Through the Shadows with O'Henry

by Эл Дженнингс

  His mind was gone. He was sent up for life to the Ohio penitentiary. No defense had been made for him.

  This was the story Ira told the warden after the operation at the prison hospital had restored his memory. The giant Hercules was no longer a gorilla man. Clean, quiet, spent, he sat like a kind old patriarch and told the aching tale.

  Darby made him caretaker in the condemned row. Ira cleaned out the cells, swept the room where the electric chair was kept and took the food to these convicts. Doomed men, counting the days between them and the chair, played checkers with the prison demon now. In the ghastly fear of the nightmare days before execution many a lost unfortunate found comfort in the benediction of Maralatt's sympathetic presence.

  I used to visit Ira in the condemned row. He was happy and serene. Some one had given him a pair of canary birds. The warden allowed him to raise them in his cell. First he had four, then ten, before long the dull, clamorous silence of the doomed men was filled with the joyous, thrilling song of many canary birds.

  It was a touching thing to see the white-haired giant sitting in his cell—the sunlight coming in in golden radiance through the window in the inner wall, and these yellow fluttering, singing things perched on his shoulders and resting in the palms of his great hands.

  Dark faces pressed against the bars of the condemned cells. "Ira, bring me a bird, let me hold it a moment!" one would call. "Ira, have Melba sing the "Toreador," another would grimly jest. In the near approach of their death, Ira and his birds and his gentle ministrations were like a prophecy of living hope.

  One day Warden Darby hurried into the office. He had been up to Cleveland. His voice was brusque. "I have discovered something," he said. "Send for Ira Maralatt, at once."

  "Sit down, Ira, and be calm." The warden could scarcely suppress the emotion of his own voice. "I've been up to Cleveland. Ran into the strangest thing. Guess you told a straight story, all right!"

  "Yes, sir," Ira answered, a frightened light in his eye. "Yes, sir it was the truth. Leastways, I'm pretty sure it was. Surely, I couldn't have dreamed it, could I?"

  "Now, that's all right. But listen to me. You had a wife, you say? Dora, that was her name, wasn't it? Well, she died—died right after they put her but of the cottage. The baby lived. She's alive today. I met her. She's pretty. She was adopted by wealthy people here in Columbus. They're friends of the governor. I just happened to talk about you. The girl's foster mother is a relative of your wife's. She thought you were a maniac. I told her the truth.

  "Ira, go over to the State shop, get a suit and shoes. You're pardoned. I took it up with the Governor. You go out tomorrow.

  With a shock of bewildered emotion that sent a quiver of sobbing happiness into his voice, Ira Maralatt put out his hands to the warden.

  "Does the girl know?"

  "Now, no, they haven't told her. It would be too sudden a strain."

  The next morning Ira, in his cheap suit, the squeaky prison shoes and a light straw hat, came to the warden's office. His gigantic frame was stooped and his face shot through with nervous excitement.

  "You did all this, Mr. Al," he said, the tears crowding into his eyes. "Just think what you did when you rolled that apple to me." He hesitated a moment.

  "Mr. Al, she won't ever recognize me, will she? I don't think I'd like her to know her father was the Prison Demon."

  When Darby handed him the pardon and the five dollars his hands shook. "I don't know how to thank you, warden!"

  "You don't have to—God knows you've paid for itl"

  Ira took two of his little canaries with him. "I'll give them to the girl for a present. I want to see her. I have to see her." He shook hands with Darby and me.

  A week passed. We heard no word from him. The warden became alarmed. "I wonder if anything could have happened to the old man?" Maralatt was but 46. His terrible suffering during 18 years in prison had broken even his magnificent strength. He seemed about 60. "I wonder if he went to see his daughter? Funny, I didn't hear."

  It worried Darby so much he inquired. He sent for the girl's foster mother. He told her of Ira and the canaries. Back came the frantic answer from the daughter herself. In an hour she was at the warden's office.

  "An old man with canaries?" Yes, an old man had come with them. She had the birds now. "What about it? That man, my father!"

  "Why didn't some one tell me? How dare they keep it from me. That's what he meant when he left. That's why he called me little Dora. Oh, what shall we do now?"

  In broken sentences she told of the mysterious visit of the old bird-peddler. Ira had gone up the steps of the palatial home where the girl lived. He had brought the little cage with the birds. Perhaps he had intended to tell Mary he was her father. The sight of her beauty, her culture, her happiness had chilled his ardor. The grand old fellow could not bear to spoil her glad youth with the tragedy of his bleak life. He had left with his claim unspoken.

  The girl was coming down the stairs as the old man rang the bell. The butler had denied him entrance. And the girl had run forward and ordered the old man to come in.

  "I thought, Miss, perhaps you would buy these birds. I'm poor and they are wonderful singers. I raised them myself."

  And just out of sympathy for the pathetic old stranger, the girl had bought the canaries. He would only take a dollar from her. She had not understood. He had looked at her and the tears had streamed down his cheeks.

  "Good-by, little Dora," he said as he left. He stood at the door as though he were about to say something further and then he looked at her with a queer, sad light on his face and went down the steps.

  They thought he was a harmless, unbalanced old oddity.

  "Where can I find him? Where shall I look for him? Why didn't some one tell me?" the girl was torn with grief. "Hurry, let us look now."

  Outside it was snowing. There had been a wind storm for a week. Maralatt's daughter and the warden searched in every street and alley for the old man.

  He was nowhere to be found.

  One night there was a knock at the guard-room door and a faint voice called out, "Let me come in, please." The captain of the guard opened the door. Ira Maralatt, his thin prison suit drenched and hanging in a limp rag about him, was kneeling in the snow at the prison door.

  "Let me in, please, I have nowhere to go."

  "No, no, go away, you're pardoned. I can't let you in, it's against the law," the captain answered.

  The warden was informed.

  "Who was it?" he asked.

  "Maralatt," they answered.

  He came rushing to the gate and ordered it opened. Maralatt was not there.

  Darby swore at them.

  "Don't you know we've been looking everywhere for him for weeks?"

  Beyond the walls, flinging himself along, the warden went on the search. He came back fifteen minutes later, the half -frozen Maralatt limping along at his side. He found him down in the snow near the river. Ira was burning up with fever. His face was already stricken with death.

  Everywhere he went asking for work, he said, they had refused him. They said he was too old. Finally he gave up trying.

  The warden sent for Maralatt's daughter.

  The young girl, graceful and white as an angel, flung herself into the old man's arms.

  "Don't die, daddy! Why didn't you tell me? See, I'm your girl, Mary. Just look at me! Oh, why didn't I know? If you only knew how many times I longed for a father—any one, any kind. Why didn't you tell me?"

  Maralatt looked at her in dim, feverish gladness. He took the delicate hands in his gigantic palm and turned to her.

  "I looked all over for you, Mary," he said. "I'm so glad you came."

  With a smile of wondrous peace on his lips, the prison demon sank back on the pillows. The old hero had won his palm at last.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  Methods of O. Henry; his promotion; the singing of Sally Castleton; O. Henry's indifference; the explanation.

  The shadows of a thou
sand Dick Prices and Ira Maralatts skulked like unhappy ghosts through the cell corridors of the Ohio penitentiary. The memory of a thousand tragedies seemed to abide in the very air of the ranges. Men who allowed themselves to come under the persistent gloom of these haunting presences went mad.

  The rest of us sought an outlet in gayety—in a hundred trivial little incidents that would bring a laugh out of all proportion to their funniness. In self-defense, the convict becomes hardened to the brutal suffering of the life about him.

  If any one had heard Billy Raidler, Bill Porter and I, as we talked and guffawed in the prison post- office, he would have rated us an unthinking trio of irresponsible scamps.

  We never aired our melancholy, but we would wrangle and jest by the hour over the probable course a fly batting itself against the post-office window might take if we let it out—over the origin of the black race and the finish of the Caucasian family.

  Or we would imagine that the prison was suddenly crushed to pieces in an earthquake, and we would begin to speculate on the menace of our presence to a terror-stricken society. No subject was too ridiculous to beguile an hour away.

  Porter was not supposed to visit the post-office while he was on duty at the hospital. As he never violated any of the prison rules, he always made it a point to come on business. Billy Raidler was a semi-invalid, and offered an unfailing excuse. Billy's amber hair was falling out. He hounded Porter to bring him a remedy.

  "Look here, Bill," the ex-train robber would say, "if you could get the arsenic out of that rock-ribbed old Coffin why can't you rouse the hair that ought to be on my scalp?"

  Warden Coffin, by some mistake, had been given an overdose of arsenic. Antidotes failed. Porter was called in. He saved the life of Coffin. This incident happened before my arrival at the "pen," but Raidler never gave Porter any peace about it. Porter always maintained that the warden was dying of fright, not of the arsenic. He said his antidote was "simplicity."

  "Simplicity or duplicity," Raidler countered, "you interfered with the ways of Divine Providence, Bill, when you saved Coffin's life. Now come through and give the archduke a helping hand. Put a little fertilizer on this unirrigated thatch of mine."

  So Porter came over one day, looking very important and complacent. One short, fat hand was stuck in his vest and in the other he carried a glove. Porter was an unmitigated dandy, even in the prison. He liked rich, well-fitting clothes. He abhorred noisy styles or colors. I never saw him when he was not well groomed and neat in his appearance.

  "Adonis Raidler," Porter ceremoniously laid the glove on the desk and drew forth a bulky, odorous package, "behold the peerless hair-regenerator compounded after tireless, scientific research by one unredeemed Bill Porter."

  Raidler grabbed the bottle and pulled out the cork. The heavy pungence of wintergreen filled the office.

  "The scent is in harmony with your esthetic soul, Billy," Porter said. "Elusive fragrance might not reach that olfactory nerve of yours."

  Billy doused some of the liquid on his head and beban to rub it viciously in. He had the most child-like faith in Porter's genius as a chemist. Every night after that I went to sleep fairly drugged by the cloud of wintergreen under which Billy submerged himself.

  Every morning he would bring over the comb to show me that fewer hairs had come out than the day before. Whatever Billy wanted his hair for, none of us could understand. The hair-restorer was nothing but bum bay rum outraged by an overdose of winter-green fragrance. Either Porter's patent, Billy's massaging or his faith stopped the emigration of his hair.

  "Now that your locks, thanks to my scientific skill, promise to grow as long as a musician's," Porter boasted, "why not get a fife, Billy, and learn to play it? The colonel here will teach you. And then the three of us will set forth from this fortress of mighty stone and like troubadours of old we will go a-minstreling from village to village."

  Porter had a guitar and he picked it with graceful touch. I played the tuba. If Billy could only play the fife, what a joyous troupe we would make!

  The idea tickled Porter. He was really in earnest about it. I think his ideal of existence was just such a free vagabondage. Many and many a time in the post-office he had brought up the subject.

  "Will you get that fife, Billy?" he said one night. "I have a plan. We will go over and serenade Miles Ogle. If he likes the tufted tinkle of our mellow madness, why forth let us stride to woo the belle demoiselles of all Beautydom!"

  Miles Ogle was the greatest counterfeiter in the United States. He was serving a long sentence at the Ohio "pen."

  "Would it not be kind to trill forth a gladsome melody to Miles ?" Porter's low, whispering voice lent an air of mystery to his lightest comment. I always felt like a conspirator when his hushed tones kept us captive. "Miles, you know, has a wholesome appreciation of the golden note!"

  Porter often spoke to me in these later prison days of his serenading in Austin. He said that he belonged to a troupe of singers. "We went about playing and serenading at the windows of all the fair maids in Austin!" Playing, singing, writing a sonnet, sketching a cartoon—what a lovable ne'er-do-well he would have been if this very breezy negligence had not caught him in a net of unfortunate circumstances at the bank.

  "I can think of nothing more delightful," he said, "than to strap a harp to my back and saunter from castle to castle living in the gracious beauty of poetry and music.

  "We have the dungeon here, but we lack both the drawbridge and the castle. How sweet it would be to sit in the silver moonlight, to summon the fairies from their leafy pavilions with the strains of our warblings! And then to lie back on the grass and weave fantastic dreams to lighten the drab heart of the world!"

  Porter was feeling very gay this night. A hope he had silently cherished. As always he came over to share his happiness. He had won an honor craved by every convict in the "stir."

  There was a light tap at the post-office door. Billy opened it and took something from the prisoner standing there and softly closed the door. He handed a card to me. In his own handwriting was Bill Porter's name and underneath a drawing of the steward's office.

  "Who brought the card?" I asked.

  "Bill; he's out there. Shall I let him in?" Raidler was in a whimsical mood. The light tap was repeated. I answered it.

  "Gentlemen, why be so exclusive?" Porter walked in with a very pompous air, his shoulders thrown back in an exaggerated swagger. "Permit me to inform you that I have changed my residence. The card will enlighten you as to my present domicile. I moved to-day."

  There was a new enthusiasm in his bantering voice. Porter had been appointed secretary to the steward. The position, with the single exception of the secretaryship to the warden, was the best in the pen. It took him beyond the walls. The steward's office was directly across the street from the pen, the edge of the building skirting the river.

  "Colonel, you would envy me---" the voice was a low chuckle.

  "I have a desk near the window a big desk with pigeon-holes. I have all the books I want. I can read and think without interruption. Now I can do something."

  Seldom had Porter alluded to his ambition to write. We sent out some of his stories, but he let us think they were done just for diversion. The new position gave him plenty of opportunity to try out his talents. He spent every spare moment "practicing," as he used to put it.

  We talked about literature and its purposes very often now, for I was even freer than Bill. I had been made secretary to Warden Darby. I had even managed to worm myself out of convict clothes. When I went into Darby's office I was brought into contact with all the distinguished visitors of the State and Nation.

  "I look pretty shabby," I hinted to Darby. "I ought to be more up to my position." He turned to me.

  "Sure," he said; "go over to the State shop and get the best suit of clothes you can order."

  He meant the best suit of convict clothes. I picked out a fine piece of serge and ordered as clever a suit as the Governor might
have worn. When Darby saw me without the stripes, he gasped.

  "Pretty slick," was the only comment he made. I never wore the stripes again.

  Nearly every night Porter would come across the street to visit Billy and me. We would talk by the hour, filling him up on the exploits of bandit days, spinning out the yarns in choice outlaw lingo. He listened captive. The stories seemed to suggest ideas to him. He never used anything just as it was told to him.

  "You ought to startle the world," he said to me one day.

  "How, by shooting it up?"

  "No, colonel, but you have a wonderful lot of stories. You can view life from a thousand viewpoints."

  I often wondered at Porter's methods. It seemed to me that he overlooked innumerable stories by his aloofness. He did not seem to have the slightest de- sire to ferret out the secrets of the men in the pen. The convict as a subject for his stories did not appeal to him.

  I am convinced that he felt himself different from the average criminal. It was not until he returned to the world and suffered from its coldness that his sympathies were broadened and his prejudices mellowed.

  One very odd experience revealed this trait in Porter. I used to play in the prison band every Sunday at chapel. One morning a song thrilled out from the the women's loft.

  It was the most magnificent contralto voice I have ever heard. It had a purple depth and intensity of feeling in its tones and at times there was a mournful, piercing pathos in it that struck into the soul like a heartbroken wail.

  I looked up, trying to trace the voice to its owner. And finally it seemed to me that a tall, proud-looking girl—a Southerner of exceeding beauty was the singer. Her skin was moon white in its purity, she had splendid gray eyes and hair that fell in a golden radiance about her face. I became greatly interested.

  "There's a girl in the pen, Bill," I told Porter, "and you want to come to chapel next Sunday and hear her sing."

  "Colonel, I fear you jest. I wouldn't go into the chapel to hear the seven choirs of angels let alone a wretched feminine convict!"

  Mrs. Mattie Brown was matron of the women's ward. I was sent over on business. I took the chance to satisfy my curiosity.