"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."
That same story paid its dividends later. Porter revamped it here and there and it made a big hit for him.
"I'll tell you why I'm not interested in Sally," he swung back to the subject with a suddenness that startled me. "She's better off here than she ever could be outside. I know this place is doom—but what chance has a girl with Sally's past in the world? What are you thinking of, colonel, when you plan to send the girl out there to be trampled in the gutter?"
Sally said almost the same words to me when I tried to get her a pardon after I was freed. I went back to the pen to see her.
"Oh, Mr. Jennings!" Her face had grown thin and its transparent whiteness made her seem a thing of unearthly spirituality. "Don't bother about me. I'm lost. You know it. Do you think they would ever let me crawl back? You know I'm a bad woman."
"I had a baby that I didn't have any right to—do you think the world ever forgives such a crime as that? Leave me alone here. I'm finished. There's no pardon on earth for me."
CHAPTER XXII.
Defiance of Foley the Goat; honesty hounded; O. Henry's scorn; disruption of the Recluse Club.
Sally was right. There was no place for her in the outside world. The ex-convict is thrown against a social and economic boycott that no courage or persistence can effectively break.
We talked about it often—Bill Porter and I. It was the topic of eternal interest just as the discussion of dress is with women. And yet, for Porter, this talk about the future was an unalloyed torment. It agitated and distressed him. He would come into the post-office of an evening and we would gossip with fluent merriment. Without prelude, one of us would mention a con who had been sent back on another jolt. All the whimsical light that usually played about his large, handsome face would give place to a shadow of heavy gloom. The quick, facile tongue would halt its whispering banter.
Bill Porter, the wag, became Bill Porter, the cynic. Fear of the future was like a poisonous serpent that had coiled into his heart and lodged there, its fangs striking into the core of his happiness.
"The prison label is worse than the brand of Cain," he said many a time. "If the world once sees it, you are doomed. It shall not see it on me. I will not become an outcast.
"The man who tries to hurl himself against the tide of humanity is sure to be sucked down in the undertow. I am going to swim with the current."
Porter had less than a year more to serve. He was already planning on his re-entrance to the free world. For me the question did not then exist. My sentence was life. But I felt that Porter's position was false. I knew that it would mean an unsheathed sword perpetually hanging over his head. The fear of exposure saddened and almost tragically hounded his life.
"When I get out, I will bury the name of Bill Porter in the depths of oblivion. No one shall know that the Ohio penitentiary ever furnished me with board and bread.
"I will not and I could not endure the slanting, doubtful scrutiny of ignorant human dogs!"
Porter was an enigma to me in those days. There was no accounting for his moods. He was the kindest and most tolerant of men and yet he would sometimes launch into invective against humanity that seemed to come from a heart charged with contemptuous anger for his fellows. I learned to understand him later. He liked men ; he loathed their shams.
The freemasonry of honest worth was the only carte blanche to his friendship. Porter would pick his companions from the slums as readily as from the drawing-rooms. He was an aristocrat in his culture and his temperament, but it was an aristocracy that paid no tribute to the material credentials of society.
Money, fine clothes, pose—they could not hoodwink him. He could not abide snobbery or insincerity. He wanted to meet men and to make friends with them—not with their clothes and their bank accounts. He knew an equal even when hidden in rags—and he could scent an inferior underneath a wealth of purple and fine linen.
Porter dealt with the fundamentals in his human relations. He went down under the skin. And so he scoffed at conventional standards of appraising men and women. He belittled the paltry claims whereon the shallow minded based their supposed prestige.
"Colonel," he would mock, "I have a proud ancestry. It runs back thousands and thousands of years. Do you know, I can trace it clear back to Adam!
"The man I would like to meet is the one whose family tree does not take its root in the Garden of Eden. What an oddity he would have to be a sort of spontaneous creation.
"And, colonel, if the first families only looked far enough back, they would find their poor, miserable progenitors blindly swallowing about in the slime of the sea!"
That any of these descendants of slime should dare to look down upon him even in thought was intolerable. He knew himself to be the equal of all men. His fierce, honest independence would brook patronage from none.
"I won't be under an obligation to any one. When I get out from here I'll strike free and bold. No one shall hold the club of ex-convict over me."
"Other men have said the same." I felt that Forter's attitude lacked courage. "And there is always some one to hunt them down. You can't get away with it."
"You can't beat the game if any one ever finds out you once were a number," Porter flung back, riled and indignant that he was forced to defend himself.
"The only way to win is to conceal."
Every day incidents happened to bear out Porter's argument.
Men would be sent out and in a few months they were back. The past was their scourge. They could not escape its lash. And just a few weeks after we had talked about the thing—a few weeks after I had told him of Sally—Foley the Goat and the sinister tragedy that followed him threw us all into a hot fury of resentment and rage.
Foley's misfortune made a tremendous impression on Porter. The incident was directly responsible for the breakup of the Recluse Club.
After Porter was transferred to the steward's office, three weeks passed and he had not come to one of our Sunday dinners. His absense was as depressing as a cold rain on a May Day fete. The club was lifeless without him. Even Billy Raidler's bubbling raillery simmered down.
Old man Carnot grew more querrulous when his napkin was carelessly folded and Louisa could not argue the beginning and the end of Creation. When he started in to divide Infinity there was no one to oppose him.