Short Fiction O. Henry (comprehension books TXT) 📖

Look at that mansion. It has fifty rooms. See the pillars and porches and balconies. The ceilings in the reception-rooms and the ballroom are twenty-eight feet high. My father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.’

“ ‘I belted one of ’em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,’ says I, ‘and he didn’t offer to resent it. He was there dividing his attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got fresh.’

“ ‘Of course,’ she goes on, ‘my father wouldn’t allow a drummer to set his foot in Elmcroft. If he knew that I was talking to one over the fence he would lock me in my room.’

“ ‘Would you let me come there?’ says I. ‘Would you talk to me if I was to call? For,’ I goes on, ‘if you said I might come and see you, the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-pins, as far as I am concerned.’

“ ‘I must not talk to you,’ she says, ‘because we have not been introduced. It is not exactly proper. So I will say goodbye, Mr.⁠—’

“ ‘Say the name,’ says I. ‘You haven’t forgotten it.’

“ ‘Pescud,’ says she, a little mad.

“ ‘The rest of the name!’ I demands, cool as could be.

“ ‘John,’ says she.

“ ‘John⁠—what?’ I says.

“ ‘John A.,’ says she, with her head high. ‘Are you through, now?’

“ ‘I’m coming to see the belted earl tomorrow,’ I says.

“ ‘He’ll feed you to his foxhounds,’ says she, laughing.

“ ‘If he does, it’ll improve their running,’ says I. ‘I’m something of a hunter myself.’

“ ‘I must be going in now,’ says she. ‘I oughtn’t to have spoken to you at all. I hope you’ll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis⁠—or Pittsburgh, was it? Goodbye!’

“ ‘Good night,’ says I, ‘and it wasn’t Minneapolis. What’s your name, first, please?’

“She hesitated. Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:

“ ‘My name is Jessie,’ says she.

“ ‘Good night, Miss Allyn,’ says I.

“The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the doorbell of that World’s Fair main building. After about three-quarters of an hour an old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted. I gave him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel. He showed me in.

“Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut? That’s what that house was like. There wasn’t enough furniture in it to fill an eight-dollar flat. Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye. But when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up. You could almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs and white stockings dancing a quadrille. It was the style of him, although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the station.

“For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass. But I got my nerve back pretty quick. He asked me to sit down, and I told him everything. I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati, and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and explained to him my little code of living⁠—to be always decent and right in your home town; and when you’re on the road, never take more than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent limit. At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window, but I kept on talking. Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocketbook and the grass widow⁠—you remember that story. Well, that got him to laughing, and I’ll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.

“We talked two hours. I told him everything I knew; and then he began to ask questions, and I told him the rest. All I asked of him was to give me a chance. If I couldn’t make a hit with the little lady, I’d clear out, and not bother any more. At last he says:

“ ‘There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I remember rightly.’

“ ‘If there was,’ says I, ‘he can’t claim kin with our bunch. We’ve always lived in and around Pittsburgh. I’ve got an uncle in the real-estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas. You can inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old Smoky Town, and get satisfactory replies. Did you ever run across that story about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a sailor say his prayers?’ says I.

“ ‘It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,’ says the colonel.

“So I told it to him. Laugh! I was wishing to myself that he was a customer. What a bill of glass I’d sell him! And then he says:

“ ‘The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed to me, Mr. Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting and perpetuating amenities between friends. With your permission, I will relate to you a foxhunting story with which I was personally connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.’

“So he tells it. It takes forty minutes by the watch. Did I laugh? Well, say! When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the superannuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my valise. It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.

“Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.

“ ‘It’s going to be a fine evening,’ says I.

“ ‘He’s coming,’ says she. ‘He’s going to tell you, this time, the story about the old negro and the green watermelons. It always comes after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster. There was another time,’ she goes