O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 Part 11

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 G.o.d!" 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s 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, pa.s.sionate, and beautiful, far away in the land of tragic romance, she heard the lodger crying:

"Stop--my G.o.d, 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 a.n.a.lyze 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.

"You Shakespearian actress!" He laughed again, longer this time. "But I have not forgotten you," he resumed. "In addition to all that I have taught you, I am going to leave you something. Here," he fumbled out a square envelope and Cake took it between her hands. "Take that to the address written on it," said the lodger, "and see what the gentleman does." He began to laugh again.

"Noyes----" he cried and broke off to curse feebly but volubly. Cake did not even glance in his direction. She went away out of the room, too utterly stunned with fatigue to look at the letter in her dingy hand.

The next morning the lodger was dead. He was buried in the potters'

field quite near his old landlady.

This second funeral, such as it was, closed the shelter that Cake, for want of a more fitting name, had called home. She decided to put all her years of bitterly acquired learning to the test. And as she best knew what she had bought and paid for it she felt she could not fail.

She unfolded from a sc.r.a.p of newspaper the envelope presented her by the lodger and carefully studied the address.

Cake could both read and write, having acquired these arts from a waiter at Maverick's, who also helped her steal the broken meats with which she secured her artistic education. And, watching the steady disappearance of the food, this waiter marvelled that she got no fatter as she grew upward, hovering about in hope of becoming her lover if she ever did. But even if that miracle had ever been accomplished the helpful waiter would still have waited. Cake's conception of a real lady was _Queen Katherine_; _Cleopatra_ her dream of a dangerous, fascinating one. And what chance in the world for either with a waiter?

Cake read the name and address upon the envelope freely as the hopeful bread-caster had taught her: Arthur Payson Noyes, National Theatre.

With the simplicity and dispatch that characterized her, she went to that place. To the man reposing somnolently in the broken old chair beside the door she said she had a letter for Mr. Noyes. The doorkeeper saw it was a large, sw.a.n.king envelope with very polite writing. He straightened up in the chair long enough to pa.s.s her in, and then slumped down again.

Cake found herself in a queer, barnlike place, half room and half hallway, feebly illumined by a single electric bulb suspended above the door. Very composedly she looked about her. If Mr. Arthur Noyes lived in this place, he was one of her own kind and there was no need for any palpitation on her part. Anyway, she was looking solely for her chance to become famous, and she brought to this second stage of her search the same indifference to externals, the same calm, unfaltering courage as she had to the first.

"Now, then," said a voice briskly. "Say what you want. We have not advertised for any extra people. At least--not this year."

A short, stout man emerged from the shadows. He was very blond, with his hair cut snapper, and his pale eyes popped perpetual astonishment.

She returned his look steadily and well. She knew she was born to be famous, and fame has a certain beauty of dignity utterly lacking in mere success.

"I am not an extra person," she replied. "I have come to see Mr.

Noyes," and she displayed once more the large square envelope, her legacy from the lodger, the knife with which she proposed to shuck from its rough sh.e.l.l that oyster, the world.

The man looked even more astonished, if the thing could have been accomplished, and regarded her keenly--stared.

"Come this way," he said.

Cake followed him along a narrow pa.s.sage that turned off to the right, down five steps, across a narrow entry, up three more steps--although it seems quite silly, she never in her life forgot the odd number of those worn steps--and halted before a closed door. On this the fat man knocked once and opened immediately without waiting.

"Someone I think you'll see," he said, standing between Cake and the interior. There came to her a murmur over his chunky shoulder.

"She has a letter from----" The fat man dropped his voice and mumbled.

"Positive," he said, aloud, after a pause broken only by the vague murmur within the room. "I'd know his fist anywhere. Yes." Then he pushed the door open wide, stood aside, and looked at Cake. "Walk in,"

he said.

She did so. Beautifully. Poems have been written about her walk. Two kinds.

The room she entered was square, with concrete floor and rough walls.

But Cake did not notice the room for three reasons: The rug on the floor, four pictures on the walls, and the man who looked at her as she entered.

They gazed at each other, Cake and this man, with sudden, intense concentration. He was a genius in his line, she as surely one in hers.

And, instinctively, to that strange, bright flame each rendered instant homage. What he saw he described long afterward when a million voices were vociferously raised in a million different descriptions.

What she saw she likened in her mind to a dark sheath from which a sword flashed gloriously. That sword was his soul.

"He says your name is Plain Cake--is that true?" He referred to the lodger's letter held open in his hand, and by that she knew he was Arthur Noyes. And great. That last she had not needed any telling.

"Yes," she replied.