Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  My father kept a large flock of turkeys and the tail feathers of these furnished us material for our “war bonnets” when we played Indian, much to the detriment of the turkeys’ appearance and to my father’s displeasure. We played this game more than any other. Our bows were of our own make as were the arrows, and were quite effective as the Poland Chinas, Berkshires, and Chester Whites could testify if they had not long since gone the way of all good hogs — which is not Jerusalem. These hogs acted in turns the part of grizzlies, deer, horses, etc., and often in the excitement of the chase an arrow would be shot just a little harder than we intended and we would thereupon chase the poor unfortunate to exhaustion to get the arrow out of its mark before my father returned We were always successful is my recollection and I am most sure that it does not fail me for any omission would certainly have been visited by such a forcible reminder that it would have remained fresh and green in my memory to this day and beyond. Another feature of the Indian play, or rather another setting to our action, was on a muddy bank down at the creek. We would take our toy gun, owned in common, go down to the soft, slippery bank — strip and paint up properly and wage warfare on each other. Dying a thousand deaths was a small item to us; we did it thoroughly that many times each day.

  During these years O. Henry cared little for indoor games and sports. In chess he could hold his own with the veterans of the town before he had reached his teens and in roller-skating he won the championship prize. He was also a good boxer and a trained fencer. But his favourite recreation was to roam around the fields and woods with a congenial companion. A book was usually taken along and was read in some shady spot or, in winter time, beneath the shelter of pines and broomsedge on a favourite hillside overlooking old Caldwell’s Pond. Even when he went fishing or swimming or hunting for chinquapins or hickory nuts, he found his chief exhilaration in the breadth and freedom of out of doors rather than in the nominal object of the jaunt. An outing with a set purpose was never to his liking. His pleasure was in merely being in the woods or on the bank of a stream, in surrendering himself to the mood rather than to the purpose of the occasion, and in interpreting in waggish ways everything said or done or seen. He was always shy, his exuberant humour and rare gift of story telling seeming to take flight within the walls of a house. He preferred the front gate or, as a halfway station, the porch. Even in a small group out of doors, if there was a stranger or one uncongenial companion, O. Henry would not be heard from. But the next day he would tell you what happened and with such a wealth of original comment and keenness of insight and alchemy of exaggeration, all framed in a droll or dramatic story, that you would think you had missed the time of your life in not being present.

  “His education is about a common school one,” said O. Henry of himself in the words already cited, “but he learns afterward from reading and life.” His teacher and his only teacher was his aunt, Miss Evelina Maria Porter, known to every one in Greensboro as Miss Lina. Hers was undoubtedly the strongest personal influence brought to bear on O. Henry during his twenty years in North Carolina. The death of his mother when he was only three years old and the increasing absorption of his father in futile inventions resulted in Miss Lina’s taking the place of both parents, and this she did not only with whole-souled devotion but with rare and efficient intelligence. She was a handsome woman with none of her father’s happy-go-lucky disposition but with much of her mother’s directive ability and with a profound sense of responsibility for the welfare of every boy and girl that entered her school. She had been educated at Edgeworth Female Seminary and in the late ‘sixties opened a small school in one of the rooms of her mother’s home. Her mother assisted her and in a few years, the school having outgrown its accommodations, a small building was erected on the Porter premises. Here Miss Lina taught until the growth of the public graded school system, which Greensboro was the first town in the State to adopt, began to encroach upon her domain and to render her work less remunerative and less needful.

  When she closed her school she carried with her the love and the increasing admiration of all whom she had taught. No teacher of a private preparatory school in Greensboro ever taught as many pupils as Miss Lina or was followed by a heartier plaudit of “Well done.” She did not, of course, spare the rod. It was not the fashion in those days to spare it. At a Friday afternoon speech-making one of her pupils started gayly off with

  One hungry day a summer ape.

  The emendation must have appealed to the youthful O. Henry. Of that, however, we are not informed, but we are informed that the perpetrator had hardly reached “ape” before he had a lesson impressed upon him as to the enormity of adjectival transposition that he will carry with him into the next world.

  But there was no cruelty in Miss Lina’s disposition. She tempered justice if not with mercy at least with rigid impartiality and with hearty laughter. I have never known a pupil of her school, whether doctor, teacher, preacher, merchant, lawyer, or judge, who did not say that every application of the rod, so far as he was concerned, was amply and urgently deserved. To have been soundly whipped by Miss Lina is still regarded in Greensboro as a sort of spiritual bond of union, linking together the older citizens of the town in a community of cutaneous experience for which they would not exchange a college diploma. The little schoolroom was removed many years ago but it still lives in the grateful memory of all who attended it and has attained a new immortality in the fame of its most illustrious pupil.

  O. Henry attended no other school, and he attended this only to the age of fifteen. He was always a favourite with Miss Lina and with the other pupils. The gentleness of his disposition and his genius for original kinds of play won his schoolmates while his aunt held up his interest in his books, his good deportment, and his skill in drawing as worthy of all emulation. Miss Lina taught drawing, but O. Henry’s sketches were almost from the start so far superior to hers that they were generally selected as the models. Some of his best free-hand sketches Miss Lina never saw, though she deserves the credit of having inspired them. She had a way of sending the arithmetic class to the blackboard while she paced the floor with the bundle of switches. O. Henry would work his “sum” with his right hand and sketch Miss Lina with his left at the same time. The likeness was perfect, not a feature or switch being omitted. The whole thing had to be done as she walked from one side of the little room to the other with her back to the blackboard. To insure safety through instantaneous erasure the fingers of the left hand held not only the rapidly moving crayon but also the erasing rag. O. Henry’s ear, long practised told him accurately how near Miss Lina was to the end of her promenade, and just before her last step was taken and the return trip begun the rag would descend and she would behold only a sum so neatly worked that it would become the subject of another address on good work and model workers.

  But we are more concerned here with Miss Lina’s method of teaching literature. She had a method, and O. Henry’s lifelong love of good books was in part the fruitage of her method. She did not teach the history of literature, but she laboured in season and out of season to have her pupils assimilate the spirit of literature. Her reading in the best English literature was, if not wide, at least intimate and appreciative. She loved books as she loved flowers, because her nature demanded them. Fiction and poetry were her means of widening and enriching her own inner life, not of learning facts about the world without. Scott and Dickens were her favourite novelists and Father Ryan her favourite poet. She did not measure literature by life but life by literature. So did O. Henry at that time, but he was later to transpose his standards, putting life first. I have often thought that Miss Lina must have been in O. Henry’s mind when he wrote those suggestive words about Azalea Adair in “A Municipal Report”:

  She was a product of the old South, gently nurtured in the sheltered life. Her learning was not broad, but was deep and of splendid originality in its somewhat narrow scope. She had been educated at home, and her knowledge of the world was derived fr
om inference and by inspiration. Of such is the precious, small group of essayists made. While she talked to me I kept brushing my fingers, trying, unconsciously, to rid them guiltily of the absent dust from the half-calf backs of Lamb, Chaucer, Hazlitt, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, and Hood. She was exquisite; she was a valuable discovery. Nearly everybody nowadays knows too much — oh, so much too much — of real life.

  Miss Lina used regularly to gather her boys about her at recess and read to them from some standard author. When she saw that she had caught their interest she would announce a Friday night meeting in the schoolroom at which they would pop corn and roast chestnuts and she would continue the readings.

  “I did more reading,” says O. Henry, “between my thirteenth and nineteenth years than I have done in all the years since, and my taste at that time was much better than it is now, for I used to read nothing but the classics. Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ and Lane’s translation of ‘The Arabian Nights’ were my favourites.” During his busy years in New York he often remarked to Mrs. Porter: “I never have time to read now. I did all my reading before I was twenty.” This did not, of course, refer to newspapers, which he devoured three or four times a day.

  But Miss Lina believed that the best way to learn or to appreciate the art of narration was to try your hand at it yourself. You might never become a great writer, but you would at least have a first-hand ac-= quaintance with the discipline that well-knit narrative involves. In the intervals, therefore, between chestnut roastings and classic readings an original story would be started, every one present having to make an impromptu contribution when called on. Each contribution, being expected to grow naturally out of the incidents that preceded it, demanded, of course, the closest attention to all that had hitherto been said. The most difficult role in this narrative program fell, of course, to the pupil who tried to halt the windings of the story by an interesting and adequate conclusion. To do this required not only a memory that retained vividly the incidents and characters already projected into the story, but a constructive imagination that could interpret and fuse them. Need I say that the creator of “The Four Million” found his keenest delight in this exercise or that his contributions were those most eagerly awaited by teacher and pupil?

  In the long summer evenings after school Miss Lina’s boys would gather on the old Edgeworth grounds for a kind of recreation which the contracted Porter premises did not permit. In an English magazine O. Henry had read two serial stories called “Jack Hark- away” and “Dick Lightheart.” These gave him the suggestion for two clubs or societies into which the more congenial of Miss Lina’s pupils were forthwith divided. One was the Brickbats, the other the Union Jacks. The Union Jacks, to which O. Henry belonged, had selected for their armory one of the few minor buildings on the Edgeworth campus which had been spared by the fire. Here they had stored a rich collection of wooden battleaxes, shields, spears, helmets, cavalry sabres, and all other things Jane Porterish, and here they held nightly conclave. The planning of raids which never took place, the discussion of the relative values of medieval weapons of which they had read, the facile citation of well-known non-existent authorities on attack and counter-attack, the bestowal of knightly titles on themselves and of less knightly on their imagined foes, and the generous use of “Hist!” “Zounds!” “Hark ye!” and “By my halidome!” make the Union Jacks and the Edgeworth grounds not the least of the formative influences that wrought upon O. Henry during his more malleable years.

  “On Friday nights,”* says one of the Union Jacks, “it was their custom to sally forth armed and equipped from their castle in search of adventure, like knights of old, carefully avoiding the dark nooks where there were gloomy shadows. Porter was the leading spirit in the daring enterprises and many were the hair- raising adventures these ten-year-old heroes encountered. The shields and battleaxes were often thrown hastily aside when safety lay in flight. Ghosts were not uncommon in those days, or rather nights, and only good, sturdy legs could cope with the supernatural.”

  Two other incidents of O. Henry’s brief school days will illustrate the artistic use that he so often makes in his stories of scraps of verse stored in the memory as well as the longing that he had to play the venturer beyond the confines of his native town and State. By way of introduction the reader will recall the dramatic manner in which O. Henry uses in “The Caballero’s Way” these lines:

  Don’t you monkey with my Lulu girl

  Or I’ll tell you what I’ll do

  Only these two lines are given in the story, once by way of prophecy and at the end by way of fulfilment; but the character of the singer and the way in which the lines are sung enable the reader who is unfamiliar with the remaining two lines to guess their import. Mr. J. D. Smith, of Mount Airy, North Carolina, writes:

  The first recollection that I can recall of William Porter was when I was going to school to Miss Lina Porter. I went to jump out of the window and in doing so dislocated my ankle. Not being able to walk Will and his brother Shirley carried me into the house, and sent for old Doctor Porter. He had about quit practising, but the ankle had to be set at once, so Shirley held me on the floor while Will seized my leg and the old doctor started to twist my ankle off, it seemed to me. I began to cry out, and then Will began to sing, and you know he could not sing, but this was his song:

  If you don’t stop fooling with my Lula

  I tell you what I’ll do;

  I’ll feel around your heart with a razor

  And I’ll cut your liver out too.

  The next adventure that I can recall was: There was a boy who lived opposite the school by the name of Robertson, whose father was a dentist. He ran away and went on a whaling vessel, but finally came back, and we would meet around and hear him tell about the sea, and how much money he made catching whales. Will and Tom Tate and I would meet and caucus whether we would go and catch whales or fight the Indians. Tom was for fighting the Indians, and Will and I decided that we would make our fortunes catching whales, so we started for the sea. Our money gave out at Raleigh and, after spending all we had for something to eat, we decided to go home if we could get there. We went to the depot and, as luck would have it, we saw a freight conductor that we knew in Greensboro, and asked him if he would let us “brake” for our fare home. He told us to crawl up on the box cars, and that two blows meant put on brakes, and one to take them off, and for us to mind or he would put us off. That is the first and last time I have ever been on top of a box car running. After we had gotten up good speed I saw the engine disappear around a curve, and it seemed to me that the box car that Will and I were on was going direct to the woods. Then we both gave up as lost, and lay right down on the running board, and Will began to repeat what Miss Lina Porter had taught him, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” etc. I had my eyes closed, expecting the car to hit the woods every minute. Finally, when nothing happened, it seemed that we both raised up about the same time, and just looked at each other. Then Will began his song, If you don’t stop fooling with my Lula, but in rather a sheepish manner.

  But when O. Henry’s boyhood friends recall him it is not usually as a pupil in Miss Lina’s school; nor is it as the writer in the great city. It is as the clerk in his uncle Clark Porter’s drug store on Elm Street, opposite the old Benbow Hotel. Here he was known and loved by old and young, black and white, rich and poor. He was the wag of the town, but so quiet, so unobtrusive, so apparently preoccupied that it was his pencil rather than his tongue that spread his local fame. His youthful devotion to drawing was stimulated in large part by the pictures painted by his mother. Many of these hung in the Porter home. Some were portraits and some landscapes. They were part of the atmosphere in which O. Henry was reared. One of his own earliest sketches was made when Edgeworth was burned. O. Henry was then only ten years old but the picture that he drew of a playmate rescuing an empty churn from the basement of the burning building, with the milk spilled all over him, is remembered for its ludicrous conception
and for its striking fidelity to the boy and to the surroundings.

  His five years in his uncle’s drug store meant much to him as a cartoonist. His feeling for the ludicrous, for the odd, for the distinctive, in speech, tone, appearance, conduct, or character responded instantly to the appeal made by the drug store constituency. Not that he was not witty; he was. But his best things were said with the pencil. There was not a man or woman in the town whom he could not reproduce recognizably with a few strokes of a lead pencil. Thus it was a common occurrence, when Clark Porter returned to the store from lunch, for a conversation like this to take place: O. Henry would say: “Uncle Clark, a man called to see you a little while ago to pay a bill.’” It should be premised that it was not good form in those days to ask a man to stand and deliver either his name or the amount due. “Who was it?” his uncle would ask. “I never saw him before, but he looks like this,” and the pencil would zigzag up and down a piece of wrapping paper. “ Oh, that’s Bill Jenkins out here at Reedy Fork. He owes me $7.25.”

  Several years before he left Greensboro the fame of his cartoons had spread to other towns, and he was urged by Colonel Robert Bingham, a relative by marriage and Superintendent of the famous Bingham School, then at Mebane, North Carolina, to come at once to Bingham’s where an education free of charge would be given him. “My only direct connection with William Sydney as a boy,” writes Colonel Bingham, “was to offer him his tuition and board in order to get the use of his talent as a cartoonist for the amusement of our boys. He was an artist with chalk on a blackboard. But he could not accept my offer for lack of means to provide for his uniform and books.” This must have been a bitter disappointment though O. Henry was never heard to allude to it.