The Furnished Room by "O Henry"

                                  The Furnished Room

RESTLESS, SHIFTING, FUGACIOUS, as time itself, is a certain vast bulk of the population of the redbrick district of the lower West Side. Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever—transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing 'Home Sweet Home' in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree. Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant ghosts. One evening after dark, a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth, he rested his lean handbag upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote, hollow depths. To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible lodgers. He asked if there was a room to let. 'Come in,' said the housekeeper. Her voice came from her throat; her throat seemed lined with fur. 'I have the third floor back, vacant since a week ago. Should you wish to look at it?' The young man followed her up the stairs. A faint light from no particular source mitigated the shadows of the halls. They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, from sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches on the staircase and was viscid underfoot like organic matter. At each turn of the stairs, there were vacant niches in the wall. Perhaps plants had once been set within them. If so, they had died in that foul and tainted air. It may be that statues of the saints had stood there, but it was not difficult to conceive that imps and devils had dragged them forth in the darkness and down to the unholy depths of some furnished pit below. 'This is the room,' said the housekeeper, from her furry throat. 'It's a nice room. It ain't often vacant. I had some of the of the most elegant people in it last summer—no trouble at all—and paid in advance to the minute. The water's at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it for three months. They did a Vaudeville sketch. Miss B'retta Sprowls—you may have heard of her. Oh, that was just the stage name—right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here, and you see there is plenty of closet room. It's a room everybody likes. It never stays idle long.'

"Are there many theatrical people staying here?" asked the young man.

"They come and go. A good proportion of my lodgers are connected with the theaters. Yes, sir, this is the theatrical district. Actors never stay long anywhere. I get my share. Yes, they come and they go."

He entered the room, paying for a week in advance. "I'm tired," he said, "and I'll take possession at once." He counted out the money. "The room has been made ready," she said, "even with towels and water." As the housekeeper moved away, he asked, as he had done countless times before,

"A young girl—Miss Vashner—Miss Eloise Vashner—do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would likely be singing on the stage. A fair girl, of medium height and slender, with reddish-gold hair and a dark mole near her left eyebrow."

"No, I don't remember the name. Those stage people have names they change as often as their rooms. They come, and they go. No, that one doesn't ring a bell."

No. Always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time was spent by day questioning managers, agents, schools, and choruses and by night among the audiences of theaters, from all-star casts down to music halls, that he dreaded finding what he most hoped for. He, who had loved her best, had tried to find her. He was sure that since her disappearance from home, this great water-girt city held her somewhere, but it was like a monstrous quicksand, shifting its particles constantly with no foundation, its upper granules of today buried tomorrow in ooze and slime.

The furnished room received its latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality—a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture frames, and a brass bedstead in a corner.

The guest reclined, inert, upon a chair, while the room, confused in speech as though it were an apartment in Babel, tried to discourse to him of its diverse tenantry. A polychromatic rug, like some brilliant-flowered, rectangular, tropical islet, lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-papered wall hung those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house to house - "The Huguenot Lovers," "The First Quarrel," "The Wedding Breakfast," "Psyche at the Fountain." The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew, like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it lay some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned guests when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port - a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards from a deck.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that a lovely woman had once walked there. Tiny finger-prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered against the wall. Across the pier glass had been scrawled with a diamond, in staggering letters, the name 'Marie.' It seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had, in fury - perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness - wreaked their passions upon it. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been wrought upon the room by those who had called it their home for a time; and yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A hut that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

The young tenant in the chair allowed these thoughts to pass, soft-shod, through his mind, while into the room drifted furnished sounds and scents. From one room, he heard tittering and incontinent, slack laughter; in others, the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby, and one person crying dully; above him, a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowed miserably on a back fence. And he breathed in the breath of the house—a dank savour rather than a smell—a cold, musty effluvium as if from underground vaults mingled with the reeking exhalations of linoleum and mildewed, rotten woodwork.

Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odor of mignonette. It came as if on a single gust of wind, with such sureness, fragrance, and emphasis that it almost seemed like a living visitor. The man cried aloud, "What, dear?" as if he had been called, and sprang up and faced about. The rich odor clung to him and wrapped around him. He reached out his arms for it, all his senses confused and commingled. How could one be so abruptly called by an odor? Surely it must have been a sound. But was it not the sound that had touched him that had caressed him?

"She has been in this room," he cried, and he sprang to find a token of her presence, for he knew he would recognize the smallest thing that had belonged to her or that she had touched. This enveloping scent of mignonette—the odor she had loved and made her own—where did it come from?

The room had been hastily tidied. Scattered upon the flimsy dresser scarf were half a dozen hairpins—those discreet, indistinguishable friends of womankind, feminine in gender, infinite in mood, and uncommunicative in tense. He ignored them, aware of their triumphant lack of identity. Ransacking the dresser drawers, he came upon a discarded, tiny, ragged handkerchief. He pressed it to his face. It was redolent and bold with heliotrope; he hurled it to the floor. In

another drawer, he found odd buttons, a theater program, a pawnbroker's card, two lost marshmallows, and a book on the divination of dreams. In the last drawer was a woman's black satin hairbow, which stopped him, poised between ice and fire. But the black satin hairbow, too, was femininity's demure, impersonal, common ornament, telling no tales.

And then he searched the room like a hound on the scent, skimming the walls, considering the corners of the bulging matting on his hands and knees, rummaging through mantel and tables, the curtains and hangings, the drunken cabinet in the corner, looking for a visible sign, unable to perceive that she was there beside, around, against, within, above him—clinging to him, wooing him, calling him so poignantly through the finer senses that even his grosser ones became aware of the call. Once again he answered loudly, "Yes, dear!" and turned, wild-eyed, to gaze at vacancy, for he could not yet discern form, color, love, and outstretched arms in the odor of mignonette. Oh, God! Where did that odor come from, and since when have odors had a voice to call? Thus, he groped.

He burrowed into crevices and corners, finding corks and cigarettes. These he passed over in passive contempt. But once, he found a half-smoked cigar in a fold of the matting, and he ground it beneath his heel with a green and trenchant oath. He sifted through the room from end to end. He found dreary and ignoble small traces of many a peripatetic tenant, but of her whom he sought, who may have stayed there, and whose spirit seemed to hover there, he found no trace.

And then he thought of the housekeeper. He hurried from the haunted room downstairs to a door with a crack of light. She emerged at his knock, and he tried to contain his excitement as best he could.

"Will you tell me, madam?" He beseeched her, "Who occupied the room I had before I came?"

"Yes, sir. I can tell you again. It was Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B'retta Sprowls in the theaters, but Mrs. Mooney she was. My house is well known for its respectability. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over—"

"What kind of lady was Miss Sprowls—in looks, I mean?"

"Why, black-haired, sir, short and stout, with a comical face. They left a week ago, Tuesday."

"And before they occupied it?"

"Well, there was a single gentleman connected with the dying business. He left, owing me a week. Before him were Mrs. Crowder and her two children, who stayed four months; and before them was old Mr. Doyle, whose sons paid for him. He kept the room for six months. That goes back a year, sir, and further I do not remember."

He thanked her and crept back to his room. The room felt lifeless. The essence that had animated it was gone. The perfume of mignonette had vanished, replaced by the old, stale odor of musty house furniture, of air long trapped.

The ebbing of his hope drained his faith. He sat staring at the yellow, humming gaslight. Soon, he walked to the bed and began tearing the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife, he tightly wedged them into every crevice around windows and doors. When all was snug and taut, he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again, and gratefully laid himself upon the bed.

                                                ..................

It was Mrs. McCool's turn to fetch the beer that night. So she retrieved it and sat with Mrs. Purdy in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers often gather and the conversation rarely falters.

"I rented out my third-floor back this evening," said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. "A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago."

"Now, did you, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am?" said Mrs. McCool, her voice filled with admiration. "You are a wonder at renting rooms of that sort. And did you tell him, then?" she asked, her voice lowering into a husky whisper, laden with mystery.

"Rooms," said Mrs. Purdy, in her most authoritative tones, "are furnished to be rented. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool."

"You are absolutely right, ma'am; it's by renting rooms that we make a living. You have a real sense of business, ma'am. There are many people who would reject renting a room if they were told a suicide had occurred in the bed."

"As you say, we have our living to make," remarked Mrs. Purdy.

"Yes, ma'am, it's true. It was just one week ago today that I helped you lay out the third-floor back. A pretty young girl, she was to be killing herself with the gas. A sweet little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma'am."

"She would have been considered handsome, as you say," Mrs. Purdy agreed, though her tone held a touch of criticism, "if not for that mole growing by her left eyebrow. Do refill your glass again, Mrs. McCool."