O. Henry

                 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. 

 < 2 >
      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. 

 < 3 >
      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. 

 < 4 >
      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?" 

 < 5 >
      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. 

 < 6 >
      "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. 

 < 7 >
      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."