by O. Henry
“If this isn’t comfortable enough for you on the hottest August night for five years,” I said, a little sarcastically, “you might think about the kids down in Delancey and Hester streets lying out on the fire-escapes with their tongues hanging out, trying to get a breath of air that hasn’t been fried on both sides. The contrast might increase your enjoyment.”
“Don’t talk Socialism,” said North. “I gave five hundred dollars to the free ice fund on the first of May. I’m contrasting these stale, artificial, hollow, wearisome ‘amusements’ with the enjoyment a man can get in the woods. You should see the firs and pines do skirt-dances during a storm; and lie down flat and drink out of a mountain branch at the end of a day’s tramp after the deer. That’s the only way to spend a summer. Get out and live with nature.”
“I agree with you absolutely,” said I, with emphasis.
For one moment I had relaxed my vigilance, and had spoken my true sentiments. North looked at me long and curiously.
“Then why, in the name of Pan and Apollo,” he asked, “have you been singing this deceitful pæan to summer in town?”
I suppose I looked my guilt.
“Ha,” said North, “I see. May I ask her name?”
“Annie Ashton,” said I, simply. “She played Nannette in Binkley & Bing’s production of ‘The Silver Cord.’ She is to have a better part next season.”
“Take me to see her,” said North.
Miss Ashton lived with her mother in a small hotel. They were out of the West, and had a little money that bridged the seasons. As press-agent of Binkley & Bing I had tried to keep her before the public. As Robert James Vandiver I had hoped to withdraw her; for if ever one was made to keep company with said Vandiver and smell the salt breeze on the south shore of Long Island and listen to the ducks quack in the watches of the night, it was the Ashton set forth above.
But she had a soul above ducks — above nightingales; aye, even above birds of paradise. She was very beautiful, with quiet ways, and seemed genuine. She had both taste and talent for the stage, and she liked to stay at home and read and make caps for her mother. She was unvaryingly kind and friendly with Binkley & Bing’s press-agent. Since the theatre had closed she had allowed Mr. Vandiver to call in an unofficial rôle. I had often spoken to her of my friend, Spencer Grenville North; and so, as it was early, the first turn of the vaudeville being not yet over, we left to find a telephone.
Miss Ashton would be very glad to see Mr. Vandiver and Mr. North.
We found her fitting a new cap on her mother. I never saw her look more charming.
North made himself disagreeably entertaining. He was a good talker, and had a way with him. Besides, he had two, ten, or thirty millions, I’ve forgotten which. I incautiously admired the mother’s cap, whereupon she brought out her store of a dozen or two, and I took a course in edgings and frills. Even though Annie’s fingers had pinked, or ruched, or hemmed, or whatever you do to ‘em, they palled upon me. And I could hear North drivelling to Annie about his odious Adirondack camp.
Two days after that I saw North in his motor-car with Miss Ashton and her mother. On the next afternoon he dropped in on me.
“Bobby,” said he, “this old burg isn’t such a bad proposition in the summer-time, after all. Since I’ve keen knocking around it looks better to me. There are some first-rate musical comedies and light operas on the roofs and in the outdoor gardens. And if you hunt up the right places and stick to soft drinks, you can keep about as cool here as you can in the country. Hang it! when you come to think of it, there’s nothing much to the country, anyhow. You get tired and sunburned and lonesome, and you have to eat any old thing that the cook dishes up to you.”
“It makes a difference, doesn’t it?” said I.
“It certainly does. Now, I found some whitebait yesterday, at Maurice’s, with a new sauce that beats anything in the trout line I ever tasted.”
“It makes a difference, doesn’t it?” I said.
“Immense. The sauce is the main thing with whitebait.”
“It makes a difference, doesn’t it?” I asked, looking him straight in the eye. He understood.
“Look here, Bob,” he said, “I was going to tell you. I couldn’t help it. I’ll play fair with you, but I’m going in to win. She is the ‘one particular’ for me.”
“All right,” said I. “It’s a fair field. There are no rights for you to encroach upon.”
On Thursday afternoon Miss Ashton invited North and myself to have tea in her apartment. He was devoted, and she was more charming than usual. By avoiding the subject of caps I managed to get a word or two into and out of the talk. Miss Ashton asked me in a make-conversational tone something about the next season’s tour.
“Oh,” said I, “I don’t know about that. I’m not going to be with Binkley & Bing next season.”
“Why, I thought,” said she, “that they were going to put the Number One road company under your charge. I thought you told me so.”
“They were,” said I, “but they won’t.. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to the south shore of Long Island and buy a small cottage I know there on the edge of the bay. And I’ll buy a catboat and a rowboat and a shotgun and a yellow dog. I’ve got money enough to do it. And I’ll smell the salt wind all day when it blows from the sea and the pine odor when it blows from the land. And, of course, I’ll write plays until I have a trunk full of ‘em on hand.
“And the next thing and the biggest thing I’ll do will be to buy that duck-farm next door. Few people understand ducks. I can watch ‘em for hours. They can march better than any company in the National Guard, and they can play ‘follow my leader’ better than the entire Democratic party. Their voices don’t amount to much, but I like to hear ‘em. They wake you up a dozen times a night, but there’s a homely sound about their quacking that is more musical to me than the cry of ‘Fresh strawber-rees!’ under your window in the morning when you want to sleep.
“And,” I went on, enthusiastically, “do you know the value of ducks besides their beauty and intelligence and order and sweetness of voice? Picking their feathers gives you an unfailing and never-ceasing income. On a farm that I know the feathers were sold for $400 in one year. Think of that! And the ones shipped to the market will bring in more money than that. Yes, I am for the ducks and the salt breeze coming over the bay. I think I shall get a Chinaman cook, and with him and the dog and the sunsets for company I shall do well. No more of this dull, baking, senseless, roaring city for me.”
Miss Ashton looked surprised. North laughed.
“I am going to begin one of my plays tonight,” I said, “so I must be going.” And with that I took my departure.
A few days later Miss Ashton telephoned to me, asking me to call at four in the afternoon.
I did.
“You have been very good to me,” she said, hesitatingly, “and I thought I would tell you. I am going to leave the stage.”
“Yes,” said I, “I suppose you will. They usually do when there’s so much money.”
“There is no money,” she said, “or very little. Our money is almost gone.”
“But I am told,” said I, “that he has something like two or ten or thirty millions — I have forgotten which.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “I will not pretend that I do not. I am not going to marry Mr. North.”
“Then why are you leaving the stage?” I asked, severely. “What else can you do to earn a living?”
She came closer to me, and I can see the look in her eyes yet as she spoke.
“I can pick ducks,” she said.
We sold the first year’s feathers for $350.
A POOR RULE
I have always maintained, and asserted time to time, that woman is no mystery; that man can foretell, construe, subdue, comprehend, and interpret her. That she is a mystery has been foisted by herself upon credulous mankind. Whether I am right or wrong we shall see. As “Harper’s Drawer” used t
o say in bygone years: “The following good story is told of Miss ––––, Mr. ––––, Mr. ––––, and Mr. ––––.”
We shall have to omit “Bishop X” and “the Rev. ––––,” for they do not belong.
In those days Paloma was a new town on the line of the Southern Pacific. A reporter would have called it a “mushroom” town; but it was not. Paloma was, first and last, of the toadstool variety.
The train stopped there at noon for the engine to drink and for the passengers both to drink and to dine. There was a new yellow-pine hotel, also a wool warehouse, and perhaps three dozen box residences. The rest was composed of tents, cow ponies, “black-waxy” mud, and mesquite-trees, all bound round by a horizon. Paloma was an about-to-be city. The houses represented faith; the tents hope; the twice-a-day train, by which you might leave, creditably sustained the rôle of charity.
The Parisian Restaurant occupied the muddiest spot in the town while it rained, and the warmest when it shone. It was operated, owned, and perpetrated by a citizen known as Old Man Hinkle, who had come out of Indiana to make his fortune in this land of condensed milk and sorghum.
There was a four-room, unpainted, weather-boarded box house in which the family lived. From the kitchen extended a “shelter” made of poles covered with chaparral brush. Under this was a table and two benches, each twenty feet long, the product of Paloma home carpentry. Here was set forth the roast mutton, the stewed apples, boiled beans, soda-biscuits, puddinorpie, and hot coffee of the Parisian menu.
Ma Hinkle and a subordinate known to the ears as “Betty,” but denied to the eyesight, presided at the range. Pa Hinkle himself, with salamandrous thumbs, served the scalding viands. During rush hours a Mexican youth, who rolled and smoked cigarettes between courses, aided him in waiting on the guests. As is customary at Parisian banquets, I place the sweets at the end of my wordy menu.
Ileen Hinkle!
The spelling is correct, for I have seen her write it. No doubt she had been named by ear; but she so splendidly bore the orthography that Tom Moore himself (had he seen her) would have endorsed the phonography.
Ileen was the daughter of the house, and the first Lady Cashier to invade the territory south of an east-and-west line drawn through Galveston and Del Rio. She sat on a high stool in a rough pine grand-stand — or was it a temple? — under the shelter at the door of the kitchen. There was a barbed-wire protection in front of her, with a little arch under which you passed your money. Heaven knows why the barbed wire; for every man who dined Parisianly there would have died in her service. Her duties were light; each meal was a dollar; you put it under the arch, and she took it.
I set out with the intent to describe Ileen Hinkle to you. Instead, I must refer you to the volume by Edmund Burke entitled: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. It is an exhaustive treatise, dealing first with the primitive conceptions of beauty — roundness and smoothness, I think they are, according to Burke. It is well said. Rotundity is a patent charm; as for smoothness — the more new wrinkles a woman acquires, the smoother she becomes.
Ileen was a strictly vegetable compound, guaranteed under the Pure Ambrosia and Balm-of-Gilead Act of the year of the fall of Adam. She was a fruit-stand blonde — strawberries, peaches, cherries, etc. Her eyes were wide apart, and she possessed the calm that precedes a storm that never comes. But it seems to me that words (at any rate per) are wasted in an effort to describe the beautiful. Like fancy, “It is engendered in the eyes.” There are three kinds of beauties — I was foreordained to be homiletic; I can never stick to a story.
The first is the freckle-faced, snub-nosed girl whom you like. The second is Maud Adams. The third is, or are, the ladies in Bouguereau’s paintings. Ileen Hinkle was the fourth. She was the mayoress of Spotless Town. There were a thousand golden apples coming to her as Helen of the Troy laundries.
The Parisian Restaurant was within a radius. Even from beyond its circumference men rode in to Paloma to win her smiles. They got them. One meal — one smile — one dollar. But, with all her impartiality, Ileen seemed to favor three of her admirers above the rest. According to the rules of politeness, I will mention myself last.
The first was an artificial product known as Bryan Jacks — a name that had obviously met with reverses. Jacks was the outcome of paved cities. He was a small man made of some material resembling flexible sandstone. His hair was the color of a brick Quaker meeting-house; his eyes were twin cranberries; his mouth was like the aperture under a drop-letters-here sign.
He knew every city from Bangor to San Francisco, thence north to Portland, thence S. 45 E. to a given point in Florida. He had mastered every art, trade, game, business, profession, and sport in the world, had been present at, or hurrying on his way to, every headline event that had ever occurred between oceans since he was five years old. You might open the atlas, place your finger at random upon the name of a town, and Jacks would tell you the front names of three prominent citizens before you could close it again. He spoke patronizingly and even disrespectfully of Broadway, Beacon Hill, Michigan, Euclid, and Fifth avenues, and the St. Louis Four Courts. Compared with him as a cosmopolite, the Wandering Jew would have seemed a mere hermit. He had learned everything the world could teach him, and he would tell you about it.
I hate to be reminded of Pollok’s “Course of Time,” and so do you; but every time I saw Jacks I would think of the poet’s description of another poet by the name of G. G. Byron who “Drank early; deeply drank — drank draughts that common millions might have quenched; then died of thirst because there was no more to drink.”
That fitted Jacks, except that, instead of dying, he came to Paloma, which was about the same thing. He was a telegrapher and station-and express-agent at seventy-five dollars a month. Why a young man who knew everything and could do everything was content to serve in such an obscure capacity I never could understand, although he let out a hint once that it was as a personal favor to the president and stockholders of the S. P. Ry. Co.
One more line of description, and I turn Jacks over to you. He wore bright blue clothes, yellow shoes, and a bow tie made of the same cloth as his shirt.
My rival No.2 was Bud Cunningham, whose services had been engaged by a ranch near Paloma to assist in compelling refractory cattle to keep within the bounds of decorum and order. Bud was the only cowboy off the stage that I ever saw who looked like one on it. He wore the sombrero, the chaps, and the handkerchief tied at the back of his neck.
Twice a week Bud rode in from the Val Verde Ranch to sup at the Parisian Restaurant. He rode a many-high-handed Kentucky horse at a tremendously fast lope, which animal he would rein up so suddenly under the big mesquite at the corner of the brush shelter that his hoofs would plough canals yards long in the loam.
Jacks and I were regular boarders at the restaurant, of course.
The front room of the Hinkle House was as neat a little parlor as there was in the black-waxy country. It was all willow rocking-chairs, and home-knit tidies, and albums, and conch shells in a row. And a little upright piano in one corner.
Here Jacks and Bud and I — or sometimes one or two of us, according to our good-luck — used to sit of evenings when the tide of trade was over, and “visit” Miss Hinkle.
Ileen was a girl of ideas. She was destined for higher things (if there can be anything higher) than taking in dollars all day through a barbed-wire wicket. She had read and listened and thought. Her looks would have formed a career for a less ambitious girl; but, rising superior to mere beauty, she must establish something in the nature of a salon — the only one in Paloma.
“Don’t you think that Shakespeare was a great writer?” she would ask, with such a pretty little knit of her arched brows that the late Ignatius Donnelly, himself, had he seen it, could scarcely have saved his Bacon.
Ileen was of the opinion, also, that Boston is more cultured than Chicago; that Rosa Bonheur was one of the greatest of women painter
s; that Westerners are more spontaneous and open-hearted than Easterners; that London must be a very foggy city, and that California must be quite lovely in the springtime. And of many other opinions indicating a keeping up with the world’s best thought.
These, however, were but gleaned from hearsay and evidence: Ileen had theories of her own. One, in particular, she disseminated to us untiringly. Flattery she detested. Frankness and honesty of speech and action, she declared, were the chief mental ornaments of man and woman. If ever she could like any one, it would be for those qualities.
“I’m awfully weary,” she said, one evening, when we three musketeers of the mesquite were in the little parlor, “of having compliments on my looks paid to me. I know I’m not beautiful.”
(Bud Cunningham told me afterward that it was all he could do to keep from calling her a liar when she said that.)
“I’m only a little Middle-Western girl,” went on Ileen, “who just wants to be simple and neat, and tries to help her father make a humble living.”
(Old Man Hinkle was shipping a thousand silver dollars a month, clear profit, to a bank in San Antonio.)
Bud twisted around in his chair and bent the rim of his hat, from which he could never be persuaded to separate. He did not know whether she wanted what she said she wanted or what she knew she deserved. Many a wiser man has hesitated at deciding. Bud decided.
“Why — ah, Miss Ileen, beauty, as you might say, ain’t everything. Not sayin’ that you haven’t your share of good looks, I always admired more than anything else about you the nice, kind way you treat your ma and pa. Any one what’s good to their parents and is a kind of home-body don’t specially need to be too pretty.”
Ileen gave him one of her sweetest smiles. “Thank you, Mr. Cunningham,” she said. “I consider that one of the finest compliments I’ve had in a long time. I’d so much rather hear you say that than to hear you talk about my eyes and hair. I’m glad you believe me when I say I don’t like flattery.”