by O. Henry
The front-doorbell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she did!
And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily the bear’s.
You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her, with nothing left for the gleaners.
‘Why haven’t you written – oh, why?’ cried Sarah.
‘New York is a pretty large town,’ said Walter Franklin. I came in a week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a Thursday. That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad luck. But it didn’t prevent my hunting for you with police and otherwise ever since!’
‘I wrote!’ said Sarah vehemently
‘Never got it!’
‘Then how did you find me?’
The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.
‘I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening,’ said he. ‘I don’t care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at this time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice, typewritten bill of fare looking for something in that line. When I got below cabbage I turned my chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where you lived.’
‘I remember,’ sighed Sarah happily. ‘That was dandelions below cabbage.’
‘I’d know that cranky capital W ’way above the line that your typewriter makes anywhere in the world,’ said Franklin.
‘Why, there’s no W in dandelions,’ said Sarah, in surprise.
The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to a line.
Sarah recognised the first card she had typewritten that afternoon. There was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner where a tear had fallen. But over the spot where one should have read the name of the meadow plant, the clinging memory of their golden blossoms had allowed her fingers to strike strange keys.
Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:
‘Dearest Walter, with hard-boiled egg.’
The Third Ingredient
The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlour floor of one side is gay with the wraps and headgear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa’s roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the doorbell rings.
This treatise shall have to do with two of the Vallambrosians – though meaning no disrespect to the others.
At six o’clock one afternoon Hetty Pepper came back to her third-floor-rear three-dollar-fifty-cent room in the Vallambrosa with her nose and chin more sharply pointed than usual. To be discharged from the department store where you have been working four years, and with only fifteen cents in your purse, does have a tendency to make your features appear more finely chiselled.
And now for Hetty’s thumbnail biography while she climbs the two flights of stairs.
She walked into the Biggest Store one morning four years before, with seventy-five other girls, applying for a job behind the waist department counter. The phalanx of wage-earners formed a bewildering scene of beauty, carrying a total mass of blonde hair sufficient to have justified the horseback gallops of a hundred Lady Godivas.
The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man, whose task it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, homely of countenance, with small, contemptuous, green eyes and chocolate-coloured hair, dressed in a suit of plain burlap and a common-sense hat, stood before him with every one of her twenty-nine years of life unmistakably in sight.
‘You’re on!’ shouted the bald-headed young man, and was saved. And that is how Hetty came to be employed in the Biggest Store. The story of her rise to an eight-dollar-a-week salary is the combined stories of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little Red Riding Hood. You shall not learn from me the salary that was paid her as a beginner. There is a sentiment growing about such things, and I want no millionaire store-proprietors climbing the fire escape of my tenement-house to throw dynamite bombs into my skylight boudoir.
The story of Hetty’s discharge from the Biggest Store is so nearly a repetition of her engagement as to be monotonous.
In each department of the store there is an omniscient, omnipresent and omnivorous person carrying always a mileage book and a red necktie, and referred to as a ‘buyer’. The destinies of the girls in his department who live on (see Bureau of Victual Statistics) – so much per week are in his hands.
This particular buyer was a capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man. As he walked along the aisles of his department he seemed to be sailing on a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds, machine-embroidered, floated around him. Too many sweets bring surfeit. He looked upon Hetty Pepper’s homely countenance, emerald eyes, and chocolate-coloured hair as a welcome oasis of green in a desert of cloying beauty. In a quiet angle of a counter he pinched her arm kindly, three inches above the elbow. She slapped him three feet away with one good blow of her muscular and not especially lily-white right. So, now you know why Hetty Pepper came to leave the Biggest Store at thirty minutes’ notice, with one dime and a nickel in her purse.
This morning’s quotations list the price of rib beef at six cents per (butcher’s) pound. But on the day that Hetty was ‘released’ by the B.S. the price was seven and one-half cents. That fact is what makes this story possible. Otherwise the extra four cents would have –
But the plot of nearly all the good stories in the world is concerned with shorts who were unable to cover; so you can find no fault with this one.
Hetty mounted with her rib beef to her three-dollar-fifty-cent third-floor-back. One hot, savoury beef-stew for supper, a night’s good sleep, and she would be fit in the morning to apply again for the tasks of Hercules, Joan of Arc, Una, Job, and Little Red Riding Hood.
In her room she got the graniteware stew-pan out of the 2 by 4-foot china – er – I mean earthenware closet, and began to dig down in a rat’s-nest of paper bags for the potatoes and onions. She came out with her nose and chin just a little sharper pointed.
There was neither a potato nor an onion. Now, what kind of beef-stew can you make out of simply beef? You can make oyster-soup without oysters, turtle-soup without turtles, coffee-cake without coffee, but you can’t make beef-stew without potatoes and onions.
But rib beef alone, in an emergency, can make an ordinary pine door look like a wrought-iron gambling-house portal to the wolf. With salt and pepper and a tablespoonful of flour (first well stirred in a little cold water) ’twill serve – ’tis not so deep as a lobster a la Newburgh, nor so wide as a church festival doughnut; but ’twill serve.
Hetty took her stew-pan to the rear of the third-floor hall. According to the advertisements of the Vallambrosa there was running water to be found there. Between you and me and the water-meter, it only ambled or walked through the faucets; but technicalities have no place here. There was also a sink where housekeeping roomers often met to dump their coffee grounds and glare at one another’s kimonos.
At this sink Hetty found a girl with heavy, gold-brown artistic hair and plaintive eyes, washing two large ‘Irish’ potatoes. Hetty knew the Vallambrosa as well as anyone not owning ‘double hextra-magnifying eyes’ could compass its mysteries. The kimonos were her encyclopaedia, her ‘Who’s What?’ her clearing-house of news, of goers and comers. From a rose-pink kimono edged with Nile green she had le
arned that the girl with the potatoes was a miniature-painter living in a kind of attic – or ‘studio’, as they prefer to call it – on the top floor. Hetty was not certain in her mind what a miniature was; but it certainly wasn’t a house; because house-painters, although they wear splashy overalls and poke ladders in your face on the street, are known to indulge in a riotous profusion of food at home.
The potato girl was quite slim and small, and handled her potatoes as an old bachelor uncle handles a baby who is cutting teeth. She had a dull shoemaker’s knife in her right hand, and she had begun to peel one of the potatoes with it.
Hetty addressed her in the punctiliously formal tone of one who intends to be cheerfully familiar with you in the second round.
‘Beg pardon,’ she said, ‘for butting into what’s not my business, but if you peel them potatoes you lose out. They’re new Bermudas. You want to scrape ’em. Lemme show you.’
She took a potato and the knife and began to demonstrate.
‘Oh, thank you,’ breathed the artist. ‘I didn’t know. And I did hate to see the thick peeling go; it seemed such a waste. But I thought they always had to be peeled. When you’ve got only potatoes to eat, the peelings count, you know.’
‘Say, kid,’ said Hetty, staying her knife, ‘you ain’t up against it, too, are you?’
The miniature artist smiled stonedly.
‘I suppose I am. Art – or, at least, the way I interpret it – doesn’t seem to be much in demand. I have only these potatoes for my dinner. But they aren’t so bad boiled and hot, with a little butter and salt.’
‘Child,’ said Hetty, letting a brief smile soften her rigid features, ‘Fate has sent me and you together. I’ve had it handed to me in the neck, too; but I’ve got a chunk of meat in my room as big as a lapdog. And I’ve done everything to get potatoes except pray for ’em. Let’s me and you bunch our commissary departments and make a stew of ’em. We’ll cook it in my room. If we only had an onion to go in it! Say, kid, you haven’t got a couple of pennies that’ve slipped down into the lining of your last winter’s sealskin, have you? I could step down to the corner and get one at old Giuseppe’s stand. A stew without an onion is worse’n a matinee without candy.’
‘You may call me Cecilia,’ said the artist. ‘No; I spent my last penny three days ago.’
‘Then we’ll have to cut the onion out instead of slicing it in,’ said Hetty. ‘I’d ask the janitress for one, but I don’t want ’em hep just yet to the fact that I’m pounding the asphalt for another job. But I wish we did have an onion.’
In the shop-girl’s room the two began to prepare their supper. Cecilia’s part was to sit on the couch helplessly and beg to be allowed to do something in the voice of a cooing ringdove. Hetty prepared the rib beef, putting it in cold salted water in the stew-pan and setting it on the one-burner gas-stove.
‘I wish we had an onion,’ said Hetty, as she scraped the two potatoes.
On the wall opposite the couch was pinned a flaming, gorgeous advertising picture of one of the new ferryboats of the P.U.F.F.Railroad that had been built to cut down the time between Los Angeles and New York City one eighth of a minute.
Hetty turned her head during her continuous monologue, saw tears running from her guest’s eves as she gazed on the idealised presentment of the speeding, foam-girdled transport.
‘Why, say, Cecilia, kid,’ said Hetty, poising her knife, ‘is it as bad art as that? I ain’t a critic, but I thought it kind of brightened up the room. Of course, a manicure-painter could tell it was a bum picture in a minute. I’ll take it down, if you say so; I wish to the holy St Pot-Luck we had an onion.’
But the miniature miniature-painter had tumbled down, sobbing, with her nose indenting the hard-woven drapery of the couch. Something was here deeper than the artistic temperament offended at crude lithography.
Hetty knew. She had accepted her role long ago. How scant the words with which we try to describe a single quality of a human being! When we reach the abstract we are lost. The nearer to Nature that the babbling of our lips comes, the better do we understand. Figuratively (let us say), some people are Bosoms, some are Hands, some are Heads, some are Muscles, some are Feet, some are Backs for burdens.
Hetty was a Shoulder. Hers was a sharp, sinewy shoulder; but all her life people had laid their heads upon it, metaphorically or actually and had left there all or half their troubles. Looking at Life anatomically, which is as good a way as any, she was pre-ordained to be a Shoulder. There were few truer collarbones anywhere than hers.
Hetty was only thirty-three, and she had not yet outlived the little pang that visited her whenever the head of youth and beauty leaned upon her for consolation. But one glance in her mirror always served as an instantaneous painkiller. So she gave one pale look into the crinkly old looking-glass on the wall above the gas-stove, turned down the flame a little lower from the bubbling beef and potatoes, went over to the couch, and lifted Cecilia’s head to its confessional.
‘Go on and tell me, honey,’ she said. ‘I know now that it ain’t art that’s worrying you. You met him on a ferry-boat, didn’t you? Go on, Cecilia, kid, and tell your – your Aunt Hetty about it.’
But youth and melancholy must first spend the surplus of sighs and tears that waft and float the barque of romance to its harbour in the delectable isles. Presently, through the stringy tendons that formed the bars of the confessional, the penitent – or was it the glorified communicant of the sacred flame? – told her story without art or illumination.
‘It was only three days ago. I was coming back on the ferry from Jersey City. Old Mr Schrum, an art dealer, told me of a rich man in Newark who wanted a miniature of his daughter painted. I went to see him and showed him some of my work. When I told him the price would be fifty dollars he laughed at me like a hyena. He said an enlarged crayon twenty times the size would cost him only eight dollars.
‘I had just enough money to buy my ferry ticket back to New York. I felt as if I didn’t want to live another day. I must have looked as I felt, for I saw him on the row of seats opposite me, looking at me as if he understood. He was nice-looking, but, oh, above everything else, he looked kind. When one is tired or unhappy or hopeless, kindness counts more than anything else.
‘When I got so miserable that I couldn’t fight against it any longer, I got up and walked out of the rear door of the ferry-boat cabin. No one was there, and I slipped quickly over the rail, and dropped into the water. Oh, friend Hetty, it was cold, cold!
‘For just one moment I wished I was back in the old Vallambrosa, starving and hoping. And then I got numb, and didn’t care. And then I felt that somebody else was in the water close by me, holding me up. He had followed me, and jumped in to save me.
‘Somebody threw a thing like a big, white doughnut at us, and he made me put my arms through the hole. Then the ferry-boat backed, and they pulled us on board. Oh, Hetty, I was so ashamed of my wickedness in trying to drown myself; and, besides, my hair had all tumbled down and was sopping wet, and I was such a sight.
‘And then some men in blue clothes came around; and he gave them his card, and I heard him tell them he had seen me drop my purse on the edge of the boat outside the rail, and in leaning over to get it I had fallen overboard. And then I remembered having read in the papers that people who try to kill themselves are locked up in cells with people who try to kill other people, and I was afraid.
‘But some ladies on the boat took me downstairs to the furnace-room and got me nearly dry and did up my hair. When the boat landed, he came and put me in a cab. He was all dripping himself, but laughed as if he thought it was all a joke. He begged me, but I wouldn’t tell him my name nor where I lived, I was so ashamed.’
‘You were a fool, child,’ said Hetty, kindly. ‘Wait till I turn up the light a bit. I wish to Heaven we had an onion.’
‘Then he raised his hat,’ went on Cecilia, ‘and said: “Very well. But I’ll find you, anyhow. I’m going to claim my rights of salv
age.” Then he gave money to the cab-driver and told him to take me where I wanted to go, and walked away. What is “salvage”, Hetty?’
‘The edge of a piece of goods that ain’t hemmed,’ said the shop-girl. ‘You must have looked pretty well frazzled out to the little hero boy.’
‘It’s been three days,’ moaned the miniature-painter, ‘and he hasn’t found me yet.’
‘Extend the time,’ said Hetty. ‘This is a big town. Think of how many girls he might have to see soaked in water with their hair down before he would recognise you. The stew’s getting on fine – but, oh, for an onion! I’d even use a piece of garlic, if I had it.’
The beef and potatoes bubbled merrily, exhaling a mouth-watering savour that yet lacked something leaving a hunger on the palate, a haunting, wistful desire for some lost and needful ingredient.
‘I came near drowning in that awful river,’ said Cecilia, shuddering.
‘It ought to have more water in it,’ said Hetty; ‘the stew, I mean. I’ll go get some at the sink.’
‘It smells good,’ said the artist.
‘That nasty old North River?’ objected Hetty. ‘It smells to me like soap factories and wet setter-dogs – oh, you mean the stew. Well, I wish we had an onion for it. Did he look like he had money?’
‘First he looked kind,’ said Cecilia. ‘I’m sure he was rich; but that matters so little. When he drew out his bill-folder to pay the cabman you couldn’t help seeing hundreds and thousands of dollars in it. And I looked over the cab doors and saw him leave the ferry station in a motor car; and the chauffeur gave him his bearskin to put on, for he was sopping wet. And it was only three days ago.’
‘What a fool!’ said Hetty shortly.