So Tyler wired the balance, but the promised phone message from the
modest and secluded lodgings never came. The first tidings came from a
hospital, to which O. Henry had been taken mortally ill with pneumonia.
He had received the money, retained the margin, and started north.
But once he had found himself at the gates of Bagdad, he had stood
wide eyed for a moment and then drifted happily off among the bazaars,
stumbling on some old cronies, and given himself over to celebration
of his return from exile. Tyler never saw him again. And the great
American play--“The World and the Door”, a comedy in three acts by the
author of “The Four Million”--was never written.
_Mary Austin_
In “_The Bookman Anthology of Verse_” I wrote of Mrs. Austin as follows:
“Few people in America understand native rhythms as does Mary Austin.
Born in Illinois, she has divided her life between the Far West and
the East, making it her special effort to understand the country as a
whole. She has written plays, essays, novels and studies of American
life. Her work among the Indians has given her not only an unusual
mastery of subtle cadences in prose and poetry; but a certain mystic
sense of the trend of national feeling that approaches the visionary.
A commanding presence, an intuitive understanding and a discriminating
tolerance make Mrs. Austin a truly vital force in American life and
literature.”
This, I think, did not do justice to her extraordinary vitality, her
knowledge of the Indians and the desert, her command of folklore and of
language. Her platform manner, her control of an audience, makes her
one of the best lecturers I know. An unusual person, Mary Austin. She
likes to be called Chisera, or “The Witch Woman”. She seems almost
that.