Through the Shadows with O'Henry
Page 23
"We used to sing under her window, once in a while. She came to me months ago. She knew my whole history. She came as a friend.
"She was in terrible straits, she said. Her Southern pride wouldn't let her ask any of her circle. She wanted a thousand. I had $150 Oilman Hall had sent me. I let her have it. She has been to see me regularly ever since. I've emptied my pockets on that table for her. Now I'm through. I could have killed her."
I knew the violence of anger that had once before swept Bill Porter when he leaped at the Spanish don. He sat back now, spent and nerveless. But I was afraid to leave him alone. I stayed there all night.
"She'll never trouble you, Bill. You should have called her bluff the first time. You've nothing to lose."
"I have much to lose, colonel. I don't look at things as you do."
The incident was closed. The woman did not bother him again, but Porter's ups and downs continued their unhappy succession.
Not blackmail, but fantastic liberality kept his pocket empty. To many a down-and-outer he must have seemed a veritable "scattergold."
I remember one quaint, elfin-faced girl. Porter supported both her and her mother.
"They were very kind to me when I had no friends in Pittsburgh," he said to me one evening, when he brought the girl to dinner with us at Mouquin's. "They came to New York and were stranded. I am but meeting an obligation."
I could see nothing to this skimpy brown remnant of a girl. She looked like a wistful little gypsy. But Porter loved her, and she worshiped him with the fidelity of a dog. She used to send him odd, outlandish presents that were an abomination to his cultured taste. But he would pretend to like them.
She was bright and happy, but she had little to say. Many a time the three of us had dinner together in New York on my first visit. There was a certain fairy- like charm to her—she was so unobtrusive. We scarcely noticed her presence. She was content to listen in smiling quiet to Porter's talk.
When he spoke to her it was with the gentle deference due a queen.
One night he put a red and green handkerchief in his coat pocket. I looked at him amazed. Rich, harmonious colors were his preference. He smiled. "She sent it up to me. I don't wish to wound her.' Prince, then pauper, Prodigal one day—broke the next. Whim was his bookkeeper. It piled a big deficit on the prosy, matter-of-fact side of the ledger, but it splashed the inner, realer pages with a bounteous, unaccountable credit. With a higher kind of reckoning it gave us Bill Porter—reckless of the superficial values ; unerring in his devotion to the better standard as he saw it.
CHAPTER XXXII.
New Year's eve; the last talk; "a missionary after all."
As one who stood in the world's highway while the rushing multitude in the ever shifting pageant of Life went by, each scene flashing upon the vivid negative of his mind a new record, each picture different, unexpected, developing new lights and shades—like that in his relation to Life was Bill Porter.
For him there could be no monotony, no "world overrun by conclusions, no life moving by rote." Ever new, ever incalculable, ever absorbing—the moving drama gripped his mind with its humor and its tragedy; it held his heart with its joy and its sadness. Desolate it was at times and piercing in its pathos—uninteresting or dull, never. Porter lived in a quivering, tense excitement, for he was one who watched and in a little understood the vast hubbub of striving, half-blind humanity.
He had about him an air of suspense, of throbbing expectancy, as though he had just concluded an adventure or were just about to set forth on one. Whenever I saw him I had an instinctive question on my lips---"What's up, Bill?"
His attitude piqued curiosity. I felt it the day he came down from the veranda of the American consulate and began, in that low-pitched voice, the droll and solemn dissertation on the Mexican liquor situation.
It was with him through the dreary unhappiness of the prison years and in the big struggle to come back in New York. In every turn of that devious route, even through the noisome tunnel, he strode with brave and questing tread. Life never bored him. From the first moment I met him until the last he never lost interest.
"You shall have a strange and bewildering experience tonight, my brave bandit, and I shall have the joy of watching you."
It was the last day of 1907. For hours I had sat in Porter's room in the Caledonia, waiting for him to finish his work. He was writing with lightning speed. Sometimes he would finish a page and immediately wrinkle it into a ball and throw it on the floor. Then he would write on, page after page, with hardly a pause, or he would sit silent and concentrated for half an hour at a stretch. I was weary of waiting.
"But there is still something new in the world, Al," he promised. "You'll get a shock that all the bumptious thrills of train-robbing never afforded."
It was almost midnight when we started forth.
He led me through alleys and by-streets I had never seen. We came into dark, narrow lanes, where old five- and six-story residences, dilapidated and neglected, sent forth an ancient musty odor. We went on and on until it seemed that we had reached the bottom of a black, unfathomable hole in the very center of the city.
"Listen," he whispered. And in a moment a wild, whistling tumult, that was as if the horns and trumpets and all the mighty bells of heaven and earth let loose a shouting thunder, came down into that hole and caught it in a shrieking boom. I reached out my hand and touched Porter's arm. "My God, Bill, what isit?"
"Something new under the moon, colonel, whenever you can't find it under the sun. That, friend, is but New York's greeting to the New Year."
That hole—and no one but the Prowling Magician in his everlasting search for the otherwise could have found it—was somewhere near the Hudson.
"Do you feel that a little conversation in my soothing pianissimo would revive you, colonel?"
We went down to the docks and sat there for an hour before we spoke a word. It was the last long communion I was ever to have with the gifted friend, whose memory has been and is an inspiration.
Porter seemed suddenly to be wrapped in gloom. I was leaving in a day or two. Moved by some unaccountable impulse—perhaps by the melancholy in his manner, I suggested that he accompany me."
"I'd like to go West and over the beaten paths with you. When I can make better provision for those dependent on me, I may."
"Oh, just cut loose and come. I'll take you out among all the old timers. You can get material enough to run you ten years on Western stories."
I was rambling on vividly. Porter's warm, strong hand clasped mine.
"Colonel," he interrupted, "I have a strange idea that this will be our last meeting." With a quick change of mood, he smiled sheepishly. "Besides, I have not yet converted New York."
Converted—I laughed at that word from Bill Porter. I remembered his flashing resentment when I suggested the role to him before he left the penitentiary.
"So you did become a missionary after all! What effect do you think "The Four Million" will have on the readers in this maelstrom? Will it reach out and correct evils?"
"That is too much to ask. The blind will not perceive its message."
"Blind—who do you mean by that?"
"Not the idle poor, colonel, but the idle rich. They will yet live to have the bandage torn by gaunt, angry hands from their lazy, unseeing eyes."
"Where did you get that hunch, Bill?"
"In our former residence, colonel."
Mellowed and broadened, he was this man who came back from the blighting tunnel to the welcoming highways. A different Bill, this friend of the shopgirl and down-and-outer, from the proud recluse who stopped his ears to Sallie's needs and shuddered with abhorrence at the mere mention of the Prison Demon.
"I haven't changed colonel; but I see more. Life seems to me like a rich, vast diamond that is forever flashing new facets before us. I never tire of watching it. When my own future seemed so black—that interest kept me going."
For all his whims and his fine, high prid
e, for all the sadness that was often his, this interest kept him forever on tiptoe. He was never a laggard in the fine art of living.
Bill Porter had a sort of corner on the romance of life—a monopoly that was his by the divine right of understanding. It was a light that rifled even the sordid murk of the basement cafe and turned upon the hidden worth in the character of the starved and wretched dancing girls.
If life brought an ever new thrill to him he returned to it a gentle radiance that made glad the heart of many a Sue, many a Soapy.
There was in him a sunny toleration—an eager youthfulness. He was the great adventurer with his hand on life's pulse-beat.
To have stood at his side and looked through his eyes has softened with mellow humor the stark and cruel things—has touched with disturbing beauty the finer elements of existence.
THE END.
UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY
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