Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"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."

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 scraps 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.