Short Fiction by O. Henry (librera reader txt) 📕

I knew that he was right, and that I should not try to reconcile him with Roman history; so I asked for news concerning other ancients with whom he had walked familiar.

Above my desk hung an engraving of Raphael’s cherubs. You could yet make out their forms, though the dust blurred their outlines strangely.

“Ye calls them ‘cher-rubs,’ ” cackled the old man. “Babes, ye fancy they are, with wings. And there’s one wid legs and a bow and arrow that ye call Cupid⁠—I know where they was found. The great-great-great-grandfather of thim all was a billy-goat. Bein’ an editor, sir, do ye happen to know where Solomon’s Temple stood?”

I fancied that it was in⁠—in Persia? Well, I did not know.

“ ’Tis not in history nor in the Bible where it was. But I saw it, meself. The first pictures of cher-rubs and cupids was sculptured upon thim walls and pillars. Two of the biggest, sir, stood in the adytum to form the baldachin over the Ark. But the wings of thim sculptures was intindid for horns. And the faces was the faces of goats. Ten thousand goats there was in and about the temple. And your cher-rubs was billy-goats in the days of King Solomon, but the painters misconstrued the horns into wings.

“And I knew Tamerlane, the lame Timour, sir, very well. I saw him at Keghut and at Zaranj. He was a little man no larger than yerself, with hair the colour of an amber pipe stem. They buried him at Samarkand. I was at the wake, sir. Oh, he was a fine-built man in his coffin, six feet long, with black whiskers to his face. And I see ’em throw turnips at the Imperor Vispacian in Africa. All over the world I have tramped, sir, without the body of me findin’ any rest. ’Twas so commanded. I saw Jerusalem destroyed, and Pompeii go up in the fireworks; and I was at the coronation of Charlemagne and the lynchin’ of Joan of Arc. And everywhere I go there comes storms and revolutions and plagues and fires. ’Twas so commanded. Ye have heard of the Wandering Jew. ’Tis all so, except that divil a bit am I a Jew. But history lies, as I have told ye. Are ye quite sure, sir, that ye haven’t a drop of whiskey convenient? Ye well know that I have many miles of walking before me.”

“I have none,” said I, “and, if you please, I am about to leave for my supper.”

I pushed my chair back creakingly. This ancient landlubber was becoming as great an affliction as any cross-bowed mariner. He shook a musty effluvium from his piebald clothes, overturned my inkstand, and went on with his insufferable nonsense.

“I wouldn’t mind it so much,” he complained, “if it wasn’t for the work I must do on Good Fridays. Ye know about Pontius Pilate, sir, of course. His body, whin he killed himself, was pitched into a lake on the Alps mountains. Now, listen to the job that ’tis mine to perform on the night of ivery Good Friday. The ould divil goes down in the pool and drags up Pontius, and the water is bilin’ and spewin’ like a wash pot. And the ould divil sets the body on top of a throne on the rocks, and thin comes me share of the job. Oh, sir, ye would pity me thin⁠—ye would pray for the poor Wandering Jew that niver was a Jew if ye could see the horror of the thing that I must do. ’Tis I that must fetch a bowl of water and kneel down before it till it washes its hands. I declare to ye that Pontius Pilate, a man dead two hundred years, dragged up with the lake slime coverin’ him and fishes wrigglin’ inside of him widout eyes, and in the discomposition of the body, sits there, sir, and washes his hands in the bowl I hold for him on Good Fridays. ’Twas so commanded.”

Clearly, the matter had progressed far beyond the scope of the Bugle’s local column. There might have been employment here for the alienist or for those who circulate the pledge; but I had had enough of it. I got up, and repeated that I must go.

At this he seized my coat, grovelled upon my desk, and burst again into distressful weeping. Whatever it was about, I said to myself that his grief was genuine.

“Come now, Mr. Ader,” I said, soothingly; “what is the matter?”

The answer came brokenly through his racking sobs:

“Because I would not⁠ ⁠… let the poor Christ⁠ ⁠… rest⁠ ⁠… upon the step.”

His hallucination seemed beyond all reasonable answer; yet the effect of it upon him scarcely merited disrespect. But I knew nothing that might assuage it; and I told him once more that both of us should be leaving the office at once.

Obedient at last, he raised himself from my dishevelled desk, and permitted me to half lift him to the floor. The gale of his grief had blown away his words; his freshet of tears had soaked away the crust of his grief. Reminiscence died in him⁠—at least, the coherent part of it.

“ ’Twas me that did it,” he muttered, as I led him toward the door⁠—“me, the shoemaker of Jerusalem.”

I got him to the sidewalk, and in the augmented light I saw that his face was seared and lined and warped by a sadness almost incredibly the product of a single lifetime.

And then high up in the firmamental darkness we heard the clamant cries of some great, passing birds. My Wandering Jew lifted his hand, with side-tilted head.

“The Seven Whistlers!” he said, as one introduces well-known friends.

“Wild geese,” said I; “but I confess that their number is beyond me.”

“They follow me everywhere,” he said. “ ’Twas so commanded. What ye hear is the souls of the seven Jews that helped with the Crucifixion. Sometimes they’re plovers and sometimes geese, but ye’ll find them always flyin’ where I go.”

I