by O. Henry
In the fall of 1909, broken in health and suffering greatly from depression, he went to Asheville to be with his wife and daughter. Here on the fifth story of a building on Patton Avenue he set up his workshop. Ideas were plentiful but the power to mould them as he knew he once could have moulded them lagged behind.
Many themes appealed alternately to him for his proposed novel and play but only bare outlines remain. “I want to get at something bigger,” he would say. “What I have done is child’s play to what I can do, to what I know it is in me to do. If I would debase it, as some of the fellows do, I could get out something. I could turn out some sort of trash but I can’t do that.”
To Harry Peyton Steger he writes from Asheville, November 5, 1909:
My Dear Colonel Steger: I’d have answered your letter but I’ve been under the weather with a slight relapse. But on the whole I’m improving vastly. I’ve a doctor here who says I have absolutely no physical trouble except neurasthenia and that outdoor exercise and air will fix me as good as new. I am twenty pounds lighter and can climb mountains like a goat.
But his Little Old Bagdad-on-the-Subway was calling to him and had called during every waking hour of his absence. He had made his last attempt to write beyond the sound of her voice. In March he was back in his old haunts. To Mr. James P. Crane, of Chicago, he writes. April 15, 1910:
I’m back in New York after a six months’ stay in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. I was all played out — nerves, etc. I thought I was much better and came back to New York about a month ago and have been in bed most of the time — didn’t pick up down there as well as I should have done. There was too much scenery and fresh air. What I need is a steam- heated flat with no ventilation or exercise.
The end was near but not much nearer, I think, than he knew. To Mr. Moyle he remarked with a shrug of the shoulders and a whimsical smile: “It’ll probably be ‘In the Good Old Summer Time.’” A few years before, the question of the after-life had come up casually in conversation and O. Henry had been asked what he thought of it. His reply was:
I had a little dog
And his name was Rover,
And when he died
He died all over.
During the last months the question emerged again. An intimate friend’s father had died and O. Henry was eager to know how he had felt about the hereafter. “For myself,” he said, “I think we are like little chickens tapping on their shells.”
On the afternoon of June 3, Mr. Gilman Hall received a telephone message: “Can you come down right away, Colonel?” His friends were all Colonel or Bill to him. He had collapsed after sending the message and was lying on the floor when Mr. Hall arrived. Dr. Charles Russell Hancock was sent for and O. Henry was taken at once to the Polyclinic Hospital on East Thirty- fourth Street. “You’re a poor barber, Doc,” he whispered, as Dr. Hancock was brushing his hair; “let me show you.” He insisted on stopping to shake hands with the manager of the Caledonia and to exchange a cheery good-bye. He asked that his family be sent for and then quietly gave directions about the disposition of his papers.
Just before entering the hospital the friend who was with him, anticipating his aversion to the newspaper publicity inseparable from his pen-name, asked what name should be announced. “Call me Dennis,” he said; “my name will be Dennis in the morning.” Then becoming serious he added: “No, say that Will S. — Parker is here.” The taking again of the old initials and the name “Will,” said O. Henry’s friend, was a whim of the moment and a whim of the most whimsical of men, but it was “prompted by the desire to die with the name and initials given him at birth and endeared by every memory of childhood and home.”
“He was perfectly conscious until within two minutes of his death Sunday morning,” said Doctor Hancock, “and knew that the end was approaching. I never saw a man pluckier in facing it or in bearing pain. Nothing appeared to worry him at the last.” There was no pain now and just before sunrise he said with a smile to those about him: “Turn up the lights; I don’t want to go home in the dark.” He died as he had lived. His last words touched with new beauty and with new hope the refrain of a concert-hall song, the catch-word of the street, the jest of the department store. He did not go home in the dark. The sunlight was upon his face when he passed and illumins still his name and fame.
After the funeral in the Little Church Around the Corner, a woman was seen to remain alone kneeling in prayer. She was one whom O. Henry had rescued from the undertow of the city and restored. “I have always believed,” says a gifted writer, “that it was not by accident that a wreath of laurel lay at the head of his coffin and a wreath of lilies at his feet.”
THE END
Riverside Cemetery, Buncombe County, North Carolina – O. Henry’s final resting place
O. Henry’s grave