Psyche and the Pskyscraper

by O. Henry

If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the topof a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, anddespise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs onsummer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically withoutaim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable intelligenceof ants, for ants always know when they are going home. The ant is ofa lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his slippers onwhile you are left at your elevated station. Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a creeping,contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires, bootblacks, beauties,hod-carriers and politicians become little black specks dodging biggerblack specks in streets no wider than your thumb. From this high view the city itself becomes degraded to anunintelligible mass of distorted buildings and impossible perspectives;the revered ocean is a duck pond; the earth itself a lost golf ball. Allthe minutiae of life are gone. The philosopher gazes into the infiniteheavens above him, and allows his soul to expand to the influence ofhis new view. He feels that he is the heir to Eternity and the child ofTime. Space, too, should be his by the right of his immortal heritage,and he thrills at the thought that some day his kind shall traversethose mysterious aerial roads between planet and planet. The tiny worldbeneath his feet upon which this towering structure of steel rests as aspeck of dust upon a Himalayan mountain--it is but one of a countlessnumber of such whirling atoms. What are the ambitions, the achievements,the paltry conquests and loves of those restless black insects belowcompared with the serene and awful immensity of the universe that liesabove and around their insignificant city? It is guaranteed that the philosopher will have these thoughts. Theyhave been expressly compiled from the philosophies of the world and setdown with the proper interrogation point at the end of them to representthe invariable musings of deep thinkers on high places. And when thephilosopher takes the elevator down his mind is broader, his heart is atpeace, and his conception of the cosmogony of creation is as wide as thebuckle of Orion's summer belt. But if your name happened to be Daisy, and you worked in an EighthAvenue candy store and lived in a little cold hall bedroom, five feetby eight, and earned $6 per week, and ate ten-cent lunches and werenineteen years old, and got up at 6.30 and worked till 9, and never hadstudied philosophy, maybe things wouldn't look that way to you from thetop of a skyscraper. Two sighed for the hand of Daisy, the unphilosophical. One was Joe, whokept the smallest store in New York. It was about the size of a tool-boxof the D. P. W., and was stuck like a swallow's nest against a cornerof a down-town skyscraper. Its stock consisted of fruit, candies,newspapers, song books, cigarettes, and lemonade in season. When sternwinter shook his congealed locks and Joe had to move himself and thefruit inside, there was exactly room in the store for the proprietor,his wares, a stove the size of a vinegar cruet, and one customer. Joe was not of the nation that keeps us forever in a furore with fuguesand fruit. He was a capable American youth who was laying by money, andwanted Daisy to help him spend it. Three times he had asked her. "I got money saved up, Daisy," was his love song; "and you know how badI want you. That store of mine ain't very big, but--" "Oh, ain't it?" would be the antiphony of the unphilosophical one. "Why,I heard Wanamaker's was trying to get you to sublet part of your floorspace to them for next year." Daisy passed Joe's corner every morning and evening. "Hello, Two-by-Four!" was her usual greeting. "Seems to me your storelooks emptier. You must have sold a pack of chewing gum." "Ain't much room in here, sure," Joe would answer, with his slow grin,"except for you, Daise. Me and the store are waitin' for you wheneveryou'll take us. Don't you think you might before long?" "Store!"--a fine scorn was expressed by Daisy's uptilted nose--"sardinebox! Waitin' for me, you say? Gee! you'd have to throw out about ahundred pounds of candy before I could get inside of it, Joe." "I wouldn't mind an even swap like that," said Joe, complimentary. Daisy's existence was limited in every way. She had to walk sidewaysbetween the counter and the shelves in the candy store. In her own hallbedroom coziness had been carried close to cohesiveness. The walls wereso near to one another that the paper on them made a perfect Babel ofnoise. She could light the gas with one hand and close the door with theother without taking her eyes off the reflection of her brown pompadourin the mirror. She had Joe's picture in a gilt frame on the dresser, andsometimes--but her next thought would always be of Joe's funny littlestore tacked like a soap box to the corner of that great building, andaway would go her sentiment in a breeze of laughter. Daisy's other suitor followed Joe by several months. He came to boardin the house where she lived. His name was Dabster, and he was aphilosopher. Though young, attainments stood out upon him likecontinental labels on a Passaic (N. J.) suit-case. Knowledge he hadkidnapped from cyclopedias and handbooks of useful information; but asfor wisdom, when she passed he was left sniffling in the road withoutso much as the number of her motor car. He could and would tell you theproportion of water and muscle-making properties of peas and veal, theshortest verse in the Bible, the number of pounds of shingle nailsrequired to fasten 256 shingles laid four inches to the weather, thepopulation of Kankakee, Ill., the theories of Spinoza, the name of Mr.H. McKay Twombly's second hall footman, the length of the Hoosac Tunnel,the best time to set a hen, the salary of the railway post-officemessenger between Driftwood and Red Bank Furnace, Pa., and the numberof bones in the foreleg of a cat. The weight of learning was no handicap to Dabster. His statistics werethe sprigs of parsley with which he garnished the feast of small talkthat he would set before you if he conceived that to be your taste. Andagain he used them as breastworks in foraging at the boardinghouse.Firing at you a volley of figures concerning the weight of a linealfoot of bar-iron 5 x 2 3/4 inches, and the average annual rainfall atFort Snelling, Minn., he would transfix with his fork the best piece ofchicken on the dish while you were trying to rally sufficiently to askhim weakly why does a hen cross the road. Thus, brightly armed, and further equipped with a measure of good looks,of a hair-oily, shopping-district-at-three-in-the-afternoon kind, itseems that Joe, of the Lilliputian emporium, had a rival worthy of hissteel. But Joe carried no steel. There wouldn't have been room in hisstore to draw it if he had. One Saturday afternoon, about four o'clock, Daisy and Mr. Dabsterstopped before Joe's booth. Dabster wore a silk hat, and--well, Daisywas a woman, and that hat had no chance to get back in its box until Joehad seen it. A stick of pineapple chewing gum was the ostensible objectof the call. Joe supplied it through the open side of his store. He didnot pale or falter at sight of the hat. "Mr. Dabster's going to take me on top of the building to observe theview," said Daisy, after she had introduced her admirers. "I never wason a skyscraper. I guess it must be awfully nice and funny up there." "H'm!" said Joe. "The panorama," said Mr. Dabster, "exposed to the gaze from the top ofa lofty building is not only sublime, but instructive. Miss Daisy hasa decided pleasure in store for her." "It's windy up there, too, as well as here," said Joe. "Are you dressedwarm enough, Daise?" "Sure thing! I'm all lined," said Daisy, smiling slyly at his cloudedbrow. "You look just like a mummy in a case, Joe. Ain't you just put inan invoice of a pint of peanuts or another apple? Your stock looks awfulover-stocked." Daisy giggled at her favorite joke; and Joe had to smile with her. "Your quarters are somewhat limited, Mr.--er--er," remarked Dabster,"in comparison with the size of this building. I understand the areaof its side to be about 340 by 100 feet. That would make you occupya proportionate space as if half of Beloochistan were placed upon aterritory as large as the United States east of the Rocky Mountains,with the Province of Ontario and Belgium added." "Is that so, sport?" said Joe, genially. "You are Weisenheimer onfigures, all right. How many square pounds of baled hay do you thinka jackass could eat if he stopped brayin' long enough to keep still aminute and five eighths?" A few minutes later Daisy and Mr. Dabster stepped from an elevator tothe top floor of the skyscraper. Then up a short, steep stairway and outupon the roof. Dabster led her to the parapet so she could look down atthe black dots moving in the street below. "What are they?" she asked, trembling. She had never been on a heightlike this before. And then Dabster must needs play the philosopher on the tower, andconduct her soul forth to meet the immensity of space. "Bipeds," he said, solemnly. "See what they become even at the smallelevation of 340 feet--mere crawling insects going to and fro atrandom." "Oh, they ain't anything of the kind," exclaimed Daisy,suddenly--"they're folks! I saw an automobile. Oh, gee! are we thathigh up?" "Walk over this way," said Dabster. He showed her the great city lying like an orderly array of toys farbelow, starred here and there, early as it was, by the first beaconlights of the winter afternoon. And then the bay and sea to the southand east vanishing mysteriously into the sky. "I don't like it," declared Daisy, with troubled blue eyes. "Say we godown." But the philosopher was not to be denied his opportunity. He would lether behold the grandeur of his mind, the half-nelson he had on theinfinite, and the memory he had for statistics. And then she wouldnevermore be content to buy chewing gum at the smallest store in NewYork. And so he began to prate of the smallness of human affairs, andhow that even so slight a removal from earth made man and his works looklike one tenth part of a dollar thrice computed. And that one shouldconsider the sidereal system and the maxims of Epictetus and becomforted. "You don't carry me with you," said Daisy. "Say, I think it's awful tobe up so high that folks look like fleas. One of them we saw might havebeen Joe. Why, Jiminy! we might as well be in New Jersey! Say, I'mafraid up here!" The philosopher smiled fatuously. "The earth," said he, "is itself only as a grain of wheat in space. Lookup there." Daisy gazed upward apprehensively. The short day was spent and the starswere coming out above. "Yonder star," said Dabster, "is Venus, the evening star. She is66,000,000 miles from the sun." "Fudge!" said Daisy, with a brief flash of spirit, "where do you thinkI come from--Brooklyn? Susie Price, in our store--her brother sent hera ticket to go to San Francisco--that's only three thousand miles." The philosopher smiled indulgently. "Our world," he said, "is 91,000,000 miles from the sun. There areeighteen stars of the first magnitude that are 211,000 times furtherfrom us than the sun is. If one of them should be extinguished it wouldbe three years before we would see its light go out. There are sixthousand stars of the sixth magnitude. It takes thirty-six years for thelight of one of them to reach the earth. With an eighteen-foot telescopewe can see 43,000,000 stars, including those of the thirteenthmagnitude, whose light takes 2,700 years to reach us. Each of thesestars--" "You're lyin'," cried Daisy, angrily. "You're tryin' to scare me. Andyou have; I want to go down!" She stamped her foot. "Arcturus--" began the philosopher, soothingly, but he was interruptedby a demonstration out of the vastness of the nature that he wasendeavoring to portray with his memory instead of his heart. For to theheart-expounder of nature the stars were set in the firmament expresslyto give soft light to lovers wandering happily beneath them; and if youstand tiptoe some September night with your sweetheart on your arm youcan almost touch them with your hand. Three years for their light toreach us, indeed! Out of the west leaped a meteor, lighting the roof of the skyscraperalmost to midday. Its fiery parabola was limned against the sky towardthe east. It hissed as it went, and Daisy screamed. "Take me down," she cried, vehemently, "you--you mental arithmetic!" Dabster got her to the elevator, and inside of it. She was wild-eyed,and she shuddered when the express made its debilitating drop. Outside the revolving door of the skyscraper the philosopher lost her.She vanished; and he stood, bewildered, without figures or statisticsto aid him. Joe had a lull in trade, and by squirming among his stock succeeded inlighting a cigarette and getting one cold foot against the attenuatedstove. The door was burst open, and Daisy, laughing, crying, scattering fruitand candies, tumbled into his arms. "Oh, Joe, I've been up on the skyscraper. Ain't it cozy and warm andhomelike in here! I'm ready for you, Joe, whenever you want me."

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