is the correct legal term—to a murder.

  As I rounded the corner nearest my hotel the Afrite coachman of the polychromatic, nonpareil coat seized me, swung open the dungeony door of his peripatetic sarcophagus, flirted his feather duster and began his ritual: “Step right in, boss. Carriage is clean—jus’ got back from a funeral. Fifty cents to any——”

  And then he knew me and grinned broadly. “’Scuse me, boss; you is de gen’l’man what rid out with me dis mawnin’. Thank you kindly, suh.”

  “I am going out to 861 again to-­morrow afternoon at three,” said I, “and if you will be here, I’ll let you drive me. So you know Miss Adair?” I concluded, thinking of my dollar bill.

  “I belonged to her father, Judge Adair, suh,” he replied.

  “I judge that she is pretty poor,” I said. “She hasn’t much money to speak of, has she?”

  For an instant I looked again at the fierce countenance of King Cettiwayo, and then he changed back to an extortionate old Negro hack driver.

  “She ain’t gwine to starve, suh,” he said slowly. “She has reso’ces, suh; she has reso’ces.”

  “I shall pay you fifty cents for the trip,” said I.

  “Dat is puffeckly correct, suh,” he answered humbly. “I jus’ had to have dat two dollars dis mawnin’, boss.”

  I went to the hotel and lied by electricity. I wired the magazine: “A. Adair holds out for eight cents a word.”

  The answer that came back was: “Give it to her quick, you duffer.”

  Just before dinner “Major” Wentworth Caswell bore down upon me with the greetings of a long-­lost friend. I have seen few men whom I have so instantaneously hated, and of whom it was so difficult to be rid. I was standing at the bar when he invaded me; therefore I could not wave the white ribbon in his face. I would have paid gladly for the drinks, hoping, thereby, to escape another; but he was one of those despicable, roaring, advertising bibbers who must have brass bands and fireworks attend upon every cent that they waste in their follies.

  With an air of producing millions he drew two one-­dollar bills from a pocket and dashed one of them upon the bar. I looked once more at the dollar bill with the upper right-­hand corner missing, torn through the middle, and patched with a strip of blue tissue paper. It was my dollar bill again. It could have been no other.

  I went up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary, eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detective story of San Francisco) by saying to myself sleepily: “Seems as if a lot of people here own stock in the Hack-­Driver’s Trust. Pays dividends promptly, too. Wonder if——” Then I fell asleep.

  King Cettiwayo was at his post the next day, and rattled my bones over the stones out to 861. He was to wait and rattle me back again when I was ready.

  Azalea Adair looked paler and cleaner and frailer than she had looked on the day before. After she had signed the contract at eight cents per word she grew still paler and began to slip out of her chair. Without much trouble I managed to get her up on the antediluvian horsehair sofa and then I ran out to the sidewalk and yelled to the coffee-­colored Pirate to bring a doctor. With a wisdom that I had not suspected in him, he abandoned his team and struck off up the street afoot, realizing the value of speed. In ten minutes he returned with a grave, gray-­haired and capable man of medicine. In a few words (worth much less than eight cents each) I explained to him my presence in the hollow house of mystery. He bowed with stately understanding, and turned to the old Negro.

  “Uncle Cæsar,” he said calmly, “run up to my house and ask Miss Lucy to give you a cream pitcher full of fresh milk and half a tumbler of port wine. And hurry back. Don’t drive—run. I want you to get back sometime this week.”

  It occurred to me that Dr. Merriman also felt a distrust as to the speeding powers of the land-­pirate’s steeds. After Uncle Cæsar was gone, lumberingly, but swiftly, up the street, the doctor looked me over with great politeness and as much careful calculation until he had decided that I might do.

  “It is only a case of insufficient nutrition,” he said. “In other words, the result of poverty, pride, and starvation. Mrs. Caswell has many devoted friends who would be glad to aid her, but she will accept nothing except from that old Negro, Uncle Cæsar, who was once owned by her family.”

  “Mrs. Caswell!” said I, in surprise. And then I looked at the contract and saw that she had signed it “Azalea Adair Caswell.”

  “I thought she was Miss Adair,” I said.

  “Married to a drunken, worthless loafer, sir,” said the doctor. “It is said that he robs her even of the small sums that her old servant contributes toward her support.”

  When the milk and wine had been brought the doctor soon revived Azalea Adair. She sat up and talked of the beauty of the autumn leaves that were then in season, and their height of color. She referred lightly to her fainting seizure as the outcome of an old palpitation of the heart. Impy fanned her as she lay on the sofa. The doctor was due elsewhere, and I followed him to the door. I told him that it was within my power and intentions to make a reasonable advance of money to Azalea Adair on future contributions to the magazine, and he seemed pleased.

  “By the way,” he said, “perhaps you would like to know that you have had royalty for a coachman. Old Cæsar’s grandfather was a king in Congo. Cæsar himself has royal ways, as you may have observed.”

  As the doctor was moving off I heard Uncle Cæsar’s voice inside: “Did he git bofe of dem two dollars from you, Mis’ Zalea?”

  “Yes, Cæsar,” I heard Azalea Adair answer weakly. And then I went in and concluded business negotiations with our contributor. I assumed the responsibility of advancing fifty dollars, putting it as a necessary formality in binding our bargain. And then Uncle Cæsar drove me back to the hotel.

  Here ends all of the story as far as I can testify as a witness. The rest must be only bare statements of facts.

  At about six o’clock I went out for a stroll. Uncle Cæsar was at his corner. He threw open the door of his carriage, flourished his duster and began his depressing formula: “Step right in, suh. Fifty cents to anywhere in the city—hack’s puffickly clean, suh—jus’ got back from a funeral——”

  And then he recognized me. I think his eyesight was getting bad. His coat had taken on a few more faded shades of color, the twine strings were more frayed and ragged, the last remaining button—the button of yellow horn—was gone. A motley descendant of kings was Uncle Cæsar!

  About two hours later I saw an excited crowd besieging the front of a drug store. In a desert where nothing happens this was
manna; so I edged my way inside. On an extemporized couch of empty boxes and chairs was stretched the mortal corporeality of Major Wentworth Caswell. A doctor was testing him for the immortal ingredient. His decision was that it was conspicuous by its absence.

  The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being had been engaged in terrific battle—the details showed that. Loafer and reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were possible, to speak of him. One kind-­looking man said, after much thought: “When ‘Cas’ was about fo’teen he was one of the best spellers in school.”

  While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of “the man that was,” which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it in a death grip.

  At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:

  “In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these no-­account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found the money was not on his person.”

  I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-­cent piece, with frayed ends of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the slow, muddy waters below.

  I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!

  WEST

  A Fog in Santone

  A METEOROLOGICAL SKETCH

  * * *

  THE DRUG clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the high-­turned overcoat collar.

  “I would rather not supply you,” he says doubtfully. “I sold you a dozen morphia tablets less than an hour ago.”

  The customer smiles wanly. “The fault is in your crooked streets. I did n’t intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up. Excuse me.”

  He draws his collar higher, and moves out, slowly. He stops under an electric light at the corner, and juggles absorbedly with three or four little pasteboard boxes. “Thirty-­six,” he announces to himself. “More than plenty.”

  For a gray mist had swooped upon Santone that night, an opaque terror that laid a hand to the throat of each of the city’s guests. It was computed that three thousand invalids were hibernating in the town. They had come from by and wide, for here, among these contracted, river-­sliced streets, the goddess Ozone has elected to linger.

  Purest atmosphere, sir, on earth! You might think, from the river winding through our town, that we are malarial, but, no, sir! Repeated experiments made by both government and local experts show that our air contains nothing deleterious—nothing but ozone, sir, pure ozone. Litmus paper tests made all along the river show—but you can read it all in the prospectuses; or the Santonian will recite it for you, word by word.

  We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold, gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.

  The purchaser of the morphia wanders into the fog, and, at length, finds himself upon a little iron bridge, one of the score or more in the heart of the city under which the small, tortuous river flows. He leans on the rail and gasps, for here the mist has concentrated, lying like a footpad to garrote such of the Three Thousand as creep that way. The iron bridge guys rattle to the strain of his cough, a mocking, phthisical rattle, seeming to say to him: “Clackety—clack! just a little rusty cold, sir,—but not from our river. Lit—mus paper all along the banks and nothing but ozone. Clacket—y—clack!”

  The Memphis man at last recovers sufficiently to be aware of another overcoated man ten feet away, leaning on the rail, and just coming out of a paroxysm. There is a freemasonry among the Three Thousand that does away with formalities and introductions. A cough is your card; a hemorrhage a letter of credit. The morphia man, being nearer recovered, speaks first.

  “Goodall: Memphis—pulmonary tuberculosis—guess last stages.” The Three Thousand economize on words. Words are breath, and they need breath to write checks for the doctors.

  “Hurd,” gasps the other. “Hurd; of T’leder. T’leder, Ah-­hia. Catarrhal bronkeetis. Name’s Dennis, too—doctor says. Says I ’ll,—live four weeks if I—take care of myself. Got your walking papers yet?”

  “My doctor,” says Goodall, of Memphis, a little boastingly, “gives me three months.”

  “Oh,” remarks the man from Toledo, filling up great gaps in his conversation with wheezes, “damn the difference. What’s months! Expect to—cut mine down to one week—and die in a hack—a four wheeler, not a cough. Be considerable moanin’ of the bars when I put out to sea. I ’ve patronized ’em—pretty freely since I struck my—present gait. Say, Goodall, of Memphis—if your doc has set your pegs so close—why don’t you—get on a big spree and go—to the devil quick and easy—like I ’m doing?”

  “A spree!” says Goodall, as one who entertains a new idea, “I never did such a thing. I was thinking of another way, but—”

  “Come on,” invites the Ohioan, “and have some drinks. I ’ve been at it—for two days, but the inf—ernal stuff won’t bite like it used to. Goodall, of Memphis, what ’s your respiration?”

  “Twenty-­four.”

  “Daily—temperature?”

  “Hundred and four.”

  “You can do it in two days. It’ll take me a—week. Tank up, friend Goodall—have all the fun you can, then—off you go, in the middle of a jag, and s-­s-­save trouble and expense. I ’m a s-­son of a gun if this ain’t a health resort—for your whiskers! A Lake Erie fog ’d get lost here in two minutes.”

  “You said something about a drink,” says Goodall.

  A few minutes later they line up at a glittering bar, and hang upon the arm rest. The bartender, blonde, heavy, well-­groomed, sets out their drinks, instantly perceiving that he serves two of the Three Thousand. He observes that one is a middle-­aged man, well dressed, with a lined and sunken face; the other a mere boy, who is chiefly eyes and overcoat. Disguised well the tedium begotten by many repetitions, the server of drinks begins to chant the sanitary saga of Santone. “Rather a moist night, gentlemen, for our town. A little fog from our river, but nothing to hurt. Repeated tests.”

  “Damn your litmus papers,” gasps Toledo,—“without any—personal offence intended. We’ve heard of ’em before. Let ’em turn red, white and blue. What we want is a repeated test of that—whiskey. Come again. I paid for the last round, Goodall, of Memphis.”

  The bottle oscillates from one to the other, continues to do so, and is not removed from the counter. The bartender sees two emaciated invalids dispose of enough Kentucky Belle to floor a dozen cowboys, without di
splaying any emotion save a sad and contemplative interest in the peregrinations of the bottle. So he is moved to manifest a solicitude as to the consequences.

  “Not on your Uncle Mark Hanna,” responds Toledo, “will we get drunk. We’ve been—vaccinated with whiskey and—cod liver oil. What would send you to the police station—only gives us a thirst. S-­s-­set out another bottle.”

  It is slow work trying to meet death by that route. Some quicker way must be found. They leave the saloon and plunge again into the mist. The sidewalks are mere flanges at the base of the houses; the street a cold ravine, the fog filling it like a freshet. Not far away is the Mexican quarter. Conducted as if by wires along the heavy air comes a guitar’s tinkle, and the demoralizing voice of some señorita singing:

  “En las tardes sombrillos del invierno

  En el prado a Morar me reclino,

  Y maldigo mi fausto destino—

  Una vida la mas infeliz.”

  The words of it they do not understand—neither Toledo nor Memphis, but words are the least important things in life. The music tears the breasts of the seekers after Nepenthe, inciting Toledo to remark:

  “Those kids of mine—I wonder—by God, Mr. Goodall, of Memphis, we had too little of that whiskey! No slow music in mine, if you please. It makes you disremember to forget.”

  Hurd, of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says:

  “I’m a son of a gun! Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San—Pedro Springs at eleven. Forgot it. A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at Rhinegelder’s Garden. That Noo York chap’s a lucky dog—Got one whole lung—good for a year yet. Plenty of money, too. He pays for everything. I can’t afford—to miss the jamboree. Sorry you ain’t going along. Good-­by, Goodall, of Memphis.”

  He rounds the corner and shuffles away, casting off thus easily the ties of acquaintanceship as the moribund do, the season of dissolution being man’s supreme hour of egoism and selfishness. But he turns and calls back through the fog to the other: “I say, Goodall, of Memphis! If you get there before I do, tell ’em Hurd ’s a comin’ too. Hurd, of T’leder, Ah-­hia.”