ads:
The Rubber Plant's Story
O Henry
We rubber plants form the connecting link between the vegetable kingdom and the
decorations of a Waldorf-Astoria scene in a Third Avenue theatre. I haven't looked up our
family tree, but I believe we were raised by grafting a gum overshoe on to a 30-cent table
d'hote stalk of asparagus. You take a white bulldog with a Bourke Cockran air of
independence about him and a rubber plant and there you have the fauna and flora of a flat.
What the shamrock is to Ireland the rubber plant is to the dweller in flats and furnished
rooms. We get moved from one place to another so quickly that the only way we can get
our picture taken is with a kinetoscope. We are the vagrant vine and the flitting fig tree.
You know the proverb: "Where the rubber plant sits in the window the moving van draws
up to the door."
We are the city equivalent to the woodbine and the honeysuckle. No other vegetable except
the Pittsburg stogie can withstand as much handling as we can. When the family to which
we belong moves into a flat they set us in the front window and we become lares and
penates, fly-paper and the peripatetic emblem of "Home Sweet Home." We aren't as green
as we look. I guess we are about what you would call the soubrettes of the conservatory.
You try sitting in the front window of a $40 flat in Manhattan and looking out into the street
all day, and back into the flat at night, and see whether you get wise or not--hey? Talk about
the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden--say! suppose there had been a
rubber plant there when Eve--but I was going to tell you a story.
The first thing I can remember I had only three leaves and belonged to a member of the
pony ballet. I was kept in a sunny window, and was generally watered with seltzer and
lemon. I had plenty of fun in those days. I got cross-eyed trying to watch the numbers of the
automobiles in the street and the dates on the labels inside at the same time.
Well, then the angel that was molting for the musical comedy lost his last feather and the
company broke up. The ponies trotted away and I was left in the window ownerless. The
janitor gave me to a refined comedy team on the eighth floor, and in six weeks I had been
set in the window of five different flats I took on experience and put out two more leaves.
Miss Carruthers, of the refined comedy team--did you ever see her cross both feet back of
her neck?--gave me to a friend of hers who had made an unfortunate marriage with a man in
a store. Consequently I was placed in the window of a furnished room, rent in advance,
water two flights up, gas extra after ten o'clock at night. Two of my leaves withered off
here. Also, I was moved from one room to another so many times that I got to liking the
odor of the pipes the expressmen smoked.
I don't think I ever had so dull a time as I did with this lady. There was never anything
amusing going on inside--she was devoted to her husband, and, besides leaning out the
window and flirting with the iceman, she never did a thing toward breaking the monotony.
When the couple broke up they left me with the rest of their goods at a second-hand store. I
was put out in front for sale along with the jobbiest lot you ever heard of being lumped into
ads:
Livros Grátis
http://www.livrosgratis.com.br
Milhares de livros grátis para download.
one bargain. Think of this little cornucopia of wonders, all for $1.89: Henry James's works,
six talking machine records, one pair of tennis shoes, two bottles of horse radish, and a
rubber plant--that was me!
One afternoon a girl came along and stopped to look at me. She had dark hair and eyes, and
she looked slim, and sad around the mouth.
"Oh, oh!" she says to herself. "I never thought to see one up here."
She pulls out a little purse about as thick as one of my leaves and fingers over some small
silver in it. Old Koen, always on the lockout, is ready, rubbing his hands. This girl proceeds
to turn down Mr. James and the other commodities. Rubber plants or nothing is the burden
of her song. And at last Koen and she come together at 39 cents, and away she goes with
me in her arms.
She was a nice girl, but not my style. Too quiet and sober looking. Thinks I to myself: "I'll
just about land on the fire-escape of a tenement, six stories up. And I'll spend the next six
months looking at clothes on the line."
But she carried me to a nice little room only three flights up in quite a decent street. And
she put me in the window, of course. And then she went to work and cooked dinner for
herself. And what do you suppose she had? Bread and tea and a little dab of jam! Nothing
else. Not a single lobster, nor so much as one bottle of champagne. The Carruthers comedy
team had both every evening, except now and then when they took a notion for pig's
knuckle and kraut.
After she had finished her dinner my new owner came to the window and leaned down
close to my leaves and cried softly to herself for a while. It made me feel funny. I never
knew anybody to cry that way over a rubber plant before. Of course, I've seen a few of 'em
turn on the tears for what they could get out of it, but she seemed to be crying just for the
pure enjoyment of it. She touched my leaves like she loved 'em, and she bent down her head
and kissed each one of 'em. I guess I'm about the toughest specimen of a peripatetic orchid
on earth, but I tell you it made me feel sort of queer. Home never was like that to me before.
Generally I used to get chewed by poodles and have shirt-waists hung on me to dry, and get
watered with coffee grounds and peroxide of hydrogen.
This girl had a piano in the room, and she used to disturb it with both hands while she made
noises with her mouth for hours at a time. I suppose she was practising vocal music.
One day she seemed very much excited and kept looking at the clock. At eleven somebody
knocked and she let in a stout, dark man with towsled black hair. He sat down at once at the
piano and played while she sang for him. When she finished she laid one hand on her
bosom and looked at him. He shook his head, and she leaned against the piano. "Two years
already," she said, speaking slowly--"do you think in two more--or even longer?"
The man shook his head again. "You waste your time," he said, roughly I thought. "The
voice is not there." And then he looked at her in a peculiar way. "But the voice is not
everything," he went on. "You have looks. I can place you, as I told you if--"
ads:
The girl pointed to the door without saying anything, and the dark man left the room. And
then she came over and cried around me again. It's a good thing I had enough rubber in me
to be water-proof.
About that time somebody else knocked at the door. "Thank goodness," I said to myself.
"Here's a chance to get the water-works turned off. I hope it's somebody that's game enough
to stand a bird and a bottle to liven things up a little." Tell you the truth, this little girl made
me tired. A rubber plant likes to see a little sport now and then. I don't suppose there's
another green thing in New York that sees as much of gay life unless it's the chartreuse or
the sprigs of parsley around the dish.
When the girl opens the door in steps a young chap in a traveling cap and picks her up in
his arms, and she sings out "Oh, Dick!" and stays there long enough to--well, you've been a
rubber plant too, sometimes, I suppose.
"Good thing!" says I to myself. "This is livelier than scales and weeping. Now there'll be
something doing."
"You've got to go back with me," says the young man. "I've come two thousand miles for
you. Aren't you tired of it yet. Bess? You've kept all of us waiting so long. Haven't you
found out yet what is best?"
"The bubble burst only to-day," says the girl. "Come here, Dick, and see what I found the
other day on the sidewalk for sale." She brings him by the hand and exhibits yours truly.
"How one ever got away up here who can tell? I bought it with almost the last money I
had."
He looked at me, but he couldn't keep his eyes off her for more than a second. "Do you
remember the night, Bess," he said, "when we stood under one of those on the bank of the
bayou and what you told me then?"
"Geewillikins!" I said to myself. "Both of them stand under a rubber plant! Seems to me
they are stretching matters somewhat!"
"Do I not," says she, looking up at him and sneaking close to his vest, "and now I say it
again, and it is to last forever. Look, Dick, at its leaves, how wet they are. Those are my
tears, and it was thinking of you that made them fall."
"The dear old magnolias!" says the young man, pinching one of my leaves. "I love them
all."
Magnolia! Well, wouldn't that--say! those innocents thought I was a magnolia! What the--
well, wasn't that tough on a genuine little old New York rubber plant?
Livros Grátis
( http://www.livrosgratis.com.br )
Milhares de Livros para Download:
Baixar livros de Administração
Baixar livros de Agronomia
Baixar livros de Arquitetura
Baixar livros de Artes
Baixar livros de Astronomia
Baixar livros de Biologia Geral
Baixar livros de Ciência da Computação
Baixar livros de Ciência da Informação
Baixar livros de Ciência Política
Baixar livros de Ciências da Saúde
Baixar livros de Comunicação
Baixar livros do Conselho Nacional de Educação - CNE
Baixar livros de Defesa civil
Baixar livros de Direito
Baixar livros de Direitos humanos
Baixar livros de Economia
Baixar livros de Economia Doméstica
Baixar livros de Educação
Baixar livros de Educação - Trânsito
Baixar livros de Educação Física
Baixar livros de Engenharia Aeroespacial
Baixar livros de Farmácia
Baixar livros de Filosofia
Baixar livros de Física
Baixar livros de Geociências
Baixar livros de Geografia
Baixar livros de História
Baixar livros de Línguas
Baixar livros de Literatura
Baixar livros de Literatura de Cordel
Baixar livros de Literatura Infantil
Baixar livros de Matemática
Baixar livros de Medicina
Baixar livros de Medicina Veterinária
Baixar livros de Meio Ambiente
Baixar livros de Meteorologia
Baixar Monografias e TCC
Baixar livros Multidisciplinar
Baixar livros de Música
Baixar livros de Psicologia
Baixar livros de Química
Baixar livros de Saúde Coletiva
Baixar livros de Serviço Social
Baixar livros de Sociologia
Baixar livros de Teologia
Baixar livros de Trabalho
Baixar livros de Turismo
