Compliments Of The Season
There are no more Christmas stories to write. Fiction is exhausted;
and newspaper items, the next best, are manufactured by clever
young journalists who have married early and have an engagingly
pessimistic view of life. Therefore, for seasonable diversion, we
are reduced to very questionable sources--facts and philosophy.
We will begin with--whichever you choose to call it.
Children are pestilential little animals with which we have to cope
under a bewildering variety of conditions. Especially when
childish sorrows overwhelm them are we put to our wits' end. We
exhaust our paltry store of consolation; and then beat them,
sobbing, to sleep. Then we grovel in the dust of a million years,
and ask God why. Thus we call out of the rat-trap. As for the
children, no one understands them except old maids, hunchbacks,
and shepherd dogs.
Now comes the facts in the case of the Rag-Doll, the Tatterdemalion,
and the Twenty-fifth of December.
On the tenth of that month the Child of the Millionaire lost her
rag-doll. There were many servants in the Millionaire's palace on
the Hudson, and these ransacked the house and grounds, but without
finding the lost treasure. The child was a girl of five, and one
of those perverse little beasts that often wound the sensibilities
of wealthy parents by fixing their affections upon some vulgar,
inexpensive toy instead of upon diamond-studded automobiles and
pony phaetons.
The Child grieved sorely and truly, a thing inexplicable to the
Millionaire, to whom the rag-doll market was about as interesting
as Bay State Gas; and to the Lady, the Child's mother, who was all
form--that is, nearly all, as you shall see.
The Child cried inconsolably, and grew hollow-eyed, knock-kneed,
spindling, and corykilverty in many other respects. The Millionaire
smiled and tapped his coffers confidently. The pick of the output
of the French and German toymakers was rushed by special delivery
to the mansion; but Rachel refused to be comforted. She was weeping
for her rag child, and was for a high protective tariff against all
foreign foolishness. Then doctors with the finest bedside manners
and stop-watches were called in. One by one they chattered futilely
about peptomanganate of iron and sea voyages and hypophosphites
until their stop-watches showed that Bill Rendered was under the
wire for show or place. Then, as men, they advised that the
rag-doll be found as soon as possible and restored to its mourning
parent. The Child sniffed at therapeutics, chewed a thumb, and
wailed for her Betsy. And all this time cablegrams were coming
from Santa Claus saying that he would soon be here and enjoining us
to show a true Christian spirit and let up on the pool-rooms and
tontine policies and platoon systems long enough to give him a
welcome. Everywhere the spirit of Christmas was diffusing itself.
The banks were refusing loans, the pawn-brokers had doubled their
gang of helpers, people bumped your shins on the streets with red
sleds, Thomas and Jeremiah bubbled before you on the bars while you
waited on one foot, holly-wreaths of hospitality were hung in windows
of the stores, they who had 'em were getting their furs. You hardly
knew which was the best bet in balls--three, high, moth, or snow.
It was no time at which to lose the rag-doll or your heart.
If Doctor Watson's investigating friend had been called in to
solve this mysterious disappearance he might have observed on the
Millionaire's wall a copy of "The Vampire." That would have
quickly suggested, by induction, "A rag and a bone and a hank of
hair." "Flip," a Scotch terrier, next to the rag-doll in the Child's
heart, frisked through the halls. The hank of hair! Aha! X, the
unfound quantity, represented the rag-doll. But, the bone? Well,
when dogs find bones they--Done! It were an easy and a fruitful
task to examine Flip's forefeet. Look, Watson! Earth--dried earth
between the toes. Of course, the dog--but Sherlock was not there.
Therefore it devolves. But topography and architecture must
intervene.
The Millionaire's palace occupied a lordly space. In front of it
was a lawn close-mowed as a South Ireland man's face two days after
a shave. At one side of it, and fronting on another street was
a pleasuance trimmed to a leaf, and the garage and stables. The
Scotch pup had ravished the rag-doll from the nursery, dragged it
to a corner of the lawn, dug a hole, and buried it after the manner
of careless undertakers. There you have the mystery solved, and
no checks to write for the hypodermical wizard of fi'-pun notes to
toss to the sergeant. Then let's get down to the heart of the thing,
tiresome readers--the Christmas heart of the thing.
Fuzzy was drunk--not riotously or helplessly or loquaciously, as
you or I might get, but decently, appropriately, and inoffensively,
as becomes a gentleman down on his luck.
Fuzzy was a soldier of misfortune. The road, the haystack, the
park bench, the kitchen door, the bitter round of eleemosynary
beds-with-shower-bath-attachment, the petty pickings and ignobly
garnered largesse of great cities--these formed the chapters of his
history.
Fuzzy walked toward the river, down the street that bounded one
side of the Millionaire's house and grounds. He saw a leg of
Betsy, the lost rag-doll, protruding, like the clue to a Lilliputian
murder mystery, from its untimely grave in a corner of the fence.
He dragged forth the maltreated infant, tucked it under his arm,
and went on his way crooning a road song of his brethrren that no
doll that has been brought up to the sheltered life should hear.
Well for Betsy that she had no ears. And well that she had no eyes
save unseeing circles of black; for the faces of Fuzzy and the
Scotch terrier were those of brothers, and the heart of no rag-doll
could withstand twice to become the prey of such fearsome
monsters.
Though you may not know it, Grogan's saloon stands near the river
and near the foot of the street down which Fuzzy traveled. In
Grogan's, Christmas cheer was already rampant.
Fuzzy entered with his doll. He fancied that as a mummer at the
feast of Saturn he might earn a few drops from the wassail cup.
He set Betsy on the bar and addressed her loudly and humorously,
seasoning his speech with exaggerated compliments and endearments,
as one entertaining his lady friend. The loafers and bibbers
around caught the farce of it, and roared. The bartender gave
Fuzzy a drink. Oh, many of us carry rag-dolls.
"One for the lady?" suggested Fuzzy impudently, and tucked another
contribution to Art beneath his waistcoat.
He began to see possibilities in Betsy. His first-night had been
a success. Visions of a vaudeville circuit about town dawned upon
him.
In a group near the stove sat "Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and
"One-ear" Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestring
district that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed
a newspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each
solid and blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed
"One Hundred Dollars Reward." To earn it one must return the
rag-doll lost, strayed, or stolen from the Millionaire's mansion.
It seemed that grief still ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of
the too faithful Child. Flip, the terrier, capered and shook his
absurd whisker before her, powerless to distract. She wailed
for her Betsy in the faces of walking, talking, mama-ing, and
eye-closing French Mabelles and Violettes. The advertisement
was a last resort.
Black Riley came from behind the stove and approached Fuzzy in
his one-sided parabolic way.
The Christmas mummer, flushed with success, had tucked Betsy under
his arm, and was about to depart to the filling of impromptu dates
elsewhere.
"Say, 'Bo," said Black Riley to him, "where did you cop out dat
doll?"
"This doll?" asked Fuzzy, touching Betsy with his forefinger to be
sure that she was the one referred to. his doll was presented to
me by the Emperor of Beloochistan. I have seven hundred others in
my country home in Newport. This doll--"
"Cheese the funny business," said Riley. "You swiped it or picked
it up at de house on de hill where--but never mind dat. You want
to take fifty cents for de rags, and take it quick. Me brother's
kid at home might be wantin' to play wid it. Hey--what?"
He produced the coin.
Fuzzy laughed a gurgling, insolent, alcoholic laugh in his face.
Go to the office of Sarah Bernhardt's manager and propose to him
that she be released from a night's performance to entertain
the Tackytown Lyceum and Literary Coterie. You will hear the
duplicate of Fuzzy's laugh.
Black Riley gauged Fuzzy quickly with his blueberry eye as a
wrestler does. His hand was itching to play the Roman and wrest
the rag Sabine from the extemporaneous merry-andrew who was
entertaining an angel unaware. But he refrained. Fuzzy was fat
and solid and big. Three inches of well-nourished corporeity,
defended from the winter winds by dingy linen, intervened between
his vest and trousers. Countless small, circular wrinkles
running around his coat-sleeves and knees guaranteed the quality
of his bone and muscle. His small, blue eyes, bathed in the
moisture of altruism and wooziness, looked upon you kindly, yet
without abashment. He was whiskerly, whiskyly, fleshily
formidable. So, Black Riley temporized.
"Wot'll you take for it, den?" he asked.
"Money," said Fuzzy, with husky firmness, "cannot buy her."
He was intoxicated with the artist's first sweet cup of attainment.
To set a faded-blue, earth-stained rag-doll on a bar, to hold mimic
converse with it, and to find his heart leaping with the sense of
plaudits earned and his throat scorching with free libations poured
in his honor--could base coin buy him from such achievements? You
will perceive that Fuzzy had the temperament.
Fuzzy walked out with the gait of a trained sea-lion in search of
other caf'es to conquer.
Though the dusk of twilight was hardly yet apparent, lights were
beginning to spangle the city like pop-corn bursting in a deep
skillet. Christmas Eve, impatiently expected, was peeping over
the brink of the hour. Millions had prepared for its celebration.
Towns would be painted red. You, yourself, have heard the horns
and dodged the capers of the Saturnalians.
"Pigeon" McCarthy, Black Riley, and "One-ear" Mike held a hasty
converse outside Grogan's. They were narrow-chested, pallid
striplings, not fighters in the open, but more dangerous in their
ways of warfare than the most terrible of Turks. Fuzzy, in a
pitched battle, could have eaten the three of them. In a go-as-you-
please encounter he was already doomed.
They overtook him just as he and Betsy were entering Costigan's
Casino. They deflected him, and shoved the newspaper under his
nose. Fuzzy could read--and more.
"Boys," said he, "you are certainly damn true friends. Give me a
week to think it over."
The soul of a real artist is quenched with difficulty.
The boys carefully pointed out to him that advertisements were
soulless, and that the deficiencies of the day might not be supplied
by the morrow.
"A cool hundred," said Fuzzy thoughtfully and mushily.
"Booys," said he, "you are true friends. I'll go up and claim the
reward. The show business is not what it used to be."
Night was falling more surely. The three tagged at his sides to
the foot of the rise on which stood the Millionaire's house. There
Fuzzy turned upon them acrimoniously.
"You are a pack of putty-faced beagle-hounds," he roared. "Go
away."
They went away--a little way.
In "Pigeon" McCarthy's pocket was a section of one-inch gas-pipe
eight inches long. In one end of it and in the middle of it was
a lead plug. One-half of it was packed tight with solder. Black
Riley carried a slung-shot, being a conventional thug. "One-ear"
Mike relied upon a pair of brass knucks--an heirloom in the
family.
"Why fetch and carry," said Black Riley, "when some one will do
it for ye? Let him bring it out to us. Hey--what?"
"We can chuck him in the river," said "Pigeon" McCarthy, "with a
stone tied to his feet."
"Youse guys make me tired," said "One-ear" Mike sadly. "Ain't
progress ever appealed to none of yez? Sprinkle a little gasoline
on 'im, and drop 'im on the Drive--well?"
Fuzzy entered the Millionaire's gate and zigzagged toward the
softly glowing entrance of the mansion. The three goblins came up
to the gate and lingered--one on each side of it, one beyond the
roadway. They fingered their cold metal and leather, confident.
Fuzzy rang the door-bell, smiling foolishly and dreamily. An
atavistic instrinct prompted him to reach for the button of his right
glove. But he wore no gloves; so his left hand dropped, embarrassed.
The particular menial whose duty it was to open doors to silks and
laces shied at first sight of Fuzzy. But a second glance took in
his passport, his card of admission, his surety of welcome--the lost
rag-doll of the daughter of the house dangling under his arm.
Fuzzy was admitted into a great hall, dim with the glow from
unseen lights. The hireling went away and returned with a maid
and the Child. The doll was restored to the mourning one. She
clasped her lost darling to her breast; and then, with the
inordinate selfishness and candor of childhood, stamped her foot
and whined hatred and fear of the odious being who had rescued her
from the depths of sorrow and despair. Fuzzy wriggled himself
into an ingratiatory attitude and essayed the idiotic smile and
blattering small talk that is supposed to charm the budding
intellect of the young. The Child bawled, and was dragged away,
hugging her Betsy close.
There came the Secretary, pale, poised, polished, gliding in
pumps, and worshipping pomp and ceremony. He counted out into
Fuzzy's hand ten ten-dollar bills; then dropped his eye upon
the door, transferred it to James, its custodian, indicated the
obnoxious earner of the reward with the other, and allowed his
pumps to waft him away to secretarial regions.
James gathered Fuzzy with his own commanding optic and swept him
as far as the front door.
When the money touched fuzzy's dingy palm his first instinct was
to take to his heels; but a second thought restrained him from that
blunder of etiquette. It was his; it had been given him. It--and,
oh, what an elysium it opened to the gaze of his mind's eye! He
had tumbled to the foot of the ladder; he was hungry, homeless,
friendless, ragged, cold, drifting; and he held in his hand the key
to a paradise of the mud-honey that he craved. The fairy doll had
waved a wand with her rag-stuffed hand; and now wherever he might go
the enchanted palaces with shining foot-rests and magic red fluids
in gleaming glassware would be open to him.
He followed James to the door.
He paused there as the flunky drew open the great mahogany portal
for him to pass into the vestibule.
Beyond the wrought-iron gates in the dark highway Black Riley and his
two pals casually strolled, fingering under their coats the inevitably
fatal weapons that were to make the reward of the rag-doll theirs.
Fuzzy stopped at the Millionaire's door and bethought himself.
Like little sprigs of mistletoe on a dead tree, certain living green
thoughts and memories began to decorate his confused mind. He was
quite drunk, mind you, and the present was beginning to fade. Those
wreaths aand festoons of holly with their scarlet berries making
the great hall gay--where had he seen such things before? Somewhere
he had known polished floors and odors of fresh flowers in winter,
and--and some one was singing a song in the house that he thought
he had heard before. Some one singing and playing a harp. Of course,
it was Christmas--Fuzzy though he must have been pretty drunk to have
overlooked that.
And then he went out of the present, and there came back to him
out of some impossible, vanished, and irrevocable past a little,
pure-white, transient, forgotten ghost--the spirit of _nobless
oblige_. Upon a gentleman certain things devolve.
James opened the outer door. A stream of light went down the
graveled walk to the iron gate. Black Riley, McCarthy, and
"One-ear" Mike saw, and carelessly drew their sinister cordon closer
about the gate.
With a more imperious gesture than James's master had ever used
or could ever use, Fuzzy compelled the menial to close the door.
Upon a gentleman certain things devolve. Especially at the
Christmas season.
"It is cust--customary," he said to James, the flustered, "when
a gentleman calls on Christmas Eve to pass the compliments of the
season with the lady of the house. You und'stand? I shall not
move shtep till I pass compl'ments season with lady the house.
Und'stand?"
There was an argument. James lost. Fuzzy raised his voice and
sent it through the house unpleasantly. I did not say he was a
gentleman. He was simply a tramp being visited by a ghost.
A sterling silver bell rang. James went back to answer it, leaving
Fuzzy in the hall. James explained somewhere to some one.
Then he came and conducted Fuzzy into the library.
The lady entered a moment later. She was more beautiful and holy
than any picture that Fuzzy had seen. She smiled, and said
something about a doll. Fuzzy didn't understand that; he
remembered nothing about a doll.
A footman brought in two small glasses of sparkling wine on a
stamped sterling-silver waiter. The Lady took one. The other was
handed to Fuzzy.
As his fingers closed on the slender glass stem his disabilities
dropped from him for one brief moment. He straightened himself;
and Time, so disobliging to most of us, turned backward to
accomodate Fuzzy.
Forgotten Christmas ghosts whiter than the false beards of the
most opulent Kris Kringle were rising in the fumes of Grogan's
whisky. What had the Millionaire's mansion to do with a long,
wainscoted Virginia hall, where the riders were grouped around a
silver punch-bowl, drinking the ancient toast of the House? And
why should the patter of the cab horses' hoofs on the frozen street
be in any wise related to the sound of the saddled hunters stamping
under the shelter of the west veranda? And what had Fuzzy to do
with any of it?
The Lady, looking at him over her glass, let her condescending
smile fade away like a false dawn. Her eyes turned serious. She
saw something beneath the rags and Scotch terrier whiskers that
she did not understand. But it did not matter.
Fuzzy lifted his glass and smiled vacantly.
"P-pardon, lady," he said, "but couldn't leave without exchangin'
comp'ments sheason with lady th' house. 'Gainst princ'ples
gen'leman do sho."
And then he began the ancient salutation that was a tradition in the
House when men wore lace ruffles and powder.
"The blessings of another year--"
Fuzzy's memory failed him. The Lady prompted:
"--Be upon this hearth."
"--The guest--" stammered Fuzzy.
"--And upon her who--" continued the Lady, with a leading smile.
"Oh, cut it out," said Fuzzy, ill-manneredly. "I can't remember.
Drink hearty."
Fuzzy had shot his arrow. They drank. The Lady smiled again the
smile of her caste. James enveloped and re-conducted him toward
the front door. The harp music still softly drifted through the
house.
Outside, Black Riley breathed on his cold hands and hugged the
gate.
"I wonder," said the Lady to herself, musing, "who--but there were
so many who came. I wonder whether memory is a curse or a blessing
to them after they have fallen so low."
Fuzzy and his escort were nearly at the door. The Lady called:
"James!"
James stalked back obsequiously, leaving Fuzzy waiting unsteadily,
with his brief spark of the divine fire gone.
Outside, Black Riley stamped his cold feet and got a firmer grip
on his section of gas-pipe.
"You will conduct this gentleman," said the lady, "Downstairs.
Then tell Louis to get out the Mercedes and take him to whatever
place he wishes to go."
-THE END-
[William Sidney Porter] O Henry's short story: Compliments Of The Season
GO TO TOP OF SCREEN
