Short Story: The Cop and the Anthem

Summary
Soapy is a vagrant in late autumn New York who has one practical ambition: to be arrested before winter so he can spend the cold months in the warm, free shelter of the city jail. He sets about accomplishing this with deliberate, almost professional, incompetence, staging petty crimes and public disturbances in a city that seems determined not to take him in. Each scheme is comic and thwarted in a small, telling way, leaving him hungry, cold, and more inventive than before.
After a long day of failures he wanders past a church and hears an anthem rising from within. The music and the mood it creates stir a surprising resolution in him: he decides to reform, to find honest work, and to take responsibility for his life. No sooner has he embraced this new path than a policeman arrests him on a trivial charge. The arrest lands him in jail for the very sentence he had been trying to secure by deliberate wrongdoing, producing the ironic twist that O. Henry is famous for.

Character and Setup
Soapy is sketched with economy and sympathy. He is resourceful, wily, and practical, yet his schemes reveal a complacent relationship with the city's margins: he knows how to survive but not how to prosper. The city itself functions almost as a character, with its institutions, policemen, and bystanders reacting to his efforts in ways that are at once bureaucratic and indifferent. The comic details of his failed attempts, meant to provoke arrest but instead yielding only annoyance, polite refusal, or accidental escape, expose the gap between intention and outcome.
O. Henry treats Soapy not as a mere caricature of a tramp but as a small, human figure caught in the indifferent churn of urban life. This intimacy allows the reader to see him both as a schemer and as someone capable of feeling uplifted by an ordinary human experience, a church anthem that reaches him despite his cynicism. The language gently balances humor with compassion, inviting laughter without cruelty.

Themes and Tone
Irony and redemption play across the story's surface. The central irony is crisp: Soapy's deliberate criminality is unsuccessful until the moment he renounces it, and then fate supplies the very fate he sought. That twist is not only amusing but also thought-provoking; it raises questions about agency, chance, and the moral economy of city life. The story also explores the tension between freedom and security. Soapy seeks the coercive sanctuary of jail, trading liberty for warmth and certainty, which reframes common moral expectations about prison and rehabilitation.
Humor in the narrative is sly and urbane, often rooted in small observational details. O. Henry's voice combines a reporter's eye for the city's scenes with a storyteller's appetite for irony. Beneath the surface wit there is a humane critique of social systems that leave people like Soapy choosing between hunger and incarceration.

Final Irony and Significance
The closing turn, Soapy's arrest after his sincere resolution to change, delivers both a neat punchline and a lasting moral image. It forces readers to ponder whether the justice system's interventions are random or inevitable, and whether human beings are shaped more by their choices or by the circumstances that confront them. The story's economy and its humane irony have made it a lasting example of O. Henry's gift for compact narratives that close with a moral or comic reversal.
As a compact urban fable, the tale endures because it combines sympathy, humor, and a final twist that is at once satisfying and unsettling. It leaves the reader smiling at O. Henry's cleverness while thinking about the precarious lives that populate the margins of modern cities.