Through the Shadows with O'Henry

CHAPTER XXXI. After two years; a wedding invitation; another visit to New York; delayed hospitality; in O. Henry's home; blackmail.

A hastily scrawled note accompanied a formal invitation. It was a bid to the wedding of William Sydney Porter and Miss Sallie Coleman, of Asheville, N. C.

Bill Porter, the prowler, the midnight investigator, the devil-may-care Bohemian was going to squeeze himself into the tight-cut habit of the benedict. When I read that note I felt as though I had been asked to a funeral.

It was more than two years since I had seen Bill. Son of impulse and whim that he was, who could figure this new venture of his?

"Pack up your togs, colonel, and come to the show. It won't be complete without you."

For months I had been planning another trip to New York. I wanted to get my book into print. Porter kept encouraging me. That was one glorious trait in him. If he saw a spark of talent in another he would fan it with praise and encouragement.

A thousand suggestions he had given me. Short stories that I had written, he had taken personally to editors and tried to make a sale for me. Another trip to New York, another joyous pilgrimage into the Mystic Maze with the Magician of Bagdad at my side—if I had any talent it would surely be kindled into flame.

The little note I held in my hand was like a heavy wet blanket on the fire of that hope. My wife and I went to the finest store in Oklahoma and bought some kind of a cut-glass water set. I sent the requisite "Congratulations and Best Wishes." There ends the greatness of Bill Porter, I thought. I was mistaken.

Toward the middle of December Porter returned a rejected manuscript to me.

"Don't give up, colonel. I'm sure you could make good at short stories. Come to New York. Don't build any high hopes on your book. Just consider you're on a little pleasure trip and taking it along as a side line. Mighty few manuscripts ever get to be books and mighty few books pay. Let me know in advance a day or two when you will arrive. Louisa is in Grand Rapids. Maybe he will run over for a day or two."

Less than a week later I was in New York. As soon as I arrived I called him up. I may have imagined it, but he did not seem like the old Bill to me. He was busy on a story.

"I'll call you up and let you buy the drinks as soon as the manuscript is finished."

Porter was an earnest worker. Pleasure never lured him from his desk, perhaps because he found such a joy in writing.

A week passed. I did not hear from him.

"He doesn't want me around his proud Southern wife," I thought. "Bill has put the convict number behind him. I've flaunted mine. This marriage of his may help him to forget. He probably doesn't want any red-headed reminder bobbing around."

As usual I had to take back the hasty judgment.

Richard Duffy came over for me one evening.

"Bill wants to see you. We're all going to dinner together."

We got to the Caledonia, where he still kept his study. Porter was at his desk, dashing in a last few periods. He looked tired, as though he had been under a long strain.

"I've been working like the devil, Bill. I've been feeling very tired. Join me in a drink. Will that make amends?"

"I don't know that any amends are necessary." I felt irritated and showed it. On the way to Mouquin's we scarcely spoke. I felt a kind of estrangement. But after the dinner the old, sunny familiarity melted the coldness.

"I'd like you to meet my wife, colonel."

Somehow I felt the words were not the truth. I all but said I didn't want to see her. I felt that she would not welcome an ex-convict.

The graciousness of Southern hospitality dispelled my fears. We reached Porter's apartments about 10:30, an hour and a half late. Mrs. Porter greeted us with great cordiality. She had been the first love of Porter in his boyhood days.

To admit the least, I was slightly "teed." Perhaps she did not observe it. Certainly there was no hint of disapproval in her manner.

She served us refreshments and chatted with a pleasant ease. I was relieved, but not convinced.

Toward midnight Duffy and I started to leave. Bill took up his hat.

"Why, you're not going, too, are you, Mr. Porter?" the lady said.

He stopped for a moment to explain. Duffy and I walked up the street.

"What the hell did Bill want with a wife? It puts an end to his liberty—his wanderings," I whispered loudly to Duffy, just as Porter tapped me on the shoulder. He smiled expansively, irrepressibly, as a boy might have.

"You're not pleased with my choice?"

"I'm not to be pleased!" I fired back.

I intended walking on with Duffy. Porter interfered.

"Come this way with me. We may not see much more of each other."

We went down to the Hudson and sat on the docks. The lights of all New Jersey, like a million stars, like a hundred Milky Ways, sparkled in the water. The big steamers, black, powerful, were moored in the slips. Tugboats and ferries skimmed—mystic, enchanted barks—up and down the river.

We talked carelessly. Porter started several times to speak seriously and broke off. Another mood seized him and he looked at me indulgently and smiled.

"You're dissatisfied with my matrimonial venture?"

"It's the silliest thing you ever did."

"She is a most estimable young lady." Porter seemed to be enjoying my resentment.

"That may be, but what did you want with her?"

"I loved her."

"Oh, my God! That covers a multitude of sins."

Porter was a born troubadour. He had a happy-go-lucky heart, for all that it was crowded down with sadness. I felt that he had made a fatal mistake to take upon himself obligations that his nature made him unfitted to meet.

"Colonel, I wanted your opinion. I've wondered if I acted honorably."

Porter was the soul of chivalry. For all that he saw in Hell's Kitchen, his reverence for woman remained. "I've married a highbred woman and brought all my troubles upon her. Was it right?"

Strange blend of impulsiveness and honor, the instinctive nobility in Porter urged him always to measure up to his big responsibilities.

My fears were ill founded. Bill's marriage did not interfere with his greatness. He was never one of the recklessly debonair who shake off with an easy conscience the obligations they have incurred. Porter served two masters—Bohemianism, Convention. He served both well.

Only the Midas touch or the purse of Fortunatus could answer such demands. It does not need the suggestion of blackmail to account for Porter's intermittent penury. But I know that in one instance he was a victim.

It was the night after his sudden despondency. For three hours I sat in his room waiting for him to keep an appointment. He came in whitef aced and haggard. The jaunty neatness that was always his was gone. He looked limp and careless to me. He went over to his desk and sat down. After a long silence he faced me. "I was serious, colonel, last night. If I should drop off, will you look after Margaret be a sort of foster-father, as it were?"

"What's up, Bill? You're as husky as a stevedore."

"Colonel, you were right. I should have faced it." And, without prelude, he launched into the most unusual confidence. Twice Porter deliberately spoke of his own affairs.

"I can't stand it much longer. She comes after me regularly, and she's the wife of a big broker here at that. Tonight I told her to go hang. She'll get no more from me."

"Will she tell?"

"Let her."

Not a former convict at the penitentiary—none of these, so far as I know, ever bothered him—but a woman of high social class, a woman who had lived in Austin and flirted with Bill Porter in his troubadour days.

"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.