by O. Henry
They came, at length, upon the levee, and sat upon a great, prostrate beam. The air was pungent with the dust of commerce. The great river slipped yellowly past. Across it Algiers lay, a longitudinous black bulk against a vibrant electric haze sprinkled with exact stars.
The girl was young and of the piquant order. A certain bright melancholy pervaded her; she possessed an untarnished, pale prettiness doomed to please. Her voice, when she spoke, dwarfed her theme. It was the voice capable of investing little subjects with a large interest. She sat at ease, bestowing her skirts with the little womanly touch, serene as if the begrimed pier were a summer garden. Lorison poked the rotting boards with his cane.
He began by telling her that he was in love with some one to whom he durst not speak of it. “And why not?” she asked, accepting swiftly his fatuous presentation of a third person of straw. “My place in the world,” he answered, “is none to ask a woman to share. I am an outcast from honest people; I am wrongly accused of one crime, and am, I believe, guilty of another.”
Thence he plunged into the story of his abdication from society. The story, pruned of his moral philosophy, deserves no more than the slightest touch. It is no new tale, that of the gambler’s declension. During one night’s sitting he lost, and then had imperilled a certain amount of his employer’s money, which, by accident, he carried with him. He continued to lose, to the last wager, and then began to gain, leaving the game winner to a somewhat formidable sum. The same night his employer’s safe was robbed. A search was had; the winnings of Lorison were found in his room, their total forming an accusative nearness to the sum purloined. He was taken, tried and, through incomplete evidence, released, smutched with the sinister devoirs of a disagreeing jury.
“It is not in the unjust accusation,” he said to the girl, “that my burden lies, but in the knowledge that from the moment I staked the first dollar of the firm’s money I was a criminal — no matter whether I lost or won. You see why it is impossible for me to speak of love to her.”
“It is a sad thing,” said Norah, after a little pause, “to think what very good people there are in the world.”
“Good?” said Lorison.
“I was thinking of this superior person whom you say you love. She must be a very poor sort of creature.”
“I do not understand.”
“Nearly,” she continued, “as poor a sort of creature as yourself.”
“You do not understand,” said Lorison, removing his hat and sweeping back his fine, light hair. “Suppose she loved me in return, and were willing to marry me. Think, if you can, what would follow. Never a day would pass but she would be reminded of her sacrifice. I would read a condescension in her smile, a pity even in her affection, that would madden me. No. The thing would stand between us forever. Only equals should mate. I could never ask her to come down upon my lower plane.”
An arc light faintly shone upon Lorison’s face. An illumination from within also pervaded it. The girl saw the rapt, ascetic look; it was the face either of Sir Galahad or Sir Fool.
“Quite starlike,” she said, “is this unapproachable angel. Really too high to be grasped.”
“By me, yes.”
She faced him suddenly. “My dear friend, would you prefer your star fallen?” Lorison made a wide gesture.
“You push me to the bald fact,” he declared; “you are not in sympathy with my argument. But I will answer you so. If I could reach my particular star, to drag it down, I would not do it; but if it were fallen, I would pick it up, and thank Heaven for the privilege.”
They were silent for some minutes. Norah shivered, and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. Lorison uttered a remorseful exclamation.
“I’m not cold,” she said. “I was just thinking. I ought to tell you something. You have selected a strange confidante. But you cannot expect a chance acquaintance, picked up in a doubtful restaurant, to be an angel.”
“Norah!” cried Lorison.
“Let me go on. You have told me about yourself. We have been such good friends. I must tell you now what I never wanted you to know. I am — worse than you are. I was on the stage . . . I sang in the chorus . . . I was pretty bad, I guess . . . I stole diamonds from the prima donna . . . they arrested me . . . I gave most of them up, and they let me go . . . I drank wine every night . . . a great deal . . . I was very wicked, but— “
Lorison knelt quickly by her side and took her hands.
“Dear Norah!” he said, exultantly. “It is you, it is you I love! You never guessed it, did you? ’Tis you I meant all the time. Now I can speak. Let me make you forget the past. We have both suffered; let us shut out the world, and live for each other. Norah, do you hear me say I love you?”
“In spite of— “
“Rather say because of it. You have come out of your past noble and good. Your heart is an angel’s. Give it to me.”
“A little while ago you feared the future too much to even speak.”
“But for you; not for myself. Can you love me?”
She cast herself, wildly sobbing, upon his breast.
“Better than life — than truth itself — than everything.”
“And my own past,” said Lorison, with a note of solicitude— “can you forgive and— “
“I answered you that,” she whispered, “when I told you I loved you.” She leaned away, and looked thoughtfully at him. “If I had not told you about myself, would you have — would you— “
“No,” he interrupted; “I would never have let you know I loved you. I would never have asked you this — Norah, will you be my wife?”
She wept again.
“Oh, believe me; I am good now — I am no longer wicked! I will be the best wife in the world. Don’t think I am — bad any more. If you do I shall die, I shall die!”
While he was consoling, her, she brightened up, eager and impetuous. “Will you marry me to-night?” she said. “Will you prove it that way. I have a reason for wishing it to be to-night. Will you?”
Of one of two things was this exceeding frankness the outcome: either of importunate brazenness or of utter innocence. The lover’s perspective contained only the one.
“The sooner,” said Lorison, “the happier I shall be.”
“What is there to do?” she asked. “What do you have to get? Come! You should know.”
Her energy stirred the dreamer to action.
“A city directory first,” he cried, gayly, “to find where the man lives who gives licenses to happiness. We will go together and rout him out. Cabs, cars, policemen, telephones and ministers shall aid us.”
“Father Rogan shall marry us,” said the girl, with ardour. “I will take you to him.”
An hour later the two stood at the open doorway of an immense, gloomy brick building in a narrow and lonely street. The license was tight in Norah’s hand.
“Wait here a moment,” she said, “till I find Father Rogan.”
She plunged into the black hallway, and the lover was left standing, as it were, on one leg, outside. His impatience was not greatly taxed. Gazing curiously into what seemed the hallway to Erebus, he was presently reassured by a stream of light that bisected the darkness, far down the passage. Then he heard her call, and fluttered lampward, like the moth. She beckoned him through a doorway into the room whence emanated the light. The room was bare of nearly everything except books, which had subjugated all its space. Here and there little spots of territory had been reconquered. An elderly, bald man, with a superlatively calm, remote eye, stood by a table with a book in his hand, his finger still marking a page. His dress was sombre and appertained to a religious order. His eye denoted an acquaintance with the perspective.
“Father Rogan,” said Norah, “this is he.”
“The two of ye,” said Father Rogan, “want to get married?”
They did not deny it. He married them. The ceremony was quickly done. One who could have witnessed it, and felt its scope, might have trembled at
the terrible inadequacy of it to rise to the dignity of its endless chain of results.
Afterward the priest spake briefly, as if by rote, of certain other civil and legal addenda that either might or should, at a later time, cap the ceremony. Lorison tendered a fee, which was declined, and before the door closed after the departing couple Father Rogan’s book popped open again where his finger marked it.
In the dark hall Norah whirled and clung to her companion, tearful.
“Will you never, never be sorry?”
At last she was reassured.
At the first light they reached upon the street, she asked the time, just as she had each night. Lorison looked at his watch. Half-past eight.
Lorison thought it was from habit that she guided their steps toward the corner where they always parted. But, arrived there, she hesitated, and then released his arm. A drug store stood on the corner; its bright, soft light shone upon them.
“Please leave me here as usual to-night,” said Norah, sweetly. “I must — I would rather you would. You will not object? At six to-morrow evening I will meet you at Antonio’s. I want to sit with you there once more. And then — I will go where you say.” She gave him a bewildering, bright smile, and walked swiftly away.
Surely it needed all the strength of her charm to carry off this astounding behaviour. It was no discredit to Lorison’s strength of mind that his head began to whirl. Pocketing his hands, he rambled vacuously over to the druggist’s windows, and began assiduously to spell over the names of the patent medicines therein displayed.
As soon as be had recovered his wits, he proceeded along the street in an aimless fashion. After drifting for two or three squares, he flowed into a somewhat more pretentious thoroughfare, a way much frequented by him in his solitary ramblings. For here was a row of shops devoted to traffic in goods of the widest range of choice — handiworks of art, skill and fancy, products of nature and labour from every zone.
Here, for a time, he loitered among the conspicuous windows, where was set, emphasized by congested floods of light, the cunningest spoil of the interiors. There were few passers, and of this Lorison was glad. He was not of the world. For a long time he had touched his fellow man only at the gear of a levelled cog-wheel — at right angles, and upon a different axis. He had dropped into a distinctly new orbit. The stroke of ill fortune had acted upon him, in effect, as a blow delivered upon the apex of a certain ingenious toy, the musical top, which, when thus buffeted while spinning, gives forth, with scarcely retarded motion, a complete change of key and chord.
Strolling along the pacific avenue, he experienced singular, supernatural calm, accompanied by an unusual a activity of brain. Reflecting upon recent affairs, he assured himself of his happiness in having won for a bride the one he had so greatly desired, yet he wondered mildly at his dearth of active emotion. Her strange behaviour in abandoning him without valid excuse on his bridal eve aroused in him only a vague and curious speculation. Again, he found himself contemplating, with complaisant serenity, the incidents of her somewhat lively career. His perspective seemed to have been queerly shifted.
As he stood before a window near a corner, his ears were assailed by a waxing clamour and commotion. He stood close to the window to allow passage to the cause of the hubbub — a procession of human beings, which rounded the corner and headed in his direction. He perceived a salient hue of blue and a glitter of brass about a central figure of dazzling white and silver, and a ragged wake of black, bobbing figures.
Two ponderous policemen were conducting between them a woman dressed as if for the stage, in a short, white, satiny skirt reaching to the knees, pink stockings, and a sort of sleeveless bodice bright with relucent, armour-like scales. Upon her curly, light hair was perched, at a rollicking angle, a shining tin helmet. The costume was to be instantly recognized as one of those amazing conceptions to which competition has harried the inventors of the spectacular ballet. One of the officers bore a long cloak upon his arm, which, doubtless, had been intended to veil the I candid attractions of their effulgent prisoner, but, for some reason, it had not been called into use, to the vociferous delight of the tail of the procession.
Compelled by a sudden and vigorous movement of the woman, the parade halted before the window by which Lorison stood. He saw that she was young, and, at the first glance, was deceived by a sophistical prettiness of her face, which waned before a more judicious scrutiny. Her look was bold and reckless, and upon her countenance, where yet the contours of youth survived, were the finger-marks of old age’s credentialed courier, Late Hours.
The young woman fixed her unshrinking gaze upon Lorison, and called to him in the voice of the wronged heroine in straits:
“Say! You look like a good fellow; come and put up the bail, won’t you? I’ve done nothing to get pinched for. It’s all a mistake. See how they’re treating me! You won’t be sorry, if you’ll help me out of this. Think of your sister or your girl being dragged along the streets this way! I say, come along now, like a good fellow.”
It may be that Lorison, in spite of the unconvincing bathos of this appeal, showed a sympathetic face, for one of the officers left the woman’s side, and went over to him.
“It’s all right, Sir,” he said, in a husky, confidential tone; “she’s the right party. We took her after the first act at the Green Light Theatre, on a wire from the chief of police of Chicago. It’s only a square or two to the station. Her rig’s pretty bad, but she refused to change clothes — or, rather,” added the officer, with a smile, “to put on some. I thought I’d explain matters to you so you wouldn’t think she was being imposed upon.”
“What is the charge?” asked Lorison.
“Grand larceny. Diamonds. Her husband is a jeweller in Chicago. She cleaned his show case of the sparklers, and skipped with a comic-opera troupe.”
The policeman, perceiving that the interest of the entire group of spectators was centred upon himself and Lorison — their conference being regarded as a possible new complication — was fain to prolong the situation — which reflected his own importance — by a little afterpiece of philosophical comment.
“A gentleman like you, Sir,” he went on affably, “would never notice it, but it comes in my line to observe what an immense amount of trouble is made by that combination — I mean the stage, diamonds and light-headed women who aren’t satisfied with good homes. I tell you, Sir, a man these days and nights wants to know what his women folks are up to.”
The policeman smiled a good night, and returned to the side of his charge, who had been intently watching Lorison’s face during the conversation, no doubt for some indication of his intention to render succour. Now, at the failure of the sign, and at the movement made to continue the ignominious progress, she abandoned hope, and addressed him thus, pointedly:
“You damn chalk-faced quitter! You was thinking of giving me a hand, but you let the cop talk you out of it the first word. You’re a dandy to tie to. Say, if you ever get a girl, she’ll have a picnic. Won’t she work you to the queen’s taste! Oh, my!” She concluded with a taunting, shrill laugh that rasped Lorison like a saw. The policemen urged her forward; the delighted train of gaping followers closed up the rear; and the captive Amazon, accepting her fate, extended the scope of her maledictions so that none in hearing might seem to be slighted.
Then there came upon Lorison an overwhelming revulsion of his perspective. It may be that he had been ripe for it, that the abnormal condition of mind in which he had for so long existed was already about to revert to its balance; however, it is certain that the events of the last few minutes had furnished the channel, if not the impetus, for the change.
The initial determining influence had been so small a thing as the fact and manner of his having been approached by the officer. That agent had, by the style of his accost, restored the loiterer to his former place in society. In an instant he had been transformed from a somewhat rancid prowler along the fishy side streets of gentility into an hone
st gentleman, with whom even so lordly a guardian of the peace might agreeably exchange the compliments.
This, then, first broke the spell, and set thrilling in him a resurrected longing for the fellowship of his kind, and the rewards of the virtuous. To what end, he vehemently asked himself, was this fanciful self-accusation, this empty renunciation, this moral squeamishness through which he had been led to abandon what was his heritage in life, and not beyond his deserts? Technically, he was uncondemned; his sole guilty spot was in thought rather than deed, and cognizance of it unshared by others. For what good, moral or sentimental, did he slink, retreating like the hedgehog from his own shadow, to and fro in this musty Bohemia that lacked even the picturesque?
But the thing that struck home and set him raging was the part played by the Amazonian prisoner. To the counterpart of that astounding belligerent — identical at least, in the way of experience — to one, by her own confession, thus far fallen, had he, not three hours since, been united in marriage. How desirable and natural it had seemed to him then, and how monstrous it seemed now! How the words of diamond thief number two yet burned in his ears: “If you ever get a girl, she’ll have a picnic.” What did that mean but that women instinctively knew him for one they could hoodwink? Still again, there reverberated the policeman’s sapient contribution to his agony: “A man these days and nights wants to know what his women folks are up to.” Oh, yes, he had been a fool; he had looked at things from the wrong standpoint.
But the wildest note in all the clamour was struck by pain’s forefinger, jealousy. Now, at least, he felt that keenest sting — a mounting love unworthily bestowed. Whatever she might be, he loved her; he bore in his own breast his doom. A grating, comic flavour to his predicament struck him suddenly, and he laughed creakingly as he swung down the echoing pavement. An impetuous desire to act, to battle with his fate, seized him. He stopped upon his heel, and smote his palms together triumphantly. His wife was — where? But there was a tangible link; an outlet more or less navigable, through which his derelict ship of matrimony might yet be safely towed — the priest!