Al Jennings - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

Porter gives Dick the chance in the story that he never had in life. The history of the real Jimmy Valentine, shadowed, embittered, done to death in the stir, was just another of the tragedies that ripped through the film and showed Bill Porter the raw, cruel soul of the "upper crust."

Dick Price had been in prison ever since he was a little fellow of 11. There were a few wretched years in the outer world. It was not freedom.

Bill Porter took but one incident out of that tragic life for his story, "A Retrieved Reformation." His Jimmy Valentine is a rather debonair crook—but in the moment when he throws off his coat, picks up his tools and starts to open the safe, in that moment there is crowded the struggle and the sacrifice of a lifetime. It goes to the heart, quick and piercing, when Jimmy's chance of happiness seems lost; it sends the breath into the throat with a quiver of joy when he wins out in the end. Porter has touched the strings so deftly because the whole shadow of Dick Price's broken life hovers in the background of the story.

Dick was what convicts call a "stir bug." He had been in the pen so long he had become morose, sour, a brooding sort. But he was as square a man as Christ ever put on the earth. Dick was the fellow that tried to save me from the beating and the contract after my attempt to escape. I had done him a little favor and he was ready to have his flesh torn to ribbons in gratitude.

He was in under the "habitual criminal act." In Ohio a man caught at his third offense is given a life sentence in the penitentiary and denied all privileges. Only the man that has been half blinded in solitary, that has been cooped in wretched cells and denied the right to read or write—only the fellow that has had the spirit beaten down in him by the agonized screams of tortured men, can know what Dick Price's sentence meant.

He was about 20 when he was thrown into prison on his third offense. And because it was the third he was robbed of all human comforts. He couldn't have a book or a paper. He wasn't allowed to write a letter; he wasn't even allowed to receive one. And if there was a kind, anxious soul in the outer world eager to hear from him, to see him, it made no difference. For 16 years not one stray word, not one bit of cheer had come to him from the world.

I never saw anything so terrible as the way that fellow's heart was breaking. He had an eternal hankering to hear from his old mother. It whipped him ceaselessly. He wanted to know if she was alive, if she had to work as hard as before, if she thought of him. He had a passion to get a word from her that was driving him mad.

I got the word for him. And he was ready to die for me in his gratitude. Because of that word he opened the safe of the Press-Post Publishing Company.

I met Dick first walking about the cell ranges at night. It was just a few months after I arrived. I was in the transfer office and was about the last man to be locked up. Dick had been there so long the deputies trusted him and gave him passes to leave his cell and wander about the corridors. I used to see his small, nervous figure pacing back and forth. He had a keen, dark face and a restless gray eye. One night I came upon him sitting in a corner, eating a piece of pie.

"Have a slice, pardner?" he called to me. The other men shunned Dick a bit because he was moody and nerve-racked because, too, he had a sharp, almost brilliant mind, much superior to the average convict.

I accepted, and it was then that he told me of his longing for news of his mother. "I tell you it's hell, to think the way she's made to suffer. I'll bet you she stands outside these infernal walls at night—I'll bet she'd tear her heart out to hear from me. You know---"

Dick swung into his story. Men in prison hunger for conversation. They will tell their histories to any one who will listen to them.

Little Dick was a gutter snipe, he said. His father was a Union soldier He died of delirium tremens when Dick was a few years old. After that the kid just belonged down in the alley with the tin cans. His mother took in washing. She tried to give the boy enough to eat. She sent him to school. Sometimes there was soup and bread for dinner ; sometimes Dick took his meals out of the rubbish piles.

And one day the poor, ravenous little ragpicker broke into a box car and stole a 10-cent box of crackers.

"And they sent me to hell for the rest of my life for that," a look of bitterness lashed like a dark wave over his face. "I might have put these to good use if I'd had a chance." He looked down at his hands. They were the strongest, most perfectly shaped hands I have ever seen. The fingers were long and tapered, muscular yet delicate. "They said my mother didn't take care of me. They sent me to the Mansfield reformatory and they turned me out a master mechanic at 18."

His graduation papers were of no value. A man named E. B. Lahman controlled all the bolt works in the Ohio penitentiary. Convicts loathed him, and because he knew the danger of employing any upon their discharge, he made it a rule that no ex-convict would be given work in his shops. Dick Price had a job there. Somebody found that he had been dragged up in a reform school. He was fired.

He couldn't get a job. His mechanical training made him adept at safemanipulating. He cracked one, took a few hundred dollars, got a jolt for it.

It was the same story again when he was released. No one would give him a job. He could starve or steal. He cracked another safe, got caught and was given life.

"You know, the old woman came to the court," he told me. "And, gee, I can hear it yet, the way she bawled when they took me away. It's just awful. You know, Jennings, if you could write to her, I'd die for you."

I managed to get a note smuggled out to her. The most pitiful broken, little mispelled scrawl I ever saw came back.

And when that bent, heart-broken old mother stumbled across the guardroom floor and stood with her feeble hands shaking the wicket, I'd like to have died. I couldn't speak. Neither could she.

She just stood there with the tears running down her rough cheeks and her poor chin trembling.

Dick's mother had a faded red shawl wrapped about her head. She was twisted and bent. A bit of gray hair, coarse and curly, fell over her ear. She had fixed herself up, thinking she might catch a glimpse of her boy:

"And they won't let his old mother see the lad, my poor little Dick—the poor child!" The sobs caught in her throat. She pressed her face against the wicket, her gnarled wasted hands shaking the iron bars.

The poor old creature was just crazy for a sight of her son. Dick was not 100 yards away. They wouldn't let these two have that scrap of joy. Not in four million years could the law understand the agony it had wrought.

"But I thought I might catch the look of him, by chance, maybe." She looked up at me with a pitiful hope in her dim eyes. It hurt the heart to wound the poor creature. I had to tell her that Dick could not come, that I had sent for her, that I would tell Dick anything she wanted to say, that she must not let the guards know who she was.

"Dick is the foreman of the machine shop and the smartest man in the prison," I told her. A prideful smile came like a sunbeam into her eye.

"Sure, I know it, that pert he was a baby." She began to grope into the pocket of her skirt and brought out an envelope tied in red ribbon. Carefully wrapped in brown paper were a couple of pictures. One was of a big-eyed, laughing youngster of four or five.

"A prettier bairn never drew breath. 'Tis happy we were in that time. 'Twas before the drink got the better of poor John."