Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  (December 12, 1895) A young lady in Houston became engaged last summer to one of the famous shortstops of the Texas baseball league. Last week he broke the engagement, and this is the reason why:

  He had a birthday last Tuesday, and she sent him a beautiful bound and illustrated edition of Coleridge’s famous poem, “The Ancient Mariner.” The hero of the diamond opened the book with a puzzled look.

  “What’s dis bloomin’ stuff about anyways?” he said. He read the first two lines:

  “ It is the Ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three” — The famous shortstop threw the book out the window, stuck out his chin, and said: “No Texas sis can’t gimme de umpire face like dat. I swipes nine daisy cutters outer ten dat comes in my garden, dat’s what.”

  (February 26, 1896) Bill Nye, who recently laid down his pen for all time, was a unique figure in the field of humor. His best work probably more nearly represented American humor than that of any other writer. Mr. Nye had a sense of the ludicrous that was keen and judicious. His humor was peculiarly American in that it depended upon sharp and unexpected contrasts and the bringing of opposites into unlooked for comparison for its effect. Again he had the true essence of kindliness, without which humor is stripped of its greatest component part. His was the child’s heart, the scholar’s knowledge, and the philosopher’s view of life. The world has been better for him, and when that can be said of a man, the tears that drop upon his grave are more potent than the loud huzzas that follow the requiem of the greatest conqueror or the most successful statesman. The kindliest thoughts and the sincerest prayers follow the great humanitarian — for such he was — into the great beyond, and such solace as the hearty condole- ment of a million people can bring to the bereaved loved ones of Bill Nye, is theirs.

  When O. Henry ceased to write for the Houston Daily Post he had closed a significant chapter in his life. Had he died at this time those who had followed his career closely would have seen in him a mixture of Bill Nye and Artemus WTard with an undeveloped vein of Eugene Field. There was a hint of many things which he was later to use as embellishments of his art, but there was no indication of the essential nature of the art that was to be embellished. A character in Fletcher’s “Love’s Pilgrimage” is made to say:

  Portly meat, Bearing substantial stuff, and fit for hunger, I do beseech you, hostess, first; then some light garnish, Two pheasants in a dish.

  But O. Henry served the “light garnish” first. His “two pheasants” were the Rolling Stone and his column in the Houston Daily Post. His more “substantial stuff” came after these, but was not the natural outgrowth from them.

  Nothing that he had written for these two publications was selected by him for reproduction in the volumes of his short stories. The so-called stories that he read to Mrs. Hall on the ranch and those that appeared now and then in the Rolling Stone were sketches or extravaganzas rather than real stories at grips with real life. “I was amazed,” said Mrs. Hall, “when I learned that O. Henry was our Will Porter. I had thought that he might be a great cartoonist but had never thought of his being a master of the modern short story.”

  O. Henry was now to begin a period of severe trial and of prolonged and unmerited humiliation. But he was to come out of it all with purpose unified and character deepened. Experience with the seamy side of life was to do for him what aimless experimentation with literary forms would never have done.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE SHADOWED YEARS

  WHEN O. Henry left Houston, never to return, he left because he was summoned to come immediately to Austin and stand trial for alleged embezzlement of funds while acting as paying and receiving teller of the First National Bank of Austin. The indictments charged that on October 10, 1894, he misappropriated $554.48; on November 12, 1894, $299.60; and on November 12, 1895, $299.60.

  Had he gone he would certainly have been acquitted. He protested his innocence to the end. “A victim of circumstances” is the verdict of the people in Austin who followed the trial most closely. Not one of them, so far as I could learn after many interviews, believed or believe him guilty of wrong doing. It was notorious that the bank, long since defunct, was wretchedly managed. Its patrons, following an old custom, used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars, and say a week later: “Porter, I took out two hundred dollars last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to.” It must have recalled to O. Henry the Greensboro drug store. Long before the crash came, he had protested to his friends that it was impossible to make the books balance. “ The affairs of the bank,” says Mr.’ Hyder E. Rollins, of Austin, “were managed so loosely that Porter’s predecessor was driven to retirement, his successor to attempted suicide.”

  There can be no doubt that O. Henry boarded the train at Houston with the intention of going to Austin. I imagine that he even felt a certain sense of relief that the charge, which had hung as a dead albatross about his neck, was at last to be unwound, and his innocence publicly proclaimed. His friends were confident of his acquittal and are still confident of his innocence. If even one of them had been with O. Henry, all would have been different. But when the train reached Hempstead, about a third of the way to Austin, O. Henry had had time to pass in review the scenes of the trial, to picture himself a prisoner, to look into the future and see himself marked with the stigma of suspicion. His imagination outran his reason, and when the night train passed Hempstead on the way to New Orleans, O. Henry was on it.

  His mind seems to have been fully made up. He was not merely saving himself and his family from a public humiliation, he was going to start life over again in a new place. His knowledge of Spanish and his ignorance of Honduras made the little Central American republic seem just the haven in which to cast anchor. How great the strain was can be measured in part by the only reference of the sort, so far as I know, that O. Henry ever made to his life in the little Latin American country: “The freedom, the silence, the sense of infinite peace, that I found here, I cannot begin to put into words.” His letters to Mrs. Porter from Honduras show that he had determined to make Central America his home, and that a school had already been selected for the education of his daughter.

  How long O. Henry remained in New Orleans, on his way to or from Honduras, is not known; long enough, however, to draw the very soul and body of the Crescent City into the stories that he was to write years afterward. With his usual flair for originality, he passes by Mardi Gras, All Saints’ Day, Quatorze Juillet, and crevasses; but in “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking,” “The Renaissance of Charleroi,” “Cherchez La Femine,” and “Blind Man’s Holiday,” he has pictured and interpreted New Orleans and its suburbs as only one who loved and lived the life could do.

  It is probable that he merely passed through New Orleans on his way to Honduras and took the first available fruit steamer for the Honduran coast, arriving at Puerto Cortez or Criba or Trujillo. At any rate, he was in Trujillo and was standing on the wharf when he saw a man in a tattered dress suit step from a newly arrived fruit steamer. “Why did you leave so hurriedly?” asked O. Henry. “Perhaps for the same reason as yourself,” replied the stranger. “What is your destination?” inquired O. Henry. “I left America to keep away from my destination,” was the reply; “I’m just drifting. How about yourself?” “I can’t drift,” said O. Henry; “I’m anchored.”

  The stranger was A1 Jennings, the leader of one of the most notorious gangs of train robbers that ever infested the Southwest. In “Beating Back,” which Mr. Jennings was to publish eighteen years later, one may read the frank confession and life story of an outlaw and ex-convict who at last found himself and “came back” to live down a desperate past. That he has made good may be inferred from the spirit of his book, from the high esteem in which he is held by friends and neighbours, and from the record of civic usefulness that has marked his career since his return.

  But when he and O. Henry met at Trujillo Mr. Jennings was still frankly a fugitive out
law. He and his brother Frank had chartered a tramp steamer in Galveston, and the departure had been so sudden that they had not had time to exchange their dress suits and high hats for a less conspicuous outfit. Mr.

  Jennings and his brother had no thought of continuing their career of brigandage in Latin America. They were merely putting distance between them and the detectives already on their trail. O. Henry joined them and together they circled the entire coast of South America. This was O. Henry’s longest voyage and certainly the strangest. When the money was exhausted, “Frank and I,” says Mr. Jennings, “decided to pull off a job to replenish the exchequer. We decided to rob a German trading store and bank in northern Texas, and I asked Porter if he would join us. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I could.’ ‘Well, Bill,’ I said, ‘you could hold the horses, couldn’t you?’ ‘No,’ said Porter, ‘I don’t think I could even hold the horses.’”

  In these wanderings together Mr. Jennings probably saw deeper into one side of O. Henry’s life than any one else has ever seen. In a letter to Harry Peyton Steger, he writes: “Porter was to most men a difficult proposition, but when men have gone hungry together, feasted together, and looked grim death in the face and laughed, it may be said they have a knowledge of each other. Again, there is no period in a man’s life that so brings out the idiosyncrasies as gaunt and ghastly famine. I have known that with our friend and could find no fault. If the world could only know him as I knew him, the searchlight of investigation could be turned on his beautiful soul and find it as spotless as a bar of sunlight after the storm-cloud had passed.” In a letter just received Mr. Jennings says: “Porter joined with Frank in urging me to leave the ‘Trail,’ establish ourselves in Latin America, and forget the past. Quite often, indeed, he spoke of his wife and his child and there was always a mist in his eye and a sob in his throat.”

  O. Henry’s letters to Mrs. Porter came regularly after the first three weeks. The letters were inclosed in envelopes directed to Mr. Louis Ivreisle, in Austin, who handed them to Mrs. Porter. “Mrs. Porter used to read me selections from her husband’s letters,” said Mrs. Kreisle. “They told of his plans to bring Athol [Mrs. Porter] and Margaret to him as soon as he was settled. He had chosen a school for Margaret in Honduras and was doing everything he could to have a little home ready for them. At one time he said he was digging ditches. He also mentioned a chum whom he had met. Sometimes they had very little to eat, only a banana each. He had a hard time but his letters were cheerful and hopeful and full of affection. Mr. and Mrs. Roach were, of course, willing to provide for Athol and Margaret but Athol did not want to be dependent. She said she did not know how long they would be separated, so she planned to do something to earn some money. She commenced taking a course in a business college but ill health interfered. When Christmas came she made a point lace handkerchief, sold it for twenty-five dollars, and sent her husband a box containing his overcoat, fine perfumery, and many other delicacies. I never saw such will power. The only day she remained in bed was the day she died.”

  O. Henry did not know till a month later that this box was packed by Mrs. Porter when her temperature was 105. As soon as he learned it, he gave up all hope of a Latin American home and started for Austin, determined to give himself up and to take whatever medicine fate or the courts had in store for him. He passed again through New Orleans, and, according to the trial reports, arrived in Austin on February 5, 1897. His bondsmen were not assessed, but the amount of the bond was doubled and O. Henry went free till the next meeting of the Federal Court.

  All of his time and thought was now given to Mrs. Porter. When she was too weak to walk O. Henry would carry her to and from the carriage in which they spent much of their time. His wanderlust seemed stilled at last and these days of home-keeping and home- tending were happy days to both, though they knew that the end was near. Mrs. Porter had been almost reared in the Sunday-school and the neighbours say that it was a familiar sight on Sunday mornings, in the last spring and summer, to see O. Henry and his wife driving slowly beneath the open windows of the Presbyterian Church. Here they would remain unseen by the congregation till the service was nearly over. Then they would drive slowly back. Each service, it was feared, might be the last. The end came on July 25th.

  After many postponements O. Henry’s case came to trial in February, 1898. He pleaded not guilty but seemed indifferent. “I never had so non-communicative a client,” said one of his lawyers. “He would tell me nothing.” O. Henry begged his friends not to attend the trial and most of them respected his wishes. In fact, he seemed, as usual, to be only a spectator of the proceedings. He was never self- defensive or even self-assertive, and at this crisis of his life he showed an aloofness which, however hard to understand by those who did not know him, was as natural to him as breathing. He simply retreated into himself and let the lawyers fight it out.

  One error in the indictment was so patent that it is hard to understand how it could have gone unchallenged. He was charged, as has been stated, with having embezzled $299.60 on November 12, 1895, “the said W. S. Porter being then and there the teller and agent of a certain National Banking Association, then and there known and designated as the First National Bank of Austin.” Nothing in O. Henry’s life is better substantiated than that on November 12, 1895, he was living in Houston and had resigned his position in the Austin bank early in December, 1894. And yet the reader will hardly believe that this flagrant inconsistency in the charge against him has remained to this moment unnoticed. The foreman of the grand jury and the foreman of the trial jury are reported to have regretted afterward that they had voted to convict. “O. Henry was an innocent man,” said the former, “and if I had known then what I know now, I should never have voted against him.” As the contradiction in time and place was not one of the things that either foreman learned later, one cannot help asking what it was that led to conviction.

  The answer is easy. O. Henry lost his case at Hempstead, not at Austin. “Your Grand Jurors,” so runs the charge, “further say that between the days the sixth (6th) of July a. d. 1896 and the fifth (5th) of February a. d. 1897 the aforesaid W. S. Porter was a fugitive and fleeing from justice and seeking to avoid a prosecution in this court for the offense hereinbefore set out.” This was true, and the humiliation of it and the folly of it were so acutely felt by O. Henry that he remained silent. I think it unlikely that he noticed the impossible date, November 12, 1895, for a more dateless and timeless man never lived. To a trusted friend in New Y’ork, O. Henry declared that Conrad’s “Lord Jim” made an appeal to him made by no other book. “I am like Lord Jim,” he added, “because we both made one fateful mistake at the supreme crisis of our lives, a mistake from which we could not recover.”

  “Lord Jim” has been called the greatest psychological study of cowardice that modern literature has to its credit. But Lord Jim was no coward. When he knew that the ship was about to sink, a certain irresolution took possession of him and he did not and could not wake the passengers. He did not think of saving himself, but his mind conjured up the horrors of panic, the tumult, the rush, the cries, the losing fight for place, and it seemed infinitely better to him that they should all go down in peace and quiet. “Which of us,” says Conrad, “has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person — this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those striving with unreasonable forces know it well — the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature or the stupid brutality of crowds.”

  Like Lord Jim, O. Henry was governed more by impulse than by reason, more by temperament than by commonsense. The sails ruled the rudder in his disposition, not the rudder the sails. When he changed trains at Hempstead it was not cowardice that motivated his action. It was the lure of peace and quiet under Honduran skies, the call of a new start in life, the challenge of a novel and romantic career. The same faculties that were to plot
his stories were now plotting this futile jaunt to Central America. The vision swept him along till, like Lord Jim, he had time to reflect and still longer time to regret.

  The jury rendered its verdict of guilty on February 17, 1898, and on March 25, O. Henry was sentenced to imprisonment in the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus for the period of five years. Immediately after being sentenced he wrote from the jail in Austin the following letter to his mother-in-law, Mrs. G. P. Roach: ‘

  Dear Mrs. Roach:

  I feel very deeply the forbearance and long suffering kindness shown by your note, and thank you much for sending the things. Right here I want to state solemnly to you that in spite of the jury’s verdict I am absolutely innocent of wrong doing in that bank matter, except so far as foolishly keeping a position that I could not successfully fill. Any intelligent person who heard the evidence presented knows that I should have been acquitted. After I saw the jury I had very little hopes of their understanding enough of the technical matters presented to be fair. I naturally am crushed by the result, but it is not on my own account. I care not so much for the opinion of the general public, but I would have a few of my friends still believe that there is some good in me.

  O. Henry entered the penitentiary on April 25, 1898, and came out on July 24, 1901. On account of good behaviour his term of confinement was reduced from five years to three years and three months. There was not a demerit against him.

  When O. Henry passed within the walls of the Ohio prison he was asked: “What is your occupation?” “I am a newspaper reporter,” he replied. There was little opportunity for that profession in that place, but the next question may be said to have saved his life: “What else can you do?” “I am a registered pharmacist,” was the reply, almost as an afterthought. The profession which he loathed in Greensboro because it meant confinement was now, strangely enough, to prove the stepping-stone to comparative freedom. His career as a drug clerk in the prison, his fidelity to duty, the new friendships formed, the opportunity afforded him to write, and his quick assimilation of short story material from the life about him are best set forth in the testimony of those who knew him during these years of seeming eclipse.