Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

fell down on that job. I went back and turned in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn’t seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I’ll give you the details.”

After the performance my friend, the reporter, recited to me the facts over the Würzburger.

“I see no reason,” said I, when he had concluded, “why that shouldn’t make a rattling good funny story. Those three people couldn’t have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner if they had been real actors in a real theatre. I’m really afraid that all the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. ‘The thing’s the play,’ is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare.”

“Try it,” said the reporter.

“I will,” said I; and I did, to show him how he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper.

There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where toys and notions and stationery are sold.

One night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store. The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was married to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a “Wholesale Female Murderess” story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.

Frank Barry and John Delaney were “prominent” young beaux of the same side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen’s hand. When Frank won, John shook his hand and congratulated him⁠—honestly, he did.

After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put on her hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank were going to Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress gaiters and paper bags of hominy.

Then there was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating her to flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where there are Italian skies and dolce far niente.

It would have carried Blaney off his feet to see Helen repulse him. With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that way.

In a few moments she had him going. The manliness that had possessed him departed. He bowed low, and said something about “irresistible impulse” and “forever carry in his heart the memory of”⁠—and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going down.

“I will away,” said John Delaney, “to the furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know that you are another’s. I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to for⁠—”

“For goodness sake, get out,” said Helen. “Somebody might come in.”

He knelt upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he might give it a farewell kiss.

Girls, was this choice boon of the great little god Cupid ever vouchsafed you⁠—to have the fellow you want hard and fast, and have the one you don’t want come with a damp curl on his forehead and kneel to you and babble of Africa and love which, in spite of everything, shall forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To know your power, and to feel the sweet security of your own happy state; to send the unlucky one, brokenhearted, to foreign climes, while you congratulate yourself as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that your nails are well manicured⁠—say, girls, it’s galluptious⁠—don’t ever let it get by you.

And then, of course⁠—how did you guess it?⁠—the door opened and in stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.

The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen’s hand, and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney, Africa bound.

A little slow music, if you please⁠—faint violin, just a breath in the clarinet and a touch of the cello. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to explain. He catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders⁠—once, twice, thrice he sways her this way and that⁠—the stage manager will show you how⁠—and throws her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from the house through the staring groups of astonished guests.

And, now because it is the Thing instead of the Play, the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad during the intermission of twenty years which must precede the rising of the curtain again.

Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the house. At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.

One day a middle-aged moneymaking lawyer, who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to marry him.

“I’m