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

a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and one of red-hot tea.

“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the tea?” “On the shelf by the window,” she answered. When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon a huge Dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle tomorrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your guest we’ll have supper.”

He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing⁠—not as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort, came also a sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at every day⁠—the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and⁠—the knock of the adventurer upon the green door.

But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in Junie’s Love Test.

“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.

“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.

“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”

“None whatever.”

“I am all alone in the world, too,” said Rudolf, after a pause.

“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.

Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.

“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”

Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good night. A long night’s sleep will be fine for you.”

He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good night.” But her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that he answered it with words.

“Oh, I’m coming back tomorrow to see how you are getting along. You can’t get rid of me so easily.”

Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you come to knock at my door?”

He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been driven by her great distress.

“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at your door by mistake.”

The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her smile.

At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him. And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back, ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations. Every door that he found in the house was painted green.

Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.

“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he asked.

In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid advertisement of his master’s profession.

“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street. “But I ’spect you is a little late for de fust act.”

Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”

“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro. “De agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute a few of his cards along with de doctah’s. May I offer you one of de doctah’s cards, sah?”

At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp post on the corner:

“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way for me to find her.”

Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.

The Church with an Overshot-Wheel

Lakelands is not to be found in the catalogues of fashionable summer resorts. It lies on a low spur of the Cumberland range of mountains on a little tributary of the Clinch River. Lakelands proper is a contented village of two dozen houses situated on a forlorn, narrow-gauge railroad line. You wonder whether the railroad lost itself in the pine woods and ran into Lakelands from fright and loneliness, or whether Lakelands got lost and huddled itself along the railroad to wait for the cars to carry it home.

You wonder again why it was named Lakelands. There are no lakes, and the lands about are too poor to be worth mentioning.

Half a mile from the village stands the Eagle House, a big, roomy old mansion run by Josiah