by O. Henry
When Binkley had relieved the hermitage from the blot of his presence and the first faint star showed above the pines, the hermit got the can of baking-powder from his cupboard. He still smiled behind his beard.
There was a slight rustle in the doorway. There stood Edith Carr, with all the added beauty and stateliness and noble bearing that ten years had brought her.
She was never one to chatter. She looked at the hermit with her large, thinking, dark eyes. The hermit stood still, surprised into a pose as motionless as her own. Only his subconscious sense of the fitness of things caused him to turn the baking-powder can slowly in his hands until its red label was hidden against his bosom.
“I am stopping at the inn,” said Edith, in low but clear tones. “I heard of you there. I told myself that I must see you. I want to ask your forgiveness. I sold my happiness for money. There were others to be provided for — but that does not excuse me. I just wanted to see you and ask your forgiveness. You have lived here ten years, they tell me, cherishing my memory! I was blind, Hampton. I could not see then that all the money in the world cannot weigh in the scales against a faithful heart. If — but it is too late now, of course.”
Her assertion was a question clothed as best it could be in a loving woman’s pride. But through the thin disguise the hermit saw easily that his lady had come back to him — if he chose. He had won a golden crown — if it pleased him to take it. The reward of his decade of faithfulness was ready for his hand — if he desired to stretch it forth.
For the space of one minute the old enchantment shone upon him with a reflected radiance. And then by turns he felt the manly sensations of indignation at having been discarded, and of repugnance at having been — as it were — sought again. And last of all — how strange that it should have come at last! — the pale-blue vision of the beautifulest of the Trenholme sisters illuminated his mind’s eye and left him without a waver.
“It is too late,” he said, in deep tones, pressing the baking-powder can against his heart.
Once she turned after she had gone slowly twenty yards down the path. The hermit had begun to twist the lid off his can, but he hid it again under his sacking robe. He could see her great eyes shining sadly through the twilight; but he stood inflexible in the doorway of his shack and made no sign.
Just as the moon rose on Thursday evening the hermit was seized by the world-madness.
Up from the inn, fainter than the horns of elf-land, came now and then a few bars of music played by the casino band. The Hudson was broadened by the night into an illimitable sea — those lights, dimly seen on its opposite shore, were not beacons for prosaic trolley-lines, but low-set stars millions of miles away. The waters in front of the inn were gay with fireflies — or were they motor-boats, smelling of gasoline and oil? Once the hermit had known these things and had sported with Amaryllis in the shade of the red-and-white-striped awnings. But for ten years he had turned a heedless ear to these far-off echoes of a frivolous world. But to-night there was something wrong.
The casino band was playing a waltz — a waltz. What a fool he had been to tear deliberately ten years of his life from the calendar of existence for one who had given him up for the false joys that wealth— “tum ti tum ti tum ti” — how did that waltz go? But those years had not been sacrificed — had they not brought him the star and pearl of all the world, the youngest and beautifulest of —
“But do not come on Thursday evening,” she had insisted. Perhaps by now she would be moving slowly and gracefully to the strains of that waltz, held closely by West-Pointers or city commuters, while he, who had read in her eyes things that had recompensed him for ten lost years of life, moped like some wild animal in its mountain den. Why should— “
“Damn it,” said the hermit, suddenly, “I’ll do it!”
He threw down his Marcus Aurelius and threw off his gunny-sack toga. He dragged a dust-covered trunk from a corner of the cave, and with difficulty wrenched open its lid.
Candles he had in plenty, and the cave was soon aglow. Clothes — ten years old in cut — scissors, razors, hats, shoes, all his discarded attire and belongings, were dragged ruthlessly from their renunciatory rest and strewn about in painful disorder.
A pair of scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled razors to perform approximately their office. Cutting his own hair was beyond the hermit’s skill. So he only combed and brushed it backward as smoothly as he could. Charity forbids us to consider the heartburnings and exertions of one so long removed from haberdashery and society.
At the last the hermit went to an inner corner of his cave and began to dig in the soft earth with a long iron spoon. Out of the cavity he thus made he drew a tin can, and out of the can three thousand dollars in bills, tightly rolled and wrapped in oiled silk. He was a real hermit, as this may assure you.
You may take a brief look at him as he hastens down the little mountain-side. A long, wrinkled black frock-coat reached to his calves. White duck trousers, unacquainted with the tailor’s goose, a pink shirt, white standing collar with brilliant blue butterfly tie, and buttoned congress gaiters. But think, sir and madam — ten years! From beneath a narrow-brimmed straw hat with a striped band flowed his hair. Seeing him, with all your shrewdness you could not have guessed him. You would have said that he played Hamlet — or the tuba — or pinochle — you would never have laid your hand on your heart and said: “He is a hermit who lived ten years in a cave for love of one lady — to win another.”
The dancing pavilion extended above the waters of the river. Gay lanterns and frosted electric globes shed a soft glamour within it. A hundred ladies and gentlemen from the inn and summer cottages flitted in and about it. To the left of the dusty roadway down which the hermit had tramped were the inn and grill-room. Something seemed to be on there, too. The windows were brilliantly lighted, and music was playing — music different from the two-steps and waltzes of the casino band.
A negro man wearing a white jacket came through the iron gate, with its immense granite posts and wrought-iron lamp-holders.
“What is going on here to-night?” asked the hermit.
“Well, sah,” said the servitor, “dey is having de reg’lar Thursday-evenin’ dance in de casino. And in de grill-room dere’s a beefsteak dinner, sah.”
The hermit glanced up at the inn on the hillside whence burst suddenly a triumphant strain of splendid harmony.
“And up there,” said he, “they are playing Mendelssohn — what is going on up there?”
“Up in de inn,” said the dusky one, “dey is a weddin’ goin’ on. Mr. Binkley, a mighty rich man, am marryin’ Miss Trenholme, sah — de young lady who am quite de belle of de place, sah.”
HE ALSO SERVES
If I could have a thousand years — just one little thousand years — more of life, I might, in that time, draw near enough to true Romance to touch the hem of her robe.
Up from ships men come, and from waste places and forest and road and garret and cellar to maunder to me in strangely distributed words of the things they have seen and considered. The recording of their tales is no more than a matter of ears and fingers. There are only two fates I dread — deafness and writer’s cramp. The hand is yet steady; let the ear bear the blame if these printed words be not in the order they were delivered to me by Hunky Magee, true camp-follower of fortune.
Biography shall claim you but an instant — I first knew Hunky when he was head-waiter at Chubb’s little beefsteak restaurant and café on Third Avenue. There was only one waiter besides.
Then, successively, I caromed against him in the little streets of the Big City after his trip to Alaska, his voyage as cook with a treasure-seeking expedition to the Caribbean, and his failure as a pearl-fisher in the Arkansas River. Between these dashes into the land of adventure he usually came back to Chubb’s for a while. Chubb’s was a port for him when gales blew too high; but when you dined there and Hunky went for your steak you never knew whether he would come to a
nchor in the kitchen or in the Malayan Archipelago. You wouldn’t care for his description — he was soft of voice and hard of face, and rarely had to use more than one eye to quell any approach to a disturbance among Chubb’s customers.
One night I found Hunky standing at a corner of Twenty-third Street and Third Avenue after an absence of several months. In ten minutes we had a little round table between us in a quiet corner, and my ears began to get busy. I leave out my sly ruses and feints to draw Hunky’s word-of-mouth blows — it all came to something like this:
“Speaking of the next election,” said Hunky, “did you ever know much about Indians? No? I don’t mean the Cooper, Beadle, cigar-store, or Laughing Water kind — I mean the modern Indian — the kind that takes Greek prizes in colleges and scalps the half-back on the other side in football games. The kind that eats macaroons and tea in the afternoons with the daughter of the professor of biology, and fills up on grasshoppers and fried rattlesnake when they get back to the ancestral wickiup.
“Well, they ain’t so bad. I like ‘em better than most foreigners that have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own vices for them of the pale-faces — and he retains all his own virtues. Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets ‘em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep their own vices — and it’s going to take our whole standing army some day to police that gang.
“But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High Jack Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent kid moccasins and Madras hunting-shirt with turned-back cuffs. He was a friend of mine. I met him in Tahlequah when I was out there during the land boom, and we got thick. He had got all there was out of colleges and had come back to lead his people out of Egypt. He was a man of first-class style and wrote essays, and had been invited to visit rich guys’ houses in Boston and such places.
“There was a Cherokee girl in Muscogee that High Jack was foolish about. He took me to see her a few times. Her name was Florence Blue Feather — but you want to clear your mind of all ideas of squaws with nose-rings and army blankets. This young lady was whiter than you are, and better educated than I ever was. You couldn’t have told her from any of the girls shopping in the swell Third Avenue stores. I liked her so well that I got to calling on her now and then when High Jack wasn’t along, which is the way of friends in such matters. She was educated at the Muscogee College, and was making a specialty of — let’s see — eth — yes, ethnology. That’s the art that goes back and traces the descent of different races of people, leading up from jelly-fish through monkeys and to the O’Briens. High Jack had took up that line too, and had read papers about it before all kinds of riotous assemblies — Chautauquas and Choctaws and chowder-parties, and such. Having a mutual taste for musty information like that was what made ‘em like each other, I suppose. But I don’t know! What they call congeniality of tastes ain’t always it. Now, when Miss Blue Feather and me was talking together, I listened to her affidavits about the first families of the Land of Nod being cousins german (well, if the Germans don’t nod, who does?) to the mound-builders of Ohio with incomprehension and respect. And when I’d tell her about the Bowery and Coney Island, and sing her a few songs that I’d heard the Jamaica niggers sing at their church lawn-parties, she didn’t look much less interested than she did when High Jack would tell her that he had a pipe that the first inhabitants of America originally arrived here on stilts after a freshet at Tenafly, New Jersey.
“But I was going to tell you more about High Jack.
“About six months ago I get a letter from him, saying he’d been commissioned by the Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology at Washington to go down to Mexico and translate some excavations or dig up the meaning of some shorthand notes on some ruins — or something of that sort. And if I’d go along he could squeeze the price into the expense account.
“Well, I’d been holding a napkin over my arm at Chubb’s about long enough then, so I wired High Jack ‘Yes’; and he sent me a ticket, and I met him in Washington, and he had a lot of news to tell me. First of all, was that Florence Blue Feather had suddenly disappeared from her home and environments.
“‘Run away?’ I asked.
“‘Vanished,’ says High Jack. ‘Disappeared like your shadow when the sun goes under a cloud. She was seen on the street, and then she turned a corner and nobody ever seen her afterward. The whole community turned out to look for her, but we never found a clew.’
“‘That’s bad — that’s bad,’ says I. ‘She was a mighty nice girl, and as smart as you find em.’
“High Jack seemed to take it hard. I guess he must have esteemed Miss Blue Feather quite highly. I could see that he’d referred the matter to the whiskey-jug. That was his weak point — and many another man’s. I’ve noticed that when a man loses a girl he generally takes to drink either just before or just after it happens.
“From Washington we railroaded it to New Orleans, and there took a tramp steamer bound for Belize. And a gale pounded us all down the Caribbean, and nearly wrecked us on the Yucatan coast opposite a little town without a harbor called Boca de Coacoyula. Suppose the ship had run against that name in the dark!
“‘Better fifty years of Europe than a cyclone in the bay,’ says High Jack Snakefeeder. So we get the captain to send us ashore in a dory when the squall seemed to cease from squalling.
“‘We will find ruins here or make ‘em,’ says High. ‘The Government doesn’t care which we do. An appropriation is an appropriation.’
“Boca de Coacoyula was a dead town. Them biblical towns we read about — Tired and Siphon — after they was destroyed, they must have looked like Forty-second Street and Broadway compared to this Boca place. It still claimed 1300 inhabitants as estimated and engraved on the stone court-house by the census-taker in 1597. The citizens were a mixture of Indians and other Indians; but some of ‘em was light-colored, which I was surprised to see. The town was huddled up on the shore, with woods so thick around it that a subpoena-server couldn’t have reached a monkey ten yards away with the papers. We wondered what kept it from being annexed to Kansas; but we soon found out that it was Major Bing.
“Major Bing was the ointment around the fly. He had the cochineal, sarsaparilla, log-wood, annatto, hemp, and all other dye-woods and pure food adulteration concessions cornered. He had five-sixths of the Boca de Thingama-jiggers working for him on shares. It was a beautiful graft. We used to brag about Morgan and E. H. and others of our wisest when I was in the provinces — but now no more. That peninsula has got our little country turned into a submarine without even the observation tower showing.
“Major Bing’s idea was this. He had the population go forth into the forest and gather these products. When they brought ‘em in he gave ‘em one-fifth for their trouble. Sometimes they’d strike and demand a sixth. The Major always gave in to ‘em.
“The Major had a bungalow so close on the sea that the nine-inch tide seeped through the cracks in the kitchen floor. Me and him and High Jack Snakefeeder sat on the porch and drank rum from noon till midnight. He said he had piled up $300,000 in New Orleans banks, and High and me could stay with him forever if we would. But High Jack happened to think of the United States, and began to talk ethnology.
“‘Ruins!’ says Major Bing. ‘The woods are full of ‘em. I don’t know how far they date back, but they was here before I came.’
“High Jack asks what form of worship the citizens of that locality are addicted to.
“‘Why,’ says the Major, rubbing his nose, ‘I can’t hardly say. I imagine it’s infidel or Aztec or Nonconformist or something like that. There’s a church here — a Methodist or some other kind — with a parson named Skidder. He claims to have converted the people to Christianity. He and me don’t assimilate except on state occasions. I imagine the
y worship some kind of gods or idols yet. But Skidder says he has ‘em in the fold.’
“A few days later High Jack and me, prowling around, strikes a plain path into the forest, and follows it a good four miles. Then a branch turns to the left. We go a mile, maybe, down that, and run up against the finest ruin you ever saw — solid stone with trees and vines and under-brush all growing up against it and in it and through it. All over it was chiselled carvings of funny beasts and people that would have been arrested if they’d ever come out in vaudeville that way. We approached it from the rear.
“High Jack had been drinking too much rum ever since we landed in Boca. You know how an Indian is — the palefaces fixed his clock when they introduced him to firewater. He’d brought a quart along with him.
“‘Hunky,’ says he, ‘we’ll explore the ancient temple. It may be that the storm that landed us here was propitious. The Minority Report Bureau of Ethnology,’ says he, ‘may yet profit by the vagaries of wind and tide.’
“We went in the rear door of the bum edifice. We struck a kind of alcove without bath. There was a granite davenport, and a stone wash-stand without any soap or exit for the water, and some hardwood pegs drove into holes in the wall, and that was all. To go out of that furnished apartment into a Harlem hall bedroom would make you feel like getting back home from an amateur violoncello solo at an East Side Settlement house.
“While High was examining some hieroglyphics on the wall that the stone-masons must have made when their tools slipped, I stepped into the front room. That was at least thirty by fifty feet, stone floor, six little windows like square port-holes that didn’t let much light in.
“I looked back over my shoulder, and sees High Jack’s face three feet away.
“‘High,’ says I, ‘of all the— ‘