by O. Henry
“Saw it,” said the man from Topaz City. “But you ought to come out our way. It’s mountainous, you know, and the ladies all wear short skirts for climbing and——”
“Excuse me,” said the New Yorker, “but that isn’t exactly the point. New York must be a wonderful revelation to a visitor from the West. Now, as to our hotels——”
“Say,” said the man from Topaz City, “that reminds me— there were sixteen stage robbers shot last year within twenty miles of——”
“I was speaking of hotels,” said the New Yorker. “We lead Europe in that respect. And as far as our leisure class is concerned we are far——”
“Oh, I don’t know,” interrupted the man from Topaz City. “There were twelve tramps in our jail when I left home. I guess New York isn’t so——”
“Beg pardon, you seem to misapprehend the idea. Of course, you visited the Stock Exchange and Wall Street, where the——”
“Oh, yes,” said the man from Topaz City, as he lighted a Pennsylvania stogie, “and I want to tell you that we’ve got the finest town marshal west of the Rockies. Bill Rainer he took in five pickpockets out of the crowd when Red Nose Thompson laid the cornerstone of his new saloon. Topaz City don’t allow——”
“Have another Rhine wine and seltzer,” suggested the New Yorker. “I’ve never been West, as I said; but there can’t be any place out there to compare with New York. As to the claims of Chicago I——”
“One man,” said the Topazite—“one man only has been murdered and robbed in Topaz City in the last three——”
“Oh, I know what Chicago is,” interposed the New Yorker. “Have you been up Fifth Avenue to see the magnificent residences of our mil——”
“Seen ’em all. You ought to know Reub Stegall, the assessor of Topaz. When old man Tilbury, that owns the only two-story house in town, tried to swear his taxes from $6,000 down to $450.75, Reub buckled on his forty-five and went down to see——”
“Yes, yes, but speaking of our great city—one of its greatest features is our superb police department. There is no body of men in the world that can equal it for——”
“That waiter gets around like a Langley flying machine,” remarked the man from Topaz City, thirstily. “We’ve got men in our town, too, worth $400,000. There’s old Bill Withers and Colonel Metcalf and——”
“Have you seen Broadway at night?” asked the New Yorker, courteously. “There are few streets in the world that can compare with it. When the electrics are shining and the pavements are alive with two hurrying streams of elegantly clothed men and beautiful women attired in the costliest costumes that wind in and out in a close maze of expensively——”
“Never knew but one case in Topaz City,” said the man from the West. “Jim Bailey, our mayor, had his watch and chain and $235 in cash taken from his pocket while——”
“That’s another matter,” said the New Yorker. “While you are in our city you should avail yourself of every opportunity to see its wonders. Our rapid transit system——”
“If you was out in Topaz,” broke in the man from there, “I could show you a whole cemetery full of people that got killed accidentally. Talking about mangling folks up! why, when Berry Rogers turned loose that old double-barrelled shot-gun of his loaded with slugs at anybody——”
“Here, waiter!” called the New Yorker. “Two more of the same. It is acknowledged by every one that our city is the centre of art, and literature, and learning. Take, for instance, our after-dinner speakers. Where else in the country would you find such wit and eloquence as emanate from Depew and Ford, and——”
“If you take the papers,” interrupted the Westerner, “you must have read of Pete Webster’s daughter. The Websters live two blocks north of the court-house in Topaz City. Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and nights without waking up. The doctors said that——”
“Pass the matches, please,” said the New Yorker. “Have you observed the expedition with which new buildings are being run up in New York? Improved inventions in steel framework and——”
“I noticed,” said the Nevadian, “that the statistics of Topaz City showed only one carpenter crushed by falling timbers last year and he was caught in a cyclone.”
“They abuse our sky line,” continued the New Yorker, “and it is likely that we are not yet artistic in the construction of our buildings. But I can safely assert that we lead in pictorial and decorative art. In some of our houses can be found masterpieces in the way of paintings and sculpture. One who has the entrée to our best galleries will find——”
“Back up,” exclaimed the man from Topaz City. “There was a game last month in our town in which $90,000 changed hands on a pair of——”
“Ta-romt-tara!” went the orchestra. The stage curtain, blushing pink at the name “Asbestos” inscribed upon it, came down with a slow midsummer movement. The audience trickled leisurely down the elevator and stairs.
On the sidewalk below, the New Yorker and the man from Topaz City shook hands with alcoholic gravity. The elevated crashed raucously, surface cars hummed and clanged, cabmen swore, newsboys shrieked, wheels clattered ear-piercingly. The New Yorker conceived a happy thought, with which he aspired to clinch the pre-eminence of his city.
“You must admit,” said he, “that in the way of noise New York is far ahead of any other——”
“Back to the everglades!” said the man from Topaz City. “In 1900, when Sousa’s band and the repeating candidate were in our town you couldn’t——”
The rattle of an express wagon drowned the rest of the words.
The Foreign Policy of Company 99
* * *
JOHN BYRNES, hose-cart driver of Engine Company No. 99, was afflicted with what his comrades called Japanitis.
Byrnes had a war map spread permanently upon a table in the second story of the engine-house, and he could explain to you at any hour of the day or night the exact positions, conditions and intentions of both the Russian and Japanese armies. He had little clusters of pins stuck in the map which represented the opposing forces, and these he moved about from day to day in conformity with the war news in the daily papers.
Whenever the Japs won a victory John Byrnes would shift his pins, and then he would execute a war dance of delight, and the other firemen would hear him yell: “Go it, you blamed little, sawed-off, huckleberry-eyed, monkey-faced hot tamales! Eat ’em up, you little sleight-o’-hand, bow-legged bull terriers—give ’em another of them Yalu looloos, and you’ll eat rice in St. Petersburg. Talk about your Russians—say, wouldn’t they give you a painsky when it comes to a scrapovitch?”
Not even on the fair island of Nippon was there a more enthusiastic champion of the Mikado’s men. Supporters of the Russian cause did well to keep clear of Engine-House No. 99.
Sometimes all thoughts of the Japs left John Byrnes’s head. That was when the alarm of fire had sounded and he was strapped in his driver’s seat on the swaying cart, guiding Erebus and Joe, the finest team in the whole department—according to the crew of 99.
Of all the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch trying for place and show.
The Constitution says that one man is as good as another; but the Fire Department says he is better. This is a too generous theory, but the law will not allow itself to be construed otherwise. All of which comes perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the
attention of the S. P. C. A.
One of the transatlantic liners dumped out at Ellis Island a lump of protozoa which was expected to evolve into an American citizen. A steward kicked him down the gangway, a doctor pounced upon his eyes like a raven, seeking for trachoma or ophthalmia; he was hustled ashore and ejected into the city in the name of Liberty—perhaps, theoretically, thus inoculating against kingocracy with a drop of its own virus. This hypodermic injection of Europeanism wandered happily into the veins of the city with the broad grin of a pleased child. It was not burdened with baggage, cares or ambitions. Its body was lithely built and clothed in a sort of foreign fustian; its face was brightly vacant, with a small, flat nose, and was mostly covered by a thick, ragged, curling beard like the coat of a spaniel. In the pocket of the imported Thing were a few coins—denarii—scudi—kopecks—pfennigs—pilasters—whatever the financial nomenclature of his unknown country may have been.
Prattling to himself, always broadly grinning, pleased by the roar and movement of the barbarous city into which the steamship cut-rates had shunted him, the alien strayed away from the sea, which he hated, as far as the district covered by Engine Company No. 99. Light as a cork, he was kept bobbing along by the human tide, the crudest atom in all the silt of the stream that emptied into the reservoir of Liberty.
While crossing Third avenue he slowed his steps, enchanted by the thunder of the elevated trains above him and the soothing crash of the wheels on the cobbles. And then there was a new, delightful chord in the uproar—the musical clanging of a gong and a great shining juggernaut belching fire and smoke, that people were hurrying to see.
This beautiful thing, entrancing to the eye, dashed past, and the protoplasmic immigrant stepped into the wake of it with his broad, enraptured, uncomprehending grin. And so stepping, stepped into the path of No. 99’s flying hose-cart, with John Byrnes gripping, with arms of steel, the reins over the plunging backs of Erebus and Joe.
The unwritten constitutional code of the firemen has no exceptions or amendments. It is a simple thing—as simple as the rule of three. There was the heedless unit in the right of way; there was the hose-cart and the iron pillar of the elevated railroad.
John Byrnes swung all his weight and muscle on the left rein. The team and cart swerved that way and crashed like a torpedo into the pillar. The men on the cart went flying like skittles. The driver’s strap burst, the pillar rang with the shock, and John Byrnes fell on the car track with a broken shoulder twenty feet away, while Erebus—beautiful, raven-black, best-loved Erebus—lay whickering in his harness with a broken leg.
In consideration for the feelings of Engine Company No. 99 the details will be lightly touched. The company does not like to be reminded of that day. There was a great crowd, and hurry calls were sent in; and while the ambulance gong was clearing the way the men of No. 99 heard the crack of the S. P. C. A. agent’s pistol, and turned their heads away, not daring to look toward Erebus again.
When the firemen got back to the engine-house they found that one of them was dragging by the collar the cause of their desolation and grief. They set it in the middle of the floor and gathered grimly about it. Through its whiskers the calamitous object chattered effervescently and waved its hands.
“Sounds like a seidlitz powder,” said Mike Dowling, disgustedly, “and it makes me sicker than one. Call that a man!—that hoss was worth a steamer full of such two-legged animals. It’s a immigrant—that’s what it is.”
“Look at the doctor’s chalk mark on its coat,” said Reilly, the desk man. “It’s just landed. It must be a kind of a Dago or a Hun or one of them Finns, I guess. That’s the kind of truck that Europe unloads onto us.”
“Think of a thing like that getting in the way and laying John up in hospital and spoiling the best fire team in the city,” groaned another fireman. “It ought to be taken down to the dock and drowned.”
“Somebody go around and get Sloviski,” suggested the engine driver, “and let’s see what nation is responsible for this conglomeration of hair and head noises.”
Sloviski kept a delicatessen store around the corner on Third avenue, and was reputed to be a linguist.
One of the men fetched him—a fat, cringing man, with a discursive eye and the odors of many kinds of meats upon him.
“Take a whirl at this importation with your jaw-breakers, Sloviski,” requested Mike Dowling. “We can’t quite figure out whether he’s from the Hackensack bottoms or Hongkong-on-the-Ganges.”
Sloviski addressed the stranger in several dialects, that ranged in rhythm and cadence from the sounds produced by a tonsilitis gargle to the opening of a can of tomatoes with a pair of scissors. The immigrant replied in accents resembling the uncorking of a bottle of ginger ale.
“I have you his name,” reported Sloviski. “You shall not pronounce it. Writing of it in paper is better.” They gave him paper, and he wrote. “Demetre Svangvsk.”
“Looks like short hand,” said the desk man.
“He speaks some language,” continued the interpreter, wiping his forehead, “of Austria and mixed with a little Turkish. And, den, he have some Magyar words and a Polish or two, and many like the Roumanian, but not without talk of one tribe in Bessarabia. I do not him quite understand.”
“Would you call him a Dago or a Polocker, or what?” asked Mike, frowning at the polyglot description.
“He is a”—answered Sloviski—“he is a—I dink he come from—I dink he is a fool,” he concluded, impatient at his linguistic failure, “and if you pleases I will go back at mine delicatessen.”
“Whatever he is, he’s a bird,” said Mike Dowling; “and you want to watch him fly.”
Taking by the wing the alien fowl that had fluttered into the nest of Liberty, Mike led him to the door of the engine-house and bestowed upon him a kick hearty enough to convey the entire animus of Company 99. Demetre Svangvsk hustled away down the sidewalk, turning once to show his ineradicable grin to the aggrieved firemen.
In three weeks John Byrnes was back at his post from the hospital. With great gusto he proceeded to bring his war map up to date. “My money on the Japs every time,” he declared. “Why, look at them Russians—they’re nothing but wolves. Wipe ’em out, I say—and the little old jiu jitsu gang are just the cherry blossoms to do the trick, and don’t you forget it!”
The second day after Byrne’s reappearance came Demetre Svangvsk, the unidentified, to the engine-house, with a broader grin than ever. He managed to convey the idea that he wished to congratulate the hose-cart driver on his recovery and to apologize for having caused the accident. This he accomplished by so many extravagant gestures and explosive noises that the company was diverted for half an hour. Then they kicked him out again, and on the next day he came back grinning. How or where he lived no one knew. And then John Byrnes’s nine-year-old son, Chris, who brought him convalescent delicacies from home to eat, took a fancy to Svangvsk, and they allowed him to loaf about the door of the engine-house occasionally.
One afternoon the big drab automobile of the Deputy Fire Commissioner buzzed up to the door of No. 99 and the Deputy stepped inside for an informal inspection. The men kicked Svangvsk out a little harder than usual and proudly escorted the Deputy around 99, in which everything shone like my lady’s mirror.
The Deputy respected the sorrow of the company concerning the loss of Erebus, and he had come to promise it another mate for Joe that would do him credit. So they let Joe out of his stall and showed the Deputy how deserving he was of the finest mate that could be in horsedom.
While they were circling around Joe confabbing, Chris climbed into the Deputy’s auto and threw the power full on. The men heard a monster puffing and a shriek from the lad, and sprang out too late. The big auto shot away, luckily taking a straight course down the street. The boy knew nothing of its machinery; he sat clutching the cushions and howling. With the
power on nothing could have stopped that auto except a brick house, and there was nothing for Chris to gain by such a stoppage.
Demetre Svankvsk was just coming in again with a grin for another kick when Chris played his merry little prank. While the others sprang for the door Demetre sprang for Joe. He glided upon the horse’s bare back like a snake and shouted something at him like the crack of a dozen whips. One of the firemen afterward swore that Joe answered him back in the same language. Ten seconds after the auto started the big horse was eating up the asphalt behind it like a strip of macaroni.
Some people two blocks and a half away saw the rescue. They said that the auto was nothing but a drab noise with a black speck in the middle of it for Chris, when a big bay horse with a lizard lying on its back cantered up alongside of it, and the lizard reached over and picked the black speck out of the noise.
Only fifteen minutes after Svangvsk’s last kicking at the hands—or rather the feet—of Engine Company No. 99 he rode Joe back through the door with the boy safe, but acutely conscious of the licking he was going to receive.
Svangvsk slipped to the floor, leaned his head against Joe’s and made a noise like a clucking hen. Joe nodded and whistled loudly through his nostrils, putting to shame the knowledge of Sloviski, of the delicatessen.
John Byrnes walked up to Svangvsk, who grinned, expecting to be kicked. Byrnes gripped the outlander so strongly by the hand that Demetre grinned anyhow, conceiving it to be a new form of punishment.
“The heathen rides like a Cossack,” remarked a fireman who had seen a Wild West show—“they’re the greatest riders in the world.”
The word seemed to electrify Svankvsk. He grinned wider than ever.
“Yas—yas—me Cossack,” he spluttered, striking his chest.
“Cossack!” repeated John Byrnes, thoughtfully, “ain’t that a kind of a Russian?”