If you are feeling a little over-stuffed, this short story
by O. Henry may make you appreciate your Thanksgiving feast. There's the usual O. Henry twist at the
end. I've included a link to an audio I
recorded if you would rather listen to the story.
Dane
Click for an audio version
https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-itewf-15ba2d
Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen
by O. Henry/ William Sydney Porter
There is one day that is ours. There is one day when all we
Americans who are not self-made go back to the old home to eat saleratus
biscuits and marvel how much nearer to the porch the old pump looks than it
used to. Bless the day. President Roosevelt gives it to us. We hear some talk
of the Puritans, but don't just remember who they were. Bet we can lick 'em,
anyhow, if they try to land again. Plymouth Rocks? Well, that sounds more
familiar. Lots of us have had to come down to hens since the Turkey Trust got
its work in. But somebody in Washington is leaking out advance information to
'em about these Thanksgiving proclamations. The big city east of the cranberry
bogs has made Thanksgiving Day an institution. The last Thursday in November is
the only day in the year on which it recognizes the part of America lying
across the ferries. It is the one day that is purely American.
Yes, a day of
celebration, exclusively American.
And now for the story which is to prove to you that we have
traditions on this side of the ocean that are becoming older at a much rapider
rate than those of England are--thanks to our git-up and enterprise.
Stuffy Pete took his seat on the third bench to the right as
you enter Union Square from the east, at the walk opposite the fountain. Every
Thanksgiving Day for nine years he had taken his seat there promptly at 1
o'clock. For every time he had done so things had happened to him--Charles
Dickensy things that swelled his waistcoat above his heart, and equally on the
other side.
But to-day Stuffy Pete's appearance at the annual trysting
place seemed to have been rather the result of habit than of the yearly hunger
which, as the philanthropists seem to think, afflicts the poor at such extended
intervals.
Certainly Pete was not hungry. He had just come from a feast
that had left him of his powers barely those of respiration and locomotion. His
eyes were like two pale gooseberries firmly imbedded in a swollen and
gravy-smeared mask of putty. His breath came in short wheezes; a senatorial
roll of adipose tissue denied a fashionable set to his upturned coat collar.
Buttons that had been sewed upon his clothes by kind Salvation fingers a week
before flew like popcorn; strewing the earth around him. Ragged he was, with a
split shirt front open to the wishbone; but the November breeze, carrying fine
snowflakes, brought him only a grateful coolness. For Stuffy Pete was
overcharged with the caloric produced by a super-bountiful dinner, beginning
with oysters and ending with plum pudding, and including (it seemed to him) all
the roast turkey and baked potatoes and chicken salad and squash pie and ice
cream in the world. Wherefore he sat, gorged, and gazed upon the world with
after-dinner contempt.
The meal had been an unexpected one. He was passing a red
brick mansion near the beginning of Fifth Avenue, in which lived two old ladies
of ancient family and a reverence for traditions. They even denied the
existence of New York, and believed that Thanksgiving Day was declared solely
for Washington Square. One of their traditional habits was to station a servant
at the postern gate with orders to admit the first hungry wayfarer that came
along after the hour of noon had struck, and banquet him to a finish. Stuffy
Pete happened to pass by on his way to the park, and the seneschals gathered
him in and upheld the custom of the castle.
After Stuffy Pete had gazed straight before him for ten
minutes he was conscious of a desire for a more varied field of vision. With a
tremendous effort he moved his head slowly to the left. And then his eyes
bulged out fearfully, and his breath ceased, and the rough-shod ends of his
short legs wriggled and rustled on the gravel.
For the Old Gentleman was coming across Fourth Avenue toward
his bench.
Every Thanksgiving Day for nine years the Old Gentleman had
come there and found Stuffy Pete on his bench. That was a thing that the Old
Gentleman was trying to make a tradition of. Every Thanksgiving Day for nine
years he had found Stuffy there, and had led him to a restaurant and watched
him eat a big dinner. They do those things in England unconsciously. But this
is a young country, and nine years is not so bad. The Old Gentleman was a
staunch American patriot, and considered himself a pioneer in American
tradition. In order to become picturesque we must keep on doing one thing for a
long time without ever letting it get away from us. Something like collecting
the weekly dimes in industrial insurance. Or cleaning the streets.
The Old Gentleman moved, straight and stately, toward the
Institution that he was rearing. Truly, the annual feeling of Stuffy Pete was
nothing national in its character, such as the Magna Charta or jam for
breakfast was in England. But it was a step. It was almost feudal. It showed,
at least, that a Custom was not impossible to New Y--ahem!--America.
The Old Gentleman was thin and tall and sixty. He was
dressed all in black, and wore the old-fashioned kind of glasses that won't
stay on your nose. His hair was whiter and thinner than it had been last year,
and he seemed to make more use of his big, knobby cane with the crooked handle.
As his established benefactor came up Stuffy wheezed and
shuddered like some woman's over-fat pug when a street dog bristles up at him.
He would have flown, but all the skill of Santos-Dumont could not have
separated him from his bench. Well had the myrmidons of the two old ladies done
their work.
"Good morning," said the Old Gentleman. "I am
glad to perceive that the vicissitudes of another year have spared you to move
in health about the beautiful world. For that blessing alone this day of
thanksgiving is well proclaimed to each of us. If you will come with me, my
man, I will provide you with a dinner that should make your physical being
accord with the mental."
That is what the old Gentleman said every time. Every
Thanksgiving Day for nine years. The words themselves almost formed an
Institution. Nothing could be compared with them except the Declaration of
Independence. Always before they had been music in Stuffy's ears. But now he
looked up at the Old Gentleman's face with tearful agony in his own. The fine
snow almost sizzled when it fell upon his perspiring brow. But the Old
Gentleman shivered a little and turned his back to the wind.
Stuffy had always wondered why the Old Gentleman spoke his
speech rather sadly. He did not know that it was because he was wishing every
time that he had a son to succeed him. A son who would come there after he was
gone--a son who would stand proud and strong before some subsequent Stuffy, and
say: "In memory of my father." Then it would be an Institution.
But the Old Gentleman had no relatives. He lived in rented
rooms in one of the decayed old family brownstone mansions in one of the quiet
streets east of the park. In the winter he raised fuchsias in a little
conservatory the size of a steamer trunk. In the spring he walked in the Easter
parade. In the summer he lived at a farmhouse in the New Jersey hills, and sat
in a wicker armchair, speaking of a butterfly, the ornithoptera amphrisius,
that he hoped to find some day. In the autumn he fed Stuffy a dinner. These
were the Old Gentleman's occupations.
Stuffy Pete looked up at him for a half minute, stewing and
helpless in his own self-pity. The Old Gentleman's eyes were bright with the
giving-pleasure. His face was getting more lined each year, but his little
black necktie was in as jaunty a bow as ever, and the linen was beautiful and
white, and his gray mustache was curled carefully at the ends. And then Stuffy
made a noise that sounded like peas bubbling in a pot. Speech was intended; and
as the Old Gentleman had heard the sounds nine times before, he rightly construed
them into Stuffy's old formula of acceptance.
"Thankee, sir. I'll go with ye, and much obliged. I'm
very hungry, sir."
The coma of repletion had not; prevented from entering
Stuffy's mind the conviction that he was the basis of an Institution. His Thanksgiving
appetite was not his own; it belonged by all the sacred rights of established
custom, if not, by the actual Statute of Limitations, to this kind old
gentleman who bad preempted it. True, America is free; but in order to
establish tradition someone must be a repetend -- a repeating decimal. The
heroes are not all heroes of steel and gold. See one here that wielded only
weapons of iron, badly silvered, and tin.
The Old Gentleman led his annual protégé southward to the
restaurant, and to the table where the feast had always occurred. They were
recognized.
"Here comes de old guy," said a waiter, "Dat
blows dat same bum to a meal every Thanksgiving."
The Old Gentleman sat across the table glowing like a smoked
pearl at his corner-stone of future ancient Tradition. The waiters heaped the
table with holiday food--and Stuffy, with a sigh that was mistaken for hunger's
expression, raised knife and fork and carved for himself a crown of
imperishable bay.
No more valiant hero ever fought his way through the ranks
of an enemy. Turkey, chops, soups, vegetables, pies, disappeared before him as
fast as they could be served. Gorged nearly to the uttermost when he entered
the restaurant, the smell of food had almost caused him to lose his honor as a
gentleman, but he rallied like a true knight. He saw the look of beneficent
happiness on the Old Gentleman's face--a happier look than even the fuchsias
and the ornithoptera amphrisins had ever brought to it--and he had not the
heart to see it wane.
In an hour Stuffy leaned back with a battle won.
"Thankee kindly, sir," he puffed like a leaky steam pipe;
"thankee kindly for a hearty meal." Then he arose heavily with glazed
eyes and started toward the kitchen. A waiter turned him about like a top, and
pointed him toward the door. The Old Gentleman carefully counted out $1.30 in
silver change, leaving three nickels for the waiter.
They parted as they did each year at the door, the Old
Gentleman going south, Stuffy north.
Around the first corner Stuffy turned, and stood for one
minute. Then he seemed to puff out his rags as an owl puffs out his feathers,
and fell to the sidewalk like a sun-stricken horse.
When the ambulance came the young surgeon and the driver
cursed softly at his weight. There was no smell of whiskey to justify a
transfer to the patrol wagon, so Stuffy and his two dinners went to the
hospital. There they stretched him on a bed and began to test him for strange
diseases, with the hope of getting a chance at some problem with the bare
steel.
And lo! an hour later another ambulance brought the Old
Gentleman. And they laid him on another bed and spoke of appendicitis, for he
looked good for the bill.
But pretty soon one of the young doctors met one of the
young nurses whose eyes he liked, and stopped to chat with her about the cases.
"That nice old gentleman over there, now," he
said, "you wouldn't think that was a case of almost starvation. Proud old
family, I guess. He told me he hadn't eaten a thing for three days."
Here's a link to the text with the audio link at the bottom.
http://daneallred.podbean.com/2010/11/23/two-thanksgiving-day-gentlemen-by-o-henry-william-sydney-porter/
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