The Last Leaf

"Twelve," whispered Johnsy. A little later: "Eleven." Then: "Ten. Nine."

Sue looked up from her drawing board. Her friend lay in bed, very still, staring out of the window. There was nothing out there but a bare brick wall, twenty feet away, and an old ivy vine climbing halfway up it. The autumn wind had stripped it until it was nearly a skeleton.

"What are you counting, dear?" Sue asked.

"Leaves," said Johnsy. "On the ivy. When the last one falls, I must go too. I've known it for three days."

A studio at the top of the stairs

Sue and Johnsy were young artists who had met in May and liked each other at once. They found they shared the same taste in art, in salads and in sleeves, so they took a small studio together at the top of an old brick house in Greenwich Village, the corner of New York where painters lived cheaply.

Then, in November, a cold, invisible stranger walked through the Village. The doctors called him Pneumonia. He touched people here and there, and one of the people he touched was Johnsy.

Now she lay on her painted iron bed, hardly moving, looking at the wall.

That morning the doctor had taken Sue into the hallway. Johnsy had perhaps one chance in ten, he said, and that chance depended on her wanting to live. When a patient starts counting the carriages at her own funeral, medicine loses half its power. If Sue could get her to care about anything at all, the chance would be far better.

Sue went into her workroom and cried into a napkin. Then she marched back into Johnsy's room with her drawing board, whistling cheerfully, and set to work. That was when she heard the counting.

Nonsense about leaves

"What does the ivy have to do with getting well?" Sue scolded. "You used to love that vine, you naughty girl. The doctor said your chances were very good. Now eat a little soup, and let me finish this drawing so I can buy you some port wine."

"No need for wine," said Johnsy, eyes still on the window. "There goes another. Only four left now. I want to see the last one go before dark."

Sue begged her to close her eyes and not look until the drawing was done. She pulled down the blind. Then she went downstairs to find a model for her picture of an old miner.

Old Behrman

On the ground floor lived Behrman, a painter past sixty with a long, curling beard. For forty years he had held a brush, and he had never painted anything good. Always he talked about the masterpiece he was going to paint. He had never begun it. He earned a little by posing for younger artists, drank more gin than was good for him, and thought of himself as the fierce guardian of the two young women upstairs.

When Sue told him about the leaves, he roared with scorn. Were there people in the world so foolish as to die because leaves fell off a vine? He would not hear of it. How could Sue allow such silly ideas into her friend's head?

But he climbed the stairs with her. Johnsy was asleep. Sue and Behrman looked out of the window at the ivy, and then looked at each other without a word.

A cold rain was falling, mixed with snow.

The morning after the storm

All night the wind howled and the rain beat against the glass.

In the grey morning, Johnsy said in a flat voice, "Pull up the blind. I want to see."

Sue raised it wearily.

And there, against the brick wall, after that long night of wind and rain, one ivy leaf still clung to its stem. It was dark green near the stalk, with yellowed, ragged edges, and it hung bravely about twenty feet above the ground.

"It's the last one," said Johnsy. "I was sure it would fall in the night. It will fall today, and I shall die at the same time."

But the day passed, and the leaf stayed. Night came, and the wind rose again, and the rain lashed the windows. When it was light, Johnsy asked for the blind to be raised.

The leaf was still there.

Johnsy lay looking at it for a long time. Then she called to Sue, who was stirring broth on the stove.

"I've been a bad girl, Sudie," she said. "Something has made that last leaf stay there to show me how wicked I was. It's a sin to want to die. You may bring me a little broth now, and a mirror, and some pillows so I can sit up and watch you cook."

An hour later she said that one day she hoped to paint the Bay of Naples.

The masterpiece

That afternoon the doctor came again. Johnsy's chances were even, he said, and with good nursing she would win. Then he added that he had another patient downstairs, an old man called Behrman, also with pneumonia. The old man was weak and the attack was severe. There was no hope for him, but he was being taken to the hospital to be made more comfortable.

The next day the doctor said Johnsy was out of danger.

That evening Sue came and sat on the bed, and put her arm around her friend, pillows and all.

She had something to tell her. Old Behrman had died that day in the hospital. He had been ill only two days. On the first morning, the janitor had found him in his room, helpless with pain. His shoes and clothes were soaking wet and icy cold. Nobody could imagine where he had been on such a terrible night.

Then they found a lantern, still lit. And a ladder that had been dragged from its place. And some scattered brushes, and a palette with green and yellow colours mixed on it.

"Look out of the window, dear," said Sue, "at the last ivy leaf on the wall. Didn't you ever wonder why it never fluttered or moved when the wind blew?"

It was Behrman's masterpiece. He had painted it there, on the night the last leaf fell.

About this story

O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), an American writer loved for his stories of ordinary New Yorkers and their famous twist endings. "The Last Leaf" first appeared in 1907. This version is a shortened, simplified retelling.