Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"Nobody here now, nobody here," Sally muttered to herself. "Send him out now."

A big form strode down the corridor and the next second Philip Austin swung through the door. Proud and magnificent, he walked like a prince. He walked as he did that joyous day when he swept his hat down in a lordly salute as Sally came down the cathedral steps. He had the same kingly smile on his lips.

Sally's nerve went loose as a taut string when one end is suddenly released. She ran up to him pitiful, distracted, beside herself with misery.

"Phil oh, Phil, the baby died! You put me in jail and it died. It died without any one near it. It died because you wouldn't take care of it."

Not knowing what she was doing or saying in her beating grief, Sally flung herself into Austin's arms.

"The baby died it's dead, dead. Oh, Phil, the baby is dead!"

With one swift, angry wrench the man caught her violently by the wrists.

" -----------you, you little hag what do I care about your brat! Let it die. Now go and don't hang around slopping tears at me. Let the brat die!"

Cold, scornful contempt scowling his features, Austin went to shove Sally from him. There was a little gasp, a tussle, a scream of hurt, sobbing agony, and the double-action revolver was jammed against the man's stomach.

"You don't care? Oh, God!" The trigger snapped.

"He looked me straight in the eye. He looked startled and frightened. He knew I did it. I saw it in his eye. He looked at me for just a moment and then he went down in a slump as though his backbone had suddenly melted."

From everywhere men and women darted into the street. They leaned over the prostrate form. And when they saw that the banker's son was dead, they turned on Sally with their fists and one giant tore her cheek open with a vicious blow.

"But he knew I did it. I saw that in his last glance!" Sally's face was daubed with tears, but there was a triumphant smile in her eye at the memory of Austin's death. "That's satisfaction enough for me. I'm content to spend my days here."

The girl's trial had taken just one day. The jury found her guilty. She was nineteen. That fact saved her from the death penalty.

Sally was a Southerner, with all the hot, proud vengeance of Kentucky in her veins. Her story moved me more than all the horrors I had felt in prison. I could understand the murderous fury that swept over her when the fellow turned her down. I went to the warden's office and blurted the whole story out to him.

"When I hear things like this, I want to leave the damn' hell." Darby did resign eventually because he could not endure the job of electrocuting the condemned. "But some one's got to be here. I hope I do the service well."

Darby said he would try for a pardon. It would have been granted on his recommendation, but the family of the dead man heard about it. They weren't satisfied with the mischief their blackguard son had already done. They went to work and villified Sally until there wasn't a scrap of flesh left on her bones.

The pardon was denied.

Every time I heard that voice with its cascade of golden notes rippling down from the convict women's loft in the chapel it sent daggers through me.

This was a tale, it seemed to me, worthy of the genius of Bill Porter. I told it to him the next afternoon. He listened rather indifferently and when I was finished, he turned to Billy Raidler, "I've brought you a box of cigars."

I was furious at his unmoved coldness. I turned my back on him in angry humiliation. I wanted Porter to write a story about Sally—to make the world ring with indignation over the wrong that had been done. And the story did not seem to make the slightest impression on him. At that time my taste ran entirely to the melodrama. I could not understand Porter's saner discrimination.

He had distinct theories as to the purpose of the short story. We often discussed it. Now it seemed to me that he was deliberately refusing to carry out his ideas.

"The short story," he used to say, "is a potent medium of education. It should combine humor and pathos. It should break down prejudice with understanding. I propose to send the down-and-outers into the drawing-rooms of the 'get-it-alls,' and I intend to insure their welcome. All that the world needs is a little more sympathy. I'm going to make the American Four Hundred step into the shoes of the Four Million."

Porter said this long before any of the stories that make up "The Four Million" had been written.

"Don't you think Sally's story has the real heart throb in it?"

"Colonel, the pulse beats too loud," Porter yawned. "It's very commonplace."

"And so is all life commonplace," I fired back. "That's just what genius is for—you're supposed to take the mean and the ordinary and tell it in a vital way—in a way that makes the old drab flesh of us glow with a new light."

I also was writing a story in those days and I had my own methods and theories. They usually dried out when I tried to run them into the ink well and onto the paper.

There was no use in trying to coax Porter into conversation when he was not in the mood. If a thing didn't catch his interest at once, it never did. There were no trials over with him. The slightest detail would sometimes absorb him and seem to fill him with inspiration. And again, a drama would pass before him and he would let it go unmarked. I knew this. I had seen him coolly ignore Louisa and old man Carnot often enough. But I was just goaded into persistence.

"Sally has a face like Diana," I said.

"When did you meet the goddess, colonel?" Porter jested, all at once absorbed in flicking a bit of dust from his sleeve. "Convict wool is shoddy enough, let alone a convict bundle of muslin."

A few years later. I saw this very same man go into all the honkatonks of New York and no woman was too low to win courtesy from Bill Porter. I have seen him treat the veriest old hag with the chivalry due a queen.

His indifference to Sally's plight was singular. If he had seen her and talked to her I know it would have gripped him to the heart.

Porter saw that I was bitterly wounded and in the petting kind of a way he had he came over to win me back.

" Colonel, please don't be angry with me." You misunderstand me. I wasn't thinking much of Sally tonight. My mind was far away," he laughed. "It was down in Mexico, perhaps, where that indolent, luxurious valley of yours is and where we might have been happy."

"Colonel," Porter's face lighted with humorous eagerness, "do you think we stand any chance to collect that $7,000 you paid down on it? I'm a little in need of funds."

Not many could resist the winning magnetism of Bill Porter if he chose to make himself agreeable. As soon as he had spoken I knew that some secret grief was tugging at him. Porter had labored hard over some story—Billy Raidler had sent it out in the usual way for him. It had come back. He jested about it.

"The average editor," he said, "never knows a firecracker until he hears the bang of its explosion. Those fellows can't tell a story until some one else takes the risk of setting it off."

"They're a damn' bunch of ignoramuses!" Porter had read the story to Billy and me and we had sent it off with singing hearts. We werfe sure the world must acknowledge Porter, even as we did.

"All I'm sorry for is the loss of the stamps, Billy was forced to steal from the State to mail it with. It may damage the reputation of the State board of the Ohio penitentiary," Porter replied, but he was really disappointed. The rejection of his manuscripts did not dull the edge of his self-confidence, but filled him with forebodings as to his future.

"I should not like to be a beggar, colonel," he often said, "and my pen is the only investment I can make. I am continually paying assessments on it. I would like to collect a few dividends."