Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 632
Agnes understood that Men always show a Strong Preference for a Feather Headed Girl, if she has the Looks and a Circus Style, and particularly if all the sedate, well read, plain, intellectual Girls are trying to Close Up ahead of her, so as to throw her into a Pocket.
So long as Mazie was the Reigning Fad, and while Mazie’s Front Room was the Mecca for Golf Players and Glee Club Undergraduates, Agnes sat back, a trifle Forlorn, but not so Rattled that she took any Chances of Queering her own Game.
Sometimes when there was such a Push at Mazie’s Home that the Late Comers could not get up to within Rubbering Distance of the celebrated Siren of Springfield, and it was too Early to go Home, one or two of the Young Men would drift over to pay a little Attention to Agnes. Here was the chance for Agnes to make the Mistake of her Life. But she never asked them if they had been to see Mazie first, and she never made any of these unwelcome Cracks about being Second Choice. She received them with the long Hand Clasp and the Friendly Smile, and threw herself to Entertain them, wotting well that now and then a Girl must pocket her Pride and she Laughs Best who postpones her Laughing until after the Banns have been Published.
Instead of seeking to undermine the Uncrowned Queen of Springfield and put the Skids under her, she lauded Mazie to the Skies. She asked the Boys if they did not think that Mazie was a Dashing Beauty and by far the Swellest in Town, and was it any Wonder that the whole Crowd was Dotty about her. When she talked like that, Beaux who had been getting the gleaming Cold Shoulder from Mazie, were inclined to Demur and say that Mazie was unquestionably an Artist on the Make-Up and a Caution when it came to Coquettish Wiles, but there were Others just as Nice.
In this Town of Springfield there was a Steady Young Fellow who wrote Junior after his Name, and was Prospective Heir to an Iron Foundry. He was Foolish about Mazie for quite a Spell, but when he went up to see her and try to make it worth her Time to look him over, the Door-Bell kept ringing, and he found that instead of conducting a Courtship he was simply getting in on a Series of Mass Meetings. So he dropped out of the Competition and took to calling on Agnes, and found that he was the Whole Thing. She treated him Kindly and never disagreed with him except on one Point. Whenever he would say that Mazie was getting the Big Head and put on too many Frills to suit him, and had been Spoiled by having so many on her Staff at one time, Agnes would stick up for her Friend, and say that she could hardly blame any Man for giving in to the Superlative Charms of One who had Julia Marlowe set back a Mile.
She kept that Talk going until he was good and tired of having Mazie dingdonged at him. One Evening he stopped her right in the middle of an Eulogium and suggested that they let up on the Mazie Topic and talk about Themselves for a while. And although she Protested, he convinced her that she was worth a Ten Acre Field full of Mazies.
So they were Married and went to Niagara Falls and came Home and still Mazie remained Single.
She was supposed to be several Notches too High Up for any One Man in Springfield. After getting such Job Lots of Adulation and having at least six pulsating Courtiers kneeling on her Sofa Pillows every Evening it would have been a Tame Let-Down for her to splice up with one lone Business Man and settle down to a dull Existence in some Apartment House.
So it came about that there was a General Impression in Springfield that Mazie was the Unattainable. She was a kind of Public Character to be Idolized, but not removed from the Pedestal. The discouraged Suitors fell away one by one, and married the ordinary Girls who were willing to Play Fair and not keep the Applicants dangling. Mazie took up with a new Generation and seemed to believe that she could reign Forever, the same as the Elfin Queen in the Fairy Tale.
But the Peach Crops come and go.
After a few Years Mazie’s Door-Bell did not Tinkle with its whilom frequency, and right down the Street there was a Seventeen-Year-Older who had shot up out of Short Dresses like a Willow Sprout, and it was her Picture that went into the Special Illustrated Edition as Springfield’s Fairest Daughter.
Mazie saw that the Vernal Season had passed and the Harvest Time was at Hand, so she decided to chop the Philandering and pick one for Keeps. But when she began to encourage the Eligibles they took it to mean that she was prolonging the same old String Game. The Men who knew that she had turned down at least Fifty figured that there was no Possible Chance for them, so they were Leery and would not be led into Committing themselves. Besides, Mazie had been handed around by so many that she was beginning to be Graded as Second Hand, and there was not the same keen Anxiety to capture her that there had been along about the Year of the World’s Fair.
At last Accounts she was supposed to be Guessing. Agnes is doing Nicely, with a well trained Husband.
MORAL: Cheer Up, Girls.
Chapter Sixteen . THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF O. HENRY
AN AMERICAN WRITER — A Shadowed Life — The Amazing Genius of O. Henry — His Visions in Exile and New York — Eyes that Could See without Looking — The Effortless Ease of Genius.
IT WAS A SPECIAL FEATURE of Mark Twain’s work that he was an “American writer” in the full sense of the word. Reference has already been made of the use of this phrase being the cause of so many angry disputes. An American writer may mean merely a writer who lives — entirely or chiefly or at least while making his name and fame — in America. Writing in the English language, his work may be indistinguishable from that of his British contemporaries, as was the case with Longfellow and Fenimore Cooper. He may, or he may not, write on American themes. But there presently grew up on this continent modes of thought and turns of phrase distinct from those of British writers. They made a new form of “American literature” not superior to any other but unique and separate from the main body of British literature. English readers delighted in Mark Twain, English critics recognized in him a man of letters, while Boston still thought of him as a comic man from the West. Yet no Englishman could have written in the terms and modes made use of by Mark Twain.
So it was with O. Henry. From first to last he wrote in a distinctive way, quite different to that of British writers, although many of the most distinguished British writers, when, late in the day and after O. Henry’s death, they got to know his work, accorded him a higher place in the hall of fame than the one commonly assigned to him by American authorities.
O. Henry was born as Sydney Porter in Greensboro, N. C., in 1862. He had but little school and no college. He worked in a drugstore in his native town, then went West and in Texas drifted about as a cowboy, a bank clerk and as the editor of a small journal in Austin. He married there and had one daughter. His life till he was well over thirty was undistinguished and unknown to the outer world. He was, to those who knew him, a queer, bright and humorous companion; he had contributed a few “pieces” to the press. Beyond that he was nothing and nobody in particular. Then on his life fell the heavy shadow that never left it, and that knew no illumination but that of the bright and radiant mind it could not altogether darken. In O. Henry’s bank days he had as bank teller cashed certain checks without legal warrant. Whether this meant theft or merely Western civility, whether O. Henry profited personally or not, we do not know. But some years after he had left the bank he learned that a warrant was out against him and fled to Central America. Here he became a wanderer and an exile, in that strange world of tropical languor, of lost hope and unredeemed ambitions which forms the background of some of his best stories. The writer of this book has said elsewhere:
Latin America fascinated O.Henry. The languor of the tropics; the sunlit seas with their open bays and broad sanded beaches with green palms nodding on the slopes above, — white-painted steamers lazily at anchor, — quaint Spanish towns, with adobe houses and wide squares, sunk in their noon-day sleep, — beautiful Senoritas drowsing away the afternoon in hammocks; the tinkling of the mule bells on the mountain track above the town, — the cries of the unknown birds issuing from the dense green of the unbroken jungle — and at night in the soft darkness, the low murmur of the guitar, soft thrumming with the voices of love — these are the sights and sounds of O. Henry’s Central America. Here live and move his tattered revolutionists, his gaudy generals of the mimic army of the existing republic; hither ply his white-painted steamers of the fruit trade; here the American consul, with a shadowed past and $600 a year, drinks away the remembrance of his northern energy and his college education in the land of forgetfulness. Hither the absconding banker from the States is dropped from the passing steamer, clutching tight in his shaking hand his valise of stolen dollars; him the disguised detective, lounging beside the little drinking shop, watches with a furtive eye. And here in this land of enchantment the broken lives, the wasted hopes, the ambition that was never reached, the frailty that was never conquered, are somehow pieced together and illuminated into what they might have been, — and even the reckless crime and the open sin, viewed in the softened haze of such an atmosphere, are half forgiven.
News his wife was ill and must soon die brought O. Henry back to Texas to face the law. He was condemned to five years in the Ohio State Penitentiary. He served there his allotted time, most of it in a trusted position as a night attendant in the infirmary. He saw there life in its saddest forms and death in its loneliest aspect. There, in the grim silence of his prison nights, Sydney Porter received his literary training. The stories sent out, without a personal identification, from the prison found acceptance in good magazines.
His allotted time served, O. Henry came forth from the shadow to the shade. The sunlight he never knew. He lived a nondescript existence in New York, wandering the streets, frequenting the saloons, seeing everything without looking at anything. Bob Davis in his fine book The Caliph of Bagdad has told all about it. But it may be permitted again to quote from what was written a quarter of a century ago by the present writer.
What O. Henry did for Central America, he does again for New York. It is transformed by the magic of his imagination. He waves a wand over it and it becomes a city of mystery and romance. It is no longer the roaring, surging metropolis that we thought we knew, with its clattering elevated, its unending crowds, and on every side the repellent selfishness of the rich, the grim struggle of the poor, and the listless despair of the outcast. It has become, as O. Henry loves to call it, Bagdad upon the Subway. The glare has gone. There is a soft light suffusing the city. Its corner drug-stores turn to enchanted bazaars. From the open doors of its restaurants and palm rooms, there issues such a melody of softened music that we feel we have but to cross the threshold and there is Bagdad waiting for us beyond. A transformed waiter hands us a chair at a little table, — Arabian, I will swear it, — beside an enchanted rubber tree. There is red wine such as Omar Khayyam drank, here on Sixth Avenue. At the tables about us are a strange and interesting crew, — dervishes in the disguise of American business men, caliphs masquerading as tourists, bedouins from Syria and fierce fantassins from the desert turned into western visitors from Texas, and among them — can we believe our eyes, — houris from the inner harems of Ispahan and Candahar, whom we mistook but yesterday for the ladies of a Shubert chorus! As we pass out we pay our money to an enchanted cashier with golden hair, — sitting behind glass, — under the spell of some magician without a doubt, — and then taking O. Henry’s hand we wander forth among the ever changing scenes of night adventure, the mingled tragedy and humour of The Four Million that his pen alone can depict. Nor did ever Haroun al Raschid and viziers, wandering at will in the narrow streets of their Arabian city. meet such varied adventure as lies before us, strolling hand in hand with O. Henry in the new Bagdad that he reveals.
It is said that O. Henry’s fame is fading. It may be so. Everything is. In the rushing world in which we now live nothing seems to last. But at least it can be said that O. Henry’s place in the history of American humor ought not to fade. In the mere technique of words O. Henry was a rare artist. He had Mark Twain’s gift of making old words do new tricks. He used language with a careless ease as if contemptuous of style or rule. He never elaborated or polished, or strove for art. Life was not worth it, for him. It is often said — indeed it is now the stock thing to say — that O. Henry wrote only anecdotes, not stories. In a literal sense this is true, but in the wide sense it is not. O. Henry’s work must be taken altogether, or at least gathered in large canvases; his pictured West with amiable and inimitable scoundrels like Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, the sanded beaches of his Central America with its sunlit exile, and the vast panorama of his great city of the Four Million. O. Henry’s picture of New York, seen not in one but in twenty stories, grows to the magnitude of Zola’s Paris or Dickens’s London. The “anecdotes” join up into a saga.
Greatest of all of O. Henry’s characteristics is the power of bringing good out of evil, of finding a place for love and laughter, where all around seems misery and sin. He has the same power, known best to Charles Dickens, of turning a crook into a sort of genial soul, an embezzler into an admired companion. He makes a kind of Robin Hood world in which the social values are reversed, and the outlaw becomes the real man, and the sheriff and the bishop the villains of the piece.
The stories selected below need no comment nor expianation to carry them. The first one, “A Municipal Report,” shows O. Henry’s extraordinary originality in creating such a setting and the wonderful power of presentation which it involves. The second, “Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet,” shows the typical O. Henry story of the West at its very best. If these are anecdotes, let us have more of them.
Chapter Seventeen . SELECTIONS FROM O. HENRY
A MUNICIPAL REPORT
The cities are full of pride,
Challenging each to each —
This from her mountainside,
That from her burthened beach.
R. KIPLING.
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. — FRANK NORRIS.
EAST IS EAST, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians. Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a State. They are the Southerners of the West. Now, Chicagoans are no less loyal to their city; but when you ask them why, they stammer and speak of lake fish and the new Odd Fellows Building. But Californians go into detail.
Of course they have, in the climate, an argument that is good for half an hour while you are thinking of your coal bills and heavy underwear. But as soon as they come to mistake your silence for conviction, madness comes upon them, and they picture the city of the Golden Gate as the Bagdad of the New World. So far, as a matter of opinion, no refutation is necessary. 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.
NASHVILLE. — A city, port of delivery, and the capital of the State of Tennessee, is on the Cumberland River and on the N. C. & St. L. and the L. & N. railroads. This city is regarded as the most important educational centre in the South.
I stepped off the train at 8 P. M. Having searched the thesaurus in vain for adjectives, I must, as a substitution, hie me to comparison in the form of a recipe.
Take of London fog 30 parts; malaria 10 parts; gas leaks 20 parts; dewdrops gathered in a brick yard at sunrise, 25 parts; odor of honeysuckle 15 parts. Mix.
The mixture will give you an approximate conception of a Nashville drizzle. It is not so fragrant as a moth-ball nor as thick as pea-soup; but ’tis enough— ‘twill serve.
I went to a hotel in a tumbril. It required strong selfsuppression for me to keep from climbing to the top of it and giving an imitation of Sidney Carton. The vehicle was drawn by beasts of a bygone era and driven by something dark and emancipated.
I was sleepy and tired, so when I got to the hotel I hurriedly paid it the fifty cents it demanded (with approximate lagniappe, I assure you). I knew its habits; and I did not want to hear it prate about its old “marster” or anything that happened “befo’ de wah.”
The hotel was one of the kind described as “renovated.” That means $20,000 worth of new marble pillars, thing, electric lights and brass cuspidors in the lobby, and a new L. & N. time table and a lithograph of Lookout Mountain in each one of the great rooms above. The management was without reproach, the attention full of exquisite Southern courtesy, the service as slow as the progress of a snail and as good-humored as Rip Van Winkle. The food was worth traveling a thousand miles for. There is no other hotel in the world where you can get such chicken livers en brochette.
At dinner I asked a Negro waiter if there was anything doing in town. He pondered gravely for a minute, and then replied: “Well, boss, I don’t really reckon there’s anything at all doin’ after sundown.”
Sundown had been accomplished; it had been drowned in the drizzle long before. So that spectacle was denied me. But I went forth upon the streets in the drizzle to see what might be there.
It is built on undulating grounds; and the streets are lighted by electricity at a cost of $32,470 per annum.
As I left the hotel there was a race riot. Down upon me charged a company of freedmen, or Arabs, or Zulus, armed with — no, I saw with relief that they were not rifles, but whips. And I saw dimly a caravan of black, clumsy vehicles; and at the reassuring shouts, “Kyar you anywhere in the town, boss, fuh fifty cents,” I reasoned that I was merely a “fare” instead of a victim.
I walked through long streets, all leading uphill. I wondered how those streets ever came down again. Perhaps they didn’t until they were “graded.” On a few of the “main streets” I saw lights in stores here and there; saw street cars go by conveying worthy burghers hither and you; saw people pass engaged in the art of conversation, and heard a burst of semi-lively laughter issuing from a soda-water and ice-cream parlor. The streets other than “main” seemed to have enticed upon their borders houses consecrated to peace and domesticity. In many of them lights shone behind discreetly drawn window shades; in a few pianos tinkled orderly and irreproachable music. There was, indeed, little “doing.” I wished I had come before sundown. So I returned to my hotel.
