by O. Henry
Sitting there, he leaned far back on the hard bench and laughed a jet of cigarette smoke up to the lowest tree branches. The sudden severing of all his life’s ties had brought him a free, thrilling, almost joyous elation. He felt precisely the sensation of the aeronaut when he cuts loose his parachute and lets his balloon drift away.
The hour was nearly ten. Not many loungers were on the benches. The park-dweller, though a stubborn fighter against autumnal coolness, is slow to attack the advance line of spring’s chilly cohorts.
Then arose one from a seat near the leaping fountain, and came and sat himself at Vallance’s side. He was either young or old; cheap lodging-houses had flavoured him mustily; razors and combs had passed him by; in him drink had been bottled and sealed in the devil’s bond. He begged a match, which is the form of introduction among park benchers, and then he began to talk.
“You’re not one of the regulars,” he said to Vallance. “I know tailored clothes when I see ‘em. You just stopped for a moment on your way through the park. Don’t mind my talking to you for a while? I’ve got to be with somebody. I’m afraid — I’m afraid. I’ve told two or three of those bummers over about it. They think I’m crazy. Say — let me tell you — all I’ve had to eat to-day was a couple pretzels and an apple. To-morrow I’ll stand in line to inherit three millions; and that restaurant you see over there with the autos around it will be too cheap for me to eat in. Don’t believe it, do you?
“Without the slightest trouble,” said Vallance, with a laugh. “I lunched there yesterday. To-night I couldn’t buy a five-cent cup of coffee.”
“You don’t look like one of us. Well, I guess those things happen. I used to be a high-flyer myself — some years ago. What knocked you out of the game?”
“I — oh, I lost my job,” said Vallance.
“It’s undiluted Hades, this city,” went on the other. “One day you’re eating from china; the next you are eating in China — a chop-suey joint. I’ve had more than my share of hard luck. For five years I’ve been little better than a panhandler. I was raised up to live expensively and do nothing. Say — I don’t mind telling you — I’ve got to talk to somebody, you see, because I’m afraid — I’m afraid. My name’s Ide. You wouldn’t think that old Paulding, one of the millionaires on Riverside Drive, was my uncle, would you? Well, he is. I lived in his house once, and had all the money I wanted. Say, haven’t you got the price of a couple of drinks about you — er — what’s your name— “
“Dawson,” said Vallance. “No; I’m sorry to say that I’m all in, financially.”
“I’ve been living for a week in a coal cellar on Division Street,” went on Ide, “with a crook they called ‘Blinky’ Morris. I didn’t have anywhere else to go. While I was out to-day a chap with some papers in his pocket was there, asking for me. I didn’t know but what he was a fly cop, so I didn’t go around again till after dark. There was a letter there he had left for me. Say — Dawson, it was from a big downtown lawyer, Mead. I’ve seen his sign on Ann Street. Paulding wants me to play the prodigal nephew — wants me to come back and be his heir again and blow in his money. I’m to call at the lawyer’s office at ten to-morrow and step into my old shoes again — heir to three million, Dawson, and $10,000 a year pocket money. And — I’m afraid — I’m afraid.”
The vagrant leaped to his feet and raised both trembling arms above his head. He caught his breath and moaned hysterically.
Vallance seized his arm and forced him back to the bench.
“Be quiet!” he commanded, with something like disgust in his tones. “One would think you had lost a fortune, instead of being about to acquire one. Of what are you afraid?”
Ide cowered and shivered on the bench. He clung to Vallance’s sleeve, and even in the dim glow of the Broadway lights the latest disinherited one could see drops on the other’s brow wrung out by some strange terror.
“Why, I’m afraid something will happen to me before morning. I don’t know what — something to keep me from coming into that money. I’m afraid a tree will fall on me — I’m afraid a cab will run over me, or a stone drop on me from a housetop, or something. I never was afraid before. I’ve sat in this park a hundred nights as calm as a graven image without knowing where my breakfast was to come from. But now it’s different. I love money, Dawson — I’m happy as a god when it’s trickling through my fingers, and people are bowing to me, with the music and the flowers and fine clothes all around. As long as I knew I was out of the game I didn’t mind. I was even happy sitting here ragged and hungry, listening to the fountain jump and watching the carriages go up the avenue. But it’s in reach of my hand again now — almost — and I can’t stand it to wait twelve hours, Dawson — I can’t stand it. There are fifty things that could happen to me — I could go blind — I might be attacked with heart disease — the world might come to an end before I could— “
Ide sprang to his feet again, with a shriek. People stirred on the benches and began to look. Vallance took his arm.
“Come and walk,” he said, soothingly. “And try to calm yourself. There is no need to become excited or alarmed. Nothing is going to happen to you. One night is like another.”
“That’s right,” said Ide. “Stay with me, Dawson — that’s a good fellow. Walk around with me awhile. I never went to pieces like this before, and I’ve had a good many hard knocks. Do you think you could hustle something in the way of a little lunch, old man? I’m afraid my nerve’s too far gone to try any panhandling.”
Vallance led his companion up almost deserted Fifth Avenue, and then westward along the Thirties toward Broadway. “Wait here a few minutes,” he said, leaving Ide in a quiet and shadowed spot. He entered a familiar hotel, and strolled toward the bar quite in his old assured way.
“There’s a poor devil outside, Jimmy,” he said to the bartender, “who says he’s hungry and looks it. You know what they do when you give them money. Fix up a sandwich or two for him; and I’ll see that he doesn’t throw it away.”
“Certainly, Mr. Vallance,” said the bartender. “They ain’t all fakes. Don’t like to see anybody go hungry.”
He folded a liberal supply of the free lunch into a napkin. Vallance went with it and joined his companion. Ide pounced upon the food ravenously. “I haven’t had any free lunch as good as this in a year,” he said. “Aren’t you going to eat any, Dawson?
“I’m not hungry — thanks,” said Vallance.
“We’ll go back to the Square,” said Ide. “The cops won’t bother us there. I’ll roll up the rest of this ham and stuff for our breakfast. I won’t eat any more; I’m afraid I’ll get sick. Suppose I’d die of cramps or something to-night, and never get to touch that money again! It’s eleven hours yet till time to see that lawyer. You won’t leave me, will you, Dawson? I’m afraid something might happen. You haven’t any place to go, have you?”
“No,” said Vallance, “nowhere to-night. I’ll have a bench with you.”
“You take it cool,” said Ide, “if you’ve told it to me straight. I should think a man put on the bum from a good job just in one day would be tearing his hair.”
“I believe I’ve already remarked,” said Vallance, laughing, “that I would have thought that a man who was expecting to come into a fortune on the next day would be feeling pretty easy and quiet.”
“It’s funny business,” philosophized Ide, “about the way people take things, anyhow. Here’s your bench, Dawson, right next to mine. The light don’t shine in your eyes here. Say, Dawson, I’ll get the old man to give you a letter to somebody about a job when I get back home. You’ve helped me a lot to-night. I don’t believe I could have gone through the night if I hadn’t struck you.”
“Thank you,” said Vallance. “Do you lie down or sit up on these when you sleep?”
For hours Vallance gazed almost without winking at the stars through the branches of the trees and listened to the sharp slapping of horses’ hoofs on the sea of asphalt to the south. His mind was
active, but his feelings were dormant. Every emotion seemed to have been eradicated. He felt no regrets, no fears, no pain or discomfort. Even when he thought of the girl, it was as of an inhabitant of one of those remote stars at which he gazed. He remembered the absurd antics of his companion and laughed softly, yet without a feeling of mirth. Soon the daily army of milk wagons made of the city a roaring drum to which they marched. Vallance fell asleep on his comfortless bench.
At ten o’clock on the next day the two stood at the door of Lawyer Mead’s office in Ann Street.
Ide’s nerves fluttered worse than ever when the hour approached; and Vallance could not decide to leave him a possible prey to the dangers he dreaded.
When they entered the office, Lawyer Mead looked at them wonderingly. He and Vallance were old friends. After his greeting, he turned to Ide, who stood with white face and trembling limbs before the expected crisis.
“I sent a second letter to your address last night, Mr. Ide,” he said. “I learned this morning that you were not there to receive it. It will inform you that Mr. Paulding has reconsidered his offer to take you back into favor. He has decided not to do so, and desires you to understand that no change will be made in the relations existing between you and him.”
Ide’s trembling suddenly ceased. The color came back to his face, and he straightened his back. His jaw went forward half an inch, and a gleam came into his eye. He pushed back his battered hat with one hand, and extended the other, with levelled fingers, toward the lawyer. He took a long breath and then laughed sardonically.
“Tell old Paulding he may go to the devil,” he said, loudly and clearly, and turned and walked out of the office with a firm and lively step.
Lawyer Mead turned on his heel to Vallance and smiled.
“I am glad you came in,” he said, genially. “Your uncle wants you to return home at once. He is reconciled to the situation that led to his hasty action, and desires to say that all will be as— “
“Hey, Adams!” cried Lawyer Mead, breaking his sentence, and calling to his clerk. “Bring a glass of water — Mr. Vallance has fainted.”
THE PLUTONIAN FIRE
There are a few editor men with whom I am privileged to come in contact. It has not been long since it was their habit to come in contact with me. There is a difference.
They tell me that with a large number of the manuscripts that are submitted to them come advices (in the way of a boost) from the author asseverating that the incidents in the story are true. The destination of such contributions depends wholly upon the question of the enclosure of stamps. Some are returned, the rest are thrown on the floor in a corner on top of a pair of gum shoes, an overturned statuette of the Winged Victory, and a pile of old magazines containing a picture of the editor in the act of reading the latest copy of Le Petit Journal, right side up — you can tell by the illustrations. It is only a legend that there are waste baskets in editors’ offices.
Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth and science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomfited instead of being elected to the board of directors. But in the meantime fiction must not only be divorced from fact, but must pay alimony and be awarded custody of the press despatches.
This preamble is to warn you off the grade crossing of a true story. Being that, it shall be told simply, with conjunctions substituted for adjectives wherever possible, and whatever evidences of style may appear in it shall be due to the linotype man. It is a story of the literary life in a great city, and it should be of interest to every author within a 20-mile radius of Gosport, Ind., whose desk holds a MS. story beginning thus: “While the cheers following his nomination were still ringing through the old court-house, Harwood broke away from the congratulating handclasps of his henchmen and hurried to Judge Creswell’s house to find Ida.”
Pettit came up out of Alabama to write fiction. The Southern papers had printed eight of his stories under an editorial caption identifying the author as the son of “the gallant Major Pettingill Pettit, our former County Attorney and hero of the battle of Lookout Mountain.”
Pettit was a rugged fellow, with a kind of shame-faced culture, and my good friend. His father kept a general store in a little town called Hosea. Pettit had been raised in the pine-woods and broom-sedge fields adjacent thereto. He had in his gripsack two manuscript novels of the adventures in Picardy of one Gaston Laboulaye, Vicompte de Montrepos, in the year 1329. That’s nothing. We all do that. And some day when we make a hit with the little sketch about a newsy and his lame dog, the editor prints the other one for us — or “on us,” as the saying is — and then — and then we have to get a big valise and peddle those patent air-draft gas burners. At $1.25 everybody should have ‘em.
I took Pettit to the red-brick house which was to appear in an article entitled “Literary Landmarks of Old New York,” some day when we got through with it. He engaged a room there, drawing on the general store for his expenses. I showed New York to him, and he did not mention how much narrower Broadway is than Lee Avenue in Hosea. This seemed a good sign, so I put the final test.
“Suppose you try your hand at a descriptive article,” I suggested, “giving your impressions of New York as seen from the Brooklyn Bridge. The fresh point of view, the— “
“Don’t be a fool,” said Pettit. “Let’s go have some beer. On the whole I rather like the city.”
We discovered and enjoyed the only true Bohemia. Every day and night we repaired to one of those palaces of marble and glass and tilework, where goes on a tremendous and sounding epic of life. Valhalla itself could not be more glorious and sonorous. The classic marble on which we ate, the great, light-flooded, vitreous front, adorned with snow-white scrolls; the grand Wagnerian din of clanking cups and bowls, the flashing staccato of brandishing cutlery, the piercing recitative of the white-aproned grub-maidens at the morgue-like banquet tables; the recurrent lied-motif of the cash-register — it was a gigantic, triumphant welding of art and sound, a deafening, soul-uplifting pageant of heroic and emblematic life. And the beans were only ten cents. We wondered why our fellow-artists cared to dine at sad little tables in their so-called Bohemian restaurants; and we shuddered lest they should seek out our resorts and make them conspicuous with their presence.
Pettit wrote many stories, which the editors returned to him. He wrote love stories, a thing I have always kept free from, holding the belief that the well-known and popular sentiment is not properly a matter for publication, but something to be privately handled by the alienists and florists. But the editors had told him that they wanted love stories, because they said the women read them.
Now, the editors are wrong about that, of course. Women do not read the love stories in the magazines. They read the poker-game stories and the recipes for cucumber lotion. The love stories are read by fat cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls. I am not criticising the judgment of editors. They are mostly very fine men, but a man can be but one man, with individual opinions and tastes. I knew two associate editors of a magazine who were wonderfully alike in almost everything. And yet one of them was very fond of Flaubert, while the other preferred gin.
Pettit brought me his returned manuscripts, and we looked them over together to find out why they were not accepted. They seemed to me pretty fair stories, written in a good style, and ended, as they should, at the bottom of the last page.
They were well constructed and the events were marshalled in orderly and logical sequence. But I thought I detected a lack of living substance — it was much as if I gazed at a symmetrical array of presentable clamshells from which the succulent and vital inhabitants had been removed. I intimated that the author might do well to get better acquainted with his theme.
“You sold a story last week,” said Pettit, “about a gun fight in an Arizona mining town in which the hero drew his Colt’s .45 and shot seven bandits as fast as they came in the door. Now, if a six-shooter could— “
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bsp; “Oh, well,” said I, “that’s different. Arizona is a long way from New York. I could have a man stabbed with a lariat or chased by a pair of chaparreras if I wanted to, and it wouldn’t be noticed until the usual error-sharp from around McAdams Junction isolates the erratum and writes in to the papers about it. But you are up against another proposition. This thing they call love is as common around New York as it is in Sheboygan during the young onion season. It may be mixed here with a little commercialism — they read Byron, but they look up Bradstreet’s, too, while they’re among the B’s, and Brigham also if they have time — but it’s pretty much the same old internal disturbance everywhere. You can fool an editor with a fake picture of a cowboy mounting a pony with his left hand on the saddle horn, but you can’t put him up a tree with a love story. So, you’ve got to fall in love and then write the real thing.”
Pettit did. I never knew whether he was taking my advice or whether he fell an accidental victim.
There was a girl he had met at one of these studio contrivances — a glorious, impudent, lucid, open-minded girl with hair the color of Culmbacher, and a good-natured way of despising you. She was a New York girl.
Well (as the narrative style permits us to say infrequently), Pettit went to pieces. All those pains, those lover’s doubts, those heart-burnings and tremors of which he had written so unconvincingly were his. Talk about Shylock’s pound of flesh! Twenty-five pounds Cupid got from Pettit. Which is the usurer?