Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  “‘I’ve had the cousin of it,’ says I. ‘I’ve been on the trot with pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know.’

  “‘The longer word,’ says me friend Nero, ‘is the tachin’ of this new sect of people they call the Christians. ’Tis them that’s raysponsible for me smokin’ be night in holes and corners of the dark.’

  “And then I sets down and takes off a shoe and rubs me foot that is frosted, and the Imperor tells me about it. It seems that since I passed that way before, the Imperor had mandamused the Impress wid a divorce suit, and Misses Poppæa, a cilibrated lady, was ingaged, widout riferences, as housekeeper at the palace. ‘All in one day,’ says the Imperor, ‘she puts up new lace windy-curtains in the palace and joins the anti-tobacco society, and whin I feels the need of a smoke I must be after sneakin’ out to these piles of lumber in the dark.’ So there in the dark me and the Imperor sat, and I told him of me travels. And when they say the Imperor was an incindiary, they lie. ’Twas that night the fire started that burnt the city. ’Tis my opinion that it began from a stump of segar that he threw down among the boxes. And ’tis a lie that he fiddled. He did all he could for six days to stop it, sir.”

  And now I detected a new flavour to Mr. Michob Ader. It had not been myrrh or balm or hyssop that I had smelled. The emanation was the odour of bad whiskey — and, worse still, of low comedy — the sort that small humorists manufacture by clothing the grave and reverend things of legend and history in the vulgar, topical frippery that passes for a certain kind of wit. Michob Ader as an impostor, claiming nineteen hundred years, and playing his part with the decency of respectable lunacy, I could endure; but as a tedious wag, cheapening his egregious story with song-book levity, his importance as an entertainer grew less.

  And then, as if he suspected my thoughts, he suddenly shifted his key.

  “You’ll excuse me, sir,” he whined, “but sometimes I get a little mixed in my head. I am a very old man; and it is hard to remember everything.”

  I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with whom he had walked familiar.

  Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael’s cherubs. You could yet make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.

  “Ye calls them ‘cher-rubs’,” cackled the old man. “Babes, ye fancy they are, with wings. And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye call Cupid — I know where they was found. The great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein’ an editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon s Temple stood?”

  I fancied that it was in — in Persia? Well, I did not know.

  “’Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was. But I saw it, meself. The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon thim walls and pillars. Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum to form the baldachin over the Ark. But the wings of thim sculptures was intindid for horns. And the faces was the faces of goats. Ten thousand goats there was in and about the temple. And your cher-rubs was billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters misconstrued the horns into wings.

  “And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well. I saw him at Keghut and at Zaranj. He was a little man no larger than yerself, with hair the colour of an amber pipe stem. They buried him at Samarkand. I was at the wake, sir. Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin, six feet long, with black whiskers to his face. And I see ‘em throw turnips at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa. All over the world I have tramped, sir, without the body of me findin’ any rest. ’Twas so commanded. I saw Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the fireworks; and I was at the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin’ of Joan of Arc. And everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions and plagues and fires. ’Twas so commanded. Ye have heard of the Wandering Jew. ’Tis all so, except that divil a bit am I a Jew. But history lies, as I have told ye. Are ye quite sure, sir, that ye haven’t a drop of whiskey convenient? Ye well know that I have many miles of walking before me.”

  “I have none,” said I, “and, if you please, I am about to leave for my supper.”

  I pushed my chair back creakingly. This ancient landlubber was becoming as great an affliction as any cross-bowed mariner. He shook a musty effluvium from his piebald clothes, overturned my inkstand, and went on with his insufferable nonsense.

  “I wouldn’t mind it so much,” he complained, “if it wasn’t for the work I must do on Good Fridays. Ye know about Pontius Pilate, sir, of course. His body, whin he killed himself, was pitched into a lake on the Alps mountains. Now, listen to the job that ’tis mine to perform on the night of ivery Good Friday. The ould divil goes down in the pool and drags up Pontius, and the water is bilin’ and spewin’ like a wash pot. And the ould divil sets the body on top of a throne on the rocks, and thin comes me share of the job. Oh, sir, ye would pity me thin — ye would pray for the poor Wandering Jew that niver was a Jew if ye could see the horror of the thing that I must do. ’Tis I that must fetch a bowl of water and kneel down before it till it washes its hands. I declare to ye that Pontius Pilate, a man dead two hundred years, dragged up with the lake slime coverin’ him and fishes wrigglin’ inside of him widout eyes, and in the discomposition of the body, sits there, sir, and washes his hands in the bowl I hold for him on Good Fridays. ’Twas so commanded.”

  Clearly, the matter had progressed far beyond the scope of the Bugle’s local column. There might have been employment here for the alienist or for those who circulate the pledge; but I had had enough of it. I got up, and repeated that I must go.

  At this he seized my coat, grovelled upon my desk, and burst again into distressful weeping. Whatever it was about, I said to myself that his grief was genuine.

  “Come now, Mr. Ader,” I said, soothingly; “what is the matter?”

  The answer came brokenly through his racking sobs:

  “Because I would not … let the poor Christ … rest … upon the step.”

  His hallucination seemed beyond all reasonable answer; yet the effect of it upon him scarcely merited disrespect. But I knew nothing that might assuage it; and I told him once more that both of us should be leaving the office at once.

  Obedient at last, he raised himself from my dishevelled desk, and permitted me to half lift him to the floor. The gale of his grief had blown away his words; his freshet of tears had soaked away the crust of his grief. Reminiscence died in him — at least, the coherent part of it.

  “’Twas me that did it,” he muttered, as I led him toward the door— “me, the shoemaker of Jerusalem.”

  I got him to the sidewalk, and in the augmented light I saw that his face was seared and lined and warped by a sadness almost incredibly the product of a single lifetime.

  And then high up in the firmamental darkness we heard the clamant cries of some great, passing birds. My Wandering Jew lifted his hand, with side-tilted head.

  “The Seven Whistlers!” he said, as one introduces well-known friends.

  “Wild geese,” said I; “but I confess that their number is beyond me.”

  “They follow me everywhere,” he said. “’Twas so commanded. What ye hear is the souls of the seven Jews that helped with the Crucifixion. Sometimes they’re plovers and sometimes geese, but ye’ll find them always flyin’ where I go.”

  I stood, uncertain how to take my leave. I looked down the street, shuffled my feet, looked back again — and felt my hair rise. The old man had disappeared.

  And then my capillaries relaxed, for I dimly saw him footing it away through the darkness. But he walked so swiftly and silently and contrary to the gait promised by his age that my composure was not all restored, though I knew not why.

  That night I was foolish enough to take down some dust-covered volumes from my modest shelves. I searched “Hermippus Redivvus” and “Salathiel” and the “Pepys Collection” in vain. And then in a book called “The Citizen of the World,” and
in one two centuries old, I came upon what I desired. Michob Ader had indeed come to Paris in the year 1643, and related to the Turkish Spy an extraordinary story. He claimed to be the Wandering Jew, and that —

  But here I fell asleep, for my editorial duties had not been light that day.

  Judge Hoover was the Bugle’s candidate for congress. Having to confer with him, I sought his home early the next morning; and we walked together down town through a little street with which I was unfamiliar.

  “Did you ever hear of Michob Ader?” I asked him, smiling.

  “Why, yes,” said the judge. “And that reminds me of my shoes he has for mending. Here is his shop now.”

  Judge Hoover stepped into a dingy, small shop. I looked up at the sign, and saw “Mike O’Bader, Boot and Shoe Maker,” on it. Some wild geese passed above, honking clearly. I scratched my ear and frowned, and then trailed into the shop.

  There sat my Wandering Jew on his shoemaker’s bench, trimming a half-sole. He was drabbled with dew, grass-stained, unkempt, and miserable; and on his face was still the unexplained wretchedness, the problematic sorrow, the esoteric woe, that had been written there by nothing less, it seemed, than the stylus of the centuries.

  Judge Hoover inquired kindly concerning his shoes. The old shoemaker looked up, and spoke sanely enough. He had been ill, he said, for a few days. The next day the shoes would be ready. He looked at me, and I could see that I had no place in his memory. So out we went, and on our way.

  “Old Mike,” remarked the candidate, “has been on one of his sprees. He gets crazy drunk regularly once a month. But he’s a good shoemaker.”

  “What is his history?” I inquired.

  “Whiskey,” epitomized Judge Hoover. “That explains him.”

  I was silent, but I did not accept the explanation. And so, when I had the chance, I asked old man Sellers, who browsed daily on my exchanges.

  “Mike O’Bader,” said he, “was makin’ shoes in Montopolis when I come here goin’ on fifteen year ago. I guess whiskey’s his trouble. Once a month he gets off the track, and stays so a week. He’s got a rigmarole somethin’ about his bein’ a Jew pedler that he tells ev’rybody. Nobody won’t listen to him any more. When he’s sober he ain’t sich a fool — he’s got a sight of books in the back room of his shop that he reads. I guess you can lay all his trouble to whiskey.”

  But again I would not. Not yet was my Wandering Jew rightly construed for me. I trust that women may not be allowed a title to all the curiosity in the world. So when Montopolis’s oldest inhabitant (some ninety score years younger than Michob Ader) dropped in to acquire promulgation in print, I siphoned his perpetual trickle of reminiscence in the direction of the uninterpreted maker of shoes.

  Uncle Abner was the Complete History of Montopolis, bound in butternut.

  “O’Bader,” he quavered, “come here in ‘69. He was the first shoemaker in the place. Folks generally considers him crazy at times now. But he don’t harm nobody. I s’pose drinkin’ upset his mind — yes, drinkin’ very likely done it. It’s a powerful bad thing, drinkin’. I’m an old, old man, sir, and I never see no good in drinkin’.”

  I felt disappointment. I was willing to admit drink in the case of my shoemaker, but I preferred it as a recourse instead of a cause. Why had he pitched upon his perpetual, strange note of the Wandering Jew? Why his unutterable grief during his aberration? I could not yet accept whiskey as an explanation.

  “Did Mike O’Bader ever have a great loss or trouble of any kind?” I asked.

  “Lemme see! About thirty year ago there was somethin’ of the kind, I recollect. Montopolis, sir, in them days used to be a mighty strict place.

  “Well, Mike O’Bader had a daughter then — a right pretty girl. She was too gay a sort for Montopolis, so one day she slips off to another town and runs away with a circus. It was two years before she comes back, all fixed up in fine clothes and rings and jewellery, to see Mike. He wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with her, so she stays around town awhile, anyway. I reckon the men folks wouldn’t have raised no objections, but the women egged ‘em on to order her to leave town. But she had plenty of spunk, and told ‘em to mind their own business.

  “So one night they decided to run her away. A crowd of men and women drove her out of her house, and chased her with sticks and stones. She run to her father’s door, callin’ for help. Mike opens it, and when he sees who it is he hits her with his fist and knocks her down and shuts the door.

  “And then the crowd kept on chunkin’ her till she run clear out of town. And the next day they finds her drowned dead in Hunter’s mill pond. I mind it all now. That was thirty year ago.”

  I leaned back in my non-rotary revolving chair and nodded gently, like a mandarin, at my paste-pot.

  “When old Mike has a spell,” went on Uncle Abner, tepidly garrulous, “he thinks he’s the Wanderin’ Jew.”

  “He is,” said I, nodding away.

  And Uncle Abner cackled insinuatingly at the editor’s remark, for he was expecting at least a “stickful” in the “Personal Notes” of the Bugle.

  THE DUPLICITY OF HARGRAVES

  When Major Pendleton Talbot, of Mobile, sir, and his daughter, Miss Lydia Talbot, came to Washington to reside, they selected for a boarding place a house that stood fifty yards back from one of the quietest avenues. It was an old-fashioned brick building, with a portico upheld by tall white pillars. The yard was shaded by stately locusts and elms, and a catalpa tree in season rained its pink and white blossoms upon the grass. Rows of high box bushes lined the fence and walks. It was the Southern style and aspect of the place that pleased the eyes of the Talbots.

  In this pleasant, private boarding house they engaged rooms, including a study for Major Talbot, who was adding the finishing chapters to his book, “Anecdotes and Reminiscences of the Alabama Army, Bench, and Bar.”

  Major Talbot was of the old, old South. The present day had little interest or excellence in his eyes. His mind lived in that period before the Civil War, when the Talbots owned thousands of acres of fine cotton land and the slaves to till them; when the family mansion was the scene of princely hospitality, and drew its guests from the aristocracy of the South. Out of that period he had brought all its old pride and scruples of honour, an antiquated and punctilious politeness, and (you would think) its wardrobe.

  Such clothes were surely never made within fifty years. The major was tall, but whenever he made that wonderful, archaic genuflexion he called a bow, the corners of his frock coat swept the floor. That garment was a surprise even to Washington, which has long ago ceased to shy at the frocks and broadbrimmed hats of Southern congressmen. One of the boarders christened it a “Father Hubbard,” and it certainly was high in the waist and full in the skirt.

  But the major, with all his queer clothes, his immense area of plaited, ravelling shirt bosom, and the little black string tie with the bow always slipping on one side, both was smiled at and liked in Mrs. Vardeman’ s select boarding house. Some of the young department clerks would often “string him,” as they called it, getting him started upon the subject dearest to him — the traditions and history of his beloved Southland. During his talks he would quote freely from the “Anecdotes and Reminiscences.” But they were very careful not to let him see their designs, for in spite of his sixty-eight years, he could make the boldest of them uncomfortable under the steady regard of his piercing gray eyes.

  Miss Lydia was a plump, little old maid of thirty-five, with smoothly drawn, tightly twisted hair that made her look still older. Old fashioned, too, she was; but ante-bellum glory did not radiate from her as it did from the major. She possessed a thrifty common sense; and it was she who handled the finances of the family, and met all comers when there were bills to pay. The major regarded board bills and wash bills as contemptible nuisances. They kept coming in so persistently and so often. Why, the major wanted to know, could they not be filed and paid in a lump sum at some convenient period — say when the “
Anecdotes and Reminiscences” had been published and paid for? Miss Lydia would calmly go on with her sewing and say, “We’ll pay as we go as long as the money lasts, and then perhaps they’ll have to lump it.”

  Most of Mrs. Vardeman’s boarders were away during the day, being nearly all department clerks and business men; but there was one of them who was about the house a great deal from morning to night. This was a young man named Henry Hopkins Hargraves — every one in the house addressed him by his full name — who was engaged at one of the popular vaudeville theatres. Vaudeville has risen to such a respectable plane in the last few years, and Mr. Hargraves was such a modest and well-mannered person, that Mrs. Vardeman could find no objection to enrolling him upon her list of boarders.

  At the theatre Hargraves was known as an all-round dialect comedian, having a large repertoire of German, Irish, Swede, and black-face specialties. But Mr. Hargraves was ambitious, and often spoke of his great desire to succeed in legitimate comedy.

  This young man appeared to conceive a strong fancy for Major Talbot. Whenever that gentleman would begin his Southern reminiscences, or repeat some of the liveliest of the anecdotes, Hargraves could always be found, the most attentive among his listeners.

  For a time the major showed an inclination to discourage the advances of the “play actor,” as he privately termed him; but soon the young man’s agreeable manner and indubitable appreciation of the old gentleman’s stories completely won him over.

  It was not long before the two were like old chums. The major set apart each afternoon to read to him the manuscript of his book. During the anecdotes Hargraves never failed to laugh at exactly the right point. The major was moved to declare to Miss Lydia one day that young Hargraves possessed remarkable perception and a gratifying respect for the old regime. And when it came to talking of those old days — if Major Talbot liked to talk, Mr. Hargraves was entranced to listen.

  Like almost all old people who talk of the past, the major loved to linger over details. In describing the splendid, almost royal, days of the old planters, he would hesitate until he had recalled the name of the Negro who held his horse, or the exact date of certain minor happenings, or the number of bales of cotton raised in such a year; but Hargraves never grew impatient or lost interest. On the contrary, he would advance questions on a variety of subjects connected with the life of that time, and he never failed to extract ready replies.