The Poet and the Peasant

by O. Henry

　　

---

The other day a poet friend of mine, who has lived in close communionwith nature all his life, wrote a poem and took it to an editor. It was a living pastoral, full of the genuine breath of the fields, thesong of birds, and the pleasant chatter of trickling streams. When the poet called again to see about it, with hopes of a beefsteakdinner in his heart, it was handed back to him with the comment: "Too artificial." Several of us met over spaghetti and Dutchess County chianti, andswallowed indignation with slippery forkfuls. And there we dug a pit for the editor. With us was Conant, awell-arrived writer of fiction--a man who had trod on asphalt all hislife, and who had never looked upon bucolic scenes except withsensations of disgust from the windows of express trains. Conant wrote a poem and called it "The Doe and the Brook." It was afine specimen of the kind of work you would expect from a poet who hadstrayed with Amaryllis only as far as the florist's windows, and whosesole ornithological discussion had been carried on with a waiter. Conantsigned this poem, and we sent it to the same editor. But this has very little to do with the story. Just as the editor was reading the first line of the poem, on the nextmorning, a being stumbled off the West Shore ferryboat, and loped slowlyup Forty-second Street. The invader was a young man with light blue eyes, a hanging lip andhair the exact color of the little orphan's (afterward discovered to bethe earl's daughter) in one of Mr. Blaney's plays. His trousers werecorduroy, his coat short-sleeved, with buttons in the middle of hisback. One bootleg was outside the corduroys. You looked expectantly,though in vain, at his straw hat for ear holes, its shape inauguratingthe suspicion that it had been ravaged from a former equine possessor.In his hand was a valise--description of it is an impossible task; aBoston man would not have carried his lunch and law books to his officein it. And above one ear, in his hair, was a wisp of hay--the rustic'sletter of credit, his badge of innocence, the last clinging touch of theGarden of Eden lingering to shame the gold-brick men. Knowingly, smilingly, the city crowds passed him by. They saw the rawstranger stand in the gutter and stretch his neck at the tall buildings.At this they ceased to smile, and even to look at him. It had beendone so often. A few glanced at the antique valise to see what Coney"attraction" or brand of chewing gum he might be thus dinning into hismemory. But for the most part he was ignored. Even the newsboys lookedbored when he scampered like a circus clown out of the way of cabs andstreet cars. At Eighth Avenue stood "Bunco Harry," with his dyed mustache and shiny,good-natured eyes. Harry was too good an artist not to be pained at thesight of an actor overdoing his part. He edged up to the countryman, whohad stopped to open his mouth at a jewelry store window, and shook hishead. "Too thick, pal," he said, critically--"too thick by a couple of inches.I don't know what your lay is; but you've got the properties too thick.That hay, now--why, they don't even allow that on Proctor's circuit anymore." "I don't understand you, mister," said the green one. "I'm not lookin'for any circus. I've just run down from Ulster County to look at thetown, bein' that the hayin's over with. Gosh! but it's a whopper. Ithought Poughkeepsie was some punkins; but this here town is five timesas big." "Oh, well," said "Bunco Harry," raising his eyebrows, "I didn't meanto butt in. You don't have to tell. I thought you ought to tone downa little, so I tried to put you wise. Wish you success at your graft,whatever it is. Come and have a drink, anyhow." "I wouldn't mind having a glass of lager beer," acknowledged the other. They went to a café frequented by men with smooth faces and shifty eyes,and sat at their drinks. "I'm glad I come across you, mister," said Haylocks. "How'd you like toplay a game or two of seven-up? I've got the keerds." He fished them out of Noah's valise--a rare, inimitable deck, greasywith bacon suppers and grimy with the soil of cornfields. "Bunco Harry" laughed loud and briefly. "Not for me, sport," he said, firmly. "I don't go against that make-upof yours for a cent. But I still say you've overdone it. The Reubshaven't dressed like that since '79. I doubt if you could work Brooklynfor a key-winding watch with that layout." "Oh, you needn't think I ain't got the money," boasted Haylocks. He drewforth a tightly rolled mass of bills as large as a teacup, and laid iton the table. "Got that for my share of grandmother's farm," he announced. "There's$950 in that roll. Thought I'd come to the city and look around for alikely business to go into." "Bunco Harry" took up the roll of money and looked at it with almostrespect in his smiling eyes. "I've seen worse," he said, critically. "But you'll never do it in themclothes. You want to get light tan shoes and a black suit and a strawhat with a colored band, and talk a good deal about Pittsburg andfreight differentials, and drink sherry for breakfast in order to workoff phony stuff like that." "What's his line?" asked two or three shifty-eyed men of "Bunco Harry"after Haylocks had gathered up his impugned money and departed. "The queer, I guess," said Harry. "Or else he's one of Jerome's men.Or some guy with a new graft. He's too much hayseed. Maybe that his--Iwonder now--oh, no, it couldn't have been real money." Haylocks wandered on. Thirst probably assailed him again, for he divedinto a dark groggery on a side street and bought beer. At first sightof him their eyes brightened; but when his insistent and exaggeratedrusticity became apparent their expressions changed to wary suspicion. Haylocks swung his valise across the bar. "Keep that a while for me, mister," he said, chewing at the end of avirulent claybank cigar. "I'll be back after I knock around a spell. Andkeep your eye on it, for there's $950 inside of it, though maybe youwouldn't think so to look at me." Somewhere outside a phonograph struck up a band piece, and Haylocks wasoff for it, his coat-tail buttons flopping in the middle of his back. "Divvy, Mike," said the men hanging upon the bar, winking openly at oneanother. "Honest, now," said the bartender, kicking the valise to one side. "Youdon't think I'd fall to that, do you? Anybody can see he ain't no jay.One of McAdoo's come-on squad, I guess. He's a shine if he made himselfup. There ain't no parts of the country now where they dress like thatsince they run rural free delivery to Providence, Rhode Island. If he'sgot nine-fifty in that valise it's a ninety-eight cent Waterbury that'sstopped at ten minutes to ten." When Haylocks had exhausted the resources of Mr. Edison to amuse hereturned for his valise. And then down Broadway he gallivanted, cullingthe sights with his eager blue eyes. But still and evermore Broadwayrejected him with curt glances and sardonic smiles. He was the oldest ofthe "gags" that the city must endure. He was so flagrantly impossible,so ultra rustic, so exaggerated beyond the most freakish products of thebarnyard, the hayfield and the vaudeville stage, that he excited onlyweariness and suspicion. And the wisp of hay in his hair was so genuine,so fresh and redolent of the meadows, so clamorously rural that even ashell-game man would have put up his peas and folded his table at thesight of it. Haylocks seated himself upon a flight of stone steps and once moreexhumed his roll of yellow-backs from the valise. The outer one, atwenty, he shucked off and beckoned to a newsboy. "Son," said he, "run somewhere and get this changed for me. I'm mightynigh out of chicken feed. I guess you'll get a nickel if you'll hurryup." A hurt look appeared through the dirt on the newsy's face. "Aw, watchert'ink! G'wan and get yer funny bill changed yerself. Deyain't no farm clothes yer got on. G'wan wit yer stage money." On a corner lounged a keen-eyed steerer for a gambling-house. He sawHaylocks, and his expression suddenly grew cold and virtuous. "Mister," said the rural one. "I've heard of places in this here townwhere a fellow could have a good game of old sledge or peg a card atkeno. I got $950 in this valise, and I come down from old Ulster to seethe sights. Know where a fellow could get action on about $9 or $10? I'mgoin' to have some sport, and then maybe I'll buy out a business of somekind." The steerer looked pained, and investigated a white speck on his leftforefinger nail. "Cheese it, old man," he murmured, reproachfully. "The Central Officemust be bughouse to send you out looking like such a gillie. Youcouldn't get within two blocks of a sidewalk crap game in them TonyPastor props. The recent Mr. Scotty from Death Valley has got you beata crosstown block in the way of Elizabethan scenery and mechanicalaccessories. Let it be skiddoo for yours. Nay, I know of no gilded hallswhere one may bet a patrol wagon on the ace." Rebuffed once again by the great city that is so swift to detectartificialities, Haylocks sat upon the curb and presented his thoughtsto hold a conference. "It's my clothes," said he; "durned if it ain't. They think I'm ahayseed and won't have nothin' to do with me. Nobody never made fun ofthis hat in Ulster County. I guess if you want folks to notice you inNew York you must dress up like they do." So Haylocks went shopping in the bazaars where men spake through theirnoses and rubbed their hands and ran the tape line ecstatically over thebulge in his inside pocket where reposed a red nubbin of corn with aneven number of rows. And messengers bearing parcels and boxes streamedto his hotel on Broadway within the lights of Long Acre. At 9 o'clock in the evening one descended to the sidewalk whom UlsterCounty would have foresworn. Bright tan were his shoes; his hat thelatest block. His light gray trousers were deeply creased; a gay bluesilk handkerchief flapped from the breast pocket of his elegant Englishwalking coat. His collar might have graced a laundry window; his blondhair was trimmed close; the wisp of hay was gone. For an instant he stood, resplendent, with the leisurely air of aboulevardier concocting in his mind the route for his evening pleasures.And then he turned down the gay, bright street with the easy andgraceful tread of a millionaire. But in the instant that he had paused the wisest and keenest eyes in thecity had enveloped him in their field of vision. A stout man with grayeyes picked two of his friends with a lift of his eyebrows from the rowof loungers in front of the hotel. "The juiciest jay I've seen in six months," said the man with gray eyes."Come along." It was half-past eleven when a man galloped into the West Forty-seventhStreet Police Station with the story of his wrongs. "Nine hundred and fifty dollars," he gasped, "all my share ofgrandmother's farm." The desk sergeant wrung from him the name Jabez Bulltongue, of LocustValley farm, Ulster County, and then began to take descriptions of thestrong-arm gentlemen. When Conant went to see the editor about the fate of his poem, he wasreceived over the head of the office boy into the inner office that isdecorated with the statuettes by Rodin and J. G. Brown. "When I read the first line of 'The Doe and the Brook,'" said theeditor, "I knew it to be the work of one whose life has been heart toheart with Nature. The finished art of the line did not blind me to thatfact. To use a somewhat homely comparison, it was as if a wild, freechild of the woods and fields were to don the garb of fashion and walkdown Broadway. Beneath the apparel the man would show." "Thanks," said Conant. "I suppose the check will be round on Thursday,as usual." The morals of this story have somehow gotten mixed. You can take yourchoice of "Stay on the Farm" or "Don't Write Poetry."

---

---