haired girl at her side.
"Suppose you order, Mame." There was no pretense to Mame. She was hungry and she spotted a chance to eat. "Say, Mister," she leaned toward Porter, "can I order what I want?"
"I don't think you better. You see, ladies, I haven't the price." He ordered four beers.
I couldn't follow the drift of this experiment. Porter had picked out these two from the dozens of tell-tale painted faces. He knew his magic circle. But I didn't like the bore of hungry eyes. Mame was absorbed in watching a blowsy, puffy-cheeked woman amiably gathering in drippy spoonfuls of cabbage. It bothered me. I slipped my purse to Porter.
"My God, Bill, buy them a feed." He sneaked it back to me.
"Wait. There's a story here." He paid the bill. It was about 20 cents. He spoke a moment to the manager. Whatever he wanted, the manager was ready to give.
"Would you ladies like to come out and get a square meal?" Mame looked nervously about the room. Sue stood up. "Thank you," she said. "It would be quite agreeable."
We started toward the Caledonia Hotel, where Porter had his study. "We're making a mistake, Sue. We'll all get pinched. The instant we step into a hash house with these gents, the bulls'll nab us. We better beat it. We're makin' an awful mistake."
"We're nuthin' but mistakes anyhow. If there's a chance to eat I'm gonna take it." Sue's talk vas a curious blend of dignity, bitterness and slang.
"You're making no mistake."
Porter led the way at a quick pace. "Where we are going the foot of a bull has never thumped."
It was after one o'clock when we reached the hotel. Porter ordered a beefsteak, potatoes, coffee, and a crab salad. He served it on the table where so many of his masterpieces were written. In that outlandish situation, w r ith Mame sitting on a box, Sue in an easy chair, and Porter with a towel over his arm like a waiter serving us, one of those stories came into being that morning.
"Do you make much coin?" When he talked to them he was one of them. He adopted their language and their thought.
"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."
CHAPTER XXIX.
Quest for material; Pilsner and the Halberdier; suggestion of a story; dining with editors; tales of train-robberies; a mood of despair.
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.