Being acquainted with a newspaper reporter who had a couple of free passes, I
got to see the performance a few nights ago at one of the popular
vaudeville houses.
One of the numbers was a
violin solo by a striking-looking man not much past forty, but with very
gray thick hair. Not being afflicted with a taste for music, I let the
system of noises drift past my ears while I regarded the man.
"There was a story about that chap a month or
two ago," said the reporter. "They gave me the assignment. It was to run a
column and was to be on the extremely light and joking order. The old man
seems to like the funny touch I give to local happenings. Oh, yes, I'm
working on a farce comedy now. Well, I went down to the house and got all
the details; but I certainly fell down on that job. I went back and turned
in a comic write-up of an east side funeral instead. Why? Oh, I couldn't
seem to get hold of it with my funny hooks, somehow. Maybe you could make
a one-act tragedy out of it for a curtain-raiser. I'll give you the
details."
After the performance my friend,
the reporter, recited to me the facts over Wurzburger.
"I see no reason," said I, when he had
concluded, "why that shouldn't make a rattling good funny story. Those
three people couldn't have acted in a more absurd and preposterous manner
if they had been real actors in a real theatre. I'm really afraid that all
the stage is a world, anyhow, and all the players men and women. 'The
thing's the play,' is the way I quote Mr. Shakespeare."
"Try it," said the reporter.
"I will," said I; and I did, to show him how
he could have made a humorous column of it for his paper.
There stands a house near Abingdon Square. On
the ground floor there has been for twenty-five years a little store where
toys and notions and stationery are sold.
One
night twenty years ago there was a wedding in the rooms above the store.
The Widow Mayo owned the house and store. Her daughter Helen was married
to Frank Barry. John Delaney was best man. Helen was eighteen, and her
picture had been printed in a morning paper next to the headlines of a
"Wholesale Female Murderess" story from Butte, Mont. But after your eye
and intelligence had rejected the connection, you seized your magnifying
glass and read beneath the portrait her description as one of a series of
Prominent Beauties and Belles of the lower west side.
2
Frank Barry and John Delaney were "prominent" young beaux of the same
side, and bosom friends, whom you expected to turn upon each other every
time the curtain went up. One who pays his money for orchestra seats and
fiction expects this. That is the first funny idea that has turned up in
the story yet. Both had made a great race for Helen's hand. When Frank
won, John shook his hand and congratulated him - honestly, he did.
After the ceremony Helen ran upstairs to put
on her hat. She was getting married in a traveling dress. She and Frank
were going to Old Point Comfort for a week. Downstairs the usual horde of
gibbering cave-dwellers were waiting with their hands full of old Congress
gaiters and paper bags of hominy.
Then there
was a rattle of the fire-escape, and into her room jumps the mad and
infatuated John Delaney, with a damp curl drooping upon his forehead, and
made violent and reprehensible love to his lost one, entreating her to
flee or fly with him to the Riviera, or the Bronx, or any old place where
there are Italian skies and
dolce far niente.
It would have carried Blaney off his feet to
see Helen repulse him. With blazing and scornful eyes she fairly withered
him by demanding whatever he meant by speaking to respectable people that
way.
In a few moments she had him going. The
manliness that had possessed him departed. He bowed low, and said
something about "irresistible impulse" and "forever carry in his heart the
memory of" - and she suggested that he catch the first fire-escape going
down.
"I will away," said John Delaney, "to
the furthermost parts of the earth. I cannot remain near you and know that
you are another's. I will to Africa, and there amid other scenes strive to
for -"
"For goodness sake, get out," said
Helen. "Somebody might come in."
He knelt
upon one knee, and she extended him one white hand that he might give it a
farewell kiss.
Girls, was this choice boon of
the great little god Cupid ever vouchsafed you - to have the fellow you
want hard and fast, and have the one you don't want come with a damp curl
on his forehead and kneel to you and babble of Africa and love which, in
spite of everything, shall forever bloom, an amaranth, in his heart? To
know your power, and to feel the sweet security of your own happy state;
to send the unlucky one, broken-hearted, to foreign climes, while you
congratulate yourself as he presses his last kiss upon your knuckles, that
your nails are well manicured - say, girls, it's galluptious - don't ever
let it get by you.
3
And then, of course - how did you guess it? - the door opened and in
stalked the bridegroom, jealous of slow-tying bonnet strings.
The farewell kiss was imprinted upon Helen's
hand, and out of the window and down the fire-escape sprang John Delaney,
Africa bound.
A little slow music, if you
please - faint violin, just a breath in the clarinet and a touch of the
'cello. Imagine the scene. Frank, white-hot, with the cry of a man wounded
to death bursting from him. Helen, rushing and clinging to him, trying to
explain. He catches her wrists and tears them from his shoulders - once,
twice, thrice he sways her this way and that - the stage manager will show
you how - and throws her from him to the floor a huddled, crushed, moaning
thing. Never, he cries, will he look upon her face again, and rushes from
the house through the staring groups of astonished guests.
And, now because it is the Thing instead of
the Play, the audience must stroll out into the real lobby of the world
and marry, die, grow gray, rich, poor, happy or sad during the
intermission of twenty years which must precede the rising of the curtain
again.
Mrs. Barry inherited the shop and the
house. At thirty-eight she could have bested many an eighteen-year-old at
a beauty show on points and general results. Only a few people remembered
her wedding comedy, but she made of it no secret. She did not pack it in
lavender or moth balls, nor did she sell it to a magazine.
One day a middle-aged money-making lawyer,
who bought his legal cap and ink of her, asked her across the counter to
marry him.
"I'm really much obliged to you,"
said Helen, cheerfully, "but I married another man twenty years ago. He
was more a goose than a man, but I think I love him yet. I have never seen
him since about half an hour after the ceremony. Was it copying ink that
you wanted or just writing fluid?"
The lawyer
bowed over the counter with old-time grace and left a respectful kiss on
the back of her hand. Helen sighed. Parting salutes, however romantic, may
be overdone. Here she was at thirty-eight, beautiful and admired; and all
that she seemed to have got from her lovers were approaches and adieus.
Worse still, in the last one she had lost a customer, too.
4
Business languished, and she hung out a Room to Let card. Two large rooms
on the third floor were prepared for desirable tenants. Roomers came, and
went regretfully, for the house of Mrs. Barry was the abode of neatness,
comfort and taste.
One day came Ramonti, the
violinist, and engaged the front room above. The discord and clatter
uptown offended his nice ear; so a friend had sent him to this oasis in
the desert of noise.
Ramonti, with his still
youthful face, his dark eyebrows, his short, pointed, foreign, brown
beard, his distinguished head of gray hair, and his artist's temperament -
revealed in his light, gay and sympathetic manner - was a welcome tenant
in the old house near Abingdon Square.
Helen
lived on the floor above the store. The architecture of it was singular
and quaint. The hall was large and almost square. Up one side of it, and
then across the end of it ascended an open stairway to the floor above.
This hall space she had furnished as a sitting room and office combined.
There she kept her desk and wrote her business letters; and there she sat
of evenings by a warm fire and a bright red light and sewed or read.
Ramonti found the atmosphere so agreeable that he spent much time there,
describing to Mrs. Barry the wonders of Paris, where he had studied with a
particularly notorious and noisy fiddler.
Next comes lodger No. 2, a handsome, melancholy man in the early 40's,
with a brown, mysterious beard, and strangely pleading, haunting eyes. He,
too, found the society of Helen a desirable thing. With the eyes of Romeo
and Othello's tongue, he charmed her with tales of distant climes and
wooed her by respectful innuendo.
From the
first Helen felt a marvelous and compelling thrill in the presence of this
man. His voice somehow took her swiftly back to the days of her youth's
romance. This feeling grew, and she gave way to it, and it led her to an
instinctive belief that he had been a factor in that romance. And then
with a woman's reasoning (oh, yes, they do, sometimes) she leaped over
common syllogism and theory, and logic, and was sure that her husband had
come back to her. For she saw in his eyes love, which no woman can
mistake, and a thousand tons of regret and remorse, which aroused pity,
which is perilously near to love requited, which is the
sine qua
non in the house that Jack built.
5
But she made no sign. A husband who steps around the corner for twenty
years and then drops in again should not expect to find his slippers laid
out too conveniently near nor a match ready lighted for his cigar. There
must be expiation, explanation, and possibly execration. A little
purgatory, and then, maybe, if he were properly humble, he might be
trusted with a harp and crown. And so she made no sign that she knew or
suspected.
And my friend, the reporter, could
see nothing funny in this! Sent out on an assignment to write up a
roaring, hilarious, brilliant joshing story of - but I will not knock a
brother - let us go on with the story.
One
evening Ramonti stopped in Helen's hall-office-reception-room and told his
love with the tenderness and ardor of the enraptured artist. His words
were a bright flame of the divine fire that glows in the heart of a man
who is a dreamer and doer combined.
"But
before you give me an answer," he went on, before she could accuse him of
suddenness, "I must tell you that 'Ramonti' is the only name I have to
offer you. My manager gave me that. I do not know who I am or where I came
from. My first recollection is of opening my eyes in a hospital. I was a
young man, and I had been there for weeks. My life before that is a blank
to me. They told me that I was found lying in the street with a wound on
my head and was brought there in an ambulance. They thought I must have
fallen and struck my head upon the stones. There was nothing to show who I
was. I have never been able to remember. After I was discharged from the
hospital, I took up the violin. I have had success. Mrs. Barry - I do not
know your name except that - I love you; the first time I saw you I
realized that you were the one woman in the world for me - and" - oh, a
lot of stuff like that.
Helen felt young
again. First a wave of pride and a sweet little thrill of vanity went all
over her; and then she looked Ramonti in the eyes, and a tremendous throb
went through her heart. She hadn't expected that throb. It took her by
surprise. The musician had become a big factor in her life, and she hadn't
been aware of it.
6
"Mr. Ramonti," she said sorrowfully (this was not on the stage, remember;
it was in the old home near Abingdon Square), "I'm awfully sorry, but I'm
a married woman."
And then she told him the
sad story of her life, as a heroine must do, sooner or later, either to a
theatrical manager or to a reporter.
Ramonti
took her hand, bowed low and kissed it, and went up to his room.
Helen sat down and looked mournfully at her
hand. Well she might. Three suitors had kissed it, mounted their red roan
steeds and ridden away.
In an hour entered
the mysterious stranger with the haunting eyes. Helen was in the willow
rocker, knitting a useless thing in cotton-wool. He ricocheted from the
stairs and stopped for a chat. Sitting across the table from her, he also
poured out his narrative of love. And then he said: "Helen, do you not
remember me? I think I have seen it in your eyes. Can you forgive the past
and remember the love that has lasted for twenty years? I wronged you
deeply - I was afraid to come back to you - but my love overpowered my
reason. Can you, will you, forgive me?"
Helen
stood up. The mysterious stranger held one of her hands in a strong and
trembling clasp.
There she stood, and I pity
the stage that it has not acquired a scene like that and her emotions to
portray.
For she stood with a divided heart.
The fresh, unforgettable, virginal love for her bridegroom was hers; the
treasured, sacred, honored memory of her first choice filled half her
soul. She leaned to that pure feeling. Honor and faith and sweet, abiding
romance bound her to it. But the other half of her heart and soul was
filled with something else - a later, fuller, nearer influence. And so the
old fought against the new.
And while she
hesitated, from the room above came the soft, racking, petitionary music
of a violin. The hag, music, bewitches some of the noblest. The daws may
peck upon one's sleeve without injury, but whoever wears his heart upon
his tympanum gets it not far from the neck.
This music and the musician caller her, and at her side honor and the old
love held her back.
7
"Forgive me," he pleaded.
"Twenty years is a
long time to remain away from the one you say you love," she declared,
with a purgatorial touch.
"How could I tell?"
he begged. "I will conceal nothing from you. That night when he left I
followed him. I was mad with jealousy. On a dark street I struck him down.
He did not rise. I examined him. His head had struck a stone. I did not
intend to kill him. I was mad with love and jealousy. I hid near by and
saw an ambulance take him away. Although you married him, Helen -"
"
Who are you?" cried the woman, with
wide-open eyes, snatching her hand away.
"Don't you remember me, Helen - the one who has always loved you best? I
am John Delaney. If you can forgive -"
But
she was gone, leaping, stumbling, hurrying, flying up the stairs toward
the music and him who had forgotten, but who had known her for his in each
of his two existences, and as she climbed up she sobbed, cried and sang:
"Frank! Frank! Frank!"
Three mortals thus
juggling with years as though they were billiard balls, and my friend, the
reporter, couldn't see anything funny in it!
O. Henry
