The Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  Gillian phoned for a cab and said to the driver: "The stage entrance of the Columbine Theatre."- Miss Lotta Lauriere was assisting nature with a powder puff, almost ready for her call at a crowded Matinee, when her dresser mentioned the name of Mr. Gillian.

  "Let it in," said Miss Lauriere. " Now, what is it, Bobby? I'm going on in two minutes."

  "Rabbit-foot your right ear a little," suggested Gillian, critically. " That's better. It won't take two minutes for me. What do you say to a little thing in the pendant line? I can stand three ciphers with a figure one in front of 'em."

  "Oh, just as you say," carolled Miss Lauriere. my right glove, Adams. Say, Bobby, did you see that necklace Della Stacey had on the other night? Twenty-two hundred dollars it cost at Tiffany's. But, of course -pull my sash a little to the left, Adams."

  "Miss Lauriere for the opening chorus!" cried the call boy without.

  Gillian strolled out to where his cab was waiting.

  "What would you do with a thousand dollars if you had it?" be asked the driver.

  "Open a s'loon," said the cabby, promptly and huskily. " I know a place I could take money in with both hands. It's a four-story brick on a corner. I've got it figured out. Second story - Chinks and chop suey; third floor -manicures and foreign mis- sions; fourth floor -poolroom. If you was think- of putting up the capital.

  "Oh, no," said Gillian, I merely asked from cu- riosity. I take you by the hour. Drive 'til I tell you to stop."

  Eight blocks down Broadway Gillian poked up the trap with his cane and got out. A blind man sat upon a stool on the sidewalk selling pencils. Gillian went out and stood before him.

  "Excuse me," he said, " but would you mind tell- ing me what you would do if you bad a thousand dollars?"

  "You got out of that cab that just drove up, didn't you? " asked the blind man.

  "I did," said Gillian.

  " guess you are all right," said the pencil dealer, "to ride in a cab by daylight. Take a look at that, if you like."

  He drew a small book from his coat pocket and held it out. Gillian opened it and saw that it was a bank deposit book. It showed a balance of $1,785 to the blind man's credit.

  Gillian returned the book and got into the cab.

  "I forgot something," be said. "You may drive to the law offices of Tolman & Sharp, at - Broad- way." Lawyer Tolman looked at him hostilely and in- quiringly through his gold-rimmed glasses.

  " I beg your pardon," said Gillian, cheerfully, "but may I ask you a question? It is not an im- pertinent one, I hope. Was Miss Hayden left any- thing by my uncle's will besides the ring and the $10?"

  " Nothing," said Mr. Tolman.

  " I thank you very much, sir," said Gillian, and on he went to his cab. He gave the driver the ad- dress of his late uncle's home.

  Miss Hayden was writing letters in the library. She was small and slender and clothed in black. But you would have noticed her eyes. Gillian drifted in with his air of regarding the world as inconsequent.

  I've just come from old Tolman's," he explained. They've been going over the papers down there. They found a - Gillian searched his memory for a legal term - they found an amendment or a post- script or something to the will. It seemed that the old boy loosened up a little on second thoughts and willed you a thousand dollars. I was driving up this way and Tolman asked me to bring you the money. Here it is. You'd better count it to see if it's right."

  Gillian laid the money beside her hand on the desk. Miss Hayden turned white. "Oh! " she said, and again "Oh !"

  Gillian half turned and looked out the window. "I suppose, of course," be said, in a low voice, that you know I love you."

  "I am sorry," said Miss Hayden, taking up her money.

  " There is no use? " asked Gillian, almost light- heartedly.

  " I am sorry," she said again.

  " May I write a note? " asked Gillian, with a smile, I-re seated himself at the big library table. She sup- plied him with paper and pen, and then went back to her secretaire.

  Gillian made out his account of his expenditure of the thousand dollars i;i these words:

  Paid by the black sheep, Robert Gillian, $1,000 on account of the eternal happiness, owed by Heaven to the best and dearest woman on earth."

  Gillian slipped his writing into an envelope, bowed and went his way.

  His cab stopped again at the offices of Tolman & Sharp.

  "I have expended the thousand dollars," he said cheerily, to Tolman of the gold glasses, " and I have come to render account of it, as I agreed. There is quite a feeling of summer in the air - do you not think so, Mr. Tolman?" He tossed a white envelope on the lawyer's table. You will find there a memo- randum, sir, of the modus operandi of the vanishing of the dollars."

  Without touching the envelope, Mr. Tolman went to a door and called his partner, Sharp. Together they explored the caverns of an immense safe. Forth they dragged, as trophy of their search a big envelope sealed with wax. This they forcibly invaded, and wagged their venerable heads together over its con- tents. Then Tolman became spokesman.

  "Mr. Gillian," he said, formally, "there was a codicil to your uncle's will. It was intrusted to us privately, with instructions that it be not opened until you had furnished us with a full account of your handling of the $1,000 bequest in the will. As you have fulfilled the conditions, my partner and I have read the codicil. I do not wish to encumber your understanding with its legal phraseology, but I will acquaint you with the spirit of its contents.

  In the event that your disposition of the $1,000 demonstrates that you possess any of the qualifica- tions that deserve reward, much benefit will accrue to you. Mr. Sharp and I are named as the judges, and I assure you that we will do our duty strictly according to justice-with liberality. We are not at all unfavorably disposed toward you, Mr. Gillian. But let us return to the letter of the codicil. If your disposal of the money in question has been prudent, wise, or unselflish, it is in our power to hand you over bonds to the value of $50,000, which have been placed in our hands for that purpose. But if - as our client, the late Mr. Gillian, explicitly provides - you have used this money as you have money in the past, I quote the late Mr. Gillian - in reprehensible dissipation among disreputable associates - the $50,000 is to be paid to Miriam Hayden, ward of the late Mr. Gillian, without delay. Now, Mr. Gillian, Mr. Sharp and I will examine your account in regard to the $1,000. You submit it in writing, I believe. I hope you will repose confidence in our decision."

  Mr. Tolman reached for the envelope. Gillian was a little the quicker in taking it up. He tore the account and its cover leisurely into strips and dropped them into his pocket.

  "It's all right," he said, smilingly. "There isn't a bit of need to bother you with this. I don't suppose you'd understand these itemized bets, anyway. I lost the thousand dollars on the races. Good-day to you, gentlemen."

  Tolman & Sharp shook their beads mournfully at each other when Gillian left, for they heard him whis- tling gayly in the hallway as he waited for the elevator.

  THE DEFEAT OF THE CITY

  Robert Walmsley's descent upon the city resulted in a Kilkenny struggle. He came out of the fight victor by a fortune and a reputation. On the other band, he was swallowed up by the city. The city gave him what he demanded and then branded him with its brand. It remodelled, cut, trimmed and stamped him to the pattern it approves. It opened its social gates to him and shut him in on a close- cropped, formal lawn with the select herd of rumi- nants. In dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness he acquired that charming in- solence, that irritating completeness, that sophisti- cated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.

  One of the up-state rural counties pointed with pride to the successful young metropolitan lawyer as a product of its soil. Six years earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between its huckle- berry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced " Bob ab
andoned the certain three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, au- tomobile accident or cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure. Tailors waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from the cut of his unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fel- lows in the clubs and members of the oldest subpoenaed families were glad to clap him on the back and allow him three letters of his name.

  But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley's success was not scaled until be married Alicia Van Der Pool. I cite the Matterhorn, for just so high and cool and white and inaccessible was this daughter of the old burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her over whose bleak passes a thousand climbers struggled -- reached only to her knees. She towered in her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She was a Van Der Pool. Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were made for other people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created to be companions of blind persons and objec- tionable characters who smoked pipes.

  This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley accomplished. If he found, with the good poet with the game foot and artificially curled hair, that he who ascends to mountain tops will find the loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow, he concealed his chilblains beneath a brave and smiling exterior. He was a lucky man and knew it, even though he were imitating the Spartan boy with an ice-cream freezer beneath his doublet frappeeing the region of his heart.

  After a brief wedding tour abroad, the couple re- turned to create a decided ripple in the calm cistern (so placid and cool and sunless it is) of the best so- ciety. They entertained at their red brick mausoleum of ancient greatness in an old square that is a ceme- tery of crumbled glory. And Robert Walmsley was proud of his wife; although while one of his hands shook his guests' the other held tightly to his alpen- stock and thermometer.

  One day Alicia found a letter written to Robert by his mother. It was an unerudite letter, full of crops and motherly love and farm notes. It chronicled the health of the pig and the recent red calf, and asked concerning Robert's in return. It was a letter direct from the soil, straight from home, full of biographies of bees, tales of turnips, peaans of new-laid eggs, neg- lected parents and the slump in dried apples.

  "Why have I not been shown your mother's let- ters?" asked Alicia. There was always something in her voice that made you think of lorgnettes, of ac- counts at Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding on the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling of pendant prisms on your grandmothers' chandeliers, of snow lying on a convent roof; of a police sergeant refusing bail. "Your mother," continued Alicia, "invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have never seen a farm. We will go there for a week or two, Robert."

  "We will," said Robert, with the grand air of an associate Supreme Justice concurring in an opinion. "I did not lay the invitation before you because I thought you would not care to go. I am much pleased at your decision."

  "I will write to her myself," answered Alicia, with a faint foreshadowing of enthusiasm. " Felice shall pack my trunks at once. Seven, I think, will be enough. I do not suppose that your mother entertains a great deal. Does she give many house parties?"

  Robert arose, and as attorney for rural places filed a demurrer against six of the seven trunks. He en- deavored to define, picture, elucidate, set forth and describe a farm. His own words sounded strange in his ears. He had not realized how thoroughly urbsi- dized he had become.

  A week passed and found them landed at the little country station five hours out from the city. A grin- ning, stentorian, sarcastic youth driving a mule to a spring wagon hailed Robert savagely.

  "Hallo, Mr. Walmsley. Found your way back at last, have you? Sorry I couldn't bring in the auto- mobile for you, but dad's bull-tonguing the ten-acre clover patch with it to-day. Guess you'll excuse my, not wearing a dress suit over to meet you -- it ain't six o'clock yet, you know."

  "I'm glad to see you, Tom," said Robert, grasp- ing his brother's band. "Yes, I've found my way at last. You've a right to say 'at last.' It's been over two years since the last time. But it will be oftener after this, my boy."

  Alicia, cool in the summer beat as an Arctic wraith, white as a Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and fluttering lace parasol, came round the corner of the station; and Tom was stripped of his assurance. He became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on the homeward drive to the mule alone did he confide in language the inwardness of his thoughts.

  They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a spendthrift flood of gold upon the fortunate fields of wheat. The cities were far away. The road lay curl- ing around wood and dale and bill like a ribbon lost from the robe of careless summer. The wind followed like a whinnying colt in the track of Phoebus's steeds.

  By and by the farmhouse peeped gray out of its faithful grove; they saw the long lane with its convoy of walnut trees running from the road to the house; they smelled the wild rose and the breath of cool, damp willows in the creek's bed. And then in unison all the voices of the soil began a chant addressed to the soul of Robert Walmsley. Out of the tilted aisles of the dim wood they came hollowly; they chirped and buzzed from the parched grass; they trilled from the ripples of the creek ford; they floated up in clear Pan's pipe notes from the dimming meadows; the whippoorwills joined in as they pursued midges in the upper air; slow-going cow-bells struck out a homely accompaniment -- and this was what each one said: "You've found your way back at last, have you?"

  The old voices of the soil spoke to him. Leaf and bud and blossom conversed with him in the old vocabu- lary of his careless youth - the inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a power in the transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt the breath of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love. The city was far away.

  This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. A queer thing he noticed in con- nection with it was that Alicia, sitting at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not be- long to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, so colorless and high - so intan- gible and unreal. And yet he had never admired her more than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring wagon, chiming no more with his mood and with her environment than the Matterhorn chimes with a peasant's cabbage garden.

  That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown. Robert's mother dis- coursed to her happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat on the top step; Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch the lightning bugs. Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the big armchair with one of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle of the porch in everybody's way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole forth un- seen and plunged other poignant shafts of memory into the heart of Robert. A rural madness entered his soul. The city was far away.

  Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a sacrifice to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: "No, you don't!" He fetched the pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman's boots and tore them off. The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert Walmsley, of Washington Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top of him, bowling fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.

  Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac bush.

  "Come out here, you landlubber," be cried to Tom, and I'll put grass seed on your back. I think you called me a 'dude' a while ago. Come along and cut your capers."

  Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with delight. Three times they wrestled on the grass, "side holds," even as the giants of the mat. And twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of the distinguished lawyer. Dishevelled
, panting, each still boasting of his own prowess, they stumbled back to the porch. Millie cast a pert reflection upon the qualities of a city brother. In an instant Robert had secured a horrid katydid in his fingers and bore down upon her. Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane, pursued by the avenging glass of form. A quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to the victorious " dude." The rustic mania possessed him unabatedly.

  I can do up a cowpenful of you slow hayseeds," he proclaimed, vaingloriously. "Bring on your bull- dogs, your hired men and your log-rollers."

  He turned handsprings on the grass that prodded Tom to envious sarcasm. And then, with a whoop, he clattered to the rear and brought back Uncle like, a battered colored retainer of the family, with his banjo, and strewed sand on the porch and danced "Chicken in the Bread Tray" and did buck-and- wing wonders for half an hour longer. Incredibly, wild and boisterous things he did. He sang, he told stories that set all but one shrieking, he played the yokel, the humorous clodhopper; he was mad, and with the revival of the old life in his blood. He became so extravagant that once his mother sought gently to reprove him. Then Alicia moved as though she were about to speak, but she did not. Through it all she sat immovable, a slim, white spirit in the dusk that no man might question or read.