O. Henry

              A Newspaper Story


Файл с книжной полки Несененко Алексея



AT 8 A. M. it lay on Giuseppi's news-stand, still damp
from the presses.  Giuseppi, with the cunning of his ilk,
philandered on the opposite comer, leaving his patrons
to help themselves, no doubt on a theory related to the
hypothesis of the watched pot.

This particular newspaper was, according to its custom
and design, an educator, a guide, a monitor, a champion
and a household counsellor and vade mecum.

From its many excellencies might be selected three
editorials.  One was in simple and chaste but illuminat-
ing language directed to parents and teachers, depreca-
ting corporal punishment for children.

Another was an accusive and significant warning
addressed to a notorious labour leader who was on the
point of instigating his clients to a troublesome strike.

The third was an eloquent demand that the police
force be sustained and aided in everything that tended
to increase its efficiency as public guardians and servants.

Besides these more important chidings and requisitions
upon the store of good citizenship was a wise prescription
or form of procedure laid out by the editor of the heart-
to-heart column in the specific case of a young man who
had complained of the obduracy of his lady love, teaching
him how he might win her.

Again, there was, on the beauty page, a complete
answer to a young lady inquirer who desired admonition
toward the securing of bright eyes, rosy cheeks and a
beautiful countenance.

One other item requiring special cognizance was a
brief "personal," running thus:

DEAR JACK: -- Forgive me.  You were right.  Meet me
comer Madison and -th at 8.30 this morning.  We
leave at noon.
                                    PENITENT.

At 8 o'clock a young man with a haggard look and the
feverish gleam of unrest in his eye dropped a penny and
picked up the top paper as he passed Giuseppi's stand.
A sleepless night had left him a late riser.  There was
an office to be reached by nine, and a shave and a hasty
cup of coffee to be crowded into the interval.

He visited his barber shop and then hurried on his
way.  He pocketed his paper, meditating a belated
perusal of it at the luncheon hour.  At the next corner
it fell from his pocket, carrying with it his pair of new
gloves.  Three blocks he walked, missed the gloves and
turned back fuming.

Just on the half-hour he reached the corner where
lay the gloves and the paper.  But he strangely ignored
that which he had come to seek.  He was holding
two little hands as tightly as ever he could and looking
into two penitent brown eyes, while joy rioted in his
heart.

"Dear Jack," she said, "I knew you would be here
on time."

"I wonder what she means by that," he was saying
to himself; "but it's all right, it's all right."

A big wind puffed out of the west, picked up the paper
from the sidewalk, opened it out and sent it flying and
whirling down a side street.  Up that street was driving
a skittish bay to a spider-wheel buggy, the young man
who had written to the heart-to-heart editor for a recipe
that he might win her for whom he sighed.

The wind, with a prankish flurry, flapped the flying
newspaper against the face of the skittish bay.  There
was a lengthened streak of bay mingled with the red of
running gear that stretched itself out for four blocks.
Then a water-hydrant played its part in the cosmogony,
the buggy became matchwood as foreordained, and the
driver rested very quietly where he had been flung on the
asphalt in front of a certain brownstone mansion.

They came out and had him inside very promptly.  And
there was one who made herself a pillow for his head,
and cared for no curious eyes, bending over and saying,
"Oh, it was you; it was you all the time, Bobby!  Couldn't
you see it?  And if you die, why, so must I, and -- "

But in all this wind we must hurry to keep in touch
with our paper.

Policeman O'Brine arrested it as a character dangerous
to traffic.  Straightening its dishevelled leaves with his
big, slow fingers, he stood a few feet from the family
entrance of the Shandon Bells Cafй.  One headline he
spelled out ponderously: "The Papers to the Front in a
Move to Help the Police."

But, whisht!  The voice of Danny, the head bartender,
through the crack of the door: "Here's a nip for ye, Mike,
ould man."

Behind the widespread, amicable columns of the press
Policeman O'Brine receives swiftly his nip of the real
stuff.  He moves away, stalwart, refreshed, fortified,
to his duties.  Might not the editor man view with pride
the early, the spiritual, the literal fruit that had blessed
his labours.

Policeman O'Brine folded the paper and poked it
playfully under the arm of a small boy that was passing.
That boy was named Johnny, and he took the paper
home with him.  His sister was named Gladys, and
she had written to the beauty editor of the paper asking
for the practicable touchstone of beauty.  That was
weeks ago, and she had ceased to look for an answer.
Gladys was a pale girl, with dull eyes and a discontented
expression.  She was dressing to go up to the avenue to
get some braid.  Beneath her skirt she pinned two leaves
of the paper Johnny had brought.  When she walked the
rustling sound was an exact imitation of the real thing.

On the street she met the Brown girl from the flat
below and stopped to talk.  The Brown girl turned green.
Only silk at $5 a yard could make the sound that she
heard when Gladys moved.  The Brown girl, consumed
by jealousy, said something spiteful and went her way,
with pinched lips.

Gladys proceeded toward the avenue.  Her eyes now
sparkled like jagerfonteins.  A rosy bloom visited her
cheeks; a triumphant, subtle, vivifying, smile transfigured
her face.  She was beautiful.  Could the beauty editor
have seen her then!  There was something in her answer
in the paper, I believe, about cultivating kind feelings
toward others in order to make plain features attractive.

The labour leader against whom the paper's solemn
and weighty editorial injunction was laid was the father
of Gladys and Johnny.  He picked up the remains of
the journal from which Gladys had ravished a cosmetic
of silken sounds.  The editorial did not come under his
eye, but instead it was greeted by one of those ingenious
and specious puzzle problems that enthrall alike the
simpleton and the sage.

The labour leader tore off half of the page, provided
himself with table, pencil and paper and glued himself
to his puzzle.

Three hours later, after waiting vainly for him at the
appointed place, other more conservative leaders declared
and ruled in favour of arbitration, and the strike with its
attendant dangers was averted.  Subsequent editions
of the paper referred, in coloured inks, to the clarion tone
of its successful denunciation of the labour leader's
intended designs.

The remaining leaves of the active journal also went
loyally to the proving of its potency.

When Johnny returned from school he sought a secluded
spot and removed the missing columns from the inside of
his clothing, where they had been artfully distributed so as
to successfully defend such areas as are generally attacked
during scholastic castigations.  Johnny attended a private
school and had had trouble with his teacher.  As has
been said, there was an excellent editorial against corporal
punishment in that morning's issue, and no doubt it had
its effect.

After this can any one doubt the power of the press?