by O. Henry
When I showed him the emblem of my paper he sprang out of a high window into a hothouse filled with rare flowers.
This somewhat surprised me.
I examined myself. My hat was on straight, and there was nothing at all alarming about my appearance.
I went into the President’s private office.
He was alone. He was conversing with Tom Ochiltree. Mr. Ochiltree saw my little sphere, and with a loud scream rushed out of the room.
President Cleveland slowly turned his eyes upon me.
He also saw what I had in my hand, and said in a husky voice:
“Wait a moment, please.”
He searched his coat pocket, and presently found a piece of paper on which some words were written.
He laid this on his desk and rose to his feet, raised one hand above him, and said in deep tones:
“I die for Free Trade, my country, and — and — all that sort of thing.”
I saw him jerk a string, and a camera snapped on another table, taking our picture as we stood.
“Don’t die in the House, Mr. President,” I said. “Go over into the Senate Chamber.”
“Peace, murderer!” he said. “Let your bomb do its deadly work.”
“I’m no bum,” I said, with spirit. “I represent The Rolling Stone, of Austin, Texas, and this I hold in my hand does the same thing, but, it seems, unsuccessfully.”
The President sank back in his chair greatly relieved.
“I thought you were a dynamiter,” he said. “Let me see; Texas! Texas!” He walked to a large wall map of the United States, and placing his finger thereon at about the location of Idaho, ran it down in a zigzag, doubtful way until he reached Texas.
“Oh, yes, here it is. I have so many things on my mind, I sometimes forget what I should know well.
“Let’s see; Texas? Oh, yes, that’s the State where Ida Wells and a lot of colored people lynched a socialist named Hogg for raising a riot at a camp-meeting. So you are from Texas. I know a man from Texas named Dave Culberson. How is Dave and his family? Has Dave got any children?”
“He has a boy in Austin,” I said, “working around the Capitol.”
“Who is President of Texas now?”
“I don’t exactly— “
“Oh, excuse me. I forgot again. I thought I heard some talk of its having been made a Republic again.”
“Now, Mr. Cleveland,” I said, “you answer some of my questions.”
A curious film came over the President’s eyes. He sat stiffly in his chair like an automaton.
“Proceed,” he said.
“What do you think of the political future of this country?”
“I will state that political exigencies demand emergentistical promptitude, and while the United States is indissoluble in conception and invisible in intent, treason and internecine disagreement have ruptured the consanguinity of patriotism, and— “
“One moment, Mr. President,” I interrupted; “would you mind changing that cylinder? I could have gotten all that from the American Press Association if I had wanted plate matter. Do you wear flannels? What is your favorite poet, brand of catsup, bird, flower, and what are you going to do when you are out of a job?”
“Young man,” said Mr. Cleveland, sternly, “you are going a little too far. My private affairs do not concern the public.”
I begged his pardon, and he recovered his good humor in a moment.
“You Texans have a great representative in Senator Mills,” he said. “I think the greatest two speeches I ever heard were his address before the Senate advocating the removal of the tariff on salt and increasing it on chloride of sodium.”
“Tom Ochiltree is also from our State,” I said.
“Oh, no, he isn’t. You must be mistaken,” replied Mr. Cleveland, “for he says he is. I really must go down to Texas some time, and see the State. I want to go up into the Panhandle and see if it is really shaped like it is on the map.”
“Well, I must be going,” said I.
“When you get back to Texas,” said the President, rising, “you must write to me. Your visit has awakened in me quite an interest in your State which I fear I have not given the attention it deserves. There are many historical and otherwise interesting places that you have revived in my recollection — the Alamo, where Davy Jones fell; Goliad, Sam Houston’s surrender to Montezuma, the petrified boom found near Austin, five-cent cotton and the Siamese Democratic platform born in Dallas. I should so much like to see the gals in Galveston, and go to the wake in Waco. I am glad I met you. Turn to the left as you enter the hall and keep straight on out.” I made a low bow to signify that the interview was at an end, and withdrew immediately. I had no difficulty in leaving the building as soon as I was outside.
I hurried downtown in order to obtain refreshments at some place where viands had been placed upon the free list.
I shall not describe my journey back to Austin. I lost my return ticket somewhere in the White House, and was forced to return home in a manner not especially beneficial to my shoes. Everybody was well in Washington when I left, and all send their love.
The editor of The Rolling Stone collected old, quaint cuts of which
this page from “The Plunkville Patriot” shows several specimens.
AN UNFINISHED CHRISTMAS STORY
[Probably begun several years before his death. Published, as it here appears, in Short Stories, January, 1911.]
Now, a Christmas story should be one. For a good many years the ingenious writers have been putting forth tales for the holiday numbers that employed every subtle, evasive, indirect and strategic scheme they could invent to disguise the Christmas flavor. So far has this new practice been carried that nowadays when you read a story in a holiday magazine the only way you can tell it is a Christmas story is to look at the footnote which reads: [“The incidents in the above story happened on December 25th. — Ed.”]
There is progress in this; but it is all very sad. There are just as many real Christmas stories as ever, if we would only dig ‘em up. Me, I am for the Scrooge and Marley Christmas story, and the Annie and Willie’s prayer poem, and the long lost son coming home on the stroke of twelve to the poorly thatched cottage with his arms full of talking dolls and popcorn balls and — Zip! you hear the second mortgage on the cottage go flying off it into the deep snow.
So, this is to warn you that there is no subterfuge about this story — and you might come upon stockings hung to the mantel and plum puddings and hark! the chimes! and wealthy misers loosening up and handing over penny whistles to lame newsboys if you read further.
Once I knocked at a door (I have so many things to tell you I keep on losing sight of the story). It was the front door of a furnished room house in West ‘Teenth Street. I was looking for a young illustrator named Paley originally and irrevocably from Terre Haute. Paley doesn’t enter even into the first serial rights of this Christmas story; I mention him simply in explaining why I came to knock at the door — some people have so much curiosity.
The door was opened by the landlady. I had seen hundreds like her. And I had smelled before that cold, dank, furnished draught of air that hurried by her to escape immurement in the furnished house.
She was stout, and her face and lands were as white as though she had been drowned in a barrel of vinegar. One hand held together at her throat a buttonless flannel dressing sacque whose lines had been cut by no tape or butterick known to mortal woman. Beneath this a too-long, flowered, black sateen skirt was draped about her, reaching the floor in stiff wrinkles and folds.
The rest of her was yellow. Her hair, in some bygone age, had been dipped in the fountain of folly presided over by the merry nymph Hydrogen; but now, except at the roots, it had returned to its natural grim and grizzled white.
Her eyes and teeth and finger nails were yellow. Her chops hung low and shook when she moved. The look on her face was exactly that smileless look of fatal melancholy that you may have seen on the countenance of
a hound left sitting on the doorstep of a deserted cabin.
I inquired for Paley. After a long look of cold suspicion the landlady spoke, and her voice matched the dingy roughness of her flannel sacque.
Paley? Was I sure that was the name? And wasn’t it, likely, Mr. Sanderson I meant, in the third floor rear? No; it was Paley I wanted. Again that frozen, shrewd, steady study of my soul from her pale-yellow, unwinking eyes, trying to penetrate my mask of deception and rout out my true motives from my lying lips. There was a Mr. Tompkins in the front hall bedroom two flights up. Perhaps it was he I was seeking. He worked of nights; he never came in till seven in the morning. Or if it was really Mr. Tucker (thinly disguised as Paley) that I was hunting I would have to call between five and —
But no; I held firmly to Paley. There was no such name among her lodgers. Click! the door closed swiftly in my face; and I heard through the panels the clanking of chains and bolts.
I went down the steps and stopped to consider. The number of this house was 43. I was sure Paley had said 43 — or perhaps it was 45 or 47 — I decided to try 47, the second house farther along.
I rang the bell. The door opened; and there stood the same woman. I wasn’t confronted by just a resemblance — it was the same woman holding together the same old sacque at her throat and looking at me with the same yellow eyes as if she had never seen me before on earth. I saw on the knuckle of her second finger the same red-and-black spot made, probably, by a recent burn against a hot stove.
I stood speechless and gaping while one with moderate haste might have told fifty. I couldn’t have spoken Paley’s name even if I had remembered it. I did the only thing that a brave man who believes there are mysterious forces in nature that we do not yet fully comprehend could have done in the circumstances. I backed down the steps to the sidewalk and then hurried away frontward, fully understanding how incidents like that must bother the psychical research people and the census takers.
Of course I heard an explanation of it afterward, as we always do about inexplicable things.
The landlady was Mrs. Kannon; and she leased three adjoining houses, which she made into one by cutting arched doorways through the walls. She sat in the middle house and answered the three bells.
I wonder why I have maundered so slowly through the prologue. I have it! it was simply to say to you, in the form of introduction rife through the Middle West: “Shake hands with Mrs. Kannon.”
For, it was in her triple house that the Christmas story happened; and it was there where I picked up the incontrovertible facts from the gossip of many roomers and met Stickney — and saw the necktie.
Christmas came that year on Thursday, and snow came with it.
Stickney (Harry Clarence Fowler Stickney to whomsoever his full baptismal cognominal burdens may be of interest) reached his address at six-thirty Wednesday afternoon. “Address” is New Yorkese for “home.” Stickney roomed at 45 West ‘Teenth Street, third floor rear hall room. He was twenty years and four months old, and he worked in a cameras-of-all-kinds, photographic supplies and films-developed store. I don’t know what kind of work he did in the store; but you must have seen him. He is the young man who always comes behind the counter to wait on you and lets you talk for five minutes, telling him what you want. When you are done, he calls the proprietor at the top of his voice to wait on you, and walks away whistling between his teeth.
I don’t want to bother about describing to you his appearance; but, if you are a man reader, I will say that Stickncy looked precisely like the young chap that you always find sitting in your chair smoking a cigarette after you have missed a shot while playing pool — not billiards but pool — when you want to sit down yourself.
There are some to whom Christmas gives no Christmassy essence. Of course, prosperous people and comfortable people who have homes or flats or rooms with meals, and even people who live in apartment houses with hotel service get something of the Christmas flavor. They give one another presents with the cost mark scratched off with a penknife; and they hang holly wreaths in the front windows and when they are asked whether they prefer light or dark meat from the turkey they say: “Both, please,” and giggle and have lots of fun. And the very poorest people have the best time of it. The Army gives ‘em a dinner, and the 10 a. m. issue of the Night Final edition of the newspaper with the largest circulation in the city leaves a basket at their door full of an apple, a Lake Ronkonkoma squab, a scrambled eggplant and a bunch of Kalamazoo bleached parsley. The poorer you are the more Christmas does for you.
But, I’ll tell you to what kind of a mortal Christmas seems to be only the day before the twenty-sixth day of December. It’s the chap in the big city earning sixteen dollars a week, with no friends and few acquaintances, who finds himself with only fifty cents in his pocket on Christmas eve. He can’t accept charity; he can’t borrow; he knows no one who would invite him to dinner. I have a fancy that when the shepherds left their flocks to follow the star of Bethlehem there was a bandy-legged young fellow among them who was just learning the sheep business. So they said to him, “Bobby, we’re going to investigate this star route and see what’s in it. If it should turn out to be the first Christmas day we don’t want to miss it. And, as you are not a wise man, and as you couldn’t possibly purchase a present to take along, suppose you stay behind and mind the sheep.”
So as we may say, Harry Stickney was a direct descendant of the shepherd who was left behind to take care of the flocks.
Getting back to facts, Stickney rang the doorbell of 45. He had a habit of forgetting his latchkey.
Instantly the door opened and there stood Mrs. Kannon, clutching her sacque together at the throat and gorgonizing him with her opaque, yellow eyes.
(To give you good measure, here is a story within a story. Once a roomer in 47 who had the Scotch habit — not kilts, but a habit of drinking Scotch — began to figure to himself what might happen if two persons should ring the doorbells of 43 and 47 at the same time. Visions of two halves of Mrs. Kannon appearing respectively and simultaneously at the two entrances, each clutching at a side of an open, flapping sacque that could never meet, overpowered him. Bellevue got him.)
“Evening,” said Stickney cheerlessly, as he distributed little piles of muddy slush along the hall matting. “Think we’ll have snow?”
“You left your key,” said —
[Here the manuscript ends.]
A front page of The Rolling Stone.
THE UNPROFITABLE SERVANT
[Left unfinished, and published as it here appears in Everybody’s Magazine, December, 1911.]
I am the richer by the acquaintance of four newspaper men. Singly, they are my encyclopedias, friends, mentors, and sometimes bankers. But now and then it happens that all of them will pitch upon the same printworthy incident of the passing earthly panorama and will send in reportorial constructions thereof to their respective journals. It is then that, for me, it is to laugh. For it seems that to each of them, trained and skilled as he may be, the same occurrence presents a different facet of the cut diamond, life.
One will have it (let us say) that Mme. André Macarté’s apartment was looted by six burglars, who descended via the fire-escape and bore away a ruby tiara valued at two thousand dollars and a five-hundred-dollar prize Spitz dog, which (in violation of the expectoration ordinance) was making free with the halls of the Wuttapesituckquesunoowetunquah Apartments.
My second “chiel” will take notes to the effect that while a friendly game of pinochle was in progress in the tenement rooms of Mrs. Andy McCarty, a lady guest named Ruby O’Hara threw a burglar down six flights of stairs, where he was pinioned and held by a two-thousand-dollar English bulldog amid a crowd of five hundred excited spectators.
My third chronicler and friend will gather the news threads of the happening in his own happy way; setting forth on the page for you to read that the house of Antonio Macartini was blown up at 6 a. m., by the Black Hand Society, on his refusing to leave two thou
sand dollars at a certain street corner, killing a pet five-hundred-dollar Pomeranian belonging to Alderman Rubitara’s little daughter (see photo and diagram opposite).
Number four of my history-makers will simply construe from the premises the story that while an audience of two thousand enthusiasts was listening to a Rubinstein concert on Sixth Street, a woman who said she was Mrs. Andrew M. Carter threw a brick through a plate-glass window valued at five hundred dollars. The Carter woman claimed that some one in the building had stolen her dog.
Now, the discrepancies in these registrations of the day’s doings need do no one hurt. Surely, one newspaper is enough for any man to prop against his morning water-bottle to fend off the smiling hatred of his wife’s glance. If he be foolish enough to read four he is no wiser than a Higher Critic.
I remember (probably as well as you do) having read the parable of the talents. A prominent citizen, about to journey into a far country, first hands over to his servants his goods. To one he gives five talents; to another two; to another one — to every man according to his several ability, as the text has it. There are two versions of this parable, as you well know. There may be more — I do not know.
When the p. c. returns he requires an accounting. Two servants have put their talents out at usury and gained one hundred per cent. Good. The unprofitable one simply digs up the talent deposited with him and hands it out on demand. A pattern of behavior for trust companies and banks, surely! In one version we read that he had wrapped it in a napkin and laid it away. But the commentator informs us that the talent mentioned was composed of 750 ounces of silver — about $900 worth. So the chronicler who mentioned the napkin, had either to reduce the amount of the deposit or do a lot of explaining about the size of the napery used in those davs. Therefore in his version we note that he uses the word “pound” instead of “talent.”