Delphi Complete Works of O. Henry

by O. Henry

  “Let her go out and play like the rest of ‘em if she wants to be amused,” said the red-haired, unshaven, untidy man, “and don’t bother me.”

  Like its more famous successor, “The Guilty Party” ends in a dream. The case is tried in the next world. The celestial court-officer discharges Liz, though she had killed her betrayer and committed suicide. He then pronounces the verdict:

  The guilty party you’ve got to look for in this case is a red- haired, unshaven, untidy man, sitting by the window reading in his stocking feet, while his children play in the streets. Get a move on you.

  Now, wasn’t that a silly dream?

  “An Unfinished Story,” framed on the model of “The Guilty Party,” is O. Henry’s indictment of employers who cause the ruin of working girls by underpaying them. It is probably the most admired of O. Henry’s stories. In the ten lists of the ten preferred stories sent to the Bookman, this story of less than two thousand five hundred words was mentioned seven times, “A Municipal Report” coming next with six mentions. Some one has said that Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” has done more good than any other story ever written. As the years go by will not the “Christmas Carol” be overtaken by “An Unfinished Story?” It was not hunger, it was not the need of the so-called necessities that wrecked Dulcie’s life. The cause lay deeper than that; it belonged not to the eternal-human but to the eternal-womanly. It was neither food nor clothing; it was the natural love of adornment. Dulcie received $G a week. The necessities amounted to $4.70. “I hold my pen poised in vain,” says O. Henry, “when I would add to Dulcie’s life some of those joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven.” There is no crack of the whip at the end: there is the ring of steel:

  As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “Why,” said he, “they are the men who hired working girls, and paid ‘em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?”

  “Not on your immortality,” said I. “I’m only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.”

  In “Brickdust Row” indictment is brought not against guardians of the young who are found to be prohibitive rather than cooperative; it is not against the careless father, nor the miserly employer. The shaft is aimed at the owners of houses tenanted by working- girls. These houses, having no parlours or reception rooms, compel the occupants to meet their friends “ sometimes on the boat, sometimes in the park, sometimes on the street.” Blinker, another Irving Carter, falls in love with Florence, another Masie. But Florence lives in Brickdust Row. “They call it that,” says Florence, “because there’s red dust from the bricks crumbling over everything. I’ve lived there for more than four years. There’s no place to receive company. You can’t have anybody come to your room. What else is there to do? A girl has got to meet the men, hasn’t she? . . . The first time one spoke to me on the street, I ran home and cried all night. But you get used to it. I meet a good many nice fellows at church. I go on rainy days and stand in the vestibule until one comes up with an umbrella. I wish there was a parlour, so I could ask you to call, Mr. Blinker.” Blinker owns Brickdust Row. “Do what you please with it,” he says to his lawyer the next morning. “Remodel it, burn it, raze it to the ground. But, man, it’s too late I tell you. It’s too late. It’s too late. It’s too late.”

  But the greatest of the shop-girl stories as a story is, to my thinking, “The Trimmed Lamp.” It is the only one written for the shop-girl rather than about her. But it is not for her alone; it is for all, of whatever age or sex, who work at tasks not commonly rated as cultural. Much has been said and written in recent years about “self-culture through the vocation,” but nothing so apt and adequate, I think, as this little story about Nan and Lou and Dan. Froude touched the rim of it when he wrote, fifty years ago:

  Every occupation, even the meanest — I don’t say the scavenger’s or the chimney-sweep’s — but every productive occupation which adds anything to the capital of mankind, if followed assiduously with a desire to understand everything connected with it, is an ascending stair whose summit is nowhere, and from the successive steps of which the horizon of knowledge perpetually enlarges.

  But Froude limited his occupations too narrowly. He did not quite glimpse the vision of “The Trimmed Lamp.” He was afraid to break away from the old and minutely graduated scale of vocations with their traditional degrees of respectability. But this is just what “The Trimmed Lamp” does. It dramatizes the truth that, in spite of inherited divisions and subdivisions, there are only two occupations worth thinking about, and these are one too many. Everybody who has an occupation uses it as a means of subsisting or as a means of growing, as a treadmill or as a stairway, as a shut door or as an open window, as a grindstone or as a stepping-stone.

  Every worker may learn from his occupation, “even the meanest,” the difference between good work and bad work in his particular calling. But the difference between good work and bad work here is the difference between good work and bad work everywhere. Once erect the standard — and it may be erected by the chimney-sweep as well as by the artist — growth is assured. The lever of Archimedes finds its analogue to-day in such a conception of one’s work as moves him to say, “I will examine the universe as it is related to this.” Culture is not in the job; it is in the attitude to the job.

  Nan illustrates every stage in the upward transition. “‘The Trimmed Lamp,’” said O. Henry, “is the other side of ‘An Unfinished Story.’” It is the other side of all the stories in which the light is focussed on the downward slope. Nan is the ascending shop-girl. Lou, a piecework ironer in a hand laundry, is her antithesis. Dan is what Coventry Patmore somewhere calls the punctum indifferens, “the point of rest.” He is what Kent is in “King Lear,” Friar Laurence in “Romeo and Juliet,” Horatio in “Hamlet.” “He was of that good kind,” says O. Henry, “that you are likely to forget while they are present, but to remember distinctly after they are gone.” “Faithful? Well, he was on hand when Mary would have had to hire a dozen subpoena servers to find her lamb.” Lou has him on her string at first but casts him off.

  Three months pass. Nancy and Lou meet accidentally on the border of a little quiet park and Nancy notices that “prosperity had descended upon Lou, manifesting itself in costly furs, flashing gems, and creations of the tailors’ art.”

  “Yes, I’m still in the store,” said Naney, “but I’m going to leave it next week. I’ve made my catch — the biggest catch in the world. You won’t mind now, Lou, will you? I’m going to be married to Dan — to Dan! — he’s my Dan now — why, Lou!”

  Around the corner of the park strolled one of those new-crop, smooth-faced young policemen that are making the force more endurable — at least to the eye. He saw a woman with an expensive fur coat and diamond-ringed hands crouching down against the iron fence of the park sobbing turbulently, while a slender, plainly-dressed working girl leaned close, trying to console her. But the Gibsonian cop, being of the new order, passed on, pretending not to notice, for he was wise enough to know that these matters are beyond help, so far as the power he represents is concerned, though he rap the pavement with his nightstick till the sound goes up to the furthermost stars.

  But the shop-girl is a part of a larger theme and that theme is the city.

  What a world he left behind him, what

  a web of wonder tales,

  Fact and fiction subtly woven on the

  spinning wheel of Truth!

  How he caught the key of living in

  the noises of the town,

  Major music, minor dirges, rhapsodies

  of Age and Youth!

  In the twilight of the city,

  as I dreamed, as I dreamed,

  Watching that eternal dra
ma in the

  ever-pulsing street,

  All about me seemed to murmur of the

  master passed away,

  And his requiem was sounded in the

  city’s fever beat.*

  *”O. Henry: In Memoriam,” by Mr. Elias Lieberman.

  A city was to O. Henry not merely a collective entity, not merely an individuality; certainly not a municipality: it was a personality. In “The Making of a New Yorker,” it is said of Raggles:

  He studied cities as women study their reflections in mirrors; as children study the glue and sawdust of a dislocated doll; as the men who write about wild animals study the cages in the zoo. A city to Raggles was not merely a pile of bricks and mortar, peopled by a certain number of inhabitants; it was a thing with a soul, characteristic and distinct; an individual conglomeration of life, with its own peculiar essence, flavor, and feeling.

  The words are as true of O. Henry himself as any that he ever wrote. And he was always so. When he was eighteen years old, six of us went on a camping trip from Greensboro to old Pilot Mountain and on to the Pinnacles of the Dan. Brief stops were made at Kernersville, Mount Airy, Danbury, and intervening villages. O. Henry, it is needless to say, was the life of the party and, though much has been forgotten, none of us will forget his peculiar interest in these little towns or his quaint, luminous, incisive comments on them as we drove to the next camping place. It was not so much the intensity of his interest that impressed us or that lingers in the memory still. It was that he was interested at all in places so much smaller and, as we thought, less worth while than our own native Greensboro. But interested he was, keenly and steadfastly, and in every book that he has written towns and cities loom large in his survey of human life.

  His Latin American stories may serve as illustrations. They deal sparingly with native characters. O. Henry evidently felt some hesitation here, for in his rapid journey from Honduras around both coasts of South America the unit of progress was the coastal town. There was little time to study native character as he studied it on his own soil. The city, therefore, rather than the citizen, is made prominent. An American doctor, for example, who has travelled widely in Latin America, considers O. Henry’s description of Espiritu unequalled in accuracy and vividness as a sketch of the typical Latin American coastal town. Certainly no one of his Latin American character portraits is as detailed or as intimate. Sully Magoon is talking:

  Take a lot of Filipino huts and a couple of hundred brick-kilns and arrange ‘em in squares in a cemetery. Cart down all the conservatory plants in the Astor and Vanderbilt greenhouses, and stick em about wherever there’s room. Turn all the Bellevue patients and the barbers’ convention and the Tuskegee school loose in the streets, and run the thermometer up to 120 in the shade Set a fringe of the Rocky Mountains around the rear, et it rain, and set the whole business on Rockaway Beach m the middle of January-and you’d have a good imitation of Espintu.*

  *From “On Behalf of the Management.”

  But it is in his references to American cities that O. Henry’s feeling for the city as a unit is best revealed. It has been said of George Eliot that her passion for individualizing was so great that a character is rarely introduced in her stories, even if he only says “Breakfast is served,” without being separated in some way from the other characters. The same may be said of O Henry’s mention of American towns and cities. Sometimes the differentiation is diffused through the story from beginning to end. Sometimes it is summarized in a phrase or paragraph. Of our same Rag- gles it is said:

  Chicago seemed to swoop down upon him with a breezy suggestion of Mrs. Partington, plumes, and patchouli, and to disturb his rest with a soaring and beautiful song of future promise. But Raggles would awake to a sense of shivering cold and a haunting impression of ideals lost in a depressing aura of potato salad and fish.

  Pittsburg impressed him as the play of “Othello” performed in the Russian language in a railroad station by Dockstader’s minstrels. A royal and generous lady this Pittsburg, though — homely, hearty, with flushed face, washing the dishes in a silk dress and white kid slippers, and bidding Raggles sit before the roaring fireplace and drink champagne with his pigs’ feet and fried potatoes.

  New Orleans had simply gazed down upon him from a balcony. He could see her pensive, starry eyes and catch the flutter of her fan, and that was all. Only once he came face to face with her. It was at dawn, when she was flushing the red bricks of the banquette with a pail of water. She laughed and hummed a chan- sonette and filled Raggles’s shoes with ice-cold water. Allons!

  Boston construed herself to the poetic Raggles in an erratic and singular way. It seemed to him that he had drunk cold tea and that the city was a white, cold cloth that had been bound tightly around his brow to spur him to some unknown but tremendous mental effort. And, after all, he came to shovel snow for a livelihood; and the cloth, becoming wet, tightened its knots and could not be removed.

  In “A Municipal Report,” O. Henry answers the challenge of Frank Norris who had said:

  Fancy a novel about Chicago or Buffalo, let us say, or Nashville, Tennessee! There are just three big cities in the United States that are “story cities” — New York, of course, New Orleans, and. best of the lot, San Francisco.

  O. Henry replies:

  But, dear cousins all (from Adam and Eve descended), it is a rash one who will lay his finger on the map and say: “In this town there can be no romance — what could happen here? Yes, it is a bold and a rash deed to challenge in one sentence history, romance, and Rand and McNally.

  Then follows a story of Nashville, Tennessee, which O. Henry had visited when his daughter was attending Belmont College. “For me,” writes Mr. Albert Frederick Wilson, of New York University, “it is the finest example of the short story ever produced in America.” “If the reader is not satisfied,” says Mr. Stephen Leacock, after attempting to summarize “Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet” and “The Furnished Room,” “let him procure for himself the story called ‘A Municipal Report’ in the volume ‘Strictly Business.’ After he has read it he will either pronounce O. Henry one of the greatest masters of modern fiction or else, well, or else he is a jackass. Let us put it that way.”

  The story ends on the note with which it began: “I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo?” It is O. Henry’s most powerful presentation of his conviction that to the seeing eye all cities are story cities. It is the appeal of an interpretative genius from statistics to life, from the husks of a municipality as gathered by Rand and McNally to the heart of a city as seen by an artist.

  But it happened to O. Henry as it had happened to Raggles:

  One day he came and laid siege to the heart of the great city of Manhattan. She was the greatest of all; and he wanted to learn lier note in the scale; to taste and appraise and classify and solve and label her and arrange her with the other cities that had given him up the secret of their individuality.

  In “The Voice of the City,” O. Henry approaches New York as did Raggles via other cities:

  “I must go and find out,” I said, “what is the Voice of this city. Other cities have voices. It is an assignment. I must have it. New York,” I continued, in a rising tone, “had better not hand me a cigar and say: ‘Old man, I can’t talk for publication.’ No other city acts in that way. Chicago says, unhesitatingly, ‘I will’; Philadelphia says, ‘I should’; New Orleans says, ‘I used to’; Louisville says, ‘Don’t care if I do’; St. Louis says, ‘Excuse me’; Pittsburg says, ‘Smoke up.’ Now, New York”

  O. Henry’s synonyms for New York and his photographic descriptions of special streets and squares have often been commented upon. Mr. Arthur Bartlett Maurice says again:

  In the course of this rambling pilgrimage, the name of Sydney Porter has appeared, and will very likely continue to appear, two or three times to one mention of any other one writer. This is due not only to the high esteem in which the pilgrim holds the work of that singular and gifted man, but also to t
he fact that the dozen volumes containing the work of O. Henry constitute a kind of convenient bank upon which the pilgrim is able to draw in the many moments of emergency. Pcrfect frankness is a weapon with which to forestall criticism, and so, to express the matter very bluntly, whenever the writer finds himself in a street or a neighbourhood about which there is little apparent to say, he turns to “The Four Million,” or “The Trimmed Lamp,” or “The Voice of the City,” or “Whirligigs,” or “Strictly Business,” and in one of these books is able to find the rescuing allusion or descriptive line.

  But O. Henry’s study went far deeper than “the rescuing allusion or descriptive line.” “I would like to live a lifetime,” he once said to Mr. Gilman Hall, “on each street in New York. Every house has a drama in it.” Indeed the most distinctive and certainly the most thought-provoking aspect of O. Henry’s portrayal of New York is not to be found in his descriptions. It lies rather in his attempt to isolate and vivify the character, the service, the function of the city. Streets, parks, squares, buildings, even the multitudinous life itself that flowed ceaselessly before him were to him but the outward and visible signs of a life, a spirit, that informed all and energized all.

  But what was it? O. Henry would seem to say, “It is not a single element, like oxygen or hydrogen or gold. It is a combination, a formula, compounded of several elements.” In “Squaring the Circle” we learn that a Kentucky feud of forty years’ standing had left but a single member of each family, Cal Harkness and Sam Folwell. Cal has moved to New York. Sam, armed to the teeth, follows him. It was Sam’s first day in New York. Loneliness smote him; a fat man wouldn’t answer him; a policeman told him to move along; an immense engine, “running without mules,” grazed his knee; a cab-driver bumped him and “explained to him that kind words were invented to be used on other occasions”; a motorman went the cab- driver one better; a large lady dug an elbow into his back. But at last the bloody and implacable foe of his kith and kin is seen.