by O. Henry
Under the present administration a new coat of paint has vulgarized its ancient and venerable walls. Modern tiles have replaced the limestone slabs of its floors, worn in hollows by the tread of thousands of feet, and smart and gaudy fixtures have usurped the place of the time-worn furniture that has been consecrated by the touch of hands that Texas will never cease to honor. But even now, when you enter the building, you lower your voice, and time turns backward for you, for the atmosphere which you breathe is cold with the exudations of buried generations. The building is stone with a coating of concrete; the walls are immensely thick; it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter; it is isolated and sombre; standing apart from the other state buildings, sullen and decaying, brooding on the past.
But the happiest event of O. Henry’s life in Texas was his marriage on July 5, 1887, to Miss Athol Estes, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Mrs. G. P. Roach. It was a case of love at first sight on O. Henry’s part but he deferred actual courtship until Miss Athol had finished school. Mr. and Mrs. Roach, however,
entered a demurrer on the score of health. Miss Athol’s father had died of consumption as had O. Henry’s mother and grandmother. But the young lovers were not to be denied. An elopement was instantly planned and romantically carried out. Borrowing a carriage from Mr. Charles E. Anderson they drove out at midnight to the residence of Dr. R. K. Smoot, the Presbyterian minister in whose choir they both sang. Mr. Anderson was dispatched to the Roach home to sue for peace. Forgiveness was at last secured, and O. Henry never had two stauncher friends than Mr. and Mrs. Roach. In the darkest hours of his life their love for him knew no waning and their faith in him neither variableness nor the shadow of turning.
To the manner of his marriage O. Henry occasionally referred in later years and always with the deepest feeling and the tenderest memory. The moonlight drive under the trees, the borrowed carriage, the witticisms on the way, the parental opposition, the feeling of romantic achievement, the courage and serenity and joy of the little woman at his side, his own sense of assured and unclouded happiness for the future — these came back to him touched with pathos but radiant and hallowed in the retrospect. Surely a whiff of that July night transfigures these words, written eighteen years later:
On the highest rear seat was James Williams, of Cloverdale, Missouri, and his Bride. Capitalize it, friend typo — that last word — word of words in the epiphany of life and love. The scent of the flowers, the booty of the bee, the primal drip of spring waters, the overture of the lark, the twist of lemon peel on the cocktail of creation — such is the bride. Holy is the wife; revered the mother; galliptious is the summer girl — but the bride is the certified check among the wedding presents that the gods send in when man is married to mortality. . . . James Williams was on his wedding trip. Dear kind fairy, please cut out those orders for money and 40 H. P. touring cars and fame and a new growth of hair and the presidency of the boat club. Instead of any of them turn backward — oh, turn backward and give us just a teeny-weeny bit of our wedding trip over again. Just an hour, dear fairy, so we can remember how the grass and poplar trees looked, and the bow of those bonnet strings tied beneath her chin — even if it was the hatpins that did the work. Can’t do it? Very well; hurry up with that touring car and the oil stock, then.
O. Henry found in his married life not only happiness but the incentive to effort that he had sorely lacked. It was an incentive that sprang from perfect congeniality and from the ambition to make and to have a home. Mrs. Porter was witty and musical. She was also stimulatively responsive to the drolleries of her husband. She cooperated with him in his sole journalistic venture and helped him with the society items of the Houston Daily Post. If the thought of her did not shape the character of Delia in “The Gift of the Magi,” it might have done so. She did not live to see him become famous but, if she had, she would have been the first to say “I told you so.” It is certainly no accident that the year of his marriage is also the year in which he begins to rely on his pen as a supplementary source of income. The editor of the Detroit Free Press writes, September 4, 1887:
My Dear Sir:
Please send your string for month of August. And it would please me to receive further contributions at once. Send a budgetevery week.
A. Sincerely, Mosley.
B.
And again three months later:
My Dear Mr. Porter:
Your string for November just in. Am sorry it is not longer.
Check will be sent in a few days.
Can you not send more matter — a good big installment every week? I returned everything that I felt I could not use, in order that we might resume operations on a clear board. Hereafter all unavailable matter shall be sent back within two or three days. After you get a better idea of the things we do not want, the quantity to be returned will be very small.
About the same time presumably, though the note is undated, the editors of Truth write from New York:
We have selected “The Final Triumph” and “A Slight Inaccuracy,” for which you will receive a check for $6.
In the printed form used by the editors of Truth, contributions were classified as Jokes, Ideas, Verses, Squibs, Poems, Sketches, Stories, and Pictures. The two contributions accepted from O. Henry were entered 011 the line reserved for Sketches. The earliest record of an accepted short story that I have found, the earliest evidence that O. Henry had turned from paragraph writing to really constructive work, is in the following note written ten years later:
New York, Dec. 2, 1897.
W. S. Porter, Esq., 211 E. Oth St., Austin, Texas.
Dear Sir: Your story, “The Miracle of Lava Canon,”* is excellent. It has the combination of humane interest with dramatic incident, which in our opinion is the best kind of a story. If you have more like this, we should be glad to read them. We have placed it in our syndicate of newspapers. The other stories we return herewith. They are not quite available.
Very truly yours The S. S. McClure Co.
* This story, which deserves all that is here said of it, was entered for copyright by the McClure Syndicate, September 11, 1898, marked “ for publication September 18, 1898.” It was undoubtedly to this story that O. Henry referred in later years when he said: “My.first story was paid for but I never saw it in print.”
The four years in the General Land Office were the happiest years of O. Henry’s life in Texas. The work itself was congenial, he found time for drawing, his co-workers in the office were his warm personal friends, and his occasional contributions of jokes, squibs, sketches, etc., could be counted upon whenever needed to help out the family larder. There was born to him also at this time a daughter, Margaret Worth Porter, whom the proud parents journeyed twice to Greensboro to exhibit and whose devotion to her father was to equal, though it could not surpass, that of the father to his only child.
But a change was imminent. Dick Hall ran for governor of Texas in 1891 but by a close margin was defeated by James Hogg. His term as Land Commissioner had expired, and, on January 21, O. Henry resigned his position as assistant compiling draftsman and entered the First National Bank of Austin as paying and receiving teller. The change, as will be seen, was to prove a disastrous one, the only rift in the cloud being that the new position was to widen his range of story themes and to force him to rely wholly upon his pen for a living. He had hitherto coquetted with his real calling, using it in Scott’s words “as a staff, not as a crutch,” as a buffet lunch rather than as a solid meal. Early in December, 1894, he resigned his position in the bank but not until he had begun to edit a humorous weekly which he called the Rolling Stone.
The first issue of the Rolling Stone appeared in Austin on April 28, 1894, and the last on April 27, 1895. It can hardly be said to have flourished between these dates: it only flickered. “It rolled for about a year,” said O. Henry, “and then showed unmistakable signs of getting mossy. Moss and I never were friends, and so I said good-bye to it.” “It was one of the means we employ
ed,” writes Mr. James P. Crane, of Chicago, one of the editors, “to get the pleasure out of life and never appealed to us as a money-making venture. We did it for the fun of the thing.” This may have been O. Henry’s motive in the beginning, but after resigning his position in the bank the financial side of the Rolling Stone assumed a new importance. In fact, the following letter to Mr. Crane shows that O. Henry was looking to his little paper for income:
San Antonio, Dec. 20, 1894.
Dear Jeems :
I am writing this in the City of Tomales. Came over last night to work up the Rolling Stone a little over here. Went over the city by gas-light. It is fearfully and wonderfully made. I quit the bank a day or two ago. I found out that the change was going to be made, so I concluded to stop and go to work on the paper.
Are you still in Chicago and what are the prospects? I tell you what I want to do. I want to get up in that country somewhere on some kind of newspaper. Can’t you work up something for us to go at there? If you can I will come up there any time at one day’s notice. I can worry along here and about live but it is not the place for one to get ahead in. You know that, don’t you? See if you can’t get me a job up there, or if you think our paper would take, and we could get some support, what about starting it up there?
I’m writing you on the jump, will send you a long letter in a few days which will be more at length than a shorter one would.
Yours as ever Bill.
The visit to San Antonio was the beginning of the end of the Rolling Stone. In the issue of January 2G, 1895, the announcement is made that the paper is “published simultaneously in Austin and San Antonio, Texas, every Saturday.” Encouraging letters had been received from Bill Nye and John Kendrick Bangs but when O. Henry was over-persuaded to launch the Rolling Stone into the Callaghan mayoralty fight in San Antonio its doom was sealed. The Austin end of the little weekly had already lost heavily through a picture with a humorous underline which O. Henry had innocently inserted. The picture was of a German musician brandishing his baton. Underneath were the lines:
With his baton the professor beats the bars,
’Tis also said he beats them when he treats;
But it made that German gentleman see stars When the bouncer got the cue to bar the beats.
“For some reason or other,” says Doctor Daniels,* “that issue alienated every German in Austin from the Rolling Stone and cost us more than we were able to figure out in subscriptions and advertisements.”
But the by-products of the visits to San Antonio were later to reimburse O. Henry far over and beyond the immediate loss incurred. Cities were always in a peculiar sense his teachers, and from his editorial trips to the most interesting city of the Southwest he was later to find material for “ Hygeiaat]the Solito,” “The Enchanted Kiss,” “The Missing Chord,” “The Higher Abdication,” “Seats of the Haughty,” and “A Fog in Santone.”
After the demise of the Rolling Stone, the opportunity “to get on some kind of newspaper,” about which he had written to Mr. Crane, did not present itself until nearly six months had passed. In the meantime he was supporting himself by writing for any paper that paid promptly for humorous contributions. The Rolling Stone had given him the opportunity of a tryout and he seems never afterward to have doubted that writing of some sort was the profession for which he was best fitted. His experience in the bank had also convinced him that business was not his calling. “Frequently when I entered the bank,” said a citizen of Austin, “O. Henry would put hastily aside some sketch or bit of writing on which he was engaged, before waiting on me.” He had lived in his writings long before he attempted to live by them.
In July, 1895, O. Henry decided to accept a call to Washington, D. C. His household furniture was sold by way of preparation and he was on the eve of starting when Mrs. Porter became ill. The doctors found that the long-dreaded blow had fallen. She had consumption. O. Henry was unwilling to leave her or to attempt so long a journey with her. He continued, therefore, his contribution of odds and ends to newspapers and in October was writing chiefly for the Plain Dealer of Cleveland, Ohio, but hoping in the meanwhile to secure a more permanent position nearer home.
The opportunity came when Colonel R. M. Johnston offered him a position on the Houston Daily Post. Mrs. Porter was not well enough at first to accompany her husband to Houston but in a little while she was pronounced much better and joined him. Prospects were brighter now than they had been since his resignation from the General Land Office. The Post was one of the recognized moulders of public opinion in the Southwest and O. Henry’s work gained for it new distinction. “The man, woman, or child,” wrote an exchange, “who pens ‘Postscripts’ for the Houston Post, is a weird, wild-eyed genius and ought to be captured and put on exhibition.”
“He became,” said an editorial in the Post at the time of O. Henry’s death, “the most popular member of the staff.” “As a cartoonist,” continues the Post, “Porter would have made a mark equal to that he attained as a writer had he developed his genius; but he disliked the drudgery connected with the drawing and found that his sketches were generally spoiled by any one else who took them to finish. In the early days he illustrated many of his stories. Those were days before the present development of the art of illustration, whether for magazine or newspaper, and he did most of the work on chalk, in which the drawing was made, a cast of lead being afterward made with more or less general results of reproducing the drawing in the shape of printing. The generality of the result was at times disheartening to the artist and Porter never followed his natural knack for embodying his brilliant ideas in drawings.” His salary was quickly raised from fifteen to twenty-five dollars a week and he was advised by Colonel Johnston to go to New York where his talents would be more adequately rewarded.
O. Henry’s first column appeared in the Post on October 18, 1895, his last on June 22, 1896. He began with “Tales of the Town” but changed quickly to “Some Postscripts and Pencillings,” ending with “Some Postscripts.” But the names made no difference. O. Henry wrote as he pleased. The cullings that follow will give a better idea of his matter and manner at this time than mere comment, however extended, could do. The tribute to Bill Nye lias the added interest of containing O. Henry’s only known reference to American humour as a whole:
(October 18, 1895) Of an editor: He was a man apparently of medium height, with light hair and dark chestnut ideas.
(October 21, 1895) “Speaking of the $140,000,000 paid out yearly by the government in pensions,” said a prominent member of Hood’s Brigade to the Post’s representative, “I am told that a man in Indiana applied for a pension last month on account of a surgical operation lie had performed on him during the war. And what do you suppose that surgical operation was?” “Haven’t the least idea.”
“He had his retreat cut off at the battle of Gettysburg!”
(November 3, 1895)
LOOKING FORWARD
Soft shadows grow deeper in dingle and dell,
Night hawks are beginning to roam; The breezes are cooler; the owl is awake, The whippoorwill calls from his nest in the brake;
When
the
cows
come
home.
The cup of the lily is heavy with dew;
In heaven’s aerial dome
Stars twinkle; and down in the darkening swamp
The fireflies glow, and the elves are a-romp;
When
the
cows
come
home.
And the populist smiles when he thinks of the time
That unto his party will come;
When at the pie counter they capture a seat,
And they’ll eat and eat and eat and eat Till
the
cows
come
home.
(November 6, 1895)
EUGENE FIELD
No gift bis genius might have had,
Of titles high i
n church or State,
Could charm him as the one he bore
Of children’s poet laureate.
He smiling pressed aside the bays
And laurel garlands that he won,
And bowed his head for baby hands
To place a daisy wreath upon.
He found his kingdom in the ways
Of little ones he loved so well;
For them he tuned his lyre and sang
Sweet simple songs of magic spell.
Oh, greater feat to storm the gates
Of children’s pure and cleanly hearts,
Than to subdue a warring world
By stratagems and doubtful arts!
So, when he laid him down to sleep
And earthly honors seemed so poor;
Methinks he clung to little hands
The latest, for the love they bore.
A tribute paid by chanting choirs
And pealing organs rises high;
But soft and clear, somewhere he hears
Through all, a child’s low lullaby.
(November 27, 1895)
An old woman who lived in Fla.
Had some neighbors who all the time ba.
Tea, sugar, and soap,
Till she said: “I do hope I’ll never see folks that are ha.”
(December 1, 1895)
“You’re at the wrong place,” said Cerberus. “This is the gate that leads to the infernal regions, while this is a passport to heaven that you’ve handed me.”
“I know it,” said the departed Shade wearily, “but it allows a stop-over here. You see, I’m from Galveston, and I’ve got to make the change gradually.”