The Two Women

Front matter

THE TWO WOMEN

The One: A FOG IN SANTONE The Other: A MEDLEY OF MOODS

By O. HENRY

A Fog in Santone

THE TWO WOMEN

THE ONE: A FOG IN SANTONE

A METEOROLOGICAL SKETCH

The drug clerk looks sharply at the white face half concealed by the high-turned overcoat collar.

“I would rather not supply you,” he says doubtfully. “I sold you a dozen morphia tablets less than an hour ago.”

The customer smiles wanly. “The fault is in your crooked streets. I didn’t intend to call upon you twice, but I guess I got tangled up. Excuse me.”

He draws his collar higher, and moves out, slowly. He stops under an electric light at the corner, and juggles absorbedly with three or four little pasteboard boxes. “Thirty-six,” he announces to himself. “More than plenty.”

For a gray mist had swooped upon Santone that night, an opaque terror that laid a hand to the throat of each of the city’s guests. It was computed that three thousand invalids were hibernating in the town. They had come from by and wide, for here, among these contracted, river-sliced streets, the goddess Ozone has elected to linger.

Purest atmosphere, sir, on earth! You might think, from the river winding through our town, that we are malarial, but, no, sir! Repeated experiments made by both government and local experts show that our air contains nothing deleterious—nothing but ozone, sir, pure ozone. Litmus paper tests made all along the river show—but you can read it all in the prospectuses; or the Santonian will recite it for you, word by word.

We may achieve climate, but weather is thrust upon us. Santone, then, cannot be blamed for this cold, gray fog that came and kissed the lips of the three thousand, and then delivered them to the cross. That night the tubercles, whose ravages hope holds in check, multiplied. The writhing fingers of the pale mist did not go thence bloodless. Many of the wooers of ozone capitulated with the enemy that night, turning their faces to the wall in that dumb, isolated apathy that so terrifies their watchers. On the red stream of Hemorrhagia a few souls drifted away, leaving behind pathetic heaps, white and chill as the fog itself. Two or three came to view this atmospheric wraith as the ghost of impossible joys, sent to whisper to them of the egregious folly it is to inhale breath into the lungs, only to exhale it again, and these used whatever came handy to their relief, pistols, gas or the beneficent muriate.

The purchaser of the morphia wanders into the fog, and, at length, finds himself upon a little iron bridge, one of the score or more in the heart of the city under which the small, tortuous river flows. He leans on the rail and gasps, for here the mist has concentrated, lying like a footpad to garrote such of the Three Thousand as creep that way. The iron bridge guys rattle to the strain of his cough, a mocking, phthisical rattle, seeming to say to him: “Clackety—clack! just a little rusty cold, sir,—but not from our river. Lit—mus paper all along the banks and nothing but ozone. Clacket—y—clack!”

The Memphis man at last recovers sufficiently to be aware of another overcoated man ten feet away, leaning on the rail, and just coming out of a paroxysm. There is a freemasonry among the Three Thousand that does away with formalities and introductions. A cough is your card; a hemor- rhage a letter of credit. The morphia man, being nearer recovered, speaks first.

“Goodall: Memphis—pulmonary tuberculosis—guess last stages.” The Three Thousand economize on words. Words are breath, and they need breath to write checks for the doctors.

“Hurd,” gasps the other. “Hurd; of T’leder. T’leder, Ah-hia. Catarrhal bronkeetis. Name’s Dennis, too—doctor says. Says I’ll,—live four weeks if I—take care of myself. Got your walking papers yet?”

“My doctor,” says Goodall, of Memphis, a little boastingly, “gives me three months.”

“Oh,” remarks the man from Toledo, filling up great gaps in his conversation with wheezes, “damn the difference. What’s months! Expect to—cut mine down to one week—and die in a hack—a four wheeler, not a cough. Be considerable moanin’ of the bars when I put out to sea. I’ve patronized ’em—pretty freely since I struck my—present gait. Say, Goodall, of Memphis—if your doc has set your pegs so close—why don’t you—get on a big spree and go—to the devil quick and easy—like I’m doing?”

“A spree!” says Goodall, as one who entertains a new idea, “I never did such a thing. I was thinking of another way, but—”

“Come on,” invites the Ohioan, “and have some drinks. I’ve been at it—for two days, but the inf—ernal stuff won’t bite like it used to. Goodall, of Memphis, what’s your respiration?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Daily—temperature?”

“Hundred and four.”

“You can do it in two days. It’ll take me a—week. Tank up, friend Goodall—have all the fun you can, then—off you go, in the middle of a jag, and s-s-save trouble and expense. I’m a s-son of a gun if this ain’t a health resort—for your whiskers! A Lake Erie fog’d get lost here in two minutes.”

“You said something about a drink,” says Goodall.

A few minutes later they line up at a glittering bar, and hang upon the arm rest. The bartender, blonde, heavy, well-groomed, sets out their drinks, instantly perceiving that he serves two of the Three Thousand. He observes that one is a middle-aged man, well dressed, with a lined and sunken face; the other a mere boy, who is chiefly eyes and overcoat. Disguised well the tedium begotten by many repetitions, the server of drinks begins to chant the sanitary saga of Santone. “Rather a moist night, gentlemen, for our town. A little fog from our river, but nothing to hurt. Repeated tests.”

“Damn your litmus papers,” gasps Toledo,—“without any—personal offence intended. We’ve heard of ’em before. Let ’em turn red, white and blue. What we want is a repeated test of that—whiskey. Come again. I paid for the last round, Goodall, of Memphis.”

The bottle oscillates from one to the other, continues to do so, and is not removed from the counter. The bartender sees two emaciated invalids dispose of enough Kentucky Belle to floor a dozen cowboys, without displaying any emotion save a sad and contemplative interest in the peregrinations of the bottle. So he is moved to manifest a solicitude as to the consequences.

“Not on your Uncle Mark Hanna,” responds Toledo, “will we get drunk. We’ve been—vaccinated with whiskey and—cod liver oil. What would send you to the police station—only gives us a thirst. S-s-set out another bottle.”

It is slow work trying to meet death by that route. Some quicker way must be found. They leave the saloon and plunge again into the mist. The sidewalks are mere flanges at the base of the houses; the street a cold ravine, the fog filling it like a freshet. Not far away is the Mexican quarter. Conducted as if by wires along the heavy air comes a guitar’s tinkle, and the demoralizing voice of some señorita singing:

“En las tardes sombrillos del invierno En el prado a Morar me reclino, Y maldigo mi fausto destino— <>Una vida la mas infeliz.”

The words of it they do not understand—neither Toledo nor Memphis, but words are the least important things in life. The music tears the breasts of the seekers after Nepenthe, inciting Toledo to remark:

“Those kids of mine—I wonder—by God, Mr. Goodall, of Memphis, we had too little of that whiskey! No slow music in mine, if you please. It makes you disremember to forget.”

Hurd, of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says:

“I’m a son of a gun! Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San—Pedro Springs at eleven. Forgot it. A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at Rhinegelder’s Garden. That Noo York chap’s a lucky dog—Got one whole lung—good for a year yet. Plenty of money, too. He pays for everything. I can’t afford—to miss the jamboree. Sorry you ain’t going along. Good-by, Goodall, of Memphis.”

He rounds the corner and shuffles away, casting off thus easily the ties of acquaintanceship as the moribund do, the season of dissolution being man’s supreme hour of egoism and selfishness. But he turns and calls back through the fog to the other: “I say, Goodall, of Memphis! If you get there before I do, tell ’em Hurd ’s a comin’ too. Hurd, of T’leder, Ah-hia.”

Thus Goodall’s tempter deserts him. That youth, uncomplaining and uncaring, takes a spell at coughing, and, recovered, wanders desultorily on down the street, the name of which he neither knows nor recks. At a certain point he perceives swinging doors, and hears, filtering between them, a noise of wind and string instruments. Two men enter from the street as he arrives, and he follows them in. There is a kind of antechamber, plentifully set with palms and cactuses and oleanders. At little marble-topped tables some people sit, while softs-hod attendants bring the beer. All is orderly, clean, melancholy—gay; of the German method of pleasure. At his right is the foot of a stairway. A man standing there holds out his hand. Goodall extends his, full of silver, and the man selects therefrom a coin. Goodall goes upstairs, and sees there two galleries extending along the sides of a concert hall which he now perceives to lie below and beyond the anteroom he had first entered. These galleries are divided into boxes or stalls which bestow, with the aid of hanging lace curtains, a certain privacy upon their occupants.

Passing, with aimless feet, down the aisle contiguous to these saucy and discreet compartments, he is half checked by the sight, in one of them, of a young woman, alone and seated in an attitude of reflection. This young woman becomes aware of his approach. A smile from her brings him to a standstill, and her subsequent invitation draws him, though hesitating, to the other chair in the box, a little table between them.

Goodall is only nineteen. There are some whom, when the terrible god Phthisis wishes to destroy he first makes beautiful; and the boy is one of these. His face is wax, and an awful pulchritude is born of the menacing flame in his cheeks. His eyes reflect an unearthly vista engendered by the certainty of his doom. As it is forbidden man to guess accurately concerning his fate, it is inevitable that he shall tremble at the slightest lifting of the veil.

The young woman is well dressed, and exhibits a beauty of a distinctly feminine and tender sort; an Eve-like comeliness that seems scarcely predestined to fade.

It is immaterial, the steps by which the two mount to a certain plane of good understanding; they are short and few, as befits the occasion.

A button against the wall of the partition is frequently disturbed, and a waiter comes and goes at its signal. Pensive Beauty would nothing of wine; two thick plaits of her blonde hair hang almost to the floor; she is a lineal descendant of the Loreley. So the waiter brings the brew; effervescent, icy, greenish-golden. The orchestra on the stage is playing “Oh, Rachel.” The two youngsters have exchanged a good bit of information. She calls him “Walter,” and he calls her “Miss Rosa.”

Goodall’s tongue is loosened, and he has told her everything about himself. About his home in Tennessee, the old pillared mansion under the oaks, the stables, the hunting; the friends he has; down to the chickens, and the box bushes bordering the walks. About his coming South for the climate, hoping to escape the hereditary foe of his family. All about his three months on a ranch; the deer hunts, the rattlers, and the rollicking in the cow camps. Then of his advent to Santone, where he has indirectly learned from a great specialist that his life’s calendar probably contains but two more leaves. And then of this death-white, choking night which has come and strangled his fortitude, and sent him out to seek a port amid its depressing billows.

“My weekly letter from home failed to come,” he told her, “and I was pretty blue. I knew I had to go before long; and I was tired of waiting, I went out and began morphine at every drug store where they would sell me a few tablets. I got thirty-six quarter-grains, and was going back to my room and take them, but I met a queer fellow on a bridge, who had a new idea.”

Goodall fillips a little pasteboard box upon the table, “I put ’em all together in there.”

Miss Rosa, being a woman, must raise the lid, and gave a slight shiver at the innocent-looking triturates. “Horrid things! but, those little, white bits—they could never kill one!”

Indeed they could. Walter knew better. Nine grains of morphia! Why, half the amount might.

Miss Rosa demands to know about Mr. Hurd, of Toledo, and is told. She laughs like a delighted child. “What a funny fellow! But tell me more about your home and your sisters, Walter. I know enough about Texas and tarantulas and cowboys.”

The theme is dear, just now, to his mood, and he lays before her the simple details of a true home; the little ties and endearments that so fill the exile’s heart. Of his sisters, one Alice furnishes him a theme he loves to dwell upon.

“She is like you, Miss Rosa,” he says. “Maybe not quite so pretty, but just as nice, and good, and—”

“There! Walter,” says Miss Rosa sharply, “now talk about something else.”

But a shadow falls upon the wall outside, preceding a big, softly treading man, finely dressed, who pauses a second before the curtains and then passes on. Presently comes the waiter with a message: “Mr. Rolfe says—”

“Tell Rolfe I’m engaged.”

“I don’t know why it is,” says Goodall, of Memphis, “but I don’t feel as bad as I did. An hour ago I wanted to die, but since I’ve met you, Miss Rosa, I’d like, so much, to live.”

The young woman whirls around the table, lays an arm behind his neck, and kisses him on the cheek.

“You must, dear boy,” she says. “I know what was the matter. It was this miserable foggy weather that has lowered your spirit and mine too—a little. But, look now!”

With a little spring she has drawn back the curtains. A window is in the wall opposite, and lo! the mist is cleared away. The indulgent moon is out again, revoyaging the plumbless sky. Roof and parapet and spire are softly pearl enamelled. Twice, thrice the retrieved river flashes back, between the houses, the light of the firmament. A tonic day will dawn, sweet and prosperous.

“Talk of death, when the world is so beautiful!” says Miss Rosa, laying her hand on his shoulder. “Do something to please me, Walter. Go home to your rest, and say: ‘I mean to get better,’ and do it.”

“If you ask it,” says the boy, with a smile, “I will.”

The waiter brings full glasses. Did they ring? No; but it is well. He may leave them. A farewell glass. Miss Rosa Says: “To your better health, Walter.” He says; “To our next meeting.”

His eyes look no longer into the void, but gaze upon the antithesis of death. His foot is set in an undiscovered country tonight. He is obedient, ready to go. “Goodnight,” she says.

“I never kissed a girl before,” he confesses, “except my sisters.”

“You didn’t this time,” she laughs, “I kissed you—good-night.”

“When shall I see you again?” he persists.

“You promised me to go home,” she frowns, “and get well. Perhaps we shall meet again—soon. Good-night.” He hesitates, his hat in hand. She smiles broadly and kisses him once more, upon the forehead. She watches him far down the aisle, then sits again at the table.

The shadow falls once more against the wall. This time the big, softly stepping man parts the curtains and looks in. Miss Rosa’s eye meets his, and for half a minute they remain thus, silent, fighting a battle with that king of weapons. Presently the big man drops the curtains and passes on.

The orchestra ceases playing suddenly, and an important voice can be heard loudly talking in one of the boxes farther down the aisle. No doubt some citizen entertains there some visitor to the town, and Miss Rosa leans back in her chair and smiles at some of the words she catches:

“Purest atmosphere—in the world—litmus paper all along—nothing hurtful—our city—nothing but pure ozone.”

The waiter returns for the tray and glasses. As he enters, the girl crushes a little empty pasteboard box in her hand, and throws it in a corner. She is stirring something in her glass with her hat-pin.

“Why, Miss Rosa,” says the waiter, with the civil familiarity he uses,—“putting salt in your beer this early in the night!”

A Medley of Moods

THE TWO WOMEN

THE OTHER: A MEDLEY OF MOODS

Alas! for the man and for the artist with the shifting point of perspective. Life shall be a confusion of ways to the one; the landscape shall rise up and confound the other.

Take the case of Lorison. At one time he appeared to himself to be the feeblest of fools; at another he conceived that he followed ideals so fine that the world was not yet ready to accept them. During one mood he cursed his folly; possessed by the other, he bore himself with a serene grandeur akin to greatness: in neither did he attain the perspective.

Generation before, the name had been “Larsen”; his race had bequeathed him its fine-strung, melancholy temperament, its saving balance of thrift and industry.

From his point of perspective he saw himself an outcast from society, forever to be a shady skulker along the ragged edge of respectability; a denizen of le trois-quarts de monde, that pathetic spheroid lying between the haut and the demi, whose inhabitants envy each of their neighbors, and are scorned by both. He was self-condemned to this opinion, as he was self-exiled, through it, to this quaint southern city a thousand miles from his former home. Here he had dwelt for longer than a year, knowing but a few, keeping in a subjective world of shadows which was invaded at times by the perplexing bulks of jarring realities. Then he fell in love with a girl whom he had casually met in a cheap restaurant, and his story begins.

The Rue Chartres, in New Orleans, is a street of ghosts. It lies in the quarter where the Frenchman, in his prime, set up his translated pride and glory. Where, also, the arrogant Don had swaggered, and dreamed of gold and grants and ladies’ gloves. Every flagstone has its grooves worn by footsteps going royally to the wooing and the fighting. Every house has a princely heartbreak; each doorway its untold tale of gallant promise and slow decay.

By night the Rue Chartres is now but a murky fissure, from which the groping wayfarer sees, flung against the sky, the tangled filigree of Moorish iron balconies. The old houses of Monsieur stand yet, indomitable against the century, but their essence is gone. The street is one of ghosts to whosoever can see them.

A faint heart-beat of the street’s ancient glory still survives in a corner occupied by the Café Carabine d’Or. Once men gathered there to plot against Kings and to warn Presidents. They do so yet, but they are not the same kind of men. A brass button will scatter these; those would have set their faces against an army. Above the door hangs the sign-board, upon which has been depicted a vast animal of unfamiliar species. In the act of firing upon this monster, is represented an unobtrusive human levelling an obtrusive gun, once the color of bright gold. Now the legend above the picture is faded beyond conjecture; the gun’s relation to the title is a matter of faith; the menaced animal, wearied of the long aim of the hunter, has resolved itself into a shapeless blot.

The place is known as “Antonio’s,” as the name, white upon the red-lit transparency, and gilt upon the windows, attests. There is a promise in “Antonio”; a justifiable expectancy of savory things in oil and pepper and wine, and, perhaps, an angel’s whisper of garlic. But the rest of the name is “O’Riley.” Antonio O’Riley! The Carabine d’Or is an ignominious ghost of the Rue Chartres. The café where Bienville and Conti dined, where a prince has broken bread, is become a “family restaurant.”

Its customers are working men and women, almost to a unit. Occasionally you will see chorus girls from the cheaper theatres, and men who follow avocations subject to quick vicissitudes, but, at Antonio’s (name rich in Bohemian promise but tame in fulfillment) manners debonair and gay are toned down to the “family” standard. Should you light a cigarette, mine host will touch you on the “arrum” and remind you that the proprieties are menaced. “Antonio” entices and beguiles from fiery legend without, but “O’Riley” teaches decorum within.

It was at this restaurant that Lorison first saw the girl. A flashy fellow, with a predatory eye, followed her in, and had advanced to take the other chair at the little table where she stopped, but Lorison slipped into the seat before him. Their acquaintance began, and grew, and now for two months they had sat at the same table each evening, not meeting by appointment, but as if by a series of fortuitous and happy accidents. After dining, they would take a walk together in one of the little city parks, or among the panoramic markets where exhibits a continuous vaudeville of sights and sounds. Always at eight o’clock their steps led them to a certain street corner, where she prettily but firmly bade him good-night and left him. “I do not live far from here,” she frequently said, “and you must leave me go the rest of the way alone.”

But now Lorison had discovered that he wanted to go the rest of the way, or happiness would depart, leaving him on a very lonely corner of life. And, at the same time that he made the discovery, the secret of his banishment from the society of the good laid its finger in his face and told him it must not be.

Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it. During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honor, but it shall bubble from his dying lips though it disrupt a neighborhood. It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion. In the case of Lorison, his particular ethics forbade him positively to declare his sentiments, but he must needs dally with the subject, and woo by innuendo, at least.

On this night, after the usual meal at the Carabine d’Or he strolled, with his companion, down the dim old street toward the river.

The Rue Chartres perishes in the old Place d’Armes. The ancient Cabildo, where Spanish justice fell like hail, faces it, and the cathedral, another provincial ghost, overlooks it. Its centre is a little, iron-railed park of flowers and immaculate gravelled walks, where citizens take the air of evenings. Pedestalled high above it, the General sits his cavorting steed with his face turned stonily down the river toward English Turn, whence come no more Britons to bombard his cotton bales.

Often the two sat in this Square, but tonight Lorison guided her past the stone-stepped gate, and still riverward. As they walked, he smiled to himself to think that all he knew of her (except that he loved her) was her name, Norah Greenway, and that she lived with her brother. They had talked about everything except themselves. Perhaps her reticence had been caused by his.

They came, at length, upon the levee, and sat upon a great, prostrate beam. The air was pungent with the dust of commerce. The great river slipped yellowly past. Across it Algiers lay, a longitudinous black bulk against a vibrant electric haze sprinkled with exact stars.

The girl was young, and of the piquant order. A certain bright melancholy pervaded her; she possessed an untarnished, pale prettiness doomed to please. Her voice, when she spoke, dwarfed her theme. It was the voice capable of investing little subjects with a large interest. She sat at ease, bestowing her skirts with the little womanly touch, serene, as if the begrimed pier were a summer garden. Lorison poked the rotting boards with his cane.

He began by telling her that he was in love with some one to whom he durst not speak of it. “And why not?” she asked, accepting swiftly his fatuous presentation of a third person of straw. “My place in the world,” he answered, “is none to ask a woman to share. I am an outcast from honest people; I am wrongly accused of one crime, and am, I believe, guilty of another.”

Thence he plunged into the story of his abdication from society. The story, pruned of his moral philosophy, deserves no more than the slightest touch. It is no new tale, that of the gambler’s declension. During one night’s sitting he lost, and then had imperilled a certain amount of his employer’s money, which, by accident, he carried with him. He continued to lose, to the last wager, and then began to gain, leaving the game winner to a somewhat formidable sum. The same night his employer’s safe was robbed. A search was had; the winnings of Lorison were found in his room, their total forming an accusing nearness to that of the sum purloined. He was taken, tried, and, through incomplete evidence, released, smutched with the sinister devoirs of a disagreeing jury.

“It is not in the unjust accusation,” he said to the girl, “that my burden lies, but in the knowledge that, from the moment I staked the first dollar of the firm’s money, I was a criminal—no matter whether I lost or won. You see why it is impossible for me to speak of love to her, an angel of goodness and innocence.”

“It is a sad thing,” said Norah, after a little pause, “to think what very good people there are in the world.”

“Good?” said Lorison.

“I was thinking of this superior person whom you say you love. She must be a very poor sort of creature.”

“I do not understand.”

“Nearly,” she continued, “as poor a sort of creature as yourself.”

“You do not understand,” said Lorison, removing his hat, and sweeping back his fine, light hair. “Suppose she loved me in return, and were willing to marry me. Think, if you can, what would follow. Never a day would pass but she would be reminded of her sacrifice. I would read a condescension in her smile, a pity even in her affection, that would madden me. No. The thing would stand between us forever. Only equals should mate. I could never ask her to come down upon my lower plane.”

An arc light faintly shone upon Lorison’s face. An illumination from within also pervaded it; the girl saw the rapt, ascetic look; it was the face either of Sir Galahad or Sir Fool.

“Quite star-like,” she said, “is this unapproachable angel. Really too high to be grasped.”

“By me, yes.”

She faced him suddenly. “My dear friend, would you prefer your star fallen?” Lorison made a wide gesture.

“You push me to the bald fact,” he declared. “You are not in sympathy with my argument. But I will answer you so: if I could reach my particular star, to drag it down, I would not do so. But if it were fallen, I would pick it up, and thank Heaven for the privilege.”

They were silent for some minutes. Norah shivered, and thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. Lorison uttered a remorseful exclamation.

“I’m not cold,” she said, “I was just thinking. I ought to tell you something. You have selected a strange confidante. But you expect a chance acquaintance picked up in a doubtful restaurant to be an angel.”

“Norah!” cried Lorison.

“Let me go on. You have told me about yourself. We have been such good friends! I must tell you now what I never wanted you to know. I am—worse than you are—I was on the stage—I sang in the chorus—I was pretty bad, I guess—I stole diamonds from the prima donna—they arrested me—I gave most of them up, and they let me go—I drank wine every night—a good deal—I was very wicked, but—”

Lorison knelt quickly by her side and took her hands.

“Dear Norah,” he said exultantly. “It is you, it is you I love! You never guessed it, did you? ’T is you I meant all the time. Now I can speak. Let me make you forget the past. We have suffered; let us shut out the world, and live for each other. Norah, do you hear me say I love you?”

“In spite of—”

“Rather say because of it. You have come out of your past noble and good. Your heart is an angel’s. Give it to me.”

“A little while ago you feared the future too much to even speak.”

“But for you; not for myself. Can you love me?”

She cast herself, wildly sobbing, upon his breast.

“Better than life—than Truth itself, than everything.”

“And my own past,” said Lorison, with a note of solicitude; “can you forgive and—”

“I answered you that,” she whispered, “when I told you I loved you.” She leaned away, and looked thoughtfully at him. “If I had not told you about myself, would you have—would you—”