O. Henry

                          Best-Seller



Файл с книжной полки Несененко Алексея



I


One day last summer I went to Pittsburgh--well, I had to go there on 
business.

My chair-car was profitably well filled with people of the kind one 
usually sees on chair-cars.  Most of them were ladies in brown-silk 
dresses cut with square yokes, with lace insertion, and dotted veils, 
who refused to have the windows raised.  Then there was the usual 
number of men who looked as if they might be in almost any business 
and going almost anywhere.  Some students of human nature can look at 
a man in a Pullman and tell you where he is from, his occupation and 
his stations in life, both flag and social; but I never could.  The 
only way I can correctly judge a fellow-traveller is when the train is 
held up by robbers, or when he reaches at the same time I do for the 
last towel in the dressing-room of the sleeper.

The porter came and brushed the collection of soot on the window-sill 
off to the left knee of my trousers.  I removed it with an air of 
apology.  The temperature was eighty-eight.  One of the dotted-veiled 
ladies demanded the closing of two more ventilators, and spoke loudly 
of Interlaken.  I leaned back idly in chair No.  7, and looked with 
the tepidest curiosity at the small, black, bald-spotted head just 
visible above the back of No.  9.

Suddenly No.  9 hurled a book to the floor between his chair and the 
window, and, looking, I saw that it was The Rose-Lady and Trevelyan, 
one of the best-selling novels of the present day.  And then the 
critic or Philistine, whichever he was, veered his chair toward the 
window, and I knew him at once for John A.  Pescud, of Pittsburgh, 
travelling salesman for a plate-glass company--an old acquaintance 
whom I had not seen in two years.

In two minutes we were faced, had shaken hands, and had finished with 
such topics as rain, prosperity, health, residence, and destination.  
Politics might have followed next; but I was not so ill-fated.

I wish you might know John A.  Pescud.  He is of the stuff that heroes 
are not often lucky enough to be made of.  He is a small man with a 
wide smile, and an eye that seems to be fixed upon that little red 
spot on the end of your nose.  I never saw him wear but one kind of 
necktie, and he believes in cuff-holders and button-shoes.  He is as 
hard and true as anything ever turned out by the Cambria Steel Works; 
and he believes that as soon as Pittsburgh makes smoke-consumers 
compulsory, St.  Peter will come down and sit at the foot of 
Smithfield Street, and let somebody else attend to the gate up in the 
branch heaven.  He believes that "our" plate-glass is the most 
important commodity in the world, and that when a man is in his home 
town he ought to be decent and law-abiding.

During my acquaintance with him in the City of Diurnal Night I had 
never known his views on life, romance, literature, and ethics.  We 
had browsed, during our meetings, on local topics, and then parted, 
after Chateau Margaux, Irish stew, flannel-cakes, cottage-pudding, and 
coffee (hey, there!--with milk separate).  Now I was to get more of 
his ideas.  By way of facts, he told me that business had picked up 
since the party conventions, and that he was going to get off at 
Coketown.


II


"Say," said Pescud, stirring his discarded book with the toe of his 
right shoe, "did you ever read one of these best-sellers?  I mean the 
kind where the hero is an American swell--sometimes even from Chicago-
-who falls in love with a royal princess from Europe who is travelling 
under an alias, and follows her to her father's kingdom or 
principality?  I guess you have.  They're all alike.  Sometimes this 
going-away masher is a Washington newspaper correspondent, and 
sometimes he is a Van Something from New York, or a Chicago wheat-
broker worthy fifty millions.  But he's always ready to break into the 
king row of any foreign country that sends over their queens and 
princesses to try the new plush seats on the Big Four or the B.  and 
0.  There doesn't seem to be any other reason in the book for their 
being here.

"Well, this fellow chases the royal chair-warmer home, as I said, and 
finds out who she is.  He meets here on the corso or the strasse one 
evening and gives us ten pages of conversation.  She reminds him of 
the difference in their stations, and that gives him a chance to ring 
in three solid pages about America's uncrowned sovereigns.  If you'd 
take his remarks and set 'em to music, and then take the music away 
from 'em, they'd sound exactly like one of George Cohan's songs.

"Well, you know how it runs on, if you ve read any of 'em--he slaps 
the king's Swiss body-guards around like everything whenever they get 
in his way.  He's a great fencer, too.  Now, I've known of some 
Chicago men who were pretty notorious fences, but I never heard of any 
fencers coming from there.  He stands on the first landing of the 
royal staircase in Castle Schutzenfestenstein with a gleaming rapier 
in his hand, and makes a Baltimore broil of six platoons of traitors 
who come to massacre the said king.  And then he has to fight duels 
with a couple of chancellors, and foil a plot by four Austrian 
archdukes to seize the kingdom for a gasoline-station.

"But the great scene is when his rival for the princess' hand, Count 
Feodor, attacks him between the portcullis and the ruined chapel, 
armed with a mitrailleuse, a yataghan, and a couple of Siberian 
bloodhounds.  This scene is what runs the best-seller into the twenty-
ninth edition before the publisher has had time to draw a check for 
the advance royalties.

"The American hero shucks his coat and throws it over the heads of the 
bloodhounds, gives the mitrailleuse a slap with his mitt, says 'Yah!' 
to the yataghan, and lands in Kid McCoy's best style on the count's 
left eye.  Of course, we have a neat little prize-fight right then and 
there.  The count--in order to make the go possible--seems to be an 
expert at the art of self-defence, himself; and here we have the 
Corbett-Sullivan fight done over into literature.  The book ends with 
the broker and the princess doing a John Cecil Clay cover under the 
linden-trees on the Gorgonzola Walk.  That winds up the love-story 
plenty good enough.  But I notice that the book dodges the final 
issue.  Even a best-seller has sense enough to shy at either leaving a 
Chicago grain broker on the throne of Lobsterpotsdam or bringing over 
a real princess to eat fish and potato salad in an Italian chalet on 
Michigan Avenue.  What do you think about 'em?"

"Why," said I, "I hardly know, John.  There's a saying: 'Love levels 
all ranks,' you know."

"Yes," said Pescud, "but these kind of love-stories are rank--on the 
level.  I know something about literature, even if I am in plate-
glass.  These kind of books are wrong, and yet I never go into a train 
but what they pile 'em up on me.  No good can come out of an 
international clinch between the Old-World aristocracy and one of us 
fresh Americans.  When people in real life marry, they generally hunt 
up somebody in their own station.  A fellow usually picks out a girl 
that went to the same high-school and belonged to the same singing-
society that he did.  When young millionaires fall in love, they 
always select the chorus-girl that likes the same kind of sauce on the 
lobster that he does.  Washington newspaper correspondents always many 
widow ladies ten years older than themselves who keep boarding-houses.  
No, sir, you can't make a novel sound right to me when it makes one of 
C.  D.  Gibson's bright young men go abroad and turn kingdoms upside 
down just because he's a Taft American aud took a course at a 
gymnasium.  And listen how they talk, too!"

Pescud picked up the best-seller and hunted his page.

"Listen at this," said he.  "Trevelyan is chinning with the Princess 
Alwyna at the back end of the tulip-garden.  This is how it goes:


"'Say not so, dearest and sweetest of earth's fairest flowers.  Would 
I aspire?  You are a star set high above me in a royal heaven; I am 
only--myself.  Yet I am a man, and I have a heart to do and dare.  I 
have no title save that of an uncrowned sovereign; but I have an arm 
and a sword that yet might free Schutzenfestenstein from the plots of 
traitors.'

"Think of a Chicago man packing a sword, and talking about freeing 
anything that sounded as much like canned pork as that!  He'd be much 
more likely to fight to have an import duty put on it."

"I think I understand you, John," said I.  "You want fiction-writers 
to be consistent with their scenes and characters.  They shouldn't mix 
Turkish pashas with Vermont farmers, or English dukes with Long Island 
clam-diggers, or Italian countesses with Montana cowboys, or 
Cincinnati brewery agents with the rajahs of India."

"Or plain business men with aristocracy high above 'em," added Pescud.  
"It don't jibe.  People are divided into classes, whether we admit it 
or not, and it's everybody's impulse to stick to their own class.  
They do it, too.  I don't see why people go to work and buy hundreds 
of thousands of books like that.  You don't see or hear of any such 
didoes and capers in real life."


III


"Well, John," said I, "I haven't read a best-seller in a long time.  
Maybe I've had notions about them somewhat like yours.  But tell me 
more about yourself.  Getting along all right with the company?"

"Bully," said Pescud, brightening at once.  "I've had my salary raised 
twice since I saw you, and I get a commission, too.  I've bought a 
neat slice of real estate out in the East End, and have run up a house 
on it.  Next year the firm is going to sell me some shares of stock.  
Oh, I'm in on the line of General Prosperity, no matter who's 
elected!"

"Met your affinity yet, John?" I asked.

"Oh, I didn't tell you about that, did I?" said Pescud with a broader 
grin.

"0-ho!" I said.  "So you've taken time enough off from your plate-
glass to have a romance?"

"No, no," said John.  "No romance--nothing like that!  But I'll tell 
you about it.

"I was on the south-bound, going to Cincinnati, about eighteen months 
ago, when I saw, across the aisle, the finest-looking girl I'd ever 
laid eyes on.  Nothing spectacular, you know, but just the sort you 
want for keeps.  Well, I never was up to the flirtation business, 
either handkerchief, automobile, postage-stamp, or door-step, and she 
wasn't the kind to start anything.  She read a book and minded her 
business, which was to make the world prettier and better just by 
residing on it.  I kept on looking out of the side doors of my eyes, 
and finally the proposition got out of the Pullman class into a case 
of a cottage with a lawn and vines running over the porch.  I never 
thought of speaking to her, but I let the plate-glass business go to 
smash for a while.

"She changed cars at Cincinnati, and took a sleeper to Louisville over 
the L.  and N.  There she bought another ticket, and went on through 
Shelbyville, Frankfort, and Lexington.  Along there I began to have a 
hard time keeping up with her.  The trains came along when they 
pleased, and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular, except to 
keep on the track and the right of way as much as possible.  Then they 
began to stop at junctions instead of towns, and at last they stopped 
altogether.  I'll bet Pinkerton would outbid the plate-glass people 
for my services any time if they knew how I managed to shadow that 
young lady.  I contrived to keep out of her sight as much as I could, 
but I never lost track of her.

"The last station she got off at was away down in Virginia, about six 
in the afternoon.  There were about fifty houses and four hundred 
niggers in sight.  The rest was red mud, mules, and speckled hounds.

"A tall old man, with a smooth face and white hair, looking as proud 
as Julius Caesar and Roscoe Conkling on the same post-card, was there 
to meet her.  His clothcs were frazzled, but I didn't notice that till 
later.  He took her little satchel, and they started over the plank-

walks and went up a road along the hill.  I kept along a piece behind 
'em, trying to look like I was hunting a garnet ring in the sand that 
my sister had lost at a picnic the previous Saturday.

"They went in a gate on top of the hill.  It nearly took my breath 
away when I looked up.  Up there in the biggest grove I ever saw was a 
tremendous house with round white pillars about a thousand feet high, 
and the yard was so full of rose-bushes and box-bushes and lilacs that 
you couldn't have seen the house if it hadn't been as big as the 
Capitol at Washington.

"'Here's where I have to trail,' says I to myself.  "I thought before 
that she seemed to be in moderate circumstances, at least.  This must 
be the Governor's mansion, or the Agricultural Building of a new 
World's Fair, anyhow.  I'd better go back to the village and get 
posted by the postmaster, or drug the druggist for some information.

"In the village I found a pine hotel called the Bay View House.  The 
only excuse for the name was a bay horse grazing in the front yard.  I 
set my sample-case down, and tried to be ostensible.  I told the 
landlord I was taking orders for plate-glass.

"'I don't want no plates,' says he, 'but I do need another glass 
molasses-pitcher.'

"By-and-by I got him down to local gossip and answering questions.

"'Why,' says he, 'I thought everybody knowed who lived in the big 
white house on the hill.  It's Colonel Allyn, the biggest man and the 
finest quality in Virginia, or anywhere else.  They're the oldest 
family in the State.  That was his daughter that got off the train.  
She's been up to Illinois to see her aunt, who is sick.'

"I registered at the hotel, and on the third day I caught the young 
lady walking in the front yard, down next to the paling fence.  I 
stopped and raised my hat--there wasn't any other way.

"'Excuse me,' says I, 'can you tell me where Mr.  Hinkle lives?'

"She looks at me as cool as if I was the man come to see about the 
weeding of the garden, but I thought I saw just a slight twinkle of 
fun in her eyes.

"'No one of that name lives in Birchton,' says she.  'That is,' she 
goes on, 'as far as I know.  Is the gentleman you are seeking white?'

"Well, that tickled me.  'No kidding,' says I.  'I'm not looking for 
smoke, even if I do come from Pittsburgh.'

"'You are quite a distance from home,' says she.

"'I'd have gone a thousand miles farther,' says I.

"'Not if you hadn't waked up when the train started in Shelbyville,' 
says she; and then she turned almost as red as one of the roses on the 
bushes in the yard.  I remembered I had dropped off to sleep on a 
bench in the Shelbyville station, waiting to see which train she took, 
and only just managed to wake up in time.

"And then I told her why I had come, as respectful and earnest as I 
could.  And I told her everything about myself, and what I was making, 
and how that all I asked was just to get acquainted with her and try 
to get her to like me.

"She smiles a little, and blushes some, but her eyes never get mixed 
up.  They look straight at whatever she's talking to.

"'I never had any one talk like this to me before, Mr.  Pescud,' says 
she.  'What did you say your name is--John?'

"'John A.,' says I.

"'And you came mighty near missing the train at Powhatan Junction, 
too,' says she, with a laugh that sounded as good as a mileage-book to 
me.

"'How did you know?' I asked.

"'Men are very clumsy,' said she.  'I knew you were on every train.  I 
thought you were going to speak to me, and I'm glad you didn't.'

"Then we had more talk; and at last a kind of proud, serious look came 
on her face, and she turned and pointed a finger at the big house.

"'The Allyns,' says she, 'have lived in Elmcroft for a hundred years.  
We are a proud family.  Look at that mansion.  It has fifty rooms.  
See the pillars and porches and balconies.  The ceilings in the 
reception-rooms and the ball-room are twenty-eight feet high.  My 
father is a lineal descendant of belted earls.'

"'I belted one of 'em once in the Duquesne Hotel, in Pittsburgh,' says 
I, 'and he didn't offer to resent it.  He was there dividing his 
attentions between Monongahela whiskey and heiresses, and he got 
fresh.'

"'Of course,' she goes on, 'my father wouldn't allow a drummer to set 
his foot in Elmeroft.  If he knew that I was talking to one over the 
fence he would lock me in my room.'

"'Would you let me come there?' says I.  'Would you talk to me if I 
was to call?  For,' I goes on, 'if you said I might come and see you, 
the earls might be belted or suspendered, or pinned up with safety-
pins, as far as I am concerned.'

"'I must not talk to you,' she says, 'because we have not been 
introduced.  It is not exactly proper.  So I will say good-bye, Mr.--'
"'Say the name,' says I.  'You haven't forgotten it.'

"'Pescud,' says she, a little mad.

"'The rest of the name!' I demands, cool as could be.

"'John,' says she.

"'John-what?' I says.

"'John A.,' says she, with her head high.  'Are you through, now?'

"'I'm coming to see the belted earl to-morrow,' I says.

"'He'll feed you to his fox-hounds,' says she, laughing.

"'If he does, it'll improve their running,' says I.  'I'm something of 
a hunter myself.'

"'I must be going in now,' says she.  'I oughtn't to have spoken to 
you at all.  I hope you'll have a pleasant trip back to Minneapolis --
or Pittsburgh, was it?  Good-bye!'

"'Good-night,' says I, 'and it wasn't Minneapolis.  What's your name, 
first, please?'

"She hesitated.  Then she pulled a leaf off a bush, and said:

"'My name is Jessie,' says she.

"'Good-night, Miss Allyn,' says I.

"The next morning at eleven, sharp, I rang the door-bell of that 
World's Fair main building.  After about three-quarters of an hour an 
old nigger man about eighty showed up and asked what I wanted.  I gave 
him my business card, and said I wanted to see the colonel.  He showed 
me in.

"Say, did you ever crack open a wormy English walnut?  That's what 
that house was like.  There wasn't enough furniture in it to fill an 
eight-dollar flat.  Some old horsehair lounges and three-legged chairs 
and some framed ancestors on the walls were all that met the eye.  But 
when Colonel Allyn comes in, the place seemed to light up.  You could 
almost hear a band playing, and see a bunch of old-timers in wigs and 
white stockings dancing a quadrille.  It was the style of him, 
although he had on the same shabby clothes I saw him wear at the 
station.

"For about nine seconds he had me rattled, and I came mighty near 
getting cold feet and trying to sell him some plate-glass.  But I got 
my nerve back pretty quick.  He asked me to sit down, and I told him 
everything.  I told him how I followed his daughter from Cincinnati, 
and what I did it for, and all about my salary and prospects, and 
explained to him my little code of living--to be always decent and 
right in your home town; and when you're on the road, never take more 
than four glasses of beer a day or play higher than a twenty-five-cent 
limit.  At first I thought he was going to throw me out of the window, 
but I kept on talking.  Pretty soon I got a chance to tell him that 
story about the Western Congressman who had lost his pocket-book and 
the grass widow--you remember that story.  Well, that got him to 
laughing, and I'll bet that was the first laugh those ancestors and 
horsehair sofas had heard in many a day.

"We talked two hours.  I told him everything I knew; and then he began 
to ask questions, and I told him the rest.  All I asked of him was to 
give me a chance.  If I couldn't make a hit with the little lady, I'd 
clear out, and not bother any more.  At last he says:

"'There was a Sir Courtenay Pescud in the time of Charles I, if I 
remember rightly.'

"'If there was,' says I, 'he can't claim kin with our bunch.  We've 
always lived in and around Pittsburgh.  I've got an uncle in the real-
estate business, and one in trouble somewhere out in Kansas.  You can 
inquire about any of the rest of us from anybody in old Smoky Town, 
and get satisfactory replies.  Did you ever run across that story 
about the captain of the whaler who tried to make a sailor say his 
prayers?' says I.

"'It occurs to me that I have never been so fortunate,' says the 
colonel.

"So I told it to him.  Laugh!  I was wishing to myself that he was a 
customer.  What a bill of glass I'd sell him!  And then he says:

"'The relating of anecdotes and humorous occurrences has always seemed 
to me, Mr.  Pescud, to be a particularly agreeable way of promoting 
and perpetuating amenities between friends.  With your permission, I 
will relate to you a fox-hunting story with which I was personally 
connected, and which may furnish you some amusement.'

So he tells it.  It takes forty minutes by the watch.  Did I laugh?  
Well, say!  When I got my face straight he calls in old Pete, the 
super-annuated darky, and sends him down to the hotel to bring up my 
valise.  It was Elmcroft for me while I was in the town.

"Two evenings later I got a chance to speak a word with Miss Jessie 
alone on the porch while the colonel was thinking up another story.

"'It's going to be a fine evening,' says I.

"'He's coming,' says she.  'He's going to tell you, this time, the 
story about the old negro and the green watermelons.  It always comes 
after the one about the Yankees and the game rooster.  There was 
another time,' she goes on, 'that you nearly got left--it was at 
Pulaski City.'

"'Yes,' says I, 'I remember.  My foot slipped as I was jumping on the 
step, and I nearly tumbled off.'

"'I know,' says she.  'And--and I--I was afraid you had, John A.  I 
was afraid you had.'

"And then she skips into the house through one of the big windows."


IV


"Coketown!" droned the porter, making his way through the slowing car.

Pescud gathered his hat and baggage with the leisurely promptness of 
an old traveller.

"I married her a year ago," said John.  "I told you I built a house in 
the East End.  The belted--I mean the colonel--is there, too.  I find 
him waiting at the gate whenever I get back from a trip to hear any 
new story I might have picked up on the road."

I glanced out of the window.  Coketown was nothing more than a ragged 
hillside dotted with a score of black dismal huts propped up against 
dreary mounds of slag and clinkers.  It rained in slanting torrents, 
too, and the rills foamed and splashed down through the black mud to 
the railroad-tracks.

"You won't sell much plate-glass here, John," said I.  "Why do you get 
off at this end-o'-the-world?"

"Why," said Pescud, "the other day I took Jessie for a little trip to 
Philadelphia, and coming back she thought she saw some petunias in a 
pot in one of those windows over there just like some she used to 
raise down in the old Virginia home.  So I thought I'd drop off here 
for the night, and see if I could dig up some of the cuttings or 
blossoms for her.  Here we are.  Good-night, old man.  I gave you the 
address.  Come out and see us when you have time."

The train moved forward.  One of the dotted brown ladies insisted on 
having windows raised, now that the rain beat against them.  The 
porter came along with his mysterious wand and began to light the car.

I glanced downward and saw the best-seller.  I picked it up and set it 
carefully farther along on the floor of the car, where the rain-drops 
would not fall upon it.  And then, suddenly, I smiled, and seemed to 
see that life has no geographical metes and bounds.

"Good-luck to you, Trevelyan," I said.  "And may you get the petunias 
for your princess!"