O. Henry

                 The World and the Door


   A favourite dodge to get your story read by the public is to assert 
that it is true, and then add that Truth is stranger than Fiction. I 
do not know if the yarn I am anxious for you to read is true; but the 
Spanish purser of the fruit steamer El Carrero swore to me by 
the shrine of Santa Guadalupe that he had the facts from the U.S. 
vice-consul at La Paz-a person who could not possibly have been 
congnizant of half of them.
   As for the adage quoted above, I take pleasure in puncturing it by 
affirming that I read in a purely fictional story the other day the 
line: " `Be it so,' said the policeman." Nothing so strange has yet 
cropped out in Truth.
   When H. Ferguson Hedges, millionaire promoter, investor and man-
about-New-York, turned his thoughts upon matters convivial, and word 
of it went "down the line," bouncers took a precautionary turn at the 
Indian clubs, waiters put ironstone china on his favourite tables, cab 
drivers crowded close to the curbstone in front of all-night 
cafés, and careful cashiers in his regular haunts charged up a 
few bottles to his account by way of preface and introduction.
   As a money power a one-millionaire is of small account in a city 
where the man who cuts your slice of beef behind the free-lunch 
counter rides to work in his own automobile. But Hedges spent his 
money as lavishly, loudly and showily as though he were only a clerk 
squandering a week's wages. And, after all, the bartender takes no 
interest in your reserve fund. He would rather look you up on his cash 
register than in Bradstreet.
   On the evening that the material allegation of facts begins, Hedges 
was bidding dull care begone on the company of five or six good 
fellows- acquaintances and friends who had gathered in his wake.
   Among them were two younger men-Ralph Merriam, a broker, and Wade, 
his friend.
   Two deep-sea cabmen were chartered. At Columbus Circle they hove to 
long enough to revile the statue of the great navigator, 
unpatriotically rebuking him for having voyaged in search of land 
instead of liquids. Midnight overtook the party marooned in the rear 
of a cheap café far uptown.
   Hedges was arrogant, overriding and quarrelsome. He was burly and 
tough, iron-gray but vigorous, "good" for the rest of the night. There 
was a dispute-about nothing that matters-and the five-fingered words 
were passed-the words that represent the glove cast into the lists. 
Merriam played the rôle of the verbal Hotspur.
   Hedges rose quickly, seized his chair, swung it once and smashed 
wildly down at Merriam's head. Merriam dodged, drew a small revolver 
and shot Hedges in the chest. The leading roysterer stumbled, fell in 
a wry heap, and lay still.
   Wade, a commuter, had formed that habit of promptness. He juggled 
Merriam out a side door, walked him to the corner, ran him a block and 
caught a hansom. They rode five minutes and then got out on a dark 
corner and dismissed the cab. Across the street the lights of a small 
saloon betrayed its hectic hospitality.
   "Go in the back room of that saloon," said Wade, "and wait. I'll go 
find out what's doing and let you know. You may take two drinks while 
I am gone-no more."
   At ten minutes to one o'clock Wade returned.
   "Brace up, old chap," he said. "The ambulance got there just as I 
did. The doctor says he's dead. You may have one more drink. You let 
me run this thing for you. You've got to skip. I don't believe a chair 
is legally a deadly weapon. You've got to make tracks, that's all 
there is to it."
   Merriam complained of the cold querulously, and asked for another 
drink. "Did you notice what big veins he had on the back of his 
hands?" he said. "I never could stand-I never could--"
   "Take one more," said Wade, "and then come on. I'll see you 
through."
   Wade kept his promise so well that at eleven o'clock the next 
morning Merriam, with a new suit case full of new clothes and hair-
brushes, stepped quietly on board a little 500-ton fruit steamer at an 
East River pier. The vessel had brought the season's first cargo of 
limes from Port Limon, and was homeward bound. Merriam had his bank 
balance of $2,800 in his pocket in large bills, and brief instructions 
to pile up as much water as he could between himself and New York. 
There was no time for anything more.
   From Port Limon Merriam worked down the coast by schooner and sloop 
to Colon, thence across the isthmus to Panama, where he caught a tramp 
bound for Callao and such intermediate ports as might tempt the 
discursive skipper from his course.
   It was at La Paz that Merriam decided to land-La Paz the Beautiful, 
a little harbourless town smothered in a living green ribbon that 
banded the foot of a cloud-piercing mountain. Here the little steamer 
stopped to tread water while the captain's dory took him ashore that 
he might feel the pulse of the coconut market. Merriam went too, with 
his suit case, and remained.
   Kalb, the vice-consul, a Græco-Armenian citizen of the United 
States, born in Hessen-Darmstadt, and educated in Cincinnati ward 
primaries, considered all Americans his brothers and bankers. He 
attached himself to Merriam's elbow, introduced him to every one in La 
Paz who wore shoes, borrowed ten dollars and went back to his hammock.
   There was a little wooden hotel in the edge of a banana grove, 
facing the sea, that catered to the tastes of the few foreigners that 
had dropped out of the world into the triste Peruvian town. At 
Kalb's introductory: "Shake hands with--," he had obediently exchanged 
manual salutations with a German doctor, one French and two Italian 
merchants, and three or four Americans who were spoken of as gold men, 
rubber men, mahogany men-anything but men of living tissue.
   After dinner Merriam sat in a corner of the broad front 
galeria with Bibb, a Vermonter interested in hydraulic mining, 
and smoked and drank Scotch "smoke." The moonlit sea, spreading 
infinitely before him, seemed to separate him beyond all apprehension 
from his old life. The horrid tragedy in which he had played such a 
disastrous part now began, for the first time since he stole on board 
the fruiter, a wretched fugitive, to lose its sharper outlines. 
Distance lent assuagement to his view. Bibb had opened the flood-gates 
of a stream of long-dammed discourse, overjoyed to have captured an 
audience that had not suffered under a hundred repetitions of his 
views and theories.
   "One year more," said Bibb, "and I'll go back to God's country. Oh, 
I know it's pretty here, and you get dolce far niente handed to 
you in chunks, but this country wasn't made for a white man to live 
in. You've got to have to plug through snow now and then, and see a 
game of baseball and wear a stiff collar and have a policeman cuss 
you. Still, La Paz is a good sort of a pipe-dreamy old hole. And Mrs. 
Conant is here. When any of us feels particularly like jumping into 
the sea we rush around to her house and propose. It's nicer to be 
rejected by Mrs. Conant than it is to be drowned. And they say 
drowning is a delightful sensation."
   "Many like her here?" asked Merriam.
   "Not anywhere," said Bibb, with a comfortable sigh. "She's the only 
white woman in La Paz. The rest range from a dappled dun to the colour 
of a b-flat piano key. She's been here a year. Comes from-well, you 
know how a woman can talk-ask 'em to say `string' and they'll say 
`crow's foot' or `cat's cradle.' Sometimes you'd think she was from 
Oshkosh, and again from Jacksonville, Florida, and the next day from 
Cape Cod."
   "Mystery?" ventured Merriam.
   "M-well, she looks it; but her talk's translucent enough. But 
that's a woman. I suppose if the Sphinx were to begin talking she'd 
merely say: `Goodness me! more visitors coming for dinner, and nothing 
to eat but the sand which is here.' But you won't think about that 
when you meet her, Merriam. You'll propose to her too."
   To make a hard story soft, Merriam did meet her and propose to her. 
He found her to be a woman in black with hair the colour of a bronze 
turkey's wings, and mysterious, remembering eyes that-well, 
that looked as if she might have been a trained nurse looking on when 
Eve was created. Her words and manner, though, were translucent, as 
Bibb had said. She spoke, vaguely, of friends in California and some 
of the lower parishes in Louisiana. The tropical climate and indolent 
life suited her; she had thought of buying an orange grove later on; 
La Paz, all in all, charmed her.
   Merriam's courtship of the Sphinx lasted three months, although he 
did not know that he was courting her. He was using her as an antidote 
for remorse, until he found, too late, that he had acquired the habit. 
During that time he had received no news from home. Wade did not know 
where he was; and he was not sure of Wade's exact address, and was 
afraid to write. He thought he had better let matters rest as they 
were for a while.
   One afternoon he and Mrs. Conant hired two ponies and rode out 
along the mountain trail as far as the little cold river that came 
tumbling down the foothills. There they stopped for a drink, and 
Merriam spoke his piece-he proposed, as Bibb had prophesied.
   Mrs. Conant gave him one glance of brilliant tenderness, and then 
her face took on such a strange, haggard look that Merriam was shaken 
out of his intoxication and back to his senses.
   "I beg your pardon, Florence," he said, releasing her hand; "but 
I'll have to hedge on part of what I said. I can't ask you to marry 
me, of course. I killed a man in New York-a man who was my friend-shot 
him down-in quite a cowardly manner, I understand. Of course, the 
drinking didn't excuse it. Well, I couldn't resist having my say; and 
I'll always mean it. I'm here as a fugitive from justice, and-I 
suppose that ends our acquaintance."
   Mrs. Conant plucked little leaves assiduously from the low-hanging 
branch of a lime tree.
   "I suppose so," she said, in low and oddly uneven tones; "but that 
depends upon you. I'll be as honest as you were. I poisoned my 
husband. I am a self-made widow. A man cannot love a murderess. So I 
suppose that ends our acquaintance."
   She looked up at him slowly. His face turned a little pale, and he 
stared at her blankly, like a deaf-and-dumb man who was wondering what 
it was all about.
   She took a swift step toward him, with stiffened arms and eyes 
blazing.
   "Don't look at me like that!" she cried, as though she were in 
acute pain. "Curse me, or turn your back on me, but don't look that 
way. Am I a woman to be beaten? If I could show you-here on my arms, 
and on my back are scars-and it has been more than a year-scars that 
he made in his brutal rages. A holy nun would have risen and struck 
the fiend down. Yes, I killed him. The foul and horrible words that he 
hurled at me that last day are repeated in my ears every night when I 
sleep. And then came his blows, and the end of my endurance. I got the 
poison that afternoon. It was his custom to drink every night in the 
library before going to bed a hot punch made of rum and wine. Only 
from my fair hands would he receive it-because he knew the fumes of 
spirits always sickened me. That night when the maid brought it to me 
I sent her downstairs on an errand. Before taking him his drink I went 
to my little private cabinet and poured into it more than a 
teaspoonful of tincture of aconite-enough to kill three men, so I had 
learned. I had drawn $6,000 that I had in bank, and with that and a 
few things in a satchel I left the house without any one seeing me. As 
I passed the library I heard him stagger up and fall heavily on a 
couch. I took a night train for New Orleans, and from there I sailed 
to the Bermudas. I finally cast anchor in La Paz. And now what have 
you to say? Can you open your mouth?"
   Merriam came back to life.
   "Florence," he said earnestly, "I want you. I don't care what 
you've done. If the world--"
   "Ralph," she interrupted, almost with a scream, "be my world!"
   Her eyes melted; she relaxed magnificently and swayed toward 
Merriam so suddenly that he had to jump to catch her.
   Dear me! in such scenes how the talk runs into artificial prose. 
But it can't be helped. It's the subconscious smell of the footlights' 
smoke that's in all of us. Stir the depths of your cook's soul 
sufficiently and she will discourse in Bulwer-Lyttonese.
   Merriam and Mrs. Conant were very happy. He announced their 
engagement at the Hotel Orilla del Mar. Eight foreigners and four 
native Astors pounded his back and shouted insincere congratulations 
at him. Pedrito, the Castilian-mannered barkeep was goaded to extra 
duty until his agility would have turned a Boston cherry-phosphate 
clerk a pale lilac with envy.
   They were both very happy. According to the strange mathematics of 
the god of mutual affinity, the shadows that clouded their pasts when 
united became only half as dense instead of darker. They shut the 
world out and bolted the doors. Each was the other's world. Mrs. 
Conant lived again. The remembering look left her eyes. Merriam was 
with her every moment that was possible. On a little plateau under a 
grove of palms and calabash trees they were going to build a fairy 
bungalow. They were to be married in two months. Many hours of the day 
they had their heads together over the house plans. Their joint 
capital would set up a business in fruit or woods that would yield a 
comfortable support. "Good night, my world," would say Mrs. Conant 
every evening when Merriam left her for his hotel. They were very 
happy. Their love had, circumstantially, that element of melancholy in 
it that it seems to require to attain its supremest elevation. And it 
seemed that their mutual great misfortune or sin was a bond that 
nothing could sever.
   One day a steamer hove in the offing. Bare-legged and bare-
shouldered La Paz scampered down to the beach, for the arrival of a 
steamer was their loop-the-loop, circus, Emancipation Day and four-
o'clock tea.
   When the steamer was near enough, wise ones proclaimed that she was 
the Pajaro, bound up-coast from Callao to Panama.
   The Pajaro put on brakes a mile off shore. Soon a boat came 
bobbing shoreward. Merriam strolled down on the beach to look on. In 
the shallow water the Carib sailors sprang out and dragged the boat 
with a mighty rush to the firm shingle. Out climbed the purser, the 
captain and two passengers ploughing their way through the deep sand 
toward the hotel. Merriam glanced toward them with the mild interest 
due to strangers. There was something familiar to him in the walk of 
one of the passengers. He looked again, and his blood seemed to turn 
to strawberry ice cream in his veins. Burly, arrogant, debonair as 
ever, H. Ferguson Hedges, the man he had killed, was coming toward him 
ten feet away.
   When Hedges saw Merriam his face flushed a dark red. Then he 
shouted in his old, bluff way: "Hello, Merriam. Glad to see you. 
Didn't expect to find you out here. Quinby, this is my old friend 
Merriam, of New York-Merriam, Mr. Quinby."
   Merriam gave Hedges and then Quinby an ice-cold hand.
   "Br-r-r-r!" said Hedges. "But you've got a frappéd flipper! 
Man, you're not well. You're as yellow as a Chinaman. Malarial here? 
Steer us to a bar if there is such a thing, and let's take a 
prophylactic."
   Merriam, still half comatose, led them toward the Hotel Orilla del 
Mar.
   "Quinby and I," explained Hedges, puffing through the slippery 
sand, "are looking out along the coast for some investments. We've 
just come up from Concepción and Valparaiso and Lima. The captain 
of this subsidized ferry boat told us there was some good picking 
around here in silver mines. So we got off. Now, where is that 
café, Merriam? Oh, in this portable soda-water pavilion?"
   Leaving Quinby at the bar, Hedges drew Merriam aside.
   "Now, what does this mean?" he said, with gruff kindness. "Are you 
sulking about that fool row we had?"
   "I thought," stammered Merriam-"I heard-they told me you were- that 
I had--"
   "Well, you didn't, and I'm not," said Hedges. "That fool young 
ambulance surgeon told Wade I was a candidate for a coffin just 
because I'd got tired and quit breathing. I laid up in a private 
hospital for a month; but here I am, kicking as hard as ever. Wade and 
I tried to find you, but couldn't. Now, Merriam, shake hands and 
forget it all. I was as much to blame as you were; and the shot really 
did me good-I came out of the hospital as healthy and fit as a cab 
horse. Come on; that drink's waiting."
   "Old man," said Merriam, brokenly, "I don't know how to thank you- 
I-well, you know--"
   "Oh, forget it," boomed Hedges. "Quinby'll die of thirst if we 
don't join him."
   Bibb was sitting on the shady side of the gallery waiting for the 
eleven-o'clock breakfast. Presently Merriam came out and joined him. 
His eye was strangely bright.
   "Bibb, my boy," said he, slowly waving his hand, "do you see those 
mountains and that sea and sky and sunshine?-they're mine, Bibbsy-all 
mine."
   "You go in," said Bibb, "and take eight grains of quinine, right 
away. It won't do in this climate for a man to get to thinking he's 
Rockefeller, or James O'Neill either."
   Inside, the purser was untying a great roll of newspapers, many of 
them weeks old, gathered in the lower ports by the Pajaro to be 
distributed at casual stopping-places. Thus do the beneficent voyagers 
scatter news and entertainment among the prisoners of sea and 
mountains.
   Tio Pancho, the hotel proprietor, set his great silver-rimmed 
anteojos upon his nose and divided the papers into a number of 
smaller rolls. A barefooted muchacho dashed in, desiring the 
post of messenger.
   "Bien venido," said Tio Pancho. "This to Señora Conant; 
that to el Doctor S-S-Schlegel-Dios! what a name to say!-that 
to Señor Davis- one for Don Alberto. These two for the Casa de 
Huespedes, Numero 6, en la calle de las Buenas Gracias. And say to 
them all, muchacho, that the Pajaro sails for Panama at 
three this afternoon. If any have letters to send by the post, let 
them come quickly, that they may first pass through the 
correo."
   Mrs. Conant received her roll of newspapers at four o'clock. The 
boy was late in delivering them, because he had been deflected from 
his duty by an iguana that crossed his path and to which he 
immediately gave chase. But it made no hardship, for she had no 
letters to send.
   She was idling in a hammock in the patio of the house that 
she occupied, half awake, half happily dreaming of the paradise that 
she and Merriam had created out of the wrecks of their pasts. She was 
content now for the horizon of that shimmering sea to be the horizon 
of her life. They had shut out the world and closed the door.
   Merriam was coming to her house at seven, after his dinner at the 
hotel. She would put on a white dress and an apricot-coloured lace 
mantilla, and they would walk an hour under the coconut palms by the 
lagoon. She smiled contentedly, and chose a paper at random from the 
roll the boy had brought.
   At first the words of a certain headline of a Sunday newspaper 
meant nothing to her; they conveyed only a visualized sense of 
familiarity. The largest type ran thus: "Lloyd B. Conant secures 
divorce." And then the subheadings: "Well-known Saint Louis paint 
manufacturer wins suit, pleading one year's absence of wife." "Her 
mysterious disappearance recalled." "Nothing has been heard of her 
since."
   Twisting herself quickly out of the hammock, Mrs. Conant's eye soon 
traversed the half-column of the "Recall." It ended thus: "It will be 
remembered that Mrs. Conant disappeared one evening in March of last 
year. It was freely rumoured that her marriage with Lloyd B. Conant 
resulted in much unhappiness. Stories were not wanting to the effect 
that his cruelty toward his wife had more than once taken the form of 
physical abuse. After her departure a full bottle of tincture of 
aconite, a deadly poison, was found in a small medicine cabinet in her 
bedroom. This might have been an indication that she meditated 
suicide. It is supposed that she abandoned such an intention if she 
possessed it, and left her home instead."
   Mrs. Conant slowly dropped the paper, and sat on a chair, clasping 
her hands tightly.
   "Let me think-O God!-let me think," she whispered. "I took the 
bottle with me … I threw it out of the window of the train … 
I-- … there was another bottle in the cabinet … there were 
two, side by side-the aconite-and the valerian that I took when I 
could not sleep … If they found the aconite bottle full, why-but, 
he is alive, of course -I gave him only a harmless dose of valerian 
… I am not a murderess in fact … Ralph, I-O God, don't let 
this be a dream!"
   She went into the part of the house that she rented from the old 
Peruvian man and his wife, shut the door, and walked up and down her 
room swiftly and feverishly for half an hour. Merriam's photograph 
stood in a frame on a table. She picked it up, looked at it with a 
smile of exquisite tenderness, and-dropped four tears on it. And 
Merriam only twenty rods away! Then she stood still for ten minutes, 
looking into space. She looked into space through a slowly opening 
door. On her side of the door was the building material for a castle 
of Romance-love, an Arcady of waving palms, a lullaby of waves on the 
shore of a haven of rest, respite, peace, a lotus land of dreamy ease 
and security-a life of poetry and heart's ease and refuge. 
Romanticist, will you tell me what Mrs. Conant saw on the other side 
of the door? You cannot?-that is, you will not? Very well; then 
listen.
   She saw herself go into a department store and buy five spools 
of silk thread and three yards of gingham to make an apron for the 
cook. "Shall I charge it, ma'am?" asked the clerk. As she walked out a 
lady whom she met greeted her cordially. "Oh, where did you get the 
pattern for those sleeves, dear Mrs. Conant?" she said. At the corner 
a policeman helped her across the street and touched his helmet. "Any 
callers?" she asked the maid when she reached home. "Mrs. Waldron," 
answered the maid, "and the two Misses Jenkinson." "Very well," she 
said. "You may bring me a cup of tea, Maggie."
   Mrs. Conant went to the door and called Angela, the old Peruvian 
woman. "If Mateo is there send him to me." Mateo, a half-breed, 
shuffling and old but efficient, came.
   "Is there a steamer or a vessel of any kind leaving this coast to-
night or to-morrow that I can get passage on?" she asked.
   Mateo considered.
   "At Punta Reina, thirty miles down the coast, señora," he 
answered, "there is a small steamer loading with cinchona and 
dyewoods. She sail for San Francisco to-morrow at sunrise. So says my 
brother, who arrived in his sloop to-day, passing by Punta Reina."
   "You must take me in that sloop to that steamer to-night. Will you 
do that?"
   "Perhaps-" Mateo shrugged a suggestive shoulder. Mrs. Conant took 
a handful of money from a drawer and gave it to him.
   "Get the sloop ready behind the little point of land below the 
town," she ordered. "Get sailors, and be ready to sail at six o'clock. 
In half an hour bring a cart partly filled with straw into the 
patio here, and take my trunk to the sloop. There is more money 
yet. Now, hurry."
   For one time Mateo walked away without shuffling his feet.
   "Angela," cried Mrs. Conant, almost fiercely, "come and help me 
pack. I am going away. Out with this trunk. My clothes first. Stir 
yourself. Those dark dresses first. Hurry."
   From the first she did not waver from her decision. Her view was 
clear and final. Her door had opened and let the world in. Her love 
for Merriam was not lessened; but it now appeared a hopeless and 
unrealizable thing. The visions of their future that had seemed so 
blissful and complete had vanished. She tried to assure herself that 
her renunciation was rather for his sake than for her own. Now that 
she was cleared of her burden-at least, technically-would not his own 
weigh too heavily upon him? If she should cling to him, would not the 
difference forever silently mar and corrode their happiness? Thus she 
reasoned; but there were a thousand little voices calling to her that 
she could feel rather than hear, like the hum of distant, powerful 
machinery-the little voices of the world, that, when raised in unison, 
can send their insistent call through the thickest door.
   Once while packing, a brief shadow of the lotus dream came back to 
her. She held Merriam's picture to her heart with one hand, while she 
threw a pair of shoes into the trunk with her other.
   At six o'clock Mateo returned and reported the sloop ready. He and 
his brother lifted the trunk into the cart, covered it with straw and 
conveyed it to the point of embarkation. From there they transferred 
it on board in the sloop's dory. Then Mateo returned for additional 
orders.
   Mrs. Conant was ready. She had settled all business matters with 
Angela, and was impatiently waiting. She wore a long, loose black-silk 
duster that she often walked about in when the evenings were chilly. 
On her head was a small round hat, and over it the apricot-coloured 
lace mantilla.
   Dusk had quickly followed the short twilight. Mateo led her by dark 
and grass-grown streets toward the point behind which the sloop was 
anchored. On turning a corner they beheld the Hotel Orilla del Mar 
three streets away, nebulously aglow with its array of kerosene lamps.
   Mrs. Conant paused, with streaming eyes. "I must, I must see 
him once before I go," she murmured in anguish. But even then she did 
not falter in her decision. Quickly she invented a plan by which she 
might speak to him, and yet make her departure without his knowing. 
She would walk past the hotel, ask some one to call him out and talk a 
few moments on some trivial excuse, leaving him expecting to see her 
at her home at seven.
   She unpinned her hat and gave it to Mateo. "Keep this, and wait 
here till I come," she ordered. Then she draped the mantilla over her 
head as she usually did when walking after sunset, and went straight 
to the Orilla del Mar.
   She was glad to see the bulky, white-clad figure of Tio Pancho 
standing alone on the gallery.
   "Tio Pancho," she said, with a charming smile, "may I trouble you 
to ask Mr. Merriam to come out for just a few moments that I may speak 
with him?"
   Tio Pancho bowed as an elephant bows.
   "Buenas tardes, Señora Conant," he said, as a cavalier 
talks. And then he went on, less at his ease:
   "But does not the señora know that Señor Merriam sailed 
on the Pajaro for Panama at three o'clock of this afternoon?"