by O. Henry
Of these particular stories, “The Pendulum” makes unquestionably the deepest impression. O. Henry at first called it “Katy of Frogmore Flats” but reconsidered and gave it its present name, thus indicating that the story is a dramatization of the measured to-and-fro, the monotonous tick-tock of a life dominated by routine. “The Pendulum” should be read along with the story by De Maupassant called “An Artist.” Each has habit as its central theme, and the two reveal the most characteristic differences of their authors. In the setting, the tone, the story proper, the conversations, the characters, the attitude of the author to his work, there is hardly an element of the modern short story that is not sharply contrasted in these two little masterpieces, neither of which numbers two thousand words.
“Man lives by habits indeed, but what he lives for is thrills and excitements.” These words are Professor James’s, not O. Henry’s, but O. Henry would have heartily applauded them. “What’s around the corner” seems at first glance too vague or too inclusive to be labelled a distinctive theme. But it was distinctive with O. Henry, distinctive in his conduct, distinctive in his art. What was at first felt to be an innate impulse, potent but indefinable, came later to be resolutely probed for short story material. “At every corner,” he writes,f “handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.”
From “The Enchanted Kiss,” written in prison, to “The Venturers,” written a year before his death, one may trace the footprints of characters who, in dream or vision, in sportive fancy or earnest resolve, traverse the far boundaries of life, couching their lances for routine in all of its shapes, seeking “a subject without a predicate, a road without an end, a question without an answer, a cause without an effect, a gulf stream in life’s ocean.” Fate, destiny, romance, adventure, the lure of divergent roads, the gleam of mysterious signals, the beckonings of the Big City — these are the signs to be followed. They may lead you astray but you will at least have had the zest of pursuit without the satiety of conquest.
“Nearly all of us,” says O. Henry, of the unheroic hero of “The Enchanted Kiss,” “have, at some point in our lives — either to excuse our own stupidity or placate our consciences — promulgated some theory of fatalism. We have set up an intelligent Fate that works by codes and signals. Tansey had done likewise; and now he read, through the night’s incidents, the finger-prints of destiny. Each excursion that he had made had led to the one paramount finale — to Katie and that kiss, which survived and grew strong and intoxicating in his memory. Clearly, Fate was holding up to him the mirror that night, calling him to observe what awaited him at the end of whichever road he might take. He immediately turned, and hurried homeward.”
Fate did her part but Tansey, a “recreant follower of destiny,” did not do his. In his absinthe-born dreams he had tried two roads and found knightly exploits and Katie’s lips waiting for him at the end of each. Now, though unaided by absinthe, it is no wonder that he takes confidently the homeward road, the road leading to the Peek boarding-house. Katie was waiting, but —
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves that we are underlings.
“The Roads of Destiny,” the most carefully wrought out of O. Henry’s longer stories, is an answer to the question with which it begins:
I go to seek on many roads
What is to be.
True heart and strong, with love to light-
Will they not bear me in the fight
To order, shun or wield or mould
My Destiny?
The answer is: No. Take what road you please, the right or the left or the home-faring, the same destiny awaits you. You cannot “order, shun or wield or mould” it. The story has an Alexander Dumas exterior, a Poe structure, and an Omar Khayyam interior.
In “The Roads We Take,” Shark Dodson says:
I was born on a farm in Ulster County, New York. I ran away from home when I was seventeen. It was an accident my comin’ West. I was walkin’ along the road with my clothes in a bundle, makin’ for New York City. I had an idea of goin’ there and makin’ lots of money. I always felt like I could do it. I came to a place one even in’ where the road forked and I didn’t know which fork to take. I studied about it for half an hour, and then I took the left-hand. That night I run into the camp of a Wild West show that was travelin’ among the little towns, and I went West with it. I’ve often wondered if I wouldn’t have turned out different if I’d took the other road.
The reply sums up O. Henry’s last word on fate, destiny, and roads:
“Oh, I reckon you’d have ended up about the same,” said Bob Tidball, chcerfully philosophical. “It ain’t the roads we take; it’s what’s inside of us that makes us turn out the way we do.”
It was certainly so with Shark Dodson. He “wouldn’t have turned out different.” He only dreamed that he took the left-hand road and became the murderer of his friend. He took, in fact, the right-hand road, came to New York, and became a Wall Street broker. But on awaking from his dream he sacrificed a friend to inexorable cupidity, thus doing as a broker what he dreamed that he had done as a bandit.
In “The Complete Life of John Hopkins,” fate and destiny give place to pure romance. “There is a saying,” begins the author, “that no man has tasted the full flavor of life until he has known poverty, love, and war.” But the three dwell in the city rather than in the country:
In the Big City large and sudden things happen. You round a corner and thrust the rib of your umbrella into the eye of your old friend from Kootenai Falls. You stroll out to pluck a Sweet William in the park — and lo! bandits attack you — you are am- bulanced to the hospital — you marry your nurse; are divorced — get squeezed while short on U. P. S. and D. O. W. N. S. — stand in the bread line — marry an heiress, take out your laundry and pay your club dues — seemingly all in the wink of an eye. You travel the streets, and a finger beckons to you, a handkerchief is dropped for you, a brick is dropped upon you, the elevator cable or your bank breaks, a table d’hote or your wife disagrees with you, and Fate tosses you about like cork crumbs in wine opened by an un-feed waiter. The City is a sprightly youngster, and you are red paint upon its toy, and you get licked off.
John Hopkins experienced poverty, love, and war between the lighting and relighting of a five-cent cigar. But they were thrust upon him. He was no true adventurer. The first true adventurer is Rudolf Steiner of “The Green Door.” Here is the test:
Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner with ten minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, “parallelogram!” and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder.
That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You would flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not dead.
But the venturer is a finer fellow than the adventurer, and in “The Venturers” O. Henry tilts for the last time at a theme which, if health had not failed, says Mr. Gil- man Hall, would have drawn from him many more stories. In a little backless
notebook which O. Henry used in New York I find the jotting from which “The Venturers” grew. The notebook kept in Columbus gives only the titles of completed stories and the names of the magazines to which they were forwarded. The New York notebook mentions no magazines but contains in most cases only the bare theme or motif that was later to be elaborated into a story. Many of these jottings proved unmanageable and left no story issue. But “The Venturers” harks back to this entry, the last in the book: “Followers of chance — Two knights-errant — One leaves girl and other marries her for what may be ‘around the corner.’ “
Of the two characters in the story, Forster and Ives, the latter is the better talker. The essayist in O. Henry never appeared to better advantage than in the resourceful way in which Ives is made to expound the nature of a venturer:
I am a man who has made a lifetime search after the to-be- continued-in-our-next. I am not like the ordinary adventurer who strikes for a coveted prize. Nor yet am I like a gambler who knows he is either to win or lose a certain set stake. What I want is to encounter an adventure to which I can predict no conclusion. It is the breath of existence to me to dare Fate in its blindest manifestations. The world has come to run so much by rote and gravitation that you can enter upon hardly any footpath of chance to which you do not find signboards informing you of what you may expect at its end. . . . Only a few times have I met a true venturer — one who does not ask a schedule and map from Fate when he begins a journey. But, as the world becomes more civilized and wiser, the more difficult it is to come upon an adventure the end of which you cannot foresee. In the Elizabethan days you could assault the watch, wring knockers from doors and have a jolly set-to with the blades in any convenient angle of a wall and “get away with it.” Nowadays, if you speak disrespectfully to a policeman, all that is left to the most romantic fancy is to conjecture in what particular police station he will land you. . . . Things are not much better abroad than they are at home. The whole world seems to be overrun by conclusions. The only thing that interests me greatly is a premise. I’ve tried shooting big game in Africa. I know what an express rifle will do at so many yards; and when an elephant or a rhinoceros falls to the bullet, I enjoy it about as much as I did when I was kept in after school to do a sum in long division on the blackboard. . . . The sun has risen on the Arabian nights. There are no more caliphs. The fisherman’s vase is turned to a vacuum bottle, warranted to keep any genie boiling or frozen for forty-eight hours. Life moves by rote. Science has killed adventure. There are no more opportunities such as Columbus and the man who ate the first oyster had. The only certain thing is that there is nothing uncertain.
In fact, the central idea of “The Venturers,” the revolt against the calculable, seems at times to run away with the story itself. Ives marries Miss Marsden at last because he became convinced that marriage is the greatest “venture” of all. But what convinced him? The expository part of the narrative has put the emphasis elsewhere. The centre of the story seems not quite in the middle.
Another theme, one that O. Henry has almost preempted, is the shop-girl.
Five years — the pencil and the yellow pad
Are laid away. Our changes run so swift
That many newer pinnacles now lift
Above the old four million he made glad.
But still the heart of his well-loved Bagdad
Upon-the-Subway is to him renewed.
He knew, beneath her harmless platitude,
The gentler secrets that the shop-girl had.*
*Mr. Christopher Morley in the New York Evening Post, June 5, 1915.
Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay calls him “ the little shopgirl’s knight”:
And be it said, ‘mid these his pranks so odd, With something nigh to chivalry he trod, And oft the drear and driven would defend — The little shop-girl’s knight, unto the end.*
*”The Knight in Disguise” (the American Magazine, June, 1912). t The Bookman, New York, January, 1916.
Certainly no other American writer has so identified himself with the life problems of the shop-girl in New York as has O. Henry. In his thinking she was an inseparable part of the larger life of the city. She belonged to the class that he thought of as under a strain and his interest in her welfare grew with his knowledge of the conditions surrounding her. “Across every counter of the New York department store,” writes Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice,f “is the shadow of O. Henry.” It has been said that O. Henry laughs with the shop-girl rather than at her, but the truth is that he does not laugh at all when she is his theme; he smiles here and there but the smile is at the humours of life itself rather than at the shop-girl in particular.
His first shop-girl story, “A Lickpenny Lover,” was written in the summer of 1904. There are thousands of working girls in New York whose world is bounded bv Coney Island. From some such commonplace of daily speech O. Henry took his cue. Masie, a shop-girl, is courted by Irving Carter, artist, millionaire, traveller, poet, gentleman. He had fallen in love at first sight. When he asks if he may call at her home she laughs and proposes a meeting at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street. He is troubled but accepts.
Carter did not know the shop-girl. He did not know that her home is often either a scarcely habitable tiny room or a domicile filled to overflowing with kith and kin. The street-corner is her parlor, the park is her drawing-room, the avenue is her garden walk; yet for the most part she is as inviolate mistress of herself in them as is my lady inside her tapestried chamber.
Two weeks later he courts her with all the ardour of his nature and all the resources of his vocabulary. “Marry me, Masie,” he whispered, “and we will go away from this ugly city to beautiful ones. I know where I should take you,” and he launched into an impassioned picturing of palaces, towers, gondolas, India and her ancient cities, Hindoos, Japanese gardens — but Masie had risen to her feet. The next morning she scornfully remarked to her chum Lu: “What do you think that fellow wanted me to do? He wanted me to marry him and go down to Coney Island for a wedding tour!”
So the Hostess in “Henry V” thought that the dying Falstaff only “babbled of green fields,” but he was repeating or trying to repeat the Twenty-third Psalm.
Words meant to Masie and to the poor Hostess only what their experience would let them mean. And words mean no more than that to any of us. The pathos as well as the humour of speech as a social instrument is that the appeal of every word is measured not by its formal definition but by our orbit of experience and association. The tragedy of the circumscribed life is not that it occasionally mistakes the imitation world for the real world but that the imitation world is its all. There is humour in the story but it is close to pathos. It is furnished by life rather than by Masie.
“The Lickpenny Lover” was followed by four stories which established O. Henry’s right to be called the knight of the shop-girl. These stories are constructive in aim and are energized by a mingled sympathy and indignation that recall Dickens on every page. In the first, “Elsie in New York,” O. Henry, recognizing that he is in Dickensland, ends the story not with a sudden surprise but with a quotation from “him of Gad’s Hill, before whom, if you doff not your hat, you shall stand with a covered pumpkin”:
Lost, Your Excellency. Lost, Associations and Societies. Lost, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Lost, Reformers and Lawmakers, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts, but with the reverence of money in your souls. And lost thus around us every day.
But where Dickens wrote “Dead,” O. Henry writes “Lost.” It is the key word to all of these stories. Elsie was lost before she became a shop-girl. She was only seeking a position, and she found three. But at the very threshold of each she was met and shooed away by the agent of some self-styled charitable organization. “But what am I to do?” asks Elsie. The agents had nothing to suggest. They knew nothing more than that the places had been ticketed as potentially bad. They could only say “Go,” not “Come.” If one had forgotten
the name of this story he would doubtless say and say rightly: “The point of it is that many charitable organizations of New York are very successful in preventing girls from securing positions but do nothing to secure other positions for them.”
In “The Guilty Party, an East Side Tragedy,” Liz drifts to the street and ruin because her father would do nothing to make home attractive for her. She is not a shop-girl but she belongs here: she is one of the lost whom the world judged wrongly. The action of the story begins:
A little girl of twelve came up timidly to the man reading and resting by the window, and said:
“ Papa, won’t you play a game of checkers with me if you aren’t too tired?”
The red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting shoeless by the window, answered with a frown:
“Checkers! No, I won’t. Can’t a man who works hard all day have a little rest when he comes home? Why don’t you go out and play with the other kids on the sidewalk?”
The woman who was cooking came to the door.
“John,” she said, “I don’t like for Lizzie to play in the street. They learn too much there that ain’t good for ‘em. She’s been in the house all day long. It seems that you might give up a little of your time to amuse her when you come home.”