Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

until he had tackled another book. I once made a calculation that the Reverend Homer’s concordance would be worked up as far as the Seven Vials mentioned in Revelations about the third day after they were opened.

Louis Devoe, as well as I, was a visitor and an intimate friend of the Greenes. It was there I met him the oftenest, and a more agreeable man or a more accomplished I have never hated in my life.

Luckily or unfortunately, I came to be accepted as a Boy. My appearance was youthful, and I suppose I had that pleading and homeless air that always draws the motherliness that is in women and the cursed theories and hobbies of paterfamilias.

Chloe called me “Tommy,” and made sisterly fun of my attempts to woo her. With Devoe she was vastly more reserved. He was the man of romance, one to stir her imagination and deepest feelings had her fancy leaned toward him. I was closer to her, but standing in no glamour; I had the task before me of winning her in what seems to me the American way of fighting⁠—with cleanness and pluck and everyday devotion to break away the barriers of friendship that divided us, and to take her, if I could, between sunrise and dark, abetted by neither moonlight nor music nor foreign wiles.

Chloe gave no sign of bestowing her blithe affections upon either of us. But one day she let out to me an inkling of what she preferred in a man. It was tremendously interesting to me, but not illuminating as to its application. I had been tormenting her for the dozenth time with the statement and catalogue of my sentiments toward her.

“Tommy,” said she, “I don’t want a man to show his love for me by leading an army against another country and blowing people off the earth with cannons.”

“If you mean that the opposite way,” I answered, “as they say women do, I’ll see what I can do. The papers are full of this diplomatic row in Russia. My people know some big people in Washington who are right next to the army people, and I could get an artillery commission and⁠—”

“I’m not that way,” interrupted Chloe. “I mean what I say. It isn’t the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a woman. When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady’s hand by being on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show his love in little ways. He must never forget, after hearing it once, that I do not like to have anyone walk at my left side; that I detest bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light; that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am looking at the moonlight shining on water, and that I very, very often long for dates stuffed with English walnuts.”

“Frivolity,” I said, with a frown. “Any well-trained servant would be equal to such details.”

“And he must remember,” went on Chloe, “to remind me of what I want when I do not know, myself, what I want.”

“You’re rising in the scale,” I said. “What you seem to need is a first-class clairvoyant.”

“And if I say that I am dying to hear a Beethoven sonata, and stamp my foot when I say it, he must know by that that what my soul craves is salted almonds; and he will have them ready in his pocket.”

“Now,” said I, “I am at a loss. I do not know whether your soul’s affinity is to be an impresario or a fancy grocer.”

Chloe turned her pearly smile upon me.

“Take less than half of what I said as a jest,” she went on. “And don’t think too lightly of the little things, Boy. Be a paladin if you must, but don’t let it show on you. Most women are only very big children, and most men are only very little ones. Please us; don’t try to overpower us. When we want a hero we can make one out of even a plain grocer the third time he catches our handkerchief before it falls to the ground.”

That evening I was taken down with pernicious fever. That is a kind of coast fever with improvements and high-geared attachments. Your temperature goes up among the threes and fours and remains there, laughing scornfully and feverishly at the cinchona trees and the coal-tar derivatives. Pernicious fever is a case for a simple mathematician instead of a doctor. It is merely this formula: Vitality + the desire to live − the duration of the fever = the result.

I took to my bed in the two-roomed thatched hut where I had been comfortably established, and sent for a gallon of rum. That was not for myself. Drunk, Stamford was the best doctor between the Andes and the Pacific. He came, sat at my bedside, and drank himself into condition.

“My boy,” said he, “my lily-white and reformed Romeo, medicine will do you no good. But I will give you quinine, which, being bitter, will arouse in you hatred and anger⁠—two stimulants that will add ten percent to your chances. You are as strong as a caribou calf, and you will get well if the fever doesn’t get in a knockout blow when you’re off your guard.”

For two weeks I lay on my back feeling like a Hindu widow on a burning ghat. Old Atasca, an untrained Indian nurse, sat near the door like a petrified statue of What’s-the-Use, attending to her duties, which were, mainly, to see that time went by without slipping a cog. Sometimes I would fancy myself back in the Philippines, or, at worse times, sliding off the horsehair sofa in Sleepytown.

One afternoon I ordered Atasca to vamose, and