Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

landmark. Civic pride is strongest in New Bagdad; and the wettest weeper and the loudest howler against the iconoclasts will be the man (originally from Terre Haute) whose fond memories of the old hotel are limited to his having been kicked out from its free-lunch counter in 1873.

At this hotel always stopped Mrs. Maggie Brown. Mrs. Brown was a bony woman of sixty, dressed in the rustiest black, and carrying a handbag made, apparently, from the hide of the original animal that Adam decided to call an alligator. She always occupied a small parlour and bedroom at the top of the hotel at a rental of two dollars per day. And always, while she was there, each day came hurrying to see her many men, sharp-faced, anxious-looking, with only seconds to spare. For Maggie Brown was said to be the third richest woman in the world; and these solicitous gentlemen were only the city’s wealthiest brokers and business men seeking trifling loans of half a dozen millions or so from the dingy old lady with the prehistoric handbag.

The stenographer and typewriter of the Acropolis Hotel (there! I’ve let the name of it out!) was Miss Ida Bates. She was a holdover from the Greek classics. There wasn’t a flaw in her looks. Some old-timer paying his regards to a lady said: “To have loved her was a liberal education.” Well, even to have looked over the black hair and neat white shirtwaist of Miss Bates was equal to a full course in any correspondence school in the country. She sometimes did a little typewriting for me, and, as she refused to take the money in advance, she came to look upon me as something of a friend and protégé. She had unfailing kindliness and a good nature; and not even a white-lead drummer or a fur importer had ever dared to cross the dead line of good behaviour in her presence. The entire force of the Acropolis, from the owner, who lived in Vienna, down to the head porter, who had been bedridden for sixteen years, would have sprung to her defence in a moment.

One day I walked past Miss Bates’s little sanctum Remingtorium, and saw in her place a black-haired unit⁠—unmistakably a person⁠—pounding with each of her forefingers upon the keys. Musing on the mutability of temporal affairs, I passed on. The next day I went on a two weeks’ vacation. Returning, I strolled through the lobby of the Acropolis, and saw, with a little warm glow of auld lang syne, Miss Bates, as Grecian and kind and flawless as ever, just putting the cover on her machine. The hour for closing had come; but she asked me in to sit for a few minutes in the dictation chair. Miss Bates explained her absence from and return to the Acropolis Hotel in words identical with or similar to these following:

“Well, Man, how are the stories coming?”

“Pretty regularly,” said I. “About equal to their going.”

“I’m sorry,” said she. “Good typewriting is the main thing in a story. You’ve missed me, haven’t you?”

“No one,” said I, “whom I have ever known knows as well as you do how to space properly belt buckles, semicolons, hotel guests, and hairpins. But you’ve been away, too. I saw a package of peppermint-pepsin in your place the other day.”

“I was going to tell you all about it,” said Miss Bates, “if you hadn’t interrupted me.

“Of course, you know about Maggie Brown, who stops here. Well, she’s worth $40,000,000. She lives in Jersey in a ten-dollar flat. She’s always got more cash on hand than half a dozen business candidates for vice-president. I don’t know whether she carries it in her stocking or not, but I know she’s mighty popular down in the part of town where they worship the golden calf.

“Well, about two weeks ago, Mrs. Brown stops at the door and rubbers at me for ten minutes. I’m sitting with my side to her, striking off some manifold copies of a copper-mine proposition for a nice old man from Tonopah. But I always see everything all around me. When I’m hard at work I can see things through my side-combs; and I can leave one button unbuttoned in the back of my shirtwaist and see who’s behind me. I didn’t look around, because I make from eighteen to twenty dollars a week, and I didn’t have to.

“That evening at knocking-off time she sends for me to come up to her apartment. I expected to have to typewrite about two thousand words of notes-of-hand, liens, and contracts, with a ten-cent tip in sight; but I went. Well, Man, I was certainly surprised. Old Maggie Brown had turned human.

“ ‘Child,’ says she, ‘you’re the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life. I want you to quit your work and come and live with me. I’ve no kith or kin,’ says she, ‘except a husband and a son or two, and I hold no communication with any of ’em. They’re extravagant burdens on a hardworking woman. I want you to be a daughter to me. They say I’m stingy and mean, and the papers print lies about my doing my own cooking and washing. It’s a lie,’ she goes on. ‘I put my washing out, except the handkerchiefs and stockings and petticoats and collars, and light stuff like that. I’ve got forty million dollars in cash and stocks and bonds that are as negotiable as Standard Oil, preferred, at a church fair. I’m a lonely old woman and I need companionship. You’re the most beautiful human being I ever saw,’ says she. ‘Will you come and live with me? I’ll show ’em whether I can spend money or not,’ she says.

“Well, Man, what would you have done? Of course, I fell to it. And, to tell you the truth, I began to like old Maggie. It wasn’t all on account of the forty millions and what she could do for me. I was kind of lonesome in the world