by O. Henry
His pencil sketches sometimes gave offence, especially when some admirer would hang them in the store window, but rarely. He was absolutely without malice. There was about him also a gentleness of manner, a delicacy of feeling, a refinement in speech and demeanour that was as much a part of him as his humour. I have received no reminiscences of him that do not make mention of his purity of speech and thought. Yet he was never sissy. He could be genuinely funny so easily himself without striking beneath the belt that a resort to underhand tactics seemed crude and awkward to him. It betrayed poverty of resources. In the presence of such methods he seemed to me uneasy and bored rather than indignant or shocked. No one at least who knew him in the old days will wonder at the surprise with which in later years he resented the constant comparison of his work with that of De Maupassant, though toward the last he kept a copy of De Maupassant always at hand. No two writers ever lived more diametrically opposed than O. Henry and De Maupassant except in technique. “I have been called,” he said, “the American De Maupassant. Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.” Like Edgar Allan Poe, with whom he had little else in common, O. Henry was honoured during his whole life with the understanding friendship of a few noble-spirited women who in the early days, as in the later, helped, I think, to keep his compass true.
After Miss Lina’s school the drug store was to O. Henry a sort of advanced course in human nature and in the cartoonist’s art. George Eliot tells in “Romola” of the part played in medieval Florence by the barber shop. A somewhat analogous part was played in Greensboro forty years ago by Clark Porter’s drug store. It was the rendezvous of all classes, though the rear room was reserved for the more elect. The two rooms constituted in fact the social, political, and anecdotal clearing house of the town. The patronage of the grocery stores and drygoods stores was controlled in part by denominational lines, but everybody patronized the drug store. It was also a sort of physical confessional. The man who would expend only a few words in purchasing a ham or a hat would talk half an hour of his aches and ills or those of his family before buying twenty-five cents’ worth of pills or a ten-cent bottle of liniment. When the ham or the hat was paid for and taken away there was usually an end of it. Not so with the pills or the liniment. The patient usually came back to continue his personal or family history and to add a sketch of the character and conduct of the pills or liniment. All this was grist to O. Henry’s mill.
No one, I think, without a training similar to O. Henry’s, would be likely to write such a story as “Makes the Whole World Kin.” It is not so much the knowledge of drugs displayed as the conversational atmosphere of the drug store in a small Southern town that gives the local flavour. A burglar, you remember, has entered a house at night. “Hold up both your hands,” he said. “Can’t raise the other one,” was the reply. “What’s the matter with it?” “Rheumatism in the shoulder.” “Inflammatory?” asked the burglar. “Was. The inflammation has gone down.” “ ‘Scuse me,” said the burglar, “but it just socked me one, too.” “How long have you had it?”
inquired the citizen. “Four years.” “Ever try rattlesnake oil?” asked the citizen. “Gallons. If all the snakes I’ve used the oil of was strung out in a row they’d reach eight times as far as Saturn, and the rattles could be heard at Valparaiso, Indiana, and back.” In the end the burglar helps the citizen to dress and they go out together, the burglar standing treat.
The drawings that O. Henry used to make of the characters that frequented the drug store were not caricatures. There was usually, it is true, an overemphasis put upon some one trait, but this trait was the central trait, the over-emphasis serving only to interpret and reveal the character as a whole. Examining these sketches anew, when the characters themselves are thirty odd years older than they were then, one is struck with the resemblance still existing. In fact, O. Henry’s sketches reproduce the characters as they are to-day more faithfully than do the photographs taken at the same time. The photographs have been outgrown, but not the sketches; for the sketches caught the central and permanent, while the photographs made no distinction. In O. Henry’s story called “A Madison Square Arabian Night,” an artist, picked at random from the “free-bed line,” is made to say:
Whenever I finished a picture people would come to see it, and whisper and look queerly at one another. I soon found out what the trouble was. I had a knack of bringing out in the face of a portrait the hidden character of the original. I don’t know how I did it — I painted what I saw.
But O. Henry’s distinctive skill, the skill of the story teller that was to be, is seen to better advantage in his pictures of groups than in his pictures of individuals. Into the group pictures, which he soon came to prefer to any others, he put more of himself and more of the life of the community. They gave room for a sort of collective interpretation which seems to me very closely related to the plots of his short stories. There is the same selection of a central theme, the same saturation with a controlling idea, the same careful choice of contributory details, the same rejection of non-essentials, and the same ability to fuse both theme and details into a single totality of effect. “He could pack more of the social history of this city into a small picture,” said a citizen of Austin, Texas, “than I thought possible. Those of us who were on the inside could read the story as if printed. Let me show you,” and he entered into an affectionate rhapsody over a little pen and ink sketch which he still carried in his inside coat pocket.
An illustration is found in a sketch of the interior of Clark Porter’s drug store. The date is 1879. Every character is drawn to the life, but what gives unity to the whole is the grouping and the implied comment, rather than criticism, that the grouping suggests.
The picture might well be called, to borrow one of O. Henry’s story names, “The Hypothesis of Failure.” Indeed Clark Porter’s expression, as he gazes over the counter, signifies as much. But the failure is due to good-natured foibles rather than to faults. The central figure is the speaker. He was a sign painter in Greensboro, a dark, Italianate-looking man, whose shop was immediately behind the drug store. He was one of the first to recognize O. Henry’s genius and treasured with mingled affection and admiration every drawing of the master’s that he could find. He did not rightfully belong, however, to the inner circle of the drug store habitues. If he had, he would never have said “I’ll pay you for it.” He is here shown on his way to the rear room. His ostensible quest is ice, but the protrusions from the pitcher indicate that another ingredient of “The Lost Blend” is a more urgent necessity. His plaintive query about cigars finds its answer in the abundant remains, mute emblems of hospitality abused, that already bestrew the floor. On the right is the Superintendent of the Presbyterian Sunday School. He was also a deacon and kept a curiosity shop of a store. His specialties were rabbit skins and Mason and Hamlin organs. But he made his most lasting impression on O. Henry as a dispenser of kerosene oil.
It happened in this way: the Pastor of the Presby terian Church had always carried his empty oil can, supposed to hold a gallon, to be replenished at the Superintendent’s font. But one day the Superintendent’s emporium was closed and the pastoral can journeyed on to the hardware store of another deacon. “Why,” said the latter, after careful measurement, “this can doesn’t hold but three quarts.” “That’s strange,” said the minister pensively; “Brother M. has been squeezing four quarts into it for twenty years.” The reply went the rounds of the town at once and O. Henry, who no more doubted Brother M’s good intentions than he did his uncle’s or the sign painter’s, put him promptly into the picture as entitled to all the rights and privileges of the quartette. The venerable figure on the left is Dr. James K. Hall, the Nestor of the drug store coterie and the leading physician of Greensboro. He was a sort of second father to O. Henry, whom he loved as a son, though O. Henry drew about as many cartoons of him as he filled prescriptions made by him. Three years later Doctor Hall was to take O
. Henry with him to Texas where the second chapter in his life was to begin. Doctor Hall was the tallest man in Greensboro and the stoop, the pose of the head, the very bend of the knee in the picture are perfect. He is sketched at the moment when, having contributed his full quota of cigar stumps, he is writing a prescription for Clark or O. Henry to fill.
O. Henry’s reading at this time as well as his drawing had begun to widen and deepen. At first he had been gripped by the dime novel. He was four years old when George Munro began to issue his “Ten Cent Novels.” These became to O. Henry what Skelt’s melodramas were to Robert Louis Stevenson. “In this roll-call of stirring names,” says Stevenson,* “you read the evidences of a happy childhood.” The roll- call included “The Red Rover,” “The Wood Demon,” “The Miller and His Men,” “Three-fingered Jack,” and “The Terror of Jamaica.” “We had the biggest collection of dime novels,” says Mr. Thomas H. Tate, O. Henry’s schoolmate and co-reader, “I have ever seen outside of a cigar stand, and I don’t think we could have been over seven or eight years old. Will soon imbibed the style and could tell as good a thriller as the author of ‘Red-Eyed Rube.’ I can see the circle of wide-eyed little fellows lying around in the shade on the grass as he opened up with: ‘If you had been a close observer you might have descried a solitary horseman slowly wending his way’ or ‘The sun was sinking behind the western hills,’ and so on.”
Stevenson’s early favourites were plays while O. Henry’s were stories, but by acting on the banks of Caldwell’s Pond the more romantic episodes in the Munro tales O. Henry turned the dime novel into a sort of home-made melodrama. If we may make the distinction between the acquisitive reader and the assimilative reader we should say that O. Henry was first and last assimilative. For facts as facts in books he cared but little, but for the way they were put together, for the way they were fused and used, for the after-tones and after-glow that the writer’s personality imparted, he cared everything. We have often wondered what effect a college education would have had upon him. The effect, we think, that it would have had upon Bret Harte or Joel Chandler Harris or Mark Twain, that of making each more acquisitive and less assimilative.
After the dime novel came the supernatural story, when “the clutch of a clammy hand” replaced the solitary horseman and the dutiful sun. Before leaving Greensboro, however, O. Henry had passed to the stage represented in his own statement: “I used to read nothing but the classics.” But to “The Arabian Nights,” a lifelong inspiration, and Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy,” must be added the novels of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Reade, Bulwer Lytton, Wilkie Collins, Auerbach, Victor Hugo, and Alexander Dumas. His love of Scott came via an interest which he soon outgrew in “Thaddeus of Warsaw” and “The Scottish Chiefs.” He considered “Bleak House” the best of Dickens’s works and “Vanity Fair” of Thackeray’s. Dickens’s unfinished story, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” occupied much of his thought at this time and he attempted more than once to complete the plot but gave it up. Of Charles Reade’s masterpiece he said later: “If you want philosophy well put up in fiction, read ‘The Cloister and the Hearth.’ I never saw such a novel. There is material for dozens of short stories in that one book alone.”
Three other novels made a deep impression upon him at this time: Spielhagen’s “Hammer and Anvil,” Warren’s “Ten Thousand a Year,” and John Esten Cooke’s “Surry of Eagle’s Nest.” He thought Warren’s character of “Oily Gammon” the best portrait of a villain ever drawn and always called one of Greensboro’s lawyers by that name. Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart, among the characters introduced by Cooke, were the Confederate heroes of whom he talked with most enthusiasm.
In fact, his reading and his close confinement in the drug store had begun to threaten his health. His mother and grandmother had both died of consumption and O. Henry, never robust, was under the obsession that he had already entered upon his fateful inheritance. He took no regular exercise. An occasional fishing or seining jaunt out to Caldwell’s or OrreH’s or Donnell’s Pond, a serenade two or three times a week, and a few camping-out trips to Pilot Mountain and beyond made almost the only breaks in the monotony of the drug store regime. But however many or few fish might be caught on these jaunts O. Henry was always more of a spectator and commentator than participant; on the serenades he played what he called “a silent tenor” violin or twanged indifferently a guitar, the E string of which was usually broken; and on the camping-out expeditions his zest and elation were due more to freedom from pills and prescriptions than to the love of mountain scenery.
But he did not slight his work in the drug store and never intimated that it was distasteful. It was only in later years that he said: “The grind in the drug store was agony to me.” It doubtless was, not so much in itself as in the utter absence of outlook. No profession attracted him, and there was no one in Greensboro doing anything that O. Henry would have liked to do permanently. The quest of ‘ What’s around the corner,” a theme that he has wrought into many stories and that grew upon him to the last, was his nearest approach to a vocation and he had about exhausted the possibilities of his birthplace. Sixteen years later, at the darkest moment of his life, his skill as a pharmacist was to help him as no other profession could have helped him. But even if the future had been known, there was nothing more to be learned about drugs in his uncle’s drug store, nor would added knowledge have proved an added help.
The release came unexpectedly. Three sons of Dr. James K. Hall, Lee, Dick, and Frank, had gone to Texas to make their fortunes. They were tall, lithe, blond, iron-sinewed men, and all had done well. Lee, the oldest, had become a noted Texas Ranger. As “Red Hall” his name was a terror to evil-doers from the Red River to the Rio Grande. Though Red Hall himself was a modest and silent man, his brief letters to his parents, his intermittent visits to Greensboro, and the more detailed accounts of his prowess that an occasional Texas newspaper brought, kept us aglow with excitement. Whenever it was known that Red Hall and his wife were visiting in Greensboro there was sure to be a gratifying attendance of boys at the morning service of the Presbyterian Church. To see him walk in and out, to wonder what he was thinking about, to speculate on the number of six-shooters that he had with him, were opportunities not lightly disregarded. The drug store was, of course, headquarters for the latest from Texas and O. Henry used to hold us breathless as he retailed the daring arrests and hair-breadth ‘scapes of this quiet Greensboro man whom the citizens of the biggest State in the Union had already learned to lean upon in time of peril.
In March, 1882, Doctor and Mrs. Hall were planning to visit their sons in Texas. O. Henry at this time had a hacking cough and Doctor Hall used to wince as if struck whenever he heard it. “Will,” he said, a few days before starting on the long trip, “I want you to go with us. You need the change, and ranch life will build you up.” Never in his life had O. Henry received an invitation that so harmonized with every impulse of his nature. It meant health and romance. It was the challenge of all that he had read and dreamed. It was the call of “What’s around the corner” with Red Hall as guide and co-seeker.
CHAPTER FIVE
RANCH AND CITY LIFE IN TEXAS
IF O. HENRY could have chosen the ranch and the ranch manager that he was to visit in Texas he could not have done better than to choose the ranch in La Salle County that had Lee Hall at its head. He was to see much more of Dick Hall than of Lee, but it was Lee’s personality and Lee’s achievement that opened the doors of romance to him in Texas and contributed atmosphere and flavour to the nineteen stories that make up his “Heart of the West.”
Red Hall, as we prefer to call him, was now at the height of his fame. The monument erected to him in the National Cemetery, in San Antonio, contains only the brief inscription:
Jesse Lee Hall
1849-1911
Captain Co. M., 1st U. S. Vol. Inf.
War with Spain
But had there been no war with Spain Red Hall’s claim on the gr
atitude of the citizens of the Lone Star State would have been almost equally well founded. “He was the bravest man I ever knew,” said the old Comanche chief against whose warriors Red Hall had led the Texans in the last battle with the tribe in northeast Texas. “He did more to rid Texas of desperadoes/’ wrote Mr. John E. Elgin, “to establish law and order, than any officer that Texas ever had. He has made more bad men lay down their guns and delivered more desperadoes and outlaws into the custody of the courts, and used his own gun less, than any other officer in Texas.” “I have known him intimately for twenty- five years,” wrote Major-General Jesse M. Leef, United States Army Retired, “in peace and in war. No braver spirit, no more devoted friend ever passed from earth. He was ‘the bravest of the brave,’ and his heart was as tender as that of the most lovable woman. His heroic deeds would fill a volume.”
Ten years before O. Henry went to Texas Red Hall’s name had become one to conjure with. When Edward King, at the instance of Scribner’s Month!?/, visited the fifteen ex-slave States in 1873-1874, he met Red Hall and paid prompt tribute to his daring and to his unique success in awing and arresting men without using his pistol. The desperado problem was especially acute along the Red River because the thieves could cross into Indian Territory where arrest was almost impossible. Mr. King describes the situation as follows: (“The Great South” (1874))
So frequent had this method of escape become at the time of the founding of Denison, that the law-abiding citizens were enraged; and the famous deputy-sheriff, “Red Hall,” a young man of great courage and unflinching “nerve,” determined to attempt the capture of some of the desperadoes. Arming himself with a Winchester rifle, and with his belt garnished with navy revolvers, he kept watch on certain professional criminals. One day, soon after a horse-thief had been heard from in a brilliant dash of grand larceny, he repaired to the banks of the Red River, confident that the thief would attempt to flee.