to listen. “Keep nothing of mine,” said Ameera. “Take no hair from my
head. _She_ would make thee burn it later on. That flame I should feel.
Lower! Stoop lower! Remember only that I was thine and bore thee a son.
Though thou wed a white woman to-morrow, the pleasure of receiving in
thy arms thy first son is taken from thee forever. Remember me when
thy son is born--the one that shall carry thy name before all men. His
misfortunes be on my head. I bear witness--I bear witness”--the lips
were forming the words on his ear--“that there is no God but--thee,
beloved!”
160. Then she died. Holden sat still, and all thought was taken from
him--till he heard Ameera’s mother lift the curtain.
161. “Is she dead, _sahib_?”
162. “She is dead.”
163. “Then I will mourn, and afterwards take an inventory of the
furniture in this house. For that will be mine. The _sahib_ does not
mean to resume it? It is so little, so very little, _sahib_, and I am
an old woman. I would like to lie softly.”
164. “For the mercy of God be silent a while. Go out and mourn where I
cannot hear.”
165. “_Sahib_, she will be buried in four hours.”
166. “I know the custom. I shall go ere she is taken away. That matter
is in thy hands. Look to it, that the bed on which--on which she lies--”
167. “Aha! That beautiful red-lacquered bed. I have long desired--”
168. “That the bed is left here untouched for my disposal. All else
in the house is thine. Hire a cart, take everything, go hence, and
before sunrise let there be nothing in this house but that which I have
ordered thee to respect.”
169. “I am an old woman. I would stay at least for the days of mourning
and the rains have just broken. Whither shall I go?”
170. “What is that to me? My order is that there is a going. The
house-gear is worth a thousand rupees, and my orderly shall bring thee
a hundred rupees to-night.”
171. “That is very little. Think of the cart-hire.”
172. “It shall be nothing unless thou goest, and with speed. O woman,
get hence and leave me with my dead!”
173. The mother shuffled down the staircase, and in her anxiety to
take stock of the house-fittings forgot to mourn. Holden stayed by
Ameera’s side and the rain roared on the roof. He could not think
connectedly by reason of the noise, though he made many attempts to
do so. Then four sheeted ghosts glided dripping into the room and
stared at him through their veils. They were the washers of the dead.
Holden left the room and went out to his horse. He had come in a
dead, stifling calm through ankle-deep dust. He found the courtyard a
rain-lashed pond alive with frogs; a torrent of yellow water ran under
the gate, and a roaring wind drove the bolts of the rain like buckshot
against the mud walls. Pir Khan was shivering in his little hut by the
gate, and the horse was stamping uneasily in the water.
174. “I have been told the _sahib’s_ order,” said Pir Khan. “It is
well. This house is now desolate. I go also, or my monkey face would
be a reminder of that which has been. Concerning the bed, I will bring
that to thy house yonder in the morning; but remember, _sahib_, it will
be to thee a knife turning in a green wound. I go upon a pilgrimage,
and I will take no money. I have grown fat in the protection of the
Presence whose sorrow is my sorrow. For the last time I hold his
stirrup.”
175. He touched Holden’s foot with both hands, and the horse sprang out
into the road, where the creaking bamboos were whipping the sky and
all the frogs were chuckling. Holden could not see for the rain in his
face. He put his hands before his eyes and muttered:
176. “Oh, you brute! You utter brute!”
177. The news of his trouble was already in his bungalow. He read the
knowledge in his butler’s eyes when Ahmed Khan brought in food, and
for the first and last time in his life laid a hand upon his master’s
shoulder, saying: “Eat, _sahib_, eat. Meat is good against sorrow. I
also have known. Moreover the shadows come and go, _sahib_; the shadows
come and go. These be curried eggs.”
178. Holden could neither eat nor sleep. The heavens sent down eight
inches of rain in that night and washed the earth clean. The waters
tore down walls, broke roads, and scoured open the shallow graves on
the Mohammedan burying-ground. All next day it rained, and Holden sat
still in his house considering his sorrow. On the morning of the third
day he received a telegram which said only: “Ricketts, Myndonie. Dying.
Holden relieve. Immediate.” Then he thought that before he had departed
he would look at the house wherein he had been master and lord. There
was a break in the weather, and the rank earth steamed with vapour.
179. He found that the rains had torn down the mud pillars of the
gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung
lazily from one hinge. There was grass three inches high in the
courtyard; Pir Khan’s lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged
between the beams. A gray squirrel was in possession of the veranda,
as if the house had been untenanted for thirty years instead of three
days. Ameera’s mother had removed everything except some mildewed
matting. The _tick-tick_ of the little scorpions as they hurried
across the floor was the only sound in the house. Ameera’s room and
the other one where Tota had lived were heavy with mildew; and the
narrow staircase leading to the roof was streaked and stained with
rain-borne mud. Holden saw all these things, and came out again to meet
in the road Durga Dass, his landlord--portly, affable, clothed in white
muslin, and driving a C-spring buggy. He was overlooking his property
to see how the roofs stood the stress of the first rains.
180. “I have heard,” said he, “you will not take this place any more,
_sahib_?”
181. “What are you going to do with it?”
182. “Perhaps I shall let it again.”
183. “Then I will keep it on while I am away.”
184. Durga Dass was silent for some time. “You shall not take it on,
_sahib_,” he said. “When I was a young man I also--But to-day I am a
member of the Municipality. Ho! Ho! No. When the birds have gone, what
need to keep the nest? I will have it pulled down--the timber will sell
for something always. It shall be pulled down, and the Municipality
shall make a road across as they desire, from the burning-ghaut to the
city wall, so that no man may say where this house stood.”
SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY
1. Using the term “Emotion”[22] broadly, make a list of all the
emotions you can.
2. Which of these are displayed in “The Last Class”?
3. Which in “Without Benefit of Clergy”?
4. Cite different passages, by referring to the numbered paragraphs, in
which certain specific emotions are displayed.
5. Do you notice any emotional expressions which seem to you to be
either extravagant, or weak, or in any way untrue to life?
6. Point out how the author conveys the ideas of emotion, such as by
emotional words, gestures, attitudes, etc.
7. Write five short original paragraphs expressing five different
emotions, using varied means of conveying the impressions of strong
feeling.
8. Select from some magazine a story of the emotional type, and point
out in a few words why you consider it to be a typically emotional
story.
TEN REPRESENTATIVE STORIES OF EMOTION OR SENTIMENT
“A Doctor of The Old School,” Ian Maclaren, in _The Days of Auld
Lang Syne_.
“A Descent into the Maelstrom,” Edgar Allan Poe, in _Tales_.
“The Duchess at Prayer,” Edith Wharton, in _Crucial Instances_.
“A Lear of the Steppes,” Ivan Turgeneff, translated in _The Book of
The Short-Story_. Jessup and Canby.
“The Death of the Dauphin,” Alphonse Daudet, translated in _Little
French Masterpieces_.
“The Birthmark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, in _Mosses From an Old Manse_.
“Tennessee’s Partner,” Bret Harte, in _The Luck of Roaring Camp and
Other Stories_.
“The Death of Olivier Becaille,” Émile Zola, translated in
_Masterpieces of Fiction_.
“They,” Rudyard Kipling, in _Traffic and Discoveries_.
“Juggler to ‘Our Lady,’” Anatole France, in _Short-Story
Masterpieces_.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] Emotion is a broad word loosely used to embrace all the tones of
inner feeling, from the palest sentiment depicted by a Jane Austen, to
the darkest passion of a Werther.--_Writing the Short-Story_, p. 181,
which see for a fuller discussion of emotion in the short-story.
[21] “S’il tient sa langue, il tient la clé qui de ses chaînes le
délivre.”--FREDERIC MISTRAL, a poet friend of Daudet’s.
[22] NOTE.--Any good psychology is likely to help you understand the
nature of emotion in general.
IV
HUMOROUS STORIES
_The Ransom of Red Chief._--O. HENRY
_The Courting of T’Nowhead’s Bell._--J. M. BARRIE
Sydney Smith uses this word [humor] to cover any thing that
is ridiculous and laughable. So the epithet _comic_ is quite
indiscriminately applied. But we ought not to submit to this
loose application; for there are plenty of other words to make
proper distinctions for us amid our pleasurable moods, and permit
us to reserve humor for something which is neither punning, wit,
satire, nor comedy. Humor may avail itself of all these mental
exercises, but only as a manager casts his stock company to set
forth the prevailing spirit of a play. Comedy, for instance,
represents sorrows, passions, and annoyances, but shows them
without the sombre purpose of tragedy to enforce a supreme will
at any cost. All our weaknesses threaten in comedy to result in
serious embarrassments, but there is such inexhaustible material
for laughter in the whims and follies with which we baffle
ourselves and others, that the tragic threat is collared just in
time and shaken into pleasure. All kinds of details of our life
are represented, which tragedy could never tolerate in its main
drift towards the pathos of defeated human wills and broken hearts.
Tricks, vices, fatuities, crotchets, vanities, play their game for
a stake no higher than the mirth of outwitting each other; and
they all pay penalties of a light kind which God exacts smilingly
for the sake of keeping our disorders at a minimum. Comedy also
finds a great deal of its charm in the unconsciousness of an
infirmity. We exhibit ourselves unawares: each one is perfectly
understood by everybody but himself; so we plot and vapor through
an intrigue with placards on each back, where all but the wearers
can indulge their mirth at seeing us parading so innocently with
advertisements of our price and quality.--JOHN WEISS, _Wit, Humor,
and Shakespeare_.
HUMOROUS STORIES
There are as many kinds of humorous stories as there are kinds of
humor, ranging from gentle mirth, comedy, fun, and farce, to burlesque,
ridicule, satire and irony. Some stories are typically humorous in
their central situation, as Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County”; others abound in a whole series of funny
situations, as “The King of Boyville,” by William Allen White; others,
again, are rich in the humorous sayings by the writer, rather than
revealed in humorous plot, as in Artemus Ward’s sketch, “Horace
Greeley’s Ride to Placerville”; still others put the humor into the
speech of the characters, as in “The Phonograph and the Graft,” by O.
Henry; while yet others exhibit two or more of the foregoing kinds, and
are by turns gay, or whimsical, or satirical, as the characters and
happenings may permit, mingling humor of plot with mirth of word and
incident.
The two chief ingredients of humor--though for the most part it defies
analysis--are surprise, and a feeling of incongruity. But these must
be accompanied by no higher emotion. It would surprise us to meet the
incongruous sight of a half-clad child struggling in the snow, but
the vision would not be humorous--the higher emotion of pity would
preclude that. But to see an arrogant fop stripped of his finery and
floundering and spluttering in a snow drift into which he had been
tossed, _would_ be funny--to others.
Merely for a story to possess humor would not warrant our classing it
as a humorous story, for humor is a sunny ray gleaming often through
literature and life, but when the typical spirit and prevailing
treatment of the story are humorous, it may properly be so entitled.
HENRY AND HIS WRITINGS
William Sidney Porter, otherwise known as “O. Henry,” was born in
1867, in Greensboro, N. C.--the descendant of several governors of
that state, it may be remarked in passing. While still very young he
went to Texas and received his education at an academy there. Because
of poor health he was unable to attend college, so he spent two and
a half years of his early manhood on a cattle ranch. Following that
period came his journalistic work on the Houston _Post_, and a little
ten-page weekly story-paper of his own, _The Iconoclast_--afterwards
renamed _The Rolling Stone_--most of the stories for which he wrote
himself. After several years in Houston, he visited Central America
with a friend--a trip which, later, yielded rich material for his first
book. Then followed a short period as a drug clerk in Austin, Texas.
Next we see him in New Orleans, again embarked upon literary work;
and there it was that he first showed real promise as a short-story
writer, and there also that he adopted his unique pseudonym--the
surname of which was selected at random from a newspaper account of a
social function, and the initial letter because it was the “easiest
letter written.” About eight years before his death he came to New
York, in response to an offer from one of the magazine editors there,
and after that his name became well-known and his success assured.
He died in New York City, June 5, 1910, at the age of forty-two. His
three earliest books are perhaps the ones by which he is best known;
_Cabbages and Kings_, _The Four Million_, and _The Trimmed Lamp_.
Eleven volumes of short-stories comprise his literary output. The later
stories do not enhance his reputation, though some of them are in his
best vein--notably “The Ransom of Red Chief,” contained in the volume
_Whirligigs_, published the year of his death. His last book, _Sixes
and Sevens_, was issued posthumously, in 1911.
* * * * *
Of all short-story writers O. Henry was easily first as a master of
surprise. The sudden and often astounding reversals at the end of his
stories became delightfully characteristic, and the reader with the
O. Henry habit played a happy though always losing game with himself
in trying to forecast the denouement of each new story. Sometimes the
yarn-spinner would delight in leading us to curl our lip, and say,
“Pshaw, O. Henry is employing a rather old device--in fact, this is
quite trite--” and then all in an instant the sly phrase would peep
forth to show that we had been caught from ambush; for O. Henry had
scant reverence for the reader’s dignity--he poked fun at him as
laughingly as could Shakespeare himself, on occasion.
No other writer ever made slang so really funny, yet few knew better
the richness of serious English diction for really literary ends. Not
that he embellished his sentences, but that he appraised every word
at its true value before uttering it as literary coin. When he said
that one of his characters was “denounced by the name of----” (I have
forgotten what), he extracted the full essence from those six words,
and that is art.
Other short-story writers have been as trenchant in wit, others
as keen in observation, but none has known so wide a variety of
common-folk as O. Henry. Four great types he understood with rare
completeness: the Texan (_Heart of the West_), the Central American
(_Cabbages and Kings_), the middle-and lower-class New Yorker (_The
Four Million_),--and Everybody Else (_all of his eleven books of
short-stories_).
O. Henry’s advice to young writers as to the secret of short-story
writing is well known. “There are two rules,” he said. “The first
rule is to write stories that please yourself. There is no second
rule.” He was once facetiously asked if there were a second rule,
what that rule would be. “Sell the story,” he answered.--G. J.
NATHAN, _O. Henry in His Own Bagdad_. _The Bookman_, vol. 31.
O. Henry has often been called “the Yankee Maupassant,” and up to
a certain point the characterization is suggestive. His stories
have the swiftness and point of the anecdote, as Maupassant’s
have. He employs just enough art to keep alive the reader’s
interest for the laugh or the gasp to which everything else leads
up.... As a humorist he was American to the finger tips. That is
to say, he secured his effects by over-statement, which is the
salient characteristic of American humor.... Mark Twain was a world
humorist; O. Henry was an American humorist.--_A Typically American
Short-Story Writer_ (_Current Literature_, vol. 49).
The author seems to know almost every type of man--the rich and
portly financier, the “fly” newsboy or district messenger, the
denizens of the great hotels, the “salesladies,” the chorus girls,
the women in the shop, the raffish hangers-on of the saloons, the
gamblers, and the grafters.... Mr. Porter is a real _flâneur_ of
the American type, only, he confines himself to no boulevard, to
no city, to no state, nor even to a single country. The world,
in fact, is his oyster, and he has learned almost unconsciously
to open it and to extract from it alike the meat and the salty
juices.... He gets down to the very heart of things. He sees the
humour and the pathos blended; yet, on the whole, he is an optimist
... who believes that in every human being there is to be found
something good, however mixed it may be with other qualities;
and, like a true American, he can see and chuckle at the humour
of it all.--HARRY THURSTON PECK, _Some Representative American
Story-Tellers_, _The Bookman_, vol. 31.
FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON O. HENRY
_Some American Story-Tellers_, Frederic Taber Cooper (1911); _Life of
O. Henry_, Peyton Steger (1911); _O. Henry Biography_, C. Alphonso
Smith (1916). Magazine articles: _The Bookman: The Personal O. Henry_,
29, 345; 29, 579; _O. Henry’s Shorter Stories_, Justus Miles Forman,
31, 131; _Sketch of O. Henry_, 31, 456; _Representative American
Story-Tellers_, Harry Thurston Peck, 31, 477; _O. Henry in His Own
Bagdad_, G. J. Nathan, 31, 477. _North American Review_, 187, 781.
THE RANSOM OF RED CHIEF[23]
BY O. HENRY
[Sidenote: INTRODUCTION.]
[Sidenote: Setting and characters.]
[Sidenote: A favorite form of humor with O. Henry.]
It looked like a good thing; but wait till I tell you. We were down
South, in Alabama--Bill Driscoll and myself--when this kidnapping idea
struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, “during a moment of
temporary mental apparition”; but we didn’t find that out till later.
[Sidenote: Setting more specific.]
[Sidenote: Satire of contrast--frequent with author.]
2. There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called
Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and
self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a Maypole.
[Sidenote: The narrator is not consistently ungrammatical.]
[Sidenote: The introduction develops the foundation of the PLOT
SITUATION gradually.]
3. Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we
needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-lot
scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front steps
of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-rural
communities; therefore, and for other reasons, a kidnapping project
ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers that send
reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such things. We
know that Summit couldn’t get after us with anything stronger than
constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical blood-hounds and a diatribe
or two in the Weekly Farmers’ Budget. So, it looked good.
[Sidenote: The humor takes the form of situation, diction, satire, and
sly little surprises throughout.]
4. We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen
named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a mortgage
fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and forecloser.
The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and hair the color
of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-stand when you want to
catch a train. Bill and me figured that Ebenezer would melt down for a
ransom of two thousand dollars to a cent. But wait till I tell you.
[Sidenote: Setting for main action.]
5. About two miles from Summit was a little mountain, covered with a
dense cedar brake. On the rear elevation of this mountain was a cave.
There we stored provisions.
[Sidenote: MAIN ACTION BEGINS: FIRST PLOT INCIDENT.]
6. One evening after sundown, we drove in a buggy past old Dorset’s
house. The kid was in the street, throwing rocks at the kitten on the
opposite fence.
7. “Hey, little boy!” says Bill, “would you like to have a bag of candy
and a nice ride?”
[Sidenote: CONTRIBUTORY INCIDENT.]
[Sidenote: As a matter of technique, note that contributory incidents
might be varied or omitted without altering the plot _essentially_.
These are not all specifically noted in this story.]
8. The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.
9. “That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says
Bill, climbing over the wheel.
10. That boy put up a fight like a welterweight cinnamon bear; but, at
last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We
took him up to the cave, and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake.
After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away,
where we had hired it, and walked back to the mountain.
[Sidenote: “Bill” and “the Kid” serve as the contesting characters.]
11. Bill was pasting court-plaster over the scratches and bruises on
his features. There was a fire burning behind the big rock at the
entrance of the cave, and the boy was watching a pot of boiling coffee,
with two buzzard tail-feathers stuck in his red hair. He points a stick
at me when I come up, and says:
[Sidenote: Note title of the story.]
[Sidenote: “Bill” never smiles.]
12. “Ha! cursed paleface, do you dare to enter the camp of Red Chief,
the terror of the plains?”
[Sidenote: Note how the author uses swift changes to humorous effect.]
13. “He’s all right now,” says Bill, rolling up his trousers and
examining some bruises on his shins. “We’re playing Indian. We’re
making Buffalo Bill’s show look like magic-lantern views of Palestine
in the town hall. I’m Old Hank, the Trapper, Red Chief’s captive, and
I’m to be scalped at daybreak. By Geronimo! that kid can kick hard.”
[Sidenote: ESSENTIAL, or PLOT, SITUATION.]
14. Yes, sir, that kid seemed to be having the time of his life. The
fun of camping out in a cave had made him forget that he was a captive
himself. He immediately christened me Snake-eye, the Spy, and announced
that, when his braves returned from the warpath, I was to be broiled
at the stake at the rising of the sun.
15. Then we had supper; and he filled his mouth full of bacon and bread
and gravy, and began to talk. He made a during-dinner speech something
like this:
[Sidenote: Somewhat overdone, but we must judge the story not as comedy
but as farce, which blithely assumes the improbable as true.]
16. “I like this fine. I never camped out before; but I had a pet
'possum once, and I was nine last birthday. I hate to go to school.
Rats ate up sixteen of Jimmy Talbot’s aunt’s speckled hen’s eggs. Are
there any real Indians in these woods? I want some more gravy. Does the
trees moving make the wind blow? We had five puppies. What makes your
nose so red, Hank? My father has lots of money. Are the stars hot? I
whipped Ed Walker twice, Saturday. I don’t like girls. You dasent catch
toads unless with a string. Do oxen make any noise? Why are oranges
round? Have you got beds to sleep on in this cave? Amos Murray has got
six toes. A parrot can talk, but a monkey or a fish can’t. How many
does it take to make twelve?”
[Sidenote: ESSENTIAL SITUATION.]
17. Every few minutes he would remember that he was a pesky red-skin,
and pick up his stick rifle and tip-toe to the mouth of the cave to
rubber for the scouts of the hated paleface. Now and then he would let
out a war-whoop that made Old Hank the Trapper, shiver. That boy had
Bill terrorized from the start.
18. “Red Chief,” says I to the kid, “would you like to go home?”
[Sidenote: KEY.]
[Sidenote: Use of the unexpected.]
19. “Aw, what for?” says he. “I don’t have any fun at home. I hate to
go to school. I like to camp out. You won’t take me back home again,
Snake-eye, will you?”