"Look at that weak-kneed saphead, Bill. Picture him as an ancient man-at-arms!" His fingers were yellow with nicotine to the knuckles.
Porter looked at him, sat back, finished his beer in silence. "It's a good story." That was all he said. We went home early and both of us were sober.
Whenever this happened we used to sit in Bill's room and talk until one or two o'clock. This night it was different.
"Are you sleepy tonight, colonel?" he said. "I think I shall retire."
Whenever his mind was beset with an idea he lapsed into this extremely formal manner of speaking. It was bitterly irritating to me. I would leave in a kind of huff determined not to bother him again. But I knew that he was not conscious of his coldness. He was remote because his thought had built a barrier about him. He could think of nothing but the story in his mind.
I had an appointment with him for noon time. I decided not to keep it unless he remembered. At about 10 minutes after 12 he called me up.
"You're late. I'm waiting," he said.
When I got to his room the big table where he did his writing was littered with sleets of paper. All over the floor were scraps of paper covered with writing in long hand.
"When I get the returns on this I'll divvy up with you." Porter picked up a thick wad of sheets.
"Why?"
"It was you that gave me the thought."
"You mean the cigarette fiend in the armor?"
"Yes; I've just finished the yarn."
He read it to me. Just the merest glint had come to him from that steel-plated armor. The Halberdier himself would never have recognized the gem Porter's genius had polished for him. The story just as it stands today was written by Porter some time between midnight and noon.
And yet he looked as fresh and rested as though he had slept ten hours.
"Do you always grab off an inspiration like that and dash it off without any trouble?"
Porter opened a drawer in the desk. "Look at those." He pointed to a crammed-down heap of papers covered with his long freehand.
"Sometimes I can't make the story go and I lay it away for a happier moment. There is a lot of unfinished business in there that will have to be transacted some day. I don't dash off stories. I'm always thinking about them, and I seldom start to write until the thing is finished in my mind. It doesn't take long to set it down."
I have watched him sit with pencil poised sometimes for hours, waiting for the story to tell itself to his brain.
O. Henry was a careful artist. He was a slave to the dictionary. He would pore over it, taking an infinite relish in the discovery of a new twist to a word.
One day he was sitting at the table with his back to me. He had been writing with incredible rapidity, as though the words just ran themselves automatically from his pen. Suddenly he stopped. For half an hour he sat silent, and then he turned around, rather surprised to find me still there.
"Thirsty, colonel? Let's get a drink."
"Bill," my curiosity was up, "does your mind feel a blank when you sit there like that?" The question seemed to amuse him.
"No. But I have to reason out the meaning of words."
There was no ostentation in Porter, either in his writing or in his observations. I never saw him making notes in public, except once in a while he would jot a word down on the corner of a napkin.
He didn't want other people to know what he was thinking about. He didn't need to take notes, for he was not a procrastinator. He transmuted his thoughts into stories while the warm beat throbbed in them.
Careless and irresponsible as he seemed--almost aimless at times—I think there was in Bill Porter a purposiveness that was grim and so determined that he would allow no external influence to interfere with his plan of life.
I have sometimes felt that this passionate will to be himself at all times made him so aloof and reclusive. He sought companionship freely with strangers, for he could dispense with their company at will. He wanted to live untrammeled. And he did. He was incorrigibly stubborn-minded. Of all the men I have ever known, Bill Porter ran truest to the natural grain.
As soon as New York became aware of O. Henry's lucky strike, it was ready with its meed of homage. An eager, rushing multitude sought him out. Doors were flung wide. The man who had but a few years before been separated from his fellows could now stand among the proudest, commanding, as he would, their smiles and their tears. He preferred solitude. Not because he disdained company—not that he feared exposure, but because he despised deceit and hypocrisy. And these, he felt, were the inevitable attendants of men and women in their social intercourse.
"Al, I despise these literati." Many a time he voiced the sentiment. "They remind me of big balloons. If one were to puncture their pose, there would be an astonished gasp as when one sticks a pin in the stretched rubber. And then they would be no more—not even a wrinkled trace of them!"
They could sue him with invitations. He had no time to waste. He was not vain, and never did he consciously try to impress any one. He was not of that righteous type that takes itself and its beliefs with ponderous seriousness, insisting that the world hear them out and then applaud.
Bill Porter was too busy watching others to take much heed about his own reflection. Because he was eminently self-sufficient, he would not allow circum- stances to set his friendships for him.
But with the few who were the elect to him; who knew him and understood him he was the droll and beloved vagabond. Reticence would drop from him. He was in his element—the troubadour of old, the sparkle of his gracious wit bubbling through every breath of the heavier discourse.
"I have a treat for you, colonel. Tonight you shall meet the Chosen Few."
He would tell me no more, seeming to take a boyish delight in my irritable suspense. The Chosen Few happened to be Richard Duffy, Oilman Hall and Bannister Merwin. We had dinner together at the Hoffman House.
It was a treat—for that night I saw O. Henry as he might have been if the buoyant happiness that seemed to be his native disposition had not been deepened and saddened by the distressing humiliation of his prison years.
Porter handed me the menu. He was a bit finicky about his eating. "Gentlemen," he said to the distinguished editors, "the colonel will pick out a surprise for us." I think Porter considered me somewhat brazen because I was not awed by this presence of the elite.
"I could order bacon broiled on the hickory coals, terrapin, sour-dough biscuit and coffee strong enough to float the bullets—how would you like it, Bill?"
"Don't endanger my future in my chosen profession by making me hit the tracks for the West."
Duffy and Hall looked at Porter as though a sudden vision of his portly figure galloped before them on horseback and swinging a lariat. Porter caught the question in their eyes. He was in a tantalizing mood.
"You wouldn't mind edifying the company with a discourse on the ethics of train-robbing, would you, colonel?" The three guests sat up, tense with interest. It was just the setting I loved. It gave me a big bump of joy to throw a shock into those blase New Yorkers.
Yarn after yarn I reeled off for their absorption. I told them all the funny incidents connected with the stickup of the trains in the Indian Territory.
I made them see the outlaw, not as a ruthless brute, but as a human being possessed of a somewhat different bias or viewpoint from their own. Porter sat back, expansive and sedate, with his large gray eye lighted with amusement.
"Colonel, I stood in your shadow tonight," he said to me as we were parting at the Caledonia.
"What do you mean, Bill?"