Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

"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.

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.