Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  “Yes, yes,” said I, hurriedly, pulling out my typewritten play. “She’s no doubt a charming girl. Now, here’s that little curtain-raiser you promised to listen to.”

  “Ever been tried on the stage?” asked Hollis.

  “Not exactly,” I answered. “I read half of it the other day to a fellow whose brother knows Robert Edeson; but he had to catch a train before I finished.”

  “Go on,” said Hollis, sliding back in his chair like a good fellow. “I’m no stage carpenter, but I’ll tell you what I think of it from a first-row balcony standpoint. I’m a theatre bug during the season, and I can size up a fake play almost as quick as the gallery can. Flag the waiter once more, and then go ahead as hard as you like with it. I’ll be the dog.”

  I read my little play lovingly, and, I fear, not without some elocution. There was one scene in it that I believed in greatly. The comedy swiftly rises into thrilling and unexpectedly developed drama. Capt. Marchmont suddenly becomes cognizant that his wife is an unscrupulous adventuress, who has deceived him from the day of their first meeting. The rapid and mortal duel between them from that moment — she with her magnificent lies and siren charm, winding about him like a serpent, trying to recover her lost ground; he with his man’s agony and scorn and lost faith, trying to tear her from his heart. That scene I always thought was a crackerjack. When Capt. Marchmont discovers her duplicity by reading on a blotter in a mirror the impression of a note that she has written to the Count, he raises his hand to heaven and exclaims: “O God, who created woman while Adam slept, and gave her to him for a companion, take back Thy gift and return instead the sleep, though it last forever!”

  “Rot,” said Hollis, rudely, when I had given those lines with proper emphasis.

  “I beg your pardon!” I said, as sweetly as I could.

  “Come now,” went on Hollis, “don’t be an idiot. You know very well that nobody spouts any stuff like that these days. That sketch went along all right until you rang in the skyrockets. Cut out that right-arm exercise and the Adam and Eve stunt, and make your captain talk as you or I or Bill Jones would.”

  “I’ll admit,” said I, earnestly (for my theory was being touched upon), “that on all ordinary occasions all of us use commonplace language to convey our thoughts. You will remember that up to the moment when the captain makes his terrible discovery all the characters on the stage talk pretty much as they would, in real life. But I believe that I am right in allowing him lines suitable to the strong and tragic situation into which he falls.”

  “Tragic, my eye!” said my friend, irreverently. “In Shakespeare’s day he might have sputtered out some high-cockalorum nonsense of that sort, because in those days they ordered ham and eggs in blank verse and discharged the cook with an epic. But not for B’way in the summer of 1905!”

  “It is my opinion,” said I, “that great human emotions shake up our vocabulary and leave the words best suited to express them on top. A sudden violent grief or loss or disappointment will bring expressions out of an ordinary man as strong and solemn and dramatic as those used in fiction or on the stage to portray those emotions.”

  “That’s where you fellows are wrong,” said Hollis. “Plain, every-day talk is what goes. Your captain would very likely have kicked the cat, lit a cigar, stirred up a highball, and telephoned for a lawyer, instead of getting off those Robert Mantell pyrotechnics.”

  “Possibly, a little later,” I continued. “But just at the time — just as the blow is delivered, if something Scriptural or theatrical and deep-tongued isn’t wrung from a man in spite of his modern and practical way of speaking, then I’m wrong.”

  “Of course,” said Hollis, kindly, “you’ve got to whoop her up some degrees for the stage. The audience expects it. When the villain kidnaps little Effie you have to make her mother claw some chunks out of the atmosphere, and scream: “Me chee-ild, me chee-ild!” What she would actually do would be to call up the police by ‘phone, ring for some strong tea, and get the little darling’s photo out, ready for the reporters. When you get your villain in a corner — a stage corner — it’s all right for him to clap his hand to his forehead and hiss: “All is lost!” Off the stage he would remark: “This is a conspiracy against me — I refer you to my lawyers.’”

  “I get no consolation,” said I, gloomily, “from your concession of an accentuated stage treatment. In my play I fondly hoped that I was following life. If people in real life meet great crises in a commonplace way, they should do the same on the stage.”

  And then we drifted, like two trout, out of our cool pool in the great hotel and began to nibble languidly at the gay flies in the swift current of Broadway. And our question of dramatic art was unsettled.

  We nibbled at the flies, and avoided the hooks, as wise trout do; but soon the weariness of Manhattan in summer overcame us. Nine stories up, facing the south, was Hollis’s apartment, and we soon stepped into an elevator bound for that cooler haven.

  I was familiar in those quarters, and quickly my play was forgotten, and I stood at a sideboard mixing things, with cracked ice and glasses all about me. A breeze from the bay came in the windows not altogether blighted by the asphalt furnace over which it had passed. Hollis, whistling softly, turned over a late-arrived letter or two on his table, and drew around the coolest wicker armchairs.

  I was just measuring the Vermouth carefully when I heard a sound. Some man’s voice groaned hoarsely: “False, oh, God! — false, and Love is a lie and friendship but the byword of devils!”

  I looked around quickly. Hollis lay across the table with his head down upon his outstretched arms. And then he looked up at me and laughed in his ordinary manner.

  I knew him — he was poking fun at me about my theory. And it did seem so unnatural, those swelling words during our quiet gossip, that I half began to believe I had been mistaken — that my theory was wrong.

  Hollis raised himself slowly from the table.

  “You were right about that theatrical business, old man,” he said, quietly, as he tossed a note to me.

  I read it.

  Loris had run away with Tom Tolliver.

  A LITTLE TALK ABOUT MOBS

  “I see,” remarked the tall gentleman in the frock coat and black slouch hat, “that another street car motorman in your city has narrowly excaped lynching at the hands of an infuriated mob by lighting a cigar and walking a couple of blocks down the street.”

  “Do you think they would have lynched him?” asked the New Yorker, in the next seat of the ferry station, who was also waiting for the boat.

  “Not until after the election,” said the tall man, cutting a corner off his plug of tobacco. “I’ve been in your city long enough to know something about your mobs. The motorman’s mob is about the least dangerous of them all, except the National Guard and the Dressmakers’ Convention.

  “You see, when little Willie Goldstein is sent by his mother for pigs’ knuckles, with a nickel tightly grasped in his chubby fist, he always crosses the street car track safely twenty feet ahead of the car; and then suddenly turns back to ask his mother whether it was pale ale or a spool of 80 white cotton that she wanted. The motorman yells and throws himself on the brakes like a football player. There is a horrible grinding and then a ripping sound, and a piercing shriek, and Willie is sitting, with part of his trousers torn away by the fender, screaming for his lost nickel.

  “In ten seconds the car is surrounded by 600 infuriated citizens, crying, ‘Lynch the motorman! Lynch the motorman!’ at the top of their voices. Some of them run to the nearest cigar store to get a rope; but they find the last one has just been cut up and labelled. Hundreds of the excited mob press close to the cowering motorman, whose hand is observed to tremble perceptibly as he transfers a stick of pepsin gum from his pocket to his mouth.

  “When the bloodthirsty mob of maddened citizens has closed in on the motorman, some bringing camp stools and sitting quite close to him, and all shouting, ‘Lynch him!’ Policeman Fogarty forces
his way through them to the side of their prospective victim.

  “‘Hello, Mike,’ says the motorman in a low voice, ‘nice day. Shall I sneak off a block or so, or would you like to rescue me?’

  “‘Well, Jerry, if you don’t mind,’ says the policeman, ‘I’d like to disperse the infuriated mob singlehanded. I haven’t defeated a lynching mob since last Tuesday; and that was a small one of only 300, that wanted to string up a Dago boy for selling wormy pears. It would boost me some down at the station.’

  “‘All right, Mike,’ says the motorman, ‘anything to oblige. I’ll turn pale and tremble.’

  “And he does so; and Policeman Fogarty draws his club and says, ‘G’wan wid yez!’ and in eight seconds the desperate mob has scattered and gone about its business, except about a hundred who remain to search for Willie’s nickel.”

  “I never heard of a mob in our city doing violence to a motorman because of an accident,” said the New Yorker.

  “You are not liable to,” said the tall man. “They know the motorman’s all right, and that he wouldn’t even run over a stray dog if he could help it. And they know that not a man among ‘em would tie the knot to hang even a Thomas cat that had been tried and condemned and sentenced according to law.”

  “Then why do they become infuriated and make threats of lynching?” asked the New Yorker.

  “To assure the motorman,” answered the tall man, “that he is safe. If they really wanted to do him up they would go into the houses and drop bricks on him from the third-story windows.”

  “New Yorkers are not cowards,” said the other man, a little stiffly.

  “Not one at a time,” agreed the tall man, promptly. “You’ve got a fine lot of single-handed scrappers in your town. I’d rather fight three of you than one; and I’d go up against all the Gas Trust’s victims in a bunch before I’d pass two citizens on a dark corner, with my watch chain showing. When you get rounded up in a bunch you lose your nerve. Get you in crowds and you’re easy. Ask the ‘L’ road guards and George B. Cortelyou and the tintype booths at Coney Island. Divided you stand, united you fall. E pluribus nihil. Whenever one of your mobs surrounds a man and begins to holler, ‘Lynch him!’ he says to himself, “Oh, dear, I suppose I must look pale to please the boys, but I will, forsooth, let my life insurance premium lapse to-morrow. This is a sure tip for me to play Methuselah straight across the board in the next handicap.’

  “I can imagine the tortured feelings of a prisoner in the hands of New York policemen when an infuriated mob demands that he be turned over to them for lynching. ‘For God’s sake, officers,’ cries the distracted wretch, ‘have ye hearts of stone, that ye will not let them wrest me from ye?’

  “‘Sorry, Jimmy,’ says one of the policemen, ‘but it won’t do. There’s three of us — me and Darrel and the plain-clothes man; and there’s only sivin thousand of the mob. How’d we explain it at the office if they took ye? Jist chase the infuriated aggregation around the corner, Darrel, and we’ll be movin’ along to the station.’”

  “Some of our gatherings of excited citizens have not been so harmless,” said the New Yorker, with a faint note of civic pride.

  “I’ll admit that,” said the tall man. “A cousin of mine who was on a visit here once had an arm broken and lost an ear in one of them.”

  “That must have been during the Cooper Union riots,” remarked the New Yorker.

  “Not the Cooper Union,” explained the tall man— “but it was a union riot — at the Vanastor wedding.”

  “You seem to be in favor of lynch law,” said the New Yorker, severely.

  “No, sir, I am not. No intelligent man is. But, sir, there are certain cases when people rise in their just majesty and take a righteous vengeance for crimes that the law is slow in punishing. I am an advocate of law and order, but I will say to you that less than six months ago I myself assisted at the lynching of one of that race that is creating a wide chasm between your section of country and mine, sir.”

  “It is a deplorable condition,” said the New Yorker, “that exists in the South, but— “

  “I am from Indiana, sir,” said the tall man, taking another chew; “and I don’t think you will condemn my course when I tell you that the colored man in question had stolen $9.60 in cash, sir, from my own brother.”

  THE SNOW MAN

  EDITORIAL NOTE. — Before the fatal illness of William Sydney Porter (known through his literary work as “O. Henry”) this American master of short-story writing had begun for Hampton’s Magazine the story printed below. Illness crept upon him rapidly and he was compelled to give up writing about at the point where the girl enters the story.

  When he realized that he could do no more (it was his lifelong habit to write with a pencil, never dictating to a stenographer), O. Henry told in detail the remainder of The Snow Man to Harris Merton Lyon, whom he had often spoken of as one of the most effective short-story writers of the present time. Mr. Porter had delineated all of the characters, leaving only the rounding out of the plot in the final pages to Mr. Lyon.

  Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow. To men, it is something like a crucible in which their world melts into a white star ten million miles away. The man who can stand the test is a Snow Man; and this is his reading by Fahrenheit, Reaumur, or Moses’s carven tablets of stone.

  Night had fluttered a sable pinion above the canyon of Big Lost River, and I urged my horse toward the Bay Horse Ranch because the snow was deepening. The flakes were as large as an hour’s circular tatting by Miss Wilkins’s ablest spinster, betokening a heavy snowfall and less entertainment and more adventure than the completion of the tatting could promise. I knew Ross Curtis of the Bay Horse, and that I would be welcome as a snow-bound pilgrim, both for hospitality’s sake and because Ross had few chances to confide in living creatures who did not neigh, bellow, bleat, yelp, or howl during his discourse.

  The ranch house was just within the jaws of the canyon where its builder may have fatuously fancied that the timbered and rocky walls on both sides would have protected it from the wintry Colorado winds; but I feared the drift. Even now through the endless, bottomless rift in the hills — the speaking tube of the four winds — came roaring the voice of the proprietor to the little room on the top floor.

  At my “hello,” a ranch hand came from an outer building and received my thankful horse. In another minute, Ross and I sat by a stove in the dining-room of the four-room ranch house, while the big, simple welcome of the household lay at my disposal. Fanned by the whizzing norther, the fine, dry snow was sifted and bolted through the cracks and knotholes of the logs. The cook room, without a separating door, appended.

  In there I could see a short, sturdy, leisurely and weather-beaten man moving with professional sureness about his red-hot stove. His face was stolid and unreadable — something like that of a great thinker, or of one who had no thoughts to conceal. I thought his eye seemed unwarrantably superior to the elements and to the man, but quickly attributed that to the characteristic self-importance of a petty chef. “Camp cook” was the niche that I gave him in the Hall of Types; and he fitted it as an apple fits a dumpling.

  Cold it was in spite of the glowing stove; and Ross and I sat and talked, shuddering frequently, half from nerves and half from the freezing draughts. So he brought the bottle and the cook brought boiling water, and we made prodigious hot toddies against the attacks of Boreas. We clinked glasses often. They sounded like icicles dropping from the eaves, or like the tinkle of a thousand prisms on a Louis XIV chandelier that I once heard at a boarder’s dance in the parlor of a ten-a-week boarding-house in Gramercy Square. Sic transit.

  Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars; but they who believe that all things, from a without-wine table d’hote to the crucifixion, may be interpreted through music, might have found a nocturne or a symphony to express the isolation of that blotted-out world. The clink of glass and bot
tle, the aeolian chorus of the wind in the house crannies, its deeper trombone through the canyon below, and the Wagnerian crash of the cook’s pots and pans, united in a fit, discordant melody, I thought. No less welcome an accompaniment was the sizzling of broiling ham and venison cutlet indorsed by the solvent fumes of true Java, bringing rich promises of comfort to our yearning souls.

  The cook brought the smoking supper to the table. He nodded to me democratically as he cast the heavy plates around as though he were pitching quoits or hurling the discus. I looked at him with some appraisement and curiosity and much conciliation. There was no prophet to tell us when that drifting evil outside might cease to fall; and it is well, when snow-bound, to stand somewhere within the radius of the cook’s favorable consideration. But I could read neither favor nor disapproval in the face and manner of our pot-wrestler.

  He was about five feet nine inches, and two hundred pounds of commonplace, bull-necked, pink-faced, callous calm. He wore brown duck trousers too tight and too short, and a blue flannel shirt with sleeves rolled above his elbows. There was a sort of grim, steady scowl on his features that looked to me as though he had fixed it there purposely as a protection against the weakness of an inherent amiability that, he fancied, were better concealed. And then I let supper usurp his brief occupancy of my thoughts.

  “Draw up, George,” said Ross. “Let’s all eat while the grub’s hot.”

  “You fellows go on and chew,” answered the cook. “I ate mine in the kitchen before sun-down.”

  “Think it’ll be a big snow, George?” asked the ranchman.

  George had turned to reenter the cook room. He moved slowly around and, looking at his face, it seemed to me that he was turning over the wisdom and knowledge of centuries in his head.