by O. Henry
And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. Once again he answered loudly, ‘Yes, dear!’ and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped.
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.
And then he thought of the housekeeper.
He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement as best he could.
‘Will you tell me, madam,’ he besought her, ‘who occupied the room I have before I came?’
‘Yes, sir. I can tell you again. ’Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B’retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Mrs Mooney she was. My house is well known for respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over – ’
‘What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls – in looks, I mean?’
‘Why, black-haired, sir, short and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago Tuesday.’
‘And before they occupied it?’
‘Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Mrs Crowder and her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old Mr Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember.’
He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldy house furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.
It was Mrs McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
‘I rented out my third floor back, this evening,’ said Mrs Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. ‘A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.’
‘Now, did ye, Mrs Purdy, ma’am?’ said Mrs McCool, with intense admiration. ‘You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?’ she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
‘Rooms,’ said Mrs Purdy, in her furriest tones, ‘are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs McCool.’
‘ ’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of it.’
‘As you say, we has our living to be making,’ remarked Mrs Purdy.
‘Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin’ herself wid the gas a swate little face she had, Mrs Purdy, ma’am.’
‘She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,’ said Mrs Purdy, assenting but critical, ‘but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs McCool.’
The Last Leaf
In a little district west of Washington Square the streets have run crazy and broken themselves into small strips called ‘places’. These ‘places’ make strange angles and curves. One street crosses itself a time or two. An artist once discovered a valuable possibility in this street. Suppose a collector with a bill for paints, paper and canvas should, in traversing this route, suddenly meet himself coming back, without a cent having been paid on account!
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a chafing dish or two from Sixth Avenue, and became a ‘colony’.
At the top of a squatty, three-storey brick Sue and Johnsy had their studio. ‘Johnsy’ was familiar for Joanna. One was from Maine, the other from California. They had met at the table d’hôte of an Eighth Street ‘Delmonico’s’, and found their tastes in art, chicory salad and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and there with his icy finger. Over on the East Side this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown ‘places’.
Mr Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by Californian zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, looking through the small Dutch windowpanes at the blank side of the next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, grey eyebrow.
‘She has one chance in – let us say, ten,’ he said, as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. ‘And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopoeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she’s not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?’
‘She – she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,’ said Sue.
‘Paint? – bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice – a man, for instance?’
‘A man?’ said Sue, with a jews’-harp twang in her voice. ‘Is a man worth – but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.’
‘Well, it is the weakness, then,’ said the doctor. ‘I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract fifty per cent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.’
After the doctor had gone, Sue went into the workroom and cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy’s room with her drawing-board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy’s eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and counting – counting backward.
‘Twelve,’ she said, and a little later, ‘eleven’; and then ‘te
n’, and ‘nine’; and then ‘eight’ and ‘seven’, almost together.
Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed halfway up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.
‘What is it, dear?’ asked Sue.
‘Six,’ said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. ‘They’re falling faster now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.’
‘Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.’
‘Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go too. I’ve known that for three days. Didn’t the doctor tell you?’
‘Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,’ complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. ‘What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don’t be a goosey. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon were – let’s see exactly what he said – he said the chances were ten to one! Why, that’s almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the streetcars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.’
‘You needn’t get any more wine,’ said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed out the window.
‘There goes another. No, I don’t want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go too.’
‘Johnsy, dear,’ said Sue, bending over her, ‘will you promise me to keep your eyes closed, and not look out of the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by tomorrow. I need the light or I would draw the shade down.’
‘Couldn’t you draw in the other room?’ asked Johnsy coldly.
‘I’d rather be here by you,’ said Sue. ‘Besides, I don’t want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.’
‘Tell me as soon as you have finished,’ said Johnsy, closing her eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, ‘because I want to see the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want to turn loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves.’
‘Try to sleep,’ said Sue. ‘I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I’ll not be gone a minute. Don’t try to move till I come back.’
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a Michelangelo’s Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his Mistress’s robe. He had been always about to paint a masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man, who scoffed terribly at softness in anyone, and who regarded himself as especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly-lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy’s fancy, and how she feared she would, indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
‘Vass!’ he cried. ‘Is dere people in de world mit der foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not heard of such a thing. No, I vill not bose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of her? Ach, dot poor little Miss Yohnsy.’
‘She is very ill and weak,’ said Sue, ‘and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr Behrman, if you do not care to pose for me, you needn’t. But I think you are a horrid old – old flibbertigibbet.’
‘You are just like a woman!’ yelled Behrman. ‘Who said I vill not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go avay. Gott! yes.’
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window-sill and motioned Behrman into the other room. In there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling, mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour’s sleep the next morning she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
‘Pull it up! I want to see,’ she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground.
‘It is the last one,’ said Johnsy. ‘I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall today, and I shall die at the same time.’
‘Dear, dear!’ said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow; ‘think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would I do?’
But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
‘I’ve been a bad girl, Sudie,’ said Johnsy. ‘Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in it, and – no; bring me a hand-mirror first; and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.’
An hour later she said – ‘Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.’
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.
‘Even chances,’ said the doctor, talking Sue’s thin, shaking hand in his. ‘With good nursing you’ll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman, his name is – some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him; but he goes to the hospital today to be made more comfortable.’
The next day the doctor said to Sue: ‘She’s out of danger. You’ve won. Nutrition and care now – that’s all.’
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very
useless woollen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.
‘I have something to tell you, white mouse,’ she said. ‘Mr Behrman died of pneumonia today in hospital. He was ill only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They couldn’t imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colours mixed on it, and – look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece – he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell.’
The Trimmed Lamp
Of course there are two sides to the question. Let us look at the other. We often hear ‘shop-girls’ spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair. We do not refer to the girls who live on Fifth Avenue as ‘marriage-girls’.
Lou and Nancy were chums. They came to the big city to find work because there was not enough to eat at their homes to go around. Nancy was nineteen; Lou was twenty. Both were pretty, active, country girls who had no ambition to go on the stage.