by O. Henry
‘I tell you, Lynn, it’s the girls like us on the stage that ought to be pitied. It’s girls from good homes that are honestly ambitious and work hard to rise in the profession, but never do get there. You hear a lot of sympathy sloshed around on chorus girls and their fifteen dollars a week. Piffle! There ain’t a sorrow in the chorus that a lobster cannot heal.
‘If there’s any tears to shed, let ’em fall for the actress that gets a salary of from thirty to forty-five dollars a week for taking a leading part in a bum show. She knows she’ll never do any better; but she hangs on for years, hoping for the “chance” that never comes.
‘And the fool plays we have to work in! Having another girl roll you around the stage by the hind legs in a “Wheelbarrow Chorus” in a musical comedy is dignified drama compared with the idiotic things I’ve had to do in the thirty-centres.
‘But what I hated most was the men – the men leering and blathering at you across tables, trying to buy you with WŸrzburger or Extra Dry, according to their estimate of your price. And the men in the audiences, clapping, yelling, snarling, crowding, writhing, gloating – like a lot of wild beasts, with their eyes fixed on you, ready to eat you up if you come in reach of their claws. Oh, how I hate ’em!
‘Well, I’m not telling you much about myself, am I, Lynn?
‘I had two hundred dollars saved up, and I cut the stage the first of the summer. I went over on Long Island, and found the sweetest little village that ever was, called Soundport, right on the water. I was going to spend the summer there, and study up on elocution, and try to get a class in the fall. There was an old widow lady with a cottage near the beach who sometimes rented a room or two just for company, and she took me in. She had another boarder, too – the Reverend Arthur Lyle.
‘Yes, he was the headliner. You’re on, Lynn. I’ll tell you all of it in a minute. It’s only a one-act play.
‘The first time he walked on, Lynn, I felt myself going; the first lines he spoke, he had me. He was different from the men in audiences. He was tall and slim, and you never heard him come in the room, but you felt him. He had a face like a picture of a knight – like one of that Round Table bunch – and a voice like a ’cello solo. And his manners!
‘Lynn, if you’d take John Drew in his best drawing-room scene and compare the two you’d have John arrested for disturbing the peace.
‘I’ll spare you the particulars; but in less than a month Arthur and I were engaged. He preached at a little one-night stand of a Methodist church. There was to be a parsonage the size of a lunch-wagon, and hens and honeysuckles when we were married. Arthur used to preach to me a good deal about Heaven, but he never could get my mind quite off those honeysuckles and hens.
‘No; I didn’t tell him I’d been on the stage. I hated the business and all that went with it; I’d cut it out for ever, and I didn’t see any use of stirring things up. I was a good girl, and I didn’t have anything to confess, except being an elocutionist, and that was about all the strain my conscience would stand.
‘Oh, I tell you, Lynn, I was happy. I sang in the choir and attended the sewing society, and recited that “Annie Laurie” thing with the whistling stunt in it, “in a manner bordering upon the professional,” as the weekly village paper reported it. And Arthur and I went rowing, and walking in the woods, and clamming, and that poky little village seemed to me the best place in the world. I’d have been happy to live there always, too, if—
‘But one morning old Mrs Gurley, the widow lady, got gossipy while I was helping her string beans on the back porch, and began to gush information, as folks who rent out their rooms usually do. Mr Lyle was her idea of a saint on earth – as he was mine, too. She went over all his virtues and graces, and wound up by telling me that Arthur had had an extremely romantic love-affair, not long before, that had ended unhappily. She didn’t seem to be on to the details, but she knew that he had been hit pretty hard. He was paler and thinner, she said, and he had some kind of a remembrance or keepsake of the lady in a little rosewood box that he kept locked in his desk drawer in his study.
‘ “Several times,” says she, “I’ve seen him gloomerin’ over that box of evenings, and he always locks it up right away if anybody comes into the room.”
‘Well, you can imagine how long it was before I got Arthur by the wrist and led him down stage and hissed in his ear.
‘That same afternoon we were lazying around in a boat among the water lilies at the edge of the bay.
‘ “Arthur,” says I, “you never told me you’d had another love affair. But Mrs Gurley did,” I went on, to let him know I knew. I hate to hear a man lie.
‘“Before you came,” says he, looking me frankly in the eye, “there was a previous affection – a strong one. Since you know of it, I will be perfectly candid with you.”
‘ “I am waiting,” says I.
‘ “My dear Ida,” says Arthur – of course, I went by my real name while I was in Soundport – “this former affection was a spiritual one, in fact. Although the lady aroused my deepest sentiments, and was, as I thought, my ideal woman, I never met her, and never spoke to her. It was an ideal love. My love for you, while no less ideal, is different. You wouldn’t let that come between us.”
‘ “Was she pretty?” I asked.
‘ “She was very beautiful,” said Arthur.
‘ “Did you see her often?” I asked.
‘ “Something like a dozen times,” says he
‘ “Always from a distance?” says I.
‘ “Always from quite a distance,” says he.
‘ “And you loved her?” I asked.
‘ “She seemed my ideal of beauty and grace – and soul,” says Arthur.
‘ “And this keepsake that you keep under lock and key, and moon over at times, is that a remembrance from her?”
‘ “A memento,” says Arthur, “that I have treasured.”
‘ “Did she send it to you?”
‘ “It came to me from her,” says he.
‘ “In a roundabout way?” I asked.
‘ “Somewhat roundabout,” says he, “and yet rather direct.”
‘ “Why didn’t you ever meet her?” I asked. “Were your positions in life so different?”
‘ “She was far above me,” says Arthur. “Now, Ida,” he goes on, “this is all of the past. You’re not going to be jealous, are you?”
‘ “Jealous!” says I. “Why, man, what are you talking about? It makes me think ten times as much of you as I did before I knew about it.”
‘And it did, Lynn – if you can understand it. That ideal love was a new one on me, but it struck me as being the most beautiful and glorious thing I’d ever heard of. Think of a man loving a woman he’d never even spoken to, and being faithful just to what his mind and heart pictured her. Oh, it sounded great to me. The men I’d always known come at you with either diamonds, knock-out-drops or a raise of salary – and their ideals! – well, we’ll say no more.
‘Yes, it made me think more of Arthur than I did before. I couldn’t be jealous of that faraway divinity that he used to worship, for I was going to have him myself. And I began to look upon him as a saint on earth, just as old lady Gurley did.
‘About four o’clock this afternoon a man came to the house for Arthur to go and see somebody that was sick among his church bunch. Old lady Gurley was taking her afternoon snore on a couch, so that left me pretty much alone.
‘In passing by Arthur’s study I looked in, and saw his bunch of keys hanging in the drawer of his desk, where he’d forgotten ’em. Well, I guess we’re all to the Mrs Bluebeard now and then, ain’t we, Lynn? I made up my mind I’d have a look at that memento he kept so secret. Not that I cared where it was – it was just curiosity.
‘While I was opening the drawer I imagined one or two things it might be. I thought it might be a dried rosebud she’d dropped down to him from a balcony, or maybe a picture of her he’d cut out of a magazine, she being so high up in the world.
‘I took one look at that memento, and then I went to my room and packed my trunk. I threw a few things into my grip, gave my hair a flirt or two with a side-comb, put on my hat, and went in and gave the old lady’s foot a kick. I’d tried awfully hard to use proper and correct language while I was there for Arthur’s sake, and I had the habit down pat, but it left me then.
‘ “Stop sawing gourds,” says I, “and sit up and take notice. The ghost’s about to walk. I’m going away from here, and I owe you eight dollars. The express man will call for my trunk.”
‘I handed her the money.
‘ “Dear me, Miss Crosby!” says she. “Is anything wrong? I thought you were pleased here. Dear me, young women are so hard to understand, and so different from what you expect ’em to be.”
‘ “You’re damn right,” says I. “Some of ’em are. But you can’t say that about men. When you know one man you know ’em all! That settles the human-race question.”
‘And then I caught the four-thirty-eight, soft-coal unlimited; and here I am.’
‘You didn’t tell me what was in the box, Lee,’ said Miss D’Armande anxiously.
‘One of those yellow silk garters that I used to kick off my leg into the audience during that old vaudeville swing act of mine. Is there any of the cocktail left, Lynn!’
The Furnished Room
Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the Lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients for ever – transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing ‘Home Sweet Home’ in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant ghosts.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths.
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers.
He asked if there was a room to let.
‘Come in,’ said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. ‘I have the third floor back, vacant since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?’
The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below.
‘This is the room,’ said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. ‘It’s a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer – no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney – kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls – you may have heard of her – Oh, that was just the stage names – right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It’s a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.’
‘Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?’ asked the young man.
‘They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and they goes.’
He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question that he carried at the end of his tongue.
‘A young girl – Miss Vashner – Miss Eloise Vashner – do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow.’
‘No, I don’t remember the name. Them stage people has names they change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don’t call that one to mind.’
No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home this great water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.
The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demi-rep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a footwide cheap pier-glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a corner.
The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its divers tenantry.
A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered, rectangular, tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house – The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port – a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny fingerprints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier-glass had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name ‘Marie’. It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in fury – perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness – and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incred
ible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house – a dank savour rather than a smell – a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud, ‘What, dear?’ as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
‘She has been in this room,’ he cried, and he sprang to wrest from it a token, for he knew he would recognise the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own – whence came it?
The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins – those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a theatre programme, a pawnbroker’s card, two lost marshmallows, a book on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman’s black satin hair-bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hair-bow also is femininity’s demure, impersonal, common ornament, and tells no tales.