O. Henry

by O. Henry

“No man would kick a woman,” said Peters, virtuously. “A little choking—just a touch on the windpipe—that gets away with ’em—and no marks left. Wait for me. I’ll bring back that dollar, boys.”

  High up in a tenement-­house between Second Avenue and the river lived the Peterses in a back room so gloomy that the landlord blushed to take the rent for it. Mrs. Peters worked at sundry times, doing odd jobs of scrubbing and washing. Mr. Peters had a pure, unbroken record of five years without having earned a penny. And yet they clung together, sharing each other’s hatred and misery, being creatures of habit. Of habit, the power that keeps the earth from flying to pieces; though there is some silly theory of gravitation.

  Mrs. Peters reposed her 200 pounds on the safer of the two chairs and gazed stolidly out the one window at the brick wall opposite. Her eyes were red and damp. The furniture could have been carried away on a pushcart, but no pushcart man would have removed it as a gift.

  The door opened to admit Mr. Peters. His fox-­terrier eyes expressed a wish. His wife’s diagnosis located correctly the seat of it, but misread it hunger instead of thirst.

  “You’ll get nothing more to eat till night,” she said, looking out of the window again. “Take your hound-­dog’s face out of the room.”

  Mr. Peters’s eye calculated the distance between them. By taking her by surprise it might be possible to spring upon her, overthrow her, and apply the throttling tactics of which he had boasted to his waiting comrades. True, it had been only a boast; never yet had he dared to lay violent hands upon her; but with the thoughts of the delicious, cool bock or Culmbacher bracing his nerves, he was near to upsetting his own theories of the treatment due by a gentleman to a lady. But, with his loafer’s love for the more artistic and less strenuous way, he chose diplomacy first, the high card in the game—the assumed attitude of success already attained.

  “You have a dollar,” he said, loftily, but significantly in the tone that goes with the lighting of a cigar—when the properties are at hand.

  “I have,” said Mrs. Peters, producing the bill from her bosom and crackling it, teasingly.

  “I am offered a position in a—in a tea store,” said Mr. Peters. “I am to begin work to-­morrow. But it will be necessary for me to buy a pair of——”

  “You are a liar,” said Mrs. Peters, reinterring the note. “No tea store, nor no A B C store, nor no junk shop would have you. I rubbed the skin off both me hands washin’ jumpers and overalls to make that dollar. Do you think it come out of them suds to buy the kind you put into you? Skiddoo! Get your mind off of money.”

  Evidently the poses of Talleyrand were not worth one hundred cents on that dollar. But diplomacy is dexterous. The artistic temperament of Mr. Peters lifted him by the straps of his congress gaiters and set him on new ground. He called up a look of desperate melancholy to his eyes.

  “Clara,” he said, hollowly, “to struggle further is useless. You have always misunderstood me. Heaven knows I have striven with all my might to keep my head above the waves of misfortune, but——”

  “Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about walkin’ one by one through the narrow isles of Spain,” said Mrs. Peters, with a sigh. “I’ve heard it so often. There’s an ounce bottle of carbolic on the shelf behind the empty coffee can. Drink hearty.”

  Mr. Peters reflected. What next! The old expedients had failed. The two musty musketeers were awaiting him hard by the ruined château—that is to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-­iron legs. His honor was at stake. He had engaged to storm the castle single-­handed and bring back the treasure that was to furnish them wassail and solace. And all that stood between him and the coveted dollar was his wife, once a little girl whom he could—aha!—why not again? Once with soft words he could, as they say, twist her around his little finger. Why not again? Not for years had he tried it. Grim poverty and mutual hatred had killed all that. But Ragsy and Kidd were waiting for him to bring the dollar!

  Mr. Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his wife. Her formless bulk overflowed the chair. She kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been recently weeping.

  “I wonder,” said Mr. Peters to himself, “if there’d be anything in it.”

  The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring. But spring doesn’t come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.

  “I’ll try it,” said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.

  He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.

  “Clara, darling,” he said in tones that shouldn’t have fooled a baby seal, “why should we have hard words? Ain’t you my own tootsum wootsums?”

  A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid. Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and utterance of two of Love’s holiest of appellations.

  But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the back room over the back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger. It was ridiculous, and yet—— Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir and all of us, are in it.

  Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his arms were bound to his sides.

  “Do you love me, James?” asked Mrs. Peters.

  “Madly,” said James, “but——”

  “You are ill!” exclaimed Mrs. Peters. “Why are you so pale and tired looking?”

  “I feel weak,” said Mr. Peters. “I——”

  “Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  With a parting hug that revived in Mr. Peters recollections of the Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

  Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.

  “All right,” he confided to the ceiling. “I’ve got her going. I hadn’t any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib. Well, sir; ain’t I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What? It’s a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder what she went out for. I guess she’s gone to tell Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor, that we’re reconciled. I’ll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy was talking about slugging her!”

  Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla.

  “I’m glad I happened to have that dollar,” she said. “You’re all run down, honey.”

  Mr. Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff inserted into him. Then Mrs. Peters sat on his lap and murmured:

  “Call me tootsum wootsums again, James.”

  He sat still, held there by his materialized goddess of spring.

  Spring had come.

  On the bench in Union Square Mr. Ragsdale and Mr. Kidd squirmed, tongue-­parched, awaiting D’Artagnan and his dollar.

  “I wish I had choked her at first,” said Mr. Peters to himself.

  Brickdust Row

  * * *

  BLINKER WAS displeased. A man of less culture and poise and wealth would have sworn. But Blinker always remembered that he was a gentleman—a thing that no gentleman should do. So he merely looked bored and sardonic while he rode in a hansom to the center of disturbance, which was the Broadway office of Lawyer Oldport, who was agent for the Blinker estate.

  “I don’t see,” said Blinker, “why I should be always signing confounded papers. I am packed, and was to have left for the North Woods this morning. Now I must wait until to-­morrow morning. I hate night trains. My best razors are, of course, at the bottom of some unidentifiable trunk. It is a plot to drive me to bay rum and a monologueing, thumb-­handed barber. Give me a pen that do
esn’t scratch. I hate pens that scratch.”

  “Sit down,” said double-­chinned, gray Lawyer Oldport. “The worst has not been told you. Oh, the hardships of the rich! The papers are not yet ready to sign. They will be laid before you to-­morrow at eleven. You will miss another day. Twice shall the barber tweak the helpless nose of a Blinker. Be thankful that your sorrows do not embrace a hair-­cut.”

  “If,” said Blinker, rising, “the act did not involve more signing of papers I would take my business out of your hands at once. Give me a cigar, please.”

  “If,” said Lawyer Oldport, “I had cared to see an old friend’s son gulped down at one mouthful by sharks I would have ordered you to take it away long ago. Now, let’s quit fooling, Alexander. Besides the grinding task of signing your name some thirty times to-­morrow, I must impose upon you the consideration of a matter of business—of business, and I may say humanity or right. I spoke to you about this five years ago, but you would not listen—you were in a hurry for a coaching trip, I think. The subject has come up again. The property—”

  “Oh, property!” interrupted Blinker. “Dear Mr. Oldport, I think you mentioned to-­morrow. Let’s have it all at one dose to-­morrow—signatures and property and snappy rubber bands and that smelly sealing-­wax and all. Have luncheon with me? Well, I’ll try to remember to drop in at eleven to-­morrow. Morning.”

  The Blinker wealth was in lands, tenements and hereditaments, as the legal phrase goes. Lawyer Oldport had once taken Alexander in his little pulmonary gasoline runabout to see the many buildings and rows of buildings that he owned in the city. For Alexander was sole heir. They had amused Blinker very much. The houses looked so incapable of producing the big sums of money that Lawyer Oldport kept piling up in banks for him to spend.

  In the evening Blinker went to one of his clubs, intending to dine. Nobody was there except some old fogies playing whist who spoke to him with grave politeness and glared at him with savage contempt. Everybody was out of town. But here he was kept in like a schoolboy to write his name over and over on pieces of paper. His wounds were deep.

  Blinker turned his back on the fogies, and said to the club steward who had come forward with some nonsense about cold fresh salmon roe:

  “Symons, I’m going to Coney Island.” He said it as one might say: “All’s off; I’m going to jump into the river.”

  The joke pleased Symons. He laughed within a sixteenth of a note of the audibility permitted by the laws governing employees.

  “Certainly, sir,” he tittered. “Of course, sir, I think I can see you at Coney, Mr. Blinker.”

  Blinker got a paper and looked up the movements of Sunday steamboats. Then he found a cab at the first corner and drove to a North River pier. He stood in line, as democratic as you or I, and bought a ticket, and was trampled upon and shoved forward until, at last, he found himself on the upper deck of the boat staring brazenly at a girl who sat alone upon a camp stool. But Blinker did not intend to be brazen; the girl was so wonderfully good looking that he forgot for one minute that he was the prince incog, and behaved just as he did in society.

  She was looking at him, too, and not severely. A puff of wind threatened Blinker’s straw hat. He caught it warily and settled it again. The movement gave the effect of a bow. The girl nodded and smiled, and in another instant he was seated at her side. She was dressed all in white, she was paler than Blinker imagined milkmaids and girls of humble stations to be, but she was as tidy as a cherry blossom, and her steady, supremely frank gray eyes looked out from the intrepid depths of an unshadowed and untroubled soul.

  “How dare you raise your hat to me?” she asked, with a smile-­redeemed severity.

  “I didn’t,” Blinker said, but he quickly covered the mistake by extending it to “I didn’t know how to keep from it after I saw you.”

  “I do not allow gentlemen to sit by me to whom I have not been introduced,” she said, with a sudden haughtiness that deceived him. He rose reluctantly, but her clear, teasing laugh brought him down to his chair again.

  “I guess you weren’t going far,” she declared, with beauty’s magnificent self-­confidence.

  “Are you going to Coney Island?” asked Blinker.

  “Me?” She turned upon him wide-­open eyes full of bantering surprise. “Why, what a question! Can’t you see that I’m riding a bicycle in the park?” Her drollery took the form of impertinence.

  “And I am laying brick on a tall factory chimney,” said Blinker. “Mayn’t we see Coney together? I’m all alone and I’ve never been there before.”

  “It depends,” said the girl, “on how nicely you behave. I’ll consider your application until we get there.”

  Blinker took pains to provide against the rejection of his application. He strove to please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase, he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl’s way was that naturally, they were on a mutual plane of communication from the beginning.

  He learned that she was twenty, and her name was Florence; that she trimmed hats in a millinery shop; that she lived in a furnished room with her best chum Ella, who was cashier in a shoe store; and that a glass of milk from the bottle on the window-­sill and an egg that boils itself while you twist up your hair makes a breakfast good enough for any one. Florence laughed when she heard “Blinker.”

  “Well,” she said. “It certainly shows that you have imagination. It gives the ‘Smiths’ a chance for a little rest, anyhow.”

  They landed at Coney, and were dashed on the crest of a great human wave of mad pleasure-­seekers into the walks and avenues of Fairyland gone into vaudeville.

  With a curious eye, a critical mind and a fairly withheld judgment Blinker considered the temples, pagodas and kiosks of popularized delights. Hoi polloi trampled, hustled and crowded him. Basket parties bumped him; sticky children tumbled, howling, under his feet, candying his clothes. Insolent youths strolling among the booths with hard-­won canes under one arm and easily won girls on the other, blew defiant smoke from cheap cigars into his face. The publicity gentlemen with megaphones, each before his own stupendous attraction, roared like Niagara in his ears. Music of all kinds that could be tortured from brass, reed, hide or string, fought in the air to gain space for its vibrations against its competitors. But what held Blinker in awful fascination was the mob, the multitude, the proletariat shrieking, struggling, hurrying, panting, hurling itself in incontinent frenzy, with unabashed abandon, into the ridiculous sham palaces of trumpery and tinsel pleasures. The vulgarity of it, its brutal overriding of all the tenets of repression and taste that were held by his caste, repelled him strongly.

  In the midst of his disgust he turned and looked down at Florence by his side. She was ready with her quick smile and upturned, happy eyes, as bright and clear as the water in trout pools. The eyes were saying that they had the right to be shining and happy, for was their owner not with her (for the present) Man, her Gentleman Friend and holder of the keys to the enchanted city of fun?

  Blinker did not read her look accurately, but by some miracle he suddenly saw Coney aright.

  He no longer saw a mass of vulgarians seeking gross joys. He now looked clearly upon a hundred thousand true idealists. Their offenses were wiped out. Counterfeit and false though the garish joys of these spangled temples were, he perceived that deep under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the restless human heart. Here, at least, was the husk of Romance, the empty but shining casque of Chivalry, the breath-­catching though safe-­guarded dip and flight of Adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards of space. He no longer saw a rabble, but his brothers seeking the ideal. There was no magic of poesy here or of art;
but the glamour of their imagination turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into the silver trumpets of joy’s heralds.

  Almost humbled, Blinker rolled up the shirt sleeves of his mind and joined the idealists.

  “You are the lady doctor,” he said to Florence. “How shall we go about doing this jolly conglomeration of fairy tales, incorporated?”

  “We will begin there,” said the Princess, pointing to a fun pagoda on the edge of the sea, “and we will take them all in, one by one.”

  They caught the eight o’clock returning boat and sat, filled with pleasant fatigue against the rail in the bow, listening to the Italians’ fiddle and harp. Blinker had thrown off all care. The North Woods seemed to him an uninhabitable wilderness. What a fuss he had made over signing his name—pooh! he could sign it a hundred times. And her name was as pretty as she was—“Florence,” he said it to himself a great many times.

  As the boat was nearing its pier in the North River a two-­funnelled, drab, foreign-­looking sea-­going steamer was dropping down toward the bay. The boat turned its nose in toward its slip. The steamer veered as if to seek midstream, and then yawed, seemed to increase its speed and struck the Coney boat on the side near the stern, cutting into it with a terrifying shock and crash.

  While the six hundred passengers on the boat were mostly tumbling about the decks in a shrieking panic the captain was shouting at the steamer that it should not back off and leave the rent exposed for the water to enter. But the steamer tore its way out like a savage sawfish and cleaved its heartless way, full speed ahead.

  The boat began to sink at its stern, but moved slowly toward the slip. The passengers were a frantic mob, unpleasant to behold.

  Blinker held Florence tightly until the boat had righted itself. She made no sound or sign of fear. He stood on a camp stool, ripped off the slats above his head and pulled down a number of the life preservers. He began to buckle one around Florence. The rotten canvas split and the fraudulent granulated cork came pouring out in a stream. Florence caught a handful of it and laughed gleefully.