41 Stories Read online

  Nor is O.Henry the flighty, fundamentally unserious writer he is sometimes made out to be. (No more are Strauss waltzes flighty. They are neither Bach-like nor Brahms-like, but they do not purport to be. Do we reproach a beautiful dog for not being a beautiful horse, or a handsome boy for not being a dashing man?) There is intense seriousness in his stories, even intense seriousness about the craft he practiced so secretively. “The art of narrative,” declares the narrator in “The Phonograph and the Graft,” not here reprinted, “consists in concealing from your audience everything it wants to know until after you expose your favorite opinions on topics foreign to the subject. A good story is like a bitter pill with the sugar coating inside of it.” In “Springtime à la Carte,” again, he begins with a short, one-sentence paragraph, “It was a day in March,” and then goes on, brilliantly:

  Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening could possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat dry, and likely to consist of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of the reader without preparation.

  This is the art which, proclaiming artlessness, neatly conceals art. We are all no more than common men together, O.Henry keeps insisting, but what common man could have written phrases like “Women are the natural enemies of clocks,” “We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs,” or “Women do not read the love stories in the magazines.... The love stories are read by fat cigar drummers and little ten-year-old girls”? What common man could say of a commemorative statue standing in New York City traffic that “the great General must feel, unless his nerves are iron, that rapid transit gloria mundi”? Or could gloriously destroy one of the most famous schoolboy phrases in all of Latin literature and then redeem the farce with as deft a bit of social comment as could possibly be written?

  I’m mindful of Mr. Julius Caesar’s account of ‘em where he says: “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est”; which is the same as to say, “We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.” I hated to make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States is situated.

  What common man could dispose of female do-gooders one minute, saying of a cabman’s horse “that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him,” and then, the next minute, declare that a character “found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him?”

  O.Henry, at his best, is both brilliant and wise, both serious and funny. He mixes and he pours, and his concoctions, though brewed according to formula, are nevertheless daz zlingly potent at their best, for the formula is unique, it is his alone, and it is framed out of materials as true as much of what goes into the heaviest, most ponderous tomes. Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real. O.Henry is many things, and like all good artists, he is sometimes a contradictory, complex mixture of many different things, but he is almost never boring—and certainly not in any of the stories here spread out for your enlightenment, instruction, and entertainment.

  —BURTON RAFFEL

  The Social Triangle

  At the stroke of six Ikey Snigglefritz laid down his goose. Ikey was a tailor’s apprentice. Are there tailors’ apprentices nowadays?

  At any rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament let shine.

  It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat and collar with its frazzled tie, and chalcedony pin, and set forth in pursuit of his ideals.

  For each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.

  Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between the rows of reeking sweatshops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the bacillus of society.

  Ikey’s legs carried him to and into that famous place of entertainment known as the Café Maginnis—famous because it was the rendezvous of Billy McMahan, the greatest man, the most wonderful man, Ikey thought, that the world had ever produced.

  Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots.

  Ikey slunk along the bar and gazed, breath-quickened, at his idol.

  How magnificent was Billy McMahan, with his great, smooth, laughing face; his gray eye, shrewd as a chicken hawk’s; his diamond ring, his voice like a bugle call, his prince’s air, his plump and active roll of money, his clarion call to friend and comrade—oh, what a king of men he was! How he obscured his lieutenants, though they themselves loomed large and serious, blue of chin and important of mien, with hands buried deep in the pockets of their short overcoats! But Billy—oh, what small avail are words to paint for you his glory as seen by Ikey Snigglefritz!

  The Café Maginnis rang to the note of victory. The white-coated bartenders threw themselves featfully upon bottle, cork and glass. From a score of clear Havanas the air received its paradox of clouds. The leal and the hopeful shook Billy McMahan’s hand. And there was born suddenly in the worshipful soul of Ikey Snigglefritz an audacious, thrilling impulse.

  He stepped forward into the little cleared space in which majesty moved, and held out his hand.

  Billy McMahan grasped it unhesitatingly, shook it and smiled.

  Made mad now by the gods who were about to destroy him, Ikey threw away his scabbard and charged upon Olympus.

  “Have a drink with me, Billy,” he said familiarly, “you and your friends?”

  “Don’t mind if I do, old man,” said the great leader, “just to keep the ball rolling.”

  The last spark of Ikey’s reason fled.

  “Wine,” he called to the bartender, waving a trembling hand.

  The corks of three bottles were drawn; the champagne bubbled in the long row of glasses set upon the bar. Billy McMahan took his and nodded, with his beaming smile at Ikey. The lieutenants and satellites took theirs and growled “Here’s to you.” Ikey took his nectar in delirium. All drank.

  Ikey threw his week’s wages in a crumpled roll upon the bar.

  “C‘rect,” said the bartender, smoothing the twelve one-dollar notes. The crowd surged around Billy McMahan again. Some one was telling how Brannigan fixed ’em over in the Eleventh. Ikey leaned against the bar a while, and then went out.

  He went down Hester Street and up Chrystie, and down Delancey to where he lived. And there his women folk, a bibulous mother and three dingy sisters, pounced upon him for his wages. And at his confession they shrieked and objurgated him in the pithy rhetoric of the locality.

  But even as they plucked at him and struck him Ikey remained in his ecstatic trance of joy. His head was in the clouds; the star was drawing his wagon. Compared with what he had achieved the loss of wages and the bray of women’s tongues were slight affairs.

  He had shaken the hand of Billy McMahan.

  Billy McMahan had a wife, and upon her visiting cards was engraved the name “Mrs. William Darragh McMahan.” And there was
a certain vexation attendant upon these cards; for, small as they were, there were houses in which they could not be inserted. Billy McMahan was a dictator in politics, a four-walled tower in business, a mogul, dread, loved and obeyed among his own people. He was growing rich; the daily papers had a dozen men on his trail to chronicle his every word of wisdom; he had been honored in caricature holding the Tiger cringing in leash.

  But the heart of Billy was sometimes sore within him. There was a race of men from which he stood apart but that he viewed with the eye of Moses looking over into the promised land. He, too, had ideals, even as had Ikey Snigglefritz; and sometimes, hopeless of attaining them, his own solid success was as dust and ashes in his mouth. And Mrs. William Darragh McMahan wore a look of discontent upon her plump but pretty face, and the very rustle of her silks seemed a sigh.

  There was a brave and conspicuous assemblage in the dining saloon of a noted hostelry where Fashion loves to display her charms. At one table sat Billy McMahan and his wife. Mostly silent they were, but the accessories they enjoyed little needed the indorsement of speech. Mrs. McMahan’s diamonds were outshone by few in the room. The waiter bore the costliest brands of wine to their table. In evening dress, with an expression of gloom upon his smooth and massive countenance, you would look in vain for a more striking figure than Billy’s.

  Four tables away sat alone a tall, slender man, about thirty, with thoughtful, melancholy eyes, a Van Dyke beard and peculiarly white, thin hands. He was dining on filet mignon, dry toast and apollinaris. That man was Cortlandt Van Duyckink, a man worth eighty millions, who inherited and held a sacred seat in the exclusive inner circle of society.

  Billy McMahan spoke to no one around him, because he knew no one. Van Duyckink kept his eyes on his plate because he knew that every one present was hungry to catch his. He could bestow knighthood and prestige by a nod, and he was chary of creating a too extensive nobility.

  And then Billy McMahan conceived and accomplished the most startling and audacious act of his life. He rose deliberately and walked over to Cortlandt Van Duyckink’s table and held out his hand.

  “Say, Mr. Van Duyckink,” he said, “I’ve heard you was talking about starting some reforms among the poor people down in my district. I’m McMahan, you know. Say, now, if that’s straight I’ll do all I can to help you. And what I says goes in that neck of the woods, don’t it? Oh, say, I rather guess it does.”

  Van Duyckink’s rather somber eyes lighted up. He rose to his lank height and grasped Billy McMahan’s hand.

  “Thank you, Mr. McMahan,” he said, in his deep, serious tones. “I have been thinking of doing some work of that sort. I shall be glad of your assistance. It pleases me to have become acquainted with you.”

  Billy walked back to his seat. His shoulder was tingling from the accolade bestowed by royalty. A hundred eyes were now turned upon him in envy and new admiration. Mrs. William Darragh McMahan trembled with ecstasy, so that her diamonds smote the eye almost with pain. And now it was apparent that at many tables there were those who suddenly remembered that they enjoyed Mr. McMahan’s acquaintance. He saw smiles and bows about him. He became enveloped in the aura of dizzy greatness. His campaign coolness deserted him.

  “Wine for that gang!” he commanded the waiter, pointing with his finger. “Wine over there. Wine to those three gents by that green bush. Tell ’em it’s on me. D—n it! Wine for everybody!”

  The waiter ventured to whisper that it was perhaps inexpedient to carry out the order, in consideration of the dignity of the house and its custom.

  “All right,” said Billy, “if it’s against the rules. I wonder if ’twould do to send my friend Van Duyckink a bottle? No? Well, it’ll flow all right at the caffy to-night, just the same. It’ll be rubber boots for anybody who comes in there any time up to 2 A.M.”

  Billy McMahan was happy.

  He had shaken the hand of Cortlandt Van Duyckink.

  The big pale-gray auto with its shining metal work looked out of place moving slowly among the push carts and trash-heaps on the lower east side. So did Cortlandt Van Duyckink, with his aristocratic face and white, thin hands, as he steered carefully between the groups of ragged, scurrying youngsters in the streets. And so did Miss Constance Schuyler, with her dim, ascetic beauty, seated at his side.

  “Oh, Cortlandt,” she breathed, “isn’t it sad that human beings have to live in such wretchedness and poverty? And you—how noble it is of you to think of them, to give your time and money to improve their condition!”

  Van Duyckink turned his solemn eyes upon her.

  “It is little,” he said, sadly, “that I can do. The question is a large one, and belongs to society. But even individual effort is not thrown away. Look, Constance! On this street I have arranged to build soup kitchens, where no one who is hungry will be turned away. And down this other street are the old buildings that I shall cause to be torn down and there erect others in place of those death-traps of fire and disease. ”

  Down Delancey slowly crept the pale-gray auto. Away from it toddled coveys of wondering, tangle-haired, bare footed, unwashed children. It stopped before a crazy brick structure, foul and awry.

  Van Duyckink alighted to examine at a better perspective one of the leaning walls. Down the steps of the building came a young man who seemed to epitomize its degradation, squalor and infelicity—a narrow-chested, pale, unsavory young man, puffing at a cigarette.

  Obeying a sudden impulse, Van Duyckink stepped out and warmly grasped the hand of what seemed to him a living rebuke.

  “I want to know you people,” he said, sincerely. “I am going to help you as much as I can. We shall be friends.”

  As the auto crept carefully away Cortlandt Van Duyckink felt an unaccustomed glow about his heart. He was near to being a happy man.

  He had shaken the hand of Ikey Snigglefritz.

  Tobin’s Palm

  Tobin and me, the two of us, went down to Coney one day, for there was four dollars between us, and Tobin had need of distractions. For there was Katie Mahorner, his sweetheart, of County Sligo, lost since she started for America three months before with two hundred dollars, her own savings, and one hundred dollars from the sale of Tobin’s inherited estate, a fine cottage and pig on the Bog Shannaugh. And since the letter that Tobin got saying that she had started to come to him not a bit of news had he heard or seen of Katie Mahorner. Tobin advertised in the papers, but nothing could be found of the colleen.

  So, to Coney me and Tobin went, thinking that a turn at the chutes and the smell of the popcorn might raise the heart in his bosom. But Tobin was a hard-headed man, and the sadness stuck in his skin. He ground his teeth at the crying balloons; he cursed the moving pictures; and, though he would drink whenever asked, he scorned Punch and Judy, and was for licking the tintype men as they came.

  So I gets him down a side way on a board walk where the attractions were some less violent. At a little six by eight stall Tobin halts, with a more human look in his eye.

  “ ‘Tis here,” says he, “I will be diverted. I’ll have the palm of me hand investigated by the wonderful palmist of the Nile, and see if what is to be will be.”

  Tobin was a believer in signs and the unnatural in nature. He possessed illegal convictions in his mind along the subjects of black cats, lucky numbers, and the weather predictions in the papers.

  We went into the enchanted chicken coop, which was fixed mysterious with red cloth and pictures of hands with lines crossing ‘em like a railroad centre. The sign over the door says it is Madame Zozo the Egyptian Palmist. There was a fat woman inside in a red jumper with pothooks and beasties embroidered upon it. Tobin gives her ten cents and extends one of his hands. She lifts Tobin’s hand, which is own brother to the hoof of a drayhorse, and examines it to see whether ’tis a stone in the frog or a cast shoe he has come for.

  “Man,” says this Madame Zozo, “the line of your fate shows—”

  “ ‘Tis not me foot at all,” says Tobin, interrupt
ing. “Sure, ’tis no beauty, but ye hold the palm of me hand.”

  “The line shows,” says the Madame, “that ye’ve not arrived at your time of life without bad luck. And there’s more to come. The mount of Venus—or is that a stone bruise?—shows that ye’ve been in love. There’s been trouble in your life on account of your sweetheart.”

  “ ‘Tis Katie Mahorner she has references with,” whispers Tobin to me in a loud voice to one side.

  “I see,” says the palmist, “a great deal of sorrow and tribulation with one whom ye cannot forget. I see the lines of designation point to the letter K and the letter M in her name.”

  “Whist!” says Tobin to me; “do ye hear that?”

  “Look out,” goes on the palmist, “for a dark man and a light woman; for they’ll both bring ye trouble. Ye’ll make a voyage upon the water very soon, and have a financial loss. I see one line that brings good luck. There’s a man coming into your life who will fetch ye good fortune. Ye’ll know him when ye see him by his crooked nose.”

  “Is his name set down?” asks Tobin. “ ‘Twill be convenient in the way of greeting when he backs up to dump off the good luck.”

  “His name,” says the palmist, thoughtful looking, “is not spelled out by the lines, but they indicate ‘tis a long one, and the letter ’o’ should be in it. There’s no more to tell. Good-evening. Don’t block up the door.”

  “ ‘Tis wonderful how she knows,” says Tobin as we walk to the pier.

  As we squeezed through the gates a nigger man sticks his lighted segar against Tobin’s ear, and there is trouble. Tobin hammers his neck, and the women squeal, and by presence of mind I drag the little man out of the way before the police comes. Tobin is always in an ugly mood when enjoying himself.