"I have accepted an invitation for you, colonel." He was in one of his gently sparkling moods. "Get into your armor asinorum, for we fare forth to make contest with tinsel and gauze. In other words we mingle with the proletariat. We go to see Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller in that superb and realistic Western libel, 'The great Divide'."
After the play the great actress, Porter and I and one or two others were to have supper at the Breslin Hotel. I think Porter took me there that he might sit back and enjoy my unabashed criticisms to the lady's face.
"I feel greatly disappointed in you, Mr. Porter,"
Margaret Anglin said to Bill as we took our places at the table.
"In what have I failed?"
"You promised to bring your Western friend—that terrible outlaw Mr. Jennings—to criticise the play."
"Well, I have introduced him." He waved his hand down toward me.
Miss Anglin looked me over with the trace of a smile in her eye.
"Pardon me," she said, "but I can hardly associate you with the lovely things they say of you. Did you like the play?"
I told her I didn't. It was unreal. No man of the West would shake dice for a lady in distress. The situation was unheard of and could only occur in the imagination of a fat-headed Easterner who had never set his feet beyond the Hudson.
Miss Anglin laughed merrily. "New York is wild over it. New York doesn't know any better."
Porter sat back, an expansive smile spreading a light in his gray eyes. "I am inclined to agree with our friend," he offered. "The West is unacquainted with Manhattan chivalry." Afterward he kept prodding every one present with his genial quips.
I never saw him in a happier mood. The very next morning he was in the depths of despondency. I went over early in the afternoon. He was sitting at his desk rigid and silent. I started to tiptoe out. I thought he was concentrated in his writing.
"Come in, Al." He had a picture in his hand. "That's Margaret, colonel. I want you to have the picture. If anything should happen to me, I think I'd feel happy if you would look after her."
He seemed crushed and hopeless. He went over to the window and looked out.
"You know I kind of like this old dismal city of dying souls."
"What the hell has that got to do with your kicking off?"
"Nothing, but the jig is up. Colonel, have you the price? Let's have a little refreshment. They'll be up with a check some time, I hope."
I did not know the cause of his sudden overpowering dejection, but no drink could lighten it. The light-hearted, winsome joyousness of the night before had vanished. The bright hues in the spectrum were muddled into the drab.
One night—a cold, raw, angry night—Bill and I were strolling along somewhere in the East Side. "Remember the kid they electrocuted at the O. P.?" he said to me. "I will show you life tonight that is more tragic than death."
Faces that were no longer human—that seemed scarred and blemished as though the skin were a kind of web-like scale—dodged from alleyways and basements.
"They are the other side of the Enchanted Profile. You don't see it on our God. He keeps it hidden."
To Bill, long before he had written the story of that name, the Enchanted Profile was the face on the dollar.
We were turning a dingy corner. The sorriest, forlornest slice of tatterdemalion came shambling along. He was sober. Hunger—if you've ever felt it, you recognize in the other fellow's eyes—stared out from his emaciated face. "Hello, pard." Bill stepped to his side and slipped a bill into his hand. We went on. A moment later the hobo shuffled up. "'Scuse me, mister. You made a mistake. You gave me $20."
"Who told you I made a mistake?" Porter pushed him. "Be off."
And the next day he asked me to walk four blocks out of our way to get a drink.
"We need the exercise. We're getting obese." I noticed that the bartender greeted Bill with a familiar smile. At the counter a big fat man jostled me, nearly knocking the glass from my hand.
It made me furious. I swung my fist. Porter caught my arm. "They don't mean anything, these New York hogs."
It happened again and again. The fourth time Porter asked me to go there I became curious.
"What do you like about that rough joint, Bill?"
"I'm broke, colonel, and the bartender knows me. My credit there is unlimited."
Broke—yet he had $20 to throw away to a bum! Porter had no conception of money values. He seemed to act according to some super standard of his own.
He beggared himself financially with his spend-thrift ways, but his whimsical investments brought him in a rich store of experience and satisfaction. The wealth of his self-expression was worth more to him than economic affluence.
Yet he was not one who bore amiably an empty wallet. He liked to spend. He wished always to be the host. Often he would say to me, "I shall have the pleasure of ordering this at your expense." When the meal was finished I would look for the check, picking up the napkins and fussing about.
"Cease your ostentation," he would say. "That is paid and forgotten. Don't make such a vulgar display of wealth."
He liked to spend—but he liked better to give away. In the book he had given to Sue he had slipped a $10 bill. She came back a few days later after the banquet at the Caledonia. I was waiting for Porter.
"I've come to bring this back. Your friend, Mr. Bill, forgot to look before he gave it to me." Just then Porter came in.
"Good morning, Miss Sue." I had forgotten her name and was calling her Sophie and Sarah and honey. Porter doffed the cap he was wearing.
"Will you come in?"
"I just come to hand this back." Porter looked at the note in her hand as though he considered himself the victim of a practical joker.
"What is the meaning of this?"
"It was in the book you give me."
"It does not belong to me, Sue. You must have put it there and forgotten."
The girl smiled, but into her intelligent black eyes came a look of gratitude and understanding.
"Forgotten, Mr. Bill? If you'd only handled as few ten spots as I have you couldn't no wise misplace one without knowin' it."
"It's yours, Sue, for I know it isn't mine. But, say, Sue, some day I might be hard up and I'll come around and get you to stake me to a meal. And if you're out of luck, ring this bell."
"There ain't many like you gents." The girl's face was flushed with gladness. "Mame and me, we think you're princes."
Half way down the hall she turned. "I know it's yours, Bill. Thanks,"
CHAPTER XXXI.
After two years; a wedding invitation; another visit to New York; delayed hospitality; in O. Henry's home; blackmail.
A hastily scrawled note accompanied a formal invitation. It was a bid to the wedding of William Sydney Porter and Miss Sallie Coleman, of Asheville, N. C.
Bill Porter, the prowler, the midnight investigator, the devil-may-care Bohemian was going to squeeze himself into the tight-cut habit of the benedict. When I read that note I felt as though I had been asked to a funeral.
It was more than two years since I had seen Bill. Son of impulse and whim that he was, who could figure this new venture of his?
"Pack up your togs, colonel, and come to the show. It won't be complete without you."
For months I had been planning another trip to New York. I wanted to get my book into print. Porter kept encouraging me. That was one glorious trait in him. If he saw a spark of talent in another he would fan it with praise and encouragement.
A thousand suggestions he had given me. Short stories that I had written, he had taken personally to editors and tried to make a sale for me. Another trip to New York, another joyous pilgrimage into the Mystic Maze with the Magician of Bagdad at my side—if I had any talent it would surely be kindled into flame.