Through the Shadows with O'Henry

by Эл Дженнингс

  "Would you ladies like to come out and get a square meal?" Mame looked nervously about the room. Sue stood up. "Thank you," she said. "It would be quite agreeable."

  We started toward the Caledonia Hotel, where Porter had his study. "We're making a mistake, Sue. We'll all get pinched. The instant we step into a hash house with these gents, the bulls'll nab us. We better beat it. We're makin' an awful mistake."

  "We're nuthin' but mistakes anyhow. If there's a chance to eat I'm gonna take it." Sue's talk vas a curious blend of dignity, bitterness and slang.

  "You're making no mistake."

  Porter led the way at a quick pace. "Where we are going the foot of a bull has never thumped."

  It was after one o'clock when we reached the hotel. Porter ordered a beefsteak, potatoes, coffee, and a crab salad. He served it on the table where so many of his masterpieces were written. In that outlandish situation, w r ith Mame sitting on a box, Sue in an easy chair, and Porter with a towel over his arm like a waiter serving us, one of those stories came into being that morning.

  "Do you make much coin?" When he talked to them he was one of them. He adopted their language and their thought.

  "Ain't nuthin' to be made."

  Mame was stowing in the beefsteak and swallowing it with scarcely a pause. "All we can git is enough to pay two dollars a week for a room. An' if we're lucky we eat and if we ain't we starve, 'cept we meet sporty gents like yerselves."

  "You don't know what it is to be hungry," Sue added quietly. She was ravenously hungry, and it was with an obvious jerk of her will that she kept herself from the greedy quickness of Mame. "You ain't suffered as we have."

  "I guess we ain't." Bill winked at me. "It's kind o' hard to get a footing here, I suppose."

  "Well, you guessed it that time. Sure is. If you come through with yer skin, you're lucky. And if you're soft, you die." Sue sat back and looked at her long white hands.

  "That's what Sadie done. Her and me come from Vermont together. We thought we could sing. We got a place in the chorus and for a while we done fine. Then the company laid off and it came summer and there was nuthin' we could do.

  "We couldn't get work anywhere and we were hungry everlastin'. Poor Sadie kept a-moonin' around and thinkin' about Bob Parkins and prayin' he'd turn up for her like he said he would. She was plumb nutty about him and when we left he sed he'd come and git her if she didn't make good.

  "After a while I couldn't stand it no longer and I went out to git some grub. I didn't give a darn how I got it. But Sadie wouldn't come. She said she couldn't break Bob's heart. He was bound to come. I came back in a coupla weeks. I'd made a penny. I thought I'd stake Sade to the fare back home. She was gone. She'd give up hopin' for Bob, and just made away with herself. Took the gas route in that very room where we used to stay."

  Porter was pouring out the coffee and taking in every word.

  "I guess Bob never showed up, did he?"

  "Yes, he turned up one day. Said he'd been lookin' high and low for us. Been to every boarding house in the town searchin' for Sade. I hated to tell him. Gee, he never said a word for the longest time.

  "Then he asked me all about Sade and if she'd carried on and why she hadn't let him know. I told him everything. All he said was 'Here, Sue, buy yerself some grub'.

  "He gave me five dollars and me and Mame paid the rent and we been eatin' on it since. That was a week ago. I haven't seen Bob since. He was awful cut up about it."

  Sue talked on in short, jerky sentences, but Porter was no longer paying the slightest attention to her. Suddenly he got up, went over to a small table and came back with a copy of "Cabbages and Kings."

  "You might read this when you get time and tell me what you think of it."

  The supper was finished. Porter seemed anxious to be rid of us all. The girls were quite pleased to leave. The little one looked regretfully at the bread and meat left on the table.

  "You got plenty for breakfast!"

  There was a paper on the chair. I shoved the food into it and tied it up. "Take it with you." Sue was embarrassed.

  "Mame! For Gawd's sake, ain't you greedy!" Mame laughed.

  "Rainy day like to come any time for us."

  Porter was preoccupied. He scarcely noticed that they were gone. The idea had been tracked. It possessed him. He already smelled the fragrance of mignonette.

  Sue had yielded her story to the magician. It went through the delicate mill of his mind. It came out in the wistful realism of "The Furnished Room."

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  Quest for material; Pilsner and the Halberdier; suggestion of a story; dining with editors; tales of train-robberies; a mood of despair.

  If Porter caught the Voice of the City as no other has; if he reached the veins leading to its heart, it is because he was an inveterate prospector, forever hurling his pick into the asphalt. He struck it rich in the streets and the restaurants of Manhattan. Running through the hard-faced granite of its materialism, he came upon the deep shaft of romance and poetry.

  Shot through the humdrum strata, the mellow gold of humor and pathos glinted before his eyes. New York was his Goldfield. But his lucky strike was muscled by Relentless Purpose, not Chance. Nq story-writer ever worked more persistently than O. Henry. He was the Insatiable Explorer.

  The average man adopts a profession or a trade. In his leisure he is glad to turn his attention to other hobbies. With O. Henry, his work made up the sum total of his life. The two were inseparable.

  He could no more help noticing and observing and mentally stocking up than a negative could avoid recording an image when the light strikes it. He had a mind that innately selected and recounted the story.

  Sometimes he came upon the gold already separated, as in the story Sue told him. Sometimes there was but a sparkle. In fact, it was seldom that he took things as he found them.

  His gravel went through many a wash before it came out O. Henry's unalloyed gold. What would have been but so much crushed rock for another, gleamed with nugget dust for him. So it was with "the Halberdier of the Little Rheinschloss."

  "I'll introduce you to Pilsner," he said to me one night, when we started out on our rounds. "You'll like it better than your coffee strong enough to float your bandit bullets."

  We went to a German restaurant on Broadway. We took a little table near the foot of the stairs. In one of his stories O. Henry says that "the proudest consummation of a New Yorker's ambition is to shake hands with a spaghetti chef or to receive a nod from a Broadway head waiter." That mark of deference was often his.

  The Pilsner was good, but the thing of chief interest to me was a ridiculous figure standing at the landing of the stairs tricked out as an ancient Halberdier. I couldn't take my glance from him. He had the shiftiest eyes and the weakest hands. The contrast to his mighty coat of steel was laughable.

  "Look at that weak-kneed saphead, Bill. Picture him as an ancient man-at-arms!" His fingers were yellow with nicotine to the knuckles.

  Porter looked at him, sat back, finished his beer in silence. "It's a good story." That was all he said. We went home early and both of us were sober.

  Whenever this happened we used to sit in Bill's room and talk until one or two o'clock. This night it was different.

  "Are you sleepy tonight, colonel?" he said. "I think I shall retire."

  Whenever his mind was beset with an idea he lapsed into this extremely formal manner of speaking. It was bitterly irritating to me. I would leave in a kind of huff determined not to bother him again. But I knew that he was not conscious of his coldness. He was remote because his thought had built a barrier about him. He could think of nothing but the story in his mind.

  I had an appointment with him for noon time. I decided not to keep it unless he remembered. At about 10 minutes after 12 he called me up.

  "You're late. I'm waiting," he said.

  When I got to his room the big table where he did his writing was littered with sleets of paper. All over the floor were sc
raps of paper covered with writing in long hand.

  "When I get the returns on this I'll divvy up with you." Porter picked up a thick wad of sheets.

  "Why?"

  "It was you that gave me the thought."

  "You mean the cigarette fiend in the armor?"

  "Yes; I've just finished the yarn."

  He read it to me. Just the merest glint had come to him from that steel-plated armor. The Halberdier himself would never have recognized the gem Porter's genius had polished for him. The story just as it stands today was written by Porter some time between midnight and noon.

  And yet he looked as fresh and rested as though he had slept ten hours.

  "Do you always grab off an inspiration like that and dash it off without any trouble?"

  Porter opened a drawer in the desk. "Look at those." He pointed to a crammed-down heap of papers covered with his long freehand.

  "Sometimes I can't make the story go and I lay it away for a happier moment. There is a lot of unfinished business in there that will have to be transacted some day. I don't dash off stories. I'm always thinking about them, and I seldom start to write until the thing is finished in my mind. It doesn't take long to set it down."

  I have watched him sit with pencil poised sometimes for hours, waiting for the story to tell itself to his brain.

  O. Henry was a careful artist. He was a slave to the dictionary. He would pore over it, taking an infinite relish in the discovery of a new twist to a word.

  One day he was sitting at the table with his back to me. He had been writing with incredible rapidity, as though the words just ran themselves automatically from his pen. Suddenly he stopped. For half an hour he sat silent, and then he turned around, rather surprised to find me still there.

  "Thirsty, colonel? Let's get a drink."

  "Bill," my curiosity was up, "does your mind feel a blank when you sit there like that?" The question seemed to amuse him.

  "No. But I have to reason out the meaning of words."

  There was no ostentation in Porter, either in his writing or in his observations. I never saw him making notes in public, except once in a while he would jot a word down on the corner of a napkin.

  He didn't want other people to know what he was thinking about. He didn't need to take notes, for he was not a procrastinator. He transmuted his thoughts into stories while the warm beat throbbed in them.

  Careless and irresponsible as he seemed--almost aimless at times—I think there was in Bill Porter a purposiveness that was grim and so determined that he would allow no external influence to interfere with his plan of life.

  I have sometimes felt that this passionate will to be himself at all times made him so aloof and reclusive. He sought companionship freely with strangers, for he could dispense with their company at will. He wanted to live untrammeled. And he did. He was incorrigibly stubborn-minded. Of all the men I have ever known, Bill Porter ran truest to the natural grain.

  As soon as New York became aware of O. Henry's lucky strike, it was ready with its meed of homage. An eager, rushing multitude sought him out. Doors were flung wide. The man who had but a few years before been separated from his fellows could now stand among the proudest, commanding, as he would, their smiles and their tears. He preferred solitude. Not because he disdained company—not that he feared exposure, but because he despised deceit and hypocrisy. And these, he felt, were the inevitable attendants of men and women in their social intercourse.

  "Al, I despise these literati." Many a time he voiced the sentiment. "They remind me of big balloons. If one were to puncture their pose, there would be an astonished gasp as when one sticks a pin in the stretched rubber. And then they would be no more—not even a wrinkled trace of them!"

  They could sue him with invitations. He had no time to waste. He was not vain, and never did he consciously try to impress any one. He was not of that righteous type that takes itself and its beliefs with ponderous seriousness, insisting that the world hear them out and then applaud.

  Bill Porter was too busy watching others to take much heed about his own reflection. Because he was eminently self-sufficient, he would not allow circum- stances to set his friendships for him.

  But with the few who were the elect to him; who knew him and understood him he was the droll and beloved vagabond. Reticence would drop from him. He was in his element—the troubadour of old, the sparkle of his gracious wit bubbling through every breath of the heavier discourse.

  "I have a treat for you, colonel. Tonight you shall meet the Chosen Few."

  He would tell me no more, seeming to take a boyish delight in my irritable suspense. The Chosen Few happened to be Richard Duffy, Oilman Hall and Bannister Merwin. We had dinner together at the Hoffman House.

  It was a treat—for that night I saw O. Henry as he might have been if the buoyant happiness that seemed to be his native disposition had not been deepened and saddened by the distressing humiliation of his prison years.

  Porter handed me the menu. He was a bit finicky about his eating. "Gentlemen," he said to the distinguished editors, "the colonel will pick out a surprise for us." I think Porter considered me somewhat brazen because I was not awed by this presence of the elite.

  "I could order bacon broiled on the hickory coals, terrapin, sour-dough biscuit and coffee strong enough to float the bullets—how would you like it, Bill?"

  "Don't endanger my future in my chosen profession by making me hit the tracks for the West."

  Duffy and Hall looked at Porter as though a sudden vision of his portly figure galloped before them on horseback and swinging a lariat. Porter caught the question in their eyes. He was in a tantalizing mood.

  "You wouldn't mind edifying the company with a discourse on the ethics of train-robbing, would you, colonel?" The three guests sat up, tense with interest. It was just the setting I loved. It gave me a big bump of joy to throw a shock into those blase New Yorkers.

  Yarn after yarn I reeled off for their absorption. I told them all the funny incidents connected with the stickup of the trains in the Indian Territory.

  I made them see the outlaw, not as a ruthless brute, but as a human being possessed of a somewhat different bias or viewpoint from their own. Porter sat back, expansive and sedate, with his large gray eye lighted with amusement.

  "Colonel, I stood in your shadow tonight," he said to me as we were parting at the Caledonia.

  "What do you mean, Bill?"

  "My friends to whom I introduced you ignored me. I was rather some pumpkins with Hall and Duffy until you came, and tonight I was forgotten by them. Would you mind the next time we are together telling them I held the horses for you?"

  "Honest, Bill, do you mean it?"

  "Yes, I think it would add to my prestige."

  A few days later we were at Mouquin's. I was stringing out a lurid outlaw story. I stopped in the middle and turned to Porter, as though my memory had slipped and I had overlooked an important detail. "Bill, you remember," I said, "that was the night you held the horses." Duffy dropped his fork, sending out a roar of laughter. He reached over and grabbed Porter's hand. "By Jove, I always suspected you, Bill Porter."

  "I want to thank you, colonel, for those kind words. You have done me a great service. I sold two stories this morning on the strength of my presumed association with you," Porter said a day later. "Those fellows think now that I really belonged to your gang. I have become a personage."

  Not for worlds, though, would Porter have openly acknowledged to these men that he had been a prisoner in the Ohio penitentiary. Bob Davis, I am certain, knew it. He practically admitted it to me. Duffy and Hall felt the mysterysurrounding the man.

  "Colonel, every time I step into a public cafe I have the horrible fear that some ex-con will come up and say to me 'Hello, Bill; when did you get out of the O. P.'?"

  No one ever did this. It would have been an insufferable shock to Porter's pride, especially when his success was new to him. After all the jovial warmth of that dinner a
t Mouquin's, after all the banter and gayety, the weight of oppressive sadness came down upon him.

  The memory of the past; the troubled fear of the future—the two together seemed ever to press like gigantic forces against the bonny happiness of the present for Bill Porter.

  I was recklessly gay. I had taken plenty of the "wine that boils when it is cold." In the exuberance I asked all the gentlemen present to be my escort across the river. Porter kicked me under the table, turning on me a straight, meaningful look.

  "Colonel, I am the only one that has nothing to do except yourself. These gentlemen are editors. I shall be glad to act as your escort and keep you from walking off the boat. The sea never gives up its dead."

  "I didn't want those men to be with us in our last moments," he said when we were crossing the Hudson.

  "Good God, Bill, you aren't going to jump over and pull me with you?"

  "No. But I think I would rather enjoy it."

  He had not been shamming gayety at the dinner. When a full tide, it had swept over him. But there was always an undertow of shadows and whenever he was alone it carried him out often to a bitter depth of gloomy depression.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  Supper with a star; frank criticism; O. Henry's prodigality; Credit at the bar; Sue's return.

  A human prism he was—refracting the light in seven different colors. But different in this he was not predictable. Reds and blues and yellows were in his moods, but sometimes the gold would predominate and sometimes the indigo. Bill Porter's was a baffling spectrum of gay and somber hues.

  These moods of his were inscrutable to me. At times he was so aloof I could scarcely get a word from him. I would go away seething with anger. And in an hour he would come over with the gentlest and subtlest persuasion to wheedle me into friendliness.

  "Bill, you've got a feminine streak in you; you're so damned unreliable." I meant it for a stinging rebuke.

  Porter looked at me, putting on a foolish simper. "It makes me quite interesting and enigmatic, doesn't it, colonel?"