Page:Waifs and Strays (1917).djvu/208

Now let us set beside this a story of a different type, The Furnished Room, which appears in the volume called “The Four Million.” It shows O. Henry at his best as a master of that supreme pathos that springs, with but little adventitious aid of time or circumstance, from the fundamental things of life itself. In the sheer art of narration there is nothing done by Maupassant that surpasses The Furnished Room. The story runs—so far as one dare attempt to reproduce it without quoting it all word for word—after this fashion.

The scene is laid in New York in the lost district of the lower West Side, where the wandering feet of actors and one-week transients seek furnished rooms in dilapidated houses of fallen grandeur.

One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote hollow depths. . . . “I have the third floor back vacant since a week back,” says the landlady. . . . “It’s a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some 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 three months. They done 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 mar-