O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 by Various

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She wears superb clothes--the last word in richness and the elegance
of perfection--clothes that no man can declaim over, stimulating
himself the while with shot after shot of that most insidious of all
dope, self-pity. You see, she earns them all herself, along with the
Ming jars, the point de Venise, the country place, and countless other
things. She is the funniest woman in the world--not in her
press-agent's imagination, but in cold, sober fact. She can make
anybody laugh; she does make everybody.

Night after night in the huge public theatres of the common people; in
the small private ones of the commoner rich; in Greek amphitheatres
where the laughter rolls away in thunderous waves to be echoed back by
distant blue hills; in institutions for the blind; in convalescent
wards; everywhere, every time, she makes them laugh. The day labourer,
sodden and desperate from too much class legislation, the ego in his
cosmos and the struggle for existence; the statesman, fearful of
losing votes, rendered blue and depressed by the unruliness of nations
and all the vast multitude of horrors that lie in between--all of
these, all of them, she makes laugh. She is queen of the profession
she has chosen--unusual for one of her sex. She is the funniest woman
in the world.

When she is at home--which is seldom--she has many visitors and
strives, if possible, to see none of them.

"You know, I entertain so much," she pleads in that vivid, whimsical
way of hers that holds as much of sadness as mirth.

But this time, it being so early in the afternoon, she was caught
unawares.

The girls--they were nothing but girls, three of them--found her out
upon the lawn, sitting on a seat where the velvety green turf fell
away in a steep hillside, and far beneath them they could see the
river moving whitely beyond the trees. They halted there before her,
happy but trembling, giggling but grave. They were gasping and
incoherent, full of apologies and absurd tremors. It had taken their
combined week's savings to bribe the gardener. And they only wanted to
know one thing: How had she achieved all this fame and splendour, by
what magic process had she become that rarest of all living creatures,
the funniest woman in the world?

It was an easy enough question to ask and, to them, hovering
twittering upon high heels a trifle worn to one side, a simple one for
her to answer. She looked at them in that humorous, kindly way of
hers, looked at their silly, excited, made-up faces with noses
sticking out stark, like handles, from a too-heavy application of
purplish-white powder. Then her glance travelled down the velvety
green slope to the bright river glancing and leaping beyond the shady
trees.

Did she think of that other girl? Sitting there with that strange
smile upon her face, the smile that is neither mirth nor sadness, but
a poignant, haunting compound of both, did she remember her and the
Urge that had always been upon her, racking her like actual pain,
driving her with a whip of scorpions, flaying her on and on with a far
more vivid sense of suffering than the actual beatings laid on by her
mother's heavy hand, the thing that found articulation in the words,
"I must be famous, I must!"

She belonged in the rear of a batch of a dozen, and had never been
properly named. The wind was blowing from the stockyards on the dark
hour when she arrived. It penetrated even to the small airless chamber
where she struggled for her first breath--one of a "flat" in the
poorest tenement in the worst slum in Chicago. Huddled in smelly rags
by a hastily summoned neighbour from the floor above, the newcomer
raised her untried voice in a frail, reedy cry. Perhaps she did not
like the smell that oozed in around the tightly closed window to
combat the foul odours of the airless room. Whatever it was, this
protest availed her nothing, for the neighbour hurriedly departed,
having been unwilling from the first, and the mother turned away and
lay close against the stained, discoloured wall, too apathetic, too
utterly resigned to the fate life had meted out to her to accord this
most unwelcome baby further attention. This first moment of her life
might easily serve as the history of her babyhood.

Her father was also indifferent. He brought home his money and gave it
to his wife--children were strictly none of his business. Her brothers
and sisters, each one busily and fiercely fending for himself, gave no
attention to her small affairs.

Tossed by the careless hand of Fate into the dark sea of life to swim
or perish, she awoke to consciousness with but one thought--food; one
ruling passion--to get enough. And since, in her habitual half-starved
state, all food looked superlatively good to her, cake was the first
word she learned to speak. It formed her whole vocabulary for a
surprisingly long time, and Cake was the only name she was ever known
by in her family circle and on the street that to her ran on and on
and on as narrow and dirty, as crowded and as cruel as where it passed
the great dilapidated old rookery that held the four dark rooms that
she called home.

Up to the age of ten her life was sketchy. A passionate scramble for
food, beatings, tears, slumber, a swift transition from one childish
ailment to another that kept her forever out of reach of the truant
officer.

She lay upon the floor in a little dark room, and through the window
in the airless air-shaft, high up in one corner, she could see a
three-cornered spot of light. At first she wondered what it was, since
she lived in a tenement, not under the sky. Then it resolved itself
into a ball, white and luminous, that floated remote in that high
place and seemed to draw her, and was somehow akin to the queer,
gnawing pain that developed about that time beneath her breastbone. It
was all inarticulate, queer and confused. She did not think, she did
not know how. She only felt that queer gnawing beneath her breastbone,
distinct from all her other pains, and which she ascribed to hunger,
and saw the lovely, trembling globe of light. At first she felt it
only when she was ill and lay on the tumbled floor bed and looked up
through the dark window; afterward always in her dreams.

After she passed her tenth birthday the confusion within her seemed to
settle as the queer pain increased, and she began to think, to wonder
what it could be.

A year or two later her father died, and as she was the only child
over whom her mother could exercise any control, the report of her
death was successfully impressed upon the truant officer, so that she
might be put to work unhindered to help the family in its desperate
scramble for food, a scramble in which she took part with vivid
earnestness. She was hired to Maverick's to wash dishes.

Maverick was a Greek and kept an open-all-night chop-house, a mean
hole in the wall two doors from the corner, where Cake's surpassing
thinness made her invaluable at the sink. Also the scraps she carried
home in her red, water-puckered hands helped out materially. Then her
mother took a boarder and rested in her endeavours, feeling she had
performed all things well.

This boarder was a man with a past. And he had left it pretty far
behind, else he had never rented a room and meals from the mother of
Cake. In this boarder drink and debauchery had completely beaten out
of shape what had once been a very noble figure of a man. His body was
shrunken and trembling; the old, ragged clothes he wore flapped about
him like the vestments of a scarecrow. His cheeks had the bruised
congested look of the habitual drinker, his nose seemed a toadstool on
his face, and his red eyes were almost vanished behind puffy, purple,
pillow-like lids. His voice was husky and whispering, except when he
raised it. Then it was surprisingly resonant and mellow, with
something haunting in it like the echo of an echo of a very moving
sweetness.

One night Cake, returning all weary and played-out from dish-washing
at Maverick's, heard him speaking in this loud voice of his, pushed
the door open a crack, and peeked in. He was standing in the middle of
the floor evidently speaking what the child called to herself "a
piece." Her big mouth crooked derisively in the beginning of what is
now her famous smile. The lodger went on speaking, being fairly well
stimulated at the time, and presently Cake pushed the door wider and
crept in to the dry-goods box, where her mother always kept a candle,
and sat down.

The lodger talked on and on while Cake sat rapt, the flickering candle
in her hands throwing strange lights and shadows upon her gaunt face.
How was she to know she was the last audience of one of the greatest
Shakespearian actors the world had ever seen?

It was a grave and wondering Cake that crept to her place to sleep
that night between her two older sisters. And while they ramped
against her and chewed and snorted in her ears, she listened all over
again to that wonderful voice and was awed by the colour and beauty of
the words that it had spoken. She slept, and saw before her the globe
of light, trembling and luminous, the one bright thing of beauty her
life had ever known, that seemed to draw her up from darkness slowly
and with great suffering. Trembling and weeping she awoke in the dawn,
and the strange pain that had tortured her so much and that she had
called hunger and sought to assuage with scraps from the plates that
came to the sink at Maverick's became articulate at last. With her
hands clasped hard against her breast she found relief in words.

"I gotta be somebody," sobbed the child. "I mus' be famous, I mus'!"

She arose to find life no longer a confused struggle for food, but a
battle and a march; a battle to get through one day to march on to the
next, and so on and on until, in that long line of days that stretched
out ahead of her like chambers waiting to be visited, she reached the
one where rested Fame, that trembling, luminous globe of beauty it was
so vitally necessary for her to achieve. "How come he c'n talk like
that?" she demanded of herself, musing on the lodger's wonderful
exhibition over the greasy dish-water at Maverick's.

And that night she asked him, prefacing her question with the offering
of an almost perfect lamb-chop. Only one piece had been cut from it
since the purchaser, at that moment apprised by Maverick himself that
the arrival of the police was imminent, had taken a hasty departure.

"Who learned you to talk that-a-way?" demanded Cake, licking a faint,
far-away flavour of the chop from her long, thin fingers.

The lodger, for a moment, had changed places with the candle. That is
to say, he sat upon the dry-goods box, the candle burned upon the
floor. And, having been most unfortunate that day, the lodger was
tragically sober. He bit into the chop voraciously, like a dog, with
his broken, discoloured teeth.

"A book 'learned' me," he said, "and practice and experience--and
something else." He broke off short. "They called it genius then," he
said bitterly.

Cake took a short step forward. That thing beneath her prominent
breastbone pained her violently, forced her on to speak.

"You learn me," she said.

The lodger ceased to chew and stared, the chop bone uplifted in his
dirty hand. A pupil for him!

"You want to do this perhaps," he began. "Pray do not mock me; I am a
very foolish, fond old man----"

The disreputable, swollen-faced lodger with a nose like a poisoned
toadstool vanished. Cake saw an old white-haired man, crazy and
pitiful, yet bearing himself grandly. She gasped, the tears flew to
her eyes, blinding her. The lodger laughed disagreeably, he was
gnawing on the chop bone again.

"I suppose you think because you've found me here it is likely I'll
teach you--you! You starved alley cat!" he snarled.

Cake did not even blink. It is repetition that dulls, and she was
utterly familiar with abuse.

"And suppose I did--'learn' you," he sneered, "what would _you_ do
with it?"

"I would be famous," cried Cake.

Then the lodger did laugh, looking at her with his head hanging down,
his swollen face all creased and purple, his hair sticking up rough
and unkempt. He laughed, sitting there a degraded, debauched ruin,
looking down from the height of his memories upon the gaunt, unlovely
child of the slums who was rendered even more unlovely by the very
courage that kept her waiting beside the broken door.

"So you think I could learn you to be famous, hey?" Even the words of
this gutter filth he sought to construe into something nattering to
himself.

Cake nodded. Really she had not thought of it that way at all. There
was no thinking connected with her decision. The dumb hours she had
spent staring up the air-shaft had resolved themselves with the
passing years into a strange, numb will to do. There was the light and
she must reach it. Indeed the Thing there behind the narrow walls of
her chest gave her no alternative. She did not think she wanted to be
an actress. It was a long time after that before she knew even what an
actress was. She did not know what the lodger had been. No.
Instinctively, groping and inarticulate, she recognized in him the
rags and shreds of greatness, knew him to be a one-time dweller in
that temple whither, willing or not, she was bound, to reach it or to
die.

The lodger looked down at the naked chop bone in his hand. The juicy,
broiled meat was comforting to his outraged stomach. Meat. The word
stood out in his mind to be instantly followed by that other word
that, for him, had spelled ruin, made him a ragged panhandler, reduced
him to living among the poorest and most hopeless. Drink! He raised
his head and eyed Cake with crafty calculation.

"What will you pay me for such teaching?" he demanded, and looked down
again at the bone.

What he did in the end, Cake herself was satisfied came to him
afterward. At first he was actuated only by the desire to procure food
and drink--more especially the drink--at the cost of the least
possible effort to himself.

Cake saw the look, and she knew. She even smiled a little in the
greatness of her relief. She saw she had been right to bring the chop,
and appreciated that her progress along road to fame would be as slow
or fast as she could procure food for him in lesser or larger
quantities.

"I'll bring you eats," she said cunningly. "From Maverick's," she
added. By which she meant the eats would be "has-is"--distinctly
second class, quite possibly third.

The lodger nodded. "And booze," he put in, watching her face.

"And booze," Cake assented.

So the bargain was struck in a way that worked the most cruel hardship
on the girl. Food she could steal and did, blithely enough, since she
had no monitor but the lure of brightness and that Thing within her
breast that hotly justified the theft and only urged her on. But booze
was a very different proposition. It was impossible to steal
booze--even a little. To secure booze she was forced to offer money.
Now what money Cake earned at Maverick's her mother snatched from her
hand before she was well within the door. If she held out even a dime,
she got a beating. And Cake's mother, in the later years of her life,
besides being a clever evader of the police and the truant officer,
developed into a beater of parts. Broken food the child offered in
abundance and piteous hope. But the lodger was brutally indifferent.

"Food," he scoffed. "Why, it says in the Bible--you never heard of the
Bible, hey?" Cake shook her tangled head.

"No? Well, it's quite a Book," commented the lodger. He had been
fortunate that day and was, for him, fairly intoxicated. "And it says
right in there--and some consider that Book an authority--man cannot
live by food alone. Drink--I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes
when I have no occasion--Don't you know what drink is, alley-cat? Very
well, then, wine is wont to show the mind of man, and you won't see
mine until you bring me booze. Get out!"

And Cake got out. Also, being well versed in a very horrid wisdom, she
took the food with her. This was hardly what the lodger had expected,
and I think what respect he was capable of sprouted for her then.

Behind a screen of barrels in the corner of the alley Cake ate the
broken meats herself, taking what comfort she could, and pondering the
while the awful problem of securing the booze, since she must be
taught, and since the lodger moved in her sphere as the only available
teacher.

There was a rush up the alley past her hiding-place, a shout, and the
savage thud of blows. Very cautiously, as became one wise in the ways
of life in that place, Cake peered around a barrel. She saw Red Dan,
who sold papers in front of Jeer Dooley's place, thoroughly punishing
another and much larger boy. The bigger boy was crying.

"Anybody c'n sell pipers," shouted Red Dan, pounding the information
home bloodily. "You hear me?--anybody!"

Cake crept out of her hiding-place on the opposite side.

She did not care what happened to the bigger boy, though she respected
Red Dan the more. She knew where the money was going to come from to
buy the lodger's booze. It meant longer hours for her; it meant care
to work only out of school hours; it meant harder knocks than even she
had experienced; it meant a fatigue there were no words to describe
even among the beautiful, wonderful, colourful ones the lodger taught
her. But she sold the papers and she purchased the booze.

Her mother did not know where she spent this extra time. She did not
care since the money came in from Maverick's steadily each week.
Neither did the lodger care how the booze was procured; the big thing
to him was that it came.

At first these lessons were fun for him; the big, gawky, half-starved,
overworked child seeing so vividly in pictures all that he told her in
words. Full-fed on the scraps from Maverick's--he was no longer
fastidious--well stimulated by the drink she brought, he took an ugly
sort of degraded pleasure in posturing before her, acting as he alone
could act those most wonderful of all plays, watching with hateful,
sardonic amusement the light and shadow of emotion upon her dirty
face. Oh, he was a magician, no doubt at all of that! Past master in
the rare art of a true genius, that of producing illusion.

Then he would make Cake try, rave at her, curse her, strike her, kill
himself laughing, drink some more and put her at it again.

Night after night, almost comatose from the fatigue of a day that
began while it was still dark, she carried a heaped-up plate and a
full bottle to the lodger's room and sat down upon the dry-goods box
with the candle beside her on the floor. And, having thus secured her
welcome, night after night she walked with him among that greatest of
all throngs of soldiers and lovers, kings and cardinals, queens,
prostitutes and thieves.

If the liquor was short in the bottle a dime's worth, the lesson was
curtailed. At first Cake tried to coax him. "Aw, c'mon, yuh Romeo on
th' street in Mantua."

But the lodger was never so drunk that he made the slightest
concession.

"Yes, I'm Romeo all right--the lad's there, never fear, gutter-snipe.
But--the bottle is not full."

After that she never attempted to change his ruling. She was letter
perfect in the bitter lesson, and if the sale of papers did not bring
in enough to fill the bottle, she accepted the hard fact with the calm
of great determination and did not go near the lodger's room, but went
to bed instead.

Perhaps it was these rare occasions of rest that kept her alive.

After the lodger had been teaching her for several years her mother
died and was buried in the potters' field. Cake managed to keep two
rooms of the wretched flat, and no word of his landlady's demise
reached the lodger's drink-dulled ears. Otherwise Cake feared he might
depart, taking with him her one big chance to reach the light. You
see, she did not know the lodger. Things might have been different if
she had. But he was never a human being to her, even after she knew
the truth; only a symbol, a means to the great end.

Her brothers went away--to the penitentiary and other places. One by
one the flood of life caught her sisters and swept them out, she did
not know to what. She never even wondered. She had not been taught to
care. She had never been taught anything. The knowledge that she must
be famous danced through her dreams like a will-o'-the-wisp; had grown
within her in the shape of a great pain that never ceased; only eased
a little as she strove mightily toward the goal.

So she still sold papers, a homely, gawky, long-legged girl in ragged
clothes much too small for her, and slaved at Maverick's for the
lodger's nightly dole that he might teach her and she be famous.

At first he was keen on the meat and drink--more especially the drink.
Later, gradually, a change came over him. Only Cake did not notice
this change. She was too set on being taught so she could become
famous. At first the lodger was all oaths and blows with shouts of
fierce, derisive laughter intermingled.

"My God!" he would cry. "If Noyes could only see this--if he only
could!"

This Noyes, it appeared, was a man he furiously despised. When he was
in the third stage of drunkenness he would never teach Cake, but would
only abuse his enemies, and this Noyes invariably came in for a
fearful shower of epithets. It was he as Cake heard it, sitting
huddled on the old dry-goods box, the candle casting strange shadows
into her gaunt, unchildlike face, who was the cause of the lodger's
downfall. But for Noyes--with a blasting array of curses before the
name--he would now have what Cake so ardently strove for: Fame. But
for Noyes he would be acting in his own theatre, riding in his own
limousine, wearing his own diamonds, entertaining his own friends upon
his own gold plate.

When he was still too sober to take a really vital interest in the
teaching, he was a misanthrope, bitter and brutal, with an astonishing
command of the most terrible words. At these times he made the gravest
charges against Noyes; charges for which the man should be made
accountable, even to such a one as the lodger. One evening Cake sat
watching him, waiting for this mood to pass so that the teaching might
begin.

"If I was youse," she said at last, "and hated a guy like youse do
this Noyes, I'd fetch 'im a insult that'd get under his skin right.
I'd make evens wit' 'im, I would, not jes' talk about it."

"Oh, you would!" remarked the lodger. He took a long pull at the
bottle. "You be _Queen Kathrine_, you alley-cat."

So the nightly teaching began with the usual accompaniment of curses,
blows, and shouts of brutal laughter. But when it was over and the
lodger was sinking to the third stage that came inevitably with the
bottom of the bottle, he kept looking at his pupil queerly.

"Oh, you would! Oh, you would, would you?" He said it over and over
again. "Oh, you would, would you?"

And after that he was changed by the leaven of hate her suggestion had
started working in him. For one thing, he took a far greater interest
in the teaching for its own sake. Of that much the girl herself was
thankfully aware. And she thought, Cake did, that the dull husk of
self was wearing away from that part of her destined to be famous,
wearing away at last. The lodger's curses changed in tone as the
nights filed past, the blows diminished, the laughter became far more
frequent.

Cake, as rapidly reaching the end of her girlhood as the lodger was
nearing the limits of his drink-sapped strength, redoubled her
efforts. It was very plain to her that he could not live much longer;
death in delirium tremens was inevitable. After that, she decided,
school would not keep, and she must try her fortune.

Then one night in the midst of the potion scene when she felt herself
_Juliet_, soft, passionate, and beautiful, far away in the land of
tragic romance, she heard the lodger crying:

"Stop--my God, stop! How do you get that way? Don't you know there's a
limit to human endurance, alley-cat?"

He was fairly toppling from the dry-goods box. His eyes were popping
from his head, and in the flickering candlelight his face looked
strained and queer. In after life she became very familiar with that
expression; she saw it on all types of faces. In fact, she came to
expect to see it there. But she did not know how to analyze it then.
She glimpsed it only as a tribute to her performance, so immense that
she had to be halted in the middle, and felt correspondingly elated.
She was exactly right in her deduction. But Cake and the lodger
advanced along very different lines of thought.

The next night he was shaky, came all too quickly to the teaching
period, and left it as speedily. Then he retired to the flock mattress
in the corner of the room and called Cake to bring the candle.

"I've an idea I'm going to leave you, gutter-snipe," he said, "and I
doubt if I ever see you again. The end of life cancels all bands. And
the one that bound you to me, alley-cat, was very material, very
material indeed. The kind that runs easily in and out of a black
bottle." He laughed.

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