There is a little area west of Washington Square called Greenwich Village*. The streets there are crazy, and break themselves into small parts called “places”. These “places” make strange angles and curves. One street even crosses itself twice. Artists soon came to Greenwich Village, looking for big windows, high ceilings and low rents. The called themselves a “colony*”.
At the top of a three story brick building Sue and Joanna had their studio*. Sue was from Main, Joanna from California. They had met at an Italian restaurant, and found that their tastes in art, potato salad and flared pants* were so similar that they moved in together.
That was in May. In November a cold, unseen stranger, whom the doctors called Pneumonia*, visited the colony. He touched one here and there with his icy fingers. Over on the east side this killer travelled easily, finding many victims, but he moved more slowly through the maze* of narrow “place”.
Mr.Pneumonia was not a nice old gentleman. It wasn’t fair that he would strike* a skinny young woman who was used to Californian sun and gentle breezes. But he did. He struck Joanna, and she lay in bed hardly moving, looking out the window at a brick wall.
One morning the busy doctor had a secret talk with Sue in the hallway.
“She has one chance in ten*, ” he said, “but she has to want to live. I think your friend has decided that she will not get better. Is there anything she lives for?”
“She – she wanted to paint the Bay of Naples some day,” said Sue.
“Pain? Nonsense! Has she anything on her mind worth thinking about – a man, for example?”
“A man?” said Sue, with an annoyed note in her voice. “Is a man worth… No, doctor, there is nothing like that.”
“Well, that is a problem, then,” said the doctor.
“I will do everything that I can do. But once a patient gives up, medicine loses half its power. You need to get her to ask one question about the new winter style in pants. Then I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one-in-ten.”
After the doctor had gone Sue cried. Then she skipped* into Joanna’s room with her drawing board,* whistling a happy tune.*
Joanna lay still under the blanket, with her face toward the window. Sue stopped whistling, thinking she was asleep.
She set up her drawing board and began a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate* a magazine story. Young artists must climb the ladder to* Art by drawing pictures for magazine stories that young authors write to climb the ladder to Literature.
As Sue was sketching a silk suit on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, repeated several times. She went quickly to the bedside.
Joanna’s eyes were wide open. 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 out the window. What was there to count? there was only the blank wall* of the brick house twenty meters away. An old, old ivy vine climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of fall had taken most of the leaves away, and its skeleton branches* hung, almost bare, to the bricks.
“What is it, dear?” asked Sue.
“Six,” whispered Joanna. “They’re falling faster now. A few days ago there were almost a hundred. It was difficult to count them. But now it’s easy. There goes another one. There are only five left now.”
“Five what, dear? Tell me.”
“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’ve never heard such nonsense,” complained Sue. “What have old ivy leaves to do with you getting well? Don’t be silly. The doctor told me this morning that your chances of getting better were – let me think exactly what he said – he said the chances were ten to one! Now, try to drink some soup, and let me go back to the drawing, so the editor will pay me. Then I will buy some wine for my sick friend, and some pork chops for my greedy self.”
“You don’t need to get any more wine,” said Joanna, looking out the window. “There goes another one. No, I don’t want any soup. That leaves just four. I want to see the last one fall before it gets dark. Then I’ll go, too.”
“Joanna, 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 these drawings in by tomorrow.”
“Couldn’t you draw in the other room?” asked Joanna, coldly.
“I’d rather be here bedside you,” said Sue. “Bedsides, I don’t want you looking at those silly ivy leaves.”
“Tell me as soon as you are finished,” said Joanna, closing her eyes, and lying as white and still as fallen statue, “because I want to see the last one fall. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of thinking. I want to lose my hold one 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 story about the old miner. I’ll only be gone a minute. Don’t move ’til I come back.”
Old Behrman was a painter who lived on the ground floor beneath them. He was past sixty and had a beard like Moses. Behrman was a failure at art. For forty years he had painted without success. He was always about to paint a master-piece, but had never begun it. For the last few years he had done only a little painting for advertisements. He earned a little money by serving as a model for the young artists in the colony who could not afford to pay the price of a professional. He drank a lot of gin, and still talked about his coming masterpiece. He thought of himself as the protector of Sue and Joanna. But everyone else thought he was a fierce and tough old man.
Sue found Behrman smelling strongly of gin in his badly lighted room down below. In one corner was blank canvas on an easel that had been wating for twenty-five years for the first line of his masterpiece. She told him Joanna’s belief about the leaves, and how she feared that Joanna, who was so weak and fragile, would actually float away like a leaf herself.
Old Behrman’s red eyes are filled with tears as he shouted with anger at such idiotic imaginings.
“What!” he cried. “Is there someone in the world foolish enough to die because leaves drop off a vine? I have never heard such a thing. No, I will not pose as a model for your stupid old miner. Why did you allow this foolishness to come into her brain? Oh, pool little Miss Joanna.”
“She is very ill and weakm” said Sue, “and the fever has filled her mind with trrange ideas. Mr. Behrman, if you don’t want to pose for me, you don’t have to. But I think you are a horrible old-old thing.”
“You are a typical woman!” yelled Behrman. “Who said I would not pose? Come on. I have been ready to pose for half an hour. God! What a terrible place for someone as good as Miss Joanna to be sick. When I paint my masterpiece we will go away together. God!”
Joanna was sleeping when they went upstairs. Sue pulled the shades down and led Behrman into the other room. They peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking. Cold rain was falling, mixed with snow. Behrman posed as an old miner, and Sue drew him.
When Sue got up the next morning, after an hour’s sleep, she found Joanna with dull, wide-open eyes staring at the drawn green shade.
“Pull it up, Sue, I want to see it,” she ordered, in a whisper.
Wearily, Sue obeyed.
Amazingly, after the heavy rain and fierce gusts of wind that had gone on all night, there was an ivy leaf left on the brick wall. It was the last one. It was still dark green near the stem, but turning yello at the edges. It hung bravely from a branch about six meters above the ground.
“It is the last one,” said Joanna, “IU thought it would surely fall during the night. I heard the wind. It will fall today, and I shall die at the same time.,”
“Dear, dear!” said Sue, leaning her tired face down to the pillow, “think of me, if you won’t think of yourself. What would iI do without you?”
But Joanna did not anser. The loneliest thing in all the world is a soul when it is getting ready to go on its mysterious, far journey. The ties that bound her to friendship and to earth were coming loose.
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 night, the north wind came again, and rain beat against the window.
When it was light enough,k Joanna commanded that the shades be pulled open again.
The ivy leaf was still there.
Joanna lay for a long time looking at it. And then she called to Sue, who was stirringchecken soup over the gas stove.
“I’ve been a bad girl, Suzie,” said Joanna. “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 soup now, and some milk with a little wine in it, and – no, bring me a hand-mirror first, and pack some pillows around me, and I will sit up and watch you cook.”
An hour later she said, “Suzie, some day I hope to paint the Bay of Naoles.”
The doctor came in the afternoon, and secretly talked to Sue in 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 patient downstairs. His name is Behrman, he’s some kind of artist, I believe. He also has Pneumonia.
He is an old man, and weak. There is no hope for him, but we will take him to hospital to be more comfortable.”
The next day the doctor said to Sue, “She’s out of danger. You’ve won. Just give her good food and care – that’s all.”
And that afternoon Sue came to the bed where Joanna lay, happily knitting a bright blue scarf, and put one arm right around her.
“I have something to tell you, Jo,” she said. Mr. Behrman died of pneymonia today in the hospital. He was sick for only two days. The janitor found him on the morning of the first day in his room downstairs. He was in awful pain. His colothes and shoes 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 lit, and a ladder, some brushes, and a palette with green and yello colors mixed on it. Look out the window, dear, at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn’t you wonder why it never fluttered or moved? Ah, darling, it’s Behrman’s masterpiece – he painted it the night the last leaf fell.
