The Door of Unrest

"The Door of Unrest" is a short story by O. Henry that explores themes of love, longing, and the human condition through the lens of urban life. The narrative revolves around a man who, feeling trapped in his monotonous routine, becomes captivated by a mysterious woman he observes through an apartment window. This encounter leads him to reflect on his own desires and the nature of relationships. With O. Henry's signature wit and twist ending, the story poignantly captures the complexities of yearning and the search for connection in a bustling city.

• Short story

								
I sat an hour by sun, in the editor’s room of the Montopolis Weekly
Bugle. I was the editor.

The saffron rays of the declining sunlight filtered through the
cornstalks in Micajah Widdup’s garden-patch, and cast an amber glory
upon my paste-pot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary
revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies. The
room, with its one window, was already a prey to the twilight. One by
one, with my trenchant sentences, I lopped off the heads of the
political hydra, while I listened, full of kindly peace, to the
home-coming cow-bells and wondered what Mrs. Flanagan was going to have
for supper.

Then in from the dusky, quiet street there drifted and perched himself
upon a corner of my desk old Father Time’s younger brother. His face
was beardless and as gnarled as an English walnut. I never saw clothes
such as he wore. They would have reduced Joseph’s coat to a monochrome.
But the colours were not the dyer’s. Stains and patches and the work of
sun and rust were responsible for the diversity. On his coarse shoes
was the dust, conceivably, of a thousand leagues. I can describe him no
further, except to say that he was little and weird and old—old I began
to estimate in centuries when I saw him. Yes, and I remember that there
was an odour, a faint odour like aloes, or possibly like myrrh or
leather; and I thought of museums.

And then I reached for a pad and pencil, for business is business, and
visits of the oldest inhabitants are sacred and honourable, requiring
to be chronicled.

“I am glad to see you, sir,” I said. “I would offer you a chair,
but—you see, sir,” I went on, “I have lived in Montopolis only three
weeks, and I have not met many of our citizens.” I turned a doubtful
eye upon his dust-stained shoes, and concluded with a newspaper phrase,
“I suppose that you reside in our midst?”

My visitor fumbled in his raiment, drew forth a soiled card, and handed
it to me. Upon it was written, in plain but unsteadily formed
characters, the name “Michob Ader.”

“I am glad you called, Mr. Ader,” I said. “As one of our older
citizens, you must view with pride the recent growth and enterprise of
Montopolis. Among other improvements, I think I can promise that the
town will now be provided with a live, enterprising newspa—”

“Do ye know the name on that card?” asked my caller, interrupting me.

“It is not a familiar one to me,” I said.

Again he visited the depths of his ancient vestments. This time he
brought out a torn leaf of some book or journal, brown and flimsy with
age. The heading of the page was the Turkish Spy in old-style type;
the printing upon it was this:

“There is a man come to Paris in this year 1643 who pretends to have
lived these sixteen hundred years. He says of himself that he was a
shoemaker in Jerusalem at the time of the Crucifixion; that his name is
Michob Ader; and that when Jesus, the Christian Messias, was condemned
by Pontius Pilate, the Roman president, he paused to rest while bearing
his cross to the place of crucifixion before the door of Michob Ader.
The shoemaker struck Jesus with his fist, saying: ‘Go; why tarriest
thou?’ The Messias answered him: ‘I indeed am going; but thou shalt
tarry until I come’; thereby condemning him to live until the day of
judgment. He lives forever, but at the end of every hundred years he
falls into a fit or trance, on recovering from which he finds himself
in the same state of youth in which he was when Jesus suffered, being
then about thirty years of age.

“Such is the story of the Wandering Jew, as told by Michob Ader, who
relates—” Here the printing ended.

I must have muttered aloud something to myself about the Wandering Jew,
for the old man spake up, bitterly and loudly.

“’Tis a lie,” said he, “like nine tenths of what ye call history. ’Tis
a Gentile I am, and no Jew. I am after footing it out of Jerusalem, my
son; but if that makes me a Jew, then everything that comes out of a
bottle is babies’ milk. Ye have my name on the card ye hold; and ye
have read the bit of paper they call the Turkish Spy that printed the
news when I stepped into their office on the 12th day of June, in the
year 1643, just as I have called upon ye to-day.”

I laid down my pencil and pad. Clearly it would not do. Here was an
item for the local column of the Bugle that—but it would not do.
Still, fragments of the impossible “personal” began to flit through my
conventionalized brain. “Uncle Michob is as spry on his legs as a young
chap of only a thousand or so.” “Our venerable caller relates with
pride that George Wash—no, Ptolemy the Great—once dandled him on his
knee at his father’s house.” “Uncle Michob says that our wet spring was
nothing in comparison with the dampness that ruined the crops around
Mount Ararat when he was a boy—” But no, no—it would not do.

I was trying to think of some conversational subject with which to
interest my visitor, and was hesitating between walking matches and the
Pliocene age, when the old man suddenly began to weep poignantly and
distressfully.

“Cheer up, Mr. Ader,” I said, a little awkwardly; “this matter may blow
over in a few hundred years more. There has already been a decided
reaction in favour of Judas Iscariot and Colonel Burr and the
celebrated violinist, Signor Nero. This is the age of whitewash. You
must not allow yourself to become down-hearted.”

Unknowingly, I had struck a chord. The old man blinked belligerently
through his senile tears.

“’Tis time,” he said, “that the liars be doin’ justice to somebody. Yer
historians are no more than a pack of old women gabblin’ at a wake. A
finer man than the Imperor Nero niver wore sandals. Man, I was at the
burnin’ of Rome. I knowed the Imperor well, for in them days I was a
well-known char-acter. In thim days they had rayspect for a man that
lived forever.

“But ’twas of the Imperor Nero I was goin’ to tell ye. I struck into
Rome, up the Appian Way, on the night of July the 16th, the year 64. I
had just stepped down by way of Siberia and Afghanistan; and one foot
of me had a frost-bite, and the other a blister burned by the sand of
the desert; and I was feelin’ a bit blue from doin’ patrol duty from
the North Pole down to the Last Chance corner in Patagonia, and bein’
miscalled a Jew in the bargain. Well, I’m tellin’ ye I was passin’ the
Circus Maximus, and it was dark as pitch over the way, and then I heard
somebody sing out, ‘Is that you, Michob?’

“Over ag’inst the wall, hid out amongst a pile of barrels and old
dry-goods boxes, was the Imperor Nero wid his togy wrapped around his
toes, smokin’ a long, black segar.

“‘Have one, Michob?’ says he.

“‘None of the weeds for me,’ says I—‘nayther pipe nor segar. What’s the
use,’ says I, ‘of smokin’ when ye’ve not got the ghost of a chance of
killin’ yeself by doin’ it?’

“‘True for ye, Michob Ader, my perpetual Jew,’ says the Imperor; ‘ye’re
not always wandering. Sure, ’tis danger gives the spice of our
pleasures—next to their bein’ forbidden.’

								Rate this book:0.0 / 0 votes