"Brindle," I said--I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname
sounds now--"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed."
It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never saw him
again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from the
Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for the week before
commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came
back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with
the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article
in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost
every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters,
so full of _verve_ and _élan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was
always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a
Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour,
dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I
have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p.
189).
He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a
pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of
Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for
the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache
of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from
it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never
be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!"
All the world knows how he died....