“How do you mean?” I asks her.
“Why,” says she, “by saying, 'Eeny meeny, miney, mo!' or else 'Monkey, monkey, bottle of beer, how many monkeys have we here?' or something like that.”
But that ain't romantic enough to suit me and I remember how you pluck a daisy and say: “She loves me! She loves me not!” And I think I will get an American beauty rose and do it that way. Well, they had the operation, and it was a success. And about a week later I'm to go to the hospital and tell 'em which one has been elected to the holy bonds of matrimony. I gets me a rose, one of the most expensive that money can buy in the town we was in, and when I arrive at the hospital I start up the front steps pluckin' the leaves off and sayin' to myself: “Hetty she is! Netty she is! Hetty she is!”—and so on. But I never got that rose all plucked.
I knowed all along that it was wrong to put asunder what God had joined together, and I orter stuck to the hunch I had. You can't do anything to a freak without changing his or her disposition some way. You take a freak that was born that way and go to operating on him, and if he is good-natured he'll turn out a grouch, or if he was a grouch he'll turn out good-natured. I knowed a dog-faced boy one time who was the sunniest critter you ever seen. But his folks got hold of a lot of money and took him out of the business and had his features all slicked up and made over, and what he gained in looks he lost in temper and disposition. Any tinkering you do around artists of that class will change their sentiments every time.
I never got that rose all plucked. At the top of the steps I was met by Hetty and Netty, just cornin' out of the hospital and not expectin' to see me. With one of them was a young doctor that worked in the hospital and with the other was a patient that had just got well. They explained to me that as soon as they had that operation their sentiments toward me changed. Before, they had both loved me. Afterwards, neither one of 'em did. They was right sorry about it, they said, but they had married these here fellows that morning in the hospital, with a double wedding, and was now starting off on their wedding trips, and their husbands would pay back the operation money as soon as they had earned it and saved it up.
Well, I was so flabbergasted that my skin stiffened up on me, and it stayed stiff for the rest of that day. I never said a word, but I turned away from there a sad man with a broken heart in my bosom. And I quit bein' an artist. I didn't have the sperrit to be in a show any more.
And through all the years since then I been a saddened man. But as time went by there come a kind of sweetness into that sadness, too. It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, like the poet says. I was one of the saddest men in the world, but I sort o' enjoyed it, after a few years. And all them memories sort o' kept me a better man.
I orter stuck to that kind of sweet sadness. I orter knowed that if I went back on all them beautiful memories of them girls something bitter would come to me.
But I didn't, gentlemen. I went back on all that sentiment and that tenderness. I betrayed all them beautiful memories. Five days ago, I went and married. Yes, sir, I abandoned all that sweet recollection. And I been livin' in hell ever since. I been reproachin' myself day and night for not provin' true and trustworthy to all that romantic sadness I had all them years. It was a sweet sadness, and I wasn't faithful to it. And so long as I live now I will have this here bitter sadness.
The stranger got up and sighed and stretched himself. He took a fresh chew of tobacco, and began to crank his flivver.