O. Henry

                   The Furnished Room


   Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk 
of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side. 
Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to 
furnished room, transients for ever-transients in abode, transients in 
heart and mind. They sing "Home, Sweet Home" in ragtime; they carry 
their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined 
about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.
   Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, 
should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but 
it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the 
wake of all these vagrant ghosts.
   One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling 
red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean 
hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hat-band and 
forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow 
depths.
   To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came 
a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm 
that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the 
vacancy with edible lodgers.
   He asked if there was a room to let.
   "Come in," said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; 
her throat seemed lined with fur. "I have the third floor back, vacant 
since a week back. Should you wish to look at it?"
   The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no 
particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod 
noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. 
It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, 
sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to 
the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter. At 
each turn of the stairs were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants 
had once been set within them. If so they had died in that foul and 
tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but 
it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them 
forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished 
pit below.
   "This is the room," said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. 
"It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some most elegant 
people in it last summer-no trouble at all, and paid in advance to the 
minute. The water's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it 
three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls-you 
may have heard of her-Oh, that was just the stage names-right there 
over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The 
gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It's a room 
everybody likes. It never stays idle long."
   "Do you have many theatrical people rooming here?" asked the young 
man.
   "They comes and goes. A good proportion of my lodgers is connected 
with the theatres. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actor 
people never stays long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they comes and 
they goes."
   He engaged the room, paying for a week in advance. He was tired, he 
said, and would take possession at once. He counted out the money. The 
room had been made ready, she said, even to towels and water. As the 
housekeeper moved away he put, for the thousandth time, the question 
that he carried at the end of his tongue.
   "A young girl-Miss Vashner-Miss Eloise Vashner-do you remember such 
a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage, most 
likely. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish gold 
hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow."
   "No, I don't remember the name. Them stage people has names they 
change as often as their rooms. They comes and they goes. No, I don't 
call that one to mind."
   No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the 
inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning 
managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences 
of theatres from all-star casts down to music halls so low that he 
dreaded to find what he most hoped for. He who had loved her best had 
tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home 
this great water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a 
monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly, with no 
foundation, its upper granules of to-day buried to-morrow in ooze and 
slime.
   The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of 
pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the 
specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected 
gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a 
couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier-glass between the two 
windows, from one or two gilt picture frames and a brass bedstead in a 
corner.
   The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused 
in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse 
to him of its divers tenantry.
   A polychromatic rug like some brilliant-flowered, rectangular, 
tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon 
the gay-papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one 
from house to house-The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The 
Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely 
severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn 
rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was 
some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky 
sail had borne them to a fresh port-a trifling vase or two, pictures 
of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of a deck.
   One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the 
little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests 
developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of 
the dresser told that lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny 
finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel 
their way to sun and air. A splattered strain, raying like the shadow 
of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had 
splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier-glass 
had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name 
"Marie." It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished 
room had turned in fury-perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its 
garish coldness-and wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was 
chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed 
a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some 
grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great 
slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its 
particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It 
seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought 
upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and 
yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the 
resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A 
hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.
   The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-
shod, through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished 
sounds and furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and 
incontinent, slack laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the 
rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one crying dully; above him a banjo 
tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains 
roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably upon a back fence. And 
he breathed the breath of the house-a dank savour rather than a smell-
a cold, musty effluvium as from underground vaults mingled with the 
reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed and rotten woodwork.
   Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the 
strong, sweet odour of mignonette. It came as upon a single buffet of 
wind with such sureness and fragrance and emphasis that it almost 
seemed a living visitant. And the man cried aloud, "What, dear?" as if 
he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odour 
clung to him and wrapped him about. He reached out his arms for it, 
all his senses for the time confused and commingled. How could one be 
peremptorily called by an odour? Surely it must have been a sound. 
But, was it not the sound that had touched, that had caressed him?
   "She has been in this room," he cried, and he sprang to wrest from 
it a token, for he knew he would recognise the smallest thing that had 
belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of 
mignonette, the odour that she had loved and made her own-whence came 
it?
   The room had been but carelessly set in order. Scattered upon the 
flimsy dresser scarf were half-a-dozen hairpins-those discreet, 
indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine of gender, infinite 
of mood and uncommunicative of tense. These he ignored, conscious of 
their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the drawers of the 
dresser he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He 
pressed it to his face. It was racy and insolent with heliotrope; he 
hurled it to the floor. In another drawer he found odd buttons, a 
theatre programme, a pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, a book 
on the divination of dreams. In the last was a woman's black satin 
hair-bow, which halted him, poised between ice and fire. But the black 
satin hair-bow also is femininity's demure, impersonal, common 
ornament, and tells no tales.
   And then he traversed the room like a hound on the scent, skimming 
the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands 
and knees, rummaging mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the 
drunken cabinet in the corner, for a visible sign, unable to perceive 
that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him, 
clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the 
finer senses that even his grosser ones became cognisant of the call. 
Once again he answered loudly, "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to 
gaze on vacancy, for he could not yet discern form and colour and love 
and outstretched arms in the odour of mignonette. Oh, God! whence that 
odour, and since when have odours had a voice to call? Thus he groped. 
He burrowed in crevices and corners, and found corks and cigarettes. 
These he passed in passive contempt. But once he found in a fold of 
the matting a half-smoked cigar, and this he ground beneath his heel 
with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted the room from end to end. 
He found dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic 
tenant; but of her whom he sought, and who may have lodged there, and 
whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace. And then he 
thought of the housekeeper.
   He ran from the haunted room downstairs and to a door that showed a 
crack of light. She came out to his knock. He smothered his excitement 
as best he could.
   "Will you tell me, madam," he besought her, "who occupied the room 
I have before I came?"
   "Yes, sir. I can tell you again. 'Twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I 
said. Miss B'retta Sprowls it was in the theatres, but Missis Mooney 
she was. My house is well known for respectability. The marriage 
certificate hung, framed, on a nail over-"
   "What kind of a lady was Miss Sprowls-in looks, I mean?"
   "Why, black-haired, sir, short, and stout, with a comical face. 
They left a week ago Tuesday."
   "And before they occupied it?"
   "Why, there was a single gentleman connected with the draying 
business. He left owing me a week. Before him was Missis Crowder and 
her two children, that stayed four months; and back of them was old 
Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room six months. That 
goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember."
   He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room was dead. The 
essence that had vivified it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had 
departed. In its place was the old, stale odour of mouldly house 
furniture, of atmosphere in storage.
   The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the 
yellow, singing gaslight. Soon he walked to the bed and began to tear 
the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them 
tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug 
and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again, and 
laid himself gratefully upon the bed.
   It was Mrs. McCool's night to go with the can for beer. So she 
fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean 
retreats where housekeepers forgather and the worm dieth seldom.
   "I rented out my third floor back this evening," said Mrs. Purdy, 
across a fine circle of foam. "A young man took it. He went up to bed 
two hours ago."
   "Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?" said Mrs. McCool, with intense 
admiration. "You do be a wonder for rentin' rooms of that kind. And 
did ye tell him, then?" she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with 
mystery.
   "Rooms," said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, "are furnished for 
to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool."
   "'Tis right ye are, ma'am; 'tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye 
have the rale sense for business, ma'am. There be many people will 
rayjict the rentin' of a room if they be tould a suicide has been 
after dyin' in the bed of it."
   "As you say, we has our living to be making," remarked Mrs. Purdy.
   "Yis, ma'am; 'tis true. 'Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye 
lay out the third floor back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be 
killin' herself wid the gas-a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, 
ma'am."
   "She'd a-been called handsome, as you say," said Mrs. Purdy, 
assenting but critical, "but for that mole she had a-growin' by her 
left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool."