by O. Henry
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 offences 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 safeguarded 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 shirtsleeves 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, seagoing 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.
‘It looks like breakfast food,’ she said. ‘Take it off. They’re no good.’
She unbuckled it and threw it on the deck. She made Blinker sit down, and sat by his side and put her hand in his. ‘What’ll you bet we don’t reach the pier all right?’ she said, and began to hum a song.
And now the captain moved among the passengers and compelled order. The boat would undoubtedly make her slip, he said, and ordered the women and children to the bow, where they could land first. The boat, very low in the water at the stern, tried gallantly to make his promise good.
‘Florence,’ said Blinker, as she held him close by an arm and hand, ‘I love you.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ she replied lightly.
‘I am not one of “they all”,’ he persisted. ‘I never knew anyone I could love before. I could pass my life with you and be happy every day. I am rich. I can make things all right for you.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ said the girl again, weaving the words into her little, reckless song.
‘Don’t say that again,’ said Blinker in a tone that made her look at him in frank surprise.
‘Why shouldn’t I say it?’ she asked calmly. ‘They all do.’
‘Who are “they”?’ he asked, jealous for the first time in his existence.
‘Why, the fellows I know.’
‘Do you know so many?’
‘Oh, well, I’m not a wallflower,’ she answered with modest complacency.
‘Where do you see these – these men? At your home?’
‘Of course not. I meet them just as I did you. Sometimes on the boat, sometimes in the park, sometimes on the street. I’m a pretty good judge of a man. I can tell in a minute if a fellow is one who is likely to get fresh.’
‘What do you mean by “fresh”?’
‘Why, try to kiss you – me, I mean.’
‘Do any of them try that?” asked Blinker, clenching his teeth.
‘Sure. All men do. You know that.’
‘Do you allow them?’
‘Some. Not many. They won’t take you out anywhere unless you do.’
She turned her head and looked searchingly at Blinker. Her eyes were as innocent as a child’s. There was a puzzled look in them, as though she did not understand him.
‘What’s wrong about my meeting fellows?’ she asked, wonderingly.
‘Everything,’ he answered, almost savagely. ‘Why don’t you entertain your company in the house where you live? Is it necessary to pick up Tom, Dick and Harry on the streets?’
She kept her absolutely ingenuous eyes upon his.
‘If you could see the place where I live you wouldn’t ask that. I live in Brickdust Row. They call it that because there’s red dust from the bricks crumbling over everything. I’ve lived there for more than four years. There’s no place to receive company. You can’t have anybody come to your room. What else is there to do? A girl has got to meet the men, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ he said hoarsely. ‘A girl has got to meet a – has got to meet the men.’
‘The first time one spoke to me on the street,’ she continued, ‘I ran home and cried all night. But you get used to it. I meet a good many nice fellows at church. I go on rainy days and stand in the vestibule until one comes up with an umbrella. I wish there was a parlour, so I could ask you to call, Mr Blinker – are you really sure it isn’t “Smith”, now?’
The boat landed safely. Blinker had a confused impression of walking with the girl through quiet cross-town streets until she stopped at a corner and held out her hand.
‘I live just one more block over,’ she said. ‘Thank you for a very pleasant afternoon.’
Blinker muttered something and plunged northward till he found a cab. A big, gray church loomed slowly at his right. Blinker shook his fist at it through the window.
‘I gave you a thousand dollars last week,’ he cried under his breath, ‘and she meets them in your very doors. There is something wrong; there is something wrong.’
At eleven the next day Blinker signed his name thirty times with a new pen provided by Lawyer Oldport.
‘Now let me go to the woods,’ he said surlily.
‘You are not looking well,’ said Lawyer Oldport. ‘The trip will do you good. But listen, if you will, to that little matter of business of which I spoke to you yesterday, and also five years ago. There are some buildings, fifteen in number, of which there are new five-year leases to be signed. Your father contemplated a change in the lease provisions, but never made it. He intended that the parlours of these houses should not be sub-let, but that the tenants should be allowed to use them for reception rooms. These houses are in the shopping district, and are mainly tenanted by young working girls. As it is they are forced to seek compani
onship outside. This row of red brick—’
Blinker interrupted him with a loud, discordant laugh.
‘Brickdust Row for an even hundred,’ he cried. ‘And I own it. Have I guessed right?’
‘The tenants have some such name for it,’ said Lawyer Oldport.
Blinker arose and jammed his hat down to his eyes.
‘Do what you please with it,’ he said harshly. ‘Remodel it, burn it, raze it to the ground. But, man, it’s too late, I tell you. It’s too late. It’s too late. It’s too late.’
The Lost Blend
Since the bar has been blessed by the clergy, and cocktails open the dinners of the elect one may speak of the saloon. Teetotalers need not listen, if they choose; there is always the slot restaurant, where a dime dropped into the cold bouillon aperture will bring forth a dry Martini.
Con Lantry worked on the sober side of the bar in Kenealy’s café. You and I stood, one-legged like geese, on the other side and went into voluntary liquidation with our week’s wages. Opposite danced Con, clean, temperate, clear-headed, polite, white-jacketed, punctual, trustworthy, young, responsible, and took our money.
The saloon (whether blessed or cursed) stood in one of those little ‘places’ which are parallelograms instead of streets, and inhabited by laundries, decayed Knickerbocker families and Bohemians who have nothing to do with either
Over the café lived Kenealy and his family. His daughter Katherine had eyes of dark Irish – but why should you be told? Be content with your Geraldine or your Eliza Ann. For Con dreamed of her; and when she called softly at the foot of the back stairs for the pitcher of beer for dinner, his heart went up and down like a milk punch in the shaker. Orderly and fit are the rules of Romance; and if you hurl the last shilling of your fortune upon the bar for whisky, the bartender shall take it, and marry his boss’s daughter, and good will grow out of it.
But not so Con. For in the presence of woman he was tongue-tied and scarlet. He who would quell with his eye the sonorous youth whom the claret punch made loquacious, or smash with lemon squeezer the obstreperous, or hurl gutterwards the cantankerous without a wrinkle coming to his white lawn tie, when he stood before woman he was voiceless, incoherent, stuttering, buried beneath a hot avalanche of bashfulness and misery. What, then, was he before Katherine? A trembler, with no word to say for himself, a stone without blarney, the dumbest lover that ever babbled of the weather in the presence of his divinity.
There came to Kenealy’s two sunburned men, Riley and McQuirk. They had conference with Kenealy; and then they took possession of a back room which they filled with bottles and siphons and jugs and druggist’s measuring glasses. All the appurtenances and liquids of a saloon were there, but they dispensed no drinks. All day long the two sweltered in there, pouring and mixing unknown brews and decoctions from the liquors in their store. Riley had the education, and he figured on reams of paper, reducing gallons to ounces and quarts to fluid drams. McQuirk, a morose man with a red eye, dashed each unsuccessful completed mixture into the waste pipes with curses gentle, husky and deep. They laboured heavily and untiringly to achieve some mysterious solution, like two alchemists striving to resolve gold from the elements.
Into this back room one evening when his watch was done sauntered Con. His professional curiosity had been stirred by these occult bartenders at whose bar none drank, and who daily drew upon Kenealy’s store of liquors to follow their consuming and fruitless experiments.
Down the back stairs came Katherine with her smile like sunrise on Gweebarra Bay.
‘Good evening, Mr Lantry,’ says she. ‘And what is the news today, if you please?’
‘It looks like r–rain,’ stammered the shy one, backing to the wall.
‘It couldn’t do better,’ said Katherine. ‘I’m thinking there’s nothing the worse off for a little water.’
In the back room Riley and McQuirk toiled like bearded witches over their strange compounds. From fifty bottles they drew liquids carefully measured after Riley’s figures, and shook the whole together in a great glass vessel. Then McQuirk would dash it out, with gloomy profanity, and they would begin again.
‘Sit down,’ said Riley to Con, ‘and I’ll tell you.
‘Last summer me and Tim concludes that an American bar in this nation of Nicaragua would pay. There was a town on the coast where there’s nothing to eat but quinine and nothing to drink but rum. The natives and foreigners lay down with chills and get up with fevers; and a good mixed drink is nature’s remedy for all such tropical inconveniences.
‘So we lays in a fine stock of wet goods in New York, and bar fixtures and glassware, and we sails for that Santa Palma town on a line steamer. On the way me and Tim sees flying fish and plays seven-up with the captain and steward, and already begins to feel like the highball kings of the tropic of Capricorn.
‘When we gets in five hours of the country that we was going to introduce to long drinks and short change the captain calls us over to the starboard binnacle and recollects a few things.
‘ “I forgot to tell you, boys,” says he, “that Nicaragua slapped an import duty of forty-eight per cent ad valorem on all bottled goods last month. The President took a bottle of Cincinnati hair tonic by mistake for tabasco sauce, and he’s getting even. Barrelled goods is free.”
‘ “Sorry you didn’t mention it sooner,” says we. And we bought two forty-two gallon casks from the captain, and opened every bottle we had and dumped the stuff all together in the casks. That forty-eight per cent would have ruined us; so we took the chances on making that $1,200 cocktail rather than throw the stuff away.
‘Well, when we landed we tapped one of the barrels. The mixture was something heart-rending. It was the colour of a plate of Bowery pea soup, and it tasted like one of those coffee substitutes your aunt makes you take for the heart trouble you get by picking losers. We gave a nigger four fingers of it to try it, and he lay under a coconut tree three days beating the sand with his heels and refused to sign a testimonial.
‘But the other barrel! Say, bartender, did you ever put on a straw hat with a yellow band around it and go up in a balloon with a pretty girl with $8,000,000 in your pocket all at the same time? That’s what thirty drops of it would make you feel like. With two fingers of it inside you you would bury your face in your hands and cry because there wasn’t anything more worthwhile around for you to lick than little Jim Jeffries. Yes, sir, the stuff in that second barrel was distilled elixir of battle money and high life. It was the colour of gold and as clear as glass, and it shone after dark like the sunshine was still in it. A thousand years from now you’ll get a drink like that across the bar
‘Well, we started up business with that one line of drinks, and it was enough. The piebald gentry of that country stuck to it like a hive of bees. If that barrel had lasted that country would have become the greatest on earth. When we opened up of mornings we had a line of Generals and Colonels and ex-Presidents and revolutionists a block long waiting to be served. We started in at fifty cents silver a drink. The last ten gallons went easy at five dollars a gulp. It was wonderful stuff. It gave a man courage and ambition and nerve to do anything; at the same time he didn’t care whether his money was tainted or fresh from the Ice Trust. When that barrel was half gone Nicaragua had repudiated the National Debt, removed the duty on cigarettes and was about to declare war on the United States and England.
‘ ’Twas by accident we discovered this king of drinks, and ’twill be by good luck if we strike it again. For ten months we’ve been trying. Small lots at a time, we’ve mixed barrels of all the harmful ingredients known to the profession of drinking. Ye could have stocked ten bars with the whiskies, brandies, cordials, bitters, gins and wines me and Tim have wasted. A glorious drink like that to be denied to the world! ’tis a sorrow and a loss of money. The United States as a nation would welcome a drink of the sort, and pay for it.’
All the while McQuirk had been carefully measuring and pouring together small quantities
of various spirits, as Riley called them, from his latest pencilled prescription. The completed mixture was of a vile, mottled chocolate colour. McQuirk tasted it, and hurled it, with appropriate epithets, into the waste sink.
‘ ’Tis a strange story, even if true,’ said Con. ‘I’ll be going now along to my supper.’
‘Take a drink,’ said Riley. ‘We’ve all kinds except the lost blend.’
‘I never drink,’ said Con, ‘anything stronger than water. I am just after meeting Miss Katherine by the stairs. She said a true word. “There’s not anything,” says she, “but is better off for a little water.” ’
When Con had left them Riley almost felled McQuirk by a blow on the back.
‘Did ye hear that?’ he shouted. ‘Two fools are we. The six dozen bottles of ’pollinaris we had on the ship – ye opened them yourself – which barrel did ye pour them in – which barrel, ye mud-head?’
‘I mind,’ said McQuirk, slowly, ‘ ’twas in the second barrel we opened. I mind the blue piece of paper pasted on the side of it.’
‘We’ve got it now,’ cried Riley. ‘ ’Twas that we lacked. ’Tis the water that does the trick. Everything else we had right. Hurry, man, and get two bottles of ’pollinaris from the bar, while I figure out the proportionments with me pencil.’