Delphi complete works of.., p.109
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 109
But let us turn to the stories themselves. O. Henry wrote in all two hundred short stories of an average of about fifteen pages each. This was the form in which his literary activity shaped itself by instinct. A novel he never wrote. A play he often meditated but never achieved. One of his books, — Cabbages and Kings, — can make a certain claim to be continuous. But even this is rather a collection of little stories than a single piece of fiction. But it is an error of the grossest kind to say that O. Henry’s work is not sustained. In reality his canvas is vast. His New York stories, like those of Central America or of the west, form one great picture as gloriously comprehensive in its scope as the lengthiest novels of a Dickens or the canvas of a Da Vinci. It is only the method that is different, not the result.
It is hard indeed to illustrate O. Henry’s genius by the quotation of single phrases and sentences. The humour that is in his work lies too deep for that. His is not the comic wit that explodes the reader into a huge guffaw of laughter and vanishes. His humour is of that deep quality that smiles at life itself and mingles our amusement with our tears.
Still harder is it to try to shew the amazing genius of O. Henry as a “plot maker,” as a designer of incident. No one better than he can hold the reader in suspense. Nay, more than that, the reader scarcely knows that he is “suspended,” until at the very close of the story O. Henry, so to speak, turns on the lights and the whole tale is revealed as an entirety. But to do justice to a plot in a few paragraphs is almost impossible. Let the reader consider to what a few poor shreds even the best of our novels or plays is reduced, when we try to set forth the basis of it in the condensed phrase of a text-book of literature, or diminish it to the language of the “scenario” of a moving picture. Let us take an example.
We will transcribe our immortal Hamlet as faithfully as we can into a few words with an eye to explain the plot and nothing else. It will run about as follows:
“Hamlet’s uncle kills his father and marries his mother, and Hamlet is so disturbed about this that he either is mad or pretends to be mad. In this condition he drives his sweetheart insane and she drowns, or practically drowns, herself. Hamlet then kills his uncle’s chief adviser behind an arras either in mistake for a rat, or not. Hamlet then gives poison to his uncle and his mother, stabs Laertes and kills himself. There is much discussion among the critics as to whether his actions justify us in calling him insane.”
There! The example is, perhaps, not altogether convincing. It does not seem somehow, faithful though it is, to do Shakespeare justice. But let it at least illustrate the point under discussion. The mere bones of a plot are nothing. We could scarcely form a judgment on female beauty by studying the skeletons of a museum of anatomy.
But with this distinct understanding, let me try to present the outline of a typical O. Henry story. I select it from the volume entitled The Gentle Grafter, a book that is mainly concerned with the wiles of Jeff Peters and his partners and associates. Mr. Peters, who acts as the narrator of most of the stories, typifies the perennial fakir and itinerant grafter of the Western States, — ready to turn his hand to anything from selling patent medicines under a naphtha lamp on the street corner of a western town to peddling bargain Bibles from farm to farm, — anything in short that does not involve work and carries with it the peculiar excitement of trying to keep out of the State penitentiary. All the world loves a grafter, — at least a genial and ingenious grafter, — a Robin Hood who plunders an abbot to feed a beggar, an Alfred Jingle, a Scapin, a Raffles, — or any of the multifarious characters of the world’s literature who reveal the fact that much that is best in humanity may flourish even on the shadowy side of technical iniquity. Of this glorious company is Mr. Jefferson Peters. But let us take him as he is revealed in Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet and let us allow him to introduce himself and his business.
“I struck Fisher Hill,” Mr. Peters relates, “in a buckskin suit, moccasins, long hair and a thirty-carat diamond ring that I got from an actor in Texarkana. I don’t know what he ever did with the pocket-knife I swapped him for it.
“I was Dr. Waugh-hoo, the celebrated Indian medicine man. I carried only one best bet just then, and that was Resurrection Bitters. It was made of life-giving plants and herbs accidentally discovered by Ta-qua-la, the beautiful wife of the chief of the Choctaw Nation, while gathering truck to garnish a platter of boiled dog for an annual corn dance. . . .” In the capacity of Dr. Waugh-hoo, Mr. Peters “struck Fisher Hill.” He went to a druggist and got credit for half a gross of eight-ounce bottles and corks, and with the help of the running water from the tap in the hotel room, he spent a long evening manufacturing Resurrection Bitters. The next evening the sales began. The bitters at fifty cents a bottle “started off like sweetbreads on toast at a vegetarian dinner.” Then there intervenes a constable with a German silver badge. “Have you got a city license?” he asks, and Mr. Peters’ medicinal activity comes to a full stop. The threat of prosecution under the law for practising medicine without a license puts Mr. Peters for the moment out of business.
He returns sadly to his hotel, pondering on his next move. Here by good fortune he meets a former acquaintance, a certain Andy Tucker, who has just finished a tour in the Southern States, working the Great Cupid Combination Package on the chivalrous and unsuspecting south.
“Andy,” says Jeff, in speaking of his friend’s credentials, “was a good street man: and he was more than that — he respected his profession and was satisfied with 300 per cent. profit. He had plenty of offers to go into the illegitimate drug and garden seed business, but he was never to be tempted off the straight path.”
Andy and Jeff take counsel together in long debate on the porch of the hotel.
And here, apparently, a piece of good luck came to Jeff’s help. The very next morning a messenger brings word that the Mayor of the town is suddenly taken ill. The only doctor of the place is twenty miles away. Jeff Peters is summoned to the Mayor’s bedside. . . . “This Mayor Banks,” Jeff relates, “was in bed all but his whiskers and feet. He was making internal noises that would have had everybody in San Francisco hiking for the parks. A young man was standing by the bedside holding a cup of water. . . .” Mr. Peters, called to the patient’s side, is very cautious. He draws attention to the fact that he is not a qualified practitioner, is not “a regular disciple of S. Q. Lapius.”
The Mayor groans in pain. The young man at the bedside, introduced as Mr. Biddle, the Mayor’s nephew, urges Mr. Peters, — or Doctor Waugh-hoo, — in the name of common humanity to attempt a cure.
Finally Jeff Peters promises to treat the Mayor by “scientific demonstration.” He proposes, he says, to make use of the “great doctrine of psychic financiering — of the enlightening school of long-distance subconscious treatment of fallacies and meningitis, — of that wonderful in-door sport known as personal magnetism.” But he warns the Mayor that the treatment is difficult. It uses up great quantities of soul strength. It comes high. It cannot be attempted under two hundred and fifty dollars.
The Mayor groans. But he yields. The treatment begins.
“You ain’t sick,” says Dr. Waugh-hoo, looking the patient right in the eye. “You ain’t got any pain. The right lobe of your perihelion is subsided.”
The result is surprising. The Mayor’s system seems to respond at once. “I do feel some better, Doc,” he says, “darned if I don’t.”
Mr. Peters assumes a triumphant air. He promises to return next day for a second and final treatment.
“I’ll come back,” he says to the young man, “at eleven. You may give him eight drops of turpentine and three pounds of steak. Good morning.”
Next day the final treatment is given. The Mayor is completely restored. Two hundred and fifty dollars, all in cash, is handed to “Dr. Waugh-hoo.” The young man asks for a receipt. It is no sooner written out by Jeff Peters, than:
“ ’Now do your duty, officer,’ says the Mayor, grinning much unlike a sick man.
“Mr. Biddle lays his hand on my arm.
“ ’You’re under arrest, Dr. Waugh-hoo, alias Peters,’ says he, ‘for practising medicine without authority under the State law.’
“ ’Who are you?’ I asks.
“ ’I’ll tell you who he is,’ says Mr. Mayor, sitting up in bed. ‘He’s a detective employed by the State Medical Society. He’s been following you over five counties. He came to me yesterday and we fixed up this scheme to catch you. I guess you won’t do any more doctoring around these parts, Mr. Fakir. What was it you said I had, Doc?’ the Mayor laughs, ‘compound — well, it wasn’t softening of the brain, I guess, anyway.’ ”
Ingenious, isn’t it? One hadn’t suspected it. But will the reader kindly note the conclusion of the story as it follows, handled with the lightning rapidity of a conjuring trick.
“ ’Come on, officer,’ says I, dignified. ‘I may as well make the best of it.’ And then I turns to old Banks and rattles my chains.
“ ’Mr. Mayor,’ says I, ‘the time will come soon when you’ll believe that personal magnetism is a success. And you’ll be sure that it succeeded in this case, too.’
“And I guess it did.
“When we got nearly to the gate, I says: ‘We might meet somebody now, Andy. I reckon you better take ’em off, and — —’ Hey? Why, of course it was Andy Tucker. That was his scheme; and that’s how we got the capital to go into business together.”
Now let us set beside this a story of a different type, The Furnished Room, which appears in the volume called The Four Million. It shows O. Henry at his best as a master of that supreme pathos that springs, with but little adventitious aid of time or circumstance, from the fundamental things of life itself. In the sheer art of narration there is nothing done by Maupassant that surpasses The Furnished Room. The story runs, — so far as one dare attempt to reproduce it without quoting it all word for word, — after this fashion.
The scene is laid in New York, in the lost district of the lower West Side, where the wandering feet of actors and one-week transients seek furnished rooms in dilapidated houses of fallen grandeur.
One evening after dark a young man prowled among these crumbling red mansions, ringing their bells. At the twelfth he rested his lean hand-baggage upon the step and wiped the dust from his hatband and forehead. The bell sounded faint and far away in some remote hollow depths. . . . “I have the third floor back vacant since a week back,” says the landlady. . . . “It’s a nice room. It ain’t often vacant. I had some most elegant people in it last summer — no trouble at all and paid in advance to the minute. The water’s at the end of the hall. Sprowls and Mooney kept it three months. They done a vaudeville sketch. Miss B’retta Sprowls, you may have heard of her, — Oh, that was just the stage name — right there over the dresser is where the marriage certificate hung, framed. The gas is here and you see there’s plenty of closet room. It’s a room every one likes. It never stays idle long — —”
The young man takes the room, paying a week in advance. Then he asks:
“A young girl — Miss Vashner — Miss Eloise Vashner — do you remember such a one among your lodgers? She would be singing on the stage most likely.”
The landlady shakes her head. They comes and goes, she tells him, she doesn’t call that one to mind.
It is the same answer that he has been receiving, up and down, in the crumbling houses of the lost district, through weeks and months of wandering. No, always no. Five months of ceaseless interrogation and the inevitable negative. So much time spent by day in questioning managers, agents, schools and choruses; by night among the audiences of theatres from allstar casts down to music halls so low that he dreaded to find what he most hoped for. . . . The young man, left in his sordid room of the third floor back, among its decayed furniture, its ragged brocade upholstery, sinks into a chair. The dead weight of despair is on him. . . . Then, suddenly, as he rested there, the room was filled with the strong, sweet odour of mignonette — the flower that she had always loved, the perfume that she had always worn. It is as if her very presence was beside him in the empty room. He rises. He cries aloud, “What, dear?” as if she had called to him. She has been there in the room. He knows it. He feels it. Then eager, tremulous with hope, he searches the room, tears open the crazy chest of drawers, fumbles upon the shelves, for some sign of her. Nothing and still nothing, — a crumpled playbill, a half-smoked cigar, the dreary and ignoble small records of many a peripatetic tenant, but of the woman that he seeks, nothing. Yet still that haunting perfume that seems to speak her presence at his very side.
The young man dashes trembling from the room. Again he questions the landlady, — was there not, before him in the room, a young lady? Surely there must have been, — fair, of medium height, and with reddish gold hair? Surely there was?
But the landlady, as if obdurate, shakes her head. “I can tell you again,” she says, “ ’twas Sprowls and Mooney, as I said. Miss B’retta Sprowls, it was, in the theatres, but Missis Mooney she was. The marriage certificate hung, framed, on a nail over — —”
. . . The young man returns to his room. It is all over. His search is vain. The ebbing of his last hope has drained his faith. . . . For a time he sat staring at the yellow, singing gaslight. Then he rose. He walked to the bed and began to tear the sheets into strips. With the blade of his knife he drove them tightly into every crevice around windows and door. When all was snug and taut he turned out the light, turned the gas full on again and laid himself gratefully upon the bed.
And now let the reader note the ending paragraphs of the story, so told that not one word of it must be altered or abridged from the form in which O. Henry framed it.
It was Mrs. McCool’s night to go with the can for beer. So she fetched it and sat with Mrs. Purdy (the landlady) in one of those subterranean retreats where housekeepers foregather and the worm dieth seldom.
“I rented out my third floor, back, this evening,” said Mrs. Purdy, across a fine circle of foam. “A young man took it. He went up to bed two hours ago.”
“Now, did ye, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am?” said Mrs. McCool, with intense admiration. “You do be a wonder for rentin’ rooms of that kind. And did ye tell him, then?” she concluded in a husky whisper, laden with mystery.
“Rooms,” said Mrs. Purdy, in her furriest tones, “are furnished for to rent. I did not tell him, Mrs. McCool.”
“ ’Tis right ye are, ma’am; ’tis by renting rooms we kape alive. Ye have the rale sense for business, ma’am. There be many people will rayjict the rentin’ of a room if they be tould a suicide has been after dyin’ in the bed of it.”
“As you say, we has our living to be making,” remarked Mrs. Purdy.
“Yis, ma’am; ’tis true. ’Tis just one wake ago this day I helped ye lay out the third floor, back. A pretty slip of a colleen she was to be killin’ herself wid the gas — a swate little face she had, Mrs. Purdy, ma’am.”
“She’d a-been called handsome, as you say,” said Mrs. Purdy, assenting but critical, “but for that mole she had a-growin’ by her left eyebrow. Do fill up your glass again, Mrs. McCool.”
Beyond these two stories, I do not care to go. But if the reader is not satisfied 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.
O. Henry lived some nine years in New York but little known to the public at large. Towards the end there came to him success, a competence and something that might be called celebrity if not fame. But it was marvellous how his light remained hid. The time came when the best known magazines eagerly sought his work. He could have commanded his own price. But the notoriety of noisy success, the personal triumph of literary conspicuousness he neither achieved nor envied. A certain cruel experience of his earlier days — tragic, unmerited and not here to be recorded, — had left him shy of mankind at large and, in the personal sense, anxious only for obscurity. Even when the American public in tens and hundreds of thousands read his matchless stories, they read them, so to speak, in isolated fashion, as personal discoveries, unaware for years of the collective greatness of O. Henry’s work viewed as a total. The few who were privileged to know him, seem to have valued him beyond all others and to have found him even greater than his work. And then, in mid-career as it seemed, there was laid upon him the hand of a wasting and mortal disease, which brought him slowly to his end, his courage and his gentle kindliness unbroken to the last. “I shall die,” he said one winter with one of the quoted phrases that fell so aptly from his lips, “in the good old summer time.” And “in the good old summer time” with a smile and a jest upon his lips he died. “Don’t turn down the light,” he is reported to have said to those beside his bed, and then, as the words of a popular song flickered across his mind, he added, “I’m afraid to go home in the dark.”
That was five years ago. Since his death, his fame in America has grown greater and greater with every year. The laurel wreath that should have crowned his brow is exchanged for the garland laid upon his grave. And the time is coming, let us hope, when the whole English-speaking world will recognise in O. Henry one of the great masters of modern literature.
A Rehabilitation of Charles II
IT IS PERHAPS a far cry from the subjects treated in the previous chapters to the topic of Charles the Second. But I have a special reason for introducing his name. In my schooldays Charles II was always my particular hero. His amiable common sense and his native good-humour seemed to mark him out from the fussy, self-important egotistic monarchs who sprawl wide anon the pages of history and obliterate from our view everything except their trivial personalities. I always felt that if I ever had a chance I would like to do something for King Charles. I have it now. A whole book lies open to me, which I can fill as I like. I cannot conclude this volume of essays better than by devoting the last of them to the memory of one whose character I would wish to imitate and for whose quaint and inimitable humour I have long cherished a despairing admiration.
