O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 — The Urge

From _Everybody's_ She is now a woman ageless because she is famous.

She is surrounded by a swarm of lovers and possesses a great many beautiful things.

She has more than one Ming jar in the library at her country place; yards upon yards of point de Venise in her top bureau-drawer.

She is able to employ a very pleasant, wholesome woman, whose sole duty it is to keep her clothes in order.

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.

"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 scrap 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, swanking envelope with very polite writing.

He straightened up in the chair long enough to pass 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 shell that oyster, the world.

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