The Last Leaf by O' Henry
B.A First Semester
Short Story: The Last Leaf
O' Henry
Also Read Elements of Short Story
Also Read The Cow of the Barricades
MCQ: Patriotism Beyond Politics and Religion
Introduction
William
Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O' Henry, was an American writer known primarily for his short stories, though he also wrote poetry and non-fiction. His
important works include "The Gift of the Magi", "The Duplicity of
Hargraves", and "The Ransom of Red
Chief", as well as the novel Cabbages
and Kings. Porter's stories are known for
their naturalist observations, witty narration, and surprise endings. His stories often depicted the life of the common man of
New York. He was also a music enthusiast and singer and could play the guitar
and mandolin.
Porter's
most prolific writing period started in 1902, when he moved to New York City.
While there, he wrote 381 short stories. He wrote a story a week for over a
year for the New York World Sunday Magazine. His wit,
characterization, and plot twists were adored by his readers but often panned
by critics.
Life
O' Henry was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, on September 11, 1862, during the American civil war. His father Algermon Sidney Porter, was a physician and his mother's name was Mary Jane Virginia Porter. At the age of three, his mother died and he was brought up under the care of his aunt Evelina and was enrolled in her elementary school. Thereafter, he studied at the Lindsey Street High School. Porter worked at his uncle's pharmacy after completing his school education and became a licensed pharmacist at the age of 19. In March 1882, he moved to Texas, where he initially lived on a ranch, and later settled in Austin.
As a young bachelor, Porter led an active social life in Austin. He was known for his wit, story-telling, and musical talents. He played both the guitar and mandolin. Porter began working at the First National Bank of Austin as a teller and bookkeeper. The bank was operated informally, and Porter was apparently careless in keeping his books and may have embezzled funds. He was accused by the bank of embezzlement and lost his job. Before the trial, he fled to Honduras, where he began writing Cabbages and Kings (in which he coined the term "banana republic"). But he surrendered to U.S. authorities when he learned that his wife was dying from tuberculosis, and he cared for her until her death. He began his five-year prison sentence in March 1898. While in prison, he published 14 stories under various pseudonyms, one being O' Henry.
Released from prison early for good behavior, Porter moved to Pittsburgh to be with his daughter Margaret before relocating to New York City, where he wrote most of his short stories. He then worked full-time on his humorous weekly called The Rolling Stone. The Rolling Stone featured satire on life, people, and politics and included Porter's short stories and sketches. Although eventually reaching a top circulation of 1,500, The Rolling Stone failed in April 1895 because the paper never provided an adequate income. However, his writing and drawings had caught the attention of the editor at the Houston Post.
Porter and his family moved to Houston in 1895, where he started writing for the Post. His salary was only $25 a month, but it rose steadily as his popularity increased. Porter gathered ideas for his column by loitering in hotel lobbies and observing and talking to people there. This was a technique he used throughout his writing career.
Porter died on June 5, 1910, after years of deteriorating health.
So, to quaint old Greenwich Village the art people soon
came prowling, hunting for north windows and eighteenth-century gables and
Dutch attics and low rents. Then they imported some pewter mugs and a
chafing dish or two from Sixth avenue, and became a “colony.”
At the top of a squatty, three-story brick Sue and
Johnsy had their studio. “Johnsy” was familiar for Joanna. One was from
Maine; the other from California. They had met at the table d'hote of
an Eighth street “Delmonico's,” and found their tastes in art, chicory salad
and bishop sleeves so congenial that the joint studio resulted.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom
the doctors called Pneumonia, stalked about the colony, touching one here and
there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this ravager strode
boldly, smiting his victims by scores, but his feet trod slowly through the
maze of the narrow and moss-grown “places.”
Mr. Pneumonia was not what you would call a chivalric old
gentleman. A mite of a little woman with blood thinned by California
zephyrs was hardly fair game for the red-fisted, short-breathed old
duffer. But Johnsy he smote; and she lay, scarcely moving, on her painted iron
bedstead, looking through the small Dutch window-panes at the blank side of the
next brick house.
One morning the busy doctor invited Sue into the hallway with a
shaggy, gray eyebrow.
“She has one chance in—let us say, ten,” he said, as he shook
down the mercury in his clinical thermometer. “And that chance is for her to
want to live. This way people have of lining-up on the side of the undertaker
makes the entire pharmacopeia look silly. Your little lady has made up her mind
that she's not going to get well. Has she anything on her mind?”
“She—she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.
“Paint?—bosh! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about
twice—a man, for instance?”
“A man?” said Sue, with a jew's-harp twang in her voice. “Is a
man worth—but, no, doctor; there is nothing of the kind.”
“Well, it is the weakness, then,” said the doctor. “I will do
all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish.
But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession
I subtract 50 percent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her
to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise
you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten.”
After the doctor had gone Sue went into the workroom and
cried a Japanese napkin to a pulp. Then she swaggered into Johnsy's
room with her drawing board, whistling ragtime.
Johnsy lay, scarcely making a ripple under the
bedclothes, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling,
thinking she was asleep.
She arranged her board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to
illustrate a magazine story. Young artists must pave their way to Art by
drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to pave their
way to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers
and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low
sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to the bedside.
Johnsy's eyes were open wide. She was looking out the window and
counting—counting backward.
“Twelve,” she said, and a little later “eleven”; and then “ten,”
and “nine”; and then “eight” and “seven,” almost together.
Sue looked solicitously out the window. What was there to count?
There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick
house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the
roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had
stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost
bare, to the crumbling bricks.
“What is it, dear?” asked Sue.
“Six,” said Johnsy, in almost a whisper. “They're falling faster
now. Three days ago there were almost a hundred. It made my head ache to count
them. But now it's easy. There goes another one. There are only five left
now.”
“Five what, dear? Tell your Sudie.”
“Leaves. On the ivy vine. When the last one falls I must go,
too. I've known that for three days. Didn't the doctor tell you?”
“Oh, I never heard of such nonsense,” complained Sue, with
magnificent scorn. “What have old ivy leaves to do with your getting well? And
you used to love that vine so, you naughty girl. Don't be a goosey. Why, the
doctor told me this morning that your chances for getting well real soon
were—let's see exactly what he said—he said the chances were ten to one! Why,
that's almost as good a chance as we have in New York when we ride on the
street cars or walk past a new building. Try to take some broth now, and let
Sudie go back to her drawing, so she can sell the editor man with it, and
buy port wine for her sick child, and pork chops for her greedy self.”
“You needn't get any more wine,” said Johnsy, keeping her eyes
fixed out the window. “There goes another. No, I don't want any broth. That
leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then
I'll go, too.”
“Johnsy, dear,” said Sue, bending over her, “will you promise me
to keep your eyes closed, and not look out the window until I am done working?
I must hand those drawings in by tomorrow. I need the light, or I would
draw the shade down.”
“Couldn't you draw in the other room?” asked Johnsy, coldly.
“I'd rather be here by you,” said Sue. “Besides, I don't want
you to keep looking at those silly ivy leaves.”
“Tell me as soon as you have finished,” said Johnsy, closing her
eyes, and lying white and still as a fallen statue, “because I want to see the
last one fall. I'm tired of waiting. I'm tired of thinking. I want to turn
loose my hold on everything, and go sailing down, down, just like one of those
poor, tired leaves.”
“Try to sleep,” said Sue. “I must call Behrman up to be my model
for the old hermit miner. I'll not be gone a minute. Don't try to move
’till I come back.”
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath
them. He was past sixty and had a Michael Angelo's Moses beard curling down
from the head of a satyr along the body of an imp. Behrman was a failure in
art. Forty years he had wielded the brush without getting near enough to touch
the hem of his Mistress's robe. He had been always about to paint a
masterpiece, but had never yet begun it. For several years he had painted
nothing except now and then a daub in the line of commerce or advertising. He
earned a little by serving as a model to those young artists in the colony who
could not pay the price of a professional. He drank gin to excess, and still
talked of his coming masterpiece. For the rest he was a fierce little old man,
who scoffed terribly at softness in any one, and who regarded himself as
especial mastiff-in-waiting to protect the two young artists in the studio
above.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of juniper berries
in his dimly lighted den below. In one corner was a blank canvas on an easel
that had been waiting there for twenty-five years to receive the first line of
the masterpiece. She told him of Johnsy's fancy, and how she feared she would,
indeed, light and fragile as a leaf herself, float away when her slight hold
upon the world grew weaker.
Old Behrman, with his red eyes plainly streaming, shouted his
contempt and derision for such idiotic imaginings.
“Vass!” he cried. “Is dere people in de world mit der
foolishness to die because leafs dey drop off from a confounded vine? I haf not
heard of such a thing. No, I will not bose as a model for your fool
hermit-dunderhead. Vy do you allow dot silly pusiness to come in der prain of
her? Ach, dot poor leetle Miss Yohnsy.”
“She is very ill and weak,” said Sue, “and the fever has left
her mind morbid and full of strange fancies. Very well, Mr. Behrman, if you do
not care to pose for me, you needn't. But I think you are a horrid old—old
flibbertigibbet.”
“You are just like a woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I will
not bose? Go on. I come mit you. For half an hour I haf peen trying to say dot
I am ready to bose. Gott! dis is not any blace in which one so goot as Miss
Yohnsy shall lie sick. Some day I vill baint a masterpiece, and ve shall all go
away. Gott! yes.”
Johnsy was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the
shade down to the window-sill, and motioned Behrman into the other room. In
there they peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at
each other for a moment without speaking. A persistent, cold rain was falling,
mingled with snow. Behrman, in his old blue shirt, took his seat as the
hermit miner on an upturned kettle for a rock.
When Sue awoke from an hour's sleep the next morning she found
Johnsy with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
“Pull it up; I want to see,” she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily Sue obeyed.
But, lo! after the beating rain and fierce gusts of wind that
had endured through the livelong night, there yet stood out against the
brick wall one ivy leaf. It was the last on the vine. Still dark green near its
stem, but with its serrated edges tinted with the yellow of dissolution and
decay, it hung bravely from a branch some twenty feet above the ground.
“It is the last one,” said Johnsy. “I thought it would surely
fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall to-day, and I shall
die at the same time.”
“Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her worn face down to the
pillow, “think of me, if you won't think of yourself. What would I do?”
But Johnsy did not answer. The lonesomest thing in all the
world is a soul when it is making ready to go on its mysterious, far journey.
The fancy seemed to possess her more strongly as one by one the ties that bound
her to friendship and to earth were loosed.
The day wore away, and even through the twilight they could see
the lone ivy leaf clinging to its stem against the wall. And then, with the
coming of the night the north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat
against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves.
When it was light enough Johnsy, the merciless, commanded that
the shade be raised.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Johnsy lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to
Sue, who was stirring her chicken broth over the gas stove.
“I've been a bad girl, Sudie,” said Johnsy. “Something has made
that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It is a sin to want to
die. You may bring me a little broth now, and some milk with a little port in
it, and—no; bring me a hand-mirror first, and then pack some pillows about me,
and I will sit up and watch you cook.”
An hour later she said:
“Sudie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naples.”
The doctor came in the afternoon, and Sue had an excuse to go
into the hallway as he left.
“Even chances,” said the doctor, taking Sue's thin, shaking hand
in his. “With good nursing you'll win. And now I must see another case I have
downstairs. Behrman, his name is—some kind of an artist, I believe. Pneumonia,
too. He is an old, weak man, and the attack is acute. There is no hope for him;
but he goes to the hospital to-day to be made more comfortable.”
The next day the doctor said to Sue: “She's out of danger.
You've won. Nutrition and care now—that's all.”
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Johnsy lay, contentedly
knitting a very blue and very useless woolen shoulder scarf, and put one arm
around her, pillows and all.
“I have something to tell you, white mouse,” she said. “Mr.
Behrman died of pneumonia to-day in the hospital. He was ill only two days. The
janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs
helpless with pain. His shoes and clothing were wet through and icy cold. They
couldn't imagine where he had been on such a dreadful night. And then they
found a lantern, still lighted, and a ladder that had been dragged from
its place, and some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow
colors mixed on it, and—look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on
the wall. Didn't you wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew?
Ah, darling, it's Behrman's masterpiece—he painted it there the night that
the last leaf fell.”
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