The Last Leaf by "O Henry"

                                                           The Last Leaf

In a little district west of Washington Square, the streets have gone wild and fractured themselves into narrow strips called 'places.' These 'places' twist at strange angles and curves, with one street crossing itself more than once. An artist once found an intriguing possibility on this street. Imagine a collector, with a bill for paints, paper, and canvas, traversing this route only to meet himself coming back with not a cent paid!

So, to the quaint old Greenwich Village, the artists soon came prowling, searching for north-facing windows, eighteenth-century gables, Dutch attics, and affordable rents. They imported pewter mugs and a few chafing dishes from Sixth Avenue and became a 'colony.'

At the top of a squatty, three-story brick building, Sue and Johnsy had their studio. 'Johnsy' was a familiar nickname for Joanna. One hails from Maine, the other from California. They had met at the table d'hôte of an Eighth Street 'Delmonico's,' and discovered that their tastes in art, chicory salad, and bishop sleeves were so congenial that a joint studio resulted. That was in May. By November, a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called pneumonia, stalked the colony, touching one here and there with his icy finger. Over on the East Side, this ravager strode boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the maze of the narrow and moss-grown 'places.'

Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old gentleman. A petite woman with blood thinned by Californian zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old duffer. Yet Johnsy smote, and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron bedstead, gazing through the small Dutch window panes at the blank side of the neighboring brick house.

One morning, the busy doctor beckoned Sue into the hallway with a shaggy, gray eyebrow.

'She has one chance in, let us say, ten,' he said as he shook down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. 'And that chance is for her to want to live. This way people have of lining up on the side of the undertaker makes the entire pharmacopœia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind that she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?'

'She wanted to paint the Bay of Naples someday,' said Sue.

'Paint? Bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about twice—a man, for instance?'

"A man?" said Sue, with a twang of the Jewsharp in her voice. "Is a man worth it? But, no, doctor, there is nothing of the kind."

"Well, if it's not that, then it's weakness," said the doctor. "I will do all that science, as far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient starts to count the carriages in her funeral procession, I subtract 50 percent from the curative power of medicines. If you can get her to ask a single question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves, I'll promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten."

After the doctor had left, Sue went into the workroom and cried into a Japanese napkin until it was a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.

Johnsy lay there, barely making a ripple under the bedclothes, her face turned toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.

She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a magazine story. Young artists often pave their way to art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their way to literature.

As Sue sketched a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, repeated several times. She went quickly to the bedside.

Johnsy's eyes were wide open. She was looking out the window and counting—counting backward.

"Twelve," she said, and a little later, "eleven"; then "ten" and "nine"; then "eight" and "seven," almost together.

Sue looked out the window with concern. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house was twenty feet away. An old, gnarled ivy vine, decayed at the roots, climbed halfway up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stripped its leaves until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.

"What is it, dear?" asked Sue.

"Six," said Johnsy, almost in a whisper. "They're falling faster now. Three days ago, there were almost a hundred. It gave me a headache to count them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now."

"Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie."

"Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls, I must go too. I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?"

"Oh, I never heard of such nonsense," complained Sue, with magnificent scorn. "What do old ivy leaves have to do with your getting well? And you used to love that vine so much, you naughty girl. Don't be silly. Why, the doctor told me this morning that your chances of getting well real soon were—let's see exactly what he said—the chances were ten to one! Why, that's almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the streetcars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell it to the editor, and buy port wine for her sick child and pork chops for her greedy self."

"You needn't get any more wine," said Johnsy, keeping her eyes fixed on the window.

"There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I'll go too."

"Johnsy, dear," said Sue, bending over her, "will you promise me to keep your eyes closed and not look out of the window until I am done working? I must hand those drawings in by tomorrow. I need the light, or I would draw the shade down."

"Couldn't you draw in the other room?" asked Johnsy coldly.

"I'd rather be here with you," said Sue. "Besides, I don't want you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves."

"Tell me as soon as you have finished," said Johnsy, closing her eyes, lying white and still as a fallen statue, "because I want to see the last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to let loose my hold on everything and go sailing down, down, just like one of those poor, tired leaves."

"Try to sleep," said Sue. "I must call Behrman up to be my model for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone for a minute. Don't try to move till I come back."

Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty, with Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in art. For forty years, he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch the hem of his mistress's robe. He had always been about to paint a masterpiece but had never yet begun it. For several years, he had painted nothing except now and then a daub for commerce or advertising. He earned a little by serving as a model for those young artists in the colony who could not afford a professional. He drank gin to excess and still talked of his coming masterpiece. But he was a fierce little old man who scoffed terribly at softness in anyone and who considered himself the especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio above.

Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries in his dimly lit den below. In one corner, a blank canvas on an easel had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of

 

the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy's fancy and how she feared she might, indeed, float away like a leaf herself, light and fragile, when her tenuous hold on the world grew weaker.

Old Behrman, with his red eyes streaming plainly, shouted his contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.

"Foolishness!" he cried. "Are there people in the world so foolish as to die because leaves drop off from a vine? I have not heard of such a thing. No, I will not pose as a model for your fool hermit-dunderhead. Why do you allow that silly notion to come into her head? Ah, that poor little Miss Johnsy."

"She is very ill and weak," said Sue, "and the fever has left her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman; if you do not care to pose for me, you don't. But I think you are a horrid old flibbertigibbet."

"You are just like a woman!" yelled Behrman. "Who said I would not pose? Go on. I will come with you. For half an hour, I have been trying to say that I am ready to pose. God! This is not a place for someone as good as Miss Johnsy to lie sick. Some day I will paint a masterpiece, and we shall all go away. Yes, God!"

Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shade down to the window sill and motioned Behrman into the other room. There, they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain fell, mixed with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the hermit-miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.

When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning, she found Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.

"Pull it up! I want to see," she ordered in a whisper.

Wearily, Sue obeyed.

But, behold! After the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that had endured through the long night, one ivy leaf stood out against the brick wall. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground.

"It is the last one," said Johnsy. "I thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall today, and I shall die at the same time."

"Dear, dear!" said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the pillow. "Think of me if you won't think of yourself. What would I do?"

But Johnsy did not answer. The loneliest thing in all the world is a soul when it is preparing to go on its mysterious, far-reaching journey. The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as, one by one, the ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were loosened.

The day wore away, and even through the twilight, they could see the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the coming of night, the north wind was again unleashed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.

When it was light enough, Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that the shade be raised.

The ivy leaf was still there.

Johnsy lay there for a long time, looking at it. And then she called Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.

"I've been a bad girl, Sudie," said Johnsy. "Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now and some milk with a little port in it, and—no; bring me a hand mirror first; and then pack some pillows about me, and I will sit up and watch you cook."

An hour later, she said,

"Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples."

The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go into the hallway as he left.

"Even chances," said the doctor, shaking Sue's thin, shaking hand in his. "With good nursing, you'll win. And now I must see another case I have downstairs. Behrman's name is—some kind of artist, I believe. Pneumonia, too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him, but he goes to the hospital today to be made more comfortable."

The next day, the doctor said to Sue, "She's out of danger. You've won. Nutrition and care now—that's all."

And that afternoon, Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm around her, pillows and all.

"I have something to tell you, white mouse," she said. "Mr. Behrman died of pneumonia today in the hospital. He was ill for only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs.

helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet and icy cold. They couldn't imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they found a lantern, still lit, and a ladder that had been dragged from its place, some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colors mixed on it. They looked out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew? Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece—he painted it there the night that the last leaf fell."