Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  Will [O. Henry] was a great lover of fun and mischief. When we were quite small his father, Dr. A. S. Porter, fell a victim to the delusion that he had solved the problem of perpetual motion, and finally abandoned a splendid practice and spent nearly all his time working on his machines. His mother, who was a most practical and sensible old woman, made him betake himself and his machines to the barn, and these Will and I, always being careful to wait for a time when the doctor was out, would proceed to demolish, destroying often in a few minutes that which it had taken much time and labor to construct. While, of course, I do not know the fact, I strongly suspect that the doctor’s mother inspired these outrages.

  Scientists distinguish three kinds of inheritance. In the case of “blended” inheritance, the child, like a folk-song, bears the marks of composite authorship; in “prepotent” inheritance, one parent or remoter ancestor is supposed to be most effective in stamping the offspring; and in “exclusive” inheritance, the character of the descendant is definitely that of one ancestor. Though the classification rests on no well- established basis and illustrates the use of three obedient adjectives rather than the operation of ascertained laws, it is at least convenient and may serve pro tern till a wiser survey replaces it. It is easy to see that O. Henry was the beneficiary not of an exclusive but of a blended inheritance. “This is a country,” he reminds us, “of mix-ups.” But the mother strain, if not prepotent in the sense of science, seems to me to have outweighed that of any other relative of whom we have record.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY YEARS

  O. HENRY once wrote from New York:

  I was born and raised in “No’th Ca’llina” and at eighteen went to Texas and ran wild on the prairies. Wild yet, but not so wild. Can’t get to loving New Yorkers. Live all alone in a great big two rooms on quiet old Irving Place three doors from Wash. Irving’s old home. Kind of lonesome. Was thinking lately (since the April moon commenced to shine) how I’d like to be down South, where I could happen over to Miss Ethel’s or Miss Sallie’s and sit down on the porch — not on a chair — on the edge of the porch, and lay my straw hat on the steps and lay my head back against the honeysuckle on the post — and just talk. And Miss Ethel would go in directly (they say “presently” up here) and bring out the guitar. She would complain that the E string was broken, but no one would believe her; and pretty soon all of us would be singing the “Swanee River” and “In the Evening by the Moonlight” and — oh, gol darn it, what’s the use of wishing?

  These words, in which O. Henry almost succeeds in expressing the inexpressible, are cited by Miss Marguerite Campion in Harper’s Weekly as an example of “charm.” “For charm,” she says, “is three parts softness. Did not O. Henry, almost more than any other American writer, possess it, and was he not, until the day of his death, the soft-hearted advocate of humanity, the friend-of-all-the-world, after the only original model of Kim, the vagabond? Charm flowed from him through his peculiarly personal pen into all that he wrote.”

  The passage is reproduced here not to illustrate charm — though every word is instinct with it — but as an example of O. Henry’s ingrained affection for the place of his birth. A boy’s life in a small Southern town immediately after the war, one phase of that life at least, was never better portrayed than these lines portray it, and whatever facts or events may be added in this chapter may best be interpreted against the background of the April moon, the porch, the honeysuckle, and the guitar with the broken E string. A few years later O. Henry said, of the novel that he hoped to write: “The ‘hero’ of the story will be a man born and ‘raised’ in a somnolent little Southern town. His education is about a common school one, but he learns afterward from reading and life.”

  It is of this little town and of the formative influences that passed from it into O. Henry that we purpose in this chapter to write. Had William Sydney Porter not been reared in “a somnolent little Southern town”

  he would hardly have developed into the O. Henry that we know to-day. He was all his life a dreamer, and if the “City of Flowers” had already become the “Gate City” during his boyhood, if the wooded slopes had already been covered with the roaring cotton mills, the dreamer whose dreams were to become literature would hardly have found in the place of his birth either the time or the clime in which to develop his dream faculties. The somnolent little Southern town, moreover, which he would have sketched if he had lived to write his literary autobiography, deserves more than a mere mention. Not only was it the place that nurtured him and his forebears, that released his constructive powers, that held a place in his dreams to the end; it had also an individuality of its own and a history not without dignity and distinction.

  Greensboro took its name from General Nathanael Greene, of Rhode Island. Five miles northwest of the town, on March 15, 1781, the great Rhode Islander fought his greatest battle, that of Guilford Court House. The fact that the battle was not incontest- ably a victory for either Greene or Cornwallis has, by multiplying discussion, been an advantage in keeping alive the memory of the conflict and of the issues involved. The boys and girls of Greensboro know more about the battle and about the traditions that still hover around the field than they would have known if either Greene or Cornwallis had been decisively and undebatably defeated. Mark Twain says that every American is born with the date 1492 engraved on his brain. The children of Guilford County are born with March 15, 1781, similarly impressed. Since the publication, however, of Schenck’s “Memorial Volume of the Guilford Battle Ground Company,” in 1893, historians have begun to recognize that in any fair perspective the battle of Guilford Court House must rank as a turning point in the Revolutionary War. Ultimate victory was assured and would have come to the patriot arms without the contribution of this battle, but it would not have come at Yorktown seven months and four days later. A participant in the battle wrote immediately afterward :*

  * The letter was published in the New Jersey State Gazette of April 11, 1781.

  The enemy were so beaten that we should have disputed the victory could we have saved our artillery, but the General thought that it was a necessary sacrifice. The spirits of the soldiers would have been affected if the cannon had been sent off the field, and in this woody country cannon cannot always be sent off at a critical moment.

  The General, by his abilities and good conduct and by his activity and bravery in the field, has gained the confidence and respect of the army and the country to an amazing degree. You would, from the countenances of our men, believe they had been decidedly victorious. They are in the highest spirits, and appear most ardently to wish to engage the enemy again. The enemy are much embarrassed by their wounded. When we consider the nakedness of our troops and of course their want of discipline, their numbers, and the loose, irregular manner in which we came into the field, I think we have done wonders. I rejoice at our success, and were our exertions and sacrifices published to the world as some commanding officers would have published them, we should have received more applause than our modesty claims.

  When the battle was fought there was of course no Greensboro. The county seat of Guilford was Martinsville, where the court house was, where the battle took place, and where the court records of November 21, 1787, remind us that “Andrew Jackson produced a license from the judges of the Superior Court of Law and Equity to practise law and was admitted as an attorney of this court.” But twenty-eight years after the battle the court records read: “Court adjourned from the town of Martinsville to the town of Greensboro, the centre of the county, to meet at 10 o’clock tomorrow, Friday, 19 May, 1809. . . . According to adjournment the court met Friday, 19 May, at Greensboro, for the first time.” This procedure marked the death of Martinsville and the birth of Greensboro. But the historic old court house at Martinsville was to render a patriotic service that its builders could never have anticipated. Some of the great oak logs of which it was built, long seasoned and carefully hewn, were sold year by year to the buil
ders of new homes in the new county seat. Some of them were sawed up into weather-boarding while others were only shortened or placed just as they were in the new buildings. These scarred memorials of Revolutionary days may not have meant much to the generation that utilized them, but to the younger generation of another age they were as full of historic romance as the Spanish ships that young Longfellow used to gaze at in the wharves of his native Portland. One of these logs formed a part of the Porter home, which was built of logs weather- boarded over, and O. Henry used to exhibit with boyish pride a treasured Indian arrow-head which he had found sticking in it.

  Guilford Battle Ground is now covered with stately memorials, more than thirty monuments or shafts testifying to the pride that North Carolina and Virginia and Maryland and Delaware and the national Government itself feel in the service rendered by the men who fell or fought on this field. In addition to the great monument to Nathanael Greene there is a monument to “No North, No South.” There is another to the “Hon. Lieut. Colonel Stuart, of the 2nd Battalion of the Queen’s Guards”; it was erected on the spot where he fell “by the Guilford Battle Ground Company in honour of a brave foeman.” But during O. Henry’s boyhood and till he left Greensboro no organized attempt had been made to redeem the field from its century of neglect. It was only an expanse of red soil and woodland, but an expanse that by its very bareness stimulated the constructive imagination.

  There was no part of the ground that O. Henry did not know. Bullets, buttons, pieces of swords or shells or flint-locks could be picked up after an hour’s search. The visitor to the battlefield does not now lose himself in a reverie; he reads history as recorded and interpreted for him on monument and slab, on boulder and arch. But in the ‘seventies the field had to be reconstructed in imagination, the contestants visualized, the lines of battle regrouped, the sound of gun and drum made audible again, the charge and countercharge reenacted. If the field is history now, it was the stuff that dreams are made of then, and to no one was its appeal stronger or more fertile in storied suggestion than to O. Henry. “I have never known any one who read history with such avidity,” said Mrs. R. M. Hall, in whose home on the Texas ranch O. Henry lived. “He not only devoured Hume, Macaulay, Green, and Guizot, but made their scenes and characters live again in vivid conversation.”

  But though General Greene gave Greensboro its name, the real founder of the town was an old-field school teacher, one of those rare characters who, unknown to history, seem endowed with the power to vitalize every forward-looking agency of their times and to touch constructively every personality that comes within the orbit of their influence. The year 1824, which witnessed the marriage of Sidney Porter and Ruth Worth, O.Henry’s grandparents, witnessed the death at the age of one hundred years of David Caldwell, the man who, more than any other, made Guilford County and Greensboro known beyond State lines.

  It lias been already said that when the battle of Guilford Court House was fought there was no Greensboro. There was, however, the triangle in which Greensboro was to be placed, a triangle formed by David Caldwell’s log schoolhouse and his two Presbyterian churches, Alamance and Buffalo. The school- house, which was also his home, stood on the road between Guilford Court House and what was to be Greensboro. To it came students from every Southern State and from it went five governors, more than fifty ministers, and an uncounted number of teachers and trained citizens. David Caldwell was a Scotch-Irishman from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a graduate of Princeton, a teacher, preacher, carpenter, farmer, doctor, and patriot.

  David Caldwell had espoused the cause of the Revolution ten years before the storm broke and from his schoolroom and pulpit had prepared his countrymen for the issue which he plainly foresaw. He had reasoned with Tryon and Cornwallis and had given valuable counsel to Greene. Though a price had been set upon his head he was with his two congregations when they faced the British at Alamance and Guilford Court House. The greatest personal loss that had come to him was in the wanton burning of his books, letters, and private papers. Armful after armful of these memorials of an heroic past were dumped by Cornwallis’s troopers into the flaming oven in the doctor’s backyard. Though his books were his tools, he was often heard to say that he regretted most of all the loss of his private papers which constituted a sort of first-hand history of the times. Had these been preserved Doctor Caldwell’s name would probably appear in every record of the original sources of colonial and Revolutionary history, while now it appears in none.

  His life was written eighteen years after his death by Dr. Eli Y. Caruthers, and he appears as one of the characters in at least two historical novels, “Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment,” written by Dr. Calvin II. Wiley, in 1847, and “The Master of the Red Buck and the Bay Doe,” a recent work by Mr. William Laurie Hill. Doctor Wiley’s book is mentioned by Mr. William Dean Howells as having “bewitched” him in his boyhood:

  At nine years of age he [Mr. Howells] read the history of Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a little while after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; but he did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who read novels, and a novel was like “Handy Andy,” or “Harry Lorrequer,” or the “Bride of Lammermoor.” His brother had another novel which they preferred to either; it was in Harper’s old “Library of Select Novels,” and was called “Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment,” and it was about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. It be witched them, and though my boy could not afterward recall;t single fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind’s eye every trait of its outward aspect.

  But David Caldwell lives most securely not in books but in the men that he made and in the widening compass of their influence. The Guilford County of his day was peculiarly cosmopolitan and even international in its make-up. There were the Scotch-Irish in and around Greensboro, then as now the masterful stock; there were the German exiles from the Palatinate in the eastern part of the county; and there were the English Quakers, who came via Nantucket, and a little band of Welshmen to the west and south. Out of the clash or coincidence of these varied racial stocks the history of the county was builded. But all elements went to school to David Caldwell or to teachers trained by him.

  The Worth and Porter families form no exception. Jonathan Worth, Quaker and future governor, came from Center to Greensboro to be taught and to teach in the Greensboro Academy, a Presbyterian school taught by a pupil and son of David Caldwell. In 1821 “the trustees of the Academy think it necessary to announce to the public that they have employed Mr. Jonathan Worth as an assistant teacher. No young gentleman, we believe, sustains a fairer character than Mr< Worth.” When Jonathan Worth began the study of law it was under Archibald D. Murphey, another graduate of David Caldwell’s log school. For fifty years after his death the educational currents flowing through the county can be traced back to a common source in David Caldwell.

  But the channel through which he was chiefly to exert an influence upon the Porter family was Governor John Motley Morehead, the founder of Edgeworth Female Seminary. Edgeworth, as we have seen, played an important role in the lives of O. Henry’s parents, but after the buildings were burned the spacious lawn was to serve in a peculiar way as playground and dreamland for the son. Mr. Morehead attended David Caldwell’s school when the old dominie had passed his ninetieth year but when his ability as a teacher and his range of vision as a citizen seemed to have suffered no diminution. Governor Morehead was an admirer and close reader of the novels of Maria Edgeworth and of her earlier “Essays on Practical Education,” written in collaboration with her father.

  Miss Edgeworth’s favourite contrast between the social careers of young women who had been sanely educated at home and those who had not, her constant balancing of the simple affections against false sentiment and sentimentality, her pitting of the “dasher” and “title-hunter” against modes
ty and native worth appealed strongly to a man who had five daughters to be educated but who could find no girls’ school that met the Maria Edgeworth requirements. He founded, therefore, a school between his own residence, Bland- wood, and the Porter home, which he called the Edge- worth Female Seminary. It was the only advanced school for women in North Carolina that was founded, owned, and financed not by a board or a church but by an individual. Teachers were brought from France and Germany, the grounds were beautifully kept, new buildings were added, and till the beginning of the war Edgeworth enjoyed a growing and generous patronage from the South and West.

  The war converted Edgeworth into a hospital for both Confederate and Federal soldiers. As the buildings were almost opposite the Porter home, O. Henry’s father was kept busy in the practice of his profession. The old Presbyterian Church, which O. Henry’s grandmother attended, had also to do hospital duty by turns, and thus father and grandmother were not only in constant demand but were laying up a store of interesting reminiscence that was to become a part of O. Henry’s heritage in later years. The war took its toll of Greensboro citizens though there was little destruction of property. The town and county and State had been overwhelmingly for union and against secession, but when the order came to North Carolina to send troops with which to fight her seceding neighbours, all parties were united in opposition. The contest then became, as O. Henry puts it, (in “Buried Treasure.) “the rebellion of the abolitionists against the secessionists.” No battle was fought in Guilford County, but Greensboro loomed into sudden prominence at the close of the war and again a few years after the close.