by O. Henry
As the dinner waned, hands reached for the pepper cruet rather than for the shaker of Attic salt. Miss Tooker, with an elbow to business, leaned across the table toward Grainger, upsetting her glass of wine.
“Now while you are fed and in good humor,” she said, “I want to make a suggestion to you about a new cover.”
“A good idea,” said Grainger, mopping the tablecloth with his napkin. “I’ll speak to the waiter about it.”
Kappelman, the painter, was the cut-up. As a piece of delicate Athenian wit he got up from his chair and waltzed down the room with a waiter. That dependent, no doubt an honest, pachydermatous, worthy, tax-paying, art-despising biped, released himself from the unequal encounter, carried his professional smile back to the dumb-waiter and dropped it down the shaft to eternal oblivion. Reeves began to make Keats turn in his grave. Mrs. Pothunter told the story of the man who met the widow on the train. Miss Adrian hummed what is still called a chanson in the cafés of Bridgeport. Grainger edited each individual effort with his assistant editor’s smile, which meant: “Great! but you’ll have to send them in through the regular channels. If I were the chief now — but you know how it is.”
And soon the head waiter bowed before them, desolated to relate that the closing hour had already become chronologically historical; so out all trooped into the starry midnight, filling the street with gay laughter, to be barked at by hopeful cabmen and enviously eyed by the dull inhabitants of an uninspired world.
Grainger left Mary at the elevator in the trackless palm forest of the Idealia. After he had gone she came down again carrying a small hand-bag, ‘phoned for a cab, drove to the Grand Central Station, boarded a 12.55 commuter’s train, rode four hours with her burnt-umber head bobbing against the red-plush back of the seat, and landed during a fresh, stinging, glorious sunrise at a deserted station, the size of a peach crate, called Crocusville.
She walked a mile and clicked the latch of a gate. A bare, brown cottage stood twenty yards back; an old man with a pearl-white, Calvinistic face and clothes dyed blacker than a raven in a coal-mine was washing his hands in a tin basin on the front porch.
“How are you, father?” said Mary timidly.
“I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann. You will find your mother in the kitchen.”
In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for breakfast. Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a thrill in her heart.
For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and tea.
“You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which you have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust,” said her father.
“Yes,” said Mary, “I am still reviewing books for the same publication.”
After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat in straight-back chairs in the bare-floored parlor.
“It is my custom,” said the old man, “on the Sabbath day to read aloud from the great work entitled the ‘Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy,’ by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered theologian, Jeremy Taylor.”
“I know it,” said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.
For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello. Mary sat gloating in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought her. Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr’s. Jeremy’s minor chords soothed her like the music of a tom-tom. “Why, oh why,” she said to herself, “does some one not write words to it?”
At eleven they went to church in Crocusville. The back of the pine bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar. The preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the damnation of the world. At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to the bar of judgment. An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move. She lowered her eyes before the congregation — a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her. Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy. For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom. Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child. She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered. When they came out the minister stopped to greet them. Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions. When she saw that the other women carried their hymn-books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.
She took the three-o’clock train back to the city. At nine she sat at the round table for dinner in the Café André. Nearly the same crowd was there.
“Where have you been to-day?” asked Mrs. Pothunter. “I ‘phoned to you at twelve.”
“I have been away in Bohemia,” answered Mary, with a mystic smile.
There! Mary has given it away. She has spoiled my climax. For I was to have told you that Bohemia is nothing more than the little country in which you do not live. If you try to obtain citizenship in it, at once the court and retinue pack the royal archives and treasure and move away beyond the hills. It is a hillside that you turn your head to peer at from the windows of the Through Express.
At exactly half past eleven Kappelman, deceived by a new softness and slowness of riposte and parry in Mary Adrian, tried to kiss her. Instantly she slapped his face with such strength and cold fury that he shrank down, sobered, with the flaming red print of a hand across his leering features. And all sounds ceased, as when the shadows of great wings come upon a flock of chattering sparrows. One had broken the paramount law of sham-Bohemia — the law of “Laisser faire.” The shock came not from the blow delivered, but from the blow received. With the effect of a schoolmaster entering the play-room of his pupils was that blow administered. Women pulled down their sleeves and laid prim hands against their ruffled side locks. Men looked at their watches. There was nothing of the effect of a brawl about it; it was purely the still panic produced by the sound of the ax of the fly cop, Conscience hammering at the gambling-house doors of the Heart.
With their punctilious putting on of cloaks, with their exaggerated pretense of not having seen or heard, with their stammering exchange of unaccustomed formalities, with their false show of a light-hearted exit I must take leave of my Bohemian party. Mary has robbed me of my climax; and she may go.
But I am not defeated. Somewhere there exists a great vault miles broad and miles long — more capacious than the champagne caves of France. In that vault are stored the anticlimaxes that should have been tagged to all the stories that have been told in the world. I shall cheat that vault of one deposit.
Minnie Brown, with her aunt, came from Crocusville down to the city to see the sights. And because she had escorted me to fishless trout streams and exhibited to me open-plumbed waterfalls and broken my camera while I Julyed in her village, I must escort her to the hives containing the synthetic clover honey of town.
Especially did the custom-made Bohemia charm her. The spaghetti wound its tendrils about her heart; the free red wine drowned her belief in the existence of commercialism in the world; she was dared and enchanted by the rugose wit that can be churned out of California claret.
But one evening I got her away from the smell of halibut and linoleum long enough to read to her the manuscript of this story, which then ended before her entrance into it. I read it to her because I knew that all the printing-presses in the world were running to try to please her and some others. And I asked her about it.
“I didn’t quite catch the trains,” said she. “How long was Mary in Crocusville?”
“Ten hours and five minutes,” I replied.
“Well, then, the story may do,” said Minnie. “But if she had stayed there a week Kappelman would have got his kiss
.”
THE FERRY OF UNFULFILMENT
At the street corner, as solid as granite in the “rush-hour” tide of humanity, stood the Man from Nome. The Arctic winds and sun had stained him berry-brown. His eye still held the azure glint of the glaciers.
He was as alert as a fox, as tough as a caribou cutlet and as broad-gauged as the aurora borealis. He stood sprayed by a Niagara of sound — the crash of the elevated trains, clanging cars, pounding of rubberless tires and the antiphony of the cab and truck-drivers indulging in scarifying repartee. And so, with his gold dust cashed in to the merry air of a hundred thousand, and with the cakes and ale of one week in Gotham turning bitter on his tongue, the Man from Nome sighed to set foot again in Chilkoot, the exit from the land of street noises and Dead Sea apple pies.
Up Sixth avenue, with the tripping, scurrying, chattering, bright-eyed, homing tide came the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s. The Man from Nome looked and saw, first, that she was supremely beautiful after his own conception of beauty; and next, that she moved with exactly the steady grace of a dog sled on a level crust of snow. His third sensation was an instantaneous conviction that he desired her greatly for his own. This quickly do men from Nome make up their minds. Besides, he was going back to the North in a short time, and to act quickly was no less necessary.
A thousand girls from the great department store of Sieber-Mason flowed along the sidewalk, making navigation dangerous to men whose feminine field of vision for three years has been chiefly limited to Siwash and Chilkat squaws. But the Man from Nome, loyal to her who had resurrected his long cached heart, plunged into the stream of pulchritude and followed her.
Down Twenty-third street she glided swiftly, looking to neither side; no more flirtatious than the bronze Diana above the Garden. Her fine brown hair was neatly braided; her neat waist and unwrinkled black skirt were eloquent of the double virtues — taste and economy. Ten yards behind followed the smitten Man from Nome.
Miss Claribel Colby, the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, belonged to that sad company of mariners known as Jersey commuters. She walked into the waiting-room of the ferry, and up the stairs, and by a marvellous swift, little run, caught the ferry-boat that was just going out. The Man from Nome closed up his ten yards in three jumps and gained the deck close beside her.
Miss Colby chose a rather lonely seat on the outside of the upper-cabin. The night was not cold, and she desired to be away from the curious eyes and tedious voices of the passengers. Besides, she was extremely weary and drooping from lack of sleep. On the previous night she had graced the annual ball and oyster fry of the West Side Wholesale Fish Dealers’ Assistants’ Social Club No. 2, thus reducing her usual time of sleep to only three hours.
And the day had been uncommonly troublous. Customers had been inordinately trying; the buyer in her department had scolded her roundly for letting her stock run down; her best friend, Mamie Tuthill, had snubbed her by going to lunch with that Dockery girl.
The Girl from Sieber-Mason’s was in that relaxed, softened mood that often comes to the independent feminine wage-earner. It is a mood most propitious for the man who would woo her. Then she has yearnings to be set in some home and heart; to be comforted, and to hide behind some strong arm and rest, rest. But Miss Claribel Colby was also very sleepy.
There came to her side a strong man, browned and dressed carelessly in the best of clothes, with his hat in his hand.
“Lady,” said the Man from Nome, respectfully, “excuse me for speaking to you, but I — I — I saw you on the street, and — and— “
“Oh, gee!” remarked the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s, glancing up with the most capable coolness. “Ain’t there any way to ever get rid of you mashers? I’ve tried everything from eating onions to using hatpins. Be on your way, Freddie.”
“I’m not one of that kind, lady,” said the Man from Nome— “honest, I’m not. As I say, I saw you on the street, and I wanted to know you so bad I couldn’t help followin’ after you. I was afraid I wouldn’t ever see you again in this big town unless I spoke; and that’s why I done so.”
Miss Colby looked once shrewdly at him in the dim light on the ferry-boat. No; he did not have the perfidious smirk or the brazen swagger of the lady-killer. Sincerity and modesty shone through his boreal tan. It seemed to her that it might be good to hear a little of what he had to say.
“You may sit down,” she said, laying her hand over a yawn with ostentatious politness; “and — mind — don’t get fresh or I’ll call the steward.”
The Man from Nome sat by her side. He admired her greatly. He more than admired her. She had exactly the looks he had tried so long in vain to find in a woman. Could she ever come to like him? Well, that was to be seen. He must do all in his power to stake his claim, anyhow.
“My name’s Blayden,” said he— “Henry Blayden.”
“Are you real sure it ain’t Jones?” asked the girl, leaning toward him, with delicious, knowing raillery.
“I’m down from Nome,” he went on with anxious seriousness. “I scraped together a pretty good lot of dust up there, and brought it down with me.”
“Oh, say!” she rippled, pursuing persiflage with engaging lightness, “then you must be on the White Wings force. I thought I’d seen you somewhere.”
“You didn’t see me on the street to-day when I saw you.”
“I never look at fellows on the street.”
“Well, I looked at you; and I never looked at anything before that I thought was half as pretty.”
“Shall I keep the change?”
“Yes, I reckon so. I reckon you could keep anything I’ve got. I reckon I’m what you would call a rough man, but I could be awful good to anybody I liked. I’ve had a rough time of it up yonder, but I beat the game. Nearly 5,000 ounces of dust was what I cleaned up while I was there.”
“Goodness!” exclaimed Miss Colby, obligingly sympathetic. “It must be an awful dirty place, wherever it is.”
And then her eyes closed. The voice of the Man from Nome had a monotony in its very earnestness. Besides, what dull talk was this of brooms and sweeping and dust? She leaned her head back against the wall.
“Miss,” said the Man from Nome, with deeper earnestness and monotony, “I never saw anybody I liked as well as I do you. I know you can’t think that way of me right yet; but can’t you give me a chance? Won’t you let me know you, and see if I can’t make you like me?”
The head of the Girl from Sieber-Mason’s slid over gently and rested upon his shoulder. Sweet sleep had won her, and she was dreaming rapturously of the Wholesale Fish Dealers’ Assistants’ ball.
The gentleman from Nome kept his arms to himself. He did not suspect sleep, and yet he was too wise to attribute the movement to surrender. He was greatly and blissfully thrilled, but he ended by regarding the head upon his shoulder as an encouraging preliminary, merely advanced as a harbinger of his success, and not to be taken advantage of.
One small speck of alloy discounted the gold of his satisfaction. Had he spoken too freely of his wealth? He wanted to be liked for himself.
“I want to say, Miss,” he said, “that you can count on me. They know me in the Klondike from Juneau to Circle City and down the whole length of the Yukon. Many a night I’ve laid in the snow up there where I worked like a slave for three years, and wondered if I’d ever have anybody to like me. I didn’t want all that dust just myself. I thought I’d meet just the right one some time, and I done it to-day. Money’s a mighty good thing to have, but to have the love of the one you like best is better still. If you was ever to marry a man, Miss, which would you rather he’d have?”
“Cash!”
The word came sharply and loudly from Miss Colby’s lips, giving evidence that in her dreams she was now behind her counter in the great department store of Sieber-Mason.
Her head suddenly bobbed over sideways. She awoke, sat straight, and rubbed her eyes. The Man from Nome was gone.
“Gee! I believe I’ve been asleep,
” said Miss Colby “Wonder what became of the White Wings!”
THE TALE OF A TAINTED TENNER
Money talks. But you may think that the conversation of a little old ten-dollar bill in New York would be nothing more than a whisper. Oh, very well! Pass up this sotto voce autobiography of an X if you like. If you are one of the kind that prefers to listen to John D’s checkbook roar at you through a megaphone as it passes by, all right. But don’t forget that small change can say a word to the point now and then. The next time you tip your grocer’s clerk a silver quarter to give you extra weight of his boss’s goods read the four words above the lady’s head. How are they for repartee?
I am a ten-dollar Treasury note, series of 1901. You may have seen one in a friend’s hand. On my face, in the centre, is a picture of the bison Americanus, miscalled a buffalo by fifty or sixty millions of Americans. The heads of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clark adorn the ends. On my back is the graceful figure of Liberty or Ceres or Maxine Elliot standing in the centre of the stage on a conservatory plant. My references is — or are — Section 3,588, Revised Statutes. Ten cold, hard dollars — I don’t say whether silver, gold, lead or iron — Uncle Sam will hand you over his counter if you want to cash me in.
I beg you will excuse any conversational breaks that I make — thanks, I knew you would — got that sneaking little respect and agreeable feeling toward even an X, haven’t you? You see, a tainted bill doesn’t have much chance to acquire a correct form of expression. I never knew a really cultured and educated person that could afford to hold a ten-spot any longer than it would take to do an Arthur Duffy to the nearest That’s All! sign or delicatessen store.