[adapted]

by
O. Henry

At midnight the café was crowded. By some chance the little table where I sat was not seen by people coming in, and two empty chairs at it seemed to open their arms with eager welcome to the rush of customers.

And then a cosmopolite sat in one of them, and I was glad, for I had an idea that since Adam no true citizen of the world has lived. We hear about them, and we see foreign labels on many bags, but we find travellers instead of cosmopolites.

I ask you to think about the scene — the marble-topped tables, the row of leather-covered wall seats, the merry company, the ladies dressed in fine dresses, speaking in a fine clear chorus of taste, thrift, wealth or art; the hard-working and tip-loving waiters, the music wisely pleasing everyone with its choices from many composers; the mix of talk and laughter — and, if you like, the Würzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips like a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the scene was truly like Paris.

My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan, and people will hear from him next summer at Coney Island. He is going to set up a new “attraction” there, he told me, offering fun fit for a king. And then his talk went along the lines of latitude and longitude. He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, easily, with disrespect, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a set-menu grape fruit. He spoke with no respect about the equator, he skipped from continent to continent, he made fun of the zones, he wiped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain market in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. Zip! Now you rode the waves with the Kanakas at Kealaikahiki. Presto! He pulled you through an Arkansas oak swamp, let you dry for a moment on the salty plains of his Idaho ranch, then spun you into the company of archdukes from Vienna. Soon he would be telling you of a cold he caught in a Chicago lake breeze and how old Escamila cured it in Buenos Ayres with a hot tea of the chuchula weed. You would have addressed a letter to “E. Rushmore Coglan, Esq., the Earth, Solar System, the Universe,” and mailed it, feeling sure that it would be delivered to him.

I was sure that I had found at last the one true cosmopolite since Adam, and I listened to his worldwide talk afraid that I would find in it the local tone of just a tourist. But his opinions always stayed the same; he was as fair to cities, countries and continents as the winds or gravity.

And as E. Rushmore Coglan talked of this small planet I thought with joy of a great almost-cosmopolite who wrote for the whole world and dedicated himself to Bombay. In a poem he says that there is pride and competition between the cities of the earth, and that “the men born there, they travel up and down, but hold to their cities like a child to the mother’s dress.” And whenever they walk “by loud, unknown streets” they remember their home city “very faithful, foolish, loving; making only her spoken name their promise upon their promise.” And my joy grew because I had caught Mr. Kipling making a mistake. Here I had found a man not made from dust; one who did not brag about his birthplace or country, one who, if he bragged at all, would brag about his whole round globe against the Martians and the people of the Moon.

Talking on these subjects was started in E. Rushmore Coglan by the third person at our table. While Coglan was describing to me the land along the Siberian Railway the orchestra began to play a mix of songs. The last song was “Dixie,” and as the exciting notes came out they were almost covered by loud clapping from almost every table.

It is worth a paragraph to say that this special scene can be seen every evening in many cafés in the city of New York. Lots of beer has been drunk while people talk about ideas to explain it. Some have guessed quickly that all Southerners in town hurry to cafés at night. This cheering of the “rebel” song in a Northern city does puzzle a little; but it can be explained. The war with Spain, many years of big mint and watermelon crops, a few surprise winners at the New Orleans race track, and the grand dinners given by the Indiana and Kansas citizens who make up the North Carolina Society have made the South rather a “fad” in Manhattan. Your manicurist will say softly that your left pointer finger makes her think so much of a gentleman’s in Richmond, Va. Oh, sure; but many a lady has to work now — the war, you know.

When “Dixie” was played a dark-haired young man jumped up from somewhere with a Mosby guerrilla yell and waved his soft hat wildly. Then he walked through the smoke, sat down in the empty chair at our table and took out cigarettes.

It was the time in the evening when shyness melts. One of us mentioned three Würzburgers to the waiter; the dark-haired young man showed he was part of the order with a smile and a nod. I quickly asked him a question because I wanted to try out a theory I had.

“Would you please tell me,” I began, “where you are from — ”

The fist of E. Rushmore Coglan banged the table and I became silent.

“Excuse me,” he said, “but that’s a question I never like to hear asked. What does it matter where a man is from? Is it fair to judge a man by his address? Why, I’ve seen people from Kentucky who hated whiskey, people from Virginia who weren’t related to Pocahontas, people from Indiana who hadn’t written a novel, Mexicans who didn’t wear velvet trousers with silver dollars sewed along the seams, funny Englishmen, wasteful Yankees, cold Southerners, Westerners who were not open, and New Yorkers who were too busy to stop for an hour on the street to watch a one-armed grocery clerk pack cranberries in paper bags. Let a man be a man and don’t hold him back with the label of any region.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but my curiosity was not just for nothing. I know the South, and when the band plays ‘Dixie’ I like to watch. I have come to believe that the man who claps for that tune very hard and with a showy love for one part of the country is always born in either Secaucus, N.J., or the area between Murray Hill Lyceum and the Harlem River in this city. I was about to test my opinion by asking this gentleman when you interrupted with your own — bigger theory, I must say.”

And now the dark-haired young man spoke to me, and it became clear that his mind also followed its own path.

“I would like to be a little sea snail,” he said, in a strange way, “on the top of a valley, and sing tooralloo-ralloo.”

This was clearly too hard to understand, so I turned again to Coglan.

“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” he said. “I know an Eskimo in Upernavik who orders his neckties from Cincinnati, and I saw a man who herds goats in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle contest. I pay rent for a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohama all year round. I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a teahouse in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell them how to cook my eggs in Rio de Janeiro or Seattle. It’s a very small world. What is the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house in the valley, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s Peak, or Fairfax County, Virginia, or Hooligan’s Flats or any place? It will be a better world when we stop being fools about some moldy town or ten acres of swamp land just because we were born there.”

“You seem to be a real cosmopolite,” I said in an admiring way. “But it also seems that you would be against love for your country.”

“An old thing from very old times,” said Coglan, warmly. “We are all brothers — Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this small pride in one’s city or State or area or country will be ended, and we’ll all be citizens of the world, as we should be.”

“But while you are traveling in foreign countries,” I continued, “don’t your thoughts go back to some place — some dear and — ”

“Not a single place,” interrupted E. R. Coglan, jokingly. “The round world, a little flat at the poles, and known as the Earth, is my home. I’ve met many citizens of this country abroad who are tied to their own place. I’ve seen men from Chicago sit in a gondola in Venice on a moonlight night and brag about their drainage canal. I’ve seen a Southerner, when he was introduced to the King of England, give that king, without blinking, the information that his great-aunt on his mother’s side was related by marriage to the Perkinses, of Charleston. I knew a New Yorker who was taken for ransom by some bandits in Afghanistan. His family sent the money and he came back to Kabul with the agent. ‘Afghanistan?’ the local people said to him through a translator. ‘Well, not so slow, do you think?’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he says, and he begins to tell them about a cab driver at Sixth Avenue and Broadway. Those ideas don’t suit me. I’m not tied down to anything that isn’t 8,000 miles across. Just put me down as E. Rushmore Coglan, citizen of the Earth.”

My cosmopolite said a big goodbye and left me, because he thought he saw someone through the talk and smoke who he knew. So I was left with the would-be periwinkle, who had to drink Würzburger and could not any more say his hopes to sit, singing, on the top of a valley.

I sat thinking about my clear cosmopolite and wondering how the poet had not seen him. He was my find, and I believed in him. How could it be? “The men that are born from them they travel up and down, but hold on to their cities’ edge like a child to the mother’s dress.”

But not E. Rushmore Coglan. With the whole world for his —

My thoughts were stopped by a very loud noise and a fight in another part of the café. I saw over the heads of the people sitting E. Rushmore Coglan and a man I did not know in a big fight. They fought between the tables like giants, and glasses broke, and men grabbed their hats and were knocked down, and a dark-haired woman screamed, and a blonde began to sing “Teasing.”

My cosmopolite was keeping up the pride and name of the Earth when the waiters came close around both fighters with their well-known V-shaped line and carried them outside, still fighting.

I called McCarthy, one of the French waiters, and asked him the reason for the fight.

“The man with the red tie” (that was my cosmopolite), he said, “got angry because of things said about the bad sidewalks and water supply of the place he came from by the other guy.”

“Why,” said I, confused, “that man is a citizen of the world — a cosmopolite. He — ”

“He was from Mattawamkeag, Maine, he said,” McCarthy continued, “and he would not allow anyone to say bad things about the place.”