Лучшие рассказы О. Генри = The Best of O. Henry

A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A girl not yet twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed the knob and swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her and laid her on a faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed the door and took a swift glance around the room by the light of a flickering gas jet. Neat, but extreme poverty was the story that he read.

The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the room excitedly for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who – no, no; that was for drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat. That was successful, for he struck her nose with the brim of his derby and she opened her eyes. And then the young man saw that hers, indeed, was the one missing face from his heart’s gallery of intimate portraits. The frank, grey eyes, the little nose, turning pertly outward; the chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea vine, seemed the right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But the face was wofully thin and pale.

The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.

“Fainted, didn’t I?” she asked, weakly. “Well, who wouldn’t? You try going without anything to eat for three days and see!”

“Himmel![150 - Himmel! = Heavens! (German)]” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”

He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it. With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the restaurant. On the table he laid them – bread and butter, cold meats, cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, 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 to-morrow. 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 to-morrow 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.

From the Cabby’s Seat

The cabby has his point of view. It is more single-minded, perhaps, than that of a follower of any other calling. From the high, swaying seat of his hansom he looks upon his fellow-men as nomadic particles, of no account except when possessed of migratory desires. He is Jehu[151 - Jehu – a commander of chariots, and later, in 842 BC–815 BC, the king of Israel], and you are goods in transit. Be you President or vagabond, to cabby you are only a Fare, he takes you up, cracks his whip, joggles your vertebrae and sets you down.

When time for payment arrives, if you exhibit a familiarity with legal rates you come to know what contempt is; if you find that you have left your pocketbook behind you are made to realise the mildness of Dante’s imagination.

It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter[152 - Jupiter – in Roman mythology, the chief god] on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap – you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land – and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.

Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant; you are contents. You are a cargo at sea, and the “cherub that sits up aloft” has Davy Jones’s street and number by heart.

One night there were sounds of revelry in the big brick tenement-house next door but one to McGary’s Family Café. The sounds seemed to emanate from the apartments of the Walsh family. The sidewalk was obstructed by an assortment of interested neighbours, who opened a lane from time to time for a hurrying messenger bearing from McGary’s goods pertinent to festivity and diversion. The sidewalk contingent was engaged in comment and discussion from which it made no effort to eliminate the news that Norah Walsh was being married.

In the fulness of time there was an eruption of the merry-makers to the sidewalk. The uninvited guests enveloped and permeated them, and upon the night air rose joyous cries, congratulations, laughter and unclassified noises born of McGary’s oblations to the hymeneal[153 - hymeneal – adj wedding; Hymen, in Greek mythology, was the god of marriage.] scene.

Close to the curb stood Jerry O’Donovan’s cab. Night-hawk was Jerry called; but no more lustrous or cleaner hansom than his ever closed its doors upon point lace and November violets. And Jerry’s horse! I am within bounds when I tell you that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled – yes, smiled – to have seen him.

Among the shifting, sonorous, pulsing crowd glimpses could be had of Jerry’s high hat, battered by the winds and rains of many years; of his nose like a carrot, battered by the frolicsome, athletic progeny of millionaires and by contumacious fares; of his brass-buttoned green coat, admired in the vicinity of McGary’s. It was plain that Jerry had usurped the functions of his cab, and was carrying a “load.” Indeed, the figure may be extended and he be likened to a bread-waggon if we admit the testimony of a youthful spectator, who was heard to remark “Jerry has got a bun.”

From somewhere among the throng in the street or else out of the thin stream of pedestrians a young woman tripped and stood by the cab. The professional hawk’s eye of Jerry caught the movement. He made a lurch for the cab, overturning three or four onlookers and himself – no! he caught the cap of a water-plug and kept his feet. Like a sailor shinning up the ratlins during a squall Jerry mounted to his professional seat. Once he was there McGary’s liquids were baffled. He seesawed on the mizzenmast of his craft as safe as a Steeple Jack[154 - Steeple Jack = steeplejack] rigged to the flagpole of a skyscraper.

“Step in, lady,” said Jerry, gathering his lines. The young woman stepped into the cab; the doors shut with a bang; Jerry’s whip cracked in the air; the crowd in the gutter scattered, and the fine hansom dashed away ’crosstown.

When the oat-spry horse had hedged a little his first spurt of speed Jerry broke the lid of his cab and called down through the aperture in the voice of a cracked megaphone, trying to please:

“Where, now, will ye be drivin’ to?”

“Anywhere you please,” came up the answer, musical and contented.

“’Tis drivin’ for pleasure she is,” thought Jerry. And then he suggested as a matter of course:

“Take a thrip around in the park, lady. ’Twill be ilegant cool and fine.”