I was about to say that I had known the Celebrity from the time he
wore kilts. But I see I shall have to amend that, because he was not a
celebrity then, nor, indeed, did he achieve fame until some time after
I had left New York for the West. In the old days, to my commonplace and
unobserving mind, he gave no evidences of genius whatsoever. He never
read me any of his manuscripts, which I can safely say he would have
done had he written any at that time, and therefore my lack of detection
of his promise may in some degree be pardoned. But he had then none of
the oddities and mannerisms which I hold to be inseparable from genius,
and which struck my attention in after days when I came in contact
with the Celebrity. Hence I am constrained to the belief that his
eccentricity must have arrived with his genius, and both after the age
of twenty-five. Far be it from me to question the talents of one upon
whose head has been set the laurel of fame!
When I knew him he was a young man without frills or foibles, with an
excellent head for business. He was starting in to practise law in
a downtown office with the intention of becoming a great corporation
lawyer. He used to drop into my chambers once in a while to smoke, and
was first-rate company. When I gave a dinner there was generally a cover
laid for him. I liked the man for his own sake, and even had he promised
to turn out a celebrity it would have had no weight with me. I look
upon notoriety with the same indifference as on the buttons on a man's
shirt-front, or the crest on his note-paper.
When I went West, he fell out of my life. I probably should not have
given him another thought had I not caught sight of his name, in old
capitals, on a daintily covered volume in a book-stand. I had little
time or inclination for reading fiction; my days were busy ones, and
my nights were spent with law books. But I bought the volume out of
curiosity, wondering the while whether he could have written it. I was
soon set at rest, for the dedication was to a young woman of whom I had
often heard him speak. The volume was a collection of short stories.
On these I did not feel myself competent to sit in judgment, for my
personal taste in fiction, if I could be said to have had any, took
another turn. The stories dealt mainly with the affairs of aristocratic
young men and aristocratic young women, and were differentiated to fit
situations only met with in that society which does not have to send
descriptions of its functions to the newspapers. The stories did not
seem to me to touch life. They were plainly intended to have a bracing
moral effect, and perhaps had this result for the people at whom
they were aimed. They left with me the impression of a well-delivered
stereopticon lecture, with characters about as life-like as the shadows
on the screen, and whisking on and off, at the mercy of the operator.
Their charm to me lay in the manner of the telling, the style, which I
am forced to admit was delightful.
But the book I had bought was a success, a great success, if the
newspapers and the reports of the sales were to be trusted. I read the
criticisms out of curiosity more than any other prompting, and no two of
them were alike: they veered from extreme negative to extreme positive.
I have to confess that it gratified me not a little to find the
negatives for the most part of my poor way of thinking. The positives,
on the other hand, declared the gifted young author to have found a
manner of treatment of social life entirely new. Other critics still
insisted it was social ridicule: but if this were so, the satire was too
delicate for ordinary detection.
However, with the dainty volume my quondam friend sprang into fame. At
the same time he cast off the chrysalis of a commonplace existence. He
at once became the hero of the young women of the country from Portland,
Maine, to Portland, Oregon, many of whom wrote him letters and asked
him for his photograph. He was asked to tell what he really meant by
the vague endings of this or that story. And then I began to hear rumors
that his head was turning. These I discredited, of course. If true, I
thought it but another proof of the undermining influence of feminine
flattery, which few men, and fewer young men, can stand. But I watched
his career with interest.
He published other books, of a high moral tone and unapproachable
principle, which I read carefully for some ray of human weakness,
for some stroke of nature untrammelled by the calling code of polite
society. But in vain.