O Henry
      
                   Strictly Business
           More Stories of the Four Million


                          XIV

               PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER



Файл с книжной полки Несененко Алексея



If you are a philosopher you can do this thing:  you can go to the 
top of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet 
below, and despise them as insects.  Like the irresponsible black 
waterbugs on summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle 
about idiotically without aim or purpose.  They do not even move 
with the admirable intelligence of ants, for ants always know when 
they are going home.  The ant is of a lowly station, but he will 
often reach home and get his slippers on while you are left at your 
elevated station.

Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a 
creeping, contemptible beetle.  Brokers, poets, millionaires, 
bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little 
black specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than 
your thumb.

From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to an 
unintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible 
perspectives; the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth 
itself a lost golf ball.  All the minutiae of life are gone.  
The philosopher gazes into the infinite heavens above him, 
and allows his soul to expand to the influence of his new 
view.  He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and the child 
of Time.  Space, too, should be his by the right of his immortal 
heritage, and he thrills at the thought that some day his 
kind shall traverse theose mysterious aerial roads between planet 
and planet.  The tiny world beneath his feet upon which this 
towering structure of steel rests as a speck of dust upon a 
Himalayan mountain--it is but one of a countless number of such 
whirling atoms.  What are the ambitions, the achievements, the 
paltry conquests and loves of those restless black insects below 
compared with the serene and awful immensity of the universe that 
lies above and around their insignificant city?

It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts.  
They have been expressly compiled from the philosophies of the 
world and set down with the proper interrogation point at the end 
of them to represent the invariable musings of deep thinkers on 
high places.  And when the philosopher takes the elevator down 
his mind is broader, his heart is at peace, and his conception 
of the cosmogony of creation is as wide as the buckle of Orion's 
summer belt.

But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an Eighth 
Avenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five 
feet by eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches 
and were nineteen years old, and got up at 6:30 and worked till 9, 
and never had studied philosophy, maybe things wouldn't look 
that way to you from the top of a skyscraper.

Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical.  One was 
Joe, who kept the smallest store in New York.  It was about the 
size of a tool-box of the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow's 
nest against a corner of a down-town skyscraper.  Its stock 
consisted of fruit, candies, newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and 
lemonade in season.  When stern winter shook his congealed locks 
and Joe had to move himself and the fruit inside, there was exactly 
room in the store for the proprietor, his wares, a stove the size 
of a vinegar cruet, and one customer.

Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with 
fugues and fruit.  He was a capable American youth who was 
laying by money, and wanted Daisy to help him spend it.  Three 
times he had asked her.

"I got money saved up, Daisy," was his love song; "and you know 
how bad I want you.  That store of mine ain't very big, but--"

"Oh, ain't it?" would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one.  
"Why, I heard Wanamaker's was trying to get you to sublet part of 
your floor space to them for next year."

Daisy passed Joe's corner every morning and evening.

"Hello, Two-by-Four!" was her usual greeting.  "Seems to me your 
store looks emptier.  You must have sold a pack of chewing gum."

Ain't much room in here, sure," Joe would answer, with his slow 
grin, "except for you, Daise.  Me and the store are waitin' for you 
whenever you'll take us.  Don't you think you might before long?"

"Store!"--a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy's uptilted nose--
"sardine box!  Waitin' for me, you say?  Gee! you'd have to throw 
out about a hundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of 
it, Joe."

"I wouldn't mind an even swap like that," said Joe, complimentary.

Daisy's existence was limited in every way.  She had to walk 
sideways between the counter and the shelves in the candy store.  
In her own hall bedroom coziness had been carried close to 
cohesiveness.  The walls were so near to one another that the paper 
on them made a perfect Babel of noise.  She could light the gas 
with one hand and close the door with the other without taking her 
eyes off the reflection of her brown pompadour in the mirror.  She 
had Joe's picture in a gilt frame on the dresser, and sometimes--but 
her next thought would always be of Joe's funny little store tacked 
like a soap box to the corner of that great building, and away 
would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter.

Daisy's other suitor followed Joe by several months.  He came to 
board in the house where she lived.  His name was Dabster, and he 
was a philosopher.  Though young, attainments stood out upon 
him like continental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case.  
Knowledge he had kidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of 
useful information; but as for wisdom, when she passed he was left 
sniffling in the road without so much as the number of her motor 
car.  He could and would tell you the proportion of water and 
muscle-making properties of peas and veal, the shortest verse in 
the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nails required to fasten 
256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, the population of 
Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr. H. McKay 
Twombly's second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel, 
the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-office 
messenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the 
number of bones in the foreleg of a cat.

The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster.  His statistics 
were the sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of 
small talk that he would set before you if he conceived that to be 
your taste.  And again he used them as breastworks in foraging at 
the boardinghouse.  Firing at you a volley of figures concerning 
the weight of a lineal foot of bar-iron 5 x 2 3/4 inches, and the 
average annual rainfall at Fort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix 
with his fork the best piece of chicken on the dish while you were 
trying to rally sufficiently to ask him weakly why does a hen cross 
the road.

Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good 
looks, of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon 
kind, it seems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival 
worthy of his steel.

But Joe carried no steel.  There wouldn't have been room in his 
store to draw it if he had.

One Saturday afternoon, about four o'clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabster 
stopped before Joe's booth.  Dabster wore a silk hat, and--well, 
Daisy was a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its 
box until Joe had seen it.  A stick of pineapple chewing gum was 
the ostensible object of the call.  Joe supplied it through the open 
side of his store.  He did not pale or falter at sight of the hat.

"Mr. Dabster's going to take me on top of the building to observe 
the view," said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers.  "I 
never was on a skyscraper.  I guess it must be awfully nice and 
funny up there."

"H'm!" said Joe.

"The panorama," said Mr. Dabster, "exposed to the gaze from the top 
of a lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive.  Miss 
Daisy has a decided pleasure in store for her."

"It's windy up there, too, as well as here," said Joe.  "Are you 
dressed warm enough, Daise?"

"Sure thing!  I'm all lined," said Daisy, smiling slyly at his clouded 
brow.  "You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe.  Ain't you just 
put in an invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple?  Your stock 
looks awful over-stocked."

Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her.

"Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.--er--er," remarked 
Dabster, "in comparison with the size of this building.  I 
understand the area of its side to be about 340 by 100 feet.  
That would make you occupy a proportionate space as if half of 
Beloochistan were placed upon a territory as large as the United 
States east of the Rocky Mountains, with the Province of Ontario 
and Belgium added."

"Is that so, sport?" said Joe, genially.  "You are Weisenheimer on 
figures, all right.  How many square pounds of baled hay do you 
think a jackass could eat if he stopped brayin' long enough to keep 
still a minute and five eighths?"

A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator 
to the top floor of the skyscraper.  Then up a short, steep stairway 
and out upon the roof.  Dabster led her to the parapet so she could 
look down at the black dots moving in the street below.

"What are they?" she asked, trembling.  She had never before been 
on a height like this before.

And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower, 
and conduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space.

"Bipeds," he said, solemnly.  "See what they become even at the 
small elevation of 340 feet--mere crawling insects going to and fro 
at random."

"Oh, they ain't anything of the kind," exclaimed Daisy, suddenly--
"they're folks!  I saw an automobile.  Oh, gee! are we that high 
up?"

"Walk over this way," said Dabster.

He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array of toys far 
below, starred here and there, early as it was, by the first beacon 
lights of the winter afternoon.  And then the bay and sea to the 
south and east vanishing mysteriously into the sky.

"I don't like it," declared Daisy, with troubled blue eyes.  "Say we 
go down."

But the philosopher was not to be denied his opportunity.  He would 
let her behold the grandeur of his mind, the half-nelson he had 
on the infinite, and the memory he had for statistics.  And then 
she would nevermore be content to buy chewing gum aat the 
smallest store in New York.  And so he began to prate of the 
smallness of human affairs, and how that even so slight a removal 
from earth made man and his works look like one tenth part of a 
dollar thrice computed.  And that one should consider the sidereal 
system and the maxims of Epictetus and be comforted.

"You don't carry me with you," said Daisy.  "Say, I think it's awful 
to be up so high that folks look like fleas.  One of them we saw 
might have been Joe.  Why, Jiminy! we might as well be in New 
Jersey!  Say, I'm afraid up here!"

The philosopher smiled fatuously.

"The earth," said he, "is itself only as a grain of wheat in space.  
Look up there."

Daisy gazed upward apprehensively.  The short day was spent and 
the stars were coming out above.

"Yonder star," said Dabster, "is Venus, the evening star.  She is 
66,000,000 miles from the sun."

"Fudge!" said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, "where do you 
think I come from--Brooklyn?  Susie Price, in our store--her 
brother sent her a ticket to go to San Francisco--that's only three 
thousand miles."

The philosopher smiled indulgently.

"Our world," he said, "is 91,000,000 miles from the sun.  There 
are eighteen stars of the first magnitude that are 211,000 times 
further from us than the sun is.  If one of them should be 
extinguished it would be three years before we would see its light 
go out.  There are six thousand stars of the sixth magnitude.  It 
takes thirty-six years for the light of one of them to reach the 
earth.  With an eighteen-foot telescope we can see 43,000,000 
stars, including those of the thirteenth magnitude, whose light 
takes 2,700 years to reach us.  Each of these stars--"

"You're lyin'," cried Daisy, angrily.  "You're tryin' to scare me.  
And you have; I want to go down!"

She stamped her foot.

"Arcturus--" began the philosopher, soothingly, but he was 
interrupted by a demonstration out of the vastness of the nature 
that he was endeavoring to portray with his memory instead of his 
heart.  For to the heart-expounder of nature the stars were set in 
the firmament expressly to give soft light to lovers wandering 
happily beneath them; and if you stand tiptoe some September night 
with your sweetheart on your arm you can almost touch them with 
your hand.  Three years for their light to reach us, indeed!

Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the skyscraper 
almost to midday.  Its fiery parabola was limned against the sky 
toward the east.  It hissed as it went, and Daisy screamed.

"Take me down," she cried, vehemently, "you--you mental arithmetic!"

Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it.  She was wild-
eyed, and she shuddered when the express made its debilitating 
drop.

Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philosopher lost 
her.  She vanished; and he stood, bewildered, without figures or 
statistics to aid him.

Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his stock succeeded 
in lighting a cigarette and getting one cold foot against the 
attenuated stove.

The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying, scattering 
fruit and candies, tumbled into his arms.

"Oh, Joe, I've been up on the skyscraper.  Ain't it cozy and warm 
and homelike in here!  I'm ready for you, Joe, whenever you want 
me."