Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"Colonel, do they starve a man's soul and kill his mind like that?" He said nothing more. He seemed shocked and bitter. In a moment he got up to go. At the door he turned.

"Well for him that he has not much longer to live."

The words sent a gust of white fury over me. I began to fear again. I went over to the ranges every night to see Dick. He was getting worse. I begged the warden to press his case.

At last the day came when the Governor was to pass upon it. There was nothing for him to do but to sign it. Dick had performed his part of the bargain. The State could now pay off its obligation. I told Dick.

"You can have a nice little feed with the old woman day after tomorrow," I said. He didn't answer. He didn't want me to know he hoped, but in spite of himself his breath came hurriedly and he turned his back quickly.

I knew then that this silent, grateful fellow had been waiting and counting on that pardon. I knew that the thought of freedom and a few years of peace had sustained him in all the suffering of these last months.

The next morning I got the word from the warden. The pardon had been denied.

When the warden gave me that word I felt as though a black wall had dropped suddenly before me, cutting off the light and the air. I felt shut-in, smothered, dumb.

What would poor Dick do now? What would he think of me? If I had not told him it was coming up I might have jollied him along. But he knew. He would be waiting for me. All day he would be thinking of it. I would have to see him in the corridors that night.

When I went into his range, there he was, pacing up and down the corridor. I looked at the stooped, emaciated form. The prison clothes hung from his bones as though he were a peg. His haggard face turned upon me a look of such pathetic eagerness I felt my courage sinking in a cold, speechless misery.

I tried to tell him. The words got caught in the gulp in my throat.

The flush faded from his dark cheek until his skin looked the color of a gray cinder, with the over-brilliant eyes glaring forth like burning coals. He understood. He stood there staring at me like a man who has heard his own death sentence. And I could not say a word to him. After a moment, age-long with its dull agony, he put out his hand.

"It's all right, Al," his voice was a choking whisper. "I don't care. Hell, it doesn't make any difference to me."

But it did. It finished him. It broke his heart. He hadn't the courage to fight it out any longer. A month later they took him to the prison hospital.

He was dying. There was no chance of a cure. I wanted to write to his old mother. But it would only have pained her. They wouldn't have let her come to him. The warden couldn't break the State's law. So I just went to see him every few nights. I sat and talked to him. As I would come up to his cot he would put out his hand and grin. And when I looked into those quick, intelligent, game eyes, a stab of pain went through me. He never spoke of his old mother now.

At this time I was a somewhat privileged character in the prison. s the warden's secretary, I could visit any department at will. Otherwise Dick Price might have died and I would never have had even one chance to see him.

When a convict went to the hospital he was cut off from all communication with his former fellows.

Men lay sometimes for months in their cots without ever a word from the only friends they had. They suffered and died without one touch of human sympathy.

I was the only visitor Dick had. Men had called him a "stir bug" because of his erratic, moody ways because, too, of his uncanny genius as a mechanic. As he lay there coughing his life away, he was the gentlest and the calmest soul in the prison. He viewed his suffering and his certain death as a spectator might have. The queerest, oddest fancies possessed him. One night he turned to me with a whimsical dreaminess in his voice.

"Al, why do you suppose I was born?" he asked. "Would you say that I had ever lived?"

I couldn't think of any answer to make. I knew that I had lived and got a lot of joy out of it. I wasn't sure about Dick. He didn't wait for my verdict.

"Remember that book your friend Bill slipped me? I read every story in it. It showed me just how I stack up. It told me what a real life might mean. I'm 36 years old and I'm dying without ever having lived. Look at this, Al."

He handed me a scrap of paper with a long list of short phrases on it.

"Those are the things I've never done. Think of it, Al. I never saw the ocean, never sang, never danced, never went to a theatre, never saw a good painting, never said a real prayer---.

"Al, do you know that I never talked to a girl in my life? Never had one of them so much as give me a kind look? I'd like to figure out why I was born."

There came a week when I was so busy I did not go to see him. One night very late I dropped into the post-office to talk to Billy Raidler. Down the alley toward the dead house came the big negro porter, whistling and shuffling along. Billy and I used to look out, inquire the name of the stiff, and pay no further respects. We were familiar with death and suffering. This night the negro rapped at the window.

"Massa Al, can't nebber guess who I'se got with me to-night?"

"Who, Sam?" we called out.

"Little Dick Price."

Little Dick, thrown into the wheelbarrow, with nothing but an old rag over his body, his head lopped out at one end, his feet hung over the other. Sam rattled the barrow off to the dead house.

I stayed with Billy that night. Both of us were fond of Dick. We couldn't sleep. Billy sat up in bed.

" 'Sleep, Al?" he called.

"Hell, no."

"God, don't it give you the creeps to think of poor little Dick alone down there in that trough?"

I went down to the dead house the next morning. Dick was already closed up in the rough wooden box. The one-horse spring wagon that carried off the unclaimed convict dead was waiting to take him to the potter's field. I was the only one who followed him. The wagon started off at a trot. I ran ahead of it to the east gate. Old Tommy, the gateman, stopped me.

"What you after, Mr. Al?"

"I'm just coming as far as I can with a friend of mine," I told him.

The gate swung to. It was a chill, foggy morning. I looked out. Leaning against a tree was a poor, huddled, bent little figure, with an old red shawl drawn tight about the shoulders. She had her hands clasped tight together, her elbows dug into her waist, and she was swinging those hands up and down and shaking her head in a grief so abject, so desolate, it sent a broken sob even into old Tommy's voice.

"Tommy, go speak to her," I said. "That's Dick's mother."

"Aw, gee, ain't that hell! The poor old soull"

The spring wagon rattled by. Tommy put up his hand to the driver. "Go slow there, ye heartless boob. That there is the poor lad's old mother."

The driver reined in the horse. Dick's mother lurched, against the wagon and looked in at; the wooden box. She was swaying from side to side like a crazy thing.

All that she had on earth—the boy whose tragic, broken life had been her crucifixion—was in that crude box. The wagon jogged off—the trembling, heart-piercing old figure half running, half falling along the road after it.

Society had taken the last farthing of its debt from Dick Price and it had beaten his mother into the dust in the cruel bargain.

Such is the story of Jimmy Valentine as it unfolded itself in the Ohio penitentiary. O. Henry takes the one great episode in that futile life and with it he wins the tears and the grateful smiles of the nation. In that throbbing silence, when the ex-con opens the safe and the little sister of the girl he loves is saved from suffocation, Jimmy as he might have been, not Jimmy as he was, is before us. Few who have breathed hard in that gripping moment would have denied Dick Price his chance, would have refused him the pardon he earned, would have doomed him to his forlorn and lonely death in the prison hospital.