Эл Дженнингс - Through the Shadows with O'Henry

He had about him an air of suspense, of throbbing expectancy, as though he had just concluded an adventure or were just about to set forth on one. Whenever I saw him I had an instinctive question on my lips---"What's up, Bill?"

His attitude piqued curiosity. I felt it the day he came down from the veranda of the American consulate and began, in that low-pitched voice, the droll and solemn dissertation on the Mexican liquor situation.

It was with him through the dreary unhappiness of the prison years and in the big struggle to come back in New York. In every turn of that devious route, even through the noisome tunnel, he strode with brave and questing tread. Life never bored him. From the first moment I met him until the last he never lost interest.

"You shall have a strange and bewildering experience tonight, my brave bandit, and I shall have the joy of watching you."

It was the last day of 1907. For hours I had sat in Porter's room in the Caledonia, waiting for him to finish his work. He was writing with lightning speed. Sometimes he would finish a page and immediately wrinkle it into a ball and throw it on the floor. Then he would write on, page after page, with hardly a pause, or he would sit silent and concentrated for half an hour at a stretch. I was weary of waiting.

"But there is still something new in the world, Al," he promised. "You'll get a shock that all the bumptious thrills of train-robbing never afforded."

It was almost midnight when we started forth.

He led me through alleys and by-streets I had never seen. We came into dark, narrow lanes, where old five- and six-story residences, dilapidated and neglected, sent forth an ancient musty odor. We went on and on until it seemed that we had reached the bottom of a black, unfathomable hole in the very center of the city.

"Listen," he whispered. And in a moment a wild, whistling tumult, that was as if the horns and trumpets and all the mighty bells of heaven and earth let loose a shouting thunder, came down into that hole and caught it in a shrieking boom. I reached out my hand and touched Porter's arm. "My God, Bill, what isit?"

"Something new under the moon, colonel, whenever you can't find it under the sun. That, friend, is but New York's greeting to the New Year."

That hole—and no one but the Prowling Magician in his everlasting search for the otherwise could have found it—was somewhere near the Hudson.

"Do you feel that a little conversation in my soothing pianissimo would revive you, colonel?"

We went down to the docks and sat there for an hour before we spoke a word. It was the last long communion I was ever to have with the gifted friend, whose memory has been and is an inspiration.

Porter seemed suddenly to be wrapped in gloom. I was leaving in a day or two. Moved by some unaccountable impulse—perhaps by the melancholy in his manner, I suggested that he accompany me."

"I'd like to go West and over the beaten paths with you. When I can make better provision for those dependent on me, I may."

"Oh, just cut loose and come. I'll take you out among all the old timers. You can get material enough to run you ten years on Western stories."

I was rambling on vividly. Porter's warm, strong hand clasped mine.

"Colonel," he interrupted, "I have a strange idea that this will be our last meeting." With a quick change of mood, he smiled sheepishly. "Besides, I have not yet converted New York."

Converted—I laughed at that word from Bill Porter. I remembered his flashing resentment when I suggested the role to him before he left the penitentiary.

"So you did become a missionary after all! What effect do you think "The Four Million" will have on the readers in this maelstrom? Will it reach out and correct evils?"

"That is too much to ask. The blind will not perceive its message."

"Blind—who do you mean by that?"

"Not the idle poor, colonel, but the idle rich. They will yet live to have the bandage torn by gaunt, angry hands from their lazy, unseeing eyes."

"Where did you get that hunch, Bill?"

"In our former residence, colonel."

Mellowed and broadened, he was this man who came back from the blighting tunnel to the welcoming highways. A different Bill, this friend of the shopgirl and down-and-outer, from the proud recluse who stopped his ears to Sallie's needs and shuddered with abhorrence at the mere mention of the Prison Demon.

"I haven't changed colonel; but I see more. Life seems to me like a rich, vast diamond that is forever flashing new facets before us. I never tire of watching it. When my own future seemed so black—that interest kept me going."

For all his whims and his fine, high pride, for all the sadness that was often his, this interest kept him forever on tiptoe. He was never a laggard in the fine art of living.

Bill Porter had a sort of corner on the romance of life—a monopoly that was his by the divine right of understanding. It was a light that rifled even the sordid murk of the basement cafe and turned upon the hidden worth in the character of the starved and wretched dancing girls.

If life brought an ever new thrill to him he returned to it a gentle radiance that made glad the heart of many a Sue, many a Soapy.

There was in him a sunny toleration—an eager youthfulness. He was the great adventurer with his hand on life's pulse-beat.

To have stood at his side and looked through his eyes has softened with mellow humor the stark and cruel things—has touched with disturbing beauty the finer elements of existence.

THE END.

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