Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

“You remember,” said Eighteen, “the guy in the hammered brass Prince Albert and the oroide gold pants and the amalgamated copper hat, that carried the combination meat-axe, icepick, and liberty-pole, and used to stand on the first landing as you go up to the Little Rindslosh.”

“Why, yes,” said I. “The halberdier. I never noticed him particularly. I remember he thought he was only a suit of armour. He had a perfect poise.”

“He had more than that,” said Eighteen. “He was me friend. He was an advertisement. The boss hired him to stand on the stairs for a kind of scenery to show there was something doing in the has-been line upstairs. What did you call him⁠—a what kind of a beer?”

“A halberdier,” said I. “That was an ancient man-at-arms of many hundred years ago.”

“Some mistake,” said Eighteen. “This one wasn’t that old. He wasn’t over twenty-three or four.

“It was the boss’s idea, rigging a man up in an antebellum suit of tinware and standing him on the landing of the slosh. He bought the goods at a Fourth Avenue antique store, and hung a sign-out: ‘Able-bodied hal⁠—halberdier wanted. Costume furnished.’

“The same morning a young man with wrecked good clothes and a hungry look comes in, bringing the sign with him. I was filling the mustard-pots at my station.

“ ‘I’m it,’ says he, ‘whatever it is. But I never halberdiered in a restaurant. Put me on. Is it a masquerade?’

“ ‘I hear talk in the kitchen of a fishball,’ says I.

“ ‘Bully for you, Eighteen,’ says he. ‘You and I’ll get on. Show me the boss’s desk.’

“Well, the boss tries the Harveyized pajamas on him, and they fitted him like the scales on a baked redsnapper, and he gets the job. You’ve seen what it is⁠—he stood straight up in the corner of the first landing with his halberd to his shoulder, looking right ahead and guarding the Portugals of the castle. The boss is nutty about having the true Old-World flavour to his joint. ‘Halberdiers goes with Rindsloshes,’ says he, ‘just as rats goes with rathskellers and white cotton stockings with Tyrolean villages.’ The boss is a kind of a antiologist, and is all posted up on data and such information.

“From 8 p.m. to two in the morning was the halberdier’s hours. He got two meals with us help and a dollar a night. I eat with him at the table. He liked me. He never told his name. He was travelling impromptu, like kings, I guess. The first time at supper I says to him: ‘Have some more of the spuds, Mr. Frelinghuysen.’ ‘Oh, don’t be so formal and offish, Eighteen,’ says he. ‘Call me Hal⁠—that’s short for halberdier.’ ‘Oh, don’t think I wanted to pry for names,’ says I. ‘I know all about the dizzy fall from wealth and greatness. We’ve got a count washing dishes in the kitchen; and the third bartender used to be a Pullman conductor. And they work, Sir Percival,’ says I, sarcastic.

“ ‘Eighteen,’ says he, ‘as a friendly devil in a cabbage-scented hell, would you mind cutting up this piece of steak for me? I don’t say that it’s got more muscle than I have, but⁠—’ And then he shows me the insides of his hands. They was blistered and cut and corned and swelled up till they looked like a couple of flank steaks crisscrossed with a knife⁠—the kind the butchers hide and take home, knowing what is the best.

“ ‘Shoveling coal,’ says he, ‘and piling bricks and loading drays. But they gave out, and I had to resign. I was born for a halberdier, and I’ve been educated for twenty-four years to fill the position. Now, quit knocking my profession, and pass along a lot more of that ham. I’m holding the closing exercises,’ says he, ‘of a forty-eight-hour fast.’

“The second night he was on the job he walks down from his corner to the cigar-case and calls for cigarettes. The customers at the tables all snicker out loud to show their acquaintance with history. The boss is on.

“ ‘An’⁠—let’s see⁠—oh, yes⁠—‘An anachronism,’ says the boss. ‘Cigarettes was not made at the time when halberdiers was invented.’

“ ‘The ones you sell was,’ says Sir Percival. ‘Caporal wins from chronology by the length of a cork tip.’ So he gets ’em and lights one, and puts the box in his brass helmet, and goes back to patrolling the Rindslosh.

“He made a big hit, ’specially with the ladies. Some of ’em would poke him with their fingers to see if he was real or only a kind of a stuffed figure like they burn in elegy. And when he’d move they’d squeak, and make eyes at him as they went up to the slosh. He looked fine in his halberdashery. He slept at $2 a week in a hall-room on Third Avenue. He invited me up there one night. He had a little book on the washstand that he read instead of shopping in the saloons after hours. ‘I’m on to that,’ says I, ‘from reading about it in novels. All the heroes on the bum carry the little book. It’s either Tantalus or Liver or Horace, and its printed in Latin, and you’re a college man. And I wouldn’t be surprised,’ says I, ‘if you wasn’t educated, too.’ But it was only the batting averages of the League for the last ten years.

“One night, about half past eleven, there comes in a party of these high-rollers that are always hunting up new places to eat in and poke fun at. There was a swell girl in a 40 hp auto tan coat and veil, and a fat old man with white side-whiskers, and a young chap that couldn’t keep his feet off the tail of the girl’s coat, and an oldish lady that looked upon life as immoral and unnecessary. ‘How perfectly delightful,’ they says, ‘to sup in a slosh.’ Up the stairs they go; and in half a minute back down comes the girl,