by O. Henry
Tripp pulled the bell at the door of the mouldy 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 dollars—quick!” he said.
The door opened six inches. Mother McGinnis stood there with white eyes—they were white, I say—and a yellow face, holding together at her throat with one hand a dingy pink flannel dressing-sack. Tripp thrust the dollar through the space without a word, and it bought us entry.
“She’s in the parlor,” said the McGinnis, turning the back of her sack upon us.
In the dim parlor a girl sat at the cracked marble centre-table weeping comfortably and eating gum-drops. She was a flawless beauty. Crying had only made her brilliant eyes brighter. When she crunched a gum-drop you thought only of the poetry of motion and envied the senseless confection. Eve at the age of five minutes must have been a ringer for Miss Ada Lowery at nineteen or twenty. I was introduced, and a gum-drop suffered neglect while she conveyed to me a naïve interest, such as a puppy dog (a prize winner) might 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 Lowery, 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.” (O Tripp, wasn’t it the silver-tongued 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 apprized 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.—Mr. Snip 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 Lowery,” 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 gum-drop toward me. “There ain’t anything to tell except that—well, everything’s fixed for me to marry Hiram Dodd next Thursday evening. Hi has got two hundred acres of land with a lot of shore-front, and one of the best truck-farms on the Island. But this morning I had my horse saddled up—he’s a white horse named Dancer—and I rode over to the station. I told ’em 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 G—G—”
“Now, Miss Lowery,” broke in Tripp, 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’s all right, and good to you, ain’t he?”
“Of course I like him,” said Miss Lowery, emphatically. “Hi’s all right. And of course he’s good to me. So is everybody.”
I could have sworn it myself. Throughout Miss Ada Lowery’s life all men would be 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 Lowery, “last night I got to thinking about G—George, and I—”
Down went the bright gold head upon her 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 half-way smiling. She would have made a splendid wife, for crying only made her eyes more bright and tender. She took a gum-drop 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. G—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 Greenburg 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 any more. And I—I—liked him.”
Another flow of tears seemed imminent, but Tripp hurled himself into the crevasse and dammed 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 Tripp. I saw my duty. Cunningly I had been inveigled, but I was securely trapped. Tripp’s first dictum to me had been just and correct. The young lady must be sent back to Greenburg 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 hoped Miss Lowery had never heard Mr. Cohan’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 Lowery, if you think you could pass a happy—that is, a contented and harmonious life with Mr.—er—Dodd—if in other ways than romantic recollections he seems to—er—fill the bill, as I might say?”
“Oh, Hi’s all right,” answered Miss Lowery. “Yes, I could get along with him fine. He’s promised me an automobile and a motor-boat. 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 dime into 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 Tripp, I argued gently and philosophically with Miss Lowery, 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 mention to Hi the wonders or the fact of her visit to the city that had swallowed up the unlucky George.
She said she had left her horse (unfortunate Rosinante) 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 Greenburg to be but a dollar and eighty cents. I bought one, and a red, red rose with the twenty cents for Miss Lowery. 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 Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre verities of life.
The spell wrought by beauty and romance was dwindling. I looked at Tripp 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 gayety, “and take the next car ’cross town.”
I steeled myself against his unexpressed but palpable desire. He should not coax, cajole, or wring from me the dollar he craved. I had had enough of that wild-goose chase.
Tripp 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 W. C. T. U., 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.
FINAL STORIES
Let Me Feel Your Pulse
* * *
SO I went to a doctor.
“How long has it been since you took any alcohol into your system?” he asked.
Turning my head sidewise, I answered, “Oh, quite awhile.”
He was a young doctor, somewhere between twenty and forty. He wore heliotrope socks, but he looked like Napoleon. I liked him immensely.
“Now,” said he, “I am going to show you the effect of alcohol upon your circulation.” I think it was “circulation” he said; though it may have been “advertising.”
He bared my left arm to the elbow, brought out a bottle of whiskey, and gave me a drink. He began to look more like Napoleon. I began to like him better.
Then he put a tight compress on my upper arm, stopped my pulse with his fingers, and squeezed a rubber bulb connected with an apparatus on a stand that looked like a thermometer. The mercury jumped up and down without seeming to stop anywhere; but the doctor said it registered two hundred and thirty-seven or one hundred and sixty-five or some such number.
“Now,” said he, “you see what alcohol does to the blood-pressure.”
“It’s marvellous,” said I, “but do you think it a sufficient test? Have one on me, and let’s try the other arm.” But, no!
Then he grasped my hand. I thought I was doomed and he was saying good-bye. But all he wanted to do was to jab a needle into the end of a finger and compare the red drop with a lot of fifty-cent poker chips that he had fastened to a card.
“It’s the hæmoglobin test,” he explained. “The colour of your blood is wrong.”
“Well,” said I, “I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so——”
“I mean,” said the doctor, “that the shade of red is too light.”
“Oh,” said I, “it’s a case of matching instead of matches.”
The doctor then pounded me severely in the region of the chest. When he did that I don’t know whether he reminded me most of Napoleon or Battling or Lord Nelson. Then he looked grave and mentioned a string of grievances that the flesh is heir to—mostly ending in “itis.” I immediately paid him fifteen dollars on account.
“Is or are it or some or any of them necessarily fatal?” I asked. I thought my connection with the matter justified my manifesting a certain amount of interest.
“All of them,” he answered cheerfully. “But their progress may be arrested. With care and proper continuous treatment you may live to be eighty-five or ninety.”
I began to think of the doctor’s bill. “Eighty-five would be sufficient, I am sure,” was my comment. I paid him ten dollars more on account.
“The first thing to do,” he said, with renewed animation, “is to find a sanitarium where you will get a complete rest for a while, and allow your nerves to get into a better condition. I myself will go with you and select a suitable one.”
So he took me to a mad-house in the Catskills. It was on a bare mountain frequented only by infrequent frequenters. You could see nothing but stones and boulders, some patches of snow, and scattered pine trees. The young physician in charge was most agreeable. He gave me a stimulant without applying a compress to the arm. It was luncheon time, and we were invited to partake. There were about twenty inmates at little tables in the dining room. The young physician in charge came to our table and said: “It is a custom with our guests not to regard themselves as patients, but merely as tired ladies and gentlemen taking a rest. Whatever slight maladies they may have are never alluded to in conversation.”
My doctor called loudly to a waitress to bring some phosphoglycerate of lime hash, dog-bread, bromo-seltzer pancakes, and nux vomica tea for my repast. Then a sound arose like a sudden wind storm among pine trees. It was produced by every guest in the room whispering loudly, “Neurasthenia!”—except one man with a nose, whom I distinctly heard say, “Chronic alcoholism.” I hope to meet him again. The physician in charge turned and walked away.
An hour or so after luncheon he conducted us to the workshop—say fifty yards from the house. Thither the guests had been conducted by the physician in charge’s understudy and sponge-holder—a man with feet and a blue sweater. He was so tall that I was not sure he had a face; but the Armour Packing Company would have been delighted with his hands.
“Here,” said the physician in charge, “our guests find relaxation from past mental w
orries by devoting themselves to physical labour—recreation, in reality.”
There were turning-lathes, carpenters’ outfits, clay-modelling tools, spinning-wheels, weaving-frames, treadmills, bass drums, enlarged-crayon-portrait apparatuses, blacksmith forges, and everything, seemingly, that could interest the paying lunatic guests of a first-rate sanitarium.
“The lady making mud pies in the corner,” whispered the physician in charge, “is no other than—Lula Lulington, the authoress of the novel entitled ‘Why Love Loves.’ What she is doing now is simply to rest her mind after performing that piece of work.”
I had seen the book. “Why doesn’t she do it by writing another one instead?” I asked.
As you see, I wasn’t as far gone as they thought I was.
“The gentleman pouring water through the funnel,” continued the physician in charge, “is a Wall Street broker broken down from overwork.”
I buttoned my coat.
Others he pointed out were architects playing with Noah’s arks, ministers reading Darwin’s “Theory of Evolution,” lawyers sawing wood, tired-out society ladies talking Ibsen to the blue-sweatered sponge-holder, a neurotic millionaire lying asleep on the floor, and a prominent artist drawing a little red wagon around the room.
“You look pretty strong,” said the physician in charge to me. “I think the best mental relaxation for you would be throwing small boulders over the mountainside and then bringing them up again.”
I was a hundred yards away before my doctor overtook me.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“The matter is,” said I, “that there are no aeroplanes handy. So I am going to merrily and hastily jog the foot-pathway to yon station and catch the first unlimited-soft-coal express back to town.”
“Well,” said the doctor, “perhaps you are right. This seems hardly the suitable place for you. But what you need is rest—absolute rest and exercise.”