Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"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 at 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.