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A Madison Square Arabian Night

Short Stories

"Fox-in-the-Morning"

A Bird of Bagdad

A Blackjack Bargainer

A Call Loan

A Chaparral Christmas Gift

A Chaparral Prince

A Comedy in Rubber

A Cosmopolite in a Cafe

A Departmental Case

A Dinner at--------*

A Double-Dyed Deceiver

A Fog in Santone

A Harlem Tragedy

A Lickpenny Lover

A Little Local Colour

A Little Talk about Mobs

A Madison Square Arabian Night

A Matter of Mean Elevation

A Midsummer Knight's Dream

A Midsummer Masquerade

A Municipal Report

A Newspaper Story

A Night in New Arabia

A Philistine in Bohemia

A Poor Rule

A Ramble in Aphasia

A Retrieved Reformation

A Ruler of Men

A Sacrifice Hit

A Service of Love

A Snapshot at the President

A Strange Story

A Technical Error

A Tempered Wind

According to Their Lights

After Twenty Years

An Adjustment of Nature

An Afternoon Miracle

An Apology

An Unfinished Christmas Story

An Unfinished Story

Aristocracy Versus Hash

Art and the Bronco

At Arms With Morpheus

Babes in the Jungle

Best-Seller

Between Rounds

Bexar Scrip No. 2692

Blind Man's Holiday

Brickdust Row

Buried Treasure

By Courier

Calloway's Code

Caught

Cherchez La Femme

Christmas by Injunction

Compliments of the Season

Confessions of a Humorist

Conscience in Art

Cupid a La Carte

Cupid's Exile Number Two

Dickey

Dougherty's Eye-Opener

Elsie in New York

Extradited from Bohemia

Fickle Fortune or How Gladys Hustled

Friends in San Rosario

From Each According to His Ability

From the Cabby's Seat

Georgia's Ruling

Girl

He Also Serves

Hearts and Crosses

Hearts and Hands

Helping the Other Fellow

Holding Up a Train

Hostages to Momus

Hygeia at the Solito

Innocents of Broadway

Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet

Jimmy Hayes and Muriel

Law and Order

Let Me Feel Your Pulse

Little Speck in Garnered Fruit

Lord Oakhurst's Curse

Lost on Dress Parade

Madame Bo-Peep, of the Ranches

Makes the Whole World Kin

Mammon and the Archer

Man About Town

Masters of Arts

Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

Modern Rural Sports

Money Maze

Nemesis and the Candy Man

New York by Camp Fire Light

Next to Reading Matter

No Story

October and June

On Behalf of the Management

One Dollar's Worth

One Thousand Dollars

Out of Nazareth

Past One at Rooney's

Phoebe

Proof of the Pudding

Psyche and the Pskyscraper

Queries and Answers

Roads of Destiny

Roses, Ruses and Romance

Rouge et Noir

Round the Circle

Rus in Urbe

Schools and Schools

Seats of the Haughty

Shearing the Wolf

Ships

Shoes

Sisters of the Golden Circle

Smith

Sociology in Serge and Straw

Sound and Fury

Springtime a La Carte

Squaring the Circle

Strictly Business

Strictly Business

Suite Homes and Their Romance

Telemachus, Friend

The Admiral

The Adventures of Shamrock Jolnes

The Assessor of Success

The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear

The Badge of Policeman O'Roon

The Brief Debut of Tildy

The Buyer From Cactus City

The Caballero's Way

The Cactus

The Caliph and the Cad

The Caliph, Cupid and the Clock

The Call of the Tame

The Chair of Philanthromathematics

The Champion of the Weather

The Church with an Overshot-Wheel

The City of Dreadful Night

The Clarion Call

The Coming-Out of Maggie

The Complete Life of John Hopkins

The Cop and the Anthem

The Count and the Wedding Guest

The Country of Elusion

The Day Resurgent

The Day We Celebrate

The Defeat of the City

The Detective Detector

The Diamond of Kali

The Discounters of Money

The Dog and the Playlet

The Door of Unrest

The Dream

The Duel

The Duplicity of Hargraves

The Easter of the Soul

The Emancipation of Billy

The Enchanted Kiss

The Enchanted Profile

The Ethics of Pig

The Exact Science of Matrimony

The Ferry of Unfulfilment

The Fifth Wheel

The Flag Paramount

The Fool-Killer

The Foreign Policy of Company 99

The Fourth in Salvador

The Friendly Call

The Furnished Room

The Gift of the Magi

The Girl and the Graft

The Girl and the Habit

The Gold That Glittered

The Greater Coney

The Green Door

The Guardian of the Accolade

The Guilty Party - An East Side Tragedy

The Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss

The Hand that Riles the World

The Handbook of Hymen

The Harbinger

The Head-Hunter

The Hiding of Black Bill

The Higher Abdication

The Higher Pragmatism

The Hypotheses of Failure

The Indian Summer of Dry Valley Johnson

The Lady Higher Up

The Last Leaf

The Last of the Troubadours

The Lonesome Road

The Lost Blend

The Lotus And The Bottle

The Love-Philtre of Ikey Schoenstein

The Making of a New Yorker

The Man Higher Up

The Marionettes

The Marquis and Miss Sally

The Marry Month of May

The Memento

The Missing Chord

The Moment of Victory

The Octopus Marooned

The Passing of Black Eagle

The Pendulum

The Phonograph and the Graft

The Pimienta Pancakes

The Plutonian Fire

The Poet and the Peasant

The Pride of the Cities

The Princess and the Puma

The Prisoner of Zembla

The Proem

The Purple Dress

The Ransom of Mack

The Ransom of Red Chief

The Rathskeller and the Rose

The Red Roses of Tonia

The Reformation of Calliope

The Remnants of the Code

The Renaissance at Charleroi

The Roads We Take

The Robe of Peace

The Romance of a Busy Broker

The Rose of Dixie

The Rubaiyat of a Scotch Highball

The Rubber Plant's Story

The Shamrock and the Palm

The Shocks of Doom

The Skylight Room

The Sleuths

The Snow Man

The Social Triangle

The Song and the Sergeant

The Sparrows in Madison Square

The Sphinx Apple

The Tale of a Tainted Tenner

The Theory and the Hound

The Thing's the Play

The Third Ingredient

The Trimmed Lamp

The Unknown Quantity

The Unprofitable Servant

The Venturers

The Vitagraphoscope

The Voice of the City

The Whirligig of Life

The World and the Door

Thimble, Thimble

Tictocq

To Him Who Waits

Tobin's Palm

Tommy's Burglar

Tracked to Doom

Transformation of Martin Burney

Transients in Arcadia

Two Recalls

Two Renegades

Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

Ulysses and the Dogman

Vanity and Some Sables

What You Want

While the Auto Waits

Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking

Witches' Loaves







To Carson Chalmers, in his apartment near the square, Phillips
brought the evening mail. Beside the routine correspondence there
were two items bearing the same foreign postmark.

One of the incoming parcels contained a photograph of a woman. The
other contained an interminable letter, over which Chalmers hung,
absorbed, for a long time. The letter was from another woman; and
it contained poisoned barbs, sweetly dipped in honey, and feathered
with innuendoes concerning the photographed woman.

Chalmers tore this letter into a thousand bits and began to wear out
his expensive rug by striding back and forth upon it. Thus an animal
from the jungle acts when it is caged, and thus a caged man acts
when he is housed in a jungle of doubt.

By and by the restless mood was overcome. The rug was not an
enchanted one. For sixteen feet he could travel along it; three
thousand miles was beyond its power to aid.

Phillips appeared. He never entered; he invariably appeared, like a
well-oiled genie.

"Will you dine here, sir, or out?" he asked.

"Here," said Chalmers, "and in half an hour." He listened glumly to
the January blasts making an Aeolian trombone of the empty street.

"Wait," he said to the disappearing genie. "As I came home across
the end of the square I saw many men standing there in rows. There
was one mounted upon something, talking. Why do those men stand in
rows, and why are they there?"

"They are homeless men, sir," said Phillips. "The man standing on
the box tries to get lodging for them for the night. People come
around to listen and give him money. Then he sends as many as the
money will pay for to some lodging-house. That is why they stand in
rows; they get sent to bed in order as they come."

"By the time dinner is served," said Chalmers, "have one of those
men here. He will dine with me."

"W-w-which--," began Phillips, stammering for the first time during
his service.

"Choose one at random," said Chalmers. "You might see that he is
reasonably sober--and a certain amount of cleanliness will not be
held against him. That is all."

It was an unusual thing for Carson Chalmers to play the Caliph. But
on that night he felt the inefficacy of conventional antidotes to
melancholy. Something wanton and egregious, something high-flavored
and Arabian, he must have to lighten his mood.

On the half hour Phillips had finished his duties as slave of the
lamp. The waiters from the restaurant below had whisked aloft the
delectable dinner. The dining table, laid for two, glowed cheerily
in the glow of the pink-shaded candles.

And now Phillips, as though he ushered a cardinal--or held in charge
a burglar--wafted in the shivering guest who had been haled from the
line of mendicant lodgers.

It is a common thing to call such men wrecks; if the comparison be
used here it is the specific one of a derelict come to grief through
fire. Even yet some flickering combustion illuminated the drifting
hulk. His face and hands had been recently washed--a rite insisted
upon by Phillips as a memorial to the slaughtered conventions. In
the candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the
apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes
with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter's coat. Phillips's
comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and
conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were
full of a hopeless, tricky defiance like that seen in a cur's that
is cornered by his tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high,
but a quarter inch of redeeming collar showed above it. His manner
was singularly free from embarrassment when Chalmers rose from his
chair across the round dining table.

"If you will oblige me," said the host, "I will be glad to have your
company at dinner."

"My name is Plumer," said the highway guest, in harsh and aggressive
tones. "If you're like me, you like to know the name of the party
you're dining with."

"I was going on to say," continued Chalmers somewhat hastily, "that
mine is Chalmers. Will you sit opposite?"

Plumer, of the ruffled plumes, bent his knee for Phillips to slide
the chair beneath him. He had an air of having sat at attended
boards before. Phillips set out the anchovies and olives.

"Good!" barked Plumer; "going to be in courses, is it? All right,
my jovial ruler of Bagdad. I'm your Scheherezade all the way to the
toothpicks. You're the first Caliph with a genuine Oriental flavor
I've struck since frost. What luck! And I was forty-third in line. I
finished counting, just as your welcome emissary arrived to bid me
to the feast. I had about as much chance of getting a bed to-night
as I have of being the next President. How will you have the sad
story of my life, Mr. Al Raschid--a chapter with each course or the
whole edition with the cigars and coffee?"

"The situation does not seem a novel one to you," said Chalmers with
a smile.

"By the chin whiskers of the prophet--no!" answered the guest. "Now
York's as full of cheap Haroun al Raschids as Bagdad is of fleas.
I've been held up for my story with a loaded meal pointed at my
head twenty times. Catch anybody in New York giving you something
for nothing! They spell curiosity and charity with the same set of
building blocks. Lots of 'em will stake you to a dime and chop-suey;
and a few of 'em will play Caliph to the tune of a top sirloin;
but every one of 'em will stand over you till they screw your
autobiography out of you with foot notes, appendix and unpublished
fragments. Oh, I know what to do when I see victuals coming toward
me in little old Bagdad-on-the-Subway. I strike the asphalt three
times with my forehead and get ready to spiel yarns for my supper.
I claim descent from the late Tommy Tucker, who was forced to hand
out vocal harmony for his pre-digested wheaterina and spoopju."

"I do not ask your story," said Chalmers. "I tell you frankly that
it was a sudden whim that prompted me to send for some stranger to
dine with me. I assure you you will not suffer through any curiosity
of mine."

"Oh, fudge!" exclaimed the guest, enthusiastically tackling his
soup; "I don't mind it a bit. I'm a regular Oriental magazine
with a red cover and the leaves cut when the Caliph walks abroad.
In fact, we fellows in the bed line have a sort of union rate
for things of this sort. Somebody's always stopping and wanting
to know what brought us down so low in the world. For a
sandwich and a glass of beer I tell 'em that drink did it. For
corned beef and cabbage and a cup of coffee I give 'em the
hard-hearted-landlord--six-months-in-the-hospital-lost-job story.
A sirloin steak and a quarter for a bed gets the Wall Street
tragedy of the swept-away fortune and the gradual descent. This
is the first spread of this kind I've stumbled against. I haven't
got a story to fit it. I'll tell you what, Mr. Chalmers, I'm
going to tell you the truth for this, if you'll listen to it.
It'll be harder for you to believe than the made-up ones."

An hour later the Arabian guest lay back with a sigh of satisfaction
while Phillips brought the coffee and cigars and cleared the table.

"Did you ever hear of Sherrard Plumer?" he asked, with a strange
smile.

"I remember the name," said Chalmers. "He was a painter, I think, of
a good deal of prominence a few years ago."

"Five years," said the guest. "Then I went down like a chunk of
lead. I'm Sherrard Plumer! I sold the last portrait I painted for
$2,000. After that I couldn't have found a sitter for a gratis
picture."

"What was the trouble?" Chalmers could not resist asking.

"Funny thing," answered Plumer, grimly. "Never quite understood it
myself. For a while I swam like a cork. I broke into the swell crowd
and got commissions right and left. The newspapers called me a
fashionable painter. Then the funny things began to happen. Whenever
I finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and
look queerly at one another."

"I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing
out in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original.
I don't know how I did it--I painted what I saw--but I know it did
me. Some of my sitters were fearfully enraged and refused their
pictures. I painted the portrait of a very beautiful and popular
society dame. When it was finished her husband looked at it with a
peculiar expression on his face, and the next week he sued for
divorce."

"I remember one case of a prominent banker who sat to me. While I
had his portrait on exhibition in my studio an acquaintance of his
came in to look at it. 'Bless me,' says he, 'does he really look
like that?" I told him it was considered a faithful likeness. 'I
never noticed that expression about his eyes before,' said he; 'I
think I'll drop downtown and change my bank account.' He did drop
down, but the bank account was gone and so was Mr. Banker.

"It wasn't long till they put me out of business. People don't
want their secret meannesses shown up in a picture. They can smile
and twist their own faces and deceive you, but the picture can't.
I couldn't get an order for another picture, and I had to give
up. I worked as a newspaper artist for a while, and then for a
lithographer, but my work with them got me into the same trouble. If
I drew from a photograph my drawing showed up characteristics and
expressions that you couldn't find in the photo, but I guess they
were in the original, all right. The customers raised lively rows,
especially the women, and I never could hold a job long. So I began
to rest my weary head upon the breast of Old Booze for comfort. And
pretty soon I was in the free-bed line and doing oral fiction for
hand-outs among the food bazaars. Does the truthful statement weary
thee, O Caliph? I can turn on the Wall Street disaster stop if you
prefer, but that requires a tear, and I'm afraid I can't hustle one
up after that good dinner."

"No, no," said Chalmers, earnestly, "you interest me very much. Did
all of your portraits reveal some unpleasant trait, or were there
some that did not suffer from the ordeal of your peculiar brush?"

"Some? Yes," said Plumer. "Children generally, a good many women and
a sufficient number of men. All people aren't bad, you know. When
they were all right the pictures were all right. As I said, I don't
explain it, but I'm telling you facts."

On Chalmers's writing-table lay the photograph that he had received
that day in the foreign mail. Ten minutes later he had Plumer at
work making a sketch from it in pastels. At the end of an hour the
artist rose and stretched wearily.

"It's done," he yawned. "You'll excuse me for being so long. I got
interested in the job. Lordy! but I'm tired. No bed last night, you
know. Guess it'll have to be good night now, O Commander of the
Faithful!"

Chalmers went as far as the door with him and slipped some bills
into his hand.

"Oh! I'll take 'em," said Plumer. "All that's included in the fall.
Thanks. And for the very good dinner. I shall sleep on feathers
to-night and dream of Bagdad. I hope it won't turn out to be a dream
in the morning. Farewell, most excellent Caliph!"

Again Chalmers paced restlessly upon his rug. But his beat lay as
far from the table whereon lay the pastel sketch as the room would
permit. Twice, thrice, he tried to approach it, but failed. He could
see the dun and gold and brown of the colors, but there was a wall
about it built by his fears that kept him at a distance. He sat down
and tried to calm himself. He sprang up and rang for Phillips.

"There is a young artist in this building," he said. "--a Mr.
Reineman--do you know which is his apartment?"

"Top floor, front, sir," said Phillips.

"Go up and ask him to favor me with his presence here for a few
minutes."

Reineman came at once. Chalmers introduced himself.

"Mr. Reineman," said he, "there is a little pastel sketch on yonder
table. I would be glad if you will give me your opinion of it as to
its artistic merits and as a picture."

The young artist advanced to the table and took up the sketch.
Chalmers half turned away, leaning upon the back of a chair.

"How--do--you find it?" he asked, slowly.

"As a drawing," said the artist, "I can't praise it enough. It's the
work of a master--bold and fine and true. It puzzles me a little; I
haven't seen any pastel work near as good in years."

"The face, man--the subject--the original--what would you say of
that?"

"The face," said Reineman, "is the face of one of God's own angels.
May I ask who--"

"My wife!" shouted Chalmers, wheeling and pouncing upon the
astonished artist, gripping his hand and pounding his back. "She is
traveling in Europe. Take that sketch, boy, and paint the picture
of your life from it and leave the price to me."




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