The Skylight Room

by O. Henry

　　First Mrs. Parker would show you the double parlours. You would notdare to interrupt her description of their advantages and of themerits of the gentleman who had occupied them for eight years. Thenyou would manage to stammer forth the confession that you wereneither a doctor nor a dentist. Mrs. Parker's manner of receivingthe admission was such that you could never afterward entertain thesame feeling toward your parents, who had neglected to train you upin one of the professions that fitted Mrs. Parker's parlours.Next you ascended one flight of stairs and looked at the second-floor-back at $8. Convinced by her second-floor manner that it wasworth the $12 that Mr. Toosenberry always paid for it until he leftto take charge of his brother's orange plantation in Florida nearPalm Beach, where Mrs. McIntyre always spent the winters that had thedouble front room with private bath, you managed to babble that youwanted something still cheaper.If you survived Mrs. Parker's scorn, you were taken to look at Mr.Skidder's large hall room on the third floor. Mr. Skidder's room wasnot vacant. He wrote plays and smoked cigarettes in it all day long.But every room-hunter was made to visit his room to admire thelambrequins. After each visit, Mr. Skidder, from the fright causedby possible eviction, would pay something on his rent.Then--oh, then--if you still stood on one foot, with your hot handclutching the three moist dollars in your pocket, and hoarselyproclaimed your hideous and culpable poverty, nevermore would Mrs.Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk loudly the word "Clara"she would show you her back, and march downstairs. Then Clara, thecoloured maid, would escort you up the carpeted ladder that servedfor the fourth flight, and show you the Skylight Room. It occupied7x8 feet of floor space at the middle of the hall. On each side ofit was a dark lumber closet or storeroom.In it was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. A shelf was thedresser. Its four bare walls seemed to close in upon you like thesides of a coffin. Your hand crept to your throat, you gasped, youlooked up as from a well--and breathed once more. Through the glassof the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity."Two dollars, suh," Clara would say in her half-contemptuous, half-Tuskegeenial tones.One day Miss Leeson came hunting for a room. She carried atypewriter made to be lugged around by a much larger lady. She wasa very little girl, with eyes and hair that had kept on growing aftershe had stopped and that always looked as if they were saying:"Goodness me ! Why didn't you keep up with us?"Mrs. Parker showed her the double parlours. "In this closet," shesaid, "one could keep a skeleton or anaesthetic or coal ""But I am neither a doctor nor a dentist," said Miss Leeson, witha shiver.Mrs. Parker gave her the incredulous, pitying, sneering, icy starethat she kept for those who failed to qualify as doctors or dentists,and led the way to the second floor back."Eight dollars?" said Miss Leeson. "Dear me! I'm not Hetty if I dolook green. I'm just a poor little working girl. Show me somethinghigher and lower."Mr. Skidder jumped and strewed the floor with cigarette stubs at therap on his door."Excuse me, Mr. Skidder," said Mrs. Parker, with her demon's smile athis pale looks. "I didn't know you were in. I asked the lady tohave a look at your lambrequins.""They're too lovely for anything," said Miss Leeson, smiling inexactly the way the angels do.After they had gone Mr. Skidder got very busy erasing the tall,black-haired heroine from his latest (unproduced) play and insertinga small, roguish one with heavy, bright hair and vivacious features."Anna Held'll jump at it," said Mr. Skidder to himself, putting hisfeet up against the lambrequins and disappearing in a cloud of smokelike an aerial cuttlefish.Presently the tocsin call of "Clara!" sounded to the world the stateof Miss Leeson's purse. A dark goblin seized her, mounted a Stygianstairway, thrust her into a vault with a glimmer of light in its topand muttered the menacing and cabalistic words "Two dollars!""I'll take it!" sighed Miss Leeson, sinking down upon the squeakyiron bed.Every day Miss Leeson went out to work. At night she brought homepapers with handwriting on them and made copies with her typewriter.Sometimes she had no work at night, and then she would sit on thesteps of the high stoop with the other roomers. Miss Leeson was notintended for a sky-light room when the plans were drawn for hercreation. She was gay-hearted and full of tender, whimsical fancies.Once she let Mr. Skidder read to her three acts of his great(unpublished) comedy, "It's No Kid; or, The Heir of the Subway."There was rejoicing among the gentlemen roomers whenever Miss Leesonhad time to sit on the steps for an hour or two. But MissLongnecker, the tall blonde who taught in a public school and said,"Well, really!" to everything you said, sat on the top step andsniffed. And Miss Dorn, who shot at the moving ducks at Coney everySunday and worked in a department store, sat on the bottom step andsniffed. Miss Leeson sat on the middle step and the men wouldquickly group around her.Especially Mr. Skidder, who had cast her in his mind for the starpart in a private, romantic (unspoken) drama in real life. Andespecially Mr. Hoover, who was forty-five, fat, flush and foolish.And especially very young Mr. Evans, who set up a hollow cough toinduce her to ask him to leave off cigarettes. The men voted her"the funniest and jolliest ever," but the sniffs on the top step andthe lower step were implacable.* * * * * *I pray you let the drama halt while Chorus stalks to the footlightsand drops an epicedian tear upon the fatness of Mr. Hoover. Tune thepipes to the tragedy of tallow, the bane of bulk, the calamity ofcorpulence. Tried out, Falstaff might have rendered more romance tothe ton than would have Romeo's rickety ribs to the ounce. A lovermay sigh, but he must not puff. To the train of Momus are the fatmen remanded. In vain beats the faithfullest heart above a 52-inchbelt. Avaunt, Hoover! Hoover, forty-five, flush and foolish, mightcarry off Helen herself; Hoover, forty-five, flush, foolish and fatis meat for perdition. There was never a chance for you, Hoover.As Mrs. Parker's roomers sat thus one summer's evening, Miss Leesonlooked up into the firmament and cried with her little gay laugh:"Why, there's Billy Jackson! I can see him from down here, too."All looked up--some at the windows of skyscrapers, some casting aboutfor an airship, Jackson-guided."It's that star," explained Miss Leeson, pointing with a tiny finger."Not the big one that twinkles--the steady blue one near it. I cansee it every night through my skylight. I named it Billy Jackson.""Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "I didn't know you were anastronomer, Miss Leeson.""Oh, yes," said the small star gazer, "I know as much as any of themabout the style of sleeves they're going to wear next fall in Mars.""Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker. "The star you refer to isGamma, of the constellation Cassiopeia. It is nearly of the secondmagnitude, and its meridian passage is--""Oh," said the very young Mr. Evans, "I think Billy Jackson is a muchbetter name for it.""Same here," said Mr. Hoover, loudly breathing defiance to MissLongnecker. "I think Miss Leeson has just as much right to namestars as any of those old astrologers had.""Well, really!" said Miss Longnecker."I wonder whether it's a shooting star," remarked Miss Dorn. "I hitnine ducks and a rabbit out of ten in the gallery at Coney Sunday.""He doesn't show up very well from down here," said Miss Leeson."You ought to see him from my room. You know you can see stars evenin the daytime from the bottom of a well. At night my room is likethe shaft of a coal mine, and it makes Billy Jackson look like thebig diamond pin that Night fastens her kimono with."There came a time after that when Miss Leeson brought no formidablepapers home to copy. And when she went out in the morning, insteadof working, she went from office to office and let her heart meltaway in the drip of cold refusals transmitted through insolent officeboys. This went on.There came an evening when she wearily climbed Mrs. Parker's stoop atthe hour when she always returned from her dinner at the restaurant.But she had had no dinner.As she stepped into the hall Mr. Hoover met her and seized hischance. He asked her to marry him, and his fatness hovered above herlike an avalanche. She dodged, and caught the balustrade. He triedfor her hand, and she raised it and smote him weakly in the face.Step by step she went up, dragging herself by the railing. Shepassed Mr. Skidder's door as he was red-inking a stage direction forMyrtle Delorme (Miss Leeson) in his (unaccepted) comedy, to"pirouette across stage from L to the side of the Count." Up thecarpeted ladder she crawled at last and opened the door of theskylight room.She was too weak to light the lamp or to undress. She fell upon theiron cot, her fragile body scarcely hollowing the worn springs. Andin that Erebus of the skylight room, she slowly raised her heavyeyelids, and smiled.For Billy Jackson was shining down on her, calm and bright andconstant through the skylight. There was no world about her. Shewas sunk in a pit of blackness, with but that small square of pallidlight framing the star that she had so whimsically and oh, soineffectually named. Miss Longnecker must be right; it was Gamma,of the constellation Cassiopeia, and not Billy Jackson. And yet shecould not let it be Gamma.As she lay on her back she tried twice to raise her arm. The thirdtime she got two thin fingers to her lips and blew a kiss out of theblack pit to Billy Jackson. Her arm fell back limply."Good-bye, Billy," she murmured faintly. "You're millions of milesaway and you won't even twinkle once. But you kept where I could seeyou most of the time up there when there wasn't anything else butdarkness to look at, didn't you? . . . Millions of miles. . . .Good-bye, Billy Jackson."Clara, the coloured maid, found the door locked at 10 the next day,and they forced it open. Vinegar, and the slapping of wrists andburnt feathers proving of no avail, some one ran to 'phone for anambulance.In due time it backed up to the door with much gong-clanging, and thecapable young medico, in his white linen coat, ready, active,confident, with his smooth face half debonair, half grim, danced upthe steps."Ambulance call to 49," he said briefly. "What's the trouble?""Oh, yes, doctor," sniffed Mrs. Parker, as though her trouble thatthere should be trouble in the house was the greater. "I can't thinkwhat can be the matter with her. Nothing we could do would bring herto. It's a young woman, a Miss Elsie--yes, a Miss Elsie Leeson.Never before in my house--""What room?" cried the doctor in a terrible voice, to which Mrs.Parker was a stranger."The skylight room. It--Evidently the ambulance doctor was familiar with the location ofskylight rooms. He was gone up the stairs, four at a time. Mrs.Parker followed slowly, as her dignity demanded.On the first landing she met him coming back bearing the astronomerin his arms. He stopped and let loose the practised scalpel of histongue, not loudly. Gradually Mrs. Parker crumpled as a stiffgarment that slips down from a nail. Ever afterward there remainedcrumples in her mind and body. Sometimes her curious roomers wouldask her what the doctor said to her."Let that be," she would answer. "If I can get forgiveness forhaving heard it I will be satisfied."The ambulance physician strode with his burden through the pack ofhounds that follow the curiosity chase, and even they fell back alongthe sidewalk abashed, for his face was that of one who bears his owndead.They noticed that he did not lay down upon the bed prepared for it inthe ambulance the form that he carried, and all that he said was:"Drive like h**l, Wilson," to the driver.That is all. Is it a story? In the next morning's paper I saw alittle news item, and the last sentence of it may help you (as ithelped me) to weld the incidents together.It recounted the reception into Bellevue Hospital of a young womanwho had been removed from No. 49 East -- street, suffering fromdebility induced by starvation. It concluded with these words:"Dr. William Jackson, the ambulance physician who attended the case,says the patient will recover."