41 Stories Read Free

‘em where he says: “Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est” ; which is the same as to say, “We will need all of our gall in devising means to tree them parties.” I hated to make a show of education; but I was disinclined to be overdone in syntax by a mere Indian, a member of a race to which we owe nothing except the land on which the United States is situated.
    What common man could dispose of female do-gooders one minute, saying of a cabman’s horse “that he was stuffed with oats until one of those old ladies who leave their dishes unwashed at home and go about having expressmen arrested, would have smiled—yes, smiled—to have seen him,” and then, the next minute, declare that a character “found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him?”
    O.Henry, at his best, is both brilliant and wise, both serious and funny. He mixes and he pours, and his concoctions, though brewed according to formula, are nevertheless daz zlingly potent at their best, for the formula is unique, it is his alone, and it is framed out of materials as true as much of what goes into the heaviest, most ponderous tomes. Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real. O.Henry is many things, and like all good artists, he is sometimes a contradictory, complex mixture of many different things, but he is almost never boring—and certainly not in any of the stories here spread out for your enlightenment, instruction, and entertainment.
    â€”BURTON RAFFEL

The Social Triangle
    At the stroke of six Ikey Snigglefritz laid down his goose. Ikey was a tailor’s apprentice. Are there tailors’ apprentices nowadays?
    At any rate, Ikey toiled and snipped and basted and pressed and patched and sponged all day in the steamy fetor of a tailor-shop. But when work was done Ikey hitched his wagon to such stars as his firmament let shine.
    It was Saturday night, and the boss laid twelve begrimed and begrudged dollars in his hand. Ikey dabbled discreetly in water, donned coat, hat and collar with its frazzled tie, and chalcedony pin, and set forth in pursuit of his ideals.
    For each of us, when our day’s work is done, must seek our ideal, whether it be love or pinochle or lobster à la Newburg, or the sweet silence of the musty bookshelves.
    Behold Ikey as he ambles up the street beneath the roaring “El” between the rows of reeking sweatshops. Pallid, stooping, insignificant, squalid, doomed to exist forever in penury of body and mind, yet, as he swings his cheap cane and projects the noisome inhalations from his cigarette you perceive that he nurtures in his narrow bosom the bacillus of society.
    Ikey’s legs carried him to and into that famous place of entertainment known as the Café Maginnis—famous because it was the rendezvous of Billy McMahan, the greatest man, the most wonderful man, Ikey thought, that the world had ever produced.
    Billy McMahan was the district leader. Upon him the Tiger purred, and his hand held manna to scatter. Now, as Ikey entered, McMahan stood, flushed and triumphant and mighty, the centre of a huzzaing concourse of his lieutenants and constituents. It seems there had been an election; a signal victory had been won; the city had been swept back into line by a resistless besom of ballots.
    Ikey slunk along the bar and gazed, breath-quickened, at his idol.
    How magnificent was Billy McMahan, with his great, smooth, laughing face; his gray eye, shrewd as a chicken hawk’s; his diamond ring, his voice like a bugle call, his prince’s air, his plump and active roll of money, his clarion call to friend and comrade—oh, what a king of men he was! How he obscured his lieutenants, though they themselves loomed large and serious, blue of chin and important of mien, with hands buried deep in the pockets of their short overcoats! But