Scribd Logo
Upload

Welcome to Scribd!

  • 3 views

    Chapter 50

    Uploaded by

    engrjonathanokechukwu

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Chapter 50

    Uploaded by

    engrjonathanokechukwu
    3 views2 pages

    Copyright

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Available Formats

    DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    Did you find this document useful?

    Is this content inappropriate?

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    3 views2 pages

    Chapter 50

    Uploaded by

    engrjonathanokechukwu

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 2

    O HENRY 100 SELECTED STORIES

    77

    Tropical islet lay surrounded by a billowy sea of soiled matting. Upon the gay-
    papered wall were those pictures that pursue the homeless one from house
    to house – The Huguenot Lovers, The First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast,
    Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel’s chastely severe outline was ingloriously
    veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the
    Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the
    room’s marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port – a trifling
    vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out of
    a deck.

    One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little


    signs left by the furnished room’s procession of guests developed a
    significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that
    lovely woman had marched in the throng. Tiny finger-prints on the wall spoke
    of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain,
    raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or
    bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall. Across the pier glass
    had been scrawled with a diamond in staggering letters the name ‘Marie.’ It
    seemed that the succession of dwellers in the furnished room had turned in
    fury – perhaps tempted beyond forbearance by its garish coldness and
    wreaked upon it their passions. The furniture was chipped and bruised; the
    couch, distorted by bursting springs, seemed a horrible monster that had
    been slain during the stress of some grotesque convulsion. Some more
    potent upheaval had cloven a great slice from the marble mantel. Each plank
    in the floor owned its particular cant and shriek as from a separate and
    individual agony. It seemed incredible that all this malice and injury had been
    wrought upon the room by those who had called it for a time their home; and
    yet it may have been the cheated home instinct surviving blindly, the
    resentful rage at false household gods that had kindled their wrath. A but
    that is our own we can sweep and adorn and cherish.

    The young tenant In the chair allowed these thoughts to file, soft-shod,
    through his mind, while there drifted into the room furnished sounds and
    furnished scents. He heard in one room a tittering and incontinent, slack
    laughter; in others the monologue of a scold, the rattling of dice, a lullaby,
    and one crying dully; above him a banjo tinkled with spirit. Doors banged
    somewhere; the elevated trains roared intermittently; a cat yowled miserably
    upon a back fence. And he breathed the breath of the house – a dank savor
    rather than a smell – a cold, musty effluvium as from

    You might also like