Travelling a few years ago through a Middle Western State, during an intolerable drought, I fell into conversation with a man the burden of whose speech was "I've made my pile and now I'm going away to live." He was plainly an unlettered man but by no means ignorant. He talked interestingly, because genuinely, until he put the usual question: "What line of goods do you carry?" When I had to admit my unappealing profession his manner of speech became at once formal and distant. "Professor," he said, after a painful pause, “Emerson is a very elegant writer, don't you think so?" I agreed and also agreed, after another longer and more painful pause, that Prescott was a very elegant writer. These two names plus "elegant" seemed to exhaust his available supply of literary allusion. "Did you ever read O. Henry?" I asked. At the mention of the name his manner changed instantly and his eyes moistened. Leaning far over he said: "Professor, that's literature, that's literature, that's REAL literature." He was himself again now. The mask of affectation had fallen away, and the appreciation and knowledge of O. Henry's work that he displayed, the affection for the man that he expressed, the grateful indebtedness that he was proud to acknowledge for a kindlier and more intelligent sympathy with his fellowmen showed plainly that O. Henry was the only writer who had ever revealed the man's better nature to himself.

The incident is typical. The jaded critics and the short story writers read O. Henry and admire him: they find in him what they want. Those who do not criticise and do not write read him and love him: they find in him what they need-a range of fancy, an exuberance of humour, a sympathy, an understanding, a knowledge of the raw material of life, an ability to interpret the passing in terms of the permanent, an insight into individual and institutional character, a resolute and pervasive desire to help those in need of help, in a word a constant and essential democracy that they find in no other short story writer. But the deeper currents in O. Henry's work can be traced only through a wider knowledge of O. Henry the man.

CHAPTER

THREE

ANCESTRY

THE O. Henry myth could not forever withstand the curiosity and inquiry begotten by the increasing acclaim that the stories were beginning to receive. O. Henry himself must have recognized the futility of attempting a further mystification, for there is evident in his later years a willingness and even a desire to throw off the mask of the assumed name and thus to link his achievement with the name and fortunes of his family. He had sought freedom and self-expression through his writings rather than fame. In fact, he shunned publicity with the timidity of a child. "What used to strike me most forcibly in O. Henry," writes Mr. John H. Barry, who knew him from the beginning of his career in New York, "was his distinction of character. To those he knew and liked he revealed himself as a man of singular refinement. He had beautiful, simple manners, a low voice, and a most charming air of self-effacement. For the glory of being famous he cared little. He had a dislike of being iionized. Lion-hunting women filled him with alarm. In fact, he was afraid of nearly all women."

But fame had come and with it came a vein of ancestral reminiscence and a return in imagination to the days of childhood. His marriage, in 1907, to the sweetheart and the only sweetheart of the Greensboro years, his visits to Mrs. Porter's home in Asheville, and his affectionate allusions to his father and mother show plainly a tendency to relax the cordon about him and to re-knit the ties and associations of youth. O. Henry was becoming Will Porter again. Even the great American novel, of which Professor Phelps speaks, was to be in the nature of an autobiography. "Let Me Feel Your Pulse," the last complete story that he wrote, was also the most autobiographical. "It was written," says Dr. Pinkney Herbert, of Asheville, "with the aid of my medical books. Sometimes he would take them to his office and again he would sit in my outer office." It was heralded by the magazine announcement, "If you want to get well, read this story." But O. Henry was dead before the story was published. In it he speaks of his ancestors who blended the blood of North and South:

"It's the hæmoglobin test," he [the doctor] explained. "The color of your blood is wrong." "Well," said I, "I know it should be blue; but this is a country of mix-ups. Some of my ancestors were cavaliers; but they got thick with some people on Nantucket Island, so

His forebears were again in his mind when, wrenched with pain but not bowed, he went to the hospital

in New York from which he knew he would not return alive. Will Irwin describes the scene as follows:*

Then as he stepped from the elevator to the ward, a kind of miracle came over him. Shy, sensitive, guarding the bare nerveends of his soul with an affectation of flippancy, his gait had always been furtive, his manner shrinking. Now he walked nobly, his head up, his chest out, his feet firm-walked as earls walked to the scaffold. Underneath all that democracy of life and love of the raw human heart which made him reject the prosperous and love the chatter of car-conductors and shop-girls -that quality which made Sydney Porter "O. Henry”—lay pride in his good Southern blood. It was as though he summoned all this pride of blood to help him fight the last battle like a man and a Sydney.

Thus

After Last returns the First,

Though a wide compass round be fetched.

William Sydney Porter was named after his mother's father, William Swaim, and his father's father, Sidney Porter.† He was always called Will Porter in the early days except by his grandmother on his father's side who occasionally called him Sydney. He never saw either of his grandfathers, both dying long before he was born. But William Swaim, his mother's father, who died in 1835, left his impress upon the State and was, so far as can be learned, the only journalist or writer among O. Henry's ancestors. The ink in O. Henry's blood came from this Quaker grandparent,

*“O. Henry, Man and Writer" (in the Cosmopolitan, September, 1910).

†O. Henry changed the spelling of his middle name from Sidney to Sydney in 1898. See page 169.