Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

all my might to keep my head above the waves of misfortune, but⁠—”

“Cut out the rainbow of hope and that stuff about walkin’ one by one through the narrow isles of Spain,” said Mrs. Peters, with a sigh. “I’ve heard it so often. There’s an ounce bottle of carbolic on the shelf behind the empty coffee can. Drink hearty.”

Mr. Peters reflected. What next! The old expedients had failed. The two musty musketeers were awaiting him hard by the ruined château⁠—that is to say, on a park bench with rickety cast-iron legs. His honor was at stake. He had engaged to storm the castle single-handed and bring back the treasure that was to furnish them wassail and solace. And all that stood between him and the coveted dollar was his wife, once a little girl whom he could⁠—aha!⁠—why not again? Once with soft words he could, as they say, twist her around his little finger. Why not again? Not for years had he tried it. Grim poverty and mutual hatred had killed all that. But Ragsy and Kidd were waiting for him to bring the dollar!

Mr. Peters took a surreptitiously keen look at his wife. Her formless bulk overflowed the chair. She kept her eyes fixed out the window in a strange kind of trance. Her eyes showed that she had been recently weeping.

“I wonder,” said Mr. Peters to himself, “if there’d be anything in it.”

The window was open upon its outlook of brick walls and drab, barren back yards. Except for the mildness of the air that entered it might have been midwinter yet in the city that turns such a frowning face to besieging spring. But spring doesn’t come with the thunder of cannon. She is a sapper and a miner, and you must capitulate.

“I’ll try it,” said Mr. Peters to himself, making a wry face.

He went up to his wife and put his arm across her shoulders.

“Clara, darling,” he said in tones that shouldn’t have fooled a baby seal, “why should we have hard words? Ain’t you my own tootsum wootsum?”

A black mark against you, Mr. Peters, in the sacred ledger of Cupid. Charges of attempted graft are filed against you, and of forgery and utterance of two of Love’s holiest of appellations.

But the miracle of spring was wrought. Into the back room over the back alley between the black walls had crept the Harbinger. It was ridiculous, and yet⁠—Well, it is a rat trap, and you, madam and sir and all of us, are in it.

Red and fat and crying like Niobe or Niagara, Mrs. Peters threw her arms around her lord and dissolved upon him. Mr. Peters would have striven to extricate the dollar bill from its deposit vault, but his arms were bound to his sides.

“Do you love me, James?” asked Mrs. Peters.

“Madly,” said James, “but⁠—”

“You are ill!” exclaimed Mrs. Peters. “Why are you so pale and tired looking?”

“I feel weak,” said Mr. Peters. “I⁠—”

“Oh, wait; I know what it is. Wait, James. I’ll be back in a minute.”

With a parting hug that revived in Mr. Peters recollections of the Terrible Turk, his wife hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

Mr. Peters hitched his thumbs under his suspenders.

“All right,” he confided to the ceiling. “I’ve got her going. I hadn’t any idea the old girl was soft any more under the foolish rib. Well, sir; ain’t I the Claude Melnotte of the lower East Side? What? It’s a 100 to 1 shot that I get the dollar. I wonder what she went out for. I guess she’s gone to tell Mrs. Muldoon on the second floor, that we’re reconciled. I’ll remember this. Soft soap! And Ragsy was talking about slugging her!”

Mrs. Peters came back with a bottle of sarsaparilla.

“I’m glad I happened to have that dollar,” she said. “You’re all run down, honey.”

Mr. Peters had a tablespoonful of the stuff inserted into him. Then Mrs. Peters sat on his lap and murmured:

“Call me tootsum wootsums again, James.”

He sat still, held there by his materialized goddess of spring.

Spring had come.

On the bench in Union Square Mr. Ragsdale and Mr. Kidd squirmed, tongue-parched, awaiting D’Artagnan and his dollar.

“I wish I had choked her at first,” said Mr. Peters to himself.

The Day Resurgent

I can see the artist bite the end of his pencil and frown when it comes to drawing his Easter picture; for his legitimate pictorial conceptions of figures pertinent to the festival are but four in number.

First comes Easter, pagan goddess of spring. Here his fancy may have free play. A beautiful maiden with decorative hair and the proper number of toes will fill the bill. Miss Clarice St. Vavasour, the well-known model, will pose for it in the “Lethergogallagher,” or whatever it was that Trilby called it.

Second⁠—the melancholy lady with upturned eyes in a framework of lilies. This is magazine-covery, but reliable.

Third⁠—Miss Manhattan in the Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday parade.

Fourth⁠—Maggie Murphy with a new red feather in her old straw hat, happy and self-conscious, in the Grand Street turnout.

Of course, the rabbits do not count. Nor the Easter eggs, since the higher criticism has hard-boiled them.

The limited field of its pictorial possibilities proves that Easter, of all our festival days, is the most vague and shifting in our conception. It belongs to all religions, although the pagans invented it. Going back still further to the first spring, we can see Eve choosing with pride a new green leaf from the tree ficus carica.

Now, the object of this critical and learned preamble is to set forth the theorem that Easter is neither a date, a season, a festival, a holiday nor an occasion. What it is you shall find out if you follow in the footsteps of Danny McCree.

Easter Sunday dawned as it should, bright and early, in its place on the calendar between Saturday and Monday. At 5:24 the sun rose, and at 10:30 Danny followed its example. He went into the kitchen and washed his face at the sink. His mother was frying bacon. She looked at his hard, smooth, knowing countenance as he juggled with