O. Henry

                 The Defeat of the City


   Robert Walmsley's descent upon the city resulted in a Kilkenny 
struggle. He came out of the fight victor by a fortune and a 
reputation. On the other hand, he was swallowed up by the city. The 
city gave him what he demanded, and then branded him, with its brand. 
It remodelled, cut, trimmed and stamped him to the pattern it 
approves. It opened its social gates to him, and shot him in on a 
close-cropped, formal lawn with the select herd of ruminants. In 
dress, habits, manners, provincialism, routine and narrowness, he 
acquired that charming insolence, that irritating completeness, that 
sophisticated crassness, that overbalanced poise that makes the 
Manhattan gentleman so delightfully small in his greatness.
   One of the up-state rural counties pointed with pride to the 
successful young metropolitan lawyer as a product of its soil. Six 
years earlier this county had removed the wheat straw from between its 
huckleberry-stained teeth, and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as 
old man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain three-
per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick-lunch 
counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years 
no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was 
complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure. Tailors 
waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from the cut of his 
unwrinkled trousers. Hyphenated fellows in the clubs and members of 
the oldest subpœnaed families were glad to clap him on the back 
and allow him three letters of his name.
   But the Matterhorn of Robert Walmsley's success was not scaled 
until he married Alicia Van Der Pool. I cite the Matterhorn, for just 
so high and cool and white and inaccessible was this daughter of the 
old burghers. The social Alps that ranged about her-over whose bleak 
passes a thousand climbers struggled-reached only to her knees. She 
towered in her own atmosphere, serene, chaste, prideful, wading in no 
fountains, dining no monkeys, breeding no dogs for bench shows. She 
was a Van Der Pool. Fountains were made to play for her; monkeys were 
made for other people's ancestors; dogs, she understood, were created 
to be companions of blind persons and objectionable characters who 
smoked pipes.
   This was the Matterhorn that Robert Walmsley accomplished. If he 
found, with the good poet with the game foot and artificially curled 
hair, that he who ascends to mountain-tops will find the loftiest 
peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow, he concealed his chilblains 
beneath a brave and smiling exterior. He was a lucky man and knew it, 
even though he were imitating the Spartan boy with an ice-cream 
freezer beneath his doublet frappéeing the region of his heart.
   After a brief wedding-tour abroad, the couple returned to create a 
decided ripple in the calm cistern (so placid and cool and sunless it 
is) of the best society. They entertained at their red-brick mausoleum 
of ancient greatness in an old square that is a cemetery of crumbled 
glory. And Robert Walmsley was proud of his wife; although while one 
of his hands shook his guests' the other held tightly to his 
alpenstock and thermometer.
   One day Alicia found a letter written to Robert by his mother. It 
was an unerudite letter, full of crops and motherly love and farm 
notes. It chronicled the health of the pig and the recent red calf, 
and asked concerning Robert's in return. It was a letter direct from 
the soil, straight from home, full of biographies of bees, tales of 
turnips, pæans of new-laid eggs, neglected parents, and the slump 
in dried apples.
   "Why have I not been shown your mother's letters?" asked Alicia. 
There was always something in her voice that made you think of 
lorgnettes, of accounts at Tiffany's, of sledges smoothly gliding on 
the trail from Dawson to Forty Mile, of the tinkling of pendant prisms 
on your grandmother's chandeliers, of snow lying on a convent roof; of 
a police sergeant refusing bail. "Your mother," continued Alicia, 
"invites us to make a visit to the farm. I have never seen a farm. We 
will go there for a week or two, Robert."
   "We will," said Robert, with the grand air of an associate Supreme 
Justice concurring in an opinion. "I did not lay the invitation before 
you because I thought you would not care to go. I am much pleased at 
your decision."
   "I will write to her myself," answered Alicia, with a faint 
foreshadowing of enthusiasm. "Félice shall pack my trunks at 
once. Seven, I think, will be enough. I do not suppose that your 
mother entertains a great deal. Does she give many house parties?"
   Robert arose, and as attorney for rural places filed a demurrer 
against six of the seven trunks. He endeavoured to define, picture, 
elucidate, set forth, and describe a farm. His own words sounded 
strange in his ears. He had not realised how thoroughly urbsidised he 
had become.
   A week passed, and found them landed at the little country station 
five hours out from the city. A grinning, stentorian, sarcastic youth 
driving a mule to a spring wagon hailed Robert savagely.
   "Hallo, Mr. Walmsley. Found your way back at last, have you? Sorry 
I couldn't bring in the automobile for you, but dad's bulltonguing the 
ten-acre clover patch with it to-day. Guess you'll excuse my not 
wearing a dress suit over to meet you-it ain't six o'clock yet, you 
know."
   "I'm glad to see you, Tom," said Robert, grasping his brother's 
hand. "Yes, I've found my way at last. You've a right to say `at 
last.' It's been over two years since the last time. But it will be 
oftener after this, my boy."
   Alicia, cool in the summer heat as an Arctic wraith, white as a 
Norse snow maiden in her flimsy muslin and fluttering lace parasol, 
came round the corner of the station; and Tom was stripped of his 
assurance. He became chiefly eyesight clothed in blue jeans, and on 
the homeward drive to the mule alone did he confide in language the 
inwardness of his thoughts.
   They drove homeward. The low sun dropped a spendthrift flood of 
gold upon the fortunate fields of wheat. The cities were far away. The 
road lay curling around wood and dale and hill like a ribbon lost from 
the robe of careless summer. The wind followed like a whinnying colt 
in the track of Phœbus's steeds.
   By and by the farmhouse peeped grey out of its faithful grove; they 
saw the long lane with its convoy of walnut trees running from the 
road to the house; they smelled the wild rose and the breath of cool, 
damp willows in the creek's bed. And then in unison all the voices of 
the soil began a chant addressed to the soul of Robert Walmsley. Out 
of the tilted aisles of the dim wood they came hollowly; they chirped 
and buzzed from the parched grass; they trilled from the ripples of 
the creek ford; they floated up in clear Pan's pipe notes from the 
dimming meadows; the whip-poor-wills joined in as they pursued midges 
in the upper air; slow-going cowbells struck out a homely 
accompaniment-and this was what each one said: "You've found your way 
back at last, have you?"
   The old voices of the soil spoke to him. Leaf and bud and blossom 
conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth-the 
inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows 
and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a power in 
the transformation. The country had smiled, and he had felt the breath 
of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love. 
The city was far away.
   This rural atavism, then, seized Robert Walmsley and possessed him. 
A queer thing he noticed in connection with it was that Alicia, 
sitting at his side, suddenly seemed to him a stranger. She did not 
belong to this recurrent phase. Never before had she seemed so remote, 
so colourless and high-so intangible and unreal. And yet he had never 
admired her more than when she sat there by him in the rickety spring 
wagon, chiming no more with his mood and with her environment than the 
Matterhorn chimes with a peasant's cabbage garden.
   That night, when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire 
family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the 
front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed 
in an exquisite pale-grey tea-gown. Robert's mother discoursed to her 
happily concerning marmalade and lumbago. Tom sat on the top step; 
Sisters Millie and Pam on the lowest step to catch the lightning bugs. 
Mother had the willow rocker. Father sat in the big arm-chair with one 
of its arms gone. Buff sprawled in the middle of the porch in 
everybody's way. The twilight pixies and pucks stole forth unseen and 
plunged other poignant shafts of memory into the heart of Robert. A 
rural madness entered his soul. The city was far away.
   Father sat without his pipe, writhing in his heavy boots, a 
sacrifice to rigid courtesy. Robert shouted: "No, you don't!" He 
fetched the pipe and lit it; he seized the old gentleman's boots and 
tore them off. The last one slipped suddenly, and Mr. Robert Walmsley, 
of Washington Square, tumbled off the porch backward with Buff on top 
of him, howling fearfully. Tom laughed sarcastically.
   Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac 
bush. "Come out here, you land-lubber," he cried to Tom, "and I'll put 
grass seed on your back. I think you called me a `dude' a while ago. 
Come along and cut your capers."
   Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with delight. Three 
times they wrestled on the grass, "side holds," even as the giants of 
the mat. And twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of the 
distinguished lawyer. Dishevelled, panting, each still boasting of his 
own prowess, they stumbled back to the porch. Millie cast a pert 
reflection upon the qualities of a city brother. In an instant Robert 
had secured a horried katydid in his fingers and bore down upon her. 
Screaming wildly, she fled up the lane, pursued by the avenging glass 
of form. A quarter of a mile and they returned, she full of apology to 
the victorious "dude." The rustic mania possessed him unabatedly.
   "I can do up a cowpenful of you slow hayseeds," he proclaimed 
vaingloriously. "Bring on your bulldogs, your hired men, and your log-
rollers."
   He turned hand-springs on the grass that prodded Tom to envious 
sarcasm. And then, with a whoop, he clattered to the rear and brought 
back Uncle Ike, a battered coloured retainer of the family, with his 
banjo, and strewed sand on the porch and danced "Chicken in the Bread 
Tray" and did buck-and-wing wonders for half an hour longer. 
Incredibly wild and boisterous things he did. He sang, he told stories 
that set all but one shrieking, he played the yokel, the humorous 
clodhopper; he was mad, mad with the revival of the old life in his 
blood.
   He became so extravagant, that once his mother sought gently to 
reprove him. Then Alicia moved as though she were about to speak, but 
she did not. Through it all she sat immovable, a slim, white spirit in 
the dusk that no man might question or read.
   By and by she asked permission to ascend to her room, saying that 
she was tired. On her way she passed Robert. He was standing in the 
door, the figure of vulgar comedy, with ruffled hair, reddened face, 
and unpardonable confusion of attire-no trace there of the immaculate 
Robert Walmsley, the courted clubman and ornament of select circles. 
He was doing a conjuring trick with some house-hold utensils, and the 
family, now won over to him without exception, was beholding him with 
worshipful admiration.
   As Alicia passed in Robert started suddenly. He had forgotten for 
the moment that she was present. Without a glance at him she went on 
upstairs.
   After that the fun grew quiet. An hour passed in talk, and then 
Robert went up himself.
   She was standing by the window when he entered their room. She was 
still clothed as when they were on the porch. Outside and crowding 
against the window was a giant apple tree, full blossomed.
   Robert sighed and went near the window. He was ready to meet his 
fate. A confessed vulgarian, he foresaw the verdict of justice in the 
shape of that still, white-clad form. He knew the rigid lines that a 
Van Der Pool would draw. He was a peasant gambolling indecorously in 
the valley, and the pure, cold, white, unthawed summit of the 
Matterhorn could not but frown on him. He had been unmasked by his own 
actions. All the polish, the poise, the form that the city had given 
him had fallen from him like an illfitting mantle at the first breath 
of a country breeze. Dully he awaited the approaching condemnation.
   "Robert," said the calm, cool voice of his judge, "I thought I 
married a gentleman."
   Yes, it was coming. And yet, in the face of it, Robert Walmsley was 
eagerly regarding a certain branch of the apple tree upon which he 
used to climb out of that very window. He believed he could do it now. 
He wondered how many blossoms there were on the tree-ten millions? But 
here was some one speaking again:
   "I thought I married a gentleman," the voice went on, "but-" Why 
had she come and was standing so close by his side?
   "But I find that I have married"-was this Alicia talking?-
"something better-a man. Bob, dear, kiss me, won't you?"
   The city was far away.